Before the War: The Bolsheviks Applaud Kautsky’s Tactics
Lenin remained true to the tactical ideas of Karl Kautsky after the latter had abandoned them.
By Lars T. Lih
Karl Kautsky
In recent months, Jacobin has seen an exchange of views on the theme of Kautsky vs Lenin. Many good points were made, but on the subject of the October Revolution, we are presented with a stark choice: either Kautsky is right and Lenin is wrong, or Lenin is right and Kautsky wrong.
But this is a strange and unhelpful debate, because — as Bolsheviks of Lenin’s generation knew very well and current research reaffirms — Kautsky and Lenin were on the same page over a whole range of fundamental issues. Indeed, Kautsky served as mentor to the Bolsheviks precisely on the issues that defined them and divided them from their Menshevik rivals. Read more…
‘Liberate the Colonies’, published by LeftWord Books, New Delhi
By John Riddell
New Delhi-based publisher LeftWord Books has opened new paths for socialist historical understanding by publishing Liberate the Colonies, a collection of speeches and resolutions from the early colonial liberation movement (1917-1924).
Liberate the Colonies innovates in Communist historical publishing in three ways:
- Contributions from more than thirty revolutionary voices from Asia and Africa are organized to tell a coherent and easily accessible story.
- Although based on global collaboration, the collection was conceived and executed in India, far from the traditional centres of publishing on world socialism.
- The book is open-sourced: Its full text and annotation are available worldwide through a free PDF edition.
Liberate the Colonies! Communism and Colonial Freedom, 1917-24, ed. John Riddell, Vijay Prashad, Nazeef Mollah, New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2019, 292 pp, INR 450; US$22.
The Communist International Publishing Project 1983-2021
General Editors: John Riddell and Mike Taber
With eight volumes of the originally projected series have now been published, with another scheduled for 2020. In addition, three related collaborative projects are completed or in preparation. All published books on the list, below, are available both at libraries and for purchase.
These additions will bring the total by the end of 2020 to 12 volumes, containing more than 8,000 pages. Here are the components, both published and projected.
Except where noted, the volumes are edited by John Riddell.
Discussion articles on these volumes can be accessed through the “category” feature of this website, particularly under “Communist International.” Read more…
Ottawa’s disgraceful role in promoting regime change in Venezuela
By Vijay Prashad: Canada’s embassy in Venezuela has just been closed. The spur for this closure is an open attempt by Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to overthrow Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. Canada is one of the leaders of the Lima Group, a network of countries that came together in 2017 with the express purpose of regime change in Venezuela.
Vijay Prashad, Chief Editor of LeftWord Books.
Canada’s diplomatic corps has played the role of facilitator for the Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó. Trudeau and Guaidó speak regularly. Their plot against Venezuela thickens.
The Canadian government held the meeting of the Lima Group this year. It helped organize the speaking tours of Venezuelan opposition figures. But, most controversially, Canada’s ambassador to Venezuela – Ben Rowswell – held an annual dinner and delivered a human rights award to people who amplified the voices of those opposed to the Bolivarian Revolution. “The tradition here,” Rowswell said sanctimoniously, “is that Canada believes in the principles of human rights and democracy and takes pragmatic measures on the ground to unblock political situations.” Unblock political situations is a uniquely Canadian way of saying promoting regime change.
Venezuela has been – as the most recent dossier from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research argues – the target of a hybrid war. Canada has not been a bystander in this hybrid war, but it has functioned to give the entire maneuver the sheen of Canadian liberalism. Read more…
QUESTION: What is historical materialism?
ANSWER: A defeat we’re transforming into a luminous victory.
— Victor Serge, April 17, 1941 (in Notebooks 1936-1947, p. 72)
What happened to the International Socialist Organization (ISO) is that it self-destructed. The outgoing leadership of the outgoing organization presented this fact to the world in its statement of April 19, 2019, “Taking Our Final Steps”. For many who are committed to the socialist cause, whatever criticisms or reservations they might have had regarding the ISO, this is truly a defeat. One of the purposes of what follows is to explore how and why this happened, and what it means for those who take seriously the struggle for revolutionary socialism.
