Contrary to Leon Trotsky's influential account, Bolsheviks in March 1917 opposed the Provisional Government and called for a revolutionary soviet regime.

Eric Blanc is an independent researcher in Oakland, California. He is the author of the forthcoming monograph, Anti-Colonial Marxism: Oppression & Revolution in the Tsarist Borderlands (Brill Publishers, Historical Materialism Book Series).

Photo Caption: Lev Kamenev reading Pravda

Intro

In the hundred years since the overthrow of Tsarism, there has been a near consensus among socialists and scholars that Bolshevism underwent a strategic rupture in early 1917. According to this account, the Bolsheviks supported the liberal Provisional Government until Vladimir Lenin returned to Russia in April and veered the party in a radical new direction by calling for socialist revolution and soviet power.

Through a re-examination of Bolshevik politics in March 1917, the following article demonstrates that the prevailing story is historically inaccurate and has distorted our understanding of how and why the Bolsheviks eventually came to lead the Russian Revolution.

That important facts about early 1917 remain obscure one century later in part stems from an ongoing uncritical acceptance of Leon Trotsky’s interpretation of ‘Old Bolshevism’, first articulated in his famous 1924 pamphlet ‘The Lessons of October’. Trotsky claimed that because the Bolshevik leadership had not hitherto advocated socialist revolution in Russia, it had therefore sought only to pressure the bourgeois Provisional Government, rather than overthrow it.^[1]

According to Trotsky, ‘Old Bolsheviks’ such as Lev Kamenev and Joseph Stalin ‘took the position that it was necessary to complete the democratic revolution by putting pressure on the Provisional Government’.^[2] Adherence to the ‘doctrinaire’ conception of democratic revolution had led ‘inevitably to Menshevism’ in March.^[3] Not until Lenin’s April 1917 campaign to convince the party to fight for socialist revolution did the Bolshevik leadership break from this de facto Menshevism, seek to overturn the bourgeois regime, and fight to establish a soviet government.^[4]

Were such claims correct, it would indeed be fair to state that Lenin’s April interventions brought about a dramatic break with ‘Old Bolshevism’. On the basis of my original research into Russian and Latvian Bolshevik newspapers, leaflets, minutes, and resolutions across the empire in March 1917, I will show below that irrefutable primary sources undermine the entire edifice of Trotsky’s argument.

 The top Bolshevik leaders in March––including both Kamenev and Stalin––did call for the elimination of the Provisional Government and the establishment of a revolutionary soviet government. Only by breaking with the national and imperialist bourgeoisie, they argued, could working people end the war, win their social demands in Russia, and spark the world socialist revolution. Without this programmatic foundation, the rise of the Bolshevik party in 1917 would have been unthinkable. April marked a moment of political evolution rather than strategic rupture for Bolshevism.

My argument coincides in part with historian Lars Lih’s groundbreaking challenges to Trotsky’s narrative.^[5] The available evidence generally corroborates Lih’s stress on the Bolshevik party’s radicalism in March and its strategic continuities up through October 1917. That said, Lih overstates the case by minimising the early political vacillations of the party and downplaying some significant changes in Bolshevik politics over the course of the year.

Despite the party’s militant strategy, Bolshevik leaders not infrequently politically bent to moderate socialists and workers during March, particularly in the periphery of the empire. In most regions, this wavering constituted a break from (rather than expression of) the stance articulated by the party’s ‘Old Bolshevik’ leadership. But political inconsistency before Lenin’s return was also facilitated by certain tensions in Bolshevik strategy, particularly its open-ended approach to which party and class should lead the revolutionary regime. Ambiguities in the ‘Old Bolshevik’ call for a ‘democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants’ meant that party policy could be–and indeed was–developed in distinct directions following Tsarism’s demise.

On the whole, however, it is justified to highlight Bolshevism’s continuities in 1917, especially because these have been so widely denied by decades of historiography. Bolshevik vacillations–unavoidable to a certain extent for any political current engaged in mass struggle–were overshadowed by the current’s general orientation to proletarian hegemony.

Trotsky can be excused for putting forward a one-sided account of ‘Old Bolshevism’ during his desperate struggle to uphold workers’ democracy and proletarian internationalism against rising Stalinism in the 1920s. In the face of an increasingly bureaucratised Communist party and Soviet state, it is hard to fault Trotsky for using all the polemical weapons at his disposal to discredit the ‘Old Bolshevik’ triumvirate of Stalin, Kamenev, and Grigory Zinoviev. But there is no need today to remain wedded to Trotsky’s interpretation of early 1917, which is clearly contradicted by a wide range of primary sources. Revolutionary Marxism, including the strategy of permanent revolution, is strong enough to withstand a critical re-assessment of the actual politics of Bolshevism in March 1917.

The Political Context

Bolshevik policy prior to Lenin’s arrival in Petrograd can only be adequately examined in light of the context of that very particular moment in the revolution. At no other point in 1917 would the stance of both the Provisional Government and the moderate socialists be so in line with popular sentiment.

By March the basic structure of dual power had been established in the capital and across the empire. The Provisional Government nominally ruled the land, but the soviets held more real power and authority. Elected by nobody, and isolated from the working class due to the liberal leaders’ longstanding support for the war and the monarchy, the Provisional Government’s survival depended on the support given to it by the moderate socialist leaderships. In the eyes of most politically active workers and soldiers, the soviets were the sole legitimate power. In the famous phrase of the 2 March Petrograd Soviet resolution, the new bourgeois administration would be supported only ‘in so far as’ [постольку, поскольку] it met the people’s demands.

Menshevik leaders could largely take political credit for establishing this dual power regime, which to a great extent reflected their post-1905 strategy of conditional support for the liberals. Though Menshevism remained a heterogeneous political tent, one fundamental point upon which all wings agreed was that the bourgeoisie must assume the reigns of power following the downfall of the autocracy. Given Russia’s backward social conditions, socialist transformation was impossible and, therefore, a working people’s government was off the table.

By 1917 most Mensheviks had long ago abandoned the strategy of the hegemony of the proletariat and viewed liberals as indispensable allies of the proletariat. On an immediate level, they felt that only an alliance with a wing of the bourgeoisie would be sufficient to defeat the serious threat of a right-wing counter-revolution. Ideologically, the Mensheviks were committed to the view that decisive forces in the upper class would support democracy and social progress against the remnants of feudalism. At the same time, opinions among Mensheviks continued to vary widely concerning expectations in Russian liberalism. This is important to stress, since Menshevism in March was significantly more oppositional than it became after the April Crisis and the conciliatory socialists’ subsequent entry into the Provisional Government.

In early 1917 the general Menshevik sentiment was that steady pressure by an independent labour movement was necessary to push from below to overcome the hesitations of the bourgeoisie. Mensheviks held firm to this relatively oppositional stance for most of March and they sought to use their strength to steer the government in a progressive direction. Thus they rejected the liberals’ initial attempt to maintain monarchic rule; they asserted the Soviet’s political control over the mass of soldiers; they sought to build up the Soviet as an effective proletarian bastion to drive forward the government and society generally; and they initiated a major campaign to pressure the Provisional Government and the Allies to take concrete steps towards ending the war.

Under the leadership of the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), the Soviet scored some important early victories. It obliged the Provisional Government to grant political freedom and legal equality for all, abolish the police and security apparatus, release all political prisoners, refrain from reprisals against mutinous soldiers, remove the top Tsarist officials, and agree to rapidly convoke a Constituent Assembly. The latter promise, in particular, should be underscored, since many socialists in March emphasised the provisional nature of the current government, which they believed would only be around for a few months.

The viability of the Menshevik dual power plan hinged on two factors: the bourgeoisie’s ability to continue to meet the people’s urgent demands and the proletariat’s ability to refrain from pushing too far, too fast. Events would soon show that neither class behaved in the way the Mensheviks had hoped.

March constituted the high point of the Provisional Government’s grudging acceptance of progressive measures. Despite the Soviet’s campaign for peace, Russian liberals––backed by French and English imperialism––continued the war and stated that no major social reforms would be implemented until military victory. When news of the administration’s plans to continue the war ‘until victory’ became public in April, anti-government demonstrations and riots broke out in the capital, against the wishes of the Soviet leadership. The April Crisis made it clear that the current Provisional Government lacked sufficient popular legitimacy to govern. A restructuring of the administration––and Menshevik strategy––was required. Forced to choose between their principled opposition to participation in a capitalist government and their commitment to an alliance with liberals, the Mensheviks chose the latter.

Bolshevism and Revolutionary Government

The specific political configuration of Russian society in March 1917 had not been foreseen by the Bolsheviks. From 1905 onwards, they had assumed that either workers and peasants would establish their own ‘democratic dictatorship’ or Russian liberals would come to power in the framework of a constitutional monarchy. Yet the unexpected emergence of a post-Tsarist liberal government did not invalidate the Bolsheviks’ main line of march: proletarian hegemony to establish a revolutionary workers’ and peasants’ government to end the war and meet the people’s urgent social demands. ‘Bolshevism did not primarily make a prediction about the day after the fall of the tsar, but rather proposed a scenario of the “active forces” of Russian society, joined to a corresponding strategy for carrying the revolution “to the end,”’ notes Lih.^[6]

In the first few days of March, the most radical (arguably ultra-left) Petrograd Bolsheviks had called for immediate mass agitation for an armed uprising against the Provisional Government.^[7] Most Bolshevik leaders, in contrast, argued that such a push was dangerously premature, given that workers generally supported the moderate socialists in the Soviet; since the Bolsheviks were organisationally weak; and because revolutionary developments outside Petrograd lagged behind the capital.^[8] Additionally, the Provisional Government in these very days was ceding to key democratic measures. As Bolshevik leader Filipp Goloschekin put it at the party’s late March conference, ‘the Provisional Government is counter-revolutionary both in its personnel and in its essence. Under the pressure of the masses it is accomplishing revolutionary tasks, and to this extent, it entrenches itself. We must not overlook that the masses are saying that the Provisional Government has done everything. … If we want to struggle against the counter revolution, we must aim for the seizure of power, but without forcing events.’^[9]

On 4 March, the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee––the top Bolshevik leadership body inside of Russia, led by Alexander Shlyapnikov and Vyacheslav Molotov––affirmed the current’s strategic orientation in a resolution published in the party’s central newspaper, Pravda:

The present Provisional Government is essentially counter revolutionary, because it consists of representatives of the big bourgeoisie and the nobility, and thus there can be no agreement with it. The task of the revolutionary democracy is the creation of a Provisional Revolutionary Government that is democratic in nature (the dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry).^[10]

The Vyborg Bolsheviks felt that this goal was an immediate task and passed the following resolution at a big factory rally in early March: ‘The Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies must immediately eliminate the Provisional Government of the liberal bourgeoisie and declare itself to be the Provisional Revolutionary Government.’^[11]

Other Bolshevik leaders put forward a somewhat more cautious tactic. On 3 March the Petersburg Committee of the party resolved that it would ‘not oppose the Provisional Government power in so far as its actions comply to the best interests of the proletariat and the broad masses of the democracy and the people.’^[12] Various authors have incorrectly claimed that these Bolsheviks had thereby adopted the Mensheviks’ stance of conditional support for the Provisional Government.^[13] In fact, the resolution only implied that the Bolsheviks did not seek to immediately eliminate the regime and that they would support the specific progressive measures that it implemented––additionally, as Bolshevik leader V. N. Zalezhsky explained, the use of the phrase ‘does not oppose’ instead of ‘support’ was consciously employed to differentiate the Bolsheviks’ stance from that of the Soviet leadership.^[14]

The political orientation of the Bolsheviks’ Petersburg Committee was soon expounded in the party press. One of the more articulate explanations came from Latvian Bolshevik leader, Pēteris Stučka, a member of the Petersburg Committee and one of the three Bolsheviks represented in the Soviet Executive Committee. As a supporter of the Petersburg Committee’s 3 March ‘in so far as’ resolution, Stučka elaborated on how it fit into party strategy in his 7 March article ‘Our Mission’.

This important document––overlooked in the historiography because it was published in Latvian––sought to answer ‘whether the revolution has come to an end or is just beginning’ and, subsequently, how the Bolsheviks addressed the question of state power. Stučka noted that though the workers and peasants in uniform had made the revolution, the Provisional Government was run by the ‘counter-revolutionary’ bourgeoisie. The new administration had been obliged by popular pressure to take some real steps forward (such as eliminating the monarchy), but it was incapable of meeting the essential tasks of the revolution: ‘As soon as it loses the support of the revolutionary people, it will fall.’ He explained that this strategic perspective constituted ‘the foundation which separates us from the moderate leftists’ who believe that ‘the fall of the Provisional Government would mean the collapse of the whole revolution’.

In contrast, Stučka concluded that only a ‘truly revolutionary provisional government, that is, a provisional government of workers and peasants’ could lead Russia out of its crisis and meet the demands of the people such as land to the peasants and an end to the imperialist war. With this state power objective in mind, the immediate task of revolutionaries was to reject ‘moderation’, to raise ‘direct revolutionary slogans’, and to ‘criticise every step’ of the Provisional Government, while ‘supporting only those [steps]’ that did not go against the development of the revolution.^[15]

Clearly Bolshevik leaders integrated the ‘in so far as’ formulation into a distinct strategy from that of the conciliatory socialists. Petrograd Soviet leader Nikolai Sukhanov recalled that to not oppose the Provisional Government’s progressive steps ‘was the official position of the Bolsheviks at that time. But the sabotaging of Right Socialists, and demagogy addressed to the masses—that was also their official position.’^[16] Whereas the Menshevik leadership actively supported the establishment of bourgeois rule and limited its strategic perspective to pressuring the liberals, the Bolsheviks rejected an alliance with the bourgeoisie and explicitly called for the replacement of the current government with a workers’ and peasants’ regime. Russian historian V.I. Startsev notes that ‘the similarity of the [3 March Bolshevik] resolution to the 2 March Soviet resolution was purely superficial, one could say grammatical, in that it included “in so far as”’.^[17]

‘Old Bolsheviks’ in March were quite clear that the revolution was far from over. Crucially, the Bolsheviks never reduced the goal of the democratic revolution to ending autocratic rule––in their view, this upheaval would only be complete once the landed estates were confiscated, the workers armed, a republic established, and a series of radical economic measures enacted. As ‘Old Bolshevik’ Nikolai Miliutin put it later in the month, ‘our revolution is not only a political but also a social revolution.’^[18]

On 12 March, party leaders Kamenev, Stalin, and Matvei Muranov arrived in Petrograd and promptly assumed editorial responsibility for Pravda. Their arrival tilted the balance of forces towards the relatively cautious elements within the party leadership and away from the more intransigent Russian Bureau and Vyborg Committee. Put simply, Kamenev and Stalin promoted the revolutionary ‘in so far as’ line first elaborated by the Bolshevik Petersburg Committee on 3 March.

Contrary to Trotsky’s unfounded claims, the new Pravda editors openly affirmed the party’s objective of eliminating the current government and putting all power into the hands of workers and peasants.^[19] Throughout the month, Kamenev and Stalin affirmed that they did not support the government as such, only the particular progressive actions that it was compelled from below to implement. To quote Kamenev: ‘Support is absolutely inacceptable. It is impermissible to have any expression of support, even to hint at it. We can not support the Government because it is an imperialist government.’^[20]

 In a 14 March article, Kamenev clearly reiterated the standard Bolshevik perspective on state power:

The proletariat and the peasantry and the army composed of [these groups] will consider that the revolution that has begun will be completed only when their demands are entirely and fully satisfied, when all the remnants of the former regime are torn to the ground, both in economic and in the political sphere. This full satisfaction of the [demands of] workers, peasants and the army is possible only when all the power is in their own hands. Insofar as the revolution will widen and deepen, it will arrive at this, to the dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.^[21]

To underscore the continuity of their strategy on soviet power, on 17 March the new editors published on Pravda’s front page the entire Bolshevik 1906 resolution on the soviets, which affirmed that these bodies were ‘embryos of revolutionary power’ that must be ‘turn[ed] into a provisional revolutionary government’ through a proletarian-led uprising. The editors declared that the orientation of the resolution ‘basically remains true today’ even though ‘today’s soviets operate on a terrain that has already been cleared of Tsarism’.^[22]

This line was developed in Pravda’s 18 March issue, in which Stalin explicitly called for the establishment of an empirewide Soviet body, which must take political power. ‘The first condition for the victory of the Russian revolution’, he argued, is that an ‘all-Russian Soviet’ must ‘transform itself at the necessary moment from an organ of the revolutionary struggle of the people into an organ of revolutionary power’.^[23]

To be sure, Kamenev and Stalin (unlike the most radical elements in the Bolshevik party) were not calling for the immediate overthrow of the Provisional Government. Against the impetuousness of Petrograd Bolshevik militants eager to initiate an armed uprising at the earliest possible moment, Kamenev insisted that it was necessary not only to conquer power, but to keep it.^[24] ‘This moment will come, but it is beneficial for us to delay, as our forces are still currently insufficient’, he argued in the Petrograd Committee.^[25]

The Pravda editors in March viewed party isolation and tendencies towards ultra-leftism as a grave danger. This issue was not a figment of their imagination: wings of the Petrograd organisation, particularly in the Vyborg district, were treading close to Blanquism by pushing to take down the government well before the majority of workers supported soviet power. After returning to Russia, Lenin similarly fought hard against impatient Bolsheviks, whose reckless actions in April and July threatened to abort the revolutionary process through a premature uprising.

Similarly, there is considerable evidence that Pravda’s flanking tactics may have been the best suited for the political climate in March. To cite just one example, Israel Getzler’s study of Kronstadt shows that the tactical pivot under Kamenev’s guidance succeeded in turning around the party’s fortunes in this strategic locale: ‘If the unsuccessful Bolshevik debut in Kronstadt [under the influence of the Vyborg Committee] was to some extent due to its aggressive, ‘maximalist’, jarring tone, the moderate, ‘minimalist’ stance adopted from the latter part of March until the ‘April Days’ seems to have served well in the building up of the Bolshevik party organization and influence.’^[26]

Calls in March for a revolutionary soviet government (and/or dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry) were not limited to Petrograd. In Latvia, one party committee declared that ‘the only consistent expression of the workers’ interests is the Soviet of Workers' Deputies, and therefore it is our duty to support it in every way, to transfer the power of the Provisional Government to it, and through this to continue the revolution until final victory.’^[27] Similar proclamations were made by Bolsheviks in Moscow, Ekaterinburg, Kharkov, and Krasnoyarsk.^[28]

The April 3-4 Bolshevik Moscow citywide conference likewise gives a good sense of the general party leadership’s state perspective on the eve of Lenin’s return. Only a single person, V.I. Yahontov, opposed the fight for a new revolutionary regime, arguing that ‘if the working class takes power into its own hands, it will not be able to cope with the economic breakdown.’ The other delegates responded by shouting him down––‘you are a Bolshevik?’ they taunted.^[29] Yahontov immediately after joined the Mensheviks, as did a handful of co-thinkers in Petrograd led by Wladimir Woytinsky (who was likewise sharply criticised and politically isolated by the Petrograd Bolsheviks).

It is significant that the very few opponents of seizing power among the Bolsheviks were overwhelmingly marginalised before Lenin’s return and that they therefore immediately joined the Menshevik party. If there were no major differences between the currents, as Trotsky implies, how can one explain the resignations of Yahontov and Woytinsky?

Likewise, how are we to account for the numerous examples of the right-wing press publicly singling-out the Bolsheviks for political denunciation? Shlyapnikov’s memoir documents ‘the furious persecution and slander’ of the upper class against the party throughout the month due to its opposition to the war and the government––‘the hostility of the bourgeoisie proved to us that the decisions we took were correct’, he concludes.^[30] Michael Hickey’s recent work on the revolution in Smolensk similarly observes that ‘Bolshevist positions repeatedly came under fire in the local press even before Lenin's return to Russia’.^[31]

Bolshevism’s stance on the war and the Provisional Government was also sharply attacked by the moderate socialists in March. The party’s refusal to support the military effort was particularly controversial. As Shlyapnikov recalls, ‘the bourgeoisie and the defencist Mensheviks and SRs managed to create literally a pogrom mood against us. There were days when we could not speak to soldiers to outline our internationalist views.’^[32] Polemics over the question of soviet power likewise began well before Lenin’s return. Against their radical rivals, the Mensheviks responded that the need for an alliance with the bourgeoisie, as well as the low level of Russia’s level of economic development, precluded the rule of working people. ‘If the Petrograd Soviet of Workers and Soldiers’ Deputies took power into its own hands, it would be an illusory power, a power that would immediately lead to the eruption of civil war,’ declared the Mensheviks’ main Petrograd newspaper.^[33]

As we have seen, Bolshevik leaders explicitly called for a soviet regime prior to the arrival of Lenin in April. Contrary to the assumptions of most academic and activist historians today, socialist revolution was not seen by Marxists at this time as a necessary corollary of soviet power. Looking back at the politics of the party in March, Stučka noted in 1918 that ‘we, the Bolsheviks, the Petrograd executive committee, both raised the demand for all power to the soviets, but we did not yet think about immediately moving to socialism’.^[34]

It should be underscored that until late 1917 the demand for ‘All Power to the Soviets!’ concretely meant the establishment of a government led by the Mensheviks and SRs, two currents openly opposed to direct socialist transformation. Similarly worth noting is the fact that the Menshevik Internationalists later in the year called for a soviet government but not socialist transformation. Thus Rafael Abramovitch, a central leader of the Menshevik (and Bundist) Internationalists, argued in July 1917 that the Soviet must take the reigns of power.^[35] He declared: ‘The revolution now only has one way forward: the dictatorship, the rule of the working class, together with the revolutionary layers of the urban and rural petty bourgeoisie! In Russia, the bourgeois-democratic revolution must take place without the help of and even against the will of the middle or big bourgeoisie!’^[36] Various other parties and currents across the empire put forward calls for soviet power from a range of distinct strategic perspectives, most of which did not include socialist revolution.^[37]

Unlike the later-day stageism of the Stalinised Communist International, the ‘Old Bolsheviks’ did not argue that socialist transformation in Russia could only take place after an extended period of capitalist development and political democracy. In fact, Bolshevik leaders explicitly rejected this view in March 1917. They argued, instead, that the working class at the head of the peasantry had to seize power in Russia to spark the international overthrow of capitalism.

In countless leaflets, speeches, and articles, Bolsheviks affirmed that the capitalist crises expressed and exacerbated by the imperialist conflict must lead to an imminent world socialist revolution, which would allow the Russian Revolution to move beyond capitalism. In a typical article on 21 March, Stučka made the case for why revolutionary Marxists in the Russian empire rejected the view that ‘first there must be a long period of social freedom and only then can one start a serious struggle for socialism’, which would mean ‘postpon[ing] socialism itself for many years’. He explained that while ‘there was little hope of putting socialism into practice within Russia’s borders only, the rise of social revolution across Europe without a doubt will also drag Russia into it.’ The transformative experience of revolution, Stučka declared, would allow Russia’s workers to reach radical conclusions without an extended period of political freedom: ‘it should be noted that six months in the life of a revolution equals the same as decades of peaceful development.’^[38]

Up through and often well past October, most Bolshevik leaders continued to predicate the potential for any substantial socialist transformation of the Russian economy on successful proletarian revolutions in Europe. Lenin’s April proposals for ‘steps towards socialism’—calls for ‘socialist revolution’ in Russia were conspicuously absent—did not include expropriating capitalist industry. He 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’.^[39] Explicitly disputing the claim that he was aiming to ‘skip’ the bourgeois-democratic stage, Lenin insisted in April that he was not advocating a ‘workers’ government’ but rather a broader regime of workers, peasants, soldiers, and agricultural labourers.^[40]

For months after the October Revolution, Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership continued to push back against the calls and initiatives from below to nationalise production. 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, 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 circumstances, this wave of premature nationalisations deepened the catastrophic collapse of production and played a central role in the massive growth of a privileged state bureaucracy.^[41]

Bolshevism’s evolution regarding socialist transformation was far more convoluted and protracted than has usually been assumed. Though the historical record undermines claims that Lenin won the party to socialist revolution in April 1917, it confirms the prescience of Trotsky’s argument for permanent revolution made eleven years prior:

Under whatever political banner the proletariat has come to power, it will be obliged to take the path of socialist policy. It would be the greatest utopianism to think that the proletariat, having been raised to political domination by the internal mechanism of a bourgeois revolution, will be able, even if it so desires, to limit its mission to the creation of republican-democratic conditions for the social domination of the bourgeoisie.^[42]

Conciliation in the Capital

Despite the Bolshevik leaders’ general agreement on the governmental goal of the revolution in March 1917, they often sharply conflicted on the best tactics to win it. Crucial ongoing points of debate included: How far, and on what issues, would it be possible to push the liberals and conciliatory socialists to cede to the masses’ demands? Was the seizure of power an immediate or medium-term task? In the interim, should demands be placed on the Provisional Government and should its progressive steps be supported?^[43]

 Given the complexity and fluidity of the post-Tsarist political situation, it is not surprising that there was considerable internal conflict over how best to advance the struggle. The future course of events was very difficult to predict. To quote one Latvian Bolshevik leader, ‘finding the correct tactical line in these circumstances [following the fall of the Tsar] was extremely difficult.’^[44] How to engage in mass politics while avoiding the twin traps of sectarian isolation or unprincipled adaptation was no easy feat; nor was the fine line between opportunism and a necessary compromise always self-evident. As would be the case in April and throughout 1917, the Bolshevik party was the most strategically cohesive empirewide socialist current, but the political and tactical approaches of its militants were far from homogenous.

For the purposes of this article, there is no need to delve into the details of all these debates. I do think, however, that it is important to point out that there was a marked tendency of various Bolsheviks to problematically bend to outside political forces in March. In the wake of the Tsar’s overthrow, revolutionary Marxists across the empire were subjected to tremendous pressures––from the conciliatory socialists and from the mass of workers––to tone down or hold back their independent line for the sake of unity. All regions were swept by a ‘honeymoon’ mood of euphoria and class collaboration. One left SR recalled that ‘the events of February made people forget what only a few days earlier had been their irreconcilable differences with the landowners and capitalists. It seemed like all were united.’^[45] And no less important as a factor pushing towards conciliationism was the widespread fear in early March of the immediate danger of a counter-revolutionary reaction.^[46]

Across the empire, from ‘the South’ to the Baltic, various tendencies of revolutionary socialists in early 1917 reversed (or temporarily abandoned) their programmatic commitments to proletarian hegemony. For instance, the Finnish Social Democratic Party in March dropped its longstanding opposition to class collaboration and participation in capitalist government. Party leader Otto Kuusinen recalled the dynamic:

This spring-time liberty fell for us like a gift from the skies, and our party was overwhelmed by the intoxicating sap of March. The official watchword had been that of independent class-struggle, i.e., the same which German Social Democracy had put forward before the war. During the reactionary [pre-1917] period it was easy enough to maintain this position; it was not exposed to any serious attack, and resistance on the part of the Socialists of the Right could not manage to make itself felt. In March the Party’s proletarian virtue was exposed to temptation and to fall into sin.^[47]

Holding a certain political strategy could not completely immunise any socialist tendency from adapting to the inevitable pressures of outside society, particularly those refracted through rival socialist currents and/or mass sentiment. Nor could it prevent the emergence of ultra-left, impatient tendencies in the party ranks. A revolutionary programme, in this sense, was a necessary but insufficient condition for revolutionary practice.

