Historical Materialism, Volume 18, Number 3, 2010

Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 3–24 brill.nl/hima Dialectical Realism and Radical Commitments: Brecht and Adorno on ...

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Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 3–24

brill.nl/hima

Dialectical Realism and Radical Commitments: Brecht and Adorno on Representing Capitalism Gene Ray Geneva University of Art and Design [email protected]

Abstract Bertolt Brecht and Theodor W. Adorno stand for opposing modes and stances within an artistic modernism oriented toward radical social transformation. In his 1962 essay ‘Commitment’, Adorno advanced a biting critique of Brecht’s work and artistic position. Adorno’s arguments have often been dismissed but, surprisingly, are seldom closely engaged with. This paper assesses these two approaches that have been so central to twentieth-century debates in aesthetics: Brecht’s dialectical realism and Adorno’s sublime or dissonant modernism. It provides what still has been missing: a close reading and immanent critique of Adorno’s case against Brecht. And it clarifies one methodological blind spot of Adorno’s formalist conceptualisation of autonomy: he fails to provide the detailed analysis of context that his own dialectical method immanently calls for. The paper shows how and why Brecht’s dialectical realism holds up under Adorno’s attack, and draws conclusions for contemporary artistic practice. Keywords Theodor W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Marxist aesthetics, realism, modernism, the sublime, political theatre

In twentieth-century debates over the intersections of art and radical politics, Bertolt Brecht and Theodor W. Adorno stand for opposing productive modes and stances within artistic modernism.1 Brecht’s works were aimed at stimulating processes of radical learning, within specific contexts of social struggle. He based his practice on the possibility of re-functioning and radicalising institutions and reception-situations. In this, he took art’s relative autonomy for granted, but refused to fetishise that autonomy or let it become reified into an impassable separation from life. Adorno, in contrast, made the categorical separation from life the basis of art’s political truth-content. In its 1. I thank Steve Corcoran, Steve Edwards, Anna Papaeti and Dmitry Vilensky for their helpful responses to drafts of this essay, which revises Ray 2010. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010

DOI: 10.1163/156920610X533306

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G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 3–24

structural position in society, art is contradictory: artworks are relatively autonomous, but, at the same time, are ‘social facts’ bearing the marks of the dominant social ‘outside’.2 Paradoxically, only by insisting on their formal non-identity with this ‘outside’ can artworks ‘stand firm’ against the misery of the given.3 Adorno’s critique of Brecht, developed most fully in the 1962 radio-talk and essay ‘Engagement’, is notorious enough.4 Its conclusions are difficult to swallow: Brecht ends up as an apologist for Stalinist terror and the false reconciliations of ‘really-existing socialism’, and his works are pronounced politically ‘untrue’.5 These damning judgements are more often dismissed than seriously confronted; perhaps surprisingly, they still have not been convincingly answered with the care and rigour they demand.6 That is unfortunate, because the confrontation of these two positions clarifies issues and problems that remain centrally relevant to politicised art and to the urgent project of leftist renewal. This is especially true with regard to the problem of artistically representing capitalist social reality. This essay reconstructs Brecht’s and Adorno’s positions, in order to clarify what is at stake in the confrontation between them. It aims to provide what has so far been missing: a detailed immanent critique of Adorno’s case against Brecht. The argument I unfold here proceeds in three parts. In the first, I characterise Brecht’s committed approach to representing social reality as ‘dialectical realism’.7 In the second, I reread Adorno’s critique of Brecht, and, in the third, I consider Adorno’s counter-models. My conclusions are, first, that Adorno’s critique fails to demonstrate the political ‘untruth’ of Brecht’s work. As will be shown, Adorno does not provide the close attention to context that his own method immanently requires; consequently, he fails to take into account the shifting conjuncture of struggle that gives Brecht’s work its 2. ‘Art’s double character as both autonomous and fait social announces itself unfailingly from the zone of its autonomy.’ Adorno 1997, p. 5, and 1998a, p. 16. In this and subsequent citations from Adorno, Brecht and Max Horkheimer, I have modified the published English translation. 3. The argument is formulated concisely in the opening paragraph of Adorno 1997, pp. 1–2, and 1998a, pp. 9–11; ‘standing firm [Standhalten]’ is thereafter a codeword by which Adorno invokes this argument, for example in Adorno 1997, p. 40, and Adorno 1998a, p. 66. 4. Adorno 1992a and 1998b. ‘Commitment’ is the standard translation of the essay’s title (‘Engagement’ in the original). I use both here, treating them as a semantic pair and opting for the one that resonates most estrangingly in any given sentence. 5. Adorno 1992a, p. 84, and 1998b, p. 419. 6. The ad hominem aspect of Adorno’s attack on Brecht is easily dismissed; the critique of Brecht’s works is more serious. Jameson 1998 can be read as a general answer to Adorno, but Jameson does not provide any close engagement with the substance of Adorno’s arguments. 7. Brecht uses the phrase ‘the new dialectical realism’ in an important letter to Eric Bentley, written from Santa Monica in August 1946, reprinted in Brecht 1990, p. 412.


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political force. Second, Adorno’s discussion of Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka and Arnold Schoenberg in this connection does not convincingly establish a generalised political truth-effect for their works, and therefore does not establish them as counter-models to Brecht. In any case, the truth-effect Adorno claims for Beckett is not one that is oriented toward a radical political practice aiming at a passage out of capitalism. Brecht’s works have their weaknesses, and Adorno has incisively exposed some of them. But Brecht’s dialectical realism is open and provisional enough to turn the specific defects of particular works into productive discussion and debate. As a model of committed paedagogical-artistic practice, it holds up to Adorno’s categorical attack.

I. Brecht’s dialectical realism There are many roads to Athens. – B. Brecht

Brecht’s representations of capitalism are often rough sketches or snapshots of the background-processes against which radical learning takes place. Arguably, the learning process itself is almost always the main object represented. Capitalism – including fascism, one of its exceptional state- and régime-forms – appears as ‘the immense pressure of misery forcing the exploited to think’.8 In discovering the social causes of their misery, they discover themselves, as changed, changing and changeable humanity. Seeing the world opened up to time and history in this way, Brecht was sure, inspires the exploited to think for themselves and fight back. As Fredric Jameson rightly points out, critical approaches to Brecht need to periodise his production carefully, and situate each theatre-piece and other forms of writing within the context of struggles and social convulsions in which he worked.9 Minimally, we can distinguish between Germany before the Nazi-takeover, the stations of exile through the period of fascism and war, and the years at the Berliner Ensemble after his return to a divided Germany. Within this rough division, moreover, every work and collaboration takes form as a specific intervention into a specific social force-field. 8. Brecht 1967a, p. 1051, and 1992, p. 83. 9. Jameson 1998, p. 17. The ten ‘monadic chronologies’ that Jameson proposes are stimulating and do justice to the complex ‘historical layering of “Brecht” as such’. They are more than we need here, however, to minimally establish the practice and model of ‘dialectical realism’ – the actual object, that is, which confronts Adorno’s modernism.

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Notably, the great experiments of committed didactic theatre and film were produced in the three or four years just prior to 1933, a period of acute social misery and urgent partisan struggle. In addition to the crisis in Germany itself, where massive unemployment and the split in the German Left were effectively exploited by the Nazis and their backers, there was the additional problem, new and difficult, of evaluating developments in the Soviet Union under Stalin – namely the pressures of ‘socialism in one country’ within a capitalist global order, the persecution of the old Bolsheviks in opposition, and the emergence, from 1929 on, of a leadership-cult enforced by terror. In the stresses of these few years, Brecht and Hanns Eisler collaborated on The Measures Taken and The Mother, the two most important of the learningplays, and Kuhle Wampe, the film with Slatan Dudow; from these years as well came Saint Joan of the Stockyards, the collaboration with Elisabeth Hauptmann that is, arguably, Brecht’s most direct representation of capitalism as a nexus of forces and processes. Brecht’s theoretical production has to be periodised and situated in the same way. The major treatments of epic or ‘non-Aristotelian theatre’, developed in the pre-Nazi German period in the wake of The Threepenny Opera, show Brecht opening his way to a fully committed and politicised theatre. The encounter with Mei Lan-Fang, Sergei Tretiakov and others in Moscow in 1935, combined with the loss of his own apparatus and public, spurs the development of Verfremdung, or ‘estrangement’, as an organising artistic category, from 1936 on, as well as his reconsideration of the relation between critical thinking, feelings and pleasure in the Work Journals and Messingkauf Dialogues. These would be worked out more formally in the Short Organon for Theatre, written in Zurich in 1948, just before his return to Germany, and would become the working programme for the Berliner Ensemble. The retorts to Georg Lukács and others over the meaning of realism, which Brecht chose to hold back from publication, were worked up from the insecurities of exile in Denmark on the eve of war in 1938, well after Zhdanovist socialist realism had become official Comintern-doctrine. Around this same time, Brecht learned that Tretiakov and Carola Neher, among others close to his own artistic positions, had been accused and ‘disappeared’ in Stalin’s purges. But, having registered the differences in these moments, I now work back in the other direction, and go from the particular back to the general. For, beyond the shifts in emphasis and focus, some abiding and properly Brechtian artistic principles are derivable. These can be brought together under the sign of ‘realism’, in the precise and flexible sense in which Brecht developed this category. For reasons I now make clear, ‘dialectical’ is the best term with which to qualify Brecht’s notion.


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In the polemics over realism, Brecht had to defend his earlier innovations against charges of formalism and against a rigid and restricted conception of realism based on models from the bourgeois tradition. His strategy, then, was to broaden the category by demolishing simplistic separations of form and content and by exposing the narrowness and rigidity of criteria derived exclusively from particular historical forms – in this case, from the bourgeois novels favoured by Lukács. Brecht writes: Keeping before our eyes the people who are struggling and transforming reality, we must not cling to ‘tried’ rules for story-telling, venerable precedents from literature, eternal aesthetic laws. We must not abstract the one and only realism from certain existing works, but shall use all means, old and new, tried and untried, deriving from art and deriving from other sources, in order to put reality into peoples’ hands as something to be mastered.10

Since there are many ways to represent reality as material to be mastered, as a nexus to be grasped and changed, it is important, Brecht goes on, to encourage artists to explore all means available in seeking effective combinations of form and content: For time flows on, and if it did not it would bode ill for those who do not sit at golden tables. Methods exhaust themselves, stimuli fail. New problems surface and call for new means. Reality changes; to represent it, the mode of representation must change as well. Nothing comes from nothing; the new comes out of the old, but that is just what makes it new.11

In contrast to official versions of socialist realism, then, the realism Brecht calls for is precise in aim, but flexible, even experimental, in means and method. It aims at representations of reality that are workable, operable, practicable – helpfully applicable to transformative practice and permanently open to correction and revision. What makes them workable is that they are de-reifying: they show society, not as a static and naturalised fate or second nature, but as a field of forces and processes in motion, unfolding in time, subject to development. The individual appears in such representations not just as a psychological subject, but also as a nexus or ensemble of social relations that are historical and therefore changeable. The name for this mode of radical thinking, this critical stance or Haltung oriented toward transformative practice, is, of course, dialectics. 10. Brecht 1967g, p. 325, and 1992, p. 109. 11. Brecht 1967g, p. 327, and 1992, p. 110.

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Brecht’s flexible realism is dialectical, in this radical, Marxist sense. The first test of dialectical realism is whether or not, in context, it produces this effect of de-reification or estrangement. Verfremdung is, then, the general category for all the diverse artistic techniques for producing this effect, which, in turn, becomes a moment in a larger process of radical learning. These artistic principles – what I now call dialectical realism – can be actualised today, provided that artists mark the distance between Brecht’s time and our own and aim their interventions at the struggles and crises that constitute the contemporary conjuncture.

II. Re-reading Adorno’s ‘Commitment’ Better no more art at all than Socialist Realism. – T.W. Adorno

In ‘Engagement’, Adorno makes two kinds of arguments against Brecht. The first is structural or categorical: it unfolds from Adorno’s analysis of art’s double character. Art’s autonomy, or difference from life, is what constitutes it in the first place; art cannot renounce this autonomy without at the same time undoing itself as art. The second kind of argument is immanent: Adorno makes specific criticisms of Brecht’s works based on Brecht’s own political criteria. ‘If one takes Brecht at his word and makes politics the criterion of his engaged theatre’, Adorno concludes, ‘then by this criterion his theatre proves to be untrue [unwahr].’12 How are the two kinds of arguments articulated? The mediating pivot that joins them is an implicit distinction between artistic and theoretical representations. Artistic representations are assessed as aesthetic instances of non-identity, but theoretical representations have to meet the rigours of a different kind of testing. Brecht chose to be governed by the criteria of committed theory rather than those of autonomous art; in effect, he turned Marxist theory into his formal artistic principle. For Adorno, adequate theoretical representations of social reality have to dig out the ‘essence’ of social processes – that is, their deepest logic and tendencies, what Marx called their ‘law of motion or movement’.13 Adorno invokes Hegel to make this

12. Adorno 1992a, p. 84, and 1998b, p. 419. 13. It is the ‘ultimate aim’ of his ‘Critique of Political Economy’, Marx writes famously in the 1867 preface, ‘to reveal the economic law of motion [Bewegungsgesetz] of modern society’. Marx 1977, p. 92.


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point. ‘Hegel’s Logic taught that essence must appear’, he notes.14 In other words, essence must take concrete, determinate form in time and place. To represent the social essence in a form other than the one in which it actually appears in history is to represent something different. If, in order to construct a memorable parable, amusing satire or effective piece of agitation, a committed writer or artist attempts to slip essence into a different form, Adorno concludes, then this is a falsifying representation that is politically untrue, even if it is produced in the name of a true cause. Why? Because the process of aesthetic reduction short-circuits the chain of mediations that joins essence and the social facts that are its specific appearance-form.15 Brecht wants to foster critical spectatorship, but the imperatives of partisan struggle lead him to render reality as something less complex and threatening than it is. The theory that submits to such imperatives ends by teaching submission. For Adorno, this is most clear when Brecht ‘glorifies the Party without mediations’16 or degrades himself as a ‘eulogist of agreement’.17 Ultimately, this is not just Brecht’s failure, Adorno argues; it is a structural problem with all committed art that renounces its autonomy in order to instrumentalise itself politically. Art can only do poorly what theory already does better, and dishonesty about this becomes political untruth. Art that accepts its autonomous status only has to answer to local aesthetic criteria and earns the medal of political truth by insisting on its difference from praxis and real life. But, because Brecht’s art is bad theory, Adorno contends, especially given Brecht’s position, it therefore fails as art as well. Adorno’s specific criticisms of Brecht’s works are underwritten by the structural-categorical argument, but try to demonstrate it through an immanent immersion in particular works: by showing how particular works fail as theory and recoil into dishonesty and untruth, Adorno also aims to show the impossibility of art merging with theory under the sign of commitment. This is the gist of Adorno’s critique of Brecht. It can be tested by directing critical questions toward any of its three levels: the structural argument, the specific criticisms, or the notion of theory on which the whole case turns.

14. ‘Das Wesen erscheinen muß.’ Adorno 1992a, pp. 84–5, and 1998b, p. 419. The dialectical point, from the ‘Doctrine of Essence’, is that essence must appear as something other than itself; that is, as a dialectical unity with a determinate appearance-form. Adorno is citing Hegel 1969, p. 479. 15. ‘The process of aesthetic reduction [Brecht] undertakes for the sake of political truth cuts truth off and leads it on a parade. Truth requires countless mediations, which Brecht disdains.’ Adorno 1992a, p. 82, and 1998b, p. 416. 16. Adorno 1992a, p. 82, and 1998b, p. 415. 17. Adorno 1992a, p. 86, and 1998b, p. 421. Adorno alludes here to The Measures Taken.

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i) The structural-categorical argument I accept the premise of Adorno’s structural argument, but not the proof he derives from it. Art under capitalism does have this double character: both relatively autonomous and social fact. Politically, art is this contradiction produced from an extracted social surplus: it exists only by sharing in the general social guilt, and yet bears a radical promise of happiness that stubbornly exceeds its saturation by exchange-value. Art is relatively autonomous, because every artwork, despite its autonomy, remains a specific appearance of the social essence; the master-logics of capitalist processes always leave scars traceable in the dialectic of form and content. Moreover, art is relatively autonomous because, despite the autonomy of specific artworks, the production and reception of art as a whole has affirmative and stabilising social functions: the compensatory virtual utopia of art captures and neutralises rebellious energies, fostering resignation, accommodationism and conformity in real life.18 And, because the reception of art, even leaving ownership-issues aside, still presumes a privileged access to leisure-time, education and dominant class-culture, it also functions as a system of social distinctions that supports class-society.19 For all these reasons, it is appropriate to speak of the capitalist art-system, as well as culture-industry – although Adorno does not go this far. The crux is this: within these institutionalised social functions, there is still enough relative autonomy for an artwork to assume a critical stance, even a radically critical stance. But, and here is where I part from Adorno, such a stance actualises itself in the form of an intervention in specific moments and situations. The critical force and political truth-content of a work can only appear and have effects within the openings and constraints of specific contexts or conjunctures. This Adorno tends not to admit. From art’s contradictory double character, he concludes that artists either accept autonomy as such, or reject it full stop. Any compromise of autonomy at all becomes equivalent to total surrender. This does not follow, and the example of Brecht suffices to demonstrate why. Whatever Brecht may have said, in practice he never gave up an operative relative autonomy; there was never any absolute renunciation of autonomy. Thus, the categorical argument on its own is not a serious disqualification of Brecht’s art. I will develop this point below.

18. Marcuse 1968 established the terms of this functionalist dialectic. 19. This is the aspect analysed in Bourdieu 1984.


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ii) What form of theory? Before addressing some of Adorno’s specific criticisms, I want to question the conception of theory Adorno invokes against Brecht. Is he here invoking radical-critical theory, as Max Horkheimer elaborated it in his programmatic 1937 essay, or is it, in fact, something more like that ‘traditional theory’ – bourgeois or liberal theory – which Horkheimer rejected? Traditional theory sees its task narrowly as the production of knowledge in a form that is neutral with regard to social conflict. Accordingly, it enforces a strict separation of facts and values. Critical theory, in contrast, has understood that in a classsociety constituted by relations of exploitation and domination, pure knowledge is an illusion. All theory is committed, knowingly or not.20 Adorno certainly took over this Frankfurt-Institute position and, we know, polemicised energetically against the ‘positivist’ heirs of Max Weber. But, here, he forgets that commitment to the real struggle to change the world is precisely what differentiates a radical-dialectical critical theory from affirmative (or non-critical) and liberal (or non-radical) forms of theory. Frankfurt critical theory positioned itself outside party-discipline, but this was not in order to avoid the struggle for classless society. And Horkheimer makes this point unmistakably in his 1937 essay – just as the Moscow Trials were beginning and in the year after the new Soviet Constitution had cynically declared socialism to be an accomplished fact. After duly noting the tensions inherent in a critical theory that mirrors neither the existing consciousness of the exploited nor the slogans and policies of their party-vanguard, Horkheimer nevertheless makes clear that it is the practical orientation toward ‘the struggle for the future’ that sets it apart from theory as a reified, ideological category: ‘[The critical theorist’s] profession is the struggle to which his thinking belongs, not the thinking that considers itself independent and separable from that

20. See Horkheimer 2002a. The role and responsibility of science expressed in Galileo’s great mea culpa speech (Scene 14 in the post-Hiroshima versions: Brecht 1967d, pp. 1339–41, and Brecht 1994, pp. 107–9) draws very near to the position Horkheimer marks out in 1937: committed, but outside church- (read: market- and party-) discipline. Arguably, Brecht’s formulations of this problematic in the Short Organon are less radical in its critique of science. There, Brecht having resumed the battle for a ‘theatre worthy of the scientific age’, the technodomination of nature inherent in the bourgeois-scientific project goes uncriticised. However, Brecht’s enlistment there of Galileo, Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer for ‘an aesthetics of the exact sciences’ that makes room for the beauty and pleasure of experimental research is blown up, perhaps intentionally, by the explosive naming of Hiroshima in Section 16, several pages on. Brecht 1967c, pp. 668–9, and 1992, p. 184.

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struggle.’21 This struggle is imposed on theory by the social antagonisms structured into productive relations under capitalism.22 I quote Horkheimer’s own words, underscoring their repetition of the term ‘struggle’, because this is precisely what Adorno loses sight of – or disavows, in the psychoanalytical sense – in his 1962 essay.23 Although he is criticising works written for a real and shifting conjuncture of struggle, he elides the concrete situations to which Brecht’s works respond. The slippage comes in the move from the empirical defects of Brecht’s representations to their ostensible political ‘untruth’. ‘Truth’ and ‘untruth’ – social and political Wahrheit and Unwahrheit in the Marxist-Hegelian sense in which Adorno used these terms – are relational categories, actually situational evaluations made with regard to the aim of global emancipation, classless society, what Adorno packed into the codeword ‘reconciliation’.24 Whatever really or potentially contributes to the process of realising classless society is true, in this sense; whatever blocks, sets back or endangers this process is untrue.25 But, given the ruses of reason and ironies of history, assessing truth-content is difficult work. And the reversals and paradoxes of the revolutionary process, experienced as the dilemmas of disciplined militant praxis, surely constitute one of Brecht’s abiding themes. ‘Who fights for communism’, as the controlchoir in The Measures Taken puts it, must ‘speak the truth and not speak the truth’, as the struggle demands.26 If a falsified or weaponised representation contributes effectively to the revolutionary process, because it answers to an urgent need in a context of struggle, then, false or not, it becomes politically true. What needs might these be? All that contributes to morale and sustains a 21. Horkheimer 2002a, p. 270, and 2002b, p. 216. Or, again, Horkheimer 2002a, p. 272, and 2002b, p. 219: ‘The theory that in contrast drives on the transformation of the social whole has for now the effect of intensifying the struggle to which it is bound.’ 22. Disputes over the politics of the Frankfurt Institute at other moments (or the degree of its commitment to a Marxist or Marxian critique of capitalism, and so on) need not bog us down here. At this critical moment of 1937, ‘struggle’ means ‘class-struggle’, and Horkheimer’s positioning of Frankfurt critical theory commits it to the side of the working class. Frankfurtantifascism is not liberal. 23. I register the gap between 1937 and 1962 in passing; a full accounting of it, which would require analysis of the Cold-War and West-German contexts, is beyond what I can do here, but would obviously bear on the question of Adorno’s own commitments. 24. To be strict, reconciliation for Adorno would go beyond classless society, as usually conceived, for it would also have to include the liberation of ‘nature’, internal and external. However, this supplement is interpreted, it certainly includes the passage out of capitalism that classless society entails. 25. Hereafter, when ‘truth’ and ‘untruth’ (and its cognates) appear in italics, it is to indicate this special usage and underscores its difference from others based on an allegedly ‘value-neutral’ correspondence-theory of truth. 26. Brecht 1967e, p. 638, and 2001a, p. 13.


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struggle through difficult moments, for example – all that inspires tenacity and resilience, and staves off resignation and despair. Are we, then, slipping into the abyss of apologetics for terror? We are, at least, in waters deep and murky, and any evaluation in this direction is instantly contestable. Still, the paradox holds: sometimes, doing bad contributes to the good, while sometimes doing good leads to the bad. Or, in the form we are considering: artful lies and fictions can sometimes serve the truth. It does depend on the situation. About these kinds of problems, to paraphrase Marx, clarity only begins post festum. iii) The level of specific criticisms If we grant this, then an artwork’s truth-content can be evaluated only on the basis of a rigorous, detailed analysis of its context and effects. Adorno does not provide this kind of analysis. Let us take his criticisms of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. They are, on first reading, well and cogently made. As a representation of German fascism, Brecht’s satire of Hitler is indeed problematic. ‘In place of a conspiracy of the highly placed and powerful’, Adorno writes, we have a silly gangster organisation, the Cauliflower Trust. The true horror of fascism is conjured away; it is no longer something incubated in the concentration of social power, but is accidental, like misfortunes and crimes.27

In other words, Ui misses rather than clarifies the essence of fascism as a product of capitalist social logics. In so far as it re-packages this essence in a form that makes it unrecognisable, Brecht’s comic parable is a falsifying representation. Moreover, the strategy of satire and humour Brecht uses to deflate Hitler and ridicule the Nazi-leaders only trivialises both the social forces backing the Nazis and the enormous powers of violence and terror gathering behind the social contradictions of Weimar. But let us accept these points. Must we then also accept Adorno’s summary judgement, that Ui is politically untrue? No, for this evaluation does not necessarily follow. Brecht and his collaborator Margarete Steffin completed Ui in Finland in April of 1941, but it was never staged or published in his lifetime – a fact Adorno fails even to acknowledge in his 1962 critique. In early 1941, Hitler’s war-machine was everywhere triumphant. Its eventual defeat could in no way be taken for granted, then, as it could be after the belated entry of the Americans and turning of Stalingrad in early 1943. In this light, Ui is not so easily dismissed. Arguably, in that dark moment, this satire might have contributed something. However, had Ui been written and staged ten years 27. Adorno 1992a, p. 83, and 1998b, p. 417.

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earlier, in 1931, then Adorno’s criticisms would carry more weight. At that moment, a representation of fascism that is falsifying in the ways Adorno pointed out would also have been politically untrue, for the underestimation of the Nazis and lack of clarity about the social forces behind them could have had catastrophic consequences for praxis: precisely this kind of confusion contributed to the Nazis’ rise to power. A sober and accurate estimation of fascism would have clarified the urgent need for a united front between Communists and Social Democrats to bridge the split in the German Left. Obviously, no single artistic representation can be held responsible for the poverty and defects of political consciousness at that crucial moment. But, possibly, if enough eyes had been opened, the Nazi-takeover might have been averted. However, to go beyond such an assertion and actually demonstrate the political untruth of a given representation, it would be necessary to establish a minimally accurate baseline against which the representation in question could be assessed. Then it would be necessary to demonstrate how the defects of this representation actually damaged the antifascist struggle in the moments of a specific and unfolding situation. This Adorno does not try to do. With good reason: to do so would itself require a feat of historical representation. For what constitutes the essence of both German fascism and fascism per se is still a hotly debated question – especially since it touches upon the relation between fascism and capitalism and the role of anti-Semitism. And, even within the tradition of critical Marxism, divergent theories of fascism are continuously being revised and corrected in light of ongoing research.28 But, let us take it a few steps further. Assuming we can confidently establish what social forces and processes combined to produce particular forms of fascism, we would still need to mark the difference between our reflected retrospection and the efforts of those who had to grasp fascism from within that moment of struggle and crisis. Representations produced under such pressures can only be adequate in the most provisional way; to treat them as definitive would itself be a falsifying distortion. Retrospective evaluations of Brecht’s works would require a detailed discussion of both the actual social reality that forms the context of those works and the representations of that reality available at the time. Strategy entails representations that interpret reality. For the working class on the defensive, the struggle against the Nazis was above all a strategic problem of alliances.29 A practical unification of working-class parties and 28. A moment in this process is documented in Dobowski and Wallimann (eds.) 1989. 29. As has been amply demonstrated in autopsies of the Left’s strategic failures during those years. See, for example, Poulantzas 1979 and Claudin 1975. Of the analyses of fascism produced


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organisations should therefore have been the priority. If we accept that a united front between the Social Democrats of the SPD and Communists of the KPD would have been the necessary, not to say sufficient, condition of blocking the Nazis, then we would have a criterion: representations of fascism that foreclosed the possibility of a united front, after events had clarified the urgent need for it, would be both false and untrue. But the exact point at which this urgency became clear, or should have become clear, would be difficult to establish. It could probably be shown that the official position of the Third International from 1928 until 1935 was both false and untrue in precisely this way. Moreover, certain defects of the Comintern-position could probably be tracked back to the strategic realignments compelled by the Stalinist doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’. The strict subordination of the parties to the imperatives of Soviet foreign policy certainly distorted political analysis and strategy during these years,30 and it is there, in those distortions, where the false can be seen to become the untrue, in Adorno’s sense. But we cannot implicate Brecht in this, by simply identifying his representations with official Stalinist ones – at least, not without much more evidence and argumentation than Adorno provides. Adorno seems to assume, on the basis of The Measures Taken, that Brecht glorified the Party blindly and uncritically, and that there is no distance at all between his positions and representations and the Party’s. Adorno certainly does not demonstrate this, and I doubt that it could be demonstrated, even for works produced in the early 1930s, when Brecht was closest to the KPD. When we immerse in the particulars, as Adorno insists we do, and work to dig out the truth and untruth entangled in the social flow of time, then the rigours of empirical testing cut both ways. What has been clarified is that each of Brecht’s anti-Nazi works – from Roundheads and Peakheads, nearing completion just as the Nazis came to power, to Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, written in 1937, Ui of 1941, and Schweyk in the Second World War, written mainly in 1943 – each has to be evaluated carefully in light of unfolding events and the urgent effort to comprehend them. They need, that is, to be assessed as specific interventions in specific situations.

on the Left from within that moment, Trotsky 1971 is probably the most incisive treatment of these fatal missteps and faulty interpretations. Without doubt, it would have been extremely difficult to overcome the historical mistrust and hostility between the SPD and KPD. Nevertheless, that, and no less, is what the conjuncture objectively demanded. 30. As Claudin 1975 documents copiously. Obviously, this is not to imply that SPD-analyses and responses to Nazism were any less disastrous.

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‘A Fairytale of Horror’ Roundheads and Peakheads, begun in 1931, would have been a better choice than Ui for Adorno’s critical attentions. A stage-manuscript of this horrorparable was circulating by the end of 1932. When he left Germany the day after the Reichstag burned, Brecht took with him the proofs of a revised version subtitled Rich and Empire Go Gladly Together. In exile, he revised it again, with Steffin and Eisler; versions in Russian and English were published in Moscow in 1936 and 1937, and a German edition was brought out in London by the Malik Verlag in 1938.31 It was first staged, with Eisler’s music, in Copenhagen in 1936. Unlike Ui, then, the genesis of Roundheads and Peakheads reaches back before the Nazi-takeover and, as a representation of fascism, presumably bears more directly the traces of class-struggle in its pre-1933 conjuncture. The epic parable focuses on the Nazi-displacement of class-antagonism into race-antagonism. This displacement consists of a recoding that invests ideological meanings in arbitrary physical attributes, destroying solidarities and producing realignments among groups in class-struggle. The shape of the head becomes the marker of standing in the new régime; those with the wrong head-shape, purportedly evidence of foreign origins and an abject spirit, will be dispossessed and exterminated. The work depicts the susceptibility of the impoverished peasantry and Mittelstand – the petty-bourgeois shop-owners, small producers and salaried employees – to this ideology. The Pachtherren, the estate-owners, give Iberin-Hitler dictatorial powers because he alone can repress the rebellious renters and crush their communist Sickle League; at the same time, they think they can manage and exploit Iberin’s racial turn. Roundheads and Peakheads began as an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. The Verfremdungseffekt of the parable derives, in large part, from the combination of a feudal setting and elevated poetic diction with contemporary scenes and language: in the streets of the old city, Iberin’s Huas or SS talk in Nazi-jargon and Umgangssprache. However, the feudal setting is also a source of the main defects of the work. The altered balance of social forces and statecrisis that conditioned the Nazi-takeover is inadequately represented. The Junker estate-owners are depicted, but they were only one class making up the dominant power-bloc in Weimar – the other, the grande bourgeoisie, is absent. And with it, so is the master-logic of capital-accumulation. The antagonism between rural landlords and tenants cannot simply stand in for that between 31. Die Rundköpfe und die Spitzköpfe, oder Reich und Reich gesellt sich gern: Ein Greuelmärchen. For the German, I have used the London Malik version reprinted in Brecht 1967f; for the English, I have preferred N. Goold-Verschoyle’s 1937 translation, reprinted in Brecht 1966.


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capital and waged labour. The sickle is there, but the hammer is missing; the workers and their unions and parties are absent. As a result, the real political problem of the German Left and the working-class movement at that moment – how to overcome the SPD/KPD split and form a united front – cannot emerge.32 This is, indeed, a serious fault of the work in its conjuncture, and I doubt that allowances for the distantiations of the parable-form would succeed in extricating it from this criticism. In light of Adorno’s battery of arguments concerning the exigencies imposed on art ‘after Auschwitz’, an additional defect must be registered. At the beginning of the work, Brecht effectively fingers the genocidal threat of Nazi ‘blood-and-soil’ ideology. In Scene Two, an Iberin militiaman reads it aloud from a newspaper: ‘Iberin says expressly that his single aim is: extermination of the Peakheads, wherever they are nesting!’33 By the end, however, this racist aspect has become a discardable, merely opportunistic factor. The Peakheadlandlords are able to restore themselves to power, and the class-antagonism is now projected outward in a war of expansion. In retrospect, at least, this reflects a fatal underestimation of the Nazi-investment in anti-Semitism. To sum up, my reading does not so much prove the political untruth of Roundheads and Peakheads as it shows how far truth and untruth remain entangled in it. The critical task is to do the untangling, not to issue a crude retrospective condemnation of the playwright. Adorno’s critique of Brecht: conclusions All this points to a problem in the critical method Adorno develops from his structural analysis of art’s double character. Any artwork that takes a critical stance against capitalism necessarily does so from a position of at least relative autonomy vis-à-vis the dominant social totality: otherwise, such a stance would not be possible at all. But, because Adorno does not admit that radically committed art under capitalism entails an operative relative autonomy rather than an utter renunciation of all autonomy, he relieves himself of the need to investigate context and conjuncture in a more than abstract and passing way. 32. When it does finally appear, in the peat-bog soldiers, episode of Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, added to the work in 1945 (Scene 4 in Brecht 1967b, and 2009), it is, of course, too late. There the retrospective lesson is: the united front that went unmade in the streets and factories was realised impotently in the concentration-camps – under the gaze of the SS. 33. ‘Ausrottung der Spitzköpfe, wo immer sie nisten!’ Brecht 1966, p. 186, and 1967f, p. 929. Tom Kuhn’s rendering (‘To flush out the Ziks, wherever they’re hiding!’) misses the strongly dehumanising resonance of the German. ‘Wipe out’ comes closer to the sense of ausrottung, but in combination with nesting [nisten], we have the rhetoric of pest-control, right out of Hitler’s speeches. Kuhn’s translation is in Brecht 2001b, p. 20.

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If the social ‘outside’ always shows up within artistic form, as its ‘polemical a priori’,34 then this structural constant cannot by itself be the basis for differentiation and assessment. This alone should point us back to the ‘outside’, to specific effects in actual reception-situations, but Adorno declines to make this move. He supports his conception of dissonant modernism with a formalist tendency to discount context. But this tendency leads him to treat representations as if each one were definitive – meant to stand for all time, rather than to intervene in specific situations. If there is a ‘use by’ date, Adorno does not notice. In the case of his critique of Brecht, this tendency becomes a destructive avoidance. To conclude: dialectical immersion in particular works entails a simultaneous immersion in the social contexts for which they were produced. The dialectical point, to which Adorno should be held, is that works do not stand alone: the work is the work together with its context. Evaluations of the quality of Brecht’s representations and the net-balance of their truth-content cannot simply be carried out categorically. Nor do specific criticisms alone suffice to render a summary judgement, without seriously taking into account the real context of struggle. If this is right, then Adorno has failed to back up his judgement of Brecht in anything like an adequate way.

III. Of the radical sublime Not even the dead will be safe from the enemy if he wins. – W. Benjamin

The essay ‘Engagement’ is also one of the places where Adorno revisits his 1951 assertion that ‘after Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric’.35 Elaborating this claim, he advances Samuel Beckett as the artistic counter-model to JeanPaul Sartre and Brecht. Without getting into all the issues and problems opened up by this ‘after-Auschwitz’ formula, I at least need to insist that Adorno is pointing here to the catastrophic character of capitalist modernity as a whole. The catastrophe is the whole dialectic of enlightenment and domination – as it has unfolded and continues to unfold in the late-capitalist era of culture-industry and administered integrations. To Adorno’s Auschwitz, we need to add Hiroshima.36 These two events are the ‘test-pieces’ which 34. Adorno 1992a, p. 77, and 1998b, p. 410. Or again, Adorno 1992a, p. 92, and 1998b, p. 428: ‘The effect-complex [Wirkungszusammenhang] is not the principle that governs autonomous art; this principle is in their very structure [ihr Gefüge bei sich selbst].’ 35. Adorno 1976, p. 31, and 1992b, p. 34. 36. This paragraph and the one that follows summarise a case I argue more fully in Ray 2005


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confirm that the catastrophe is not somewhere in the future, still to be avoided, but has already taken place – and is continuing, in the sense that the global social process that produced them continues to churn on. More specifically, they demonstrate what administered state-violence is now materially capable of. All this confirms that social reality, unfolding as history, has killed off the myth of automatic progress. The future of humanity in any form, let alone emancipated ones, is from now on open to doubt, and can no longer be taken for granted. And this has consequences for the representation of social reality. Crucially, these genocidal techno-administrative powers were developed in a specific global conjuncture of class-struggle: they are products of defeats suffered by the exploited, and from now on are aimed at the exploited, as the weapons of state-terror. It does not follow that the revolutionary process is dead or that humanity will never reach classless society. But it does mean that, on the side of the exploited, the political and cultural forms of class-struggle have to process and reflect these new realities. The old postures, images and marching music that asserted the advent of classless society as imminent, inevitable or otherwise automatic have been falsified by history, in a very precise sense. Auschwitz and Hiroshima are two events of qualitative genocidal violence that cannot be folded back into any redemptive narrative of progress. The potentials they announce enter history as irredeemable moments that explode toxically in every direction. Revolutionary theory and practice now must take this into account: the qualitative event that arrives to reorder everything is not necessarily progressive. The Novum, or radically new, now appears as the ambiguous Angelus novus – the machine-angel or angel of history that announces either a leap toward emancipation or else an absolute ruination more terrible than any momentary defeat.37 Which one, none can

and 2009a. The critical conjunction of Auschwitz and Hiroshima remains controversial – indeed, taboo – in some academic circles, but, in these texts, I show why they must be grasped together: in different ways, each realises a qualitatively new power of genocidal violence. Together, both transformations of quantity into quality are the material basis of a new logic of global-systemic enforcement. 37. I use Novum here, as well as the more usual ‘event’, to invoke the use of this term in Jameson 1998, pp. 125, 127 and 175–8. Adorno brings in Walter Benjamin’s ‘Angelus novus, the machine angel’ at the end of 1992a, p. 94, and 1998b, p. 430. Jameson, fine as his book on Brecht is, elides the catastrophe exactly at this point. What Benjamin and Adorno clarify for us is that welcoming the new as such, as Brecht perhaps wished to, is now a dubious risk, for its arrival may be the straight gate to self-rescue or utter obliteration; after 1945, it has objectively changed from a symbol of political truth and progress to a problem and enigma. This change is strongly intimated, though not elaborated, at the end of Brecht’s post-Hiroshima Galileo (Brecht 1967d and 1994).

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know beforehand. Now, any representation of contemporary social reality must also comprehend these products and meanings of capitalist modernity.38 For Adorno, the catastrophe of capitalist modernity in this larger sense can only be evoked in art indirectly, through the oblique dissonance of negative representations. Beckett’s Endgame becomes for him the main model. This, I have argued at length elsewhere, is Adorno’s rewriting of the sublime.39 Sublime representations do not have to be empirically accurate renderings of social processes. They merely have to stand firm in their autonomous difference from the given, Adorno claims, and they will function as formal mirrors of the social ‘outside’, whether they want to or not. Perhaps. And, perhaps, as Luke White has argued cogently, a work like Damien Hirst’s infamous platinumand-diamond skull is a sublime representation of capitalism along these lines.40 Perhaps we can even, with enough ingenuity and goodwill, get from there to the critique of capitalism – as we would need to, if we would set free the political truth locked up in the sublime. But, in general, it is clear that sublime representations of the social given – and especially those evoking the catastrophic aspect of social relations and processes – are not likely to inspire a struggle-oriented political practice. The sublime hits and overwhelms us, but nothing more or specific necessarily follows from this hit. If there is a likely political response to an enjoyable encounter with the semblance of terror, then it is probably resignation or prudent quietude. If sublime hits are linked to a radically critical receptive process – it is by no means certain that they will be, but if they are – then representations of this kind may help us by grounding our critical reflections bodily, in the feelings and sinews, as it were. Where this happens, it means that sublime feelings have been successfully translated into critical consciousness. 38. Thus, it is no longer enough merely to represent capitalism per se, as if Auschwitz and Hiroshima had not taken place, for these events clarify tendencies and potentials that belong to the essence of capitalism as it has actually developed in time. We need to follow up seriously on Thompson 1980 and Kovel 1983: weapons of mass-destruction have to be grasped not as things, but as social processes. My point has been that, as potentially terminal leaps in the powers of enforcement, these processes in turn change the state-form and the modes of capitalist social control. The so-called war on terror, with its politics of fear and emergency, is the contemporary appearance-form of these processes that have become tendencies. There remains much work to be done in thinking through the enforcement-functions of state-terror, grounded in the fatal merger of science, state and war-machine. I make a beginning in Ray 2009b. And this problem of genocidal powers of enforcement is, of course, now converging with another fruit of the techno-domination of nature: processes of ecocide and climate-change that threaten biospheric collapse. 39. Ray 2005 and 2009a. 40. White 2009.


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This is how Adorno thought we might respond to Beckett: an aesthetic experience that, triggering and passing through emphatic anxiety, gives bodily support to a radical stance against all forms of false reconciliation. This seems to be the only kind of hit or effect [Wirkung] Adorno was willing to endorse. Here is the passage where he makes the case for this sublime way of representing post-Auschwitz capitalism. The paradox, that for the impulse of committed art to be fulfilled, art has to give up all commitment to the world, is, he writes: based on an extremely simple experience [Erfahrung]: Kafka’s prose and Beckett’s plays and his truly monstrous novel, The Unnamable, produce an effect [Wirkung] in comparison to which official works of committed art look like child’s play; they arouse the anxiety [Angst] that existentialism only talks about. In taking apart illusion, they explode art from inside, whereas proclaimed commitment subjugates art from outside, and therefore in a merely illusory way. Their implacability compels the change in behaviour that committed works merely demand. Anyone over whom Kafka’s wheels have passed has lost all sense of peace with the world, as well the possibility of being satisfied with the judgement that the world is going badly: the moment of confirmation within the resigned observation of evil’s superior power has been eaten away.41

Such an experience actualises, at the level of form, the Verfremdungseffekt that Brecht tried to install at the level of content or message. Maybe. This is, first of all, Adorno’s testimony about his own responses; the rest is extrapolation dressed in categories. Let us assume these responses really can be generalised. But, in that case, what really is the politics of all these Beckett and Kafka readers? How many battalions are they? Will their labour produce ‘four moons’ to light the night-sky? My crude point is that the stance that appreciates standing firm against false reconciliation is different from the stance seeking a practice to restart a blocked revolutionary process. Or, in a more contemporary idiom: these are different subjectivities. It is the latter stance or subjectivity that dialectical realism on the Brechtian model would today aim to support and foster. Not to say that the sublime is therefore worthless and should be thrown away. We can have our Brecht and read our Beckett too. It is only Adorno’s strident insistence on posing a choice between two ‘irreconcilable’ positions that justifies some sarcasm.

41. Adorno 1992a, p. 90, and 1998b, p. 426.

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IV. Conclusion If a problem can be clarified, the solutions are emerging. – Anonymous paraphrase of a Marxian classic

Adorno’s case against Brecht, then, comes down to this: art must not try to do what theory already does better, and, in any case, preaching to the converted does not win anyone for the revolution. For the reasons given, Adorno’s preference for the sublime anxieties of uncommitted art should not scare us away from Brecht or contemporary forms of dialectical realism. If it is ‘the immense pressure of misery’ itself that forces us to think, what we think still needs to pass through our reflections and representations. Any artistic representation of social reality that provokes or fosters radical learning is a contribution to emancipation. In certain contexts, and given an adequate critical reception, sublime works and images may have this effect. Committed works of dialectical realism are likely to be more helpful. We cannot expect that any single representation, however ambitious and monumental, will give us the essence of social appearance with exhaustive perfection, as Alexander Kluge’s nine-and-a-half hour gloss on Eisenstein’s unmade film of Capital should remind us.42 Such totalising finality is in any case antithetical to Brecht’s conception of an open, flexible and provisional dialectical realism. But, if the pressures of crisis and war, mega-slums and absolute poverty, climate-change and ecological degradation lead us to try again to organise a passage beyond the master-logic of capital-accumulation, then we will need artistic as well as theoretical representations of social reality. The more representations the better, then, so long as they are dialectical – so long as they dissolve social facts into processes and the logics driving them. This kind of radical realism will always contribute to that Great Learning by which alone we can make our collective leap.

References Adorno, Theodor W. 1976 [1951], ‘Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft’, in Prismen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —— 1992a [1962], ‘Commitment’, in Notes to Literature, Volume 2, translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen, New York: Columbia University Press. —— 1992b [1949], ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, in Prisms, translated by Samuel and Shierry Weber, Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.

42. Kluge 2008.


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—— 1997, Aesthetic Theory, edited and translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. —— 1998a [1970], Ästhetische Theorie, edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —— 1998b [1962], ‘Engagement’, in Noten zur Literatur, Volume 3, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Bourdieu, Pierre 1984 [1979], Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, translated by Richard Nice, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Brecht, Bertolt 1966 [1937], Roundheads and Peakheads, in Jungle of the City and Other Plays, edited by Eric Bentley and translated by N. Goold-Verschoyle et al., New York: Grove. —— 1967a [1938], ‘Anmerkungen zur Mutter’, in Gesammelte Werke, Volume 17, edited by Werner Hecht et al., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —— 1967b [1948], Furcht und Eland des Dritten Reiches, in Gesammelte Werke, Volume 3, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —— 1967c [1948], ‘Kleines Organon für das Theater’, in Gesammelte Werke, Volume 16, Frankfurt an Main: Suhrkamp. —— 1967d [1955], Leben des Galilei, in Gesammelte Werke, Volume 3, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —— 1967e [1931], Die Maßnahme in Gesammelte Werke, Volume 2, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —— 1967f [1938], Die Rundköpfe und die Spitzköpfe, in Gesammelte Werke, Volume 3, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —— 1967g [1958], ‘Volkstümlichkeit und Realismus’, in Gesammelte Werke, Volume 19, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —— 1990, Letters, edited by John Willet and translated by Ralph Manheim, New York: Routledge. —— 1992 [1964], Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, edited and translated by John Willet, New York: Hill and Wang. —— 1994 [1980], Life of Galileo, translated by John Willet, New York: Arcade. —— 2001a [1977], The Measures Taken and Other Lehrstücke, translated by Carl Mueller et al., New York: Arcade. —— 2001b, Round Heads and Pointed Heads, in Collected Plays, Volume 4, edited by Tom Kuhn and John Willet and translated by Tom Kuhn et al., London, Methuen. —— 2009 [1983], Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, translated by John Willet, London, Methuen. Claudin, Fernando 1975 [1970], The Communist Movement: From Comintern to Cominform, translated by Brian Pearce and Francis MacDonagh, London: Penguin. Dobowski, Michael N. and Isidor Wallimann (eds.) 1989, Radical Perspectives on the Rise of Fascism in Germany 1919–1945, New York: Monthly Review Press. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 1969 [1832], Science of Logic, translated by A.V. Miller, New York: Humanity Books. Horkheimer, Max 2002a [1937], ‘Traditionelle und kritische Theorie’, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 6, 2: 245–94. —— 2002b, ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’, in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, translated by Matthew J. O’Connell et al., New York: Continuum. Jameson, Fredric 1998, Brecht and Method, London: Verso. Kluge, Alexander 2008, Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike: Marx-Eisenstein-Das Kapital [DVD], Suhrkamp. Kovel, Joel 1983, Against the State of Nuclear Terror, Boston: South End Press. Marcuse, Herbert 1968 [1937], ‘The Affirmative Character of Culture’, in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, translated by Jeremy Shapiro, Boston: Beacon Press.

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Marx, Karl 1977 [1867], Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, translated by Ben Fowkes, New York, Vintage. Poulantzas, Nicos 1979 [1970], Fascism and Dictatorship: The Third International and the Problem of Fascism, translated by Judith White, London: Verso. Ray, Gene 2005, Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory: From Auschwitz to Hiroshima to September 11, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. —— 2009a, ‘Hits: From Trauma and the Sublime to Radical Critique’, Third Text, 23, 2: 135–49. —— 2009b, ‘Terror, Sublime, History: Notes on the Politics of Fear’, in The Sublime Now, edited by Luke White and Claire Pajaczkowska, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. —— 2010, ‘Radical Learning and Dialectical Realism: Brecht and Adorno on Representing Capitalism’, Left Curve, 34: 11–21. Thompson, Edward P. 1980, ‘Notes on Exterminism, the Last Stage of Civilization’, New Left Review, I, 121: 3–31. Trotsky, Leon 1971 [1930–3], The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, New York: Pathfinder. White, Luke 2009, ‘Damien Hirst’s Diamond Skull and the Capitalist Sublime’, in The Sublime Now, edited by Claire Pajaczkowska and Luke White, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.


brill.nl/hima

Editorial Introduction Symposium on Lars Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered

Paul Blackledge Leeds Metropolitan University [email protected]

Abstract1 Lars Lih’s study of Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? demolishes the shared liberal and Stalinist myth of Leninism as an ice-cold ideology of professional and opportunistic revolutionary organisation. He conclusively shows, not only that Lenin’s thought had deep roots in the democratic culture of contemporary Marxism, but also that it was predicated upon a strong belief in the revolutionary potential of the working class. Lih’s research thus moves the debate about Lenin’s contribution to Marxism on from the tired caricatures of the textbooks to focus instead upon his complex relationship to the Marxism of the Second International. By showing that Lenin’s Marxism was much more sophisticated and textured than is normally allowed, this debate opens his rich legacy to contemporary re-evaluation. Keywords Lenin, Kautsky, Marxism, Second International, socialism, What Is to Be Done?

Superficially, there appears to be no very good reason why Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? (WITBD?) should be numbered amongst the most (in)famous and influential texts of the classical-Marxist tradition. Not only did it address specifically Russian concerns at the turn of the last century, but also, within half a decade of its publication, Lenin stressed that these concerns were of mainly historical interest. Moreover, beyond its local polemics, the main argument of the booklet – that Russia’s weak and fragmented Left could be transformed into a strong unified party through the creation of a network of buyers and sellers of a national socialist newspaper – was not particularly novel within the international socialist movement. And, in light of the problems 1. This essay draws on Blackledge 2006. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010

DOI: 10.1163/156920610X532226

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P. Blackledge / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 25–33

associated with untangling the general insights of its arguments from the distinctly Russian colouration of their presentation, in 1921 Lenin questioned the desirability of translating it for non-Russian Communist Parties.2 Despite this unassuming provenance, WITBD? has come to define ‘Leninism’, and Lenin’s name has perhaps become the primary political connotation of the phrase ‘what is to be done?’. Whatever the merits of the book itself, this somewhat bizarre development was a product, first and foremost, of the power-struggle within Russia after Lenin’s death. To justify their claims to power in the early to mid-1920s, the triumvirate of Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin orchestrated a ‘cult of Lenin’ in which they, the ‘old Bolsheviks’, were to be the high priests. As part of this campaign, WITBD? was deployed, for instance, by Stalin in The Foundations of Leninism (1924) and by Zinoviev in Bolshevism or Trotskyism? (1925), as the textual bearer of a definitive and essential ‘Leninism’. In the context of Trotsky’s criticisms of the lack of democracy within the Communist Party, the triumvirate found it convenient to point out that, amongst other heresies, Trotsky had clashed with Lenin over formally similar criticisms of WITBD? two decades earlier. Consequently, for their own short-term political reasons, first the triumvirate and then Stalin alone promoted WITBD? as the definitive manual for their own authoritarian model of political leadership. Unappealing as it was, this image of ‘Leninism’ was quickly embraced by Western liberals as an authentic rendering of Lenin’s politics. If the demise of this ‘Leninist’ model of political organisation was widely portrayed as a footnote to Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’, the re-emergence of a global anticapitalist movement from the late 1990s onwards reopened Lenin’s question, if not his answer. For, even within the anticapitalist milieu, the Stalinist connotations of ‘Leninism’ have tended to inform a widely accepted assumption that Lenin’s proposed cure to the contradictions of capitalism was at least as bad as the disease itself. By effectively endorsing Stalin’s cynical claim to be Lenin’s true heir, this common-sense opposition to ‘Leninism’ not only obscures the process through which the Russian Revolution degenerated, but also that by which the Bolsheviks had previously won hegemony on the Russian Left. As Lars Lih argues in his magnificent study of Lenin’s early political thought, a key failing of the standard interpretation of ‘Leninism’ is that it is almost impossible to conceive of how such a moribund, undemocratic, and dogmatic organisation might have escaped the sectarian wilderness to seriously challenge tsarism. Not only did the Bolsheviks succeed in leading this challenge, they also 2. Le Blanc 1990, p. 63.


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influenced the construction of other mass-parties which posed a credible challenge to capitalism in its European heartlands in the half decade after the First World-War. These facts alone suggest that we need an account of Lenin’s politics that escapes the cardboard-abstractions of ‘Leninism’. Such a project is all the more important given the limitations of alternative modes of political theorisation. Commenting upon the social and political irrelevance of much of contemporary political theory, Raymond Geuss recently suggested that if political philosophy wishes to be at all connected with a serious understanding of politics, and thus to become an effective source of orientation or a guide to action, it needs to return from the present reactionary forms of neo-Kantianism to something like the ‘realist’ view, or, to put it slightly differently, to neoLeninism.3

The limitations of mainstream (liberal) political philosophy reflect deeper problems liberalism has with the question ‘what is to be done?’. If an answer to this question necessarily involves an assessment of where one is, a vision of where one wants to be, and an outline of the agency to bridge the gap between these two states, the positivism of political science lends itself to an impressionistic reconciliation with existing power-relations while the abstract content of political philosophy’s normative alternatives leaves its various pseudo-universal oughts safely quarantined from the machinations of realworld politics. These two sides to liberalism are, of course, rooted in its naturalisation of modern capitalist social relations: because liberals assume these to be universal, they tend to conceive radical alternatives as mere utopias with no immanent mechanisms through which they might be realised. Consequently, political philosophy tends to a farcical repetition of what Fourier recognised as the moralistic ‘impotence in action’ of those sections of the Left influenced by classical-German idealism.4 If, as Geuss suggests, Lenin’s question ‘who whom?’ – which Geuss expands as ‘who does what to whom for whose benefit’5 – points beyond the limitations of contemporary political philosophy, Lih, in his demolition of the myth of ‘Leninism’, makes a fundamental contribution to an honest historical reassessment of the political consequences of that theoretical breakthrough. Whatever else it does, by demonising Lenin, the liberal variant of the myth of ‘Leninism’ tends to obscure his world-historic importance. The Bolsheviks 3. Geuss 2008, p. 99. 4. Fourier quoted in Marx and Engels 1975, p. 201. 5. Geuss 2008, pp. 23–30.

