From: "David Bedggood" <d.bedggood-AT-auckland.ac.nz>
Date: Wed, 6 Aug 1997 11:49:28 1200+
Subject: M-G: The German Revolution


I'm not going to try to answer the personal insults of Proyect. I 
will use my three posts to send part of Trotsky's book "The Third 
International After Lenin" originally written in 1928, in particular 
the section from page 87, which deals with the failed German 
Revolution in context.  As an antidote to menshevik thought as 
pactised by Proyect this is hard to beat.

Part one

 3.   THE  THIRD  CONGBESS  AND  THE  QUESTION  OF  THE
       PERMANENCE  OF THE REVOLUTIONARY PROCESS ACCORDING TO 
      LENIN AND ACCORDING TO BUKHARIN.
 Three periods can be established in the political develop-
  ment of Europe after the war.  The first period runs from
 1917  to  1921,  the  second  from  March  1921  to  October
 1923, and the third from October 1923 up to the English general
 strike, or even up to the present moment.
 
The post-war revolutionary movement of the masses was
 strong enough  to  overthrow  the  bourgeoisie.   But there
 was no one to bring this to a consummation.  The social
 democracy, which held  the  leadership  of  the   traditional
 organizations of the working class, exerted all its efforts to
 save  thc bourgeois  regime.   Wlien  we  looked  forward  at
 that time to an immediate seizure of power by the proleta riat,
 we reckoned that a revolutionary party would mature rapidly in
 the fire of the civil war.  But the two terms did not  coincide. 
 The  revolutionary  wave  of  the  pcst-war period ebbed before
 the communist parties  grew  up and reached maturity in the
 struggle with the social democracy so as to assume the leadership
 of the insurrection.
 
In March 1921, the German Communist Party made the
attempt to avail itself of the declining wave in order to over-
throw the bourgeois state with a single blow.  The guiding
thought of the German Central Committee in this was to save the
Soviet republic  (the theory of  socialism in one country had not
yet been proclaimed at that time).  But it turned out that the
determination of the leadership and the dissatisfaction  of  the 
masses  do  not  suffice for victory. There must obtain a number
of other conditions, above all, a close bond between the
leadership and the masses and the confidence of  the latter in the 
leadership.  This  condition was lacking at that time.

The Third  Congress  of  tlie Comintern  was  a milestone
demarcating the first and second periods.  It set down the
fact tha the resources of the communist parties, politically
as well as organirationally, were not sufficient for the con-
quest of power.  It advanced the slogan: "To the masses "
that is, to the conquest of power through a Previous conc-
quest of  tlae masses, achieved on the basis of the daily life
and struggles.  For the mass also continues to live its daily
life in a revolutionary epoch, even if in a somewhat different
manner.

This formulation of the problem met with a furious resis-
tance at the Congress which was inspired theoretically by
Bukharin.  At that time he held a viewpoint of  his own
permanent revolution and not that of Marx.  "Since capi-
talism had exhausted itself, therefore the victory must be
gained through an uninterrupted revolutionary off'ensive."
Bukharin's position always  reduces itself  to syllogisms of
this sort.

Naturally, I never shared the Bukharinist version of the
theory of the "permanent" revolution, according to which
no interruptions, periods of stagnation, retreats, transition-
al demands, or the like, are at all conceivable in the revolu-
tionary process.  On the contrary, from the first days of
October, I fought against this caricature of the permanent
revolution.

