Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it.   Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review
[P&P Bulletin Publications, PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.] 
No 1065 Nov 7 2000                                                                                                                                       25p

Big-money presidential opportunist ignorance and shallowness should alert the whole world to the dangers of imperialism's 'democracy' fraud, covering up ruthless monopoly-exploitation interests and brutal neo-colonial domination everywhere. Fake-'lefts' in the West shamefully betray the real opponents of international capitalism by subjectively sticking to various bankrupt derivatives of Western 'democracy' propaganda, such as constitutional republicanism, 'multanimous' practice, and tail-ending reactionary trade-unionism as phony 'mass democracy'. Objective world developments rule, not the sectarian idealism of the swamp. Stalinism needs to be explained and overcome, not retreated from. OPEB again misses the point.

The disgusting farce of US 'democracy' in action, - pretending that the billions of dollars spent on propaganda stunts through TV ads; on lying rival press-monopoly campaigns covering up the rackets, graft, corruption, and venality of the millionaire political cliques competing for office; and on shallow academic bromides for the masses justifying the whole obscene circus, - challenges every 'democratic' illusion.

Fake-'lefts' in Britain and elsewhere still hide behind various 'democracy' formulas in order to posture as 'opponents' of Western imperialist crooked domination of the planet but at the same time avoid being smeared with the 'communist tyranny' label with which bourgeois ideology won the propaganda Cold War, thanks to the revisionist bureaucratic complacency which had replaced revolutionary thinking in Moscow, and thanks to the unprecedented 'freeworld' trade boom since 1945.

But confusion about what 'democracy' is has been the most effective weapon that the capitalist system has ever used against the working class, keeping it subservient to perpetual economic exploitation via hire-and-fire employment insecurity and via turning all civilisation's achievements into commodities for sale, at a profit to the ruling class (the monopoly owners of the vast majority of property and capital). Far from guaranteeing fair play for 'democratic' anti-capitalist agitation, all that is achieved by joining in with the bourgeois smears against the dictatorship of the proletariat in the workers states is to help make an even bigger rod for the back of every real anti-imperialist.

The history of the Cold War proves it. The more Moscow (and then Beijing) retreated from any longer having any world socialist revolution ambitions at all, the more aggressively imperialism intervened against would-be adherents to the socialist camp or other anti-imperialist regimes, Afghanistan, Grenada, Nicaragua, Iraq, Serbia, etc, - steadily escalating towards the 'right' to openly blitzkrieg 'the enemies of freedom', etc.

Not all the present swamp of fake-'leftism' is responsible for international support for revisionism lasting so long, through directly backing it via various 'communist' parties (CPGB, CPB, NCP, Lalkar, etc): but the Trot 'opponents' of Stalinism played right into imperialism's hands by falling for every anti-communist provocation imaginable, typified by the CIA/Vatican fiction of the supposedly 'rank-and-file socialist trade union' Solidarnosc, a wholly counter-revolutionary stunt led by a fully conscious Pilsudkiite (Polish fascist). Thanks to revisionist feeblemindedness, the Polish workers state was duly destroyed in due course, along with the rest of the European socialist camp, to catastrophic consequences for the people living there.

One form which this swamp refusal to defend the workers states of East Europe has taken more recently is the 'democracy' posturing of such sects as the Weekly Worker and Open Polemic Editorial Board, pretending to still be 'communists' and even (in very small print) to still be supporters of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but ostentatiously winning popular 'anti-Stalinist' brownie points via ludicrously-inflated claims for such supposed 'free-world wholesomeness' as becoming fully-fledged constitutional democratic reformists wishing to bless present (bourgeois) Britain with a completely multinational federal republic; or stressing their inner-party fair mindedness by suggesting that 'multanimous democracy' could avoid the presumed dangers of the 'hardline leader centralism' that Bolshevism is alleged to have suffered from.

Such poses are hardly worth discussing in themselves, being mainly for show to try to get some publicised 'anti-Stalinist' credibility in the absence of any ability to provide what is really required, which is a fully revolutionary Marxist-Leninist analysis of the Stalinist revisionist phenomenon in history and how the anti-imperialist march of proletarian dictatorship will be resumed against monopoly-capitalist world crisis. They do reflect, however, on how laughably degenerated is the present-day fake-'left' swamp, resurrecting all the old illusions in 'democracy' which their predecessors early last century were ridiculed by Lenin for. So much for the swamp's claim to be 'Marxist-Leninist'.

The OPEB has just produced a reply to Review 1052 in which the EPSR yet again urged that only a concrete analysis of real world developments could convince the international working-class to have renewed faith in a world communist-revolutionary leadership, and that the endless abstract arguments about how to constitutionally organise a party, or what role should be played in party-building by interim-tactics and minimum programmatic demands, etc, were all just further diversions from the redevelopment of communist consciousness, and a further retreat from Marxism-Leninism, prolonging the damage done by revisionism rather than trying to overcome it. Specifically, the Review once more challenged OP "to analyse the situation, say, in Ireland which the rest of the fake-'left' make such nonsense of, but which it is so crucial to understand and explain correctly from a communist perspective before the working class in Britain can begin to be broken from its links with British imperialism, (ideologically sharing, in part, its racist and colonialist prejudices)".

Despite a nearly 4,000 word reply, the issue is again evaded. The nearest OP gets to an answer runs as follows: 

"Open Polemic devotes its time not in the advocacy of, but in opposition to, the factional anarchism of the leader centralist sects who are constantly busying themselves in plying their programmatic wares in front of a disinterested working class.

"The EPSR's challenge that OP should join this factional anarchism by analysing 'real world developments' in the international class struggle as the only way of demonstrating any leadership qualities themselves for the rest of us to follow is merely an invitation for the OPEB to liquidate itself and participate in wasting valuable preparation time. Any leadership qualities that the OPEB may have will continue to be demonstrated by the advocacy of party multanimity in opposition to the new 'revolutionary leadership' of factional anarchism in a disintegrated communist movement."

