Revolution or War n°14

(Semestrial - February 2020)

PDF - 416.7 kb

HomeVersion imprimable de cet article Version imprimable

The Communist Workers Organisation, the Journal Kommunist (1918) and the Period of Transition

Our article, Bukharin’s Fraction Contrary to the Communist Left [1], about the Kommunist review published in issue 13 of our journal Revolution or War seems to have provoked several reactions from readers. It was in fact intended to be a detailed criticism of the positions of the Kommunist with the aim of showing that these positions do not belong in any way to the political heritage of the Communist Left, even less to its so-called Italian tradition. Indeed, we have shown how the Italian Left was completely on Lenin’s side in 1918, and consequently against Bukharin, Radek, Ossinsky and others, as much on the question of Brest-Litovsk as on the question of state capitalism. And we have shown how Lenin and the Italian Left were fundamentally right. We don’t come back to it here, the reader can always refer to our first article which looks at the question in more detail. If we attack the theses of Kommunist head-on, it is because a whole section of the current Communist Left takes up or tends to take up these theses as if they were part of the political heritage of the Left. The editorial line of the Smolny collective in its complete edition of the journal is quite edifying in this respect and this was criticized in its time [2]. For its part, the Communist Workers Organisation has published articles of Kommunist in English translation with its own introductions.

These introductions have the merit of going back over the concrete difficulties and the political and theoretical problems that the proletariat and its party, the Bolshevik Party, were facing in a dramatic way in Russia. From its first days, the dictatorship of the proletariat had to face an economy already in ruins and devastated by war. How to feed the starving population [3] when the economy was already largely paralysed in an isolated country and when the imperialist world war was continuing its ravages? Thus, they are part of the indispensable debate and reflection on the period of transition from capitalism to communism.

However, it should be noted that many of these introductions tend to make concessions to the political positions put forward by Kommunist, particularly on the issue of state capitalism in Russia, by presenting the Bukharin faction, "the Left Communists of 1918 [as being] amongst the clearest about the way in which events were taking both the revolution in Russia and the world in general, but they were in no stronger a position to influence those events than anyone else. Therein lies the tragedy of the working class" [4]. In this sense, we repeat, these positions are in contradiction with the historical positions of the Communist Left of Italy. That the CWO, a British group of the Internationalist Communist Tendency with a direct link to the Italian Left, defends positions opposed to the latter is not in itself a scandal, nor a crime of lèse-majesté. But it does require the CWO, the ICT, and the entire proletarian camp to further its reflection and to conduct a critical assessment of the inadequacies it would point out in the historical positioning of the Italian Left. Otherwise, to remain in political and theoretical vagueness and confusion can only put the ICT itself in front of political and theoretical contradictions, which will be insurmountable in the long run, sooner or later, and thus in danger in the face of the historical stakes that are coming up.

Has the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk ’Squandered’ the Prestige of the Russian Revolution?

Although the comrades of the CWO seem to reject the argument in favour of revolutionary war advocated by some Kommunist participants and accept the need for the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, they have a very curious appreciation of the impact of the treaty on the world revolution. Indeed, for the CWO, "the controversy over Brest-Litovsk was whether buying a temporary breathing space for the revolution in Russia came at the price of undermining the very world revolution on which the future of socialism depended. Even today it is difficult to say if the signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk did “squander the international capital” of the revolution (…)" [5]. Unlike the comrades, we are certain that Brest-Litovsk did not damage the prestige of the Russian Revolution in the eyes of revolutionaries around the world. Wasn’t it precisely the prestige of the Russian Revolution that prompted the creation of the Communist International just some months after Brest-Litovsk? In fact, the militants of the time who opposed Brest-Litovsk did so because they were either foreign to Marxism or they were significantly diverging from it. End of story. The uncertain position of the CWO is thus a first concession, or at least a position that one would call centrist.

