by Wildcat
The current period is one in which Communism is supposed to be bankrupt. The recent events in China and the open acceptance of market economics and political democracy by most of Eastern Europe are used by the Western media to convince us that the epoch of communism, which they say began with the Russian Revolution of October 1917, is coming to an end.
Yet, shortly after that event critics had already begun to doubt the Communist credentials of the new rulers of Russia. From 1921 especially, tendencies emerged which saw the social systems of Russia, and later the rest of Eastern Europe, China, etc., as another form of capitalism. Herman Gorter belonged to one such tendency, the German Communist Left. For all its errors, his Open Letter is a Communist pamphlet. And its target is unequivocally capitalist.
This is the full text of one the landmark texts of the Communist Left: Herman Gorter’s Open Letter To Comrade Lenin. Dirt-cheap copies of Lenin’s notorious diatribe against the Communist Left, “Left-Wing” Communism, an Infantile Disorder, have been churned out by the ton by the state presses of Moscow and Peking, whereas Gorter’s methodical destruction of Lenin’s arguments has languished in near-total obscurity, at least to the English-speaking world, for nearly seventy years. Its reappearance is long overdue. The Open Letter was published in French by Spartacus, Paris, in 1979.
The original Russian text of Lenin’s pamphlet was dated April-May 1920, and during the next few months it was published in various other languages. The chapter on ‘“Left-Wing” Communism in England’, for example, appeared in the Workers’ Dreadnought, published in London, at the end of July 1920. The Dreadnought, a weekly newspaper edited by Sylvia Pankhurst, was one of the principal mouthpieces of the “Left” or “Anti-Parliamentary” Communists in Britain, and was thus one of the main targets of Lenin’s attack. Gorter wrote his reply to Lenin during July or August 1920, and two extracts from the opening sections of the resulting Open Letter to Comrade Lenin appeared in the Dreadnought in September and October. It was not until the following year, however, that the Dreadnought published the whole of Gorter’s reply, in eleven instalments between 12 March and 11 June 1921. It is this version of the Open Letter which is being published here. We have made a few minor improvements to the translation, otherwise it is the original.
The context of Lenin’s pamphlet was, on the surface, the forthcoming Second Congress of the Third (Communist) International. The founding Congress of the International in March 1919 had been a hurriedly-convened affair. Only one “bona fide” foreign delegate, from the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) had managed to attend; the other foreign delegates were mostly emigrés who happened to be in Russia at the time and found themselves acting as “representatives” of the Communist parties of their respective countries of origin – parties which in some cases had not yet even been formed. This is not to deny the immense significance of the event. The Third International promised to be a revolutionary replacement for the blood-stained Second International, most of whose member parties had supported the first world war. All revolutionaries at the time enthusiastically welcomed the new International. The Second Congress promised to be a much better attended event, and hence an important opportunity for the Bolsheviks to try to make their politics the International’s.
In “Left-Wing” Communism Lenin addressed most of the crucial issues which were then being debated within and among the various revolutionary groups in Western Europe. If the gist of his arguments sounds familiar, this is because the tactics which Lenin prescribed are still peddled in more or less the same guise by many of the left wing groups around today... Communists must not refuse to work within the reactionary trade unions, but must work “wherever the masses are to be found”. It was “obligatory” for Communists to participate in parliamentary elections, and if possible enter Parliament itself, “for the purpose of awakening and enlightening the undeveloped, downtrodden, ignorant peasant masses”. The Communist party in Britain was instructed to offer an electoral alliance to the Labour Party, or if this was rejected, to “urge the electors to vote for the Labour candidate against the bourgeois candidate”, in order to “help the masses of the workers to see the results” of a Labour Government. This experience was expected to “bring the masses over” to the side of the Communists. Lenin supported the KPD’s policy in Germany to “abandon all attempts at a violent overthrow” of the state there if a Social-Democratic government “which enjoys the confidence of a majority of the urban workers” came to power [Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism, an Infantile Disorder, Progress Publishers 1950, p94]. He criticised some aspects of the policy but accepted both “its basic premise and its practical conclusions” [p93].
