ISRAEL GETZLER

Marxist Revolutionaries
and the Dilemma of Power

This paper seeks to investigate the dilemma of power which Marxist revolutionaries seem to have faced when active in “backward” societies like that of Germany in 1848 and Russia in 1905 and 1917. I became interested in the subject in the course of my study of Martov and through conversations with the late Boris Nicolaevsky and N. V. Vol’sky-Valentinov. My examination of the Marxist foundations to which the Russian debates of 1905 and 1917 were related benefited greatly from a reading of Karl Marx, Man and Fighter.¹ Though it may be doubtful whether Boris Nicolaevsky would have agreed with my conclusions, I am certain that he was passionately interested in the questions I propose to raise.

My starting point is the failure of the Mensheviks in the 1917 revolution. The most current explanation of the failure is that the Mensheviks, a party of great talents and considerable political experience, saw their Russian world with Marxist blinkers and were in the end “ruined by their pedantic Marxism.”² That is to say, they were in the straitjacket of a doctrine according to which the Russian revolution of their day could be none other than a “bourgeois” revolution and would put the liberal middle classes into power.

The Menshevik concept of bourgeois revolution postulated that, in a backward, absolutist, and semi-feudal country like Russia, it made no sense for socialists and the party of the proletariat to seize power and plunge Russia into socialism. Capitalist development under bourgeois-democratic auspices was not only the order of the day: it was also desirable. Abstention from power, a socialist version of the self-denying ordinance, even when power lay within easy reach and the temptation to seize it was great, was the basic practical commitment inherent in the concept of bourgeois revolution.

In 1917 the Mensheviks did abstain from supreme power only until the April crisis, after which they joined the first coalition government (formed on May 5) as junior partners to a bourgeois majority. They repeated the performance by entering the second coalition government (formed July 24), but on even worse terms. Was Menshevik political thinking as developed in the 1905 debate on power and as practiced in 1917—first abstention from and then acceptance of a minor share in power—grounded in Marxist theory, prescription, or precedent?

Marx and Engels were extremely wary about offering advice on revolutionary strategy in Russia, and it would be futile therefore to search in their works for an unambiguous revolutionary recipe for Russia. Still, Marx and Engels, between 1846 and 1850, were practical revolutionaries in prebourgeois and pre-industrial Germany, a situation in many ways comparable to that of pre-1917 Russia. Like their Russian disciples they too faced a dilemma of power. What revolutionary strategy did they advocate and pursue, and above all, what was their attitude to the question of power?

Before 1848, Marx and Engels hoped and prophesied that the German revolution would be a bourgeois revolution. Marx, in his famous row with Wilhelm Weitling in Brussels on March 30, 1846, did more than ridicule Weitling’s Utopian Handwerkerkommunismus as “sentimental drivel”; he insisted that in Germany a bourgeois revolution was on the agenda. This, he stated, meant that “there could be no talk of the immediate realization of communism—first the bourgeoisie must come to the helm.”³ Yet Weitling had no time for the moderate counsel of scientific socialism which told impatient maximalists like himself to wait. To him “mankind was always or never ripe [for communism]” and Marx’s patient writing-desk analyses were developed “in aloofness from the suffering world and the tribulations of the people.”⁴

One reason why Moses Hess fell foul of Marx and Engels in 1847 was his insistence that in Germany, because of the cowardice and weakness of its bourgeoisie, a proletarian and not a bourgeois revolution was on the agenda. However, thanks to the German Misère, that proletarian revolution would have to rely on an “external stimulus,” the “approaching storm” of a French revolution. ⁵

Karl Heinzen, who campaigned in 1847 for an immediate insurrection in Germany, was thus lectured by Engels and Marx: in a country like Germany, which “industrially was so dependent and enslaved,” the only possible change in property relations would be “in the interest of the bourgeoisie and of free competition.”⁶ To try to do more in a situation where the political rule of the bourgeoisie corresponded to the stage reached in the development of productive relations was futile.

Even were the proletariat to overthrow the political domination of the bourgeoisie, its victory could only be transient, nothing but a passing moment in the service of the bourgeois revolution as in Anno 1794.⁷

Against this general principle of social evolution “no powerful effort of the mind or of the will” could be of much avail. The “definitive fall of the political bourgeois domination” would come only when the material conditions had been created which necessitated “the abolition of the bourgeois mode of production.”⁸ However, a patient acceptance of bourgeois revolution and bourgeois rule did not mean that socialists ought to wash their hands of the revolutionary movement; they must support the bourgeoisie when it was making its bourgeois revolution, knowing that their “own struggle against the bourgeoisie can begin only on the day, when the bourgeoisie has been victorious.”

While bourgeois revolution may have been a handy stick with which to beat maximalist rivals such as Weitling, Hess, Heinzen, and all the Straubingers, in a nascent German labor movement, to Marx and Engels it was far more than a mere polemical concept. It was the rationale of a minimalist revolutionary strategy. In backward, absolutist Germany, statepower was conceded to the bourgeoisie at a time when the working class was still an insignificant political force, on the grounds that bourgeois rule was a necessary precondition for eventual proletarian rule. Engels thus explained why even in the “ancient-Germanic” democracies of Switzerland and Norway, “modern democracy” (i.e. socialism) was not yet on the agenda:

In all civilized countries the democratic movement aims in the last resort at the political domination of the proletariat. It presupposes then that a proletariat exists, that a ruling bourgeoisie exists, that an industry exists which creates the proletariat and which has brought the bourgeoisie to power.⁹

Thus, in spite of all their democratism, what Switzerland and Norway still needed was a bourgeois revolution and bourgeois rule. Likewise, Engels’ “Basic Principles of Communism” of October-November, 1847, postulated that in Germany it was in the interest of the communists to help the bourgeoisie come to power as soon as possible, so that they could overthrow it again as soon as possible.¹⁰ What he expected from bourgeois rule by the “lords of capital” and its fatally transient nature Engels spelled out in a memorable passage in his review of the year 1847:

We need you for the time being; we even need your domination here and there. You must remove for us the relics of the Middle Ages and the absolute monarchy; you must destroy patriarchalism, you must centralize; you must transform all more or less property-less classes into real proletarians, into recruits for us by means of your factories and trade connections; you must supply the basis for these material means which the proletariat requires for its emancipation. As your wage for this you may for a short time rule. You may dictate laws and bask in the majestic splendor which you have created; you may feast in the royal hall and wed the beautiful princess; but do not forget—”The executioner stands at the door.”¹¹

Both points, the necessity of a bourgeois revolution and bourgeois rule in Germany and its transient nature, are reiterated in the Communist Manifesto. It diagnosed Germany to be on the eve of a bourgeois revolution and prescribed a revolutionary strategy of full support for the bourgeoisie “whenever it acts in a revolutionary way against the absolute monarchy, the feudal squirearchy, and the petty bourgeoisie.” Such support must not gloss over the fundamental antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat which must burst into the open immediately upon the overthrow of the reactionary classes. Then the proletariat will embark on its struggle against the bourgeoisie. Thus the German bourgeois revolution (by contrast with those of England in the seventeenth century and of France in the eighteenth) would not usher in a long historical phase of bourgeois domination. The question then was how long. Was it to be measured in decades or in years? If only in years, how could the bourgeoisie manage to do all that Marx and Engels expected it to do and prepare the ground for the proletariat? While Marx and Engels may have seen the brevity of bourgeois rule as a function of its belatedness, the fact that they expected the bourgeoisie to come to the helm, whether for a brief period or for an entire historical phase, exempted them for some time from the responsibility of making ready for government. Moreover, it gave them theoretical justification for restraining their more maximalist followers without robbing them of the hope of seeing socialism realized in their time.

