Deirdre O’Neill and Mike Wayne

This essay is taken from the forthcoming anthology Considering Class, Theory, Culture and the Media in the 21^st Century, (eds) Deirdre O’Neill and Mike Wayne, Brill, Leiden/Boston, 2018.

Introduction

This essay explores the social and political role and significance of the intellectuals within capitalist society. It sets out to define the intellectual and the nature of what they produce (ideas) and their relationship to broader class relations. It shows how key Marxist thinkers provide the basis for a socio-economic understanding of the activities and products of the intellectual. At the heart of transforming the current role of the intellectual within the existing divisions of labour, lies the project to democratise the social role of the intellectuals. This requires expanding the social base of the intellectuals and connecting their activities to a self-reflexive project of social and political transformation. This is the basis and definition of truly critical thought. In this essay we discuss how Marx and Engels’ began the task of establishing a theoretical framework for a historical and materialist account of the intellectuals inThe German Ideology. We show how the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci further developed our understanding of the intellectual and we clarify and add to his key distinctions between the traditional and organic intellectual. Having set out the theoretical framework and broad philosophical and political implications of the intellectual, we then look at the role of the intellectual in the post-Second World War era, up to our contemporary moment. We discuss the relationship between the middle class and the hegemonic intellectual, the difficulties posed for the middle class intellectual to be genuinely counter-hegemonic and the need for the reconstitution of organic intellectuals from the working class. Finally we explore these issues in relation to the media and especially oppositional digital and social media practices.

Marx and Engels on the Intellectuals

The starting point for thinking about a Marxist conception of the role of intellectuals must be Marx and Engels’ work The German Ideology. It is here that they begin to situate intellectuals in relation to the dominant class forces. “The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production at its disposal ” (Marx and Engels 1989, 64). This formulation would grow in relevance with the development of the mass media. At the same time, the very growth of what Ensenzberger later called the ‘industrialisation of the mind’ (Ensenzberger 1982) would require the development of a sophisticated account of intellectual production that could avoid the twin traps of reducing it to the economic class interests of the dominant class who formally own the media or believing that it transcended class relations and struggle. Marx and Engels noted that “mental production” was delegated to the “thinkers of the class (its active, conceptive ideologists…)” (Marx and Engel 1989, 65). The beginnings of an account of intellectual production that could register how it may be affected by broader social, political and economic changes and conflicts is evident where they state that a “cleavage” between intellectuals and the dominant class “can develop into a certain opposition and hostility”, although they are also (overly) quick to state this conflict “automatically comes to nothing” if the dominant class to which the intellectuals are attached, are “endangered” (Marx and Engels 1989,65). Their own political trajectory suggests that this is not necessarily the case.

Marx and Engels no doubt had in mind in this section of The German Ideology the German intellectuals and philosophers from whose ranks they emerged in the 1840s and from whom they wished to establish an epistemological and political break.The German Ideology opens with a satirical account of the post-Hegelian scene, in which Left and Right Hegelians fought over the legacy and meaning of the master philosopher Hegel, who had died in 1831. In the minds of said protagonists, these philosophical battles were momentous, a “revolution beside which the French Revolution was child’s play” (Marx and Engels 1989, 39).  Dissecting the moment, Marx and Engels lampoon the series of fashions and fads to which this intellectual production fell victim.  In terms that seem strikingly relevant today, they pinpoint how commodification and competition erodes the authentic usefulness of ideas which suffer a gradual “deterioration in quality, adulteration of the raw materials, falsification of labels”, the results of which “is now being extolled and interpreted to us as a revolution of world significance, the begetter of the most prodigious results and achievements” (Marx and Engels 1989, 39-40). With only a little less of a sweeping dismissal, these words do seem more than a little pertinent to some of our own intellectual ‘revolutions’ in recent years.

The problem for Marx and Engel’s was that the Left Hegelian ‘revolutionary’ philosophy “never quitted the realm of philosophy” (Marx and Engels 1989, 40). As a result, methodologically it remained flawed in its ability to ground idea-systems in their real conditions of existence. “It has not occurred to these philosophers” Marx and Engels noted, “to inquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the relation of their criticism to their own material surroundings” (Marx and Engels 1989, 41). It was this lack of self-reflexive interrogation that made German philosophy an ideology. Their own philosophy, historical materialism, would break with this lack of self-reflexivity and provide the basis for a socio-economic understanding of the activities of the intellectual. The intellectual and the most prestigious form of intellectual production, philosophy, could not, in their view, be seen as some free-floating, universal group transcending social conflicts. Ideas and the producers of those ideas had to be socially contextualised.

Along with this methodological break there was a political break to be made from the Left Hegelians. The intimations of change, the analysis of the need for change, the need to identify the forces of change and press them forward in a progressive direction, could not occur unless philosophy was integrated into those social forces and political action. As Marx famously put it in the Twelfth Thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is tochange it” (Marx and Engels 1989, 123). In re-uniting philosophy with democratic social change Marx and Engels aim no less than to set in reverse the entire historical development of intellectual production and consciousness in class societies. This development has been marked by the division of labour between manual and intellectual labour and within the latter, the development of ever more specialised regions such as philosophy, ethics, theology, law, etc. (Marx and Engels 1989, 51-2).

 The basis of a democratic conception of the intellectual is at least sketched out in this early work. Since consciousness for Marx and Engels develops out of our everyday practical productive life, satisfaction of needs and the production of new needs and the co-operation this requires, then an explicit and self-conscious reconnection of intellectual functions to the social production of life would seem both possible and desirable. Habermas argued that by “turning the construction of the manifestation of consciousness into an encoded representation of the self-production of the species, Marx discloses the mechanism of progress in the experience of reflection…” (Habermas 1978, 43). Yet Habermas warned that this was vitiated by the fact that self-reflection was reduced to and made identical with labour. In so doing Marx “reduces the process of reflection to the level of instrumental action”  (Habermas 1978, 44).  If this were the case then Marx would be no more than a philosopher of the factory, as it were. But Marx neither saw labour in such instrumental terms (he saw it as intrinsically creative even if tasked with meeting certain historical needs) nor saw the intellectual and creative functions as having their highest manifestation necessarily within the material production of the species. Marx’s philosophy is perfectly capable of sustaining the view that our intellectual activities find their highest culmination in culture, communication and aesthetics, where some distanciation from immediate needs have been established (Wayne 2016, 140-48). Historical materialism is not reductionist in relation to consciousness and its specialised manifestations, it merely poses the crucial question: what are the methodological and political-moral implications of the idea that intellectual activity has certain conditions of existence that involve the totality of society?

The question of the actual and desirable relationship between the intellectual and other forms of labour is significant primarily because it is capitalism that has the instrumental view of labour (which Habermas uncritically accepts in its impoverished form as inevitable). Furthermore, today it is capitalism that poses a clear and present danger in reducing intellectual activity to serving the needs of the labour process, subordinate as it is to capital, and thus eliminating the critical component of reflective thought. In order to realise that critical component Marx and Engels recommended articulating thought to those social agents struggling for progressive change. The internal conflicts within the ‘conceptive ideologists’ of the dominant class (the fight between the Right and Left Hegelians) were not insignificant. It helped expand the repertoire of discourses available and seed the ideas for change. However, for these seeds of change to be activated required intellectuals to break both methodologically and politically with the dominant class. This is what Marx and Engels did in fact do.

Gramsci on the Intellectuals

The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) has widely and rightly been seen as making a significant contribution to the Marxist understanding of the role of intellectuals. Like Marx and Engels he argued for a democratic conception of intellectual activity. Taking the most prestigious form of intellectual production, philosophy, as an example, he argued that “all men [sic] are “philosophers”’ insofar as everyone has a specific conception of the world, a “worldview” which they have forged out of their experience and circumstance. The task was to develop philosophy, both in its specialised form as scholarship and in its everyday form, into “critical awareness” (Gramsci 1967, 58).  As we have seen, for Marx and Engels, the philosophy of the intellectuals would develop its critical potential the more it could interrogate its conditions of existence. With a slight nuancing, the same prescription was applied to the philosophy of everyday life. Gramsci argued that it needed to develop critical awareness by a) not accepting ideas and value-systems passively from the dominant institutions in society and b) overcoming its fragmented and disparate character and developing itself as a systematic and coherent worldview in the way traditional philosophers have had the time to do with their own more ‘rarefied’ systems. The ideal of developing a popular form of critical philosophy would have to overcome and address a number of problems concerning the actual historical development of intellectual production and its relationship to powerful socio-economic groups. It would have to overcome firstly the fact that “All men [sic] are intellectuals…but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals” (Gramsci 1998, 9). This is the division between intellectual and manual labour. Secondly, within the ‘function of intellectuals’ there are different types of intellectuals.

Gramsci identified two types of intellectuals. The first were what he called the traditional intellectuals, which he defined rather ambiguously in both historical terms and social-ideological terms. The historical definition of traditional intellectuals refers to the way intellectuals associated with one mode of production need to be assimilated by the intellectuals associated with a rising class and a new mode of production. So that for example, the intellectuals of the feudal mode of production (clerics, scholars, artists) had to be integrated and re-functioned according to the new practices and needs of the capitalist mode of production (Gramsci 1998, 10-11). Likewise, the intellectuals developed within capitalism would become the ‘traditional’ intellectuals vis-à-vis the development of a socialist mode of production, and again would need to be assimilated into new social priorities and needs. Gramsci also defined traditional intellectuals as those within the capitalist mode of production that remained remote and aloof from the economic and political needs of the capitalist class despite their assimilation. Again clerics and philosophers and perhaps much of the arts and humanities within the academy might once have fallen within this type of intellectual function, where non-instrumental metaphysical values could be articulated. These intellectuals are ‘traditional’ when compared to Gramsci’s other main category: organic intellectuals.

To understand the concept of organic intellectuals, we have to first relate this concept to two other concepts in Gramsci’s work: the economic-corporative and hegemony.  Gramsci argues that the political consciousness of a dominant class is one which must move beyond merely a defence of its own economic interests. It must move firstly to unite with other fractions of its own class, in the way that different kinds of capital, such as industrial, financial, commercial and landed capital have historically done. If a class stays at just this level of defending its economic interests, it stays at the level of the economic-corporative. Beyond establishing intra-class cohesion a dominant class must move beyond their own collective interests and command the moral-political terrain across society, so as to convince all other classes that their interests can be met by aligning themselves with or accepting the rule of the dominant class. When a dominant class achieves this, it is not merely dominant but also hegemonic (Gramsci 1988, 205-6). By hegemonic, Gramsci means that this is a class that wins (at least to some degree) the consent of the exploited classes to their situation.

It is the role of the organic intellectuals to produce this consent and to do so they work primarily to change and influence culture, morality and political agendas. Classically, organic intellectuals would have been found in political parties, in the top most prestigious newspapers, in public relations and advertising and perhaps today also in think tanks. These intellectuals are tied organically to the economic and political needs of the dominant class. In recent times, these are the thinkers, commentators, editors, writers, broadcasters and so forth that try and persuade the general population that neo-liberalism means progressive reform.

However, Gramsci also refers to the practical organisers of production, the scientist and the engineer for example, and today also we would say managers, as intellectuals. We might think that the organic intellectual would automatically include these kinds of intellectuals organised at the heart of the production process. But this interpretation is at odds with Gramsci’s analysis of the economic-corporate activity of the dominant classes and the need to go beyond their immediate economic needs and build political alliances and broader political-moral projects (such as neo-liberalism). A number of writers have suggested that with the expansion of corporate and state bureaucracies, the economic-corporate role of the intellectual, working within and primarily concerned with the needs of the state or the company, has expanded (Boggs 1993, and see Pratschke in this volume).  This has led to the expansion and redefinition of intellectual functions that are neither ‘traditional’ because they are so obviously tied to the dynamic and moving terrain of occupations responding to economic forces, nor are they ‘organic’ in the sense that their agenda is more focused on the smooth functioning of an apparatus rather than the broader project of public persuasion and politics. We need then to supplement Gramsci’s analysis with a new category, that of the technocratic intellectual. This is the ‘expert’ in science, engineering, law, economics, management, even the trade union leader and negotiator, etc. They embody specialised and instrumentalised forms of knowledge. They work within the framework of policy, which ultimately stems from the broader political struggle conducted on the terrain of the masses and the organic intellectuals. They administer but do not determine, they examine how things work but not why things work as they do, and within that framework they may produce new solutions, products and ideas.  If they become great advocates of such new ideas and practices that re-shape how we look at the world more broadly, from Henry Ford to Steve Jobs, then they lift themselves out from the merely technocratic intellectual onto the terrain of the organic intellectual.  The technocratic intellectual, long dominant in the natural and social sciences, has been in the last few decades, reshaping the humanities and arts as well as the critical social sciences. Edward Said argues that the greatest threat to independent intellectual thought comes from the dominance of this technocratic type of intellectual. For Said:

The major choice faced by the intellectual is whether to be allied with the stability of the victors and rulers or – the more difficult path – to consider that stability as a state of emergency threatening the less fortunate (Said 1996, 35).

We can now tabulate the different types of intellectual functions we have discussed:

1. Traditional: either eclipsed by the new rising class and/or the economically and politically marginalised intellectuals within capitalism.

2. Technocratic: numerically the biggest class of contemporary intellectual activity, working within economic-corporative horizons.

3. Organic Intellectuals.  They are defined not by their occupation but by the scope and compass of the change they seek to initiate.

This category can be subdivided between:

      i) Hegemonic organic intellectuals who work on behalf of the capitalist class and whose main business is in helping to shape the broader political-moral, social and cultural agenda.

     ii) Counter-Hegemonic organic intellectuals. They work to call the dominant frames of reference, the dominant assumptions, and the dominant policy trends that favour capitalism, into question. They are organically tied to the classes and groups for whom stability is ‘a state of emergency’. This group can in turn be sub-divided between:

ii. a) those that, like Marx and Engels, come from the middle classes but who have distanced themselves from the hegemonic group politically, psychologically and ideally, in terms of their practices (but often they fall short of this crucial need to democratise their practices, retaining instead the stamp of elitism);

 ii. b) those intellectuals that develop from within the working classes and other subaltern groups (but who must resist assimilation and neutralisation within the established institutions).

Organic Intellectuals Today

In his 1967 essay on the role of the intellectual in Western democracies Chomsky considered the intellectual in relation to the concepts of responsibility, power and truth seeking. He argued that their relative power bestows upon them a responsibility to interrogate, critique and expose the disastrous effects of right wing ideologies.

Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyse actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions. In the Western world, at least, they have the power that comes from political liberty, from access to information and freedom of expression. For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us (Chomsky 1967)

There are two significant contextual points to be made here. Firstly Chomsky was writing in relation to the Vietnam War over fifty years ago. It was a challenge to the intellectuals of the time to expose the lies that were disseminated in order to justify a war that killed over a million people in total. Secondly he is referring here to a particular kind of intellectual, that is the counter hegemonic intellectual. As we have pointed out in the discussion of Gramsci, we can consider the role of intellectuals in two ways as hegemonic or as counter hegemonic. While the type of intellectual Chomsky refers to is one that works to expose the facade of the powerful there are intellectuals who can just as easily play a role in reinforcing the status quo. The Vietnam War as with the Iraq War in 2003 had its intellectual cheerleaders, giving power the gloss of higher ideals (the 2003 war was we were told about defending and extending freedom, democracy, etc.).

Conventionally those who are considered to be intellectuals –or we could call them professional thinkers -have hailed from the upper and middle classes. This is not because these groups possess an inherent intelligence consistently absent from the working class. Rather it is because those from the middle and upper class designated as intellectuals -or as Gramsci would have it fulfilling the function of the intellectual- are in possession of the social, cultural and economic capital that makes such a designation possible and ensures they are recognised and acknowledged as such by other members of their class. This means it is possible to understand the hegemonic intellectual not in relation to a superior ‘intellect’ (whatever that might mean) but in terms of their significant role in the  reproduction of the socio -economic relations of capital.

It remains true today that the majority of contemporary hegemonic organic intellectuals in the UK are drawn from the middle and upper classes. The decision-making professions within which many institutional intellectuals operate are dominated by privately educated Oxbridge graduates who posses a shared culture, value system and set of attitudes which when taken together coalesce into a world view which they hold in common. The link between education and the production of intellectuals has meant that formal education has been a crucial filter by which to reproduce an intellectual class dedicated to reproducing the class system (Reay 2010, 400). It is within the private education system and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge that the middle and upper class intellectuals learn about the way in which the world works. Here they are prepared to run that world as if opposition to their view of the world is a deviance from the norm.

What this means in effect is that as members of a middle class elite whose perspective is universalised, intellectual engagement with the condition of society and the way in which it is organised and regulated is filtered through the sensibilities of those for whom the prevailing structural arrangements do not appear to be alienating and exploitative. Whilst there is no suggestion that the hegemonic intellectual is unable to engage critically with the world –indeed they even, at times, are able to appear radical- the depth of their analysis and level of critical engagement is typically limited because the position they inhabit is a privileged one. Consequently their radicalism only appears as such when presented to other hegemonic intellectuals. Significantly their intellectual endeavour evaluates the immediate situation and typically accepts the given parameters in place to make sense of that situation while a more critical intellect “evaluates evaluations” (Hofstadter 1966, 25). As Schwartz has pointed out many university students are aware of the reason that corporate boardrooms should promote diversity “but few question the concept of corporate rule itself” (2013,184) .

If the role of the critical intellectual as Chomsky claims is to make public what the powerful would rather keep hidden, we need to recognise the significance of this in relation to a contemporary society consistently divided along class lines and to realise any intellectual endeavour wishing to ‘evaluate the evaluation’ must eventually engage with the question of class and the unequal distribution of economic and cultural resources which class divisions rest upon. It is the approach to this question we would argue that separates the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic intellectual. As Marx made clear it is only by engaging with the question of class, the ways in which class is structured and reconfigured over time, that we can begin to understand the nature of capitalism and come to terms with his claim:  “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (Marx 1985, 79).

The crucial point here is that for the hegemonic middle class intellectual, class is not an overtly exploitative or antagonistic relationship. Their experiential horizons are confined by lives of privilege where the politics of identity takes a primary position. The last thirty years of neoliberalism has witnessed class as a source of intellectual analysis take second place to the politics of race, sexuality and gender, concepts that affect the middle class the most. In the meantime economic inequality has increased to historically high levels, the working class have been incrementally excluded from the public sphere and immigrants forced to live and work in the most appalling conditions. Yet those in positions of intellectual power have normalised and universalised this inequality.M While their own class world becomes normalised questions of class, which are essential to any transformative process, are secondary. This has allowed for an on-going abdication of any responsibility towards the working class and no demand for a critical self-interrogation necessary to consider the role class plays in the social relations of exploitation. As Marx has made clear, it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social being that determines consciousness (Marx 1977, 181). While it is possible, through social change and political events  (e.g. war, political revolutions, etc.) for consciousness to be reconfigured and established dominant patterns of social conditioning that has formerly shaped a life to be questioned, the tendency is for social being to produce the consciousness that is most conducive for the reproduction (within a range) of the social relationships in which social being is formed.

The problem then becomes one of praxis; of intellectual work that is able to inquire into and evaluate the connection between ideas and their material affects and translate them into new ways of being as Marx and Engels called for in The German Ideology. The process of re-evaluating ideas about the world can bring about the potential to transform the world. Thus conservatives and liberals are certainly not averse to acknowledging that inequality exists, but they never come up with policy ideas that could remotely change this situation. When they are confronted with policy ideas that could have a positive impact on inequality, they attack those ideas as ‘extreme’ because they encroach, necessarily on the prerogatives of private property.  Gramsci linked the economic rule of the elites to the complex practices of everyday existence where to a great extent there is an unquestioned conformity to the rules and conventions of a given social order.  This intellectual acceptance of hegemonic boundaries, this refusal to surmount the imposed limitations of the institutions, politics and ideological framework of neoliberalism, illuminates the distinction to be made between the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic intellectual.

Non-conformity to these rules, a refusal to live by their precepts, engenders in the counter-hegemonic intellectual the condition of potential isolation and marginalisation and indicates an acknowledgement that analysis is informed by and dependent upon action – and vice versa. At present the hegemonic power of the dominating groups is such that the critical analysis required for strategic explorations of the consequences of objective material structures exists in isolation from the action required to transform society. 

This is no more apparent than in the claim associated with the Occupy movement that began in the US: ‘we are the 99%’.  This slogan functioned to differentiate the majority from the obscenely rich capitalist class minority right at the top of society. We would argue that this contradictory model of inclusivity is problematic and functions to exclude the working class by smoothing out the differences in lives that are significantly different within the majority. On the one hand the slogan draws attention to a powerful global elite at the top of society who exist in a shadowy world of financial deals and political agreements. At the same time it eradicates the peculiarities, oppressions and exploitative relationships of many members of the working class and the very real class differences and conflicts that exist between groups within the 99%. This collapsing of the working classes and the more privileged lives of the confortable middle class into one homogenous mass inevitably functions to exclude the working class from the struggle for change and leads to a weakening of the potential to build intellectual and political arguments and crucially, anti capitalist alliances that acknowledge the material realities of working class life. As a ‘unifying’ slogan it is unable to engage with the complexities of a classed stratified, multi ethnic globalised world. What is envisaged, as a tool against neoliberalism becomes in effect a method of annihilation – a theoretical and essentialising meme which both conceptually and practically results in the destruction of the working class as a category. Similarly, orthodox Marxist conceptions which equate ‘the working class’ with wage-labour are problematic, since they disavow the different types and levels of cultural, social and economic advantage the middle class wage-labourer has, as well as their position of administrative, managerial or intellectual dominance over other strata within the category of ‘working class’.

This returns us to the concept of praxis and its relationship to working class intellectuals. What it demonstrates is the need for the middle class intellectual to adequately address their relationship to existing structures and patterns of inequality in which they are implicated and their increasing control of the means of communication, their domination of the media, academia and other decision making professions, all of which are conduits for the transmission of power and the construction of ideology (Wayne and O’Neill 2013).  The truly counter-hegemonic middle class intellectual who seeks an organic relation to the working class must remember that, as Marx wrote in ‘The Theses on Feuerbach’, “it is essential to educate the educator” (Marx and Engels 1989,121). A dialectical relationship of mutual learning means that organic intellectuals must also emerge from within the working class.

The counter-hegemonic working class intellectual traditionally was dependent on organisations and institutions such as trade unions, adult education institutions and socialist parties (Rose 2001) to provide the means to develop as counter-hegemonic thinkers. Yet neoliberalism has progressively destroyed or neutralised these organisations. It is a political truism to claim neoliberalism is responsible for the rolling back of the welfare state and the destruction of the public services that function within it. One of the consequences of this is a shrinking of the public sphere and the access to it that is essential to making subaltern voices heard (Wacquant 2008).

Neoliberalism has destroyed the fabric of the communities in which the working class found material and ideological strength and in the process strategically depoliticised the working class. The left intelligentsia has receded into a kind of “ideological policing” (Hall 2012, 9) obsessed with theories of differences and transgression that has resulted in its increasing insignificance and the erosion of the concept (and practice) of social solidarity.  Schwartz reinforces this point in his discussion of radical theory:

As the right’s growing hegemony from the 1980s onwards eroded majoritarian support for progressive taxation and universal public goods, radical theory, through its dominant concerns for difference and transgression, abandoned any intellectual defence of the core democratic value of social democracy (Schwartz 2013, 395).

The destruction of the civil society in which the working class had established some organisational and institutional bases, has also eroded the links between the working class and the middle class. Middle class intellectuals could once be rooted in working class struggles such as trade union movements, social movements (such as Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners) or in the colleges and working-men’s institutes, civil rights protests, and so forth. As all of these have become weakened, so the role of the counter-hegemonic radical intellectual has declined. Our reading of this situation leads us to suggest that the middle class counter-hegemonic intellectual requires movements and working class intellectuals to work along side and to learn form. A symbolic moment when the working class counter-hegemonic intellectual and the institutional production of middle class intellectuals converged, was Jimmy Reid’s 1972 inaugural address as Rector of Glasgow University. Reid was a leading figure in the 1971 work-in to save the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders from bankruptcy. In Britain now it is virtually unthinkable for a University to appoint a radical trade union leader to such a position and to acknowledge that the ‘educators need educating’. Ours in not the era to give such a platform, such a vindication and such an acknowledgement, to a radical organic intellectual of the working class.  In his famous address Reid made a direct appeal to the students as intellectuals in the making:

A rat race is for rats. We're not rats. We're human beings. Reject the insidious pressures in society that would blunt your critical faculties to all that is happening around you, that would caution silence in the face of injustice lest you jeopardise your chances of promotion and self-advancement. This is how it starts, and before you know where you are, you're a fully paid-up member of the rat-pack (Reid 2010).

Yet if the old established platforms (the universities, the press) have become integrated into the neoliberal order and hostile to participation of the working class as critical thinkers, new spaces have opened up around the digital media.

Counter-Hegemonic Spaces and the Digital Media

In our multi-media saturated society the significance of the media as a site of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic struggle takes on a dynamic role in framing our social and historical experiences and the ways in which they are interpreted, evaluated and made sense of. Within the dominant media environment, the processes of public debate, policy-making and political power are asymmetrically skewed towards both the middle classes and large capital interests. The dominant media are run by middle class intellectuals who largely operate within the spectrum of liberal and conservative thought and opinion in the current period. In the UK, the leading editorial thinkers on the premier liberal paper The Guardian have overwhelmingly been privately educated and went through Oxford or Cambridge.  They police the boundaries of the acceptable and at their more ‘radical’ end of the spectrum they present as counter-hegemonic intellectuals and ‘left-wing firebrands’.  The ideological effect of incorporating ‘radical’ politics inside such dominant organs is that anything outside those boundaries can be labelled and dismissed as ‘extremist’.

One example of the policing of who gets to speak, where and on what issues is Russell Brand.  Brand crossed boundaries that unsettled the established hierarchies and divisions of labour. Here was an ‘entertainer’ who became politicised and began commenting critically on political matters. But he was also from a working class background that was outside the golden Oxbridge circle and this seemed for many liberals to disqualify him to speak on political issues and be a political actor (See Fisher 2013, El-Gingihy 2014 and for an example of the established political commentators’ collective noses being firmly put out of joint, O’Hagan 2014). 1 In particular his critique of the current state of representative democracy in the UK and its inability to bring about progressive change (through voting) enraged many in the political and media class who are invested in the status quo. Brand disrupted the middle class norms of style in the way he talked (the accent and content), the way he dressed, his very tactile interactions with interviewers, etc., all spoke to an informal unpredictability that was seen as a symbolic attack on ‘serious discourse’. Brand launched his Trews news channel on You Tube which has more than one million subscribers and which regularly makes the media itself and their questionable shaping of the public agenda, his topic. 2 The development and popularisation of such media literacy is an important component of the oppositional digital and social media world, which defines its identity precisely in terms of its difference from the dominant media. The dominant media in turn fear this growing media literacy and meta-commentary on its practices since it calls them to account and deconstructs the naturalisation of the dominant media’s perspectives. The success of Brand’s Trews channel demonstrates that the digital and social media also threaten the dominant media in terms of audience reach and not just ideological critique.

Social media and digital media may also be seen as a counter-hegemonic model of labour or intellectual production.  In contrast to those that have a corporate contract, bloggers, micro-bloggers, commentators, memes, online papers, You Tube political rappers such as bin-man Sean Donnelly (NXTGen) and so on, produce material in their spare time and in most cases for free. 3  The demographic background of the politicised social media are far more diverse than the narrow private school/Oxbridge nexus that filters and shapes the formation of British intellectuals.  Although social media is often criticised for encouraging a privatised and individualistic politics (the so-called ‘keyboard activist’), we would argue that it can be a perfect example of praxis. Social media offers a means of offering clear and succinct explanations of what is happening and why it is happening; it provides the ‘theory’ in a idiom that is accessible to non-academics, and that can seed political action.

The digital and social media help produce horizontal communication that is very important in helping people overcome the sense of isolation and marginalisation that one feels when they have political views and opinions that find little or no place in the dominant media. In such a situation of tacit censorship it is easy to believe that few people share those beliefs and opinions, and this can lead to a demoralising atomisation of the left.  Since many of the public spaces where working class people used to congregate have been decimated, virtual networks in the social media have provided one forum to reconstitute such opportunities for conversation and knowledge exchange. As with any other form of media, the social and digital media can be used for a variety of purposes, including highly reactionary ones. But the left has often shown itself to be suspicious of social and digital media as a mode of political engagement and this has meant underestimating its potentialities, or concentrating exclusively (in a reaction to the techno-determinists and techno-utopians) on the way the political economy of the internet for example is dominated by corporations (Dean 2009).

Gramsci’s argument that everyone is an intellectual but that only some people have the social function of being intellectuals is relevant here. We are arguing that the digital and social media enormously expands the range of people who can assume the social function of being an intellectual. The genre of citizen journalism has been enriched by an influx of counter-hegemonic intellectuals who do not respect the narrow norms and rules of political discourse. To take one random example, Rachel Swindon has been micro-blogging on her Twitter account exposing Conservative MPs who voted to cut benefits while spending thousands of pounds of public money on their expenses claims.  Interestingly this was a story in the dominant media back in 2009. But what Swindon has done is firstly pursue the story consistently over time, demonstrating that little has changed, whereas the dominant media tend to move on and have largely left the issue behind. Secondly, she has linked the on-going issue of MP’s expenses to the brutal cuts in benefits under austerity politics. By contrast the dominant news media keep such issues separate, thus failing to make the connections that reveal the class dynamics of the social totality. On the back of this successful campaign (she has more than forty-four thousand Twitter followers at the time of writing) Swindon has launched a blog declaring that the British media are failing to hold the Conservative government to account. Subscription models from readers/supporters often provide some financial support for this kind of citizen journalism.

Conclusion

Praxis is the integration of theoretical activities that have been cut off from the widest possible social base and restricted to elite demographics and narrow circles of action and knowledge. This is why Marx, Engels and Gramsci called for philosophy, the most elite but also most highly developed system of thought, to be brought back into contact with not ‘reality’ (since philosophy is hardly unreal) but the reality of the lives of the majority. Education – in the broadest sense and not just in formal institutions – is therefore a crucial part of developing praxis. Praxis means not only linking theory and practice, as it is typically defined, but democratising who gets to have access to those frameworks, perspectives and intellectual resources that provide the basis of critical thought and critical action.

The system-integrated intellectuals take different forms: the traditional intellectuals, remote from the immediate political or economic needs of capitalism, have always been on hand to provide spiritual, artistic, philosophical or other ideals that have provided important resources for the bourgeoisie in the ideological struggle. The organic intellectuals – those elites within the intellectual elite - who link the economic interests of the capitalist class with the broader strategic political and cultural goals of the class, fight the ideological struggle in the more immediate, day-to-day battle over the direction of social life. The massed ranks of the technocratic intellectuals follow their lead in the myriad institutions of modern society. It is from this dense bloc of integration that the middle class counter-hegemonic intellectual must emerge. Radical social change will need the critical leverage and resources within existing public opinion formation which intellectuals from the middle class already have. The contradiction between their access to the most sophisticated intellectual culture and the absurdity and irrationality of capitalism has often thrown them into conflict with it. But counter-posing rationality against the evident waste and crisis tendencies of capitalism does not break down the privileged superiority of the intellectuals.

Intellectuals from the middle class can only play a truly counter-hegemonic role if they are sufficiently and critically self-reflexive about the class divisions and competitive culture from which they have emerged. Their educational privilege “creates a bond of solidarity which attaches him [sic] to his class, and still more attaches his class to him” (Benjamin 1998, 102). Even the ‘proletarianisation’ of the intellectual (real or imagined) does not alter this instinctive “bond of solidarity”. Benjamin’s call for intellectuals to change the production relations within which they work, to find ways of democratising the apparatus, to create collaborators and co-producers from their audience, must fight against the constant tendency of the broader social relations to shore up privilege and expertise (through cultural capital for example). The paradoxical task of the middle class counter-hegemonic intellectual is that they must aim to abolish their own conditions of existence, that is the class privilege from which they have emerged. Like withering the state, this has proved difficult to do, although there have been inspiring examples that provide pointers in the right direction.

The democratisation of the function of intellectuality requires then the development of organic counter-hegemonic intellectuals from the working class itself, without which the middle-class intellectual cannot forge an organic relationship to any class but their own. The danger for organic intellectuals of the working class is that they become assimilated within the status quo leaving behind their own class and taking on the hegemonic precepts of the class in which they find themselves but in which they are heavily outnumbered. The institutions, organisations and workplaces which once would have fostered and nurtured working class organic intellectuals no longer exist or have been neutralised. This means that the possibility of organising around the demands of working class life – one of the functions of the counter hegemonic intellectual- is severely limited.  As the neoliberal state privatises what once were accepted as public rights, the spaces for the counter hegemonic intellectual become severely restricted, particularly for those who wish to challenge the universalisation of middle class competitive individualism. The choices for the working class counter hegemonic intellectual appear in our contemporary moment to be stark: incorporation into the traditional hegemonic institutions that reinforce the status quo –or an enforced, politically convenient marginalisation in which all conversations around class that actually include the working class are ignored. We have discussed how the digital media potentially and also in practice, have played a role in re-opening up civic-political spaces that have been closed down elsewhere. Of course it is not enough. Of course digital media openings for organic intellectuals in general must be linked with real political action, which must in turn be linked to re-enfranchising politically, socially and culturally, the working class.  The social order does not want the evaluation to be evaluated from the interests and perspectives of the working class. Which is why democratising the function of the intellectual is so hard and so necessary.

Notes

1. Brand was accused of sexism by some high profile commentators. The delight with which they leapt onto his remarks about his ‘love of a good women’ curing him of sexism suggested a certain keenness to find something to attack him on and deflect away from the other unequal power relations he was drawing attention to. In fact Brand showed a good deal more reflexivity about his own sexism than his critics did of their own class privilege. Brand has more recently adopted less explicitly political positions on the Trews, his You Tube news channel.

2. See https://www.youtube.com/user/russellbrand.

3. We do not agree with the argument that voluntary cultural labour for online digital dissemination constitutes ‘exploitation’ in the Marxist sense. Such labour produces no value directly (no ratio between investment and surplus extraction). Even when advertising makes use of this content, this is a re-distribution of value produced elsewhere by the workers who produce the goods that advertisers sell on behalf of their clients. Labour that chooses to produce what it wants, when it wants and without any direct economic compulsion, can in no way be described as ‘value producing’. If it was, there could be no Marxist theory of capitalist crisis rooted in the tendency for the rate of profit to fall.

References

Benjamin, W. (1998) Understanding Brecht. Trans.  A. Bostock. London: Verso.

Boggs, C. (1993) Intellectuals and the Crisis of Modernity. New York:  State University of New York Press.

Chomsky, N (1967) A Special Supplement: The Responsibility of Intellectuals. New York Review of Books. February 23.http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1967/02/23/a-special-supplement-the-responsibility-of-intelle/

Dean, J. (2009) Democracy and other neoliberal fantasies, communicative capitalism and left politics. Durham NC: Duke University Press.

El-Gingihy, Y. (2014) ‘Russell Brand vs the bloody liberal majority’, New Internationalist,https://newint.org/blog/2014/10/28/russell-brand-liberal-majority/#comments

Enzensberger, H.M. (1982) Critical Essays. New York: Continuum.

Fisher, M. (2013) Exiting the Vampire Castle. The North Star.

Available at: http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=11299

Gramsci, A. (1967) The Modern Prince and other writings. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Gramsci, A. (1988) A Gramsci Reader. Forgacs D (ed) London:  Lawrence and Wishart.

Gramsci, A. (1998) Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Hoare Q and Nowell-Smith G (eds) London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Habermas, J. (1978)  Knowledge and Human Interests. London: Heinemann.

Hall, S (2012) Theorising Crime and Deviance: A New Perspective. London: Sage.

Hofstadter, R. (1966) Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Mark, K. and Engels, F. (1989) The German Ideology. London: Lawrence Wishart.

Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1985) The Communist Manifesto, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Marx, K. (1977) ‘Preface To A Contribution To The Critique of Political Economy’. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Vol.1. London:  Lawrence and Wishart.

O’Hagan, E. (2014) ‘Russell Brand’s ‘love of a good woman’ is not what feminism needs’, The Guardian, January 17.https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/17/russell-brand-no-more-page-3-feminism?CMP=fb_gu

Reay, D. (2010) Sociology, social class and education. In:  Apple M. Ball S. and Gandin L. The Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Education. London: Routledge.

Reid, J. (2010) ‘Still irresistible, a working-class hero’s finest speech’, The Independent, August 12.http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/still-irresistible-a-working-class-heros-finest-speech-2051285.html

Rose, J. (2001) The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Said, E. (1996) Representations of the Intellectual. London: Vintage.

Schwartz, J. (2013) A Peculiar Blind Spot: Why did Radical Political Theory Ignore the Rampant Rise in Inequality Over The Past Thirty Years? New Political Science 35 (3): 389-402.

Wacquant, L. (2008) Relocating Gentrification: The Working Class, Science and the State in Recent Urban Research. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32 (1): 198-205.

Wayne, M (2016) Red Kant, Aesthetics, Marxism and the Third Critique. London: Bloomsbury.

Wayne, M. and O’Neill, D (2013) The Gentrification of the Left. New Left Project. Available at:http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/the_gentification_of_the_left

About the Authors

Deirdre O’Neill is a working class lecturer and filmmaker. Her forthcoming bookFilm as a Radical Pedagogic Tool explores the way a radical pedagogy of film grounded in the experiences and everyday realities of the working class can provdiea starting point for a critical engagement with and a materialist understanding of how society is organised. She is the co-director (with Mike Wayne) of the feature length documentaryThe Condition of the Working Class (2012) (www.conditionoftheworkingclass.info) and the forthcomingThe Acting Class (www.theactingclass.info).

