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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

References

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Althusser, Louis 1977, ‘On the Twenty-Second Congress of the French Communist Party’, translated by Ben Brewster, New Left Review 104: 3-22.

Althusser, Louis 1978, ‘The Crisis of Marxism,’ Marxism Today, July 1978.

Antonini, Francesca 2020, Caesarism and Bonapartism in Gramsci, Leiden Brill.

Balibar, Étienne 1974, Cinque études de matérialisme historique, Paris : Maspero

Balibar, Étienne, ‘Living, Learning, Imagining in the Middle of the Crisis’, Crisis and Critique 7:3:10-24.

Baran, Paul A. 1973, The Political Economy of Growth, London: Penguin.

Chatterjee, Partha 2010, Empire and Nation. Selected Essays, New York: Columbia University Press.

Deutscher, Isaac 1950, Soviet Trade Unions: Their Place in Soviet Labour History,https://www.marxists.org/archive/deutscher/1950/soviet-trade-unions/index.htm

Draper, Hal 2011, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution. Critique of Other Socialisms, Delhi: Aakar Books.

Duncan, John 2021, ‘The death of neoliberalism? UK responses to the pandemic’, The International Journal of Human Rights, DOI: 10.1080/13642987.2021.1945583

Gramsci, Antonio 1971, Selections from Prison Writings, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Gramsci, Antonio 2007, Prison Writings. Volume 3, edited and translated by Joseph A. Buttigieg, New York: Columbia University Press.

Holloway, John and Sol Piccioto (eds.) 1978, State and Capital. A Marxist Debate, London: Edward Arnold.

Hongsheng, Jiang 2014, La Commune de Shanghai: Et la Commune de Paris, Paris : La fabrique.

Laumonier, Jean Claude 2021, ‘Macron, la vaccination et le pass sanitaire: pour une alternative au libéralisme autoritaire’, https://www.contretemps.eu/macron-covid-pass-sanitaire-vaccination-capitalisme-autoritarisme/

Lenin, Vladimir Illich 1965, Collected Works, Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Linera, Álvaro García 2011, Las tensiones creativas de la revolución, La Paz : Vicepresidencia del Estado Plurinacional.

Martinez, Carlos 2020, ‘Karl Marx in Wuhan: How Chinese Socialism is Defeating Covid-19’, International Critical Though, 10:2.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels 1975-2004, Collected Works, London: Lawrence and Wishart (MECW).

Müller, Wolfgang and Christel Neusüss 1971, ‘Die Sozialstaatsillusion und der Widerspruch von Lohnarbeit und Kapital’, PROKLA 1(SH1): 7-70.

Ostrowski, Marius S. 2021, Eduard Bernstein on Socialism Past and Present. Essays and Lectures on Ideology, London: Palgrave.

Pannekoek, Anton 2003, Worker’s Councils, Oakland: AK OPres

Pateman, Joe 2021, ‘Friedrich Engels on state socialism’, Human Geography 14:2:198-211

Poulantzas, Nicos 2000 (1980), State, Power, Socialism, London: Verso.

Russian Communist Party. Documents, 1919–30. Leiden: Brill.

Rossana, Rossanda 1970, ‘Class and Party’, Socialist Register.

Russo, Alessandro 2020, Cultural Revolution and Revolutionary Culture, Durham: Duke University Press.

Théret, Bruno et Michel Wieviorka 1978, Critique de la théorie du « capitalisme monopoliste d’État », Paris : Maspero.

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

Weber, Henri 1977, ‘Le PCF et l’État’, Critique Communiste 16 : 1-13.

Woo-Cummings, Meredith (ed.) 1999, The Developmental State, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Zavaleta Mercado, René 1974, El poder dual en América Latina, Mexico : Editores Siglo XXI

• 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.

Daniela Russ

A century ago, in April 1921, Lenin received a letter from Petr Alekseevich Kozmin, an old Social Democrat and agricultural engineer specialising on the grain economy. At the latest party congress, which had just ended a few weeks before, there had been a conversation about the possibility of using the wind power of existing windmills for the electrification of the countryside. Gleb Krzhizhanovskii, head of Russia’s electrification commission, had proposed that Kozmin should investigate the matter, as he had access to the necessary information on mills in his capacity as head of the chief grain administration (glavmuka). Kozmin’s follow-up letter––printed with Lenin’s remarks in ‘Leninskii Sbornik’ in 1932, a source recently rediscovered in the context of the October Ecologies project1––reveals a stunning planetary perspective of Russian engineers and a largely forgotten history of renewable energies in the Soviet Union.

In his letter, Kozmin made a proposal that went far beyond the original idea of rural electrification: he argued that an autonomous commission on wind power should be formed where theoretical physicists, experts on aero-dynamics, and engineers would work together on the issue. Such a commission, he claimed, could in only ten years produce more wind than fossil-fueled power and “command five times as much energy than GOELRO.” In what seems like a sudden leap, Kozmin then closes his letter with the assertion that such a commission would constitute “a first step to the organisation of a glavsolnca––a chief administration of the sun.”2

Glavki were the chief committees of the war economy. In a sense, it was no big deal to propose a new one––whatever material needed to be produced, supplied, and distributed could justify central administration. By 1920, when the war economy was coming to an end, there were around 50 glavki, each responsible for a certain economic sector within the Supreme Economic Council:3there was Kozmin’s glavmuka,glavelektro for the electricity sector,glavneft for procuring oil, and so on. But Kozmin’s proposal broke with the established forms of economic organisation and gave theglavy a new meaning.Glavy managed scarce resources in a war-torn economy, but there was no shortage of the sun––even less so one aglavsolnca could possibly manage. Unlike grain and oil, the sun was more a natural condition of the war economy than a thing-like resource in it. Lenin was struck by the term as well, circling it with thick lines and adding a sceptical-interested ‘hm!??’ at the margin. Komzin’s idea of aglavsolnca pointed far beyond the management of scarce resources towards the making of a future base of abundance for the Soviet state: solar radiation.

