Insurrection or Democratism. Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in the 1905 revolution

[p070] Insurrection or Democratism Mensheviks in the 1905 revolution By JENNY WOODHOUSE movements date from the 1890s, and yet by 1905 the Russian working class was able to face, and win concessions from, the Tzarist autocracy. But in spite of the peculiarities of Russian social development, the lessons of the 1905 Revolution are universal ones. Rosa Luxemburg recognized this in her pamphlet The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions, but she drew from it only the lessons which were relevant to her fight against the reformist bureauc- racies of German Social Democracy and the German trade unions. For her the important feature of 1905 was the spontaneous, elemental activity of the workers, and the victories which could be won by the general strike: she failed to consider the role of the revolu- tionary parties in Russia, and the way in which failures- of political leadership contributed to the defeat of the revolution. From Zubatovism to the Potemkin In Tzarist Russia, as in any capitalist country in crisis, strikes which began on purely trade union issues became political actions as the forces of the state were turned against the strikers. From 1901 onwards in Russia successive waves of strikes, sparked off by some minor question of wages and conditions, spread to involve whole towns and areas in southern Russia and the Caucasus; for the first time revolutionary agitators were able to speak in public, and as the strikes spread and the police and military were called in, more general demands such as the eight-hour day and political democracy were added to the aims of the strikers. The first open discontent in the bourgeois intelligentsia also appeared in the student movement and, with the beginning of the war against Japan and the successive Russian defeats in 1904, the movement of political protest grew wider. Sections of the bour- geois intelligentsia began to turn their attention from piecemeal local government work to the demand for political democracy, and held meetings, disguised from the police in the form of banquets, at which calls were made for a constitution. 131

[p071] Although the Menshevik faction of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (the Russian Marxist Party) tried to involve workers in this ‘banquet cam- paign’ with the aim of pushing the liberal bourgeoisie to the left, the entry of the workers into the political movement took place independently of Marxist leader- ship, almost accidentally. A local strike in a St. Petersburg factory spread to other workers in the city, and a series of demands was formulated including the eight-hour day, an end to the war, political freedoms and the responsibility of ministers to the people. These and other demands were embodied in a petition which was to be taken to the Tzar by a mass procession of workers. At this stage the political consciousness of many of the workers involved was at a very low level; speakers from the revolutionary parties had a poor reception at meetings, and the movement was led by a priest, Father Gapon, who was involved in the police- sponsored trade union movement known as Zubatov- ism. If not Gapon himself, many of his followers seem to have thought that the Tzar would help his people, if he was made aware of their grievances. In fact, the Tzar had already prepared his answer. When the procession began on January 9 police and military were out in force, and the peaceful demonstrators were shot down. Bloody Sunday, as it was called, was the signal for the beginning of the revolution. A wave of strikes spread outwards from the capital culminating in many areas in street fighting, and although the strikes began to break up before a week was out, they had begun a radical development in working-class _ consciousness. The traditional loyalty to the Tzar, a feature of peasant consciousness which had been carried over into the factories, was rapidly broken down, and for the first time not merely a small section of ‘advanced’ workers but broader and broader layers of the working class became receptive to socialist ideas. The months that followed saw the development of trade unions, which the police now had no alter- native but to tolerate, waves of strikes which spilled over from trade union to political demands and, on a more limited scale, peasant revolts and mutinies in individual regiments and in the fleet. The mutiny on the battleship Potemkin, in May, is fairly typical : mutineers seized the ship and sailed it to Odessa, which was then in the grip of a general strike. But the co-ordination between the revolutionary groups in the city and on the ship was poor, and when the rest of the fleet failed to respond the Potemkin mutineers gave up the ship in a neutral port. The Bulygin Duma Meanwhile Tzarism was forced on to the defensive. In February the Tzar had proposed the setting-up of an elected body, the State Duma, which was a parody of constitutionalism, since it was to be elected indirectly and to have only consultative powers. But this body, the Bulygin Duma, was swept aside by the revolution before it was even elected, by the most widespread and solid strike movement of the entire 132 revolution, in October. This strike was once again a spontaneous movement which snowballed from a num- ber of isolated events into a mass political protest. We will mention here only two of the major causes of the strike, both occasions when concessions by the insecure government gave weapons to the revolution. First, a decree