Mike Wayne is a Professor in Screen Media at Brunel University. He has written widely on the politics and ideology of film, television and the media. He is the co-director (with Deirdre O’Neill) of the feature length documentaryThe Condition of the Working Class (2012) and the forthcomingThe Acting Class. Wayne has written widely on Marxist cultural theory. His most recent book,Red Kant: Aesthetics, Marxism and the Third Critique (2014) is published by Bloomsbury.

Eric Blanc

Eric Blanc is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at New York University. He is the author of the forthcoming monograph, Anti-Colonial Marxism: Oppression & Revolution in the Tsarist Borderlands (Brill Publishers, Historical Materialism Book Series), and has published a series of articles this year for us on the Russian Revolution. Seehere andhere, andhere for his interview of China Miéville on his recent bookOctober.

A critical engagement with the past remains an indispensable instrument for critically confronting the present. Yet 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.

Interestingly, this account of how Lenin ‘re-armed’ the Bolsheviks is one of the few points of agreement shared by Trotskyists, Stalinists, and liberals alike. According to Trotsky’s influential 1924 polemic The Lessons of October, the Bolsheviks under the leadership of Joseph Stalin and Lev Kamenev had been mired in de facto Menshevism before Lenin ‘re-armed’ the party in April to fight for socialist revolution. Since they did not consider Russia to be ripe for this task, Trotsky argued, the ‘Old Bolshevik’ leaders ‘took the position that it was necessary to complete the democratic revolution by putting pressure on the Provisional Government’.^[1] Most academic historians have likewise shared this view.^[2]

The standard Stalinist analysis was strikingly similar, though it placed less emphasis than Trotsky on the extent of the strategic rupture and absolved Stalin of responsibility for the party’s pre-April waverings. The classic Stalinist Short Course history of Bolshevism, for example, condemned the ‘semi-Menshevik’ position of party leaders such as Kamenev in March and affirmed that ‘the Party needed a new orientation to advance boldly and confidently along the new road. … Lenin’s April Theses laid down for the Party a brilliant plan of struggle for the transition from the bourgeois-democratic to the Socialist revolution.’^[3]

Unfortunately, this historiographical consensus is factually inaccurate and has distorted our understanding of Bolshevism in 1917. In this article, I take a fresh look at Bolshevik stances on state power and socialist revolution from April through October. Based on my research in Russian, Latvian, and German primary sources, I show that the available evidence does not confirm the standard ‘re-arming’ account, which has obscured a far more convoluted internal debate and political evolution. We will see that while the Bolsheviks throughout the year hinged their politics on the imminence of international socialist revolution, their orientation within Russia itself remained significantly less socially ambitious. And on several critical issues—including the class leadership of the coming Soviet regime—the Bolsheviks as a whole upheld an open-ended approach up through October. Therewas an important political evolution of the party towards socialist revolution over the course of 1917, but this was uneven, protracted, and was primarily a response to lived developments in the class struggle.

Getting this 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. The ‘rearming’ account has problematically inflated Lenin’s ability to determine Bolshevik policy, thereby minimising the extent to which the organisation evolved collectively and contentiously through the accumulated experience and contributions of its cadres. By greatly oversimplifying the nature of the 1917 debates, moreover, the prevailing historiography has minimised the inherent difficulties and challenges of pursuing effective socialist politics in the face of the necessarily unpredictable dynamics of the class struggle. Contrary to the impression given by the ‘re-arming’ interpretation, revolutionary theory was (and remains) a necessary but insufficient basis for successfully pushing towards anti-capitalist rupture.

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.

Our discussion will begin by charting out the meaning ascribed by the Bolsheviks to the demand for Soviet power and the confoundingly wide array of ways they described the unfolding revolutionary process in Russia. From there we turn to a question on which there was a clear Bolshevik consensus: the world socialist revolution was fast approaching. The subsequent segment will demonstrate that Bolsheviks also generally agreed that while workers’ control was necessary and urgent, capitalist production should not be abolished before the West went socialist. But on the most immediate point relating to socialist revolution—i.e., the political composition of the projected revolutionary government—the hegemonic Bolshevik approach remained algebraic for most of the year. Since so much of this question depended on which other socialist currents would ultimately break with the bourgeoisie, it is unsurprising that the precise class-party composition of Soviet rule remained difficult to predict up through October. We conclude with an overview of the famous late-year events in Petrograd, where the Bolsheviks ultimately came to push for a proletarian-led government due to the obstinate refusal of moderate socialists to support Soviet power.

The Meaning of Soviet Power

Much of the confusion around the impact of Lenin’s intervention within the Bolshevik current in April is that it has been assumed that the internal debates revolved around whether to critically back the bourgeois Provisional Government or to push for a Soviet regime of and for working people. In reality, as Lars Lih has shown in numerous articles, there was no substantial debate on this issue, since the Bolshevik leadership in March 1917 was already openly advocating that a Soviet government replace the Provisional Government.^[4] As such, the party’s political evolution in April was far less of a break than has usually been claimed.

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.^[5] 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.^[6] A different picture emerges when we look at what the Bolsheviks actually said and wrote in 1917. As self-described ‘old Bolshevik’ leader Kalinin argued at the 24-29 April All-Russian Bolshevik conference:

Read our first document during the Revolution, the [27 February] manifesto of our party, and you will see that our picture of the revolution and our tactics did not diverge from the theses of comrade Lenin. Of course, the picture sketched out by comrade Lenin is whole, complete, but its method of thinking is that of an Old Bolshevik, which can cope with the originalities of this revolution. As a ‘conservative’ I confirm that our old Bolshevik method is quite suitable for the present time and I do not see any significant differences between us and comrade Lenin.^[7]

Contrary to what is usually assumed, neither Lenin nor the Bolshevik current in 1917 equated Soviet power as such withworkers’ power. The Soviets (councils) represented a segment of the population much larger than just the working class. As Lenin noted in April: ‘in these Soviets, as it happens, it is the peasants, the soldiers, i.e., petty bourgeoisie, who preponderate.’^[8] Similarly, Karl Radek explained in September that the ‘transformation of the Workers' Delegates Council [of 1905] into the Workers' and Soldiers' Council [in February 1917] thus meant the transformation of a proletarian organ of struggle into an organ of revolutionary democracy, into an organ, therefore, with a predominant—and even artificially proportioned—petty bourgeois majority.’^[9] By June 1917 roughly 37 million people were represented by the councils—only about seven million less than voted in the Constituent Assembly elections in November.^[10] 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.

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.^[11] 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.^[12] 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. In 1917, Lenin’s particular gloss on Soviet power was conspicuously absent not only in the mass agitation of the Bolsheviks, but also in the writings of most other party cadres.

Many Bolsheviks well after April generally continued to see the fight for Soviet power as part of the democratic revolution. Speaking to the Moscow Soviet in the summer, one Bolshevik leader thus argued: ‘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.’^[13]

Without understanding the actual meaning ascribed to Soviet power by Bolsheviks and working people in 1917, it is hard to make sense of party stances and debates throughout the year. Consider, for example, the resolution on Soviet power passed in April by the Bolshevik conference. According to the ‘re-arming’ account, this conference concretised its call for socialist revolution in the demand for a Soviet regime. In reality, the conference declared that any majoritarian representative body could serve as the vehicle for the new revolutionary power. Thus, it called for the party to orient towards ‘the second stage of the revolution—which must transfer all state power to the Sovietsor to other bodies directly expressing the will of the majority of the people (organs of local self-government, the Constituent Assembly, etc.).’^[14]

Soviets and a Constituent Assembly, in other words, would act as instruments of what in 1917 was referred to as the ‘democracy’ or ‘revolutionary democracy’, i.e., the worker-peasant majority. The Bolsheviks, including both Lenin and Trotsky, consistently campaigned for giving power to both Soviets and a Constituent Assembly up through the October Revolution. The significant difference between pre- and post-April Bolshevik approaches was not that the demand for a Constituent Assembly was discarded or minimised, but that Soviet power was less frequently framed as a provisional step towards the latter. Nevertheless, the precise relationship between the two bodies was left undefined, since this clearly would depend on the concrete political-electoral composition of both. In an internal letter to Bolshevik leaders on the eve of the October uprising, Lenin insisted that ‘once power is in the hands of the Soviets’ the success of the Constituent Assembly would be ‘guaranteed.’ The Bolsheviks, he noted, ‘have said so thousands of times and no one has ever attempted to refute it. Everybody has recognised this “combined type” [of state].’^[15] That after 1917 Bolsheviks and moderate socialists alike counterposed democracy to (proletarian) dictatorship, and counterposed democratic republics to Soviet republics, need not to oblige us to overlook how these concepts were employed in the first year of revolution.

Given the aforementioned nature of the demand for Soviet power, it is understandable why there was only one major Bolshevik-affiliated committee in the spring to oppose Lenin’s April call to replace the Provisional Government with a Soviet regime. And even this exception proves the general rule, since this opposition came from Kiev, where the RSDRP committee was headed by former members of G.V. Plekhanov’s ‘party-Menshevik’ current. Led by Georgy Piatakov, the Kiev Committee had in February and March consistently argued that the Russian proletariat’s strategic perspective must be limited to pressuring the bourgeois government to cede to its demands; unlike the Petrograd Bolshevik leadership, the Kiev Committee did not raise the perspective of workers and peasants seizing power to win the democratic revolution. Significantly, the committee’s case against the April Theses—the ‘largest outright opposition to Lenin’s ideas in the country’ as one recent Ukrainian study notes—was premised on the strategy of left Menshevism rather than ‘Old Bolshevism’.^[16]

According to the Kiev Committee, since Russia was not ready for socialist revolution, therefore the proletariat must limit itself to forcing the bourgeoisie in power to cede to its democratic and economic demands. Like the Mensheviks, the Kiev leaders conflated overthrowing the Provisional Government with socialist revolution: ‘The defeat of the government, the socialist revolution, is impossible because the economic prerequisites do not exist for this.’^[17] But this internal opposition proved to be rather short lived. At the 15-17 April regional Bolshevik meeting in Kiev, after an extensive debate on the April Theses, the vast majority of the participants decided to reject the line of their local leaders; bowing to the popular sentiment, Piatakov and the rest of the Kiev leadership dropped its opposition to the fight for Soviet power.

April marked a moment of political evolution rather than strategic rupture for Bolshevism. Though substantial political opposition like that seen in Kiev was rare, the discussions in April played an important role empirewide in politically cohering the Bolsheviks and undercutting their early year vacillations. Sharp attacks on the Provisional Government were stepped up after the April conference. Local Bolshevik militants across the empire began for the first time to consistently foreground the call for a Soviet regime, which was henceforth less often framed as a temporary power. The need to clearly demarcate themselves from the conciliatory socialists also became more widely accepted.

How much of this evolution was due to Lenin’s impact or to the rapidly changing political context is difficult to measure precisely. In March, the Provisional Government had not yet announced any major measures openly in contradiction with the popular demands for change. Early Bolshevik vacillations generally reflected an adaptation to the post-February euphoria—and this mood in Russia didn’t last more than a month. April was marked by a massive outcry from workers in response to the revelation that the government planned to continue the war ‘until victory’. The soon-to-be well-known slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’ was raised by protestors for the first time in the April demonstrations. And whereas the Soviet leadership had initially fought in practice to push the Provisional Government forward, from early April onwards it increasingly focused on propping up the bourgeois regime and dampening popular militancy—an orientation culminating in the moderate socialist entry into the Provisional Government in early May. In the midst of an unprecedented proletarian upsurge against the Provisional Government and a sharp shift to the right by the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and Mensheviks, it is not surprising that many Bolsheviks across the empire took a more militant and independent stand. And as the convocation of a Constituent Assembly continued to be pushed by the government into the indefinite horizon, the authority and permanency of the Soviets in the eyes of workers were correspondingly heightened. Particularly given the absence of any existing national parliament, the Soviets became the dominant democratic expression of working people, into which they increasingly invested their participation and aspirations.

Across Russia from late April onwards, the Bolsheviks churned out leaflet after leaflet, and made speech after speech, reaffirming the same simple message: to satisfy the demands of the people, workers and their allies must break with the bourgeoisie and take all power into their hands. In other words, to defend and deepen the revolution required class struggle not class collaboration. ‘Our programme is the struggle with the bourgeoisie,’ explained one Bolshevik rank-and-file militant.^[18] In June, Armenian Bolshevik agitators in the army declared that the only way to win the masses’ demands was through ‘overthrowing the bourgeois Provisional Government and creating a real People's Government’.^[19]

Throughout 1917 it was almost always the moderate socialists (and the liberals), rather than the Bolsheviks, who framed the sole options for Russian development as capitalist democracy or socialism. The Mensheviks’ argument, repeated incessantly across the empire, was the following: Socialism is off the table, because peasants are a majority and because workers are insufficiently organised and conscious. Therefore, an extensive period of bourgeois democratic rule and capitalist development is needed during which the proletariat can become sufficiently educated and organised to achieve its final goal. In the interim, socialists must not push for a non-bourgeois government, lest they scare off the liberals and pave the way for counter-revolution.

Rather than engaging with Lenin or the Bolsheviks’ actual arguments, Menshevik polemicists generally accused the Bolshevik leader and his current of advocating the clearly utopian adventure of immediate socialist revolution. Upon Lenin’s return in April, the Petrograd Menshevik newspaper Rabochaia Gazeta thus derided the promises of ‘full and immediate economic liberation’ made by the ‘Leninists’. The title of paper’s April 9 anti-Bolshevik polemic speaks for itself: ‘The Revival of Anarchism and Maximalism.’^[20]

In response to such claims, Latvian Bolshevik leader Pēteris Stučka posited that erecting such a rigid dichotomy between bourgeois and socialist revolution was essential for justifying their refusal to support the demand for Soviet power.^[21] Along these lines, Trotsky similarly noted that the Mensheviks in February had invoked the bourgeois nature of the revolution to justify their refusal to take power; then in May they raised this same point to justify participation in a coalition government. Trotsky concluded that these invocations were ‘purely practical’ measures ‘to preserve the privileges of the bourgeoisie, and to assign to it in the government a role, to which it is by no means entitled by the alignment of political groups within the country.’^[22]

The Bolsheviks and other radicals generally refused to enter into this debate within the analytical framework of the moderate socialists. Bolshevik cadres repeatedly rejected the accusations that they were trying to ‘introduce socialism’ as an inaccurate straw-man argument that deflected attention from the real political alternative: collaboration or rupture with the bourgeoisie.^[23] Instead of making a case for a Russian socialist revolution, they insisted that while socialism would have to be built internationally, it was both possible and necessary in Russia to break with the native and imperialist capitalists. Even if one believed that the revolution was bourgeois in nature, they argued, it didn’t follow that this obliged the establishment of a bourgeois government. Not only would such a regime be incapable of achieving the central bourgeois-democratic goals (agrarian reform, a Constituent Assembly, etc.), but it would also be necessarily anti-democratic since most people in Russia were peasants or workers.^[24]

 Space reasons obviously preclude recounting the specific form that the October Revolution took in each city and region of the empire. For all the tactical and political differences that local contexts imposed, there was nevertheless a common underlying content to the late 1917 struggle for Soviet power across imperial Russia. The shared goal was a clean political break with the bourgeoisie to implement the urgent demands of working people. In the immediate aftermath of the October uprising, for instance, the declaration of the Baku Bolshevik committee made the following case for Soviet power: ‘Either revolution or counter-revolution. Either the power of the bourgeoisie or the power of the Soviets. … Down with the bourgeois coalition government! Long live the Great Russian Revolution! Long live the heroic proletariat and the garrison of Petersburg! Long live the power of the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants’ deputies!’^[25]

The October Revolution did break with the native and international bourgeoisie and implement the core aspirations for which working people had fought throughout the year, including Russia’s exit from World War One, land to the peasants, workers’ control of production, and the election of a Constituent Assembly. Unlike the moderate socialists, the Bolsheviks upheld and implemented orthodox Marxism’s longstanding commitment to proletarian hegemony. But, as the following sections will show, it is hardly the case that the Bolsheviks from April onwards put an equals sign between the establishment of a Soviet regime and socialist revolution.

Categorising the Revolution

It has often been overlooked that in 1917 there was no clear Marxist definition of socialist revolution. Nor was there a general agreement on the exact political boundary between a democratic and socialist revolution, or for that matter between a capitalist and socialist society. These conceptual ambiguities—rooted in the difficulties of categorising extremely fluid and hybrid socio-political processes—were very much part of the story of 1917. One manifestation of the reigning theoretical haziness was that both the Bolsheviks’ April conference and the Sixth Congress (26 July-3 August, 1917) decided to postpone the thorny discussion of updating the party programme.

 Marxists of the era generally agreed that there were at least two central components to a socialist revolution. The first related to the means of production: some significant inroads into capitalist property would have to take place, leading towards the full socialisation of production. But how much control and/or ownership would be seized immediately was undefined. The fact that since 1905 the conception of democratic revolution articulated by Karl Kautsky and other revolutionary social democrats had projected the nationalisations of some major industries further muddied the theoretical waters.

The second connotation related to social class and the government: unlike a democratic revolution, a socialist revolution would be exclusively (or perhaps primarily) the act of the urban and rural working class, culminating in its seizure of state power. Much of the uncertainty of how to categorise the revolution in Russia revolved around the expectation that it would also be the product of a non-proletarian class (the peasantry) and would likely not result in an exclusively working-class government.

In light of these conceptual grey areas, it is not surprising that Bolshevik political stances and debates generally concentrated on concrete political and economic questions—different categories to describe the revolution were invoked in these debates, but they did not constitute their analytical starting point. In other words, the evolving Bolshevik meta-categorisations of the revolution tended to nebulously reflect much more substantial political positions and discussions.

In February and March, the revolution had been described primarily as democratic or bourgeois-democratic. Such designations continued well past April. Of the many examples that could be cited, at a late July meeting of Latvia’s main Soviet, one Bolshevik declared that since the upheaval across Russia was taking place in an era when the world capitalist system was ripe for overthrow, therefore ‘in these circumstances, the Russian revolution does not have the character of what we call a bourgeois revolution—rather, it is distinct: a democratic revolution.’^[26] Other top Bolshevik leaders continued to use this term through the Summer.^[27] Even after the October Revolution, one can find numerous of examples of Bolshevik cadres arguing that the revolution underway was democratic rather than socialist.^[28]

For his part, Lenin argued in April that the ‘main flaw’ in the reasoning of socialists regarding the ‘tasks of the revolutionary proletariat’ was that they put this question ‘in too general a form, as the question of the transition to socialism.’ Instead, he made the case for focusing on ‘concrete steps and measures’ and argued that the establishment of Soviet power would begin a novel ‘transitional’ social period.^[29] This conception that Russia was undergoing an exceptional historical process with as-yet undetermined possibilities for radical social transformation was widespread among Bolshevik cadres. During the April discussion and throughout the year, various Bolsheviks positively invoked Kautsky’s influential 1906 argument that the Russian Revolution was a unique project situated on the border of democratic and socialist revolution.^[30] In this context, it merits mention that Trotsky had argued as early as 1906 that ‘the issue, of course, is not what to call our revolution—whether it is bourgeois or socialist’ and that ‘under whatever political banner the proletariat has come to power, it will be obliged to take the path of socialist policy.’^[31]

From the Summer onwards, Bolsheviks increasingly came to describe the revolution simply by the class forces involved: i.e., workers and peasants (including the soldiers). The declaration announcing the Provisional Government’s overthrow in Petrograd thus typically concluded: ‘Long live the revolution of workers, soldiers and peasants!’^[32] Analogous formulations were the norm across the empire.^[33]

In Bolshevik discourse up through (and usually well past October) invocations of socialist revolution almost always related to the approaching social overturn in the West and/or the world revolution. Categorising the seizure of power by working people in Russia as a socialist revolution was extremely uncommon (and completely absent from the April discussions and resolutions in Petrograd and beyond). In fact, top Bolshevik leaders – including Lenin in April – explicitly rejected the claims that they were calling for socialist revolution inside of Russia.^[34]

A partial exception took place in the immediate aftermath of the July Days, when a wing of the Bolshevik leadership dropped the slogan ‘All Power to Soviets’, having been won to Lenin’s argument that the SRs and Mensheviks had irrevocably capitulated to the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie and that the existing Soviets could no longer become organs of revolutionary power. At the Petrograd party conference and again at the Sixth party congress Stalin described the forthcoming Russian Revolution as a socialist revolution, the first such explicit use of the term by a Bolshevik leader that I have found in 1917.^[35] But other cadres such as V. Volodarsky sharply rejected this innovation: ‘This revolution is a transition to a socialist revolution, but it is not a socialist revolution, in which we lose our allies and fight alone. Between us and Western Europe there is a big difference. We have more than a bourgeois revolution, but it is not a socialist revolution.’ Other cadres similarly insisted that Stalin’s case marked a break with the more modest stance taken by the April conference. Arguing against Stalin, future Left Opposition leader Y.A. Preobrazhensky insisted that successful socialist transformation in Russia required Western workers’ rule and he rejected Stalin’s sharp counterposition of socialist and bourgeois revolution. This method, he argued, was undialectical and had more to do with Menshevism than Bolshevism. Ultimately the Sixth Congress open-endedly resolved that the events were leading to ‘an increase in the elements of the proletarian revolution’.^[36] Furthermore (for reasons discussed below) even this compromise formulation, and the line of the Sixth Congress to which it was linked, was ignored by the party committees.

In virtually all Bolshevik internal resolutions, literature, and agitation leading up to the October Revolution—and issued by the 25-26 October All-Russian Second Soviet Congress—references to socialist revolution relate only to the international process.^[37] It is true that in Lenin’s essay Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?—published in the party’s theoretical magazine eight days before the start of the October Revolution—he in passing described the forthcoming upheaval in Russia as a socialist revolution.^[38] But particularly before the dramatic events of 25-26 October, there is little evidence to suggest that this conception was widely shared within the Bolshevik party or among the workers that supported it. To quote David Mandel: ‘October was first and foremost an act of defence of the actual and promised achievements of February in conditions where society had split into two irreconcilably hostile camps. And although October was seen as opening the way to socialism, all the measures taken in October and the following months were seen either as completing the democratic revolution or as fundamentally defensive actions aimed at preserving the revolution in the new circumstances.’^[39] Though various top Bolshevik cadres began to explicitly identify Russia’s revolution as socialist following the October uprising—particularly during the debates on incorporating SR-Mensheviks into the government, signing a separate peace with Germany, and regarding the Constituent Assembly—only in early 1918 did this formulation generally become widely used in the party and government.^[40]

The International Socialist Revolution and Workers’ Control

One of the key complicating factors in categorising the revolution was that by 1917 all Bolsheviks and internationalist Marxists saw socialist revolution as first and foremost a worldwide phenomenon. Thus the Russian Revolution could be treated as the spark for and a constituent componentof the international socialist revolution even if the process within Russia itself was still considered to be primarily or exclusively democratic. Indeed, this had become the hegemonic stance among the Bolsheviks and revolutionary socialists across the empire from at least 1914 onwards. Affirming this approach at the April conference, Bagdatev argued that fully carrying out the party’s minimum programme was ‘logically impossible’ without the socialist revolution in Western Europe that would be sparked by the Soviet conquest of power in Russia.^[41] Similarly, Latvian Bolshevik leader Fricis Roziņš wrote in July: ‘Peace and freedom can only be won by the proletarian revolution. The bourgeois revolution in Russia must initiate the proletarian revolution in all capitalist countries. From this theoretical understanding follows all [the internationalists’] practical activities.’^[42]

The importance of the fact that the Russian Revolution had erupted in the context of World War One cannot be overemphasised. On the one hand, the catastrophe of the war led all revolutionary Marxists internationally to confidently predict impending socialist explosions in the West—by 1917 this was seen as a matter of weeks and months, not years. Moreover, since a serious fight for peace would put Russia on a collision course with foreign imperialism, the majority view among radicals throughout the entire year was that a successful revolution in Russia would be crushed by foreign powers if it did not succeed in spreading abroad.

 As Lenin argued in April: ‘We are now tied up with all the other countries, and are unable to disentangle ourselves—the proletariat will either break free as a whole or it will be crushed.’^[43] The Bolsheviks’ main rejoinder to Menshevik polemics on the absence of objective conditions for socialism within Russia was to insist on the actuality of world revolution. Stučka declared that the revolution in Russia would only be won when the proletariat in the West ‘raised the Red Flag’ because otherwise the Soviet government would fall under the blows of global capitalism.^[44]

Very much contrary to his later advocacy of ‘socialism in one country’, Stalin in 1917 similarly affirmed that the ‘Russian revolution is not something isolated. It is vitally bound up with the revolutionary movement in the West … only in alliance with the workers of the West, only by shaking the foundations of capitalism in the West, can they [workers and soldiers] count on the triumph of the revolution in Russia!’^[45] Like Trotsky, he explicitly argued that without the support of revolutions abroad, not only socialist transformation but even the basic survival of the Russian Revolution would be impossible.^[46]

The centrality of the imminent worldwide anti-capitalist conflagration was an ever-present aspect of Bolshevik agitation and propaganda in 1917. Over and over, the party press insisted that the fate of the Russian Revolution depended on the international class struggle. Party literature thus consistently seized upon and highlighted any instance of a rise in worker and anti-war struggle abroad. This wager on world revolution was affirmed on the eve, during, and following the October Revolution. Lenin later noted that not a single Bolshevik in October 1917 would have believed that a Soviet regime in Russia could have survived three years without the spread of revolution abroad: ‘when we began working for our cause we counted exclusively on the world revolution.’^[47]

This stance constituted one of the core strategic difference between moderate and radical socialists across the empire. While the Bolsheviks and their allies wagered their push for a seizure of power on the ability of workers abroad to do the same, the moderates justified their conciliationism by affirming that that Western revolution was not on the immediate agenda and that it would thus be foolhardy to premise a political project in Russia on expectations for its extension abroad. Revolution in their eyes was primarily a process that took place within discrete nations, each of which had to have fully ‘mature’ conditions before socialist revolution would be possible.

In hindsight, it might appear as if the moderates were proven right by the survival of capitalism outside Russia. But such an analysis obscures the fact there was a post-1917 international revolution and that its defeat was in large part due to the class-collaborationism of the conciliatory socialists in Russia and abroad. As such, moderate socialist scepticism regarding worldwide anti-capitalist upheaval, far from being a neutral analysis, was a political intervention and to a significant degree a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Just as on international revolution, there was a general Bolshevik consensus up through at least October regarding workers’ control and the expropriation of capitalist property. Put simply, the Bolsheviks were in favour of the former but not the latter (until revolution in the West). Even Lenin’s talk of ‘steps towards socialism’ in April did not include the partial or complete expropriation of capitalist industry. Lenin posited that ‘we cannot be for “introducing” socialism—this would be the height of absurdity’ since ‘the majority of the population in Russia are peasants, small farmers who can have no idea of socialism’.^[48] As such, Bagdatev agreed with the specific planks proposed by Lenin, but argued that these were fully within the framework of the party’s minimum programme.^[49]

The factory committee movement for workers’ control likewise did not aim to socialise capitalist industry. Disputing bourgeois ownership or administration of the workplace was not the goal—indeed, the word kontrol in Russia actually translates better as supervision or checking. Workers’ control for most of 1917 was a largely defensive measure that consisted of monitoring the actions of the employers. The goal was to ensure that the bosses respected the rights of employees and, above all, that they did not continue to dislocate and sabotage production. In his classic study, S.A. Smith notes that ‘the policy of workers' control over production was first and foremost an attempt by factory committees to stem the tide of industrial chaos.’^[50] Anarchists and SR-Maximalists called for the immediate seizure of industry and the complete proletarian management of the factories, but this stance was generally rejected by the committees (as well as the Bolsheviks) throughout 1917. Workers’ control was analogous to the ‘dual power’ structure of government envisioned by the Mensheviks: though they did not seek full power for themselves, workers demanded partial authority to pressure the bourgeoisie in the right direction.

The push for the Bolsheviks to take a positive approach towards the factory committees and workers’ control came not from Lenin, but from rank-and-file workers and party labour militants.^[51] As Bolshevik labour leader Vladimir Milyutin noted to the Sixth Congress, the party had ‘borrowed’ the demands for workers’ control ‘from the experience of self-activity carried out on the ground’.^[52] Like in the labour movement generally, the hegemonic stance among Bolsheviks was that the possibility for workers’ control (in conjunction with Soviet state control) to be expanded toward full ownership and management of industry depended on the spread of revolution internationally. One Bolshevik leader explained to the June factory committee conference that ‘no one knows how [the] revolution will end up: at the least, in the deprivation of capital of a part of its rights; at the most, who will say that from a Russian revolution it will not become a world revolution?’^[53] Nevertheless, it was clear to all that even the relatively limited workers’ control that prevailed up through October pointed in a different direction than the normal functioning of capitalism.

Though the employers had grudgingly acquiesced to workers’ control in the spring, from early September onwards they led an aggressive campaign against the factory committees with the goal of regaining full control of their enterprises. In a context marked by the rapid dislocation of industry and a capitalist offensive against the committees, workplaces across the empire were the sites of bitter battles for authority throughout the Fall. Indeed, the mutual intransigence of workers and bosses pushed the workplace struggle further and faster than even most Bolshevik leaders, including Lenin, had desired.

The October Revolution codified workers’ control but it did not nationalise industry. Indeed, Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership for months after October sought to reach some sort of working arrangement with the owners of industry. Nevertheless, as Trotsky had predicted in 1906, upon leading workers to power the Bolsheviks were compelled to go much further than they had initially planned. Capitalist economic sabotage and political resistance, a wave of workers’ wildcat expropriations, and the dynamics of civil war swept the party into nationalising all major industries in the second half of 1918. Though there was likely no other viable option in the given context, this wave of Soviet nationalisations deepened the catastrophic collapse of production and played a central role in the massive growth of a privileged state bureaucracy.^[54]

The Class Leadership of Soviet Power

Whereas there was little internal Bolshevik discord in 1917 regarding world revolution and workers’ control, the question of the party/class leadership of Soviet government was far more contentious. And ultimately it was this question that was decisive for the course of the revolution and for practical party politics. Though my preceding analysis has overlapped in important respects with the pioneering work of Lars Lih, in my view his stress on the continuity of Bolshevism in 1917 has led him to minimise the importance of this debate.

 Ever since 1905 the Bolsheviks had insisted on the need for a Soviet government of workers and peasants, without specifying which class (and its corresponding party) should be hegemonic in such a power. The crucial thing to note about the Bolshevik call for a ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’ was that it referred to the general class content of a revolutionary state power without specifying the weight of the working class and its political representatives inside of it. Crucially, this meant that Bolshevik strategy could be concretised in a number of different directions. In contrast, Trotsky argued that the proletariathad to be the hegemonic current within any government capable of leading the democratic revolution to victory. Trotsky justifiably argued that his position regarding this issue––‘who is to wield the hegemony in the government itself, and through it in the country?’––was one of the most fundamental tenets of the strategy of permanent revolution.^[55]

From 1905 onwards, Bolsheviks at different times projected distinct concrete governmental visions for the democratic revolution. It is generally overlooked that these sometimes included support for a form of proletarian state hegemony virtually identical to that of Trotsky.^[56] At other times, however, the Bolsheviks projected that the workers’ party could act as an equal (or even minority) partner in a government with ‘petty-bourgeois’ revolutionary democrats (e.g. the SRs and Trudoviks).^[57]

For most of 1917, the Bolsheviks upheld this open-ended approach regarding whether (proletarian) Bolshevik governmental leadership would prove to be necessary for the victory of the democratic revolution or whether the (petty-bourgeois) moderate socialists––Mensheviks and SRs—could be compelled to break with the bourgeoisie. The April debates did not lead the Bolshevik current as a whole to adopt Trotsky’s longstanding view that a viable workers’ and peasants’ regime required proletarian hegemony in the state. On this question the April conference’s central message was that a cross-class Soviet government could and should be established through the uncompromising promotion of the ‘proletarian line’ (i.e. for a break with the bourgeoisie) within the Soviets.^[58] Though a few formulations in the April resolutions written by Lenin vaguely pointed in the direction of proletarian state leadership as a necessary next step, the precise class-political leadership of the projected Soviet government was generally left unspecified.

Underlying the ambiguities of the April resolutions was the fact that a wide range of different views had been articulated during the conference. Lenin’s stance differed in a substantial way from that articulated most clearly by Kamenev. According to Lenin, it was now anachronistic to speak only of a ‘revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’ since this dictatorship had been unexpectedly realised in a Soviet whose petty-bourgeois leaders had handed power over to the big bourgeoisie. He concluded that a ‘new and different task now faces us: to effect a split within this dictatorship’ between the ‘proletarian’ elements and the ‘petty-bourgeois’ elements (Right Menshevik and SR leaders) committed to supporting the bourgeoisie.^[59] Reflecting this analysis, Lenin projected that the main allies of workers in class struggle and in the future state power would be poor peasants and agricultural labourers, rather than the peasantry as a whole.

This stance pointed in the direction of proletarian hegemony in revolutionary government, a form of power that Lenin tended throughout 1917 to describe as a government of workers and poor peasants. Lenin’s framing of the establishment of Soviet power as a ‘step towards socialism’ likewise had strong connotations of working-class hegemony. It is not entirely surprising that a few Bolsheviks and the overwhelming majority of Mensheviks saw Lenin’s stance as equivalent to socialist revolution. But it is crucial to note that Lenin rejected this label and affirmed that it was ‘quite possible’ that the petty-bourgeoisie and its representatives en toto might still break from the bourgeoisie and take state power together with the proletariat. He concluded that ‘if this is still possible, then there is one, and only one, way towards it, namely, an immediate, resolute, and irrevocable separation of the proletarian Communist elements from the petty-bourgeois elements.’^[60]

Lenin’s party critics generally remained more hopeful in the potential for the entire petty-bourgeoisie and its political representatives to break with the capitalists. Kamenev declared that ‘a clash of the bourgeoisie with the entire revolutionary democracy is inevitable’—given this impending split from the capitalists it was therefore necessary to ‘build all of our tactics to not break the bloc’ between the proletariat and the petty-bourgeoisie.^[61] At the April conference Bagdatev argued that the essence of the party critics’ disagreements with Lenin was that they did not think that winning the Soviet to the stance of the Bolsheviks was a precondition for its assumption of power.^[62]

Throughout the year, the defining attribute of Bolshevik moderates was that they were the most consistently oriented towards winning the SRs and Mensheviks to jointly form a broad multi-party socialist government. There were compelling reasons to orient in this direction. Since the working class was a minority in Russia, a politically broad Soviet government seemed to offer the best possible prospects for cementing a worker-peasant alliance and a solidly majoritarian social base against the bourgeoisie. The Bolsheviks lacked strong rural support and rural class differentiation (apart from Latvia) was far less prevalent than Lenin claimed in April. The approach of Bolshevik moderates, in other words, differed considerably from the Mensheviks and it should not be lightly dismissed as doctrinairism or reformism.

These distinct Bolshevik expectations coexisted well past April. Given the ambiguities of the April party discussions, and the fact that Lenin himself did not deny the potential for a SR-Menshevik rupture with the liberals, the Bolsheviks overwhelmingly continued to conceive of and agitate for Soviet power within a strategic framework open to all eventualities about its potential class leadership. Neither the post-April internal discussions nor the party press indicate that the Bolsheviks were specifically oriented towards establishing Soviet power through first winning a majority for their party. Given the moderate socialist dominance of the Soviets, the slogan ’All Power to the Soviets’ concretely meant the creation of a SR-Menshevik government. Bolshevik agitation for this demand was not primarily a tactical ruse to expose their rivals, but a serious push to form a broad non-capitalist power committed to meeting the demands of working people.

Bolshevism’s post-April stance was not that the SRs and Menshevik leaderships were incapable of breaking with the bourgeoisie, but rather that they could andshould do so immediately. In his July call for the moderate socialists to ‘take power into their own hands’, Baku Bolshevik leader Stepan Shaumian concluded with the following question: ‘Will the ruling socialist parties listen to the imperious voice of life or will they continue to persist in their stupid misunderstanding of the interests of the revolution?’^[63] Bolshevik agitation for Soviet power, he explained, gave expression to ‘the desire of the revolutionary proletariat to tear the petty-bourgeois Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik parties from the influence of [liberal leaders] Milyukov and Guchkov, and from their slavish subordination to Russian and Allied imperialism.’^[64]

 Speaking to the Sixth Congress, Stalin uncontroversially explained the meaning given by the Bolsheviks to their famous watchword: ‘Our slogan was “All power to the Soviets!” and, hence, a united revolutionary front. But the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries feared to break with the bourgeoisie, [they] turned their backs on us.’^[65] The dominant Bolshevik approach was that only time would tell whether the moderate socialists would break. In contrast, Trotsky argued in June that ‘with downfall of the present government will come the downfall of the present leaders of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Delegates. To preserve the authority of the Soviet as a representative of the Revolution, and to secure for it a continuance of its functions as a directive power, is now within the power only of the present minority of the Soviet.’^[66]

The first major break within Bolshevik approaches to Soviet power came not in April, but after the July Days. Following the coalition government’s bloody repression of workers and its subsequent anti-radical offensive, Lenin declared that the SRs and Mensheviks had definitively ‘betrayed the cause of the revolution’ and that it was no longer possible to peacefully push the existing Soviets to take power since these (in his view) had yielded all their authority to the bourgeois dictatorship. The party should drop the call for ‘All Power to the Soviets’ and orient instead towards an armed proletarian uprising against the counter-revolutionary militarist regime. He argued that, unlike in the preceding period, a rupture with the bourgeoisie now absolutely required that the masses ‘turn their backs on the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik parties … after the experience of July 1917, it is the revolutionary proletariat that must independently take over state power. Without that the victory of the revolution is impossible.’ This did not mean that Lenin had abandoned the goal of creating a majoritarian Soviet regime representing both workers and the broad mass of peasants—but, in his view, the path towards this now necessarily passed through the immediate assumption of power by the armed workers.^[67]

Lenin’s sharp insistence that the advance of the revolution absolutely required a proletarian-led government was new, as was his view that power should be taken independently of the existing Soviets and against their SR-Menshevik majorities. Various radical Bolshevik cadres in Petrograd supported this stance, which coincided with a strong sense of the militant proletariat’s isolation from the moderate socialists after the July Days. But on the whole this line proved to be far more disputed in the Bolshevik leadership and ranks than the April Theses.

