Revolution in Danger

by Victor Serge

  In short, it constitutes the great internal danger of the revolution. State communism, which has indisputable advantages over the chaos of capitalist production, would also run the risk of crystallizing in the same way, if the Communists did not take precautions against it. Now among the Communists some are temperamentally inclined to underestimate the danger; others let themselves be charmed by the perquisites of power; it will be the task of libertarian Communists to recall by their criticisms and by their actions that at all costs the workers’ state must be prevented from crystallizing.

  The important thing is that the Communist state, straight after the revolution, should fulfill its task, which is to ensure the maximum welfare and leisure to all citizens. By suppressing the idleness and the parasitism of the rich, by rationally reorganizing production and the distribution of goods—under the especially rigorous supervision of the masses—it will be relatively easy for it to achieve this result. Now, prosperity and leisure condition freedom and libertarian education. And in this way state communism, even if it diverges from its revolutionary and progressive direction, will nonetheless have achieved the necessary preconditions for a subsequent development which will enable it to be destroyed and replaced by a stateless communism, the free association of producers.

  The state and production

  Thus as far as the old question of state control, so often disputed between socialists and anarchists, is concerned, the experience of the social revolution in Russia leads us to a twofold conclusion: first of all the necessity of taking hold of the state, a powerful apparatus of coercion; and secondly the necessity of defending ourselves against it, of relentlessly working for its destruction, perhaps at the price of a long and laborious struggle.

  Four years have already elapsed since the great revolution of modern times. Today it seems to me to be possible to formulate, at least approximately, a new conclusion about the role and the mission of the state as a tool of revolutionary dictatorship in a transitional period.

  It would be a mistake to attribute the formation in Russia of a workers’ and peasants’ state to the conscious intentions of Marxist Jacobins—although Marxist notions of centralization and the Jacobin spirit formed in the struggle between parties are certainly not foreign to it. But it seems to me to be quite obvious that any other revolutionary tendency or grouping would, in the same historical conjuncture, have acted very similarly to the Russian Bolsheviks. The formation of the Red Army, the transition from voluntary to compulsory military service, courts, centralized administration—these were all deplorable but inevitable devices to wage war against the enemies without and within (the latter took many forms, for hunger, ignorance and error are also enemies within); even if one were a libertarian, one faced the task of fighting against modern armies without having a modern army of one’s own. The function creates the organ: the army is the product of war. Discipline, centralized command, even a single command covering several fronts, centralization of the enormous apparatus of supplies, relief and transport at the rear—then nationalization, militarization of war industries, which in modern warfare means virtually all industries; everything is interconnected and rigorously necessary in this field. Moreover, against the enemy within, the apparatus of control, coercion and terror, at the summit of which, whether we like it or not, is always the revolutionary tribunal and the Lord Low Executioner of class justice (after all, our revolutionary justice is not more beautiful than theirs!) Here we have the two faces of the revolutionary state, the instrument of domination of one class over another, in these circumstances turned against the bourgeois class in order to destroy it as a class.

  In all this the role of the state is very clear: to kill. Kill the enemy without, by making war. Kill the enemy within by repression, passing sentence and instituting terror. The state is a weapon, an instrument of death, a killing machine.

  Hence its inability to manage production. To kill and to oblige men to get themselves killed, we need constraint, harshness, violence which crushes masses and individuals, violence which crushes consciousness. To produce—and above all to produce during great crises, during periods of moral confusion, of privation and danger, we need on the contrary interest, initiative, dedication (or at the very least goodwill), the willing self-discipline of the producer. The application of methods of constraint to production, the attempts at the militarization of labor in Russia (1919-1920) have, I think, adequately demonstrated that they could only be used as an expedient in the most difficult times, but that under no circumstances can they contribute to a lasting restoration of production.

  One of the misfortunes of Red Russia has precisely been that it has been unable to avoid the almost total nationalization of production. The program of the Bolshevik Communist Party provides for the transfer of production to the trade unions. But at the time of the October revolution, there were hardly any syndicalists in Russia, and there were no organizations of producers to take over production. Of necessity the state which was conducting the armed defence of the revolution had to take over industry—and not without invoking in its support a host of good reasons. A whole quite specific ideology was to flow from this circumstance, as a result of which production has greatly suffered. So it will easily be understood that, in the autumn and winter of 1920, the whole of Communist Russia took a passionate interest in the debate about the role of the trade unions in production. All the tendencies and all the leaders of the revolution were, in fact, agreed in desiring to see this role as essential; but the embryonic state of the unions, the scarcity of militants in a proletariat which was completely exhausted by the civil war, and almost all of whose energies had been absorbed by the party, did not allow a conclusive answer to be given to the question.

  The confusion between the internal and external defence of the revolution and the organization of production, resulting from the subordination of the creative apparatus (industry) to the destructive and murderous apparatus (the state) seems to me today to be as serious in the field of ideas as in the field of facts.