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led a revolution which ended the First World-War on the Eastern Front and acted as a beacon to those who, a year later, did the same in the West. Moreover, Lenin’s actions were premised on a theoretical ‘renewal’ of Marxism that re-emphasised the democratic-revolutionary core of Marx’s ideas in the wake of their debasement at the hands of the official leadership of the international socialist movement in 1914.6 Wartime-antagonists responded to this new situation by throwing aside their old differences in a joint effort to crush the new workers’ régime. If this act is evidence of just how much they feared the spirit of revolution spreading from Petrograd, the consequent civil war ensured that the new régime was born in the worst possible circumstances. The importance of this context to an adequate explanation of the emergence of Stalinism implies that it would be a mistake, as Victor Serge famously argued, to judge Bolshevism by its eventual rotten corpse.7 Stalin’s rule was built not only on the decimation of the Russian proletariat and the defeat of the German Revolution,8 but also through the destruction of the Bolshevik Party itself.9 These processes have been downplayed and sometimes entirely dismissed in an approach in which the horrors of Stalinism are easily identifiable on the pages of WITBD?: a method Lih labels ‘Soviet history made easy’.10 Although it is unsurprising that right-wing critics of socialism skirt over the social basis of Stalinism, it is less understandable that Serge’s plea for understanding has tended to fall on deaf ears even on the radical Left – where tired clichés about the corrupting influence of power and revolutions devouring their children regularly act as substitutes for concrete analyses of Lenin’s legacy. Perhaps ‘democratic centralism’ is the pivotal concept deployed in criticisms of Lenin’s politics. Associated with Stalin’s authoritarianism, this concept is typically coupled with WITBD? to portray the essence of Leninism, and deployed to bear the weight of explanation for all that went wrong in Russia after 1917. A key problem with this claim, as Lih points out, is that the idea of democratic centralism is neither mentioned in WITBD? nor particularly ‘Leninist’ in its provenance. Moreover, as Paul Le Blanc affirms in his contribution to this symposium, this concept is not even a fundamental tenet of Lenin’s politics. Typically, these mere facts have not been allowed to interfere with the ideological medium through which the myth of ‘Leninism’ has been reproduced in the West: what Lih calls the ‘textbook interpretation’. According 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Bloch quoted in Anderson 2007, p. 123. Serge 1939. Cohen 1980, p. 123; Harman 1982; Broué 2005. Harris 1978, p. 272. Lih 2006, p. 433.


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to Lih, within this interpretation of Lenin’s legacy, the concept of textbook operates at two complementary levels. Textbook-histories of the Russian Revolution tend to rip WITBD? from its social context to represent it as a textbook on Bolshevik organisation and practice. Thus represented within the textbooks as itself a textbook, WITBD? tends to be interpreted as a Rosetta Stone with which Soviet history is easily deciphered. According to Lih, the substance of the textbook-interpretation of ‘Leninism’ includes, primarily, the assumption that Lenin had contempt for the intellectual capacities of workers who, allegedly, were incapable of escaping the parameters of bourgeois ideology. This intellectual élitism informed his project of, first, building a party of professional revolutionaries whose job it was to bring socialist ideas to the working class from the bourgeois intelligentsia, after which, in a second moment, these revolutionaries would lead the working class in a top-down manner. Bad enough before the Revolution, the textbooks insist that this perspective led to Stalinism after 1917. Widespread amongst reactionary histories of the Soviet state, this interpretation has also become something of a commonplace across much of the contemporary Left.11 Left-wing criticisms of Lenin tend to be framed through reference to a supposed contradiction between Lenin’s conception of socialist leadership and Marx’s democratic dictum that ‘the emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working class itself ’. While obviously true of Stalin’s ‘Marxism-Leninism’, Lih points out that, irrespective of Lenin’s thoughts on the subject, the claim that leadership is inimical to self-emancipation is not as obvious as a superficial rendering of the question might suggest. On the contrary, because Marx’s vision of socialism is rooted in a model of the democratic workers’ movement from below, he conceives it as emerging from sectional and fragmented struggles that constantly tend to create and recreate differences between more and less advanced sections of the working-class movement. This process gives rise to an organic conception of socialist leadership. At its heart, Lenin’s contribution to Marxism is perhaps best understand as the most systematic attempt to deal with this practical problem. As Lih argues, Sometimes the dictum [socialism is the self-emancipation of the working class] is viewed as the opposite of the vanguard outlook, but, in actuality, it makes vanguardism almost inevitable. If the proletariat is the only agent capable of introducing socialism, then it must go through some process that will prepare it to carry out that great deed.12 11. See, for instance, the essays collected together in Bonefeld and Tischler (eds.) 2002. 12. Lih 2006, p. 556.

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The great strength of Lih’s book is that, by crushing the textbook-interpretation of ‘Leninism’ beneath an avalanche of scholarship, he opens the door to a serious engagement with Lenin’s contribution to such a democratic model of socialist leadership. Lih argues that, once adequately contextualised, Lenin’s argument in WITBD? is best understood as the diametric opposite of that presented in Russian-history textbooks. It was Lenin’s opponents rather than Lenin who dismissed the socialist potential of the Russian workers – accusing him of ‘being over-optimistic about the possibility of proletarian awareness and organisation’. Lenin replied, as Lih paraphrases him, with the claim that worker militancy is not the problem because it is increasing in leaps and bounds all on its own. The problem, the weak link, is effective party leadership of all this militancy. Iskra very properly focuses attention precisely on this problem – on Social-Democratic deficiencies, not worker deficiencies.13

If the great and powerful contribution of Lih’s book is its demolition of the underlying assumptions of the textbook-interpretation of Leninism, the debate on the pages that follow tends to focus on his claim that the interpretations of Lenin written by what Lih calls ‘activists’ – he focuses on the work of Tony Cliff, John Molyneux, and Paul Le Blanc, but also mentions important contributions by Ernest Mandel and Marcel Liebman – have been marred, at least partially, by their more or less tacit acceptance of large chunks of the myth of WITBD?. There are two key aspects to this debate. First, there is the matter of fact about the extent to which various activists, more or less influenced by the writings of Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and Georg Lukács, actually embraced something like the textbook-interpretation. Second, there is the more nuanced issue of Lenin’s relationship to Kautsky generally, and the idea that he formulated a model of a party of a ‘new type’ more specifically. Here, both sides agree that Lenin thought himself an orthodox Kauskyist right up to 1914. However, as Chris Harman argues in his contribution to the symposium, there is a divergence between the activists and Lih about the extent to which there was a growing practical separation between what Lenin and Kautsky did in the two decades leading up to the First World-War – a separation that was only adequately theorised after the political split between the two at the outbreak of war. As to Lenin’s relationship to Kautskyism, it is perhaps illuminating to point to an ambiguity in the oft-repeated claim that Lenin built a ‘party of a new 13. Lih 2006, pp. 316–17.


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type’. This seemingly innocuous phrase was never deployed by Lenin himself, but was coined by Stalin in his History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1939). According to Stalin, the ‘ideological foundations’ of this new type of party were first formulated in WITBD? and finally realised in 1912 when the Bolsheviks ‘purged the proletarian party of the filth of opportunism and succeeded in creating a party of a new type, a Leninist Party’.14 Lih paraphrases this account of the model of a party of a new type as being ‘hyper-centralised, confined to a few “professional revolutionaries” recruited amongst the intelligentsia, and dedicated to conspiracy’.15 If authors such as Alexander Rabinowitch16 have debunked the myth that the Bolshevik Party was actually organised along these lines in 1917, Lih shows in exhaustive detail that, far from having a clearly thought-out alternative to Kautskyism, Lenin conceived his own role in the decades up to 1914 as one of applying to Russian conditions the party-building philosophy outlined by Kautsky in the Erfurt Programme (1891). While Lih’s general point is undoubtedly true, and despite the Stalinist provenance of the phrase ‘party of a new type’, a number of the contributors to this symposium point to a tacit break with orthodoxy. On the one hand, Robert Mayer suggests that Lenin’s formulations opened his ideas to authoritarian misrepresentation, while, on the other hand, the (Trotskyinspired) ‘activists’ tend to agree that Lenin did in effect build a new kind of party before 1914, but that this organisation had precious little in common with Zinoviev’s and Stalin’s ideology of ‘Leninism’. Consequently, as opposed both to Mayer’s claim that Lenin’s formations opened the door to Stalinist distortion and Lih’s suggestion of a strong continuity between Kautsky and Lenin, the activists tend to follow Lukács in positing deep theoretical and political roots to the 1914 split between Kautsky and Lenin which pointed to a new and profoundly democratic form of political organisation. Concretely, as Alan Shandro points out in his contribution to the symposium, this division emerged out of the struggle for hegemony against reformism – economism as its Russian variant. According to Lukács, whereas ‘the Second International . . . was able to commit itself to many things in theory without feeling the least compelled to bind itself to any particular line in practice’, because Lenin orientated to the revolution as a real living ‘actuality’ rather than a far-distant myth, ‘the development which Marxism thus underwent through [him] consist[ed] merely – merely! – in its increasing grasp of the intimate, visible,

14. Stalin 1939, Chapter 4. 15. Lih 2006, p. 17. 16. Rabinowitch 2004.

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and momentous connexion between individual actions and general . . . revolutionary destiny of the whole working class’.17 Whatever the strengths of the various contributions to this debate, one thing is beyond doubt: Lih’s formidable book opens the door to a serious re-engagement with Lenin’s politics that escapes the boring clichés of the textbooks. This is important because the issues Lenin engaged with are not of mere academic interest. On the contrary, because activists are constantly confronted with the problem of what to do, if we are to avoid the errors of the past, we must learn from it: and, for the Left, this project includes rescuing the real Lenin from the myth of ‘Leninism’ so that we can make an honest assessment of what is living and what is dead in his contribution to Marxism.

Addendum: Chris Harman Chris Harman’s contribution to this symposium was written before his untimely death on the eve of his sixty-seventh birthday in November 2009. The arguments of this piece have roots going back at least as far as 1968 when Harman put his PhD to one side while he engaged in a few months’ full-time revolutionary activity for the International Socialists (IS). These few months turned into more than four decades of full-time political activity, during which time he played a leading role within, first the IS, and then its successororganisation the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP). One of Chris’s earliest and most important contributions to the IS/SWP was his essay ‘Party and Class’ published in International Socialism in 1968. This essay not only informed the IS/SWP’s subsequent political orientation, it also combined Harman’s typically deep understanding of the subject-matter with eminently clear and jargonfree presentation. The essay below marks Harman’s return to the themes of this article forty years after he first made that fundamental contribution. We are proud to publish it on these pages, most importantly because of Harman’s importance as a Marxist, but also because he has been a long-standing friend of Historical Materialism. He was a regular contributor both to the journal itself and to our annual conference. Chris was ‘above all else a revolutionary’. Historical Materialism mourns his loss and dedicates this symposium to his memory.

17. Lukács 1971, p. 301; Lukács 1970, p. 13.


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References Anderson, Kevin 2007, ‘The Rediscovery and Persistence of the Dialectic in Philosophy and in World Politics’, in Lenin Reloaded: Towards a Politics of Truth, edited by Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis and Slavoj Zizek, Durham, NC.: Duke University Press. Blackledge, Paul 2006, ‘What Was Done’, International Socialism, II, 111: 111–26. Bonefeld, Werner and Sergio Tischler (eds.) 2002, What Is to Be Done? Leninism, Anti-Leninist Marxism and the Question of Revolution Today, Aldershot: Ashgate. Broué, Pierre 2005, The German Revolution, Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill. Cohen, Stephen 1980, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Geuss, Raymond 2008, Philosophy and Real Politics, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Harman, Chris 1968/9, ‘Party and Class’, International Socialism, I, 35: 24–32. —— 1982, The Lost Revolution, London: Bookmarks. Harris, Nigel 1978, The Mandate of Heaven, London: Quartet. Le Blanc, Paul 1990, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press. Lih, Lars T. 2006, Lenin Rediscovered: ‘What Is to Be Done?’ in Context, Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill. Lukács, Georg 1970 [1924], Lenin: A Study in the Unity of his Thought, London: New Left Books. —— 1971 [1923], History and Class Consciousness, London: Merlin Press. Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels 1970 [1845–6], The German Ideology, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels 1975 [1845], The Holy Family in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 4, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Rabinowitch, Alexander 2004, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, Chicago: Haymarket. Serge, Victor 1939, ‘A Letter and Some Notes’, New International, available at: . Stalin, Joseph 1939, History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, at: .


brill.nl/hima

Reconsidering Lenin: What Can Be Said about What Is to Be Done? Ronald Grigor Suny University of Michigan [email protected]

Abstract Lars Lih’s explication of the intended meaning of Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? is not only the most sophisticated to date, it is also unlikely to be surpassed in the foreseeable future. Lih’s portrayal of Lenin as a democratic ‘Erfurtian’ Marxist undoubtedly poses a powerful challenge to those would suggest that Stalinism can be deduced from the arguments of the book. Nonetheless, there exists contemporary evidence to suggest that not only Mensheviks but also some Bolsheviks interpreted Lenin in a way not too dissimilar from what Lih calls the ‘textbook-interpretation’. Keywords consciousness, hegemony, intelligentsia, party, spontaneity, workers

Lars Lih has written a big book about a little book, and, in doing so, has re-opened and clarified the debates that have centred on an important text now over one hundred years old. What Is to Be Done? has been given pride of place as the founding document of Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet system, and international communism. Characterised by one of the most influential opponents of the Left (a former Communist) as containing ‘all the essentials of what was later to be known as Leninism’ and the doctrinal source of Leninist authoritarianism, the foundation of the Soviet dictatorship,1 the book’s critics from Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky on the Left through to the Cold-War analysts like Philip Selznik and Bertram Wolfe have credited its ideas as the source of intellectual élitism overtaking worker-initiative, a fatal evolution from democracy to dictatorship of the party, and the degeneration of revolutionary promise and hope into Stalinism and totalitarianism. The origins of the little book lie in the esoteric debates of Russian Social Democrats, who, at the turn of the last century, were faced by a growing but 1. Conquest 1972, p. 32. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010

DOI: 10.1163/156920610X532235

R.G. Suny / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 34–46

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disorganised workers’ movement. By May 1901, Lenin was working on a synthetic statement of the position of the Social Democrats around the newspaper Iskra [Spark] on the rôle of a revolutionary Social-Democratic party. Published in the spring of 1902, What Is to Be Done? set out to defend the positions of Iskra against the economists and their allies, who argued that workers were primarily interested in the daily struggles for wages and working conditions, that, out of these struggles, they would gravitate spontaneously toward socialism, and accused the Iskra-ites of being dogmatic propagandists who were forcing workers into political confrontations. Lenin pleaded for an effective Social-Democratic party, uniting the disparate activities of the dozens of circles and organisations then functioning in an ‘amateurish’ way inside Russia. Hostile to the terrorism of the populists and the pusillanimous moderation of ‘bourgeois’ liberals, Lenin called on Russia’s workers to participate in the broad social opposition to tsarism and not isolate themselves within their own class-ghettos.2 Castigating the economists for limiting their attention to the working class alone, Lenin argued that Social Democracy must lead an all-nation, all-class struggle for political emancipation. The task of the party was to expand the outlook of workers from a narrow understanding of their own class-interests to an inclusive vision of the interests of the whole society. Such an expansion could only be achieved by a struggle on the level of theory, a struggle against the tendency of some workers to be concerned solely with their own problems – in other words, a struggle against ‘spontaneity [stiikhinost’ ]’ and for political consciousness [soznatel’nost’ ]. Lenin broke with those Marxists who believed that the consciousness generated by actually living and working under capitalism was sufficient for workers. ‘The history of all countries bears witness,’ he wrote in one of his most dramatic but elusive phrases, ‘that exclusively by its own forces the working class is in a condition to work out only a tred-iunionist awareness’.3 This trade-unionism was not simply economistic but also involved a kind of ‘bourgeois’ politics, expressing workers’ interests within the framework of the existing economic and political order. The task of Social Democrats was to assist in the development of political consciousness – the awareness of the need for the political overthrow of autocracy – in the workers, something that would not emerge simply from the economic struggle, but rather from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers, from ‘the area of the relations of all classes and [social] strata to the state and to the government – the area of the interrelations between all classes’.4 Here, the Social Democrats had a most important rôle to play. 2. This point is at the centre of the analysis in Tucker 1987. 3. Lih 2006, p. 703. 4. Lih 2006, p. 745.

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Lenin did not argue that the working class could not spontaneously gravitate toward socialism, as many of his critics would later claim, nor did he argue that only intellectuals could lead workers. Rather, workers easily assimilate socialist ideas, for they are perfectly aware of their own misery, but, under the conditions of bourgeois cultural hegemony, socialist consciousness faces powerful obstacles. ‘The working class is drawn in stiikhinyi fashion to socialism, but nevertheless bourgeois ideology, more broadly disseminated (and constantly resurrected in the most various forms), all the more thrusts itself on the worker in stikhiinyi fashion’.5 Social Democrats must struggle against this kind of spontaneity in order to lead the working-class movement away from a gravitation toward trade-unionism and bourgeois politics. ‘Modern socialism’ – that is, Marx and Engels’s understandings of the dynamics of capitalism and the development of the working class – was the product of intellectuals, and Social Democrats, both intellectuals and advanced workers, would bring that theoretical expression to the working class, which, because of its experience, could easily assimilate it. Lenin’s stark formulation – that full socialist consciousness under bourgeois hegemony required Social-Democratic intervention – seemed to many of his critics to move beyond the orthodox Plekhanovian synthesis that workers would gravitate naturally to socialism while Social Democrats would merely accelerate that movement. For Lenin, the party of revolutionary Social Democrats was to act neither as a ‘trade-union secretary’ advocating the immediate material interests of workers alone, nor as disconnected leaders independent of the workers, but as tribunes of the whole people, expounding the need for political freedom.6 Under Russian conditions, the party was to be made up ‘first and foremost of people who make revolutionary activity their profession’, full-time revolutionaries. But Lenin was ‘not proposing any monopoly of decision-making by the revolutionaries by trade’.7 All distinctions between workers and intellectuals were to be effaced. The organisation was to be small, as secret as possible, made up of people who understood how to work in the difficult conditions of a police-state. They had to practice konspiratsiia, ‘the fine art of not getting arrested’.8 Lenin concluded his essay with a call for the foundation of a central party-newspaper that would become a collective organiser, linking up local struggles and engaging in political and economic exposures all over Russia. Around the 5. Lih 2006, p. 712. Stiikhinyi is usually translated as spontaneous, but Lih carefully dissects the various meanings of ‘spontaneity’ and prefers to leave this word in the original Russian. 6. Lih 2006, p. 746. 7. Lih 2006, p. 464. 8. Lih 2006, p. 447. Lih shows conclusively that the Russian term konspiratsiia should not be confused with the English word conspiracy, which is equivalent to the Russian zagovor.


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newspaper, an ‘army of tried fighters’ would gather, ‘Social Democratic Zheliabovs’, made up not only of intellectuals but of ‘Russian Bebels from among our workers.’9 Lenin’s pamphlet was, at one and the same time, a relentless polemic against the critics of Iskra, a plea for workers to reflect the aspirations of the whole of society, and an inspirational call for a new relationship between Social Democrats and workers. Unwilling to concede that the current stage of the average worker’s consciousness required socialists to moderate their tactics, he insisted on an active intervention by politically conscious revolutionaries. Lenin refused to confuse the present with the future or to consider the labourmovement one-dimensionally determined by objective-economic forces or fated to fall under the sway of the currently hegemonic ideology of the bourgeoisie. Conscious political activity by leaders, along with changing circumstances, offered broad perspectives for a revolutionary working class. Blame for the failure to develop such a movement was to be placed, not on the workers, but on Social Democrats who were unable to raise socialist consciousness among the rank and file. The issues laid out in What Is to Be Done? had been widely discussed in Social-Democratic circles, but no-one before Lenin had exposed them so starkly. Lenin’s personal political style, which was to have a decisive influence on the Bolshevik wing of Russian Social Democracy, was expressively demonstrated in this book. Here, sharp ideological distinctions, principled divisions, and purity of position were made virtues. Accommodation, compromise, and moderation were thrown aside in favour of an impatient commitment to action. Conciliation [soglashatel’stvo] was, in Lenin’s view, a negative quality for a militant revolutionary. Although Bolshevism or Leninism was not yet a fully-formed political tendency, Lenin’s language and proposed practice had an immediate appeal for certain Social-Democratic activists and bred anxiety in others. For the praktiki inside Russia, those working with workers or underground presses, like Iosip Jughashvili (the future Stalin), Lenin’s message was inspirational: ‘You brag about your practicality and you do not see (a fact known to any Russian praktik) what miracles for the revolutionary cause can be brought about not only by a circle but by a lone individual’.10 Not surprisingly, as a secret-police report noted, Lenin’s pamphlet 9. Andrei Ivanovich Zheliabov (1851–81) was a leading populist revolutionary, an adherent of the terrorist People’s Will, executed for participation in the assassination of Alexander II. August Bebel (1840–1913), a founder of the German Social-Democratic Party, began his career as an artisan and ended as a leading politician and theorist of Social Democracy. The reference to ‘Russian Bebels’ was to turning workers into Social-Democratic activists. 10. Lenin 1958–65b, p. 107. Lars T. Lih argues convincingly that What Is to Be Done? was ‘a pep talk to the praktiki ’, a challenge to them to carry the socialist word to the masses, which in

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soon made ‘a great sensation’ among revolutionary activists in Russia.11 The young Georgian Social Democrat Avel Enukidze remembers how he convinced a policeman to let him keep a confiscated copy of the book, which he then smuggled into Metekhi Prison in Tiflis after his arrest in September 1902.12 His comrade Jughashvili read What Is to Be Done? sometime later, and his subsequent writings show the profound effect it had on his thinking. The man who would become Stalin was one of those ‘daring and determined’ young men who found in this pamphlet a clear call to the exalted rôle they were to play. ‘[I]t applied to all of us in those years’, writes N. Valentinov (Vol’skii). ‘Daring and determination’ were common to us all. For this reason What Is to Be Done? struck just the right chord with us and we were only too eager to put its message into practice. In this sense, one may say, we were one hundred per cent Leninists at that time.13

At the time it was written, What Is to Be Done? was – and remains even more so today – a dense and difficult text that requires deep knowledge of the specific context in which it was written. Its sharp criticisms are directed precisely against opponents within the Marxist movement in Russia at the turn of the century, when differences between various groups, newspapers, and ‘tendencies’ were often subtle and nuanced and more often exaggerated by competing adherents. Lenin was willing to blur distinctions that future historians would be more careful to delineate when he felt essential characteristics revealed underlying affinities between groups. As analytical and programmatic as the pamphlet was, it was also a polemic, written with passion and fierce commitment to a particular vision of what Russian emancipation required. What Is to Be Done? was a political intervention at a key-moment in the formation of a Marxist opposition to tsarism autocracy, and it proved to be both foundational in the creation of a Russian Social-Democratic Party and ultimately fatally divisive for those who credentialed themselves as the leaders of the working class. For the last half century at least, What Is to Be Done? has come down to us in what Lars Lih characterises as the ‘textbook-version’. While details and emphases may differ among writers, the general argument centres on Lenin’s pessimism about the potential of workers to become conscious, revolutionary 1902 were receptive to Social Democracy and already moving toward revolution. See Lih 2003, p. 47. 11. Quoted in Mayer 1996, p. 311. For thoughts about why workers were receptive to Lenin’s ideas, see Reichman 1996, and Zelnik 1976. 12. Enukidze 1923, pp. 133–4. 13. Valentinov 1968, p. 27.


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socialists. This ‘worry about the workers’ led Lenin to emphasise consciousness over spontaneity, leadership by the Social-Democratic intelligentsia over the self-activisation of the workers, and the development of a ‘party of a new type’, the tight, centralised, conspiratorial party of professional revolutionaries. Lenin’s pessimism and its need for a narrow élitist party is contrasted with Martov and the Mensheviks’ optimism about workers coming to socialist consciousness through their own efforts, guided and assisted by Social Democrats, which led the more moderate wing of Russian Social Democracy to advocate the formation of a broad, inclusive, more democratic political organisation. The textbook-version, then, sees Lenin and Leninism as a break with orthodox Marxism, a populist-tinged deviation, and this deviation as fundamental to the split in the RSDRP, the international socialist movement, and twentieth-century Marxism more broadly. Even more damning, Lih writes: There has been a persistent effort in Western scholarship to tie Lenin as closely as possible to the Russian revolutionary tradition and, by so doing, to distance him as far as possible from European socialism. The aim, one speculates, is to ‘Orientalise’ Lenin and to make him the voice of a so-called Eastern Marxism: Marx, for all his sins, was a solid European, while Lenin the non-European Russian misunderstood Marx so completely because he was a Russian.14

Lih shows that Lenin’s alleged sympathy for the views of Petr Tkachev, the most fitting candidate for the title ‘Russian Jacobin’ or ‘Russian Blanquist’, is based on misreadings and has no basis in the extant evidence.15 Rather, Lih argues, Lenin was quintessentially ‘European’, in the sense that he was a fervent follower of Karl Kautsky and German Social Democracy. Perhaps the most impressive and influential presentation of the ‘textbookversion’ is the now-classic work by Leopold H. Haimson, The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism. The mentor of a generation of American historians of Russia and the Soviet Union – many of whom studied the history of the Marxist and labour-movements, among them Allan K. Wildman, Alex Rabinowitch, Ziva Galili, William G. Rosenberg and (in the interest of full disclosure) myself – Haimson deployed a psychological framing to illuminate how personality and politics combined to form opposing political tendencies, Bolshevism and Menshevism. His own sympathies lay with the Mensheviks, whose history he would continue to explore throughout his career and whose basic contours of analysis he deftly employed in his own interpretation of the 14. Lih 2006, p. 377. 15. Lih 2006, pp. 377–84.

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pre-revolutionary crisis of the tsarist régime. Haimson introduced as a central conceptualisation the distinction embedded in the discourse of Russian intelligenty of ‘consciousness [soznatel’nost’ ]’ versus ‘spontaneity [stikhiinost’ ]’. It is in this process of dissociation in the psychic life of the members of the intelligentsia, just as much as in their alienation as a ‘conscious’ minority from the ‘unconscious’ masses, it is in the contrast between the elevated sentiments that they could incorporate in their world view and the more undisciplined feelings that they attempted to suppress or ignore, that we should look in part for the origin of the duality of soznatelnost and stikhiinost, consciousness and elemental spontaneity, the two basic conceptual categories under which so many of the intelligentsia were subsequently to subsume the conflicts in their own existence and the evolution of the world around them.16

Haimson linked consciousness to a ‘left’ position within the radical intelligentsia, expressed in an ‘insistence on the ability of a small elite to remake the world in the image of its consciousness’ and a ‘spontaneity’ to the ‘more adaptive position of the right’ that sought to fuse with the ‘potent’, elemental ‘spontaneous’ forces either of the peasants or the workers. The ‘father of Russian Marxism, Georgii Plekhanov, moved from the sentiments he felt for the peasants to a rational commitment to the proletariat ‘as an instrument of reason, of history, of his will’, in contrast to his comrade Pavl Aksel’rod, who emphasised the ‘free development . . . free maturation’ of the working class as they moved toward consciousness.17 ‘Lenin, like Plekhanov, attempted to reconcile the imperious demand of his will to mould the world in his own image with an insistence that the revolutionary adapt to the requirements of an objective reality external to the will, external to the self ’.18 But Lenin did not share Plekhanov’s confidence that objective laws of history would inexorably move that external reality toward the desired rational order. Instead, the younger Marxist worried (unlike Martov) that ‘spontaneity’ would be a persistent element in the development of the working class for a long and perhaps indefinite period. . . . Lenin’s new organisational model was designed to secure the overthrow of absolutism by harnessing the persistent ‘spontaneous’ forces in the working class movement, by insuring that these forces would be guided – and economically utilised – by a ‘conscious’ Social Democratic elite.19

16. 17. 18. 19.

Lih 2006, p. 8. Lih 2006, p. 45. Lih 2006, p. 46. Lih 2006, p. 138.


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Haimson’s Lenin was a man of great passion, often undone by his strong emotions, who fought with himself to restrain his affective side with his reason and will. The conscious historical actor, Lenin himself and right-thinking Social Democrats, were essential for the success of the revolution. Haimson makes a strong claim about Lenin’s élite leadership-rôle of the Social Democrats. Not only was the working class incapable of developing independently a socialist ideology but, unless the Social Democrats proved successful in their efforts to indoctrinate it into the socialist faith, it would inevitably fall under the spell of its enemies – it would inevitably be converted to the ideology of the bourgeoisie.20 Haimson sees Lenin’s critics, like the ‘economist’ Boris Krichevskii or the left Social Democrat Rosa Luxemberg, as ‘prophetic’: . . . implicit in the conception of ‘spontaneity’ that Lenin had broadly sketched in Chto delat’? was not merely a lack of faith in the capacity of the labor movement to grow to consciousness by its own resources, but also a basic distrust in the ability of any man to outgrow his ‘spontaneous’ elemental impulses, and to act in accord with the dictates of his ‘consciousness’ without the guidance, and the restraint, of the party and its organisations.21

Lih argues that every one of the contentions of the textbook-version does violence to Lenin’s own intentions and ideas in What Is to Be Done?. Rather than gloomy about the prospects for socialism and the potential of the workers to become revolutionary, Lenin was buoyant about the possibility, and revelled in their day-by-day, year-by-year mobilisation.22 Where the textbook-version sees workers as lagging behind, benighted and unable to rise to socialist consciousness, Lih demonstrates through his extensive citations that Lenin enthusiastically applauded the stikhiinyi pod’em [elemental upsurge] of the workers, and faulted the Social Democrats for not being prepared to offer them the needed guidance and leadership. Rather than Lenin being a pessimist, Lih shows that it was his adversaries, the economists like Elena Kuskova and Sergei Prokopovich, who believed that workers were only interested in 20. Haimson 1955, p. 134. 21. Haimson 1955, pp. 138–9. 22. Scholars disagree over whether Lenin was fundamentally pessimistic about the workers’ capability to achieve socialist consciousness on their own or optimistic about their potential but emphasising a rôle for the Social Democrats in facilitating and accelerating the development of consciousness. For the pessimistic view, see Zelnik 2003. For the challenge to this view, see Lih 2006, pp. 15, 20–8. Robert Mayer argues that Lenin’s pessimism in What Is to Be Done? was a momentary departure from his usual optimism about workers spontaneously generating a socialist consciousness, a position he held before and shortly after the years 1899 to 1903 (Mayer 2006).

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their material interests and had little enthusiasm for the political struggle against autocracy or for socialism. Lih argues that, rather than deviating from orthodox Marxism, the young Lenin enthusiastically aligned himself with the leading German theorist, and heir to Marx and Engels, Karl Kautsky, and his version of Second-International Marxism. This synthesis, which Lih labels ‘Erfurtianism’, takes its name from Kautsky’s Das Erfurter Programm of 1892 and included eight principal premises: acknowledgment that the party, its programme, and Kautsky’s writings were the sources of authority; commitment to the idea that Social Democracy meant the merger of socialism and the workers’ movement; dedication to the notion that Social Democracy’s mission was to bring the ‘good news’ to the workers of their world-historical task; the aspiration to establish an independent class-based political party; insistence on the priority of political freedom and democracy; the expectation that the Social-Democratic party would become the party of the whole people; the assertion that the workers were the natural leaders of the movement to socialism; and advocacy of internationalism. Lenin was, Lih claims, a ‘Russian Erfurtian’. Like other Russian Social Democrats, Lenin saw the German SocialDemocratic Party (SPD) as the model that a Marxist party ought to emulate. Social Democracy’s task was to combat certain forms of ‘spontaneity’, e.g., undisciplined outbursts of anger or rage, but to work with and encourage the ‘spontaneous upsurge’ of the workers’ movement. Spontaneity, Lih believes, is not an accurate translation of the Russian stiikhinost’ and collapses many different meanings of what might be called ‘spontaneous [stiikhinyi]’ into a single word. Under stiikhinyi, diverse meanings – disorganised, unplanned, chaotic, sudden, haphazard, surprising, unstoppable, explosive, elemental, natural, occurring in various places without co-ordination – can be discerned. The meanings are sometimes contradictory in the same text. Not only workers suffered from stiikhinost’, but intellectuals as well, those who turned to individual terrorism as a tactic, giving in to emotion and attempting to carry on the struggle exclusively with their own forces. Rather than favouring intellectuals over workers, Lenin was particularly critical of the intelligenty, who often were more indecisive and wavered more than real proletarians. The message of What Is to Be Done?, Lih argues, is that Social Democrats have lagged behind; they must be energised to organise and act, to take up their historical rôle in fostering the already-effervescent labourmovement. Workers’ experiences do not occur in a vacuum; they must be interpreted and explained by agitators and propagandists, by intelligentnye rabochie [intelligentnye workers]. Social Democrats are to mediate and interpret that experience. Lenin wrote:


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The central point is this: it’s not true that the masses will not understand the idea of political struggle. The most backward [samyi seryi] worker will understand this idea, on the following condition: if an agitator or propagandist knows how to translate it into understandable language while relying on facts well-known to him from everyday life.23

Many Social Democrats imagined three different kinds of workers: the gray masses, which knew their economic interests but were not very clear about their political interests; the middle strata, which was already interested in politics more than merely economic interests; and advanced, conscious workers, worker-intelligenty already dedicated to the political struggle. For the Iskra-ites, the ‘economists’ reflected the views of the least advanced part of the working class, while the Social Democrats were to represent those of the most advanced and struggle to bring the other strata into conscious political life. Rather than pessimism about workers, the Social Democrats believed in the bright future of the movement, only the more attainable through the joint efforts of the party and the workers. For all his emotional attachment to the cause to which he dedicated his life and energies, Lenin was a supremely rational politician. He believed that people act in line with their interests and are even capable of heroic and selfsacrificing action. ‘Indeed’, writes Lih, ‘the more people realise their true interests, the more heroically they will act’.24 Workers do not act out of instinct, but in line with interests that they come to understand from experience, reflection, and through the explanations of the Social Democrats, which can overcome the hegemonic power of bourgeois ideology. Less-developed workers may be mistaken or led astray, which only makes the task of the Social Democrats even more important – to guide them toward an understanding of their true interests. Lih has thoroughly detailed the various arguments that Lenin proposed at the turn of the century. His explication de texte is unlikely to be repeated or surpassed for many decades. But unravelling the layers of Lenin’s meanings is only the beginning of the task. All Social Democrats understood that intelligenty had a rôle in the labour-movement. For some, it was explanation; for others, it was guidance or leadership. The former easily slipped into the latter, the latter into substitution of the party for the workers themselves. Whatever Lenin intended in What Is to Be Done?, his readers took from it different emphases. And, later, the Communist Party in power would make its own

23. Lih 2006, p. 345. 24. Lih 2006, p. 397.

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interpretation of the foundational text, much more in line with the textbookversion than with Lih’s more careful and nuanced reading of Lenin in context. As soon as the text left the printing press, the struggle over its meaning began in earnest, and Lenin was forced to defend himself against what he considered misreadings. Some of his most loyal followers, however, understood Lenin’s views in ways not much different from the Menshevik interpretation, though unlike the Mensheviks they supported ideas of a highly-centralised party of professional revolutionaries, who, by default, would largely come from the intelligentsia and through their greater knowledge and political commitment lead the workers’ movement. Lenin would be compelled to ‘de-Bolshevise’ some of the more militant Bolsheviks, most emphatically in the revolutionary fervour of 1905. While researching and writing the biography of the young Stalin, I have revisited the period 1902–6 and come to appreciate the ongoing confusions about what Lenin might have meant and how both opponents and supporters interpreted his text. It is very clear that powerful and persuasive Menshevik voices in the pivotal years 1903–5 have shaped the Western academic and popular reception of What Is to Be Done? At the very moment when Bolshevism and Menshevism were taking shape, key interventions by Pavl Aksel’rod, Iulii Martov, and – in the case of the South Caucasus, where Menshevism became the dominant wing of Social Democracy – Noe Zhordania defined the differences between the factions as more than personal or intramural differences. Aksel’rod, for example, wrote to his friend Kautsky, a figure revered both in the German Social-Democratic Party and among Russian Social Democrats, accusing Lenin of ‘Bonapartist methods together with a healthy dose of Nechaevan ruthlessness’, and being a man determined to create his own ‘administrative dictatorship’ in the Party, no matter what.25 Particularly telling is a letter from Zhordania in June 1904 announcing his decisive adherence to the party-‘minority’ and laying out his critique of Lenin’s approach.26 He lashed out against the dominance of the Party by the intelligentsia, rejecting Lenin’s formulations in What Is to Be Done?

25. Letter of Aksel’rod to Kautsky, 22 May 1904, Kautsky Archive, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam; quoted in Ascher, 1973, p. 208. For Marxists, Bonapartism referred to deceptive dictatorial tendencies akin to the practices of Louis Bonaparte (Napoleon III, 1851– 70); Sergei Nechaev (1847–82) was a revolutionary populist, whose slogan ‘the end justifies the means’ was manifested in the murder of an associate who disagreed with Nechaev’s methods. 26. RGASPI (Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History), f. 17, op. 1, d. 168, my translation from the Georgian; GARF (State Archive of the Russian Federation), f. DP, OO, 1905 g, m d, 118, ch. 3, l. 21a, b; perlustration. My translation is from the handwritten-Russian version in the RGASPI.


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In Lenin’s opinion, not only socialist but political class-consciousness of the workers is brought from outside, by other classes. . . . Thus, the proletariat must receive everything from another, from the non-proletarian. In this way, having degraded the proletariat and elevated the intelligentsia, the author de-valued the economic struggle. He even denied such an indisputable fact that the economic struggle is the best means to lead the workers into the political arena. ‘Political class consciousness can be brought to the workers only from outside (the emphasis is Lenin’s), i.e., from outside the economic struggle . . .’ Lenin completely distorts Marxism in order to raise the political element above socialism, i.e., in order to give the party over to the intelligentsia.27

For Zhordania, accepting Lenin’s vision of the party-organisation would lead to the driving of many proletarians out of the Party and ‘a complete dictatorship of the intelligentsia’. Fortunately, he says, the Party rejected Lenin’s formula. If this plan had been adopted, then our party would have been Social-Democratic only in name, and in fact would have turned into a closed little circle, a sect, the master of which would have been Lenin and Company. That would have been a Blanquist organisation (that is, an organisation for a tight circle of conspirators who each minute must listen to the orders of their chief ) that would have forever eliminated from our party its proletarian spirit.28

Zhordania read Lenin in the spirit of Aksel’rod. While Lenin emphasised the key rôle of Social Democrats in the development of political consciousness and was not particularly enamoured of intellectuals playing the rôle of leaders, nor of neglecting the vital contribution of ‘advanced workers’, Aksel’rod and Zhordania, in contrast, depicted Lenin as substituting a party of intellectuals for the workers’ movement. Such readings gave content to the factional split. This struggle was not about the editorship of Iskra or the sovereignty of the party-congress; the schism was presented as an epic battle between democracy and dictatorship within the Party (and, by implication, in the future socialist state). Lars Lih’s reconsideration and new translation of What Is to Be Done? forces serious rethinking of what he calls the ‘textbook-version’. He opens up what looked to many as a closed argument. Instead of deducing the Soviet future from this 1902 pamphlet, and by doing so, avoiding the intervening history, Lih proposes that the causes of Soviet dictatorship remain a major question. The arguments about democracy presented in What Is to Be Done?, Lih writes,

27. RGASPI (Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History), f. 17, op. 1, d. 168, ll. 10–10ob. 28. RGASPI ll. 17–17ob.

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‘do not make Stalinist tyranny easier to explain – they make it harder to explain’.29

References Ascher, Abraham 1973, Pavel Axelrod, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Conquest, Robert 1972, V.I. Lenin, New York: Viking. Enukidze, Avel 1923, Istoriia organizatsii i raboty nelegal’nykh tiplografii RSDRP na Kavkaze’, Proletarskaia revoliutsia, no. 2, 14. Haimson, Leopold H. 1955, The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Lenin, V.I. 1958–65a, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, Volume 4, Moscow: Gosizdat. —— 1958–65b [1902], Chto delat’? [What Is To Be Done?] in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, Volume 6, Moscow: Gosizdat. Lih, Lars 2003, ‘How a Founding Document Was Found, or One Hundred Years of Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? ’, Kritika, 4, 1: 5–49. —— 2006, Lenin Rediscovered: ‘What Is to Be Done?’ in Context, Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill. Mayer, Robert 1996, ‘The Status of a Classic Text: Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? After 1902’, History of European Ideas, 22, 4: 307–20. Reichman, Henry 1996, ‘On Kanatchikov’s Bolshevism: Workers and Intelligenty in Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? ’, Russian History/Histoire Russe, 23, 1–4: 27–45. Tucker, Robert 1987, Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia: From Lenin to Gorbachev, New York: W.W. Norton. Valentinov, Nikolay 1968, Encounters with Lenin, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zelnik, Reginald E. 1976, ‘Russian Bebels: An Introduction to the memoirs of the Russian Workers Semen Kanatchikov and Matvei Fisher’, Russian Review, 35, 3: 289 & 35; 4: 417–47. —— 2003, ‘Worry about Workers: Concerns of the Russian Intelligentsia from the 1870s to What Is To Be Done? ’, in Extending the Borders of Russian History: Essays in Honor of Alfred J. Rieber, edited by Marsha Siefert, Budapest: Central European University Press.

29. Lih 2006, p. 476.


brill.nl/hima

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: On Lars Lih’s Lenin Robert Mayer Loyola University Chicago [email protected]

Abstract Lars Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered seeks to replace the textbook-myth of Leninism with a painstaking reconstruction of ‘Lenin’s Erfurtian drama’. That reconstruction is more accurate than the Leninmyth, but Lih’s step forward is marred by two steps back. One is his account of Lenin’s ‘worry about workers’. The other is Lih’s new translation of What Is to Be Done?. Keywords Lenin, class-consciousness, proletariat

For decades, the widely held view in the scholarly literature was that ‘the basic principles of Lenin’s system were set out in his pamphlet What Is to Be Done? ’.1 This was said to be Lenin’s ‘decisive work’, ‘the most important single work of Leninist theory’.2 In it, he ‘hammered his revolutionary philosophy into shape’ and ‘sketched out the revolutionary principles which he employed sixteen years later’. ‘For the rest of his life he was to remain the prisoner of the ideas expounded in What is to be Done?. They possessed for him a fatal finality’.3 More specifically, the famous thesis about bringing consciousness from without in the second chapter of Lenin’s book has been called ‘one of the most essential elements of his developed theory’; ‘to this fundamental theme he returned again and again’.4 It is ‘the most distinctively Leninist argument’, ‘the doctrinal core of Leninism’, from which his authoritarianism is said to have ‘flowed logically’.5 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Schapiro 1970, p. 39. Childs 1973, p. 68; Utechin 1963, p. 217. Payne 1964, pp. 147, 154. Mirsky 1931, p. 202; Schub 1966, p. 73. Van den Berg 1988, pp. 125–6, 128.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010

DOI: 10.1163/156920610X532244

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R. Mayer / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 47–63

That is the textbook-interpretation of What Is to Be Done? (WITBD? ). But, in Lenin Rediscovered, Lars Lih sets out to prove that the conventional account is deeply flawed.6 Even in 1902, Lenin was not pessimistic about proletarian abilities, as many have claimed. ‘The keynote of Lenin’s outlook was not worry about workers but exhilaration about workers’.7 The Russian proletariat was on the march in 1902, and Lenin had great faith that wage-labourers would acquire class-consciousness and also become the vanguard-fighter in the struggle for democracy. Despite his reputation, Lenin was in fact a passionate advocate of political freedom, and the party he wanted to build in order to win that freedom was well within the mainstream of European Social Democracy. According to Lih, the future-leader of the Bolshevik faction was at this time an orthodox Kautskyist, not a Jacobin or a nascent Stalinist, and he ‘retained the same Erfurtian outlook . . . at least up to 1917’.8 This is not the textbook-Lenin. According to Lih, that caricature was the product of a Cold-War scholarship that ripped WITBD? from its context and elevated a few ‘scandalous passages’ into a pessimistic theory that seemed to anticipate the despotism of later decades. Lenin, however, did not subscribe to this textbook-theory, for his words have been misunderstood. Key terms in the Russian text have been mistranslated, and the ideological and historical contexts within which Lenin wrote have been forgotten. Lih’s aim in this big book is to reconstruct those contexts and to translate more faithfully Lenin’s words so that we can rediscover what the author really meant. This book is so big because it contains both a new translation of WITBD? and a detailed reconstruction of Lenin’s thinking and polemics during the decade before the outbreak of the 1905 Revolution. A behemoth, Lih’s work will likely be seen as an exhaustive account of the topic; certainly it will exhaust those who read the book from cover to cover. Lih’s refutation of the textbook-interpretation of WITBD? constitutes one step forward. His is not the first such refutation, but it is, by far, the most detailed. Lih is right that WITBD? is not the founding text of Bolshevism and that the arguments in its second chapter are not the theoretical heart of Leninism. Lenin was indeed the most Erfurtian of the Russian SocialDemocratic leaders, and his main aim at this time was to facilitate the birth of an inclusive-democratic state in Russia. Throughout the decade covered by this book and beyond, Lenin expressed great faith in the proletariat as an agent of political and economic change. He did not think that the party could substitute for the class in the revolutionary process, or that the intelligentsia 6. Lih 2006. 7. Lih 2006, p. 20. 8. Lih 2006, p. 114.


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should seek to dominate the workers within the party. Lih is also right that Lenin’s writings are filled with harsh polemics that distort his opponents’ views and that Lenin was sometimes sloppy in expressing his ideas. The ‘scandalous passages’ in the second chapter of WITBD? are a case in point, and do not reflect Lenin’s considered position. Lenin did not believe that workers would fixate at the stage of trade-union consciousness if left to themselves, or that the party had to combat the spontaneous development of the class. He was an optimist about the maturation of the proletariat, not a pessimist. All of these claims are correct, and together they constitute one step forward in our understanding of Lenin. Lih’s proof for some of these claims could be tighter, sharper, and supported with better evidence, but the claims themselves are valid. However, as Lenin says in another book that got him into trouble, ‘One step forward, two steps back. . . . It happens in the lives of individuals, and it happens in the history of nations and in the development of parties’.9 It happens in scholarship too. Lih does refute the textbook-account of WITBD?, but he then leaves the reader with the false impression that there is nothing worrisome or unusual in Lenin’s view of the proletariat before 1905 (or even 1917). He exonerates WITBD? and directs all of our attention to it, but then misses a different ‘worry about workers’ that emerges in Lenin’s texts at this time, and that will grow and remain with him after the seizure of power. Like the textbook-dogma he refutes, Lih makes a fetish of WITBD?, and exaggerates its importance in understanding the Lenin who will take power in 1917. But it is not in this ‘classic text’ that Lenin’s more important ‘worry about workers’ is expressed. That worry is to be found, instead, sprinkled through the minor writings and forgotten polemics that fill the 55 volumes of Lenin’s Collected Works. But we cannot see it if we allow WITBD? and its scandalous passages to dazzle our vision. This failure to take notice of other ideas that emerge in Lenin’s writings during this time-period, and that will endure and shape his choices when he comes to power, constitutes one step back in our understanding of Lenin’s thought. The other step back is Lih’s translation of WITBD?. I admire the effort, and agree that Russian terms should be translated consistently and faithfully into English. But Lih’s translation often transforms Lenin’s vigorous prose into a clumsy mess of ambiguity. In a misguided effort to render Lenin’s scandalous passages less scandalous, Lih substitutes constructions that are vague and ungainly. WITBD? would never have enhanced Lenin’s reputation in the underground-movement and attracted followers, as in fact it did, if the original conveyed the impression which Lih’s translation does. One of Lenin’s comrades 9. Lenin 1961, p. 412.

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on the Iskra editorial board, A.N. Potresov, praised this text for the poetry of some of its passages.10 Unfortunately, Lih has purged the poetry in order to protect Lenin from criticism. That is a second step back. In the following sections, I will describe each of these steps and missteps in greater detail. At the end, I will briefly speculate about the future of Lenin-studies.

Lenin-slips The really important thing to know about WITBD? is that the ‘scandalous passages’ in the second chapter are a mistake. They do not accurately express Lenin’s considered view on the subject of working-class consciousness. The great irony of this text is that its most famous passages – the ones thought to be the very core of Leninism – are, in fact, the sloppiest and most deceptive in WITBD?. This is why Lih proposes to bracket them in his analysis of the book. ‘The scandalous passages are just about the last place to look for something genuinely revealing about Lenin’s outlook’.11 Lih is right that ‘the formulations about spontaneity are not the heart of WITBD? but a tacked-on polemical sally’; they are ‘confusing’ and ‘unedifying’.12 Lenin ‘obscures’ his own view by making it sound ‘as if he were somehow suspicious and fearful of stikhiinost’.13 His insistence on diverting the workers away from their spontaneous path ‘must be adjudged a very bad move’.14 Lenin was actually ‘trying to affirm something that was utterly noncontroversial’. But, ‘unfortunately, he did not do it very well’, due to ‘hasty polemical improvisation, use of borrowed vocabulary, and an insistence on equating Rabochee delo with people holding quite different views’. The outcome was a ‘sorry result’.15 In the end, ‘the scandalous overtones of his words arise solely from his insistence – for strictly polemical motivations – on using a confusing and ambiguous vocabulary to express his accusations’.16 ‘Such was his polemical overkill that he ended up giving the impression that he himself held scandalous opinions. One is tempted to say “serves him right” ’.17 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Lih 2006, p. 387. Lih 2006, p. 396. Lih 2006, p. 20. Lih 2006, p. 352. Lih 2006, p. 353. Lih 2006, p. 395. Lih 2006, p. 615. Lih 2006, p. 667.


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All of these assertions are correct. In fact, I said something like this more than a decade ago in a set of articles on Lenin’s theory of working-class consciousness. Against the textbook-interpretation, I argued that Lenin’s pessimism in WITBD? was ‘in fact irrelevant for an understanding of Lenin’s mature theory and practice. A systematic review of the evidence indicates that Lenin’s critique of spontaneity there was an aberration – indeed, an error – from which he soon retreated’.18 The text ‘was not composed in a leisurely and reflective manner’ but ‘was a polemic dashed off in the heat of battle and should not be mistaken for a polished work of theory’. The thesis of consciousness from without was ‘a mistaken formulation that did not define the essence of Bolshevism’. It was, rather, ‘a famous failure’ and ‘should not be viewed as the doctrinal core of Leninism’.19 The evidence for this interpretation of the scandalous passages consists of Lenin’s own statements between 1903 and 1907; the testimony of other Social Democrats, both friends and foes; and Lenin’s failure to employ this argument in any of his writings after 1905. I reviewed this evidence in several articles, and it is gratifying to see that Lih has discovered no additional evidence of any consequence bearing on the question, despite his exhaustive search.20 I agree completely with his judgement that in the second chapter of WITBD?, ‘Lenin made a number of “mistakes” – that is, he said or implied things that he clearly did not believe’.21 I also agree with him that ‘what seems to the textbook interpretation as the very heart of WITBD? could be erased from the book without trace by snipping a couple of paragraphs’.22 Despite challenging the centrality of WITBD? as a statement of Lenin’s considered view on proletarian capacities, Lih says in the article that preceded his book that my work ‘leaves the textbook interpretation of WITBD? itself untouched’.23 While I get credit for putting ‘new source material . . . into scholarly circulation’, my mistake consists in trying to square this new material with ‘the standard reading of WITBD? ’. I do this by setting forth the ‘double flip-flop hypothesis: Lenin had a crisis of faith immediately before WITBD? and then had a radical change of mind very soon thereafter, thus leaving WITBD? disconnected both to Lenin’s past and his future’.24 18. Mayer 1996, p. 308. 19. Mayer 1996, pp. 309, 315, 318. 20. Mayer 1994, 1996, 1997a, and 1997b. Several of my early articles on Lenin do adhere to the textbook-view. It took me some time to figure out that there was a problem with this interpretation. See Mayer 1992, 1993a, 1993b, and 1993c. 21. Lih 2006, p. 650. 22. Lih 2006, p. 646. 23. Lih 2003, p. 41. 24. Lih 2006, p. 24.

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Lih has such enthusiasm for this material that he tends to imitate the polemical methods of his subject. The advantage of this method is that it makes a long journey less weary. The disadvantage is that it tends to ‘bend the stick’. Politicians are in the business of bending sticks, but scholars are not. To say that Lenin flip-flopped twice implies that he lacked convictions, or just said what his audience wanted to hear, or was thoughtless and confused. Whatever else we might say about Lenin, none of those criticisms apply. Since it is hard to think of a politician in the past century who flip-flopped less than Lenin, my double-flip-flop hypothesis must seem quite ridiculous. But I do not think that Lenin flip-flopped on the topic of working-class consciousness. Neither do I think that he had a crisis of faith in 1899 and a radical change of mind in 1903. The real difference between Lih’s interpretation and mine is that I think Lenin meant what he said in the second chapter of WITBD? and Lih does not. According to Lih, While I emphasise polemical context, I am not making the argument often heard in the activist tradition that polemical overkill led Lenin to ‘bend the stick’ and overstate a valid point. My argument is, rather, that when we grasp Lenin’s polemical aims, we discover that he is affirming something rather banal and noncontroversial for Social Democrats.25

It was ‘hasty carelessness’26 that accounts for the scandalous passages. Lenin was like an undergraduate who bashes out an answer in an essay-exam and does not realise that his sloppy formulations convey the wrong impression. He only made the mistake here and nowhere else. Yet the textbook-interpretation focuses only on the mistake, and treats it not as the mistake it was but as the very essence of Leninism. Both Lih and I think that Lenin made a mistake in WITBD?, but we disagree about the nature of this mistake. If Comrade Martynov was still alive, he could write a pamphlet on the controversy entitled Two Mistakes. Lih says that Lenin was careless in his choice of words. I say that Lenin chose his words carefully, but did not appreciate at the time how his strategy of argumentation in responding to the ‘economists’ was vulnerable to the charge of authoritarianism and unorthodoxy. As I have shown in detail elsewhere, beginning in 1899 Lenin formulated a response to the ‘economist’ challenge that was different from Plekhanov’s.27 In a nutshell, Plekhanov said that to help workers attain consciousness sooner 25. Lih 2006, p. 615. 26. Lih 2006, p. 573. 27. Mayer 1997b.


