Owen Miller,  SOAS, University of London

In the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, I came across a post on Facebook that caught my eye immediately: images of a newly-discovered article from a Chinese Trotskyist journal of the 1940s containing news of a Trotskyist organisation in US-occupied South Korea.1 This was astonishing because I’d never previously seen or even heard of any evidence of Korean Trotskyists in the 1940s. The closest thing that came to mind were one or two Korean communist intellectuals of the time who seemed to hold positions similar to those espoused by Trotsky, whether by distant influence or coincidence. But, here it was, in black and white, in the Chinese-language journal New Banner:2 an article about a Trotskyist seaman of unidentified nationality who had recently called into a port in Korea and encountered a substantial Trotskyist organisation called the Internationalist Communist Party of Korea. The report claimed that the party had split from the Korean Communist Party six years previously and saw itself as politically aligned with the Fourth International, although its leading members knew little about the FI and were eager for news about Trotskyists around the world and their positions on major current events. The Chinese article relates that the foreign sailor spent time with the leaders of the organisation and learned about political events in South Korea and the current situation of the non-Stalinist left there before leaving the country.

This newly-discovered article immediately raised a series of questions about who the mysterious sailor was and whom he had met in Korea in 1946, but, above all, it begged for corroborating evidence. It seemed highly unlikely that an article from a Chinese Trotskyist journal would be entirely fictional, so it had to be based on another source. But it also seemed unlikely that everything in the article could be correct, as the organisation described had never been heard of before. Moreover, the idea that the Korean Communist Party – which barely existed in 1940 – had suffered a Trotskyist split while under the most repressive period of Japanese colonial rule seemed far-fetched. Based on a few clues in the text, I had a hunch that the sailor mentioned in the article was likely to be American, or at least from an English-speaking country. So, on the off-chance I would find something, I began looking at issues of the US Trotskyist newspaper The Militant from around the time that theNew Banner article was published in the first half of 1947. Quite quickly, I found something promising: an article in the 15 March issue of the newspaper headlined: ‘What I Saw In Korea Under American Rule’ by a man named Bill Morgan.3 This article is written by a Trotskyist sailor from the US and describes his recent sojourn in US-occupied southern Korea. Morgan provides considerable detail and colour about the three weeks he spent in the southeastern seaport of Pusan, describing the poverty, black marketeering and the brutality of the police under US occupation. However, there is no mention of Korean Trotskyists and almost no discussion of the Korean left at all, until the enigmatic final sentences:

Korean Marxists have had a long and militant history. They are stronger today than ever. Only the reactionary policy of the Stalinists prevents the Korean workers from coming to open revolutionary grips with Wall Street’s oppression. The official Stalinist party in Southern Korea is disintegrating, however. Many thousands of workers have organized into new groups and are carrying on a militant class struggle.4

It struck me immediately after reading this article that there was little chance of this being a coincidence: Bill Morgan had to be the foreign sailor mentioned in the Chinese article on Korean Trotskyists and he had most likely written a more detailed private report which had informed that article. Presumably, security considerations prevented Morgan and The Militant from publishing anything about his encounters with Korean revolutionaries, but there are clear hints in the lines quoted above that the author knew about ‘new groups’ that were opposed to the policy of the Stalinist communist party in southern Korea.

There seemed to be the slightest glimmer of hope that an internal report by Bill Morgan on his stay in Korea might still exist in an archive somewhere, so I began to look at the catalogues of archives relating to US Trotskyists and Trotskyist organisations held at places like the Tamiment Library at New York University and the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford. The latter archive holds both the Joseph Hansen Papers, which contain a folder of correspondence with ‘Bill and Ada Morgan’, and also the Papers of the Socialist Workers’ Party (the American Trotskyist organisation that published The Militant newspaper). Tantalisingly, in the finding aid for the SWP papers,5 I found reference to a folder marked simply, ‘Korea, 1946’. With the help of David Palumbo-Liu at Stanford University, I was able to obtain a scan of the contents of this folder and it turned out to be exactly what I had been looking for: Bill Morgan’s account of his visit to Korea. Curtly headed ‘Report on Korea’, and presumably intended only for the central committee of the Socialist Workers’ Party, the report runs to seven pages of typescript and contains much more detail than either the New Banner article or the report inThe Militant. Moreover, it became obvious from reading the Bill Morgan report that the Chinese article consisted almost entirely of excerpts translated verbatim from the report.

Before delving more into the content of the report and the further questions it raises about Trotskyism in 1940s Korea, it is necessary to pause for some historical context. Until now, the documented history of Korean Trotskyism only goes back to the late 1980s, when some of the works of Trotsky first began to be translated into Korean by activists and scholars. At the same time, Trotskyist ideas began to break through the stranglehold of varieties of Stalinism on the Korean left since socialist politics had re-emerged in the late 70s and early 80s, after decades of dictatorship. The first work of Trotsky to appear in South Korea was The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects, which was translated and published in 1988.6 The first Korean organisation espousing Trotskyist and Third Campist positions – the International Socialists of South Korea – emerged in the early 1990s and it was not until the mid 1990s that some of the well-known works of Trotsky, such as The Revolution Betrayed,7 were finally translated. The emergence of new evidence that there was a Korean Trotskyist organisation more than four decades before the first work of Trotsky was ever published in Korean was therefore quite surprising. However, if we look at the objective conditions of US-occupied Korea in the late 1940s, the emergence of a Trotskyist current there does not seem so surprising.

