Less than five months have passed since those words were written, and it must be said that during this time, in view of the fact that workers of various countries have turned to communism and Bolshevism, the maturing of the world proletarian revolution has proceeded very rapidly….
Now, on Jan. 12, 1919, we already see quite a number of communist proletarian parties, not only within the boundaries of the former tsarist empire—in Latvia, Finland and Poland, for example—but also in Western Europe—Austria, Hungary, Holland and, lastly, Germany. The foundation of a genuinely proletarian, genuinely internationalist, genuinely revolutionary Third International, the Communist International, became a fact when the German Spartacus League, with such world-known and world-famous leaders, with such staunch working-class champions as [Karl] Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin and Franz Mehring, made a clean break with socialists like Scheidemann and Südekum, social-chauvinists (socialists in words, but chauvinists in deeds) who have earned eternal shame by their alliance with the predatory, imperialist German bourgeoisie and Wilhelm II1. It became a fact when the Spartacus League2 changed its name to the Communist Party of Germany. Though it has not yet been officially inaugurated, the Third International actually exists.
No class-conscious worker, no sincere socialist can now fail to see how dastardly was the betrayal of socialism by those who… supported “their” bourgeoisie in the 1914-18 war. That war fully exposed itself as an imperialist, reactionary, predatory war both on the part of Germany and on the part of the capitalists of Britain, France, Italy and America. The latter are now beginning to quarrel over the spoils, over the division of Turkey, Russia, the African and Polynesian colonies, the Balkans, and so on….
Then, on Aug. 20, 1918, the proletarian revolution was confined to Russia, and “Soviet government”, i.e., the system under which all state power is vested in Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, still seemed to be (and actually was) only a Russian institution.
Now, on Jan. 12, 1919, we see a mighty “Soviet” movement not only in parts of the former tsarist empire, for example, in Latvia, Poland and the Ukraine, but also in West-European countries, in neutral countries (Switzerland, Holland and Norway) and in countries which have suffered from the war (Austria and Germany). The revolution in Germany…clearly shows how history has formulated the question in relation to Germany: “Soviet power” or the bourgeois parliament, no matter under what signboard (such as “National” or “Constituent” Assembly) it may appear….
“Soviet power” is the second historical step, or stage, in the development of the proletarian dictatorship. The first step was the Paris Commune. The brilliant analysis of its nature and significance given by Marx in his The Civil War in France showed that the Commune had created a new type of state, a proletarian state. Every state, including the most democratic republic, is nothing but a machine for the suppression of one class by another. The proletarian state is a machine for the suppression of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat. Such suppression is necessary because of the furious, desperate resistance put up by the landowners and capitalists, by the entire bourgeoisie and all their hangers-on, by all the exploiters, who stop at nothing when their overthrow, when the expropriation of the expropriators, begins.
The bourgeois parliament, even the most democratic in the most democratic republic, in which the property and rule of the capitalists are preserved, is a machine for the suppression of the working millions by small groups of exploiters. The socialists, the fighters for the emancipation of the working people from exploitation, had to utilise the bourgeois parliaments as a platform, as a base, for propaganda, agitation, and organisation as long as our struggle was confined to the framework of the bourgeois system: Now that world history has brought up the question of destroying the whole of that system, of overthrowing and suppressing the exploiters, of passing from capitalism to socialism, it would be a shameful betrayal of the proletariat, deserting to its class enemy, the bourgeoisie, and being a traitor and a renegade to confine oneself to bourgeois parliamentarism, to bourgeois democracy, to present it as “democracy” in general, to obscure its bourgeois character, to forget that as long as capitalist property exists universal suffrage is an instrument of the bourgeois state.
2The Spartacus League had originated as a revolutionary current in the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), initiating and spearheading opposition to the SPD majority leadership’s open support in August 1914 to German imperialist war policy. When the workers overthrew the kaiser on Nov. 9, 1918, the main social-democratic currents formed a provisional government. The Spartacists advocated replacing this government with one resting on the mass-based councils of workers and soldiers formed during the uprising.
Front page (for this issue) |
Home |
Text-version home