(b) Forcing the Pace of the Revolution

The Labour Revolution thus progresses upon the basis of democracy, while the Middle Class Revolution proceeds from the fight for democracy. This distinction involves a further point of difference.

We have seen that the Middle Class Revolution begins as a revolt of various classes against absolutism. When the latter is overthrown, the liberated sections of the people become fully conscious of their class interests and class antagonisms, and begin to fight among themselves, using the forcible methods characteristic of the Middle Class Revolution, which push the latter to greater lengths and bring ever more extreme classes and parties to political power.

In her remarkable work entitled The Russian Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg asserts the necessity of “advancing impetuously, crushing all obstacles with an iron hand, and continually extending its aims,” to be the “vital principle” and the basic doctrines of every great revolution” (pp. 77 and 78).

As a matter of fact, this process is only the vital principle of every great middle class revolution.

The Labour Revolution is accomplished under quite different conditions. As it presupposes a long period of familiarity with democratic institutions, the Labour Revolution is carried out after the full development and clear recognition of class antagonisms which were formerly veiled by absolutism. Although democracy introduces into political struggles more peaceful methods than those of former times, it must not be assumed that this denotes a mitigation of class antagonisms. Classes are economic, and not political, categories; their interests and antagonisms, as well as the degree of their acuteness, depends upon economic, and not political, factors. The separate classes become enlightened as to their interests and antagonisms in the degree that the various sections of the people have opportunities for self-expression. Any accentuation of these interests and antagonisms produced by economic causes is immediately detected under democracy. Consequently, the Labour Revolution, unlike the Middle Class Revolution, cannot originate in illusions entertained by various antagonistic classes regarding their common interests. The Labour Revolution is the result of decades of tenacious class struggles, during which class consciousness on each side has been developed to the highest pitch. It is inaugurated by the preponderance of a single class, the working class, behind which there stands no other class to be oppressed and exploited by the new rulers. Through its political organization, the Social Democracy, the working class has set forth its aims in the most comprehensive manner long before its victory. There is no class or party which can rise up behind its back to extend the limits of the Revolution.

Nevertheless, we have to be prepared for the appearance of an extreme party, which would try to carry the Revolution to greater lengths.

The workers do not form a homogeneous mass. They are divided into two sections, one of which is so favoured by special economic conditions or by legislation that it is able to form strong organizations, and thereby look after its interests: it constitutes the ascending portion of the working class, its “aristocracy,” which is able to offer successful resistance to the depressing tendencies of capitalism, sometimes to the extent that the struggle against capitalism is no longer a fight against poverty, but a struggle for power.

By the side of these well-disciplined, trained, and fit troops is the great army of those who are placed in such unfavourable conditions that they are not yet able to organize themselves and counteract the depressing tendencies of capitalism. They remain in poverty, and often sink deeper into the mire.

The Labour Revolution also arouses these sections and inspires them with courage for the struggle. And the workers who have previously been most apathetic are now most eager to force the pace. For them the class struggle is a war against poverty. The worker who is crushed by poverty cannot wait; he urgently needs immediate help. As long as he feels impotent, he resigns himself. But the moment he gains possession of power, he determines to put an immediate stop to all suffering and oppression. Ignorant of the iron laws of economics, he believes he is able to accomplish everything by force. Owing to his ignorance and inexperience, he falls an easy prey, in his enthusiasm for liberty and prosperity, to the demagogues who deliberately or carelessly dangle before him the most brilliant promises. He is goaded into fighting the trained and organized workers, who are accustomed to slow movement, who only attempt to perform the tasks for which their strength and capacity are adequate, and who have sufficient experience to realize that the problems in question are not so simple as they appear. This antagonism within the ranks of the working class is accentuated through the influence of Marxism. At the time of the Middle Class Revolution, a science of political economy had indeed come into existence, but it regarded commodity production as the natural form of production, and its laws as the natural laws of social economy. The extent to which all political and social ideas and institutions are economically determined had not yet been discerned.

Consequently economic knowledge was only to be found amongst the bourgeoisie. This word is constantly used as if it were synonymous with the capitalist class, but this is a mistake. Bourgeois signifies the municipal citizen as distinct from citoyen, the citizen of the State. We understand by the term bourgeoisie the whole of the educated and comfortable section of the urban population, in contradistinction to the whole of the country population, the large landowners as well as the peasantry, and the poorer section of the urban population. The bourgeoisie does not form a class in the economic sense; it is, like the “Third Estate,” a collective name, which comprises various elements, intellectuals as well as capitalists, and in addition many sections that live, not from the exploitation of alien labour, but merely from their own labours, being frequently exploited themselves. The intellectuals among the bourgeoisie are perhaps more numerous than the capitalists.