As best as the Review can understand it, this 'factional anarchism' of which it is accused, translates as being so bold as to put forward to the workers movement a concrete analysis of world developments which shows the need and opportunity for revolutionary international communist organisation to resume and prepare to bring down world imperialism as the economic crisis of the free-market system reaches its explosive inter-imperialist warmongering phase, measuring the historical movement and direction in the international balance of class forces strictly on the evidence of weekly events, analysed immediately in the light of the EPSR's understanding of Marxist-Leninist science.

Such attempted revolutionary-educational agitation is allegedly 'anarchic' because it is put before workers (to agree with or to disagree with and polemicise against) before it has won the support of a new party of the working class; and it is allegedly 'factional' because it emerges as EPSR editorial output rather than as the agreed outlook of every last supporting group of EPSR readers. These bizarre arguments have been dismissed by the Review before, and there is not much point in keeping on going over the same ground. 

It is agreement about what is wrong with the world and about what needs doing to put it right which unites workers into a party of socialist revolution, and the great communist movements of history have all famously started with just a tiny handful of comrades agitating for their ideas and steadily winning support for them, building a party in the process. There is only one test for the validity of any analysis of the world put forward, and that is whether it is correct or not. As a party of revolutionary leadership develops, confidence grows in its past ability to get things right and in its future ability to do so. The Lenin group had a dozen adherents in 1900 but a party, educated in revolutionary understanding of the world, by 1917 big enough to carry out the Bolshevik Revolution. Other parties and groups which disputed the Leninist leadership throughout, continually got things wrong and ended up as counter-revolutionaries. 

The answer to the EPSR's challenge to the entire fake-'left' (from the SLP to the OP) as representing nothing but anti-communist defeatism and philistinism, is to prove the Review wrong in its consistent 21-year weekly analysis, say, of how in reality the international balance of class forces was steadily moving against the outdated British imperialist colonial toe-hold on Ireland and towards the triumph of revolutionary national-liberation struggle, resolved in the Good Friday Agreement which will systematically dismantle the failed and discredited 'Northern Ireland' bigoted tyranny as used to exist. Or dispute the Review's longstanding investigation of the relentless build-up of 'surplus' capital throughout the free market which must result in a universal Crash sooner or later, spreading the paralysis which has undermined the Japanese economy for 10 years to the rest of the world, accompanied by all-out trade war leading onto inter-imperialist armed conflict such as alone terminated the two previous great imperialist economic crises in the last 86 years. Or disprove the EPSR's detailed tracking of Stalinist revisionist liquidation from its culmination in Gorbachev philistinism back to Stalin's own retreat from revolutionary perspectives into total coexistence complacency and bureaucratic-mindedness, most ludicrously expressed in his 1952 'Economic Problems of Socialism' nonsense about imperialism being no longer capable of resumed economic expansion etc.

On every major domestic and world issue for 21 years, opponents of the EPSR's attempted revival of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary science have had the opportunity to polemically shoot down the EPSR's conclusions about the world. The entire fake-'left' refuses the challenge, retreating further and further into anti-communism. Here again, the OP refuses to make any criticism of the Review's actual analysis of domestic and international developments, on which alone the worthwhileness (or otherwise) of the EPSR's Marxist understanding can be tested. Instead, all we get is the weird notion that the Review is 'factionally anarchist' for even attempting to understand what is going on in the world or to agitate for communist revolutionary consciousness as a result of such an analysis.

Sadly, the rest of the OPEB's 4,000 words are mostly accusations that Review 1052 misrepresented what the OP polemic was trying to say. But since that critique reproduced the entire OP statement as part of the demolition, and can be re-read again and again, there seems little point in hacking through these rival interpretations a second time. One attempted OP clarification/justification of its refusal to polemicise about real world developments now, -  (which would make it possible to see whose grasp and application of Marxist-Leninist science is more accurate), leaves things as before, about as clear as mud, and in total internal self-contradiction. It reads:

"As there is no party in the present situation, the party must firstly be formally established on the basis of a common outlook, fundamental principles, and a common theoretical programme before it can, as a party, discuss everything and engage with the class. Engaging with the class involves the party having every debate out in front of the class, with nothing hidden. As for 'conceited arrogance', that continues to reside in the sectarianism of those leaders who, in the face of the continuing disintegration of the communist movement, insist on going directly to the class with their competitive, particular programmes."

This makes even less sense second time round. Without published discussions on 'everything', open to criticism from whoever wants to inject a better understanding, the only 'common outlook, fundamental principles, and common theoretical programme' that can possibly be developed is that of a very tiny closed-in sect. But even more ludicrously, this OP monastic cell still refuses to develop any 'common outlook', etc, or at least refuses to say what it is. It is precisely OPEB's 'outlook, principles, and theoretical programme' for assessing the direction and significance (or otherwise) of the conflict between the forces of national-liberation and the forces of dying British imperialism in Ireland, for example, that the EPSR is asking for so that the potential of the OP comrades can be assessed for building a Marxist-Leninist scientific communist party.

Subsequent jibes that the Review does not really wants its views discussed in 'open' polemics, least of all by its own followers, must sadly be concluded as terminal silliness. The EPSR is begging anyone and everyone to (e.g.) come out of the woodwork and polemicise against its denunciation of 'left' swamp solidarity with 'Kosovo Albanian self-determination' as the most crass and degenerate capitulation to as plain an imperialist warmongering stunt as the Cold War had ever seen against the workers states (or in this case the sad revisionist-nationalist-corrupted remnants in the wretched Milosevic's degenerate Yugoslav regime), for example, - such is the importance of establishing imperialist crisis manoeuvres as the major enemy of civilisation and the main driving force behind all developments now on earth. It is the OPEB which did not really want polemics on the vexed question of 'self-determination against imperialism', having been "unable to resolve those differences as an editorial board". So the 'common outlook, fundamental principles, and common theoretical programme' about the real world still remains at zero on the OPEB, presumably.