In the early phase of the 1848 revolution Marx reiterated the minimalist view that the Germans in 1848 were now where the French had been in 1789.¹² Marx and his followers in the Communist League merged with the general democratic movement.¹³ But by June, 1848, he and Engels began to strike a more maximalist note, reminiscent of the “heresy” of Moses Hess.

The big bourgeoisie, they now discovered, was already revolutionsmüde and had cheated the revolution of its democratic fruits, aiming at establishing its domination by way of compromise with the old police and feudal state. This compromise was effected at the expense of its most natural allies, the peasantry, whose feudal burdens had not been seriously relieved. This, more than anything, proved that the German revolution of 1848 was no more than “a parody of the French revolution of 1789” which within three weeks of the fall of the Bastille had made a clean sweep of all feudal burdens.¹⁴

History knew no more despicable wretchedness than that of the German bourgeoisie, an Allerweltsknecht, especially the Prussian bourgeoisie: ¹⁵

Without initiative, without faith in itself or in the people, without historical vocation, . . . thus the Prussian bourgeoisie found itself at the helm of the Prussian state after the March revolution.¹⁶

The German bourgeoisie was at the helm but had failed in its historical task of completing the bourgeois revolution. Marx and Engels now pinned their hopes on another revolution in Paris which would issue in revolutionary war and then, Vae Victis!, democrats in Germany would get their revenge.

The cannibalism of the counterrevolution will have convinced the nations that there is only one means to abbreviate, to simplify, to concentrate the murderous agonies of the old society and the bloody birthpangs of the new, only one means—revolutionary terrorism.¹⁷

The whole course of the 1848 revolution in Germany proved that in Germany a “pure bourgeois revolution” was impossible; the alternative was either “feudal absolutist counterrevolution or the social-republican revolution.” ¹⁸ For some time then Marx and Engels in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung spoke of a new victorious revolution, of a people’s revolution,¹⁹ a democratic revolution which would come in the wake of a new French revolution—a “February in higher potency.”²⁰ “Bourgeois revolution” had disappeared from their revolutionary vocabulary.

Marx’s and Engels’ left-turn in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was paralleled in the tactical sphere by their renewed interest in the Arbeiterverein and their exodus from the Democratic Association and the attempt to create a “purely social party” upholding the “principles of social democracy.”²¹ From their early role as radical left-wing democrats they now began to assume the role of leaders of a socialist class-party of the proletariat.

In review then, Marx and Engels reacted to the shattering experience of the failure of the 1848 revolution in Germany by modifying, if not abandoning, their deterministic scheme and above all by lifting their taboo on power. Surely a revolution which aimed at the establishment of a social republic would put socialists at the helm of government. But the flirtation with the notions of a “social-republican” revolution and of revolutionary terror never matured into hard policy; it merely reflected a passing mood of despair when the revolution was crushed in Berlin and Vienna.

Early in 1850 Marx and Engels expected a new revolutionary upheaval in Germany which would be sparked by an uprising of the French working class or by a counterrevolutionary military invasion of France. In the March, 1850, Address of the Central Bureau to the Communist League, they prescribed a minimalist-maximalist revolutionary strategy for Germany’s second revolution. The “revolutionary workers’ party” which they hoped to create and lead should give its support to the petty-bourgeois democratic party in its struggle against the reactionary government and even allow it to seize power. Yet it must prevent the democrats in government from consolidating their power and freezing the revolution since “our interest and our task is to make the revolution permanent, until . . . the proletariat had conquered state power.” Therefore it must take an attitude of “unconcealed mistrust in the new government,” harass it, and “dictate such conditions to them that the rule of the bourgeois democrats will from the outset bear within it the seeds of their downfall and that their subsequent extrusion by the rule of the proletariat will be considerably facilitated.” This could best be done by keeping up the “revolutionary excitement” and by “establishing simultaneously and alongside the new official government their own revolutionary workers’ governments whether in the form of municipal committees and municipal councils, or by way of workers’ clubs or workers’ committees.” In other words, the new revolutionary strategy aimed at dual government: while the “momentary, inevitable dominance of bourgeois democracy”²² was grudgingly accepted, the proletariat was to entrench itself in “revolutionary workers’ governments” and assume the role of irreconcilable revolutionary opposition which would push the official government into realizing, in spite of itself, as many radical and social objectives as possible and thus prepare for its own advent to power.

While it was true that German workers could not as yet “attain power and realize their own class interests without completely going through a lengthy revolutionary development,” their advent to power lay at the end of that permanent revolution which was about to begin and which would possibly coincide with and be accelerated by the victory of the proletariat in France.²³

While the ambiguity of the Address on the cardinal question of power may be partly a concession to maximalist followers like Willich and Schapper, partly a realistic appraisal of the immaturity and impotence of the “workers’ party” and of the working class in Germany as an aspirant to governmental power, it certainly illustrates a reluctance to take power and govern. Dual government and permanent revolution were the answers with which Marx and Engels resolved their dilemma of power when the classical answer of bourgeois revolution and abstention from power proved impracticable and unattractive. This represented a more radical resolution of the tension that existed between the maximalist, subjective will of the revolutionary socialist and the objectivity of the social scientist, a tension which defies resolution in a backward situation where the objective prerequisites are missing. In other words, the “scientific socialism”²⁴ of Marx and Engels gave no satisfactory answer to the dilemma of power in the backward, prebourgeois, and pre-industrial situation in which they found themselves as active revolutionaries in Germany in the period 1848-50.

Marx’s and Engels’ hopes for a new revolutionary upsurge in Germany (and France) in which the working class and the Arbeiterpartei would play an independent role soon proved a delusion. Europe was settling down in a counterrevolutionary mold, while their Blanquist allies in the Communist League, all stranded in the frustrating atmosphere of London emigration, proved as impatient and maximalist as ever.

It was in conflict and debate with Karl Schapper and August Willich and in the course of the split which Marx and Engels provoked in the Communist League, that they returned to and reiterated the concept of bourgeois revolution as an inevitable and necessary historical stage during which socialists must abstain from power. By the autumn of 1850 Marx and Engels assumed that the first phase of the revolutionary period had ended and would be renewed only by a new world-wide economic crisis.²⁵ Efforts at playing with revolution by Blanquist elements in the Communist League made no sense in these circumstances and could not be tolerated. It was necessary for Marx and Engels to part company with them, as they were in complete disagreement on the vital question of “the position of the German proletariat in the next revolution,”²⁶ i.e., on the question of power. While Marx and Engels told workers, “You have fifteen or twenty or fifty years of civil and national wars to go through, not just to change conditions but to change yourselves to become fit for political rule,”²⁷ the maximalists in the Communist League, who “stressed the will as the main thing in the revolution instead of the real conditions,” insisted they “must immediately come to power or . . . [they] might as well go to sleep”²⁸ and trusted that in a new German revolution “the final goal of the movement could be realized.”²⁹ Schapper reduced the whole debate to the brutal

question [of] whether in the beginning we shall chop heads or our heads will be chopped. In France the workers will come to power and with them we in Germany. Were this not the case, I could indeed go to sleep and would then have a very different material position. Should we come to power we could put through measures which would secure domination to the proletariat. I am a fanatical enthusiast in this matter.³⁰

Marx did not think it required much “enthusiasm to belong to a party which one thought would soon be in government”³¹ and thus the cardinal principle of Marx’s revolutionary strategy in Germany was that communists must not form “the governmental but the opposition party of the future”:

