John Marot

German Social-Democracy does not put into its programme the demand for a republic. The situation in Germany is such that this question can in practice hardly be separated from that of socialism.

Lenin, 1905

[T]he sole state form in which socialism can be realised is the republic, the democratic republic.

Kautsky, 1909.

Introduction: Kautsky or Lenin?

The “S” word no longer scares as many people in the United States as it used to. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign made it official: democratic socialism will not bring an end to common decency, good cheer and Christianity. Moreover, the break-out Black Likes Matter movement in the United States has once again shown the world the political bona fides of mass, direct action in the streets – an essential component of any revolution worthy of the name. Finally, the recent centenary of the October Revolution sparked an interest in the history of socialism and socialist political theory among radicalizing youth. Many learned about Lenin and the Bolshevik Party and how they led the working class in Russia to power.

And yet, when all is said and done, the socialist Elysium remains for many distant, elusive.

Over a century later, the October Revolution and Bolshevism are still unduplicated originals. No reasonable facsimile of either has ever been reproduced outside Russia. In Russia itself a murderous Stalinist dictatorship soon supplanted soviet democracy and workers’ rule. ‘Leninist Bolshevism’ leads to Stalinism. For many post hoc ergo propter hoc.

The ultimately disastrous outcome of the October Revolution prompted many socialists in the West to condemn wholesale Lenin and Bolshevism very early on. Leading the charge was Karl Kautsky (1854-1938), the ‘pope’ of Second International Marxism, the most prominent theoretician of the German Social-Democratic Party (SPD), the party most socialists, especially the Bolsheviks in Tsarist Russia, looked up to for guidance in the classical epoch of the Second International, 1889-1914.

Beginning on the morrow of the October 1917 Revolution until his death, Kautsky denounced the Bolshevik leader and his ‘anti-democratic’, ‘Blanquist’ and ‘insurrectionary’ conception of socialist revolution.1 With the onset of the Cold War, ‘free-world’ socialists raised high the banner of Kautsky’s crusade, broadcasting their anti-communism far and wide.

For his part, Lenin and other revolutionaries turned against Kautsky for not doing anything in 1914 to stop the inter-imperialist slaughter. Lenin excoriated the ‘renegade’2 and set out to destroy the hold of ‘Kautskyism’ in the workers’ movement by founding the Third International in 1919 as a revolutionary, communist alternative to the social democratic, pro-war, counter-revolutionary reformism (as he now saw it) of the Second. So began the Great Divergence in a period of revolutionary upheaval: Social Democracy vs. Communism, the ballot box vs. the street, reform vs. revolution, workers’ self-determination vs. party dictatorship, slavery vs. freedom. The debate continues.

Despite (because of?) Lenin’s anathema, Kautsky’s pre-1914 writings presently appear to many socialist activists politically relevant whereas Lenin’s do not. This is understandable. But appearances can be deceptive.

Kautsky addressed an array of political issues facing socialists operating in an advanced capitalist society, addressing us. In sharp contrast, Lenin dealt with a ‘backward’ society where the working class was but an island in a sea of small-holding peasants, and an autocrat ruled Russia by the Grace of God. This reality was far removed fromours, from secular, bourgeois-democratic states of Western Europe and the United States, with their very large working classes and (more or less) extensive representative political forms, and other regions of the world where, broadly speaking, the capitalist mode of production reigned (and reigns).3

Today’s watchword is: free Kautsky from Lenin’s damnatio memoriae and give his political writings a second reading. Lars Lih has given a historical justification – and much more.

In Lih’s view, Kautsky’s pre-1914 political writings – Kautskyism – guided Lenin and his partisans in Russia not just before 1914, but right through 1917 as well. Indeed, Kautsky was nothing less than the “architect” of the October Revolution – a singular claim as Lih realises.4 But this is the least of it.

Lih also claims that Lenin’s politics, right through the 1917 Russian Revolution, are relevant to modern day socialists in advanced capitalist societies with bourgeois-democratic states. He contradicts those socialists who think bourgeois-democratic revolutions in countries with non-bourgeois-democratic states, with autocracies such as Tsarist Russia, mandate political strategies and forms of party/political organisation fundamentally different from with those required for socialist revolutions in capitalist democracies.5

Lih’s double conception of overarching continuity in Bolshevik politics, from 1903 on, and fidelity to Second International Marxism – Lenin’s ‘Kautskyism’ – up to and including 1917, has no precedent. It has been hailed in academia as a breakthrough, generally by non-specialists of Russian and Soviet history. In some quarters of the activist left, it has earned Lih Herostratic fame. The latter, ‘orthodox Leninists’ mostly, deny that Lenin continued in Kautsky’s footsteps, retorting that the Bolshevik leader had broken with him not just in 1917, but that Bolshevism itself, from its very inception in 1903, actually represented an organized political trend – a ‘party of a new type’ – distinctly, if only implicitly, at odds with Second International orthodoxy, with Kautskyism. August Nimtz’s work is the latest and fullest iteration of this argument.6

These competing lines of argument clash. In their totality, both cannot be right.

In 1917, Lenin deepened his attack on Kautsky counter-revolutionary politics, initiated in 1914, to embrace Kautsky’s theory of democracy, parliament and the state underlying those politics. Lenin’s State and Revolution, drafted in early 1917, was its centrepiece. Here, there was no continuity with Kautskyism, as Lih thinks. Here, the ‘Leninists’ are right. But this is not to endorse as well the standard ‘Leninist’ view of Bolshevism assui generis long before 1917 (a view also shared by Stalinists, the latter just pushing back Lenin’s hostility to Kautsky almost to a time when Lenin was still in his crib).

These Leninists are skating on dangerously thin ice to single out Bolshevism as the only true-blue revolutionary trend in the Second International, with a few approving nods in Luxemburg’s direction. They understand something the leading thinkers of the Second International did not only because they have the benefit of hindsight. For the orthodox Leninists recognise today that no one then thought the ‘left’, Bolshevik wing of the RSDLP was incompatible with membership in the Second International – just as little as anyone thought the left or ‘Luxemburgist’ wing of the SPD was beyond the pale.

As Lih has shown beyond all reasonable doubt, Lenin, Trotsky, and Luxemburg were all adherents of ‘Erfurtianism’ – Lenin especially. As used here – and only here, for the purposes of my argument – Erfurtianism is synonymous with ‘Kautskyism’: a concrete political strategy for a socialist transformation of a developed capitalist society with abourgeois-democratic state – and understood to be such by Second International Marxist theorists, by Kautsky, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, and others.7

The social transformation we strive for, Kautsky wrote in Road to Power (1909), can only be attained through a political revolution, by means of the fighting proletariat conquering political power. And the sole state form in which socialism can be realised is the republic, the democratic republic.8

Broadly speaking, Kautsky argued that the German Social-Democratic Party, legalised in 1890, could use the legislative arm of the bourgeois-democratic state – the Reichstag (or Parliament, Congress, Diet, House of Commons, Chamber of Deputies, Sejm, Knesset, etc.) – to blaze a parliamentary road to socialism. Conquering a majority in parliament by winning seats to it in electoral contests, possible only under a democratic republic with universal, direct, equal and secret suffrage, was the first step. Once won, a socialist transformation of capitalist society could begin promptly, via the institution of parliament.9 Ben Lewis accurately restates Kautsky’s position: The “struggle for more extensive representative political forms in state and society forms the strategic bridge between existing society and the socialist state of the future.”10 In this sense, all Social Democrats in Russia and the West were partisans of “Marxist Republicanism” to use Lewis’s apt, if jarring, expression

But could Marxist republicanism also ‘extend representative political forms’ to Tsarist Russia, as Lih holds, a country where there was no democratic republic, indeed, where there was no republic at all but a feudal autocracy? Where a transition to socialism was off the table because the material pre-requisites for it were absent there but present in the West? The relationship between ‘Kautskyism’ and ‘Leninism’ in the light of these heterogeneous social realities is more complex than Lih, ‘orthodox’ Leninists and many others allow.

After the defeat of the 1905 Revolution, Russian Social Democrats divided over whether Kautsky’s political thinking could be suitably modified to fit Russian conditions simply because they could not agree what conditions in Russia were and how they were developing. Only the Mensheviks believed that Erfurtian conditions were being realised in Russia, that the country was making slow, mottled progress toward bourgeois democracy, as expressed in the formation of the Duma in 1906, the Russian Parliament, rendering Kautsky’s strategy, devised for a bourgeois-democratic state, increasingly relevant. The Bolsheviks thought otherwise.

The Bolsheviks did not think an Erfurtian strategy could be adapted to conditions that were not Erfurtian at all, nor becoming Erfurtian. The Russian state remained in their eyes an unreconstructed feudal or quasi-feudal autocracy.  Here, the state ran parliament. In the West, however,parliament ran the state – or so nearly every social democrat then thought. Lih misses this inverse causal relation. So does Nimtz. Only a fuller analysis of the singularities of the Russian state and its parliament in relation to bourgeois-democratic states and their legislative arms can lay the basis for a better, more politically fruitful grasp of the issues at stake.

In Lenin’s view, post-1905 Russia with its parliament still required a political strategy qualitatively different than Kautsky’s in the West, catering to the specificities of Russia’s class and property relations. The Mensheviks did not. Pace Lih, the Mensheviks were the true Erfurtians in Russian Social Democracy, not the Bolsheviks.Pace Nimtz, the Bolsheviks limited their attack on the relevance of Erfurtian strategy to Russia alone before 1917; only in 1917 did Leninextend it to the Westas well, universalising the Russian experience – but in a very specific sense. Below, I try to substantiate these and other broad claims.

I: Before 1917

The Road to Socialism in the West: Winning the Battle of Democracy

“Winning the battle of democracy” in capitalist society, declared the Communist Manifesto, ultimately spelled the “conquest of political power by the proletariat,” the “overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy,” and the subsequent formation of a new society. The 1891 Erfurt Congress of the German Social-Democratic Party codified these spare remarks into a full-fledged strategy. Kautsky was the most powerful exponent of Erfurtianism, working out in intricate detail the tactics of this strategy in many books and articles.

One aspect of Kautsky’s politics did generate critical scrutiny, though. On Kautsky’s left, Rosa Luxemburg became well known after the 1905 Russian Revolution for promoting the revolutionary tactic of the mass strike to complement and bolster the SPD’s electoral strategy.

In The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions (1906), her masterly study of the 1905 Russian Revolution, Luxemburg envisaged the use of the mass strike even in bourgeois-democratic, Erfurtian conditions, in the West and not just in autocratic Russia. Should bourgeois parties dare contest the SPD’s democratically acquired and legally constituted supremacy in parliament by unlawful, extra-parliamentary, extra-electoral means, potentially creating a revolutionary or quasi-revolutionary crisis, Social Democrats must be prepared to respond with mass strikes and mass action in the streets to crush any would-be usurpers of the democratically expressed will of the people.

Moreover, events in Russia had revealed the labour movement’s discontinuous, episodically revolutionary character, mandating dynamic changes in the SPD’s hitherto more-or-less permanently defensive Ermattungstrategie, or strategy of attrition. Here, Luxemburg took exception to the SPD leadership’s marked tendency to call for the mass strike only defensively, only as a last resort, in spectacular, do-or-die circumstances – a veiled reference to Kautsky who often invoked Engels to justify prudence: “…if we are not insane enough to favour them by letting them drive us into street battles, nothing will in the end be left to them but themselves to break through the legality that is so fatal to them.”11

Luxemburg pressed for mass, direct action offensively as well, even in non-revolutionary situations, whenever the opportunity arose. She insisted that the party promote and deepen working-class activity by providing the workers’ movement with political leadership oriented toward a strategy of confrontation instead of accommodation with the employers and the state, opening the way for victory. In this way, non-institutionalised forms of working-class power in the streets could decisively influence the course of politics off the streets, in parliament. Luxemburg proposed what some today call the ‘inside-outside’ strategy: the ballot box and the street.

Right, Centre and Left in the SPD well understood Kautsky’s strategy for realising socialism under a bourgeois-democratic state. As Lih has copiously shown, no Social Democrat in Russia took fundamental issue with Kautsky’s political thinking – though Lenin and the Bolsheviks almost always upheld Luxemburg’s bolder, more activist tactics, tactics that often went beyond police legality, or threatened to do so.

To Lenin and his partisans, Kautsky was no reformist but a revolutionary whose theory did not exclude revolutionary tactics a priori to achieve a socialist transition. And they staunchly defended Kautsky whenever the ‘revisionist’, Bernsteinian right in the SPD dismissed the mass strike as ‘mass nonsense’, with trade union leaders especially opposed to ‘adventurist’ tactics under any circumstances because they were illegal, provoking state repression of the party and the trade unions, inevitably destroying both.12 Nevertheless, there is an all-important caveat.

Soviets and Revolution: ‘Smashing’ Parliament? ‘Smashing’ the State?

Rarely, if ever, discussed in the relevant literature is that Luxemburg did not think direct action in the streets would ‘smash’ parliament, replacing it with something else. Once the smoke cleared, the dust settled and the barricades came down, parliament would still stand as it remained the institutional fulcrum of the democratic republic around which the transition to socialism could be organised. Neither she, Kautsky, Trotsky, Lenin nor anyone else in the Second International then recognised in the St. Petersburg Soviet of 1905 a working-class institutional alternative not only to parliament, to the democratic republic, but to the state qua state, whether capitalist or feudal. Lenin’sState and Revolution was still 12 years away.

In the 1905 Revolution, workers in Russia established soviets to regulate their self-movement. The soviet exhibited features of the 1871 Paris Commune, notably the fusion of legislative and executive functions through the mandat impératif. Moreover, whereas artisans, craftsmen and shop-owners of Paris formed the cadres of this first iteration of direct producers’ rule, 34 years later, these had been replaced in Russia by great assemblages of skilled and unskilled workers in very large units of production, units resembling, outwardly at least, the great industrial enterprises of America and Western Europe. Lenin and the Bolsheviks, however, only acknowledged soviet power as the organised embodiment of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ much later, in 1917. Luxemburg and the revolutionary left world-wide would soon follow suit.

No one in international Social Democracy before 1917 had reflected much about the world-historical significance of the 1905 Soviet because no one thought it had such significance. It was an institution that had appeared and disappeared like a meteor. The Mensheviks speculated the Soviet might evolve into an extremely powerful trade union, looking after the economic interests of the working class. It might even become a kind of ‘big tent’ political party operating under a bourgeois-democratic state, hence the Menshevik project after the defeat of the 1905 Revolution in favour of convening a ‘Labour Congress’ to represent all trends in the workers’ movement, not just Social Democracy.13 Lenin had other ideas.

In 1905, Lenin thought the Soviet was an organ of insurrection, possibly the “embryo” of a provisional government, or that it could set one up.14 Certainly, he never thought a Labour Congress – the Soviet under an alias in the Menshevik conception – could be convened in autocratic conditions.

The key point, however, is that it did not come into Lenin’s or anyone else’s mind until many years later to join three critical ideas: the Soviet itself was a government; it was (relatively)permanent, making it a (transitory)state, run by the working class; a state that would “wither away” as the classless, communist Eldorado approached. Lenin came to these conclusions only in January-February 1917, just days before the second coming of the Soviet – the mark of genius (within limits). InState and Revolution Lenin looked to the October Revolution as a practical confirmation of a new, Marxist theory of the state.

Kautsky: ‘Architect’ of the October Revolution?

According to most Leninists, only the outbreak of WWI and the catastrophic collapse of the Second International in 1914 opened Lenin’s eyes to the hitherto unrecognised reality that an unbridgeable chasm separated Bolshevism from the rest of International Social Democracy not just in 1917, or even in 1914, but had separated them long before.

Lih finds the conventional account of Lenin’s tardy coming-to-awareness unconvincing. His scepticism is well-founded. As Lih has emphasised, for many years Lenin never raised any basic theoretical objection or criticism to Kautsky’s analysis of parliament and state or political strategy. “When and where did I ever claim to have created any sort of special trend in international Social-Democracy not identical with the trend of Bebel and Kautsky?” queried Lenin in 1905.15

The standard interpretation, as Lih rightly says, presupposes “Lenin’s inability to understand what he read, or Lenin’s unawareness of his own beliefs.”16 It fails because the documentary record does not support it. The same documentary record, however, does not support Lih’s alternative either.

Lenin’s 1917 April Theses staked out an irreconcilable position vis-a-vis Kautsky’s strategy. Kautsky recognised, at once, that the October Revolution marked a definitive break, in practice and in theory, with Erfurtianism. He launched an unremitting ideological crusade against Lenin and the Bolsheviks, in the Proletarian Revolution (1918), to which Lenin responded withThe Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918). Consistency within Lih’s paradigm would require thatKautsky not understand Lenin, or be unaware that Lenin was actually ‘adapting Erfurtianism’ to Russian conditions before, and in, 1917. But the facts show that Lenin and the Bolsheviks did not follow Kautsky’s strategy, as is universally agreed among specialists of the 1917 Russian Revolution, such as Rabinowitch.17 Lih has not persuaded these historians otherwise, as Lih himself ruefully remarks on occasion.

Nonetheless, what gives Lih’s revisionist argument a semblance of plausibility to many, especially to non-readers of Russian and to lay historians of Russian and Soviet history, is his extraordinarily loose handling of Social-Democratic political nomenclature, indeed, his readiness to substitute his own political definitions for those of the disputants, warping the historical record. Why Lih has developed a special, distorting and imprecise vocabulary for commonly translated Russian expressions, however, is beyond the scope of this essay.

In support of his thesis of Bolshevik continuity dating from before 1914 through 1917, together with the parallel claim of Lenin’s fidelity to Kautskyism in the same period, Lih highlights that in 1906 Kautsky came out four square in favour of the Bolshevik, not Menshevik, assessment of the current and future roles, and relative strengths, of the liberal-bourgeois and working-class oppositions to Tsarism, respectively. The Bolsheviks felt vindicated by Kautsky.18 So did Trotsky. The 1905 Revolution had laid bare the impotence of the liberal bourgeoisie and the ‘hegemonic’ power of the working class in the bourgeois-democratic revolution, Kautsky concluded. Implicitly, Kautsky had rebuked the Mensheviks. However, this did not constitute ‘tactical advice’ to the Bolsheviks as Lih thinks.

Rather, Kautsky’s was a broad historical perspective, a sociological generalisation shared by Social Democrats with different tactics. Lenin and Trotsky disagreed politically for the better part of the inter-revolutionary period yet always lay into what they saw as the Mensheviks’ misunderstanding of the class forces driving the revolution. 1917 changed all that.

In 1917, Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks because Lenin now rejected the idea Kautsky and the Mensheviks had held in 1906, and still held in 1917: that the working-class driven revolution must stop short of a proletarian socialist revolution, respecting its bourgeois-democratic limits. Kautsky could not have advised the Bolsheviks to adopt de facto Trotsky’s permanent revolution theory – “democratic revolutiondo kontsa” (to the end) – in Lih’s parlance. The defrocked pope of Marxism could not be the architect of the October Revolution.

Nor does the relevant political documentation bear out Lih’s assertion of continuity in Bolshevik political strategy with the pre-1917 period. Lih bases his conclusion, in part, on a reading Lenin’s texts but does not examine closely what the Mensheviks had to say. If Bolshevism alone meant Erfurtian political practice, what non-or-anti-Erfurtian political practice did Menshevism represent? If both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were bona fide Erfurtians, what where they arguing about? A comparative study of both trends in the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) reveals that the prize of Erfurtianism must be categorically awarded to the Mensheviks, not the Bolsheviks.

Parliamentary Roads in Russia and the West: How they became commensurable only after 1905

Was Lenin adapting Erfurtianism to Russian conditions as Lih proposes? That is not the right question. The right question is: did Erfurtian conditions prevail in Russia? Before 1905, Russian Social Democrats were of one mind: Erfurtian conditions did not prevail.

In Russia, there was no bourgeois-democratic state, no parliament, and no parliamentary road from a feudal or semi-feudal state to a capitalist one. Even after Mensheviks and Bolsheviks split in 1903 over the internal functioning of their party, both trends understood they lived under an autocratic regime that outlawed free elections, freedom of speech, assembly and press. The Tsars upheld the existing order by any means necessary – and necessity knew no law. Upon his ascension to the throne in 1894, Nicholas II unceremoniously dismissed “senseless dreams” of constitutional limits to his authority deferentially proposed by the miniscule, cowed and hesitant liberal opposition.

Since no parliament in Russia existed, only the Tsarist autocracy, there was no parliamentary road to overthrowing the Tsarist state or even to materially transforming it. Lenin made no reference to that road in What Is to Be Done? (1902). No wonder: Russian Social Democrats neither rejected nor accepted it. Kautsky’s Erfurtian strategy was simply irrelevant to the then nascent mass movement in Russia, a non-starter with respect to both institutional means and political ends.

With respect to means, in the absence of any democratic-parliamentary form only an RSDLP-led armed insurrection of the people in a bourgeois-democratic revolution could topple the Tsarist state. With respect to ends, an RSDLP-led Provisional Government would found after the Tsarist state’s destruction the most democratic form of the capitalist state, the democratic republic. Until this Erfurtian goal was reached, the RSDLP could not emulate the lawful functioning of the SPD either politically or organisationally.

Unlike its Western counterparts, the Russian section of the International could not have open debates in publicly-held conferences and Congresses; it could not disseminate its views in the popular press, or hold elections to leadership positions. It had to operate in violation of law, underground.

Once the democratic republic had been established in Russia, however, the RSDLP could emulate – perhaps even copy – the SPD’s internal and external modus operandi. But the RSDLP would then become the means to another end – socialism – and Kautsky’s Erfurtian strategy now became applicable because relevant. Russian Social Democrats maintained a clear consensus on this strategic question until 1905.

The 1905 Revolution: A Fork in the Road

The 1905 Revolution forced the Tsar to issue the October Manifesto granting the Russian people an elected parliament – the Duma. Bolsheviks and Mensheviks agreed that Parliament was a central institutional component of Erfurtianism. But was this Russian parliament real or illusory? Were Erfurtian conditions being realised or not? For the next 12 years, until 1917, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks fought it out.

The Menshevik Road19

The Mensheviks insisted the Duma was the authentic keystone of an emerging capitalist state, albeit a most authoritarian one. Elections to the Duma were based on estates or property qualifications, relics of Russia’s feudal past, awarding the landed gentry parliamentary representation far above, and the working class and peasantry far below, their respective numbers in society.

Despite being a minority in the Duma, Russian Social-Democratic deputies had a parliamentary duty to democratise the Tsarist state just as (for example) the SPD could use the Reichstag as a platform from which to call for the abolition of the undemocratic, three-class electoral system that guaranteed Junker domination of the Prussian Landtag, a feudal enclave within the Rechtsstaat.20

As the Mensheviks saw it, the RSDLP in the Duma must work with its (admittedly inconstant) allies, notably the bourgeois Kadet Party, to lift the prohibition on openly functioning political parties. Socialists and liberals must act jointly to remove gross limitations on the right to vote, keeping their eyes on the prize: universal, equal, secret and direct suffrage. Deft parliamentary maneuvering will lift onerous restrictions on freedom of speech, press and assembly. Lesser measures will be realised more easily and quickly, such as making the Tsar’s cabinet ministers accountable to the Duma, or passing legislation to help workers: the eight hour day, a minimum wage, and improved working conditions.

In the streets, the workers’ movement must support the parliamentary activity of its Social-Democratic representatives within limits acceptable to its non-socialist partners. Naturally, to press beyond, to socialism, was politically out of the question. In the first place, and of great theoretical importance for all Russian Social Democrats taking the long view, the material basis for socialism did not yet exist in Russia -- a point of political economy on which Social Democrats everywhere, Trotsky included, agreed. Of far greater practical importance, though, the Mensheviks feared scaring away liberals into the arms of reactionaries with irresponsible, Bolshevik talk of an RSDLP-led working class in the vanguard of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. The Bolsheviks dismissed Menshevik apprehension as a politically demoralising consideration. Placating liberals, ever fearful of mob rule and other unpleasantries meant limiting, narrowing, and undermining independent working-class activity that, along with the support of the land-starved peasantry, was the only way to win the bourgeois-democratic revolution in the first place.

As the 1905 Revolution receded into history, the workers’ movement collapsed, bottoming out in 1909-1911. The RSDLP mirrored the collapse, with membership cratering from 150,000 to fewer than 1,000. Reformism became ever more pronounced among the Mensheviks in this period of downturn.

In light of the destruction of the revolutionary movement, many Menshevik leaders called ever more insistently on all Social Democrats to give priority to electoral work over illegal street action, overtly political demonstrations and wild-cat strikes, even to consider dismantling the underground apparatus of the RSDLP in favour of a law-abiding party, just like the German SPD, foregoing, for good measure, ‘adventurist’ thoughts of insurrection that frightened liberals, even dropping the demand for a republic.

From the common premise that the coming democratic revolution was not socialist but bourgeois, Lenin deduced a wholly different scenario, one incompatible with the Menshevik.

The Bolshevik Road21

In Lenin’s view, the Mensheviks were evading the “difficult and urgent question of how a particular class, in non-European conditions, ought to act for a stubborn struggle to secure a basis” for European conditions in the first place. Only “after a radical change in political conditions – after a definite constitutional system had been firmly established”22 – could all Russian Social Democrats unite and act as one, in a newly-Europeanised party. He thought the Menshevik reading of post-1905 Russian realities was unrealistic.

He agreed there were

bourgeois-democratic regimes like the one in Germany, and also like the one in England; like the one in Austria and also like those in America and Switzerland. He would be a fine Marxist indeed, who in a period of democratic revolution failed to see this difference between the degrees of democratism and the difference between its forms...23

But Tsarist Russia formed a category apart. Lenin did not think the Duma was a genuine parliament. It did not and could never reform the Russian state forward, toward a democratic republic.

Unlike parliaments in the West, the Duma was impotent, Lenin wrote, a trompe-l’oeil ornament mounted atop the wall of the Tsarist autocracy. Social-Democratic parliamentarians must use the Duma as a tribune from which to speak the truth to the oppressed masses, not foster reformist illusions. And, in truth, the Duma could not be used as an instrument of capitalist (let alone socialist) transformation because it was a feudal or quasi-feudal institution, implacably dedicated to maintaining gentry rule, the Bolshevik leader argued. It was less a relic of the past than a living element of the current political order.

Lenin’s stance requires the closest analysis in light of present-day historiographical and political controversies swirling around the relationship between parliament, suffrage and revolution.

Lenin’s assessment of the Russian parliament in the inter-revolutionary period was not an assessment of parliaments in advanced capitalist societiesas well, as Lih and Nimtz both think, for example. Because their respective positions fail to recognise the historical specificity of the Duma and the Russian state that, in Lenin’s estimation, distinguished both from parliaments and states in the West, the Leninists inadvertently make Lenin’s pre-1917 attacks on the Duma appear relevant to current debates about the parliamentary road to socialism in advanced capitalist countries. For Leninists (and this writer) theyare relevant today – but they were not relevantthen.Then Lenin addressed the Mensheviks alone in his polemics against the parliamentary road to a democratic republic in autocratic Russia. Lih makes an inverse mistake.

Lih thinks Lenin’s Menshevik-centred polemics - Lenin's 'Kautskyism' - were relevant to, and supportive of, Kautsky’s parliamentary road to socialism in the bourgeois-democratic states of Western Europe and the United States. This, too, is a mistake. Lenin, at this juncture, did not have such as expansive understanding of Bolshevism, covering both the West and Russia, and running together socialist and bourgeois-democratic revolutions.

