“LEFT-WING” COMMUNISM IS not only a correct definition of a petty bourgeois adventurist and terroristic deviation; it is not only the proposal of a Bolshevik model and the attempt to push for, in this way and in the short term, a formidable acceleration of the pace of the revolutionary process; it is not only even a series of exemplifications or applications of the Bolshevik model to the vicissitudes of class struggle and organization in Western European countries with the difficulties this entails. “Left-Wing” Communism is also the start of a new theme, the voluntary and decisive foreboding of a new cycle of struggles, the beginning of a discussion of the strategy, tactics, and organization of the international communist movement, not only as a repetition of the dialectical adventure of the capsizing and inversion of the relation between composition and organization or in the sense of, as we have already pointed out, an acceleration of the revolutionary pace in the short term on the basis of Lenin’s realization of the subjective transformations introduced by the Soviet triumph over class composition in advanced capitalist countries. There is more to it than this. We would like to trace, in “Left-Wing” Communism, a second stratum in his political proposal and analysis that coexists with what we have argued so far but is not homogeneous to it, because instead of assuming the question of the international revolution as a conclusion to be drawn from the Bolshevik model, Lenin develops his discussion starting from an original novum, from the new international working-class composition. From this standpoint, “Left-Wing” Communism contains cues for an analysis and proposal whose fecundity we can only fully appreciate today.
I am not trying to exaggerate Lenin’s new awareness, but he certainly has no doubts about the fact that the historical period from the Paris Commune to the First Soviet Socialist Republic has come to a close.1 There is more to this:
After the proletarian revolution in Russia and its victories on an international scale, which were unexpected for the bourgeoisie and the philistines, the whole world has changed, and the bourgeoisie has changed everywhere too. It is terrified of “Bolshevism,” incensed with it almost to the point of frenzy, and, precisely for that reason, it is, on the one hand, accelerating the progress of events and, on the other, concentrating attention on the suppression of Bolshevism by force, and thereby weakening its position in a number of other fields. The Communists in all advanced countries must take into account both these circumstances in their tactics.2
For this reason: “Unless we master all means of warfare, we may suffer grave, often even decisive, defeat if changes beyond our control in the position of the other classes bring to the forefront forms of activity in which we are particularly weak.”3
“Violence” and new “forms of activity” of the class adversary: on these terrains the communists, as the vanguard of the working class, must face the new cycles of struggle. Lenin’s possibilism has nothing to do with unilateral availability in questions of organization (with an obligatory complement of theoretical cynicism), but it is the armed awaiting for the opening of a new cycle.
If these are the terms of the question, then the strategic perspective and the theoretical outlook need to completely open up again and retrace the whole dialectical path of the program. Lenin’s insistence on the need to develop and reconstruct the particular character of the international strategic design4 must be read as being very different from the bureaucratic order of specializations mandated by the central committees of external offices. This insistence, preoccupation, and instance are rather an attempt to found, again, in the new situation of the initiative, an idea of class composition and to ground again the unique international task of communists in this idea of class composition and the concrete modes of its expression. If we return to Lenin’s study of dialectics, we could call this a search for the new “essence” of the movement, where by movement and essence we do not simply mean connection and coordination, but a new production of the revolutionary struggle. The conditions of the process are wholly material and consist in national particularities, and their driving force lies in the power of the working class. As Lenin writes: “The big, advanced capitalist countries are marching along this road much more rapidly than did Bolshevism, which history granted fifteen years to prepare itself, as an organized political trend, for victory.”5
To reinstate this: we are not exaggerating Lenin’s awareness. We are retracing a second stratum in his thought that is often suffocated by other exigencies. But there is a hugely fascinating element in this text. Not only, in a more or less determinate way, is the theoretical stance turned toward the refoundation of class composition as the fundamental and exemplary yet not paradigmatic term of the revolutionary process; the analysis also wants to become internal to this refoundation and focus on the decisive shift immediately:
