Revolution et democratie chez Marx et Engels

Jacques Texier, Revolution et democratie chez Marx et Engels. Presses Universitaires de France, 1998

Reformist socialism? Who is there, who could there be, who would hold to such a doctrine today? As a positive scheme for a society of free and democratic cooperation, rather than as a negative hesitation at greater radicalism?
The entrenched Establishment of New Labour, the supposedly reformist party in Britain, will not even submit peacefully and constitutionally to a vote of their own conference to raise pensions a little, or to hold off on privatisation. They will not agree quietly even to have a debate in Parliament before taking Britain to war in Afghanistan, let alone a vote. They will allow no leeway to councils run by their own party on what they submit to their local voters and then carry out.
After all that, who can believe that the big Establishment behind that small Establishment – the big-business class which the Blair faction serves – would ever wait quietly while socialists won a majority in Parliament and then carried out our measures one by one, shaking hands with us as we expropriate them and congratulating us on a good clean fight?
Few active socialists do believe that. Many, however, hesitate at the stark alternative of committing themselves to revolutionary socialism. The great merit of Texier’s book is that he spells out as theory the half-thought ideas which must often underpin such hesitation.
Texier is an expert on Gramsci and a not-exceptionally-left-wing member of the French Communist Party. He defines his hesitation thus: “The 20th century saw a whole series of glorious revolutions… 1917… Chinese, Vietnamese, Cuban… Algerian… They all failed to install a socialist system capable of functioning normally. Our revolutionary enthusiasm, without having disappeared, is accompanied by doubts about the capacity of revolutionary violence alone to give birth to a social system superior to capitalism”.
He pursues the question, not by analysing those 20th century revolutions, but by studying the ideas of Marx and Engels on revolution and democracy, and their interpretation by Lenin and Trotsky. His account is lucid and unpretentious, as good as summary of the ideas of Marx and Engels on the question as you will find anywhere.
His conclusion is that, despite the good and generous impulses behind it, the idea of permanent revolution – sketched by Marx and Engels, developed by Trotsky, then tacitly adopted by Lenin – is a snare.
Texier does not counterpose revolution to democracy in general. He recognises plainly that, contrary to liberal myth, historically it has taken revolutionary action to win democracy. But, he notes: “Effectively, it is hardly a question of democratic procedures during revolutionary confrontations”. So the question arises: “We can always wonder, ‘How long does a permanent revolution last?’ And the Stalinist despot has his reply ready: ‘As long as it takes, that is, a long time, or for ever’.”
Permanent revolution, argues Texier, was a tactic advocated by Marx and Engels for a particular time and place – continental Europe between 1848 and 1871. For Britain and the USA they saw a different perspective, peaceful revolution through a working-class parliamentary majority. Moreover, in his later years, Engels saw his and Marx’s “point of view of that time [1848-50] to have been an illusion”. He emphasised peaceful methods of struggle, and defined a democratic republic as “the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat”.
Texier knows that Engels never renounced the right of revolution, and emphasised, even when writing about the possibility of a peaceful working-class victory in Britain, that he “hardly expected the English ruling classes to submit, without a ‘pro-slavery rebellion’ [i.e. without violent clashes], to this peaceful and legal revolution”. Nevertheless, he believes that, in part because of defects in Lenin’s presentation in State and Revolution, the legacy of Marx and Engels has been transmitted in a one-sided way.
Where many “orthodox” neo-Trotskyists have argued that the Maoist revolution in China, for example, was a form of permanent revolution, because the Maoists started with a broad democratic alliance against the Japanese invaders and then pushed on to undivided “communist” power, Texier implicitly agrees. Only where the neo-Trotskyists saw credit for Mao, Texier sees discredit for permanent revolution.
In fact the Maoist road to power was not permanent revolution in any Marxist sense. Whatever the formal similarities, it was different in substance because the agency was a hierarchical military machine, ready to transform itself into the core of a state-centred exploitative ruling class against the workers, not the working class. The answer to the ensuing Stalinist despotism is a new revolution — only a working-class one.
But is it any wonder that activists hesitate to declare themselves “revolutionary” in general? Successful revolutions in the 20th century were generally operations by which a military force, building itself up by guerrilla war and by broad-bush democratic agitation, eventually went on the attack against a decrepit old power and replaced it by its own rule. Some were more benign (Nicaragua, for example), some were horrific (Cambodia), but Texier is right: none produced anything like a functioning socialist democracy.
The Russian revolution of October 1917 was something qualitatively different, a successful workers’ revolution, but the constraints of its isolation in poverty and its civil war against counter-revolution of 1918-21 make it look not so very different when viewed “backwards”, through the lenses of the ensuing Stalinist degeneration. (Texier knows that Stalinism was qualitatively different from Lenin’s regime. He believes, however, that Lenin’s revolutionary daring in 1917, and the ensuing emergency regime, laid the basis for Stalinism).
“Revolutionary” is no less ambiguous a word than “communist” or “socialist”, after the experience of Stalinism. Working-class democratic revolutionaries? Yes, that’s us! “Revolutionaries” in general? Tell us what sort of revolution you mean.
The problem is compounded by traits of the anti-Stalinist left. Too often, instead of denouncing revolutionary Stalinists for the sort of revolution they went for, we would denounce them for being too slow about that revolution, wanting to do it in “stages” for example.
From a working-class point of view, a revolutionary perspective means aiming to change society drastically and thoroughly – replacing the rule of the capitalist class by that of the working class, which is something that cannot be done quietly and bit-by-bit any more than a person can turn a somersault in gradual stages. That revolutionary perspective is not counterposed to reform. Only by struggles for reform can the working class gain the organisation, confidence and awareness necessary for revolution. It is counterposed only to reformism, meaning a doctrine which sees no further than piecemeal changes within the framework of status quo, and imagines that the working-class can be liberated just by the accumulation of those pieces.
This argument is quite distinct from the one about violence. Reformism can be violent, too! Can hard-fought strikes for better wages be won without pickets willing to use force if necessary? Can oppressed minorities resist fascist and racist violence without militant defence squads? You can answer no – that is, you can recognise that working-class and democratic fighters must sometimes use violence – while still being a reformist.
It is also distinct from the one about fetishising democratic forms above the substance of mass popular self-assertion. No militant trade unionist needs to be a revolutionary in order to recognise that successful strike leadership may sometimes clash with prissy punctilio about democratic procedures.