The Lenin quotes in Review 1052 still stand as a more than adequate answer to the continued OP insistence that its determination to restrict its discussion of foundation 'outlook, principles, theoretical programme', etc, only to its own circle of 'advanced workers' is not anti-Leninist. Declaring that without a party,

"what the EPSR needs to understand is that even the most correct line is quite useless if the conditions are such that it cannot be tested in practice"

- is just an evasion. In time, world developments themselves show whether or not the working class has been offered a line (on responding to imperialist-crisis driving forces) which could have helped agitate an advance in revolutionary consciousness. Has there been the slightest chance for any realistic Kosovo Albanian self-determination? (dominated as that territory and its politics now are by total NATO imperialist domination, which only the KLA drugs banditry is tolerant of, and which has overseen some genuine genocidal ethnic-cleansing, - that against the Kosovo Serb population, the strongest cultural tradition in the region, and the original inhabitants, with a continuous homeland there, now no more, thanks to NATO barbarism which the fake-'left' "Kosovo self-determination" stooges for imperialist warmongering helped to impose)??? The Kosovo Albanians are 'free' to remain the CIA's patsies, nothing else.

And the EPSR equally warned workers to not fall for the echoed Stalinism, backing the wretched loser and liquidator Milosevic whose regime of revisionist confusion could only continue to bring more and more chaos and defeats, exactly as has now been proved in practice.

'Defeat for imperialist meddling, - by any means' was the only worthwhile slogan and explanation of that highly significant warmongering turmoil inflicted on the Balkans by deepening imperialist crisis, plus 'no support for Milosevicism or KLA banditry'.

The entire 'left' swamp falls into subjective-idealist philosophical nonsense of one kind or another because of an inability or unwillingness to just take an objective look at the world of class struggle and inter-imperialist conflict (in the light of Marxist-Leninist proven historical analysis), an inability or unwillingness entirely due to class influences (the petty-bourgeois mentality of comfortable complacency tending easily towards class-collaborative anti-communism alongside 'popular' (i.e. bourgeois-ideologically-dominated and manufactured) sentiment). This odd little OP sect is notable because it has actually turned this retreat from objectivity into its most boasted quality. Its greatest virtue, it claims, is its refusal to discuss the objective world situation.

Such is the mind-bending influence of the bourgeois capitalist world's basic philosophical glue, subjective idealism, - starting with some fetish or fixed-notion or other (like a communist movement cannot be a communist movement until it is proficient in the weird art of 'multanimous practice'),and then refusing to acknowledge anti-imperialist developments in the real world if they do not conform to this fixed notion in someone's head about how the world can alone be put right. This subjective idealism, hopelessly misunderstanding what were Stalin's real crimes and mistakes, placed its artificial ideas on the Cuban Revolution, found it wanting, and for years the entire fake-'left' simply ignored this titanic real-world defeat for imperialism and heroic defiance of US hegemonic bullying, either refusing to discuss it, or ludicrously dismissing it as a 'Stalinist counter-revolution', etc. Only much later did some of the fake-'left' camp creep on board the brilliant Cuban revolutionary bandwagon because the real world had finally knocked some sense into their silly Trot heads.

But such episodic coat-tailing should fool no one. The philosophy of the fake-'left' swamp remains incurably subjective idealist and thoroughly hostile to the real proletarian-revolutionary spirit of Marxist-Leninist science, which can easily see the enormous worthwhileness and significance of e.g. the nationalist revolutionary triumph by Sinn Féin and the IRA against imperialism, where the Trots, and the museum-Stalinist philistines like the SLP, can only see a 'US-imperialist imposed settlement'; or 'a sell-out by Adams & Co for bourgeois office'; or even 'a deplorable deal for Green fascist-nationalist terror', etc, etc. The dialectical need to hail Sinn Féin and the IRA's brilliant revolutionary political and guerrilla-war victory over British imperialist reaction while remaining critical of the liberation movement's nationalist ideological failings, is beyond the swamp, as was the need to proclaim worldwide the epoch-making triumph of the Cuban Revolution while remaining critical of Castro's subservience for a long time to much of Moscow's revisionist theoretical nonsense, and critical of Havana's continued inability or refusal to seriously address the crucial world role for Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory.

Countless more examples can be brought of the subjective-idealist nonsense of the fake-'left' swamp in the comfortable, complacent petty bourgeois-minded West, failing or refusing to acknowledge the colossal worth and importance of such real-world anti-imperialist developments as the Castro Revolution, -  most blatantly recently in the SWP's monstrous damning-with-faint-praise of the FARC revolution in Colombia (see last week's Review).

The pattern is invariably the same, of some aspect or other of relentless bourgeois 'democracy' propaganda having infiltrated these middle-class mentalities, allowing them to posture as the most 'left' of the 'lefts' while in reality taking the easy route of 'popular' (i.e. bourgeois-dominated) sentiment.

The unbelievable posturing in favour of 'Kosovo Albanian self-determination rights', - all conveniently whipped-up for them in the swamp by mainstream bourgeois press and television coverage (e.g. the much-filmed stunt of the Albanian 'exodus', devised and scripted by Hollywood-trained CIA headquarters staff), - was one of the most astonishingly effective pieces of imperialist Cold-War propaganda nonsense yet, persuading thousands of petty-bourgeois 'socialists' in Britain and elsewhere to suddenly rush around agitating on behalf of just about the most obscure 'cause' imaginable. Having been handed on a plate the chance for much blameless publicity, surely, on behalf of such a 'good' cause as the 'democratic right to self-determination for the Albanians in Kosovo', etc, the swamp felt itself safe in not having to ask why the savagery of Western imperialism, which has not just failed to rescue scores of very legitimate 'self-determination rights' cases all over the world since 1945 but has deliberately engineered the worst tyranny against the most heart-rending situations such as the genocidal exiling and colonisation of the entire Palestinian nation and their homeland by Western imperialism's Zionist creation, and which booted the entire Chagos Islands people off their Indian ocean paradise in order to build a B52 nuclear-bomber runway to threaten the whole of Southern Asia with, - was suddenly risking so much (possible military defeat by the ferociously anti-imperialist Serbs if they had been given a scrap of leadership by the ludicrously deplorable Milosevic regime) in order to 'support' this obscure drug-running A1banian-mafia community in southern Yugoslavia????