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rather than later, Social Democrats must accelerate the pace of their maturation. That maturation was occurring spontaneously even now, but would reach its goal more quickly through timely intervention by conscious Social Democrats. Lenin, by contrast, responded to the ‘economists’ by arguing that the maturation could not happen without external intervention by those who possessed the science of socialism. The two ideologists were fighting a common enemy, but adopted different rhetorical strategies to defeat those who (in Plekhanov’s memorable phrase) gazed in awe on the posterior of the Russian proletariat. Lenin’s strategy, however, was vulnerable to counterattack, because it seemed to express doubt about one of the holiest propositions in Marxism, the capacity of the proletariat to emancipate itself. It took the controversy over WITBD? for Lenin to recognise the weakness of his formula, and he then quietly revised it. He had always believed in the holy proposition, but inadvertently gave the impression in WITBD? that he might not. That was Lenin’s mistake. I doubt that it matters very much which interpretation of Lenin’s mistake is correct. As I see it, Lih and I belong to the same camp, and that is why I view this aspect of his work as a step forward in relation to the textbook-account. But, like his subject, Lih is opposed to ‘vagueness and the blunting of sharply drawn boundaries’.28 So I am consigned to the textbook-camp, but deemed at least an honest representative who does ‘make a good faith effort to incorporate a wider range of evidence’ into his interpretation.29 Perhaps we can form alliances for tactical purposes, even if we do not belong to the same party. Lih thinks the mistake I identify in Lenin is a mistake because the source from which Lenin drew his inspiration in responding to the ‘economists’ was Karl Kautsky, the premier theorist of the Second International. Kautsky’s orthodoxy was beyond dispute, so, if Lenin was guided by Kautsky, the ideas Lenin was trying to express in WITBD? must be thoroughly orthodox. That is not a bad argument, but we should bear in mind three facts. First, as I have demonstrated elsewhere, Lenin garbled Kautsky’s ideas.30 Lih agrees with this, but we might quibble about the exact details of Lenin’s confusion.31 Second, as I argue in another article, the Russian orthodoxy on workingclass consciousness formulated by Plekhanov was not exactly the same as Kautsky’s, and was more optimistic about proletarian capacities.32 Lih assumes that orthodox Social Democrats had to be Kautskyists at the turn of the 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

Lih 2006, p. 675. Lih 2006, p. 555. Mayer 1994. Lih 2006, p. 576. Mayer 1997b.

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century, but European Marxism was, in fact, diverse, and the orthodoxy in the Russian branch was a purer version of the ‘sooner-or-later’ theory than Kautsky’s Erfurtism. In turning to Kautsky, then, Lenin was turning away from or ignoring the Russian Marxism of his own movement. Third, doubts were sometimes expressed, even by Kautsky’s comrades, about the consistency of his formulation with the views of Marx and Engels. At the Austrian party-congress in November 1901, no less a figure than Victor Adler criticised Kautsky’s ‘merger formula’.33 Adler thought Marx would have rejected Kautsky’s formula because it distinguished too sharply between science and knowledge born of practice. I agree with Adler, but Lih, curiously, chooses to interpret the thought of Marx and Engels through the lens of Kautsky.34 As I see it, Kautsky got Marx wrong and Lenin, in turn, got Kautsky wrong. Lenin would have stayed out of trouble if he had simply followed the lead of Plekhanov. Speaking of Plekhanov, he offers evidence neglected by Lih that casts doubt on the ‘hasty-carelessness’ version of Lenin’s mistake. If Lenin’s error was due only to sloppiness, and not conviction, the mistake could have been corrected by a collaborator who read the first draft. In fact, Lenin had such a reader, but he refused to correct the mistake when it was pointed out to him. That reader was Plekhanov, and I discuss the evidence elsewhere.35 Lenin showed the first few chapters of WITBD? to Plekhanov in late December 1901. The latter pointed out Lenin’s hasty carelessness to him, but Lenin failed to revise his draft. Plekhanov complained when he saw the proofs of the pamphlet, and P.B. Akselrod agreed with him that Lenin’s ‘work in certain respects seems to me to have important defects and to be too extreme [v svoem rode vabank]’.36 In short, Plekhanov tried to save Lenin from the controversy over his scandalous passages that would soon explode, but Lenin refused to acknowledge the mistake. The explanation for Lenin’s refusal could have been pride, arrogance, confusion, or conviction – or all of these at once. But the important point is that the second chapter of WITBD? was a mistake which Lenin would not repeat. You will not find Lenin employing the arguments from that chapter after the seizure of power, and it is therefore a serious error to interpret it as the

33. For Adler’s criticism, see Mayer 1994, p. 679. In a 22 October 1901 letter to Kautsky, Adler criticised his friend’s Neue Zeit article and the assertion that ‘socialism must be brought “from without” into the masses’. He told Kautsky that ‘this is a point about which I am a heretic, but a heretic with Marx and not against him insofar as I understand him’. See Adler 1954, p. 373. 34. Lih 2006, pp. 42–53. 35. Mayer 1997b, pp. 176–80. 36. Berlin 1925, p. 165.


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central text in Leninism. Lih makes this case forcefully in his tome, and that is indeed one step forward from the textbook-view.

Worry about workers Lih’s suggestion that we bracket the scandalous passages and interpret the rest of WITBD? without them is fruitful. If we do, we see that Lenin was optimistic about the workers’ movement, eager to imitate the success of Kautsky’s party, and a passionate advocate of political freedom. As Lih observes, ‘WITBD’s arguments about democracy do not make Stalinist tyranny easier to explain – they make it harder to explain’.37 This view is correct. Aside from two perfunctory references to the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, there is no trace in this book of Lenin’s later ideas about the state and revolution or proletarian democracy.38 The kind of democracy for which Lenin was fighting at the turn of the century is bourgeois democracy – liberal, inclusive, and competitive. A reader of this pamphlet in 1902 would have had no reason to suspect that its author would one day press for an immediate transition to socialism in Russia on the morrow of the bourgeois revolution; suppress a democratically chosen constituent assembly; construct a one-party dictatorship; or establish a political police-force more ruthless than the one he was combating at that time. There is scarcely any hint of that Lenin in WITBD?. Indeed, as Lih depicts him, the Lenin of 1894–1904 is progressive and democratic and wise. He is usually on the right side in his polemics with opponents, and his polemical methods are no worse than theirs. To be sure, Lenin could be ‘inexcusably misleading’39 in his counterattacks, and he did sometimes indulge in ‘unscrupulous and obfuscating polemics’.40 But even Rosa Luxemburg was guilty of ‘an unscrupulous hatchet job’ from time to time.41 That was how Marxists argued amongst themselves. Lenin had a sharp pen and was sometimes sloppy in wielding it. That seems to be the worst one could say about him, based on Lih’s reading of this decade in Lenin’s revolutionary career. But there is more going on in Lenin’s writings during this period than Lih recognises. There is a worry about workers expressed in his articles and manuscripts after 1898 that grows and persists during the remainder of Lenin’s 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

Lih 2006, p. 476. On the evolution of Lenin’s view of proletarian dictatorship, see Mayer 1993a. Lih 2006, p. 359. Lih 2006, p. 384. Lih 2006, p. 526.

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career. This worry is not emphasised in WITBD?, and that is another reason not to exaggerate the importance of this book. In directing our attention there, Lih fails to ‘rediscover’ another Lenin who will matter a lot later on. I have developed this argument at greater length elsewhere, and will only sketch the outlines here.42 In the last months of his Siberian exile, Lenin began to express the anxiety that certain fractions of the Russian proletariat were corruptible, and could be bought off by reforms or deceived by reformist ideas. The result of this corruption would be to divert these workers away from the revolutionary path being blazed by the vanguard and to divide the class against itself. This fear of corruption explains why it was so important to Lenin to wage a vigorous campaign against the ‘Russian Bernsteins’, who had become unwitting agents of this corruption. As he explained in ‘A Retrograde Trend in Russian Social Democracy’, the lower strata of the proletariat may become downright corrupted if they hear such calumnies as that the founders of Russian Social Democracy view the workers only as a means for overthrowing the autocracy; if they hear invitations to limit themselves to the restoration of holidays and to craft unions, with no concern for the final aims of socialism and the immediate tasks of the political struggle.43

The uneducated workers did not know any better, Lenin warned, and, if their leaders encouraged them to pursue material gain at the expense of the longterm interest of their class, they were all too ready to listen. ‘The most undeveloped workers, we repeat, can be corrupted’. ‘Such workers can always be ensnared (and will be ensnared) by the bait of any dole offered by the government or the bourgeoisie.’ They were too foolish and could not control themselves. These proletarians jumped at the smallest morsels, and did not think about the future. As organs of the lowest stratum of workers, ‘economist’ publications like Rabochaia mysl could therefore do tremendous harm, for ‘to reduce the entire movement to the interests of the moment means to speculate on the undeveloped character of the workers, to play into the hands of their worst passions’.44 The ‘economists’ were pouring ladles of tar into a barrel full 42. Mayer 1993c, 1996, and 1997a. 43. Lenin 1960, p. 283. To avoid misunderstanding, I do not think that Lenin had a ‘crisis of faith’ in 1899, or underwent a change in personality. He was the same old Lenin, but, in 1899, he confronted, for the first time, serious deviations within the workers’ movement. Until then, his opponents had always been outsiders, like the legal populists. Bernsteinism was a much more threatening phenomenon because it came from within the Marxian camp and could therefore more easily pervert. 44. Lenin 1960, pp. 280–5. In places, I have revised the English translation in Lenin’s Collected Works.


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of honey, Lenin claimed, and the time had come for the orthodox to fight this corruption of the undeveloped workers. The English word ‘corruption’ is the standard translation of the Russian term razvrashchenie, which recurs again and again in Lenin’s texts, from this time forward to the end of his political career. As he often does, Lih tries to dull Lenin’s vocabulary by rendering the word as ‘leading astray’,45 but, in Russian, razvrashchenie and its cognates has a sexualised flavour of debauchery. As a verb, the term is probably best translated as ‘to pervert’. Lenin was fearful that external forces and opportunists within the Party would pervert sections of the working class and render them unfit for revolutionary action. They enticed these workers from the difficult path of struggle and encouraged them to indulge or relax. When successful, this corruption deformed its victims and perverted their minds so that they cooperated in their own oppression. I submit that texts like ‘A Retrograde Trend’ betray a worry about workers. The worry is not about the class as a whole, but certain fractions within it. In that manuscript, Lenin worries about the corruptibility of the lowest stratum of the class, but, in later writings, he will also warn of perversion in the ‘labour aristocracy’. Both the top and the bottom of the class are unreliable, and can yield to temptation. As the revolution approaches, Lenin will also speak about the ‘petty-bourgeois instincts’ of these strata, which are powerful in a peasant country like Russia. Scratch a Russian worker, Lenin seems to say, and you may well find a flip-flopping petty bourgeois. As he explained in Left-Wing Communism (1920), small proprietors ‘surround the proletariat on every side with a petty-bourgeois atmosphere, which permeates and corrupts the proletariat, and constantly causes among the proletariat relapses into pettybourgeois spinelessness, disunity, individualism, and alternating moods of exaltation and dejection’.46 While much water will have flowed under the bridge by the time we reach the late civil-war period, I believe that the first traces of this rather obvious worry about workers manifest themselves in Lenin’s pre-WITBD? writings. This worry is important, because it is the justification Lenin will offer for discounting the views of workers who do not follow the lead of his faction, both before the Revolution and after. Proletarians who align themselves with a different party or faction, or who fail to do what Lenin wants them to do, will be written off as corrupted – either by external forces or by the petty bourgeois within. They had betrayed the class or never really belonged to it in the first place. They were not the steadfast, rock-hard proletarians, who, of 45. Lih 2006, p. 401, n. 23. 46. Lenin 1966, p. 44.

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course, always supported Lenin’s policies. As Lenin explained in Steps, discipline is the essential trait of the proletarian.47 Thus, any workers who deviate from his preferred position prove that they have lost their proletarian soul or never possessed it to begin with. Lenin could afford to drop the scandalous argument about consciousness from without made famous in WITBD?, because it was unnecessary and in fact counterproductive. That argument appeared to clash with the holy proposition of proletarian self-emancipation, but the ‘perverted and/or pettybourgeois’ formula did not. The keynote of Lenin’s outlook could be exhilaration about workers, as Lih says, because real workers always played the role assigned to them in Lenin’s script. People who did not play that role were not real workers, even if they performed wage-labour. They lacked the requisite proletarian mentality [ psikhiia]. Their views (and votes) could therefore be discounted, because they were in fact outsiders, not insiders. Salvation did not come from outside the proletariat, Lenin believed; that was in fact the source of corruption, betrayal, and opportunism. Anxiety about the corruptibility of the proletariat runs like a red thread through Lenin’s mature writings. Although much of what he said about workers and their inclinations was perfectly orthodox, a deep-seated fear of working-class corruption was distinctive to him. It is true that one can find occasional expressions of this anxiety in the works of other Marxist thinkers. Marx and Engels were the first to make use of the concept of corruption in order to explain the reformism of the English workers, and their argument was certainly familiar to turn-of-the-century Social Democrats. Dissidents within the German Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, for instance, employed this rhetoric against the leadership in an 1890-campaign to wrest control from party-moderates.48 Among Russian Marxists, Iulii Martov in particular wrote often of the danger of ‘Zubatov corruption’ in the early issues of Iskra. But the depth of Lenin’s fear, and the frequency with which he spoke of it, were unprecedented in Russian Social-Democratic circles. There is simply no trace of this anxiety in the writings of Plekhanov, Akselrod or Zasulich, either before 1899 or after. They did not fear that many workers were corruptible or worry that some were insufficiently proletarian to withstand temptation. Lenin alone expressed such pessimistic sentiments and – what is more – drew organisational and tactical conclusions from them. Lih, however, misses the emergence of this worry about workers in the phase of Lenin’s career which he examines. This worry is registered in a few 47. Lenin 1961, pp. 387–9, 392. 48. Lidtke 1966, pp. 305–19.


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passages in the first chapter of WITBD?, but does not surface in the more famous second chapter. By directing our attention there, Lih fails to detect other scandalous passages in Lenin’s writings that do point toward the future. That counts as one step back in our effort to understand Lenin.

Ballhorning Lenin In Chapter Three of WITBD?, Lenin explains that Verballhornung, or ballhorning, is a German expression that means an effort to improve that actually makes things worse.49 That is, unfortunately, an accurate description of Lih’s translation of WITBD?. While much of it is fine, where it really matters, Lih’s version makes Lenin muddled or incomprehensible. This is another step back. Part of the problem is that Lih lacks faith in his readers. In the text, he explains what Lenin meant by the terms konspiratsiia and tred-iunionizm, but Lih seems to think that we will forget those explanations when we read Lenin’s text, and so he retains the Russian terms in his English translation. But English-speakers are still going to think ‘conspiracy’ or ‘trade-unionism’ when they run across those foreign terms – and there is no reason why they should not, as long as they bear in mind the explanation. The untranslated words only make Lenin’s text more ungainly than it actually is. That is a minor problem. More serious is the refusal to translate the infamous stikhiinost, a decisive word in WITBD?. That Russian word will not suggest anything to English-speakers when they encounter it, and this may be why Lih refuses to translate it. He wants us to draw a blank, because he thinks the word is polymorphous, ambiguous, and confusing. Above all, we must not think ‘spontaneous’, which is how the word is usually translated in WITBD?. Lih devotes a dozen pages50 to the history of the word and its various meanings in Lenin’s texts, and the story is so confusing that he just ‘throws up [his] hands’ and refuses to translate the term at all.51 The result is that the scandalous passages in his translation are no longer scandalous, but incomprehensible. Thus we are sure to ignore them as we set about rediscovering Lenin. One way to determine what the word means is to ask how Lenin’s Russian readers in 1902 understood what he was saying. But Lih does not want to do this, because many who read Lenin’s pamphlet thought he meant something like ‘spontaneity’. That word may not be precise, but it is close enough – especially 49. Lih 2006, p. 735. 50. Lih 2006, pp. 616–28. 51. Lih 2006, pp. 35–6.

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because Lenin slips in these passages. By the time we get to the translation, we know that we must be cautious about the second chapter. No harm will be done if the translator does his job and finds an English equivalent for us, and, thus far, no-one has found a better equivalent than the dreaded ‘spontaneity’. But, even worse than not translating at all is translating in ways that soften or confuse, or render ungainly Lenin’s incisive style. From a purely literary point of view, WITBD? is Lenin’s best book. In no other work was he so playful with language, inventing new concepts and words that quickly entered the Russian Social-Democratic vocabulary and set the terms of debate. The book made ‘a great sensation’ in underground-circles in 1902, in part because it was lively and well written.52 But Lih dulls Lenin’s edge by substituting ‘awareness’ and ‘purposiveness’ for ‘consciousness’; ‘to cause to stray’ for ‘to divert’; ‘leader/guide’ for ‘leader’; ‘writerism’ for ‘bookishness’; ‘activeness’ for ‘activity’; ‘led astray’ for ‘corrupted’; and ‘worker-class’ for ‘working class’. The translated title of chapter two is an excellent example of ballhorning: ‘The Stikhiinost of the Masses and the Purposiveness of Social Democracy’. That title conveys no meaning at all. This objection is partly stylistic, which is a matter of taste, but, in places, I think the new terminology positively obfuscates. One example is Lih’s translation of kustarnichestvo as ‘artisanal limitations’. The phrase is not only awkward, but severs the connection we are meant to draw between Lenin’s organisational views and the topic that engaged much of his energy during the 1890s, the development of capitalism in Russia. A kustar is a handicraftworker, and, all through the 1890s, Lenin engaged in a debate with the legal populists about the fate of these labourers. The legal populists imagined that handicraft-industry remained outside the bounds of the capitalist system because it was conducted on a small scale. But, in The Development of Capitalism in Russia and other writings, Lenin demonstrated that handicraft-production in Russia was already a constituent-part of the capitalist system, and that the supposed independence of the handicraftsmen was a sham. Most handicraftworkers, were, in fact, wage-labourers in the kind of putting-out system described by Marx in the fifteenth chapter of Capital. They were already proletarians of a sort, but the conditions in which they worked prevented the kustari from recognising this or organising to improve their situation. Encouraged by the legal populists, they dreamed of regaining the independence and the property they had lost during the course of capitalist development and therefore remained divided and supremely exploitable.

52. On the reception of Lenin’s text, see Mayer 1996, pp. 310–16.


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When he turned from his economic studies to organisational questions in the late 1890s, Lenin was able to frame the problem in a way that would make Russian Marxists sympathetic to his call for the construction of a nationwide organisation. Lenin invented the term kustarnichestvo to describe the fragmented and amateurish state of the movement in the absence of an integrated party-apparatus. The local circles were like isolated kustari, too disorganised to fight effectively against the enemy who oppressed them. Just as capitalism was moving forward from the handicraft to the industrial phase of development, so too must the Party leave behind its kustarnichestvo or handicraftism. The implication of the term was that advocates of local autonomy and circle-democracy were akin to the legal populists, a retrograde and non-Marxian trend. Handicraftism, then, is a better translation for this term than ‘artisanal limitations’, and helps tie WITBD? more closely to Lenin’s earlier economic studies. Neil Harding makes this argument in the first volume of his great study of Lenin’s thought.53 In any case, ‘artisan’ is likely to create the wrong impression for English-speakers, because kustari tended to be unskilled, parttime labourers and not highly skilled masters of an art. I also think that ‘professional revolutionary’ is better than ‘revolutionary by trade’ as a translation, because it suggests the source of Lenin’s memorable image in the Webbs’ book Industrial Democracy. But I have made that argument elsewhere, and will not repeat it here.54 Translation is a difficult art, and Lars Lih is well-qualified to undertake this task. He is right that the older translations are not entirely satisfactory, and that a solid knowledge of the context is necessary to do justice to a complicated work like WITBD?. But Lih has nonetheless ‘ballhorned’ Lenin, although not in the fashion of Martynov. Martynov tried to render Plekhanov more profound, but Lih has succeeded in making Lenin more awkward and confusing than he was.

What is to be done? Despite the two steps back which the Party suffered after the Second Congress, Lenin remained optimistic about the long-term prospects of the workers’ movement. At a low point in his career, with most of his former comrades arrayed against him, a lesser man might have quit in despair. But Lenin steeled

53. Harding 1977, pp. 136–8. 54. Mayer 1993b.

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himself and took solace in the dialectic. History proceeds by way of contradictions, he said. But does scholarship? I have my doubts. The textbook-view of Lenin persists, despite efforts to correct it. The mistakes have been passed down from one generation to the next until they seem like an obvious truth. The legend of WITBD? endures, perhaps because it fills a need. It tells a simple story and identifies a moment when the future is foreshadowed. In this text, Lenin seems to lift his mask and reveal to us who he will become. The future dictator shows himself in the scandalous passages. Unfortunately, this myth makes for a more compelling story than ‘Lenin’s Erfurtian drama’, even though the latter is closer to the truth. The myth also has the advantage of legitimating the status quo and discrediting alternatives to it. For these reasons, I am not optimistic that better scholarship will succeed in rewriting the textbook-interpretation of Lenin. It does not help that the market for Lenin-studies has collapsed. Hardly any journals or publishers are interested in this story, because Lenin now seems truly to be dead. Some have spoken of the ‘Leninist extinction’. As long as his creation endured, the story was important, but once the creature died, Lenin lost his fascination. We know how this story ends, apparently, so who cares how it begins? Lars Lih makes a valiant effort to get this story right. His effort is not entirely successful, but he is certainly a talented scholar.55 Scholarship, however, is not always enough. Myths frequently have more power than the truth.

References Adler, Friedrich (ed.) 1954, Victor Adler: Briefwechsel mit August Bebel und Karl Kautsky, Vienna: Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung. Berlin, P.A. (ed.) 1925, Perepiska G.V. Plekhanova i P.B. Akse’roda Volume 2, Moscow: Izdanie R.M. Plekhanovoi. Childs, David 1973, Marx and the Marxists: An Outline of Practice and Theory, New York: Barnes and Noble. Harding, Neil 1977, Lenin’s Political Thought, Volume 1, New York: St Martin’s Press. Lenin, Vladimir I. 1960 [1899], ‘A Retrograde Trend in Russian Social Democracy’, in Collected Works, Volume 4, Moscow: Progress Publishers. —— 1961 [1904], One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, in Collected Works, Volume 7, Moscow: Progress Publishers. —— 1966 [1920], Left-Wing Communism – an Infantile Disorder, in Collected Works, Volume 31, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Lidtke, Vernon 1966, The Outlawed Party: Social Democracy in Germany, 1878–1890, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

55. I highly recommend Lih 1990.


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Lih, Lars 1990, Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914–1921, Berkeley: University of California Press. —— 2003, ‘How a Founding Document Was Found, or One Hundred Years of Lenin’s “What Is To Be Done?” ’, Kritika, 4: 5–49. —— 2006, Lenin Rediscovered: ‘What Is to Be Done?’ in Context, Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill. Mayer, Robert 1992, ‘Hannah Arendt, Leninism and the Disappearance of Authority’, Polity, 24, 3: 399–416. —— 1993a, ‘The Dictatorship of the Proletariat from Plekhanov to Lenin’, Studies in East European Thought, 45, 4: 255–80. —— 1993b, ‘Lenin and the Concept of the Professional Revolutionary’, History of Political Thought, 14, 2: 249–63. —— 1993c, ‘Marx, Lenin and the Corruption of the Working Class’, Political Studies, 41, 636– 49. —— 1994, ‘Lenin, Kautsky and Working-Class Consciousness’, History of European Ideas, 18, 5: 673–81. —— 1996, ‘The Status of a Classic Text: Lenin’s “What Is To Be Done?” after 1902’, History of European Ideas, 22, 4: 307–20. ——1997a, ‘Lenin, the Proletariat, and the Legitimation of Dictatorship’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 2, 1: 99–115. —— 1997b, ‘Plekhanov, Lenin and Working-Class Consciousness’, Studies in East European Thought, 49, 3: 159–85. Mirsky, D.S. 1931, Lenin, Boston: Little and Brown. Payne, Robert 1964, The Life and Death of Lenin, New York: Simon and Schuster. Schub, David 1966, Lenin: A Biography, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Schapiro, Leonard 1970, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, New York: Vintage. Utechin, S.V. 1963, Russian Political Thought: A Concise History, New York: Praeger. Van den Berg, Axel 1988, The Immanent Utopia: From Marxism on the State to the State of Marxism, Princeton: Princeton University Press.


brill.nl/hima

Lenin Rediscovered? Chris Harman

Abstract By framing Lenin’s thought squarely within the mainstream of classical Marxism, Lars Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered acts as a powerful contribution to rescuing Lenin’s Marxism from the condescension of the ‘textbook-interpretation’ of Leninism. However, the power of Lih’s book is weakened by a failure to grasp the slippage between what Kautsky wrote and the various ways in which his writings were interpreted within the Second International. While Lenin attempted to apply lessons from the German Social-Democratic Party to Russian conditions, so too did his opponents within the Russian socialist movement. The actual degree of difference between what Lenin did and what Kautsky wrote became fully apparent only after the events of 1914 and 1917. Keywords Lenin, Kautsky, Marxism, Second International, socialism, What Is to Be Done?

Lenin’s short book What Is to Be Done? is one of the most maligned texts in modern history. For liberal, social-democratic, anarchist, and conservative historians, academic and popular alike, it has long been portrayed as the source of the full horrors of Stalinism. It is generally claimed that Lenin laid down his scheme for a totalitarian party which would cajole workers into acting as cannon-fodder in his drive to establish a totalitarian state. And, should anyone doubt these claims, they are often supported by statements from Rosa Luxemburg and the young Trotsky. The essence of the hegemonic interpretation of Lenin is that he distrusted the mass of workers, despised their ‘spontaneity’, held that they could only be won to socialism by forces coming from outside the working class, and believed they could only be induced to take part in revolutionary action if brought under the control of a top-down centralised organisation of professional revolutionaries made up of bourgeois intellectuals. This argument is typically supported with selected quotations from What Is to Be Done? and the later text, One Step Forwards, Two Steps Back. Some on the revolutionary Left have criticised this interpretation. Tony Cliff did so in the first volume of his biography of Lenin, Building the Party, © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010

DOI: 10.1163/156920610X532253

C. Harman / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 64–74

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as did John Molyneux in his Marxism and the Party, I did so in my little pamphlet of 1968, Party and Class, so too did Paul Le Blanc, Ernest Mandel and Marcel Liebman. Yet the contrary message has been so pervasive as to have been incorporated without question into numerous works on the history of the twentieth century, even when written by people whose sympathies are with the far Left. It should not need adding that resisting the message has not been made easier by the support it receives among those Stalinists who welcomed its presumed authoritarianism. Lars T. Lih has done historical truth a favour with this monumental exploration of What Is to Be Done?. In 840 pages, he expounds the historical background against which it was written, the purpose Lenin had in mind, and what it actually said – providing a new translation of the text so as to eliminate mistaken understandings based on mistranslations of certain key concepts. His central argument is that Lenin, far from wanting to impose some sort of dictatorial rule on the workers’ movement, was in fact concerned with how, in conditions of extreme illegality in which any activist could expect to face arrest, imprisonment or exile within a few months, it was possible to build the enduring elements of a workers’ movement capable of being at the centre of an uprising against tsarism. He provides copious quotations showing Lenin’s faith in the possibility of workers achieving this goal. So Lenin writes in 1899: Not a single class in history has achieved a position of dominance if it did not push forward its own political leaders and its own advanced representatives who were capable of organising the movement and guiding it. The Russian worker class has already shown that it is capable of pushing forward such people: the overflowing struggle of the last five or six years has shown what a mass of revolutionary forces are hidden in the worker class.1

After a May-Day demonstration in 1900, Lenin similarly argued: In the history of the Russian worker movement, an epoch of excitement and outbursts has commenced, occasioned by a very wide variety of causes. . . . There exists a fairy tale that says that the Russian workers have not yet grown up enough for political struggle, that their main cause is a pure economic struggle that will imperceptibly and bit by bit be supplemented by partial political agitation for individual political reforms and not by a struggle against the entire political system of Russia. This fairy tale is decisively refuted by the May First events in Kharkov.2

1. Lih 2006, p. 421. 2. Lih 2006, p. 425.

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How do Lenin’s much commented-on ‘professional revolutionaries’ fit with this picture? Lih describes how, time and again, the tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, would discover and destroy workers’ organisations by arresting their members. What made this task easier was the amateurism of many revolutionaries: those new to the struggle found it difficult to hide their activities from the authorities. This could only be avoided by ‘conspiratorial methods’ – meaning not the organisation of terrorist acts or military actions, but the use of secrecy to hide from the authorities the organisation’s propaganda and agitational activities among workers. To achieve these goals, the principal enemy was amateurism (or, as Lih translates Lenin, ‘artisanal limitations’) – acting in a haphazard and disorganised manner and so playing into the hands of the Okhrana. There needed to be an organisation with a core of ‘professional revolutionaries’ – Lih prefers the translation ‘revolutionaries by trade’ – who knew the ‘conspiratorial techniques’ needed to avoid arrest while organising workers’ meetings, intervening in strikes, and circulating the paper. Lih shows how widely the need for such an approach was recognised by quoting not Lenin, but an article written for a German socialist newspaper in 1902 by Vera Zasulich: one of the people who turned against Lenin in 1903. According to Zasulich: The pressing necessity of the creation of a ‘Central Committee’, a central organisation that would stand over and above the local organisations, is felt by everybody, although not everybody has a clear idea of its character. We think, however, that to some extent this central organisation will be formed and already gradually is being formed according to the only model possible under a regime of unlimited despotism. This is an organisation of carefully selected ‘illegal’ revolutionaries – an organisation consisting of people for whom revolution is, so to speak, their only trade, who devote themselves exclusively to revolutionary activity and who are ready at any moment to change their name or change their mode of life in order to escape from persecution and constantly serve the cause. Only under these conditions is intensive revolutionary activity that is measured in years thinkable in Russia. Only such people will be able to hold out for several years, as opposed to the present time when a single revolutionary can barely be active for a few months. Only under these conditions will they acquire the knack for konspiratsiia, the skill in revolutionary matters, that is unattainable in other conditions even given outstanding revolutionary abilities.3

3. Lih 2006, p. 485.


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This was the message Lenin attempted to hammer home in What Is to Be Done?. As Lih points out, the equation of ‘professional revolutionaries’ with the intellectuals involves a distortion of Lenin’s argument: There is no textual justification for taking the alleged arguments about ‘intellectuals’ and applying them to the ‘revolutionary by trade’. Of course, Lenin recognises that at the time of writing, most full-time revolutionaries are not originally from the worker class. But neither then nor later is there any logical or factual reason for us to equate ‘revolutionaries by trade’ with intellectuals. According to the study of worker membership . . . 48 percent of pre-Second Congress [i.e. 1903] ‘revolutionaries by trade’ were of worker origin. The same study indicates that the total number of revolutionaries by trade during this period is quite small – no more than two hundred.4

If these figures challenge the dominant proto-totalitarian interpretation of Leninism, a central-democratic theme of What Is to Be Done? is the need for a revolutionary-socialist paper, printed abroad and circulated as widely as possible inside Russia. This, Lenin argued, could provide the necessary linkage between activists and workers across Russia. It could express a sense of common purpose across the workers’ movement, generalise their experiences, and orient to the goal of the uprising in each concrete situation. Lih quotes Lenin from 1901: If we unite our forces in producing a newspaper common to all, then this work will prepare and push forward not only the most able propagandists, but the most expert organisers, the most talented political leaders of the party, capable at the right time to give the watchword for the decisive battle and to guide it.5

Spontaneity, economism and leadership In pulling such material together, Lih dispels the myth that Lenin’s practice was in opposition to the self-emancipation of the working class. The libel rests on taking two paragraphs – from a work of over 160 pages – out of context. These refer to socialism coming from outside the working class and on spontaneity leading to subordination of bourgeois ideology. Lih gives the two quotations in the form they appear in the usual translation: We have said that there could not have been Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. It could only have been brought to them from without. The 4. Lih 2006, p. 465. 5. Lih 2006, p. 421.

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C. Harman / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 64–74 story of all countries shows that the working class exclusively by its own effort is able to develop only trade-union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation etc. The teachings of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by the intelligentsia. By their social status, the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, belonged themselves to the bourgeois intelligentsia.6 There is much talk of spontaneity. But the spontaneous development of the working-class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology to its development along the lines of the Credo programme; for the spontaneous workingclass movement is trade-unionism, and trade-unionism means the ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie. Hence, our task, the task of Social Democracy, is to combat spontaneity, to divert the working-class movement from this spontaneous trade-unionist striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary Social Democracy.7

Lih argues that the usual interpretation of these passages confuses the translation of the Russian into English. The Russian word translated as ‘spontaneity’ in the second passage, stikhiiny, does not refer to the positive sense in which ‘spontaneity’ is usually used in English. Rather, he claims, it has the negative sense of meaning ‘disorganised, lacking purpose’.8 He also argues that the word translated as ‘divert [sovlech], would be better translated as ‘attract away from’.9 So, the message of the second passage becomes that disorganised, undirected action by workers can easily fall into a very narrow form of trade-unionism that rejects political action. Or, if I can paraphrase Lih’s translation of Lenin: hitting out angrily is not good enough, you have to direct your anger. And the job of socialists is to provide some direction for that anger. I do have a quibble with Lih’s arguments here. I think he underestimates the importance of Lenin’s struggle against ‘economism’ – the tendency to reduce workers’ struggles to those of narrow trade-union issues. Lih argues that, by the time What Is to Be Done? was written, ‘economism’ was finished as a tendency within Russian Social Democracy, and therefore the function of the chapters against economism in Lenin’s book was not to defeat ‘economism’ but to label a non-economistic tendency, Rabochee delo, as economistic. Lenin himself recognised in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back that the ‘the division of Russian social democrats into Economists and 6. 7. 8. 9.

Lih 2006, p. 641. Lih 2006, p. 614. Lih 2006, p. 625. Lih 2006, p. 629.


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politicians has long been obsolete. . . . the fight against “economism” subsided and came to an end altogether as far back as 1902’.10 But that did not mean that economism did not continue to emerge (and does not continue to arise today) within the wider workers’ movements. The ‘independents’ opposed to the Social Democrats were, for instance, very influential among Odessa’s workers in 1903,11 and again in St Petersburg in 1904.12 More importantly, ‘economism’ has regularly raised its head within the international workers’ movement. As Gramsci pointed out, labour-power has two faces in capitalist society: on the one hand, its exploitation is the whole basis of that society, while, on the other, it appears on the market as a commodity like any other commodity. This aspect encourages the idea among workers that all that is needed is to negotiate harder over the terms on which their labour-power is sold. One face leads workers in the direction of class-struggle and consciousness, the other in the direction of subordination to a conservative trade-union bureaucracy. Or, as Gramsci put it elsewhere (in a passage virtually ignored by would-be Gramscian Eurocommunists and neo-Gramscian academics), workers under capitalism have a contradictory consciousness.13 From this perspective, the point of revolutionary organisation is to develop one element in this contradictory experience at the expense of the other. Lenin, the translator of the Webbs’ history of trade-unionism into Russian, may not have theorised this very well in What Is to Be Done?, but he was absolutely aware of its consequences.

The question of Kautsky There is a more important weakness in Lih’s book which confuses his otherwise powerful reinterpretation of Lenin’s project. He claims Lenin was simply following the path of pre-World-War-One German Social Democracy and its principal theoretician, Karl Kautsky, and that it has been a mistake of revolutionaries to argue otherwise. Certainly, it was Kautsky who repeatedly referred to bringing socialism to the working class from outside. So he wrote in 1901: The vehicle of science is not the proletariat, but the bourgeois intelligentsia: modern socialism arises among individual members of this stratum and then is

10. 11. 12. 13.

Lih 2006, p. 384. Schneiderman 1976, pp. 298–9. Surh 1989, pp. 113–14. Gramsci 1971, p. 641.

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C. Harman / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 64–74 communicated by them to proletarians who stand out due to their intellectual development, and these then bring it into the class struggle of the proletariat where conditions allow.14

According to Lih, Lenin was simply a follower of Kautsky at this time. This leads him repeatedly to refer to Lenin’s positions as ‘Erfurtian’, after the Erfurt Programme of German Social Democracy written by Kautsky. So strongly does Lih adhere to this view that he criticises mercilessly those who have drawn a strong divide between Lenin’s approach to politics and Kautsky’s: On the Left, a number of writers with no or very shallow roots in the Second International – Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Karl Korsch – created a theory (not shared by Lenin) that Leninism was the principled rejection of the fatalistic Marxism of the Second International and of Kautsky in particular. In my view, the insistence on seeing a great gulf between Kautsky on the one hand and Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky on the other has condemned those in the postwar Trotskyist tradition to a deep misunderstanding of their own heroes.15

That Lenin believed he was a conventional follower of Kautsky in 1902–3 is not in doubt. It is a point I made in Party and Class and John Molyneux made in Marxism and the Party. In fact, in his bitter criticism of Lenin in Our Political Tasks, Trotsky wrote that ‘Lenin took up Kautsky’s absurd idea of the relationship between the “spontaneous” and the “conscious” elements of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat.’16 Unfortunately, Trotsky did not develop this claim to challenge the fundamental approach of Kautskyism. Indeed, much of the rest of Our Political Tasks (the text in which this claim was made) consists in a criticism of Lenin for breaking with the WestEuropean approach to party-building. Lih argues that Lenin’s reliance on Kautskyite arguments in What Is to Be Done? means that it is wrong to claim that his overall conception of the relationship between party and class was different to Kautsky’s. He therefore criticises John Molyneux for writing that Lenin in 1904 ‘diverged’ in a ‘fundamental way’ from ‘social democratic orthodoxy’, but was not aware that he did so. Lih writes, ‘I am not sure whether we are supposed to explain this by Kautsky’s deceitfulness, Lenin’s inability to understand what he read, or Lenin’s unawareness of his own beliefs’.17 14. 15. 16. 17.

Lih 2006, p. 636. See also Kautsky 1910, p. 198. Lih 2006, p. 32. Trotsky 1904. Lih 2006, p. 25.


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This argument fails to understand how people read texts. We do so in terms of the context in which we find ourselves and interpret them accordingly. This frequently means both that readers ascribe different meanings to texts from those intended by the author and that different readers interpret the same text in different ways – without necessarily becoming aware of these differences. In the case of Kautsky, this was not just a problem for Lenin. Virtually the whole of the Second International accepted Kautsky’s version of orthodoxy until August 1914, with only a small group around Bernstein publicly dissenting on one side, and an even smaller group around Rosa Luxemburg on the other. The Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks, and those that wavered between them, all believed themselves to be ‘Kautskyists’ until 1914.18 This did not stop their various practices from being very different. Does Lih really believe the ‘activists’ can only explain this ‘by Kautsky’s deceitfulness’, their ‘inability to understand’ what they ‘read’, or their ‘unawareness’ of their ‘own beliefs’? In fact, we all know of cases in which people who claim to agree on a series of texts interpret them differently. The reason why so many people looked to Kautsky was that he was very good at explaining Marxist ideas in an easily intelligible way, and using those ideas to analyse certain long-term historical developments. His Foundations of Christianity and two-volume work, The Agrarian Question, are still well worth reading a century after their publication. It is unsurprising that not only Lenin, but also Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg were impressed by Kautsky so long as it was a question of asserting Marxist ideas against those of liberalism and tsarist conservatism. The problem with Kautsky became apparent when it came to moving from the picture of general historical trends to the role of human action in relating to and shifting the direction of such trends – from a ‘war of position’ to a ‘war of manoeuvre’ to use Gramsci’s terminology. Kautsky’s approach to politics was always paedagogic and schoolmasterish. In his texts, theory attempts to guide practice, but practice never causes a radical transformation of theory. Consequently, the party was always teacher to the class; the class never the teacher of the party. But, once the routine tempo of political life is shaken by enormous political, social or economic crises, the paedagogical approach blurs important issues relating to the application of abstract principles to reality. Such blurring explains how various people in Russia who saw themselves as ‘Kautkyites’ could adopt diametrically opposed practical-political approaches 18. With the exception of a few small groups, such as the one surrounding Rosa Luxemburg from around 1908.

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in 1904–6 and 1912–14 – and why the revolutionaries who had accepted the Kautskyite theoretical approach found themselves compelled to break from it explicitly after August 1914. Lenin’s life – before as well as after 1914 – displayed an approach to politics very different to that of Kautsky. He saw the party not merely as a teacher, but above all as an instrument for engaging in revolutionary-socialist action. That was why his supporters were known as the ‘hard side’ in the first split with the Mensheviks in 1903. This was why it was the Bolsheviks, not the Mensheviks, who organised the Moscow insurrection of December 1905. This was why, as Israel Getzler pointed out in his biography of Martov forty years ago,19 the Bolsheviks were enthusiastic about the spontaneous irruptions of workers’ anger in 1912–14, while the Mensheviks were afraid of their disorderly aspect. This also explains why Lenin was so insistent on berating party-members in 1905 to open up the Party to the newly revolutionary layer of workers – something Lih’s work recognises as having happened, but whose significance he feels compelled to minimise because of his ‘Erfurtianism’thesis. It took the outbreak of the First World-War to reveal to Lenin that his interpretations of Kautsky’s argument had been very different to those of Kautsky himself. This was because it was only then that the practical implications of the Kautskyite approach became clear internationally. Until that point, people could read what they wanted into Kautsky’s writings, within certain limits. This should not surprise us. You do not only judge someone by what they say they are. You have to work out what they really are. Or, as Marx once put it: ‘We do not set out from what men say, imagine or conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real active men . . .’20 And real, active people, who say the same things, often behave very different to each other. Lenin came to the conclusion, after reading Hegel in the first months of the War, that the Kautskyite orthodoxy’s basic form of understanding of the world was a mechanical, rather than dialectical, version of materialism. He wrote in his notebook, ‘Marxists criticised (at the beginning of the 20th century) the Kantians more in the manner of Feuerbach (and Büchner) than of Hegel’.21 Feuerbach and Büchner were mechanical materialists – and so, by implication, was the ‘pope’ of pre-1914 Marxism, Kautsky. Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci and Karl Korsch had a point which Lih fails to grasp. The 19. Getzler 1967. 20. Marx 1970, p. 47. 21. Lenin 1961b, p. 179.


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proof of the pudding, as Engels would have put it, was in the eating. Lenin behaved very differently in the Russian Revolution of 1917 from Kautsky and the Kautskyites did in the German Revolution of 1918–23. And the theses and resolutions of the Communist International in Lenin’s time were very different to Kautsky’s Erfurt Programme. It was not only those ‘with no or very shallow roots in the Second International’, as Lih claims, who commented on the mechanical character of its Marxism, as represented by Kautsky. Trotsky, writing in the immediate aftermath of the outbreak of the First World-War, noted that ‘Marxism became for the German proletariat not the algebraic formula of the revolution . . . but theoretic method for adaptation to a national-capitalist state crowned with the Prussian helmet.’22 He later noted that: Kautsky the propagandist and vulgariser of Marxism saw his principal theoretical mission in reconciling reform and revolution. But he himself took shape ideologically in an epoch of reform. For him reform was the reality. Revolution was a theoretical generalization and a historical perspective. . . . Kautsky did not have this indispensable living experience of revolution. He received Marxism as a finished system and popularized it like the schoolmaster of scientific socialism. . . . Kautsky tirelessly defended the revolutionary character of the doctrine of Marx and Engels. . . . But politically Kautsky had totally reconciled himself with social-democracy as it had developed . . .23

The same point is made in the obituary Trotsky wrote of Kautsky in 1938, which contrasts him sharply with Lenin: Almost up to the time of the world war, Lenin considered Kautsky as the genuine continuator of the cause of Marx and Engels. . . . This anomaly was explained by the character of the epoch, which was an era of capitalist ascension, of democracy, of adaptation of the proletariat. . . . It was taken for granted that with the change of the objective conditions, Kautsky would know how to arm the party with other methods. That was not the case. . . . His character, like his thought, lacked audacity and sweep, without which revolutionary politics is impossible.24

Neither Lenin’s thought nor his character lacked ‘audacity and sweep’. This is why it is fundamentally misleading to portray him, as Lih does, as an ‘Erfurtian’. He might have made use of the ‘vulgarised’ and ‘pedantic’ texts of

22. Trotsky 1971, p. 57. 23. Trotsky 1919. 24. Trotsky 1938.

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Second-International Marxism. But he did so for purposes of his own, and put back into them the revolutionary zest so missing from Kautsky. Lih has written a very useful book, but come close to ruining it as various points by trying to make Lenin into the something he certainly was not.

References Getzler, Israel 1967, Martov, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gramsci, Antonio 1971, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Kautsky, Karl 1910, The Erfurt Programme, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr. Lenin, Vladimir 1961a [1904], One Step Forward, Two Steps Back in Collected Works, Volume 7, Moscow: Progress Publishers. —— 1961b [1914], Conspectus on Hegel’s ‘Science of Logic’, Collected Works, Volume 38, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Lih, Lars 2006, Lenin Rediscovered, Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill. Marx, Karl 1970 [1845–6], The German Ideology, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Schneiderman, Jeremiah 1976, Sergei Zubatov and Revolutionary Marxism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Surh, Gerald D. 1989, 1905 in St Petersburg, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Trotsky, Leon 1904, Our Political Tasks, available at: . —— 1919, Political Profiles (Karl Kautsky), available at: . —— 1938, ‘Karl Kautsky’, New International, available at: . —— 1971 [1914], The War and the International, Colombo: Wesley Press.


brill.nl/hima

Text and Context in the Argument of Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? Alan Shandro Laurentian University [email protected]

Abstract Lars Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered aims to overthrow what he labels the textbook-myth of Leninism through a comprehensive reconstruction of Lenin’s relationship, both to the Kautskyite orthodoxy that dominated the international socialist movement, and more local polemics. While the resulting rereading of Lenin’s early Marxism is a powerful counter to the ‘textbookinterpretation’ of Leninism, Lih has perhaps ‘bent the stick’ too far in an attempt to prove Lenin’s orthodoxy. Importantly, he misconstrues Lenin’s critique of ‘economism’ through a toonarrow reading of ‘economism’. Lih would have been better served to recognise the importance of Lenin’s polemic as an attempt, not simply to paint his opponents on the Russian Left as ‘economists’, but, more importantly, to grasp the organic nature of reformism and thus the true scale of the difficulties involved in challenging its hegemony within the workers’ movement. Keywords hegemony, economism, consciousness, spontaneity, self-emancipation

For those interested in the revaluation and reworking of the theory and practice of the classical-Marxist tradition, Lars Lih’s ‘rediscovery’ of the political context of Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? (WITBD?) is a work of considerable importance. Lenin’s text has been a key-point of reference, perhaps the key-point of reference, in debates around the political function of a Marxist vanguard and the logic of political action, and hence around the relation of theory and practice. According to ‘the textbook-interpretation’, as Lih terms it, a reading that has passed into a broader conventional wisdom to the extent that it has gained the status of common sense, Lenin’s scepticism as to the capacity of the working class to spontaneously generate socialist consciousness led him to assign revolutionary agency to a vanguard-party of professional revolutionaries, rather than to the working-class movement. The subordination of the workers to the Leninist vanguard-party prescribed by Lenin thus prefigures, and thereby serves to provide the veneer of an © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010

DOI: 10.1163/156920610X532262

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A. Shandro / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 75–89

explanation for, the authoritarian upshot of the revolutionary process. The plausibility of attributing such a blatant departure from the canons of historical materialism to a professed Marxist depends upon situating Lenin’s thought in the context of the political élitism and messianic voluntarism of the pre-Marxist tradition of Russian populism. This depends, in turn, upon reading Marxism (or at least the Marxism with which Lenin was familiar), not as a guide to action, but, as the populist adversaries of Russian Marxism did, as a conceptual straightjacket that precluded the theorisation of effective revolutionary-political action. And, if this reading is to have any plausibility, it must rely upon contemporary criticism of Lenin from a few minor figures on the margins of the Russian Social-Democratic movement, from the retrospective criticism of Lenin’s Menshevik adversaries, and from the laterLeninist characterisation of Kautsky and the Mensheviks as mechanical Marxists. The textbook-interpretation not only serves to sustain the legend of Lenin’s populism, but also to constrain debate over the logic of revolutionarypolitical action within the narrow confines of an abstract opposition between agency and structure. The textbook-interpretation has been subjected to serious scholarly criticism before, notably in the first volume of Neil Harding’s Lenin’s Political Thought,1 but Lih here lays out a much more relentlessly detailed – I am tempted to say exhaustive – refutation. The theoretical and evidentiary issues Lih addresses are complex, and he combines evidence drawn from historical, literary and linguistic sources into a powerful multi-faceted argument that resists brief summary. His interpretation turns upon the meticulously argued claim that the historical narrative of the fusion of socialism and the workers’ movement epitomised in Kautsky’s commentary upon the German Social-Democratic Party (SPD)’s Erfurt Programme, and the attempt by Russian Marxists to situate their political aims and practice in the terms of this narrative, constitute the context without which Lenin’s text cannot be understood. The ‘Erfurtian’ narrative is shot through with biblical overtones – it is the ‘mission’ of the Social Democrats to bring to the workers the ‘good news’ of the world-historical ‘mission’ of the working-class movement to seize power and establish socialism – and so the political project of Social Democracy is not premised simply upon a dryly mechanical theory of history, but resonates with activist-evangelism. ‘Socialist consciousness’ is thus to be understood essentially in terms of the task of spreading this ‘good news’, and an evangelical and democratic confidence in the capacity of the workers to receive it and act upon it was essential to the Social-Democratic project. This 1. Harding 1977, Chapters 6 and 7.


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portrait of the political orientation of Kautsky’s orthodox Marxism, in which confidence in the inevitable unfolding of the historical laws of capitalism, rather than excusing a political posture of passive expectation, sustains a durable will to revolutionary activism, is a crucial building-block in Lih’s argumentative strategy, for it is only by contrast with a fatalistic caricature of orthodox Marxism that Lenin’s advocacy of the organisation of a revolutionary vanguard could appear heterodox. Once the caricature is exposed as such – and it is one of the signal contributions of this work to have done so – it is possible and necessary to measure WITBD? against the standard set by Kautsky’s Marxism and the political project of the SPD. How, then, does WITBD? measure up? The strategic perspective fashioned by Plekhanov, Lenin and their Iskra-colleagues, the hegemony of the proletariat in the Russian bourgeois-democratic revolution, is construed by Lih in terms of the Erfurtian narrative, and he accumulates a mass of evidence to demonstrate the fidelity, not only of Lenin and Iskra, but also of the most prominent of their polemical adversaries, to its narrative structure. Indeed, he suggests that the Russians added little besides the term ‘hegemony’, and perhaps not even that, to the political orientation of the SPD. If anything distinguished Lenin in Russian-Marxist circles, in the company both of his Iskra-colleagues and of his polemical adversaries, it was his more unyielding attachment to the theme and the logic of the Erfurtian narrative and his correspondingly greater confidence in the political capacity of the workers to meet the demands of revolutionary-political struggle: if Kautsky’s rectitude in matters of Marxist theory made him, according to a witticism of the time, ‘the pope of SocialDemocratic ideology’, then Lenin, according to Lih, ‘comes off as more Social-Democratic than the pope’.2 Following Lenin’s commentary on the 1907 re-edition of WITBD?, Lih insists that the pamphlet be read in ‘connection with the concrete historical situation of a definite, and now long past, period in the development of our Party’.3 It was widely expected, around the turn of the century, in revolutionary circles that the struggles of the nascent working-class movement would serve to galvanise the opposition to tsarist rule that was welling up throughout Russian society. But early attempts to provide the movement with organised Social-Democratic leadership proved abortive when policeraids decimated its central organisations and reduced the fledgling party to a mere aspiration. In the resulting atmosphere of disorientation and demoralisation, a tendency emerged to shrink back from the revolutionary 2. Lih 2006, p. 114. 3. Lenin 1962d, p. 101.

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mission of Social Democracy, to narrow its practical ambition for the working class to a kind of Gompers-style trade-unionism pure and simple, and to cede the political struggle against the government, and consequently hegemony in the democratic revolution, to the representatives of bourgeois liberalism. Lih notes, however, that by the time WITBD? was written, although the Social-Democratic movement remained a congeries of circles, principally those around Iskra and those around the journal Rabochee delo [Workers’ Cause], loosely co-operating and, at the same time, contending for influence in the process of drawing together into an organised party, Lenin was able to assume opposition on the part of his readership to this ‘economist’ tendency. Lih fails to note, however, that, at least according to Lenin, disagreement over how this protean tendency to economism was to be understood – and consequently, how it was to be dealt with – played an important part in the contention among the Russian Social Democrats. As we shall see, this disagreement serves as a kind of index of tensions and ambiguities that beset the Social-Democratic project of proletarian hegemony and the Marxist orthodoxy upon which it rested; and it is thus an index of pervasive, if latent, differences in approach to understanding and acting within and upon the ‘concrete historical situation’. On Lih’s reading, the argument of WITBD? was structured in two main ways by this situation. First, it was shaped by Lenin’s concern to map out a plan for the construction of a party-organisation through the production and distribution of a newspaper devoted largely to political agitation and thus to sustain in practical terms Iskra’s bid for leadership. The requisite organisation would have, under then prevailing conditions, to be narrow rather than broad, a vanguard as distinct from a mass-organisation, capable of resisting police-repression and hence of growing roots in the working-class movement and of focusing worker-struggles on a political assault upon the tsarist régime. Thus understood, the newspaper-proposal would not displace working-class activity and consciousness, but rather serve to develop them and so enable Social-Democratic activists to act out the Erfurtian narrative under the trying conditions of tsarist autocracy. ‘[T]he vanguard outlook’ not only does not contradict the Marxist assumption that ‘the emancipation of the working classes must be the work of the working classes themselves’, but is effectively derived from it.4 The significance of the newspaper lies in the need for a vanguard-organisation of revolutionaries, this need from the exigencies of political agitation under autocratic conditions and the need for political agitation from the struggle for hegemony of the working class in the 4. See Lih 2006, p. 556.