granting some autonomy to the uni- versities in an attempt to end the six-month-old student strike had induced the students to return to the universities for the new academic year. They threw open the university buildings to the workers, and every night mass meetings were held, giving a powerful impetus to the political development of the workers. Secondly, the railway unions were allowed to hold a congress; thanks to the railway telegraph system the congress was in constant contact with the rank and file, who pressurized the delegates into call- ing a strike. From Moscow, the venue of the congress, the strike spread along the railway network, and in each city affected railwaymen called the other indus- tries out, until all Russia was paralyzed, and even the Tzar’s ministers could reach him only by boat. At this stage in the Revolution, as Lenin saw, the forces were equally balanced; the government was too weak to repress the revolution, and was forced to make a further concession; Count Sergei Witte, the most ‘liberal’ of a reactionary body of bureaucrats, was made premier, and the suffrage for the Duma was slightly extended, some legislative powers were given to it and freedom of speech was conceded. This October Manifesto was the highest point of the revolution; following it the bourgeois intelligentsia and the capital- ists, having gained the concessions they wanted, took fright and withdrew their passive support from the workers. The attitude of large sections of workers was summed up by Trotsky: ‘We have been granted free- dom of assembly, but our meetings are surrounded by soldiers . . . we have been granted a constitution, but the autocracy still exists . .. we have been granted everything, but we have nothing’. The general strike was not called off, and the workers now demanded a political amnesty. In some places prisons were stormed and prisoners freed. But gradually the impetus of the movement died down, the storm-troops of Tzar- ism, the notorious ‘Black Hundreds’, re-appeared on the streets, and Witte began to take actions as repress- ive as those of any of his predecessors. After wavering on the brink of being overthrown, Tzarism began to re-conquer its positions. The victories of October had been won by the mass strength, largely unorganized, of the working class. But to go beyond this position strong organization and conscious leadership were needed: and no _ sufficiently developed leadership existed in 1905. Political Parties in the Revolution In our account of the events of 1905 little mention has been made of political parties; and certainly they were to a great extent peripheral to the main struggle of the workers. The Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party had been split since 1903 between Fourth International, Winter 1968/1969

[p072] Bolsheviks and Mensheviks; and although this split meant little at local level, where what differences had existed between the factions were rapidly being dissolved by the wave of revolutionary enthusiasm, it was of vital importance to the work of the party’s central leadership. The split, which had begun on ap- parently minor organizational grounds, revealed itself with the development of revolution to involve major differences over the nature of the Russian Revolu- tion and the class relationships within it. It was generally accepted that at the level of social develop- ment of Russia in the early twentieth century the working class was not sufficiently developed to win socialism; the aims of the revolution must therefore Ne solely to achieve the level of democracy possible under capitalism, and to win reforms which would assist the working class in its own struggle against the capitalists. This analysis was interpreted in a routine fashion by the Mensheviks; in the period of the banquet campaign, before Bloody Sunday, they saw their role as being to exert pressure from the left on the liberals, so that the workers would assist liberalism and make sure that it fought for the broadest possible democracy. The emergence of the working class as the most significant force in the revolutionary movement completely disorientated this policy, and a section of the Mensheviks joined Trot- sky in fighting for the continuation of the bourgeois revolution and its transformation into a proletarian revolution. Others, like Martov and Axelrod, avoided the question of taking power. Martov envisaged the creation of ‘islands of revolutionary self-government’ -—he considered that the revolution would triumph, initially, on a local scale, with the taking-over of individual municipalities, etc., by the workers. When the Bulygin Duma was announced, he called for electors to this Duma to elect, at the same time, deputies to a second assembly which, at the appro- priate time, could function as a Constituent Assembly. In fact this policy of ultra-democratism meant the complete abandonment of any hope of political power. The islands of revolutionary democracy, the embry- onic Constituent Assembly, remained targets for Tsarist repression, as long as the central organs of power, the army and the police, remained loyal to the government. As Lenin clearly recognized, demo- cracy could be won in Russia only by an armed uprising of the proletariat and the peasantry to defeat and smash the Tsarist state. The emergence of the Soviet The role of Menshevism can be seen most clearly in its activities in the St. Petersburg Soviet, where, thanks to Bolshevik abstention, they held the lead- ing position. The Soviet was formed, as a committee of workers’ deputies, as part of the Menshevik cam- paign