Daniel Hartley is a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Languages, Cultures, and Societies at the University of Leeds. He is the author of The Politics of Style: Towards a Marxist Poetics (2017). He is on the comité editorial of the French online journal of Marxist theory Revue Période. He has published widely on Marxist theory and contemporary literature. His current book project, provisionally entitled Capital Personified: Impersonality in the Modern World-System, investigates the multiple political valences of literary impersonality in world literature across the long twentieth century. Daniel Hartley'sThe Politics of Style has recently been published as apaperback, after its originalhardback publication in the Historical Materialism book series. 

The interview was conducted by Frédéric Monferrand for Periode and is availablehere in French. 

FM: The idea that style, like language in general, is traversed by class contradictions seems central to your work on the “politics of style.” Could you explain it to us? Doesn’t this idea risk a sociological reductionism that would deny the autonomy of the literary work by making it a simple transmitter of the interests of a given social group?

DH: Perhaps I should begin by explaining a bit about the systematic framework of the theory of style I’ve developed, since it’s crucial to this question. Firstly, I claim that my theory of style constitutes a foundational element of what could become a more general ‘Marxist poetics.’ I certainly don’t see my theory of style as, in and of itself, sufficient as a theory of literature in its entirety. Rather, it is the first in what would have to become a series of ground-up ‘recalibrations’ of classical literary and aesthetic concepts (e.g., genre, character, plot, form, etc.) within the context of an overarching historical-materialist research programme – something which Bakhtin and Medvedev were already calling for in 1928. Secondly, I call it a ‘poetics’ because, as the finest commentators on Aristotle’s eponymous work have emphasised, poiēsis must be understood as a dynamic operation. That is, literary composition is a productive and transformative ‘poietical’ act, of which stylization is the predominantly verbal component. (I tend to prefer the term ‘stylization’ to ‘style,’ firstly, because it emphasises this dynamic, processual aspect, and, secondly, because it enables us to see that literary composition combines and sculpts a multiplicity of pre-existent written and spoken styles. To speak of a writer’s ‘style’ in the singular is thus, strictly speaking, to refer to an artistically organized totality of sub-styles; ‘style’ as such is never reducible to one of them alone. This was one of Bakhtin’s great insights).

Finally, my theory of style is premised upon an immanent critique and historicization of Paul Ricoeur’s ‘threefold mimesis’. For Ricoeur, the act of narrative production comprises three moments: prefiguration (mimesis₁), configuration (mimesis₂) and refiguration (mimesis₃). The first denotes theprefiguration of the practical field: “a pre-understanding of the world of action, its meaningful structures, its symbolic resources, and its temporal character” (Ricoeur 1984, 54). The second signifies theconfiguration performed by emplotment, a dynamic operation which organizes (serial) events into a (narrated) story, transforms the paradigmatic elements of action into syntagmatic signifying chains, and performs a synthesis of the heterogeneous. Mimesis₃ is then therefiguration of the practical field through reading; it refigures the semantics and symbolic mediation of action and the time of action. There are, of course, many residual idealisms at work in Ricoeur’s conception, ones which I attempt to overcome in various ways in the book, but it nonetheless remains a useful framework for thinking the process of stylization from its origins in the practical field of everyday language, through literary composition, and ending with the reader. This is not least because it, too, emphasises the dynamism of Aristotelianpoiēsis.

Thus, to return to your question, I would deny that I run the risk of sociological reductionism. It is certainly true that I emphasise the fact that language is traversed by the class contradictions that structure the social totality more generally; I account for this with the concept of the ‘linguistic situation’ (with which I supplement Ricoeur’s notion of “prefiguration”). I define the ‘linguistic situation’ as the hypothetical reconstruction of the state of a language as a writer or set of writers would have experienced it, including its inner tensions and social stratifications. The linguistic situation has a specific scope and internally structuring tensions (themselves produced by the constellation of linguistic sub-situations – international, national, immigrant/ émigré, etc. – through which a given writer achieves utterance) and consists of specific ideological and semantic content at the level of individual words and phrases. But – crucially – the linguistic situation is only the informing ground and material on, in and through which stylization operates. This operation of ‘poetic shaping’ takes the raw material of the situation – its words, phrases, jargons, and pre-existent semi- and extra-literary styles (diaries, newspapers, philosophical argument, etc.) – and sculpts them into an artistic totality which transforms the political valence of the ideological content, all the while relying on this latter’s vitality for its verbal vigour. The sedimented ideological meanings embedded in the language do not simply persist unadulterated into the literary work: they are rendered different to themselves in the very process of literary production. Hence, the ‘politics of style’, at this level, refers tothe literary act itself, to its product and to the artistic choices – conscious, semi-conscious and unconscious – that it implies. At this level of analysis, the writer is politicalpreciselyas a writer. 

MF: You introduce the concept of “stylistic ideology” to designate the principles which guide a writer’s organisation of the linguistic material on which he or she works. Could you explain the concept in a little more depth?

DH: Yes, certainly. One of the classical ideals of poetics as a discourse was to describe or delineate that which is rational within the process and product of poiēsis. Arguably, then, a Marxist poetics would continue this tradition by thinking both what is rational and what, from the perspective of historical materialism, isideological in the process and product of literary composition. From this perspective, the key moment is the second stage of stylization: configuration. This consists of both a process of composition and an artistic organization of pre-existent sub-styles which is internally guided by a whole series of conscious and unconscious factors, of which two are crucial: firstly, the inherited logics of specific modes, genres, types and forms, and, secondly, what I call stylistic ideology.

To explain the first, we can say that many genres, types and forms include literary conventions which exercise a force of linguistic propriety in that they possess the filtering power to negate, inform or enhance the verbal resources which are available to a writer. For example, it would be quite possible to live in the centre of London, read formal prose in the e-broadsheet, puerile puns in the gutter press, hear the “Queen’s English” or cockney dialect on the Underground, lifeless business English in the City, not to mention a great number of foreign languages, and yet when one sits down to write a sonnet, one’s conception of that form be so stereotypical and superficial that one writes in a diction that Tennyson himself would have found archaic – as if the preceding two and a half centuries of literary innovation had never occurred. In short, the verbal resources of the linguistic situation do not necessarily enter the work, though they will certainly affect its reception since they constitute the everyday linguistic environment of its readers (thereby making it a virtual norm).

The second factor is then stylistic ideology. This refers to the set of assumptions and rationales guiding the stylization of the pre-existent common language. It ranges from a relatively spontaneous sense of ‘how one should write’ all the way to self-conscious stylistic projects which writers develop and (to varying degrees of fidelity) put into practice, along with their accompanying theoretical justifications. I developed this concept because of certain problems I have with the traditional understanding of the “politics of style” within British and American Marxist literary theory. My basic claim is that style does not always reside solely in the words on the page: it can also be the name of the relation between a literary or artisticconcept and a verbal inscription. I began thinking about this by way of conceptual art and the way in which the actual art-object becomes in many ways secondary to the concept informing its contextually specific staging. It is precisely this element of self-conscious conceptuality that, for all his other strengths, Raymond Williams underestimates. Williams’s fundamental critical operation is to reconstruct the specific social relations of which a style is said to be the linguistic mode. Thus the style is ‘political’ to the extent that it instantiates specific social relations, of which the author himself is often unaware. I argue that, whilst this critical operation is important, it must be supplemented with the level of self-reflexive conceptuality: at this level, the ‘politics of style’ would not be that which can be reconstructed from the ‘words on the page’, but that which is implicit or explicit in the theoretical justifications writers give for their stylistic practices.

Obvious examples include Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (with its prefatory apologia), Ezra Pound’s critical texts, Robbe-Grillet’s essays on thenouveau roman, and Charles Olson’s explications of ‘projective verse’. Significantly, what all such stylistic ideologies have in common is, firstly, an awareness of their position within literary history such as they conceive it, and, secondly, an explicitly political desire to overcome modes of writing which they associate with social and artistic conservativism, obsolescence, or outright degradation. Thus, Robbe-Grillet’s literary experiments in such novels asLa jalousie employ self-consciously new styles whose aim is not simply to regenerate the novel, but proactively to demystify the bourgeois conception of reality which he saw as enshrined in the very forms of the classical realist novel itself. And yet, one cannot locate this desire within the texture of his prose; that is, ‘close reading’ or ‘practical criticism’ offers little in the way of guidance when determining the larger stylisticproject of a writer. For this, one must turn to an author’s overt paratextual and critical theorizations.

FM: Does the concept of “stylistic ideology” apply solely to those writing practices which participate in the reproduction of social relations marked by class inequality, or is it valid for all literary production? If the latter, is there not a tension between, on the one hand, the idea you develop from Williams, according to which literature enables the expression of certain experiences that have been rendered socially invisible, and on the other hand the argument according to which all literary production, all style, is “ideological”? Can we (and if so, how) distinguish ideological styles from emancipatory styles?

DH: This is a brilliant question. Let me begin by explaining the reasons for my choice of terminology. I took my inspiration for the term ‘stylistic ideology’ from a now relatively little-read book by Terry Eagleton entitled Criticism and Ideology (1976). In a chapter entitled “Categories for a Materialist Criticism” Eagleton develops a series of concepts for a Marxist theory of literature: general mode of production, literary mode of production, general ideology, authorial ideology, aesthetic ideology, and text. The meaning of “general ideology” is obvious. It is articulated with two further levels: “authorial ideology,” which Eagleton defines as “the effect of the author’s specific mode of biographical insertion into [the general ideology], a mode of insertion overdetermined by a series of distinct factors: social class, sex, nationality, religion, geographical region, and so on” (1976, 58), and “aesthetic ideology,” which is that region of the general ideology which deals with the arts and literature (ibid., 60). The most important point here is thatthere is no necessary homology between authorial ideology, aesthetic ideology, stylistic ideology, and style. It is quite possible for an author’s own political stance to be perfectly at odds with the implicit politics of either her stylistic ideology or her style. Take Pound, for example: he combined an authorial ideology which was broadly fascistic with an avant-garde style, and a politically ambiguous stylistic ideology (combining both avant-gardist and conservative elements), all of which was produced in the context of an aesthetic ideology which had downgraded poetry to a position of borderline irrelevance within the total social formation. On the other hand, of course, there are cases where an author’s political stance is avowedly radical but her stylistic practice largely conforms to the status quo of aesthetic ideology – perhaps Rachel Kushner would be a case in point. Thus, one must postulate a political effectivity inherent to literary styles, which intersects with and potentiallydisrupts the self-conscious political affiliations of the author, whilst at the same time being determined in its own right by authorial, aesthetic and contextual factors.

That, I think, explains my choice of terminology. At the same time, however, you are right to point out that, strictly speaking, the concept of ‘ideology’ should be applied only to those values, ideas, representations, and so on, which enable the reproduction of the social relations of production marked by class inequality. So let me try and be more precise. Firstly, as already noted, I actually distinguish between stylistic ideology and stylistic practice; a writer’s self-understanding of her writing practice can often be at odds with the writing practice itself. Secondly, Eagleton, whose terms I extend, developed his categories for a materialist criticism as part of an intellectual attack on certain ideologically powerful liberal-conservative cultural institutions and formations in British universities and beyond. I thus suspect that his emphasis on theideological was part of this project of demystification; that is, it was a polemical projectagainst a dominant formation, rather than the construction of a new one (though he would go on to correct this emphasis in his work in the 1980s). In extending those categories, then, I am certainly at risk of remaining within a purely demystifcatory project, rather than enabling the emergence of a counter-hegemonic one.

To counteract that impression, let me offer one example of what such a counter-hegemonic stylistic project might look like. One of Raymond Williams’s crucial insights was that the ruling styles of every epoch are the styles of the ruling class. That is, styles are linguistic modes of social relation, and the reproduction of dominant styles simultaneously reproduces the dominant social relations of production. The emergence of new styles which embody new social relations is notoriously difficult, precisely because the dominantremains dominant only insofar as it captures and incorporates emergence. The social hegemon must capture and incorporate all emergent social relations if the constellation of social relations favourable to its reproduction is to remain hegemonic. 

Williams was well aware of this during his work for the Workers’ Educational Association from 1947 to 1961. There, he invented a course called “Public Expression”. The syllabus was designed specifically to “[equip] members of working-class movements for the discharge of actual public responsibilities” (Williams 1952, 181). That is, the course was intended as a way of releasing latent social relations and of giving linguistic body to working-class consciousness: “Does one impose on a social class that is growing in power the syllabus of an older culture; or does one seek means of releasing and enriching the life-experience which that rising class brings with it?” (ibid.). Rather than incorporating the working-class students into written and spoken styles whose origins lay in the social consciousness of the hegemonic class and its selective tradition, Williams sought to work with his students to enable them to produce styles which would be adequate to their unique social experience and would release their emergent practical consciousness. In this sense, it constituted an attempt at a counter-hegemonic stylistic practice.

Thus, although I am happy to agree that not all stylistic practices and theories are inherently ideological, we must nonetheless be aware that an “emancipatory style” cannot simply be achieved at the level of the words on the page. It must be internal to a larger counter-hegemonic project with a multiplicity of cultural and political apparatuses.

MF: How can literature participate in the radical transformation of society in an emancipatory sense? What is a “politics of style”?

DH: In the Marxist tradition there have been many different answers to this question. For Lukács, the realist novel was radical in the sense that it penetrated beneath the epiphenomena of daily life to reveal the hidden objective laws that constitute society as such. For Sartre, those forms of literature are radical which appeal to the innate freedom of the reader and urge him or her to see the world as a product of free human action (their own action). More recently, for Rancière, literature is political because it directly intervenesas literature into the reigning distributions of the sensible [partages du sensible], undoing the fixed intertwinings of saying, doing and being which constitute ‘common sense’. I could go on, of course, but my point is that there is no single answer to this question; indeed, I very much suspect that it depends upon the specific conjuncture in which one finds oneself.

Nonetheless, I strongly believe that we must pose the problem in terms of levels. At the smallest level – that of style – I think that if we accept that language is a way of being together, but one which is internally stratified and divided according to broader economic and political divisions, then writing is a way of both revelling in our sociality and, via the act of stylization, symbolically healing the rifts which divide humanity from itself. Even satire, which aims to exacerbate those rifts, ultimately does so only to overcome them. Literary writing thus at once partakes in and absorbs the ferocity and mutual recriminations built into the language, our way of being together, and – however fleetingly – sublates them into an artistic organization which only subsequently becomes a factor in those divisions in its own right. That brief moment of reconciliation, however, is never lost: it is reactivated on every reading of the text.

This first level, which some may interpret as my flirtation with liberal aestheticism, but which I prefer to think of as having elective affinities with Blochian hope, then links to the level of literary form in general. For a form is a shared relationship between people which implies a stance towards those people and to the world itself. As Williams often noted, there is a point in any process of literary composition at which it becomes difficult to distinguish between the writer writing the form and form writing the writer. That is, literary forms, like ourselves, are aligned, and any task of emancipation will involve first and foremost a realisation of the depths to which our unconscious commitments extend. Many of the greatest and most radical writers were those who were aware of their alignments and who attempted either to affirm them, to alter them or to produce new forms for the embodiment of new alignments. Thus, a truly radical politics of form is not necessarily one which aims at formal and stylistic innovation for its own sake (this is simply the ideology of modernism), but one which accepts the immanent, constitutive efficacy of inherited forms and, by tarrying with them, extends, develops or transcends them. Innovation is necessary, but it is progressive only if it struggles with the inherited resources.

The next level of response to this question is then that of literature as such. Here, I agree with Rancière that literature intervenes directly into dominant distributions of the sensible and that this is an inherently political function. I would then want to add two things. Firstly, one of the progressive tasks of realism has always been to make visible and experienceable zones of social experience which are systematically occluded from the dominant ideological regimes of representation. This is a function I still think inherently worthwhile, though I suspect that literature’s role in this regard is now relatively irrelevant compared to film and TV. The second, and more general, point is that certain types of literature introduce into the world a principle through which what is different from that world becomes thinkable. In many kinds of literature this effect is minimal but it is nonetheless there; in genres such as science fiction, however, it is extremely powerful. Given postmodernity’s lack of a sense of past or alternative future, not to mention a neoliberal present which has become nothing but an eternal return of austerity, it should go without saying that any force whatsoever which introduces a principle of difference into this grim ever-sameness is performing a vital task for the political imagination. When neoliberal governments shut down public libraries as part of so-called ‘austerity’ packages, they are killing the imaginative principle of their non-existence.

The next level of literature’s role in the emancipatory transformation of society is that of what Williams calls the ‘formation’: a non-institutional, group self-organization, with specializing, alternative or openly oppositional external relations to more general organizations and institutions within society at large (Williams 1981, 57-86). This includes such groupings as the avant-garde. Here, ‘literature’ becomes a matter, not only of intra-textual attributes or a principle of difference introduced to an ever-same present, but also of self-consciously connecting intra-literary projects to wider social movements. Such formations are never automatically progressive (as was clear with, say, the marriage of Italian fascism and futurism), but they enable literature to gain traction within the social formation in a manner which transcends the individual production and consumption of literary works.

Finally, the most important level is that of literature’s becoming connected to mass counter-hegemonic projects. And it is here that I suspect we transcend the received, bourgeois notion of “literature”. At this level, it is not only literature which is at stake, but literacy and writing as such. If a language truly is a way of being together, then modes of writing must be invented to embody new social relations. This would extend, not only to Williams’s notion of “Public Expression”, but also to those modes of writing that occur in the business of everyday life: workplace e-mails, official forms, newspapers, online media, and so on. A truly democratic society would embody democratic modes of communicating with one another at every level. (Though please do not mistake my ideal of linguistic democracy for the current populist condescension of postmodern American English. When your computer starts speaking to you in the casual diction of a carefree adolescent – “Thanks for being cool and confirming your registration” – reach for your gun). Moreover, within this broader counter-hegemonic purview, we must aim politically and economically to overhaul the material conditions which have prevented the vast majority of the world’s population from the privilege of becoming authors (as Sarah Brouillette has recently reminded us); we require a communalisation of the means of communication. But then, of course, if that happened, the very category of the “author” would undergo a transformation of its own.

All in all, then, I would advise against trying to think the relation of literature to revolution through a single lens. Rather, the relation consists of various levels; precisely which level is most relevant at which moment will ultimately be decided by the limits of the conjuncture itself.

FM: You accord a central importance to the work of Raymond Williams, yet he is still little known in France, or at least rarely written about. What, in your view, are the principal contributions Williams made to literary theory in general and Marxist theory in particular?

It’s difficult to distinguish between Williams’s importance to literary theory and his importance to Marxist theory more generally precisely because it was part of his life’s work to show that the underlying problematics of either theory are, in fact, the same. That is, you cannot understand literature without historical materialism, but a historical materialism shorn of its residual bourgeois-idealist conceptions of culture. The ultimate example of this is Williams’s Marxism and Literature (1977), which opens with a systematic application of historical materialist principles and insights to those elements of historical materialism which are, or have become, residually idealist. He came to call this lifelong project “cultural materialism,” which he defined as “a theory of culture as a (social and material) productive process and of specific practices, of ‘arts’, as social uses of material means of production (from language as material ‘practical consciousness’ to the specific technologies of writing and forms of writing, through to mechanical and electronic communications systems)” (Williams 2005, 243). Unfortunately, many theorists have come to believe – wrongly, in my opinion – that “cultural materialism” is somehowopposed to historical materialism, rather than a specific form of its renewal and extension. One result of this has been that Williams’s work, even in the Anglophone world, has not always been treated with the systematic rigour it deserves, and is instead more often than not merely wheeled out as part of the décor to connote gravitas and moral integrity.

I would also argue that we have a lot to learn from Williams’s insistence on what I call the “principle of immanence.” Like Gramsci’s notion of “absolute immanence,” as elaborated upon by Peter D. Thomas in The Gramscian Moment, Williams’s work insists on the mutual imbrication, constitution and translatability of politics, economics and thought. This principle of immanence informs his work at all levels: at the level of ‘keywords’ (such as ‘culture’, ‘society’, ‘aesthetics’) it takes the form of an insistence that these words areimmanent and constitutive factors of the very historical realities they purport merely to ‘denote’. At the level of literary form, it results in the claim that forms are not merely ‘reflections’ or ‘symbolic resolutions’ of specific historical contexts, but are in factinforming elements of them. There is not a context ‘out there’ and a literary form ‘over here’; rather, there is a single socio-material process of which literary forms are formative elements (not “cultureand society,” then, because without “culture” “society” would be ontologically incomplete). Finally, at the level of politics, it is the insistence that there is no ‘outside’ from which to look at world events; the outside is already a constitutive element of the inside. 

It is in this sense that we must understand Williams’s central emphasis on “experience,” which has been a much-maligned aspect of his work, leading some to label it “humanist”. But whereas the humanist conception would imply a subject who is self-present and coextensive with his or her experience, for Williams ‘experience’ names one’s mode of insertion into transindividual socio-matieral processes (one’s affective attachments, belongings and alignments) which almost necessarily elude the limits of one’s conscious self-comprehension; the ‘subject’ – a term he himself does not actually use – is then nothing but the constant, and often very painful, toing and froing between this immanent reality and her attempt consciously to articulate it using theories and vocabularies that are often inadequate to it (either because they emerged in a previous conjuncture and no longer equate to present reality or because they originated in a ruling class whose forms and categories are incommensurable with one’s own experience).

For these reasons and more, then, I would strongly urge people to engage with Williams’s oeuvre. What his critics unfairly write off as obsolete, ‘humanist’ or ‘culturalist’ is usually nothing of the sort: on the contrary, it is a resource of hope.

References

Eagleton, Terry. 1976. Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory. London: NLB.

Higgins, John. 1999. Raymond Williams: Literature, Marxism and Cultural Materialism. London: Routledge.

Jones, Paul. 2004. Raymond Williams's Sociology of Culture: A Critical Reconstruction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

O'Connor, Alan. 1989. Raymond Williams: Writing, Culture, Politics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Ricoeur, Paul. 1984. Time and Narrative. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. 3 vols. Vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Williams, Raymond. 1952. “The Teaching of Public Expression.” In Border Country: Raymond Williams in Adult Education, edited by John McIlroy and Sallie Westwood. Leicester: NIACE.

Williams, Raymond. 1981. Culture. London: Fontana.

Williams, Raymond. 1976. Communications. 3rd ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Williams, Raymond. 2005 [1980]. Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays. London: Verso.

Soviet Environmentalism: The Path Not Taken by Arran Gare

This article originally appeared in Capitalism Nature Socialism1993, vol 4 no 4, pp. 69-88 and also in Ted Benton (ed.) The Greening of Marxism, New York: Guilford, 1996, pp. 111-28

1. Introduction

     Capitalism is a system which by its very nature must expand until it destroys the conditions of its own existence. It is hardly surprising then that Marxists in the Soviet Union argued that in the current environmental crisis lay the ultimate reason for replacing capitalism with socialism. As A.D. Ursal, the editor of Philosophy and the Ecological Problems of Civilization, argued:

[T]he crisis of the environment, which is reaching extreme development almost everywhere, coincides with the last stage of the general crisis of capitalism. A conviction is growing throughout the world that only collapse of the capitalist system and victory of socialism throughout the world will create a general, fundamental, social opportunity for rational use of natural resources and the highest degree of optimum interaction with nature... Convincing evidence that socialism is a necessary condition for optimising relations between society and nature is socialism as it actually exists, and the policy of socialist countries in respect of the environment.[1]

However with the collapse of the Soviet Union, all hope that Eastern European communism might somehow be transformed into a more attractive, less environmentally destructive social order than the liberal democratic societies of the West has been destroyed. The description of the modern predicament by Alvin W. Gouldner has become even more poignant: "The political uniqueness of our own era then is this; we have lived and still live through a desperate political and social malaise, while at the same time we have outlived the desperate revolutionary remedies that had once been thought to solve them."[2] If this is the case, there is reason to examine the failure of the Soviet Union more closely. Was it possible that things might have worked out differently; and if so, does this provide any orientation for the present? In this paper I will show how an alternative path for Soviet society had been charted, and partly implemented, in the 1920's by the radical wing of Bolshevism, a path which made environmental conservation a central issue. And I will suggest that this is the path which holds most hope for the future.[3]

2. Socialist Environmentalism

     One of the unfortunate legacies of Soviet communism was to leave Russians ignorant of much of their past. In the last decades of the Soviet Union there emerged a large environmental movement.[4] This was more than a movement concerned with the environment. While some Soviet ideologists such as Ursal attempted to use environmental destruction in the West as an instrument of ideological struggle against the West, and others such as Boris Komarov to condemn communism as an inherently environmentally destructive system,[5] some saw in the environmental crisis a common cause for all humanity. Environmental destruction throughout the world was seen by Ivan Frolov (who under Gorbachev became editor of the Communist Party's theoretical journalKommunist) to provide justification for ending the Cold War, for reorganizing societies for the benefit of their members rather than for the struggle for world supremacy, and more fundamentally, for replacing anthropocentricism with "biocentricism" or "biosphereocentricism".[6] Since the overthrow of communism, new environmental movements have formed, mostly anti-Marxist either of a right-wing, extreme nationalist and racist, or a left-wing, anarchist variety. However none of these environmentalists appear to be aware that a strong environmental movement developed in the 1920's as one of the outcomes of the revolution of 1917,[7] nor of the roots of this environmentalism in the ideas of the left-wing of Bolshevism, a movement which attempted a synthesis of socialism and anarcho-syndicalism and was aligned with Western Marxists opposed to both the control of society by markets and to the domination of society by centralized State bureaucracies. This movement aimed to transform people through the creation of a new culture, and along with this, the to transform humanity's relationship to its environment.

     The origins of environmentalism in Russia go back long before the revolution, and there were a number of strands to Bolshevik environmentalism. In his monumental history of Soviet environmentalism up until 1935, Douglas Weiner pointed out the strong commitment by Lenin to the cause of conservation. In 1919, with Kochak's armies crossing the Urals and making their way toward the heartland of Soviet-controlled Russia, Lenin personally took time out to hear the case for conservation.[8] However Lenin's conservation policies and general attitude to government were for the most part very similar to those of the Progressive Conservation Movement which developed in U.S.A. under the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt.[9] Like Roosevelt, Lenin had a strong faith in science and was committed to creating an efficiently managed society. Lenin's environmentalism, while important and enlightened, offers us little that is new. In fact there are good grounds for accepting the argument of the anti-Bolshevik Council Communist Anton Pannekoek that Leninism was simply the expression of the late drive by Russians for industrialization.[10] Marxism as it was appropriated by such Russians as Struve, Plekhanov and Lenin provided an ideology which enabled them, as it has since enabled a number of political leaders in the Third World, to appropriate the Western drive for technological development while struggling against efforts by the advanced capitalist societies of the West to subjugate them. The history of the Soviet Union has been a continuation of this struggle, and it is impossible to understand the oppressive, technologically oriented policies of the Soviet Union except in relation to almost constant threats of invasion from the West. However by promoting their drive for industrialization as a Marxist revolution, many more radical ideas than those supported by Lenin were not only promoted, but at least to some extent, put into practice. The central idea of these radicals was that to create a socialist society it would be necessary to develop a new culture.

     In September, 1918, the Proletarian Cultural and Educational Organizations or Proletkult, were set up to give substance to the dreams of a group of Marxists to create a proletarian culture. The organizers of this movement, the left-Bolsheviks, were the butt of Lenin's polemic in his Materialism and Empirio-criticism. The leader of the left-Bolsheviks was Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Bogdanov. To fully understand his ideas and their significance it is necessary to see his work in relation to his political views and the philosophers and scientists along with whom he and his fellow Bolsheviks were condemned as idealists by Lenin. These thinkers were influenced primarily by thermodynamics or energetics. Their "empiricism" was elaborated as part of their efforts to overcome the dualism between matter and mind associated with the mechanistic view of the world.[11] Being almost all socialists of one form or another, they were among the founders of what Juan Martinez-Alier has called ecological economics. The first to develop ideas along these lines was a Ukrainian Narodnik, strongly influenced by Marx's economics, Serhii Podolinskii who lived from 1850-1891 and who met Marx and Engels in 1872 and corresponded with Marx in 1880. Podolinskii tried to reformulate Marx's theory of surplus value in physicalist terms as appropriation of usable energy, thereby focussing attention on the limits of the natural environment, on the way in which peasants were being exploited, and on how some regions were being exploited by others. Similar ideas were then developed, largely independently, by Edward Sacher, Leopold Pfaundler, Josef Popper-Lynkeus, Wilhelm Ostwald, Ernst Mach, Frederick Soddy and Otto Neurath.[12] It was these thinkers whom Lenin attacked.

     Bogdanov developed his ideas trying to reconcile Marxism with the energistic monism of Wilhelm Ostwald. However his intellectual work was associated with his engagement in political action and a range of ideological disputes. As a student Bogdanov had become a Narodnik, and still adhered to the views of Narodnaya Volya (the People's Will - the group which had assassinated Alexander II in 1881) on his exile to Tula in 1894.[13] It was while participating in political agitation in Tula that he became a Marxist. However unlike most other Russian Marxists, Bogdanov was not interested in combating the Narodniks, and was sympathetic to the spontaneous action of the workers. In 1904 he wrote that "workers know better by experience what exploitation is" and urged the use of strikes and trade unions so that "the workers will unite in larger and larger masses".[14] After the uprising of 1905, in which workers with little direction from political leaders had almost succeeded in seizing power, he, along with a number of other Bolsheviks, including Maxim Gor'kii and Anatolii Lunacharskii, was strongly influenced by the ideas and practices of the anarcho-syndicalists.[15] He was influenced by Georges Sorel (whose bookReflections on Violence was translated into Russian in 1907) who argued workers need a myth to inspire them to action rather than just a scientific analysis of society. Bogdanov sympathised with Lunacharskii's efforts to join socialism with anarcho-syndicalism and his call for the subordination of political organizations to a class syndicalist organization, a kind of "General Worker's Soviet". It was this more than anything else which led in 1908 to the split in the Bolsheviks between Lenin and Bogdanov and his supporters, including Lunacharskii, and it was this split which precipitated Lenin's attack on the philosophy of his opponents among the Bolsheviks inMaterialism and Empirio-criticism. In 1909 Bogdanov wrote that "the working class as a social system does not exist unless the proletariat is organized into a party, syndicates, and so forth," as a "living collective."[16] Along with the left Marxists of Western Europe such as Pannekoek and Gorter, Bogdanov extolled the work of the worker-philosopher Joseph Dietzgen (1826-1888) who had argued that: "For a worker who seeks to take part in the self-emancipation of his class ... the prime necessity is to cease allowing himself to be taught by others and to teach himself instead"[17] and who, to support the historical role he attributed by him to the subject, argued for a monist philosophy in which active, experiencing subjects had a place in the world. However Bogdanov regarded Dietzgen's philosophy as still too much based on contemplation, defending Marx's (and modern physicists') concept of matter as that which resists labour (or action) against Dietzgen's conception of matter as substance or primary being. Ostwald's monism provided Bogdanov with a philosophy to address and relate these diverse concerns.

     There were two stages to Bogdanov's intellectual career. To begin with, in his work Empiriomonism, published between 1904 and 1906, Bogdanov added a social dimension to the epistemological theories of the empirio-critics, Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius, whom Ostwald had used to justify taking energy as the basic principle of scientific explanation in place of matter. Opposing the concept of passive experience of the empirio-critics, Bogdanov argued that while the experience of the mental world is the product of individually organized experience, the physical world is the product of socially organized experience, primarily associated with labor. These two worlds reveal two different biological-organizational tendencies.[18] He argued that the conflicts of value associated with the sphere of individually organized experience were manifestations of the divisions within society based on class, race, sex, language, nationality, work specialization, and relations of domination and subordination of all kinds. It was necessary to overcome these conflicts for a new communal consciousness to emerge in with basic values could be agreed upon. But while Bogdanov accepted that it was important to transform class relations to achieve this, he argued that the importance of this had been over-emphasized by Marx. Other conflicts, including organizational relations and unequal relations between the sexes, also had to be overcome. And to achieve this, it was necessary for the proletariat to transcend bourgeois culture, which he argued could only be achieved by creating a new culture to organize experience.[19] Anticipating later Marxist critiques of the science which emerged with capitalism, he saw the mechanical view of the world, the split between mind and matter, idealism and materialism, as expressions of the social practices of capitalist society, of the fetishism of commodities involved in market relationships and of the split between the organizational and the executive functions in the labour process. Bogdanov called for a cultural regeneration based on developing the modes of understanding appropriate for a society in which the divisions in society, including the division between manual and mental labour, had been overcome.

     In the second stage of his intellectual career from 1913 to 1922 Bogdanov attempted to provide the key to these modes of understanding in his three volumed work, Tektology: The Universal Oganizational Science, a general theory of organization.[20] Tektology was designed to provide a harmonious unity between the spiritual, cultural and the physical experience of the "working collective" in whose interest all science and activity were to be organized and all past culture, including bourgeois science, reworked. By uniting the most disparate phenomena under one conceptual scheme, tektology would allow human beings torn apart by strife to find a common language. Since the sources of strife were larger than the merely economic, the common language had to be larger than traditional Marxism, although Marxism would be included as a special case. According to this philosophy, all objects are distinguishable as different degrees of organization. The focus was not on what the world was made of, but on the nature of organization. Organized complexes or systems are composed of inter-related elements, conceived of as activities, such that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Living beings and automatic machines are dynamically structured complexes in which "bi-regulators" provide for the maintenance of order. Bogdanov argued that no matter how different the various elements of the universe - electrons, atoms, things, people, ideas, planets, stars - and regardless of the considerable differences in their combinations, it is possible to establish a small number of general methods by which any of these elements joins with another.