During WWII, many Trotskyists predicted that the war would give rise to a global wave of revolution on a scale last seen immediately after WWI. While this prediction proved to be wrong in a general sense, many colonial or former colonial countries did experience a revolutionary situation in the postwar period, usually aimed at achieving independence and implementing modernising social reforms. In Korea, there was also a revolutionary feeling in the air as the country was liberated from 35 years of Japanese colonial occupation in August 1945. Koreans expected not only a return to independence but also substantial social change, including land reform, labour reform, nationalisation of industry and democracy.8 In effect, they anticipated changes in their society that at the time came under the general rubric of ‘socialism’. However, at the very moment Korea was liberated from the Japanese in August 1945, it was divided between the two superpowers, the US and the USSR. Stalin readily agreed to this partition of the peninsula in order to gain a bigger foothold for Russia in East Asia, ordering his advancing troops – who had already entered Korea on August 12 – to halt at the 38^th parallel, just north of the capital Seoul. There were attempts in early September to form an independent national government on the basis of the ‘people’s committees’ that had sprung up all over the country after August 15, but this ‘Korean People’s Republic’ was swept aside by the US Army after it arrived at the port of Incheon on September 8 and instituted its military occupation government under General Hodge. Thus, from September 1945, Korea had replaced one hated colonial power with two occupying armies, and the new occupiers set out from early on to find reliable allies in their sector and begin the process of ensuring a ‘friendly’ regime on the peninsula once they had left.

In the northern occupation zone, the Soviets took a somewhat different approach to the Americans in the south, co-opting the people’s committees rather than outlawing them. They also moved swiftly to put their trusted Stalinist allies from various parts of the disparate Korean communist movement into positions of power. Most prominent among them was a certain former anti-Japanese guerrilla named Kim Il Sung, who had spent most of WWII as a Soviet Army officer in far eastern Russia. In 1946, the Soviets and their Korean allies quickly initiated a series of social reforms that went some way to fulfilling the hopes of liberated Koreans: completely overhauling the land tenure system, nationalising formerly Japanese-owned industry and enshrining formal gender equality in law.9 Thus a substantial gap opened up between the northern and southern zones, and the frustration in the US zone at the lack of democracy or social reform and the worsening economic situation exploded into a series of mass strikes, violent demonstrations and peasant uprisings in the autumn of 1946.10

All this created much potential for a revolutionary uprising in the south, but the policies of the Korean Stalinists tended to work directly against the revolutionary tendencies in Korean society. The Korean Communist Party, which re-formed in the autumn of 1945 and in August 1946 fused with another party to become the Korean Workers’ Party (with separate sections in north and south), was close to Moscow from early on, even in the south away from the direct control of the Soviets. As a result, when the question of a four-power trusteeship over the Korean peninsula became a major issue during the winter of 1945-46, the Korean Communists toed the official Moscow line of supporting trusteeship negotiations between the US and Soviet Union, making them instantly unpopular among swathes of the population. Not only this, but the Stalinists in southern Korea took a generally passive or even at times supportive position with regards to the US military occupation, no doubt following instructions from Stalin that they should not rock the boat and upset the US-Soviet Joint Commission. As Bill Morgan notes in his report (interestingly, a point that is repeated in the New Banner article), the Korean Communists stood candidates for the US military government’s ‘Interim Legislative Assembly’ elections in the autumn of 1946, until they were forced to withdraw them by popular demand.11 Taken together, the revolutionary situation and the lack of leadership from the Stalinist left show that there was a clear political space in US-occupied south Korea for a revolutionary socialist organisation that would oppose the US military occupation as well as the Soviet occupation of northern Korea and the Korean Stalinists who were beholden to Moscow. But, until now, there has been little evidence of such an organisation to the left of the Stalinist Communist party, let alone an organisation that identified itself with Trotskyism.12

Turning to Bill Morgan’s report, I will draw out some of the most interesting elements within the document and then conclude by looking at the big questions it leaves unanswered. First, it’s worth noting that there is very little contextual information about the document, such as who exactly it was written for and when it was written. The document heading contains only the title ‘Report on Korea’ and a note that outlines the other places Morgan’s ship called in at besides Korea. However, it can be assumed that the report was meant only for the internal use of the SWP and perhaps to be shared with other organisations within the Fourth International, since it clearly made it in some form to Trotskyists in China. The first part of the report describes Morgan’s arrival in the south-eastern port of Pusan (often called Fusan at the time, according to Japanese pronunciation) and his encounters with local black marketeers. He quickly set about trying to find Korean political contacts and struck lucky when he found a bookshop that had a single Marxist book on the shelves in English. This led to a conversation with the owner of the bookshop and a further meeting with him and a friend where they began to discuss socialist politics and the Trotskyist leaders in the US. According to Morgan, the two Koreans then took him into their confidence and told him that they knew of the Fourth International and were waiting to be contacted by comrades from the organisation. They also told him that they had split from the Korean Communist Party six years previously and that there were now four Marxist parties in Korea, including the official Stalinist party. The claim that there had been a split in the Korea communists six years before – e.g. in 1940 – is one of the most puzzling things in the whole document, since, in 1940, all communists in Korea itself were either in prison or living underground and there was no Korean Communist Party to speak of.13 It seems possible that there was a misunderstanding here and Morgan actually misheard ‘six months’. There was much political turmoil on the left in Korea during late 1945 and 1946 and it is very likely that a number of new socialist parties were formed during this period.