With respect to Kautsky’s occasional comments on intra Social-Democratic affairs in Russia, Lenin protested that “even clever and revolutionary Social-Democrats” like Kautsky were liable “to put their foot in it” because they tended to make light of, even dismiss, Bolshevik and Menshevik political competition for leadership of the workers’ movement in Russia, along with their competing notions of political realities, of Tsarism, and of party organisation.24

Readers must always keep in mind that, institutionally, Kautsky’s strategy was minimally premised on an at least partially successful bourgeois-democratic revolution having breached the old order, exemplified by the emergence of parliamentary forms, and then using these forms as a means to complete the democratisation of the state through universal, direct and equal suffrage. Social Democrats could then capture the state by winning a Social-Democratic majority in parliament, and then using that majority to legislate a socialist transition, resorting to revolutionary means, if necessary, to put down extra-parliamentary coups by irredentist bourgeois parties.

In contrast, Lenin’s position was that there had not even been a partial breakthrough toward a bourgeois-democratic state in Russia leading the Mensheviks to a mistaken because irrelevant application of Kautsky’s strategy, even, ultimately, to the “liquidation” of the RSDLP as a revolutionary party. However, Lenin did not advocate abstaining or boycotting the Duma.

Once it became clear that the 1905 Revolution had been defeated, and the Duma was here to stay in the new, counter-revolutionary conditions, he urged Social Democrats to vote for their candidates in elections to Duma, however grossly limited, unequal, open, and indirect suffrage remained in Russia.

Lenin argued that, while no opportunity should be missed to introduce legislation in the Duma benefiting the direct producers in the city and the countryside, all parliamentary activity must be subordinated to developing the independent activity of the working class in the forthcoming bourgeois-democratic revolution. Russian Social Democracy must expose in the Duma the Kadet Party as a false friend of the people. It must lead the working class and its only true ally, the land-hungry peasantry, in an armed, insurrectionary fight for freedom and democracy. Victory will bring down the autocracy together with the Duma. Here was the striking difference between autocratic Russia and the more-or-less bourgeois-democratic states of the West, a difference not sufficiently appreciated by most analysts, if not missed entirely.

In the West, apart from anarchists, no one called for the destruction of parliament. In the West, all Social Democrats wanted to use their (eventual) supremacy in parliament to lay hold of the existing state and move toward socialism if, and only if, parliament was supreme.

Marx thought a possible candidate for a peaceful, electoral transfer of power to the working class was England, where the monarch was but a figurehead and Parliament all-powerful. Eduard Bernstein, Kautsky’s Anglophile colleague, mooted this possibility at length. In 1893 and again in 1911, Kautsky himself noted with keen satisfaction how the English working class

… is already capable of influencing domestic politics in its favour in and through parliament, and, with giant steps, the day is approaching when the almighty English parliament will be a tool of the dictatorship of the proletariat. 25

If parliament was not almighty, as in a Bonapartist-type regime, then the working class could not “lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” This was the lesson Marx learned from studying the experience of the 1871 Paris Commune.  Kautsky repeated that lesson time and again. The Commune had arisen entirely outside the Bonapartist, military-bureaucratic state apparatus, like “Venus from the foam”, to use Luxemburg’s lyrical expression. In Russia, however, the “ready-made state machinery” was an autocracy, not a democratic republic. Workers could not seize it (or any of its component parts) and use it for their ends. It had to be destroyed in a bourgeois-democratic revolution.26

Whereas social-democratic advocates and adherents of Marxist republicanism in the West could use the democratic republic as a stepping stone to socialist transition, Social Democrats in Russia had first to set up that democratic republic – and that could only happen only after smashing the absolutist Tsarist state in the bourgeois-democratic revolution, not before. This was Russian Social Democracy’s immediate task.

As late as October 1915, Lenin wrote:

The task confronting the proletariat of Russia is the consummation of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia in order to kindle the socialist revolution in Europe. The latter task now stands very close to the former, yet it remains a special and second task, for it is a question of the different classes which are collaborating with the proletariat of Russia. In the former task, it is the petty-bourgeois peasantry of Russia who are collaborating; in the latter, it is the proletariat of other countries.27

In 1917, socialist revolution was no longer a ‘special and second task’ but the order of the day.

Bolshevism, the Provisional Government, and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the Peasantry

At their June 1905 London Congress, held months before the formation of the St. Petersburg Soviet, emerging from a general strike in October, climax of the 1905 Revolution, the Bolsheviks called for the formation of a Provisional Government after the anticipated RSDLP-organised and led overthrow of the Tsarist state and its toy-parliament. Having won the people’s confidence, the Bolsheviks also forecast leading the Provisional Government. Owing to that leadership, the Provisional Government would be a revolutionary one, the Social Democrats in it working furiously to enlarge “from above” the democratic component of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, by forcefully championing the rights of workers, peasants, women, national and religious minorities, all the oppressed, giving the revolution a “proletarian imprint”28.

Once a revolutionary provisional government was up and running, it would convene a constituent assembly to draw up a constitution for the new state. Russian Social Democrats would again play a directing role. Capitalising on the masses’ trust in the RSDLP as valorous leader of the people’s insurrection, a provisional “dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” would write the most democratic constitution in the world, creating the most democratic republic in the world, endowed with the most powerful parliament in the world. The Russian Revolution of the 20th century would surpass “almost all the nineteenth-century democratic revolutions” in its world-historical significance, Lenin enthused.

With the foundation of a republic, the Provisional Government, its work done, would dissolve, and the RSDLP, following the example of German Social Democracy, would become a party of revolutionary opposition to capitalism and the capitalist state, inside and outside the newly constituted parliamentary institutions.

Until that revolution had come to pass, however, the “Europeanisation” of Russian Social Democracy was a Menshevik pipe-dream, its Erfurtian premises inapplicable where non-Erfurtian, autocratic conditions prevailed.

The Mensheviks had cause and effect reversed, in Lenin’s view. Acting as if Erfurtian conditions were present, they thought these conditions would materialise: if the Mensheviks looked at the mirage of a parliamentary road hard enough and long enough, one-day, somehow, the mirage would become real. This was a politically pernicious “dream.”29

Once Erfurtian conditions were really present, though, and Erfurtian institutions – elected office generally – firmly anchored, Kautsky’s strategy, especially Luxemburg’s tactically daring variant, became applicable because relevant. The democratic road to socialism was now open. Lenin and the Bolsheviks would think this way until 1917 caused them to reconsider – not the democratic road, as Eric Blanc and others have imprudently argued – but using bourgeois-democratic institutions, the democratic republic, to travel down that road to reach socialism.

1914: Lenin breaks with Kautsky

Lenin could not believe his eyes when he read in Die Neue Zeit that German Social Democrats had almost unanimously voted to fund Germany’s participation in an imperialist world war. He thought the issue was a fake. It was not. Lenin’s surprise was a spontaneous expression of his longstanding and firmly-held belief in the viability of the Erfurtian road to progress and socialism – a belief now unexpectedly shattered.

In doing nothing to oppose the Kaiser’s war-making machine, Kautsky caused great offence to Hegel and dialectical thinking according to some. But Lenin was in no doubt about this: Kautsky had betrayed the cause.

Kautsky had wilfully violated Second International resolutions requiring all Social Democrats to do everything in their power to prevent the outbreak of war or, if it could not be prevented, to do everything in their power to stop it. For the next three years, Lenin condemned Kautsky for his treachery, for what he thought was an objectively pro-war position, camouflaged by Marxist phraseology.

Seconding Lenin was Luxemburg, who pronounced the SPD a “stinking corpse”. She, Trotsky and a few others joined Lenin to propagandise in favour of a fresh start, for the eventual formation of a Third International that was revolutionary.

Lenin’s break with Kautsky in 1914 was at first a crack, narrow but deep, and could not be plastered over. In 1917, the crack became a canyon.

II: 1917

The Russian Revolution of 1917 radically transformed longstanding debates in the West and in Russia around what road to take to reach the ultimate goal of socialism. As in 1905, the Russian working class once more created new realities, raised new issues, and posed new problems that no Second International political text of Kautsky’s, Lenin’s, Luxemburg’s, or Trotsky’s had ever dealt with before, raising the debate to an altogether higher plane.

How the February Revolution spoiled the Menshevik and Bolshevik scenarios in some respects but not in others.

The Mensheviks had always looked to Kadet leadership to reform the Tsarist state in a democratic direction. The February Revolution put paid to this component of the Menshevik scenario, in two respects. A popular, largely spontaneous insurrection in the streets, not studied reform, brought the autocracy down, giving way to a Provisional Government. Further, the liberal Kadets had done nothing to lead the people. While workers and soldiers in the streets of the capital were fighting and dying, Kadets took cover, waiting for the outcome, a few parlaying with high Tsarist dignitaries to save what could be saved.

The February Revolution went according to the Bolshevik scenario of armed insurrection of the people over and against the double-dealing, cowardly Kadets, party of the bourgeoisie in the Social Democratic scheme of things. In another respect, it did not. Though thousands of former and current RSDLP rank and filers risked life and limb to overthrow the Tsar, the insurrection was not organized and led by the RSDLP. Finally, in still another respect it confounded the Bolsheviks utterly: leading the Provisional Government were counter-revolutionary Kadet politicians, not revolutionary Social Democrats!

The incredible, the unimaginable, the perverse had taken place: Kadet Duma liberals were running the Provisional Government, just as the Mensheviks thought they should. After all, this was a bourgeois-democratic not a socialist revolution. Even so, how was it that these pro-war, anti-working class Kadet politicians had reaped the harvest without sowing it? Consternation and alarm seized the local Bolshevik leadership in Petrograd before this stunning turn of events. They were thrown for a gigantic loop.

Confronted with the unanticipated situation of the counter-revolutionary Kadets heading the Provisional Government, the two national Bolshevik authorities Stalin and Kamenev, newly arrived in the capital from exile, introduced a tactical novelty to take into account the equally novel and distressing fact that the Provisional Government was not the one the Bolsheviks had anticipated, prepared, and fought for since 1905, that is, a revolutionary because RSDLP-led Provisional Government.

Because it was a Kadet-led Provisional Government instead, the top Bolshevik leadership decided that the 1905 slogan of democratic dictatorship was now best expressed by “critical support” for the Provisional Government “insofar as” it carried the bourgeois-democratic revolution to the very end, setting up a democratic republic – and opposition to them if they did not. Kamenev and Stalin overruled Petrograd Bolsheviks of the Vyborg district, who demanded a more radical solution.

The middle-level cadres of Vyborg were pressing for a Provisional Government led by representatives of parties elected to the Soviet, by the RSDLP, by the Socialist Revolutionary Party and by others.30 As they saw it, purged of Kadet counter-revolutionaries and replaced by revolutionaries, a new, revolutionary Provisional Government would convene a constituent assembly that would establish a fully democratic capitalist state, in strict accordance with the 1905 Bolshevik platform.

Millerandism and the Provisional Government

Before Lenin’s homecoming then, Stalin, Kamenev and others tried to advance the cause within the longstanding theoretical framework of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, upheld by both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks – but with the Bolsheviks modifying their platform by adopting one, tactical or subordinate feature from the 1905 Menshevik platform:non-participation in bourgeois governments, whether provisional or not, whether long-established or not, whether revolution was in the air or not. To use Lih’s nomenclature, this was ‘anti-agreementism’. To do otherwise and accept government posts was, conversely, ‘agreementism’31 – or Millerandism – to use the customary expression.

Millerand was a French socialist parliamentarian who in 1899 joined a bourgeois government as cabinet minister. Kautsky, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg and all the major Marxist authorities of the Second International condemned him for violating the ban on Social Democrats joining non-socialist administrations.

With the autocracy overthrown, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks now had to define their attitude toward Millerandism: refuse – or accept – cabinet posts in a provisional government run by bourgeois liberals. To be sure, it was not a government operating in reformist, economically stable political environment – the only environment Millerandism had ever dealt with – but a highly unstable one, trying to function in a revolutionary situation and with an economy in free-fall. Only in the latter case, in the midst of a bourgeois-democratic revolution, had the Bolsheviks justified leadership – and only leadership -- of a provisional government by the RSDLP. In their minds, this had nothing to do Millerandism, where liberals held hostage a handful of socialists in the cabinets of a stable democratic republic, such as France in 1899, or even in a revolutionary period, as in 1848 France, where Louis Blanc was the only socialist sitting (duck) in Lamartine’s provisional government.

Refusing to join the Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks avoided all direct political subordination to the Kadet party which ran it. However, by staying outside (anti-Millerandism) and offering conditional support to them, Lenin’s partisans subordinated themselves indirectly to the liberals in the Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks had no alternate plan of action “insofar as” the Kadets did not do what they were supposed to do in the interim – end the war, give land to the peasant, and bread to the worker.

Neither did the Mensheviks. The national leaderships of the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks agreed the bourgeois-democratic revolution needed to be completed, crowned with a democratic republic. Soon, visions of a reunited, fully Europeanised RSDLP danced before them, organised according to the best practices of German Social Democracy.

In short, no Bolshevik, whether radical or not, gave serious consideration to campaigning at once to transfer permanently all power to the soviets. This is because pre-1917 Bolshevism, like Menshevism, never entertained the idea that a soviet-led socialist revolution could be on the agenda. Instead, the Bolsheviks had to restrict themselves to pressuring the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries in the soviet to compel the Provisional Government to carry out the bourgeois-democratic revolution to the end, ultimately creating in Russia a democratic republic and Erfurtian conditions of working-class political struggle.

Since Lih gives extraordinary salience to linguistic issues and to certain Russian expressions in his work, I must unequivocally state: nobody “actually proclaimed” soviet power in the first weeks of the revolution. The most comprehensive account of the February Revolution, weighing in at 654 pages, finds no call for the permanent transfer of power to the soviets at this time – and Lih cites no resolution, decision, article, essay, declaration, manifesto, graffito, and so on, proving the contrary.32 Nobody considered the soviets a “viable candidate for sovereign authority in the land that relied on this broad popular constituency,” as Lih asserts.33 This is not surprising. No one then looked to the Soviet to ultimately and permanently replace the democratic republic – the democratic republic that many thought would be set up after the self-dissolution of the Provisional Government.

The Bolshevik call for “All Power to the Soviets” would only come many weeks later, after Lenin’s April Theses had been ratified by the rank-and-file in late April 1917 – collaterally warding off the imminent danger of Bolshevik-Menshevik reunification projected by starry-eyed, stuck-in-the-past ‘Old Bolsheviks’ who still anticipated the RSDLP making its mark on events not by participation in the Provisional Government, as they had originally forecast in 1905, but by ‘critically supporting’ it from the outside, influencing it without ever taking ministerial posts in it – an anti-Millerandist, ‘anti-agreementist’ stance.

Dual Power

The root cause of the Bolshevik leadership’s disorientation in the first days and weeks of the February Revolution was understandable (though Lenin did not excuse it). Something without precedent and never forecast by any Social Democrat anywhere arose – and for which Kautsky could not provide any guidance whatsoever: the simultaneous formation of a never-before-seen Provisional Government, sitting in one wing of the Tauride Palace, and the reappearance of the Petrograd Soviet, sitting in the other.

As in 1905, the soviets were rooted in the working class of the city. They arose outside any previously existing political organisation, outside the Duma, outside the Russian state. As with the Paris Commune, the soviets lay no hold on the previously existing machinery of the state, they lay hold of the urban economy instead.

Inside every factory, at the point of production, workers, many of them armed, elected factory committees. This represented a direct challenge to managerial authority, to put it mildly. They also sent representatives to the soviets. Order No. 1 of the Petrograd Soviet put the Russian armed forces under its ultimate authority, thereby seizing state power de facto. Elected democratically, its proceedings public, the Mensheviks led the soviets. The Socialist Revolutionaries followed the Mensheviks. Only 15% of the delegates present at the First All Russian Congress of Soviets, held in June 1917, were Bolsheviks.

The appearance of the soviets contained not only the potential to take the bourgeois-democratic revolution to the limit, but to go beyond it, toward a workers’ state and socialism – the perspective of Trotsky’s permanent revolution theory.

“We need a state,” Lenin declared on his way to Russia, “but not the kind of state the bourgeoisie has created everywhere, from constitutional monarchies to the most democratic republics. And in this we differ from the opportunists and Kautskyites…” This state was not limited to Russia.

The Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies are a form of state which does not exist and never did exist in any country. This form represents the first steps towards socialism and is inevitable at the beginning of a socialist society. This is a fact of decisive importance. The Russian revolution has created the Soviets. No bourgeois country in the world has or can have such state institutions. No socialist revolution can be operative with any other state power than this.34

The April Theses: The Bolsheviks Change Course

Lenin arrived at the Finland Station in early April. Having examined from afar the balance of class forces and concluded that it favoured a soviet-led socialist revolution, he campaigned for “All Power to the Soviets,” jettisoning the idea of critical support to the Provisional Government, let alone joining it to create a Revolutionary Provisional Government as the Bolsheviks had originally intended.

The Mensheviks, for their part, had initially adopted a position in accordance with their, ‘anti-Millerandist’, ‘anti-agreementist’ platform of 1905. That platform stipulated that the RSDLP “must not set itself the aim of seizing power or sharing power in a provisional government, but must remain the party of extreme revolution opposition,”35 from the outside, to any provisional government. In fact, ‘anti-agreementism’ was, and remained, for the next 12 years, Menshevik, not Bolshevik policy -- a fact that flies in the face of Lih’s contrary assertion.

The Mensheviks abandoned their ‘anti-agreementism’ in early May 1917, when they took up ministerial posts in the Provisional Government. By taking this ‘Millerandist’ step, the Mensheviks adopted the 1905 Bolshevik resolution calling for such participation – but onlyformally because Menshevik participation was now devoid of a revolutionary perspective pushing beyond revolutiondo kontsa, beyond the democratic republic and capitalism, toward soviet power and socialism.

The balance of forces in the Bolshevik rank-and-file favoured Lenin. The remorseless, Kadet-eating polemics the cadres had read in the Bolshevik press over the last decade or so had not gone down the memory hole, and many among them had presaged, if in institutionally ambiguous terms, Lenin’s unconditional rejection of the Kadet-dominated Provisional Government.

Beyond reaffirming Bolshevism’s long-standing tradition – continuity – of intransigent, ferocious, and persuasively-argued anti-Kadet, anti-Menshevik, anti-liberal, anti-reformist politics – ‘parliamentary cretinism’ for short – what Lenin was able to show in the April Debates of 1917 was that the issue of state-power, that is, power to the soviets, was the crucial issue for all the others – for ending the war; for giving land to the peasants and bread to the workers; for taking the first steps toward socialism in Russia; and for encouraging socialist revolution abroad. Calling for “All Power to the Soviets,” Lenin broke with the past and forged the future. With the support of the rank and file, he executed a strategic reorientation. ‘New Bolshevism’ now led the way. 

Without the Bolshevik cadres’ sterling education in the ways and means of Menshevik/Kadet, reformist politics – soon to be identified with the apostate Kautsky – Lenin’s victory would not have been so swift, if, indeed, he would even have won in a timely manner. This alone justified the rationale for organising a revolutionary party long before the revolution to lead the revolutionary masses. In any event, Lenin did not have to reinvent the wheel on this score.

For the next seven months Bolshevik workers in and out of uniform did the job of organising and leading at all levels, on the shop-floor, in the barracks, at the front, by fully participating in workers' struggles, in street demonstrations and strikes.

The street was not the only arena of class struggle, so was the ballot box.

The Bolsheviks no longer operated under an autocracy but in the freest and most democratic country in the world, freer and more democratic than any in the West, where Eugene Debs, Luxemburg and thousands of other anti-war socialists were under lock and key. Here, in Russia, there was a ‘parliamentary’ road to proletarian rule – so long as that ‘parliament’ was asoviet one!

The Bolshevik electoral campaign to the soviets was successful. By late September 1917, the overwhelming majority of the working class had voted Bolshevik, for All Power to the Soviets.36

It was indispensable that an important section of worker leaders become Bolshevised and accept its cardinal conception, All Power to the Soviets. Without the Bolshevik conception, these worker leaders could not have fought for it. That they fought for it, interpreting the world from its standpoint was indispensable.

The October Revolution and After

In The Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the Renegade Kautsky, Lenin charged Kautsky with rehashing truths that had been valid and accepted by all Social Democrats before 1917. But the experience of the working-class movement, and the critical study of that experience, had since shown many of these truths to be false or inadequate. New realities and new truths had to be recognised, not dismissed. In short, Kautsky had renounced living Marxism in favour of dead dogma.

Closely studying the experience of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Lenin and the Bolsheviks did not merely reaffirm long-standing polemics against the Mensheviks that Kautsky’s Erfurtian strategy had never been inappropriate for backward, feudal or semi-feudal Russia and its state. Worse, the strategy was mistaken for all advanced capitalist countries with bourgeois or semi-bourgeois-democratic states as well. A revolution in revolutionary thinking led them to strategise,inter alia, about how to get rid of the statequa state, the feudal no less than the capitalist state, no matter the form of the latter, including the democratic republican form. Such was the essence of Lenin’sState and Revolution.

The October Revolution proved to Lenin’s satisfaction that the working class had created the new institution, the new state – the soviets – it required to exercise its political supremacy. Revolutionary socialists everywhere soon recognised it as the only possible form of working-class rule. Thus, Lenin believed his polemic against Kautsky in State and Revolution, once critically assimilated, was relevant anywhere and anytime workers were presented with the opportunity to seize power, whether in ‘backward’ Russia or ‘advanced’ Europe, whether in 1917 or 2017.

Conclusion: The Political Take-away of this Historical Intervention

No Leninist today can say with absolute certainty that the soviet is the final form of workers’ rule. To do so would be to repeat Kautsky’s fallacy of identifying a suitably transformed democratic republic as the finished institutional expression of a workers’ state. But the soviet is the latest form that state has taken. If a practical alternative to it exists, theory alone will not find it, only the “direct training that the masses and the classes receive in the course of the revolutionary struggle itself”37 will – by creating it. Theory will then study it.

The last word in revolutionary theory will only be understood to be such – the last word – only if revolution succeeds, retrospectively. Until then, all Leninists have to go on is the latest word. But the first Four Congresses of the Third International pronounced the latest word a century ago. In the eyes of the delegates assembled in Moscow, Social Democracy – Kautskyism – had proved in practice to be unsuited to lead a workers’ revolution in Germany, or anywhere else. Worse, in revolutionary times it was a counter-revolutionary force every time, and was destined to remain so.38

Afterword: The Stalinist Apocalypse

The Stalinist counter-revolution was a world-historical disaster for the workers’ movement. It destroyed Leninism and Bolshevism in Russia and abroad within ten years of the foundation of the Third International in 1919.

At its Fifth Congress, held in June 1928, the Third International forsook, inter alia, two great political lessons it had taught a new generation of revolutionaries at its first four Congresses: the united front strategy on the one hand, and the need for a revolutionary break with the state, whatever socio-property regimes of class rule it defended, in favour of soviet power, on the other.

From the late 1920s, communist parties followed Moscow’s new strategic lead and renounced the united-front strategy, careering instead from infantile ultra-leftism to cross-class, popular-front politics – and back again. The other shoe dropped a half-century later, in the 1970s.

In the 1970s ‘Euro-Communism’ renounced de jure the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and revived Kautsky’s parliamentary road to socialism. But the long march through the institutions of the bourgeois state in the last half-century has been a revolving door to nowhere. Socialism is, arguably, further away now than it was over a century ago.

Bibliography

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Blanc, Eric 2019, ‘Why Kautsky Was Right (and Why You Should Care)’, available at https://jacobinmag.com/2019/04/karl-kautsky-democratic-socialism-elections-rupture.

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--------- 1962c, ‘Report on the Unity Congress’, in Collected Works, Volume 10, Fourth Edition, Moscow: Gospolizdat .

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--------- 1962f, ‘Several Theses’ in Collected Works 21, pp.402-403.

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• 1. Kautsky, 1918, The Proletarian Revolution.
• 2. Lenin, 1918, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky.
• 3. ’Lessons from the First Red Century: Interview with Bhaskar Sunkara’. https://jacobinmag.com/2017/12/russian-revolution-bolsheviks-social-democracy.
• 4. Lars Lih, ‘Karl Kautsky as Architect of the October Revolution’ https://jacobinmag.com/2019/06/karl-kautsky-vladimir-lenin-russian-revolution.
• 5. Eric Blanc, ‘Why Kautsky Was Right (and Why You Should Care)’ https://jacobinmag.com/2019/04/karl-kautsky-democratic-socialism-elections-rupture.
• 6. August H. Nimtz, The Ballot, the Streets – or Both: From Marx and Engels to Lenin and the October Revolution, Haymarket Books, Chicago 2019.
• 7. Symposium on Lars Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered, Historical Materialism Volume 18, (2010) 108–174. My conception of Erfurtianism is more historically specific than Lih’s. Lih’s Erfurtianism is much more general or abstract, “a complex but coherent outlook that combined the world-historical narrative set out in the writings of Marx and Engels, an idealized model of the German Social-Democratic Party, and an ideological self-definition set out to greatest effect in the writings of Karl Kautsky.” p. 109
• 8. Lewis, Kautsky 1909, pp. 49–50
• 9. Ben Lewis offers a comprehensive and exact survey of Kautsky’s political thought, “Introduction: Karl Kautsky’s Democratic Republicanism,” in Karl Kautsky on Democracy and Republicanism, Ben Lewis editor and translator, Brill 2019.
• 10. Lewis, p. 18.
• 11. Engels, 'Introduction to Marx’s Class Struggles in France', 1895, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Class_Struggles_in_France.pdf
• 12. Engels, 'Introduction to Marx’s Class Struggles in France', 1895, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Class_Struggles_in_France.pdf
• 13. P.B. Axelrod, Narodnaia duma i rabochii s’ezd (Geneva, 1906).
• 14. Lenin 1962c, p. 20
• 15. CW vol. 9 p. 66.
• 16. Lars Lih, Lenin Rediscovered 2006, p. 25
• 17. Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power
• 18. Lenin, 1962c CW vol. 10, p. 379
• 19. I have mapped out the Menshevik road on the basis of political resolutions adopted at the Menshevik-led Fourth Unity Congress of the RSDLP in 1906; Menshevik resolutions submitted but voted down at the Fifth London Congress, held in 1907; and resolutions at Menshevik-only conferences held in 1905, 1908 and 1912. Mensheviki: dokumenty i materialy: 1903-1917 gg. Pp. 107-129, 155-163, 304-309, 323-339, 340-346, Moscow: Rosspen, 1996.
• 20. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905-1917 (Cambridge, 1955) pp. 177-187. With an absolute social-democratic majority in the Reichstag, feasible only where suffrage was universal, equal and direct, Kautsky “held out the possibility of an early, peaceful revolution by parliamentary means” in Germany writes Schorske. p. 184.
• 21. Lenin detailed the basic Bolshevik scenario in “Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution”, in Collected Works, Volume 9, Fourth Edition, Moscow: Gospolizdat. He amended it in subsequent years to address what he saw as the Mensheviks’ growing reformism, toward a de facto alignment with the right-wing of Social Democracy internationally, which had abjured all thought of revolution.
• 22. “How P.B. Axelrod Exposes the Liquidators” 1912 CW vol. 18, pp. 184
• 23. Lenin 1962b, CW vol. 9 p. 5
• 24. Lenin 1962b, CW vol. 9 p. 109. In ‘Open Letter to the Leipziger Volkszeitung’, organ of the left-wing in the SPD, Lenin chided Kautsky for his ignorance, for his distorted view of relations within the RSDLP, and for condoning measures to silence the Bolshevik viewpoint in the German Social-Democratic press. CW vol. 8 531-533.
• 25. Lewis, Kautsky p. 129 ‘Parliamentarism and the Parties in England.’ Pp. 118-129. Originally published in 1893, its republication in 1911 demonstrates an overarching, quasi-doctrinaire continuity in Kautsky’s political thinking, sharply calling into question the notion of a ‘break’ around 1910, as Ben Lewis, Eric Blanc and others have proposed.
• 26. Stathis Kouvelakis misses the wholesale democratic-republican appropriation – récupération -- of the Paris Commune by Second International Marxists and by Kautsky in particular because he accords great weight to the post-1917 Leninist take on the Commune – greater weight than the pre-1917 historical record warrants. On the Paris Commune: Part 3 https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/5044-on-the-paris-commune-part-3. Luxemburg was referring to the lightning-fast formation of ‘buoyant’ trade unions in 1905 Russia, festive year of the oppressed.
• 27. CW 21, pp.402-403.
• 28. CW 9, p.21
• 29. “How P.B. Axelrod Exposes the Liquidators” 1912 CW vol. 18, pp. 175-183.
• 30. Hasegawa, pp. 333-334.
• 31. Lars Lih, “For or against ‘AGREEMENTISM’?” https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1332/for-or-against-agreementism/
• 32. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, 1981, The February Revolution, Petrograd, 1917, Seattle: University of Washington Press, pp. 582-583. Hasegawa does note Vyborg militants demanding the Soviet take the place of the Provisional Government. But this was a call for soviet power only provisionally, followed eventually by a democratic republic. This was not the “alternative” (p.334) Lenin would present in his April Theses, as Hasegawa thinks. For his part, Lih references an old, 1915 article of Lenin’s (Lenin, 1962f) ostensibly calling for “all power to the soviets”.” Lih 2011a, Lenin, Reaktion Books, 2011, p. 113. But no such call appears in Lenin’s text – not even the cited phrase.
• 33. Lars Lih, “From February to October” https://jacobinmag.com/2017/05/russian-revolution-power-soviets-bolsheviks-lenin-provisional-government. Lih invests ‘agreementism’ with a meaning that serves his revisionist agenda. It is to assert that the allegedly Kautsky-inspired Bolshevik strategy of ‘anti-agreementism’, from 1905 up to and including 1917, automatically meant: do not sit in – ‘agree with’ – any Provisional Government, overthrow them no matter their political physiognomy might be, in any political situation, in favor of …Soviet Power. But Lih attributes to the Bolsheviks a position they had never held, indeed, that no one could have held anywhere in the world before April 1917 given that no one recognised the Soviet as an alternative to a provisional government, let alone to a capitalist Republic, until April 1917.
• 34. Lenin, ‘The April All Russia Conference’, in Collected Works, Volume 23, p. 241 Fourth Edition, Moscow: Gospolizdat. Lenin, 1964a.
• 35. Mensheviki: dokumenty i materialy: 1903-1917 gg. p. 123.
• 36. The Bolsheviks Come to Power. Rabinowitch’ tracks, with the utmost precision, the Bolshevik electoral campaign. His account does not in the least give credence to Lih’s revisionism, or to Eric Blanc’s revival of Cold War historiographical tropes – tropes Rabinowitch did much to destroy in the first place.
• 37. ’Revolutionary Days’ CW. Vol. 8 p. 104
• 38. Why social democracy is and must remain a counter-revolutionary force is beyond the scope of this paper. Robert Brenner examines the structural reasons in The Paradox of Social Democracy.

