The Russian ‘Socialist Revolutionaries’ were always the most moral individuals: essentially, they were composed of ethics alone. This did not prevent them, however, at the time of revolution, from deceiving the Russian peasants. In the Parisian organ of Kerensky, that very ethical socialist who was the forerunner of Stalin in manufacturing spurious accusations against the Bolsheviks, another old ‘Socialist Revolutionary’ Zenzinov writes:
Lenin, as is known, taught that for the sake of gaining the desired ends communists can, and sometimes must ‘resort to all sorts of devices, manoeuvres and subterfuge…’ (New Russia, February 17, 1938, p.3)
From this, they draw the ritualistic conclusion: Stalinism is the natural offspring of Leninism.
Unfortunately, the ethical indicter is not even capable of quoting honestly. Lenin said:
It is necessary to be able… to resort to all sorts of devices, manoeuvres, and illegal methods, to evasion and subterfuge, in order to penetrate into the trade unions, to remain in them, and to carry on communist work in them at all costs.
The necessity for evasion and manoeuvres, according to Lenin’s explanation, is called forth by the fact that the reformist bureaucracy, betraying the workers to capital, baits revolutionists, persecutes them, and even resorts to turning the bourgeois police upon them. “Manoeuvres and subterfuge” are in this case only methods of valid self-defence against the perfidious reformist bureaucracy.
The party of this very Zenzinov once carried on illegal work against Czarism, and later – against the Bolsheviks. In both cases, it resorted to craftiness, evasion, false passports and other forms of “subterfuge”. All these means were considered not only ‘ethical’ but also heroic because they corresponded to political aims of the petty bourgeoisie. But the situation changes at once when proletarian revolutionists are forced to resort to conspirative measures against the petty-bourgeois democracy. The key to the morality of these gentlemen has, as we see, a class character!
The ‘amoralist’ Lenin openly, in the press, gives advice concerning military craftiness against perfidious leaders. And the moralist Zenzinov maliciously chops both ends from the quotation in order to deceive the reader: the ethical indicter is proved as usual a petty swindler. Not for nothing was Lenin fond of repeating: it is very difficult to meet a conscientious adversary!
A worker who does not conceal the ‘truth’ about the strikers’ plans from the capitalists is simply a betrayer deserving contempt and boycott. The soldier who discloses the ‘truth’ to the enemy is punished as a spy. Kerensky tried to lay at the Bolsheviks’ door the accusation of having disclosed the ‘truth’ to Ludendorff’s staff. It appears that even the ‘holy truth’ is not an end in itself. More imperious criteria which, as analysis demonstrates, carry a class character, rule over it.
The life and death struggle is unthinkable without military craftiness, in other words, without lying and deceit. May the proletariat then not deceive Hitler’s police? Or perhaps Soviet Bolsheviks have an ‘immoral’ attitude when they deceive the GPU? Every pious bourgeois applauds the cleverness of police who succeed through craftiness in seizing a dangerous gangster. Is military craftiness really permissible when the question concerns the overthrow of the gangsters of imperialism?
Norman Thomas speaks about “that strange communist amorality in which nothing matters but the party and its power” (Socialist Call, March 12, 1938, p.5). Moreover, Thomas throws into one heap the present Comintern, that is, the conspiracy of the Kremlin bureaucracy against the working class, with the Bolshevik Party, which represented a conspiracy of the advanced workers against the bourgeoisie. This thoroughly dishonest juxtaposition has already been sufficiently exposed above. Stalinism merely screens itself under the cult of the party; actually, it destroys and tramples the party in filth. It is true, however, that to a Bolshevik the party is everything. The drawing-room socialist, Thomas, is surprised by and rejects a similar relationship between a revolutionist and revolution because he himself is only a bourgeois with a socialist ‘ideal’. In the eyes of Thomas and his kind, the party is only a secondary instrument for electoral combinations and other similar uses, not more. His personal life, interests, ties, moral criteria exist outside the party. With hostile astonishment, he looks down upon the Bolshevik to whom the party is a weapon for the revolutionary reconstruction of society, including also its morality. To a revolutionary Marxist there can be no contradiction between personal morality and the interests of the party, since the party embodies in his consciousness the very highest tasks and aims of mankind. It is naive to imagine that Thomas has a higher understanding of morality than the Marxists. He merely has a base conception of the party.
“All that arises is worthy of perishing,” says the dialectician, Goethe. The destruction of the Bolshevik party – an episode in world reaction – does not, however, disparage its world-wide historic significance. In the period of its revolutionary ascendance, that is, when it actually represented the proletarian vanguard, it was the most honest party in history. Wherever it could, it, of course, deceived the class enemies; on the other hand, it told the toilers the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Only thanks to this did it succeed in winning their trust to a degree never before achieved by any other party in the world.
The clerks of the ruling classes call the organizers of this party “amoralists”. In the eyes of conscious workers, this accusation carries a complimentary character. It signifies: Lenin refused to recognise moral norms established by slave-owners for their slaves and never observed by the slave-owners themselves; he called upon the proletariat to extend the class struggle into the moral sphere too. Whoever fawns before precepts established by the enemy will never vanquish that enemy!
The ‘amoralism’ of Lenin, that is, his rejection of supra-class morals, did not hinder him from remaining faithful to one and the same ideal throughout his whole life; from devoting his whole being to the cause of the oppressed; from displaying the highest conscientiousness in the sphere of ideas and the highest fearlessness in the sphere of action, from maintaining an attitude untainted by the least superiority to an ‘ordinary’ worker, to a defenseless woman, to a child. Does it not seem that ‘amoralism’ in the given case is only a pseudonym for higher human morality?