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democratic revolution. This logic governs the last three chapters of WITBD?, which Lih terms its ‘business part’.5 Second, however, the argument of WITBD? was subject to the political logic of the factional struggle. Lenin was obliged by this logic to respond to a virtual challenge from Rabochee delo to defend Iskra against charges of having dogmatically subordinated the spontaneous struggles of the workers to an arid theoretical purism, that is, of having abandoned the ‘class point of view’ which led him to introduce the ‘business part’ of the book with two chapters devoted, respectively, to discussions of dogmatism and freedom of criticism and of spontaneity and consciousness. But, carried away by polemical zeal, he was led to assimilate the stance of his opponents, who, like Iskra, situated themselves inside the Erfurtian narrative, to that of acknowledged economists. In so doing, a penchant for trying to bend the rhetorical tropes of his opponents to his own purposes pushed him into a series of hasty and sometimes ill-considered and cryptic formulations, notably in his discussion of spontaneity and consciousness, that has become the focal point of subsequent political and exegetical controversy. Once Lenin’s argument is read in context and its practical essence distinguished from the distortions introduced by factional polemics, Lih argues, WITBD? can be seen, not as the site of dramatic political departures or theoretical innovations, but as nothing more nor less in substance than a reassertion and detailed application to the practical problems of Russian Social Democracy of the Erfurtian perspective of orthodox Second-International Marxism. If Lih is right, the political and theoretical controversy that has swirled around WITBD? is simply ‘much ado about nothing’. Any reading of a text must draw some kind of distinction between what is essential to its meaning and what is merely incidental, between what is of theoretical relevance and what is merely circumstantial. This distinction corresponds, in Lih’s work, to his distinction between the practical or ‘business’sections and aspects of Lenin’s argument, those devoted to his proposal for the appropriate tactical, organisational and practical arrangements to give effect to the Erfurtian perspective, itself uncontested among the Russian Marxists, and the polemical aspects of the work, dominated by the struggle as to who, which circle, would take upon itself the leadership of Russian Social Democracy within the parameters of the shared Erfurtian perspective. This distinction rests, in turn, upon a narrow construal of the term Lenin uses to designate the object of his criticism, ‘economism’, as entailing a rejection of workingclass participation in the bourgeois-democratic revolution. Thus understood, 5. Lih 2006, pp. 11, 353.

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Lenin’s attribution to Rabochee delo of an economist perspective is a polemical distortion of little or no theoretical interest, but one that has had the unfortunate effect of fostering the impression, among those unfamiliar with the context of the debate, that the critique of economism signified a departure from the canons of Marxist orthodoxy and hence of lending unwarranted plausibility to the textbook-interpretation. If we take Lenin at his word, however, economism is not to be understood in such narrow terms. The term ‘economism’, although entrenched by usage, did not, he acknowledged, adequately convey the character of the political trend he designated by it.6 Understood ‘in the broad sense of the word’, the ‘principal feature’ of economism was ‘its incomprehension, even defence, of . . . the lagging of the conscious leaders behind the spontaneous awakening of the masses’.7 Thus understood, the meaning of economism is subordinate to Lenin’s distinction between consciousness and spontaneity, and its significance is to be sought in the relation between leadership and the masses. Not only was economism not inconsistent with political activity, it was not inconsistent with political revolution. Thus understood, the category of economism did indeed allow Lenin to associate Rabochee delo with economism in the narrow sense, but this does not imply that he attributed the reformist views of the latter to the former – he did not. If we turn Lih’s interpretive procedure around and assume that Lenin intended his category of economism to designate some coherent referent, the question necessarily arises as to just what the coherence of its referent consists in. The coherence of economism certainly does not consist in an agreement of ideas, but the political significance of an idea is not necessarily what its proponent professes it to be. It depends upon the context in which it is professed: different ideas may play the same or an analogous rôle in different contexts, and even in the same context may display a convergent significance. The connection Lenin asserts between Rabochee delo and economism in the narrow sense is to be understood in some such sense, not as that between different adherents of the same set of ideas, but as that between variant forms of a political tendency. Judgements in matters of this kind suppose, of course, a claim to understand, at least in its broad outline, the strategic logic of political struggles, but that Lenin was prepared to make such a claim is not, I think, a matter of debate. Making sense of Lenin’s notion of economism thus requires us to grapple, not only with his distinction between spontaneity and consciousness, but also with the logic of political strategy in the democratic revolution. The matter is

6. Lenin 1962c, pp. 386–7. 7. Lenin 1962b, p. 317.


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best approached by considering the latter issue first. One of the merits of Lih’s book is to have shown that working-class participation in the struggle for political freedom flows naturally from the Erfurtian perspective: according to the Erfurtian narrative, it is only in the course of the struggle for political democracy that the workers learn to wield political freedoms in their own interests and hence develop the understanding and political capacity necessary to assume political power and organise society along Social-Democratic lines and, since the growing political strength of the working class tempers bourgeois enthusiasm for democracy, leadership in the struggle for political democracy is increasingly incumbent upon the proletariat. This conception refers, on one hand, to the theme of proletarian self-emancipation, the idea that the working class is – in the course of its struggle becomes – capable of taking charge of its own emancipation and, on the other, to the idea that the need of the working class for democracy in its struggle for a classless society renders it the appropriate leader for the democratic aspirations and struggles of other, non-proletarian classes and strata of society. It is thus characterised by some internal complexity – it assumes that the two tasks, self-emancipation and democratic leadership, and two corresponding interests, class-interest and popular-democratic interest, coincide. In Germany, where capitalism was incomparably more highly developed than in Russia and where the bourgeoisie had, accordingly, already been able to establish its preponderant weight in state-affairs, the established rôle of the SPD as the pre-eminent party of opposition may have seemed, in Erfurtian eyes, to cement the conjunction of these two terms into self-evidence. But, in Russia, where this Erfurtian conception was translated into the strategic orientation of proletarian hegemony in the bourgeois-democratic revolution, the conjunction of class-interest and popular-democratic interest was as yet only a strategic aspiration. Its translation into Russian political reality was conditional upon successfully coping with the challenge of rival, bourgeois, projects for hegemony in the revolutionary process. And if he is to be taken at his word, Lenin took the threat of such projects seriously. It is not that he feared the spectre of some latter-day revival of the Jacobin Clubs – that prospect was, indeed, historically dépassé. But bourgeois hegemony could take quite different forms than this. And, in the important essay, ‘The Persecutors of the Zemstvo and the Hannibals of Liberalism’, written just a few months before WITBD? and reissued along with the latter in 1907, Lenin discerned the lineaments of such a bourgeois-hegemonic project in an attempt by Peter Struve, former Social Democrat (in fact, the author of the manifesto that emerged from the abortive first congress of the Russian SocialDemocratic Labour-Party [RSDLP]) and future luminary of Russian liberalism, to use the threat of a revolutionary workers’ movement to urge

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reforms upon tsarism: this attempt presaged a scenario in which the revolutionary force of the masses played a necessary rôle, albeit only as a kind of stage-army with which to frighten the tsar, but which would then, when the time came for the serious business of renegotiating the redistribution of power, yield the political stage, willingly or unwillingly, to liberal specialists in constitutional politics.8 Such a scenario did not assume workers smitten with liberal ideology; rather, it envisaged a workers’ movement of militant, even revolutionary, even socialist temperament, but for which revolution was a means to enforce its economic class-interests, narrowly construed, rather than to transcend its interest-group limitations. Any tendency to construe the political project of the working class in restrictive terms, even one decked out, as in the case of Rabochee delo, in the language of revolution and claims to vanguard-status, would play into such a scenario: at stake in Lenin’s critique of economism was not only the relation of politics and economics, revolution and reform, but also, and perhaps more basically, the relation between classinterests and popular-democratic interests in the project of proletarian hegemony. If, as Lih claims, there was consensus among the Russian Social Democrats over the Erfurtian narrative and the project of proletarian hegemony in the bourgeois-democratic revolution, then Lenin’s critique of economism indicates that this project was beset by internal political, and therefore perhaps also theoretical, tensions; hegemony could not be taken as given, it would have to be constructed. And this suggests, in turn, that the relation between the business- and the polemical aspects of Lenin’s argument is more fluid (and perhaps more productive) than Lih would have it: if we once again take Lenin at his word and assume that a tendency exists corresponding to his definition of economism, it could reveal itself only in the course of polemics over what proletarian hegemony is, that is, how it was to be constructed. The polemical aspect plays not only a rhetorical or even political rôle in Lenin’s argument, but also an epistemological rôle. If the economist tendency as identified by Lenin does exist, the question must arise as to how it is to be understood and, in this connection, recourse to the distinction between spontaneity and consciousness is necessary. If we retain the possibility that Lenin’s polemic does play a theoretical rôle in his argument, then it may, conversely, help in clarifying the distinction between spontaneity and consciousness. It is a crucial weakness of Lih’s reading of WITBD? as an exemplification of the Erfurtian narrative that it is unable to account for some of Lenin’s most noteworthy (or, at least, most noted) formulations on the relation between spontaneity and consciousness, 8. See Lenin 1962a.


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particularly his repeated claim that ‘the task of Social-Democracy is to combat spontaneity, to divert the working-class movement from this spontaneous, trade-unionist striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary Social-Democracy’.9 The logic of the Erfurtian narrative can be stretched to accommodate a good deal of Lenin’s polemic against the economist practice of subordinating consciousness to spontaneity, but it cannot contain this crucial claim; it is a tribute to Lih’s intellectual honesty that he acknowledges this difficulty. And, while Lih can attribute the formulations in question to a combination of polemical distortion and editorial haste, it should be noted that his procedure of determining the meaning of key-terms in Lenin’s text, including spontaneity and consciousness, by reference to common Russian usage of the time, while necessary and sometimes illuminating, is ill-adapted to the task of discerning their place, and hence their meaning, in the logic of Lenin’s argument and therefore for determining whether or not they indicate an innovative movement of thought. The rôle played by ‘consciousness’ in Lenin’s text is not to be understood, Lih cautions, in abstraction from political practice, and since the political practice advocated by Lenin is to be understood in terms of the Erfurtian narrative, consciousness is construed as an awareness of the task of spreading the good news of the fusion of socialism and the working-class movement. Inasmuch as historical materialism supplies the theory of the historical movement of this fusion, consciousness is to be grasped by reference to Marxist theory. The introduction of consciousness into the spontaneous working-class movement from without signifies, in terms of the Erfurtian narrative, a practice of making workers aware of a goal and a direction of their movement that is already implicit in their practice. Since the spontaneous movement and the conscious awareness of it, practice and theory, are congruent and harmonious, there is no need, and no theoretical room, for a struggle between them. This is, indeed, the implication of the passage by Kautsky famously cited by Lenin in his own discussion of consciousness and spontaneity in WITBD?.10 However, while some of Lenin’s formulations can be assimilated to this logic, others, in particular those enjoining a struggle against spontaneity, are suggestive of a different logic at work in Lenin’s argument. The evidence assembled by Lih renders the ‘textbook-interpretation’ unsustainable, yet the conceptual tensions upon

9. Lenin 1962c, p. 384. 10. See Shandro 1997/8.

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which that reading feeds cannot be resolved absent an explanation of these passages. Socialist consciousness, as it figured in Lenin’s argument, certainly carried an injunction to working-class solidarity in the struggle for a socialist aim that transcended capitalism and class-society, but it also assumed an awareness of ‘the irreconcilable antagonism of [the workers’] interests to the whole of the modern political and social system’11 and, thus, it implied attentiveness to the twists and turns in the path to the socialist end, that is, to the politico-strategic logic of the class-struggle. The irreconcilability of class-antagonism implied that it is built into the very foundation of the bourgeois social edifice and it enjoins systematic distrust of the class-enemy; the pervasive character of class-antagonism implied that it cannot be escaped and argued that exclusion of any aspect of the socio-political totality from the purview of the socialist project might concede the strategic initiative to the adversary. Socialist consciousness could not but draw upon Marxist theory (the theorisation of the irreconcilability of class-antagonism) and could not be brought to bear upon the class-struggle in the absence of an organised leadership informed by that theory and able to apply it ambitiously and with confidence. Lenin’s argument distinguishes two contradictory tendencies in the spontaneous working-class movement, that is, in the working-class movement insofar as the consciousness of ‘the irreconcilable antagonism of [the workers’] interests to the whole of the modern political and social system’ has not been brought to bear upon it: the movement, grounded in the exploitative social relations of capitalist production that structure the workers’ lives and experience, tends spontaneously through the experience of solidarity and struggle to engender a socialist consciousness (that is, the spontaneous movement is the ‘embryo of consciousness’) but bourgeois ideology imposes itself spontaneously as the frame within which working-class experience and struggles are grasped in terms that could not shake the hegemony of the adversary (that is, the spontaneous movement leads to a merely corporate or ‘trade-union consciousness’). Lenin’s claim is that the latter tendency ‘spontaneously’ predominates over the former and that it is therefore incumbent upon ‘Social-Democratic consciousness’ or rather, those who have achieved this consciousness, to struggle against ‘spontaneity’. To appreciate the force of this claim, we need to look at the logic of the interplay between these tendencies.12 The workers struggle spontaneously, 11. Lenin 1962c, p. 375. 12. The point is more thoroughly argued in Shandro 1995.


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and, in the course of their struggles, a combination of changed circumstances and innovative methods of struggle may result in a challenge and even, on occasion, a breach of the parameters of bourgeois hegemony. Spontaneous working-class struggles may elicit not only a re-assertion of the tried and true themes of class-rule, but also sometimes innovative attempts to reformulate the parameters of bourgeois hegemony, that is, the reorganisation of bourgeois strategy and the spontaneous imposition of bourgeois ideology onto the struggle of the workers. To be effective, this kind of response must appear in forms that have some purchase upon the spontaneous proletarian experience of the class-struggle; indeed, bourgeois hegemony need not depend upon denial of the class-struggle and might be most effectively expressed in and through the political shape, organisation and direction of the resistance of its socialist adversary. Accommodation to bourgeois hegemony thus proceeds spontaneously, not through a failure of proletarian commitment to the struggle for socialism, which Lenin never questioned, but through failure effectively to mount a political project of proletarian hegemony, that is, to contend for, establish and maintain the strategic initiative in the struggle for hegemony in the democratic revolution. An effective project of proletarian hegemony could not arise simply from the workers’ spontaneous experience, because that experience is structured both by the reality of class-antagonism and by the bourgeois-ideological construction of such antagonism as somehow reconcilable. Since each aspect of this spontaneous movement may take on novel forms beyond the current experience of the participants, the irreconcilability of their antagonism can only be grasped theoretically. Since attempts at class-conciliation can draw upon ideological and political materials from anywhere in the social totality and may do so innovatively, Marxist theory must be open to the whole of the social order, including the open-ended logic of the struggle for hegemony, that is to say, it must itself develop; indeed, theory and the political project grounded in it can only be vindicated, however, through engagement with periodically renewed attempts to reconcile class-antagonisms, including attempts that would instrumentalise elements of socialist theory and practice to this end. Why could the workers themselves not grasp Marxist theory? Lenin’s explicit answer was that they could do it, better in fact than the intellectuals. They would do so, however, not in the mass, but as individuals, and having become conscious, they would find themselves in a position analogous to that occupied by the initial, intellectual, carriers of Marxist theory, confronting the challenge of bringing consciousness to bear upon the contradictory logic of the spontaneous movement. Meeting it spontaneously,

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they might observe the objective logic of the class-struggle and, accommodating themselves to flow of events, no doubt participate along with their fellow-workers in whatever struggles should arise, but forego any pretensions to provide leadership in the class-struggle. Meeting it consciously, they would employ Marxist theory reflexively to grasp their own situation within the spontaneously-given conjunctures of the class-struggle and, acting from where they are, assume the burdens of leadership in the struggle for hegemony. To assume this responsibility was to take up a sophisticated political stance, sustaining the spontaneous struggles of the workers and fostering the embryonic forms of socialist consciousness thrown up in the course of them by diagnosing and combating the forms in which bourgeois ideology spontaneously imposes itself within the working-class movement. At stake in Lenin’s discussion of spontaneity and consciousness was, not an issue in the sociology of knowledge concerning the bearer of socialist consciousness, but the strategic, or better, meta-strategic, issue of the terms in which Marxist political actors – intellectuals or workers – can come to grips with their own situation within the class-struggle and position themselves to act effectively upon it. Indeed, that the ‘profound theoretical error’ of Rabochee delo and other Economists had to do with just this issue, their inability ‘to connect spontaneous evolution with conscious revolutionary activity’,13 is asserted by Lenin in a brief article he described as a ‘synopsis’ of WITBD?.14 Lenin’s distinction between spontaneity and consciousness is not a transposition into political terms of an ontological distinction between matter and mind or of a social-scientific distinction between base and superstructure, or even of a sociological distinction between workers and intellectuals. It invokes, rather, the contradictory combination of a complex set of forces and tendencies in a concrete conjuncture of political struggle and implicitly, through this, the operation of a politico-strategic logic of struggle for hegemony in relation to which the Marxist political actors are invited/ required to situate themselves. Refracted through this logic, the class-struggle and, with it, working-class consciousness cannot but develop unevenly. The thesis of consciousness from without is an attempt to think through the implication of this unevenness for political action and political leadership of the working-class movement. It provides the conceptual underpinnings for the distinctive Leninist injunction to concrete analysis of the concrete situation, and it mandates, accordingly, the reflexive adjustment of 13. Lenin 1962b, p. 316. 14. Lenin 1962c, p. 350.


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consciousness to the shifting lines and logic of the struggle for hegemony. Thus, paradoxically, it generates the possibility of opening up Marxist theory to unexpected innovation and diversity in the spontaneous movement of the class-struggle.15 Lenin’s WITBD? emerges from and cannot be understood without the context of orthodox Erfurtian Marxism, but it points beyond it. If some such logic is at work in WITBD?, then it becomes plausible to regard Rabochee delo and Kuskova’s Credo as, not necessarily different expressions of the same set of political ideas, but distinct phenomenal forms of the same underlying political tendency. For, on this logic, political tendencies are to be identified not only by reference to the ideas expressed by political actors but essentially by reference to the rôle ideas and actions play in the class-political struggle for hegemony. The economism that was the target of Lenin’s critique need not imply the reduction of political to economic struggle; indeed, it could be and often was articulated in quite revolutionary terms. Thus, it could assume an indefinite number of forms, leftist as well as rightist, as it did during the revolution of 1905, and again, during the First World-War, when Lenin would revive the terminology of the earlier polemic to tax Bukharin and his co-thinkers with the charge of ‘imperialist economism’ for their refusal to recognise a right of nations to self-determination as an essential part of a revolutionary-socialist programme.16 Thus understood, the economist-trend consisted in the effective concession to bourgeois interests of areas of political debate and activity and thereby and to that extent the restriction of working-class politics to narrowly corporate concerns and the accommodation of socialist politics to the spontaneous movement of the classstruggle, that is, to lines, forms and trajectories of conflict prescribed by, or at least recoverable by, bourgeois hegemony. The struggle between political tendencies in the working-class movement is no longer reduced to a struggle between ideas proper to the working class itself and those proper to historically outmoded social strata intermingled with it, but is to be understood as well in terms of the logic of contemporary political struggles. If some such logic underpins Lenin’s argument, then his critique of Rabochee delo’s theoretical indifference in the first chapter of WITBD? is not, as Lih maintains, of merely polemical significance but integral to his political position, that is, to the way in which he was beginning to conceive the hegemony of the proletariat. For knowledge of Marxist theory figures there, not as a rigid standard of orthodox rectitude with which to chastise his

15. See Shandro 2007. 16. See Lenin 1964.

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adversaries for their departures, but, more importantly, as a necessary condition for grappling consciously with the new and in some cases unprecedented issues posed by the struggle against the tsarist autocracy and, consequently, for situating oneself in concrete political terrain. The importance of theory is enhanced for the Russian Marxists, Lenin writes, not only by the need to settle accounts with non-Marxist trends of revolutionary thought and the consequent necessity of a ‘strict differentiation of shades of opinion’, but by the need to develop ‘the ability to treat [the] experiences [of other countries] critically and test them independently’ and by the fact that ‘the national tasks of Russian Social-Democracy are such as have never confronted any other socialist party in the world’.17 And this suggests, if it does not imply, that the defence of theory requires it to be further developed by applying it to new and as-yet unresolved questions. Rabochee delo’s theoretical gaffes and practical blunders are to be gauged, accordingly, not only by already-established Erfurtian standards, but also by the task of grappling with challenges on the frontiers of Marxist theory and practice. Lars Lih’s comprehensive demonstration that WITBD? cannot be understood apart from the political and discursive context of Erfurtian Marxism, and its attempted translation into Russia Social Democracy provides an indispensable service to the historiography of Marxist theory and practice. But, if I may borrow a Leninist metaphor, it seems that Lih has bent this particular stick too far. This is most evident in Lih’s narrow construal of the pivotal concept of ‘economism’, in terms of the professed positions of only some of the targets of Lenin’s polemic, although Lenin explicitly cautions his readers against this kind of misreading. But the same sort of difficulty appears in Lih’s assumptions about the status of Marxist theory in Lenin’s argument. Where Lenin derived his recourse to theory from the very logic of the debate over practical proposals – ‘the perplexity of the Economists over the practical application of our views in Iskra clearly revealed that we often speak literally in different tongues and therefore cannot arrive at an understanding without beginning ab ovo’18 – Lih subordinates the text of WITBD? to his distinction between its ‘business’ – and its polemical parts, thus making it impossible to see what of theoretical significance could possibly be at stake in the controversy and reading as mere rhetoric, superfluous except for polemical purposes, the necessity Lenin asserts for recourse to Marxist theory in order to understand what is at issue in the debate over the practical project of proletarian hegemony. In these ways, the necessary and proper concern with restoring the context of 17. Lenin 1962c, p. 370. 18. Lenin 1962c, p. 350.


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WITBD?, pushed too far, actually leads to distortions of the text itself. In effect, Lih reduces the argument of Lenin’s text to its Erfurtian context and thereby misses its innovative aspect and, paradoxically, this kind of procedure can occlude such a crucial contextual feature as the connection, designated by Lenin, between economism as a political current and an emergent liberalbourgeois bid for hegemony in the democratic revolution. Where a text challenges the terms of debate, it may illuminate unsuspected distinctions and connections in the reality it seeks to grasp, and where that reality is the political context within which it is written, it may change the terms in which its context is understood; in this – materialist – sense, a text such as Lenin’s WITBD? may re-invent its own context.

References Harding, Neil 1977, Lenin’s Political Thought: Theory and Practice in the Democratic Revolution, London: Macmillan. Lenin, V.I. 1962a [1901], ‘The Persecutors of the Zemstvo and the Hannibals of Liberalism’, in Collected Works, Volume 5, Moscow: Progress Publishers. —— 1962b [1901], ‘A Talk With Defenders of economism’, in Collected Works, Volume 5, Moscow: Progress Publishers. —— 1962c [1902], What Is to Be Done?, in Collected Works, Volume 5, Moscow: Progress Publishers. —— 1962d [1907], ‘Preface to the Collection Twelve Years’, in Collected Works, Volume 5, Moscow: Progress Publishers. —— 1964 [1916], ‘A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist economism’, in Collected Works, Volume 23, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Lih, Lars 2006, Lenin Rediscovered: ‘What Is to Be Done?’ in Context, Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill. Shandro, Alan 1995, ‘Consciousness from Without: Marxism, Lenin and the Proletariat’, Science & Society, 59, 3: 268–97. —— 1997/8, ‘Karl Kautsky: On the Relation of Theory and Practice’, Science & Society, 61, 4: 474–501. —— 2007, ‘Lenin and Hegemony: The Soviets, the Working Class, and the Party in the Revolution of 1905’, in Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth, edited by Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis and Slavoj Zizek, Durham, NC.: Duke University Press.


brill.nl/hima

Rediscovering Lenin Paul Le Blanc La Roche College, Pittsburgh [email protected]

Abstract Lenin Rediscovered is an important and powerful contribution to our understanding of Lenin’s Marxism. However, it is also flawed by an attempt to push too far the claim that Lenin was a consistent ‘Erfurtian’ or Second-International Marxist. The dynamics of a mass political party and social movement are very different from even the most representative theoretician. The reality of German Social Democracy was certainly more problematic than what Lenin was able to glean from the very best of Kautsky’s writings. This became apparent to Lenin in 1914, when he recognised that he had been building a very different kind of party from the actual SPD. It may be possible that the SPD and the RSDLP (Bolsheviks) were both ‘parties of a new type,’ but it is also clear that they were not parties of the same type. There was much that Lenin had in common with Kautsky and Bebel – but he was doing something that was, in important ways, quite different. Keywords Bolshevism, communism, Lenin, Marxism, party, revolution, socialism, working class

The first thing one must say about Lars T. Lih’s massive study, Lenin Rediscovered: ‘What Is to Be Done?’ in Context, is that it is a magnificent contribution to our understanding of V.I. Lenin, Bolshevism, Marxism, the history of the Russianrevolutionary movement and of Communism. It stands as an incredibly effective challenge to anti-communist and anti-Lenin dogmas and distortions that have dominated scholarship and popular expositions since the 1950s in the advanced-capitalist countries – and, since 1990, throughout most of the world. Clearly written, well-reasoned, effectively documented, it is a work that no scholar seriously examining the life and thought of Lenin will be able to ignore. More than this, it is a gift to serious political activists seeking to draw on traditions and lessons of the past in order to get present-day and future possibilities into sharper focus. Although the sheer bulk of the volume (more than 860 pages) will be daunting for many, those who seek to bridge the gap © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010

DOI: 10.1163/156920610X532271

P. Le Blanc / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 90–107

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between serious scholarship and serious activism by helping deepen their comrades’ understanding through the development of more-widely accessible educational materials will certainly want to draw on this outstanding resource. Lih’s primary target for criticism is ‘a strong consensus of informed experts’ who, ‘at least from the mid-1950s’, have put forward a reading of What Is to Be Done? that ‘has found its way into textbooks of political science and of Russian history, and, from there, into almost any secondary account that has reason to touch on Lenin. The two or three famous passages that form the textual basis of this reading are endlessly recycled from textbook to popular history to specialised monograph and back again’. He sums up: ‘Putting all the assertions of the textbook interpretation together, we realise that WITBD? is a profound theoretical and organisational innovation, the charter document of Bolshevism, and the ultimate source of Stalinism’1 – a set of contentions unable to withstand this scholarly onslaught. Lih presents a Lenin who is absolutely committed to the establishment of political democracy as essential to the struggle for and the realisation of socialism, a Lenin who has immense confidence that the working class has a natural capacity for absorbing revolutionary-socialist ideas and committing itself to the struggle for a radically better world, a Lenin who is determined to help build a broad working-class party with a principled socialist programme flowing from a Marxist understanding of the world. He demolishes the notions that Lenin diverged qualitatively from Marx, that he distrusted the workers and their ‘spontaneity’, that he was an élitist and an authoritarian. In doing this, Lih draws together a variety of facts and opens up certain lines of thought that greatly add to our knowledge and understanding. It is a splendid achievement. There is, however, a problematic feature of Lenin Rediscovered that merits critical scrutiny. A somewhat exaggerated claim and unfortunate literary strategy are part of the structure of his argument. I would contend that this does no harm whatsoever to the primary thrust of his work – an examination of what Lenin actually thought and said and did. But it does introduce a distortion into secondary matters having to do with Lenin-historiography and how Lenin has been understood by a significant layer of pro-Lenin activists of the twentieth century. Lih presents his book as a boldly innovative challenge to what he calls ‘the textbook interpretation’ of What Is to Be Done?, Lenin’s major 1902 work on ‘the organisation question’. This so-called ‘textbook interpretation’, he tells us, 1. Lih 2006, pp. 13–14, 18.

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is offered not only by ‘academic specialists’ (Alfred G. Meyer, Adam Ulam, Leonard Schapiro, John Keep, Samuel Baron, Allan Wildman, Israel Getzler, Abraham Ascher, Richard Pipes, Jonathan Frankel, Herbert Marcuse, Barrington Moore, Bertram D. Wolfe, Reginald Zelnick, and others) – but also by ‘activists in the Trotskyist tradition’ (specifically ‘writers such as Tony Cliff, John Molyneux and more recently Paul Le Blanc’). The activists, he claims, have been inclined to give too much ground to the academics’ positing an élitist and authoritarian content in Lenin’s 1902 classic. The problem, he suggests, is that the activists are swayed by the unfair and inaccurate antiLenin polemics of 1904 advanced by Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky (which are also employed by many of the academics). I would insist that the argument is far too neat. The reality is messier, more interesting. Related to this, it is odd that Lih does not include at least brief consideration of important discussions of Lenin and the Bolsheviks by Isaac Deutscher, E.H. Carr, Moshe Lewin, C.L.R. James, Victor Serge, Ernest Mandel, Marcel Liebman, and Neil Harding (only the last three are even cited in the bibliography). To do so, however, would disrupt the neatly schematic generalisations he makes about the interpretations of academics and activists – and would also demonstrate (in the case of most of these authors) that Lih’s interpretation is hardly the innovation that he implies it is.2 Consider, for example, the 1963 comment by C.L.R. James, which seems a succinct summary of Lih’s argument: The theory and practice of the vanguard party, of the one-party state, is not (repeat not) the central doctrine of Leninism. It is not the central doctrine, it is not even a special doctrine. It is not and it never was. . . . Bolshevism, Leninism, did have central doctrines. One was theoretical, the inevitable collapse of capitalism into barbarism. Another was social, that on account of its place in society, its training and its numbers, only the working class could prevent the degradation and reconstruct society. Political action consisted in organizing a party to carry out these aims. These were the central principles of Bolshevism. The rigidity of its political organization came not from the dictatorial brain of Lenin but from a less distinguished source – the Tsarist police state. Until the

2. To Lih’s credit, he does acknowledge ‘that there exists a solid counter-tradition on WITBD – so much so that I can safely say I am rediscovering Lenin rather than presenting an original new picture’ (Lih 2006, p. 22). But the counter-tradition not only excludes the three textbook-tainted Trotskyists but also the other just-mentioned prominent scholars and activists. It involves what early Bolsheviks (including the young Stalin) and Mensheviks, plus Kautsky, said and did not say about What Is to Be Done?, as well as the comments of ‘informed outside observers’ such as journalist William Chamberlin, insights from two of his own teachers (John Plamenatz and Robert C. Tucker), and good points made by a scattering of others (such as Stephen Cohen, Moira Donald, Henry Reichman).


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revolution actually began in March 1917, the future that Lenin foresaw and worked for was the establishment of parliamentary democracy in Russia on the British and German models. . . . Bolshevism looked forward to a regime of parliamentary democracy because this was the doctrine of classical Marxism that it was through parliamentary democracy that the working class and the whole population . . . was educated and trained for the transition to socialism.3

It is not the case that Lenin has been ‘rediscovered’ only with the appearance of this excellent new study. It takes its place as a valuable contribution to an important body of literature defending the ‘Leninism of Lenin’ from slander and distortion. This quibble with Lenin Rediscovered seems worth further elaboration, it seems to me (perhaps not surprisingly, since I am one of its ‘activist’ targets). Lih’s argument is also ‘far too neat’, I will suggest in the concluding section of this essay, in relation to the development of Bolshevism in later years. First, however, we should look more closely at the solid merits of this important work.

I What, according to Lih, was the Leninist vision of the revolutionary party as put forward in his 1902 classic? His view of Lenin’s orientation could be summarised this way: the creation of a revolutionary workers’ party, guided by a serious-minded utilisation of socialist theory and scientific analysis, drawing increasing numbers of working people into a highly conscious struggle against all forms of oppression – this could not be expected to arise easily or spontaneously. It had to be created through the most persistent, serious, consistent efforts of revolutionary socialists. The working class would not automatically become a force for socialist revolution, but it could develop into such a force with the assistance of a serious revolutionary workers’ party. Such a party – making past lessons, the most advanced social theory, and a broad social vision accessible to increasing numbers of workers – would be a vital component in the self-education and self-organisation of the working class, helping to develop spontaneous working-class impulses toward democracy and socialism into a cohesive, well-organised, and powerful social force.4

3. James 1992, pp. 327–8. 4. This is a summary of Le Blanc 1990, p. 67. Lih cites it when acknowledging that ‘the activists have a more accurate sense than the academics of Lenin’s vision of the party’ (Lih 2006, p. 20).

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Lih is able to demonstrate, with an almost overwhelming scholarly thoroughness, that this vision is at the core of Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? and other writings from the mid-1890s up to the revolutionary upsurge of 1905. Thanks to his knowledge of Russian, he is able to comb through existing English translations to identify problematic formulations not existing in the Russian original. In fact, about one-third of the text consists of a retranslation of What Is to Be Done?, with two sections of detailed annotations – an incredible contribution by itself. He also trawls through an immense quantity of other Russian-language materials that he utilises to help bring the context of Lenin’s writings into clearer focus than ever before. For those of us labouring without Russian-language skills, this in itself is a precious offering. More than this, noting that Lenin unambiguously projected a Russian version of the German Social-Democratic Party as the kind of organisation to bring about socialism in Russia, Lih focuses sustained attention on the German Party and its powerful influence on the Russian Marxists. In doing this, he gives a well-merited respectful attention to the early contributions of Karl Kautsky and to his importance for the revolutionary Left, Lenin most of all. One might argue that he ‘bends the stick’ too far – being rather dismissive of the powerful critique of ‘so-called fatalistic Marxism’ of the Second International advanced in the 1920s by the likes of Lukács, Korsch and Gramsci, and not being alert to the critical insights that Rosa Luxemburg and other revolutionary Marxists (Pannekoek, Riazanov, Parvus, Trotsky, Radek, Rakovsky, etc.) were developing at the time. These critical insights that found confirmation in the debacle of 1914, a ghastly tragedy causing Lenin himself to revise his earlier positive judgements and to recast and sharpen his own Marxism. But a serious understanding of Lenin and the other Russian Marxists of the early 1900s can be advanced by setting these matters aside in order to fully comprehend the understanding they had at the time of the Marxism of the Second International and of German Social Democracy. And as he does this, Lih helps us to see the strengths and grandeur of these truly impressive entities. He thereby helps us see that What Is to Be Done? – far from representing some single-minded determination to create a ‘party of a new type’ (as Soviet dogmatists and Western Cold-War scholars insisted) – expressed the common orientation of the great majority of Russian Social Democrats (those who would become Mensheviks as well as future Bolsheviks) to create on Russian soil, and under Russian conditions, a socialist workers’ party coming as close to the German model as possible. This included that party’s core-commitment to advancing the most-thoroughgoing democracy as the essential basis for the workers’ struggle to take power and initiate the socialist reconstruction of society.


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In making this case, Lih treats us to the delicious demolition of one antiLenin myth after another. Consider, for example, his comments on Richard Pipes: Advocates of the textbook interpretation will sometimes admit that Lenin did not explicitly advance the views attributed to him, although this fact does not seem to worry them much. For example, Richard Pipes summarises a Lenin article of 1899 by telling us that Lenin’s ‘unspoken assumption is that the majority of the population is actually or potentially reactionary; his unspoken conclusion, that democracy leads to reaction.’ Pipes is absolutely right: these particular assumptions and conclusions are definitely unspoken. Lenin’s spoken assumptions and conclusions – a subject in which Pipes shows less interest – are all about the majority of the population charging the citadel of the autocracy in order to achieve democratic political freedom as the necessary next step toward socialism.5

Sometimes, what Lih is able to do along these lines has the quality of shooting fish in a barrel.6 He takes, for example, a sentence from What Is to Be Done? whose meaning is consistently garbled by ‘textbook’-academics: ‘We said that there could not have been a Social-Democratic awareness among the workers.’ Presumably translating from the original Russian, Adam Ulam has Lenin proclaiming: ‘Socialist consciousness cannot exist among the workers’. This is used to buttress the notion that Lenin believed only revolutionary intellectuals such as himself were fit to lead ignorant workers (incapable of thinking socialist thoughts) in a socialist revolution . . . somehow. The incoherence of such a notion is cleared away by Lih’s explanatory restatement of Lenin’s point: ‘The Russian workers who carried out the heroic strikes of the mid-1890s did not yet have socialist awareness nor could we have expected them to’. Yet Ulam’s rendition turns Lenin’s historical statement into a general proposition about workers as such, everywhere, at all times. Some such misreading must be behind some extraordinary assertions by scholars. In 1956, Alfred Meyer wrote that Lenin’s ‘generally prevailing opinion was that the proletariat was not and could not be conscious’. More recently, James D. White makes the same point, with the assertion that in Lenin’s view ‘socialist consciousness always remained outside the working class because it could never see beyond its narrow material class interests’. It is impossible not to concur with Lih’s scornful comment: ‘Amazing’. It is not difficult for him to direct our attention to an avalanche of words and analyses from Lenin himself, and other original source-material as well 5. Lih 2006, pp. 23–4. 6. Lih 2006, pp. 647–8.

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(including from Lenin’s political opponents), to demonstrate that Lenin’s central mission was to bring about a merger of socialism with the workers, and that he did not waver from very confident assumptions about workers’ receptivity to the Social-Democratic message and about the ability of underground activists [under Russian conditions of tsarist despotism] to build and sustain a nation-wide political organisation, one that could both put down roots in the worker milieu and escape destruction at the hands of the police. . . . He is always on the side making the most confident assumptions about the empirical possibility of a mass underground SocialDemocratic movement. . . . Lenin generally argued that the ‘advanced workers’ were already committed Social Democrats and that these advanced workers were in an ideal position to spread the message further, since they would be accepted by other workers as their natural leaders.7

In 1895, Lenin – discussing his own draft political programme for the Russian Social-Democratic Labour-Party – explained that a particular paragraph of the programme is the most important and central one because it shows what should be the activity of a party that defends the interests of the worker class and what should be the activity of all purposive workers. It shows the way by which the aspiration of socialism – the aspiration of ending the eternal exploitation of man by man – must be merged with movement of the people that arose out of the conditions of life created by large-scale factories and workshops’.8

Lih has little patience for even prestigious revolutionaries who indulged in distortions of Lenin’s views. ‘[Rosa] Luxemburg’s prestige as an icon of the Left has given her anti-Lenin broadside an uncriticised authority among academics and activists’, he says,9 but ‘I feel it is my duty as a historian to point out that it is not a perceptive or prophetic critique but an unscrupulous hatchet job’. This is a harsh judgement that my own research corroborates (although I believe that, independently of her anti-Lenin invective, there are magnificent insights in her 1904 polemic that are more generally applicable for revolutionary socialists). Lih also offers a scathing judgement of Trotsky’s anti-Lenin polemic of 1904, Our Political Tasks – although it is hardly more scathing than the judgment of Isaac Deutscher many years ago that ‘it required a volatile and

7. Lih 2006, pp. 7–8. 8. Lih 2006, pp. 124–5. 9. Lih 2006, p. 526.


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irresponsible imagination in the pamphleteer to show his adversary in so distorting a mirror’.10 He also offers new information, rich insights, and challenging interpretations. Again, some of what Lih offers has a delicious irony. For example, Rosa Luxemburg, in arguing ‘that Lenin was so intent on total central control that he overlooked the creative role of the worker movement itself ’, made reference to a series of unsigned articles from Iskra demonstrating spontaneous mass actions of the workers in Rostov-on-the-Don – and Lih shows us that, unbeknown to Luxemburg, these articles had been written by Lenin himself.11 His formulations on the matter of a ‘party of a new type’ and ‘vanguard party’12 are provocative and illuminating: As we set about the task of rediscovering Lenin’s actual outlook, the terms ‘party of a new type’ and ‘vanguard party’ are actually helpful – but only if they are applied to the SPD [Social-Democratic Party of Germany] as well as the Bolsheviks. The SPD was a vanguard party, first because it defined its own mission as ‘filling up’ the proletariat with the awareness and skills needed to fulfill its own world-historical mission, and second because the SPD developed an innovative panoply of methods for spreading enlightenment and ‘combination.’ The term ‘vanguard party’ was not used during this period (I do not believe the term can be found in Lenin’s writings), but ‘vanguard’ was, and this is what people meant by it. Any other definition is historically misleading and confusing.13

‘Let us build a party as much like the SPD as possible under underground conditions so that we can overthrow the tsar and become even more like the SPD’, was Lenin’s perspective, Lih tells us. ‘He gave advice on how to build an effective party in the underground, but the reason he wanted an effective party was to be able to leave behind forever the stifling atmosphere of the underground’.14 This was the orientation of the Mensheviks as well. So what explains the devastating 1903 Bolshevik/Menshevik split in the RSDLP? The problem, Lih accurately notes, was the development and implementation, at the 1903 Second Congress of the RSDLP, of democratic rules and structures that stepped on the toes of old and respected comrades. As he puts it, old habits die hard, especially for individualistic intellectuals. The old Iskra editors felt that [they] had a personal right to the editorial chairs of the party newspaper. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Deutscher 1954, p. 95. Lih 2006, pp. 206–7. Lih 2006, p. 556. Ibid. Lih 2006, p. 557.

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P. Le Blanc / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 90–107 They felt they had a right to advocate whatever policies they felt best, even if those run directly against the policies of the Congress. They were eager for the authority conferred by the Party, but had no time for the discipline that went with it.15

What happened next flowed from this élitist impulse. The indignant ‘aristocrats’ rebelled against the democratic decisions of the Congress. ‘Since the old Iskra board had split five against one, the five were able to accuse the one [Lenin] of dictatorial ambitions – all the while acting as a compact oligarchy and taking one high-handed action after another’. Between the worthy ideals of ‘a national democratic organisation’ and ‘the continuity and prestige of the top leaders’, they felt the second must not be trumped by the first in the manner that Lenin had insisted on. Lih goes on to stress that it was not Lenin but the Mensheviks themselves who chose the label ‘the minority’ (which is what Menshevik means) – because of their ‘feeling that “minority” signified a progressive vanguard leading the way’, that ‘going along with the majority’ meant ‘being conservative and in the tail of the movement, instead of acting as a minority that advanced new and broader tasks’. Related to the ‘new and broader tasks’ was the campaign blueprinted by Menshevik-elder Pavel Akselrod to lobby liberal political figures for a ‘zemstvo campaign’ to broaden democracy, introducing a worker-bourgeois class-collaborationism, a new political note that Lih – unlike Lenin, who favoured a worker-peasant alliance – does not seem to catch.16 What Lih does emphasise, most interestingly, is that Lenin – often accused of reverting from Marxism to nineteenth-century conspiratorial traditions of People’s Will [Narodnaia volia] – was actually the defender of SocialDemocratic orthodoxy. This becomes clear in his proposal that a member of the RSDLP be someone who agrees with the party-programme, pays dues, and is an active member of the organisation. In contrast, Martov proposed a loose definition of membership as someone who agreed with the programme and gave the RSDLP ‘regular assistance’. It was Martov’s formulation ‘that represented the spirit of Narodnaia volia’, Lih tells us, and ‘Akslerod explicitly brought up Narodnaia volia as a positive model that exemplified Martov’s logic’. Commenting from afar, Kautsky ‘also sided with Martov – because of the special circumstances of the Russian underground. In the case of a party operating under political freedom, Lenin’s formulation would be preferable’. Lenin’s formulation, more in line with the statutes of the SPD, was voted down at the 1903 Congress, and most ‘textbook’-historians have made much 15. Lih 2006, p. 500. 16. Lih 2006, pp. 501–9.


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of it (contrasting the ‘authoritarian’ Lenin with the ‘democratic’ Martov), falsely identifying it as a reason for the Bolshevik/Menshevik split – although the Mensheviks themselves adopted Lenin’s formulation within a couple of years.17 One of the most interesting points highlighted in Lih’s account of the 1903 split and its aftermath is the place of the practical workers [ praktiki] of the RSDLP’s underground-committees in the swirl of polemics. I find it so interesting that I will give-in to the temptation of simply quoting it at length: The bitterness and contempt toward the party praktiki is another striking feature of the Menshevik polemics in 1904. While officially the abuse is directed at Lenin’s supporters, it is not counterbalanced by any praise or encouraging words for Menshevik praktiki. One discerns a feeling of exasperation on the part of the educated and cosmopolitan émigrés toward the young, semi-educated and provincial praktiki in Russia. The most thorough-going expression of this attitude is a series of articles published in 1905 by Potresov. These articles portray the history of the Russian revolutionary underground as a series of misadventures by the utterly provincial and comically self-absorbed praktiki. Lenin acquired influence among the praktiki because he shared and faithfully reflected these delusions. There is nothing similar to this in Bolshevik polemics, which are directed solely against the Iskra editors and allies such as Trotsky. Oliminskii and Bogdanov [leading Bolshevik activists] quickly picked up on this feature of Menshevik writings. Olminskii even took his pseudonym from a remark in this vein by Martov, who attributed Lenin’s success to his pandering to the ‘cheap seats [ galerka]’. Thus Olminskii signed his pamphlets Cheap Seats, while Bogdanov adopted the pseudonym Rank-and-Filer [Riadovoi ]. They portrayed the party split as a clash of the party aristocracy and of prestigious émigré writers on the one side and the party plebians and the rank and file on the other.18

What has been summarised here consists of only a modest sampling of the riches offered in Lih’s fine volume. Some of us will certainly be going through it again and again to find valuable nuggets and to ponder challenging conceptualisations. It is unfortunate, however, that amid the myth-busting and stimulating new interpretations, Lih employs his critical-minded and creative intelligence to create his own little myth of ‘activists in the Trotskyist tradition’ (Cliff, Molyneux, Le Blanc) who choose to link themselves with ‘the textbook interpretation’ of anti-Lenin academics.

17. Lih 2006, p. 519. 18. Lih 2006, pp. 506–7.

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II One way of puncturing the mythic conceptualisation of ‘the activists’ which Lih presents is to provide some autobiographical information on how I came to engage with What Is to Be Done? and to develop the understanding of Lenin that culminated in my study Lenin and the Revolutionary Party. I would imagine that the story of Cliff and Molyneux would have to be different, particularly since, despite much common ground, there are differences between their interpretations and mine. When I was very young, I discovered that the admirably idealistic views of my parents and favourite relatives were under sustained assault from the dominant culture in the United States, including from such publications as the Weekly Reader, which we got every week in my junior high-school socialstudies class (displaying portraits of a noble George Washington and a sinister V.I. Lenin under the heading ‘Democracy Means Freedom and Communism Means Tyranny’). There were also the somewhat-more sophisticated and richly-illustrated Life-magazine expositions on Communism, not to mention the crude assaults by J. Edgar Hoover of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the reasonably-priced paperback-edition of his book Masters of Deceit. My father was a dedicated trade-union organiser who had been in and around the Communist Party from the early 1930s to the early 1950s. He saw unions as a coming-together of the workers to struggle for a better life for themselves and their families in the face of the tyranny of selfish and powerful profiteers who own and control the capitalist workplaces and economy. Unions meant workers sticking up for each other and struggling for a better future. I knew, by the time I was 13 years old, that he believed in socialism or communism (these were synonyms for him) which he viewed as people sharing the abundant resources of society so that each and every person could have all their basic material needs met, with possibilities opened up for free and creative lives – not just for a lucky few, but for each and every person. I asked him one day: ‘What about Lenin?’ And he explained to me that Lenin was for the workers, that things like oppression and exploitation made him very angry, and that he was a very tough man, tough in a good way – tough-minded about how to organise to change the world. From that time onward, I saw Lenin as representing something very positive. In 1962, in the small Pennsylvania-town where I lived, I found and immediately bought a small, densely-packed, and (again) reasonably-priced paperback-book by the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills entitled The Marxists. Mills, not at all hostile to Lenin, presented me with what Lih calls ‘the textbook interpretation’, writing that one distinctive feature of Lenin’s outlook was favouring ‘a disciplined, tightly organised party of professional


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revolutionaries [that] “represents” (or replaces) the proletariat as the spontaneous historical agency of this [socialist] revolution’. I accepted this for good coin, until I immersed myself in the writings of Isaac Deutscher a couple of years later – first the biography of Stalin, then the Trotsky-trilogy, which gave a vibrant sense of the Russian-revolutionary movement and early Bolshevism. The understanding of Lenin conveyed there was quite inconsistent with ‘the textbook interpretation’. This – along with a reading of The State and Revolution and a few other, short writings by Lenin, and Hal Draper’s seminal ‘Two Souls of Socialism’ (placing Lenin firmly and unambiguously in the tradition of uncompromisingly democratic revolutionaries) – prepared me for my first reading of the notorious What Is to Be Done?, but there was one more crucial influence. While still in high school, I had been drawn to the rising ‘New Left’ and, in my senior year, joined Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In 1965, I went on to help organise an SDS-chapter at the University of Pittsburgh, and, in the summer of the following year, I worked in the SDS national office in Chicago. These were exciting times, and SDS was beginning to experience a very dramatic growth. While working in the national office, however, I was in a position to see, up close and personal, the utter inadequacy of the nationalorganisational structure – fragmented and all-too-amateur – which would contribute, given the tidal-wave of new members, to a small but promising organisation turning into an utterly chaotic national disorganisation incapable of doing much more than spinning out of control while being swept along by turbulent events. At the end of the year, I picked up Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? and devoured it. By then, I was also encountering versions of ‘the textbook interpretation’ offered by the likes of the bitter ex-Leninist Bertram D. Wolfe, and I rejected that with utter contempt. For me, What Is to Be Done? was an illuminating and inspiring revolutionary text that fitted together with State and Revolution to form a dynamic and vibrant whole. Over the next couple of years, I supplemented this with One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, plus such splendid shorter works of Lenin’s as ‘The Urgent Tasks of Our Movement’ and ‘Karl Marx’. Helpful in contextualising these writings was the account by his companion Nadezhda Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin. By the early 1970s, I was engaging with the intensive and instructive discussions of Leninism of Leon Trotsky (post-1917), Ernest Mandel (especially his ‘Leninist Theory of Organization’), and – blended with the rich traditions of American radicalism – James P. Cannon. It all made sense to me, and it had nothing to do with ‘the textbook interpretation’. The Trotskyist movement, into which I was drawn, followed Trotsky in dismissing his 1904 anti-Leninist polemic Our

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Political Tasks, and, while we greatly respected Rosa Luxemburg, we rejected her early attacks on Lenin as well. Before the 1970s were over, I came across other interpretations of Lenin that seemed a cross between the one I had embraced and the ‘textbook’hostility of Bertram Wolfe. In particular, there was Marcel Liebman, who, in Leninism Under Lenin and other writings, saw two souls of Leninism: one tending toward sectarianism, dogmatism, and authoritarianism, the other wonderfully creative, revolutionary, democratic. According to Liebman’s influential exposition, elements of the bad Lenin were reflected in What Is to Be Done?, but the revolutionary events of 1905 brought the good Lenin to the fore. The hard times of 1907–12 caused Lenin to revert to the negative qualities of earlier times, but 1917 once again brought forth the positive qualities. The isolation and agony of the early Soviet Republic predictably caused a swing back toward the dark side, and the crystallisation of Stalinism, after Lenin’s death, resulted in the murderous elimination of Leninism’s brighter side within the Communist mainstream. Far more satisfying to me was Tony Cliff ’s extensive and overwhelmingly positive assessment of Lenin. But I did not accept his less-than-positive assessment of my beloved What Is to Be Done?, and more to my liking was the stress by Neil Harding, in The Political Thought of Lenin and other works, on the consistency of Lenin’s orientation (including that of 1902) with Marxism pure and simple.19 In the 1980s, under the influence and at the urging of George Breitman (best known for editing and explicating the works of Malcolm X and Leon Trotsky), I wrote Lenin and the Revolutionary Party. Our particular corner of the Trotskyist movement was being severely damaged by a presumed ‘Leninism’ gone terribly wrong. One of the primary purposes of the book was to recover genuine Leninism in a way that would be helpful for present-day and future revolutionaries. Concepts and quotations from What Is to Be Done? and Lenin’s other early writings are peppered through the early chapters, with texts related to contexts, in a positive exposition of what Lenin thought and said. Given all of this, it should not be surprising that my conclusions on What Is to Be Done? do not quite match what Lih describes as the position of the ‘activists.’ These conclusions approximate to Lih’s own:

19. The earlier Harding seemed to like both Lenin and Marxism, but, in later years, he stressed the same point (Leninism is fully grounded in Marxism) with a negative twist brought on by apparent disillusionment.


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The general arguments it contains – despite polemical exaggerations – remain reasonable and valuable for later periods, including our own. . . . In recent years some left-wing writers have felt a need to distance themselves from what Tony Cliff, for example, has called ‘Lenin’s . . . mechanical over-emphasis on organisation in What Is to Be Done?,’ but the powerful stress in that work on the practical implementation of revolutionary perspectives continues to have an impact after eight decades. . . . It is worth repeating that Lenin shared this orientation with all those gathered around Iskra. . . . As it turned out, however, Lenin was one of the few leaders of the Iskra current who was prepared to follow the implications of the orientation through to the end.20

This view has been carried over by me into later studies, From Marx to Gramsci and Marx, Lenin, and the Revolutionary Experience, although as part of an increasingly critical exploration, which seems to me to be consistent with the Leninist spirit.

III What is of primary importance, however, is not the minor matter of a mischaracterisation of ‘the activists’, but the understanding of ‘the Leninism of Lenin’ to which Lih makes such an outstanding contribution. ‘The present study is neither pro-Lenin nor anti-Lenin,’ he tells us. ‘Its aim is to give an accurate account of Lenin’s outlook and his empirical judgements’.21 Except as a literary device to establish an image of ‘scholarly objectivity’, however, this seems an odd thing to say, given the overwhelmingly pro-Lenin tone of the entire work. In fact, a pro-Lenin orientation, in the hands of a capable scholar, can have the effect of providing a ‘sympathetic reading’ yielding a far more coherent and insightful account than the hostile sort of ‘scholarship’ predominant among anti-Communists both during the Cold War and since the collapse of the USSR. Such a work as this, which goes against the stream of standard-interpretation and also refuses to conform to dominant fashions and moods, runs the risk of being dismissed, distorted, or treated as if it had never been written. But such works sometimes appear at a time when dominant ideologies and scholarly paradigms are challenged by political and social crises generating insurgent forces that are ready to connect with these challenging works. It is possible that Lih’s book comes to us on the eve of what may be a Lenin-revival – to which it will contribute and from which it will benefit. 20. LeBlanc 1990, pp. 64–5, 67–8. 21. Lih 2006, p. 29.