By Samuel Farber

Eric Blanc’s reply to my review of his book,ⁱ titled “Leninist Can’t Explain the Russian Revolution” (later changed to “Can Leninists Explain the Russian Revolution?”),ⁱⁱ makes it appear as if I dealt primarily with the Russian Revolution. But that is not so. To the extent that I deal with a revolution, it is primarily with the Finnish Revolution, because Blanc presents it in his book as his model socialist revolution. My review focuses, instead, on what I believe is the central point of disagreement between Blanc and myself, namely, Blanc’s efforts to replace the classical revolutionary Marxist model followed by Lenin and by Rosa Luxemburg that holds that the ruling class could not be expected to surrender its power peacefully. It is a model that therefore calls for Marxists, regardless of their specific conceptions of the revolutionary role of the socialist parties, to actively organise and prepare, strategically and tactically, to confront the violence of the ruling classes. Blanc argues for an alternative model based on a neo-Kautskyan approach that focuses on parliamentary activity and assumes that the revolution will happen without the purposeful revolutionary preparation and agency of its flesh and blood participants. To replace that classical model with a neo-Kautskyan approach is, to my mind, the equivalent in Cuban parlance of “swapping a cow for a goat” (cambiar una vaca por un chivo).

I refuse to speculate on comrade Blanc’s motivation to label me as a Leninist, although I am surprised he does it, since I know he is familiar with my book Before Stalinism. The Rise and Fall of Soviet Democracy, which did not get good reviews from Leninists, including comrades and friends. Be that as it may, I take no offence at being called a Leninist (or a Luxemburgist, Trotskyist or Gramscian). While I certainly don’t lose any sleep over this particular matter, if I was asked what I would call my politics, I would respond by calling myself a “democratic revolutionary socialist”, which, in my view, is an expression of the concept of socialism from below.

What makes a Marxist party a revolutionary party?

In his reply, comrade Blanc continues to sideline the single most important issue of my review: my insistence that Marxist theoretical orthodoxy does not by itself make a revolutionary party. As I argue in said review, to qualify as revolutionary, a party must also be a combat-oriented party both in strategic and tactical terms. That does not mean that revolutionary parties do not have to adjust to changing developments in the course of a revolutionary situation, as was the case, for example, of the defensive position that the Bolsheviks temporarily found themselves in during the 1917 “July Days”, a failed uprising that they were compelled to support, in spite of their misgivings, after it had broken out in the open. However, those common political ups and downs of any revolutionary process do not invalidate the fact that the overall Bolshevik revolutionary activity followed the political direction stipulated earlier by Lenin in his April Thesis, to focus the struggle on taking over the government and replacing a parliamentary republic with a “Republic of Soviets”.

Compare that, as I do in my review, with how the “good Kautsky”—the Kautsky before 1910, who Blanc looks up to—measures as a revolutionary leader. Although he did allow for the possibility of a violent resistance by the ruling class to defend their power, it is nevertheless clear that he expected a peaceful transition to socialism based on the considerable growth of a highly organised working class in Germany. That, in the context of what Massimo Salvadori described in his Karl Kautsky as his Darwinian evolutionism, led him to a particularly organic, non-dialectical view of the “inevitability of socialism”. This ideology was conducive to the organisational conclusions that he formulated in The Road to Power (1909), his single most important work addressing the issue of the overthrow of capitalism: “The Socialist party is a revolutionary party, but not a revolution-making party ... It is not part of our work to instigate a revolution or prepare the way for it ...” In light of the abstentionism of the “good Kautsky”, one wonders what he would have told a Russian revolutionary to do confronting, in August of 1917, general Kornilov’s attempted right-wing coup against the Provisional Government. It was the armed intervention of working-class militants led by the Bolsheviks that made all the difference, not only by preventing the success of the coup, but also by dramatically increasing the political influence of the Bolshevik Party in the Soviets, thus laying the basis for the latter’s victory in October. This is a clear example of what preparing for a revolution is about, a task to which the “good Kautsky” was, at best, indifferent.

This does not mean, as Blanc claims, that I am proposing that there is only one socialist strategy and tactics that applies to every situation or, as he puts it, to “an autocracy, a semi authoritarian parliamentary regime, or a democratic capitalist state”. I am well aware that political strategies and tactics must vary not only among the three different systems Blanc mentions, but also among different kinds of democracies and dictatorships. I am intimately aware of this issue since I follow Cuban politics very closely and actively collaborate with La Joven Cuba, the most important blog of the critical Cuban Left. (I am a member of its Advisory Board.) The political situation in the island could not be more difficult for a left-wing critic or oppositionist, and is radically different from what leftist oppositionists face in capitalist parliamentary democracies. For example, approximately 1,300 people were arrested during the spontaneous popular, and heavily Black, demonstrations on 11 July of last year. Many of those arrested received sentences of up to a year in prison, but some two hundred of them have been threatened with heavy prison sentences ranging from 5 to 30 years for demonstrating in the streets, or at most for some destruction of property, since the demonstrations were, for the most part, peaceful. The critical Left in Cuba which, like all critics and oppositionists in the island, has zero access to the government-controlled mass media (radio, television and newspapers), has supported the demonstrations while making crystal-clear their principled opposition to the US economic blockade of the island. Over the long run, this critical Left is aiming at a thorough democratisation of Cuban society while, at the same time, opposing any outside foreign intervention in Cuban affairs.

However, I do argue in my review that, even though neither socialism nor revolution are on the agenda or in the political horizon of the US, it is highly unlikely that the ruling class will accept a peaceful transition to socialism, and that, long before that happens, capital will likely dismantle the democratic system at the mere threat of losing its power. That is what the right-wing sectors of the ruling class are already trying to accomplish in the face of the comparatively much less threatening challenge to its political and economic power. They are implementing this through a wide battery of measures aimed at restricting voting rights and eliminating vote counting safeguards, and by adopting new gerrymandering measures to limit the political influence of racial and minority groups and white liberals, while propelling a vicious anti-immigrant agenda to make sure the narrowing 58 percent white majority does not soon become a minority. The likely future economic, ecological and political crises will encourage future US governments to increasingly turn to “exceptional” undemocratic measures. That is what makes it necessary for socialists in the US to develop a long-term strategy that prepares them to confront those critical turning points in the future.

Defensive politics of Blanc’s revolutionary model

Blanc takes a particular offense to my characterisation of his politics as a defensive politics, which as I argue in my review, is closely related to what I regard as the absence of a combat perspective in his analysis of what he calls “revolutionary social-democratic” parties. He fails to mention, however, that he was the one to introduce that concept in his book when he stated that the “October Revolution itself was also a ‘defensive revolution’ and the Bolsheviks similarly cast their politics in defensive terms” (p. 313). In my review I refute Blanc’s “defensive” characterisation of the Russian Revolution by pointing out that the overall Bolshevik revolutionary policy from at least April to November 1917 was strategically and tactically oriented towards what Lenin referred in his April Thesis, as overthrowing the government and replacing it with a republic of Soviets. This was not only Lenin’s position: by the end of April, the party’s seventh all-Russian conference overwhelmingly approved his call for “all power to the Soviets”.

But the fact remains that Blanc does follow a defensive politics when he uncritically states that it was the semi-authoritarian political context that prevailed in the Germany of Kautsky’s time that led the SPD to adopt a strong educationalist ethos with an emphasis on building an organised proletarian subculture and patiently spreading the “good word” of socialism, rather than promoting risky mass actions or winning immediate parliamentary reforms. He then goes on to celebrate the German SPD for having amassed one million members and for having built a dense subculture based on proletarian political, social and cultural associations, without uttering one word on how these institutions might have ended functioning as agents of working-class adaptation rather than as fighting class instruments. Neither does he write a single word regarding the bureaucratisation of the party and its unions and of their fundamentally anti-democratic practices (described in detail in Robert Michel’s Political Parties) and increasingly conservative politics (pp. 90-91).

Blanc is, in fact, describing and defending an SPD that was not a revolutionary party (as analysts outside the Left at that time, such as Max Weber, had pointed out). Yet, he writes, without questioning the implications, that Kautsky, along with other “revolutionary social democrats”, argued that the persistent promotion of proletarian education and collective association was revolutionary in itself, as long as it was consistently linked to the assertion of the party’s end goals (p. 56). This assertion of final goals is, unfortunately, not very meaningful unless those goals are continuously nourished by the daily militant practice of party members and the working class.

Class independence

In the absence of a revolution of a revolutionary situation in the US, revolutionaries get involved in the struggle for reforms. But, in a different manner from that reformists use for reform: they insist, as I argue in my review, on preserving the independence of the working class and the oppressed groups involved in the struggle by opposing their collaboration with the state and with the employers that, in the end, might become an obstacle in their future struggles. That is why revolutionaries hold that unions cannot concern themselves, and much less guarantee, the profitability of the enterprises for which their members work. That includes participating in co-management schemes with employers, which, in practice, involves accepting responsibility without getting any power in decision making and compromising in the process the unions’ organisational independence.

Blanc rejects my conception of class independence calling it an “extreme degree of political independence”, which, in a previous exchange on Facebook, he called an “extreme degree of class intransigence”. If by “extreme” or “intransigent” he means my standing against making concessions on the independence of the working class to the political and economic powers, I plead guilty to that. The problem is, he never explicitly states what class independence means to him. He seems to imply, by omission, that, for him, class independence is relevant only in relation to the state; on the independence from the ruling class he doesn’t say anything. That is what I think allows him to support political campaigns regardless of their relationship of the ruling classes, or sectors thereof, that back them.

But what he also does is that he uses what he labels as my “extreme” position on class independence to portray me as a sectarian who opposes all political campaigns that are not “revolutionary”. He is wrong. I celebrated Boric’s victory in Chile, which I see as an achievement of a mass democracy movement that also elected the current Chilean Constitutional Convention. I don’t know what Boric might do once he takes office, but what is undeniable is that, in the two electoral rounds, he defeated the other candidates supported by, and connected with, the Chilean ruling classes. Like Comrade Blanc, I was also thrilled when Jeremy Corbyn was elected as leader of the British Labour Party because he was a prominent left-wing leader of that party, an organisation that is still organically tied to the working class as shown by the major role that the British unions play inside it.

However, the political campaigns of Boric and Corbyn differ from Bernie Sanders campaign. Not because Sanders’ domestic programme has been more or less radical than Boric and Corbyn’s; or because Sanders has more or less political integrity than them. The real difference lies in the Democratic Party, to which Sanders has, unfortunately, tied himself hand and feet, a party that is organically tied to major sections of the US capitalist class—although I understand and respect the many young radicals who have been attracted to Sanders. The Democratic Party is not even a real party with a real membership—even though Sanders won over twenty state primaries in the 2016 elections, he did not end up, as a result, controlling a single one of the Democratic parties in those states. It, rather, functions as an electoral committee mostly dependent on the money it gets from ruling class circles from Silicon Valley, Hollywood and most of Wall Street firms, among others. Along with the Republican Party, it is a quasi-legal entity with immense powers to establish the electoral rules that insure their permanent control. As these lines are being written, Democratic and Republican politicians are playing a major role in the congressional redistricting in a large number of states.

The Finnish Revolution

Comrade Blanc proposes the revolution led by the Finnish Social-Democratic Party in 1918, as the model to be emulated by revolutionary socialists. As I previously noted, this is why my review focuses on this revolution. Based on what Blanc himself wrote about it, and on the work of Finnish social scientist and historian Risto Alapuro (State and Revolution in Finland, Haymarket Books, 2019), and of the late Finnish social activist Pekka Haapakosi, I concluded in my review that the politics that informed the practice of those Finnish social democrats, the left-wing included, was a “defensive” politics that did not rise to the challenge of taking power when that was feasible.

After the February 1917 revolution in Russia, when Finland—then a part of what had been the Tsarist Empire but was granted a considerable degree of political autonomy—was left without an army and police, the SDP did come to power, although in coalition with the bourgeois parties, having adopted a position to the right of Karl Kautsky, who had at one time criticised French socialist leader Millerand for entering the same type of coalition government in France. The Finnish SDP was, however, expelled from the Finnish ruling coalition by the Russian Provisional government, who, in addition, dissolved the government. This opened the door to a process of mass radicalisation that grew when the new elections that were called by the Russian Provisional government in October 1917, resulted in a narrow loss for the SDP, that insisted that the elections were illegal and that their defeat had been the result of electoral fraud, although, according to Risto Alapuro, the SDP narrow loss may have also been due to the party’s decision to limit their campaign to the issue of national independence from Russia and say little about its social objectives, an approach consistent with its defensive politics and methods (p. 147).

Mass radicalisation escalated when the newly elected right-wing government went into the offensive, disarming the worker-guards that had been put in place in September 1917 with the consent of the SDP party and trade-union leaders as a concession to the more radical Finnish elements in the context of the growing political agitation exacerbated by a worsening food shortage. At the same time, upper-class forces began to develop their own paramilitary forces, officially recognised as government troops in January 1918, as the right-wing was extending its power (Risto Alapuro, p. 156).

It was at the high point of revolutionary agitation and strength, when workers had assumed power disarming and arresting the local authorities, and controlling, through the strike committees they instituted, the acquisition and distribution of food supplies (Pekka Haapakoski, “Finska Klasskriget 1918” Internationalen, #5-7, 1974, translated from the Swedish by Hannu Reime), that the SDP leadership, unable to reach agreement on seizing power, called instead for a general strike on 14 November 1917. The general strike was very successful, and, even then, the party leadership remained reluctant to seize power. Although Blanc acknowledges that the SDP decision to not take power at that time allowed the bourgeois forces to build up their own troops in the following two months leading up to their defeating the revolution, he nevertheless is noncommittal on the SDP’s decision not to seize power at that moment, insisting that “there was no way of knowing during the general strike whether a more favourable moment for taking power might subsequently present itself” (p. 144). This is a point that an outside observer may make after the fact. But, for those involved in the struggle informed by the perspective of seizing power, the decisive question was whether there was a reasonable chance for the revolutionary forces to prevail in November or whether that would have been premature, if not suicidal to attempt to do so.

As it happened, it was only months later, in January 1918, when the strength of the revolutionaries had considerably diminished, that the SDP leadership chose the revolutionary option. Yet, even then, their defensive political outlook prevented them from giving the necessary attention to the military preparations and operations required to win against the Finnish Whites. Instead, they decided to concentrate their efforts on administering the newly won territories of Helsinki and southern Finland (Alapuro, pp. 157-8) instead of trying to take over the whole country. So, the Finnish Whites won. It might be, as Blanc argues, that the powerful military intervention of the Germans in Finland, which started by providing aid to the Finnish Whites and was followed by German troops landing in the southern coast and marching into Helsinki in April of 1918 (Alapuro, p. 160), would have brought down the revolution had it won. But it was the defensiveness, lateness and hesitation of the “revolutionary social-democratic” Finns that hindered the revolution’s chances. Revolutionaries are often compelled to act defensively, but a strategy of defensive politics is fatally flawed in the context of a revolutionary upsurge where defensiveness means doing too little and too late, and, more importantly, not acting to win.

Blanc’s “Tensions and Difficulties”

Towards the end of his critique of my review, comrade Blanc writes about what he calls “the tensions and difficulties” of the democratic-socialist push to overturn capitalist rule. He mentions two “difficulties”: one, the vastly unequal power resources of different classes”, a point with which I agree; and two, “the contradictory openings and obstacles [of] parliamentary rule under capitalism”, which suggests to me that his political strategy is primarily centred on parliament (i.e., Congress) as the arena of struggle for the American Left.

However, if the main strategic task for the American Left is to change the existing relation of forces in society, Congress (the American parliament) cannot be the main arena of struggle. It is not changes in congressional politics that changes the relations of forces in society, but it is those changes, if they do occur and are successful, that are reflected in Congress. What changes the relation of forces are social mass movements that disrupt business as usual.

Less than two years ago, the Black Lives Matter movement erupted into the streets of America in what became the largest and longest lasting demonstrations witnessed in this country. This movement had a substantial impact on the social and political climate of race relations in the USA. It was able to do so because it disrupted business as usual in this country. Similarly, it was the massive disruptions that the Civil Rights Movement created in American cities from 1963 until the end of that decade that brought about the victories represented by the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in 1964 and 1965. It is worth noting that it was Republican Senate minority leader Everett Dirksen who, in cooperation with liberal and moderate Democratic senators, broke the filibuster with which the white racist Southern Democratic senators tried to kill civil rights legislation. Besides electoral considerations, Dirksen and the Republicans did that because of their fear of unrest and instability in the US. One of the challenges of the US Left today is to use those proven methods of mass disruption to combat the national reactionary offensive to dramatically reduce voting rights and most ominously sharply reduce existing guarantees that votes will be counted as they are cast. The current attacks on voting rights and the Biden Administration’s failure to do anything to protect undocumented immigrants calls for the renewal of mass actions like the massive street demonstrations against immigration restrictions and abuses that took place in the spring of 2006.

In the long term, the union movement must be revived with a focus on helping to bring about a radicalised, anti-bureaucratic multi-racial labour movement that emphasises the development of militant rank-and-file control from below. As we know from historical experience, the development of this new labour movement will depend on what E.P. Thompson called the “conscious minority” of militant cadres to act as the spark plugs for this new labour upsurge.

Samuel Farber was born and raised in Cuba and has written numerous books and articles on that country as well as on many other political topics. He is also the author of Before Stalinism. The Rise and Fall of Soviet Democracy recently reissued by Verso Books.

ihttps://newpol.org/was-there-a-revolutionary-social-democracy/

iihttps://www.historicalmaterialism.org/index.php/blog/can-leninists-expl…

"London anti-capitalist protest" bynicksarebi is licensed underCC BY-NC-ND 2.0

1

Darko Suvin

Lenin’s note to Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik, “Human consciousness does not only reflect the objective world but also creates it” … takes into account that knowledge is areceptionof the natural and historicalworld of experience, aconstructionof aworld of knowledgeproper to human subjectivity, and an anticipationof thepossible worlds for pre-conceiving thought.

Hans Jörg Sandkühler  

 

[The goal of philosophy is] to show the fly the way out of the flytrap.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

Que sçays-je (What do I know)?

Michel de Montaigne

0. This essay wishes to delve into what Wittgenstein’s wondrous epigraph means here and now, in the dire emergency that the degenerating capitalism enforces upon humanity and our ecosystem. It notes that philosophy and knowledge are always pursued by some people and for some goal to be implemented by further (groups of) people. I am interested exclusively in the liberatory or left group of goals. My stance arises from wonder and dismay at how much the “really obtaining” Left and Marxism of my generation firmly believed it knew thatturned out partly or wholly wrong, and what are the means and methods to minimise this. I do not doubt that strategic human knowledge (Erkennen) is possible, once we focus on it not as afenced-off project without subject and goal, but as a history and theory of understanding and furthering the interests of humanity and those that concretely represent it: for example, the Aegean poets and philosophers plus Athenian dramatists, Jehoshua and Spartacus, Diderot and Saint-Just, Lenin’s Bolsheviks and Brecht with Benjamin, Lao Zi and Mao, Toussaint’s Haiti and Marcos’s EZLN2 – always against the background of the hundreds of millions murdered and the billions lesioned by our rulers to stymie and deflect these representatives.

To understand how to believe better, with a reasonable chance for success, we have to take a large step back from the historical everyday and ask:What are the necessary presuppositions for a general epistemology? What are the criteria for attempting to understand what is knowledge and how can any answer be justified (from slight buttressing to strong causality)? This would also mean embarking upon the criteria for both the general possibility and the particular felicity of valid answers about our pragmatic reality.3I am not presenting here a theory nor even a fully articulated hypothesis, but what seem necessary building blocks for such positions and criteria.

I posit first that knowledge bearers are human persons and smaller or larger societal groups and institutions; knowledge means are general premises (presuppositions) and specified positions; and knowledge ends are human interventions into the societal and historical pragmatic reality with the goal of furthering the wellbeing of people and the humanisation of the species Homo sapiens. All three are historically constituted by the needs and interests of societal groups and classes.

Second, I posit that we cannot do without a “possibilist” and non-absolutist materialism. Materialism radically opposes the monotheistic stance ofcredo ut intelligam (I believe in order to understand) and replaces it byintelligo ut credam (I understand in order to believe): so far so good. However, materialism must acknowledge that it has to continually negotiate between thenon-identity of knowledge and reality (for if they were identical, the limits and structure of our knowledge would be frozen once and for all) and the – partial but for key practical matters provisionally valid –identity of knowledge and reality (otherwise we could not successfully intervene into it at all). This means that no presupposition or knowledge is unhistorically absolute: materialism cannot obtain purchase upon reality without dialectics. Dialectics centrally means that any totality has inbuilt contradictions which make for changes, glacially slow or explosively sudden. The only possible objects of cognitive acts are flexible and imperfect totalities. Flexible means changeable in extension and intension (see section 1.2); imperfect means not only unfinished but in principle unfinishable multiplicities and dualities. This amounts to using simultaneously a firm belief into some practically possible actions while tempering it with a permanent “soft” scepticism.4 All commitments to an absolute Truth are socio-politically absolutist too.

1. A first central problem for epistemology is to find a royal road towards clarifying how can our knowledge relate to reality. That it can is an evolutionary axiom which underlies the coming about and survival of the human species. Kant argued that, although sensory experience does not make us immediately aware of the world, one must suppose it exists in order to make sense of those experiences through reason:5 in a stronger version, I would argue that our inferences from experience lead to checkable actions and consequences. But how can mental processing ground a realisation of collective interests and needs in human and non-human nature? Are not entities internal to the mind ideal (impalpable) while the external ones are real (palpable)? How can a realist signification come about?

1.1. I would concede that purely introversive signification might dominate, e.g., in music and some impoverished – if technically interesting – segments of visual arts or glossolalic poetry, but it seems proper in this essay to concentrate on how signification is co-constituted, and for practical purposes predominantly shot through, by extroversive signification. In Putnam’s words, meanings “ain’t in the head… [but] interactional”.6 All that seems to us immediately given by sensual “evidence” or perception is mediated by dominant presuppositions, the stronger when unconscious.

Further, as Goodman and Elgin argue, no proposition claiming knowledge can be validated if one's belief in it, though it may happen to be true, is not connected to other propositions which "tether" it, making it part of a consistent and justifiable argument.7 A formally coherent tether implying accounting and arguing for your insights (a stance or horizon) there certainly must be, or no judgment will be possible, and thus no critical politics or cognition. Epistemologists divide according to the nature of this indispensable tether. "Internalists" believe the tether is purely mental and formal: knowledge is anchored by justification epistemically accessible to the knower, usually as compossible propositions in natural language, possibly buttressed by mathematics, that employ only concepts and categories plus various operations by which they form a system. "Externalists" believe knowledge is anchored to a not only mental fact or set of facts that makes it true, and there is a debate as to the anchor, which could be arrived at inductively or deductively. The “internal” absolutism8 presents the danger of closed systems of statements chasing each other's tail but with insufficient or aberrant justification (e.g. the Nazi belief); while the “external” absolutism presents the danger of unjustifiable assumption of opening or anchoring, usually some certainty of a divine kind.

The proper answer to this dilemma, which I shall also take as an axiom is: the division between real and ideal entities of knowledge or epistemata9 is to be firmly rejected. A pioneering insight here was Marx’s revolutionary updating of Bacon’s “knowledge is power”: “theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses”.10 To generalise this approach, while factoring in also an update of Vico’s correlation of vera andfacta (proof by practical effect): what seems merely internal and ideal (theory) is really homogeneous with what seems merely material and external to people (material force) – otherwise they could not interact – and they are mediated by the mind. The “ideal” concepts, categories, and other logical (but always also historical) forms are a cognitive reality that is epistemologically not different from any other more easily recognisable “reflections” of non-mental reality: say the “internal” image of a person, a house or a machine. While in the mind, the logical forms and – for me more important as richer – the semantic forms are epistemic elements or aspects just like the apparently isomorphic reflections of easily noticeable objects. Both ideational forms and “reflections” are collective constructs independent of a merely personal consciousness. All the supposed “objects” of our “subjective” activity are always already theory-laden.11 As Gramsci noted, whether there could be a reality independent of humanity is for humans an empty question – unless it is used as a hyperbolic spur for action before the end of humanity, I would add – and he acerbically compared the vacuous concept of an objectiveuniverse outside of human history and praxis to belief in God.12 And echoing Marx’s 2nd Thesis on Feuerbach, “In science too, looking for reality outside people, in a religious or metaphysical sense, is merely a paradox”.13

Therefore, a materialism based on collective practices and returning into a possible human practice must radically refuse any primitive “reflection” of objective reality in us supposed subjects. Any observational description necessarily incorporates presuppositions.14 The fulcrum of this proper materialism cannot be either reified objects or “pure” ideas and/or perceptions but only phenomena correlated to methods as well as to the investigation’spurpose;15 therefore, it cannot do without mental epistemata. It is a methodical knowledge, checkable by physical or mental experiment: it is fully wedded to some variant of an experimental method as ushered in by the young revolutionary bourgeoisie, from Bacon to Saint Simon. It is value-laden (Putnam): that is, both factual and fictional, also both rational and emotional (or better, it indicates that these oppositions are dubious).

