From the Bourgeois to the Proletarian Revolution by Ottle Ruhle (1924)

Part 1 of 3

1 THE BOURGEOIS REVOLUTIONS

Under the dominion of the Roman Empire the economy had developed in 
Italy almost to the threshold of capitalism. But the military and 
political collapse of this world power meant at the same time  as 
result and cause in one the end of the economic development. What 
followed was reversion to earlier primitive economic forms and 
centuries-long stagnation. Only the crusades brought back the 
impulse to new development. Conceived as raids which were to 
open up the orient with its treasures to the conquering pressure 
and avarice of western freebooters and adventurers, they introduced 
for the following period a chain of very successful trade connections, 
of which the North Italian states became the bases. Via Venice, 
Florence, Pisa, Genoa, the merchandise found its way on ancient 
army and trade routes to Nuremburg, Augsburg, Ulm, round from 
there out to the north and north-west, especially to be transported 
towards Flanders and Brabant. In connection with this grew up, 
in Italy first, an indigenous production of goods, which provided 
for exchange of commodities; the sudden impetus given to the money 
economy, led to the foundation of banks of exchange and to the 
concentration of finance capital in the hands of a few families. 
The springtime of modern capitalism set in.

Its full development was however interrupted and disturbed by the 
advance of the Turks in the Near East and the discovery of the sea 
route to the East Indies. The traffic with the orient was cut off; 
a total displacement of the trade routes occurred. The bulk of the 
commodity exchange between east and west was shifted from Italy to 
Portugal. The Italian states became poor and declined; their 
Renaissance culture perished; the attempts to attain national 
unification on the basis of economic unity, through the chaos 
of the struggles between patrician families and state republics, 
stopped in the early stages. As no real bourgeoisie, which had 
learned to recognise itself as a class in the modern sense, 
existed, it also stopped short of a centralised assertion of 
capitalist interests on a large scale, short of any independent 
economic and state establishment over the surrounding dependencies 
of aristocratic dynasties and city guilds, short of a bourgeois 
revolution, which would have brought about a fundamental break 
with the old order of things and set up a new economic and social 
system.

In Portugal and Spain capitalism shot up like a hot-house plant 
from the same soil, which was abundantly fertilised with the 
riches of newly discovered continents opened up to boundless 
exploitation. But the favourable economic situation found for 
itself no state power which would have developed from its 
political task and would have grasped the essence of the 
capitalist element. The Court, schooled and directed towards 
territorial internationalisation as a result of marriage, 
inheritance and conquest, saw itself, if it wished to safeguard 
its interests, bound to the sole international power of its 
time, the Catholic Church. This in turn perceived in the state 
power the surest defender of the faith, which was basically 
only the ideological armoured shield for its economic interests, 
anchored in feudalism. Thus Emperor and Pope, state power and 
church, were present in the Inquisition, which raged against 
the heretics whose unbelief only formed the pretext for the 
method of confiscation of goods, high fines, legalised robbery 
and systematic combat of the awakening bourgeois class, bearer 
of a new economic principle. The movement of the Communeros, 
in which the self-consciousness of Castilian towns had risen
up, was smothered in blood; the hopeful blossoming of the 
textile industry ended in the chaos of a crisis from which 
it never recovered; as representatives of the early-capitalist 
epoch there remained behind only crowds of lumpen-proletariat, 
who populated an impoverished country, ruined towns and 
desolate wastelands. The strength of the bourgeois class, 
loaded suddenly with riches which it dissipated, but just 
as suddenly pushed into the abyss of poverty, had not found 
expression in a bourgeois revolution.

The maritime commerce which formed numerous bonds between 
south and north had established in Bruges and later in 
Antwerp large depots for the North and Baltic Sea shipping. 
Soon the Netherlands were interpenetrated with capitalism, 
central to the entirety of European trade and the great 
reference point of all nations. The bourgeoisie,, grown 
prosperous and conscious of its worth, held on to what it 
acquired and was determined to defend property and the 
right of property under all circumstances and against 
every danger. This danger came from Spain when Philip 
sent the dreaded Alba to the Netherlands in order to 
secure the continuation of the Spanish crown by plundering 
the capitalist riches. Under pressure of the danger, the 
Netherlands bourgeoisie welded itself into the compact 
unity of a class capable of resistance.

The bourgeois revolution in the Netherlands had no
aggressive character. It is much more a heroic resistance 
struggle against an enemy power invading from outside, 
more a national defence than a social confrontation. 
But precisely in the awareness of common economic interests, 
in the alliance for national action occasioned by it, consisted 
an important factor for the consolidation of the forces whose 
sum total was capitalism. The bourgeois class of the 
Netherlands triumphed over the might of the Spaniards 
because it stood on the ground of a more developed and 
more viable economy  that's understood. But as it 
triumphed, the combination into a new national community 
was accomplished, and political freedom was proclaimed. 
The strong economic potency lived and developed with 
national and political vigour.

