Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (18 page)

Having outlined his views on the war the remaining two-thirds of the article is devoted to denouncing opportunist, right-wing Social Democrats. Their role in ‘hoodwinking’ the workers was, if anything, gaining prominence in Lenin’s analysis. If revolution had not come about as it should have done, who could be more to blame than these class traitors? The bourgeoisie acted in its own interests, which in Marxist theory meant digging their own graves, but the role of the ‘petty-bourgeois opportunists’ was to make the workers believe their interests were close to those of the bourgeoisie and could be achieved by reform. Instead of opposing their governments’ ‘criminal conduct’ they ‘called upon the working class to
identify
its position with that of the imperialist governments’. [SW 1 659] In a diatribe which brought together many elements of the case against the Social-Democratic right wing Lenin said:

The opportunists have long been preparing the ground for this col
lapse [of the Second International] by denying the socialist revolution and substituting bourgeois reformism in its stead; by rejecting the class struggle with its inevitable conversion at certain moments into civil war, and by preaching class collaboration; by preaching bourgeois chauvinism under the guise of patriotism and the defence of the fatherland, and ignoring or rejecting the fundamental truth of socialism, long ago set forth in the Communist Manifesto, that the workingmen have no country; by confining themselves, in the struggle against militarism, to a sentimental, philistine point of view, instead of recognizing the need for a revolutionary war by the proletarians of all countries, against the bourgeoisie of all countries; by making a fetish of the necessary utilization of bourgeois parliamentarianism and bourgeois legality, and forgetting that illegal forms of organization and propaganda are imperative at times of crisis. [SW 1 661]

Socialists everywhere should follow the example of the Russian Social Democrats (nowhere does he use the terms Bolshevik and Menshevik) who suffered for their opposition to the war through loss of their legal press, the forced closure of most of their associations and arrest and imprisonment of members but who still voted against war credits and denounced the war as imperialist. [SW 1 660]

Idealistically, Lenin concluded with a number of assertions about the next steps. First, socialists should adopt the slogan of ‘the formation of a republican United States of Europe’, that is for the revolutionary over
throw of the German, Austrian and Russian monarchies. However, Russia itself was not, Lenin argued, ready for socialism. ‘Since Russia is most backward and has not completed its bourgeois revolution, it still remains the task of Russian Social Democracy to achieve the three fundamental conditions for consistent democratic reform, viz., a democratic republic (with complete equality and self-determination for all nations), confiscation of the landed estates, and an eight-hour working day.’ This contrasted with ‘all the advanced countries’ in which ‘the war has placed on the order of the day the slogan of socialist revolution’ and where the proletariat will have to bear a heavy burden ‘in the recreation of Europe after the horrors of the present “patriotic” barbarism’. [SW 1 662] Workers must unite with one another, so that ‘The conversion of the present imperialist war into a civil war is the only correct proletarian slogan.’ [SW 1 663]

In these few short pages Lenin laid down many of the principles that were to guide him into and beyond the seizure of power. His opposition to the barbarism of war was clear, but he was no pacifist – the ‘sentimental, philistine’ opponents of militarism being the Ramsay MacDonalds of the left. Instead, there would have to be a class war, a civil war, a revolutionary war to achieve the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. The socialist right wing also made the mistake of ‘making a fetish of the necessary utilization of bourgeois parliamentarianism and bourgeois legality, and forgetting that illegal forms of organization and propaganda are imperative at times of crisis’, in other words they mistook the useful tools of parliament and bourgeois rights as ends in themselves rather than means that had to give way to more direct methods of struggle at crucial moments.

Around this time, Lenin also clarified other important aspects of internationalism. First, the internationalist could not be blind to the existence of nations and the diversity of cultures associated with them. True, they were destined to disappear, but, in the meantime, like social classes, they had to be dealt with. Early in 1914 he had written a treatise on national self-determination emphasizing the freedom and equality of all nations and national cultures. However, implementation of these principles was complicated. While socialists should struggle for the equality of nations it was imperative that the socialist struggle itself should not be broken down into a series of national struggles. Instead, it should be conducted above the level of individual nations. In Russia, this meant that socialists would assert the rights of all nationalities but not break the movement down into Ukrainian, Georgian, Polish or Armenian parties. No, the struggle must be conducted over the whole empire at once. In asserting this he was opposing, in particular, Rosa Luxemburg for whom Polish independence was a goal in itself. Lenin mistrusted such ‘separatism’. Instead, he argued:

The proletariat of Russia is faced with a twofold or, rather, two-sided task: to combat nationalism of every kind, above all, Great Russian nationalism; to recognize, not only fully equal rights for all nations in general, but also equality of rights as regards polity, i.e., the right of nations to self-determination, to secession. And at the same time, it is their task, in the interests of a successful struggle against all and every kind of nationalism among all nations, to preserve the unity of the proletarian struggle and the proletarian organizations, amalga
mating these organizations into a close-knit international association despite the strivings for national exclusiveness.

