Daniel Bensaïd (2018) Strategy and Politics. From Marx To The Third International

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–38
brill.com/hima
Strategy and Politics: From Marx to the Third

International
Daniel Bensaïd
Université Paris X – Nanterre
http://danielbensaid.org/
Abstract
The following text is a translation of Daniel Bensaïd’s ‘Strategy and Politics’, which
covers debates within the workers’ movement from Marx and Engels, through the
Second and Third Internationals, up to the more immediate revolutionary experiences
in Nicaragua and Latin America. An Introduction to this has been published simulta-
neously (DOI:10.1163/1569206x-12341670).
Keywords
Marxism – Daniel Bensaïd – Lenin – strategy – Second International – Third

International – Trotskyism – Marx and Engels
In Marx and Engels, the question of strategy is little developed. There is a

discrepancy between the attention they pay to social spontaneity and its in-
ventions (an attention commensurate with their suspicion of Blanquist volun-
tarism and the conspiratorial cult of minority action), and a strategic thought
sometimes reduced to its directly military aspect, something for which not
only Engels exhibited a passion, but Marx, too, in his articles on the American
* Contribution presented at the Marx Seminar: ‘Marx au 21ième siècle: l’esprit et la lettre’. [‘Marx
in the 21st Century: The Spirit and the Letter’. The original French text was published as
‘Stratégie et politique. De Marx à la IIIe Internationale’, in La Politique comme art stratégique,
Antoine Artous (ed.), Paris: Éditions Syllepse, 2011. All notes in square brackets are the
translator’s.]
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/1569206X-00001670

2 doi 10.1163/1569206x-00001670 | Bensaïd
Civil War and the Crimean War. Engels even went so far as to describe revolu-
tion as ‘a purely natural phenomenon which is subject to physical laws’.1
The question of strategy thus emerges only intermittently, in close rela-
tion to moments of revolutionary intensity (the revolutions of 1848, the Paris
Commune). The enigma of the metamorphosis of ‘nothing’ into ‘everything’ –
of a class exploited, dominated and mutilated by labour into a hegemonic class
capable of changing the world – seems resolved by a sociological wager on the
fact that the growth and concentration of the proletariat would lead mechani-
cally to a rising collective consciousness and advancing modes of organisation.
The intermittency of political organisation, which Marx also calls ‘the
ephemeral party’, so as to distinguish it from the ‘historical party’ (which is
none other than the movement of self-emancipation of the class as such),
appears as the consequence of intermittencies in revolutionary opportunity.
That is why Marx twice advocated the dissolution of parties he had helped
to found, the Communist League in 1852 and the International Workingmen’s
Association in 1874:
I would point out d’abord that, after the ‘League’ had been disbanded
at my behest in November 1852, I never belonged to any society again,
whether secret or public; that the party, therefore, in this wholly ephem-
eral sense, ceased to exist for me 8 years ago … Moreover, I have tried to
dispel the misunderstanding arising out of the impression that by ‘party’
I meant a ‘League’ that expired eight years ago, or an editorial board that
was disbanded twelve years ago. By party, I meant the party in the broad
historical sense.2
In other words, one must know how to break with a so-called revolutionary
party when defeat transforms it into a ‘school of scandal and meanness’.3
Likewise, Engels comments in a letter to Becker on the dissolution of the
IWA after the crushing of the Commune and the reaction which followed:
… [T]he International does indeed still exist. In so far as it can be ef-

fective, there is liaison between the revolutionary workers of all coun-
tries … I honestly don’t see how at this juncture the grouping of these
small centres round a large main centre could give added strength to the
movement – it would probably only lead to greater friction. But once the
1 Engels, Letter to Marx, 13 February 1851, in Marx and Engels 1982, p. 290.
2 Marx, Letter to Freiligrath, 29 February 1860, in Marx and Engels 1985, pp. 81 and 87.
3 [Engels, Letter to Marx, 12 February 1851, in Marx and Engels 1982, p. 287.]

Strategy and Politics | doi 10.1163/1569206x-00001670 3
moment comes for us to concentrate our forces, it will, for that very rea-
son, be the work of a moment, nor will any lengthy preparation be called
for.4
Engels advises, therefore, that one should not overwork this necessity by the
premature reconstitution of an ‘official International’, which would be reduced
by force of circumstance to a propaganda society. This opposition between ‘of-
ficial International’ and ‘de facto International’ extends Marx’s distinction be-
tween the ephemeral party and the historic party.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the young Trotsky and Rosa
Luxemburg remained, in large measure, loyal to this sociological determinism.
For Trotsky, the ‘interests of the proletariat’ are ‘so powerful and so inescap-
able that they finally oblige the proletariat to allow them into the realm of
its consciousness, that is, to make the attainment of its objective interests its
subjective concern.’5 A perilous dialectic of object and subject, of in-itself and
for-itself! Which leads to a veritable credo: ‘… faith in the fate of the working
class as being social revolution’ and ‘[in] revolutionary ideas as being those
corresponding best to the historical movement of the proletariat.’6 Clearly, this
is a matter of faith in the meaning of history. Similarly, for Rosa Luxemburg,
‘social democracy is not linked to the organisation of the working class; it is
the working class’s own movement’, a formula indeed very close to that of the
Communist Manifesto.7
1 Foundational Debates
It was thus in the early twentieth century, in the ranks of the massive SPD, that
the foundational strategic debates took shape. The parliamentary state had
rendered the political struggle more complex and, thanks to universal suffrage,
4 Engels, Letter to Johann Philipp Becker, 10 February 1882, in Marx and Engels 1992, p. 197. [For
the last sentence Bensaïd has: ‘Néanmoins, le moment venu, il importera de rassembler les
forces pour toutes ces raisons, il faudra une longue préparation.’ This is the completely op-
posite sense to the English translation – and to the original. It is also opposite in sense to the
French Dangeville translation, published by Maspero in 1973. It reads: ‘Néanmoins, lorsque
le moment sera venu où il importera de rassembler les forces, pour toutes ces raisons, il ne
faudra pas une longue préparation.’ – Editors.]
5 Trotsky 1979, p. 74.
6 Trotsky 1979, pp. 74 and 123. [Bensaïd is here stressing the young Trotsky’s sociological deter-
minism. In the French this is clearer since his translation of Trotsky has ‘foi … dans la récep-
tion inevitable des idées révolutionaires’ – Editors.]
7 Luxemburg 2004, p. 253.

4 doi 10.1163/1569206x-00001670 | Bensaïd
seemed to create the possibility of the gradual conquest of power: it was fore-
seeable, therefore, that the political (electoral) majority would converge with
the social majority – a claim that François Mitterrand echoed on the night of
his first election to the presidency. This perspective translates and maintains
the illusion of a homogeneity or a continuity between the political and the
social levels. Moreover, a period of growth for capitalism contradicts the illu-
sions of its inevitable collapse. Ultimately, the growth of the proletariat does
not entail the disappearance of the ever-resurgent middle classes (the petite
bourgeoisie).
Eduard Bernstein drew a number of conclusions from this. Firstly, that of a
long march through the institutions as a way of access to the exercise of power.
Secondly, that of an ideological continuity between liberalism and socialism:
‘In fact, there is no liberal thought that is not also part of the intellectual equip-
ment of socialism.’8 Consequently, he downplayed the question of property,
which had been crucial since the birth of the socialist movement, in favour of
a merely juridical regulation of social relations: ‘The least factory act contains
more socialism than all nationalisation.’ Finally, he drew the logical conclu-
sion: ‘There where the state is least profitable, we must favour the private sec-
tor.’ It was almost as good as Rocard in 1977 before the employers’ forum of
the business magazine L’Expansion, or Ségolène Royale. This made-over par-
liamentary socialism granted a new importance to the question of alliances
between classes – notably on the electoral terrain – just as it diminished by the
same token the importance of working-class spontaneity.
From the moment that the movement becomes everything, and the aim
nothing, this vision leaves little room for the question of strategy. It is already
the ‘tranquil force’9 advancing with senatorial gait – no rupture! – along the
Roman road of history.
In relation to this Angelo Tasca has spoken of a ‘timeless socialism’, without
targets or deadlines, without interruptions or changes of rhythm. Yet, strategic
time is precisely broken time, ‘kairotic’, punctuated by propitious instants and
opportunities that must be seized, the total opposite of a uniform duration,
‘homogeneous and empty’.10
Faced with what seemed like a serious revision of orthodoxy, Kautsky –
against Bernstein – made himself its champion. Lenin, though a virtuoso of
‘symptomal reading’, took The Road to Power (1909) as his bedside reading. He
8 Bernstein 1993, p. 148.

9 [This was the theme of François Mitterrand’s 1980/1 election campaign.]
10 [Benjamin 1968, p. 261.]

declared himself in perfect agreement with it, remaining blind to what, when
its logic is understood, should have struck him as outrageous:
The Socialist party is a revolutionary party, but not a revolution-making

party. We know that our goal can be attained only through a revolution.
We also know that it is just as little in our power to create this revolu-
tion as it is in the power of our opponents to prevent it. It is no part of
our work to instigate a revolution or to prepare the way for it. And since
the revolution cannot be arbitrarily created by us, we cannot say any-
thing whatever about when, under what conditions, or what forms it will
come.11
That we cannot declare a revolution or any other event, nor trigger at will a
mass uprising, makes good sense. But to claim that the enemy has no means to
prevent it is far more imprudent and much too reassuring, as the coups d’état
in Indonesia (1965) and Chile (1973) cruelly reminded us: in critical situations
the possession of state power and its repressive organs permits the dominant
forces to seize the initiative and nip in the bud any nascent revolution. It is one
of the elementary strategic consequences of the asymmetry between domi-
nated and dominant. If it is true to say, like Kautsky, that we do not ‘make’ a
revolution as we please, it is, on the other hand, highly questionable to con-
clude from this, as he does, that we do not know how to prepare it and how to
prepare ourselves for it.
It is this passive position which led to Kautsky’s opponents, in particular
Pannekoek, to charge him with ‘passive radicalism’.12 For Kautsky, the revolu-
tion is effectively limited to ‘a shift of forces in the state’ and ‘the conquest of
public powers’.13 The dictatorship of the proletariat, which he claims to follow
in all orthodoxy, is thus reduced to the occupation ‘of a dominant position
in the state’ and ‘the expression of the political hegemony of the proletariat’.
The conquest of power means the investment of the state and existing institu-
tions, given that, if the modern state remains an ‘instrument of class domina-
tion’, its social functions increase, though also provoking a ‘Manchester-type’
reaction against the emerging welfare state:14 ‘The economic activity of the
11 Authorised translation by A.M. Simons, Kautsky 1909, p. 50.