Little is known about Petr Kozmin’s work and life, so there is room for speculation what exactly he had in mind when he proposed a main administration of the sun. As an expert in flour milling, he worked with grain, a product of photosynthesis, but there is no evidence that Kozmin associated agriculture with the solar economy. Not his grain commission, but the commission on wind power pioneered a glavsolnca by tapping into the air’s motion triggered by solar radiation. Rather than a broad biospheric perspective, he seems to have shared the view of geophysicists, who focused on the sun as a source of energy and work. It was not uncommon among Soviet physicists of that time to conceive of the energy economy as harnessing solar radiation in its different forms and transformations. It is therefore possible that Kozmin had in mind a central administration of what we would today call renewable energy, the use of the infrared and visible wavelengths of solar radiation.

Energy historians commonly associate the first half of the twentieth century with an intensification of fossil fuel use through a transition to the more versatile forms of energy, oil and electricity.4 In the early Soviet Union, however, the two did not merge easily into the same kind of modernity. While electricity was widely understood as progressive, oil was not generally seen as an energy of the future. The electrification plan treated oil as a transitory fuel and argued against combustion engines for their ‘centrifugal’ and ‘decentralising’ tendencies.5Well-known physicists, such as Nikolai Semenov, Abram Ioffe, and Boris Veinberg, thought it reasonable to prepare for a post-fossil future and develop technologies for a more direct use of the sun’s energy.6 Research on renewable energies was necessary, argued Semenov, as “[s]ocialism is not built to last for only a century,” the period over which fossil resources were expected to last.7

Soviet historiography was no less ignorant about this future past than today’s energy historians. While the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute found Kozmin’s letter worthwhile publishing in 1932, later Soviet historians ridiculed his proposal, denouncing him as an insane ‘superrevolutionary’ who had lost contact with the concrete work of planning.8 Yet this interpretation conceals that Lenin’s reaction was far from dismissive and that research on wind power indeed intensified over the 1930s. Passing the letter on to Gleb Krzhizhanovskii, head of GOELRO and Gosplan, Lenin asked: “A special commission? Do we need that? I remember reading on the impressive progress of wind turbines before the war and that they have achieved impressive success. Shouldn’t one of our experts do a more detailed inquiry: order the (particularly German) literature and study it in Gosplan?”9 Krzhizhanovskii’s reply is unknown, but it is unlikely that he found the idea entirely outlandish. While he saw renewables as an energy for the fringes of the Soviet economy––the backward agriculture of the imperial periphery––he supported research on the matter (his Institute of Energetics later even set up a solar power laboratory).

For a short time, the Soviet Union was leading wind power technology in the 1930s.10 While the concrete chain of events and the role of Kozmin’s letter have yet to be established, a wind power commission was indeed formed. The Central Aero-Hydrodynamic Institute (ZAGI), which had studied wind turbines since 1918, set up a wind power laboratory in the mid-1920s. Supported by the head of the Supreme Economic Council, the Georgian Bolshevik Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the laboratory designed and constructed various wind power plants with a capacity of up to 100 kW over the 1930s.11 True to the Soviet commitment to electrification, the ZAGI engineers developed the first utility-scale wind generator and the earliest system integrating wind and thermal power. Contrary to Kozmin’s hopes, however, neither the commission, nor the successes in wind power technology, gave way to a glavsolnca and a deeper institutionalization of renewable energy. By World War II, the Soviet Union had embarked on an oil-based energy path.12The urgency to secure current energy supply may have eclipsed a planetary perspective, which drew a future into the present that was looming a century ahead.  

Image: Stalingrad Hydroelectric Power Station. Public domain.

• 1. The October Ecologies Project (Giulia Rispoli, Daniela Russ, and Andreas Malm) is striving to make early Soviet ecological thought more accessible to an international audience. In a cooperation between the Historical Materialism Book Series and the V-A-C Foundation based in Moscow, the project is collecting, translating, and publishing primary sources on Soviet ecological thought broadly conceived, covering texts on the biosphere, energetics, cosmism, and conservation.
• 2. Vladimir Ilich Lenin and Petr A. Kozmin, “Zametki o Vetrosilovykh Ustanovkakh [Correspondence between Lenin and Kozmin on Wind Power Stations],” in Leninskii Sbornik, Tom XX (Moscow: Institut Marksa-Engelsa-Lenina, 1932), 217.
• 3. Silvana Malle, The Economic Organization of War Communism, 1918-1921, Soviet and East European Studies (Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 218–26, 232.
• 4. Astrid Kander, Paolo Malanima, and Paul Warde, Power to the People: Energy in Europe over the Last Five Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).
• 5. Gosudarstvennoi Komissii po elektrifikacii Rossii, “Plan Elektrifikacii RSFSR, Vvedenie k Dokladu 8-Mu s’ezdu Sovetov” (Moscow: Nauchno-Tekhnicheskii Otdel Vysshego Sovet Narodnogo Khozyaystvo, 1920), 50.
• 6. Boris P. Veinberg, Boris P., “Predposylki k Izpolzovaniiu Solnechnoi Energii v SSSR,” Planovoe Khoziaistvo, no. 6 (1927): 201–5; Nikolai N. Semenov, “Problema Energii,” Nauchnoe Slovo, no. 2–3 (1931): 3–12. Before turning to nuclear energy, Abram Ioffe worked on semiconductors and the photoelectric effect, the conversion of solar radiation into electricity.
• 7. Semenov, “Problema Energii,” 12.
• 8. Vladimir Krasilshchikov, Chelovek Budushchego. Povest’ o Glebe Krzhizhanovskom (Moscow: Politizdat, 1977), 365–66. The book idealises Krzhizhanovskii and justifies the energetic path taken.
• 9. enin and Kozmin, “Zametki o Vetrosilovykh Ustanovkakh [Correspondence between Lenin and Kozmin on Wind Power Stations],” 217 – Lenin’s emphasis.
• 10. Brandon Owens, The Wind Power Story: A Century of Innovation That Reshaped the Global Energy Landscape (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley IEEE Press, 2019), 42–45, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/bkabstractplus.jsp?bkn=8826414.
• 11. A.C. Ginevskii, “N. E. Zhukovskii i Promyshlennaia Aerodinamika,” Uchenie Zapiski ZAGI XXVIII, no. 1 (1997): 73–84.
• 12. Felix Rehschuh, Aufstieg zur Energiemacht. Der sowjetische Weg ins Erdölzeitalter, 1930er bis 1950er Jahre, 2019. Jeronim Perović, “The Soviet Union’s Rise as an International Energy Power: A Short History,” in Cold War Energy: A Transnational History of Soviet Oil and Gas, ed. Jeronim Perović (Cham: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017), 1–43.