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If this is the case, then we may see new works inspired by, responding to, and taking issue with various aspects of Lih’s interpretation of Lenin and early Bolshevism. In the hope that this will turn out to be so, I want to conclude by touching briefly on some areas of potentially fruitful exploration and engagement. There may be a tendency in Lih’s study to idealise the praktiki who lined up with Lenin. A lengthy extract from the reminiscences of Lenin’s companion Krupskaya highlights some of the problems: The organisations in Russia definitely existed already in the shape of illegal local committees, which were obliged to work under extremely difficult conditions of secrecy. As a result, these committees everywhere practically had no workers among their membership, although they had a great influence on the workers’ movement. The committees’ leaflets and instructions reflected the mood of the working-class masses, who felt that they now had a leadership. . . . The ‘committeeman’ was usually a rather self-assured person. He saw what a tremendous influence the work of the committee had on the masses, and as a rule he recognised no inner-Party democracy. ‘Inner-Party democracy only leads to trouble with the police. We are connected with the movement as it is,’ the ‘committeemen’ would say. Inwardly they rather despised the Party workers abroad, who, in their opinion, had nothing better to do than squabble among themselves – ‘they ought to be made to work under Russian conditions.’ The ‘committeemen’ objected to the overruling influence of the Centre abroad. . . . The opposition to this Centre was headed by Bogdanov.22

Krupskaya adds that they did not want innovations. They were neither desirous nor capable of adjusting themselves to the quickly changing conditions. The ‘committeemen’ had done a tremendous job during the period of 1904–5, but many of them found it extremely difficult to adjust themselves to the conditions of increasing legal facilities and methods of open struggle.23

This finds corroboration in memoirs from activists on both Bolshevik and Menshevik sides of the split.24 Amid the turbulence, upsurge, and opportunities of 1905, Lenin felt it necessary to write to his praktiki comrades: Be sure to put us in direct touch with new forces, with the youth, with newly formed circles. . . . So far not one of the St. Petersburgers (shame on them) has

22. Krupskaya 1970, pp. 124ff. 23. Krupskaya 1970, p. 125. 24. Trotsky 1967, pp. 61–8; Schwartz 1967; Broido 1967; Bobrovskaya 1976.


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given us a single new organisation. . . . It’s a scandal, our undoing, our ruin! Take a lesson from the Mensheviks, for Christ’s sake!25

Nothing in Lih’s study quite prepares us for any of this. Aspects of the ‘committeeman’-mentality contained seeds of a future factional struggle led by Bogdanov that unfolded in 1907–11 within the Bolshevik current that ultimately resulted in a split. Krupskaya commented: A Bolshevik, they declared, should be hard and unyielding. Lenin considered this view fallacious. It would mean giving up all practical work, standing aside from the masses instead of organising them on real-life issues. Prior to the Revolution of 1905 the Bolsheviks showed themselves capable of making good use of every legal possibility, of forging ahead and rallying the masses behind them under the most adverse conditions. Step by step, beginning with the campaign for tea service and ventilation, they had led the masses up to the national armed insurrection. The ability to adjust oneself to the most adverse conditions and at the same time to stand out and maintain one’s high-principled positions – such were the traditions of Leninism.26

This suggests a greater complexity, a greater messiness in the story of Lenin and early Bolshevism than is conveyed in Lih’s account. In his defence, we should note that he stops the story before such complexities become clear. The same can be said for other matters that complicate the unfinished story that he presents. For example, his argument that the Social-Democratic Party of Germany is the Leninist ‘party of a new type’ par excellence seems to hold up relatively well if we stop the story in early 1905, and it allows Lih to have fun at the expense of one of the ‘activist’-writers: The activist writers also talk as if they knew Lenin’s beliefs better than he did himself. John Molyneux writes, for example, that ‘Lenin at this stage [1904] was not aware that he diverged in any fundamental way from social democratic orthodoxy’ and therefore incorrectly identified himself with the mainstream of SPD luminaries such as Karl Kautsky and August Bebel. We are left with the following picture. There was probably no one in Russia who had read Kautsky’s voluminous writings so attentively, extensively and admiringly as Lenin, yet he remained completely unaware that he diverged in fundamental ways from Kautsky. I am not sure whether we are supposed to explain this by Kautsky’s deceitfulness, Lenin’s inability to understand what he read, or Lenin’s unawareness of his own beliefs.27

25. Quoted in Le Blanc 1990, p. 117. 26. Krupskaya 1970, p. 167. 27. Lih 2006, p. 25.

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This is certainly not a highpoint in Lenin Rediscovered. The writings of a capable theoretician such as Kautsky are not necessarily the same as the complex dynamics of a mass political party and social movement. The reality of German Social Democracy was certainly more problematic than what Lenin was able to glean from the very best writings of Karl Kautsky. This became clear to Lenin himself in 1914. At that point, it became obvious that Lenin had been building a very different party than the actual SPD. The point was made again – by actual historical developments – in the period 1917–20. It may be possible that the SPD and the RSDLP (Bolsheviks) were both ‘parties of a new type’, but it is also clear that they were not parties of the same type. Here, Molyneux is much more on target. Lenin did not understand in 1904 what he understood in 1914. People learn – even Lenin. And this all has interesting implications that Lih seems inclined to turn away from. There was much that Lenin had in common with Kautsky and Bebel – but it turns out that what he was doing was, in important ways, quite different. This obviously merits further exploration. Similarly, while the Lenin of 1904 seemed to have far more in common with Kautsky and Bebel than with Luxemburg and Trotsky – Lih certainly makes that crystal-clear – the unfolding of reality suggests a different truth. By 1917, this had become clear to Lenin himself. It is worth giving greater attention to such commonalities and convergences with Luxemburg and Trotsky than Lih seems inclined to offer in this work. For that matter, his dismissive attitude toward Georg Lukács and Antonio Gramsci strikes this reviewer as off-base. They were not only prominent theorists but, in the 1920s, practical, partybuilding revolutionary activists working very much in the Leninist tradition. Much can be learned from them, as well as from Luxemburg and Trotsky, by those who would seek to explore the continuing relevance of Lenin’s revolutionary orientation. While these and other pathways of exploration must be taken up by those (including Lih himself ) who wish to further advance our understanding, Lenin Rediscovered makes a powerful, very substantial contribution to those who would comprehend the life and thought of this great revolutionary.

References Bobrovskaya, Cecelia 1976, Twenty Years in Underground Russia: Memoirs of a Rank-and-File Bolshevik, Chicago: Proletarian Publishers. Broido, Eva 1967, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cannon, James P. 1962, The First Ten Years of American Communism: Report of a Participant, New York: Lyle Stuart.


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Cannon, James P. 1971 [1968], ‘The Vanguard Party and the World Revolution’, in Fifty Years of World Revolution (1917–1967): An International Symposium, edited by Ernest Mandel, New York: Pathfinder Press. Carr, Edward H. 1950, The Bolshevik Revolution: 1917–1923, three volumes, London: Macmillan. ——. 1979, The Russian Revolution: From Lenin to Stalin, New York: The Free Press. Cliff, Tony 1975–9, Lenin, four volumes, London: Pluto Press. Deutscher, Isaac 1954, The Prophet Armed, Trotsky: 1879–1921, Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— 1967, Stalin, A Political Biography, Second Edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gerson, Lennard D. (ed.) 1984, Lenin and the Twentieth Century: A Bertram D. Wolfe Retrospective, Stanford: Hoover Institution Press. Harding, Neil 1975, Lenin’s Political Thought, Volume 1: Theory and Practice in the Democratic Revolution, New York: St Martin’s Press. —— 1996, Leninism, Durham, NC.: Duke University Press. —— (ed.) 1983, Marxism in Russia: Key Documents 1879–1906, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. James, Cyril L.R. 1992, ‘Lenin and the Vanguard Party’, in The C.L.R. James Reader, edited by Anna Grimshaw, Oxford: Blackwell. —— 1993, World Revolution 1917–1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press. Krupskaya, Nadezhda K. 1970, Reminiscences of Lenin, New York: International Publishers. Le Blanc, Paul 1990, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press. —— 1996, From Marx to Gramsci: A Reader in Revolutionary Marxist Politics, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press. —— 2006, Marx, Lenin, and the Revolutionary Experience: Studies in Communism and Radicalism in an Age of Globalization, London: Routledge. Lenin, Vladimir I. 1967, Selected Works, three volumes, New York: International Publishers. Lewin, Moshe 1985, The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social and Cultural History of Interwar Russia, New York: Pantheon Books. Liebman, Marcel 1980, Leninism Under Lenin, London: Merlin Press. Lih, Lars T. 2006, Lenin Rediscovered: ‘What Is to Be Done?’ in Context, Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill. Luxemburg, Rosa 1970, ‘Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy’, in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, edited by Mary-Alice Waters, New York: Pathfinder Press. Mandel, Ernest 1994, ‘The Leninist Theory of Organization’, in Revolutionary Marxism and Social Reality in the 20th Century: Writings of Ernest Mandel, edited by Steve Bloom, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press. Mills, C. Wright 1962, The Marxists, New York: Dell. Molyneux, John 1978, Marxism and the Party, London: Pluto Press. Schwartz, Solomon C. 1967, The Russian Revolution of 1905: The Workers’ Movement and the Formation of Bolshevism and Menshevism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Serge, Victor 1980 [1937], From Lenin to Stalin, New York: Monad Press. Trotsky, Leon n.d. [1904], Our Political Tasks, London: New Park Publications. —— 1967 [1941], Stalin, An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence, New York: Stein and Day. Wolfe, Bertram D. 1948, Three Who Made a Revolution, New York: Dial Press.


brill.nl/hima

Lenin Disputed Lars T. Lih Montreal, Quebec [email protected]

Abstract Critical discussion of Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? is hindered by a series of historical myths. Issues such as the following need to be studied more empirically and more critically: Did the attitudes of early readers of WITBD? reflect Lenin’s alleged ‘worry about workers’? Did the events of 1905 cause Lenin to renounce his earlier views about the workers and about party-organisation, giving rise to disputes with Bolshevik activists? Did either Lenin or Trotsky ever rethink and reject the ideological positions that Karl Kautsky defended before World-War I? These and related issues are addressed with close attention to source-material. Keywords Lenin, Bolshevism, Trotsky, Kautsky, Menshevism

The principal aim of Lenin Rediscovered was to allow and encourage people to shift their attention away from a relatively narrow set of passages from What Is to Be Done? towards a much broader range of historical data. People have been focusing so intently, and for so long, on what I term the ‘scandalous passages’ that my aim of shifting attention could not possibly succeed unless I provided a great deal of historical data. This necessity is the cause of the book’s immoderate length. One central aim of my book is negative and polemical, namely, to challenge the textbook-interpretation of Lenin’s ‘worry about workers’ in all its varieties. But, once the blinders imposed by the textbookinterpretation have been removed, what do we see? I would stress four themes that emerge from the material presented in the book. The first is the vast influence of what I call ‘Erfurtianism’ on Russian Social Democracy and on Lenin personally. Erfurtianism was a complex but coherent outlook that combined the world-historical narrative set out in the writings of Marx and Engels, an idealised model of the German Social-Democratic Party, and an ideological self-definition set out to greatest effect in the writings of

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010

DOI: 10.1163/156920610X533315

L. T. Lih / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 108–174

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Karl Kautsky. As often in such cases, outsiders such as the Russian Social Democrats were the most purs et durs Erfurtians of all. The party-model inherent in Erfurtianism was summed up by Kautsky’s merger-formula: ‘Social Democracy is the merger of socialism and the workermovement’. Behind this ideological formula lies the scenario of the inspired and inspiring leader. To use an image found in both Kautsky and Lenin, the Social Democrat preached the ‘good news’ of socialism in the confident expectation that the workers would respond. The spread of socialist awareness was seen as so powerful that the workers were assigned the rôle of leader (or ‘hegemon’) of the people as a whole. For the Russians, acceptance of this party-model implied a whole political strategy: ‘Let us build a party as much like the German SPD as possible under the autocracy so that we can overthrow the tsar and build a party even more like the SPD.’ This Erfurtian strategy had an enormous impact on many levels. It led to the creation of an underground of a new type. It gave Russian Social Democracy its most urgent goal, right up to 1917: to overthrow the tsar and introduce the political freedom needed for the full SPD-model. Finally, it explains many developments even after the party emerged from the underground – among others, the vast propaganda and agitational campaigns undertaken by the new Soviet state. The original Erfurtian party-model grew up in countries with relativepolitical freedom. The second main theme of my book is the way the Russian underground grew up as the result of an empirical search for ways to apply the Erfurtian model under repressive underground-conditions – a search undertaken by a whole generation of anonymous Russian Social-Democratic praktiki. The innovative set of institutions that was built up step-by-step starting in the early 1890s was an underground of a new type. The old Russian underground aimed at a successful conspiracy [zagovor] in lieu of a massmovement that was deemed impossible. The new underground aimed at creating as much of a mass-party as was possible under tsarist absolutism. This kind of underground required a culture of konspiratsiia, which can be defined as ‘the fine art of not getting arrested’. The two types of ‘conspiracy’ – zagovor and konspiratsiia – implied two vastly different types of underground. This Erfurtian underground (no longer an oxymoron) also required a functional equivalent of the full-time party-workers that constituted the backbone of European Social Democracy. Lenin christened this type the ‘revolutionary by trade [revoliutsioner po professii or professionalnyi revoliutsioner]’. The name and the type caught on with all factions of the

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Russian underground. Neither konspiratsiia nor ‘revolutionary by trade’ was a distinctive feature of Bolshevism. WITBD? did not set forth a new and innovative party-model, but, rather, presented an idealised version of the empirical creation of the praktiki. In 1905, when the fervent Bolshevik M.G. Tskhakaia described his reaction to reading WITBD?, he stressed that he had found nothing earth-shaking or requiring special attention. Nevertheless, he was highly pleased that ‘a decade of the practical experience [praktika] of Russian Social Democracy had not gone to waste. It had found a worthy expression of itself on organisational, tactical and overall party-issues – an expression that summed up all of Russian practical experience’.1 A third theme of my book is the insistence that the proper way to grasp Lenin’s individual outlook is not to become obsessed about abstract generalities concerning ‘spontaneity’ and ‘consciousness’, but, rather, to examine Lenin’s concrete views about the actions of the Russian working class during the years 1895 to 1905. When these views become the centre of attention, Lenin’s romantic optimism about the working class becomes glaringly obvious. Lenin wrote WITBD? at a time when the revolutionary temperature in Russia was rising rapidly and the upsurge in worker-militancy was noted by all observers. Furthermore, in the various disputes within Russian revolutionary circles, Lenin is always on the side with the most optimistic assumptions about the revolutionary fervour of the workers, the organisational potential of the Russian underground, the willingness of other classes to follow the lead of the workers, and so on. Why did Lenin strive for an organised, centralised, efficiently-structured party that was staffed with people who knew their business? Because he had given up on the masses and was looking for a substitute? Just the opposite: Lenin wanted all these things because he thought he saw the masses on the move. Finally, I argue that Lenin understood his own basic outlook and remained loyal to it. Anyone who thinks this assertion is anodyne and uncontroversial will change their mind once they have read my critics. It is an article of faith for many on the Left and on the Right that Lenin was fundamentally opposed to basic features of what I call Erfurtianism – and, if Lenin himself insisted on the opposite, he was mistaken. Many people also believe that Lenin continually ‘bent the stick’ from one extreme to the other, leading to various breakthroughs to a fundamentally new vision of things – if not in 1902, when he published WITBD?, then during the revolution of 1905 or after the outbreak of war in 1914. And, if Lenin insisted that he was the one who remained loyal to the 1. Tretii s”ezd RSDRP: Protokoly 1959, p. 340.


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old orthodoxy and his opponents were the renegades – well, once again, he was mistaken. The standard textbook-interpretation of WITBD? puts Lenin’s alleged worry about workers at the centre of things. When I wrote Lenin Rediscovered, I thought of the textbook-interpretation as a global approach to WITBD?, Lenin and Bolshevism. WITBD? showed worry about workers, which meant that Lenin was worried about workers throughout his career, which meant Bolshevism as a whole was worried about workers. Although my study focused sharply on WITBD?, the ultimate target was the worry-about-workers approach to Lenin and Bolshevism generally. One thing I learned from my critics was that the textbook-interpretation comes in an extensive range of partial applications. Robert Mayer, for example, accepts a worry-about-workers approach both regarding WITBD? and regarding Lenin generally. According to Mayer, Lenin thought that any worker who disagreed with him must have lost his proletarian soul or never had it to begin with. This attitude finds expression in WITBD?’s controversial formulations. Where Mayer differs from the mainstream is his insistence that WITBD? is not the most important or influential expression of Lenin’s worries. A more revealing clue to Lenin’s feelings is his use of the word razvrashchenie [corruption or perversion], which showed that he felt that the outlook of most workers had been corrupted, and that they were therefore useless as revolutionaries. Mayer does no more than tweak the standard textbook-interpretation. Ron Suny accepts my argument that Lenin himself did not intend WITBD? to communicate worry about workers. Yet, for Suny, Lenin’s own intentions are almost irrelevant, since everybody else read WITBD? along the lines of the textbook-interpretation: Mensheviks, Lenin’s Bolshevik-followers and the Communist Party in power. Thus the standard-scholarly textbook-interpretation is a perfectly accurate description of the historical impact of WITBD?. John Molyneux,2 Chris Harman and, to a lesser extent, Paul Le Blanc reject the textbook-interpretation for Lenin generally, yet mainly accept it for WITBD? itself. As they see it, Lenin renounced the worry about workers found in WITBD? only under the impact of unexpected (to him) worker-militancy in 1905. In their version of events, WITBD?’s avid Bolshevik readers were so infected with worry about workers that even in 1905 they resisted allowing workers on local Social-Democratic committees! These writers also duplicate another feature of the textbook-interpretation: the desire to dig as deep a gulf as possible between Lenin and other Social Democrats, particular Karl Kautsky. 2. See Molyneux 2006.

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Paul Le Blanc and Alan Shandro are influenced by the textbook-interpretation in a more subtle way. Though they do not portray Lenin as hand-wringingly worried about workers, nor as pessimistic about their revolutionary inclinations, they do present Lenin as centrally concerned about protecting the workeroutlook from malign influences. Le Blanc emphasises Lenin’s views about the need to educate the workers through long years of hard work, while Shandro emphasises Lenin’s vigilance about combating attempts at bourgeois hegemony over the workers. In my view, their picture is both accurate and misleading: accurate, because Lenin really did hold these views; misleading, because it distorts what is distinctive about Lenin. Not only did Lenin share these views with other Social Democrats, but Lenin’s opponents often insisted on them with even greater emphasis. Lenin’s most characteristic arguments and policies stemmed, rather, from enthusiasm and exhilaration about the current state of the Russian and European workers’ outlook. With the partial exception of Ron Suny, none of my critics pay me the ultimate compliment of having changed their minds. I am praised when I confirm what the author in question has long believed on the subject. I am complimented on my industriousness and gently chided for overstating my originality. I am then put on notice that I have ‘bent the stick too far’ at precisely the point where I challenge each author’s long-held beliefs. Like Lenin in this respect, I do not see myself as bending the stick too far, but rather as straightening-out a stick bent out of true alignment by others. My critics themselves rightly stress the importance of their remaining disagreements with me. These disagreements all stem from continued loyalty to some aspect of the textbook-interpretation, which I reject lock, stock and barrel. I approach these questions as a historian whose only concern is to be true to the evidence. Reading over my critics, I have come to believe that the greatest stumbling block to profitable discussion is adamant loyalty to a number of historical myths. The best use of the space accorded me, therefore, is to summarise the evidence against these various myths and ask my critics as firmly as possible to engage with this evidence.3 Each of the following nine topics is treated in Lenin Rediscovered, but, in all cases, I have added new evidence, with occasional retraction of some mistakes in my book.

3. In the interests of making the evidence widely available, all Lenin-citations in this essay are to the English-language Collected Works. Actual quotations have been checked against the Russian-language texts, as found in Lenin 1958–65a, 1958–65b and 1958–65c.


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I. On translation There are two ways of approaching the translation of a literary, philosophical or political classic that originates in a culture with outlooks and assumptions very different from our own. One is to ‘make familiar’: to make the translation as painless to read as possible. A translation adopting this strategy strives to replace strange idioms and turns of speech with local equivalents, even if only approximate. Such a translation would certainly not retain unfamiliar foreign words. The other strategy is to ‘make strange’: to embed the work in its own culture, and emphasise the gap between our automatic assumptions and those of the author. In such a translation, certain expressions or revealing key-terms will often be kept in the original language. There already exist several translations of WITBD? that follow the ‘makingfamiliar’ strategy. For a variety of reasons, I chose the path of ‘making strange’ for my new translation. Robert Mayer is so hostile to the result that he thinks it cancels out any merits of my commentary, and contests some of my translation-choices for key-terms. In self-defence, I could cite the words of Tatyana Shestakov, a reviewer who is a native Russian speaker and who sympathises with my approach to translation: Lih does not try to domesticate the source and the target texts, he courageously leaves foreign elements (in this case Russian words and exclusively Russian notions of that particular epoch) untouched, but he doesn’t leave his reader alone with them: he explains, contextualizes them and thus makes his reader familiar with the reality of the Russian historical, social, and political situation in the beginning of the twentieth century. This model is more characteristic of the Russian and German schools of translation. . . . By introducing different options of translation of the same words and explaining his choices, Lih engages his reader in an active intellectual participation in the process of discovering the real intentions of Lenin, and the social and political situation in Russia and in Europe at the beginning of the last century. . . . Being born in Russia, I have a direct access to the source text and can attest that Lars T. Lih grasps even the slightest subtleties in the meaning of Russian words as Lenin uses them. . . . Usually, in discussing a translated text, scholars argue about how much has been ‘lost in translation’. In case of Lars T. Lih and V. Lenin, we can certainly talk about how much Lenin’s work has gained after Lars T. Lih’s ‘interference’. As a native Russian speaker, who grew up in Moscow being forced to read and reread Lenin’s works in Russian, I can say that in this book Lih has managed not only to rediscover but also to liven up Lenin’s difficult-to-absorb oeuvre. He makes Lenin sound not only polemical but also surprisingly absorbing.4

4. Shestakov 2005.

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I should note that my translation-choices were made for the specific purpose of a scholarly translation of WITBD?. I think that ‘revolutionary by trade’ is a somewhat more accurate translation than ‘professional revolutionary’, but I often find myself speaking or writing in contexts where it is inconvenient to explain why, and so I use ‘professional revolutionary’. I think ‘spontaneous’ is a misleading translation of stikhinnyi. I prefer ‘elemental’, although there were reasons (distorted by Mayer), particular to What Is to Be Done?, why ‘elemental’ could not be used. For this and other reasons, therefore, I kept stikhinost in Russian. I am confident that anyone who reads all of WITBD? in my translation will get a good idea of what the word means, even without taking advantage of my commentary. But, in many other contexts, I cannot expect such devotion to the issue, and so I use the word ‘spontaneity’ in order to communicate with my audience.5 According to Mayer, my translation is ugly and grating, not only because I have a tin-ear, but because I have an ideological agenda: Lih’s translation often transforms Lenin’s vigorous prose into a clumsy mess of ambiguity. In a misguided effort to render Lenin’s scandalous passages less scandalous, Lih substitutes constructions that are vague and ungainly. . . . Lih has purged the poetry in order to protect Lenin from criticism.

Here, I think, we see the reason why Mayer reacts so violently to my translationstrategy. He has his own definite interpretation of the book’s scandalous passages, and my translation evidently weakens its plausibility. Let us compare the standard translation and my translation of one such passage. I choose this particular passage because Alan Shandro strengthens his critique of my book by citing it in the older translation (without noting the fact or explaining why he rejects my rendering). Standard translation: Hence, our task, the task of Social Democracy, is to combat spontaneity, to divert the working-class movement from this spontaneous, trade-unionist striving to come under the wing of the bourgeois, and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary Social Democracy. 5. Mayer also argues that ‘One way to determine what [stikhinost] means is to ask how Lenin’s Russian readers in 1902 understood what he was saying. But Lih does not want to do this because many who read Lenin’s pamphlet thought he meant something like “spontaneity”.’ In other words, I avoid looking at reader-reactions to WITBD? in order to suppress inconvenient evidence. A glance at my Index under ‘What Is to Be Done?, reactions by’, however, reveals entries for An (Zhordania), Gorev, Krupskaya, Lenin, Luxemburg, Martynov, Miliukov, Nadezhdin, Olminskii, Parvus, Plekhanov, Potresov, Radchenko, Stalin, Trotsky, Tskhakaia, Valentinov, and Vorovskii.


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My translation: Therefore our task – the task of Social Democracy – consists of a struggle with stikhinost, consists in causing the worker movement to stray away from this stikhiinyi striving of tred-iunionizm toward accepting the leadership of the bourgeoisie and in causing the worker movement to go toward accepting the leadership of revolutionary Social Democracy.6

My translation is undoubtedly more ungainly, and reads less smoothly. In my view, these defects are amply compensated by a greater accuracy that enables the serious student of Lenin to avoid common misreadings. • The Russian word rendered by ‘to combat’ is borba, the word ordinarily used to render ‘struggle’, as in ‘class-struggle’. • ‘Combat spontaneity’ is often read in the manner of Bertrand Wolfe, for whom Lenin was the self-proclaimed enemy of ‘spontaneity, the natural liberty of men and classes to be themselves’.7 By retaining the idiosyncratic Russian word stikhinost – with its connotations of primitiveness, uncontrolled impulsiveness, lack of organisation and purposeless violence – I make it less paradoxical that all Russian Social Democrats wanted to overcome the initial stikhinost of the Russian worker-movement. Indeed, as noted in Section IV, the Mensheviks were probably more wary of stikhinost than were the Bolsheviks. • I substituted ‘cause to stray’ for ‘divert’, because ‘cause to stray’ is closer to the Russian idiom here invoked (straying from the path of righteousness). Furthermore, this rendering allows me to bring out the significant parallelism Lenin establishes between getting the worker-movement to move away [otvlech] from tred-iunionizm and getting it to move towards [privlech] Social Democracy. • ‘Spontaneous, trade-unionist striving’ is simply inaccurate, since it says that the workers are striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie. Lenin does not say ‘trade-unionist striving’, but ‘the striving of tred-iunionizm’. Tred-iunionizm is an ideology, whose alien nature was signalled to the Russian-reader by its ostentatiously English origin (which is one reason I have merely transcribed it back from Russian). Lenin is therefore saying that tred-iunionizm, a bourgeois ideology that rejects the need for a SocialDemocratic party, has a stikhiinyi striving to seduce the worker-movement. Social Democracy must struggle against it.

6. Lih 2006, p. 711 (see pp. 658–67 for discussion). 7. Wolfe 1984, p. 30.

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• I translated the literal expression ‘under the wing’ according to the meaning of the idiom. I make no great claims for this decision, but I think it adds clarity.8 In order to really understand what is going on in this passage, the reader also has to know that Lenin has sarcastically borrowed the term ‘divert/cause to stray’ from the people he is attacking. In fact, the key-term stikhinost is so prominent in WITBD? only because it was used in a polemical attack on Lenin’s faction that was published a few days before Lenin sat down to write his book. Lenin’s cut-and-thrust polemical style creates problems for a translation. Lenin’s original reader may have enjoyed his polemical sarcasm, but, by the time the joke is explained to the modern reader, the humour is inevitably lost. Mayer further castigates me for losing the ‘poetry’ of WITBD?, that is, the rousing eloquence that inspired many of its earliest readers. In my opinion, WITBD? ’s poetry simply does not reside in Lenin’s crabbed polemical formulae, effective as they were in their way.9 Typical of Lenin’s whole approach to politics is a combination of obsessive polemics and inspiring vision. The polemics are usually front and centre, while the inspiring parts of Lenin’s writings are harder to find. Lenin’s enthusiastic vision of the workers leading the anti-tsarist revolution is all over his writings, but it is almost never set out systematically – it just pops out here and there, often in the final paragraph or two of an article. A scrupulously accurate translation can also convey the effect of these more inspirational passages. When Lenin really becomes eloquent, he does not need the specialised jargon, often borrowed from the very people he is attacking, that he uses when refuting detailed arguments. This following passage from WITBD? invites the local activist to see herself as part of a vast crusade against tsarism. Lenin speaks directly, without resorting to the polemical vocabulary over which Mayer and I clash: If we genuinely succeed in getting all or a significant majority of local committees, local groups and circles actively to take up the common work, we would in short order be able to have a weekly newspaper, regularly distributed in tens of thousands of copies throughout Russia. This newspaper would be a small part of a huge bellows that blows up each flame of class struggle and popular indignation into a common fire. Around this task – in and of itself a very small and even 8. For the reasoning behind my somewhat unidiomatic ‘worker movement’, see Lih 2006, pp. 68–70. 9. As shown in Section V, many Bolsheviks declared their admiration for Lenin’s book despite the clumsiness of some of these formulae.


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innocent one but one that is a regular and in the full meaning of the word common task – an army of experienced fighters would systematically be recruited and trained. Among the ladders and scaffolding of this common organisational construction would soon rise up Social-Democratic Zheliabovs from among our revolutionaries, Russian Bebels from our workers, who would be pushed forward and then take their place at the head of a mobilised army and would raise up the whole people to settle accounts with the shame and curse of Russia. That is what we must dream about!10

II. Perverting the worker-outlook According to Robert Mayer, the controversial formulation in WITBD? about ‘from without’ is indeed an expression of Lenin’s ‘worry about workers’, but Lenin quickly realised this formulation was impolitic and dropped it. No real flip-flop in Lenin’s outlook was involved, however, because his worry about workers is revealed in another series of texts starting in 1899.11 The essential clue hidden in these texts is the word razvrashchenie, variously translated as ‘corruption’, ‘perversion’, or ‘leading astray’ (my translation). Thus, the textbook-interpretation is correct about Lenin’s outlook and mistaken only in seeing WITBD? as the classical formulation of it. Mayer says that I have overlooked this evidence. I can assure him that I read his provocative article with great interest, weighed his arguments with care, and examined all the Lenin texts he cited to back up his case. In the first draft of Lenin Rediscovered, I included a ten-page section explaining why Mayer’s own evidence led me to reject his conclusions. This section hit the cuttingroom floor in a last-minute drive to make my book less of a ‘behemoth’ (as Mayer describes it). The excised section explained at length why I adopted the translation ‘leading astray’. The definition of razvrashchenie found in Dal’s nineteenthcentury dictionary, plus the usage of the word in texts of the time, convinced me that the word did not have exclusively sexual connotations, but also referred to false doctrine.12 I searched for a translation that, as I put it, ‘preserved the overtones of vice without overemphasising it’. 10. Lih 2006, p. 828. (Zheliabov was a leader of Narodnaya volya, the organisation that assassinated Tsar Aleksandr II. August Bebel was the worker who became the leader of the German Social-Democratic Party.) 11. I was therefore mistaken in labeling Mayer’s interpretation ‘double flip-flop’ (Lih 2006, p. 24). 12. In a book published in America in 1919, the following conversation between Lenin and Raymond Robins is recorded. Lenin says, ‘The American government is corrupt.’ Robins responds, ‘You cannot call the American government a bought government.’ Lenin explains: ‘I should not have used the word corrupt. I do not mean that your government is corrupt

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My aim was not to ‘dull Lenin’s vocabulary’, as Mayer assumes. In fact, it seems to me that ‘leading astray’ is more overtly sexual than ‘corruption’. But there is no need to argue about how to translate razvrashchenie. After reading Mayer’s present critique, I decided that the term he often uses there, ‘perversion’, is the best translation. Furthermore, after consulting modern dictionaries and observing usage, I conclude that ‘perversion’ can refer both to sexual debauchery and false doctrine. The Russian and the English terms are also etymologically similar. Now that we have a mutually acceptable English equivalent, let us turn to the substantive issues. Does Lenin’s use of ‘perversion’ betray a distinctive worry about workers that led him to ‘write off ’ large sections of the working class as lacking a ‘proletarian soul’, as Mayer claimed? The heart of Social Democracy’s self-appointed mission was to bring the socialist message to the working class, to ‘merge socialism and the workermovement’. At any one time, there would be workers who had already accepted the message and those who had not. Social Democracy was pleased to call the former category ‘advanced’ and the latter ‘backward’. Of course, Social Democracy was not the only force trying to inculcate a particular world-outlook in the workers. From the point of view of the forces of order, Social Democracy was trying to pervert the naturally healthy outlook of the otherwise-loyal worker, so they put a great deal of energy into propagating a less subversive world-outlook. Naturally, Social Democracy was well-aware of this threat and took it very seriously indeed. As Wilhelm Liebknecht said in 1875, ‘Our most dangerous enemy is not the standing army of soldiers, but the standing army of the enemy press.’13 The forces of order were not the only perceived threat to the correct workeroutlook. The most common mutual accusation among Social Democracy and its rivals on the Left, and among Social Democrats themselves, was that one’s opponents were corrupting the class-awareness of the workers. Naturally enough, all Social Democrats were ‘anxious’ about this situation. They saw attempts to inculcate hostile world-views as a serious threat, they were not complacent about the possible damage this could do to Social Democracy, and they were determined to fight back vigorously. On this meaning of ‘anxious’, it is misleading to say (in Mayer’s words) ‘there is simply no trace of this anxiety in the writings of Plekhanov, Akselrod or Zasulich, either before 1899 or after’.14 Lenin is in no way unique when he talks about the backwardness of through money. I mean that it is corrupt in that it is decayed in thought . . . It is, therefore, lacking in intellectual integrity.’ (Williams 1919, pp. 140–1.) 13. Steenson 1981, p. 129. 14. See the discussion in Sections III and IV.


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some Russian workers, and warns about the dangers of adjusting to their level instead of fighting against their nerazvitost, their ‘lack of development’. What is the proper Social-Democratic reaction to the danger of the perversion of the worker-outlook by hostile or misguided opponents? Obviously, to roll up one’s sleeve and get down to the job of spreading what one believes is the correct socialist message to the undeveloped strata, and of subjecting to critique the perverted doctrine being foisted on them by others. In Lenin’s view, counteracting attempts at perverting worker-outlook required vigorous polemics, often against fellow Social Democrats or allied anti-tsarist revolutionaries. Other Social Democrats felt that the take-no-prisoners rhetorical style of Lenin and his fellow Iskra-colleagues was outrageously intolerant, dogmatic, and uncomradely. In response, Lenin polemicised in favour of vigorous polemics – for example, in the first chapter of WITBD?. This is the context – justifying combative polemics – in which we most often find him writing about attempts at ideological ‘perversion’. Lenin was typically confident that such polemics would lead to a successful and fairly speedy end-result. Mayer denies the presence of this optimism. On the contrary, he tells us, Lenin washed his hands of such workers and wrote them out of the proletarian family. Any worker who disagrees with Lenin can be ‘written off as corrupted’. For Lenin, ‘any workers who deviate from his preferred position prove that they have lost their proletarian soul or never possessed it to begin with. . . . Lenin alone expressed such pessimism and – what is more – drew organisational and tactical conclusions from them.’15 Mayer and I thus have very different readings of Lenin’s reaction to worker‘backwardness’. Oddly enough, we use exactly the same texts to make our respective cases. A key-text for Mayer is the unpublished 1899 essay, ‘A Retrograde Trend in Russian Social Democracy’. I, too, have a high opinion of this essay. In Lenin Rediscovered, I commented that it ‘contains some of the most eloquent assertions of his basic beliefs and I particularly recommend it as the most revealing of Lenin’s early writings’.16 This essay makes clear Lenin’s extravagant admiration for the ‘advanced workers’: their hunger for knowledge, their devotion to socialism, their heroism in the fight for Russian freedom, and their ability to lead less advanced workers. ‘The advanced workers, as always and everywhere, determined the character of the movement, and they were followed by the working masses because they showed their readiness and their ability to serve the cause of 15. ‘The “corruption” which Lenin confronted was therefore more disgusting and more dangerous [because associated with moral perversity], a disease which had to be purged from the body of the movement through renovation’ (Mayer 1993, p. 642). 16. Lih 2006, p. 140.

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the worker class, because they proved able to win full confidence of the mass of workers.’17 For Mayer, Lenin’s views about the advanced workers are irrelevant. But does Lenin dismiss the backward worker as irredeemable? On the contrary, reaching the backward worker is a major theme of this text. Lenin felt that Rabochaia mysl (the only Russian-underground Social-Democratic newspaper in 1899) was pitching its message to the backward worker. Seeking to attract this audience was valuable and indeed ‘absolutely essential’ work, that is, until this newspaper put forth a programmatic philosophy about limiting the SocialDemocratic message to what these lower-strata could grasp immediately. These programmatic claims spoiled the good work it was doing. According to Lenin, an official Social-Democratic newspaper should aim instead at the advanced workers. When and if the intellectual demands of this stratum of advanced workers are met, it will ‘take the cause of the Russian workers and, consequently, the cause of the Russian revolution, into its own hands’.18 Perhaps backward workers will probably find such a newspaper well-nigh incomprehensible, but this is nothing to get upset about. Even in Europe, many loyal Social-Democratic voters do not read Social-Democratic newspapers. All it means is that other ways of approach should be used, such as oral agitation or leaflets on local problems. Lenin demonstrates by giving what he calls Kautsky’s ‘superb’ description of the technique of oral agitation. Lenin turns the necessity of reaching out to the lower strata into yet one more argument for moving to a nation-wide revolutionary party. Those who restrict themselves to local economic struggles deprive themselves of ‘even an opportunity of successfully and steadily attracting the lower strata of the proletariat to the cause of the working class’.19 If, on the other hand, the field is left exclusively to non-revolutionary socialists such as Rabochaia mysl, the backward workers ‘might’ very well fall under the influence of various baneful bourgeois prejudices. Let us next turn to something that all Social Democrats regarded as a direct and conscious attempt to ‘pervert’ the outlook of the workers: the Zubatov police-unions. Zubatov was the police-official who, during the Iskra-period, tried to convince workers that they could have effective economic unions if they only renounced the project of overthrowing the tsar. In WITBD?, Lenin actually argues that Social Democrats should welcome Zubatov-type organisations as ultimately working to the advantage of the Social Democrats – of course, on

17. Lenin 1960–8a, p. 260. 18. Lenin 1960–8a, p. 281. 19. Lenin 1960–8a, p. 283.


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the assumption that the Social Democrats do their job of exposing Zubatov’s attempts at perversion.20 In January 1905, Father Gapon’s Zubatov-like organisation led the workers of St. Petersburg in a massive demonstration that turned into the massacre of Bloody Sunday. Lenin’s immediate response was to claim that his argument in WITBD? had been confirmed.21 Because Lenin uses the word ‘perversion’, Mayer actually cites the following passage as evidence for Lenin’s pessimistic worry about workers: A legally-permitted and Zubatov-type worker-society, sponsored by the government in order to pervert the proletariat by systematic monarchist propaganda, rendered no little service in organising the movement in its early stages and in expansion. What happened was something that the Social Democrats had long ago pointed out to the Zubatovists, namely, that the revolutionary instinct of the worker-class and the spirit of solidarity would prevail over all the petty ruses. Even the most backward workers would be drawn into the movement by the Zubatovists, and then the tsarist government would itself take care to drive the workers further; capitalist exploitation itself would turn them away from the peace-preaching and utterly hypocritical Zubatovshchina toward revolutionary Social Democracy. The practice of proletarian life and proletarian struggle would prove superior to all the ‘theories’ and all the vain efforts of the Zubatov-crowd.22

After the 1905 Revolution, Lenin often used the imagery of ideological perversion to describe the attempts of bourgeois liberals to win hegemony over the peasants. What ‘organisational and tactical conclusions’ (Mayer’s words) did Lenin draw from bourgeois attempts at perversion? Lenin concluded that the main task of Russian Social Democracy was to wrest hegemony over the peasants from the liberals. This strategy rested on a highly optimistic reading of the Social-Democratic solidarity of the workers, as well as the ultimate rationality of the peasant-outlook and its democratic nature. The Mensheviks simply threw up their hands at the romanticism of the whole strategy. This reaction is understandable when one reads a passage such as the following, which comes from the very same paragraph as a sentence referred to by Mayer because it contained the word ‘perversion’:

20. Lih 2006, pp. 402–3, 595, 778–9. 21. As we shall see in Section VII, this is the sort of passage that is often used to show how far Lenin moved away from his WITBD?-outlook during 1905. Yet Lenin explicitly cited WITBD? in order to document the continuity in his views (Lenin 1960–8e, p. 115). 22. Lenin 1958–65b, pp. 220–1; Lenin 1960–8e, pp. 114–5 (January 1905); cf. Mayer 1993, p. 642, n. 30.

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L. T. Lih / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 108–174 By the heroic struggle it waged during the course of three years (1905–07), the Russian proletariat won for itself and for the Russian narod gains that took other peoples decades to win. It won the liberation of the labouring masses from the influence of treacherous and contemptibly powerless liberalism. It won for itself the role of hegemon in the struggle for freedom, for democracy, as a precondition of the struggle for socialism. It won for all the oppressed and exploited classes of Russia the ability to wage a revolutionary mass struggle, without which nothing of importance in the progress of mankind has been achieved anywhere in the world.23

Lenin’s political strategy in the 1914–18 period – ‘civil war instead of imperialist war’, and so forth – was similarly based on a cluster of very optimistic (from the revolutionary point of view) assumptions. By 1920, it is true, Lenin was worried about how to proceed in Russia, and for once Mayer’s citation (from Left-Wing Communism) is apposite. Lenin found himself in a situation he never predicted, precisely because some of his earlier keyassumptions turned out to be over-optimistic. Nevertheless, Left-Wing Communism shows abundantly that Lenin could not envisage a successful revolution without the full support and participation of ‘the masses’, in the manner of 1917. The standard version of the textbook-interpretation fetishises a single word: spontaneity/stikhinost. It insists that the key-question to ask is, ‘What is Lenin’s relation to spontaneity?’, and focuses on drawing vast conclusions from his not-very-frequent use of the word. Mayer attempts to re-establish the textbookinterpretation by fetishising a different word: perversion/razvrashchenie. He draws vast conclusions from what he takes to be the exclusively sexual connotations of this word, and shows no interest in the actual arguments Lenin is making in the various texts in which this word is found. Anyone who actually examines the texts themselves will conclude that Mayer’s ‘worryabout-workers-Mark-II’ is a non-starter.

III. WITBD? and the Mensheviks Ron Suny states a widespread belief with the following words: ‘It is very clear that powerful and persuasive Menshevik voices in the pivotal years 1903–5 have shaped . . . the Western academic and popular meaning of What Is To Be Done? ’. In Lenin Rediscovered, I put forth a very different thesis about the relation of Menshevik polemics in 1904 and the historiography. The textbook23. Lenin 1960–8j, p. 387 (1910); cf. Mayer 1993, p. 643, n. 37.


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interpretation of WITBD? did not arise out of Menshevik polemics – rather, scholars imposed the textbook-interpretation on Menshevik polemics and, as a consequence, thoroughly misread them. According to the textbookinterpretation, WITBD? was the basic cause of the party-split in 1903–4. Historians begin with the assumption that Mensheviks reacted in horror to the heresies of What Is to Be Done?. And, since the textbook-interpretation also tells them what they needed to know about Lenin’s argument, they are able to deduce the views of the Mensheviks, almost without the need of textual evidence. Clarity on this point is essential if we are to grasp the real nature of the split within Russian Social Democracy. In this section, I will review the factual difficulties with the standard version of events. In Section IV, I will examine some of the real differences between Menshevism and Bolshevism. According to the textbook-interpretation, Lenin endorsed intelligentsiadomination of the party. Therefore, the Mensheviks must have been hostile to Bolshevik glorification of the intellectuals. But I presented evidence showing that the Bolsheviks attacked the leadership-role of intellectuals in 1904–5, while Menshevik spokesmen and defenders such as Akselrod, Trotsky and Luxemburg justified this role.24 According to the textbook-interpretation, Lenin was against democracy in the Party on principle. So the Mensheviks must have defended ‘democratism’. But I presented statements by Mensheviks that condemned democratism (invocation of democratic principles in inappropriate contexts) and by Bolsheviks defending party-democracy.25 According to the textbook-interpretation, Lenin was obsessed with ‘professional revolutionaries’. So the Mensheviks must have denounced professional revolutionaries. But I presented endorsements of the professional revolutionary by Mensheviks such as Pavel Akselrod, Vera Zasulich, and Georgii Plekhanov, among others. Of course, the Mensheviks did not want to restrict the party to professional revolutionaries. But then, neither did the Bolsheviks. The professional revolutionary was a type common to all the underground-parties of the era and played an equivalent role in each.26 24. The evidence mentioned in the following paragraphs can be found in Lih 2006, Chapter Nine (‘After the Second Congress’), pp. 489–553. (Trotsky’s views are discussed in Section IX.) 25. For Bolshevik views on party-democracy before and during the 1905 Revolution, see Section IX. 26. Very instructive in this regard is the chapter ‘Professional Revolutionists’ in Moissaye J. Olgin, The Soul of the Russian Revolution (Olgin 1917, pp. 321–34). This chapter (written in 1917) relies completely on novelistic portraits of a well-known social type. This type was not restricted to any one party or faction (Olgin does not even mention Bolsheviks or Mensheviks). Neither the term nor the type is associated by Olgin with Lenin in any way.

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According to the textbook-interpretation, WITBD? is a blueprint for Soviet tyranny. So Menshevik attacks on Lenin must have been a prophetic protest against Soviet tyranny. But I presented evidence showing that the Mensheviks such as Akselrod attacked the Bolsheviks for their exclusive focus on achieving political freedom as opposed to inculcating a specifically socialist class-consciousness. According to the textbook-interpretation, WITBD? was a founding document of Bolshevism. Therefore the Mensheviks must have aimed their polemics at WITBD? and its heresies from the very beginning. But I presented material showing the limited and ambiguous role of WITBD? in Menshevik polemics. At the Second Congress in August 1903, the ‘economists’ Aleksandr Martynov and Vladimir Akimov attacked the scandalous passages in What Is to Be Done? as part of their attack on the Iskra-group as a whole. The textbook-interpretation does owe a debt to this critique.27 At that time, either because of conviction or as an act of Iskra-solidarity, the future Menshevik leaders all defended Lenin and his book. Although they were soon attacking Lenin personally, they were loath to backtrack on their defence of WITBD?. In Section IX, I give passages from Trotsky’s Menshevik manifesto Our Political Tasks (1904) in which he presents WITBD? as an acceptable, if crude, presentation of Akselrod ’s outlook during the period 1900–3. According to the Menshevik leaders, Lenin’s problem in 1903–4 was his refusal to move on to the new tasks of the present stage of the movement. Only a full year after in the Second Congress, in August 1904, did Plekhanov bite the bullet: he strongly condemned WITBD? for its ideological heresies and (feebly) explained away his own earlier defence. After Plekhanov’s intervention, WITBD? did become a standard talking-point for Menshevik polemicists. Yet the most prominent spokesman for Menshevism in 1904 – Pavel Akselrod – never, as far as I know, attacked WITBD? or traced the conflict with Bolshevism to ideological heresies of any kind. In fact, in his foundational Iskra-articles of early 1904, he explicitly endorses the orthodoxy of Lenin’s Marxism.28

27. I base my reading of the Menshevik view on the writings of the Iskra-editors and other émigré pamphleteers. Suny quotes a letter of June 1904 from the Georgian Menshevik Noe Zhordania that suggests that Menshevik praktiki in Russia itself may have been more directly influenced by the earlier ‘economist’ critique. For example, Zhordania writes that Lenin ‘even denied such an indisputable fact that the economic struggle is the best means to lead the workers into the political arena’. Zhordania’s (shaky) critique is not ‘in the spirit of Akselrod’, but rather in the spirit of earlier opponents of Iskra such as Martynov and Krichevsky of Rabochee delo. 28. ‘To complete its malicious irony, history will perhaps place at the head of this bourgeois


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The scholarly view of the party-split owes much to Abraham Ascher’s description of what Ron Suny terms ‘the spirit of Akselrod’. Ascher’s Pavel Axelrod and the Development of Menshevism (1972) is the one scholarly account of Akselrod’s writings in any language. Following Ascher, Suny tells us that Akselrod ‘depicted Lenin as substituting a party of intellectuals for the workermovement’ and depicted the factional split as ‘an epic battle between democracy and dictatorship within the Party (and, by implication, in the future socialist state)’. I agree about Akselrod’s importance and disagree completely about his actual views. Let us look at a document highly relevant to this dispute. Suny mentions a letter that Akselrod sent to Kautsky in summer 1904 describing the factional split. Kautsky wrote back saying that he still could not perceive any substantive differences and that the split seemed based on ‘misunderstandings’. Akselrod therefore wrote a second letter to Kautsky in order to set him right about the dispute. He then published this letter in Iskra and republished it in 1906.29 Thus, Akselrod’s second letter to Kautsky is a carefully considered and authoritative statement of his view of the party-split. Yes (Akselrod says to Kautsky), the split is based on misunderstandings – on the part of the majority of Russian praktiki, who support Lenin. Lenin himself knows exactly what he is doing. He challenges us Mensheviks on organisational grounds, simply because he knows he can get no mileage on anything more substantive. Not that Lenin does have any real ‘organisational plan’ or any talent as an organiser. No, Lenin is unique only in this: his complete demagogic unscrupulousness. ‘He was the only one of us who was able to use for his advantage precisely the weak sides of our movement, in particular, the sense of helplessness felt by our praktiki. Indeed, perhaps even from the very beginning he systematically exploited it.’ Lenin, aided and abetted by his ‘agents’ and ‘minions’, uses ‘banalities’ about the ‘centralism acknowledged [as a value] by all of us’, in order to become the ‘idol’ of the majority of the party and to increase the ‘chaos in their heads’. What these praktiki seem incapable of understanding is that our party is still much too primitive for genuine centralism. Russian Social Democracy is not yet ‘a political party in the real sense of the word’. The mission of the minority [menshinstvo] is constantly to point this out to the local activists. But the disorganising methods of ‘Lenin and Co.’ and their

revolutionary organization, not just a Social Democrat, but the very one who by origin is the most “orthodox”.’ Lenin is not named, but the allusion was unambiguous (Lih 2006, p. 551). 29. Iskra No. 68 (25 June 1904); ‘Iskra’ za dva goda 1906, pp. 147–54. For further discussion, see Lih 2003, p. 14.

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‘systematic casting of suspicion on our critical and positive explanation’ is threatening the Party with ruin. You, my dear Kautsky, have trouble gasping our difficulties because partyconflicts in the West usually involve genuine programmatic and tactical differences. Not in our case. All we have is ‘organisational fetishism’, that is, the pathetic daydreams of powerless praktiki. The result in practice cannot be compared to Jacobins or to Blanquists, who were, despite everything, real revolutionaries. No, the dreams of the Russian praktiki are merely a limp parody of the tsarist bureaucracy. So goes Akselrod’s explanation of party-differences. Akselrod tells Kautsky that the split in Russian Social Democracy reflects the primitive problems of a primitive party in a primitive country. Lenin is an unscrupulous nonentity and nothing else, his émigré admirers are ‘agents’ and ‘minions’, his Russian admirers are simple-minded praktiki afflicted by a psychological complex that prevents them from attending to the wisdom dispensed by the Menshevik spokesmen.30 Akselrod does not in any way suggest that the split is based on principled differences of vast significance for the future socialist state that stem from Lenin’s ideological heresies in WITBD?. Ascher almost literally turns this crucial document on its head when he tells the reader that the letter stressed ideological differences, contained no personal attack on Lenin, compared Bolshevism to Jacobinism, and so on.31 The same comment can be made about Ascher’s entire interpretation – perforce influential, since it had no rivals – of the ‘spirit of Akselrod’. Ascher was not able to take in what he was reading because he was in thrall to the textbookinterpretation of WITBD? as the ultimate source of Soviet tyranny. Therefore, Lenin’s foe Pavel Akselrod had to be opposing Soviet tyranny, as foreshadowed in WITBD?.32 Another eloquent illustration of the gulf between the textbook-interpretation and the actual Menshevik interpretation of Bolshevism comes from Martov’s writings after 1917. In 1917–18, Martov wrote a history of Russian Social Democracy in which he talked about WITBD? in its time and place. Yet, in 1919, in his book World Bolshevism, WITBD? is not even mentioned. Indeed, Martov’s explanation of the origins of ‘world Bolshevism’ makes no reference 30. I discuss the content of the Menshevik message in Lih 2006, pp. 509–17. 31. Ascher 1972, p. 211. 32. ‘Bolshevism took shape as the bearer of predominantly general-democratic and political tendencies of the movement, and Menshevism as the bearer predominantly of its class and socialist tendencies.’ Thus wrote Fyodor Dan in 1945 in his Origins of Bolshevism (cited in Lih 2006, p. 553). Dan, one of the principal Menshevik leaders in 1904, is summarising Axelrod’s critique. The emerging postwar scholarly consensus took no notice of this central aspect of the actual ‘spirit of Axelrod’.


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whatsoever to prewar Bolshevik ideology. World-Bolshevism is shown to be the product of impatient activists, cut off from the tradition of Social Democracy by the crisis of the War, brutalised by wartime-psychology, and resorting to stikhiinyi explosions of ‘anarcho-Jacobinism’. The only role assigned to the ideology of Bolshevik leaders is the existence of Marxist scruples against giving in completely to demagogic exploitation of these stikhiinyi passions.33 For the textbook-interpretation, WITBD? is the ultimate source of worldBolshevism. In Martov’s interpretation of world-Bolshevism, even though he was as familiar with it as any man living, WITBD? is the book that did not bark – eloquent by its absence. For Martov, WITBD? is a footnote in the history of Russian Social Democracy, but plays no role in the explanation of the Bolshevik Revolution and its European aftermath.