Though the Bolsheviks acquitted themselves better than most socialists in imperial Russia, they too were subjected to the same centrifugal forces and manifest some of the same vacillations. ‘The pressure was so strong that even some of those whom we previously considered ‘ours’ wavered and retreated’, recalls Shlyapnikov.^[48] Various Bolshevik party leaders politically bent in ways that went beyond simply pedagogically presenting their demands in an understandable manner to broad sections of workers.

Kamenev was particularly culpable in this regard. For example, in a 15 March article in Pravda he put forward a perspective on the war that was mostly indistinguishable from the Soviet leadership’s stance of ‘revolutionary defencism’. While denouncing the war as imperialist and calling for a campaign of revolutionary class struggle to force the Provisional Government and Europe’s other bourgeois regimes to end it, Kamenev echoed the moderate socialists’ call for the defence of Russia against Germany in the meantime:

When one army is against another the army, it would be the most absurd policy to suggest that one of them lay down their arms and go home. That would not be a policy of peace and but a policy of slavery, a policy which would be indignantly rejected by a free people. No, it will stand firmly at its post, answering bullet for bullet and shell for shell.^[49]

This formulation marked a significant departure away from the Bolsheviks’ hitherto clear opposition to defencism––not surprisingly it was immediately rejected by other Bolshevik leaders. After some sharp pushback within the party leadership, Kamenev dropped this concession to defencism the next day. Indeed, as Shlyapnikov notes, the second half of March was marked by an ‘even greater’ bourgeois persecution of the Bolsheviks for their opposition to the war, which obliged the party to concentrate its activities on a self-preservation campaign against this offensive.^[50] Trotsky’s assertion that Kamenev’s 15 March piece ‘expresses perfectly accurately the position of Pravda prior to Lenin’s return to Russia’ has little basis in fact.^[51]

Testifying to the anti-defencist consensus in the party, Kamenev delivered the main Bolshevik speech on the war at the 29 March-3 April All-Russian Soviet conference. Intransigently denouncing the war and calling for world socialist revolution, Kamenev affirmed (as Lenin too would later) that only ‘when society’s working classes conquer power’ would national defence be warranted.^[52] Illustrating the balance of forces inside the working class at this moment, the Bolshevik proposal was overwhelmingly defeated, 57 to 325.

Though Kamenev’s sharp defence of internationalism contradicts the widespread misconception that he was for unity at any price with the moderate socialists, some of his actions at this conference also testify to a tendency towards conciliationism. Declaring that the bourgeois Provisional Government would inevitably clash with working people, his opening plenary speech cuttingly criticised the Soviet leadership’s resolution on state perspectives and announced that the task of the day was to strengthen ‘the embryos of revolutionary power: the Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies’.^[53] In the hopes of cohering the conference around the Soviet leadership’s text, Menshevik leader Irakli Tsereteli responded by demagogically declaring that ‘if [the Petrograd Soviet] considers it necessary for the interests of the people, it could even seize power’.^[54] An amendment was likewise accepted to scratch the initial proposal’s call to support the Provisional Government.

At this point, while various top Bolshevik leaders including Shlyapnikov argued for sticking with their original plan to present a separate governmental resolution, Kamenev won the majority of the fraction to a more conciliatory approach. In the plenary he read out loud the party’s militant proposal on state power, but declared that the Bolsheviks would vote for the compromise resolution––a vague ‘in so far as’ text that was basically uncritical of the Provisional Government and that said nothing explicit about the need to establish a government of workers and peasants.^[55] Not without reason, Shlyapnikov concluded that ‘this decision of the majority of our faction was a concession to the compromisers, dictated by diplomatic considerations on the need for the ‘unity of the democracy’ in the face of a common enemy––the bourgeoisie.’^[56]

A drift towards conciliationism was hardly a secondary matter. Lenin’s longstanding intransigence against the Mensheviks and SRs was in large part aimed at pushing back against the real tendency of some of his comrades to bend to the moderate socialists, who in turn were bending to the liberal bourgeoisie. ‘Whoever wants to help the waverers must first stop wavering himself,’ Lenin insisted.^[57]

It is important to note that for Kamenev this ongoing search for an agreement with other socialists was connected to a certain extent with aspects of ‘Old Bolshevism’. Bolshevik strategy had left unanswered which (if any) social class and party should be dominant in the desired ‘democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants’, a regime that was often envisioned as a coalition between different socialist parties. The tension between such an algebraic conception and the Bolsheviks’ simultaneous insistence on proletarian hegemony became starkly evident when the moderate socialists handed power to the liberals after the fall of the autocracy. In such a context, the burning question for Bolshevik strategy became whether other socialist currents could be convinced or compelled to break with the bourgeoisie and join the fight for a new revolutionary regime.

 As Trotsky, Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg and the Polish Social Democrats had done since 1905-06, Lenin during 1917 increasingly pushed for a government in which the proletarian party would be the dominant political current.^[58] In April, while noting that the petty-bourgeoisie might eventually break with the bourgeoisie, he declared that the call for a ‘democratic dictatorship’ was ‘antiquated’ in the concrete circumstances because the petty-bourgeois socialists at that moment were supporting the liberals.^[59] By September, Lenin was arguing that ‘our Party, like any other political party, is striving after political domination for itself. Our aim is the dictatorship of the revolutionary proletariat’.^[60] In 1906, Trotsky had justifiably argued that his response to this question––‘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.^[61]

Though they did not reject the goal of Bolshevik leadership in a revolutionary government, Kamenev and his allies particularly stressed the strategic possibility and desirability of including SRs and Mensheviks––who stood at the head of the ‘petty-bourgeois’ masses––in revolutionary governance. In his April debates with Lenin, Kamenev argued that ‘a clash of the bourgeoisie with the entire revolutionary democracy is inevitable’––given this impending split of the petty-bourgeoisie 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.^[62]

This was a reasonable wager. Since workers were a minority in Russia, a Bolshevik-Socialist Revolutionary-Menshevik government offered the best possible prospects for a new revolutionary power to cement a worker-peasant alliance and a solidly majoritarian social base. Particularly because the Bolsheviks lacked strong rural support, hopes to establish such a regime can hardly be reduced to, or dismissed as, political faintheartedness or a ‘doctrinaire’ adherence to an out-dated theory.

The problem, however, was that the SRs and Mensheviks were committed to an alliance with the liberals for most of the year. And in the fall, when large wings of moderate socialists did call for a break with the bourgeoisie, most nevertheless refused to participate in a revolutionary soviet government where the Bolsheviks would be a leading force. In such conditions, the push by Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, and various other Bolshevik militants for a multi-tendency ‘homogenous socialist government’ famously pitted them against the rest of the Bolshevik leadership, who were prepared to take power without the other socialist currents.

Lih has minimised the importance of this strategic divergence, the practical consequences of which could be profound. Kamenev’s conciliatory approaches in March, however, cannot be arbitrarily equated with that of the party leadership as a whole. Historian D.A. Longley notes that ‘the “right swing” after Stalin's return affected only a very small part of the Petrograd party and was more a triumph of public relations of the “rightist” group than a significant shift in party policy.’^[63]

The Russian Bureau, the Vyborg Committee, and top Bolshevik leaders such as Stučka, Shlyapnikov, and Molotov were no less committed than Kamenev and Stalin to the political perspective of ‘Old Bolshevism’. Yet in March 1917 they took a more radical stance against the government and implemented a more independent approach towards other socialist currents. In so doing, they leaned on Bolshevism’s longstanding strategic insistence on proletarian hegemony in the fight for state power, as well as its well-known tradition of sharply criticising moderate socialists.

Based on their own concrete experiences and assessments, many Bolshevik leaders before April had already become skeptical about the potential for the moderates to break from the bourgeoisie. During the February Revolution, for instance, Shlyapnikov had unsuccessfully attempted to convince the SRs and Mensheviks to form a revolutionary government with the Bolsheviks.^[64] Historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa notes that following this aborted effort, Shlyapnikov and the Russian Bureau re-oriented their views as early as March 1:

Since the leadership of the Petrograd Soviet disagreed with the formation of a provisional revolutionary government and Bolshevik strength was not yet pronounced, Shliapnikov and his colleagues of the Russian Bureau concluded that it was still premature to adopt even their own slogan. For the time being it was necessary for the Bolsheviks to concentrate on organizational work and agitation among the masses and achieve a majority in the Soviet.^[65]

 The course of the Bolshevik party as a whole paralleled Shlyapnikov’s evolution. Up through at least October 1917, it remained an open question whether the moderate socialists could be brought on board the project of a workers’ and peasants’ government. The fact that most Bolshevik leaders eventually concluded that soviet power could only be established under their party’s hegemony had as much to do with the lived experience of class struggle as high ideology.

Beyond the Capital

Though Petrograd was the centre of the empire’s political life, it is important to broaden the geographic scope of our analysis of socialist politics in 1917. Whether an adaptation of Bolsheviks in Petrograd to ultra-leftism or opportunism was their greatest weakness in early 1917 is hard to say––but in the imperial provinces and periphery it is clear in hindsight that the latter was by far the deeper problem.

To understand why Bolshevik conciliationism was deepest outside the capital, some key contextual factors must be foregrounded. The February Revolution really took on an insurrectionary character only in Petrograd and for most of 1917 class polarisation in the rest of the empire continued to lag behind the capital. Ronald Suny’s description of Baku was valid for most regions: ‘The moderate socialist parties … benefited from the defensist mood of the population and the relative calm in Baku during the first months of the revolution.’^[66]

In further contrast with Petrograd and Moscow––where the national party leaderships were based and where factional differences were sharpest––a large number, perhaps a majority, of Bolshevik militants elsewhere remained in joint Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (RSDRP) committees with Mensheviks up through the February Revolution and the early months of 1917.^[67] From the party’s initial split in 1903 onwards, RSDRP organisations (as well as factional allegiances) were almost always significantly weaker outside the capital, prompting local militants to combine their forces. Not until the summertime of 1917 (i.e., following the Mensheviks’ entry into the government) did the establishment of separate Bolshevik organisations become the norm––and even after October some Bolsheviks continued to work in united committees.^[68]

Bolshevik participation in joint RSDRP bodies did not as such imply a political adaptation to the Mensheviks. Many militants hoped to win the committees to a Bolshevik, or at least firmly ‘internationalist’, perspective and correctly saw that splitting away prematurely would isolate them from the RSDRP ranks, who were still firmly disposed towards party unity. This organisational flexibility was often crucially important, as it allowed the Bolsheviks win over much of the membership when the realities of the Menshevik leadership’s class-collaborationism became more evident in practice.^[69]

Yet the degree of political commitment to the strategy of ‘Old Bolshevism’ remained uneven in the periphery and provinces. For geographic as well as political reasons, these Bolshevik militants in early 1917 were often very weakly ideologically and organisationally connected to the national leadership in Petrograd. Georgian Bolshevik leader Filipp Makharadze typically explained that in February the current had no distinct organisational expression ‘either in Tiflis or the provinces’ and that they had ‘no contact with the Central Committee’.^[70] As one Baku socialist lamented in April, not only was the local RSDRP party organisation very weak, but ‘there is no definite [political] line.’^[71]

In March 1917, the pressures of collaboration inside united RSDRP committees, the concentration of top party cadre in Petrograd or abroad, the relatively weak ideological commitments of local militants, and the conciliatory context of the periphery weighed heavy on Bolshevik practice. In most towns outside of Petrograd and Moscow, a sharp political delineation from the conciliatory socialists was the exception rather than the norm. Pressures towards unity frequently led local Bolsheviks to act on a vague, lowest-common-denominator orientation that did not go beyond calling for pressure on the government to meet the peoples’ demands.^[72] Whereas the ‘in so far as’ formulation was attached by the top Bolshevik leadership to an explicit advocacy of a workers’ and peasants’ government, such a state objective was rarely articulated by borderland Bolsheviks either publicly or in internal party resolutions.

Bolshevik leaflets and resolutions as well as numerous studies of local militants across the empire––from Ukraine, to Transcaucasia, to the Volga––testify to the tendency of these party activists in March to avoid Bolshevism’s call for a Provisional Revolutionary Government and/or drop its opposition to defencism.^[73] A few illustrative examples can be cited. In Ekaterinoslav, the Bolshevik organisation did not raise the need for a new government, arguing instead that ‘the power of [proletarian] class organisations has to be used to revolutionise the bourgeoisie’.^[74] And in Tallinn, the Estonian Bolsheviks during late March supported a resolution declaring that ‘until the possibility of making peace has been fully explored we must continue to support a defensist war’.^[75]

Such positions went far beyond tactical flexibility. They illustrated real political weaknesses in the Bolshevik current. Unlike in Petrograd, however, there is little evidence that such vacillations were significantly rooted in the ambiguities of ‘Old Bolshevism’. These positions were not articulated as, or justified with reference to, the long-standing tenets of Bolshevism. Rather than reflecting an affirmation of party strategy, it was precisely a lack of sharp commitment to revolutionary theory generally, and Bolshevik theory in particular, that manifest itself in these regions. This dynamic helps explain the ease with which these very Bolshevik party committees following April adjusted their stance and adopted the slogan of ‘All Power to the Soviets!’. By way of contrast, despite Lenin’s vehement call for a new orientation on the national question, most borderland Bolshevik organisations and leaders up through 1918 continued to uphold their longstanding commitment to an intransigent internationalism that tended to dismiss national movements for self-determination.

At the same time, it merits mention that many of the local Bolsheviks initially prone to watering down their current’s stance began to more clearly differentiate themselves from the Mensheviks by late March. Major divergences continued to mark the two tendencies even in towns where the Bolsheviks initially limited their perspectives to class struggle to pressure the bourgeoisie. Whereas the commitment of most Mensheviks to an alliance with liberals prevented them from consistently relying on popular struggle to push the regime, Bolsheviks were free of any such political contradictions. In city after city, factional strife emerged when the Bolsheviks resolutely fought to arm the workers and for mass action to win a democratic republic, the eight-hour day, land confiscation, and peace. Donald Raleigh’s study of Saratov, for instance, notes that ‘by the end of March tactical differences reflecting the Bolsheviks’ willingness to implement their minimum program began to isolate them from their socialist comrades.’^[76] In Georgia, the local cadre similarly fought against the Menshevik leaders’ push for a strategic alliance with the bourgeoisie, a class that these Bolsheviks declared to be ‘inherently counter-revolutionary’.^[77]

Put briefly: Bolshevik circles outside Petrograd and Moscow were marked by major conciliatory tendencies during March, though the overall trend was towards greater conflict with the moderate socialists and the government. For Russia’s peripheral Bolsheviks, the discussions and debates of April played a deeper reorienting role than in the centre.

 The 24-29 April All-Russian Bolshevik conference, and the preceding internal discussions of Lenin’s ‘April Theses’, significantly strengthened the party’s political cohesion and intransigence empirewide. Sharp attacks on the Provisional Government were stepped up after April and local Bolshevik militants across the empire began for the first time to consistently foreground the call for a soviet regime. The need to clearly demarcate themselves from the conciliatory socialists also became much more widely accepted.

How much this evolution was due to Lenin’s impact or to the rapidly changing political context is difficult to gauge precisely. In March, the Provisional Government had not yet announced any major measures openly in contradiction with the popular demands for change. April, however, was marked by a massive outcry from below in response to the revelation that the government planned to continue the imperialist 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. In the midst of an unprecedented proletarian upsurge against the Provisional Government and a marked shift to the right by the SRs and Mensheviks, it is not surprising that many Bolsheviks across the empire took a more militant and independent stand.

This did not mean that Bolsheviks as a whole from April onwards accepted Lenin’s particular views on important issues such as ‘steps towards socialism’, the predominance of Bolsheviks in revolutionary government, or soviets as the highest form of democracy and the permanent expression of workers’ rule. Up through October and often even into 1918, the stance of the party and its leadership as a whole generally remained open-ended on these questions.

Bolshevism’s increasingly radical evolution was frequently determined by the response of party leaders at all levels to the ‘big events’ of the class struggle––notably the stubborn refusal of SRs and Mensheviks throughout 1917 to break with the bourgeoisie, the election of a moderate majority to the Constituent Assembly, and the sabotage of capitalists after October. Lenin’s interventions were important but far from consistently decisive.

Conclusion

This article has shown that Bolsheviks––in sharp contrast with conciliatory socialists––were homogeneously committed in March 1917 to class independence and the fight for proletarian hegemony over the revolutionary process.

The top Bolshevik leadership consistently argued that the overthrow of the Tsar did not mean that the democratic revolution was finished. Counter-revolution had not been crushed and the essential demands for peace, land, the eight-hour day, and a republic through a Constituent Assembly had not yet been satisfied. Since the liberal bourgeoisie would inevitably resist such a radical social transformation, workers and peasants would have to seize full political power. In so doing, the Russian Revolution would immediately set off a socialist upheaval in the West, which in turn would allow Russia to transcend the limits of capitalism.

Though this perspective was indisputably radical, Bolshevik practice in Petrograd, and particularly in the periphery, was often irresolute. For the most part, this dynamic reflected a practical adaptation to the ‘honeymoon’ context of March; the algebraic, open-ended formulations of ‘Old Bolshevik’ state perspectives also facilitated the tendency of some party leaders to vacillate.

The big story of March, however, is that the strategy of ‘Old Bolshevism’ set the stage for the party’s militancy throughout 1917. Bolsheviks over the course of the year were committed to a break with the bourgeoisie and the establishment of a soviet government. Within this consensus, party leaders at different moments put forward distinct views on whether moderate socialists could be won to this governmental goal. Whether the resulting regime could advance beyond capitalism before the impending socialist revolution in Europe was a far more marginal discussion up through October, though different perspectives on this issue were also put forward.

An accurate assessment of the Russian Revolution requires acknowledging the facts about Bolshevik politics in general and during March in particular. Doing so does not require overlooking the party’s early limitations. Nor does it require downplaying the real political modifications in its perspective over 1917––though these have often been exaggerated and/or wrongly attributed primarily to Lenin’s personal influence.

To conclude, it should be underscored that the tensions and ambiguities in Bolshevik strategy reflected the real social and political contradictions of promoting proletarian-led revolution 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 its scepticism about building socialism within the confines of Russia. At the same time, experience likewise confirmed the case of Trotsky (and later Lenin) that workers and peasants in Russia could come to power only under the governmental leadership of a revolutionary Marxist party––and that the resulting regime must attack the foundations of capitalist property relations.

The sole path to positively resolving these contradictions was through the spread of workers’ rule abroad. And regarding the imminence and necessity of world revolution, the perspectives of the ‘Old Bolsheviks’ and Trotsky fully converged. All revolutionary Marxists agreed in 1917 that the Russian Revolution would be defeated it if remained isolated. This prediction was borne out, though in an unforeseen form: tragically, the defeat of the international revolutionary wave of 1917-23 resulted in the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet regime and the Bolshevik party. This basic point cannot be over-emphasised today, as a new generation of socialists seeks to grapple with the lessons of the Russian Revolution.

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

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^[1] Trotsky 2016 [1924], pp. 92, 95-6, 101.

^[2] Trotsky 2016 [1924], p. 101.

^[3] Trotsky 2016 [1924], p. 92. Trotsky asserts that ‘in limiting, for doctrinaire reasons, the tasks of the revolution to its designation (‘bourgeois’ revolution), it was impossible not to end up with a policy of supervising the Provisional Government.’ (p. 102.)

^[4] Trotsky 2016 [1924], pp. 92-102. For a recent effort to uphold Trotsky’s interpretation, see Marot 2014.

^[5] For his important pieces on the Bolsheviks in March, see Lih 2014 and Lih 2015. Lih argues that ‘the strategy outlined in the March consensus was consistently applied throughout the year and led to victory in October.’ (Lih 2015, p. 801) For an earlier article challenging Stalin’s supposed Menshevism in March, see Van Ree 2000.

^[6] Lih 2014, p. 61.

^[7] Шляпников 1992 [1923], pp. 217-8, 230.

^[8] For a discussion of why the Bolshevik leadership declined to fight for power after the toppling of Tsarist authority on 27 February, see Blanc 2017.

^[9] Cited in Trotsky 1937, pp. 248-9.

^[10] ‘Тактические задачи’, Правда, 9 March, 1917. On Shlyapnikov, see Allen’s recent biography. (Allen 2014.) All dates in this article are cited according to the old Julian calendar, which was thirteen days behind the modern Gregorian calendar.

^[11] ‘Резолюция по текущему моменту’, Правда, 9 March, 1917.

^[12] ‘Протокол собрания от 5 марта 1917 года’, Правда, 7 March, 1917.

^[13] See, for example, Elwood 1974, p. 197.

^[14] Сахнин 2010, p. 67.

^[15] ‘Mūsu uzdevums’ [7 March, 1917] in Stučka 1978, pp. 122-4.

^[16] Sukhanov, N.N. 1955 [1922], p. 191.

^[17] Старцев 1978, p. 37.

^[18] Cited in Trotsky 1937, p. 247.

^[19] Another widespread myth concerning the Bolsheviks in March is that the Pravda editors politically censored Lenin’s March ‘Letters from Afar’. This claim has been rather conclusively debunked by Lih. (Lih 2015)

^[20] Cited in Trotsky 1937, p. 270. For Stalin’s opposition to supporting the government, see Trotsky 1937, p. 239.

^[21] ‘Временное Правительство и революционная социал-демократия’, Правда, 14 March, 1917.

^[22] ‘Советы Рабочих и Солдатских Депутатов и наша партия’, Правда, 17 March, 1917.

^[23] ‘Об условиях победы русской революции’, Правда, 18 March, 1917.

^[24] Петербургский комитет РСДРП(б) 2003 [1917], p. 120.

^[25] Ibid.

^[26] Getzler 1983, pp. 43-4.

^[27] ‘Сообщение Руиенской социал-демократической группы’ [12 March, 1917], in Латвияс КП ЦК Партияс вēстурес инститьūц 1963, p. 24.

^[28] Бурджалов 1971, pp. 33-4, 38, 197, 225, 319, 336.

^[29] Cited in Сахнин 2010, p. 211.

^[30] Шляпников 1992, p. 434.

^[31] Hickey 1996, p. 631.

^[32] Шляпников 1992 [1923], p. 399.

^[33] Cited in Шляпников 1992 [1923], p. 371.

^[34] ‘Oktobra revolūcijas gada svētkos. 1917.-1918’ [1918] in Stučka 1978, pp. 279-80.

^[35] Gelbard 1982, p. 70.

^[36] Cited in Gelbard 1982, p. 71.

^[37] Calls for a soviet government were raised, with distinct levels of consistency, also by the Polish Socialist Party-Left, the anarchists, the SR-Maximalists, the Left SRs, the left wing of the Ukrainian Social Democrats and Ukrainian SRs, as well as the Menshevik and Bundist Internationalists. As will be demonstrated in subsequent instalments in this series, most of these currents did not equate soviet government with socialist revolution.

^[38] ‘Pilsoniskā revolūcija un proletariāts’ [21 March, 1917], in Stučka 1978, p. 128.

^[39] ‘Report on the Current Situation’ [April 1917] in Lenin 1964, p. 242.

^[40] Lenin argued that ‘power in Russia now can pass from Guchkov and Lvov only to these Soviets. And in these Soviets, as it happens, it is the peasants, the soldiers, i.e., petty bourgeoisie, who preponderate.’ (‘Letters on Tactics’ [April 1917] in Lenin 1964, p. 48.)

^[41] On the nationalisation of industry and the related political issues, see, for example, Насырин 1956 and Chamberlin 1965, Volume 2, pp. 96-116. Chamberlin notes that ‘the attempt to nationalize everything from locomotive works to public baths and to provision the population through state agencies with everything from bread to mushrooms inevitably led to an enormous, unwieldy and incompetent bureaucracy, which stifled all creative initiative and often led to bungling misuse and neglect of the slender resources which the country possessed.’ (Chamberlin 1935, p. 113.)

^[42] Trotsky 1969 [1906], pp. 101-2. My emphasis.

^[43] In April, as in the month prior, Kamenev and many other Bolsheviks argued that this ‘control’ tactic was the most effective path toward soviet power in the given circumstances: rather than relying on propaganda, raising demands on the regime would allow the proletarian party to ‘enable the masses to comprehend through practical experience’ the nature of the Provisional Government and the need for soviet power. (РСДРП (большевиков) 1958 [1917], pp. 83-4.) This stance was sharply criticised by Lenin, who believed that placing demands on the bourgeois regime only fuelled illusions in it.

^[44] Dauge 1958, p. 471.

^[45] Cited in Mandel 1983, p. 80.

^[46] For example, on the moderating impact of this fear on Moscow Bolsheviks, see Бурджалов 1971, p. 87.

^[47] Kuusinen 1919, p. 1.

^[48] Шляпников 1992 [1923], p. 367.

^[49] ‘Без тайной дипломатии’, Правда, 15 March, 1917.

^[50] Шляпников 1992 [1923], p. 452; Шляпников 1994 [1925], p. 213.

^[51] Trotsky 2016 [1924], p. 98.

^[52] Cited in Шляпников 1994 [1925], p. 232. The Bolsheviks’ proposed resolution similarly declared that solely ‘the transfer of power to the proletariat and the revolutionary democracy’ could make Russia’s involvement in the war anything other than imperialist in nature. (‘Резолюция о войне’ Правда, 29 March, 1917.)

^[53] Cited in Шляпников 1994 [1925], pp. 252-3.

^[54] Cited in Смирнова 2004, p. 50.

^[55] For the Bolsheviks’ original proposal––which called to ‘rally around the Soviets of Workers and Soldiers Deputies as the embryos of revolutionary power’––see ‘Резолюция’, Правда, 8 April, 1917. (Shlyapnikov cites a milder wording of this proposal in Шляпников 1994 [1925], pp. 223-4.)

^[56] Cited in Шляпников 1994 [1925], p. 259.

^[57] ‘The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution’ [April 1917] in Lenin 1964, p. 84.

^[58] The views of Trotsky, Kautsky, and Luxemburg are documented in Day and Gaido 2009.

It is significant that only Trotsky among these forces believed that such a proletarian government could––indeed, must––transgress the bounds of capitalism prior to Western social revolution. In 1917, as in previous years, one cannot assume that arguments for the working class to takepolitical power were seen by their authors or audience as calls for socialist revolution. Whether it was realistic to believe that a workers’ government could remain within the bounds of capitalist property relations is a distinct question.

^[59] ‘Letters on Tactics’ [April 1917] in Lenin 1964, p. 45. In this important document Lenin argued that it was ‘quite possible’ that the ‘petty-bourgeoisie’ could eventually break with the bourgeoisie, which would thereby put the ‘democratic dictatorship’ back on the table. But he argued that the only way to promote such a potential development was through clear political separation from the moderate socialists, rather than accommodation to them.

