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The Defence of the Proletarian Character of the October Revolution is still a class frontier !

The Smolny Publishing Firm has just published in a book a French translation of the revieuw Komunist from the beginning 1918 by the "first Left Opposition" within the Bolshevik Party. The main act of this short-lived opposition called "Left Communist" and whose most famous leader was Bukharin, has been to oppose the signature of the Peace Treaty of Brest-Litovsk between the Soviet Russia and the German imperialism. The publication of theses texts would have a secondary "historical" interest, a "curiosity" one, if its true aim was not, in its "presentation", a barely hidden attack against the Russian Revolution of October 1917 and against the Bolshevik Party.

Actually, the short introduction made by the publishers and above all the Preface written though by comrades with whom we have been members of the ICC during decades, take back to their account, 90 years later, the positions of Komunist and in particular its opposition to the Brest-Litovsk Peace. Still worse, they introduce the idea that there is a link, a continuity, between this opposition of the beginning of 1918 and the Left oppositions and fractions which fought in the afterwards against the counter-revolution and the stalinization of the Communist Parties !

Except rare expressions, it has been a long time that the peace signed at Brest-Litovsk was not questioned by people who claim communism. How can one affirm today that "to be defeated as the Paris Commune was better (in January-February 1918 while the international revolutionary wave was not but at its very beginnings and that the World War carried on !) than participating in a corruption of the power distorting socialism and the revolution" (Preface¹) ? The only credit of the book is that it reproduces Lenin's article about the The Revolutionary Phrase which criticizes the booming declamation, and empty of any practical meaning, about the revolutionary war advocated by the "Left Communists" while there were no more army for the massive desertions it was suffering.

Unfortunately, the writers of the Preface does not contend themselves with adopting the Bukharin's "leftist and infantile" position about Brest-Litovsk. Characterizing since January 1918, barely two months after the October insurrection, the Revolution as "a confiscated socialist revolution", they pretend that "since the insurrection [the Bolshevik Party] has progressively substituted the Soviets by assuming the power in their place". Even worse, they affirm that "the Bolshevik Party progressively abandons the development of the international revolution for the benefit of the defence of the Russian bastion and ends up adopting the theory of socialism in one country". This is a political outrage ! The thesis according to which Stalin is Lenin's continuity, is one of the greatest lies utilized by the bourgeoisie to attack the very idea of communism and to distort the Russian Revolution of October 1918. How the authors could so much slide from the ground of the revolutionary phrase up to, it seems, abandon the fundamental position of the Left Communist about the proletarian character of the October Revolution and bring their support and their participation to the bourgeois campaigns of today against communism ?

Will they have the political strength and courage to acknowledge their major fault and to dissociate themselves from this Preface or will they end up joining in the classes fights which are coming, the crowd of "thinkers" who are in bourgeoisie's pay ?

The FICL, December 24th, 2011

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