Daniel Hartley interviews Richard Seymour, author, journalist, online editor forSalvage, and member of Historical Materialism's Corresponding Editorial Board. The interview was first published in French on 3 May 2017 inPeriode.

Often, when intellectuals are interviewed – I am thinking especially of the recent series of interviews carried out by George Souvlis (e.g., Davis 2016; Eley 2016) – it’s the task of the interviewer to invite the interviewee to connect her academic research more directly to immediate strategic political concerns. In your case, it’s the reverse. If there is one thing that defines your intellectual activity, it is your ability to respond immediately to constantly shifting political and historical events. Consequently, the aim of this interview is to invite you to expand upon the more theoretical aspects of your work (albeit with the obvious caveat that your immediate political responses are themselves theoretically informed). Perhaps you might begin by telling us about your theoretical and political formation. How did you become involved in Marxist politics and who were the intellectual figures that most influenced you?

My early, formative influences as a Marxist all come from the International Socialist tradition. It is difficult not to speak ill of this tradition given where its major legatee, the British Socialist Workers’ Party, ended up. And I’ve always been hugely unconvinced by the sentimentality with which some of its apostles today recount its past triumphs. Still, it is a tradition that was able to produce Marxists, and that isn’t a small thing.

I joined the SWP at the inception of New Labour rule in 1998, and was immediately immersed in its theoretical traditions. Mike Kidron and Chris Harman for economics, Alex Callinicos for political philosophy, and Tony Cliff for the weltanschauung (which was strangely both sober and excitable). There is a type of Trotskyist orthodoxy that used to call itself ‘Third Camp’, identifying the workers’ movement as a potentially autonomous source of socialist democracy as against Stalinism and US-led capitalism. SWP orthodoxy, you might say, was ‘No Camp’. The USSR was a state-capitalist dictatorship whose implosion was almost a given, the ‘Free World’ was perpetually heading toward its worst crisis, social-democracy had become an agent of the capitalist system, trade union leaders were part of the system’s successful functioning, and the only plausible alternative was in the ‘rank and file’ of the working class — except the rank and file didn’t really exist any more. It is hardly surprising that the most damning thing anyone in this tradition could say about someone was that they were ‘pessimistic’, since the entire edifice was constructed over a repressed knowledge of the most comprehensive destruction of the possibilities for revolutionary politics.

The second layer of influence comes from the ‘political Marxists’, Ellen Wood and Robert Brenner. I read Wood’s The Origin of Capitalism and was struck by the fact that as well as being persuasive in its own right, it entirely lacked any appeal to teleology and was happy to accentuate the contingent in a way that Marxists generally do not. The appeal of this was both political and theoretical. In the context of the ‘war on terror’ with its revived, Whiggish empire myths, there was a premium on dissecting and confounding progressivist views of history. Theoretically, I liked the aleatory element of political Marxism. I think it was Freud who argued that to think contingency is unworthy of determining our fates is to lapse into a kind of spiritualism. And you could argue that there’s a displaced spiritualism in some forms of Marxism. The thrust of political Marxism is to attack certain connotative associations that more Hegelian variants of Marxism insist upon — say, between urban development and capitalism, or between capitalism and democracy. The idea of ‘bourgeois democracy’ in particular raises the ‘political Marxist’ eyebrow, since they don’t think the bourgeoisie had a great deal to do with democracy. There was also an hysterical function of identifying with the ‘political Marxists’, which was to begin to challenge (in a relatively safe way) the orthodoxies of the SWP.

The third layer of influences comes from a series of Marxist theorists who each, in their different way, emphasised the conjuncture, and particularly the formative role of ideology in determining the placement of class actors and the outcomes of their struggles: Althusser, Gramsci, Poulantzas, Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School. This made a certain sense since I was increasingly writing about racist ideology, and I was particularly interested in understanding how ideas of race and nationality were so powerful in Britain that the major beneficiaries of the disappointments of New Labour were not the radical left or anticapitalists, but the far right. It was the BNP who ended up with close to a million votes, while no radical left vehicle really got off the ground. It was then UKIP which took off after the credit crunch, while the far left got nowhere. Obviously, there had been a lot wrong with our thinking if we got it that badly wrong. One of the things I thought we had got wrong was our relative inattention to ideology, and there discovering Gramsci and Hall were a useful corrective. Another was that we had totally misunderstood the nature of modern states and their neoliberal constitution, and in that case Althusser and especially Poulantzas had something to say. In particular, since Poulantzas did not reify the state like most Marxist theorists, he made it possible to understand it as a condensation of a balance of forces — that is, as a social outcome, a product of struggles. Not one that might be pushed determined in any direction, willy-nilly, since the format of a capitalist state selects in favour of capitalist-reproductive outcomes. But, for example, the struggles for democracy, welfare, social security, comprehensive education, trade union rights, public sector jobs, and so on, are all struggles by the left within as well as against the capitalist state.

Your Ph.D. thesis, entitled “Cold War Anticommunism and the Defence of White Supremacy in the Southern United States” (2016), argues that anticommunism was a “hegemonic project” whose exclusionary form of Americanism “cemented the role of the Jim Crow South within American nationhood.” Could you expand upon the main lines of argument? How did the intersecting scales of the Cold War conjuncture – the international, the national and the regional – overdetermine the hegemonic project of anticommunism in the US South from 1945 to 1965?

The “intersecting scales” could be taken as a reminder that the term anticommunism doesn’t correspond to a single process or practice. At each level — international, national and regional — anticommunism meant something quite different. But what they each have in common is that anticommunism emerges as a way of managing a transitional period, a period in which traditional authority, political relations and forms of production are breaking down.

In the international sphere, broadly speaking, the colonial form of white-world supremacy is breaking down, and anticommunism organises US-led interventions to defeat its opponents, while both conserving and reforming it. At the national level, it was part of a process that brought to a conclusion the period of liberal reform initiated in the 1930s, formalising its accomplishments while disorganising the popular CPUSA-led coalitions, including incipient forms of civil rights organising in which communists played an important role, not reducible to the ‘long arm of Moscow’. The role played by Southern politicians, usually drawn from the class of planters and textile-capitalists, in both the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC), and Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS), is hugely important. It becomes more important after the decline of McCarthy himself, and the haut anticommunism of the period before 1956.

The thawing after 1956, coupled with the Supreme Court’s decision to gradually desegregate education in Brown vs the Board of Education (coterminous with the reversal of a series of anticommunist legal rulings by the Court), made the role of the South in anticommunism even more important. First of all, the emphasis of federal investigative apparatuses shifted from harassing the CPUSA and toward investigating civil rights activists, because a new generation of activists was discovering new repertoires of tactics. The breakdown of the old Southern geoeconomy predicated on rural authority relations, the urbanisation and industrialisation of the South, drew millions of black people into new forms of collective subjectivity, created a layer of new black churches who were more radical, and expanded a black middle class with the resources and a degree of state access, able to support ongoing forms of moderately successful activism, and incremental legal action - which was too much for the segregationists.

So, anticommunism became the basis for urgent counterinsurgency in the South. Senator James Eastland, a wealthy planter from Mississippi linked to White Citizens Councils and other forms of segregationist activism, used his position in SISS to ritually terrorise black civil rights activists, hoping to elicit from them confessions of communist enticement and agitation. Carl and Anne Braden were dragged before HUAC. But more importantly, Southern states underwent a drastic shift to the Right in this era, often setting up their own localised variants of HUAC called State Sovereignty Commissions. They were if anything more secretive, more terrifying, and more dubiously linked to civil society organisations like the Citizens Councils. They organised purges of the NAACP and, linked to the activity of attorney generals, hounded and harassed left-wing teachers and trade unionists. That worked roughly until 1960, by which time the federal authorities had effectively demonstrated that local states did not have the capacity to resist them.

After that, the international vector comes in, in a new way: the very success of decolonisation disrupted the already thawing Cold War binary freeze, and opened up a new political imaginary. It also put new pressure on federal authorities, aligned to big Fordist monopoly capital, to somehow contain and deal with the crisis in the South. Civil rights actors were able to exploit the emergent schism between the Southern ruling class fractions, and the national power bloc, as well as the emerging tension between domestic forms of hegemony and international forms of hegemony. Even from this thumbnail sketch, you can see how the ‘political opportunity-structure’ that civil rights actors were ultimately able to exploit was produced and structured by transitional crises happening on several scales of production, representation and politics.

You write that the “master-concept” of your thesis is the Gramscian one of “hegemony”. Why does hegemony specifically lend itself to an analysis of the complex intersection of anti-communism and white supremacy in the Cold War US South? What distinguishes this approach from others? Inversely, how do your findings alter or nuance our understanding of the concept of hegemony itself?

If hegemony ever came close to being an accomplished state-of-affairs, as opposed to a process, a set of practices oriented toward that state-of-affairs as a goal, it was in the post-war United States. There, the ruling class did not merely rule, but led. It articulated an historic mission, a moral cause - fighting communism, defending ‘the Free World’ - which assembled broad popular consent, excluding only a truculent but easily dispersed and controlled minority.

The Southern ruling classes, of course, gained from this, even though they were always subordinate in relation to the national power bloc. But in what way? One of the ways we can think about this is to ask why they opted for red-hunting at all. Why wasn’t white-supremacy enough? Most historians seem to agree that anticommunism was a necessary element in assembling the consent of Southerners for a programme of Massive Resistance, and for dragging the whole organisation of Southern states and culture to the Right. Leaving aside whether Massive Resistance was ultimately a good idea — I think it was less effective than the strategy of ‘pragmatic segregation’ which ascended to dominance after 1960 — it is terribly interesting that the publicity said things like “Race-Mixing Is Communism” rather than “Defend the Supremacy and Integrity of the White Race”.

The idea of hegemony allows one to grasp the strategic dimension of this, and it also allows one to think that such slogans may be psychologically meaningful if they are able to summon loyalty and support. It permits one to understand how such ideologies are materialised in rituals of terror and violence (be it the ritualised interrogations of state apparatuses, scurrilous media attacks, Citizens Council terror, or Klan murder, or something else). In the past, the category of hegemony was misleadingly reduced to the problematic of ‘consent’. In fact, as I think Peter Thomas has shown us, hegemony is about specific combinations of symbolic and physical force, specific embodiments — violent or otherwise — of the moral and political ideologies of rule.

When you look at anticommunist terror, what is striking is how its popular basis allows it to be dispersed through the institutions of civil society, how it percolates through workplaces, unions, the cultural fabric, and so on. It would not have been anywhere near as effective if people didn’t rat on, betray and ostracise leftists. When you look at white-supremacist terror in the South, something similar applies. It only took the tiniest infraction of the immensely cumbersome and complex codes of racial civility, to produce crazy outbursts of popular violence, lynchings, usually backed up by state power. In each case, consent was achieved through violence, and vice versa, so that it was not just a question of the power bloc defending its interests through the organisation of state power, but ‘society’ as such defending itself against what were experienced as existential threats. That is far closer to capitalist hegemony in its actual operation than purely consensual, persuasive incorporation.

Of course, there’s something which the category of hegemony cannot do, and that is go beyond situating the subjective aspect of this. To apprehend the subjective meaning of white-supremacist anticommunism, I turned to Lacan, and the symptomatic reading.

From Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields’ work on “racecraft” in the US to Sadri Khiari and Houria Bouteldja’s work on races sociales in France, to Satnam Virdee’s reconceptualisation of the history of the “English” working class from the perspective of the “racialized outsider” in Britain, the contemporary theoretical conjuncture is characterised by a series of attempts to rediscover, reconceptualise or to (re)invent Marxist understandings of race and racism. How would you position your own work within this field, and what sets contemporary racism apart from its historical predecessors?

I came of age, politically, in an era in which there was a lot of empire nostalgia — fantasies of global omnipotence being a major cultural response to the 9/11 attacks. Coupled with that was a revival of Spenglerian and Pearsonian ideas about ‘the West’, its moral and civilizational superiority, and its existential crisis — and, of course, its Islamic Other. Underwriting all this was a racial metaphysics which, because it didn’t have reference to race as an organic entity, was able to disavow its racism.

The novelty here was therefore the energetic disavowal of the category of race. Contemporary racism is the stupidity that dare not speak its name. “Islam isn’t a race,” its arbiters said. That was true, of course, but made little difference to those who suffered surveillance, harassment, internment, shooting and extraordinary rendition as if they were a race. So, there was a need to understand, if Islam supposedly wasn’t a race, what a race actually is. Said’s Orientalism thesis helped, allowing us to think that the ‘Islam’ that was being talked about, the ‘Islam’ that had become an object of knowledge — internally cohesive, monolithic, etc — had nothing to do with what Muslims were actually practising.

But, of course, the axis of colonialism and empire was nowhere near adequate in understanding race; one had to comprehend the ‘domestic’ dynamics, the aspects of everyday capitalist society that were being organised by race, and which lent themselves to racist symbolisation. This was particularly important to understanding the direction of British politics in particular after the credit crunch. The ‘Islamic Question’ became reconfigured as part of a wider story about the losses incurred by white Britons. Class trajectories, regional forms of decline, crises in gender relations and family structures, changing patterns of socialisation, were all refracted through race. As you would expect, I have tended to be most interested in works that grasp the interconnections between race and other levels of social reality in a Gramscian register — not just Hall and the Birmingham School, but also Omi & Winant’s ‘Racial Formation’ thesis, despite the latter’s political limitations.

The concept of hegemony, as both your own sociological work and Peter D. Thomas’s (2009) recent philological elaborations make clear, entails an expanded conception of the state – what Gramsci calls the “integral state.” Among the most significant critical inheritors of this theory are, in different ways, Louis Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas. Of Althusser you have written that “there is a real sense in which the ‘aleatory materialism’ which I think is characteristic of his work, and particularly the concepts of ‘overdetermination’ and ‘contradiction,’ has a formative role in guiding my interpretation of situations” (Seymour 2016: 26); likewise, of Poulantzas, you have said that you “consider [his] work on the state to be unsurpassed within the Marxist tradition” (25). Could you tell us more about the importance of these two theorists for your work?

Well, readers of Althusser’s On The Reproduction of Capitalism will notice, I think, that he is less of an Althusserian reader of the state than Poulantzas is. It’s actually surprisingly close to Pashukanis in its reading of the law, inasmuch as he ultimately locates the basis of the legal form in the commodity form (although I understand that he was more interested in the Kantian legal theorist Hans Kelsen). Poulantzas’s approach inState, Power, Socialism seems to me really does offer an account of law’s overdetermination and relative autonomy.  

This, taken in conjunction with the fact that Althusser continues to use an idiom associated with the ‘repressive hypothesis’ - and this does not appear to be ‘mere coquetry’ - suggests to me that on this subject he was in the position he ascribed to Marx, that of trying to develop his ‘scientific’ discoveries within borrowed ‘ideological’ language. I also wonder to what extent his writing on the state and law is symptomatic of a displacement, viz. the attempt to analyse the class nature of the USSR.

So, I think what Poulantzas did was to take Althusserian terms of analysis, increasingly in a productive dialogue with Gramsci (as well as Foucault, the ‘capital logic’ school and so on), and develop them in the solving of concrete problems of strategy.

Incidentally, do you notice Poulantzas’s profound ambivalence about the state? He wants, on the one hand, to demystify it, to treat it as a product of human labour like any other social phenomenon, to argue for the left to stop worshipping it (or, which is the obverse, adopting a noli me tangere attitude of incorruptibility toward it — as if we are not all already inside the state). On the other hand, he finds the state idea both enthralling and horrifying, the real “Kafkaesque castle”, embodying the logic of “Kafka’s penal colony,” the grundnorm of ‘totalitarianism’, and so on.