12 Anton Pannekoek, ‘Action de masse et revolution’, 1912, in Weber (ed.) 1983, p. 322.
13 Only the second quoted passage can be found, at Karl Kautsky, ‘La nouvelle tactique’, 1912,
in Weber (ed.) 1983, p. 376. [Editors]
14 [‘[L]a réaction manchestérienne (libérale)’ refers to Elie Halévy’s characterisation, in Le
Radicalisme Philosophique (1904), of the Manchester School (which, in his view, included

6 doi 10.1163/1569206x-00001670 | Bensaïd
modern state is the natural starting point of the development that leads to the
Co-operative Commonwealth.’15
It is thus a matter of transforming the state into a ‘big economic cooperative’
in accordance with an ‘implacable necessity for economic evolution’. In this
big modern state, the question is not one of making parliament superfluous,
but at the very most of correcting its actions in certain particular cases: ‘For as
long as the modern state exists, the focus of political activity will always lie in
its parliament’,16 and in the parliamentary republic the crucial political ques-
tion is that of suffrage.
Unlike Bernstein, Kautsky downplays the question of alliances by relying
on the organic growth of the labouring masses, who will become ‘increasingly
numerous and increasingly powerful’. But he also rejects anarchism as a ‘pro-
letarian utopia’ which ‘leads sooner or later to a purely corporate syndicalism
or to an anti-political corporatism’. In the end he advocates ‘a total defiance to-
wards all bourgeois parties’, setting himself up as guardian of a ‘pure socialism’,
spared disagreeable compromises and led to the happy ending guaranteed by
history by the logic of progress and the promise of victory. It is enough, then,
patiently to rely on the passive accumulation of forces: ‘It is necessary to keep
our gun powder for the next great battle’ – that is, for the next elections to the
Reichstag! Unlike Kropotkin, claiming that ‘the people always sense the situa-
tion correctly’, Kautsky is consequently wary of crowds with their disordered
spontaneity, vulnerable to provocations liable to disrupt the tranquil march
on the road to power: ‘The mass can only realise actions which last but a few
hours, and which can only be acts of destruction’; mass action can be victori-
ous, ‘but cannot store up the fruits of victory.’17
The controversy over the general strike illustrates this reluctance. Faced with
the Belgian and Russian strikes at the outset of the century, Rosa Luxemburg
quickly understood that here was a demonstration of a social energy capable
of unsettling the conservative inertia of organisational apparatuses. Unlike
the union pontificators, squarely opposed to these spontaneous movements,
Kautsky adopted a halfway position which contrasted the ‘coercive’ or offensive
Richard Cobden and Herbert Spencer) as laissez-faire liberalism, as opposed to the ‘philo-
sophical radicalism’ of the disciples of Bentham based at Westminster.]
15 Kautsky 1971, p. 109. [For ‘Co-operative Commonwealth’, Bensaïd has ‘société socialiste’.
The original German has it as: ‘zur sozialistischen Genossenschaft führt’.]
16 Ibid. [Editors] Ben Lewis translation in Lewis (forthcoming), p. 51.
17 [Kautsky 1914, excerpted and translated as ‘The Mass Strike’, in Kautsky 1983, pp. 53–73.]
In Kautsky’s repulsive mistrust of spontaneity and improvisation there are echoes of Le
Bon’s La psychologie des foules [‘Crowd Psychology’] or de Sighele’s De la psychologie des
crimes de foules et de masses [The Psychology of Crowd- and Mass-Crimes].

(Russian or Eastern) general strike with the simply ‘demonstrative’ general

strike, the ultimate last resort when faced with an adversary who will no longer
play the game. For ‘a political – coercive – mass strike and an electoral battle
completely exclude one another.’18 In the absence of political rights, the strike
was the only means of protest in Russia, and represented a victory in itself, but
in Germany the socialists had other means available to them, such that the
strike would be ‘the ultimate weapon which enables the decisive blow’, when
the moment comes.19
It comes as no surprise, then, that the term ‘evolution’ returns incessant-
ly throughout his work. It expresses an unshakeable confidence in historical
teleology allied with economic determinism: the catastrophic agony of capi-
talism is ‘necessary’ and ‘inevitable’. The Paris Commune, on the other hand,
had demonstrated that the days of ‘the tactics of overthrow were temporarily
over’.20 This outdated strategy, its name borrowed from Delbrück’s great mili-
tary history, could still hold in places where transport was little developed and
a large urban metropolis predominated. Kautsky thus takes up in his own way
Engels’s famous 1895 preface to The Class Struggles in France, in order to plead
for a ‘strategy of attrition’ corresponding to universal suffrage. Engels, however,
never imagined that attrition could dispense with the final struggle.21 By insist-
ing on the modern state’s monopoly over effective weapons and reflecting on
‘the architecture of modern cities’, Engels wanted to communicate to his in-
heritors ‘the impossibility of an armed insurrection’: the days of ‘coups de main’
and ‘revolutions carried out by minorities at the head of unconscious masses’
18 Kautsky 1910a, pp. 656–67.

19 [Karl Kautsky, ‘Une nouvelle stratégie’, 1910, in Weber (ed.) 1983, p. 159. Original German
version: ‘Eine neue Strategie’, Kautsky 1910b.] On the other hand, Kautsky remains at this
point absolutely orthodox concerning the economic programme: ‘To substitute common,
for private, ownership in the means of production’ we must go one step further than the an-
archists and the liberals, ‘we must go as far as the abolition of market production’ by the
unification into one large cooperative (in other words, a plan). [Editors’ note: the mean-
ing of the first quotation in this note can be found at Kautsky 1910d, p. 95. But the English
translation of the Erfurt Programme is very different to the French on the second point.
The English is rendered, ‘To substitute common, for private, ownership in the means of
production, this it is that economic development is urging upon us with ever-increasing
force’. In the French it is written that ‘Si l’on veut sérieusement substituer à la propriété
capitaliste la propriété coopérative des moyens de production, il faut faire un pas de plus
que les anarchistes et les libéraux, il faut aller jusqu’à la suppression de la production
marchande’.]
20 [Karl Kautsky, ‘Et maintenant?’, 1910, in Weber (ed.) 1983. Original German version: ‘Was
nun?’ (Kautsky 1910c).]
21 No more than the logic of hegemony in Gramsci eliminates the test of force and the revo-
lutionary rupture (cf. Anderson 1976).

8 doi 10.1163/1569206x-00001670 | Bensaïd
were henceforth over.22 The organised masses now had their own institutions,
even though it was in all likelihood impossible to organise the total population
within the framework of the capitalist mode of production.
Reference to war of attrition or position, in contrast to rapidly decisive in-
surrections, emphasises the aspect of duration:
[It is not] necessary that the social revolution be decided at one blow …
Revolutions prepare themselves by years or decades of economic and po-
litical struggle; they are accomplished amidst constant ups and downs
sustained by the conflicting classes and parties; not infrequently they are
interrupted by long periods of reaction.23
It was, then, very much Kautsky, before Gramsci, who introduced military
vocabulary into workers’ movement debate, starting from the opposition be-
tween war of attrition and war of annihilation: faced with the modern state,
the point is to weaken and wear down the enemy, while putting oneself in a
situation of legitimate defence. This strategy dreams of the possibility of never
having to fight.
World-war and fascism, accordingly, were perceived at first as simple paren-
theses (detours or mishaps) on the straight road of progress, a staircase which
one climbs but never descends, as Péguy ironically noted. It was this historical
quietism that Walter Benjamin, in his touching philosophical testament, ac-
cused of having decreased revolutionary vigilance in the face of dangers:
Nothing has corrupted the German working class so much as the notion
that it was moving with the current … Social Democratic theory, and even
more its practice, have been formed by a conception of progress which
did not adhere to reality but made dogmatic claims.24
This progress, ‘as it was painted in the minds of the social democrats’, was
firstly a progress of humanity as such, not simply of its knowledge and capaci-
ties; it was also an unlimited progress which matched a dogma of perfectibility
that was just as unlimited; and finally, it was an irresistible and irreversible
progress inscribed in a ‘homogeneous and empty time’. What Benjamin did not
point out was that a comparable reproach could already be made against the
Stalinised and bureaucratised Communist movement.
22 Kautsky 1914.

23 Kautsky 1971, p. 91.
24 [Benjamin 1968, pp. 258 and 260.]

From the 1902 polemic over Reform or Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg under-
stood the issue of institutional conservatism in politics and the danger this
presented. She went on to perceive workers’ spontaneity as an antidote: ‘1905
opens a new epoch for the workers’ movement’ thanks to the irruption of a
new element, ‘the appearance of the proletarian struggle in the revolution’.
The general strike is therefore for her not a defensive last resort, but the irrup-
tion which makes a revolutionary strategy conceivable. Kautsky then accepted
her distinction between ‘Russian general strike’ and ‘Western general strike’,
expressing the paradigmatic difference between East and West.25
For Luxemburg, the opposition between a war of attrition and a war of anni-
hilation was purely formal, and the opposition between Asiatic Russia and par-
liamentary Europe too abrupt. But some years later it was Anton Pannekoek
from the Netherlands who caused uproar by asserting that the point was not to
conquer public power ministry by ministry, but rather to crush the entire state
apparatus.26 This debate acquired new life in light of the trauma of August 1914,
with an article by Bukharin which Lenin initially received with incredulity.27
Pannekoek emphasised the age of imperialism, the importance of the arms
race, and the increase in fiscal pressure which threw the working class back
on the defensive. He underscored the cultural and organisational superiority
of the dominant classes by means of their mastery of state power, whereas ‘the
nature of [the proletariat’s] organisation is something spiritual – no less than
the whole transformation of the proletarian mentality …’28 The elimination of
class domination was therefore possible only ‘because a permanent popular
power exists which is constructed step by step and in an inexorable manner,
until the point where its force will be such that it will destroy the state power
of the bourgeoisie and dissolve it into nothingness.’ Before, it was enough that
a section of the popular classes ‘amassed in the capital’, whereas now an active
minority can bring with it increasingly broad sectors. Kautsky, however, had
neglected the specific social composition of modern classes, leading him to
develop – by erecting into a system the ‘tried and tested old tactic’ – a theory of
‘passive anticipation’ [l’expectative passive] and of ‘passive radicalism’, opposed
to revolutionary activity.
Kautsky’s response was that in the context of a rise in conflicts, ‘the cata-
clysmic element of the situation’ lies in the combination of the action of an
25 A commonplace distinction found in Lenin, Trotsky, Radek and Gramsci.

26 In his articles from 1910 to 1912 in Die Neue Zeit.
27 See Sawer 1977.
28 [Anton Pannekoek, ‘Action de masse et revolution’, 1912, in Weber (ed.) 1983, p. 322. Original
German version: ‘Massenaktion und Revolution’ (Pannekoek 1911–12, pp. 541–50).]

