State
and Revolution, Part 1
Lenin arrives at the Finland Station in April, 1917
The April
Theses
This is the first part of our ten-part course on Lenin’s
1917 work “The State and Revolution”. The book has only six chapters, which we
will take one at a time from part 4 to part 9 of the course. In the first three
parts we will try to furnish some of the prior political context. In part 10 we
will pose the question of where Lenin’s unfinished work would need to be taken,
if it were to be extended in light of the new knowledge that we now have, nearly
a century after Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution.
The year of 1917 in Russia was actually a year of two
revolutions, and another revolution had gone before, in 1905. The 1905
revolution had seen the formation of the parliament (the Duma) and also the
organs of Russian popular power, the Soviets. Both the Duma and the Soviets still
existed in 1917.
The “Great War”, or “First World War”, of 1914-1918 was
still going on, involving tens of millions of armed men in unparalleled
slaughter. It was an inter-Imperialist war. Russia was fighting Germany. The
Bolsheviks (under Lenin’s leadership from exile in Switzerland) had refused to
take part in this inter-Imperialist war in any way, and instead denounced it
and opposed it.
The February 1917 revolution established something resembling
a bourgeois-democratic republic based on the Duma. Lenin returned to Russia
from Switzerland by train in April, just over a month later. All kinds of
questions remained to be resolved. The question of war and peace was the most
urgent. The nature of the revolution was still to be decided. In between April
and October, and among other things, Lenin pronounced the “April Theses”, and
wrote “The State and Revolution”. We will begin with the first of these two.
The April Theses is a classic
document, not because it is polished (it is rough), but because of its impact
at a moment of history. It was given by Lenin verbally. The written version
(download linked below) was prepared very shortly afterwards.
Lenin arrived in Petrograd (also called St Petersburg, and
Leningrad) barely a month after the February, 1917 revolution which had
overthrown the Tsar and installed the bourgeois republican government. This
bourgeois government had the intention of continuing the disastrous
intra-Imperialist war in which Russia was involved.
At the same time, faraway South Africa was also involved in the
same war.
It was among those South Africans who opposed the
1914-18 Imperialist war that the need for our communist party was first
seriously raised. The Communist Party of South Africa was formed by admission
to the Communist International in 1921. That Communist International had been
called for by Lenin in this document, the April Theses, in Thesis 10:
“We must take the initiative in creating a
revolutionary International, an International against the social-chauvinists and
against the ‘Centre’,” it says. The Third International
(also called Communist International or Comintern) was duly established in
1919.
The
“social-chauvinists” of different individual countries (e.g. Germany, Britain,
France and Italy as well as Russia) had supported the Imperialist war against
each other, while the Russian Bolsheviks and the German Spartacists had opposed
the war and had supported proletarian internationalism. The term “revolutionary
defencism” was a code for the further continuation of the Russian war policy,
which Lenin clearly opposes in Thesis 1.
The “April Theses” are short and do not therefore need a
long introduction, but one can usefully highlight the following:
Thesis 2 says: “The specific feature of the present
situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the first stage of the
revolution — which, owing to the insufficient class-consciousness and
organisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie —
…
“This peculiar
situation demands of us an ability to adapt ourselves to the special conditions
of Party work among unprecedentedly large masses of proletarians who have just
awakened to political life.”
There are echoes of this situation in South Africa today.
Thesis 4 says: “As long as we are in the minority we carry
on the work of criticising and exposing errors and at the same time we preach
the necessity of transferring the entire state power to the Soviets of Workers'
Deputies, so that the people may overcome their mistakes by experience.”
This led to the slogan “All
Power to the Soviets”, and Thesis 5
then says “to return to a parliamentary
republic from the Soviets of Workers' Deputies would be a retrograde step.”
Thesis 8 says: “It is not our immediate task to
"introduce" socialism, but only to bring social production and the
distribution of products at once under the control of the Soviets of Workers'
Deputies.” In other words, the bourgeois dictatorship was to be replaced at
once by a dictatorship over the bourgeoisie.
Thesis 9 proposes
to change the Party’s name from “Social Democrat” (RSDLP) to “Communist Party.”
So much of this did come to pass, as we know, that it is
difficult to imagine that Lenin’s support for these demands, among the
leadership and even among the strictly Bolshevik leadership, was quite small.
But Lenin knew how the base of the Party was constructed and
how it was reproducing itself. Hence he was able to be bold. He knew that the Bolshevik
cadre force as a whole, and potentially the entire working masses of Russia,
were behind his proposals, or soon would be. And so it came to pass.
- The above is to introduce the original reading-text: The April Theses, 1917, Lenin.
