https://libcom.org/article/world-revolution-1924

Continue from subheading: the world proletariat.

The accomplishment of the Russian revolution was so mighty that the vanguard of the workers of Western Europe were impressed by it and obeyed the leaders of the Bolshevist Party, and the whole Third International followed Russia. Just as in Russia, what the Third International called upon the European workmen to do was partly proletarian-communist, and partly bourgeois-capitalist. Although these countries were for the most part proletarian, the European workers followed in adopting mixed tactics – partly proletarian, partly bourgeois.

https://libcom.org/article/world-revolution-1924

They [the Bolsheviks] did not claim as the basis of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils the destruction of the trade unions. The workshop councils alone can fight and are the essential bedrock of communism. By making peace with trade unionism the Russian Bolshevists and the Third International showed that they were themselves still capitalist, and neither wished, nor dared, to smash up European capitalism.

Moreover, the Bolshevists and the Third International did not call for the abolition of Parliamentarism in the revolution. Thus they left the European workers, who had never yet fought for themselves, under the delusion that a revolution can be made in Parliament and through leaders. A real proletarian revolution must abolish Parliamentarism when the revolution comes in sight.

https://libcom.org/article/world-revolution-1924

The Third International did not demand the abolition of party dictatorship in Western Europe. Nothing has shown their bourgeois character more than this. This slavish subjection to party, was the pest and ruin of social democracy and of the proletariat, which was its slave.

https://libcom.org/article/world-revolution-1924

In Russia this was not understood, and thus, as Rosa Luxemburg said, a dozen leaders dictate over a flock of sheep, which one calls to action when convenient, and through this flock of sheep, over the vast masses of the unthinking class. This method is bourgeois capitalist, through and through. By this method, more than any other, the Third International has led the proletarian revolution to defeat. The principle of the few dictating to the stupid mass has thrown the German proletariat into the abyss.

https://libcom.org/article/world-revolution-1924

Lenin and the Third International have talked the proletariat into a combination with the capitalist nationalism of Asia. My reply is that we have never supported European capitalism. We have urged the rising of India against European capitalism; but you of the Third International support the rising capitalism of Asia; you urge the subjection of the Asiatic proletariat to their native capitalism. There is no wonder that you do it, for peasant-capitalist Russia desires also a capitalist Asia.

https://libcom.org/article/world-revolution-1924

All classes in all capitalist States are enemies of world revolution. The Third International has not explained this to the workers.

https://libcom.org/article/world-revolution-1924

Many fake principles have penetrated from Moscow to Western Europe and North America.

This has been largely through Lenin’s book called The Infantile Diseases of Left Wing Communism. See the ideas expressed in that book on Asquith and Lloyd George and on the splits in the bourgeois classes and parties in the capitalist States, of which, he declares, Communists may make use. Lenin contends there that Communists may take advantage of the differences between Monarchists and Republicans, democrats and reactionaries.

https://libcom.org/article/world-revolution-1924

Note the differences over the translation of Lenin’s title. Детская болезнь, the phrase in question, also translates to Children’s Disease.

A further botching of the translation of Lenin’s title can be found here:

“The whole idea that the fight for revolution and reform are part of an indissoluble process, which separates real Marxism from left-wing infantilism, remains completely foreign to these sectarians.” -Bill Van Auken

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/04/iso-a29.html

You can see the bourgeoisie wants to change the meaning of Lenin’s words in order to argue that these “Left Communists,” or Marxists who argue consistently for the self-emancipation of the working class and Lenin’s theory of the party as expressed in What is to Be Done, these “Left Communists” never fully matured, never married the bourgeoisie politically and accepted their perspective as dominant. This ignores the historical context of Lenin’s work: the revolution had conquered in the Soviet Union, a new Third International formed, and he sought to unite the various children of the Third International under one organization. The children would necessarily suffer the symptoms of each others’ contagious diseases in order to build immunity into adulthood.