In these circumstances, as already mentioned, any idea of serious, full 'self-determination' by the Kosovo Albanians themselves was just a pipe dream. They will dance to the tune of their US imperialist paymasters who have been financing this breakaway aspect (to break up Yugoslavia) all along. And now Kosovo will remain a US-imperialist stooge client state, - just in fact like the Zionists have been in occupied Palestine hitherto, but whose 'democratic right to self-determination, equal to that of the Palestinians' the entire fake-'left' swamp has equally fallen for in recent weeks (see EPSR 1063 for a full analysis of this imperialist 'democracy' coat-tailing nonsense). The Palestinians have never been given any serious rights, and will be denied them now by Western imperialism, backing up its armed stooge for the region in Zionist colonisation. A Zionist-fascist revolt against Washington domination is the likely next development, before a Palestinian-nationalist revolution finally sweeps to power and totally ends the whole colonisation annexation nightmare over the whole Palestinian homeland. Only then will any democratic rights for any genuine Jewish settlers, who wish to immigrate legally and form a genuine multicultural state, become a real issue. Likewise, Kosovo Albanian democratic rights can never get serious consideration again until the warmongering imperialist domination intervention is over and done with, - which is hardly likely this side of the world socialist revolution. Only then will the seriously conflicting historical and cultural claims on the land be able to be sensibly and peacably worked out.

The hounding of the fake-'left' into sterile stupidity by relentless bourgeois 'democracy' propaganda pressure via the swamp's retreat into subjective-idealist philosophical nonsense, is remarkably captured in an OP polemic against another critic, which concludes:

"Floundering in his own confusion, Kenna even turns to the notion of the line having a life of its own, declaring: 'If the line changes, it may be necessary to change the leader and elect someone who is more enthusiastic about the new line'."

But the party 'line' precisely does have a 'life of its own' if it is genuinely based on objective scientific analysis of the world rather than on subjective-idealist fetishism. That is the whole point of Marxism-Leninism.

Lastly, a comment from the National Committee for Marxist-Leninist Unity, another OPEB sparring partner, has accused the EPSR of not understanding that single issues must be fought for in order to develop

"the practical struggle which alone can lead the proletariat to struggle for the ultimate goal (of revolution)".

The Review does indeed understand this and has said so frequently. Its argument has been against single-issue campaigns which deliberately refuse to allow the background ultimate revolutionary understanding to even be mentioned, without which all single-issue fights can degenerate into meaningless reformism. The Review has quoted extensively from Lenin attacking exactly this anti-revolutionary retreat in swamp behaviour (see EPSR 1021).

As well as this insistence on 25 minutes devoted to the longterm revolutionary goal in every 30-minute speech in support of some reformist single-issue demand, Lenin also specifically denounced many of the 'democratic' crutches which the swamp still tries leaning on today, such as 'democratic constitutional-reformist' posturing around a federal republic; continuing to tail-end trade-unionism because it is supposed to represent 'mass democracy'; or failing to attack the whole 'democracy' racket in general by slyly kowtowing to bogusly 'democratic' anti-communism via the misdirected hoped for 'anti-Stalinism' of the OP's 'multanimous' practice. Build Leninism.  EPSR

Kievsky has given no thought to that. We would remind him of the following words of Engels in reference to the democratic republic. Can wealth dominate under this form of government? The question concerns the "contradiction" between economics and politics.

Engels replies: "The democratic republic officially knows nothing any more of property distinctions [between citizens]. In it, wealth exercises its power indirectly, but all the more surely. On the one hand, in the form of the direct corruption of officials, of which America provides the classical example; on the other hand, in the form of an alliance between government and stock exchange ...." 

There you have an excellent example of economic analysis on the question of the "achievability" of democracy under capitalism. And the "achievability" of self-determination under imperialism is part of that question.

The democratic republic "logically" contradicts capitalism, because "officially" it puts the rich and the poor on an equal footing. That is a contradiction between the economic system and the political superstructure. There is the same contradiction between imperialism and the republic, deepened or aggravated by the fact that the change-over from free competition to monopoly makes the realisation of political freedoms even more "difficult".

How, then, is capitalism reconciled with democracy? By indirect implementation of the omnipotence of capital. There are two economic means for that: (1) direct bribery; (2) alliance of government and stock exchange. (That is stated in our theses - under a bourgeois system finance capital "can freely bribe and buy any government and any official".)

Once we have the dominance of commodity production, of the bourgeoisie, of the power of money - bribery (direct or through the stock exchange) is "achievable" under any form of government and under any kind of democracy.

What, it can be asked, is altered in this respect when capitalism gives way to imperialism, i.e., when pre-monopoly capitalism is replaced by monopoly capitalism?

Only that the power of the stock exchange increases. For finance capital is industrial capital at its highest, monopoly level which has merged with banking capital. The big banks merge with and absorb the stock exchange. (The literature on imperialism speaks of the declining role of the stock exchange, but only in the sense that every giant bank is itself virtually a stock exchange.)

Further. If "wealth" in general is fully capable of achieving domination over any democratic republic by bribery and through the stock exchange, then how can Kievsky maintain, without lapsing into a very curious "logical contradiction", that the immense wealth of the trusts and the banks, which have thousands of millions at their command, cannot "achieve" the domination of finance capital over a foreign, i.e., politically independent, republic??

Well? Bribery of officials is "unachievable" in a foreign state? Or the "alliance of government and stock exchange" applies only to one's own government?

The same applies to the democratic republic: our programme defines it as "government by the people", though all Social-Democrats know perfectly well that under capitalism, even in the most democratic republic, there is bound to be bribery of officials by the bourgeoisie and an alliance of stock exchange and the government.

