Doug Nielson's List: Victor Serge

• • The French police apparently published a pirate edition in the 1960s (?) ... for the use of their “employees”.

• the marked development of class consciousness among the bourgeoisie,
• Now, all action aimed at the destruction of capitalist institutions needs to be complemented by the preparation, at least in theory, of the creative work of tomorrow. “The urge to destroy,” Bakunin used to say, “is also the creative urge.” This profound thought, which when taken literally has sent many revolutionaries astray, has just become practical reality.
• ust as anti-militarism today needs to be complemented by the preparation of the Red Army,

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• It begins with some general guidelines:

    

  The Political Police must prepare to destroy the revolutionary centres at the moment their activity is greatest and not allow their work to be diverted by dwelling on secondary undertakings.
• After a final payment made in February 1914, Serova got a little job with the railway administration. She soon lost it for pilfering small sums of money from her workmates.
• But they are individuals to whom the habit of collective thought and work, strict discipline, and action calculated by the masses and inspired by a scientific theory of the social situation, give the least chance of success.
• In this sense, the Communist Party is, among all the revolutionary organisations history has produced up to now, the least vulnerable to the blows of provocation.
• Provocation, when it becomes so widely extended, becomes a danger even to the regime it serves, and above all to the men at the head of this regime. It is known, for example, that one of the highest officials of the Ministry of the Interior, the policeman Rachkovsky, knew and approved of the plans for the execution of Plehve and of Grand Duke Sergei. Stolypin [4], well informed on this score, was accompanied whenever he went out by the police chief Gerasimov, whose presence he took to be a guarantee against attacks instigated by provocateurs. Stolypin was nonetheless killed by the anarchist Bagrof, who had belonged to the police.
• Committed revolutionaries’ found themselves tempted to take advantage of provocation. Petrov, the Socialist-Revolutionary, who has left us intensely tragic memoirs, entered the Okhrana the better to fight it. Imprisoned, after meeting with an initial refusal from the chief of police, he pretended to be mad in order to be sent to a place of exile from which he could escape, did so, and came back as a free man to offer his services. But, soon convinced that he had gone too far, and that in spite of himself he was betraying, Petrov committed suicide after executing Colonel Karpov (1909).
• As a general rule, it is impossible to hoodwink the police; impossible for a revolutionary to penetrate its secrets. The most trusted secret agent only has contact with one or two policemen, whom he can get nothing out of; but to whom the least word is of use, even the lies they are told, which are soon brought to light. [6]