The shower of sparks from the Netherlands revolution
had set fire to the decaying structure of the English 
feudal economy. The change to the capitalist economic 
method proceeded very swiftly; trade spread its net 
over the seas; domestic industry took up all the 
liberated energies of the impoverished peasantry; 
big trading and industrial centres with depots, 
warehouses and counting-houses, mills and banks, 
wharves and overseas companies were already 
growing up. And in the parliament of estates, the 
bourgeois class won an important position after 
the other classes.

For the first time in world history the Parliament in 
England became the arena for the fighting out of 
bourgeois-capitalist interests. Crown and money-bag, 
royal power and burghers' will, exploded at each other 
in the fiercest and most embittered quarrels. The king 
clung to prerogative and privileges, monopolies and 
tax-raising, highest power of command and Divine Right; 
the bourgeoisie with total energy and obstinacy stood 
up for freedom of trade and competition, security of 
property and fruit of enterprise, free play in 
energies, markets, profit. In order to break the 
reactionary power of the crown, the Parliament under 
Cromwell organised an army which, after it had 
destroyed the monarchy, at once set about securing 
private property through suppression of the Levellers, 
and winning in Ireland and Scotland a greater Britain 
for capital's need to expand. Even when the bourgeoisie, 
dependent on the support of the military, could not 
prevent the return of the monarchy, it divested it of 
all real power in affairs and questions of economic 
life and reduced its existence to the luxury of a 
decorative accessory, which it could accomplish 
nolens volens.

In the English revolution was demonstrated the entire 
strength and determination of the bourgeois class, 
already grown economically firmly rooted and politically 
independent, which smashes old traditions as soon as 
they become a hindrance to it, recognises no sentimentality, 
knows exactly what it wants and shrinks back from no step 
which its interests order it to take.

The most spectacular of all bourgeois revolutions  the 
'Great Revolution' took place in France. It is without 
equal in its Qlan, its class character and its historical 
import. The historiographers see in it the landmark for 
the beginning of the modern period, of the bourgeois 
epoch proper.

A general-staff of the most outstanding minds had ideologically 
prepared the revolution, which had become inevitable through the 
catastrophic breakdown of the feudal system under Louis XIV and 
his successors. Montesquieu's 'L'Esprit des Lois' provided the 
building-stone for the foundation of the later revolutionary 
constitutions; Rousseau in his 'Social Contract' sketched the 
picture of a new condition of society; the Encyclopaedists 
advocated with much wit and fervour the 'transformation of 
the general mode of thinking'; Voltaire destroyed the 
prestige of traditional authorities and propagated the new 
precepts of a natural morality; SiVyes established with 
cogent logic and stirring eloquence the political claims 
of the 'Third Estate'. And while the mass of petty bourgeois 
and workers did the rough work, while they stormed the 
Bastille, marched to Versailles, seized the Tuileries 
and dragged the king to the scaffold, the bourgeoisie, 
according to the intentions of their political leaders 
and intellectual mentors, built up the edifice of a new 
state, which was to come for them a comfortable residential 
palace; for the proletariat a hated militarily-secured 
fortress. All attempts to obtain for those cheated of the 
fruits of the revolution a voice within the new order 
were bloodily repulsed: Marat, the Herbertists, Danton 
and finally Ropespierre  the head of the Republic of 
Virtue having become inconvenient  fell by the wayside. 
'The thieves have won!' cried Ropespierre on being arrested  
in fact, the bourgeoisie, greedy for booty, came into power. 
The petty bourgeoisie were burdened with taxation beyond 
their means, the proletariat was refused the right of 
coalition. Freedom and equality of franchise disappeared 
under the brutal fraud of the Two-Chamber system. Baboeuf's 
desperate attempt to rescue the betrayed communism, even 
at the eleventh hour, ended on the scaffold. Instead 
Napoleon sprang from the bourgeoisie as the hero who 
was to bring them the garland of glory and material 
success from the heavens. They were going to produce, 
sell, earn, conquer the world market, rake in wealth. 
Capitalism was to triumph. Thus the Emperor Bonaparte 
became the latest and essential executor of the will 
to power, economically based and politically established,
of the bourgeoisie.

The line of the bourgeois revolutions, which reached 
its high point in France, took a sudden downward turn 
in the German Revolution of 1848.