1

David S. Law

University of Keele

During the Great French Revolution many were guillotined. We too had many people brought before the firing squad. But in the Great French Revolution there were two great chapters, of which one went like this (points upwards) and the other like that (points downwards). We must understand this. When the chapter headed like this – upwards – the French Jacobins, the Bolsheviks of that time, guillotined the Royalists and Girondists … And then there began another chapter in France, when the French Ustrialovs and semi-Ustrialovs – the Thermidorians and the Bonapartists from among the Right-wing Jacobins – began exiling and shooting the Left Jacobins – the Bolsheviks of that time. I should like comrade Sol’c to think this analogy through to the end and, first of all, to give himself an answer to the following question: in accordance with which chapter is Sol’c preparing to have us shot? … When we did the shooting, we were firm in our knowledge as to the chapter. But comrade Sol’c, do you clearly understand in accordance with which chapter you are now preparing to shoot? I fear, comrade Sol’c, that you are about to shoot us in accordance with the Ustrjalov, i.e., Thermidorian chapter.2

This was Trotsky speaking in his defence at the Central Control Commission in 1927. He was making a forthright public declaration that the concept of a Thermidor could be usefully applied to the understanding of post-revolutionary events in Russia. From this time, Trotsky would be fascinated by the uses to which the notion of Thermidor could be put.

Trotsky used Thermidor both as analogy and as metaphor: he gave it both a precise and a broad scope. What begins as analogy to indicate parallel processes between events in France and Russia becomes overextended and transformed into a metaphor for the Soviet counter-revolution. It becomes a backcloth against which all the scenery of the decline and fall of October can be arranged. Yet the kernel of the analogy endures: the idea that a counter-revolution may be achieved through the degeneration of the revolutionary party, assisted by the evaporation of revolutionary class consciousness once the first objectives have been achieved.

            This paper discusses the more precise aspects of Trotsky’s use of Thermidor. It begins by outlining the intellectual context in which the analogy was developed, then it describes the form Trotsky’s ideas took at different stages. It concludes by pointing to the strengths and weaknesses of Trotsky on Thermidor.

Context

Just as the Russian Revolution fascinates twentieth-century socialists, so the French Revolution stimulated Russian revolutionaries. Already before 1917, most of the classic accounts from Thiers to Carlyle to Aulard and Sorel had been translated; so too had Taine, Louis Blanc and Jean Jaurès.3A bibliography published in 1924 in Russia entitledWhat to Read on the Social Sciences, contained a section on the Great French Revolution which listed 45 items ranging from modest pamphlets to a republication of Kropotkin’sGreat French Revolution (600 pages) and several weighty volumes by Jaurès.4 All publications listed appeared between 1917 and 1923 at a time when there was an acute shortage of paper. No more than this is needed to testify to the fascination the French Revolution engendered.

The fascination, however, was by no means abstract. Prior to 1917, the French Revolution figured in the deliberations of revolutionaries as a possible model for Russia. In a country still feudal in many respects, the great bourgeois revolution of history could not be ignored. Trotsky in his first major theoretical work, Results and Prospects, takes up the example of 1789 as one form of bourgeois revolution, counterposes it to 1848 and asks himself which model the Russian bourgeoisie will follow. Nearly twenty years later, in a work devoted to urging a critical study of Bolshevik theory and practice in 1917,Lessons of October, he states with some polemical exaggeration:

Had we failed to study the Great French Revolution, the revolution of 1848, and the Paris Commune, we should never have been able to achieve the October Revolution, even though we passed through the experience of the year 1905.5

Inevitably, after the establishment of the Soviet regime, the question would be asked – does the French Revolution in its post-1789 phases offer any hints as to the future of the October Revolution?

            As early as 1921, the Russian Communist Party explicitly accepted the view that the drawing of revolutionary parallels need not be restricted to the “first chapter” of revolutionary ascendancy. The resolution of the Tenth Party Congress, On Party Unity, passed partly in response to the Kronstadt rebellion, included the following paragraph:

Propaganda should also explain the experience of previous revolutions, in which the counter-revolution supported the petty-bourgeois groups that were closest to the extreme revolutionary party, in order to shake and then overthrow the revolutionary dictatorship, thus opening the way for the subsequent complete victory of counter-revolution, the capitalists and the landowners.6

When Lenin was not using the polemical characterisation of the Kronstadt revolt as a White Guard plot, this was precisely his view.

            During the 1920s, parallels were frequently drawn in literature. In 1920, Albert Mathiez, the distinguished historian of the French Revolution, devoted a ten page article to discussing what he regarded as close parallels between Jacobinism in power, between June 1793 and July 1794, and Bolshevism.7 Two years later, Martov followed the same paths, elaborating on “the striking similarity and a number of perfect analogies, between the institutions used by the Jacobins and those serving the contemporary dictatorship”.8 By the end of the decade, Victor Serge was writing in his Year One of the Russian Revolution (the title in itself is significant), of the “striking parallels (which) can be traced between the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, even in the details of events and actions” and outlining some of them in a section on comparisons between 1793 and 1918.9 Lenin himself often took reference points from French revolutionary history when discussing the course of the Russian revolution.10

            Bolshevism did not shrink from being compared with revolutionary Jacobinism, just as Lenin had proudly accepted the taunt of Jacobin from Trotsky and others, after his plans for a vanguard party had caused the split in Russian Social Democracy at the Second Congress in 1903.11 But what credibility should be given to those who sought parallels and prediction not from the Jacobin dictatorship of 1793 but from the Thermidorian period after July 1794? The period when Robespierre went to the guillotine, the revolutionary Jacobins gave way to moderates and the Revolution took a sharp swing to the Right with the disarming and disenfranchising of the sans-culottes and the attempt to revert to “the principles of 1789”. What of those who saw in Bonapartism and restoration, the future of the Russian Revolution?