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• It should be stressed: the interception of correspondence by the secret agencies – whose existence, as a matter of strictly observed custom, is totally denied by the police, but without which there is no police – is of great importance. The mail of known or suspected persons is opened in the first instance; then there is also a random selection of letters bearing “please forward” on the envelope, others with the envelope addressed in a particular way – those, in a word, which attract attention. The opening of letters at random provides as much useful documentation as the interception of the mail of known revolutionaries. The latter in fact do try to write with caution (although the only worthwhile precaution is really not to mention in letters, even indirectly, anything to do with action), while the ordinary members of the party – the unknown ones – forget the most elementary precautions.
• The letters intercepted were never handed over to the courts, in order not to shed the least light, even indirectly, on the work of the mail-opening office. They were used purely for making police reports.
• Once the work was done, those responsible felt a legitimate pride in preserving a record of it. They produced what was virtually a de luxe album of photographs of members of the liquidated organisation. I have in front of me the album on the liquidation of the anarchocommunist group “The Communards” by the Moscow police, in August 1910. Four pictures show the group’s arms and equipment; there follow 18 portraits accompanied by biographical details.
• the treatment the Russian police meted out to prisoners before the 1905 revolution seems to have been generally more humane than is the case today when workers are arrested in any one of a dozen European countries. After 1905, the Okhrana had torture chambers in Warsaw, Riga, Odessa and apparently in most of the great urban centres.
• The police had to see everything, know, understand and have power over everything. The strength and perfection of their machinery appears all the more terrible because of the unsuspected resources they dragged up from the depth of the human soul.
• It would in fact be wrong to let oneself be taken in by the apparently perfect mechanism of Tsarist security. It is true that at the top there were some intelligent men, technicians of high professional standing; but the whole machine rested on the work of a mass of ignorant civil servants. In the best prepared reports some quite amusing discrepancies appear. Money oiled the wheels of this enormous machine; and gain is a strong but inadequate stimulus. Nothing great is achieved without disinterestedness. And the autocracy had no disinterested supporters.
• M.E. Bakai observes that, in periods of revolutionary upsurge, agents provocateurs often lay low; but they reappeared as reaction gained the upper hand. Like carrion crows over the battle-fields.
• Just as the most knowledgeable doctors called to a deathbed can only observe, minute by minute, the progress of the disease, the omniscient police of the Empire watched impotently as the world of Tsarism plunged into the abyss.
• Because it is the eternal illusion of the ruling classes to think that they can remove the effects without getting to the causes, legislate against anarchy or against syndicalism (as in France and the United States), against socialism (as Bismarck did in Germany), or against communism, as they strive to do more or less everywhere today. The same old historical experience. The Roman Empire too persecuted the Christians in vain. Catholicism had people burned at the stake throughout Europe, without defeating the heresy which is the essence of life.
• Among the people, Christians for long centuries, there was an irresistible attraction towards the apostolic life of the propagandists who, renouncing comfort and security, faced prison, Siberian exile and death itself to bring the new evangel to the oppressed.
• They were the real “salt of the earth”: they were the best, the only bearers of an immense hope, and for this they were persecuted.
• Even religion, in the voices of its most sincere thinkers, condemned a regime which now rested solely on the systematic use of violence.
• everyone among them who acted and thought, was a revolutionary, that is, a “socialist” of some kind. There was no satisfied middle bourgeoisie as in the countries of Western Europe. The ancien regime was no longer really defended by anyone except the upper clergy, the court nobility, the financiers, and a few politicians, in other words, by a very small aristocracy.
• When he was arrested it happened more and more frequently that the soldiers in charge of conveying him sympathised with him, and among the jailers he almost found “comrades”.
• When a revolutionary went into hiding, he found many spontaneous, disinterested, devoted helpers.
• So much so that in most prisons it was easy to communicate illegally with the outside world.
• Cases of “screws” who were converted by prisoners were not at all rare.
• The power of ideas, the moral strength, organisation and mentality of the revolutionaries were only the results of an economic situation which was developing towards revolution.
• Few in number, deprived of political influence, and discontented, the middle class of the towns gave their children – student youth and intellectuals – to the revolution, a liberal revolution of course, not seeing the workers and muzhiks coming up the line.
• In the midst of the masses, were the revolutionary organisations, broad-based and disciplined, constantly active, possessing both vast experience and the prestige and support of a magnificent tradition ...
• Such were the profound forces working for the revolution. And it was against them, in the vain hope of ste~ the avalanche, that the Okbrana stretched its spindly strands of barbed wire!
• For a start, the imprisonment of the seventy did not go unnoticed. Each of the members was in contact with at least ten people. Seven hundred people, at least, were suddenly faced with the brutal fact of the seizure of honest, brave people, whose only crime was to strive for the common good ... The trial, the sentences, the private dramas involved, brought about an explosion of interest and support for the revolutionaries. If even one of them was able to make his impassioned voice heard from the dock, it could be said with certainty that the organisation, at the sound of this voice, would rise again from the ashes. It was only a question of time.
• And then what was to be done with the seventy members in prison? They could only be locked up for a long time or deported to the deserted regions of Siberia. Very good. But in prison – or in Siberia – they find comrades, teachers and pupils. Their enforced leisure obliges them to study, to shape their theoretical ideas. Suffering together, they grow harder, become tempered, impassioned. Sooner or later, escaping, amnestied – through general strikes – or paroled, they will return to the life of society as “veteran” revolutionaries, “illegal” this time, and much stronger than ever. Not all of them of course. Some of them will die on the way; a painful selection process, useful in its own way. And the recollections of the friends who disappeared will make those who survive intransigent ...
• Repression can only really live off fear. But is fear enough to remove necessity, thirst for justice, intelligence, reason, idealism, all the revolutionary forces which express the formidable, profound impulse of the economic factors of a revolution? Relying on intimidation, the reactionaries forget that they will cause more indignation, more hatred, more thirst for martyrdom, than real fear. They only intimidate the weak: they exasperate the best forces and temper the resolution of the strongest.
• 1. the agent provocateur is a policeman who serves the revolution in spite of himself.
   
    

  Because he must always appear to be serving it. But in this question there are no appearances. Propaganda, fighting, terrorism, is all reality. There is no way you can be a member half-way or superficially.
• What is certain is that provocation poisons the struggle.
• From another standpoint, the provocateurs and the police have a direct interest in ensuring that the revolutionary movement, which is their raison d’être, should always be a threat. In case of need, rather than give up a second source of earnings, they hatch plots themselves, as we have seen. In such cases, the interests of the police are completely in contradiction with those of the regime which it is their job to defend.
• Provocation is much more dangerous in terms of the distrust it sows among revolutionaries.
• There is a tradition of it: the enemies of action, the cowards, the well-entrenched ones, the opportunists, are happy to assemble their arsenal – in the sewers! Suspicion and slander are their weapons for discrediting revolutionaries. And we have not seen the end of it yet.
• and slanderous accusation of members is playing the game of provocation
• Every time anyone is touched by suspicion, a jury formed of comrades should determine whether it is a well-founded accusation or a slander.