     Conceiving humans as part of and within nature, as existing only through their capacity to obtain and process usable energy, the limitations of the natural environment were immediately brought into sharp focus. This concern was expressed Red Star, a novel written in 1908 by Bogdanov to proselytise his ideas.[21] This work is set on Mars, a planet on which the communist order had already been established, in which society is governed by a "Council of Syndicates". In one conversation Bogdanov has his Martian interlocutor point out the continuing problem in Martian history of natural resource and energy shortages, despite the power of their science and technology. The highlight ofRed Star is a debate between two Martians over whether they should exterminate the Earthlings to get access to more natural resources. Sterni defends this on the grounds that socialist society on Mars is the highest form of life. Netti, Sterni's opponent, reprimands him for proposing to eliminate "an entire individual type of life, a type which we can never resurrect or replace."[22]

3. The Proletkult Movement

     The Proletkult movement, inspired by and largely under Bogdanov's direction, gained over 400,000 members, and attracted the support of a wide section of the Russia's artists, musicians and writers.[23] Major Proletkult organizations were established in the big industrial towns and capitals, Proletkult cells were established in every factory, and studios, where eighty thousand workers learned and practiced the arts and sciences, were set up around the country. Between 1918 and 1923 this organization published as many as thirty-four journals.[24] People in part inspired by Proletkult formed the "Worker's Opposition" who opposed the bureaucratic tendencies of the new government, the "return to capitalism" of the New Economic Policy (N.E.P.) and also Trotsky's call to militarize society, and instead, called for worker's control of industry. This whole development, which resonated with developments in Western Marxism, was attacked by Lenin, who saw it as a syndicalist threat to his own political philosophy and the institutions he was building.[25] Lenin, who conceived history in dualist terms as a dialectical conflict between spontaneity and conscious direction, in which progress is achieved through the control of spontaneity by consciousness,[26] condemned the syndicalist tendencies among Marxists as an "infantile disorder".[27] Bogdanov in particular came under attack. Lenin, who as Robert Williams noted, "was well aware that behind the Aesopian language of 'experience', 'energy', and 'collectivism' lay the syndicalist politics of direct action",[28] republished hisMaterialism and Empirio-criticism to undermine Bogdanov's authority. As with his philosophy of history and political philosophy, this work affirmed a fundamental dualism between consciousness and the world, with knowledge being conceived as the true representation of the world. Late in 1920 Lenin forced the subordination of the hitherto free-wheeling Proletkult to the People's Commissariat of Enlightenment or Education (Narkompros), and it was later abolished altogether. By the timeTektology was completed in 1922, Bogdanov's prestige had been almost destroyed. However his works continued to have an influence, particularly through the Commissar of Enlightenment, Lunacharskii, Bogdanov's brother-in-law and a supporter of his philosophy.[29]

     Lunacharskii had become the Commissar of Enlightenment in 1917 and remained in this position until he resigned in September, 1929. This period is regarded as the Golden Age of Soviet culture, largely due to the influence of the Commissariat for Enlightenment and the policies promoted by Lunacharskii. These achievements can be accounted for by the increased State support for education and other cultural activities, by the pluralistic policies pursued by Lunacharskii, but also by the significance accorded to culture, and correspondingly, to the intense debates on fundamental issues of culture. These debates progressively impinged upon the sciences.

4. Soviet Science

     Alexander Vucinich in his study of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR characterized scientists of the 1920's as struggling to rebuild science after the chaos of the World War and the Civil War, and to fend off Marxist efforts to control science. He claimed that "...during the first ten years under Soviet rule the Academy was involved in a gruelling struggle to regain the growth momentum lost at the beginning of World War I: it was not until 1928 that its publication output reached the prewar level."[30] For Vucinich, it was only with the Stalinization of Soviet science, that is, the reduction of science to an instrument of the economy, that science came to be Marxist. I wish to suggest that it was the developments in science which took place under the auspices of Lunacharskii's Commissariat of Enlightenment which give some idea of what a socialist science would be like. Later developments are better characterized as revivals of Russian nihilism.[31] Developments in science in the 1920's were moving Soviet society towards a new relationship to its natural environment, and these developments were closely associated with the conservation movement.

     Initially the Commissariat of Enlightenment promoted the establishment of specialized Institutes of Research, and cultivated the support of the largely anti-Marxist scientific establishment. Marxist appointees within universities defended science as the ultimate product of human consciousness. Their views of science were essentially positivistic - science was seen as superior to and independent of philosophy, and mechanistic. Reductionist theories, such as Pavlov's psychology, were defended, and it was argued by these Marxists (and by Trotsky) that the goal of science is to explain the world in terms of chemistry and physics. However these "mechanists" were soon opposed by a new intellectual movement. In 1918 the Communist Government set up the Socialist Academy of the Social Sciences (which was renamed in 1923 the Communist Academy). It rapidly expanded its activities, and was the guiding star in widely ranging efforts to create new centres for the training of future Marxist scholars. In 1921 it set up the Institute of the Red Professoriat to supply institutes of higher learning with Marxist instructors in economics, sociology and philosophy. This provided the conditions for the establishment of a Marxist intellectual culture and in 1924, the Society of Militant Dialectical Materialists was founded. Its leader, A. M. Deborin, based in the Communist Academy and giving seminars at the Institute of the Red Professoriat, was able to create a movement devoted to critically scrutinising the philosophical assumptions of natural science.[32] Bogdanov's idea of a proletarian science was refurbished.

     While the mechanists claimed the successes of reductionist science validated their position, the dialecticians were strengthened by the publication in 1925 of Engels' Dialectics of Nature. The dialecticians rejected both the reductionism of the mechanists as well as the organic analogies of Western anti-mechanists. While rejecting Bogdanov's philosophy, they defended similar ideas, arguing that nature is essentially dynamic and creative, generating qualitatively new processes which cannot be understood in terms of the conditions of their emergence. Humans were seen as creative participants within nature who could only be understood in their own terms, as determined neither by their constituents nor their natural or social environments, but able to control their own destinies. From 1926 onwards the dialecticians not only criticised developments within science, but were able to influence the direction of research.

     In 1928, following Stalin's alliance with the supporters of the N.E.P. to expel Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev from the party leadership, Stalin embraced the cause of the workers who, disaffected by the contrast between the decline of their own living standards and the growing prosperity of the peasantry, regarded the N.E.P. as a betrayal of the revolution. In response to the demands of the workers he initiated a cultural revolution to purge society of bourgeois forms of thought.[33] Initially, this move put the Deborinites in a good position to exert their influence, which culminated in 1929 when they gained control of the Communist Academy and other institutions. Entire fields of science were then scrutinized for their philosophical assumptions. However Stalin's agenda was to speed up economic growth. Arguing that immediate industrialization was required to face the growing threat from Western Europe and collectivization of land was required to supply workers with food, Stalin called for a reassertion of conscious direction over spontaneity. In this milieu, in which Stalin was working to destroy the power of the remaining Bolshevik leaders,[34] Deborin's ideas were no longer supported. Having breached the walls of the "bourgeois professoriat" and after having established the principle of direct political intervention in scientific institutions, Deborin and his followers were attacked in turn by former Deborinites led by M.B. Mitin for not serving the revolution.[35] By the end of 1930, by which time Lunacharskii had resigned as Commissar of Enlightenment in protest at the rejection of his ideals of humanistic education and cultural pluralism, the Deborinites were distinctly out of favour. While "mechanists" had been knowledgeable about science, but ignorant of philosophy, and the Deborinites had been knowledgeable about philosophy, but ignorant of science, Mitin and his followers achieved a dialectical synthesis of the ignorance of each. However there was more to Mitin's views than ignorance. He revived the ideas of the nihilists of the 1860's and 70's; in particular, the idea that science is nothing but an instrument for the development of technology. It was Mitin's defence of this view which endeared him to Stalin, who then dismissed the Deborinites as "Menshevising idealists" - his ultimate term of abuse and dismissal. Thereafter proletarian science was no longer anti-mechanistic science, but science in the service of Five Year Plans devoted to the domination of nature.

5. The Career of Ecology

     Prior to the revolution there had been a range of environmentalists in Russia roughly corresponding to the range found in Western Europe and U.S.A. (although there were also some highly original thinkers among Russian environmentalists).[36] To begin with there were those who were concerned about environmental destruction for purely utilitarian reasons, evaluating nature only as an economic resource. Secondly there were those who extolled the intrinsic value of nature, and called for a recognition of the rights of all living things to their existence, such as Ivan Parfen'evich Borodin and Oleg Lzmailovich Semenov-tian-shanskii. But there was also a third group, the scientific one based on the development of phytosociology - the study of vegetational communities, a field in which Russians had been particularly innovative. These pioneers of plant ecology looked to virgin nature as a model of harmony, efficiency, and productivity that agriculturalists should strive to emulate. To put agriculture on a sound basis it was argued that pristine natural communities should be studied, and it was proposed that areas of nature be set aside as models (etaloni) within protected nature reserves (zapovedniki) against which cultivated land could be compared. It was this third group which gained vigorous support after the Revolution, firstly from Lunacharskii who commended the idea to Lenin, and then by Lenin who did all he could to support the environmentalists. Following Lenin's support for the first proposedzapovednik in 1919, responsibility for their creation and administration was granted by Lenin to Lunacharskii's Commissariat of Enlightenment to ensure their independence from short-term economic imperatives. By 1929 61zapovedniki had been established, with a total area of almost 4 million hectares, distributed throughout the Soviet Union to provide the basis for developing a comprehensive understanding of the natural environment of the whole country.[37] After a number of battles with the Commissariat for Agriculture (Narkomzem) and the Commissariat for Trade (Narkomtorg), thesezapovedniki were able to support a rapid expansion of ecology. Associated with this development, ecology was increasingly included in the curricula of universities and schools, and in the later 1920's ecologists were able to make a determined effort to influence State economic policy.[38]

     Before the revolution Russian ecology had focussed almost exclusively on plants and soils. With the provision of zapovedniki, Soviet ecologists began to appreciate the role of fauna in shaping the development of natural communities so that in the end communities were seen as a complex system of three interacting elements of equal importance - vegetation, fauna, and the abiotic environment. By 1931 when Daniil Nikolaevich Kashkarov published his great survey textbook of community ecology,Environment and Community, later published in English, it could be fairly argued that the Soviet Union led the world in ecology. To appreciate some of the ideas being developed by Soviet ecologists, and how these developments were related to the Communist revolution and to the ideas of Proletkult, it is necessary to examine the careers of some of the main figures.

     One of the most important figures was V.I. Vernadskii. Vernadskii had developed the concept of biosphere, and had himself warned of the bio-physico-chemical limits to economic development.[39] While an opponent of Tsarism, he had also been an opponent of the Bolsheviks.[40] However he was sympathetic to the work of Podolinskii and had very similar ideas to Lunacharskii and Bogdanov on the need for a close relationship between science and the popular masses, on the need to develop radically new ideas in science and to leave behind the old ideas of the nineteenth century, and associated with this, on the centrality of energetic processes and complex interdependencies within nature. Vernadskii's work on geochemistry and biogeology, which led him to promote and elaborate the concept of the biosphere, were entirely in accordance with Bogdanov's tektology. Proletkult and theCommissariat of Enlightenment had created a sympathetic environment for such ideas.[41] After the revolution, Vernadskii tried to get permanent funding in the West, but was unable to do so, while in 1925 he was awarded a newly created chair at the Academy of Science in Russia.[42] And while Vernadskii was criticised by some Marxists, his concepts were accepted into the mainstream of science in the Soviet Union in a way which contrasts radically with the marginal place they and similar ideas have occupied in the West.[43]

     The ecologist most influenced by Vernadskii, the man who in 1931 had become the foremost ecologist in the Soviet Union, was Vladimir Vladimirovich Stanchinskii. Stanchinskii obtained his doctorate from Heidelberg University in 1906, but found it was not recognized in Russia, and had to pass external exams at Moscow University.[44] It was only after the revolution, in the new, intellectually freer environment created by the Commissariat of Enlightenment, that Stanchinskii was able to embark on a successful career. During the Civil War he headed the local El'ninsk district branch ofNarkompros (Commissariat of Enlightenment) RSFSR in Smolensk Oblast, and was one of the organizers of the new Smolensk University set up byNarkompros. Playing a major role in Smolensk intellectual life, he became full professor at Smolensk University and head of its Department of Zoology, while also serving as the president of the Smolensk Society of Physicians and Naturalists, which he founded. Having an exceptionally broad vision, he soon gravitated to one of the leading theoretical problems in biology, the mechanism of speciation. He then moved on to what had been defined in the Soviet Union as the other great theoretical issue of the day: the nature of biological community. His guiding idea in this study, an idea deriving from Vernadskii but clearly resonating with Bogdanov's energistic philosophy, was that by virtue of their being in a continual state of matter- and energy-exchange with their environment, and continually changing, destroying and synthesizing substances within themselves, each species must be seen to have a very specific biochemical and physico-chemical role in the "economy of nature". Stanchinskii had visited thezapovednik at Askania-Nova in 1926, and decided this was an ideal spot to relocate his investigations into biological communities. In the spring of 1929 he assumed the posts of deputy director of the reserve and director of its scientific sector, simultaneously gaining appointment as head of the Department of Vertebrate Zoology at Khar'kov University.

     Biological communities had previously been defined by their floristic composition, by certain structural features, or by a certain visual homogeneity. Stanchinskii investigated the food webs to identify the boundaries of communities within nature, tracing the transformation of solar energy by vegetation and other "autotrophs" - organisms which gain their energy directly from the sun, through myriad biotic pathways of the "heterotrophs" - those organisms which gain the energy from other organisms, until all the accumulated energy potential had been exhausted. He showed how the biocenosis (biological community) was characterized by relative stability, a "dynamic equilibrium" in which relative numbers of the various component species remained surprisingly constant over long periods of time, despite their theoretical ability to propagate exponentially. Placing each organism on a "trophic ladder", he pointed out that each successive rung of the ladder would have less energy in the form of food than the next lower level, and could only exist with a fraction of the bio-mass, since each successive level was dependent on the previous one for its energy supply, and energy was dissipated at each level. He then constructed an ideal mathematical model to describe the annual energy budget of a simple theoretical biocenosis to guide his empirical research, and developed a methodology and the instrumentation for measuring the biomass of the various component species of a biocenosis.

     What is significant about Stanchinskii's career is not simply the ideas he developed, which are now recognized to have been about ten years in advance of the work of American ecologists (whom he influenced), but the way in which his career was made possible by changes wrought by the communist government, and the status his ideas were accorded within the Soviet Union. It appears unlikely that Stanchinskii's career would have been possible without the new opportunities opened by the expansion of education, by the establishment of new scientific institutions, and by the establishment of zapovedniki inaugurated by the communist government. It also appears unlikely that the diversity of theoretical approaches to ecology developed in the 1920's and early 1930's could have taken place in the rigid institutions of pre-war Russia. The cultural flowering of the 1920's, of which the development of ecology was a part, can only be accounted for by the ferment created by the significance accorded to culture, particularly to science, and the Marxist challenges to the assumptions underlying the sciences. This seems particularly evident in the case of Stanchinskii's work. The favourable reception of Stanchinskii's ideas can also be accounted for by the intellectual environment created by Bogdanov's philosophy and the Proletkult movement. The high status accorded to science, and the high status accorded to ecology within science, particularly when this was formulated in terms of energetics, gave Stanchinskii a significance in Soviet society unmatched by ecologists in other countries.

      This high status attracted the attention of the Deborinites. I.I. Bugaev of the Communist Academy who was assigned the task of investigating the ecologists, attacked those ideas which failed to allow for emergence, and thereby the irreducibility of humanity to biology. Pachoskii's attempt to prove the necessity of inequality in nature and to extend this to humanity was censured. But Stanchinskii was able to reformulate his ideas to accord with the strictures of the Deborinites, and arguably, strengthened his theory and research program in the process. He replaced the static-sounding notion of the equilibrium of the biocenosis with the notion of "proportionality" and emphasised the continuous self-creation of the biocenosis which he depicted as growing out of interactions among its components and between them and the abiotic environment, with the result that new syntheses were continually arising in the form of successional series.[45] His work was then not only acceptable to the Deborinites, but could be taken by them as further corroboration of the dialectical nature of the world.

     With the backing of his ecological theory, Stanchinskii was able to argue for a role for ecology in economics. He argued that by studying the energy flows in a whole range of biocenoses, humans would be able to calculate the productive capacities of these natural communities and would be able to structure their own economic activity in conformity with them. He also saw such a program of biocenotic research as an aid in achieving biotic protection of cultivated croplands and thereby overcoming the need to use harmful pesticides. Stanchinskii played a major part at the First All-Russian Congress for the Conservation of Nature held in September, 1929. In this, he argued that ecologists must play a major part in the formulation of the Five Year Plan, arguing that conservation organizations must be able to review plan targets and monitor plan fulfilment. The Congress accepted his arguments and resolved:

The economic activity of man is always one form or another of the exploitation of natural resources ... The distinction and tempo of economic growth can be correctly determined only after the detailed study of the environment and the evaluation of its production capacities with the aim of its conservation, development and enrichment. This is what conservation is all about.[46]

     The ecologists failed in their effort to gain a place in economic planning within the Soviet Union. They nevertheless became the most trenchant critics of the implementation of the Five Year Plan. They opposed the damming of rivers without due care for the effects of this, the collectivization and uniform mechanization of agriculture, the efforts to acclimatize exotic fauna, and interference in the lifestyles of traditional societies occupying ecologically fragile environments. They in turn drew a massive response from the Stalinists who condemned the conservationists as "organically alien to active youth and in particular to Soviet Youth, seized ... with the enthusiasm of socialist construction and reconstruction."[47] V.L. Komarov argued in 1931 that all reference to "plant communities" should be expunged from biology, a call which foreshadowed a drive against ecology by I.I. Prezent, a colleague of Lysenko, who was committed to the wholesale acclimatization of exotic species and creating a world in which "All living nature will live, thrive, and die at none other than the will of man and according to his designs."[48] Stanchinskii lost his job, the research station at Askania-Nova was closed down, and in 1934 he was arrested. The typesetting for his book which was about to be published was destroyed. Although conservationists fought an effective rearguard action, this was eventually defeated, and the science of ecology was virtually suspended for two decades.

6. Conclusion

     The story of Proletkult, of Bogdanov, Lunacharskii and the ecologists, is the story of the path not taken. But it was a path sufficiently ventured upon to show what might have been if Leninism, then Stalinism, had not triumphed. It is this untaken path, the path of cultural revolution on the basis of a post-dualist (and post-mechanist) conception of the world in which people are seen as active, conscious participants within nature rather than as standing over and above nature, conjoined with a struggle to transform the social order which engendered such dualism - the commoditization of the world, the division between intellectual and manual labour, and relationships between people based on domination and subordination, which modern environmentalists must now consider.

[1] A.D. Ursal ed.,Philosophy and the Ecological Problems of Civilisation, trans. H. Cambell Creighton, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1983), pp.10f.

[2] Cited without reference in Alec Nove,The Economics of Feasible Socialism, (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983).

[3] This is further argued in Arran E. Gare,Beyond European Civilization: Marxism, Process Philosophy and the Environment, (Bungendore: Eco-logical Press, 1993).

[4] See Philip R. Pryde,Conservation in the Soviet Union, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972) andEnvironmental Management in the Soviet Union, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Joan DeBardeleben,The Environment and Marxism-Leninism: The Soviet and East German Experience, (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985); and Douglas R. Weiner, "The Changing Face of Soviet Conservation", Donald Worster ed.The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

[5] Boris Komarov,The Destruction of Nature in the Soviet Union, (London: Pluto Press, 1978). The author now lives in Israel.

[6] Ivan T. Frolov "The Marxist-Leninist Conception of the Ecological Problem" in Ursal ed. Philosophy and the Ecological Problems of Civilisationop.cit. and I.T. Frolov and V.A. Los, "Filosofskie osnovaniia sovremenio ekologii",Ekologischeskaia propaganda v SSSR, (Moscow: Nauka, 1984). This paper is discussed and partly translated by Douglas Weiner in "Prometheus Rechained: Ecology and Conservation in the Soviet Union" in Loren R. Graham ed.,Humanistic Dimensions of Science and Technology in the Soviet Union, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).

[7] Douglas Weiner gave a paper he had written on Stanchinskii to Frolov in 1985 when Frolov spoke at Boston University. Frolov appeared to be unaware of the conservationists of the 1920's.

[8] Douglas R. Weiner,Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation, and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia, (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), p.27.

[9] This has been described by Samuel Hays,Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement 1890 - 1920, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959).

[10] Anton Pannekoek,Lenin as Philosopher [1932], (London: Merlin Press, 1975).

[11] Seen in relation to the history of logical positivism, their philosophies have been largely misrepresented. Paul Feyerabend, on reading Ernst Mach, characterized him as a "dialectical rationalist". See "Mach's Theory of Research and Its Relation to Einstein,"Farewell to Reason, (London: Verso, 1987), pp.192-218.

[12] J. Martinez-Alier and J.M. Naredo, "A Marxist Precursor of Energy Economics: Podolinski",Journal of Peasant Studies, 8, 1982, pp.207-224; and Juan Martinez-Alier,Ecological Economics, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987).

[13] On the early evolution of Bogdanov's political ideas, see James D. White, "Bogdanov in Tula"Studies in Soviet Thought, 22, 1981. See also John Biggart, "Bogdanov and Lunacharskii in Vologda"Sbornik, 5, 1980.

[14] Cited by Robert C. Williams, "Collective Immortality: The Syndicalist Origins of Proletarian Culture",Slavic Review, 39, September, 1980 p. 395 from Riadovoi [Bogdanov],O sotsializme (Geneva: 1904), pp.15, 17, 21.

[15] On the syndicalist influence on Bogdanov and other Marxists, seeibid. pp. 389-402. However, none of the Marxists appear to have been influenced by the work of Peter Kropotkin.

[16] Cited from A. Bogdanov, "Filosofiia sovremennago estestvo ispytatelia", inOcherki filosofi kollektivizma, (St. Petersberg, 1909), p.133 by White,op.cit., p.397.

[17] Cited by D.A. Smart,Pannekoek and Gorter's Marxism, (London: Pluto Press, 1978), p.18.

[18] See Kenneth Jensen,Beyond Marx and Mach: Aleksandr Bogdanov's Philosophy of Living Experience, (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1978).

[19] It appears that Gramsci's ideas ultimately derived from Bogdanov. See Zenovia A. Sochor, "Was Bogdanov Russia's Answer to Gramsci?"Studies in Soviet Thought, 22, February, 1981.

[20] This has not been translated. However a good idea of his philosophy can be gained fromEssays in Tektology: The General Science of Organization, trans. George Gorelik, (Seaside, CA: Intersystems Publications, 1980). See also George Gorelik, "Bogdanov's tektology: its basic concepts and relevance to modern generalizing sciences",Human Systems Management 1, 1980.

[21] Alexander Bogdanov,Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia, ed. Loren R. Graham and Richard Stites, trans. Charles Rougle, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).

[22]Ibid., p.116.

[23] See Lynn Mally,Culture of the Future: On the Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

[24] Sochor, 1988, op.cit. p.129.

[25] Peter Kropotkin had written to Lenin, predicting that "the syndicalist movement ... will emerge as the great force over the next fifty years, leading to the creation of the communist stateless society" (cited by Robert C. Williams, "Childhood Diseases: Lenin on 'Left' Bolshevism",Sbornik, 8, 1982, without a reference. In 1920, there had been an epidemic of trade union unrest, anarchists had bombed the Moscow party headquarters, and in the Ukraine the anarchist Makhnovites, flying the black flag, were attacking the Red armies as well as the White. Towards the end of 1920, anarchists organizations in Russia were crushed.

[26] The best analysis of Lenin's political philosophy is Neil Harding,Lenin's Political Thought, (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1983). However it is in Katarina Clark,The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981) that the best analysis of the dialectic of spontaneity and consciousness and the influence of this on Societ culture are provided.

[27] V.I. Lenin, "'Left-Wing' Communism - An Infantile Disorder", (April 1920),The Lenin Anthology, ed., Robert C. Tucker, (N.Y.: Norton, 1975). On Lenin's relation to left Marxists, see Williamsop.cit.

[28] Williams, 1980,op.cit., p.397.

[29] On Lunacharskii's policies and influence, see Sheila Fitzpatrick,The Commissariat of Enlightenment, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).

[30] Alexander Vucinich,Empire of Reason, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p.122.

[31] That Stalinism was a conscious throwback to the nihilism of the 1860's has been argued by James H. Billington inThe Icon and the Axe, [1966] (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), p.534f. The connection between Stalinist biology and the biologists of the 1840's, 50's and 60's (extolled by the nihilists) has been shown by Douglas Weiner, "The Roots of Michurinism: Transformist Biology and Acclimatization as Currents in Russian Life Sciences",Annals of Science, 42, 1985.

[32] The conflict between the mechanists and the "dialectical" Deborinites has been described by David Joravsky inSoviet Marxism and Natural Science 1917-1932, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961).

[33] On this, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Cultural Revolution as Class War" and Moshe Lewin, "Society, State, and Ideology during the First Five-Year Plan", in Sheila Fitzpatrick ed.,Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), pp.8-40 and pp.41-77.

[34] Stalin's main opponent was Bukharin - whose ideas were influenced by Bogdanov's work. Had Bukharin survived and defeated Stalin, the position of the conservationists would have been much more secure. On Bukharin, his relation to Bogdanov, his ideas and political career, and his struggle with Stalin, see Stephen F. Cohen,Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).

[35] On this see Leszek Kolakowski,Main Currents of Marxism 3 - The Breakdown, trans. P.S. Falla, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).

[36] On the early history of Soviet ecology and conservation see Weiner,Models of Nature,op.cit. I am deeply indebted to Professor Weiner for sharing his vast knowledge of Russian ecology and environmentalism, and indeed for his help in my efforts to understand the dynamics of Russian culture.

[37]Ibid. p.61

[38] On the rapid expansion of ecology in Russia in the 1920's, and the rapidity with ecology entered the curricula of universities, see (apart from the work of Weiner) J. Richard Carpenter, "Special Review: Recent Russian Work on Community Ecology",Journal of Animal Ecology, 8, 1939.

[39] On Vernadskii's concept of the biosphere see Jacques Grinevald, "Sketch for a History of the Idea of the Biosphere", inGaia, the Thesis, the Mechanisms and the Implications, ed. Peter Bunyard and Edward Goldsmith, (Camelford: Wadebridge Ecological Centre, 1988) pp.1-34. See also Weiner, 1988, op.cit. p.44.

[40] On Stanchinskii's relation to Vernadskii, see Weiner,Models of Nature,op.cit., p.80. Stanchinskii explicitly acknowledge his debt to Vernadskii.

[41] See Kendell E. Bailes,Science and Russian Culture in an Age of Revolutions: V.I. Vernadsky and His Scientific School, 1863-1945, (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990).

[42] See Kendall E. Bailes,Science and Russian Culture in an Age of Revolutions: V.I. Vernadsky and His Scientific School, 1863-1945 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), p.161.

[43] For the place of Vernadskii's ideas in Russian science see DeBardeleben,The Environment and Marxism-Leninsim, op.cit. p.93. On the place of these ideas in the West see Lynn Margulis and Edward Goldsmith,Gaia, the Thesis, the Mechanisms and the Implications, ed. Peter Bunyard and Edward Goldsmith, (Camelford: Wadebridge Ecological Society Centre, 1988), p.166.

[44] For details on the life and career of Stanchinskii, see Weiner,Models of Nature,op.cit. pp.78-8 and passim.

[45] Douglas Weiner, "Community Ecology in Stalin's Russia",Isis, 75, 1984, p. 692.

[46] Douglas Weiner,The History of the Conservation Movement in Russia and the U.S.S.R. from its Origin to the Stalin Period, (Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, 1983), p.348.

[47]Ibid. p.275.

[48]Ibid. p.517.

Presented at Historical Materialism London (2017) by Tiarnán Somhairle

Tiarnán is an independent Marxist researcher interested in theories of underdevelopment and Irish historiography. He blogs at https://chemicalelementsof.wordpress.com/.

This paper is a preliminary attempt to sketch out some aspects of a Political Marxist analysis of Irish economic development and underdevelopment in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

It’s divided into four short sections:

The first section is a brief summary of the Political Marxist definition of contrasting feudal and capitalist social property relations and ‘rules for reproduction’.

The second section then attempts to adjudicate based on prima facie evidence whether feudal or capitalist social-property rules for reproduction were being followed by exploiters and exploited in Ireland on the eve of the Famine in the 1840s.

It’s suggested that non-capitalist social-property relations prevailed across much of the country, but that a transition to capitalism had occurred in the settler-colony in the northeastern region of Ulster and had occurred or was occurring in the enclosed grazing lands of the midlands.

The third section offers an explanation for these regionally distinct social-property relations from a Political Marxist perspective, in terms of divergent patterns of colonisation in the seventeenth century and the subsequent regional evolution of class struggle and balance of class forces.

The forth section briefly surveys the post-famine era and questions whether it witnessed the consolidation of capitalism in Ireland, as suggested by Marx in Chapter 8 of Capital. Drawing on the work of Ellen Hazelkorn, I suggest this is doubtful, thus partly explaining the persistence of “underdevelopment” in the south-west of Ireland into the 20^th century.

Social-property relations and rules for reproduction

For Robert Brenner, as he and later Political Marxists have systematised his approach, class societies are constituted by specific macroeconomic contexts or social-property relations – i.e. the dispersal and possession of economic and political resources that determines the interaction of actors within a given set of social relations, as well as determining the relationship between the productive system and nature.

Each system of social-property relations has its own corresponding microeconomics, or rules of reproduction, i.e. the rational actions and constraints that actors must follow in order to successfully reproduce themselves within that system.

The pursuit of these reproductive strategies by economic actors – whether exploiters or exploited – are thus reflected in aggregate patterns of development or non-development as the case may be in the economy.

Feudalism

Under feudal social-property relations, peasant possession of the means of subsistence in land, and means of production in their tools and labour, means that surplus has to be extracted by extra-economic coercion after the process of production itself has been completed, i.e. the forceful taking of feudal rent.

This feudal macroeconomics corresponds to the microeconomics of its conflictual rules of reproduction: since peasants quite rationally – given possession of their means of production (land, tools) – aim to produce for subsistence, rather than surpluses that could be appropriated without recompense by lords.

This typically means undertaking ‘safety first’ agriculture on the small plots of land in their possession, in order to insure against poor harvest and other variable factors, and only selling physical surpluses on the market.

These conservative economic practices go hand-in-hand with precapitalist family reproductive and property strategies: for example the subdivision of holdings in order to set up children independently and the practices of early marriage and high fertility, intended to act as a safety net for when peasants grows old or infirm in the absence of a social security system.

Lords on the other hand carry out ‘political accumulation’ under feudalism. Unable to wield entrepreneurial oversight over the direct labour process, they instead invest surpluses coercively extracted from their peasants in building larger, more cohesive, better-armed political groups, in order to in turn to coercively extract further surpluses either from other lords or peasants.

Production can be expanded, but usually only extensively rather than intensively – for example, through the cultivation of new lands, not via the application of superior techniques or technology to current land inputs, since the peasants given their possession of the means of production are not expellable from the process of production.

The aggregate pattern of these feudal rules for reproduction follow a very classical Malthusian-Ricardian trajectory: as peasant population grows, the average size of holdings decreases due to the subdivision of land, which in turn leads to forced movement onto worse land and the reclamation of marginal land. Little specialisation or investment occurs, and instead there a decline in labour productivity across the economy occurs, alongside rising food and land prices as population explodes.

This “development” culminates in recurrent eco-demographic crises as peasant over-population strikes, leading to a fall in population, which in turn causes a decline in lordly incomes, which given feudal social-property relations can only be made up for by further punitive taxation of the peasantry, which inevitably triggers a downward spiral culminating in war or prolonged social conflict.

Capitalism

Capitalist social-property relations on the other hand are characterised fundamentally by the separation of the direct producers from their means of subsistence, rendering them dependent on the market for inputs.  As “market dependent” producers, obliged to purchase their inputs, they are in turn required to sell their outputs, in order to secure the funds to buy their inputs – they are thus required to produce competitively in order to survive.

In other words capitalist rules for reproduction compel individual economic units to maximise their price-cost ratio and profits: they’re compelled to specialise, to accumulate/reinvest surpluses; to innovate and bring in the latest inventions; and to move from line to line in order to meet changing demand.

This economic behaviour in the aggregate witnesses the classic Smithian pattern of capitalist growth with rising productivity/output per person, especially in agriculture; which in turn means the capacity to support an ever large proportion of population outside of agriculture.

This then leads to a rising real wage due to the declining cost of food, and an increase in discretionary spending which leads to the growth of the domestic market. This is reflected in terms of settlement pattern by the ascension of towns and cities, and increasing urbanisation.

Again, capitalist social-property relations generate their own specific forms of crisis: over-accumulation, over-production, a falling rate of profit, etc.

Transition

Transitions between the two regimes of social-property relationships (and from slavery to feudalism, or capitalism to socialism) can and of course do occur, but within the Political Marxist perspective they are usually premised on a crisis of the existing social-property relations and the historically specific and contingent outworking of class conflict, not the transhistorical or teleological outworking of forces such as commercialisation, the growth of the productive forces, or demography.

Ireland on the eve of the Famine: prime-facie evidence of precapitalist social-property relations

So what is the prima facie evidence for non-capitalist or feudal social-property relations and rules for reproduction in Ireland on the eve of the Famine in the 1840s?

Quantitative evidence is offered by the incredible extent of sub-division, which had fuelled early marriage, and a high birth rate, indicating classical precapitalist peasant rules for reproduction.

The potato, which was grown widely, was used as a primary subsistence crop for the smallholder and labourer, and an entire leasing system was developed around it: the cottier or conacre system, whereby labourers were able to access a patch of land on which to grow their potato crop in return for labour on a farmer’s holding or on a landlord’s demesne. Access to fuel was also non market-dependent, as ancient turbary rights were strongly defended.

Irish smallholder agriculture was also characterised by its technological and technical backwardness that rendered ‘improving’ landlords, interested observers, and celebrity travellers such as Arthur Young aghast. Some of these practices included ploughing with the tail of a horse, and other ‘primitive’ Gaelic methods that had been long superseded by convertible husbandry in England and the nascent mechanisation of agricultural labour. There was also the widespread and continued existence of ancient rights to the commons such as the rundale system.

Another example of non-capitalist reproductive strategies on the part of the Irish peasantry was the proliferation of “proto-industry” across Ireland in the period preceding the famine. For typical Smithian historians this is indicative of a tenantry seeking to benefit from growing commercial opportunities, however this is belied by the crude and unspecialised nature of the crafts – particularly part-time spinning and weaving of low quality wool and linen – and the failure to make the transition to mechanisation in the 19^th century.

These crafts thus were not specialised petty commodity production but rather the by-employments of rural tenants squeezed to the max by growing demographic pressures and landlord exactions of “absolute” surplus labour. This is demonstrated by the fact that they were concentrated in the poorest parts of countryside, their geographically “scattered” pattern across the countryside (rather than in specialised rural industrialised regions as occurred in England, and in Ulster), and by their non-specialisation and general orientation towards the domestic market, as well as their collapse in the wake of the famine as holdings consolidated and extreme rural precarity declined.

Qualitative evidence for the existence of a pre-capitalist landlord and tenant class is offered by the extent to which contemporaries described the Irish tenantry as a peasantry, in contrast to the English yeomanry. Travellers and statistical observers – from Arthur Young to Poor Law Inspectors – were wont to describe the abject poverty of the Irish tenant in contrast to his English counterpart. In particular, it was suggested that their clothing and houses were of a particularly poor quality. And yet modern cliometrics has demonstrated that the Irish tenant was a relatively healthy and physically robust specimen in this period – precisely due to his non-market determined access to turf and the potato, the staples of peasant reproduction.

In terms of landlord rules for reproduction, the lack of investment by Irish landlords in their properties was a renowned and almost caricatured aspect of this social class, as satirised in the classic of Irish 18^th century literature ‘Castle Rackrent’.

While nationalists then and now have attributed this to absenteeism (which never stopped English landlords from systematically improving their estates) or lack of patriotic feeling, it seems more straightforward to relate this economic behaviour by the lords to the fact that they were confronted by a traditional non-capitalist tenantry, that violently refused to be separated from its means of subsistence, and thus could not be rendered fully market dependent.

As non-capitalist lords therefore, they took a rational extensive approach to increasing surpluses: through the reclamation of marginal lands or through the intensive squeezing of their tenants through ‘rack-rent’ and precarious leases such as those of a ‘tenant at will’. This relationship between Anglo-Irish lords and tenants was bound up with extra-economic conditions involving a particular mixture of coercion and patronage. Penal laws still held many Catholics in forms of legal bondage, and debt bondage was added to that burden as rural precarity grew in the period leading up to the famine.

