The outbreak of the First World War was the clearest sign that capitalism had entered into its period of decline. Everything that it had been able to contribute to the progress of humanity is henceforth threatened. Immense material resources are periodically destroyed: the First World War; the economic crisis of 1929-32; the Second World War; colonial wars of reconquest; numerous ‘recessions’; the destruction of the ecological balance. The survival of capitalism is assured at the cost of millions of human lives. Bloody dictatorships, military and fascist, and the more widespread use of torture sweep away the gains of the great bourgeois-democratic revolutions. Humanity is faced with this dilemma: socialism or barbarism. 

1 The international labour movement and the imperialist war

During the decade prior to 1914, the Socialist International and the entire international labour movement had begun to educate and mobilise the working masses against the growing threat of war. Increasing armament, the growth of ‘local’ conflicts, the heightening of inter-imperialist contradictions all clearly announced the imminent conflagration. The International reminded the workers of all countries that they had common interests and should stay out of the sordid quarrels among the ruling classes: quarrels about the distribution of the profits snatched from the proletarians and colonised peoples of the world.

But when the war broke out in 1914, most of the social democratic leaderships capitulated before the wave of chauvinism unleashed by the bourgeoisie. Each identified with ‘its’ own imperialist camp against the enemies of its own bourgeoisie. Everyone had an excuse. For the German and Austrian social democratic leaders, it was a matter of protecting their people against the barbarism of ‘Czarist absolutism’. For the French, Belgian, and British social democratic leaders, the struggle against ‘Prussian militarism’ came before anything else. 

In both camps the chauvinistic espousal of the national defence of the imperialist ‘fatherland’ implied the end of anti-militarist and revolutionary socialist propaganda, as well as the end of all defence of even the immediate class interests of the workers. The ‘sacred union’ of the workers and capitalists in the face of the ‘foreign enemy’ was proclaimed. But, like the war, this ‘sacred union’ in no way altered the capitalist exploitative nature of the economy and society; social patriotism implied the de facto acceptance of a worsening of the living and working conditions of the workers, and a scandalous growth in the wealth of the trusts and other profiteers of capitalist wars.

2 The imperialist war leads to the revolutionary crisis

But the contradictions of social patriotism soon erupted. The most artful reformist leaders explained that the masses themselves were in favour of the war, and that ·a mass workers party cannot oppose the predominant feelings of the people. But soon the predominant feelings within the masses turned into dissatisfaction, opposition to the war, and revolt. This time, however, the German social-patriot leaders Scheidemann and Noske and the French social-patriot leaders Renaudel and Jules Guesde did nothing ‘to adapt to the predominant feelings within the working class’. On the contrary, they manoeuvred in every way to avoid the outbreak of strikes and mass demonstrations, entering into coalition governments with the bourgeoisie, helping it to suppress anti-militarist, strike and revolutionary propaganda, and sabotaging the development of the workers’ struggles. When revolutions finally broke out, the social democratic leaders, who had given their approval to the massacre of millions of soldiers for the cause of capitalist profit, quickly rediscovered their pacifism and begged the workers not to have recourse to violence, not to provoke the spilling of blood.

At the beginning of the war, while the masses were disoriented by bourgeois propaganda and the betrayals of their own leaders, only a handful of revolutionary socialists remained faithful to proletarian internationalism, refusing to take up a common cause with their own bourgeoisie: Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in Germany; Monatte and Rosmer in France; Lenin, a section of the Bolsheviks, Trotsky, Martov in Russia; the SDP in the Netherlands; John MacLean in Great Britain; Eugene Debs in the USA; while in Italy, Serbia, and Bulgaria, a majority inside the social democratic parties held internationalist positions.

The Socialist International fell to bits. The internationalists regrouped, first at the Zimmerwald conference (1915) and then at Kienthal (1916). They were, however, divided into two currents: the centrists, who wanted to establish a reunited International with the social-patriots; and the revolutionaries, who looked towards the foundation of a Third International.

Lenin, who was the key figure in the Zimmerwald left, based his analyses on the certainty that the war was going to worsen all the contradictions of the imperialist system and lead to a large-scale revolutionary crisis. In this perspective, the internationalists could look forward to a spectacular reversal of the balance of forces between the extreme left and the right of the workers movement.