Some comprehension of the laws of political economy existed amongst the bourgeoisie at the time of the Middle Class Revolution, although such knowledge was not to be found amongst the poorer members of the lower middle class, the workers, or the peasants. The workers above all were not yet in a position to acquire economic knowledge; they instinctively fought against the recognition of economic laws, inasmuch as the latter taught that the workers’ poverty was an ordinance of nature. The struggles of these sections against the bourgeoisie during the Revolution were at the same time struggles of ignorance against economic insight.

The position is quite different to-day. Marx and Engels perceived that the laws of political economy have the force of natural laws only under specific historical conditions, conditions which alter in accordance with their natural laws. They discerned not only the laws of movement of the existing mode of production more profoundly than anyone else, but also its laws of development. Whilst the former reveal the necessity of exploitation and poverty under the existing conditions, the latter show the abolition of exploitation and the victory of the workers to be inevitable.

During the same period as the more fortunate section of the workers raises itself out of its degradation and is enabled to acquire more and more knowledge, there also arises the doctrine which promises the victory of the working class and imposes on it the duty of studying the laws and the facts of economic life as closely as its circumstances permit.

There are, however, two sides to the Marxian doctrine. On the one hand, it shows the necessity of the Labour victory.

The weaker the position of the workers and the more oppressive the conditions under which they live, the more important it becomes to emphasize this side of the Marxian doctrine, as it is essential to encourage a working class battling with superior forces by pointing out that the laws of development of the capitalist mode of production itself are moving in its direction and will eventually assure it a preponderant position in society.

The task of trained Marxists assumes quite a different shape after victory has been attained. Now the great question that arises is how to make use of the victory.

And it behoves us Marxists to lay the greatest stress upon the other side of Marxism, which teaches that all political and social ideas and institutions are conditioned byeconomic laws which may not be altered at will. It teaches that Socialism will inevitably, and as a necessity of nature, emerge at a certain stage of capitalist development. But this involves a recognition of the fact that Socialism is impossible at an earlier stage of development. To quote a well-known, but too little regarded, passage from the preface to Marx’s Capital:

“And even when a society has got upon the right track for the discovery of the natural laws of its movement ... it can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development. But it can shorten and lessen the birth-pangs.”

In these revolutionary tunes another passage from Capital, which also employs the metaphor of birth, is more frequently quoted than the above:

“Force is the midwife of every old society that is pregnant with a new.”

Those who are fond of quoting this passage generally forget that Marx has just described this force, not as that of the fist or the bayonet-machine guns did not yet exist-but as the State power, the “concentrated and organized force of society,” and that, on the other hand, in the passage previously quoted, Marx expressly warns against attempting to clear by bold leaps the obstacles offered by the successive phases of social development.

An impatient midwife who employs force to deliver a pregnant woman in the fifth month instead of the ninth will perform the feat of considerably shortening the period of pregnancy, but all the vital functions of the child will be suspended after a few convulsions, and the mother will be lucky if she escapes a lingering illness or even death.

This species of midwifery is at the moment being practised on that poor mother called Russia by a number of doctors who assert that they have walked the Marxian hospital. These loud-mouthed saviours announce in every accent of quackery that their application of force is the appropriate means “of shortening and mitigating the birth pangs of Socialism.”

Whenever and wherever the working class conquers political power, it behoves us Marxists to ascertain in which normal phase of development this conquest of power has taken place, to make whatever use of this victory is practicable in the given stage of development, and above all to warn the workers against the adoption of methods which, however desirable they might seem, are bound in the existing circumstances to lead to failure and setback.

We are emphatically not of the opinion of Rosa Luxemburg, who contends that the Revolution always imposes on Socialists the duty of forcing the pace of events, as the Bolshevists are doing:

“The fundamental doctrine of every great revolution or its vital principle is as follows: Either the revolution must press forward with determination and rapidity, crushing all obstacles with an iron hand, and continually extending its aims, or it will be very quickly thrown back beyond its weaker starting-point and crushed by the counter-revolution (The Russian Revolution, 1922, p.77-78)

“Once the working class has seized power, it may never renounce its task of socialist transformation, in accordance with Kautsky’s good advice, under the pretext of the ‘unripeness of the country,’ without treason to itself, to the International, and to the Revolution. It shall and must immediately embark upon socialistic measures in the most energetic, uncompromising, and ruthless manner” (op. cit., p.115).