of revolutionary self-government, and soon re- presented most of the industrial workers of the capi- tal. In spite of its initial conception as a ‘political’ body, it owed its mass basis, which extended to the less politically-conscious workers, to the fact that it Insurrection or Democratism became a co-ordinating commitieé tui strike action. After the October Manifesto the Soviet continued to exist and indeed increased its activity. It was instru- mental in forcing the St. Petersburg press to defy the censorship and become the centre of the fight for an eight-hour day. Lenin greeted the appearance of the Soviet with enthusiasm, regarding it as a possible nucleus for a provisional revolutionary government, which could take power by armed struggle (the role which the Soviets played in 1917). But later, according to the memoirs of a leading Bolshe- vik, he said that ‘The Soviet is just like a talking- shop; They are trying to turn it into a workers’ Par- liament.’ This was, in fact, precisely the aim of the Mensheviks. They were trying to ‘link up’ the Soviet to the Peasants’ Union, a body which represented the land-holding peasants rather than the rural pro- letariat, but the gesture was purely formal. Where, on the other hand, real struggle was needed, the Men- sheviks hesitated and retreated. When, towards the end of October, the campaign began for the eight-hour day, which had been spontaneously instituted in the factories by the simple expedient of walking out after eight hours’ work, the Menshevik leaders tried to hold it back, for fear of alienating bourgeois support for the revolution, and for the purely doctrinaire reason that it was considered necessary to finish off Tsarism before attacking capitalism. In the absence of a clear lead, the eight-hour movement began to disintegrate, and the authority of the Soviet among the workers began to collapse. Witte thus had the satisfaction of seeing one of the most important of the forces opposing his government alienate its own support, so that when he arrested first its chairman and then many of its delegates, there was little re- sponse from the workers to a call for its defence. Lenin’s rofe in the Bolshevik leadership The Mensheviks, like the Bolsheviks, suffered from the absence of effective leadership caused by the party split. But this factor influenced them less than it did the Bolsheviks, since for their policy of vague ‘democratic’ activity a firm centralized leadership was not vital. For the Bolsheviks, on the other hand, organization was essential. Lenin had recognized that the Russian bourgeoisie was weak and vacillating, and that, provided it could secure minimal concessions from Tsarism, its fear of working-class action was such that it preferred autocracy to revolution. The only way forward, therefore, was for the oppressed classes—the proletariat and the peasantry—to form an alliance with the aim of establishing what he called the ‘revolutionary-democratic dictatorship’. Although the balance of class forces in the country was such that a socialist revolution was impossible, even demo- cracy could be won only under the leadership of the proletariat. Insisting that democracy could be achieved only by the armed defeat of Tsarism, Lenin saw the aim of the Bolsheviks to be the turning of the general strike into an armed insurrection. The October Manifesto was of no significance in 133

[p073] the reforms it promised, which benefited nobody but the bourgeoisie: its significance lay in the fact that it revealed the strength of the working class, a strength which must be exercised even more forcibly to overthrow Tsarism. He therefore stressed the need for Bolsheviks to become both political and military organisers, combining the political education of the ’ working class with the preparations for an armed up- rising. Lenin’s proposals were, however, hampered not only by the confused state of party organization following the initial split and subsequent factional struggles, but also by the conservatism of many lead- ing Bolsheviks throughout the country. The organiza- tion of the RSDLP had from its outset consisted of ‘committees’ composed of the ablest and most reliable members (in practice usually intellectuals) who took the important decisions for their area, decisions which were then carried out by a ‘periphery’ of rank-and- file workers. Lenin’s organizational theories, (which he had set out in What is to be Done?) stressing the need for a party of trained professional revo- lutionaries, had the result of confirming this pattern of organization, and the attitudes of the committee- men had hardened into dogmas. Much of Lenin’s efforts during the revolutionary period were devoted to stressing the need for inner-party democracy, as- pects of which had been impossible under Tsarist repression, and to demanding that more and more workers and youth were brought into the committees, reflecting the leap which had taken place in working- class consciousness. But in spite of this there was a resistance to change in the Bolshevik local leader- ships. The St. Petersburg Bolsheviks, for instance, interpreted Lenin’s stress on the leading role of the party as a prohibition of work in non-party organiza- tions, and thus failed to work in the Soviet, leaving it as a Menshevik preserve. The armed insurrection Lenin’s slogan, ‘organize the revolution’, which he opposed to the Martovite concept of ‘unleashing the revolution’, meant, in effect, that the party must strive to raise every stage of the movement to a higher level—to transform waves of partial strikes into a general