For some years the ISO had existed as the largest and strongest revolutionary socialist organization in the United States. As its foremost leader, Ahmed Shawki, emphasized more than once, the primary take-away from this indisputable fact was that revolutionary socialism was a pitifully weak force in the United States. And yet, the disappearance of this organization certainly merits more than a shrug. Read more…
Text of the Communist International’s 1923 decision
Reproduced below are a resolution and excerpts from a report adopted in June 1923 by the Communist International (Comintern). It took place at an enlarged meeting of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI).
It is reprinted from The Communist Movement at a Crossroads: Plenums of the Communist International’s Executive Committee, 1922-1923. That book, edited by Mike Taber and translated by John Riddell, is being published in a paperback edition by Haymarket books, available June 18. (A hardback edition was published last year by Brill.) It is the eighth installment in the series on the Communist International in Lenin’s time that was launched in 1983 under the editorship of John Riddell. Read more…
Excerpts from the original leadership debate, 1922
Introduction by Mike Taber: Below are excerpts from the February 1922 debate on the united front that took place at an enlarged meeting of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI). The speakers include Grigorii Zinoviev, Karl Radek, and Leon Trotsky.
The excerpts are reprinted from The Communist Movement at a Crossroads: Plenums of the Communist International’s Executive Committee, 1922-1923. That book, edited by Mike Taber and translated by John Riddell, will be appear in a paperback edition this summer by Haymarket books. (A hardback edition was published last year by Brill.) Read more…
Part 1: Honored but silenced, 1924–28
Clara Zetkin in the 1920s
By John Riddell: An internationally respected revolutionary leader since the 1880s and a close collaborator of Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin (1857-1933) became part of the newly formed Communist International (Comintern) in 1919. In 1921, she joined with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Leon Trotsky in helping to win the Comintern to an effort to unify working people and their organizations in joint struggle against the evils of capitalism. This policy was termed the “united front.” (See “Clara Zetkin’s Struggle for the United Front”.)
Two years later, the German Communist leader applied this policy to the challenge of unity against fascism in a report adopted by the Comintern. (See Zetkin, “The Struggle Against Fascism” and “Fighting Fascism: How to Struggle and Win“.) Read more…
Zetkin’s defense of the United Front, Part 2
See also Part 1, “Honored but Silenced,” 1924–28. Appended to this text is a portion of Zetkin’s historic speech to the German Reichstag on August 30, 1932, which presents a final summary of her views on workers’ unity against fascism. The text that follows first appeared in Clara Zetkin, Fighting Fascism: How to Struggle and How to Win, ed. Mike Taber and John Riddell, Haymarket Books, 2017.
Clara Zetkin
By John Riddell: Following Stalin’s expulsion of Zetkin’s co-thinkers in the German Communist Party (KPD) in 1928, the internal dispute in the Russian Communist leadership escalated toward Joseph Stalin’s open break with Nikolai Bukharin several months later. Bukharin’s faction was crushed; Bukharin and other leading “right oppositionists” capitulated, admitting their supposed errors. Expelled supporters of Bukharin in Germany organized a new movement, which took the name Communist Party of Germany (Opposition), or KPD(O).
Privately, Zetkin wrote bitterly of the Comintern’s transformation into a mechanism that “sucks in Russian-language directives on one side and shoots them out, translated into various languages, on the other.”[1] Yet she still believed that Communists must work to reform the International, as did her friends in the KPD(O) and also the now-exiled Leon Trotsky and his comrades in the International Left Opposition. Read more…
A rejoinder to Eric Blanc
By Mike Taber: It should be apparent that my exchange with Eric Blanc (See part 1, part 2, part 3) involves more than different historical appreciations. In the background are clear differences over how to evaluate politics in general, as well as what perspective socialists and revolutionaries should adopt today. But to conduct a fruitful discussion of these points of debate, questions need to be presented clearly and assessed accurately.
I won’t try here to take up all of Blanc’s arguments, but I do hope to point to some questions that can facilitate broader discussion, hopefully outside the narrow framework of this polemical exchange.