No doubt, any personal consciousness will at best render reality only rather partially, its epistemata will be embryonic – both incomplete and rough-hewn (allomorphic); however, this can, for practical purposes, be largely alleviated for tasks at hand if collective experimentation with proper feedback obtains. In that case, materialist knowledge appears through the activity of bearer-protagonists and is constituted as positions and propositions of various scope. The greatest examples I know thereof – in terms of both scope and value – would be Marx’s theory of capitalism and Einstein’s two Relativities; within the art mode or domain of knowledge, there are comparably great ensembles, say Shakespeare’s or Zeami’s theatre, the “realistic” and the modernist novel or some agglomerations of verse, but since such macro-texts are as a rule not analysed as wholes, this remains a postulate. All materialist knowledge is situational, but such paragons are in feedback with long-duration situations, lasting centuries.

In this context, direct reference to ontologies is, to my mind, not necessary for a realistically modest epistemological method, in diametrical opposition to the most instructive case of the horrors of Heidegger. From arguments for this stance, I offer two. First, amid our rapidly escalating dangers to the very existence of human civilisation and bios, depth care about ontology can be left for happier times. Symmetrically obverse, I would refuse any hermeneutics based on exclusive autarchy of either discourse or modal logic. True, long duration stabilities are needed for any judgment, but, unless the epistemic worlds are constantly porous to sociohistorical praxis, they lead to sterility.

Second, science after Einstein has revealed that the historical knowledge of mankind was confined to the mesocosm where Newtonian physics obtain. In the sub-atomic microcosmos and the astronomic megacosmos, our meso “laws” are at best subsumed and usually replaced by different regularities. It is very probable our views of micro and mega are still hugely anthropomorphic. Further, this also holds for our views of the immensely complex mental life of Homo, a continent whose Columbus (for good and bad) was Freud. Our species is still like the child skipping stones across one ocean bay. The fallibility of all our propositions and judgments means that a chance for right knowledge is systematically frustrated in our time, especially in matters of politics in the widest sense, where oligopoly about information and upper-class secrecy about state actions (remember Assange!) prevail, as well as the general poisoning of the noosphere by the rulers’ lies and omnipresent blathering. To the contrary, we should recur to Marx’s resolute refusal not only of censorship but also of financial control as constrictions for intellectual labour and for empowering the powerless is a necessary component of what he considered a realisation of human freedom.

1.2. Let me insist on two key elements and nodes for knowledge. The first is its being imbued withinterests, desires, goals, values, and norms.16 “Concepts,” boldly affirmed Wittgenstein, “express our interest and guide our interest”.17 What Putnam has passionately dubbed “The Philosophers’ of Science Evasion of Values”,18 hides that “Knowledge of facts presupposes knowledge of values…. justifying factual claims presupposes value judgments”.19 A fact is only a fact for a given human collective at a given situation. Examples: the existence of the Americas was not a fact for the Old World before Columbus. Or: the existence of vaccines against Covid-19 is not a fact today (end of 2021) for the majority of humankind since it has no access to them.

In particular, I take norm in the meaning of both a widely accepted societal standard and a model that serves in feedback with “a principle of right action binding upon the members of a group [in order] to guide, control, or regulate proper and acceptable conduct”.20 Not having norms (interests, desires, values), however implicit and fragmentary, is impossible.

In that limited sense, all opinions are constructed and relatively wrong or limited, yet nonetheless some are valid within given limits. This needs a sense of relevance or pertinence, impossible to detach from the situation of the knower,21 and some opinions are more wrong than others. This holds pre-eminently for those I would call monoalethist (from alethé, truth): all those – from monotheists to lay dogmatists (Fascists, Stalinists, and believers in the Invisible Hand of the Market) – who hold they have the Absolute Truth, including the belief that relativism is absolute. Only belief in the absolute right, Haraway’s “God-trick”,22 is absolutely wrong.

My second focus is the inevitable articulation of knowledge that assigns rankings in time and space, which means recognising that the use of grouped concepts orcategories is quite inevitable for making sense. Human understanding is multiply mediated, it uses complex. imbricated, and flexible means (a theory, an experiment, an action), it both theorises and objectifies for understanding. The Copernican revolution of Marx and Engels was to insist on the key category ofhuman work, which in class society means the sometimes necessary but always alienating division of labour.23 The central contradiction in capitalism arises from the division between capital and labour as mega-alienations of frozen labour from the past vs. presently needed labour – a huge undersea reef on which the ship of 20^th-Century “really obtaining socialism” got wrecked.

1.3. Last not at all least but central, I posit that the supreme value and fulcrum of knowledge is its consubstantiality with personal and collective freedom. Not having norms based on humanising values(interests, desires) allows or indeed imposes an ideal horizon of slavery and fascism. It follows that Marx’s and Engels’s great insertion of the major human shapers of interests, desires, and values – power politics and class horizons – into the very structure of theorising is usable for all human sciences and probably further too,24 even if in the natural sciences only in the final instance.

What does freedom imply, among other matters? First, the negotiation between the non-identity and the identity of knowledge and reality means no cognition can even theoretically be finite and full, there are only islands of knowledge in a vast ocean of nescience. Second, if the experimental method of knowledge is driven by purpose and strongly interfused with interests, desires, and values, the addressee of knowledge (say a reader) is pre-eminently solicited to practice permanent choices how to interpret and evaluate theepistemata of a text. No text, in the widest sense of signifying systems that includes all writing and imagining fixed in a form – whether scientific, artistic or purely a momentary newspaper or TVdoxa – can be read without being first somehow scanned andthen imagined as a meaningful whole.25 The very act of scanning a text open up the interpretive necessity as well as extroversive possibility of freedom: “Having reconstructed the fictional world as a mental image, the reader can ponder it and make it a part of his experience, just as he experimentally appropriates the actual world”.26

Third, freedom for one and for all is always firmly based on vulnerable personal bodies and bodies politic, and since behaviour and cognition are whole-body processes, this includes what is usually called mind (or soul). Personal sovereignty is humanity’s first and last “commons.” Yet breathless capitalism is profoundly inimical to it and is working ceaselessly at new technological means of manipulating bodies — from the factory floor to biogenetics and capillary surveillance (in use) and then nanophysics (coming fast). So this discussion should properly branch into all mega-lesions of personal integrity, from war and other overt violence to hunger and all varieties of alienation.

1.4. The refusal of a subject-object split of blessed Cartesian memory holds for any human signic system, but becomes obvious when we focus on the only universally necessary system, though sometimes not sufficient (maths anybody?), for understanding: human language. Within it, the central conceptual pivot translating group interests and personal needs into epistemology is preciselymeaning, whose articulation is a most pliable and rich semantico-pragmatic index of human self-production within the contradictory history of societal mega-formations. The universe of meanings has a sufficient autonomy to be the central subject-object of knowledge. Its bearer or protagonist is neither “the society” nor “the individual” but active persons associated in various ways. It remains to be analysed at length later whether and how the possible epistemic worlds issue into the epistemological Possible Worlds. The nodes of either are again categories (classifying forms) as “societally relevantdimensions of meaning, e.g. age, sex, power, possessions, kinship, food or clothing”27 but one could add more.

A key foundation stone here seems to me Frege’s opposition of Sinn vs. Bedeutung, sense and meaning.28 In his discussing of “Morning Star” and “Evening Star” for the planet Venus, the two terms quoted are senses and Venus is meaning. The “senses” – that is, the language fixations of a visual existent – are ways in which the meaning is given to us (Art des Gegebenseins), once as associated with morning and once with evening; Wittgenstein would felicitously say that we “see Venus as” morning or evening star. If generalised from single existents to concepts, this is also called extension (the set of all elements covered by the concept) and intension (the way these elements are given and the stance toward them implied). In fiction I would associate this with allegory, and centrally with the parable form and mode. This means that the interlinear causal systems guaranteeing coherence and readability always go beyond the actualepistemata used and enmesh with possibilities of wider and additional public understanding, which was its original meaning:allos means other, andegorein to speak or present publicly (as it were in theagora). In underground ways, I believe this holds also in verbal genres claiming “factuality,” which is why Marx and Einstein are not only concerned with a critique of political economy or of old-style physics.

Here, it would be useful and to my mind necessary to discuss the central epistemic category of Possible Worlds, as “constructed by the creative activities of human minds and hands”.29 But this is matter for another essay.30

• 1. I acknowledge much stimulation and learning from the authors cited, including the overviews by Ernst and Sandkühler. Behind them is my permanent drawing upon Brecht and Benjamin. All unacknowledged translations in this essay are mine. I have decided a brief overview cannot bear any canonic bibliography. A useful tool when critically used could be the materials in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://www.iep.utm.edu/, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, htttp://plato.stanford.edu
• 2. Possibly minor on a world scale but for this writer directly constitutive is the experience of Yugoslavia after 1941, stenographically: Tito and Krleža, Kidrič and the workers’ councils, the Non-Aligned South as the refusal of the imperialists’ Cold War (cf. my https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1075-splendour-misery-and-possibilities).
• 3. As Pope noted, fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Still, I hope to be useful by opting in this essay to bracket whole libraries that deal with the most contentious question of defining and using “truth” as one’s foundation stone, and with many other key terms (e.g. thought, conviction, claim, justification…), often taken over uncritically from linguistics or logic. My defence would be, first, that all introductions to epistemology I consulted acknowledge they are egregiously simplifying, and second, that I hope to be clearer in feedback with ”fiction” in a following essay. This quite minimal discussion presents an orientation.
• 4. Suvin, Darko. “An Approach to Epistemology, Literature, and the Poet’s Politics.” Annual Review of the Faculty of Philosophy, Univ. of Novi Sad (2016), 421-40
• 5. cf. Scruton, Roger. Kant: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP (2001).
• 6. Putnam, Hilary. “The Meaning of Meaning,” in his Mind, Language and Reality. Cambridge UP (1975), 227.
• 7. Goodman, Nelson, and Catherine Z. Elgin. Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences. Hackett, 1988, 150ff.
• 8. Ernst, Gerhard. Einführung in die Erkenntnistheorie, 5th edn. WBG, 2014, 90-93.
• 9. Sandkühler, Hans Jörg. Die Wirklichkeit des Wissens. Suhrkamp (1991), 15.
• 10. Marx, Karl. “Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” (1843), www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm
• 11. cf. Goodman & Elgin, Reconceptions, and Elgin, Elgin, Catherine Z. With Reference to Reference. Hackett (1982), 183-85
• 12. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Transl. Q. Hoare & G.N. Smith. International Publ. (1971), 440-48.
• 13. Gramsci, Quaderni del Carcere (Vol. II). Ed. V. Gerratana. Einaudi (1975), 1457.
• 14.
• 15. cf. Putnam Meaning; Realism with a Human Face. Harvard UP (1990); Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge UP (1981).
• 16. This list of terms is provisional and not exhaustive. One would have to refuse also the reason-emotion split (as I do in other places) and then delve more deeply into the cognitive potential of non-conceptual or topological stances, foremost among them the spread between sympathy and love: "’Knowledge’ is a familiarity, awareness, or understanding of someone or something, which might include facts (propositional knowledge), skills (procedural knowledge), or objects (acquaintance knowledge)” (Wikipedia. “Epistemology.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology [with a huge list of further resources]). Yet – with all due respect – the great majority of current professional epistemology is primarily concerned with propositional knowledge, slighting "knowing how" and "knowing by acquaintance" (cf. the exceptional Polanyi, also Wikipedia, with ancestors in Gilbert Ryle and Bertrand Russell). It is difficult to believe that a depth involvement in understanding, say, music or painting – or even humanising politics – is non-cognitive.
• 17. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophische Untersuchungen. Werkausg. Bd. 1. Suhrkamp, (1988), point 570.
• 18. The title of his chapter 8 in Collapse.
• 19. Putnam, Hilary. The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays. Harvard UP (2002), 137.
• 20. Merriam-Webster [Dictionary], s.v. “Norm.” www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/norm. Accessed Oct. 10, 2021.
• 21. cf. Prieto, L.J. Pertinence et pratique. Minuit (1975).
• 22. Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledge.” Feminist Studies 14.3 (1988), 589.
• 23. I approached this in “Living Labour,” quite initially. Suvin, Darko. “Living Labour or the Labour of Living,” in his Defined by a Hollow. P. Lang, 2010, 419-71.
• 24. A parallel would be Bachelard’s wonderful characterisation of Lobachevsky’s enterprise in mathematics: “He has turned into dialectics (dialectisé) the notion of the parallel, invited the human spirit to dialectically round off our fundamental notions… and upgraded polemical reason to the status of constituent reason….” (“Lobatchewsky a dialectisé la notion de parallèle, il a invité l’esprit humain à compléter dialectiquement les notions fondamentales […] il a promu la raison polémique au rang de raison constituante…” 8-9). I acknowledge here a major debt to the opus of Herbert Marcuse, an occulted Great Ancestor of ours to whom we shall have to return. I also take a good part – say one-third – of Nietzsche most seriously while rejecting other aspects of his. Bachelard, Gaston. L’Engagement rationaliste. PUF, 1972.
• 25. cf. Jakobson, Roman. “Concluding Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” in T. A. Sebeok ed., Style in Language, 2nd edn. MIT P (1964), 350-377; and my discussion in “The Day and the Not-Day: On Possible Worlds and Freedom.” (circulating).
• 26. Doležel, Lubomír. Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Johns Hopkins UP (1998), 21; and see much more in Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader. Indiana UP, 1979 (variant Lector in Fabula. Bompiani, 1979).
• 27. Schmidt, Siegfried J. Histories & Discourses. Transl. K.W. Köck and A.R. Köck. Imprint Academic (2016), n.p. [12].
• 28. I pluck this pioneering dyad from a long and rich work whose horizons I do not discuss, and that grow unfortunate when he gets to fictional existents such as Odysseus. Interestingly, Frege also uses “sign” for all such binary relations and may be taken as a forerunner of much more sophisticated semiotics. Frege, Gottlob. “On Sense and Meaning”, in P. Geach and M. Black eds., Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, 3d ed. Transl. M. Black. Blackwell (1985), [“Über Sinn und Bedeutung” (1892)].
• 29. Doležel, Heterocosmica, 14.
• 30. A Possible World is a provisional totality with a defined spacetime and agents – all else is open. Possible Worlds in logical semantics (à la Kripke, or the Eco-type semiotics following logics) are maximally comprehensive and fully furnished, and therefore usually have to be very small and are only fit for introspective purposes; I would refuse them as a general tool for both theoretical and practical reasons: “Fictional worlds of literature [and other arts, also philosophy, DS] are incomplete” (Doležel 22). Rather than pertaining to logic or linguistics, a useful Possible World is epistemological: modelled on our historical world – that is, on dominant conceptions thereof or what Eco calls its imaginary encyclopedia – yet significantly different from it. The possible cognitive increment lies in the difference and in its applicability, direct or very indirect, to our common world. All art and all planning deals implicitly with Possible Worlds; this is foregrounded in Science Fiction or Five-Year Plans (cf. much more in my “The Day and the Not-Day: On Possible Worlds and Freedom” (circulating)).

By Eric Blanc

Can Leninists explain the Russian Revolution and its lessons for today? My new book Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics Across the Russian Empire, 1882-1917 marshals extensive new primary data from across the Russian Empire to challenge longstanding myths about the Russian Revolution — and to challenge unhelpful Leninist (aka “revolutionary socialist”) political strategies based on these myths.

Here I will only address major errors of fact and analysis in Samuel Farber’s recently published review of Revolutionary Social Democracy, since space is limited and because the points unaddressed here are dealt with at length in my book. Farber’s review begins with one big factual mistake and proceeds on that basis, without citing new historical data and without challenging the data I provide in my book, to recapitulate the standard “revolutionary socialist” critique of Karl Kautsky and Second International, whose strategy V.I. Lenin and the Bolsheviks supposedly broke with.

The big factual error is Farber’s claim that, in imperial Russia, “most of the ‘revolutionary social democratic parties’ supported the war.” Though he cites my book as the supposed source of this claim, at no point do I make it — for the simple reason that it’s untrue. Not only is Farber’s assertion about most borderland parties’ supposed support for World War One untrue, but, as I showed in the book, revolutionary social democrats led successful seizures of power in a majority of imperial Russia’s regions in 1917-18 that had their own Marxist parties — this radical outcome placing all power in the hands of working people occurred in Estonia, Latvia, Central Russia, Azerbaijan, Finland, as well as Lithuania. And, even in other regions such as Poland, revolutionary social-democratic parties such as the PPS-Left and SDKPiL tried but did not ultimately succeed in overthrowing capitalist rule.

Having decreed by unfounded fiat that most revolutionary social democrats were not in fact revolutionary in practice, Farber then goes on to recapitulate Leninist myths about non-revolutionary Second International Marxism and the supposed strategic innovations that distinguished the Bolsheviks. But, as I showed in detail my book, and as historian Lars Lih and others have shown elsewhere, the strategy of revolutionary social democracy (aka “orthodox Marxism”) articulated by the early Kautsky was actually shared by Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and other revolutionaries across Tsarist Russia — and this strategy was the strategic basis for all parties that overthrew capitalist rule in 1917-18, including the Bolsheviks and the Finnish Social Democrats. Farber provides no new evidence to bolster the old claim that the strategy of “Second International Marxism” was not as revolutionary as it claimed, or that the Bolshevik current broke from this strategy before or during 1917.

Farber asserts that what distinguishes Kautsky’s strategy and tactics from that of real revolutionaries is that the latter base their strategy on the “expectation that a socialist revolution will have to rely on the widespread use of force” and, therefore, that they base their tactics on class independence against the capitalist state and employers. The problem with Farber’s claim is that the revolutionary social-democratic strategy articulated by Kautsky consistently advocated both of these points.

In terms of strategy, as I cite and explore at length in the book, here is what Kautsky actually argued: “Now, as in the past, Marx’s saying remains true: force is the midwife of any new society. No ruling class abdicates voluntarily and nonchalantly … A rising class must have the necessary instruments of force at its disposal if it wants to dispossess the old ruling class.” Similarly, I showed at length that one of the defining and central tenets of Second International “orthodox Marxist” strategy was its intransigent insistence on class struggle, its opposition to participation in coalition governments between workers and liberals, and its opposition to participation in executive government under capitalism as a general rule.

I was particularly surprised to read Farber’s claim that what’s “missing in Eric Blanc’s analysis” in Revolutionary Social Democracy is a case for the centrality of working-class political independence. In reality, one of my book’s central themes is that it was precisely the acceptance or rejection of an intransigent strategy of class struggle and opposition to participation in capitalist coalition governments that wasthe central divergence between imperial Russia’s radical and moderate socialists andthe central factor explaining the revolution’s divergent outcomes across the Russian Empire.

The fact that I’m unconvinced that an extreme degree of political independence is relevant to the United States (or many other parliamentary regimes) today does not shape my analysis of imperial Russia’s movements a century ago. The contexts are different. According to the political formulae of that era’s revolutionary socialists (including Kautsky), socialist and workers should have actively opposed trying to elect not only Bernie Sanders in the US, but also Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Gabriel Boric in Chile — all participation in executive governance under capitalist parliamentary regimes was rejected by Second International revolutionaries. The burden of proof is on Farber and those who share his views thatthis level of independence from the state is relevant today.

Farber is on no stronger factual or analytical ground when he claims that I and Kautsky argue that “an entirely defensive politics can be successful in gaining power.” In fact, far from elaborating a case for the strategic centrality of “defensive politics,” I barely address this question at all. As I explain in the book, the line between “defensive” and “offensive” politics is usually exceedingly unclear (and often non-existent) in the class struggle. For example, each of the most plausibly “offensive” actions of the Finnish Social-Democratic Party (SDP) and the Bolsheviks — from calling general strikes to initiating revolutionary uprisings — were consistently framed and seen in “defensive” terms. A strong commitment to “defensive politics” was neither a significant theme in my book nor in revolutionary social-democratic strategy.

Nor, contrary to Farber’s claims, was “defensive politics” a major point of contention in the Finnish Marxist debates over taking power in November 1917 — as I showed in the book, according to the Finnish SDP’s revolutionary social-democratic politics, all the strategic preconditions for seizing power were present that month. The reason the Finnish Marxists seized power two months later —like the “delay” of the Baku Bolsheviks (April 1918) and others across imperial Russia — was primarily due to contingent questions of context and tactics, not “Kautskyist” strategy. (A few further factual corrections: Farber incorrectly claims that the Finnish SDP from its founding onwards “did not call for even the gradual contest of power.” It is also not factually correct to claim that the SDP in 1917 said “little about its social objectives.” Nor is it plausible to suggest that the trajectory of the Finnish revolution in 1918 was not leading beyond capitalism.)

Any even-handed historiographic account has to acknowledge that the main reason why the Finnish Red Government was eventually crushed in 1918 had relatively little to do the timing of its initial establishment. Far more important was the fact that, absent significant military aid from the Bolsheviks, the Finnish workers’ regime was vastly outgunned by the combined military weight of the German and White Guard armies. In this sense, as well as its commitment to workers’ rule through universal suffrage, the Finnish Red Government was very similar to the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871. Why should socialists like Farber today reject the socialist content and strategic lessons of the former but not the latter?

Farber’s desire to cast true revolutionaries as advocates of “offensive” revolutionary politics leads him to make another inaccurate claim: that the Bolsheviks from March 1917 onwards were “oriented towards a revolutionary insurrection.” But as Lenin and Trotsky consistently emphasized in 1917, and as even other Leninist historianshave acknowledged, the demand “All Power to the Soviets” for most of the year simply meant that the Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary leaders should end their coalition with liberals, peacefully displacing the illegitimate, un-elected, widely despised Provisional Government.

Contrary to what Farber claims, all revolutionary social democrats, Kautsky included, expected and prepared workers for capitalist counter-revolution. Once workers were strong enough to win a parliamentary majority for socialism, Kautsky and his co-thinkers expected that the ruling class would resort to anti-democratic reaction. It was precisely for this reason that Kautsky and revolutionary social democrats in Finland and beyond pushed for the dissolution of the standing army, the arming of the people, and why they explicitly and consistently rejected pacifism and called for revolution. The major difference between revolutionary social democracy and post-1917 Leninism is not, as Farber asserts, that the latter had a more realistic understanding that capitalists would resist and refuse to accept the legitimacy of parliamentary sectioned socialist transformation.

The actual difference between Leninists and revolutionary social democrats was that the latter believed that reaching socialism and socialist revolution in democratic contexts required that socialists push to win a majority to parliament through universal suffrage elections. According to both Kautsky and the early Lenin (i.e. prior to his State and Revolution), workers would seek to seize the democratic governmental openings that existed under capitalism — socialists before, during, and following socialist revolution should therefore seek to preserve and expand republican parliamentary institutions, rather than discard them. Leninists, in contrast, from 1918 onwards, proposed thatonly workers’ councils installed through mass armed uprisings against theentire existing parliamentary state (not just its anti-democratic bureaucratic and military structures) could install socialism.

Since I and others like Carmen Sirianni have explained elsewhere why Leninism has nowhere come close to becoming a viable majoritarian current in capitalist democracies and why it’s an unsuitable strategy for socialists today, there’s no need here to rehash those arguments. Only two points should be underscored here. First, revolutionary social-democratic strategy was proven to be a viable path to workers’ power in Finland. And, second, the October Revolution hardly confirms the Leninist case for “dual power” insurrections against capitalist democracies — the Bolsheviks in 1917 led a soviet revolution in a context defined by decades of autocratic rule, in which there was no existing government democratic elected through universal suffrage.

The relation of political strategy to distinct political regimes is a central component of my book but it nowhere figures in Farber’s review. In fact, he doesn’t engage with my book’s major thesis: that the experience of imperial Russia shows why effective socialist strategy necessarily looks different in different political contexts (autocracies like most of Tsarist Russia, semi-authoritarian parliamentary regimes like pre-war Finland or Germany, or capitalist democracies). This is true both for tactical questions — such as the relative emphasis socialists place on disruptive mass action — and for long-term strategy, such as the expected role of parliamentary institutions in the transition beyond capitalism. Farber seems to assume that I’m making a case for the relevance of Kautsky’s strategy toall contexts, an idea I explicitly and repeatedly reject. As I argue in the book, and as I haveelaborated on recently,neither early revolutionary social-democratic strategy nor post-1917 Leninism is the most suited socialist strategy for capitalist democracies today.

Farber, like other Leninists, implausibly suggests that socialist strategy and tactics should be fundamentally identical in an autocracy, a semi-authoritarian parliamentary regime, or a democratic capitalist state. At no point in his review, or elsewhere, has Farber made a positive or plausible case for this claim.

It’s easy to point out the tensions and difficulties of the democratic-socialist push to overturn capitalist rule. We openly acknowledge these as well. These political dilemmas are rooted in the vastly unequal power resources of different classes and the contradictory openings and obstacles of parliamentary rule under capitalism — unfortunately, nobody has yet developed a suitable strategic formula for overcoming these dilemmas.

Given the actual historical record since 1917, it’s much harder to demonstrate in theory or practice that “revolutionary socialism” has a plausible chance of ever becoming a majoritarian current in parliamentary contexts. Learning the right lessons from the Russian Revolution is one way socialists today can start to more critically, and more effectively, develop strategies and tactics appropriate to the actual contexts in which we find ourselves.

A Review of Un parricidio compiuto by Roberto Finelli

Panagiotis Sotiris

Hellenic Open University, Greece

panagiotis.sotiris@gmail.com

Roberto Finelli, (2014) Un parricidio compiuto. Il confronto finale di Marx con Hegel, Milan: Jaca Book.

This book represents one of the most coherent versions of Roberto Finelli’s argument in regard to his reading of what constitutes the originality of Karl Marx’s mature theory and, in particular, his insistence that what designates the differentia specifica of Marx’s mature thinking is not a theory of dialectical contradictions but, rather, a theory ofreal abstractions.

In a certain way, this book is the continuation of Failed Parricide, his work of 2004 (published in English in 2016 as part of the Brill/Historical Materialism Book Series), In that book, Finelli characterised the relationship between Hegel and the young Marx in the following manner:

The underlying thesis of my reconstruction breaks the order and the progressive dimensions of such deductions and proposes an interpretation of the relationship between Hegel and the early Marx as characterised by a permanent and structural subordination of the young revolutionary intellectual to the great philosopher from Stuttgart. This subordination lasts for a long time, for a whole period of Marx’s life; when denied and repressed, it became the origin of many hasty and not very rigorous aspects of Marx’s first theoretical paradigm.Finelli 2016, p. xi.

‘Gulag socialism’ writes Jean-Jacques Marie. ‘Primitive thinking’ replies Domenico Losurdo. We publish here a review by Jean-Jacques Marie (contributor to La Quinzaine littéraire and head of the Centre d’études et de recherche sur les mouvements trotskistes et révolutionnaires internationaux) of Domenico Losurdo’s book Staline, histoire et critique d’une légende noire, along with Losurdo’s response.Originally published here : http://lafauteadiderot.net/A-propos-du-Staline-de-Losurdo-le A short version of Jean-Jacques Marie’s text was published in La Quinzaine littéraire no. 1034 on 15 March 2011. Domenico Losurdo sent the journal extracts from his response to this article, in a very polemical tone. To date, the journal has not brought this to the attention of its readers. We therefore offer here the exchanges between Jean-Jacques Marie and Domenico Losurdo in full.