strike and to carry the general strike forward into an armed insurrection. Only through the final stage of insurrection could the workers’ strength win real change in society. Lenin’s view of the revolution was anything but narrow: the party must work to develop all the forms of struggle which the working class itself brought into being, lead strike movements, organize and arm the workers’ militias which came into being to fight the right- wing Black Hundred mobs, and train them for the uprising. By local Bolsheviks, however, Lenin’s ideas - were interpreted narrowly, and each of his recom- mendations was carried out only as a fixed formula. Only the revolutionary mobilization he demanded could have kept up the impetus of the October strike when the political betrayal of the Mensheviks took 134 effect: and when, in December, the Moscow Bolshe- viks took up Lenin’s call for an armed insurrection, they did it in circumstances in which it was by then foredoomed to failure. The Moscow uprising The Moscow working class had always been poli- tically less developed than that of St. Petersburg: the scale of industrial enterprises was smaller, and many workers tended to have closer ties with the land. The Moscow Soviet was not formed until November 22, when the impetus of the St. Petersburg Soviet was already beginning to falter. A combination of circum- stances—among them a mutiny in one of the regi- ments garrisoned in the city—decided the Soviet leadership, dominated by the Bolsheviks, to call a general strike with the aim of transforming it into an armed insurrection, in protest against the suppres- sion of the St. Petersburg Soviet, and this decision was reinforced by over-optimistic reports of the readiness of the St. Petersburg workers to come to the aid of Moscow. The uprising was, however, badly prepared—there were few arms available, and the workers’ militias were small—and in addition several of the most prominent leaders were arrested on the eve of the insurrection, leaving no effective guiding centre. For a short time it seemed as if the rising would be successful—the police were withdrawn from the streets because their forces were completely inadequate—but within a few days, with the arrival of army reinforcements, the rising was forced back to a heroic last stand in the working-class district of Presnya (known today as Red Presnya in memory of 1905) where it was finally brutally suppressed. Some lessons From the suppression of the Moscow uprising dates the end of the active phase of the 1905 Revo- lution—the period in which the working class had the initiative. The beginning of 1906 marked the re-establishment of Tsarist power, the gradual sup- pression of the remnants of the revolutionary forces, and the fighting of a parliamentary rearguard action. The revolutionary struggles of 1905 were fought almost exclusively by the workers, and it was for this reason that failure was inevitable: without the mass support of the peasantry, and especially of the largely peasant army, the working class was too weak to tip the balance of power against Tsarism. But the immaturity of the contradictions in Russian society was accompanied by the political immaturity of the revolutionary leadership. Bolshevism as a poli- tical tendency was only two years old in 1905, and the type of party organization for which Lenin had been fighting throughout those two years had not been built in time to undertake the tasks of the revolu- tion. The failure of 1905 pointed to the need to build a party which was both strongly organized and theoretically developed—a party such as Lenin was aiming for, and which began to emerge in a developed form after 1910. Fourth International, Winter 1968/1969

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[p076] cs Syndicalism --a case history , The South Wales Miners—A History of the South Wales Miners’ Federation, 1898-1914 by R. Page Arnot Allen and Unwin, 1967 60s. R. PAGE ARNOT’S book on the miners of South Wales could have been a major contribution to the under- standing of the development of the revolutionary movement in Britain and in particular the role of revo- lutionary politics in the trade unions. From the 1890s onwards the South Wales coal industry was a storm-centre of industrial conflict in Britain. It was an area where an increasing number of rank-and- file trade unionists turned to Marx- ism as a guide to action against capitalism, an area which saw the growth of revolutionary syndicalism from 1909 and the emergence of the basis for the mass appeal of the Communist Pary from 1920. By the mid-1920s the Communist Party and the Miners’ Minority Move- ment were the effective determin- ing influence in union policy in the coalfield and it was in South Wales that the CP had gone furthest in establishing a mass influence among the working class. Arnot’s book covers the period which saw the beginnings of this development, the formative years of the South Wales Miners’ Federation (SWMEF). The feature of central importance to Marxists in this period is obviously the great conflict .of 1910-1911, the Cambrian Combine Strike, from which emerged the syndicalist Un- official Reform Movement (URM), the organisation which played a major role in linking the struggles of the Welsh miners to those of miners throughout Britain in the fight for a minimum living wage and which, in effect, forced the right-wing bureaucracy of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain into the great strike for the mini- mum wage in 1912. Even more im- portant, it was the URM which set the pattern for revolutionary