When I spoke as did Lenin of the incompatibility between
Soviet Russia and the world of imperialism, I had in mind
the great strategical curve and not its tactical windings.
Bukharin, on the contrary, prior to his transformation into
his own antipode, invariably expounded a scholastic carica-
ture of the Marxian conception of a continuous revolution.
Bukharin opined  in the days of  his "Left Communism ",
that the revolution allows neither of retreats nor temporary
compromises with  the enemy.  Long after the question of
the Brest-Litovsk Peace, in which my position had nothing
in common with Bukharin's, the latter together with the
entire ultra-Left wing of the Comintern of that time advo-
cated the line of the March 1921 days in Germany, being
of the opinion that unless the proletariat in Europe was
"galvanized," unless there were ever new revolutionary erup-
tions, the Soviet power was threatened with certain destruc-
tion.  The consciousness that real dangers actually threat-
ened the Soviet power did not prevent me from waging an
irreconcilable struggle shoulder to shoulder with Lenin at
the Third  Congress  against  this  putschistic  parody  of  a
Marxian conception of  the permanent revolution.  During
the Third Congress, we declared tens of  times to the im-
patient Leftists: "Don't be in too great a hurry to save us.
In that way you will only destroy yourselves and, therefore,
also bring  about our destruction.   Follow  systematically
the path of  the struggle for the masses in order thus to
reach the struggle for power.  We need your victory but not
your readiness to fight under unfavorable conditions.  We
will manage  to  maintain  ourselves  in  the  Soviet  republic
with the help of the N.E.P. and we will go forward.  You
will still have time to come to our aid at the right moment
if you will have gathered your forces and will have utilized
the favorable situation."

Although this took place after the Tenth Party Congress
which prohibited  factions, Lenin nevertheless assumed the
initiative at that time to create the top nucleus of a new
faction for the struggle against the ultra-Leftists who were
strong at that time.  In our intimate conferences, Lenin
flatly put the question of how to carry on the subsequent
struggle should the Third World Congress accept Bukhar-
in's viewpoint.  Our "faction" of that time did not develop
further only because our opponents "folded up" consider-
ably during the Congress.

Bukharin, of course, swung further to the Left of Marx-
ism than anybody else.  At this same Third Congress and
later, too, he led the fight against my view that the economic
conjuncture  in  Europe  would  inevitably  rise;  and  that
despite a whole series of  defeats of the proletariat I ex-
pected after this inevitable rise of the conjuncture not a
blow at the revolution, but, on the contrary, a new impetus
to revolutionary struggle.  Bukharin, who held to his stand-
point of  the scholastic permanence of  both  the economic
crisis and the revolution as a whole, waged a long struggle
against me on this viewpoint, until facts finally forced him,
as usual, to a very belated admission that he was in error.

At  the Third  and Fourth  Congresses  Bukharin  fought
against the policy of the united front and the transitional
demands, proceeding from his mechanical understanding of
the permanence of the revolutionary process.

The struggle between these two tendencies, the synthe-
sized, Marxian conception of the continuous character of
the  proletarian  revolution  and  the  scholastic parody  of Marxism 
which  was  by  no  means  an  individual  quirk  of Bukharin's, can 
be followed through a whole series of other questions, big as well 
as small.  But it is superfluous to do so.   Bukharin's position 
today is essentially the self-same ultra-Left  scholasticism  of  the 
 "permanent  revolution ", only,  this  time, turned  inside out.   
If,  for  example, Bukharin was of  the opinion until 1923 that 
without permanent economic crisis and a permanent civil war in 
Europe the Soviet republic would perish, he has today discovered a 
recipe for building socialism without any international revolution at 
all.  To be sure, the topsy-turvy Bukharinist permanency has not 
improved any by the fact  that the present leaders of the Comintern 
far too frequently com- bine their adventurism of yesterday with 
their opportunist postion of today, and vice versa.  

The Third Congress was a great beacon.  Its teachings are still vital 
and fruitful today.   The Fourth Congress only concretized these 
teachings.  The slogan of the Third Congress did not simply read: "To 
the masses!" but: "To power through a previous conquest of 
the masses!"  After the faction led  by Lenin  (which  he  
characterized demonstratively as the "Right" wing) had to curb 
intransigently the entire Congress throughout its duration, Lenin 
arranged a  private  conference  toward the  end  of  the  Congress  
in which he warned prophetically : "Remember, it is  only  a question 
of getting a good running start for the revolutionary leap.  The 
struggle for the masses is the struggle for pnwer."

The events of 1923 demonstrated that this Leninist posi-
tion was not grasped, not only by "those who are led" but
also by many of the leaders.

Part 2. The german events of 1923...


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