IV. Distinctiveness of Bolshevism In late 1901, a Russian Social Democrat accused a rival Social-Democratic faction of giving too much scope to the spontaneity [stikhinost] of the workermovement. In his opinion, the worker-movement would go astray unless the Party ‘takes upon itself the immediate guidance of the economic struggle of the proletariat and by so doing turns it into a revolutionary class struggle’. Of course, the workers do not need Social Democracy in order to undertake an economic struggle. Nevertheless, without the influence of Social Democracy this struggle has a stikhiinyi character. Often workers, aware of only their transitory and special interests, act in opposition to the interests of the working class as a whole. There have been and there continue to be cases where the workers themselves demand longer shifts and non-compliance with factory-laws. There have been and there continue to be times when their boiling rage unleashes itself against Jews . . . against foreigners, and so on. By taking into its hands the guidance of this struggle, Social Democracy significantly widens it and, most of all brings into it light and awareness.34

In 1902, this same Russian Social Democrat spelled out his vanguardist convictions even more explicitly. He told the workers that the enemy – the autocratic government and the exploiting élite – had the experience, knowledge and organisation that the workers did not have. Individual workers certainly 33. World Bolshevism and other relevant writings have been recently reprinted in Martov 2000. Martov’s views are further discussed in Section IV. 34. Quoted in Lih 2006, pp. 394–5.

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could not work out the necessary socialist science on their own. Fortunately, ‘the socialist intelligentsia, devoted to the proletariat and in part itself emerging from its ranks, flesh of its flesh, using the knowledge of the present century and the experience of proletarian struggle, succeeded in working out a socialist science’. Only the Social-Democratic Party embodied this socialist science, ‘only this party is capable of creating and of guiding the liberation struggle of the working class, only this party is capable of guiding the proletariat at the present moment of revolution’.35 Who expressed this worry about workers, this anxiety about the spontaneous development of the workers’ struggle? Aleksandr Martynov, Lenin’s principal polemical target in WITBD? and, later, a vociferous anti-Lenin Menshevik. Leopold Haimson describes Martynov’s views in 1901–2 as follows: ‘workers by their own devices would be able to set their own political objectives, rather than having them dictated to them by outside political actors’.36 Why does this respected historian give such a distorted picture of Martynov’s views? For the same reason that Abraham Ascher distorted Akselrod, Haimson is in thrall to the textbook-interpretation of WITBD?. According to the textbookinterpretation, Lenin argued that the political objectives had to be dictated to workers by outside-political actors. Martynov was a foe of Lenin’s who mounted a critique of WITBD?. Therefore, he must have been in favour of leaving workers to their own ‘spontaneous’ devices. The textbook-interpretation thus creates a very problematic contrast between Lenin and his ‘economist’ opponent Martynov. Two of my critics, Alan Shandro and Paul Le Blanc, present the heart of Lenin’s message in a way that does not fully escape the same framework. Alan Shandro argues that To assume [the burdens of leadership in the struggle for hegemony] was to take up a sophisticated political stance, sustaining the spontaneous struggles of the workers and fostering the embryonic forms of socialist consciousness thrown up in the course of them by diagnosing and combating the forms in which bourgeois ideology spontaneously imposes itself within the working-class movement.

Paul Le Blanc, for his part, argues that The creation of a revolutionary workers’ party, guided by a serious-minded utilisation of socialist theory and scientific analysis, drawing increasing numbers of working people into a highly conscious struggle against all forms of oppression –

35. Lih 2006, p. 556. 36. Haimson 2004, p. 60 (emphasis in original).


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this could not be expected to arise easily or spontaneously. It had to be created through the most persistent, serious, consistent efforts of revolutionary socialists. The working class would not automatically become a force for socialist revolution, but it could develop into such a force with the assistance of a serious revolutionary workers’ party.37

I accept these formulations as accurate statements of important aspects of Lenin’s outlook. Now, let us ask the question: would Martynov, set up by Lenin as a model ‘economist’, have disagreed with them? Not at all. No doubt Haimson’s Martynov would have disagreed, since he wanted to leave the workers to their own devices, and thus negated any need for leadership by a Social-Democratic party. The Martynov described by Haimson had no motive for worrying about bourgeois influence on the workers. But Martynov’s Martynov would certainly have agreed with the formulations of Le Blanc and Shandro – in fact, he insisted upon them. Since Lenin and his most irreconcilable foe agree on these basic points, I conclude they are part of a broad Social-Democratic consensus. They do not tell us what is distinct about Lenin or Bolshevism. Shandro disagrees and points particularly to Lenin’s comment that ‘the task of Social Democracy is to combat spontaneity’.38 Shandro comments: ‘The logic of the Erfurtian narrative can be stretched to accommodate a good deal of Lenin’s polemic against the economist practice of subordinating consciousness to spontaneity, but it cannot contain this crucial claim; it is a tribute to Lih’s intellectual honesty that he acknowledges this difficulty.’ My actual argument is somewhat different: ‘the most important thing to keep in mind about the scandalous passages [is] that Lenin’s aim is not to assert a bold new proposition, but to make his opponents look marginal by claiming that they reject a universally accepted commonplace’.39 Are Lenin’s images of combating and diverting indeed incompatible with Erfurtianism? Lenin certainly did not think so. He immediately illustrates his point about combating spontaneity by evoking ‘the example of Germany’. Lassalle carried out ‘a desperate struggle with spontaneity’ with excellent results. The SPD still today carries out ‘unremitting struggle’ with ideologies that emerged from the worker-movement, such as those propagated by Catholic

37. Le Blanc 1990, p. 67 (also quoted in his essay supra). 38. For unexplained reasons, Shandro chooses to cite this crucial Lenin passage in an older translation. I discuss the relevant translation-problems in Section I. In this Section, I follow Shandro’s choice of translation. 39. Lih 2006, p. 394. Where I found Lenin less than convincing is his claim that his opponents did reject these commonplaces.

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and monarchical trade-unions.40 Lenin’s style of argument here – ‘Remember the example of Germany’ – is extremely typical. He knew the history of the European worker-movement and Social Democracy after 1848 backwards and forwards. For both Martynov and Lenin, a central aspect of the rôle of Russian intelligenty was to inform the Russian workers about the achievements of the European workers. Kautsky’s formulations were crucial for Lenin, because they showed him how the actual history of European Social Democracy could be viewed as a confirmation of the Communist Manifesto. According to Shandro, however, Kautsky himself felt no need for ‘combating spontaneity’: The introduction of consciousness into the spontaneous working-class movement from without signifies, in terms of the Erfurtian narrative, a practice of making workers aware of a goal and a direction of their movement that is already implicit in their practice. Since the spontaneous movement and the conscious awareness of it, practice and theory, are congruent and harmonious, there is no need, and no theoretical room, for a struggle between them. This is indeed the implication of the passage by Kautsky famously cited by Lenin in his own discussion of consciousness and spontaneity in WITBD?.

At the highest level of abstraction, Marx and Engels certainly did claim that their mission was to make workers aware of the goal already implicit in their practice. Kautsky and Lenin undoubtedly believed this as well. But it does not follow that Kautsky, for instance, did not ‘combat spontaneity’ in the relevant sense, that is, vigorously warning against and subjecting to critique tendencies that emerged from the practice of the worker-movement. Kautsky systematically covers a whole range of such phenomena, from the continual influx of new workers from the countryside to the formation of labour-aristocracies, from Nur-Gewerkschaftlerei (the principled restriction of worker-activity to tradeunions) to violent anarchism. In the first chapter of WITBD?, Lenin calls (not for the first time) for a creative application of Marxist theory to the unprecedented problems of the Russian movement. Russian Social Democracy needed to find answers to questions such as these: how can we merge socialism with the workermovement, given the entire lack of political freedom? How can we achieve the necessary political freedom? How can we get other classes to see the workers as the leaders in the fight for democracy? In other words: how do we achieve basic Erfurtian goals in an extremely hostile environment?

40. Lih 2006, pp. 711–2. For evidence that the German Party saw the issue in similar terms, see Bebel’s comment in Lih 2006, p. 406.


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Shandro points to the first chapter of WITBD? as a crucial breakthrough, since he sees creativity and Erfurtianism as incompatible. If Lenin is not content with ‘a rigid standard of orthodox rectitude’ or with ‘already-established Erfurtian standards’, if he is open to ‘unexpected innovation and diversity in the spontaneous movement of the class-struggle’, he is ipso facto moving beyond Erfurtianism. I think this is too narrow a definition of Erfurtianism. In any event, as we shall see in Section VIII, Lenin specifically praised Kautsky’s writings during the decade 1899–1909 precisely for his creative openness to new developments, and in particular, his appreciation of the innovations arising out of the workers’ struggle in Russia. For Paul Le Blanc, the heart of Lenin’s message in WITBD? is that purposiverevolutionary struggle ‘could be expected to arise easily or spontaneously’, but only through long, hard effort. And, of course, Lenin believed this very deeply – but he was not alone. As Le Blanc puts it: ‘Lenin was one of the few leaders of the Iskra-current who was prepared to follow the implications of the orientation through to the end.’41 As we have seen, Lenin shared this orientation not only with his fellow Iskra-editors, but with ‘economists’ like Martynov and indeed all of Social Democracy. But, according to Le Blanc, the Mensheviks did not follow-out the implications of this perspective, that is, they forgot that the working class was not automatically or spontaneously a force for socialist revolution and that only persistent and serious efforts by socialists made it such a force. The Mensheviks did not forget these truths – indeed, they made them the centre of their critique of Bolshevism. A typical analysis of events by the Menshevik leader Iulii Martov runs something like this: yes, Bolshevik policies are more popular with the workers, but that is because so many workers are backward, subject to influence from other classes, demoralised by economic constraints, and so on. The Bolsheviks cannot resist the temptation to pander demagogically to the workers’ mistaken outlook. In response, we must put all our attention toward bringing correct class-awareness into the working class. A very revealing sample of Menshevik reasoning is a short ‘tactical platform’ written by Martov and other leading Mensheviks (including Martynov) in 1907.42 This platform is a critique of Bolshevik tactics (too much suspicion of urban-democratic classes and not enough suspicion of peasant-democratic classes), although the Bolsheviks are not mentioned. According to the platform, 41. Le Blanc 1990, pp. 64–8, also quoted in his essay supra. 42. The platform was published as a separate pamphlet with the following title: ‘A Tactical Platform for the Upcoming Congress, worked out by Martov, Dan, Starover [Potresov], Martynov and others, with the participation of a group of Menshevik praktiki’. The text can be found in Trotskii 1993, pp. 174–7. See also Lenin’s dissection in Lenin 1960–8h, p. 249–64.

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the workers themselves have these incorrect tactical views and they are therefore not yet ready to fulfill their historical mission of leading the Russian revolution. The implication is that the Bolsheviks merely reflect the mistaken outlook of the workers. The platform sets up the issue just the way Alan Shandro would like: The proletariat can fulfill the role [of leader of the Russian revolution] only to the extent that it steps forward as a political force that is conscious of its own position among the conflicting classes, of its urgent and final goals, and of the paths leading to them – only to the extent that it conducts an independent class-policy, free from subordination to the leadership of other classes.43

Unfortunately (the platform continues), the proletariat is not free from ‘the influence of other classes’ that threatens to ‘divert the proletariat from the path dictated by its class-interests’ (this is exactly the same idiom that seemed so shocking when used by Lenin in WITBD?). Overreacting to lack of support during the 1905 Revolution from the urban-democratic classes, the Russian proletariat tends in its hostility to underestimate the progressive-historical rôle of these classes. And, because a significant portion of the Russian proletariat still retains ties with the village, the workers are infected with peasant-violence and utopian thinking. This problem is compounded by the worrisome inroads among the workers of propaganda emanating from the SocialistRevolutionary Party. According to the platform, the spontaneous/stikhiinyi influences emanating from the workers’ social environment are not meeting enough resistance from the advanced, vanguard-elements of the proletariat – the ones with sufficient socialist consciousness to grasp the historical mission of the proletariat.44 The immediate task is, therefore, to gather these elements together, so that they can collectively fulfil their task of leading the mass-movement. Only in this way can they counteract the ‘spontaneous’ emergence of an economic struggle independent of Social Democracy. The argument of the Mensheviks should sound very familiar. It shows that both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks were solid Erfurtians, but that Mensheviks were typically sceptical about actual developments and the Bolsheviks typically sanguine.45 The Russian historian N.A. Kazarova has recently summed up Martov’s experience with these words: ‘Since he understood that Social 43. Trotskii 1993, p. 175. 44. The platform uses the term peredovye or ‘advanced’ workers; this term is sometimes translated as ‘vanguard’ in the English-language Collected Works of Lenin. 45. For another sample of Martov’s analysis, see his provocative 1919 description of ‘world Bolshevism’ (Martov 2000, pp. 393–434).


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Democracy in Russia did not possess a sufficiently powerful social base, he aimed at creating one, using all possible means for developing the self-activity of the proletariat and its class-consciousness.’46 My dispute with Alan Shandro and Paul Le Blanc is on a different level than the other issues treated in this essay. Each of them has zeroed-in on something true and important about Lenin. Nevertheless, they distort historical perspective when they claim that they have identified what is distinctive about Lenin – either because he was moving beyond the Erfurtian consensus, or because he remembered what other Social Democrats forgot. A foundational outlook such as Erfurtianism needs to be applied to an empirical reality, and legitimate differences can arise about how to view the facts of the case. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were typically optimistic about the implications of the facts. Drop the needle on a typical Bolshevik-Menshevik dispute, and you will hear the Bolsheviks berating the nedoverie, the lack of faith, of their opponents.47 Conversely, their opponents were the ones who typically stressed the need for patient consciousness-raising and the dangers of ideological infection from other classes.

V. Did Lenin ever renounce or distance himself from the arguments in WITBD? Partial answers to this question are scattered throughout Lenin Rediscovered.48 After reading my critics, I realise the issue requires more direct treatment. In particular, this issue determines our view of how Lenin reacted to the events of 1905 (as discussed in Section VII). To a varying extent, the interpretations of Robert Mayer, Ron Suny, Chris Harman and John Molyneux, and Paul Le Blanc all depend on a positive answer to this question. In 1907, Lenin republished WITBD? in a collection of his writings entitled During Twelve Years. In his preface to this edition, he makes the following points about WITBD?, which I will paraphrase in the following words: What I meant to say in the controversial formulations of WITBD? is clear enough if you take into account the argument and spirit of the book as a whole. And when understood properly, these formulations are only a restatement of universally-accepted axioms of Social Democracy. In fact, the same basic idea is 46. Kazarova 2006, p. 363. 47. In particular, Lenin’s use of the word ‘hegemony’ points not primarily to Lenin’s anxiety about the distorting influence of bourgeois hegemony over the workers, but rather to his daring project of exercising proletarian hegemony over the peasantry. 48. Further material on this topic can be found in Lih 2003.

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L. T. Lih / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 108–174 found in the party-programme of the RSDWP: ‘Social Democracy organises [the proletariat] into an independent political party . . . guides all manifestations of its class-struggle . . . and explains to it the historical significance and necessary conditions of the social revolution that stands before us.’ I must admit, however, that the actual formulations given in WITBD? are clumsy and not particularly successful in conveying what I meant to say. Nevertheless, it hardly elevates party-debate to nitpick about the exact wording, draw absurd conclusions, and dream up non-existent differences. Even those who grasp what I meant to say should remember that I was responding to a particular challenge to Social-Democratic orthodoxy, namely, ‘economism’. I was not doing what I have often done elsewhere, namely, putting forth comprehensive-programmatic statements of the Social-Democratic outlook as a whole. No, I stressed only those parts of the Social-Democratic outlook that were appropriate to the task at hand.49

Lenin also expressed this last point – about responding to a particular challenge – by using the image of ‘bending the stick’. The image comes at the beginning and end of a daisy-chain of polemical outbursts. A correct reading of several documents cited by my critics depends on inserting them into their proper place in this polemical chain. It is important to note the dates of the various pronouncements listed below, since there exists a myth that the events of 1905 refuted in some way the arguments of WITBD? and that Lenin recognised this. • At the Second Congress in August 1903, the Iskra editorial board makes common cause in defending Lenin’s book against ‘economist’ critics. In particular, Plekhanov points out that the book was aimed at ‘economists’ who (allegedly) denied the need for Social-Democratic leadership. In response (continues Plekhanov), Lenin properly stressed the need for leadership. Lenin makes the same point using the ‘bend-the-stick’ metaphor: the economists bent the stick away from the centre, so we should bend it back, in order that ‘our stick will therefore always be straight as possible and as ready as possible for action’.50 Thus, the ‘bend-the-stick’ imagery was not created in reaction to the events of 1905 or in reaction to Menshevik critics, but rather as part of a general Iskra-rebuttal of ‘economist’ critics. • For a full year after the beginning of the party-split, WITBD? plays a very minor rôle in intra-party polemics.51 Finally, in July/August 1904, Plekhanov 49. This paraphrase is based on Lenin 1960–8i, pp. 106–8. Here, Lenin says only that his WITBD?-formulation is reflected in the party-programme. The actual quote from the programme, as well as the words ‘dreaming up imaginary differences’, come from the 1905 Lenin/Vorovsky article discussed below. 50. Lih 2006, p. 27; Lenin 1960–8c, p. 491. 51. This point is discussed further in Section III.


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(who, by this time, sides with the Mensheviks) reverses direction and writes an extensive article attacking WITBD?, arguing that Lenin was no Marxist and that the weakest aspects of the book were precisely what made it popular among the praktiki (whom Plekhanov obviously despised). According to Plekhanov, Lenin’s formulation implied that socialist ideas came about in complete isolation from social practice (a point later taken up by writers such as John Molyneux). Plekhanov sharply contrasts Lenin’s heresy with Kautsky’s orthodoxy. Without mentioning that he himself had made a similar point in Lenin’s defence, he took up Lenin’s ‘bend-the-stick’ metaphor as proof that Lenin had semi-recanted: ‘Lenin himself . . . admitted that in the dispute with the economists he went too far and ‘bent the stick in the other direction’ (Plekhanov’s emphasis). Crucial here is the contrast between going too far (Plekhanov’s reading of what Lenin said) and Lenin’s actual emphasis on making the stick as straight as possible.52 • In the autumn of 1904, the Bolshevik pamphleteer Mikhail Olminsky comments on the over-the-top nature of Plekhanov’s rhetoric and mocks the idea that Lenin really believed that the intelligentsia developed in complete isolation from the worker-movement (‘One has to wonder how it is that Lenin doesn’t know what everybody else in the world knows’). Olminsky observes that, when Plekhanov defended WITBD? at the Second Congress, he described its formulations as a not very happy presentation of what were nonetheless correct ideas.53 In another pamphlet around the same time, Olminsky explains why Lenin’s WITBD? formulations did not give a full account of the rôle of stikhinost. He and other Iskra-authors were writing at a time when the worker-masses were ahead of many SocialDemocratic intellectuals in acknowledging the need for anti-tsarist political action. Therefore one should not look upon WITBD? as ‘a complete catechism for Social Democrats nor as a full expression of the opinions of its author’.54 • In early 1905, a local Menshevik committee issued an attack on Lenin that relied heavily on Plekhanov’s article. Lenin and his lieutenant Vlatislav Vorovsky used this as an excuse to respond directly to Plekhanov, in an article drafted by Vorovsky, with corrections and additions by Lenin. This article dismissed Plekhanov’s picture of Lenin as a demagogic caricature 52. Plekhanov 1923–7, p. 138 (originally published in Iskra [now edited by the Mensheviks], 25 July and 1 August 1904). John Molyneux dismisses my attempt in Lenin Rediscovered to sort out what Lenin meant by ‘bend the stick’ as too complicated, so I have tried to make the contrast as clear as possible. 53. Olminskii and Bogdanov 1904, pp. 81–8. 54. Olminskii 1904b, p. 7.

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carried out for purely factional motives. In response to Plekhanov’s attempt to dig a gulf between Lenin and Kautsky, Vorovsky claimed that the alleged ‘Leninist heresy’ was nothing more than a restatement of the ideas of the ‘principal theorists of socialism’ (a formulation meant to include Kautsky) and especially Marx himself. To support this claim, Vorovsky brought forth passages from the Communist Manifesto and Poverty of Philosophy. The ‘salt’, the core, of Lenin’s WITBD? argument was the merger-formula – ‘Social Democracy is the merger of the worker-movement with socialism’ – as explicitly stated in the first issue of Iskra by a joint statement of the entire editorial board.55 Vorovsky responded to Plekhanov’s charge that Lenin saw socialist thought as something isolated from worker-practice by arguing there was no need to state the obvious (material in brackets added directly by Lenin): ‘It would be ridiculous – in a work discussing “the burning questions of our movement”56 – if Lenin were to start demonstrating that the development of ideas, and in particular the development of scientific socialism, took place and takes place in close historical connection with the development of productive forces, [in close connection with the growth of the workermovement in general].’ Lenin added another sentence stating that his aim was a straightforward [nekhitryi] reminder to the ‘economists’ about ‘the duty of a socialist to bring in awareness from without’.57 In April 1905, at the Third Congress, Bolshevik M.G. Tskhakaia compliments WITBD?, but adds ‘Of course, he makes mistakes, untrue or unsuccessful formulations, and he himself, no doubt, would now better formulate and support the very same ideas that he set out in WITBD? ’. (These remarks were made in Lenin’s presence.)58 In early 1905, the Georgian Menshevik Noe Zhordania publishes an attack on WITBD?. Zhordania’s critique is evidently influenced by Plekhanov, since he argues that ‘the fight against “economism” gave rise to another extreme’.59 In other words, he takes a ‘going too far’ reading of the ‘bend the stick’ metaphor. An extensive response to Zhordania’s articles was written by a fellowGeorgian, the young Bolshevik praktik Iosif Dzugashvili (Stalin).60 Stalin’s

55. Vorovskii 1955. 56. ‘Burning Questions of Our Movement’ is the subtitle of WITBD?. 57. Vorovskii 1955. 58. Tretii s”ezd RSDRP: Protokoly 1959, p. 341. 59. Stalin 1946–52, p. 96 (Stalin’s counterblast is my only source for Zhordania’s article). For Zhordania’s anti-WITBD? comments in a private letter written in Summer 1904, see Ron Suny’s contribution to this symposium. 60. Stalin 1952, pp. 90–132, 162–74.


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defence tied Lenin’s formulation very closely to Kautsky and to the mergerformula from the Erfurt Programme (and not specifically to the Kautsky passage cited in WITBD?, although Stalin also cites this passage with approval). (It is pleasant to think of the diligent Soviet reader in the 1940s learning from Stalin what a great Marxist theoretician Kautsky was.) Stalin makes much use of an argument found in Kautsky but not in Lenin, namely, that workers ‘sooner or later’ would come to socialism without Social Democracy, but only after much avoidable travail and error. According to Stalin, Plekhanov’s 1904 article was the result of a desperate search by the Mensheviks to find some substantive disagreement to justify their takeover of the Iskra editorial board. ‘They searched and searched until they found a passage in Lenin’s book which, if torn from the context and interpreted separately, could indeed be cavilled at.’ But, (continues Stalin) if we look at Lenin’s actual position, we see that, in fact, ‘Plekhanov does not disagree with [the Bolsheviks] and with Lenin. And not only Plekhanov. Neither Martov, nor Zasulich, nor Akselrod disagree with them.’61 • Stalin listed a number of ‘lies’ about Lenin’s position. The truth? Lenin did not say that only intellectuals can bring socialist awareness to the workers. ‘Why do you think that the Social-Democratic Party consists exclusively of intellectuals? Do you not know that there are many more advanced workers than intellectuals in the ranks of Social Democracy? Cannot SocialDemocratic workers introduce socialist awareness into the worker movement?’62 Lenin did not want to limit party membership to professional revolutionaries or to committee-members. Lenin did not say that socialist thought arose in isolation from the worker-movement. Lenin did not deny the historical inevitability of socialism. Lenin’s proposed definition of partymembership does not discourage worker-enrolment into the Party (with some glee, Stalin cites Plekhanov himself on this point).63 • We can debate whether Stalin has described Lenin’s position accurately (I believe he is more-or-less accurate). Nevertheless, Stalin’s article indicates that highly committed Bolsheviks such as Stalin did not read WITBD? in the way suggested by the textbook-interpretation.64 In October 1905, Lenin’s party-newspaper Proletarii had a discussion of the Georgian partynewspaper that had published Stalin’s articles. Lenin himself wrote the page-long paragraph that discussed Stalin’s second article. He praised the article for its ‘excellent presentation of the notorious issue of “bringing in 61. 62. 63. 64.

Stalin 1946–52, pp. 127, 122. Stalin 1946–52, pp. 166–7. Stalin 1946–52, pp. 162–74. For Ron Suny’s claim to the opposite effect, see Section III.

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awareness from without” ’. He then summarised Stalin’s argument and concluded: ‘What does Social Democracy meet in the proletariat itself, when it goes to the proletariat with its preaching of socialism? An instinctive urge [vlechenie] toward socialism.’65 In other words, in October 1905, in the midst of a grandiose general strike, Lenin explicitly endorsed WITBD? ’s argument about bringing awareness from without. • We finally arrive back at our starting point, namely, the 1907 introduction to the republication of WITBD?. Here, Lenin referred with some irritation to the way Mensheviks used his ‘bend-the-stick’ comment as an admission of error. On the contrary, ‘the sense of these words is clear: WITBD? was a polemical correction of “economism” and to consider its content outside this task of the book is incorrect’.66 A couple of comments on this polemical daisy-chain. To grant that WITBD? is one-sided and therefore incomplete is not the same as conceding that Lenin’s outlook during the Iskra-period as a whole is similarly one-sided. Lenin wrote on a variety of topics that brought out different aspects of the Social-Democratic outlook, and he also participated in the creation of the RSDWP partyprogramme. Indeed, what all contributors to this debate overlooked was that an evocation of the other side of the Social-Democratic synthesis can be found in WITBD? itself, in the small but significant section devoted to critique of the individual terrorist who despaired of the mass-movement.67 Also noteworthy is the way that Karl Kautsky served as ideological goldstandard for everyone in the debate: Lenin, Plekhanov, Olminsky, Vorovsky, Zhordania, Stalin, and even Trotsky (as shown in a later section). The Bolsheviks pushed Lenin and Kautsky closer together, the Mensheviks pulled them apart. (Perhaps the emphasis on Kautsky’s merger-formula in particular was a distinctive feature of Bolshevik polemics.) Only recently, I have become aware of one source of confusion about this whole issue. The English-language edition of Lenin’s Collected Works does not provide a literal translation of Lenin’s use of ‘bend the stick’ in relation to WITBD?. Lenin’s comment at the 1903 Second Congress is translated as follows:

65. Lenin 1960–8f, p. 388. A verb with the same root as vlechenie is used in WITBD? in a passage quoted by Stalin. In my translation, the relevant passage runs: ‘It is often said: the worker class is drawn to socialism in stikhinnyi fashion. This is completely true’ (Lih 2006, p. 712). 66. Lih 2006, p. 27; Lenin 1960–8i, pp. 106–8. 67. Lih 2006, pp. 583–5, 741–4.


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We all know the ‘economists’ have gone to one extreme. To straighten matters out somebody had to pull in the other direction – and that is what I have done. I am convinced that Russian Social Democracy will always vigorously straighten out whatever has been twisted by opportunism of any kind, and that therefore our line of action will always be the straightest and the fittest for action.68

Given the notoriety of the ‘bend-the-stick’ metaphor, it is unfortunate that the standard translation hides its presence. On the other hand, this translation accurately presents the gist of Lenin’s remark. Lenin’s motto was not ‘bend the stick,’ but ‘straighten out whatever has been twisted’. We can see, then, that there are two ways of interpreting the ‘bend-thestick’ comment. According to the Mensheviks, Lenin admitted going too far, for which he was properly chastised by Plekhanov. Many years later, Trotsky set forth this Menshevik interpretation: according to Lenin, revolutionary awareness was brought into the proletariat from without by the Marxist intelligentsia. . . . The author of WITBD? himself subsequently acknowledged the one-sidedness and therefore the incorrectness of his theory. . . . After his break with Lenin, Plekhanov came forward with a belated but all the more severe critique of What Is to Be Done?.69

Writers in the Trotskyist tradition such as Liebman, Cliff, and Molyneux are still loyal to this Menshevik reading. According to the Bolsheviks – including not only Lenin himself but, oddly enough, Plekhanov at the Second Congress – Lenin’s argument straightened out a stick that had been bent out of alignment by the ‘economists’. Thus Lenin did not acknowledge the incorrectness, but only the incompleteness of his argument: it was not a complete ‘catechism’ of the Social-Democratic outlook, nor was it meant to be. The WITBD?-formulations did not set forth a new ‘theory’, but, rather, a straightforward [nekhitryi] restatement of a basic SocialDemocratic axiom. Plekhanov’s caricature was due solely to partisan nitpicking. If Lenin’s clumsy wording gave rise to ridiculous misapprehensions, this was cause for apology and regret and not the result of systematic exaggeration in order to get the point across.70

68. Lenin 1960–8c, p. 491; see also Lenin 1960–8i, p. 107, and compare with Lenin 1958– 65a, p. 272 and 1958–65c, p. 107. (Brian Pearce’s edition of the Second-Congress minutes evidently keeps the literal ‘bend-the-stick’ image.) 69. Trotskii 1996, p. 91. The word ‘one-sidedness [odnostoronnost’ ]’ has been misleadingly translated as ‘bias’. Although he gets factual details garbled, Martov’s history of the Party follows the same line (Martov 2000, p. 65). 70. The apologies started early, since even in the Foreword to WITBD?, Lenin apologises for

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Taken in the main, my account supports the Bolshevik reading of the ‘bendthe-stick’ comment and the status of the scandalous passages. Of course, WITBD? had many other arguments besides the scandalous passages. (In fact, these passages were a last-minute addition.) Contrary to the myth that Lenin distanced himself from WITBD? in 1905, he actually endorsed other specific WITBD? arguments fairly often after Bloody Sunday (9 January 1905). These include: • endorsement of the Zubatov-paradigm. Lenin referred to What Is to Be Done? ’s discussion of this topic on a number of occasions;71 • pride that WITBD? had already broached the topic of armed insurrection;72 • self-quotation (without explicit citation) of the WITBD? formulation ‘many people, but no people [massa liudei, a liudei net]’;73 • affirmation of earlier arguments about the impossibility of applying the elective principle under underground-conditions;74 • affirmation of the call in WITBD? for a wide variety of organisations, from very broad to very secretive, in explicit connection with an affirmation of the famous definition of party-membership put forth by Lenin at the Second Party-Congress;75 • insistence that his call for workers to be enlisted into the local committees was a reflection of a long-held stand (see Section VII); • finally, besides these comments from 1905, Lenin insisted in his 1907 introduction to these collected writings that WITBD? did not ‘exaggerate’ the rôle of the revolutionary by trade. Rather, WITBD? insisted on a necessary truth against those who just didn’t get it. This ‘correct way’ of accomplishing organisational tasks was now accepted by both SocialDemocratic factions (and indeed, by all underground-parties).76 As Robert Mayer and I have both documented, WITBD? was then more-orless forgotten until after Lenin’s death.77 This fact is completely compatible ‘the many inadequacies in its literary presentation. I was forced to work at the highest possible speed along with interruptions from all other sorts of work’ (Lih 2006, p. 678). 71. For Lenin’s 1905 endorsement of WITBD? on this topic, see Section II and Lih 2006, pp. 401–3. 72. Lenin 1960–8e, p. 142. 73. Lenin 1960–8e, p. 144. 74. Lenin 1960–8f, p. 167, Lenin 1960–8g, pp. 30–1 (see Section VII on ‘deBolshevisation’). 75. Lenin 1960–8e, p. 444. 76. Lenin 1960–8i, pp. 101–4. 77. Mayer 1996; Lih 2003.


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with the Bolshevik defence that I have just described. From the Bolshevik point of view, why would anyone read WITBD? after 1905? It did not advance any new theories or make any points that could not be found in what remained the Bolshevik party-textbook, Kautsky’s Erfurt Programme. Its restatement of these basic axioms was admittedly clumsy. Its practical arguments were very dated. Why bother to argue that a party-newspaper would be a good way to set up as-yet-nonexistent central party-organs? WITBD? was a good book for its time, but its time had past. It applied some basic Social-Democratic truths to a specific situation, but now the task was to apply these and other truths to more current problems. Such was the Bolshevik view of WITBD?: neither embarrassment nor founding document.

VI. Did Lenin have a ‘bend-the-stick’ theory of leadership? Any polemicist will aim his remarks at the people against whom he is polemicising. Similarly, any political leader who advocates a particular policy at a particular time will use only arguments that show the advantages of that policy. Anyone seeking to understand the world-view of the polemicist or political leader would be ill-advised to take advocacy of any one polemic or policy as a full expression of her practical views. A full range of her writings or leadershipactivities should be considered. These are very elementary rules of historical interpretation. An energetic protest should be lodged against the violation of such axiomatic rules. But this protest need not and should not be based on an alleged ‘bend-the-stick’approach unique to Lenin. There is nothing special about Lenin’s polemics and policy-advocacy in this regard. As I have shown in Section V, Lenin himself used the ‘bend-the-stick’ metaphor to make this point about elementary fairness in interpretation. He was trying to say: When I wrote WITBD?, I was straightening the stick bent awry by one particular set of opponents, I was advocating one particular set of policies appropriate for that moment, as any responsible Social-Democratic leader would do, In any such case, it is inaccurate and unfair to deduce an entire worldview without a further range of evidence. Writers such as Tony Cliff and John Molyneux agree with Plekhanov’s reading of the ‘bend-the-stick’ metaphor: Lenin admitted going too far. He overstated his point, he took an extreme position, he was obsessed about one particular aspect to the exclusion of all else:

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L. T. Lih / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 108–174 After the event, [Lenin] would say: ‘We overdid it. We bent the stick too far,’ by which he did not mean that he had been wrong to do so. To win the main battle of the day, the concentration of all energies on the task was necessary. . . . He always made the task of the day quite clear, repeating what was necessary ad infinitum in the plainest, heaviest, most single-minded hammer-blow pronouncements. Afterwards he would regain his balance, straighten the stick, then bend it again in another direction.78

We are furthermore told by Molyneux that this alleged procedure on Lenin’s part is a good thing – a necessary and effective tool for leaders of revolutionary parties. Unless you exaggerate and become obsessed, you will not overcome the inertia of the rank and file. Bending the stick, going too far, is like the proverbial whack on the head of the donkey: first, you have to get people’s attention. Of course, once the activists are pushed in one direction, they will inevitably end up going too far, and so they must be yanked back by exaggerating and obsessing in some other direction. According to Tony Cliff, this is exactly how Lenin operated. In Lenin Rediscovered, I reviewed Cliff ’s description of Lenin from 1895 and 1905, and remarked that Cliff ’s portrait of Lenin as a leader is a rather unattractive one.79 An audience at the Marxism 2008 conference was told by John Molyneux that I objected to Cliff ’s portrait because it showed Lenin changing his mind, and I was duly reminded that there is nothing wrong in changing one’s mind where circumstances warrant. Given this misunderstanding of my observation, I am compelled to explain at greater length the deficiencies of Cliff ’s portrait. As we follow Cliff ’s Lenin from year to year, we find that he continually veers back and forth on fundamental questions. Back in 1895, we find Lenin propagating the idea that ‘class consciousness, including political consciousness, develops automatically from the economic struggle’.80 In 1899, it was fear of the danger to the movement occasioned by the rise of Russian ‘economism’ and German revisionism in the second half of 1899 that motivated Lenin to bend the stick right over again, away from the spontaneous, day-to-day fragmented economic struggle and towards the organisation of a national political party.81 78. Cliff 1975, p. 67. 79. Lih 2006, p. 25. 80. Cliff 1975, p. 52. Cliff also writes, ‘In November 1895, in an article called What are our ministers thinking about? Lenin urged the expediency of leaving the tsar out of the argument, and talking instead about the new laws that favoured employers and of cabinet ministers who were anti-working class.’ This assertion is entirely without factual basis. 81. Cliff 1975, p. 69.


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Also in late 1899, however, Lenin ‘sharply contradicted his later statements in What Is to Be Done? on the relation between the spontaneous class struggle and socialist consciousness’.82 In 1902, Lenin bent the stick ‘right over to mechanical over-emphasis on organization in What Is to Be Done? ’. This operation, however, was ‘quite useful operationally . . . the step now necessary was to arouse, at least in the politically conscious section of the masses, a passion for political action’. Lenin had so far forgotten the views he held a year or two earlier that Cliff is forced to lecture him solemnly: ‘many economic struggles do spill over into political ones’.83 But did the stick need to be bent in this way at this particular time? Did the masses lack any passion for political action? Evidently not, since Cliff informs us that ‘the “economism” that Lenin attacked so sharply in What Is to Be Done? was already on the decline and practically finished by the time the pamphlet saw the light of day. . . . During the years 1901–3, workers became the main active political opponents of Tsarism.’84 In 1905, ‘Lenin was singing a different tune. . . . The unfortunate Lenin had to persuade his supporters to oppose the line proposed in What Is to Be Done?. . . . Lenin now formulated his conclusion in terms which were the exact opposite of those of What Is to Be Done?.’85 My main problem with this description of Lenin’s description is that it is incorrect: Lenin did not hold these extreme positions and certainly did not veer from one to the other. At all times, Lenin realised that economic struggles often lead to political struggles, especially in Russia. At all times, Lenin gave an essential rôle to Social Democracy in bringing organisation and insight. Cliff ’s mistake arises from the same source as those of many academic historians: they focus exclusively on one sentence by Lenin and do not bother to look at the argument in the surrounding paragraph, much less the entire article. This procedure is especially problematic with Erfurtian Social Democrats such as Lenin, since they consciously fought a two-front polemic war against both those who pinned their hopes on the worker-movement in isolation, and those who pinned their hopes on the socialist movement in isolation. Let us assume for purposes of argument that Cliff ’s portrait is an accurate one. I find Cliff ’s Lenin unattractive for the following reasons: • Stick-benders seem to come in two types, manipulative (consciously exaggerating to get the attention of activists) and self-deceiving (sincerely 82. Cliff 1975, pp. 80–8. 83. Cliff 1975, p. 82. If Cliff had looked at Lenin’s many Iskra-articles of 1900–2, he would not have been so condescending. 84. Cliff 1975, pp. 97–8. 85. Cliff 1975, pp. 171, 175–6 (these assertions are examined in Section VII).

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veering from one ‘operationally useful’ extreme to the other). I am not sure which of these two types is the least attractive. In any event, Cliff ’s Lenin deceives himself. The various positions taken by Lenin are incorrect, as even Cliff states. Class-consciousness does not develop ‘automatically’ from the economic struggle. Mechanical over-emphasis on organisation is not a defensible position. Excluding workers from local committees is not a defensible policy. Indeed, these various positions are not simply incorrect, they are extremist and rather stupid. As Cliff accurately points out, the rapid rise of worker-politicisation in the years 1900–3 was a crucial development in Russian politics. As shown in Lenin Rediscovered, all participants in the polemics of 1901 took this new phase of the worker-movement for granted. Yet Cliff ’s justification for Lenin’s exaggerations in his book of 1902 is that the workers needed to be politicised. It would seem that Lenin was so ill-informed that he bent the stick precisely where it was not needed. Cliff asks us to forgive the inadequacy of Lenin’s stated positions because of the ‘operational’ advantages of ‘bending the stick right over’ from one extreme to the other. But he overlooks the many operational disadvantages of stick-bending. For a start, if Lenin’s position in WITBD? was as extreme as Cliff says, he gave his factional opponents a justifiable talking point: Lenin had gone too far and overreacted to economism. Plekhanov very properly pointed this out. Lenin’s stick-bending thus led to confusion and defensiveness on the part of his own supporters.86 Another operational disadvantage of Lenin’s stick-bending, if Cliff ’s account is to be believed, is that the Bolshevik praktiki considered it their duty to exclude workers from local committees. Indeed, they were so committed to this policy that even Lenin could not bend the stick back again in Spring 1905. Bolshevism in the period 1902–5 was therefore objectively antiworker in organisational terms, thanks to Lenin. In the midst of revolution in 1905, Lenin had to lose precious time trying to undo the damage of his previous ideological extremism. Although Cliff pictures the Bolshevik activists as stodgy and not over-bright, surely even they would start, at some point, to discount Lenin’s exhortations as just the latest bending of the stick – nothing to get excited about. Stickbending seems doomed to diminishing returns.

86. As shown in Section V, Lenin was aware that his less-than-successful formulations had led to confusion in his own ranks and regretted the fact.


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These are the reasons leading me to conclude that over-frequent recourse to the ‘bend-the-stick’-type of explanation ‘ends up making Lenin look like a rather incompetent and incoherent leader’.87 Cliff ’s Lenin stands for nothing definite, and his habit of jerking his followers around had many practical disadvantages, even if one overlooks the disrespect involved. Lenin used the metaphor of bending the stick to defend the theoretical formulae of WITBD? as an incomplete but thoroughly mainstream statement of basic Social-Democratic truths. He believed he had a duty to straighten out what others had bent awry, but he did not think that ‘going too far’ was a necessary or attractive part of leadership.

VII. ‘Lenin vs. the Bolsheviks’: WITBD? and the Revolution of 1905 A very dramatic story is often told about Lenin’s relation to the praktiki of his own faction during the Revolution of 1905 – a story that provides considerable support to the textbook-interpretation of WITBD? A good title for this story is ‘Lenin vs. the Bolsheviks’. It can be paraphrased as follows: Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?, published in 1902, propagated distrust of worker-spontaneity and suspicion of party-democracy. Lenin’s book successfully – too successfully – imbued local Bolsheviks with these attitudes. But the revolutionary militancy of the workers in 1905 showed the inadequacy of Lenin’s arguments. Lenin himself was open and flexible enough to admit this, and the tone of his writings changed completely. Now, for the first time, he argued for recruitment of workers to local party-committees and for the maximum practicable extension of party-democracy. Unfortunately, no other Bolshevik shared this flexibility. The local Bolshevik praktiki remained loyal to WITBD?, and, therefore, fought Lenin tooth and nail in 1905, quoting WITBD? against its straying author. Lenin was compelled to fight a year-long battle against his own party. In April 1905, at the Bolshevik Third Party-Congress, Lenin fought unsuccessfully for recruitment of workers to partycommittees. In November 1905, Lenin returned to the attack and called for opening the gates of the party. A striking feature of this story is the way it foreshadows Trotsky’s relationship with the ‘epigones’ and ‘party-bureaucrats’ in the 1920s. In each case, the great 87. Lih 2006, p. 25.

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leader is frustrated by the unimaginative stodginess of the middle levels of the Party and longs for union with the masses against the conservative and routinebound praktiki. We should therefore not be surprised that the writers who insist on ‘Lenin. vs. the Bolsheviks’ in 1905 tend to be admirers of Trotsky: Marcel Liebman, Tony Cliff, John Molyneux, Chris Harman and Paul Le Blanc. The commitment of writers in the activist-tradition to ‘Lenin vs. the Bolsheviks’ is a major reason why I count them as supporters of the textbookinterpretation of WITBD?, despite their pro-Lenin attitude in general. If Lenin was so worried about workers in 1902 that only the volcanic events of 1905 persuaded him to allow them on party-committees – if he had done such a thorough job of imbuing his followers with similar worries that even in 1905 they were determined to keep the workers out of party-committees – then Lenin must really have been one worried guy! Of course, the activist-account goes on to tell us how the great leader Lenin later rises above these limitations, and – in a satisfyingly ironic sort of way – loses his personal worries in 1905, even while his followers are displaying theirs. The story of Lenin vs. the Bolsheviks shows its kinship with standard antiLenin academic stories in yet another respect. In both cases, Lenin is the sole creator of the Bolshevik faction, whose members are defined by the attitudes allegedly propagated by WITBD?. His followers (I had almost said, his minions) are thoroughly unable to think for themselves. Any change in their outlook has to come from above (in the ‘bend-the-stick’ manner discussed in Section VI). Elements of this story can indeed be found in academic scholars as well.88 For example, Leopold Haimson also remarks on ‘Lenin’s inebriation with the spontaneous labor movement’ which led to ‘dramatic changes’ in his view of the party. To which my response was and is: Lenin indeed may have been inebriated in 1905, but he was hardly sober before.89 But the overlap between the activist-writers and academic historians such as Haimson is no coincidence, since the story told by the activist-writers is taken directly from academic historians – indeed, strongly anti-Leninist historians. 88. In his contribution to this symposium, Ron Suny writes ‘Lenin would be compelled to ‘de-Bolshevise’ some of the more militant Bolsheviks, most emphatically in the revolutionary fervour of 1905’. He does not elaborate, but I learn from later discussions with him that he means primarily Bolshevik attitudes toward the revolutionary soviets of 1905. This is a separate and rather complicated issue, so I will just say here that I do not see anything in WITBD? that contradicts enthusiasm about the soviets, so that, in my opinion, the term ‘de-Bolshevisation’ sows more confusion than light. (The term ‘de-Bolshevise’ evidently goes back to Trotsky in 1917, explaining why he could now join with Lenin. Exactly what Trotsky meant is unclear from the reference in Deutscher 1965, p. 258. The term was taken up by Marcel Liebman to describe opening up the Party in 1917 [Liebman 1975, pp. 157–61].) 89. Haimson 2005, pp. 10; Lih 2006, p. 430.


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This observation is a correction to my account in Lenin Rediscovered, since I thoroughly misunderstood the historiography of this issue. Misled by Tony Cliff ’s idiosyncratic footnote-practices, I was under the impression that he had consulted primary, Russian-language sources, and so I made him my principal interlocutor. I now realise his remarks have no independent value. Here are the facts of the case. In 1963, John Keep published The Rise of Social Democracy in Russia. Keep is a respected academic historian who is intensely hostile to Lenin personally.90 In 1967, Solomon Schwarz published The Russian Revolution of 1905. Schwarz was a Bolshevik in 1905 but moved to the Mensheviks soon thereafter. His account is more a monograph than a memoir. In 1973, Marcel Liebman published Le léninisme sous Lénine. Liebman is the real creator of the ‘Lenin vs. the Bolsheviks’ story. Without access to Russian-language sources, Liebman relied heavily on Keep and Schwarz, particularly in his account of the dramatic episode of the Third Congress. Liebman wove their material into a story that was much more hostile to the Bolshevik praktiki than either of his two main sources. In his book, Lenin stands as an isolated figure of wisdom within the Bolshevik faction throughout 1905. Liebman’s contemptuous attitude toward the Bolshevik praktiki contrasts with his treatment of the Menshevik activists, to whom he accords a good deal of praise. Liebman’s list of supporting anecdotes and Lenin citations forms the basis of later accounts in the activist-tradition. In 1975, Tony Cliff published Lenin: Building the Party. Cliff took over the Liebman-story, but he also went directly back to Keep and Schwarz – and I mean directly. Keep describes Bolshevik activists at the Third Congress (as it happens, without any factual basis) as follows: ‘Buttressing themselves with quotations from What Is to Be Done?, they called for “extreme caution” in admitting workers into the committees and condemned “playing at democracy”.’ In Cliff, this becomes: ‘Buttressing themselves with quotations from What Is to Be Done?, they called for “extreme caution” in admitting workers into the committees and condemned “playing at democracy”.’91 No footnotes, no attribution. Cliff takes several pages to describe the debate at the Third Congress, during which he gives substantial excerpts, all footnoted to the original Russian-language sources. The entire section is lifted almost word for word from Solomon Schwarz.92 90. Sample: ‘Uppermost in his mind [at the Third Congress], as always, was the question of power. He reasoned that the untutored workers suddenly brought into the Party could serve as an instrument for the leaders to crush the “opportunist” intellectuals’ (Keep 1963, p. 211). Keep clearly had direct access to Lenin’s mind, since the documents do not reveal this reasoning. 91. Compare Cliff 1975, p. 175 to Keep 1963, p. 210. If Cliff had actually consulted the original source, he might have realised that Keep’s assertion is baseless. 92. Compare Cliff 1975, pp. 173–5, to Schwarz 1967, pp. 217–19.

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Anyone who looks at the footnotes in the relevant chapters in Cliff ’s biography will get the impression that Cliff had consulted many arcane Russian-language sources from the 1920s and the like. I, personally, would be surprised if any of these attributions were not taken from secondary sources. I have no wish to impose what may be inappropriate academic standards on Cliff. Nevertheless, it must be realised that the activist-account, especially in regard to the Third Congress, originates in the (as it happens, deeply distorted) interpretations of John Keep and Solomon Schwartz. As their contributions to this symposium and elsewhere show, John Molyneux, Chris Harman and Paul Le Blanc are also committed to ‘Lenin vs. the Bolsheviks’.93 I tacked Chapter Nine on to my already long book partly to address this issue. In this chapter, I document the actual Bolshevik reading of WITBD? and show the errors of Cliff and other activist-writers about the Third Congress. For reasons I can only guess at, none of my critics have even acknowledged the existence of these arguments, much less responded to them. I must therefore once again address this issue as forcefully as I can. Did 1905 cause a fundamental change in the tone of Lenin’s writings? John Molyneux writes that in 1905, ‘in the face of the enormous and spontaneous revolutionary achievements of the Russian working class, the tone of Lenin’s writings changes completely’.94 As we have seen, Leopold Haimson concurs, speaking of ‘Lenin’s inebriation with the spontaneous labor movement’. The question asked by Molyneux and Haimson is: are Lenin’s pronouncements about the workers in 1905 consistent with what we ourselves feel are the implications of his WITBD? formulations? A better question to ask is: how do Lenin’s pronouncements about the Russian workers in 1905 compare with what he was saying about the Russian workers earlier? The answer to this more concrete question is scattered throughout Lenin Rediscovered. Gathering this material together, we find the following picture. In 1896, the Petersburg-workers carried out strike-actions that amazed Russian society. Lenin’s reaction? These events show that the Russian workers are moving rapidly toward purposive anti-tsarist revolutionary action, thus 93. In Paul Le Blanc’s version of ‘Lenin vs. the Bolsheviks’, WITBD? is not explicitly mentioned. Nevertheless, we are told that ‘Lenin quickly perceived the need for a shift’ away from an organisational model in which professional revolutionaries demanded absolute obedience. In 1905, ‘Lenin himself “bent the stick” away from one of the formulations of 1902,’ that is, from What Is to Be Done? (Le Blanc 1990, pp. 117, 121). Le Blanc’s hostile attitude toward the Bolshevik praktiki in this period comes out not only in Le Blanc 1990 but in his contribution to this symposium. 94. Molyneux 1978, pp. 59–63.


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confounding the sceptics. The weak link is us, the Social Democrats. We are falling short of what the workers ask of us. We need to redouble our efforts to bring enlightenment and organisation so that the revolutionary fervour of the workers will become more effective.95 In 1900, May-Day demonstrations by workers in Kharkov inaugurated a new stage of political protest in the Russian worker-movement. Lenin’s reaction? These events show that the Russian workers are moving rapidly toward purposive anti-tsarist revolutionary action, thus confounding the sceptics. The weak link is us, the Social Democrats. We are falling short of what the workers ask of us. We need to redouble our efforts to bring enlightenment and organisation so that the revolutionary fervour of the workers will become more effective.96 In the so-called ‘spring-events’ of February/March 1901, workers went out on the street to support student-protests. Lenin’s reaction? These events show that the Russian workers are moving rapidly toward purposive anti-tsarist revolutionary action, thus confounding the sceptics. The weak link is us, the Social Democrats. We are falling short of what the workers ask of us. We need to redouble our efforts to bring enlightenment and organisation so that the revolutionary fervour of the workers will become more effective.97 In May 1901, striking workers fought a pitched battle with police that became famous as ‘the Obukhov-defence’. Lenin’s reaction? These events show that the Russian workers are moving rapidly toward purposive anti-tsarist revolutionary action, thus confounding the sceptics. The weak link is us, the Social Democrats. We are falling short of what the workers ask of us. We need to redouble our efforts to bring enlightenment and organisation so that the revolutionary fervour of the workers will become more effective.98 In November 1902, worker-demonstrations in Rostov-on-Don turned into a massive general strike. Lenin’s reaction? These events show that the Russian workers are moving rapidly toward purposive anti-tsarist revolutionary action, thus confounding the sceptics. The weak link is us, the Social Democrats. We are falling short of what the workers ask of us. We need to redouble our efforts to bring enlightenment and organisation so that the revolutionary fervour of the workers will become more effective.99 In the summer of 1903, massive strikes rolled across the cities of South Russia. Lenin’s reaction? These events show that the Russian workers are 95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

Lih 2006, pp. 125–6, 641. Lih 2006, pp. 424–6. Lih 2006, pp. 426–7. Lih 2006, pp. 202–3. Lih 2006, pp. 203–6.

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moving rapidly toward purposive anti-tsarist revolutionary action, thus confounding the sceptics. The weak link is us, the Social Democrats. We are falling short of what the workers ask of us. We need to redouble our efforts to bring enlightenment and organisation so that the revolutionary fervour of the workers will become more effective.100 In 1905, a wave of strikes and demonstrations culminates in the massive general strike of October and armed insurrection in December. Lenin’s reaction? These events show that the Russian workers are moving rapidly toward purposive anti-tsarist revolutionary action, thus confounding the sceptics. The weak link is us, the Social Democrats. We are falling short of what the workers ask of us. We need to redouble our efforts to bring enlightenment and organisation so that the revolutionary fervour of the workers will become more effective.101 Do Lenin’s comments in 1905 reveal a complete change of tone from years past? In no way. Lenin’s exhilaration with worker-militancy in 1905 was preceded by his exhilaration with every indication of worker-militancy since 1895. Lenin’s enthusiastic insistence on the revolutionary fervour of the workers does not contradict his insistence on the necessity of the party. The two are part and parcel of the same outlook. Did Bolsheviks learn ‘worry about workers’ from Lenin? We have examined the continuity between Lenin’s pre-1905 views and his outlook during the Revolution. Let us now turn to the other protagonist in this story, the Bolshevik praktik. Did Bolsheviks in Russia pick up ‘worryabout-workers’ attitudes from Lenin or from WITBD? In my book, I discuss the views of Aleksandr Bogdanov, M. Liadov, Vlatislav Vorovsky, Iosif Dzugashvili (Stalin), I.I. Radchenko, M.G. Tskhakaia, among others – all Bolsheviks, all militant, all admirers of Lenin (although they did not like to think of themselves as Lenin’s ‘minions’ in the style of Akselrod and later historians), all attentive readers of WITBD? Their views provide no support for ‘Lenin vs. the Bolsheviks’. Here is one more instructive example. In 1904, the Bolshevik pamphleteer Mikhail Olminsky sketched Lenin’s ‘political physiognomy’. What is crucial for the issue before us is not the adequacy of his portrait of Lenin, but the mere fact that one of his ardent followers pictured Lenin in this way in autumn 100. Lenin 1960–8c, pp. 515–16 and 1960–8d, pp. 199–202. See also Lih 2006, p. 185, where an Iskra-article by Plekhanov from summer 1903 is quoted. 101. See, for example, ‘Lessons of the Moscow Uprising’, Lenin 1960–8i, pp. 171–8 [1906].