Only those who cannot think straight or have no knowledge of Marxism will conclude: so there is no point in having a republic, no point in freedom of divorce, no point in democracy, no point in self-determination of nations!

But Marxists know that democracy does not abolish class oppression. It only makes the class struggle more direct, wider, more open and pronounced, and that is what we need. The fuller the freedom of divorce, the clearer will women see that the source of their "domestic slavery" is capitalism, not lack of rights. The more democratic the system of government, the clearer will the workers see that the root evil is capitalism, not lack of rights. The fuller national equality (and it is not complete without freedom of secession), the clearer will the workers of the oppressed nations see that the cause of their oppression is capitalism, not lack of rights, - etc.
	A CARICATURE OF MARXISM Oct. 1916

And is there such a great difference between Lloyd George and the Scheidemanns, Legiens, Hendersons and Hyndmans, Plekhanovs, Renaudels and Co.? Of the latter, it may be objected, some will return to the revolutionary socialism of Marx. This is possible, but it is an insignificant difference in degree, if the question is regarded from its political, ie., its mass aspect. Certain individuals among the present social-chauvinist leaders may return to the proletariat. But the social-chauvinist, or (what is the same thing) opportunist trend can neither disappear nor "return" to the revolutionary proletariat. Wherever Marxism is popular among the workers, this political trend, this "bourgeois labour party", will swear by the name of Marx. It cannot be prohibited from doing this, just as a trading firm cannot be prohibited from using any particular label, sign or advertisement. It has always been the case in history that after the death of revolutionary leaders who were popular among the oppressed classes, their enemies have attempted to appropriate their names so as to deceive the oppressed classes.

The fact is that "bourgeois labour parties", as a political phenomenon, have already been formed in all the foremost capitalist countries, and that unless a determined and relentless struggle is waged all along the line against these parties -- or groups, trends, etc., it is all the same there can be no question of a struggle against imperialism, or of Marxism, or of a socialist labour movement. The Chkheidze faction,58 Nashe Dyelo and Golos Trudo in Russia, and the 0.C. supporters abroad are nothing but varieties of one such party. There is not the slightest reason for thinking that these parties will disappear before the social revolution. On the contrary, the nearer the revolution approaches, the more strongly it flares up and the more sudden and violent the transitions and leaps in its progress, the greater will be the part the struggle of the revolutionary mass stream against the opportunist petty-bourgeois stream will play in the labour movement. Kautskyism is not an independent trend, because it has no roots either in the masses or in the privileged stratum which has deserted to the bourgeoisie. But the danger of Kautskyism lies in the fact that, utilising the ideology of the past, it endeavours to reconcile the proletariat with the "bourgeois labour party", to preserve the unity of the proletariat with that party and thereby enhance the latter's prestige.

One of the most common sophistries of Kautskyism is its reference to the "masses". We do not want, they say, to break away from the masses and mass organisations! But just think how Engels put the question. In the nineteenth century the "mass organisations" of the English trade unions were on the side of the bourgeois labour party. Marx and Engels did not reconcile themselves to it on this ground; they exposed it. They did not forget, firstly, that the trade union organisations directly embraced a minority of the proletariat. In England then, as in Germany now, not more than one-fifth of the proletariat was organised. No one can seriously think it possible to organise the majority of the proletariat under capitalism. Secondly -  and this is the main point -  it is not so much a question of the size of an organisation, as of the real, objective significance of its policy: does its policy represent the masses, does it serve them, i.e., does it aim at their liberation from capitalism, or does it represent the interests of the minority, the minority's reconciliation with capitalism? The latter was true of England in the nineteenth century, and it is true of Germany, etc., now.

Engels draws a distinction between the "bourgeois labour party" of the old trade unions - the privileged minority - and the "lowest mass", the real majority, and appeals to the latter, who are not infected by "bourgeois respectability". This is the essence of Marxist tactics!

Neither we nor anyone else can calculate precisely what portion of the proletariat is following and will follow the social-chauvinists and opportunists. This will be revealed only by the struggle, it will be definitely decided only by the socialist revolution. But we know for certain that the "defenders of the fatherland" in the imperialist war represent only a minority. And it is therefore our duty, if we wish to remain socialists, to go down lower and deeper, to the real masses; this is the whole meaning and the whole purport of the struggle against opportunism. By exposing the fact that the opportunists and social-chauvinists are in reality betraying and selling the interests of the masses, that they are defending the temporary privileges of a minority of the workers, that they are the vehicles of bourgeois ideas and influences, that they are really allies and agents of the bourgeoisie, we teach the masses to appreciate their true political interests, to fight for socialism and for the revolution through all the long and painful vicissitudes of imperialist wars and imperialist armistices.

The only Marxist line in the world labour movement is to explain to the masses the inevitability and necessity of breaking with opportunism, to educate them for revolution by waging a relentless struggle against opportunism, to utilise the experiences of the war to expose, not conceal, the utter vileness of national-liberal labour politics.
	IMPERIALISM AND THE SPLIT IN SOCIALISM October 1916

Hobson, the social-liberal, fails to see that this "counteraction" can be offered only by the revolutionary proletariat and only in the form of a social revolution. But then he is a social-liberal! Nevertheless, as early as 1902 he had an excellent insight into the meaning and significance of a "United States of Europe" (be it said for the benefit of Trotsky the Kautskyite!) and of all that is now being glossed over by the hypocritical Kautskyites of various countries, namely, that the opportunists (social chauvinists) are working hand in glove with the imperialist bourgeoisie precisely towards creating an imperialist Europe on the backs of Asia and Africa, and that objectively the opportunists are a section of the petty bourgeoisie and of certain strata of the working class who have been bribed out of imperialist superprofits and converted into watchdogs of capitalism and corrupters of the labour movement.