Rather than technical implements or improvements to the land, the Irish landlords’ preferred mode of surplus appropriation was “political accumulation”: gaining political office and building the coercive apparatus of the state, as well as conspicuous consumption. Rationally, the rents they did accumulate were removed to London’s stock markets or gambling dens, rather than re-invested in their estates.

In other words, the lords of the great arable estates in Ireland were much like the slaveholding planters of the southern United States that Charlie Post has described – they were market dependent and rational profit seekers, however their process of production contained a ‘fixed’ and unmovable labour force, that could not be expelled in order to cut costs in response to declining market productions, or at least not without the cost of sustained and costly social conflict and violence. Though obviously the oppressive system of Irish tenurial relations did not involve the same degree of naked brutality or domination as the West African slave trade and US chattel slavery.

Many Irish landlords were deeply indebted themselves – partly a reflection of these conditions – and simply didn’t have the funds to undertake large-scale clearance or combat agrarian tenant resistance, which was widespread in this period in the form of tenant secret societies such as the Whiteboys.

The macro-economic result of these non-capitalist rules for reproduction was, unsurprisingly, an extreme and continually increasing population, declining labour productivity, the classical Ricardian/Malthusian factor price movements described by Brenner, and a lack of profound urbanisation outside of the commercial hub of Dublin. This all culminated of course in the classical “Malthusian” crisis of the Famine.

It is my belief therefore that strong prima facie evidence existences for the categorisation of social property relations in pre-famine Ireland, despite the innovations of some landlords and tenants, under the pressure of British trends – as precapitalist.

However, there is also prima facie evidence that a transition to capitalism had occurred in two specific regions in Ireland prior to the famine: in industrialising Ulster – which had become a hub of British imperial textile exports in linen weaving and spinning, and in the cattle-raising regions of Leinster and east Munster where large grazier farmers and ranchers formed a distinct and prosperous yeomanry.

It’s my belief that these two sets of social-property relations (precapitalist and capitalist) that existed in the Irish countryside prior to the famine existed in dynamic tension – as indicated by the increase in evictions, the sustained pattern of agrarian violence carried out by tenant secret societies, and the gradual pushing of the smallholders onto inferior land with the westwards expansion of cattle-raising.

Divergent evolutions from 16^th and 17^th century colonisation

So how does a Political Marxist approach attempt to tackle this evidence of uneven development, without falling back into various teleologies or transhistorical extra-human motive forces?

I believe that the answer lies in investigating the specific social-property relations established in the 17^th century when the last of the precapitalist Gaelic system was destroyed by the English state.

I believe that across much of the west and south of the island that remained non-capitalist in character in the mid 19^th century, peasant political organisation and relative lack of lordly resources in the 15^th, 16^th and 17^th century colonisation process allowed the vast majority of the peasantry to remain on the land in their traditional ways.

The conversion to “commercialised” agriculture allowed the flourishing of a money economy and private property, but it could not separate the producers from their means of production so long as they remained politically organised enough to resist landlord encroachments. The tenants were also at a land/labour advantage given the demographic crisis that occurred in the wake of the Cromwellian invasion through devastating war and plague.

Particularly given its relative isolation, as well as the extent of lands maintained by Catholic landholders in the southwestern region, I think this adequately explains subsequent evolutions in a feudal pattern across much of the south and west of Ireland.

In the grazier lands of the midlands, east Connacht, and east Munster however, I believe that a relative transition was carried out in the wake of the Cromwellian settlement through the physical extinction of the previous landholders, and the cooperation between landlords, middlemen, and a tenantry holding competitive leases which resulted in a booming agrarian capitalism focused on the export of live cattle to English and European markets.

Here tenants managed the vast cattle herds of the great estates in compact enclosed farms, leading to the specific rural class structure of the midlands by the mid 19^th century. The majority of this “underground gentry” practiced primogeniture, and its ranks (and second sons) formed the cadre of middle class Irish constitutional nationalism. The continued existence of the cottier system however – where labour was exchanged for a potato wage – kept a large proportion of landless producers on the land, thus retarding social differentiation or the growth of a domestic market for farm implements.

In Ulster on the other hand, a number of processes lead to the growth of a capitalist linen export industry and the growth of petty commodity agriculture servicing this growing class of textile workers off the land.

Firstly, the relative equality of Protestant tenants and lords ruled out direct extra-economic rents, and this ‘Ulster Custom’ allowed for the development of a competitive market in land, and security of tenure.

Secondly, I believe that in the industrial core of the Lagan Valley tenant farmer-weavers – and their Catholic competitors – were rendered market dependent in the early 18^th century when leases were adjusted from the previous “customary” sub-economic rents dating from the initial plantation to economic rents reflecting the market value of land, compelling these specialised linen weavers to orient ever-increasing proportions of their product to the market.

As weavers continued to sub-divide their holdings, i.e. tried to reproduce themselves in non-capitalist ways, they were rendered more and more market dependent as their holdings shrunk below subsistence, and thus could serve as a source of commoditised labour power for market dependent linen merchants and bleachers.

Finally, and this was a more protracted process, the Protestant farmland core of Derry, south Antrim, and North Down developed a specialisation in grains as the breadbasket for its industrialising sister region around Belfast and its hinterlands, involving a similar pattern competitive leaseholding setting off a Smithian process of growth.

Post-famine

To conclude, what was impact of the Famine for social-property relations in Ireland?

In conventional Marxist writing on the topic (including Marx’s own contribution in Chapter 8 of Capital Volume 1), the potato famine of 1845-1852 and its associated demographic catastrophe are often taking as the obvious “transition point” for the establishment of capitalism in Ireland, due to the consolidation of holdings it triggered and the transition from arable to pasture farming.

However – drawing on Ellen Hazelkorn’s essays on Marx’s writings on Ireland in Capital – I believe that this is a mistake. In particular, Marx made a number of avoidable empirical errors – for example choosing for his survey of consolidated holdings and declining smallholders a period of deep depression in the Irish agrarian economy – as well as unavoidable ones: for example he could not have foreseen the Land War and the eventual move towards peasant proprietorship in Ireland.

Instead of the extinction of the smallholder and the move towards ever larger and more consolidated enclosed farms on the English model, the post-Famine period in Ireland demonstrated its own specific dynamics of class struggle, which in fact resulted in the consolidation of an only partially market dependent smallholding class on the land – particularly across most of the poorest regions of the south, a class which proved almost impossible to remove by peaceful means right into the 20^th century.

In the absence of systematic land reform, capitalist growth – outside of the grazier holdings of the midlands and east coast, and Ulster, which remained part of the United Kingdom following partition in 1921 – could not be instantiated. This (along with the graziers rational commitment to free trade with England at any cost) was the primary cause of Irish underdevelopment over the post-famine period and into the 20^th century, not the caricatured impact of “neo-colonialism” or continued domination by perfidious Albion.

 A French version was originally published in Période as 'Le communisme britannique face à la question raciale : entretien avec Evan Smith'.

Evan Smith is a Visiting Adjunct Fellow in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Flinders University, South Australia. He has written widely on the British and Australian left, anti-racism, immigration control and youth culture. He is the co-author of Race, Gender and the Body in British Immigration Control (Palgrave Macmillan 2014) and the co-editor ofAgainst the Grain: The British Far Left from 1956 (Manchester University Press 2014) and its companion volume,Waiting for the Revolution (Manchester University Press 2017). His first single authored monograph,British Communism and the Politics of Race, will be published by Brill as part of its Historical Materialism series in 2018.

Selim Nadi (SN): In your book British Communism and the Politics of Race (Brill, 2017), you explore the role the Communist Party of Great-Britain (CPGB) played in the anti-racist movement in the second half of the 20^th Century: how did you become interested in this topic? Why did you specifically choose to explore this issue from the 1940s to the 1980s?

Evan Smith (ES): I first became interested in the history of the Communist Party of Great Britain after reading Eric Hobsbawm’s autobiographyInteresting Times. My Honours thesis was on the Communist Party’s Historians’ Group (of which Hobsbawm was a part) and their role in the events of 1956, when a significant portion of the Party’s membership revolted against the CPGB leadership. One of the reasons that many Party members have for being in the CPGB during the first decade of the Cold War and remaining in the Party even after 1956 was the Party’s anti-fascist legacy. My doctoral research was originally on how this anti-fascist legacy informed anti-fascism in the post-war era and eventually widened to look at the CPGB’s anti-racism more broadly.

I chose to focus on the period between the late 1940s and the early 1980s because this was the period that was the height of the CPGB’s post-war trajectory, and it mirrors the rise of the anti-racist movement in Britain. The book begins with the early days of the Cold War, which also saw the spread of decolonisation across the British Empire and a massive influx of migrants to Britain from these former colonies. The CPGB came out of the Second World War with an increased membership, political influence in the trade union movement and two MPs, as well as hundreds of councillors at the local government level. During the 1950s, they were the first (and most influential) organisation within the British labour movement to appeal to migrant workers and campaign against racial discrimination in Britain.

The book follows the involvement of the CPGB in the wider anti-racist movement through the 1960s and 1970s, with the narrative being that the Party was highly influential in the 1950s and early 1960s, but eventually overtaken on one hand by black activist groups and on the other by the Trotskyist and Maoist left. The Socialist Workers Party was able to co-opt the legacy of the CPGB’s anti-fascism of the 1930s, including the famous ‘Battle of Cable Street’, and formed the Anti-Nazi League in the late 1970s, which spurred on a new generation of anti-racist activists.

It ends with the early 1980s and the riots the broke out in 1980 and 1981 across Britain under Thatcher. These riots came at a time when the left, including the Communist Party, was in flux, perturbed by the rise of Thatcherism and the neoliberal assault on various sections of British society seen as ‘subversive’, including the labour movement and Britain’s black communities. The left saw the riots through the spectrum of class and tried to see them as part of a longer history of episodes of public disorder perpetrated by the unemployed and the lower classes. However many black activists saw the riots as part of a longer history of black rebellion, going back to the 1919 riots in Cardiff. These differing interpretations are a microcosm of the shifting attitudes towards class and race in the 1980s, problematized further by the threat of Thatcherism to the post-war social democratic consensus.

At the same time, the Communist Party itself was in disarray, reeling from the deep schisms in the Party that were exposed in the late 1970s over the split regarding the influence of Eurocommunism and Gramscism on the Party’s programme. By 1983, these schisms ripped the Party apart with a large section of the Party’s labourist wing leaving the CPGB (including the editors of the newspaper Morning Star) and the decline of the Party seemed inevitable from this moment onwards. I finish the book at this juncture because the Party, as both a political organisation and as part of the anti-racist movement, probably ceases to be relevant at this point.

SN: A highly interesting point is that, according to your book, the CPGB had a real understanding of the concept of “race” which was “heavily informed by Marxist theory” (p. 8) : could you please come back on this understanding and how it evolved from the End of World War II to the 1980s? Did the concept divide the member of the Party?

ES: Throughout the inter-war period, the Party campaigned against the ‘colour bar’ in the colonies, but did not really formulate a theoretical understanding of the ‘colour bar’ during this time. In the 1950s and 1960s, as more migrant workers came to Britain, the Party started to expand on the idea of how racism fit into broader Marxist theory and the notion of capitalist exploitation. Two members of the Party’s International Department, Kay Beauchamp and Joan Bellamy, were the two main authors of the Party’s anti-racist literature during this period, although CPUSA exile and African-American Claudia Jones and the Caribbean Winston Pinder both contributed to the Party’s publications on the problems facing black workers in Britain too.

Beauchamp and Bellamy both emphasised the origins of notions of racism and racial superiority in the colonial expansion of the British Empire, imported from the Spanish and Portuguese Empires in the 1500-1600s.  Racism was a conscious part of the imperial project to justify the conquest of new territory, the exploitation of the indigenous population and the extraction of raw materials. The capitalist system promoted racial division amongst black and white workers to divide the working class and prevent revolt against the ruling class. From this, it was argued that racism would still exist until the capitalist system was overthrown. In practical terms, many of the Party’s black members believed that this attitude saw the Party overlook anti-racist campaigning in favour of ‘bread and butter’ trade union issues – the fight against the capitalist system was first and foremost, and the fight against racism was a by-product of this primary struggle. When black members, such as Jones or Pinder, wrote about racism, they focused much more on the everyday racism and racial discrimination faced by black workers in Britain and called for much more practical activism.

A new generation of Party members writing on the issues of race emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s, such as Stuart Hall, Dave Cook, Vishnu Sharma, Martin Rabstein, Dorothy Kuya and Gideon Ben-Tovim. Most of these people were much more sympathetic with Eurocommunism and the embrace of new social movements, such as an anti-racist movement led by black activists. The interpretation of how racism fit within the wider capitalist system became less rigid and there was a increased consensus that racism was a form of exploitation and oppression, but was not necessarily caused directly by capitalism and the ruling class. Racial discrimination, like sexist discrimination, was something to be fought against at the same time as fighting against capitalism.

SN: What kind of consequences did this involvement from the CPGB in the British anti-racist movement had concerning its relationship with trade-union? And more broadly with its allies on the Left?

ES: The relationship between the Party and the trade union movement was paramount to the CPGB’s post-war programme and while the Party campaigned against racial discrimination in the labour movement, it found it difficult to gain much traction for anti-racism within many sections of the labour movement. Until the late 1970s, the labour movement was pretty slow to take racial discrimination seriously and even into the 1980s, combating racism was seen as a side issue concerning only a minority of trade unionists. Therefore the CPGB was caught in a balancing act, trying to convince trade unions to take the fight against racism seriously but not wanting to alienate its allies in the labour movement.

On the far left, the International Marxist Group, the International Socialists (later the Socialist Workers Party) and some of the Indian Maoists attached to the Indian Workers Associations were able to promote themselves as more militantly anti-racist than the CPGB. Particularly in the fight against the National Front in the 1970s, the IMG and the IS/SWP pushed a much more confrontational approach, developing the policy of ‘no platform’ for fascists and building the Anti-Nazi League. While the CPGB supported some of these initiatives, they stressed their differences with these other groups and accused them of ‘adventurism’ and ‘ultra leftism’ on several occasions.

SN: In his book Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider, Satnam Virdee writes that “From the mid-1930s, it [the CPGB] embraced the strategy of the Popular Front forcing it to nationalize its Communist message. The language of class war and proletarian internationalism was subsumed in an emergent discourse that spoke increasingly of the ‘British nation’ and the ‘British people’. (…) While many were draw towards the CPGB precisely because of its changing orientation, particularly its attempt to entwine the communist project with a radical British patriotism, the specific focus on anti-imperialism and anti-racism was increasingly sidelined. Long-term ethnic minority members like Clemens Dutt (…) was one of the first to raise objections, claiming that such activity was increasingly left to minority communists, and accused the party of ‘white chauvinism’” (Palgrave McMillan, 2014, p. 96). The French and the US Communist parties had similar attitudes during the Popular Front, which has huge consequences on their anti-colonial and/or anti-racist politics. How did the CPGB evolved from its Popular Front Period to the 1940s on the issue of race?

ES: The Popular Front definitely did hinder the Communist Party’s anti-colonial activism and practically the issue of colonial liberation was de-emphasised in the Party’s publications and in their propaganda material. But at the same time, the issue did not go entirely away. Support for eventual colonial freedom was still expressed in the Party’s publications, particularly regarding India. The CPGB promoted a view that the colonies should assist Britain in the fight against fascism and once victorious, this anti-fascist struggle could be transformed into an anti-colonial and anti-capitalist struggle.

SN: While in 1936, the fight of Cable Street opposed some antifascist activists (including communists) against the British Union of Fascists, protected by the police, could you please come back on the way the CPGB opposed fascism afterwards? Cable Street is a well-known event in the history of British antifascism but what is, maybe, less know (especially for foreign readers) is the attitude the CPGB had not only during WWII but also after the War on the issue of fascism. Could you, especially, develop the relationship of some communist militants with the 43 Group? Could you come back on the relationship between the Jewish community and the CPGB after the War?

ES: Although the CPGB leadership was actually divided over whether to mobilise against the BUF at the ‘Battle of Cable Street’ in October 1936 (the initiative was taken up by members of the Young Communist League and Jewish members of the Party in the East End of London), the fact that the CPGB was heavily involved in the actions of that day, as well as other confrontations with the BUF during the 1930s was publicised greatly in the following years. During the 1945 election, the CPGB strongly campaigned on its anti-fascist legacy and this legacy, as well as a large Jewish membership in London, helped Phil Piratin win the seat of Stepney and Mile End.

This legacy also inspired some CPGB members, including some of its Jewish members, to become involved in the fight against Oswald Mosley’s post-war organisation, the Union Movement. Starting in 1946, Mosley attempted to rehabilitate his image and used the events in Palestine (and the 1948 creation of Israel) to revive the BUF’s inter-war anti-semitism in the new organisation. Members of the CPGB, alongside members of the Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Party, fought the UM in pitched street battles in London, Manchester and Birmingham, while the CPGB also campaigned for the UM to be banned under the Public Order Act 1936 (ironically introduced after Cable Street and as David Renton has shown, primarily used by the police against the CPGB in the 1940s). Part of this post-war anti-fascist movement was the 43 Group, which involved several Jewish CPGB members and were looked upon sympathetically by the Party leadership, even though they stressed that the two organisations were not formally linked.

Eventually the Jewish population in the East End dissipated, with many moving to other boroughs of London, and the CPGB’s anti-fascist legacy faded, until it was revived in the 1970s in the fight against the National Front, but often utilised by the Trotskyist left to condemn the ‘reformism’ of the contemporary CPGB.

SN: How did the Commonwealth immigration evolved after WWII and how did the CPGB react to this evolution of the British Working Class? Besides the direct political reaction to immigration, was there a theorization of this issue from Communist intellectuals?

ES: Commonwealth migration started to increase in the late 1940s and continued throughout the 1950s. In the early 1960s, there were restrictions placed by the Conservative government on Commonwealth migration and Labour strengthened these restrictions in 1965 and 1968. By the early 1970s, labour migration from the Commonwealth had declined significantly, with most migrants from the Commonwealth coming for the purpose of family unification. Although the CPGB campaigned against the racial discrimination faced by black workers, the Party’s perception of the British working class for many years was that it was still white (and male and heterosexual). This was eventually broken down in the 1970s and 1980s, as more black workers fought for recognition, inside the CPGB and in the wider labour movement.

Similar to concept of racism as part of the capitalist system, the Party was unclear about how migrant workers fit into the broader class dynamics in Britain. Inspired by the Marxist sociologists of the 1960s and 1970s, there was some theorising that migrant workers were part of a ‘reserve army of labour’ used by the ruling class to divide the working class and dampen down industrial militancy. However these theoretical debates were quite limited (featuring primarily in the not widely read Marxism Today of the 1960s) and these concepts were quietly dropped by the Party in the 1970s and 1980s as a new generation of membership started writing about issues of race for Party publications.

SN: How did the CPGB analysed and react to the development of black organisations in Britain in the 1960s? Was there a difference between the CPGB and other leftist groups concerning their relationships to black organisations?

The Party was wary of the overt ‘black power’ organisations of the late 1960s and early 1970s, seeing them as promoting separatism instead of black and white unity, and likely to be influenced by the ultra-leftism of Trotskyism and Maoism. The CPGB preferred to deal with organisations such as Liberation (formerly the Movement for Colonial Freedom) and the Indian Workers Association, which had several CPGB members, such as Vishnu Sharma, in leadership positions.

The IMG and the IS/SWP were much more sympathetic to these black-led organisations, with Tariq Ali forming ties with several black power activists in Britain, such as Darcus Howe. But at the same time, these black activists often viewed these Marxist organisation with suspicion.

SN: Did the rise of new social movements in the 1960s/70s changed anything in the relation the CPGB had toward the anti-racism movement?

The new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, such as the anti-racist movement, the women’s liberation movement and the gay rights movement, impacted heavily upon the Communist Party. A younger generation of CPGB members, partially inspired by the works of Antonio Gramsci, the Prague Spring and Eurocommunism, called for the Party leadership to take these new social movements more seriously and argued that they challenged the traditional labourism of the Party. These new social movements highlighted forms of oppression that existed alongside class oppression and these reformers inside the Party proposed that the Party programme, The British Road to Socialism, reflect this. This eventually culminated in a revision of the programme in 1977, which proposed a ‘broad democratic alliance’ between the Communist Party and those involved in these new social movements, with Party members encouraged to be involved in a number of anti-racist organisations, including the Anti-Nazi League, the Campaign Against Racist Laws and the Community Relations Committees set up by the Race Relations Act 1976.

SN: What was the 1971 Immigration Act? How did it change something in the debate on racism and was the CPGB (and more widely, the British Left) able to fight it?

The Immigration Act 1971 was introduced by the Heath government at the same time as the Industrial Relations Act 1971. The labour movement was mobilised on a massive scale to fight the Industrial Relations Act, with several members of the CPGB in leadership positions within the trade union bodies involved in this campaign, including the Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions. A number of the Party’s black members, including Winston Pinder and Trevor Carter, criticised the CPGB for mobilising its members against one bill and not the other, particularly as the Immigration Act would place heavy restrictions upon the rights of migrant workers in Britain.

In the fight against racism, the Immigration Act made it harder for migrants coming to the UK and their families. Starting in the mid-1970s, defence campaigns for those affected by the Immigration Act was increasingly a major part of the anti-racist movement’s agenda. Campaigns such as the Anwar Ditta Defence Campaign involved some CPGB members in the North-West, as well as members of the IMG, SWP and the Revolutionary Communist Group.

SN: Did the CPGB evolved in its anti-racist strategy with the successes of the British National Front at the End of the 1970s and in the 1980s? Could you especially explain how the rise of the SWP as the dominant anti-fascist force and the organizing of a new kind of anti-fascist militancy (like the anti-Nazi league) influenced the CPGB’s anti-fascist strategy?

In the post-war period, the CPGB increasingly campaigned for the authorities to use the Public Order Act and the Race Relations Act to ban fascist and racist organisations and/or curtail their public activism. This was a constant feature of the CPGB’s anti-fascist campaign against the National Front during the 1970s. The SWP, on the other hand, promoted a much more confrontational approach, as evidenced at the ‘Battle of Lewisham’ in August 1977, when SWP activists, alongside local black youth, fought with the NF and the police, while the CPGB held a ‘peaceful rally’ away from the epicentre of the clashes. In the lead up to this event, and also in its aftermath, the SWP utilised the legacy of the CPGB’s anti-fascism of the 1930s to justify their approach.

Even when the SWP adapted its approach to encourage a broad-based anti-fascist movement with the Anti-Nazi League, they were seen as taking the initiative, while the CPGB, which was originally hesitant to endorse the ANL, was made to look like it had ‘missed the boat’.

SN: How did the CPGB, who was weakened in the 80s, managed the turn toward an “authoritarian populism”, with the elections of M.Thatcher in 1979, concerning their anti-racist activities? A very interesting point that you develop in the last chapter of your book is that “[w]hile the left, including the CPGB, had been successful as part of the Anti-Nazi League’s defeat of the National Front, it had not made the same headway in combating other forms of popular and institutional racism. For the Communist Party, the proposition of the broad democratic alliance, envisioned to bring wider movements, such as black activists, into progressive leftist politics, failed to appeal to a disillusioned black community, who felt betrayed and patronised by the white left, which had for so long minimised the role of ‘race’ within the class struggle and the fight against racism” (p. 271): could you please explain this point?

Many of the left saw Thatcherism as just a revision of the Heath government, while some within the CPGB, primarily Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques proposed that Thatcher presented something different. Writing in Marxism Today in 1979 and 1980, Hall and Jacques argued that Thatcherism presented a threat to many different sections of British society, including both the labour movement and Britain’s black communities. They argued against the complacency of the success of the ANL in defeating the National Front, pointing to future confrontations between black people and the state, pre-empted by police behaviours at the Notting Hill Carnival in 1976, during the Grunwick strike in 1977 and at Southall in 1979.

While the ANL, including the CPGB, was successful in the campaign against the NF, many black activists felt that this has been at the expense of a broader anti-racist campaign and many felt that the black communities were abandoned once the threat of the NF had passed. When the riots broke out in 1980 and then 1981, a number of black activists, including Paul Gilroy and Darcus Howe, expressly asked the left wing organisations that had been involved in the ANL where they had been over the last few years.

SN: Does an effective anti-racist movement still exist in Britain today? If yes, would you say that the CPGB had a sort of theoretical influence on it?

The anti-racist movement in Britain still exists, although it is very different from the anti-racist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, when the CPGB was its post-war height. The CPGB probably has had an influence, because it was one of the first organisations to campaign for the wider labour movement to take racism seriously. People like Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques have had an influence because they proposed taking new social movements seriously and encouraged the left to attempt to incorporate these social movements (including the rise of identity politics) into a broadly class-based outlook. But possibly the most lasting legacy of the CPGB is still its anti-fascism on the 1930s. The ‘Battle of Cable Street’ is still seen as an important framework for militant anti-fascism over 80 years since it happened and in a world where the far right seems to be growing, the inspiration of that day in October 1936 still guides anti-fascists and anti-racists today. 

Dave Beech, Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics (Boston: Brill, 2015)

Reviewed by Nizan Shaked

Dr. Nizan Shaked is professor of contemporary art history, museum and curatorial studies, at California State University Long Beach. She is author of The Synthetic Proposition: Conceptualism and the Political Referent in Contemporary Art (Manchester University Press, 2017), and is currently working onMuseums, the Public, and the Value of Art: The Political Economy of Art Collections, forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic. 

Abstract

Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics reveals the irreconcilable differences between the Marxist economic definition of the term ‘value’ and its other uses in relation to the art object. It corrects the faulty assumption that rare or historical objects bear intrinsic value, symptomatic of capitalist worldview. Beech’s analysis of art’s value-form is critical to unpacking the double ontological condition of art as both an object of collective symbolic value and a hoard of monetary value, since the two operate in mutually exclusive spheres, yet function to constitute one another. The book can help us understand the capitalist sleight of hand that allows art to flicker between two forms of being, making profit appear as value, and value appear as significance (and vice versa), the toggling between the two facilitating the transfer of commonly held symbolic value in support of the individual accumulation of wealth.

A long-awaited turn from the melancholic or moralistic tone taken in most accounts of art and the market, Art and Value by Dave Beech is a systematic examination of art’s economic status in relation to the capitalist mode of production, circulation and consumption. Mapping art’s position as exceptional to that of the standard capitalist commodity, Beech examines piece-by-piece art’s anomaly at every stage of capital’s transformation, from the labour relations of its production and entry into the circuit of merchant capital, to its behaviour as an asset in financial capital. Until recently direct economic inquiry was considered vulgar (as Beech reminds us in the seventh chapter ‘On the Absence of a Marxist Economics of Art’), and Western Marxism largely integrated Weberian Sociology to form a cultural analysis of art’s relationship to the market, developing terms such as ‘reification, culture industry, commodification, Ideological State Apparatuses, spectacle and cultural capital’ (p. 221). Determining that art has been incorporated and/or commodified, key thinkers that developed the terms above such as György Lukács, who described the effects of capitalism on the culture and psychological wellbeing of subjects; Theodor Adorno, who, together with Max Horkheimer, theorised the systematisation and rationalisation of culture as a form of mass consumption; Louis Althusser, who analysed the relation of politics and culture; Guy Debord, who developed the concept of spectacle; or Pierre Bourdieu, whose sociology of art institutions identified how cultural predispositions help sustain class stratification—all sidestepped the basic economic description of the mechanisms that organise art under capitalism, and assessed the consequences instead. These approaches have become staples for theorising art’s social roles, as artists negotiated or attempted to negate the coercive powers of capitalism. However, in the vast majority of cases, Beech shows, the application of Marxist theory to art theory and history is done by ways of homology. His work is therefore a major contribution to addressing this gap as he positions art in terms of: ‘the labour theory of value, labour power, surplus value, formal and real subsumption, self-accumulation, relative surplus value, and so on’ (pp. 226-7). Beech’s entry point into the question, and the structural set up of the book, reveal the complexity of a field that on the one hand is deeply concerned with politics as theme and context, and on the other hand is an arena where political battles play out.

Using the three volumes of Capital, theGrundrisse, and theContribution to a Critique of Political Economy, Beech argues that art is not a typical capitalist commodity since the labour of artists has not been subject to abstraction. Artists do not sell their labour power but rather a product for which they own the means of production; they do not work for a capitalist giving the latter their surplus labour over and above the time needed for their sustainment; no capital is advanced for art’s production; the means of art-making have not been organised to maximise profit (at least not on a social scale); and the prices of art bear no relation to the cost of their production. So, we must ask, if art is exceptional to the capitalist mode of commodity production, why use these terms of analysis at all?

The answer is twofold. Firstly, since the world order is dominated by capitalism, we would be remiss to forego a close analysis of art’s movement through the system, and secondly, without a sound understanding of the economic forms of the art object our further inquiry into the political implication of its social functions would be impeded. Beech’s book is a first step in a wholly new mode of describing art and its institutions. Given the scope of the undertaking, it is understandable why Beech does not address the broader implications of art’s exceptionalism (his advocacy for the public funding of the arts ultimately argued on the basis of those historical and cultural claims that form the context of his economic analysis). It remains for others to apply his findings, and perhaps clarify and sharpen those few instances where the writing, and the materials chosen for discussion, meander and return without clear resolution. That said, the study is thorough and profound and should be applied to a series of interlocking fields that include art economics, the politics of art’s funding, institutional analysis, the study of collecting and museums, discussion of aesthetic judgment and the discipline of art history.

The first part of the book is an intellectual history of art’s anomalies, providing arguments for debating neo-classical and conservative outlooks that see art as ‘nothing but’ a regular commodity whose value can be measured by empirical tools, an activity that requires no special support or state funding. Framing his discussion in the distinction between classical, neoclassical, and Marxist economics, Beech sets the ground for dialogue with policy-makers in the field, the majority of which do not subscribe to Marxist world-views. Dedicated to a rigorous analysis based in a primary reading of Marx, the second part provides us with a toolkit of defined categories that we can now apply towards debates within the critical, professional, and academic field commonly referred to as the ‘art world,’ and which is vast if you include its markets and audiences. Whether we agree with all of Beech’s formulations or not, what is clear is that a baseline from which to work has been set.

The art world speaks predominantly in liberal terms, which in many ways is a different language, such that common words like ‘value,’ ‘abstraction,’ or ‘productive’ are employed in a disparate sense from their proper Marxist definitions. Value, price, or worth may be used in various interchangeable combinations as do money, wealth, capital, surplus, revenue, and profit. A cause for confusion in intellectual and academic circles, it is also a reflection of the continued blindness to some fundamental realities that structure our current existence. As some basic assumptions have gone unchecked, the assimilation of Leftist art history into the system can carry on without interrupting the operation of the liberal institution, where for example Marxist cultural criticism or formalist analysis are fuel for research and development. Likewise, protest actions quickly find their place under the thematic rubric of political art.

Beech’s assertion that art has no intrinsic value, anathema to the liberal mind, is one of two interconnected myths to be dispelled: that money is productive of value, and that things (land, rare objects, precious stones) have inherent value to them: ‘[i]f we know from where added value derives, then we will not be fooled into thinking, for instance, that banks, money markets and commodity markets are wealth creators’ (p. 258). Making art does not contribute surplus value to the economy either—‘artworks have no value (average labour time) since they cannot be reproduced and therefore it is impossible for surplus value to be created in their production’ (p. 263).[1]

In her review for Mute, Josefine Wikström notes that, for those versed in the historical specificity of Marx’s critique of political economy, Beech’s argument is not new, reiterating that:

Categories like ‘productive’ and ‘abstract labour’ are in Marx’s work relational, or perhaps better put, ‘social.’ Whether labour is productive or not is dependent on its relation to wage labour and the production of surplus value. This is why art production, like other marginal forms of production, only produce surplus value relatively and marginally compared with other sectors. They are, in that sense, not really subsumed.[2]

Luke Stobart interviews SOAS Justice for Workers.

Important social victories have been achieved recently at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, University of London). Junior lecturers (‘fractionals’) held a marking boycott to protest against the unpaid labour they are asked to perform, and SOAS staff and students fought against the victimisation of a well-respected Unison rep. The most dramatic conquest occurred during the summer of 2017. Migrant cleaners won being brought 'in house' after more thana decade of protest against low pay, abuse and harassment at the hands of unscrupulous subcontractors. The mainly Latin American cleaners even suffered a border-agency raid of a staff meeting leading to several colleagues being deported – an event the migrant workers understood was a response by employers and theuniversity to shut down their growing movement against abusive working conditions. Here three leading members of the Justice for SOAS Workers organisation discuss forHistorical Materialism the longer history of their campaign and draw from it strategic and political lessons.Lenin Escudero and Consuelo Moreno Yusti  (left and middle of the picture) are shop stewards for cleaning staff and Luis-Carlos Valencia (right of the picture) is a SOAS caterer and ex-cleaner. The interview was conducted on 18 August 2017 in Spanish and was translated by Luke Stobart. Luke's PhD research was on immigration politics and he is currently writing for Verso Books on Catalan independence and other challenges to the post-Franco regime.

LS: This is not the first time that SOAS cleaners have won important victories. Could you sum up what you have achieved since you began your struggle? How have working conditions been transformed? 

Lenin Escudero (LE): Our main demand when we began getting organised [in Unison] and campaigning in 2006 was to receive the months of overtime pay many of us were owed. But the problem was not just one of getting our money; we also campaigned for the London Living Wage – of around £7.20 – because we were paid at the [national] minimum wage of £5.20. We weren’t given work benefits such as sick pay and we had no union recognition. In the campaign’s first year we won the London Living Wage and union recognition; after striking in 2014 we won benefits such as pension rights and increased sick and holiday pay. However, we were still exploited by outsourced firms and still didn’t enjoy the same conditions as other university staff. The campaign continued.

To keep us happy management gave us equal sick pay and almost the same holiday pay as other SOAS workers but with worse pension rights. But by continuing pushing, in early August the university decided once and for all to bring us back in-house. We will have the same sick-pay and holiday and pension rights as other SOAS workers but most importantly we will have job security and we think we will be treated with more respect and dignity.

LS: What are cleaners’ working lives like?

Consuelo Moreno Yusti (CMY): Cleaning is a dignified and respectable job. It’s a profession like others. But most cleaners have to work long shifts because many workplaces don’t pay a decent wage. You earn what the law guarantees but this country is very expensive to live in. Some people work 15-18 hours a day and you don’t get to share much time with your family because you get home tired and have to get up early. People generally get up very early in the morning – around five. I get up at 2.30 because I start at SOAS at 3.45. Cleaning is also done at night-time and cleaners have other occupations during the day. Because of the long shifts people cannot study or do things they really like doing. That’s the most difficult part of being in the cleaning sector.

LS: What has been the most important aspect of your victory?