In passing, it should be noted how successful Lenin was in defending his political arguments to the delegates who travelled to Russia from far and wide to attend the Second Congress. Every “Thesis” presented to and approved by the Congress, including the central twenty-one “Conditions of Admission to the International”, resounded with phrases plucked straight from the pages of Lenin’s pamphlet. Only an obstinate minority – notably the tendency to which Gorter belonged – withstood the prestige that the Bolsheviks derived from October 1917: few then disputed that they were the leaders of the first successful proletarian revolution in history. This blinded most militants to the absurdity of such passages as:
“You must not sink to the level of the masses, to the level of the backward strata of the class. That is incontestable. You must tell them the bitter truth. You are in duty bound to call their bourgeois-democratic and parliamentary prejudices what they are – prejudices. But at the same time you must soberly follow the actual state of the class-consciousness and preparedness of the entire class (not only of its Communist vanguard), and of all the working people (not only of their advanced elements).” [p43].
Obviously, you cannot both tell workers the bitter truth and at the same time follow their prejudices. In practice, Lenin’s followers encourage faith in democracy, parliament, trade unions, left wing parties, and all the other reactionary things they think workers believe in, in order to remain “with the masses”.
Lenin’s obsession with influencing and winning over “the masses”, plainly evident in the sentences quoted above and also throughout the rest of “Left-Wing” Communism, provides a clue to the underlying aim of his attack on the Communist Left. At the time he was writing, the light at the end of the tunnel of the Bolsheviks’ struggle against their internal and external enemies appeared to be dawning. On the other hand, the prospects were looking decidedly less bright for the spread of Bolshevik revolutions to Western Europe. The central organs of the Bolshevik Party and the Soviets had made their peace with capitalism in Russia and were now actively engaged in imposing it on the working class. The survival of the isolated Russian state depended on restoring normal relations with its bourgeois counterparts elsewhere in Europe. One way of trying to achieve this was to create mass movements in these countries, which could exert strong pressure to influence the policies of “their own” governments in Russia’s favour. As Lenin made clear on several occasions in “Left-Wing” Communism, the perspectives of the Communist Left seemed to him one of the principal obstacles in the path of the this strategy; quite simply, they had to be swept out of the way.
The object at the basis of “Left-Wing” Communism soon became obvious in the statements of the Third International. For example, this organisation, which in the Invitation to its First Congress had spoken of “subordinating the interests of the movement in each country to the common interest of the international revolution”, was by the time of its Third Congress (June-July 1921) demanding that its adherents must “fight energetically to clear away all the obstacles which the capitalist states place in the way of Soviet Russian trade on the world market”.
In his Open Letter Gorter occasionally hints at some awareness of the transformation of the International into a tool of Russian state foreign policy, especially at one point towards the end where he describes how he and his comrades had tried to figure out some of the possible reasons behind Lenin’s tactics:
“The one said: the economic condition of Russia is so bad, that, above all, it needs peace. For that reason Comrade Lenin wants to gather around him as much power as possible: the Independents, Labour Party, etc., that they may help him to obtain peace.”
For the most part, however, Gorter took Lenin’s pamphlet at face value, as a dangerously misguided but nonetheless serious proposal of tactics to be adopted by the Western European revolutionary movement. Although he often succeeded in defeating Lenin’s arguments, the assumption that this is a fraternal debate within the revolutionary movement gave far too much credit to his opponent. The word “Comrade” in the title is the first of Gorter’s many mistakes.
In “Left-Wing” Communism Lenin repeatedly attributed the “mistakes” of the Left Communists to their supposed youthfulness and inexperience – hence his characterisation of Left Wing Communism as an “infantile disorder” to be cured by a stern telling off from the Big Daddy of Bolshevism. Yet this description in no way fits the author of the Open Letter. Gorter, born in 1864, six years before Lenin, was already an experienced militant and theoretician with a lengthy record of involvement in the Dutch and German socialist movements. Within these movements had appeared the earliest and clearest critics of international Social Democracy. Likewise, Lenin’s gibe that the Left Wing Communists “argue like doctrinaire revolutionaries who have never taken part in a real revolution” was also misleading, since Gorter’s involvement in the German revolution of 1918 onwards was one of the strongest foundations on which his politics were built.
