Loren: My name is Loren and what we’re going to deal with today is Lenin and Luxemburg. This is a huge topic. Both of these people are great revolutionaries and there are libraries of books written about them. So in two hours, I’m going to try to sort of summarize what I think is really important about them. First of all, how many people had a chance to read Rosa Luxemburg’s The Mass Strike? I’m sure on a first read a lot of it struck you as kind of strange or unfamiliar. But I think the more you get into it you’ll understand what a radical text it is. I re-read it last night for the first time in many years, and it just hit me between the eyes like the first time or second times I read it. I’m sure there are a lot of references in it that wouldn’t be terribly familiar. I’m going to start with Luxemburg. It’s kind of arbitrary but here we go. I think towards the end you’ll see how it all fits together.

Rosa Luxemburg was born in 1870. She was Jewish, born in a Polish-speaking area. The first thing we’ve got to realize is that at this time , Poland did not exist on the map. Poland was wiped off the map in the late 18th century. It only became a country again after World War 1. Polish nationalism was a tremendously powerful force that Rosa Luxemburg had to deal with and she was very critical or hostile to it. So by the time the Socialist movement in Poland became a mass movement, there were two major wings. One was Polish nationalist, almost proto-fascist ,and the other one was Internationalist Marxist, and Rosa Luxemburg was a major figure in the latter. Poland, even though it didn’t formally exist, always played an important role in the European revolutionary movement. Much of what I’m going talk about today will strike you as ancient history, and what they call “Eurocentric” today. I think it’s really important, as I hope you’ll see in the course of our discussion, and I do want it to be a discussion. So please feel free to interrupt, and ask questions if I make references that aren’t clear. All of these questions are totally alive today, such as the question of nationalism, in a different form but still completely contemporary. So the Polish question was a very important question in the revolutionary movement in Europe. The Poles were famous for failed uprisings. Poland was divided between Russia, Austria and Germany; each had a share of it. In 1846 and in 1863 there were these massive insurrections which were mainly crushed by the Russian Czar’s Army. But there were also rallies of support all over Europe; Marx was involved. There were demonstrations for Polish independence, Polish liberation and so on. So the Polish question was just all over the place. One of the interesting things about Rosa Luxemburg is that she broke with the tradition of support for Polish nationalism. Why did she do that? She was smuggled out of Poland in a pile of hay, on a farmer’s cart, in about 1890, to get to Germany where she could participate in a more open Socialist movement. A few years after that she went to graduate school in Switzerland.

Switzerland, as some of you probably have known, was a major magnet for revolutionaries at this time. And particularly Russian revolutionaries and from those other repressed nationalities in those different empires. So the graduate schools in the big cities of Switzerland were basically seminars of revolutionaries, arguing about all these questions of the revolutionary movement. Rosa wrote her doctoral dissertation on the topic ‘The Industrial Development of Poland’. This may sound like a dry topic but her purpose in writing it was to demonstrate that the project of an independent Poland was a utopia, because; the Polish economy was so integrated into the Russian economy that there had to be a revolution in both places. So, she said, ‘’Polish independence is utopian within capitalism and it is reactionary within socialism’’. This became a very controversial thing. She was really disliked, and hence much later, in the Polish Solidarnosc movement in 1980 and 1981, Rosa Luxemburg was never mentioned because she was known for her anti-nationalist views. That’s a whole other story, but she became a militant, an agitator, a journalist, and a revolutionary in the German socialist movement. She was really tri-national. She became fluent in German; she was active in the German, Polish and Russian movements, and she spoke all these languages and probably a couple of others.

She was such a great speaker that she was greatly in demand on the circuit of conferences, meetings and things like that. There is a pretty interesting movie about her you might want to see. It’s just called “Rosa Luxemburg”; it was made in 1980s by a German woman named Margarethe von Trotta. It’s well worth seeing. It’s a full length feature film and it’s just very curiously makes absolutely no mention of Lenin or of Rosa Luxemburg’s relationship to Lenin because the film had to be approved by the highest levels of the (then) East German authorities. East Germany of course still existed at that time. But aside from that, it’s really worth seeing. Now, why did Rosa Luxemburg go to Germany and get involved in the SPD? The SPD was and is a Social Democratic Party in Germany. At that time, the German Socialist party was the “queen” of all socialist parties in the world. It was, then, what Russia became after 1917; everybody went to Germany to find out about it. The works of its main theoreticians were translated into all kinds of languages. It was kind of the orthodoxy in the international movement. I am going to skip over a lot of details, so anytime you want to ask this or that please feel free.

Speaker 2: Wasn’t she very high up in the Polish socialist party?

Loren: Oh yeah! She was in the central group. It was called the…, it had this very long name. It was called the “Socialist Party of Poland and the Kingdom of Lithuania”, another country that was completely submerged by the Russian empire. Luxemburg’s party was known for being very orthodox Marxist and very anti-nationalist. So they were always fighting with the pro- nationalist, you might say, a proto-fascist Polish Socialist Party, led by a man named Pilsudski,who after World War I became the strong man, not to say dictator, of newly independent Poland.

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I want to get back to the SPD. By the time Luxemburg got to Germany it was a mass party with hundreds of thousand of members, thirty newspapers, journals, a whole network that it’s almost impossible to imagine today in a capitalist country. It had gone through this long history; it had been repressed from 1878 to 1890, for twelve years, under Bismarck. It was just more or less completely underground, but allowed to participate in elections. So in the course of the twelve years it was repressed, it grew stronger and stronger; finally it was so strong they had to legalize it. So, it was legalized in 1890. Luxemburg got there shortly after that. If I go off into what the SPD was, we will be here until 10 PM. I just want to say a few things about it. Even though it was known as the party of orthodox Marxism, Marx and Engels privately thought it was very highly problematic. In their own private correspondence they referred to it as these idiot social democrats. Engels attacked the very idea of Social Democracy as having nothing to do with communism and their projects because… Engels was ambiguous about the nature of bourgeois democracy, they were not —

Speaker 3: So why were they against [inaudible] democracy?

Loren: Well! Because they were communists and they realized that the party couldn’t call itself

Communist. The liberal forces at that time was still battling with all these monarchies, at that time most of Europe was under one kind of monarchy or another. So when the revolutions of 1848 failed, Marx and Engels had to flee to England. This was before Switzerland became this big centre; at that time, London was kind of the place revolutionaries could go and be tolerated. Volume 2 of Marx’s Complete Works is a 400 page polemic called The Great Men of Exile, which is a portrait of the exile scene in London, denouncing them all as worthless sectarians that…, kind of imagine fifteen different groups like the today’s Spartacist League all in this very intense exile scene and that gives you a certain idea. After the revolution died away, Marx went off to the British museum to write Capital. He wasn’t turning his back on activity at all; he was just waiting for the next wave. Which he for a long time was expecting the day after tomorrow, but that’s another story. In 1857, he wrote to Engels that he expected revolution imminently and regretted that no one would read his book.

So, meanwhile, while he was in exile; these different forces in Germany started to organize. There was this guy name Ferdinand Lassalle who was the most important of them. Ferdinand Lassalle was not a Marxist and not even a materialist. He was very intelligent, a great speaker, charismatic, and kind of a natural leader. His idea of socialism was essentially having a bunch of cooperatives in which the market would not be abolished, and also relying on the state. Later he got into a secret relationship with Bismarck, who was a key unifier of Germany about ten years later. Lassalle and his group were socialist; they hated the liberals, Bismarck hated the liberals, so they had these negotiations about sticking it to the liberals together, which ultimately didn’t come to anything. These negotiations remained secret for forty years until after the Russian Revolution. So Lassalle was always this great hero of the revolutionary movement until these documents were found that showed he had these secret meetings with Bismarck. Meanwhile this other faction of pro- Marx people also developed in Germany and they finally fused in 1875 to form the SPD. Then they were banned three years later and re-emerged in 1890, becoming this mass party. But this Lassallean influence always remained strong; for example, after the Russian Revolution, at one of the first congresses of the Communist (Third) International, there were three massive photographs behind the speakers’ podium: Marx, Engels and Lassalle.

And once it was discovered that Lassalle was secretly involved with Bismarck, that all came to an end, but that just shows how powerful his influence was.

So Rosa Luxemburg stepped into this situation and what emerged were basically three factions in the SPD. There was the left wing, of which she was the most important spokesperson; then there was the center, around a guy named Karl Kautsky. At that time Karl Kautsky was known throughout the world the way Lenin was known after the Russian Revolution. He was considered THE heir of Marx. But in fact he had all kinds of problems and he was no way near Marx’s level. But he was in those years the guy who would decide on questions of orthodoxy. So he headed the centre, though it wasn’t really called the centre at that time, I’ll get to that in a minute. Then there was the right wing , which was based on the trade unions. Now, in The Mass Strike, Rosa Luxemburg is mainly denouncing that right wing and the trade union leaders and the people in the party who were oriented to them. Just like trade unions today, (though at that time they were bigger and more powerful), they became conservative forces. They became more and more interested in preserving themselves as trade unions and less and less interested in revolution, but they hid behind the orthodoxy of the party. Luxemburg talks about this dual relationship between the party and its ideas, then about the trade unions and their ideas. She was constantly getting into trouble; she would go to some city and make some radical speech, and would offend the centre and the right bureaucrats of that city, and there would be turmoil in the party etc.

Things really came to a head in 1898 when a guy named Bernstein published a book in which he basically said…, I think it’s called Evolutionary Socialism. Bernstein said in effect that Karl Marx was a great thinker, but let’s face it, his ideas are completely out of date. Marx was imagining a collapse of the capitalist system, he was imagining the that workers were getting poorer as time went on, when in fact we’re seeing the workers are getting better and better off. There was some amount of temporary truth to that, but Bernstein was just basically throwing Marx out the window. This led to this huge battle that was known as the Revisionist Debate. That’s when the term “revisionism” first came into the Marxist lexicon. On paper, the left won the debate, and Kautsky sided with Luxemburg…

Speaker 3: Bernstein was arguing that there would be like a gradual evolution.

Loren: Right! His slogan was “the goal is nothing, the movement is everything” and therefore all we have to do is just keep fighting for better conditions and one day we’ll have socialism. We don’t have to worry about the revolution. Every aspect of Marx just went out the window except the trade unions struggle.( Anybody want to ask a question at this point?)

So, nominally the left won that debate but in reality and practice the right just kept on doing what it was doing and got stronger and stronger. That’s where 1905 came in and Luxemburg’s pamphlet is about the 1905 revolution. The 1905 revolution is what brings Lenin and Luxemburg together to some extent.

As I was saying earlier, Poland, Russia and Germany were all involved in this area where the revolution took place. If you read The Mass Strike, you’ll remember these incredible passages about thirty different cities all going out on strike at once. It’s just suddenly something happens and it electrifies everybody and in no time hundreds of other cities are doing the same thing. I’d say the key thing, we’ll go over the text more carefully in a bit, is that Luxemburg is distinguishing here between what Marx in different writings called the ‘class in itself’ which is the class when it’s like sort of typical trade union struggle. One industry, one factory, one town, as opposed to the “class for itself” when it emerges as a force in the whole country actually fighting the state! The 1905 revolution was as important, maybe in some ways as important as a social movement as the 1917 revolution itself. Because it’s the first time that these institutions called ‘’soviets’’ appeared’. (“Soviet” in Russian just means ‘’council’’.)

Speaker 3: What does a council mean in English?

Loren: Okay! Let me just back up for a second. Up until that time most people, even radical people (I’m not sure about Luxemburg), but most people imagined that socialism, whether gaining power by election or revolution, that a socialist party would capture the state and do all kinds of good things. There was very little thought about what a socialist society would really look like. Suddenly in 1905 came along and these soviets appeared all over Russia and Russian Poland. Soviets are councils but they’re like regional councils. They’re not just based on the workplace, they’re based on class so all kinds of proletarian people, such as the unemployed and the retired, could participate in them. And for brief periods they had actual power in these different cities. They were so unique, so novel that Lenin, who was off in Switzerland in exile, was very suspicious of them for weeks until he began to realize this is the way in which working class power expresses itself. Along with the soviets came workers’ councils, which were councils that took over specific workplaces and ran them under workers’ control. And of course they are related to each other. Workers’ councils elected delegates for the soviets and it kind of , for a very short period, solved the question of what a real society run by ordinary working people would look like. So it was just an incredible breakthrough and it was not something out of any book. No one before 1905 had talked about these institutions. It was a classic example of the discovery by a movement in motion.

It was truly a working class creation. People like CLR James for example, had the idea that the role of revolutionaries is to “recognize and record”. Well, this is the classic example of where that approach is right in the mark. It is recognizing the importance of something that the class itself developed while it was in motion and seeing that as a theoretical breakthrough. The theoreticians come along and say “well this is very important, this is the class for itself.” I don’t totally agree with James overall but if you ever want to have a situation that confirms his way of looking at things, this is it.

Speaker 3: How did the revolution in 1905 begin?

Loren: The way it began was Russia and Japan got into a war in 1904. This war itself was incredibly significant on the world scale because; it was the first time that a non-European country, using modern weapons and modern strategy and a modern army, defeated a European country. It was celebrated all over the world, all over the colonial world because most of what we call the Third World, the developing world today, at that time was under different colonial empires. It actually helped to inspire the founding of the NAACP in the United States, which was founded in the same year. It was something way beyond just a Japanese victory. The Japanese victory itself was very important in terms of the emergence of real capitalism in East Asia because; up until that time…

Speaker 3: I know that the Japanese won in the war; Japan became like a big political center for East Asian revolutionaries and nationalists. So could it be argued that while this was happening in like Germany it was happening also in Japan? Like with this epicenter like propagation of revolutionaries and nationalists?

Loren: Sure! Tokyo became around that time was for East Asian revolutionaries what London was for revolutionaries in Western Europe. It’s where you went to really immerse yourself in politics, Marxism etc. The Japanese translated Marx probably before many western countries translated Marx. Korea at that time was a Japanese colony, and China was very weak and was divided up among different western powers. Revolutionaries just flocked to Tokyo, so it created this real international scene. It was of tremendous importance. The other thing that was remarkable in that 1904-05 war is that the Russians actually sent a fleet all the way around Africa and the Indian Ocean to take care of this new country and the Japanese just sank virtually every ship in the fleet. There were a couple of very famous naval battles and then there were battles on land as well. The world was absolutely stunned because no one expected Japan to win the war or even do well in the war. So, the shock of the defeat, the Russian loss set off…, Russia was a tinder box, I’ll get to that more when I talk about Lenin. But that’s what started the revolution; just a bunch of protests against the war which escalated into these s soviets and workers’ councils.

Let me now shift over to Lenin. During World War 1 and after World War 1, Lenin and Luxemburg were in closer touch. Luxemburg was quite aware of Lenin. Probably one of the most important points I want to emphasize is at that time Russia appeared to the rest of the revolutionary movement like some backwater that nobody else knew much about, nobody cared much about. The Russian revolutionaries were mainly in exile in Western Europe.

They would hold these congresses of a few hundred people that would last for six weeks with people getting into fist fights, shouting at each other in a language that few outsiders understood. They were just considered very weird. No one ever imagined that Russia would become the centre of a revolutionary breakthrough. In a certain sense I would say it was kind of an accident that it did. Somebody once described it as if a platoon on the western front during World War I that accidentally captured a huge division of German troops. That was certainly how it struck people at the time. Let’s get to that when we go through Lenin.

Lenin was also born in 1870. He came from almost an aristocratic background. After the revolution the Communist party took a poll asking everybody to describe their class origin, Lenin proudly wrote down “aristocrat”. His father was as petty aristocrat who was actually a civil servant in the Tsarist bureaucracy. Russia, as you probably, know at that time was one of the most repressive societies on earth. The Tsarist autocracy meant the rule of one person, and dominated society even much more than any empire in western Europe like the Austrian or German, which were repressive enough. Even the nobility in Russia was essentially almost appointed by the Tsar, which was absolutely not the case in Western Europe. The Tsar could more or less take land from the nobles.

Speaker 3: Sorry to interrupt! I’m having difficulty trying to imagine that.

Loren: As you can imagine Russia was economically backward, and until the late 19th century the great majority of people were peasants. As you know, Russia was a huge country. It was expanding eastward the way the United States was expanding westward. Actually, I remember reading somewhere that the empire grew by 365 square miles a day for three hundred years. The Russians were incorporating all the countries on the southern tier, the Muslim countries like Uzbekistan, Turkestan, and all the other stans. They were constantly being incorporated into the Russian empire by military expansion and by pioneers sent out to colonize, start farms and things like that. It was a dynamic system in its own way. Russia started to industrialize in the 1860s. Of course, almost entirely foreign investment began industry. But even by the time of the revolution itself in 1917, only about 10% of the population was working class. So the peasantry was 80% to 90% of the population. Needless to say, the peasant question was the question of the early revolutionary movement in Russia. From the time that I spent in East Asia and Korea, I was quite interested to learn that the early revolutionary movements in Japan and Korea and China they all looked to Russia much more than they did to Europe. They followed events in Russia because… it was the country that seemed most similar to their own situation with this mass peasant majority. So writers like Tolstoy, for example, were widely read in translation in Asia from the 1880s onward, and many other examples like that.

Russia developed revolutionary movements of sorts well before industrialization, and it was mainly in the aristocracy. The aristocracy was a very small group of people on top of this peasant mass. You have to realize that like, for example, when Lenin was going to university, there were probably two thousand or three thousand university students in all of Russia in a population of a hundred and fifty million people. So when Lenin was talking about the role of intellectuals in the movement you’ve got to remember that he is talking about this very small group of educated people within this vast mass of people, most of whom were illiterate. And most of whom were almost literally owned by the local landlords whose estates they worked on. So the movement started from a very difficult level. So industrialization began, and with industrialization came a lot of western ideas that had already began to percolate after the French Revolution and Napoleon invaded Russia . The Russian elite was totally hooked into French culture. The aristocrats actually spoke French among themselves. They considered Russian to be a backward, barbaric language.

So, by the middle of the 19th century the Utopian Socialists like Fourier and others were all the rage in this very small world of the intelligentsia. If you’re familiar with Dostoyevsky, he was arrested in 1849 as a member of an underground Fourierist socialist group, and he was sent off to Siberia for ten years. It totally turned his head inside out, completely changed him. He became something of a reactionary, but we don’t have to get off into that. He wrote a great book , by the way, called The Devils, which is a portrait of the Russian revolution milieu; we can get to that in a minute. Marx was very disappointed that the first foreign language translation of Volume One of Capital was into Russian, as he was expecting it be into French and English. I don’t think Capital came out in English until the 1880s if I’m not mistaken. The German original came out in 1867: the Russian translation (largely done by Bakunin by the way), came out a few years later. Bakunin thought Marx’s Capital was a great book even when they had totally fallen out. But because of; the agrarian nature of Russia, the movement that really took off was called Populist, the Populist movement.

The Populist movement was a few thousand people from this educated elite that, starting in the early 1870s, decided that they were going to foment a peasant revolution by going to the people. Their main organization was called The People’s Will. In 1874 thousands of students dropped out of school and went to the countryside to try to arouse the peasantry to revolution. There had been a number pf great peasant revolutions pver several hundred years but as you can imagine, these highly educated people trying to pass themselves off as ordinary peasants in the backwaters of Russia didn’t work out too well, and most of the time the peasants actually turned them over to the police, things like that. So it was kind of a fiasco. The Populists also, after that disappointment, turned to terrorism. They managed to assassinate two Tsars, in 1881 and 1888. They assassinated a lot of other Russian officials as well. One of the things that is important for understanding Lenin is that there was no comparable social stratum anywhere in the world, then or since, really, like this Russian intelligentsia. It was just in a world of its own of extremely hardened people. The conspirators who killed the first Tsar in 1881, when they went to the scaffolds, one of them had talked. I think there was six of them and they didn’t even look at the traitor. They just were there, the hoods went on and they were hung. They didn’t say a word except “down with the Tsars” or something like that. You’ve got to realize these were just incredibly repressive conditions.

