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Lenin, the Commune and the State* Thoughts for a Centenary

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Ghita Lonesu
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Government and Opposition , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , 01 April 1970 , pp. 131 - 165
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Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1970

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References

** The Blue Note Book, Appendix III to K. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, Lawrence and Wishart, London, n.d.

1 This is due in great part to Lenin’s own efforts to intertwine his activity with the teleological history of world revolution. It is understandable that Marxist-Leninist exegetes should continue this magnification. What is less understandable is that Western historians and political scientists have not as yet succeeded in isolating Lenin and Leninism more effectively. E. H. Carr, though he places Lenin unhesitatingly in the centre of his History of the Russian Revolution, fails to distinguish clearly between the part played by Lenin and the part played by Stalin, in the many twists and turns between 1917 and 1923, when they were still contemporaries. Isaac Deutscher tried to paint the two side panels of the triptych, Stalin and Trotsky, but left the central one blank. Herbert Marcuse blurs the whole thing in the confusing notion of ‘Soviet Marxism’. G. Licht-heim in his Marxism does try to bring out the difference between Marxism and Marxism-Leninism. Leonard Schapiro, whose Origins of the Communist Autocracy (1955) is the closest analysis of Lenin’s specific politics, afterwards wove this essential thread into the fabric of his History of the CPSU (1965). Alfred Meyer’s Leninism (1957), Adam Ulam’s Lenin and the Bolsheviks (1965) and Jean Laloy’s Le socialisme de Lénine (1969) have on the contrary concentrated most rewardingly on this overdue work of historical analysis.

2 Why the emphasis on political? For two reasons: Lenin’s major relevance to the history of communism is, unlike Marx’s, political in theory as well as in practice. And then the history of the USSR and the other communist states which have not, during respectively a half and a quarter century, grown out of their political dimensions, must be re-situated in this perspective.

10 Among whom the highly respected philosophers Ernst Fischer and Roger Garaudy, since then in trouble with the Austrian and French parties respectively.

11 The Twelfth Congress of the Italian CP in Bologna, 8–15 February 1969 was the melancholy climax of these recent international confrontations.

12 The Czechoslovak crisis pointed towards the antagonisms within the Leninist state, the Sino-Soviet crisis towards the antagonisms between the Leninist states, and the outflanking of the French CP by the New Left in the May events in France, towards the antagonisms in the ideology.

13 Letter of the Communist and Workers’ Parties of Bulgaria, Poland, the GDR, Hungary and the USSR after their meeting of 14–15 July 1968 in Warsaw.

14 See especially the four recommendations at the end of the letter.

15 See infra, pp. 150–2.

16 Probably one of the first formulations of this leit-motiv afterwards constantly used by Lenin is in ‘Victory of the Cadets and Tasks of the Workers’ Party’, April 1906, Collected Works, vol. 10, pp. 243–8, when for instance he says that what is important is ‘the seizure by the people of political liberty—its exercise without any rights and laws and without any limitations (freedom of assembly, even if only in the universities, freedom of the press, freedom of association, the holding of congresses etc)’, followed by ‘the use by the people of force against those who used force against the people’. (Italics in the text.) This becomes in State and Revolution the well-known sentence: ‘And since the majority of the people itself suppresses its oppressors, a “special force” for suppression is no longer necessary! In this sense the state begins to wither away’. (Italics in the text.)

17 Akimov’s arguments are still highly topical. See Frankel, Jonathan, Vladimir Akimov on the Dilemmas of Russian Marxism, 1895-1903, Cambridge, 1969 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and see Rosa, Luxembourg in Leninism or Marxism, Michigan, 1961 Google Scholar.

18 ‘Victory of the Cadets’, loc cit.

19 In a ‘Letter to Inessa Armand’ of 18 December 1916, in Lenin, Against Revisionism, Moscow, 1966, pp. 359–41.

20 In ‘Marxism on the State. January-February 1917’, Appendix 3 in Marx, Karl, Critique of the Gotha Programme, Lawrence and Wishart, London, n.d.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 ‘The Youth International, a review’, in Collected Works, Vol. 23, p. 165.