  This is not wholly avoidable. In a period of revolution, it is sometimes much more important to kill than to produce. In all periods people produce in order to live. When a revolution is being made, they more or less stop producing in order to fight. So it is in the very logic of the facts that the revolutionary state should have a strong tendency to subordinate everything to itself. However, the ideal would be for the system of production to be taken out of the hands of the possessing classes and given to the producers, thus becoming the only center of gravity which would subordinate the defence apparatus to itself and require obedience from it. But reality will always be a compromise between the ideal and the necessary.

  In countries other than Russia, where there is already a well established industrial base, together with a large skilled proletariat, powerfully organized and prepared by long years of industrial struggle for the expropriation of the wealthy classes, the organizations of producers, the trade unions, will doubtless have a key role to play in the revolution. Even if they fail to exercise this role in full, they will certainly participate for a long time in the dictatorship of the proletariat. The only theoretical conception which, in my view, needs to be formulated as of now is that it will be necessary, on pain of making the most painful and dangerous mistakes, to establish a very clear notion of the historical mission of the state, and not to confuse two things which are absolutely distinct, although closely interrelated at certain points in time, namely war and production. The producers can make war, and that is what happens in the social war: the army, the police and the bureaucracies which they maintain can neither produce nor effectively ensure that production takes place.

  I recognize the inadequacy of this insight, among many others. When the overall lessons of the Russian Revolution are drawn, I am sure that the relations between the state and production will be studied at great length—and that the conclusion will hardly be in favor of the nationalization of production. The revolutionary slogan
of the future, I believe, should rather be: Production to the producers, that is, to the trade unions.

  From a different point of view, moreover, we shall find ourselves even in this case confronted with state control within the organizations of production. With its bureaucratic and administrative habits, with its staff of full-time officials and its own legal processes, a union like the CGTq could very well itself become a sort of state in a real sense. It is a complex problem. But even with this terrible deformation, an industrial confederation of unions would be better equipped to organize production than the political and military mechanism of the bourgeoisie, taken from it and turned back against it.

  The great confirmations of anarchism

  As soon as it becomes possible for revolutionaries to cast an eye over the road they have travelled so far and to draw up a balance-sheet of the struggle, all critical minds will have to accept certain conclusions which will already be familiar to anarchists. Already today there are certain ones which seem to be beyond doubt. They are:• The deadly harmful nature of authority;

  • The harmful nature of state control and of authoritarian centralization.

  (These are the cause of the doubtless inevitable and necessary evils which arise in a period of social transformation; evils which we must, to a very large extent, learn to accept, but which are none the less evils, something which should not be forgotten.)

  It will be observed that here we have, quite simply, the refutation in practice of the principles of authority, that is, one of the essential postulates of the anarchist philosophy.

  The revolutionary movement is never more seriously put to the test than by the seizure of power. From the very day after it takes place, no one who is observing things closely can deny that the exercise of authority is the worst cause of economic and psychological corruption, whether for parties, for groups or for individuals.

  Economic corruption, since the possession of power is itself a privilege, which immediately creates numerous categories of privileged persons. It encourages the sacrifice of economic considerations to political considerations (the preservation and reinforcement of power). This in turn can lead to the most undesirable consequences.

  Psychological corruption, since authority produces a professional deformation in whoever exercises it, something which is all the more rapid and marked if we are dealing with a character which is less resolute, with a way of thinking which is less cultivated and libertarian. In the one who commands, it arouses arrogance, scorn for the personality of others, and, in times of social war, brutality and general contempt for human life; in the one who has to obey, it produces servility, hypocrisy, dishonesty or, in the best case—all things considered!—the behavior of a robot. In such a way does authority corrupt. I would venture to claim that virtually nobody escapes its depraving effects. That is why I think I can state it as axiomatic that the exercise of authority is one of the most pernicious forms of the exploitation of man by man. For whoever carries out the will of another is exploited by another. And in such a matter, use is inseparable from abuse. One cannot say where one begins and the other ends. In the everyday practice of a revolution, authority is generally the exercise of arbitrary power, and abuses, great and small, become so numerous that it would be childish to try and consider them in isolation. It is a terrifying and heart-breaking sight to see how the exercise of power, even if it is shortlived, even if it is of minimal extent, can transform anybody at all into a petty tyrant. The obsession with commanding, prescribing, decreeing, ordering and bullying, especially when it wins over the uncultivated masses, has been one of the major causes of the cruelties and of the mistakes of the Russian Revolution. This is, moreover, a very old experience. It is only necessary to reread the history of the Jacobin dictatorship, which in this respect is much more instructive than the history of the present revolution. To prove it one would simply have to name some of the proconsuls of the Convention.r