Anybody arrested with a book or a pamphlet, not to mention attending a meeting, could be sent off to Siberia or sent to these prisons that were a virtual death sentence. A very important twist on this (there is, by the way, a great book which I highly recommend. Franco Venturi, The Roots of Revolution) is a history of the whole revolutionary movement up to the appearance of Marxism. It covers everything from the French Revolution to the history of the last Populists. In the mid-1870s this young charismatic brilliant guy named Nechayev became part of the revolution. Nechayev was the ultimate conspirator. I think it’s somewhat controversial, but he apparently killed a member of his own group who was suspected of being a police spy. It became a cause celebre in the world press. Nechayev was in and out of jail many times. He was such a charismatic guy that he actually managed to recruit the guards to his own cause and they would let him escape or they would bring him books. He was really quite a character. Then he went to the west, where he met Bakunin and he convinced Bakunin that he had an underground organization of a hundred thousand people behind him in Russia and they were going to set up a new international organization. This “Nechayev episode” really gave Bakunin something of a black eye. He’d been so taken in by this. The reason I’m mentioning Nechayev is that he theorized the hard, exceptional quality of the Russian revolutionary milieu. It’s called the Revolutionary Testament. Let me just read to you briefly a couple of passages from it. This was something that did not exist in the west. Karl Marx would never had written something like this.

“The revolutionary is a lost man. He has no interests of his own, no cause of his own, no feelings, no habits, no belongings…Everything in him is absorbed by a single exclusive interest, a single thought, a single passion – the revolution.” “In the depths of his being, not just in words but in deed, he has broken every tie with the civil order, with the educated world and all laws, all conventions and generally accepted conditions of this world.”

“He will be an implacable enemy of this world and if he continues to live in it that will only be to destroy it… The revolutionary despises all doctrinaires; he has rejected the science of the world, leaving it to the next generation. He knows only one science, that of destruction. He despises public opinion, he despises and hates the existing social ethic and all its expressions. For him everything that allows the triumph of the revolution is moral, everything that stands in its way is immoral. The character of a true revolutionary has no place for any romanticism such as mental enthusiasm or seduction, nor has it any place for private hatred or revenge. The revolutionary passion becomes a daily hourly passion, which most people liken to cold calculation” etc.

You get the idea? This was in extreme form the mentality of this hardened underground elite from generation to generation. I mentioned that some of the Bolsheviks later officially denounced Nechayev . But there was something about that mentality that ran through this whole milieu… Maybe when get to the origins of Stalinism, that’s something we can talk about. People like Lenin, Trotsky, all the people who were off in Switzerland or England in exile writing books and so on, they were shaped by this but people in Russia, the underground, the people who were known as the “praktiki”, the people who really did the daily work, were imbued with this ethos.

Even though the Bolsheviks were anti-Populist and criticizing Nechayev. It’s a very touchy subject. I’m going to just go off on a tangent for one minute, When Dostoevsky’s book came out, The Devils, it had a fictional character based on Nechayev. It portrayed this whole episode, the execution of the suspected spy and the whole scandal that emerged from that. After the Bolshevik Revolution and the triumph of Stalin, the complete works of Dostoevsky were published for decades, but always without that book. The Stalinists knew that he had put his finger on something important. Finally; in the 1950s, after Khrushchev came in, they published The Devils for the first time in over 30 years. Some of the Soviet bureaucrats would read it and they were just say: “how did he know?” “This guy is writing in the 1870s and he’s got down to the smallest details what would later happen when the revolution took power.”

So Lenin was growing up in the provinces; his father was this low level conventional bureaucrat but his older brother got involved with the Populist movement. He was arrested in a plot to assassinate the Tsar in about 1886. He was executed almost immediately along with other comrades. Up until that time Lenin was a kind of a dreamer, sitting in the backyard reading novels, making fun of his brother who was a biologist always studying insects and other species; “why are you wasting your time with that stuff?” The execution of his brother totally changed Lenin. He took over all of his habits.

Of course it all went into the study of society, economics and theory, and so on. He is out in the provinces; he was not immediately exposed to Marxism. By the early 1890s after he got a law degree he was already influenced by revolutionary ideas, in a confused way. But he finally got to the big time in Moscow and in St. Petersburg, the city that was then called St Petersburg was later called Leningrad; that’s where he entered the revolutionary milieu. He immediately rose very quickly because he was so brilliant, articulate and knowledgeable. He was incredibly thorough, always studying conditions, statistics and so on. He was very quickly arrested and he was sentenced to Siberia. A friend of mine who much later went to Harvard used to say “in Russia when you failed in politics you went to Siberia; in America when you fail in politics you go to Harvard.” Going to Siberia at that time was not what it became later under Stalin. If you read any biography of Lenin, you can see that the revolutionaries had books, they had access to newspapers and correspondence. Lenin himself was out hunting, fishing, ice skating in the winter, hiking; it wasn’t a bad life. Lenin’s wife came with him and they had a circle of people. So during these five years in Siberia, as you can just imagine in the days of the internet, if the newspaper came one day late from Moscow he would be pacing back and forth; he really wanted to stay on top of things.

So, he wrote his first important book, which is called ‘’The Development of Capitalism in Russia’’. It’s a massive 500-page book; I never managed to get all the way through it. Some people say it’s more important to understand what Lenin did in power than What is to be done?, which is the work that is conventionally cited. I should cite also one other aspect to the backdrop of Lenin. In the 1860s there was this guy named Chernyshevsky, who was the hero of the young Populist movement at that time. He was an older revolutionary; he also wrote all kinds of books. He was exiled and sent to Siberia around 1863, I don’t think he ever came back. But he wrote this novel that’s called What Is to Be Done? Lenin took that title for his own pamphlet. The novel portrays a main character, Rakhmetov, who more or less leads the life that is described later by Nechayev. . In other words, self-sacrifice, self-denial, everything for the revolution… Again illustrating this very special quality of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia, Lenin apparently read that book twenty times, so it was one of his favorite novels. From a literary point of view, it’s unreadable, but it was absolutely a “best seller” in the revolutionary milieu in Russia in 1860s.

Victor Serge in his Memoirs has a portrait of Chernyshevsky, just as he was being humiliated in public, just as he was being sent into exile. and he writes “the old man, his head hung, grey hair, looking really miserable and he was going to be riding in a cart all the way to Siberia.. But would it have been better if he had become an academic?” I really always loved that formulation; it’s one of the reason I never became an academic.

So Lenin wrote his book; the reason why this book The Development of Capitalism in Russia is considered to be so important is that Lenin identifies (I think) five different strata of the Russian peasantry. When he actually took power, all the agricultural policies were based on the analysis of that book. Recently, this guy name John Marot has written a book about the peasant question in the Russian revolution. If you look on my website ‘Break Their Haughty Power’ ( breaktheirhaughtypower.org )you’ll find a review of it, which summarizes what he says. He basically said that Lenin got it all wrong.

Indeed there were rich peasants, poor peasants, peasants in between, these five different groups but, in reality, when they were threatened as peasants, they all came together in a certain way. So a lot of Lenin’s policies on the agrarian question were kind of wrong, at best. But that’s something else to talk about more when we get to Stalin.

Lenin finally was freed from Siberia, and goes back, and then he goes into exile in the west, Switzerland and later to England. Then he writes his other important book. It’s a little book, I thought of having us reading it for today, but it is a hundred pages; it’s called What Is To Be Done? Lenin sets out what he considers to be the way of having a revolutionary organization in the conditions of Tsarist repression and its police state; that’s where he comes up with this idea of the vanguard party. It’s not often pointed out but I will point it out that this guy Lassalle in Germany had really anticipated much of what Lenin said; because; what Lassalle was always arguing for was this military-like grouping of special professional revolutionaries. You will never find anything in the writing of Karl Marx about professional revolutionaries. Lassalle theorized it and it was taken over generally; it was considered like the blue of the sky in certain parts of the Russian movement. That’s what Lenin theorizes in this book What Is To Be Done?

There is a huge controversy about what exactly it means. There is whole eight hundred page book called Lenin Rediscovered by a guy named Lars Lih, which is definitely worth reading. He reconstructs the whole milieu to which Lenin addresses this book. It’s also interesting that on the title page of the first Russian edition of What Is To Be Done?, there is a quote from Lassalle saying “the party strengthens itself by purging itself.” Lars Lih in his appendix, actually provides his own translation of What Is To Be Done? in which Lenin comes across as a nice guy and that quote is missing from the translation. I contacted a couple of people I know who read Russian and asked if this word “purge” is the same word which was used in the mass trails and executions.Yes, indeed. It’s a frightening subject and people been arguing about it ever since, particularly since 1905 and particularly since Stalinism. What exactly does this pamphlet mean?

Speaker 3: When was it published and whem it was written?

Loren: It was written in 1902, and published in 1902 or 1903. In 1903 there was a congress of the Bolshevik party in Russia where this famous split occurred between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. It was really over the questions raised in What Is to Be Done? What it really came down to was a party resolution on who could be a member of the Bolshevik Party. Lenin was arguing for a tighter, more disciplined definition of membership. Whereas Martov, who was kind of the leader of the other faction said “people who pay dues and come to an occasional meeting and involve themselves in a peripheral way, they should be considered members too.” It’s funny that at the congress itself Lenin and Martov kept going back and forth saying “why don’t you make the formulation? No! No!, you do it.” Finally Lenin’s resolution carried and that became the beginning of the Bolshevik-Menshevik split. We’ll talk about that more when we get to the origins of Trotsky and Stalin next week. So these are the two major theoretical works of Lenin. By the way, Rosa Luxemburg wrote several critiques of Lenin – Problems of Russian Social Democracy and so on, in which she already zeroed in on the kind of elitist character of some of Lenin’s formulations. It’s a very complicated debate… Rosa Luxemburg is somebody that everybody likes. The liberals like Rosa Luxemburg because they saw her as kind of a democrat with a small “d”. Mensheviks like her because they see her as a critic of Lenin. Leninists like her because; she was a tough- minded revolutionary. When she was murdered in 1919, Lenin gave a funeral oration for her in which he said “Rosa Luxemburg was wrong on the national question.

She was wrong in the question of organization. She was wrong about economics. But as we know an eagle can sometimes fly lower than a chicken, but a chicken can never fly as high as an eagle, and Rosa Luxemburg will always be for us an eagle.” So even Lenin who disagreed with her on so many things recognized her as kindred spirit, another revolutionary that he disagreed with. So, there is a whole spectrum of opinion about Rosa Luxemburg. I believe that…, actually one of her pamphlets was published in the 1960s in the United States in English under the title “Leninism or Democracy?” which is absolutely not the title in German or Russian. But that’s how she was kind of integrated into a certain kind of ideology.

Lenin is off in Switzerland in 1905, and was puzzled by these things called soviets; what are they? But pretty quickly he recognizes that they are something very unique and very important. I don’t think he ever got back to Russia at that time. “1905” lasted for almost two years, just as Luxemburg describes in her pamphlet; one strike after another in whole regions. But finally, the revolution dies down.

Let me just go into hopefully one more theoretical background here. At this time, everybody and I mean everybody thought that the Russian revolution was going to be a bourgeois revolution. So when 1905, came along, the big demand of the movement was for a constitution, the constitutional assembly, elections, freedom of the press, right to trade union organizing etc. And the feeling that is striking when you read The Mass Strike, as great as this revolution is, it’s about putting an end to the Tsar’s autocracy and replacing that with bourgeois democracy, even though she is very clear that the actual liberals, the Russian bourgeois, are bunch of weaklings and in no position to lead this revolutionary movement for their own bourgeois democracy.

So, it would be a bourgeois revolution made by the working class. It’s only Trotsky who already in 1905 realized that, because of this fragility of the Russian bourgeoisie, there could be a working class revolution in Russia. He began to work this out in what’s called the theory of permanent revolution, which was a term already used by Marx. Let’s talk about that next time when we do Trotsky and Stalin. Trotsky was way out in left field at that time. He’s the only important person who was arguing that. So twelve years later, in January 1917, Lenin was still in Switzerland and was invited to speak to the Swiss Socialist Youth. He talked to the Swiss Socialist Youth and said, ‘’Oh, you know, the bourgeois revolution will happen in Russia maybe in about 1950’’. Eight months later, he’s in power at the head of a working class revolution. So, it just shows how removed from reality theory can be, how this reality was moving so quickly. Even the most radical people were having a hard time keeping up. Lenin had the slogan “be as radical as reality”. This is a perfect illustration of it.

Okay! So in 1905 the Tsar is half-defeated, and does grant a constitutuent assembly. But within a couple of years he’s turned that just into nothing but a showpiece. I think at one point in the later years of ebb, in about 1910 or 1911, Lenin had eleven correspondents in all of Russia. Three or four years before he had been in touch with hundreds of people all over the place, lots of people were driven into exile in Siberia, and then World War 1 started. So this is where Lenin and Luxemburg really came together. Now one important thing to tie this all together; you recall this guy Kautsky and the so-called “center” of social democracy. Lenin revered Kautsky, whereas Rosa Luxemburg by 1910, from a whole series of incidents inside the German Social Democracy , had decided that Kautsky was not.., they were not in the same camp. There was effectively a break between them. The war started and, this is really quite remarkable. Up to that time it was always believed, and there was congress after congress of the Socialist International saying that in the event of a war in Europe all working class parties will oppose their own bourgeoisie and unite with the working class parties of all other countries and do whatever they could, maybe make the revolution.

Along comes World War I and every party in Europe collapsed into the patriotic hysteria in its own country. There were just massive crowds in the street and anybody who openly opposed the war in the street ran a good chance of being lynched. Interestingly, for some damn reason, only the Serbian Socialist Party refused to support its own bourgeoisie in the war. But that again is a whole other story. And interestingly the American Socialist Party also opposed American entry into the war. The U.S. didn’t enter the war for two and a half years but there was a strong left opposition, with the IWW as well, against the war. So the Second International collapses and you know Lenin is sitting in Switzerland and he gets the first newspapers and he can’t believe it; he thinks that the newspapers were police forgeries, about the German Social Democrats voting the war credits in the German parliament. But in fact it was true, so this already shows a very important difference between Lenin and Luxemburg in terms of their different insights into what was going on in the European movement as a whole. But Lenin quickly recovered and in 1915 there was a congress in a small town in Switzerland called Zimmerwald , where all the anti-war socialists of all of Europe came together and debated what to do. Even there, Lenin stood out as the extreme radical, more radical than Rosa Luxemburg. Some people were for peace without annexations, others were for a negotiated settlement. Whatever! There were all these different solutions. I think Luxemburg’s formulation was “peace without annexation.” Lenin said “turn the inter-imperialist war into civil war.” This was the opportunity for the working class revolution in the western world, and very shortly after this, things started to happen that looked like they were going that way, and there are mutinies in the French army. There were also mutinies in 1918, in the German Navy.

It was just clear that the different governments in Europe were barely keeping the lid on and forcing people to go on fighting. And finally in February 1917, there was a demonstration for Women’s Day in Petrograd and I think the police attacked the demo and maybe fired on it, and it led to the overthrow of the Tsar. Again showing how nobody, as Luxemburg says in this mass strike pamphlet, nobody plans these things. (Her formulation was “The mistakes of a mass movement in motion are more valuable than the decisions of the best central committee.” We can see the conditions; we can see that these governments were sitting on a volcano. But when, how, where, it’s all going to break out? It’s just totally beyond the control of the most intelligent central committee. So the Tsar falls and an actual bourgeois democracy is set up. It goes through a whole series of changes and winds up within a few months under the leadership of this guy Kerensky. And what does Kerensky do? Everybody who made the revolution wants the war to end and they want land to the peasants. And so even though the government continues to pursue the war, the peasants en masse start go back home and start seizing the land of the aristocracy. By the time of the October Revolution, most of the estates have been broken up and seized by the peasants living on them. There was nothing that this so-called provisional government could do about it. Lenin comes back in April of 1917 and he’s greeted at the Finland Station, which is the big train station in Petrograd, by fifty thousand people, masses of people cheering him.

They’re all taken with this idea that it’s a two stage bourgeois revolution and that bourgeois democracy is the goal of the revolution, it’s already there. And Pravda, the main newspaper of the Bolsheviks, edited by Stalin, is printing these articles about how great Kerensky and how great all these people in the provisional government are. Lenin gets off the train and makes a speech in which he denounces his own party and denounces its whole collaboration with the Kerensky regime, and says “look at what the working class is doing; the working class is headed for proletarian revolution” which will be as radical as reality. It’s kind of “We are the leaders, we must follow them.” And the most hardened Bolsheviks were just totally shocked by this speech. Some people said Lenin had become a Bakuninist or a putchist or whatever. It just led to an uproar within the party. But, Lenin being Lenin, with his prestige, , years of hammering away… This is the point at which, according to Trotsky, (and I think it’s true) Lenin and Trotsky are reconciled. Lenin accepts this idea of permanent revolution as the idea that the proletariat was going to go beyond the bourgeois revolution and make the proletarian revolution, together with revolution in the West. And that’s a very important point because they never imagined that a working class socialist revolution in backward Russia with 10 to 15% of the population in the working class could possibly build socialism. I think maybe I should stop there because; everything after that sort of leads very quickly to the Stalin and Trotsky battle, which we’ll deal next. But please some questions, comments. Let me drink some water…

Speaker 3: You didn’t finish the story about what happened to Luxemburg’s party collapsing.

Loren: That’s a very good point! Okay! So, back to Germany; Rosa Luxembourg is imprisoned first of all, after she makes some speeches against the war; she and a number of other anti-war socialists go to jail. And she wrote (you can look it up online) what is called the Junius Pamphlet which she published anonymously under the pseudonym Junius, denouncing the war, and denouncing the Social Democrats’ support for the war. Of course at the beginning just like everywhere else it’s a very small group of people who were seriously against the war but they started to make contact with each other. By 1916 they led a major split in the SPD and they’ set up another party that was called the Independent Social Democratic Party. It had a very serious working class base including a whole network of shop stewards in Berlin and other major cities, who were very antiwar and ready to move. So the war continues, the naval mutiny happens shortly after that. But it was very curious that from a purely military point of view at that time, it looked to many people like Germany still had a very good chance of winning the war because it hadn’t been defeated anywhere. The United States had just entered and hadn’t yet really become a factor. Then all of a sudden, a month or two before Germany surrendered, the top general staff said “this is hopeless, we’re going to lose. Let’s try to make peace now and get the best possible deal.”

But after the war, because of that situation; it gave rise to this thing that was known as the ‘stab in the back legend’ that blamed the Socialists and the Jews for having sabotaged Germany’s victory. But this is now getting into the post-war period, something of another story. So then as the government collapses, the revolution breaks out all over Germany. Workers’, soldiers’ and sailors’ councils are set up all over the place, with red flags. But it’s very curious; in the main plaza in downtown Berlin, a million people congregated on the first day. At one end of the plaza were Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the other major anti-war figure; who had both been in jail. They’re calling for the immediate establishment of the Soviet Republic of Germany, while at the other end of the plaza, with the same crowd, all the Social Democrats were talking about the need to immediately establish a bourgeois Republic and the crowd is cheering both of them. So it kind of shows a certain level of confusion about what exactly was going on.