  • key
• At every turn they asked themselves: “Is this in line with the rules of conspiracy?” [15] The “code of conspiracy” had outstanding theoreticians and practitioners among the great enemies of the autocracy and of capital in Russia. It would be extremely useful to study this in depth. It must contain the simplest rules, precisely those which, because they are so simple, are often forgotten ...
• Lenin and Zinoviev, hunted by Kerensky’s police, were able to find a hiding-place in Petrograd and only went out in disguise. Lenin was a factory worker.
• Illegal action, over a period, creates habits and an outlook which can be considered the best guarantee against police methods. What talented police, what clever impostors can be compared with revolutionaries who are sure of themselves, circumspect, thoughtful and valiant, who obey a common watchword?
• When you have on your side the laws of history, the interests of the future, the economic and moral needs which lead to revolution, when you know with certainty what you want, what arms you have and what the enemy has; when you have decided on illegal action; when you hate confidence in yourself and you work only with those in whom you have confidence; when you know that revolutionary work demands sacrifices and that every lovingly sown seed will bear fruit a hundred times over, then you are invincible.

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• Fetishism of legality was and still is one of the characteristic features of the class-collaboration tendency of socialism. It involves a belief in the possibility of transforming the capitalist order without entering into conflict with its privileged elements. But rather than indicating a naivety quite incompatible with the mentality of politicians, it is a sign of the corruption of the leaders. Entrenched in a society they pretend to be fighting, they recommend respecting the rules of the game. The working class can only respect bourgeois legality if it ignores the real role of the state and the deceptive nature of democracy; in short, the first principles of the class struggle.
• In our unequal struggle against the old world, the simplest things must be explained again and again each day. We need only mention a number of fairly well-known facts.

• To respect legality such as this is to be fooled by it.

    

  ... Nonetheless, it would be equally disastrous to ignore it. The advantages for the workers’ movement are the greater the less one is fooled. The right to exist and to act legally is, for the organisations of the proletariat, something which must constantly be re-won and extended. We stress this because sometimes among good revolutionaries there emerges the diametrical opposite of fetishising legality – due to a kind of tendency to make the least political effort (it is easier to conspire than to lead mass action) they have a certain disdain for legal action.

  • legal vs illegal
• In France itself, the legal status the workers’ movement enjoys must be extended, and this can only be done through struggle.
• The right of association and the right to strike are still denied to state employees and certain other categories of workers; the right to demonstrate is much more restricted than in the Anglo-Saxon countries; the advanced guards of workers’ defence have still not conquered the streets and gained legality as in Germany and Austria.
• Now, for a revolutionary party, being taken unawares by being outlawed means that you disappear. On the other hand, being prepared for illegality makes you certain of surviving any measures of repression. Three striking examples from recent history illustrate the truth of this.
• Propaganda in the army, a vital necessity, is not legally tolerated. Without the defection of at least a part of the army, there is no victorious revolution. This is a law of history.
• The most democratic of legal systems would not in the least tolerate action committees at the very points where they are most necessary: in the great railway junctions, the docks, the arsenals and the airports.
• Finally, it need scarcely be said that international communications services must at all times be subject to investigation by the political police.
• that is, in reality, to the many sympathisers, especially in intellectual circles, who would try not to compromise themselves to the point of collaborating in illegal actions.
• Lenin maintained that to belong to the party it was necessary “to participate in the work of one of its (illegal) organisations”. The discussion appeared to be splitting hairs. But Lenin was a thousand times right. You cannot be half or a third a revolutionary. The party of the revolution must, of course, make use of every contribution; but it cannot be content with receiving just vague, discreet, verbal, inactive sympathy from its members.
• Those who do not agree to risk a privileged material situation for the sake of the working class, should not be in a position to exercise real influence within it. The attitude towards illegality was for Lenin the touchstone for differentiating between real revolutionaries and ... others.

• In the United States, the participation of the private police in the conflicts between labour and capital has grown fearfully. The offices of famous private detectives provide the capitalists with discreet informers, expert provocateurs, riflemen, guards, foremen and also totally corrupt “trade union militants”. The Pinkertons, Burns and Thiels detective agencies have 100 head offices and about 10,000 branches: they supposedly employ 135,000 people. Their annual budget comes to $65 million. They have set up industrial espionage, factory-floor espionage, espionage in the workshop, the shipyards, offices, and wherever there are workers employed. They have created the prototype of the worker-informer. [5]

    

  An analogous system, exposed by Upton Sinclair, operates in the universities and schools of the great democracy whose praises are sung by Walt Whitman ...

• V. Conclusions

    

  To sum up: the study of the workings of the Okhrana shows us that the immediate aim of the police is more to know than to repress. To know in order to repress at the appointed hour, to the extent desired – if not altogether. Faced by this wily adversary, powerful and cunning, a workers’ party lacking clandestine organisation, a party which keeps nothing hidden, is like an unarmed man, with no cover, in the sights of a well-positioned rifleman. Revolutionary work is too serious to be kept in a glasshouse. The party of the revolution must organise so as to avoid enemy vigilance as far as possible; so as to hide its most important resources absolutely; so as not – in the countries which are still democratic – to be at the mercy of a lurch to the right by the bourgeoisie or of a declaration of war [6]; so as to train our comrades in the behaviour which is demanded by these imperatives.