Gorter started immediately by taking issue with the opening premise of “Left-Wing” Communism. Lenin had asserted “the historical inevitability of a repetition on an international scale of what has taken place here” (i.e. in Russia), and had sought to “apply to Western Europe whatever is of general application, general validity and is generally binding in the history and the present tactics of Bolshevism”. Gorter, on the other hand, constantly stressed the contrasts between Russia and Western Europe, to defend his view that whilst the Bolshevik revolution was appropriate for Russia, it would not necessarily work in the West.
In Russia, Gorter argued, the working class was able to count on having the large peasantry on its side in forging a movement which overthrew a weak and faction ridden ruling class. In Western Europe, on the other hand, the working class faced a strong and united ruling class, and could rely on the support of no other classes but itself. All tactics of the revolutionary movement should proceed from this reality, about which Lenin, Gorter maintained, was disastrously ill-informed.
Against the powerful ruling class in Western Europe, Gorter continued, the only strengths which will bring victory to the working class are its weight of numbers, its unity, and its revolutionary consciousness. It is necessary for the vast majority of the working class to become active and class conscious fighters for communism. Depending on a majority of the working class becoming class conscious Communists before the insurrection would simply put it off indefinitely. But the long term success of the revolution requires this.
Despite the emphasis on working class self-activity, though, Gorter still wrote as if he saw Communist revolution in terms of creating a new government. In Russia this could be achieved by means of a handful of leaders, a few thousand followers with guns and a lot of passive support. In Western Europe it would be more difficult, requiring the participation of masses of workers. “To triumph over so many, with so few, is in the first place a matter of tactics”, Gorter says of the Russian Revolution, speaking of Lenin and the Bolsheviks as Winston Churchill was later to speak of the Royal Air Force.
There are sound reasons for Gorter’s seeming obsession with the question of leaders. Decades of parliamentarism had given many West European workers the idea that you can create socialism by electing party leaders to parliament, who will then create socialism from above. The Communist revolution is completely unlike this. The permanent mobilisation of many millions of proletarians is necessary even to make a start on the process of replacing the state, wage labour and the market with the human community.
For this reason, Gorter attacked Lenin’s idea that Communists should participate in parliamentary activity. The deep rooted strength of parliamentary ideology, and especially its tendency to encourage passive reliance on leaders, can only begin to be combated by revolutionaries if they take up a position of clear cut abstention from and hostility to parliament.
To fight capitalism and carry through the revolution, Gorter argued, the working class cannot rely on the trade unions, which have already amply demonstrated their counter-revolutionary role, but must create new organisations of its own, in which it can keep control of the struggle. Here Gorter made it clear that he had in mind bodies like the “Factory Organisations” created by the most radical industrial workers during the German revolution, which at their height were united in the 200,000 strong AAUD (General Workers Union of Germany), and which Gorter believed could be forerunners of the Soviets or Workers’ Councils which had been central to the working class seizure of power in Russia. His defence of the Factory Organisations assumes that factory workers are inherently more revolutionary than the rest of the proletariat. This was a common point of view amongst revolutionaries of the time. A later text by Gorter (The Organisation of the Proletariat’s Class Struggle, published in 1921) exemplifies the German Left’s glorification of life on the shop floor. Today we reject this idea.