The Kaiser, the head of Imperial Germany, had to flee into exile, and the military begged the Social Democrats to take power. They were the only group that could control the working class. Maybe we should do another session on the German revolution because; it gets very complicated. So suddenly the centre and right wing of the Social Democratic Party are the government in Germany, supported by the army and getting ready to crush the left wing. By that time, Luxemburg and her faction had split off into what became known as the Spartakusbund, and shortly after that, they would rename themselves the Communist Party of Germany. In January 1919, some members of the Spartacists and other people from around Germany tried to make a revolution. And it was a little premature but Luxemburg and Liebknecht both said “when the masses go into the streets, we go with them.” They were both killed in January 1919. This begins a whole different chapter in the development of German Socialism and Communism but that’s essentially what happened. That’s what happened to Rosa Luxemburg. Almost immediately after her death all these different versions of the true Rosa began to be developed, but again it gets off into a whole other story. So, let’s have a discussion and questions but also let’s go over this text a little bit because; there’s just some really great formulations are in there. So, I hope I didn’t overwhelm everyone with all kinds of facts and stories. You know it’s just an incredible period of history.

Loren: I photocopied a little map of Russia. Unfortunately it’s from a book in French but I think you can figure it out, all the names are pretty much the same. I know some people probably are not so familiar with the geography that we are talking about. So here you have some kind of a reference.

Last week, we were talking about Lenin and Luxemburg, and I was trying to work up some notes for today; I just realize that the topic of Stalin and Trotsky is far more complicated. Why? First of all, because it was in this period that Bolshevism became an international phenomenon. Things were going on back and forth between what was happening in the Soviet Union and what was happening in other countries, where the Soviet Union, through the Third International, the Communist International, had great influence. So, the order will be a little bit skewed but try to bear with me. Just a couple of things I want to mention, from last week, I said one thing that I want to kind of modify, which is on the question of leadership. When I said that there are leaders and that there are people who speak better and who write better and who have more organizing skills and so on.

And that this should be recognized and not fetishized. I also want to emphasize the old Wobbly idea, we are all leaders. That is one of the weaknesses of the Bolshevik form of organization because of its centralization is that if the state picks off and arrests certain people, the organization becomes deeply weakened. I don’t know if I have any obvious solution to this but it’s just something to keep in mind. I just wanted to modify that a bit from last week. Another thing I just wanted to point out is that if you really want to pursue, there is a really good book about Stalin by a Frenchman named Boris Souvarine, which translated into English by C.L.R James in the late 1930s. Boris Souvarine was a very interesting guy who was close to Lenin in the very early years of the revolution and slowly became disillusioned and wound up being a real Cold War reactionary. But nevertheless, he wrote this book before that happened. If you want to read one book about Stalin, that’s it. I’m going to start out talking about–

Speaker 2: What’s the name of the book?

Loren: It’s called Stalin.

Speaker 2: Oh it’s Stalin.

Loren: Yeah. Okay! So, I’m starting out talking about Trotsky. We’ll develop this as we go long. As I said, we’ll be kind of going back to some of the things that came up last week. Trotsky was born in 1879. He was born in the same year as Stalin. Trotsky’s family were Jewish farmers in the Ukraine, which is this big area down here, and which at that time and is still was a huge agricultural centre. It was kind of financing Russian industrialization by exporting wheat to the rest of the world. So much that even during famines in Russia, they were exporting wheat to raise money for buying more factories, things like that. So Trotsky grew up in what you might call a petty bourgeois kind of family and social milieu. He went off to school and he was extremely intelligent, a great speaker and very quickly got involved in an underground study group of the kind that existed all over the place in Russia at this time. This would be in the mid 1890s, but he was then nowhere near being a Marxist or a revolutionary.

He was just part of the general liberal socialist opposition to Tsarism, without any kind of clear focus. Then he fell in with the Marxist milieu. Actually one of the interesting things about Trotsky was that all his life, up until the time of the Russian Revolution, he was kind of a free floater. He did not side with either the Bolsheviks or the Mensheviks in the split that occurred in 1903. To go back briefly to last week and for people who weren’t there, at the time of the original split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, nobody realized that it was history in the making. Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks, and Martov, the leader of the Mensheviks, were presiding at a conference and the issue was the definition of membership. Lenin wanted a more narrow, tighter disciplined definition, Martov was more open. They kept saying “why don’t you introduce the motion? no no no, you do it.” It was like it didn’t seem like a big deal. It was only over the course of time that it really turned out to be this historical dividing point. But Trotsky didn’t join either faction. I think it was in 1899 that he got arrested as member of this underground group and was sent off to Siberia.

As I was saying last week about Lenin, going to Siberia for revolutionaries, particularly revolutionaries of middle class background, wasn’t exactly a vacation but it was nothing what it became under Stalin; where it was essentially a bullet in the back of the head, or being worked to death in a forced labor camp or being sent to the Arctic Circle. Prisoners then had books, they had newspapers, they were under loose police surveillance but people escaped all the time from Siberia. Bakunin, for example, was sent to Siberia sometime in the 1860s, I believe. He managed to escape to Japan, stopped over in Japan, founded Japanese anarchism for a couple of months while he was there, and then caught a boat to California, and he was back in action in Europe shortly thereafter. Siberia was kind of like a prison, but it was also more like a sort of a revolutionary graduate school where you did a lot of reading, lots of intense discussion, cliquish in-fighting and so on. Compared to imprisonment in western Russia, it was a step up. So Trotsky was out in Siberia for three years, and he escaped. Some of his comrades forged a passport for him. His real name was Bronstein and “it was that nice train conductor in such and such a place whose name was Trotsky, so let’s put that on the passport.” That’s how Trotsky got the name Trotsky.

Then he went to western Europe and without a penny and actually managed to get to London, where he knocked on Lenin’s door at six o’ clock in the morning. But he was already kind of famous, because he was a great journalist who already had been writing some very interesting stuff about the conditions in Siberia. Lenin and Trotsky just immediately warmed to each other. Trotsky overnight had access to the inner circle of the party which, even in 1903, was impressive.(Its official name was the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party). Because there was already a big network in Russia, and here were Lenin and Martov and all the other people had later become known as the leaders of RSDLP, all groups together either in London or (as I was talking about last week) in Switzerland. Probably one of the three most important things I wanted to mention in this whole presentation is about a theory of permanent revolution. I talked about it last week and I want to talk about it more now. The theory of permanent revolution goes back to Marx, but it’s much more generally associated with Trotsky. Marx developed it in 1850 when he was on trial after the revolution of 1848. When Marx wrote it, the only developed countries were England and France. Germany was a developing country, still not even unified.

In such countries, Marx said, because they are competing with already developed countries, the bourgeoisie in these western underdeveloped countries was too weak to fight for political power itself, as had happened in England or in France. In such situations, the working class tended to push behind the limits of the bourgeois revolution and not necessarily make the proletarian revolution but clearly go beyond the kind of bourgeois liberalism that was the ideology and practice of the bourgeoisie. As some of you probably know, there was a real working-class communist uprising in Paris in June 1848. The news of it rippled all around the world. If you can believe it, the White House at the time was lit up to celebrate the 1848 revolution. That was back in the days when America tended to side with people who were fighting against monarchy. The Paris communist uprising of June 1848 really scared the hell out of the bourgeoisie, not just in France but everywhere.

So, in Germany when red flags started appearing in the worker demonstrations, the weak bourgeoisie there was all the more frightened. Engels wrote a very good book called Revolution and Counter Revolution In Germany which I highly recommend, just to sketch the outline of what happened there. So Marx was on trial for getting associated with a communist publication and he first elaborated this theory of permanent revolution – the idea that the working class in developing countries can go beyond the weak bourgeoisie and make the revolution permanent. It kind of was forgotten and the reason it was forgotten was because people later tended to adopt this two-stage view of how the revolution would come about. First there would be the bourgeois revolution; then there would be the socialist-communist working-class revolution. Marx already criticized this point of view but Marx got caught up in writing Capital and in the politics of the First International; the question wasn’t posed practically really in any way in any country for a long time so it was kind of forgotten and buried by this mechanistic linear view that took over the Second International in particular.

We recall that the First International collapsed in the early 1870s because of the battle between the Marxists and the anarchists after the defeat of the Paris Commune, with different interpretations of why that happened, but it happened. The Second International was founded in 1889 on the strength of a strike wave throughout Europe and particularly in England, where a so-called “New Union” strike wave headed by longshoremen sort of got class struggle going again. As we discussed last week, this was the International at that time, with Germany and the German Social Democratic Party as the model for all other parties. Like in the United States for example, there were lots of German Marxists of different sorts who had come already after the defeat of 1848 and even more so in the later emigration and Bismarck’s crackdown on the Social Democrats in 1878; more refugees came to the United States. They also were presenting the model of the German Social Democratic Party as the socialist party.

So, Trotsky comes along and he hooks up with a rather colorful guy named Parvus (that’s his pseudonym). Parvus was a brilliant theoretician and he was also a very skillful businessman who actually made a lot of money through this whole period in places like Turkey during World War I. He was an arms dealer but at the same time was generally in agreement with the radical wing of the Russian revolutionary movement. He tried to see Rosa Luxemburg in 1915 and she just slammed the door in his face. Most revolutionaries had broken with him by that point but in 1904/1905, Parvus and Trotsky looked at what happened in Russia, the 1905 revolution that we discussed last week with Soviets, these regional councils and worker’s councils in the factory, and said, “here it is, here is the working class way ahead of the bourgeois revolution and the coming revolution in Russia will not be bourgeois, it will be proletarian”. Ten years later Lenin was still speaking in Switzerland to the Swiss Socialist Youth, as I mentioned last time and he said, “I expect the bourgeois revolution in Russia for 1950 or so.” Ten months later he was in power at the head of a working-class revolution. Just to show how out of touch ideology could be with reality. Lenin’s famous slogan was “be as radical as reality”. It was never more confirmed by that misunderstanding of the timing the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions.

Any Trotskyist you will meet to this day will give you some version of permanent revolution, in one form or another. Some Trotskyists for example say that India is not a bourgeois democracy because it’s impossible for the bourgeoisie to establish a firm bourgeois democracy because the proletarian democracy is on the agenda. Well, the proletarian revolution has been on the agenda a very longtime but yet in some parts of the world the bourgeoisie seems to have established parliamentary forms and the formality of bourgeois democracy and so on. It’s a complicated question; we certainly don’t have to get into it here. But this was what I would say, more than anything else, was Trotsky’s true great contribution to Marxism. I don’t think of myself as a Trotskyist, I disagree with Trotsky on a whole bunch of other questions but I do accept the theory of permanent revolution. Look at Iran, for example, in 1979 where they overthrew the shah and immediately workers’ councils appeared in the oil fields and different factories. The liberal bourgeoisie represented by people like Bani Sadr and so on, if you remember them, were just swept aside and unfortunately they were swept aside by the Islamists more than by the workers. But nonetheless , it just shows that fragility of liberal democracy in so- called developing countries.

So 1905/1906 is defeated and Trotsky spent the years up to World War I in western Europe, or in Europe generally. Another important part of his life was he was a journalist during the Balkan Wars of 1912/1913. (Unfortunately the Balkans really barely appear on this map.) But these are the different ethnic areas that became part of what was called Yugoslavia up until the early 1990s. The conflict also involved Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, and Greece. There were two Balkan Wars and what it really was about was the decline and collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish Empire, that was going to fall apart in 1917 at the end of the war. So you have a question?

Speaker 2: Oh no. You answered my question.

Loren: Okay. And you have a question?

Speaker 3: You said the Balkan War was when

Loren: 1912 to 1913.

Speaker 3: Awesome!

Loren: They were kind of a dress rehearsal for World War I. Everybody has forgotten about them but Trotsky covered them in great depth as a journalist and that’s really where he learned military strategy. Trotsky never had formal military training and yet starting in 1917 he built the Red Army from scratch and was essentially a genius at strategy. The Red Army accepted a number of Tsar’s officers who decided they didn’t want to fight for the Whites; that’s the kind of revolution it was like. So, they would be in charge of different regiments and divisions with a political commissar with a pistol next to their heads in case they tried to sabotage. Then, after the war they said, Trotsky just made these unbelievable decisions on the spur of the moment and they were always right. It’s really kind of remarkable. So studying strategy later, that’s where Trotsky got that kind of ability. When World War I broke out, I’m not sure where Trotsky was, but he wound up in the Bronx, of all places. I think he lived in the Bronx for about six months. He was making a living as a bit actor in grade C films.

There are still apparently some ads for those films with him embracing some women or something like that. He established relations with American Socialist Party which he later called the “socialism of dentists” because it was such a middle-class, reformist, and basically conservative party. This was at a point where that the IWW was still going strong. He once asked some of the specialists of the Socialist Party, at the SP headquarters here in New York, “do the Negroes in America speak English?” And they said, “yes, at least we think so, we’ll send some of our people to find out.” That’s how disconnected they were from American realities. So Trotsky wasn’t terribly impressed with the American SP. After the fall of the Tsar in the February revolution, tens of thousands of revolutionaries from all over the world, including from United States, were going back to Russia to participate in the real revolution.

By the way, if you haven’t seen the Warren Beatty’s movie “Reds”, I really recommend it. Trotsky does not figure in it but it’s a pretty good portrayal. For a Hollywood movie released at the beginning of the Reagan years it’s kind of unbelievable as a portrayal of what actually happened.

So Trotsky gets on a ship to go back to Russia and the ship is diverted by the British navy off the coast of Canada because they know very well who is on it. Not just Trotsky but hundreds of other people and they’re put into a prison or work camp near Halifax, in Nova Scotia, with mainly German POWs. Trotsky, who spoke fluent German, spent the whole time haranguing the German soldiers who were there, and when he was finally released to continue his trip, he was carried to the gates of the camp on the shoulders of all these German soldiers. It was real internationalism and that by the way is a very important part of how the revolution happened in the very same year on the eastern front, with the German army and the Russian army and the Austrian army. There was tremendous fraternization going on which, of course, greatly frightened the heads of state and all of these countries.

So Trotsky, he was among the first to go back. Last week we also talked about the Zimmerwald Conference of 1915. That was when a very small number of revolutionaries from all European countries came together in this little town in Switzerland, Zimmerwald, to discuss strategy after all the the big working class socialist parties had collapsed in 1914, supporting their own bourgeoisie in the war, with the exception of the Serbians, for some damn reason, and also the Italian party which basically opposed the war, and the American Socialist Party of all things, with the left wing gaining dominance and opposing American entry. But the French, British, German, Austrian, Dutch, Belgian etc. All these big parties, just one week before the war, were holding massive antiwar rallies but when the crunch came they all voted for war credits for their own countries. So Zimmerwald happened and people were debating what to do. We are talking about 20 or 30 people. That’s where Lenin really stands out for raising the slogan “turn the inter-imperialist war into a civil war.”

(One thing I wanted to point out from last week also is the 1905 revolution was actually started by the defeat of Russia in the war with Japan, 1904/1905. Lenin raised the slogan “we favor the defeat of our own side, down with the Tsar.” The Japanese Socialist Party was very concerned by this formulation and so they wrote to Lenin saying “the defeat of your side means the victory of the Japanese empire, which we’re fighting against.” So by the time of Zimmerwald, Lenin had modified this “to turn the inter-imperialist war into civil war”. Even Rosa Luxemburg, I think her formulation was ‘peace with no annexations’ and Trotsky was also somewhere in the middle there as well. So again, Lenin kind of stood out for the radical perspective that he had. We went through the dynamic of the revolution last week but let us just touch on it again briefly. Lenin returns with most of the exiled revolutionaries in the spring of 1917 and launches the April Theses. Which are theses where more or less, a typical Trotskyist today will tell you, in the spring of 1917, Lenin and Trotsky finally came together. Trotsky joined the Bolshevik Party and Lenin accepted the thesis of permanent revolution that, yes, the coming revolution is going to be proletarian.

The bourgeois revolution had just happened so what else was there ? and the workers were getting more and more militant. In the summer of 1917 there were these events called the July Days, in which the working class seemed to be mobilizing for an insurrection in some cities but the Bolsheviks felt that it was going to be premature and that they would be crushed. One really remarkable thing, that’s coming up in a minute. The Bolsheviks went out into the streets and said, “not now, we’re not strong enough, we don’t have the momentum. The Mensheviks control too many of the Soviets so let’s just prepare and we’ll take power later.” But nevertheless there was a hard crackdown. Lenin had to disguise himself as a worker. He and many revolutionaries fled to Finland which was part of the Russian empire but kind of autonomous. As you see on this map, from Petrograd to Helsinki is a one hour or two hour trip. So it was not such a big deal; the party resumed its underground existence and finally in the fall of 1917 started to prepare the insurrection. Now here again is where Trotsky’s military genius came to the fore. There’s this huge controversy about the meaning of the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917; it’s referred to as the October Revolution because Russia at the time was still on the Eastern Orthodox calendar, so by the western calendar it was on November 7.

So, you’ll see it referred to both ways. But finally they decided it was time and, very interestingly, two leading Bolsheviks, Zinoviev and Kamenev, not only opposed the insurrection, but they went to the press and said the Bolsheviks were preparing an insurrection. Just to show the difference between Bolshevism under Lenin and the Communist Party under Stalin, they were forgiven, “there was a real breach of discipline but you people have proved yourself to be revolutionaries so we’ll take you back into the party.” 20 years later, during the Moscow trials of course, Stalin would make a big thing out of this betrayal. Trotsky is kind of the architect of the actual seizure of the government buildings. And one thing that all histories will point out is that very few people were involved. The armed resistance to the Bolshevik seizure of power was minimal. It was a handful of troops who had remained loyal to the Kerensky government. So, it was at first almost a bloodless revolution. It was immediately followed by a huge carnival in all the major cities and in Petrograd, St. Petersburg, later in Leningrad. The first thing that happened was that thousands of soldiers poured into the wine cellars of the Tsar’s Winter Palace and had this wild festival. The Bolsheviks were sending one regiment after another to calm people down. That regiment would join the party; it only ended when they drank all the wine and finally woke up. In other words, it definitely was a popular revolution.

One of the most interesting radical things that the Bolsheviks did immediately, aside from recognizing all the land seizures of the peasantry and all power to the soviets and the workers’ councils, they published all the secret treaties that had been signed among the great powers in 1914 while the war raged in Europe. It was wiki leaks, ten times intensified. Because here were all these governments who were saying, “The American government and the British government, we’re fighting for democracy.” The treaties involving Britain and the United States showed that they were going to get this or that territory after the victory and Germany had been saying “we’re fighting to stop barbaric, Tsarist, Cossack Russia.” Germany was supposed to get this land and so on. It was a devastating blow to all the powers, the traditional powers fighting the war. It was a true popular proletarian gesture. A major debate erupted in the Bolshevik Party immediately. We can’t obviously go over the whole history every month of the revolution; we’d have to expand this group by several weeks at least. But I did want to throw it out, now that everyone is here. I was thinking I would kick this around with a bit, we really kind of didn’t do justice in the Lenin/Luxemburg session to the German revolution as such. So I was going to propose a fifth meeting in which we would go from the German Revolution to the triumph of Hitler, 1918 to 1933. Is that agreeable for everyone? So that would make five sessions instead of four. 

