LENIN’S PAMPHLET STARTS with an irrefutable definition of left-wing communism, a definition that is still valid today, if we substitute some of its terms, and that is grounded in the experience of struggle of the Russian party outlined in both its material origins and its theoretical and practical character. Let us read the definition:
It is far from sufficiently known as yet abroad that Bolshevism grew up, took shape, and became steeled in long years of struggle against petty-bourgeois revolutionism, which smacks of, or borrows something from, anarchism, and which falls short, in anything essential, of the conditions and requirements of a consistently proletarian class struggle. For Marxists, it is well established theoretically—and the experience of all European revolutions and revolutionary movements has fully confirmed it—that the small owner, the small master (a social type that is represented in many European countries on a very wide, a mass scale), who under capitalism always suffers oppression and, very often, an incredibly acute and rapid deterioration in his conditions, and ruin, easily goes to revolutionary extremes, but is incapable of perseverance, organization, discipline and steadfastness. The petty bourgeois “driven to frenzy” by the horrors of capitalism is a social phenomenon which, like anarchism, is characteristic of all capitalist countries. The instability of such revolutionism, its barrenness, its liability to become swiftly transformed into submission, apathy, fantasy, and even a “frenzied” infatuation with one or another bourgeois “fad”—all this is a matter of common knowledge. But a theoretical, abstract recognition of these truths does not at all free revolutionary parties from old mistakes, which always crop up at unexpected moments, in a somewhat new form, in hitherto unknown vestments or surroundings, in a peculiar—more or less peculiar—situation. Anarchism was not infrequently a sort of punishment for the opportunist sins of the working-class movement. The two monstrosities were mutually complementary. And the fact that in Russia, although her population is more petty bourgeois than that of the European countries, anarchism exercised a relatively negligible influence in the preparations for and during both revolutions (1905 and 1917) must undoubtedly be partly placed to the credit of Bolshevism, which has always combated opportunism ruthlessly and uncompromisingly. I say “partly,” for a still more important role in weakening the influence of anarchism in Russia was played by the fact that in the past (in the seventies of the nineteenth century) it had had the opportunity to develop with exceptional luxuriance and to display its utter fallaciousness and unfitness as a guiding theory for the revolutionary class. At its inception in 1903, Bolshevism took over the tradition of ruthless struggle against petty-bourgeois, semi-anarchist (or dilettante-anarchist) revolutionism, the tradition which has always existed in revolutionary Social-Democracy, and became particularly strong in 1900–03, when the foundations for a mass party of the revolutionary proletariat were being laid in Russia. Bolshevism took over and continued the struggle against the party which more than any other expressed the tendencies of petty-bourgeois revolutionism, namely, the “Socialist-Revolutionary” Party, and waged this struggle on three main points. First, this party, rejecting Marxism, stubbornly refused (or, it would be more correct to say: was unable) to understand the need for a strictly objective appraisal of the class forces and their interrelations before undertaking any political action. Secondly, this party considered itself to be particularly “revolutionary,” or “Left,” because of its recognition of individual terror, assassination—a thing which we Marxists emphatically rejected. Of course, we rejected individual terror only on grounds of expediency, whereas people who were capable of condemning “on principle” the terror of the Great French Revolution, or in general, the terror employed by a victorious revolutionary party which is besieged by the bourgeoisie of the whole world, were ridiculed and laughed to scorn already by Plekhanov, in 1900–03, when he was a Marxist and a revolutionary. Thirdly, the “Socialist-Revolutionaries” thought it very “Left” to sneer at comparatively insignificant opportunist sins of the German Social-Democratic Party, while they themselves imitated the extreme opportunists of that party, for example, on the agrarian question, or on the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat.1
The lack of method in the revolutionary analysis of the political composition of class; the tendency toward fanatical and individualist leftism and terrorism; opportunism and the absence of a party perspective on crucial questions: these are the features Lenin ascribes to extremism and they are still current. Its origins are all petit bourgeois, its motivations desperate, and its extraneousness to the dialectics of collective practice total. The rogue character of extremism could not be better defined than by an explicit association with the definition of the material condition of uprootedness and precariousness of the petty bourgeoisie, of the “small masters” in whatever figure they present themselves: Lenin underlines its difference from the political comportment of the working class efficiently and truthfully. Our experience of these years and beyond has verified the validity of Lenin’s definition.2 The greatest danger for communism is failing to follow and carry out a class analysis of its motivations when it is politically necessary, or failing to develop the most rigorous and constant procedure of its criticism and self-criticism.