syndicalism in the unions with its 136 publication of the famous manifesto, The Miners’ Next Step. Arnot’s book is concerned with none of these issues. He devotes less than two pages to the unoffi-. cial movement; such information as he provides is vague and inaccurate. His excuse of the scarcity of sources is simply false. The Labour press of the period allows a full analysis to be made of the revo- lutionary movement among the Welsh miners. The point is, of course, that not only is Arnot not interested in the revolutionary de- velopments in South Wales in the 1900s, but he finds it impossible to understand and relate them to the present problems of the miners, to whom he has the effrontery to dedicate his book. In the first place, given the counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism in Britain, Arnot, a life-long apologist for Stalinism, is unable to draw any revolutionary lessons from the experiences of the Welsh miners; such lessons are meaningless to a party which has totally rejected revolutionary - poli- tics. In the second place, as far as the Welsh miners are concerned, the last thing Arnot wants to do is to draw attention to their past revolutionary experience and the origins of the movement that led directly to the formation of the CP in Wales. From the 1930s the history of Stalinism in the miners’ trade unions has been the history of the betrayal of the rank and file. In the interests of popular front politics the militant struggles of the Welsh miners in the 1930s to crush company unionism in the coalfield and to rebuild the SWMF as a fighting union were compromised and in some cases blatantly sold out in order to avoid offending pro- gressive parsons on the platforms of the popular front. Again, in the post-war period, to avoid conflict with the Labour government in the interests of peaceful co-existence, the CP supported what was a purely capitalist nationalization even when it was well aware that this must be the prelude to rationalization schemes at the expense of the miners. It was because of this that the CP avoided any principled poli- cies against the bureaucracy of the NUM. Identified with this bureau- cracy through successive general secretaries, Horner and Paynter, the CP refused to give any effective lead against pit closures and the speeding up of production. As a result, in South Wales, as elsewhere, the National Coal Board has been able to destroy the jobs of tens of thousands of miners since 1947 and threaten the security of every single miner left in the area. Only a prin- cipled political and industrial fight against closures could have pre- vented this; the policy of peaceful co-existence has led to quite the. opposite result. History of trade union bureaucracy It is therefore not coincidental that Arnot’s book (apart from the initial chapters on the formation of the SWMF) concentrates almost wholly on the activities of the lead- ership of the union. For Arnot, trade union history is the history of the trade union bureaucracy, and even within this limited context he is not interested in serious analysis of the factors causing the growth of bureaucracy. The same point applies to all his other works on the history of miners’ trade union- ism. In none of these does Arnot attempt seriously to examine the conflict between the rank and file and the union bureaucracy, nor does he show at any point that such conflicts were essentially political, that they represented the repeated attempts of the rank and file to fight capitalism as against the readi- ness of the bureaucracy to accept the capitalist system and to work Fourth International, Winter 1968/1969

[p077] within it. But it was these conflicts from the 1900s which provided the basis in leading trade unions in Britain, the railworkers and engin- eers as well as the miners, for the attempt by the younger genera- tion of trade union militants to find their way to a _ revolutionary opposition to capitalism and _ to realize in the process the need for the destruction of the trade union bureaucracy as one of the main obstacles preventing the full strength of the working class being de- ployed against capitalism. From the 1870s to the 1890s It is from this position that an understanding of the history of the South Wales miners has to begin. What was so prominent in the his- tory of the SWMF in the period covered by Arnot was the deep division between a growing section of the rank and file, particularly the young miners, and the pro-Liberal leadership of the union. The origins of this division lay in the circum- stances surrounding the formation of the union. In the period between the destruction of Halliday’s Amalgamated Association of Miners in the 1870s and the creation of the SWMF in 1898 trade unionism among the miners had virtually ceased to exist in South Wales. What took its place in most of the valleys. was a form of company unionism, the Sliding Scale Asso- -Clation. Wages were regulated not through any form of struggle against the owners but through the auto- matic upward and downward move- ment of wages in relation to the market price of coal. This meant that the owners were compensated for the sharp fluctuations in prices on the export markets for which South Wales produced; profit levels were maintained at the expense and frequent destitution of the miners. Furthermore, the only contact be- tween miners and owners was through the miners’ agent on the Sliding Scale Association, a paid official whose money was deducted from individual miners’ pay-packets at the colliery office. To all intents and purposes this agent was in the