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Karl Kautsky as Architect of the October Revolution: Part 2

John Riddell

1917: The Bolsheviks Apply Kautsky’s Tactics

Lenin remained true to the tactical ideas of Karl Kautsky after the latter had abandoned them.

By Lars T. Lih

Lars T. Lih

As we have seen, the Bolsheviks came into 1917 with two pieces of Kautsky advice firmly under their belts: enlist the peasantry as a revolutionary ally, and do not deviate from militant anti-agreementism. In order to see how this advice played out in 1917, we need first to dispense with a couple of will-o’-the-wisps about the October revolution.

What the 1917 Revolution Was Not

In his Jacobin article [republished on this blog], Eric Blanc states the following: “Following Lenin’s arguments in his 1917 pamphlet State and Revolution, Leninists for decades have hinged their strategy on the need for an insurrection to overthrow the entire parliamentary state and to place all power into the hands of workers’ councils.”

This remark brings together not one, but two, deep-rooted misconceptions about 1917: first, that a clash between two types of democracy—parliamentary vs soviet—as found in the pages of State and Revolution, had anything to do with the October victory or the politics of the revolutionary year. (State and Revolution was drafted in 1917 but only published in 1918 and it is irrelevant to the events of the previous year.) Second, that the Bolsheviks took power by means of an “insurrection,” “armed uprising,” or whatever. Let us consider.

“All power to the Soviets!” — this was the rallying cry of 1917. But “soviet” here expresses merely the institutional form of class power. “Soviet power” meant a vlast (sovereign authority or “power”) based on the workers and peasants. No one particularly cared about how much more democratic the soviets were as opposed to parliamentary democracy — these concerns were pretty much confined to Lenin, and even he downplayed them in 1917 (compare State and Revolution to writings published in 1917 such as Can the Bolsheviks Hold State Power [vlast]?). The Bolshevik message was based rather on anti-agreementism: the workers and peasants cannot get their basic needs met in league with the elite (more below on anti-agreementism in 1917).

In no way can it be said that the Bolshevik message was based on rejection of the Constituent Assembly as “parliamentary democracy”. The opposite is the case: defense of the Constituent Assembly was an integral part of the Bolshevik agitation throughout 1917. This was particularly true in October, when Bolshevik accusations that the Provisional Government would sabotage the elections for the Assembly reached a fever pitch. In fact, fear of such sabotage was a central argument for an immediate takeover of power. After the Constituent Assembly was disbanded, Trotsky affirmed that “when we argued [in October] that the road to the Constituent Assembly lay … through the seizure of power by the Soviets, we were absolutely sincere.”[1] (It is no surprise that this statement by Trotsky is met by a scornful laugh from academic historians. What is truly remarkable, however, is that many self-styled Trotsky admirers will also automatically assume that Trotsky is lying for political reasons and that I am naïve for taking him at his word.)

Nor, further, were the alleged defects of parliamentary democracy prominent among the announced motivations for disbanding the Constituent Assembly in January. Witness: Trotsky, who gives a number of pertinent reasons for disbandment at the time, but does not mention any contrast between soviet-style government and “bourgeois parliamentarianism”. Witness: The Left SRs, who cooperated with disbandment for their own reasons.

In October, when the Second Congress of Soviets voted for soviet power, a Bolshevik-dominated committee arrested members of the Provisional Government and took other actions to prevent armed overthrow of the new government. For a number of reasons, both academic and activist historians come together in exaggerating the importance of a violent “insurrection” in the Bolshevik path to power. Essentially, the academics want to delegitimize the Bolsheviks as a whole, while the Trotsky tradition only wants to delegitimize most of the top Bolshevik leadership.

But any contrast, whether in approval or disapproval, between the Bolshevik takeover and “electoralism” is absurd. The Bolsheviks won in 1917 through winning elections — through acquiring a majority in key soviet bodies as a result of arduous campaigning — campaigning that was based on a message (anti-agreementism) that made sense to people. In fact, the Soviet government set up in October was the only government in 1917 that had any real electoral legitimacy.

The Bolsheviks won majority support for full soviet power (in other words, for anti-agreementism) in the key capital soviets in early September. After that, it was only a matter of time, of making things official. Of course, this process was dramatic and no doubt that Bolsheviks could have screwed it up. But essentially what happened was that the Petrograd Soviet officially set up a body to protect the revolution and this body did so by making a few arrests in order to protect the Second Congress. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the Second Congress would declare for full soviet power — so that the existing national soviet body, the agreementist TsIK, was already a lame-duck walking corpse.

Throughout 1917, the final say in the composition of the government had always rested with the Soviet, for the simple but profound reason that it commanded the ultimate loyalty of the Petrograd workers and soldiers (that is, “real force”). Thus the February Revolution and the October Revolution gave rise to a government in essentially the same way: the relevant soviet authority spoke, and that was it. In February, there was indeed a real “insurrection” from below, but in October the so-called uprising was a police action set in motion by duly constituted authorities.