LE: It has been to show that change is possible when you make a commitment, believe in yourselves, and are organised, consistent and optimistic. We have shown that you can defeat outsourcing: something that for a long time people across the world thought was impossible. Outsourcing to private firms means exploitation, injustice and suppression of basic labour and even human rights. We have shown that ‘sí, se puede’ [‘yes we can’] is a reality and not just a promise.

CMY: The victory has been very important for the whole union movement and all people trying to organise to bring about change. For me the key to our campaign has been that students as well as workers have been involved. Also, that we the workers have provided all of the might to achieve our objectives. It is really essential for workers to exercise our right to be in a trade union but union strength comes from [the grassroots].

Another positive aspect has been its selflessness. We have been sharing our experiences with any group wishing to get organised. (We have always tried to “infect” others – such as academics and students – with our strength, willpower and encouragement). We do videos – really important – and we have spoken at different meetings in London and elsewhere to explain our campaign and so people realise that they can do what we have done.

LS: Have you spoken at places other than universities?

CMY: Yes, even in McDonalds – where they want to get organised. It is important for [these groups] that we inspire them. We try and get across that campaigning isn’t only about gaining better conditions but winning respect and our full dignity. And we want people to know that these changes have been won by a union force that we are proud to say is immigrant.

Luis-Carlos Valencia (LCV): An important achievement has been to change the mind-set of those running the university. Choosing to directly employ us implies breaking with neoliberal policy by which services are outsourced to firms that go against workers’ interests. This means a radical change in the way SOAS will be managed…

CMY:…I’m not so sure they have changed their mind. I think we forced them to adopt the changes. For many years they have made lots of lies and excuses, often leading to frustration. Whenever they did this, we pushed harder and saw ourselves more as workers. There came a point when their backs were against the wall. Their opposition [to us being brought in-house] was not financial but ideological [a commitment to private provision and prejudices towards poor migrants leading to us being excluded from being hired directly by the university]. We forced their hand. During the negotiations [on implementation] we will have to keep fighting. They are not so open- or broad-minded that they truly mean it when they say “how sweet. We brought our outsourced workers in-house”. I think the struggle will carry on but in a different way.

LE: I agree with [much of] what both are saying but I’d like to put things in [the new] context. It is partly true that SOAS management acted not voluntarily but because of our pressure. But will they change their approach? Yes, they have been forced to have a different attitude. They have had to admit they made a mistake in outsourcing. They are going to be forced to treat us with respect. They will have to change their attitude because their previous one did not work and they willnot be ableto come back at us. There has already been a change in attitude towards us. And this change will have an impact on other universities. Managers there will see what SOAS are doing.

LS: Over the years what action have you taken to get where you are today?

CMY: We have held demos, strikes and ‘fiestas’ to involve sympathisers and the new intake of students each year. We fought against the suspension of Lenin and our branch secretary Sandy Nicholl. Our actions and events have always been planned through campaign meetings – a key thing. Of all the injustices we have suffered, trade-union persecution has affected us greatly and marked our campaign. Students have carried out spectacular actions against this…

LCV:…The awareness generated among SOAS students and workers towards migrant-worker issues was solid from the start. The activities Consuelo has mentioned allowed us [grassroots workers] to maintain hegemony over how the trade-union struggle was carried out. Unity and cooperation between the different SOAS unions – including the student’s union –has been fundamental.

CMY: Our campaign has continually featured on students’ courses because it has always had an educational side. For eleven years degree ceremonies students have taken a graduation photo with [our shield and our message of thanks to them]. They wanted to say goodbye to the campaign but also we wanted to say thanks. This was very pleasing because students were a central part of our campaign.

LE: Our struggle is often described as a workers’ struggle. And it has been – a fight by cleaners supported by students and others. But it went beyond being a workers fight to be one by the whole SOAS community. This was because everyone (students, the academic community and workers) understood that this was not about turning up to give the worker support but getting involved. Classes are given at SOAS on human rights – including workers’ rights – while these are not being practiced. We managed to get across the message that we didn’t simply want people to give solidarity but feel the injustice. We wanted people to work for things, create friendships, link arms and fight, and a key feature of the campaign was getting people to feel that we all were affected [by the way cleaners have been treated]. For me the most important of our many activities were our direct actions: occupations; graffitiing our demands to discredit the university; interrupting speeches at the university by public figures. Sometimes we could not join in these directly because of our contractual obligations, and the students protested for us.

LS: In many ways your campaigning experience has been wonderful; but it wasn't always easy. Stalin Bermúdez, a Unison shop steward who had helped your campaign at the beginning, was sacked. And some workmates were deported from the country after a police raid at SOAS...

LCV: Ken Loach’s film Bread and Roses [about the Justice for Janitors movement in Los Angeles, and which was shown at the SOAS cleaners’ first ever public meeting] had a big effect on us. It showed us how cleaners can get organised and what can be done to win labour improvements. Next week we are going to speak in Sheffield on the trade-union struggle and have named the talk “between thorns and roses”. Not everything has been roses: we have been in very critical and tough situations.

LE: It has not all been rose-tinted. We knew when we started the campaign that we were starting a war. What normally happens in a war? You attack and they counter-attack. You do harm, they harm you. You kill, they kill you. Unfortunately as you go winning improvements, there will be reprisals. This is what happened. After winning a decent wage and union recognition in the first two years, we suffered reprisals that cost some colleagues their job and destroyed the lives of the nine that were deported.

But the most incredible thing is that these retaliations were planned between the university and the cleaning firm to scare us because we dared challenge them and won better conditions. They thought the deportations would stop us. But the effect produced was that we became stronger and more united. The community became more aware. We started growing as a group and became more optimistic. We were disturbed by the loss. We still are. Stalin had been suspended just before. He was one of the important people in our campaign: he took our case to the union and helped guide our campaign. They later came after me. They have taken steps towards suspending Consuelo. But after coming at us and trying to intimidate us we started thinking “we are going to achieve the impossible”. People told us it would be impossible to end the outsourcing. At times we could get down but we also gained confidence with each attack.

LCV: Immediately after the deportation – a low blow – the most delightful thing happened: the students decided to occupy the management offices for nearly two weeks to protest against this abuse of workers. Demos [and a strike] were held in support of Stalin but in that particular case [management] won (although he is a person that has followed our campaign in one way or another).

LS: In the most recent phase of your campaign you have demanded that allworkers at SOAS be brought in-house, and catering staff have been part of the fight. Can you tell us more about this phase, and why you changed your campaign’s name [from Justice for Cleaners] to “Justice for Workers”?

LCV: The cleaners decided they needed to expand their campaign to include other exploited support staff. It was important that the cleaners recognised that other groups of workers suffered similar or even worse conditions and looked at how they could help and work with us. We tried doing what we needed to do together. In June SOAS managers announced they would close down the Elior refectory, leading to many redundancies. Again students protested – occupying management offices. They tried to convince management how unfair [the redundancies] were and SOAS chose not to close the refectory or allow anyone to be sacked. Indeed we even won rights that we did not have previously: sick pay and better holiday and pension entitlements.

CMY: When the campaign began, it was for cleaners and nobody else. Some people were indifferent to it – like with all campaigning. Others gave solidarity to the protests but saw the struggle as being the cleaners’ and didn’t get more involved. This situation changed a little after SOAS tried a trick on the cleaners. A new cleaning firm was brought in which took over the hiring of maintenance and security staff. We were then told that we could not be brought back in-house because they would not extend the measure “to van drivers or painters…”. We kept pressing them. They then manoeuvred [to avoid ending outsourcing] by saying the new company would hire cleaners, maintenance and security staff on almost the same conditions as in-house staff. This was supposed to be their boldest move but it turned out to be their biggest mistake because it brought staff together in the same package. As a result the campaign needed to be broader. [Crucially] the restaurant workers were left out [of the proposed improvements in conditions]. And straight away those on ‘zero-hours’ contracts were threatened with the sack. The whole campaign met – including the students. Within twenty minutes it decided to hold a radical action: an occupation – something that would hit the university hard. SOAS was targeting its most vulnerable workers: the group with the worst job conditions. Within two weeks the occupation achieved the impossible. The caterers joined the campaign against outsourcing, helping us to win it.

LS: Moving away from SOAS somewhat, sometimes union or left-wing leaders have talked about migrant labour being used by unscrupulous companies to weaken the conditions of the British working class. Such an idea can encourage sympathy for migrant workers but it can also fuel attempts to exclude such people from the workplace or even from entering the country. How would you react to those that argue migrant labour helps weaken labour conditions?

LCV: There is some truth to this: some unscrupulous firms breach labour laws and exploit migrants. The problem is when people start thinking that the immigrant is aburden for a country. I think it is the opposite. He or she helps to develop the country in many ways. History shows this. Unfortunately some people forget that in the past many people escaped wars [in Europe] by emigrating to the Americas, Asia and Africa. Regardless of why people are coming here now – whether fleeing poverty or war – we arediscriminatedagainst andtreated as robbing jobs from native people. This idea is totally wrong.

Laws and protections can overcome migrant workers’ exploitation. Migrant workers are pushing hard to bring them about. Often they have led the most important labour victories because they know best the difficulties faced [in the workplace], and they know how much they are contributing to the country’s economy.

LE: I totally agree. Immigration is created politically as a problem. But we only talk about immigration as a problem when it involves people of colour. When North Americans and Europeans have [migrated] to Latin America they are helping produce and save [the region]. Immigration is a political problem, not an economic one at all, and it is particularly talked about when there are elections or when [governments] wish to cover up their own deficiencies. Immigrants contribute lots of things to society – like everyone else. We do decent work and even do the jobs that no-one else wants to do (even while we are told we are not needed here). We produce things. We keep cities alive. And that’s not all. We also create jobs and [markets] for jobs, and we areimproving labour conditionsthrough our struggles. Our fight at SOAS has not just improved the lives of Latin American immigrants. In catering we have African and Polish colleagues, and we haveBritish colleagues here. We are creating opportunities. The immigration problem is created by politicians to turn the people against itself. They say migrants are to blame for the crisis. We are demonstrating, reinvesting, producing, growing, creating jobs, improving working conditions,… We have even been inspiring the British people to wake from many years of slumber. Thanks to our struggle many British comrades come and see us and feel proud [of what we have done]. Sometimes we have the difficulty of not being able to express ourselves well in the [English] language but there is no problem with our fighting spirit. This is a message that is having an impact (also in bakeries and the Ritzy Cinema where workers are also getting organised) and will have a domino effect in the future.

CMY: 90% of workers in the cleaning sector are migrants. We have achieved a victory for the whole sector. We are contributing quality work, paying taxes and our achievements also benefit English people. Cleaners [not just in SOAS] are helping develop union strength that is going to be very big and beneficial to Britain.

LCV: The language issue is always a barrier for us. I think it is crucial that we get the chance to learn English. [Limited English] hasn’t stopped us achieving wins but sometimes for the immigrant it is hard to overcome the language barrier. At SOAS we have won being provided with free English-language classes. This means we can integrate more easily. In the cleaning sector there are many people who in our own countries were skilled professionals but sometimes our level of English doesn’t allow us to go beyond cleaning.

LS: The British working class has not been used to winning many victories in recent years. Based on your experience what is the key for the union movement to win again?

CMY: A few notions: awareness raising, involvement, organisation, unity and perseverance. Also to launch any campaign it is essential that you know your rights. When you know, for example, that all workers have the right to join a union you can [start to] overcome your fear and you think about demanding rights and your place [in society]. And you grow in self-respect and dignity.

LE: I have learned that a union’s strength does not come from the people running it. It comes from workers, whom we have seen can win change. When workers gain in consciousness they can even win change when going against the existing union bureaucracies. They can also do it in the face of laws created to hold workers back. In SOAS we won changes even when we thought differently [about our struggle] than our union chiefs. They have a different trade-union mentality and expectations. We understand trade unionism as responding to today’s – not tomorrow’s – needs. We understand that change can be won now. The unions must start to understand that they can achieve changes and that the workers provide their strength. It is we that maintain those at the top [of these organisations] but change comes from the bottom.

Our campaign’s success has been due to our firmness. We have achieved a historic and legendary result. We need to look after it, defend it and cultivate it. We should not think of it as irreversible. We need to continue our work and being firm. In other words, ‘¡la lucha continua!’

Soma Marik (b. 1962) is Associate Professor of History , RKSM Vivekananda Vidyabhavan, West Bengal, and former Visiting Professor, School of Women's Studies, Jadavpur University. She has published extensively on Marxism, the Russian Revolution, Communist Women in India, and Communalism in India. She has been an activist in the women's liberation/gender rights movements for over three decades.

Republished from Economic & Political Weekly

Marxist attempts at integrating gender in the class-struggle framework was uneven in the Russian revolutionary movement. A class reductionism often held back the Bolsheviks, but contests with the liberal feminists, as well as the objective reality of more women entering the labour force, led to changes. Women activists took the lead in this. The Revolution of 1917 saw a much greater degree of women’s involvement. Women workers provided leadership in the early stages of the February Revolution, though it often remains unacknowledged by mainstream (including mainstream left) historiography of the revolution. At the same time, gendering the practice of class went hand in hand with a sharp rise in class issues against undifferentiated feminism, for liberal feminism supported the war and the bourgeois Provisional Government.

Classical Marxism and Women’s Liberation

Gender was not a conceptual category used often by Social Democrats in late 19th or early 20th century. So, it is possible, and necessary, to point to flaws in Marxist thinking of that period, particularly when shades of “Marxist” dogmatism cites Lenin or Engels in order to shout down women’s struggles for equality. But it is also necessary today, in the centenary of the Russian Revolution, to go beyond academic condescension and the liberal-to-right-wing attacks; it is important to look at the concrete achievements of the left wing of Marxism in connection with the issue of women’s liberation, with special reference to the Bolsheviks.

Unlike many of its rivals in the socialist movement, Marxism started with the proposition that the emancipation of the working class is a task of the working class itself. This fundamental principle was repeatedly stated by Marx and Engels, as also by their immediate political heirs (Marik 2008; Draper 1971). At the same time, Marx’s conception of the proletariat as a universal class meant that the emancipation of the proletariat would have to involve a total social upheaval and the opening up of the potential for the emancipation of all the oppressed and exploited peoples.

The principle of working-class self-emancipation meant that Marxists rejected the two major routes to socialism/communism offered so far: enlightened preaching to the entire society, hoping to convert people, and building up a conspiratorial organisation hoping to make a minority revolution. While this is obviously a simplification, it is close enough to reality. Even the League of the Just—an early socialist group that both Marx and Engels joined—had these two trends. This is documented by the internal debate within the League between Wilhelm Weitling and Kriege favouring instant revolution on the one hand, and Schapper and his associates stressing pure propagandism on the other (Forder et al 1970). Marx and Engels wanted to build a party of revolutionary workers. But the working class in capitalist society is often fragmented and polarised. From this, Lenin emphasised the need to unify and concentrate the consciousness of the advanced workers gained from their struggle and merge it with the advances in theoretical knowledge. The massive study of Lars Lih (2008) and the debates over it¹ have suggested that it was a widely accepted position among Marxists even before Lenin that the socialist message and the organised movement of the workers had to be united. InWhat Is to Be Done? this has been one of Lenin’s core aims.

However, we need to recognise that Lih goes to another extreme in the course of his debunking of the myth that What Is to Be Done? represented the essence of Leninism, and that it was absolutely novel. The arguments cannot be made in detail here, but Lenin introduced a political practice and an institutional set-up that was not identical to what German Social Democracy had (Marik 2017). Operating within the specificity of the Russian context, where there was total lack of democratic rights and even the minimum of civil liberties, Lenin stressed the need for an underground party and “professional revolutionaries”—workers who would be full-time party workers, in a way that German Social Democracy had not done. These were important tactical issues. But an element of core principle was mixed up with Lenin’s idea of centralisation and his defence of the professional revolutionary. Lenin argued that the diverse experiences of class struggle had to be centralised into the revolutionary party. Moreover, for him, workers, and not just middle-class intellectuals, could understand socialism through their experiences of exploitation and struggle. But Lenin believed that sustained class consciousness of the advanced workers could be actualised in form of a vanguard party if they were relieved of their daily factory load. Hence, the professional revolutionary could often be a worker who had been moved from the factory to full-time political work.

Since the class was fragmented, a fact Lenin recognised from an early stage, it made sense to organise the more politically conscious elements separately. But this tended to exclude women, who were perceived very often as backward elements. The problem lay in not recognising, at least in the early years, that women did not come into the socialist movement, or indeed in organised trade union movements, not just due to backwardness, but due to the double burden they faced (Marik 2004: 13–50). The Party Programme, drafted mainly by Plekhanov and Lenin and adopted by the Second Congress in 1903, did not even include the demand for equal pay for equal work (1903: Second Ordinary Congress 1978: 3–9).

However, if we move ahead to 1917, the Bolsheviks had a membership of around 24,000 on the eve of the revolution, of whom 2,500 were women. A detailed study by Barbara Evans Clements (1997: 32) shows that among the members, while 62.1% of the men came from worker or peasant background, only 36.8% of the women were workers or peasants. There are reasons for this gap. An average Russian working-class woman was likely to be married by the time she was 18 and a mother shortly thereafter. Seldom were there men willing to take up the duties of arranging for family income, childcare, etc. Without party education to enhance the value of work done by women or to organise them separately, the formal equality of comrades in the party could not erase the real inequality of the private sphere. Women party workers were often from a background where other family members could look after the children (for example, in the case of Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai), or where they could take the decision to not have children (as in the case of Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya). Working-class women could not often ensure such conditions. Moreover, the Russian social prohibition against women taking part in the male domain of politics operated with greater strictness on women from working-class and peasant families, in contrast to women from more affluent milieus. That there were still over 36% women members from worker and peasant backgrounds is quite remarkable.

Why did they come? First, within the asphyxiating conditions of Tsarist Russia, the Social Democratic Labour Party (the Russian acronym is RSDRP), whatever its shortcomings, provided far greater equality for women. Second, Marxism did not see women’s equality as mere legal equality. It insisted that women’s liberation and social revolution were integrally connected, and this pulled many women to the revolutionary party.

Women’s work within the party structure showed both the scope for their mobility as well as the limitations they faced. As the party grew in size from the time of the 1905 Revolution, city committees (and district committees in big cities) were set up. Secretaries of such committees were usually party full-timers, with two or three secretaries with different duties assigned. The propaganda work (writing leaflets, ensuring the publication of pamphlets and journals, etc) were usually the duties of male secretaries. Women who became secretaries were technical secretaries, working to ensure the smooth running of the organisation, sending reports to the Central Committee, etc. We can cite the case of Elena Stasova, who was the Technical Secretary of Petersburg for years. Her correspondence with Lenin shows organisational news being exchanged. Political disputes or reports, on the other hand, are found in his correspondence with male secretaries like Radin, etc.

This structure goes all the way to the top. Krupskaya was the de facto organisational secretary of the newspaper Iskra, and then of the Bolshevik faction. But apart from the partial exception of Kollontai, political decision-making tended to be concentrated in the hands of men.

Programme and Theoretical Reflections

The Russian Social Democrats, as Lars Lih (2008) has shown, were greatly influenced by the Germans. But on the question of women, a gap remained for a long time. The Germans were aware that women faced additional burdens; they had drawn up a separate programme for them back in 1896. They had also been tremendously successful in organising women workers through autonomous structures (Marik 2003: 169–223). The RSDRP programme of 1903 did demand stopping the appointment of women in sectors where it was harmful for their health, the opening of crèches in factories where women worked, paid maternity leave, etc (1903: Second Ordinary Congress 1978: 7). These suggest a greater emphasis on demands that projected women as “weak” and in “need of protection.” But, in any case, the RSDRP was serious in implementing this programme, which partially reflected its class–gender focus. Strikes in 1905–07 showed that women’s demands were regularly coming up. Moreover, one must remember that issues concerning maternity and crèche are important, vitally connected with women’s right to work.

The first ever pamphlet on women workers by a Russian Social Democrat was the 1901 pamphlet Zhenshchina Rabotnitsa (The Woman Worker), identified by Moira Donald (1982: 129–60) as being the work of Krupskaya. It saw women workers as “backward,” but called for party work among them. Elisabeth A Wood (1997: 29) is rather critical in her assessment and has argued that Krupskaya described the woman worker first and foremost as a burden on her husband’s involvement in political work. However, even the summary she provides permits a somewhat different interpretation. Krupskaya argued that if women were kept out of the political process, half the working-class army would be lost, and that this exclusion would be the reason why women would pose a hindrance to men’s participation in politics. Moreover, Krupskaya’s description of women workers discussed concrete issues they faced, including wife-beating, wage inequality, malnourishment, harassment at the hands of foremen, etc.

Following the Revolution of 1905, feminists attempted to fight for women’s rights. Many of them came together in 1908 to organise an All-Russian Women’s Congress. In effect, it was led by an alliance of Constitutional Democratic Party women (liberal feminists), and feminists belonging to the radical intelligentsia. Wood lists about five prominent feminist organisations active in 1905 (though she prefers the term used by the Russian women, namely, women’s rights organisations). These included the Women’s Union, the Mutual Philanthropic Society, the League for Women’s Equal Rights (often mentioned as Women’s League), the Women’s Progressive Party, and the Women’s Political Club (Wood 1997). Many of their members were also present at the Congress, and would be active in 1917 as well. Kollontai, a left-wing Menshevik at that time, reacted by seeking party support to organise women workers to go to the Congress. The Women’s Congress has found fairly strong defenders in post-Soviet times (Ruthchild 2010: 102–45). 1,053 people officially registered for the Congress. Only four were shown as workers. In fact, the data is based on responses to a questionnaire distributed late, by which time many of the workers had left.

Nonetheless, available statistics does show that peasant women were totally absent, while a large section was from the intelligentsia. Kollontai sought the consent of the then united party to organise participation to the Congress. The Petersburg Party Committee opposed her proposal to organise women workers and go for the feminist conference. However, she succeeded in gaining Central Committee endorsement. Rank and file women were more supportive, and the backing of the textile workers eventually led to support from the Saint Petersburg Central Bureau of the Trade Unions. Over 50 preparatory women workers’ meetings were held. Interestingly, at that point of Russian history, the Women’s Congress saw less of a problem with some of the economic demands raised by the working class and socialist women. The real dispute arose around the political demands. The radical feminists argued that a partial suffrage would be a step towards general suffrage, while Kollontai and her comrades stressed that limited suffrage was being used by the bourgeoisie as an antidote to the democratic demands of the working class (Ruthchild 2010: 129–30).

In 1909, Kollontai published her book The Social Basis of the Woman Question. Written in response to the Women’s Congress, she was critical of them, but was willing to engage with them in debate. This book came out after the conference, and had interesting points to make. It emphasised the oppressive character of the family and questioned the prevalent RSDRP view that simply getting women into productive work would transform their conditions. At the same time, her analysis stressed that the contemporary state was the protector of “legitimate” marriages and the family; so, as long as the state remained intact, real liberation for women was impossible (Clements 1979: 57–59).

Real liberation for women, Kollontai argued, could come in a society where the responsibilities of mothers, and the duties of childcare, would be society’s collective responsibility. Therefore, her definition of socialism itself envisaged looking at society and politics through a gendered lens.

With liberal feminists, Kollontai had two clear differences. First, liberal feminists were demanding voting rights for women along the same lines as those that men had, which involved property qualifications. Kollontai, however, saw proletarian women as marching with proletarian men against the tsarist state and the bourgeoisie. Second, certain liberal feminists rejected demands for protectionism (crèches, maternity leave, etc) as being opposed to the demand for equality. Kollontai, on the other hand, held that such special measures were essential to make unequals equal, since women were burdened by these duties—not naturally, but due to the social structure. It seems, however, that feminists read and disputed her arguments to a much greater extent than her fellow Social Democrats (Ruthchild 2010: 142–43; Clements 1979: 56–81).

Organising Women

It was from the Revolution of 1905 that relatively larger groups of women were coming into the party. This shifted the party’s orientation for the first time. Feminists were trying to create women-only trade unions. This compelled Marxists to turn more seriously to working-class women. When a few women workers were elected as representatives to the Shidlovsky Commission, appointed by the tsarist government to inquire into the tragedy of Bloody Sunday,² the government refused them seats. This led to protests by women workers. In Ivanovo-Voznesensk, around 11,000 women workers took part in a major strike.

Kollontai played an important role in this period. Participating in the inaugural meeting of the Women’s Union in 1905, she was appalled at socialist women supporting the liberal feminists (Clements 1979: 44–45). She criticised any idea of feminism transcending class boundaries, and was attacked in response by the liberal feminists. However, after attending a meeting of socialist women in Germany, she was convinced that within the working class, a special effort among women was necessary. But party comrades accused her of showing sympathy towards feminism, which they thought was harmful (Marik 2009: 3550–55). Even among women, Vera Slutskaya, a Bolshevik, opposed Kollontai. But in 1911–12, as the struggles among workers picked up again, the Bolsheviks started to organise women. The lead was taken by women Bolsheviks themselves. When Pravda was launched, it occasionally carried items specifically on women. Then, on the initiative of the women Bolsheviks, a journal for women workers was launched.

It has occasionally been claimed that the initiative came from Lenin (Cliff 1987), but this has been contested (Marik 1999: 765–66). The initiative came from Krupskaya, Inessa Armand, Anna Elizarova, Konkordiya Samoilova, and others. The journal was named Rabotnitsa. In his letter to his elder sister Elizarova, Lenin wrote that Krupskaya would be writing to her about a proposed women’s paper. This has led to the assumption that Lenin must have been the person who took the initiative (Cliff 1987: 101). In reality, Lenin only wrote just one letter to Armand asking her to work for the paper, and another one to his sister Elizarova (Lenin 1964: 143; Elizarova 1923: 63). The word “we” in a letter from Krupskaya in this connection has led writers to assume that she was referring to herself and to Lenin. But Elwood shows that a copy of the letter in the Okhrana archives is signed by Armand along with Krupskaya. The letters of Krupskaya and Armand indicate that they were the ones who thought about the paper seriously, while the funds came partly from Armand’s well-to-do friends and partly from money collected by those in the editorial board operating from within Russia (Elwood 1992: 118).

Between Krupskaya and Armand, there was a clear difference in perception. Armand was a feminist, as her biographer Elwood shows. Krupskaya or Samoilova were not. But they worked together to collect funds for the journal, with the Bolshevik Central Committee only giving it their formal approval. Krupskaya’s article in the first issue looked at how “backward” women were to be mobilised. Armand’s article, by contrast, highlighted that the struggle for socialism would be strengthened if women’s struggles for rights were supported. Rabotnitsa combined articles written by the editors—notably by Krupskaya and Armand, which discussed the situation of women workers and their “double burden” (of housework and childcare in addition to paid employment) as well as their place in the struggle of their class—along with short reports. It is possible to overstress the differences among the editors; so let us also note that generally the paper (it had seven issues in 1914) tended to gloss over abuse that women workers might have faced from male workers, though they recognised that men’s attitudes towards women needed to change. Elizarova, co-opted primarily because of her long experience as a professional revolutionary, had a different outlook. The majority of internal editors were arrested before the first issue came out. Elizarova brought out several issues, but was often in conflict with the editors abroad. Her stress on reaching out to “the least conscious women” meant that she tended to omit more theoretical and abstract articles sent by Armand, Krupskaya or Ludmila Stal in favour of stories, poems, and letters from women workers. Moreover, like Kudelli, she was willing to collaborate with Mensheviks, and wanted Kollontai to contribute, while Armand, Krupskaya, and Samoilova were opposed to it (Turton 2007: 69–70).

In late 1914, some women did come close to the Bolsheviks. Two authors of a major study have noted that the Bolsheviks responded positively to help them improve their educational and organisational skills, though some of the Bolsheviks appear to have remained sceptical about women’s ability to organise and shake off their traditional subservience (McDermid and Hillyar 1999: 134–35).

All the way up to 1917, the Bolsheviks were divided. The only article by a male Bolshevik in 1917 on women’s issues came from N Glebov. He claimed that, unlike bourgeois women, proletarian women had no demands distinct from men. But Slutskaya and Kollontai, both in the Bolshevik party in 1917, fought for a separate structure within the party for women. While the demand for an autonomous organisation was rejected, mobilising women was recognised as an important task. Rabotnitsa was revived.

If we turn to grass roots work, we find complexities developing. In 1905, during the first revolution, demands for minimum wages came up. But the tendency was to demand a lower minimum wage for women than for men. Even in 1917, when trade unions managed to get minimum wages, men received five roubles while women got only four in Petrograd. Only two strikes in Moscow saw the demand of equal pay for women and men being raised (Smith 1994: 141–68).

Women in the Bolshevik Faction/Party

If only for tactical reasons, both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks attempted to recruit women in the years after 1905 as a result the growing number of working-class women. We have limited documentation, especially on the Mensheviks. However, despite the scarcity of published sources, women Bolsheviks have to be written about, if only to remove the impression that the women who participated in the various socialist organisations hailed exclusively from the middle or upper classes, especially from the intelligentsia. Even those women who belonged to the intelligentsia—including activists and students who played important organisational roles—often get ignored in dominant narratives.

Nina Agadzhanova was one such woman. She joined the Bolsheviks in 1907 as a student at a time when the first ­revolution had begun to retreat but the radical pull still ­remained. In 1914, she was a member of both the Vyborg and the City Party Committee. Arrested and exiled to Siberia, she escaped and was back in Petrograd by 1916, working ­under an assumed name. Together with her friend Mariia ­Vydrina, she was involved in organising strikes and demonstrations of metal and tram workers. Elected by the Vyborg district to the Petrograd Soviet, Agadzhanova continued to organise and participate in struggles all the way up to the October Revolution.

Another woman was Elena Giliarova, who became involved with the Bolsheviks in 1915. She went as a nurse to the Russian–Turkish front, where she also acted as a propagandist for the Bolsheviks among the troops, although she was not yet a member of the party. She formally joined the Bolshevik party in May 1917.

Petronelia Zinchenko came from a very different social background. Born in a poor peasant family, she entered the job market at the age of eight. She had a wide range of work experience, and in 1917 was employed in the naval fortress of Kronstadt making uniforms for soldiers. In 1917 she joined the Bolsheviks and was elected to the Kronstadt Soviet. Able to speak three languages, she was an effective propagandist. In October she played an important role in maintaining contact between Kronstadt and the capital (McDermid and Hillyar 1999: 72–74).

Alekseeva, a woman textile worker, had joined the Bolsheviks in 1909. Sacked for her political work in 1912, she joined a metal factory. Her political activities included collection of funds, distribution of literature, and participation in strikes. The sexist approach of later Soviet writers becomes apparent from how they project the high point of her career in 1917 as one when she served as a lookout and provided tea in a meeting that discussed the October Revolution. They overlook the fact that she participated actively in working-class organisations throughout the year (McDermid and Hillyar 1999: 74).

Anastasia Deviatkina had joined the Bolsheviks in 1904, and she was active right from the first moments in February, organising and leading a demonstration of women workers and soldiers’ wives on International Women’s Day. Deviatkina was then elected to the local district soviet, and she also played an important role in creating a union of the soldatki (wives of soldiers). During October, she was at the Smolny Institute, ensuring regular contact of the headquarters with the entire capital.

Finally, there were women who joined the Bolsheviks in 1917. One such was Liza Pylaeva, who worked in Petrograd from the early part of the war and came into contact with the Bolsheviks through her brother. Joining the party in 1917, she was involved in creating a youth movement.

The February Revolution, Women and the Bolsheviks

Though 43% of the labour force consisted of women by 1917, lack of gender awareness among men, who headed most unions, meant that organised struggles seldom kept in mind the special conditions of women. Poverty, lack of education, and deskilling due to the double burden meant that “backwardness” did exist among women. But it was not a natural condition. Rather, it was imposed by social hierarchies. Interestingly, we find that when agitations tended to be spontaneous, women raised the issue of sexual assault/harassment quite regularly, as in strikes led by women in 1912 and 1913 in Moscow. But it was only in 1917 and after that the Bolsheviks took this up seriously.

Most general accounts of the revolution of 1917 mention women twice: the start of the February Revolution, and the women’s battalion that promised to defend the Provisional Government during the October insurrection. But women were much more active than what this highly biased (and often-repeated) account implies. Feminism-influenced historiography has done much to recover the role of women (Stites 1978; Bobroff 1974; McDermid and Hillyar 1999; Clements 1979; Goldberg Ruthchild 2010). If we move away from century-old narratives that focus only on male workers, considerable changes take place in our portrayal of the revolution. Once we get away from the notion of the revolution as a minority coup and we look at how the masses of workers were reacting, it becomes as important to look at both women and men. It was because of the growth of female labour force that not only the Bolsheviks but also the Mensheviks attempted to reach out to them in 1914 through papers (such as Rabotnitsa andGolos Rabotnitsy) meant exclusively for them (McDermid and Hillyar 1999: 141).

As the war continued, working-class unrest grew. From the second half of 1915 strikes were increasing. Food crises, low wages, and inflation hit both women workers and soldiers’ wives very hard, and resulted in a heightened political consciousness. Alexander Shlyapnikov (1982: 118), Bolshevik leader and a metal worker, recognised this, though he persisted in assuming that women’s actions were apolitical. The strikes saw large-scale involvement of female industrial workers protesting not only over pay and deteriorating conditions of work, but also about the lack of respect shown to them by foremen and employers as well as sexual harassment in the name of search by factory inspectors. But left activists as well as tsarist authorities persisted in drawing a sharp distinction between bread “riots”—which they assumed was all that women were capable of—and revolutionary struggles. In December 1916 and January 1917 signs of increasing militancy among women workers in various industries were evident. In the munitions plants, wartime conditions had seen an influx of women, though they still remained a minority. In December 1916 many of them agitated, because their pay was considerably lower than the pay of men. In January 1917, women textile workers led a strike for five days (Hasegawa 1981: 201–03).

The International Women’s Day strikes of 1917 that toppled tsarism were preceded by a strike among textile workers (mainly women) when a Petrograd mill-owner tried to increase the shift from 12 hours to 13 hours. Some women reacted in the traditionally docile manner and were prepared to go along with the management, but the majority refused and forced the latter to withdraw the directive (McDermid and Hillyar 1999: 146–47). There had been strikes among male metal workers as well. But they had stuck mainly to economic demands. It was precisely the double burden that women faced—working for long hours in the factory, as well as trying to feed their families—which made them turn to “political” militancy. Moreover, it remains unrecognised far too often how during the war many families came to be headed by women. This made women’s wages—far from being “supplementary wages”—essential to the survival of families, and hence an important factor behind their politicisation.

So, on 23 February 1917, it was primarily women workers who came out on the streets and urged others to do the same. The slogans the women workers raised indicate they were not waging a purely economic battle. These included “Down with the war,” “Down with high prices,” and “Bread for the workers.” It is also significant that the women did not simply start a “riot.” They aimed to persuade workers from other factories, both women and men, to come out on strike. They used violence to do so, which included throwing lumps of ice and snow at windows. If this is seen as a sign of “irrationality,” then violently stopping strike-breakers from entering factories is also irrational. Clearly, the men who joined did so because they too felt that ruling-class oppression had gone beyond all limits of toleration. If that is so, then one needs to see women also as part of the vanguard, rather than simply as a “spark” that set the country on fire.