We devote ourselves to a party which in its own best interest cannot as yet take power. Were the proletariat to come to power [now], it would be able to realize only petty-bourgeois, but not directly proletarian measures. Our party can take over the government only when conditions permit it to realize its ideas.³²

Even were the proletariat to come to power in France, it would have to share that power with the peasants and the petty-bourgeoisie and pursue their policies rather than its own. Louis Blanc’s performance in the Provisional Government of 1848 was a warning of what happened “when one comes prematurely to power.” ³³

It fell to Engels to set out in detail the danger of coming to power prematurely. In his Peasant War in Germany (written in the summer of 1850), referring to Thomas Münzer’s failure as president of the Council of Mühlhausen and to the failure of Louis Blanc and Alexandre Martin in the French Provisional Government of 1848, he sounded this warning:

The worst that can happen to the leader of an extreme party is that he is compelled to take over the government in a period when the movement is not sufficiently mature for the dominance of the class which he represents and for the realization of those measures required by the dominance of that class. . . . inevitably he finds himself in an insoluble dilemma: what he can do contradicts his entire previous performance (Auftreten), his principles, and the immediate interests of his party; and what he ought to do is not realizable. In a word, he is forced to represent the class for whose domination conditions are ripe, and not his own party and class. In the interest of the movement he must realize the interests of a class which is alien to him, while feeding his own class with phrases and promises and with the assurance that the interests of another class are its own. Whoever falls into such a false position is irretrievably lost.³⁴

In a letter to Filippo Turati (January, 1894), Engels analyzed the dilemma of power which the Italian socialists faced, a situation in which the bourgeoisie had “been neither able nor willing to complete its victory” and destroy feudalism. There was no question, Engels urged, that in Italy, for both objective and subjective reasons, a socialist revolution was not on the agenda and that all one could hope to gain from a successful revolution was a “bourgeois republic.”³⁵ Faced with this prospect, socialists, as an “independent party,” ought to cooperate with the radicals in a “positive way” when making a revolution which was to be “genuinely national” and not just another irresponsible conspiracy. After the achievement of such a victory, “our ways will part,” and socialists “shall constitute the new opposition to the new government” and press on to “new conquests.” However, the new opposition, Engels insisted, must not enter the government.

After the common victory, we might be offered some seats in the new government, but always in a minority. THAT IS THE GREATEST DANGER. After February, 1848, the French socialist democrats (of the Réforme, Ledru-Rollin, Louis Blanc, Flocon, etc.) made the mistake of accepting such posts. Constituting a minority in the government, they voluntarily shared the responsibility for all the infamies and treachery which the majority, composed of pure republicans, committed against the working class, while their presence in the government completely paralyzed the revolutionary action of the working class which they claimed they represented.³⁶

Engels had no doubt that the general tactics which he and Marx had advocated in similar situations in the past had proved correct. “As regards their application to present conditions in Italy,” he added, “that is another matter; that must be decided on the spot, by those who are in the thick of events.”³⁷

During the years 1873-75 and in the course of the debate with their Bakuninist opponents, Engels and Marx had occasion to reiterate their views on the position of socialists in the bourgeois revolution with regard to such backward countries as Russia and Spain. Commenting on Peter Tkachev’s impatient call for a social revolution Engels observed:

The revolution aimed at by modern socialism is, to put it briefly, the victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie and the reorganization of society by the destruction of all class distinctions. To accomplish this revolution not only a proletariat is needed, but also a bourgeoisie in whose hands the productive forces of society have developed to such a stage to allow the final destruction of class distinctions. . . . The bourgeoisie is consequently . . . as equally necessary a precondition for a socialist revolution as the proletariat.³⁸

Therefore a Tkachev who believed that socialism could easily be realized in Russia because it had no bourgeoisie, even though it had no proletariat, had still “to learn the ABC of socialism.”³⁹ In a similar vein Marx censured Bakunin’s schülerhafte Eselei, his reliance on “the will” to make a “European social revolution, which is founded on the economic basis of capitalist development, at the level of the Russian or Slavic agricultural and pastoral peoples.”⁴⁰

Engels took the Spanish Bakuninists to task for having bungled the 1873 revolution in Spain by their maximalist boycottism and subsequent volte face on the question of power:

Spain is industrially so backward a country that as yet there can be no talk whatever of an immediate, complete emancipation of the working class. Before it gets there, Spain must go through various preliminary steps of development and must clear the road of a whole series of obstacles. The republic [which the Bakuninists initially boycotted] offered the opportunity to contract the course of these preliminary steps into the shortest possible period of time. This opportunity, however, could have been utilized only by the active political intervention of the Spanish working class.⁴¹

After their maximalist principle proved unrealistic, i.e., that “workers should not take part in a revolution which does not aim at the complete emancipation of the proletariat,” the Bakuninists did an about face and even went so far as to join the various provisional governments which cropped up in the cities, “almost everywhere as an impotent minority which [was] outvoted by the bourgeoisie and politically exploited by it.” Thus the Spanish Bakuninists set an “unsurpassed example” of how “one ought not to make a revolution.” ⁴²

There can be little doubt that when Marx and Engels were active revolutionaries (during the period 1848-50) or when they were concerned with the prospects of revolution and socialism in Germany, they showed little enthusiasm for immediate power. They seemed to have been happy to see the bourgeoisie (and after it had disappointed them, the radical pettybourgeois democrats) form the government on the morrow of a successful revolution in Germany. Even as late as the 1880s, after Germany had gone through an unprecedented spurt of industrialization and had already acquired a substantial industrial proletariat with Social Democratic allegiances, Engels thought a bourgeois republic was still on the agenda and counseled German Social Democratic leaders not to strive for immediate power. As he put it in a letter to Eduard Bernstein:

In our country the first immediate result of revolution can and must be nothing but a bourgeois republic. But here [i.e. in Germany] this will be only a brief transitory moment as fortunately we have no republican bourgeois party. The bourgeois republic, headed perhaps by the progressive party, will serve us in the first place (zunächst) to conquer the vast workers’ mass for revolutionary socialism; this will be done within one or two years—and to allow for the thorough exhaustion and selfdestruction of the middle parties that are still possible, apart from us. Only then will our turn come and we will succeed.⁴³

In other words, Engels still recommended the revolutionary strategy of the Address to the Communist League, which, as he wrote in 1885, was “still of interest today, because petty-bourgeois democracy is even now that party which during the next European upheaval soon due, must certainly be the first to come to the helm in Germany.” ⁴⁴

It appears then that Marx and Engels, as practical revolutionaries in a backward, pre-industrial, and pre-bourgeois situation, faced a dilemma of power to which they provided a number of solutions. None of these solutions (with the exception of their irate ephemeral toying with a “social republic” and “revolutionary terrorism”) advocated or envisaged an immediate accession to power; rather, they accepted a long-term or short-term role of “oppositional party” vis-à-vis the new post-revolutionary government. While generally recommending modified forms of the revolutionary strategy of the Address to the Communist League to socialists in backward countries (to be adapted to the local situation by those who were in “the thick of events”), Marx and Engels’ hard and fast rule was never to repeat the performance of Louis Blanc and join a post-revolutionary coalition government “in a minority.”

As for their later comments on the prospects of a socialist revolution in Russia without a preceding bourgeois revolution,⁴⁵ Marx and Engels, while understanding the populists’ aversion to seeing Russia “plunge into capitalism,” refused to commit themselves either way. In the end, they offered no more specific guidance than Engels’ statement of 1894 that “the coming disintegration of capitalist society in the West will also place Russia in a position in which it can shorten its now inevitable transition through the capitalist system”⁴⁶—a statement which could be interpreted to mean both “bourgeois” and/or “permanent” revolution. Neither Marx nor Engels presumed to offer advice on the general revolutionary strategy which ought to be pursued in Russia or on the question of power.