The capitalist development begun in the Middle Ages, 
which had received impetus and nourishment from the 
Eastern and Levantine trade of the North Italian towns 
and had radiated its ideological reflections in the 
Reformation, had slowly died away with the shifting 
of the trade routes and finally expired completely. 
Feudalism had struck roots again; with the Peasants' 
War and the Thirty Years' War the people had been so 
thoroughly bled that they bore the yoke of blackest 
reaction for years with dumb submission. Around 1800 
the dominant form of manufacturing was still petty 
handicrafts. Where capitalism had gone over to 
production, it prolonged a miserable existence in 
domestic industry or in state manufactures under 
the police baton of mercantile regimentation. Not
until Napoleon opened the eastern markets by force 
of arms to the acquisitiveness of his capitalist 
bosses, but especially when he decreed the continental 
blockade, did a current of fresh air enter the dull 
and narrow Prussian-German servants' hall. Soon 
machines were clattering, factories grew up, and 
in Rhineland, Saxony and Thuringia a great industry 
developed. The bourgeoisie began to awaken as a 
class and to announce its political demands. But 
seemingly everywhere crown and nobility as representatives 
of the feudal system stood obstructing its path. The 
call for a constitution which would suit the claims 
of the bourgeois class was answered by the Hohenzollerns 
with persecution, treachery and provocative scorn. 
Finally, the February Revolution in Paris in 1848 
produced as a weak echo the German Revolution. The 
circumstance that the definitive impulse for a 
rising against obsolete conditions and privileges 
came from outside and found a bourgeoisie which, 
timid and politically innocent, had not acquired 
the determination of a revolutionary class, had as 
a consequence that the movement was not adequate to 
smashing the existing bases of the state and creating 
a unified state with republican forms in accordance 
with the interests of the ascending capitalist economy. 
The German bourgeoisie, achieving meagre success, 
showed itself content with half freedoms, lame concessions 
and rotten compromises. It abandoned the leadership 
of the revolution to a clique of confused and rival 
ideologists, while the pillars of the industrial development, 
frightened by the class goals vigorously placed on the 
agenda by the French proletariat, quickly fled back into 
the wide-open arms of the princely reaction. Indeed, then 
the June battle in Paris had shot down the fighting 
proletariat and the reaction breathed freely again, to 
raise its head more boldly than ever, in Germany even 
these meagre gains were again lost by the bourgeoisie. 
Political ambitions were renounced, people contented 
themselves with the business of profit-making and went 
on living in the old servility.

In the end it was Bismarck who helped the bourgeoisie 
towards its historic role by means of Prussian domestic 
power politics. On the way to a German unified state 
under Prussian hegemony, which offered the rapidly 
growing capitalism a large market and opened up new 
possibilities of development, he knocked Austria out 
of the running as a political competitor in 1866; in 
1870-71, France as an economic one. With the right to 
vote in the Reichstag, he granted the bourgeoisie a 
political voice. At the head of the state he set a 
half-absolute empire, a symbol for the compromise 
arrived at between feudal power and bourgeoisie, 
crown and moneybag.

When Germany collapsed after four years of world war, 
the bourgeoisie, massively strengthened in the meantime, 
in desperation found the strength to make an abrupt end 
of the compromise which had become a danger to its 
dominance and existence. In the choice between throne 
and bank-vaults, it shortly decided with revolution 
for the latter; threw the Kaisers and Kings overboard, 
set up the republic, gave itself a new constitution 
and completed  with the active assistance of the 
working class organised in parties and trade unions  
the bourgeois revolution of 1848.

As the last in the line of the great bourgeois 
revolutions of Europe, the Russian Revolution followed.

Russian feudalism, an economic colossus of bearlike primitiveness 
and strength of resistance to which the tyranny of tsarism lent 
the political form, had experienced through the war with Japan 
a shock that immediately set free energies in which the need 
for political liberties and innovations of the classes 
committed to the capitalist economic mode found its expression. 
The desire of the bourgeoisie for a constitution was however 
at once extended and strengthened through the demand of the 
industrial proletariat for minimum wages, 8-hour day, 
protection of labour; until now never recorded in the 
bourgeois revolutions: the Russian Revolution had from 
the beginning a strong proletarian-socialist strand. 
Certainly in earlier uprisings greater and smaller 
sections of the working class had also joined in the 
struggle and shed blood: but they had always been 
only appendages and following-troops of the bourgeois 
class. Even in the German revolution of 1848 the March
fighters in Berlin had fallen as plain, mostly unknown 
workers, not as conscious proletarians and class 
combatants. In Russia on the other hand the proletarians 
among the social-democrats, cut off for the first 
time from the political part played by the bourgeoisie, 
came on to the stage of history with their own revolutionary 
demands and aims. Certainly the first phase, starting 
from the march of the petitioning masses to the Winter 
Palace under the leadership of the priest Gapon, until 
the decreeing of the October Manifesto, still took the 
typical course of all bourgeois revolutions, which are 
concerned with liberal goals. But already in the next 
phase the bourgeois-liberal voices  thin and timorous 
enough given the Russian reaction's hardness of hearing  
got lost in the roaring gale of the mass demands of 
proletarian deprived of rights, and bloodily tortured, 
impoverished and neglected peasants. Even if the 
strongly rooted counter-revolution might succeed 
in snatching away again from the bourgeois element 
the first parliamentary and legal concessions, and 
stifling the revolutionary outcry of the masses 
with bloody executions and behind prison walls, 
it still gained by that only a respite, but no 
rescue. Indeed, on the contrary, the forcibly 
dammed-up strength of the revolution erupted, 
after three years of world war loosened the chains, 
in an explosion of such power that the whole 
system of tsarism was scattered like dust and 
left no more trace behind. The thin voice of 
the Russian bourgeoisie was certainly aptly 
accompanied by a weak energy: it was not capable 
of fulfilling its historical task. Then the 
proletariat put its shoulder to the wheel and 
seized government power for itself. It concluded 
peace, proclaimed the dictatorship of the 
proletariat and set about causing the dancing 
star of socialism to rise out of the chaos of 
the sinking world of tsarism.

