Strategy (53 page)

There was nothing particularly new in the idea of the mass strike, but it was not normally associated with Marxists. Its potential had been demonstrated by the General Strike in Britain in 1842, which involved some half a million workers. This was a response to wage cuts during tough economic times but then picked up on the political demands associated with the Chartists. Even then the Chartist leadership was equivocal about the connection and in Britain, as elsewhere in Europe, strikes had come to be associated with trade unions and economic demands. Only anarchists adopted the idea of political strikes as a reflection of the sort of mass spontaneity celebrated by Bakunin. For that reason alone, the tactic was treated skeptically by Marxists. In 1873, Engels had mocked the Bakuninist idea that

one fine morning all the workers in all the industries of a country, or even of the whole world, stop work, thus forcing the propertied classes either humbly to submit within four weeks at the most, or to attack the workers, who would then have the right to defend themselves and use this opportunity to pull down the entire old society.

According to Engels, a mass strike required a “well-formed organization of the working class and plentiful funds.” Before that was achieved, the workers would have achieved power by other means. And if they did have the
organization and the funds “there would be no need to use the roundabout way of a general strike to achieve its goal.”
¹⁰

Luxemburg therefore needed to explain how her idea met Engels's objections. She argued that 1905 had demonstrated something new about the tactic and that it had nothing to do with anarchism. However, her enthusiasm for the idea of change coming about as a natural, organic response of the working classes to their conditions rather than as a device of party strategy was not far away from Bakunin. In her treatise, she thus went out of her way to demonstrate her contempt for anarchism. Still, her distrust for party bureaucrats was evident in the polemics against those who treated tactics as if a “board of directors” could decide on them for an appointed day, and against those who respected only “orderly and well-disciplined” struggles that ran “according to plan and scheme.” In Russia in 1905 there was “no predetermined plan, no organized action.” The parties were almost left behind by the “spontaneous risings of the masses.” Here she was careful to argue that the events were not wholly spontaneous but reflected years of agitation by social democrats.

Nor did she agree with those, such as the German trade unions, who saw strikes in a separate category of economic actions. The economic and political spheres could not be separated. One fed off the other. The advantage of the mass strike was that this was where they came together. The strikes could start with economic demands and then the combination of socialist agitation and government responses would turn them into something more political. Above all, they would be consciousness-raising events: “The most precious, lasting, thing in the rapid ebb and flow of the wave is its mental sediment: the intellectual, cultural growth of the proletariat, which proceeds by fits and starts, and which offers an inviolable guarantee of their further irresistible progress in the economic as in the political struggle.” Her aim was to assert the role of the mass strike in Germany as the “first natural, impulsive form of every great revolutionary struggle.” The more developed the antagonism between capital and labor, the more effective the mass strikes. They would not replace “brutal street fights,” for at some culminating point the armed power of the state would have to be faced. This would be no more than “a moment in the long period of political struggle.”
¹¹

In his memoir, Leon Trotsky described being present at an encounter between Luxemburg and Kautsky in 1907. The two had been close friends but since 1905 had diverged. Trotsky described Luxemburg as small and frail but intelligent and courageous, with a “precise, intense and merciless” style. Kautsky, by contrast, Trotsky found “charming,” but with an “angular and dry” mind lacking in “nimbleness and psychological insight.” He was caught
up in the reality of reform: revolution was just a “misty historical prospect.” Together they went to a demonstration, and the exchanges between the two intensified: “Kautsky wanted to remain an onlooker, whereas Rosa was anxious to join the demonstration.”
¹²
The antagonism between the two came out in 1910 over Luxemburg's continued advocacy of the mass strike.

We noted in the last section the influential distinction, introduced by the military historian Hans Delbrück, between a strategy of annihilation, which demanded a decisive battle to eliminate the enemy's army, and a strategy of exhaustion, which drew on a range of alternative means to wear down the enemy. These could also be understood respectively as strategies of overthrow or attrition—terms that might be more helpful in the context of political strategy. In 1910, responding to Luxemburg, Kautsky drew explicitly on Delbrück's work. While overthrow depended on drawing “forces rapidly together in order to go to meet the enemy and to deal decisive blows by means of which the enemy is overthrown and rendered incapable of struggle,” with attrition

the commander-in-chief initially avoids any decisive battle; he aims to keep the opposing army on the move by all sorts of maneuvers, without giving it the opportunity of raising the morale of its troops by gaining victories; he strives to gradually wear them out by continual exhaustion and threats and to consistently reduce their resistance and paralyze them.
¹³

Kautsky was all in favor of attrition. Luxemburg's mass strike was an attempt at overthrow, imprudent because it would provoke the state repression and antisocialist legislation he was so anxious to avoid. What if a mass strike was called and few turned up? All the gains from the parliamentary strategy would be lost.

Kautsky's distinction between overthrow and attrition was also adopted by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democrats. He was arguing about the meaning of 1905 with the opposing Menshevik faction who had used Kautsky's formulation.
¹⁴
Later, Kautsky and Lenin would fall out, but for the moment Kautsky was the leader of European socialists and Lenin had his own disagreements with Luxemburg.

Lenin's extraordinary appetite for factional struggle reflected his top priority, which was to get the right form of party organization—with him
in control. It was for this reason that while the 1905 revolution was getting started, he was locked in battle in a party congress in London, vying for control of the party newspaper. His approach to all revolutionary matters betrayed a single-mindedness acquired at an early age. Lenin's formative political experiences included his brother Aleksandr being executed for an attempted assassination attempt against the Tsar and expulsion from university for participation in demonstrations. In 1891, having spent two years studying Marx, he was drawn into more active politics (as were others of his generation) by the terrible famine that overtook the country that year, which was only aggravated by government action. He began to identify himself as a socialist revolutionary, true to the word of Marx. He had followed the familiar Russian path of imprisonment and exile, traveling around Europe, attending meetings with other revolutionaries, attempting to establish clandestine organizations that could escape police scrutiny, and editing a revolutionary paper (
Iskra
) while in Zurich.