[Audience agrees]

Loren: Okay! We can talk about that later. The first thing that had to happen was to spread the revolution and end the war. Because what had brought the Bolsheviks to power was their recognition of the peasants land seizures, and also because they knew that the vast majority of the troops at the front were sick of the war. They were already mutinying, shooting their officers, returning home on foot to seize land on the estates they’d been working on. So ending the war was a real imperative. So, that meant peace negotiations with Germany and Austria, Austro-Hungary to be exact, that still had massive armies on the Russian border or and inside Russian territory. This huge debate again showed the tremendous difference between the Bolshevik Party with Lenin and Trotsky as opposed to later. Lenin wanted to make peace with Germany on any terms, just to stop the war, and the terms turned out to be very draconian. There was another faction led by Bukharin and some others who were saying “no, we send the Red Army; we build up the Red Army and send it into Europe to greet the coming proletarian revolution there.” Which sounded like a great idea except where was the Red Army? People had been at war already for four years; they did not know they were about to go off for three more years of civil war. It was a great idea, sounds great in theory but what about in practice?

Actually I believe that the Bukharin position had the majority. But Trotsky in very early 1918 went off to a little town called Brest-Litovsk, on the border of Russia and Poland, where he met with the German High Command and the Austro-Hungarian High Command and I think after two weeks of negotiations he just walked out. He said he couldn’t accept these terms; his position was “no war no peace.” He returned to Petrograd and immediately after the collapse of the negotiations, the Austrian and German armies started to advance. They wound up seizing this whole area, essentially the Ukraine, which was not only the bread basket of Russia but it was also where the Makhno movement and other radical peasant movements were active. And they carried out guerrilla activity against the German and Austrian occupation until it collapsed in November 1918. At the same time, the Civil War was starting, the White armies were massing and so the Makhnovites and others were fighting the Germans, the Austrians and the White armies. But the Red Army, under the terms of the ceasefire, just had to sit on the borders. They finally did sign a treaty, that conceded all of this land to Germany and Austria. They were withholding any kind of military support to the insurrectionary movements going on in the Ukraine. Some people say that that’s where the Russian revolution first went off the rails. Some people say the Russian Revolution signed its own death warrant with the post Brest-Litovsk agreement with Germany and Austria. Let’s not forget that put an end to all this fraternization that had been going on between all the armies on the eastern front. So I’ll just take a pass on that; it would have been great but I really don’t think they had the forces to do much of anything at that point.

Speaker 2: Could you just emphasize a little bit more on what’s the significance of that Brest-Litovsk treaty, signed in 1918, correct?

Loren 1: Yes.

Speaker 2: So, what’s the significance for a political tendency if it dated the degeneration of the Russian revolution from that point, regardless of whether that’s right or wrong: what’s the political significance of seeing it there instead of a later date?

Loren: The abandonment of internationalism.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Loren: There was just the first step towards “socialism in one country”, which would not even emerge as a slogan for another seven years. What the Bolsheviks and Lenin were doing with the Brest-Litovsk negotiation was basically a huge gamble which, in fact, paid off. Because their calculation was that the Allies were going to defeat Germany, Germany would collapse and they would just take the Ukraine back without having to fight for it, and that’s what happened. But before that happened, the Civil War got going. This was the period in which Trotsky actually did put together the Red Army. It used to be common coin among Stalinists and Maoists that Trotsky never built the Red Army. I don’t think Maoists today still assert that. But for a very long time they were even denying that. Trotsky was not only a genius in military strategy but he really had this organizational flair. In this country that had already been at war for four years, where the regular army had collapsed, Trotsky put together an army that defeated all the Whites. Just to put that into perspective, at one point in the civil war, the area controlled by the Bolsheviks was a relatively small area around Moscow and Petrograd. All the rest of the country was up for grabs or in the hand of different White armies.

There were three major White armies led by different factions, financed by western powers and for example, there were 70,000 Czech soldiers who had been prisoners of war in Siberia and they were just incorporated into the White armies; they ultimately deserted. Then, as I mentioned last week, seventeen capitalist countries invaded Russia, including the United States. This was at the end of World War I, and for one or two years after World War I, most of these countries were exhausted militarily as well. There was huge agitation going on in virtually every one of them. So the Russian Revolution definitely happened because of World War I, which was not to say that it was an accident because capitalism brings war like clouds bring rain. The war was what made it possible for the revolution to happen and it was the war and the aftermath of the war that made it possible for the Bolsheviks to stay in power. It’s not that they didn’t defend themselves brilliantly, as well with the forces that they had, and so over the course of the next two and half years they defeated the White armies one by one. Any questions at this point?

Speaker 3: Until you start to go off into the dynamics of the Civil War I was wondering, can you describe some of the criticisms you have about the Bolsheviks after they took power? I forget the exact date when the Civil War begins, is it 1918?

Loren: Very early 1918.

Speaker 3: Right! So the spring of 1918 because; that’s another defining point of where the continued degeneration of Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution occurred. Could you spend a few minutes on that?

Loren: Sure! For those of you; who read the Simon Pirani chapter in the attachment that I sent around, Pirani started in 1920 but he does talk about things that happened up to that point. That’s an amazing book that was done with archival material that became available after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and actually this same archive has closed again under Putin because it’s just too explosive. But what Pirani found, what he shows in that chapter that we read for today is that this disconnect between the Bolshevik Party and the working class, certainly by 1920, and possibly earlier was already a reality. So as I mentioned last week, the Cheka, that’s the special secret police organized to repress the counter- revolution, they were shooting strikers as early as March 1918. They were executing masses of people who were declared to be bourgeois. A bourgeois could be a peddler who had a couple of pounds of coffee under his coat and was trying to sell them on the black market. I don’t know if it was specifically mentioned in anything we read for today, but even Dzerzhinsky who was the head of the Cheka (who was Polish by the way), admitted that a lot of innocent people had been executed by the Cheka by 1920.

There was just one funny point I forgot to mention, in the debate over the Polish-Russian War which happened in 1920, where the Red Army invaded Poland trying to come to the aid of the revolution in Poland and Germany. Lenin was against it and Dzerzhinsky was for it. So Dzerzhinsky attacked Lenin as a Polish nationalist and Lenin attached Dzerzhinsky as a Great Russian chauvinist. Not entirely seriously, but just kind of a role reversal. A police state was in place very early; what this actually meant in the Soviets and Workers’ Councils in this early months, I’m not sure. Alexander Berkman, an anarchist who I think wrote one of the best books, he and Emma Goldman were in Russia for those years and actually I think they got there in 1919 or 1920. But they wrote very observant reports of what they saw just in those years. There was this state apparatus that became later the overall new ruling class, you could hardly call it a new ruling class in 1918 or 1919, but part of it was in place. Let’s face it, civil wars are not pretty. The American Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, the Russian Civil War, everyone who has ever really studied them always says they that they were bloody and more cruel and violent than the average war. One has to be extremely careful when looking at the events from 1917 to 1921. In terms of, the Bolsheviks and the few other people who supported them, like the Left Social Revolutionaries, they were in a very difficult situation: reduced to a very small area, all these countries invading, huge numbers of people supporting the Whites: with this unprecedented seizure of power by a self-designated Marxist party, one has to be very careful.

Speaker 3: One more question! The reason I was asking is because in the Trotskyist tradition, the fact that the imperialists attacked us is the reason for the problems in the revolution; it’s kind of become a recurring argument to justify state communism, basically all over the globe.

Loren: Right.

Speaker 3: And then the claim, that before the summer of 1918 Bolshevism is like the starry-eyed organization whose political dynamic can be replicated. So that’s why I’m kind of asking because of if it’s a perfect organization before 1918 then it gets much harder to say, well there are some embryonic problems within the Bolshevik politics and organization, and it can’t be just blamed on “well we were in invaded by 17 armies and that’s why that you don’t understand.” That is one of Trotskyism’s de facto argument.

Loren: Well Victor Serge, if you haven’t ever read Victor Serge, look at his Memoirs of a Revolutionary; it’s one of the most beautiful incisive books ever written about the Russian Revolution, among other things. He started out as an anarchist in Spain and France, came to Russia in 1919, joined the Bolshevik Party and he became the bridge between Bolsheviks and the Anarchists for a couple of years. To people who said, “the virus of Stalinism was present in Leninism”, Serge said, “yes, that’s true, but in Leninism there were many other viruses that could have developed in other ways.” Let’s not forget that from Day One up until the early 20s, the top level of the Bolshevik Party had no illusions that they could do anything without revolution in western Europe and above all, in Germany. They were looking at Germany, Italy, France, England, where there was tremendous upheaval after the war and in some sense a near-revolution in Germany, which was a much more important country. It was much more industrialized , much more like the kind of country in which you would expect a socialist revolution to take place.

That’s where all the focus was so there was that Internationalist perspective. At the same time, it’s certainly true that for the reasons I was talking about last week about the special character of the Russian intelligentsia, its relationship to the working class not to mention the peasantry, being pretty tenuous already in the early going, definitely set the stage for the creation of this sort of independent bureaucracy that ultimately would destroy the revolution. That’s what I would answer to the typical Maoist and, in a different way, to a Trotskyist, who is a little more subtle.

I’ve probably gone talking too much about Lenin and Trotsky. Notice by the way, that I haven’t even mentioned Stalin yet. One reason for that is that Stalin was nowhere in the picture while these early events were going on. John Reed’s classic book, The Ten Days That Shook The World, written as an eye witness account in 1920, doesn’t mention Stalin. Same goes for (French revolutionary) Alfred Rosmer’s eye witness account. In these eye witness accounts by western revolutionaries who were on the scene, Stalin is just nowhere.

(The World Socialist website has just put out a DVD of film footage of the revolution. It actually goes back to the pre-revolutionary period; that film, which is called “From The Tsar To Lenin” came out in the United States in 1937. It was picketed all over the country by the Communist Party. Why? Because; Stalin does not appear in the film, Stalin was a faceless bureaucrat. It was not that he was a nobody, but from a political point of view, in terms of these major events, he was not at the centre of the action.)

So that’s what I would answer to the typical Trotskyist. The Civil War was going on, the Reds were winning and by the summer of 1920, it was basically over. During this time the Bolsheviks implemented what is called War Communism. War Communism was a kind of a state of emergency in which wages were frozen, prices were frozen and it was a command economy of the typical very beleaguered wartime state. During this period, of course, needless to say, strikes were outlawed and generally this was a period also during which the power of the Cheka and other repressive apparatuses really tightened up. Again without making a virtue of necessity, it’s hard to imagine how else the Bolsheviks could have responded given their extremely defensive position at the beginning of the Civil War.

But when the Civil War was over the question emerged… let’s talk a little bit about Kronstadt. We could have a whole session on Kronstadt. Kronstadt became the symbol of the moment in which the revolution began to really devour itself. In the 30s and 40s, in the anti-Stalinist left opposition, it replaced Waterloo. In the 19th century people always said “well so and so experienced his/her Waterloo at X time”. So Kronstadt replaced that and one ex Trotskyist once commented, I think in the 1940s, “my Kronstadt was Kronstadt.” It’s a question of when you think…I’m sure you have already gotten the impression that these Trotskyist groups in particular but other left groups as well are constantly arguing about “when was the revolution dead in the water?” My general feeling is it’s 1921, which we’re getting to, and Kronstadt was the symbol of that. Kronstadt had been the centre of the revolution of 1917. It was a big naval base in the harbor of Petrograd (later Leningrad), filled with revolutionary sailors who were called the “anvil of the revolution.” In 1921 when the war was over, the Kronstadt naval base rose up again, calling for a return of all power to the soviets, which was just essentially the basic goal of the October Revolution of 1917.

In order to understand what happened at Kronstadt you’ll have to peel away layers and layers of lies and ideology because the Bolsheviks by that time, again in their siege mentality, immediately denounced the Kronstadt uprising as a White insurrection against the revolution. In fact, an insurrection at Kronstadt had been announced in a French daily newspaper a week before it actually happened. There is no question, the French and British intelligence services were very active in Finland which was in the middle of the Civil War at that time, between the Reds and Whites, which the Whites won. The French and British intelligence services were 50 miles away. There is no question that they were trying to influence what was going on there. So that’s the number one claim by the Bolsheviks. Number two claim is that people in Kronstadt were not the same people who had been there in 1917. The best workers had been killed in the Civil War. By the way, that was absolutely true in general; Winston Churchill for example, who was in charge of the British counter-revolution said, “if we can’t beat them, at least we’ll kill as many workers as possible to weaken them.”

Nevertheless, Pirani and others have established that there was a lot more continuity of personnel at Kronstadt than the Bolsheviks claimed. The Bolsheviks were very hysterical about it because it had such symbolic power. Trotsky was in Moscow at the time but he was sending telegrams saying, “we’ve got to pin this on the Whites, we got to show this is a White counter revolution.”

Zinoviev, who was another leading Bolshevik, was in charge of the Petrograd Soviet. He was hysterical, he had a tendency to become hysterical, that’s a whole other story. Just before the Kronstadt uprising, there had been six weeks of strikes in Petrograd by workers, again the cream of the revolutionary working class. Demanding what? Demanding food. In some cases, now that the war was over, demanding a return to some kind of soviet power. The Bolsheviks had come in there, satisfying the basic demands, but at the same time keeping everybody on a very short leash. The real timing of the Kronstadt uprising was the attempt by the sailors of Kronstadt to hook up with these struggles. One of the things that really undermine the idea that it was a conspiracy of western intelligence was that the whole port was still frozen. You could walk from the city to the naval base on the island. But it was going to melt in seven to ten days, so if it was really a conspiracy, why not wait a week and take over when it would be much harder to attack the island? So the real impetus, I think, was to join up with what was going on in the strikes in Petrograd. The Bolsheviks sent a delegation to Kronstadt; they were welcomed. The Kronstadt Soviet met and bands were playing and banners welcomed comrades and it was a third tier Bolshevik leader, I can’t remember his name, who just got up and read the riot act to the Kronstadt Soviet: “resolve this nonsense right now or we’re going to attack.” That was what really pushed the uprising into a full blown insurrection.

One interesting detail in addition, is that the Kronstadt Soviet immediately arrested all Communist commissars and put them in jail. They were in jail through the whole thing and they were still there when the Bolsheviks recaptured the island. When the Bolsheviks finally did capture the island, they executed thousands of people.

A small rump escaped across the ice into Finland. But that’s another thing that indicates that the Kronstadt sailors were prepared to negotiate in good will and they just got slapped down by the Bolsheviks. The Kronstadt uprising occurred simultaneously with the Tenth Party Congress of the Bolshevik Party and of course it was one of the topics of discussion. It was at this time that a group called the First Workers Opposition arose. It included some Bolsheviks as well, in particular a woman named Alexandra Kollontai who was a very important feminist agitator. I don’t know how long she’d actually been in the party. She’d written some very interesting stuff on sexual emancipation during and after the revolution , and there were some other second-tier, third-tier Bolshevik figures in the First Workers Opposition; and again, their basic demand was: return to Soviet power, return to the all the power of the Soviets perspective in the first months of the revolution. Lenin got up and made a speech in which he said, “the Russian working class no longer exists,” because of the destruction of the Civil War. Once again, let’s keep in mind that after seven years of warfare there was famine breaking out down in the Ukraine for a number of reasons. It was a very grim situation and the people, even party members were surviving on very, very lean rations.

So Lenin says, the “Russian proletariat no longer exists” because, aside from all the people killed in the Civil War, many workers had gone back to the farm just to survive. Let’s keep in mind that at that time the Russian working class was largely half the year in the factory, half the year on the family farm or on the estate or whatever it was. So it really was a working class in formation. Shliapnikov, who was a leader of the working-Workers Opposition, jumped to his feet and said, “So! you are exercising a dictatorship in the name of a class which no longer exists” and the debate went on like that. The First Workers Opposition was defeated; Alexander Kollontai went on to become a diplomat for Stalin. I don’t know that there’s any real continuity between her position of 1921 and fifteen years later, but that’s one small anecdote.

So the Bolsheviks were confronting this very grim situation and by 1921 it was also clear that the revolution in Western Europe was not going to happen. It was still going on in Germany but in Italy early 1920, the workers had seized the factories in northern Italy and run up the red flags. The bourgeoisie just sat back and waited for two, three, four weeks. Workers did nothing with the factories and that was the turning point after which Fascist squads began to form, attacking union meetings, destroying socialists’ and communists’ offices, newspapers and so on. So that was the beginning of the rise of Mussolini.

In Britain, in January 1919, there was a massive strike wave with factory occupations. The heads of the Trade Unions Congress went to see Lloyd George who was the Prime Minister at that time and Lloyd George said to them, “listen guys, it’s all up, if you people want to take over you can” and they of course being just cowardly reformers just kind of shrugged and said, “who us?” and so things kind of petered out. In England there were these mass strikes taking place, major steel strikes in the United States and then also the seven-day general strike in Seattle. So things were happening but they weren’t happening fast enough and the Bolsheviks began to realize that there were going to have to deal with a long period of isolation.

Speaker 3: Is it correct from my understanding that large layers of the First Opposition also became crucial in attacking Kronstadt and were involved in the military [inaudible]?

Speaker 1: Yes, I believe so.

Speaker 3: It becomes important because that’s like the left wing of the Bolsheviks and they’re also participating and crushing the left-wing rebellion against Bolshevik power.

Speaker 1: Lenin made a speech to this congress in which he said, “you can be with us or you can be over there with a gun,” that is at Kronstadt, “but not in the opposition; the party, we’ve had it with opposition.” At that Tenth Congress some very important decisions were made and probably the most important was the banning of factions. Up to that time, as in the case of debate over Brest-Litovsk, there were factions all over the place. The Bolshevik Party had always had factions. The party congress decided on temporarily banning factions without banning discussion, with the idea that when the situation permitted, the right to faction would be restored, but of course it never was.

This is why I draw the line at 1921. The third congress of the Communist International happened a few months later and in the course of those months the following policies were developed. The crushing of Kronstadt, then the party congress also adopted the New Economic Policy, the NEP. The NEP as you saw in John Marat’s article was the decision to drop world communism, and let the peasants produce for the market and to basically enrich themselves. They could, in order to increase food production. Again, many people have said well, “NEP, that’s the restoration of capitalism” and most of the Bolsheviks were appalled. They said, “we just fought three years of Civil War in order to restore the market?” but that was adopted. In the spring, the Soviet government signed a trade agreement in England, the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement. The first official agreement with the western power and this was defended as a necessary move to break the blockade and isolation of the Soviet Union and to restore access to certain kinds of machinery and other goods that were desperately needed, but it was a step. The real question is, at what point, can one speak definitely of a counter-revolution? In some ways, and I want to keep insisting on this, there is a constant relationship between the international situation and foreign policy questions and policy questions of the Communist International on one hand and the domestic situation in Russia.

So, the decision to restore the market for the peasantry and the population at large, to restore trade relations with Britain, these are two parts of a general kind of ebb in which the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union begin to be a conservatizing force in international relationships, in my view. If there was an orthodox Trotskyist here, they would be howling because they see this is happening at least a few years later. Another less noticed aspect of this, and you can read about this; there is an article on my website called, Socialism in One Country Before Stalin – The Case of Turkey 1917/1925. In Turkey, there was an insurrection, there was a complicated situation, we don’t have time to go into it. But the key point is that while the Soviet Union was arming the bourgeois nationalists around Ataturk. Ataturk’s regime was massacring communist militants in Turkey. This is the first case of so-called national liberation where it was a Soviet foreign policy interest because people fighting against Ataturk were being armed and financed by Great Britain. So struggle against imperialism, but the reality was it was at the expense of the Turkish Communist Party.