Jean-Jacques Marie: ‘Gulag Socialism’

With courage nothing is impossible, if we believe the Scouts. Domenico Losurdo belies this masculine motto. He is certainly courageous in trying to rehabilitate Stalin. But the inanity of such an undertaking, whose ambition is undoubtedly excessive, quickly becomes obvious.

Vade retro, Khrushchev!

Losurdo lambasts the report delivered by Khrushchev on some of Stalin’s crimes during a final closed-door session of the 20th Congress of the CPSU in February 1956. First of all, he distorts its scope. According to him, this report was an ‘indictment which proposed to liquidate Stalin in every aspect’. But Khrushchev asserted right away: ‘The aim of this report is not to make an in-depth criticism of Stalin’s life and activities. Enough books, pamphlets and studies were written on Stalin’s merits during his lifetime. Stalin’s role in the preparation and execution of the civil war and in the struggle for the building of socialism in our country is universally known. Everyone knows this perfectly well.’ And for those who didn’t understand he adds: ‘The Party fought a hard fight against Trotskyists, rightists and bourgeois nationalists... There Stalin played a positive role.’ Khrushchev therefore had nothing to say about the Moscow trials, from which Domenico Losurdo borrows a number of inventions that he presents as truths. Thanks, therefore, to Stalin for the liquidation of opponents of every shade! Khrushchev indeed specified that ‘before the 16th Congress’, which took place in January 1934, ‘Stalin had always taken into account the opinion of the collective’. Until then, Stalin had therefore been an excellent Communist leader. Stalin only became bad when he started to liquidate his own supporters from 1934 onwards. Losurdo erases this distinction to put Khrushchev and Trotsky on the same level.

Collective leadership versus ‘cult of personality’

I say Khrushchev, but Domenico Losurdo seems unaware (or conceals) the fact that Khrushchev was not in fact the author of the said report. This was written by Piotr Pospelov, on the basis of the work of a commission of the presidium of the Central Committee that he headed. Pospelov had been the main editor of the official biography of Stalin published shortly after the war, and was for a long time editor-in-chief of Pravda. A good and authentic Stalinist, therefore. Khrushchev was content to add to Pospelov’s text a few embellishments of his own, such as the detail (invented and grotesque) that Stalin had led the military operations of the Second World War on a globe. Two or three jokes of similar kind only marginally alter the nature and scope of a report produced collectively by a commission of Stalin’s supporters.

These Stalinists had only one concern, expressed in the reproach of ‘cult of personality’. Its very simple meaning escapes Losurdo completely – even with the help of Hegel. It meant that power was now in the hands, not of the Supreme Guide and Father of Peoples, but of the Central Committee, which Stalin had convened only four times from 1941 until his death in 1953. This is what Khrushchev had promised the Central Committee when it met to judge Beria in June 1953. And this is what the members of the Central Committee, silenced during the last thirteen years of Stalin’s rule, wanted to hear: ‘Now we will have collective leadership... The plenums of the Central Committee must be convened regularly.’ The report read by Khrushchev on behalf of the presidium of the Central Committee was the expression of this collective will.

The deportation of peoples ... ‘a lack of common sense’!

Losurdo’s arguments generally boil down to a simple schema: all states and all governments do the same thing. So what can we reproach Stalin for? He quotes the passage where the Khrushchev report denounced the deportations of certain peoples in 1943-44: ‘Not only a Marxist-Leninist, but anyone of good sense, cannot understand how it is possible to hold entire nations responsible for unfriendly activity, including women, children, old people, Communists and Komsomols [Communist youth], to the point of resorting to massive repression against them and condemning them to misery and suffering because of hostile acts perpetrated by individuals or groups of individuals.’

Khrushchev listed only five of the dozen deported peoples who suffered this fate, and Losurdo – who in no way reproaches him for this selective choice – refrains from listing them. In a few words, Losurdo evokes ‘the horror of collective punishment’, but once this humanitarian concession is made to a tragedy in which on average a quarter of the deportees – primarily old people and children – perished in the course of their interminable transport, he adds cynically: ‘This practice was characteristic of the second Thirty Years’ War,’From the start of the First World War to the end of the Second. starting with tsarist Russia which, although allied with the liberal West, experienced during the First World War ‘a wave of deportation’ of ‘dimensions unknown in Europe (especially people of Jewish or Germanic origin)’. He then evokes the expulsion of the Han people from Tibet by the ultra-reactionary Dalai Lama, who flirted for a while with the Nazis, and the internment in camps of all American citizens of Japanese origin by the President Roosevelt in 1942. So our Italian philosopher benignly concludes: ‘If it was not distributed equally, the lack of “common sense” was widespread among the political leaders of the twentieth century.’ Hey presto!

Thus, in the triumphant homeland of socialism (as for Losurdo socialism flourished in the USSR), which achieved the unity of peoples, it was normal to use the same methods as the leaders of the capitalist countries, a feudal obscurantist, or even Tsar Nicholas II. The latter, in response to the German advance in 1915, did indeed moved half a million Jews to the east, unofficially suspected of spying for the Germans. But the justificatory reference to this is unfortunate, because however barbaric this transfer was, it caused far fewer deaths than that of the Soviet Koreans in 1937 (in the absence of any war), who were collectively described as potential spies for Japan... after they had fled from the terror that Japan was unleashing in their country, or the Crimean Tatars, Kalmuks, Chechens and Ingush in 1944. We should add that the deportation of these last two peoples is one of the causes of the tragedy that their region has been experiencing for almost twenty years. Stalin’s legacy still causes bloodshed today.

Losurdo uses the same line of argument when he evokes the gulag by parading all the horrors of concentration camps in colonial countries.

An heir to the Moscow trials

Losurdo repeats the falsifications of the Moscow trials, but without referring directly to them given how polluted is the source. For example, he maintains that in 1918: ‘Lenin, accused or suspected of treason, seemed to be the target of a plan envisaged by Bukharin, however vague, for a coup d’état.’ This plan, fabricated by prosecutor Vychinsky during the third Moscow trial of March 1938, is presented here first as hypothetical, before becoming a certainty with the wave of a magic wand: ‘To thwart the peace of Brest-Litovsk, which he had experienced as a capitulation to German imperialism and a betrayal of proletarian internationalism, Bukharin cultivated for a moment the idea of a kind of coup d’état, aiming to remove from power at least for a while the man who until then had been the indisputable leader of the Bolsheviks’ (Losurdo gives here a reference to his previous sentence, the invention supposedly serving itself as evidence). No doubt thinking that a fable repeated several times thereby acquires the status of truth, he continues: ‘We have seen Bukharin on the occasion of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk caress for a moment the project of a sort of coup d’état against Lenin, whom he criticised for wanting to “turn the party into a dung heap”.’ In reality, we have seen nothing at all, except Losurdo’s pirouettes.

Why is it that Losurdo, who multiplies references to anyone, including novelists such as Montefiore, promoted to historian, or Feuchtwanger, whom Stalin brought to exalt the second Moscow trial in exchange for the publication of his works in the USSR and the payment of a juicy fee, does not refer to this invention of Vychinsky’s? The truth is quite simple: during Lenin’s speech to the Soviet executive committee on the Brest-Litovsk treaty, on 23 February 1918, the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Kamkov – whose party was still in coalition government at the time – approached the ‘Left Communists’ Piatakov and Bukharin, who were hostile to signing, and asked them what would happen if they had a majority in the party against the Brest-Litovsk peace. In his opinion, he told them, ‘In that case Lenin will leave and we and you will have to set up a new Council of People’s Commissars’ which Piatakov could chair. The two men saw this simply as a joke. A few days later, the Left S-R Prochian suggested to Radek that, instead of writing interminable resolutions the Left Communists would do better to arrest Lenin for twenty-four hours, declare war on the Germans and then unanimously re-elect Lenin president of the government, since being forced to react to the German offensive, ‘while insulting us and you, Lenin will nevertheless wage a defensive war better than anyone else’. Six months later, Prochian died. Radek then repeated the sentence to Lenin, who burst out laughing.

At the beginning of December 1923, in the middle of the Left Opposition’s campaign for the democratisation of the party, Bukharin, then allied with Stalin against it, transformed these anecdotes into serious proposals that the ‘left-wing Communists’ of the time supposedly discussed – so he asserted, despite the denials of all concerned. The Opposition, he concluded, thus played into the hands of the party’s enemies. Zinoviev protested: the Left Communists had hidden these ignoble proposals from the Central Committee, which only learned of them six years later! Stalin went further: some of his opponents of 1923 had already, according to him, been potential members of the would-be anti-Leninist government of 1918. Bukharin would pay with his life for this trafficking in memory. At the third Moscow trial, in March 1938, the prosecutor Vyshinsky, using his demagogic declarations of 1923, accused him of having negotiated with the Left S-Rs the overthrow and arrest of Lenin. Bukharin was sentenced to death.

Ignorantus, ignoranta, ignorantum...

Domenico Losurdo does not know the history on which he writes commentaries, sometimes with references to Hegel, who, sadly, cannot respond. He describes the head of the provisional government of 1917, Alexander Kerensky, as a ‘Menshevik leader’. But Kerensky was close to the Socialist-Revolutionaries, and had never in his life been a Menshevik. Referring to the assassination of Serge Kirov on 1 December 1934 in Leningrad, Losurdo writes: ‘Initially the authorities’ enquiries turned to the White Guards’ (p. 102). The authorities had a strange way of turning to them. The day after the murder, Stalin had a hundred White Guards shot, men who were already in prison and who were not questioned beforehand, given that they could not organise the slightest attack from their cells.

Seeking to confirm Trotsky’s perfidy, Losurdo further states that ‘Lenin already saw a Bonapartist peril hanging over Soviet Russia and expressed his concerns even about Trotsky’ (p 127). The absence of reference here again conceals a trick. In 1924, the year of Lenin’s death, Gorky, then in Italy, published Lenin and the Russian Peasant, in which he quoted only Lenin’s laudatory phrases about Trotsky. Six years later, Gorky republished his book in the USSR and added a sentence ascribed to Lenin, who had returned from the grave six years after his death to express a belated fear of Trotsky’s imaginary Bonapartist ambitions. Even more astounding, Losurdo repeatedly evokes an alleged ‘conspiracy led by Trotsky’ and confirms this fable from the Moscow trials with a quote from Curzio Malaparte. Yet no historian has ever considered Malaparte as anything other than a literary source. Who would quote Malaparte’sKaputt in a history of the Second World War? A talented writer, he considered history nothing more than a servant of literature and fabricated just as he pleased.

What a lovely gulag!

We must pause for a moment in the all too easy dismantling of Losurdo’s fantasies. But we cannot pass over in silence his ramblings about the gulag. He is certainly right to stress that the Stalinist gulag was not the kind of extermination camp that the Nazis set up for the Jews. That said, one cannot read without surprise the assertion that ‘the attempts to achieve in the “whole” of the country “Soviet democracy”, “socialist democracy” and even “a socialism without the dictatorship of the proletariat” [as if the oppressed proletariat then exercised the slightest dictatorship!], were matched by attempts to re-establish “socialist legality” or “revolutionary legality” in the gulag’. Finally, Losurdo ecstatically finds in the gulag ‘a paedagogical concern’: ‘the gulag prisoner was a potential “comrade” obliged to participate in particularly harsh conditions in the productive effort of the whole country’. Particularly harsh, of course, but the word ‘comrade’, even a very potential one, is priceless. And, Losurdo swears, ‘until 1937 the guards called the prisoners “comrade”. Imprisonment in a concentration camp, moreover, did not exclude the possibility of social promotion’. What a social ascent this gulag socialism provided!

***

Domenico Losurdo’s response: Primitive thinking and Stalin as a scapegoat

One can never appreciate enough the wisdom of the phrase attributed to Georges Clemenceau: war is too serious a business to entrust it to generals! Even in his acute chauvinism and anticommunism, the French prime minister kept a fairly lucid awareness of the fact that specialists (in this case war specialists) are often able to see the trees but not the forest, and let themselves be overwhelmed by details while losing sight of the whole. In this sense, they know everything but the essential. One is immediately inclined to recall Clemenceau’s saying on reading the demolition job that Jean-Jacques Marie attempts to inflict on my book on Stalin. From what it seems, the author is one of the greatest experts in ‘Trotskyism-ology’, and he is keen to demonstrate this in all circumstances.

1. Stalin liquidated by the Khrushchev report, the Khrushchev report liquidated by the historians

Marie immediately begins by challenging my assertion that Khrushchev ‘sought to liquidate Stalin in all aspects’. Yet it was the great Trotskyist intellectual Isaac Deutscher who pointed out that the secret report portrayed Stalin as a ‘huge, dark, capricious, degenerate human monster’. And even this portrait is not monstrous enough in Marie’s eyes! My book goes on to say that, in Khrushchev’s indictment, ‘the man responsible for horrible crimes was a despicable individual, both morally and intellectually. The dictator was not only ruthless but also laughable.’ Let’s just dwell on one detail that Khrushchev mentions: ‘It is worth noting that Stalin drew up his plans using a globe. Yes, comrades, it was with the help of a globe that he drew the front line’ (p. 27-9). It is clear that the portrait of Stalin drawn here is a caricature: how did the USSR manage to defeat Hitler under a leader who was both criminal and a fool? And how did this leader, both criminal and foolish, manage to lead on a ‘globe’ an epic battle such as that of Stalingrad, fought district by district, street by street, floor by floor, door by door? Instead of answering these objections, Marie is concerned to demonstrate that, as a great expert of ‘Trotskyismology’, he knows the Khrushchev report from memory, and he starts quoting it at length and in broad terms on aspects that have nothing to do with the problem in question!

I demonstrate that this total liquidation of Stalin (on the intellectual as well as the moral side) does not stand up to historical investigation, by calling attention to two points: eminent historians (none of whom can be suspected of being pro-Stalin) speak of Stalin as the ‘greatest military leader of the twentieth century’. And they go even further: they attribute to him an ‘exceptional political talent’ and consider him an ‘extremely gifted’ politician who saved the Russian nation from the decimation and enslavement that the Third Reich had destined it for; and this was thanks not only to his military strategy but also to his ‘masterful’ war speeches, sometimes real ‘purple passages’ which stimulated national resistance in tragic moments. And that is not all: fervent anti-Stalinist historians acknowledge the ‘perspicacity’ with which he dealt with the national question in his 1913 writings and the ‘positive effect’ of his ‘contribution’ on linguistics (p. 409).

Secondly, I note that, as early as 1966, Isaac Deutscher expressed strong doubts about the credibility of the Secret Report: ‘I cannot accept without reservation Khrushchev’s alleged “revelations”, in particular his assertion that during the Second World War [and in the victory over the Third Reich] Stalin had a practically insignificant role’ (p. 407). Today, in the light of the new material at our disposal, researchers who accuse Khrushchev of having resorted to lies are far from rare. So, if Khrushchev undertook the total liquidation of Stalin, more recent historiography liquidates the credibility of the so-called Secret Report.

How does Marie respond to all this? He summarises not only my point of view but that of the authors I quote (including the Trotskyist Isaac Deutscher) with the formula: ‘Vade retro Khrushchev!’ In other words, the great expert in ‘Trotskyism-ology’ believes he can exorcise the insurmountable difficulties in which he struggles by pronouncing two words in (ecclesiastical) Latin!

Let us look at a second example. At the beginning of the second chapter (‘The Bolsheviks from ideological conflict to civil war’), I analyse the conflict that developed on the occasion of the Brest-Litovsk peace. Bukharin denounced the ‘peasant degeneration of our party and Soviet power’; other Bolsheviks resigned from the party; still others declared Soviet power itself to be worthless. On the opposite side, Lenin expressed his indignation at these ‘strange’ and ‘monstrous’ remarks. From the very first months of its existence, Soviet Russia saw an ideological conflict developing which was extremely bitter and on the verge of turning into civil war. And would all the more easily turn into civil war, I say in my book, when, with Lenin’s death, ‘an undisputed authority was missing’. On that very occasion, I add, following an illustrious bourgeois historian (Robert Conquest), Bukharin had already toyed with the idea of a coup d’état (p. 71). How does Marie respond to all this? Once again, he displays all his erudition as the great and perhaps greatest expert in ‘Trotskyismology’, but makes no effort to answer the questions that arise: If the deadly conflict which lacerated the Bolshevik ruling group was Stalin’s fault (primitive thinking cannot do without a scapegoat), how can we explain the harsh exchange of accusations in which Lenin condemned as ‘monstrous’ the words uttered by those who castigated the ‘degeneration’ of the Communist Party and Soviet power? And how do we explain the fact that Robert Conquest, who has dedicated his entire existence to demonstrating the infamy of Stalin and the Moscow trials, speaks of a plan for a coup d’état against Lenin cultivated and toyed with by Bukharin?

Not knowing what to answer, Marie accuses me of manipulation and even writes that the idea of a coup d’état by Bukharin is my own invention. I have no time to waste with insults. I shall confine myself to pointing out that on p. 71, note 137, I refer to a historian (Conquest) who is inferior to Marie neither in erudition nor in anti-Stalinist zeal.

2. How do Trotskyists à la Marie insult Trotsky?

With the death of Lenin and the consolidation of Stalin’s power, the ideological conflict increasingly turned into a civil war: the diabolical dialectic that manifests itself in one way or another in all great revolutions sadly did not spare the Bolsheviks either. I develop this thesis in the second part of my second chapter, quoting a series of quite varied figures who revealed the existence of a clandestine and military apparatus set up by the Opposition, and above all quoting Trotsky himself. Yes, it was Trotsky who declared that the struggle against the Stalinist ‘bureaucratic oligarchy’ precluded a peaceful solution. And it was Trotsky himself who proclaimed that ‘the country is clearly heading towards revolution’, towards civil war, and that ‘in conditions of civil war, the murder of certain oppressors ceases to be individual terrorism’ and is an integral part of the ‘struggle to the death’ between opposing factions (p. 104). As can be seen, in this case, at least, it was Trotsky himself who turned the tables on the scapegoat myth.

We can thus understand Marie’s particular embarrassment. So what? We are already familiar with the display of erudition as a smokescreen. Let’s proceed to the substance. Among the many diverse figures I quote, Marie chooses two: one of these (Malaparte) he considers incompetent, the other (Feuchtwanger) he stigmatises as a bribed agent in the service of the criminal and idiot who sat in the Kremlin. And so the game is played: the civil war has disappeared and once again this scapegoat primitivism can celebrate its triumph. But to refuse to take into consideration the arguments put forward by a great intellectual such as Feuchtwanger, to limit oneself to describing him as a bribed agent in the service of the enemy: is this not the way of proceeding generally considered ‘Stalinist’? And above all: what should we think of Trotsky’s testimony which speaks of ‘civil war’ and ‘struggle to the death’? Isn’t it a paradox that the great specialist and high priest of ‘Trotskyismology’ silences the deity he worships? But this is not the only paradox, or even the most glaring one. Trotsky not only compares Stalin to Nicholas II (p. 104), but goes further: in the Kremlin sits ‘a provocateur in the service of Hitler’ or even ‘Hitler’s majordomo’ (pp. 126 and 401). And Trotsky, who boasted of having many followers in the Soviet Union and who even, according to Pierre Broué (Trotsky’s biographer and hagiographer), had managed to infiltrate his ‘followers’ into the GPU – did Trotsky do nothing to overthrow the counter-revolutionary power of this new tsar, the servant of the Third Reich? Marie ends up painting Trotsky as a simple phrasemonger who limits himself to barroom tirades, even as an inconsistent revolutionary, fearful and abject. The most glaring paradox is that I am in fact forced to defend Trotsky against some of his apologists!

I say ‘some of his apologists’ as not all of them are as destitute as Marie. With regard to the ‘merciless civil war’ that developed between the Bolsheviks, I observe in my book:

We have here a category that constitutes the main research thread of a Russian historian (Vadim Rogovin) of sure and proven Trotskyist obedience, author of a monumental work in several volumes dedicated precisely to the meticulous reconstruction of this civil war. He speaks of the ‘civil war’ unleashed by Stalin against those in Soviet Russia who organised to overthrow him. This civil war manifested itself even outside Russia, and at times spread within the framework of the front fighting against Franco; indeed, referring to Spain in 1936-39, people talk of not one but ‘two civil wars’. With great intellectual honesty and making use of new and rich documentary material, available thanks to the opening of the Russian archives, the author quoted here comes to the conclusion: ‘The Moscow trials were not a cold-blooded, unmotivated crime, but Stalin’s reaction during an acute political struggle.’

In a polemic with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who portrayed the victims of the purges as a collection of ‘rabbits’, the Russian Trotskyist historian reports a leaflet from the 1930 that called for ‘the fascist dictator and his clique’ to be swept out of the Kremlin. And he comments: ‘Even from the point of view of the Russian legislation in force today, this leaflet must be judged as a call for a violent overthrow of the state (more precisely of its dominant upper stratum).’ In conclusion, far from being the expression of ‘an irrational and senseless outburst of violence’, the bloody terror unleashed by Stalin was in fact the only way in which he managed to break ‘the resistance of real Communist forces’ (p. 117-8).

This is how the Russian Trotskyist historian expresses himself. Except that Marie, in order not to renounce his primitivism and the quest for a scapegoat (Stalin) on whom to focus all the sins of the terror and the Soviet Union as a whole, prefers to follow the path traced by Solzhenitsyn and depict Trotsky as a ‘rabbit’.

3. Betrayal or objective contradiction? The lesson from Hegel

Within the framework I have outlined, Stalin’s merits remain. He understood a series of essential points: the new historical phase that opened with the failure of revolution in the West; the danger of enslaving colonisation that threatened Soviet Russia; the urgency of recovering from backwardness in relation to the West; the necessity of acquiring the most advanced science and technology, and the awareness that the struggle to achieve this could be in certain circumstances an essential, even decisive aspect of the class struggle; the need to link patriotism and internationalism and the understanding that a victorious struggle of resistance and national liberation (the Great Patriotic War) was at the same time a major contribution to the internationalist cause of the struggle against imperialism and capitalism. Stalingrad established the foundations for the crisis of the colonial system on a global scale. Today’s world is characterised by the growing difficulties of the neo-colonialist system, by the emergence of countries like China and India and more generally of civilisations that had been subjugated or annihilated by the West, by the crisis of the Monroe doctrine and the effort of some South American countries to link the struggle against imperialism with the construction of a post-capitalist society. Well, this world would have been unthinkable without Stalingrad.

And yet, having said this, it is possible to understand the tragedy of Trotsky. After acknowledging the great role he played during the October Revolution, my book describes the conflict that would arise with Lenin’s death as follows:

To the extent that charismatic power was still possible, it tended to take form in the figure of Trotsky, the outstanding organiser of the Red Army and the brilliant orator and writer who claimed to embody the hopes of triumph of world revolution, and derived from this the legitimacy of his aspiration to rule the party and the state. Stalin, on the other hand, was the embodiment of the legal-traditional power that was laboriously trying to take shape. Unlike Trotsky, who came late to Bolshevism, he represented historical continuity in the party that was the protagonist of the revolution and, therefore, the holder of the new legality; moreover, by affirming the feasibility of socialism even in a single (large) country, Stalin conferred a new dignity and identity on the Russian nation, which thus overcame the appalling crisis, which was not only material, arising from the defeat and chaos of the First World War. In this way the nation recovered its historical continuity. But precisely because of this, his adversaries cried ‘treason’, while in the eyes of Stalin and his followers they appeared as traitors on account of an adventurism which facilitated the intervention of foreign powers and in the last analysis endangered the survival of the Russian nation, which was at the same time the vanguard component of the revolutionary cause. The confrontation between Stalin and Trotsky was a conflict not only between two political programmes but also between two principles of legitimacy (p. 150).

At a certain point, faced with the radical novelty of the national and international context, Trotsky was (wrongly) convinced that there had been a counter-revolution in Moscow and acted accordingly. In the context presented by Marie, on the other hand, Trotsky and his followers, although they had managed to infiltrate the GPU and other vital sectors of the state apparatus, let themselves be slaughtered and massacred without a fight by the criminal and idiot counter-revolutionary in the Kremlin. Without a doubt, it is this reading that particularly ridicules Trotsky, by making all the protagonists of the great historical tragedy which developed on the wave of the Russian revolution (as of any great revolution) petty and unrecognisable.

In order to understand this tragedy adequately, we must rely on the category of objective contradiction dear to Hegel (and Marx). Unfortunately, on the other hand (as I observe in my book), both Stalin and Trotsky shared the same philosophical poverty and were unable to go beyond the mutual accusation of treason:

On both sides, rather than engage in the laborious analysis of objective contradictions and opposing options, and the political conflicts that developed on this basis, the protagonists preferred to invoke the category of treason, and in its extreme configuration the traitor becomes the conscious and mercenary agent of the enemy. Trotsky consistently denounced ‘the plot of the Stalinist bureaucracy against the working class’, a plot that was all the more despicable because the ‘Stalinist bureaucracy’ was nothing more than an ‘apparatus for the transmission of imperialism’. The least one can say is that Trotsky was repaid in kind. He complained at being stigmatised as an ‘agent of a foreign power’, yet he had himself stigmatised Stalin as a ‘provocateur in the service of Hitler’ (p. 126).

Jean-Jacques Marie

Before the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, on 31 October 1939, Vyacheslav Molotov, then Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, declared: ‘One may like or dislike Hitlerism. But any sane person will understand that an ideology cannot be destroyed by force. It is therefore not only foolish but also criminal to continue a war for the destruction of Hitlerism under the false banner of a struggle for democracy’ (Pravda, 1 December 1939).

Thus, for the head of the Soviet government, Stalin’s right-hand man, a war for the destruction of Hitlerism would be ‘criminal’.

The buffoon Grover Furr might care to classify Molotov among the clandestine survivors of the so-called ‘plot of rightists and Trotskyists’ in which he had already placed Khrushchev. But this would be rather difficult, for if, by chance, Stalin had not endorsed this superb statement, he would have read it the next day in Pravda. No correction was made to this declaration of support for Nazism until 22 June 1941, when Hitler’s hordes invaded the USSR.

Stalin, it is true, had declared to Comintern secretary Dimitrov on 7 September 1939: ‘Without understanding it, nor wanting it himself, Hitler is undermining the capitalist system’ (Georgi Dimitrov, Journal 1933-1949, p. 339). So, Hitler could be called an objective ally.

The full meaning of this collaboration with Hitler was made clear in February 1940, when Stalin handed over to the Gestapo thirty German Communists who had emigrated to the USSR to escape Nazism, including Margarete Buber-Neumann, wife of Heinz Neumann, a leading member of the KPD and editor-in-chief of its daily newspaper Die Rote Fahne, whom Stalin had had shot in 1937 and could not therefore deliver to Hitler in February 1940 (Margarete Buber-Neumann,Déportée en Sibérie, p. 213 [English edition:Under Two Dictators]).

Stalin’s remaining supporters should remember these facts and statements and draw appropriate conclusions.

Instead, three Italian Stalinists have written a huge book published by a French publishing house, Le vol de Piatakov [Piatakov’s Flight], subtitled ‘La collaboration tactique entre Trotsky et les nazis’, whose cover, to their shame, is adorned with a photo of Trotsky covered by a huge swastika.Daniele Burgio, Massimo Leoni, Roberto Sidoli, Le Vol de Piatakov (Paris: Editions Delga, 2021).

The three peddlers of this old and murderous slander are trying to cover up the historical collaboration between Stalin and Hitler from August 1939 to 22 June 1941 (i.e. for 22 months), which, apart from the handover of German Communists to the Gestapo, would lead, among other things, to an original tactical collaboration in France: the request to the Nazi authorities by the leaders of the PCF to resume publication of L’Humanité.