    

   

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• The great Russian Bolsheviks choose to describe themselves as “professional revolutionaries”. It is a description perfectly suited to all real agents of social transformation. It rules out from revolutionary activity all dilettantism, amateurism, playing about and posturing; it locates the revolutionary irrevocably in the world of labour, where there is no question of “airs”, nor of finding interesting ways to fill up one’s leisure time, nor the spiritual or moral pleasure of holding “advanced” ideas. For those who do this work, their job (or profession) fills the best part of their life. They know it is a serious business and that their daily bread depends on it; they also know, with varying degrees of consciousness, that the whole social life and destiny of men depends on it too.
• The job of a revolutionary requires a long apprenticeship, gaining purely technical knowledge, as well as love for the work and understanding of the cause, the means and the end. If, as often happens, he is obliged to take another job – in order to live – it is the job of being a revolutionary which fills his life, and the other job is only something secondary. The Russian Revolution was able to triumph because m twenty-five years of political activity it had formed strong teams of professional revolutionaries, trained to carry out an almost superhuman labour.
• The truth of this experience must always be borne in mind by any revolutionary worthy of the name. In the present complexity of the class war, the training of a revolutionary needs years of effort, testing out, study and conscious preparation. Every worker spurred on by the desire not to be an insignificant by-stander among the exploited masses, but to serve his class and live a fuller life, taking part in the fight to transform society, must endeavour to be also – so far as possible – a professional revolutionary ... And in his party, trade union or branch work, he must – and this is what concerns us today – show himself to be on his guard against police surveillance and uncover it, even when it is invisible and appears to be innocuous, as it does in periods of calm.

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• To put an end to oppression, poverty, prostitution and war, they trust only in the intervention – above all the literary intervention – of the Mind. In fact enjoying considerable comfort in society as it is, they haughtily place themselves “above the social melée”.
• They dream, in defiance of history, truth, common sense and their own experience, of a total revolution, doubtless not only idyllic, but short, decisive and definitive, leading to a radiant morrow.
• We have raised the question of repression. We shall see that the analogy between the repressive apparatus of the bourgeois state and that of the proletarian state is much more apparent than real.
• The victorious revolution, not the least inclined to shed blood, in fact showed a dangerous degree of indulgence to its enemies. Freed on parole (as in the case of General Krasnov) or ignored, the monarchist officers assembled hastily in the South, forming the first nuclei of the armies of Kornilov, Alexeyev, Krasnov, Denikin and Wrangel. The magnanimity of the young Soviet republic was to cost her rivers of blood for years. The historians will certainly ask themselves one day – and communist theoreticians would undoubtedly do well to keep ahead of the work of the historians – whether, with greater rigour at the outset, with a dictatorship which had been obliged to reduce the enemy classes to impotence without delay by measures of public safety, even when these classes may have appeared passive – whether Red Russia could not in this way have spared herself something of the horrors of civil war and the double terror of Red and White. This was apparently Lenin s thinking, as he set himself very early on to combat hesitations and half measures in repression, just as in everything else.

  • Srge and Lenin argue that the problem is not enough repression
• Between October and December 1917, revolutionary justice carried out only 21 executions, the majority of them of social scum. The Extraordinary Commission for the Repression of Counter-Revolution and Speculation, Cheka for short, was founded on December 7, in the face of increasingly bold operations by the enemy within.

  • is Serge blood thirsty?
• Plots would follow one after the other for years, undermining the state from within in line with the external offensive of the White armies and foreign intervention.
• For years, directors of nationalised enterprises would in fact remain in the service of the expropriated capitalists, giving them information, carrying out their orders, sabotaging production in their interest; there would be countless abuses and excesses of all kinds, the leading party would be infiltrated by those who like to go fishing in troubled waters
• There was no question about the need for repression. The Cheka was no less indispensable than the Red Army and the Commissariat for Supplies.

