The Soviet Union and Revolutionary Violence

The Socialist Labour League celebrates the 42nd anniversary of the October revolution in the USSR by outlining the Marxist attitude towards the use of force and violence.

We do this because the Stalinist bureaucrats, headed by Khrushchev, who at present wield power in the Soviet Union, are busy obscuring the significance of the struggle of the Bolshevik Party which made the Soviet Union possible. They do this because of their adherence to peaceful co-existence with the imperialists. They lecture the working-class movements of the world against the use of force; and at the same time they endeavour to obscure their own brutal methods and the brutal methods of imperialism today.

Mr Aristov, a secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU told a meeting celebrating the forty-second anniversary of the October Revolution that: ‘The socialist system needs neither force nor violence.’

In the same issue of the Daily Worker which reported this speech was an article by Mr John Gollan, who introduced the following quotation from Lenin: ‘The expropriation of the capitalists will result in an enormous development of the productive forces.’

But how are we to expropriate the capitalists? That’s the declaration we must formulate in a manner as brief as it 1s big question, for Marxists. Engels answered the question in vigorous this conclusion: peace to the peoples, land to the this way: ‘.... force, however, plays yet another role (other peasants, confiscation of the scandalous profits of the than that of diabolical power) in history, a revolutionary role; capitalists, strong measures to curb these latter and prevent in the words of Marx, it is the midwife of every old society them from continuing to disorganize production. which is pregnant with the new, it is the instrument by the ‘Our cadres must be ready to sacrifice themselves to the last aid of which the social movement forces its way through and man rather than allow the enemy to penetrate into the centre shatters the dead fossilized political forms.’ of the town. We must mobilize the armed workers, summon As long as any remnants of imperialism survive, until the them to the greatest fight of all, occupy simultaneously the whole world enters the period of communism, so long will central telegraph office and the telephone exchange, get socialists need force and violence. There have been many telephone connections with all the factories, all the regiments, important struggles between revolutionary and reactionary all the points at which the attacking army displays itself.’ classes. History is on the side of the revolutionaries, but they win only when their organized armed force is stronger than Workers’ dictatorship relied on force the defenders of the old system.

Lenin wasted no time appealing to the imperialist tigers to _ Revolutionary groups such as the. Socialist Labour League cut off their claws. are always anxious to achieve their aims peacefully, for The imperialists deployed their armies against the Soviet revolutions are much more than mere acts of violence. But state so fiercely because they knew, as Lenin knew, that the the old ruling class refuses to disappear from the scene, long Russian Revolution is the ‘first stage of the international after it has ceased to serve human progress. In order to stay socialist revolution. Workers’ power puts an end for ever to on top they will go to any length in the use of force and all forms of private property in the means of production, violence against the socialist movement.

permanently abolishes the whole basis of the old ruling classes.

The Bolsheviks would not have got the power in the 1917 War against the Soviet Union is simply the continuation by Revolution if they had believed what Aristov is saying now. violent means of the imperialist struggle to' keep on top. Who They did not at all wantonly choose force as the way to set up defeats whom? This will be decided not only in peaceful the Soviet State. They had no alternative. They knew that competition but by all forms of struggle. the old ruling classes would resist with violence. So they The revolutionary dictatorship of the Soviet workers relied prepared a political leadership for revolution, the Bolshevik on force and violence. But in the German revolution of 1918 - Party. the great capitalists and generals consciously used armed counter-revolutionary violence against unprepared workers and The Bolsheviks and- force soldiers. The people lacked a political leadership to warn them against provocations and prepare them to defend their Between February and October 1917, the Bolshevik Party councils. The victorious reaction reached its climax in the was able to protect the workers of Petrograd and the soldiers victory of Hitler, the price which the German people paid for of the garrison from the counter-revolutionary attacks of failing to take and hold the power in 1918.

Kerensky’s government, warning them against being provoked Would the Chinese People’s Republic exist today if the into premature outbreaks and organizing a strategic retreat.

peasants had not systematically waged war on Chiang Kai-shek, The same party mobilized defensive forces to repel the attacks with weapons got by politically undermining their opponent’s of the Cossack General Kornilov. All through, the workers troops? . were arming themselves and building the Red Guards, the ;

But Aristov does not square even with his own friends. core of the Red Army.

When Communist Party speakers want to justify Stalin’s When every possibility was exhausted of taking the power murders, they tell us that .... the nearer the Soviet Union peacefully in agreement with the other Soviet Party leaders, gets to catching up the imperialists, the more desperate, not and only then, Lenin wrote to the Central Committee of the more co-operative the imperialists become!

Bolsheviks his letter ‘Marxism and Insurrection’: ‘In order to be entirely victorious, insurrection must not depend on a conspiracy, or on a party, but on a revolutionary class. That Soviet bureaucracy rests on force and violence is the first point. Insurrection must break out at the highest Could there have been something unique about the Russian point of the rising revolution, that is, the moment when the revolution? If Russian socialism alone needed violence, why activity of the vanguard of the people is greatest, when the did Lenin write in ‘Left-wing Communism’: ‘All fundamental fluctuations among the enemy and among the weak and in- and many secondary features of our revolution are of interdecisive friends of the revolution are strongest.’ national significance.’ Despite Russian peculiarities, the Explaining thus the art of insurrection, Lenin outlined its Marxist ideas of the Bolsheviks were based on the previous programme: ‘With the whole of our fraction concentrated in experience of class-war in Western Europe, of German and the factories and the barracks, we shall be able to judge the French revolutions. moment when the insurrection should be begun. In our And does not the Soviet state itself rest on force and

violence? Are there not still prisons, and a legal system for exerting force, no less than in capitalist countries? Every state rests on force, and will do so until the world-wide triumph of communism.

If Soviet industry outstrips that of the USA, will the capitalists of the world then become unnecessary? But they are unnecessary already, and their removal by the working-class is already overdue by several decades. The programme of the Communist International said back in 1928: “The epoch of imperialism is the epoch of moribund capitalism . . . the material pre-requisites for socialism have already ripened in the womb of capitalist society, the shell of capitalism has become an intolerable hindrance to the further development of mankind and history has brought to the forefront the task of the revolutionary overthrow of the yoke of capitalism.’

Soviet bureaucracy yields to imperialist powers Nor is it true that if the Soviet lands outstrip the USA the people of America will all join together to bring in socialism by agreement regardless of class interests. Does Aristov expect anyone seriously to picture the Wall Street bankers politely vacating their offices and handing over their factories and their H-bombs?

As Palme Dutt wrote as long ago as 1923, ‘the present Euopean situation is a deadlock from which there is no way out save the proletarian revolution’... . before Stalinist conceptions of national socialism and peaceful co-existence had politically undermined the Communist Parties.

Suppose Aristov is right and Marx and Lenin were wrong? Then all the revolutionary struggles would have been misunderstandings. If there is a peaceful road to overthrow capitalism, history does not speak of it.

Aristov clearly means that there are to be no more 1917s. The only good revolution is the one that happened 42 years ago. He appeals from the highest committees of the Soviet bureaucracy to the leaders of US imperialism. He tells the Wall Street magnates that they need not fear that the Soviet chiefs will defend themselves by helping revolutionary movements in any other country.

Aristov does not speak as a revolutionary fighter, but as a leader of a parasitic bureaucracy who are today usurping the best fruits of the struggles of the Bolshevik Party.

Their opportunist policies will not buy off the imperialists. On the contrary, they will spur them on towards the organization of more violence against both the USSR and the international working class.