Lenin’s argument proceeds and extends in the rest of the pamphlet, tracing the reconstruction of two experiences of struggle against left-wing deviations within the party from the definition of extremism and a recounting of the struggle against social revolutionary extremism outside the party. The two examples recalled are a discussion from 1908 on the question of participation in an ultrareactionary parliament and in the legal societies subjected to ultrareactionary laws, and the debate in 1918 (the Brest peace) on the question of allowing for some compromises. Lenin’s analysis of these two cases develops the criteria of the definition of “extremism” outlined earlier. In both instances, the deviation consisted in failing to reconnect the ability of decision and the political line with a determinate analysis of class composition, and in subsequently giving rise to comportments and perspectives, in the case of the comrades fallen into deviation, of adventurism and opportunism.
The first case concerns the question of sabotage. In 1905 Bolsheviks had boycotted parliament:
At that time the boycott proved correct, not because non-participation in reactionary parliaments is correct in general, but because we correctly gauged the objective situation which was leading to the rapid transformation of the mass strikes into a political strike, then into a revolutionary strike, and then into uprising. Moreover, the struggle at that time centered on the question whether to leave the convocation of the first representative assembly to the tsar, or to attempt to wrest its convocation from the hands of the old regime. When there was no certainty, nor could there be, that the objective situation was analogous, and likewise no certainty of a similar trend and rate of development, the boycott ceased to be correct. The Bolshevik boycott of “parliament” in 1905 enriched the revolutionary proletariat with highly valuable political experience and showed that in combining legal with illegal, parliamentary with extra-parliamentary forms of struggle, it is sometimes useful and even essential to reject parliamentary forms. But it is a very great mistake indeed to apply this experience blindly, imitatively and uncritically to other conditions and to other situations. The boycott of the “Duma” by the Bolsheviks in 1906 was, however, a mistake, although a small and easily remediable one. A boycott of the Duma in 1907, 1908 and subsequent years would have been a serious mistake and one difficult to remedy, because, on the one hand, a very rapid rise of the revolutionary tide and its conversion into an uprising could not be expected, and, on the other hand, the whole historical situation attending the renovation of the bourgeois monarchy called for combining legal and illegal activities. Today, when we turn back at this completed historical period, the connection of which with subsequent periods is fully revealed, it becomes particularly clear that the Bolsheviks could not have in 1908–14 preserved (let alone strengthened, developed and reinforced) the firm core of the revolutionary party of the proletariat had they not upheld in strenuous struggle the viewpoint that it is obligatory to combine legal and illegal forms of struggle, that it is obligatory to participate even in a most reactionary parliament and in a number of other institutions restricted by reactionary laws (sick benefit societies, etc.).3
Clearly the crux of the argument is established in the relation between class composition and revolutionary objectives, the keeping of the main means of revolutionary action.
The same applies to the analysis of the second case, the discussion on Brest in 1918.4 Lenin’s argument digs deeper into the terms of the definition of extremism and reinstates the more general aspects of its methodology and political critique. The certainty of the analysis of its character and the power relations of the political composition of the Russian proletariat determines adequate steps and adequately defines not only the currency of these deviations but also some important lines along which they can reproduce themselves: “But anyone who set out to invent a recipe for the workers that would provide in advance readymade solutions for all cases in life, or who promised that the policy of the revolutionary proletariat would never encounter difficult or intricate situations, would simply be a charlatan.”5 Having examined Lenin’s definition of the concept of extremism in relation to the politics of the Russian party, we move closer to the core concern of the pamphlet. This is a polemic against the extremism of the comrades in Western Europe and a clarification of the equilibrium between the Bolshevik model and the revolutionary program adequate to the political class composition in Western Europe. In light of this statement and of all of Lenin’s method, the analysis and polemic are intended to be internal, commensurate, and adequate to the object, which is the revolutionary movement in Europe. The definition of extremism based on the model and past history of the Bolshevik Party must become exemplary of the current vicissitudes of communist internationalism. By “exemplary” we mean the realization of a party line that is rigorous but not schematic. Does Lenin’s exemplification achieve its aim? This is what we need to ask.