I don’t think this is just a poetic heuristic. Poulantzas describes well the “mechanisms of fear,” the rituals and theatrics of state power, without which it is difficult to understand rather a lot of what capitalist states do — obviously, HUAC and SISS are prominent in my thinking. But implicated here, there is a dimension of state action, law, and so on — its erotics — which he is not really able to account for in theoretical terms, hence he quite properly reaches for a starting point in literature.

With the growing success of a new authoritarian, statist Right, predicated on spectacles of sadism and punishment (spectacles which were prepared by neoliberalism — Trump was a reality television star before he was president-elect), I’m increasingly inclined to think we also need to account for the mystique of the state idea in psychoanalytic terms.

What, in your view, are the key components of a Marxist theory of social movements? What distinguishes your own understanding of social movements from the general “social movement studies” literature? Could you exemplify your response by way of reference to your work on the white supremacist “Massive Resistance” movement in the Cold War US South, and – in a very different conjuncture – recent calls to transform Corbyn’s Labour Party into a “social movement”?

In my thesis, I try to identify some starting points for a Marxist theory of social movements, largely because there isn’t a theory of social movements. Almost all of the ‘theory’ is descriptive, and predicated on a reification — that is, treating the social movement as an accomplished fact to be explained. I was influenced by Peter Bratsis’s re-reading of Poulantzian state theory through an exegesis of Gaston Bachelard’s work on fire, which struck me as a very smart reading not only of the state but of reification as such. It occurred to me that this was as central an epistemological obstacle to understanding movements as states.

One of the problems with social movement theory is that it spends its time trying to identify a number of uniform characteristics of social movements which can form the basis of a theory. What you actually end up with is quite nebulous: it has to be sustained (though no one knows for how long), it has to involve some noninstitutional action (though how much is unclear), it has to be aimed at transforming or conserving something (which basically describes all political action), and so on. It’s not clear where a campaign becomes a social movement, or what differentiates a movement from a mobilised interest, if anything. What kind of theory can you derive from this?

Following Bratsis’s cues, I thought: what if we start from the fact that a movement is not a coherent substance or subject in itself, but an outcome of other processes? Rather than trying to identify a number of characteristics and seeing if they can be functionally related to one another, it makes more sense to start with the inputs. I think a Marxist method would start with the social relationship as the fundamental unit of analysis. It would start with the way in which social relationships are organised within a particular mode of production along axes of exploitation and oppression, and thus are overdetermined by antagonism and struggle. It would look for the ways in which these relationships have to be reproduced on an extended and open-ended basis over time, in part through struggle.

On the basis of a relational and processual perspective like that, we can identify the conditions under which a social movement might emerge. We can say that the reproduction of a given social relationship will have been put into question, and that classes and social groups in antagonism will have come into open (though overdetermined) conflict, activating their own relationally endowed capacities while drawing others in alongside them. We can say that since reproduction is a political issue, they will have some reference to state power (the idea of being totally ‘noninstitutional’ is a liberal myth that even liberals don’t believe in), and that since it is necessarily organised in spatial contexts, it will have a geography a type of setting (Civil Rights being a movement of big cities, Massive Resistance being a movement of the rural Delta). These are just coordinates, investigating principles, to help guide the concrete analysis of concrete situations.

But one fall-out of this way of looking at things is that you have to wonder about those who say they want to ‘build’ a social movement, or ‘create’ one, or turn a party into a movement. It has nice resonances, because movements seem (even if they are not) innocent of the evils and trappings of state power, unlike parties. But you can’t summon a social movement into existence any more than you can engineer a secular crisis in the rate of profit. It makes more sense to talk about we can do, whether we are in a party or a campaign, or something else, and that is organise the class — or ‘the 99%’ if you prefer the populist interpellation.

One of the hallmarks of the work of Stuart Hall, as well as many of his colleagues and contemporaries at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, was an ability to combine solid empirical analysis with extremely nuanced and sophisticated theory. Arguably, these analyses reached their apotheosis in Hall’s analyses of Thatcherism and authoritarian populism. In one of your recent analyses of the politics of “austerity,” you wrote that “[i]f you want to begin to understand what happened, you have to go back and read Stuart Hall. You have to read Policing the Crisis, and ‘The Great Moving Right Show’. Hall, whatever you think of his practical politics, grasped the breadth of the transformative project being undertaken by the neoliberals, the fact that it was a comprehensive attempt at constructing a new hegemony which operated as much on the level of culture, and ideology, and the techniques of governmentality, as on the level of industrial class struggles, and privatizations” (Seymour 2013). Could you speak about the importance of Hall’s work – or that of the “Birmingham School” more generally – to your own? What are the specific features of this theoretical approach, and what are its strengths and limitations?

It is impossible to do justice to the Birmingham School, because it revolutionised the analysis of race and culture in Britain, practically invented the discipline of cultural studies (and thus rendered a whole lot visible that hadn’t been before), and forced these issues up the agenda of all Marxists bar the knuckle-draggers. Even today, if you teach race analysis, you find it hard to move far outside the orbit of these thinkers, so that is crucial. Whoever cannot talk about race sacrifices their probity on class.

What struck me, however, was that Policing the Crisis, and the essays of that era, were all extremely urgent investigations of concrete situations, of the conjuncture. They were, perhaps for that reason, theoretically rather opulent. The Gramscian motifs were dominant, but the School continually replenished its theoretical armoury through engagements with feminism, Foucault, Derrida, screen theory, and anything else that could be made ready-to-hand in analysis. The result was the most extraordinarily acute representation of power, crisis and the insurgent Right that was on the brink of taking hold of the situation. They described, with great prescience, an emerging mode of dominance that — by the time I began reading their work — had entered into its own crisis.

On a personal note, I had also been alarmed by the unavailing dogmas of the far left in response to the capitalist crisis, noted the failure of our predictions, registered the economistic assumptions underpinning our fruitless strategies, and was delighted to come across ‘The Great Moving Right Show’ and its merciless head-on assault on what were then hard left catechisms. It was a leap forward in light years.

Of course, it is easy and conventional to dismiss all that on the basis of where it ended up — in the case of Hall and his allies in the Marxism Today magazine, it passed through Kinnockism toward incipient Blairism, and then concluded with crashing disappointment once Blair took power. My feeling about Hall is that perhaps in his particular reading of Gramsci, notwithstanding the theoretical breakthroughs he was able to make with it, he participated in that tendency to reduce hegemonic practices to their consensual, discursive side, being far less attentive to the side of outright force. I think his underestimation of the importance of the Miners’ Strike of 1984-5, and his overestimation of Kinnockite soft-leftism, was implicated in this. He over-valued Thatcherism’s persuasive appeal, and as such invested too much importance in trying to negotiate with and sympathise with the forward-moving elements in its cultural sources. This resulted in self-inflicted defeat of a kind, in that it meant ceding ideological terrain that did not have to be ceded, while paying insufficient attention to the war of movement taking place in key industries.

But after years of right-ward-moving social democracy, the evisceration of left-wing cultures and organisation, the secular decline of unions, the mediation of more and more social relations through markets and market-like mechanisms, and the transformation of popular culture by the competitive ethos, the situation was very different. Confronting the age of austerity, we needed a language for addressing political situations where the conflict wasn’t primarily structured around industries and workplaces, and where there were indeed large and puzzling wells of consent for some of the nastiest and most perverse legislation. On top of this, the growing articulation of neoliberalism with nationalist racism in recent years has finally produced a genuine, though germinal, fascist reflux — with elements of it present in the Trump campaign, some of it in the basis of Farageism, and plenty of it slathered across Europe. We need to know how this political and ideological terrain was formed. We need to engage in the analysis of the conjuncture, and its relationship to structure. And that’s where the Birmingham School is invaluable.

It seems to me that many of your writings are informed by a dual impulse: to render multiple, contradictory and complex that which gives itself to thought as homogeneous and simplistic (be it race, the state, gender, or entire conjunctures), and to think this contradiction and complexity from the perspective of the multiple – and equally contradictory – subjectivations that they enable or compel. Your more recent writings especially seem to tend towards a more sustained engagement with psychoanalysis and the work of Jacques Lacan. What is the political and theoretical importance of psychoanalysis for Marxism, and how has it informed your work?

I’ve hinted at some of the issues driving me to psychoanalysis in my previous answers. But I can add that part of what I wanted was to resist the ‘rational kernel’ style of analysis, and spend some time with the ‘irrational kernel’. There is a rationalising tendency in all theory, Marxism included: a drive to ‘make sense’ of things. One of the virtues of psychoanalysis at its best is that it is comfortable making do with nonsense for a while — it doesn’t move too quickly to sense-making. And when you have people beating up Mexicans, or Poles, or behaving politically in ways that seem profoundly injurious even to themselves, there is a temptation to try to rationalise and move quickly to solutions. To say, “ah, they’re doing this because of economic insecurity” or “they’re doing this because the media have misinformed them about the real causes of their situation”. It might be worth spending time with the nonsense before moving to problem-solving.

In my work, I was looking for a way to understand why, beyond instrumentality, white-supremacists were using the language of anticommunism. I thought that it would be flattening the subject in an unwarranted way to neglect the extent to which it was psychologically meaningful. For example, if I just said, “they used anticommunism because that was more popular than explicit and unmediated white-supremacism, and thus a better mobilising tool,” I would be telling a very impoverished story that was only partially true.

But the methodological problem for me was, how am I supposed to understand the subjectivity of people I can’t even speak to, because most of them are now dead? Even if I could speak to them, what would I be able to tell? According to the Weberian concept of Verstehen, we know enough about one another to be able to imaginatively sympathise with others and grasp the meanings attached to their behaviour. But is this precisely the problem with ‘understanding’, in Lacanian terms — often, when we ‘understand’ others, we find only ourselves. This is discourse in the Imaginary register, discourse in its capacity as a mirror. That is, we find only the meanings that make sense to us, that are commensurable with our existing sense of reality. We are thus apt to ignore and overlook that which we can’t make sense of. The same critique applies to all psychologisms.

Lacanian psychoanalysis usefully resists this tendency. Lacan’s advice to analysts, do not try to understand too soon, was based on the insight that ‘understanding’ could just be a countertransference — that is, a resistance on the part of the analyst to the analysis. And social theorists are not less susceptible to this resistance, not less likely to want to avoid difficult truths, not less charmed by the lure of intelligibility.  But that leaves us with the question of what we should be doing if not trying to understand. In the analytic context, the analyst is supposed to exercise a free-floating attention, listening out for the holes in meaning, the places where the ego doesn’t successfully cover its tracks and there is a cut into a subterranean current of meaning — the slip, the slurred statement, the joke, the gaffe, the compromise formation, and so on. At these points of what Lacan calls “full speech”, discourse is something other than a mirror: the Imaginary register gives away to the Symbolic register. Here, the analyst pays attention to the formal, material properties of language: what you actually said, not what you ‘meant’.

Well, this approach has a number of advantages. It is a hermeneutics of suspicion, but it means taking people fully at their word. It is interpretive, but its interpretation is based on the logical properties of statements, rather than attempting to infer what they might mean from extraneous evidence. It is concerned with subjective meaning, but at the same time language is a collective, public property, and so the iron wall between the ‘individual’ and society, between ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’, is problematised. So, it was possible to extract certain principles or guidelines of interpretation from the strictly clinical context in which Lacan’s theory was developed — and that is what became Lacanian discourse analysis.

Marxists have struggled to adequately explain and theorise the subject, because it is a theory of the relations between different levels and structures of social reality, not a theory of subjectivity. And all I would say is that psychoanalysis has made unparalleled, groundbreaking and tendentially subversive advances on this terrain, so it is incumbent on Marxists to take this seriously.

Finally, I would like to ask you about the art of writing itself. There exists among a certain type of Marxist thinker an insistence, which occasionally (though not always) goes hand in hand with a residual philistinism, upon the urgent political necessity of a “plain style”. The irony of this, of course, is that plain prose is ideologically highly ambiguous – with a certain Protestant-tending, empiricist heritage that runs from Francis Bacon and Thomas Pratt to George Orwell. One remarks in your own work, however, a clear sense of the joys and jouissances of writing. How do you understand the relation between style and politics?

Oscar Wilde has one of his characters say, “Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.”

I can afford a little more sympathy to naturalism, provided it is aware of its -ism, of its artifice. People who write in a “plain style” can sometimes be extraordinarily effective with it, if they know that it is just another literary form with — to use your phrase — its own “joys and jouissances”.

Even the business of simply telling a story, from beginning to end, is an artifice. Stories never really happen that way, there are no natural beginnings and the ‘finished’ work is an ideological form. Even explaining things purely and simply, is a lie. As Wilde again said, the truth is rarely pure and never simple. Most of the time, it barely makes sense.

Writing is an artifice in its essence; it is an art of embodiment, giving physical form to being. “Putting it into words” means giving form to existence, and there is no omnipotent father, Big Other, or whomever, to guarantee that superiority of one form over another.

The metaphysic of writing that is implied by “plain style” zealots, however, is that wherein writing is a ‘window on reality’, with the subject neatly extruded — and that is, lamentably, how many people are taught to write. Nancy Welsh in her very fine book on writing, Getting Restless, is scathing about the advice given to students to suppress their own role in the writing of knowledge — “this isn’t about you, don’t talk about yourself”.

On the left, this has to do with a half-digested puritanism, and a degree of ‘workerist’ (patronisingly anti-working class) anti-intellectualism. There’s almost a sense of shame at the intrinsic excess of writing, at the fact that it is never reducible to communication, that it always produces effects other than knowledge-effects. Words are aesthetic objects, erotic objects, and that produces a certain phobia in parts of the left. And, I suspect, there’s a degree of aggression toward the reader among leftists who write in this ‘plain’ style, a desire to bore and bully readers as much as possible — I’ve suffered for my vulgar exhortation, now it’s your turn.

This approach is giving us the worst of both worlds. People, to the extent that they go along with the idea that they can take themselves out of their writing, become bad writers, and bullshitters. They become bad writers because writing becomes yet another means of repression, rather than sublimation; it also becomes a guilt function, since having turned it into a joyless process, people can’t understand why they’re so bad at writing. They become bullshitters to the extent that they present a version of reality as if from a god’s-eye-view, as if told by a non-desiring, Buddha-like being.

Radical politics must be, if nothing else, radically de-naturalising. It must stress the art in living, the extent to which we produce and design the world we live in, even if not under circumstances and not with materials of our choosing.

References

Davis, Mike 2016. “‘Fight with hope, fight without hope, but fight absolutely’: An interview with Mike Davis,” LSE Department of Sociology Blog. URL: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/researchingsociology/2016/03/01/fight-with-hope-fight-without-hope-but-fight-absolutely-an-interview-with-mike-davis/ [Date last accessed: 11/10/16]

Eley, Geoff 2016. “Europe, Democracy and the Left: An interview with Geoff Eley,” Salvage. URL:http://salvage.zone/online-exclusive/europe-democracy-and-the-left-an-interview-with-geoff-eley/ [Date last accessed: 11/10/16]

Seymour, Richard 2013. “Where Next for the Left?” The North Star. URL:http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=8949 [Date last accessed: 11/10/16]

–––– 2016. “Cold War Anticommunism and the Defence of White Supremacy in the Southern United States” (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, LSE).

Thomas, Peter D. 2009. The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (Leiden: Brill).

Michael Roberts is a private researcher who has worked as an economist in the City of London for over 30 years. He is the author of The Great Recession - a Marxist View (2009, Lulu Press) and The Long Depression (2016, Haymarket Publications). He has presented papers to the American Economics Association annual conferences, Historical Materialism conferences and to those of the International Initiative for the Promotion of Political Economy (IIPPE) and the Association of Heterodox Economists (AHE). He writes a blog on Marxist economics at thenextrecession.wordpress.com.

According to Jim Kincaid, 'Michael Roberts has emerged as one of the leading Marxist analysts of current economic developments.  For many of us, his blog, The Next Recession, has become an indispensable and challenging resource.'  