^[60] ‘On Compromises’ [September 1917] in Lenin 1964b, p. 310. Significantly, Lenin here declared that even if (as he proposed) the moderate socialist Soviet leadership broke with the liberals and took full power, the Bolsheviks still would not participate in the resulting government. The extent of his strategic break with the old ‘democratic dictatorship’ conception is evident.

^[61] Trotsky 1969 [1906], p. 70.

^[62] РСДРП (большевиков) 1958 [1917], pp. 81-2.

^[63] Longley 1972, p. 62.

^[64] Шляпников 1992 [1923], pp. 66, 165, 196.

^[65] Hasegawa 1981, p. 537. My emphasis.

^[66] Suny 1972, p. 80.

^[67] For example, see Service 1979, pp. 25, 53, 56, 60; Suny 1972, p. 77; Haimson 1974, p. 11; Jones 1984, p. 311; Шляпников 1994 [1925], p. 205. Since a myth persists today that the Bolshevik leadership in March sought to reunify with the Mensheviks, it should be stressed that the pervasiveness of such joint committees predates the February revolution. In a subsequent article in this series, I will show that the ‘Old Bolshevik’ leaders did not seek a merger with the Mensheviks as a whole; rather, they (like Lenin) only raised the perspective of a potential merger with revolutionary internationalist Mensheviks.

^[68] Haimson 1974, p. 12; Acton 1990, p. 197; Suny 1972, pp. 94-7; Jones 1984, pp. 320-1.

^[69] Acton 1990, p. 197.

^[70] Cited in Jones 1984, p. 311.

^[71] Cited in Suny 1972, p. 88.

^[72] For a typical example, see ‘Обращение временного бакинского комитета РСДРП’ [22 March, 1917] in Ибрагимова and Искендерсва 1957, pp. 7-9.

^[73] See, for example, the Kiev Bolshevik committee’s March resolution, which did not pose the question of taking power. (‘Резолюция о текущем моменте’ [8 March, 1917] in Манилова 1928, pp. 167-8.) Bolshevik conciliationism in the periphery is well documented in the best studies that examine the party in March beyond Petrograd: Шляпников 1994 [1925] and Бурджалов 1971. See also Suny 1972, pp. 75-6 and Raleigh 1986, pp. 108, 114.

^[74] Cited in Бурджалов 1971, p. 230.

^[75] Cited in Arens 1976, p. 88.

^[76] Raleigh 1986, p. 114. For similar conflicts in Ekaterinoslav, see Бурджалов 1971, pp. 230-1.

^[77] Cited in Бурджалов 1971, p. 286.

Sara R Farris on Elena Ferrante. 

Main photo: Six Shirtwaist Strike women in 1909, USA. Mary Dreier, Ida Rauh, Helen Marot, Rena Borky, Yetta Raff, and Mary Effers

Sara R. Farris is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She works on sociological and political theory, ‘race’/racism and feminism, migration and gender, with a particular focus on migrant women and their role within social reproduction. She is the author of Max Weber's Theory of Personality. Individuation, Politics and Orientalism in the Sociology of Religion (Haymarket, 2015), and In the Name of Women's Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism (Duke University Press, forthcoming in April 2017). She is a longstanding member of theHistorical Materialism Editorial Board. This article was originally published byViewpoint Magazinehere.

“There is no true life, if not in the false one,” is a dictum from Franco Fortini, Italian poet and communist intellectual, of the same generation of Pier Paolo Pasolini, and yet unlike him (by choice and destiny) not as well known internationally.[1] With these words Fortini turned upside down Adorno’s famous line from Minima Moralia, “Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im Falschen,” usually translated into Italian as “Non si dà vita vera nella falsa”: there is no true life in the false one.[2] In that line Adorno seems to argue that it is not possible to conduct an ethical, morally just and true life within an unjust social order. The aspiration to truth and justice, the very possibility of enjoying life fully, requires us to change that social order. Fortini’s claim was no less radical. By turning Adorno’s line into its opposite, Fortini pointed to the fact that what we call truth and authenticity, or ethical life, can and does emerge even in the midst of the falsehood and injustice capitalism brings about. The true life, framed in any purist sense as “stainless,” and authentic experience of oneself and others does not exist. Life, as well as political work, is always a mishmash of true and false, authentic and inauthentic, rational and irrational, revolution and reform. Our “capitalist” life is enmeshed in contradictions; we need to work through them if we wish to attain a more just social order, not as some sort of utopian, happy island, but as the concrete unfolding of our struggles for justice, including the struggles with ourselves. The problem with Adorno’s thesis, Fortini seems to suggest, is that his true life does not appear to leave room for the murky, unsettled, uncanny zone that characterizes our experience in this world – a zone that will not be erased by a more just society.

When I read Elena Ferrante’s justly celebrated works, I could not help but think about Fortini’s words. Ferrante’s quartet, entitled My Brilliant Friend but known in English as the Neapolitan novels, has become a true literary event in both Italy (her home country) and the English-speaking world.[3] In Italy the fourth volume has been recently nominated for the most prestigious literary prize – the Premio Strega – and the entire quartet will soon be turned into a TV series. In the United States, parties were organized to celebrate the release of the English translation of the fourth and last installment of the series. All major literary journals and newspapers have hosted enthusiastic reviews of her books, praising the clarity of her style and the precision of her descriptions of complex emotions. In spite of the different angles from which her work has been judged, the majority of reviewers stress the psychological motives to which Ferrante has been able to give voice, to the extent that she has been nominated as the “master of the unsayable.”

For anyone who has read these novels, it is impossible not to acknowledge that so much of their power lies in the disarming frankness with which Elena Greco – the narrating voice and one of the two main characters – forces the reader to confront the profound inner drives, desires and fears no one has the courage to tell others, or oneself, let alone to phrase in such acute and accurate prose. Ferrante’s chosen register, however, is not limited to the psychological realm. Her novels are not only superb frescoes of the passions, but also windows onto history, condensations of the personal and the social context in which the characters move. History, in this sense, is not inert background, but part and parcel of the biographies of the dramatis personae; all of them are powerfully affected by its unfolding, while also trying themselves to affect history, or what appears to be their seemingly ascribed destiny.

In this essay I will try to convey some of the complexities of Ferrante’s novels by thinking of them as impassioned journeys towards the discovery of the many archives of Italy, as well as of the self. In doing so, I will draw in particular upon one central theme in Ferrante’s works: that of “dissolving margins.” It is this theme, I argue, and the many ways in which Ferrante grapples with it, that makes the Neapolitan novels a testament to the borderline experience between true and false, as categories of both the personal and the political.

A Tale of Two Women

The quartet that begins with L’amica geniale – the title of the first installment as well as of the entire series in Italian – narrates the friendship between two women, Lila and Elena (called “Lenù”). They both grow up in a poor rione (neighborhood) of Naples in the aftermath of World War II. Lila is an apparently fearless, erratic child who scares even older male children with her temper and determination. Lenù is instead a more docile girl and perhaps for this reason, she is disturbed and yet seduced by Lila’s wild manners. Their friendship begins the day Lenù retaliates against Lila’s bullying behavior by throwing Lila’s doll in a dark underground cellar, as Lila had done the same to Lenù’s doll. When the two girls go to find their dolls, they have disappeared; according to Lila, they have been taken by Don Achille, the rione’s boogey-man:

My friendship with Lila began the day we decided to go up the dark stairs that led, step after step, to the door of Don Achille’s apartment.… Don Achille was the ogre of fairy tales, I was absolutely forbidden to go near him, speak to him, look at him, spy on him, I was to act as if neither he nor his family existed (Vol. 1, p. 27).

This apparently trivial episode is key to making sense of Lenù and Lila’s relationship, up until the very last lines of the fourth and final volume. From the loss of the two dolls and the visit to Don Achille onwards, a strong bond of love and hate, dependence and need for autonomy, faith and mistrust will be forged between the two girls. Lenù’s attachment to Lila deepens once she discovers something that troubles and yet excites her. Lila is not only the unruly and unpredictably brave daughter of a shoemaker; she is also extremely intellectually gifted. Lila can read before all other children in her class can; she has an incredibly precocious mind that allows her effortlessly to teach herself anything she is interested in. She is as sharp as a knife, including in her judgments about people’s character, something that seems to alienate her from her peers. Lenù is fascinated and challenged by Lila’s gifted persona to the extent that she will spend the rest of her life attempting to find out the secret of, and trying to emulate, what she regards as Lila’s superior mind. The academic competition between the two girls is interrupted, however, by a story all too common in Southern Italy in the early 1950s. They are both working-class daughters; neither of them is destined to continue her studies after their mandatory five years at the primary school. Their families don’t have the resources to send them to the more demanding secondary school, nor can they afford to lose their labor-power, which is essential for the sustenance of the working-class Southern Italian household. However, while Lila’s family obeys this rule, despite much crying and anger from Lila who wants nothing but to continue her studies, Lenù’s family finally decides to allow their daughter to go to secondary school (thanks to the insistence of her teacher). This event marks the beginning of the many moments of separation/incommunicability/return between the two. Lenù can continue to cultivate her intelligence, to dream of that social mobility they both well understand can be achieved in two ways: either through education, or through marriage with a higher-ranked man. Lenù is allowed to turn down the first path by attending a liceo classico (classical lyceum) and then being awarded a scholarship at the prestigious Scuola Normale di Pisa to study Classics. Lila, on the other hand, will undertake the second road by marrying a well-off shopkeeper from the rione. Lenù will thus manage slowly to subtract herself from the small-minded, poor, and violent environment of the rione, whereas Lila will never be able to do so (Lila will seldom leave the rione for most of her life). And yet, the more successful Lenù – who will end up becoming a famous writer and marrying a respected academic from a well-known Italian Leftist family – will always feel inferior to the uneducated Lila, who instead will leave her husband to become a worker in a meat factory first and then the owner of an accounting company.

Lenù’s personal tale of her friendship with Lila spanning six decades is the story of her coming to terms with the emotional and intellectual debts – both fictitious and real – she feels towards the extravagant, brilliant Lila. But Lenù’s confessional story is also a testimony of post-WWII Italy: a full immersion into its history, politics, mutations and more recent decay. By presenting in front of our eyes the world of unsettled feelings and memories she has built up against, and shared with, Lila, Lenù also takes us through the years of reconstruction from the ruins of war, the golden years of industrialization and social changes, the years of the student movement, the sexual revolution, feminism and the rise of the Communist Party, but also through the years of red terrorism and the slow decaying phase of the 1980s and 1990s, with rampant ex-radical students becoming corrupt power players in the interstices of the state apparatuses and Camorra families controlling the public and private bodies of the country.

“Dissolving Margins”: On the Italian Anthropological Mutation

One of the most recurrent, intriguing and yet obscure concepts to be found in the Neapolitan novels is that of “dissolving margins” [smarginatura]. This is the concept through which Lila describes the experience of her own body – as well as objects and people surrounding her – expanding to  break its own boundaries and fall violently to pieces. The first time we encounter this experience is in the first volume, when she is still a young teenager, soon to be married to a wealthier shopkeeper from the rione. It is the 31st of December and everyone is preparing for the New Year’s Eve festivities. Rino (Lila’s brother), Stefano (her future husband), and the other boys who gravitate around Lila and Lenù are particularly excited as they plan to compete with the antagonistic gang of Camorra boys (the Solara family) over who can fire the biggest crackers. Lila watches the spectacle in silence and quasi-disgust:

The thing was happening to her that I mentioned and that she later called dissolving margins. It was – she told me – as if, on the night of a full moon over the sea, the intense black mass of a storm advanced across the sky, swallowing every light, eroding the circumference of the moon’s circle, and disfiguring the shining disk, reducing it to its true nature of rough insensate material. Lila imagined, she saw, she felt – as if it were true – her brother break. Rino, before her eyes, lost the features he had had as long as she could remember, the features of the generous, candid boy, the pleasing features of the reliable young man, the beloved outline of one who, as far back she had memory, had amused, helped, protected her (Vol. 1, p. 176).

Lila’s first encounter with the experience of the dissolving of boundaries occurs when she believes her brother begins to behave like the wealthy and arrogant Camorra boys from the rione. This episode occurs just when Rino, thanks to both Lila’s creative mind as a shoe-designer and Stefano’s promise of investment, finally sees the possibility of making money by beginning an entrepreneurial activity as a shoe-factory owner. In Lila’s eyes, however, the dream of moneymaking has turned her brother into an unreasonable individual in a hurry to get rich. As they both come from very poor families, both Lenù and Lila had always cultivated the dream of becoming wealthy, but now Lila begins to see money differently: “Now it seemed that money, in her mind, had become a cement: it consolidated, reinforced, fixed, this and that.… She no longer spoke of money with any excitement, it was just a means of keeping her brother out of trouble” (179).

Lila will resort to the image of “dissolving margins” on other occasions. But the experience becomes devastating when later in life, after separating from her husband, Stefano, and breaking with her lover, Nino, she ends up working in a meat factory in order to sustain herself and her newborn son. In the factory Lila experiences exploitation, sexual harassment, humiliation, fatigue, and the loss of contact with, and time for, her child’s education. But more than the fatigue of shifts and the impossibility of combining work and care for her son, it is the encounter with politicization in the midst of the student and workers movement of 1968-69 that almost causes her to have a nervous breakdown. One morning, as soon as she arrives at work, she finds out that her account at a political meeting of the many instances of brutality she had witnessed in the factory has been used, without her consent, for a political leaflet by radicalized students in order to target her factory and to urge the workers to revolt. Everyone in the workplace understands Lila is behind the story recounted in that leaflet; her boss threatens to fire her and her co-workers despise her for making their lives more miserable. That night, she is so furious with the students for not informing her of their actions and for getting her into trouble that she feels her body is on the edge of blowing up.

She was getting back in bed when suddenly, for no obvious reason, her heart was in her throat and began pounding so hard that it seemed like someone else’s. She already knew those symptoms, they went along with the thing that later – eleven years later, in 1980 – she called dissolving boundaries. But the signs had never manifested themselves so violently, and this was the first time it had happened when she was alone, without people around who for one reason or another set off that effect (Vol. 3, p. 180).

Dissolving margins is the experience of the known that becomes unknown, of the truthful that becomes false, of the beautiful that becomes ugly, of the familiar that becomes unfamiliar and dangerous. It is the fear of a world that breaks and morphs into monstrous forms. One way to read the notion of dissolving margins is in terms of Lila’s resistance to, and fear of, a world that is changing in front of her eyes. It is Lila’s refusal to accept or to comply with the path to industrialization and phony modernization that Italy is undertaking. In a way, Lila’s horror at the dissolving of margins is her panic in front of what Pier Paolo Pasolini called the “anthropological mutation” occurring in the country in the 1960s.[4] With this term, Pasolini referred to what he saw as the transition from traditional to modern values in Italy. For Pasolini, this was not a positive change, for it meant the homogenization of everyone’s ideas, tastes, desires and appearances brought about by mass consumption. Lila first sees the ugly face of that anthropological mutation when she witnesses how the greed for money transformed her brother from a modest artisan into a greedy individual. But above all, she sees the ugly face of the anthropological mutation and experiences the scattering of her own body when she feels that the political turmoil at her working place is not the result of her colleagues’ own making, but rather of the insincerity and naivety of middle-class students who want to “rescue” the workers:

The students made speeches that seemed to her hypocritical; they had a modest manner that clashed with their pedantic phrases. The refrain, besides, was always the same: We’re here to learn from you, meaning from the workers, but in reality they were showing off ideas that were almost too obvious about capital, about exploitation, about the betrayal of social democracy, about the modalities of the class struggles (Vol. 3, p. 110).

Here again a Pasolinian motif emerges: the “artificiality” and precariousness of the coalition between workers and students. Famously, in 1968 when the police attacked protesting students, Pasolini provocatively took sides with the former. The policemen were the real representatives of the working classes, Pasolini argued, and not the students, whom he labeled petit-bourgeois kids born with a silver spoon in their mouths. Lila looks at the students with that class-inflected Pasolinian eye, and yet she takes sides with them. In spite of her anger at their immaturity, she believes what they say is right. She agrees with their denunciation of capitalism as a source of injustice, even if she is convinced they do not have real first-hand experience of that very injustice. She will thus become a union activist and, through Lenù’s pen, publicly denounces the working conditions in the factory in the pages of the most important leftist newspaper in the country.

When everything is breaking within and around her, when silence and assent would be much easier choices, Lila nonetheless takes sides with the weak and the marginalized. Despite her lack of boundaries, she transmits solidity and embodies an integrity that is the truest mark of her personality. It is to these features of Lila’s personality, to her authenticity and honesty, even in their unpleasant manifestations, that Lenù – who feels fake, inauthentic and “opaque” – is drawn.

Tano D'Amico

Dissolving the Margins of Class and Gender

The theme of dissolving margins traverses the four books in less explicit and more metaphorical ways when we are confronted with gender and class boundaries. Both Lenù and Lila grew up in working-class patriarchal families where it was not uncommon to see their fathers beating their mothers, or men beating women. These episodes assume quasi-natural and ineffable contours in front of their eyes, belonging to the rubric of customary facts. And yet both girls, from very early on, each in her own way, strive for their independence and emancipation from an environment that oppresses them and that they feel is unfair to women. Lila is the first to recognize and to name the codes of men’s domination over women. She does so in her own non-bookish, but instinctive and radical way: after the disappointment of an intense clandestine love affair with a young intellectual, Nino, she separates from her authoritarian and small-minded husband and decides to live in a partnership with Enzo, a man who does not give her luxury but transmits integrity and political passion, and above all, who respects her. As a factory worker she recognizes especially the sexism and other problems to which working women and mothers are subjected. She describes them in a speech that resembles the powerful and memorable monologue by Gian Maria Volontè in La Classe Operaia va in Paradiso (The Working Class Goes to Heaven):

She said jokingly that she knew nothing about the working class. She said she knew only the workers, men and women, in the factory where she worked, people from whom there was absolutely nothing to learn except wretchedness. Can you imagine, she asked, what it means to spend eight hours a day standing up to your waist in the mortadella cooking water? Can you imagine what it means to have your fingers covered with cuts from slicing the meat off animal bones? Can you imagine what it means to go in and out of refrigerated rooms at twenty degrees below zero, and get ten lire more an hour – ten lire – for cold compensation? If you imagine this, do you think you can learn from people who are forced to live like that? The women have to let their asses be groped by supervisors and colleagues without saying a word. If the owner feels the need, someone has to follow him into the seasoning room; his father used to ask for the same thing, maybe also his grandfather; and there, before he jumps all over you, that same owner makes you a tired little speech on how the odor of salami excites him (Vol. 3, p. 110).

Lila is also the first to understand the power and yet fragility of gender boundaries when she encourages her brother in-law, Alfonso, to feel comfortable in his non-conforming, gay skin.

Lenù, on the other hand, discovers and challenges gender boundaries in a bookish but no less transformative way. Her sister-in-law, Mariarosa, introduces her to feminism and to a consciousness-raising group. Lenù is struck in particular by Carla Lonzi’s famous text “Let’s spit on Hegel.” In this text, Lonzi questioned the possibility of applying Hegel’s master-slave dialectic to the man-woman relationship. For Lonzi, women need to become subjects of a renewed history, thereby putting an end to that condition in which they are merely an hypothesis formulated by others.

How is it possible, I wondered, that a woman knows how to think like that. I worked so hard on books, but I endured them, I never actually used them, I never turned them against themselves. This is thinking. This is thinking against. I – after so much exertion – don’t know how to think. Nor does Mariarosa: she’s read pages and pages, and she rearranges them with flair, putting on a show, That’s it. Lila, on the other hand, knows. It’s her nature, If she had studied, she would know how to think like this. That idea became insistent. Everything I read in that period ultimately drew Lila in, one way or another (Vol. 3, p. 260).

Lenù’s discovery of the transformative potential of feminist thinking and gender-breaking is life-changing; and yet it is beset by deep contradictions. What fascinates her in feminist theories and the consciousness-raising group is not their political implications and activism, but how this feminine model of thought causes in her the same admiration and subalternity she had always felt towards Lila. Lenù does not use this newly found feminist consciousness to become closer to other women, but to get closer to Lila. Unlike the latter – who uses her private experience of gendered inequality and abuse in the factory for public denunciation – Lenù initially exploits the public experience in the feminist group for her personal struggle with Lila and herself. Even later, when she decides to write an essay-style book on the history of Western culture as one in which “men fabricate women,” Lenù tells us about this decision by emphasizing her questionable private motives and ambiguities. She writes about women and flirts with feminists because she wants to impress and seduce a man, Nino. She advocates women’s empowerment and yet lets her lover deceive and disrespect her with his many lies. All passages in the third and fourth volume about Lenù’s relationship with feminism and feminists are traversed by anxiety and the symptoms of the impostor syndrome. As a successful writer, she can make her readers think she has successfully crossed the boundaries of the male-dominated literary canon – her first book was avant-gardist in its explicit sexual content, right on the eve of the sexual revolution – but she can’t trick herself. Lenù’s feelings of insecurity and lack of authenticity concerning her feminist and intellectual credentials, however, cannot be dissociated from her confidence crises related to her class. By crossing the boundaries of gender orders, literary canons and even bourgeois domestic respectability – she leaves her husband and daughters for Nino, a love from her childhood – Lenù gives expression to her anxiety about the uncertain boundaries of her class identity. Education and marriage have allowed her to climb the social ladder and to leave behind the working class environment into which she was born and to embrace a comfortable middle-class milieu. Yet, she always feels a stranger in both classes. While Lila dissolves the margins of her own body and fears the disintegration of the world around her, Lenù dissolves the margins of her gender and class identity. While Lila seemingly faces the earthquake within and around her with sturdiness in the desperate attempt to keep herself and her son unharmed, Lenù lets everything within and around her fall to pieces: her marriage, her relationship with her daughters and her own self.

And yet, Ferrante disorders this binary picture of Lila the authentic and Lenù the inauthentic with the power of her own narrative choices. Isn’t in fact the apparently fake, self-deprecating Lenù also the one who tells us about her struggles for authenticity with impassioned honesty? If the solidity of unfaltering convictions and irreprehensible behavior is denied to her as a woman who lives at the borderline of class and gender hierarchies, what she is left with as a narrator is sincerity: the striving for truth despite the knowledge of its impossible attainment.

The Double and the Uncanny

It has been suggested that Ferrante’s quartet are novels of the couple, of the memorable pair. Like Prince Hal and Falstaff, Settembrini and Naphta, Ferrante’s Lenù and Lila seem to stay impressed in our memory because of the force of their quasi-symbiotic relationship.

To make full sense of these novels, however, particularly of their enigmatic ending, I suggest that we look at Lenù and Lila as two faces of the same person; that we think of Lila as a symbolic projection of Lenù’s fantasy. In this sense, the Neapolitan novels could be also seen as novels of the double and the uncanny, like Poe’s William Wilson, or Wilde’s Dorian Gray. Freud famously linked the theme of the double that was present in German literature of the nineteenth century to the theme of the uncanny.[5] The presence of a pattern of repetition of the same destinies, misdeeds and even names involving two individuals (i.e., the main character and his/her significant Other), is what creates the disquieting feeling of something being unfamiliar, uncanny. In other words, what enables a series of disparate and yet repetitious events in a narration to be experienced as uncanny, according to Freud, is the sensation that they are not coincidental contingencies, but pieces of a puzzle hiding a fateful meaning. More importantly here, for Freud the uncanny emerges from the intimation that the significant other in the novel is not a real person but an automaton, or a shadow of the imagination, onto which the main character mirrors, or projects, his/her own fantasies. From this perspective, it is hard not to see all the ingredients of the uncanny in Ferrante’s quartet.

The lover of Lila the adolescent, Nino, later becomes the lover and then partner of Lenù as an adult. The dream of Lila as a child to become a writer becomes Lenù’s reality later on in life. Both Lenù and Lila give birth to two daughters at roughly the same time and Lila names her daughter after Lenù’s doll, Tina. The two little daughters in turn seem to repeat the paths of their mothers: Lila’s Tina is precocious and extremely intelligent; Lenù’s Imma is instead rather unexceptional. And more importantly, Lila’s daughter disappears into the void, just like Lenù’s doll with the same name had vanished years before and was never found again (until the very end). Yet, this series of momentous coincidences is never merely repetition of the same. All occur at different stages of Lila and Lenù’s life. More precisely, Lenù “realizes” the dreams of her childhood and adolescence –  to become Nino’s lover, to be a famous novelist – in her adulthood. And it is at the apex of her success as a writer and of her newfound feminist consciousness that Lenù, this time vicariously, re-lives her childhood’s inferiority complex towards Lila through her daughter’s daily encounter with the more gifted Tina. That is presumably why Tina must go – twice! First as a doll and lastly as Lila’s beloved daughter. Her presence as the reincarnation of Lenù’s unsettling double stands in the way of Lenù’s rebirth as her own self.

Step by step, Ferrante takes us through Lenù’s encounter with, and desire for, Lila as her double. It is a painful and distressing encounter, yet she needs it in order to find herself. Ferrante’s Lenù does not in fact narrate the journey towards the discovery of her own persona as a sort of monadic development of her inner potentiality. Lenù the adult is not an expanded, fully unfolded version of Lenù the child. Rather, Ferrante’s Lenù needs to face and confront Lila, as well as to recognize Lila as her double (whether Lila is fictitious or real is unimportant here) in order to find her own skin. It is perhaps for this reason that only at the end of the fourth novel, in the very last lines, after she mysteriously finds the two missing dolls from her childhood in her apartment building (presumably left by Lila), that Lenù expresses the doubt that she might have lived her own life as the projection, or perhaps even the embodiment of the life of Lila as her Other.

[Lila] had deceived me, she had dragged me wherever she wanted, from the beginning of our friendship. All our lives she had told a story of redemption that was hers, using my living body and my existence (Vol. 4, p. 356).

Thomas Weiss on Stephan Krüger

Thomas Weiss works since 1991 as an economist with the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs in Berlin, Germany. His research interests are empirical studies with a background of Marxian economics, for example, about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

Abstract

This article presents selected aspects of the work of the German Marxist Stephan Krüger. With his numerous publications since the 1970s Krüger has covered a wide range of topics such as Marxist economic theory, the development of world and German capitalism, the relationship between Marx and Keynes and questions of policy for socialists. This article deals first with Krüger’s Marxist explanation of the capitalist economy. Krüger’s analysis of the business cycle in terms of a Goodwin model on the basis of fluctuations of the reserve army of labour is presented and commented on. Proceeding to long term developments, the article shows Krüger’s discussion of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and how this finally leads to a situation of secular stagnation. Krüger’s detailed suggestions for a market socialism to overcome capitalism are presented. The article concludes with a discussion of his politics.