The first target of Lenin’s polemic is the line of left-wing communists in Germany.6 It is not difficult for him to approach their kind polemically: too much talk, doctrine, intellectually rigid alternatives, and utopianism. Lenin’s black beast, the focus of his polemic, is clarified soon enough: it is the absurd and ridiculous subversion operated by left-wing communists of the right polemics against the corrupt heads of social democracy (the representatives of the labor aristocracy) and the counterpositing of the dictatorship of the masses to the dictatorship of the leaders. The consequences are extremely serious, since they imply a simultaneous underestimation of the power of the adversary that leads to the renunciation of the only valid means of struggle, the centralized Bolshevik Party, as well as to an overestimation of the power of the masses, of their spontaneity and closeness to communism:
Repudiation of the party principle and of party discipline—such is the opposition’s net result. And this is tantamount to completely disarming the proletariat in the interest of the bourgeoisie. It is tantamount to that petty-bourgeois diffuseness, instability, incapacity for sustained effort, unity and organized action, which, if indulged in, must inevitably destroy every proletarian revolutionary movement. From the standpoint of Communism, the repudiation of the party principle means trying to leap from the eve of the collapse of capitalism (in Germany), not to the lower, or the intermediate, but to the higher phase of Communism. We in Russia (in the third year since the overthrow of the bourgeoisie) are going through the first steps in the transition from capitalism to Socialism, or the lower stage of Communism. Classes have remained, and will remain everywhere for years after the conquest of power by the proletariat. Perhaps in England, where there is no peasantry (but where there are small owners!), this period may be shorter. The abolition of classes means not only driving out the landlords and capitalists—that we accomplished with comparative ease—it also means abolishing the small commodity producers, and they cannot be driven out, or crushed; we must live in harmony with them; they can (and must) be remolded and re-educated only by very prolonged, slow, cautious organizational work. They encircle the proletariat on every side with a petty-bourgeois atmosphere, which permeates and corrupts the proletariat and causes constant relapses among the proletariat into petty-bourgeois spinelessness, disunity, individualism, and alternate moods of exaltation and dejection. The strictest centralization and discipline are required within the political party of the proletariat in order to counteract this, in order that the organizational role of the proletariat (and that is its principal role) may be exercised correctly, successfully, victoriously. The dictatorship of the proletariat is a persistent struggle—bloody and bloodless, violent and peaceful, military and economic, educational and administrative—against the forces and traditions of the old society. The force of habit of millions and tens of millions is a most terrible force. Without an iron party tempered in the struggle, without a party enjoying the confidence of all that is honest in the given class, without a party capable of watching and influencing the mood of the masses, it is impossible to conduct such a struggle successfully. It is a thousand times easier to vanquish the centralized big bourgeoisie than to “vanquish” the millions and millions of small owners; yet they, by their ordinary, everyday, imperceptible, elusive, demoralizing activity, achieve the very results which the bourgeoisie need and which tend to restore the bourgeoisie. Whoever weakens ever so little the iron discipline of the party of the proletariat (especially during the time of its dictatorship) actually aids the bourgeoisie against the proletariat.7
This is beautiful passage. Here Lenin comes to the realization that the process of the withering-away of the state is one of the destruction of the mechanisms of the production and reproduction of the power of capital at a level that was not found even in The State and Revolution. But are the application of the Russian model and its exemplification really adequate to the German situation?