There is a French proverb that ‘Whoever feels snotty should blow their nose’, but the three slanderers seem to be unaware of it.

Translated by David Fernbach

Jean-Jacques Marie

Grover Furr’s book Yezhov Vs. Stalin,Yezhov Vs. Stalin: The Truth About Mass Repressions and the So-Called ‘Great Terror’ in the USSR (Beverly Hills, CA: Erythros Press, 2018). Page references here are to the French edition, Iejov contre Staline (Paris: Editions Delga, 2018). – Trans. modestly subtitled ‘The truth about the mass repressions and the so-called “Great Terror” in the USSR’, has just been published in French. Furr is talking nonsense. To refute this nonsense is all the less necessary since Stalin himself did it masterfully on the central question of repression, as we shall see below. Furr invents a Stalin who was a fanatical supporter of democracy, bullied by his regional secretaries. Engaging in a very unmaterialistic introspection of Stalin’s brain, Furr claims that, for Stalin, ‘the party had to run the organisations, but not the legislative or executive organs of the state. Once the party was deprived of direct control of society, Stalin believed that its role should be limited to agitation and propaganda’ (p. 19).

Alas, at the Central Committee plenum in June 1936, ‘the delegates had unanimously approved the draft constitution. But none of them had spoken in favour of it. This failure to give at least lip service to a proposal of Stalin’s certainly indicated latent opposition’ (p. 22). He repeats: ‘Many elements [about whom Furr is mysteriously silent] suggest that the central leadership [i.e. Stalin] wanted... to continue to implement the open and secret ballot elections of the new constitution’ (p. 59). He insists: ‘Stalin and those close to him in the central Soviet government and the party fought for such elections but failed to get the Central Committee to approve them’ (p. 61). As a tragic result: ‘The Central Committee plenum of October 1937 saw the final cancellation of the project of open elections to the soviets... This represented a serious defeat for Stalin and his supporters in the Politburo’ (p. 79).

How curious! Stalin could not impose on the Central Committee the democracy to which he so deeply aspired, but he could, at the June 1937 plenum of this body which was supposed to lead the party, exclude 31 members, who were then arrested and shot in the following months! When the plenum met in January 1938, only 28 remained of the 71 members elected in January 1934. Stalin’s supposed victors were liquidated. Some victories have a curious taste of defeat!

According to Furr, finally, Yezhov ‘carried out a massive repression of innocent people and deceived Stalin and the Soviet leaders into seeing this as a battle against subversion’ (p. 132), in order to arouse popular discontent. He repeats this several times as if the repetition of a fable should, by some mysterious alchemy alien to historical materialism, transform it into truth. The repression unleashed in July 1937 had mown down nearly 750,000 men, women and children by the end of 1938. Furr claims: ‘Yezhov’s own confessions prove that Stalin and the Soviet leadership were not responsible for his mass executions’ (p. 107). This was the final service Yezhov would render to Stalin. Furr adds: ‘As soon as Yezhov resigned, to be replaced by Beria, orders were given to stop all repression immediately, to abrogate all operational orders of the NKVD’ (p. 100). But Stalin himself refutes this. In March 1939, at the 18th Congress of the Communist Party, he declared: ‘We will no longer have to use the method of mass purge’ (stenographic report of the 18th Congress, p. 28). The meaning of this statement is clear: Stalin assumes responsibility for the repression unleashed in 1937 and justifies it by calling it a ‘purge’, i.e. the elimination of elements declared harmful or hostile; he does likewise for 1938, but reduces its scope; from ‘massive’ it was to become more targeted or selective, but would not disappear – contrary once again to Furr’s misleading statements.

Furr is a confirmed supporter of Stalin and has certainly read this speech, but, practising the art of camouflage, he conceals it from his reader.

Finally, Furr has discovered that Yezhov, arrested on 10 April 1939, had been a German agent... A pathetic discovery! Yezhov, knowing better than anyone the methods used by the NKVD to make the accused confess, and certainly not wishing to suffer these until he broke, quickly ‘confessed’ that he had been working for the Germans since 1932. Furr considers his confession to be perfectly sincere. At any rate, his investigators left proof (?) that Yezhov was free to confirm or deny what he was accused of. When the investigator Bogdan Kobulov, on 11 May 1939, reminded him that he had beaten his wife when he discovered she was sleeping with the writer Mikhail Sholokhov, Yezhov denied it. Kobulov then read him a testimony that confirmed it. Furr understands the message and gloats: ‘These two passages are proof that... the investigation was genuine’ (p. 184). Everything that the investigator dictated to him and that he finally signed is therefore true. But, in view of the accusation of being a German agent since 1932, of having sent hordes of innocent people to their deaths, of having planned the assassinations of Stalin and Molotov and a coup de force for 7 November 1938, what does it matter that Yezhov, unhappy at being cuckolded, had slapped and punched his wife yet was given the right to deny this in order to better present his confessions as voluntary? 

Furr’s trademark, that of an unintentional comedian, is the grotesque. Let us recall the contortions he achieved in Khrushchev Lied, where he asserted without laughing ‘the existence of a series of rightist/Trotskyite/anti-government plots’, and added: ‘There is plenty of circumstantial evidence to suggest [sic! evidence that merely ‘suggests’ clearly proves nothing] the hypothesis that Khrushchev himself may [resic!] have participated in this rightist/Trotskyite conspiracy…The hypothesis that Khrushchev may [rereresic!] have been a member of a secret branch [which, being secret, has left no trace!] of the highly ramified Trotskyite/rightist conspiracy is reinforced by the fact that he was certainly (rereresic!) involved in a number of other conspiracies’, unknown to all, but of which Furr draws up a list consisting mainly of accusations of concealment and destruction of documents, and which is replete with such shocking formulae such as ‘Khrushchev was to [?] lead another conspiracy...’ followed by a litany of ‘it may be assumed that’, ‘very likely’, ‘probably’, ‘it seems probable that’, not to mention the superb formula: ‘A large number of researchers and officials, including of course party officials loyal to Khrushchev, but as yet unknown to us [sic!], must have [resic!] been involved (Khrushchev Lied, pp. 34-5 and 220-1).Grover Furr, Khruchshev Lied (Beverley Hills: Erythros Press, 2019). References here are again to the French edition, Khrouchtchev a menti (Paris: Editions Delga, 2014). – Trans. These ‘unknowns who must have been involved’ represent... perhaps one of the high points of historical research. In essence Furr is telling his readers: I don’t know, but I am sure.

So, in summary, for him it seems ‘perhaps probably likely’ that Khrushchev was a member of a large number of conspiracies that were poorly, little, or not at all known but detected by Furr, and thanks to which Mr K became First Secretary of the CPSU. This is the method of the conjurer, with one nuance: the conjurer succeeds in his tricks, Furr fails in them all.

Thus, in his Yezhov Vs. Stalin, Furr forgets to ask one awkward question (among many others). If all of Yezhov’s actions as a German agent were aimed at stirring up the Soviet population against Stalin and his government, why was he not made to confess to this sinister plan – and thus exonerate the Soviet leadership and Stalin from its painful consequences – in a public trial, as Stalin had done with his predecessor Yagoda? Instead, Yezhov was sentenced to death on 4 February 1940 and immediately shot.

The answer is childishly simple, although it is, Furr might comment, ‘perhaps probably likely’ not in any of the documents on the Yezhov case. On 23 June 1939, Hitler and Stalin had signed a ten-year non-aggression pact with a secret protocol for partitioning Poland. How could a public trial of a so-called ‘German agent’ be organised in this period, which also saw, in a nice practical collaboration, Stalin handing over to the Gestapo dozens of German Communists who had taken refuge in the USSR, among them Margarete Buber-Neumann, wife of a former leading figure in the KPD and editor-in-chief of its daily newspaper Die Rote Fahne, Heinz Neumann. The latter, by a typically Stalinist miracle, escaped this touching manifestation of German-Soviet friendship, a subject on which Furr – unable despite the many contortions of his meagre thinking to attribute it either to Trotsky or to Yezhov, already in prison at the time – does not say a word. For Stalin had had Neumann arrested in 1937 and shot a few months later. The killer Yezhov had nothing to do with it: as early as 2 May 1934, when Yagoda was still at the head of the NKVD, Stalin had declared to Dimitrov: ‘Neumann... He’s a political degenerate’ (Georgi Dimitrov,Journal 1933-1949, p. 123). His fate was therefore already sealed. Only the date was left open.

It was better to kill Yezhov discreetly, far from the noise of the street, in one of those discreet cellars that he knew so well...

Translated by David Fernbach

Jean-Jacques Marie

Grover Furr, Khrushchev Lied. The Evidence that Every Revelation of Stalin’s (and Beria’s) Crimes in Nikita Khrushchev’s Infamous Secret Speech to the 20^th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February 25, 1956, is Provably False(Kettering, OH: Erythos Press, 2011).

On 25 February 1956, the First Secretary of the CPSU delivered a report to a closed session of the party’s 20^th Congress denouncing a certain number of Stalin’s crimes. Although this report was declared ‘secret’, it was read to some 25 million members of the CPSU and the Komsomol (Communist youth), as well as to suitable ‘non-party’ persons. Published in the United States and internationally at the beginning of June, it provoked a brutal shock in Communist parties across the world. An obscure American academic, Grover Furr, now reveals – with a quite unintended humour – that Khrushchev invented everything about Stalin’s crimes, which are thus reduced to the rank of fairy tales.

Furr’s book, originally published in 2010 in Russia under the title Shadows of the 20th Congress, or Anti-Stalin Villainy, offers unsuspected pleasures. Furr’s sensational discovery presents him – again quite unwittingly – as a disciple of Alfred Jarry: Khrushchev was an old secret enemy of Stalin, a member of the fantastical conspiracy of Trotskyists and rightists fabricated by Stalin, a nostalgic supporter of Bukharin, shot in March 1938. Furr denounces Khrushchev’s secret report as a ‘complete deception’ and claims: ‘Not a single statement of Khrushchev’s “revelations” about Stalin or Beria has proved accurate’ (p. 10). He asserts, without joking: ‘All the indications we currently have [???] tend to show the existence of a series of anti-government Trotskyist-rightist plots involving many senior party leaders, the NKVD heads Yagoda and Yezhov, high-ranking military chiefs and many others’ (who despite being in decisive positions at the head of the police, the army and whole regions of the Communist party, never tried anything, which proves that some conspirators are nicely complacent). ‘There is much circumstantial proof [proof as soft as Dali’s famous watches – JJM] that Khrushchev himself may [sic!] have participated in this Trotskyist-rightist conspiracy...) The hypothesis [re-sic!] that Khrushchev may [re-re-sic!] have been a member of a secret branch [which therefore left no trace!] of the highly ramified Trotskyist-rightist conspiracy is reinforced by the fact that he was certainly [re-re-re-sic!] involved in a number of other plots’ (pp. 34-5 and 220)[Page references here are to the French edition of the book.] – unknown to anyone, but which Furr draws up a highly fanciful list of!

Thus, Khrushchev’s unknown, but supposedly ‘certain’ presence in plots of which nothing is known would confirm the hypothesis of his participation, ‘secret’ and thus unknown to anyone, in one of the many indistinct ‘branches’ of other possible imaginary plots.

Superb reasoning: one adventurous hypothesis confirms another hypothesis which is even more so. And, yes the moon is made out of blue cheese and Khrushchev is a liar. This Stalinist logorrhoea extends over more than 400 pages, in the course of which, for example, Furr takes at face value the confessions extorted from the defendants in the Moscow trials and even from the leader of the NKVD from 1936 to 1938, Nikolai Yezhov, after he had been dismissed and arrested. And, with totally unwitting humour, Furr asserts that Yezhov organised the ‘massive atrocities’ which he was guilty of for two years ‘to cover up his own involvement in the rightist conspiracy and military espionage for the benefit of Germany as well as in a plot to assassinate Stalin or [sic!] another member of the Politburo and seize power in a coup d’état’ (p. 65). Now, it was this same Yezhov who organised the second and third Moscow trials that so delight Furr. But, if the aim of his massive atrocities was to cover up his own involvement in the ‘rightist conspiracy’ (???), then the confessions he extorted supposedly served this cover-up... in other words, the confessions Furr takes at face value were a manoeuvre of the conspirator... The load a Stalinophile has to bear is decidedly a heavy one.

Khrushchev, Trotsky, same fight?

Worse still, according to Furr, Khrushchev’s ‘denunciation of Stalin in the “secret report” essentially echoes Trotsky’s earlier demonisation of Stalin... The Khrushchev report revived Trotsky’s caricature of Stalin... the “secret report” constituted an unacknowledged rehabilitation of Trotsky’ (p. 235). Now, Furr swears that ‘Trotsky was involved with other oppositions in the USSR to overthrow Stalin’s government and even had contacts with the German and Japanese military. There is also evidence that Trotsky’s clandestine groups both outside and inside the party were involved in sabotage and espionage in the USSR and in spreading false accusations of treason against others.’ And he adds: ‘There is much documentary evidence that Trotsky and his supporters were involved in anti-Soviet plots, including with the Nazis’ (p. 40). The Stalinist dinosaurs, unlike the herbivores of yesteryear, are clearly not all extinct.

Oh, what a lovely deportation!

Furr also considers the mass deportation of the peoples of the Caucasus by Stalin in 1943-4 to have been very humane. He says: ‘Splitting up a small national group united by a language, a unique history and a culture in fact amounts to destroying it. In the case of the Chechens, Ingush and Crimean Tatars, collaboration with the Nazis was massive, involving the largest part of the population. Trying to isolate and punish “only the guilty” would have led to dividing the nation and probably destroying it entirely. Instead, the national group was maintained and its population increased... the Nazi collaboration of these groups was so massive that punishing those involved would have endangered the survival of these groups. They would have had to be deprived of young men by imprisonment and execution, leaving very few young men for young women to marry. Deportation kept these groups intact. The deportations took place almost entirely without victims’ (almost... since no one is perfect, even Stalin! yet on average a quarter of the deportees died in the course of a transport that took several weeks). ‘Thus their cultures, their language and indeed their existence as peoples were safeguarded’. Not deporting them, Grover Furr concludes, ‘would have led to... the destruction of these ethnic groups as ‘peoples’ – in short, to genocide’ (pp. 111-12).

He maintains what we dare not call the same ‘reasoning’ about the Crimean Tatars. Claiming that their ‘massive collaboration’ had been established and that 20,000 Tatars had deserted from the Red Army, he asserts: ‘The Soviets could have killed the 20,000 deserters. Or they could have imprisoned and deported only those young men of fighting age. That would have meant the virtual end of the Tatar nation of Crimea, as there would have been no husbands for the next generation of young women. Instead, the Soviet government decided to expel the whole nationality to Central Asia, which was done in 1944, giving them land and a few years of tax relief. The Tatar nation remained intact’ (p. 113) – except for the thousands of deaths during the transport which took more than a month, but why get lost in such trivial details? He forgets, alas, to evoke the fate of the Volga Germans – deported as collaborators even before the Wehrmacht entered their territory: real deportation as a response to virtual collaboration... It is by dialectic of this kind that we recognise a real leader!

Furr’s little book has the same relationship to history as Alfred Jarry’s The Passion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race, save for one nuance: the exhilarating aspect of the creator of King Ubu is totally absent from his logorrhoea.

Losurdo and the beauties of the gulag...

Furr’s book comes with a preface by the Italian academic Domenico Losurdo, a specialist on Hegel. Losurdo has acquired modest fame by assuming the defence of Stalin in a book subtitled ‘History and Criticism of a Black Legend’. According to him, the gulag was, among other things, ‘a pedagogical concern’. Losurdo waxes lyrical on the prisoners’ contribution to the building of socialism: ‘the gulag prisoner was a potential “comrade” obliged to participate in particularly harsh conditions in the productive effort of the whole country’. Particularly harsh, of course, but the word ‘comrade’, even very potential, is priceless! And Losurdo is even more ecstatic about the exquisite politeness that governed relations between guards and prisoners: ‘until 1937 the guards called the prisoners “comrade”’. So, a guard that shot a prisoner who clumsily stepped too far outside the column actually shot a comrade – sadly, of course, thus giving him advance consolation. Losurdo adds: ‘And besides, imprisonment in concentration camp did not exclude the possibility of social advancement’ (Staline, histoire et critique d’une légende noire, pp. 30, 57 and 215)’. The gulag as a school of courtesy and on-the-job training – a real social elevator, a true lost paradise!

The rescuing deportation of the peoples of the Caucasus and the building of such a fraternal gulag confirm what his sycophants of yesteryear proclaimed: Stalin was indeed the greatest humanist of our time.

Translated by David Fernbach

[1] [Page references here are to the French edition of the book.]

A Review of A Jewish Communist in Weimar Germany: The Life of  Werner Scholem (1895–1940) by Ralf Hoffrogge

Victor Strazzeri

ORCID: 0000-0001-7525-3932

Postdoctoral Fellow, Département d’histoire générale, Université de Genève, Geneva, Switzerland

victor.strazzeri@hist.unibe.ch

Ralf Hoffrogge, (2018) A Jewish Communist in Weimar Germany: The Life of  Werner Scholem (1895–1940), translated by Loren Balhorn and Jan-Peter Herrmann,Historical Materialism Book Series, Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

1.

Amongst the many anniversaries submerged by the pandemic’s sabotaging of our sense of time in 2020 were the eighty years since the death of Werner Scholem (1895–1940). The outcome, in this case, was not the cascade of cancelled events that marked the commemorations of his fellow Germans Ludwig van Beethoven, Friedrich Engels and Max Weber. Because, in contrast to the broad communities that cultivate the memory of these figures, Scholem’s is a legacy largely withoutclaimants. Like a long-neglected garden, it hence risks becoming overgrown with weed-like misconceptions or, worse, barren historiographical silence. Ralf Hoffrogge’s biography constitutes, in this regard, not only a first-rate exercise in historical scholarship in terms of source-work and quality of narrative; it shines precisely in its leveraging of a life story ‘[b]anished from public memory for decades’ (p. 584) into a magnifying glass aimed at the contradictions of three distinct, yet interconnected historical formations: Imperial Germany, the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. While usually studied separately, Hoffrogge’s reappraisal of Scholem’s fate starkly raises the question of their deeper linkages.

So why was the knowledge potential of this individual trajectory not mobilised earlier? As Hoffrogge puts it, the ‘twists and turns’ of Scholem’s biography ‘made him difficult to categorize for posterity: mainstream historiography viewed him as a suspicious Communist, orthodox Communism condemned him as an enemy of the party, and Zionism treated him as a wayward son’ (p. 4). As such, Scholem’s legacy was liable to a double jeopardy of sorts; on the one hand, he paid the penalty for being Stalin’s erstwhile man in the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and key operator of its ‘Bolshevisation’; yet, he also suffered the consequences of subsequently becoming Stalin’s foe and, after his expulsion from the party, collaborating with the Left Opposition. But the ultimate persecutors of this true bête noir of German Communism were the Nazis. They targeted Scholem in the first wave of arrests of political opponents in 1933, subsequently interning him in various camps, from Sachsenhausen to Dachau. He was murdered in Buchenwald in 1940. As a Jewish intellectual and a communist, Scholem provided Nazis with an ideal embodiment for the enemy of theVolksgemeinschaft; his effigy was, in fact, part of the displays of the infamous anti-Semitic exhibitionDer ewige Jude [The Eternal Jew] in 1937 (pp. 555–7).

Any attempt to narrate Scholem’s life must, therefore,  struggle with the vortex of -isms that came to bear upon it, while somehow not losing sight of his particular fate. Hoffrogge addresses this by alternating close-ups on Scholem the individual, whose physiognomy the reader will get to know well, and wide-angle shots of the dramatic events he witnessed in his lifetime. Scholem emerges from this effort as inextricable from his fractious historical setting, yet as more than the sum of its contradictions.

The introduction constitutes the author’s first exercise in situating Scholem without burying him under the rubble of his historical circumstances (pp. 1–8). In it, Hoffrogge draws a parallel between the trajectories of Scholem and Walter Benjamin. The men were not only contemporaries, but had much in common; they experienced the same Berlin childhood and youth in an affluent Jewish family, the same turn to the labour movement and Marxism after an encounter with Zionism. A further link is Benjamin’s close collaboration with Werner’s brother, Gershom Scholem, the noted Zionist and scholar of Jewish Mysticism. There were, nonetheless, many bifurcations in these mirrored lives. Scholem was primarily a political operator, Benjamin an intellectual; their posthumous reception, in turn, could not have been more divergent. Their most intimate link would tragically be a shared fate as a result of fascist persecution, even if under very different circumstances.

Hoffrogge does not invoke Benjamin’s trajectory merely for the sake of this suggestive parallel. He engages heavily with the latter’s Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), which provides a silent counterpoint to the entire narrative. Indeed, the book was manifestly written from the standpoint of  today’s ‘moment of danger’. As Hoffrogge states: ‘A closer exploration of Scholem’s life is … a glimpse at a time that heavily influenced our own historical moment – a watershed eventfrom which there can be no turning back’ (p. 8).

2.

The book can be divided roughly into three parts. The first encompasses Scholem’s youth in Imperial Germany and his early politicisation within German Social Democracy, also covering his time as a soldier on the Western Front; it closes, fittingly, with the November Revolution of 1918 (chapters 1–2). The second and most substantial part of the book covers the period from 1919 to 1933, i.e., Scholem’s swift rise through the ranks of the KPD – after a brief stint in the USPD –, followed by his dramatic debacle and expulsion from the party in late 1926 (chapters 3–4); the book’s core section resumes with Scholem’s activities as a ‘reluctant’ dissident (chapter 5) and his retreat into private life in 1928. That brief respite from politics would be cut short by his arrest in early 1933 (chapter 6). The book’s final segment encompasses the drama of Scholem’s internment in the Nazi camps and eventual murder at the hands of an SS officer (chapter 7) and closes with a reflection on his legacy (chapter 8).

The book’s structure corresponds not only to three distinct epochs in German history, but also to Hoffrogge’s reliance on different sets of sources, i.e., from the private letters of the first and final parts, to the party documents and political publications of the middle one. They also reflect a life that was at times entirely submerged by political activity. Surprisingly, we learn the most about Scholem’s personality in the tail-end of the book, as life in the camps threatened to destroy any semblance of his individuality. These are also the most moving and reflective passages of a book that offers a broad spectrum of moods to accompany Scholem’s eventful life.

The book begins with an overview of the Scholem family dynamic and how it inevitably refracted the multiple contradictions of a wealthy Jewish existence in Imperial Germany, notwithstanding their ‘assimilated’ status. German society in the 1900s was a strange amalgamation of cutting-edge modernity and aristocratic ‘remnants’; its political constitution a no less peculiar mix of mass electoral politics and monarchical autocracy. Completing the picture was the flammable combination of the Kaiserreich’s imperial aspirations on the global arena and many cleavages and inequalities domestically – along urban/rural, class, ethnic and religious lines. The four Scholem brothers all bore the imprint of this reality, yet each acted upon it differently. The two elder ones, Reinhold and Erich, represented German liberalism’s ‘right’ and ‘left’ wings and followed their father into the family’s printing business; the younger Scholems, in turn, found in Zionism (Gershom) and socialism (Werner) their pathway to rebellion.

The fact that the same ‘social milieu’ could prompt such diverging fates builds the central theme of the book’s first segment. Hoffrogge underscores how even a shared drive to revolt against the status quo could take on quite different forms in the peculiar setting of the Kaiserreich. Whereas for Gerhard (later, Gershom), ‘history was a bearer of myth and revelation’, ‘Werner’s materialism negated any sort of transcendence’ (p. 54). What united them, in fact, was the search for an overarching ethical orientation for what would soon become a time of constant upheaval. Against this backdrop, Werner’s ‘practical response to all questions concerning the meaning of life’ eventually boiled down to one formula: ‘taking sides’ (p. 55). Joining the Social-Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) was, in this regard, his fundamental gesture. Hoffrogge highlights how the party’s egalitarian, anti-authoritarian and anti-militarist positions – also reflected in its struggle for women’s liberation – gave Scholem the ideal conduit for his oppositional attitude (pp. 40–1). One driver of this act of ‘class treason’, a repudiation of Imperial Germany’s abysmal social inequality, gets perhaps less attention from the author than is deserved.

Hoffrogge’s framing is, nevertheless, spot on: Scholem’s was very much a partisan life. What makes this biographical treatment so appealing, however, is how it manages to illustrate the ramifications of this fundamental stance while at the same time demonstrating that, to unlock the personality of a ‘political animal’ like Scholem, more intimate dimensions must also come into view. Hence the intermittent close-ups on Werner’s role as partner and family man throughout the narrative and, most notably, the attention Hoffrogge dedicates to Emmy Wiechelt. Scholem met the clerk and committed socialist activist with a working-class background during his political work before the war; the couple quickly got engaged (pp. 58–63). Emmy’s letters and voice inform, in fact, the entire account, offering a glimpse into the consequences of Scholem’s lifelong dedication to politics and revolution for those nearest to him. Crucially, Emmy is not portrayed as a passive witness or partner; Hoffrogge does his best to reconstruct her views and autonomous role despite limited source material, managing to convey not only the considerable impact she had on Scholem, but also her own struggles and adversities.

3.

The first section wraps up with an account of Scholem’s service at the front during the First World War. In Hoffrogge’s portrayal, this experience marks both his sudden entry into adulthood and the decisive influence upon an entire generation of German leftists. In terms of brutalisation and numbing exposure to senseless loss of life, Scholem’s experience is predictably in line with countless other portrayals of war in the trenches; it was compounded as a source of rebellion in his particular case by his arrest in 1918 on treason charges (due to participation in anti-militarist activities in conjunction with the Socialist Workers’ Youth; pp. 140–4).

Crucially, ‘[t]hose who came of age in these surroundings expected neither social reforms nor democracy from the state, and believed in neither parliament nor the rule of law’ (p. 143). As the quote suggests, if the experience of war put many German youth on the path to communist revolution, it proved an equally fertile breeding ground for those mutations in right-wing politics that would culminate in Nazism. A further biographical connection epitomises such bifurcations, namely, the trajectory of Scholem’s one-time prep school classmate, Ernst Jünger. While the resulting polyphonic portrayal of the war period does enrich this segment of the book, Hoffrogge’s digression on Jünger may prove too extended for some (pp. 154–9).

That being said, the book’s considerable length –  it clocks in at 600 pages excluding appendixes and references – is not a significant issue; in fact, it only feels long when Hoffrogge’s insightful efforts at contextualisation – or at engagement with the theoretical and/or historiographical issues raised by his subject – reach essay-length proportions. The most notable instance is the sprawling dive, towards the end of the book, into the many myths that have come to surround Scholem’s trajectory, including espionage, love affairs and intrigue (pp. 494–528). Hoffrogge is arguably doing a public service with this section, especially considering how widespread the legends surrounding Scholem are in the German context. They still felt out of place to me, coming as they do between the dramatic depiction of Scholem’s arrest and the book’s moving passages on his time in the camps.

4.

Before reaching them, however, the reader must first pass through the effective core of the book, i.e., the segment covering a truly frenzied decade of activity that begins with Scholem’s engagement as journalist and agitator for the USPD in 1919 and closes with his withdrawal from politics as a left-oppositionist to the KPD in 1928. Tackling this period, which boasts as many open political controversies as historiographical ones, is a considerable challenge. Hoffrogge’s strategy, in this regard, is to reconsider the facts on and extant interpretations of most of the convoluted matters and conjunctures the German 1920s have bequeathed us; he then makes his own position explicit and moves on with the story. There is, in other words, no attempt to circumvent controversy or settle on ‘mainstream’ positions (hardly a viable prospect with Scholem as subject). Instead, we see Hoffrogge seize the opportunity and work through every major turning point in the history of the German labour movement from fin-de-siècle Imperial Germany to Nazi rule (but focusing especially on the Weimar years). This is to the reader’s great benefit, German history scholar and non-specialist alike.

