The economic platform of the Bolshevik Party was a sharp contrast to the programme of all the other parties, the purpose of which was to preserve the capitalist system. The Bolshevik Party exposed the principle that underlay all of them, namely, to perpetuate the exploitation of the toilers.
The programmes of the bourgeois parties were designed to assist the capitalists to emerge from the crisis by making concessions in partial matters while preserving capitalism as a whole. The Bolshevik platform sought a way out of the impasse by adopting a number of far-reaching measures tending to undermine and finally to abolish the entire capitalist system.
The Cadets, Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries were incapable of finding a solution for the existing difficulties. On the contrary, their policy tended to extend and aggravate economic chaos in the country. Lenin at the time stated that to leave power in the hands of the representatives of the bourgeoisie would mean
“to throw the door wide open to famine and inevitable economic catastrophe on the one hand, which the capitalists are intentionally accelerating and intensifying, and to a military catastrophe on the other. . . . ”(1)
The only way in which the impending collapse could be averted was by a proletarian revolution.
The economic platform of the Bolsheviks expressed the interests and aims of the working class and the working peasantry. The Bolsheviks called upon the proletarians and the working peasants to seize the landed estates immediately, to nationalise all the land, the industrial trusts and the banks, to institute workers’ control over production and distribution, etc.
Every point in the economic platform of the Bolsheviks, whether it was the nationalisation of the land, or workers’ control over industry, or the nationalisation of the banks and trusts, was a fighting slogan, used by the Bolsheviks to rally the masses and to create that political army, without which the conquest of power by the working class and the poor peasants would have been impossible. Every demand in the Bolshevik platform concerned some urgent question of the day, every one of its clauses was comprehensible, every one of its slogans was understood by wide sections of the workers and the working peasants. The precise and definite slogans and the self-sacrificing fight of the Party showed that a proletarian government would not cringe to the capitalists, would stop at no measure against the bourgeoisie, would smash every attempt at resistance on the part of the capitalists and landlords and would bring about an immediate improvement in the condition of the working masses.
But each slogan, each practical proposal was only part of a general platform, of an integral and harmonious plan, the whole meaning and purpose of which was the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The demands contained in the programme of the Bolshevik Party could be realised only by a dictatorship of the proletariat, only by destroying the power of the capitalists and landlords, and only by setting up a Soviet government.
And when every worker, every unemployed person, every cook, every poor peasant saw with his own eyes how the proletarian government fought the capitalists, when he saw that the land was being handed over to the working peasants and the mills and factories placed under the control of the workers
“then,” Lenin said, “no forces of the capitalists . . . no forces of international finance capital, which manipulates hundreds of billions of money, will be able to defeat the people’s revolution. On the contrary, the people’s revolution will conquer the whole world, for in every country the Socialist revolution is ripening.”(2)
The basis of the economic platform of the Bolshevik Party on the eve of the October Revolution was Lenin’s fundamental thesis that the victory of Socialism was possible in one country alone. The economic development of Russia down to 1917 had created every possibility for the advance of Socialism. The political gains won by the working class in the interval between the February Revolution and the October Revolution created every condition necessary for transforming these possibilities into reality. In his historic article, “The Threatening Catastrophe and How To Fight It,” Lenin said:
“it is impossible to advance in the Russia of the twentieth century, a Russia that has won a republic and a democracy in a revolutionary way, without advancing towards Socialism, without taking steps towards it. . . .”(3)
This was the thesis on which the economic platform drawn up by the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party was based.
The resolutions adopted by the Sixth Congress plainly declared that improvement in the economic situation could begin only after a revolution, only after the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie had been abolished and the power transferred to the proletariat, to Bolshevik Soviets.
What were the revolutionary measures which under a dictatorship of the proletariat would save the country from catastrophe?
The Congress pointed out that what was first of all required was
“intervention in the sphere of production, with the object of systematically regulating production and distribution, and also . . . the nationalisation and centralisation of banking and the nationalisation of a number of trustified enterprises (e.g., oil, coal, sugar, metallurgy and transport).”(4)
The nationalisation of the large enterprises and the nationalisation of the land would create a basis for the inauguration of a planned economy by the organs of the proletarian dictatorship. This would cut the ground from under the feet of the capitalists and landlords.
The Congress went on to state that it was necessary
“properly to organise exchange between town and country, through the co-operatives and the food committees, with the object of supplying the towns with necessary agricultural produce and the countryside with necessary manufactured articles, agricultural implements and machines, etc.”(5)
The Sixth Congress devoted particular attention to the question of workers’ control over industry, outlining both its forms of organisation and its methods of operation.
The resolution then went on to outline measures for averting financial collapse and for the rational distribution of labour power (the transfer of workers engaged in war industries to industries engaged in satisfying the needs of the country).
[1] Lenin, “The Aims of the Revolution,” Selected Works (Eng. ed.), Vol. VI, p. 242.
[2] Lenin, “Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?” Selected Works (Eng. ed.), Vol. VI, p. 288.
[3] Lenin, “The Threatening Catastrophe and How To Fight It,” Collected Works (Russ. ed.), Vol. XXI, p. 187.
[4] The Sixth Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. (Bolsheviks), August, 1917, Moscow, 1934, p. 199.
[5] Ibid., p. 199.
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