If in 1917 the imperialism of the Russian bourgeoisie 
had conquered, taken Constantinople and achieved all 
its war-aims, a bourgeois liberal epoch on the English, 
French and German model would have been instituted 
in Russia. But as it was, the world war had cut the 
ground from under the feet not only of the old 
feudal despotism but also of every capitalist 
bourgeois government that was at all on the cards. 
For foreign capital was chased out: domestic 
capital, anyway only moderately developed, was 
destroyed. The fiasco of Miliukov, Gutschkov, 
Kerensky was therefore inevitable. In the end 
there remained. to last out through everything 
to the conclusion of the war, only the proletariat 
as bearer of the state power and executor of the 
people's will.

But the proletariat stood under the political 
leadership of intellectuals who had been schooled 
in the spirit of west-European social democracy. 
They were socialists and wanted socialism. Now the 
seizure of state power in Russia seemed to them 
to offer the chance for the realisation of the 
socialist idea.

The surrounding world was faced with a sensation: 
the Russian Revolution, recently still an overdue, 
feeble bourgeois revolution, turned in an instant 
into a proletarian revolution. Beginning and end 
of the bourgeois revolution came together in one.

Was that reality or illusion?

2 THE RUSSIAN PROBLEM

It is the historical task of the bourgeois revolution to overcome 
the absolutism of the feudal era and to procure for capitalism, 
as the new economic system, legal recognition and social acceptance 
in the framework of the bourgeois-liberal state order.

In all countries with a formerly feudal economy and absolutist 
form of government the bourgeois revolution has fulfilled this 
task.

It never had the aim and function of infringing or even suspending 
the principle of the economic basis and the social order dependent 
on it, that is private property in the means of production. It 
only changed, for the time being, the class which exercised 
authority over the whole as the representative of this 
principle.

While in the feudal epoch the nobility forms this class, supported 
fundamentally by private property, holding dominion in the 
despotically administered patriarchal state, organised by 
estates with the monarch at its head, in the capitalist era 
the bourgeoisie  as private possessor of goods and money 
takes over the government, which is established in the 
constitutional state with Parliament and Cabinet, at its 
most ideal in the form of the parliamentary republic.

The bourgeois revolution, everywhere it has manifested 
itself, brought the bourgeois class to the fore. This 
class was more or less conscious of its historical mission. 
It had also prepared the revolutionary movement, at least 
economically, often ideologically to. Under the pressure 
of unavoidable necessities resulting from the conflict of 
the old and new tendencies, it had finally become the 
leader of the revolutionary action and had won political 
power, in order to use it immediately after the victory 
for the erection of the bourgeois state and social order.

The success alone of the revolution, which consists in the 
creation of the capitalist economic order and the social 
order appropriate to it, determines it nature as a bourgeois 
revolution. The circumstances that proletarian strata also 
form a part, now smaller, now greater, of the revolutionary 
fighters, does not come into consideration in determining 
the historical nature of the revolution. Even when the 
proletariat is already formed as a class and marches in 
the revolution with its own political class aims perhaps 
indeed influences its development considerably or even 
controls nothing of the historical nature of the revolution 
is changed. The weak or strong proletarian admixture in a 
bourgeois revolution can slow down or accelerate, sometimes 
deflect or disturb, its completion; can temporarily 
obliterate or deform its face; can affect or sometimes 
endanger its success, but to the essence of the 
revolution, its socio-economic content, it can make 
no difference. Likewise in the bourgeois state and 
in the army the workers form the strongest contingent, 
they make up a large class grouping  and yet no one 
will be tempted on this account to call the bourgeois 
state proletarian or to speak of a proletarian army. 
Even the Red Army of Soviet Russia, consisting solely 
of peasants and workers, is a military machine 
constructed on a bourgeois model and functioning 
according to the laws of bourgeois state policy, 
which only political demagogy, with the intention 
to deceive, can describe as a 'proletarian' army.

Where and whenever proletarian strata play a role in 
the bourgeois revolution, they always appear in the 
train of the bourgeois class, partly as paid mercenaries, 
partly as fellow-travellers, partly as political 
auxiliaries of uncertain tendency. They often form 
the rump, mostly the tail of the movement, never the 
head. The last is always with the merchants, bankers,
professional politicians, lawyers, intellectuals, literati. 
Here the demands are formulated, the programme developed, 
the goals fixed, the statements given out. Here bourgeois 
policy is made. The historical face of the revolution 
receives its imprint from here outwards.