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1904 – that is, prior to the events of 1905. Olminsky cited the following Lenin-pronouncements to back up his admiring portrait.102 In 1901, Lenin wrote ‘Before our eyes, the wide masses of urban workers and “simple folk” [ prostonarode] are straining at the bit to join in struggle – and we revolutionaries appear to be without a staff of leaders and organizers’.103 In 1902, Lenin criticised ‘inappropriate and immoderate application of the electoral principle’. Olminsky emphasised the words ‘inappropriate and immoderate’ to show that Lenin was not opposed to the electoral principle per se. Olminsky further quotes Lenin to the effect that ‘the estrangement of workers from active revolutionary work’ was one of the principal defects of party-organisation at present.104 In 1903, Lenin asserted that ‘in order to become a party of the masses not only in words, we need to enlist ever wider masses in all party affairs’. Steps should be taken ‘so that the experience of the workers in struggle and their proletarian sense of things teach us a thing or two’. Lenin also insisted that ‘it is necessary to do everything possible, up to and including some deviations from beautifully centralized organizational charts, from unconditional subordination to discipline, to give to groups [within the Party] the freedom to speak out’.105 Olminsky’s Lenin-citations show us the kind of thing that really inspired the praktiki – not ‘worry about workers’, but, rather, faith in the revolutionary fervour of the workers and the historic mission of the Party. Olminsky went on to predict that, if Lenin acted consistently with his printed statements, he could be counted on to advocate expansion of the electoral principle whenever circumstances warranted. He noted Lenin’s 1903 call for wide glasnost within the Party, to the extent consistent with konspiratsiia and tactical secrecy. Olminsky himself argued that the principle of freedom of press within the Party should be introduced now, to the extent practicable – otherwise the Party would be bankrupt when freedom of press was won for Russia as a whole. Throughout this pamphlet, Olminsky made clear his own views about party-democracy. He insisted that, for any consistent Social Democrat, ‘partiinost and democratic organization of the party are two inseparable concepts’. The party-ideal should be ‘centralized democracy’. True, the environment of the underground forced many painful compromises – all the more reason to insist on any democratic procedures that were possible. 102. 103. 104. 105.

Olminsky 1904a (I have provided references to Lenin’s Collected Works). Lenin 1960–8b, pp. 13–24. ‘Letter to a Comrade’, in Lenin 1960–8c, pp. 231–52. Lenin 1960–8d, pp. 115–18.

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Olminsky was confident that the Party would not reject the democratic principle ‘until the second coming of Christ’. In looking back at party-history, Olminsky insisted that the workers had moved forward more quickly toward open political struggle than ‘economists’ from the intelligentsia. The workers themselves seized the first opportunity to demonstrate openly in the streets, despite the scepticism of their own leaders. According to Olminsky, the triumph of Iskra-ism owed much less to the talented editors of Iskra than to the reaction of the Russian workers themselves to changing circumstances.106 Would Mikhail Olminsky have been surprised or upset by Lenin’s outlook in 1905? Did Lenin need to wean Olminsky away from his ‘sectarian’ and ‘élitist’ views about party-democracy and worker-recruitment? Hardly. We may therefore conclude that neither the textbook-interpretation nor the story of ‘Lenin vs. the Bolsheviks’ gives us even a clue about the outlook of Lenin’s most committed followers. Lenin vs. the praktiki at the Third Congress (April 1905) According to ‘Lenin vs. the Bolsheviks’, this is what happened at the Bolshevik Third Congress: Lenin saw that the surprising worker-militancy of 1905 required a change of outlook, and so he, and only he, insisted that workers be allowed entry to the party-committees. Most other Bolsheviks were dead set against this, since they remained loyal to WITBD? and even quoted it against its baffled author. The anti-worker praktiki won hands down.107 Here is what the factual record shows. At the Congress, Lenin bragged that his published writings showed that he had been the one Russian SocialDemocratic leader who had always openly called for more workers in the committees, and other speakers confirmed this claim. WITBD? was not mentioned in the debate. Everybody at the Congress agreed that the local committees needed to recruit more workers – the only question was how. The resolution submitted jointly by Lenin and Bogdanov was criticised by praktiki because it merely affirmed an axiomatic goal (worker-recruitment) without showing ways and means. The people most informed about the situation on the ground – activists who had recently visited a number of local committees in Russia – opposed Lenin’s resolution as impracticable at the present time. After Lenin’s resolution was defeated by a close vote (Lenin was not isolated on

106. Olminsky 1904a. 107. Liebman 1975, pp. 84–6; Cliff 1975, pp. 171–9; Molyneux 1978, pp. 59–63; Le Blanc 1990, pp. 116–19.


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this issue), the Congress passed another resolution on the topic which tied worker-recruitment to concrete solutions.108 The activist-view of the Third Congress pictures Lenin battling stick-in-themud komitetchiki [members of local committees]. The opposite view of the dynamics of the congress was provided by a participant, M. Liadov (not a komitetchik), looking back in 1911: ‘Look at the proceedings of the Bolshevik Third Congress and you will immediately see the extent to which the lower ranks [nizy] had overtaken their leader at that time.’109 Rejecting the completely erroneous standard account of the Third Congress is very important. Anyone who maintains that one of Bolshevism’s most influential texts turned local Bolshevik activists into fanatic opponents of putting workers on party-committees does not understand Bolshevism. Lenin’s article on party-reorganisation (November 1905) In late 1905, Lenin, newly arrived in Russia, wrote an article on partyorganisation that called for fundamental changes to party-institutions: more sweeping application of the electoral principle, greater efforts at massrecruitment into the Party, and more open party-conferences, congresses, and so forth.110 This important article has been misused in a number of ways to support the story of ‘Lenin vs. the Bolsheviks’. First, Lenin’s slogans are often cited as evidence of a fundamental turnaround in his views on party-organisation, caused by his new enthusiasm for workermilitancy.111 This interpretation is based on a fundamental misreading of the historical situation. In October 1905, the tsar issued a manifesto granting a certain measure of political freedom. This manifesto, plus widespread pressure from below, led to a very short-lived situation that became known as ‘the days of freedom’. In the opening words of Lenin’s article: ‘The conditions in which our party is functioning are changing radically. Freedom of assembly, of

108. Lih 2006, pp. 540–4. Lenin certainly felt that praktiki were not doing enough to recruit workers to local committees. This attitude was partly motivated by factional competition with the Mensheviks. I see no reason to assume that the émigré Lenin had a more realistic view of actual conditions in Russia than Bolshevik praktiki such as Lev Kamenev and Rosalia Zemliachka. In her memoirs, Krupskaya loyally supports Lenin’s view of the matter. (Note that the English translation muddlies Krupskaya’s point [see Lih 2006, p. 541].) Krupskaya’s overall judgment on the praktiki does not lend much support to ‘Lenin vs. the Bolsheviks’. 109. Liadov 1911. In his memoir written in the 1920s, Liadov is, of course, less condescending to Lenin, but still stresses the active initiative shown by the praktiki-delegates. Liadov views the Third Congress as the real founding congress of Bolshevism (Liadov 1956, pp. 80–3). 110. Lenin 1960–8 g, pp. 29–39. 111. Examples include Cliff 1975; Haimson 2005; Le Blanc 1990.

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association and of the press has been captured.’112 And since de facto political freedom had been acquired, vast changes in party-organisation should follow. Was this a new position, a change of heart? Of course not! In my book, I sum up Lenin’s pre-1905 political strategy in this way: ‘Let us build an underground-organisation as much like the German SPD as possible so that we can overthrow autocracy in order to obtain the political freedom that we need to build a party even more like the German SPD.’ For one brief shining moment, it looked as if political freedom had been won, and Lenin acted immediately to cash in his revolutionary chips and put the Party on the more efficient and more mass basis he had always dreamed about. As I put it in Lenin Rediscovered: Lenin ‘gave advice on how to build an effective party in the underground, but the reason he wanted an effective party was to be able to leave behind forever the stifling atmosphere of the underground’.113 Lenin’s article has also been tied to the story of the Third Congress in a way that suggests a year-long fight against the ‘party machine’.114 As Cliff describes it, ‘it was not characteristic of Lenin to give up a fight, and a few months after the third Congress, in November 1905, he returned to the issue with increased vigour’.115 This is the reverse of the truth. Lenin says in the article of November 1905 that ‘we Bolsheviks have always recognized that in new conditions, when political freedoms were acquired, it would be essential to adopt the elective principle. The minutes of the third Congress of the RSDWP prove this most conclusively, if, indeed, any proof is required’.116 Compare Le Blanc, who quotes Lenin’s November article and then says ‘At the Third Congress, in April 1905, the Bolshevik committeemen had revolted against such ideas’.117 Thus Lenin’s affirmation of continuity with earlier Bolshevism and his specific endorsement of the Third Congress is turned into its opposite. The issue over which Lenin found himself in conflict with many praktiki at the Third Congress in April 1905 was substantially different from the issue at stake in November 1905. In the spring, the problem was worker-recruitment to local party-committees under conditions of a konspiratsiia-underground. In the autumn, the problem was worker-entry as general party-members under conditions of rapidly expanding political freedom. 112. Lenin 1960–8g, p. 29 (emphasis added). 113. Lih 2006, p. 557. 114. Molyneux 1978, pp. 59–63. 115. Cliff 1975, p. 177. 116. Lenin 1960–8g, p. 30. Lenin also continues to insist that full democracy within the Party is impossible without political freedom, that is, in the underground. 117. Le Blanc 1990, p. 118. Le Blanc also erroneously suggests that Lenin discussed the rôle of professional revolutionaries in this article.


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Finally, one particular sentence in this article is taken to be a repudiation of Lenin’s earlier outlook. Lenin writes: ‘The working class is instinctively, spontaneously Social Democratic, and more than ten years of work put in by Social Democracy has done a great deal to transform this spontaneity into consciousness.’118 Does this statement really ‘bend the stick’ away from Lenin’s earlier standpoint, as Cliff and Le Blanc assert?119 Even on a purely verbal level, Lenin’s 1905 formulation does not differ in essential ways from his WITBD?formulations. He says, in WITBD?, that, while, it is completely true’ that ‘the working class is spontaneously drawn toward socialism’, Social Democracy is not thereby excused from its leadership-role.120 More substantively, Lenin’s statement of November 1905 reflects his life-long assumptions about the receptivity of the workers to the socialist message. In his text, Molyneux cites Lenin’s statement in WITBD? that the working class exclusively by its own efforts is able to develop only tred-iunionist consciousness. He then comments: ‘This is not, and was not, true – witness the Paris Commune – and Lenin saw with his own eyes that it was not true in 1905, hence his statement then that “the working class is spontaneously social democratic”.’ This is a curious observation. Does either the Paris Commune in 1871 or worker-militancy in 1905 show us workers achieving socialist insight without socialists? By 1871, socialists had been at work in Paris for at least a generation. As for Russia, Molyneux himself states Lenin’s view of the matter: ‘The openended expansion envisaged by Lenin in the revolutionary period was possible only on the basis of the solid preparation of the party beforehand.’121 Chris Harman sees Lenin’s article of November 1905 as proof of his revolutionary and therefore (in Harman’s view) non-Erfurtian political outlook: ‘This is also why Lenin was so insistent on berating established partymembers in 1905 to open up the Party to the newly revolutionary layer of workers – something Lih recognised happened, but feels compelled by his “Erfurtianism”-thesis to minimise its significance.’ This statement is triply misleading. First, I do not minimise the significance of this article but see it as

118. Lenin 1960–8g, p. 32. 119. Cliff 1975, p. 176 (‘Lenin now formulated his conclusion in terms which were the exact opposite of those of What Is to Be Done? ’); Le Blanc 1990, p. 121. 120. Lih 2006, p. 712 (translation adjusted by using standard renderings). 121. Molyneux 1978, pp. 59–63. Mikhail Pokrovsky cites a comment of Lenin from 1908: ‘In the summer of 1905, our party was a union of underground groups; in the autumn it became the party of millions of workers. Do you think, my dear sirs, this came all of a sudden, or was the result prepared and secured by years and years of slow, obstinate, inconspicuous, noiseless work?’ (Pokrovsky 1933, pp. 193–4).

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an important confirmation of my general view of Lenin.122 Second, Lenin’s call for party-democracy in conditions of political freedom stems from his Erfurtian outlook. Third, Lenin was not berating party-members in this article, in which he says that he was ‘profoundly convinced’ that these proposals would be accepted by local committee-members.123 Lenin’s endorsement of WITBD? arguments in 1905 Contrary to the myth that Lenin distanced himself from WITBD? in 1905, he actually endorsed many specific WITBD? arguments fairly often after Bloody Sunday (9 January 1905). Besides the issues treated in Section V, we find the following. • Endorsement of WITBD? ’s ‘bring-it-on’ attitude toward police-socialists such as Zubatov. Lenin referred to his discussion of this topic in WITBD? on a number of occasions in 1905.124 • Pride that WITBD? had already broached the topic of armed insurrection.125 • Self-quotation (without explicit citation) of the WITBD? formulation ‘many people, but no people [massa liudei, a liudei net]’.126 • Affirmation of earlier arguments about the impossibility of applying the elective principle under underground-conditions.127 • Affirmation of the call in WITBD? for a wide variety of organisations, from very broad to very secretive, in explicit connection with an affirmation of the famous definition of party-membership advocated by Lenin at the Second Party-Congress.128 • Insistence that his call for workers to be enlisted into the local committees was a reflection of a long-held stand (as noted in this section). • Finally, besides these comments from 1905, Lenin insisted in his 1907 introduction to this collected writings that WITBD? did not ‘exaggerate’ the role of the revolutionary by trade. Rather, WITBD? insisted on a necessary truth against those who just did not get it. This ‘correct way’ of accomplishing organisational tasks was now accepted by both Social-Democratic factions (and, we might add, by all underground-parties).129 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129.

Lih 2006, p. 473. Lenin 1960–8g, p. 30. See Section II and Lih 2006, pp. 401–3. Lenin 1960–8e, p. 142. Lenin 1960–8e, p. 144. Lenin 1960–8f, p. 167; 1960–8g, pp. 30–1. Lenin 1960–8e, p. 444. Lenin 1960–8i, pp. 101–4.


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Lenin and the praktiki The story told by a number of activist-writers, ‘Lenin vs. the Bolsheviks’, needs to be replaced with a new story, ‘Lenin and the praktiki’, one that goes something like this. By 1902, owing to the collective and anonymous work of Social-Democratic activists all over Russia, an underground of a new type had been created in Russia – one based on imaginative adaptation of Erfurtian principles to the alien environment of tsarist Russia. Lenin’s WITBD? painted an idealised portrait of these underground-institutions and inspired local activists with a vision of the ‘miracles’ of leadership they could perform, given the revolutionary fervour of the workers. The Bolshevik praktiki choose Lenin as their spokesman because he was the émigré leader who best understood their practical problems and who had the most optimistic vision of what they could accomplish. Both Lenin and the praktiki saw the events of 1905 as a giant confirmation of their general outlook. They had wagered on the workers as leaders of the Russian revolution, and (so it seemed to them) the wager was paying off handsomely. The interaction between leader and party in 1905 was complicated, sometimes conflicted but on the whole productive. Neither side monopolised the initiative in this interaction. Sometimes, Lenin showed symptoms of émigré disconnection from Russian realities (as in his unrealistic demands for immediate and massive worker-recruitment to party-committees in April 1905). Sometimes, the enthusiasm of leader and locals were mutually reinforcing. There was nothing resembling a year-long battle of Lenin against the praktiki. At no time did Lenin repudiate the arguments of WITBD? or substantially change the tone of his writings. On the contrary, he specifically endorsed WITBD? ’s arguments throughout the year. In November 1905, he affirmed his Erfurtian credentials by calling for thorough-going party-democracy under the conditions of the short-lived ‘days of freedom’. A centrally defining feature of Bolshevism in post-revolutionary years (1907–17) was the assertion that the 1905 Revolution had confirmed the political and organisational outlook of ‘old Iskra’, that is, Iskra prior to the Menshevik/Bolshevik split. Lenin regarded WITBD? as a succinct expression of many aspects of that outlook. He attacked all those who would liquidate the heritage of the prerevolutionary underground.

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VIII. Lenin and ‘Kautsky when he was a Marxist’ In a last-minute addition to WITBD?, Lenin cited a passage from an article that had just been published by Karl Kautsky. A huge amount of attention has been given to this passage and its relation to Lenin’s outlook (as illustrated by this symposium). A principal aim of my book is to shift the focus away from Lenin’s ad hoc use of Kautsky to bolster a passing polemic, and toward the rôle Kautsky played in Lenin’s outlook for the entire first decade of his revolutionary career, 1894–1904. Three key-components of Lenin’s revolutionary activity have deep roots in Kautsky’s writings: • the merger-formula (‘Social Democracy is the merger of socialism and the worker-movement’). As shown in Section V, Lenin saw his WITBD? formulations as a clumsily-worded restatement of the merger-formula. In fact, the merger-formula is central to all of Lenin’s programmatic writings during this decade. For Lenin, the merger-formula is ‘K. Kautsky’s expression that reproduces the basic ideas of the Communist Manifesto’.130 • The primordial importance of political freedom. As Kautsky wrote in the Erfurt Programme, basic political freedoms are ‘light and air for the proletariat; he who keeps the proletariat from the struggle to win these freedoms and to extend them – that person is one of the proletariat’s worst enemies’.131 Kautsky explained why the proletariat needs political freedom, namely, in order to organise and educate itself on a national scale. The urgent priority of political freedom is what made Russian Social Democracy into a revolutionary party. • The hegemony-scenario, in which the Russian workers lead the entire Russian narod to overthrow the tsar. The hegemony-scenario was part of Lenin’s outlook from the very beginning, but it only became central to his political activity in the decade 1904–14. Accordingly, Kautsky became a sort of honorary Bolshevik during and after the 1905 Revolution.132 Lenin’s debt to Kautsky on these three points – the heart of his political outlook – is manifest and explicit. Of course, this does not mean Lenin got his Marxist outlook from Kautsky. On the contrary, Lenin was exceptional in his 130. Lih 2006, p. 147. 131. Lih 2006, p. 89. 132. Lenin in 1909 writes: ‘Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Kautsky – Social Democrats who often write for Russians and to that extent are in our party – have been won over ideologically [ideino], despite the fact that at the beginning of the split (1903) all their sympathies were with the Mensheviks’ (Lenin 1960–8j, pp. 58–9).


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comprehensive knowledge of the writings of the Masters.133 Lenin read Marx and Engels, he read Kautsky, and he concluded that Kautsky had got Marx and Engels right, particularly on points with the greatest practical implications for Russian Social Democracy. My exploration of Kautsky’s rôle runs right into the deeply-ingrained desire of much of the Left to dig as deep a gulf as possible between Lenin and Kautsky. In order to brush away the inconvenient fact that Lenin himself was unaware of any such gulf, many writers of the Left resort to the idea that Lenin had ‘unconsciously’ or ‘semi-consciously’ broken with Kautsky. In this, they join anti-Lenin scholars who have their own reasons for digging the gulf deep and wide. John Molyneux states the case with admirable explicitness. Lenin rebelled ‘at first instinctively and politically, and then philosophically’ against Kautsky’s ideological position.134 True, ‘the citations of Kautsky as the marxist authority are legion in Lenin’s works at this time and remain so throughout the pre-war period’.135 Lenin was still not ‘aware that he diverged in any fundamental way from social democratic orthodoxy’.136 The mechanistic, fatalistic and passive nature of Kautsky’s Marxism escaped his attention. But ‘in 1914 the scales fell from Lenin’s eyes regarding Kautsky, Bebel and the rest and theory caught up with a vengeance (see Imperialism – The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Imperialism and the Split in Socialism, the Philosophical Notebooks, Marxism on the State, The State and Revolution and much else besides).’137 In my book, I pointed out the logical implications of this kind of formulation: either Lenin misunderstood Kautsky, or he misunderstood himself, or both. This observation evoked much criticism on the part of Harman, Le Blanc and Molyneux (who, despite the fact that he was the nominal target of my remark, responded in a comradely way).138 133. This point is well documented in Nimtz 2009 (unfortunately Nimtz seems to be under the impression that I argue that Lenin’s knowledge of Marx was mainly through Kautsky). 134. Molyneux 2006. 135. Molyneux 1978, pp. 56–7. 136. Molyneux 1978, pp. 52, 56. 137. Molyneux 2006. 138. Paul Le Blanc defends Molyneux against my criticism, and yet I rather doubt he actually agrees with Molyneux’s view of the Kautsky-Lenin relationship. Instead, Le Blanc points out that the Russian Bolshevik Party and the German SPD were quite different from each other – an observation that is very true, very obvious, and very irrelevant to the dispute about Lenin’s relation to Kautsky’s theoretical framework. As Le Blanc himself has pointed out, Kautsky was unhappy with many developments in the German Party (Le Blanc 2006, pp. 65, 259). When Lenin later criticised the German Party for succumbing to ‘opportunism’, he was using a concept that he shared with Kautsky, as he himself stated more than once after 1914 (see the Kautsky-asMarxist database discussed below).

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My critics point to Lenin’s later break with Kautsky and argue more-or-less the following: Lenin broke decisively with Kautsky in 1914 and this break led to a root-and-branch rejection of Kautskyism in general. So why is Lih making such heavy weather about the alleged logical difficulties of the earlier situation, when the paths of the two men began to diverge, even though Lenin was not yet fully aware of the fact? Perhaps Lih’s presentation of Lenin as an Erfurtian has some merit, but his exclusive focus on this earlier period has caused him to ‘bend the stick’ too far. By overlooking the later break, he fundamentally distorts the Lenin-Kautsky relationship. My critics are justified in challenging me on this point, since I said nothing in my book about the Lenin-Kautsky relationship after 1914. It remains to be seen whether I can meet this challenge. In 1914, Lenin’s attitude toward Kautsky as a person and toward his current writings changed drastically. But this change still leaves open the most relevant question: did Lenin change his attitude toward Kautsky’s prewar-writings and his prewar-outlook? According to Tony Cliff, Lenin ‘had to admit that he had been wrong, terribly wrong, in his approbation of Karl Kautsky’ – not only about Kautsky as a person, but also Kautsky’s brand of Marxism.139 Did Lenin in fact ever admit he was mistaken about Kautsky’s theoretical framework? Or did he affirm the opposite in the strongest possible terms? In a letter written to Aleksandr Shliapnikov in the first shock of what he took to be Kautsky’s betrayal, Lenin wrote ‘I hate and despise Kautsky now more than anyone, with his vile, dirty, self-satisfied hypocrisy’. This sentence has often been quoted (not least by Trotsky in 1932).140 But, surely, for those interested in the intellectual connection between Lenin and Kautsky, more informative is this sentence from another letter to Shliapnikov written a few days later: ‘Obtain without fail and reread (or ask to have it translated for you) Road to Power by Kautsky [and see] what he writes there about the revolution of our time! And now, how he acts the toady and disavows all that!’141 In order to answer the essential question on a firm documentary-basis, I compiled a database containing all comments on Kautsky’s prewar-writings made by Lenin after the outbreak of war in 1914. I would like to thank my critics for provoking me into compiling this material, since I garnered enough research-leads to last me a long time.142 Here, I will only touch upon the main points.

139. 140. 141. 142.

Cliff 1976, p. 6. Trotsky 1970, p. 607. Lenin 1960–8n, pp. 167–72. A talk based on this research (Lih 2008) has been published by International Socialist


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The number of references by Lenin to ‘Kautsky when he was a Marxist’ is truly amazing. I have collected more than eighty comments. Examples come from every year from 1914 to 1920 (after that, Lenin’s obsession subsides and both positive and negative comments are infrequent). Most of these are passing comments on the fact that Kautsky was once an admirable Marxist, but there are also a number of substantive discussions.143 Lenin cites Kautsky on a wide range of issues and refers to a long list of Kautsky’s works (most coming from the decade 1899–1909). In many cases, Lenin had recently re-read the work in question. We must therefore conclude that the opinions expressed by Lenin after 1914 about ‘Kautsky when he was a Marxist’ are the outcome of considerable thought, graced with the advantage of hindsight, and based on a recent examination of relevant texts. What picture of the prewar-Kautsky emerges from this material? I composed the following portrait, based entirely on Lenin’s pronouncements after his break with Kautsky in 1914: Karl Kautsky was an outstanding Marxist who was the most authoritative theoretician of the Second International and a teacher to a generation of Marxists. His popularisation of Das Kapital has canonical status. He was one of the first to refute opportunism in detail (although he hesitated somewhat before launching his attack) and continued to fight energetically against it, asserting that a split would be necessary if opportunism ever became the official tendency of the German Party. A whole generation of Marxists learned a dialectical approach to tactics from him. Only vis-à-vis the state do we observe in him a tendency to restrict himself to general truths and to evade a concrete discussion. Kautsky was also a reliable guide to the revolutionary developments of the early twentieth century. His magisterial work on the agrarian question is still valid. He correctly diagnosed the national problem (as opposed to Rosa Luxemburg). He insisted that Western Europe was ripe for socialist revolution, and foretold the connection between war and revolution. Kautsky had a special relation to Russia and to Bolshevism. On the one hand, he himself took great interest in Russian developments, Review and is available online; the full database is available on the Historical Materialism website: <www.historicalmaterialism.org>. 143. The most important of these are contained in the 1914 article ‘Dead Chauvinism and Living Socialism’, the 1917 discussion in State and Revolution, and the 1920 discussion in LeftWing Communism.

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and endorsed the basic Bolshevik view of the 1905 Revolution. On the other hand, the Russian revolutionary workers read him eagerly and his writings had greater influence in Russia than anywhere else. This enthusiastic interest in the ‘latest word’ of European Marxism is one of the main reasons for Bolshevism’s later revolutionary prowess. Such is Lenin’s portrait of ‘Kautsky when he was a Marxist’, a portrait from which he never diverged. Of course, this portrait needs to be extracted from the voluminous abuse hurled at Kautsky’s current writings by Lenin after 1914. The reader of the English-language Collected Works is also easily misled by Lenin’s polemic against ‘Kautskyism’. ‘Kautskyism’, however, translates kautskianstvo, a term that is not an ‘ism’ – that is, it does not mean ‘the system of ideas associated with Kautsky’ (Lenin could have used the term kautskizm, a perfectly possible neologism in Russian). Rather, kautskianstvo means ‘acting in a revolutionary crisis the way Kautsky is now acting’ – more precisely, using revolutionary verbiage to disguise a refusal to act in a revolutionary way. Accordingly, Lenin applies the term to people whose views at the time were not at all similar to those of Kautsky. The term is applied, for example, to Lev Trotsky and to Christian Rakovsky. Paradoxically, then, Trotsky in 1916 is a kautskianets, but Kautsky in 1906 is not.144 Chris Harman writes: But, once the routine tempo of political life is shaken by enormous political, social or economic crises, the paedagogical approach blurs important issues relating to the application of abstract principles to reality. Such blurring explains how various people in Russia who saw themselves as ‘Kautskyites’ could adopt diametrically opposed practical-political approaches in 1904–6 and 1912–14 – and why the revolutionaries who had accepted the Kautskyite theoretical approach found themselves compelled to break from it explicitly after August 1914.145

This statement is triply misleading. If we use ‘Kautskyites’ the way Lenin used it after 1914, then no-one thought of themselves as a Kautskyite before 1914. Harman’s statement is equally misleading if we understand ‘Kautskyite’ in the way he evidently intends, namely, ‘someone who shares Kautsky’s theoretical approach’. From 1905 on, Kautsky was, in fact, much closer to the Bolsheviks 144. Lenin 1960–8k, pp. 311–12. 145. Harman also argues that Lenin and Kautsky applied the same general positions in very different ways (‘we all know of cases in which people who claim to agree on a series of texts interpret them differently’). I very much sympathise with this way of putting things and I use it, for example, when talking about Bolsheviks and Mensheviks (see Section IV). But this is a very different approach from claiming that Lenin rejected these general positions, which he never did.


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and to Trotsky than to the Mensheviks. Both factions were aware of this. Finally, I doubt whether any Russian Social Democrat broke explicitly with ‘the Kautskyite theoretical approach’ after 1914, even when they did break with Kautsky himself. Certainly, Lenin did not. Another factor easily overlooked is Kautsky’s continued status as a Marxist authority even after the Bolsheviks took power. Paradoxically, at the very same time Kautsky was penning savage polemics against Soviet Russia, his prewarwritings were held in greater esteem in that country than anywhere else in the world. If Lenin actually realised that he fundamentally disagreed with the prewar-Kautsky, then, clearly, it was his bounden duty to wean party-members away from this profoundly erroneous world-view. After all, Kautsky’s writings had been ideological mother’s milk to the pre war Bolsheviks, as stressed by Lenin himself. Not only does Lenin fail to take up this task, but he actually continues to invoke Kautsky when making a case to Bolshevik and other sympathetic audiences. Lenin used Kautsky’s prewar-writings to bolster his argument in remarks before the following audiences: Swiss workers in January 1917, Bolshevik party-conference in April 1917, congress of peasants in November 1917, Executive Committee of Congress of Soviets in April 1918, Eighth Party-Congress in March 1919, Adult-Education Congress in May 1919, Lenin’s fiftieth birthday celebration in 1920, and Second Comintern-Congress in 1920.146 The extent of Kautsky’s continued authority in Bolshevik Russia is demonstrated by the invaluable appendix provided by Moira Donald listing Kautsky’s works published in Soviet Russia. Donald informs us that when Lenin died in 1924 his library contained more works by Kautsky than by any other author, Russian or foreign, apart from his own work. Surprisingly, perhaps, of the eighty-nine titles listed, more were official Soviet publications dating from 1918 onwards than were published abroad or in Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution.147

‘Renegade Kautsky’ – this epithet was not chosen lightly. A renegade is someone who renounces the truths he earlier supported. When Lenin called Kautsky a renegade, he was, at the same time, affirming his own continued loyalty to these truths. Lenin almost never changed his mind about Kautsky’s writings. What he likes the first time he read it, he continued to like. What he disliked the first time he read it, he continued to dislike.

146. For references, see the Kautsky-as-Marxist database. 147. Donald 1993, p. 247.

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There is therefore no escape-clause from the dilemma that presents itself to those who wish to dig a gulf between Lenin and Kautsky. If Lenin disagreed fundamentally with Kautsky’s brand of Marxism as expressed in his voluminous prewar-writings, then either Lenin misunderstood Kautsky, or he misunderstood himself, or both, throughout his revolutionary career. Those who wish to dig a gulf between Lenin and Kautsky must claim, and must back up their claim, that either they understand Kautsky better than Lenin did, or they understand Lenin better than Lenin understood himself. Another tactic used by the gulf-diggers is to paint Kautsky as a mediocre old duffer who had nothing in common with revolutionaries who had red blood in their veins. Chris Harman paints Kautsky as someone who wrote a few elementary textbooks back in the 1890s and lived off them for the rest of his career. Molyneux tells us that Kautsky saw ideas in total isolation from social practice, that he saw the job of a socialist as representing the present state of the working class, and so on and so forth.148 On the basis of the Kautsky passage in WITBD?, for example, Molyneux concludes that for Kautsky, science develops ‘in complete isolation from social life’.149 Harman’s portrait of Kautsky as someone stuck in the 1890s is equally far from the truth. As my database brings out, the writings by Kautsky that Lenin found most impressive were those from 1899 to 1909, the reason being precisely because of what Lenin believed to be Kautsky’s revolutionary response to the new developments of the early twentieth century. The effort to glorify Lenin by rubbishing Kautsky can easily backfire. At the Essen Conference on Lenin in 2001, Slavoj Žižek could hardly find words to express his contempt for Kautsky and especially for his 1902 book Social Revolution. However, Lenin himself had a well-documented and life-long admiration for Social Revolution.150

148. Molyneux 1978, pp. 46–9, 52, 54, 72, 75. 149. Molyneux 1978, pp. 46–9. As shown in Section V, this charge goes back to Plekhanov in 1904 and was immediately denied by Bolshevik writers. 150. Immediately after Kautsky’s Social Revolution was published in 1902, Lenin arranged for a Russian translation. In 1907, he devoted an article to praising Kautsky’s new introduction to a second edition of Social Revolution, in which Kautsky summed up the lessons of the 1905 Revolution. In early 1917, he reread it and immediately quoted it approvingly in a lecture on the Revolution of 1905: ‘The case of the Russian revolution of 1905 confirmed what K. Kautsky wrote in 1902 in his book Social Revolution (by the way, he was then still a revolutionary Marxist, and not a defender of social-patriots and opportunists, as at present)’ (Lenin 1960–8l, pp. 249– 50). In State and Revolution, he criticised it for not taking up the question of the state, but also stated that ‘the author gives here a great deal that is extraordinarily valuable’ (Lenin 1960–8m, p. 479). On several occasions in 1917, 1918 and 1919, Lenin cites Social Revolution approvingly in speeches (see Kautsky-as-Marxist database).


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Fortunately, there is a heartening movement to re-examine Kautsky undertaken by writers such as Moira Donald, Paul Blackledge, Alan Shandro, Paul Le Blanc, Jean Ducange, Daniel Gaido and myself.151 I predict that those who are compelled by their ideology to dig a deep and impassable gulf between Lenin and Kautsky will soon find themselves on the dust-heap of historiography.

IX. Trotsky as witness An important topic brought up by my critics that warrants further examination is Trotsky’s relation to Kautsky, which naturally varied over the years. What Kautsky wrote in the earlier – the better! – period of his scientific and literary activity . . . was and remains . . . a complete theoretical vindication of the subsequent political tactics of the Bolsheviks[.]152

In 1904, when Trotsky was a principal spokesman for the Mensheviks, he published a violently anti-Lenin pamphlet entitled Our Political Tasks. Although this pamphlet was published at about the same time as Plekhanov’s anti-Lenin articles discussed in an earlier section, the influence of Plekhanov’s polemics on Trotsky’s argument, if any, is very slight. Toward the end of his life, Trotsky made a comment on WITBD? that reproduced Plekhanov’s critique. We shall examine these two pieces of evidence in turn. After taking a careful second look at the WITBD? references in Trotsky’s Our Political Tasks, I find that I have to correct what I said in my book on the subject: ‘Trotsky’s pamphlet confines its critique of WITBD? to a few passing pot-shots at some of Lenin’s obiter dicta.’153 In reality, Trotsky gives some very conditional praise to WITBD? as a serviceable statement of what needed to be done – back in 1902. Lenin’s problem, Trotsky tells us, is that he has refused to move on, as shown by his deeply reactionary 1904 pamphlet on the partycrisis, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. Our Political Tasks has a strangely split personality. The first half of the pamphlet is a relatively calm polemic about what was to be done in 1904. Trotsky consciously tried to build on the accomplishments of the earlier precongress period and not simply reject it as mistaken. The second half of Trotsky’s pamphlet is a relatively unhinged polemic inspired by the recently published One Step Forward (‘What indignation seizes you, when you read 151. For an excellent introduction to the current discussion on Kautsky, see Blackledge 2006. 152. Trotsky writing in 1922, as cited in Gaido 2003, p. 80. 153. Lih 2006, p. 28.

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these monstrous, degenerate and demagogic lines! . . . Truly, one could not approach the ideological heritage of the proletariat with more cynicism than does Lenin!’).154 The second half is also filled with venom toward a majority of his own party’s praktiki. Comments concerning WITBD? are mostly in the relatively calm first half. To a surprising extent, Trotsky’s overall argument in this first half of Our Political Tasks can be summed up: what Pavel Akselrod says, goes. During the period of the old Iskra (1900–3), Akselrod best understood the tasks of the movement and set the tone that was followed by the other editors. In 1903, Akselrod realised it was time to move on and managed to convey this to the future Mensheviks (in face-to-face encounters, not published articles). Unfortunately, Lenin stopped being a pupil of Akselrod, stayed true to the outlook of the old Iskra, and carried along a majority of the Party in his reactionary stubbornness. Things will be set right once the minority is able to reorient the Party’s outlook along Akselrodian lines. (Among other things, this narrative justifies control of the official party-newspaper by a self-proclaimed minority.) Trotsky slots WITBD? into this narrative, as shown by the following passages from Our Political Tasks: ‘Any kowtowing before the stikhinost of the worker movement’, says the author of What Is to Be Done?, thereby popularising Akselrod and Plekhanov, ‘signals just by itself the strengthening of the influence of bourgeois ideology on the workers’.155 Lenin’s ‘organisational plan’ – if we keep in mind not the bureaucratic prose of his Letter to a Comrade, but the article ‘Where to Begin?’ or the pamphlet What Is to Be Done? – was not, of course, any big discovery, but it gave a successful answer to the question: where to begin? what was to be done in order to bring together the scattered elements of the future party organisation and therefore make possible the setting of broad political tasks? . . . I repeat, the so-called ‘organisational plan’ embraced – and Lenin himself understood this, as long as he was carrying out progressive work – not the party building itself, but only the scaffolding.156 When Lenin palmed off on Kautsky [his own] absurd presentation of the relations between the ‘stikhinyi’ and the ‘purposive’ elements in the revolutionary movement of the proletariat, he simply depicted the task of his period with crude strokes.157

In this last comment, Trotsky is saying that Kautsky is not to blame for Lenin’s theoretical crudities. This remark perhaps shows the influence of Plekhanov’s 154. Trotskii 1904, p. 75 (Trotsky is referring here to Lenin’s criticism of intellectuals, for which, see below). 155. Trotskii 1904, p. 3; cf. Lih 2006, p. 708. 156. Trotskii 1904, p. 34. 157. Trotskii 1904, p. 20.


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anti-WITBD? article that made a strong contrast between Kautsky’s orthodoxy and Lenin’s heresy. Misled by the highly inaccurate English translation available on the Marxists Internet Archive, Harman incorrectly states that Trotsky criticised Kautsky in Our Political Tasks.158 What Trotsky sees (inaccurately) as Lenin’s exaltation of the intelligentsia in 1902 is, for him, a peccadillo compared to the ‘degenerate demagoguery’ of Lenin’s 1904 attack on the intelligentsia. Because of the prominent rôle he assigns to the intellectuals, Trotsky is infuriated by Lenin’s intelligentbaiting. Trotsky rejects with sarcastic wrath Lenin’s 1904 suggestion that the proletariat can ‘give lessons in discipline to its “intellectuals”.’ On the contrary, says Trotsky, the Russian proletariat goes through the school of political life ‘only under the leadership – good or bad – of the Social Democratic intelligentsia’.159 In 1939, when writing his biography of Stalin, Trotsky returned to the subject of WITBD?. Trotsky portrayed Stalin as a deeply provincial praktik who defended WITBD? in 1905 even though ‘the author of WITBD? himself subsequently acknowledged the one-sidedness and therefore the incorrectness of his theory’.160 Trotsky is here giving the standard Menshevik reading of Lenin’s 1903 statement about ‘bending the stick’. Trotsky’s 1939 comment therefore adds nothing new to the discussion. Kautsky and ‘permanent revolution’ While sitting in prison in 1906, Trotsky produced a translation-cumcommentary of Kautsky’s seminal article ‘Driving Forces and Prospects of the Russian Revolution’.161 Trotsky not only announces complete solidarity between Kautsky’s argument and his own theory of permanent revolution, but he even gives Kautsky priority: If the reader will take the trouble to read through my article Results and Prospects, he will recognise that I have absolutely no reason to repudiate any of the positions contained in the [present] article by Kautsky that I have translated, since the train of thought in both articles is completely the same. . . . 158. The MIA-translation says: ‘Lenin took up Kautsky’s absurd idea of the relationship between the “spontaneous” and the “conscious” elements of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat.’ 159. Lih 2006, p. 535. See Section III for further discussion of Mensheviks vs. Bolsheviks on the rôle of the intellectuals. 160. Trotskii 1996, p. 96. 161. Trotsky’s rendition was published in 1907. It was republished in the invaluable Russianlanguage collection Trotskii 1993 (Permanentnaia revoliutsiia), put out by the Iskra ResearchGroup based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A translation of this important and revealing document can be found in Day and Gaido (eds.) 2009.

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L. T. Lih / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 108–174 Kautsky refuses to call this political domination of the proletariat a dictatorship. I usually avoid this word in the same way, but in any event, the social content of proletarian domination is completely the same with me as with Kautsky. . . . Kautsky, who very rarely speaks of dialectical materialism, but does an excellent job of applying its method for the analysis of social relations. . . . Meanwhile, this is not the first time Kautsky has expressed these thoughts. Here [in this article] he only brings them together in one place.162

In his own Results and Prospects (1906), the link to Kautsky is hardly less clear, since Trotsky gives page-long quotations from Kautsky on a number of occasions. After citing Kautsky’s statement in 1904 about the very real possibility of Russia taking the lead in international socialism, Trotsky notes that ‘the theorist of German Social Democracy wrote these words at a time when for him it was still a question whether or not the revolution would break out earlier in Russia or in the West’.163 In a personal letter to Kautsky in 1908, Trotsky told him that Kautsky’s ‘Driving Forces and Prospects’ ‘is the best theoretical statement of my own views, and gives me great political satisfaction’.164 In 1922, looking back, Trotsky reaffirmed this solidarity in a comment that is close in spirit to Lenin’s attitude toward ‘Kautsky when he was a Marxist’: At the time, Kautsky himself fully identified himself with my views.165 Like Mehring (now deceased), he adopted the viewpoint of ‘permanent revolution’. Today, Kautsky has retrospectively joined the ranks of the Mensheviks. He wants to reduce his past to the level of his present. But this falsification, which satisfied the claims of an unclear theoretical conscience, is encountering obstacles in the form of printed documents. What Kautsky wrote in the earlier – the better! – period of his scientific and literary activity . . . was and remains a merciless rejection of Menshevism and a complete theoretical vindication of the subsequent political tactics of the Bolsheviks, whom thickheads and renegades, with Kautsky today at their head, accuse of adventurism, demagogy, and Bakuninism.166

Writers on the Left, such as Molyneux and Harman, also want to ‘reduce Kautsky’s present to the level of his [post-1914] present’. Not only that, they claim that Lenin and Trotsky agree with them on this issue. But they, too, are encountering obstacles in the form of printed documents. 162. Trotskii 1993, pp. 122–8, order of passages changed. 163. Trotskii 1993, p. 168. Actually, as Lenin was aware, Kautsky made similar comments in 1902 in the article ‘Slavs and Revolution’. Lenin gave long citations from this article on more than one occasion in 1920. 164. Donald 1993, p. 91. 165. An interesting way of putting it. Many people, after reading Trotsky’s words at the time, would say that Trotsky fully identified himself with Kautsky’s views. 166. Gaido 2003, p. 80.


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In 1906–7, the connection with Kautsky was an asset. After the Bolshevik Revolution, it became more and more of a liability. Accordingly, Trotsky’s unambiguous statement of 1922 is an anomaly, and he more often pictures Kautsky’s relation to the 1905 Revolution and to ‘permanent revolution’ in the most grudging way possible. In particular, Trotsky describes Kautsky as nothing but a ‘talented commentator’ who was briefly and superficially radicalised by the Russian Revolution of 1905 – a thesis that is widespread today on the Left. Trotsky clearly did not see things this way back in 1906–8, but perhaps he changed his mind for better reasons than polemical convenience. Nevertheless, there is a stark contrast between Lenin’s and Trotsky’s retrospective assessment of Kautsky precisely on this point. There seems to be no trace in Lenin’s writings of the ‘radicalised-by-1905’ scenario. On the contrary, Lenin pictures Kautsky as someone who responded with innovative revolutionary insight to the new developments of the early-twentieth century on the European and global level. Trotsky’s personal relations with Kautsky before the War In the years after 1905, Trotsky was much closer personally to Kautsky than was Lenin. He corresponded regularly with Kautsky and, in fact, was one of his principal sources of information about Russian affairs (to Lenin’s annoyance). He was a regular contributor to Kautsky’s journal Die Neue Zeit, as described by Isaac Deutscher: [Trotsky] turned these friendships and contacts [among German Social Democrats] to political advantage. In Neue Zeit, Kautsky’s monthly, and in Vorwärts, the influential Socialist daily, he often presented the case of Russian socialism and explained, from his angle, its internal dissensions. . . . Trotsky’s manner of writing was undogmatic, attractive, European; and he appealed to German readers as no other Russian Socialist did. His German friends, on the other hand, occasionally contributed to his Russian émigré paper, helping to boost it.167

In March 1914, Trotsky’s journal Bor’ba published the following statement: ‘On 16 October of this year Kautsky will celebrate his 60th birthday. Socialists of all countries will honor on that day the most brilliant personality in the International. The day will certainly not pass unnoticed by Russian workers, whose best friend Kautsky has been and remains.’168 167. Deutscher 1965, p. 182; see also Donald 1993, pp. 168–9, Gaido 2003, p. 88. 168. 2 March 1914, as quoted in Donald 1993, p. 183.

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Trotsky does not give any sense of this closeness in his post-revolutionary comments. He pictures himself as quickly seeing through Kautsky’s superficial good nature and observing him thereafter with contemptuous eyes and a sardonic smile.169 Trotsky’s retrospective comments seem less than candid. Trotsky on Kautsky’s ‘organic opportunism’ As Trotsky points out, he was more intimately involved with the German Party before the War than was Lenin. Partly for this reason, his post-1914 dissection of Kautsky contains a more searching critique of Kautsky’s function within the German Party than we find in Lenin’s writings. According to Trotsky, Kautsky papered over the growing reformism of the German Party with revolutionary generalities. As the Party split wide open, this operation no longer worked. The ‘organic opportunism’ of Kautsky’s personality and his situation meant that he was incapable of striking out on his own in a revolutionary way, and so he gradually collapsed into a dithering, handwringing mass of confusion. Thus he was only ‘half a renegade’ after 1914. While he did betray his ‘principled revolutionary ideology’, he remained true to his ‘practical opportunism’.170 This is not the place to evaluate this explanation of Kautsky’s actions, an explanation that strikes me as insightful but ‘one-sided and therefore erroneous’. For our purposes, two points need to be made. First, Lenin had no theory of this kind. Trotsky’s observations cannot tell us anything about how Lenin saw things. Second, and more importantly, Trotsky’s explanation of why Kautsky fell from grace gives no support whatsoever to the ‘scales-fell-from-Lenin’s-eyes’ scenario. Indeed, in all of Trotsky’s postrevolutionary polemics against Kautsky, I see no indication that Trotsky has any problem with Kautsky’s revolutionary generalities as such. On the contrary, he stressed that ‘there was a time when Kautsky was in the true sense of the word the teacher who instructed the international proletarian vanguard’ and that Kautsky ‘tirelessly defended the revolutionary character of Marx and Engels’.171 Kautsky’s pronouncements were indeed objectively hypocritical, since the German Party failed to live up to them, but certainly, in Trotsky’s opinion, the Party should have lived up to them.

169. Trotsky 1919; Trotsky 1938. 170. Trotsky 1919; Trotsky 1938. 171. These descriptions come from Trotsky 1919 and Trotsky 1938.


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Lenin’s and Trotsky’s postrevolutionary attitude to Kautsky compared On the most important point, Trotsky and Lenin agree: they both see Kautsky as a renegade from his prewar ‘principled revolutionary ideology’. If told by their present-day admirers that they had earlier failed to understand Kautsky’s prewar-writings, Lenin and Trotsky would have snorted angrily: ‘We understood perfectly well what he was saying, and he did not live up to his own pronouncements. Why do you defend this man by claiming against the evidence that he was consistent?’ Lenin and Trotsky both affirmed their solidarity with Kautsky’s prewarwritings, but with a different range of ideas and with a different intensity. Kautsky’s 1906 article ‘Driving Forces and Prospects’ was seminal for both, although they drew different conclusions from it.172 On my present knowledge of the evidence, Trotsky lacked Lenin’s intense involvement with either the merger-formula or Kautsky’s later views on colonialism, national selfdetermination and ‘the oncoming age of wars and revolutions’, as set forth in Kautsky’s Road to Power (1909) and many other writings. Trotsky did not match the intensity of Lenin’s involvement with Kautsky – indeed, this was hardly possible. Accordingly, Lenin gave much more of his post-1914 time and energy to the issue of ‘Kautsky when he was a Marxist’. Trotsky had a more fully worked-out theory of the personal and institutional reasons for Kautsky’s fall from grace. He therefore added the proviso that Kautsky was only half a renegade, since he was true to his earlier ‘practical opportunism’. Lenin advanced no such theory.

Concluding remarks The aim of this essay has been to debunk a number of historical myths that stand in the way of a full rejection of the ‘worry-about-workers’ interpretation of Lenin’s outlook. Lenin’s alleged rejection of workers whose outlook had been ‘perverted’, inaccurate contrasts with alleged Menshevik optimism, the story of de-Bolshevisation in 1905, the desire to dig as deep a gulf as possible between Lenin and Kautsky – all of these issues are barriers to a more empirically-grounded appreciation of the historical Lenin. My fight against the remnants of the textbook-interpretation, spread out over so many pages, may have left a misleading impression of my relation to the other participants in the present HM-symposium. With the exception, perhaps, of Robert Mayer, all of us are agreed in rejecting the textbook-interpretation 172. Donald 1993, pp. 91–3.

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in fundamental ways.173 Many of my present critics have been fighting the good fight for years. Throughout this essay, I have quoted only those passages from my critics with which I disagree. Anyone who reads the other contributions to the symposium will realise that they also contain some very generous assessment of Lenin Rediscovered, for which I am very grateful. Indeed, this essay is an expression of my gratitude, since I believe that all my critics share with me a desire to get Lenin right. Looking ahead, I stress that the textbook-interpretation of WITBD? has served as a distorting mirror for much wider topics – the nature of the split in Russian Social Democracy, the rôle of the konspiratsiia-underground as a factor in Russian history, the real impact of Bolshevik ideology on the revolution of 1917 and its outcome, to name but three. All of these issues offer a wide scope for rethinking and re-examination to me and my fellow historians. I also believe that much of the dispute between myself and writers in the activist-tradition is unnecessary. For various accidental reasons, these writers have ended up committed to historical myths that stem originally from academic historians of a very different political outlook. These myths can be jettisoned without any damage to the political values of the activist-tradition. The irony is that these myths that are defended with such fervour by proLenin writers end up by tarnishing Lenin’s image. If Lenin shuttled back and forth between one ideological extreme and another, if he established a faction whose original hallmark was suspicion of workers in the Party, if he had a lifelong admiration for the writings of a passive, mechanical fatalist – then Lenin is just that harder to admire. The activist-tradition has some great strengths in its approach to Lenin, and it will only become stronger by rethinking these superfluous positions.

References Ascher, Abraham 1972, Pavel Axelrod and the Development of Menshevism, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Blackledge, Paul 2006, ‘Karl Kautsky and Marxist Historiography’, Science and Society, 30, 3: 337–59. Cliff, Tony 1975, Lenin. Volume 1: Building the Party, London: Pluto Press.

173. I should like to state more explicitly than I have in the past that Robert Mayer’s articles from the 1990s are path-breaking explorations of Lenin in historical context that used a wider and more imaginative range of empirical evidence than previously. We have ended up with very different views of Lenin, but I greatly benefited from careful reading of his articles and from following up many of their empirical leads.


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—— 1976, Lenin. Volume 2: All Power to the Soviets, London: Pluto Press. Day, Richard and Daniel Gaido (eds.), Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record, Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill. Deutscher, Isaac 1965 [1954], The Prophet Armed: Trotsky: 1879–1921, New York: Vintage Books. Donald, Moira 1993, Marxism and Revolution: Karl Kautsky and the Russian Marxists, 1900– 1924, New Haven: Yale University Press. Gaido, Daniel 2003, ‘ “The American Worker” and the Theory of Permanent Revolution: Karl Kautsky on Werner Sombart’s Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? ’, Historical Materialism, 11, 4: 79–123. Haimson, Leopold 2004, ‘Lenin’s Revolutionary Career Revisited’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 5, 1: 55–80. Haimson, Leopold 2005, Russia’s Revolutionary Experience, 1905–1917: Two Essays, New York: Columbia University Press. ‘Iskra’ za dva goda: Sbornik statei iz ‘Iskry 2006, St Petersburg: Saltykov. Kautsky, Karl 1908, Die historische Leistung von Karl Marx, Berlin: Vorwärts. Kazarova, N.A. 2006, ‘Iu. O. Martov o kharaktere i perspektivakh revoliutsionnogo protsessa v Rossii’, in Mirovaia sotsial-demokratiia: Teoriia, istoriia i sovremennost’, edited by Aleksandr Oganovich Chubarian, Moscow: Sobranie. Keep, John L.H. 1963, The Rise of Social Democracy in Russia, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Le Blanc, Paul 1990, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press. —— 2006, Marx, Lenin, and the Revolutionary Experience: Studies of Communism and Radicalism in the Age of Globalization, London: Routledge. Lenin, Vladimir I. 1958–65a, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, fifth edition, Volume 7, Moscow: Gospolizdat. —— 1958–65b, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, fifth edition, Volume 9, Moscow: Gospolizdat. —— 1958–65c, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, fifth edition, Volume 16, Moscow: Gospolizdat. —— 1960–8a, Collected Works, Volume 4, New York: International Publishers. —— 1960–8b, Collected Works, Volume 5, New York: International Publishers. —— 1960–8c, Collected Works, Volume 6, New York: International Publishers. —— 1960–8d, Collected Works, Volume 7, New York: International Publishers. —— 1960–8e, Collected Works, Volume 8, New York: International Publishers. —— 1960–8f, Collected Works, Volume 9, New York: International Publishers. —— 1960–8g, Collected Works, Volume 10, New York: International Publishers. —— 1960–8h, Collected Works, Volume 12, New York: International Publishers. —— 1960–8i, Collected Works, Volume 13, New York: International Publishers. —— 1960–8j, Collected Works, Volume 16, New York: International Publishers. —— 1960–8k, Collected Works, Volume 21, New York: International Publishers. —— 1960–8l, Collected Works, Volume 23, New York: International Publishers. —— 1960–8m, Collected Works, Volume 25, New York: International Publishers. —— 1960–8n, Collected Works, Volume 35, New York: International Publishers. Liadov, M. 1911, Po povodu partiinogo krizisa: chastnoe zaiavlenie, Paris: Izdanie gruppy ‘Vpered’. —— 1956 [1925], Iz zhizni partii v 1903-1907 godakh, Moscow: Gosizdat. Liebman, Marcel 1973, Le léninisme sous Lénine, 1: La conquête du pouvoir, Paris: Éditions du Seuil. —— 1975, Leninism Under Lenin, London: Jonathan Cape. Lih, Lars T. 2003, ‘How a Founding Document was Found, or One Hundred Years of Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? ’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 4, 1: 5–49. —— 2006, Lenin Rediscovered: ‘What Is to Be Done?’ in Context, Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.