After this, Morgan describes how he was introduced to more of the men’s comrades and learned that their programme was “substantially the same” as the Trotskyist one he outlined and that their organisation was formally called the ‘International Communist Party of Korea’.14 On the following day, Morgan was taken to address a mass meeting of the party’s followers in a warehouse five miles from the centre of Pusan.15 At the meeting, he was told that “three thousand workers and intellectuals were present”. In a moment of some levity, Morgan says that he was introduced to the meeting as “Comrade from country which is the monster imperialist” and given the temporary pseudonym “Comrade Kim Boy”. After the mass meeting, Morgan continued to spend time with the leaders of the organisation and came to know the leader by the initials L.B.S. He apparently had a publishing house in Seoul that published textbooks by day and printed Marxist works at night. Although he had published works by Lenin and Engels since liberation in 1945, he did not have access to works by Trotsky and was keen to read and publish his writings, especially on the Soviet Union. From L.B.S. Morgan learned that the International Communist Party of Korea was not the only organisation in the country that agreed with the Fourth International and that there were multiple groups based in different regions who needed to be united around a common programme. Apparently, there was even a Korean organisation with a ‘third camp’ position close to that of the US Workers’ Party, which rejected the mainstream Trotskyist position of defence of the Soviet Union. The Korean comrades were most anxious for support from the Fourth International and apparently “begged for assistance on political work”, including not only the despatch of books and papers to Korea but also a comrade who could “stay with them for a few months or more”, whom “they could support … and teach enough Korean to speak and write in about six or eight weeks of constant study.” In addition, they asked to be put in touch with Trotskyists in Japan as soon as possible.16

In the final paragraphs of the report, Morgan describes meeting some Koreans who had come down from the Soviet-occupied zone north of the 38^th parallel and hearing their “horrible stories of looting, murder, rape and wholesale removal of villages and towns by the Russian Army”. Not only did these refugees from the north prefer to live in the American zone because they had the opportunity to organise there but, according to Morgan, many of them also held a defeatist position on the Soviet Union, like the third campists. On the last page of the report, Morgan briefly discusses the current political situation in US-occupied south Korea, mentioning the failures of the Stalinist Communists in south Korea with regards to the US military government’s interim legislative assembly elections. Morgan records that he left Korea for Japan on 30 December 1946. If we note the period of ‘three weeks’ that he mentions in his article forThe Militant it would appear that the whole of Morgan’s visit to Pusan fell within the month of December.

The Bill Morgan report is undoubtedly an important document for the history of the Korean left. It opens up the intriguing possibility of a Trotskyist current in Korean politics 40 years earlier than previously known and the existence of an organisation that, had it been more successful and not disappeared into oblivion, might have had a profound effect on the course of Korea’s history in the post-liberation period. Since discovering the report at the end of 2020, I have attempted to find corroborating evidence for the existence of the organisation described in the document in other places, including in Korean-language research on the period, but so far to no avail. The authenticity of the document seems unquestionable, but this still leaves some fundamental questions about the accuracy of Bill Morgan’s report. Did he actually witness a substantial, functioning Trotskyist organisation in Pusan in the winter of 1946?

It is noticeable that Morgan does not explicitly call the organisation he encountered ‘Trotskyist’. He notes that the leaders were interested in reading and publishing the works of Trotsky, that the programme of their organisation was aligned with that of the FI and that they requested direct assistance from the FI, but this was clearly not an ‘official’ Trotskyist organisation. It seems that it was a spontaneous anti-Stalinist split from the official communist organisation that had similar criticisms of Stalinism to the global Trotskyist movement and had a vague awareness of its existence, presumably through the media rather than direct contacts. This raises the further question of when and how such a split came about and what the other non-Stalinist communist organisations were that Morgan is told about by his Korean contacts. As I noted above, the idea of a split from the Korean Communist Party in 1940 seems unlikely, not least because such a party did not really exist at that time. But, during the tumultuous period of 1945-48, it is quite feasible that there were a multitude of competing minor left-wing parties that have been largely forgotten by history. Even for a minor party though, the International Communist Party of Korea sounds quite impressive from Morgan’s description: an organisation that could muster thousands of workers for a rally and had an armed militia patrolling the neighbourhood. For an organisation that no-one has heard of, this sounds astonishing, but it is worth remembering the context in which Morgan visited Korea. He arrived at Pusan only two months after an armed uprising of workers and peasants had swept the southeast of Korea, which could help to explain both the level of fervour and mobilisation that Morgan witnessed and the fact that security was such an important consideration for left-wing organisations during the post-uprising period of repression.