Lenin summarized the apparently paradoxical principle thus: ‘Complete equality of rights for all nations; the right of nations to self-determina
tion; the unity of the workers of all nations – such is the national programme that Marxism, the experience of the whole world, and the experience of Russia, teach the workers.’ [SW 1 652]

Some months later, after the war had begun and Lenin was thoroughly denouncing bourgeois chauvinism, he had to make allowances for the inroads nationalism had made on the identity of workers. In another article, entitled ‘On the National Pride of the Great Russians’, Lenin made the distinction between justified and unjustified feelings of national pride. ‘Is a sense of national pride alien to us, Great-Russian class conscious proletarians? Certainly not! We love our language and our country.’ [SW 1 665] He continued, ‘We are full of a sense of national pride, and for that very reason we
particularly
hate our slavish past … and our slavish present.’ [SW 1 665]

Little attention was paid to these writings when they first came out as they were swamped by the tidal wave of war fever gripping Europe, but they were to have greater and greater resonance, Lenin’s ideas on self-determination even supposedly affecting US President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points for ending the war. The statements about Russian national pride could have been penned by Stalin and were used to justify socialism in one country and socialist patriotism in the Second World War. The kernel of Lenin’s much better known pamphlet
Imperialism
can be found in these brief articles and much of Lenin’s strategy for 1917 can be traced back to them. The capitalist elites of the warring blocs would relentlessly prolong the bloody and barbarous struggle for domination over their rivals. In the process, the war would increasingly polarize the combatant countries. The masses would increasingly look to opponents of the war for leadership. In central and western Europe socialism was a possibility while in Russia a bourgeois democratic revolution would open the road to further progress. Interestingly, Lenin makes no reference to the United States. Within a few weeks of the war beginning, at a time when societies were still intoxicated with the elixir of nationalist fervour, the left was in disarray and the internationalists apparently a tiny, isolated minority, Lenin was calmly looking forward to a moment of triumph hardly anyone else could foresee.

However, there was still a long way to go from autumn 1914 to February 1917 and, though the goal of revolution was achieved, it did not necessarily come about for the reasons Lenin expected. None the less, for the next two-and-a-half years, Lenin retained this framework of analysis. He developed aspects of it, notably being more specific about the approach of revolution in Russia and in producing a more elaborate theory of imperialism which shaped twentieth-century thinking beyond the confines of the revolutionary left.

The ever-deepening crises of early twentieth-century Europe drew the best analysts of the radical left into attempts to uncover the fundamental dynamic driving international relations. They did not have to look far to find their villain, imperialism, but delving into what it actually was and how it worked caused great controversy.

Before going any further we need to pause for a moment to consider what phenomena the theory of imperialism was supposed to explain. The features which dominated economic and political life in the late nineteenth century were certainly dramatic. In 1870, the year of Lenin’s own birth, Germany had fought a war against France and emerged as a budding superpower right in the heart of Europe. This alone destabilized the pre-existing balance of power. Europe’s other predominantly German-speaking Great Power, Austria-Hungary, was fading as was its neighbour Turkey. The contraction of these two declining empires opened up all sorts of areas of conflict. Germany increasingly took on the role of Austria-Hungary’s patron in the Balkans and Near East. This, in turn, antagonized Britain and France, who feared German expansion into the Middle East and Egypt where the Suez Canal had altered the strategic significance of the Eastern Mediterranean. Russia, too, was alarmed to see German influence arriving at the Straits, in addition to its existing enemies Britain, France and Turkey. It meant that Germany effectively blocked Russia’s two main sea routes to the west, the exits from the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea.

Increasing international antagonism coincided with a second industrial revolution. The first industrial revolution had been characterized by steam, coal, iron and the emergence of railways. The second was based on steel, electricity, chemicals, and later oil. The new features came together in rapid technological developments, notably a worldwide telegraph system, steam ships, dynamite, machine-guns and massive steel artillery and shells. A military revolution ensued, as did an ever-escalating arms race.