These predictions were to be confirmed from 1917 onwards. The Russian Revolution broke out in March 1917. In November 1918, revolution broke out in Germany and Austro-Hungary. In 1919-20 a revolutionary upsurge of huge proportions shook Italy, especially in the industrial North. The split between social-patriots and internationalists widened into a split between social democrats, refusing to break with the bourgeois state and capitalism, and communists, striving for the victory of the proletarian revolution and the establishment of Republics of Workers Councils. The former adopted a clearly counter-revolutionary position once the masses threatened bourgeois order. 

3 The February 1917 revolution in Russia

In February 1917 (March according to the Western calendar) the Czarist autocracy fell under the combined impact of hunger riots and the decomposition of the army (brought about by the growing opposition to the war among the peasantry). The failure of the Russian revolution of 1905 had resulted from the inability of the workers movement to link up with the peasant movement. Their coming together in 1917 was to be fatal for Czarism.

The working class had played the major role in the revolutionary events of February 1917. But, lacking a revolutionary leadership, it was robbed of victory. The executive power taken from Czarism was placed in the hands of a Provisional Government, a coalition of bourgeois parties like the Cadets (constitutional democrats) and moderate groups from the labour movement (Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries).

The mass movement was, however, so strong that it had its own organisational structure: that of councils (soviets) of workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ delegates, backed up by the armed Red Guards. Thus, from February 1917, Russia experienced a de facto dual power regime. The Provisional Government, resting on a bourgeois state apparatus in slow decomposition, was confronted by a network of soviets progressively constructing a workers’ state power.

Leon Trotsky’s prediction at the end of the Russian revolution of 1905 that Russia’s future revolution would see the blossoming of thousands of soviets was thus confirmed strikingly by events. The Russian and international Marxists had no alternative but to re-examine their analysis of the social nature of the Russian revolution in progress.

These Marxists had traditionally considered that the Russian revolution was going to be a bourgeois revolution. Russia being a backward country, the fundamental tasks of this revolution appeared to be similar to the great bourgeois revolutions of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: the overthrow of absolutism, the winning of democratic liberties and a constitution; the liberation of the peasants from semi-feudal chains; the liberation of oppressed nationalities; the creation of a unified national market to assure the rapid growth of industrial capitalism, indispensable in preparing for the victory of a future socialist revolution. From this resulted a strategy based on an alliance between the liberal bourgeoisie and the workers movement, the latter having to content itself with the struggle for immediate class objectives (an eight hour day, freedom to organise and to strike, etc.), while pressing the bourgeoisie to fulfil more radically the tasks of ‘its’ revolution.

Lenin had already rejected this strategy in 1905. He recalled the analysis that Marx had made of the attitude of the bourgeoisie since the revolutions of 1848: once the proletariat appeared on the political scene, the bourgeoisie went over into the counter-revolutionary camp for fear of the workers’ power. He did not modify the analysis of the historical tasks of the Russian revolution which had been traditionally formulated by the Russian Marxists. But from the clearly counter-revolutionary character of the bourgeoisie he concluded the impossibility of fulfilling these tasks through an alliance between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. For this he substituted the idea of an alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry.

4 The theory of permanent revolution

But Lenin conceived of the ‘democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants’ as being based upon a capitalist economy and in the context of a state which would still be bourgeois.

As early as 1905-6, Trotsky pointed to the weakness of this conception: the chronic inability (admitted by Lenin after 1917) of the peasantry to constitute an independent political force. Throughout modern history the peasantry has, in the last analysis, always followed a bourgeois leadership or a proletarian one. With the bourgeoisie fatally sliding over into the counter-revolutionary camp, the fate of the revolution depends on the ability of the proletariat to conquer political hegemony over the peasant movement and establish an alliance between the workers and peasants under its own leadership. In other words: the Russian revolution could only triumph and fulfil its revolutionary tasks if the proletariat conquered political power and established a workers state, backed up by an alliance with the poor peasants.
 The theory of permanent revolution therefore proclaim that in the imperialist epoch, because innumerable links tie the so-called ‘national’ or ‘liberal’ bourgeoisie in under- developed countries both to foreign imperialism and to the old ruling classes, the historical tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution (agrarian revolution, national independence, the conquest of democratic freedoms, unification of the country to allow the growth of industry) can only be realised through the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, backed up by the poor peasants. Trotsky’s prediction in 1906 was entirely confirmed by the course of the Russian Revolution of 1917. It has also been confirmed by the course of all the revolutions which have broken out since then in under-developed countries.