Finally, there is the question of who the leaders of this organisation were and whether they can be traced in the historical record. Bill Morgan left a handful of important clues in his report, making this one of the most promising avenues for discovering more about the Korean Trotskyists of 1946-1947. Most intriguingly there is the appearance of the initials L.B.S. for the name of the man who was the leader and Morgan’s main contact in the party. It looks very much like it stands for the three characters of a Korean name, probably with the surname Lee (or Yi), although I have not found a good candidate in my searches so far. There is also the fact that L.B.S. was the proprietor of a publishing company in Seoul. The years immediately after liberation in Korea saw an explosion of left-wing publishing after decades of Japanese repression and there have been some detailed studies of the numerous new publishing companies that sprang up, offering the possibility of identifying the textbook publisher mentioned by Morgan. Another route might be to look at local histories of the left and left-wing bookshops in Pusan to see if the bookshop that Morgan mentions can be identified or possibly even a locally-based left-wing organisation that has been overlooked by nationally-focused histories. Perhaps, due to the vicissitudes and destruction of mid-twentieth century Korean history (civil war and repressive states north and south) we may never know more about the International Communist Party of Korea. But I’m hopeful that more material could come to light and we might even find out what happened to the party and its leadership. Did the Fourth International ever get in contact with them after Bill Morgan’s visit? Were the Korean Trotskyists crushed by the repression of the US Military Government and their allies in the South Korean right-wing? Or did they escape to the North, only to be purged by the formidable security apparatus of the Kim Il Sung regime? Perhaps they simply faded into obscurity in the maelstrom of the late 1940s? Any of these possibilities would help to explain why this early Korean encounter with Trotskyism was lost to history for the next 75 years.

owenski@gmail.com

• 1. The discoverer of this article in the Chinese archives was Yan Chaofan, a scholar based at Wuhan University.
• 2. The article appears in New Banner, issue 16, p15. The journal was the monthly publication of the minority faction led by Wang Fanxi and Zheng Chaolin within the Chinese Communist League and a total of 20 issues were published in the period 1946-1948. Details can be found on the Marxists’ Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/chinese/reference-books/new-banner/index.htm
• 3. Bill Morgan wrote frequently for The Militant on trade union issues and had apparently been a “leading militant in the unemployed movement”. See: Cannon et al. 2004, The Fight Against Fascism in the USA, p121.
• 4. The Militant, March 15, 1947, p3. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/themilitant/1947/v11n11-mar-15-1947.pdf
• 5. The finding aid can be found here: http://pdf.oac.cdlib.org/pdf/hoover/socworpa.pdf
• 6. Published as Yŏnsok hyŏngmyŏng, p’yŏngga wa chŏnmang by the socialist publisher Sinp’yŏngnon.
• 7. The Revolution Betrayed was translated into Korean by Kim Songhun and first published in 1995.
• 8. These aspirations are well represented in the platform and policies of the People’s Republic of Korea proclaimed on September 6, 1945 (see Chung 1956, Korea Tomorrow: Land of the Morning Calm, pp304-305). They were also expressed in spontaneous revolutionary actions on the ground: the seizure of factories by workers’ committees and the seizure of land from landlords by peasants soon after liberation (see Chang 2020, ‘Independence without Liberation: Democratization as Decolonization Management in U.S.-Occupied Korea, 1945-1948’, pp81-84).
• 9. For more on the social reforms of 1946 see: Suzy Kim, Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, chapter 3.
• 10. The best English-language account of the 1946 ‘Autumn Harvest Uprisings’ is in Cumings 1981, The Origins of the Korean War, vol 1, chapter 10.
• 11. While the Moscow-aligned communists in South Korea tended to hold back the radicalism of the Korean masses in the earlier period of the US occupation (1945-1946), they shifted left and became more confrontational in the later period (1947-1948) when the US-Soviet Joint Commission collapsed and the US military government became more repressive towards the left. See Han Kyuhan, ‘Haebang konggan esŏ chwap’a ŭi chŏllyak’, in Han Kyuhan et al 2018, Marŭk’ŭsŭjuŭi ro pon han’guk hyŏndaesa, Seoul: Ch’aekkalp’i. For more on the interim legislative assembly see: Cumings 1981, The Origins of the Korean War, vol 1, pp260-262.
• 12. Factionalism within the Korean communists during the period after liberation has been quite well studied, including the story of the ‘Changan Faction’ who tried to re-found the Korean Communist party in August 1945 but were quickly defeated by Pak Hŏn-yŏng’s more pro-Moscow faction. Some of these non-mainstream Korean Communists, such as Im Hae, seem to have been quite close to Trotskyists on issues such as the nature of the Korean revolution (espousing a ‘permanent revolution’ position), but they have not been identified as Trotskyists as such. See: Sim Chi-yon 1987, Chosŏn hyŏngmyŏng non yŏn’gu, chapter 2.
• 13. Between 1939 and 1941, there was an attempt to re-found a Korean Communist Party in Seoul, usually referred to as the ‘Kyŏngsŏng K’om Group’, but it was crushed by the colonial police. There were also many diasporic Korean communists in the Soviet Union, China and Japan during the late 1930s and early 1940s and so it is possible that the split referred to here happened outside of Korea. They sometimes formed separate Korean communist organisations but they were usually members of the local parties in their respective host countries, as was decreed by Comintern policy. Kim Il Sung, for example, was a member of the Chinese Communist Party during the 1930s.
• 14. This is how Bill Morgan rendered the name of the organisation, although, in the Chinese article, it is changed to ‘Internationalist Communist Party of Korea’, a subtle but significant change. Without finding any of the organisation’s own documents, there is no way for us to know which was correct.
• 15. It is worth noting that the Chinese article in New Banner incorrectly identifies the city that Morgan was visiting as Seoul. It is a mystery how such a mistake came about in the course of translation because Morgan is very clear in his original report that he only visited Pusan.
• 16. Although writings by Trotsky had been translated into Japanese by this time, the first known Trotskyist organisation in Japan was the Japan Revolutionary Communist League which was founded more than 10 years later in 1957.