But, as the memoirs of male Bolshevik leaders show, they were not pushing the women beyond a limited degree of militancy. While the Bolsheviks were looking for greater militancy, they were planning on a big show on 1 May. Despite the massive growth of the female labour force, women were being ignored. In fact, it was a few female party members who persuaded the hesitant male leadership to make an effort in the working-class district of Vyborg by holding a meeting on the linked themes of war and inflation. These women, who cooperated with women from the inter-district committee, were part of a circle that had been established by the Bolsheviks in Petrograd in recognition of the growing importance of women workers to the wartime labour movement.

Kayurov, the influential metal worker and leader of Vyborg, appealed to the women on 22 February not to go on strike the next day. When he discovered that they had ignored his appeal, he was upset. He went on to dismiss women as typically emotional, irrational, and undisciplined. Yet, as we have seen, not only did the women display a rationality in the context of the times, but they had been brought together by women on the left, including Nina Agadzhanova and Mariia Vydrina, who organised mass meetings of workers and soldiers’ wives, workplace strikes and mass demonstrations, searches for weapons to arm the crowds, as well as securing the release of political prisoners and setting up first-aid units. Others like Anastasia Deviatkina were also involved, as also some women members of the Mezhraionka, a small left-wing organisation led by Iurenev in Russia and with which were associated Trotsky, Lunacharsky, and a number of others in exile (Lilina et al 1967: 318–19). But the leaflets calling for a general strike also appeared in the names of the Vyborg District Bolsheviks and the Mezhraionka. This suggests that a class and gender combination has to be taken into account (McDermid and Hillyar 1999: 152). Textile workers were proportionately the most mobilised during the five days of the February Revolution, as one early Soviet source suggested (McDermid and Hillyar 1999: 153). Women led demonstrations and confronted soldiers. Bolshevik woman worker Kruglova led the workers of her factory; they faced soldiers of the Novocherkassk regiment and some Cossacks. When an officer told the marchers, “You are being led by a baba [an old hag],” Kruglova responded, “Not ababa, but a sister and a wife of soldiers who are at the front” (Ruthchild 2010: 221). The soldiers and the Cossacks put their guns down at this. The appeal to a gender stereotype was resisted, and the stress on kinship ties caused soldiers to refuse to fire.

However, when the delegates to the soviets were elected, women were numerically far fewer. Skilled men dominated the elections for the Petrograd Soviet and then the factory committees that started coming up a little later. This was true even for industries in which women formed a clear majority of the workforce. There were two main reasons for this: women’s continuing responsibility for household responsibilities, especially with shortages persisting, and a lack of confidence on the part of women themselves, including women’s own lack of self-confidence, as to how far they could carry on sustained “conscious” politics.

Organising Women after February 1917: Gendering Class Consciousness

Russian radicalism had a feminist current from the 19th century. The revolution of 1905 had seen the emergence of women’s rights organisations of different types. Some feminists, like Anna Kal’manovich, had connections with the socialists. Others, like Anna Miliukova, were liberals. At the founding congress of the Constitutional Democratic Party, she debated in favour of a resolution to include women’s suffrage in the new party’s platform. It was a stormy debate in which she was opposed by her husband, the historian and future leader of the party, Pavel Miliukov (Ruthchild 2010: 65). The first All-Russia Women’s Congress, in which Kollontai’s participation has been discussed earlier, was organised and attended mainly by the liberal women. While a range of positions were adopted, the struggle for the suffrage was their central plank. But the dominant position, led by women who were Constitutional Democrats, called for a limited suffrage, leading to the Social Democratic walkout.

The liberals, who had detested any idea of revolution, now stepped forward to form a provisional government. The moderate socialists of the Menshevik, Socialist Revolutionary (SR), and Popular Socialist parties accepted this government, since according to their schema, this was a bourgeois democratic revolution in which the bourgeoisie should lead.

This Provisional Government started working on the project of elections to a Constituent Assembly. It lifted restrictions on Jews and took some other actions. However, when the government’s programme was announced on 3 March, there was no reference to women’s suffrage. Alexander Kerensky, the only socialist minister in the first Provisional Government, asserted on 11 March that women’s suffrage would have to wait for the Constituent Assembly’s decision, for this was too vast a change to be undertaken immediately. In response, the Women’s League organised a huge demonstration of women in Petrograd. While “universal suffrage” had been promised, there had been a refusal to explicitly state that the “universal” included all women too. The demonstration, nearly 40,000 strong, moved down Nevskii Prospekt, Petrograd’s main street, to the Tauride Palace, which was the seat of both the government and the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. They first met and put pressure on the Soviet, whose leaders, after some pressure, promised to support women’s rights. Prince Lvov, the head of the Provisional Government, accepted their demand for suffrage after the second delegation led by the veteran revolutionary Vera Figner, who had recently been released from jail. Yet the right to vote was formalised only in July (Ruthchild 2010: 223–29).

A sidelight of the 19 March demonstration was the refusal of the feminists to allow Alexandra Kollontai to speak. Indeed, when she tried to speak, she was pushed off the steps of the Tauride Palace by some women. This is also worth remembering when socialists alone are condemned for being opposed to the (liberal or bourgeois) feminists. However, the success of this demonstration, one in which not an inconsiderable number of workers participated, possibly played a role in convincing socialist leaders of the value of what their women comrades were saying.

During 1917, the untiring work of women Bolsheviks led to tens of thousands of women workers joining the party, coming into the trade union movement, and bringing a gender sensitivity into the struggle for socialism. Immediately after the formation of the first Provisional Government under Prince Lvov, the Menshevik–SR alliance which then dominated within the working class brokered a class truce.

Bolshevik women would work in two areas to break through this. Although both the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet leadership recognised that inflation and food shortages were issues of crucial significance, they did nothing about them. So long as the war was on, these problems could not be resolved; but the bourgeois Provisional Government would not end the war and the Mensheviks and SRs would not go further than the Provisional Government. But women started raising their voices soon. Soldiers’ wives started protesting about the lack of any improvement. On 11 April, a huge demonstration of these women went to the Tauride Palace, where sat the Soviet, showing that they trusted the Soviet rather than the Provisional Government. But the Menshevik leader Dan, on behalf of the Soviet, scolded them for demanding money when the treasury was empty. Dan also refused to allow Kollontai, a member of the Soviet, to speak to the women. Kollontai spoke to them nonetheless, albeit unofficially, and urged them to elect their own delegates to the Soviet.

From this point on, Bolshevik women were playing a major role among the soldatki. The first strike to break through the “civil peace” was a strike by close to 40,000 women laundry workers, demanding an eight-hour day and a minimum wage. They were unionised and led by Bolshevik women like Goncharova, Novi-Kondratyeva and Sakharova. The strike won a partial victory after a month. By then, the first Provisional Government had collapsed, largely over its war aims (which were expansionist), and some leading Mensheviks and SRs from the Soviet had entered a coalition government with former Duma members³ determined to continue with the war effort. To this government, the laundresses’ action was an irritant that endangered their plans for the country. Organising the laundresses was difficult, since they were scattered throughout the city, rather than working in large or even medium-sized factories. The Bolshevik press reported the strike regularly, and clearly saw it as a model of militancy. All this indicated a de facto shift in the attitude of the Bolsheviks to women workers. Women would be engaged in struggles in other sectors too. They were particularly demanding wage rises, improved working conditions (particularly sanitary), maternity benefits, and the abolition of child labour. They were also sharply angered at the sexual harassment they faced in the workplace, and demanded an end to body searches (Figes 1996: 368).

When Lenin returned from exile, one of his early supporters inside the Bolshevik party was Kollontai. It is to be noted that Lenin was initially in a minority in the leadership levels of the party, both in terms of his ideas on strategy of revolution and even on the question of unity with the Mensheviks. For, when he returned, the Bolsheviks were in fact in the middle of discussions with the Mensheviks over the possibility of unity. Kollontai was also one of the first to propose the setting up of women’s bureaus.

Resistance to Separate Organisational Structure for Women

The Bolsheviks agreed to some form of separate work among women for practical reasons. Their rivals in the socialist movement, the Mensheviks, and the SRs were initially recruiting rapidly, while the Bolsheviks, with their insistence on a minimum degree of political education before a worker could be recruited, were lagging behind. So separate work among women was deemed necessary for Bolshevik party development. But there was still considerable resistance to special work, particularly on the issue of a separate organisational structure for women. Leading Bolshevik women such as Krupskaya, Kollontai, Samoilova, Stal, and Slutskaia insisted that such theoretical purity was holding back the class struggle on two counts: first, in not recognising that women were a force to be reckoned with and building on their militancy was vital; second, however, despite their militancy, women workers were backward—in terms of political consciousness and organisational experience—in comparison to men. Of these women, Kollontai was certainly the most outstanding. But she was not as isolated and unique as some of her early bio­graphies tended to suggest (Farnsworth 1980; Porter 1980).

More recent work, studying other women (McDermid and Hillyar 1999; Clements 1997; Turton 2007) has stressed that a large group of women were working together. Vera Slutskaia had made similar suggestions even before Kollontai returned to Russia. But it is undeniable that there was a Bolshevik fear of feminism/separatism (the two being seen as identical). So, instead of an organisation such as a bureau, what the party agreed to was the revival of Rabotnitsa, and work among women through the journal. However, the 19 March demonstration showed that the world would not sit still if the Bolsheviks did not intervene, and this probably gave a push. A militant woman tram worker named Rodionova gave three days’ wages to kick-start the paper. This was at a meeting where 800 roubles were collected. From this point, the editors started roping her in for work with the paper, getting her to run errands for it, and eventually to write in it. Through this process she eventually became a party member.

Samoilova conducted classes among women. Krupskaya, a little after her return to Russia, turned to work in the educational and youth sectors in a working-class district of Petrograd (Vyborg). Her biographer R H McNeal (1973: 73) suggests that this was because she felt that Lenin’s line of calling for a socialist revolution was doubtful. This was based on a conception of the Bolshevik strategy that transforms it into a plot for a coup. In fact, political education was essential, if the revolution was indeed to be the self-emancipation of the working class.

Rabotnitsa, regardless of individual opinions of members, played a vital role in gendering class consciousness. On the one hand, they challenged the stereotypes about women. On the other, the kind of articles and reports that came out showed that male and female workers did not have identical demands and did not face identical forms of exploitation. Bolsheviks also recognised that patriarchal attitudes were not only dividing the class, but were also being used by male workers to position themselves against women in the name of family needs, though there were, in fact, many women who headed families as well. So, as the year wore on, gender became an issue that had to be taken up across classes, and not just with women workers. The Bolsheviks fought to get representation for women in the factory committees, which of course meant persuading men to vote for women. From June, there were calls from male workers’ representatives to deal with job losses and lay-offs by protecting men’s jobs at the expense of women’s, supposedly because women’s wages were supplementary while men were the principal breadwinners. The Bolsheviks and the metal workers’ union jointly fought this, but they stressed upon class unity rather than gender equality (McDermid and Hillyar 1999: 168).

Women workers were aware of the problems they faced. Tsvetskova, a woman in the tannery industry, wrote in a trade union journal that if socialism did not take women’s voices into account, it would create a society with negative attitudes towards women. Another woman, A Ilyina, writing in Tkach, the journal of the textile workers’ union, pointed out that male workers could attend meetings or go for a stroll after work, while women had to undertake household drudgery. She associated the latter with the Russian word “barshchina” for “drudgery,” which meant the labour of a serf (Smith 1986: 155–73).

After the July Days⁴ the Bolsehvik Party was under attack. Lenin was slanderously accused of having taken German gold. He had to go into hiding. Trotsky and a number of others were arrested.Pravda had to be shut down. For a time, the party depended onRabotnitsa.

Following the July Days there came the military rout, and then the attempt by General Kornilov to carry out a coup. These resulted in increasing popular discontent with the Provisional Government, in which the Mensheviks and the SRs were now fully integrated; it was headed now by Kerensky, and no longer Prince Lvov. As a result, support for the Bolsheviks increased, including among women workers. Women fought together with men to repel the general’s forces, building barricades and organising medical aid by forming the Red Sisters (McDermid and Hillyar 1999: 179).

The liberal feminists’ position was the very opposite. They supported the war. A section of these women saw joining the army and fighting for the war as the key issue of equality. But this led to an increase in the gulf between these bourgeois (or intelligentsia) women and the mass of working-class, lower-petty-bourgeois, and peasant women who wanted an end to the war. Maria Bochkareva, a woman who was a committed patriot and one who had served as a soldier in the war, petitioned the Provisional Government to set up women’s military units in May 1917. This received immediate support mainly from upper-class women. Bochkareva herself did not see this as another way of championing the women’s cause, but many feminists did. A women’s battalion was formed. Feminists such as Olga Nechaeva and Ariadna Tyrkova tried to build on Bochkareva’s May initiative by proposing to the Prime Minister that women aged between 18 and 45 be drafted into state service, in order to replace men who could then be available for military conscription. Of the 3,000 troops based in the Winter Palace in Petrograd to protect ministers of the Provisional Government, approximately 200 were from the women’s battalion. By then, the government had become so isolated that there was little confidence in its survival. And, in a war-weary Russia, the attitude of working-class women towards this battalion was one of contempt and not sisterhood. However, the charge of mass rape of the members of the Battalion of Death has been contested by historians like Stites, though three women are said to have been sexually assaulted (Shukman 1988: 36).

Stereotypes Challenged

In November 1917, Kollontai, Samoilova, and others organised a meeting of women workers to discuss the elections to the Constituent Assembly, in which there were over 500 delegates elected by over 80,000 women in 70 preparatory meetings. Thus, as the October insurrection was setting up a new order, there was also the recognition that a separate structure for women was not separatism but a dire necessity. At the same time, the Bolsheviks did not take a position that women were incapable of fighting. Rather, they were stressing the question of which class and which goal the women should fight for. While numerically a minority, armed women in the Red Guards were considerably more numerous than the women fighting for the counter-revolution. Slutskaia played a key role in organising the rising in the Moscow district of Petrograd, as L R Menzhinskaia and D A Lazurkina did in the First City district and A I Kruglova in the Okhta district. The Party’s youth workers Liza Pylaeva and Evgeniia Gerr were members of the Red Guards. The tram conductor, Rodionova, who had hidden 42 rifles and other weapons in her depot after the July Days, was responsible in October for making sure that two tramloads of machine guns went off for the storming of the Winter Palace (McDermid and Hillyar 1999: 185–86). This would lay the foundation for the significant numbers of women who would join the Red Army in 1918–20. During 1917–20, then, stereotypes were challenged and, even if in a minority, women played a notable part in the revolution.

Though a study of events beyond 1917 lies outside the purview of this essay, we need to emphasise that the early years of the revolution saw major strides forward. This is reflected not only in lawmaking but also in practical ways in which attempts were made to address women’s rights, the question of substantive equality, the issue of marginal sexualities and so on, despite a civil war and in the face of tremendous difficulties. However, at no stage was this an unchallenged process. Goldman and Wood have different assessments of the early years, but both agree that by the end of the 1920s there was a clear decline in space for women. Yet it would be an error to write off Bolshevism as gender blind, or to assume that Bolshevik support for women’s causes were purely instrumentalist. Sharp conflicts occurred in the 1920s, and women’s rights also figured there. This becomes apparent when one looks at the attempt made to transform the society of the Central Asian states with large Islamic populations, the new family law and the debates surrounding it, issues concerning peasants and land during discussions on the New Economic Policy, or the question of gender equality within the party. Rather, it is necessary to look at the rise of the new Soviet bureaucracy, and see gender as one of the areas where the retreat was carried out early (Marik 2008: 419–27, 487–88; Goldman 1993: 337).

Notes

1 See, for example, Blackledge (2010).

2 On 9 January 1905 by the Russian calendar (22 January by the Gregorian calendar), unarmed working-class demonstrators were fired upon by the Imperial Guards while they were marching towards the Winter Palace to present a petition to the Tsar. The demonstration of about 50,000 was repeatedly fired upon, and estimates of the casualties range from 1,000 killed and wounded to 4,000 killed. Bloody Sunday, as the day came to be called, transformed the image of tsarism in Russia, and led to popular unrest across the country. The revolution of 1905 was triggered by Bloody Sunday, and saw, by the summer of 1906, about 15,000 workers and peasants executed and 45,000 persons sent off into exile (Sablinsky 1976; Ascher 2004; Trotsky 1971; Harcave 1964).

3 Duma refers to the lower house of the elected legislature established after the revolution of 1905, which lasted from 1906 to 1917.

4 The July Days saw a semi-insurrection that began against the advice of the Bolsheviks, which the latter continued to support because they felt that abandoning workers and soldiers would be a big mistake. It ended in a confused retreat and a rout.

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Heide Gerstenberger

Heide Gerstenberger was Professor for the 'theory of state and society' at the University of Bremen in Germany and is now retired. Her research covers a wide range of topics and has been centred on the development of capitalist states. Her work with Ulrich Welke engaged in an empirical analysis of maritime labour. Since 2005, she has been focusing on the history of capitalist societies, and has published in EnglishImpersonal Power: History and Theory of the Bourgeois State(2009, Brill/Haymarket). Her more recent work has been published as Markt und Gewalt(to be translated by Brill soon as Market and Violence). In anticipation of her talk at the 2017 conference, where she will present her new work, we publish here her presentation from her last HM London conference paper in 2013. 

After having made fun of Adam Smith’s anecdotal narrative of the birth of capitalism, Marx explains, that primitive accumulation of capital was “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt”. [i] The seven paragraphs of the chapter on “so-called primitive accumulation” contain extensive historical descriptions. This notwithstanding, they do not represent historical analysis as such. Instead, Marx highlighted strategies and processes which resulted in the dispossession of labourers from autonomous means of reproduction and in the accumulation of capital. While the latter was achieved through “colonialism, national debt, taxation, protectionism, trade wars, etc.”[ii], the former was brought about through forceful appropriation and expropriation. All of these strategies were ripe with violence, and all of them made use of state power.

You may have noted that I omitted the double-freedom of labourers as one of the prerequisites for capitalist production. That capitalist production requires labourers who are not only dispossessed of autonomous means of reproduction but are also legally free to sell their capacity to labour, has been - and still is - central to Marxist analysis of capitalism. Any endeavour to confront it with the actual history of capitalism not only runs counter to dominant contents of traditional Marxist analysis but also to the fundamentally optimistic Marxist philosophy of history. Notwithstanding exploitation, pauperization, injustice and all the other evils of this historical epoch, Marx, Engels and Marxists have also conceived of capitalism as being one step further in the development of humanity. There are two aspects to this conception:

Contrary to pre-capitalist forms of production, when direct violence against producers was constantly threatening and often applied, Marx, just as well as proponents of capitalism, has explained that it is no longer required in capitalism. Indeed, Marx, Engels and Marxists have maintained, that direct violence against labourers is contrary to the successful production of surplus value, and hence profit. While this is conceived of as marking human progress in comparison to pre-capitalist forms of production, capitalism is also conceived of as human progress because it produces the historical possibility of revolution.

The optimism inherent in the Marxist philosophy of history has been and sometimes still is a historical force in itself, but it has also limited the analysis of capitalism. For a very long time it has prevented the realisation that the actual history of capitalism challenges the assumption that the double freedom of labour is a requisite for capitalist labour relations.

Before considering slavery, coolie contracts, peonage, and all the other forms of labour having been summed up by Yves Benot under the heading of  'ersatz d‘esclavage'[iii], I propose to, once more, look at Marx’s chapter on so-called primitive accumulation. There is this famous statement about violence being the mid-wife of any old society which is pregnant with a new one.[iv] We might smile about Marx’s choice of words. Because, instead of using the word 'Hebamme', which would be mid-wife in English, he entrusts historical progress to a male, designating him as 'Geburtshelfer'. We will leave that aside. I will also leave aside the extensive debate on revolution in the course of which this sentence has, once and again, been cited.[v] But this statement is not only relevant for debates on revolution but also for the analysis of capitalism. Having helped a woman in labour to give birth to a new life, the mission of a mid-wife is fulfilled. Assuming that Marx has chosen his terms conscientiously, this also applies to the role of violence in history. And, indeed, it is in the same chapter that we are told that extra-economic violence, though exceptionally still made use of in capitalism, has been replaced by the “natural laws of production”.[vi] In other words: the open violence of former times has been replaced by the silent force of market conditions.

Of course, Marxists have not conceived of capitalism as being devoid of violence. Instead, they have remarked, that the place of violence has changed. It is no longer in the open, executed through the state or – in places where the monopoly of legitimate physical violence has not yet been appropriated by the state – by open private violence. Instead, violence is now inherent in the capitalist labour relation. This capitalist form of violence, no longer in the open and no longer sporadic, has become the central element of the everyday life of capitalism. Its analysis forms the centre of the Marxist analysis of capitalist labour, and rightly so. Nevertheless, by focusing exclusively on the violence inherent in the everyday command over the application of one’s capacity to labour, and hence over the bodies and the intellectual capacities of wage-labourers themselves, one only grasps specific historical developments of capitalist labour, albeit important ones.

I am rather convinced that Marx himself conceived of primitive accumulation as a historical phase which more or less ended when and where capitalist forms of production became dominant. Why else would he have stated that at the time of his writing, primitive accumulation had been more or less accomplished in Western Europe? [vii] But I am not against those re-interpretations which endeavour to make use of the analytical concept of primitive accumulation in order to grasp continual processes of expropriation as well as the extension of market structures into spheres of life heretofore outside the realm of competition.[viii] Instead, my critique focuses on the assumption, that the constitution of labour relations through direct violence and constraint is only prevalent at the fringes of capitalism and that this will be overcome when the rationality of capitalist economic relations becomes dominant. In other words: forceful constraint is conceived of as constituting a hindrance to advanced capitalist development. Marcel van der Linden and Karl Heinz Roth have recently labeled this a euro-centric conception of the history of capitalism.[ix] I would rather point to the fact that – very few exceptions apart – it is not economic rationality that effects the end of forced labour.

Let me start to explain this by pointing to the results of recent historical research on the history of wage labour in England. Contrary to developments on the continent, English labourers have early on been legally free to sell their capacity to labour. However, until the middle of the 1870s, and that definitely was long after the beginning of industrial capitalism in England, they were not legally free to end their contract at will. If they did so and their employer went to court, they had to expect a sentence in prison. Arriving there, they were officially welcomed by being flogged, during their stay many experienced forced labour in a tread mill. In his important work on the history of wage labour at will Robert J. Steinfeld is very firm in his rejection of any functional explanation of the long continuance of using state violence to constrain the duration of contracts to the will of employers. [x] He resumes that what we call “free” wage labour “is defined essentially by the moral and political judgment that penal sanctions ….should not be permitted to enforce ‘voluntary’ labour agreements.”[xi] The political success of the de-legitimation of coercion was furthered when suffrage was extended to more labourers in 1868. Seven years later the penal sanctions on so-called breaches of contract were repealed.

While corresponding developments have been taking place in other states of the metropolitan core of capitalism, developments in France were somewhat different. Though the hated livret which had put labourers under police control before the revolution, was re-instituted at the beginning of the 19^th century, it no longer functioned as a means to constrain employment at will as far asjournaliers, meaning industrial wage-labourers, were concerned. In spite of the fact that post-revolutionary development was a struggle about the removal or the preservation of revolutionary changes in society, and in spite of the numerous endeavors to control and discipline labourers, labour relations as such remained private, i.e. not under the direct supervision of the state. The argument is all the more telling because in France industrialized production was developed much later than in the United Kingdom. Once again, there is no convincing functional economic explanation for the development of modern free wage labour.

Of course, this does not bode well for the incompatibility of slavery and capitalism, not only dear to proponents of capitalism, but also, at least until very recently, to its critics. Wilhelm Backhaus is convinced that Marx had to postulate the incompatibility of slavery and capitalism because the division between free wage-labourers and slaves would have prevented the development of a revolutionary class in the United States.[xii]  Of course, not only Marx and Engels but also later critics have suggested other explanations for their assertion. They have been successfully refuted by historical research. Local conditions for making profitable use of slave labour varied and these conditions also varied over time, but as soon as we replace conviction by analysis it is simply not possible to object to Robin Blackburn’s résumé that “slavery was not overthrown for economic reasons but where it became politically untenable.”[xiii]

The movement for the abolition of slavery has lent moral justification to wage labour. But abolition has not done away with the reality of forced labour. (In medical terms this would be called a negative side effect.) Not only has so-called domestic slavery remained lawful in many parts of the world and have slave trade as well as slavery been secretly continued, but black codes, vagrancy laws, and especially peonage have forced freed slaves into labour that was not of their choosing. And then there was contract labour. If some of the millions of coolies engaged in Asia hoped to better their situation by agreeing to be shipped abroad, many others were victims of deception if not of outright abduction. Officially, they were entitled to return to their home-countries at the end of their contract, but even if there would have been a ship and they would have been able to pay their fare, many were tricked and forced into the renewal of their contract.

In the early phases of the trade in coolies these laborers most often found themselves on plantations or in sugar mills whose owners and overseers had been used to slavery. Their hypothetical ability to leave at the end of a contract did not improve their working and living conditions while the contract lasted. From the 1860s onward governments in the home countries tried to forbid or at least to control the trade and governments in the receiving countries, especially in West-India, sometimes set up commissions to look into the realities of contract labour. The most important incentive to do so seems to have come from free wage-labourers in these countries, among them those former coolies who would not or could not return after the end of their contract. They protested against the fact that the very low pay of coolies endangered their own demand for better wages.

At the end of the 19^th and in the first decades of the 20^th century there were many places in world capitalism where unbiased observers were at a loss to detect differences between slavery and contract labour. Often coolies were forced to live at their place of work, and not only the managers of the tea-gardens in Assam but also those of mines in Rhodesia or of tobacco plantations at the Eastern Coast of Sumatra tried to prevent the flight of their labour force by guarding them with fences, with dogs and armed watch personnel. Of the 85 000 coolies who had arrived in the modern hell of tobacco plantations in Sumatra in 1866, 35 000 had already died three years later. In 1873 planters were granted penal jurisdiction over their labour force.[xiv]

You may point to the fact that, in the metropolitan core states of capitalism free wage labour has, indeed, become prevalent, and that, in the course of time, not only individual wage earners have acquired the freedom to end a contract without having to fear repression, but that labour organisations have also attained the right to collective bargaining. I nevertheless insist on the hypothesis that open constraint and repression are constant possibilities of capitalist labour regimes. Far from marking a certain epoch of capitalist development, violence is constantly hanging about in the wings of capitalist labour relations. They come into the open when governments and societies refrain from decisive objection.

German concentration camps were not founded in order to supply factories with unpaid labour, but there were many employers who applied for its delivery and only very few who refused its offer. It was only after the end of the Second World War that political struggle and political regulation resulted in what Robert Castel has called the civilisation of labour[xv] and what I call the domestication of capitalism. Alas, it was rather short-lived. Because not only has rigid competition on the world market led governments to sharpen the constraint to offer one’s capacity to labour on a very unfavourable market, but societies and governments all over the world also, once again, more or less tolerate forced labour. My definition of forced labour centres on the restriction of movement, i.e. the prevention to leave the work-place and/or the job. Taking away the passports of foreign wage-earners implies that they are threatened with criminal procedure for lack of an identification card, preventing their leave from the work-place by barring doors and windows, implies the threat of illness and even death. We all know numerous examples.

Political struggles against such practices of constraint have not become easier since the globalisation of the labour market. They are, nevertheless, unavoidable. If it has always been analytically problematic to conceive of the violence inherent in primitive accumulation as being the characteristic of a certain historical phase of capitalism or of its fringes, globalization forces us to finally recognize that open violence and forceful constraint continue to present dangers in all phases and all places of capitalist labour regimes.

[i] MEW 23: 788

[ii] MEW 23:785

[iii] Yves Benot, Yves (2003)La modernité s’esclavage. Essai sur la servitude au cœr du capitalism (Éditions la Découverte) Paris: 247

[iv] MEW 23: 779

[v] In his „Reflections on Gewalt” Etienne Balibar has discussed the theoretical history of this concept. See:Historical Materialism 17 (2009) 99-125; especially: Paragraph 3

[vi] MEW 23: 765

[vii] MEW 23, 25:792

[viii] Massimo De Angelis debates these interpretations. See: Marx’s Theory of Primitive Accumulation: A Suggested Reinterpretation;http://homepages.uel.ac.uk/M.DeAngelis/PRIMACC.htm

[ix] Marcel van der Linden & Karl Heinz Roth, 2009Einleitung; in: Über Marx Hinaus (Assoziation A) Berlin, p. 22-23

[x] Robert J. Steinfeld  (2001)Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press), Cambridge usw.,P.85-86 and passim

[xi] Op. cit. 239-249

[xii] Wilhelm Backhaus, (1974)Marx, Engels und die Sklaverei. Zur ökonomischen Problematik der Unfreiheit (Pädagogischer Verlag Schwann) Düsseldorf, p. 67f.

[xiii] Robin Blackburn(1988)The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 1776-1848 (Verso) London, p. 520

[xiv]  Karl J. Pelzer (1978)Planter and Peasant. Colonial policy and the agrarian struggle in East Sumatra. 1863-1947 (‘S-Gravenhage - Martinus Nijhoff ) The  Hague

[xv] Robert Castel (1995/2000)Die Metamorphosen der sozialen Frage (Universitätsverlag) Konstanz, S. 401

Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of  London. She is the author of Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (Pluto, 2000), Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-garde (Verso, 2002), Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (Reaktion 2005), Walter Benjamin: Critical Lives (Reaktion, 2007) and Liquid Crystals: The Art and Science of a Fluid Form (Reaktion, 2016). Together with Ben Watson she runs the website www.militantesthetix.co.uk.

Esther has been involved on the HM editorial board since it came into existence 20 years ago. This interview is therefore an opportunity to discuss her work as well as the history of the journal.

George Souvlis is a doctoral candidate in history at the European University Institute in Florence and a freelance writer for various progressive magazines including Salvage, Jacobin, ROAR and Lefteast.

George Souvlis (GS): Can you tell us a bit about your intellectual and political formation?

Esther Leslie (EL): I come from a political family – my parents were Trotskyists, my grandparents on one side were anarchists and, on the other, one grandfather had been involved in unemployment marches. There was a strong sense of class consciousness and political engagement at home. My anarchist grandfather, who was German, was a book publisher and bookseller in London and so we were surrounded at home by many books, from him and also because my parents could never stop acquiring books – they themselves became involved in a journal, Revolutionary History, and a publishing venture, Socialist Platform. My anarchist grandmother was a Jew of Polish descent and she had been arrested in the struggle for woman’s votes towards the start of the century and was a firebrand speaker at Highbury Corner, denouncing war. I was intrigued by this political tradition and by the presence of Germans and Jews in my lineage. It drew me towards Marx and also drew me to investigate the meaning of Nazism, especially as in my teenage years the National Front fascists were gaining prominence in the UK. I was a teenager when punk emerged and I was drawn to anarchist bands, such as Crass and the Poison Girls, and my schoolfriends recorded on their label. Aesthetically though I preferred the simultaneously melodious and dissonant punk of ATV, the Buzzcocks, the Nightingales and others. This fueled too an interest in the mass reproduced form that is the record cover, a small artwork. I watched and read John Berger at an early age. I found Walter Benjamin on the bookcases. We had piles of Marx and Trotsky at home. I went to Sussex University because it was understood as a more radical place than others. I studied German so that I might get to live in Berlin for a year. While there, I took courses – on the aesthetics of the ugly, on Fassbinder, on Georg Buechner, on Benjamin and thresholds, on the anthropology of the early Marx and many more things – which opened up a lot of areas and intensified the excitement of learning.

GS: In your first study, Walter Benjamin, Overpowering Conformism, you attempt to offer an analysis of Walter Benjamin's oeuvre that differs substantially from the conformist readings of his work. Which are these readings? What do these studies not grasp from his analysis in order to be defined as conformist? Additionally to this study, you offer a presentation of his politics. What kind of politics did he endorse? Was he Marxist? If yes, what kind of Marxism did he promote? For example, what was his take on the Marxist analytical metaphor of base and superstructure? 

EL: I wrote my PhD on Benjamin and technology. There had been a wave of interest in Benjamin in English in the late 1970s, early 80s, Eagleton, Jameson, Julian Roberts for example who had taken for granted that Benjamin was Marxist, in some way. John Berger’s Ways of Seeing from the early 1970s presented itself as a popularization of Benjamin’s ideas and it directed those ideas determinedly towards emancipation, without compromise. By the time I came to write my PhD in the 1990s, a new Benjamin was being invented. It was one that was doused in melancholy, loss, impossibilities, suicides. It was one tied up in complex linguistic theories that seemed more drawn from Derrida and deconstruction. It was one that emphasized Judaism as holding the key to Benjamin’s thought. It was one that took Scholem’s claim to be the only true interpreter of Benjamin seriously, negating Brecht, negating Adorno. It was also one that tried to reimagine Benjamin as a proponent, a trailblazer of consumerism, a dilettante of the Arcades. It seemed as if, from various directions, Benjamin was being made useless, postmodernised, seized from his time and directed towards either a smooth fitting into ours – he would be so at home in the shopping mall – or make to face it impotently, like his own angelus novus, watching in sweet horror the broken rubbles of the hopes and dreams of modernity, of revolutionaries which can of course never be realized, are fatal, are impossible and vicious. 

The hate was removed from Benjamin. The energies of hate, the cool appraisal of the horror and of who causes it. It was all gone. This was not a Benjamin who was Brecht’s finest interpreter. Nor a Benjamin who wrestled with actually existing communism. Not a Benjamin who experienced daily, in his adult years, what it meant to be short of means, to be censored, made into a hack, oppressed. There are quite a number of people who feel comfortable with that Benjamin today – and seem to refuse to read anything of his published after 1918. Benjamin is rooted in his times. This is why he was clear about who was working in the cultural field in any way adequate to those times. This was why he was interested in technology – cultural techniques as well as technological forms that make commodities, make wars, make possible new ways of living. I wanted to bring out that sense of Benjamin as materialist. It means making clear how extraordinary his study of the Arcades as a crucible of the nineteenth century, as a kind of technology, was. He indicted consumerism as the birthplace of fascism. I still don’t think people credit with enough perspicacity his idea of the aestheticization of politics. His Marxism relates to this – it is a Marxism of the everyday, a full accounting of experience and how experience can be alienated from the experiencer – as he explains in his 1933 essay Experience and Poverty. Experience is a battleground. The battleground forms our experience – directly then for those on the battlefields of the First World War, but no less now in our age of permanently threatened war, hi-tech war. We are in the shadow of war, as he was, and our experience is overshadowed by this. Benjamin’s Marxism of the everyday is also a Marxism that understands Surrealism, understands how dream and wish and hope colour our engagements in the world, render art a training ground, a prefigurative space, a gauge and a promise. Benjamin’s was astute politically and curious – you can sense that in his conversations with Brecht, in his discussions in Moscow, his thoughts in letters on the Popular Front in France. Scholem wanted to portray Benjamin as a naïve figure, but that is a misrepresentation. His theses on the Concept of History contribute a profound historical document, not a jolt arising from disappointment, but a full reckoning of the calamitous actions and concepts of Social Democracy. Stalinism and Fascism. 