For its part, the historical position of the so-called Italian left has long been clear. "The future has proved Lenin right and wrong those who superficially judged that it was necessary to continue the struggle against militaristic Germany, not caring either for these considerations of long programmatic scope or for these practical considerations (this time absolutely coinciding with the first (...). General Ludendorff stated in his memoirs that the collapse of the German front, after a series of incredible military victories on all sides, at a time when the situation was technically good according to all reports, was due to moral, i.e. political reasons: the soldiers no longer wanted to fight. Lenin’s ingeniously revolutionary policy, while speaking a language of protocol transactions with the Kaiser’s delegates, was able to find revolutionary means to awaken, under the uniform of the German automaton-soldier, the exploited proletarian who is led to massacre in the interest of his oppressors" [6].

State Capitalism, Cause of the Failure of the Russian Revolution?

But Brest-Litovsk is in a way a secondary subject for the editors of the Kommunist journal. Indeed, if this is where they originally united, the fact that they ’lost the battle’ and the Bolsheviks accepted the treaty made it so that the ’proletarian communists’ soon changed their minds and chose another battleground: state capitalism. On this question, it was very surprising to see that the CWO’s introductions invariably sided with Bukharin and Ossinsky against Lenin, but also against the Italian Left, of which it claims to be the continuator: "The Left Communists (...) were the first to raise the dangers of the Russian revolution creating a new form of capitalist exploitation"; "Its [the USSR] subsequent evolution towards an even more dirigiste state capitalism which continued to exploit the workers has vindicated Bukharin’s view on this right down to our own day" [7].

Indeed, for the CWO, the pages of Kommunist adequately explain how the Russian Revolution failed. "The work of the Left Communists does not explain why the Russian Revolution failed (as this was entirely due to its isolation) but they do point to precisely how it failed, and in this they give us valuable insights for our own understanding of how the future emancipation of humanity will come about" [8]. This unusual separation between the ’why’ and the ’how’ of the failed Russian Revolution introduced by the CWO leads to concessions. From the beginning of the October Revolution, the right-wing Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, are supposed to have replaced the initiative of the masses toward self-organization with a regime of state capitalism, which would have oriented Russia toward capitalism instead of socialism as early as 1918. However, the reality is much more complicated than this simplistic scheme borrowed from the anarchist tradition suggests. The CWO poses the problem incorrectly. The issue of ’domestic policy’ in Russia was not socialism through the activity of the masses itself or state capitalism with the re-establishment of the principle of single factory management. This is a vision centered on the factory, which was the specific ground of the anarcho-syndicalists. In reality, despite some ultra-modern industrial centers, Russia was essentially in the early stages of capitalism, which implies that large parts of its economy were still pre-capitalist. Thus, faced with the need both to maintain the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia while awaiting revolution in Europe and to revive an economy devastated by the destruction of the war so that the starving masses could simply eat, the dilemma facing the Bolsheviks in 1918 was more the following: to bet on the fragmented pre-capitalist economy largely reigning in Russia or on the few sectors, mainly industrial, highly developed and centralized? Considering that the second option is a prerequisite for communist society, the choice is not hard to make for the communists. And what is the only option for developing and accelerating the socialization of the productive forces in a backward country - 85% of the Russian population were peasants - while waiting for the spread of world revolution? State capitalism assumed, controlled and centralized as much as possible by class dictatorship.

As Lenin firmly pointed out during the controversy, "Bukharin is an extremely well-read Marxist economist. He therefore remembered that Marx was profoundly right when he taught the workers the importance of preserving the organisation of large-scale production, precisely for the purpose of facilitating the transition to socialism. (…) But Bukharin went astray because he did not go deep enough into the specific features of the situation in Russia at the present time — an exceptional situation when we, the Russian proletariat, are in advance of any Britain or any Germany as regards our political order, as regards the strength of the workers’ political power, but are behind the most backward West-European country as regards organising a good state capitalism, as regards our level of culture and the degree of material and productive preparedness for the ’introduction of socialism’" [9].