Since Lenin was in hiding, the new line’s main defender at the party’s Sixth Congress in late July-early September was Stalin, who went further than Lenin himself by arguing that Russia was now ready for a socialist revolution even before it erupted in the West. But top Bolshevik leaders at the Sixth Congress sharply disputed the call for a proletarian seizure of power independent of the Soviets, as well as the related description of the revolution as socialist in nature. Dropping the fight to transform the Soviets into organs of power, in their view, dangerously risked isolating the party and the working class. They insisted that it was premature to write off the current Soviets and the alliance with the petty-bourgeois masses that these bodies represented.^[68]

This revealing discussion has largely been overlooked in the historiography since it contradicts the prevailing misunderstanding of the demand for Soviet power. At the Sixth Congress, it was the Bolshevik moderates who most consistently demanded ‘All Power to the Soviets’ against the line of advocates of socialist revolution (and/or taking power independently of the Soviets). In the end, the Sixth Congress dropped the call for ‘All Power to the Soviets’ and passed a series of compromise resolutions that leaned in the direction of Lenin’s stance while simultaneously reaffirming much of party’s preceding approach.^[69]

It is highly instructive to examine the reaction of the party as a whole to the new line espoused by Lenin and (in more attenuated form) the Sixth Congress. The call to drop the fight for ‘All Power to the Soviets’ was basically ignored across the board; by all accounts, Bolshevik committees continued to raise this demand and to push for the moderate socialists to break with the liberals. This was the case not only in the main provincial and borderland cities, but also in Moscow and Petrograd. ‘At the local level there was widespread refusal to implement a change in policy that ran counter to mass feelings,’ notes Acton. ‘The result was to soften what might have been a deeply damaging blow to the party’s image as the champion of soviet-based government.’^[70]

The defeat of Kornilov at the hands of a broad multi-party resistance in late August radically changed the political situation. Contrary to what Lenin had been insisting for the past month, the anti-Kornilov struggle had demonstrated that the existing Soviets were not obsolete and that the SRs and Mensheviks had not definitively subordinated themselves to the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie. In the wake of this united victory it seemed to many across the political spectrum that the Soviet leadership would finally break with the liberals. From his hideout in Finland, Lenin made yet another abrupt political reversal and now lent his support for the Bolshevik leaderships’ call on the SR-Mensheviks leadership to form a Soviet government. Since his immediate goal remained ‘the dictatorship of the revolutionary proletariat’, Lenin personally argued that the Bolsheviks should not participate in the proposed SR-Menshevik Soviet government.^[71] But the anti-coalition state proposals made by the Bolshevik Central Committee (which now included Trotsky) to the Soviet Executive leadership on 31 August and again for the 14-22 September All-Russia Democratic Conference did not reject this possibility.

In this spirit, the Bolshevik leaders in Petrograd’s City Duma on 1 September declared: ‘Let only the genuine revolutionary democracy take the management of the great revolutionary Petrograd into its hands and we, too, will take our place in its ranks to work intensively and selflessly for the benefit of the capital of the world revolution.’^[72] The leadership’s editorial two weeks later struck a similar note: ‘You want a united front with the Bolsheviks? Then break with the Kerensky government, support the Soviets in their struggle for power, and there will be unity.’^[73] Had this compromise been accepted, a regime resembling Kamenev and co.’s vision of a democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants would have been the result. But the SR-Menshevik leaderships—despite the strong growth of anti-coalition wings within both parties—set up yet another government with the liberals.

Only days after the Bolshevik leadership made their proposed compromise to the moderate socialists, a major new development entered into the political equation: the Bolsheviks for the first time won the leadership of the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets. Soviets across the empire soon followed. Now that the Bolsheviks were the strongest current within these bodies, the demand for Soviet power took on a whole new political content. A Soviet government henceforth likely meant a Bolshevik-led government; in terms of Bolshevik class analysis, it would be a regime in which the proletariat was the hegemonic force.

Had the moderate socialists agreed to accept the legitimacy of such a Bolshevik-led Soviet regime, its broad social base would have represented the vast majority of the population. Most people continued to envision Soviet power as a multi-party regime representing workers, peasants, soldiers, the left intelligentsia and their political representatives. But the continued opposition of the SRs and Mensheviks to Soviet power raised the spectre that a Bolshevik-led Soviet government might be primarily (or exclusively) based on the working class. Left wings in the SR and Mensheviks were growing, but it was unclear where their political allegiances would ultimately fall. In this context, the assumption of power by the Soviets without the agreement of other socialist currents brought with it the potential danger of proletarian isolation and civil war.

In such a context, Lenin’s exhortations—made from mid-September onwards—that the Bolshevik leadership immediately organise an armed uprising to depose the Provisional Government were at first flatly rejected by the rest of the Bolshevik Central Committee. For weeks after the moderates’ initial rebuff of their proposed compromise, Bolshevik cadres nevertheless continued in negotiations and pressure initiatives to find a way to peacefully establish a multi-party working people’s government in agreement with the other socialist currents. This stance resulted not only from Bolshevik leaders’ desire to secure as broad a base as possible for anti-bourgeois rupture, but also from the ongoing pressure from below for the unity of the ‘revolutionary democracy’. In such a context, the political success of the Bolsheviks required that they challenge the moderates for the mantle of unity.

But by October 10, the impasse of negotiations with the moderates, combined with the Kerensky government’s new initiatives to restore order, led the majority of the Central Committee to finally accept Lenin’s argument concerning the necessity of an armed uprising. The party would have to forge ahead towards the establishment of a Soviet regime despite the uncertainty of support from other socialist currents and/or their constituencies. Like Lenin, the party majority now wagered that upon assuming power they would subsequently be able to win over the broad mass of peasants, a dynamic hopefully foreshadowed by the growing Bolshevik-Left SR collaboration.

This did not mean, however, that the Bolshevik leadership agreed with Lenin’s ill-advised push for the party to organise an insurrection weeks before the forthcoming Second All-Russia Soviet Second Congress. Instead, the Bolsheviks under the leadership of Trotsky sought to promote the overthrow of the government through a more cautious and defensive approach that would tie armed actions to legitimacy of the Soviet, its institutions, and its Second Congress. Ultimately, it was the latter method that prevailed, though it would appear that Lenin played an important role in pushing these ongoing military manoeuvres into a more offensive mode a few hours before the Second Congress opened on 25 October.

As is well known, a minority of two in the Bolshevik Central Committee, Kamenev and Zinoviev, voted against the October 10 resolution and proceeded to argue against an armed uprising in the non-Bolshevik press. The essence of their case—which was shared by many Bolshevik party cadres across the empire—was that the proletariat and its party was still too weak and isolated for an armed conquest of power to succeed. Pointing towards the importance of the forthcoming Constituent Assembly, they argued that time was on the side of the workers since (among other things) in the future ‘the position of the petty-bourgeois parties...will not be exactly the same as it is now.’ Pressure from below ‘will put ever greater pressure on them and force them to seek an alliance with the proletarian party against the landowners and capitalists represented by the Kadet Party.’^[74]

In a certain sense, Kamenev and Zinoviev’s opposition to an immediate armed uprising was no different from that which had prevailed among the Bolsheviks before October 10. As the preceding months of debates had demonstrated, there was no obvious answer to the question of if and when attempts to reach an agreement with the moderate socialists should be abandoned. Moreover, in the concrete circumstances of October 1917 there was a very significant tension between the Bolshevik party’s principled insistence on proletarian hegemony in the fight for Soviet power and the desire shared by workers and party militants alike to establish a broadly-based regime of working people. Lenin, Trotsky, the Bolshevik Central Committee had not abandoned the latter goal, but its realisation in practice was now based more on a wager on future developments than on a political certainty.

Perhaps the main criticism to be levelled against Kamenev and Zinoviev is that they failed to make a political turn when conditions warranted it. Though they pointed to real political dilemmas and dangers, their initial opposition to the uprising cannot be reduced to a simple difference in tactics. Their tendency towards treating an alliance with moderate socialists as a precondition for Soviet government threatened to subordinate the Bolsheviks to political forces who themselves remained subordinate to Capital. In this sense, Trotsky was not off the mark in arguing that the minority leadership opposition in October reflected ‘the pressure exerted on the party by bourgeois public opinion at a time when mortal peril was gathering above the heads of bourgeois society.’^[75] This point, however, should not be overstated since despite their early opposition to the initiation of an armed uprising, Kamenev and Zinoviev both ended up playing central roles during the founding of the new Soviet government on 25-26 October – indeed, Kamenev was elected chair of the Soviet Central Executive Committee and Zinoviev wrote multiple leading Bolshevik articles on 25 October and then became editor of Izvestiya, the paper of the Soviet leadership.^[76]That the actual October insurrection had been so defensive, and so tied to Soviet legality, meant that moderate Bolshevik hopes in finding an accord with a large swath of the SRs and Mensheviks had not yet been dashed.

Though the Kamenev-Zinoviev wing leaned on the important strategic aspects of ‘Old Bolshevism’, it makes little sense to reduce this tradition to their wavering. By mid-October the other top Bolshevik leaders had become convinced that the establishment of a proletarian-led Soviet government was necessary and possible despite the opposition of the SRs and Mensheviks and the related threat of Civil War. As we have seen, the party’s algebraic stance on Soviet rule could be developed in different directions. And even had Bolshevism been based on a less open-ended strategy, the party still would have been subjected to intense external political pressures and it would still have had to grapple with the challenge of wagering on the best moment and means to push for power.

The Bolsheviks were the leading current in the armed actions that overthrew the Provisional Government on 25 October, but nobody knew ahead of time whether they would have an absolutely majority or only a large plurality at the Second All-Russia Soviet Congress. As it turned out, the vast majority of delegates supported granting all power to the Soviets, though the Bolsheviks themselves fell just short of having a majority (300 of the 670 delegates). Had they so desired, the non-Bolshevik currents could have exerted considerable influence over the Congress (which was chaired by Kamenev) and the new government. Though Lenin had advocated the establishment of a specifically Bolshevik administration, the Bolshevik delegates unanimously accepted the proposal made in the opening congress session by Martov for the establishment of a broad multi-party socialist power. Yet the potential for creating some form of wide Soviet regime was soon squandered by the walkout of the moderates and the refusal of any other political currents to participate in the newly established government.

The Bolsheviks’ desire to prevent proletarian isolation nevertheless found expression, among other things, in the new government’s immediate implementation of the SR agrarian programme and its incorporation a few weeks later of the Left SRs as minority partners in power. On a local and regional level, the newly established Soviet governments included an even wider array of political currents, namely non-Russian Marxists, SR-Maximalists, anarchists, and revolutionary nationalists. Only in the course of 1918 would these alliances be blown apart by the storms of foreign intervention, civil war, and economic collapse.

Conclusion

Much more could be said about Bolshevik stances on socialist revolution in 1917, but the preceding discussion was hopefully sufficient to have clarified the main lines of development. 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. But it is not historically accurate to claim that the Bolshevik current from April 1917 onwards saw this goal as the revolution’s necessary next stage, nor that it equated the establishment of such a government with socialist revolution.

Ultimately, the tensions and ambiguities in Bolshevik strategy reflected the real social and political contradictions of promoting working-class hegemony in an economically backwards, war-torn, primarily peasant society. The course of events largely vindicated the ‘Old Bolshevik’ stress on the need for a worker-peasant alliance and the centrality of democratic demands. At the same time, the experience of 1917 likewise confirmed Trotsky’s argument that the success of this democratic revolution required proletarian governmental leadership. Events similarly vindicated his contention that the resulting regime would have to attack the foundations of capitalist property relations.

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.

The author would like to thank John Riddell, Todd Chretien, Lars Lih, and Charlie Post for their comments on this article.

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^[1] ‘The Lessons of October’ [1924], Leon Trotsky, in Corney 2016, p. 101.

^[2] Slusser 1987, p. 54.

^[3] Commission of the Central Committee Of The C.P.S.U. (B.) 1939, pp. 183-84.

^[4] Many of Lih’s important pioneering contributions can be found here: https://johnriddell.wordpress.com/category/authors/lars-t-lih/ For my recent accounts of Bolshevism in February and March 1917, see Blanc 2017a and Blanc 2017b.

^[5] For typical Menshevik claims about Lenin’s purported ‘anarchism’, see Rabinowitch 1968, p. 40.

^[6] 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.

^[7] РСДРП (большевиков) 1958a [1917], p. 18.

^[8] ‘Letters on Tactics’ [1917] in Lenin 1964a, p. 48.

^[9] Radek 1917, pp. 3-4.

^[10] Getzler 1992, 30.

^[11] ‘Letters on Tactics’ [1917] in Lenin 1964a, p. 48.

^[12] Smith 2006, p. 134; Anweiler 1974, p. 157-58.

^[13] Cited in Anweiler 1974, p. 171.

^[14] ‘On the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies’ [1917] in Elwood 1974, p. 223. My emphasis.

^[15] ‘Letter to Comrades’ [1917] in Lenin 1964b, p. 200.

^[16] Любовець and Солдатенко 2010, pp. 82, 91.

^[17] Солдатенко 2004, p. 100.

^[18] Cited in Service 1979, p. 45.

^[19] Cited in Маркарян 1985, p. 145.

^[20] Cited in Galili y Garcia 1989, p. 157. Only by way of exception did the Mensheviks engage with the actual stance of their rivals. For instance, in mid-October Menshevik leader D. Kol’tsov argued that there was no ‘third way’ between capitalism and socialism. Marxist theory, he asserted, did not support the conception of a ‘semi-socialist revolution.’ (Cited in Shkliarevsky 1985, p. 330.)

^[21] ‘Demokrātija un kapitālisms’ [1917] in Stučka 1978, p. 203.

^[22] ‘What Next? After the July Days,’ Leon Trotsky [1917], in Lenin and Trotzky 1918, pp. 268-69.

^[23] Шаумян 1958, p. 47.

^[24] ‘What Next? After the July Days,’ Leon Trotsky [1917], in Lenin and Trotzky 1918, pp. 268-71.

^[25] ‘Kо всем рабочим Бакинского района’ [1917] in

Ибрагимова and Искендерсва 1957, p. 179.

^[26] Iskolats 1973, p. 29.

^[27] ‘Политический кризис’ [1917] in Шаумян 1958, p. 22; ‘Новый взрыв революции в Петрограде’ [1917] in Шаумян 1958, p. 27.

^[28] Treijs, R. 1977, p. 38; Raleigh 1986, p. 320.

^[29] ‘Report on the Current Situation April 24 (May 7)’ [1917] in Lenin 1964a, p. 241.

^[30] РСДРП (большевиков) 1958a [1917], pp. 15, 96; РСДРП (большевиков) 1958b [1917], pp. 114, 132.

^[31] ‘Kautsky on the Russian Revolution’ [1906], Leon Trotsky, in Day and Gaido 2009, pp. 574, 578. My emphasis.

^[32] ‘To the Citizens of Russia!’ [1917] in Lenin 1964b, p. 236.

^[33] For one of many such examples, see ‘Kо всем товарищам солдатам Kавказской армии’ [1917] in Шаумян, С. Г. 1958, p. 108.

^[34] ‘Letters on Tactics’ [1917] in Lenin 1964a, p. 52; ‘Речь на заседании бакинского совета рабочих и военных депутатов’ [1917] in Джапаридзе 1958, p. 166.

^[35] ‘Reply to the Discussion’ [1917] in Stalin 1953a, p. 133; ‘Speeches at the Sixth Congress of the R.S.D.L.P.(B.)’ [1917] in Stalin 1953a, p. 185.

^[36] РСДРП (большевиков) 1958b [1917], p. 119, 128, 133, 254.

^[37] See, for example, the documents collected in Бош 1925, Chamberlin 1935, Ибрагимова С. Искендерсва 1957, Elwood 1974, RSDRP Central Committee 1974, Stalin 1953a.

^[38] ‘Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?’ [1917] in Lenin 1964b, p. 105.

^[39] Mandel 1984, p. 80.

^[40] For the invocation of the category of socialist revolution in the post-October internal debates on Soviet power, see RSDRP Central Committee 1974. On the post-October general evolution of Bolshevik categorisations of the revolution, see, for example, the documents collected in Бош 1925, Chamberlin 1935, Ибрагимова С. Искендерсва 1957, Stalin 1953a, Stalin 1953b. Lenin’s descriptions of the October revolution continued to vary after 1917. Sometimes he called it a socialist revolution. (‘Theses on the Question of a Separate Peace’ [1918] in Lenin 1964b, p. 445.) Other times he called it fundamentally bourgeois-democratic. (‘Report of the Central Committee March 18’ [1919] in Lenin 1965, p. 157.)

^[41] РСДРП (большевиков) 1958a [1917], p. 18.

^[42] Roziņš 1965, p. 273.

^[43] ‘Report On The Current Situation’ [1917] in Lenin 1964a, pp. 239-40.

^[44] ‘Revolūcijas Burzmā’ [1917], in Stučka 1978, pp. 226-27.

^[45] ‘Yellow Alliance’ [1917] in Stalin 1953a, pp. 267, 270.

^[46] ‘О политическом положении,’ Пролетарий, 16 August, 1917. Significantly, these arguments were not included in Stalin’s collected works.

^[47] ‘Speech at a Joint Plenum of the Moscow Soviet of Workers’, Peasants’ and Red Army Deputies’ [1920] in Lenin 1966, p. 397.

^[48] ‘Report on the Current Situation’ [1917] in Lenin 1964a, p. 242.

^[49] РСДРП (большевиков) 1958a [1917], p. 91.

^[50] Smith 1983, p. 146.

^[51] Shkliarevsky 1985, pp. 146-50, 190.

^[52] РСДРП (большевиков) 1958b [1917], p. 153.

^[53] Cited in Mandel 1983, p. 153.

^[54] On the nationalisation of industry and the related political issues, see, for example, Chamberlin 1965, Volume 2, pp. 96-116.

^[55] Trotsky 1969 [1906], p. 70. It should be noted that, among others, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Kautsky in this period similarly advocated for Russia a governmental power in which the working class party would be the hegemonic force; neither of these two leaders equated the establishment of such a government with socialist revolution.

^[56] See, for example, РСДРП 1959 [1905], p. 102-3.

^[57] See, for example, Шляпников 1992 [1923], pp. 66, 165.

^[58] ‘On the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies’ [1917] in Elwood 1974, p. 223.

^[59] ‘Letters on Tactics’ [1917] in Lenin 1964a, pp. 44-46.

^[60] Ibid., pp. 46, 51.

^[61] РСДРП (большевиков) 1958a [1917], pp. 81-2.

^[62] РСДРП (большевиков) 1958a [1917], pp. 90-91.

^[63] ‘Новый взрыв революции в Петрограде’ [1917] in Шаумян 1958, p. 28.

^[64] ‘О Кадетском Съезде’ [1917] in Шаумян 1958, p. 61.

^[65] ‘Report on the Political Situation’ [1917] in Stalin 1953a, p. 188.

^[66] ‘The Farce of Dual Power’ [1917], Leon Trotsky, in Lenin and Trotzky 1918, p. 192.

^[67] ‘On Slogans’ [1917] in Lenin pp. 188, 191.

^[68] See, for example, РСДРП (большевиков) 1958b [1917], pp. 114-17.

^[69] For the full Sixth Congress resolutions see РСДРП (большевиков) 1958b [1917], pp. 253-76.

^[70] Acton 1990, pp. 197-98.

^[71] ‘On Compromises’ [1917] in Lenin 1964b, pp. 310-11.

^[72] ‘Declaration by the Bolshevik Group’ [1917] in RSDRP Central Committee 1974, p. 40.

^[73] ‘The Revolutionary Front’ [1917] in Stalin 1953a, p. 326.

^[74] ‘Kamenev’s and Zinoviev’s Opposition to Insurrection’ [1917] in Kowalski 1997, p. 83.

^[75] ‘Our Differences’, Leon Trotsky, in Corney 2016, p. 310.

^[76] For one of the few serious accounts of the late year moderate Bolshevik opposition, see Hedlin 1975.

Michael Bray

Michael Bray is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Southwestern University. His article, “Rearticulating Contemporary Populism: Class, State, and Neoliberal Society” appeared in Historical Materialism 23:3 (2015). His monograph, Powers of the Mind: Mental and Manual Labor in the Political Crisis, is forthcoming from transcript in Fall 2018. He is also working on a manuscript for a second book, The People in Crisis: A Historical-Materialist Theory of Contemporary Populisms.

On August 12^th, in the wake of the racist, murderous violence in Charlottesville, VA, the white, liberal Governor of the state, Terry McAuliffe, steps before the cameras to denounce “white supremacists and Nazis.” “Go home,” McAuliffe tells them, “You are not wanted in this great commonwealth. Shame on you. You pretend you are patriots, but you are anything but a patriot.” Behind him, on the right edge of the screen, the African-American Vice-Mayor of Charlottesville, Wes Bellamy (wearing a “Menace II Supremacy” t-shirt), nods repeatedly and emphatically. But then McAuliffe continues: “You want to talk about patriots, talk about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, who brought our country together.” Bellamy stops nodding immediately, his face resolving itself into blankness. Afterwards, liberals celebrate McAuliffe presenting his speech as a counter-model to Trump’s ambivalent response, which barely masks his sympathy to the “Unite the Right” ralliers (Later, of course, that sympathy will be made plain). No one mentions Bellamy, who, unlike everyone else standing behind McAuliffe, is not invited to speak. The tortured logic of McAuliffe’s assertion that the slave-owning plantocracy of the early Republic is a model for the “patriots” we need to ward off white supremacy today appears invisible to everyone but Bellamy, who is himself more or less invisible.

This tableau is emblematic of the character of racial liberalism today and of the impotence of its response to the resurgence of white nationalism. Like all such political logics (or ideologies), this one holds together not through its internal coherence but, at least in part, through its projection onto an imagined figure to whom the speech is addressed, a “subject supposed to believe,” who provides the needed coherence precisely by believing that it is there (or, rather, by the speaker believing that that subject, which does not exist, believes). McAuliffe’s claim signals as much in its final phrase: Washington and Jefferson “brought our country together.” Who is this us that they bring together today by having brought us together in the past? Who is the subject McAuliffe (described in The New York Times in 1999 as “Mr. Clinton's closest and most loyal Washington friend as well as his tireless money man”) is enjoining? Not one that includes Bellamy, it would seem.

Read in the general context of the liberal response to Trump’s surprise election, the addressee in question is clear enough: it is “the white working class.” One can imagine the implicit thought process that went on in the mind of McAuliffe or of whoever wrote his speech: “we want to invoke some “patriots” here, native Virginians, but nothing too controversial, nothing that might alienate white working people.” In the wake of last November, much has been made of that group’s anger and proclivity for racism. “The mainstream narrative…is that Trump rode a wave of white working-class resentment, mobilizing traditional nonvoters as well as alienated blue-collar Republicans and Democrats.”[1] Breaking the “postracial” spell of Obama’s electoral victories, that resentment, if generally understood to be catalyzed in some manner by political-economic shifts, has also been taken to express intrinsically atavistic, pathological forms of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. Jefferson and Washington the white working class can unite around; even the sanitized version of King, on the other hand, might be too much.

If the “white working class” is held responsible for the fracturing of “postracial” peace, however, I want to argue that this same imaginary figure was central to the imposition of that “peace,” which claimed to settle racial inequalities while leaving unchallenged their structural reproduction. The white working class is not only the imagined addressee of McAuliffe’s speech but of liberal (post)racial discourse in general. Why, after all, has this fixation on the white working class endured, insofar as the working class itself has become increasingly racialized? Why not a concern with the large proportion of African Americans and latino/as (and, for that matter, poor whites) who simply do not vote? Or a concern with the large percentages of wealthy and professional whites who voted for Trump? Or a reckoning with why the professional, postracial left increasingly seems to alienate people of all races, especially youth? Why is the specter ofthe white working class continually invoked? Why are liberal still addressing it? Sketching out the history of racial liberalism that led us to this moment will provide at least part of an answer. As a "subject-supposed-to-inexplicably-and-pathologically-believe" in racist theory, it allows liberals to simultaneously believe themselves to be antiracist, deny their denial of racial history, and do nothing much about the racial structures they help to reproduce. Seeing this connection clarifies both the weakness of liberal responses to the resurgence of white supremacy and why a genuinely anti-racist response to this resurgence must include having done with the trope of the “white working class.”

Racial liberalism and racial pathologies

Today’s liberal postracialism descends in key respects from "racial liberalism," the consolidated form of “official antiracism”[2] in the post-war United States, which responded to the dual pressures of black freedom and anti-colonial struggles in the context of the Cold War. Bearing the marks of its statist allegiances, racial liberalism aspired to nothing less than “a new master theorem of race relations that was interpretively progressive but not socially destabilizing.”[3] A collaborative project of the US state, capital, and university-credentialed knowledge workers, that theorem received its ur-form inAn American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, a large-scale research study funded by the Carnegie Foundation, coordinated and authored by the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, and published in 1944.[4]

In the terms of this theorem, evolving racial justice represented “the gradual realization of the American Creed,” a teleological process in which the U.S. moved ever closer to fully actualizing the values of liberty and equality. It was this intrinsic national trajectory and its dawning realization of racial justice that qualified the United States for the task of “international leadership” in a decolonizing world. “America saving itself becomes savior of the world.”^[5]

The means for this salvation were to be a program of “social engineering,” overseen by the professional-managerial administrators of the state, educational apparatuses, and philanthropic institutions.^[6] Given the naturalness of the American Creed, departures from it had to involve pathological beliefs, attitudes, and prejudices, which, for Myrdal, were primarily identified with “poor and uneducated” whites in “backward” parts of the South. The struggle against it was to be waged by and within individual white souls and the heroes of that pedagogical struggle were to be white liberals. In this way, racial liberalism renewed white privilege by constituting the white liberal American as the most felicitous member of the U.S. nation-state on the grounds of his or her liberal antiracist disposition. Myrdal set the stage for a new, heroic form of liberal whiteness…To be American is to occupy the place of the universal subject – for which whiteness was once the synecdoche—with the authority to intervene into, order, and rationalize whatever such universality entailed.^[7]

To be American is to be a (white) liberal knowledge worker, whose interests are identified with a nationalized “universal” interest: the global hegemony of the U.S. state. Official anti-racism was achieved only by identifying it with that hegemony, “explicitly requir[ing] the victory and extension of the U.S. empire, the motor force of capitalism’s next unequal development.”^[8]

This naturalizing identification of white liberals, capitalist accumulation, the U.S. state, and racial justice identified racist practices as unnatural, productive of pathology. For Myrdal, this meant that the source of white pathology was, in fact, racist treatment of blacks. If the American Creed was intrinsic to all (white) Americans, as he claimed it was, then racist acts produced a form of psychic dissonance that could only be assuaged by “the race dogma”: “The need for race prejudice is, from this point of view, a need for defense on the part of Americans against their own national Creed, against their own most cherished ideals.”[9]  Blacks, as the objects of that treatment were also pathologized but in an even more striking (and stigmatizing) way. Since the “very definition of the ‘Negro race’…is a social and conventional, not a biological concept,”[10] the only politico-cultural existence of that race as a groupis identical with its pathological reaction to white racism. “In practically all its divergences, American Negro culture is not something independent of the general American culture. It is a distorted development, or a pathological condition, of the general American culture.”[11]

These dual pathologies became the central figures of racial liberalism, undercutting its projected Creedal and cultural unity: the becoming-“middle-class” of poor and uneducated whites and the becoming-white of black people. However, these figures were not equivalent, as Naomi Murakawa notes: “For white people, racism was an irrationality, a pollution to the real self. For black people, racism was an injury, a disfigurement of psychological development and therefore constitutive of the real self.” The white working class, thus, was the addressee of liberal racial discourse, meant to be educated by it, summoned back to its “true self”; black people were only its objects. This non-equivalence not only left racial liberalism ambivalent about what, ultimately, was to be done with or to black people to bring them into the American Creed, it also underpinned a “political strategy of compelling reform by making black people seem damaged or potentially violent.”[12] For liberals, this portrayal was initially intended to be a strategy that would compel whites’ self-interest towards deracializing state policy: defending civil rights, addressing poverty, dispensing neutral procedures of criminal justice, would ultimately produce law and order as well. Under pressure from conservatives, it would become the justification for a “race neutral” politics of law and order, surveillance and discipline, that would occlude its ongoing reproduction of racial inequalities and racialized state violence.

The threat of postracialism

In this light, we might say, the origins of postracialism lie in the simultaneous defense of “law and order” and assault on the welfare state that defined the beginnings of the conservative break with Keynesianism and racial liberalism. The translation of racial liberalism into postracialism would, in a sense, require only the denial of racial history altogether: reframing social relations on the schema of rational choices made in competitive markets, removing them from the weight of history and its structures. Divorced from the history of racial injustice, the neoliberal reaction could, by insisting on the nonracial legal and political forms of equality which racial liberalism had legislated, make them work towards racializing effects of a deniable form. Racial liberalism could be stripped of its ambivalence – the guilty sense of history that motivated welfare benefits and affirmative action – by freeing it from history. Racism was not a set of historical structures but, as liberalism had already suggested, an individual pathology. Only where such pathologies had come from was no longer of interest.

Thus, postraciality “committed to erasing any racial categorization or naming by public institutions, while protectingprivate racial arrangements and expression.”^[13] Private expressions are protected by the erasure of the categories by which they could be judged as racist. “Absent racial terms, intentionality no longer has to be denied. It simply can be said never to have crossed my mind.”^[14] If you think the politics of law and order are really about race, then that’s on you. Perhaps you are the racist you accuse me of being? “Those who keep talking about race are the racists.” Meanwhile, elect us and we will go about cleaning up the streets which we all know are crime-infested, the people who we all know are suspicious, irresponsible, lazy, etc., etc. Losing its historical legacy, racism goes viral yet never comes wholly into focus. Loosed from their historical origins in racial injustice, the unequal, structured outcomes of racialization become so much evidence for privatized racisms to present themselves as forms of realism. “I’m not racist, but…”

Those who fall under such suspicion bear the responsibility and pay the cost. If Keynesianism was haunted by the social revolution,^[15] postracialism (or racial neoliberalism) is haunted by the post-colonial revolution, “the threat of race.”^[16] Only, where Keynesianism sought to temper its fear through the economic functions of the state, the provision of a material substratum for consent, racial neoliberalism seeks to make the concrete object of its fear disappear, writing “race” out of public conceivability, extending segregation in neighborhoods and schools without legal codifying it, consigning racialized men to prisons, turning discretely away as racialized women drop off welfare rolls to who knows where, rendering their lives unprotected, expendable. Shorn of publicly relevant history, that fear itself is privatized, naturalized, made to appear “rational” as a “choice” in the self-maximizing split second in which one glimpses a woman on the ground reaching for her cell phone or a twelve-year old boy holding a toy gun.

Liberal postracialism and “the white working class”

For liberals, this trajectory into a postracial world has presented enormous intellectual difficulties. Having provided so many of its foundational terms, institutional and legal structures, it becomes unclear how (or even if) they can resist it. All the more so, since they have gone so far in embracing the very political economy of neoliberalism, with its heightened emphasis on and rewards for individualism and “merit” displayed in competition. Still, t hey have become vaguely anxious about the carceral and workfare state they helped to produce and legitimate.[17] They remain discomfited by the increasing private-public expressions of (deniable) racism, especially as they come to be spoken from the office of the Presidency.

As much as the 1970s represented the start of a conservative backlash against Keynesian hegemony, it also represented the crystallization of a trajectory in liberal politics away from the working class. Over the course of the 1950s and 1960s a discourse of the working class as undermined by its own supposed affluence, as “essentially integrated, inside the system, and outside social dynamics of change” coalesced and became the legitimating narrative for the increasing control of liberal professionals over the Democratic party and its policy priorities. The McGovern campaign of 1972 – the first Democratic campaign to do better with white-collar than blue-collar workers – “offered a precursor to the Democratic Party’s growing commitment to knowledge workers and economic policies that touted the government’s stimulation of private high-tech industry.”[18] Ironically, this shift occurred at the same time as a large influx of African Americans and women into unions and unionization struggles, as the result of civil rights and feminist struggles.[19] But it would come to be remembered as a kind of inevitability – not only because of the necessary trajectory of global capital, but also as an outcome of union bureaucratization, white workers’ enduring racism and support for the Vietnam war, etc.

Something of the perversity of the liberal position is captured in the identification of support for the Vietnam war with the white working class.[20] Here, liberal knowledge workers assign blame for a neo-imperialist project of the state (theincarnation of mental labor as separated from manual, as Poulantzas put it[21]) to the supposed conservatism and racism ofmanual laborers. The same logic has become operative regarding postracial “racism without race.” Unwilling to simply accept privatized racism, yet also unwilling to move towards either any full-scale reckoning with the structural character of racism or an embrace of racial resistance in the streets, liberals have held fast to the vision of the state and of knowledge workers as de-racialized mediators. Yet, racial history (the history of the racial state) has institutionalized whiteness in every aspect of our political economy, in every apparatus of the state, be it mortgage assistance, social services, the neo-imperial projects of the military (which, in its way, remains most committed to the integrationist vision that project requires for legitimation), criminal justice and the legal system, education, the geography of our cities and country, the heroic figures of our imagination, etc.

Liberals tend to imagine they stand outside all of this,[22] that their commitment to procedural neutrality is at least enough to ameliorate its worst effects until the moral arc of pedagogy makes us all partisans of that neutrality. But they can hold to this faith, in the meantime, only by projecting the inevitably racist outcomesof state and pedagogical procedures onto the pathological desires of some other subject, once again, the “white working class.” In this way, liberals can present themselves not so much as initiating or condoning racial logics as eithermoderating them, under immense pressure to which they must occasionally bend if they are to remain “electable,” ortranscending them, standing apart as moral witnesses in academia and other cultural apparatuses.

For liberals, atavistic racism in the post-civil rights era is a pathology of “the white working class” – a discourse conservatives were happy to bend, refigured in a positive valence, in their own “postracial” directions (paired with a critique of liberal knowledge workers). Only now, given that we live in a post-civil rights era and a “knowledge society” of mass education and free information, that pathology seems less and less explicable as a mere “pollution to the real self.” It seems increasingly that, for poor and ignorant whites, as originally (and still) for blacks, that pathology is understood to be intrinsic, definitive of their “real selves.” Its class consciousness fragmented, along with its unions, the white working class comes to be defined by its pathologies. There’s little sense of social pedagogy in liberal discussions of the “stupidity” and “ignorance” of those who voted for Trump.

Never mind that most of the story about the “white working class” is untrue or, at best ambiguous. The evidence available suggests that Trump’s supportdid not come overwhelmingly from white manual laborers, that the average income and wealth levels of Trump’s supporters werehigher than those for most recent Republican candidates and for all but one of his primary rivals.[23] Likewise, it appears that Clintonlost many more white working class voters (while also losing the votes of people of color) in the Rust Belt than Trump gained,[24] while “not more than half of the working class even voted.”[25] Today, as in the 1970s-1980s, “the typical working-class response in the United State is to abstain.”[26] Moreover, there continues to be little evidence that the white working class ismore racist, on average, than white professionals or the wealthy (especially when one takes into accountregional effects related to the South).[27] Whatever else we can say, it does not appear that racism (or party voting) maps onto class position in the way that the mainstream account suggests.[28] At best, the historical consensus will likely come down somewhere in the range of Mike Davis’s recent analysis: the phenomenon of “Trump Democrats” was only real in “a score or so of troubled Rust Belt counties from Iowa to New York where a new wave of plant closure or relocation…coincided with growing immigrant and refugee populations.”[29]

In part, the contemporary uses of this discourse may be related to the development of a certain, nascent form of class consciousness around the division between mental and manual labor. Already in the 1980s, “the mental-manual class division [was] the single most important determinant of class perception” in the US, precisely because this was the site where power was apparently most visible and active.[30] More recently, Andre Levinson has proposed that resentment towards “a powerful political class (cut off from ordinary people)”[31] may represent a nascent form of class consciousness. Accounts of such resentments, which sometimes paralleland often exceed racialized resentments, abound. By tying this resentment to thewhite working class, though it clearly extends beyond it, and conceiving it as the “anti-intellectualism” portion of their pathology, such class perceptions can be implicitly dismissed as part of the “ignorance” that fosters racism. The actual (multi-racial, feminized, fragmented) working class tends to disappear in favor of this imaginary, unified, and pathological white one and its racialized potential victims. Postracialism becomes, for liberals, a discourse addressed to the image of the white working class they have invented, an imaginary addressee that resents anything that smacks of racial history. Better to let that history go or to invoke it only in the form of something we have overcome through the national unity of racial liberalism, now “including everyone” as the individuals they are, and are responsible for being. The naturally pathological white worker becomes the figure that validates the ever tighter embrace by liberals of neoliberal nostrums. The racist beliefs of the “white working-class” validate white liberals’ failure to undertake anti-racist projects, as well as their success in defending the social powers of supposedly non-pathological, educated, credentialed professionals – whose ranks have been lightly diversified. For the black “underclass” and many others, on the other hand, the prescription is still disciplinary submission to low wage markets and incarceration.