Richard Westra

1. Introducing Thomas T. Sekine’s Academic Journey

While it was with extreme sadness and sense of loss that I learned of the passing of Thomas T. Sekine on 16 January 2022, I am honoured to be able to celebrate his extraordinary contribution to Marxian economic and political economic thought in this short article. Sekine’s academic journey commenced in 1953 when he entered the undergraduate programme in Social Science at Hitotsubashi University in Japan. By his own admission, he was not drawn to economic studies specifically. Yet he found himself caught up in a controversy raging at that time in Japanese academia between bourgeois and Marxian economics, forcing him to publicly declare which side of the divide he stood on. That Sekine was proficient in reading French, German and English at that time greatly aided him in his quest to achieve knowledge in Marxian economics to which he felt most disposed toward.

To offer a brief contextualisation here, many readers will certainly be surprised to learn of a contestation between Marxian and bourgeois economics in Japanese universities in the 1950s! After all, across much of the western academy bourgeois economics in its neoclassical mode had largely achieved hegemony early in the twentieth century. In the post-war period, its growing sense of triumphalism empowered it to begin a process of expelling non-neoclassical, “heterodox” research and teaching foci, such as economic history, from economic departments. Yet, in Japan, by the 1960s it was estimated that a full 50 percent of all economists in economics departments were Marxian. As summed up by Hoff,1 ‘it is still safe to assume that there is scarcely another capitalist country in the world where scientific interest in the Marxian critique of political economy is greater than in Japan’. Within this fecund milieu for Marxian economic studies, the work of Kozo Uno, and the ‘school’ he established, arguably gained prominence.2

Uno, a professor of economics at Japan’s prestigious Tokyo University, also gave weekly lectures on Marxian economics at Hitotsubashi University. Attending Uno’s lectures is where Sekine first learned about Marxian economics. Not only did Uno inspire Sekine academically but also deeply impressed him on a personal level. On the one hand, for Uno’s seeming inscrutability. On the other hand, for his approachability and warmth notwithstanding the fact that Uno was a venerated academic in Japan. What particularly struck Sekine as a student of Uno was Uno’s claim that he learned over 90 percent of his economics directly from Marx by going head-to-head, so to speak, with the three volumes of Marx’s Capital, rather than participating in this or that study group as was generally the fashion in Japan.3

Influenced by Uno, Sekine proceeded to delve further into Marxian economics. As Sekine turned to graduate studies, however, he felt a compulsion to study bourgeois economics as well. Not because it excited him, but for the simple reason that it constituted the predominant rival theory to Marxian economics. Sekine, at this time, in his early graduate studies, took the opportunity to attend McGill University in Montreal Canada, in 1958. From there, with his mind made up to study bourgeois economics, Sekine went to Britain, completing his Ph.D. at the London School of Economics in 1966. Sekine then secured employment firstly in the economics department at Simon Fraser University in Canada, then in economics at York University in Toronto. However, Sekine soon tired of academic writing related to his teaching in bourgeois economics and rekindled his contact with Uno. From that juncture, which, in the early 1970s, coincided with renewed academic interest in the West in Marx’s economic thought (the English translation of the Grundrisse appeared in 1973, for example), Sekine embarked upon a journey that would consume his life, to reinvigorate Marxian economics by reconstructing Marx’s theory inCapital in the vein opened by Uno.

Sekine’s initial major publication detailing the signal constituents of Uno’s approach to Marxist theory in contrast with what Sekine dubs ‘conventional Marxism’ appeared in Journal of Economic Literature.4 This was followed up by his English translation of Uno’s single volume abridged version of the two volume Principles of Political Economy Uno published in the early 1950s.5 During the time Sekine was engaging in the translation and following its publication, he cultivated contacts with scholars in Japan similarly working in the Uno School tradition. Yet Sekine maintained what he saw as a healthy intellectual distance from them. The reason for this was that he viewed them as proceeding far too cautiously in seeking to be super faithful to the letter of what Uno wrote in this or that context. Sekine well knew that Uno’s writings were anything but transparent and this issue was amplified, Sekine learned, when translating Uno’s work into English. Hence, Sekine concluded that he had to be courageous in transposing Uno’s economic writings on Marx in a more graspable form. One that was close to Uno’s thought and person to which Sekine felt a kindred spirit, whatever the risks or criticisms he might face in that endeavour.6

By 1986, Sekine had written his magisterial two volume Dialectic of Capital which simultaneously dialogued with Uno’s two volumePrinciples of Political Economy, Marx’s three volumeCapital, G.W.F. Hegel’sLogic, and offered a critique of bourgeois economics in its neoclassical mode. Much to Sekine’s disappointment, a major university press that his magnum opus was destined for baulked at the last-minute, likely for fear of its devastation of bourgeois economics, criticism of ‘conventional Marxism’ and robust defence of Marx’s scientificity, prompting Sekine to self-publish a limited edition of the volumes which he distributed to close colleagues. Ultimately, it is in the Historical Materialism Book Series that this work has been published decades later.7 A ‘shorter’ two volume version of the foregoing also appeared in print in the hands of another publisher.8 Selection of Sekine’s articles and book chapter contributions are collected in an accessible edited volume.9 Most recently, Sekine published a translation of Uno’s major writing on stages of capitalist development.10