Now all efforts, all attention, must be concentrated on the next step, which seems, and from a certain standpoint really is, less fundamental, but which, on the other hand, is actually closer to the practical carrying out of the task, namely: seeking the forms of transition or approach to the proletarian revolution. The proletarian vanguard has been won over ideologically. That is the main thing. Without this not even the first step towards victory can be made. But it is still a fairly long way from victory. Victory cannot be won with the vanguard alone. To throw the vanguard alone into the decisive battle, before the whole class, before the broad masses have taken up a position either of direct support of the vanguard, or at least of benevolent neutrality towards it, and one in which they cannot possibly support the enemy, would be not merely folly but a crime. And in order that actually the whole class, that actually the broad masses of the working people and those oppressed by capital may take up such a position, propaganda and agitation alone are not enough. For this the masses must have their own political experience. Such is the fundamental law of all great revolutions, now confirmed with astonishing force and vividness not only in Russia but also in Germany. Not only the uncultured, often illiterate, masses of Russia, but the highly cultured, entirely literate masses of Germany had to realize through their own painful experience the absolute impotence and spinelessness, the absolute helplessness and servility to the bourgeoisie, the utter vileness of the government of the knights of the Second International, the absolute inevitability of a dictatorship of the extreme reactionaries (Kornilov in Russia, Kapp and Co. in Germany) as the only alternative to a dictatorship of the proletariat, in order to turn them resolutely toward Communism.6
Despite the indeterminacy of the argument and its methodological tone, from stitching up the fabric of class composition some important indications of the struggle of the new cycle emerge. The first element is “the political experience of the masses”; the second is the insistence on the “last and decisive struggle” to which the masses are called and to which they must come. Behind these indications a new subject begins to emerge in relation to the Russian experience and the Bolshevik model, and this subject is a mass subject capable of communism. The modes of the tactics then must start from this new composition and a more mature subject that is to be transformed by it. Lenin’s attention increasingly moves from observation and suggestions relative to tactical shifts between democratic struggle and socialist struggle, between economic and political struggle, to an extremely robust and destructive concept of anticapitalist workers’ struggle.
In starting from the new workers’ subject, what interests Lenin is not the disquisition over democracy and socialism that typified the previous cycle of struggle: here workers’ struggle can strike at the heart of capital and use the crisis against it. An anticapitalist use of the crisis to the end:
The fundamental law of revolution, which has been confirmed by all revolutions, and particularly by all three Russian revolutions in the twentieth century, is as follows: it is not enough for revolution that the exploited and oppressed masses should understand the impossibility of living in the old way and demand changes; it is essential for revolution that the exploiters should not be able to live and rule in the old way. Only when the “lower classes” do not want the old way, and when the “upper classes” cannot carry on in the old way—only then can revolution triumph. This truth may be expressed in other words: revolution is impossible without a nation-wide crisis (affecting both the exploited and the exploiters). It follows that for revolution it is essential, first, that a majority of the workers (or at least a majority of the class-conscious, thinking, politically active workers) should fully understand that revolution is necessary and be ready to sacrifice their lives for it; secondly, that the ruling classes should be passing through a governmental crisis, which draws even the most backward masses into politics (a symptom of every real revolution is a rapid, tenfold and even hundredfold increase in the number of members of the toiling and oppressed masses—hitherto apathetic—who are capable of waging the political struggle), weakens the government and makes it possible for the revolutionaries to overthrow it rapidly.7
But this is not sufficient. Retracing this second stratum of “Left-Wing” Communism, one comes to think that the rules of tactics and strategy change radically not only in the face of the main moments of the crisis (workers’ use of the crisis, direct communist struggle), but also in their entire development. In the new cycle of struggles, on the basis of a new workers’ subject, the gradualism of tactics and the party seems to wane. The inversion of the relation between composition and organization given in October seems by now to be embodied in the new class composition. Therefore it is the accumulation of struggles and their adding-up to become a cycle, all against capital and not focused on various shifts but on the decisive shift, that is what interests Lenin. Workers’ struggle matures the capitalist shifts and exposes capital to the harshest of offensives: “Victorious tsardom is compelled to accelerate the destruction of the remnants of the pre-bourgeois, patriarchal mode of life in Russia. The country’s development along bourgeois lines proceeds with remarkable speed. Extra-class and above-class illusions, illusions concerning the possibility of avoiding capitalism, are scattered to the winds. The class struggle manifests itself in quite a new and more distinct form.”8 Hence the “astonishing richness of content”9 of the struggles explodes and turns to directly revolutionary objectives:
Because in the era of imperialism generally, and especially now, after the war, which was a torment to the peoples and quickly opened their eyes to the truth (viz., that tens of millions were killed and maimed only for the purpose of deciding whether the British or the German pirates should plunder the largest number of countries), all these spheres of social life are being especially charged with inflammable material and are creating numerous causes of conflicts, crises and the accentuation of the class struggle. We do not and cannot know which spark—of the innumerable sparks that are flying around in all countries as a result of the economic and political world crisis—will kindle the conflagration, in the sense of specially rousing the masses, and we must, therefore, with the aid of our new, communist principles, set to work to “stir up” all and sundry, even the oldest, mustiest and seemingly hopeless spheres, for otherwise we shall not be able to cope with our tasks, we shall not be comprehensively prepared, we shall not master all arms and we shall not prepare ourselves to achieve either the victory over the bourgeoisie (which arranged all sides of social life—and has now disarranged them—in its bourgeois way) or the impending communist reorganization of every sphere of life after that victory.10
Tactics and strategy are rooted in a new subject capable of communism and of the last and decisive shift. The emphasis is on spontaneity, development, and a variety of forms of struggle, on the cumulative character they reveal in the middle term, on the destructive character they make explicit in periods of crisis. What about organization? We have two considerations on this issue. The first is what Lenin regards as “fully completed,” the historical period in which “the opinion we have always advocated, namely, that revolutionary German Social-Democracy, … came closest to being the party which the revolutionary proletariat required in order to attain victory.”11 The second consideration is that “now the idea of Soviet power has arisen all over the world and is spreading among the proletariat of all countries with extraordinary speed.”12 Well, organization must change to reflect these considerations. We must not repeat the “dialectical errors” committed by the leaders of the Second International:
They fully appreciated the need for flexible tactics; they learned themselves and taught others Marxist dialectics (and much of what they have done in this respect will forever remain a valuable contribution to socialist literature); but in the application of these dialectics they committed such a mistake, or proved in practice to be so un-dialectical, so incapable of taking into account the rapid change of forms and the rapid acquiring of new content by the old forms, that their fate is not much more enviable than that of Hyndman, Guesde and Plekhanov. The principal reason for their bankruptcy was that they were “enchanted” by one definite form of growth of the working-class movement and Socialism, they forgot all about the one-sidedness of this form, they were afraid of seeing the sharp break which objective conditions made inevitable, and continued to repeat simple, routine, and, at a first glance, in contestable truths, such as: “three is more than two.” But politics is more like algebra than arithmetic; and still more like higher mathematics than elementary mathematics. In reality, all the old forms of the socialist movement have acquired a new content, and, consequently, a new sign, the “minus” sign, has appeared in front of all the figures; but our wiseacres stubbornly continued (and still continue) to persuade themselves and others that “minus three” is more than “minus two”!13
Organization must change too and become adequate to the new contents of class composition. Obviously, on this second stratum of “Left-Wing” Communism, the linearity of the argumentation is often suffocated by the needs of the movement, such as when Lenin places trust in the hope that old organizations can be seized again:
The old forms have burst asunder, for it has turned out that their new content—an anti-proletarian and reactionary content—had attained inordinate development. Today our work has, from the standpoint of the development of international Communism, such a durable, strong and powerful content (for Soviet power, for the dictatorship of the proletariat) that it can and must manifest itself in every form, both new and old, it can and must regenerate, conquer and subjugate all forms, not only the new, but also the old—not for the purpose of reconciling itself with the old, but for the purpose of making all and every form—new and old—a weapon for the complete, final, decisive and irrevocable victory of Communism.14
But this cannot hide the intensity and novelty of the dialectical path, from new composition to new organization, which, if not described, is at least alluded to in this second stratum of “Left-Wing” Communism. Again, once the Bolshevik ability to anticipate and lead has ceased, workers’ struggle has to accomplish the philological labor of reading Lenin and filling his allusions with explosive contents. Our philology, too, is grounded in this new workers’ struggle, in this new cycle of struggles, and in its new organization.
NOTES
1. V. I. Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism, an Infantile Disorder (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1970), 19ff.