Keywords: Marxian economics - Keynesianism – business cycle – crisis – history of capitalism – market socialism - tendency of the rate of profit to fall

Stephan Krüger is a German Marxist, who, according to his own self-description, has been working since the 1990s as an advisor for employees and their representatives such as factory councils, employee representatives on company boards and trade unions.[1]

Stephan Krüger is loosely affiliated with the Hamburg political magazine Sozialismus, whose forerunners wereProjekt Klassenanalyse - which published on Marxist economics in the 70s - and theSozialistische Studentengruppen (SOST), whose publications date from the 80s.Sozialismus addresses the left of the trade unions and of the political parties, particularly the German left party DIE LINKE, the SPD and the German Green party.[2]

Also, Krüger has set up a private data bank in order to use the framework of the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) and other data sources for Marxist analyses. For Krüger NIPA implicitly reflects a conceptual framework, which is closer to a Marxist than to any bourgeois theory.[3]

This article can give only a flavour of Krüger’s voluminous work. Due to the encyclopaedic scope and scale of Krüger’s publications it can only deal as examples with a selection of topics: Krüger’s Marxist theory of the capitalist economy, his history of capitalism and his political recommendations.[4]

Krüger’s Marxist theory of the capitalist economy

Krüger distinguishes short-term developments of capitalism from long-term ones. The former are the business cycle. The latter are, firstly, the tendency of the organic composition of capital to rise. This is in Krüger’s view a rise in the value of fixed capital with respect to value created by the productive workers. Based on this is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

The business cycle - the Goodwin model

Krüger follows the Goodwin model to explain the business cycle.[5] This model describes the periodic cycles of capitalist economies by the interplay between employment as a share of the total labour force and wages as a share of some measure of national income (this is the wage or labour share).[6] During the boom the employment-population ratio rises. This finally leads to rising wages and a rising wage share, not just, Krüger emphasises, because of the growing scarcity of the labour supply, but also because of the almost permanent struggle of the working class to defend their wages.[7] The profit share, the counterpart of the wage share, declines. This hampers further employment. The employment ratio starts to fall. With this the cause for rising wages ceases to operate. With a then falling wage share the incentives to expand employment reappear.

The mathematical formulation of Goodwin’s model as a “predator-prey-model”[8] implies that the employment ratio and the wage share should fluctuate together with the cycle. The wage share follows the employment ratio with a time lag. This can indeed be confirmed as a “stylised fact” of the business cycle.[9] Both ratios reach their maximum during or around the recessions, the wage share slightly after the employment ratio. Also, the rate of change of total employee compensation follows the rate of change of gross domestic investment with a lag.[10] Compensation follows investment.

For Krüger, this simple Goodwin model needs further specification. It focuses on the labour market and lacks any mediation with the goods markets. In Krüger’s more detailed version of the model costs, especially labour costs, rise towards the end of the boom. Profits decline and consequently so does the demand for investment.[11] The investment goods producing department (department I in Marx’s language) of the economy now faces overcapacities. These overcapacities trigger the lapse of the economy into recession.[12] The recession itself precipitates the lower turnaround of the cycle, because capitalists are now forced to invest in new machinery to raise labour productivity and to get out of the slump. These investments are “autonomous”, they do not depend on profits.[13] They are necessary to avoid a further financial deterioration of the firms.[14] These initial investments in machinery of a higher technological level, with a higher labour productivity, usually with labour-saving technical progress, occur on a mass scale during the period of capitalist crisis.[15] They determine the technological level for the next cycle. This level then limits the ability of firms to respond to higher costs by increasing labour productivity for the rest of the cycle. This is the reason why the ongoing boom, together with additional investment now on the same technological level, inevitably leads to costs squeezing profits. According to Krüger’s critique the Goodwin model, however, simply assumes that in some way at some stage rising costs terminate the boom.[16] To complete the description Krüger adds that the technological level implemented at the beginning of a cycle is the material basis for the length of the cycle, in Marx’s time about ten years.[17]

When overcapacities are already developing in the investment goods sector (Department I), consumption also begins to decline. Consumption is curbed, because towards the end of the boom prices rise, whereas part of consumption is financed out of pensioners’ or state employees’ incomes which are fixed by contracts. Now overcapacities also appear in the consumption goods sector (Department II).[18]

For Krüger Keynes’s theory of the business cycle has its faults, but does not contradict Marx’s scenario.[19] Keynes has two factors which cause his “marginal efficiency of capital”, the expected rate of profit,[20] to fluctuate cyclically. The first factor is overinvestment. Investment and the build-up of production capacities outpace consumption. Krüger does not see this as a theory of under-consumption. It is a phenomenon of the reproductive sphere of the economy.[21] It is true that with Keynes the marginal propensity to consume declines with rising income, but Krüger characterises this as an additional cause for the beginning of the recession. Decisive is that the capital stock outgrows demand, in Keynes’s words, the scarcity of capital declines.

This development inside the reproductive sphere influences the personal outlook of entrepreneurs and leads to a sudden breakdown of the marginal efficiency of capital. Keynes identifies this contradiction between consumption and production as crucial for capitalist economies.

The second factor in Keynes’s business cycle theory is the question of costs, particularly labour costs. These rise towards the end of a boom.[22] This is the contradiction between labour and capital, which is central to Marx’s theory. Again, this is not psychological, but a phenomenon of the reproductive sphere. Keynes would have been closer to the mark, Krüger claims, if he had mediated these two factors with each other. Krüger mentions two problems with Keynes’s explanation of the end of the boom. First, Keynes believes that the state can influence investment in such a way that the cyclical movement of the capitalist economy can be dampened or even avoided. This shows that for Keynes the cyclical movement is not really endogenous. In contrast to a Marxist explanation, it lacks any inherent logical necessity. Secondly, the concept of overinvestment with respect to consumption is too vague to give any indication about the length of the business cycle.

Long term tendencies

To increase the productivity of labour, which becomes necessary for the firms during the cyclical recessions in order to get out of the slump, living labour is replaced by machinery.[23] Hence, the structure of capital outlays shifts away from expenditure on wages, away from variable capital, towards expenditure on machinery, on constant capital. Krüger is confident that this rising organic composition of capital must result in a falling rate of profit. In crises, where the rate of profit is cyclically low, capitalists have no choice but to invest massively in machinery on a higher technological level. This will in all likelihood be labour-saving technical progress. From one business cycle to the next the organic composition of capital rises and the rate of profit declines. It is the short-term cycles, which enforce this long-term development. Countervailing tendencies can only slow this down.

The neo-Ricardian objections to the famous Okishio theorem do not apply for the simple reason that they presume steady-state equilibrium paths of the economy. In truth, however, with respect to the cyclical accumulation of capital no concept of equilibrium or of “dis-equilibrium”, in the sense of deviations from a theoretically determined equilibrium path[24], makes sense.[25] There is, however, a tendency toward the realisation of a general rate of profit. Capitalists tend to invest in those branches which have an above average rate of profit. This increases the supply in these branches in relation to demand and thus drives prices and the rate of profit down. Conversely, capitalists stop investing in branches with below average rates of profit. In those branches supply falls behind demand. Prices and the rate of profit rise.

But, contrary to what neo-Ricardians assume with their steady-state models and their comparative-static analysis, “the general rate of profit appears as a vanishing shape of mist compared to the definite rate of interest, which … faces all borrowers as a fixed fact, …”.[26] What capitalists experience is that, if they want to survive in the competitive struggle and to defend their market share, they must raise labour productivity by investing in labour-saving technical progress.[27] That this results in a lower average of the rate of profit is beyond their control and often beyond their immediate interest.[28]

With Krüger the tendencies of the organic composition of capital to rise and of the rate of profit to fall do not cause the business cycle. On the contrary, they are the result of it. But these long-term developments react back on the business cycle.[29] At first, in the period of “accelerated accumulation”, the rise of the organic composition of capital, the value of fixed investment in relation to productive employment, can in its effect on the mass of profits be more than offset by the rising rate of surplus value. The accumulation is “accelerated”, that is, capital is accumulated in terms of value but even more so in terms of use-values. The rising productivity of labour means more use-values are produced per unit of labour time, whereas the necessary labour time in production determines the quantity of value produced.[30] Mathematically, from a certain point onwards, if these tendencies hold, even the absolute mass of profits must decline. This is the period of “structural over-accumulation”. New investments can only take place by crowding out older ones.[31]

The falling rate of profit has long-term consequences. The replacement of productive labour, labour employed in the productive sectors (manufacturing, transport and communication), by machines implies a tendency for unemployment to rise. This shifts the balance of power against the working class in favour of the capitalist class.[32] This gives rise to what Krüger calls a “socialism of shortages within the working class”. By this stage during crises wage levels cannot be defended and no longer serve as stabilisers of demand. Due to this there is no quick rebound after a crisis, the business cycles become more protracted.

Due to the structural over-accumulation financial investors do not find enough investment opportunities with reproductive capital (industry plus commerce). They divert into high risk projects which might fail and are thus, so to speak, involuntary consumption. Or they finance private consumption or public expenditures through debt. This is then observed by commentators as the “hypertrophy of finance capital”, because on the one side financial assets and on the other side financial liabilities outpace the accumulation of reproductive capital. This goes along with growing indebtedness of countries, whose imports are larger than their exports, whereas exporting countries like Germany or China build up a “positive net investment position”. This is then discussed by commentators as “international imbalances”.

A feature of the long-term trend is that productive employment falls behind the accumulation of capital. Its rate of growth declines, ultimately it could even shrink. To avoid shrinking employment, with Marx a cause for revolution[33], jobs must be created in the unproductive parts of the economy. It is up to the left to fight for reasonable jobs, in the social sphere.[34]

Keynes, with his famous “In the long run we are all dead”, did not provide his own elaborate theory of long-term capitalist development. But Krüger believes that there are enough statements by Keynes from which such a theory can be deduced. This can then be compared with Marx’s account of the long-term development of capitalism.[35]

Krüger claims that basically the Keynesian explanations for the short- and long-term crises are the same[36] (whereas Krüger himself, as described above, explains the short term with a Goodwin model and the long term with the tendency of the rate of profit to fall). There is a minor contradiction here. Krüger’s description of the Keynesian explanation of the short term emphasised that the boom comes to an end, because investment tends to outpace demand for consumption. Now, with the long term, Krüger does not shy away from Keynes’s psychological law, according to which it is consumption that does not keep up with growing income.[37] The gap between possible supply on the one hand and demand for consumption on the other must be closed by demand for investment. But because the ultimate destination of all production is final consumption[38], the slowdown of the growth of consumption also limits the demand for investment.[39] The marginal efficiency of capital falls in the long run because of the oversupply of capital in comparison with the demand for consumption. This again is Keynes’s basic contradiction between production and consumption.[40]

In Krüger’s view, again, with a Keynesian explanation the origin of the long-term contradictions of capitalism is located within the sphere of the reproduction process of capital.[41] A “bastard-Keynesianism” (Joan Robinson)[42], which just raises demand, will not suffice to overcome the contradictions of capitalism. The contradiction between consumption and production, as Keynes perceives it, calls for a “somewhat comprehensive” intervention by society.[43]

The corresponding scenario according to Marx is that with the rising organic composition of capital productive employment falls behind the accumulation of capital. This is the reason why the mass of the consumption of the workers falls behind the growth of the capital stock. Because value creation in production, but also creation of demand in terms of value, is limited by the amount of productive employment, with Marx a “bastard-Keynesian” solution of increasing public spending will, of course, not overcome the structural over-accumulation of capital either.

A short history of capitalism

According to Krüger, modern capitalism has, up to now, seen two eras.[44] The first with Great Britain, initially, as the “demiurge of the bourgeois cosmos”[45] began in the early 19^th century and lasted till the Second World War. The period of “accelerated accumulation” was followed by “structural over-accumulation” during the interwar years. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall ending in structural over-accumulation finally undermined the position of the “demiurge”. With the First World War the US was not yet the demiurge, but became the hegemon inside a polycentric regime. This First Era of modern capitalism ended with the First Great Crisis of 1929 and the following world war.[46]

The Second Era began with the Second World War with the United States now as the new demiurge. After the Second World War gold as money commodity played a minor role and finally the gold standard was abandoned in the early 1970s. This allowed for a flexible monetary policy by the central banks. They could not abolish the business cycle, but by avoiding deflationary periods they were able to weaken the slumps, thereby bolstering long-term growth.[47] This regime of accelerated accumulation of the Second Era became known as “Fordism”[48] or as Thomas Piketty’sTrente Glorieuses[49]. Eventually, the phase of accelerated accumulation turned again into structural over-accumulation around the late 70s,[50] and finally culminated in the Second Great Crisis of capitalism[51], which began in 2007 in the US.

Recently, Krüger speculated on a nascent new regime of production or Betriebsweise[52], which he dubs a “network-based market regime” or “industry 3.0”, after industry 1.0, the regime following the industrial revolution, and industry 2.0, which is Fordism and Taylorism. For what is now called “industry 4.0” in Germany he prefers the term “3.1”, because the digitalisation of the economy is just a further development of the network-based regime.[53]

Krüger identifies ten cycles before the world wars, the first one lasting from 1827 to 1842/1843. For the USA the three inter-war cycles spanned the years 1922 to 1927, 1928 to 1933 and 1934 to 1938, and for Great Britain and Germany the years 1924 to 1926, 1927 to 1932 and 1933 to 1938. By now world capitalism is in its XIth post-war cycle, cycle I lasted in the Federal Republic of Germany from 1949[54] till 1953, and cycle XI, still continuing, started in 2010. Cycle VII 1976 to 1982 is the one with the lowest period-average rate of profit in Germany and probably in the world as a whole. After that this rate recovered slightly[55], but far from enough for a return to a phase of accelerated accumulation. Without a major change of the economic regime this can happen, Krüger believes, only by a “thorough capital devaluation and destruction with catastrophic tendencies”.[56] One aspect of such a catastrophe could be a collapse of the international financial system and a return to gold as the international money commodity. From gold, Krüger believes following Marx, capitalism has never really been able to emancipate itself.[57]

Krüger’s politics

Economic situation

In the present period of structural over-accumulation the low rates of profit are not much above the rates of interest, which are even lower. Although the gap between profits and interest has widened somewhat in recent decades, it is still by no means big enough to evoke a return to a new phase of accelerated accumulation. “Secular stagnation” has set in. This is the challenge to be solved by economic policy. Capitalism was able to overcome its First Great Crisis with the following Trente Glorieuses after the Second World War by making concessions to the labour movement. The welfare state went along with a partial decommodification of labour.[58] Krüger believes that only another such concession, now a turn to some early stage of socialism, can provide another regime of growth for the world economy. This new regime will be a market socialism.[59]

The subjects of change

However, the times for “storming the Winter Palace” are over.[60] The road to market socialism is via a piecemeal approach.[61] The subjects to bring this about are a “coalition of progressives”[62]. This consists, first of all, of left parties, in Germany the SPD, the Green party and the left party DIE LINKE[63], secondly, the trade unions, and finally the social movements, such as Attac, a non-government organisation critical of capitalism. In a lengthy Gramscian “war of position” for hegemony[64] these three coalition partners must fend off any counterattacks from backward forces, be they capitalists or “reactionary-romantic” groups or parties[65]. They must, step by step, push back elements of capitalist society in order to come closer to market socialism. A first step for a transition to a more socialist society would be a “minimal consensus”, which would simply be a traditional social-democratic policy worthy of the name.[66]

These efforts of “the progressives” have as their basis the state of mind of the working class. The consciousness of the workers (male and female) is “contradictory”. On the one hand, neoliberalism is in the process of creating a new individualism and sense of “self-responsibility” alien to any forms of collective action.[67] On the other hand, this “self-empowerment” is not just ideology. Workers can gain self-confidence by caring for themselves in a hostile neoliberal competitive environment. This may result, Krüger hopes, in the workers’, as Marx put it, “…recognition of the products as [their] own [of their “living labour capacity”], and the judgement that [their] separation from the conditions of [their] realisation is improper – forcibly imposed – … an enormous awareness, itself the product of the mode of production resting on capital, and as much the knell to its doom ...”[68]. The Great Crisis with its ongoing rescue operations by the state and the central banks (as part of the state) in favour of private enterprises also shakes the ideology of capital.[69]

What to do

For Krüger the failure of the “so-called actually existing socialism”[70], of countries around the Soviet Union[71], shows a fundamental problem with the idea that markets must be replaced by an all-comprehensive central plan, that money can be abolished.[72] Krüger’s reasoning is that as long as the needs of society surpass production capacities, rationing is necessary.[73] The information necessary for such rationing, information about costs and demand, can be provided more effectively, if not only, by a market mechanism.[74] But even in the more distant future, where due to the development of the productive forces most products can be provided for free, societies will still not be able to cope with the dynamics of technologies of production, on the one hand, and those of needs, on the other, without any market mechanism .[75]

On the other hand, already in present-day capitalist societies, there are many institutions, which can be modified, enlarged, relocated in order to be useful inside a market-socialism. Krüger builds on proposals presented by people like Fritz Naphtali or Rudolf Hilferding in the 1920s or by Viktor Agartz in the late 1940s[76] or by Ota Šik in the late 60s. One could add here the social democrat Carl Landauer, who had to emigrate from Germany to the United States. His “Theory of National Economic Planning” was published in two editions in the United States, in 1944 and 1947.

Krüger expects the future market socialism to have three sectors.[77] The biggest sector will still be a market economy. Enterprises - private, cooperative, and state owned - will mainly to be located here. The decisions of the enterprises will be guided by expected profits, but market data will be influenced by state policy. Control in enterprises will be exerted by the owners, that means by boards which consist of members representing different parts of civil society.[78] As Keynes suggested: “…all manner of compromises and of devices by which public authority will co-operate with private initiative”.[79] In spite of their present faults, Krüger sees in private-public partnerships or in the Greater London Enterprise Board (GLEB) of the 1980s examples for such collaborations consisting of different forms of ownership.[80]

The second sector is the “social economy” (Gemeinwirtschaft). This sector provides infrastructure and social and cultural services at cost, or occasionally at below-cost, prices. The third sector is the state. It will be controlled by parliaments on the local, regional, national, and, in the future, European and world level.[81] This sector provides the services of the executive, legislative, and judicial branch (still separate powers in Krüger’s socialism[82]).

Co-ownership by public institutions and co-determination by employee representatives, together with traditional forms of labour market policies, will serve to decommodify labour - a crucial feature of any market socialism. Profits will, on the one hand, serve as incentives for the firms to increase efficiency, and, on the other hand, as a lever to be influenced by democratically controlled public authorities, via taxes and subsidies. In addition, the central bank will control interest rates to help implement the social goals determined by the parliaments.

All this, finally, is to be established within a framework of macroeconomic “guidance”. Again, present-day capitalism already provides an array of short-, mid- and long-term “projections”. Up to now, however, these have been subject to the superordinate goal of profit maximisation. Through these institutions, which already exist and will be further developed in the future, employment and working hours and thus possible production will be forecast[83], and also wage guide-lines will be established. The latter should really only be suggestions. Krüger is aware of the sensibilities of German trade unions, which abhor any interference in “autonomous collective wage bargaining” (Tarifautonomie).

“Macroeconomic Guidance” will be realised mainly by structural policies, structural policy being in addition to the decommodification of labour another crucial feature of market socialism.[84] Structural policies will complement monetary and fiscal policies. They are, so to speak, the socialist counterpart of “structural reforms”, which under neoliberalism are also thought to complement monetary and fiscal policies, but as part of a repressive social policy. As with contemporary structural policy (to be distinguished from the “structural reforms” just mentioned), but in the future as instruments of a socialist society, structural policy will serve to overcome inequalities between regions and branches[85] and to prepare sustainable technological progress compatible with the protection of the environment.

Krüger is aware that it will not be enough to simply develop forms of proto-socialism further inside German or European capitalism. In recent years many neoliberal features like the so-called debt brake have been introduced, not the least on German initiative. Socialist governments will have to remove all this, reregulate financial markets, for example, and abolish the “Agenda 2010” in Germany and similar austerity policies in other countries.

The European and international level

Krüger sees the European Union, with all its faults, as a progressive achievement, which socialists should not oppose.[86] He refers approvingly to Trotsky and Bucharin as critics of Stalin’s policy of “socialism in one country”. He himself, however, for now advocates a market socialism in one continent. If the model of market socialism could be introduced in Germany, this would help to spread it throughout Europe, because Germany is the hegemon.[87] For this market-socialist Europe Krüger, following Keynesian suggestions, advocates “self-sufficiency”. Europe would export, as now, high-tech machinery and know-how and import food and raw materials.[88] On the world level, again following ideas of Keynes[89], the International Monetary Fund would be developed to become an international Clearing Union and, in fact, to become the future world central bank or even the economic government.[90]

The Keynesian heritage

Krüger’s political concepts owe much to Keynes.[91] Keynes is, Krüger affirms, the only economist of bourgeois provenance, whose theory can be integrated into a Marxist analysis of the capitalist mode of production and into a modern conception of socialism.[92] Keynes is the theoretician of a capitalism, which is by now characterised by a regime of - potential - plenty, a capitalism, in which buyer’s markets[93] dominate instead of seller’s markets, in which overproduction has become a general tendency.[94] Maybe the fact that Keynes is held in high esteem by many on the left plays a role for Krüger because an, albeit critical, reception of Keynes’s theory by Marxists might help to reach a wider audience within the broader left.

Communist perspectives

Krüger provides a sketch of a more distant future communist society, which would be another quantum leap with respect to the foregoing socialist market economy. He believes that such a society would still use money for accounting purposes in distribution and production. In this sense, banks will still be with us. Consumption goods will be free, but the sphere of production still needs bookkeeping based on monetary units.

A complete central plan still will not be advisable. Decentralised decision-making will still be important. Production and distribution of the communist society will work on the basis of buffer stocks of the production and distribution units, which will base their decisions on the observed reduction or build-ups of inventories. Labour will now be completely decommodified, so wages will no longer exist, neither as income nor as a part of costs. Labour has become travail attractif.[95] Distribution units will provide consumption goods free. They will pay the production units, which produce consumption and investment goods via monetary transfers. The income of the production units will be channelled back to the distribution units to close the financial circle. These monetary and commodity flows will be controlled by democratically legitimised agencies.

So the means of production will still have the value-form. Krüger sees the value-form as transhistorical. Since it already existed in pre-capitalist modes of production, so it can continue to exist in post-capitalist societies without itself threatening their socialist or communist character.[96]

Population growth will be around zero, Krüger speculates, but due to increasing labour productivity the supply of goods will increase, mainly in quality. The state will finally “wither away”. For Krüger the privatisations which are already taking place now show that the state, albeit at present still in perverse ways, can be replaced by direct action of civil society.[97]

Summary and evaluation

Roughly, one could claim for the present situation of capitalism four possible outcomes. A first possibility is that central banks keep interest rates low or negative in line with the low rates of profit, which ensue from structural over-accumulation. This is the present strategy of capital with the hope that eventually everything will turn out well. A more hard-line approach, implying in Krüger’s view “catastrophic dimensions”, would be to raise interest rates, force out weak capitals and hope that the remaining parts of capital will be able to return to a regime of accelerated accumulation. The third possibility is what Krüger calls a minimal consensus. This is in line with what traditional left parties demand, namely strict regulation of the financial markets, environmental policies, co-determination of workers in corporations, enlargement of the welfare state, and strong intervention by the state to mitigate crises.

This should proceed to the final outcome, market socialism, featuring comprehensive socialisation of investments and strong, if not yet complete, decommodification of labour. Whereas flexible handling of changes in demand or supply will still need the ongoing existence of markets, these include, in addition to private companies, cooperatives and other enterprises which are, at least partially, under public control. On markets profits will still have a role to play, but structural policies and a democratic guidance will now be crucial in order to guarantee the socialist character of the economy. All this will be under the guidance of parliamentary parties supported by progressive trade unions and social movements.

Needless to say, there are numerous problems still to be solved. Krüger himself mentions, amongst other things, the attitude of the existing bureaucracies. On the other hand, he hopes that, combined with the, in his view, progressive achievements of the bourgeois era such as independent central banks or the separation of the executive, legislative and judicial powers, the numerous “socialist” elements already existing in present capitalism are a good basis for socialists to build on. It is true that some of them appear nowadays in neoliberal forms such as private-public partnerships or privatisations. But the hard school of neoliberalism will, Krüger hopes, enhance individual competence in economic matters.

Krüger’s suggestions for overcoming capitalism compete with other approaches, which at least at first sight seem to be more bottom-up. Michael Albert’s “Parecon” or, along more traditional socialist lines, Alex Callinicos’s “Anti-Capitalist Manifesto” spring to mind. Whether enough “progressives” will be found to rally around Krüger’s proposals, which, after all, appear to be rather technocratic or bureaucratic, is open to question. Although Krüger mentions the labour movement here and there, its role is not clear. He mentions, for instance, that in Venezuela Hugo Chavez was elected with 56 % of the votes, but he does not mention the social struggles which brought Chavez to power. Similarly, despite all his discussion of Lenin’s New Economic Policy or of the Yugoslavian model of workers' self-management, readers learn nothing about the previous actual revolutions or international and social confrontations.

This leads to some minor points. Although not a few on the German left respect Krüger’s voluminous work, they nevertheless doubt whether his sometimes old-fashioned turgid language can reach a wider audience. This high-brow language stands in contrast to some negligence of academic standards.^[98] Often his graphs have as source only “computations by author” and the name of a major institution. Also his - laudably - numerous and extensive data presented in terms of Marxist concepts could benefit from some more intersubjective verifiability. In this sense his criticism of Sahra Wagenknecht for “autism” backfires.

An age, in which Marxism has lost its monopoly on theoretical crisis explanation, needs workable practical alternatives. Krüger demonstrates how complicated capitalist economies have meanwhile become and that this makes the task of overcoming them no easier. In this sense Krüger’s opus is a valuable contribution to the political discussion of the German left. One can laud Krüger’s effort to avoid utopia and instead to link up with existing and already working institutions to achieve socialism. If this, however, is not itself to be perceived as utopian, it needs - and deserves - wider discussion to become useful for the more ordinary political struggle.

References

Albert, Michael 2004, Parecon: Life After Capitalism, South End Press.

Callinicos, Alex 2003, An anti-capitalist manifesto, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Callinicos, Alex 2014, Deciphering Capital – Marx’s Capital and its Destiny, London: Bookmarks.

Dunayevskaya, Raya 2000, Marxism and Freedom, from 1776 Untill Today, Amherst: Humanity Books.

Flaschel, Peter 2010, The Macrodynamics of Capitalism, Elements for a Synthesis of Marx, Keynes and Schumpeter, Second Revised and Enlarged Edition, Berlin Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag.

Flaschel, Peter and Sigrid Luchtenberg 2012, Roads to Social Capitalism, Theory, Evidence, and Policy, Cheltenham, UK, Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar.

Harman, Chris 2009, Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx, Bookmarks Publications.

Heinrich, Michael 2012, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital, translated by Alex Locascio. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Heinrich, Michael 2013: ‘Crisis Theory, the Law of the Tendency of the Profit Rate to Fall, and Marx’s Studies in the 1870s’, Monthly Review 64/11 (http://monthlyreview.org/2013/04/01/crisis-theory-the-law-of-the-tenden…).