Changing completely the meaning of the title of the work demonstrates submission to bourgeois forces. Further political context would show the natural rebellion of children to the authority of the Bolshevik fathers of the Third International who suddenly wielded some God-given right to dictate policy to every other Communist Party, however long they had participated in the struggle initiated decades earlier in the UK, France and Germany by the original Marxists. These life-long revolutionaries, dedicated to the liberation of the proletariat, saw in Lenin’s position a compromised position. He needed, as the head of state that had not succeeded to spread the revolution into Germany, to secure for the Soviet Union export contracts through contracts with the bourgeoisie and pro-capitalist trade unions, as well as with the peasant class. He could only do this by turning on his own theory of the revolutionary party as a purely proletarian internationalist party. This could itself be seen as a contagious disease to which the Bolsheviks would need to gain immunity, and this could have been done through association with British Marxists aligned with Pankhurst, as well as other Marxists who opposed the Third International’s policies from the Left.

Sections of the bourgeois classes will eventually come over, but it
is essential not to count upon their doing so in the beginning.

https://libcom.org/article/world-revolution-1924

Even those tactics of combining with peasant bourgeois parties arose out of the peasant capitalist character of the Russian revolution, and the European workers only accepted them because they were still bourgeois in their opinions.

The Russians, because they were bourgeois revolutionists, wanted a compromise to be made in Western Europe. They feared a really proletarian revolution, and therefore they advised the Communists to compromise.

A genuine proletarian revolution will stand on its feet and will oppose equally Democrats, Social-Democrats, Monarchists and Republicans.

https://libcom.org/article/world-revolution-1924

Also compare this writing by Pankhurst and the following quote by Engels:

Lenin contends there that Communists may take advantage of the differences between Monarchists and Republicans, democrats and reactionaries.

This has proved quite untrue. Against Communism all bourgeois parties in all countries, including the Social-Democrats and Independents of Germany, the Labour Party and the ILP of Britain, have formed an absolutely firm and united front.

https://libcom.org/article/world-revolution-1924

Engels letter to Bebel, London, 28 October, 1882:

He [Vollmar] at last is the dreamed-of realisation of the phrase about the “one reactionary mass.” All the official parties united in one lump here, all the Socialists in one column there–great decisive battle. Victory all along the line at one blow. In real life things do not happen so simply. In real life, as you also remark, the revolution begins the other way round by the great majority of the people and also of the official parties massing themselves together against the government, which is thereby isolated, and overthrowing it; and it is only after those of the official parties whose existence is still possible have mutually and successively accomplished one another’s destruction that Vollmar’s great division takes place and with it the prospect of our rule. If, like Vollmar, we wanted to start straight off with the final act of the revolution we should be in a miserably bad way.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_Engels_Correspondence.pdf

Pankhurst’s depiction of the ruling parties in firm, united front against Communism follows the same logic as Engel’s observations. Lenin, in this case, broke from the scientific view of the action of parties in relation to states and revolution. In one moment, they may all favor the government against communism, as Pankhurst stated. In another moment, they may all turn against the government, followed by pursuing a policy of mutual destruction.

Lenin assumes that differences do exist and can with a wedge action by the party be released into a revolutionary conflict. This had to do with his assumption that the revolution would not spread through open conflict between the revolutionary state and the powers of Western Europe. He wanted to protect the Bolsheviks from a process of mutual destruction which had a occurred in Russia but would also have required the mutual destruction to envelop many Western European political parties in a destructive conflict with the Bolsheviks and their allies. He sought to avoid this conflict by turning against Pankhurst and reaching out to the imperialist Labor Party to accept a treaty. He sacrificed the Bolshevik position in the UK in exchange for promises of peace from the imperialists. As the rise of Stalinism proved, these promises could not have materialized and his belief in those promises itself led to the isolation and destruction of the Bolsheviks by Stalinism. As Pankhurst predicted, this led to a new united front of all government parties against Communist revolution that also included the parties of the Comintern itself. When a new revolutionary moment approaches and all parties again turn like the people against the government, the task of the revolutionary party will be to seperate itself from all the parties marked for destruction as usurpers and not as honest protectors of a new revolutionary order.

Lenin writes in Chapter 8 of Infantile Disorders of Left-Wing Communism:

After the war, defence of the robber League of Nations, ^[31] defence of direct or indirect alliances with the bourgeoisie of one’s own country against the revolutionary proletariat and the “Soviet” movement, and defence of bourgeois democracy and bourgeois parliamentarianism against “Soviet power” became the principal manifestations of those intolerable and treacherous compromises, whose sum total constituted an opportunism fatal to the revolutionary proletariat and its cause.