  • Cheka indispensable
• Legal proof! You count at nothing the blood this will cost you! Legal roof! Ah! We would rather avoid the disasters which would provide us with such proof!
• We do not deny that terror is terrible. Threatened with death, the proletarian revolution resorted to it in Russia for three years, from 1918 to 1921.
• During this glorious reign, vagrants of over 18 whom nobody would hire for at least 2 years were put to death.
• For centuries, justice has been nothing but terror organised to the advantage of the possessing classes. To steal from a rich man has always been a greater crime than to kill a poor man.
• The opinion of a few “good people” was more than enough to justify a death sentence, when, naturally, the accused was a poor man.
• “it was already clear that the suppression of suspects was the essence of the law.” Suspects to whom? To the rich, of course.
• The ordinances according this right did not admit that a nobleman could be put on trial: the law could only begin to be applied to peasants, merchants and craftsmen, and became rigorous only in the case of the poor.
• What is clear is that revolutions make no innovations in the sphere of repression and terror; they only revive, in the form of emergency measures, the norms of law and justice which for centuries have been the weapons of the possessing classes against the dispossessed classes ...
• hey were hanged; in 1848, the insurgent Parisians of the Saint-Antoine district were machine-gunned in their thousands, and they were only unemployed people, pushed over the brink by skilful provocation. We should never weary of recalling these great facts of history.
• There are no valid statistics on the victims of the White terror in Russia in the areas where counter-revolution and foreign intervention triumphed. But the victims of the anti-semitic pogroms in the Ukraine alone, under General Denikin, are estimated at one million. The Jewish population of whole towns (such as Fastov) was systematically wiped out.
• Repression is one of the essential functions of all political power. The revolutionary State, at least in the first phase of its existence, needs it more than any other. It appears that in its three basic elements – the police, the army, the courts and prisons – the mechanism of repression and coercion does not vary. We have just made a study of a secret police force. We have gone into its most secret recesses and dirtiest corners. And we have seen its impotence. In the hands of the ancien régime, as we said, this weapon could neither save it nor destroy the revolution. We do however admit of the decisive efficacy of this same weapon in the hands of the revolution. The weapon is only the same in appearance: an institution, we repeat, undergoes profound transformation according to the class it serves and the ends it pursues.

  • The revolutionary State, at least in the first phase of its existence, needs it (repression) more than any other.
• outline the basic differences between repression as exercised by the capitalist class and repression as exercised by the revolutionary class.
• Thieves are no longer hanged; not because “humanitarian principles” are “making progress”, but because the balance of forces between the possessing classes and the non-possessing classes and the development of class consciousness among the poor no longer permit the judge to throw such insults at the poor.
• In other words, to be found on seven successive occasions on the streets of Paris with no bread and no roof over your head is a crime punishable by a life sentence.
• The penal code of the proletarian state does not, as a general rule, allow the death penalty in criminal cases (except sometimes where the physical suppression of particular incurable, dangerous madmen is the only solution). Nor does it allow life sentences. The severest sentence is ten years imprisonment. Deprivation of liberty, a measure taken for the safety of society and for re-education, is conceived of as excluding the medieval idea of punishment, of suffering imposed by way of expiation. In this realm, and in the present situation of the Soviet Union, the material possibilities are naturally far behind the aim in view. The building of the new society – which will be without prisons – does not begin with the construction of ideal prisons. This is beyond doubt; but the impulse is there, and a thorough reform has begun. Like the legislature, the courts, from the clearest class standpoint, take account of the social causes of crime, and the social origins and situation of the criminal. Being without bread or lodging, as we have seen, is a serious crime in Paris; in Moscow it is, in a criminal case, an important mitigating circumstance.

  • death penalty
• Under bourgeois law, to be poor is often a crime, and always an aggravating circumstance or ground for presuming guilt. Under proletarian law, to be rich – even within the very strict limits in which, during the period of the NEP, individual enrichment is tolerated – is always an aggravating circumstance.

  • is being poor criminal or being rich?
• Crises thus become the great regulators of economic life; they rectify the errors of the big industrialists at the expense of the workers, the lower middle classes and the weakest capitalists.
• Within the narrow limits in which it permits capitalist initiative, it controls and regulates it, exercising a double tutelage over it: by law and by what we may call direct action on the market, credit and production.
• It acts each day directly in the essential functions of economic life.

  • Socialism means complete state control of the economy
• t is not unreasonable to predict, once social development has reached a certain point, that they can be completely eliminated.
• After each economic crisis, crime increases; it can’t be otherwise. And the capitalist courts become doubly severe.
• For the troubles caused by the normal working of the capitalist economy – anarchic, irrational, governed by the egoism of individuals and by the collective egoism of the possessing classes – the bourgeoisie knows no remedy but repression.
• The Soviet state, attacking the causes of the evil, has evidently much less need of repression.

  • Is the Soviet State less repressive?
• Even today – and we are a long way from our goal! – our conviction is that, contrary to appearances, the Soviet State uses infinitely less repression than any other. Just think about it: in the present economic situation of Russia, would a bourgeois government not have to rule by force to an infinitely greater extent than the Soviets? The peasantry are often discontented. They find the taxes too high and industrial articles too dear. Their discontent is sometimes expressed in acts which have to be classed as counter-revolutionary. The peasantry as a whole has nonetheless given the Soviets the military victory – the Red Army consisted above all of peasants – and continues to support them. A capitalist government, restoring the land to the landowners, would have had to contain the anger of a hundred million peasants, which it could only have done by unceasing, pitiless repression. This is precisely why all the White regimes in the pay of foreign financial interests have fallen.