Exposition

In his study of the Georgian Menshevik Republic published in 1922 under the title Between Imperialism and Revolution, Trotsky briefly referred to the Menshevik hope of a Russian Thermidor. His answer to the Mensheviks was that the Soviet regime had demonstrated its vitality by recognising and responding to the moods of the petty bourgeois masses of Russia and instituting the NEP. The Communist Party had dealt correctly with “the Thermidor moods and tendencies of the petty bourgeois”.12

During the following year, 1923, Trotsky, in conjunction with a left opposition, began to publicly criticise the bureaucratism of the party. In his famous letter to the Party of 8 December 1923, later republished as an appendix in The New Course, he warned: “History offers us more than one case of degeneration of the old guard”. But, at this time, the parallel in his mind was the degeneration of German Social Democracy and he warned, at about the same time, in a set of theses first published inThe New Course, that:

Historical analogies with the Great French Revolution (the fall of the Jacobins) made by liberalism and Menshevism for their own nourishment and consolation, are superficial and inconsistent.13

Trotsky here viewed the fall of the Jacobins as “predetermined by the lack of maturity of the social relationship”, moreover, “Europe, economically and politically more backward, prevented the revolution from spreading beyond the limits of France”. Whereas in Russia:

The proletariat is politically so strong that while permitting, within certain limits, the formation by its side of a new bourgeoisie, it has the peasantry participate in the state power not through the intermediary of the bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeois parties, but directly, thus barring to the bourgeoisie any access to political life.

In Trotsky’s view, the economic and political situation of Europe made an extension of the revolution inevitable and this made revolutionary prospects in Russia “infinitely more favourable” than they had been in France. Nevertheless, “for a considerable period of time”, the current political line would be “a decisive factor in safeguarding the revolution”. Socialism had to be built; political revolution, nationalisation of the means of production and the prospect of imminent revolutionary support from the West was not enough.

            When Trotsky, in 1926 and 1927, turned to systematic consideration of Thermidor he did so with a revised attitude. No longer were the analogies with the French Revolution “superficial and inconsistent” but now he declared “it is absolutely indispensable” that “we must at all costs refresh our knowledge of the Great French Revolution”, “especially of its late period”.14

            Despite the great reversals in policy represented by the repudiation of NEP, Trotsky retained a consistent appraisal of Thermidor from 1927 until 1933. In essence, his position was that Thermidor could be said to exist only in the case of a restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union; prior to this all that could be observed was the political preparation for Thermidor. Thus, in the present situation, it was permissible to speak of Thermidorean tendencies but not of Thermidor. The tendencies towards Thermidor could be seen in the existence of capitalist elements, primarily the kulaks, the upper section of the middle peasants who are trying to become kulaks, and private merchant capital, and in the right wing of the Party which was influenced by these forces, adapted to them and paved the way for their growth. This right faction of the party, which became the Right Opposition in 1928, was identified by Trotsky as early as the summer of 1926 even to the extent of correctly naming names.15 It believed itself to be revolutionary but, for all that, its policies prepared the way for counter-revolution. Although Trotsky referred to Thermidor, more than once, as capitalism on the instalment plan he also consistently declares that without civil war, by which he means sharp and probably violent class conflict, the reestablishment of capitalism could not take place. The instalments are only at the level of a political preparation represented by the adoption of policies which foster capitalist tendencies. When these regenerated forces of capitalism are strong enough to attempt capitalist restoration, they will be resisted by the socialist forces. To believe otherwise is, according to Trotsky, to run the film of reformism backwards.16

            Trotsky’s view of politics in the 1920s was that the Soviet state and the Communist Party had been considerably influenced by the necessity of the class compromise represented by the NEP. With a heterogenous society but a dictatorship of a single party, the diverse interests of antagonistic social classes found reflection among the ranks of the Communists. Trotsky sees class struggle between proletariat, and capitalist elements, especially the kulak and merchant capital, as taking an inner party form of Left Opposition and Right Opposition against the Party centrist apparatus which attempts to mediate between classes but of necessity is pulled first this way, then that.

            For Trotsky, the social basis of Thermidor was the peasantry. An article of 1933 declares unequivocally: “In the Soviet Union only the peasantry can become a force for Thermidor”. Those who spoke most forcefully for a policy of adaptation to the peasantry were to be accused of preparing Thermidor: “… a consistent right-wing policy, whatever the intentions of Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky, is the policy of Thermidor”.17 However, Trotsky was clearly aware that the charge of “agent of capitalist restoration” did not sit easily on the shoulders of an old Bolshevik like Bukharin, and he conscientiously drew a distinction between the intention and effects of the policy of the Right. “Even that right group which represents an open tendency to abandon the proletarian revolution does not consciously desire a Thermidor”.18 In various writings, Trotsky declares that the “real Thermidoreans of the Party” are to be found not in the first rank of the right wingers but in the “second, third and fifth ranks”.19

            After 1933, Thermidor, as a term, underwent a period of relative neglect by Trotsky. Although the reasoning was never made explicit, it is not difficult to understand why Trotsky, for a period, hesitated to use the analogy. Prior to 1933, the centrality of Thermidor in Trotsky’s theoretical armoury had represented the belief that the most acute danger to the revolution was the restoration of capitalism, taking place in an insidious manner with the cooperation, albeit unconscious, of the right wing of the Party. The description of the Stalinist faction as “centrist” carried the corollary of the incapacity of this group to operate on its own behalf. The centrists lacked a definitive social base in class relations and would, by turns, be drawn towards the left and proletarian policies and then towards the right reflecting the pressure of bourgeois interests. Once Trotsky had adopted the orientation of political revolution, it followed that the characterisation of the Stalinist faction as centrist would be dropped. It also implied that, even if the restoration of capitalism was a possible ultimate destination of the society, the view that the greatest immediate danger was “creeping capitalist restoration” had been rejected, to be replaced by a concentration upon, and a greater respect for, the current political regime. It is, therefore, not surprising that the pamphlet in which Trotsky redefined his position in 1933, the Class Nature of the Soviet State, contains absolutely no reference to Thermidor. The central strategic concept that Trotsky had used from 1925 to 1933 was temporarily to virtually disappear from view.20

            Trotsky returns to the problem of Thermidor in 1935. He now openly admits that “the analogy of Thermidor served to becloud rather than to clarify the question”. Thermidor in the French Revolution is now defined as a counter-revolutionary overturn in a narrowly restricted political sense. The political/social distinction made for Soviet development by Trotsky is introduced to his appreciation of the French Thermidor. The political change represented by Thermidor in France was undeniable, but Thermidor represents no change in the social basis of the revolution. The French revolution was bourgeois in character.