Importantly, while at York University, Sekine inspired a generation of scholars to bring his approach to Marx and Uno into debates over Marxism. He was also instrumental in cultivating interest in Japanese studies more broadly at York. My initial meeting with him was in 1981 when he came to lecture in an advanced undergraduate course taught by Robert Albritton on the three volumes of Marx’s Capital. I had, fortunately, readCapital by 1978 along with theGrundrisse and parts of Hegel’sLogic enabling me to better comprehend the nuanced approach I was being exposed to. Sekine was always extremely giving with his thoughts and time. Between Sekine and Albritton who was strongly influenced by Sekine as well in the shaping of his thinking on Marx, I emerged a different Marxian thinker from that class, being previously a subscriber of Ernest Mandel’s approach to Marxian economic theory.

2. Sekine in the Pursuit of Science

As Uno before him, Sekine recognised Marx as a genius and extraordinary human being who could write voluminous scientific tracts, op-eds and journalistic articles, speak exaltingly at working class meetings and engage in revolutionary activism. Like Uno, Sekine always respected those participating in direct revolutionary struggle. But Sekine understood his own limitations in this world and realised that mere mortals attempting to duplicate everything Marx accomplished would at best amount to ‘mini-Marxs’ leading to impoverished renderings of all that Marx excelled in.

Where Sekine believed his forte within the Marxian fold resided was in defending Marx’s project in Capital as the preliminary attempt to set forth a new science and to refine Marx’s oeuvre in a fashion that definitively established Marxian economic theory as the foundation for modern social science (with what that entails to be addressed below) and as the basis for critique of bourgeois economics in all its forms. Science, to be clear, is used by Sekine, as he believed Marx adverts to it, in its strong sense as objective knowledge or truth of its subject matter. Marx’s and Sekine’s subject matter is the capitalist mode of production withcapital as its causal force.

For Sekine, why Marx devoted so much of his own life to analysis of the capitalist mode of production through Capital and its ‘workbooks’ theGrundrisse andTheories of Surplus Value, rather than drawing up blueprints for socialism, as undertaken by the ‘utopian socialists’, or writing grand tomes on human history in toto (as Marx hinted at attempting in his 1845The German Ideology), stemmed from Marx’s apprehension of the unique ontological properties of capital. After all, as recent economic history demonstrates, prior to the dawn of the capitalist era no one ever refers to such a thing as ‘an economy’ because economic life was always enmeshed with other social practices and indistinguishable from them. Because it is only in the capitalist era that economic life appears to ‘disembed’ from the social (to use Polanyi’s term) or, as Marx captures it, for the economic substructure to tend toward self-subsistence, separate from the ideological, legal and political superstructure, the very possibility of economic theory constitutes the historical existence of capitalism.

What makes Marxian economic theorising of capital an objective social science, according to Sekine, returns us to the ontological properties of capital. That is, underpinning the appearance of economic life levitating from the social in the capitalist era is the material tendency of capital toward self-abstraction or self-reification. Capital, in other words, is the only object of study in the social world that objectifies social relations. But such objectified social relations are never directly visible on the ‘surface’ of capitalist society. Rather, they recede behind that which they constitute the basis of – relations between material things that, to paraphrase Marx, appear, then, ‘to take on a life of their own’. Given how human economic life first becomes visible in history in its capitalist form, bourgeois economics was led to the exciting, but egregiously erroneous, conclusion that forms of appearance of capitalism were ‘natural’ instead of socially and historically constituted and proceeded with their enterprise in the false belief that they could study substantive economic life directly in an ‘economics’. For Sekine, it is precisely such an ‘inversion’ of reality that constitutes the true meaning of fetishism.11

To fully expose the fetishism of capital in its manifold guises on a scientific, rather than ideological, basis, Sekine argues, is the primary role of Marxian economic theorising of capital. The scientificity of Marxian economic theory is established by following or ‘copying’ the ontological object’s own method of self-abstraction or self-reification. This methodological procedure brings to bear the epistemological resource of the materialist dialectic. As Marx had made crisply clear, the initial, most unspecified or ‘cell form’ of capital is the commodity. It is the internal opposition or contradiction existing within the commodity between its material substance as a use value and historically constituted social substance as value which drives the dialectic forward. Objective theorising of capital is arrived at through disciplined thought tracking capital’s own inner motion to unfurl all the categories of capital in their logical immanence, thus demonstrating what capital, in its most fundamental incarnation, is anddoes.