The danger of nebulous language
What is a “democratic socialist transformation”? Read more…
By Eric Blanc: I wrote my piece on Marxist theorist Karl Kautsky’s pre-1910 strategy on the democratic road to socialism in the hopes of helping socialists today sharpen our political strategy. Moving beyond various unfounded assumptions about working-class politics and history — particularly regarding the generalizability of the October 1917 model for capitalist democracies — is a good starting point for critically thinking about the specific challenges facing us today and in the coming years.
I was excited to read Mike Taber’s response to my article, since I am a big fan of his historical work. Though his contribution distorts some of my arguments and misrepresents key historical facts, I appreciate his contribution and I hope that responding to it will help clarify the political and historical stakes of this debate. Here are my responses to what I see as the main problems with his piece. Read more…
Mike Taber’s article below responds to Eric Blanc’s text “Why Kautsky was right and why you should care.”
Eric Blanc is a talented Marxist historian and activist, with a reputation for questioning accepted wisdom. While one may not always agree with all of his conclusions, Eric’s works generally have a refreshing quality that can only be welcomed. (See articles by Eric Blanc on this website.)
That freshness, however, is not in evidence in his latest article, “Why Kautsky Was Right (and Why You Should Care)” published in Jacobin.[1] Read more…
by Eric Blanc
The article that follows first appeared in Jacobin, and is reprinted by permission of the author. The text is followed by references to related articles by Eric Blanc.
Karl Kautsky (1854-1938)
Karl Kautsky’s vision for winning democratic socialism is more radical, and more relevant, than most leftists care to admit.
With the recent upsurge in democratic socialism in the United States and the United Kingdom, a new generation of radicals is searching for a viable strategy to overcome capitalism. So it’s not surprising that a debate has broken out over the relevance of Karl Kautsky, the world’s preeminent Marxist theorist from the late 1880s through 1914. Read more…
Interview on ‘The Communist Women’s Movement 1920-22’
8 March 2019: As we mark International Women’s Day (8 March), and the centenary of the establishment of the Communist International (March 1919), Estelle Cooch interviews Daria Dyakonova and Mike Taber about their project on the history of the Communist Women’s Movement (1920-22). The text is reprinted with permission from rs-21 (Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century). Subheadings have been added.
Estelle Cooch: The fund drive for your forthcoming book The Communist Women’s Movement, 1920-22 received an overwhelming response. Can you tell us a bit about the idea for the project came about and some of the challenges of undertaking such extensive archival research?
Clara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai at the 1921 conference of Communist women
Mike Taber: The original idea for the book was simply to continue the 36-year effort to publish the record of the Communist International (Comintern) under Lenin. Led by John Riddell – who remains an active collaborator on this book – the effort has already led to the publication of eight large volumes. With this ninth volume on the Communist Women’s Movement (CWM), we’ve begun to take up the Comintern’s auxiliary organizations. As we’ve worked on the book, however, we’ve come to see how valuable it is on a number of levels. Read more…
100 years ago today, on March 4, 1919
This post is Part 2 of a reader’s guide to the proceedings of the Comintern’s founding congress. See also Part 1, “How the Comintern Was Founded.”
‘Workers of all Countries, Unite’: Delegates at March 1919 Congress
By John Riddell: Each of the early Comintern gatherings unfolded in a surprising way, but the founding congress was unique in its unpredictability. After an initial decision to postpone forming the new movement, the delegates changed course abruptly during the third day of debate and launched the Communist International.
This decision is the outstanding event in the 1919 congress, whose entire proceedings and related documents are available in a fully annotated edition from Pathfinder.
Founding the Communist International: Proceedings and Documents of the First Congress: March 1919, ed. John Riddell, New York: Pathfinder, 2012 (1987).[1] See also Part 1 of this study.
As of the projected opening day of the congress in Moscow, March 1, only two delegates had managed to break through the imperialist blockade against the Soviet republic and reach the site of deliberations. Both these delegates held that it was too soon to launch the new International, and one – Hugo Eberlein from Germany – was categorical in his opposition. Read more…