After a panel at the HM London 2016 Conference, we publish the following discussions of Michael's book The Long Depression:

Jim Kincaid Michael Roberts on US Profit Rates: A Critique and an Alternative View

Michael Roberts responds Debating the rate of profit

Pete Green Marxist Theory and the Long Depression

In conversation with Christoph Jünke, on the legacy of German Marxist theorist Leo Kofler and why we need a Marxist understanding of anthropology today.

At the beginning of the 1980s, leftists, socialists, and Marxists still talked quite a bit about “humanity” (den Menschen) as such, while authors like Erich Fromm with his humanism were very popular. Today these discussions are comparatively rare, and the debate on Marxist anthropology is largely over. Where does that come from?

That naturally has to do with, above all, the socialist and Marxist left being shattered, shrunk, and marginalised since the 1980s. The discussion of the concept of man ended in tandem with a specific historical moment as the socialist left largely fell apart at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s – or rather was occupied from the right, by conservatives and liberals and, above all, by the emerging neoliberals and postmodernists. The debate on socialist humanism and a Marxist anthropology was also by no means hegemonic on the left, but in fact quite controversial to begin with.

And how is that all connected in your opinion?

I think that we have a bundle of causes here. For one, there is a historic cause: in bourgeois thought there is a very strong tradition of citing or conceptualising the human as such – and, moreover, of doing so in a horrifying way. All of the biologism and racism of the bourgeois tradition of thought, down to fascism, is naturally something with which the left has always had abundant problems, while questions from that tradition are only begrudgingly posed by the left. Socialists and Marxists would rather avoid these bourgeois anthropological waters.

There are also, however, theoretical reasons internal to Marxism itself. Marxist theory seeks to engage with historical and concrete temporal conditions and emphasize the changeable in history, linking it with an imperative to push said history in another direction. Marxism therefore cultivates a strong tradition of not engaging with allegedly abstract insights into the human essence, but rather concerns itself with what can concretely be changed. One seeks to analyse above all the forms of motion of hegemonic capitalism and what is changeable within it – while anthropology is always insight into essences, the consideration of the unchangeable.

The non-discussion of this topic enjoys a long tradition. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was generally regarded as an inheritance of classical bourgeois humanism, but not as a special topic in itself. That Marxists began to preoccupy themselves more explicitly with questions of anthropology in the 20th century is due, more than anything else, to the experiences of fascism as well as Stalinism, but also due to the Social Democratic movement’s growing integration into welfare state capitalism. The experience of defeat on the part of leftist emancipatory movements plays a particularly central role here, as the question of in what form and with what substance one can and should criticise these no-longer emancipatory movements quickly raises the question of the socialist notion of humanity or of “the human” as such (Menschenbild): can one hold fast to the socialist idea? Can people be taught to be good, or must they teach themselves? Can they do so at all – and if yes, how?

The experience of historical collapse brought many socialists and Marxists, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, to grapple with concepts of the human. Erich Fromm is surely one of the most well-known and important of these thinkers, but we also find comparable work in the writings of Ernst Bloch and Jean-Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse and Henri Lefebvre, Che Guevara or Isaac Deutscher, the East European reform Communists, or the Lukács disciples Agnes Heller and Györgi Markus. We find in the middle of the century an attempt to begin anew, where anthropological questions and considerations in fact play an important role.

You have addressed this problematique following the example of German Marxist Leo Kofler.

Yes, and I consider Kofler’s work to be one of the most systematic and convincing attempts at such a reworking of anthropological themes. Kofler began addressing the topic systematically in the 1950s, and came to the conclusion that a specific Marxist anthropology does indeed exist – something that others who have studied the topic often deny.

Kofler attempted to conceive anthropology as, and I quote, the “science of the unchangeable preconditions of human changes”. In Marxist tradition, he also stressed that labour as a whole, as human activity, is what makes humans human. However, Kofler emphasised more strongly than most other Marxists that one could not separate this labour or activity from human consciousness, that human activity has always been indissolubly (unaufhebbar) paired with consciousness. In addition, he emphasises that human activity has always had a playful character, that humans strive to engage in their activity as playfully as possible, because in the end labour serves to satisfy human needs, and these needs do not exhaust themselves in the purely material, but rather have an erotic purpose in the broadest sense of the word. Humans consist not only of Reason, but are also irrational, instinct-driven beings (Triebwesen) that, through reasoning, attempt to realise their ultimately irrational human drives.

For Kofler, however – and this is seldom understood – Marxist anthropology was no direct guide to action, although indispensable in the critique of the actually existing and in discussions of necessary and possible alternatives. Kofler sees the human as a holistic being and argues for the full development of its personality as a species-being. Herein lies a critique of capitalist class society, which does not do justice to this human being, and is, for example, always founded upon a repressive, ascetic labour discipline.

Kofler’s teaching of the unchangeable preconditions of human change is thus a type of meta-theory, an auxiliary science in the humanistic changing of bourgeois capitalist social relations. It connects past, present, and future, and exhibits a utopian component in the best sense of the word.

Traditionally, Marxists have argued against this point of view, saying that in the struggle for liberation, questions of the economy, of the material interests of real people, are more important, which means class interests and class struggles.

That is also not incorrect, although it is a bit one-sided. Since the end of the 19th century, there has been a long tradition of Marxist thought that must be characterised as dogmatic and mechanistic, which reduced everything to questions of the economy. That was born out of a certain historical situation, but was nevertheless false in its one-sidedness. Their heterogeneity notwithstanding, the later thinkers of anti-dogmatic Marxism were united in the conviction that this kind of Marxism represented a false interpretation. The human is an active, acting being, and the stakes are higher than the mere economy for them – for them, it’s about human relationships and self-realisation. To paraphrase Brecht: “Man does not live by bread alone, and doesn’t even have this without culture.”

Kofler himself always spoke about this, that one must be clear about what one wants, what one actually understands by socialism. Is it already socialism if we have two or three more sausages on our plate? Or isn’t socialism something that frees humans from the alienation they have historically manoeuvred themselves into? Is socialism not something that understands the individual human as an integral part of the human species-being, without requiring this human to give up their individuality in its uniqueness? Such a point of view addresses the economy only contingently, for the economy and labour are indeed only means to an end. However, it does address the end – the goals of human existence – as well as the relationship between means and ends.

Why exactly did Kofler emphasise this?

That can naturally be traced back to his practical experiences with the socialism of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), where he lived and worked from 1947 to the end of 1950. There it became clear to him in practice that one cannot criticise the social relations under actually existing socialism appropriately without a concept of the purpose for which socialism ought to exist in the first place, what the goal of human emancipation is. However, one cannot have such a concept of emancipation if one does not also have a concept of human existence, of what purpose humans serve and what not, what they may and can do and what not. Critical thinking requires a criterion of critique, and Kofler finds this ethical criterion, so to speak, in anthropological considerations. One cannot bring people to socialism through bureaucratic means, nor through force; this Stalinist technocratism has not only revealed itself to be false and disastrous in both history and practice, but is also incompatible with Marxist theory and humanity as such.

This Stalinist technocratism, of which you speak, exhibits interesting similarities with today’s postmodern thought. Nothing is impossible, as it is said, everything is changeable, including the human itself, even the sex (Geschlecht)of the person. Even many leftists today emphasise that there is absolutely no human sexual essence (sexuelles Wesen).

The fact that some people are born into a sex (Geschlecht) that does not fit them does not mean there is no human sexual essence.

In the philosophical tradition, there are two great currents: the so-called Naturalists, who trace everything back to the nature of the world, and the Culturalists, who recognise everything in culture. Postmodernism, one could argue, stands markedly in the tradition of Culturalism, despite its considerable heterogeneity. Pointedly stated, the human for them is exclusively culture. That naturally has a kernel of truth, but is also not really correct. For me, that seems to be exactly what is exciting about a thinker like Kofler: he tends to overcome the dichotomy between Naturalism and Culturalism.

Discussions today go in this direction as well – particularly in English-language Marxism, which has played a vanguard role in international Marxist theory since the 1980s, and where we find reinvigorated engagement with anthropological questions. Norman Geras was a particularly noteworthy pioneer in the first half of the 1980s. As the decade drew to a close, the critique of postmodern thought emanating from figures like Alex Callinicos and Terry Eagleton helped to sharpen anthropological perspectives. Eagleton has been particularly prolific on the topic of Marxist anthropology for over a decade. Despite coming from an entirely different tradition and flirting with the anti-humanist structuralism of a Louis Althusser, today he not only emphasises the existence of a human essence but also that the left suffers by not taking this question more seriously. We humans, as Eagleton trenchantly puts it, are “cultural beings by virtue of our nature, which is to say by virtue of the sorts of bodies we have and the kind of world to which they belong”.

That, to me, seems to be the central idea of Marxism, which overcomes both one-sided culturalism and one-sided naturalism. The human is both: natural being as well as cultural being. This is the point Leo Kofler made fifty years earlier. Yes, our nature is that we are cultural beings, but we can only change ourselves to a certain point without ceasing to be humans. This arc of suspense appears to me to be Marxism’s exciting and original contribution to anthropology.

And can the currently dominant regime of neoliberalism sharpen this perspective?

Where humans appear to be wolves to other humans; where the human is understood as the individuated individual, as I, Inc., as a lone warrior who throws their individual resources into the competition of commodification – there, leftist, emancipatory considerations on another concept of humanity are more needed than ever.

The Marxist tradition stands and falls with the assertion that, irrespective of all individuality, the human is part of a collective, it is a species-being – and not the individuated individual as conceived today. The human, as Leo Kofler’s anthropological dictum puts it, can only individuate itself in the context of community. What we lack is a consciousness of this collectivity, a consciousness of this solidarity – what can the human do, what can’t the human do?

Can one then, for example, discuss cloning or eugenics without agreeing on one’s concept of the human? That so few Marxists engage in these sorts of discussions shows how much we’ve lost over the last three decades. Naturally, there were and are exceptions. I’ve already mentioned Terry Eagleton. Let’s take as further examples Pierre Bourdieu and Naomi Klein, who were decidedly popular at the end of the 1990s because they convincingly questioned the neoliberal concept of the human, writing popular texts against the kind of capitalist commodification that closes off the human from its inherent possibilities.

If, as I think Terry Eagleton so aptly writes in his impressive work on the meaning of life, the meaning of life lies in the free unfolding of human possibilities and capabilities, then this can be understood in both an individual as well as a collective sense, and requires a conception of humanity that one can only acquire and understand by reflecting on the anthropological foundations of human existence.

Yet how does one approach such a humanism in practice? Erich Fromm, for example, speaks rather often of the human, but barely addresses collective protest or strike movements. We are dealing, generally, with the human as an abstract individual. In Leo Kofler’s view, humanity is formed above all through consciousness and education. Yet how do theory and practice come together in a practical sense?

There are two great sources on which the classical socialist movement builds. On one side, we have the radical tradition of the Enlightenment, which rested above all on education and upbringing; on the other, the working classes’ struggle for their own emancipation. Both elements were increasingly unified in the classical socialist movement, but taken by themselves have little to do with each other. With the end of the classical socialist movement in the mid-20th century, this growing unity of theory and practice slackened noticeably, and also affected the work of a Fromm, Marcuse, or Kofler. It is important to take critical note of this development in retrospect, although it was ultimately largely historically determined.

I think that the times are over when one could have believed that people will become socialists through upbringing (Erziehung) alone. The experience of the old labour movement makes the limits of pure education quite evident. These organisations failed when those limits were reached politically, because they did not understand in what form and to what degree the consciousness of broad sections of the population was created and sharpened by social practice – by demonstrations, actions, and strike movements, by day-to-day class- and mass struggles.

However, this does not mean that the practical movement is everything. Not at all. It should be understood to mean that without practical movement, theory not only does not come to fruition, but cannot even be developed properly. One becomes a socialist in that one has practical experiences and then develops these experiences theoretically. Both, however, cannot really come together without the presence of mass social movements. One must rediscover a way to connect consciousness work, theoretical work, and educational work in everyday life with oppositional struggles in the broader sense, and labour struggles in the narrower sense – although the working class of today is of course different in many ways. That strikes me as the main task confronting Marxists today: finding a way to reunite both of these strands.

That this undertaking went so poorly last time around is just a sign that, despite some positive indications, in general the outlook for socialists and Marxists remains fairly grim. The practical discussion of a new form of socialism for the 21 century is just beginning to develop, and it requires larger mass movements in which new thinkers can develop themselves, to which they can contribute as much intellectually as they themselves are intellectually invigorated and enriched by these movements. If intellectuals shut themselves away at their desk and maintain a distance from the movements, they also change their own way of thinking – although it’s of course also impossible for intellectuals to be practically involved in everything.

In this context, is it an advantage for you that, as a general rule, today’s working class is better educated and skilled than it was in previous eras?

One would hope it’s an advantage. The average wage-labourer today is not only more feminine and ethnically diverse, they also appear more enlightened and educated than 50 or 100 years ago. On the other hand, this advantage encounters phenomena that can twist and partially dissolve enlightened consciousness. It is no coincidence that leftists and socialists have grappled so intensively with the culture industry and media policy over recent decades. Today’s education system or television broadcasts are more often than not really just systems of dumbing down the population. One is “enlightened” here in a way that is not practical.

For example, today’s secondary school students are forced to cram the intricacies of mathematics into their heads, but hardly anyone can say why they would need these skills later in life. Students don’t learn why they need these skills and, correspondingly, the interest of most is lacking in how to appropriately acquire this knowledge. In school today, one can learn how a computer is built, but not how to appropriately and responsibly interact with it. School conveys theoretical media knowledge, but rarely media competence. The entire recreational and media industry today after all continues to exist largely to shut off the consciousness of the consumer. It still only meets needs of relaxation and distraction. Thus, the average European today is certainly more enlightened but, for the aforementioned reasons, doesn’t necessarily take to the streets to fight for their needs and wants. We can’t afford to be naïve on this point: we can hope that processes of becoming conscious will take place much more rapidly once masses of people start getting active and defending themselves, but we have to get to that point first – and the few swallows we see today don’t quite make a summer, so to speak.

In general, a form of everyday cynicism is dominant today that barely existed in this form a few decades ago. The contemporary bourgeois concept of the human is certainly a largely pessimistic one, a negative one, and people resign themselves cynically to this state of affairs: “That’s just how humans are…”, etc. Interestingly, Leo Kofler already broached this issue in 1960 in his book on State, Society, and the Elite between Humanism and Nihilism,although certain parts of society, like the Catholic labour movement of the 1950s, were indeed of a bourgeois character, but were certainly not cynical.

You’re right: this phenomenon of an all-pervasive everyday cynicism in this form is historically novel, and Kofler perceived it and theorised it very early on. In fact, the work you mentioned reads more convincingly today than it did then, as this everyday nihilism so prevalent today only affected a small layer of society at the time of his writing. Today, it affects the majority of society. Back then, however, Kofler’s book was not noticed or absorbed – it was regarded as stale. In the 1980s, I still occasionally heard claims that Kofler’s discussions of, as he wrote, “occurrences of decadence, of cynicism and nihilism in the postmodern manner” were considered antiquated and out of proportion. That doesn’t seem so convincing anymore. Of course, we can’t apply what Kofler wrote a half-century ago to today on a one-to-one basis, but the basic thoughts seem even more relevant to me today than they were back then.

Revolutions Against Capital, Capital Against Revolutions?

Central London, 9-12 November 2017

http://conference.historicalmaterialism.org/

***EXTENDED Deadline for abstracts: 15 May 2017. Participants from previous conferences will need to create a new login for this year's conference website. ***

***UPDATE: The streams are now listed at the end of this post.***

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abstracts should be between 250 and 350 words. Panels should include abstracts for all individual presentations.