However, perhaps the most striking phenomenon of the late nineteenth century was the division of the globe. From 1880 to 1905 almost all the world fell under the direct political or indirect economic hegemony of one or other of the Great Powers. India, China, Africa and South America all came under foreign domination. In 1900 London was the focus of the first global economy. Within hours, companies and the government could communicate with Hong Kong, Sydney, Alexandria, Buenos Aires, San Francisco or Cape Town. Economic shifts in the City of London translated into boom or bust for Bolivian miners and Chinese traders as much as they did for British farmers and industrialists. As we have seen, it was this intoxicating atmosphere which had brought Lenin and Krupskaya into direct contact with the contradictions of capitalism on their visits to London.
⁴
But from the Marxist point of view the astonishing two decades needed some explanation. What was the driving force or forces? Had capitalism itself changed since Marx’s heyday? Was the evidence used by Marx, taken largely from British data for the 1840s and 1850s, still relevant? What impact did the new phenomena have on the prospects for revolution? Did the new situation help explain the critical fact that no Marxist revolution had taken place or even appeared likely, in 1900? These were the questions pondered by the analysts of the left.

Lenin had become interested in such phenomena at least from August 1904 when he and Krupskaya translated one of the great liberal analyses of imperialism by the British economist J.A. Hobson. [Weber 38] In Hobson’s view, imperialism was underpinned by increasingly competitive economic forces. In place of the free trade and
laissez-faire
ethos of the mid-century a more militaristic and aggressive form of capitalist expansion had evolved, as easy opportunities for profit in industrial capitalism’s early years gave way to a harsher environment as the number of competing investors increased exponentially.

Two fundamental features of Hobson’s analysis were adopted by many Marxist theorists. First, they picked up the idea that imperialism had an economic basis derived from increasing competition to invest capital profitably. Second, they shared the liberal critique of the aggressive and inhuman nature of the phenomenon which uprooted native communities, obliterated resistance with overwhelming military force and cared nothing for the humanitarian and environmental consequences of its ever-deepening exploitation of the resources of the globe. Not surprisingly, this led to a very hostile interpretation of imperialism on the part of radical Marxists.

The most sophisticated analyses in the Marxist tradition came from the Austrian Marxist Rudolf Hilferding and from Rosa Luxemburg. In a seminal book, entitled
Finance Capital
, Hilferding set out to link the origins of increasing international tensions, the arms race and the economic and political division of the globe to basic social changes observable in Europe. His starting point was the changing nature of capital since Marx’s day. Early capitalism had been characterized by direct contact between investor and his investment. In other words, the investor would usually know the entrepreneur or industrialist to whom he or she was entrusting his or her money. Decisions to invest were taken directly by those whose money it was. Since that time, however, banks had come to take an ever-increasing role in controlling the flow of capital. Individual investors were rapidly giving way to institutions which held vast capital resources and, consequently, had more and more power over the economy. In place of hundreds of thousands of competing small investors, national economies were seeing the emergence of a few dozen banks.

The relative simplification of the investment process meant that, although they still competed against one another, the possibility of controlling the market began to arise. Where, under early capitalism, the market was the unpredictable ocean in which investors and producers alike were tossed uncontrollably, the construction of the new capitalist super-institutions meant they could be less subject to market anarchy. Indeed, far from showing capitalism’s supposed commitment to competition, the institutions emerging at this time showed its even greater appetite for subduing and fixing the market. In addition to banks, producers were also coming together in larger and larger institutions. Mega-companies were emerging, the predecessors of twentieth-century global corporations. Bosch, Krupp, Siemens, Schneider, Vickers and more became vast enterprises employing tens of thousands. Many of them were arms producers, an area where the free market never dominated for obvious reasons. Hilferding, though he was not the first to do so, called these large economic players monopolies, a term that was not literally true since a monopoly meant domination by one entity. However, it emphasized what Hilferding saw as the tendency of capitalism to produce a smaller and smaller number of dominant companies.

This tendency was reinforced by the grouping of these monopolies into cartels. The purpose of the cartel, for Hilferding and the left, was to control prices so that the fluctuations of the market could be reduced and, if possible, prices kept high. By doing this, all members of the cartel would benefit though they might still compete in other ways, for instance to win more contracts than their competitors. However, the emergence of what became known on the left as monopoly capitalism meant that a small number of more-or-less unbankruptable major companies came to dominate some 70 per cent or so of key sectors – steel, chemicals, coal, oil, capital (i.e. banks) – while a mass of smaller players were left exposed even more to the chill winds of competition. If a sector contracted, when demand for, say, coal started to fall, the smaller players would go to the wall first and the big companies pick up the pieces. It was also the case that smaller companies were often the most innovative while large companies were risk-averse since they had so much to lose. However, a successful innovation, pioneered by a small producer, could, once it had been tried and tested so the risk was minimized, be taken over by the large company once the risk element had been taken out and its success proved.