Marx, in his notes on Bakunin’s Staatlichkeit and Anarchie, seems to have envisaged the possibility of a seizure of power and victory by an industrial proletariat which (thanks to “capitalist production”) “occupied at least an important position among the mass of the people,” provided it “were at least capable of doing directly for the peasants what the French bourgeoisie in its revolution did at the time for the peasants.”⁴⁷ Thus with no hard and fast guidance from the founders of Marxism, it fell to George V. Plekhanov to work out Marxist revolutionary strategy in Russia.⁴⁸

Plekhanov came to grips with the question of power in his earliest Marxist work, Socialism and the Political Struggle (1883). This work took issue with Narodnaia volia and its scheme of “seizure of power by a provisional revolutionary government” as the instrument by which socialism could be realized. Marxists, Plekhanov urged, were not opposed in principle to the seizure of power as such but to its seizure by a revolutionary minority which, establishing itself as some sort of “socialist caste,” presumed to engage in “social experiments” from above. Russia being what it was, “we do not believe in the near possibility of a socialist government in Russia.” In Russia a bourgeois revolution, i.e., the overthrow of tsarism, the establishment of free political institutions, and the formation of a workers’ socialist party, was on the agenda, no more. Warned Plekhanov:

To fuse into one, two such essentially distinct phenomena as the overthrow of absolutism and the socialist revolution, to wage the revolutionary struggle on the supposition that these two phenomena will coincide in the history of our fatherland-means to delay the occurrence of one and of the other,⁴⁹

Since seizure of power in Russia by a socialist minority was foredoomed, even agitation for it was harmful, for it would frighten and alienate such potential allies as Russian liberals and bourgeois Europe from the Russian liberation movement.⁵⁰ Similarly, in his “Letter to P. L. Lavrov” (1884), Plekhanov denounced, from the standpoint of “scientific socialism,” the impatient will to power of Narodnaia volia and its obsession with conspiracy. ⁵¹

In his essay Our Differences, Plekhanov recommended the revolutionary tactics which had been pursued by the Communist League in Germany, approved of Marx’s action against the maximalist faction of Willich and Schapper, and quoted from Engels’ polemics with Tkachev and from his Peasant War to warn against the danger of a premature accession to power by a socialist party in Russia. The most likely result would be a “shameful fiasco.”⁵² True, because capitalism had come so late in Russia, “it was bound to wither away before it had fully blossomed,” so that the historical phase of bourgeois rule and capitalist development would be greatly abbreviated. Still, the coming revolution in Russia could bring only “the victory of the, bourgeoisie and the beginning of the political and economic emancipation of the working class.”⁵³

It was not surprising that, in his first draft of the program for the Marxist Group for the Emancipation of Labor of 1884, Plekhanov (while still conceding the need for “a terrorist struggle against the absolutist government”) should single out the question of “the seizure of power by a revolutionary party” as the major point of disagreement with Narodnaia volia.⁵⁴ Russian Marxism, therefore, began by fencing itself off from those populist maximalists who saw in the seizure of power an integral part of revolution making.

When Plekhanov concluded his speech at the Paris congress of the Socialist International in 1889 with the emphatic words: “The revolutionary movement in Russia will be victorious only as a workers’ movement, or it will never be victorious!”⁵⁵ he unwittingly posed a new problem which his teachers Marx and Engels had not known in their revolutionary days in Germany: that of a backward situation where the bourgeoisie was relatively weak and meek, while the working class was relatively strong, alienated, and rebellious. The Manifesto of Russian Social Democracy of 1898, drafted by Peter Struve, while ignoring the question of power, spelled out the problem of a bourgeois revolution in a backward society:

The further east one goes in Europe, the more feeble, cowardly, and mean the bourgeoisie becomes in the political sense and the greater the cultural and political tasks which fall to the lot of the proletariat. On its strong shoulders the Russian working class must carry and is carrying the burden of conquering political freedom.⁵⁶

The conquest of “political freedom” was only the “first step” in the realization of the “historical mission” of the proletariat. The struggle for socialism would begin after the proletariat had thrown off the “yoke of autocracy.”

The program of the RSDRP, which was adopted at its Second Congress in 1903, “resolved” the dilemma of power simply by dividing itself into minimum and maximum programs: the specifically Russian minimum program, i.e., “the immediate political task being the overthrow of the tsarist autocracy and its replacement by a democratic republic” in which the liberal bourgeoisie was expected to rule, and the maximum program, i.e., the realization of the “final goal” which Russian Social Democrats shared with Social Democrats of all countries, and which would begin with the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. However, this matter-of-fact division of the program into “immediate aims” (minimum program) and “final goal” (maximum program) without theoretical props, was already the product of Lenin’s war of attrition against Plekhanov’s original two drafts of the program of January, 1902, in which Plekhanov had spelled out the reasons for minimalism in terms of the necessity of bourgeois revolution and abstention from power:

Russian Social Democrats can still secure only those legal institutions which constitute the natural, legal complement to capitalist relations of production which exist already in the advanced capitalist countries and which are a prerequisite for the full and all-sided class-struggle of wage labor against capital.⁵⁷

There can be no doubt then that “bourgeois revolution” and acceptance of a liberal bourgeois government to issue from it were by 1903 part of Social Democratic revolutionary strategy in Russia, while the division into minimal and maximal programs resolved, or rather shelved, its dilemma of power and absolved Social Democrats from the responsibility of government on the morrow of a successful revolution. We might as well note in passing that it was very likely owing to the insistence of Lenin⁵⁸ that the rationale of the minimalist self-limitation of Russian Social Democracy was not advertised in its program.

There is no evidence that in the Menshevik-Bolshevik feud in the aftermath of the split the dilemma of power played any divisive or polemical role. Even Aksel’rod’s famous essays in Iskra did no more than taunt Lenin with turning the party into a “Jacobin club.”⁵⁹ Ironically, it was Trotsky who, in his vitriolic tract Nashi politicheskie zadachi of August, 1904, attacked Lenin and especially his Ural supporters for their Jacobinism and Blanquism.⁶⁰ Neither Lenin nor Trotsky are on record as having disagreed with the doctrine of bourgeois revolution and its self-denying ordinance before Bloody Sunday. Trotsky, as late as August, 1904, expected the “period of the liquidation of autocracy” to usher in “honeyed years of a liberated bourgeois Russia” and feared that “Russian capitalism, intoxicated by the new sources of development which had opened up for it” after the fall of Tsarism, might divert the working class from its political struggle into economist and trade-unionist channels.⁶¹

True, in the debate on the organizational question some of Lenin’s diehard supporters in the Urals seem to have made light of the self-denying ordinance. In their manifesto in support of Lenin’s centralism, the representatives of the committees of Ufa, Sredne-Uralsk and Perm urged that “not only Russia but also the international proletariat” create a highly centralized, homogeneous, “strong and authoritative” organization, led by a “good commander” and training “dictators” to enable it to “administer” and “utilize for its ends that power which—ere long—would fall under its control.” Were the proletariat, so the argument ran, “not to have state-power, it could not only not realize its maximal goal but not even all its minimal desires,” indeed, its “immediate task coincided with the final task”; consequently, to prepare the proletariat “for the dictatorship is such an important organizational task that all others should be subordinated to it.”⁶² In the same vein, another Bolshevik activist described the seizure of power as the “immediate task” of Social Democracy, even if its tenure were “only temporary.”⁶³

There is no evidence that Lenin inspired the letters. In fact, the words “commander” and “dictator” which the Ural Bolsheviks used, as well as their maximalist argument, suggest that he did not. But Lenin did not disown them and remained “eloquently silent.” Martynov and Trotsky interpreted this to mean that Lenin had prudently refrained from coming out into the open with his heterodox views.⁶⁴

Whatever the significance one may attribute to the maximalist manifesto of the Ural Bolsheviks (to the Mensheviks it was no more than a handy stick to beat Lenin with⁶⁵) the momentous debate over power within Russian Social Democracy began in earnest during the 1905 Revolution. The debate over power became part of the perennial Menshevik-Bolshevik feud, reaching its climax in the 1917 Revolution and ending only when silenced by the force majeure of the Soviet state.