10 doi 10.1163/1569206x-00001670 | Bensaïd
organised proletariat with that of the great unorganised masses. For Pannekoek,
masses which were formerly still bourgeois had become proletarian, but class
instinct does not always move in the right direction. He did not, however, pos-
sess a theory of ideology, of fetishism or reification, which would have enabled
him to understand that there is no way out of the vicious circle of reproduction
of social relations except by rupture with homogeneous and linear temporal-
ity, through a theory of revolutionary crises and situations.
For Anton Pannekoek, the new tactic was limited to advocating that ‘the
leadership of the party organise the revolution’.29 Going beyond the contro-
versy between the anarchists and the social-democrats (or claiming to do so),
he meant at the same time ‘to seize state power and to destroy it’.30 But de-
stroy what exactly? Centralisation? But the Communist League of 1848 wanted
precisely the opposite … Abolish the administration? Or rather elect it? And
which ministries should be abolished? For Kautsky the question was not really
to destroy state power, but rather to assert ‘a pre-eminence’ of the legislative
over the executive and the judiciary, and to democratise the electoral system
by eliminating upper houses: ‘never – never – can this process lead to the de-
struction of state power, but always to a shift in the balance of forces at the
heart of state power.’31 Against the ‘cretinism of mass action’, the fast track to
power remained the conquest of a parliamentary majority.
For Pannekoek, on the contrary, social revolution had presented itself until
now as a goal ‘at an inaccessible distance’.32 Reformism was absorbed in trade-
union and parliamentary action, whereas ‘for us, revolution is a process which,
from its earliest phases, enables us to forge ahead’.33 In this perspective, the
party is a ‘transformer of energy’ which undertakes revolutionary actions.34
Kautsky’s error was his incapacity to conceive transition as a dialectical pro-
cess. Consequently, he reduced the party to the role of a pedagogue, educating
and organising the proletariat rather than taking the initiative:
Develop the organisation, capture all positions we can conquer by our

own forces, that we can hold on to, study the state and society, educate
the masses: today we cannot assign ourselves and our organisations,
consciously and methodically, any other tasks. We can reflect on the
29 Karl Kautsky, ‘La nouvelle tactique’, 1912, in Weber (ed.) 1983, p. 370.
30 Karl Kautsky, ‘La nouvelle tactique’, 1912, in Weber (ed.) 1983, p. 371.
31 [Karl Kautsky, ‘La nouvelle tactique’, 1912, in Weber (ed.) 1983, p. 371. Original German: ‘Die
neue Taktik’ (Kautsky 1911–12, pp. 654–64).]
32 Pannekoek 1978, p. 51.

unforeseeable, but we cannot anticipate the future by making tactical

decisions in advance.35
The spirit of Erfurt sought to unite the real workers’ movement and socialist
doctrine, which had been born separately:
But socialism and the class struggle arise side by side and not one out of
the other; each arises under different conditions. Modern socialist con-
sciousness can arise only on the basis of profound scientific knowledge
[…] The vehicle of science is not the proletariat, but the bourgeois intel-
ligentsia [K.K.’s italics] […] Thus, socialist consciousness is something
introduced into the proletarian class struggle from without [von Aussen
Hineingetragenes] and not something that arose within it spontaneously
[urwüchsig].36
Lenin cites this passage with approval. But twenty pages later, in paraphrasing
it, he says something completely different:
Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from

without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside
the sphere of relations between workers and employers. The sphere from
which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge is the sphere of rela-
tionships of all classes and strata to the state and the government, the
sphere of the interrelations between all classes. […] To bring political
knowledge to the workers the Social Democrats must go among all classes
of the population; they must dispatch units of their army in all directions.37
This (very) free interpretation is in effect consistent with his understanding of

the specificities of political struggle, irreducible to workers’ claims alone.
Greeted by Trotsky as a ‘genius eclectic’, Jaurès developed his conception
of socialism by revisiting the legacy of the French Revolution, but also in re-
sponse to the German controversy. The republic, as a principle for organising
society, was conceived of as a totally social republic.38 Jaurès’s doctoral thesis
(in Latin) was already devoted to the relationship between the state and prop-
erty. In his view, the Lutheran critique of usury prefigured the socialist critique
35 Kautsky 1914, p. 281.

36 Kautsky 1901–2, p. 79. [Cited (and translated) in Lenin 1961, pp. 383–4.]
37 Lenin 1961, p. 422.
38 Antonini 2004.

12 doi 10.1163/1569206x-00001670 | Bensaïd
of ‘the reproductive power of money abandoned to itself’. This leads to a ‘moral

socialism’, heir to the Christian critique of money, and a rehabilitation of the
state as a rational contract and necessary lever of political emancipation:
The political and economic rights of each citizen are not to be found out-
side the state and the social contract; individualism and socialism, there-
fore, are not opposed, but united and reconciled.39
Between state socialism and collectivism, however, there remains an abyss: the
first is, in fact, ‘state capitalism in public services’, whereas socialism is ‘the in-
tervention of society into the economic relations that the existence of property
creates between men’. Collectivism is therefore the only means to ‘re-establish
and universalise personal property’, within the framework of the ‘economic
sovereignty of the nation’.40
Jaurès thus accepts the perspective of the withering-away of the state, as
public function becomes ‘social function’. He champions the constitution
of 1793 and considers everything distinct from this in modern constitutions
as a concession to the spirit of conservative defiance and privilege in which
monarchic habits live on. Whilst, for Rosa Luxemburg, bourgeois democracy
was merely an ‘abstract imaginary democracy’, Jaurès proposes to ‘graft the
proletarian revolution onto the bourgeois democratic revolution’. As a good
Cartesian, he conceives the ‘socialist method’ as a scientific method which ‘un-
derstands the law of evolution and imposes on all revolutionary thought a long
period of economic and political preparation’.41 ‘Evolutionary’, as much as or
more than revolutionary, the desired goal is for him always preformed, and
social transformation presupposes a ‘preliminary idea of justice and of law’,
a ‘preconceived ideal which humanity pursues’. Consequently, he reproaches
Blanqui, but also Marx and Engels, for a conspiratorial conception of revolu-
tion that is still bourgeois, and that would maintain the proletariat in a subal-
tern position. That is why the Communist Manifesto still belongs to ‘the utopian
period’: it is ‘a pipe-dream to hope that communism can be grafted onto the
bourgeois revolution’.42 Nonetheless, Jaurès does not subscribe to Bernstein’s
orientation which seems to him ‘to dissolve the final goal of socialism in the
mists of the future’.43
39 Cited in Antonini 2004, p. 71.

40 [Cited in Antonini 2004, p. 97.]
41 Jaurès, quoted in Antonini 2004, p. 159.
42 Antonini 2004, pp. 183–4. [Editorial addition – passage was not cited in Bensaïd’s original.]
43 Antonini 2004, p. 187. [Editorial addition – passage was not cited in Bensaïd’s original.]

In spite of his criticisms, Jaurès remained discreet and evasive in the stra-
tegic controversy. During the polemic over the participation of the socialist
Millerand in a bourgeois government, he considered this – as did Kautsky – to
be a question of tactics, whilst for Rosa Luxemburg the republican state was
the practical form of bourgeois hegemony.
2 Revolution in the Revolution
During the German controversy, Lenin remained faithful to the orthodoxy em-
bodied by Kautsky, against the revisionism of Bernstein and the radicalism of
Rosa Luxemburg. However, his own approach engaged him in a quite different
problematic, one that it would take him a good deal of time to fully appreci-
ate. Against the economism that was predominant in nascent Russian social-
ism, he insisted very early on the necessity of an ‘ample political campaign of
denunciation of autocracy’. He thus maintained the primacy of the political
against the corporative limits of a narrow vision of class interests. With Lenin
it was a matter of an idea-force whose logic would recur in his 1921 polemic
against the Workers’ Opposition. To confront tsarist despotism at the level of
state organisation – i.e. the level of its domination – local economic struggles
were not enough: what was needed was ‘a party for all of Russia’. His critique of
spontaneity (stikhiinost in Russian actually signifies ‘disorganisation’ as much
as ‘spontaneity’) seems to have echoes of Kautsky’s reticence towards impro-
vised mass movements:
… [I]t is fully possible and historically much more likely that the autoc-
racy will fall under the pressure of one of those stikhiinyi explosions or
unexpected political complications that constantly threaten it from all
sides.
But no political party, unless it falls into adventurism, can base its ac-
tivity solely on the expectation of such explosions and complications. We
must travel along our own path, carrying out our systematic work with-
out deviation, and the less we base our calculations on unexpected oc-
currences, the greater the possibility that no ‘historical turning-point’ will
catch us flat-footed.44
Until the war, then, Lenin remained an apparently orthodox Kautskyist.

It would take the shock of the vote in favour of war credits (which at first
44 Cited in Lih 2005, p. 311.

14 doi 10.1163/1569206x-00001670 | Bensaïd
he found difficult to believe) for him to recognise the fracture that had ap-
peared between his own strategic approach and the majority orientation of
the Second International. The full extent of this approach can be observed in
his notion of ‘revolutionary crisis’, which had matured through the course of
his articles since 1905. This notion stands in a logical relationship with those
of conjuncture and situation, which politically single out the opportune mo-
ment and shatter the temporal linearity of timeless socialism: the struggle has
its own rhythms, its beats and pulses. It was certainly the traumatic shock of
August 1914 which jolted Lenin’s strategic thought and led him to take the de-
cisive step by lending coherence to his diverse theoretical reflections: a sudden
realisation of the bankruptcy of the social democrats and of its causes (forma-
tion of a labour aristocracy, bureaucratic conservativism of apparatuses, sink-
ing into parliamentary routines); an elaboration of the concept of imperialism
as global overdetermination of national social formations; a re-examination
of the question of the state which would find its apotheosis in The State and
Revolution; a rediscovery of the dialectic on reading Hegel’s The Science of
Logic, as recorded in his Philosophical Notebooks.45
It was in this context that Lenin systematised his notion of revolutionary cri-
sis, which would guide his actions between February and October 1917. It made
it possible to break out of the vicious circle of submission, and finally rendered
conceivable the taking of power by a class subject to all forms of domination
(including ideological), once the routine of social reproduction was torn asun-
der. The general description is well known: the crisis occurs when those at the
top can longer govern as before…; when those below no longer tolerate it…;
when those in the middle hesitate and topple into the revolutionary camp…46
These three elements are closely bound together. A revolutionary crisis is
therefore a political crisis, and not simply an extension of protest or corporate
struggle, even if purely working-class in nature. It is a ‘national crisis’ of social
relations as a whole (Lenin constantly insists on this point). It is closely related
to another essential strategic concept, that of the duality of power between
two antagonistic legitimacies. Such a situation is conceivable only if there arise
instruments which begin to fulfil better or differently the functions which the
old state apparatus – paralysed, in the process of breaking up – can no longer
manage to fulfil.
Moreover, new forms must appear: ones that are not only more democratic,
but also more effective at carrying out necessary functions in the everyday life
45 See Löwy 1993.