22 Collected Works, Vols. 23, 24 and 25.

23 State and Revolution.

24 Collected Works, Vol. 23, pp. 324, 325 and 327.

25 Collected Works, Vol. 24, p. 23.

26 Ibid., p. 23.

27 Ibid., p. 27. But compare this particular point with Thesis 4 of ‘Six Theses on the Immediate Tasks of Soviet Government’ (April-May 1918): ‘The Soviet government was obliged in certain cases to take a step backward … Such a step backward and departure from the principle of the Paris Commune was, for example, the introduction of high salaries for a number of bourgeois experts’ (Collected Works, Vol. 27, p. 315).

28 Collected Works, Vol. 24, p. 24.

29 Ibid., p. 63

30 The classic Marxist arguments about Marx’s and Lenin’s interpretation of the Commune are still to be found in Kautsky, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, Vienna, 1918, and in Lenin’s rejoinder ‘The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky’ (1918) in Collected Works, Vol. 28. E. S. Mason, The Paris Commune, New York, 1930 was, even if crudely anti-Marxist, a typical attempt to penetrate this imbroglio of misinterpretations. Among recent works which have contributed to a scholarly clarification, see Georges Bourgin’s summing up, La Commune, Paris, 1953; Charles Rihs, La Commune de Paris, sa structure et ses doctrines, Geneva, 1955; the re-publication in 1959 of Lissagaray’s indispensable Histoire de la Commune de Paris, Brussels, 1876; and of Albert Ollivier’s La Commune, Paris, 1939. Roger Williams’s scholarly The French Revolution of 1870–1 (London, 1969) contains also a very useful bibliography. Most relevant to the subject of this inquiry is Klaus Meschkat, Die Pariser Kommune von 1871 im Spiegel der Sowjetischen Geschichtschreibung, Berlin-Wiesbaden, 1965, and Henri Lefevbre, La Proclamation de la Commune, Paris, 1965. Lefevbre, a Marxist historian, denounces the use made by the Stalinists of the Paris Commune.

31 Although Paris, the proudest of the medieval French communes was complètement assujettie, in the sense that the kings used it as their capital, its métiers (craft unions linked through the communal oath) tried several times in history to achieve communal independence, the most illustrious instance being the revolt of the prévôt Etienne Maret against the king in 1532.

32 See especially Lefevbre, op. cit., from which most of these characteristics are drawn. A sketch of the history of the Commune is as follows: On 4 September 1870, two days after the capitulation of Sedan, when Napoleon III was taken prisoner, the Republic was proclaimed. On 28 January 1871 the government of national defence signed the armistice with the Germans. The National Assembly moved to Bordeaux, and on 15 February stopped the payments for the National Guard. A central committee of the National Guard was formed on 15 March in Paris, which remained the pivot of the entire revolution. On 18 March the people of Paris launched a successful insurrection with the result that the Thiers government left Paris for Versailles. On 25 March general elections for the Council of the Commune of Paris were held, and on 27 March the Commune was proclaimed. On 8 April its forces tried to march on Versailles but were repelled. On 8 May the Thiers government delivered an ultimatum to the Commune and started military action the next day. After 20 days of particular cruel fighting, the Commune ended its resistance on 28 May 1871.

33 The National Guard, the name given since 1789 to the former citizen militia of Paris and whose first head had been Lafayette, had existed intermittently ever since. It had played an important part during the ‘Great Feat’ and therefore bore the reputation of an urban guard directed against the peasants. And it had also a distinct municipal character insofar as National Guards were set-up in 1789 by the new revolutionary municipalities. But, precisely because of these characteristic origins, the social formation and the ultimate allegiances of the National Guard followed the evolution of the respective city and municipality. In the revolution of 1830 it had been on the side of the democratic revolutionaries against Charles X who dissolved it. It was reinstituted again in 1848. During the Commune of 1871 it assumed the urgent and heroic responsibilities of defence both against the Prussians and against Versailles, and it was the backbone of the entire revolution. That it was manned mostly by workers was also doubly natural, Paris being an industrial centre and the workers being determined to link together in one single action their national and social aspirations.

