The Communists, therefore, are practically the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others…
—The Communist Manifesto†
The recent railroad strike in Russia, which suddenly brought about a new turn in the course of the revolution, has now moved off stage for the time being. With that, a particular phase of the revolution has come to a close. The question is this: what situation has now been created and what further course of events is to be expected?
Observed superficially, the tsarist empire at this moment presents the appearance of being a wasteland of chaos, a hodgepodge of highly contradictory phenomena, in which the bourgeois press wanders erratically, including the German liberal press with its customary tendency to lose its head [Kopflosigkeit], to rejoice all filled with hope at every news report about the “endeavors” of its beloved Witte, and immediately thereafter to again shut down, deeply disturbed at the news of another pogrom against the Jews. In reality, the outward-appearing chaos of conditions in Russia is only a characteristically adequate expression of the particular internal relations that have been created during the last two weeks among the existing social and political forces.
The railroad strike, which became the signal for a universal walkout in all the cities of the giant empire, demolished with a single blow the latest attempt of absolutism to hide itself behind the spindly frame of a “Duma” constitution. The tsarist government was forced by the colossal and unanimous onslaught of the working class, whose general strike brought all the machinery of state and all of public life to a standstill—forced to come out with wide-ranging promises of real parliamentary liberties, but by that very action, absolutism actually submitted its resignation. With this latest constitutional manifesto—even though it remains merely a piece of paper—it gave notice of its own bankruptcy as a system of government. This piece of paper is not really the proclamation of a constitution, but it is a statement of abdication.
Absolutism has abdicated. It no longer exists in reality. But the political form that the new Russia will and must take has not yet been decided. And this is surely not so because of Mr. Witte along with [Ivan Logginovich] Goremykin or some other “worthy gentleman” of that sort—it is not because they have failed to make themselves clear or because “someone” in Peterhof has “lost his head,” as the Mosse press groans despairingly.*
The power relations among classes and parties do not give a damn about the petty scoundrels of the court camarilla and their lively games of intrigue because those power relations are caught up in a rapid and shifting process of change. The new Russia, as a social and political construction on which the political constitution will be fastened like a fully finished roof, is now caught up in a process of becoming. And this process of inner differentiation and clarification has been given a powerful push forward by the railroad strike and the general strike.
The moderately liberal, constitutional-monarchist zemstvo party—which was always available and willing to engage in horse-trading with absolutism, and which was pushed to the fore during the recent period (when a relatively moderate atmosphere of calm prevailed and the street revolution experienced a lull)—has now suddenly been shoved into the background again. The “statesmanlike wisdom” and “moderation” of the liberals falls silent, terrified by the powerful entrance which “the street” has made upon the scene.
The intermediate stratum of radical-democratic bourgeois intelligentsia has been swept along together with the onslaught of the workers. Today the intelligentsia energetically supports the general strike of the proletariat and its radical demands.
The recent battles have so greatly altered the physiognomy of the opposing camps that today the call for universal, direct, and equal suffrage is a firm demand advocated by all oppositional parties.
But the working class, for its part, has at the same time been pushed further ahead with a powerful thrust, by its own movement of the last few weeks. Because of the inner logic of the struggle, the action of the proletariat, its demands, and its conduct have become ever-more determined and radical. The demand for a republic has now come to the forefront of proletarian action. Whereas in the previous period, from January to October, the convening of a Constituent Assembly based on universal suffrage was the watchword of the mass movement, the central slogan is now a republican form of government. Of course, the call for a republic was always part of the program of the Social Democratic parties, from long ago, and was always faithfully referred to in the writings and speeches of Social Democracy.* For the masses, however, and in the living struggle, this demand was for the time being a kind of schematic abstraction devoid of substance. Only the forward strides of the revolution itself, and the leftward shift of the whole situation, have driven the proletariat en masse beyond the initial demand for universal suffrage and a Constituent Assembly and have made the demand for a republic the focal point of the struggle today.
On the one hand, it is precisely the political freedoms authoritatively won in the streets by the proletariat itself and already put into practice—it is because of these that the mere slogan “Constituent Assembly” has been bypassed. In the most important large cities and industrial centers, the working class has already realized for itself the most elementary rights and freedoms that were expected from the Constituent Assembly. Unrestricted mass gatherings, giant demonstrations, speeches made directly to the people, Social Democratic writings openly produced and distributed, the Social Democratic parties coming forward openly as legally recognized powers, and here and there, for example in the Sosnowiec coal basin, a literal dictatorship of the working class—all these [realities] have with compelling logic driven the working class toward ever-more radical and resolute demands.
On the other hand, Social Democracy instinctively and in accordance with its nature takes up the sharpest demands, makes its political position and its demands as sharply pointed as possible in order to maintain its role as the force that drives all others onward, in distinction from the bourgeois-liberal and democratic groups. On the basis of the demand for a republic, it can be expected that subsequent struggles between parties and classes, between the working class on the one hand and the bourgeois liberals on the other, will be the ground on which the battle will be fought.
To the philistine, the demand for a republic in yesterday’s empire of the tsars surely appears unrealistic and foolhardy. To the so-called “practical politician” and Social Democratic “statesman,” it is an irresponsibly “dogmatic form of fanaticism.” Many a Western Social Democrat until recently still regarded it as the task of the working class to serve as a support and stabilizer for anxious and jittery Russian liberalism and to console itself with the melancholy realization that in the present period, after all, it is the bourgeoisie and not the proletariat which has been decreed by fate and divine providence to assume political power.†
This statesmanlike wisdom is dictated from the perspective of the small frog in the pond, as it has shown itself to be in the present struggle as in every other previous one. Obviously, to the fighting proletariat in Russia it does not occur for an instant that it is on the verge of winning some sort of socialist paradise. Rather, it understands very well that on the day after the revolution the helm of state will fall into the hands of those who are now parasites upon the revolution, the bourgeoisie and the nobility.
However, it is the inner logic of the events themselves that pushes the fighting proletariat onward to express its radical class position in the form of ever sharper and more determined political demands and in this way to drive the bourgeois opposition forward as far as possible, to the outermost point reachable by the revolutionary wave. And you know, if one follows attentively the course of the Russian Revolution up until now, everything has gone literally according to the old, much-pooh-poohed “schema” of Marxism. It is nothing other than the very politics of Marx taken from the Communist Manifesto and from the March Revolution of 1848, which before our eyes sixty years later is becoming reality in Russia, together with “vestiges of Blanquism,” and the “utopian” demand for a republic.
Still there remains the inexhaustible treasure of political lessons that can be taken from the flying sparks of the Russian Revolution, lessons that have not yet been learned by the international proletariat. But the self-evident history of this revolution already speaks with a voice of thunder—the voice of Marx. And whoever has lost the ability to understand and recognize the living truth of Marx’s spirit here in the sandy wastes of bourgeois parliamentarianism has only to go there to learn in Russia!