Lenin’s transitional programme: “Perish or forge full steam ahead”

Revolutions are crises of the whole of society, in which none of its classes can go on living in the old way. Something must give and a crisis erupts. But revolutions are far from simple. They have ebbs and flows, and new crises within them. Six months into the Russian Revolution of 1917, and a new crisis was impending. How to cut through the Gordian Knot? This was the question to which Lenin turned his attention in The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It.

In February 1917, the workers and peasants of Russia had proven strong enough to bring down the Tsar but had not been able to take power into their own hands. Their reformist leaders were the main blockage. They had instead handed power back to the capitalist class, represented by the Provisional Government. After six months of turbulence, however, the regime formed by the February Revolution of 1917 had failed to solve any of the fundamental problems of the workers and peasants.

The metal and coal industries were at the brink of collapse due to the sabotage of the bosses. This was compounded by the dislocation of the railways which prevented grain, iron, coal and other fuel from being transported to the cities where it was needed. Paper currency was becoming worthless for millions of workers trying to scrounge the essentials of life. All this meant that despite Russia being a country rich in raw materials, famine and breakdown was looming. Unemployment grew to terrible new highs.

On the military front, the Russian army’s morale was at rock bottom after the surrender of Riga to German forces, who were now dangerously near Petrograd. Rumours flew around that the army was deliberately courting defeat so that the German army might crush the revolutionary masses. Kerensky’s disastrous June offensive was still fresh in the minds of the soldiers who were being massacred or deserting en masse.

In the villages there was a state of near-civil war, as the peasantry refused to wait any longer for the Provisional Government to keep its promises. Workers and peasants were fed up with how nothing had fundamentally changed.

The revolution was clearly in crisis. Tsarist officers watched expectantly as support drained from the Provisional Government. They sensed that the moment was approaching to launch a coup to crush the revolutionary masses once and for all.

Russia stood at a decisive juncture. A catastrophe was impending. Either the workers would take the initiative and seize power from the Provisional Government, or the initiative would slip to the side of counter-revolution.

With all these pressures spelling out potential doom for the revolution, Lenin explained how these threats could be averted in The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat it.

Kerensky’s disastrous June offensive was still fresh in the minds of the soldiers who were being massacred or deserting en masse / Image: public domain

Millions of workers and peasants were swinging towards the Bolsheviks. The task was one of mobilising the masses for revolutionary action. But to save the revolution, it wasn’t enough to feed the workers and peasants abstract slogans about socialism or workers’ power. The need for a decisive leap had to be concretely, clearly explained in terms that the masses understood.

Measures of control

Lenin explained in simple terms what needed to be done. The wealth was there to solve the deep crisis. It was clear in the opulent luxury of the capitalists who continued to pop champagne corks even as the masses starved in bread queues. It was well known that the capitalists were making massive war profits. It was also known that in order to keep prices high, the capitalists hoarded away grain and vital goods.

The ‘left’ ministers in the Provisional Government talked a lot about punishing hoarders and profiteers… but then took no action. The fact was that, in order to combat the breakdown of industry, the chaos in the economy, and the threat of famine, what was needed was insight and control. The state had to know what resources were where and had to have the ability to distribute them.

“But such measures are extremely difficult,” the reformist ‘socialist’ parties (the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries) objected. This was nonsense, Lenin replied. No special state apparatus was needed. All that had to be done was to pass a decree declaring that the competing monopolies in key sectors of the economy, such as coal, iron, sugar refineries etc. be amalgamated into single nationalised entities so that the state could begin to get a clear picture of production. Conferences of specialists employed in these industries could share techniques, eliminate inefficiencies, and make for smooth mergers.

Above all, the most urgent task in Lenin’s eyes was to merge all banks into a single state bank / Image: public domain

Above all, the most urgent task in Lenin’s eyes was to merge all banks into a single state bank. This was the first step to expose the reality of the economy: how much money the bosses really had and where it was going.

Just like today, the capitalists employed all kinds of tricks and distortions to conceal their wealth and investments. But there is no hiding the real state of play from the banks, which concentrate all of a nation’s capital in their accounts. Such a measure would also be very simple and wouldn’t affect ordinary deposit holders in the least. They could still deposit and withdraw their cash. In fact, small peasants and small businesses could expect much better credit terms from a state bank, which would no longer be oriented towards making a profit.

Taking over the banks would be a major step towards gaining an insight into where the wealth in society is. But in order to really gain control over the economy and direct it towards satisfying the needs of the masses, Lenin added that commercial secrecy must be abolished. The capitalists (then as now) claimed that this secrecy was necessary to incentivise industrial innovations. Why innovate at all if they are forced to share what they know?