  This is not the time to make an all too facile criticism of state socialism and authoritarian centralization which, by paralyzing initiative, squander an enormous quantity of energy and create stagnation. The present experience of revolutionary Russia reveals an energetic and innovative minority which is compelled to make up for the deficiencies in the education of the backward masses by the use of compulsion. In this situation it is probable that no other minority, no minority guided by different principles, could have done anything different, and certainly nobody would have done any better. But from its immense efforts we can already draw one conclusion: namely, that those who exercise power can in reality achieve only very few things by means of power. In the successes of soviet Russia (military victories, moral victories and even relative economic victories, since despite everything it has survived) very little credit accrues to authority. Many things have been done despite it, and even when constraint has played a role, almost everything was achieved only as a result of revolutionary idealism, of the action of new interests and of a mass of social factors where coercion scarcely enters into the question. On the contrary, coercion sometimes reveals itself to be virtually impotent. The death penalty used to combat banditry has not succeeded in stamping it out to this very day. The soviet state is not preserved by its apparatus of compulsion, but by its apparatus of agitation and propaganda, and above all because it is the most basic expression of proletarian interests.

  I believe violence is necessary to disentangle historical situations and to carry through an evolution which has been blocked by outdated institutions. It destroys the harmful forces of a past which has outlived its usefulness. It kills. It thus opens up vast new possibilities for life. But it creates nothing; it is powerless to give birth to an idea or a creation. And what is dangerous is the fact that it gives birth to a great illusion. For men are prone to nourish illusions about their own capacities, and to believe that they can construct with the same victorious daring that they used for destruction.

  But this is not the case. The new society can be built only through knowledge, the spirit of organization and the unceasing development of the consciousness of the masses and of individuals. The guns and bayonets of the Red Army, the decrees and measures of compulsion introduced by the dictatorship of the proletariat—these will kill the old regime and defend the new communist society against attempts to strangle it; but then they must make way for education, propaganda, the initiative of the masses and the organizing spirit of leading elements.

  The role of anarchists in the communist movement

  Within the revolutionary movement, the anarchists represent the spirit of freedom, the critical spirit, individualism, the unending quest—in short, a temperament and a way of approaching life.

  They are without doubt revolutionaries.

  Is it possible for them, when confronted with the experience of a contemporary revolution, to preserve the standpoint of the old utopianism? Can they carry on confining themselves to pushing the old liberal ideas—which even the bourgeoisie pay hypocritical lipservice to—to their logical conclusion?

  No.

  And this “No” is not just my personal opinion. To these questions, the experience of the last few years answers as follows:

  If the anarchists fail to adopt a clear and distinct position towards the revolution, and that means all the necessities of the revolution; if they do not unhesitatingly and everywhere align themselves with the revolution, whatever sacrifices it may impose on them (and I am well aware that concessions of principle made in the face of harsh reality are very great sacrifices), then they will be worthless. They will play no role. Some will confine themselves to tailing behind the more determined Communists at a greater or lesser distance. The others—alas! for such is the irony of fate—will find themselves following in the footsteps of reaction. 6

  They will not be able to carry out their task, and to exercise an influence unless, as revolutionaries, they accept their role without hiding from themselves any of the consequences of their position.

  If they f
ollow this course, they will become Communists who, in the major episodes of the revolutionary struggle, will necessarily act like all true communists and hand in hand with them. But unlike many others, they will strive throughout these battles to preserve the spirit of liberty, which will give them a greater critical spirit and a clearer awareness of their long-term goals. Within the Communist movement their clear-sightedness will make them the enemies of the ambitious, of budding political careerists and commissars, of formalists, party dogmatists and intriguers. In other words, by their very presence within the organizations, they make a substantial contribution to driving away the self-seekers.

  In tactical and theoretical questions their role will be to fight the illusions of power, to foresee and forestall the crystallization of the workers’ state as it has emerged from war and revolution, everywhere and always to encourage the initiative of individuals and of the masses, to recall to those who might forget it that the dictatorship is a weapon, a means, an expedient, a necessary evil—but never an aim or a final goal.

  The pressure of reaction which is probably most to be feared after a victorious revolution is reaction in behavior, which is expressed almost imperceptibly by a process in which some militants get absorbed into bourgeois practices, as they are decidedly corrupted by power, through an instinctive return to old routines, especially to those of private life. Anarchist philosophy, which appeals to individuals, imposes on them attitudes in their private life and their inner life, proposes a morality, which is something that Marxism, a theory of class struggle, does not do to such a great extent. Armed with the spirit of free enquiry, more liberated than anyone else from bourgeois prejudices with regard to the family, honor, propriety, love, from worrying about “what people will say” and “what is expected,” militants who see anarchism as “an individual way of life and activity,” in the well-chosen phrase of some of the French comrades, will resist reaction in behavior with their common sense and their courage in setting an example. While others become officers, functionaries, judges, sometimes joining the privileged elite, they will remain simply men, free workers, who can perform in a stoical fashion all the tasks that are necessary to plough up the old land, but who will never be intoxicated by rhetoric, or by success, or by the lure of profitable careers.