46 [Ellipses in the original.]

of the majority of populations. The national crisis therefore implies the ques-
tion of hegemony.
So that the crisis can lead to a victorious conclusion, it is necessary that a
fourth element be added to the three enumerated by Lenin: a conscious proj-
ect and a force capable of initiative – of decision.47 The party is no longer the
Kautskyan pedagogue whose task is limited to rendering unconscious expe-
rience conscious and illuminating the path already sketched out by history.
It becomes a strategic operator capable of seizing the propitious moment,
of organising – if necessary – an orderly retreat, of seizing the initiative in a
counter-attack and switching to the offensive, of taking decisions in relation to
the ebb and flow of the class struggle. If revolution is first and foremost a social
uprising, its fate is decided politically and militarily, in a conjuncture where
hours count for days and days are worth years. That is why we must ‘prepare’
(contrary to Kautsky’s assertion) the revolution by constructing a collective
capable of acting in extreme situations, without being paralysed at the first
hurdle or suffering division at the first obstacle. What enables decision and
action is not just the passive accumulation of forces and the good education of
party cadres; it is the quality of the ties woven with the social movement and
the political and moral legitimacy of its direction.48
A revolutionary strategy based on the notions of revolutionary crisis and
dual power therefore implies a conception of the party quite different from
that of the Erfurt tradition. The party is no longer simply the product of the
social growth and maturity of the proletariat. It acts to modify the balance
of forces and forge necessary alliances. In other words, it engages in politics.
Lenin’s strategic thought is thus radically distinct from the mechanical leftist
idea of the ‘theory of the offensive’. This would be seen again in the assessment
he made of the disastrous action of March 1921 in Germany, and the reproach
he made to its instigators for having interpreted ‘the actuality of the revolu-
tion’ not in the sense of an epoch, but as immediate and continuous. They had
not thought in terms of economic cycles, cycles of experience, the ebb and
flow of struggles (and of consciousness), but according to a linear temporal-
ity, symmetrical to that of the snail’s-pace parliamentary reformism. Time had
become for them just as irreversible as electoral accumulation. Strategy was
then reduced to a permanent timeless offensive at the organisational, political
47 See Bensaïd 2003.

48 Lenin returns to the notion of revolutionary crisis in Left-wing Communism: An Infantile
Disorder.

16 doi 10.1163/1569206x-00001670 | Bensaïd
and military levels, combined with an evolutionary conception of the workers’

movement.49
Faced with the ‘economists’ who were the object of his polemic in What
Is to Be Done?, Lenin cited in glowing terms an article by Kautsky which had
appeared in Die Neue Zeit on the new programme of the Austrian Social-
Democratic party. This text follows the strict Erfurt logic of a fusion between
the reality of the workers’ movement and socialist doctrine:
But socialism and the class struggle arise side by side and not one out of
the other; each arises under different conditions. Modern socialist con-
sciousness can arise only on the basis of profound scientific knowledge
[…] The vehicle of science is not the proletariat, but the bourgeois intel-
ligentsia [K.K.’s italics] […] Thus, socialist consciousness is something
introduced into the proletarian class struggle from without [von Aussen
Hineingetragenes] and not something that arose within it spontaneously
[urwüchsig].50
Kautsky thus argued for the relative autonomy of theory and the pedagogical
role of the party, whilst insisting on the unequal relation between teacher and
taught.
By citing him as witness in his own cause against the economistic currents
of his party, Lenin was protecting himself behind an authority who remained
uncontested. As we have seen, however, a few pages further on he transforms
(consciously or not) the terms and the meaning of the text:
Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from

without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside
the sphere of relations between workers and employers. The sphere
from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge is the sphere of
relationships of all classes and strata to the state and the government,
the sphere of the interrelations between all classes … To bring political
knowledge to the workers the Social Democrats must go among all classes
of the population; they must dispatch units of their army in all directions.
49 See the assessment of the Reval insurrection in Neuberg 1970. The evolutionary concep-
tion of a workers’ movement, running through – in the manner of humanity – a scale
of ages, from early childhood to maturity, to which would correspond forms of specific
organisation was shared, to various degrees, by Görter, Pannekoek, Bordiga, the leaders
of the KAPD in Germany, and Zinoviev, Béla Kun and Mátyás Rákosi in the Communist
International.
50 See Footnote 33.

We deliberately select this blunt formula, we deliberately express our-

selves in this sharply simplified manner, not because we desire to indulge
in paradoxes, but in order to ‘impel’ the Economists to a realisation of
their tasks which they unpardonably ignore, to suggest to them strongly
the difference between trade-unionist and Social-Democratic politics,
which they refuse to understand.51
This passage clearly reminds us of the context and the stakes of the polemic
against the economists. Paraphrasing Kautsky, and undoubtedly convinced
that he was being faithful to him, Lenin in fact says something completely
different. Firstly, that political consciousness is born outside of the economic
struggle, outside the single sphere of production, but not outside of the class
struggle. Next, that knowledge of social relations demands, not a science mo-
nopolised by intellectuals, but knowledge of the reciprocal relation between
all classes – both among themselves and with the state – in other words, a
point of view of the totality of the relations of production, circulation, and
reproduction which characterise capital. Finally, that in order to produce such
knowledge, party politics, unlike trade-unionist politics, must synthesise the
intervention of its detachments among all classes of the population, and not
just within the confines of the factory. He thus defines a logic of hegemony
which is the exact opposite of a narrow workerism or economic determin-
ism. He confirms himself as an authentic thinker of politics as a strategic art.
Throughout the crucial sequence from February to October 1917, this strategic
thought exhibited its full scope by its capacity to match ebbs and flows, to deci-
pher the balance of forces, to seize the favourable moment of action, to change
slogans, to take the initiative.52
The interwar years were a period of effervescence and instability marked
by the repercussions of the Russian Revolution and by the struggle against fas-
cism. The great controversies which led to the separation between the Second
and the Third International centred on the ‘lessons of October’, on the con-
ceptions of the state and democracy, on the type of revolutionary party, and
on the colonial question. Beyond the first theoretical and organisational syn-
theses, however, the strategic implications of the Russian, German and Italian
experiences were only partially drawn out.53 From the Fifth Congress of the
51 Lenin 1961, p. 422.

52 Cf. ‘The April Theses’, ‘The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It’, or even the
comminatory telegrams he addressed to the Bolshevik leadership from his refuge in
Finland, calling for insurrection.
53 See Lenin 1974, pp. 227–325; Adler (ed.) 1980; Luxemburg 1961; Trotsky 1963, pp. 113–77.

18 doi 10.1163/1569206x-00001670 | Bensaïd
Communist International onwards, the assessment of the failure of the 1923

German October was compromised by the factional struggle which began the
day after Lenin’s death. The debate which had hardly begun over transitional
demands, the united front, and the workers’ government came to an abrupt
halt. It was continued, however, through the isolated reflections of Gramsci
and the contributions of the Left Opposition.
The paradigmatic opposition between East and West emphasised the dif-
ference between states reduced to their repressive apparatuses and states with
strong ramifications in society, the latter possessing as a corollary a strong
trade-union and parliamentary institutionalisation of the workers’ movement.
It followed from this that in the West, power seemed more difficult to seize but
easier to keep, and that it was necessary to distinguish between the universal
import of the lessons of October and their Eastern or Russian specificity. Thus
Trotsky envisaged the possibility of a brutal collapse of the national state, leav-
ing a void from which an alternative form of power could rapidly arise. But
he also envisaged the possibility of a long and slow crisis, enabling a gradual
apprenticeship in the holding of power. Workers’ control is not, thereby, re-
served – as the nascent orthodoxy claimed – to the paroxysmal moment of
dual power. It could begin to be exercised in local experiences. This different
approach holds in general for transitional demands, cooperatives, etc. The im-
portant thing for Trotsky was to escape the fetishism of organisational forms
and slogans, detached from the balance of forces and the concrete situation.
The great unfinished controversies of the interwar years, therefore, revolve
around a strategic systematisation of the notions of transitional demands,
the united front and hegemony. The discussion over the programme of the
Communist International began in the summer of 1922 in preparation for
the Third Congress and was continued until the Fifth, in light of the German
October and its failure.54 It was crystallised to a large extent over ‘transitional
demands’, which were supposed to go beyond the traditional distinction be-
tween minimum and maximum programme and the formal antinomy be-
tween reform and revolution. The point was to attribute to such claims not an
intrinsic value, but rather a dynamic function destined to modify the balance
of forces. Their formulation and their setting-out were therefore linked to the
question of the united front in action and its governmental outcome. The alge-
braic formula of ‘workers’ government’ inevitably gave rise to the most diverse,
and sometimes the most opposed, interpretations.
54 Ernesto Ragioneri, Le programme de l’Internationale Communiste, ‘Studi Storici’, 4

December 1972, in Cahiers d’Histoire de l’Institut Maurice Thorez, Nº 22, 1977.

The formula of the united front was tested out in the ‘open letter’ of
Radek and Paul Levi in January 1921, which proposed joint action with social-
democratic allies. Anticipating the change of direction of the Third Congress of
the Communist International, it constitutes a sort of preview. In his ‘Provisory
Remarks’ of July 1922 ‘on the question of the Comintern’s programme’, Radek
attempts to draw out the first lessons:
The age of revolution which, on a global scale, will probably last for de-
cades, makes it impossible, simply because of its very duration, to draw
out lessons from a general perspective. This leaves the communist par-
ties with a series of concrete questions that they up till now resolved
empirically. It is a matter of economic and political questions such as,
for example, the attitude regarding the defence of bourgeois democracy,
the attitude regarding the global politics of capitalism […]. Behind all
these questions lies the problem of the character of the current phase
of the world revolution, that is to say, the question of knowing whether
we should put forward transitional demands, which are in no way the
concretisation of the dictatorship of the proletariat as, for example, the
concrete demands of the Spartacus programme really were, but demands
which must carry the working class to a struggle which could become the
struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat.55
Radek consequently rejects the separation between tactics and programmatic

principles:
Such a rigid distinction between tactical questions and programmatic

ones was until now a characteristic of opportunism, which willingly pre-
served the cleanliness of the programme in order to keep hands free to
accomplish all sorts of filth on the practical terrain.56
Architect of the draft programme in 1922 but opposed to the NEP experiment
and the turn to the united front, Bukharin was converted to the new orienta-
tion after the Tenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and
the Third World Congress of the Communist International. He then revisited
the struggle between German orthodox Marxism and revisionist Marxism and
proclaimed the ‘total capitulation’ of the former to the latter: ‘We hadn’t no-
ticed it before, but today we can state it clearly and transparently, and we can
55 [Radek 1924, pp. 7–8.]

56 [Ibid.]

20 doi 10.1163/1569206x-00001670 | Bensaïd
also understand why it has happened.’ He stresses the misunderstood role of

the state but continues to play down transitional demands, reduced to simple
provisional slogans.
In his report to the Fourth Congress, Thalheimer took up again the reasons
for the theoretical break that the question of the mass strike produced in the
SPD: ‘One need only think back to the history of the Second International and
of its disintegration to recognise that it is precisely the separation between tac-
tical questions and overarching objectives which constitutes the beginning of
its opportunist slide [dérapage opportuniste].’57 This had begun with the con-
troversy between Bernstein and Kautsky over tactics, but ‘in the process it was
final goals which were lost from view’:
The specific difference between us and the reformist socialists does not
consist in the fact that we would like to detach reformist demands from
our programme (no matter what name we give them) to put them ‘in a
room apart,’ but in the fact that we situate these transitional demands,
these transitional slogans, in the closest relation with our principles and
our goals.58
To resolve the confrontation with Thalheimer, Lenin, Trotsky, Radek, Bukharin

and Zinoviev co-signed a conciliatory statement:
The debate on the question of knowing which formulation should be

given to transitional demands, and especially what place they should oc-
cupy in the programme, has given the totally false impression that there
exist divergences of principle. The Russian delegation confirms that the
inclusion of transitional demands in the programme of national sections,
as well as their general formulation and their theoretical justification in
the general part of the programme, cannot be considered as sullied with
opportunism.59
This ecumenical declaration did not settle the debate in a sense coherent with
the united-front approach and the winning of a majority among the masses,
as opposed to the putschist temptations revealed by the action of March 1921.
57 August Thalheimer, Report on Programme, Session 14, 18 November 1922, Fourth Congress
of the Communist International, in Riddell (ed.) 2012, p. 510.
58 Ibid.
59 Communist International 1923, p. 542.