The denial of history today

Let us close with the same tableau with which we began, with Bellamy going still as McAuliffe invokes slave owners (and Presidents) as the patriots we need today. In that invocation is exemplified what Goldberg has parsed as postracialism’s “denial of its own denial”: “it erases the very histories producing the formations of racial power and privilege, burying them alive but out of recognizable reach. They wipe away the very conditions out of which guilt could arise. That denial of denial: there is no guilt because there is nothing recognizable to be guilty about, least of all the guilt itself."[32]

But history will not stay (wholly) erased. Trump’s private-made-public racism intrudes: some people at the rally, he argues two days later, are not racist. They were protesting the removal of a statue. “This week it’s Robert E. Lee. I notice that Stonewall Jackson’s coming down. I wonder: is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?” Trump then goes on to declare forthrightly the very thing McAuliffe denies that he denies: “George Washington was a slave owner!”

The perverse irony registered here is that the racist, Trump, tells a (slightly) more coherent story about history than the postracial liberal, who relates to that history in the form of the denial of denial, who cannot upset “the white working class” by directly recognizing its racial character (which, on the other hand, is precisely what Trump is trying to do). If McAuliffe and Trump embrace the same history but only one of them is telling a semi-coherent story about it, then how effective is such "antiracist" discourse likely to be? The ostensible addressee of this message – theactual working classes, white and non-white – can tell that liberals who blather this nonsense don't really mean it, don't really care that much. In seeking to appease an imaginary working class, liberals move ever farther away from the existing one.

We need to tell more, not less, coherent stories about racial history than the right, which means we need to openly confront its racist character and imagine not what keeps us from confronting it but what might allow us to work through it. Rendering that history unthinkable renders white supremacy unthinkable as anything but an individualized pathology, leaving its privatized forms to run free in the streets. Shaping our political rhetoric to address the mythical “white working class” only condones that trajectory.

Bibliography

Davis, Mike 2017, “The Great God Trump & The White Working Class,” Catalyst, vol. 1, no. 1.

Geismer, Lily 2014, Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Goldberg, David Theo 2009, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Goldberg, David Theo 2015, Are We All Postracial Yet?, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Hamilton, Richard E. 1972. Class and Politics in the United States, New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Hurst, Allison L. 2017, “Have We Been Had? Why Talking About the Working-Class Vote for Trump Hurts Us,” Working-Class Perspectives, June 12.

Levison, Andrew 1974, The Working-Class Majority, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Levison, Andrew 2013, The White Working Class Today: Who They are, How They Think, and How Progressives Can Regain Their Support, Democratic Strategist Press.

Lewis, David Levering 2000, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century 1919-1963, New York: Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

Lewis, Penny 2013, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Lowndes, Joseph E. 2008. From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Poulantzas, Nicos 1980, State, Power, Socialism, London: Verso Books.

Mann, Geoff, 2017, In the Long Run We Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy, and Revolution, London: Verso Books.

Melamed, Jodi 2011, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

Metzgar, Jack 2015, “Stereotyping White Working-Class Voters,” Working-Class Perspectives, January 15.

Metzgar, Jack 2016, “Misrepresenting the White Working Class: What the Narrating Class Gets Wrong,” Working-Class Perspectives, March 14.

Metzgar, Jack 2017, “Every part of Us Has Parts,” Working-Class Perspectives, January 16.

Murakawa, Naomi 2014, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Myrdal, Gunnar 1944, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, New York: Harper and Brothers.

Singh, Nikhil 2004, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Smith, Barbara Ellen and Jamie Winders 2017, “The Trump Effect? Whiteness, Masculinity, and Working-Class Lives,” AntipodeFoundation.org, August 8.

Turner, Patricia 2011, “Dangerous White Stereotypes,” New York Times, April 11.

Vanneman, Reeve and Lynn Weber Cannon 1987, The American perception of Class, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Windham, Lane 2017, Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

[1] Davis 2017. For additional critical reflections on this mainstream narrative (and its previous uses in recent years), see Hurst 2017; Metzgar 2015, 2016, 2017.

[2] Melamed 2011.

[3] Lewis 2000, p. 451

[4] For useful contextualizations of this study and its theorem, see Melamed 2011, pp. 56-63; Singh 2004, pp. 38-41; Lowndes 2008, pp. 18-21, and Murakawa 2014, pp. 40-54.

[5] Myrdal 1944, p. 1022.

[6] “The solution Myrdal proposed was wider dissemination of social-scientific knowledge about African American existence in the United States…to dispel white America’s psychic isolation and opportunistic belief system. Education was key to reform…” (Melamed 2011, p. 62)

[7] Melamed 2011, p. 59.

[8] Melamed 2011, p. 58.

[9] Myrdal 1944, p. 89.

[10] Myrdal 1944, p. 115.

[11] Myrdal 1944, p. 928.

[12] Murakawa 2014, p. 13.

[13] Goldberg 2015, p. 69.

[14] Goldberg 2015, p. 78.

[15] Mann 2017.

[16] Goldberg 2009.

[17] For that genealogy, see Murakawa 2014.

[18] Geismer 2015, p. 150.

[19] Windham 2017.

[20] This despite the fact that, by 1971, those with only a grade-school education were actuallymore likely to support the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam than the college-educated (80% to 60%, with those with a high school education at 75%). College students today, on the other hand, overwhelmingly presuppose the exact opposite to be the case, suggesting how deeply the notion of authoritarian white workers shapes our understanding (Lewis 2013, pp. 19-21).

[21] Poulantzas 1980, p. 56.

[22] “A kind of middle-class exceptionalism was often present among these radical thinkers, who held for themselves, as radical individualists, the possibilities of escaping mass society but saw for workers no incentive or capacity to do so” (Lewis 2013, p. 156).

[23] Smith and Winders 2017.

[24] Goldberg 2017.

[25] Hurst 2017.

[26] Vanneman and Cannon 1987.

[27] See, for example, the detailed analyses of Hamilton 1972; Levison 1974, 2013.

[28] As Jack Metzgar (2015) observes. “Cultural and economic conservatism, often accompanied by ‘racial resentfulness,’ are present (and absent) in all white demographics, and the variation by class is likely less than by gender, region, income, and religion.”

[29] Davis 2017.

[30] Vanneman and Cannon 1987, p. 81.

[31] Levinson 2013, p. 165.

[32] Goldberg 2015, p. 101.

 Michael Vester

(Extracts translated from Die Entstehung des Proletariat als Lernprozess. DieEntstehung antikapitalistischer Theorie und Praxisin England 1792–l848, third edn., Frankfurt 1975)

Translated by Jairus Banaji

The following is a translation of parts of Michael Vester’s classic work The Emergence of the Working Class as a Learning Process, which was first published in Germany in 1970.*  The translation below was made from the third German edition of 1975 and includes Vester’s important introduction to his study as well as smaller portions of Chapters 2 and 3.  It is itself a very recently revised version of a translation published, in cyclostyled form, in 1978 in what called itself the Bulletin of the Communist Platform.**  Small groups of anti-Stalinist Marxists and socialists active in India (in Bombay, Delhi and Bangalore) led a double existence throughout the seventies into the eighties, both working with workers and unions where they could (Bombay, Pune, Bangalore) and engaged in intense theoretical study that encompassed a wide range of topics and styles of Marxist theory. Apart from Capitaland everything related to it (value theory, crisis theory, etc.), those debates included Hegel, Lukács, Sartre, Althusser, Colletti, Poulantzas, Arthur Rosenberg’s essay on fascism, Kautsky’s work on the Agrarian Question, Preobrazhensky’s New Economics, Trotsky’s writings, the new feminist literature, and of course the whole debate about party and class, including the way E. P. Thompson had approached the history of the English working class. This is where Vester comes in because Emergenceis a brilliant and extended reflection on Thompson’s work and fed directly into discussions of the ‘Leninist’ party and of non-party forms of class organisation, but crucially also of what it means for a working class to exist (to come into being) and to become aware of itself as a class. In Vester, the key idea (which ties in so well with the Hegel of the Phenomenology!) is the notion of a learning-process as fundamental to class formation and combativity. Vester uses Thompson’s work to construct a theory of class learning that both valorises experience and allows for the ‘rational’ moment of drawing lessons from it. The subtitle of his book The Emergence of Anti-Capitalist Theory and Practice in England 1792–1848suggests that this dialectic (between experience and the structured reflection on it) is the heart of the process by which ‘class consciousness’ comes alive in periods of history when social learning has been effective both in terms of the goals workers set themselves and of the means by which they strive to realise those goals. - JB

* Michael Vester (b. 1939) is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of Hanover. Since the late seventies, he has been mainly involved in large-scale social structure studies and worked on both Portugal and Germany. A sample of his more recent work can be found here, http://www.scielo.mec.pt/pdf/spp/n42/n42a02.pdf

** There were just two issues of the Bulletin of the Communist Platform, one in each of the years 1977–78. By the end of the seventies a major part of the group in Bombay was absorbed in work with the unions, traveling widely across industrial areas in a massive city. Other comrades found themselves having to find jobs and mostly went into journalism. The comrades in Delhi either continued to be active with workers or turned to anti-communal work once that city saw horrific state-sanctioned pogroms against the Sikhs in 1984.

This book attempts to understand the history of the first workers’ movements and of the early socialist theories that were developed in England over the years 1792 to 1848 as a long and collect­ive learning-process. This was a process unleashed by the repressive political, economic and cultural upheavals bound up with the first Industrial Revolution and with the great political revolution in France. In confronting these pressures, the ‘poor and labouring classes’ of England gradually became aware of the need to evolve their own institutions and their own system of communication, to play an independent role as historical subjects and to develop their own theory of society. An apatheticised, manipulated and fragmented lower class (Unterklasse) solidified into a class movement that aspired to re-establish society as a whole on principles quite different from those of capitalism.

The discussion is arranged into two parts. Part 1 studies the working class as object of the agrarian/industrial revolution. New behavioural norms of asceticism and competition ran up against popular values opposed to capitalism. The class learning-process was founded initially on this conflict. The views traditionally advanced by social historians remain quite unsatis­factory in terms of the assumptions they make about psychology and class sociology. My analysis thus implies a critique of such views, which I lay out in chapter 4 in the form of ten short theses that are likewise a tentative summary of Part 1 of the book. I have not gone into any detailed specialist polemic, however.

Part 2, richer in details, describes the struggles between the landed, industrial-capitalist and working classes. Here six periods of struggle are distinguished, and each of these interpreted as feedback-cycles between theory and practice on the following pattern: the shortcomings of a given strategy of struggle are found out in practice through failures; this impels the intellectuals within the working class to work out new answers to the questions that still remain open; new strategies are then diffused through a determinate system of communication, they are more widely accepted and, finally, tested in practice in a new cycle of struggles. The descriptions of the culture of the lower classes, of the struggles they engaged in and of the theories that they worked out alternate in a corresponding manner. Thus, a reinterpretation of ‘early socialism’, especially of the school of Robert Owen, becomes necessary: already before Marx and Proudhon, England would witness a well-developed critical theory of society and of human capacities, one that was opposed to authoritarianism and revolutionary in its cultural aspect. For some time, this theory even gained practical influence over a broad-based political and syndicalist mass movement. The conception that prior to Marx and Chartism there existed only some small utopian groups that understood neither capitalism nor the necessity for class struggle is pure prejudice. The specific problems of the period of struggles extending from 1792 to l848, above all the conditions that determined their success and eventual defeat, are summarised in the introduction and conclusion to Part 2.

The workers’ movement emerged initially not as an articulate ‘socialist’ current, but as a theoretically fluid ‘anti-capitalist’ current. The closer historical definition of this ‘anti-capitalism^’ was, of course, precisely a result of the learning-process that would follow. Defined in a purely negative way, ‘anti-capitalism’ embraces quite heterogeneous expressions, both practical and theoretical, of the critique of society. These are all unified by their rejection of a specific system of social and economic domination. On the other hand, they differ according to the social position of their supporters and according to the criteria by which the dominant system is interpreted, an alternative system conceived, and the means for the realisation of the goals posited by the latter actually developed. The development of criteria of this type, underlying a certain conception of society and of history, is not a linear movement but a cyclical one. It proceeds as a confrontation between the system of domination and the system opposed to it and as a feedback-process between theory and practice within the anti-capitalist movement.

Cycles of Struggle

The first phase of the struggle for emancipation from capitalism coincided for a period of time with the final phases of the struggle for the emancipation of the capitalist middle class. The decades from 1750 to around 1850 saw the completion of the agrarian/industrial revolution, or the transition from an individ­ual mode of production based on partly independent small producers to the social mode of production based on the putting-out system and finally on wage-labour. Large-scale bourgeois property in land made its breakthrough by 1820; a mass of small farmers were thereby deprived of the very foundations of their existence, and came to form a major portion of the potential labour-power, or ^‘reserve army^’ of unemployed, for capitalism. 1787 saw the start of an industrial growth-cycle that persisted down to around 1842. Supported by a textile industry now based on steam, this was the cycle during which mechanised mass-production became established. Gradually, the small producers who had been pushed out of the countryside thanks to the competition of capitalist firms in industry found themselves dependent on those very enterprises. The 1820s formed the particular phase of this cycle of expansion during which industrial capitalism broke through as the dominant sector of the economy_. Consolidated economically, the bourgeoisie could, in 1832, extort the franchise from a parliament dominated by a landed oligarchy whose economic legislation had been a fetter on capitalist development till then.

The workers’ movement developed through confrontation with a structure of domination that was changing internally. But if the bourgeoisie already controlled pre-political instruments of power such as the economic resources at its disposal, its system of communication and social ideology, the lower classes were compelled to fight for these only now.

Part 1 investigates the point at which this confrontation starts: the contradiction between the traditional structures of need and the newly enforced norms of behaviour. Of far greater consequence than mere quantitative changes such as the decline in real incomes was the change brought about in social and cultural norms, that is, the displacement of the old ‘moral economy^’ by the ‘rational economy’ of competitive capitalism. Like the economic revolution itself, the loss of independent means of subsistence, of occupational and family status, of the relatively undisciplined rhythms of life and work and principles of solidarity underlying community, trade and family, till then all immune to the destructive force of economic calculation, was a comparatively slow process. But against the background of traditional entitlements to economic independence and community-collectivism it formed a catastrophic experience. This pattern of values, centred on mutuality and independence, was now reactivated and transfigured into an ideal nourished on memories. A utopia aspiring to restore past conditions, it formed the first alternative conception of society to emerge within the anti-capitalist movement and was already a result of incipient changes in the categories through which social processes were being perceived and evaluated. Contrasted with the fairly homogeneous character of this counter-ideology, the workers^’ life-situation was defined by extreme heterogeneity. Due to the gradual nature of industrialisation, very different forms of economic dependence coexisted for a long period: there was the formally independent craftsman threatened by unfavourable market-conditions, the skilled worker employed in manufacture or factory-production, the unskilled wage-labourer facing the threat of unemployment, the casual and seasonal workers, and finally, the great mass of unemployed ‘poor’ dependent on social welfare. Divisions determined by trade, branch of production, religious or community or regional affiliation, formed further obstacles to any overriding solidarity.

Part 2 describes the confrontations through which the lower classes made an effort to overcome their mutual isolation and a purely backward-looking definition of their goals. Due to the heterogeneous character of its life-situations, the ‘unity of the working class’ could be achieved only in a mediated form, as a coalition. The development of an alternative system of communication was closely tied in with the development of the general goals that formed the content of that system. Only an intensive, continuous and wide­spread process of communication realised in their own press, their own schools and organisations of defence and struggle made it possible for workers to articulate, exchange, test and develop their views on an adequate scale. The right to communicate was a key objective in the conflict between the establishment and the workers’ movement. Laissez-faire had a reverse side – tight controls over the freedom to correspond, to speak in public, to publish material, to meet or to form independent associations. Initially these restrictions were enforced by violence, but later and increasingly, through manipulation. Yet precisely such repression, especially the emergency measures of 1792–1819, taught the movement the necessity for a closing of its ranks.

Because of repression and the staggered nature of the industrial revolution, the workers^’ movement could emerge and develop only discontinuously, in a series of cycles. These cycles occasionally ended in defeat, evaluating which would then inaugurate a new and often qualitatively more advanced effort. The ‘evaluation’ of failures was basically the task of the leading theorists, journalists and organisers of the movement. In the ensuing wave of struggles, the strategies they proposed had to be tested in terms of seeing how widely acceptable and how practical they were. The most important contributions to the theory of the early workers’ movement came from ‘working class intellectuals’ (‘Arbeiterintelligenz’), a group of urban and, to some extent, rural craftsmen as well as of skilled industrial workers who relied either on their own capacities or on the interpretations proposed by theoreticians from other classes.

The struggles unfolded in six major cycles… In the first two of these cycles of struggle (Kampfzyklen) (1792–1819) the workers’ movement turned chiefly against the old oligarchy, attempting to force it politically, through laws protecting labour and concessions on the franchise, to annul the structural crisis of the small producer, till then the dominant concern of the mass movement, and to restore the old values of independence and community collectivism. The oligarchy blamed the movement of opposition on the ring-leaders. It failed to develop any deeper conception of the causes behind it and could therefore suppress it only superficially.

Over the next two cycles (1820–32) the workers’ movement turned mainly against a new enemy, a capitalism in consolidation, and sought to interpret its aspirations for solidarity and independence in correspondingly modified forms. Affirmative in its acceptance of the industrial mode of production, it now strove to overcome bourgeois relations of production through cooperative structures of decision-making. Yet even now a part of the movement continued to articulate an opposition to capital that was oriented to the past, and the great majority participated in the struggles of the middle class for the suffrage, helping the latter to victory and eventually pushing themselves into disillusionment. Through these experiences, working-class consciousness emerged in a more complete shape: workers realised that they could secure lasting improve­ment in their position only through mutual solidarity and through self-activity against the upper classes. In their new awareness of economic questions workers came around to accepting the principle of efficiency of bourgeois economy, without accepting the bourgeois form of property. In place of the earlier ‘moral economy’ there now emerged the vision of an economy of abundance based on cooperation.

The last two cycles of struggle (1832–48) were a time of trial for the class-consciousness gained in earlier phases. In 1832–34 a trade-union movement with syndicalist tendencies attempted to improve its position through direct economic action and partly to win cooperative control over the means of production. Defeated by lock-outs, the movement then attempted to realise its socialist aims indirectly, through the Chartist franchise-agitation. Even at this stage the means of struggle accessible to it economically, politically and ideologically were not sufficiently developed to enable the class to constitute itself as the nation.

From the 1840s on, capitalism entered a new period of stability, founded on a long cycle of expansion and more appropriate forms of political regulation. This lasted several decades so that in future capitalism could withstand even greater upheavals and re-establish a state of equilibrium through self-regulation. On the other hand, the workers^’ movement lost its revolutionary will and concentrated single-mindedly on strengthening its economic organisations for wage-struggles.

The new balance of class-forces had finally crystallised by 1848 and forced Engels and Marx to review and further develop the basic outlines of their own conception of the revolution. Whereas in the Communist Manifesto political democracy still appeared as a means to the inauguration of cooperative relationships, through an abridged development of productive forces aided by state intervention,Capital investigated the possibilities, intrinsic to capitalism’s laws of motion, of a more protracted development across capitalism itself. The conception in theManifesto is to be seen strictly in connection with a particular phase of the movement; it cannot simply be assumed to be valid for social systems at other stages of development.

The first period of development of the workers^’ movement thus coincides with the first major growth cycle of a capitalism based on machinery. In both trajectories the l820s formed a turning-point: the bourgeoisie gained the political means with which it could realise its social aims; the working class gained a historical perception of its own goals and began attempts to realise those goals by means appropriate to them.

Cycles of Learning

The emergence of the working class’s theory of society has to be seen in strict relation to its practice. A purely intellectual history cannot account for the specific changes that it went through. Theory in the formal sense arose generally as a response to the practical failures of earlier interpretations of reality, and as a new form of interpretation it had to be both understood intellectually and testable in practice by specific social groups. In this way, there arose between the writer and his public, or between the masses and their speakers, a relation of tension which repeatedly necessitated a process of adaptation and revision. Each of the six cycles of struggle can therefore be interpreted as a cycle of learning.

1. The Jacobin suffrage movement of the 1790s was triggered by Thomas Paine’s interpretation of the French Revolution. Paine articulated the urban artisans’ striving for political democracy conceived as a means of restoring small-scale property with state protection. The radical artisans threw up their own speakers, journalists, pamphlet­eers and system-builders who engaged in clarifying problems theoretically and feeding that clarity back to the public. As Jacobinism gained influence among urban wage-earners and domestic-industry workers and similar groups in the countryside who had little previous connection with the artisan movements, their associations were destroyed and formally suppressed together with the trade unions. Nevertheless, counter­revolutionary persecution could not stop the Jacobin skilled worker from gaining an important weight in the trade union struggles of l800–1814. In the struggles for legal protection against labour-saving machinery, workers reactivated their pre-industrial notions of mutualism and independence, while the Jacobin propaganda for freedom, equality and brotherhood gave those pre-political goals a political character, in the shape of a programme for social democracy. The laissez-faire policies of the regime exposed the futility of any campaign for protectionism and forced open the road to self-help. Its basic form, the organised breaking of machinery, failed at the gates of the large factories which were better defended militarily. This in turn gave rise to the need for a strategy of struggle that factory-workers could deploy and for a more effective political movement.          

2. Both of these encountered their period of trial in the years 1815–1819. Following the suppression of machine-breaking and the post-war crisis, workers confined themselves initially to political forms of struggle and became the newly-found public of middle-class parliamentary reformers: the cleavage between town-based artisans and rural industrial workers was thus partly overcome. Due to the laws regulating association, the mass assembly was at first the most important form of communication. Yet in such assemblies both ideas and actions were capable of only a low degree of articulation due to their predominantly emotional mechanisms of consensus-building and to the demagogic tendencies of the speakers at such rallies.

A more rational system of communication came about with the rapid growth of the workers’ democratic mass press. Journalists like Cobbett could carry through the process by which a yearning for independence had already started to be transformed into a programme for political democracy, and they could mediate a sense of collective experience on the part of workers throughout the country. On the other hand, the social programme still remained arrested at the level of an opposition to capitalism looking to the past. In 1818 there sprang up a more widespread trade union movement and a more rational style of mass-demonstrations. The sense of unease drove the government to retaliate with a murderous attack on about 80,000 peaceful demonstrators in Manchester in 1819 and with new repressive legislation that put a temporary halt to political agitations and to the workers’ press.

3. The years 1820–1825 formed a period of working off the earlier experiences of failure. Both in theory and in practice the movement re-oriented to the economic level; tendencies of opposition to capital dominated over those directed against absolutism. Two theories of opposition to capitalism were now advanced: an individualist theory that sought to restore the society of small-scale producers and a cooperative theory that accepted the industrial mode of production but wanted to make it the basis of a society of abundance by vesting control in cooperatives. Both these theories reached out into the recently founded workers’ schools, the first one, which corresponded to the position of the artisan, through Thomas Hodgskin, the second, which found a response among wage-earners, through William Thompson. In both of them class-antagonism was a fundamental aspect, but both saw in peaceful direct actions by the producers an adequate basis for overcoming class-conflict. Owen’s theory was the most significant theoretical achievement of the time, and Thompson made it acceptable to the ranks of the working class by rejecting Owen’s requirement that workers should cooperate with capitalists. Over the years 1822–24 the trade unions entered a phase of consolidation against a background of general prosperity, and achieved legal recognition on this consolidated basis.

4. With legality and a militant, class-based Owenism the path was now open for the decisive upsurge of the workers’ movement that unfolded over 1826–1832. There emerged a widespread Owenite cooperative movement: small producers whose markets were threatened and wage­-earners aspiring for better living conditions founded cooperative stores and even cooperative workshops. From the defeats of isolated wage struggles there emerged, under Owenite leadership, a tendency in the direction of trade-union associations cutting across trades and geographical boundaries, and in this way a basis was created for mobilising strike-funds. Even more significant was the renewed suffrage movement of 1830, which ended however by bringing the bourgeoisie into parliament two years later. This defeat shattered all residues of any surviving sympathy for the ^‘middle classes^’. Due to their growing economic, political and propaganda organisations workers established solidarity on a national scale. Working-class consciousness, now realised at a national level, found its specific expression in a unifying ideology based on Owenism and accepted by almost all groups. Of course, the practical expression of this advance had still to come.

5. The syndicalist mass-movement of 1832–134 was the first practical attempt made at testing this more sharply outlined class-consciousness. Broad-based trade-union combines emerged, and their strike-policy was aimed partly at a cooperative take-over of the means of production. In common with the cooperatives, they broke up in 1834, defeated by lock-outs and state repression. The defeat of this revolutionary syndicalism forced the masses to return to political forms of struggle.

6. The Chartist suffrage movement of 1834–48 inspired an even larger mass of workers, but at the cost of a lower level of organization and consciousness. It aimed at a Workers^’ Parliament that could provide a decisive solution to social problems. Mechanisms of agreement based on mass appeal and theories of revolution rooted in ideas of  ‘natural law’ and of Jacobinism came back into prominence. The faction defending^‘physical attacks^’ appealed to the masses to struggle for the franchise by violent means, following repeated rejections of their petitions in parliament; but this faction found little support in the ranks of the working class. Obviously, workers realised that without preparation they were no match for the military apparatus of a consolidated state-machine. The eventual defeat of Chartism ushered in decades of an economically circumscribed reformist practice during which the workers^’ organisations no longer risked confrontation with the bourgeois system as a whole.

As for the relation of theory and practice in the English workers^’ movement in its formative period, tentatively the following basic patterns are discernible:

a) The movement found its actual origin in the widespread social ‘declassing’ brought about by dynamics within agriculture and industry, a process that was subjected to interpretation in terms of criteria associated with inherited, pre-industrial patterns of behaviour.

 b) These interpretative criteria were articulated and, through feedback with practical experience, developed further by a special group with a vanguard character, distinguished by its skills and its cultural urbanity, and composed of urban craftsmen and later of skilled workers drawn from the industrial areas. (After 1820 the position of the wage-worker gradually became a more pressing problem than the crisis of craft-based small producers.)

c) The individual cycles of learning contained opposing orientations: agrarian versus industrial, craft individualism versus cooperation, economic/political, pacifist/terrorist, apathetic/  millenarian, theories looking to the past versus others that looked to the future, and theories based on conceptions of natural law vs. theories that followed utilitarian principles. Groups founded on purely individual forms of production inclined initially to utopian ideals directed towards the past; these they sought to establish by political means. Groups founded on cooperative forms of production were able to form economic associations and strive for an industrial utopia for which they would have to fight through direct economic actions. On the other hand, neither of these two groups simply remained with the positions from which they started. Skilled workers in particular were quite open to the building of more rational forms of communication, of tactics aimed at being successful, and open to a historically meaningful definition of class goals. They were likewise quite receptive to mediations between apparently opposed orientations. It follows that the individual cycles of learning should be interpreted not as meaningless oscillations between opposed extremes, but as a gradual, meaningful, and productive process of acquiring knowledge.

 d) However, the entire process of evolution from the 1790s to the 1840s is not, even if we abstract from its internal cyclical swings, something defined merely by continuity and advance. Through the defeat of revolutionary syndicalism and of the Chartist struggle for suffrage a regressive learning-process began as well, and it gripped an even larger mass of workers. Depoliticisation and bureaucratisation of the trade unions and the abandonment of any political definition of class goals were processes that defined the English workers’ movement for decades after 1848. These had already emerged prior to 1848 as the retrograde moments of a period dominated by its basically progressive tendencies.

 e) As a rule, a given cycle of learning passed through the following stages (Stadien): initially, disaffection with external conditions and the need for redress; a selective reception of redressal strategies and direct use of such strategies against the dominant system; emphatic growth following the first experiences of failure; then regress into apathy after repeated failure; and finally, renewed feelings of the need for more effective means of redress and even for a more realistic definition of goals.

f) Communication was established through specific types of persons, symbols and systems of communication. The mediation between theory and practice was embodied in the functions of publicists, journalists, educational experts, mass speakers and preachers of the various popular religious denominations. The symbols of identification at work were rituals and slogans, martyrs and icons, allegorical modes of interpretation such as anecdotes, comparisons, caricatures and satires, independent institutions, and books that were kept as classics even in the homes of families unable to read. Consensus tended to be reached in primary publics, e.g., in factories, local clubs, and reading-rooms; at formal educational events or meetings during demonstrations; in struggle; and in more formal media that went beyond the immediate neighbourhood, such as the workers’ press and workers’ associations. Because it was extremely difficult to build a formal system of communication, for the great mass of workers learning-processes followed directly from their practical experiences and, for a much smaller if expanding group of workers, from theoretical study as well.  (….)

Chapter 1 provided a summary description of the capitalist revolution in the rural and urban-industrial economies. There the interest centred chiefly on the form in which the capitalist order made its breakthrough. The position of the ‘poor and labouring classes’ was described there only insofar as the destruction of the two most important traditional structures – the village community and rural domestic industry – were preconditions of rising capitalism. In this chapter (Chapter 2), we have to look more closely at the new modes of behaviour that were imposed on the lower classes. Such impositions are deducible from the prevailing economic system, that is from the specific forms in which the valorisation-process of capital transforms humans into the commodity labour-power. Section 1 of this chapter examines the forms of behaviour required within the labour-process in the different modes of production based on domestic industry, manufacture and factory production (....)

In the general process of evolution from production based on individual craft enterprise to social forms of enterprise in which a division of labour prevails, the following stages of development are discernible. (a) A socialisation of distribution under the putting-out system, (b) socialisation of some means of production and then of labour under manufacture, finally (c) a socialisation of the total process, including the machine-system as a whole, under factory production. This logical sequence does not always coincide with the actual historical sequence. The debate on periodisation started by Sombart’s criticisms of Marx is of no concern here. It is enough to note that all these specific forms had already evolved or were doing so in the several centuries of early capitalism, and that at the start of the industrial revolution the following heterogeneous modes of production coexisted with one another: pre-capitalist forms comprising the residues of an economy of autoconsumption and larger remnants of small handicraft commodity-production; early-capitalist forms comprising a ramified and well-developed putting-out system, a small but also developed system of manufacture and a small but less developed system of factory-production. A description of their specific conditions of production would throw light on the sort of constraints which the workers’ movements based on trade unions and on cooperatives were compelled to resist. The putting-out system provoked petition-campaigns aimed at parliament and organised machine-breaking as the forms of struggle specific to unions organising workers in domestic industry. Under manufacture, and chiefly in the textile and shipbuilding industries, there emerged trade unions that evolved the strike-weapon. While these groups were already waging spectacular struggles as early as the 1790s, factory workers could organise significant strike-actions and campaigns for the defence of labour only after 1815, when the machine-system became more widespread. The different forms of struggle and aspirations of domestic-industry workers, workers in manufacture and factory-workers are to some extent easier to comprehend when related to the various forms of capitalistically-socialized production examined below.

The Putting-Out System. The first discernible predecessor of socialised production was this specific form of home-based industry. It formed a sort of symbiosis between the owners of money and domestic industry, the merchant offering several artisans an advance of money or his services as a selling-agent for their products. Through the contracts based on this system the artisan ceded his role of seller to the merchant who thereby obtained indirect control over his production. (That in this way a new relation of domination came into being is overlooked by those writers who see in this relation only a ‘differentiation’ of ‘roles’.) His superior marketing position enabled the merchant soon to force a position of dependence on the domestic worker, both as a supplier of commodities and as a buyer of raw materials  (…)

As Marx shows, down to the final breakthrough of a machine-based mode of production after 1825, the movement of opposition to capital was to a large extent shaped by the forms of dependence experienced in domestic industry (Capital, 1, pp. 595 ff. Fowkes). The entrepreneur entangled the domestic worker in various ways – through controls over the quality of his product and over prices, through clauses prohibiting work for other capitalists in the trade, and through various other restrictions like the truck-system, according to which the worker was compelled to spend the greater portion of her wages purchasing means of subsistence from the capitalist’s own store, despite their inflated prices and adulterated quality. Because craftsmen progressively lost their independence but remained formally independent, the relation of exploitation was especially obvious to them and drove them, quite early on, to associate together in unions. But the isolated nature of their mode of production severely limited the effectiveness of economic means of struggle in their case. Whereas employees in larger enterprises could develop the strike-weapon, outworkers reacted chiefly with political campaigns for protection or for the franchise and by a policy of selective machine-breaking. Their goals mainly resembled those of the urban small craftsmen. They supported the Jacobin franchise-movement as a means of politically restoring the stability and independence of small-scale production. Thus they were far more sympathetic to the individualist critique of capitalism proposed by Hodgskin than to the cooperativist critique developed by Owen. Hodgskin’s demand for the elimination of the capitalist middleman between producer and consumer who appropriated a surplus-product for himself correspond­ed to their day-to-day experience. But side by side with such individualist notions rooted in their isolated mode of production, the outworkers also entertained notions of solidarity that correspond­ed to the social and cultural values of their type of community. Thus, later it was possible for them, to join the real movement of unification based on the ideas of Owen.

The putting-out system appears to have provided arguments both to bourgeois economists and to the opponents of capitalism. Under it the capitalist’s ‘advances’ and the workers^’ ‘surplus product’ both acquired an independent form. The capitalist could argue that without the investment-credit which he supplied the worker would not be able to carry on production. The worker could reply, that she gave over a larger product than she actually received by way of payment.

Manufacture. According to Marx, the mode of production based on manufacture was distinguished from labour organised in the guild-system initially only in terms of the number of those employed by a given capital or in terms of the size of the workshop. Its first revolutionary achievement was a more efficient exploitation of a part of the means of production. At first effort-levels changed only in terms of the gradual emergence of socially-average norms regulating the execution of jobs and expenditure of labour-time, and in terms of the competition between workers, both of these flowing from their new spatial proximity. According to Sombart, this form of manufacture, based on simple cooperation and capable of hardly any specialisation, was rarely found.

The specific outcome of manufacture was a form of cooperation based on the division of labour. The common workshop not only made possible an intensified exploitation of human and material forces of production, but brought into being a new, social, form of productive force, the ‘collective worker who combined numerous individual labours’. The distribution of the different operations under different hands and their combined cooperation as a single collective force, or^‘mass force’ was more productive than the simple sum of all individual labour-powers. Cooperation reduced both the labour-time necessary for the production of a given commodity and the^‘false costs’ intrinsic to a system based on the spatial separation of individual processes. The social productive force of labour thus appeared as the productive power of capital, because historically it presupposed the concentration in the hands of a single capitalist of a certain minimum quantity of means of production.

Marx argues that originally, the capitalists also contributed directly to cooperation by taking on the ‘indispensable functions of directing, superintending and adjusting’ to ‘secure the harmonious cooperation of the activities of individuals and perform the general functions’ (Capital 1, p. 448ff.). However, this function was defined specifically by the fact that it aimed not merely at cooperation but also at its profitable exploitation, that it was not simply a factor of harmony but ‘despotic in form’ (p. 450). It could only be established with the help of a quasi-military organisation of  ‘direct and continuous control’ directed against the workers whose resistance grew with their numbers. Thus, it created new false costs and became in this sense itself a new hindrance to the optimum productivity which a cooperative, that is,  non-antagonistic, form might otherwise have achieved. A further instrument of domination, the individual work-contract, which precluded payments to the combined productive force of workers, likewise corresponded to an ideology that saw in co-operation ‘a productive power inherent in capital’ (p. 451). (....)

In the form of cooperation based on the division of labour there developed two specific types - organic and heterogeneous manufacture. In the latter, each worker produced a different part for later assembly; presence in the same workshop was accidental but it economised on time and space.

The principle of co-operation was fully realised only in organic manufacture. Here, the same product goes through a sequence of phases where it is worked upon simultaneously by a chain of different specialised workers. Marx stresses that “this direct mutualinterdependence of the different pieces of work and therefore of the workers each one of them to spend on his work no more than the necessary time. This creates a continuity, a uniformity, regularity, an order and even anintensity of labour quite different from that found in independent handicraft or even in simple cooperation” (Capital, 1, p. 464-5). Norms regulating working-time and the relative size of the different groups of workers concerned with different special functions were determinable in definite ratios; the absence of any one special function would paralyse the total process, whose perfection required the one-sided specialisation of particular operations, an extreme specialisation affecting both workers and their individual work-tools. The economies in time and quality made possible by functionally-specialised individual labour were bought, however, at the cost of the psychological torment implied in monotony, time-pressure and life-long annexation to a specific function. “A certain crippling of the mental and physical powers of man is itself inseparable from the division of labour in the whole length and breadth of society’’. A further consequence was the establishment of a hierarchy of labour-powers and of wages, which allowed this introduction of unskilled and therefore cheap labour-powers, e.g., of women and children. This process of the devaluation of labour-power and higher valorisation of capital remained restricted, however, within the narrow technical limits of manufacture. For, individual craft-skill remained the foundation of manufacture, essential to its difficult detail operations and often presupposing a training of several years. The limited exchangeability of skilled labour and its concentration under a single roof facilitated resistance to the process of enforcing capitalist discipline.