First important notice: while we are very open to preconstituted panels, we insist that all papers in such panels must have their own abstract and speaker details. Do NOT simply send us a list of names please. We also reserve the right to reject certain abstracts in such panels and to reconstitute them with other speakers.

Second important announcement: all participants are expected to make every reasonable effort to participate in THE ENTIRETY of the conference and be able to have their paper at any slot therein. Any absolutely imperative reasons why you cannot speak on day X or Y or at time X or Y MUST BE COMMUNICATED TO US WHEN THE ABSTRACT IS SUBMITTED as we WILL NOT be making last minute changes to the timetable as in previous years. Participants are also expected to beactually able to participate in the conference when they submit their abstracts. Of course, medical emergencies or visa denials cannot be predicted, but all other cases of last minute withdrawals cause us unnecessary stress and create chaotic conditions for a final timetable, so all teaching arrangements or other possible impediments must be checked when submitting, not when the timetable is already established.

The Great War, the Russian Revolution and Mass Rebellions 1916-1923 - Stream at the Historical Materialism Annual Conference

Mass rebellions against Capital and Empire shook the globe in the wake of World War One and the Russian Revolution. To friend and foe alike, the seizure of power by insurgent workers and organised socialists in October 1917 constituted the advanced outpost of an international offensive against the capitalist order. From the 1916 insurrections in Ireland and Central Asia, to the revolutionary proletarian insurgencies in Western and Central Europe, to the countless anti-colonial rebellions of dominated peoples in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, it seemed for a brief historical moment that imperial capitalism was on the verge of defeat.

Few people today would deny the enormous social, political, and cultural impact of these popular rebellions. Yet a major question mark hangs over their current relevancy, as well as the various radical traditions they expressed and engendered. The rise and collapse of Stalinism, the defaults and defeats of revolutionary nationalism, and the triumphant neoliberal onslaught have cast a pall over the promise of the 1916-23 upsurge and the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist project(s) it came to represent. 

Capital, with all its crises and contingencies, remains. As the political centre collapses, space is opening for new forces to fill the void. But, one century later, it remains to be seen whether the Russian Revolution and the international insurgencies of the era can recapture the imaginations of those seeking to radically overhaul existing social relations. 

It is in this open and uncertain context that the Annual Historical Materialism Conference will mark the centennial anniversary of 1917 by hosting the stream 'The Great War, the Russian Revolution and Mass Rebellions 1916-1923'.

We invite submissions for papers that take a fresh look at look at the 1916-1923 insurgencies; the impact of these events throughout the Twentieth Century; and their reverberations on (or relevancy for) the world today. 

A vast uncharted intellectual and historiographic territory lies beyond the lifeless established paradigms of so much academic and activist literature. Much of the story of these multifarious popular upheavals remains to be told. Many questions long thought settled – from classical Marxist analysis and strategy, to the early dynamics of class, nationality, gender, and sexuality in mass struggle and state power, to the divergent trajectories of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary social transformations – merit serious re-examination. Uncovering how these legacies can speak to our current realities is no less vital a task.

It is our hope that this stream can mark a major moment for a collective reinvigoration of Marxist and radical engagement with the experiences of the highest point in the Twentieth century's revolutionary tide.

Marxism, Sexuality and Political Economy: Looking Forwards, Looking Backwards - Stream at the Historical Materialism Annual Conference

The Sexuality and Political Economy network (HMSPEN), affiliated to Historical Materialism (HM), invite paper/panel proposals for a stream of panels at HM London 2017 on the theme of Marxism, Sexuality and Political Economy: Looking Forwards, Looking Backwards

After an initial launch last year with 6 successful panels, HMSPEN once again seeks to run a themed panel through HM London 2017, to be held on the 9th-12th November 2017.

Whilst we welcome any papers and panels that illuminate, debate and develop the relationmship between Marxism, sexuality and political economy, whether theoretical, analytical or empirical, from any disciplines or trans-disciplinary, we are particularly seeking paper and panel proposals on the theme of 'looking forwards, looking backwards'.

The 100th Anniversary of the Russian Revolution reminds us that there is a rich corpus of insight and vision from past Marxist scholarship and politics to complement the more recent explosion of high quality scholarship and political synergies between Marxism and the radical critiques and politics of sexuality. We want to celebrate this moment by seeking papers clustered around the following questions:

• What can we useful retrieve from the past in respect of sexuality and gender scholarship that will add to present debates? Have we adequately used the insights of Engels, Kollontai, Reich, D'Emilio and Marcuse amongst others? Are there other thinkers we have neglected to our cost - Armand, Zetkin. Mieli, Reiche, and Brown?

• Have we learned the lessons of history in respect of the radical politics of sexuality? Are there still lessons to be learned from Soviet Communism and the politics of sexuality or the radicalism of the late 1960's from Stonewall to the Gay left Collective?

• With a recent wave of critical scholarship intersecting Marxism and sexuality (Drucker, Lewis, Sears, Hennessy, Floyd amongst others), where does that leave us in developing a critical theory and politics that retains a Marxist approach but adequately incorporates and learns from radical critiques of sexuality, whether LGBTQI or queer theory or sexual worker critiques?

• How do we translate recent developments on critical theoretical intersections between Marxism and sexuality into a distinctive strategic approach to sexual politics today?

• How should we understand and theorise the continuities/discontinuities, both historical and theoretical, between social and sexual revolutions

Papers are sought that explore those themes and enrich our understanding of the political economy of sexuality from a Marxist perspective. At the same time, this does not preclude submissions along a range of additional and complementary themes:

• Commodification, Consumption and Sexual Space

• Commodification, Consumption and Homonormativity in neo-Liberal Contexts

• The Market, Capitalism and Sexual Rights and Justice

• Queer Labour, Queer Capital

• Marxism, sexuality studies, feminism and political economy

• Queer Intersections and political economy

• Sexual political economy in global contexts

• The political economy of trans and intersex

• Capitalism, class and the terms of queer resistance

• Sexual dimensions of gendered capitalism as a mode of social production and reproduction

• Imperialist and Colonial interventions, Islamophobia, homonationalism and pinkwashing

• the sexual dynamics of capitalist restoration in China

• Globalising the dialogues between Sexuality, political economy and Marxism

Green Revolutions? - Stream at the Historical Materialism Annual Conference

At the height of the Russian civil war, Bolsheviks from the besieged town of Astrakhan reached Moscow and appealed to Lenin to approve their plans for a nature reserve in the delta of the Volga, which he did, explaining that 'conservation of nature is of importance to the entire Republic; I attach urgent significance to it. Let it be declared a national necessity and appreciated by the scale of nation-wide importance.' One century later, the significance of conserving nature is no less urgent. The centenary of the Russian Revolution should prompt renewed, closer reflections on the relation between the revolutionary Marxist legacy and ecological struggles, including its historical parameters. How green were the Bolsheviks? Still only assembled in fragments, what lessons can be learned from the efflorescence of environmental science and politics between October and the onset of Stalinist industrialisation? Was adoration of modern technology and Promethean domination of nature inherent in the Soviet Union from the start, or were there other paths not taken? How did the fate of the revolution determine the trajectory of ecological thought within the working-class movement?

Ecological Marxism is by now a well-established current of research, but it sometimes falls into the trap of academic theorising, with little connection to Marxist politics. Can there be an ecological Leninism (or Luxemburgism, or autonomism, or Maoism...)? What are the most promising tendencies in environmental movements around the world today? Does Marxist thought have anything to offer activists on the frontlines, from Standing Rock via the divestment campaigns to the struggle against new coal-power plants in Bangladesh? The ecological emergencies of the twenty-first century seem to call for extraordinary measures to maintain a habitable biosphere. What would they look like? In the increasingly dangerous climate of 2017, however, neither red nor green forces dominate the political agenda – instead, the centenary comes with a worldwide surge in brown-tinged reactionary nationalism. From the United States via Poland to India, this ascendant right is waging a general onslaught on what remains of wild nature, denying climate change, speeding up the production of fossil fuels and, apparently, synthesising aggression against the environment with attacks on undesirable others. This conjuncture has yet to be met with a consistent analysis – and response – from the radical left.

The ecology stream at the HM annual conference of 2017 in London invites papers and panels on the above and related themes, in the entire field of environmental theory and politics as practiced through the lens of Marxism.

Marxist-Feminist Stream - Stream at the Historical Materialism Annual Conference

The contribution of women in mass/popular/class/revolutionary uprisings has often been overlooked, even in cases where women played a leading role. Following the Call for Papers of the 14th HM London conference in commemorating the Marxist legacy in revolutions of the past at the centenary of the October Revolution while thinking about present struggles, this is then also an opportune time to highlight and reflect on the role of women and feminist ideas in revolutionary situations.

Processes of excision, of silencing, of sidelining help explain the sway of a (neo)liberal feminism in the so-called West that places feminism as an emancipatory possibility engendered by capitalism rather than socialism or communism. This suppression of women's revolutionary histories has been successful in establishing neoliberal feminism as the mainstream. Marxist-feminists need to revisit and reclaim their histories, not only to set the record straight but to move beyond them by critically engaging with other anti-racist, anti-colonialist, revolutionary feminisms. A new generation of feminist activists and theorists is challenging neoliberal feminism and placing feminist struggles again squarely within anti-capitalist and anti-racist agendas. All across the globe, 2016 and 2017 have been years of struggle for abortion rights (as in Poland's Black Monday) and women's self-determination as well as years of resurgence of significant feminist movements (as in the case of the Women's March in the USA and the Women's Strike in many parts of the world).

In 2017, the HM London conference's Marxist feminist stream invites critical Marxist feminist thinking on the processes and strategies of excision and silencing as described above, but also on elaborating on the ways in which the important struggles of the past years can lead to the emergence and consolidation of revolutionary feminist movements worldwide. We invite papers that re-work Alexandra Kollontai's question 'what has the October Revolution done for women in the West?' (1927) to which we add the question 'what has the October Revolution done for Women in the East?' as well as a series of other questions:

• How has Marxist feminism approached the legacy of revolutions so far?

• Are there Marxist feminist theorisations of the revolution today that can operate against the neo-fascist offensive in its alliance with contemporary capitalism?

• What are the sites of Marxist feminist revolutionary pedagogy today?

• What is the connection of social movements against racism to the Marxist feminist critique of revolutions?

• What has the November Revolution, and Rosa Luxemburg's murder, achieved in terms of burying the issue of female revolutionary leaders for most of the 20^th century?

• What is the experience of women as participants in, or leaders of, revolutions beyond Europe? What feminist politics have informed those experiences? How can we expand a transnational, even global dialogue as a shared space for negotiating a possibly collective experience?

• What are the positions of Marxist feminism on the questions of revolution, violence, and self-defense?

• What counts as revolutionary praxis today from the perspectives of Marxist feminism? Does the strike, for instance, allow for a successful imbrication of women's demands concerning production and reproduction, a distinction forced by capitalist economy and economics?

• What is the impact of the wage relation (and dependency) on keeping women 'in their place' (in factories, the service industry, the home), ensuring therefore their suppression as a revolutionary force? Or should we have other readings of the wage relation as the ground of economic independence within the actuality of capitalism?

What is the role (and revival) of religion as politics in suppressing or enabling women as a revolutionary force?

• Is the abolition or the multiplication of genders a revolutionary utopia that we should strive for in opposing the concrete exploitations of capitalism?

• Has the notion of 'passive revolution' been of use to Marxist feminist struggles, or has it been twisted to negate the possibility of 'active revolution'?

• What is the relationship of sexual relations to class struggle today as opposed to 1921, when Kollontai wrote a text under this heading?

We hope that contributors to the Marxist feminist stream will bring their own critical questions, of relevance to research and to everyday struggle, to be added to the above provisional list of questions – not least in relation to what and who the social category 'woman' may encompass today as a revolutionary subject beyond a normative biologism. We invite panels, papers, and platforms where such questions can be openly debated with the sense of urgency our times command.

Race and Capital - Stream at the Historical Materialism Annual Conference

The 2008 crisis has not led to a reckoning with capital, instead we have seen a resurgence in the forces of the right: in both its 'radical' and 'moderate' varieties. Capital's primary response to the crisis is the language of racism. From the 'migrant crisis', to the racialised policing authority deployed to enforce austerity, to continued racialised military intervention; the connection between race and capital seems clear. The attempt to grapple with these issues has given rise to heated debates on the left about race and racism, and the relationship between the interpersonal the structural. Above all, these debates have related to the question of solidarity and the possibility of united political action in the face of this rising tide of racism. How we analyse and respond to these issues are thus of decisive political importance.

Of course, these questions are not entirely new. In Capital, Marx linked the dawning of capitalist production to a racialised 'primitive accumulation' in Africa. More importantly, in the Russian Revolution the Bolsheviks put anti-imperialism at the core of their international political programme. In the process they exerted a decisive influence on the emerging anti-colonial movement: inaugurating the connection between that movement and the Marxist tradition. In the intervening period, writers in the Marxist tradition – for example CLR James, Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall – have attempted to map the fraught relationship between racism, capitalist accumulation and other forms of oppression.

It is into this situation that Historical Materialism's Race and Capital stream seeks to intervene. In particular, we seek to use the resources of the Marxist tradition to illuminate questions of race and racism, and – at the same time – use these questions to reformulate key aspects of the Marxist tradition. Understanding this in a broad sense to include issues of race, racism, indigeneity, colonialism, imperialism and migration, we would be especially interested in panels or papers concerning:

• Attempts to rethink Marxist theories on the relationship between capitalism and racism

• Anti-racist engagements with the 'classics' of the Marxist tradition

• Recovering the anti-racist legacy of the Marxist tradition 

• Marxist engagement with anti-racist work outside of the Marxist tradition

• Intersectionality

• Afro-Pessimism and anti-black racism theory

• Cultural appropriation

• Black and Third World feminisms

• Anti-racist accounts of the Russian Revolution: particularly its relationship to anti-colonial uprisings in 'the East'

• Historical analyses of anti-racist (and anti-imperialist) movements and their relationship to the Marxist tradition

• Marxist analyses of indigeneity and indigenous movements

• Analyses of contemporary and historical racist practices

Ludmila Costhek Abílio on transformations of labour in Brazil.

Ludmila Costhek Abílio is a visiting researcher at the CESIT (Centre for Trade Union and Labour Studies) - Institute of Economics – UNICAMP – Brazil. This article was originally published in Portuguese at Passapalavra and atBlog da Boitempo.

Between beauty salons and apps

In October 2016, Michel Temer’s government sanctioned the Salão parceiro - profissional parceiro ('Beauty salon partner – professional partner') law. In the turbulent Brazilian context of the return of austerity packages, which include forthcoming state pension reform, labour reform, as well as the already sanctioned PEC241 - a constitutional reform limiting the expenditures in health, education, social welfare and public services for the next two decades - the law was conveniently unnoticed. Approved five months before the legal liberalisation of outsourcing in a variety of economic activities, including those of the public sector, it determines that beauty salon owners are no longer obliged to recognise their employment relationship with their manicurists, hairdressers, barbers and beauticians. The law determines that an establishment is responsible for providing the necessary infrastructure - the other workers continue to be recognised as employees - so that their “partners”, who are now legally self-employed, can carry out their work. Thus, the manicurist who works eight or more hours per day, six days a week, for the same salon, will probably become a service provider.

Most likely because it applies to a job typically carried out by women, apparently of little relevance or social visibility, the law has been received more as a mere deregulation than as a legal move towards the uberisation of work in Brazil. Uberisation, as understood here, refers to a new stage of labour exploitation, which results in qualitative changes to the worker’s categorisation and recognition, the structure of companies, in addition to means of control, management and expropriation of labour. This is a new step towards outsourcing that, while complementing the previous model of subcontracting networks made up of a wide range of firms, can also compete with it. Uberisation consolidates the passage of the worker to a nanoentrepreneur who is permanently available to work; it appropriates, in a productive and administered way, the progressive erosion of the public realm as the fundamental field of work regulation; furthermore, minimum guarantees are taken away while the worker remains subordinated.