Keynes, John Maynard 1973 [1936], The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, London, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press.

Krämer, Ralf 2015, Kapitalismus verstehen, Einführung in die Politische Ökonomie der Gegenwart, Hamburg: VSA-Verlag.

Krüger, Stephan, 2007 Konjunkturzyklus und Überakkumulation, Wert, Wertgesetz und Wertrechnung für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Hamburg: VSA-Verlag

Krüger, Stephan 2010 Allgemeine Theorie der Kapitalakkumulation, Konjunkturzyklus und langfristige Entwicklungstendenzen, Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie und Kapitalismusanalyse, Band 1, Hamburg: VSA-Verlag,

Krüger,Stephan 2012a Politische Ökonomie des Geldes, Gold, Währung, Zentralbankpolitik, und Preise, Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie und Kapitalismusanalyse, Band 2, Hamburg: VSA-Verlag,

Krüger, Stephan 2012b Keynes & Marx, Darstellung und Kritik der “General Theory”, Bewertung keynesianischer Wirtschaftspolitik, Linker Keynesianismus und Sozialismus, Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie und Kapitalismusanalyse, Band 4, Hamburg: VSA-Verlag,

Krüger, Stephan, 2015a Entwicklung des deutschen Kapitalismus 1950-2013, Beschäftigung, Zyklus, Mehrwert, Profitrate, Kredit, Weltmarkt, Hamburg: VSA-Verlag,

Krüger, Stephan 2015b: ‘Die Probleme der Marxisten mit dem Geld und die begriffslosen Anleihen der Keynesianer bei Schumpeter – Zur Debatte um Geld und Zentralbanken in “prokla” und “Z”’, Z. Zeitschrift für Marxistische Erneuerung 104/2015:86-99.

Krüger, Stephan 2015c: ‘Profitrate und Kapitalakkumulation in Deutschland - Was folgt aus ihrem langfristigen Abwärtstrend?’, Sozialismus 10/2015:60-63.

Krüger, Stephan, 2016a Wirtschaftspolitik und Sozialismus - Vom politökonomischen Minimalkonsens zur Überwindung des Kapitalismus, Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie und Kapitalismusanalyse, Band 3, Hamburg: VSA-Verlag

Krüger, Stephan 2016b: ‘Industrie 4.0 - Einordnung und Erfolgsbedingungen der neuen Produktivkräfte gesellschaftlicher Arbeit’, Sozialismus 4/2016:38-43.

Krüger, Stephan, 2017 (forthcoming) Private Vermögensbildung vs. Sozialstaatliche Umverteilung - Kapitalakkumulation und Sozialstruktur im Finanzmarktkapitalismus der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie und Kapitalismusanalyse, Band 5, Hamburg: VSA-Verla

Krüger, Stephan and Christoph Lieber 2016: ‘Freiheit statt Feudalismus - Gegen Sahra Wagenknechts Autismus in der linken Strategiediskussion’, Sozialismus 6/2016:33-40.

Lukacs, Georg 1972, Prolegomena. Zur Ontologie des gesellschaftlichen Seins, 1. Halbband, ed. by Frank Benseler, Darmstadt, Neuwied.

Nachtwey, Oliver 2016, Abstiegsgesellschaft - Über das Aufbegehren in der regressiven Moderne, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

Shaikh, Anwar 2016, Capitalism – Competition, Conflict, Crises, New York: Oxford University Press

Sherman, Howard J. 1991, The Business Cycle: Growth and Crisis under Capitalism, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press

Sotiris, Panagiotis 2015, ’Rethinking Structure and Conjuncture in Althusser’, Historical Materialism, 22,3/4: 5-51.

ten Brink, Tobias 2013, Chinas Kapitalismus, Entstehung, Verlauf, Paradoxien, Frankfurt/New York: Campus

Wagenknecht, Sahra 2016, Reichtum ohne Gier – wie wir uns vor dem  Kapitalismus retten, Frankfurt/New York: Campus

Weiß, T. 2015a, ’Sachkapitalrenditen im historischen Vergleich – Deutschland im Abwärtstrend?’, WSI-Mitteilungen, 68,4: 280-289.

Weiß, T. 2015b, ‘The rate of return on capital in Germany - an empirical study‘, presentation at the 19th FMM Conference, “The Spectre of Stagnation? Europe in the World Economy” Berlin Steglitz, 22-24 October 2015 (http://www.boeckler.de/pdf/v_2015_10_24_weiss.pdf).

[1]

Kevin Murphy reviews Trotsky and the Problem of Soviet Bureaucracy by Thomas Twiss

Dr. Kevin Murphy teaches Russian history at the University of Massachusetts Boston. His book Revolution and Counterrevolution won the 2005 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize. His current research is on the Petrograd Soviet of 1917.

Academia has never been very kind to Leon Trotsky. As part of its mandate to demonize the entire revolution, the totalitarian school from its inception portrayed Lenin and Trotsky as no better than Stalin. What currently passes as ‘scholarship’ suggests that recent standards still are not very high. Geoffrey Swain asserts that Trotsky, who was surely the foremost contemporary authority on the rise of fascism, ‘had absolutely no understanding of European politics’.[1] At the launch of his Trotsky biography in London, Robert Service declared: “There’s life in the old boy Trotsky yet—but if the ice pick didn’t quite do its job killing him off, I hope I’ve managed it.” Similarly, in his biography of Stalin, Stephen Kotkin laments that “the Bolshevik putsch could have been prevented by a pair of bullets” aimed at Lenin and Trotsky. To cut Trotsky down to size, Kotkin claims that Stalin not only outwitted Trotsky but supposedly found his “calling” as a “people person” in the party apparatus.[2]

Thomas Twiss goes against this anti-Trotsky current in his study of Trotsky and the Problem of Soviet Bureaucracy. This a thoughtful and meticulous work on many levels. Twiss aims “to explain the development of Trotsky’s thinking on the problem of Soviet bureaucracy.” While focusing on the Soviet bureaucracy, Twiss does not isolate it from the political economy of the Stalinist system. This is perhaps the most systematic work yet on Trotsky’s frequently changing and dynamic analysis. And while clearly sympathetic to Trotsky, Twiss often takes issue with his positions and avoids indulging in the latest Russian studies fad of acting as an inept lawyer for his subject. 

Much of Twiss’s analysis is based on a skillful integration of what is now known about various aspects of the Stalinist system. He repeatedly criticizes Trotsky for accepting the veracity of Stalinist propaganda, such as the Shakhty show trial of engineers in 1928 and Menshevik show trial in 1931. While Trotsky provided insights into the Moscow show trials in 1936, Twiss comments that there is no evidence that  “the supporters of repression” viewed the prospect of capitalist restoration more positively than “its victims.” He also challenges Trotsky’s absurd claim that the trials were a response by the bureaucracy to the success of the Fourth International. Indeed, Twiss repeatedly takes Trotsky to task for his exaggerated claims of the strength of the opposition that supposedly pressured the regime into the “Left” course of industrialization and still claimed thousands of supporters as late as 1936.

Twiss’s most important criticisms of Trotsky’s analysis are on Stalin’s forced collectivization and kulaks (supposedly wealthier peasants). He notes that Trotsky accepted Stalinist propaganda about a “kulak strike” in 1928 and that frequently authorities “applied the label of ‘kulak’ or ‘ideological kulak’ to middle or even poor peasants who resisted collectivization.” Significantly, Twiss emphasizes the crucial mistake he made in his support of collectivization, that “Trotsky essentially accepted the leadership’s characterization of the collectivization as a spontaneous movement by the peasantry.” Only in 1935 did Trotsky acknowledge that the “frightened muzhiks” were driven into the collective farms “by the knout” and only in 1939, though not mentioned by Twiss, did Trotsky begin to come to terms with the results of the catastrophic human cost for collectivization in the Ukraine.

In fact, all of Trotsky’s arguments about collectivization and supposed ‘kulaks’ have now been thoroughly refuted by overwhelming archival evidence. Even before the archives opened, Moshe Lewin showed that ‘kulak’ was a propaganda rather than economic term, often applied to middle and even poor peasants, which meant collectivization entailed violent reprisals “against whole sectors of the broad mass of the peasantry.” As the head of the Russian Socialist Federation argued, “if we have no kulaks, we shall have to acquire some by nomination.”[3] A systematic study of OGPU reports to Stalin shows that in early 1924 the secret police were still sympathetic to the plight of the peasantry but the increasingly hostile reports, especially under Yagoda, show that they had lost faith in their own propaganda, that the term “kulaks” became interchangeable with peasants.[4] Village meetings often nominated widows, old people or even drew lots in order to meet absurd OGPU ‘dekulakization’ quotas. Massive resistance to collectivization, particularly by women, often involved entire villages. Even skewed Soviet statistics that attempted to scapegoat ‘kulaks’, acknowledged that the majority of the 2.5 million peasants involved in 13,754 rebellions in 1930 alone were either middle or poor peasants.[5] So overwhelming is the data that standard texts on the history of the Soviet Union now refer to collectivization as Stalin’s “war on the peasants.” The total death toll of this war, including collectivization, dekulakization, famine, and peasants who died either in transit to or in the Gulags is well over six million, including half of the 700,000 political prisoners executed in 1937-8[6]

Although Twiss appears to recognize all this, he fails to draw the only logical conclusion. This is hardly an obscure issue about a minor aspect of Stalinism. Despite his later reservations and revisions, Trotsky’s position at the time of collectivization placed him on the wrong side of the most violent peasant rebellion of the Twentieth Century.

The most fascinating and provocative sections of this study are those detailing Trotsky’s changing definition of the Soviet bureaucracy as a Bonapartist regime. In State and Revolution, Lenin summarised the role of state as an instrument for the exploitation of the oppressed class but he also cited Engels on the “exception”, when “periods occur in which the warring classes balance each other so nearly that the state power as ostensible mediator acquires, for the moment, a certain degree of independence of both.” Such was the case of Bonapartism of the First and Second Empires, Bismarck in Germany and, adds Lenin, Kerensky in 1917. As early as 1928, Trotsky started describing the regime within this theoretical framework, as “Kerenskyism in reverse.” This model clearly framed much of his thinking on Stalinism as Trotsky would reference Soviet Bonapartism in over a hundred articles and interviews over the next dozen years.

Throughout the early 1930s Trotsky repeatedly used the Bonapartist state paradigm in general terms, though, as Twiss describes, sometimes inconsistently, favouring the term “bureaucratic centrism” or referring to Bonapartism in the future tense as a potential force for the restoration of capitalism.  By early 1935 he moved to a more precise definition specifically comparing the regime to the First Empire, arguing the the political conquest of Thermidor had occurred a decade earlier with the defeat of the 1924 Opposition. Yet, just as Napoleon did not  “reestablish the economy of feudalism” argued Trotsky, “the social content of the dictatorship of the bureaucracy is determined by those productive relations that were created by the proletarian revolution.”

Although he references Hal Draper’s masterful discussion on Marx and Engels writings on Bonapartism, Twiss fails to provide a precise definition to assess Trotsky’s analysis. Citing Marx and Engels at length, Draper shows that the state moves towards temporary autonomization during periods of crisis because of a class “statemate”, an “unresolved class struggle balances the power of contending classes against each other.” Comparing Bonapartism to a plaster cast, that emerges because “there is no other alternative to prevent society from shaking itself apart in internecine conflict without issue.” Bonapartism provides the conditions for the necessary “modernization of society” when no existing class is “capable of carrying out this imperative under its own political power.” Yet this transitory arrangement bore the “seeds of its own dissolution”, as modernization meant that the maturing bourgeoisie would begin to recognize its own power and the Bonapartist state “would begin to outlive the value of its services.”[7]

Attempting to apply Trotsky’s analysis to this model poses many problems. While he acknowledges Trotsky’s uncritical acceptance of much of the regime’s self-serving ‘kulak’ propaganda, Twiss underestimates the crucial role  that this phantom counter revolutionary class played in Trotsky’s analysis of Soviet Bonapartism. Trotsky’s fixation and hundreds of references to ‘kulaks’ are inexplicable outside the context the Bonapartist paradigm. As he wrote in April 1929:

“The problem of Thermidor and Bonapartism is at bottom the problem of the kulak. Those who shy away from this problem, those who minimize its importance and distract attention to questions of party regime, to bureaucratism, to unfair polemical methods, and other superficial manifestations and expressions of the pressure of kulak elements upon the dictatorship of the proletariat resemble a physician who chases after symptoms while ignoring functional and organic disturbance.”

Additionally,  Twiss cites Alec Nove’s economic study of the Soviet Union that shows that the First Five-Year Plan resulted in the "mass misery and hunger" of 1933 which was the “culmination of the most precipitous peacetime decline in living standards know in recorded history." Yet Twiss persists in describing this state offensive as a “Left” turn though he never explains why. For Trotsky, the assumption was that the working class benefited from industrialization and was the polar class versus kulaks that Stalinism wavered between. Yet in the factories, Stalinism had converted trade unions into productivity organs, largely silenced dissent, utilised food rations as a means of disciplining the workers and arrested thousands of oppositionists. Rather than providing temporary stability to keep contending classes from ripping Soviet society apart, Stalinism was a brutal, chaotic force pummelling Soviet peasants and workers in an attempt to force both to pay for rapid industrialisation.

Trotsky’s search for contending classes to fit his Bonapartist model would prove to be elusive. In October 1932, almost three years after Stalin initiated “dekulakization” and a month after the first report of the Ukrainian famine appeared in his Biulleten’ Oppozitsii, Trotsky continued to warn the regime about the “kulak danger.” His 1935 refined definition of Bonapartism was driven in part, as Twiss shows, by the regime’s concessions to pauperized peasants on the collective farms. Here Trotsky’s contending class by his own admission did not even exist yet, the very nature of agricultural production would inevitably form this reactionary force at some point in the future. By the late 1930s Trotsky largely dropped the kulak rhetoric and viewed imperialism and a section of the bureaucracy as the right restorationist forces of counterrevolution.

Twiss contends that by 1936 Trotsky believed the bureaucracy had moved away from “relative autonomy” towards “extreme autonomy” and, claims Twiss, that this “suggested a class-like degree of autonomy.” Yet such a transformation to complete autonomy would have negated Bonapartism and represented a class, not a “class-like” formation. Moreover, throughout the 1930s Trotsky asserted dozens of times that the collapse of the Stalinist system was imminent, a prognosis inextricably linked to his Bonapartist model--even if his epigones later ignored it. To be sure, Trotsky never claimed to have redefined the Marxist theory of the state as Twiss implies. Either the bureaucracy was a temporary phenomenon wavering between contending classes or it represented the interests of a particular class, even if that class was the bureaucracy itself. This was the position Trotsky himself was moving toward despite Twiss’s claim that a snapshot from 1936 was his final, frozen verdict. Twiss fails to answer the obvious question. Once contending classes and the temporary nature of Stalinist Bonapartism are jettisoned in favor the “extreme autonomy” of the bureaucracy, what exactly is left of Trotsky’s Bonapartist model?

Overwhelming archival evidence has now demolished the Stalinist myths about the regime’s brutal war on the Soviet peasantry. Marxists who had previously attempted to hold onto the remnants of Trotsky’s analysis are now faced with the conundrum of either choosing to repeat what we now know was Stalinist propaganda or alternatively coming to terms with serious defects in Trotsky’s Bonapartist analysis. Whatever shortcomings in this study, Tom Twiss deserves credit for initiating a more historically accurate and non-sectarian discussion on the nature of the Stalinist system.

Footnotes:

1.Geoffrey Swain, Trotsky, Taylor and Francis, 2006, 195.

2.Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, Penguin 2015, 223, 425.

3.Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization, Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc. 1975, 77,491.

4.Hugh Hudson, The Kulakization of the Peasantry: The OGPU and the End of Faith in Peasant Reconciliation, 1924-27. Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, vol 1, 2012.

5.Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, Oxford University Press, 1996, 100-131.

6.Ronald Suny, The Soviet Experiment, Oxford University Press, 2011, 235-250.

7.Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, vol. 1: State and Bureaucracy, Monthly Review Press, 1986, 439-463

On the centenary of the Russian Revolution's victory, Eric Blanc starts off our series of historical articles.

Eric Blanc is an independent researcher in Oakland, California. He is the author of the forthcoming monograph, Anti-Colonial Marxism: Oppression & Revolution in the Tsarist Borderlands (Brill Publishers, Historical Materialism Book Series).

Main photo caption: Petrograd protesters in early 1917

Introduction

Assessing Bolshevik policy before Lenin’s return to Russia in April 1917 has long been one of the most heated historiographic controversies in the socialist movement. As Frederick Corney’s recent documentary collection has illustrated, debates over this issue were a central component of the political struggle waged in the early 1920s by Leon Trotsky and his supporters against the degeneration of the Soviet regime under the leadership of Joseph Stalin.[1]

Seeking to push back against the increasingly bureaucratised party apparatus, Trotsky initiated the polemic in his famous 1924 The Lessons of October. In this pamphlet he argued, among other things, that the Bolshevik party under the leadership of Stalin and Lev Kamenev was mired in de-facto Menshevism before Lenin arrived in April 1917 and re-armed the party with an entirely new political strategy. According to Trotsky, the ‘old Bolshevik’ view that socialist transformation would have to start in the West had led ‘inevitably to Menshevism’ in early 1917.[2] Specifically, he asserted that since the pre-April Bolsheviks thought that Russia was not ripe for socialist revolution, they therefore failed to see the need to seize power and accordingly sought only to pressure the bourgeoisie to meet the people’s demands.[3] ‘The task of conquering power,’ Trotsky affirmed, ‘was put to the party only on 4 April, i.e., after Lenin’s arrival in Petrograd.’[4]

Over the coming years and decades, polemical assessments of early 1917 Bolshevism crystallised into points of principle. Faced with the degeneration of the Soviet state and the Communist International, it is not surprising that anti-Stalinist Marxists upholding internationalism and workers’ democracy generally re-affirmed Trotsky’s analysis of early 1917.[5] This dynamic has continued up to the present. John Marot, for instance, has sought in a recent set of polemics against Lars Lih to defend the traditional case for a ‘sea change’ in Bolshevik strategy in April.[6]

Most academic historians have likewise shared Trotsky’s interpretation. Robert Slusser has claimed that before Lenin’s return to Russia, the Bolshevik leadership agreed with the Menshevik contention that since the revolution was bourgeois-democratic, therefore ‘the proper course of action for the workers’ parties was to aid the bourgeoisie in carrying through its revolution in order to help create the conditions that would ultimately make possible a workers’ revolution leading to the establishment of socialism.’[7]

Unfortunately, Trotsky’s account obscures more than it clarifies. Contrary to his claims, the Bolsheviks did in fact aim to seize power well before Lenin’s return. That this fact has been so widely overlooked testifies to an on-going analytical confusion surrounding the politics of ‘old Bolshevism’ and revolutionary social democracy. Crucially, the Bolsheviks did not believe that setting up a workers’ and peasants’ government in Russia was justified only during a socialist revolution. In their view, such a regime was needed to lead the democratic revolution to victory – to confiscate the landed estates, pass the eight-hour day, establish a democratic republic, etc.

Building off the pioneering work of Lars Lih, I will show in this article – the first in a series on the evolution of Bolshevism in 1917 – how ‘old Bolshevism’ was articulated and implemented in the February Revolution.[8]

Though they did not think that Russia on its own was ripe for overturning capitalism, Bolsheviks called for a proletarian-peasant government to end the war, to meet the people’s demands for land and bread, and to spark the international socialist revolution (which would, in turn, allow Russia to establish socialism). This was the party’s general stance both in the February Revolution and in March, i.e., after the Tsar’s overthrow.

Bolshevik strategy certainly evolved during and following April. But the party’s longstanding orientation – indisputably distinct from Menshevism – constituted the foundation for its militancy throughout 1917.

Given the complexities of the post-Tsarist political situation, it is not surprising that there were sharp tactical debates among Bolsheviks during these early months – and throughout 1917. A certain conception of the driving forces of the revolution did not provide easy answers to the challenging tactical questions posed day-by-day – or even hour-by-hour – in the whirlwind of revolution. Even with the benefit of hindsight it is often far from clear which tactic was best suited for the particular moment.

That said, a strong case can be made that the party’s practice across the empire before Lenin’s return was in fact marked by serious waverings, which Lih has sometimes underestimated. This was mostly the case in March, as will be discussed in the next article in this series.[9] But Bolshevik behaviour in February too was marked by some significant vacillations.

Lenin’s arrival in April played an important role in pushing the party in a more politically resolute direction. But it does not follow that early Bolshevik wavering was primarily caused by flaws in the party’s strategic line of march. Much of this vacillation took place in spite of (rather than because of) the overall orientation of ‘old Bolshevism’.

The reason why it is important to re-examine the February-March debates goes beyond just setting the historical record straight. Understanding the politics of ‘old Bolshevism’ is crucial to overcoming the widespread tendency to conflate Lenin’s politics with those of the party as a whole in 1917.

It is hardly the case that Lenin’s position always prevailed even in Petrograd after April. This dynamic becomes far more evident in the provincial towns and outlying regions of the empire, where the political and organisational attachment of the local committees to Lenin and the Petrograd-based leadership was often tenuous. Historian Hugh Phillips, for example, observes that ‘Tver's archives confirm the absence of a national Bolshevik network in 1917 taking its commands from the leadership in Petrograd. In short, the city's Bolsheviks were largely on their own.’[10] The autonomous perspectives and actions of local Bolshevik leaderships were often decisive well into 1918.[11]

Without understanding the Bolshevik party’s longstanding strategic cohesiveness, it is hard to make sense of how and why it came to become the leading socialist current in so many regions of imperial Russia by October. One hundred years after the revolution, it is well past time for Marxists to take a fresh look at what Bolsheviks said and did on the ground in 1917.

The February Revolution

Before delving into the theory and practice of Bolshevism, it may be helpful to briefly sketch out the basic sequence of the February upheaval. Revolution erupted in the heart of imperial Russia on International Women’s Day (23 February in the old calendar). Working-class women in Petrograd struck, took to the streets to demand bread, and called upon workers in their neighbouring workplaces to join in. Hundreds of thousands of workers took to the streets the following day and by 25 February the capital was paralysed by a general strike. On 26 February, the state ordered troops to fire upon the protestors: some units complied, killing hundreds. Soldiers’ mutinies spread that evening and the following morning, culminating in the implosion of the city’s military apparatus on 27 February.

 Up until this point liberal leaders in the State Duma had limited their actions to calling on the Tsar to reform his government. Only on 27 February did the liberals finally side with the revolution, though they simultaneously sought to preserve the monarchy. The Tsar abdicated on 2 March and called upon his younger brother to take the throne – yet protests from workers and socialists against the preservation of the monarchy obliged the latter to step down as well. After a reign of more than three hundred years, the much-hated Romanov regime had been toppled by working people.

What should replace Tsarism? Moderate and radical socialists gave very different answers to this question during the February Revolution. Indeed, the course of events in Petrograd was inseparable from conflicts between different socialist currents over the fundamental strategic choice of 1917: whether to promote the hegemony of the proletariat or an alliance with the bourgeoisie. Whereas moderates sought to channel the upsurge into a bloc with the liberal State Duma, radicals upheld the tradition of 1905 and called for the establishment of a provisional revolutionary government of working people, with no participation of the propertied classes.

The ability of the moderate socialists to impose their vision was decisive for the particular shape of the power that replaced Tsarism. By 27 February, Tsarist authority had collapsed, and the liberal Duma was left floating in mid-air with little support on the ground. Since the insurgent workers and soldiers looked to the new Petrograd Soviet as the legitimate authority, it easily could have taken full power had it been so inclined.

During the first days of insurrection, the radicals – Bolsheviks, ‘Interdistrict’ Marxists, and left Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) – had held the initiative. But their call on workers to gather at the Finland Station to form a soviet and their own provisional revolutionary government fell flat. Instead, the insurgent crowds responded to the moderate socialists’ rival proposal to form a soviet at the Tauride Palace (where the liberal State Duma was based). The Menshevik leaders of the new Soviet were intent on a bloc with the liberals: only such an alliance, they argued, could prevent a successful counter-revolution – conditions in Russia, moreover, were unripe for a working-class regime. At the first session of the Soviet, on 27 February, the moderates thus proposed the establishment of a purely bourgeois government through negotiations with the liberal leaders.

At the same time, however, the Soviet leadership distrusted the liberals and worried about losing its hold over the radicalised workers and soldiers. Thus it sought to maintain a significant amount of power in its own hands, so as to pressure the bourgeoisie to implement the people’s wishes. Crucially, the Soviet’s famous 1 March ‘Order Number 1’ declared that soldiers must only follow governmental political instructions that were also approved by the Soviet. The fruit of this approach was the ambiguous structure of ‘dual power’.

Menshevik and liberal leaders met on the evening of 1 March. The latter were obliged to accept the Soviet leadership’s terms for its conditional support, the most important of which were that the Provisional Government grant political freedom and legal equality for all, abolish the police and establish a people’s militia, release all political prisoners, refrain from reprisals against mutinous soldiers, and convoke a Constituent Assembly as soon as possible. (Significantly, the crucial questions of war and land reform were absent from the agreement.) On 2 March, the Soviet overwhelmingly accepted the leadership’s resolution to support the government in so far as it implemented the demands of the people.