You were going to ask a question?

Speaker 2: Repeat that again about Ataturk.

Loren: Ataturk was the leader of the Turkish nationalist movement and he was fighting a successful war against an invasion by Greek troops, but the Greeks troops were backed and financed by Great Britain and probably by France. They saw Ataturk as this dangerous figure; who had ties to the Soviet Union and stuff like that. The Soviet Union was arming Ataturk and financing Ataturk but this was going on, as I indicated, while Ataturk was massacring the Communist Party. The entire central committee of the Turkish Communist Party was murdered in a boat in the Black Sea, just a couple months before the formal agreement between Turkey and the Soviet Union. I once actually wrote about this. I wrote a letter’s to the editor of Workers Vanguard, the newspaper of the most orthodox Trotskyist group Sparticist League. I said, “what about this?”

And they actually replied with a two page article in which they’d done a lot of homework in which they said, “Well you see, the Soviets were still trying to subvert Ataturk’s state.” Here’s the Soviet Ambassador to Turkey, and many of the dissidents in the party were fleeing to the Soviet embassy in Ankara for refuge, and the Soviet embassy was handing them over to Ataturk’s police where they would be executed.

How exactly does this fit with a policy of undermining Ataturk? I don’t know. It’s a very interesting thing, if you want to read about it look up the article on my website. So with the question of Kronstadt, the NEP, the Anglo Russian Trade Agreement, the betrayal trail of the Turkish revolution and Turkish revolutionaries, and finally in Germany at the very same time (March 1921) was something called the March Action. We’ll talk about that next week, I think we should do Germany and… the March Action was carried out by people that one would generally characterize as Ultra Leftist. It was really kind of the last kick of the German Revolution. It took place in one or two important industrial provinces, with workers seizing the factories and so on. But many people both in Germany and the Soviet Union criticized it as a kind of putsch.

Speaker 2: Define putsch!

Loren: A putsch is like if we got together and decided to attack City Hall and declare a Soviet Republic in Manhattan; that would be a putsch. It’s just an action by a small group of people aiming to take over a government. We’ll go into the March Action next week. It’s yet another question like Kronstadt, not as volatile as Kronstadt, but still resonates today as something that people really disagreed bitterly about. So all these things are happening at once but what they all have in common is this flashing yellow light, the revolution is slowing down and being isolated and the whole international strategy of the Bolsheviks with the idea that they were just a rearguard side show and the real action was in Germany and the West was going down the drain. So this is the beginning of the rise of Stalin. How many of you had a chance to read the article that I wrote about Max Eastman? Eastman wrote some incredible portraits of what happened when all of the shooting stopped. He was this brilliant guy, he was a Greenwich Village radical. He was indicted for sedition twice during World War I.

Speaker 4: What does that mean?

Loren: Sedition? It means trying to undermine the power of the state. What he had done particularly, he called on people to refuse the draft for World War I and he was acquitted twice because they just couldn’t find a jury that would convict him.

Speaker 2: Wasn’t Chaplin charged with sedition around that time? Was he extradited or did he leave on his own?

Loren: I don’t know.

Speaker 2: Charlie Chaplin.

Loren: I thought that was later. After World War II?

Speaker 2: That was World War II? I feel like he was kicked out of the country or he left on his own.

Loren: He was driven out because he was believed to be a–

Speaker 2: Was he indicted for the same type of reasons?

Speaker 1: I don’t recall. But it was World War II; let’s not jump ahead.

So Eastman goes to Russia in 1922. So after all these events we’ve been talking about, and he learned Russian fluently in a matter of months. He learned it so well that he actually wrote poetry in Russian that was appreciated by Russians. He was a brilliant guy, he stayed in Russia for two years with a plan of writing a book about the Bolshevik leadership. So he got to know all these people extremely well. The only one he didn’t get to know was Lenin, who by that time had been shot and had had a stroke and was ordered by his doctors to work only one hour a day. So by early 1923 Lenin was out of picture, even though he lived for another year. So Eastman is going around interviewing all these people and he got, for those of you who read the article, he got this incredible portrait of all these different individuals but this is at a time when almost no western radicals had any idea what was really going on in Russia.

As I mentioned last week, anarchists were joining the Third International and flocking to the Soviet Union because they read Lenin’s most libertarian statement State and Revolution, and were saying, “the revolution is on.” Anarchists had taken power in Russia and Anarcho-syndicalists. Bill Haywood went to Russia to get away from an indictment in the United States and some other Wobblies; from all over the world, that was this kind of a disconnect, in terms of an understanding of what was actually going on. So, Eastman was there kind of seeing this whole thing but as he says, in the different quotes that I include, he still was just looking at the surface because, behind the scenes, this battle for power had already really taken off. And what was going on was this guy Stalin, who had been appointed General Secretary of the party, which was considered like the postmaster. He seemed to be a cipher and he was given this position that no one took seriously at the time and this brings up a very important point. In this whole period, all these people imagined counter-revolution as being the return of Tsar and the return of the capitalists whose factories have been taken away. It’s very normal; just as we’re conditioned by the periods of struggle we’ve lived through and we understand progress and reactions in contemporary terms, and so off in left field that there was emerging this other danger that nobody saw.

This again, to get back to the Trotskyists. All through the battle, the factional struggles in the 1920s which I am just about to get to, Stalin was always referred to as the center. The left was Trotsky and his allies, the right was Bukharin and his allies and Stalin was the center because Stalin was trying to jockey between those two factions. As Amadeo Bordiga put it, “nobody was more reactionary than that center”, as would be proved by subsequent developments. But this was a ways in the future. The overall sense was holding out against counter revolution. Counter revolution meant a return of the Tsar and of the expropriated capitalists. Nobody ever imagined the counter-revolution in the form of a totally revamped and bureaucratized Bolshevik Party itself and the creation of a new form of class exploitation.

In 1924, Eastman has this description of Stalin, I’ll just say a few words about Stalin. I mentioned him a little bit last week, I mentioned is best friend Kamo (his real name was Ter-Petrosian) The two of them were carrying out these very daring bank robberies in Georgia, down in this area called the Caucusus that includes several other countries such as Azerbaijan, Armenia and so on. Kamo was Armenian, Stalin was Georgian. They were both brilliant underground operators and were very successful bank robbers who were really financing the Bolsheviks Party in western Europe. I mentioned some of the more dramatic bank robberies last week. So it was out this milieu that Stalin was recruiting his followers and as Eastman describes, those intellectuals who were the leaders of the party, who had spent years and years in exile and in Switzerland and France and England, they just didn’t know what to do with these people who were were basically thugs. And similar people had been them taken into the Cheka during the repression that I mentioned earlier. Dzerzhinsky, head of the Cheka, he really didn’t know what to do with these people either but they needed cold-blooded killers for the repression during the Civil War and after the Civil War; what are they going to do with them? So this is the beginning of a really important change from the whole sociology of the Bolshevik Party.

So, the debate erupts and the key question… let me just pull back here for a minute as John Marot points out in his article, none of the Bolsheviks factions, not the left, center or the right understood the situation in the countryside. They had these schemes in their heads about the kulaks who were the rich peasants, and different strata, little peasants and poor peasants and the landlords workers’ that might be interesting as sociology, but they didn’t correspond with real forces on the ground when Bolshevik detachments of soldiers from the cities would arrive to confiscate grain from the countryside, which they were doing right from the beginning of the Civil War. The only reason the Bolsheviks won the civil war is because the peasants hated the Whites more than they hated the Reds. They knew that the Reds at least would let them keep their land, while the Whites wanted to restore the old aristocrats, but meanwhile the Bolsheviks were making themselves very unpopular by confiscating grain, pigs and cows and so on all over the place to feed the city. So, the agrarian question became the question, in some in these debates in the party.

Again, I think Marot is right. If you didn’t read it before today, please read it subsequently because what he shows is that for all these years’ people had been looking at what happened in the 20s through the prism of these three fractions. When in fact, if Marot is right , and I think he is, they were all wrong. All of them misunderstood the question of the countryside and how to deal with it. The most important thing they didn’t understand was the Russian peasant commune. Last week I mentioned Lenin’s first important book, called The Development of Capitalism in Russia, which is a polemic against the idea that there is any non-capital sector left in the Russian country side. The most important institution there was called the mir, which just means commune in Russia. The Populists, the people who historically preceded Marxism in Russia, the people who were still into assassinations, terrorism and so on: they wanted to stop the invasion of Russia by capital. They saw the Russian mir, or commune, as the basis of a future communist society and, very interestingly, Karl Marx in 1882, one year before he died, in the preface to the last edition of the Communist Manifesto published before he died wrote, “the Russian mir could be the basis of an immediate transition to communism in Russia” when combined with revolution in the west. So it wasn’t that Marx and the best Marxists were unaware of this, but Lenin by 1900 had destroyed the idea that there was anything thing left of the mir. In fact, according to Marot, the mir still existed until the end of the 20th century in some form or another.

So, this debate takes off and what do the positions boil down to? Lenin and then Trotsky and the left were basically saying we have to have voluntary collectivization in the countryside. What we’re going to do is take our government subsidies and create model collective farms, and they’ll work so well that peasants were seeing that they are better than their private plots and that’s how we’ll have voluntary collectivization. Bukharin on the right, to the extent that he was on the right, was saying “no, what we’ve got to do is encourage the peasants, just like in the French Revolution, which was to get rich and we’ll just have totally free market in the countryside. Encourage the kulak class and we’ll have rapid development of agriculture and we can use the surplus from that for a slow industrialization.” The left position, particularly after Lenin died, was more and more “what we need is rapid industrialization.” We have to have rapid industrial development to be able to defend ourselves against the next invasion of western powers.

Speaker 4: That was the far left position?

Loren: I would say the left position. Rapid industrialization combined with voluntary… you are right, it was pretty dodgy. Stalin comes along and says, “The left is completely out of touch.Trotsky overestimates the peasants, overestimates the willingness of the peasants to involve themselves in this voluntary collectivization.” Amadeo Bordiga (in Italy) later came along and said, “Yes, Trotsky did overestimate the peasants because he assumed that they could have anything to do with the proletarian revolution.” The peasants clearly wanted land and, in this view, they wanted private land. (In fact they wanted to restore the mir, which they did (see my article on the Russian peasant commune
http://breaktheirhaughtypower.org/the-agrarian-question-in-the-russian-revolution-from-material-community-to-productivism-and-back/ )That was one dominant trait. The whole debate was intensified by what was called the “scissors crisis.” The Scissors Crisis meant that the prices of industrial goods being produced in the factories, first under a war communism and then under the NEP, freeing up the market, were rising very rapidly and the peasants needed some industrial goods. They needed ploughs and tools and other things like that. In the meanwhile, they were producing so much grain that the price of grain was falling so they could buy less and less: this is the Scissors Crisis. It made everybody very nervous that all of the plans for any cooperation between the city and the countryside were going down the drain because of this reality.

I should also add that in 1923 a working-class strike wave erupted. Where was Trotsky,
leader of the Left Opposition? He was totally focused on the internal struggle in the party and refused to support the strikes.

What really intervened in the situation, what kind of broke the back of this city-country dynamic, was a famine in 1927/1928. Russia had already had years of famine during World War I and during the Civil War. Even Herbert Hoover had to involve himself in massive export of grain to Russia in 1922 to stop famine there. Of course, the idea was to use it to pry open the Soviet Union and destroy the Bolshevik regime, but they did send millions of tons of grain to Russia but lots of people had already died in that famine. So a new famine starts in 1927/1928 and Stalin uses that, because by that time he had totally taken over the party apparatus. He decrees the first five-year plan and what happened essentially is that Stalin took over the left-wing program and above all the idea of rapid industrialization; he dropped the part about voluntary collectivization. By the way, and it’s very interesting, Bukharin during all these debates had said if the left program is ever implemented, it can only be implemented by the creation of the biggest bureaucracy that ever existed in history and that’s exactly what happened. He was imagining it happening under the left but it actually happened under the so-called center, led by Stalin. Stalin took over this idea of rapid industrial development, developed his five-year plan which was launched in 1928 with massive forced collectivization that lasted for 6-7 years. Later, Churchill, during World War II, was having cocktails with Stalin at one of the international meetings, and said, “Come on, tell me Joe, how many peasants died in the collectivization, five million?” This was going through an interpreter and Stalin just said, “10”. By Stalin’s own account, 10 million peasants died during these collectivizations.

They died not merely from starvation but also they were being deported all over the country to supposedly richer agricultural areas and the peasants responded to the forced collectivization by destroying livestock. They killed the sheep, goats, pigs, cows etc. by the millions. So then when the Red Army detachments actually seized the land, there wasn’t much left. That just made the famine situation worse. This is really how Stalin consolidated his power in Russia itself, taking advantage of the isolation, advantage of the failure of the revolution in the west, using the slogan of “socialism in one country”, something that no one in the Marxist tradition had ever heard of before that. Finally when the situation created by this famine really created the opportunity, he smashed the left, he smashed the right and Stalin had really taken power.

I’ve said before that what’s going on through this whole period and contining is this dialectic between domestic Russia and foreign policy. Foreign policy meant above all the policy of the Third International; the Communist International which I would say by the early 20s was already essentially a tool of Soviet state foreign policy. It was not truly an internationalist organization. So let me just cover the foreign situations in which for one reason or another, the Bolsheviks just deepened their isolation. There was the German Revolution, which we’ll deal with next week. While I would never say it was the Bolsheviks’ fault that the German Revolution failed. There was talk of Trotsky going to Germany to organize the Red Army there and lead the revolution the way he had in Russia, but it just never happened for whatever reason. There were just terrible screw ups; in one case, in 1923; an insurrection was planned, then cancelled. Except in Hamburg, one of the major ports in northern Germany. At the last minute they decided to call it off because they knew that Hamburg was completely isolated. The Comintern, the messenger with the telegram, missed the train by a few minutes.

This guy was going with the orders to cancel, so the insurrection took place in isolation, the workers were crushed and that was really kind of the end of the real armed phase of the German Revolution. But as I said, we’ll deal with that next week. The German Revolution was botched. I’m not saying that necessarily it would have happened without the involvement of the Bolsheviks and the Third International, but it failed. In 1926 there was a general strike in England that in part, I’ll have to review the events but it really took off and I believe in the middle of it, some New York Post type newspaper published what was supposedly a telegram from Moscow, in which “the heads of the Trade Union Congress were to stage this general strike and go on to revolution,” and that definitely was an wrench in the whole process. From 1924 to 1928, this is the so-called “second period”. Bukharin was running the International or his people were running the International. That meant all over the world that pro-Bukharin people were being elevated to leadership of the different communist parties.

So, during Bukharin’s period there was the failure of the British general strike; then, far and away probably the most important event during this period was the defeat of the Chinese Revolution in 1927. We’ll deal with this in detail when we get to Maoism (see my article http://breaktheirhaughtypower.org/notes-towards-a-critique-of-maoism/) But, just briefly, from 1919 to 1927 there was this constant ferment, this very small but very militant Chinese working class in key port cities, staging strike after strike up to this culmination in 1927 and what happened was a clear case of the results of Stalin’s theory of “socialism in one country”. It goes right back to the two-stage theory. A Bolshevik-type revolution was on the agenda in China. Stalin ordered the Chinese Communist to make an alliance with the nationalist party of Chiang Kai-shek, and Chiang Kai-shek just turned on the Communists at a key moment in April 1927 and massacred tens of thousands of communist workers in both Shanghai and in (then) Canton, or Guangzhou as it’s known in Chinese. So the defeat of the Chinese Revolution was kind of the end. Every turn in policy both in Russia and in the Communist International ends is some bloody defeat. Germany in 1923, China in 1927 and now begins what was known as the Third Period. And the Third Period is the period in which the Communist parties all over the world were calling the Socialist parties “Fascists”.

I should say Social Fascists. That is they seem to be Socialist but in fact, they are really pushing Fascism or they are giving way to Fascism. In some places there was a grain of truth to it, particularly the latter formulation. But the key battle was being fought in Germany. In 1929 Germany was pulled into the world economic depression more deeply than any other country except United States. Unemployment was at 30% or more. There were street battles between Nazis and Communists going on constantly and the country was rapidly becoming ungovernable. So, one would think that the obvious thing to do was to have unity between the Socialist workers and the Communist workers. But since the Comintern line at that time was that the Socialist workers were Fascists, that kind of unity was impossible. It’s much more complicated than that in reality, for all kinds of reasons we can talk about that next week. It was highly unlikely. Trotsky was exile in in Turkey writing these brilliant pamphlets about what was going on. They were read by 200 people , and yet there were spontaneous attempts by Socialist and Communist workers to work together, but it was too late. So in January 1933 Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany and just to show how abject German Socialists were, they petitioned to be recognized as a legal party in the Hitler regime. On May Day 1933, four months after Hitler came to power, the Social Democrats went out to march as they always did on May Day, and their offices all over Germany were shut down and tens of thousands of socialists were rounded up and sent to concentration camps or prison.

Loren: I put translations of the most important initials of organizations (SPD, KPD, etc.) up on the board. As I talk, I’m generally going to use the initials, just so everybody knows what they refer to. I don’t know if we’re going to really get to the Nazi seizure of power. If we do, it will be at the end, and rather schematically. But I just want to call your attention of the fact that Nazi in German comes from “National Socialist German Workers Party.” It’s really important to understand that the Nazis made real appeals to the working class, not very successfully, but they considered themselves to be a party that was for a workers’ revolution, but for a German Workers Revolution. So, that’s something often lost in translation when people just say “Nazis” or “National Socialists”.

Cindy referred to what we are doing today as a lecture and I corrected her and said this is a discussion and presentation and I really encourage people to ask questions as we go along. Hopefully I’ll manage to cover this stuff in an hour and half or two at the outside and then we can really get into it. But feel free, if I’ve made reference to anything you don’t understand, to just interrupt.

The first thing, very generally: I made a map of Germany because some people may not be familiar with where all these different cities are. Now as I said when I was handing it out, it’s unfortunately in Spanish but most of the spellings are pretty much the same. You notice for example that this eastern one fifth or so is now part of Poland. Essentially it’s been part of Poland since Poland reappeared on the map after World War I. Then over here, I believe, is still part of Russia, this area here. At one point, this is post-World War I, that is after Germany had given up territory, and particularly this blank space here between Koenigberg and the east. That was land that Germany had to give up after it surrendered in World War I. So Germany used to be a pretty large country. It still is, it’s still the biggest country in Western Europe. So as I am referring to cities I’ll occasionally point at this map. Notice that the map is a map of religious affiliation in Germany. We might think that’s not terribly important for what we are talking about, but in fact the difference between Protestant and Catholic in Germany is still quite real, not like it was during the Reformation when people were burning each other and fighting wars and things like that, but still there are areas that are very culturally Catholic, such as Bavaria, and very culturally Protestant, such as the area around Berlin.

We have some material here; there is a map, a list of organizations. One thing I wanted to mention, for those of you who might find this discussion of the teens and twenties to be somewhat ancient history, there are several points. First of all, in order to understand the political spectrum of today, basically you have to have a road map, and the road map is historical. It’s based on things that happened in some cases a long time ago. Like Stalinism for example; there aren’t too many people today in the world who call themselves Stalinists but there are plenty of people who are Stalinists in my opinion. To understand how that all came about you have to understand where Stalin came from. It’s come up in discussions before; what is the Spartacist League, and what is the RCP, and what are all these different Maoist and Trotskyist groups, and what are these Anarchist groups, and so on? They generally tend to have historical affiliation. So that’s one important reason to sort of understand this background.