This subordination, however, can operate under new logics. Uberisation can be understood as a possible future for companies in general, that become responsible for providing the infrastructure to allow their “partners” to carry out their work. It is not hard to imagine hospitals, universities and companies from a wide range of areas adopting this model, using the work of their “just-in-time partners” according to their demands.[i] However, looking at the present reality of the digital economy and its Uber drivers, Deliveroo motorcycle couriers, Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, it is possible to see the model in action, and understand that it is not only based on eliminating or disguising the employment relationship. Uber has made visible a new level of real subsumption of labour, extending globally and currently comprising millions of workers around the world, with the potential to become generalised in multiple sectors.

Uberisation has not suddenly arisen from the digital economy. It has been developing for decades and has more recently materialised in this new field. Companies that promote uberisation  in the digital economy field – from now on known as app-companies – develop mechanisms to transfer risk and costs not to other subordinated companies, but to a multitude of available and engaged independent self-employed contractors. In practice, such a transfer is managed by software and online platforms owned by these companies, which match worker-users with consumer-users, dictating and managing the rules (including the determinations of costs and gains) of this connection.

The fact is that app-companies lack the traditional material aspects of a company, but have high visibility. The sheer importance of Uber around the world allows the use of the term in question. The source of the fetishised “brand strength” in this case are the multitude of workers as well as the consumers that the company mobilises around the world - in the city of São Paulo alone there are more uber drivers than taxi drivers, with numbers exceeding 50,000; the company however does not disclose this data.[ii]

The way in which Uber was organised brought to light fundamental issues of capitalist development, such as urban mobility and the legislations surrounding the digital economy. Uber has become the subject of electoral campaigns and debates, moving through the conflictive quick sands of the permeable area between companies and state, that involves the interests of consumer-voters, workers conflicts and the disputes of titans over the so called “free” market. However, beyond this, Uber shed light on world labour market tendencies, that involve not only the transformation of the worker into a microentrepreneur, but also of the worker into a productive amateur worker[iii], a definition that will be presented throughout the analysis.

App-companies establish themselves on the market as mediators between consumers and workers-microentrepreneurs, providing the necessary infrastructure - albeit virtual – so that this meeting can take place. Just as in the case of the beauty salon owner that receives a commission for the manicurist’s work, Uber receives a percentage (25%) for acting as the mediator between thrifty consumers and the extensive number of amateur drivers, appearing as a virtual infrastructure provider for this relation to take place. Its role, however, is clearly much more complex than this. Thus, as with the manicurist “partner” - who, in her relationship with the owner of the beauty salon, is not in a position of equality to define her financial gains, work load and the length of her workday - the work of the uberised worker is also subsumed. The means of control, management, surveillance and expropriation of his work are simultaneously evident and barely tangible: after all, the status of the driver is self-employed, thus not an employee, but a registered worker (or “partner”) who works according to his own purpose. At the same time, the worker is managed by a software installed on his smartphone; despite the company defining the rules, it appears more as a brand than as a company as such. However, the market ideology of a “partnership” between workers and theapp-company quickly becomes fragile when uberised workers take charge of their power as a multitude and establish collective forms of resistance and negotiation. Means of control, expropriation and oppression thus become more explicit while the company becomes more concrete.

New forms of political organisation that involve the creation of trade unions of independent workers, strikes and demonstrations carried out by uberised workers are already taking place around the world. Uber drivers in the US (currently more than 400,000) joined nurses, hospitality workers, among others, in the “Fight for US$15” campaign, that fought for a minimum wage of US$15 per hour of work.[iv] In California, Uber opted to pay US$100 million in an agreement with tens of millions of workers (there are no precise data available on this number) that took part in a collective action requiring legal recognition of the employment relationship with the company. The agreement prevented the process going to court.[v] At the end of the year, the English justice system determined that Uber recognise its drivers as staff employees; this process is on-going.[vi]

The motorcycle couriers that work for the Brazilian app Loggi also organised demonstrations under the coordination of SindimotoSP (a São Paulo based trade union) by blocking lanes on two major roads in the city. These demonstrations were the result of a new rule of remuneration per delivery implemented by the company, which in reality increased its percentage gains over the work of the drivers. Cycle couriers from the company Foodora organised the first strikes of this kind against an app-company in Italy, which also made explicit new forms of repression (such as suspending the use of the app by movement leaders), in addition to new forms of solidarity (when user-consumers started to boycott the app).[vii] After seven days of strike, motorcycle couriers from the app Deliveroo prevented changes from being implemented that would have reduced their hourly rate.[viii] In 2016, the App Drivers Trade Union was created in São Paulo, and the Association of Autonomous App Drivers and the Trade Union for Private Individual Passenger Drivers was set up in the state of Pernambuco. At the beginning of 2017, Uber attempted to prevent the formation of trade unions by taking legal action in Seattle.[ix]

The worker-profile and the consumer-supervisor

Basically speaking, Uber matches the multitude of amateur paid drivers with a multitude of users looking for lower prices compared to taxis. In some cities, Uber is an economically accessible option, of higher quality and faster than public transport. Entering the market in an extremely predatory way, acting in a regulatory vacuum, the company has quickly reconfigured the private market of urban mobility. Uber deploys an aggressive strategy to dominate local markets; in many cities it is illegal yet continues to operate normally. To achieve this, they count on a multitude of users and recruit - or more accurately, count on the permanent adhesion of - a multitude of amateur drivers, who see this profession as a method of income generation.

Uber, like other companies that operate with the same logic, establishes rules, evaluation criteria, ways to manage the workers and their work, while at the same time being exempt from responsibilities and requirements that would lead to the legal recognition of the employment relationship. Consumption, evaluation, data collection and surveillance are inseparable elements. In reality, the control over the work is transferred to the multitude of consumers, who evaluate the professionals on each service provided. This evaluation of the worker is visible to all the other users. The work is now certified in the realm of consumption, via a type of collective manager that provides continual control over the worker. Confidence - a key element to the consumer putting their goods and documents into the hands of a motorbike courier, to get into the car of an unknown person that will be your driver (and unlike a taxi driver, did not go through a certification process ruled by the state), - is therefore guaranteed by the activity of this supervisory multitude that engages and trusts in its role as certifier. Thus, the uberised worker is aware that he is being continually watched and evaluated. This new form of control has shown to be effective in guaranteeing productivity and standard procedures – although informally defined – that determines patterns of quality and efficiency for the drivers. When the workers comply, they work for themselves and for the company, for their  own means and for the cultivation of the brand, which in reality depends entirely on the dispersed actions of this army of drivers.

The realisation of the work depends on the disposition of the worker to accept the task at hand i.e. constant management of his own productivity. But it also means beating the competition. The consumers’ evaluation supplies the elements in order to rank the workers. This operates as a criterion to determine – in a programmed and automatised way - which workers, among the large numbers of drivers available, have more access to specific rides.

Workers and consumers become virtual profiles, effectively registration numbers. Their activity is material and tangible, at the same time as it is mediated and ruled by software and their algorithms. A worker-profile in a database of a multitude signifies, in practice, a self-employed worker, that assumes the risks and costs of his work, defines his own working day and level of dedication and, in addition, creates strategies to deal with the extensive number of competitors that permanently hangs over his head.[x]

Uberisation, therefore, consolidates the worker as a microentrepreneur. This consolidation involves new logics that depend, on the one hand, on outsourcing the control of the companies to consumers; and, on the other hand, on the engagement of the multitude of workers with their own productivity, in addition to the transfer of costs and risks from the company to their “partners”.

An additional step towards the flexibilisation of work

The term “flexibilisation” has explanatory force when it is understood as a reference to the contemporary changes taking place in labour processes regarding the relationship between the state, capital and labour, in addition to the relationship between technological innovations, the rise in unemployment and national state policies that break down the barriers to financial and investment flows. In other words, it refers to the relationship between capital and labour mobility at a global level. Flexibilisation can also be understood more simply as the contemporary means to eliminate workers’ rights and, in addition to this, the transferral of risk, costs and unpaid work to the workers. This transferral involves the extension of labour time and the intensification of labour to the extent that they become difficult to recognise as such.

In the last decades, it became clear that even labour management could be transferred to the worker – clearly a management of a subordinated nature, woven by the threats of competition and unemployment. The fact is that the change from time clock to personal wrist watch proved to be extremely efficient in extending labour time and intensifying labour. Currently, an eight-hour workday is a distant memory for workers of many different qualification levels and remunerations.[xi]

Therefore, at the heart of flexibilisation is the transferral of management, costs and risks of the labour to the worker, while maintaining control over his productivity. Both David Harvey - in his definition of organisation through dispersal - and João Bernardo - on how outsourcing production does not mean loss of control - emphasise that the dispersion of work does not mean capital’s loss of control, or any type of democratisation in the work process.[xii] On the contrary, what has been seen in recent decades is the major centralisation of capital accompanied by new forms of work intensification, extension of labour time and transferral of risks and costs to the workers, in forms that are increasingly difficult to map.

Uberisation complements “the classical” outsourcing while also competing with it. It is complementary in that it is an additional step towards transferring the costs and responsibility of production. It is also, however, a way to eliminate outsourced companies that do not have the means to compete with app-companies. This is noted in the motorcycle courier segment. In the 1980s, the motoboy was directly hired by a company, and the motorbike was even owned by the contractor and not the worker. From the 1990s, outsourced courier companies took over the market. There are currently 900,000 motorcycle couriers in Brazil, with around 200,000 of these in the city of São Paulo alone. This immense army of motorbike drivers - who risk their lives and bodies on a daily basis to guarantee the circulation of goods and documents - has expanded together with the level of outsourcing of their job. The lower classes now have access to credit that makes it possible to finance the purchase of a motorbike; the use of the mobile phone has become a popular work tool, which completely reconfigures the logistics and pace of the work of these professionals; the possibility of earning a higher remuneration than other low skilled jobs are elements that contribute to the consolidation and spread of outsourced companies and an ample job on offer for motorcycle drivers. At the same time, the growth in the contingency of workers and contracting companies is also related to the development of the city of São Paulo as a collapsed metropolis in relation to urban mobility, while at the same time being a global financial centre.

Motorcycle courier app-companies have entered this well-consolidated universe of outsourced companies and its immense army of workers. These apps have been on the market for less than five years - though there are no precise data -, but it is certain that they count on thousands of motorcycle couriers in São Paulo.[xiii] To deliver for Loggi, the courier becomes a microentrepreneur (MEI in Brazil) and must be regulated as a motorcycle courier.[xiv] The founders of Loggi entered onto the market creating a niche that previously did not exist. Like Uber, Loggi app connects consumers and motorcycle couriers; it defines the price of the delivery, keeping a 20% commission for this mediation; it has automatised the logistics, developing software that geolocalises the couriers available and the consumers. The consumer makes a request, the online platform makes the request visible to the closest motorcycle couriers, and whoever accepts first, takes the delivery. Motorcycle couriers are mapped before and during the delivery, and the consumer can follow his location online. This surveillance operates as a mechanism that is fundamental to the consumer’s confidence in the service. For the courier, the app is a way to free him from the exploitation of the outsourced company (which in general takes 40% of the cost of the delivery) and turn into a self-employed worker, which, at least for now, provides him with a higher income. Being self-employed means having to give up certain rights (for themotoboys that are formal workers) in addition to facing the permanently difficult relationship between competitors and income level; the higher the number of workers that adhere to the apps, the smaller the possibility of earning, and most likely, the more one will have to work.[xv]

In addition, uberisation and traditional outsourcing can complement each other. For many, the app and outsourced companies are complementary. The motoboy may establish his own strategies to work for both of them at the same time, promoting new informal ways of labour intensification, matching his precarious formal job with the work offer from the apps. In this way, the motorcycle courier fills up the pores of his workday with the tasks offered by the apps - a strategy that requires knowledge of his own logistics.

The brave new world of the e-marketplace

To understand uberisation, we must use the terms already familiar to the market, but not so much to critical social thought. The digital economy today is a new field of work flexibilisation, being a virtual space that connects the activities of consumers, workers and companies, in less recognisable and locatable forms.

At present, regarding Brazil, many professionals such as drivers, motorcycle couriers, lorry drivers, beauticians, builders, cleaners, nannies, as well as lawyers, doctors, teachers, can count on apps that enable the uberisation of their work. The labour market is penetrated by a virtual space of buying and selling work, known as the e-marketplace. This virtual universe is extremely favourable to the transformation of workers into microentrepreneurs, as well as workers into amateur workers. As one director of a motorcycle courier app-company in São Paulo explained, the “e-marketplace is a place where people meet. We are a place where people that are looking for a courier motorcycle service can find motorcycle couriers.”

The e-marketplace has become a useful and profitable universe, boosted by new company models known as startups. Loggi, Uber, Google and Facebook are examples of startups that succeeded. Startup is the name for the contemporary combination of innovation, entrepreneurship and a substantial participation of investment funds. They are small companies with major potential in terms of profits; innovation here refers to technological development, but also the possibility to create new business models. Startups materialise the entrepreneur spirit of contemporary capitalism and a new form of future corporations. Uber is good example of a successful startup - as given on its site, it was founded in 2008 when two enlightened friends, while walking around Paris, realised that the difficulty in finding a taxi was in fact a perfect niche market. Launched onto the market in 2010, the company can currently be found in 540 cities around the world. In 2016, its market value was more than US$64 billion. The company gets rid of labour costs yet maintaining productivity gains and control over production. The startups that establish themselves as app-companies - as understood in this study - reached the pinnacle of the lean company, with very few employees and millions of connected entrepreneurs – amateur workers – and engaged consumers. These companies are fundamental in consolidating the e-marketplace, but appear as simple mediators between supply and demand (as with Amazon; the mobile apps for taxis, such as Easytaxi; online clothes shops, such as Boohoo). In reality, some of these companies dramatically reorganise the world of work, establishing new niches in diverse occupations, new forms of control over work and new consumer experiences.

Crowdsourcing: the productive multitude of amateur workers

In 2008, the journalist Jeff Howe coined the term crowdsourcing.[xvi] Outsourcing had reached a new stage, feeding now from thecrowd. Navigating in the celebration of the sharing economy, the author in fact reveals an ongoing massive transfer of work traditionally carried out by companies to the users of cyberspace. Uberisation and crowdsourcing are deeply connected when we look at the multitude of amateur workers, which are explicitly working. But their work does not count on labour rights or state regulations, nor does it give them a stable professional identity. Sometimes, it is not even defined as work. From the side of the companies, the amateur work of the crowd functions as unpaid or low paid work. At present, the transferal of work in the form of work can be recognised in several sites that count on the adhesion of a multitude of users-workers. At the beginning of the 2000s, NASA created the Clickworkers project and with it discovered that it was not necessary to hire workers to identify elements such as craters in photos from Mars: after testing the multitude, it proved that this was as efficient and a much faster way to carry out the task, in an unpaid form of “collaboration for the future”. The site Innocentive currently congregates uberised scientists with corporations such as Procter & Gamble and Johnson’s & Johnson’s. These companies realised that their Research and Development departments could be extended to improvised laboratories of professionals looking to complement their income or merely motivated by the “challenges” offered on the site. The solutions proposed by the users can be patented by the companies, while the selected/winner user receives a financial prize.