Bolshevik Theory and Practice

The Bolsheviks upheld a militant orientation throughout the February uprising. In sharp contrast with the Mensheviks, their strategy opposed any blocs with the bourgeoisie. Bolshevik leaflets declared that a regime of workers and soldiers was needed to bring peace, bread, agrarian reform, the eight-hour day, and a democratically elected Constituent Assembly. By taking power, they argued, Russia’s working people would be able to push for an end to the war and unleash a world socialist revolution. The Russian Bureau of the Central Committee wrote a proclamation on February 27 declaring:

The immediate urgent task of the Provisional Revolutionary Government is to establish relations with the proletariat of the belligerent countries with a view to the struggle of the proletariat of all countries against their oppressors and their slave masters, against the Governments of Tsarist type and the Capitalist cliques, and with a view to the immediate cessation of the bloody slaughter inflicted on the enslaved people. The workers of the factories and plants as well as the insurgent troops must choose, without delay, their representatives to the Provisional Revolutionary Government which must be established by the Revolutionary Insurgent people and the Army. … Forward! There is no turning back! Fight without mercy! Follow the Red Flag of the Revolution! Long live the Democratic Republic! Long live the Revolutionary working class![12]

That same day, another leaflet issued by the Bolshevik Vyborg Committee (probably in conjunction with other radicals) explicitly called on workers to establish a soviet regime at the Finland Station:

Comrades, the long-awaited hour has arrived! The people are taking power into their own hands, the revolution has begun; do not lose a single moment, create a Provisional Revolutionary Government today. Only organisation can strengthen our forces. First of all, elect deputies, have them make contact with one another and create, under the protection of the armed forces, a Soviet of Deputies. Bring over to our side all soldiers still lagging behind, go to the barracks themselves and summon them. Let Finland Station be the centre where the revolutionary headquarters will gather. Seize all buildings that can serve as strongholds for our struggle. Comrade soldiers and workers! Elect deputies, forge them into an organisation for the victory over autocracy![13]

Socialist revolution, a major theme in Bolshevik agitation, was always framed from an international perspective. The Bolsheviks’ Kiev Committee spelled out the party’s longstanding view that Russia should be the detonator of world revolution:

The Russian Revolution – taking place in the midst of the world conflict [WWI] and in the era of a colossal intensification of class contradictions in the West – will give a new push to the upsurge in proletarian struggle in the countries of finance capital for the full expropriation of the capitalist class. The Russian Social Democracy must strive to ensure that the democratic revolution in Russia serves as the signal for the proletarian revolution in the West and it must call on all internationalists in the warring countries to coordinate their actions to fight capitalism.[14]

As reflected above, the outbreak of world war in 1914 had significantly increased the Bolsheviks’ stress on the interdependence and immanence of the worldwide socialist revolution. On the eve of February, the Ekaterinoslav Committee distributed a typical party leaflet:

Who besides workers can stop the production of cannon and shells and end the carnage? Who else can raise high the glorious banner of the Russian Revolution? The final denouement is near, as is the final judgment on the perpetrators of the greatest crime in history against mankind. … There have been enough victims for the glory of Capital. Our common enemy is behind our backs.[15]

Sukhanov similarly observed that the Bolsheviks and left SRs in the Petrograd Soviet in February ‘believed that the World War would result in an absolutely inevitable worldwide socialist revolution and that the national revolt in Russia would lay its foundations, blazing a trail not only towards the liquidation of the Tsarist autocracy, but also towards the annihilation of the power of capital.’[16]

The Bolsheviks’ orientation, in short, was very radical. That they did not project the perspective of overthrowing capitalism in Russia prior to the Western workers’ revolution did not stop them from calling for a proletarian-peasant government to end the war, meet the people’s social demands, and spark the international overthrow of capitalism.

Bolshevik tactics regarding the creation of a revolutionary regime, in contrast, were generally cautious during late February and early March. From 27 February onwards, the party did not in practice fight for power. Though the district Bolshevik Vyborg Committee advocated a more offensive tactic, the top Petrograd party leadership – the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee led by Alexander Shlyapnikov – felt that conditions were not yet ripe for such an approach.[17]

Initially, in the first days of the insurrection, all wings of Bolsheviks had sought for the party committees to directly lead the overthrow of the autocracy and to take the initiative in establishing a broader revolutionary provisional government. Shlyapnikov recalls that on 25 February ‘we decided that the time for diplomatic negotiations and agreements [with the moderate socialists] had already passed’; instead, the mass movement should be led by ‘our battle-proven, disciplined, and centralised party groups’.[18] The 27 February proclamations by the Russian Bureau and the Vyborg Committee reflected this desire to assert Bolshevik (and/or radical) political hegemony, against the attempts of the moderate socialists to do the same. But, as we have seen, the radicals lost the battle on 27 February when the moderates succeeded in leading the masses to the Tauride Palace.

For reasons that will be discussed below, the Bolsheviks did not put forward their proposal to establish a working people’s regime during the decisive first sessions of the Soviet on 27 February, 28 February, and 1 March.[19] Nor did they generally agitate in the streets for this demand. In his celebrated memoir of the revolution, left socialist and Petrograd Soviet leader Nikolai Sukhanov notes that the Bolsheviks and other radicals who favoured ‘the immediate dictatorship of the Soviet’ did

not even think of engaging in any real struggle for their principles, either in the [Soviet] Ex.[ecutive] Com.[mittee] or the Soviet, or amongst the masses. When the question was debated these people were almost unnoticeable; they never came forward with an independent formulation of their position, and when it came to voting they constituted a single majority with the representatives of the third tendency [in favour of ‘dual power’ and the recognition of the Provisional Government].[20]

On 1 March, the radical Vyborg Committee proposed that the Bolsheviks push for the Soviet to establish itself as the government, but Shlyapnikov and the city’s other top Bolsheviks felt that this initiative was premature.[21]

Assessing whether this cautiousness was a tactical mistake hinges on one’s analysis of the objective situation. Sukhanov, Melancon and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa have argued that in Petrograd’s volatile revolutionary climate, it was conceivable that had they taken the initiative, Bolsheviks and other radicals could have taken power in Petrograd in late February or early March.[22] According to Hasegawa, ‘it was possible that if such a cry had been made, the masses might have been swayed to support it.’[23] A Bolshevik Vyborg leader, Fedor Dingelshtedt, later argued that ‘not one political rally or workers meeting would have rejected this [Vyborg] resolution of ours if someone had only proposed it.’[24]

Other sources, however, have painted a different picture. Historian Ziva Galili, for example, concludes that in late February ‘apart from a small group in Vyborg – the most militant of the working-class districts – workers did not appear ready to take responsibility for the country as a whole.’[25] For further evidence of relatively moderate mass sentiment, we could point to two more salient facts: workers flocked to the Tauride Palace rather than the Finland station on 27 February and radicals subsequently found themselves outnumbered in the early Soviet sessions. Moreover, it is far from evident that a revolutionary government in Petrograd would have found sufficient support among workers and soldiers outside the capital, where political polarisation at this moment was much less developed.

On 2 March, as the process of setting up a liberal Provisional Government was underway, various Bolshevik delegates in the Soviet raised the need for a revolutionary provisional government and criticised the decision to pass over power to the bourgeoisie. Zalutskii decried the fact that central demands of the revolution (land, peace, the eight-hour day) were not addressed in the Soviet-liberal agreement: ‘A revolutionary provisional government has not been formed in the name of the people.’ Similarly, Molotov exclaimed: ‘The Provisional Government is not revolutionary. Guchkov, factory owners, Rodzianko, and Konovalov would make a mockery out of the people. Instead of land they will throw rocks at the peasants.’[26] I. Uliantsev affirmed the call for a ‘provisional revolutionary government [to] be formed from the soviet of workers’ deputies.’[27]

The resolution put forward by the Bolsheviks, probably in conjunction with other radicals, was intransigent against the bourgeoisie and raised the perspective of the need to eventually establish a revolutionary regime:

In view of the fact that the Provisional Government is organized by antipeople circles and landlords of Guchkov’s type, whom the revolutionary workers and soldiers cannot trust, we protest against every attempt at agreement [with them]. We express no confidence in Kerenskii. Also we recognize that only the Provisional Revolutionary Government can fulfil the popular demands.[28]

Yet many Bolsheviks failed to support the line of their own party. Various Bolshevik leaders limited their interventions to calling on the Provisional Government to implement the people’s demands for a republic, elections in the army, and the eight-hour day.[29] In the end, only 14 delegates voted for the radicals’ resolution, despite the fact that there were at least 40 Bolsheviks present.[30] Moreover, a majority of Bolshevik delegates voted in favour of the Soviet leadership’s proposal to recognise the Provisional Government.[31]

In the party leadership meetings that evening and the following day, a minority of the most radical Bolsheviks demanded immediate mass agitation for an armed uprising against the Provisional Government.[32] But this perspective was defeated, as the majority of local Bolshevik heads now believed that establishing a revolutionary provisional government had become a mid-range, rather than immediate, objective. Sharp debates over how and when to replace the Provisional Government – as well as divergences concerning how much it (and the moderate socialists) could be pressured from below – continued in all levels and regions of the Bolshevik party throughout the rest of March.

Explaining Bolshevik Actions

An assessment of Bolshevik policy and practice in February must answer two distinct questions. First, since the Bolsheviks advocated a workers’ and peasants’ government, why did they not fight for this in practice after the victory of the 27 February insurrection? Second, why did so many Bolsheviks hesitate to defend their own party’s political line during the crucial debates in the Soviet?

Readers should note that the Bolsheviks’ explanations for their approach rarely related to ideological concerns – instead, questions of tactics, organisation, and assessments of the conjuncture were generally seen to be paramount.

After February, various Bolsheviks explained that seizing power in Petrograd would have been a mistake since the revolutionary mood in rest of the empire lagged behind the capital. One party militant in April explained:

When the Soviet of deputies was formed – then state power was proposed, but the workers did not consider it possible to take power into their hands ... Did the Soviet of Workers' Deputies act correctly in refusing power? I consider that it did. To take power into our hands would have been an unsuccessful policy, since Petrograd is not all of Russia. There, in Russia, is a different correlation of forces.[33]

Others stressed Bolshevik organisational weakness. Having just emerged from underground conditions, their committees were fragile and atomised, making it more difficult to push back against the prevailing current and fight for power. A Latvian Bolshevik later argued that given the party’s organisational limitations in February,

there could be no question of leading the masses to the final battle. The party had been decimated in the recent period by countless arrests of its members ... Especially in the first days of the movement, the disorganisation was terrible, a circumstance that the various opportunistic leaderships took advantage of.[34]

Along the same lines, Bolshevik worker S. Skalov posited that ‘we could not go against the Duma on 27 February 1917, nor was there any reason to. We were too weak organisationally, our leading comrades were in jails, exile and emigration.’[35] Shlyapnikov’s memoir also consistently stressed the Bolsheviks’ ‘weakness’ and the ‘hostility’ directed at them inside the mass struggle and the Soviet, which made asserting their politics ‘a daunting job’.[36]

If the Bolsheviks were indeed this weak and politically isolated, then the Vyborg Committee’s desire to push for a soviet government (including through immediate armed struggle) should probably be seen as an expression of ultra-left Blanquism. Over the coming months, Bolshevik leaders, including Lenin, would have to frequently push back against the tendency of the Vyborg Committee and other Bolshevik radicals to fight for power before a majority of the Soviet was won to this position.

Another possible explanation for Bolshevik cautiousness in February is that various party members felt that the danger of immanent counter-revolution obliged limited cooperation with the liberal elite. During the upheaval, a fear that right-wing generals would march on Petrograd to depose a new revolutionary government was one of the central factors pushing the Soviet leadership into seeking a legitimising bloc with the propertied classes. As Hasegawa notes, this fear was not misplaced; the perceived threat was in fact a very real one.[37] Alistair Dickins’ recent work on the Siberian town of Krasnoiarsk has shown that even in this soon-to-become bastion of radicalism, the Bolsheviks in early March collaborated with the liberals due to their ‘fears … of a possible counter offensive by regime loyalists.’[38] According to one secondary source, this may also have been a factor shaping Shlyapnikov’s behaviour in the February Revolution.[39]

Finally, we should take note of one factor that was tied to deeper ideological-strategic questions: how to relate to moderate socialists in the fight to establish a new power. Potential tensions in ‘old Bolshevik’ strategy – which stressed both the hegemony of the proletariat and the need for a governmental bloc with the ‘revolutionary democracy’ – revealed themselves in late February when the Mensheviks and SRs won the leadership of the insurgency away from the radicals and then sought to hand power to the liberals.

Traditionally the Bolsheviks had envisioned that the Marxist proletarian party would lead the seizure of power and establish a democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasantry. This was often portrayed as a coalition between the Russian Social Democracy and the ‘revolutionary democratic’ parties of the peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie (the SRs, etc.). Which social class and party, if any, should be the dominant current in the revolutionary government was left open-ended.

Shlyapnikov explains that in February he initially envisioned that the revolutionary government would be established ‘on the basis of an agreement between the country’s three main existing revolutionary and socialist parties [the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and SRs] … We thought that it would be possible to create a revolutionary government of the socialist parties that comprised the majority in the Soviet’.[40] Accordingly, he engaged in personal discussions with Menshevik and SR leaders in the first days following the triumph of the 27 February insurrection, hoping to convince them to support this plan.[41] But eventually, Shlyapnikov notes, ‘our “good ideas” scattered like dust under the impact of harsh reality. Neither the Menshevik Social Democrats nor the Socialist Revolutionaries wanted to take power, they were afraid of it.’[42]

In such an unforeseen context, venturing down the intransigent political path desired by the Vyborg Committee had the benefit of clearly upholding proletarian hegemony, but it dangerously risked breaking ties with the ‘petty-bourgeois’ parties and their class constituencies.

The question of whether the SRs and Mensheviks could be convinced (or cajoled) to break with the bourgeoisie had major practical implications and it remained an on-going debate in the Bolshevik party throughout 1917. But it is important to note that the radical Vyborg Bolsheviks were no less committed to the strategy and perspective of ‘old Bolshevism’ than more cautious leaders like Shlyapnikov.

The algebraic character of the ‘democratic dictatorship’ strategy (with its dual stress on proletarian leadership and ‘democratic’ alliances) could be developed and concretised in distinct directions. A strong tradition of sharply criticising moderate socialists and asserting Bolshevik political hegemony was no less important to the party’s theory and practice than its search for unity – under working-class leadership – with the non-proletarian masses and their representatives. In February, as in subsequent months, Bolsheviks could and did lean on different elements of their party’s strategic heritage to navigate the stormy revolutionary seas. And when it became clear to Bolshevik militants such as Shlyapnikov that the moderate socialists would not break from the bourgeoisie, most promptly adjusted their tactics accordingly.

The aforementioned factors explain why the Bolsheviks did not immediately fight in practice for soviet power in February. But what explains the reticence of so many of their militants to affirm their party’s call to reject the new liberal regime and eventually establish a provisional revolutionary government?

It would appear that the main factor here was a straightforward adaptation to the mood of the majority of workers and their moderate socialist representatives. Shlyapnikov noted that on 2 March ‘many of our party members in the Soviet succumbed to the hostility created by speeches of our enemies against us and not only did they not vote for our proposal … but they even voted against us.’[43] Michael Melancon similarly writes that the Petrograd radicals were perhaps ‘cowed by the right socialist intellectuals’ success in summoning the soviet under their control.’[44]

This was a significant political adaptation. As would be the case in March, wings of the Bolshevik party hesitated to publicly defend the stance of ‘old Bolshevism’ – as Sukhanov put it, the Bolsheviks failed to engage in a ‘real struggle for their principles’. Ambiguities in the strategy of ‘old Bolshevism’ itself may also have contributed to these hesitations. It was understandable that Bolshevik militants who envisioned the establishment of a revolutionary government through an agreement with the Mensheviks and SRs might be wary of engaging in a sharp political battle that could lead to a rupture with these necessary allies.

Conclusion

By way of conclusion, three points should be underscored in relation to Bolshevik theory and practice in the February Revolution.

First, the party’s strategic perspective was unquestionably militant well before Lenin’s return. Bolsheviks rejected blocs with liberals, denounced the war, demanded land to the peasants, and called for a revolutionary government based on the Soviet. The overthrow of the Tsar had not accomplished these fundamental objectives – the democratic revolution, in Bolshevik eyes, had not yet been completed. As such, even after the downfall of the autocracy, the top party leadership in March continued to uphold the general strategic orientation raised in February.

Adherence to the tenets outlined above constituted the ‘red thread’ of political continuity for Bolshevism throughout 1917. So too did the party’s stress on immanent world socialist revolution. Though Lenin in April raised the relatively modest perspective of ‘steps to socialism’ (which crucially did not include the expropriation of capitalist industry) in Russia, all wings of the party well after April continued to believe that the survival and development of the Russian Revolution – both in the immediate and long term – absolutely depended on the success of the revolution abroad. Ironically, Trotskyist accounts stressing that the party was ‘re-armed’ by Lenin in April discount the centrality of international revolution in ‘old Bolshevik’ strategy and exaggerate the extent to which the post-April Bolsheviks in 1917 believed that Russia on its own could move to socialism. The real rupture in Bolshevik strategy, in my view, was the innovation of ‘socialism in one country’.

 In light of the radical thrust of ‘old Bolshevism’ it should come as no surprise that Bolsheviks overwhelmingly supported the general line of Lenin’s April Theses.[45] As self-described ‘old Bolshevik’ leader Kalinin argued at the late April 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.[46]

Bolshevism’s relative political cohesion during 1917 cannot be plausibly explained by the personal influence of Lenin, nor by the party’s organisational structure, which hardly resembled the hyper-centralised and disciplined monolith depicted in both Cold War and Stalinist historiography. ‘Insubordination was the rule of the day whenever lower-party bodies thought questions of importance were at stake,’ notes Robert Service.[47] Indeed, Lenin’s stance on national liberation was more often than not openly rejected by borderland Bolshevik organisations as late as 1918. Some aspects of hisApril Theses (e.g., framing soviet power as a ‘step towards socialism’ or the highest form of democratic rule) were also ignored on the ground by many Bolshevik committees during 1917. Yet on the most important political questions – proletarian hegemony, opposition to the war, soviet power, land to the peasants – a fundamental continuity marked the politics of Bolshevism before and after Lenin’s return.

 Lenin’s interventions from April onwards were certainly important in pushing the party as a whole to more aggressively fight against the Provisional Government and to more consistently steer towards a revolutionary regime in which the proletariat and the Bolsheviks would be the dominant force. In practice, this helped orient the Bolsheviks to independently vie for political power and to more antagonistically approach the moderate socialists. Debates over armed insurrection and revolutionary government in October would show just how decisive these questions could be for Marxist practice. But, in sharp contrast with the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, Bolshevism did not suffer a major split over the fundamental questions of internationalism and power in 1917. This dynamic can only be understood if we acknowledge the actual politics of ‘old Bolshevism’.

Second, despite their shared political radicalism, the Bolsheviks in February were often quite divided on the best tactics to pursue regarding the fight for a revolutionary regime. Whereas the Vyborg Committee wanted to push directly for a soviet government, the tactics of the Bolshevik city leadership in February were generally cautious.

It is not self-evident even in hindsight if this caution reflected an ‘opportunist’ political adaptation or whether it was an appropriate approach for the prevailing political conditions (majority support for the moderate socialists, weak Bolshevik party organisation, the isolation of Petrograd, etc.) Precisely assessing this is impossible since the potentialities and limits of popular militancy in February could only have been tested and revealed by a pro-active initiative by the radicals to fight for power.

My impression is that while the radicals probably could have seized state power in Petrograd, such a step would have been a tactical blunder since they likely lacked the strength to hold onto it. As such, Shlyapnikov and co.’s cautious tactics were probably the best suited for the existing context.

At the same time, however, a strong case can be made that the Bolsheviks did in fact needlessly bend to outside political forces, not least of which was the moderate Soviet leadership. Particularly if the mood from below was as radical as Sukhanov, Hasegawa, and Melancon have described, then it would seem that the Bolsheviks missed a major opportunity to openly advocate for their position. Even if they believed that a soviet regime was not on the immediate agenda, the Bolsheviks still could have argued earlier and harder for a revolutionary soviet government as a medium-term goal. Doing so, at the very least, would have more clearly differentiated themselves from the moderate leadership and would have begun the process of cohering around them the most militant revolutionary workers and soldiers. The fact that so many Bolsheviks voted against their own resolution on 2 March underscores the extent to which party members were swept along with the prevailing political tide.

Last but not least, the sharp internal Bolshevik debates over tactics in February illustrates that there was no automatic, one-to-one relation between theory and practice. Despite their party’s shared strategy, Bolshevik leaders frequently advocated a range of distinct tactics at a given moment.

All too often, writers have depicted the actions of socialists in 1917 as determined solely by ideology – according to this logic, if Bolshevik tactics were wrong before Lenin’s return it must have been primarily because the party adhered to a flawed revolutionary theory. Along similar lines, the actions of the moderate socialists in February have frequently been explained as if they were solely determined by a particular theory of ‘bourgeois-democratic’ revolution. Detailed histories of 1917, however, have revealed the extent to which more immediate concerns shaped socialist behaviour.[48] SR leader Victor Chernov was only slightly exaggerating when he argued that ‘neither theory nor doctrine triumphed in the ranks of the Soviet democracy’ in February.[49]

Concrete assessments of the immediate circumstances and demands of the moment often weighed just as much as ideological considerations. How to steer the best possible political course in the midst of a fluid and unpredictable popular upheaval was always a challenge – here the role of party leaderships, and individual leaders, was crucial.[50]

All political currents were subjected to tremendous centrifugal pressures throughout 1917, and socialists in the heat of the moment frequently reversed their longstanding political stances or quietly refrained from fighting for them in practice. The extent to which this dynamic helps explain Bolshevik behaviour in March 1917 will be examined in our subsequent article.

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

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Corney, Frederick C. (ed.) 2016, Trotsky's Challenge: the “Literary Discussion” of 1924 and the Fight for the Bolshevik Revolution, Leiden, Boston: Brill.

Dickins, Alistair 2017, ‘A Revolution in March: the Overthrow of Tsarism in Krasnoiarsk’, Historical Research, 90, 247: 11-31.

Elwood, Ralph Carter (ed.) 1974, Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Volume 1, The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, 1898–October 1917, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Ferro, Marc 1972, The Russian Revolution of February 1917, translated by J. L. Richards, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.

Galili y Garcia, Ziva 1989, The Menshevik Leaders in the Russian Revolution: Social Realities and Political Strategies, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Gērmanis, Uldis 1974, Oberst Vācietis und die lettischen Schützen im Weltkrieg und in der Oktoberrevolution, Stockholm: Almqvist och Wiksell.

Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi 1981, The February Revolution, Petrograd, 1917, Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Lih, Lars T. 2014, ‘Fully Armed: Kamenev and Pravda in March 1917’, The NEP Era: Soviet Russia 1921-1928, 8: 55-68.

Mandel, David 1983, The Petrograd Workers and the Fall of the Old Regime: from the February Revolution to the July Days, 1917, New York: St. Martin's Press.

Манилова, В. 1928, 1917 год на Киевщине: хроника событий, Киев: Гос. изд-во Украины.

Marot, John 2014, ‘Lenin, Bolshevism, and Social-Democratic Political Theory: The 1905 and 1917 Soviets’, Historical Materialism, 22, 3–4: 129–171.

Marot, John 2016, ‘The Real Vladimir Lenin’, Jacobin. Accessed athttps://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/11/the-real-vladimir-lenin/

Melancon, Michael S. 2009, ‘From the Head of Zeus: the Petrograd Soviet's Rise and First days, 27 February – 2 March 1917’, The Carl Beck Papers in Russian & East European Studies, Number 2004, Pittsburgh: Center for Russian and East European Studies, University Centre for International Studies, University of Pittsburgh.

Phillips, Hugh 2001, ‘The Heartland Turns Red: The Bolshevik Seizure of Power in Tver’, Revolutionary Russia, 14, 1: 1-21.

РСДРП (большевиков) 1958 [1917], Седьмая (апрельская) Всероссийская конференция РСДРП (большевиков); Петроградская общегородская конференция РСДРП (большевиков). Апрель 1917 года. Протоколы, Москва: Госполитиздат.

Service, Robert 1979, The Bolshevik Party in Revolution: a Study in Organisational Change, 1917-1923, New York: Barnes Noble Books.

 Шляпников, А. Г. 1992 [1923], Семнадцатый год, Москва: Республика.

Slusser, Robert M. 1987, Stalin in October: the Man who Missed the Revolution, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Sukhanov, N.N. 1955 [1922], The Russian Revolution, 1917: a Personal Record, edited and translated by Joel Carmichael, London, New York: Oxford University Press.

Trotsky, Leon 2016 [1924], ‘The Lessons of October’ in Trotsky's Challenge: the “Literary Discussion” of 1924 and the Fight for the Bolshevik Revolution, edited by Frederick C. Corney, Leiden, Boston: Brill.

[1] Corney 2016.

[2] Trotsky 2016 [1924], p. 92.

[3] Trotsky 2016 [1924], pp. 92, 95.

[4] Trotsky 2016 [1924], p. 96.

[5] Challenging Trotsky’s interpretation of early 1917 neither requires rejecting the strategy of permanent revolution, nor accepting Stalinist accounts of 1917. In subsequent articles, I will show that despite the limitations in his interpretation of pre-Lenin Bolshevism, on the whole the politics of the party in 1917, and the course of the revolution, confirm the fundamental political tenets of permanent revolution.

[6] Marot 2014; Marot 2016. For a good introduction to Lih’s argument, see Lih 2014. A large collection of Lih’s articles can be found on John Riddell’s website:https://johnriddell.wordpress.com/2014/06/12/a-lars-lih-bibliography/

[7] Slusser 1987, p. 54.

[8] InThe Lessons of October Trotsky skips over the politics of the Bolsheviks in the February Revolution, limiting his discussion of pre-Lenin Bolshevism to March. Though his assertions cited above specifically pertain to the period directly following the downfall of the Tsar (and thus will be directly addressed in our next article), the ideas and actions of Bolsheviks in February are a necessary starting point for understanding the ensuing developments.

[9] Subsequent articles will then address Bolshevik conceptions of socialist revolution and their views on the state (Soviet power, a Constituent Assembly, etc.) in 1917.

[10] Phillips 2001, p. 7.

[11] The role of the Bolsheviks empirewide in 1917 is covered in my forthcoming monograph,Anti-Colonial Marxism: Oppression & Revolution in the Tsarist Borderlands (Brill–Historical Materialism Book Series).

[12] ‘The Bolshevik Manifesto of February 1917’ [27 February, 1917], in Ferro 1972, p. 345.

[13] Cited in Melancon 1988, p. 489. Hasegawa and most historians attribute the leaflet to the Bolshevik Vyborg Committee. (Hasegawa 1981, p. 333.) Melancon has countered that it was most likely issued jointly by the ‘Interdistrict’ group of the RSDRP, the Bolsheviks, and the anarchists. (Melancon 1988, p. 489.) This controversy matters little for our discussion, since all sources agree that the Vyborg Committee of the Bolsheviks openly argued in favour of the creation of a soviet government from 25 February onwards.

[14] ‘Резолюция о текущем моменте’ [8 March, 1917] in Манилова 1928, pp. 167-68.

[15] Cited in Burdzhalov 1987 [1967], p. 82.

[16] Sukhanov, N.N. 1955 [1922], p. 103. Emphasis in the original.

[17] On the conflicts between the Vyborg Committee and the Russian Bureau, see, for example, Hasegawa 1981, pp. 258, 536–37.

[18] Шляпников 1992 [1923], pp. 90, 102.

[19] Sukhanov 1955 [1922], pp. 59, 103–04, 107-8; Hasegawa 1981, p. 412-13; Melancon 2009, p. 44. Melancon notes some of the lacunae in the sources concerning what exactly was raised at the 1 March meeting.

[20] Sukhanov 1955 [1922], pp. 59, 103–04.

[21] Hasegawa 1981, pp. 536–37.

[22] Sukhanov 1955 [1922], pp. 137-38; Melancon 2009.

[23] Hasegawa 1981, p. 537.

[24] Cited in Burdzhalov 1987 [1967], p. 242.

[25] Galili y Garcia 1989, p. 66.

[26] Cited in Hasegawa 1981, p. 541.

[27] Cited in Melancon 2009, p. 46.

[28] Cited in Hasegawa 1981, p. 543.

[29] Ibid. On the factual inaccuracies of Soviet historiographic accounts of the 2 March meeting (many of which have subsequently found their way into the non-Russian literature), see Melancon 2009, p. 73.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Elwood 1974, p. 197.

