“Left Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder; A Popular Essay in Marxist Strategy and Tactics
By V. I. Lenin
()
About this ebook
The book was written in 1920 and published in Russian, German, English and French later in the year. A copy was then distributed to each delegate at the 2nd World Congress of the Comintern, several of whom were mentioned by Lenin in the work.
The present volume is a New Translation that was first published in the U.S. in 1940 and the UK in 1942. As with the earlier editions, the book is divided into ten chapters and contains an appendix, including a letter from David Wijnkoop on behalf of the Communist Party of Holland.
V. I. Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (22 April 1870 - 21 January 1924) , better known by the alias Lenin, was a Russian communist revolutionary, politician and political theorist. He served as head of government of the Russian Republic from 1917-1918, of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic from 1918-1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922-1924. Under his administration, Russia and then the wider Soviet Union became a one-party communist state governed by the Russian Communist Party. Ideologically a Marxist, he developed political theories known as Leninism. Born to a wealthy middle-class family in Simbirsk, Lenin embraced revolutionary socialist politics following his brother's execution in 1887. Expelled from Kazan Imperial University for participating in protests against the Russian Empire's Tsarist government, he began studies for a law degree. He moved to St. Petersburg in 1893 and became a senior figure in the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). In 1897, he was arrested, exiled to Shushenskoye for three years, and moved to Western Europe, becoming a prominent party theorist through his publications. In 1903, he led the Bolshevik faction against the Mensheviks and later campaigned for WWI to be transformed into a Europe-wide proletarian revolution, believing this would overthrow capitalism and replace it with socialism. After the 1917 February Revolution ousted the Tsar and established a Provisional Government, Lenin returned to Russia to play a leading role in the October Revolution, in which the Bolsheviks overthrew the new regime. Lenin's Bolshevik government withdrew from WWI by signing a treaty with the Central Powers and promoted world revolution through the Communist International. His administration defeated right and left-wing anti-Bolshevik armies in the Russian Civil War from 1917-1922 and oversaw the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1921. Lenin died in Gorki in 1924 at the age of 53.
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“Left Wing” Communism - V. I. Lenin
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Text originally published in 1940 under the same title.
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Publisher’s Note
Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.
We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.
LEFT-WING
COMMUNISM
AN INFANTILE DISORDER
A POPULAR ESSAY
IN MARXIAN STRATEGY AND TACTICS
By
V. I. Lenin
NEW TRANSLATION
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS 4
DEDICATION 5
LEFT-WING
COMMUNISM, AN INFANTILE DISORDER 6
I. IN WHAT SENSE CAN WE SPEAK OF THE INTERNATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION? 6
II. ONE OF THE FUNDAMENTAL CONDITIONS FOR THE SUCCESS OF THE BOLSHEVIKS 7
III. THE PRINCIPAL STAGES IN THE HISTORY OF BOLSHEVISM 9
IV. IN THE STRUGGLE AGAINST WHAT ENEMIES WITHIN THE WORKING CLASS MOVEMENT DID BOLSHEVISM GROW, GAIN STRENGTH AND BECOME STEELED? 13
V. LEFT-WING
COMMUNISM IN GERMANY: LEADERS—PARTY—CLASS-MASSES 18
VI. SHOULD REVOLUTIONARIES WORK IN REACTIONARY TRADE UNIONS? 23
VII. SHOULD WE PARTICIPATE IN BOURGEOIS PARLIAMENTS? 29
IX. LEFT-WING
COMMUNISM IN GREAT BRITAIN 43
X. SOME CONCLUSIONS 51
APPENDIX 61
COMRADE WYNKOOP’S LETTER 68
REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 69
DEDICATION
I dedicate this pamphlet to the Right Honourable Mr. Lloyd George as a token of my gratitude for his speech of March 18, 1920, which was almost Marxist and, in any case, exceedingly useful for Communists and Bolsheviks throughout the world.
AUTHOR
April 27, 1920
LEFT-WING
COMMUNISM, AN INFANTILE DISORDER
I. IN WHAT SENSE CAN WE SPEAK OF THE INTERNATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION?
DURING the first months after the conquest of political power by the proletariat in Russia (October 25 [November 7], 1917) it might have appeared that the tremendous difference between backward Russia and the advanced countries of Western Europe would cause the proletarian revolution in these latter countries to have very little resemblance to ours. Now we already have very considerable international experience which very definitely shows that some of the fundamental features of our revolution have a significance which is not local, not peculiarly national, not Russian only, but international. I speak here of international significance not in the broad sense of the term: not a few, but all the fundamental and many of the secondary features of our revolution are of international significance in regard to the influence it has upon all countries. No, taking it in the narrowest sense, i.e., understanding international significance to mean the international validity or the historical inevitability of a repetition on an international scale of what has taken place here, it must be admitted that some of the fundamental features of our revolution do possess such a significance.
Of course, it would be a great mistake to exaggerate this truth and to apply it to more than a few of the fundamental features of our revolution. It would also be a mistake to lose sight of the fact that after the victory of the proletarian revolution in at least one of the advanced countries things in all probability will take a sharp turn, viz., Russia will soon after cease to be the model country and once again become a backward country (in the Soviet
and in the Socialist sense).