In the first bourgeois revolutions the proletariat could 
not yet figure at all as a class because up till then it 
was not developed as such. At first in England it began to 
mark itself off as a class from the main body of the 
bourgeoisie, combined in strong organisations. But it 
was still always closely intermingled with petty-bourgeois 
elements and its programmes never went beyond the radicalism 
of these sections. Thus the Levellers marched beside the 
left Puritan sects at the very front of the revolutionary 
forces, yet their whole attitude to the revolutionary 
problem stayed bound up with the ideology of their time, 
which was at best bourgeois. The pivot of all bourgeois 
orientation is: that private property remains protected. 
To the extent that radical groups and sects transgressed 
this, it arose out of a wrongly understood primitive 
Christianity, whose postulates, too literally interpreted, 
would have been condemned to be shattered with the very 
first attempts at realisation, because all the conditions 
of the socio-economic milieu were against them. Likewise 
in the French Revolution the proletariat was not present 
as a class: the extent of the development of the bourgeois 
class did not give rise to it at all. Not even sixty years 
later, in the French as in the German revolution, did a 
proletarian segment come to light. Only half a generation 
later did Lasalle's agitation work begin, with the aim of 
preparing, through the awakening of class feeling among 
the proletariat the general education towards class 
consciousness.

>From the beginning, the Russian Revolution  in accordance 
with its historical conditions could only be a bourgeois 
revolution. It had to get rid of tsarism, to smooth the 
way for capitalism, and to help the bourgeoisie in to the 
saddle politically.

Through an unusual chain of circumstances the bourgeoisie 
found itself in no position to play its historical role. 
The proletariat, leaping on to the stage in its place, did 
make itself in a moment master of the situation by an 
unprecedented exertion of energy, daring, tactical readiness 
and intelligence, but fell in the following period into a 
fatal predicament.

According to the phaseological pattern of development as 
formulated and advocated by Marx, after feudal tsarism in 
Russia there had to come the capitalist bourgeois state, 
whose creator and representative is the bourgeois class.

But government power from 1917 was occupied not by bourgeois, 
but by proletarians who repudiated the bourgeois state and 
were ready to institute a new economic and social order 
following socialist theory.

Between feudalism and socialism yawned a gap of a full 
hundred years, through which the system of the bourgeois 
epoch fell unborn and unused.

The Bolsheviks undertook no more and no less than to jump 
a whole phase of development in Russia in one bold leap.

Even if one admits that in doing so they reckoned on the 
world revolution which was to come to their aid and 
compensate for the vacuum in development within by 
support from the great fund of culture from outside, 
this calculation was still rashness because it based 
itself solely on a vague hope. Rash too was the experiment 
arising from this calculation.

The first act of the Bolshevik regime was the Peace of Brest-Litovsk. 
But this treaty, concluded with an advanced capitalist bourgeois 
government, was an act of bourgeois politics. A really proletarian 
revolution would have maintained a hostile attitude, would have 
tied up the German fighting strength further, to thwart German 
imperialism of victory in the west, and on its part would have 
mobilised all forces for the furthering of the world 
revolution. Rosa Luxemburg gave the sharpest expression to 
this view in her time.

In connection with the treaty, the Bolsheviks declared 
themselves for the right to self-determination of nations 
on the basis of which ensued the severing of Finland, 
Poland, the Baltic, the Ukraine and the Caucasus from 
Russia. This statement was the outcome of bourgeois 
political orientation. The result was on the one hand 
the Russian national state  which is not a proletarian 
goal  and on the other the collapse of the proletarian 
revolution in the detached states. A proletarian revolution
would have had to establish solidarity over all frontier 
posts and beyond national turnpikes.

The Bolsheviks, however, began the greatest fall from grace 
with the distribution of the big estates to the peasants.
Through this the peasants obtained private property. But 
socialism should begin not with the introduction but with 
the elimination of private property. And so the measure was 
a slap in the face of the socialist idea. As obvious as this 
act would have been for the government of a bourgeois state 
power (more or less as at the time of the French Revolution), 
it is similarly inadmissible  in fact, grotesque  as an 
expression of proletarian policy. For, with the peasantry 
having attained private property, about 85% of the population 
was thereby recruited to enmity against socialism.

The consequence of this policy is manifest in the irreconcilable 
opposition between country and town, peasantry and industrial 
proletariat. It led to the boycott of the towns, to the refusing of 
food, to the sabotage of the state supply organisations: it compels 
tactics of concessions to the capitalist-orientated peasantry  
a policy directed towards peasant interests and a capitulation 
to profit.

In fact the Bolshevik regime had to go this way. While it still
based itself in 1918 on the landless, and the poor peasants with 
the industrial workers made up its surest following, it now sides 
with the property owning peasants, creates tenant farmers and big 
proprietors, sets the grain trade free, permits and encourages in 
this way the rise of a peasantry with capitalist interests, whose 
political business it takes care of.