34 Lenin limited the period of ‘duality of power’ to between 27 February 1917 and 4 July 1917. See especially ‘On Slogans’, Collected Works, Vol. 25, p. 183.

35 Marx, in his 18 Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte stressed that the Bonapartes drew their political strength from the peasants. Besides, Thiers’s supporters against the Commune were the ‘rurals’. As for the Communards themselves, their attitude towards the peasants is clearly expressed in the following quotation from the Paris journal La Commune of 21 March 1871: ‘Paris has just proved that it does not want to die. It is being reproached with the fact that it always sends to the peasants governments made by it. This confusion must stop. We have been too long depending on the peasants. They have absolved on 2 December what we had condemned, they have voted the war, which we had then rejected, they have now abandoned the country which we wanted to defend; and on top of all this they also wanted to impose a king on us. Enough of that !’

36 Moore, Barrington Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, London, 1967.Google Scholar

37 ‘The members of the Commune were divided into a majority, the Blan-quists, who had also been predominant in the Central Committee of the National Guard; and a minority: members of the International Working Men’s Association, chiefly consisting of adherents of the Proudhon school of socialism.’ Engels, Introduction to the Civil War, op. cit., p. 15. In reality, out of the 90 members of the Council, 16 were Internationalists, of whom according to Lefevbre (op. cit., p. 361) only two or three were ‘en rapport avec Marx’.

38 Who had used the Left-Communards to defeat the Right-Girondins, and then turned and crushed their former allies.

39 ‘The communes possessed extensive powers. It was through their agency that the departments and districts executed the laws and that the taxes were assessed and collected. They had the right to call out the National Guard and the troops. These two rights and especially the latter were to be operative in the storm of revolution.’ Mathiez, Albert, La devolution française, Paris, 1922–26.Google Scholar

40 In Lefevbre, op. cit., pp. 357–8.

41 Engels, Lenin and Trotsky all considered this as the proof that the Communards lacked in elementary revolutionary will.

42 ‘At the very moment when the Central Committee needed to develop as much as possible its initiative in the offensive, lacking the guidance of a proletarian party, it lost its head and hurried to transfer its power to the representatives of the Commune which needed a larger democratic basis. It was a great mistake during such a period to play with elections.’ Trotsky, Preface to Tales, C., La Commune de 1871, Paris, 1921, p. XVIII.Google Scholar ‘[Kautsky shows that] “the Paris Commune was a dictatorship of the proletariat but it was elected by universal suffrage, i.e. without depriving the bourgeoisie of the franchise … a condition which necessarily follows from pure democracy”. What have “pure democracy” and “universal suffrage” to do with it, when Paris was deciding the fate of France?’ (Lenin, ‘The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky’ in Lenin, Against Revisionism, pp. 380–1.)

43 Blanqui, Auguste, Textes choisis, ed. by Volguine, V. P., Paris, 1955.Google Scholar Dommanget, Maurice, Les idees politiques et sociales d’Auguste Blanqui, Paris, 1957 Google Scholar and Blanqui et l’opposition révolutionnaire, Paris, 1960; Spitzer, Alan B., The Revolutionary Theories of Blanqui, L. A., New York, 1957.Google Scholar

44 In Les idées … op. cit., p. 283.

45 Proudhon, P. J., Textes choisis, ed. by Lalugie, J., Paris, 1953 Google Scholar; Gurvitch, G., P. J. Proudhon, Paris, 1955.Google Scholar L’actualité de Proudhon (a symposium), Brussels, 1965, and Ansart, op. cit.

46 Bakounine, M., Oeuvres, Paris, 1934 Google Scholar; Carr, E. H., Michael Bakunin, London, 1937 Google Scholar; Joli, James, The Anarchists, London, 1955 Google Scholar; Guérin, Daniel, Les anarchistes, Paris, 1969.Google Scholar

47 Text in Ollivier, op. cit., pp. 261–2.

48 Marx, Karl, The Civil War in France, with an introduction by Engels, F., Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1933.Google Scholar

49 ‘Already in the Manifesto of the International, September 1870, Marx warned the French proletariat not to be carried away by the false national idea … But with all its errors, the Commune is the greatest example of the greatest proletarian movement of the 19th century. Marx valued very highly the historical importance of the Commune.’ Lenin, Lessons of the Commune, Appendix II, in Marx, Civil War, op. cil., pp. 79–80.