  • Soviet state much less repressive than any other.
• In its present bereft state, after years of imperialist war, civil war, blockades and famine, encircled by capitalist states, the target for financial blockades, diplomatic intrigues and war preparations, the Soviet Union, still an entrenched camp beseiged by the enemy, and moreover grappling with the internal contradictions inherent in such a difficult period of transition, still has great need of repression. It would be excessively self-deluding to think that the period of counter-revolutionary attacks is over. But whatever the present difficulties of the Soviet Union and the way it reacts to them, the essential features of the Soviet state arc not changed by them – nor, therefore, is the role played by repression.

  • The Soviet Union still has great need of repression.
• eighth year of existence
• In our presence, in one quarter of this wonderful metropolis, are packed – next door to the most enormous accumulation of wealth the world ever saw – cheek by jowl with this are 40,000 helpless, starving people.”
• The Irish famine of 1846 killed more than 1,000,000 people ... To the wealth of the country it did not the slightest damage.”
• to consent to die without revolt, like tied beasts, what formidable constraint was required? But one of the principal means of capitalist constraint is clearly in evidence: hunger. It was half a century of what could be called economic terror. The worker laboured, Threatened with unemployment, threatened wit dying of hunger, laboured like an industrial galley-slave, laboured like a beast, only to die of hunger in the end – after 15 short years.
• mach in- cry

  • machinery
• no data on the average life expectancy of wage workers at this period,
• while repression only adds to it what is required to defend capitalist “order” against certain particularly worrying categories of its victims (thieves) and against revolutionaries.
• Educated in the schools of the reactionaries, the working class, living under the shadow of the threat to its life, must strike its enemies to death. Prison intimidates no-one: riots too easily break down the bolted doors which can also be opened by corruption or the ingenuity of conspirators.

  • bloodthirsty?
• In 1871, the Communards were more than decimated by the Versailllais. We have already quoted the moderate estimate of the number shot by Gallifet: 20,000. The Commune had 160,000 fighters. The redoubtable logic of class war – that is what the French bourgeoisie, the most enlightened in the world, the bourgeoisie of Taine and Renan! – teaches us with these figures. A class does not admit itself to be defeated, a class is not conquered, until such a high percentage of losses is inflicted on it. Imagine – a situation familiar in Russia in the heroic years of the revolution – a town of 100,000 inhabitants divided into 70,000 proletarians (I am simplifying: proletarians and related elements) and 30,000 people belonging to the bourgeoisie and the middle class, accustomed to considering themselves as forming the legitimate ruling class, educated and not lacking in material means. Is it not obvious, especially if the struggle is limited to the town, that the resistance of this counter-revolutionary force, however strongly or weakly organised, will not be broken until it has suffered some quite impressive losses? And is it not less dangerous for the revolution to strike too hard than not to strike hard enough?

  • decimation
• Like the Revolutionary Tribunal of the French Revolution, but in general with rather less summary proceedings, the Cheka of the Russian Revolution dealt out justice to its class enemies, implacably and without the right of appeal; like the Revolutionary Tribunal, it judged less on the basis of depositions and precise charges and more on the enemy’s social origins, political attitude, outlook and ability to do damage. It was much more a question of striking a class trough the men belonging to it, than weighing up definite acts. Class justice only dwells on the examination of individual cases in periods of calm.

  • it judged less on the basis of depositions and precise charges and more on the enemy’s social origins,
• Mistakes, abuses and excesses appear particularly disastrous in relation to social layers which the proletariat must seek to rally to it: the middle peasantry, lower layers of the middle classes, intellectuals with no private means; and also in relation to dissidents of the revolution, sincere revolutionaries who take up objectively counterrevolutionary positions because of ideologies far removed from an understanding of the realities of the revolution. I remember the anarchists who, in 1920, when the Red Fleet was defending Kronstadt and Petrograd with difficulty against an English attack, imperturbably went on in their few boats with their old anti-militarist propaganda. I am also thinking of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries who, in 1918, strove to throw the Soviet Republic, deprived of an army and of any kind of resources, into a new war against German imperialism, which was still strong. Between these “revolutionaries” gone astray and the men of the old regime, revolutionary repression endeavoured and must always endeavour to distinguish; but it is not always possible.

  • repression against “revolutionaries” gone astray

• In every social battle, a certain percentage of excesses, abuses and errors cannot be avoided. The duty of the party and of all revolutionaries is to work to limit these. The scale of these errors only really depends on the following factors:

    
   
  1. The balance of forces at the time and the bitterness of the struggle;
    
  2. The level of organisation of the action; the effectiveness of control over the action exercised by the party of the proletariat.
    