Gorter defends a rather contradictory position on trade unions. On the one hand, he argues that trade unions are inherently anti-working class because of their structure. On the other, he argues that they are too weak to fight capitalism. But the reason they don’t fight capitalism is not because they are too weak to do so, but because their very existence depends on the continued health of capitalism. Thus they seek to preserve it by sabotaging the one thing which can destroy it – the struggle of the working class. Unions are not reactionary because of their structure but because of their role in capitalist society. This role is negotiating the rate of exploitation and getting workers to accept it. Unions are hierarchical for the same reason that any capitalist business of any size tends to be hierarchical, the need to con and coerce the “members” into acting against their interests as proletarians. By presenting the AAUD (General Workers’ Union of Germany) largely as an alternative structure to the unions Gorter is ignoring its most subversive characteristics. Its primary difference with the trade unions was not its revocable delegate structure. It existed to prepare for revolution, it did not negotiate with the bosses, and it did not regroup workers on the basis of belonging to a particular trade or industry, but on the basis of their willingness to fight for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Throughout the section on the trade unions Gorter seems to be implying that the ability of workers to recall delegates at short notice is inherently revolutionary. This is a reactionary position. We do not just judge a movement by how it makes decisions but by what those decisions are, by the content of the movement.
We have more sympathy with Gorter’s views on the nature and role of the revolutionary party. Since their task is to help bring about a situation where the working class as a whole is able to overthrow capitalism and exercise its own dictatorship, Communists must organise themselves on the basis of absolute clarity and intransigent defence of Communist principles. This ruled out, for the time being, the mass organisations which Lenin wanted.
Gorter was not simply advocating a party which led by having the best ideas. Against the social democratic tradition, his party took the lead through action:
“They see our strikes, our street fights, our councils. They hear our watchwords. They see our lead. This is the best propaganda, the most convincing.”
Gorter’s analysis of the Russian revolution is erroneous in two respects. First, it assumes that the Bolsheviks’ policies were correct for the Russian revolution. He goes as far as saying that “the liberation of the workers must be the work of the workers themselves” is more true of Germany than it is of Russia!
Second, it argues that there is a qualitative difference between the needs of the proletarian revolution in Russia and in the West. Compounding this error, many Left Communists concluded that Russia was not ripe for revolution, that it was too backward. This is a nationalistic approach. In places, Gorter’s concern to emphasise the differences between Asia, Eastern and Western Europe seriously corrode his internationalism, for example where he imagines the Russian proletariat saying to its Indian counterpart: “Our country is far more developed than yours”. But then as now, the needs of the revolution in any one country were dependent on those of the world revolution.
Those involved in the Russian revolution saw it as the first stage in a World Revolution which would bring socialism to all the world’s countries, undeveloped or otherwise. Petrograd was a link in a chain of industrial cities stretching to Berlin and Glasgow. The Petrograd working class was hardly backward, either politically or in terms of numerical concentration. True, it was surrounded by a sea of peasants, but so was Amsterdam if one looks beyond national boundaries. What went wrong in Russia had little to do with national particularities. Immediately after forming a government, the Bolsheviks, with the support of the main Soviets, and some of the established capitalists, started to run capitalism, i.e. exploitation through wage labour.
This is not to suggest they would necessarily have succeeded even if they had tried to create communism. But the prevailing Bolshevik view on what communism is (state capitalism made to serve the people) meant they had no chance of building real communism.
Another error is Gorter’s attitude to the debate on tactics. Whatever his intentions, what Lenin was advocating was objectively counter-revolutionary. Gorter did not see it that way. To him the Open Letter was part of a fraternal debate between comrades who belonged fundamentally to the same movement. Had not Lenin been one of the first and clearest revolutionaries to break with the chauvinists of the Second International, along with Gorter and the German Communists, calling on the working class to turn the imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war of class against class? Whatever his role during the first world war, the publication of “Left-Wing” Communism shows Lenin was no longer revolutionary. Accepting the label “Left Communists” implies that the Bolsheviks were part of the Communist movement, and Gorter and his comrades were the left of it.
In the pages of “Left-Wing” Communism alone, the situation in Russia two and a half years since the insurrection is unwittingly damned often enough by Lenin’s own words for a reader as sharply critical as Gorter. To take a single example, at one point Lenin argued that in Russia the trade unions were “and will long remain” a necessary means for “gradually transferring the management of the whole economy of the country to the hands of the working class (and not of the separate trades), and later to the hands of all the toilers”. Which begs the question, if two and a half years after the revolution, the management of the whole economy was not already in the hands of the working class, in whose hands was it? The answer was, of course, that the management of the Russian economy was in the hands of the Bolshevik party, now part of the ruling class. In the Open Letter, it does not seem to have occurred to Gorter to ask the sort of questions which might have led to this conclusion.