The second thing is, I want to point out some very interesting parallels between Germany in the period we’re talking about and China today. This is not just something I made up. In China, in various think tanks, all kinds of people are studying exactly the stuff we’re studying, and earlier German history, in order to understand better what parallels and differences there are; because Germany a 120 years ago was a rising power, challenging the power of France, England and the United States. And today China is a rising power challenging the power of the United States, and the parallels continue. China is full of, I don’t know exactly how many, but probably 200 million workers who are becoming more and more active and combative. In the same way, since we talked about the theory of permanent revolution before, in the same way that Germany was the weak link of the world capitalist system, above all in 1848, Russia was the weak link in 1905 and 1917. I would say that one could argue that China is the weak link today. That is, it’s a place where capitalism is really emerging very powerfully and at the same time the country has to adapt itself to its new role in the world market. We can talk about this towards the end because to me it’s one of the most important aspects of why this stuff is really still alive, as historical questions.

I just want to go into a little background about German history in order to make clear what an unusual country it was in the period we’re talking about. I didn’t make a map of Europe as a whole but with imagination we can conjure it up. As you’ll see in a minute, German history was a series of disasters and misfortunes. It’s one of the things that kind of shaped it. Today or until recently, anytime anyone wrote a book about German history, the question in the background, whether it was about the 13th century or the 19th century, was always: why did Nazism happen in Germany? It’s kind of like with Russia, you can’t pick up a history book about Russia whether it’s talking about Peter the Great or Catherine the Great, the question is: why did Russia go the way it went? One of the answers to that question, about Germany, is that, first of all Germany’s geographical location is right in the middle of Europe and it has no real natural boundaries of defense. So, armies from other countries were rolling over Germany all the time.

Before the Reformation, before the rise of Protestantism, which was in some sense the beginning of a kind of bourgeois revolution in Germany, Germany was one of the richest parts of Europe. This was before the North Atlantic became important, before the Spanish and Portuguese and other voyages that developed the slave trade and shifted the whole balance of the European economy away from the old centre. The real centre was between Germany and Italy, and trade was going north and south. By the late 17th century, Germany had become something of a backwater and in fact so had Italy, because then France and Britain and the North Atlantic kind of replaced them. So that’s the first bad thing that happened to Germany.

In 1525 or in the early 1520s, the Protestant reformation took off. The Protestant Reformation struck a real chord in Germany, probably more than anywhere else. Martin Luther and his famous 95 Theses, and the way in which a large part of the German population rallied to Luther, for all kinds of reasons, generally didn’t have that much to do with religion as such. People were just sick of being exploited by the Catholic Church and having to pay tithes and having to pay for births and funerals and having to have everything mediated through a priest who spoke Latin.

One of the most important things Luther did was translate the Bible into German so people could really know what it was about. It all started nicely from Luther’s point of view, but pretty soon it got out of hand and there was a peasant uprising in large parts of Germany, which was very radical. One of the most important figures is a specific guy named Thomas Muenzer, a kind of a hero and rightly so, in Marxist history. All through the history of the East Germany, the German Democratic Republic, there was a 300-foot high statue of Thomas Muentzer somewhere …
Speaker 2: There is a Thomas Muenzer statue?
Loren: I don’t know if it’s still there.
Speaker 2: You haven’t probably found it!
Loren: [laughter] right! I forgot to mention, by the way, let’s be clear on this too: when I say Germany, at this time and for many years afterwards Germany was really a linguistic expression. It was incredibly disunited. It was in the interest of all the major European powers to keep it disunited, which was one of it misfortunes.

So the peasants revolted and scared the hell out of the landlords, and the Peasant Wars took place. Friedrich Engels wrote a great book called the Peasant Wars in Germany which I highly recommend, probably more insightful about German history than a 100 books by academics you might come across. The forces of the peasants were poorly armed, they had no military training, just pitch forks and staves and things like that. They were opposed by the knights, and they greatly outnumbered the knights. To show the limits of that kind of revolutionary ideology, Marx and Engels said, “Muenzer was a communist who came 300 years before his time.” At key moments in battle, the peasants would stop and wait for a sign from heaven telling them what to do next, and then they would be slaughtered by the knights. So, in a relatively short time, all of the peasant uprisings were put down. The result was, and for hundreds of years, this kind of conservative, very servile ideology that survived in the German peasantry, that made it different from other peasantries that actually rose up and won, like in France or earlier in England.

The next misfortune was something called the Thirty Years War which was fought from 1618 to 1648. As I said, Germany was completely disunited at this time and most of the different small kingdoms and so on were not directly involved in the war. Just because of this problem of no natural boundaries, the war was completely fought on German soil for thirty years, with plundering and looting; by the way this, of course, was a Reformation war with Catholic armies against Protestant armies and huge battles. At that time soldiers didn’t really get paid, they mainly looted. So the winning side tended to just carry off all the crops and anything else of value in the areas that were captured. This went on for thirty years and when it ended, one-third of the population of Germany had been killed or had died from plagues and so on. So that was what really finished off the German area as an economic power for 200 years. There were totally abandoned towns and villages, wolves running in the streets, just absolute desolation. It was truly the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

So, the next thing that happened was the French Revolution. That was in 1789, and ten years later Napoleon took power and conquered all of Germany and expanded into Russia. That was an interesting episode because it was kind of like when the Red Army moved into Eastern Europe in 1945. In spite of being Stalinist and everything else you would care to mention, they carried out serious land reform. Napoleon did something of the same thing. Actually, in western Germany, which was always in the cultural sphere of France, Napoleon is remembered rather favorably because he broke the power of some of the old feudal landlord classes. That power was never really completely restored. But when Napoleon was finally defeated, Germany and Central Europe sank into a period of deep reaction which lasted for over 30 years, from 1815 to 1848. This so-called “Holy Alliance” involved Russia and different major parts of Germany, and down here in the south east, the Austrian Empire; the Habsburg Empire was the most powerful empire in Europe that time. Those three powers conspired to enforce a counter-revolutionary kind of repression of everything from education to the types of books that got published, not to mention political repression. So there was this long winter that continued to 1840, which was finally broken by the next misfortune in German history, which was the revolution of 1848.

One of the things I want to emphasize in this presentation is the way in which, for Marx and Engels and for later Marxists, in Germany the bourgeoisie came too late. The bourgeois revolution had happened in England, it had happened in France, but the German bourgeoisie, which was never terribly courageous, was ready to really try to get political power. The German economy had already created a significant working class, or just let’s say a wage labour class in cities and towns that could challenge the bourgeoisie from the left, and that’s what happened in 1848. It starts out with the usual liberal phrases but soon red flags were appearing in demonstrations and confrontations; Engels points this out in another very good book that I recommend called Revolution and Counter Revolution in Germany. Those two books by Engels will give you an excellent overview of the whole development of German history. The bourgeoisie recoiled and basically started to make peace with the status quo; in that time, the most important part of the status quo was the Emperor of Prussia. Prussia was this large eastern area of Germany that had a large Junker class; those were feudal landlords. By that time, of course, agriculture had been partially capitalized. They were producing for the world market, but the social structure and relations and mores in that cultural ambience were still very feudal.

So, those three powers, this Holy Alliance – Russia, Prussia and Austria, maintained a stranglehold on all of European politics. There was a liberal uprising in Spain in 1823 and French armies invaded to put it down, under the pressure of the Holy Alliance; that’s how totally they had the situation locked up. As you see, Germany had a problem having a real bourgeois revolution, even as it became capitalist.

So the next disaster was the unification of the country. That was carried out by Bismarck; I’m sure most of you have heard of Bismarck. Bismarck himself was a Junker, a very skillful politician. At that time, the bourgeoisie had been trying to unify the country because that’s what the bourgeoisie does. The bourgeoisie builds a nation state. Their conception was what was called the “greater German” (grossdeutsch) solution, which means that it would include lots of land that was part of the Austrian Empire. Their idea was that with Austria and the German lands together, authoritarian Prussia would be isolated, and liberalism would be more possible. Bismarck very skillfully isolated the liberals and unified the country under what was called the “smaller German” (kleindeutsch) solution, which meant excluding all the Austrian lands. He did this by a series of wars in the 1860s. Bismarck, for example, studied the Civil War in the United States. He was very interested in the use of railroads and machine guns because they were unknown at that time in warfare in Europe. So he had a real world perspective and he unified the country through three wars from 1862 to 1870. The last war was the Franco-Prussian War in which Germany defeated France, and set the stage for the Paris Commune. The entire Paris Commune took place with the German army just right outside of Paris, in case things got out of hand, and if the French reactionary forces weren’t able to handle it. Significantly, the German Socialists who were about to form the German SPD a few years later opposed the war from an internationalist point of view. They said no German soldier should die for this, in war against France. I think that was the last time that ever happened, as we shall see.

So again and again, what could be called the progressive bourgeois forces were stopped in their tracks, defeated, stymied and so on. So Germany emerged as a capitalist power, but without a real bourgeois democracy. It was a quite authoritarian modern country, with the Junker class sharing power with and really politically dominating the bourgeois. I won’t go into details but there were many key confrontations where the Junkers just put the bourgeoisie in its place and ran the country in order to preserve their power in this large eastern agriculture zone. So only when the Red Army occupied eastern Germany in 1945 were these people finally expropriated.

Now we can get into the current subject, but I think this background is important because one of the questions that has come up before was why there was no revolutionary party in Germany comparable to the Bolsheviks. I think one of the important things you can see from all the stuff that I just mentioned is how the country remained highly decentralized even when it had the Prussian regime in Berlin. There were four or five other poles of power, so that even after unification, after they’d been defeated by Bismarck politically or sometimes militarily, it just wasn’t a centralized economy in the way that the Soviet Union became with Stalinism.

We’ve covered a lot of ground before, particularly in the first meeting about Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin. So I’m not going to go over all of that again. But I do want to mention just a couple of things to keep in mind. One of the things that makes Germany so interesting, even today, is that Germany is China’s number one industrial trading partner. As I said, Chinese academics and advisors are studying the German case not just historically but also today because, for example, Germany after World War II introduced a very modernized set of labor relations in which they allowed– I think it’s right in the constitution– allowed for works councils in factories. Not workers councils, not soviets running the factories. but works councils, which mean the workers get some seats on the board of directors and sort of have some say. Some factories, for example, that would have been moved to lower-wage countries, stayed in Germany because of the pressure of these works councils. It’s a murky situation and I’m not meaning to imply that workers in Germany are in power, though they certainly have more power than workers in the United States.

So China is very interested, for example, with all the labour unrest that they’ve got: “Well, maybe we should have some works councils. Maybe we should make workers co-responsible for managing what’s going on.”

Getting back to why Germany is important and why was it so important. In some sense all the ideologies of the 20th century came out of Germany: Marxian communism, fascism (the forces that led to the Nazi seizure of power). There were of course ideologies in other countries as well. Mussolini took power eleven years before Hitler, but nonetheless Germany really put fascism on the map globally. The welfare state: Bismarck was a pioneer of the welfare state, starting in the 1880s; he faced a rising socialist movement, all these militant workers getting out of hand. He created old age insurance, health insurance and other kinds of benefits that we associate with the quickly disappearing modern capitalist welfare state. These were innovated by Bismarck. Corporatism, that is a different kind of idea that workers and peasants and capitalists together should manage society in some way, was also pretty much a German creation.
Speaker 3: I thought it was Mussolini that actually came up with corporatism in his doctrine.
Loren: He may have been the first one to use it, but there are German predecessors, there are predecessors elsewhere too. The Catholic Church was really into corporatism long before there was ever any real corporatism. But Germany had Lassalle, whom we talked about previously; he was essentially a corporatist. To him, socialism meant all workers having cooperatives, and revolution wasn’t even really necessary to bring that about.

So just to hit the highlights of a couple things we’ve talked about before: the First International collapsed in the 1870s because of the Marx-anarchism confrontation. The Second International was founded in 1889, and by the early 1900s there were large parties calling themselves socialists in Germany (the SPD), in France (the French Socialist Party), in Britain the Labour Party, which got going in 1906: these were all parties of the Second International. This is very important; the Second International was nothing like the Third International, even with the prestige of Germany, which after all is where all this Marxist theory came from. Karl Kautsky was viewed as kind of the Pope of Marxism at this time. He really kind of determined what was orthodox and what wasn’t. The idea of the Germans telling the French party what to do, or imposing discipline on some other party for its own political purposes, as the Communist government in Russia did, starting in the 1920s, was unthinkable; the Second International was a much looser association.

Bismarck fell in 1890; he was in power for over 30 years. He fell essentially because people at the top of the German government saw that the working class was getting out of control and Bismarck had banned the socialists, with the anti-Socialist laws in 1878, for twelve years. The SPD wasn’t quite wiped off the map; they were still allowed to participate in elections and things like that, but they were highly restricted in terms of meetings and publications. They were producing all kinds of books and pamphlets in Switzerland and smuggling them into the country. By the time Bismarck fell, the SPD had become a major force in the German parliament. Not a majority by any means, but still it was becoming the largest single party. So they felt that Bismarck was getting old; they felt it was time for new faces, kind of like bringing in Obama right after the crisis in 2008 or something like that: a facelift on the political class.

We talked at our first meeting about the revisionism debate and this again is an important development that goes on through this whole period, the rise of people who were saying “this Marxist stuff–let’s forget about it, it’s just too apocalyptic, it’s always talking about the final crisis of capitalism and we see the German working class is living better every year.” This was articulated by several leading party figures but they were strongly put down by Rosa Luxemburg and also by Kautsky. Kautsky was the keeper of orthodoxy but what was developing were essentially three different currents in the German working class movement. There was the left – Rosa Luxemburg, her pamphlet The Mass Strike expressed probably better than anything else I can think of the way in which party apparatuses get in the way. She never said there’re not necessary but she did say that ‘’they do not declare mass movements and they do not bring them into existence’’. They can intervene in them, guide them and so on but as she put it, “the mistakes of a genuine mass movement in motion are better than the wisest decisions of the most intelligent central committee.” This is what really got Lenin and the Bolsheviks all worked up and starting to attack Rosa as a spontaneist and so on.

Then there was the centre that was headed by Kautsky’s orthodoxy. Luxemburg and Kautsky began to fall out about 1910. At that point, let me just talk about what was happening on the right. The right was centered in the trade union bureaucracy, and at every party congress the left and the Kautsky centre always won the debates, voting for “we’re orthodox Marxists, we believe in socialism, we believe in revolution.” In reality, in the daily practice of the SPD, the conservatism of the trade union bureaucrats was getting more and more influential. By 1910, Luxemburg had had it with Kautsky, and this is important for contemporary debates if you ever have to deal with any Trotskyist. They are always saying, “Rosa Luxemburg should have founded a vanguard party just like Lenin did.” Well, in fact, Lenin up to 1914 still looked to Kautsky as the most important Marxist in Europe. As I mentioned in the first week, he couldn’t believe it when the German SPD voted for war credits for Germany in August 1914. He thought the newspapers were fakes produced by the police. So it was Luxemburg who had seen, four years before Lenin, that Kautsky had resigned from the revolutionary movement, and yet Leninists today are still banging away about how Luxemburg should have formed a vanguard party. This is a very complicated question: why wasn’t there a push for an independent revolutionary party? Because Luxemburg by this time had no illusions about the SPD.

For those of you who looked at some of the readings I sent out, already in 1908, in Holland, there was a small group of people who were effectively left communists, who broke with Dutch social democracy and instead set up their own party. As far as I know, they never became more than 500 or 1000 people until World War I, but they were some of the most talented people in the Dutch movement. The Dutch working class was very militant. If you read the Bourrinet stuff that I sent out for the second talk, there were militant mass strikes going on in Holland from 1902/1903 right up to World War I. The three figures Herman Gorter, Anton Pannekoek and Henrietta Roland-Holst were all serious theoreticians. Pannekoek entered the mass strike debate with some articles in 1909 that Lenin thought very highly of. As a matter of fact, all references to Pannekoek in Lenin’s writings up until after the Russian Revolution are quite positive. 

By the way, let’s not overlook the fact that Pannekoek’s writings were also very influential in the United States. In the left wing of the Socialist Party, there was the International Socialist Review (not to be confused with the current publication of the ISO); it was read in 20 or 30 different languages, with some great articles by Pannekoek. There were Latvian workers up in Boston and Finnish workers out in Minnesota who were deeply influenced by Pannekoek’s mass strike perspective. When the Communist Party was founded in the United States in 1919, they had a hell of a time of winning these people over to the Moscow line because they were such hard left communist mass-strike theoreticians. So Pannekoek had very wide influence and Herman Gorter’s influence came a little later. Henrietta Roland-Holst was less radical, she kind of oriented toward the centre to some extent. By the way, these people were all famous artists and scientists which was another interesting point; we would be kind of surprised today if an astronomer like Pannekoek wound up as a theoretician of one of the most radical wings of the movement. Or take a poet like Herman Gorter. Herman Gorter’s most important epic poem is still read in Dutch schools today as the national poem. It’s kind of like Melville in America or something like that, these literary and scientific people having such prestige. Probably the reason for that, similar to things we’ve talked about with Bolsheviks, is that at that time there was a very significant gap between the small minority of educated people, people with kind of high bourgeois culture, and the mass of workers. The best of them tried to hook up with the working class movement in whatever way they could, in the cases of Pannekoek and Gorter, for example, very successfully. Pannekoek travelled all over Germany before World War I and was teaching is different party schools with Rosa Luxemburg; they were actually quite close.

This brings me to another important point for the revolution itself. You notice up here in northwestern Germany, the cities of Hamburg and Bremen were ports that were open to the world in a way that most cities in Germany, which were landlocked, were not. Therefore they were always kind of more liberal in the bourgeois sense and more radical in the working-class sense than almost any other city except for Berlin. This is where Pannekoek and Gorter had their biggest influence. I’ll come back to that momentarily.

So the war starts in 1914, the SPD collapses along with all the other major parties of the Second International except for the Serbians, the Italians and the Americans, who wound up opposing entry by their own countries into the war. Another significant episode is the mass demonstration, something that should indicate the limits of mass demonstrations all over Europe against the war, in the last days of July 1914. Rosa Luxemburg was on the platform in front of two or three hundred thousand people, probably in Brussels, and she fainted on the platform. She said, “I know that in two or three days all of these countries are going to vote to enter the war on the side of their own bourgeoisie, and that most of these people will go along with it.” People in 1914 had no idea what modern warfare was about, the main really modern wars had been the US Civil War and the very brief Franco-Prussian War in 1870, which lasted a couple of months. No one imagined the fire power of modern artillery or the use of machine guns; airplanes had not yet really began to be used for military purposes. So there was a festive atmosphere all over Europe, people were just kind of bored by bourgeois society. When the war was declared most people just thought it was a great adventure; almost everyone imagined that the war would be over by Christmas time (this is in August). For example, the French army marched off to the front against the German army with the officers wearing extremely colorful uniforms with big feathers and on horseback with sabers. It’s just the kind of unreality about what was about to happen, and what did actually happen, as you know, was this meat grinder of four years of which fifty thousand people would be killed and capture two miles of the front and then the next day the other army would charge back recapture that, and another fifty thousand people would be killed. This just went on and on. The front essentially ran from all along the border of Germany from Belgium down to Switzerland and then, of course, there was further fighting in the east, but not so much trench warfare. So the populations and the political parties were just totally unprepared for what happened.