[32] Шляпников 1992 [1923], pp. 217-18, 230.

[33] Cited in Mandel 1983, p. 83.

[34] Cited in Gērmanis, 1974. p. 143.

[35] Cited in Mandel 1983, p. 83.

[36] Шляпников 1992 [1923], pp. 161, 181, 216.

[37] Hasegawa 1981, pp. 426-27.

[38] Dickins 2017, p. 30.

[39] Hasegawa 1981, pp. 537-38.

[40] Шляпников 1992 [1923], pp. 66, 165.

[41] Шляпников 1992 [1923], pp. 196.

[42] Шляпников 1992 [1923], pp. 66, 165.

[43] Шляпников 1992 [1923], p. 216.

[44] Melancon 2009, p. 33.

[45] This development is detailed in Lars Lih’s important forthcoming publication on Bolshevik discussions in April.

[46] РСДРП (большевиков) 1958 [1917], p. 18.

[47] Service 1979, p. 52.

[48] This is a major theme, for example, of Galili y Garcia 1989. The author notes that ideological language ‘was often used by the Mensheviks to rationalize political choices affected more immediately by other, less abstract and more personal factors.’ (Galili y Garcia 1989, p. 9.)

[49] Cited in Hasegawa 1981, p. 424.

[50] Sukhanov, for instance, argues that the Petrograd Bolsheviks’ hesitant performance in February was in large part due to Shlyapnikov’s limitations as a political leader: ‘An experienced conspirator, a first-rate technical organizer, and a practical trade-unionist, as a politician he was quite incapable of grasping and generalizing the essence of the conjuncture that had been created. If he had any political ideas they were the clichés of ancient party resolutions of a general nature, but this responsible leader of the most influential workers' organization lacked all independence of thought and all ability or desire to appraise the concrete reality of the moment.’ (Sukhanov 1955 [1922], p. 43.)

Karl Liebknecht in 1907. A timely archive.

Courtesy of Daniel Gaido originally published here.

Karl Liebknecht’s Speech at the SPD party congress held at Essen in September 1907

"The resolution of the Congress of Stuttgart also determines our position on the question of deportation. That is emphasized here. It contains, under point 3 of the minimum programme, the abolition of all restrictions excluding certain nationalities or races from residence in the country and from the social, political and economic rights of the natives. For this purpose, an additional motion was submitted by the delegates from Hungary, according to which expulsions should be subject to the guarantees of judicial decision. This request was withdrawn after agreement was reached that the above-mentioned paragraph 3 required the removal of the entire right of the state to deport people. The congress resolution therefore calls for the complete equality of foreigners with the nationals also with regard to the right to stay in the country. Away with the Damocles sword of deportation! That is the first prerequisite for foreigners to cease to be the pre-eminent reducers of wages and strike-breakers. The work on the question of migration is a glorious chapter of the International Congress. The problem, however, has not yet been decided; the Stuttgart resolution is only a first step in this field."

(A reference to the resolution of the Stuttgart Congress of the Second International in 1907 on immigration and emigration, which described immigration and emigration as a manifestation of capitalism, called for a far-reaching reorganization of the transport system, and proposed to the organized workers concrete measures to ensure the equality of immigrants, to fight the reduction of the workers' standard of living and to prevent the import and export of strike-breakers. Liebknecht made this speech at the SPD party congress held at Essen in September 1907.)

Source: Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des Parteitages der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands. Abgehalten zu Essen vom 15. bis 21. September 1907, Berlin 1907, S. 284.

A poster from Calais Migrant Solidarity.

Resolution on immigration and emigration adopted by the Stuttgart Congress of the Second International on August 23, 1907

The congress declares:

The immigration and emigration of workers are phenomena that are just as inseparable from the essence of capitalism as unemployment, overproduction and workers’ underconsumption. They are often a way of reducing the workers’ participation in the production process and on occasion assume abnormal proportions as a result of political, religious and national persecution.

The congress does not seek a remedy to the potentially impending consequences for the workers from immigration and emigration in any economic or political exclusionary rules, because these are fruitless and reactionary by nature. This is particularly true of a restriction on the movement and the exclusion of foreign nationalities or races.

Instead, the congress declares it to be the duty of organised labour to resist the depression of its living standards that often occurs in the wake of the mass import of unorganised labour. In addition the congress declares it to be the duty of organised labour to prevent the import and export of strike-breakers. The congress recognises the difficulties which in many cases fall upon the proletariat in a country that is at a higher stage of capitalist development, as a result of the mass immigration of unorganised workers accustomed to lower living standards and from countries with a predominantly agrarian and agricultural culture, as well as the dangers that arise for it as a result of a specific form of immigration. However, congress does not believe that preventing particular nations or races from immigrating - something that is also reprehensible from the point of view of proletarian solidarity - is a suitable means of fighting these problems. It therefore recommends the following measures:

I. For the country of immigration

1. A ban on the export and import of those workers who have agreed on a contract that deprives them of the free disposal over their labour-power and wages.

2. Statutory protection of workers by shortening the working day, introducing a minimum wage rate, abolishing the sweat system and regulating home working

3. Abolition of all restrictions which prevent certain nationalities or races from staying in a country or which exclude them from the social, political and economic rights of the natives or impede them in exercising those rights. Extensive measures to facilitate naturalisation.

4. In so doing, the following principles should generally apply in the trade unions of all countries:

(a) unrestricted access of immigrant workers to the trade unions of all countries

(b) facilitating access by setting reasonable admission fees

(c) the ability to change from the trade union of one country to another for free, upon the fulfilment of all liabilities in the previous union

(d) striving to establish an international trade union cartel, which will make it possible to implement these principles and needs internationally.

5. Support for trade union organisations in those countries from which immigration primarily stems.

II. For the country of origin

1. The liveliest trade union agitation.

2. Education of the workers and the public on the true state of the working conditions in the country of origin.

3. An active agreement of the trade unions with the unions in the country of immigration for the purpose of a common approach towards the matter of immigration and emigration.

4. Since the emigration of labour is often artificially stimulated by railway and steamship companies, by land speculators and other bogus outfits, and by issuing false and scurrilous promises to the workers, the congress demands:

l) The monitoring of the shipping agencies, the emigration bureaus, and potentially legal or administrative measures against them to prevent emigration being abused in the interests of such capitalist enterprises.

III) Reorganisation of the transport sector, especially ships; the appointment of inspectors with disciplinary powers, recruited from the ranks of unionised workers in the country of origin and the country of immigration, to oversee regulations; welfare for newly arrived immigrants, so that they do not fall prey to exploitation by the parasites of capital from the outset.

Since the transport of migrants can only be statutorily regulated on an international level, the congress commissions the International Socialist Bureau to develop proposals to reorganise these matters, in which the furnishings and the equipment of ships must be standardised, as well as the minimum amount of airspace for every migrant. Particular emphasis should be placed on individual migrants arranging their passage directly with the company, without the intervention of any intermediate contractor.

These proposals shall be passed on to the party leaderships for the purposes of legislative application and for propaganda.

Source: Internationaler Sozialisten-Kongress, Berlin 1907, pp. 57-59.

Jairus Banaji discusses fascism and its three best thinkers of the left, Rosenberg, Reich, and Sartre.

This text is the transcript of a lecture given to the students and teachers of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, on 11^th March 2016 as part of the JNU Nationalism Lectures series. Jairus Banaji is Research Professor in the Department of Development Studies, SOAS, University of London. In 2016 he publishedExploring the Economy of Late Antiquity: Selected Essays (Cambridge) and is currently writing a book called A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism.

What I want to do is talk about fascism in a strictly historical context, I will leave you to draw the kinds of analogies, connections and overlaps that what I’m going to say suggests to you in terms of whether it resonates with our situation in India today, okay? I am going to leave that to you. The three themes I want to talk to you about, which I think are key elements of the political culture of fascism, are as follows.

The first is about the constructed nature of nationalism, you can also call this general theme ‘fascism and the myth of the nation’. The second theme is associated with Wilhelm Reich, who was a psychoanalyst who worked in Berlin and had a considerable influence on sectors of post-war feminism. Reich’s thesis was that patriarchy and the authoritarian family are the mainstay of the state’s power in a capitalist society. This formulation enables us to integrate feminism and revolutionary Marxism in a way in which they are not often seen as being integrated with each other. I’ll repeat that, because it’s such an important formulation: Reich’s thesis is that the authoritarian family is a veritable ‘factory’ of reactionary ideology and structure and as such it is the mainstay of the state’s power in a capitalist society. But particularly so under fascism, where this relationship between the two becomes overtly posited. And the third thesis I want to present to you by way of describing a third element of the culture of fascism is Sartre’s conception of manipulated seriality. I will explain later what I mean by that. At the heart of fascist politics is what he calls manipulated seriality. We need to understand this term “seriality” to understand the dynamics of politics in any capitalist state.

So these are the three broad planks or strands of argument I want to briefly speak about. The first one, the constructed nature of nationalism or what I’ve called ‘fascism and the myth of the nation’ is something that emerges very clearly in a short book that the German Marxist Arthur Rosenberg published in 1934, barely a year after he fled from Germany. Rosenberg was a Reichstag deputy for the Communist Party, that is to say, in Indian terms, he was a member of their Lok Sabha, because Germany had a similar political structure to ours, federal as well as central. He was not just a communist, he was on the left wing of the German Communist Party or the KPD, one of the leading figures of what was called the ‘Berlin Left’, along with the philosopher Karl Korsch. He resigned from the KPD in 1927 because he resented the excessive Russian interference in the affairs of the German party.

Now, the very title of Rosenberg’s essay shows you how original his contribution was to the left-wing understanding of fascism, because it was called Fascism as a Mass Movement. The Comintern didn’t really believe that fascism would last long. It didn’t believe it had deep roots. The Comintern saw fascism as a conspiracy hatched by finance capital, as if a collection of German bankers could sit somewhere and make fascism happen; as if Hitler was simply a puppet of finance capital; and as if the kind of mass appeal that the Nazi party generated in the late 1920s and early 1930s had no roots deeper than finance capital, which is a ridiculous view because it so reductive, it completely misses what is so unique to these kinds of right-wing movements. SoFascism as a Mass Movement was a direct challenge to the Comintern’s understanding of fascism, in other words, to the official Soviet line on fascism, i.e. that it doesn’t have deep roots and that it has nothing to do with culture and with mass mobilisation. What did Rosenberg argue? There are interesting overlaps between the three theses that I’m talking about, between Rosenberg, Reich, and Sartre, the three best thinkers of the left on the issue of fascism, there are interesting connections between the way they argued about fascism which I’ll try and draw out a bit later.

In Rosenberg, the argument is essentially as follows: fascism only succeeds as a mass movement; it might exist in a society politically, within the political spectrum, but it will remain marginal as long as it has not mobilized a mass base. (I said I wouldn’t talk about India but look at the watershed of the 1980s in India to see this. The state-sanctioned pogroms of 1984 gave renewed legitimacy to mass violence and for the first time fuelled the expansion of communal forces further to the right.) So fascism only succeeds as a mass movement, that was the central argument of Rosenberg’s essay. But then the question becomes – how does fascism, how do right-wing movements, construct a mass base? That is the vital question we have to try and understand in our context here in India. His answer, it’s a very interesting answer, was that the ideology which people call “fascist” was already widespread in Europe by 1914. Now remember that the Nazi party wasn’t formed till the 1920s, and Hitler and the Nazi party didn’t become important until the very end of the 1920s, when the economic crisis hit Germany full blast.

So what is Rosenberg saying when he says that the ideology we call ‘fascist’ was already widespread in European society by 1914? He is reversing the relationship between politics and ideology, he is saying the ideology is not a creation of the political party, the political party or movement is a creation of the ideology. So he is pointing to some slow-moving process within European politics and society which can be traced back to the 1870s and 1880s, and what is that? As and when parliamentary democracy began to spread in Europe, the traditional elites of European society were faced with a dilemma, namely, how do they win elections? I mean, these traditional elites have absolutely no appeal to the masses, absolutely none. They represent the interests of big business and big landed property, why on earth would they have any appeal to the masses, because they are in fact the oppressors of the working people. But this is in fact where the oppressor’s ideology becomes important, because the kind of politics that emerged in Europe in the 1870s and 1880s is what Rosenberg called a ‘new authoritarian conservatism’. A conservatism of this type became widespread in Europe. The ‘new authoritarian conservatism’ was the nineteenth-century precursor of fascist ideology, of the fascisms that became more dominant later on.

Now fascist ideology is actually only a pastiche of motifs, it is a pastiche of different ideological currents, it has very little coherence on its own. It’s important to say this because it means you have to try and look at the individual components of a fascist ideology, and these should be obvious to us by today, for example, anti-semitism and other forms of racism; support for a strong state that can act externally, they wanted German capital to become German imperialism so that it could compete effectively on the world market, hence support for imperialism, for an aggressive external thrust; hostility to labour, incredible hostility to labour and to the organised working class; authoritarianism and connected with that patriarchy; and the last and most important of these components, of the kind of ideological pastiche that makes up fascism, is nationalism. The key to the success of the Right wing in European politics from the 1870s onwards lies in the emergence of a new kind of nationalism, which European politics hadn’t known before the 1870s. That kind of aggressive, xenophobic nationalism was not there on the European scene in 1848, it wasn’t really there even in the 1860s when Marx was writing Capital, it became dominant and much more aggressive, overtly aggressive, from the 1870s onwards. And that’s partly linked to the rush for colonies, the whole frantic rush to divide up Africa, to grab pieces of territory and so on. But it’s not only linked to that. I don’t want to have a kind of economic-reductive explanation of nationalism itself.

So what do I mean by the constructed nature of nationalism, why call it fascism and the myth of the nation? Do nations exist? Simple question, do nations exist the way that classes exist? Let me ask you that. I know what a class is when I see it. I know what the middle class is in a city like Bombay and I know what kind of culture is epitomized by the middle class in India today. So I can see the middle class, I see its culture, I see its politics, and if I were living somewhere else, for example in rural India, I would confront other classes. I know what the working class looks like, I know where the working class is employed and there are other working classes who are not employed in large-scale units of production, they are employed in the home and so on and so forth. But the point about class is that these are real communities, these are real existing entities, even when they have no sense of themselves as such. Who on earth would want to argue that a nation has the same ontology as a class, that a nation exists in the same sense that classes exist?

Since nationalism is one of the main themes in these lectures, let me just sum up my own position vis-à-vis the two dominant interpretations or models of nationalism accepted currently. The first is associated with Ernst Gellner. Gellner’s position was totally supported by Hobsbawm. The other position, which in some ways became more popular from the 1980s is the one Benedict Anderson argued in Imagined Communities. Benedict Anderson describes the nation as an imagined community, but he wants to give a sort of positive spin to the word “imagined”, which is very, very different from the way Gellner understood nations and nationalism. Hobsbawm has this to say on the constructed nature of nationalism: ‘With Gellner, I would stress the element of artefact, invention and social engineering which enters into the making of nations’, then he quotes Gellner, quote, ‘Nations as a natural, God-given way of classifying people, as an inherent political destiny is a myth,’ that’s why I said fascism and the myth of the nation. ‘Nationalism, which sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them and often obliterates pre-existing cultures, that is a reality,’ and that’s the dissymmetry here, nations are a myth, nationalism is a reality, and then Hobsbawm, by way of agreeing with this, says, ‘In short, for the purposes of analysis, nationalism comes before nations. Nations do not make states and nationalisms but the other way around,’ that’s the argument made by Gellner and Hobsbawm, which I completely agree with.

Now in contrast to that, Anderson says, ‘Gellner makes a comparable point when he rules that nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness…’ (why not? because nations don’t pre-exist nationalism) ‘He [Gellner] invents nations where they do not exist. The drawback to this formulation,’ says Anderson, ‘is that Gellner is so anxious to show that nationalism masquerades under false pretences, that he assimilates invention to fabrication and to falsity rather than to imagining and creation.’ Now look at the dividing-line here: one of them is saying – nations are fabricated, nations are fabrications; the other guy is saying – No, no, not quite, they are imaginings. So Anderson prefers to put it like that, imaginings and creations. In this way Anderson is implying that for Gellner true communities exist which can be juxtaposed to nations. What does Anderson have in mind? Very clearly, class. It’s very clear that he has class in mind, for him class is as imagined a community as the nation is. What does he mean by imagining? The nation is imagined as a community, because it is always conceived as a ‘deep horizontal comradeship’. Amazing! The obvious question, the big elephant in the room facing Anderson here is, Who does the imagining? Even if you suppose that nations are imagined communities, who on earth is doing the imagining? As far as I’m concerned he hasn’t answered that. And what sense does ‘comradeship’ have with the kind of profoundly unequal divisions that make up any country? What sense does it make to talk about a nation as a ‘deep horizontal comradeship’? I can understand class being conceived and discussed in those terms, but not the nation.

There’s one more thinker I want to bring into the picture, her name is Liah Greenfeld. She wrote a book called Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity in which she examines nationalism in the context of France, Russia, Germany, etc. Now, she makes an interesting point which has a direct bearing on India. ‘Much more often a nation is defined not as a composite entity’, that means as something made up of individuals, ‘but as a collective individual (This is creepy! It reminds me of Arnab Goswami…) endowed with a will and interest of its own, which are independent of and take priority over the wills and interests of human individuals within the nation.’ Those human individuals are you and I, real people, real existential entities, we meet with each other, we talk to each other and so on. But no, Arnab will have none of this, for him the supreme individual, the only one that matters is “the nation”: ‘the nation demands to know!’ Arnab keeps screeching at us every evening. So what does Greenfeld say about this conception of nationalism? ‘Such a definition of the nation results in collectivistic nationalism.’ Collectivistic nationalism is a good term for what we are up against in India today. ‘Collectivistic nationalisms tend to be authoritarian and imply a fundamental inequality between a small group of self-appointed interpreters of the will of the nation– the leaders – and the masses, who have to adapt to the elite’s interpretations.’ Self-appointed interpreters of the will of the nation is precisely what we are up against in India today! As Greenfeld says, this nationalism is intrinsically authoritarian. In India a collectivistic, authoritarian nationalism is exactly what is being pushed down our throats today and used against the students in JNU.

That’s one part of Rosenberg’s argument, the argument about the constructed or mythical character of the nation. There is another part which is worth drawing attention to. Remember he said that the ideology which is called fascist was already widespread by 1914, so in a sense, Nazism was a product of that ideology, not the other way around. But Rosenberg went on to make another important point. He said, what was peculiar to modern fascism was the ‘stormtrooper tactic’, as he called it. What’s peculiar to modern fascism are the stormtroopers. Now, we’ve had a lot of experience with stormtroopers here in India recently, but I had promised I’d not talk about India, so I’ll leave it to you to make the connection.

‘Stormtroopers’, the term basically comes from warfare. These are those elite squads that storm the trenches of the enemy. In trench warfare, which was the dominant method of warfare in the First World War. If you’ve seen this brilliant film called War Horse, it’s all about trench warfare, which is one of the bloodiest, most manual forms of warfare imaginable. True, they had already started having aircraft and so on but the bulk of the killing took place in the fields, and it took place across trenches and between trenches, and trench warfare was essentially about storming the trenches.

Now transposed to politics, this is what the stormtrooper does. The Left did not invent the concept of the political stormtrooper, it was the Right that invented it. The stormtroopers were those squads, in Italy they were called squadristi, that helped the Italian landowners in the south break strikes by sharecroppers, break those strikes, eliminate, murder the leaders of their unions in southern Italy. When the industrialists in the north saw what the stormtroopers were doing in the south, they invited them to the north, because they were confronted by working-class insurgency, so they invited the stormtroopers to the north.

Now the important point about the stormtroopers is what Rosenberg says – and I want to quote from this book because it so accurately captures the political scenario of the last six weeks. This is what he says about the stormtroopers:

‘The activities of the stormtroopers of the fascist type are in complete violation of the laws. Legally, the stormtroopers should be tried and sentenced to prison, but in fact nothing of the sort happens. Their conviction in the courts is pure show, either they do not serve their sentence or they are soon pardoned. In this way the ruling class shows its stormtrooper heroes how grateful and sympathetic it is.’

Basically, the argument here is that fascism begins to flourish in a bourgeois democracy only with the active complicity and the connivance of the state. We’ve experienced this recently in the last six weeks, we’ve seen how entities of the state have reacted, how events have unfolded. The complicity, the connivance of the state in allowing a free hand to the stormtroopers is a crucial part of the story of why fascist organisations do not simply disappear from the scene, they are covertly patronized by the existing state even when that state, formally speaking, represents a constitutional democracy such as, for example, the Weimar Republic in Germany or our own democracy in India. So much for Rosenberg. I think those two or three insights are quite valuable.

Now, I want to move on to Wilhelm Reich, to an entirely different level of mediation from Rosenberg’s picture of the kind of aggressive xenophobic nationalism that emerged in Europe in the late nineteenth century. Reich’s key thesis is that patriarchy and the authoritarian family are the mainstay of the state’s power. And in a sense Reich is not moving away from the theme of nationalism, he is addressing the same theme, what he is suggesting is a mechanism for the inculcation of nationalism from a young age.

Reich published The Mass Psychology of Fascism in 1933, a year before Rosenberg’s booklet. He had started drafting the book in 1931, and the problem he confronted was, why do the working masses allow themselves to be mobilized into movements that are manifestly opposed to their economic interest? This is a riddle. Why do the working people allow themselves to be galvanized behind right-wing chariots. Why? It’s a real riddle, because those movements have nothing to offer to the working masses. This riddle, Reich argues, cannot be solved economically, he rejected reductionism of any sort, there was no economic solution to the riddle, there was no economic explanation for it. On the other hand, if the solution to the riddle lay in ideology, we would have to explain what it means to say this, and that is what Reich sets out to do by making the family central to the kind of subjectivity pre-supposed in fascism.

The word ‘subjectivity’ now comes into the picture. There is a fascist subjectivity. There is a subjectivity presupposed in fascism and in the way it works, and the great themes that Reich develops in The Mass Psychology of Fascism can be summed up in the three vectors that run through the first two chapters of his book (there’s an excellent translation ofTheMass Psychology by Theodore Wolfe availablehere). The crucial part of Reich’s book is his conception of ideology as a material force. In other words, ideology has nothing to do with ideas in some abstract sense, it is not a mental phenomenon, it is very much rooted, bio-psychologically grounded, in structures that are moulded by the family, by ‘tradition’, and by a repressed and often brutalized sexuality. In other words, ideology is a material force, it is grounded in the family.

The second vector that runs though Reich’s argument is his conception of patriarchy as the mainstay of the state’s power. I mentioned this earlier. And thirdly, Reich claims, there is a resonance between the authoritarian character-structures that are moulded inside the patriarchal family and the Führer ideology which is characteristic of all right-wing mass movements. Now this Führer ideology revolves around a mass leader, someone with a strong, commanding will and ability to dominate the masses. Was Indira Gandhi a Führer in this sense? Not quite, she was an authoritarian leader, a strong-willed authoritarian political figure. She was quite capable of imposing a state of emergency on the whole country, but what political figure can you think of in India’s recent political experience that strikes you as coming close to the figure of a Führer? A mass leader with a commanding will, a massive chest and so on?  But who is it that creates the Führer? The people who support the Führer, the Führer would be nothing without those people. So that’s what Reich is driving at, that to explain this dialectic between leader and mass we have to invoke character-structures of a certain type, the authoritarian, repressed character-structure and the resonance this finds in the structure of the Führer; one creates or at least allows for the other.

Again, there is a reversal of causality, a reversal of the direction in which the influence moves. Again it is the ‘mass’ that comes first, the mass culture that comes first, and the politics that comes second. Politics in some sense is a reflection of that mass-culture. So I won’t say anything more about Reich, I think the whole idea of the family as a ‘factory’ of reactionary ideologies, not all families, but traditional, authoritarian families, patriarchal families as factories of reactionary ideology, is fundamental. And the family as a battle-ground where the child will either survive as an independent individual later on in life, or be permanently scarred by childhood, defeated on the battlefield of childhood, defeated in the family. There’s a brilliant movie by Theodor Kotulla called Aus einem deutschen Leben (Death Is My Trade, 1977), it’s about a concentration-camp commander, and it traces the biography of this individual. The man ends up on an assembly line processing death in the concentration camps in the 1940s, so the director is effectively asking, how could such an individual be formed? What is the process that allows for such an individual to emerge? Biographically, existentially, how can someone end up manning concentration camps, working on assembly lines of death? So the film starts with childhood and it’s a violent childhood, in a typically lower-middle class, rural Prussian family, with a violent authority figure in the family, namely, the father. Now this is the first sense in which the child confronts the state.

In childhood, if you cannot stand up for your mother against your father, if you cannot resist the violence of your father, there is a definite sense in which you have already lost the battle. When you grow up, become an adult, you are not going to be able to survive the battles of authority, you will go on to be submissive to your employer, worship the state, you will worship state authorities and cringe before the power they embody. The mechanism involved here is identification, it’s a kind of compensation mechanism, you lost in childhood, now as a grown-up you identify with authority, there you are, you have won. Now, carry this one step further into the realm of fascist politics and you’ll see where the Führer figure is coming from.

There is a brilliant passage in Mass Psychology where Reich talks about the individuals who support and worship the Führer as people who felt completely helpless in childhood. He stresses this helplessness, because when such children grow up, they seek compensation in this particular form. They lack any kind of independence of their own. They cannot think critically, they have been dominated emotionally, been scarred by childhood, and so on. So think about this. Think about the importance of character-structures, the kind of structures that are being moulded in the ‘traditional’ family in India and elsewhere. And again feminism has a major role to play, here is one of those bridges between feminism and Left politics. To talk about the family as the site of the first class struggle, the first battle, the first battle with authority.

Now, to Sartre, finally Sartre and his conception of manipulated seriality as the heart of fascist politics. There are classes in society, Sartre doesn’t dispute that, but he divides society into those who are organised (that is, groups) and those who are not (series). It’s a straightforward sociology; if you are organized you can do things, you have some degree of power; if you’re not, you can’t do a thing and you can have everything done to you. Take this away as the main lesson of this particular lecture, the division between organised groups and the unorganised mass which he calls ‘seriality’. When you wait at a bus stop for a bus, you have no intrinsic connection with the other people who are waiting for the bus except the bus itself. The bus is what unifies you, the bus is your external kind of unity, but otherwise you have no internal relationship with the people you’re waiting for the bus with. So he takes the example of the bus queue and develops it further and further. The type of ensemble we are talking about here is the series, and seriality is the condition of being part of the series.

Groups dominate series because they are organised and have the capacity to act collectively. The vast mass of any modern society forms part of the inert structures that Sartre calls the series. Here ‘inert’ simply means unable to act, powerless. The state for Sartre is an ensemble of organised groups most of which have long ago evolved into institutions. We talk about the bureaucracy, the army, the media, political parties and so on, but have you wondered about the kind of dense institutional realities these entities represent? They are profoundly institutionalised and have become part of automatically functioning machines. The important point is that these ‘machines’ would be literally unintelligible to us unless we assumed that they all emerged out of organised groups, just as the groups themselves emerged out of series/seriality, as every group does. The ruling class can rule because at its heart lies an ensemble of organised groups that have the capacity to control and dominate the masses. That’s why trade unions are so important for workers. The union is their first experience of collective strength and solidarity. As an organised group it has the capacity to confront other organised groups. Employers are of course extremely well organised. So are the media. The organised groups that form the backbone of the media and of employers as a class are part of the vast ensemble of groups that make up the power of the state.   