In essence it reduced itself to the replacement of fixed feudal property by “free” bourgeois property. The counter-revolution corresponding to this revolution would have had to attain the re-establishment of feudal property. But Thermidor did not even make an attempt in this direction.

However, political Thermidor did represent a change; power was transferred “into the hands of the more moderate and conservative Jacobins, the better-to-do elements of bourgeois society”.21

            By his reconsideration of Thermidor, Trotsky had paved the way for the reintroduction of the analogy to his analysis of Soviet history. Now Trotsky had established a direct parallel between the French and Russian revolutions in the course of their “second chapters”. In both cases, the revolutionary state was seen as subject to a process of degeneration such that the political conquests of the revolution were considerably compromised. But, in both cases, the social conquests, the transition from on mode of production to another, had been preserved, even if in a surprising manner. Once more, the French Revolution would present an irresistible temptation as a storehouse to be raided for theoretical concepts. The same pamphlet which admitted the unhelpful part played by Thermidor in previous Russian discussions also declared:

Today it is impossible to overlook that in the Soviet revolution also a shift to the right took place a long time ago, a shift entirely analogous to Thermidor, although much slower in tempo, and more masked in form … The year 1924 – that was the beginning of the Soviet Thermidor.22

The article announcing Trotsky’s reacceptance of the term Thermidor also marks definitive acceptance by Trotsky of the term Bonapartism as directly applicable to the current Soviet regime. “The present political regime in the USSR is the regime of Soviet (or anti-Soviet) Bonapartism, closer in type to the Empire than the Consulate”.23 Hitherto, Trotsky had warned of the threat of Bonapartism or had described certain features of the regime as Bonapartist (the single leader, a dictatorial style, forms of plebiscitary affirmation of the leadership) but he had hesitated to invoke the term Bonapartism as a comprehensive assessment of the current regime. Now, however, he unequivocally condemned the regime as Bonapartist. Analogy proved irresistibly tempting, surely the more so because his analysis paralleled so closely Marx’s writings on Bonapartism.24

Commentary

What were the strengths of Trotsky’s use of Thermidor? Primarily that he understood that it was possible to find parallels between the political processes of different revolutions. In consistency with a view which he had developed for ten years, Trotsky in Revolution Betrayed stated: “The axiomlike assertions of Soviet literature, to the effect that the laws of bourgeois revolution are inapplicable to a proletarian revolution have no scientific content whatever”.25

            First of all, Trotsky, over and over again, indicates that the Thermidor represents reaction clothed in the banners of revolution.

When the Opposition spoke of the danger of Thermidor, it had in mind primarily a very significant and widespread process within the party: the growth of a stratum of Bolsheviks who had separated themselves from the masses, felt secure, connected themselves with non-proletarian circles, and were satisfied with their social status, analogous to the strata of bloated Jacobins who became, in part, the support and the prime executive apparatus of the Thermidorean overturn in 1794, thus paving the road for Bonapartism.26

Secondly, Trotsky saw a certain law-like tendency for revolution to be followed by counter-revolution on the basis of features of class consciousness. The first systematic discussion of the ideas which became characteristic of Trotsky’s Thermidor analogy is in a series of notes, apparently written by Trotsky for his diary in November 1926 and marked “for reflection”.27 The notes conclude that “to speak of Thermidor as an accomplished fact would be a crude distortion of reality”, but they indicate the possibility of a Thermidor. A crucial element in this is played by the class consciousness of the revolutionary class after the fall of the old regime.

The succession of revolutions and counterrevolutions is the product of certain fundamental features in the mechanics of class society. Revolution is impossible without the participation of the masses. This participation is in its turn possible only when the oppressed masses connect their hopes for a better future with the idea of revolution. In a sense the hopes engendered by the revolution are always exaggerated … But from these same conditions comes one of the most important – and moreover, one of the most common – elements of the counterrevolution. The conquests gained in the struggle do not correspond, and in the nature of things, cannot directly correspond, with the expectation of the broad backward masses awakened for the first time in the course of the revolution. The disillusionment of these masses, their return to routine and futility, is as much an integral part of the post-revolutionary period as is the passage into the camp of “law and order” of those “satisfied” classes or layers of classes that had participated in the revolution…

Moods of caution, scepticism, lack of responsiveness to revolutionary appeals “constitute the basic background of party life”; they are the moods which bureaucratism “banks on”. Such moods together with “the fatigue of the older generation” present one of the bases on which a restoration of capitalism is possible.

            Trotsky, in various places, indicates that, although counter-revolutions may follow revolutions, they do not completely reverse the work of the revolution. For instance, the diary notes of November 1926 begin by noting that “Revolutions have always in history been followed by counterrevolutions. Counterrevolutions have always thrown society back but never as far back as the starting point of the revolution”. This was so in France: the restoration of the monarchy did not bring about a destruction of the Code Napoléon nor a restoration of feudalism. It was to prove to be so in Russia: the Stalinist counter-revolution did not, yet at least, secure the restoration of capitalism.