As to the formal apparatuses of Marxism - I do not think Benjamin – nor I – is unduly concerned by questions of base and superstructure. Or at least these things, once they become formulaic, work against Marxism. Benjamin’s sense of a relationship of expression between base and superstructure strikes me as interesting – he compares it to a person sleeping who has indigestion, and that uncomfortableness comes to expression in the dream, not as a direct reflection, but as an expression, a kind of translation, that, as we know with dreams, may be quite distorted. I have taken this idea quite literally lately (in a research and artistic project on Milk, called ‘Deeper into the Pyramid, with the artist Melanie Jackson) and have been looking at cheese and dreams and the purported relation between the two, especially as evinced in Winsor McCay’s Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend. There is a processing of the modern world, its anxieties and its technologies, its pressures and possibilities in the dream, through the workings of cheese on the body; and it takes on exaggerated expression, but is not the less true. The line by Adorno, ‘Only the exaggerations are true’, on psychoanalysis, strikes me as more broadly pertinent. It is why Benjamin was interested in Grandville’s caricatures and why I have looked at cartoons so much.

GS: One of the main topics with which Benjamin was engaged with and you analyse in your work is that of photography. Why did he decide to deal with such a medium? What is his take on photography as technological form and political tool? What were the consequences of the invention of photography for global culture according to him? 

EL: Benjamin was drawn to photography because it was unavoidable in his period, or rather it was visible because it was everywhere and still new enough to appear rather than fade into a background and become unseen. This is a signal of the extent to which Benjamin was alive to his environment, was part of the world in which he lived and wanted to understand it affects upon humans. Similarly he is alive to the presence of neon in the city and writes strikingly about what it does to language and to our consciousness in his One Way Street. He is not alone in these observations. Siegfried Kracauer is another figure who takes his cues from the streets of Weimar, who translates experience within the modern world into existential and political form. Kracauer writes a powerful essay on photography – and I wonder if this was a spur for Benjamin to contribute his own take. Clearly Benjamin had an interest in mass reproducibility, in the shift of the artwork away from unique individual existence in one place and time. The photograph has no original. Not only that as city dweller we become aware of its multiplicity, its existence as one and the same thing in countless magazines, on countless posters, on postcards, in books, on the side of vehicles. Benjamin noted that it changes how we view art – brings a version of a unique artwork into our hands, our rooms, our contexts and lives. But he was more interested in how it becomes a thing for itself, art, cultural expression made in order to be replicated, in order to be transported and recontextualised. 

What relationship did that have to politics? Of course, he was aware that it was photography that was one of the most politicized forms for the modernists of the new Soviet Union, in the work of Rodchenko and others. It was also the case that there was an efflorescence of photography in Weimar Germany and he was intrigued about its melancholic deployments of the image, how it did not serve revolutionary thinking, but because a blank affirmation of misery or a surrender to it or a beautification of what exists in the work of New Objectivists like Alfred Renger-Patzsch. The most sophisticated aesthetic discussions in Weimar and in Europe more generally were taking place in relation to film and photography – with the Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart in 1929, or the theory and practice of Laszlo Moholy Nagy. It is also significant that women around Benjamin took photographs and wrote about them, such as Gisele Freund. 

He wanted to make his contribution, I suppose, and I find it interesting that his Small History of Photography from 1931 appears in the Literarische Welt. Photography is the new literature of this world. As he notes, quoting Moholy Nagy, the illiterate of the future is the person unable to read photography. That is, I suppose, still true, or even truer, though we now have to factor in how much more sophisticated are the means by which photography can be manipulated or dislocated from its context and circulated for various ends. Here Benjamin’s thoughts on the caption and how it anchors may be of interest, for the way they suggest the need to anchor the image, to produce a dialectic between word and image, to pull it into a context – the caption need not be seen as a descriptive title, more a kind of angling on the image, on what it shows, or does not show. I imagine that he might have been thinking of the way Heartfield uses text in his photomontages, not to tie down the meaning of the poster, but to blast it into political associations, the destabilizing and humorous effects of puns, making a bridge between the world of nonsense represented in the press and official discourse and the enlivening ways in which language is used in the streets and at moments of struggle.

GS: What are the commonalities and differences between Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin in their analytical method of the diptych 'art and politics'? 

EL: Benjamin was a canny interpreter of Brecht. Brecht was a great interlocutor with Benjamin. Brecht was in the main an artist. Benjamin was in the main a critic. They have different aims, and so how they might address the relationship of art and politics is different. One analyses the potentials, as well as observing the ways in which the relation is distorted under fascism. The other works to develop art that is sufficient to the demands of the time, adequate to produce an audience that can criticize, be mobilized intellectually and emotionally by what they see. Brecht’s exchanges between aesthetics and politics were worked out in the theatre, collectively Benjamin was far more interested in the capacities of technology – potentially in many ways – to work towards emancipatory politics. He also observed how technology had altered cultural form, under capitalism. Brecht stuck with traditional forms, plays, poems, for the most part. He innovated within those traditional forms, of course, existing modes of acting, staging, plotting, using vocabulary and subject-matter, that politicized the forms. At points, at his most classically political, he drew on history, displacing contemporary questions into peasant settings from the past. His experiences of Hollywood and of Weimar Film too were negative, as much as they were educational. He made a book out of the dire experience of seeing what G.W. Pabst did to his Threepenny Opera in film. He learnt an extraordinary lesson about the bourgeois state when the film he worked on, Kuhle Wampe, was censored. 

Benjamin did not have such practical experiences of industry or state intervening in, working on outputs. But in terms of commonalities and differences, I don’t think that for either of them there is an easily definable relationship between aesthetics and politics that can be measured and then set one against the other. Both of them modulate what they mean by that relationship, by the transfer between art and politics, aesthetics and politics. They both have experiemental attitudes – Brecht in terms of the plays and formats that he writes and stages and works on. Benjamin in terms of his theoretical investigations, but also his own practical experiments. I did say that Benjamin was more a theorist than a practitioner, but he was a sophisticated user of radio and his radio scripts are an extraordinary aspect of his work. Benjamin worked in the progressive radio networks of Weimar Germany, using technology and form to generate a critical, self-reflexive audience. He did radio lectures for children, which are intimate, ambitious and engaging – that is forcing engagement from his audience. He also did radio dramas and strange word games. All this was an immanently political practice - using a technological form to promulgate a certain pedagogy through culture, history, social studies.

He also wrote odd short stories, which I issued an edition of, together with two younger colleagues, Sam Dolbear and Sebastian Truskolaski. These are also miniature models of how voice, narrative, release of information, perspective generate a politics of the text. For that volume, titled The Storyteller, we were also concerned to foreground the extent to which Benjamin was interested in pedagogy and education, and supported those initiatives that addressed children playfully or as peers. The politics of education was important to him from his earliest days and he had a certain experience of what a progressive education might be through his times at the Hermann-Lietz-Schule Haubinda in Thuringia from 1905-1907. Brecht too is concerned to understand his poetic practice as a kind of learning – in the most progressive way – maieutic, bringing to consciousness, dialogue, measuring experience against representation, using humour and irony. 

GS: One of the several topics that Benjamin engaged with is Fascism. What are the main insights that Benjamin offers for the understanding of the phenomenon? Which aspects of his understanding on the phenomenon do you think are still relevant today and can help us to understand better the current far-right that has emerged since the last global financial crisis? 

EL: Benjamin seems to become really aware of fascism as a phenomenon in 1930. That is the year of his essay ‘Theories of German Fascism’, where he condemns the work of fascist Ernst Jünger and his circle. Benjamin attacked the mysticism of war indulged in by Jünger, a continuation into the postwar of the Freikorps brutes, the ‘war engineers of the ruling class’. Jünger was two years later to publish a fantasy of the soldier-worker as automaton, ahuman and anatural in a totally mobilised society. The new machinic person is a worker-soldier technocrat, who is a ‘type’, and is motivated by ‘the will to utilise technology’. He subordinates his self to the ‘total state’, and the reward is immortality. War is magical. War is beautiful. War is an aesthetic experience of the highest order. The critique of this stance is something Benjamin will return to in the context of Nazism, when he considers the ways in which technological production and reproduction feed war and reactionary politics. 

The problem, in Benjamin’s diagnosis, though it manifests itself in various ways, is at bottom a misachieved relationship between technology and nature, as overseen by those with power, be they imperialists or capitalists or both. Imperialist capitalism turns technology against nature, militarising landscapes, slaughtering people in the pursuit of conquering other countries, as well as dominating its own. To explore social form, Benjamin makes an analogy between children and nature, on the one hand, and adults and technology and technique, on the other.

‘The mastery of nature, so the imperialists teach, is the purpose of all technology and technique. But who would trust a cane wielder who proclaimed the mastery of children by adults to be the purpose of education? Is not education above all the indispensable ordering of the relationship between generations and therefore mastery, if we are to use this term, of that relationship and not of the children? And likewise technology and technique are not the mastery of nature but of the relation between nature and man.’ 

Education is about regulating relationships between the generations, bringing new accords between those who have different experiences and futures. Just as the aim and mode of technology, in its engagements with humans, need not be to incite violence and oppression, so too education is about calibrating a communal endeavour, whereby young and old communicate, and perhaps, through the mechanism of their relationship, each learns from the other. Politics resides in the regulation of a relationship, not in the infantilisation of one part or the violent domination of it. It is not the case that technologies work, in themselves, towards the liberation of the individual or the collective. Rather, capital smashes time and space as it was known and rewrites the world in its image, from the colonies to the centres of power. The ‘human sensorium’, notes Benjamin, is submitted, across this period, ‘to a complex training’. New media forms exercise this on the body. The shock experience of factories and streetscapes is processed, accommodated to, or explored in the shock experience of new technologies of distraction. Benjamin’s commitment is to an ‘anthropological materialism’ that is aware of the recomposition of nature, in its form as human body, which the human sensorium experiences through technological development. This experience is intense and is felt on the body. Fascism fights to shape that body in its own image – indeed radio and other technologies of culture will become some of its tools, at least in the field of ideology, but perhaps more fundamentally, in the field of a kind of biopolitics.

At points Benjamin studies the past in an effort to understand how capitalism created the conditions for the victory of fascism in Europe. Benjamin writes of his Arcades Project: ‘We can speak of two directions in this work: one which goes from the past into the present and shows the arcades, and all the rest, as precursors, and one which goes from the present into the past so as to have the revolutionary potential of these “precursors” explode in the present.’ The second direction leads out of or away from fascism – and is the axis of hope. In the first direction, the arcades, and the culture of consumerism these ushered in, is identified as a prerequisite of fascism, which cannot be understood without reference to capitalism, both in terms of its economic basis and in the way in which people are encouraged to conceive themselves, against all reality, as consumers and national masses, not workers and internationalists. At the same time, the arcades and other similar nineteenth century forms, such as railway stations, museums, exhibition halls, fizz with utopian promise, the promise of luxuries, of mobility, of knowledge. Benjamin is always alert to a dialectical switch in which the contemporary ‘hell’ of commodity production and capitalist society can be probed to reveal traces of hope, but this is also the forging ground of a consumerist mentality that feeds fascism and an aestheticization that amplifies the cultivation of myth. This is the ground on which fascism thrives. 

Progress, Benjamin declares, is a nineteenth century phantasm. The trust in progress affected philosophers and industrialists as well as Social Democratic reformists. Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’ presents a critique of progress as exemplified in a nineteenth century historiography, which had been produced by a bourgeoisie that, so he tells us, had reneged on a critical attitude, for which it no longer had any use. The concept of progress becomes a dogma at that moment when it is no longer a socially critical concept. In addition to his suspicion of the concept of progress, Benjamin’s theses on the philosophy of history and his study of Eduard Fuchs, the collector, from 1936, level a more specific criticism of the confusion of human progress with technological progress. The bourgeoisie imagine infinite expansion, with the production of endless commodities to be placed in untold markets. And the Social Democrats of his time imagined that such expansion could, in the end, benefit the working class, for it would allow eventually the enrichment of each and everyone. This was tantamount to the gradual evolution to socialism, without the need for forceful revolution. Benjamin notes a confusion that arose in Social Democracy at this time. It held a misguided understanding of the role of labour, which then turned into a fetish of labour, and a belief in salvation through technology, rather than through altering the relations of production, which is another way of saying regulating the relations of technology. Benjamin observes: ‘This vulgar-Marxist conception of the nature of labour bypasses the question of how its products might benefit the workers while still not being at their disposal. It recognizes only the progress in the mastery of nature, not the retrogression of society; it already displays the technocratic features later encountered in Fascism.’ 

The Social Democratic reformists had been so convinced that progress would occur, indeed was occurring, and they were so sure of the existence of their mass base, under any circumstance, that they had entered into bargains with the political establishment. Benjamin identifies their bull-headed belief in progress and their faith in a mass base as the political will for ‘servile inclusion in an uncontrollable apparatus’. Technological development, industrial production that ‘outstrips human needs’ (most noticeably in the production of newspaper copy and armaments) and the swooning crowds, mobilised but not ‘active’, had brought about something quite other than socialism: world war. And it did this twice. 

Benjamin intertwines technology, class and consciousness, in order to pursue his programme of liberatory politics. If the state treats its citizens as fools, props and as suffering sources of profit, then the antidote to that is a collective that has shaken off its passivity. A passage that Benjamin included in the footnotes of the second version of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility’ explores this. The proletariat is a mass, but it only appears to be a compact one from the outside, through the eyes of its oppressors. At the moment of its self-activation, it begins to loosen up and moves from being a reactive force to an active one. As an active body, this proletarian mass, acting out of solidarity, lifts the separation between individual and mass, or rather renders it dialectical, such that revolutionary leadership does not pull from the front, but is rather absorbed constantly into the mass, which mobilises a collective rationality. This is not the mass that Gustav le Bon identified in his explorations of ‘mass psychology’. His is the petty bourgeois one, which is pressed into a deadened compact mass by the pressures of the classes that flank it and it has a psychology, or an emotional basis that can be – and will be – mobilised reactively. Benjamin alludes to its panicky manifestation as enthusiasm for war, hatred of Jews or the drive for self-preservation. Fascism cultivates compaction, which serves it well, while Communists prepare for the abolition of masses altogether, their dissolution into self-activating collectives. As an additional tool of rule, Fascism extends the aestheticising elements of commodification into the spectacle of politics, abusing what it means to be political and what it means to use technology at one and the same time. 

This interview was conducted by Selim Nadi and originally published in French in Période.

Elinor Taylor is a lecturer in English at the University of Westminster in London, a member of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, and a member of the executive committee of theRaymond Williams Society. She is the author ofThe Popular Front Novel in Britain, 1934-1940 (Brill), and of articles on the communist writers John Sommerfield and Jack Lindsay.

Selim Nadi: How did you first become interested in the British “literary Popular Front”? Why did you focus on communist novels rather than other “cultural forms” (cinema, theatre, dance, etc.). Can one speak about a “cultural front” in Britain as it existed in the US (see: Michael Denning, The Cultural Front, Verso, 1997) – even if what we understand as the Popular Front in Europe was not exactly the same phenomenon as in the US?

Elinor Taylor: I became interested in literary relationships with communism and anti-fascism when I was an undergraduate student. I was curious about how modernist writing, often thought to have peaked by the mid-1920s, was transformed by the rise of fascism and the coming of the Second World War. I was interested too in working-class and socialist writers, but found that these figures, and the larger socio-political developments of the later interwar years, were rarely discussed by major literary histories of the time. Part of the problem is that twentieth-century writing has come to be defined by the periodisation of modernism and post-modernism, so that writing at mid-century is often thought of as either late modernist or early postmodernist. That excludes a lot, especially the persistence and transformations of realism. It was the question of the relationship between realism and political commitment during the 1930s that became the focus of my doctoral thesis, and that was the rationale for focusing on novels rather than other forms.

There isn’t a study of the British Popular Front that encompasses the breadth that Michael Denning’s study of the American Popular Front, The Cultural Front, does. There are important studies of particular developments, like Colin Chambers’The Story of Unity Theatre (Lawrence & Wishart, 1989) and Mick Wallis’s work on thePopular Front pageants. But I would say that it’s certainly possible to speak of a ‘cultural front’ of politically engaged art and writing in Britain, though I think it was less diverse and less developed than in the American case. The USA had a longer history of cultural organisation via institutions like the John Reed Clubs, established in 1929, and theNew Masses journal, established in 1926, while in Britain the institutions of the Popular Front, such as the journalLeft Review and the Left Book Club, had no real precedents. The cultural infrastructure that sustained the ‘cultural front’ in Britain was always quite fragile and subject to financial and ideological pressures.

SN: Your forthcoming book –The Popular Front Novel in Britain (Brill, 2018) – is focused on five major British communist novelists (John Sommerfield, Arthur Calder-Marshall, James Barke, Lewis Jones and Jack Lindsay), could you please explain why you chose those authors? Could you please come back on how these writers evolved in the 1930s and after – in their relationship to communism – and if this political evolution appears in their later writings?

E.T.: These five writers provide something of a cross-section of writers on the left. Studies of 1930s literature, especially its poetry, tend to focus on upper-middle-class English writers like W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day Lewis, all of whom were ‘fellow travellers’ of communism and all of whom publicly broke with their earlier commitments within a few years.

But these figures are rather more diverse. Lewis Jones, for instance, was a Welsh communist coal miner who had a background in industrial organisation and Communist Party activities (he was imprisoned during the 1926 General Strike, for example) before he began writing fiction in the 1930s. He died in January 1939, in the week that Barcelona fell to Franco’s forces, after years of exhausting campaigning for the Spanish Republican cause. One story has it that he died after addressing 30 meetings that day.

James Barke worked for a shipbuilding company in Glasgow, Scotland, while pursuing his writing career. Although never formally a member of the Communist Party, he nonetheless wrote during the 1930s and 40s as a committed communist; in the book I suggest that his two novels of the Popular Front period, Major Operation (1936) andThe Land of the Leal (1939), show him thinking through the problems and possibilities of the Popular Front line. His main literary project in later life was a quintet of novels about the life of the poet Robert Burns. Barke saw Burns as a radical popular hero for Scotland, someone speaking to and from a popular constituency and so performing something like the function of the ‘organic’ intellectual theorised by Antonio Gramsci (though Barke would not have read Gramsci’s work). He died in 1958.

John Sommerfield was an important figure in a number of cultural initiatives of the left, such as Mass Observation, and was involved in housing campaigns in London. He also fought in the Spanish Civil War. He left the Communist Party in 1956, but the memory of the 1930s is often present in his later writings. His novel-memoir,The Imprinted (1977) is concerned with the ways that anti-communism had colonised the memory of the 1930s and with the difficulties of retrieving and preserving the memories of commitment in a very different historical moment.

Arthur Calder-Marshall’s attachment to communism was quite short-lived and he is something of a classic fellow traveller; an upper-middle-class intellectual drawn to communism by the political crises of the 1930s. He had abandoned communism by 1941, but does not seem to have become an outspoken anti-communist like Stephen Spender and other fellow travellers did. He wrote novels, screenplays and biographies for the rest of his career, though I am not aware that his commitments in the 1930s influenced his later output.

Jack Lindsay is a crucial figure in the intellectual and cultural history of British communism; born in Australia, he became a Marxist in the mid-1930s and produced novels, plays, translations, biographies and poems, among other things. Very much in contrast to the ‘fellow travellers’ like Calder-Marshall, he remained committed to communism throughout his life, remaining in the Communist Party after the crises of 1956 during which many intellectuals left the Party, some of whom, like E. P. Thompson, became key figures of the New Left.

SN: Could you please come back on Jack Lindsay’s work? Not only was he of Australian origins, but a great part of his novels take place in Ancient Greece (Cressida’s First Lover, 1932), in Ancient Rome (Rome For Sale,1934) or during King Charles I trial in the 17th Century (1649: A Novel of a Year, 1938). How did these kinds of historical novel fit with the aesthetic and political issues of the British Popular Front period?

E.T.: Lindsay is, I think, one of the most interesting and wide-ranging intellectuals in the Communist Party in the 1930s and 1940s.

The Popular Front turn, as it was articulated by the Comintern, placed considerable stress on the ideological role that national histories could play in anti-fascist activism. Thus, at the Comintern’s Seventh Congress in the summer of 1935, its General Secretary Georgi Dimitrov declared that, ‘The fascists are rummaging through the entire history of every nation so as to be able to pose as the heirs and continuators of all that was exalted and heroic in its past’, and argued that communist intellectuals should engage national histories in their work. Dimitrov’s speech was quite widely quoted in the British leftist press and seemed to capture the imagination of a number of communist intellectuals. This turn towards national culture is clearly bound up with the development of Stalinism in the Soviet Union and it reflects the de-prioritisation of international revolution and the consolidation of ‘socialism in one country’. But its consequences, at least in Britain, are culturally significant, and I think it was Lindsay who thought through the implications of this historical emphasis for British culture more thoroughly than anyone else.

I’m particularly interested in how Lindsay’s handled the idea of ‘bourgeois’ revolution as it played out in English history. An important part of the politics of the Popular Front was the claim that there were progressive elements in bourgeois culture as a result of the bourgeoisie’s formerly revolutionary history role. This is a claim Lindsay pursues, I think, through his trilogy of English historical novels, 1649, set during the English Civil War,Lost Birthright, set in 1769, andMen of Forty-Eight, set during the European revolutions of 1848. In the Leveller movement of the Civil War, Lindsay sees a revolutionary impulse that, although unrealised at the time, was nonetheless carried into the future: it was in the 1930s that he thought it might finally come to fruition. But the novels struggle to uphold both the necessity of the victory of the ‘revolutionary’ bourgeois and the other historical possibilities represented by defeated radical movements like the Levellers and the nineteenth-century Chartists. The historical novel as a form was advocated as a medium especially suitable for the rehearsal of Popular Front politics; the last chapter of Georg Lukács’The Historical Novel, written during this period, makes the claim that the Popular Front was the context in which the form might be revived after what Lukács considered its long retrograde phase that had commenced in 1848. Lindsay made a similar claim in a1937 article inNew Masses. The historical novel was felt to lend itself to the expression of the relationship between diverse social groups and world-historical events. While Lindsay’s novels are trying to bring about that revival of the historical novel, I think in many ways they end up suggesting the contradictions within it. They end up struggling to valorise the bourgeois victors and furthermore often find themselves drawing attention to the implication of the novel form itself in the histories they aim to represent. Like other Popular Front novels I discuss, they end up being about the novel itself in ways that certainly don’t fit with classic models of socialist realism that depended on fairly simplistic notions of linguistic representation.

While in the 1930s Lindsay wrote a great deal on English historical themes, from the 1940s onwards he addressed contemporary British life in many novels. Most notably, in the 1950s and 1960s he produced a series of nine novels, the ‘British Way’ series that began with Betrayed Spring (1953), in which he explored post-war social change through  class, political and industrial struggles. Those novels might be understood, loosely, as thinking through the implications of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s post-warBritish Road to Socialism programme (1951), just as the English historical novels of the 1930s think through the implications of the Popular Front line. While remaining a Party member until his death in 1990, Lindsay was often in conflict with the Party’s hierarchy and was an influence on dissident communists who left the Party after 1956 (for more on this, see John T. Connor’s 2015 article, ‘Jack Lindsay, Socialist Humanism and the Communist Historical Novel’).

SN: What kind of review was theLeft Review? How important was the British Section of the Writers’ International?

E.T. :Left Review was established in 1934 and was published monthly until its closure 1938. It was set up as the journal of the British Section of the Writers’ International. It had a very broad cultural remit and published stories, poem, extracts from plays, cartoons, reviews of films, music and art, photographs, political commentary, discussions of historical figures, and writing in translation. It was always aligned with the Communist Party, but its relationship with the Party was often uncomfortable, which contributed to its closure. Even from its first issue, it was quite conflicted about whether it was a specifically communist journal or something with a broader, more heterodox agenda. The first issue features a number of contributors disagreeing strongly about what the Review was for, what the Writers’ International should do, and so on, and disagreements and inconsistencies are present all the way through. There was a persistent ambiguity, arguably reflective of the ambiguity of the Popular Front more generally, between a defence of culture as it already existed, on the one hand, and a more modernist, vanguardist line of thought that positioned the journal less as a venue for the defence of culture and more as a vector for a radically new cultural upsurge. While some material it published clearly reflected the priorities of the Communist Party and the cultural policy of the Soviet Union, its Party alignment was less overt than that of its American contemporary theNew Masses, for instance.

The Writers International was the International Union of Revolutionary Writers, a Soviet body that aimed to promote and organise cultural work outside the Soviet Union. It ran an important journal, International Literature, which was published in Russian, English, French, German and Spanish editions from 1932 to 1945, and carried translations of Soviet literary criticism, literary and critical work by European communist intellectuals, and translations of work by Marx and Engels on literature. It’s not clear what role the Writers’ International played after 1935, when the Stalinisation of cultural organisations in the Soviet Union created an climate more hostile to foreign writers andInternational Literature reflected an increasingly prescriptive aesthetic approach. TheLeft Review’s connection with the Writers’ International is not mentioned in its later issues; I am not sure whether that is significant though it may reflect the diminishing interest of the Soviet Union in cultural work abroad.

SN: How was the aesthetic of British Communist writers linked to the debates around the Nation and about the English people?

E.T.: As I mentioned earlier, the Popular Front turn foregrounded national cultures and traditions both as the stake in the anti-fascist struggle and as the site and means of resistance. One difficulty for British communist writers, though, was the problem of what constitutes the ‘national culture’ in Britain, given its internal composition of English, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Often in British communist writing Britain is reduced to England, as is commonly the case in Jack Lindsay’s work. The 1930s saw the foundation of nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales, and for some Scottish writers on the left the deployment of Scottish national culture in Popular Front projects inevitably raised the question of Scotland’s lack of political autonomy. This problem was the subject of a discussion in Left Review in 1936. James Barke argued there against Scottish nationalism on the grounds that it was predicated on a cultural integrity that has since been lost, but his fiction of the later 1930s suggests a rapprochement with the idea of a coherent Scottish national culture. InMajor Operation, published in 1936, Scottish history is intertwined with the history of British capital, and the novel rejects the possibility of using the cultural resources of Scotland’s past as a defence against fascism and imperialism. In his later novelThe Land of the Leal (1938), however, the history of the Scottish working class is figured as a resource of resistance to capitalism and to fascism, so that one character feels that his ancestors’ struggles are now being played out in Spain. The novel’s perspective moves from the local community of the rural working-class, to one of the major cities of British capitalism, Glasgow, and finally beyond the nation to internationalist struggle. Elsewhere in the Popular Front novel, though, writers struggle to write national histories ‘from below’ in this way. As I say in the book, the ‘national turn’ is problematic in many ways because it elides the role of imperialism in British history, and particularly the ways that the British working class benefited from imperialism. This makes the idea that British history can be deployed as a tool of ideological resistance to global capital very difficult to sustain. Lindsay’s novels attempt to do so, but they often expose the limitations of the Popular Front’s emphasis on national cultures.

SN: Did the Brecht/Lukács debate on socialist realism have an influence on those British communist novelists during the Popular Front period? Did British Communist writers take a position on the issue of socialist realism? Did a literary vanguard exist in the British Left of the Popular Front?

E.T.: The main texts of the Brecht/Lukács debate, which were part of a wider debate about the politics of Expressionism, weren’t published in English until later, so the controversy didn’t have a direct influence at the time. However, Lukács published a number of important essays on realism and modernism inInternational Literature, including ‘Essay on the Novel’ in 1936 and ‘‘Narration vs. Description’ in 1937. It’s difficult to gauge whether these directly influenced British writers, but Lukács’s account of the development of realism and the historical novel are echoed in Lindsay’s writings on the novel and in Ralph Fox’sThe Novel and the People (1937). The Soviet debates around socialist realism were partly transmitted  throughInternational Literature, and the term ‘socialist realism’ is certainly used in British Marxist criticism with a positive connotation. But it wasn’t theorised in a very thorough way; ‘socialist realism’ as it was understood in Britain was usually taken to mean something closer to Lukács’s ‘critical realism’, with its roots in the nineteenth century, than to the Soviet interpretation that was endorsed by figures like Karl Radek and Andrei Zhdanov. I am not sure one can speak of a vanguard on the left; while I think it’s important that formally experimental texts like Sommerfield’sMay Day and Barke’sMajor Operation appeared during this time, they are often borrowing certain techniques already established in modernist writing and turning them to new political ends, rather than establishing new terrain for the novel altogether.

SN: What kind of influence did the Spanish civil war have on Left-wing (not only Communists) writers?

E.T.: The Civil War provoked a sense of crisis in intellectual life that, on the left, was often characterised as a moment of choice between liberal neutrality and political responsibility. The importantLeft Review pamphlet,Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War, published in 1937, gives some sense of the breadth of support for the Republican cause among leading writers and intellectuals. For a number of writers on or moving to the left, the war presented a test of commitment, and the engagements of major figures like George Orwell, W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender are well-documented (Valentine Cunningham’s Spanish Front: Writers on the Civil War (1986) records this history). InBritain, Fascism and the Popular Front (1985), Jim Fyrth calls the Aid Spain campaign ‘the largest movements for international solidarity the biggest movement of international solidarity in British history’. The Communist Party of Great Britain lost three important intellectuals, Ralph Fox, John Cornford and Christopher Caudwell, who all died fighting for the Republic. The war also had a huge influence on all the writers I discuss in my book, and it is featured in Lewis Jones’sWe Live and James Barke’sMajor Operation, in both of which characters fight and die in Spain.

Of course, a number of prominent writers came to believe that anti-fascist sentiment had been manipulated in the service of the Soviet Union in Spain, and distanced themselves from their commitments, as in Auden’s revision and renunciation of his poem Spain (1937).  

SN: Beyond the political content, to what extent was John Sommerfield’s novel May Day (1936) “formally experimental” (p. 57) as you write it in your book – especially concerning its modernism?

E.T.: May Day borrows a number of formal features from modernist novels: like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, for instance, it is set on a single London day and traces the movements of a number of characters across the city. Like Woolf, Sommerfield’s London is a city of fragmented and traumatic memories experienced by isolated characters. Sommerfield, though, aims to depict how urban experience can be transformed by political action. It inherits a modernist concern with textuality and representation, but ultimately it resists the conclusion that linguistic representation is always subjective and individual by suggesting that the fragmentation it depicts can be repaired by the language of communism. The novel also does interesting things with the relationship between narrative and the commodity form, as the commodity that is produced and circulated through the text is used as a device to reveal the underlying connections between characters as nodes in a capitalist system. I wouldn’t say that the novel breaks wholly new ground, but it certainly suggests the ways that the modernist techniques that were dismissed by Lukács, for example, could be turned to different political ends.

SN: Could you please come back on the influence that other soviet artistic forms (like cinema for example) had on British Communist writers during the Popular Front period?

E.T.: Soviet cinema was certainly influential, and popular; In the Daily Worker, the Communist Party’s newspaper, you can find adverts for film clubs in which Soviet films were shown. The influence of Soviet cinema on the emerging British documentary film movement has been discussed by Laura Marcus and Lara Feigel in their work. It’s clear that cinematic montage pioneered in the Soviet Union formally influenced novels like Sommerfield’sMay Day and James Barke’sMajor Operation, with their dynamic juxtapositions of images and scenes. But Barke returned to a more conventional realism in his 1938 novel,The Land of the Leal, which perhaps suggests that he felt the need to abandon his more experimental impulses in favour of a more popular and familiar mode. I am not sure about the impact Soviet literature had on Jack Lindsay’s novels, but he read and wrote about Soviet fiction and poetry quite frequently. Lindsay’s work, interestingly, was translated and read in the Soviet Union, at it would be fascinating to know whether his work influenced Soviet writers.

SN: Beside the novels that those writers produced, did the British Popular Front period also produce theoretical writings on the role a novel should play in the political struggle or on aesthetic issues?

E.T.: There are no systematic treatments of aesthetics, only the rather sporadic and fragmented reviews and discussions that appear in the left-wing press. I believe that James Barke began an ambitious work on aesthetics but it was never completed. The most extensive work on the role of the novel is RalphFox’s The Novel and the People, published in 1937, shortly after Fox had died, aged 36, fighting in the Civil War in Spain. The book is mostly a history of the English novel in which Fox aims to account for how the novel’s development relates to its social context. In the final chapter, he makes an appeal for socialist realist fiction, which he understood as the only hope for overcoming the decline of the novel by ‘restoring the historical view which was the basis of the classical English novel’ – the realist novel he thought was best embodied in the work of Henry Fielding. Echoing Lukács, Fox thought that the novel after 1848 had split into the twin tendencies of naturalism and modernism, the former transcribing reality divorced from the social history of its production, and the latter focusing only on the subjective perception of reality. A renewed realism would overcome this divide and restore the novel’s ‘epic’ character. This account of the novel and its possible recuperation is repeated by Arthur Calder-Marshall, Philip Henderson and Jack Lindsay, among others on the British left. In general, though, I think the novels themselves are more interesting than British Communist writing critical writing on the novel as a form.

SN: Your book that discusses all these debates around literature during the British Popular Front was fascinating to read and I was wondering to what extent the question of the “Popular Front Novel” was analysed in any previous work and what, in your opinion, are the limits of those works?

E.T.: My book is the first to specifically address the interaction between the novel and the politics of the Popular Front. Some of the novels I discuss have been analysed in different frameworks; Lewis Jones’s novels are usually situated in the history of proletarian literature, for example, but I think this misses the importance of the specific formation of communist politics in which he was writing. The modernist resonances of James Barke’s and John Sommerfield’s novels have been noted by Keith Williams and Nick Hubble in the context of the history and development of modernism, but I think their engagements with the modernist heritage can be usefully understood in terms of the political priorities of the Popular Front. My book is much indebted to Andy Croft’s ground-breaking study of the leftist novel in the 1930s,Red Letter Days (1990), but I aimed for a more sustained account of the relationship between realism and the modulations of communist politics during the decade. John Coombes’Writing from the Left: Socialism, Liberalism and the Popular Front (1989) is one of the few studies focused on the intellectual culture of the Popular Front, though situates the British Popular Front primarily in the political developments of Bloomsbury figures such as Leonard Woolf and John Middleton Murry, and in the Stalinist turn of Fabians like Beatrice and Sidney Webb. Examining the novel enabled me to look at a more diverse range of figures and also to suggest that the novel is under-valued as a venue in which the politics of the Popular Front were explored and sometimes challenged. I think there’s more to be said about the cultural left in Britain; my focus on a small group of authors omits or only briefly discusses other interesting writers on the left such as Sylvia Townsend Warner, Edward Upward, Katherine Burdekin, Storm Jameson, Rex Warner and Ralph Bates. But I hope the book suggests some of the ways that the British novel shaped and was shaped by communist politics for a brief period.