While identified with the KPD and ‘later derided as irrational and “ultra-leftist”’, Scholem was not amongst the party’s founders on New Year’s Day 1919. Instead, he ‘proved a pragmatic strategist at this point’, working to coalesce ‘revolutionary forces through a common political praxis’ during his stint as an activist in the USPD (p. 167). This phase of his trajectory would be short-lived; convinced that the defeat of the German revolution was the result of ‘an absence of sufficient clarity and leadership’ on the part of the USPD (p. 192), whose ‘murky inertia’ had, as he saw it, prevented an effective channelling of workers’ struggles towards a takeover of power, Scholem would join the KPD in late 1920. By then, the ‘revolution was over, regardless of whether radicals like Scholem accepted it or not’. Crucially, ‘workers’ councils [had] disappeared and the KPD and SPD, caught in an ongoing dichotomous interaction, [had taken] charge of events’ (p. 202).

While aware of the tragic consequences of this polarisation in German left-wing politics, Hoffrogge attempts to go beyond the facile notion that all would have been well had the KPD not compromised the Weimar ‘democratic front’ with its revolutionary agitation. As he points out, the newfound republic’s ‘entire staff of the judiciary, administration, police and army had been inherited from the Kaiserreich’. This meant that ‘elected parliamentarians represented … a thin layer of democracy superimposed on the firm base of [an] old monarchist state’ (p. 237). As Hoffrogge stresses, the forces of the Weimar establishment openly (and fatefully) tolerated rising anti-Semitism and right-wing political violence (pp. 232–3). The repeated instances of partisanship by authorities on the side of reaction and emerging fascism would play a key role in the scepticism of KPD-figures such as Scholem regarding the need to defend its constitution and promote a united-front policy.

Hoffrogge, in other words, decidedly rejects the notion of a Weimar Republic brought down by antagonistic extremes united in their ‘enmity towards democracy’. What he highlights, instead, is ‘the existence of a continuity between the Kaiserreich, the experience of the war, and the emerging Nazi movement’, crystallised early on through the collaboration of both conservatives and military personnel in Hitler’s attempted coup of 1923 (p. 277).

The portrayal of the Weimar Republic that emerges in the work is, therefore, at odds with the notion of ‘an established entity to be rejected or defended politically’ – then or now; Hoffrogge articulates it, rather, as ‘a dynamic social and political field marked by relations of power and struggles between competing interests’. Framed in this manner, the precarious ‘democratic rule of law’ that characterised that formation emerges not as a fixed set of circumstances and institutions, but as ‘both a promise and an ideal to be claimed and expanded or, alternatively, dismantled or eroded’ (p. 239).

5.

The divisive question has always been, of course, just which of these verbs best encompasses the role of the KPD (and by extension Scholem) in the Weimar Republic’s subsequent destruction. Hoffrogge suggests that an overlooked factor in the analysis of German Communists’ relationship to democracy in the 1920s was their roots in the old SPD. The mass party had not only been the reference point for socialists from Brussels to Moscow until August 1914, it had also been the initial lever for the organisation and political education of most subsequent KPD members. This was consequential, because, while the SPD had been the one consistent force for democracy in Imperial Germany, the party framed its impending realisation (along with that of socialism) as a matter of historical necessity. Analogously, many in the KPD were convinced that ‘both the Kaisserreich and the Weimar state shared a common historical destiny, namely, to one day perish’ (p. 283). In line with Benjamin’sTheses, Hoffrogge identifies the survival of this ‘philosophy of history’, with its linear understanding of progress, as ‘the most effective of the old Social Democracy’s traditions’.

This helps explain how Scholem could be both an early voice alerting to ‘the fascist danger’ in Germany, and ‘simultaneously convinced that any future radicalization would benefit the left’. As Hoffrogge surmises, he ‘simply could not imagine that fascist ideology would also resonate among young workers’ (p. 283). In the same vein, the ambivalence of German Communists’ relationship to the Weimar constitution and its (porous) democratic framework was in no small part tied to the notion that they would be overcome by a more far-reaching council democracy.

This vantage point also sheds light on the dual drivers behind Scholem’s political activity. He aimed to counteract, namely, both the efforts of a ‘historically condemned’ bourgeoisie to delay the dawn of revolution and, once it had arrived, a reprise of the betrayal of the workers by their political leadership. The latter effort was understood to be equivalent not only to the task of negating the influence of the SPD on workers, but also establishing tighter control over the various currents within the revolutionary vanguard itself (p. 359).

Scholem, who would take over the KPD apparatus as national Organisationsleiter in April 1924, emerges, in other words, as the figure that most clearly embodied the single-minded drive to avoid a repetition of revolutionary failure due either to a watering down of the party’s revolutionary programme or to a ‘right-wing’ betrayal within its own ranks (pp. 338–60). Hoffrogge stresses that, while most Communists still believed that ‘the actual political form of a Communist society remained council-based democracy’, and saw centralism as ‘a mere means to an end’ (p. 282), they also fatally underestimated the dangers inherent in the growing suppression of democratic mechanisms and pluralism within the party. This was especially perilous in the combination of ‘political isolation’, ‘absence of the revolution’ and ‘growing dependence on the Soviet Union’ (p. 282) that characterised the KPD of the late 1920s.

The Comintern’s bearing on the KPD’s politics and personnel from 1924 onwards is another contested issue in this regard. Hoffrogge’s account clearly emphasises the internal drivers of the party’s increasing subjection to the line set by the Executive Committee of the Third International. We learn, for example, of Scholem’s keen use of Bolshevik mediation in the settlement of German Communists’ inner divisions – which included gaining favour with a rising Joseph Stalin – and how the KPD ‘grew increasingly dependent on Moscow’s interventions’ as a result (pp. 330–4). Crucially, in almost every decisive move, we find Scholem acting ‘under the strong belief that he was protecting the KPD from drifting into opportunism’ (p. 334). It would not take long, however, for the centralising measures, tight control of the apparatus and close alignment with Moscow, all of which Scholem had played a key role in implementing, to catch up with him, culminating in his expulsion from the party in 1926.

6.

Scholem’s downfall began with his removal as Organisationsleiter after a deflating 1925 for the KPD; the party had decided to present Ernst Thälmann as sole presidential candidate on the left in the national elections, only to reap paltry results and the fateful victory of Field Marshal Hindenburg instead. Party membership had also stagnated at 120,000 – i.e., less than half of the 300,000 the party boasted before 1923. Given the KPD’s ‘tendency to mercilessly personalise tactical mistakes’, Scholem now served as ‘the scapegoat for all of its failures’ (p. 379).

In reaction to his sidelining, Scholem took an increasingly left-oppositional stance. Significantly, that now ran counter not only to the new KPD leadership around Thälmann, but also to Moscow’s line. In many ways, Scholem’s isolation in 1925/6 foreshadowed his contested legacy: he was ‘a revolutionary in non-revolutionary times’, ‘an opponent of monarchism who also refused to defend the existing republic’ and, finally, ‘an oppositional politician in a party that did not tolerate opposition’ (p. 371).

Party democracy was still largely in place within the KPD at the moment of Scholem’s expulsion. This meant that ‘every faction … was in fact obliged to win majorities at countless party meetings to gain power’. But such mechanisms were still regarded by most members who defended them as ‘little more than a means towards the ultimate goal of revolution’ (p. 385). Scholem was no exception, and could only frame the danger of the Communist movement’s ‘abandoning its democratic character … in terms of “liquidationism” and “opportunism”’. As late as 1926, he still ‘considered Trotsky, not Stalin, to be the “right” threat’, identifying, instead, with an embattled Zinoviev (p. 385).

This was the tragic dialectic behind Scholem’s meteoric trajectory within the KPD; his fixation with a ‘right-wing’ – i.e. reformist – betrayal had led him to put his weight behind the party’s ‘Bolshevisation’. He hence not only misjudged the danger posed by Stalin but was responsible for putting the mechanisms in place that contributed to the unimpeded ascent of his followers. As Hoffrogge stresses, this was not Scholem’s mistake alone. Other KPD-left figures such as Karl Korsch and Arthur Rosenberg still ‘framed their criticism of Stalin’s policy primarily in terms of … reform or revolution’, not of ‘democracy or authoritarianism’ (p. 297).

Hoffrogge sees this critical misjudgement, alongside an ‘abstract-revolutionary course’ that ‘lacked broad appeal’, as the main reasons behind the failure of the Left Opposition. Scholem’s final act was, nonetheless, organising the ‘first critique of Stalin’s absolute rule of any public significance in Germany’ (p. 394), the so-called Declaration of the 700, ‘a petition of oppositionists from various factions designed to exert pressure on the KPD leadership’ (p. 393). This proved the final straw and, after losing its seat in the Central Committee in the fall of 1925, the Left Opposition was ‘expelled from the party entirely in November 1926’ (p. 297).

7.

In conjunctures of political upheaval, such as the Germany of the 1920s, becoming a ‘left oppositionist’ does not necessarily follow from a fundamental change in orientation or stance. It may be that the political spectrum itself has shifted and one has merely stayed put. Two recent examples are, of course, Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, who became left-wing stalwarts of their respective parties simply by not succumbing to the right-wing cyclone that ended the more hopeful, yet long-gone 1970s that bred them. Analogously to the ‘antediluvian’ socialism of Sanders and Corbyn today, Hoffrogge argues that Scholem’s anti-Stalinism is less the product of a ‘road to Damascus moment’ than of staying the course. Both him and his fellow Left Oppositionists were, namely, still ‘evaluating the situation in light of their experiences with the SPD prior to 1914’ (p. 297). In other words, they saw Stalinism ‘as another variant of Social Democracy’, i.e., as ‘little more than the accommodation of capital and the bourgeois state on the part of the workers’ movement’ (p. 414). Hence the peculiar political credo of the Lenin League (Leninbund), the organisation which many Left Oppositionists converged upon in the spring of 1928. Its goal was to embody ‘Lenin’s legacy as a revolutionary alternative to both the “two Social Democratic parties”’, i.e. the SPD and KPD, as well as to ‘Russian state capitalism’ (p. 425). Its members actually pledged to dissolve it ‘once the KPD ‘return[ed] to being a revolutionary organisation’ (p. 430).

This quickly proved an untenable platform, especially in light of the Comintern’s adoption of the so-called ‘Third-period’ strategy in the summer of 1928, a left-wing swerve which effectively stole the League’s thunder. Born as an organised instrument of opposition to the KPD but claiming to remain loyal to it, the Lenin League began to lose members as soon as the question of participating in the May 1928 Reichstag elections on an independent ticket arose. Amongst the many who chose to leave the newly-founded organisation once it opted to do so was Scholem, who could not bring himself to be publicly at odds with the KPD (and by extension, with the leadership of the Soviet Union). Here was another symptom, Hoffrogge argues, that Scholem had fallen ‘victim to his own belief in the myth of the October Revolution’. His worldview having led to a dead end, Scholem withdrew into private life.

Because such biographical turning points are, especially in Scholem’s case, hard to dissociate from broader historical issues as effective in drawing borders between left-wing camps today as they were in the 1920s, Hoffrogge addresses them at length. The question of who could ‘rightfully’ claim Lenin’s legacy, a key element in Stalin’s effort to legitimate his ascent within the international communist movement, is one example. According to Hoffrogge, precisely because of Scholem’s determination to stay true to what he understood to be the principles of the Russian Revolution, his communist biography

… illustrates better than most the distinction between the mechanisms of Bolshevisation andStalinisation. The former was pioneered by Scholem, superimposing a [centralised] structure onto the KPD intended to heighten the party’s capacity for intervention and agitation. […] The process ofStalinisation, by contrast, transformed the KPD into a vehicle of interchangeable political substance, determined by the requirements of Stalin’s rule, Soviet foreign policy considerations and later even the dictator’s shifting moods. It depended on personal and political capitulation, and broke the will of countless individuals while implementing its often incomprehensible shifts in course. (p. 399.)

Mark Losoncz

Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade, Serbia

losonczmark@gmail.com

Abstract

G.M. Tamás’s Antitézis [Antithesis], published originally in Hungarian, mostly comprises translations of articles published previously in English. This review first contextualises Tamás’s Marxism within today’s Hungarian left, before moving to the title of the book, that is, the philosophical meaning of ‘antithesis’. Special attention is paid to the question of whether Tamás’s historical materialism should be characterised as aligned with Western Marxism, given that his theoretical preferences are eclectic and too complex for simple categorisation. The book’s contradictory statements with regard to essential questions such as class relations or revolutionary change can be explained by Tamás’s theoretical development over the last two decades. The article provides detailed analysis of the distinction between Rousseauian and Marxian socialism. Tamás’s other valuable contribution to contemporary Marxism is his analysis of Eastern European ‘real socialism’; however, his analysis of Soviet-type systems as state capitalisms should be criticised carefully. Finally, the review focuses on the implications of Tamás’s historical materialism with regard to contemporary anti-capitalist movements, and concludes that Tamás’s near-apocalyptic statements are counterbalanced by a militant, engaged attitude, producing a Janus-faced Marxism.

Keywords

antithesis – class – Rousseau – Marx – state capitalism – anti-capitalist movement

Gáspár Miklós Tamás, (2021) Antitézis. Válogatott tanulmányok 2001–2020 [Antithesis: Selected Writings], translated and edited by Balázs Sipos, Budapest: Pesti Kalligram.

Antitézis [Antithesis] is a selection of G.M. Tamás’s writings published this century.This paper was realised with the support of the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia, according to the Agreement on the realisation and financing of scientific research. The paper draws partially on my article written in Hungarian: ‘Tagadás. Kitörés?’, Élet és Irodalom, 65 (10), <https://www.es.hu/cikk/2021-03-12/losoncz-mark/tagadas-kitores.html>. With some exceptions, the book contains mostly articles written originally in English.Tamás n.d. (a), Tamás n.d. (b), Tamás n.d. (c), Tamás n.d. (d), Tamás 2011, Tamás 2012, Tamás 2015a, Tamás 2015b, Tamás 2018, Tamás 2019a. Given that it has gone through three editions, there is little doubt that the book has proved a great success in Hungary.

The book is a historical-materialist product through and through. Coincidentally, Antitézis was published on the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the most important Hungarian Marxist, Georg Lukács. Indeed, Lukács is one of Tamás’s most important discussion partners throughout the course of the book. It is worth mentioning that today there are no (former) members of the Lukács or Budapest School faithful to historical materialism. Nevertheless, Tamás does not stand entirely alone as a Marxist in Hungary. There are journals that are explicitly Marxist or open to publishing articles of historical-materialist inspiration (Eszmélet,Fordulat), and there are also websites whose profile is close to Tamás’s heretical Marxism (such as rednews.hu, reszeghajo.eoldal.hu or tett.merce.hu). What is more, a few exceptionally important Marxist books have been published in Hungary in the last two decades, including Tamás Krausz’s Deutscher Prize winnerReconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual Biography and István Mészáros’sBeyond Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition. Nevertheless, Marxism is a quite marginal intellectual current in Hungary. Tamás himself has published prolifically in Hungarian (he announced his withdrawal from political journalism at the end of 2020), that is, in the public sphere he is known as an opposition intellectual who relentlessly criticises the various authoritarian regimes. Paradoxically, Tamás’s ‘exoteric’ political criticism has triggered more resistance than his ‘esoteric’ Marxism, which seeks to understand (what he calls) the ‘occult character’ of the capitalist system. His more radical ideas have been mostly neglected – until now. Still, it is indisputable that even Tamás’s historical-materialist writings have proved heavily influential upon his – generally – young readers, thus making him the most important Marxist in Hungary.

The book’s title already demands an effort of interpretation. The term ‘antithesis’ refers to the negation of positivity, conceived in a Hegelian manner. Put simply, positivity can be equated with the constraints of objectivity (Sachzwang) that deprive subjectivity of its autonomy. While Hegel described the despotism and repressive character of Christian religion in this way, Tamás characterises capitalism as positivity – as a system that is naturalised and fetishist, seemingly unchangeable, etc. More precisely, Tamás suggests that despite its tendency to be ‘creatively destructive’ (Joseph Schumpeter, Werner Sombart – and their source, Mikhail Bakunin), capitalism has proved to be a system that separates the subject from its practice, thus, ultimately, it also has become a positivity. The same is true for ‘real socialism’ (which, for Tamás, is state-capitalist), namely, it was also a positivity since it remained faithful to institutional authority, tradition, abstract moralism, unquestioned revolutionary mythology, bureaucratic ideology, etc. According toAntitézis, the task of the left is to historicise what is naturalised, to make subjective what is alienated, in the spirit of ‘active negativity’, under the banner of Faust. At some point, Tamás accuses contemporary movements of being ‘projectless, anti-utopian revolt, pure negation’ (p. 225). This kind of criticism somewhat contradicts Tamás’s ‘pure negativism’. According to him, ‘utopia ... does not play any role in Marxism’ (p. 330), and he refuses to draft formulations even about the general framework of a postcapitalist future. However, while it is true that Marx refused to provide recipes, it is possible to reconstruct his suggestions with regard to postcapitalism in some detail,Hudis 2012. and it is also possible to have meaningful contemporary debates about the coordinates of a postcapitalist society.For example (from a vast literature): McNally 1993; Schweickart 2002; Lebowitz 2010. If statements about the postcapitalist future were not prohibited, Tamás’s book could perhaps also offer a thesis (in addition to the antithesis), and his criticism with regard to purely negative contemporary movements would be more meaningful.

The originally English-language articles were translated by Balázs Sipos, who is an established Hungarian translator (among other things, he was the co-translator of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest). His subtle editorial footnotes and his insightful introduction are invaluable. There seems to be only one point where Sipos’s suggestion is highly disputable. In the introduction, he claims that ‘the book is – according to our conviction – the most important Hungarian contribution to the tradition of “Western Marxism” since the belated domestic publication ofHistory and Class Consciousness’ (p. 10). In addition, Sipos claims that ‘Western Marxism appeared during the decade of world revolution (1917–1927)’, and that ‘it is written ... outside of institutional frames, independently from academic discourse’ (ibid.). This is somewhat surprising given that, according to Perry Anderson, the classic monographer of Western Marxism, ‘in the rest of Europe [excepting the USSR], ... the great revolutionary wave ... [that] lasted until 1920, was defeated’.Anderson 1976, p. 15. Western Marxism originates precisely in the experience of defeat, and this generation was more and more torn away from the proletariat, that is, theory’s ‘formal site [moved] from party assemblies to academic departments’.Anderson 1976, p. 50. According to the Andersonian approach, the growing distance between theory and practice explains why the Marxian critique of political economy was sublimated into hermetic philosophy, why the ‘question of organisation’ was neglected, etc.; instead, the new generation’s focus was on ideology and culture. Needless to say, Western Marxism is a very complex concept, with uncertain contours, and the Andersonian approach is not the only possible conceptual strategy (witness the rich and diverse history of the term, from Karl Korsch to Domenico Losurdo). However, it is somewhat anachronistic in 2021 to characterise Tamás’s late historical materialism as being Western-Marxist. Western Marxism’s intellectual efforts, such as self-positioning against Soviet-type orthodoxy and the Second International, are obviously not decisive for Tamás’s perspective. What is more, his writings are always embedded in a rigorous political-economic conceptual framework, that is, he cannot be accused of focusing solely on ideology or culture instead of on a deeper structural analysis. In sum, Western Marxism existed in a specific historical constellation, while Tamás’s background is essentially different. He does not seem to identify with Western Marxism, rather describing it coldly (p. 50), or even accepting the Andersonian critical analysis (p. 134).

In fact, if we read the book with sufficient care, we can identify the intellectual streams to which Tamás feels himself the closest. He mentions a ‘more secret’, ‘heretic’ and ‘underground’ tradition to which he belongs. This is the tradition of anarchism and council communism, but also the early Frankfurt School and of heterodox streams of the criticism of value-form (pp. 70, 266, 307). In an interview with Imre Széman, Tamás summarised his preferences in the following way:

I am an avid reader of operaismo and of pre-Empire Negri, and also on the opposite end, theWertkritik school, in my view the best heirs to Critical Theory (Hans-Georg Backhaus, Helmut Reichelt, Michael Heinrich, but also the unruly genius, Robert Kurz, and the ‘cult’ periodicals of this tendency,Krisis, Streifzüge, Exit!) as well as authors like Robert Brenner, Ellen Meiksins Wood, David Harvey, Michael Lebowitz, and various Marxists working in England too numerous to mention. The greatest impact came, however, from Moishe Postone’s magnum opus. These choices may seem eclectic, but I don’t belong to any of these currents. I am working on my own stuff and I am learning from all of them.Széman 2010.

Panagiotis Sotiris1

One of the arguments that have appeared during the pandemic, especially during its early phase, was that the measures taken by governments, especially the forced suspension of economic activity, even at the danger of severe economic depression, offered proof of not only the crisis of neoliberalism2 but also of the possibility to use state power as a means to promote social change in a socialist direction.

In such a perspective, a strong state intervention, even in the sense of a government ‘by decree’ that could halt aspects of capitalist production, commandeer parts of the production apparatus and impose strict forms of regulation of everyday life, offers an example that it is possible to impose important changes, through a ‘strong state’. Even the more disciplinary aspects of ‘lockdown strategies’ have been, to a certain extent, embraced as aspects of this positive potential offered by a strong state intervention, as an example on how it is possible to actually halt capitalist production and disrupt the dynamics of capitalist accumulation.

This is also enhanced of the ‘return of the state’ debate, even among ‘organic intellectuals’ of capital, and all the references to entering a period where capitalist states intervene more in the economy, or undertake larger segments of social reproduction. This is also reinforced by the fact that this ‘return of the state’ seems like a negation of an earlier neoliberal ‘anti-statism’, which had indeed led social movements to wage important struggles in defence of state functions and against attempts to privatise them. And, of course, there have been voices in the global right and far right that have accused both the urgent measures to deal with the pandemic and climate change as ‘socialism’3 and, indeed, a certain far-right populism has attempted to appear as a defender of ‘liberties’ against pandemic restrictions. The fascination also exercised by the Chinese state’s intervention and handling of the pandemic4 also suggests a certain conception of the need for a stronger state intervention.

One way perhaps to deal with this problem is to remind ourselves that, in fact, there never was an actual ‘neoliberal anti-statism’, and that neoliberal states were indeed disciplinary and in a rather authoritarian way. Consequently, the actual history of neoliberalism is full of many forms of state intervention, even in the sense of states creating markets or quasi-markets, along with all the forms of increased authoritarian measures and expansion of the coercive apparatuses that has been a defining aspect of neoliberalism.

However, the crucial question is whether, indeed, we can think of social transformation as an expansion of state power and intervention, especially since the classical definition of the transition to communism includes a ‘withering away’ of the state.

It is true that the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat includes a rather strong sense of coercion, especially in regards to the ‘violent’ re-appropriation of the means of production and the transformation of property relations along with other aspects of social reproduction, exemplified the Communist Manifesto’s call for ‘despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production’.5 And, even though one might get the idea that part of the beginning of the process of transformation includes a rather strong state apparatus gaining control over social life, in the sense of a ‘centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly’, the ‘centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State’ and the ‘extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State’,6 at the same time there is a very specific reference that the state referred to is not just the existing state but rather it is something deeply transformed. This is very evident in the tension running through the tentative phrasing of the Manifesto and the reference to ‘the state, i.e., the proletariat organised as the ruling class’.

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.7

And, even in a text by Engels that was to become a reference point for the Second International, there is a clear warning against any thinking of just using a strong existing state:

The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers—proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.8

At the same time, one can point to the Civil War in France and how Marx there insists that we are talking about a different and transformed state apparatus and not just taking over and using the existing state apparatuses.

That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today. In view of the gigantic strides of Modern Industry in the last twenty-five years, and of the accompanying improved and extended party organization of the working class, in view of the practical experience gained, first in the February Revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has in some details become antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that "the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes". (SeeThe Civil War in France. Address of the General Council of the International Working Men's Association, German edition, p. 19, where this point is further developed.)9

Moreover, as Rossana Rossanda stressed, this implies a radical socialisation of politics that moves beyond the notion of ‘withering away’ of the state: ‘

In the model of the Commune therefore, the revolution and the revolutionary society anticipated not only the withering away of the state, but, even more radically, the progressive disappearance of the political dimension as a dimension separate from (and opposed to) social being, reconstituted in its unity.10

And, of course, there is the strong critique of any simple use of existing state by Marx in the Critique of the Gotha Programme exemplified by his distrust towards‘education of the people by the state’.11 Moreover, Marx calls for a profound transformation, in the sense that the state ‘needs a very stern education by the people’12 which is presented by Marx as a process of historical experimentation:

The question then arises: what transformation will the state undergo in communist society? In other words, what social functions will remain in existence there that are analogous to present state functions? This question can only be answered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the problem by a thousandfold combination of the word people with the word state.13

On the other hand, in the tradition of the working-class movement there was also a strong ‘statist’ line, associated with figures such as Lassalle and his conception of a socialism based on the expansion of the role of the state14 and, even more, a certain idealisation of the state as an agent of social rationalisation, that owes a lot to a certain conception of the state more associated with Fichte or Hegel, namely the state as culmination and condensation of humanity’s rational capacity, exemplified in Lassalle’s conception of the state as an‘ethical whole’.15And, to a large extent, theCritique of the Gotha Programme refers exactly to ‘the Lassallean sect's servile belief in the state’.16

However, such an emphasis on social transformation that is enhanced by a strong intervention from the part of the existing state apparatus was also present in various forms of the Marxism of historical social democracy, and, of course, it was stronger after the split with the Third international.

In contrast, in the original formulation by Lenin in State and Revolution and the accompanying material, one could see a more complex articulation of the what is defined as strong state and also about how this is combined with the emphasis on the soviets - a form of organisation but also of exercise of power that is presented indeed as an aspect of the withering away of the state.

The proletariat needs the state—this is repeated by all the opportunists, social-chauvinists and Kautskyites, who assure us that this is what Marx taught. But they “forget” to add that, in the first place, according to Marx, the proletariat needs only a state which is withering away, i.e., a state so constituted that it begins to wither away immediately, and cannot but wither away. And, secondly, the working people need a “state, i.e., the proletariat organised as the ruling class”.17

And it was Lenin indeed who offered a very important reading of ‘lessons of the Commune’ that at least provide the outlines of a definition of forms of power from below or counter-power that go beyond the simple ‘use of the existing state apparatus’.

The fundamental characteristics of this type are: (1) the source of power is not a law previously discussed and enacted by parliament, but the direct initiative of the people from below, in their local areas—direct “seizure”, to use a current expression; (2) the replacement of the police and the army, which are institutions divorced from the people and set against the people, by the direct arming of the whole people; order in the state under such a power is maintained by the armed workers and peasants themselves, by the armed people themselves; (3) officialdom, the bureaucracy, are either similarly replaced by the direct rule of the people themselves or at least placed under special control; they not only become elected officials, but are also subject to recall at the people’s first demand; they are reduced to the position of simple agents; from a privileged group holding “jobs” remunerated on a high, bourgeois scale, they become workers of a special “arm of the service”, whose remuneration does not exceed the ordinary pay of a competent worker.18

Leaving aside the fact that these might sound as schematic or even simplistic, they still point to the crucial question, namely that of the need for non-state autonomous organisations as part of the very exercise of power. Forms of political organisation that attempt to subsume the state, or exercise forms of transformative control upon it and at the same time enable a politicisation of the economic sphere without precedent, again as part of a transformative political dynamic.19 I think that it is here that we can find the revolutionary importance of the very notion of ‘dual power’, which, in my reading, points not to a ‘moment’ but more to an ‘organic’ aspect of any attempt towards revolutionary transformation.