Crowdsourcing is only possible if the worker is an amateur worker. What we come across is a significant loss – that can be profitably appropriated - of stable socially established elements that structured professional identity, recognition of work and of the worker. The multitude of workers carry out work without its socially defined form, in activities that can move between leisure, creativity, consumption and ways of income generation. The Uber driver is not a professional driver, as in the case of a taxi driver. The problem solver at Innocentive may even be an employee from a Research and Development department, but as a user, he is an amateur scientist. There is no defined workplace, no employment relationship, no dedication required, no selection process, contract or dismissal (although, as has been shown, the competition is permanent, in a diffused and non-localisable form). It can be said that, in contemporaneity, every worker is a potential amateur worker. As with the motorcycle courier combining his work from the outsourced company with that from the app, and the self-employed engineer who spends his days between the computer and at the wheel of the Uber car, workers with the most diverse socioeconomic profiles engage in activities that do not have a definable professional status, but are a source of income, cost reduction, or even a way to exercise their creativity.

From “getting by” to Gig Economy

Returning to the beauty salons, with typically female workers it is possible to identify the roots of flexible work that crosses the market from top to bottom. The blurred lines between what is and what is not labour time, the fusion between professional and private spheres, the absence of the public realm as the main field for labour regulations, as well as the uncertainty over what is and what is not work are some of the elements that weave women’s lives. In the most precarious jobs as sewing homework, domestic employment, the work of housewives, one can identify elements that weave contemporary forms of labour exploitation. Investigating a typically female occupation, it was possible to identify tendencies in progress on the labour market, that today visibly merge with uberisation. Cosmetic resellers, for the Brazilian company Natura alone, comprise more than 1.5 million women in Brazil. From diverse socioeconomic profiles such as cleaners, secretaries, teachers and housewives, they combine their profession, or the lack of, with resales. Resales are largely permeable with the resellers private life and other occupations. Selling throughout the workday in schools, offices, at family gatherings, advertising makeup workshops during holidays, distributing products while working in public institutions: what was found in the research was a total adhesion to work with no actual labour form; and it is precisely this lack of form that makes its permeability with other activities possible.

The company transfers a series of risks and costs to the multitude of workers, and counts on non-accountable and unpaid work performed by these women. The home, the workplace, the investment in products for personal use as a means to sell, as well as personal relationships work as vectors for the sales and also to promote the brand. But what is of greater interest here is the recognition of the adhesion of 1.5 million women (in Brazil alone), to amateur work. Labour without defined labour forms, with fragile regulation, that operates as a means to complement income, as an exercise of an undefined professional identity and to facilitate consumption. From the company’s point of view, the informal amateur work is well appropriated, and tied by the transformation of informality into information, in a factory in which its just-in-time production is driven by the pace of this gigantic army.

The relationship that the Uber driver has with his work is very similar to that of the Natura reseller: a supplement to their income from an activity that does not confer a professional status; it is a contingent work, amateur work, for which they use their own car, driving skills, personal strategies and availability for the work.

Looking at these workers, the notion of “getting by” stands out. This is a definition that is both up to date and historically structural to Brazilian labour. The notion of getting by[xvii] is not significantly addressed in Brazilian labour studies, including in the production and analysis of data on employment/unemployment; however, it is a fundamental part of the life and survival of low qualified and poorly paid workers. The concept of “living on the edge” for the majority of Brazilian population means constantly grabbing opportunities, which technically speaking translates into a high turnover on the Brazilian labour market, the constant movement between formal and informal work (Cardoso, 2013), on combining contingent jobs, social programs of income generation, illegal activities and formal work (see research on living in the periphery, in particular those coordinated by Gabriel Feltran, Vera Telles, Cibele Rizek, Robert Cabanes and Isabel Georges[xviii]). The professional trajectory of themotoboys interviewed makes this evident. Today a formal motorcycle courier and informal pizza delivery boy, tomorrow a self employed app motorcycle courier; yesterday shoe factory worker, car-parking attendant, pizza maker, street market seller, car wash worker. Today amotogirl, before this a cleaner, kitchen assistant and coordinator at a clinic for drug addicts. Motorcycle courier, locksmith, salesman in a construction materials shop; confectioner and builder. Owner of a small beverage shop, low-paid farmer, bank worker, and today self-employed motorcycle courier. Todaymotoboy, previously cleaner, doorman and bus fare collector. This is the movement with which a large percentage of Brazilians weave the world of work.

The notion of “getting by”, however, now seems to go beyond typical structural element of peripheral countries’ labour markets. It has always been in the core of labour markets of these countries, although it has been commonly taken as an unimportant or irrelevant aspect, understood more as a sign of their late development than as an important element of capitalist accumulation. It seems now to become more recognisable and finally more politically relevant under the western definition of gig economy, which nominates the market moved by this multitude of workers that adhere to unstable work, that has no defined identity, and move between being contingent work or activities for which there is not even a defined name. The online platform of the company Airbnb, for example, counts on the adhesion of millions of users that make their homes available for instant and momentary rental. Acting as amateur microentrepreneurs, they become a kind of manager/ administrator of their own homes. Gig economy is composed of remunerated services, that barely have a concrete labour form, that count on the engagement of the worker-user, on his self-management and his own definition of personal strategies. Gig economy gives name to the multitude of just-in-time workers (as highlighted by Francisco de Oliveira at the beginning of the 2000s and Naomi Klein in mapping the path from brands to workers) [xix], that adhere in an unstable and permanently transitory form to diverse occupations and activities as a means of survival and other subjective motivations that must be better understood. These activities are however subsumed, under forms of control and exploitation, at the same time evident but hardly localisable. The so-calledsocial disposability is also productive. At least for now.

[i] The zero-hours contract already covers 3% of the workforce in the UK, more than 900,000 workers, and has grown exponentially since 2012. This contract regulates the conditions of thejust-in-time worker, allowing companies to employ workers according to their needs, with lower costs and fees involved.

[ii]http://sao-paulo.estadao.com.br/noticias/geral,total-de-carros-da-uber-e-outros-aplicativos-supera-numero-de-taxistas-em-sp-diz-doria,70001653256

[iii] For a discussion on the work of the amateur worker, see: Dujarier, M.Le travail du consommateur. Paris, La Découverte, 2009;  Abílio, L.C.Sem maquiagem: o trabalho de um milhão de revendedoras de cosméticos. São Paulo : Boitempo, 2014;  Abilio, L. C. Labour make up: A case study of 800,000 cosmetics resellers. Work Organisation, Labour & Globalisation (Print). , v.5, p.96 - 110, 2011.

[iv]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2016/11/29/uber-driv…

[v]http://observer.com/2016/05/ubers-quasi-union-could-be-a-faustian-barga… ;https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/21/uber-driver-settleme…

[vi]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/28/uber-uk-tribunal-sel…

[vii]https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/01/foodora-strike-turin-gig-economy-sta…

[viii]https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/aug/15/deliveroo-workers-stri…

[ix]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/05/uber-drivers-union-s…

[x] Evaluating the cost-benefit, hundreds of Uber drivers concluded that the costs of using the car, among others, are greater than carrying out short rides. One of the ways the drivers found to overcome this was to get longer journeys from Guarulhos, the international airport. This decision translated into the formation of parking areas, in which massive queues form while drivers wait for the next job. The driver can spend hours (12 hours, according to the news) waiting for a job from the airport - which he must accept, even though the destination and pay are unknown to him. Drivers spend the day playing cards and dominos, while around them there is a network of informal workers supplying food, beverages and portable toilets.http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/cotidiano/2017/02/1857136-por-corrida-cara-motorista-do-uber-acampa-por-12-h-perto-de-aeroporto.shtml

[xi] In the research carried out with the motorycle couriers, it was clear that the majority of interviewees have a workday of 14 hours or more, amidst the São Paulo traffic.

[xii] HARVEY, D.The condition of postmodernity: an enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.  Bernardo, J.Democracia totalitária: teoria e prática da empresa soberana. São Paulo: Cortez, 2004.

[xiii]http://valor-ri.com.br/empresas/4539699/motofretistas-tem-nova-concorre…

[xiv] In 2009, under Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s government, regulation on the motorcycle courier and motorcycle taxi professions was introduced. The municipal governments took charge of local regulations. In São Paulo, the regulation was the subject of diverse demonstrations in which hundreds of motorcycle couriers blocked main roads/routes in the city with their motorbikes. The regulation involves a series of costs for themotoboys. Up until now, despite being implemented in the city of São Paulo, it is not subject to fiscal control, thus remains optional for the worker. Motorcycle courierapp-companies only register professionally registered professionals. For these companies, the regulation is extremely propitious, as it certifies the self-employed worker, and operates as a type of bureaucratisation in relation to trust which is imperative for the consumer to contract the service. Thus,motoboys that work with apps are MEI-motorcycle couriers.

[xv]http://exame.abril.com.br/negocios/com-aporte-de-us-2-1-bi-uber-ja-vale-mais-que-ford-ou-gm/

[xvi] Howe, Jeff.Crowdsourcing: How the power of the crowd is driving the future of business. Nova York, Rondon House, 2008.

[xvii] Telles, V. Mutações do trabalho e experiência urbana.Tempo social, n.18, v.1, 2006, p. 173-95.

[xviii] CABANES, R.; GEORGES, I.; RIZEK, C. & TELLES, V (orgs.).Saídas de emergência: Ganhar/perder a vida na periferia de São Paulo. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2011; FELTRAN, G. O valor dos pobres.Cadernos CRH, Salvador, v.27, n.72, p. 495-512, Dez. 2014; TELLES, V. S.; CABANES, R. (Orgs.).Nas Tramas da Cidade - trajetórias urbanas e seus territórios. São Paulo: Associação Editorial Humanitas, 2006.

[xix] Oliveira, F. Passagem na neblina.In: Stédile, J. , Genoíno, J. (orgs.)Classes sociais em mudança e luta pelo socialismo. São Paulo: Perseu Abramo, 2000..KLEIN, N.No logo: taking aim at the brand bullies. Vintage Canada, 2000.

Alberto Toscano on Fascism

This paper was first delivered as a seminar in February 2017 at Simon Fraser University. The author thanks Clint Burnham for the comradely hospitality and the participants for their critical engagement. A Greek translation can be found here.

Alberto Toscano is Reader in Critical Theory and co-director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of Cartographies of the Absolute (2015), The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant and Deleuze (Palgrave, 2006) and Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (Verso, 2010) as well as the translator, most recently, of Alain Badiou’s Logics of Worlds(Continuum, 2009) and The Century(Polity, 2007). He also edits the Italian List for Seagull Books and is a longstanding member of the HM editorial board.

Image: Philip Guston, The Studio, 1969

Those who find themselves living in times of crisis and disorientation often seek guidance in analogical thinking. The likeness of one conjuncture with another promises the preparedness necessary not to be found wanting again, to avert the culpable errors of precursors unarmed with foresight. As a striking example of this recourse to analogy, among countless ones that have circulated before and after Trump’s grotesque coronation, consider this diagnosis by Franco Berardi ‘Bifo’, from a post on Yannis Varoufakis et al.’s DiEM25 page, entitled ‘National-Workerism and Racial Warfare’, published on November 10, 2016, and reprised in his intervention at a conference in Vienna this December under the title ‘A New Fascism?’, also featuring interventions by Chantal Mouffe and the Hungarian dissident and communist philosopher Gáspár Tamás:[1]

As they did in 1933, the workers have revenged against those who have long been duping them: the politicians of the “democratic” reformist left. … This ‘left’ should be thrown in the dustbin: they have opened the way to Fascism by choosing to serve financial capitalism and by implementing neoliberal “reforms”. … Because of their cynicism and their cowardice they have delivered people into the hands of the corporations and the governments of our lives. In so doing, they have opened the door to the fascism that is now spreading and to the global civil war that now seems unstoppable. … The white worker [sic] class, humiliated over the last thirty years, deceived by endless reformist promises, impoverished by financial aggression, has now elected the Ku Klux Klan to the White House. As the left has taken away from the hands of the workers the democratic weapons of self-defence, here comes the racist version of the class warfare.[2]

The analogy of fascism – itself inextricably entangled with its infrastructural pair, the analogy of economic crisis – is my starting point here. I don’t wish directly to explore the cognitive or strategic power of such an analogy, either in the present moment or in earlier iterations, gauging how it may allow us to see and act, but to use it as an occasion to reflect on what some philosophically-oriented theories of fascism advanced in the twentieth century may indicate about the contemporary nexus of politics and history, often by way of determinate dis-analogies. So, my aim will not be to adjudicate the question ‘Is this fascism?’, but rather to discern some of the effects of projecting theories of fascism onto the present, perhaps learning something from their refraction.

Very provisionally, I think they allow us to confront the peculiarity of a fascism without movement, without utopia; a fascism shorn of what Bloch called non-contemporaneity, and Bataille termedhetereogeneity; a fascism that is not reacting to the threat of revolutionary politics, but which retains the racial fantasy of national rebirth and the frantic circulation of a pseudo-class discourse. I also want to suggest that the latter is best met not by abetting the sociologically spectral figure of the “forgotten” white working class, but by confronting what collective politics means today, in the understanding that accepting this racialized simulacrum of a proletariat is not a stepping stone towards class politics but rather its obstacle, its malevolent ersatz form. The aim then is to sketch out, for collective debate and dispute, something like the elementary aspects of a pseudo-insurgency – with the caveat that a pseudo-insurgency was in many ways what the murderous fascism of Europe’s interwar period embodied.

For all of their disputes over the proper theoretical approach to the surge of fascism after the cataclysm of World War 1, most Marxist theorists at the time approached the phenomenon at the interface of the political and the economic, seeking to adjudicate the functionality of the fascist abrogation of liberal parliamentary democracy to the intensified reproduction of the conditions for capitalist accumulation.[3] This entailed identifying fascism as a ruling-class solution to the organic crisis of a regime of accumulation confronted by the threat of organised class struggle amid the vacillations of an imperialist order, but also recognising, at times, the contradictions between the autonomy or primacy of the political brutally asserted by fascist movements and the possibility of a reproduction of the capitalist mode of production – whence the debates of the 1930s and 1940s, especially instigated by the work of Frankfurt School theorists like Friedrich Pollock and Franz Neumann, over the viability ofstate capitalism, debates which contemporary historical work, such as Adam Tooze’s impressiveWages of Destruction, continues to illuminate. Without discounting the tactical alliances that sundry sectors of the US capitalist class may make with the Trump administration (from cement to private security, oil to cars), there is little at present,especially in what concerns any organised challenge to capitalist hegemony, which to my mind warrants the analogy of fascism in this respect – not least in light of widespread corporate protestations, the comparative attraction for capital of Hillary Clinton-style socially-conscious neoliberalism for the maintenance of social peace and profitability, the enigma of protectionism and so on.