The polemic against the left-wing communists, whether German or not, moves onto another level: “Should revolutionaries work in reactionary trade unions?”8 Now Lenin does not mystify in any way the debate on the union. We know these passages and have often gone back to them in our conversations: that “certain reactionary character” of the union; or worse, that Mensheviks and social chauvinists, who represented a “craft-union, narrow-minded, selfish, casehardened, covetous, petty-bourgeois ‘labor aristocracy,’ imperialist-minded, imperialist bribed and imperialist-corrupted,”9 were nested in the unions as real “labor lieutenants of the capitalist class” (to use Daniel De Leon’s terms), cannot be denied. But why draw from this recognition a renunciation of practice? Why reject the Bolshevik teaching to “imperatively work wherever the masses are to be found”?10 And, worst of all, why use nonsensical arguments, such as the proposal of radically new and radically democratic means, in the mass reality of the union? In this case, as in the polemic against the “leaders,” tactical mistakes are followed by strategic and theoretical ones, the underestimation of the enemy and the overestimation of one’s own strengths:
And we cannot but regard as equally ridiculous and childish nonsense the pompous, very learned, and frightfully revolutionary disquisitions of the German Lefts to the effect that Communists cannot and should not work in reactionary trade unions, that it is permissible to turn down such work, that it is necessary to leave the trade unions and to create an absolutely brand-new, immaculate “Workers’ Union” invented by very nice (and, probably, for the most part very youthful) Communists, etc., etc. Capitalism inevitably leaves Socialism the legacy, on the one hand, of old trade and craft distinctions among the workers, distinctions evolved in the course of centuries; and, on the other hand, trade unions which only very slowly, in the course of years and years, can and will develop into broader, industrial unions with less of the craft union about them (embracing whole industries, and not only crafts, trades and occupations), and later proceed, through these industrial unions, to eliminate the division of labor among people, to educate, school and train people with an all-round development and an all-round training, people who know how to do everything. Communism is advancing and must advance towards this goal, and will reach it, but only after very many years. To attempt in practice today to anticipate this future result of a fully developed, fully stabilized and formed, fully expanded and mature Communism would be like trying to teach higher mathematics to a four-year-old child. We can (and must) begin to build Socialism, not with imaginary human material, nor with human material specially prepared by us, but with the human material bequeathed to us by capitalism. True, that is very “difficult,” but no other approach to this task is serious enough to warrant discussion.11
Lenin’s writing is powerful for its realism and argumentative force. We must emphasize that he is attempting to present his own material investigation while faced with the roughness and soliciting coming from the left-wing communists of Western Europe. Lenin always tries to take into account the new situation of transition when facing both Russian and European debates, and is highly aware of the identity of the overall power relations dominating both camps. Let us read two more passages from this text:
After the first socialist revolution of the proletariat, after the overthrow of the bourgeoisie in one country, the proletariat of that country for a long time remains weaker than the bourgeoisie, simply because of the latter’s extensive international connections, and also because of the spontaneous and continuous restoration and regeneration of capitalism and the bourgeoisie by the small commodity producers of the country which has overthrown the bourgeoisie. The more powerful enemy can be vanquished only by exerting the utmost effort, and without fail, most thoroughly, carefully, attentively and skillfully using every, even the smallest, “rift” among the enemies, of every antagonism of interest 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 every, even the smallest, opportunity of gaining a mass ally even though this ally be temporary, vacillating, unstable, unreliable and conditional. Those who fail to understand this fail to understand even a particle of Marxism, or of scientific, modern Socialism in general. Those who have not proved by deeds over a fairly considerable period of time, and in fairly varied political situations, their ability to apply this truth in practice have not yet learned to assist the revolutionary class in its struggle to emancipate all toiling humanity from the exploiters. And this applies equally to the period before and after the proletariat has conquered political power.12
Therefore:
As long as the bourgeoisie has not been overthrown, and after that as long as small-scale economy and small commodity production have not entirely disappeared, the bourgeois atmosphere, proprietary habits and petty-bourgeois traditions will hamper proletarian work both outside and inside the working-class movement, not only in one field of activity, parliamentary, but inevitably in every field of social activity, in all cultural and political spheres without exception. And the attempt to brush aside, to fence oneself off from one of the “unpleasant” problems or difficulties in one sphere of activity is a profound mistake, which will later most certainly have to be paid for. We must study and learn how to master every sphere of work and activity without exception, to overcome all difficulties and all bourgeois habits, customs and traditions everywhere. Any other way of presenting the question is just trifling, just childishness.13
If all these issues are rejected, if one refuses to use all means and move in every field or rejects the long battle internal to the ranks of the proletariat to change the current power relations, then one will “think it possible to ‘solve’ the difficult problem of combating bourgeois-democratic influences within the working-class movement by such a ‘simple,’ ‘easy,’ supposedly revolutionary method, when in reality they are only running away from their own shadow, only closing their eyes to difficulties and only trying to brush them aside with mere words.”14
But is this new exemplification of the Bolshevik proposal for Europe, one that implicitly dwells on the issues pertaining to Bolshevik theory and dramatically points to the commonality of the problem of the transition in Russia as in Europe, adequate to the needs of the German and European comrades?