Although the Open Letter neither characterises the Bolshevik party nor Russia as capitalist, Gorter’s tendency was among the first to do so.
In the Open Letter (1920) he describes Lenin’s politics as “opportunist”. In 1921 he wrote of the Third International, which had adopted these politics:
“it is actually in tow to the international bourgeoisie” (Why We Need The Communist Workers’ International).
And he went on:
“The more Russia develops towards capitalism, the more apparent will be the bourgeois character of the Third International”.
The change in Gorter’s position was mainly brought about by the conflict between the Third International and the organisation to which Gorter belonged, the Communist Workers’ Party of Germany (KAPD). The KAPD had been formed in April 1920, as its revolutionary politics proved incompatible with the reactionary social democratic ideas of the “Spartacist” leaders of the KPD. The Third International tolerated two German Communist parties until its third Congress in June-July 1921, when the KAPD was told it must either reunite with the KPD or be expelled from the International. It didn’t, and was. Uniting with the KPD would have meant dissolving the Communist vanguard into a party which supported trade unions, parliament, and the social democratic parties. The KPD was not a revolutionary party, as its abandonment of the overthrow of the bourgeois state with a social democratic government shows. Luxemburg’s followers had learned nothing from her assassination.
The KAPD’s response was to issue a “Manifesto of the Fourth Communist International”. This has nothing in common with Trotsky’s attempt to set up a Fourth International – except in that they were both unsuccessful. Like the Open Letter, the Manifesto was published in the Workers’ Dreadnought, during October-December 1921. Reviewing the course of events in Russia since 1917, the Manifesto observed that “the proletarian Russia of the Red October begins to become a bourgeois state”. Taking his cue from the Theses on Tactics adopted by the Third International in July 1921, which had described “unconditional support of Soviet Russia” as “the cardinal duty of the Communists in all countries”, Gorter concluded that:
“The Third Congress of the Third International has definitely and indissolubly linked the fate of the Third International to present Soviet Russia, that is to say, to a bourgeois state. It has made the interests of the world proletarian revolution subordinate to the interests of the bourgeois revolution of one single country... The revolutionary proletariat of the whole world is today engaged in the struggle against the always-more-firmly-uniting international bourgeoisie, without possessing an international fighting organisation that will represent, determinedly and unbendingly, the interests of the proletarian revolution.”
Hence the KAPD’s call for a new International.
Russia was never Communist. Gorter and other Left Communists began the task of exposing the great lie of the century. It is not communism which is in crisis, but capitalism and its Leninist parties.
In 1922, the Third International formally announced the policy of the “United Front” with the social democratic parties. Gorter dispensed with diplomatic niceties:
“The ‘United Front’ of these Internationals is a united front with capitalism.
That is why the Bolshevik Party and the Third International have become completely counter-revolutionary organisations, which are betraying the proletarian cause”.(Lines of Orientation of the Communist Workers’ International, 1922).
Despite its undeniable errors, some of which we have briefly dealt with, the German Communist Left was a major contributor to some of the main tenets of the Communist politics of today[1].
The counter-revolution and its Leninist thought police has tried to obliterate Gorter, the KAPD and the struggle for a revolutionary International. The republication of this text is part of that continuing struggle.
Wildcat,
September 1989
[1] To some extent, Gorter’s arguments have contributed to the emergence of the ideology known as “Councilism”, whose basic positions can be roughly summarised as follows:
i) The Russian Revolution was inevitably capitalist due to the undeveloped nature of the country.
ii) All political organisations are reactionary.
iii) Elected workers’ councils are the only organisations which can defend the interests of the working class.
But it was by no means inevitable that Gorter’s views should have suffered from these distortions at the hands of the counter-revolution.