The intensely superstructural character of our present’s fascistic traits seems instead to warrant looking elsewhere. Many have already noted the insights that may be mined from the psycho-social inroads that the Frankfurt School (again) made into the phenomenon of fascism, from the writings of Fromm, Marcuse and Horkheimer on petty-bourgeois sadomasochisms in theirStudies on Authority and the Family to the postwar Studies on Prejudice series, with its compendious empirical inquiries into the authoritarian personality. I’ll return to these later, to reflect on some of Adorno’s insights on mass psychology and narcissism, but I want first to try and think with one of the most heterodox entries in the interwar philosophical debate on fascism, Ernst Bloch’sThe Heritage of Our Times. This protean, fascinating and unsettling work – which Walter Benjamin once likened with pejorative intent to spreading wonderfully brocaded Persian carpets on a field of ruins[4] – contains a central, and justly famous, reflection on ‘Non-Contemporaneity and the Obligation to its Dialectic’. Like Bataille, if in a very different register, it was not at the level of political instrument or psychic pathology but at that of perverted utopian promise that Bloch approached fascism. Notwithstanding the crucial elements this occluded from his view,[5] this angle of vision allowed Bloch to identify its popular energising features, ones which, in his view, its Marxist and communist counterpart had failed effectively to mobilise. Underlying Bloch’s argument is the idea that thesocius is criss-crossed by plural temporalities; the class structure of modern society is shadowed by multiple cultural and historical times that do not exist synchronously. The racist, conspiratorial occultism of the Nazis taps this lived experience of uneven development:

The infringement of ‘interest slavery’ (Zinsknechtschaft) is believed in, as if this were the economy of 1500; superstructures that seemed long overturned right themselves again and stand still in today’s world as whole medieval city scenes. Here is the Tavern of the Nordic Blood, there the castle of the Hitler duke, yonder the Church of the German Reich, an earth church, in which even the city people can feel themselves to be fruits of the German earth and honor the earth as something holy, as theconfessio of German heroes and German history …  Peasants sometimes still believe in witches and exorcists, but not nearly as frequently and as strongly as a large class of urbanites believe in ghostly Jews and the new Baldur. The peasants sometimes still read the so-called Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, a sensational tract about diseases of animals and the forces and secrets of nature; but half the middle class believes in the Elders of Zion, in Jewish snares and the omnipresence of Freemason symbols and in the galvanic powers of German blood and the German land.[6]

Where the class struggle between capitalist bourgeoisie and proletariat is a struggle over modernisation, the synchronous or the contemporary, both socially and psychically many (indeed most) Germans in the interwar period lived through social forms and psychic fantasies embedded in different rhythms and histories. Mindful that it would be wrong to view any of these as merely primitive, in a country where social relations of production were never actually outside capitalism, Bloch wants to detect the ways in which, when it comes to their fears (of social demotion or anomie) and desires (for order or well-being), these groups are somehow out of sync with the rationalizing present of capitalism – the enlightened space occupied by the mainstream socialist and labour movements. For Bloch, the Germany of the 1930s is a country inhabited not just by disenchanted citizens, workers and exploiters. Crisis has brought ‘nonsynchronous people’ to the fore: declining remnants of pasts whose hopes remain unquenched, easily recruited into the ranks of reaction.

In a sense at once social and psychic, the political conjuncture is torn between the antagonistic and unfulfilled Now of capitalist conflict and the incomplete pasts that teem in its interstices. The collective emotional effect is a ‘pent-up anger’, which the Nazis and their capitalist boosters are able to mine and to exacerbate, while it remains off-limits to a communism whose enlightenmental rationalism risks becoming practically irrational. So it is that the ‘monopoly capitalist upper class . . . utilizes gothic dreams against proletarian realities’. The question of how to relate, intellectually and politically, to the nonsynchronous becomes central, since it is useless to console oneself with the evolutionist just-so story according to which the archaic will gradually be eroded by social and economic progress. ‘[N]ot the theory of the national socialists is serious, but its energy is, the fanatic-religious impact, which does not just come from despair and ignorance, but rather from the uniquely stirring power of belief’, writes Bloch.[7] Though the political strategy of the proletariat must perforce be synchronous if it is to confront the capitalist Now, it is also required to recover and shape the kind of nonsynchronicity from where immemorial and invariant demands of justice stem. Bloch articulates this unfulfilled and ‘unclaimed’ task in terms of the relation between two forms of contradiction: on the one hand, the synchronous and determinate negativity of the organized proletariat; on the other, those ‘subversively utopian’ positivities that have ‘never received fulfilment in any age’. In this regard, Bloch was trying to supplement a thinking of the ‘synchronous’ contradiction between capital and labour and the ‘nonsychronous contradictions’ that implicated classesout of step with the rhythms and sites of capital accumulation (peasants, petty-bourgeoisie, aristocracy, lumpen proletariat, etc.).

As Rabinbach notes, quoting from Heritage:

The contradiction between these temporal dimensions demands what Bloch calls "the obligation to its dialectic," a recognition of complexity which not only focuses on the synchronous, but on the non-synchronous, the multi- temporal and multi-layered contradictions within a single present. For Bloch it is precisely this sedimentation of social experience that creates the intense desire for a resurrection of the past among those groups most susceptible to fascist propaganda. For Marxism the problem is that fascist ideology is not simply an instrument of deception but "a fragment of an old and romantic antagonism to capitalism, derived from deprivations in contemporary life, with a longing for a vague 'other.'”[8]

For Bloch, the point is to identify fascism as a ‘swindle of fulfilment’ – in his wonderful phrase – while taking that urge for fulfilment, and the manner in which it reactivates unfulfilled pasts and unrealised futures, seriously. But is the complex dialectic of ‘salvage’ invoked by Bloch – for whom, it is not just phases of emancipatory élan but also derived “periods of decline when the multiplicity of contents are released in its disintegration” from which one may revitalise a revolutionary heritage – one that we can turn to today? Severe doubt is cast on this possibility by all those critical theories which have emphasised, from the immediate post-war period onwards, the evanescence or obliteration of cultural and temporal difference from the lived experience of advanced capitalist economies.

A ‘postmodern’, ‘one-dimensional’ or ‘administered’ society is defined perhaps above all by this waning of historicity – which may of course be accompanied by the proliferation of its instrumentalised simulacra. An interesting testament to this might be sought in the controversial newspaper articles of the mid-1970s in which Pier Paolo Pasolini, shortly before his murder, sought to articulate the difference between an old and a new fascism. The latter, which for Pasolini was coterminous with a repressively hedonistic neo-capitalism, with its overt and covert mechanisms for utter conformity, was marked by the obliteration of the past, in the form of what he called (in supposed if rather mystifying reference to The Communist Manifesto) an “anthropological genocide”, namely the death of the experiences linked to peasant and ‘popular’ times and forms of life, a “genocide” he would even register in the transformation of bodies, gestures and postures themselves.[9] For Pasolini, the old fascism (and here the reference is strictly to its Italian variant) was incapable of really undoing or transforming – we could say ‘synchronising’ – those deeply embedded lifeways. This was evident in how they re-emerged seemingly unscathed after the death of Mussolini. Contrariwise the total power of contemporary capitalism, to intensively shape and homogenise desires and forms of life, especially under the appearance of difference, choice and freedom, meant the destruction of all the signs of historical unevenness, with all their utopian potentials. In the profoundly pessimistic view of Pasolini, and contra Bloch, there were no pasts left to salvage.

Now, how might we revisit this question of fascism and (non-)contemporaneity in our moment? Perhaps we can begin with an enormous dialectical irony: the fascistic tendencies finding expression in the election of Trump, but also in coeval revanchist nationalist projects across the ‘West’, are seemingly driven by a nostalgia for synchronicity. No archaic pasts, or invented traditions here, but the nostalgia for the image of a moment, that of the post-war affluence of thetrente glorieuses, for a racialized and gendered image of the socially-recognised patriotic industrial worker (Bifo’s national-workerism could also be called anational or racial Fordism, which curiously represses the state-regulatory conditions of its fantasy). To employ Bloch’s terms this isa nostalgia for the synchronous, for the contemporary. The authorised emblem of a post-utopian depoliticised post-war industrial modernity, the industrial worker-citizen, now reappears – more in fantasy than in fact, no doubt, or in the galling mise-en-scène of ‘coal workers’ surrounding the US President as he abolishes environmental regulations – in the guise of the “forgotten men”, the “non-synchronous people” of the political present. If this is a utopia, it is a utopia without transcendence, without any “fanatic-religious” element, without an unconscious or unspoken surplus of popular energies.

Accordingly, just as the non-synchronous dialectic has been transmuted today into the paradoxical non-synchronicity of the synchronous (or the nostalgia for Fordist modernity, the utopia of a post-utopian age), so Bataille’s parallel identification of the dynamic appeal of fascism with its manipulation of heterogeneity (that which is incommensurable with the orderly self-reproduction of capitalist order, whether from below as mass excess or from above as unaccountable sovereignty) requires present correction. The fascistic tendencies of the present contain little if any relationship to such a libidinal surplus, except in the degraded vestigial form of what we could call, by analogy with the psychoanalytic notion of the ‘obscene father’, the ‘obscene leader’. And this too is linked to the absence of one of the key historical features of fascism, namely the revolutionary threat to capitalist order, demanding that homogeneity inoculate itself with excess (or with its simulacrum) in order to survive. As Bataille noted in his essay on ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’:

As a rule, social homogeneity is a precarious form, at the mercy of violence and even of internal dissent. It forms spontaneously in the play of productive organization but must constantly be protected from the various unruly elements that do not benefit from production, or not enough to suit them, or simply, that cannot tolerate the checks that homogeneity imposes on unrest. In such conditions, the protection of homogeneity lies in its recourse to imperative elements [the fundamentally excessive character of monarchical sovereignty] which are capable of obliterating the various unruly forces or bringing them under the control of order.[10] (p. 66)

The signal absence of anything like a mass movement from contemporary manifestations of fascism – which is only further underlined by the fact that today’s racial-nationalist right advertises its movement-character at every opportunity – could also be seen as a sign of this lack ofheterogeneity andnon-synchronicity, the palpable absence of theutopian and theanti-systemic from today’s germs of fascism.

To develop this intuition further it is worth exploring in some detail the relevance of the debates over the mass psychology of fascism to the contemporary debate. It was not only Bataille in his intervention, but many members of the Frankfurt School, who saw Freud’s 1922 essay ‘Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the “I”’ as a watershed in the study of the nexus of collective politics and individual desire, not least in its analysis of leadership. The influence of Freud’s text was vast and variegated (see for an interesting contemporary reflection Stefan Jonsson’s work) but I want to consider it via a postwar text of Adorno’s, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’ (1951), which may also be taken as a kind of corrective to the salvage-readings of fascism provided by Bloch and Bataille. The interest of Adorno’s text is only increased by the fact that it relates to research, namely his own participation in the collective research project on The Authoritarian Personality and the book by Löwenthal and Guterman on American fascist agitators,Prophets of Deceit, which have been justly alluded to as illuminating of the Trump phenomenon.[11]

In The Prophets of Deceit, Löwenthal and Guterman draw the following composite  theoretical portrait of the American fascist agitator:

The agitator does not confront his audience from the outside; he seems rather like someone arising from its midst to express its innermost thoughts. He works, so to speak, from inside the audience, stirring up what lies dormant there. The themes are presented with a frivolous air. The agitator's statements are often ambiguous and unserious. It is difficult to pin him down to anything and he gives the impression that he is deliberately playacting. He seems to be trying to leave himself a margin of uncertainty, a possibility of retreat in case any of his improvisations fall flat. He does not commit himself for he is willing, temporarily at least, to juggle his notions and test his powers. Moving in a twilight zone between the respectable and the forbidden, he is ready to use any device, from jokes to doubletalk to wild extravagances. … He refers vaguely to the inadequacies and iniquities of the existing social structure, but he does not hold it ultimately responsible for social ills, as does the revolutionary. … The reformer and revolutionary generalize the audience's rudimentary attitudes into a heightened awareness of its predicament. The original complaints become sublimated and socialized. The direction and psychological effects of the agitator's activity are radically different. The energy spent by the reformer and revolutionary to lift the audience's ideas and emotions to a higher plane of awareness is used by the agitator to exaggerate and intensify the irrational elements in the original complaint. … In contradistinction to all other programs of social change, the explicit content of agitational material is in the last analysis incidental—it is like the manifest content of dreams. The primary function of the agitator's words is to release reactions of gratification or frustration whose total effect is to make the audience subservient to his personal leadership. …  He neglects to distinguish between the insignificant and the significant; no complaint, no resentment is too small for the agitator's attention. What he generalizes is not an intellectual perception; what he produces is not the intellectual awareness of the predicament, but an aggravation of the emotion itself. Instead of building an objective correlate of his audience's dissatisfaction, the agitator tends to present it through a fantastic and extraordinary image, which is an enlargement of the audience's own projections. The agitator's solutions may seem incongruous and morally shocking, but they are always facile, simple, and final, like daydreams. Instead of the specific effort the reformer and revolutionary demand, the agitator seems to require only the willingness to relinquish inhibitions. And instead of helping his followers to sublimate the original emotion, the agitator gives them permission to indulge in anticipatory fantasies in which they violently discharge those emotions against alleged enemies. … Through the exploitation of the fear of impending chaos the agitator succeeds in appearing as a radical who will have no truck with mere fragmentary reforms, while he simultaneously steers his adherents wide of any suggestion of a basic social reorganization.[12]

How does Adorno seek to theorise this ‘microfascist’ and antagonistic, but ultimately conservative, intensification of a ‘malaise’ that joins the sense of agential impotence to the disorientation of the humiliated individual before the enigmatic totality, here transmuted into conspiracy? He undertakes a detour via Freud’s ‘Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the “I”’. What he finds, especially since it relates to the forms of fascism in a post-war, i.e. post-fascist, context is perhaps more instructive for the present than the interwar philosophical reflection on fascism as a revolutionary phenomenon.

Adorno wishes to move from the agitational devices singled out by Löwenthal and Guterman, ones that have as their ‘indispensable ingredients … constant reiteration and scarcity of ideas’,[13] to the psychological structure underlying them. As Peter E. Gordon has noted, in his very rich review of Adorno’s contributions to reflecting on the Trump phenomenon,[14] Adorno’s reflections are oriented by his understanding of fascism as a phenomenon linked to the crisis of bourgeois individuality, as both psychic experience and social form. Or, in Adorno’s dialectical quip: “[We] may at least venture the hypothesis that the psychology of the contemporary anti-semite in a way presupposes the end of psychology itself”.[15] As for Freud, Adorno observes that he “developed within the monadological confines of the individual the traces of its profound crisis and willingness to yield unquestioningly to powerful outside, collective agencies”.[16] Adorno homes in on the problem of the libidinalbond that fascism requires, both vertically towards the leader (especially in the guise of a kind of play of narcissisms, the follower finding himself reflected in the leader’s own self-absorption) and horizontally, towards the racialized kin or comrade, identifying this as a technical, or psycho-technical, problem for fascism itself. Commenting on the Nazis obsession with the adjective “fanatical” (already the object of a brilliant entry by Victor Klemperer in hisThe Language of the Third Reich) and with Hitler’s avoidance of the role of the loving father, Adorno remarks: “It is one of the basic tenets of fascist leadership to keep primary libidinal energy on an unconscious level so as to divert its manifestations in a way suitable to political ends”.[17] This libidinal energy is of necessitypersonalized as an ‘erotic tie’ (in Freud’s terms), and operates through the psychoanalytic mechanism ofidentification (again, both horizontally and vertically).

At the psychoanalytic level, fascism preys on the contradiction between the self-preserving conatus of the ego and his constantly frustrated desires. This is a conflict that “results in strong narcissistic impulses which can be absorbed and satisfied only through idealization as the partial transfer of the narcissistic libido to the object [i.e. the leader] … by making the leader his ideal he loves himself, as it were, but gets rid of the stains of frustration and discontent which mar his picture of his own empirical self”.[18] What’s more, “in order to allow narcissistic identification, the leader has to appear himself as absolutely narcissistic … the leader can be loved only if he himself does not love”.[19] Even in his language, the leader depends on his psychological resemblance to his followers, a resemblance revealed in the mode of disinhibition, and more specifically in “uninhibited but largely associative speech”.[20] “The narcissisticgain provided by fascist propaganda is obvious. It suggests continuously and sometimes in rather devious ways, that the follower, simply through belonging to the in-group, is better, higher and purer than those who are excluded. At the same time, any kind of critique or self-awareness is resented as a narcissistic loss and elicits rage”.[21]

Yet the factor that more often than not the fascist leader appears as a “ham actor” and “asocial psychopath” is a clue to the fact that rather than sovereign sublimity, he has to convey some of the sense of inferiority of the follower, he has to be a “great little man”. Adorno’s comment is here instructive:

Psychological ambivalence helps to work a social miracle. The leader image gratifies the follower’s twofold wish to submit to authority and to be authority himself. This fits into a world in which irrational control is exercised though it has lost its inner conviction through universal enlightenment. The people who obey the dictators also sense that the latter are superfluous. They reconcile this contradiction through the assumption that they are themselves the ruthless oppressor.[22]

This loss of ‘inner conviction’ in authority is to my mind the true insight of Adorno’s reflections on fascist propaganda, and where it moves beyond Freud, still hamstrung by his reliance on the reactionary psychological energetics of Le Bon’s Psychology of the Crowd. This relates once again to the “end of psychology”, which is to say the crisis of a certain social form of individuality, which Adorno regards as the epochal context of fascism’s emergence. The leader-agitator can exploit his own psychology to affect that of his followers – “to make rational use of his irrationality”, in Adorno’s turn of phrase – because he too is a product of a mass culture that drains autonomy and spontaneity of their meaning.Contra Bataille and Bloch’s focus on the fascism’s perversion of revolution, for Adorno its psycho-social mechanism depends on its refusal of anything that would require the social or psychic transcendence of thestatus quo.