            Trotsky articulated the Thermidor analogy during a period of relative uncertainty regarding the course of Soviet development. There was a sureness of touch in his political analyses of 1923, and a confidence in his own theories after 1933, almost until his death. But the period 1925 to 1933 presented some difficulties: the split in the triumvirate and the formation of the Leningrad Opposition; the separation of the Right and Centre with the victory of the Centre; the rapid dismantling of NEP; the turn to industrialisation and collectivisation; and the consolidation of Stalin’s power. Trotsky found concepts to deal with all this, and even anticipated a split between Right and Centre. However, what seemed difficult for him to accept was the ability of the Stalinist Centre to so completely vanquish the forces of capitalism and to base itself on nationalised property and sustain a policy of industrial development. So, alongside some acute insights into political processes, one discovers a perspective which proved ill-founded.

            However wrong, Trotsky’s perspective of this period was, it is not difficult to see how and why it was adopted. The NEP was a concession to the self-interest of the peasantry, a recognition that capitalism in the countryside could not be so easily transcended as some Bolsheviks had imagined during the period of War Communism. NEP essentially did present some danger of the restoration of capitalism, but, in the end, a rather remote danger. The NEP also, surely, did have an influence on the Party. It did cause social differentiation. It did bring some sections of the Party and state bureaucracy into contact with “private” interests in such a way as to exert a corrupting influence. Moreover, the exclusive alternative - capitalism or socialism - was a position commonly accepted. Few people, if any, anticipated the political dispossession of the working class, forcible surplus extraction from them and a regime which developed industry on the basis of nationalisation and not private ownership. From all this, it was not difficult to conclude that the main danger to the revolution was the restoration of capitalism.

            Trotsky based his political perspectives of 1925 to 1933 on a view which ultimately history demonstrated to him to be ill conceived. Nevertheless, while the restoration of capitalism was described as the Thermidor of the Russian Revolution, the conclusion could only be that it was necessary to base political tactics on this danger. This meant fighting for correct policies within the limits of Party discipline and not weakening the unity of the Party, in the face of the danger of capitalist restoration. It meant a resolute hostility towards Bukharin and those of rightist dispositions; and it meant critical support for actions of the Stalinists against the policies of the Right (even if this could not in practice be distinguished from the consolidation of bureaucratic methods in political struggle).28 It might not unreasonably be concluded that the tactics that derived from the strategic conception of a struggle against Thermidor (as capitalist restoration) tended to reduce the effectiveness of the Left’s Opposition struggle against the bureaucracy (or as Trotsky after 1935 would regard it “Thermidor as bureaucratic degeneration”).

            It is true that, for Trotsky, these were two aspects of the same struggle: the attempt to win the Party to the policies of the Bolshevik-Leninists, that is the Left Opposition, and thereby advance proletarian interests. But it is equally true that, in certain instances, emphasis on one or other of the two sides of the struggle could produce different tactical positions, as for example in the evaluation of the policy changes of 1928. The apostasy of a majority of leaders of the Left Opposition has its basis less in repression and more in the implications of the strategic conception advocated especially by Trotsky and generalised in the concepts of the Thermidor.

            Trotsky’s usage of Thermidor in his later works prompts two further criticisms. The first is that, to an ever-increasing extent, the specificity of the analogy is lost. The second, and more substantial, criticism raises the possible limits of any Marxist comparison of bourgeois and proletarian revolutions. The criticism is suggested by Trotsky himself, although not applied to his own theories. In setting it out, we must first return to Trotsky’s revision of his strategic position regarding the Stalinist regime.

            The originality of Trotsky’s position of 1933 lies in its repudiation of the necessity of political criteria for the recognition of a workers’ state. Trotsky introduces a new concept to the lexicon of Marxist politics in 1933: the degenerated workers’ state. The term is highly significant. It is qualitatively different from the concept of a workers’ state with bureaucratic deformations, the view which Lenin takes of the young Soviet state. According to Trotsky’s new view, it is possible for a workers’ state to continue to exist even after the process of degeneration has been completed to the point where a new political revolution is urged by a new revolutionary party. This apparently bizarre position represented, in fact, a retreat from the problems of analysing the Soviet regime. Working with the traditional Marxist concepts, Trotsky, after arguing that there was neither capitalism nor socialism in the Soviet Union, was left with the transition between them, the workers’ state. However, it had become clear that the bureaucracy was an entrenched group, unwilling to be moved by demands for reform. Therefore, a new political revolution was required, but it was evident that this revolution would not change the forms of property, since nationalised property already predominated, therefore it could not be regarded as a social revolution. The conclusion was that the regime had to be regarded as a degenerated workers’ state, since the bureaucracy, by preserving nationalised property, was still expressing the workers’ interests.

            The objections to this theory are many and varied. Some have argued that the real relations of production differed little from capitalism as a far as the position of the workers was concerned and that the position of the bureaucracy was effectively that of a new ruling class. Others have suggested that the criterion of nationalisations is formal, and that the touchstone of the definition of a workers’ state should be the collective control of the means of production by the associated producers and the consequent existence of planning. The social and political contradictions of the current regime give rise not to planning but to a more or less coercive attempt to administer. This is clearly not the place to discuss the various criticisms of Trotsky’s view that have been made or that might be made. What we are interested in here is the relevance of the Thermidor analogy to the “mature” characterisation of Soviet society that Trotsky advanced.

            Once Trotsky had re-evaluated his earlier view of Thermidor as social counter-revolution, it is clear that the revised political definition of Thermidor could serve a purpose. It could serve as an analogy between the social and political relationships of a bourgeois revolution and the social and political relationships of Soviet development. Thermidor as a model was irresistible as a defence of the view that the Soviet state was a degenerated workers’ state. Political counterrevolution alongside the preservation of the social revolution. This, in Trotsky’s analysis, was the course of Soviet development. Was it not also the meaning of Thermidor?

The overturn of the Ninth Thermidor did not liquidate the basic conquests of the bourgeois revolution, but it did transfer power into the hands of the more moderate and conservative Jacobins, the better-to-do elements of bourgeois society. Today it is impossible to overlook that in the Soviet revolution also a shift to the right took place a long time ago, a shift entirely analogous to Thermidor, although much slower in tempo, and more marked in form.29

If bourgeois society could survive with a variety of different forms, why could not a workers’ state continue to exist in the Soviet Union taking different forms?