Workers in manufacture could therefore, in contrast to small independent craftsmen or to outworkers, evolve specifically non-political forms of struggle and of consciousness such as the strike. They distinguished themselves from unskilled workers by the special pride they showed in their professional skills, by their aspirations for education and their sober and respectable style of behaviour. (....)

The Factory System. Only this system, under which the functions of the collective worker in manufacture were progressively installed in automatic machinery, made possible the general devaluation and transferability of labour-powers. Marx defines machinery under three ^‘parts’ (cf.Capital, 1, pp. 494ff). The starting-point is the tool or working-machine which takes over the functions and tools of a large number of workers. Its perfection required the invention of a strong and operationally-controllable motor-mechanism not dependent on local, natural motive forces, namely, the automatic steam-engine. Both the working-machine and the motor-mechanism then required mediation through a transmitting mechanism. Over time the motor-mechanism and working-machine were rendered totally independent of human strength, they became automata.

The evolution of the mechanized factory is similar to that of the manufacturing workshop. Initially, several machines of one type were linked to the same motive mechanism in simple cooperation. Soon, the machine-system proper developed; in this the specific, individual specialised machines work on the same product according to a sequence. As in organic manufacture, so here the individual units stand in a fixed numerical proportion to one another and keep each other employed. On the other hand_, whereas in manufacture the special processes were isolated by the division of labour (Capital, 1, p. 502), here their continuity reaches perfection; there arises a unified automatic system based on the progressive reduction of labour to a^‘mere appendage^’. (Marx did not anticipate the mechanized stage of heterogeneous manufacture, where the underlying principle is assembly-line work.)

The mental powers of production which formerly were the property of the individual craft-worker were already in manufacture “required only, for the workshop as a whole. What the individual worker lost, capital concentrated within itself over against him or her as an alien property and dominating power”. It was the machine-system that accomplished the dissociation of these scientific powers from the worker in the form of independent powers of production: “The capitalist who puts a machine to work does not need to understand it. But the science realised in the machine takes on for the workers the appearance-form ofcapital.” (Results of the Immediate Process, p. 1055,  transl. modified). Science perfects machinery to the extent that its price is below the price of the labour-power that it replaces. This creates false costs insofar as in a capitalist society the price of labour-power is pushed below its value and machinery is introduced^‘too late^’.

The devaluation of the labour-power of male family-heads was soon accelerated by the fact that women and children could also compete in the labour-market as additional reserves of labour-power with no skills or any special strength. They did so in ever greater numbers. The concomitant physical and psychological misery, illness, early mortality and intellectual desolation frequently shattered the resistance from male workers that was still possible under manufacture. Further, the material and moral depreciation of machinery compelled a lengthening of the working-day and, especially after the 12-hour-day legislation of 1833 applying then only to young workers, an intensification of work-effort through a speeding-up of work and an extension in the range of operations. The constant transfer of functions performed by human labour-power to machines “destroys the technical foundation on which the division of labour in manufacture was based. Hence in place of the hierarchy of specialized workers that characterises manufacture, there appears in the automatic factory a tendency to equalise and reduce to an identical level every kind of work that has to be done by the minders of the machines. In place of the artificially produced distinctions between the specialized workers, it is natural differences of age and sex that predominate’’  (Capital, 1, p. 545). (….)

The industrial revolution transformed the worker’s position on the labour-market in three respects: in terms of the number of jobs, the requisite level of skills, and the necessary level of work-effort. Given the introduction of labour-saving machinery, full employment presupposed a simultaneous extension of markets. The deskilling of labour expanded the supply of labour-power by its incorporation of female and child labour, and the resulting competition among workers made possible drastic extensions in working-time as well as wage-cuts. Finally, machinery revolutionised the mode of production itself: its full utilisation presupposed detail work, prolonged hours of work and a rapid and exact rhythm of work.

Thus labour-power had to be adapted to the needs of capital in terms of quantity, quality and specific costs. The naturally-determined level of population had to be sufficient to ensure a continual shifting of labour-power from declining branches of production to expanding ones. These persons then had to be subordinated in a psychological sense to an externally-conditioned rhythm of work and, in terms of the quality of their labour-power, to the type of technology employed. And economically, they had to be inured to arduous work-norms as well as low wages. (....)

Work-ethics and labour-skills

 To be in a position to valorise a given supply of labour-power, the capitalist must first engage the worker’s attention in factory-work. Workers have to be broken into the punctual, regular and painstaking execution of specialised jobs before the capitalist can secure his capital against losses due to interruptions and wastage. On the other hand, the traditional work-ethic bore no traces either of an accounting mentality or of a sense of enterprise; the rhythm of work associated with it was elastic and irregular. Excessively long hours of labour alternated with frequent breaks: ‘Saint Mondays’ or even ‘Saint Tuesdays’, the numerous holidays and half-day off Saturdays, as well as the periodic interruptions due to seasonal fluctuations or to shortages of raw materials or to glutted markets. Sombart refers to an  ‘impulsive’ and ‘irrational’ adherence to the pre-capitalist principle according to which one worked only in order to survive or to enjoy oneself: work-effort declined in proportion to the satisfaction of needs, and any additional effort would be squandered on festivities or the consumption of liquor. People took the trouble to expend only so much labour-time ‘as was necessary to make a normal level of subsistence possible’ (Sombart). Moreover, because the new machinery did not belong to them, they wasted or pilfered materials and neglected or destroyed the machinery itself, so that in 1769 the first legislation banning the destruction of machinery was passed. Entrepreneurs took a series of measures, one after the other, to convert workers employed earlier on the land, in domestic service, in the army or in the poor-houses – often in utterly hopeless and wretched conditions – into disciplined detail-workers. Starting in the fourteenth century. the state evolved a number of repressive methods: regulation of work-contracts and wages, workhouses and compulsory labour, and the suppression of workers^’ coalitions. By the eighteenth century, these measures were already largely ineffective. Now the policy of low wages flourished. But under this policy work-effort could be increased only extensively, in terms of its actual duration. Initially, the attempt to increase the intensity of labour through incentives turned out to be a failure: piece-workers would cease to work at the point which they thought sufficient to enable them to recover given levels of subsistence. Moreover, the introduction of draconian factory-ordinances had a purely external impact. It became necessary to inculcate a sense of duty into workers. The role of Protestant religion in this process is debatable. The worker’s transition from modes of behaviour specific to the earlier ‘moral economy’ to those characteristic of the economy of enterprise was accomplished chiefly, as Sombart himself concedes, through the permanent external compulsions of the new mode of production itself and their associated threat of extinction in the event of resistance. This question and the problem of how far such resistance can be simply dismissed as ‘irrational’ will be taken up in more detail in later chapters.

Moreover, the new labour-processes required new skills. In England, long-accessible craft-skills could always be used. But to be able to valorise the cheaper unskilled labour-powers, complex operations were progressively transformed into simple ones through technology and the division of labour. Untrained workers were more easily transferable than trained ones. On the other hand, they were often thoroughly specialised and had to possess a general technical disposition. The simplification and decomposition of work made it possible to incorporate large sections of the population, especially women and children, as transferable labour. (....)

The emergence of the labour movement cannot be explained simply in terms of the decline in workers’ real conditions of life. The decisive factor in creating discontent was the discrepancy between the material and cultural conditions that prevailed and the entitlements in terms of which they were measured. The workers’ movement did not spring spontaneously from the factory-system. Cotton may have played a pioneering role in the general process of economic development, but it was not a total one. For a long time, it was not the workers in textiles but the handicraftsmen and skilled workers who formed the real nucleus of the workers’ movement, and taken as a whole the movement relied on a multiplicity of working classes. It is wrong to suppose, as simplistic theories do, that they acquired a consciousness of being a single class through their economic degradation and levelling and merely as the object of these processes. The decisive factor was the threefold impact of expanding population, technological revolution, and the counter-­revolutionary suppression of Jacobinism. The traumatic social experiences that hit the ‘poor and labouring classes’ are discernible chiefly at four levels. First, when they lost their traditional forms of livelihood, labour-power became their sole basis of survival, and this in the form of a marketable commodity. Secondly, their life-activity was forcibly subjected to harsher discipline and controls over time. Thirdly, the expanding metropolis ruined health, social relationships and prevailing ethical codes. Finally, traditional value-patterns and world-outlooks failed to secure any perspective in the new environment. Given the heterogeneous character of the real life-situations of different groups in the lower classes, a sense of unity could stem only indirectly – not through the passive experience of suffering but through active resistance in struggles that verged on civil war. The farming population suffered in particular from the loss of communal land-rights in the years 1760–1820, domestic outworkers suffered mainly from the process of concentration in the putting-out system that began around 1800, and the smaller entrepreneurs in charge of manufactories from their inability to purchase steam-engines.

Only a fraction of these various groups declined directly into the ranks of the factory-proletariat. On the one hand, the concentrating and disciplinary effects of factory-work strengthened the social and cultural cohesion of factory workers, on the other hand, because employer/worker relations were now defined by greater distance and anonymity, that made the process of exploitation even more transparent. Economic exploitation, reflected in the ostentatious luxury consumption of the nouveaux riches and the activity of employer associations, was reinforced by political suppression. Conflict was triggered less by living standards than by the loss of traditional relationships of mutual help and individual freedom, of mutualism and independence. What they expressed was the transition from a social order founded on mutuality to one based on competition. Thus, wages were of less importance than normative ideas about what was customary, ideas about fairness, independence, security (defined either paternalistically or in terms of of mutual aid) and ideas about family-based enterprises. The persistent nature of such memories is often underestimated. Even after 1830, wages often remained a purely secondary issue for workers who engaged in struggle, in contrast to issues such as the truck-system, cooperation, rights of association, working-time, job-security and child-labour. (….)

Organising and millenarian religions

Religion exerted a twofold influence on the nascent working class. The Methodist poor church encouraged the process by which the external compulsions of the industrial mode of production were interiorized. On the other hand, its left wing took over from the church its specific organisational techniques and introduced these into the oppositional movement. Whereas Methodism worked as an organising force, situations of despair especially tended to create more widespread millenarian movements, an apocalyptic and enthusiastic cult of the poor and downtrodden that sought refuge in the hope that Christ^’s eternal rule would soon begin.

The special feature of Methodism lay in the fact that it could respond simultaneously to the needs of industrial employers and of large masses of workers alike. It was the most important of the poor churches. During the French Revolution, it defended the establishment. This, however, was hardly calculated to bring it any recognition. During the Napoleonic wars, it won a large following drawn chiefly from the new building and industrial working classes. John Wesley had already ascribed little value to the structures of nonconformist self-administration. After his death Jabez Bunting, who dominated orthodox Methodism from the period of machine-breaking down to Chartism, established a bureaucratic and centralised executive clergy with which he persecuted Luddite, Jacobin and specifically religious deviations. In 1811, he forced a split on the Primitive Methodists because he regarded their new institutions of mass assemblies and sermons by lay persons as well as women as politically dangerous. At the same time, political radicalism took over Methodist techniques of organisation to its own advantage. The clergy, on the other hand, promoted the psychological basis for the process of subordination and, above all, of a work-discipline grounded in puritanical codes of morality.

The attempt to transfer a Puritan work-ethic from the middle class to the lower classes ran into the problem that workers were allotted not the rewards of their individual effort but only collective distress. Weber and Tawney investigate chiefly the vocational and work ideology of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century entrepreneur. The worker^’s adaptation to this is seen by them more or less as a result of market sanctions and of the ideology, grounded in utilitarian or puritanical conceptions, that poverty is a punishment meted out to the idle and undisciplined. Weber observes, without much empirical backing, that as the ideology of professional mobility, the Protestant ethic prevailed over Wesley^’s Methodism in the broad mass of the working class. Sombart argues that without a simultaneous process of interiorisation, external compulsion would have remained quite ineffective. According to him, Weber^’s thesis of the role of Protestant asceticism in promoting a capitalist disposition applies more to workers than to entrepreneurs,  as the latter would have been sufficiently inspired by other motives. Like Weber, Sombart was referring here to the group of skilled workers who, supported by religious instruction, willingly increased their effort-levels from a sense of duty as well as to obtain higher earnings. However, because only a small fraction of workers received religious education, Sombart sees the chief basis for the acceptance of bourgeois norms in the coerciveness of the economic system and its long-term impact.

E.P. Thompson uses the example of Methodism to distinguish between these hypotheses and modify them in two respects. (His arguments are equally valid for Sombart, whom he passes over without mention.) In the first place, against Sombart and Weber, it should be noted that the ascetic ideology of upward mobility is of no importance for workers who were in no position to improve either their skills or their incomes. Secondly, material necessity did not act as a stimulus to adaptation, as the low-wage theory of the entrepreneur supposes. Because the traditional culture lacked any coercive pressures in the direction of an alienated work-ethic, external compulsion tended to provoke rebellion. Resistance was inflamed less by declining living standards than by the destruction, under the pressure of factory forms of cooperation, of largely self-determined rhythms of work and effort, both in town and country, and of the close integration between home and work-place. Methodism accomplished the cultural shift to obedience postulated by utilitarians like Andrew Ure. Instead of upward mobility, it sanctified poverty, and prosperity was a fortune it transposed to a future after life. To the extent that it broke with the intellectual traditions of the older Dissenter currents and elaborated a special theory of Grace for the poor, it came closer to Lutheranism. In a formal sense, the theory of the universal nature of sinfulness and grace possessed an egalitarian character because it put rich and poor on the same level. But the thesis of the uncertain nature of grace played an authoritarian role. Grace was attainable only for the period of repentance, so that the faithful were required to be continuously active in church affairs. Moreover, you could not buy grace from God through human accomplishments, and worldly possessions were supposed only to lead to temptation: social improvement was not in any sense a meaningful goal. Fear of losing grace became the compelling basis of a specifically ‘Methodist’ mode of life, a commitment to church activity, individual training and a disciplined life-style that included one’s attitude to work. Poverty and work became signs of grace. This ‘continuous’ repression and channelling of emotional and mental energies was compensated by the emotional orgasm implied in serving God. The repression of sexuality was a recurrent motif in the activities and symbols connected with worship. The mortification of a spontaneity that had still been possible in the old culture started with the education of children and its supporting principle of punishment. As one’s form of life became defined by a submissiveness rooted in fear and anguish, Christianity became transformed from a religion of love into a religion of death (Todeskult) centred on the crucifixion and the affirmation of suffering.

For the period from 1790 to 1830, Thompson argues, the conversion of a large number of workers to Methodism can be explained in terms of three conditions specifically: (a) direct indoctrination, (b) the still important traditional sense of community life, and (c) the psychological impact of the counterrevolution. The Methodist clergy continued to practise a system of education designed to lead children from their innate sinfulness to penitence by thrashing into them ideas of cleanliness, abstinence and submission. Wesley warned, “Break his (the child’s) will and his soul will come to life”. The Sunday schools continued these irrational principles. Except for bible-reading, reading and writing were no part of their programme. In practice, much of this was modified by the fact that individual parishes often perpetuated the old community-norms, or renovated them, and provided help and consolation to people in an environment rooted in the destruction of traditional norms of reciprocity. Furthermore, religion compensated for the despair that stemmed from political repression by allowing moods of enthusiasm or tragedy to find expression in rhetoric and sometimes in mass-hysteria and panic. The millennialism of the downtrodden masses, directed initially to the heavenly abode, could also be a source of revolutionary inspiration, as in the 1790s.

This aspect evolved into a religion of the poor that stood in sharp contrast to the Methodist church and its vengeful God. In the years 1801–14, Joanna Southcott emerged as the greatest prophet of this millenarian tendency, attracting tens of thousands, especially in the North and West of England. Her apocalyptic visions contained no trace of social revolution, being nourished instead by a belief in the supernatural. They struck a chord because they reflected the mood and emotional instability of a period defined by its anomie, that sense of despair to which Methodism likewise owed its own expansion over the years 1790–1830. In many cases, it seems, the expansion of mass movements of a religious nature followed directly on the defeats inflicted on political movements, and political radicalism itself might be seen as a more secularized or social form of millenarianism.

This internal connection between secular and religious hopes of salvation was reflected not only in the oscillation between them but in the fact that, for example, several Methodists came to play a leading role in the workers’ movement. They show the ambivalent character of Methodism. They reacted against the coercive pressures of official Methodism with a libertarian antithesis; propaganda designed to discredit democracy made democracy a desirable objective in their eyes. Thus, Cobbett confined his criticisms to the clerical bureaucracy and exempted the local preachers and laity of Methodism. The Primitive Methodists, thoroughly proletarian and lay in their attitudes, made a direct contribution to the workers’ movement by articulating the demands of the discontented population of town and countryside and attracting them to its side. The Chartists for their part appropriated the image of a vengeful God in their songs and slogans, and Chartist terrorism formed a continuation of the impulses that had animated the religious mass movements.

Hobsbawm, from whom the account given above borrows no less than it takes from Thompson, is mainly interested in refuting Halevy’s view that Methodism prevented a revolution in England. He bases his arguments on the numerous Methodist centres and supporters who were at the same time politically radical, and thus arrives, like Thompson, at the position that commitment to Methodism and commitment to political radicalism sprang from the same social sources and were in no sense mutually exclusive. He adduces the further argument that, in terms of actual numbers, the Methodists were not sufficiently large to have formed an obstacle to revolution. Overall, out of ten million persons in England and Wales, there were around 150,000 followers of this denomination, and in 1851, in a population of some eighteen million, only 500,000. Hobsbawm traces the absence of revolution to the fact that while conditions of social distress and mass discontent certainly prevailed, there was no serious crisis in the ruling classes and no well-organised, unified, experienced, ideologically solid workers^’ movement – at least none sufficient for a revolution. These conditions form the subject-matter of Part 2 of my book. Here we can, for the moment, draw out two conclusions from the studies made by Hobsbawm and Thompson: (i) that religion does not necessarily play a counterrevolutionary role, and (ii) that the acceptance of a religious creed presupposes social and cultural needs that have already come into being. All this apart from the fact that those who accept the religion in that very process transform its official doctrines according to their own needs. (....)

As the work of Thompson and Hobsbawm suggests, it is possible to suppose that this religious backing, of the millenarian rebellion on one side and of clandestine organisational activity on the other (with their contrasting positions on the use of force) exerted a positive impact on the supporters of the early workers’ movement by imparting a certain stability to their motivations. However, because backing is not the motivation itself, a further question remains. We have to explore not only the social crisis or the social and cultural value patterns, but also the character-structures of those involved. Certainly, it was no accident that the position of ‘moral force’ should have been represented by the Chartist faction composed of the London-based artisan intellectuals, and that of ‘physical force’ by industrial workers of agrarian origin. As Lovett’s autobiography shows so clearly, the former were characterised by strict taboos on disorderly, epicurean, impulsive and violent behaviour, by a certain timidity that went with a scrupulous sense of fairness, by a capacity to see things through organisationally, by a readiness to make personal sacrifice, by pedantic affectations linked to a sense of tactical realism and by a rejection of authoritarian personality-cults and forms of communication based on mass appeal. The other type stemmed from an agrarian milieu in which precapitalist values were strong, and they set greater store by violence, festivities, irregularity, suffering and a sense of inspiration. Both contributed to the development of the workers’ movement but in their reified and fixated forms both were obstacles to its further development (as adventurism or craft legalism).

The Intelligentsia and the October Revolution

David Mandel

This is a revised and somewhat expanded version of an article that first appeared in Critique, no. 14, 1981, pp. 68-87. Much of it is based on research published in my The Petrograd Workers and the Fall of the Old Regime and The Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power, Macmillan Press, London, 1983 and 1986, which will be shortly republished in a new edition in the HM Book Series. This version was first published in Revista de literatura e cultura russa, v. 8, n. 9 (2017), of the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil

Tereshchenko, a sugar magnate and the Minister for External Affairs in the last coalition Provisional Government, was not merely engaging in small talk, when he asked the sailor escorting him to jail after the storming of the Winter Palace on the night of October 24-25: “How will you manage without the intelligentsia ?”[1] That question, in fact, pointed to a critical aspect of the revolutions of 1917 - the alienation between the working class and the intelligentsia, and in particular that part of the intelligentsia that was referred to, and that referred to itself, as “democratic” or “socialist.”[2] Historians have paid relatively little attention to this important aspect of the revolution, perhaps because of the prominence ofintelligenty at the highest level of the Bolshevik party, in its Central Committee. But, at all levels below that, members of the intelligentsia were scarce indeed: the Bolshevik party in 1917 was overwhelmingly proletarian, both in its social composition and in its political orientation.

But the alienation of the left intelligentsia from the workers’ movement could, in fact, trace its roots back to the Revolution of 1905, if not earlier. It was briefly reversed by the February Revolution, which, for a short period, created an atmosphere of national unity. But the mutual estrangement reappeared before long, and with a vengeance, reaching a culmination in the October Revolution, which workers overwhelming supported, but towards which the intelligentsia, including its left-wing elements, was deeply hostile.

In popular contemporary parlance, intelligent was someone who earned his or her living (or who could look forward to doing so - students) in an occupation that required a diploma of at least secondary-level education. For example, when in April 1917, the senior personnel of the Petrograd Post Office decided to form their own union in reaction to the egalitarian aspirations of the existing Union of Post and Telegraph Employees, they called themselves “The Provisional Organising Bureau ofIntelligentnykh Employees of the Petrograd Central Post Office and Branches” and stressed their “education, upon which you have expended at least a quarter of your lives,” in contrast to members of the existing union, “who cannot even spell their names properly.”[3] V.M. Levin, a Left Socialist Revolutionary (SR) member of the Central Council of Factory Committees of Petrograd, wrote in December 1917 that “People who have had the good fortune to receive a scientific education are abandoning the people... And among the latter instinctively grows a hatred for the educated, for the intelligentsia.”[4]

But besides that popular, sociological definition, the term also carried certain moral and political connotation: the intelligentsia were people preoccupied with the “accursed questions,” with Russia’s fate. The sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, Kerensky’s personal secretary in 1917, referred to the intelligentsia as “the carriers of intellect and conscience.”[5] And although most were liberals, or even further to the right, and identified with the interests and world view of the propertied classes (“census society”), the termintelligentsia nevertheless had a certain connotation of service to the toiling people.

Historically, that connotation had a certain basis in reality. Over the latter half of the nineteenth century, a significant part of the politically active intelligentsia had actively opposed the autocracy and, though only a minority of the educated population, that group had set the tone for the entire social group. The main political task it set for itself was to bridge the gulf separating it from the still dormant people, whom it wanted to arouse to oppose the autocracy. And the intelligentsia as a whole did welcome the February Revolution.   

But a closer examination of the period prior to 1917 reveals a more complex picture. For, following the Revolution of 1905, a shift to the right took place among the intelligentsia,[6] a shift that was most marked among the hitherto socialist intelligentsia. A much-discussed sign of this shift was the publication in 1909 of theVekhy collection of articles by a group of intellectuals, some of whom had been Marxists, critical of materialism and radicality of the Russian intelligentsia. In his study of the Socialist Revolutionary party, Russia’s peasant party, historian O. Radkey wrote of

a metamorphosis of... the populist intelligentsia from insurrectionaries in 1905 to jaded democrats in the period between the revolutions and then to fervent patriots, partisans of the Entente, and devotees of the cult of the state in the coming war... They clung to the old S.R. label even though the old faith was gone, aside from the residue of interest in political liberation... [7]

The same “flight of the intelligentsia” was observed in the social-democratic parties.[8] L.H. Haimson observed that the private correspondence of the Menshevik leaders in 1909-1911

…is replete with despondent statements... about the wholesale withdrawal from political and social concerns that seemed to have accompanied the radical intelligentsia’s recoil from the underground struggle. Most party members, these letters suggest, had in fact withdrawn from party activities and were wholly absorbed in the prosaic if arduous struggle to resume a normal, day-to-day existence. [9]

In the Bolshevik wing of Russian social democracy, which came to dominate the workers’ movement in the immediate pre-war years of renewed labour upsurge, following the defeat of the Revolution of 1905, was subject to the same phenomenon. Workers’ memoirs document their sense of betrayal by the Bolshevik intelligentsia. A. S. Shliapnikov, a metalworker and prominent party leader, wrote of an “'ebb” that had begun in 1906-1907 and left so few intellectuals among Petersburg Bolsheviks that there were barely enough “literary forces” to meet the needs of the Bolshevik fraction in the State Duma and the party’s daily newspapers: “In place of the raznochintsy-intelligenty[10], of the young students, a  worker-intelligentsia appeared with calloused hands, a highly developed intellect, and continuous links with the workers.”[11]

Kiril Orlov (Ivan Egorov), another Petersburg metalworker and member of the Bolshevik Petersburg Committee during the war, recalled :

During the war there was absolutely no party intelligentsia among the entire membership of the Petersburg Committee. It lived a totally separate existence somewhere in the city, nestled around Maxim Gorky. But neither the proletariat nor its districts knew or had any information about it. We felt that we, the proletarians, were alone. There was not even anyone to write a small pamphlet or an appeal. They all sat with their arms folded, grieved, and ran from illegal work like the devil flees from incense. The workers were left to their own resources. [12]

The sense of betrayal was even stronger in the provinces, where the intelligentsia was much less numerous. A. Martsionovskii, a Bolshevik carpenter, recalled:  

In a whole series of cities where I participated in illegal activity, almost everywhere the party committee consisted exclusively of workers. The intelligentsia was absent, with the exception of those who came on tour for two or three days. In the most difficult years of reaction, the workers practically remained without leaders from among the intelligentsia. They [intelligenty] said that they were tired, that young people were coming to take their place. But in the meanwhile, the youth got carried away withartsybashevshchina[13]. Some sought new gods, others went abroad and the rest led lives of philistines. But that was the period following the destruction of our organisation. Somewhat later, the intellectuals decided it was not good to be revolutionaries and set actively to a new current of liquidators.[14] At the start of the imperialist war, they stood for the defence of the country and denied their fundamental slogans, taking with them many workers who had not yet had time to think matters through... We, the underground workers, had to conduct our activity without the intelligentsia, except for a few individuals. However, after the February Revolution, they turned up, beat their breasts and shouted “We are revolutionaries,” etc. But, in fact, none of them had conducted revolutionary work, and we had not seen them in the underground.[15]

As Martsionovskii indicated, a certain rapprochement between workers and the former left intelligentsia took place following the February revolution, during the latter’s “honeymoon period” of national unity. Once the revolution in the capital had become a fait accompli, the propertied classes, hitherto profoundly fearful of popular revolution, rallied to it. That shift greatly facilitated the revolution’s victory in the rest of the country and at the front.[16] But the rosy atmosphere of February proved short-lived. Before long, already in April, the polarization that opposed the popular classes to the propertied classes was once again making itself felt.

Among workers, more slowly among soldiers, and finally in the villages, the conviction grew that the propertied classes were opposed to the democratic and anti-war goals of the revolution, that they were, in fact, determined to crush the revolution with a military dictatorship. This conviction led to growing popular support for the demand to transfer political power to the soviet of workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ deputies, that is, to a government that would exclude any influence of the propertied classes on policy, a position advocated by the Bolshevik party. By the fall of 1917, all the soviets in urban centres of any significance, and increasingly the soldiers at the front, were demanding an end to the governmental coalition with political representatives of the propertied classes and the transfer of power to the soviets. At the Second All-Russian Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Soviets in October 25-27 1917 that established a soviet government, 390 of the 650 delegates were Bolsheviks and another 90 were Left SRs, who soon joined the Bolsheviks in a coalition government. An All-Russian Congress of Peasant Deputies in 10-25 November also voted to support the Soviet government.

 It was on this background of deepening class polarization that the former rift between the workers and the intelligentsia reappeared At a conference on adult education a few days before the October insurrection, prominent Bolshevik intellectual A.V. Lunacharskii (later People’s Commissar of Education in the first Soviet government), reported on the state of worker-intelligentsia cooperation in the area of culture. He noted the great thirst for knowledge among workers that was going unsatisfied because “at present, one observes that the proletariat itself is isolated from the intelligentsia... thanks to the fact that the proletariat has crossed over to the banner of the extreme left wing of democracy, while the intelligentsia found itself on the right.” These words provoked protests among the representatives of the intelligentsia who were present. But Lunacharskii insisted that “the proletariat is not to blame, but rather the intelligentsia, which has a strongly negative attitude toward the political tasks the proletariat has put forth.” [17]

Revealing in this respect is the end-of-the-year survey of Russian journalism for 1917, of “that collective physiognomy that until recently reflected the soul of our so-called intelligentsia, our spiritual aristocracy. It was written by V.P. Polonskii, a left Menshevik historian and literary critic, himself highly critical of “Bolshevik craziness” (sumasbrodstvo) and of the Soviet regime:

One would be hard pressed to find another group of people, aside from the intelligentsia, in whose thinking and moods the revolution has wreaked more cruel havoc.

I have before me a pile of newspapers, magazines, brochures. Amidst the current material, one most often encounters the old, most sensitive theme in our intelligentsia’s consciousness – the theme of “the intelligentsia and the people.”

And as one reads, a picture emerges that is most unexpected. Until recently, the predominant type of intelligent wasthe intelligent-narodnik [populist], the well-wisher, kindly and sympathetically sighing over the lot of our “younger brother.” But, alas, this type is now an anachronism. In his place has appeared the malevolentintelligent, hostile to themuzhik, to the worker, to the entire benighted, toiling mass.

The contemporary ones are no longer striving, as before, to fill in some sort of abyss separating them from the muzhik. On the contrary, they want to demarcate themselves from themuzhik with a clear and impassable line...

Such is the emerging, portentous confusion. It manifests itself with great clarity in the literature. In a great number of articles devoted to the theme of the people and the intelligentsia, the people is treated as a benighted, brutalized, grasping, unbridled mass, a rabble. And its present leaders – as demagogues, worthless nullities, émigrés, careerists, who have adopted the motto of the bourgeoisie of old France: Après nous, le déluge...

If you will recall what yesterday’s sympathizers and advocates of the people have written of late about “mob rule,” the extremely alarming fact of our present existence will appear indisputable: the intelligentsia has completed its departure from the people. The intelligenty had just enough powder left to bid good night to the “one who suffers all in the name of Christ, whose severe eyes do not weep, whose hurting mouth does not complain.”

And that one, the eternal sufferer, had only to rise to his feet, to mightily straighten his shoulders and take a deep breath for the intelligentsia to feel disillusioned.

And it is not the excesses of the October Days, nor the craziness of Bolshevism that are the reason for this. The departure of the intelligentsia, the transformation of the “populists” into “evil-wishers,” began long ago, almost on the day after the [February] revolution…

Writers and poets, essayists and artists (not all, of course, but many, many) have turned their backs on the people. “You have stood up on your feet too soon. You are a rank barbarian. Your path is not ours....[18]

A parallel process of estrangement took place within the socialist parties themselves. Radkey writes that when the SR Party finally split in September 1917 into left and right wings (the right continuing to support the coalition government with the liberals, representatives of the propertied classes), 

…nearly all the sailors and a large majority of the workers and army went with the L[eft] SRs, most of the intelligenty and white collar workers stayed where they were, and the peasantry divided into two camps, the larger loyal to the [Right] SR but the lesser one already sizable and steadily growing... From every quarter came complaints of a dearth of intellectuals which seriously impeded the activity of the new party. Sukhanov termed it the party of the rural plebs and ranked it even lower on the cultural scale than the Bolsheviks, the party of the urban plebs.[19]

At the Second Petrograd Conference of the Bolshevik Party in July 1917, the local Bolshevik leader V. Volodarskii complained of the “wholesale desertion of the intelligentsia”: 

The intelligentsia, in accordance with its social background, has crossed over to the defencists [supporters of the coalition government] and does not want to carry the revolution further. It does not come to us, and it has everywhere adopted the position of resisting the revolutionary steps of the workers. [20]

A few weeks later, at the Sixth Party Congress, Volodarskii stated the following in his report on the Petrograd Bolshevik organisation :

Work is being conducted by local forces from among the worker masses. There are very few intelligentnye forces. All organisational work is being conducted by the workers themselves. The members of the Central Committee took little part in our organisational work. Lenin and Zinoviev very rarely, as they were preoccupied with other work. Our organisation has grown from below.[21]

In the provinces, the absence of intelligentsy was even more marked. The Bolshevik Central Committee was being bombarded with urgent requests from the provinces to send “literary forces,”, “at least oneintelligent.” But the Central Committee’ secretary, Ya. M. Sverdlov, almost invariably replied that no one could be spared, and that the situation in the capital was hardly better.[22]

As a result, workers came increasingly to identify the Bolsheviks with workers and the Mensheviks and (right) SRs with intellectuals. For example, in June 1917, a Menshevik journalist visited a tea-packing plant in Moscow. Moscow’s workers lagged behind Petrgorad politically, and all the members of the factory committee were still Mensheviks, except for one. When the latter was asked by the journalist why not a Menshevik like the others, he replied that, although he belonged to no party, he voted for the Bolsheviks because “on their list there are workers. The Mensheviks are all gospoda [gentlemen] - doctors, lawyers, etc.” He added that the Bolsheviks stood for soviet power and workers’ control.[23] Speaking on October 14 at the soviet of Orekhovo-Zuevsk, a textile town not far from Moscow, Baryshnikov, a local Bolshevik worker, explained:

Due to the fact that the ideology and politics of the working class call for a radical reformation of the present system, the relations the so-called intelligentsia, the SRs and Mensheviks, to the workers have become very strained. And, therefore,already there exist no ties between us, and in the eyes of the working class they have once and for all defined themselves as servants of bourgeois society.[24]

As the workers’ position moved to the left and they abandoned their previous support for a political coalition with representatives of “census society,” worker conferences became increasingly plebeian affairs. Typical was this report on a conference of railway workers in November 1917: “Almost complete absence of intelligentsia. Even the praesidium almost completely consists of ‘rank-and-file’.” [25] This conference was called by the workers of the railway depots and workshops of Moscow and Petrograd in opposition to the All-Russian Railway Union, which had opposed the October insurrection and the Soviet government. That union included all railway employees, including white-collar and managerial personnel. The All-Russian union was at this time led by Menshevik-Internationalists opposed the October insurrection. By contrast, two thirds of the delegates to the conference of depot and workshop workers were Bolsheviks, the rest being Left SRs. There were only a few Menshevik-Internationalists.

It was in the aftermath of the July Days that the workers were forced to directly confront the implications of their growing isolation from the intelligentsia. On July 3 and 4 Petrograd’s industrial workers, along with some military units from the local garrison, marched to the Tauride Palace in a peaceful demonstration to pressure the Central Executive Committee (CEC) of Soviets, whose majority at the time was composed of Mensheviks and SRs, to end the governmental coalition with representatives of the propertied classes and to take power on its own, that is, to form a soviet government, one in which only the workers, soldiers and peasants would be represented. But the unthinkable happened: not only did these Mensheviks and SRs refuse to heed the will of the workers, they actually stood by while the government, in which their party leaders were participating, unleashed a wave of repressions against workers, Bolsheviks, and other left socialists who opposed to the coalition government. The Minister of Internal Affairs directly responsible for this policy was none other than the Menshevik leader, I. G. Tsereteli.

Until that moment, the radicalized workers had been thinking in terms of a peaceful transfer of power to the soviets. That was possible since the soviets enjoyed the allegiance of the soldiers. But the refusal of the leaders of the CEC of Soviets to take power and their willingness to adopt repressive measures against workers profoundly altered the situation. Among other things, this forced the workers to face the prospect of taking power by armed insurrection. It also meant the new government would not enjoy the support even of the left intelligentsia, whose knowledge and skills were so needed for managing the economic and state machinery of the country.

This prospect very much worried workers. This emerged clearly at the Conference of Factory Committees of Petrograd on August 10-12, 1917. The general consensus at the conference was that industry was fast heading toward collapse, aided by the sabotage of the industrialists, who were counting on mass unemployment to undermine the workers’ movement, and by the Provisional government, which, under pressure from the industrialists, refused to adopt regulatory measures to arrest the deepening economic dislocation. The delegates were becoming aware of the likely prospect that they would be forced to assume responsibility for the economy, something they had not imagined at the moment of the February Revolution, which they had viewed in purely liberal-democratic, not socialist, terms.

One of the delegates to the conference summed up the situation: “We have to exert all our energy in this struggle [to prepare our own economic apparatus for the moment of collapse of the capitalist economy]. Especially as class contradictions are more and more revealed, and the intelligentsia leaves us, we have to rely only on ourselves and take all our organisations into our workers’ hands.” [26]  The delegates were painfully aware of the tremendous difficulty of the task. “Through all the reports,” observed one of them, “like a red thread, runs the cry of a lack of [educated] people.”[27] “Tsarism did everything to leave us unprepared,” lamented another delegate, “and naturally, everywhere, in both political and economic organs, we lack [educated] people.”[28]

How were they to proceed in such circumstances? Sedov, a Menshevik delegate, argued that there could be no question of the workers taking power on their own:

We are alone. We have few workers capable of understanding state affairs and of controlling. It is necessary to organise courses in government affairs and in control of production. If we take power, the masses will crucify us. The bourgeoisie is organised and has at its disposal a mass of experienced people. But we do not, and we will, therefore, not be in a position to hold power. [29]

But the overwhelming majority of the delegates to the conference disagreed. Their position was expressed by a delegate from the Wireless Telephone and Telegraph Factory :

The bourgeoisie knows its interest better than the petty bourgeois parties [Mensheviks and SRs]. The bourgeoisie completely understands the situation and has expressed itself very clearly in the words of Riabushinskii[30], who said that they will wait until hunger seizes us by the throat and destroys all that we have won. But while they are grabbing for our throats, we will fight and we won’t retreat from the struggle.[31]

Over and over again, delegates urged each other to abandon the workers’ old habit of relying on the intelligentsia.