The opening shot in this debate was fired by Alexander Martynov’s Dve diktatury,⁶⁶ a frontal attack on Lenin and Leninism. Mocking Lenin’s organizational principles as simple Jacobinism and trying to discredit as Blanquism Lenin’s campaign for a planned and well-timed armed insurrection, Martynov painted a nightmarish picture of a premature seizure of power by a Leninist party:

Imagine a party whose membership has been narrowed down to include only professional revolutionaries, which has managed to “prepare, schedule, and carry through a popular armed insurrection.” Is it not obvious that on the morrow of the revolution the popular will would appoint this very party the provisional government?⁶⁷

Yet this party, which had come to power in a backward country “thanks to the blind play of elemental revolutionary forces,” would be unable to fulfill its role as the dictatorship of the proletariat because all objective conditions would be lacking. Its fate could be none other than that of a “fraudulent bankrupt.” Martynov cited Engels to support his gloomy prediction, quoting the warning from the German Peasant War-a work destined to become the locus classicus for the Mensheviks’ self-denying ordinance. In the dogmatic formulation of Martynov:

The proletariat cannot accept all or part of the political power in the state, as long as it does not make a socialist revolution. This is that incontestable proposition which divides us from opportunist Jaurèsism.⁶⁸

What “opportunist Jaurèsism” was, Martynov, Martov, and Plekhanov took pains to spell out in a number of lengthy articles published in Iskra in March, April, and June, 1905.⁶⁹ It meant above all the assumption of power by socialists in petty-bourgeois Russia and thus their inevitable acceptance of its “bourgeois limitations.” This would commit them to an abstention from their “many-sided struggle against the bourgeois order in all its manifestations,” to the sanctioning of and responsibility for all the shady and oppressive aspects of a bourgeois regime, with its army, police, jail wardens, magistrates, and bureaucracy. This would bring socialists into “sharp conflict” with the workers they represented who would not cease to suffer from “all the immanent laws of the bourgeois order whose name is poverty, unemployment, inequality and lack of liberty.” The Social Democratic duty was not to accept the “bourgeois limitations” of a bourgeois order, but to fight them, and this could best be done from “without,” from the position of “principled, irreconcilable opposition” to the existing order.⁷⁰

True, Martynov did not exclude the possibility that the “internal dialectics of the revolution” would carry Social Democrats “regardless of their will” to power at a time when “the national conditions for the realization of socialism have not yet matured.”⁷¹ Martov, more specifically, envisaged a situation in which Social Democrats might have no right to “turn their back on political power,” e.g. if “those strong bourgeois revolutionary parties” on whom so much depended in the Menshevik scheme of things were not serious aspirants for power but had “withered away without ever blossoming,” then Social Democrats must throw overboard their “anti-Jacobin” scruples and save the revolution by assuming power.⁷² Once in power, they could not help bursting the “framework of the bourgeois revolution” and heading for collision with the whole of bourgeois society and the fate of the Paris Commune, unless they succeeded in spreading the revolution to the West. But a situation in which the proletariat proved to be the only serious aspirant for power was hardly likely to arise: a hundred million peasants, ten million craftsmen and professionals contained “ample fuel for revolution” and constituted a “sufficiently broad social basis” for a petty-bourgeois “Jacobin” movement and pretension to power.⁷³

Plekhanov’s main, if not sole, contribution to the debate was an attempt to shore up the Menshevik self-denying ordinance with the authority of Marx and Engels, by way of a detailed analysis and (legitimate) interpretation of Marx’s Address of the Central Bureau to the Communist League and a (less legitimate) paraphrase of Engels’ letter to Filippo Turati of January 26, 1894.⁷⁴

Yet even the authority of Marx and Engels could not do away with the basic contradiction in the Mensheviks’ revolutionary strategy: casting the working class in the heroic role of “vanguard in the national liberation struggle” and assigning it a position of “hegemony” in the Russian revolution, the Mensheviks then expected it to accept the modest task of gadfly to ‘‘exert revolutionary pressure on the will of the liberal and radical bourgeoisie.” Further, such a strategy compelled the bourgeoisie, who would by then hold state-power, to “carry the revolution to its logical conclusion,” i.e., to those extreme republican and democratic limits which would serve as the best starting-point for a socialist revolution.

Whatever the flaws in the Mensheviks’ revolutionary scheme, their resolution of the dilemma of power—abstention from power—was dictated by their understanding of backward, peasant Russia, their Marxist theory of the state, and their democratic commitments. While they believed that Russia’s vast millions of peasants, craftsmen, and urban poor contained “ample fuel for revolution,” they were even more convinced that these “petty bourgeois” masses did not want socialism. Had socialists then the right, asked Martynov in an article called “In Struggle with the Marxist Conscience,” to seize power and “use the authority of state-power to neutralize the resistance of the petty bourgeoisie to the socialist pretensions of the proletariat?” ⁷⁵

It was thus in a struggle with their Marxist conscience that the Mensheviks came to rule out the assumption of power by Social Democrats in the coming Russian revolution, except as a tragic necessity. Unable to see past the blinkers of their narrow Marxist “executive committee” theory of the state, they could discern no better choice than abstention from power or a premature and suicidal plunge into socialism.

Abstention from power in the bourgeois revolution became official Menshevik doctrine when the Menshevik conference of April-May, 1905, in Geneva reaffirmed the bourgeois nature of the revolution, enjoined the party not to capture or share power in a provisional government, and defined its relation to whatever governments the revolution might create as that of “a party of extreme revolutionary opposition.” It allowed the seizure of power for the purpose of building socialism in one situation only—if the revolution should “leap over into the advanced countries of western Europe.”⁷⁶

While, or because, supreme power was taboo and the Mensheviks saw their role as that of militant opposition to the official government which would issue from the revolution, they adopted and developed, in the second half of 1905, the concept of revolutionary self-government. That concept, rather than their justification of the taboo on power, was their positive and significant contribution to the Marxist debate on power and to Social Democratic revolutionary tactics and practice in Russia.

The Mensheviks’ concept of revolutionary self-government may have been modeled on the revolutionary strategy of Marx’s Address of the Central Bureau to the Communist League (1850)⁷⁷ and on the historical precedent of the Paris Commune;⁷⁸ it certainly was stimulated by the municipal revolution in Georgia and Latvia, where early in 1905 tsarist police and officials were ousted from entire areas and replaced by revolutionary authorities, and in particular by the heroic example of the military republic which the sailors of the Prince Potemkin of Taunts set up on their battleship in June, 1905.⁷⁹ Whatever its origins, the watchword revolutionary self-government and the organizational projects and forms it fathered stood in the center of Menshevik political thinking and agitation in the second half of 1905. The Menshevik campaign for the creation of trade unions, so-called “non-affiliated workers’ organizations” in which workers were to be united on the basis of social-economic and political needs common to the entire working class, regardless of their trade and industry,⁸⁰ as well as Aksel’rod’s plan for a workers’ congress,⁸¹ expressed the Mensheviks’ educational concern with the organization and activation of the vast and amorphous working mass which had remained outside the party.