At the Fifth Congress Bukharin and Thalheimer formed a common front

against the ‘lurch to the left’ and the ‘Bolshevisation’ advocated by Zinoviev
in reaction to the failure of the German October. Thalheimer’s report strove
to differentiate between situations according to the degree of development of
capitalism in the respective countries, with a view to foreseeing their conse-
quences for the agrarian question, the national question and the place of intel-
lectuals. For the first time here he tackled the problem of fascism. The question
of the programme was left in suspense, but returned as the Sixth Congress ap-
proached, now in the form of a manifesto, whose proclamatory aspect tended
to suppress strategic discussion.60 Gramsci and Trotsky each pursued in paral-
lel a strategic reflection, the so-called Transitional Programme amounting, for
the latter, to a provisional synthesis of this.61 This programme had to ‘bring the
mentality [of the workers] into harmony with the objective facts, to make the
workers understand the objective task’.62 It was not, then, a matter of adapting
to the mentality of the masses, but of tracing a perspective equal to the situ-
ation and its challenges: ‘Naturally if I closed my eyes I can write a good rosy
program that everybody will accept. But it will not correspond to the situation;
and the program must correspond to the situation.’63
In his discussion with American militants, Trotsky insisted:
The beginning of the program is not complete. The first chapter is only
a hint and not a complete expression. Also the end of the program is not
complete because we don’t speak here about the social revolution, about
the seizure of power by insurrection, the transformation of capitalist so-
ciety into the dictatorship, the dictatorship into the socialist society. This
brings the reader only to the doorstep. It is a program for action from
today until the beginning of the socialist revolution … There are two dan-
gers in the elaboration of the program. The first is to remain on general
abstract lines and to repeat the general slogan without real connection
with the trade unions in the locality. That is the direction of sectarian
abstraction. The other danger is the contrary, to adapt too much to the
local conditions, to the specific conditions, to lose the general revolution-
ary line.64
60 See Trotsky 1970.

61 For his discussion with members of the SWP, see Trotsky 1974.
62 Trotsky 1974, p. 141
63 Trotsky 1974, p. 127.
64 Trotsky 1974, p. 138.

22 doi 10.1163/1569206x-00001670 | Bensaïd
He cites, for example, the reticence amongst American militants over the arm-
ing of strike-pickets.
The discussions of the 1920s led to a relative clarification at the level of
principles. That said, they delivered neither a general programmatic formula,
nor a user manual or a discourse on method, beyond the concrete analysis
of concrete situations, of the precise evaluation of balance of forces and lev-
els of consciousness. They remained especially confused over the question of
government and its relation to the institutions, as well as over the relations
between class, party and state: the independence of social and trade-union
movements in relation to state and parties, as well as the major issue of politi-
cal pluralism, would in fact only begin to be clarified in the 1930s.65
3 Strategic Hypotheses
The notion of revolutionary strategy articulates a plurality of times and spac-

es. It combines history and event, act and process, the taking of power and
‘permanent revolution’. The revolutions of the twentieth century enable us to
draw out major strategic hypotheses. That of the insurrectional general strike
was inspired by the Paris Commune and the October insurrection. It involves
a confrontation with a rapid outcome; the central issue at stake is to take con-
trol of a capital and the centres of state power. That of prolonged popular war
was inspired by the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions. It involves the du-
rable installation of a dual territorial power and of self-administrated liber-
ated zones. From the German revolution to the Nicaraguan revolution, via the
Spanish Civil War, wars of national liberation, and the Cuban Revolution, the
experiences of the twentieth century present a variable combination of these
major characteristics. But all the subversive strategies have borrowed the po-
litical categories of modernity despite changing their meaning: sovereignty,
but democratic and popular; citizenship, but social; territorial liberation and
internationalism; war, but popular war. It is therefore not surprising that the
crisis of the political paradigm of modernity finds its reflection in the crisis of
strategies of subversion, starting with the disruption of their spatio-temporal
conditions.
Henri Lefebvre maintains that the development of knowledge requires the
implementation of strategic hypotheses. They commit without laying claim
to an eternal truth: sooner or later, ‘the strategic game is foiled’. The strategic
space is a force-field and a play of relations. The space of state domination is
65 Notably in Trotsky 1965.

that in which strategies are deployed that determine the places to be occupied,
the targets to attain, the centres of decision to besiege.66
The question broached here is limited to the struggle for the conquest of
political power on a national scale, which we shall call ‘restricted strategy’ in
order to distinguish it from ‘expanded strategy’ in time and space, which re-
lates to the theory of permanent revolution. In the context of globalisation,
nation states are weakened and certain transfers of sovereignty take place
to the advantage of supranational institutions. But the national level legally
structures class relations, articulates a territory to a state, and remains decisive
within the moveable scale of strategic spaces.67
Criticisms of a ‘stageist’ vision of the revolutionary process (which makes
taking power an ‘absolute precondition’ for all social transformation) are ei-
ther caricatures or ignorant of the debates within the revolutionary move-
ments. If the strategic question could sometimes be summed up in the formula
‘how does nothing become everything?’, this was in order to underline the fact
that revolutionary rupture is a perilous leap, from which a hidden passenger
(bureaucracy) can benefit. It must therefore be qualified. It isn’t true that the
proletariat is nothing before the taking of power; and it is doubtful that it has
to become everything! Borrowed from the Internationale, this alternative of
all and nothing aims only to emphasise the structural asymmetry between
bourgeois (political) revolution and social revolution, the former continuing
the inherited cultural and economic positions of power, while the latter con-
fronts a form of domination which is just as much economic as political and
cultural.
The categories of the united front, transitional demands and workers’
government, as defended each in their own way by Trotsky, Thalheimer,
Radek and Clara Zetkin in the programmatic debates of the Communist
International until its Sixth Congress, aimed precisely at articulating the
revolutionary event with its preparatory conditions, reforms with revolu-
tion, the movement with the goal. The notions of hegemony and ‘war of po-
sition’ were aimed in the same direction.68 The opposition between the East
(where power was presumed to be easier to conquer, but more difficult to
keep) and the West belonged to the same preoccupation. These approaches
66 Lefebvre 1991. [Lefebvre refers throughout to ‘strategic hypotheses’, but only deals with
‘strategic space’ overtly on p. 375.] Cf. the initiative of the Amadora commandos in
November 1975 in Portugal, the assault on Barcelona’s Telefonica in 1937, the taking of the
Winter Palace in 1917 in Russia, the assault on the Moneda by the putschists in September
1973 in Chile… Or even the attempted torching of the Bourse in 1968.
67 See Critique Communiste, Nº 179 (December 2005) and Nº 180 (July 2006).
68 See Anderson 1976.

24 doi 10.1163/1569206x-00001670 | Bensaïd
were opposed to the fatalistic breakdown theory (Zusammenbruchtheorie),

championed in the late 1920s by economists and ideologues of the nascent
Stalinist orthodoxy.
Against both spontaneist views of the revolutionary process and structur-
alist immobilism, in the 1960s we stressed the role of the ‘subjective factor’
and the importance, not of models, but of ‘strategic hypotheses’. This was not
a matter of terminological affectation. A model is something you copy, with
an instruction manual. A hypothesis is a guide for action, nourished by past
experiences, but open and modifiable in the light of new experiences and to-
tally new circumstances. It is not a matter of speculations, but of what one can
retain from past experiences (which are the only available material), knowing
that the future is never simply their repetition: revolutionaries always run a
risk analogous to that of soldiers, of whom it is said that they always fight yes-
terday’s battles.
From the revolutionary events of the twentieth century (the Russian and
Chinese revolutions, but also the German Revolution, the Popular Front, the
Civil War in Spain, the Vietnamese War of Liberation, May ’68, the Portuguese
Carnation Revolution, Popular Unity and the coup d’état in Chile, the revolu-
tions in Central America…) two major hypotheses can be drawn. They corre-
spond to two major types of crisis, two forms of dual power, two modes of
resolution of class antagonism.
For the hypothesis of the insurrectional strike, the duality of power assumes
a principally urban form, of the Commune type (not only the Paris Commune,
but the Petrograd Soviet, the Hamburg insurrection, the Canton insurrection,
those of 1936 and 1937 in Barcelona…). Two opposed powers cannot exist for
long in a concentrated space. A rapid dénouement is imposed, which can lead
on to a prolonged conflict: civil war in Russia, war of liberation in Vietnam
after the insurrection of 1945 … For this hypothesis, the work of organising
soldiers and demoralising the army (in the majority of cases, conscripts) plays
an important role.69
For the hypothesis of prolonged popular war, dual power assumes a more
territorial form (self-administering liberated zones), which can coexist for a
longer period of time in conflict with the established order. Mao summarised
some of its conditions in his 1927 pamphlet, ‘Why is it that red political power
can exist in China?’. The Yenan experience provided an illustration of it in
the 1930s. Whilst in the general insurrectional strike the organs of alternative
69 Cf. Vv.Aa. 1970; Brossat and Potel 1975–6; see also the experience of committees of soldiers
in France, of the SUV [Soldados Unidos Vencerão – ‘Soldiers United Will Win’] in Portugal,
and, from a more conspiratorial perspective, the work of the MIR in the Chilean army.

power are socially determined by urban conditions (Paris Commune, soviets,

workers’ councils, the Catalan militia committees, industrial cordones and
communal commandos in Chile…), in people’s war they are concentrated in a
‘people’s army’ consisting predominantly of the peasantry.
Between these two refined hypotheses there exists a whole range of vari-
ants and intermediary combinations. In spite of its foquista legend (simplified,
amongst others, by Debray’s book, Revolution in the Revolution), the Cuban
Revolution linked the guerrilla foco – as the core of the rebel army – with the
attempts at trade-union organisation and urban general strikes in Havana and
Santiago. The relation between the two was problematic, as witnessed in the
correspondence of Frank País, Daniel Ramos Latour, and Che himself, on the
recurrent tensions between la selva [forest] and el llano [the plains].70 The of-
ficial narrative, magnifying a posteriori the heroic epic of the Granma and its
survivors, serves to reinforce the legitimacy of the ‘26th July Movement’ and
the leading Castroite group, to the detriment of a more complex understand-
ing of the process and of its actors. Setting up the rural guerrilla as a model, this
mythologised version of the Cuban Revolution inspired the experiments of the
1960s (in Peru, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Colombia, Bolivia). The death in action of
De la Puente and Lobaton, of Camillo Torres, of Yon Sosa, of Lucio Cabañas in
Mexico, of Marighela and Lamarca in Brazil, Che’s tragic expedition in Bolivia,
the well-nigh annihilation of the Sandinistas in 1967 at Pancasán, the disaster
of Teoponte in Bolivia, all marked the end of this cycle.
In the early 1970s the strategic hypothesis of the Argentinian PRT and
the Chilean MIR was inspired more by the Vietnamese example of people’s
war (and, in the case of the PRT, a mythical version of the Algerian War of
Liberation). The history of the Sandinista Front, until its victory over the
Somoza dictatorship in 1979, illustrates the combination of these different
orientations. The ‘prolonged people’s war’ tendency of Tomás Borge stressed
the development of the guerrilla in the mountains and the necessity of a long
period of gradual accumulation of forces. The ‘proletarian tendency’ (led by
Jaime Wheelock) insisted on the social effects of capitalist development in
Nicaragua and the strengthening of the working class whilst maintaining a
perspective of prolonged accumulation of forces in the perspective of an ‘in-
surrectional moment’. The Tercerist tendency (of the Ortega brothers), which
synthesised the other two, enabled the articulation of the southern front with
the Managua uprising.
A posteriori, Humberto Ortega summarised the divergences in these terms:
70 See Franqui 1980.