One ill effect of the over-intense focus (I might even call it fetishism) on the October “insurrection” is to obscure the real problem with Bolshevik rule, which is neither the rejection of parliamentary forms nor the use of “insurrection.” It is, plain and simple, the rapid and complete destruction of political freedom. The Bolsheviks started by outlawing political parties and newspapers (the Kadets were outlawed in December 1917) and ended up squeezing all independent political and civil life out of society. This was done by the time NEP was established in 1921 and the resulting suffocation of independent civil society was never dented until perestroika.

However, it must be strongly emphasized that at no time prior to October did Lenin or the Bolsheviks speak of “insurrection” as a method opposed to majority rule, nor can we find any hint of a project to destroy political freedom. Quite the opposite. The Bolsheviks had long defined themselves as champions of political freedom for Russia, and indeed Russian Social Democracy was key in giving Russia what political freedom it had in the decade before the revolution. But ultimately the significance of this fact fades before the realities of the system created during the civil war.

Whether for good reasons or bad, Lenin and the Bolsheviks defined themselves after October as the destroyers of political freedom in Russia. People in Western Europe had a sense that Communists wanted to use “bourgeois” political freedom to get into power, and then eliminate it for everybody else. Did the Communists give them any reason to think they were wrong?

What the 1917 Revolution Was

In the aftermath of the February Revolution, the Bolshevik party as a whole emerged from the underground with Kautsky’s tactical advice in their political DNA: enlist the peasantry as a revolutionary ally, and do not deviate from militant anti-agreementism. From the very beginning of the revolution, the Bolsheviks acted on this advice and as a result they were accurately perceived as distinctive by all actors on the political scene. (Many people want to believe that the Bolsheviks were not anti-agreementist until Lenin presented his April Theses upon his return to Russia. I have documented the problems with this view elsewhere, but the issue has no bearing on the present discussion.[2])

A crucial fact, not sufficiently emphasized, is that the Petrograd Soviet was not a “Soviet of Worker Deputies” (as was the case in 1905) but a “Soviet of Worker and Soldier Deputies.” This fact changed the whole political meaning of the soviet and therefore of “soviet power.” At first, the preponderance of soldiers caused serious problems for the Bolsheviks and partly explains their original isolation within the Petrograd Soviet. But later, they began to see soldier membership in the Soviet as a great opportunity: win over the soldiers to the Bolshevik message (difficult as that may have been) and it’s game over for the Provisional Government. Which is what happened.

For this reason, Eric Blanc’s comment that Leninists wanted “to place all power into the hands of workers’ councils” leads to a serious distortion of the political dynamics of 1917. The Bolsheviks then and later interpreted the soldier presence in the soviets as a link to the peasantry — that is, as a gateway to carrying out the tactic of Bolshevik hegemony. And also from the very beginning, the Bolsheviks had their eye on the wider peasant constituency. A remark by Bolshevik activist Viktor Nogin in late March succinctly foreshadows one of the principal political dynamics of the following months:

This resolution [by the Moscow Bolsheviks] proposes the organized seizure of the lands without waiting for the Constituent Assembly. The SRs could not bring themselves to propose such a slogan, since they prefer to wait for the Constituent Assembly. When they learned of the decision of the Moscow [Bolsheviks], the SRs said, “too bad for us! Now the peasants are going to elect the Bolsheviks.”[3]

Thus the Bolsheviks quickly became identified with anti-agreementism. At an all-Russian conference of soviets in late March—that is, prior to Lenin’s return and his April Theses—the red line between agreementists and anti-agreementists was sharply drawn, with the Menshevik Irakli Tsereteli as the spokesman of agreementism and the Bolshevik Lev Kamenev as the spokesman of anti-agreementism. No one deluded themselves about the reality of this clash. The agreementists wagered their political future on a viable working relationship with the social elites represented in the Provisional Government, while the anti-agreementists wagered their political future on a rapidly growing split between Provisional Government and the soviet constituency.

What was the heart of the message the Bolsheviks addressed to the soviet constituency to convince them of the necessity for all power to the soviets? It wasn’t: the soviets are a higher type of democracy, down with parliamentary democracy! It wasn’t: we need a socialist revolution in Russia! As noted earlier, the Bolsheviks had previously assumed that “socialist revolution” was incompatible with the peasant ally. After 1917, they changed their mind — not about the peasant ally, but about the meaning of “socialist revolution.” The Bolshevik message in 1917 was not even: land, peace, and bread! What political party was against land, peace, and bread?

The question was how to attain goals that everybody accepted as valid. And here the Bolsheviks had a clear if primarily negative answer: we cannot attain these goals through any sort of “agreements,” dual power, coalitions or political understandings with elites! Socialists who insist on these agreements are leading us to disaster. We need a worker/peasant vlast (state power), as expressed through the soviets, that excludes any political voice for the elite.

Thus the Bolsheviks championed a message based directly on Kautsky’s advice about hegemony and anti-agreementism, advice of long standing that was familiar to the whole party. Of course, there existed anti-agreementist factions within the other socialist parties — but they remained opposition factions until the very eve of October, when the anti-agreementist faction of the SR party bolted and founded the Left SR party, which promptly joined with the Bolsheviks in an anti-agreementist coalition government. Until October, then, the Bolsheviks remained the only party united around anti-agreementism. This fact determined the dynamics of the party system in 1917.