If we cannot share the unfailing enthusiasm of Trotsky, for whom the dictatorship of the proletariat could have lasted up to 50 years while waiting for the extension of the revolution to other parts of the world, there is no doubt that the bet of Lenin and Trotsky was quite correct in the dramatic concrete conditions of that time. The proletariat, with the help of its party, first conquers power, establishes the dictatorship of the proletariat, fights for the extension of the revolution to the rest of the world and, while waiting for the extension to take place, tries at the same time to ensure the minimum maintenance of an economic activity allowing to eat and to prepare at best in Russia the conditions of a still largely inexistent socialization as bases for the future communist society. For this, they try to push for the development and concentration of the most developed capitalist sectors in an economically backward Russia, which will take the form of state capitalism, with the bourgeoisie and the bosses abandoning the factories and fleeing the country, controlled by the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Bolshevik wager was that the party could temporarily, but firmly, hold the revolutionary course despite the isolation of the revolution. And they were right, at least for a while. But in contrast to Kommunist’s thesis, it was not Russian state capitalism that was the cause of the retreat of the revolution in the country, but its international isolation.

Gradually, with the failure of the revolutionary attempts, particularly in Germany, and the retreat of the international revolutionary wave, the dictatorship of the isolated proletariat, in a Russia wiped out by another two years of devastating civil war dictated by the imperialist powers, had its hands completely tied in terms of the possibilities for social transformation. "In 1918, in his study of state capitalism, Lenin dismissed the exaggerations of the extreme leftists about the real scope of the Russian revolution with a scientific analysis that laid bare the impossibility of achieving great results because of Russia’s backward economic state" (Bilan #18, review of the Italian Fraction of the Left Communist, 1935 [10]).

The basic economic laws of capitalism were still in force, except if one defends the Stalinist thesis of ’socialism in one country’ to which some considerations of Kommunist and the so-called Communist Left of Bukharin open the door when they criticise the state capitalism advocated by Lenin in the Russian conditions of March-April 1918. Ossinsky defends "the dictatorship of the proletariat and the consolidation of its basis by the construction of a proletarian socialism" [11] in the isolated Russia of 1918. The class contradictions linked to the maintenance of the capitalist mode of production, inevitable in an isolated country, a fortiori backward from the capitalist point of view, could only be exacerbated until the explosions, strikes and workers’ demonstrations of 1921 and the Kronstadt revolt. In the face of this international isolation, one wanted to respond with voluntarist measures which unfortunately betrayed more and more the principles until the open counter-revolution: political united front, workers’ government, popular front, socialism in one country, participation in the imperialist war. The international proletariat had to be won over to the cause of world revolution at all costs, and to this end, they went so far as to reintroduce social-democratic policies or at least an alliance with social democracy. This was the real betrayal.

Self-organization is Everything, the Goal is Nothing

This is the crux of the problem with Kommunist, and the CWO does not seem to be aware of it since the comrades seem to be taking up some of the arguments in favour of Kommunist’s self-organization by reducing the issue to a simple problem of factory management: "Ossinsky makes it clear that more worker initiative, more actual running of the economy by the workers is the only solution to the decline in the economy. Lenin now took the opposite view. If the revolution in Russia was to survive until the international revolution came to its aid then capitalist management techniques would have to be restored to save the economy. It was his answer to the cruel dilemma facing soviet power in April 1918. Ossinsky though persisted in his belief which Lenin had shared up until that point. This is why he ends by calling for yet greater involvement of the working masses in the economic sphere: ‘Mass discussion on these questions will involve the workers in the construction of socialism which can only be realised by the workers themselves’" [12]. The measures of self-organization and self-management put forward in 1918 were nothing more than fine principles that did not take into account reality, that is, they did not take into account the material conditions necessary for the establishment of a communist society. Thus, Bukharin or Ossinsky could well protest that it was absolutely necessary for the proletariat to socialize production itself. These militants, however illustrious, forgot for a moment the ABC of Marxism: it is capitalism itself that socializes production, centralizes it, raises social productivity and makes communist society possible. Yet Russia was still far from this stage. Bukharin and his friends were basically just putting the cart before the horse, a bit like the anarchists.