Parallel to this, in the same bourgeois tracks, ran the economic 
policy vis-a-vis industry. The Bolsheviks carried out the 
nationalisation of industry, of transport, banks, factories, etc., 
and thus awoke quite generally the belief that socialist measures 
were involved here. Nevertheless, nationalisation is not 
socialisation. Through nationalisation you can arrive at a 
large-scale, tightly centrally-run state capitalism, which 
may exhibit various advantages as against private capitalism. 
Only it is still capitalism. And however you twist and turn 
it gives no way of escape from the constraint of bourgeois 
politics. So also in Russia, then, they came to the make great 
concession to foreign capitalists, to whom mineral wealth and 
labour power have been handed over for exploitation  
profit-sharing with the state. The stock exchange is open 
again. A host of dealers, entrepreneurs, agents, brokers, 
bankers, profiteers, speculators and jobbers has turned up 
again and settled in. By the decree of 27 May 1921 the right 
of possession over factories and workshops, industrial and 
trading establishments, instruments and means of production, 
agricultural and industrial produce, financial stock; the 
right to inventions, copyright, trade marks; the right to 
take up mortgages or lend money, like the testamentary or 
legal right of succession, was expressly acknowledged again. 
With this the bourgeois order is established in its entirety 
and in all essential components.

To this also belongs, besides the bourgeois jurisdiction whose 
organisational structure is being constructed, the Red Army: a 
thoroughly bourgeois army functioning in accordance with 
bourgeois-capitalist interests. In the context of policies 
dictated in the first instance by the protection of the agrarian 
profits, it represents the sharpest weapon of basic defence first 
against the Cossacks, Denikin, Wrangel and so on, but sooner or 
later also against the demands of the proletarian socialist 
revolution.

Not last is a striking expression of bourgeois politics, the 
dictatorship of the Communist Party leaders set up in Russia, 
which is falsely described as the dictatorship of the leadership. 
Behind this pseudo-revolutionary protective screen hides, as 
everyone knows, the omnipotence of a small handful of people 
who are the commanders of the authoritarian, centrally organised 
commissariat-bureaucracy. As inverted tsarism this party 
dictatorship is a completely bourgeois concern.

These few contentions show and prove that the Russian regime, 
contrary to its doubtless honest intention to pursue proletarian 
socialist policy, has been pushed step by step by the power of 
facts into bourgeois capitalist policy.

Even where they succeeded for a while in developing the shoots of
a social revolution and creating the beginnings of an economic 
and social order of a socialist nature, the pains they took ended 
finally with a failure, so that they were forced to demolish the 
attempts and experiments.

And as the best and most honourable of the fighters for a social 
revolution opposed this, the Bolshevik authorities did not shrink 
for a minute from throwing them by hundreds and thousands into 
prisons quite in the bourgeois-capitalist-tsarist manner sending 
them to Siberia, or condemning them to death. A Trotsky played 
the executioner of the Kronstadt sailors with the same 
coldbloodedness as a Gallifet having French revolutionaries, 
or a Noske German revolutionaries slaughtered.

It was an historical error to believe that the Russian Revolution 
was the start of a social revolution. And it amounts to a demagogic 
fraud to awaken and maintain this belief in the heads of workers.

When the socialists in the Russian government, after the victory 
over tsarism, imagined that a phase of historical development 
could be skipped and socialism structurally realised, they had 
forgotten the ABC of Marxist knowledge according to which 
socialism can only be the outcome of an organic development 
which has capitalism developed to the limits of its maturity 
as its indispensable presupposition. They had to pay for this 
forgetfulness by a wide, troublesome and victim-strewn detour 
which brings them in a space of time to capitalism.

To institute capitalism and to organise the bourgeois state is 
the historical function of the bourgeois revolution. The Russian 
Revolution was and is a bourgeois revolution, no more and no 
less: the strong socialist admixture changes nothing in this 
essence. So it will fulfil its task by throwing away, sooner 
or later, the last remnants of its 'War-Communism' and 
revealing the face of a real, genuine capitalism. The struggles 
within the Bolshevik party are preparing this conclusion, and
with it the end of the Bolshevik party dictatorship. The line 
of development whether that of a party coalition which hastens 
and alleviates the launching phase of capitalism, or that of 
a Bonaparte who protracts and aggravates it  is not yet clear; 
both are possible.

The parallelogram of forces will find its correct diagonals.


3 THE BOURGEOIS-CAPITALIST STATE

The bourgeois economic order rests on the possession of 
capital, the production of commodities, the exploitation 
of wage-workers and the gaining of profit.

The bourgeois state is the organisation of public and legal 
authority into a mechanism of domination, which ensures the 
functioning and the success of the bourgeois economic order.

All forces and means, in materials as in ideas, that the 
state has at its disposal stand directly or indirectly at 
the service of capital. The authority to order the state 
power lies in the hands of the bourgeois class. It receives 
the directives for the use of the state authority from 
economic necessities. In the interest of the highest 
expediency in its use, the organisation of the state 
has followed in accordance with these economic 
necessities.