26 doi 10.1163/1569206x-00001670 | Bensaïd
What I mean by passive accumulation of forces is a policy of not getting

involved in the conjunctures, of gaining strength while standing on the
sidelines; a passive policy of alliances. It’s a passive view which holds that
it is possible to pile up weapons and gain in organisation and number
without fighting the enemy, while sitting on the sidelines, without involv-
ing the masses.71
He also recognised that circumstances had upset everybody’s plans: ‘We issued
a call for the uprising. A series of events, of objective conditions, came up all
of a sudden that prevented us from being better prepared. We could not stop
the insurrection. The mass movement went beyond the vanguard’s capacity to
take the lead. We certainly could not oppose that mass movement, stop that
avalanche. On the contrary, we had to put ourselves at the forefront in order
to lead it and channel it to a certain extent.’72 And to conclude: ‘Our insur-
rectional strategy was centred on the masses, not on military considerations.
It’s important to understand that.’73 The strategic option effectively involves
an ordering of political priorities, of spheres of intervention, of slogans, and it
determines the politics of alliances.
From Los días de la selva to El Trueno en la ciudad, Mario Payeras’s nar-
rative of the Guatemalan revolutionary process marks a return from the
forest to the town, and a change in relations between military struggle and
political struggle, town and country. From 1974, A Critique of Arms by Régis
Debray recorded the assessment and the evolution of strategies on the Latin
American continent since the Cuban Revolution. In Europe and the United
States the disastrous histories of the RAF (Red Army Faction, better known
71 Ortega 1982, p. 58. When asked about the date of the call to insurrection, Ortega responds:
‘Because by then a whole series of objective conditions were coming to a head: the eco-
nomic crisis, the devaluation of the córdoba, the political crisis. And also because, after
September, we realised that it was necessary to strategically combine, in both time and
space, the uprising of the masses throughout the country, the offensive by the Front’s mil-
itary forces, and the nationwide strike in which the employers, as well, were involved or
in agreement. There would be no victory unless we succeeded in combining these three
strategic factors in the same time and space. There had already been several nationwide
strikes, but not combined with the masses’ offensive. There had been mass uprisings, but
not combined with the strike or with the vanguard’s capacity to hit the enemy hard. And
the vanguard had already dealt blows, but the other two factors had been absent.’ (Ortega
1982, p. 73.)
72 Ortega 1982, p. 66.
73 Ortega 1982, p. 70.

as the Baader-Meinhof Group),74 and other attempts to translate the expe-

rience of the rural guerrilla into an ‘urban guerrilla’, finished de facto with
the 1970s. The significant armed movements which managed to endure were
those which found their social basis in the struggles against national oppres-
sion (in Ireland or Euzkadi).75
The strategic hypotheses discussed here are not reducible to a military ori-
entation. They determine an ensemble of political tasks. Thus, the PRT’s un-
derstanding of the Argentinian revolution as a national war of liberation led
to privileging the construction of the army (the ERP, People’s Revolutionary
Army) to the detriment of self-organisation in workplaces and neighbour-
hoods. Likewise, the trend of the MIR, which stressed – under the Popular
Unity government – the accumulation of forces (and rural bases) in the per-
spective of a prolonged armed struggle, led to its downplaying the test of
strength imposed by the coup d’état and an underestimation of its long-term
consequences. Nonetheless, in the wake of the aborted coup d’état (tancazo) of
June 1973, which was a dress rehearsal for the successful coup of September,
Miguel Enriquez seized the short moment propitious to the formation of a
combat government which would prepare for the test of strength.
The Sandinista victory of 1979 marked a new turning-point. That is what
Mario Payeras maintains. He holds that in Guatemala (and in El Salvador) the
revolutionary movements were from that moment on no longer confronted
with worm-eaten puppet dictators, but with Israeli, Taiwanese and US advi-
sors, with sophisticated strategies of ‘low intensity warfare’ and ‘counter-
insurrection’. This growing asymmetry of the struggle has since spread out on
a global scale with the new strategic doctrines of the Pentagon, new weapons
and the ‘unlimited’ war on ‘terror’. That is one of the reasons (on top of rev-
elations about the Stalinist Gulag, the damage of the Cultural Revolution in
China, and the hyper-violence of the Cambodian tragedy) why the question of
revolutionary violence, yesterday perceived as innocent and liberatory (via the
epics of the Granma and Che, or the texts of Fanon, Giap, Cabral), has become
so thorny.
Thus, we can now witness a certain hesitating quest for an asymmetri-
cal strategy of weak-to-strong, which would effect a synthesis of Lenin and
74 Not to mention the ephemeral tragicomedy of the Gauche Prolétarienne in France – and
the theses of July and Geismar in their unforgettable Vers la guerre civile [Towards Civil
War] (Geismar, July and Morane 1969).
75 See Dissidences 2006.

28 doi 10.1163/1569206x-00001670 | Bensaïd
Gandhi,76 or direct itself squarely towards non-violence.77 Since the fall of the
Berlin Wall, however, the world has not become less violent, and it would be
imprudently angelic from now on to wager on a hypothetical ‘peaceful path’
that nothing, in the ‘century of extremes’, has validated.
4 Insurrectional General Strike
The strategic hypothesis which served as a yardstick for the majority of revo-
lutionary movements in developed countries was that of the insurrectional
general strike. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was opposed to adapted variants of
Maoism and imaginary interpretations of the Cultural Revolution. It is this hy-
pothesis that we are ‘orphans’ of today.
Yesterday it had a ‘use’ which today is lost. On the one hand, in countries
with complex class-relations and a long parliamentary tradition, dual power
cannot suddenly spring from the void in the form of a pyramid of soviets or
councils in total exteriority to existing institutions. If such a vision was cur-
rent in the juvenile leftism of ’68, it was corrected quite swiftly.78 It is obvious
a fortiori that, in countries with parliamentary traditions that are more than
a century old, and where the principle of universal suffrage is solidly estab-
lished, it is impossible to imagine a revolutionary process without a transfer
of legitimacy in favour of forms of direct or participatory democracy interact-
ing with representative forms. During the Nicaraguan Revolution, the fact of
organising ‘free’ elections in the context of civil war and a state of siege was up
for discussion, but not the principle of such elections. That said, the elimina-
tion of social movements from the ‘Council of State’ could be held against the
Sandinistas, since this might have constituted a sort of second social chamber
and a centre of alternative legitimacy opposed to the elected Parliament.79
76 The theme of recent texts by Étienne Balibar.

77 The debate on non-violence in the theoretical journal (Alternative) of Rifondazione
Comunista [Communist Refoundation Party] is not without relation to its current course
of action.
78 See Ernest Mandel, notably his polemics against the Eurocommunist theses. See his
book on Eurocommunism in Maspero’s ‘Petite’ collection [the English version is Mandel
1978], his response to Althusser and Elleinstein [in Mandel 1979 – the first two chapters
have been translated into English and are available here: <http://www.ernestmandel.org/
en/works/txt/1982/mandel_on_althusser.htm>] and especially his interview in Critique
Communiste in 1978 [entitled ‘L’actualité du Trotskysme’].
79 On a more modest scale, it would be useful to come back to the dialectic between the
municipal institution, elected via universal suffrage, and the committees for the partici-
patory budget of Porto Alegre.

The essential problem is not that of the relationship between territorial

democracy and workplace democracy (the Paris Commune, the soviets, and
the popular assembly of Setúbal in 1975 were also territorial democracies),
nor even that of the relationship between direct democracy and representa-
tive democracy (all democracy is partially representative, and Lenin himself
never supported the idea of an imperative mandate), but that of the forma-
tion of a general will. The reproach addressed (by the Eurocommunists and
Norberto Bobbio in the 1970s) to the soviet type of democracy was aimed at
its corporative logic: a sum (a pyramid) of particular interests (parochial, busi-
ness, bureaucratic), linked by imperative mandate, could not form a general
will. Democratic subsidiarity also has its limits: if the inhabitants of a valley
oppose the passage of a road, or a town opposes a rubbish dump, in order to
foist them on a neighbouring valley or town, a form of centralised arbitration
seems necessary to resolve disputes, seeking – without guarantee of actually
reaching – the common interest.80 The mediation of parties (and their plural-
ity) is necessary to reach synthetic propositions starting from particular points
of view.
Another objection criticises the transitional approach for stopping at the
threshold of the question of power, relying on an improbable deus ex machina
or supposing that the question of power will be resolved by the spontaneous
upsurge of the masses and the generalised irruption of soviet democracy. A
discussion about the formulation of transitional demands and their variation
as a function of the balance of forces and level of consciousness is legitimate.
But questions touching on the private ownership of the means of production,
communication and exchange inevitably occupy a central place, whether
bearing on a pedagogy of public service, the common goods of humanity, or
the increasingly important question of the socialisation of knowledge (as op-
posed to intellectual private property). Likewise, it is important to explore the
possible forms of socialisation of wages by means of systems of social protec-
tion, in order to work towards the withering-away of the wage system. Finally,
opposed to generalised commodification, possibilities are opened up by the
extension of free domains (or domains of ‘decommodification’), not only in
services but also in certain necessary consumer goods.
The thorniest question regarding a transitional approach, and one left un-
settled by the discussions and experiences of the inter-war years, is that of a
‘workers’ government’ [‘gouvernement ouvrier’] or ‘government of working
80 The experience of the participative budget at the level of the state in Rio Grande do Sul
offers concrete examples of credits, hierarchy of priorities, territorial distribution of col-
lective equipment, etc.