Full soviet power only became feasible when the two streams of Kautsky’s advice came together, that is, when the soldiers and the peasant majority in the country swung over to anti-agreementism. At least, such was the view of Lenin, as expressed in February 1918. (In the following passage, “the opportunists of October” refers to Zinoviev and Kamenev. Too much should not be read into this label, since Lenin is merely adopting the term used by his polemical opponents at the time. What can be legitimately read into Lenin’s comment is a challenge to the Trotskyist/Stalinist consensus that Zinoviev and Kamenev were enemies of the revolution and opposed in principle to soviet power. From Lenin’s standpoint, the dispute arose rather from different readings of empirical forces by leaders striving for an identical goal.) In Lenin’s words:

As matters stood in October, we had made an exact account precisely of mass forces. We not only thought, we knew with certainty, from the experience of the mass elections to the Soviets, that in September and in early October the overwhelming majority of the workers and soldiers had already come over to our side. We knew, even if only from the voting at the Democratic Conference, that support for the coalition [of moderate socialists and “bourgeois” politicians] had also collapsed among the peasantry—and that meant that our cause had already won.

The following were the objective conditions for the October insurrectionary struggle:

1. There was no longer any bludgeon over the heads of the soldiers—it was overthrown in February 1917 (Germany has not yet reached “its” February);

2. The soldiers, like the workers, had already experienced enough of the coalition and had completed a purposive, thought-through, heartfelt withdrawal from it.

This, and this alone, determined the correctness of the slogan “for an insurrection” in October (the slogan would have been incorrect in July, when in fact we did not advance it).

The mistake of the opportunists of October was not that they “worried too much” about objective conditions (and only children could think it was) but that they incorrectly evaluated the facts —they focused on details without seeing the main thing: that the Soviets had come over from agreementism [soglashatelstvo] to us.[4]

Both “Leninists” and anti-Leninists should take careful heed to what the man himself says here: only support from an “overwhelming majority” of the mass worker-soldier-peasant soviet constituency made the armed action in October politically meaningful. This support can be measured by electoral success. Rejection of agreementism is equivalent to support for all power to the soviets. These political facts as set out by Lenin are overwhelmingly more significant than whether the “insurrection” took place the day before or the day after the Second Congress of Soviets.

History’s Lessons, History’s Questions

Alas, history does not always give us usable lessons to apply in the present day. At most, it thrusts upon us some unsettling questions. Here are some that arise from the episode we have just considered.

For Russia in 1917, Kautsky’s advice about anti-agreementism was political gold, enabling the Bolsheviks to win power. In Western Europe, Kautsky’s advice was political lead, with would-be Bolsheviks never successfully attaining power.

In my view, neither Lenin nor Kautsky really understood why Kautsky’s anti-agreementist tactics met such different political fates in Russia and Europe. One key difference, perhaps hard for the Marxist tradition to fully analyze: the complete and sudden collapse of state authority in Russia, which had no equivalent in Western Europe. In any event, this deficient understanding finds expression in both the Bolshevik’s expectations for socialist revolution in Europe and Kautsky’s often arid polemics against the Bolsheviks.

Our final question is about the Russian revolution and its fate. It was best put by Kautsky himself, to whom we should give the last word. In March 1917, immediately after the fall of the tsar, before the political lines of force became clear to outsiders, Kautsky recapitulated his longtime argument that “the new revolutionary regime will be well protected against a counterrevolution, [because] the peasants will join it and remain faithful to it.” He then wondered how long the worker-peasant alliance would remain in force, since “the peasantry’s dependence on the revolution does not mean that they will support a further revolutionary advance of the proletariat.” Therefore, “the peasant is the ‘x’, the unknown variable, in the equation of the Russian Revolution. We are still unable to insert a figure for it. And yet we know that this figure is the crucial one, the decisive one. For this reason, the Russian Revolution can and will spring tremendous surprises on us.”[5]

Kautsky is right on target: the key question for the revolution and indeed for all of Soviet history, the equation that had to be solved, was always the nature of worker-peasant relations. We know now how tragically that history played out.

See also Part 1 of this article: “Before the War: The Bolsheviks Applaud Kautsky’s Tactics“

Related Articles on Kautsky, Lenin, and the Road to Socialism

Notes

[1] Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution to Brest-Litovsk can be found at https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1918/hrr/index.htm.

[2] See my series “All Power to the Soviets!,” posted on John Riddell’s blog (see https://johnriddell.com/2017/03/23/all-power-to-the-soviets-part-1-biography-of-a-slogan/).

[3] Trotsky, Stalinskaia shkola falsifikatsii, 264.

[4] From “The Revolutionary Phrase,” February 1918; see https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/feb/21a.htm (accessed 9 May 2015). I have modified this translation in accordance with the Russian text at Lenin PSS, 39:349-50.

[5] Ben Lewis’s translation of Kautsky’s article of March 1917 can be found at http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/800/supplement-prospects-of-the-russian-revolution/.