So what does ‘manipulated seriality’ mean? Well, this is Sartre’s argument: organised groups are constantly working serialities. He says working serialities, meaning working on serialities or working on series, by a process which he calls ‘extero-conditioning’. He takes that term from an American sociologist called Riesman in The Lonely Crowd. For example, the millions of news consumers who watch the same TV channels with no connection between themselves except the anchor and the news they watch, believing what the others believe, as if there really are ‘others’ who believe all this, are a perfect example of manipulated seriality. As long as ‘social media’ is organised differently, this danger is much less there. The process of domination of organised groups over series is the essential process by which rule occurs. How does the ruling class rule? It rules in this particular way, as the domination of groups over series. Under the pressure of extero-conditioning, series become ‘worked matter’.  As serial behaviour (pogroms, lynchings, ‘riots’, etc.) violence is worked matter, the product of organised groups acting on series in particular ways.

When Sartre says that manipulated seriality is the heart of fascist politics, it is this group/series relation he has in mind. The pogrom is the sovereign group (the state) or a non-state organised group directing serialities in such a way that it is actually extracting actions from series. There is nothing spontaneous about pogroms. The series is manipulated from the outside to act as if this was the organic action of a group and not the passive activity of a series. (A criminal jurisdiction that prosecutes only those who engaged in acts of violence and discounts the responsibility of the real commanders behind the scenes reflects a primitive judicial culture, out of line with international best practice.) The climate of violence that has been created in India today with black-coated stormtroopers attacking student leaders with the full complicity of the state is driven by a ‘patriotic rage’ that has been ‘manufactured’ (Rosenberg’s expression). Nationalism is mobilised to intensify the climate of violence with slogans like ‘You have insulted my country’, ‘you are anti-national’, and so on. I wanted to go on to talk about other things, but I think I’ll leave it at that.

Jairus Banaji, ‘Nationalism is the bedrock upon which all fascist movements have built themselves’, 20 March 2016, https://www.sabrangindia.in/article/nationalism-bedrock-upon-which-all-fascist-movements-have-built-themselves

Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Second edn (Cornell University Press, 2009)

Des Raj Goyal, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (Delhi, 1979)

Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Harvard University Press, 1993)

Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, Second edn (Cambridge, 2012)

Arthur Rosenberg, ‘Fascism as a Mass Movement’, Historical Materialism 20/1 (2012), pp. 133–89; reprinted in J. Banaji (ed.), Fascism: Essays on Europe and India, Second edn (Three Essays Collective, 2016)

Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, translated Theodore Wolfe (1946), accessible here:http://www.whale.to/b/reich.pdf

Arthur Duhé replies to Frédéric Lordon at London HM 2016 on Spinoza, Marx and indignation.

Arthur Duhé is a D.Phil Candidate in International Relations at the University of Oxford. His PhD thesis on Spinoza's theory of international relations both aims to understand Spinoza in his own historical context and to link his philosophy to our contemporary issues. This talk was given on 13 November 2016 at a panel entitled 'The Spinoza/Marx Relationship' with Frédéric Lordon and Panagiotis Sotiris, chaired by Sebastian Budgen. A French version of this talk can be found here.

Frédéric Lordon’s book, Willing Slaves of Capital – Spinoza and Marx on Desire[1] belongs to an on-going intellectual trend  coined as Spinozist Marxism. Although this trend has been extremely fertile and thought-provoking, I will focus here on the tensions that the fundamental differences between Spinoza and Marx’s philosophies produce. To do so, I will first analyse the notion of indignation, which reveals an irreconcilable opposition between a Marxist pole and a Spinozist one. I will argue that these tensions can be perceived in both Frédéric Lordon’s Willing Slaves of Capital and Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri’sCommonwealth[2] and I will compare how each of them deals with this issue. These two books therefore constitute precious laboratories to bring out the philosophical assumptions and consequences that are linked to the definition of indignation.

What is Spinozist Marxism?

As stated above, these two books enter a longer tradition and I would like first to present shortly Spinozist Marxism. This movement starts with Louis Althusser, who declared in his ‘Elements of Autocritics’ (1974): ‘We were not Structuralists … But now, we can confess why: we were guilty of a passion much more powerful and compromising: we were Spinozists’.[3] Althusser is undoubtedly the figure that most prominently supported the renewal of Spinozist studies with the aim of combining Spinoza and Marx and challenging the more traditional couple Hegel and Marx. To do so, he created in 1967 the Spinoza group at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and invited other intellectual figures to join them, such as Gilles Deleuze or Alexandre Matheron. However, even though Spinozist Marxism originated in Paris in 1967, it has since then crossed the Alps, the Atlantic Ocean and, to a lesser extent, the Channel.

Cesare Casarino in his article ‘Marx before Spinoza’[4] offers the most exhaustive description of Spinozist Marxism, the latter being divided into several categories:

•   1 - Thinkers who have written about Marx and Spinoza in separate yet closely related works. For example, Negri and Balibar.
•  2 - Thinkers who refer implicitly or in passing to the relation between Spinoza and Marx, such as Althusser.
•  3 - Thinkers whose entire thought is imbued thoroughly with Spinozian and Marxian problematics, see Deleuze’s thought and Negri and Hardt’s collaborative works.
• 4  - Thinkers who confront the Spinoza-Marx relation indirectly yet significantly via the examination of a third and related thinker, the best example being Macherey’s book entitled Hegel or Spinoza.
•  5 - Thinkers who directly refer to both Spinoza and Marx, and Frédéric Lordon is one of them.
•  

In sum, ‘the body of Spinozist Marxism is abundant, yet the literature on Spinoza and Marx is thin’.[4bis] I would add that this literature explicitly focused on Marx and Spinoza is particularly useful for us as it highlights the fertility of this rapprochement, but also, in a more critical manner, since it reveals some unsurpassable tensions. One of these tensions, I believe, is to be found in indignation.

A definition of indignation

Indignation, in Spinoza’s philosophy, is a form of affective imitation described in the Ethics as such: ‘if we imagine [someone toward whom we have had no affect] to affect [a thing like us], we shall be affected with hate toward him’.[5] One of the most interesting features of indignation is that it tends to spread, thanks to the affective mechanisms described in theEthics. Because it is contagious, indignation is at the root of any revolution or revolt. Indeed, when the ruler changes ‘to indignation the common fear of most of the citizens, by this very fact the commonwealth is dissolved, and the contract comes to an end; and therefore such contract is vindicated not by the civil law, but by the law of war’.[6]

In sum, indignation highlights why the multitude sometimes refuses to see its power captured by the authority of institutions. En passant, I think that the mechanisms of indignation appeared very clearly in the recent social movements against police violence in Morocco, following the death of a fisherman crushed by a garbage truck. The same scheme could also be found at the origins of the Arab Spring in Tunisia in 2010.

In other terms, Negri and Hardt are right to state that: ‘Indignation, as Spinoza notes, is the ground zero, the basic material from which movements of revolt and rebellion develop’.[7]

Indignation and dialectic

In both Willing Slaves of Capital andCommonwealth, the notion of indignation is presented not only as a key to understand how revolutions work, but also as ‘the affective historical force that is capable of bifurcating the course of events’.[8] Were indignation the affect that could lead to the end of capitalism, it would be a fair reason to pay attention to it. But, ‘can indignation lead to a process of self-determination?’[9]

In order to respond to this question, I will have first to make a digression. In a famous passage of the second Postface of the German edition of the Capital, Marx enhances the differences between Hegel’s dialectic and his own materialist dialectic. The latter implies that the concrete relations of production within the capitalist society necessarily lead to a ‘general crisis’, whose climax is the revolution of the proletariat against capitalist society itself. In other words, ‘the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself’,[10] which is characteristic of the dialectic movement. At the risk of caricaturing his philosophy, Marx depicts three historical steps that are necessarily enchained together: first, an age of Capitalism in which the Bourgeoisie is led to extend as much as it can the process of industrialization and the accumulation of capital; then, the revolution of the Proletariat; and, finally, the establishment of a communist society.

In Commonwealth, Hardt and Negri use indignation to broaden the Marxist and communist revolutionary traditions that ‘understand the revolutionary process as taking place primarily within the field of economic production’.[11] With this notion of indignation, Hardt and Negri can include in their analysis cases of revolts such as the riots in suburbs, that are not directly targeting factories or the economic system more broadly speaking. For instance, it is unclear that the riots in Morocco or during the Arab Spring were based on anti-capitalist aims or were trying to undermine the socio-economic system at all. Thanks to this Spinozist addendum, these authors can keep the core of the Marxist dialectic process that, otherwise, would be difficult to apply to some phenomena of the contemporary world. If Hardt and Negri were the first to explicitly ask whether indignation could lead to emancipation, they do not tackle this issue very clearly. I assume that this absence of response has yet to be interpreted as a positive answer: for them indignation is the affect that will produce the revolution, which will end capitalism to settle a more emancipated society.

But by doing so, Hardt and Negri separate indignation from the whole Spinozist system in which it first appeared. Two distinct critiques can be made here. First, Hardt and Negri tend to change the nature of Spinozist affects. This critique has been made in ‘The Indignant Multitude: Spinozist Marxism after Empire’ by Sean Grattan.[12] Considering Negri’s article ‘Value and Affect’, Grattan notices that affect is first defined as ‘a power of transformation, a force of self-valorisation,’ then as ‘a power of appropriation,’ and finally as ‘an expansive power’. But Spinoza’s definition is much more ambivalent: ‘by affect, I understand affections of the body by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained’ (Ethics III, d3). Given this definition, we understand why, in Spinoza’sEthics, most of the affects are dual, such as joy/sadness; hate/love, and so on. As it has been stated above, indignation is a sad affect and thus leads to a diminution of power. Even though Grattan is wrong to assume that indignation therefore ‘weakens our ability to act in the world’ since Spinoza argues that ‘we strive to deny whatever we imagine affects with sadness ourselves or what we love’ (Ethics III, proposition 25),[13] it is however true that indignation is a sad affect. Spinoza is as ambivalent concerning indignation as he is vis-à-vis the notion of multitude itself: surely, indignation can overthrow despotism; but it can also transform people into theultimi barbarorum (the last barbarians) that lynched the brothers De Witt in 1672.[14] In William Godwin’s words, there is a risk that ‘revolution is engendered by an indignation with a tyranny yet is itself pregnant with tyranny’.[15]

The second critique concerns the teleological aspect which is linked to the notion of dialectic. Even though Hardt and Negri do not argue that indignation will dialectically lead to the negation of the negation, they do enhance the optimistic assumption that it could work, without even mentioning that it may as well lead to an impasse. Again, there is no value of negativity in Spinoza’s philosophy. The Spinozist immanence is plain positivity, without any rest. Even a sad affect, such as indignation, is only to be understood as a lower degree of power so as something that is inherently positive. Althusser here confessed that ‘Spinoza will always miss what Hegel gave to Marx, namely contradiction’ and by contradiction, Althusser understood the dialectic contradiction. Because Spinoza refuses the very notion of negativity, the dialectic process is not understandable in Spinozist terms. Even though Spinoza’s materialism is radically deterministic, it is not teleological as Spinoza’s God is deprived of any form of will or desire (as it clear from the Appendix of Ethics I). In other words, history, for Spinoza, is a chain of causes and consequences that goes infinitely without any aim.

Indignation of the Willing Slaves

I would like now to compare the understanding of indignation in Commonwealth, with Frédéric Lordon’s one. As he stated explicitly, Frédéric Lordon wants to complete Marx’s structuralism with Spinoza’s anthropology of passions. Here again, the analysis of passions is for Frédéric Lordon a way to go beyond an opposition between social classes - the Proletariat and the Bourgeoisie - that has been undermined by the emergence of the executive workers. Indeed, the latter embodied the paradox of joyful workers, or, to echo the English title of Frédéric Lordon’s book, 'willing slaves'. Consequently, affects are both the notions that help to understand our modernity by shedding light on our relations of production, and the starting point to think about the change that could occur. And here, Frédéric Lordon is crystal clear: indignation is the motor of historical processes.

Nevertheless, echoing Althusser for whom materialism was an imperative to stop telling ourselves stories, Frédéric Lordon refuses the necessity of the dialectic process and states that ‘true communism does not come about immediately just because capitalism has been (hypothetically) defeated: can indignation lead to a process of self-determination? Frédéric Lordon’s response seems to be that indignation is necessary but insufficient. However, he affirms that indignation is as such a desire to live ex suo ingenio, following one’s nature:

‘indignation sometimes spreads like syphilis. It overturns the affective equilibria that have until then determined the subjects to submit to institutional relations, and leads them to desire to live, not according to their free will, but as it pleases them – ex suo ingenio – which implies, not some miraculous leap into the unconditioned, but a step into a life determined in another way.’[16]

I would disagree with the following point. First, because the fact that the multitude wants to suppress an order that they hate does not necessarily imply that it positively seeks its own emancipation. It is not because you consider that this order should be condemned that you have a clear idea of what you want instead. Second, the affective agreement on which indignation is based cannot be an agreement in nature because ‘insofar as men are subject to passions, they cannot be said to agree in nature’, [17] so indignation is already another order that shapes individuals’ natures (ingenia).

But this consideration is secondary, what is much more important is the fact that Frédéric Lordon clearly shows that indignation is not a dialectical process as he argues that ‘it is still possible to set history on the march again, or more accurately, to set in motion a possible history of transcending capitalism – but an open-ended history, not yet written and without any teleological guarantees’.[18] The difference between Frédéric Lordon and the authors ofCommonwealth becomes obvious here: by refusing any form of blind optimism, Frédéric Lordon adopts another philosophy of history.

Frédéric Lordon claims here Spinozist realism: ‘It is perhaps on this precise point that the Spinozist realism of the passions is most useful to the Marxian utopia: as a sobering-up. The extinction of politics by the final dissolution of classes and the conflict between them, transcending all antagonisms by the victory of the working class, that non-class without any class interest, are post-political phantasmagoria, perhaps Marx’s deepest anthropological error’.[19] So not only he stands here in favour of a Spinozist stance, but he denounces what he perceives as the limits of Marxism. Furthermore, it is probably not innocent that Marx, who distinguished his thought from what he called utopian forms of socialism, is here associated by Frédéric Lordon with utopia. Being aware of the tensions between Spinoza and Marx, Frédéric Lordon favours a more rigorous Spinozist approach of indignation.

To conclude, there are tensions produced by the dialectical movement of history as depicted by Marx and the mechanisms of indignation. Commonwealth andWilling Slaves of Capital apparently offer us a dilemma: either, we decide to follow Marx by considering that the affective mechanisms of indignation are part and parcel of the dialectical process; or we decide to convert Marxism to Spinozism by giving up the teleological perspective on history. As I understand it, there is novia media possible here.

Does it mean that Spinozist Marxism is based on weak foundations and that it is therefore fallacious to maintain this philosophical relationship? As a response, I will quote here Cesare Casarino for whom: ‘Their meeting, thus, is not unlike the infinitely repeated yet always impossible rendezvous between the man and the woman in Alain Resnais’ L’Année dernière à Marienbad’.[20] This impossible rendez-vous is nevertheless fertile as it opens several theoretical options and it avoids the establishment of a dogmatic school of thought.

In the last decade, several books have been published about the use of Spinoza to think about our world. Chantal Jaquet used Spinozist concepts within the field of sociology,[21] Antonio Damasio based his works in neurology on Spinoza’s materialism.[22] And Frédéric Lordon published several books on the use of affects in economics, sociology and political sciences.[23] This recent emulation may be the sign of a new configuration of the relation between Spinoza and Marx: it may be the first step of a shift from Spinozist Marxism to Marxist Spinozism, the first exploration of a philosophy that would try to go beyond Marx with Spinoza.

References

Althusser, L. (1974) ‘Eléments d’autocritique’, in Solitude de Machiavel. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France

Casarino, C. (2011) ‘Marx before Spinoza: Notes toward an Investigation’ in Spinoza Now (edited by Vardoulakis, D.). University of Minnesota Press

Citton, Y., Lordon, F. (2008) Spinoza et les sciences sociales : De la puissance de la multitude à l’économie des affects. Paris: Editions d’Amsterdam

Damasio, A. (2013) Looking for Spinoza. London: William Heinemann.

Delruelle, E. (2013) ‘Nous avons été spinozistes. Spinoza et le marxisme en France’, paper given in ‘L’actualité du Tractatus de Spinoza et la question théologico-politique’ organized by l’Université Libre de Bruxelles.

Godwin, W. (1793) Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness, vol. 2, book 4, chap. 2

Grattan, S. (2011) ‘The Indignant Multitude: Spinozist Marxism after Empire’ in Mediations, vol. 25, n°2.

Hardt, M., Negri, A. (2011) Commonwealth. Harvard University Press

Jaquet, C. (2014) Les Transclasses ou la Non-Reproduction. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France

Lordon, F. (2006) L'Intérêt souverain : essai d'anthropologie économique spinoziste. Paris: La Fabrique

Lordon, F. (2013) La Société des affects : pour un structuralisme des passions. Paris: Editions d’Amsterdam

Lordon, F. (2014) Willing Slaves of Capital – Spinoza and Marx on Desire. Verso Books

Lordon, F. (2015) Imperium : structures et affects des corps politiques. Paris: La Fabrique

Lordon, F. (2016) Les affects de la politique. Paris: Editions du Seuil

Marx, K. (2015) The Communist Manifesto. Penguin Classics.

Montag, W. (2005) ‘Who is afraid of the multitude?’ in South Atlantic Quarterly, 104:4

[1] Lordon, F. (2014)Willing Slaves of Capital – Spinoza and Marx on Desire. Verso Books

[2] Hardt, M., Negri, A. (2011)Commonwealth. Harvard University Press

[3] My translation, Althusser, L. (1974) ‘Eléments d’autocritique’, inSolitude de Machiavel. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, p.181, quoted in Delruelle, E. (2013) ‘Nous avons été spinozistes. Spinoza et le marxisme en France’, paper given in ‘L’actualité du Tractatus de Spinoza et la question théologico-politique’ organized by l’Université Libre de Bruxelles.

[4] Casarino, C. (2011) ‘Marx before Spinoza: Notes toward an Investigation’ inSpinoza Now (edited by Vardoulakis, D.). University of Minnesota Press.

[4bis] Casarino, C. (2011) ‘Marx before Spinoza: Notes toward an Investigation’, op. cit., note 3

[5]Ethics, III, prop. 27, cor. 1(traduction E. Curley)

[6]Political Treatise, chap. 4 §6

[7]Commonwealth, op. cit., p. 235

[8]Willing Slaves of Capital, op. cit. p. 103

[9]Commonwealth, op. cit., p. 236

[10] Marx, K. (2015)The Communist Manifesto. Penguin Classics.

[11]Commonwealth, op. cit., p. 239

[12] Grattan, S. (2011) ‘The Indignant Multitude: Spinozist Marxism after Empire’ inMediations, vol. 25, n°2.

[13] This convincing argument can be read inWilling Slaves of Capital.

[14] Montag, W. (2005) ‘Who is afraid of the multitude?’ inSouth Atlantic Quarterly, 104:4

[15] Godwin, W. (1793)Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness, vol. 2, book 4, chap. 2

[16]Willing Slaves of Capital, op. cit. p. 98

[17]Ethics IV, prop. 32

[18]Willing Slaves of Capital, op. cit., p. 103

[19]Ibid., p. 109

[20] ‘Marx before Spinoza: Notes toward an Investigation’, op. cit.

[21] Jaquet, C. (2014)Les Transclasses ou la Non-Reproduction. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France

[22] Damasio, A. (2013) Looking for Spinoza. London: William Heinemann.

[23] Lordon, F. (2006)L'Intérêt souverain : essai d'anthropologie économique spinoziste. Paris: La Fabrique; Citton, Y., Lordon, F. (2008)Spinoza et les sciences sociales : De la puissance de la multitude à l’économie des affects. Paris: Editions d’Amsterdam; Lordon, F. (2013) La Société des affects : pour un structuralisme des passions. Paris: Editions d’Amsterdam; Lordon, F. (2015) Imperium : structures et affects des corps politiques. Paris: La Fabrique; Lordon, F. (2016) Les affects de la politique. Paris: Editions du Seuil.

In memory of Mark Fisher (1968-2017), we republish from his blog k-punk the following text he presented at the 2009 London Historical Materialism Conference and posted on 29 November 2009. Mark Fisher contributed in many ways to the journal. His groundbreaking work will continue to influence us, as editors and contributors to developing Marxism worldwide and across various disciplines and political spaces. Acollection page has been set up to help his family with his tragic and sudden death. We recommend the following obituaries byJuliet Jacques,David Stubbs,Alex Niven,Simon Reynolds,Craig Gent, andOwen Hatherley.

Thanks to Alberto Toscano, Ben Noys andEvan Calder Williams for making today's panel on Apocalypse Marxism at the Historical Materialism conference such a success. Parts of the text I used today have appeared here before, but I have pasted below the new bits, the product of some just-in-time theoretical production this morning.

Prof. Costas Lapavitsas and Dr. Geoffrey Ingham discuss 'Thinking about Money' on 18 January 2017 at the SOAS, London.

https://soundcloud.com/soaseconomics/thinking-about-money-part-i

The recording is part of the symposium and launch of Marxist Monetary Theory,a collection of papers by Costas Lapavitsas part of the HM book series published by Brill. 

Money and finance are pre-eminent, even dominant, features of contemporary capitalism. Costas Lapavitsas was among the first political economists to notice their ascendancy and devote his research to it. The collected volume ranges far and wide, including papers on markets and money, finance and the enterprise, power and money, the financialisation of capitalism, finance and profit, even money as art.

Richard Seymour on Enzo Traverso and Daniel Bensaïd

Richard Seymour is an author, broadcaster and a founding editor of Salvage. Most recently he is the author ofCorbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics (Verso, 2016). This review was originally posted on hisblog Lenin's Tomb on 28 December 2016, and is a helpful introduction to Historical Materialism's symposium on Daniel Bensaïd in our journal's issue24.4.

This began as a review of Enzo Traverso's Left-Wing Melancholy: Marxism, History and Memory. But a review is usually a conclusion, the verdict on a closed book. This is, in fact, the beginning of something else.

I.

Our defeat is their redemption. The most raging, downwardly mobile, insecure, isolated, almost eclipsed social forces turn out to have a trump, after all.

The axis of global reaction encompasses Modi, Erdogan, Putin, and now the president-elect of the United States. The Brexit Right is victorious in Britain, and Marine Le Pen’s fascists are on the brink of another breakthrough in France. The revanchists of ‘white nationalism’ are energised, already racking up a body count, acutely aware that they have only a few years to “make America,” or its nearest equivalent, “great again”. Meanwhile, the Left is momentarily stunned, feeling almost a physical annihilation.

However, defeat should not be disabling. The history of the Left is a history of defeats. It is the history of the vanquished, necessarily. Marxism, Enzo Traverso reminds us, is a science of defeat. “The whole road of socialism,” said Rosa Luxemburg, “is paved with nothing but thunderous defeats”. In the traditions of the left, defeat is recognised as a vital pedagogical process, even as its tragic dimension overwhelms us.

The novelist Jules Valles dedicated The Insurrectionist, on the Paris Commune, “to the dead of 1871” and all who “formed, under the flag of the Commune, the great federation of sorrows”. But from the crushing of the Paris Commune came, thirty years later, an age of mass socialist parties all over Europe. From the demolition of the internationalist left in 1914, came the electrifying revolution of 1917.

Even the brutal murder of left leaders from Che Guevara to Victor Jara summon mass funerals, not as a symbol of “the end of a communist hope” but as “one of its expressions”. Defeat formed part of a texture of collective memory, a strategic factor in struggle.

Robert Motherwell - Plato's Cave.

II.

But to fight is also to mourn, since the Left “cannot refurbish its intellectual armoury without identifying empathetically with the vanquished of history”. And there is a work of mourning that has yet to be done. The sudden outbreaks of collective grief over dead celebrities are not in this sense fraudulent or mawkish. These deaths remind us of something that we're already feeling. A mourning that is thwarted.

For what collapsed with the disintegration of the USSR was not just an appalling dictatorship, but an “entire representation of the twentieth century” filled with revolutionary hopes. The Velvet Revolutions, unlike their forebears, did not arouse new utopias, but confirmed a regression to minimal liberal ideas of freedom and representation, already underway since the late Seventies.

Given the drastic contraction of historical possibilities disclosed by this process, the momentous defeat of left-wing struggles and working class movements unveiled, the absence of mourning is striking. Former communist parties, instead of working through their loss, chose to repress their past, opting to rename themselves ‘Democratic Left’ or similar substitutions. If Trotskyist currents did not collapse in the same way, they were left similarly adrift, where they did not simply enter into denial. The spectre of communism, Traverso argues, no longer haunts the bourgeoisie, announcing a “presence to come” – it haunts and taunts its former adherents, pricking their bad conscience.

For some reason, this was not a sinless defeat. A sin can, in secular terms, be seen as a special kind of defeat, a capitulation which attracts guilt. And the internalised stigma and guilt arising from the reduction of communism to its “totalitarian dimension” became, even in dissident, anti-Stalinist strains of socialism which had never invested their hopes in the Kafka’s Castle of the East, a resistance to working through this defeat. This “impossible mourning” is one way to understand the pervasiveness of left melancholia. Even the spurious ‘optimism’ of some of the remaining shards of the Left after 1989 was a result of disavowed melancholia, the refusal to mourn, the refusal to accept a loss.

Traverso’s work is therefore, firstly, a work of mourning. It aims to come to terms with left-wing melancholy, as a necessary condition for redemption. It offers us the image of what the psychoanalyst Jean Allouch calls a “dry loss”. According to Freud, mourning ends when we finally alight upon a new object, a new love. Allouch rejects this metonymy of objects. We don’t substitute one for the other, gaining something to compensate our loss. We have to make do with a loss with no compensation whatsoever. We have to go on having a relationship with someone who is no longer there. This is the working through that Traverso doesn’t so much propose as perform.

Historical Materialism's London Annual Conference 10-13 November 2016 

Please find here the audio recording of the conference's closing plenary session that took place Sunday 13 November, 17.15-19.00.

With Ashok Kumar, Tithi Bhattacharya, Susan Ferguson and David McNally.

Chair: Ashok Kumar

Tithi Bhattacharya – The Ontology of Labour Power: Producing and Social Reproducing Capital

Susan Ferguson – The Child, the Market, and Capitalism: a Social Reproduction Perspective on Children’s Subjectivities

David McNally – Dialectics and Intersectionality: Critical Reconstructions in Marxism and Social Reproduction Theory