“. . . All compromise with other parties . . . any policy of manoeuvring and compromise must be emphatically rejected,”

the German Lefts write in the Frankfurt pamphlet.

It is surprising that, with such views, these Lefts do not emphatically condemn Bolshevism! After all, the German Lefts cannot but know that the entire history of Bolshevism, both before and after the October Revolution, is full of instances of changes of tack, conciliatory tactics and compromises with other parties, including bourgeois parties!

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch08.htm

He also writes:

Is it not like making a difficult ascent of an unexplored and hitherto inaccessible mountain and refusing in advance ever to move in zigzags, ever to retrace one’s steps, or ever to abandon a course once selected, and to try others? And yet people so immature and inexperienced (if youth were the explanation, it would not be so bad; young people are preordained to talk such nonsense for a certain period) have met with support—whether direct or indirect, open or covert, whole or partial, it does not matter—from some members of the Communist Party of Holland.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch08.htm

A more mature revolutionary, we should answer, would avoid the “unexplored and hitherto inaccessible mountain” for more well-trodden trails, beaten tracks with clear markings. To lead the workers through such dangerous terrain would be to sacrifice them to the elements.

He later says:

The more powerful enemy can be vanquished only by exerting the utmost effort, and by the most thorough, careful, attentive, skilful and obligatory use of any, even the smallest, rift between the enemies, any conflict of interests among the bourgeoisie of the various countries and among the various groups or types of bourgeoisie within the various countries, and also by taking advantage of any, even the smallest, opportunity of winning a mass ally, even though this ally is temporary, vacillating, unstable, unreliable and conditional.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch08.htm

Lenin had rather applied the opposite tactics to the building of the Bolshevik faction and party. He isolated these rifts and these vacillating elements within the revolutionary party so as to eliminate internal threats. He saw the conflict between liberals and monarchists, which convinced Plekhanov (who brought along Trotsky) to support the liberals, as a cause to break with the Mensheviks who sought an alliance with the imperialist Liberals. Pankhurst sought to apply this very lesson to those seeking compromise with the imperialist Labor Party.

Since 1905 they have systematically advocated an alliance between the working class and the peasantry, against the liberal bourgeoisie and tsarism, never, however, refusing to support the bourgeoisie against tsarism (for instance, during second rounds of elections, or during second ballots) and never ceasing their relentless ideological and political struggle against the Socialist-Revolutionaries, the bourgeois-revolutionary peasant party, exposing them as petty-bourgeois democrats who have falsely described themselves as socialists.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch08.htm

This last policy, “never refusing to support the bourgeoisie against tsarism,” resembles support for Bernie Sanders and the Joe Biden. We cannot, as Pankhurst could not, accept such a reversal from Lenin, who had earlier argued that the World War had erased any difference between monarchist autocracy and bourgeois democracy. “…Imperialist war fully equates the republic with the monarchy.” (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/sep/00b.htm#fwV23E017) These contradictions can only find explanation in the changing circumstances that brought him from exiled revolutionary comfortably analyzing texts to a state leader forced to the table with the imperialists and then forced to justify his agreements with those imperialists to the people.

As Pankhurst says,

To make use of the split between bourgeois parties is to attach oneself to one of them and to combine with capitalists. Such tactics are utterly bad, for the bourgeois parties will at the decisive moment turn against the Communists and the result will be a terrible defeat for them or the total corruption of the Communist Party.

https://libcom.org/article/world-revolution-1924

“There was a moment when a small lifeboat was sent out to save Soviet Russia. That boat was the KAPD, the best and largest part of the Spartacus Bund, with its new and really revolutionary policy for the world revolution. But Russia with its Bolshevik Government despised the KAPD and declined its help.”

https://libcom.org/article/world-revolution-1924

That you could not do everything in a proletarian and communist way, and that you had to retreat when the European revolution did not materialise, is not your fault. As proletarians we shall more strenuously fight you as our class enemies the more you return to capitalism. But your real fault, which neither we nor history can forgive, is to have foisted a counter-revolutionary programme and tactics on the world proletariat, and to have rejected the really revolutionary one which could have saved us.

https://libcom.org/article/world-revolution-1924