Fascism is here depicted as a kind of conservative politics of antagonistic reproduction, the reproduction of some against others, and at the limit a reproduction premised on their non-reproduction or elimination. Rather than an emancipatory concern with equality, fascism promotes a “repressive egalitarianism”, based on an identity of subjection and a brotherhood of hatred: “The undercurrent of malicious egalitarianism, of the brotherhood of all-encompassing humiliation, is a component of fascist propaganda and fascism itself” – it is its “unity trick”.[23] In a self-criticism of the psychological individualism that governedThe Authoritarian Personality, Adorno now argues that fascism does not have psychological causes but defines a “psychological area”, an area shared with non-fascist phenomena and one which can be exploited for sheer self-interest, in what is an “appropriation of mass psychology”, “the expropriation of the unconscious by social control instead of making the subjects conscious of their unconscious”. This is “the turning point where psychology abdicates”. Why? Because what we are faced with is not a dialectic of expression or repression between individual and group, mass or class, but with the “postpsychological de-individualized atoms which form fascist collectivities”.[24] And while these collectivities may appear “fanatical” their conviction is hollow, if not at all the less dangerous for that. Here lies the “phoniness” of fascist fanaticism, which for Adorno wasalready at work in Nazism, for all of its broadcasting of its own fanaticism:

The category of “phoniness” applies to the leaders well as to the act of identification on the part of the masses and their supposed frenzy and hysteria.  Just as little as people believe in the depth of their hearts that the Jews are the devil, do they completely believe in the leader.  They do not really identify themselves with him but act this identification, perform their own enthusiasm, and thus participate in their leader’s performance.  It is through this performance that they strike a balance between their continuously mobilized instinctual urges and the historical stage of enlightenment they have reached, and which cannot be revoked arbitrarily. It is probably the suspicion of this fictitiousness of their own “group psychology” which makes fascist crowds so merciless and unapproachable. If they would stop for a second, the whole performance would go to pieces, and they would be left to panic.[25]

This potentially murderous “phony fanaticism” differs from that of the “true believer” (and we could reflect on the problem that revolutionary fascists, from National-Bolsheviks to futurists, often posed to their own regimes) in a way that hints towards the crucial reliance of fascistic phenomena on varieties of the “unity trick”, on various forms of fictitious unity. Here Jairus Banaji’s reflections on fascism in India include a key insight, namely the contemporary uses to which Sartre’s reflections on “manipulated seriality” can be put for analysing fascist violence. The fascist “sovereign group” acts by transforming the serial existence of individuals in social life (Adorno’s “postpsychological deindividualised atoms”) into a false totality – be it nation, party or race (and often all three). “Manipulated seriality is the heart of fascist politics”, as Banaji asserts, because it is not justany mass that fascism conjures up (in fact, the fear of the masses was among its originating psycho-political factors, as Klaus Theweleit’s so brilliantly showed in its analysis of the writings of theFreikorps inMale Fantasies), but an other-directed mass that never “fuses” into a group, a mass which must produce macro-effects at the bidding of the group “other-directing” it, while all the while remaining dispersed. This is the problem of fascism (in a different but not unconnected guise to the problem of a depoliticising liberal democracy): how can the many act without gaining a collective agency, and above all without undoing the directing agency of the few (the group)? Banaji insightfully enlists Sartre’s categorial apparatus from theCritique of Dialectical Reason to think through the fascist ‘pogrom’:

The pogrom then is a special case of this ‘systematic other-direction’, one in which the group ‘intends to act on the series so as to extract a total action from it in alterity itself’. The directing group is careful ‘not to occasion what might be called organised action within inert gatherings’. ‘The real problem at this level is to extract organic actions from the masses’ without disrupting their status as a dispersed molecular mass, as seriality. So Sartre describes the pogrom as ‘the passive activity of a directed seriality’, an analysis where the term ‘passive’ only underscores the point that command responsibility is the crucial factor in mass communal violence, since the individuals involved in dispersive acts of violence are the inert instruments of a sovereign or directing group. Thus for Sartre the passive complicity that sustains the mass base of fascism is a serial complicity, a ‘serial responsibility’, as he calls it, and it makes no difference, in principle, whether the individuals of the series have engaged in atrocities as part of an orchestrated wave of pogroms or simply approved that violence ‘in a serial dimension’, as he puts it.[26]

That Sartre saw seriality as crucial to the very constitution of the modern state and its practices of sovereignty, also suggests that the borders between fascist and non-fascist other-direction may be more porous than liberal common sense suggests. Yet we could also say that fascism excels in the systematic manipulation of the serialities generated by capitalist social life, moulding them into pseudo-unities, false totalities.

If we accept the nexus of fascism and seriality, of a politics which is both other-directed and in which ‘horizontal relations’ are ones of pseudo-collectivity and pseudo-unity, in which I interiorise the direction of the Other as my sameness with certain others (Sartre’s analogy in Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1 between everyday racism and the phenomenon of the Top Ten comes to mind here), then we should be wary of analysing it with categories whichpresume the existence of actual totalities. This is why I think it is incumbent on a critical, or indeed anti-fascist, Left to stop indulging in the ambient rhetoric of the white working class voter as the subject-supposed-to-have-voted for the fascist-populist option. This is not only because of the sociological dubiousness of the electoral argument, or the enormous pass it gives to the middle and upper classes, or even because of the tawdry forms of self-satisfied condescension it allows a certain academic or journalistic commentator or reader, or the way it allows a certain left to indulge in fantasies for which ‘if only we could mobilise them…’. More fundamentally, it is because, politically speaking, the working class as a collective, rather than as a manipulated seriality, does not (yet) exist. Endowing it with the spectre of emancipation is thus profoundly misleading, irrespective of statistical studies on those quintessentially serial phenomena, elections.

To impute the subjectivity of a historical agency to a false political totality is not only unwittingly to repeat the “unity trick” of fascistic propaganda, it is to suppose that emancipatory political forms and energies lie latent in social life. By way of provocation we could adapt Adorno’s statement, quoted earlier, to read: “[We] may at least venture the hypothesis that the class identity of the contemporary Trump voter in a way presupposes the end of class itself”. A sign of this is of course the stickiness of the racial qualifierwhite working class. Alain Badiou once noted about the phraseology ofIslamic terrorism that “when a predicate is attributed to a formal substance … it has no other consistency than that of giving an ostensible content to that form. In 'Islamic terrorism', the predicate 'Islamic' has no other function except that of supplying an apparent content to the word 'terrorism' which is itself devoid of all content (in this instance, political).”[27] Whiteness is here, not just at the level of discourse, but I would argue at that of political experience, the supplement to a politically void or spectral notion of the working class; it is what allows a pseudo-collective agency to be imbued with a (toxic) psycho-social content. This is all the more patent if we note how incessantly in both public discourse and statistical pseudo-reflection in order to belong to this “working class” whiteness is indispensable, while any specific relation to the means of production, so to speak, is optional at best. The racialized experience of class is not an autonomous factor in the emergence of fascistic tendencies within the capitalist state; it is the projection of that state, amanipulated seriality, and thus an experiencedifferent in kind from political class consciousness, and likely intransitive to it. In a brilliant and still vital analysis, Étienne Balibar once defined racism as a supplement of nationalism:

racism is not an 'expression' of nationalism, but a supplement of nationalism or more precisely a supplement internal to nationalism, always in excess of it, but always indispensable to its constitution and yet always still insufficient to achieve its project, just as nationalism is both indispensable and always insufficient to achieve the formation of the nation or the project of a 'nationalization' of society. ... As a supplement of particularity, racism first presents itself as a super-nationalism. Mere political nationalism is perceived as weak, as a conciliatory position in a universe of competition or pitiless warfare (the language of international 'economic warfare' is more widespread today than it has ever been). Racism sees itself as an 'integral' nationalism, which only has meaning (and chances of success) if it is based on the integrity of the nation, integrity both towards the outside and on the inside. What theoretical racism calls 'race' or 'culture' (or both together) / is therefore a continued origin of the nation, a concentrate of the qualities which belong to the nationals 'as their own' ; it is in the 'race of its children' that the nation could contemplate its own identity in the pure state. Consequently, it is around race that it must unite, with race - an 'inheritance' to be preserved from any kind of degradation - that it must identify both 'spiritually' and 'physically' or 'in its bones' (the same goes for culture as the substitute or inward expression of race).[28]

Class, in contemporary attempts both to promote and to analyse fascistic fantasies and policies of ‘national rebirth’, risks becoming in its turn a supplement (of both racism and nationalism), stuck in the echo chambers of serialising propaganda. There is no path from the false totality of an other-directed racialized class to a renaissance of class politics, no way to turn electoral statistics and ill-designed investigations into the ‘populist subject’, the ‘forgotten men and women’, into a locus for rethinking a challenge to capital, or to analyse and challenge the very foundations of fascist discourse. Any such practice will need to take its distance from the pseudo-class subject which has reared its head across the political scene. This false rebirth of class discourse is itself part of the con, and another reminder that not the least of fascism’s dangers is the fascination and confusion its boundless opportunism sows in the ranks of its opponents. Rather than thinking that an existing working class needs to be won away from the lures of fascism, we may fare better by turning away from that false totality, and rethinking the making orcomposition of a class that could refuse becoming the bearer of a racial, or national predicate, as one of the antibodies to fascism.

*           *           *

Preliminary Theses on Late Fascism

Thesis 1 (after Bloch): late fascism is bereft of non-contemporaneity or non-synchronousness – except for the non-synchronousness of the synchronous, the nostalgia for a post-utopian industrial modernity;

T1 Cor. 1 (after Bataille): fascism today is very weak on the heterogeneous surplus necessary to reproduce capitalist homogeneity, both as the “sovereign” (or imperative) level, and that of the “base” (whether lumpen excess or unconscious drives);

T1 Cor. 2 (after Pasolini): the new fascism is a fascism of homogenisation masquerading as the jouissance of difference;

T2 (after Freud and Adorno): the psychic structure of fascism operates through a form of mass narcissism;

T3 (after Adorno): late fascism operates through a performance of fanaticism devoid of inner conviction, though its “phoniness” does nothing to lessen its violence;

T4 (after Adorno): (late) fascism is a conservative politics of antagonistic reproduction;

T5 (after Banaji-Sartre): (late) fascism is not the politics of a class, a group or a mass, but of a manipulated series;

T6: the racialized signifier of class functions in the production and reception of late fascism as a spectre, a screen and a supplement – of the racism which is in turn a necessary supplement of nationalism (a minimal definition of fascism being the affirmation of the supplement, and its more or less open transmutation into a key ingredient of the nation-state);

T7: late fascism is driven by a desire for the state and a hatred of government;

T8: late fascism reacts against what is already a liberal reaction, it is not primarily counter-revolutionary;

T9: late fascism is not consolidated by a ruling class effort to use the autonomy of the political to deal with an external limit of capital but one of the offshoots of an endogenous protracted crisis of legitimacy of capital, in which the political is autonomous more at the level of fantasy than function;

T10: late fascism is a symptom of the toxic obsolescence of the modern figure of the political, namely a “national and social state” in which citizenship is organised across axes of ethno-racial and gender identity, and articulated to labour.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QHj7fE2I1o

[2]https://diem25.org/national-workerism-and-racial-warfare/

[3] For a lucid and nuanced introduction to the Marxist debate, from the standpoint of the 1970s, see Anson Rabinbach, ‘Toward a Marxist Theory of Fascism and National Socialism: A Report on Developments in West Germany’,New German Critique, 3 (Autumn, 1974), pp. 127-153.

[4] ‘The serious objection which I have of this book (if not of its author as well) is that it in absolutely no way corresponds to the conditions in which it appears, but rather takes its place inappropriately, like a great lord, who arriving at the scene of an area devastated by an earthquake can find nothing more urgent to do than to spread out the Persian carpets – which by the way are already somewhat moth-eaten-and to display the somewhat tarnished golden and silver vessels, and the already faded brocade and damask garments which his servants had brought.’ Walter Benjamin, Letter to Alfred Cohn of 6 February 1935, cited in Anson Rabinbach, ‘Unclaimed Heritage: Ernst Bloch's Heritage of Our Times and the Theory of Fascism’,New German Critique, 11 (Spring, 1977), p. 5.

[5] As Rabinbach notes, highlighting the significance of Benjamin’s reflections on capitalism, technology and modern spectacle: ‘Bloch emphasizes the continuity between fascism and the tradition embodied in its ideas, but he neglects those elements of discontinuity with the past-elements which give fascism its unique power as a form of social organization-so that its actual links to modern capitalism remain obscure.’ Ibid., p. 14.

[6] Ernst Bloch, ‘Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics’, trans. M. Ritter,New German Critique, 11 (1977), 26. This text is an excerpt fromThe Heritage of Our Times.

[7]  Bloch,The Heritage of Our Times, quoted in Rabinbach, ‘Unclaimed Heritage’, pp. 13–14.

[8] ‘Unclaimed Heritage’, p. 7.

[9] Pier Paolo Pasolini, ‘Il vuoto di potere in Italia’,Il Corriere della Sera, 10 February 1975. The article would later be reprinted inScritti Corsari, a collection of Pasolini’s journalistic interventions published shortly after his death.

[10] Georges Bataille, ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’, trans. Carl L. Lovitt,New German Critique, 16 (1979), p. 66.

[11] Perusing the list of ‘themes’ of American fascistic agitation gives an inkling of such illumination: ‘The Eternal Dupes’; ‘Conspiracy’; ‘Forbidden Fruit’ (on the jouissance of the wealthy); ‘Disaffection’; ‘The Charade of Doom’; ‘The Reds’; ‘The Plutocrats’; ‘The Corrupt Government’; ‘The Foreigner’ (with its sub-section ‘The Refugee’).

[12] Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman,Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), pp. 5-9, 34.

[13] Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’, inThe Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1982), p. 119.

[14]https://www.boundary2.org/2016/06/peter-gordon-the-authoritarian-person…

[15] Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Remarks on the Authoritarian Personality’ (1958), cited in:https://www.boundary2.org/2016/06/peter-gordon-the-authoritarian-person…

[16] Adorno, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’, p. 120.

[17] Adorno, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’, p. 123.

[18] Adorno, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’, p. 126.

[19] Adorno, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’, pp. 126-7.

[20] Adorno, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’, p. 132.

[21] Adorno, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’, p. 130.

[22] Adorno, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’, pp. 127-8.

[23] Adorno, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’, p. 131.

[24] Adorno, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’, p. 136.

[25] Adorno, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’, pp. 136-7.

[26]http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/16825/1/Jamia%20lecture%20%28fascism%29.pdf

[27] Alain Badiou,Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2003), p. 153.

[28] Étienne Balibar, ‘Racism and Nationalism’, in E. Balibar and I. Wallerstein,Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1988), pp. 54 and 59.

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.

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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.

Bibliography

Burdzhalov, E. N. 1987 [1967], Russia's Second Revolution: the February 1917 Uprising in Petrograd, translated by Donald J Raleigh, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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.)