            In fact, Trotsky answers this question in the pamphlet which readopted the Thermidor analogy. The question with which implicitly he is concerned is why a degenerated workers’ state cannot create a socialist society but, in fact, it seems that Trotsky here points to a crucial objection to his own theories, although without recognising it as such.

The proletarian revolution not only frees the productive forces from the fetters of private ownership, but it transfers them to the direct disposal of the state that it itself creates. While the bourgeois state, after the revolution confines itself to a police role, leaving the market to its own laws, the workers’ state assumes the direct role of economist and organizer. The replacement of one political regime by another exerts only an indirect and superficial influence upon market economy.30

Trotsky continues by asserting that the replacement of a workers’ government by a bourgeois or petty-bourgeois government “would inevitably lead to the liquidation of the planned beginnings and, subsequently to the restoration of private property”. But, surely, the argument also applies with full force to a regime which has degenerated from revolutionary ideals to such a point where the call for a new revolution is felt to be necessary; to a regime which does not depend on democracy; to a regime which creates and defends social inequality and material privilege; and so on? Trotsky’s Thermidor analogy, if it means anything, means that an impeccable class background and a revolutionary history offer no guarantees for future action. Why then restrict the alternative to a workers’ government or a bourgeois or petty-bourgeois government? Why not add to these a government which has its past in the workers’ revolutionary movement but its present in the offices of state and party administration, the safe end of a machine gun, the guard house of a prison camp, the soft chair of a roomy flat, the material comfort of privileged access, special shops, thenomenklatura system and so on?

            Trotsky continues:

In contradistinction to capitalism socialism is built not automatically but consciously … Socialism can acquire an immutable character only at a very high stage of development … At the given stage of development, the socialist construction stands and falls with the workers’ state … Only after thoroughly pondering the difference between the laws of the formation of bourgeois (‘anarchistic’) and socialist (‘planned’) economy, it is possible to understand those limits beyond which the analogy with the Great French Revolution cannot pass (emphasis in the original).

Trotsky puts clearly the objection to the analogy in its revised form. The concept has been re-introduced in an attempt to support his distinction between political counterrevolution and social counterrevolution. Given the Marxist approach, this is satisfactory for a bourgeois revolution. As Trotsky indicates, there is a relative autonomy of the state and the political sphere in capitalist society. Classes are established outside the arena of politics. But, surely, for a post-capitalist society the situation is quite different, and therefore the analogy dubious. Trotsky, in the passages quoted above argued cogently for the view that the working class can only articulate itself as the ruling class by political means. The position of the state is central once private ownership of the means of production is abolished. How, then, can a political counterrevolution be anything other than a social counterrevolution at the same time? Is it not control of the means of production, rather than ownership by itself, that is decisive? How can the working class control the means of production except through the state? These powerful objections to Trotsky’s theory are not removed by resort to the analogy of Thermidor. In the end, the term mainly served as a historical invocation to justify a theory which proved increasingly absurd by the standards both of common sense and theoretical analysis.

Conclusion

Trotsky’s first major theoretical enquiries attempted to employ the standards of the French Revolution in its ascendancy as a yardstick against which to assess the prospects of revolution in Russia. At the end of his life, Trotsky was still pondering the mysteries of revolution in the light of comparisons between France and Russia, by now absorbed in the problems of revolutionary decline. Frequently, political analogy mystifies as much as it reveals. Was it so with Trotsky? His uses of Thermidor surely assisted understanding of some of the processes of degeneration, but, in the end, more was asked of the analogy than it could bear. In his mature usage, Trotsky conflated two separable problems within the notion of Thermidor. The first was the political process of bureaucratisation; the second, the nature of the society which was being formed through the experience of Stalinism. Without doubt, Trotsky’s handling of the first problem was far surer than his approach to the second.

            How was it possible to make sense of a society where the working class had lost power, but capitalism and the power of the bourgeoisie had not been restored? Trotsky’s commitment to struggle against Stalinism was unquestionable, heroic, and inspiring. Yet his legacy as a theoretician is ambiguous. There was a failure to recognise that the society being established in the process of counter-revolution required its own forms of analysis; this was demonstrated by the continued prominence in Trotsky’s work of the Thermidor analogy. For all the insight he provides into the decay of a revolution, he fails to transcend a conventional view of the transition to socialism. When that process is brought to a halt, he has little to say beyond general political slogans. He concludes that the Soviet Union in its Stalinist form has no right to survive for more than a moment; there is no room for it in his theory of history. But, unfortunately, and not only for Trotsky, it has survived, and requires an investigation which sees Trotsky not as a map but simply as a signpost.

* References to the series of volumes published by Pathfinder Press, New York, which collect Trotsky’s shorter published writings of the exile years are indicated thus: WLT, with the relevant dating. For the years 1929 to 1933 citations are from the first editions, published 1972 to 1975, and for the years 1933 to 1940 they are from the second editions, published 1973 to 1978.