The Mensheviks’ call for the creation of an ever-growing “network of organs of revolutionary self-government” in towns and villages expanding “gradually all over the country with the perspective of a last assault on the center of government” was the means by which they hoped to unleash from below a “people’s revolution” against Tsarism.⁸² They envisaged the revolutionary process taking the form of conflict between aggressive organs of revolutionary self-government and a defensive central government.

Finally, the Mensheviks provided the theoretical basis and the initiative for the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies which sprang up in St. Petersburg and in a number of provincial towns in the latter part of 1905: they urged workers and peasants to “cover the country with a network of organs of revolutionary government,” and to form “workers’ agitational committees” which would elect an illegal “National Duma” representing the pays réel to confront and possibly oust the State Duma of the pays légal;⁸³ above all, they called for the creation of “non-affiliated workers’ organizations.” These were intended initially to serve as “the point of departure for the political rallying of the working class” and then to become “the permanent revolutionary organizations of the proletariat (revolutionary workers’ clubs) aiming at constant intervention in state and public affairs in the interests of the working class.”⁸⁴ It is small wonder that Martov, upon his arrival in Petersburg at the end of October, 1905, recognized in the Soviets “the embodiment of our idea of revolutionary self-government.”⁸⁵ One may perhaps go further and recognize in the Menshevik project of a rival “National” Duma confronting the “State” Duma-a scheme of “dual parliament,” and in the “nonaffiliated workers’ organizations” and Soviets aiming at “constant intervention into state and public affairs in the interests of the working class” and thus confronting and challenging the official government—a system of “dual government.” Generally, the Mensheviks’ projected network of “organs of revolutionary self-government,” when combined with the role of irreconcilable revolutionary opposition to the new government which they proposed to assume upon the fall of Tsarism, shows a political thinking to some extent akin to that of Marx in 1850 and foreshadows the “dual power” of the Provisional Government period in 1917.

Martynov’s prediction that Lenin was bound to advocate the seizure of power proved correct when in March, 1905, Lenin began to agitate for a “revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry,” i.e., a revolutionary coalition government of Social Democrats and various agrarian socialists and radicals. Yet the more radical revision of the doctrine of bourgeois revolution came sooner and from within the Menshevik camp, from Parvus (who stood close to the Mensheviks) and from Trotsky.

In his preface to Trotsky’s pamphlet Do deviatogo ianvaria, and writing soon after Bloody Sunday, Parvus argued that in Russia only the workers were capable of making a revolution. The weak bourgeoisie could not be expected to provide revolutionary initiative, nor could the amorphous and anarchic peasantry be relied upon to form a “consolidated revolutionary army.” Consequently, the “revolutionary provisional government” which would issue from the revolution could only be a government of the “workers’ democracy.” Unless Social Democracy were prepared to remain an “insignificant sect,” it must take the lead and form a “Social-Democratic government.” This government could not bring about a “socialist transformation” in Russia immediately, but the process of liquidating the autocracy and establishing a democratic republic could give it a “congenial basis for political activity.” Parvus anticipated that this scheme might lay him open to the charge of “opportunist Jaurèsism,” and therefore insisted that ministerialism and Millerandism had always been objected to, not on the ground that a socialist minister’s only business was to make a “social revolution,” but because, “remaining in a minority in the government and with insufficient support in the country, he would not be capable of doing anything at all and would only serve the capitalist government as a lightning conductor of our criticism.”⁸⁶

This would not be the case with a Social Democratic provisional government: it would be a “homogeneous” government with a Social Democratic majority, created in a revolutionary moment when the power of the state was very great. It would be supported by a revolutionary army of workers who would emerge elated and filled with extraordinary political energy from the revolution they had just made and it would have before it at the outset political tasks of a kind which would unite the entire Russian people.⁸⁷ Parvus did not ask what would happen when the revolutionary honeymoon was over. Still, he had given an unequivocal answer to the question of who should form the revolutionary government, in the slogan, “No tsar, but a workers’ government!”

When Trotsky re-examined the question of power in 1905 and 1906, he had traveled a long way since his Nashi politicheskie zadachi of August, 1904. Urging the important role of the state either as a “lever of a deep revolutionary transformation or as an instrument of organized stagnation,” Trotsky gave short shrift to the Menshevik self-denying ordinance: “Every political party deserving the name aims at seizing governmental power and thus putting the state at the service of the class whose interests it represents.”⁸⁸ Like Parvus, Trotsky insisted that in Russia only the proletariat was capable of revolutionary initiative and leadership and urged Social Democrats who were “honest revolutionaries” not to shirk the “menial work” of the revolution but to organize an “all-Russian uprising” and form the “revolutionary provisional government”: ⁸⁹

Our liberal bourgeoisie is already behaving in a counterrevolutionary manner, even before the revolutionary climax; at every critical moment our democratic intelligentsia demonstrates nothing but its impotence; the peasantry as a whole constitutes a rebellious anarchic element [stikhiia] - it could be made to serve the revolution only by the force which takes governmental power into its hands. The proletariat remains.⁹⁰

The working class, facing the formidable resistance of autocracy and the deliberate passivity of the bourgeoisie, would develop into an impressive fighting force and would push on:

There is no stage in the bourgeois revolution where this fighting force, driven forward by the steel logic of class-interests, could come to rest. Uninterrupted revolution becomes for the proletariat its law of selfpreservation as a class.

In the course of realizing basic democratic objectives and consolidating its political dominance it will be facing purely socialist objectives:

Between the minimum and maximum programs of Social Democracy a revolutionary permanence (continuum) is established. This is not one single blow; it is not a month, it is a whole historical epoch. It would be absurd to predict its duration.⁹¹

Yet, while investing the Russian proletariat with colossal revolutionary qualities, Trotsky obviously realized that while it was one thing for a revolutionary proletariat to seize power, it was another to hold power in a backward, peasant country unattuned to socialist objectives. While he expected the peasantry to turn against the socialist minority government, he also expected a general European socialist revolution to rescue Russia.

But however breathtaking Trotsky’s vista of permanent revolution might be, its answer to the Russian Social Democrats’ dilemma of power was no real answer: it represented, in effect, a gamble on the intervention of a deus ex machina in the form of “immediate state support from the European proletariat.” ⁹²

While Trotsky had resolutely thrown overboard the doctrine of bourgeois revolution, Lenin stopped half-way and tried only to divorce it from its complement, the commitment to abstain from power. Lenin agreed with Martynov that in Russia a bourgeois revolution and a democratic republic were on the agenda, but insisted that this did not absolve Social Democrats from the “duty to participate in a provisional revolutionary government after the overthrow of Tsarism.” Only thus could they “see the revolution through” and make sure that the minimum program of Russian Social Democracy (i.e., the establishment of a republic and a citizen army, separation of church from state, full democratic liberties, and radical democratic reforms) would be realized. Lenin put his finger on the basic contradiction in the Menshevik revolutionary scheme when he castigated Martynov for his gloomy forewarnings:

Martynov wants the proletariat to be the vanguard in the democratic revolution, and therefore clever Martynov frightens the proletariat with the prospect of participation in a provisional revolutionary government.⁹³

However, while Social Democrats had a duty to join the “provisional revolutionary government” it was “out of the question” that they monopolize power and make it into a homogeneous “workers’ government” à la Parvus.