The working class has always been isolated. It always has to conduct its policy alone. But in a revolution, the working class is the vanguard. It must lead the other classes, including the peasantry. It all depends on the activity of workers in the various organisations, commissions, etc., where we must constitute a majority of workers. Against the approaching hunger, we must put forward the activity of the masses. We must throw off the Slavic spirit of laziness and together cut a path through the forest that will lead the working class to socialism. [32]

When someone suggested that the number of working groups be limited, due to the complexity of the issues to be discussed and the shortage of “active forces”, S.P. Voskov, a carpenter from the Sestroretsk Rifle Factory, retorted :

The absence of intelligenty in no way impedes the work of the sections. It is high time the workers renounce the bad habit of constantly looking over their shoulder at theintelligenty. All the participants at this conference must join some section and work there independently.[33]

In fact, these workers’ worst fears did materialise in October. The Mensheviks and SRs walked out of the Congress of Soviets that elected a Soviet government, the very principle of which – a government responsible to the soviets - they rejected. Middle and senior level technical and administrative personnel of state and banking institutions, as well as doctors and teachers went on strike.[34] In the factories, the higher technical and administrative personnel also refused to recognise the new government or to cooperate with workers’ control.[35] The depth of left intelligentsia’s hostility to the October insurrection and to the Soviet government – which had no counterpart even among the most conservative workers – is forcefully expressed in the following resolution adopted by the Executive Bureau of the Socialist Group of Engineers in late October 1917:

A band of utopians and demogogues, exploiting the fatigue of the workers and soldiers, exploiting utopian appeals to social revolution, through deliberate deceit and slander of the Provincial Government, has attracted to its side the benighted masses, and, in opposition to the will the vast part of the Russian people, on the eve of the Constituent Assembly, they have seized power in the capitals and in certain cities of Russia. With the aid of arrests, violence against the free word and press, with the aid of terror, a band of usurpers is trying to maintain itself in power. The Bureau of the Socialist Group of Engineers, decisively protesting against this takeover, against the arrest of Kerenskii, against murders, violence, against the closing of newspapers, against persecutions and terror, declares that the acts of these usurpers have nothing in common with socialist ideals and that they destroy the freedom won by the people... True socialists cannot give the slightest support either to the usurpers of power or to those who will not decisively and firmly break with them. [36]

But the lower white-collar and manual workers of government and financial institution refused to take part in the strikes and condemned the higher-level employees for doing so. After the October Revolution, the Soviet government dissolved the Petrograd Duma (municipal assembly), when it refused to recognise the new regime. It held new elections, that were boycotted by all the parties except for the Bolsheviks and Left SRs. When the new Duma met, its head, M.I.  Kalinin, reported that the Duma’s “intelligentnye employees were clearly disrespectful when... [I] tried to talk with them, and they stated their intention of resisting. But the municipal workers and lower white-collars employees were happy about the transfer of power to the workers.”[37]

Alexander Blok was one of the rare major literary figures of the older generation who embraced the October Revolution. Writing in the winter months following the October Revolution, he portrayed the state of mind of the left intelligentsia in the following words:

“Russia is perishing,” “Russia is no more,” “Eternal memory to Russia” – that is what I hear on all sides...

What were you thinking? That the revolution is an idyll ? That creativity does not destroy anything in its path ? That the people is a good little girl?...

And the best people say: “We are disappointed in our people”… and they see nothing around themselves but boorishness and bestiality (but man is right here, besides them); the best people even say: “There hasn’t even been any revolution”; those who were obsessed with hatred of “tsarism” are ready to fling themselves back into its arms, just to be able to forget what is now happening; yesterday’s “defeatists”[38] are now crying about “German oppression[39]”; yesterday's “internationalists” weep for “Holy Russia”;  born atheists are ready to light votive candles, praying for victory over the internal and external foes…

So it turns out you were chopping away at the very branch on which you were sitting? A pitiable situation: with voluptuous malice you stuck firewood, shavings, dry logs into a pile of timber damp from the snow and rain; and when the flame suddenly erupted and flared up to the sky (like a banner), you run around and crying: “Oh, ah, we’re on fire !” [40]

Workers did not take the final step of seizing power in October with a light heart. In fact, most, while desperately desiring soviet power, hesitated and temporised before the “action” (vystuplenie). The insurrection was the action of the decisive minority of workers, those in an or close to the Bolshevik party. (In the capital alone, the party had 30,000 workers in its ranks.) When they forced the issue, the overwhelming majority of the rest rallied to their support. Yet even then, the workers were worried about their political isolation. In the days following the insurrection, there was broad worker support, including within the ranks of the Bolshevik party, for the formation of a “homogeneous socialist government,” that is, a coalition of all socialist parties, from left to right.

But the negotiations to form such a government, undertaken under the auspices of the Railway Workers’ Union, then headed by Menshevik-Internationalists (leftwing Mensheviks), failed, because the moderate Mensheviks and SRs, and those to the right of them, refused to participate in a government responsible uniquely, or mainly, to the soviets. Such a government would have a majority of Bolsheviks, as they had been the majority at the recent Congress of Soviets. Behind this refusal was the conviction of the moderate socialists that the revolution would be doomed without the support of the bourgeoisie. Related to this was the fear that a government led by Bolsheviks, whose base was in the working class, would undertake “socialist experiments”.  

After the talks broke down precisely over the issue of responsibility to the soviets, the Left SRs decided to take part in the Soviet government in coalition with the Bolsheviks. Their newspaper opined that “even had we achieved such a ‘homogeneous government,’ it would have, in fact, been a coalition with the most radical part of the bourgeoisie.”[41]  But the Menshevik-Internationalists, the Menshevik party’s left wing that soon took over the party’s leadership, refused to follow the Left SRs. In an article entitled “2 x 2 = 5”, the Menshevik-Internationalist economist V.L. Bazarov expressed his irritation at what he regarded at the workers’ confusion: they were calling for the formation of an all-socialist coalition but they wanted that coalition to be responsible to the soviets.

…Resolutions are being passed that demand at once a homogeneous democratic government based upon an agreement of all the socialist parties and [at the same time] recognition of the current [overwhelmingly Bolshevik] TsIK [the Central Executive Committee of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, elected at the recent Soviet Congress] as the organ to which the government should be responsible... But at present a purely soviet government can only be Bolshevik. And with each day it becomes clearer that the Bolsheviks cannot govern: decrees are issued like hotcakes and they cannot be put into practice... Thus, even if what the Bolsheviks say is true, that the socialist parties do not have any masses behind them but are purely intellectual... even then, large concessions would be necessary. The proletariat cannot rule without the intelligentsia... The TsIK has to be only one of the institutions to which the government is responsible.[42]

The Menshevik-Internationalists shared the Bolsheviks’ view of the bourgeoisie as fundamentally counter-revolutionary. But they also shared the conviction with the right wing of their own party that economically backward, overwhelming peasant Russia lacked the social and political conditions for socialism. And so, while the more right-wing Mensheviks, together with the SRs, continued to call for a coalition with representatives of the bourgeoisie, the Menshevik-Internationalists stressed the necessity of retaining the support at least of society’s “middle strata,” the petty bourgeoisie and first and foremost of the intelligentsia. The problem was, however, that the latter had overwhelmingly taken the side of the bourgeoisie. As a result, the left Mensheviks were condemned to remain passive onlookers to the unfolding revolution.

As for the workers themselves, once it became clear to them that the real issue was soviet power or renewed coalition with the bourgeoisie, in one or another form, they gave their support to the soviet government, even before the Left SRs decided to join. At a meeting on October 29, during the talks on the formation of an all-socialist coalition government, a general assembly of workers of the Admiralteiskii Shipyards appealed to all workers,

regardless of your party hue, to exert pressure on your political centres to achieve an immediate accord of all socialist parties, from Bolsheviks to Popular Socialists inclusive, and to form a socialist cabinet responsible to the Soviet of Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Deputies on the following platform: Immediate proposal of democratic peace. Immediate transfer of land to the hands of the peasant committees. Workers’ control of production. Convocation of the Constituent Assembly at the assigned date. [43]

This was an example of what Bazarov saw as the workers’ political confusion: they wanted a government coalition of all socialist parties but also wanted that government to be responsible to the soviets. But a week later, after the collapse of the negotiations, with the Bolsheviks remaining alone in the government, those same workers now decided

to speak out for full and undivided soviet power and against coalition with parties of defencist conciliators. We have sacrificed much for the revolution and we are prepared, if it is necessary, for new sacrifices, but we will not give up power to those from whom it was taken in a bloody battle. [44]

When the Left SRs decided to enter the government, having concluded that “even if we had obtained such a ‘homogeneous government.’ it would have been in fact a coalition with the most radical part of the bourgeoisie,”[45] workers breathed a collective sigh of relief: unity had been achieved at least “from below”, among thenizy, the Left SRs being mainly a peasant party. An assembly of workers at the Putilov factory declared on that occasion:

We, workers, greet, as one person, this unification that we have long desired and we send all our warm greetings to our comrades who are working on the platform of the Second All-Russian Congress of Toiling People of the poorest peasantry, workers, and soldiers. [46]

The October Revolution, having officially consecrated the already existing, profound polarization of Russian society, found the bulk of the intelligentsia on the side of the propertied classes,[47] with what remained of the left intelligentsia suspended somewhere between the two. Workers responded to the perceived betrayal with bitterness. As the Left SR Levin wrote,

At the moment when the old bourgeois chains of state are being smashed by the people, the intelligentsia is deserting the people. Those who had the good fortune to receive a scientific education are abandoning the people, who bore them on their exhausted and lacerated shoulders. And as if that were not enough, in leaving, they mock their helplessness, their illiteracy, their inability painlessly to carry out great transformations, to attain great achievements. And this last is especially bitter to the people. And among the latter, instinctively grows a hatred for the “educated,” for the intelligentsia. [48]

The Menshevik-Internationalist paper Novaia zhizn’ published the following report from Moscow in December 1917:

If the external traces of the insurrection are few, the internal division within the population is deep indeed. When they buried the Red Guard and Bolshevik soldiers [following the victory of the insurrection after several days of serious fighting], as I was told, one could not find a single intelligent or university or high-school student in the extraordinarily grandiose procession. And during the funeral of the Junkers [Officer school cadets who had fought on the side of the Provisional Government], there was not a single worker, soldier or plebeian in the crowd. The composition of the demonstration in honour of the Constituent Assembly was similar – the five soldiers following behind the banner of the SRs Military Organisation only underlined the absence of the garrison.

Now the abyss separating the two camps has grown particularly deep, thanks to the general strike of municipal employees: teachers of municipal schools, higher personnel of the hospitals, senior tram employees, etc. This strike places the work of the Bolshevik municipal government before extreme difficulties, but even more it exacerbates the hatred in the nizy of the population for all the intelligentsia and the bourgeoisie. I myself saw a [tram] conductor force a high school student out of his car: ‘They teach you alright, but it seems they don’t want to teach our children!’

The strike of the schools and the hospitals is seen by the urban nizy as a struggle of the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia against the popular masses. [49]

In trying to understand the position of the intelligentsia, one must first ask if the workers’ perception of “betrayal” had any justification. After all, viewed from one angle, it was the workers who parted ways with the intelligentsia by opting to break with the propertied classes, abandoning the national, all-class alliance that had been formed in February.

 The reasons for the workers’ subsequent radicalization can briefly be summed up as follows: on the basis of their experience, the workers reached the conclusion that the propertied classes were opposed to the popular goals of the February revolution: a rapidly concluded democratic peace, land reform, the eight-hour workday, convocation of a constituent assembly to establish a democratic republic. But not only did the propertied classes block the realization of these goals (which were purely democratic and in no way socialist), they were intent on crushing the popular classes militarily. This was amply demonstrated by the Kadet party’s barely concealed support for General Kornilov’s uprising at the end of August as well as by the industrialists’ implacable opposition to state measures to prevent the fast-approaching economic collapse.

To workers, the October insurrection and the establishment of Soviet power meant the exclusion of the propertied classes from influence over government policy. October was first and foremost an act of defence of the February Revolution, its actual achievements and its promises, in face of the active hostility of the propertied classes. Why some workers did see in October the potential for a socialist transformation, that was by no means their main goal in October.

When seen in this light, the workers’ sense of the betrayal on the part of the intelligentsia becomes comprehensible. As the Menshevik-Internationalist paper (which was hostile to the October Revolution) wrote: “Now each worker could ask the striking doctors and teachers: ‘You never struck to protest the regime under the Tsar or under Guchkov.[50] Why do you strike now, when power is in the hands of the people we recognise as our leaders?’”[51] Even left Mensheviks like Iu. O. Martov, whose dedication to the workers’ cause could not be doubted, felt like washing his hands of everything rather than doing “what seems to be our duty - to stand by the working class even when it is wrong... It is tragic. For after all, the entire proletariat stands behind Lenin and expects the overturn to result in social emancipation - realising all the while that it has challenged all the antiproletarian forces.”[52]

Why then did the socialist intelligentsia “run away,” as workers perceived it ? Writing of the populists, historian Radkey offers the following explanation:

In the trough of the revolution (many) had gone into public service or social work as civil servants in zemstvos and municipalities, as functionaries in the cooperative societies, where the daily routine and outlook induced were alike deadening to the revolutionary split. Others had entered the professions. All were getting older. [53]

But it seems rather unlikely that so profound a social transformation as the economic integration of the intelligentsia into the existing order could have taken place in the space of a decade. Besides, one has to wonder how the socialist intellectuals earned their living before the defeat of the 1905 revolution, since they could not all have been professional party activists or hungry students. And if the generation of 1905 was getting older, what of the students of 1917, most of whom were also hostile to the October Revolution. The Menshevik A.N. Potresov, who was on the extreme right wing of his party, observed in May 1918: “'In February [1917] we saw the common joy of the students and petty bourgeois. In October, students and bourgeois have become synonymous.” [54]

A more reasonable explanation of the “flight of the intelligentsia” should be sought in the class polarisation of Russian society that fully emerged  in the course of the Revolution of 1905, when the bourgeoisie, frightened by the workers’ militancy in promoting their social demands, notably the eight-hour workday, and enticed by very limited political concessions offered by a shaken autocracy, turned against the workers’ and peasant movements, notably by organizing in the fall of 1905, together with the state, a mass lockout of Petrograd’s workers, who were striking for  the eight-hour workday. [55] When the workers’ movement recovered in 1912-14 from the defeat of that revolution, their strikes typically put forth at once both political demands addressed to the autocracy and economic demands for the industrialists. And on their part, the industrialists collaborated closely with the Tsarist police to put down workers’ political as well as economic actions and to repress their activists.[56]

It was during this pre-war period that the Bolsheviks became the hegemonic political force among the workers. What distinguished the Bolshevik wing of social democracy from the Menshevik was its evaluation of the bourgeoisie, including its left, liberal wing, as fundamentally opposed to a democratic revolution. The Mensheviks, on their part, considered that the bourgeoisie’s leadership in that revolution was absolutely critical. The peasants, whom Lenin proposed as allies for the workers, were, in the Mensheviks’ view, incapable of providing national political leadership. If that role did not fall to the bourgeoisie, then it would of necessity fall to the workers. But the workers at the head of a revolutionary government would inevitably adopt measures that undermined bourgeois property rights. They would make “socialist experiments” that would prove disastrous in backward Russian conditions, leading inevitably to defeat of the revolution. And so, Mensheviks in the pre-war years called in vain on the workers to restrain their “strike passion”: they did not want to frighten the liberals, who were growing increasingly alienated from the rotten autocratic regime, away from revolution.

As we have seen, the left intelligentsia embraced the position of the Mensheviks and SRs, not that of the Bolsheviks and workers. They argued that a worker-led revolution in a backward peasant country would inevitably be crushed. The following episode, recounted in the memoir of a Petrograd metalworker, illustrates the division between the workers and left intellectuals.  

I. Gordkienko, a metalworker and Bolshevik, along with two of his comrades, who, like himself, were originally from Nizhnyi Novgorod, Maksim Gorky’s home town, decided to pay their zemlyak (fellow countryman) a visit: “Can it be that A. M. Gorky has completely moved away from us?” they asked themselves. In 1918 Gorky was an editor of the Menshevik-Internationalist paperNovaia zhizn’, which was harshly critical of the new Soviet regime, attacking especially its ineptitude, a result, in the paper’s view, of it having pushed away the intelligentsia. What particularly angered workers was that, while the papers’ editors criticized the government, they stood aside and refused to participate in it to make things better. For example, at a conference of Petrograd’s factory committees in February 1918, one of the delegates spoke bitterly of the “sabotaging intelligentsia of Gorky'sNovaia zhizn’, who are busy criticising the Bolshevik government while they themselves do nothing to lighten the tasks of this government.”[57]

 At Gorky’s home, the conversation soon turned to politics:

Aleksei Maksimovich, lost in thought, spoke: “It’s hard for you boys, very hard.”

“And you, Aleksei Maksimovich, you’re not making it any easier,” I replied.

“Not only doesn’t he help. He is even making it harder for us,” said Ivan Chugurin.

“Ekh, boys, boys, you are such fine lads. I feel sorry for you. Listen in this sea, no, in this ocean of petty bourgeois, peasant elemental forces, you are only a speck of sand. How many of you solid Bolsheviks are there? A handful. In life, you are like a drop of oil in the ocean, a thin, thin ribbon. The slightest wind, and it will snap.”

“You speak in vain, Aleksei Maksimovich. Come to us, to the Vyborg District. Take a look around. Where there were 600 Bolsheviks, there are thousands now.”

“Thousands, but raw, unshod, and in other cities even these are lacking.”

“The same is taking place, Aleksei Maksimovich, in the other cities and villages. Everywhere the class struggle is intensifying.”

“That's why I love you, for your strong faith. But that’s also why I fear for you. You will perish, and then everything will be thrown back hundreds of years. It’s terrible to contemplate.”

A couple of weeks later, the three returned and found N.N. Sukhanov and D.A. Desnitskii at Gorky’s apartment. They too were left-Menshevik intellectuals and editors of  Novaya zhizn’.

Again, Aleksei Maksimovich spoke of to the petty bourgeois sea. He lamented that there were so few of us old underground Bolsheviks, that the party was so young and inexperienced... Sukhanov and Lopata affirmed that only a madman could talk of a proletarian revolution in so backward a country as Russia. We protested determinedly. We said that behind the facade of all-Russian democracy,[58] they were defending the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie...

In the course of the conversation, Aleksei Maksimovich walked over to the window that overlooked the street. He then quickly walked over to me, seized me by the sleeve and pulled me toward the window. “Take a look,” he said in an angry and injured voice. What I saw was really disgraceful. Near a bed of flowers, on the freshly cut green lawn, a group of soldiers was sitting. They were eating herring and throwing the garbage onto the flower bed.

“And it’s the same thing at the People’s House[59]: the floors are waxed, spittoons have been placed in every comer and next to the columns. But just look at what they do there,” angrily said Maria Fedorovna, [Gorky’s wife] who managed the People’s House.

“And with this crowd, the Bolsheviks intend to make a socialist revolution,” spitefully said Lopata. “You have to teach, educate the people, and then make a revolution.”

And who is going to teach and educate them? The bourgeoisie?” one of us asked.

“And how would you go about doing it?” inquired Aleksei Maksimovich, now smiling.

“We would like to do it differently,” I replied. “First overthrow the bourgeoisie, then educate the people. We’ll build schools, clubs, people's houses...”

“But that’s not realizable,” declared Lopata.

“For you, it isn’t; for us it is,” I answered.

“Well, maybe they will, the devils, eh?” said Aleksei Maksimovich.

“We definitely will achieve it,” one of us replied, “and it will be all the worse for you.”.

“Oho! You’re threatening. How will it be worse for us?” asked Aleksei Maksimovich, laughing.

“In this way: with or without you, we will do what we have to do under the leadership of Ilyich [Lenin], and then they will ask you where you were and what you were doing when we were having such a hard time.” [60]

Lenin gave a strikingly similar account of a conversation in the summer of 1917 with a well-to-do lawyer.

This lawyer was once a revolutionary, a member of the Social- Democratic, and even Bolshevik, Party. Now he is all fright, all anger at the rampaging and uncompromising workers: “Okay, I understand the inevitability of a social revolution; but here, given the decline in the level of the workers as a result of the war[61]... that isn’t a revolution, it’s an abyss.”

He would be prepared to recognise the social revolution, if history led up to it as peacefully, calmly, smoothly and accurately as a German express train enters a station. A very proper conductor opens the door of the car and proclaims: “Station “Social Revolution”. Alle aussteigen [Everyone out]!” In such a case, why not shift from the position of an engineer working for the Tit Tityches[62] to that of an engineer working for workers’ organisations…

This man has seen strikes. He knows what a storm of passions the most ordinary strike arouses, even in the most peaceful times. He, of course, understands how many millions of times more powerful this storm must be when the class struggle has raised up the entire toiling people of a huge country, when war and exploitation have brought millions of people almost to despair, people whom the landowners have tortured, whom the capitalists and Tsarist bureaucrats have plundered and oppressed for decades. He understands all this “theoretically”; he recognises all this only with his lips; he is simply frightened by the “extraordinarily complex situation.” [63]

N. Sukhanov offered a similar explanation for the position of the left Mensheviks:

We stood against the coalition and the bourgeoisie and alongside the Bolsheviks. We did not merge with them because some aspects of positive Bolshevik creativity, as well as their propaganda methods revealed the future odious face of Bolshevism to us. It was an unbridled, anarchistic, petty-bourgeois elemental force [stikhiya], that was eliminated by Bolshevism only when it again had no masses behind it.[64]

Fear of the stikhia, the peasantry first of all, was an important aspect of Menshevism that helps to explain the party’s rejection of the October Revolution and its insistence on a coalition with the liberals, and failing that, with “the rest of democracy,” notably the intelligentsia.

But the left intelligentsia’s concern about the insufficiently developed political culture and consciousness of the poplar masses no doubt had a basis, one has to wonder how their decision to stand aside from the struggle could be justified, since the revolution was going ahead in any case. In the conditions of profound polarisation between the classes, the alternative to the Soviet government defended by the intelligentsia, left intelligentsia included, was never clear, and least of all to workers. But in fact, there was no alternative, except defeat of the revolution. As a Bolshevik worker told a conference of worker and Red-army delegates in May 1918, “We are accused of sowing civil war. But there is here a big mistake, if not a lie… Class interests are not created by us. They are a question that exists in life, a fact, before which all must bow.”[65]  That is why, despite the terrible deprivations and excesses of the civil war, the workers and peasants, some more actively, others passively, continued to support the Soviet regime.

Gorky’s concern about the uncultured, politically unenlightened masses was no doubt sincere. But the revolution was proceeding with or without the intelligentsia. On the face of it, it made more sense to take active part in it in order to ease its path and to try to limit its excesses. Some intellectuals, of course did make that choice. A certain Brik, a cultural figure in Petrograd, wrote this to Novaia zhizn’ in early December 1917 :

To my surprise, I find myself on the Bolshevik electoral list to the municipal duma. I am not a Bolshevik and am against their cultural policy. But I cannot let matters slide. It would be a disaster if the workers were left to themselves to set policy. Therefore, I will work - but under no (external) discipline. Those who refuse to work and wait for the counterrevolution to restore culture are blind. [66]

In December, a new Union of Internationalist Teachers was formed, after some of the teachers decided to secede from the All-Russian Union of Teachers over the issue of the teachers’ strike. The new organization declared that it was “impermissible that schools should be used as a political weapon,” and they called upon the teachers to cooperate with the regime to create a new socialist school. [67]

V.B. Stankevich, a Popular Socialist (right populist) and military commissar under the Provisional Governement, took a similar position in a letter to his “political friends,” written in February or March 1918:

By now, we have to see that the elemental forces of the people are on the side of the new government. There are two paths before us: to continue the irreconcilable struggle for power or to adopt the peaceful, constructive work of a loyal opposition…

Can the former ruling parties [in the Provisional Government] say that they are now so experienced that they can manage the tasks of running the country, which have become harder, not easier? Why, in essence, there is not a single programme that we can oppose to that of the Bolsheviks. And a fight without a programme is in no way better than an adventure of Mexican generals. But even if there were the possibility of creating a programme, we have to see that we lack the forces to carry it out. Why, to overthrow Bolshevism, not formally but in reality, the united forces of all – from the social revolutionaries to the extreme right - would be needed. And even then, the Bolsheviks would turn out to be stronger…

There remains one path: the path of a united popular front, united national work, common creation… So what will be tomorrow? Continuation of the aimless, meaningless and, in essence, adventuristic attempt to wrest power? Or working together with the people, feasible efforts to help it deal with the difficulties that stand before Russia, united in peaceful struggle for eternal political principles, for truly democratic foundations of government of the country![68]

The point is that the position adopted by the majority of the intelligentsia did not seem to follow from the reasons that they offered for it. And that leads one to ask if there were not other reasons. It seems that, when it came down to it, most of the socialist intelligentsia turned out to be only “the most radical part of the bourgeoisie,” as the Left SR paper concluded. As long as the task of the revolution had been to overthrow the semifeudal autocracy, to establish a liberal democracy, they could support and even spur on the popular movement. But when it emerged - and it began to emerge already in the course of the Revolution of 1905 -  that in Russian conditions, the revolution would transform itself into a struggle against the bourgeoisie itself and so against the social order of the bourgeoisie, the left intelligentsia began to feel the ground tremble under its feet.

They felt their position in society threatened. And despite everything, they enjoyed certain privileges, at least in terms of prestige and status, sometimes also income and professional autonomy. These privileges, and a genuine mistrust and fear of the “unbridled”, “uncultured” masses, bound them to the existing social (capitalist), if not political, order.

In retrospect, of course, one is tempted to argue that the left intelligentsia was right. After all, one of Lenin’s major themes in his last years was the urgent need to raise the cultural level of the people. That level, especially the level of political culture among the peasantry, which constituted the great mass of the population, was a major factor in the rise to power of the bureaucracy under the leadership of Stalin. But one has to ask if the intelligentsia, by the hostile position it adopted toward the October Revolution, did not itself contribute to this outcome. 

[1]          Cited in S.P. Melgunov,The Bolshevik Seizure of Power, (ABC-CAO : 1972), p. 90.

[2]          In contrast to the “bourgeois intelligentsia,” people like P.V. Miliukov, professor of history and leader of the Kadet Party, a liberal party that became hegemonic among the propertied classes (“census society”) in 1917, the “democratic intelligentsia” were sympathisers of the popular classes (workers and peasants) and supporters of the various socialist parties. In the contemporary terminology of the Russian Left, they were part of “revolutionary democracy,” along with the workers and peasants.

[3]          K. Bazilevich, Professional'noe dvizhenie rabotnikov sviazi (Moscow : 1927), 33.

[4]Znamia truda, Dec. 17, 1917.

[5]Volia naroda, Nov. 6, 1917. Sorokin was Kerenskii's personal secretary, later to become one of the deans of American academic sociology.

[6]    M. Shatz and J Zimmerman, ed.s,Vekhy, Routeledge, N.Y. , 1994.

[7]          O. Radkey,The Sickle under the Hammer, Columbia University Press, N.Y.,  1963, pp. 469-70. See alsoZnamia truda, (November 15, 1917), on the populist intelligentsia’s support for the Russia’s participation in the world war.

[8]    L.M. Kleinbort,Ocherki rabochei intelligentsii, Petrograd, 1923, pp. 176-177.

[9]          L.H. Haimson, “The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905-1917,” in M. Cherniavsky,The Structure of Russian History, N. Y., Random House, 1970), p. 346.

[10]Raznochintsy - from the non-aristocratic classes.

[11]         A. S. Shliapnikov,Kanun semnadisatovo goda, Moscow-Petrograd, 1923, p. 99.

[12] K. Orlov,Zhizn’ rabochego revoliutsionnera. Ot 1905 k 1917 g., Leningrad, 1925, p. 29.

[13] M.P. Artsybaev, a popular writer of the period, who writings were considered pornographic.

[14] Social-democrats who, following the defeat of the Revolution of 1905, argued for the abandonment of illegal political organization and activity.

[15] A. Martsionovskii,Zapiski revoliutsionnera-bol'shevika, (Saratov, 1923), 89. This was Martsionovskii's perception of the situation. In fact, in the capitals at least, students played a not insignificant role in 1912-14, especially in the early stages (see for example, E.E. Kruze's articlein Istoria rabochikh leningrada, vol. I, (Leningrad : 1972, 419). But that role was not even remotely comparable to their role in 1905 or in the liberation movement that had preceded it. But as far as the intelligentsia as a whole is concerned, Martsionovskii's picture is essentially accurate.

[16]  V.B. Stankevich, a Popular Socialist (moderate left), wrote of the propertied classes in this period: “Officially, they celebrated, blessed the revolution, shouted “hurray” for the fighters for freedom, decorated themselves with ribbons and marched around sporting red banners. Everyone said “we”, “our” revolution, “our” victory, “our” freedom. But in their hearts, in intimate conversation, they were horrified, they shuddered and felt themselves captives of a hostile elemental milieu that was travelling along an unknown path.” V.B. Stankevich,Vospominaniya 1914-1919, L., 1926., p. 33.

[17]Novaia zhizn', Oct. 18, 1917.

[18]         Op.cit., Jan. 4, 1918..

[19]         Radkey, op.cit., 159.

[20]Vtoraia i tret'ia obshchegorodskie konferentsii bol'shevikov v iule i sentiabre 1917g., (Moscow-Leningrad : 1927), p. 28.

[21]Shestoi vserossiiskii s'ezd RSDRP(b). Protokoly, Moscow, 1958, p. 45.

[22]         SeePerepiska sekretariata TseKa RSDRP(b) s metsnymy organizatsiamy, mart-oktiabr' 1917 Moscow, 1957, passim.

[23]Rabochaia gazeta, June 20, 1917.

[24]Nakanune Oktiabr'skovo vooruzhennovo vosstania v Petrograde, Moscow : 1957, p. 152.

[25]Znamia truda, November 17, 1917.

[26]        Oktiabr’skaia revoliutsia i fabzavkomy, Moscow , 1927, vol I, p.189.

[27]         Op. cit, p. 188.

[28]         Ibid.

[29]         Op. cit.,  208

[30]  P.P. Riabushinskii was a major banker and industrialist, considered to be on the left wing of his class. But in a speech in August 1917 before representatives of the business class, he bitterly attacked the soviets, declaring the that “long bony hand of hunger” would probably have to grasp those false friends of the people, “those members of various committees and soviets,” in order for them to come to their senses. (Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie Rossii nakanune Velikoi Oktiabr’skoi sotialisticheskoi revoliutsii, vol. 1, M. 1957, pp. 200-201.) In left and workers’ circles generally, this was received as an open admission that the industrialists were indeed conducting a creeping, hidden lockout, closing down the factories and creating mass unemployment in order to then crush a weakened workers’ movement militarily. Riabushinksii, as a result, became the personification of thekapitalist-lokautchik in left and worker circles.

[31]Oktiabr’skaia revoliutsia i fabzavkomy, vol. 1, p. 208.

[32]         Op. cit., p. 206.

[33]         Op. cit. p. 167.

[34]Novaia zhizn', Nov. 13, Dec. 8, 22 and 30, 1917.

[35]Zaniatia pervoi moskovskoi oblastnoi konferentsii, (Moscow : 1918), 47-48, cited in N. Lampert,The Technical Intelligentsia in the Soviet Union 1926-1935, PhD thesis, C.R.E.E.S., University of Birmingham, U.K. : 1976, 19.

[36]         A.L. Popov,Oktiabr'skii perevorot, (Petrograd : 1919), 364.

[37]Novaia zhizn’, December 5, 1917. See alsoOktiabr'skoe vooruzhennoe vosstanie v Petrograde, (Moscow : 1957), 368, 514-75 ; and C. Volin, “Deiatel' nost' men'shevikov v profsoiuzakh pri sovetskoi vlasti,” Inter-University Project on the History of Menshevism, paper No. 13, October 1962, p. 28.

[38]  Those who called for Russia’s defeat in the war as a spur to revolution.

[39]  Reference to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of March 1918 that ceded large parts of the former Russian empire  to the Germans in return for ending the war with Russia.

[40]Znamia truda, January 18, 1918. V.V. Veresaev’s little-known, but beautifully written, novel,V tupike, about the civil war in Crimea (first published in 1924) offers a strikingly similar portrayal of the political outlook of the left intelligentsia.

[41]Znamia truda, November, 8, 1917.

[42]Novaia zhizn', November 4, 1917.

[43]         Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Sankt-Peterburga, opis' 9, fond 2, delo 11, list 45.

[44]         Ibid.

[45]Znamia truda, November, 8, 1917.

[46]         Op. cit., Nov.8, 1917.

[47]         Pitirim Sorokin's definition in November 1917 of the “creative forces” of society – which he opposed to “pseudo-democracy” -  is telling: “Onto the stage now must come, on the one hand, the intelligentsia, the carrier of intellect and conscience, and on the other, the authentic democracy, the cooperative movement, the Russia of the dumas and zemstvos, and the conscious (!) village. Their time has come,”(Volia naroda, November 6, 1917). All organizations he listed were dominated by moderate socialists and Kadets and lacked any mass political support. Conspicuous by their absence in Sorokin’ list are the workers and soldiers, and, of course, all the “unconscious” village, the peasants who supported the Left SRs and the Bolsheviks and who had refused to wait in vain for the Provisional Government to adopt land reform.

[48]Znamia truda, Dec. 17, 1917.

[49]Novaia zhizn’, Dec. 12, 1917.

[50]  N.I. Guchkov, major Russian industrialist and Chairman of the Fourth State Duma.

[51]Novaia zhizn'. December 6. 1917. Actually. this was not quite accurate. in 1905, the intelligentsia, organised in the Union of Unions, did participate in the strike movement in the fall. But that was the first and last time. They gave no active support to the colossal strike movements of 1912-1914 and 1915-1916.

[52]         L.H. Haimson,The Mensheviks, (Chicago : 1975). 102-103. The Mensheviks, as a party, reoriented themselves following the German revolution in November 1918 and adopted a position of loyal opposition to the Soviet government.

[53]         Radkey. op. cit., 469-470.

[54]Znamia bor’by, May 21, 1918.

[55]         Ia. A. Shuster,Peterburgski rabochie v 1905-1907 gg., (Leningrad : 1976), 166-168.

[56]         “The Workers’ Movement after Lena,” in L. H. Haimson,Russia’s Revolutionary Experience, N.Y., Columbia University Press, 2005, pp. 109-229.

[57]Novaia zhizn’, Jan. 27, 1918

[58] The Menshevik-Internationalist position was that the political basis of the government had to be broadened to include all of “democracy.” That term was always vague but it meant  the middle strata of society, and in particular the intelligentsia.

[59]   An institution where popular meeting and cultural events were held.

[60]         I. Gordienko,Iz boevogo proshlovo, (Moscow : 1957), 98-101.

[61]  Reference to the influx of peasants into the expanding arms factories.

[62]  Tit Titych was a despotic rich merchant in N. Ostrovsky’s playShouldering Another's Troubles.

[63]         V.I. Lenin,Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed., (Moscow, 1962), vol. 34, 321-322..

[64]         Sukhanov, op. cit., vol. 6, 192.

[65]Pervaya konferentsiya rabochikh I krasngvardveiskikh deputatov 1-go gorodksovo raiona, Petrgorad, 1918, p. 248.

[66]Novaia zhizn', Dec. 5, 1917.

[67]         Op. cit., Dec. 6, 9, 13, 1917. Veresaev’s novel, mentioned in footnote 42, presents examples of that position, as well as of the other, adopted by most of the left intelligentsia.

[68] I.V. Orlov, “Dva puti pered nimi,”Istoricheskii arkhiv, 1997, no. 4, pp. 77-80.

Interview of Panagiotis Sotiris by Thomas E. Goes.

Originally published in http://www.zeitschrift-luxemburg.de/ein-post-nationales-volk-schaffen/

From the 'nation that was' to the 'people to come’

1.       How would you describe the political situation in Greece today?

The political situation is determined by the rhythm of the imposition of the austerity policies and neoliberal reforms imposed by the EU, the IMF and the ECB, under the terms of the Third Memorandum. In fact, as part of the constant evaluation processes, which are part of the Memoranda, the SYRIZA - ANEL government has just signed what equals another Memorandum, accepting huge budget surpluses along with extra cuts on pensions and extra taxation in beginning 2019. At the same time 14 regional Airports have just been privatised and sold to a consortium led by FRAPORT and the government is planning the privatisation of large number of public thermoelectric stations.

The main opposition party, the centre-right New Democracy, which leads the polls, is calling for even more aggressive neoliberal policies, and all systemic political forces accept the inevitability of the austerity packages. The Neo-Nazi Golden Dawn still has a significant presence, despite the trial of its leadership that is underway and is attempting to make a return to the streets with attacks etc. On the left of the political spectrum, the Communist Party (KKE) combines anticapitalist rhetoric with sectarianism and an insistence that no immediate gains are possible and a rejection of any ‘transition’ demands such as exit from the Eurozone. Apart from that, the Greek Left is marked by the difficulties of cooperation and coordination of the forces the anti-EU Left (Popular Unity and ANTARSYA).