Besides further elaborating Marxian economics on the foundations erected by Marx and Uno, Sekine always viewed one of his greatest contributions to be something neither Marx nor Uno were able to accomplish. It was this problematic which ultimately led to the dissolution of the classical school, supplanting of value theory within bourgeois economics by utility theory and serves as the differentiating marker for neoclassical economics. Calculus and the margin principle, as tools of quantitative analysis, were simultaneously deployed by Isaac Newton in his formative physics of the cosmos to treat potentially infinite shifts of infinitesimal quantities. Where neoclassical economics claimed its scientificity rested was never that its theory corresponded to the logic of any ontological object, but that its axiomatic modelling of price movements utilising calculus and the margin principle produced copies of models in theoretical physics.12 That neoclassical marginal artistry has absolutely nothing to do with capitalist prices does not mean that tools it relies upon to bolster its ideological subterfuge cannot be otherwise marshalled. What Sekine demonstrates, in a language understandable for neoclassical economists and Marxian economists mesmerised by the latter’s artifice, is that there was never any need to abandon the labour theory of value. The law of market value, the law of average profit and the so-called transformation problem, areas of Marxian economics which Marx left undeveloped, and that Uno treated only with basic numerical examples, Sekine shows pose no difficulty for Marxian economics nor does their treatment compromise value theory.13 It is simply the case that the margin principle enlarges the ambit of value theory to deal with the formal operations of the capitalist market.

During my final personal meeting with Sekine at a dinner I hosted for him at my hotel in Tokyo in late Fall 2018, Sekine expressed his hope that Marxian economic theory as he reformulated it in his Dialectic of Capital would become the basis for teaching economics world-wide.

3. From Science to the ‘Real World’ 

An oft heard refrain is that economics needs to resemble the ‘real world’. The first question that arises here is that the real world of human history and its societies is always composed of an ensemble of social practices. The very historicity of economic theory, as noted above, is the capitalist era because it is only capitalism which evidences an ontological tendency for the economic toward self-subsistence or separation from superstructure. Recognising that economic theory is only directly applicable to the study of capitalism and that Marxian economic theorising of capitalism is economic theory par excellence is thus one step in forging such a ‘resemblance’.  A second problematic is that constructing economic theory on an objective foundation, as Sekine following Uno avers, demands the appropriate cognitive resources to follow the very ontological motion of the object – capital – as it objectifies social relations. In this way, economic theory is set on objective foundations. That in no capitalist society are social relations found completely reified does not invalidate the procedure. The ‘real world’ correspondence is between the logical structure of the object and the logical structure of the theory that captures what it is and does.

When Sekine adverts to erecting social science on objective foundations, what he means is that bringing Marxian economic theory to bear upon specifically capitalist history it is necessary to reset social sciences of the superstructure such as politics, sociology and law on a non-bourgeois basis. This conceptual process unfolds at other ‘levels’ of theory which factor in a third question of the relation between economics and the ‘real world’. That is, while the economic in capitalism tends toward separation from the superstructure, the ontological condition from which its scientific study derives, it never actually achieves complete self-subsistence in history necessitating the consideration of other social practices. Sekine conceptualises this broader study foci in terms of Marxian political economic study of capitalism as a whole.

Finally, Sekine maintains that, because in non-capitalist societies there is no ontological tendency toward the separation and self-subsistence of the economic from the superstructure, thus excluding the direct applicability of economic theory, Marxian political economy in a comprehensive sense, akin somewhat to the research agenda of historical materialism, is charged with studying myriad economic and non-economic practices across the sweep of human history in the comparative light of Marxian economic science and political economy of capitalism. 

Even the possibility of socialism, for Sekine, is confirmed by Marxian economic theorising of capital through the way it demonstrates how capital manages to meet what Uno referred to as ‘general norms of economic life’ to reproduce material life of an entire society as a byproduct of profit-making. Thus, these same general norms will be met by concrete designs of free associations of free people reproducing material life of their societies for purposes of human flourishing. But all such economic knowledge hinges upon the objective theorising of capital justifying, for Sekine, his life’s endeavour to perfect that science

References

Bell, John ed. 2013, Towards a Critique of Bourgeois Economics: Essays of Thomas T. Sekine,  Berlin: Owl of Minerva Press.

Hoff, Jan 2017, Marx Worldwide: On the Development of the International Discourse on Marx Since 1965, Chicago: Haymarket.

Sekine, Thomas T. 1975, ‘Uno-Riron: A Japanese Contribution to Political Economy’, Journal of Economic Literature, 13, 3, pp. 847-77.

Sekine, Thomas T. 1997, An Outline of the Dialectic of Capital, 2 Vols., London: Macmillan Press.

Sekine, Thomas T. 2019. ‘The Legend of Unoism in Japan’, The Japanese Political Economy, 45, 3-4, pp. 132-60.

Sekine, Thomas T. 2020, The Dialectic of Capital: A Study of the Inner Logic of Capitalism, 2 Vols., Leiden: Brill.

Uno, Kozo 1980, Principles of Political Economy, Sussex: Harvester Press.

Uno, Kozo 2016, The Types of Economic Policies Under Capitalism. Leiden: Brill.

Westra, Richard 2021, Economics, Science and Capitalism, London: Routledge.

• 1. Hoff 2017, p. 98.
• 2. Hoff 2017, p. 101
• 3. Sekine 2019, p. 133.
• 4. Sekine 1975.
• 5. Uno 1980.
• 6. Sekine 2019, p. 135.
• 7. Sekine 2020.
• 8. Sekine 1997.
• 9. Bell 2013.
• 10. Uno 2016.
• 11. Sekine 2020, p. 33.
• 12. Westra 2021, 50-2.
• 13. Sekine 2020, 559-69.

John Marot

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

Lenin, 1905

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

Kautsky, 1909.