Only a revolutionary dictatorship which is supported by the vast majority of the people can be lasting. . . . However the Russian proletariat at present constitutes only a minority of the population of Russia. It can become a vast, overwhelming majority only if it unites with the mass of halfproletarians, half-proprietors, i.e., with the mass of the petty-bourgeois urban and rural poor.⁹⁴

A “social basis” so structured must “inevitably” be reflected in a “heterogeneous” revolutionary government, including a wide variety of representatives of the “revolutionary democracy” who might even be the predominant group.⁹⁵ Such a government would be perfectly capable of realizing the minimum program of Russian Social Democracy, while the maximum program, i.e., the “full emancipation of the working class,” was, in view of the backwardness of Russia, not yet realizable. In answer to the more impatient maximalists, Lenin insisted that the road to socialism led through the “democratic republic”; there was no road other than that of “political democratism.”⁹⁶

Lenin had certainly resolved the dilemma of power (Social Democrats would lead the revolution and participate in the provisional revolutionary government) and of minority (the revolutionary government would be a broadly-based coalition of Social Democrats, agrarian socialists, and radicals: a “revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry”). But this revolutionary government, which would surely consist of a majority of socialists, was committed to self-limitation-to realizing no more than the minimum program demanded, i.e., bourgeois-democratic objectives. The paradox is ingenuously illustrated in an article published in Lenin’s Vpered:

Step aside you generals and dignitaries, professors and capitalists: the proletariat is advancing to build you your bourgeois republic; but it will build it so that it can be easily converted to socialist foundations when the desired hour arrives. . . .⁹⁷

One wonders whether in the circumstances “generals and dignitaries” would not have insisted on doing the building themselves; more important still, was it likely that a revolutionary proletariat led by revolutionary socialists, having made a successful revolution and having attained state-power, would be capable of such self-restraint and self-limitation? Lenin had indeed thrown overboard the self-denying ordinance, but had replaced it with a self-limiting ordinance.

Though in the 1905 debate on power the Mensheviks claimed to have Marxist orthodoxy on their side (a claim that was only half-heartedly disputed by Trotsky and less than convincingly by Lenin⁹⁸) it is interesting to note that the theoretical leaders of German and European Social Democracy endorsed neither the Menshevik version of “bourgeois revolution” nor their self-denying ordinance. Franz Mehring, in an article significantly called “Permanent Revolution,” expressed views which came closer to those of Parvus than to those of the Mensheviks.⁹⁹ Worse still, Karl Kautsky (though a close friend of Aksel’rod and Plekhanov and on record as having been clearly on the Menshevik side in the Bolshevik-Menshevik feud of 1903-1904¹⁰⁰) took a position scarcely distinguishable from that of Lenin.

In 1906 Plekhanov sent a questionnaire to western Social Democrats asking their opinions on the “general character of the Russian revolution,” and specifically, whether a “bourgeois or a socialist revolution” was on the agenda, and what tactics should be adopted with regard to “bourgeois democracy” and the “bourgeois oppositional parties” in the Duma.¹⁰¹ Kautsky thought the Russian revolution was neither a “bourgeois” nor a “socialist” revolution but something in between, proceeding on the “borderline between bourgeois and socialist society.” He urged that “the era of bourgeois revolution, i.e., of revolutions in which the bourgeoisie was the chief driving force, had passed, even in Russia.” For the proletariat was now too powerful and independent to allow the bourgeoisie to be revolutionary. Since this ruled out the bourgeoisie as a driving force in the contemporary revolutionary movement, there could be no bourgeois revolution. Nor could the Russian revolution be a socialist revolution when the proletariat was still too “weak and undeveloped” to hold and exercise power all by itself. While the proletariat must fight for victory, i.e., for power, it must share the revolutionary struggle and the power with the peasantry. The revolution was not likely to succeed without the active support of the peasantry, nor could the peasants be expected to become socialists, so that a strengthening of small-scale land ownership would result from the revolution. Therefore it could not be a socialist revolution. Nonetheless, Russian Social Democrats must fight for victory and power.¹⁰²

Answers similar to that of Kautsky were returned by Filippo Turati, Harry Quelch (Social Democratic Federation of Britain), and Edgar Milhaud (Switzerland). Only Édouard Vaillant, a former Communard and Blanquist, saw Russia heading for a social revolution and urged its socialist party to lead the proletariat, the disinherited masses, and the idealistic intelligentsia “to the final battle and to victory.” While Paul Lafargue (Marx’s son-in-law), Enrico Ferri (leader of the Italian “Integralists”) and Émile Vandervelde (chairman of the Bureau of the Socialist International) diagnosed the Russian revolution as “bourgeois,” they endowed it with “strong socialist tendencies” and saw it marked with “the sign of the socialist proletariat.” Of all those who replied to Plekhanov’s questionnaire (and whose answers were published), Theodore Rothstein alone (and he was really a Russian if not a Menshevik emigre living in London) endorsed unreservedly the Menshevik view.¹⁰³

It is difficult to decide which of the three revolutionary schemes proposed by Russian Social Democrats in the 1905 debate on power could claim to be truly Marxian, or more Marxian than others.

There seems to be no precedent in the writings and practice of Marx and Engels for Trotsky’s “permanent revolution,” i.e., a workers’ government (which could then only be a minority dictatorship) trying to survive in backward and possibly hostile peasant Russia by way of a rescue operation coming from the state-power of a victorious socialist proletariat in the West. Even in their brief Blanquist period of 1849, when Marx and Engels toyed halfheartedly with the scheme of a “social republic” in Germany, they expected it to be established under the revolutionary impact of and in conjunction with a social revolution in France, rather than to precede it.

As for the Menshevik scheme which prescribed abstention from supreme power in the stage of bourgeois revolution and assigned to Social Democracy the role of extreme opposition until the social revolution, it had some precedent in Marx’s Address of the Central Bureau to the Communist League. However, Marx’s revolutionary strategy of 1850 was designed for Germany which had, at the time, a very weak socialist movement and a small and inexperienced working class, but a powerful radical-democratic movement. Marx expected these radical democrats to play the major role in the revolution and to form the government after victory had been achieved, while he told the German working class and its communist leaders to lend independent support to the democrats during the revolution and to confront their government as an irreconcilable opposition party after the revolution was victorious. In the Russian situation the balance of forces was very different, certainly as seen by Russian Social Democrats. They all agreed to assign the working class the role of vanguard in a Russian revolution; they had moreover done their best to organize it into a political force as effective as any which could be mustered by their rivals. There was no “natural” or practical reason why this vanguard, having been the “driving force” in a victorious revolution, should not take part in the government which issued from the revolution. What stood in the way was, rather, a self-denying ordinance, according to which the time to hold state power and govern could not be at hand until objective conditions were ripe for the realization of socialism.