  3. The level of culture of the proletarian and peasant masses.

  • errors cannot be avoided
• t the time the Communard prisoners were held in the Satory camp, lying under the open sky on the bare ground, in the mud, shivering through terrible nights in pouring rain – forbidden to get up, and the sentinels with orders to shoot at anyone who did get up – a great philosopher, Taine, wrote: “These wretches have put themselves beyond the bounds of humanity ...”
• Revolutionary repression – and this is a cause of mistakes and abuses – is left only with second-rate personnel, albeit under leaders who absolutely must be taken from among the firmest and finest of men.
• nd the scarcely less direct intervention of the masses of the people under the effective control of whom the party is situated in every action it takes.
• The possibilities of mistakes and abuses are reduced in proportion to the forces which the vanguard of the proletariat is able to put into this sector.
• n bourgeois states, police provocation, scarcely known in periods of strength, acquires growing importance in proportion as the regime declines, is weakened and slides into the abyss.
• Conscious of their impotence to prevent what is going on, the police incite initiatives which they then repress. Provocation is also a spontaneous, elementary action, resulting from the demoralisation of a police force at its wits’ end, overtaken by events, which cannot perform a task infinitely above its capacities, and nonetheless wants to justify the expectations and expenditures of its masters.
• Their actions could only gain the ancien régime a limited reprieve, and that on condition that it agreed to certain appropriate measures of general policy. How absurd was this thin line of policemen and agents provocateurs, working blindly to turn back the beating of the waves against the old, cracked, shaking cliff, ready to crumble and engulf them!
• The functions of the Cheka are not so absurd. In a country divided between red and white, in which the red are naturally the majority, it seeks out the enemy, discovers him, and strikes. It is no more than a weapon, in the hands of the majority, against the minority – one weapon among many others, and an accessory one at that. It only takes on major importance because of the danger that the enemy s bullets may strike the revolution in the head. It is said that the day after the seizure of power, Lenin worked all night on the decree for the expropriation of the land. “As long,” he said, “as we have the time to get it through. Let them try to take it from us after that!” The expropriation of the lands of the nobility instantly procured the support of 100 million peasants for the Bolsheviks.

  • repression is only one weapon among many
• Repression is effective when it completes the effect of efficient measures of general policy.

  • repression in support of policy
• nd the arrest of Socialist-Revolutionary or monarchist agitators – the former trying to exploit their past popularity in the countryside, the latter to play on religious feelings – removed one cause of disturbance.
• Let us not deny that it can be as useful to a strong bourgeoisie in decisive periods as to the proletariat during the civil war.
• Repression is effective when it acts along the lines of historical development; it is impotent in the last reckoning when it goes against the grain of historical development.
• One of the reasons he invokes when calling for the replacement of the word “social-democrat” by “communist” in the name of the Bolshevik Party is that “the term social democrat is scientifically inaccurate. Democracy is one of the forms of the State. Now, as Marxists, we are against all States.”
• Here is the supreme difference between the capitalist State and the proletarian State: the workers’ State works for its own disappearance. The supreme difference marked by the constraint-repression exercised by the dictatorship of the proletariat, is that the latter constitutes a necessary class weapon working for the abolition of all constraint.
• That must never be forgotten. This consciousness of the highest goals is also a force.
• Why should the proletariat in its magnanimity not break up the old blades and the modern firearms and grant an indemnity to its exploiters of yesterday?

  • painless revolution
• In the Second International, a handful of revolutionary Marxists alone discerned the great outlines of historical development. In France, on the question of proletarian violence, some revolutionary syndicalists had a clear view of things ...
• Everything of use for production and for extending man s power over nature, enriching his life, was now used to destroy and kill with suddenly heightened powers.
• po-one

  • no one
• Looking the harsh realities of revolution in the face, we must not forget these things.
• The sacrifices imposed by the civil war, the implacable necessity for terror, the rigours of revolutionary repression, and the inevitability of painful mistakes, then appear in their rightful proportions. They are the smallest of evils compared with such immense calamities. The cemetery of Verdun alone would be more than enough to justify them.

  • painful mistakes , but hte smallest of evils in comparison to...