But at the present moment of history the situation is precisely such that the Russian model reveals to all countries something, and something very essential, of their near and inevitable future. The advanced workers in every land have long understood this; most often they have not so much understood it as grasped it, sensed it, by revolutionary class instinct. Herein lies the international significance
(in the narrow sense of the term) of the Soviet power, as well as of the fundamentals of Bolshevik theory and tactics. This the revolutionary
leaders of the Second International, such as Kautsky in Germany and Otto Bauer and Friedrich Adler in Austria, failed to understand, and they thereby proved to be reactionaries and advocates of the worst kind of opportunism and social treachery. Incidentally, the anonymous pamphlet entitled The World Revolution (Weltrevolution){1} which appeared in 1919 in Vienna (Sozialistische Bücherei, Heft 11; Ignaz Brand) very clearly reveals their whole process of thought and their whole circle of ideas, or, rather, the full depth of their stupidity, pedantry, baseness and betrayal of working class interests—and all this under the guise of defending
the idea of world revolution.
But we shall have to discuss this pamphlet in greater detail some other time. Here we shall note only one more point: long, long ago, Kautsky, when he was still a Marxist and not a renegade, approaching the question as a historian, foresaw the possibility of a situation arising in which the revolutionary spirit of the Russian proletariat would serve as a model for Western Europe. This was in 1902, when Kautsky wrote an article entitled The Slavs and Revolution
for the revolutionary Iskra. In this article he wrote as follows:
At the present time (in contrast to 1848) it would seem that not only have the Slavs entered the ranks of the revolutionary nations, but that the centre of revolutionary thought and revolutionary action is shifting more and more to the Slavs. The revolutionary centre is shifting from the West to the East. In the first half of the nineteenth century it was located in France, at times in England. In 1848 Germany too joined the ranks of revolutionary nations....The new century opens with events which induce us to think that we are approaching a further shift of the revolutionary centre, namely, to Russia....Russia, which has borrowed so much revolutionary initiative from the West, is now perhaps herself ready to serve as a source of revolutionary energy for the West. The Russian revolutionary movement that is now flaring up will perhaps prove to be a most potent means of exorcising that spirit of flabby philistinism and temperate politics which is beginning to spread in our midst and may cause the thirst for battle and the passionate devotion to our great ideals to flare up in bright flames again. Russia has long ceased to be merely a bulwark of reaction and absolutism in Western Europe. It might be said that the very opposite is the case. Western Europe is becoming a bulwark of reaction and absolutism in Russia....The Russian revolutionaries might perhaps have settled with the tsar long ago had they not been compelled at the same time to fight his ally, European capital. Let us hope that this time they will succeed in settling with both enemies, and that the new ‘Holy Alliance’ will collapse more quickly than its predecessors. But however the present struggle in Russia may end, the blood and felicity of the martyrs, whom, unfortunately, she is producing in too great numbers, will not have been sacrificed in vain. They will nourish the shoots of social revolution throughout the civilised world and cause them to grow more luxuriantly and rapidly. In 1848 the Slavs were a black frost which blighted the flowers of the people’s spring. Perhaps they are now destined to be the storm that will break the ice of reaction and will irresistibly bring a new and happy spring for the nations.
(Karl Kautsky, The Slavs and Revolution,
Iskra, Russian Social-Democratic revolutionary newspaper, No. 18, March 10, 1902.)"
How well Karl Kautsky wrote eighteen years ago!
II. ONE OF THE FUNDAMENTAL CONDITIONS FOR THE SUCCESS OF THE BOLSHEVIKS
CERTAINLY nearly everyone now realises that the Bolsheviks could not have maintained themselves in power for two and a half months, let alone for two and a half years, unless the strictest, truly iron discipline prevailed in our Party, and unless the latter had been rendered the fullest and unreserved support of the whole mass of the working class, that is, of all its thinking, honest, self-sacrificing and influential elements who are capable of leading or of attracting the backward strata.
The dictatorship of the proletariat is a most determined and most ruthless war waged by the new class against a more powerful enemy, the bourgeoisie, whose resistance is increased tenfold by its over-throw (even if only in one country), and whose power lies not only in the strength of international capital, in the strength and durability of the international connections of the bourgeoisie, but also in the force of habit, in the strength of small production. For, unfortunately, small production is still very, very widespread in the world, and small production engenders capitalism and the bourgeoisie continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously, and on a mass scale. For all these reasons the dictatorship of the proletariat is essential, and victory over the bourgeoisie is impossible without a long, stubborn and desperate war of life and death, a war demanding perseverance, discipline, firmness, indomitableness and unity of will.
I repeat, the experience of the victorious dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia has clearly shown even to those who are unable to think, or who have not had occasion to ponder over this question, that absolute centralisation and the strictest discipline of the proletariat constitute one of the fundamental conditions for victory over the bourgeoisie.
This is often discussed. But far from enough thought is given to what it means, and to the conditions that make it possible. Would it not be better if greetings to the Soviet power and the Bolsheviks were more frequently accompanied by a profound analysis of the reasons why the Bolsheviks were able to build up the discipline the revolutionary proletariat needs?
As a trend of political thought and as a political party, Bolshevism exists since 1903. Only the history of Bolshevism during the whole period of its existence can satisfactorily explain why it was able to build up and to maintain under the most difficult conditions