Hilferding also pointed to one more crucial aspect of monopoly capitalism. As large companies became more powerful, so their links with the state became stronger as they lobbied for legislation and policies appropriate to their activities. These varied from country to country. Where industrial capitalism was weak, in Russia, Italy and to a lesser extent in France and Germany, protectionism was high on the industrialists’ agenda. In dominant countries, where they did not fear the competition of others, free trade dominated. As is still the case down to the present, one of the key differences between the ideology of free trade and that of protectionism, apart from their essence, is that protectionism can be implemented by each country for itself but free trade often requires an active policy to impose it on unwilling countries. This might take the form of economic retaliation against protectionist nations to nullify the impact of their tariff barriers but could also lead to direct political and military intervention to assert the ‘right’ of free trade. Countries might also arm to defend themselves against such threats.

In a myriad of ways, Hilferding and the radical left argued, the tentacles of contemporary capitalism were closing around the emerging nation states. The outcome was that states were increasingly representing the interests of their great companies in colonial and international economic policies. Competition between capitalists was now bloc versus bloc rather than individual versus individual. The outcome was the growth of international tensions and the economic division of the globe. The tensions also sparked off the arms race. Governments and arms companies became merged in what President Eisenhower memorably described half a century later as the military-industrial complex. In this way, Hilferding had produced a brilliant account which brought together the key phenomena of the age.

However, his analysis did not stop there. For Hilferding finance capital was a major step towards organized capitalism. In this fact, there were some crumbs of comfort for the left. Despite having described contemporary finance capitalism as a major juggernaut crushing all in its way, he also believed that the system raised some hopes for socialists. He saw it as a system in which, within its limits, capitalism was trying to organize itself. Marxist socialism was, first and foremost, supposed to be about rational organization of resources to satisfy human needs. This would require replacing the anarchy of the market by some form of rational planning and control. For Hilferding, capitalism itself was beginning to produce the means and mechanisms of planning and control. In its own hesitant and ambiguous fashion, through monopolies, cartels and ever-tightening links with the state, capitalism itself was throwing up the means by which a future socialist revolution could control the aggressive juggernaut. Lenin seized on this aspect, in particular, of Hilferding’s ideas and, as we shall see below, drew consequences crucial to his strategy and tactics in Russia in 1917.

Hilferding’s ideas were first comprehensively compiled in 1910 when the original German edition of his book came out. The impact was instantaneous. It was the book the revolutionary left had been waiting for. In a sense it was the answer to Bernstein. Like Bernstein, Hilferding was dealing with that most tantalizing of questions for Marxists at that time – why had there not been a revolution? In reply, Bernstein had painted a picture of a less and less aggressive capitalism settling into a reformist path to social justice. Hilferding, however, ripped away the mask of complacency and hypocrisy which surrounded liberal capitalism and revealed a beast within. Hilferding had started out from the classic Marxist premise of concentration of capital leading to monopoly. Far from being benevolent, the monopolies were wild beasts stalking the entire globe for profit. Anything and anyone in their path was doomed. Hilferding pointed to the fate of native Americans, of north and south, who had been massacred and their cultures destroyed by the onslaught. Now Black Africans faced the same processes.

Capitalists themselves were transformed in the process. Many free-trade liberals had been humanitarians, believing a benign capitalism would bring the world together and the interconnected economies make war impossible. Not so the expansionist monopolists of the early twentieth century. In Hilferding’s words:

The desire for an expansionist policy revolutionizes the entire view of life held by the bourgeoisie. They are no longer peace-loving and humanitarian. The old free-traders did not look on free trade simply as being the best economic policy but as a starting point for an era of peace. Finance capital lost this belief a long time ago. It does not believe in the harmony of capitalist interests, but recognizes that competition develops more and more into a political struggle for power. The ideal of peace fades away, and the ideal of greatness and power of the state replaces the humanitarian ideal.

It should be remembered that Bernstein had been basing his views on developments in Britain and Hilferding on what was happening in Germany where exaltation of the state and bellicose nationalism were indeed sweeping all before them. He continued:

The ideal of the nation
… is now transferred into belief in the exaltation of one nation over all other nations. Capital is now the conqueror of the world, and every new country it conquers represents a boundary which it has to cross. This struggle is going to be an economic necessity, for to lag behind lowers the profits of finance capital, reduces its ability to compete and, in the end, could make the smaller economic unit a tributary of the larger.

He also goes on to describe the associated decline in morality. The new capitalist argues ‘realistically’: ‘Eternal justice is a beautiful dream, but one cannot even build railways at home with moral principles. How can we conquer the world if we wait for our rivals to be converted to our principles.’ Racism is the inevitable outcome of the new capitalism: ‘Subjugation of foreign nations by force
… leads the ruling nation to attribute this domination to its special natural characteristics –
i.e.
to the character of its race. Thus, in the ideology of race there develops, disguised as natural science, the reality of finance capital’s striving for power.’
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