Lenin, for his part, clearly had the final goal in mind: communist society. In doing so, he understood that the world as a whole was in a phase ripe for revolution even though some countries, like Russia, were only at a very juvenile stage of capitalism. Always with the final goal in mind, he knew that the salvation of the revolution lay in its global extension alone, not in the tight management of Russian factories, whether by proletarians or not. The problem with the CWO is that it claims that Kommunist "give us valuable insights for our own understanding of how the future emancipation of humanity will come about" [13]. For us, on the contrary, it is time to put away the abstract and anarchist principle of self-organization in the Museum of Historical Curiosities. As much as for the opportunists of the beginning of the 20th century the movement was everything and the goal did not exist, so for the opportunists of the 21st century self-organization is everything and the final goal is completely unknown to them!

"The fragmentation of production, in order to give back to the molecules of the factories or of the plot of land the ‘freedom of management’ would represent a tremendous step backwards which does not correspond in any way with the program of the proletariat. (...) Centralization makes it possible to regulate the whole of production according to both economic and political considerations and, to this end, the only organism that can allow the proletariat or its groups to go beyond the vision of contingency is only the class party. The problem of the need for the continuous control of the working class and the increasing adaptation of the workers in the management of industry and the economy, this problem which is, in the end, the key to revolution, can only be solved through the class party" (Bilan #19, 1935).

As we can see, the positions put forward by the so-called Bukharin fraction in 1918 prefigure at best what will be in the 1930s theorization of a councilist order preaching both workers’ self-management and self-organization from the factories and the rejection of the proletarian character of the October 1917 insurrection and the Russian Revolution. At worst, they ended up helping to pave the way for the Stalinist theory of building socialism in a single country, Russia.

Nevertheless, apart from the question of the indispensable international extension of the revolution, the Russian Revolution provides us with an invaluable experience to seriously, ’scientifically’, address some of the problems that the proletariat and the communist party will inevitably face from the beginning of the transition period. As the CWO points out, and this is the merit of its introductions to Kommunist’s articles, "by this time there was a growing mismatch between socialist intentions and the need for economic survival in the face of the horrendous economic situation which the Soviet power had inherited from the Provisional Government [Kerenski’s]" [14]. Even if under objectively and historically more favourable conditions, any future dictatorship of the proletariat in a single country, or group of countries, will be confronted with the same problem while waiting for the international extension of the revolution. This is for what the communists of today must prepare the party of tomorrow. But they can only contribute positively to it on the sole condition that they make their own the lessons and the theoretical and political framework drawn from the Russian experience... by the genuine Communist Left.

Robin, January 2020.



[2. Fraction of the International Communist Left, The Defence of the Proletarian Character of the October Revolution is still a Class Frontier,

[3. "In March, workers in Petrograd already were allocated a daily ration amounting to only 1,082 calories (the norm was 3,600 calories). The figures for April, May and June were 1,013, 899 et 714 calories per days" (Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power, Indiana University Press) .

[4. Internationalist Communist Tendency, Radek on the International Situation in spring 1918,

[5. Internationalist Communist Tendency, An Epitaph for the October Revolution?,, we underline.

[6. Amadeo Bordiga, Prometeo, #3, March 1924, translated from Italian by us.

[7. Internationalist Communist Tendency, Ossinski on Bukharin’s Imperialism and the World Economy,

[8. Internationalist Communist Tendency, The Formation of the Red Army 1918,

[9. Lenin, ’left Wing’ Childishness, April 1918,

[10. Bilan, #18 Parti-État-Internationale : L’État prolétarien,

[11. Internationalist Communist Tendency, Ossinski Demands for Clear Answers (April 1918),

[12. Idem

[13. loc. cit.

[14. Internationalist Communist Tendency, N. Ossinsky’s Critique of State Capitalism in Russia,