That might be true of small businesses, which Lenin proposed ought to be left alone. But for the capitalist monopolies that dominate the economy, secrecy has nothing to do with protecting their technical innovations. The monopolies are quite open with one another. They regularly share information in order to fix prices, and even to hold back innovations that would cheapen their products.

The real purpose of commercial secrecy is to hide the fabulous profits being made from the working class – the same workers who were starving in Russia because of the profiteering of the capitalists!

Abolishing commercial secrecy would leave them with nowhere to hide. It would expose how the capitalists were profiting off the slaughter of the workers, making millions of rubles a day by Lenin’s estimates. Again, such a measure would be very simple. It would only require a decree that allowed any workers’ organisation of a certain size to gain access to the books of any corporation itself over a certain size.

Would the directors and senior managers try to sabotage such measures? Would they try to muddy the waters or falsify the books? Perhaps. But it would be a simple matter to check any sabotage. The state would only have to enact stringent laws punishing sabotage, while passing a further decree to create and extend unions across all the workers and clerical staff in these industries, with full powers to oversee and regulate their implementation.

In other words, by relying on the revolutionary initiative of the masses, state regulation would be possible. If the same revolutionary initiative was used to form consumer cooperatives across the country, with a monopoly on the distribution of consumer commodities, it would be possible to ensure everyone receive the necessities of life. And by eliminating the room for the capitalists to profit from the war, it would cease to have a reactionary, imperialist character, and would become a genuine war of revolutionary defence that would inspire the workers in Russia and beyond.

These measures of control based on revolutionary initiative, Lenin contrasted with the type of state regulation that was already a fact among much of the warring nations of Europe. There the capitalist class itself felt how the profiteering and market anarchy produced chaos and economic breakdown. They demanded state intervention. But such state intervention, carried out in a reactionary and bureaucratic way, only assisted the capitalists’ profiteering, and the hiding of these profits from the masses behind a wall of state bureaucracy.

The ‘realistic’ Mensheviks

Lenin showed what simple measures the present government could take overnight to combat the crisis, yet refused to take. Why did the so-called ‘socialist’ ministers of the Provisional Government refuse to take these measures? Because they clung to the shibboleth that the Russian revolution was a purely bourgeois revolution, and therefore could not step beyond the confines of capitalism. They refused therefore to take any measure that would break the Provisional Government coalition between themselves and the bourgeois ministers.

Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries restricted themselves to a ‘minimum’ programme of ‘realistic’ measures that respected the right of the capitalists to make fabulous profits / Image: public domain

Instead, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries restricted themselves to a ‘minimum’ programme of ‘realistic’ measures that respected the right of the capitalists to make fabulous profits… and which were, in reality, utterly unrealistic.

They passed laws taxing the incomes of the capitalists. But without taking control of the banks or abolishing commercial secrecy, they had no idea what these incomes really were! Their taxation measures thus proved impotent, and what taxes they did collect were quickly eaten up by inflation. They tried to fill the holes in the public budget by printing paper money and thus stoked inflation to even higher levels, further inflaming the economic chaos. It is noteworthy how the programmes of the left reformist ‘socialists’ of our present day differ only superficially from their Menshevik forebears!

Clearly, what Lenin suggested impinged on the ‘sacred’ right of the capitalist to make a profit without interference. The state had to take control, but not this state, the state of the Provisional Government, which protected the capitalists’ profits, despite its ‘socialist’ ministers who clung to the bosses’ coat-tails. Only a workers’ state, only the workers in power, could carry out Lenin’s programme. All signs pointed towards the October Revolution.

What Lenin proposed was not yet economic planning, nor even full workers’ control. Nevertheless, it pointed clearly in that direction, and would represent the first step towards socialism. Thus, in this brilliant text, Lenin begins not from a preconceived schema of what is ‘possible’, but from the pressing needs of the masses and what is necessary. And through a programme of demands addressing these needs, demonstrates the necessity of beginning the transition towards socialism.

In his own words: “Perish or forge full steam ahead. That is the alternative put by history.”

This method, so marvellously demonstrated and put to such effective use in The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It, is referred to by communists as a transitional method. This term is most closely associated with the name of Leon Trotsky, after his celebrated 1938 text, The Transitional Programme (the full title of which is The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International).

But this method, although expertly developed by Trotsky, was not merely invented by him in 1938. It represents a part of and a development upon the long tradition of Bolshevism, and also formed part of the thinking of Lenin himself.

The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat it is the last work in the Lenin in a Year series written by Lenin before the conquest of power in the October Revolution of 1917. It is clear from the above that the situation the Bolsheviks in power inherited represented a catastrophe. The task for the working class in power was more one of surviving, and in this tough situation, beginning the construction of socialism from the bricks left behind by the old society.

Next week we look at The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government, written in 1918, as Lenin turns his attention to the tasks of the working class in power in a vast, backward nation battered by imperialist war.