An all-around struggle is now being waged by Marxists against the social-chauvinists, the economists, and the “legalists” that all lay false claim to our banner, to the banner of Marxism. Comrades, we must intensify the struggle! This struggle has been waged before — by our predecessors, on the eve of the 20th century, prior to the great proletarian revolutions that rocked the world and threw the capitalist machine into disorder.
In the book, “What the “Friends of the People” Are,” Lenin outlined the main tasks of the Russian Marxists. In his opinion, the first duty of the Russian Marxists was to weld the disunited Marxist circles into a united Socialist workers’ party. …
The struggle waged by Lenin and his followers against Narodism led to the latter’s complete ideological defeat already in the [eighteen] nineties.
Of immense significance, too, was Lenin’s struggle against “legal Marxism.” It usually happens with big social movements in history that transient “fellow-travelers” fasten on to them. The “legal Marxists,” as they were called, were such fellow-travelers. Marxism began to spread widely throughout Russia; and so we found bourgeois intellectuals decking themselves out in a Marxist garb. They published their articles in newspapers and periodicals that were legal, that is, allowed by the tsarist government. That is why they came to be called “legal Marxists.”
History of the CPSU (Bolsheviks), Short Course
After their own fashion, they too fought Narodism. But they tried to make use of this fight and of the banner of Marxism in order to subordinate and adapt the working-class movement to the interests of bourgeois society, to the interests of the bourgeoisie. They cut at the very core of Marxism, namely, the doctrine of the proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Those of our comrades who are unfamiliar with the history of the development of revolutionary Marxism may shake their heads and wonder why, since we advocate unity, we are so divisive when it comes to “potential allies.” The first answer is in the words of Lenin in 1914: “Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists and opponents and distorters of Marxism.”
But let us say that our comrades will not be convinced by context-free quotes. Very well! Then we shall explain why we cannot have unity with those who “cut at the very core of Marxism” and deny the doctrine of the proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The first weapon of the proletarian class, the revolutionary class, is organization. Our enemy, the bourgeois class, is organized to a frighteningly high degree. It has achieved this organization through the century of its dominance in the West where it has been triumphant on every front. We must not shy away from the truth: the weakness of the Communist movement here in the U.S.-Canadian Empire is both the reflection and the cause of the imperial bourgeoisie’s strength. These are intrinsically linked, the one conditioning the other. As a result of these triumphs, which are at the same time our losses, the bourgeoisie has established a fighting-organization that was unthinkable in Marx’s time… or Lenin’s… or Stalin’s. The national security state and its reactionary vanguard is capitalism’s answer to Communism. It is the entrenchment of settler-fascism, complete with its garrisons, extermination camps, and domesticated working class. Nevertheless, despite this daunting obstacle, the main strength of the enemy does not lie in its organization. The strength of our enemy is its control of property, of productive capital, and of political power.
For us, for the revolutionary classes, it is the combination of our strength which is the source of our power. Why is this? It is a fundamental law of capital: the socialization of labor and the combination of labor-power into social forms — the factory floor, the office, any workplace — exists as the result of the form of the capitalist economy, the mode of production.
Only through the concentrated power of our class — and our class-allies — can we stand against the enemy class and against the enemy state. Alone or unorganized, we are easy to overcome. Together and united, organized such that we cannot be divided and defeated in detail, the bourgeoisie are categorically unable to be victorious in this war between our classes; the bourgeoisie cannot live on its own power — without us, it must wither and die. There is no victory for our oppressors that does not end in their own destruction.
If our weapon is organization, the organization of our entire class, what does this mean for our unity with those who seek conciliation with our enemy, the bourgeoisie? To unite with the liquidators of revolution is to surrender our weapon of organization; it is to disorganize ourselves, to throw away our weapons and armor, to bear our breasts for the lance of the enemy. Only a militant, democratic, centralized party, utterly devoted to the revolution as its aim, can lead us to victory; only this can assure that we are not divided and destroyed.
Reform? Yes, but reform through class struggle. In 1916, Lenin wrote that revolutionaries cannot, without betraying their cause, vote for reforms. “Either revolutionary class struggle,” wrote Lenin, “of which reforms are always a by-product (when the revolution is not altogether successful) or no reforms at all.” Blunter, even than this, he delivered in December of that year a speech that noted “The conditions of bourgeois democracy very often compel us to take a certain stand on a multitude of small and petty reforms, but we must be able, or learn, to take such a position on these reforms (in such a manner) that—to oversimplify the matter for the sake of clarity—five minutes of every half-hour speech are devoted to reforms and twenty-five minutes to the coming revolution.”
The organization we must craft will be an organization of Marxists. Wavering, vacillating, and revisionism cannot be permitted. Our theoretical line will be anchored to the struggle for national liberation of the oppressed nations within the U.S.-Canadian Empire. This struggle alone is incompatible with reform, with revision, with opportunism inside the borders of the Empire.
We have already seen the spread of petit-bourgeois anarchist socialism — in the 1880s, as Narodism. “Legal” Marxism finds its apogee here in the U.S. as the CPUSA, the legalist strains within the DSA and academics that reject revolution. Economism is, similarly, the substitution of the revolutionary content of Marxism for simple economic gains — pure unionism, for instance, or other strains of CPUSA and DSA “thought.” These are all forms of the domestication of Marxism, the adaptation of Marxism to the bourgeois palate.
To achieve this unity, we must intensify the struggle. As Lenin and the early Russian Social Democratic Labor Party founders fought and destroyed the tendencies of petit-bourgeois Narodism, “legal” Marxism, and economism before they could unite the Marxists around a single banner, so too must we fight the modern incarnations of these very same tendencies. We must rhetorically destroy the “legal” Marxists and economists. They draw to their ranks the advanced workers who would otherwise become real Marxists. The real Marxists they dupe into their organizations become isolated, atomized, and neutralized by the parliamentary tricks they play to prevent their radical wings from having control or influence within them.
Only by rhetorically dismantling these enemies of the people can we free this locked-up labor, can we give our comrades back the chance to take up the weapon of organization. Once this is done, we will put the weapon into the hands of our class and they will guide it to the heart of the enemy. Then, when the revolutionary moment comes, our weapon will be sharp, our strategy prepared, and our ranks unbroken and unbreakable.
We must intensify the struggle!