5 The October revolution, 1917

Coming back to Russia from abroad, Lenin immediately saw these immense revolutionary possibilities. With the April Theses he altered the direction of the Bolshevik Party along the lines of the theory of permanent revolution. They were to fight for the conquest of power by the soviets, for the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Although at first challenged by the old Bolshevik leaders (including Stalin, Kamenev and Molotov), who held to the formulas of 1905 and wished to reunite with the Mensheviks and give critical support to the Provisional Government, this position was rapidly accepted by the party as a whole, mainly under the pressure of vanguard Bolshevik workers who had instinctively adopted it even before it was consciously formulated by Lenin. Trotsky’s followers fused with the Bolsheviks, who set about winning a majority among the workers.

After various skirmishes (the premature July uprisings, the unsuccessful counter-revolutionary putsch by Kornilov in August), this majority was won by the Bolsheviks in the soviets of the large towns as from September 1917. Henceforth the struggle for the seizure of power was on the agenda. This came about in October (November in the Western calendar) under the leadership of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee, headed by Trotsky and attached to the Petrograd Soviet.

This Soviet succeeded in securing in advance the loyalty of almost all the regiments stationed in the old Czarist capital; these refused to obey the general staff of the bourgeois army. Thus the insurrection, which coincided with the second All Russian Congress of Soviets, took place with little spilling of blood. The old state apparatus and the Provisional Government collapsed. The Second Congress of Soviets voted by a large majority for the coming to power of the workers’ and peasants’ soviets. Over the vast territory of a great country a state on the model of the Paris Commune had been set up for the first time – a workers state.

6 The destruction of capitalism in Russia

In his theory of permanent revolution, Trotsky had predicted that the proletariat could not content itself after the seizure of power with the fulfilment of the historical tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, but would have to seize the factories, eliminate capitalist exploitation, and begin the construction of a socialist society. That is exactly what happened in Russia after October 1917. The revolution would ‘grow over’ from the fulfilment of bourgeois-democratic tasks into the realisation of proletarian-socialist tasks without interruption or stages. Hence the formula: permanent revolution – from the moment the proletariat seizes power.

The programme of the government which came to power at the end of the Second Congress of Soviets was, in the immediate term, limited to the establishment of workers control over production. The immediate tasks of the October revolution were considered above all to be the re-establishment of peace, the distribution of the land to the peasants, the solution of the national question, and the creation of real soviet power over the whole territory of Russia.

But the bourgeoisie inevitably applied itself to sabotaging the application of the new policies. The workers, now aware of their strength, tolerated neither the exploitation nor the sabotage of the capitalists. There was thus a very rapid passage from the establishment of workers control to the nationalisation of the banks, the big factories and the transport system. Soon all the means of production except those of the peasants and small artisans were in the hands of the people.

It was inevitable that the organisation of an economy based on the collective ownership of the means of production would come up against numerous difficulties in an extremely backward country, where capitalism had far from completed the task of creating the material foundations of socialism. The Bolsheviks were perfectly well aware of this difficulty. But they were convinced that they would not remain isolated for long. The proletarian revolution would surely break out in many industrially advanced countries, especially in Germany. The fusion of the Russian revolution, the German revolution and the Italian revolution could create an unshakeable material basis for the creation of a classless society.

History showed that these hopes were not without foundation. The revolution did break out in Germany. Italy did come near to the same situation in 1919-20. The Russian Revolution did play a key role as a detonator and model for the world socialist revolution. Those among the Russian and European social democrats who later declared that the ‘dreams’ of Lenin and Trotsky about world revolution had no basis in reality – that the Russian revolution was condemned to isolation, that it was utopian to start a socialist revolution in a backward country – forgot that the defeat of the revolutionary upsurge of 1919-20 in Central Europe was hardly due to the absence of struggles or revolutionary vigour in the masses, but arose mainly from the deliberately counter-revolutionary role played by international social democracy.

In this sense, Lenin and Trotsky and their comrades, in leading the first proletarian conquest of political power in any country, did the only thing that revolutionary Marxists can to change the balance of forces in favour of their class: to exploit to the full the most favourable chances that exist in a country for overthrowing the power of capital. This in itself is not sufficient to decide the result of the international struggle between capital and labour. But it constitutes the most effective means of influencing the result of this struggle in favour of the proletariat.