The social situation in Greece is very difficult because of the prolonged austerity policies and an economic depression without precedent. Wages are very low, especially for young people, the official unemployment rate is still over 21%, most new posts are part-time and precarious, there is a mass flight of highly qualified degree-holders abroad. A sense that there is no future prevails leading to a mixture of fear and atomised despair instead of the sense that change is possible that prevailed until 2015. The capitulation of the government of Alexis Tsipras during the summer of 2015 despite the tremendous show of determination from the part of the subaltern classes in the referendum has enhanced a feeling of helplessness and of the impossibility of change. This can account for the absence until now of social explosions despite the severity and harshness of the measures. It is only on particular concrete and localised battles and in practices of solidarity towards refugees that you still see some of the dynamics of the previous period.

At the same time, the elements of a deep political crisis and a potential crisis of hegemony are still here. The dominant classes are in no position to offer a positive narrative towards the subaltern classes and there is a constant erosion of any sense of democratic procedure. However, without a reconstitution of the possibility of an alternative it would be difficult to see social explosions or mass movements fuelled by the belief in the possibility of change.

2.       What are the reasons for this development?

The reasons for this development have to do with the inability of the Greek Left to actually have a strategy of ruptures that could stand up to the pressure by the EU, the IMF and the Troika. It was obvious that there was no progressive solution inside the Eurozone and the EU treaties, because they represented exactly the condition of reduced sovereignty and embedded neoliberalism that led to the Memoranda. After the 2010-12 movement sequence, which at certain points came close to having an almost insurrectionary character, especially during the so-called “Movement of the Squares”, most people placed their hopes upon a political change that would bring along a change in policies.

SYRIZA represented to the eyes of many people the way towards a political solution, since the ‘normal’ process of movements inducing pressure upon governments to change policies out of fear of political cost was no longer functioning in Greece. However, the deeply rooted Europeanism of SYRIZA and the belief (which also represented the dominant thinking of the bourgeois forces) that an exit from the Eurozone and the EU would be a disaster led to the capitulation of the summer of 2015 and the signing of the Third Memorandum. The fact that the government that supposedly represented the possibility of a rupture with austerity and represented the hope of change capitulated, enhanced the feeling that there is no alternative to austerity and led to disillusionment, despair, increased insecurity and a turn away from collective struggles.

The crisis of the Left became crisis of the movement. This unpreparedness for the level and intensity of the confrontation was not limited to SYRIZA but was a symptom of the entire Greek Left. Even the forces that had an anti-EU position failed to have a concrete plan for the exit process along with the necessary transition program. Moreover, despite the turn of large segments of the subaltern strata towards the Left, this remained within the limits of electoral representation. There was no effort to work upon the tectonic shifts in political representation in order to work towards a new ‘historical bloc’ in Greek society, as the combination of an alliance of the subaltern classes, an alternative narrative for society and the elaboration of new forms of organising new potential (counter)hegemonic apparatuses, based upon the collective experience and ingenuity emerging in the struggles. 

In Europe today we are experiencing the crisis of the European integration process which coincides, and is related dialectically to, with the global economic crisis and the fact that a new regime of accumulation that would guarantee long term profitability has not emerged yet, with the crisis of neoliberalism as a hegemonic project and with the crisis of a certain form of internationalisation of capital. 

The crisis of European Integration is evident in the very fact of Brexit – when the 5^th economy of the world decides to exit the supposedly most advanced example of economic integration, obviously things are not really functioning – and also in the inability to answer the dynamics of the crisis, since the particular brand of European austerity only made things worse. Moreover, the systemic social violence unleashed upon peripheral societies by means of the austerity packages exemplifies the problems with European integration.

All these have also taken the form of a deep political crisis running through most European societies. There is a growing sense of distance between the political elites and European societies exemplified in widespread distrust for politicians and the feeling that the ‘revolving doors’ between political and business leave no room for actual social needs. This also takes the need for a renewed demand for democracy and popular sovereignty, a demand that so far mainly the Far Right has attempted to hijack by mixing it with its own racist, reactionary, xenophobic agenda.

I think that the Left should base its policies upon the main contradictions of this process. At the level of the economy it is obvious that today European integration and especially the monetary, financial and institutional architecture of the Eurozone and the various austerity mechanisms inscribed in European Treaties are eroding any sense of a ‘European social model’ and have been inducing austerity policies and neoliberal reforms. A rupture with austerity, as the dominant strategy of capital in Europe, means a rupture with the Eurozone and the framework of the EU treaties. There is no room for alternatives within the current architecture of the EU.

On the political level the crucial contradiction is the actual erosion of any pretension of democracy with the reduced sovereignty condition of the EU. In this sense, reclaiming popular sovereignty not in the nationalist sense of ‘national strength’ but in the progressive sense of reclaiming the collective democratic potential for self-determination is an urgent priority with regard to the crisis of legitimacy of the current forms of governance in Europe both at the national and the EU level.

Ideologically, this requires an intervention of the Left in the open terrain of the struggle to redefine the people. In the current context of the conflict between the attempt to incorporate traditional invocations of the people in the European context, with all the references to Europe as our common home, and the Far Right’s attempt to reclaim the people but in reactionary, nationalist and racist terms, the Left should attempt to reconstruct an emancipatory conception of the people as the unity of all those that share the same demands, struggles and hopes for a better life, regardless of ethnic origin, race, nationhood, or religion, a unity in struggle against the forces of capital.

4. On the German Left it is not very common and popular to talk about “the people”, much less to see it as something that has to be part of its strategy. For example, popular classes – in German Volksklassen – isn’t a notion that is used. Partly this is due to our history. Moreover, for larger sections of the radical left “the people” is an issue of the right. What would you answer to these comrades?

It is true that in the German context the connotation of the word ‘people’ and its derivatives are usually associated with the Far-Right and even Nazism. This is due to the fact that in German people and nation are treated as similar concepts (something made evident by the fact that the German word ‘Volk’ can be translated as either people or nation).

However, I do not think it is only a question of ‘translation’. This highlights an actual tension running through the notion of the people. On the one hand, we have indeed the identification of the people and the nation, in the sense of an ‘imagined community’ of supposedly common history and identity that enables the full establishment of bourgeois hegemony, legitimises class exploitation and oppression (since we are all part of the ‘people) and can fuel nationalism and racism.

On the other hand, we can have a different notion of the people, a notion that distinguishes and opposes the people to the nation. In such a perspective, the people has nothing to do with common ‘history’ or ethnicity, but with a common condition of subalternity, resistance and struggle in contemporary societies. In such a perspective, the people have nothing to do with nationalism or with the abstract identification of the ‘sovereign people’ offered by constitutional texts; rather it refers to the potential unity of all those segments of society that, one way or the other, depend upon selling their labour power in order to survive, the potential alliance of the subaltern classes.

This is also a post-national and post-colonial conception of the people, since it is based upon a common condition of exploitation, oppression and struggle, regardless of race, religion or ethnicity. It is the potential ‘collective will’ of all those that live at a specific geographical space, share the same condition and the same desire for a better life and want to struggle together, against all those that exploit and oppress them. In this sense, immigrants and refugees are part of this potential people, in contrast to capitalists, bankers and rentiers. We can say that we talking about a ‘people to come’ instead of a ‘nation that was’. We are not talking a supposedly common past, but about a common present and future. 

I am not saying that this is an easy task, since it requires a collective effort to build common struggles, to create common spaces of struggle, to fully acknowledge, accept and face the trauma of racism and colonialism, to see the histories, cultures and identities of migrants and refugees as contributions to the formation of a new popular culture, based upon solidarity and common struggle but also upon the struggle against all forms of racism. The crucial aspect will be exactly a new ‘narrative’ for our societies, against the embedded neoliberalism of the EU, a renewed socialist project based upon the collective elaboration, experimentation and ingenuity of social movements in struggle.

In such a perspective, this reference to the people as part of a strategy for a new historic bloc (the articulation of a broad alliance of the subaltern, a program of deep transformations and new forms of organisation and collective intellectuality), is rooted in a Marxist class perspective and represents an intensification of class antagonism, both social and political. This perspective is opposed to what we can describe as ‘left populism’ which is based upon a conception of the people as a discursive construction and as a result of forms of political communication.

Theoretically, it is opposed because I insist of a class perspective, namely the people as class alliance related to the dynamics and contradictions of capitalist accumulation. Politically, it is opposed because I think that ‘left populism’ treats the question of organisation in terms of ‘electoral machines’; whereas I insist on the need for a united front based which could bring together different currents, movements, forms of representation but also help the emergence of new forms of collective critical political intellectuality as Gramsci has suggested, in an attempt to create the ‘Modern Prince’ of our times.

5.Could you deepen a little bit more, how "creating a people" is related to class struggle and class alliances? Some people would argue that there is no need for a collective subject called "the people", as wage earners are the majority of the population. Instead of "creating a people in struggle" the would argue for a broad mobilisation of the working class.

When I refer to “creating a people” I am referring to a complex process of articulating not just a social alliance but what we might call, using Gramscian terms, a potential historic bloc, that is the historical dynamic of a potential working class hegemony, in the sense of not only a broad social alliance of the subaltern classes, but also of a transitional program that could offer an alternative non capitalist narrative and political organisational forms of an expansive, participatory democracy from below that is the ‘superstructural’ form adequate to such a programme of profound social transformation and a new socialist perspective.

Although, I agree that in contemporary advanced capitalist social formations the vast majority of the subaltern classes can be defined in terms of wage earning, yet at the same time I think that simply calling them all “working class” is not very accurate. In this sense, we must still think in terms of a broad social alliance that comprises the working class, large segments of the traditional and new petty bourgeois social strata, state employees, youths, intellectuals etc. Poulantzas uses this reference to the people in the sense of a broad alliance under the hegemony of the working class and of course we can also think, in its own particular socio-historical context, the way Mao thought of the workers-peasants’ alliance in the Chinese revolution.

However, the people is not just a synonym for a social alliance. In my use of it, it refers to a particular political condition of radicalisation, politicisation, mass mobilisation, and confrontation with the forces of capital, national and international, and in this sense it requires also the emergence of a collective political subject, a left radical social and political front that could play the role of the “Modern Prince” in the formation and creation of such a people.

However, this emphasis on the political aspects of the construction of the people does not mean a detachment from class analysis. I strongly disagree with the tendency to treat the people as mainly a discursive construction or simply as the result of rhetorical or ideological interpellation, tendency one might see in thinkers but also political currents (the leadership of Podemos being the first to come to mind) influenced by the work of Laclau. Such an approach underestimates the importance of actual social and historical processes and conditions that create such a condition of social alliance inside the people. In contrast, I insist that processes such as increased exploitation, precariousness, job flexibility, privatisation of basic social infrastructure, indebtedness, all contribute to a common social condition, create common grievances and create the terrain for common struggles and demands for democracy and social justice. It is here in the common condition of exploitation, oppression, resistance and struggle that I see the potential for the emergence of the people.

6. Let us come back to the task of “defending popular sovereignty”. Isn't this a nationalist trap? For example, Marine Le Pen also claims to defend the people of Europe against the EU and - importantly - the German government. What would a strategy look like that doesn't fall into the trap of developing a nationalistic discourse? Or to put it differently: What is the difference between the right and the left defending sovereignty?

I would like to be very clear. In contemporary societies, in particular European societies we can no longer identify the people with the nation conceived as common ethnicity, history and culture. We must accept the reality of mass migration and of refugee waves, face the fact that the contemporary working class (and the other subaltern classes and social groups) is multinational, and of course deal with the real trauma of colonialism, not only as the dark side of recent European history but also, and mainly, as the persistence of colonialism inside modern European societies. Nationalism and racism (the distinction is not so easy nowadays), when reproduced inside the subaltern classes, lead to divisions and antagonisms that only help the forces of capital and their hegemony and domination.

That is why need a definition and conception of the people that is post-national and post-colonial. For me it is the unity of all those that live, work and struggle here (“here” meaning a particular European society), regardless of their origin, ethnicity, religion, gender etc. This requires extended forms that enable this unity (struggles for full political rights, opening up of trade unions and political organisation to migrants and refugees), but also an acceptance from the part of the movements of the ‘national’ population that migrants and refugees have their own right to their own histories, representations and forms of identification and, therefore, it is not a question of “assimilation” and “integration”. Moreover, one might say that the ‘national’ population must learn by means of this process of the actual histories of colonial domination and exploitation, in many instances occulted or distorted in official European histories.

Rather, we are talking about the construction of new complex forms of popular identities, based upon common conditions and struggles, that make use of these different elements, representations, imaginaries and histories as part a collective process of creating new forms of the “popular”, interlinked with processes of social transformation and a renewed socialist perspective. It is exactly this anti-nationalist and anti-colonial element that draws a line of demarcation and confrontation with the xenophobic Right and Far-Right.

Consequently, what I am referring to as “popular sovereignty” refers neither to the traditional ‘constitutional’ definition, not to a nationalist rhetoric. I am referring to the potential formation of a popular “collective will” namely a collective project of the subaltern classes, regardless of origin, ethnicity, religion, to become the leading forces of society against the forces of capital and in the aim of profound social transformation and experimentation with post-capitalist social forms. 

7. So what are the tasks for the European left today?

I think that the left in Europe must acknowledge and understand its deep strategic crisis and engage in a process of recomposition of all the elements that redefine the very essence of the Left. In a certain sense, what is needed is a ‘Constituent Process’ for the Left as a force of emancipation and transformation. This process requires

• An attempt to recompose and reconfigure the social movements and in general the organisation of the subaltern classes. Work within established trade union etc structures is indispensable, yet it is not enough. New forms or precariousness, mobility and flexible labour, especially for the younger segments of the labour force, require new forms of organising, new more inclusive structures, new forms of intervention that combine the work inside the workplace with solidarity and ‘external’ campaigns.  New challenges such as working with refugees and migrants require new forms of solidarity movements. The situation of youth, the ‘weak link’ and the target of all the violence of unemployment and capitalist restructuring requires new forms of youth movements. Moreover, all these require a new democracy of struggle, active participation by members and new forms of coordinating struggles. The Left should see this as an urgent aspect of the process of recomposition instead of just trying to be the left wing of existing trade union bureaucracies.
• An attempt to rethink strategy. Until now strategy for most currents of the Left meant thinking either in abstract terms about socialism or in tactical terms about a potential anti-neoliberal or anti-austerity government. This meant that real questions of strategy such as the relation between a transitional programme and socialist perspective or between participation in government and mobilisation from below were never discussed. When the Left actually confronted the question of power the results have been disastrous, as exemplified by the capitulation of SYRIZA. A rethinking of strategy must move, in my opinion, in two main directions. One has to do with the question of the programme. A transitional programme should not be only a set of grievances and demands, it must be an alternative, yet coherent narrative for societies and in Europe in should have the rupture with the Eurozone and the EU as the starting point of a programme based upon nationalisations, new forms of participatory democratic planning, workers’ control and self-management. The other question has to do with the question of power. The Left should have no illusions regarding governmental power, even if in conditions of acute political crisis there might be a possibility for the Left to achieve governmental power. However, from it is necessary to think this questions in terms of a ‘permanent dual power strategy’ which means the full development of popular struggles and forms and organising from below to counter the capitalist strategies and priorities inscribed in the very materiality of state apparatuses.
• An attempt to rethink the centrality of the united front. Taking into consideration the relative fragmentation of the forces of the radical Left in Europe the notion of a front acquires an urgency. However, we must avoid the tried and tested idea of the simple ‘anti-austerity front’ or even worse, as the case of the Italian Left in the 2000s exemplifies, of the front against a common enemy. We need fronts around common strategies which means around the main points of a transitional programme and clear positions on strategic issues. That is why today Europeanism is an important dividing line in the Left, because it represents the possibility of capitulation to the dominant capitalist strategy, as the case of Greece illustrates. We also need fronts that are not simple electoral campaigns but are actual democratic political processes, that enable members and militants to engage in the debates, that enable learning from the collective ingenuity and experimentation coming from struggles, movements and solidarity practices, that are, to borrow an expression from Gramsci, laboratories of new collective militant intellectualities. 

8. With regard to these considerations - what tasks do you see for the German Left today

It is not easy to indicate tasks to comrades from other countries. However, I think that it would be important if the German Left took a position against the current institutional, monetary and financial architecture of the EU and in particular of the Eurozone. It is important to explain to the broad masses of the working class and the other subaltern social groups that the Eurozone has not contributed to the prosperity of workers in Germany but only to the profit of German corporations. To remind us all that the price paid for the avoidance of the more ‘catastrophic’ aspects of the crisis has been austerity, extreme flexibilisation of labour relations, mini-jobs and intensified exploitation and to insist that in a next phase of the crisis (and the EU is more than crisis-prone) working class people will be the target of the attack.

In the sense, it is important to insist that the ‘German’ working class has much more in common with the new wave of migrants and refugees but also with the working people of the European South than with German corporations and their political representatives. I understand than in the current conjuncture this is not an easy task, however it is necessary. Simply criticising austerity and calling for “another EU” is not a solution and, in the end, enhances Europeanism and the hegemony of the bourgeoisie.

It is not possible to ‘reform’ the EU and recent developments offer the necessary proof.  Such a rupture with the dominant bourgeois strategy also calls for the elaboration of an alternative production model, a new project for society, beyond the simple anti-austerity demand of redistribution and increased social spending. Of course, I am not underestimating the importance and urgency of such demands; what I am stressing is that by themselves they do not offer a radical alternative to the existing social configuration, only a more progressive and just version of it. This cannot counter bourgeois hegemony. In contrast, a broader alternative narrative based on the rupture with the European project (in the sense that the EU and the Eurozone must be dismantled), nationalisations, new forms of workers’ control and a return to much more socially and ecologically sustainable productive practices instead of the competitiveness/export model, could be starting points. Along with the emphasis on the unity of working people beyond national, ethic, religious divisions.

Sara Salem recently joined the Historical Materialism editorial board and is a Research and Teaching Fellow at the University of Warwick in the UK. Sara’s research looks at questions of political economy, feminist and gender studies, postcolonialism, history, and Marxism in the particular context of the Middle East. She has recently published journal articles in the European Journal of Women’s Studies, Hypatia, the Review of African Political Economy, and Middle East Topics and Arguments. 

Frantz Fanon remains one of the most important writers on postcolonial issues in the world today. Although he died quite young, his many books and essays are a reminder of his immense intelligence, passion, and foresight. He was born in Martinique in 1925, and after studying in France and receiving a doctorate in psychiatry, moved to Algeria. These three geographical locations were to have an immense effect on the way he understood the world and the power structures that define it. His experiences with racism in France in particular left a strong mark, and it was then that he began to develop the ideas that would define Black Skin, White Masks. It was in Algeria, however, that Fanon both developed his most famous text on postcolonialism,The Wretched of the Earth, and where he became involved in the national fight for liberation from French colonialism.

In his excellent biography of Fanon, David Macey wrote:

Fanon was angry. His readers should still be angry too. Angry that the wretched of the earth are still with us. Anger does not in itself produce political programs for change, but it is perhaps the most basic political emotion. Without it, there is no hope (Macey 2000, 503).

In this piece, I want to first discuss the politics around teaching Fanon in today’s postcolonial world, and in particular in a post-Brexit Britain. What is it about Fanon that captures the hearts and minds of so many students, particularly students of colour? I then want to discuss the continuing debate around Fanon’s relationship to Marxism, looking at some of the ways in which Fanon’s work provides a refreshing lens on capitalism in the postcolonial world. 

Teaching Fanon

I started university teaching in the UK just a few months after the outcome of the Brexit vote, which meant that it was something students wanted to discuss often and that was connected to multiple topics in multiple classes. There is little doubt that Brexit brought to the surface many tensions that have undercut discussions around race, class, gender and nation. For many it came as a rude awakening; for others, it was far from surprising. Discussing Brexit in class, over coffee, and in reading groups, it became clear that many students were searching for ways of understanding what was happening. It turns out that, more than anyone else, Frantz Fanon seemed to provide the type of analysis they needed to make sense of the seemingly senseless.

I have been pleasantly surprised at how often Fanon comes up in the classroom. Given how little exposure most British students have to Fanon in general, I wasn’t expecting him to be a recurring presence in classes. Aside from my own inclination to use Fanon extensively, I found many students to be excited discussing his work and inspired by the new horizons it opened up. In particular, his work on double consciousness, liberation and racism in Western societies make him especially relatable to students of colour living in the current post-Brexit moment.

Fanon’s thinking is wide-ranging and touches on many topics, but there is a thread that ties it all together, and that is a focus on the colonial and postcolonial condition. This is precisely where I have found it most useful to teach Fanon: at the intersections of colonial rule, decolonisation, and postcolonial futures. In particular, I have found Fanon’s approach to Marxism an excellent lens through which to teach on the economic and political problems facing newly-independent nations. In a sense, he has been an excellent corrective to Marxist work that can often be Eurocentric and that often does not appeal to students whose everyday lives are very much racialized and tied to the global colour line. Class as an all-encompassing category simply does not grasp the reality of their worlds. Yet at the same time, given the power of the contemporary neoliberal phase of late capitalism, they can very much feel the effects of neoliberal restructuring in the UK. Class matters—but so does race, gender, sexuality, and a host of other categories.

One of the more memorable discussions I had was during a reading group meeting[1] where we discussed the antagonisms between the British ‘white working class’ and the rest of the working class who were Black, Asian and Eastern European. Precisely where one would expect to find solidarity, we instead find the same level of racism and sexism as in the rest of society. Numerous pieces have touched on the problems with romanticising the white working class and excusing their racism by arguing that they have been the most affected by neoliberal policies in the US, UK and Europe.[2]

However, in our discussion we approached the question from a Fanonian perspective, which allowed for a more nuanced understanding of how Eurocentrism has positioned white workers in an antagonistic relationship vis-à-vis non-white workers, and that this was a conscious historical development that ultimately benefitted capital. Understanding it, however, through an economistic class lens would not have revealed the racialisation involved in this divide and rule tactic that ultimately led to the Brexit vote turning out the way it did. Pushing this further, we also discussed how Fanon’s move to see Eurocentrism globally means locating Western workers at the international level, and how workers in Western nations were able to gain significantly in the 1950s and 1960s precisely because workers in the Third World were instead more intensely exploited.

Perhaps what seemed to draw so many students to Fanon was his insistence on always centring power. Power is everywhere; it is not an accident nor a coincidence. Some nations are powerful, others aren’t; some men are powerful, others are not. This happens historically and is far from natural. It is around this subject that the most interesting discussions happen. Discussions about how we got to where we are today—and how others were unable to get here. About what we mean by progress, and why we need to progress at all. About who we blame and who we hold accountable—and who slips out of the picture as a consequence. This focus on power was also extremely multifocal: power was exercised through politics and economics; but also through culture and values as well as through the psyche.

This also spoke to many students, who are trapped today between discussions around identity politics that can sometimes see identity simplistically and not pay enough attention to the structural on the one hand, and debates around structures such as capitalism that do not pay attention to identities such as race, gender and sexuality on the other. Fanon in many ways transcended this so-called divide, and I often wonder if this was because of his training as a psychoanalyst whose work has always traced the effects of colonialism on the psyche of oppressor and oppressed. This is what many students in post-Brexit Britain are dealing with today: double consciousness, daily racial and sexual forms of repression and oppression, and a worsening economic context that sets impossible standards. How this impacts the psyche of people of colour growing up today is an under-studied aspect of the racial impact of Brexit and Britain’s colonial history in general.

This focus on race, consciousness, colonialism, and power is precisely what makes his work on postcolonialism especially attractive to students living in a postcolonial world that seems to be in a constant state of crisis. Fanon’s position on power and the postcolony is neatly encapsulated in a question that he once asked: do African leaders have the right to govern their countries badly? For many students this was a strange question: it was a given that some countries are governed badly and others are governed well and it just so happened that the division between the two was a racial one. This is an assumption that has come out quite clearly in my teaching on both international development as well as Middle East politics: that there continues to be a global divide between countries that know how to run themselves and countries that seem to be in a total shambles, constantly in a state of war or poverty.

It is no surprise to find these assumptions everywhere: we see it day in and day out in the media, and it is often reproduced by both well-meaning, well-intentioned people. But Fanon pushes us to focus less on these differences and more on what caused them. Why is there poverty in some places and not others? Why are regions conflict-prone? Why do some people live well while others don’t? These are, incidentally, some of the same questions Marxists have asked for well over a century.

Fanon’s question about whether African leaders have the right to govern themselves is the question at the heart of postcolonial studies; at the heart of any class on the postcolonial world: who has the power to define, to act, and to simply be. It is by asking Fanon’s question today that we can return to Stuart Hall’s question why now? Because we see a continuity, and that is precisely why Fanon still matters. African leaders did not have that right when Fanon asked the question; they do not have that right today. The ‘post’ in postcolonial has not meant independence in the fullest sense of the word.

Marxists have rightly pointed to capitalism as an answer to the questions of global inequality. Fanon has, in turn, rightly noted that capitalism is never just about economics: it is a fully racialized project and that is why the line between those who have and those who do not have is often a racial line—for Fanon it is race, not class, which divides the zone of being and the zone of non-being. You can be poor and white and remain in the zone of being, where you have the automatic right to life; you can be rich and black and be in the zone of non-being—at the top of it, but in the zone nonetheless. This provocative challenge to economistic Marxism is what I move to next.

Elena Louisa Lange is a Senior Researcher and Lecturer at the University of Zurich, a philosopher and specialist on Japan. She has published in the Historical Materialism journal on 'Failed abstraction – The Problem of Uno Kōzō's Reading of Marx’s Theory of the Value Form' (2014, 22.1, 3-33) and is currently working on her monograph (to be published for the HM Book Series)Value without Fetish - Uno Kōzō's Theory of 'Pure Capitalism' in Light of Marx's Critique of Political Economy. This interview was updated for the HM website but conducted by Vincent Chanson and Frédéric Monferrand and originally published in French inPeriode.

VC & FM: “Japanese” Marxism is not well-known in the French-speaking [or English-speaking] worlds. Except for a study by Jacques Bidet, 'Kozo Uno et son école. Une théorie pure du capitalisme' in Dictionnaire Marx Contemporain, a special issue of Actuel Marx (Le marxisme au Japon, n°2, mai 2000) [see also 'Kôzo Uno and His School : A Pure Theory of Capitalism by Jacques Bidet in Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism (Edited by Jacques Bidet and Stathis Kouvelakis, 2009, Haymarket) and a few other texts, this tradition is missing in contemporary French Marxist debates. Could you briefly introduce its main currents and protagonists?

EL: Generally speaking, there has hardly been an intellectual in post-war Japan who has not at one point 'flirted' with Marxism. Influence of the re-shaping of the Marxist tradition after the war was so great in Japan that even conservative intellectuals knew they had to namedrop Marx to be taken seriously in public debates. Needless to say, Marx's and Marxist theories were suppressed in the early stages of the Japanese Marxist reception, the Meiji (1868-1912), the Taishō (1912-1926) and, mostly, in the early Shōwa period (1926-1945). When in the early Meiji period, the period of «Westernization » a massive and concentrated reception of Western philosophy took place (which mostly consisted in huge translation projects for which the imperial government installed a special ministry), it was of course, roughly speaking, only 'bourgeois philosophy', that is, German Idealism, British rationalism and empiricism and French philosophy of life (Bergson) that was supported by the government.

Yet, as a matter of fact, The Communist Manifesto was translated into Japanese as early as 1904 by Kōtoku Shūsui who was a political activist. But the early Meiji socialist movement was constantly persecuted. Also the 1920s saw a rise in publications dealing with Marxian theory, especially of the first volume ofCapital which was first translated in 1920, followed by volumes II and III in 1924. But generally a wider response was only possible after Japan was besieged by the US army – who, ironically, at first openly supported Marx studies at schools and universities. But 'Marx' was not an exclusively academic topic. Public debates have contributed to the Marxian impact in post-War Japanese society. Those debates, often roundtable-discussion style and taking place in Japanese newspapers like the Asahi Shinbun, which is probably comparable toLe Monde, have for very long been a lively part of the Japanese intellectual tradition. Generally a heavy and concentrated reception of even methodologically elaborate Marxology, especially in the Critique of Political Economy after the war, took place with the same vigour which had been given to the reception of Hegel and maybe Darwin in the late 19th century.

When talking about Marxist currents in Japan, one would of course have to mention the role of the Japanese Communist Party, its members, the dissidents, and the fights, like the famous debate on Japanese capitalism in the 1930s. But I will leave this out, since as far as I know Jacques Bidet has already introduced the main gist of the debate to the French speaking audience. Instead, I would like to pinpoint « heterodox » Marxist streams, if only to shortly introduce them. The most influential Marxist/Marxian currents were probably literary, philosophical, and cultural Marxism, with political-economic Marxism being the most academic. Well known-figures of the literary stream, especially the proletarian literary movement of the 1920s-1930s, cover writers as Nakano Shigeharu (1902-79), but also Yoshimoto Takaaki (1924-2012) who is the father of the famous writer Banana Yoshimoto, a popular figure of the left-wing student movement in 1968 and a literary Marxist.

As for philosophical Marxism, it is very difficult to pick only one or two names, but probably Hiromatsu Wataru (1933-1994) - Japan's best kept Marxist secret (since no texts are available in Western languages to date) - must be named. He was especially keen on the idea of reification and explored the term in all thinkable epistemological dimensions. Also Umemoto Katsumi (1912-1974) was a philosophical Marxist whose main reference texts were the Theses on Feuerbach andThe German Ideology. He was an important figure in the « Debate on Subjectivity » in 1946-48 that dealt with the question of the individual in historical materialism, often however a very limited discussion, and heavily influenced by Heideggerian-existentialist undertones. It should here be pointed out that often the language in which debates on Marx took place among philosophical Marxists were completely held in an existentialist idiom. Sartre was a superstar in Japan, and even people who were critical of him, talked very often of « being » and « nothingness ».

 In cultural Marxism, Tosaka Jun (1900-1945) must be named. Tosaka is a figure too important to be mentioned only in passing, so forgive my short account. A student of right-wing idealist philosopher Nishida Kitarō, he became very critical of idealism, and very quickly turned to materialism as a philosophical project. He founded the « Research Group on Materialism » (yuibutsu ron kenkyūkai) in 1932 where not only philosophical questions, but mostly problems of high actuality were discussed: the rise of fascism, the role of the media, ideology. He was of course arrested and died in prison in 1945. In my opinion, he was one of the few who took the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach seriously, and he was the only outspoken critic of Japanese society in a time when this was virtually impossible. Other « cultural » critics include the highly influential Maruyama Masao (1914-1996) – who however wasn't a Marxist. But his line of thought, which included psychoanalytical approaches towards a critique of society, is from its language often reminiscent of the Frankfurt School – without, of course, any acquaintance of it.

As for the Critique of Political Economy, the range of Marxist economists spreads from critics of poverty and capital accumulation in a general fashion to experts on Marxian value-form theory in the more specific sense. Needless to say, Uno Kōzō (1897-1977) was primarily a scholar in the last sense with profound knowledge of Marx's economy-theoretical work. During his lifetime, Uno had debates with many leftist contemporaries, and his collected works contain a lot of essays entitled « Answering to Prof. X's criticism », where « Prof. X » often was a rival – like Kuruma Samezō (1893-1932) – but also even his own students and fellow researchers, like, for example, Furihata Setsuo (1930-2009). Today, Uno is still considered a point of reference for many critical economists, and very often critically discussed. Professor Ōtani Teinosuke (born in 1934) who is professor emeritus of economy at Hōsei University in Tōkyō today proceeds the philological criticism that Uno's rival Kuruma Samezō started, and still holds frequent workshops on Marx's Capital or theGrundrisse.

VC & FM: From the early 1920’s, some intellectuals, as Kazuo Fukumoto for example, introduced some aspects of Marxist theory in Japan - more specifically some typical “Western Marxism” problematics like “alienation”, “reification”, etc. Do you consider these notions to be central in the Japanese debate? How would you organise thematically the relationship between Western Marxism, in its most Hegelian forms (Lukàcs, Korsch, the Frankfurt School), and “Japanese” Marxism?

EL: Generally, the fetish and value- problem along with an analysis of its reified forms have not been spectacularly featured in Japanese Marxism in general. To be sure, Georg Lukàcs' History and Class Consciousness had been partly translated as early as 1927. It just had not left such a terrible impact on the reception of the problem of reification. However, there are exceptions. As mentioned earlier, Hiromatsu Wataru has excessively dealt with the notion of reification. For him, there is a radical break between the early “Hegelian” term of alienation in Marx's early works, and the mature works with its notion of reification as treated in the theorem of theFetish Character of the Commodities in Capital vol. 1. But the latter one was incomplete in Hiromatsu's view, since the intra-subjective position was not entirely explored. Next to “Verdinglichung” (“reification”), he problematized “Versachlichung” (“objectification”), a more complete and thoroughgoing process in the act of exchange of commodities, and also between people.

Hiromatsu was however one of the few who clearly problematised value as fetish, and the forms in which social relations are consolidated as relations between things. You see, if the problem had been taken up, it was only considered in philosophical Marxism, not in economic-theoretical Marxism. But even with the philosophers, a materialist conception was often marred by the phenomenologist and existentialist – and often even idealist-Fichtean – idiom. This development may however change with the newly awakened broad interest in value theory, which as a matter of fact, cannot be silent about the fetish problem.

A newly published substantial work by the young researcher Sasaki Ryūji on Marx's Theory of Reification. Thinking Material as the Critique of Capitalism (2011) is hopefully a step in the direction of changing the neglected discussion in Japan. But it must be admitted that the discussion would have to recapitulate the long tradition that had already taken place in the West, for example in the Frankfurt School. Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse have not been taken too seriously as Marxist critics who intensely theorised the fetish problem. In Japan their texts were at best read as cultural hermeneutics (Benjamin) or sociology (Adorno, Marcuse). The reception of the Frankfurt school and its critical impact had accordingly not been overwhelming. For example, Alfred Sohn-Rethel's idea of “real abstraction”, however central to recent approaches in value-form theory, has to my knowledge not been discussed at all in Japan.

One could open a whole new chapter in the Marxian tradition if one were to theorize it in the Japanese context. This is all the stranger since, as mentioned above, Hegel was the main character taught in Japanese philosophy departments since the 19^th century. It however occurred only to very few Japanese intellectuals that there may be a “Hegelian Marxism”, the philosophers Mita Sekisuke (1906-1975) and Funayama Shin'ichi (1907-1994) with his emphasis on “anthropological materialism” being exceptions. But the rule of thumb is that Marxist economists in Japan shied away from theorising reification. It is interesting to see in this context that Mita Sekisuke was also a radical critic of Uno Kōzō. 

VC & FM: Uno Kōzō is one of the best-known “Japanese” Marxism figures in France. Could you give us a synthetic presentation of his theoretical work? One of the specificities of the Uno School is the elaboration of a “pure” theory of Capital. This “transcendental” goal seems quite counter-intuitive and speculative. Could you state its epistemological stakes?

EL: Uno's idea behind developing a “pure theory” of economy, as elaborated on in his seminal work Keizai genron (1950-2/ 1964), is much simpler than it would seem: to understand the structure of a “commodity society”, one would need to abstain from empirical and historical reflections in order to form a theory that can be valid beyond its application to capitalist society alone. It was Uno's goal to understand capitalism, but understanding bourgeois society in his view would provide the key to understanding pre- and post-bourgeois societies. To be a working theory of capitalism, however, Uno was determined to leave historical data, as well as data, tables, questionnaires, etc. out. In my view, the most strikingdifference betweenKeizai Genron and Marx'sCapital, apart from its method, that I would like briefly to refer to later on, is that Marx'sCapital is, first and foremost, A CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY.

But Uno did not write a Critique of Political Economy. Uno instead took Marx's criticism of Smith, of Ricardo, of Say, of Quesnay, and so on, for established facts. This is why Uno managed to re-write all three volumes ofCapital within a slim 227 pages (at least in the 1964 edition). This is quite a remarkable achievement. But Uno also heavily intervened into the architecture ofCapital. The Commodity, Money, and Capital that form the first three sections ofKeizai Genron, are regarded as “circulation-forms”. TheDoctrine of Circulation (ryūtsūron) therefore is posited at the beginning of Uno's investigation. Needless to say that Marx starts withThe Production Process of Capital. It is within theProduction Process of Capital that Marx analyses the commodity and money that seems to be a pure means of circulation. Marx's purpose was to show what wasnot obvious, namely, that money is a social relation grounded in the organisation of (abstract-human) labour in capitalist societies. Uno, in contrast, has a rather 'functional' understanding of money, money as a means of circulation. All in all, it must be said that Uno's analysis of the commodity, money and capitalin abstraction from the labour process is peculiar.

In my opinion, the least interesting, but probably best known fact about Uno Kōzō is his three-stages- approach (sandankairon) to political economy: where the first stage would be pure theory, the second an analysis of historical stages of capitalism (merchant, industrial and finance capital), and the third stage would have to explore the actual and “real” political events. I don't think this approach is particularly significant for Uno, because he had neither developed stage two nor three, although he had often conceptualised these methodically. Uno had, in my opinion, wisely abstained from the stages theory, which was so characteristic of traditional Marxists like Lenin or Luxemburg, and a certain fashion in 1950s Japan for the conceptualisation of Japanese capitalism.

Instead, Uno had fully concentrated his endeavours to understand capitalist socialisation within the framework of “pure theory” alone. He stripped down political economy to three fundamental laws: the law of value, the law of population, and the law of the equalisation of the profit rate. Undeterred by questions of fetishism, real abstraction, “objective forms of thought” and other concepts that have a great fascination for more recent Marxologists (including myself), he went the way of the rigid economist and explored capitalism as a process where rather everything happens for a reason. He was not interested in trying to find out why in capitalist societies, “alles mit rechten Dingen zugeht und doch nicht mit rechten Dingen” (Adorno) - everything happens properly, and therefore improperly.[1]

VC & FM: What are, according to you, the limits of Uno Kōzō approach? Do you consider Value-Form Theory-oriented readings of Marx to be a possible alternative to Uno's approach on a methodological, critical and political level?