If Lenin had a model it was Rakhmetov, the new man of Chernyshevsky's novel,
What Is to Be Done
? He shared the ascetic lifestyle, neither smoking nor drinking, and had a total devotion to the cause, for which he was prepared to sacrifice all. He also borrowed Chernyshevky's title for his first major statement of strategy, published in March 1902 when he was 33. The character he deliberately cultivated was hard, tough, disciplined, and uncompromising, prepared to break with old comrades over points of doctrine and tactics, blistering in his polemics. There was little attempt at empathy with those of different views; he could not admit to error. Into his own
What Is to Be Done?
Lenin poured all that he had studied in theory and learned in practice. He intended it as a landmark statement. It took broadly accepted positions in socialist circles to ruthlessly logical conclusions. Even those who deplored revisionism recoiled at the starkness of Lenin's message.

If moving quickly to a revolution meant accelerating the pace of historical development, in the case of Russia there was an awful lot of history to be passed through in short order. Russia was backward in its material development, straining to leave feudal times. At the same time, it was forever showing symptoms of mass discontent and militancy. Lenin's energies were geared to making revolution. His pamphlet explained why alternative approaches led to dead ends and why his own might succeed, but only if it was conducted relentlessly by a tightly controlled and disciplined party.

For much of
What Is to Be Done?
Lenin's main target was “economism.” The economists in question derided doctrinaire Marxists for filling workers' heads with unrealizable demands. Better to concentrate on practical proposals that could show real and early results. In the context of the oppressive
conditions prevailing in Russia, economic demands were less risky than political demands, which could be left to the bourgeoisie who were still waiting for their revolution. Lenin derided this approach as “tailism,” following rather than leading the proletarian movement. He pointed to the German SPD as demonstrating how effective organizations could encourage workers to embrace socialism as the best explanation for their everyday struggles. Because socialism was the best explanation it must not be diluted. The “philosophy of Marxism” was “cast from a single block of steel.” It was impossible to “eliminate a single substantial premise, a single essential part, without deviating from objective truth, without falling into the arms of bourgeois, reactionary falsehood.”
¹⁵

As his critics pointed out, this assumed that workers could not be trusted with their own struggle and so must be guided by those with the education to grasp socialist theory. “Social-Democratic consciousness,” Lenin wrote, “had to be brought to the workers from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness.” As there were only two forms of political consciousness—bourgeois and socialist—failure to adopt one inevitably meant being part of the other. Lenin did not seem, however, to have worried about this part of the equation. He was optimistic about the natural instincts of workers. So he was not suggesting that the efforts of a vanguard of professional revolutionaries could substitute for those of the working class. His main concern was with the defects of Russian socialism. With its limited political development and poor organization, it was unable to give the struggle the necessary coherence and purpose and steer it away from “bourgeois consciousness.” This required professional revolutionaries. He was not against a democratic party in principle, but in practice revolutionaries were bound to act conspiratorially, otherwise they could not survive. One of Lenin's closest associates turned out to be a police agent.

None of this was particularly controversial among mainstream European Marxists, other than the sharpness of his bifurcation between bourgeois and socialist consciousness resulting in the odd conclusion that purely working-class movements were almost bound to be bourgeois unless they were led by professionals, versed in the theory, who were invariably from the bourgeoisie. Nor was Lenin expecting leadership from intellectuals, a group far too dreamy, individualistic, and impervious to party discipline for his taste. What mattered was the party, which needed proletarian roots and support, but which had to set the objectives and the associated strategy for the movement as a whole. The anarchists had warned how the party could become an end in itself, but the Marxists had insisted that any supreme role would be
a momentary function of the exigencies of the revolutionary process rather than reflecting the self-interest of the leadership.

Lenin insisted that the party was no more than a means to an end, yet he lavished care and attention on matters of organization and leadership in a quite unique way. If the revolution was to succeed, then endless disputes about small points of theory and forms of internal democracy designed to give everyone their say—whether or not they were truly committed to the cause—were luxuries that could not be afforded. Essential political work required organization, and in the face of police agents and a dispersed leadership, often in exile, this was bound to take on conspiratorial aspects. In addition, many other energetic alternatives were competing in the same political space. The Russian Social Democratic Workers Party was in a fragile state. Lenin's ideas were therefore aspirational, looking forward to a party that could serve as the instrument of a decisive leadership, sure in theory and determined in practice.

Lenin's capacity for organization and drive was at first turned against critics within his party rather than the system he was trying to overthrow. The Second Party Congress met in Brussels in July 1903, with Lenin's group associated with
Iskra
, the party paper that he edited. The outcome was two parties rather than one, although it took another congress in 1905 for the split to be confirmed. The argument between Lenin's Bolsheviks (majority) and the Mensheviks (minority) came over control of the paper. This became linked to claims that Lenin was determined to create an all-powerful central committee, and was in turn connected to the question of whether membership should be confined to those wholly committed to the party program and prepared to work for it or opened up to those who were only prepared to give some support. One route turned the party into a focused elite group; the other created the basis for a mass party, with some expectation of democratic control of the leadership by the party. In addition there were wider differences over strategy. The Mensheviks were inclined to ally with the liberals and use parliamentary means. Lenin would place little reliance on parliament and saw peasants as more natural allies.