Introduction: Kautsky or Lenin?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I: Before 1917

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kautsky: ‘Architect’ of the October Revolution?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 1905 Revolution: A Fork in the Road

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

The Menshevik Road19

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bolshevik Road21

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

He agreed there were

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As late as October 1915, Lenin wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1914: Lenin breaks with Kautsky

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

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

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

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

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

II: 1917

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Millerandism and the Provisional Government

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dual Power

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

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

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

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

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

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

The April Theses: The Bolsheviks Change Course

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The October Revolution and After

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

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

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

Conclusion: The Political Take-away of this Historical Intervention

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

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

Afterword: The Stalinist Apocalypse

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

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

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

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

Bibliography

Axelrod, P.B. 1906, Narodnaia duma i rabochii s’ezd, Geneva.

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

Brenner, Robert 1985, ‘The Paradox of Social Democracy: The American Case’, in The Year Left: An American Socialist Yearbook, London: Verso.

Engels, Frederick 1895 'Introduction to Marx’s Class Struggles in France', available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/

Kouvelakis, Stathis 2021, ‘On the Paris Commune: Part 3’, available at https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/5044-on-the-paris-commune-part-3.

Lenin, Vladimir 1962a, ‘What Is to Be Done?’, in Collected Works, Volume 5, Fourth Edition, Moscow: Gospolizdat.

 – – – 1962b, ‘Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution’, in Collected Works, Volume 9, Fourth Edition, Moscow: Gospolizdat.

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

-------- 1962d, ‘Two Worlds’, Collected Works vol. 16, pp. 305-313.

-------- 1962e, ‘How P.B. Axelrod Exposes the Liquidators’ 1912 Collected Works vol. 18, pp. 175-183

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

 – – – 1964a, ‘The April All Russia Conference’, in Collected Works, Volume 23, Fourth Edition, Moscow: Gospolizdat.

 – – – 1964b, ‘Letters from Afar’, in Collected Works, Volume 23, Fourth Edition, Moscow: Gospolizdat.

Lewis, Ben 2019, Karl Kautsky on Democracy and Republicanism, Ben Lewis editor and translator, Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.

Lih, Lars T. 2006, Lenin Rediscovered: ‘What Is to Be Done?’ in Context, Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.

 – – – 2010, ‘Lenin Disputed’, Historical Materialism, 18, 3: 108–74.

 – – – 2011a, Lenin, London: Reaktion Books

--------- ‘Karl Kautsky as Architect of the October Revolution’ available at https://jacobinmag.com/2019/06/karl-kautsky-vladimir-lenin-russian-revolution.

---------, ‘From February to October’ available at https://jacobinmag.com/2017/05/russian-revolution-power-soviets-bolsheviks-lenin-provisional-government.

------- ‘For or against ‘AGREEMENTISM’? available at https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1332/for-or-against-agreementism.

Luxemburg, Rosa, 1971 [1906], The Mass Strike: The Political Party and the Trade Unions, translated by Patrick Lavin, New York: Harper Torchbooks.

1996, Mensheviki: dokumenty i materialy: 1903-fevral’ 1917 gg. Moscow Rosspen.

Nimtz, August H. 2019, The Ballot, the Streets – or Both: From Marx and Engels to Lenin and the October Revolution, Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Rabinowitch, Alexander 1967, Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising

-------- The Bolsheviks Come To Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd.

Sankara, Bhaskar, 2017 ‘Lessons from the First Red Century: Interview with Bhaskar Sunkara’, available at https://jacobinmag.com/2017/12/russian-revolution-bolsheviks-social-democracy.

Schorske, Carl 1955, German Social Democracy, 1905-1917, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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

By Samuel Farber

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

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

What makes a Marxist party a revolutionary party?

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

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

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

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

Defensive politics of Blanc’s revolutionary model

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

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

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

Class independence

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

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

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

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

The Finnish Revolution

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

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

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

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

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

Blanc’s “Tensions and Difficulties”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1

Darko Suvin

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

Hans Jörg Sandkühler  

 

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

Que sçays-je (What do I know)?

Michel de Montaigne

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Eric Blanc

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Review of Un parricidio compiuto by Roberto Finelli

Panagiotis Sotiris

Hellenic Open University, Greece

panagiotis.sotiris@gmail.com

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

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

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

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

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

Jean-Jacques Marie: ‘Gulag Socialism’

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

Vade retro, Khrushchev!

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

Collective leadership versus ‘cult of personality’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An heir to the Moscow trials

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

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

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

Ignorantus, ignoranta, ignorantum...

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

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

What a lovely gulag!

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. How do Trotskyists à la Marie insult Trotsky?

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Betrayal or objective contradiction? The lesson from Hegel

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jean-Jacques Marie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Translated by David Fernbach

Jean-Jacques Marie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Translated by David Fernbach

Jean-Jacques Marie

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

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

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

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

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

Khrushchev, Trotsky, same fight?

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

Oh, what a lovely deportation!

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

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

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

Losurdo and the beauties of the gulag...

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

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

Translated by David Fernbach

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

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

Victor Strazzeri

ORCID: 0000-0001-7525-3932

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

victor.strazzeri@hist.unibe.ch

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

1.

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

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

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

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

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

2.

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

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

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

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

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

3.

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

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

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

4.

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

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

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

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

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

5.

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

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

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

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

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

6.

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

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

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

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

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

7.

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

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

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

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