As we discussed in the first meeting, these little minorities of people Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, the Dutch council communists, a few people in France, a few people in Britain kept their heads and opposed the war but they would risk their lives going out into these celebrating crowds to try to agitate against the war. This changed over time; you may have heard some bourgeois liberal professor say “World War I showed that nationalism is much more powerful than Marxism, look what happened in 1914.” Well, just look what happened a few years later as the reality of the slaughter and the meaninglessness of the slaughter had really set in. I’ll just highlight a couple of episodes that sort of show that starting in late 1918. For example, the German navy mutinied up here in Kiel, which was the main port from which the Germany navy operated. The German navy never was anything nearly as powerful as the British navy but some bright-eyed admiral decided to send the whole fleet out to fight the British navy, which was blockading the country, relatively late in the war; the sailors mutinied and took over all the ships and took over Kiel and this was a real warning shot to everybody who was watching what was going on. Earlier, in spring 1917, a French general named Neville decided to launch an offensive of the western front. It was such a slaughter that again, there was a massive mutiny and special divisions of the French army had to be brought in from all over the place to put it down. The repression was so great that to this day the government archives on what happened in that mutiny and repression have never been opened. No one can see them except maybe somebody with some high connections in the military. More and more the social peace that had been established at the beginning was breaking down all over the place. That’s when these different forces go into motion.

I mentioned briefly the Dutch left. The Dutch left is kind of a misnomer. It’s really the German-Dutch left with this great influence that Pannekoek and others had up in here in these very militant northwest working class areas of Germany. The Russian Revolution, just the February Revolution when the Tsar was overthrown, was another thing that radicalized the situation. Very interestingly, in the United States, Woodrow Wilson, who was president, was watching all of this very carefully and the famous 14 Points that you probably heard about in your high school civics class or something like that, were issued as a direct response to the Bolshevik Revolution. Because Wilson realized that it was a war of propaganda between the bourgeois western powers and the new Russian Revolution that had just taken power. So there is a big geopolitical element to it. The United States Army intervened in the war in the Spring of 1917. This is also important for understanding the revolution and what happened; up until even after the US intervened, it really looked like Germany was winning the war. We talked about the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which the Bolsheviks signed under duress in early 1918 or didn’t sign, or I guess they did finally sign. They gave away one-fourth of all Russian territories to Germany and Austria. This allowed Germany to start moving troops to the western front. So things were looking pretty good and the lines were all holding on the western front. Nevertheless in September of 1918, with all of these riots and strikes beginning to really accelerate, the high level of the German general staff looked at the situation and they just decided “it’s all over, we’ve got to surrender on the best terms possible”, thinking that they would get peace without annexations or something like that.
Speaker 2: So a lot of time when you look at bourgeois histories, the decisions to surrender in war makes it look like it’s just based on external situations. But kind of maybe the implicit thing of the presentation you’re putting out is that they’re also considering the internal dynamics of their country, whether they will be overthrown themselves, all the mutinies and what not.
Loren: True!
Speaker 2: So, that’s definitely a dynamic in how long the fighting would last.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah! There is always the question of the internal politics of all the countries involved in war. In the United States as Woodrow Wilson was intervening, I understand some of you watched the Warren Beatty’s film Reds the other night; you know that Wilson got re-elected in 1916 on the slogan ‘He Kept us Out of War’; a few months later he declared war on Germany. From 1917 to 1920 the US government was repressing the IWW, pretty much unprecedented levels of repression with thousands of people jailed, with IWW offices being burned down and shut down by People’s Militias of essentially middle class people. So there was a very acute awareness of the explosive nature of the internal situation in the United States as the US entered the war. There was a lot of opposition to the war as well. The British and Americans above all were watching the situation in Germany very carefully. There were strikes going on in Britain as well and they knew that the German working class had these militant traditions and that after the war anything could happen.

As a matter of fact, Germany was under blockade during the war. The blockade was maintained for a year or two after the war ended. Why? Because they were controlling food shipments to keep revolution under control. People were hungry, starving; such people tend to go into the streets and make revolutions. In Austria, the monarchy had been overthrown exactly for that reason. In Hungary, there was a revolution; they didn’t actually take power until 1919 but the Allies knew, the Allies being France, United States and Britain. They knew that they had to deal with the internal situation in all these countries that were in the process of surrendering because they saw what happened in Russia.

So now we get into some very complicated stuff. I hadn’t really thought too much about the German Revolution for a very longtime until people expressed interest in talking about it here. So I spent a lot of time over the last week kind of reviewing and putting stuff together. Looking at it, to me at some levels it appears as kind of a blur so I’m sure those of you who are hearing about it for the first time or reading about it for the first time also experiencing something of a blur. I sent out two books to everybody who was on the list. By the way, anyone who didn’t get the notices please talk to me afterwards so I can put you on the list for further mailings. But the book by Jean Barrot (which was Dauvé’s pseudonym back in the 1970s) Jean Barrot and Denis Authier on the German Communist Left is a good source, I’ll talk about it a little later. I have my doubts about some of it, some of the people I know in Paris really hate that book for what might appear to be sectarian reasons but the second book I sent out by Phillippe Bourrinet on the Dutch and German Communist Left, I think it is more reliable. But I’ll get to that, those are X Y and Z kinds of considerations. Let me just try to touch on the A B and C.
So, Germany surrenders and the German emperor, the Kaiser, flees to Holland and crowds pour into the downtown areas of all the major cities, and above all Berlin. I think I’ve mentioned the first week that just to show where the working class was politically and in terms of consciousness, with a million people on the main downtown of Berlin on the day the Kaiser left; at one end were the Social Democrats who were getting ready to crush the revolution, by arms if necessary, proclaiming the German Republic. At the other end were Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the two best known antiwar agitators who had spent most of the war in jail, announcing the creation of the German Soviet Republic. There were wild cheers at both ends of the square. There was a lot of confusion about what was going on. The way in which Germany had collapsed, even though there is no question that in their personal communications that the top German commanders had said “this is all over,” this legend arose that became known as the “stab in the back” legend – that Germany was winning the war and that it was the Jews and Socialists who had knifed the whole thing. This was a major myth in the rise of Nazism.

So, crowds pour into the downtown areas of the main cities and all over Germany there are workers’, soldiers’ and sailors’ councils and red flags flying everywhere, the army just being essentially demobilized on both fronts. But it’s important not to fetishize these councils because a lot of them were not revolutionary. This became clear in the course of events from 1918 onward; just because people set up soviets and workers’ councils doesn’t necessarily mean that they are ready to have a communist revolution. This was one of the problems that Luxemburg and Liebknecht had in dealing with the situation. They were not totally aware of this because of course it was dazzling. The German Kaiser of the dynasty that had ruled for 350 years, was packing up and leaving town.

I’m just going to back up briefly to explain the political developments during the war. If we look at either one of those books or the short article by Bourrinet on the German Communist Left, we know the broad outlines that during the war, the antiwar sentiments in the Social Democratic party became quite significant. In early 1917 a large minority was booted out of the party for disloyalty to the war effort. They founded the USPD, the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany; I’ll just refer to it from now on as USPD. These included Kautsky and also Bernstein, who was the theoretician of revisionism. All the centre politicians left with the USPD, as did Luxemburg, Liebknecht and other leaders of the hard left. Very quickly, it was obvious that they were incompatible and within a year, shortly before the war had ended, the left constituted itself as the Spartakusbund. They were a minority; probably in all of Germany, they had 500,000 followers. Whereas the USPD had about 5 million followers and the Social Democrats, the true conservatives or reformists, Social Democrats had about six million followers. This is how it turned out in the first elections after the war. Then, within the Spartakusbund, there was already a split underway. The far left may not be brilliant in making revolutions, but it is brilliant in developing splits. This tension arose even before the collapse of the government and the German military surrender, between Luxemburg’s faction (Luxemburg of course was in jail almost all this time) but with people who founded the Spartakusbund, with the so-called IKD, who were the left communists up here; that’s the International Communists of Germany. Their real base was up here, in these radical cities Bremen and Hamburg, and elsewhere.

Now, another really interesting aspect of this whole development were these people known as the revolutionary shop stewards. They were centered in Berlin and they were sympathizers of Spartakusbund early on. They were against the war, they met almost every night; for some time during the war they were coordinating actions in the underground around Berlin and in some other key cities, and they were totally went over to the Spartakusbund.

Speaker 2: I had a quick clarifying question. According to this map as the Spartacus, the IKD, the- –

Loren: Left radicals?

Speaker 2: Are they all still part of the USPD as tendencies as fractions?

Speaker 1: Yes!

Speaker 2: Oh, so they’re not independent groups?

Speaker 1: Yes, as you see but by the way I want to explain that, while I was photocopying this, this side over here got cut off but this is basically the syndicalist forces that were concentrating different kinds of unions for direct action workers groups and things like that. I frankly don’t know that much about them, for the narrative I’m developing I don’t think they’re terribly important. So, I apologize for that.

Speaker 4: The FAUD?

Speaker 1: Yeah the FAUD and then other groups that moved in and out of the far left during the key years from 1918 to 1921/1923.

Speaker 3: In your presentation, I’m wondering if you’re going to go into a little bit about how, I know Luxemburg’s concern was not forming a sect or becoming isolated from the working class. So she was always trying to navigate a pretty complex relationship to the USPD. But when you read Trotskyist histories, they kind of slam her hard because she didn’t break with the USPD, and ended up muddling a clear organizational position.

Loren: Right.

Speaker 3: Okay.

Loren: Yeah, you know, that is true. Luxemburg felt very strongly the need not…, she was very friendly with the Dutch ultra-left people and particularly with Henrietta Roland-Holst, who kept saying “Rosa, what are you doing in that rotten reformist party? Why don’t you break out and start your own group?” and she said, “better to be part of a reformist mass group than to be a small sect on the sidelines.” That was her attitude and that is how she continued after the German military collapse, after the revolution so to speak. By the way, the first head of state after the Kaiser left was Ebert, who was one of the key right-wing socialists. The situation was so dire that the only people they could think of to put in power after the Kaiser left was the SPD. I should mention that for a year before that, the German military had been in contact with the right wing of the SPD preparing for this situation. There was something called the Groener-Scheidemann Pact. Scheidemann was another wretched right-wing SPD politician, Groener was a German general, and they worked out a deal that if the Kaiser goes, the SPD will take power and the military will support the SPD’s right wing. So, everything kind of fell into place, such as it was.

The hardcore followers of Pannekoek and Gorter up in those northwestern cities also gave Luxemburg a hard time about not breaking immediately with the USPD. The real split of the USPD from the SPD happened after Luxemburg was killed, when it was absorbed into the KPD to form a new mass party. The IKD people said the KPD would rather have five million wretched reformist left-wing Social Democrats than to have fifty thousand hardcore revolutionary workers. That certainly is not how Luxemburg imagined it but that kind of was the result of her policies.

The radical base in Bremen and Hamburg included longshoremen and other people who were connected to the ports, but I think also some important industrial workers as well. But clearly the atmosphere of the port, the constant interaction with foreign influences and things like that, was one of the reasons why those cities were more open and more radical than some of the cities in the heartland. So the right wing of the SPD took power with the support of the military. Given that it was a revolutionary or a proto-revolutionary situation, they had to move very carefully because here were all these people out in the streets waving red flags and talking about the establishment of a German Soviet Republic. The military put in these two guys Noske and Ebert, whom I just mentioned. Ebert was now the head of state, Noske was key in mobilizing this group called the Freikorps. The Freikorps was kind of like the French Foreign Legion, these were people who had spent the entire war in the trenches, very battle-hardened, very reactionary. They were pulled off the fronts where they were fighting against the Bolsheviks and the worker uprisings that were going on in Finland and in the Baltic countries, and in the western part of Russia.

There’s a book, a bit long and a bit flavored by post-modernist language, but really remarkable, called Male Fantasies. The author is Klaus Theweleit. He goes through the diaries and newspapers and somehow gets transcripts of the dreams of these Freikorps people. It’s filled with, of course, anti-Semitism, but that was the least of it. What the Freikorps was really into was incredible misogyny, and Jewish Communist women were to them anathema. Rosa Luxemburg was the symbol of everything they despised and they reveled in capturing and killing communists and executing them, but they were particularly vengeful and violent with the women communists that they captured. So these were not nice people and there were thousands of them and they were brought into Berlin by the Social Democrats. At the time, again, we have to remember, as we look back on world wars, massacres and things like that: that’s not something that we relish but we are unfortunately kind of used to that kind of catastrophe, but at this time, after a hundred years of relative peace, a peaceful development of capitalism and so on, this was just all so completely new. The Freikorps came into Berlin and street fighting started in January 1919. The KPD was founded at the very end of 1918 by those two factions I mentioned. Rosa Luxemburg and the people around her who were the leaders of the party were extremely cautious about it. What they were even more cautious about was the creation of a Third International into which they were being pressured by the Bolsheviks, because their feeling was that a new international would be dominated by the Russians. They defended the Russian Revolution down the line; Luxemburg wrote some great articles where she said, “yes, the Russian Revolution will be strangled in defeat, but it will be strangled above all by these cowardly Social Democrats who have just sit back and let it happen.” She blamed the reformist leaders of Western European social democracy more than anyone for the isolation of the Russian Revolution. She also, in one of her very last articles in the KPD daily newspaper, Rote Fahne (Red Flag), you can just imagine it’s a daily communist newspaper and it was just one of 15 or 20 daily KPD newspapers all around Germany, just to show you the depth of the revolutionary sentiment at that particular time. She wrote: “in previous class wars throughout history the opposing side entered battle under their own banners, class against class. But today, what we’re seeing is the counter-revolution entering the battle under the flag of a Social Democratic Party. If the question were posed clearly, capitalism or socialism, the great mass of German workers would have no doubts about which way they wanted to go.”

But we have entered this period in which no question can be posed clearly. Debord quotes this passage in The Society of the Spectacle, if you recall. Luxemburg and Liebknecht were murdered two weeks later. Street fighting started in Berlin and the Freikorps didn’t have too much trouble mopping up the communist people who were in the streets.

There was no mass strike backing it up; it wasn’t exactly like Occupy against the NYPD, but it was a pretty one-sided battle because behind the Freikorps who after all, were just paramilitary volunteers, behind them was the German army and the police. It is interesting, however, that the chief of police of Berlin at this particular time after the revolution was a member of the USPD and he actually helped by managing to keep the police off the backs of the communists; I think he was ousted shortly after this. It just shows what happens in a revolutionary situation, with a left Social Democrat as chief of police and so on. Luxemburg and Liebknecht were hunted down and arrested, and they were murdered by the Freikorps in January 1919. This was about two or three weeks after the creation of the KPD, and the repression came down very hard and continued for the next few months. A number of other major figures were also assassinated in that period including, see did I put him on the list? Yes, the second name Leo Jogisches. He was Luxemburg’s partner for the better part of their adult lives, also a very brilliant Polish Marxist revolutionary.

Speaker 2: Gustav Landauer also?

Loren: Yes, but Gustav Landauer was an anarchist.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I know.

Loren: He wasn’t in Berlin, he was in Munich, but I’m glad you mentioned him. He was a great, vibrant, very good writer, very good revolutionary.

But the tensions are developing between the Spartacus faction of the KPD and this IKD group from the northwest cities, with sympathizers elsewhere. This is where it gets very murky; what were the issues between them? One issue was that Luxemburg wanted to participate in the parliamentary elections for the National Assembly in January 1919. The IKD said “we are not interested in elections”; they were in agreement on breaking with the trade unions and seeing the trade unions as hopeless and irrecoverable. Again, all of them agreed that the question of forming a new international which, would tend to fall under Russian control, was something to be avoided at all cost. This remained a sentiment in the KPD for at least a couple of years after the revolution. Now, the rest of the history of the German Revolution is, and I tried to hit the high points in this second page of this handout but like I say, it really becomes a blur. What’s probably most striking about it is that there’s one revolutionary insurrection after another all over the country, but never coordinated, always in one city, always crushed in isolation. So, for example, the Bavarian Soviet Republic was declared in April of 1919, with a lot of very brilliant anarchist and communist leaders: Gustav Landauer, Erich Muehsam and others, proclaiming this variant of a republic. But notice, for example, that Munich is right in the middle of Bavaria, one of the most densely Catholic and conservative areas of Germany. So it was kind of an extreme split between the city and the countryside. Within a week the Bavarian Soviet Republic was isolated and crushed; in this case, they didn’t need to use paramilitary troops; I think the army finished them off.

In the spring of 1920, now a year and a half after the revolution and the creation of the Communist Party, there’s this very important event called the Kapp Putsch. Now, Kapp was some right-wing politician who was backed by a lot of these paramilitary elements as well as by people in the army. He staged a coup in Berlin and expected the whole country would follow. But in fact what happened instead was a general strike throughout all of Germany. This is significant because it shows that even though basically the result of the general strike was to bring back this wretched so-called socialist government, the workers knew that these far-right elements behind Kapp were preparing a bloodbath against the working class and the general strike was intended to stop that.

People have argued ever since whether they should have pushed on for revolution, or what exactly was expressed in that moment. But it was really the last time that there was a nationwide expression of working-class hostility to the move to the right. I was talking briefly last week with Tom about this. It’s just amazing… I forgot to mention, this period from 1918 till Hitler took over in 1933 is referred to in German history as the Weimar Republic. It’s called the Weimar Republic because the constitution was written in the city called Weimar, which is on the map just a little bit south of… It’s not important, it’s a small town, it’s famous because that’s where Goethe sort of held court. It has a kind of cultural symbolism in Germany. In the Weimar Republic the entire judiciary remained the judiciary of the pre1918 period and therefore, filled with judges who were monarchists and proto-fascists and so on. So that through this whole at fifteen-year period, every time a right-winger, a Kapp for example, I think he got six months in jail for trying to stage a coup. Every time a right-wing or far-right individual or group came before these courts, they would get a slap on the wrist, whereas any leftist involved in anything would either be sentenced to death or given a very long prison term. So right from the beginning, this Weimar Republic was a very shaky operation.

In 1922, there was this very charismatic guy named Walter Rathenau; he was a Jewish businessman who was the foreign minister. He was assassinated by a far-right terrorist group. Again, there were mass demonstrations all over Germany, and probably some strikes, and so on. As far as I recall, the people who killed him were never arrested and some of them, after World War II, reemerged as famous writers and things like that. Just as one would expect in any capitalist bourgeois democracy, everything was tilted towards repressing the left and at best slapping the right on the wrist.

Since I mentioned Rathenau, I want to go into another element of sort of geopolitics that played an important role. Because of the Russian Revolution, this starts with a guy named Karl Radek, who is on our list. Karl Radek, like Rosa Luxembourg and Leo Jogisches, was a Pole or maybe even a Lithuanian, but one of these people who spoke five languages and was active in the revolutionary movement all over Central and Eastern Europe. He came to Berlin as a Comintern emissary in early 1919 and was a very talented guy, politically kind of all over the map. One day he was sympathizing with the IKD, the next day he was sympathizing with somebody farther to the right. He was very quickly arrested but it was an arrest like very few others, in which he basically held court in his prison cell in Berlin for several months. He was a very important guy and he was very well known, and not just in left-wing circles. So for those two months, all kinds of top-level businessmen and military figures, as well as people from the left and the trade unions, were coming to Radek’s cell; it was like a salon. So, Radek of course became kind of the expert on the German question, for the Third International, and for the Soviet government and so on. Shortly after this, there was already a momentum for a kind of rapprochement between Germany and the Soviet Union, no matter who was in power in Germany. This is really incredibly interesting, I don’t think I should go off into too much detail but it’s just so interesting that I want to say a few words about it.