50 Avineri, S., The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx, Cambridge, 1968, p. 243.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

51 The manifesto of the Central Committee of 18 March 1871.

52 Engels’s preface to the English edition of 1888, p. 6.

53 Rémond, René, La vie politique en France, II, Paris, 1969, p. 282.Google Scholar

54 Meschkat, op. cit., pp. 64–83.

55 Ibid., p. 67.

58 ‘The “revolutionary commune” … is the name by which a certain workers’ government is known in history, a government that was unable to, and could not at that time, distinguish between the elements of a democratic revolution and a socialist revolution, a government that confused the tasks of fighting for a republic with those of fighting for socialism, was unable to launch an energetic military offensive against Versailles, made a mistake in failing to seize the Bank of France etc. In short, whether … your answer will be: it was a government such as ours should not be.’ (‘Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution’, Selected Works, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1969, pp. 101–2.)

57 On 3 September 1917, in his article ‘On Compromises’, published in September 1917, therefore a month before the revolution, Lenin wrote: ‘Every revolutionary worker and soldier will inevitably think about the Commune and believe in it; he will inevitably attempt to bring it about, for he will argue: “the people are perishing: war, famine and ruin are spreading. Only the Commune can save us. So let us all perish, let us die, but let us set up the Commune.” Such thoughts are inevitable with the workers and it will not be as easy to crush the Commune now as it was in 1871.’’In SelectedWorks, 1969, p. 355.

58 Collected Works, Vol. 28, pp. 385–492.

59 In his postscript to State and Revolution, when it appeared in 1918, Lenin wrote, ‘I was “interrupted” by a political crisis—the eve of the October Revolution of 1917. Such an interruption can only be welcomed; but the writing of the second part of the pamphlet (‘The experience of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917’) will probably have to be put off for a long time. It is more pleasant and useful to go through the “experience-of the revolution”-than to write about it,’ Collected Works, Vol. 25, p.492.

60 For a complete recapitulation of constitutional history see Denisov, P. and Kirichenko, M., Soviet State Law, Moscow, 1960 Google Scholar; Walter Pietsch, Revolution und Stoat, op. cit.; Gurvich, G. S., Istoriya sovetskoy komtitutsii, Moscow, 1923 Google Scholar; Romin, S. L., Pervaya konstitutsiya, Moscow, 1948 Google Scholar; Gorodetsky, E. N., Rozhdeniye sovetskogo gosudarstva, 1917–1918, Moscow, 1965 Google Scholar; and Iroshnikov, M. P., Sozdaniye sovetskogo tsentral’nogo gosudarstvennogo apparata, Moscow, 1966 Google Scholar. On this point I am also indebted to Roger Pethybridge for letting me see, before publication, his excellent essay on: ‘Petrograd and the Provinces’.

61 ‘How to Organize Competition’, in Lenin, V. I., On the Soviet State Apparatus, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1969 (quoted in future as OSS A), p. 115.Google Scholar

62 ‘Report on the Review of the Programme and on Changing the Name of the Party at the Seventh Extraordinary Congress of the RCP(B), 8 March 1918’, in OSS A., p. 130.

63 In OS’S A, pp. 121–3.

64 L. Schapiro, The Origin of the Communist Autocracy provides the most complete account of the Constituent Assembly, op. cit., pp. 80 ff.

65 Lenin, Against Revisionism, Moscow, 1966, p. 413.

66 Op. cit., p. 69.

67 OSSA, pp. 121–3.

68 ‘Out task is to study the state capitalism of the Germans, to spare no effort in copying it and not shrink from adopting dictatorial methods to hasten the copying of it. Our task is to hasten this copying even more than Peter hastened the copying of Western culture by barbarian Russia, and we must not hesitate to use barbarous methods in fighting barbarism.’ Lenin, ‘Left-wing Childishness and Petit Bourgeois Mentality’, May 1918, Selected Works, p. 444.

