Building Bolsheviks Part III: Legality and Revolution

Many workers, students, and soldiers are interested in fighting racism and building a movement for a better world. In countries like the U.S., violent clashes between antiracist workers and open fascists like the KKK have sharply raised the question: when is it acceptable to break the capitalists’ laws?
The Progressive Labor Party fights for communism, for the abolition of capitalism through armed revolution of masses of workers. Racism and these racist borders, police terror, sexism, and imperialist wars will be smashed and outlawed with an armed working class ruling society, and preventing a capitalist comeback with force. The capitalist class will never allow themselves to be removed from power without a fight. Whether the form of capitalist rule is more democratic or more openly repressive, threatening capitalism is always illegal, and the bosses’ state will always defend itself.
Germany: Reformism’s Road to Disaster
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the workers’ movement in highly developed industrial countries like Germany enjoyed mass support. They had fought for and won legal recognition over decades of bitter struggle, and won the respect of the working class along the way. Many workers at the time believed that, given Germany’s developed industrial economy and powerful, organized trade unions, that revolution for workers’ power must logically begin there.
The politics that workers are won to is always the decisive factor, however. While fighting militantly for reforms became a proud working class tradition in Germany, few workers were won to organizing for revolution. Over time, the workers’ organizations became intimately tied to the German capitalist class, with ultimately disastrous results.
For example, the leadership of the trade unions was tightly controlled by a majority of the capitalist Social-Democratic Party. When workers demanded a general strike against the bosses, the workers’ Trade Union Congress was influenced by Social-Democratic leaders to decide against it. Union leaders regularly collaborated with the bosses on long term agreements on wages, hours, and working conditions, tying the workers hand and foot to the very capitalist system exploiting them and preparing their children to fight and die in World War I. Since the Party there considered themselves 100 pecent legal, a recognition they had proudly fought to win, they organized demonstrations with the permission and compliance of the police (sound familiar?)
At the outbreak of World War I, a war of rival imperialists in which the working class had no stake, the workers’ parties and unions completed their betrayal of the workers by supporting German imperialism. In their insistence at fighting for and remaining within the bosses’ laws, the once-mighty workers’ organizations became little more than imperialist tools.
At the same time, a multiracial party women and men communists organizing across the vast Russian Empire, nicknamed “Bolsheviks,” solved the question of legality a different way: by organizing for illegality. During World War I, the Bolsheviks were able to turn the guns around on the warmakers and create the first workers’ state.
Bolsheviks Find Road to Revolution
They did this by organizing fightback directly within the ranks of workers, and struggling over revolutionary ideas from the beginning.
A Bolshevik named Osip Piatnitsky arrived in the city of Odessa, Russia in 1905 to organize the Party after the Russian bosses slaughtered 1,000 workers at a peaceful march. His accounts are instructive for today’s communists. In response to the massacre, revolutionary Bolshevik organizing occurred on ships, small tailoring shops, and large tobacco factories. Bolshevik workers painstakingly made connected the workers’ day-to-day demands with the need for armed revolution, and organized study groups around communist ideas.
Before strikes, workers in many factories and shops went on strike early. In one general strike, the police tried to beat the striking workers into submission. Workers responded by overturning empty train cars, throwing stones and iron fences.
Following these uprisings, the frightened Russian bosses’ mouthpiece, the Tsar, issued a manifesto proclaiming newer and more liberal freedoms. Almost immediately however, racist attacks against Jewish workers began in nearby Moldavanka. Unlike the misleaders of the German workers’ movement, who coordinated their activities carefully so as not to risk their prized legal status, Bolshevik-organized workers fought back in solidarity with Jewish workers in bitter street combat with the racist police. Despite many workers sustaining injuries, Piatnitsky wrote that after these events, the Odessa Party Committee increased its membership! As the Bolsheviks had confidence in the working class and filled its ranks with the best organizers among them, so did the working class gain confidence in the Bolsheviks and in communist ideas.
By World War I, this confidence grew tremendously and proved decisive. The working class in the Russian Empire responded to the Bolsheviks’ call for the seizure of power in 1917, and ended the imperialist World War I with a new state- what became the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union became a beacon of light to workers around the world, putting capitalism on the defensive for the first time in history.
The international working class today is struggling and fighting back in a dark night of sharpening fascism and imperialist wars. The rise of fascist movements around the world means that workers today cannot afford to repeat the mistakes of the workers in Germany one century ago. PLP follows in the footsteps of the Bolsheviks, to learn and emulate the best traditions of the past while learning and correcting inevitable political errors. Fight for a mass international anti-imperialist movement of millions of workers to fight back, and seize power for revolution- for communism. Join us!