You recall last time we were talking about how the Red Army invaded Poland, in the summer of 1920, with the hope of sparking a worker’s revolt in Poland, and being on the border of Germany, when the German revolution happened. At this particular time, some members of the IKD were in Moscow and they met Lenin. Lenin pulled down a map of Germany and said, “so, comrades, our army will soon be on the eastern border of Germany; where do you expect the revolt to break out first here, in eastern Prussia?” They all just kind of looked at each other because it would be like saying, where do you expect the revolution to start in Mississippi and Louisiana next week? It was one of the most conservative parts of Germany. This already gave the IKD people a certain sense that Lenin was a little out of touch with what was going on there. The important thing is that, as a result of all this fighting that was going on, and not just in Poland and on the Polish-German border, but also up here in the Baltic states, in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and in Finland, where there was a vicious civil war going on between the Reds and the whites, which the whites unfortunately won with help from Western powers, as a result, the German army, the German High Command was coming into contact with the Red Army and the top levels of the Red Army. There’s a very murky history that goes from 1919 right up to the Stalin/Hitler pact of 1939, in which these ties were really never broken. In 1920, Germany made its first steps towards a kind of diplomatic rapprochement with the Soviet Union, which already was a slap in the face of the Allies. The Allies had imposed this treaty, called the Versailles Treaty, on Germany in the spring of 1919; a very draconian treaty, just unbelievable reparations. I think it was calculated that Germany would finish paying these reparations in 1950, and the German army was restricted to 100,000 reservists.

All kinds of cutting-edge factories and other equipment were shipped to France and Britain. It was really a, what they call a Carthaginian peace, where Germany was left with very little. Needless to say, this treaty was very unpopular, and the Social Democrats who signed it were further considered to be traitors. At first, they had supposedly knifed the German war effort, and then they signed this horrendous treaty. Since a lot of the leaders of the SPD were Jewish, it was very easy to play up the fact that there was a Jewish conspiracy selling out the country. It was right-wing propaganda right up to 1933 when Hitler took power, and Hitler tore up the treaty. He agitated against it through all those fifteen years, along with everybody else on the right and the far right, and most of those reparations were never paid. So, Germany and Russia begin to have diplomatic feelers, and the first thing that happens is that German industrialists were allowed to build factories in the Soviet Union. This was in 1920, while the Civil War is still going on. They were allowed to make military equipment and other key materials that had military use. I of course got interested in this, I looked into it a little bit. Some of the people on the German side actually traveled to Moscow and met with Lenin and Trotsky. I have to say as critical as I am of Lenin and Trotsky, I could not find any smoking guns. It was a very straightforward pragmatic deal. “We need this military equipment, you need some profits, so we’re going to let you build these factories.” It was one of the ways in which these ties between the two governments began to be established. Around this time, there was a very colorful character, Colonel Max Bauer, who had excelled in crushing several working class uprisings. He traveled to Moscow, he meets at a ceremonial dinner with Lenin and Trotsky, and further contracts assigned. Then Max Bauer goes on to China, where he becomes a consultant to Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nationalist Party (Guomindang); there he’s involved in crushing the communist workers in Shanghai and Guangzhou in 1927. So, there’s a kind of a set of relationships that are being set down here.

I don’t want to draw any conclusions. Some people think that already allowing German factories to be built in the Soviet Union was another step towards the emergence of the Soviet Union as a nation state that was pursuing nation state aims, and to hell with the international movement. We can talk about that, but this was going on. In 1922, a formal agreement called the Treaty of Rapallo who was signed, and the guy who engineered it on the German side was this guy Walter Rathenau, and for his trouble he was promptly assassinated by these far-right underground groups. It also is hard to keep a chronological narrative going because so much is going on all over the place. The Kapp Putsch happens in March of 1920, it fails because of the general strike. In the Ruhr, the most industrial area of Germany, the true industrial heartland., there’s an uprising that lasts for a week and it results in the forming of what was known as the Red Army of the Ruhr, which was formed out of workers militias. They even had a little air force, and of course, the German Army moved in very quickly.

After the defeat of the Kapp Putsch, there was a social democrat who was concerned that the workers in the Ruhr area had never given in their weapons. They were still armed, and so there’s some evidence that the initial incident that sparked it was, of course the Kapp Putsch; Kapp wanted the workers to rise up because he thought they would be isolated, and they were, and therefore they could be relatively easily defeated. But it was quite a battle that was probably the most extended armed confrontation of the whole revolution in which thousands of workers were killed during the repression and of course afterwards, after they were rounded up.

I was in Germany last fall and I stopped off to see this guy I know in the Ruhr who’s a kind of a historian, kind of a maniac. He has 25,000 books in his library, but that’s another story, and he knows a lot about this stuff. I was looking around; nothing much of significance had happened in the Ruhr for a very long time. My friendsaid, “yes, it’s very curious; there’s a magnificent three- volume study of the Ruhr revolt, unfortunately not translated into English”.

When the author was writing this book, which was in the 70s, he went around the Ruhr and tried to find people who had had experiences in this, and it was just almost forgotten. It was just like it never happened. He talked to people who had actually fought. Of course a lot of the most class conscious and militant people had been killed, if not then, then later or during the Nazi period. But it was just like a historical amnesia like you can’t believe. Somewhat like Vietnam today in the United States, where one person in a hundred could say five interesting things about what happened in Vietnam, and why it happened and so on. That’s a far-fetched analogy but you get the idea.

So the Ruhr uprising was crushed. And then after that, last week I mentioned the 1921 March Action. Again this was in central Germany; this was basically down here south of Berlin in another industrial area where the workers also had not given up their weapons after the dust had settled in 1918/1919. This involved the Communist Party and the left communists, the KAPD. I forgot to mention that in fall 1919, the KAPD as a majority left the KPD, where I think may even have been expelled, and formed the KAPD, which lasted only a couple of years as a really mass party. When I say mass party it was maybe fifty thousand people or a hundred thousand people. I’d like to have a left communist group in the United States with fifty or a hundred thousand members, but I mean in Germany at that time, given all the other forces on the left and the right, it didn’t have a lot of weight.

I think (Anton) Pannekoek had been kicked out of Germany, since he was a Dutch citizen. Gorter was in Holland. Probably the most interesting guy on the scene at this point was a guy named Max Holz, who was a working-class firebrand, incredible speaker and great street fighter and strategist. He kind of excelled in these kinds of confrontations. He managed to play a leadership role in the March Action and then escaped to the Soviet Union and wrote a autobiography, which I haven’t read but which is supposed to be really good about what happened. He died later, much later; I don’t know in what circumstances.

So, both the KAPD and the KPD have troops, people on the ground in central Germany, and there’s tremendous hesitation in both parties actually about the wisdom of an uprising at that time. The great majority of workers in the immediate area in fact were hostile to the March Action, which involved seizing some factories with armed militias and getting ready to fight the police and the army. In fact, even the great majority of workers kind of held back and so once again, even though people like Max Holz organized brilliant resistance for a couple of weeks, the uprising was crushed. I think a thousand workers were killed, many more arrested and sent to jail for long terms, and there was much hand-wringing and accusation afterwards.

Interestingly the head of the KPD was a guy named Paul Levi, who was kind of a disciple of Rosa Luxembourg but with none of Luxemburg’s talents. He was opposed to the March Action, but it was kind of out of his control. He wrote a pamphlet called Our Road Against Putchism. He published it before the March action, and for his troubles he was expelled from the KPD. Lenin actually privately agreed with Levi, but because he broke party discipline by publishing this pamphlet, nothing was said. In the KAPD itself, there was a lot of criticism of the March action as well, that it was poorly prepared and isolated. I think the term “adventurist” was used.

So, this was not really a sticking point between the two parties at that point. There was a lot of hesitation on both sides and ultimately it was kind of an ill-considered action, which further isolated the revolutionary elements among the left communists and the best people in the left wing of the Communist Party. So that was the spring of 1921.

As I mentioned last week, I really see that as kind of the turning point of the whole world revolution after World War I. The failure of the March action, the question of Kronstadt in the Soviet Union, the Anglo-Russian trade agreement, which was the first time that relations were normalized with a capitalist country. The NEP, the New Economic Plan which opened up the market to the peasants, who were 85% of the population. Then, finally, and also lesser known, was the Soviet-Turkish commercial treaty, also in March 1921, in which Attaturk, the leader of the Turkish nationalists, was recognized and supported with Soviet money and weapons while he was crushing the Turkish Communist Party. This established a certain kind of precedent which would be followed many times in the future.

So. none of these events were particularly coordinated; what they showed was a pulling back of the revolutionary wave. Trotsky said right after 1917, “the world revolution is a matter of months away” and then by 1921 “well maybe it’s a matter of years”. Of course, Stalin moved into this whole discussion saying, “look, the world revolution is off the agenda, we’ve got to deal with our situation” and he eventually launched this formulation, which I think I mentioned before, of “socialism in one country”. Something unheard of in the Marxist tradition up to that point! So the ebb has kind of set in.

Now, just let me add a couple of more points; then we can get into our discussion. The situation in Germany was going from bad to worse. So you may recall the mass inflation of 1922/1923, when German pensioners and other people were literally pushing their weekly pensions down the street in wheelbarrows in one billion mark notes that were being issued massively by the central bank. It was just the exchange rate between the mark and the dollar went from 4 or 5:1 in 1914, up to two or three billion to one by 1923. It was just a chaotic situation. Workers were constantly striking, if for no other reason because they had to keep up with inflation, and the workers didn’t do too badly.

The people who really got screwed were the middle class, and the pensioners who had bought all these war bonds during the war. They would cash them in and the money they would get back would buy a box of matches, or pay for lunch, or something like that. The life savings of the whole German middle class were wiped out, and also all the debts of German industry were wiped out. So the industrialists generally came out of it very well. The employed working class didn’t do too badly; it was the people who had no organizing strength who just got absolutely hammered by this inflation. So the situation was deteriorating, and there was this one last attempt at a revolution in the fall of 1923. There had been discussion of sending Trotsky to Germany to run the German Revolution, the way he had run the Bolshevik seizure of power, but it never happened. I don’t know what would have happened, but finally in October of 1923, this crisis came to a head. There was Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, an attempt to seize the Munich government, which failed. At the same time, there was a completely botched uprising in Germany. I think I mentioned last time that the Comintern analyzed the situation, decided to call it off, sent off telegrams, and the guy with the telegram who
was supposed to notify the Hamburg working class that the insurrection was off missed the last train. So the Hamburg workers rose up and they were crushed in isolation. Interestingly, the weapons that the German army used there were from the Soviet Union. Not that the Soviet Union had sent them for this purpose, but they were weapons that were part of this deal in the German-Soviet accord.

Okay! I’ve talked too much, so why don’t we move to questions and discussion and see what we can flesh this out more, in terms of these different factions, and what this means for today? Just one last thing, again it’s the parallels and differences with contemporary China that I think are the most interesting aspect of why this stuff is not just ancient history for edification on a cold winter night.

Okay, first of all Germany was the most dynamic industrial country in the world at this time, with the exception of the United States. Around 1870 or at the latest 1880, both Germany and the United States passed England as leading industrial powers. In some ways Germany’s development was more interesting than that of the United States, because it had this statist top-down element that I mentioned with Bismarck. But it went much farther than that; for example, in 1870 in the United States, there were no graduate schools. If you wanted a better graduate school in the 1870s, 1880s and really up until the 1930s, you went to Germany, particularly in the sciences and in mathematics. It wasn’t just graduate schools; it was technical institutes that were innovating all kinds of stuff in engineering, steel production, chemistry, electronics and so on. It was, in that way, the most advanced industrial country. The United States was copying it with all these people coming back from studying there. None other than W,E,B Dubois went to graduate school in Germany between about 1908 and 1911; in 1912, he took classes from sociologists like Max Weber. That’s how widespread this fascination with Germany was. When the United States finally decided to have a central bank, the Federal Reserve Bank, which was created in 1913, was copied from the German central bank. There were congressional studies over several years, saying “we’ve got to have something like this.”

Germany became this model, in terms of class composition; it was a highly skilled workforce; there were not only was these technical schools. To this day, for example, Germany has these apprenticeship programs that it’s definitely a class-tilted kind of thing, sort of like tracking in the United States. Around the age of 16, if you’re not going to go to the university, you go to one of these apprenticeship schools. It turns out hundreds of thousands of skilled workers in their late teens every year. So, one of the reasons that today China and Germany have such close trade relations, with Germany exporting so much, machinery and cars and equipment and so on to China, is because of this highly skilled workforce that by comparison the US workforce fails in comparison.

So, there was this high level of labor formation and the real core industrial areas that as I mentioned earlier. The main one was over in the Ruhr area, bordering on Holland, Belgium and France. Bavaria was little industrialized, and then there was the industrial area around Berlin and then Hamburg and Bremen were more kind of export oriented but with some industry. As for the class composition within this, there’s no question that there was a division between these skilled workers who were relatively well paid and a larger mass of unskilled workers. But as for breaking it down by industry, I’m not really in a position to do that. In terms of ethnicity, there was a lot of Polish immigration into eastern Germany. A lot of Poles worked as agricultural laborers and there was some anti-Polish feeling about that.

Anti-Semitism in Germany was essentially aimed at the middle class. There was a huge Jewish working class in Poland and in some parts of Russia and other Eastern European countries. But to my knowledge there wasn’t much of a Jewish working class in Germany. The anti-Semites played on the fact that the Jews played a key role in banking and owned a lot of department stores and other things that were associated with modernization. But to my knowledge anti-Semitism played next and no role in the working class itself. The Social Democrats, just to flaunted their internationalism and their relatively advanced progressive character, went out of their way to run Jewish candidates in well-known right wing anti-Semitic areas. Anti-Semitism was something that came as a result of some fundamental transformations of German society.

There’s so much written about the German Revolution and all the stuff and I was thinking it might have been a good idea along with the Barrot-Authier and the Bourrinet chapters, to read Lenin’s pamphlet, as well as Gorter’s answer, which is also a brilliant pamphlet.

Lenin wrote Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder in the spring of 1920. The two targets in it are the German left communists, the KAPD, as well as the Dutch left and the Bordigists. We can take this up and actually maybe for our last session when we deal with left communism, we should read Lenin’s pamphlet because it’s a good introduction from the other side. Many years ago, I went to the library with that pamphlet and I looked up all the people that Lenin was denouncing, wondering “what do these people have to say?” That’s kind of how I stumbled on to the left communist tradition; at that time of course not much was published about it. Even today, there’s not a great deal that’s published but much more now.

What Lenin was basically saying, the argument was that the model of the Russian Revolution was the model for a revolution in the West. This was the process that Rosa Luxemburg had been so worried about, that by the very nature of being the only country with a Marxist party in power, that they would take over the Third International. Even though it was obvious to everyone, including the Bolsheviks, that Germany’s working class was much more important and more powerful than the Russian working class. What Lenin was trying to hammer home, what he was calling the “infantile sectarian” quality of the Western European left communists, was their refusal to enter into alliances with other forces. At the third congress of the Comintern, in 1921, the KAPD was expelled from the Third International. They set up a new international with some other left communist forces centered in Amsterdam, which unfortunately only lasted a couple of years. Trotsky made a speech (this was after Kronstadt); he said “we hear a lot of talk these days about the need for a third revolution. Well, if we’re going to have a third revolution, why not a Fourth International? Surely being overwhelmed by numbers will not be the problem of a Fourth International, if one day such an organization is ever founded.” It’s one of Trotsky’s many prophecies that wound up applying to himself!

But what Lenin was trying to do, the real core of it as I recall, was the question of the United Front. What is the United Front? The term has been used and abused ever since, but at that time it meant essentially aligning with the Social Democrats, or the left- wing Social Democrats. For example, you see here that ultimately, I did mention that, ultimately the KPD fused with the majority of the USPD to found a mass Communist Party. That was in 1920. Bordiga down in Italy was polemicizing all this time about the dangers of an absorption of the left-wing Social Democrats. Most of whom, not just in Italy but everywhere in Europe, had supported their own country in World War I. In fact there’s a very nice continuity between left Social Democrats who voted for war credits for their own bourgeoisie, who would be in the left wing of the Socialist Party after the war, and who became Stalinists five years later. So there was a certain kind of logic in their evolution. Bordiga was adamant when the Comintern ordered the Italian Communist Party, “you’ve got to fuse with the left wing of the socialists”. Bordiga said, ‘’no way!’’. So that’s how he gets into this pamphlet. But he’s really not mentioned that much. The real force of Lenin’s polemic is aimed at the KAPD and the Dutch left communists for their infantile refusal to make alliances with other forces.

Now in his reply, Hermann Gorter, along with Pannekoek, one of the two most important leaders of the Dutch leftm wrote this “Open Letter to Comrade Lenin” which you can find on Libcom. It’s really quite remarkable and in retrospect, it all seems very obvious. But here’s this guy, a poet; not really that well known outside of Holland and Germany, taking on Lenin, who was at the height of his prestige in 1920. He’s saying, “Look, Lenin, what you’ve got to understand is that the revolution in Russia triumphed because you had the support of the peasantry. The peasantry didn’t love you, they were suspicious of you and you stole the whole program of the left wing of the Social Revolutionaries by agreeing to the seizure of land in 1917, as if the Bolsheviks had any choice about that.” The peasants seized the land and handed it out among themselves, which was not the Bolshevik program. The Bolshevik program was nationalization of the land and the creation of collective farms, voluntarily. Nevertheless those were the circumstances and that was what neutralized the peasantry in the Civil War. No matter what the Whites tried to do, they could never convince the peasantry that they weren’t going to bring back the landlords, which is of course exactly what they intended to do. (see my later article, inspired by these talks (https://libcom.org/article/agrarian-question-russian-revolution-material-community-productivism-and-back )

So the alliance is between the hammer and sickle. What is the hammer and sickle? It’s a symbol of the alliance of the working class and the peasantry, but this was not on the agenda in western Europe. In western Europe, in Gorter’s words, “the working class stands alone and cannot ally with any other political force.” One might say, I think it’s right that in some cases the revolutionary working-class party could say to peasant smallholders and landless workers in the countryside, “you’ve got to recognize, capitalism is headed for large-scale capitalist agriculture. It’s going to wipe you out. We offer you, as a doomed social class, we offer you the best possible way out. On that basis you could make an alliance, but to ally with, above all with the Social Democrats who have just drowned the revolution in blood a couple of years earlier in Germany, and were getting ready to do so in other places, no.

There was just something that many communists, as well as left communists just could not swallow, and that’s what Lenin was trying to hammer away at. But the real issue in both the case of Bordiga and the Dutch left was to say that this “dual revolution”, proletarian revolution in the cities, bourgeois revolution in the countryside, land to individual peasants smallholders, that this was not the model for world revolution. This is where the Russian dominance of the International really made itself felt most forcefully. Because from that point on, nobody could argue with the Russian party and the Russian state which was using the Third International as one aspect of its foreign policy. So that that’s it, but I think when we get to the left communists in our final meeting we should definitely read Lenin’s pamphlet and Gorter’s reply, something like that!