69 II (24) January 1918. OSSA, p. 125.

70 In ‘Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government’, OSSA, p. 154.

71 Carr, op. cit., Vol. III, p. 60.

72 From this latter point of view Meyer in Leninism, provides the following penetrating remark and an apposite citation: ‘In order to trace this development it is, perhaps, best to go back to the treaty of Brest-Litovsk because the controversy that arose among Lenin’s followers just before its conclusion provides the keynote for the emergence of Soviet patriotism’ (p. 218). And later (footnote, p. 263) Meyer shows that ‘after the conclusion of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, he (Lenin) wrote that this setback would only increase “our will to liberation, and endeavour to rise anew out of servitude to independence, our unbending decision to achieve at all costs that ‘Rus’ may no longer be miserable and powerless, that she may become mighty and rich in the full sense of the word” (‘The Main Task of our Days’, Vol. 22, pp. 376–77). Note (continues Meyer with restrained surprise) the use of the traditionalist, romantic name “Rus” for Russia; it rings strangely in the mouth of a social democrat.’ But why social democrat, and not as Lenin pretended to be, international communist?

73 ‘Remarks on the draft “Regulations for the management of nationalized enterprises’” in OSS A, p. 162.

74 The Origins, etc., p. 184.

75 Vol. I, p. 169.

76 See especially Schapiro, The Origins, pp. 152 and 185.

77 Its members were Sverdlov (president); M. N. Pokrovsky, V. A. Avanesov, A. I. Berdnikov, D. F. Bogolepov, I. V. Stalin, G. S. Gurvich, M. I. Latsis, D. A. Magerovsky, E. M. Skeyansky, A. P. Smirnov, Yu. Steklov, A. A. Sreider and last but not least, N. I. Bukharin and M. A. Reisner.

78 Pietsch, op. cit., p. 75. But in this context too Lenin’s ‘Left-wing Childishness’ and ‘The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet government’ throw invaluable light on his position against the left-wing communists and their general concern about the etatization of the revolution.

79 Carr, op. cit., I, p. 136; Gurvich, G. S., Istoriya sovetskoy konstitutsii, Moscow 1925.Google Scholar

80 Pietsch, op. cit., pp. 81–2. Using the more recent work by S. L. Romin (see footnote 62), Pietsch shows that the draft presented by Reisner on 10 April 1918 rejected the national principle and was based solely on the economic-territorial principle. As economic-territorial units, Reisner listed the following: (1) economic-social associations; trade unions, producers’ co-operatives, etc.; (2) communal associations (the Petrograd or the Kronstadt commune); (3) purely political organizations like legislative or executive organs. On 19 April, I. V. Stalin presented the counter-draft, based on the national territorial principle, which was afterwards adopted.

81 Ibid.

82 And here it is useful to remember that Lenin’s representative in that particular commission was Stalin. Yet the authorized Soviet authors, Denisov and Kirichenko, stress in 1960 that ‘an important part in the preparation of the draft constitution was played by a special commission with V. I. Lenin at the head, appointed by the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (bolsheviks). It amended the articles of the draft constitution submitted by the Constitution Commission of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee’ (op. cit., p. 41). The Soviet authors’ interpretation is confirmed by the fact that in those very days Lenin published his ‘The Next Task for the Soviet Government’ (see footnote 78) in which a strong national territorial organization was advocated as the means for building the ‘state capitalism’ he then acknowledged as the fundamental operation required by Russia.

83 A complete summing-up of the interpretations in Ulam, op. cit., pp. 424–7, concludes that it was on Lenin’s order.

84 It is only the 1923 Constitution which declares unambiguously, ‘The Union of Soviet: Socialist Republics’ is a single federal state’.

85 See Alfred Meyer’s remarks on this subject in Leninism, passim.

86 Daniels, R. V., The Conscience of the Revolution, New York, 1960 Google Scholar, is an attempt to retrace all the revolutionary oppositions against the revolution.

87 For the definition of oppositionless states see G. Ionescu and de Madari-aga, I., Opposition, London, 1967.Google Scholar