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• 1. This paper was originally published in a volume bringing together papers presented at a conference in Italy : Pensiero e azione politica di Lev Trockij: atti del convegno internazionale per il quarantesimo anniversario della morte, ed. Francesca Gori (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki. 1982), 2: 433-449.
• 2. TROTSKY, ‘Two Speeches at the Central Control Commission, 1927’, in Ip., The Stalin School of Falsification, New York 1972, p. 143.
• 3. J. KEEP, 1917: ‘The Tyranny of Paris over Petrograd’, Soviet Studies, vol. XX, 1968-69, n. 1, pp. 22-35.
• 4. I. KNIZNIK, Cto Citat po Obscestvennym Naukam: Sistemasticeskij Ukazatel’ Kommunisticeskoj i Marksisticeskoj Literatury 1917-1923, Leningrad 1924.
• 5. TROTSKY, The Lessons of October reprinted in Ip., The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1923-25), New York 1975. The passage quoted appears on p. 202.
• 6. KPSS vs Rezoljucijach i Resenijach, Tom Vtoroj 1917-1924, Moskva 1970, p. 220.
• 7. A. MATHIEZ, ‘Bolshevism and Jacobinism’, Dissent, Winter 1955.
• 8. J. MARTOV, The State and the Socialist Revolution, partially published in translation in I. HOWE, Essential Works of Socialism, New York 1971. The passage quoted appears on p. 264.
• 9. V. SERGE, Year One of the Russian Revolution, London 1972, pp. 307-309.
• 10. Lenin, like Trotsky, considered approaching Russian Revolution in terms of a comparison with the French revolutions of 1789 and 1848. See: A Revolution of the 1789 or the 1848 Type?, March-April 1905, LENIN, Collected Works, vol. 8, Moscow 1962, pp. 257-259. He also, like Trotsky, made reference to the NEP as a possible Thermidor in a brief comment as part of his preparatory notes for a report to the Tenth Party Conference of May 1921 on the tax in kind. He wrote: “Thermidor? Soberly, it may be, yes? Will be? We shall see”, P.S.S., XLIII, p. 403. This idea did not find a place in the speech Lenin actually delivered. Lenin’s notes for the speech, first published in 1932, were not published in the relevant volume of the English edition of the Collected Works, published in 1969.
• 11. In his pamphlet One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, Lenin declared: “The division into majority and minority is a direct and inevitable continuation of that division of the Social Democrats into a revolutionary and an opportunist wing, into a Mountain and a Gironde, which did not appear only yesterday, nor in the Russian workers’ party alone, and which no doubt will not disappear tomorrow”. Later in the pamphlet, Lenin responds to criticism from Axelrod of “Jacobin” conceptions of revolution. He asserts that Axelrod is at one with “the Girondists of present day Social Democracy everywhere” who “always resort to the terms ‘Jacobinism’, ‘Blanquism’, and so on to describe their opponents … These ‘dreadful words’ – Jacobinism and the rest – are expressive of opportunism and nothing else. A Jacobin who wholly identifies himself with the organisation of the proletariat a proletariat conscious of its class interests – is a revolutionary Social-Democrat”. LENIN, Collected Works cit., vol. 7, pp. 344, 381, 383. See also Lenin’s response to Rosa Luxemburg’s review of One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, where he denies that he introduced the analogy with Jacobinism to the current debate but accepts the parallel between the “revolutionary” wing of Russian social-democracy and the Jacobins. Collected Works, vol. 7, pp. 474-485.
• 12. Originally published under the title Mezhdu Imperializmom i Revoliuciei. Published in translation as TROTSKY, Social Democracy and the Wars of Intervention in Russia 1918-1921 (Between Red and White), London 1975, The passage quoted appears on p. 83.
• 13. TROTSKY, The New Course, Ann Arbor 1965, pp. 92, 40.
• 14. TROTSKY, ‘Two Speeches at the Central Control Commission’, 1927, in Ip., The Stalin School of Falsification cit., p. 142.
• 15. As early as September 1926, Trotsky had predicted: “It is quite clear that neither Tomsky nor Bukharin nor Rykov, because of their past, their moral authority, and so forth are not and cannot be capable of playing the role under Stalin that is played by Uglanov, Kagonovic, Petrovskij and company. To amputate the present Opposition would in fact inevitably mean the transformation into an opposition of the rest of the former group in the Central Committee. A new discussion would then be in order, in the course of which Kaganovic would unmask Rykov, Uglanov would do the same for Tomsky, while the Slepkovs, Stalins and company expose Bukharin”, T.A., T-891.
• 16. For a reference to Thermidor as “capitalism on the installment plan” see: TROTSKY, ‘The War Danger – The Defense Policy and the Opposition, Speech at the Joint Plenary Session of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission (1 August 1927)’, in Stalin School of Falsification cit., p. 172. The reference to “film of reformism” is from The Class Nature of the Soviet State, 1 October 1933, W.L.T., 1933-1934, p. 103: “He who asserts that the Soviet government has gradually changed from proletarian to bourgeois is only so to speak, running backwards the film of reformism”. Similar statements are made elsewhere; for example: “how … can anyone assume or believe that power can pass from the hands of the Russian proletariat into the hands of the bourgeoisie in a peaceful, tranquil, imperceptible, bureaucratic manner? Such a conception of Thermidor is nothing else but inverted reformism”. ‘Defense of the Soviet Republic and the Opposition’, 7 September 1929, W.L.T. 1929, p. 284.
• 17. TROTSKY, ‘The Bloc of the Right and the Left’, 21 November 1930, W.L.T. 1930-1931, p. 58.
• 18. TROTKSY, The Platform of the Joint Opposition (1927), p. 108.
• 19. TROTSKY, ‘The Three Factions in the Comintern’, 1930, W.L.T. 1930, p. 15.
• 20. TROTSKY, The Class Nature of the Soviet State, 1 October 1933, W.L.T. 1933-1934, pp. 168, 174.
• 21. TROTSKY, ‘The Workers’ State, Thermidor and Bonapartism’, 1 February 1935, W.L.T. 1934-1935, pp. 168, 174.
• 22. Ibidem, p. 174.
• 23. Ibidem, p. 182.
• 24. Marx in an assessment of the Second Empire in France had written: “In reality it was the only form of government possible at a time when the bourgeoisie had already lost, and the working class had not yet acquired, the faculty of ruling the nation”. K. MARX, The Civil War in France, London 1921, p. 30. Trotsky’s assessment of the Stalinist regime in Russia was a mirror image of this assessment.
• 25. TROTSKY, The Revolution Betrayed, New York 1970, p. 89.
• 26. TROTSKY, ‘Thermidor and Bonapartism’, 26 November 1930, W.L.T. 1930-1931, p. 75.
• 27. TROTSKY, Iz Dnevnika (Dlja Pamjati), 26 November 1926, T.A., T-3015.
• 28. For example: “(The Bolshevik-Leninists) … will support every real, even if timid and insufficient step toward the Left taken by the Centrist leaders”. Krizis prevo-centrist-kogo bloka i perspektivy, October or November 1928, T.A., T-3143.
• 29. TROTSKY, ‘The Workers’ State, Thermidor and Bonapartism’, 1 February 1935, W.L.T. 1934-1935, pp. 173, 174.
• 30. Ibidem, p. 179.