30 doi 10.1163/1569206x-00001670 | Bensaïd
people’ [‘gouvernement des travailleurs’]. During the Fifth Congress of the

Communist International, the debates over the assessment of the German
Revolution and the governments in Saxony and Thuringia showed all the un-
resolved ambiguity of the formulas from the first congresses of the CI, plus the
range of interpretations to which they could give rise. In his report addressed
to the delegates of this conference, Treint emphasised that ‘the dictatorship
of the proletariat does not fall from the sky: it must have a beginning, and the
workers’ government is synonymous with the start of the dictatorship of the
proletariat.’81 On the other hand, he denounced the ‘Saxonisation’ of the unit-
ed front:
The entry of communists into a coalition government with bourgeois

pacifists in order to prevent an intervention against the revolution was
not false in theory, but governments like that of the Labour Party or the
Left Cartel mean that bourgeois democracy finds echoes in our own
parties.82
In the debate over the activity of the International, and addressing the same
congress, Šmeral declared: ‘As for the Czech communists’ February 1923 theses
on the workers’ government, we were all convinced whilst drafting them that
they conformed to the decisions of the Fourth Congress. There were adopted
unanimously.’83 But, he added, ‘what are the masses thinking of when they
speak about a workers’ government?’:
In England, they think of the Labour Party; in Germany and in countries

where capitalism is decomposing, the ‘united front’ means that the com-
munists and the social-democrats, instead of fighting each other when
a strike is triggered, march shoulder-to-shoulder. But the ‘workers’ gov-
ernment’ has the same meaning for these masses, and when we use this
formula they imagine a unity government of all the workers’ parties.84
81 [Editorial note: no source could be found.]

82 [Editors – presumably ibid.]
83 Šmeral, Sixth Session, 21 June, found at Fifth World Congress of the Communist
International, Abridged Report of Meetings held in Moscow, 17 June to 8 July 1924.
84 [Editorial note: This is Karl Radek’s intervention, not Šmeral’s.] Sixth Session, 21 June,
found at Fifth World Congress of the Communist International, Abridged Report of
Meetings held in Moscow, 17 June to 8 July 1924.

Šmeral continued: ‘In what consists the profound lesson of the Saxon ex-
perience? First of all in this: we cannot suddenly jump with our feet together
without gathering momentum.’85
Ruth Fischer responded that as a coalition of workers’ parties, the workers’
government would mean ‘the liquidation of our party’. But in her report on the
failure of the German October, Clara Zetkin maintained the opposite:
Concerning the workers’ and peasants’ government, I cannot accept

Zinoviev’s declaration according to which it would be a matter of a
simple pseudonym, a synonym or God knows what homonym, of the
dictatorship of the proletariat. Maybe it was right for Russia, but it does
not necessarily hold for countries where capitalism has been rigorously
developed. There, the workers’ and peasants’ government is the political
expression of a situation where the bourgeoisie can no longer maintain
itself in power but where the proletariat is not yet in a position to impose
its dictatorship.86
Zinoviev, for his part, defined as the ‘elementary objective of the workers’ gov-
ernment’ measures as non-elementary as the arming of the proletariat, work-
ers’ control over production, a fiscal revolution…
Rereading these interventions, and still others besides, one gets an impres-
sion of great confusion. This confusion translates a real contradiction and
reveals an unresolved problem, even though the question was posed under
pressure, in a genuinely revolutionary or pre-revolutionary situation. It could
not be resolved by a users’ manual valid for all circumstances. It is nonethe-
less possible to draw out combined criteria for participation in a governmental
coalition: that the context of such participation is a situation of crisis and sig-
nificant increase in social mobilisation; that the government is committed to
initiating a rupture with the established order (for example – more modestly
than the arming demanded by Zinoviev – a radical agrarian reform, ‘despotic
incursions’ into the domain of private property, the abolition of fiscal privileg-
es, rupture with the institutions – those of the Fifth Republic in France, those
of European treaties or military pacts…); finally, that the balance of forces
permits the revolutionaries, if not to guarantee that their allies keep the com-
mitments made, then at least to make them pay heavily in case of possible
breaches.
85 Ibid.
86 Clara Zetkin, Eleventh Session, 24 June, found at Fifth World Congress of the Communist
International, Abridged Report of Meetings held in Moscow, 17 June to 8 July 1924.

32 doi 10.1163/1569206x-00001670 | Bensaïd
The question of the workers’ government echoes that of the dictatorship of

the proletariat. Today, the term ‘dictatorship’ evokes military or bureaucratic
dictatorships far more than it does the venerable Roman institution of a power
of exception duly mandated by the Senate for a limited time. Since Marx saw
the Paris Commune as the ‘finally discovered form’ of this dictatorship, it is
better, if we wish to be understood, to refer to the Commune, soviets, workers’
councils or self-management, than to cling to a fetish word which history has
made into a source of confusion.87
Nonetheless, we are not finished for all that with the basic question raised by
Marx’s formula and the importance he accorded to it. The dictatorship of the
proletariat generally evokes the image of an authoritarian regime synonymous
with bureaucratic dictatorships. To Marx’s mind, on the contrary, it meant the
democratic solution of an old problem thanks to the exercise, for the first time
majoritarian in nature, of the exceptional power which until then had always
been reserved for a virtuous elite or a ‘triumvirate’ of exemplary men.88 The
term ‘dictatorship’ was thus opposed to that of tyranny as an expression of
arbitrariness.
The dictatorship of the proletariat also had a strategic bearing, often evoked
in debates surrounding its abandonment by most (Euro)communist parties at
the end of the 1970s. For Marx, it was clear that a new form of law, expressing
new social relations, could not be born as a continuation of the old form, by a
sort of juridical self-generation: ‘between two equal rights’, and two opposing
social legitimacies, ‘it is force that decides’.
Revolution, for the socialists of the Second International (including Kautsky,
and Blum at the Tours Congress), therefore implied a necessary transition
through dictatorship as the proletarian form of a state of exception bound up
with a state of war or civil war.89 What made it possible for these emergency
87 The Commune, so Millière said, was not a Constituent Assembly, but a war council. It
must have a single law: ‘that of public salvation’. Trotsky continues: ‘The Commune was
the living negation of formal democracy because, in its development, it marked the dicta-
torship of working-class Paris over the peasant nation.’
88 See Galante-Garrone 1975.
89 For Trotsky it is ‘obvious’ that if the revolution sets itself the task of abolishing individual
property, ‘the only road to its solution lies through the concentration of State power in its
entirety in the hands of the proletariat, and the setting up for the transitional period of
an exceptional regime – a regime in which the ruling class is guided, not by general prin-
ciples calculated for a prolonged period, but by considerations of revolutionary policy.
The dictatorship is necessary because it is a case, not of partial changes, but of the very
existence of the bourgeoisie. No agreement is possible on this ground … Abandoning the
idea of a revolutionary dictatorship, Kautsky transforms the question of the conquest
of power by the proletariat into a question of the conquest of a majority of votes by the

measures to be made permanent was confusion between the exception and

the rule; a confusion all the more tenacious in that the revolution was also a
permanent process in international terms, and that the question of relations
between party, state, and councils or soviets remained an obscure point in the
first congresses of the Communist International. The dictatorship of the prole-
tariat could thus be interpreted as a dictatorship of the party, indeed of a single
party, as Trotsky does in Terrorism and Communism:
We have more than once been accused of having substituted for the dic-
tatorship of the Soviets the dictatorship of our party … In this ‘substitu-
tion’ of the power of the party for the power of the working class there
is nothing accidental, and in reality there is no substitution at all. The
Communists express the fundamental interests of the working class. It is
quite natural that, in the period in which history brings up those interests,
in all their magnitude, on to the order of the day, the Communists have
become the recognised representatives of the working class as a whole.90
The dictatorship of the proletariat thus means ‘in substance’, in the fire of civil
war,
the immediate supremacy of the revolutionary vanguard, which relies

upon the heavy masses, and, where necessary, obliges the backward tail
to dress by the head. This refers also to the trade unions. After the con-
quest of power by the proletariat, they acquire a compulsory character …
The further we go, however, the more do the unions recognise that they
are organs of production of the Soviet State … The unions become the
organisers of labor discipline. They demand from the workers intensive
labor under the most difficult conditions … The introduction of compul-
sory labor service is unthinkable without the application, to a greater or
lesser degree, of the methods of militarization of labor.91
Social-Democratic Party in one of the electoral campaigns of the future … This fetishism
of the parliamentary majority represents a brutal repudiation, not only of the dictator-
ship of the proletariat, but of Marxism and of the revolution altogether.’ Trotsky 1961, pp.
20–1. Trotsky announces his opposition to the death penalty inflicted by courts-martial,
but in executing counter-revolutionary conspirators he affirms action ‘in conformity with
the laws of war’.
90 Trotsky 1961, p. 109.
91 Trotsky 1961, pp. 110–11 and 137.

34 doi 10.1163/1569206x-00001670 | Bensaïd
Trotsky would have to take the full measure of the professional dangers of
power and the logic of the bureaucratic monopoly for him to draw from this, in
The Revolution Betrayed, a theoretical critique of the single-party regime and a
principled defence of pluralism.
In the civil-war period, Lenin remained closer to the spirit of Marx. Faced
with the desperate resistance of the rich, the victory of the proletariat ‘can be
only a dictatorship’, but it must be a ‘democratic dictatorship’, whose aim is to
‘establish consistent and full democracy including the formation of a republic’
and ‘eradicate all the oppressive features of Asiatic bondage.’92 Notably, he re-
calls that the tasks assigned by Marx to the dictatorship of 1848 involved ‘noth-
ing other than revolutionary democratic dictatorship’. He thus insists:
In civil war, any victorious power can only be a dictatorship. The point is,
however, that there is the dictatorship of a minority over the majority, the
dictatorship of a handful of police officials over the people; and there is
the dictatorship of the overwhelming majority of the people over a hand-
ful of tyrants, robbers and usurpers of the people’s power.93
He defines the dictatorship as ‘an authority unrestricted by any laws’, or as ‘un-

limited, outside the law, and based on force in the most direct sense of the
word’, or again as ‘nothing more nor less than authority untrammelled by any
laws, absolutely unrestricted by any rules whatever, and based directly on
force.’94 Such formulations evoke a dialectic of force and law, and the role of
violence as moment of the foundation of law: ‘dictatorship means unlimited
power, based on force, and not on law’.95 This could be the exact definition of
the ‘sovereign dictator’, distinguished by Schmitt from the commissarial dicta-
tor. The source of power is not parliamentary law, but ‘sprang directly from the
masses’, ‘a direct and immediate instrument of the popular masses’, – in other
words, the exercise of a constituting power.96
To the extent that the ‘abolition of classes’ presupposes that of the bour-
geois state and the overthrow of the dictatorship of capital, ‘The question of
the dictatorship of the proletariat is the fundamental question of the modern
working-class movement in all capitalist countries without exception.’97 This
92 Lenin 1988a, p. 54.