Paul LeBlanc responds to Eric Blanc

Paul LeBlanc has recently published October Song: Bolshevik Triumph, Communist Tragedy 1917-1924.This post was first published on 21 October 2017 on John Riddell's blog. For a collection of articles on the Russian Revolution seeThe Bolsheviks in 1917: Index to a Debate

A valuable contribution to scholarship on Lenin, the Bolsheviks, and the Russian Revolution of 1917 has – through iconoclastic overstatement – been transformed into an odd and misleading conceptualization by two scholars whom I greatly respect and consider to be friends. Lars Lih, whose massive contribution Lenin Rediscovered has rightly enhanced his reputation among Lenin scholars, several years ago initiated the line of thought under consideration here, and he has gone on to develop and argue hard for it. He has been joined recently by an important younger scholar, Eric Blanc, whose most recent contribution – “Did the Bolsheviks Advocate Socialist Revolution in 1917?” – will be the focal-point of the present contribution.[1]

The controversy they have been initiating will surely go on for some time, with others weighing in. The discipline of history is sometimes moved forward through such confrontations, and a survey of all that would be worthwhile, but is beyond the scope of the present essay, which is a simple contribution to the process of critical clarification. In what follows, I will let Eric Blanc define the issue at hand, note a significant difference between his line of argument and that of Lars Lih, indicating what I think are the positive contributions of these two scholars in this contested terrain. At that point I will turn my attention to what strike me as serious flaws in the article under review.

The dispute may strike many as arcane or “Talmudic” or irrelevant to the burning issues of our time, and early in his article Blanc argues earnestly against the activist inclination to shrug it all off: “Getting the history right is important not only for the sake of accuracy but because it helps us better understand the real nature of the Bolshevik party, the example of which continues to inspire and inform Marxist politics today.”[2] While this may be true, however, the focus of the present contribution is simply on “getting the history right,” and also getting the historical methodology right. The activist concern for “what must we do” is one that I take seriously, but it falls beyond the narrow purview of what is offered here.

Paul Le Blanc’s new book, ‘October Song,’ is now available from Haymarket Press. (e-book $10.20)

The Iconoclastic Argument

According to Blanc, “one hundred years after the Russian Revolution, much of our understanding of 1917 and the Bolshevik party remains clouded by accumulated myths and received ideas. Not least of these is the claim that V.I. Lenin radically overhauled Bolshevik politics in April 1917 by convincing the party to fight for a socialist, instead of bourgeois-democratic, revolution.” He goes on to assure us that “this historiographical consensus is factually inaccurate and has distorted our understanding of Bolshevism in 1917.”

Did the Bolsheviks advocate socialist revolution in 1917? No, Blanc seems to be arguing, citing the comments of an unidentified “Bolshevik leader” addressing the Moscow Soviet in the summer of 1917 (after Lenin’s so-called re-arming of the party): “When we speak of transferring power to the soviets, this does not mean that the power passes to the proletariat, since the soviets are composed of workers, soldiers, and peasants; it does not mean that we are now experiencing a socialist revolution, for the present revolution is bourgeois-democratic.”

In other words, the Bolshevik position had not changed since Lenin articulated it the 1905 polemic Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution. The contrary opinion – perhaps argued most strongly and clearly by Trotsky starting with his 1924 polemicLessons of October – originated in a distorted account, the perhaps understandable product of inner-party rivalries that cropped up in the 1920s. Through subsequent accounts by Trotsky in years leading up to his death, and in the writings of his followers, the myth has been perpetuated, finding its way, as well, even into the work of more mainstream historians.

But if one sets aside the distorting lens of 1920s polemics in the Russian Communist Party and instead engages with the documents of what was actually said and done in the sweep of history leading up to the 1917 revolution (the primary sources), the myth evaporates and we are left with the reality that – despite inevitable confusions amidst the revolutionary ferment, with pulls and tugs and sometimes partial misunderstandings among personalities – the Bolsheviks were well-guided by the perspectives they had embraced since 1905. There was no need for Lenin to “re-arm” the party, and it simply didn’t happen. Or so my friends assert.

Common Ground 

There is much of value in what has been presented by Lars Lih and in what has been elaborated by Eric Blanc in the course of their advocacy of this new interpretation.

Valuable elements struck me powerfully as I read and responded to Lih’s essay from 2011, “The Ironic Triumph of Old Bolshevism: The Debates of April 1917 in Context.” I offered my response in a presentation made in Australia, later included in my collectionUnfinished Leninism. I observed, that Lih here “takes up the cudgels on behalf of Lev Kamenev, the target of Lenin’s critique of a presumably ossified ‘Old Bolshevism’ in 1917.” In a subsequent account of the dispute, as Lih put it, “Kamenev seems to think he won the debate with Lenin in April 1917,” and Lars suggests that Kamenev was right. In my own 2013 presentation, while dissenting from this conclusion, I emphasized what struck me as the valuable contributions emerging from Lars’s account, and a restatement of that judgment is worth reproducing here.[3]

First of all, Lenin did not feel bound by some rigid notion of “democratic centralism” to refrain from expressing his own views if they happened to be in contradiction to those of the formal leadership of the revolutionary party to which he belonged. For Lenin, revolutionary principles always trump organizational harmony, and this was an element essential to his conception of democratic centralism and revolutionary organization. Related to this, an open debate between comrades in the pages of the party newspaper was by no means alien to the Leninism of the early Bolsheviks.

In a 1925 history of the Bolshevik party written by veteran Bolshevik Vladimir Nevsky (a yet-to-be translated source cited by Lars in a different context), it is explained that democratic centralism represented “complete democracy,” and that “the organization of the Bolsheviks lived fully the life of a genuine proletarian democratic organization,” with “free discussion, a lively exchange of opinions,” taking place in “the absence of any bureaucratic attitude to getting things done – in a word, the active participation of emphatically all members in the affairs of the organization.”[4]

At the same time, as Lars correctly argued, the “Old Bolshevism” that Kamenev defended had been a collectively developed orientation, the common position of Lenin and the Bolshevik comrades with whom he now disagreed. Both the Bolshevik and Menshevik wings of Russian socialism had seen Russia’s revolution as “bourgeois-democratic” – preliminary to the future transition to socialism. But in 1917 no less than before, the politics of all Bolsheviks was grounded in a militantly class-struggle orientation distinct from the worker-capitalist alliance position of the Mensheviks, projecting an uncompromising worker-peasant alliance.

While disagreeing with what struck me as a distorted minimization of the debate between Lenin and Kamemev (and other “Old Bolsheviks”) upon Lenin’s return to Russia, I went on to conclude that this common ground between “Old Bolshevism” and Lenin’s April Theses, rooted in the collectively developed politics over a period of years is what made it relatively easy for Lenin to win the debate so quickly in 1917. To understand this collective process – not the blinding revolutionary authority of the Unquestioned Leader – as essential to the Bolshevik triumph provides a better explanation of what actually happened. It was especially important, I argued, to take such Bolsheviks as Kamenev and Zinoviev more seriously than many latter-day scholars and activists have been inclined to do. To understanding that we are dealing with a vibrant revolutionary collectivity can help us (as Eric puts it) “better understand the real nature of the Bolshevik party,” and this in a way that provides insights into the kind of organization activists of today should be creating.

Blanc’s subsequent contribution builds on this strength in Lih’s argument, in the process adding valuable insights. This is related to this passage that one finds early in his article:

Unlike most examinations of this topic, the focus here will not be on Lenin’s writings. These were undoubtedly important, and as such their content will be outlined, but it is hardly the case that Lenin’s approach (which itself was in flux, both strategically and tactically) can be equated with that of the Bolshevik leadership or ranks in 1917. A distinct political portrait arises when we broaden our source base to include other Bolshevik leaders, local and regional party bodies, public speeches, and mass leaflets. Similarly, expanding our analytical attention from Petrograd to include the Russian empire’s periphery and provinces provides a better sense of what we might call ‘ballpark Bolshevism’, i.e., the core political stances generally shared by all levels of Bolshevik cadres and projected by them to working people across the empire.[5]

Not only does this emphasize the revolutionary collectivity of the Bolshevik phenomenon, but it corresponds to the messy realities of a politics that is composed not simply of ideas but of diverse personalities (with different temperaments and various levels of experience and understanding) that are combined in the complexity and fluidity of organizations, movements and struggles. Something that Lenin thinks, says, and writes will be understood (or misunderstood) and implemented (or not implemented) in a variety of ways by his many different comrades across the expanse of the Russian empire; often these will be blended with what a diverse lot of others think, say, write, and do. It makes no sense to focus simply on Lenin’s writings – a fact that the most serious students of the Russian Revolution have amply demonstrated over the course of many years.

Contested Terrain

While Lih and Blanc share substantial common ground in their valuable stress on the revolutionary collectivity that was Bolshevism, and also in their misleading contention that the notion of “Lenin re-arming the party” was a myth, it should also be recognized that the two do not fully occupy the same interpretive terrain. This is suggested by the way Blanc concludes his recent essay. Those who have read Lars’s work and benefitted from discussions with him are clear that he has no personal connection with the Trotskyist tradition and has a critical approach to much of Trotsky’s analytical orientation. Eric’s entire life, on the other hand, has been entwined with that tradition, and in his concluding paragraph he writes:

Since socialism could not be built within the confines of Russia alone, the sole path to positively resolving the inherent contradictions facing the new Soviet government was through the spread of workers’ rule abroad. And regarding the imminence and necessity of world revolution, the perspectives of all Bolsheviks in 1917 fully converged. The axiom that the Russian Revolution would be defeated if it remained isolated was borne out, though this defeat took the unforeseen form of Stalinist degeneration. In short: Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution was confirmed by the experience of the Russian Revolution, but the same cannot be said of his polemical account of how Lenin ‘re-armed’ the Bolsheviks.[6]

The line of thought predominant here is incredibly important. But of particular importance for the present controversy is the opening assertion that “socialism could not be built within the confines of Russia alone.” The word socialism is among the most misused, misunderstood, and abused terms in human history – certainly by its outright enemies, but also by its presumed partisans, and no less by those who seek to understand the world with the most exemplary objectivity.

1. For many of its enemies, the word socialism is defined as state ownership and control of the economy, while strictly overseeing the labor and life-activity of society’s inhabitants, and both caring for their basic needs while controlling what they may or may not do.
2. For Joseph Stalin and his adherents, it came to mean more or less the same thing, but with a profoundly benevolent gloss, as what they were creating in the Soviet Union, and the promise that at some point – as capitalism disappeared from one country after another – the state would wither away, with a prosperous and self-governing society as the replacement.
3. For many other would-be partisans, it is consistent simply with the proliferation of welfare-state reforms and expanding social services providing very positive systems health, education, housing, transportation and more for each and every person, although not overturning the control of the economy by capitalist enterprise – which actually creates the framework within which this “socialism” is able (or not able) to work.
4. For some objective-minded scholars, there is a tendency to call “socialist” whatever its would be partisans claim it to be. Many say that what existed in the Soviet Union was socialism (and some conclude from this that socialism did not work). Others say that there are different forms of socialism – the authoritarian or state socialism associated with the Soviet Union on the one hand, and the more moderate and democratic form of socialism associated, for example, with certain Western European countries on the other. (Some conclude from this, given the decline of welfare state and social service programs in recent times, that socialism does not work.)

Not pretending to be a political activist, Lars Lih has not felt a need to be clear about where he stands in relation to any of this. But Eric Blanc – explicit in his Marxist convictions – obviously rejects all of the above. In his emphasis that “socialism could not be built within the confines of Russia alone,” he underscores the Marxist conviction that socialism (which most fundamentally means rule by the people over the economy) not only requires democratic functioning, but also – since our economy is global – aninternational rather than a national framework in order to be functional. More than this, there is little room for doubt that he accepts Marx’s contention, expressed as early as 1845 inThe German Ideology, that modern communism (or socialism, the terms being more or less synonymous for Marx and Engels) requires the level of development generated by the Industrial Revolution – a “world of wealth and culture, both of which presuppose a great increase in [economic] productive power and a high degree of its development.” As Marx explained:

This development of productive forces (which already implied the actual empirical existence of men on a world-historical rather than local scale) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because, without it, want is merely made general, and withdestitution the struggle for necessities and all the old muck would necessarily be reproduced …[7]

Given such an understanding of what socialism means – which was accepted by knowledgeable Russian Marxists of all tendencies –socialism was quite obviously not a practical possibility for Russia of 1917. And yet, here is how Lenin explained the October Revolution “to the people of Russia” and the world immediately after the seizure of power:

The workers’ and peasants’ revolution has definitely triumphed in Petrograd… The revolution has triumphed in Moscow too. … Daily and hourly reports are coming in from the front and from the villages announcing the support of the overwhelming majority of the soldiers in the trenches and the peasants in the provinces for the new government and its decrees on peace and the immediate transfer of the land to the peasants. The victory of the workers’ and peasants’ revolution is assured because the majority of the people have already sided with it. …

Comrades, working people! Remember that now you yourselves are at the helm of state. No one will help you if you yourselves do not unite and take into your handsall affairs of the state.Your Soviets are from now on the organs of state authority, legislative bodies with full powers. …

Comrades, workers, soldiers, peasants and all working people! Take all power into the hands of your Soviets. Be watchful and guard like the apple of your eye your land, grain, factories, equipment, products, transport—all that from now onwards will be entirely your property, public property. Gradually, with the consent and approval of the majority of the peasants, in keeping with their practical experience and that of the workers, we shall go forward firmly and unswervingly to the victory of socialism—a victory that will be sealed by the advanced workers of the most civilized countries, bring the peoples lasting peace and liberate them from all oppression and exploitation.[8]

This is not, it should be emphasized, simply a statement of Lenin’s personal views. It is a formal statement from the leader of the new revolutionary government “to the people of Russia.” At this point, in the midst of the revolutionary triumph of 1917, this leader is expressing the perspective of the country’s ruling party, the Bolsheviks. Its meaning is aptly explained by Eric Blanc (although sometimes he appears to suspend his own explanation): “October can be justifiably described as a socialist revolution in so far as it established a proletarian-led state power that asserted workers’ control over the economy and that actively promoted the international overthrow of capitalism.”[9]

Lenin, Trotsky, and other prominent Bolsheviks were explicit in their insistence that the immediate establishment of a socialist economy was not possible in the newly established Soviet Republic. A workers and peasants alliance would bring about soviet power, in which working-class political power would, in ongoing partnership with the peasantry, predominate; this would open up a transitional period in which democratic and socialist policies would push against the capitalist framework of what would necessarily be a form of mixed economy; the socialist resolution to this contradictory reality would become possible only with the anticipated expansion of socialist revolution throughout the world, especially in the industrially advanced nations.[10]

In this sense, indeed, Lenin and the Bolsheviks very definitely viewed what they were doing as making a socialist revolution in 1917. And the key piece of documentary evidence indicating just that, reproduced above, is supported by what participants themselves later recalled. For reasons that are not clear to me, Eric seems reluctant to take such reminiscences seriously, a matter to which we will turn shortly.

1917 versus 1905 

The 1917 statement “to the people of Russia” represents a significant shift away from what was the primary thrust of the Bolshevik orientation back in 1905. If that is, in fact, the case, then one could expect such a shift could have been brought about only after serious debate between Lenin and some of his comrades. There certainly was such a debate, as we shall see, and Blanc stakes out a somewhat different terrain than Lih in this regard, emphasizing that “in my view his [Lih’s] stress on the continuity of Bolshevism in 1917 has led him to minimise the importance of this debate.”[11] Given this important difference between Lars and Eric, some of what is argued here can be viewed as providingsupport for that aspect of Blanc’s position. Nor is he necessarily denying (as Lih appears to do) that Lenin did, in fact, change his position between 1905 and 1917. And yet he is also strongly inclined to the view that Trotsky and most historians have been blinded to the reality of Bolshevik continuity, and that Lih is quite right to insist that any “re-arming the party” narrative is quite wrong. So let us follow his argument.

Of course, Lenin typically gravitated toward open-ended formulations involving possible “uninterrupted revolution” in Russia (between democratic and socialist stages) that could be generated by international revolutionary developments. More than this, as Lenin’s comrade and companion Nadezhda Krupskaya has explained, his thinking (again typically) continued to evolve under the impact of such momentous new developments as the First World War, in 1915-17 generating formulations in which revolutionary-democratic struggles would flow into socialist revolution.[12]

Yet in arguing for the theoretical consistency between “the Old Bolshevism” and the Lenin of 1917, Blanc writes:

Rejecting the claim that he was aiming to ‘skip’ the bourgeois-democratic stage, Lenin in April stressed that he was not calling for a ‘workers’ government’ but rather a Soviet regime of workers, agricultural labourers, soldiers, and peasants. Though Lenin personally saw Soviet power as the concretisation of a ‘commune state,’ a ‘step towards socialism’, and ‘the highest form of democracy’, for the majority of workers and Bolsheviks throughout 1917 the demand for ‘All Power to the Soviets’ meant establishing a government without the bourgeoisie. This was certainly a very radical perspective; but it was a very radical perspective that had been advocated by the Bolsheviks and other revolutionary Marxists in Russia since 1905.[13]

This is not entirely accurate, and the mistake gets to the heart of the matter.

The term “a commune state” is a reference to the Paris Commune of 1871. In 1917 Lenin saw this as an appropriate suggestion of what was called for in Russia. Consider the way he discusses the matter in The State and Revolution: “The Commune is the first attempt by a proletarian revolution tosmash the bourgeois state machine; and it is the political form ‘at last discovered,’ by which the smashed state machine can and must bereplaced.” He adds that “the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, in different circumstances and under different conditions, continue the work of the Commune and confirm Marx’s brilliant historical analysis.”[14]

Worth noting is his projection of this perspective backward to encompass the 1905 revolution. InLetters From Afar, Lenin makes precisely the same points:

The proletariat…if it wants to uphold the gains of the present revolution and proceed further, to win peace, bread and freedom, must “smash,“ to use Marx’s expression, this “ready-made” state machine and substitute a new one for it bymerging the police force, the army and the bureaucracy withthe entire armed people. Following the path indicated by the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Russian Revolution of 1905, the proletariat must organize and armall the poor, exploited sections of the population in order that theythemselves should take the organs of state power directly into their own hands, in order thatthey themselves should constitute these organs of state power.[15]

This represents an explicit break with Lenin’s own earlier perspectives. In his 1905 polemic Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, Lenin explicitly asserted that the Paris Commune “was a governmentsuch as ours should not be. ” He criticized it as “a government that was unable to, and could not, at that time, distinguish between the elements of a democratic revolution and a socialist revolution, a government that confused the tasks of fighting for a republic with those of fighting for socialism.” He explained: “Marxists are absolutely convinced of the bourgeois character of the Russian revolution. What does that mean? It means that the democratic reforms in the political system and the social and economic reforms that have become a necessity for Russia, do not in themselves imply the undermining of capitalism, the undermining of bourgeois rule; on the contrary, they will, for the first time, really clear the ground for a wide and rapid European, and not Asiatic, development of capitalism; they will, for the first time, make it possible for the bourgeoisie to rule as a class.”[16]

With most Marxists of 1905, from the most moderate Menshevik to the most militant Bolshevik, Lenin had believed that Russia must go through further capitalist economic development (which was being hindered by the quasi-feudal residue associated with tsarist autocracy) before the material basis for socialism would exist. He insisted that “the idea of seeking salvation for the working class in anything save the further development of capitalism is reactionary.” The overthrow of tsarism and the creation of a bourgeois republic, Lenin (along with most Marxists in 1905) believed, would constitute “a democratic prerequisite of the struggle for socialism.”[17]

In notes of March-April 1905, Lenin projected two possible courses for the Russian revolution: either it could “go on to the complete overthrow of the tsarist government and the establishment of a republic,” or it could “limit itself to a curtailment of tsarist power, to a monarchist constitution.” There were only two reasonable options: “are we to have a revolution of the 1789 type or of the 1848 type?” Almost parenthetically, he added: “Some might add here ‘or of the 1871 [Paris Commune] type’?” He went on to scoff: “This question must be considered as a probableobjection raised against us by many non-Social Democrats.”[18]

Both the French Revolution of 1789 and revolutionary events in Europe of 1848 were perceived by Marxists as models of bourgeois-democratic revolution, the first ending in a decisive victory over the remnants of feudalism, the second ending in a compromise with such remnants. Neither had a trajectory that went beyond capitalism (unlike the Paris Commune of 1871). Lenin expressed the hope that the Russian revolution would be of the 1789 type. This clearly confines the perspective to a bourgeois-democratic framework, as was the case with most of Lenin’s formulations.

To the extent that Eric believes Lenin’s own position changed between 1905 and 1917, all of this can be seen as vindicating his position. And it is certainly the case that not all Bolsheviks were keeping pace with Lenin’s conceptualizations and formulations – which makes the useful notion of “ballpark Bolshevism” particularly apt.

And yet at times Blanc seems to tilt in a different direction. Early in his article, he asserts that “contrary to what is usually assumed, neither Lenin nor the Bolshevik current in 1917 equated Soviet power as such withworkers’ power.” He quotes Lenin as noting: “in these Soviets, as it happens, it is the peasants, the soldiers, i.e., petty bourgeoisie, who preponderate.” Blanc suggests that “the defining class characteristic of the Soviets was not that they were a workers’ organisation, but that they were an explicitly and consciously non-bourgeois body.”[19]

This could be understood as implying that Lenin, no less than other Bolsheviks, viewed the revolution they were making as bourgeois-democratic rather than proletarian-socialist. It would be a mistake, however, to interpret this conceptualization of the soviets as being inconsistent with a shift away from the classical Bolshevik orientation of 1905. It is, in fact, perfectly consistent with a convergence toward Trotsky’s permanent revolution perspective of the same period. This becomes evident if we examine what Trotsky was actually saying in his 1906 analyses. “So far as its direct and indirect tasks are concerned,” Trotsky wrote, “the Russian revolution is a ‘bourgeois’ revolution because it sets out to liberate bourgeois society from the chains and fetters of absolutism and feudal ownership. But the principal driving force of the Russian revolution is the proletariat, and that is why, so far as its method is concerned, it is a proletarian revolution.” This working-class hegemony in the struggle had a logic, Trotsky insisted, which “leads directly … to the dictatorship of the proletariat and puts socialist tasks on the order of the day.”[20]

By dictatorship of the proletariat, of course, Marxists have not meant authoritarian rule by an elitist dictatorship, but rather political rule by the working class (often conceived as involving greater actual democracy than one finds in any form of political rule by the capitalist class). Nor did it exclude other (non-proletarian) layers of society. “The dictatorship of the proletariat in no way signifies the dictatorship of the revolutionary organization over the proletariat,” Trotsky insisted, and he want on to quote Marx’s description of the Paris Commune as “the true representative of all the healthy elements of French society, and therefore the truly national government.” He argued that in Russia “the dictatorship of the proletariat will undoubtedly represent all the progressive, valid interests of the peasantry— and not only the peasantry, but also the petty bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia.”[21]

The broad social alliance which brought the revolution to victory would, Trotsky believed, probably be reflected in the composition of the new revolutionary government. Instead of dictatorship of the proletariat he was quite willing to utilize other labels: “workers’ democracy,” or “dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the peasantry,” or “coalition government of the working class and the petty bourgeoisie.” But he insisted that the reality must involve the “dominating and leading participation” of the working class, “the rule of the proletariat.”[22]

By 1917, Lenin’s conceptualizations and formulations were converging with those of Trotsky (which would soon draw the author of the theory of permanent revolution into the ranks of the Bolsheviks). Of course Lenin came to this independently of Trotsky, but a radical shift in his thinking can certainly be traced in the documents available to us.

We have already noted (and Blanc fully agrees) that there was a debate in the wake of this, and it would be helpful to see if Lenin’s comrades were inclined to explain it all in the same way that Eric does.

A Disappearing Trick

In magicians’ performances, court rooms, and sometimes even in academic settings, inconvenient evidence can somehow be made to disappear. In the present context, if we can simply eliminate all recollections of the actual participants regarding what happened way-back-when, all we have to go on are the raw documents that the scholar offers, and then the explanations (often involving a new interpretation) provided by the scholar to help us understand the meaning of the documents.

Of course, Trotsky’s account is central to the article’s purpose, so that is a center of our attention. But what if there are dozens of reliable witnesses – not just Trotskyists, but others as well – to corroborate at least major aspects of Trotsky’s account? There are, in fact, many non-Trotskyists (various Bolsheviks and Mensheviks who presumably were in a position to know what happened) who provided reminiscences. But all are conjured away with three sentences and two end-notes. We are informed:

Much of the documentary basis for the ‘re-arming’ narrative comes from Menshevik declarations in April concerning Lenin’s arrival. But one has to take these with a large grain of salt since the Mensheviks consistently exaggerated their rivals’ extremism and were always looking to paint the Bolsheviks as puppets in the hands of Lenin. The other major source for the standard account comes from questionable 1920’s Bolshevik memoir literature written well after it had become both politically expedient for all wings of the party to emphasise the ‘genius’ of Lenin’s leadership and to claim that the Bolsheviks had from April onwards advocated socialist revolution.[23]

When we turn to the first end-note, we find this: “For typical Menshevik claims about Lenin’s purported ‘anarchism’, see Rabinowitch 1968, p. 40.”

The reference is to Alexander Rabnowitch’s pathbreaking account, Prelude to Revolution. Several distinctive things can be found if someone actually looks on the page cited. One is that Rabinowitch’s account goes in a direction that is the opposite of that mapped out by Blanc and Lih. “Now, when the predominant spirit in both the Bolshevik and Menshevik camps was one of moderation and reconciliation,” he writes, “Lenin was baldly presenting these ideas [in the April Theses] as a guide for immediate revolutionary action.” He then records “a few of the indignant Menshevik reactions” at that moment – which include charges of “anarchism” and worse. But that is all. There is no impugning of later Menshevik accounts by Sukhanov, Dan, Abramovitch, etc.[24] In fairness, Blanc himself is not asserting otherwise – he refers to “Menshevik declarations in April” – yet this seems to deflect attention away from more serious Menshevik accounts of what was happening, accounts which (as we will see) happen to give credence to what Blanc calls “the rearming narrative.”

When we turn to the second end-note, we find this: “On the dubious analytical and factual accuracy of some of these memoir accounts, see Longley 1978, pp. 252, 337-38. On the evolution of early Bolshevik historiography concerning 1917, see White 1985 and the introduction in Corney 2016.”

The reference to White will be dealt with separately. References to Longley and Corney are, respectively, to D. A. Longley’s Ph.D. dissertation, Factional Strife and Policy Making in the Bolshevik Party, 1912-April 1917, and Frederick C. Corney, ed.,Trotsky’s Challenge: The ‘Literary Discussion’ of 1924 and the Fight for the Bolshevik Revolution. On the three pages cited in Longley, we find critical reference to accounts in the late 1920s in which Trotsky’s role in the 1917 is minimized and denigrated, an unspecified question regarding how objective Shlyapnikov might be (which is certainly worth asking aboutany memoirist or historian), and another question about how Lenin might have been able to see certain issues ofPravda that presumably annoyed him. Evaluation of the Corney source is difficult since no page numbers are given for a volume of more than 800 pages (within which Corney’s valuable introductory essay consists of 85 pages). A cursory examination doesn’t indicate that Corney is offering more, in regard to critical judgments, than the sort of thing offered by Longley. One should also note that Blanc’s own end-note is critical only of “some” of the Bolshevik memoirs – with no indication of which ones or why.[25]

The reference to James D. White’s essay “Soviet Historical Interpretations of the Russian Revolution 1918-24” deserves more substantial comment, because it comes closest to saying what Blanc seems imply his sources should say. Here indeed is an across-the-board assault in the reliability of “1920’s Bolshevik memoir literature” – indeed, on all historical literature coming out of the Soviet Republic in the early 1920s (even since 1918). White’s essay begins ominously with a quote from early Bolshevik activist-historian M. S. Olminsky: “Work for the history of the revolution is work for the revolution itself.” Of course, such a quote could be understood, less ominously, as the honest belief of a revolutionary enthusiast – but White quite definitely tilts away from such innocence: “The Soviet regime began to interpret the Russian revolution in the light of current political considerations immediately after its coming to power.” Proof of such subterfuge can be found in one of the earliest accounts, Trotsky’s short popularization of 1918, The History of the Russian Revolution to Brest-Litovsk, on which White comments darkly: “Trotsky is emphatic that the Bolshevik party acquired state power not because it was effective in organizing an armed insurrection, but because it enjoyed wide popular support.” The fact that John Reed’s 1919 classicTen Days That Shook the World has the same view is no accident – at the time Reed was working (under Trotsky, no less) for in the Department of International Revolutionary Propaganda, an arm of the new Soviet Republic’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. “Political considerations during the first four years of Soviet power ensured that in the history of the 1917 revolution most attention was focused on the acquisition of power by the Bolsheviks in October,” and all Bolshevik memoirs and accounts in the historical journalProletarskaya revolyutsiya were made to conform with “the Leninist interpretation.” White concludes that “in the practice of manipulating the historical record there was a high degree of continuity between the Stalin era and the first years of Soviet rule.”[26]

The highly problematical nature of this essay is evident if we modestly focus only on the revelation that presumably discredits John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World. From White’s own reference notes, it would not be clear to the unsuspecting reader that Reed’s involvement with the Soviet Republic’s Department of International Revolutionary Propaganda was openly reported by his two sympathetic English-language biographers of 1936 and 1975, neither of whom felt this would necessarily discredit Reed’s account. That the author ofTen Days That Shook the World was an enthusiastic supporter of the Bolshevik Revolution is clear from the book itself – Reed notoriously wore his political heart on his sleeve.[27]

Of interest is the judgment of Bertram D. Wolfe, who knew Reed and many of the Russian Bolsheviks before becoming a bitterly disillusioned ex-Leninist and anti-Communist. At the height of the Cold War (while in the employ of the U.S. State Department), he edited and introduced to American readers a new edition of Reed’s account, with multiple corrective footnotes and a very critical introduction. Wolfe describes Reed as “a good reporter, always in the thick of things, his sense of vivid detail often makes one page refute another,” adding that Reed “was vulnerable to gossip, rumor and conjecture that accorded with his preconceptions, but what he actually saw with his own eyes he did his best to record faithfully.” Wolfe concludes that “as a record of significant detail, as a repository of facts for the historian, his book is crammed with precious material,” and that “whether because of or despite the dream which possessed him, as literature Reed’s book is the finest piece of eyewitness reporting the revolution has produced.”[28]

White’s seeming dismissal of Ten Days That Shook the World conveys none of this, nor do his shrugs and insinuations tell us much about actual nature or value of the variety of early Soviet historical interpretations of the Russian Revolution. It demonstrates little about the analytical and factual accuracy of memoir accounts of the 1920s.

Readers should be aware that what I am not intending a broadside dismissal or denigration of all that is offered in the works of Rabinowitch, Longley, Corney or even White. Each is a source well worth examining, each contains something of value, and I happen to think very highly of at least three of them. Nor is it my opinion that Eric Blanc intends to bamboozle us with a dishonest conjuring trick – he is among the most earnest people I have had the pleasure to know, and his intentions strike me as entirely honorable.

At the same time, when we compare the content of Blanc’s end-notes to the actual sources – from various Mensheviks and Bolsheviks alike – we are forced to conclude that a dismissal of what the actual participants have to tell us is not justified. Not all of the Menshevik accounts are equally exaggerated, and some of them don’t conform to the generalization by which they seem to be characterized. Not all of the Bolshevik accounts are equally questionable, and – here too – some of them don’t fully conform to what seems to be a dismissive generalization. Upon examination, some of the accounts by Mensheviks and Bolsheviks seem plausible, given what we know of the facts, and some of them more or less appear to corroborate each other. So let’s have a look.