From the notion of the vanguard function and position of the working class in the Russian revolution, Lenin derived the conclusion that the working class and its socialist leaders had a duty not only to make and lead the revolution but also to assume state-power and see the revolution through. From the realization or assumption that socialism could not yet be on the Russian agenda, he argued that the working class and its socialist leaders had sufficient democratic objectives in common with a potentially revolutionary peasantry, the urban poor, and other democratic elements to form a broadly-based “revolutionary-democratic dictatorship” committed to radical reforms, i.e., some sort of popular front government. In reply to the Menshevik taunt that this was nothing less than Millerandism, Lenin pointed out that it was one thing for Millerand to join the bourgeois government of Waldeck-Rousseau in association with General Gallifet, the butcher of the Paris Commune, and quite another for the Internationalist Varlin to enter the Executive Council of the revolutionary Paris Commune on which Blanquists and radicals had an overwhelming majority. ¹⁰⁴

It may be difficult, if not futile, to decide which revolutionary scheme was more Marxian. But it does seem to me that in 1905 Lenin (granting he meant what he said, and there is no convincing reason to think he did not) had the better in the debate with his Menshevik and Trotskyist opponents. His resolution of the dilemma of power confronting Marxists in Russia was more realistic than either the Mensheviks’ self-denying ordinance or Trotsky’s gamble on a socialist revolution in the West. While the Marxist heritage with regard to the question of power was ambiguous and could be interpreted in a number of ways, it was unequivocal in its injunction never to repeat the performance of Louis Blanc and join a bourgeois-democratic government as a minority. This injunction was reiterated at congresses of the Socialist International in the form of denunciation of “ministerialism” or Millerandism. Whatever justification there may have been in the Mensheviks’ criticism of Lenin’s organizational principles or of his putschism, his scheme for a “revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” could by no stretch of the imagination be interpreted as a plan for a bourgeois coalition government. Nor were the Social Democrats, whom Lenin expected to join the provisional revolutionary government as representatives of the vanguard which had made revolution successfully, cast for the role of junior partners à la Louis Blanc.

If one examines the behavior of the Russian Social Democrats in the 1917 Revolution, one finds, on the question of power, that only Trotsky adhered consistently to his 1905 position, working indefatigably from the moment of his arrival in Petrograd on May 3, for seizure of power and the establishment of a socialist dictatorship in an all-out gamble on a European socialist revolution. In a speech to Social Democratic delegates to the First Congress of Soviets early in June, 1917, Trotsky lashed out against the doubting Thomases who regarded “hope for a European revolution-a Utopia”:

We reply: if there is no revolution in Europe then Russian liberty will be crushed anyway by the united strength of both our Allies and enemies. All the social experiments which the course of events imposes on us constitute a threat to European capital. Will it not attempt by the use of universal violence to liquidate the Russian revolution? He who does not believe in the possibility of the European revolution, must expect our entire freedom to go up in smoke. . . .¹⁰⁵

As for the majority-Mensheviks, the so-called “revolutionary defensists” led by Tsereteli and Dan, Skobelev and Liber assumed the role of opposition until the April government crisis: they entrenched themselves in the Soviets and gave critical and conditional support to the bourgeois Provisional Government. While this was not exactly traditional Menshevik revolutionary strategy, which had postulated a tougher, more “irreconcilable” and more “revolutionary” opposition role, still it was no flagrant departure from it. It was after the April crisis, when the Provisional Government had proved unwilling or incapable of pursuing democratic policies that the majority-Mensheviks led by Tsereteli abandoned their self-denying ordinance and joined a bourgeois coalition government. They thus proved guilty of that Millerandism with which they had self-righteously branded Lenin’s revolutionary scheme of 1905, and acted à la Louis Blanc, ignoring the unequivocal warnings of Marx and Engels. True, in justification of the Mensheviks’ entry into the coalition government Tsereteli invoked both the authority of Engels and the general will.¹⁰⁶ Confronted with the alternative either of taking power themselves or of entering a coalition government, the Mensheviks, according to Tsereteli,

could not do the first because then we would have committed the mistake against which Engels had already warned, speaking of the tragic position of a proletariat which seized power at a time when the objective conditions for the realization of a proletarian program were still absent. This point of view was shared by the vast majority of the democracy represented by its most authoritative institutions.¹⁰⁷

Whatever one may think of Tsereteli’s interpretation of Engels’ warning, he perhaps went too far when claiming that the decision not to take power themselves but to enter the coalition government was “the greatest victory for that brand of realistically revolutionary tactics of which Menshevism had always been the representative in Russia.” ¹⁰⁸

Martov and Martynov and their small band of Menshevik-Internationalists certainly disagreed with Tsereteli’s interpretation.

It is wrong to interpret the Menshevik understanding of bourgeois revolution in the sense of absolute support and unconditional alliance with the bourgeoisie. Menshevism stood for supporting the bourgeoisie during the period of the struggle against tsarism and during the destructive phase of the revolution. To interpret this alliance as extending to all the steps and phases of the revolution is not in accordance with the traditional Menshevik understanding of the driving forces of the revolution.¹⁰⁹

The Menshevik-Internationalists remained true to their commitment to the self-denying ordinance and opposed coalition until the July Days when, after the walk-out of the four Kadet ministers from the coalition government, they realized that the Russian bourgeoisie was revolutionsmüde and abstention from power made no sense. Martov then agitated for a government of the “revolutionary democracy,” that is, for something like Lenin’s revolutionary scheme of 1905, but rather belatedly and with little gusto, as if the assumption of power by socialists in Russia was a tragic necessity.

Lenin, too, abandoned his 1905 scheme—a broadly-based revolutionary-democratic dictatorship—when he prodded his reluctant “Old Bolsheviks,” to whom this scheme made far better Marxist and Russian sense, into seizing power and establishing a Bolshevik dictatorship. He discarded his self-limiting ordinance, determined as he was to take Russia “to the commune,” for “no other aims” was he now prepared to serve.¹¹⁰ Whether Lenin’s narrow Bolshevik dictatorship was a gamble à la Trotsky on revolution in the West, or whether it expressed his new belief that the possession of state-power would make the plunge into socialism possible, even in backward Russia, is difficult to decide. It may have been a combination of both. Perhaps the example of Ludendorff’s Kriegskommunismus in Germany may have impressed Lenin with the great possibilities of state-power. ¹¹¹

Neither Bolsheviks nor Mensheviks could justly claim to have acted in accordance with Marxist theory, precedent or prescription—certainly not the majority-Mensheviks under Tsereteli. Why they acted the way they did and failed calls for detailed investigation beyond the scope of this paper, but it may have had little to do with Marxist precept or precedent. Both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks had been good revolutionaries when it was a matter of overthrowing Tsarism: what distinguished the former from the latter was their underestimation of the importance of state-power. This fear of revolutionary state-power proved to be their undoing, for seizure of power is an integral part of revolution-making.

If underestimation of the importance of state-power as expressed in their self-denying ordinance was the Mensheviks’ fatal weakness, Lenin seems to have overestimated the creative omnipotence of state-power; he abandoned his self-limiting ordinance and those democratic principles he had defended in 1905; he yoked backward, peasant Russia under a tough Bolshevik minority dictatorship and plunged the team into socialism.

This inquiry into a series of Marxist debates on power has endeavored to show that Marxism, from its earliest practical revolutionary beginnings, was bedevilled by a dilemma of power which can be traced from the Marx-Weitling clash in Brussels, to the debate of Plekhanov with the populists, and to the debates of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1905 and 1917. That dilemma of power can be seen as a reflection and illustration of the tension between Marxian scientific socialism and the Marxist revolutionary will.

None of the revolutionary schemes which Russian Social Democrats devised and argued in 1905, and abandoned, modified, or applied in 1917, succeeded in resolving that tension. Even Lenin’s tremendous revolutionary will, which resolved the dilemma of power by cutting the Gordian knot in October, 1917, and creating Soviet state-power (sovetskaia vlast’) has so far been tragically frustrated. The basic flaw in Lenin’s, Stalin’s, and Mao’s schemes of socialist revolution from above after the seizure of power, is their overestimation of the creative potentialities of state-power. It still bedevils the part of the world which professes Marxism-Leninism and honors Lenin not only as a great revolutionary but also as the founder of sovetskaia vlast’.