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• In 1914 they showed themselves prisoners of the capitalism which they fought even as they adapted themselves to it.
• It is true that German Marxism in its two forms – Social Democratic and Communist – showed itself impotent before the Nazi offensive. Along with the degeneration of Bolshevism, this is without question, let us note in passing, the greatest defeat that Marxism has ever suffered.
• One then perceives that since the birth, the apogee and the corruption of Christianity, there has been no more considerable event in the life of humanity.
• an science be anything except a process of continual self-revision, an unceasing quest for a closer approach to truth? Can it get along without hypothesis and error – the “error” of tomorrow which is the “truth” (that is, the closest approximation of the truth) of yesterday.
• Since Marx, no one seriously denies the part played by economics in history. The relationship between economic, psychological, social and moral factors appears today, even to the adversaries of Marxism, in an altogether different light from that in which it appeared before Marx. It is the same with the role of the individual in history, and with the relationship of the individual to the masses and to society. Marxism, finally, gives us what I call the “historical sense”; it makes us conscious that we live in a world which is li-i process of changing; it enlightens us as to our possible function – and our limitations – it is this continual struggle and creation; it teaches us to integrate ourselves, with all our will, all our talents, to bring about those historical processes that are, as the case may be, necessary, inevitable or desirable. And it is thus that it allows us to confer on our isolated lives a high significance, by tying them, through a consciousness which heightens and enriches the spiritual life, to that life – collective, innumerable, and permanent – of which history is only the record.
• This awakening of consciousness insists on action and, furthermore, on the unity of action and thought. Here is man reconciled with himself, whatever be the burden of his destiny. He no longer feels himself the plaything of blind and measureless forces. He looks with clear eyes on the worst tragedies, and even in the midst of the greatest defeats he feels himself enlarged by his ability to understand, his will to act and to resist, the indestructible feeling of being united in all his aspirations with the mass of humanity in its progress through time.
• One is no more able to deny the part played by economics in history than the fact that the earth is round... And even those who argue the point do not in the least deceive themselves. I should like to emphasise here an important point to which not enough attention has been paid in the past. The enemies of the working class have themselves largely assimilated the lessons of Marxism. The politicians, the industrialists and bankers, the demagogues sometimes bum the works of Marx and throw his followers into prison; but, dealing with social realities, they pay tribute to Marxist economists and political leaders. And if scholars refute the theory of surplus value, their masters do not put any less energy and stubbornness into the defence of the surplus value they appropriate as their plunder from the revenues of society. This sub-rosa Marxism of the enemies of socialism is in a fair way to become one of the most formidable means of defence of the privileged classes.
• but because of the state of siege, it soon became more and more authoritarian and intolerant.
• bureaucratic caste which has evicted the working class from power – is totalitarian, despotic, amoral, and opportunist. It ends up in the strangest and most revolting negations of itself.
• s to the Marxist line of action, it would be enough to list the prodigious success of the Bolshevik party in 1917 (Lenin–Trotsky), the predictions of Engels about the world war of the future and its consequences, some lines from the resolution adopted at the Basle Congress of the Second International (1913) – for the Marxist line to be justified as the most rigorously, scientifically thought-out of these times.
• But even when it comes to the very depths of defeat, it is still the same. Do you wish to understand your defeat? You will be able to only by means of the Marxist analysis of history. Marxism showed itself impotent in Germany before the Nazi counterrevolution; but it is the only theory that explains this victory of a party of the declassed, paid for and supported during an insoluble economic crisis, by the chiefs of the big bourgeoisie. This complex phase of the class struggle, prepared by the national humiliation at Versailles and the massacres of proletarian revolutionaries (Noske, 1918-21), is made completely intelligible to us only by the scientific thought of the defeated class. And this is one of the reasons which make Marxist thought such a threat to the victors.
• it has not dared to take a libertarian position. Or rather, it was libertarian in words and only for a short time, during the brief period of Soviet democracy which extended from October, 1917, to the summer of 1918. Then it pulled itself together and resolutely entered on the path of the old “statism” – authoritarian, and soon totalitarian. It lacked the sense of liberty.
• But one must realise that later on this policy brought about the defeat of the workers by the bureaucracy. The Bolshevik leaders of the great years lacked neither the knowledge nor intelligence nor energy. They lacked revolutionary audacity whenever it was necessary to seek (after 1918) the solution of their problems in the freedom of the masses and not in government constraint. They built systematically not the libertarian Communist State which they announced, but a State strong in the old sense of the word, strong in its police, in its censorship, its monopolies, its all-powerful bureaus. In this respect, the contrast is striking between the Bolshevist programme of 1917 and the political structure created by Bolshevism in 1919.
• After victory had been won in the Civil War, the Socialist solution of the problems of the new society should have been sought in workers’ democracy, the stimulation of initiative, freedom of thought, freedom for working-class groups and not, as it was, in centralisation of power, repression of heresies, the monolithic single-party system, the narrow orthodoxy of an official school of thought. The dominance and ideology of a single party should have preshadowed the dominance and ideology of a single leader. This extreme concentration of power, this dread of liberty and of ideological variations, this conditioning to absolute authority disarmed the masses and led to the strengthening of the bureaucracy.
• If it is possible to discover a major lesson, capable of revitalising Marxism, more threatened today than ever by the collapse of Bolshevism, one might formulate it in these terms: Socialism is essentially democratic – the word, “democratic”, being used here in its libertarian sense.
• new forms of exploitation of labour
• The masses, unfortunately, will take some time to realise this. They live not according to clear and rational thought but according to impressions which the lessons of experience slowly modify. Since all this goes on under the usurped banner of Marxism, we must expect that the masses, unable to apply Marxist analysis to this tragedy, will react against Marxism. Our enemies have it all their own way.
• But scientific thought cannot regress below the Marxist level, nor can the working class do without this intellectual weapon.

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