In the capitalist economy the capitalist is master of the 
process of production. He buys the raw materials, owns the 
means of production, decides the managing of production, 
sells the commodities, reaps the profit. He builds the 
factories, seeks out the markets, takes care of the 
customers, regulates the circulation of money, pays 
out the wage. He is commander, representative, supreme 
court. He has money. He is authority.

As in the economy, so in the state. The capitalist demands 
liberties which the feudal state refuses him: freedom of 
trade, freedom of occupation, freedom of competition. He 
needs freedom of movement, liberation from feudal charges 
and guild barriers, the right to self-determination, the 
right of personality. He demands the guaranteeing of his 
title of ownership, the legal protection of the exploitation
 process, the legitimising of profit, the social sanctioning 
of his authority.

In the state-scientific theory of liberalism are set down 
all the points and principles according to which the 
capitalist bourgeois wants to see his state, the 
bourgeois-capitalist state, organised. All the liberal 
demands and goals, aimed at obtaining and securing for 
capitalism the fullest freedom for its development, are 
here woven into a system. The philosophical anchorage of 
this system is given in individualism as it has been 
founded, formulated and completed in England by Locke, 
Shaftesbury, Hume; in France by Bayle, Voltaire, 
Helvetius, Rousseau and the Encyclopaedists; in 
Germany by Leibnitz, Lessing, Fichte. Begun as 
'Enlightenment', this philosophical school came to 
dominate the political and social provinces first 
in England, where after the Revolution the track 
had been cleared for the unfettered development of 
bourgeois-materialist interests, and finally found 
its formulation and strongest emphasis in the 
principle of Manchester liberalism, 'Laissez faire, 
laissez aller'. The whole atmosphere of the great 
French Revolution is dominated by the spirit of 
bourgeois individualism, where its manifestation 
resulted in the boldest gestures and most vigorous 
exaltations as an answer to the heavy pressure of 
the old state and ecclesiastical situation. In 
Germany, whose bourgeois class distinguished itself 
from the beginning by lack of imagination and 
calculating cowardice, the philosophical thought-content 
of individualism faded very quickly to an empty egoism, 
which enjoyed a predominantly materialist life. The 
bourgeois class also produced no statesmen from its 
ranks who would have taken care of its business: it 
entrusted its interests to the Junker Bismarck who  
according to his own words saw it as his task to 
cultivate millionaires. These millionaires symbolise 
bourgeois-capitalist authority.

Thus the bourgeois class, as soon as it has first won 
power over feudalism, arrives at a state order according 
to its needs, in its interests, for its use. Its wishes 
are decisive, its attitude determines. For it is authority. 
Its state is an authoritarian state.

In the capitalist economy all commodities develop the 
tendency to follow the market in order to be exchanged 
there. This market can be a shop, a department store, 
an annual market, a fair or the world market. The market 
is the point to which the centripetal force of all 
commodities tends. It is, however, also the point from 
which the centrifugal force of all commodities pushes 
apart again as soon as they are exchanged, i.e. fulfilled 
their capitalist purpose. If the commodity is money, the 
market is stock exchange or bank. Always the market 
stands at the middle point of a process working in two 
directions. The market is the centre.

To the law of motion of the capitalist economy corresponds 
that of the bourgeois state. All the forces of the government 
collect at one point, there receive their orders and then 
act back centrifugally. The bureaucracy escalates up to its 
highest peak, the minister; the army organisation up to the 
generalissimo; there the decision is taken, the command 
given, the decree proclaimed; and with the precision of 
a mechanical apparatus, the organisation functions 
according to the will of one head, the centre, down to 
its last errand boy and lowest organ. Only the central 
office is autonomous: it is the brain and thinks for 
the whole. Its decision is definitive, it is to be obeyed 
unconditionally. Strict order and discipline prevail.

In the feudal era, when every socage-farm with its 
copyholders formed a small economic unit, more or 
less self-contained and self-supporting, the individual's 
power to give orders did not have much scope. One was 
situated beside the other and each was to the same extent 
his own master. The system of organisation in which every 
part of the whole enjoys its full autonomy is called 
federalism. The feudal state, then, had been a federal 
state.

The bourgeoisie had gained from the conditions of its 
capitalist economy the insight that centralism was in 
many respects superior to federalism. Especially insofar 
as it united all the dispersed and isolated forces into 
a whole. They came out in favour of a centralised will 
and therewith won the ability to do great things. When 
the capitalist brought the hand-workers together in the 
factory, went over from domestic industry to co-operation, 
finally evolved this into manufacture, he went through 
practical schools of centralism. All the experiences and
knowledge thus gained the bourgeois class now utilised 
in establishing its state structure. It needed a large 
centralised mechanism that obeyed every finger-touch at 
the highest point. A mechanism with which it, the small 
minority, could be the brain, issuing commands, 
accomplishing its will. And with which the large mass, 
the proletariat, was subjected to its dominance through 
strict order and discipline. This mechanism was provided 
by the centralist system of organisation. It made 
possible in the best and surest way the domination of 
few over many. So the bourgeoisie created its state 
for itself as a centralised state.