EL: The limits of Uno's approach, I would see precisely in his dismissal of the “impure” elements of capitalism as a historical form. This not only refers to “primitive accumulation” - in fact, Uno speaks very much about primitive accumulation - but rather questions of the autonomisation of the law of value, of the value form as a historically conditioned fetish, and the complex of real abstraction. In other words, what is missing in Uno is an extended discussion of thequalitative dimension of value. The law of value cannot be explained on the ground of economic data. That would beg the question. The task of political economy would be to explainwhy labour in capitalist societiesnecessarily takes on the form of value. Reflections of this kind are in my view indispensable for understanding capitalist economy. Analysing the capitalist mode of production therefore cannot and should not be “pure”.

For example, in my research project, among other things, I am trying to find out if Uno's view of money and value – you can say, neither a monetary, nor a pre-monetary theory of value, but rather a 'functional-relational' theory – owes to Uno's disregard for the problem of fetishisation and reification. The dismissal of the labour theory of value – or rather, its misunderstanding in the Japanese reception – is very telling here. Uno criticized Marx for developing the labour theory of value within the “sphere of circulation” - in the chapter on The Commodity in vol. 1 of Capital, when it should have been in the sphere of production. This misunderstanding of Marx in my view perpetuated an ever more growing suspicion against Marx's fundamental theorem, so that we have the peculiar case in Japan that even Marxist economists disavow the labour theory of value as “substantialist”, completely ignoring its critical impetus. It is no wonder that marginal utility theory has again become popular, and along with it, purely quantitative economic research that has given up on criticising theform which labour takes (as, for example, can be seen in the ex-Marxian economist Michio Morishima and his “Theory of Economic Growth”). Wages are again seen as an equivalent for a certain amount of labour, so that, at best, pay increases are discussed, not the wage system as such. Of course, this is a phenomenon to be found in almost all late-industrialist countries.

In May 2017, I gave a talk in Tôkyô at the University of Economics - in front of a lot of Unoists, as well as former students of Uno, all self-proclaimed ‘Marxists’. Yet I was stunned how in fact their line of thought is much closer to mainstream economics than Marx. If I were cynical, I’d say, “with Marxists like that, you don’t need marginalists.” But, thankfully, not all Japanese Marxists are secret supporters of Menger.

The “new readings” of value form theory have thankfully helped to reintroduce the theoretical relation between value, money, capital, and labour. They often go beyond Marx, which I think is needed and welcome. At the same time, I feel they sometimes undercut Marx's critical impetus, often losing sight of the political and concrete everyday struggle. However important I think it is to go beyond Marx, one should keep in mind the maximal gesture that is intrinsic to his project: abolishing the capitalist mode of production and its “objective thought-forms”. Start at your work place.

[1] Theodor W. Adorno, « Introduction », inDe Vienne à Francfort, Bruxelles, Éditions Complexes, 1979, p.26

George Souvlis interviewed Sara Farris, a longstanding contributor and member of the Historical Materialism editorial board, and of itsMarxist Feminist stream. Sara Farris is Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths College, University of London and the author of In the Name of Women’s Rights. The Rise of Femonationalism (2017, Duke University Press), as well as many journal articles on Marxism, political theory, migration. The interview was originally published on 13 July 2017 in Salvage. 

George Souvlis: Would you like to introduce yourself by describing the formative experiences (academic and political) that strongly influenced you?

Sara Farris: I grew up in a little town of 12,000 people in Sardinia (Italy). I was politicized there and it was definitely in this period – between age 12 and 18 – that I had some of the most formative political and academic experiences of my life. I come from a working class family; like many of their generation, my parents invested strongly in education in order to secure the social mobility of their daughters. I also grew up in a family in which discussions about politics – or I should rather say – my father’s monologues about political events both national and international, were routine at the dinner table. My father was some kind of a socialist, who strongly believed in social justice though he was very skeptical about the possibility that the workers, as he knew them, would be able to bring about any type of social change.

In any case, I guess I am trying to say that my family’s environment certainly exposed me to the importance of education and the ideas of the left. I then attended a classical lyceum in my home town. It is here that I was first politicized and that I also discovered my interest for sociology. When I was 14 I was approached by a friend –a sort of Marxist-friendly anarchist – who asked me to join a political group he and some other people were forming in order to shake up the tedious cultural life of our town and to demand more investment in culture by the mayor. It was a very weird group made up mostly of Trotskyists and anarchists (of course, we had lots of fights over Kronstadt!), as well as young people who did not identify with any particular political tradition but were attracted by the discourse of the far-left. The Trotskyists of the group belonged to the 4th International at that time; they organized the most theoretical discussions on the political conjuncture inviting especially the youngest of us to read Marx and Lenin. I was fascinated particularly by them, as they seemed to me to provide the most coherent answers to the issues we were discussing; but I was also somehow allergic to what I perceived as a certain communitarianism and sectarianism on their part.

A few years later, when I enrolled at the University La Sapienza in Rome, I became a member of Communist Refoundation first (Rifondazione Comunista) and the section of the 4th International afterwards. I found the Trotskyist comrades in Rome to be much more open than those in my hometown and I agreed with their politics, particularly with their strong emphasis on the importance of feminism. During these years in Rome I was also fascinated by the multiculturalism of the city and I became very interested in migrants’ struggles and migrant women’s specific position in the so-called destination countries. I think this combination of factors shaped the type of Marxist anti-racist feminism that probably best describes my approach.

GS: Let’s discuss Max Weber, whose work is the topic of your first monograph, Max Weber’s Theory of Personality. Weber is one of the first observers to recognize that the structural change of modern mass politics threatened the basic tenets of nineteenth-century liberal parliamentarianism. The emergence of mass parties in the first two decades of 20th century challenged radically notions and practices of the political status quo of the period. One of Weber’s risky intellectual answers to this ongoing crisis was the theory of charismatic-plebiscitary democracy. Do you think that we could draw elective or direct affinities between this conceptualization and Carl Schmitt’s theory of plebiscitary legitimacy of the President of the Reich? Could we say that Weber prepared – along with other disillusioned liberals – the intellectual background for the rise of authoritarian theories like that of Carl Schmitt?

SF: The question of the affinity between Weber and Schmitt on charismatic-plebiscitary democracy is one of the most debated ones, from Mommsen (who was among the first to propose it) to Habermas and others. Mommsen did not argue that the two thinkers’ political and theoretical positions were compatible in general – as they were in fact very different on most accounts – but rather that their ideas converged in one particular case: that is, Weber’s idea regarding the necessity for a plebiscitary-charismatic democracy in the wake of the German Revolution, and Schmitt’s opposition to parliamentary democracy in the last years of the Weimar Republic.

To be sure, Weber’s political thought and positions consistently oscillated between liberalism and more authoritarian tendencies. On the one hand, he advocated for an “agreement” between the liberal forces of Germany and the labour aristocracy within the Social Democratic party in order to consolidate the country’s transition to capitalism and “modernization”. On the other hand, Weber was a strong admirer of Bismarck and believed that politics needs strong charismatic leaders. And we should remember that for Weber, the charismatic leader is not someone who uses their appeal to seek consensus, but rather someone whose power is already legitimate in itself because of the charismatic gift he (because it is a man Weber implicitly think about) possesses.

There is something very aristocratic about Weber’s notion of charismatic power. The suggestion that there is an affinity between Weber and Schmitt, between the champion of German liberal democracy at the turn of the Twentieth century (that is, Weber) and the enemy of liberalism on the eve of Nazism (that is, Schmitt) is thus I think still very interesting and insightful not least because it reminds us fundamentally of the historical/theoretical links liberalism and authoritarianism.

GS: In one of your articles you use the debate between Marx and Bauer on the Jewish Question in order to shed light on the French law on conspicuous religious symbols. How can this past discussion help us to grasp better our current reality? Do you see any analogies between the two debates? In this article, you also criticise the universal values of Enlightenment that inform to a certain extent the French legal system. How you do you think we can demonstrate – in this context and regarding this debate – the antinomies of modernity without resorting to a postmodern cultural relativism?

SF: The point I try to make in that article is that the debate on whether Jews should be accorded full political rights in 1840s Prussia presents some striking similarities with the debate on Muslims’ integration into French society today. More precisely, my point is that the French state’s demand that religious minorities (and let’s be frank, Muslims in particular) respect the principle of secularism in the public space is reminiscent of Bruno Bauer’s position on the Jewish Question. Bruno Bauer believed that the Jews deserved to be granted political rights only if they stopped being Jews and embraced Enlightenment thought. In other words, he conceived of political emancipation as a kind of award that individuals receive only if they renounce their own religious identity and embrace the identity that the secular state deems as appropriate. Likewise, the French state demands that Muslims get rid of their religious/cultural practices if they want to show willingness to integrate into French society.

The notion of secularism that is put forward by both Bauer and the French state is one that individualizes secularism, that conceives of it almost as a trait of one’s personality rather than as an institutional issue. In other words, while I do agree that public spaces should not privilege one religion over another – so for instance, class-rooms should not have crucifixes hanging on walls, as happens in Italy – I disagree that individuals should not be allowed to express their religious beliefs in public spaces. This is only one very narrow and problematic version of secularism. But above all, the position according to which the people who belong to a religious and stigmatized minority should deny their religion in order to demonstrate that they deserve the status of citizens is profoundly racist. Just like Bauer was fundamentally an anti-Semite hiding behind the idea of secular Enlightenments, so the French state is reinforcing Islamophobia in the name of laïcité.

By pointing to some analogies between the discussion on Jews’ emancipation in Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century and the discussion on Muslims’ integration in France today I also want to argue that Muslims play the role of todays’ Jews. After the Holocaust we have been accustomed to the idea that the atrocities committed against the Jews have no comparison. But what we should remember is that there is a long history of anti-Jewish racism in Europe which has taken different forms and which has preceded the tragedy of the Holocaust. We should be aware of that history precisely in order to avoid repeating it, not only against the Jews but against any other group of people. My second point in that article is that Marx’s position on the Jewish Question was much more aware than some contemporary Marxists of the dangers of questioning religious minorities’ right to their freedom of expression, and here I think specifically of some French Marxists or Left-wing representatives. During the discussions that led to the ban of the veil in public schools, some of them agreed that Muslim women should not wear it in public spaces and invoked notions of secularism, atheism and women’s rights to justify their position. There is absolutely nothing Marxist in that. When Bruno Bauer blamed the Jews for remaining Jews and thus being undeserving of political rights, Marx told him that political rights can very well co-exist with religious identities. The problem for Marx instead was the bourgeois state itself and its claim of representing a space of universal inclusion while in reality it was only the expression of the exclusion and inequalities of civil society.

GS: Considering the recent developments with the bomb attacks in France, Brussels and the UK, and the emergence of the panic/racist rhetoric and state of emergency policies in these and other countries, what do you think should be the basic rhetorical axes of a counter-hegemonic critique towards their ideological appropriation by the far-right? 

SF: I think it is essential to make very, very clear that these attacks have nothing to do with Islam. The young terrorists who committed these atrocities were born and raised in France or Belgium, or the UK, some of them apparently smoked and drank and did not even attend the Mosque. Most of them were known to the police for petty crimes and some of them apparently found meaning in ISIS ideas while in jail, where they met already radicalized Islamists who introduced them to the abhorrent Daesh dystopia. This reminds me of the French movie A Prophet, in which a young man of Algerian descent, illiterate and with no religious beliefs, is sent to prison for a petty crime. It is in prison that he learns how to kill people and the ‘art’ of drug-dealing. The movie of course is about the violence and ineffectiveness of the so-called correction and punitive system, and also about its racism, given that the large majority of prisoners we see portrayed are of immigrant descent.

But I think the prison in the movie can also be understood as a metaphor for a French or Belgian banlieu, where the second and third generations of migrants from the ex-French colonies have being ghettoized, made to feel different, unwelcome, or jobless and constantly targeted by the racism and Islamophobia of the state and the police – as plenty of studies demonstrate. Within these environments, these social prisons, young people particularly if they are unemployed and without a clear prospect for the future, can develop a great sense of alienation and some of them may feel attracted by the easy Manichaeism of extremist Islamism and its promise of revenge.

The second thing to remember time and time again is that Muslims are the first victims of so-called Islamist terrorism. More than one-third of the people killed by the truck driver in Nice in July 2016 were Muslims, without mentioning the fact that the large majority of victims of ISIS in Syria and Iraq are Muslims. The Left needs to recall this simple and atrocious fact each time the right instrumentalises terrorism to instigate Islamophobia.

But the French Left in particular should also be confronted very seriously with its responsibilities in exacerbating the Islamophobic climate that in France is already intolerable. And here I think of Mélenchon, for instance, who criticized the NPA’s veiled candidate in 2010, Ilham Moussaid, for not taking her headscarf off; more recently, in the case of the outrageous behavior of the police who forced a Muslim woman to undress on a beach in Nice, he took the side of the police. He claims to take these positions in the name of women’s rights and in the name of laïcité. But the reality is that these positions do in fact deny the right Muslim women have to put on whatever clothes they want. They interpret secularism through the lenses of a form of republican rigorism that is fundamentally intolerant of difference and exclusionary towards those who do not embody the French (i.e., white, Christian, etc.,) ideal of the citizen. This republican consensus against the headscarf in France, from right to left, is shameful and irresponsible vis-à-vis the multiplication of terrorist attacks involving young French men and women self-identifing as Muslims.

Of course we need to condemn in the strongest possible terms any form of terrorism, there is no question about it, and in fact I feel there shouldn’t even be the need to say it, if it weren’t for the fact that we live in very crazy times hegemonized by the racist discourse of the right. But above all, we need to say that our politics against terrorism is diametrically opposed to that of the right-wing and is, in fact, more effective because the right has nothing to say about how to solve the problem. The only thing it proposes is to close the borders, stop immigration and intensify Islamophobic measures. But how stupid is that when terrorists are in fact not migrants but French or Belgian, or British citizens? And how irresponsible is that when it is precisely Islamophobia that is creating a climate in which terrorism thrives?

I do think that the fight against Islamophobia and racism is the defining political issue of the future for the Left. We have seen how the capitulation of the European social democracy before anti-immigration discourses in the last fifteen years has not brought more votes to the Left. On the contrary, it has helped the far-right to grow and consolidate its powerbase, at least until recently.

GS:In one volume that you edited along with others you wrote a piece focusing on the theoretical insights of Althusser and Tronti regarding the Marxist question of the relationship between politics and economy. During the last year the global financial crisis gave the opportunity to left-wing forces to come close to winning elections or even – in the case of Syriza – to take office – though withοut really managing to produce any serious cracks in the system. Do you think that a possible explanation of these defeats might be an implicit “politicism” that have been adopted by the parties of the European Left? 

SF: In that article I define ‘politicism’ as the idea that the state is autonomous from economic determinants and that the party is autonomous from its class basis. On the one hand, it is the idea that the state follows its own logic and its own rhythm, and is not simply the “committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” – as Marx famously wrote in the Manifesto of the Communist Party. This conception of the state and politics as autonomous from the economic level led Tronti to argue that the party representing the working classes needs to take state power into its hands in order to change the system of economic exploitation itself. On the other hand, Tronti explicitly argued that the party of workers (and clearly he meant the PCI) had to be autonomous from its class basis at the moments in which the political logic of state power demanded that. Here lies an important paradox: on the one hand, by declaring politics and economics as autonomous one from the other, you are claiming that one cannot determine the other; but on the other hand, you are proposing a determinist argument – and therefore denying the autonomy of the political itself – the moment in which you argue that a change in the political realm will automatically determine a change in the social-economic realm. In this sense ‘politicism’ is the mirror image of economic determinism. And both of these perspective are unable to grasp the complexities of the relationships between the state and capitalist interests, or the economic sphere more generally.

The ‘politicist’ perspective was put forward by Tronti in the 1970s during the years of the historical compromise (compromesso storico) in order to support the participation of the Italian Communist Party in government. Tronti criticized the Marxist tradition for lacking a coherent and systematic theory of the state, but what he proposes instead is the old social-democratic trope. That is, the idea that the party representing the interests of the workers needs to take state power to promote the implementation of socialist policies, before communism can finally take over.

The contemporary cases you cite are certainly examples of ‘politicism’ in the sense that these are parties, or political formations that, in various and different ways put forward a social-democratic agenda and overall approach to politics and their working class bases. None of them aims to smash the state, as it were.

However, I don’t think we can talk about defeats pure and simple here. Syriza won the elections, even though it completely betrayed the hopes to end austerity. More recently La France Insoumise obtained 20% of the vote in the first round of the French presidential elections, and in Britain Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour has increased Labour’s number of seats and share of vote in unprecedented ways. Of course, these parties and the contexts in which they operate are very different and we cannot abstract from those national differences. What I am trying to say is that the social-democratic Left running for state power in order to change the rules of the economy from above, seems to be actually registering significant advances in electoral terms when it runs on an explicit socialist, anti-austerity programme. The retreat to ‘politicism’, or the idea that the party can forget its working class basis in the name of ‘electability’ and for the sake of staying in government, on the other hand, as in the case of Syriza, will most likely lead to electoral defeat – beside producing demobilization and demoralization.

GS: You edited along with others an issue of the Historical Materialism journal (24.2, 2016) that is focused on recent theoretical developments within the Marxist-Feminist tradition. In theintroduction that you wrote you endorse Social-Reproduction feminism. Would you be able to explain the origins of this theoretical trend and what it implies? In what ways can it help us to understand the complexity of gender oppression in this historical conjuncture?

SF: Social-reproduction feminism refers to that strand of theories developed by Marxist-feminists in the 1960s and 1970s seeking to understand the role of domestic labour and reproductive tasks within the household for capital accumulation. Social Reproduction Feminism asks: how is the reproduction of labour power and life that usually takes place within households connected to capital accumulation? And why is it women who are mostly the ones performing social reproduction? Is there a link between the feminization of social reproduction and gender oppression under capitalism? By focusing on the largely gendered nature of social-reproductive labour Social Reproduction Feminism also aims to analyse one of the weaknesses of Marxist feminism, that is, its tendency to frame class exploitation and gendered oppression as separate one from the other. The challenge for Social Reproduction Feminism instead is to understand gendered oppression neither in isolation from class exploitation, nor from race, sexuality and other constitutive social relations. This is not an easy task, as our very modes of thinking about the social are fragmented, or intersectional, as it were. That is why, I think, intersectionality has become such an important paradigm for feminism. It is because it conceives of different experiences of oppression and exploitation as coming from different and separate systems and tries to recombine the fragments of oppression without denying their singularity. I think Social Reproduction Feminism seeks to include and to go beyond intersectionality by saying both that we need to understand capitalism as the very specific socio-economic system in which those forms of oppression are generated and nourished, and that there are not ‘separate’ systems of oppression or exploitation under capitalism that can be understood in isolation one from the other.

Social Reproduction Feminism also represents a critique of those Marxist positions that maintain that capitalism is indifferent to the gender or race of those it exploits as long as profit and accumulation are guaranteed. This is a very limited and problematic way of looking at how capitalism functions, but also at what capitalism is. As we write in our introduction, exploitation and dispossession exist concretely “only in and through generalised, systematic and differentiated control and degradation of human life itself. And control and degradation are secured concretely in and through the negotiation of race, gender, sexuality, and other interwoven social relations.” These are the relations that ensure that labour arrives at capital’s doorstep ready to be further dehumanized and exploited.

GS: In your latest book you analyze the instrumentalisation of feminist ideas by the contemporary far-right and mainstream “liberal” parties by means of the term of “femonationalism”. Could you explain what this means and how a critical examination of this phenomenon can be useful?

SF: Femonationalism is the term I have introduced to describe both the exploitation of feminist ideas by nationalist right-wing parties within Islamophobic campaigns, and the endorsement by some feminists and femocrats of anti-Islam agendas in the name of women’s rights. In the book I analyse how and why parties such as the Northern League in Italy, the National Front in France and the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands have shown “concern” for Muslim women by describing them as “victims to be rescued”, all the while stigmatising Muslim and other non-western male immigrants as women’s worst enemies. I wrote this book mostly because I wanted to introduce a political-economic perspective into the scholarly and activists’ debate on the new faces of Islamophobia. The convergence between some feminists and nationalists on anti-Islam agendas of course has been noticed and analysed by several scholars, but I think most of them – at least in the European context – have not paid sufficient attention to the broad material interests and economic calculations behind such a convergence.

What I note in the book is that we should pay attention to the gendered double-standard that is applied to migrant men and women (Muslim and non-Muslim alike) in the mainstream media and that we need to decipher its economic rationality alongside its ‘culturalist’ expressions. Muslim men as well as immigrant men from the Global South are usually described not only as potential rapists and women’s oppressors, but also as “jobs’ stealers”. They are the unredeemable bad guys in all senses. On the other hand Muslim and non-western migrant women are portrayed as victims of patriarchal and backward cultures, but also as those who can be assimilated to western values (because, qua women, they don’t really have a mind of their own) and who can positively contribute to western economies by working in the understaffed social reproductive sector (i.e, social care and childcare primarily) for very low wages. They are the redeemable others.

I think this dichotomous gendered representation, or gendered double-standard, which the mainstream media as well as right-wingers use to refer to migrant populations, is central for revealing the political economic rationality of femonationalism. In other words, one of the claims of my book is that the “rescue” offers, which right wing-nationalists send to Muslim women (but also to non-western migrant women more generally), are linked to the hugely important role these women play in the social reproductive economy. But they are also linked to these political parties’ desire to keep the social care and childcare sectors exactly as they are: that is, as racialised, feminized, super-exploitative, low-status and low-paid sectors of the labour market.

On the other hand, the book looks closely at the feminists and femocrats who support anti-Islam politics in the name of women’s rights, and what they propose to Muslim women in particular in their race to rescue them from the “bad” Muslim guys.

What I notice here is that, first, these feminists cover the whole political spectrum; it is not just right-wing feminists (or self-proclaimed feminists like Ayan Hirsi Ali in the Netherlands or Souad Sbai in Italy) who have endorsed anti-Islam discourses and policies such as veil bans, but also left-leaning feminists like Giuliana Sgrena in Italy, or Najat Vallaud-Belkacem in France. Second, I emphasise the deep contradictions of this anti-Islam feminist front. On the one hand, these feminists and femocrats call Islam a misogynist religion and treat Muslim women who wear the veil as sort of self-enslaved individuals who do not understand what freedom and emancipation really are about. On the other hand, these same feminists fail to mention that many Muslim migrant women today in Europe are obliged to undergo integration programmes – sometimes implemented by femocrats themselves – that push them towards the social reproductive sectors to become cleaners, social carers and childminders. But in what sense is this emancipation for women? Weren’t these exactly the activities and jobs against which the feminist movement fought in its battle to denounce gender roles and the lack of economic recognition of social reproduction?

Already published in "Materialismo Storico. Rivista di filosofia, storia e scienze umane", Nr. 1/2017, L'egemonia dopo Gramsci: una riconsiderazione, edited by Fabio Frosini, pp. 115-163, licence Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Anti-imperialism has a history that has been in large part repressed, if not buried, amongst many currents of criticial thought and much of the radical Left. The struggles for decolonisation after the Second World War are, of course, remembered, but, too often, it is forgotten that the international communist movement created anti-colonial and anti-imperialist organisations on a transnational scale. Such was the case of the League Against Imperialism. In this interview by Selim Nadi, first published in French in the online journal Périodehttp://revueperiode.net/willi-munzenberg-la-ligue-contre-limperialisme-et-le-comintern-entretien-avec-fredrik-petersson/, Fredrik Petersson discusses the foundation of the LAI by the Comintern. He depicts a colonial question that was resolutely understood as a transversal question by communists. He highlights also the necessity for a mediation between the headquarters of world communism (Moscow) and the nationalist forces in each country that were its allies, all of which is helpful in developing the concept, which is still neglected, of the ‘anti-imperialist united front’.

In your academic work, you are mainly interested in the League Against Imperialism (LAI) – founded in 1928 in Brussels. Why focus on anti-imperialism during the inter-war period (and not only during the decolonisation process after World War II)?

First of all, the founding congress of the League against Imperialism took place 10-14 February 1927. Now, with that sorted out, yes, one of my central items of research has been on the history and transnational networks of the LAI. I did my doctoral thesis on the LAI from the perspective that wanted to examine the twofold purpose: first, why the LAI was established in 1927; and second, the internal aspect of the organisation, something that required doing extensive empirical research in several archives in Moscow, Berlin, Amsterdam, London, and Stockholm, if I wanted to put the pieces together in a proper way. However, and after I got the thesis published the same year in 2013 as two volumes, I think the question of interwar anti-imperialism involves so many aspects that tells us about how the world was reconstituted after the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. It is commonly accepted that the world was decolonised after the Second World War, yet my argument is that, in order for us to understand how this even was possible, we have to take into consideration the development of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements as politically conscious entities between the wars. It was in the purest sense a time of learning, a time of accumulating experiences, and a time of creating relations and connections that either lasted or changed in the interwar years. Hence, it is about reading the history of decolonisation backwards, dating from, for example the “Afro-Asian conference” in Bandung 1955, and of connecting it to an organisation such as the LAI.

30 years after the founding of the LAI, during the Bandung Conference (1955), Sukarno said that if the founding congress of the LAI was held in Belgium in was not “by choice, but by necessity”, could you please explain this point?

Well, this is kind of a political statement on behalf of Achmed Sukarno where he more or less defined the historical progression of twentieth century anti-colonialism, and how the movement both relied on and was dependent on establishing connections and relations. But what Sukarno even more wanted to show with his observation was probably the following: in the interwar period, it was next-to-impossible to convene a similar congress or conference as the one held in Bandung 1955. Thus, by holding the “First International Congress against Colonialism and Imperialism” in Brussels, it was not only held there “by necessity”, but it was intended to function as a demonstration against colonialism and imperialism in one of the “hearts of imperialism”, and it could also gain attention amongst colonial emigrants living in Western Europe. However, what comes across as rather evident by reading the sources is that the formal organisers of the congress (the LAI’s forerunner: the League against Colonial Oppression, established in Berlin 10 February 1926) and its secretary, the Hungarian communist Laszlo Dobos, had promised the Foreign Secretary in Belgium, the well-renowned socialist Emile Vandervelde, that under no circumstances was the congress to deliver any critique of Belgian colonialism and the atrocities taking place in Congo. Even more, Dobos had to provide Vandervelde with extensive list of names of individuals planning to attend the congress. Hence, this pretty much outlines the historical experience of the Brussels Congress of not having been “by choice, but by necessity” as Sukarno later stated in his opening address. 

Could you develop the main differences between the founding Congress of the LAI in Brussels in 1928, and the Baku Congress (1920)?

The central difference is how it was organised and under what kind of auspices and with what intentions. If we think about the Baku congress in 1920, it had been preceded by intense discussions between Lenin and the Indian nationalist revolutionary Manabendra Nath Roy on the colonial question at the Second International Comintern Congress in Moscow. Even more, the Baku congress was held for the primary reason of getting Far Eastern anti-colonial activists to support the recently established Bolshevik regime in Soviet Russia, or as the then Comintern chairman, the Russian communist Grigori Zinoviev, explained it: it was to win them fully over to communism. However, there is another dimension to the Baku congress, and it is that it offered Asian activists with an opportunity to meet and discuss with each other the situations in their home countries. While some, so to speak, drifted towards communism as a source that would support their struggle, other continued to forge the nationalist struggle along other principles shaped by socialism and liberalism. Thus, if we can compare Baku with Brussels, the later essentially continued the agenda of the former by highlighting how colonialism and imperialism continued to shape the world after 1919. One important difference between these two events was the more international scope of the Brussels congress, meaning, while Baku focused primarily on Asia and the Far East, the Brussels congress had an international outlook that tried to depict a global system of colonialism and imperialism. What unites the two of them is that they were both organised and sanctioned by the Communist International and its headquarters in Moscow.  

To what extent was the LAI a response to Woodrow Wilson’s principle of national self-determination?

I think this is a central question that pretty much outlines and explains how the LAI came into fruition, at least, in the initial phase of 1927. As Woodrow Wilson introduced the famous Fourteen Points in January 1918, which included the relevance and importance of paying attention to the principle of national self-determination, in fact, this was replaced by the liberal internationalism on display at Versailles, and as consequence of this, this somewhat downgraded the capacity of the colonial world to become independent once the war was over. If we look again at the Brussels congress, its official credo and public slogan was to advocate “National Freedom – Social Equality”, and a majority of the speeches delivered at the congress addressed the call for national independence and the right to self-determination. In general, the propaganda of the LAI frequently called for a critical scrutiny of the fallacy of the League of Nations of putting into practice what it once had set out to do, that is, the equal treatment of all peoples and races through the principle of national self-determination. I think this was one of most potent and viable political messages of the LAI, and therefore, it can be seen as adversary and subversive contingent to the League of Nations. 

Who was Willy Münzenberg (1889 – 1940)? What role did he play in the LAI?

Willi Münzenberg was pivotal for the LAI. Being a German communist and member of the German Reichstag, Münzenberg has been recognised as the leading entrepreneurial force in the development of communist propaganda in Europe and beyond between the wars. What has to be emphasised is that Münzenberg came from a pacifist and socialist background; however, after meeting Lenin in Zimmerwald in 1915, this was the beginning of his journey to communism. After having been an organisational force in coordinating the work among socialist and communist youth during the Great War, in 1919, Münzenberg was central in the establishment of the Youth Communist International (KIM). Later in 1921, Lenin appointed Münzenberg to establish the embryo of International Workers’ Aid, an international proletarian mass organisation that lasted until 1935 when it was quietly dissolved on the direct instructions of Comintern headquarters in Moscow. While this is a general description of Münzenberg’s political career, I consider Arthur Koestler’s foreword in Babette Gross book Willi Münzenberg. A politische Biographie (1967) still as one of the most accurate descriptions of the man: he was “a political realist” that should be seen as a propagandist and activist, neither as a politician nor theoretician. Then we have his so-called mysterious death in 1940, where his body was found in the outskirts of the French town Montaigne. There has been debate as to whether it was suicide or murder that caused Münzenberg’s death. Yet this discussion will continue without any real or credible empirical evidence. If we return then to his pivotal role in the establishment of the LAI, by this I mean that, without his energy and vision to organise “an international congress against colonialism and imperialism”, as he declared in a personal letter to Zinoviev in August 1925, there would not have been a project of trying to mobilise the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movement in Europe and the USA like that of the LAI. Second - and I keep returning to the Brussels congress, but still, it represents a central moment for interwar anti-colonialism - it was an idea that Münzenberg developed after being introduced to it by a couple of Chinese trade unionists in Berlin in connection with the “Hands off China” campaign in 1925. Yet what Münzenberg managed to do was to transform the idea into something viable and concrete. This did not, however, come without a price tag. Münzenberg had to either negotiate or rely on the consent of the Comintern before being able to proceed with the political project of the Brussels congress. And, indeed, the idea of establishing the LAI was not Münzenberg’s; it was on the recommendation of Manabendra Nath Roy in 1926. However, without the success of the Brussels congress, there would have never been any need for the establishment of the LAI. But both Münzenberg and the Comintern seemed unprepared as to how to approach and build on the success of the Brussels congress, which in the longer perspective implied that the idea of the LAI and its practical outcome started from the wrong foot from the beginning.  Actually, together with some colleagues, I ma planning to write a personal biography of Münzenberg, with emphasis not on his political persona but rather trying to going beyond this perspective, and instead, try to discuss Münzenberg as a person and how different spatialities, opportunities and moments shaped his life. I mean, he still continues to haunt me in a funny way, and you just have to take into account the traces the man has left in numerous archives across the world. The story of Münzenberg has for sure not been fully told yet, I argue.   

In your forthcoming book in the Historical Materialism Book Series, you write that the Brussels Congress and, later, the establishment of the LAI, had been the results of meticulous planning and construction rather than “by necessity”, in a “cleverly-disguised interplay between Münzenberg, the IAH [Internationale Arbeiterhilfe] and the Comintern”. Could you please develop the role played by the IAH and by the Comintern? What were the relations between the LAI and the Comintern?

Yes, that is correct; I am working on my book at the moment, which will focus more on the transnational character of the LAI, but also, the transnationalism of anti-colonialism between the wars. This November, I will return to Moscow and do additional research in the Russian State Archive for Social and Political History, which houses the papers of the Communist International. And this leads me again to the intertwined relationship between the LAI and the Comintern, or to be more precise, the constant and regular contacts that flowed between the LAI’s international headquarters in Berlin – the International Secretariat – and Comintern headquarters in Moscow. I mean, from the very onset, and even prior to the establishment of the LAI in 1927, various institutions and individuals at Comintern headquarters stipulated during the preparations for the Brussels congress in 1926, that the sole reason for establishing an international organisation against colonialism and imperialism was “to act as an intermediary between the Comintern and nationalist organisations in the colonies”. Further, the LAI’s International Secretariat in Berlin functioned as a hub for the organisation, meaning that it received instructions from Comintern headquarters, which in return were dispatched to the LAI’s national sections or affiliated members. In return, when the International Secretariat received information or intelligence from the sections, it was dutifully dispatched back to Moscow. In conclusion, every important decision pertaining to budget or personnel questions was taken in Moscow. This also involved the writing of political material such as congress resolutions, manifestos, pamphlets or material for the official publications of the LAI.    

What where the kind of contacts the LAI had with European radical left movements?

In 1927, the contacts were strong and many. However, this depends on how you define “radical left movements” in Europe”. If we exclude the communist aspect here, I would say that contacts with radical trade unions, pacifist circles, socialists or anarchists were large from a quantitative perspective. However, once talk of the LAI as a new actor on the political stage began to emerge in 1927, and particularly as the organisation raised the question of being an ardent opponent against colonialism and imperialism, various circles in the European socialist movement approached the LAI with suspicion. For example, the leader of the Labour and Socialist International, the Swiss socialist Friedrich Adler, instigated a thorough investigation on the historical and political ties of the LAI, which in October 1927, drew the conclusion that the LAI had intimate ties to the Comintern and the international communist movement. As a consequence of this, any party affiliated to the Labour and Socialist International was prohibited of becoming member to the LAI. In a longer-term perspective, the communist connotations of the LAI severely restricted access to radical leftist movements that were not communist in nature and scope. What I am really talking about here is a kind of historical narrative that began with success but ended in seclusion and isolation the longer we stretch out the history of the LAI. 

Did the LAI lead to any theoretical innovations concerning colonialism and/or racism?

No, I do not believe that. Yet what the LAI amounted to do was to function as nostalgic point of reference for the decolonisation movements that emerged in the postwar period. I have stated that the LAI should be seen as “a concerted source of inspiration” in the context of postwar decolonisation of the world, something that reached its culmination at the “Afro-Asian Conference” in Bandung in 1955. Moreover, what the LAI accomplished to do was in raising awareness in the so-called “imperialist centres” on the situation in the colonies. This was done through various campaigns, letter writing campaigns and so forth. Hence, what we are addressing here is the transnational scope of anti-colonialism between the wars, and how this was further developed after the Second World War in the postwar period.

In an article published in 1960 in Les Temps Modernes on Sultan Galiev, Maxime Rodinson wrote that the “Afro-Asian bloc” that followed the Bandung Conference was a kind of “Colonial International”, would you agree with this?

No, I would not agree with that. I think that you should rather see the LAI as an effort that tried to coordinate a range of nationalist organisations and movements that all were seeking to highlight their own political and cultural agenda. In fact, the Comintern feared the idea of the LAI becoming an anti-imperialist “International” capable of standing on its own. It was all about control over an agenda and political idea that had managed to create a buzz, and therefore, once the LAI was dissolved in 1937, several individuals that previously had held some role in the organisation, for example the British socialist and pacifist Reginald Orlando Bridgeman (who acted as International Secretary of the LAI from 1933 to 1937), quickly acted and formed new anti-colonial organisations or associations. In Bridgeman’s case, he formed the “Colonial Information Bureau” in 1937, which cooperated closely with the British “Centre against Imperialism”, where the former should be seen as more “socialist” while the later was “communist”. Hence, we are talking of transformations and transferences of ideas and practices here. 

How would you describe the legacy of the LAI?

I think I have summed up that answer already, however, I would like to add that the LAI introduced a new form of activism in a world that had faced the horrors of global war (the Great War, 1914-18), and it aided in making anti-colonialism into a politically conscious movement from the perspective that it provided with contacts, relations and networks for anti-colonial activists that travelled the world between the wars. Later, a person such as India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who had been active in the first years of the LAI, could draw on this experience. In conclusion, I think that the LAI broke new political ground for anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, however, due to the intimate relation to the Comintern and how the organisation developed itself in the 1930s, much of its history was seen as a failure, and therefore reduced to the dustbin of history. Yet, and which I hoped to do with my research, is in showing that there exists so many dynamic perspectives and relations that up until now have been forgotten and hidden.

Fredrik Petersson is Lecturer in General History at Åbo Akademi University since 2014. He received his PhD from Åbo Akademi University in 2013; his dissertation was titled‘We Are Neither Visionaries Nor Utopian Dreamers’. Willi Münzenberg, the League Against Imperialism, and the Comintern, 1925-1933 (published as vol. I-II, Lewiston: Queenston Press, 2013). Petersson is currently working on two projects: “The Elephant and the Porcelain Shop”. Transnational Anti-Colonialism and the League against Imperialism, 1927 - 1937 (forthcoming 2017) ; and the research project “Hidden Narratives and Forgotten Stories. The Colonial World in the Nordic World”. He has published several articles on anti-imperialism, international communism and radicalism.