Both in articles and in the resolutions of our Party, we have repeatedly pointed to this most profound connection, the economic connection, between the imperialist bourgeoisie and the opportunism which has triumphed (for long?) in the labour movement. And from this, incidentally, we concluded that a split with the social-chauvinists was inevitable. Our Kautskyites preferred to evade the question! Martov, for instance, uttered in his lectures a sophistry which in the Bulletin of the Organising Committee, Secretariat Abroad 53  (No.. 4, April 10, 1916) is expressed as follows:

"...The cause of revolutionary, Social-Democracy would be in a sad, indeed hopeless, plight if those groups of workers who in mental development approach most closely to the intelligentsia and who are the most highly skilled fatally drifted away from it towards opportunism ...."

By means of the silly word "fatally" and a certain sleight-of-hand, the fact is evaded that certain groups of workers have already drifted away to opportunism and to the imperialist bourgeoisie! And that is the very fact the sophists of the 0.C. want to evade! They confine themselves to the "official optimism" the Kautskyite Hilferding and many others now flaunt: objective conditions guarantee the unity of the proletariat and the victory of the revolutionary trend! We, forsooth, are "optimists" with regard to the proletariat!

But in reality all these Kautskyites-Hilferding, the 0.C. supporters, Martov and Co. are optimists... with regard to opportunism. That is the whole point!

The proletariat is the child of capitalism - of world capitalism, and not only of European capitalism, or of imperialist capitalism. On a world scale, fifty years sooner or fifty years later - measured on a world scale this is a minor point - the "proletariat" of course "will be" united, and revolutionary Social-Democracy will "inevitably" be victorious within it. But that is not the point, Messrs. Kautskyites. The point is that at the present time, in the imperialist countries of Europe, you are fawning on the opportunists, who are alien to the proletariat as a class; who are the servants, the agents of the bourgeoisie and the vehicles of its influence, and unless the labour movement rids itself of them, it will remain a bourgeois labour movement. By advocating "unity" with the opportunists, with the Legions and Davids, the Plekhanovs, the Chkhenkelis and Potresovs, etc., you are, objectively, defending the enslavement of the workers by the imperialist bourgeoisie with the aid of its best agents in the labour movement. The victory of revolutionary Social-Democracy on a world scale is absolutely inevitable, only it is moving and will move, is proceeding and will proceed, against  you, it will be a victory over you.
	IMPERIALISM AND THE SPLIT IN S0CIALISM

In the usual arguments about the state, the mistake is constantly made against which Engels warned and which we have in passing indicated above, namely, it is constantly forgotten that the abolition of the state means also the abolition of democracy: that the withering away of the state means the withering away of democracy.

At first sight this assertion seems exceedingly strange and incomprehensible; indeed, someone may even suspect us of expecting the advent of a system of society in which the principle of subordination of the minority to the majority will not be observed - for democracy means the recognition of this very principle.

No, - democracy is not identical with the subordination of the minority to the majority. Democracy is a state which recognises the subordination of the minority to the majority, i.e., an organisation for the systematic use of force by one class against another, by one section of the population against another.

We set ourselves the ultimate aim of abolishing the state, i.e., all organised and systematic violence, all use of violence against people in general. We do not expect the advent of a system of society in which the principle of subordination of the minority to the majority will not be observed. In striving for socialism, however, we are convinced that it will develop into communism and, therefore, that the need for violence against people in general, for the subordination of one man to another, and of one section of the population to another, will vanish altogether since, people will become accustomed to observing the elementary conditions of social life without violence and without subordination.

In order to emphasise this element of habit, Engels speaks of a new generation, "reared in new, free social conditions", which will "be able to discard the entire lumber of the state''  -- of any state, including the democratic-republican state.
	THE STATE AND REVOLUTION

Furthermore, faith in "democracy" in general, as a universal panacea, and failure to understand that this democracy is bourgeois democracy, historically limited in its usefulness and its necessity, have for decades and centuries been particularly characteristic of the petty bourgeoisie of all countries. The big bourgeois is case-hardened; he knows that under capitalism a democratic republic, like every other form of state, is nothing but a machine for the suppression of the proletariat. The big bourgeois knows this from his most intimate acquaintance with the real leaders and with the most profound (and therefore frequently the most concealed) springs of every bourgeois state machine. The petty bourgeois, owing to his economic position and his conditions of life generally, is less able to appreciate this truth, and even cherishes the illusion that a democratic republic implies "pure democracy", "a free people's state", the non-class or supra-class rule of the people, a pure manifestation of the will of the people, and so on and so forth. The tenacity of these prejudices of the petty-bourgeois democrat is inevitably due to the fact that he is farther removed from the acute class struggle, the stock exchange, and "real" politics; and it would be absolutely un-Marxist to expect these prejudices to be eradicated very rapidly by propaganda alone.

World history, however, is moving with such furious rapidity, is smashing everything customary and established with a hammer of such immense weight, by crises of such unparalleled intensity, that the most tenacious prejudices are giving way. The naïve belief in a Constituent Assembly and the naïve habit of contrasting "pure democracy" with "proletarian dictatorship" took shape naturally and inevitably in the mind of the "democrat in general". But the experiences of the Constituent Assembly supporters in Archangel, Samara, Siberia and the South could not but destroy even the most tenacious of prejudices. The idealised democratic republic of Wilson proved in practice to be a form of the most rabid imperialism, of the most shameless oppression and suppression of weak and small nations. The average "democrat" in general, the Menshevik and the Socialist-Revolutionary, thought: "How can we even dream of some allegedly superior type of state, some Soviet government?

God grant us even an ordinary democratic republic!" And, of course, in "ordinary", comparatively peaceful times he could have kept on cherishing this "hope" for many a long decade.

Now, however, the course of world events and the bitter lessons - derived from the alliance of all the Russian monarchists with Anglo-French and American imperialism are proving in practice that a democratic republic is a bourgeois-democratic republic, which is already out of date from the point of view of the problems which imperialism has placed before history. They show that there is no other alternative: either Soviet government triumphs in every advanced country in the world, or the most reactionary imperialism triumphs, the most savage imperialism, which is throttling the small and weak nations and reinstating reaction all over the world -Anglo-American imperialism, which has perfectly mastered the art of using the form of a democratic republic.