In the capitalist economy the production of commodities soon 
becomes mass production. But the absorption capacity of the 
existing market is quickly sated. New, bigger selling 
outlets become necessary. Capitalism develops a drive to 
expand, which threatens to burst the boundaries of the 
state. Thus every young capitalist state seeks, through 
wars, conquest, colonial acquisitions, etc., to become a 
bigger state. This requires a certain mental and spiritual 
preparation and influencing of the citizens a certain 
ideology which interprets the pressure towards expansion 
and extension in the interest of profit as the expression 
of imaginary forces and needs, and lyingly converts warlike 
conquests into achievements for the common good. This 
ideology invents the concept nation, exploits sentiments 
about home and fatherland and misuses them for class-interested 
purposes of enrichment. It deals in national interests, 
national honour, national duties and national responsibility, 
until it gets involved in the national war, which is 
falsified into a war of national defence. To wage the 
war a national army has been provided, the schools have 
been made into abodes of national incitement; in national 
politics a special national phraseology has been cultivated 
which furnishes every war, however notoriously for plunder 
and conquest, with the requisite intellectual and moral 
justification. When the SPD defended the world war from 
1914 to 1918 as a national war, when the KPD, during the 
collapse of the Ruhr, joined in supporting the national 
defence of the Ruhr zone alongside Schlageter, then both 
parties proved their character as national auxiliary 
organs of the bourgeois state, which is always a national 
state.

The capitalist economy, once it has entered the arena 
of large-scale enterprises and beyond that, the formation 
of stock companies, has created for itself a complicated 
apparatus of management, very appropriate for its 
requirements. In it all forces are well weighed up 
against each other, all functions cleverly distributed, 
all individual actions bound into an exact collective 
action. The technology of the machine is its model.

In broad outline, the management structure of a large 
modern factory looks like this: nominal owners and with 
them actual interested parties, and so the real beneficiaries 
of the capitalist large-scale concern are the shareholders. 
These come together in the shareholders' meeting which 
passes important resolutions, exercises control, calls 
in reports, relieves and appoints officials, and concedes
wages. From the shareholders' meeting issues the board of 
directors, which supervises the management, comes to final 
decisions, constitutes the supreme court in all the vital 
questions of the works, but is still responsible vis-a-vis 
the shareholders' meeting.

An image of this large-scale industry's machinery is the 
bourgeois state. There the bearers of a mandate from the 
electorate sit in the parliament, a large meeting of the 
shareholders entitled to vote who, discussing and resolving, 
equipped with important powers, decide about the weal and woe 
of the state as a whole. From its midst issues the board of 
directors, the Cabinet, which has the task of looking after, 
with special care and heightened vigilance, the interests 
served by the functioning of the state machinery. The Cabinet 
members (ministers) represent the state at its highest point; 
they supervise the work of the management bureaucracy placed 
under them, make the big contacts within the competing firms 
abroad, i.e. the capitalist foreign states, but always they 
stay dependent on Parliament and responsible to it; by it 
they are appointed and recalled.

As in the assembly of shareholders, so too in Parliament 
questions and proposals often manage to be carried through 
and dismissed which already are foregone conclusions and 
are only put to the vote for form's sake. They have already 
been put forward and decided on in another place, whose 
importance more or less strongly controls the vote of the 
shareholders' meeting or the parliament. This other place 
is identical with the offices of the great banks or of the 
captains of industry. Here, where the most significant 
decisions of the capitalist economy come down, the decisive 
resolutions of bourgeois politics are passed. And indeed 
by the same people in the same case. For politics is nothing 
other than struggle for the legal protection of economic 
interests  is the defence of profit with the weapons of 
paragraphs in law, the securing of the capitalist system 
of exploitation with the means of state authority.

With tirelessness and zeal the bourgeoisie has worked at 
the construction of its state form and at the development 
of its legislature. For this it found its most reliable 
tool in Parliament, which in turn found its auxiliary organs 
in the parties. Today, having reached the highest peak of 
capitalist development, big capital feels the power of 
Parliament and parties as burdensome. It avoids it by 
Enabling Acts, military dictatorships, and shifting 
important authority and decisions to other bodies in 
which the representatives of capital and economic concerns
have the upper hand (state economic council). Open 
antagonism towards Parliament and parliamentarism is 
no longer at all concealed in big-capitalist circles; 
in fact attacks directed against parliament and 
parliamentary government are debated quite openly 
without inhibition. The slave, Parliament, has done 
his duty. When the idea of a Directory was being 
discussed in the bonapartist tendency, Herr Minoux 
was selected as the supreme holder of power. Herr 
Minoux the General Director of Stinnes.