Unfortunately, Rosa Luxemburg was precluded from observing the example of the Soviet Republic in Turkestan, otherwise she might have reconsidered the question as to whether the socialist transformation ought to have proceeded there, if we were not to be traitors to our dearest principles.

To-day we are able to observe things more dispassionately than was possible in the year 1918, when Rosa Luxemburg wrote the above words. We have now the example of the hopeless conditions of Russia to show us what happens when, without regard to the given stage of development, socialist measures are adopted in the most energetic, uncompromising, and ruthless manner.

When the working class captures power, we need not be really concerned about urging it to adopt socialist measures in the most energetic, uncompromising, and ruthless manner. The danger does not lie in the fact that too little revolutionary driving force will be released, but that it will be expended in an inappropriate manner, upon measures which will achieve the opposite of what is expected.

It is not to ruthlessness and to carrying positions by storm that we have to exhort the workers, but to reflexion and to that limitation wherein is revealed the master, to limitation that is not dictated by fear or weakness, but by the clear perception of what is possible or practicable at a given moment. This in no wise signifies renunciation of the idea of socialist transformation, which of course I have never advocated, but merely means desisting from attempting such a task with inappropriate means or under circumstances which render it impossible. The question now is whether the working class, when it comes to power, will be inclined to practise the qualities of reflexion and self-limitation which Marxism enjoins.

These qualities will be assimilated the soonest by the organized and trained section of the working class, and least of all by the unorganized and untrained section. Thus in the course of the Labour Revolution these two sections tend to fall into an antagonism, which sometimes breaks out into forcible conflict and outwardly recalls the struggles between the various fractions of the Middle Class Revolution, in which the radicals always dished the moderates and constantly forced the pace of the Revolution. And thus it seems that the Labour Revolution obeys the same “law of life” as the Middle Class Revolution.

But in reality the two types of revolution are fundamentally different. The “forcing the pace” which was a struggle between different classes in the Middle Class Revolution, is in the case of the Labour Revolution a struggle between the members of the same class. In the Middle Class Revolution it was the most advanced elements of the propertyless classes which broke away from middle class leadership and embarked upon a struggle against the bourgeoisie, as radicals against moderates. In the Labour Revolution the entire working class is freed from middle class leadership, and the struggle of radicals against moderates is a struggle of the ignorant, unorganized, inexperienced, in other words, the most backward members of the working class against the trained, experienced, and most highly developed sections of the workers.

In both revolutions the radicals are bound finally to fail, but in the Middle Class Revolution they fail because their aim is unattainable in the existing conditions, because they attempt to banish poverty and misery while leaving commodity production untouched. In the Labour Revolution the Socialists of every school of thought have the same objective, which is now attainable. When the radicals fail in this instance, it is because, in their ignorance and carelessness, they steer blindly for their goal, without studying their course and taking account of its shallows and rocks. They do not fail because their class position impels them to attempt the impossible, but because they are in too much of a hurry to achieve what is attainable and within easy reach. Thus they break their legs and lose their capacity to continue advancing towards a goal that will never be reached by such methods.

Finally we have to consider yet another distinction between the Middle Class and the Labour Revolution.

At the time of the Middle Revolution the conditions of production are still of a very simple nature, and can stand a severe shock. Civil war and terrorism only temporarily injure the process of production, and the economic liberation which the Revolution effects is so immense that the damage suffered is rapidly repaired. After the Revolution production progresses by leaps and bounds, and an era of prosperity sets in. Thus the Revolution lives in the memory of the whole nation as a proud and fortunate episode. And in the minds of the propertyless sections, which succumbed to it, the Revolution is remembered as the first attempt to achieve their emancipation, which they intend soon to repeat with better judgment.

The process of production which prevails at the time of the Labour Revolution is, on the contrary, of an extremely complicated and sensitive nature. Every rude attack of amateurs or illiterates threatens to bring it to a standstill, and the suspension of production signifies death.

Consequently, when the above described “radical” elements come to the top in the Labour Revolution, and proceed to the most reckless destruction of the “old,” so as to clear the path for the “new,” the upshot is not merely the reaction which follows upon vanished illusions, pricked like brilliant soap bubbles, but complete economic ruin, such as we now contemplate in Russia with a shudder.

To the workers who survive these reprehensible methods of forcing the pace of the Revolution, the most radical elements of this Revolution will not appear in the same light as the radicals of the Middle Class Revolution, as the pioneers of the Labour struggle for emancipation to be remembered with reverence, but as its destroyers, to be held in abhorrence.