One or the other.

There is no middle course. Until quite recently this view was regarded as the blind fanaticism of the Bolsheviks.

But it turned out to be true.

20/11/18 VALUABLE ADMISSIONS OF PITIRIM SOROKIN

Not only the ancient and feudal, but also "the modern representative state is an instrument of exploitation of wage-labour by capital" (Engels, in his work on the state).101 "As, therefore, the state is only a transitional institution which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, to hold down one's adversaries by force, it is sheer nonsense to talk of a 'free people's state'; so long as the proletariat still needs the state, it does not need it in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist" (Engels, in his letter to Bebel, March 28, 1875). "In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy" (Engels, Introduction to The Civil War in France by Marx).102 Universal suffrage is "the gauge of the maturity of the working class. It cannot and never will be anything more, in the present-day state". (Engels, in his work on the state.103 Mr. Kautsky very tediously chews over the cud in the first part of this proposition, which is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. But the second part, which we have italicised and which is not acceptable to the bourgeoisie, the renegade Kautsky passes over in silence!)

 "The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time .... Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to represent and suppress (ver- and zertreten) the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for workers, foremen and accountants for his business" (Marx, in his work on the Paris Commune, The Civil War in France).104

Every one of these propositions, which are excellently known to the most learned Mr: Kautsky, is a slap in his face and lays bare his apostasy. Nowhere in his pamphlet does Kautsky reveal the slightest understanding of these truths. His whole pamphlet is a sheer mockery of Marxism!

Take the fundamental laws of modern states, take their administration, take freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, or "equality of all citizens before the law", and you will see at every turn evidence of the hypocrisy of bourgeois democracy with which every honest and class-conscious worker is familiar. There is not a single state, however democratic, which has no loopholes or reservations in its constitution guaranteeing the bourgeoisie the possibility of dispatching troops against the workers, of proclaiming martial law, and so forth, in case of a "violation of public order", and actually in case the exploited class "violates" its position of slavery and tries to behave in a non-slavish manner. Kautsky shamelessly embellishes bourgeois democracy and omits to mention, for instance, how the most democratic and republican bourgeoisie in America or Switzerland deal with workers on strike.

The wise and learned Kautsky keeps silent about these things! That learned politician does not realise that to remain silent on this matter is despicable. He prefers to tell the workers nursery tales of the kind that democracy means "protecting the minority". It is incredible, but it is a fact! In the year of our Lord 1918, in the fifth year of the world imperialist slaughter and the strangulation of internationalist minorities (i.e., those who have not despicably betrayed socialism; like the Renaudels and Longuets, the Scheidemanns and Kautskys, the Hendersons and Webbs et al.) in all "democracies" of the world, the learned Mr. Kautsky sweetly, very sweetly, sings the praises of "protection of the minority". Those who are interested may read this on page 15 of Kautsky's pamphlet. And on page 16 this learned ... individual tells you - about the Whigs and Tories in England in the eighteenth century!

What wonderful erudition! What refined servility to the bourgeoisie! What civilised belly-crawling before the capitalists and boot-licking! If I were Krupp or Scheidemann, or Clemenceau or Renaudel, I would pay Mr. Kautsky millions, reward him with Judas kisses, praise him before the workers and urge "socialist unity" with "honourable" men like him. To write pamphlets against the dictatorship of the proletariat, to talk about the Whigs and Tories in England in the eighteenth century, to assert that democracy means "protecting the minority", and remain silent about pogroms against internationalists in the "democratic" republic of America  -  isn't this rendering lackey service to the bourgeoisie?

The learned Mr. Kautsky has "forgotten" - accidentally forgotten, probably - a "trifle", namely, that the ruling party in a bourgeois democracy extends the protection of the minority only to another bourgeois party, while the proletariat, on all serious, profound and fundamental issues, gets martial law or pogroms, instead of the "protection of the minority". The more highly developed a democracy is, the more imminent are pogroms or civil war in connection with any profound political divergence which is dangerous to the bourgeoisie. The learned Mr. Kautsky could have studied this "law" of bourgeois democracy in connection with the Dreyfus - case105 in republican France, with the lynching of Negroes and internationalists in the democratic republic of America, with the case of Ireland and Ulster in 'democratic' Britain,106 with the baiting of the Bolsheviks and the staging of pogroms against them in April 1917 in the democratic republic of Russia. I have purposely chosen examples not only from wartime but also from pre-war time, peace-time. But mealy-mouthed Mr. Kautsky prefers to shut his eyes to these facts of the twentieth century, and instead, to tell the workers wonderfully new, remarkably interesting, unusually edifying and incredibly important things about the Whigs and Tories of the eighteenth century!

Take the bourgeois parliament. Can it be that the learned Kautsky has never heard that the more highly democracy is developed, the more the bourgeois parliaments are subjected by the stock exchange and the bankers? This does not mean that we must not make use of bourgeois parliament (the Bolsheviks made better use of it than probably any other party in the world, for in 1912-14 we won the entire workers' curia in the Fourth Duma). But it does mean that only a liberal can forget the historical limitations and conventional nature of the bourgeois parliamentary system as Kautsky does. Even in the most democratic bourgeois state the oppressed people at every step encounter the crying contradiction between the formal equality proclaimed by the "democracy" of the capitalists and the thousands of real limitations and subterfuges which turn the proletarians into wage-slaves. It is precisely this contradiction that is opening the eyes of the people to the rottenness, mendacity, and hypocrisy of capitalism. It is this contradiction that the agitators and propagandists of socialism are constantly exposing to the people, in order to prepare them for revolution! And now that the era of revolution has begun, Kautsky turns his back upon it and begins to extol the charms of moribund bourgeois democracy.

	PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION AND RENEGADE KAUTSKY

The present "freedom of assembly and the press" in the "democratic" (bourgeois-democratic) German republic is false and hypocritical, because in fact it is freedom for the rich to buy and bribe the press, freedom for the rich to befuddle the people with the venomous lies of the bourgeois press, freedom for the rich to keep as their "property" the landowners' mansions, the best buildings, etc. The dictatorship of the proletariat will take from the capitalists and hand over to the working people the landowners' mansions, the best buildings, printing-presses and the stocks of newsprint.

But this means replacing "universal", "pure" democracy by the "dictatorship of one class", scream the Scheidemanns and Kautskys, the Austerlitzes and Renners (together with their followers in other countries -  the Gomperses, Hendersons, Renaudels, Vandervelde and Co.).

Wrong, we reply. This means replacing what in fact is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (a dictatorship hypocritically cloaked in the forms of the democratic bourgeois republic), by the dictatorship of the proletariat. This means replacing democracy for the rich by democracy for the poor. This means replacing freedom of assembly and the press for the minority, for the exploiters, by freedom of assembly and the press for the majority of the population, for the working people. This means a gigantic, world-historic extension of democracy, its transformation from falsehood into truth, the liberation of humanity from the shackles of capital, which distorts and truncates any, even the most "democratic" and republican, bourgeois democracy. This means replacing the bourgeois state by the proletarian state, a replacement that is the sole way the state can eventually wither away altogether.

But why not reach this goal without the dictatorship of one class? Why not switch directly to "pure" democracy? So ask the hypocritical friends of the bourgeoisie or the naive petty bourgeois and philistines gulled by them.

And we reply: Because in any capitalist society the decisive say lies with either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat, while the small proprietors, inevitably, remain wavering, helpless, stupid dreamers of "pure", ie., non-class or above-class, democracy. Because from a society in which one class oppresses another there is no way out other than through the dictatorship of the oppressed class. Because the proletariat alone is capable of defeating the bourgeoisie, of overthrowing them, being the sole class which capitalism has united and "schooled", and which is capable of drawing to its side the wavering mass of the working population with a petty-bourgeois way of life, of drawing them to its side or at least 'neutralising" them. Because only mealy mouthed petty bourgeois and philistines can dream -- deceiving thereby both themselves and the workers  --  of overthrowing capitalist oppression without a long and difficult process of suppressing the resistance of the exploiters.   

	"DEMOCRACY" AND DICTATORSHIP  Pravda No. 2, January 3, 1919

Of course, compared with tsarism, absolutism, monarchy and all feudal survivals, bourgeois democracy historically denotes immense progress. Of course, we shall have to utilise it. And until the time comes for the struggle of the working class for full power, it is incumbent on us to make use of the forms of bourgeois democracy. But the fact is that we have now arrived at this decisive moment of the struggle internationally. For the issue now is whether the capitalists can maintain their power over the means of production and, above all, their ownership of the implements of production. And this means they are preparing for new wars. The imperialist war has quite clearly demonstrated how capitalist property is connected with that slaughter of the nations, how it led up to it irresistibly and inexorably. But that being so, all talk of democracy expressing the popular will is obviously sheer deception, nothing but the privilege of the capitalists and the rich to dupe the more backward sections of the, working people both through their press, which remains in the hands of the property-owners, and by all other means of political influence.

There is and can be only one alternative: either the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, disguised by constituent assemblies, all kinds of voting systems, democracy and similar bourgeois frauds that are used to blind fools, and that only people who have become utter renegades from Marxism and socialism all along the line can make play of today - or the dictatorship of the proletariat for suppressing with an iron hand the bourgeoisie, who are inciting the most backward elements against the finest leaders of the world proletariat. This dictatorship means the victory of the proletariat for the purpose of suppressing the bourgeoisie, who are now putting up a most desperate resistance, which gets all the more furious the more clearly the bourgeoisie perceive that it is the people that have raised this issue.

And knowing this, what is the sense of all the references to democracy and all talk about "independence" and suchlike, which are constantly tending towards some classless position? We know that in capitalist society it is the bourgeoisie that rule, that capitalist society in fact arises from the bourgeoisie's political and economic power. Either the power of the proletariat or dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, there is no middle course on issues of any seriousness for any length of time. And anyone who talks about independence, about democracy in general, consciously or unconsciously presupposes something intermediate, something standing between classes or above classes. In every case that is self-deception or deception of others. It serves to conceal the fact that as long as capitalist power remains, as long as the capitalists retain the ownership of the means of production, democracy may be broad or narrow, more or less civilised, and so on and so forth, but it actually remains dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and all the more obviously and palpably does civil war spurt from every big contradiction.

The nearer the French political forms are to democracy, the more easily something like the Dreyfus case causes civil war. The broader democracy is in America, with its proletariat, its internationalists, and even pure pacifists, the more easily cases of lynching and outbreaks of civil war arise. The meaning of this is even clearer now, when the first week of bourgeois freedom, of democracy, in Germany has led to a most frenzied outbreak of civil war, far more acute and far more desperate than in our country.

And whoever judges these outbreaks from the point of view of whether proceedings were brought by parties, whoever judges them simply from the point of view of the murder of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, reveals blindness and intellectual cowardice, refusing to understand that these are outbreaks of an irresistible civil war, a war that springs irresistibly from all the contradictions of capitalism. There is not and cannot be any middle course. All talk of independence or democracy in general, no matter what sauce it may be served up with, is a sheer fraud and a downright betrayal of socialism.

From the point of view of bourgeois society, once there is "democracy", and once capitalist and proletarian alike take part in the voting, this is the "popular will",  this is "equality" and an expression of the people's will. We know what an abominable fraud this talk is, which only serves as a cover for butchers and murderers like Ebert and Scheidemann. In bourgeois society, the mass of the working people are governed by the bourgeoisie with the help of more or less democratic forms. They are governed by a minority, the property-owners, those who have a share in capitalist property and who have turned education and science, that supreme bulwark and flower of capitalist civilisation, into an instrument of exploitation, into a monopoly, in order to keep the overwhelming majority of the people in slavery.

SECOND ALL-RUSSIA TRADE UNION CONGRESS