What is the class composition of this other government? It consists of the proletariat and the peasants (in soldiers’ uniforms). What is the political nature of this government? It is a revolutionary dictatorship, i.e., a power directly based on revolutionary seizure, on the direct initiative of the people from below, and not on a law enacted by a centralised state power. It is an entirely different kind of power from the one that generally exists in the parliamentary bourgeois-democratic republics of the usual type still prevailing in the advanced countries of Europe and America. This circumstance is often overlooked, often not given enough thought, yet it is the crux of the matter. This power is of the same type as the Paris Commune of 1871.20

In the complex situation created by the realities and difficulties of the Russian Revolution and the Civil War, priorities seem to change, yet the question whether we are just dealing with an expansion of centrali,ed power and what the role of non-state entities would be re-emerges, albeit in an over-determined manner, in the debates and around trade unions21 and the critiques from various oppositionist currents.22 By itself, the debate on the role of trade unions is indicative of the centrality of this question and, despite the ‘canonisation’ of Lenin’s response, we should bear in mind that it was, after all, a very time-specific intervention, in a very peculiar conjuncture and not a strategic positioning. And, of course, one could point to the persistence of the councilist tradition outside the Soviet Union,23 within the various forms of left oppositions to the Communist parties.

The evolution of the Soviet state would again pose the problem, since it was obviously moving into the direction of a consolidation and increased strengthening of state power. One could point to the way that Gramsci treated the question of what he defined as ‘statolatry’. Gramsci, although he seemed to accept at least as a provisional or transitory condition a certain form of Soviet ‘Bonapartism’, at the same time offered clear warnings against such positions.

Some social groups rose to autonomous state life without first having had an extended period of independent cultural and moral development of their own (which in medieval society and under absolute regimes was rendered possible by the legal existence of privileged estates or orders; for such social groups, a period of statolatry is necessary and indeed appropriate. Such “statolatry” is nothing other than the normal form of "state life" or, at least, of initiation into autonomous state life and into the creation of a "civil society," which historically could not be created before the ascent to independent state life. Nevertheless, this kind of "statolatry" must not be abandoned to itself, above all, it must not become theoretical fanaticism or come to be seen as "perpetual." It must be criticized, precisely in order for it to develop and to produce new forms of state life in which individual and group initiative has a "state" character even if it is not indebted to the "official government " (makes state life "spontaneous'').24

I believe that this stressing by Gramsci of the need for ‘statolatry’ to be criticised and the need to avoid it becoming ‘perpetual’ and also to avoid it becoming ‘theoretical fanaticism’ in order to move forward with the emergence of forms of political and state organisation that are based on subaltern initiatives, namely transformative political practice with a communist horizon, is very important, in the sense that it offers a dialectical way of moving beyond the identification of socialism with a strong state.25

The way the Soviet model was exported and put in practice did create a very strong sense of the ‘Socialist State’ as the agent of social transformation. State ownership and planning seemed to be the basic aspects of socialist transition and this would also be considered as an example for a ‘developmental’ state enhancing process of democratic modernisation in the context of anticolonial practices and decolonial practices.26

Questions of mass participation and mobilisation would, of course, re-occur and the same can be said about particular experiences such as the particular Yugoslav experiment with self-management (which was not combined with a similar emphasis on non-state political and organisational forms).

The Chinese experience was, at the same time, very important, especially since the first phase of the Cultural Revolution and the Shanghai Commune suggested the return to the logic of non-state independent political forms of organisation, even though this aspect was soon abandoned to a certain degree, and a series of compromises were introduced.27

In contrast, the ‘Western’ Communist movement, along with social democracy ,started to treat the state as inherently progressive, in the sense that a democratised state, implementing progressive reforms and engaging in forms of planning of the economy, along with an expansion of public ownership, was presented as a crucial aspect of the politics of a ‘democratic progressive government’. Moreover, the expansion of the role of the state along with the forms of ‘socialisation of production’ associated with ‘state-monopoly capitalism’ were presented as the ‘objective tendencies towards socialism’ in contrast to the way the ‘monopolies’ were trying to annul them. This ended up in certain idealisation of the state as an antechamber of socialism.28

Against such positions, one could point to the critique of the ‘welfare state’ offered by various forms of radicalism inspired by the Marxist tradition, from the critique of a technocratic society proponents of critical theory to the various radical critiques of the role of the state in social production and reproduction and a conception of the welfare state as an attempt to strengthen the rule of capital. And one could also point to how radical movements, within the context of the ‘Global 1968’, went beyond demanding just an expansion of state education and health systems, offering at the same time a criticism of how they also represented aspects of capitalist social reproduction.

Moreover, against the idea that social transformation will begin by electoral means, a democratic progressive government and the use of the state as a vector for socialist politics, many currents returned to a conception of ‘smashing of the state’ within a revolutionary process, however schematic such position might be at certain points and despite the lack of an elaborated strategy in that direction.

Moreover, movements and forms of organisation that were autonomous from the state were presented as a crucial aspect of social transformation. This was evident in the many varieties of experiments in self-management but also in more articulated conceptions of a dual power of long duration, as suggested for example by Christine Buci-Glucksmann.

In contrast to the contemporary soviet ‘model’ with its constant attack to freedoms, its psychiatric hospitals, its blocking of any real dialectic of the masses, we know that working class hegemony means the recognition of its parties, the autonomy of trade unions, the biggest possible degree of democratic expansion of the base, the highest degree of freedom. However, this hegemony […] also means the exit from a capitalist logic and to go beyond the strict framework of classical “bourgeois democracy”. In this sense we cannot pose within the democratic transition on the one hand the elected assemblies and the class struggle on the other. We must articulate, to think a constant rupture, a dual power of long duration.29

At the same time, such positions were also conditioned by different theoretical approaches to the state. Parts of the German critique of the welfare state30 were based on the particular conception of derivation of the state from social relations of the economy and the value-form.

‘Social policy’ (i.e. state activity intervening ex post facto in society and seeking to resolve its ‘social problems’) thus has the characteristics, down to its smallest details, of a process of paternalistic supervision, control or ‘welfare’ of the producer. (This is felt by every worker who has to wait in the work, who repairs his labour-power as quickly as possible). Hence, however much state social policy offers individual producers a certain security in the event of their partial or total inability to, work, social policy can never provide a conscious and planned care for the maintenance, renewal and improvement of the social working capacity of the collective worker, the associated producers themselves. In a communist society suchplanned care would necessarily be part of the collective social production process; it would be apublic responsibility of society and of its members, as would the rest of social subsistence, and not the object of the abstract bureaucratic activity of a particularpolitical organization31

Also in the 1970s, Louis Althusser’s calls for the need to have autonomous organisations and for the party not to be identified with the state, were based on his rather idiosyncratic conception of the state as a machine that transforms social force into political power and law. It is on the basis of such a conception that Althusser warned against every tendency to imagine a simple ‘democratisation’ of the existing state apparatuses.

Truly, and I ask that these words be carefully weighed, to ‘destroy’ the bourgeois state, in order to replace it with the state of the working class and its allies, is not to add the adjective ‘democratic’ to each existing state apparatus. It is something quite other than a formal and potentially reformist operation, it is to revolutionize in their structures, practices and ideologies the existing state apparatuses; to suppress some of them, to create others; it isto transform the forms of the division of labour between the repressive, political and ideological apparatuses; it isto revolutionize their methods of work andthe bourgeois ideology that dominates their practices; it is to assure themnew relations with the masses in response to mass initiatives, on the basis of a new,proletarian ideology, in order to prepare for the ‘withering away of the state’, i.e. its replacement by mass organizations.32

And even Poulantzas’s relational conception of the state as the condensation of a social relation of forces, sometimes misread as a call for struggles within the state, was also combined with an insistence on autonomous forms of organisations of the masses as part of his strategy for ‘democratic socialism.’ Poulantzas’s fear was that any call simply for awithering away’ of the state, interpreted as doing away with representative democracy in favour of rank-and-file direct participation would eventually lead again to technocracy and statism. However, Poulantzas himself admitted that ‘left to itself, the transformation of the state apparatus and the development of representative democracy would be incapable of avoiding statism’,33hence the need to combine ‘the transformation of representative democracy with the development of forms of rank-and-file democracy or the movement for self-management’.34

I would suggest that, in a certain way, the question of dual power constantly re-emerges whenever the dynamics of social movements and political contestation go beyond a certain threshold and challenge the existing configuration of power. And, in each case, the open question is what to do with those autonomous organisations that are not just ‘instruments of struggle’ but more like forms of counter-power or power from below. And this can explain why this question does not only arise as an ‘article of faith’ with regard to an insurrectionary conception of revolutionary process, but also as way to answer with political challenges in hand, in a spectrum from the Bolivia of René Zavaleta Mercado35 to the debates around ‘Left Eurocommunism’.

Althusser posed this as an open question in his intervention on the ‘Crisis of Marxism’, especially since, for Althusser, the crisis of Marxism had to do with the question of the state. For Althusser, the crisis of Marxism was the result of an inability to come in terms with the theoretical and strategic question facing us, especially in light of the open crisis of the Soviet social formations. And this meant how to think the question of the party and mass organisations and their relation to the state not just as theoretical questions but as a revolutionary practice and politics that started immediately. For Althusser, the process that can lead us to an actual withering away of the state starts from now, must be a defining aspect of our political practice long before the revolutionary process. The question is: ‘How can we grasp now, in order to spur on the process, the need for the “destruction” of the bourgeois State, and prepare the ‘withering away’ of the revolutionary State?’ 36 Therefore, the open questions coming from the crisis of “actually existing socialism” along with the new dynamics of the movements become, at the same time, the potential explanation for the crisis of Western Communism and Marxism and the testing ground for any proposition to exit this crisis. A new practice of mass politics is necessary both for the recomposition of the revolutionary movement but also for the transition process. That is why, noting the emergence of new mass popular movements that emerge outside the limits of the traditional party-form but also of the trade unions, Althusser insists that ‘the most important of questions for past and future—how can relations be established with the mass movement which, transcending the traditional distinction between trade union and party, will permit the development of initiatives among the people, which usually fail to fit into the division between the economic and political spheres.’ 37

The crisis of the Communist movement from the 1980s onwards and the fact that revolutionary politics seemed to be no longer part of the order of the day, led to certain disregard of such questions. However, such questions resurfaced in the context of movements in Latin America. From the way the Zapatistas chose to organize in opposition to the state to contradictions in the relations between the state and autonomous movements within the revolutionary process in Venezuela or Bolivia.

For example, in Bolivia, Álvaro Garcia Linera has referred to the creative tensions within the Bolivian revolutionary process, in the period that followed the failed coup of 2008, exemplified in the contradictory relations between the state and social movements, including the efforts of the state to take over some of the functions of social movements and community institutions. Linera has used Gramsci’s notion of theintegral state to describe this process. However, it is interesting – and very indicative of the actual contradictions of this approach – that this is described both as a ‘dilution’ of the state within society and as certain expansion of a democratised state.38

Or, equally, one could look at the problems and dynamics in the process of transferring power to the communes in Venezuela.39 Even the dynamics of social struggles in Greece in the first half of the 2010s and the emergence of an impressive variety of forms of self-organisation also posed, even in the form of an open question that was never answered what could be described as potential forms of dual power.40

So, it is obvious that we are dealing with an important question and, to a certain extent, an open debate running through the history of both Marxism and the working-class movement.

I think it is imperative to pick up this debate again. This, of course, requires a re-opening of the debate on the state. The denial of any instrumentalist theory of the state as a tool of the bourgeoisie, or of any crude class reductionism that disregards the relative autonomy of the superstructures, or indeed the relations and contradictory character of the very materiality of the state cannot lead us to idealisation of the state. In contrast, we need to rethink the state as the material condensation of a relation of forces, with the emphasis on ‘material condensation’ which suggest both a relational character, and the constant effectivity of class struggles and social antagonism, but also the fact that it is the materialisation of a relation of forces that enables bourgeois domination (and, to different extents, hegemony), hence, indeed, acting within the conjuncture as a ‘machine transforming social force into political power and law’. This means that the class character of the state is deeply inscribed in its institutional architecture, in the ways knowledge and information is circulates, in the different ways that  crucial aspects are insulated against any form of democratic control, a process enhanced by the constant transfer of authority to various levels of experts, the militarisation of the security and police apparatus and the widespread and pervasive logic of ‘independent agencies’ exemplified in the very notion of ‘Independent Central Banks’ but also in the increased autonomisation of the repressive apparatuses. In this sense, a certain suspicion, at the very least, of the state is always in the order of the day and we cannot suggest that just making this kind of state apparatus stronger can be the starting point of a process of social transformation. Consequently, the necessary clash with the ersatz ‘anti-statism’ of neoliberalism should not lead to a simple support or defence of the existing state forms without questioning the many ways that they are the actual materialisation of class strategies.

What about what we usually consider as ‘public services’, such as education, health systems and social services? It is obvious that we would prefer public services to private, but this does not mean that we are dealing with socially neutral institutions. Public education can also act a process for the reproduction of class hierarchies, the social division of labour and aspects of the dominant ideology, in short to act like an Ideological State Apparatus or a hegemonic apparatus. And there have been important critiques of the way the dominant conception of health and medicine can also be reproduced through a public health system, along with important contributions to how an alternative conception of a public health oriented towards social needs and not just the ‘repair of the labour power’ might be.

Moreover, sometimes we tend to forget that the crucial aspect that makes such state services ‘public’, in the sense of being oriented towards the needs of the subaltern classes, has also to do with the fact that there are important movements in them, movements that oppose aspects of their role in the reproduction of capitalist social relations of domination and exploitation, and, in a certain way, represent the interests, needs and aspirations of the subaltern classes. Étienne Balibar recently highlighted this point and the necessary contradictory (one might say dialectical) contradiction running through the very notion of the state as provider of ‘public services’

As a consequence, the “state” at the same time appears as a recourse, an agent of protection, and an object of critique and replacement, which is challenged by “counter-conducts” and “counterpowers”, in a fragile and problematic equilibrium. But perhaps we are not, in fact, talking of the same “state”? Or perhaps the state itself, in the process of the crisis, becomes divided between antithetic logics? It seems to me that a theoretical solution for this riddle, provisionally at least, could reside in deciding that it is rather the “public service” that harbors a unity of opposites, a dialectics of conflict and cooperation between the two logics which are also two “concepts of the political”, the logic of statist authority (rather than “sovereignty”), and the logic of horizontal commonality. The comprehensive notion of the “public” ranging from public governance and property to the responsibility of institutions before the public as enlightened multitude appears at the same time as a site of encounter between these two logics, and a stake at play in their competition. This is of course not an entirely new pattern of social and political agency, especially in periods of historic crises. But in the current situation it remains to be seen which intensity it will acquire and where it will lead our societies. This will largely depend on how the crisis affects the evolution of the current form of capitalism.41

One might say that the reason we indeed support and defend public services is exactly that, within the terrain of the state, it is possibly to have the intervention of movements that actually represent subaltern needs and aspirations. In this sense, the very notion of what belongs to the state is a terrain of struggle with regard to its very definition and the crucial aspect exactly has to do with a collective practice that redefines the very notion of a ‘public service’.

It is on the basis of the above that I would like to suggest that we can find in the Marxist tradition another theoretical and practical current that attempts to rethink social transformation as a process of experimentation and change that is based not just on the expansion of state power (especially if we think it as the expansion of the power of the existing state apparatus) but also on the emergence of different forms of popular power and counter-power from below, along with profound transformations of the state, a contemporary version of dual power. In such a perspective, autonomous movements and initiatives, from trade unions to forms of self-management and even forms of collective self-defence are crucial aspects even if the political representatives of the subaltern classes have indeed reached political power. At the same time, this requires a complete rethinking of the very notion of the state apparatus that goes beyond simply making it stronger or expanding its powers. In a certain sense, this requires thinking the state exactly as the condensation of a relation of forces but with a strong transformative dynamic. This will require both the existence of strong movements outside the state but also the strong presence and intervention of movements within the state by means of the expansion of forms of democratic control and accountability, but also in the sense of self-management and expansive forms of democratic autonomy.

In such a perspective, not all forms of a ‘stronger’ state can be treated as equally important and not all of them are positive or contribute to social change. It is one thing to use political power to promote important changes, even ‘institutionally violent’ in matters that refer to the expansion of public ownership or interventions that reduce the pervasive effectivity of market mechanisms (from price controls to raising the minimum wage) and another for example to treat as a form of a positively strong state aspects of what we have witnessed during the pandemic. Aspects that include the expansion of police power, the restriction of political freedom (such as the right to assembly), the new forms of supervision and surveillance and the increased authoritarian aspects of what can be described as the lockdown strategy (including the very problematic suspension of access to basic services included in some forms of ‘heath passes’42).

This is definitely not a ‘blueprint for the “despotic” aspects of the dictatorship of the proletariat’, rather this is authoritarian neoliberalism on steroids. One might even say that the very fact that we are in a conjuncture where neoliberalism has been dealt heavy blows, while, at the same time, no plausible alternatives have emerged, can explain why, in a certain way, this is compensated by the turn toward an increasingly authoritarian handling of social problems. Moreover, one might point to the fact that, at least in some countries, the pandemic and the exceptional measures associated with it have been used as a way to enforce large-scale forms of capitalist restructuring.

It is true that aspects of the ‘return of the state’ debate, such as the realisation of the limits of the markets, or of the inability of the markets to act as rational optimisers, are important and represent opportunities for the left to change the relation of forces in the public sphere and articulate aspects an alternative strategy. The same goes for the importance of the provision of public services and also the importance of having state agencies that indeed act to delimitate the private from the public, the market from the terrain of social needs and aspirations. These are surely crucial aspects.

But, at the same time, if we are still thinking in terms of social transformation, it is important to also think about ways to create and bring forward the initiative and ingenuity of the subaltern as a way to suggest that social organisation based on solidarity, collective discussion and decision and constant effort at transformation is possible. In a certain way, this can be the only attempt towards moving beyond the fetishism of the market and the fetishism of the state, which represent the double process of mystification of social relations of domination and exploitation. This is the only way to enable and enhance the emergence of antagonistic social practice, relations and forms.

This also entails another conception of the state itself. Even if we do want stronger state interventions, at the same time we struggle for a profound transformation of the state, in the sense of creating ways that social antagonism becomes more apparent and active within the state, forcing forms of openness and democratic accountability, putting crucial aspects under social control, reducing the size, power and opacity of the oppressive apparatuses of the state, introducing new forms of democratic participation at all levels, and, at the same time, expanding basic political freedoms against all forms of oppression, including the pervasive development of a surveillance state.

If we try and think about the main challenges facing us to today, from the pandemic to climate change, and the need to make again pertinent the need for a non-capitalist organisation of the economy, the necessity for a perspective that moves beyond the call for a ‘strong state’ becomes evident. In the case of the pandemic and the failure of the ‘lockdown strategy’ to deliver, it became obvious that the challenge has been not of suspending social life, but of collectively inventing ways and practices that make it safer, by redesigning production and reproduction on the basis of solidarity and collective mobilisation and not coercion enhanced surveillance. In the case of climate change, the extent of the need for changes in productive and consumer paradigms and the increased need for decentralisation and collective use of limited resources also entails a very wide spectrum of collective redesigning of production that goes beyond the scope of state coercion and have more to do with collective initiative and self-management.

In a similar manner, if we go back to the question of whether some form of ‘left governance’ is possible, in the way it came to the fore during the 2010s, we can see that it was never simply about a left government passing progressive legislation through parliament. If this were to be a socialist strategy, that is a strategy of ruptures with existing social configurations, it would also include a widespread unleashing of collective initiatives at all levels, both as pressure for change, but also as learning sites for new ways to organise schools or hospitals or to manage publicly owned enterprises. It is in this sense that we need to rethink the very notion of dual power as an integral and permanent aspect of any process of transformation.

Consequently, such a conception of transformative politics which is not limited to making good use of the coercive potential of the states should not be conceived as a simple implementation of a set of measures, or just as an institutional reform, even though profound institutional reforms are necessary. It should be thought of as process of transformation, for which, in a certain sense, only principles can be offered, especially if we going to think this as a process of socialisation of politics in the form of a re-absorption of political society into civil society to use Gramsci’s definition of the transformation of state and political forms in the transition to communism.

It is not possible to create a constitutional law of the traditional type on the basis of this reality, which is in continuous movement; it is only possible to create a system of principles asserting that the State's goal is its own end, its own disappearance, in other words the re-absorption of political society into civil society.43

I think that this note from 1930 offers a necessary starting point for a relational and, to a certain extent, open and transformational political practice, treating the state as the terrain and object of this transformation, refusing any conception of the state as the locus of social rationality (although, at the same time, stressing its material efficacy) and indeed treating it as a relation of forces to be changed by means of a new and expansive subaltern politicity. The opposition between ‘constitutional law’ and ‘system of principles’ does not point towards some form of unrestrained revolutionary practice, or towards the simple substitution of the state by ‘soviet-type’ institutions, but rather towards the need to think of both the state and the movements inside and outside of it as parts of the same process of transformation and experimentation. At the same time, this passage suggests a new practice of politics that supersedes the division of the economic and the political within bourgeois society and attempts to create conditions for a subaltern universality, opposed to both the abstract universality of the state and the particularity of ‘corporate interests’ and thus opening the way for social transformation.44

To conclude: it is true that the idea that the state can be the main agency of social rationality and ‘represent’ the collective effort towards an emancipated and just society has a long history. In a certain way, this was the main question that the political philosophy of modernity faced. And some of the answers offered to that direction were indeed very elaborate, suggesting the complex interrelations and mediations between the state, civil society and the possibility of moving from particular interests towards a more universal conception of freedom and justice. If we go back to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, to give an example, we can find a very complex conception of an ‘integral state’, that leaving aside the shortcomings of some of Hegel’s ‘solutions’, such as the role of the sovereign or the reference to the estates system, is well beyond any liberal conception of the state, includes a conception of sovereignty that is really dialectical, and is based on a very complex articulation of civil society and the state.45 However, one of Marx’s actual epistemological breaks was exactly the idea that social emancipation was not only a process that would lead to the ‘withering away’ of the state, but also a process that will not be state-driven or limited to the state, it will not a self-transformation of the state. Not in the sense of a technocratic replacement of the ‘government of persons’ by the ‘administration of things’,46 but in the constant expansion of new forms of an agonistic democratic political participation at all levels, including that of the economy, of new forms of collective management, of new forms of political civility, and consequently of the emergence of new and original forms of institutionalization, in a process that is going to be both contradictory and experimental.

"A Boy Confronts Egyptian Military Police South of Tahrir Square - A Potentially Tragic Disparity of Power and Equipment." byalisdare1 is licensed underCC BY-SA 2.0

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• 1. Paper presented at the 2021 Historical Materialism Conference.
• 2. This usually takes the form of the ‘neoliberalism is dead’ approach. For a discussion of this position, see Duncan 2021. For a critique of this thesis in the context of the pandemic see Šumonja 2021.
• 3. Cheryl K. Chumley, an American right-wing pundit has announced a book entitled aptly: ‘Lockdwon. The Socialist Plan to Take Away Your Sleep’.
• 4. See for example Martinez 2020.
• 5. MECW, 6, p. 504.
• 6. MECW, 6, p. 505.
• 7. MECW, 6, p. 504.
• 8. MECW, 25, p. 266. For a reminder of Engels’ opposition to ‘state socialism’ see Pateman 2021.
• 9. MECW, 23, p. 175. On the importance of this ‘rectification’ of the Communist Manifesto see Balibar 1974.
• 10. Rossanda 1970, pp. 220-221.
• 11. MECW, 24, p. 97.
• 12. MECW, 24, p. 97.
• 13. MECW, 24, p. 95.
• 14. On Marx’s critique of the various forms of ‘State socialism’ see Draper 2011.
• 15. Lassalle quoted by Edward Bernstein in Ostrowski 2021, p. 166.
• 16. MECW, 24, p. 97.
• 17. LECW, 24, p. 407.
• 18. LCW, 24, pp. 38-39.
• 19. Balibar has encapsulated this in the following manner: ‘1. The first condition is the existence, besides the state apparatus of political organizations of a new type, mass political organisations, political organisations of workers, which control and subsume the state apparatus, even in its new form […] 2. However, the second condition is even more important, because it is the condition of the preceding one: it is the penetration of political practice to the sphere of “labour”, of production. In other words, it is the end of the absolute separation, developed by capitalism itself, between ‘politics’ and economics’. Not in the sense of an ‘economic policy’ that has nothing new, not even by the transfer of political power to workers, but in order to exercise it as workers, and without stopping workers, the transfer, in the sphere of production of an entire part of political practice. Therefore we can think that work, and before it social conditions, become not only a ‘socially useful’ and ‘socially organised’ practice, but a political practice.’ (Balibar 1974, p. 96-97).
• 20. LCW, 24, p. 38.
• 21. See Lenin’s interventions in the relevant debates in LECW 32. See also Deutscher 1950.
• 22. Allen (ed.) 2021.
• 23. See for example Pannekoek 2003.
• 24. Gramsci PN3, pp. 310-311, Q8, §130).
• 25. As Francesca Antonini notes, Gramsci’s words ‘sound like an invitation to overcome the mere external or formal ‘adjustment’ of the masses to the new political, social and productive system (this adjustment is unavoidable, given the ‘premises’ of the Russian revolution) and to develop, as quickly as possible, a form of hegemony that will lead to the establishment of fully realised socialism. Therefore, Gramsci is warning against the dangers of ‘static’ situations and of the ‘lack’ of revolutionary pressure.’ (Antonini 2020, p. 182).
• 26. Paul Baran (1973) offered the crucial arguments in favour of a strong planning socialist state offering the solution to the challenges of postcolonial growth and development. On the various forms and trajectories of the developmental state see inter alia Woo-Cumings (ed.) 1999 and Chatterjee 2010.
• 27. On the complex dynamics the Cultural Revolution see Hongsheng 2014 and Russo 2020.
• 28. For a critique of such positions, especially in relation the French Communist Party see Weber 1977. See also Théret at Wievorka 1978.
• 29. Buci Glucksmann 1977, p. 153.
• 30. Müller and Neusüss 1971
• 31. Müller and Neüssus in Holloway and Piccioto (eds.) 1974, pp. 38-39.
• 32. Althusser 1977, p. 17.
• 33. Poulantzas 2000, p. 260.
• 34. Poulantzas 2000, p. 262.
• 35. Zavaleta 1974.
• 36. Althusser 1978, p. 220.
• 37. Althusser 1978, p. 220.
• 38. Garcia Linera 2011.
• 39. Cicciariello-Maher 2016
• 40. Sotiris 2018
• 41. Balibar 2020, pp. 19-20.
• 42. Laumonier 2021.
• 43. Gramsci 1971, p. 253 (Q5, § 127).
• 44. In this context, the re-absorption of political society in civil society would constitute the foundation for the emergence of a “self-regulated society”, indicating not merely the relocation of the mechanisms of decision-making and governance from one (minoritarian) sphere to another (majoritarian), but the self-regulation of a society in which economics and politics, the kingdom of necessity and the kingdom of freedom, of external determination and selfdetermination, are no longer separated. More precisely, it would indicate a civil society that, in the midst of its divisive particularity and subaltern interpellation by the existing political society, assumes consciousness of its own contradictions; but not in order to cancel them in a universality that hovers above it in a political society, the “constitutional Right, of a traditional type”.’ (Thomas 2009, p. 190).
• 45. On readings of Hegel that stress the complexity of his thinking of the state see inter alia Lefebvre and Macherey 1984 and Losurdo 2004.
• 46. MECW, 25, p. 268.