The question becomes serious, and it is appropriate for us to try to answer it. From a relatively personal point of view, I must immediately clarify that from the first readings of “Left-Wing” Communism I have always had the impression that, despite everything, there lies in the roughness of the German comrades a dark prediction of a state of class struggle that was irreducible to the Bolshevik experience. In fact, German communists struggled against a social democracy that was not only a conglomerate of corrupt leaders, a whole of representatives of the labor aristocracy, but also a formidable mechanism of capitalist integration, a direct instrument for the social reproduction of capitalist relations that had very relevant functions, a slow but sure step in the capitalist pace toward its restructuring into social capital. In fact, German, Dutch, and English communists could not fight, along the ridge of tradition, for the democracy that followed: unions, parties, and other representative institutions were actually becoming necessary moments of integration, moments of a system of new formation of the social legitimacy of capital. Only by directly putting a strain on the mechanisms of representation, breaking them, opening a political space directly to the action of the workers’ variable could they hope to seize, in the medium-to-long term, a dimension of offensive and adequate revolutionary theory. What could the polemic of “Left-Wing” Communism mean to these comrades? Didn’t it end up configuring, for them, when they were faced with the problems that arose from the capitalist response, a position external to the needs gathered from the working-class composition in which they operated? Didn’t “Left-Wing” Communism present itself to them more as a conclusion to the Russian debate on insurrection than as the beginning of a determinate analysis of the opening of the revolutionary process in Western Europe?
And wasn’t it the case that the ongoing capitalist initiative could only be anticipated by insisting precisely on the new form of organization of the base, on the opening-up of a process of struggles not in the union, but antiunion? Wasn’t the refusal of the centers of state political mediation, either as centers of denunciation or as centers of propaganda, actually setting off a process of reappropriation and a mass defense of spaces of power?
This is one impression. If this were the case, “Left-Wing” Communism would be a dead work; its efficacy would simply amount to the moralist appeal to and soliciting of the activism of the militant cadres. But this is not the case. “Left-Wing” Communism is also something else: the attempt to accelerate the pace of the revolutionary process through the revolutionary exporting of a victorious model, the attempt to invert the relation between composition and organization in the countries of Western Europe. Above all, “Left-Wing” Communism, for Lenin, is the will to play out, in the short term, the process of the international revolution. From this standpoint, the serious limitations of its prediction are obvious, as are the limits of its adequacy to the single class compositions in the short term. But this does not mean that these limits were not real, and that, once Lenin’s own ability to directly lead the project waned, these would not come to the fore and determine significant conditions in the tragedy of the years of the 1920s and the 1930s.
In the long term, the correctness of the definition of “left-wing” communism as a petty bourgeois phenomenon ended up being confounded with ambiguous exemplifications and, beyond Lenin’s direction of the Communist International, was undoubtedly reduced to an instrument of repression. This became confused, and again, anarchism came to represent “a sort of punishment for the opportunist sins of the working-class movement.”15 Today, however, we are in the position to recover the correctness of Lenin’s definition of extremism as a petty bourgeois ideology without falling into the quicksand of traditional exemplifications. And the more we recover this radical cleaning operation in Leninism, the more we will take into account another series of motivations of “Left-Wing” Communism that leads to defining the most profound and truest moments of Bolshevism as a weapon of proletarian subversion.
NOTES
1. V. I. Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism, an Infantile Disorder (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1970), 16–18.
2. For a series of references to “Left-Wing” Communism, some adequate and matured in a long vicissitude of struggles, see A. Bordiga, “Estremismo malattia infantile del comunismo,” Condanna dei futuri rinnegati [“Left-Wing” Communism, an Infantile Disorder: a condemnation of futures disowned] (Milan: Edizioni Il programma comunista, 1973).
3. Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism, 20. On the boycott, see also p. 122ff.
4. Ibid., 22, and also, on the question of “compromises,” p. 62ff.