93 Lenin 1988b, p. 347.
94 Lenin 1988b, p. 353.
95 Lenin 1988b, p. 347.
96 Lenin 1988b, p. 352.
97 Lenin 1988b, p. 340.

shows to what extent, for Lenin as for Marx, this ‘essential’ question bears less
on the institutional forms and duration of the regime of exception (Lenin,
faithful to the spirit of The State and Revolution, goes so far as to maintain that
this dictatorship is a power ‘without any police’),98 than on the necessary rup-
ture of continuity, including juridical continuity, between two dominations
and two legitimacies. As paradoxical as it may seem, for Lenin not only is the
dictatorship of the proletariat, understood in this way, not incompatible with
the withering-away of the state, it is in fact the first stage of it.
References
Adler, Alan (ed.) 1980, Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses
of the Third International, translated by Alix Holt and Barbara Holland, London: Ink
Links.
Anderson, Perry 1976, ‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’, New Left Review, I, 100:
5–78.
Antonini, Bruno 2004, État et socialisme chez Jean Jaurès, Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan.
Benjamin, Walter 1968, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, trans-
lated by Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books.
Bensaïd, Daniel 2003, ‘La Politique comme art stratégique’, in Un monde à changer.
Mouvements et stratégies, Paris: Textuel.
Bernstein, Eduard 1993 [1899], The Preconditions of Socialism, edited and translated by
Henry Tudor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brossat, Alain and Jean-Yves Potel 1975–6, Antimilitarisme et révolution, two volumes,
Paris: Union générale d’éditions.
Communist International 1923, Protokoll des Vierten Kongresses der Kommunistischen
Internationale, Hamburg: Verlag der Kommunistischen Internationale.
Dissidences 2006, Révolution, lutte armée et terrorisme, Volume 1, Paris: Éditions
L’Harmattan.
Franqui, Carlos 1980, Diary of the Cuban Revolution, translated by Georgette Felix et al.,
New York: Viking Press.
Galante-Garrone, Alessandro 1975, Philippe Buonarroti et les révolutionnaires du XIXe
siècle, 1828–1837, Paris: Champ libre.
Geismar, Alain, Serge July and Erlyne Morane 1969, Vers la guerre civile, Paris: Éditions
et publications premières.
Halévy, Elie 1904, Le Radicalisme Philosophique, Paris: Félix Alcan.
98 Lenin 1988b, p. 352.

36 doi 10.1163/1569206x-00001670 | Bensaïd
Kautsky, Karl 1901–2, ‘Die Revision des Programms der Sozialdemokratie in Oesterreich’,
Die Neue Zeit, 20. Jahrgang, 1. Band: 68–82.
Kautsky, Karl 1909, The Road to Power, translated by A.M. Simons, Chicago: Samuel A.
Bloch.
Kautsky, Karl 1910a, ‘Zwischen Baden und Luxemburg’, Die Neue Zeit, 28. Jahrgang, 2.
Band: 652–67.
Karl Kautsky 1910b, ‘Eine neue Strategie’, Die Neue Zeit, 28. Jahrgang, 2. Band: 332–41,
364–74, 412–21.
Kautsky, Karl 1910c, ‘Was nun?’, Die Neue Zeit, 28. Jahrgang, 2. Band: 33–40, 68–80.
Kautsky, Karl 1910d [1892], The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program), translated by William E.
Bohn, Charles H. Kerr & Co.
Kautsky, Karl 1911–12, ‘Die neue Taktik’, Die Neue Zeit, 30. Jahrgang, 2. Band: 654–64,
688–98, 723–33.
Kautsky, Karl 1914, Der politische Massenstreik. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der
Massenstreikdiskussionen innerhalb der deutschen Sozialdemokratie, Berlin:
Veröffentlicht von Buchhandlung Vorwärts Paul Singer GmbH.
Kautsky, Karl 1971 [1892], The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program), translated by William E.
Bohn, New York: Norton & Co.
Kautsky, Karl 1983, Karl Kautsky: Selected Political Writings, edited by Patrick Goode,
London: Macmillan.
Lefebvre, Henri 1991, The Production of Space, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith,
Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 1961 [1902], ‘What Is to Be Done?: Burning Questions of Our
Movement’, in Collected Works, Volume 5, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing
House.
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 1974 [1918], The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky,
in Collected Works, Volume 28, Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 1988a [1905], Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic
Dictatorship, in Collected Works, Volume 9, Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 1988b [1920], A Contribution to the History of the Question of the
Dictatorship, in Collected Works, Volume 31, Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Lewis, Ben (forthcoming), Karl Kautsky on Democracy and Republicanism, Historical
Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.
Lih, Lars T. 2005, Lenin Rediscovered: ‘What Is to Be Done?’ in Context, Historical
Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.
Löwy, Michael 1993 [1976], ‘From the “Logic” of Hegel to the Finland Station in
Petrograd’, in On Changing the World: Essays in Political Philosophy, from Karl Marx
to Walter Benjamin, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
Luxemburg, Rosa 1961, The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism?, edited by
Bertram D. Wolfe, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Luxemburg, Rosa 2004 [1904], ‘Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy’,

in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, edited by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson, New
York: Monthly Review Press.
Mandel, Ernest 1978, From Stalinism to Eurocommunism: The Bitter Fruits of ‘Socialism
in One Country’, London: NLB.
Mandel, Ernest 1979, Réponse à Louis Althusser et Jean Elleinstein, Paris: La Brèche.
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels 1982, Collected Works, Volume 38, 1844–51, Letters,
London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Neuberg, A. 1970, Armed Insurrection, London: NLB.
Ortega, Humberto 1982, ‘Nicaragua: The Strategy of Victory’, interview conducted by
Martha Harnecker, in Tomás Borge et al., Sandinistas Speak, New York: Pathfinder
Press.
Pannekoek, Anton 1911–12, ‘Massenaktion und Revolution’, Die Neue Zeit, 30. Jahrgang,
2. Band: 541–50, 585–93, 609–16.
Pannekoek, Anton 1978, ‘Marxist Theory and Revolutionary Tactics’, in Pannekoek and
Görter’s Marxism, edited by D.A. Smart, London: Pluto Press.
Radek, Karl 1924, ‘Zur Frage des Programms der Kommunistischen Internationale
(Vorläufige Bemerkungen)’, in Materialien zur Frage des Programms der Kom
munistischen Internationale, Hamburg: Verlag der Kommunistischen Internationale.
Ragionieri, Ernesto 1977, ‘Le programme de l’Internationale Communiste’, Cahiers
d’Histoire de l’Institut Maurice Thorez, 22: 8–52.
Riddell, John (ed.) 2012, Toward the United Front: Proceedings of the Fourth Congress
of the Communist International, 1922, Historical Materialism Book Series, Chicago:
Haymarket Books.
Sawer, Marian 1977, ‘The Genesis of State and Revolution’, in Socialist Register 1977, ed-
ited by Ralph Miliband and John Saville, London: Merlin Press.
Trotsky, Leon 1961 [1920], Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky, Ann
Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Trotsky, Leon 1963 [1924], ‘The Lessons of October’, in The Essential Trotsky, London:
Allen & Unwin.
Trotsky, Leon 1965 [1937], The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where
Is It Going?, translated by Max Eastman, New York: Merit Publishers.
Trotsky, Leon 1970 [1928], The Third International after Lenin, translated by John G.
Wright, New York: Pathfinder Press.

38 doi 10.1163/1569206x-00001670 | Bensaïd
Trotsky, Leon 1974, ‘(Discussions with Leon Trotsky) On the Transitional Program’, in
The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution, including: ‘The Death Agony of
Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International’, New York: Pathfinder Press.
Trotsky, Leon 1979 [1904], Our Political Tasks, London: New Park Publications.
Vv.Aa. 1970, Crosse en l’air. Le mouvement ouvrier et l’armée, 1900/1914, Paris: François
Maspero.
Weber, Henri (ed.) 1983, Socialisme: la voie occidentale. Introduction au débat sur la
grève de masse: Kautsky, Luxemburg, Pannekoek, Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France.

Daniel Bensaïd (2018) Strategy and Politics. From Marx To The Third International

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Daniel Bensaïd (2018) Strategy and Politics. From Marx To The Third International

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–38

Strategy and Politics: From Marx to the Third

Marxism – Daniel Bensaïd – Lenin – strategy – Second International – Third

In Marx and Engels, the question of strategy is little developed. There is a

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/1569206X-00001670

… [T]he International does indeed still exist. In so far as it can be ef-

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–38

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–38

8 Bernstein 1993, p. 148.

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–38

The Socialist party is a revolutionary party, but not a revolution-making

11 Authorised translation by A.M. Simons, Kautsky 1909, p. 50.

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–38

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–38

(Russian or Eastern) general strike with the simply ‘demonstrative’ general

18 Kautsky 1910a, pp. 656–67.

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–38

22 Kautsky 1914.

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–38

25 A commonplace distinction found in Lenin, Trotsky, Radek and Gramsci.

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–38

Develop the organisation, capture all positions we can conquer by our

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–38

unforeseeable, but we cannot anticipate the future by making tactical

Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from

This (very) free interpretation is in effect consistent with his understanding of

35 Kautsky 1914, p. 281.

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–38

of ‘the reproductive power of money abandoned to itself’. This leads to a ‘moral

39 Cited in Antonini 2004, p. 71.

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–38

2 Revolution in the Revolution

Until the war, then, Lenin remained an apparently orthodox Kautskyist.

44 Cited in Lih 2005, p. 311.

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–38

45 See Löwy 1993.

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–38

47 See Bensaïd 2003.

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–38

and military levels, combined with an evolutionary conception of the workers’

Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–38

We deliberately select this blunt formula, we deliberately express our-

51 Lenin 1961, p. 422.

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–38

Communist International onwards, the assessment of the failure of the 1923

54 Ernesto Ragioneri, Le programme de l’Internationale Communiste, ‘Studi Storici’, 4

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–38

Radek consequently rejects the separation between tactics and programmatic

Such a rigid distinction between tactical questions and programmatic

55 [Radek 1924, pp. 7–8.]

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–38

also understand why it has happened.’ He stresses the misunderstood role of

To resolve the confrontation with Thalheimer, Lenin, Trotsky, Radek, Bukharin

The debate on the question of knowing which formulation should be

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–38

At the Fifth Congress Bukharin and Thalheimer formed a common front

60 See Trotsky 1970.

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–38

The notion of revolutionary strategy articulates a plurality of times and spac-

65 Notably in Trotsky 1965.

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–38

Historical Materialism (2018) 1–38

8 Bernstein 1993, p. 148.

11 Authorised translation by A.M. Simons, Kautsky 1909, p. 50.

18 Kautsky 1910a, pp. 656–67.

22 Kautsky 1914.

25 A commonplace distinction found in Lenin, Trotsky, Radek and Gramsci.

35 Kautsky 1914, p. 281.

39 Cited in Antonini 2004, p. 71.

44 Cited in Lih 2005, p. 311.

45 See Löwy 1993.

47 See Bensaïd 2003.

51 Lenin 1961, p. 422.

54 Ernesto Ragioneri, Le programme de l’Internationale Communiste, ‘Studi Storici’, 4

55 [Radek 1924, pp. 7–8.]

60 See Trotsky 1970.

65 Notably in Trotsky 1965.

70 See Franqui 1980.

76 The theme of recent texts by Étienne Balibar.

81 [Editorial note: no source could be found.]

92 Lenin 1988a, p. 54.

98 Lenin 1988b, p. 352.