What Participants Tell Us

The Russian-born U.S. journalist Isaac Don Levine, with a treasure-trove of documents in his position and important contacts among Russian revolutionaries particularly in the moderate wing of the movement, was able to report in a 1917 account that upon returning to Russia, Lenin had “alienated the large following he had as one of the leaders of the Russian Social Democracy,” summing up: “To Lenin, a capitalist was worse than a king. An industrial magnate or leading banker to him was more perilous than a Czar or a Kaiser. The working classes, he said, had nothing to lose whether their rulers were German, French, or British. The imperative thing for them to do was to prepare for a social revolution.” Menshevik leader Raphael Abramovitch recalled, similarly, that Lenin argued “world revolution would help Russia overcome her general backwardness … turn her into a socialist country,” but that “this concept shocked the Russian Marxists in April 1917” and “isolated him even within his own party circle.”[29]

Angelica Balabanoff had heard Lenin make similar points just before he left his Swiss exile for Russia. “Unless the Russian Revolution develops into a second and successful Paris Commune,” she remembers him saying, “reaction and war will suffocate it.” She confessed that “I had ben trained, like most Marxists, to expect the social revolution to be inaugurated in one of the highly industrialized countries, and at the time Lenin’s analysis of the Russian events seemed to me almost utopian.” After her own return to Russia, she concluded that had those activists who embraced Lenin’s analysis failed to convince “the peasants, workers and soldiers of the need for a more far-reaching, socialist revolution in Russia, Tsarism or some similar form of autocracy would have been restored.”[30]

Initially, however, as Levine and Abramovitch note, many had a very different reaction – it all seemed demagogic and out of touch with reality. To an old Bolshevik transitioning to Menshevism, Wladimir Woytinsky (or Voytinsky), what Lenin had to say was a “diatribe that would become the Sermon on the Mount of a new church,” in which “Lenin mingled Marxian terminology and old clichés with strange new slogans.” Menshevik leader Theodore Dan reminisced that “with the astonishing revolutionary flair peculiar to him, Lenin … removed the slogan of the ‘democratic republic’ completely and made his chief agitational slogan ‘workers’ control’ – among the workers; confiscation of all the big estates – among the peasants; and an immediate peace – among the soldiers.”[31] Woytinsky summarized:

Why should we wait for a peace concluded by governments? Make peace with your German brothers, regiment by regiment, company by company, through fraternization! Why should we wait for a Constituent Assembly? Seize power at once through the Soviets and write your own laws. The agrarian question? Let the landless peasants and farmhands take land wherever they find it.[32]

Another Menshevik, N. N. Sukhanov offers a similar summary, adding that Lenin’s speech “was a bolt from the blue not only for me,” and that “it caused the more literate of his faithful disciples extreme perplexity,” resulting in “his complete isolation not only among Social-Democrats in general but also among his own disciples.” Alexandra Kollontai, a Menshevik-turned-Bolshevik, recalled “I was in substantial agreement with Lenin and stood closer to him than many of his older followers and friends,” adding that in the meetings recalled by Woytinsky, Sukhanov and Dan, “I was the only one of his Party comrades who took the floor to support his theses.”[33]

Veteran Bolshevik Fyodor Raskolnikov describes the same meetings. “The most responsible Party workers were represented here, but even for them what Ilyich said constituted a veritable revelation,” he notes. “It laid down a ‘Rubicon’ between the tactics of yesterday and those of today.” Lenin’s position “produced a complete revolution in the thinking of the Party’s leaders. And underlay all the subsequent work of the Bolsheviks.” Raskolnikov concludes: “It was not without cause that our Party’s tactics did not follow a straight line, but after Lenin’s return took a sharp turn to the left.”[34]

“Lenin expounded his views as to what had to be done in a number of theses,” his close comrade Krupskaya reminisced regarding the April controversy. “The comrades were somewhat taken aback for the moment. Some of them thought that Ilyich was presenting the case in much too blunt a manner, and that it was too early yet to speak of a socialist revolution.” Lenin’s April Theses were published in Pravda, followed by an article by editor Lev Kamenev “in which he dissociated himself from these theses.” These were, according to Kamenev, “the expression of Lenin’s private views, which neitherPravda nor the Bureau of the Central Committee shared.” Krupskaya notes: “A struggle started within the Bolshevik organization. It did not last long.” She adds that “a number of important events took place which showed that Lenin had been right,” that Lenin’s point of view won the backing of a decisive majority in the Bolshevik organization, first in the Petrograd organization, then in the Bolshevik Central Committee, and finally at an All-Russia Conference held near the end of April.[35]

Eduard Dune, a working-class militant in Bolshevism’s ranks, described how he and his comrades went on to debate the Mensheviks in the factories once the new line was consolidated. The mass working-class upsurge of February – overthrowing the Tsar, creating revolutionary-democratic Soviets whose authority rivaled that of the Provisional Government, empowering workers in their workplaces – had made factory-wide debates the new normal. The Bolsheviks’ opponents – older experienced workers, quoting Bebel and Lassalle and Marx from memory – argued: “A socialist revolution could occur only when the country was mature economically and culturally, and then the transition from bourgeois-democratic revolution to socialism would be as natural as our revolution had been in February.” Bolshevik partisans, absorbing such texts as Lenin’s Letters from Afar, argued differently and more effectively: “Did we need a government composed of representatives of the bourgeoisie and farmer tsarist officials or should we transfer power into the hands of the representatives of the revolution, the representatives of the working class, the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies?” They drove the argument home: “The Bolsheviks said that the transfer of power to the soviets meant creating what we already had at the factory – a dictatorship of the proletariat.” They elaborated: “We must preserve and strengthen the power we had won during the revolution, not give any of it away to the bourgeoisie. We must not liquidate the soviets as organs of power, but transfer power to them instead, so that there would no longer be dual power, but a single revolutionary government.”[36]

The situation varied in different places. Serving as a Navy sub-lieutenant in the Finnish borderland, Bolshevik militant A.F. Ilyin-Genevsky reported sharply contradictory moods within the crowds, and a lack of unity among the Bolsheviks themselves. “In the Committee there were two points of view on the political situation, one more moderate, approaching the point of view of Kamenev at that time, and the other more revolutionary, based on the famous thesis published by Lenin immediately on his arrival from abroad.” Two prominent and articulate comrades in their ranks adhered to one and the other of the two positions, and the Bolshevik committee was preparing for a mass meeting that would be discussing the political situation. “In order to deal with all sides of this important point on the agenda, it was decided to have both points of view advocated, and let these two speakers deal with the question.” The discussion was full and animated, and at its conclusion “the meeting adopted a compromise resolution, in which the Provisional Government was recognized to the extent that its actions did not clash with the actions of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. On the other hand the resolution exposed the bourgeois character of the Provisional Government, and demanded that all power should be handed over to the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Soviets.”[37]

Nonetheless, as events of the summer and early autumn unfolded, they were seen by many (as Krupskaya had put it) as having “showed that Lenin had been right.” The Menshevik Abramovitch noted “the balance of forces within the all-important Soviets had shifted radically. One Soviet after another was slipping out of the control of the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks and into the hands of the Bolsheviks and their allies, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries.” Particularly “among the workers in Petrograd, the atmosphere was becoming increasingly tense as the second congress of Soviets approached. Bolshevik slogans were winning support in most large factories.” While “the country as a whole … was not nearly so uniform,” he observed, “nevertheless, the trend in October was unmistakable. … The Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks were aware that the rising tide of political and social discontent was carrying the Bolshevik party toward victory.”[38]

In combing through these accounts from people who lived through the period culminating in the October Revolution, we can find – just as Wolfe noted regarding John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World – contradictions as well as “gossip, rumor and conjecture that accorded with preconceptions,” and also slips in memory, slips of the tongue, and other slips away from some of the actual facts. Yet taken together, one could say (as Wolfe says about Reed’s work) that they provide “a record of significant detail, a repository of facts for the historian, … precious material,” forming a pattern of impressions that help give us a sense of what happened in history.

It is hardly the case that after-the-fact reminiscences somehow trump primary documentary sources emerging from the immediate events. But reminiscences such as these – which come from a variety of sources that do not flow from the same fountainhead, and which seem to form a particularly coherent and compelling pattern – should themselves be seen as constituting a unique primary source, and they must be taken seriously as latter-day historians craft their interpretations of what actually happened. They must be harmonized more carefully with the other primary sources than either Blanc or Lih have done.

The Bottom Line

The richness that Blanc and Lih have brought to our understanding of the Russian Revolution cannot be denied or minimized – even within contributions that have been the focus of the present critique. The vast, complex, multi-faceted process that culminated in the revolution of October 1917 was fraught with multiple contradictions, and many of these are fruitfully revealed in the challenges posed, and the research offered, by these iconoclastic scholars.

At the same time, as we sift through the evidence available to us, it does seem that the Bolsheviks believed they were – in a significant way – initiating a socialist revolution in 1917. While rooted in longstanding Bolshevik perspectives of worker-peasant alliance, this was not simply the “old Bolshevism” of 1905. The new element in the Bolshevik orientation was decisively pushed forward by Lenin in April 1917, and it had won mass support by October. To label this “rearming the party” is by no means far-fetched.

Notes

[1] An early articulation can be found in Lars T. Lih, “The Ironic Triumph of Old Bolshevism: The Debates of April 1917 in Context,”Russian History, 38, 2011, and a more recent articulation is Eric Blanc, “Did the Bolsheviks Advocate Socialist Revolution in 1917?” inthe blog site of Historical Materialism. (Pagination offered in this latter article refers to the printed-out copy of 46 pages provided by my particular printer and computer.)

[2] Blanc, p. 3

[3] Paul Le Blanc,Unfinished Leninism: The Rise and Return of a Revolutionary Doctrine (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), pp. 189-193.

[4] Lars Lih, “Democratic Centralism: Fortunes of a Formula,”Weekly Worker, April 11, 2013,http://links.org.au/node/3300;

[5] Blanc, p. 3.

[6] Ibid., p. 33.

[7]Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, ed. by Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1967), p. 427. Some would translate this final phrase as “the same old shit starts all over again.”

[8] Reproduced in John Reed,Ten Days That Shook the World (New York: International Publishers, 1926), pp. 363-364.

[9] Blanc, p. 32.

[10] This is elaborated and documented in various works, most recently Paul Le Blanc,October Song: Bolshevik Triumph, Communist Tragedy, 1917-1924 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), pp. 131-179.

[11] Blanc, p. 21.

[12] N. K. Krupskaya,Reminiscences of Lenin (New York: International Publishers, 1979), pp. 327-333.

[13] Blanc, p. 6. Italics in the original.

[14] V.I. Lenin, “The State and Revolution,”Collected Works, vol. 25 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), p. 437.

[15] V.I. Lenin, “Letters from Afar,”Collected Works, vol. 23 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), pp. 325-326.

[16] V.I. Lenin, “Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution,”Collected Works, vol. 9 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), pp. 80-81, 48.

[17] Ibid., pp. 49, 83.

[18] V.I. Lenin, “A Revolution of the 1789 or the 1848 Type?,”Collected Works, vol. 8 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), p. 257.

[19] Blanc, pp. 5-6.

[20] Leon Trotsky,1905 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), p. 42; Leon Trotsky,The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1978), p. 132.

[21] Leon Trotsky, “Thirty-Five Years After: 1871-1906,” inLeon Trotsky on the Paris Commune (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), p. 24.

[22] Trotsky,The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects, pp. 69-72.

[23] Blanc, pp. 4-5.

[24] Ibid., p. 41; Alexander Rabinowitch,Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), p. 40.

[25] Blanc, p. 41; D.A. Longley,Factional Strife and Policy Making in the Bolshevik Party, 1912-April 1917 (With Special Reference to the Baltic Fleet Organisations 1903-17), PhD Dissertation, University of Birmingham, 1978, pp. 251-252, 337-338.

[26] James D. White, “Early Soviet Historical Interpretations of the Russian Revolution 1918–24,’”Soviet Studies, 37, 3, 1985, pp. 330, 332, 333, 335, 342, 346, 350.

[27] Granville Hicks,John Reed, The Making of a Revolutionary (New York: The Macmillan Company,1936), pp. 290-291; Richard A. Rosenstone,Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), p. 307.

[28] Bertram D. Wolfe, “Introduction,” in John Reed,Ten Days That Shook the World (New York; Vintage Books, 1960), pp. xxxii-xxxiii, xxxv, xxxvi.

[29] Isaac Don Levine,The Russian Revolution (New York: Harper and Brothers, June 1917), pp. 275-276; Raphael R. Abramovitch,The Soviet Revolution 1917-1939 (New York: International Universities Press,1962), pp. 30, 31

[30] Angelica Balabanoff,My Life as a Rebel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), pp. 143-144.

[31] W. S. Woytinsky,Stormy Passage: A Personal History Through Two Russian Revolutions to Democracy and Freedom, 1905-1960 (New York: Vanguard Press, 1961), pp. 265-266; Theodore Dan,The Origins of Bolshevism (New York: Schocken Books, 1970), p. 406.

[32] Woytinsky, p. 266.

[33] N. N. Sukhanov,The Russian Revolution 1917, A Personal Record(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 281, 282, 283, 288; Alexandra Kollontai,The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), pp. 27, 31.

[34] F. F. Raskolnikov,Kronstadt and Petrograd in 1917 (London: New Park Publications, 1982), pp. 76-77.

[35] Krupskaya, pp. 348-351

[36] Eduard M. Dune,Notes of a Red Guard (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), pp. 48-50.

[37] A. F. Ilyin-Genevsky,From the February Revolution to the October Revolution 1917 (New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1931), pp. 43, 44, 45.

[38] Abramovitch, pp. 75, 76, 77.

HM at 20 and 16

For the journal's 20th anniversary, we repost here extracts of interviews with Esther Leslie for HM in 2017 and with Peter Thomas for Jacobin in 2004, both conducted by George Souvlis.

HM London 2017: Revolutions Against Capital, Capital Against Revolutions?

9-12 November at the SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) Main building, Russell Square (more details below).

*** ONLINE REGISTRATION IS NOW CLOSED. PLEASE REGISTER AT THE DOOR *** 

*** DRAFT PROGRAMME NOW ONLINE ***

*** ABSTRACTS AVAILABLE HERE ***

***  FULL INTERVIEW WITH EDITOR ESTHER LESLIE ***

EXTRACTS OF NEW INTERVIEW WITH ESTHER LESLIE BY GEORGE SOUVLIS - HM AT 20 - 6 NOVEMBER 2017

GS: Now let's discuss a bit the Historical Materialism initiative, now in its twentieth year, in which you are one of the founding members. Let’s begin with how the publication of the journal of Historical Materialism began. What were the initial aspirations for it? Could you mention some continuities and discontinuities in the twenty years history of the journal?

EL: I was not there right at the beginning. I was brought in before the first issue appeared though, so while not a founder, I have been involved since the journal has been in existence. We were initially self-published, did it all ourselves, including putting the journal in envelopes in my living room. The partnership with Brill has changed that and imposed on us a certain regularity, mechanized processes, and it has professionalized certain aspects - paying a copy editor, for example. We inhabit also a different environment of scholarly journals and online publishing nowadays. But I don’t think those changes have fundamentally altered the way in which we come together as a group of editors and discuss each article sent to us, commission reviews, argue over the direction of the journal, the necessity or not of a certain piece. I believe we wanted a journal which could represent the variety of ways in which Marxism could be brought to bear on aspects of the world. We did not want to be stuck in disciplinary silos but thought that one of the more brilliant things about Marxism is how it refuses those divisions, or if it does not refuse them, it becomes stupid. I am not claiming that we do not publish Fachidioten in the journal, of course, but the aspiration at the start was to publish articles that emerged from a Marxist perspective and could be read by anyone who was engaged in that mode of thinking – or interested to learn more about it - and acting, irrespective of theme. We wanted to represent the work of both the established scholars in Marxism and a younger or newer generation. We had aspirations to be the leading Marxist journal. We have tried to be supra-sectarian – and have weathered some difficult moments as groups on the Left around us have collapsed, gone rotten, recomposed, been riven apart. The board has constantly replenished itself, which has been a good thing, bringing in international perspectives, which enabled us to not get too embroiled in the catastrophic moves of parts of the UK Left. Perhaps it means that there is little collective memory of what we have been – but that is not a bad thing. Why look back, to glorious or inglorious pasts? One continuity has been the provision of covers by Noel Douglas. 20 years of covers is an achievement – but then these covers are also a tracking of the political events, highs and lows, in the world and so form in themselves a museum of world struggles, wins and defeats. 

GS: Another significant aspect of the Historical Materialism project is the conferences that it organises and which have a global character, considering that they are now held annually in four continents (India, Europe, Australia, USA/Canada). Would you like to comment on the origins of this and its transformation through time?

EL: The conference began in 2004. It was much smaller, of course. It was even more chaotic than it is nowadays - we have learnt much about event planning and have been lucky to have been aided by some formidable organisers – always women. The conference grew in the subsequent years and is perhaps stable in terms of numbers now, but we always hope for expansion, for more people than we could possibly cope with, because for us, unlike other conferences, our conference is some sort of gauge of the significance, resonance, importance of our mode of comprehension, of Marxism in the world. We like to think that the conference is a must-do event for the global Left and enjoy the buzz of people meeting and re-meeting, quite apart from the papers that are delivered. It is not easy to organize and we do not really have institutional support, so it is in many ways done from the bottom up, which is why people should give us some slack if things do not run perfectly. The conference is franchised, so to speak now, with satellite events happening in other countries. I hope that means that the space for committed, intelligent Marxist work has expanded in the world and perhaps we have contributed to that. We have also learnt from that expansion, and from the drawing in of international voices. We are conscious that there is much beyond the Western tradition and also we have turned more attention to questions of sexuality and gender in later years.

GS: The conferences have succeeded at creating a new solid radical milieu around them. What else has HM accomplished?

EL: There is the book series, which has felled quite a few forests, and also, hopefully, circulated and recirculated some important materials. Some of the books in the series have been honoured with the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher prize, as recognition of their import. HM has kept Marxism as a point of attraction through years in which the Left has been, as ever, under assault, including from within its own ranks. To be able to meet together, hear each other, discuss, make future plans, develop projects, is positive. 

Maia Pal: Not everyone on the radical left is a fan of anniversaries, perhaps considering their often stale and fixed look back into the past. This year's HM conference set out to celebrate a few - the centenary of the Russian Revolution, the publication of Marx's Capital, the journal's birth... What do you think this says about the HM project, the left in general and the topic of memory your work generally explores? Finally, could you say something about your paper for this year's London conference, 'Lenin and the body in memorialis and the ecstatic sexuality in Eisenstein's film' which perhaps explores this desire to keep the revolutionary past alive?

EL: The celebration of anniversaries is usually reactionary. As I said earlier, why look back on glorious or inglorious pasts? Of course, I also take from Benjamin the idea that we have to hold onto the tradition of the oppressed, have to keep the red thread, the weak messianic force of resistance going, because otherwise the only story, or history, that remains is that of the victors. Much celebration is celebration by the victors. The monument to Benjamin in Port Bou, where he committed suicide, is to some extent sensitive to this. The memorial by Dani Karavan is in the idiom of the post-conceptual memorial as artwork. A narrow shaft leads one down to the perilous sea, in order to make us think about loss, danger, death. Etched on the glass of the memorial is, in several languages, a phrase from Benjamin, which observes: ‘It is more arduous to honour the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned. … Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the nameless.’ 

There is another intriguing history of memorialisation in Port Bou, occulded by this grander, European gesture. In 1979 a little plaque in Catalan was set in the cemetery wall. It reads ‘A Walter Benjamin – ’Filòsof alemany – Berlin 1892 Portbou 1940’, and in the context of post-Franco Spain appears to hint at the possibility and necessary recovery of a non-Fascist German tradition. Inside the cemetery too is another memorial stone, this time from 1990. It bears a very famous line from Benjamin: ‘Es ist niemals ein Dokument der Kultur, ohne zugleich ein solches der Barbarei zu sein’, then in Catalan: ‘No hi ha cap document de la cultura que non ho sigui també de la barbàrie’. In English this line from ‘On The Concept of History’ reads, according to the Selected Writings, ‘There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’. Monuments to civilisation and culture are frequently also monuments to barbarism. Benjamin is clear, taking his line from Marx, that the oppressed are constantly robbed of their history and their memory is always ‘in danger’ of eradication, undermined, ‘in favour of the grand and official narratives of power, the ‘triumphal procession in which today’s rulers tread over those who are sprawled underfoot’, whereby historical memory is ‘handed over as the tool of the ruling classes’. In the preparatory note for ‘On the Concept of History’, he criticizes historical recounting that depends on recounting the antics of glorious heroes of history in monumental and epic form, and is in no position to say anything about the ‘nameless’, those who are the toilers in history, as much as those who suffer the effects of historical agency. His own mode of ‘historical construction is devoted to the memory of the nameless.' It is able to remember the repressed of history who were its victims and its unacknowledged makers. 

Benjamin constructs a re-visioning of the past, wherein the historian bears witness to an endless brutality committed against the ‘oppressed’. This, he understands to have been Marx’s task in Das Kapital. Das Kapital is a memorial, an anti-epic memorial, pulsating in the present, insisting on redress. Marx’s sketch of the lot of labour is presented as a counter-balance to the obfuscation of genuine historical experience. Marx memorializes the labour of the nameless, whose suffering and energy produced ‘wealth’ in the vast accumulations of commodities.

What interests me here is the ways in which we might think of what could be called counter-memory or counter-memoralisation not just as the acknowledgement of an alternative mode of understanding the past, but also as an ongoing necessity, that we are constantly steered away from knowledge of our own experience.  The First World War was, for Benjamin, one marker of this: in it experience tumbles in the old style, no longer matching life or language. He writes: ‘For never has experience been contradicted so thoroughly: strategic experience has been contravened by positional warfare; economic experience, by the inflation; physical experience, by hunger, moral experience, by the ruling powers.’

We of all people are aware of Lenin’s thoughts on commemoration, as evinced in his degree from 12 Apr. 1918, titled ‘On Removing Monuments Erected in Honor of Tsars and Their Servants and Developing a Project for Monuments Dedicated to the Russian Socialist Revolution (On Monuments of the Republic)’. This provided for the removal of monuments that had apparently no historical or artistic value, as well as for the creation of works of revolutionary monumental art, which took one of two forms: – (1) decorating buildings and other surfaces ‘traditionally used for banners and posters’ with revolutionary slogans and memorial relief plaques; (2) – vast erection of "temporary, plaster-cast" monuments in honour of great revolutionary leaders. These monuments were created mainly as temporary works – Lunarcharchsiki recalled Lenin stating that the monument should be not of marble, granite and gold lettering, but instead of inexpensive materials (plaster of Paris, concrete, wood). Based on the frescoes in Campanella’s City of the Sun, these were to be educational, hinges for discussion in the city, occasions for learning – each unveiling was to be the occasion for a little holiday, a lecture.

Alternatively, we could think of Debord. Debord made an extraordinary book in 1959 called Memoires with the artist Asger Jorn, famously covered in sandpaper to scar the books in its proximity on the shelf. Memoires begins with a quotation from Marx: ‘Let the dead bury the dead, and mourn them.... our fate will be to become the first living people to enter the new life.’  It is comprised of two layers, emulating the layers of memory. One layer has black ink that outlines newspaper snippets, graphics from magazines, maps of Paris and London, images of war, reproductions of old artworks, pictures of friends, hoodlum girls, people in their milieu, and the occasional thought or question from Debord. The other layer is splattered coloured inks, which lead paths from or overlap with the black inked layer. Memory is obscure, invaded, fragmented, on the cusp of disappearance. It is abrasive, cut up, destructive, involuntary – in the mode of Proust, dispersed. For the reader there is only a drift, a wandering path, with no assured meaning, a place for rag pickers rescuing the detritus of life. Countering the regimentation of time in work and the straight-ahead narrative, this book squanders time, in emulation of ruling class leisure and luxury. There are constellations, moments, evanescent points that flare up in the memoir and burn out again to be forgotten, as much as remembered. 

The situationists knew that conventional forms of historical memorialization risked partaking in the society of the spectacle’s reification of everyday life. Magnificent monumentalization offered a historical survival not worth living. But they did not wish for their own erasure. They developed new strategies of memorialization, liquid ones, and as Frances Stracey puts it: ‘those commemorated were not reduced to a dead correlate of the present, frozen in perpetuity, but salvaged in a more revitalized form, ideally as a constantly shifting, eruptive force in the present and for the future.’ Our memorials should aim at being such. My paper at the conference thinks about the ways in which film, film of a cream separator, film of a twirling ceramic pig, and film of Lenin, might speak to these concerns, might speak into a world, the Soviet one, in which Lenin’s body was frozen, hardened, its dissolution counteracted in death, supposedly for ever more. It was a wrong-footed hope, but it was emblematic of the sclerosis of the state. Sometimes forgetting might be better. Sometimes remembering differently might be advised. Keeping things alive is a kind of art, if it is not to be a cult. 

******************************************************************************************

AN INTERVIEW WITH  PETER D. THOMAS BYGEORGE SOUVLIS

Peter D. Thomas is a lecturer in the history of political thought at Brunel University, London. He is the author of The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism. He is a member of the HM editorial board and co-editor of the Historical Materialism Book Series.

The interview was conducted by George Souvlis, a PhD candidate in history at the European University Institute, Florence.

GS: Let’s begin with how the publication of the Journal of Historical Materialism began. What were the initial aspirations for it?

PT: The journal began in the late 1990s, emerging out of different seminars attended by young postgraduate students — so, largely people writing PhD dissertations — who fortuitously came together to set up the project. It was initially a rather modest project of establishing a journal where there could be debates and discussions of topics in Marxist theory, after the long seasons of “post-Marxisms.” The journal really entered into a phase of international expansion through coming into contact with people from many different countries who were studying in London or had different connections with London.

These people became involved in the broader project of Historical Materialism and gradually there emerged a development of the journal beyond the boundaries of the English-speaking world, with a very strong focus on international discussions. In other words, we attempt to rebuild some of the bridges to other left-wing and Marxist cultures in other languages which had existed previously in the 1960s and 1970s but which have been lost for generational reasons in the 1980s and early 1990s.

I can’t speak for other members of the editorial board, but in my personal view, the fundamental rationale behind the journal was a commitment to a non-sectarian approach to developing a broad forum of discussion for all of those who identified with the Marxist tradition or the Marxist traditions in many different senses. The project soon developed in the direction of an ongoing self-critique of Marxist knowledge.

The rediscovery of old debates, the initiation of new debates and the attempt to develop a type of research project for contemporary Marxist theory became our central concerns.

GS: Could you mention some continuities and discontinuities in the sixteen-year history of the journal?

PT: There have been many continuities in the journal in terms of our focus on encouraging international discussion and always reaching out to other areas of the world and comrades working in languages other than English. Another important continuity is the strong pedagogical focus of the journal; the journal is very much dedicated not simply to publishing the big stars or the established scholars but also to encouraging younger scholars and new emerging research projects.

Another element of continuity is our commitment to non-sectarian discussions and debates. We take very seriously the idea that theoretical debates in the Marxist tradition need to be conducted with the highest standards of scholarly rigor, rather than descending into slanging matches and ritualized abuse. This involves people, without negating their own political commitments, learning new ways of discussing and debating those commitments, beyond the sometimes very polemical and conflictual environments of militant politics.

So, we see ourselves very much as a necessary continuation of politics, albeit at a certain enabling distance. We certainly do not promote an academisist form of Marxism, whatever that may be.

At its best, HM has functioned as a complement to existing political debates and sometimes has helped to create a type of “demilitarized” space for productive scholarly and theoretical conflicts, rather than the destructive conflicts that sometime develop under the pressures of the conjuncture and the urgency of certain forms of militant politics.

The discontinuities are also noticeable. There have been different generations or phases of involvement on the editorial board. Some people for different reasons decided to become engaged in other projects or found their interests moving in other directions. We are thus always looking for the involvement of new members of the editorial board, seeking to connect with younger generations and thus developing an ongoing transmission of the political culture we have tried to develop.

GS: What do you think is the position of the journal in relation to other Anglophone left-wing journals/magazines like New Left Review, Socialist Register, Red Pepper, or Jacobin?

PT: All of these journals are committed to broad discussions on the Left in different ways, and I think they should all be seen as complimentary elements of the broader contemporary left-wing and Marxist culture. In my personal view, I would suggest that one of the distinctive features of Historical Materialism is that we aim very seriously not at being an academic journal in a narrow professional sense, but at being a serious scholarly research journal.

Thus, the majority of the articles we publish are serious research papers that have emerged from long-term research projects; engagement with immediate political disputes or with contemporary political issues may very well figure in such articles, but that is not usually the primary focus. There is a certain “time” of theory, or temporality of theoretical practice, as Louis Althusser would have said, and we have tried to respect that temporal dimension, to enable the space for reflection and theoretical elaboration.

In terms of our relations with other Marxist journals in English, which I think also includes many other journals in addition to those you mention, such as Rethinking Marxism andScience and Society in United States,Thesis Eleven in Australia,Capital and Class in the UK, and so on, I think members of the editorial board ofHM regard those journals as our comrades and collaborators in building a new left-wing theoretical culture of discussion and debate.

The focus of Historical Materialism, however, is in my view unapologetically theoretical, in a scholarly rather than academic sense, rather than directly interventionist (other members of the editorial board have different perspectives on this question — my comments should not be taken as an “official” position of the editorial board, which does not exist). I think that theoretical work, serious scholarly historical work, serious philosophical work, can make a very important contribution to the broader culture of the Left and to political activity as well.

I don’t think that it is useful or productive for people working in Marxist theory today to feel intimidated by some of the older divisions between an academic and an activist Marxism that emerged from the impasses encountered by the New Left. Theory also is a very important component of political practice, and theoretical practice has an important contribution to make to the broader culture of the Left, as one of our many “resources of hope.”

The Left needs places such as Historical Materialism and other journals to develop the theoretical tools which can then be taken up by all of us in different practices and political struggles.

GS: Another significant aspect of the Historical Materialism initiative is the conferences that it organizes which have a global character, considering that they are now held annually in four continents (India, Europe, Australia, USA/Canada). Would you like to comment on the origins of this and its transformation through time?

PT: The Historical Materialism Conferences started in 2004. We held the first conference here, at Birkbeck College in London. It was quite a small gathering, sixty or seventy people, and it involved the collaboration from the beginning with Socialist Register and the Deutscher Prize Committee. It was an attempt to draw together and to connect with some of the older traditions of Marxist theoretical publishing and a new generation.

We really moved decisively the next year, in 2005, to expand our international focus, particularly in Europe at that stage, and in increasing years we have been working hard to be in contact with comrades in Latin America, in South Asia, in South-East Asia, in North America and in many other parts of the world including Africa and the Arabic speaking countries. We have had success in building bridges with some cultures more than others, but we continue to try to reach new discussion partners.

It has been an intense process of expansion: the conference grows each year, there are more and more proposals for panels and for papers. This year we received well over two thousand proposals for papers, though we only had room to accommodate a very small number of these — around 300. International interest has been expanding for a number of years now, with conferences in other parts of the world, such as Toronto, New York, Sydney and Delhi. We are presently engaged in ongoing discussions about organizing conferences in Berlin, in Vienna, in Moscow, in Rome, in Athens and in Brazil.

I think that we can explain this international interest in terms of comrades working in other countries identifying the type of conferences we organize as Historical Materialism as a distinctive model of discussion and debate on the Left. We offer space for theoretical reflection and serious theoretical debate, we do not tolerate sectarian polemics, and we insist that comradely and civil standards of debate are respected, even when people have strong and passionate disagreements.

We are also keen to create a space of discussion in which theory and politics can organically grow together; but as the young Marx teaches us, that means not only that theory should go towards politics, but also that politics should come towards theory.

I would thus suggest that in some sense the Historical Materialism conferences represent a space for a political form of “theoretical practice,” to use an Althusserian phrase (and again, this characterization is one with which many of my fellow editorial board members, non- or anti-Althusserians, certainly will not agree!). I think that our attempt to build the Historical Materialism conferences as a distinctive space of theoretical reflection on the Left has been successful if we judge by the number of people who come to the conferences regularly year after year and have identified these conferences as important spaces for the development of their own work.

It has also been successful judging by the wide international interest in holding events similar to the Historical Materialism conference in many other countries, either in direct collaboration in the journal or as independent initiatives (the recent conference held in Paris, Penser l’émancipation, could be taken as an example of the latter model, inspired in some ways by Historical Materialism).

I think the combination of these elements indicates that Historical Materialism has played a small modest role of leadership in promoting new models of discussion and debate on the Left; but it also indicates that there was a readiness amongst the left and amongst Marxists around the world to work together towards finding these new forms of debate and discussion.

I think that one of the reasons for such an interest has also been the fact that the upturn in social struggles over the last decade has been accompanied by a renewed need for theoretical clarification and preparation for future struggles. The conjuncture has thus given rise to a sort of ‘fortuitous encounter’ between theory and practice.

GS: The conferences have succeeded at creating a new solid radical milieu around them. What else has HM accomplished?

PT: I think we have helped to create a space where there are ongoing discussions from one year to the next, which has led to the emergence of new and collective research projects out of Historical Materialism conferences. That has occurred not only in the sense of publications being produced, journal articles, edited collected volumes, and so forth, but also in terms of other conferences emerging from those workshops and seminars.

For a long period, in the 1980s and 1990s, the bridges of the international left collapsed and there was very little regular exchange between different national-theoretical cultures, with some important exceptions. We have attempted to create a space where there is more regular and ongoing contact between different cultures. The success of these efforts up to now is obviously only partially due to the efforts of the Historical Materialism editorial board; equally if not more important has been the enthusiasm with which people have responded to our initiatives, which is what has made them such a success.

Another distinctive feature of the conference of Historical Materialism this year in London was the fact that a lot of panels focused on discussions regarding the current feminist trends.

I think this is a fundamental and decisive development, and one towards which we have been working for very many years. We have been trying for over a decade to reinitiate the Marxist-feminist discussions which, for many difficult reasons, in some countries and some cultures on the Left internationally, had fallen apart after the upsurge of very interesting work in the 1960s and 1970s.

In some cultures, such as Germany, there was a continuing Marxist-feminist dialogue that was very productive, and continues today to produce important new work. In English-speaking world, for different reasons, there was a collapse of the important and integral contacts between important sections and Marxist and feminist theory.

Today, though, we are witnessing a new generation of young women — but also of queer theorists and people from other traditions — engaging with these questions and making an essential contribution to the new theoretical debates.

In my personal opinion, any future vibrant Marxist theory will necessary simultaneously be a socialist feminist-Marxist theory. We cannot develop Marxist theory without this central component, without theorizing one of the core areas of capitalist exploitation and oppression.

We are continuing to promote these discussions and debates and make them not simply one part or one disciplinary area of Marxist discussions, but absolutely fundamental to debates in all areas of Marxist theory. The response that we have received over the last years to these initiatives indicates that there is a lot of energy, particularly amongst younger socialist feminist theorists, to expand this project.

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HM 2017 Conference (see here for more details)

Organised in collaboration with the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Committee and Socialist Register.

Plenary sessions

- Andreas Malm's Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Lecture 'In Wildness Is The Liberation Of The World: On Maroon Ecology And Partisan Nature' on Friday evening 

- Panel on 'Value and Value Theory' with David Harvey, Michael Henrich and Moshe Postone on Saturday evening

- Closing plenary on 'Race, Migration and the Left' on Sunday evening

Streams

- The Great War, the Russian Revolution and Mass Rebellions 1916-1923 

- Marxism, Sexuality and Political Economy: Looking Forwards, Looking Backwards

- Green Revolutions?

- Marxist-Feminist Stream

- Race and Capital

One hundred years ago, hailing the Russian Revolution, Antonio Gramsci characterised the Bolsheviks’ success as a "revolution against Capital." As against the interpretations of mechanical "Marxism," the Russian Revolution was the "crucial proof" that revolution need not be postponed until the "proper" historical developments had occurred.

2017 will witness both the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution and the 150th anniversary of the first publication of Marx’s Capital. Fittingly, the journal Historical Materialism will celebrate its own twentieth anniversary.

In his time, Gramsci qualified his title by arguing that his criticism was directed at those who use "the Master’s works to draw up a superficial interpretation, dictatorial statements which cannot be disputed," by contrast, he argues, the Bolsheviks "live out Marxist thought." From its inception, Historical Materialism has been committed to a project of collective research in critical Marxist theory which actively counters any mechanical application of Marxism qua doctrine. How the Russian Revolution was eventually lived out — with all of its aftershocks, reversals, counter-revolutions, and ultimate defeat — also calls not just for a work of memory but for one of theorisation.

We might view the alignment of these anniversaries, then, as disclosing the changing fates of the Marxist tradition and its continued attempt to analyse and transform the world. Especially once it is read against the grain of the mechanical and determinist image affixed to it by many of the official Marxisms of the 20th Century, and animated by the liberation movements that followed in its wake, the work-in-progress that was Capital seems vitally relevant to an understanding of the forces at work in our crisis-ridden present. The Russian Revolution, on the contrary, risks appearing as a museum-piece or lifeless talisman. By retrieving Gramsci’s provocation, we wish to unsettle the facile gesture that would praise Marxian theory all the better to bury Marxist politics.

Gramsci also remarks that Marx "predicted the predictable" but could not predict the particular leaps and bounds human society would take. Surveying today’s political landscape that seems especially true. Since 2008, we have witnessed a continuing crisis of capitalism, contradictory revolutionary upsurges — and brutal counterrevolutions — across the Middle East and North Africa and a resurgent ‘populist’ right represented by Trump, the right-wing elements of the Brexit campaign, the authoritarian turn in central Europe and populist right wing politics in France; the power of Putin's Russia and authoritarian state power in Turkey, Israel, Egypt and India. Even the "pink tide" of Latin America appears to be turning. Disturbingly, we seem to face a wave of reaction, and in some domains a recrudescence of fascism, much greater in scope and intensity than the revolutionary impetus that preceded and sometimes occasioned it. There is a new virulence to the politics of revanchist nationalism, ethno-racial supremacy, and aggressive patriarchy, but its articulation to the imperatives of capital accumulation or the politics of class remains a matter of much (necessary) debate.

This year’s Historical Materialism Conference seeks to use the "three anniversaries" as an opportunity to reflect on the history of the Marxist tradition and its continued relevance to our historical moment. We welcome papers which unpack the complex and under-appreciated legacies of Marx’s Capital and the Russian Revolution, exploring their global scope, their impact on the racial and gendered histories of capitalism and anti-capitalism, investigating their limits and sounding out their yet-untapped potentialities. We also wish to apply the lessons of these anniversaries to our current perilous state affairs: dissecting its political and economic dynamics and tracing its possible revolutionary potentials. 

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The HM conference is not a conventional academic conference but rather a space for discussion, debate and the launching of collective projects. We therefore discourage "cameo appearances" and encourage speakers to participate in the whole of the conference. We also strongly urge all speakers to take out personal subscriptions to the journal.