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—— 2008, ‘Lenin and Kautsky: The Final Chapter’, International Socialist Review, May–June, available at: . Martov, Iulii 2000 [1919], Mirovoi bol’shevizm, in Izbrannoe, Moscow: publisher unknown. Mayer, Robert 1993, ‘Marx, Lenin and the Corruption of the Working Class’, Political Studies, 41: 636–49. —— 1996, ‘The Status of a Classic Text: Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? after 1902’, History of European Ideas, 22, 4: 307–20. Menon, Ramesh 2001, The Ramayana, New York: North Point Press. Molyneux, John 1978, Marxism and the Party, London: Pluto Press. —— 2006, ‘Lih’s Lenin: A Review of Lars T. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered ’, available at: . Nimtz, August 2009, ‘A Return to Lenin – But Without Marx and Engels?’, Science and Society, 73, 4: 452–73. Olgin, Moissaye J. 1917, The Soul of the Russian Revolution, New York: Henry Holt and Company. Olminskii, M. 1904a, Doloi Bonapartizm!, Geneva: Rossiskaia Sotsial’demokraticheskaia Rabochaia Partiia. —— 1904b, Na novyi put’, Geneva: Rossiskaia Sotsial’demokraticheskaia Rabochaia Partiia. Olminskii, M. and A. Bogdanov 1904, Nashi nedorazumeniia, Geneva: Izdanie avtorov. Plekhanov, Georgii V. 1923–7, Sochineniia, Volume 13, edited by D. Riazanov, Moscow: Gosizdat. Pokrovsky, Mikhail 1933, Brief History of Russia, Volume II, New York: International Publishers. Schwarz, Solomon M. 1967, The Russian Revolution of 1905: The Workers’ Movement and the Formation of Bolshevism and Menshevism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shestakov, Tatyana 2005, ‘Review of Lenin Rediscovered by Lars T. Lih’, Revue TTR: traduction, terminologie, redaction, 18, 2: 258–62. Stalin, I.V. 1946–1952, Sochineniia, Volume 1, Moscow: Politizdat. Stalin, J.V. 1952, Works. Volume 1, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Steenson, Gary P. 1981, ‘Not One Man! Not One Penny!’: German Social Democracy, 1863–1914, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Tretii s”ezd RSDRP: Protokoly 1959, Moscow: Gospolizdat. Trotskii, Lev 1904, Nashi politicheskie zadachi (takticheskie i organizatsionnye voprosy), Geneva: Izdanie Sotsialdemokraticheskoi Rabochei Partii. —— 1993, Permanentnaia revoliutsiia, Cambridge, MA.: Iskra Research. —— 1996, Stalin, t. 1, Moscow: Terra. Trotsky, Leon 1919, Political Profiles (Karl Kautsky), available at: . —— 1938, ‘Karl Kautsky’, New International, available at: . —— 1961 [1919], Terrorism and Communism, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. —— 1970 [1932], ‘Hands off Rosa Luxemburg!’, in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, edited by MaryAlice Waters, New York: Pathfinder. Vorovskii V.V. 1955 [1905], ‘Plody demogogii’, in Izbrannye proizvedeniia o pervoi russkoi revoliutsii, Moscow: Gospolizdat. Williams, Albert Rhys 1919, Lenin: The Man and His Work, New York: Scott and Seltzer. Wolfe, Bertram 1984, Lenin and the Twentieth Century, Stanford, California: Hoover Institution Press.


brill.nl/hima

Critical Thoughts on the Politics of Immanence Matteo Mandarini Queen Mary University of London [email protected]

Abstract This intervention aims to question the opposition between a ‘politics of immanence’ and a ‘politics of transcendence’ through a critical assessment of some contemporary philosophical approaches to politics and a reappraisal of Mario Tronti’s account of the autonomy of the political. I shall argue that the contrast between immanence and transcendence is ultimately politically disabling, as it fails to provide an adequate position from which to situate a political thinking and practice. Keywords political philosophy, autonomy of the political, immanence, transcendence, operaismo, Tronti

The aim of this brief intervention will be to question the theoretical operation that opposes a politics of immanence to one of transcendence. The easy slippage – so characteristic of contemporary philosophy’s approach to politics – from immanence to molecular to bottom-up (or vice versa), and their evil twins used to condemn modernity itself, fails to grasp the specificity of the delimited fields within which these notions are inscribed or, and more crucially for our purposes, to be of any service to the political. The attempt to oppose a politics of immanence to one of transcendence is seductive and, perhaps, has some utility in signalling certain forms of allegiance. But I will claim that this is ultimately politically disabling, as it fails to provide an adequate position from which to situate a political thinking and practice. To put this another way, one can have immanence and transcendence, but in neither case does one have a politics specific to either term. They are two concepts that remain trapped in their inarticulate, voluble one-sidedness. To remain caught within their double-pincer (or on one side or the other, which is the same thing), leaves us with ethics in the guise of politics; and, while it has the attraction of simplicity that characterises all Manichean dualities, it takes us no further along the path to renewing political thinking. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010

DOI: 10.1163/146544609X12537556703278

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M. Mandarini / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 175–185

Theorising politics What I intend to do in the course of this intervention is to outline a series of positions that have been taken on the notion of ‘the political’ and show the inability of the immanence/transcendence conceptual pairing to shed light on those positions or their consequences. That is, my discussion will demonstrate the inability of this dichotomy to adequately trace the contours of what is at stake. In Peter Thomas’s typically combative article in a recent issue of Radical Philosophy, ‘Gramsci and the Political’, he outlines three contemporary positions on the ‘the political’. The first, which he traces back to the work of Carl Schmitt, understands the political as foundational of politics – since politics, for Schmitt, is, in Thomas’s words, ‘the conjunctural instantiation of a structure of “the political” that necessarily and always exceeds it’.1 Thus the political is autonomous both from all other realms – such as the social, the aesthetic, the ethical – as well as from politics itself, which only exists as such insofar as it ‘participates’ in the political that founds it. For this current, Thomas suggests that the political is to be understood in the Platonic sense of an essence that founds politics. This is where Thomas’s account of Schmitt is at its least convincing, since this purported Platonism sits uneasily with Schmitt’s emphasis on the concrete, existential political decision over the exception as the origin of the politico-juridical order. As Carlo Galli writes in his monumental Genealogia della politica, for Schmitt ‘order is not a foundation but an abyss, it is precisely the concrete and contingent crisis, radical disorder . . . and hence the practice that opens over that abyss is not a calculation but a “leap”, the adoption of risk’.2 Unfortunately there is not the space here to develop Galli’s account of Schmitt. It should, however, be clear that although there are many things that can be said about the viability of Schmitt’s theorisation of the political, Plato’s transcendent theory of Ideas fails to adequately account for the opacity of this concrete, contingent exception that lies at the core of Schmitt’s thinking. The second approach to the political usefully outlined by Thomas, and which he associates with the names of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, in contrast to the former emphasis on its autonomy, seeks the immanent conditions of possibility for ‘radical political engagement’3 in existing (social) antagonisms to which a ‘true’ politics would provide a resolution. Both of these currents are then contrasted – although this contrast is the least well-developed, being 1. Thomas 2009, p. 27. 2. Galli 1996, pp. 335–6. 3. Thomas 2009, p. 27.


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relegated to a note – with Antonio Negri’s position, in which politics is said to be immanent-imminent, that is ‘requiring more to be revealed than reconstituted’.4 An improbable philosophical precursor to this latter position is Heidegger; improbable but useful for indicating one particular consequence of this position – namely that politics is, for Negri, that which must be uncovered, brought out from the stratified forms within which it is caught. Although Marxist and Hegelian notions of de-mystification might be more obvious – and are clearly present – it seems to me that the radical dichotomy between ‘meditative’ and ‘calculative thinking’, employed by the later Heidegger, is actually more in tune with what Negri means here than the dialectic of truth in falsity that characterises the dialectical tradition.5 For Negri is specifically interested in a difference in kind here. Summarising Thomas’s account, then, we could say that there are three contrasting positions: a Žižekian/Badiousian construction of a ‘true’ politics from the conditions of antagonism; a revealed politics, in Negri, which calls rather upon a process of composition; and an originary one in Schmitt that is decided upon on the basis of a conditioning nothingness. We can leave Thomas’s paper aside now – though it should be widely read for its fascinating account of Gramsci as the thinker who demands that politics be put to work at the heart of philosophy, rather than allowing what is, for Thomas, the ultimately bourgeois notion of ‘the political’ to overdetermine concrete political practices.

Immanence and transcendence as political categories It seems clear to me that to assign to these respective positions the labels ‘immanence’ or ‘transcendence’ sheds no light on either the operation of the political or on their respective political consequences. Let us take, for example, Schmitt’s decision over the exception that originates the political order. To what might the decision be said to be transcendent or immanent? To order and disorder? What difference would this make to such a decision, given that the decision operates within contingency, within the opacity of the concrete which it alone can order? But regardless, since the decision lies at the origin of the distinction of order and disorder, it cannot be understood by reference to the terms decided upon – and hence whether it is immanent or transcendent to them reveals little. Although Galli argues that 4. Thomas 2009, p. 35, n. 3. 5. On Heidegger’s use of this opposition in relation to Italian political thought of the 1970s, see Mandarini 2009, especially pp. 43–4.

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the notion of order becomes ‘transcendental’ – rather than ‘transcendent’ – in the sense that order is the ‘transcendental of every form of politics . . . in that its absence demands its “realisation” . . . as a duty’;6 that transcendental notion of order cannot be presupposed, since it is an entirely concrete transcendental, only functioning as the effect of a specific concrete decision in the face of the contingency that threatens it. That is not to say that transcendence for Schmitt plays no role; it plays a role to the extent that political order is not overdetermined by a divine plan, and hence, in genealogical terms, it is crucial.7 But transcendence – or immanence, for that matter – has no specific political function. It is, rather, the contingent, unconditioned, concrete nature of the decision that marks the innovation of the Schmittian position: whether the secularisation of theological categories of which Schmitt speaks is tantamount to resolving the transcendent in the immanent, or whether the sovereign decision indicates the spectral persistence of transcendence within immanence, has a genealogical importance but no political consequences. That is, the terms become redundant within political modernity, foreclosing their use for the determination of specific political orientations or concepts. What of the ‘true’ politics that constructs or translates the social antagonism into an organised force for social transformation? To what might its truth be transcendent? To the state’s partition of the situation? Or is it the state’s partitioning of the social body that transcends the unfolding of the true political sequence? Truth’s irreducibility to the situation, its exteriority to it, is all that is required for it to play the role asked of it. There are surely other distinctions – and commonalities – that help shed light on the politics that emerge from the respective positions. So, for example, all three positions place some version of the notion of antagonism at the heart of their accounts – although, while Žižek, Badiou and Negri draw upon preexisting antagonisms that need to be organised, Schmitt demands that they be decided upon. Is not the existential irrationality of the latter what makes this position tendentially fascistic – rather than any purported sympathy for the transcendent?8 Consider then that Badiou and Schmitt emphasise the act or decision as the core political moment. Is it not this which draws out the resonance of all these thinkers with a non-statist conception of politics, and which goes some way towards explaining the contemporary revival of Schmitt by the anti-state Left – rather than the interestingly diverse theological 6. Galli 1996, pp. 354–5. 7. Indeed, the whole of Schmitt’s Political Theology is a meditation on this question. 8. The crucial place for the critique of Schmitt in these terms is to be found in Löwith 1995; see also Tronti 2006 and Mandarini 2008.


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resonances of their positions? Schmitt and Negri see the decision as the moment or mechanism that forms a political collectivity, whereas Žižek and Badiou see the decision as one that affirms a specific political truth (or sequence) that one avows and from which organisational consequences follow. This marks the anti-sociological position common to all their conceptions of politics. Where they stand on transcendence helps not a jot. On the other hand, one may argue that Negri’s emphasis on revelation, in contrast to Badiou’s notion of ‘true’ political sequences, demonstrates the former’s continuing debt to a modified-Marxist account of de-mystification, just as it reveals Badiou’s Blanquist tendencies. The contrast of immanence and transcendence as a conceptual pairing used to distinguish political positions persists, but these terms have no substantive political pertinence.

The autonomy of the political in Italy The lack of political purchase of these two categories can be brought out further by a turn to the concept of the ‘autonomy of the political’ as developed by Negri’s erstwhile collaborator, Mario Tronti. The reason for choosing this specific topic is that the divergence between Negri and Tronti has, in the course of the intervening decades, come to epitomise the conflict between a supposed politics of immanence and one of transcendence. It should be noted that the distinction between a politics of immanence and one of transcendence is in no way present in the original debate. Rather, the development of the notion of an autonomy of the political was a response to a completely different series of specifically political problems, irreducible to the categories under which it has since been relegated. With these concerns, we begin to see what a properly revolutionary notion of the political might look like. In his thinking of the 1970s, Tronti directly confronted the concept of the political not only as the point of intervention and of active transformation of a reality in which the driving-force of the economic – as he saw it – had ceased to offer an adequate conceptualisation of social change. More importantly, he recognised that the field of the political had been left in the hands of capital for too long. At a time when the new footing on which capitalist development had been placed in the middle of the twentieth century (as exemplified by Roosevelt’s New Deal and the so-called Fordist-Keynesian compromise) was running out of steam, it was necessary for the Party to take up the reins of social transformation. In other words, the political was to be the new terrain of victory or defeat in conditions where the social struggle had been isolated and was increasingly overdetermined by the capitalist restructuring that was

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breaking the centrality of the factory as a site of political struggle. Classstruggle was the terrain of the economic struggle, the space of spontaneity in which the fate of politics was to serve the immediate struggle, but the shifting terrain called upon the struggle to attain its properly political dimension. This is expressed most forcefully in Tronti’s demand for the development of a ‘concept of political rationality that is completely autonomous from everything, independent even of class-interests’.9 It was through a reappraisal of German Social Democracy, as well as of the political significance of Lenin, that Tronti began to develop a radically innovative conception of politics. The brilliance of German Social Democracy was, he argued, that it was able to keep tactically united the two aspects of its politics: ‘a quotidian Menshevik tactic and an ideology of pure principle’10 – which is to say, workers’ struggles within given conditions but in view of their amelioration, and the revolutionary refusal of those conditions themselves. In contrast, the genius of Lenin was to refuse to reduce the party to the role of passive subject of even the highest level of worker-spontaneity – i.e. a spontaneity that was not in contrast to an internal moment of organisation and direction. Tronti summarises Lenin’s innovation as follows: To actively mediate in complete fashion the complex real whole of the concrete situation, where workers’ struggle never operates alone in pushing in a single direction, but is always interwoven with the political response of capital, with the latest results of bourgeois science, and with the levels of organisation achieved by the workers’ movement.11

To flirt with Heidegger’s terminology, we might say that the metaphysical problematic of immediacy, of presence, and its concomitant rational deduction of organisational forms, would result in politics being fatally contained. Or, as Tronti states in the brief introduction appended to the publication of his lecture and seminar discussion, ‘L’autonomia del politico’: ‘we cannot go back to the philosophy of the economy’ – what Antonio Peduzzi calls the ‘first philosophy’ of vulgar Marxism.12 And so, to counteract the metaphysical closure, it was necessary to leap to another plane. What was at stake, then, in his reassertion of the role of the Party, was not a mere genuflection before the Great Lenin (an affirmation of some form of hyper-orthodoxy), but rather a call to recognise the need for a new terrain of struggle. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Tronti, 1971, p. 277. Tronti 1971, p. 279. Tronti 1971, p. 281. Tronti 1977, p. 6 and Peduzzi 2006, p. 14.


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To continue with this interweaving of Marxist categories with those of the critique of metaphysics, what Tronti was pointing to was the need to refuse the notion of the metaphysics of the base, that is, the metaphysical deceit or conceit that presents a univocal, spontaneous determination of the present state or the state of the present, by the metaphysical. Instead, what Tronti saw emerging in the 1970s was a lag, a being out of synch’, between the economic and the political; a lag that was functional to capital, that is, which enabled the state to absorb and temper socio-economic conflicts.13 It was precisely because the form they took on the political plane in this period was retarded – that is, out-of-synch with those struggles – that the system was able to absorb them. The effectiveness of this operation by capital was evident – and it explained the persistence of capitalism, as becomes clear when confronted with Tronti’s account of Marx’s reading of the manner in which capitalism was to be brought to an end: If we bring it about that the two-class system, from a purely economic struggle is raised to the level of confrontation, i.e. becomes a political fact, then the system has reached the conclusion of its cycle; and in this way one is able to move beyond it. In other words, it was precisely the . . . political unfolding of the classcontradiction, the process of moving from the relations of production to power . . . that was to lead the capitalist system to its death.14

The lag, then, that emerges between the planes (and it is not always the political that lags behind – as Tronti indicates when discussing the New Deal),15 the discontinuity produced, is precisely functional to the continuity of the system as a whole.16 The effect of it is that, however advanced the class-struggle is, to the extent that it sees the shift to the plane of politics as a deduction following from the correct organisation of socio-economic contradictions, its struggle remains discontinuous with the political – that is, it remains isolated, caught up within the objective, unable to attain political subjectivity.17 It is not the failure of immanence to attain the correctly vertical, transcendent, standpoint of intervention (for example, taking state-power); neither is it a case for the transcendent level of the state to be dissolved in immanence (for instance, via an exodus that leaves the transcendent to rotate idly in the void). It is simply that to treat the non-homologous as homologous, in this case, means condemning 13. Tronti 1977, pp. 10–13. 14. Tronti 1977, pp. 12–13. 15. Tronti 1977, p. 13. 16. Tronti 1977, p. 12. 17. This what Tronti calls a ‘diffetto soggettivo’, that is, a deficiency of subjectivity, Tronti 1977, p. 14.

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them to inefficacy by blocking the different articulations they are required to take on the different planes of their intervention. In such cases, the noncoincidence becomes dangerously structural in that, paradoxically, it is precisely this non-coincidence that prevents any hope in the automaticity or spontaneity of crisis.18 This assessment of the structuring relations opens the route to ‘the political’ being understood as that theoretical practice that sets out from the proper recognition of this non-coincidence and of politics as the practice of negotiation, manipulation, and intervention opened up by that recognition. Moreover, it is clear that the space of the political itself is produced through shifting relations between politics and the socio-economic.19 What becomes crucial, however, is the careful work of assessment of the levels of autonomy reached by the various strata of social organisation and their shifting articulations; as well as the evaluation of the points of fragility of the class-enemy and of the dispersal and disposition of forces that is opened up by this shift of terrain; an opening not only for the autonomy of the political but – something usually forgotten in the bitter disputes between the different strands of operaismo – also for the autonomy of class-struggles on the terrain of production, of social struggles on those of the social, and so on. In the final article in the 1971 edition of Operai e capitale, Tronti writes: He who delays loses. And take care: it is not a case of hurrying to prepare the response to the bosses’ move . . .; one must first foresee their move, in some cases suggest it, in every case anticipate it with the forms of one’s own organisation so as to render it not only politically unproductive for capitalist ends but productive of workers’ aims.20

This definition of revolutionary political action reaffirms the political as against any attempt to isolate the political within the state – or, for that matter, to reduce revolutionary political struggle to direct confrontation within the immediate process of production. The political response can vary: it can sometimes involve holding the planes apart and articulating struggles upon a specific terrain on which one’s own forces have greater possibility of winning; at others, it is the confusion of terrains that becomes essential so as to combine 18. Tronti 1977, p. 14. 19. As Tronti writes, ‘it is a case of reconstructing a process . . . of distinction and separation that instead of coming to an end, deepens its historical rationale . . . It is a process that, on the one hand, capital grants, and on the other hand, undergoes’ (Tronti 1977, p. 16). To that extent, I think that – perhaps surprisingly – Tronti’s position is not so different from the one that Thomas tries to extract from Gramsci. 20. Tronti 1971, p. 307.


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forces or to play-off a divided class-enemy. It may be the case that one can only speak of a revolutionary situation – that is, a total social transformation – when autonomy, non-coincidence is eroded, since, in revolution, struggle expands beyond a specific plane to affect all areas of the social order. But it is clear that one cannot always hope to advance through a mere refusal of noncoincidence. The decision on specific practices can only follow from a careful assessment of these various elements.

Thinking politics beyond immanence and transcendence What use, then, do the concepts of immanence and transcendence have as political categories? Immanence and transcendence become entirely redundant when assessing the political – even if we allow, which I would not – that classstruggle dictating political struggle captures what we understand by a politics of immanence, whereas by a politics of transcendence we understand Tronti’s idea of the autonomy of the political struggle from that of the class. That is to say, there is a rigidity (and one-sidedness) to the notion of immanence and transcendence that fails to grasp that politics is always fluid, contingent, and must be responsive in its forms and interventions to the concrete conditions of its operation. To that operation which deploys these categories for the purposes of thinking politics, we might respond with Marx’s words from his ‘Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality’. He writes there that: . . . where it succeeds in seeing differences, it does not see unity, and that where it sees unity, it does not see differences. If it propounds differentiated determinants, they at once become fossilised in its hands, and it can see only the most reprehensible sophistry when these wooden concepts are knocked together so that they take fire.21

So, while it is perfectly possible – indeed justified – to speak of the immanent emergence of transcendence, I am not sure it gives us any more than is said by the materialist genealogy of the ideal. Ultimately, however, I am not sure what either of these gives us in terms of the political. How, then, are we to think of revolutionary politics beyond immanence and transcendence? I think we can extract a set of conditions from what has been said that might help towards such a rethinking.

21. Marx 1976, p. 320.

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1) Political organisation cannot slavishly follow struggles within the immediate process of production – let alone as generalised socially, and vice versa. Such struggles take their character from the changes in capitalist restructuring and are, therefore, inevitably behind the curve – they are politically retarded. 2) Workers’ struggles have always been formidable information conduits for capital. It is not always clear they have been for the Left – who tend to use them (at best) as a material force to be organised.22 To that extent, ‘bourgeois science’ is often ahead of thinking on the Left .23 3) The weakening (if not disappearance) of struggle from the advanced sectors of the economy heightens ignorance regarding the status of the system for both capital and labour.24 To adapt a well-known saying of Kant’s, we can summarise these conditions in the following formula: Without struggle politics is empty. Without politics struggle is blind. But more crucially, beyond immanence and transcendence, the specificity of the political is linked to the emergence of a tendency towards a separation of planes upon which it is then asked to operate. It is to this present condition, not to a disguised ethics of immanence or transcendence, that politics must respond.

References Galli, Carlo 1996, Geneaologia della politica, Bologna: Il Mulino. Löwith, Karl 1995, ‘The Occasional Decisionism of Carl Schmitt’, in Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, edited by R. Wolin, New York: Columbia University Press. Marx, Karl 1976, ‘Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality’, in Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 6, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Mandarini, Matteo 2008, ‘Not Fear but Hope in the Apocalypse’, Ephemera, 8, 2: 176–81.

22. As Tronti writes in 1971: ‘ “Workers” struggles are an irreplaceable instrument of capitalist self-consciousness; without them, capital cannot see, cannot recognise its adversary, and so fails to know itself ’ (Tronti 1971, pp. 284–5). 23. For this reason, the disengagement from the workers’ inquiry method of co-research [conricerca] by later operaismo is deeply troubling, as it fails to advance an adequate revolutionary epistemology. 24. It would be interesting to test this hypothesis to find out to what extent the current crisis can be linked to the lack of information being passed on to capital regarding the material conditions of the exploited in the wake of the dismembering of organised worker-resistance.


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—— 2009, ‘Beyond Nihilism: Notes Towards a Critique of Left-Heideggerianism in Italian Philosophy of the 1970s’, in The Italian Difference, edited by Lorenzo Chiesa and Alberto Toscano, Melbourne: re.press. Peduzzi, Antonio 2006, Lo Spirito della politica e il suo destino, Rome: Ediesse. Thomas, Peter 2009, ‘Gramsci and the Political’, Radical Philosophy, 153, Jan/Feb: 27–36. Tronti, Mario 1971, ‘Poscritto di Problemi’, in Operai e Capitale, Turin: Einaudi. —— 1977, Sull’autonomia del politico, Milan: Feltrinelli. —— 2006, ‘Politica e destino’, in Politica e destino, Rome: Sossella Editore.


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Workerism and Politics Mario Tronti Centro per la Riforma dello Stato [email protected]

Abstract This is the text of Mario Tronti’s lecture at the 2006 Historical Materialism conference. It provides a brief, evocative synopsis of Tronti’s understanding of the historical experience and contemporary relevance of operaismo, a theoretical and practical attempt, embodied in journals such as Quaderni Rossi and Classe Operaia, to renew Marxist thought and politics in the Italy of the 1960s through a renewed attention to class-antagonism and the changing composition of labour. Keywords capitalism, communism, factory, Italy, labour-power, workerism

First, what is ‘workerism’? It is an experience that tried to unite the thinking and practice of politics, in a determinate domain, that of the modern factory. It looked for a strong subject, the working class, capable of contesting and putting into crisis the mechanism of capitalist production. I underscore its character as an experience. Young intellectual forces were involved, encountering the new levies of workers, introduced especially into the large factories of the Taylorist and Fordist phase of capitalist industry. What had taken place in the thirties in the US was happening in the sixties in Italy. The historical context for workerism was precisely that of the sixties of the twentieth century. In Italy, that period witnessed the take-off of an advanced capitalism, the passage from an agricultural-industrial society to an industrialagricultural one, with the migratory displacement of labour-power from the peasant South to the industrial North. They called it ‘neo-capitalism’. Mass-production and mass-consumption, social modernisation with the welfare-state, political modenisation with centre-left governments. Christian Democrats plus Socialists, a mutation in customs, mentality, behaviour. We were moving towards ’68, which in Italy was to be ’68–9, youth protest plus the ‘hot autumn’ of the workers, which © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010

DOI: 10.1163/146544609X12537556703232

M. Tronti / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 186–189

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saw a great shift in the balance of power between workers and capital, with wages impacting directly on profits. And this could happen also because of workerism, with its stress on the centrality of the factory and of the working class in the general social relation. Workerism was, therefore, a political experience, which mattered historically, that is in a determinate historical situation. It was a question of giving a new theoretical and practical form to the fundamental contradiction. The latter was identified from within the capitalrelation, namely in the relations of production, that is in what we called ‘the scientific concept of the factory’. Here, the (collective) worker, if he fought, if he organised his struggles, potentially held a kind of sovereignty over production. He was, or better, he could become a revolutionary subject. The central figure was the worker on the shop-floor, the assembly-line worker, within the Fordist organisation of the productive process and within the Taylorist organisation of the labour-process. Here, the alienation of the worker reached its peak. Not only did the worker not love his work. He hated it. The refusal of work became a lethal weapon against capital. By making itself autonomous, labour-power, as an internal part of capital, variable capital as distinct from constant capital, evaded its function as productive labour, planting its threat in the heart of the capitalist relation of production. The struggle against work sums up the meaning of the workerist heresy. Yes, workerism is a heresy of the workers’ movement. It should be rigorously conceived as internal to the great history of the workers’ movement, not outside, never outside. One of the many experiences, one of the many attempts, one of the many headlong rushes, one of the many generous revolts and one of the many glorious defeats. Following the example of Marx, who studied the laws of movement of capitalist society, we went to study the laws of movement of workers’ labour. Workers’ struggles have always pushed forward capitalist development, forcing capital to innovation, technological leaps, social transformation. The working class is not the general class. That is how the parties of the Second and Third International wanted to represent it. Marx’s phrase was right: the proletariat, emancipating itself, will emancipate the whole of humanity. This process has already happened, limited to the West alone. If emancipation is progress, modernisation, affluence, democracy, all of this is there, but in the service of a great conservative revolution, of a process of stabilisation of the capitalist system, which today, following its original vocation, takes on the dimensions of world-space; a world-order of domination that comes down from the heights of Empire, but also rises from below, incorporated by the bourgeois mentality of the majority.

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Today, democratic political systems provide the tribune for free consent to voluntary servitude. Workerism, the claim of the centrality of workers [centralità operaia] in the class-struggle, came up against the problem of the political. In the middle, between workers and capital, I found politics: in the form of institutions, the state, in the form of organisations, the party, in the form of actions, tactics and strategy. Modern capitalism would never have been born without modern politics. Hobbes and Locke come before Smith and Ricardo. There would have been no primitive accumulation of capital without the centralisation of the state under absolute monarchies. The history of England teaches us this. The first English revolution, the ugly one of Cromwell’s dictatorship, and then the beautiful, glorious one of the Bill of Rights, correspond to the two phases dictated by Machiavelli: the conquest of power and its administration are two different things. For the first, you need force; for the second, consensus. Free and competitive capitalism needed the liberal state, the capitalism of welfare needed the democratic state. Then, after the (provisional) solution of totalitarianism, fascist and Nazi, the synthesis of liberal democracy stabilised the domination of capitalist production. And, now, we are in the phase in which the model is exported on a global scale. Not everything works according to capital’s plans. Today, what is most interesting politically is the world. The ‘great transformation’, to use Polanyi’s expression, concerns the shift of the global centre of gravity from West to East. Internally, our European countries offer little of interest. It is difficult to feel a passion for politics with the likes of Blair or Prodi. But capitalism is an order and today, as Marx predicted, a world-order, continually revolutionising itself. And this is the interesting point. Look at the revolution it has brought to the world of work. To respond to the threat posed by the centrality of workers, it decided to destroy the centrality of industry and it abandoned, or revolutionised, the industrial society which had been the reason and the instrument for its birth and its development. When the assembly-island replaces the assembly-line in the great automated factory and we enter the post-Fordist phase, all other work changes with it, in the classical passage from the factory to society. This is the question of the day: Does the working class still exist? The working class as the central subject of the critique of capitalism. Not a sociological object but a political subject. And the transformations of work, and of the figure of the worker, from industry to service, from employment [lavoro dipendente] to self-employment [lavoro autonomo], from security to


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precarity, from the refusal of work to the lack of it, what does all this mean politically? It is this that we need to discuss. Workerism was the contrary of spontaneism. And the opposite of reformism. Closer, then, to the initial communist movement than to the classical or contemporary social democracies. Creatively, it renewed the link between Marx and Lenin. I ask myself if, in the changed conditions of contemporary work – fragmentation, dispersion, individualisation, precarisation – and of the figures assumed by the worker we can once again, here and now, articulate the analysis of capitalism with the organisation of alternative forces. And I do not have an answer. What I do know with certainty is that, without organisation, there will be no real, serious struggle, capable of victories. There is no social conflict capable of defeating the class-adversary without a political force. This is what we have learned from the past. If the new movements do not pick up the legacy of the great history of the workers’ movement, to take it forward in new forms, they have no future. Look. Capitalists are afraid of the history of workers, not of the politics of the Left. The first they cast down among the demons of hell, the second they welcomed into the halls of government. And we need to make the capitalists afraid. It is time that another spectre start to haunt not just Europe, but the world. The resurrected spirit of communism.


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Review Articles Oktyabr’skaya Revolyutsiya i Fabzavkomy [The October Revolution and Factory-Committees], edited by Steve A. Smith, London: Kraus International Publications, 19831 Oktyabr’skaya Revolyutsia i Fabzavkomy, Volume 3, Second Edition, edited by Yoshimasa Tsuji, Tokyo: Waseda University, 20012 Oktyabr’skaya Revolyutsiya i Fabzavkomy: Materialy po istorii fabrichno-zavodskikh komitetov, Volume 4, edited by Yoshimasa Tsuji, St Petersburg: St Petersburg University Press, 20023

Abstract The article re-examines the key debates concerning the relationship between the Russian factorycommittee movement and the Bolshevik Party and Soviet state in 1917–18. It does so with reference to a four-volume collection of documents in Russian on the history of the factorycommittees in 1917/18 which first began to be published in 1927 and completed publication in 2002. Rather than the traditional totalitarian view of a movement which was cynically manipulated and dominated by an authoritarian party, what emerges is a much more complex and dynamic relationship. The article in particular argues that the so-called bureaucratisation of the factory-committee movement after the October Revolution emerged out of the practical dilemmas faced by the committees in the economic chaos of 1917/18 and the factory-committee leaders’ own desires to promote a rational, planned alternative to that chaos. Keywords Russian Revolution, factory-committees, workers’ control, historiography of the Russian Revolution, bureaucratisation, Bolshevik Party

1. A republication with notes and introduction of Volumes 1 and 2 of Oktyabr’skaya revolyutsii i fabzavkomy, edited by P.N. Amosov, Moscow: VTsSPS, 1927. In the text below referred to as either Volumes 1 or 2. 2. A republication with introduction of the first edition of Oktyabr’skaya Revolyutsiya I fabzavkomy, Volume 3, edited by P.N. Amosov et al., Moscow: VTsSPS, 1929. In the text below referred to as Volume 3. 3. In the text below referred to as Volume 4. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010

DOI: 10.1163/156920610X532280

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Review Articles / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 191–207

The Factory-Committees and the Struggle over the Fate of the 1917 Russian Revolution4 Nationalisation of the banks, state-intervention in industry, credit-crisis, workers’ occupation of factories – these have been headline-phrases of the current economic crisis. While attempts to draw parallels with Russia in 1917 may be overblown, it is interesting to note from recent events how concepts which are normally associated with revolutionaryleft ideology can rapidly be adopted as part of the common language in an economic crisis and, in some cases, such as nationalisation of the banks, can even be advocated by mainstream-politicians. There are several lessons that can be derived from this recent experience which do have parallels with the experience of Russia in 1917. For political activists and historians, one lesson is that economic and social crises create situations where radical shifts in thinking can happen almost overnight, and the unthinkable becomes mainstream. In the case of the recent factory-occupations (Visteon, Vestas) and the establishment of factory-committees and factory-seizures in 1917, another lesson is that people at a grassroots-level are often capable of resorting to radical action and developing new types of politics outflanking the conventional thinking of political and labour-leaders, especially when their jobs and livelihoods are at stake. For historians of the Russian Revolution of 1917, recent events give us some insight into how the social and economic crisis of 1917 provided the context in which the radical-socialist ideas of the Bolshevik Party – nationalisation of the banks, industry and workers’ control and soviet-power – very quickly became acceptable as logical solutions to the problems of ordinary people. This latter point, concerning the relationship between the radicalisation of workers and the Bolshevik Party and its ideology, has been at the centre of the debate among historians of the Russian labour-movement in the 1917 Revolution since the 1920s. As we shall see, the debates about the factory-committee movement, in particular, revolve around three elements – the nature of the relationship between the Bolshevik Party and the factorycommittees, the motivations behind the development of the committees and the nature and causes of bureaucratic degeneration of the labour-movement after the October Revolution. Insights into all these debates and parallel examples of the ‘lessons’ mentioned at the beginning can be found in the series of documents covering the development of the Russian factory-committee movement in 1917/18, which are under review here. The project to publish these documents was started in the 1920s. The first three volumes were originally compiled by former leading members of the Central Council of Factory-Committees of Petrograd under the auspices of the Commission for the Study of the History of the TradeUnion Movement in the USSR. Volumes 1 and 2 were originally published in 1927 on the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. Their re-publication in Russian in 1983 by Kraus International Publications was undertaken under the auspices of the UK Study Group on the Russian Revolution. The editor, S.A. Smith, one of the leading Western historians of the Russian workers’ movement, provides extensive notes and an initial introduction to the volumes. Contained in them are the proceedings of the first four 4. I am grateful to the anonymous Historical Materialism reviewers of my original reviewarticle for their comments and suggestions. However, responsibility for the views and comments made here is entirely mine.


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conferences of the Petrograd Factory-Committees from May to October 1917, and the first All-Union Conference of Factory-Committees held on 17–22 October, just before the Bolshevik Revolution. Volume 3 was originally published in 1929 and was republished by Waseda University Press in Japan in 2001 with an introduction by Dr. Yoshimasa Tsuji, also a leading historian of the subject and a regular participant in the above Study Group. This volume consists of the proceedings of the fifth Conference of Petrograd Factory-Committees held on 15–16 November 1917. In the conference-reports in all three volumes, not all speeches are published in full. The original compilers blame ‘technical reasons’ (Volume 1, p. 78), e.g. failure by speakers to provide full summaries of their speeches. S.A. Smith, the later editor of Volumes 1 and 2, suggests that there has been some tampering with the speeches, especially those of non-Bolshevik activists. However, he suggests that this is far too inconsistent to suggest wilful political censorship (Volume 1, p. xxviii). Both Bolshevik and non-Bolshevik speeches are truncated and some non-Bolshevik speeches are reported at length. In addition, these volumes include a wide range of materials related to the development of the factory-committees in 1917, including resolutions and extracts from the protocols of other conferences, such as those of representatives of the factories of the artillery-department (Volume 1, pp. 28–31, Volume 2, pp. 97–103), various guidelines on how factory-committees were to be organised, reports of meetings at individual factories, instructions by the Central Council of Factory-Committees (CCFC) and, especially in Volume 3, guidelines from various institutions, trade-unions, the CCFC and the new Soviet government to factory-committees on how to go about the execution of workers’ control after the Bolshevik Revolution. The sources for most of these extra materials are contemporary reports in newspapers and journals, especially Novyi Put’, the journal of the CCFC. According to the original 1920s compilers, the most important source of materials was the former archive of the CCFC, held at the Communist Academy after the CCFC was abolished. The original CCFC-compilers argued that the rather ad hoc nature of much of the collection is largely a consequence of the desire to publish what was available in that archive rather being due to systematic censorship. However, as Diane Koenker, another leading historian of the Russian labour-movement, has pointed out, reports submitted ‘from below’ and selected for publication were most likely to be the ones which best reflected the values and expected behaviour of the time. They would be the reports which conformed to Bolshevik assumptions about the nature of the working class and its activists.5 One can see that the materials in these volumes do reflect the productivist ideology of Soviet socialism. In the reported debates, except for concerns about food-distribution, there is little or no reflection of the ‘ordinary’ life [byt] and concerns of workers beyond the organisation of work, labour-organisations and the production-process. In addition, apart from reference to pay-levels of unskilled workers, there is also little reflection of other divisions and conflicts in the workplace – whether generational or gender-based – or problems such as alcoholism, housing, health etc. While it is true to say that the Revolution- and CivilWar cohort of 1917–21 was likely to be different in its preoccupations from those before or after,6 it seems unlikely that, during the chaos of revolution, these wider issues of 5. Koenker 1995, p. 1440. 6. Koenker 2001, p. 809.

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concern would be entirely submerged by a commitment to politics, ideology and the work-process. Volume 4 of the materials is rather different from the other volumes in that it is not part of the original series compiled by the CCFC-leaders in the 1920s, but has been edited by Dr Tsuji and published by St. Petersburg University with the support of Waseda University in 2002. In addition, unlike the other volumes, it is based on the full stenographic report of the sixth Petrograd Conference of Factory-Committees held between 22 and 27 January 1918. In this case, we have a much more complete record of the proceedings than with the other conferences. Taken together with the other volumes, we now have a series of documents which chart the development and fate of the factory-committees either side of the October Revolution and give us insights into the development of the revolution ‘from below’. Although, as indicated above, the volumes were re-published in the West from 1983 onwards, the materials in Volumes 1 and 2 consisting of factory-committee conference and congress-protocols, had been available and used earlier by Western and Soviet historians.7 In researching for his dissertation on the factory-committees in Russia in 1917, Paul Avrich, the historian of Russian anarchism, made use of some of the materials.8 His work formed an important part of the ‘libertarian’ or anarchist interpretation of the labour-movement in the Russian Revolution. In his dissertation and in further articles,9 Paul Avrich argued that the factory-committee movement had been motivated by a vision of building a workers’ self-managed society from the bottom up based on the factory-committees. This view had been articulated by Russian anarcho-syndicalist activists within the factory-committee movement itself in 1917/18 such as Gregori Maximov. In his work, Paul Avrich had, in some ways, taken Maximov’s and other such views as the ‘authentic’ independent voice of the factory-committee movement. Paul Avrich’s interpretation was taken up in the early 1970s by Maurice Brinton who further laid out the ‘libertarian’ perspective on the Russian Revolution.10 For Brinton, the anarcho-syndicalist dream of the factory-committees was ultimately undermined by the centralism of Lenin and the Bolshevik Party. The Bolsheviks took over the leadership of the factory-committees in 1917 in part by deliberately allowing the Bolshevik policy on workers’ control to be confused with the anarchist slogan on workers’ control during most of 1917 in order to gain support. For Lenin and the Bolsheviks, however, the factory-committees were merely useful vehicles for smashing the old régime and for coming to power. Once in power, the centralist, statist nature of Bolshevik ideology revealed itself. The new Soviet government argued that the committees were contributing to the economic chaos and sought to bring them and the wider workers’ movement under state-control. Firstly, they brought the committees under the control of the trade-unions at the beginning of 1918 and then they tied the unions themselves to the state. In 1918, therefore, the workers’ movement was effectively bureaucratised as part of the new stateapparatus, expected to enforce management and state-policies rather than represent workers’ interests. The origins of bureaucratisation and dictatorship lay in Bolshevik politics

7. 8. 9. 10.

Kaplan 1968. Avrich 1961. Avrich 1963a, Avrich 1963b. Brinton 1970.


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and ideology – a view shared at the time by some of the earliest critics of the way the Russian Revolution was developing such as Victor Serge and Gregori Maximov.11 While coming from a radical perspective, the conclusions of this ‘libertarian’ critique ultimately coincided with the conclusions of the dominant Western Cold-War view of the Revolution. The latter has sometimes been called the ‘liberal’ perspective, but it fits well within the overall paradigm of the ‘totalitarian’ view which dominated mainstream Western interpretations of the Soviet Union. Like the libertarians, the totalitarian view was that the origins of the degeneration of the Revolution lay with the Bolshevik Party and its assertion of dictatorship and control from above very soon after October 1917. The key difference between them was that the ‘totalitarian’ perspective tended to concentrate on the leadership of the revolution. Workers were a rather undifferentiated mass at best, manipulated by political leaders rather than having their own independent aspirations. The Bolshevik Party had largely seized power in an unrepresentative left-wing coup, or, at best, on the backs of a mass-support which had been duped into thinking that they stood for further democratisation. Possibly the best, most recent example of this view was put forward by Richard Pipes. For him, the Bolshevik Revolution was a coup by a small minority without widespread social support.12 Given the Cold-War context for much of this writing, it is perhaps not surprising that the mainstream ‘totalitarian’ Western view concluded that the Soviet system, right from the beginning, was established through control and coercion from above and hence lacked any legitimacy. Unlike the ‘libertarians’, the ‘totalitarians’ tended to reject the idea that there was a genuine grassroots-revolution with its own motivations, ideals and agenda. Even if they did recognise grassroots-unrest, they argued that it had little to do with the transfer of power. Rebellion had been a feature of Russian history for centuries. It was the behaviour of the élites that counted for Revolution, whether the mistakes of the existing political élite or the leadership of the oppositional intellectual élite.13 In the late 1970s and 1980s, further research and publications began to emerge which challenged not only this dominant totalitarian view, but also the less well-known libertarian perspective by re-examining the revolution ‘from below’, and, in this context, the documents under review play an important role as a key-source. Overall, the totalitarian model of the Soviet Union and its origins had been too simplistic. Its emphasis on control and coercion from above had obscured the complexity of Soviet society and did not seem to explain why the system had survived so long, let alone been able to establish itself in 1917 and survive a civil war and external intervention. Equally, it had left academic research rather blinkered. Why bother to study Soviet trade-unions in great detail, when we all knew the answer, i.e., that they were tools of control from above by the Party? Similarly, the terror and purges of the 1930s had been seen as manifestations of Stalin’s paranoia. Paradoxically, in their views of the extent of social control from above, the ‘totalitarians’ had produced a mirror-image of what the Soviet state said about itself, i.e., that the Soviet Party and society were united and there was no significant social conflict within it. The 1970s, however, saw a change in attitudes towards the USSR. Many scholars became less convinced of the absolute 11. Serge 1972; Maximov 1935. 12. Pipes 1990. 13. An extreme example of this emphasis on conspiracy at the top can be seen in George Katkov’s study of the February Revolution (Katkov 1967).

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differences between the ‘democratic’ West on the one hand and the ‘totalitarian’ Soviet Union, on the other. Some even talked of ‘convergence’ of the two systems. The VietnamWar and the civil-rights movement had also meant many were now more critical of democracy in the West. In addition, détente in the 1970s itself gave some degree of legitimacy to the Soviet state. The Helsinki-Conference of 1975 was indicative of a new bi-polar world in which the US and the Soviet Union would manage their relationship through mutual recognition of spheres of influence. One of the consequences of this period was greater mobility of academics between the USSR and the West, and the limited opening up of Soviet archives to Western scholars. Intellectually, it meant that certain academics were more open to the idea that the Soviet system was established and survived through more than just coercion and terror and that perhaps also it was a far more contradictory beast, riven with political and social tensions. The new research on the Russian Revolution ‘from below’ which emerged from all this proposed a view of the relationship between the Bolshevik Party/Soviet state, on the one hand, and the working class, on the other, which was much more complex than either the ‘libertarians’ or the ‘totalitarians’ had proposed. In studying the grassroots-revolution in the factories, historians made use of some of the materials in these volumes under review. In particular, S.A. Smith, Diane Koenker and David Mandel argued that the increasing radicalism among workers in 1917 was not so much inspired by a grand project for workers’ self-management in its own right, but was more of a response to a worsening economic situation.14 Workers’ control was seen as a practical solution to their problems. The increasing support for the Bolshevik Party from the factory-committees was not due to manipulation but because the Bolsheviks were more effective in articulating workers’ anger and channelling it into a political programme. More than that, the concept of a division between party and class was a misrepresentation by both the ‘libertarians’ and the ‘totalitarians’. What was proposed was a more dynamic relationship between party and class. This is brought out most clearly in the work of Robert Service.15 After the collapse of the autocracy in February 1917, the more open political atmosphere meant workers from the factory-committees and shop-floor began to join the Bolshevik Party. In doing so, they not only changed the social composition of the Party, but they shifted the centre of gravity of the Party to a more radical perspective. At the beginning of 1917, the Left Bolsheviks in local areas like the Vyborg-region of Petrograd and Lenin in exile had been rather marginalised within the Party with their calls for a break with the Provisional Government, ‘All Power to the Soviets’ and nationalisation of significant parts of industry. By the middle of 1917, these ideas had become mainstream. This was not just to do with the ‘persuasive’ powers of Lenin over his colleagues or, indeed, merely because the economic crisis was worsening, but to do with the fact that the Bolsheviks had become a more proletarian party at its base, and the pre-1917 intellectual old guard, such as the ‘more conservative’ Kamenev, were now swamped by the new, more radical recruits from the factories. What emerges then in this later work is a much more dialectical relationship between party and class. The Party gave some kind of ideological and programmatic form to the fears and aspirations of workers, while, at the same time, worker-activists were radicalising the Party from below. We see this throughout 1917 and into the post-October period. After 14. Smith 1983a; Koenker 1981; Mandel 1983; Mandel 1984. 15. Service 1979.


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the October Revolution, Sovnarkom, the new government, advertised its policy of legalising workers’ control via the Decree on Workers’ Control. This meant that, for most of industry, private owners were supposed to stay in situ, but the factory-committees had a right to check on what they were doing and examine their accounts, etc. Only certain large-scale syndicates and key sectors would actually be nationalised. In practice, at a local level, workers and local party-activists often went beyond this and interpreted the October Revolution as meaning that they had carte blanche to take over the whole of industry. In the Urals, in particular, a stronghold of Left Communism within the Bolshevik Party, workers undertook wholesale nationalisation.16 In this and other areas, the grassroots-party was often more radical than the centre and dictating the pace of developments. The materials contained in these volumes tend to support this much more dialectical view of the relationship between the Bolshevik Party and the factory-committees. We see how the factory-committees’ ideas of workers’ control and greater intervention in industry became more radical as the economic situation worsened through 1917, and, from May onwards, there is majority-support for Bolshevik proposals at the factory-committee conferences in Petrograd. The materials in Volume 1 initially display more conciliatory attitudes to employers. In the Spring of 1917, the committees put forward workers’ economic demands, asking to be consulted on the hiring and firing of workers and setting up commissions to assist in obtaining supplies of fuel, etc. Only in the state-factories where there is a vacuum of management is there more active workers’ management. However, the later materials in Volume 1 and through Volume 2 show that as the economic crisis deepened from the early Summer, support grew for more interventionist control – the right to look at the financial books of factories, control of the movement of materials at the factory-gates, demands for more state-regulation and intervention. This occurs in an atmosphere of suspicion that employers are sabotaging industry and now deliberately targeting the workers’ movement – a Bolshevik interpretation of the crisis which seemed to make sense of what was happening. One key-emphasis which emerges from the material in all the volumes is the positive contribution made by the factory-committees to the maintenance of production in 1917/18. The committees are shown trying to protect factories against economic sabotage (Volume 3, pp. 224–40), helping to stave off the economic crisis of 1917 (Volume 2, pp. 71–81) or trying to tackle unemployment (Volume 3, pp. 244–52). This positive contribution is emphasised by the original editors themselves (see Kaktyn’ in Volume 3, p. 195). In part, this was deliberate. A major debate in the labour-movement at the time, and a key-theme running through these documents, concerns the relations and tensions between the trade-unions and the factory-committees. The February Revolution had seen not only the establishment of factory-committees for the first time, but also saw the revival of the trade-unions. Throughout 1917, there was tension between the activists in both organisations over their relative roles.17 Trade-unionists such as Veinberg of the Metalworkers’ Union and Lozovsky had justified their own institutions by suggesting that the factorycommittees were highly localised and therefore could not represent the broad interests of workers across an industry. The factory-committee leaders, as evidenced in these materials, 16. Flenley 1983, pp. 436–70. 17. See a full debate on the problem on 20 October 1917 at the first All-Russian Conference of Factory-Committees (Volume 2, pp. 188–95).

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protested that through their city-wide conferences, and through organisations such as the Central Council of Factory-Committees, they were well capable of taking a co-ordinated approach. In fact, they could represent workers as a whole, unlike the trade-unions which represented particular sectors of industry. As 1917 drew on, however, it became obvious that having two separate labour-organisations was a luxury. Moreover, the heightened economic crisis meant that there was increasing overlap between them. Earlier, the tradeunions had claimed that their particular contribution was the ability to negotiate wages across an industry rather than in individual factories. In the Summer of 1917, inflation began to undercut this function as the economic crisis meant that the key issue was keeping industry going and trying to regulate production. Both institutions had an interest in this. An understanding of this conflict provides the context for much of the debate at the sixth Petrograd Factory-Committee Conference (22–7 January 1918) which is contained in Volume 4. Speakers at the earlier first All-Russian Congress of Trade-Unions (7–14 January 1918) had criticised the factory-committees for lacking discipline and pandering to the whims of workers. That congress resolved that the solution to this and to the conflict of interests should be that the committees be subordinated to the trade-unions.18 For many, this marked the end of the independence of the factory-committees.19 Indeed, for the ‘libertarian’ view, this was a key part of the Bolshevik scheme for post-October control of the labour-movement – subordination of the committees to the trade-unions and the tying of the unions to the state.20 Dr Tsuji in his introduction to Volume 4 also seems to subscribe to the view that the committees effectively committed suicide.21 For him, the sixth Conference of Petrograd Factory-Committees at the end of January 1918 was ‘the last conference imbued with a spirit of freedom’ (Volume 4). However, the protocols of the sixth Petrograd Factory-Committee Conference in Volume 4 reveal a very different picture to the above views. The Conference was, in many ways, the committees’ response to the trade-unions. The committees reject the accusations made against them and agree to merger on the basis that it is the trade-unions which have changed their behaviour and become acceptable partners. As we see in this and the earlier volumes, the committees had long since been concerned with the organisation of production. Now that the trade-unions were also focussing on this, merger became possible. Moreover, the debates at the Conference show that the committees were not cowed in their radicalism. There were many calls for the confiscation of factories where necessary, and nationalisation of large-scale industry and also general support for the more radical interpretation of workers’ control put forward by the Central Council of Factory-Committees as opposed to that put forward by the tradeunion dominated All-Russian Council for Workers’ Control. This meant that, even after the merger, the factory-committees would still exercise control and regulation in industry. In many ways, it could be said that the situation re the relative powers of the two labourorganisations was the opposite of what is generally presented. It was the trade-unions who had lost their original role and whose organisations had been weakened by loss of personnel. Rather than the factory-committees ‘committing suicide’, the incorporation of the 18. 19. 20. 21.

Pervyi vserossiiskii s’ezd professional’nykh soyuzov, 7–14 yanvarya 1918g., pp. 236–8. Ferro 1980, pp. 173–7. Brinton 1970, p. 32. Tsuji in the introduction to Volume 4.


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committees into the structure of trade-unions would actually breathe life into the empty shells of the trade-unions.22 This latter point returns us to a key element in the historiographical debate about the Russian labour-movement – the nature and origins of the bureaucratisation of the Revolution. In the early 1970s, a debate opened up in the pages of the journal Critique concerning the relations between the Bolshevik Party and the factory-committees. Part of this focused on the origins of the bureaucratic degeneration. Maurice Brinton pursued a ‘libertarian’ perspective, as mentioned earlier. For him, the origins lay in Bolshevik politics and tactics as they deceived, took over and finally controlled the factory-committee movement.23 For Chris Goodey, however, the relationship between the Party and the committees was much more intertwined, and, if one is going talk about the process of bureaucratisation, then it has to include the factory-committees themselves as active participants in the process rather than passive victims. After all, they urged central regulation of the economy and indeed many of their leaders ended up as managers of the Soviet economic apparatus.24 In attempting to explain the reasons for this complicity of the factory-committees in the Soviet project of centralisation and control, Shkliarevksy argued, in a book published in 1993, that the factory-committee leaders have to be seen as a separate grouping in their own right. In the conflicts of 1917, especially with the trade-unions, they found that alliance with Lenin and the Bolsheviks strengthened their position. However, after October, this turned into a fatal embrace and they found themselves isolated both from their members and from other revolutionary activists. As a consequence, they were dependent on the Bolsheviks and vulnerable to incorporation into the new state-apparatus.25 Shkliarevsky’s view could be seen as part of a recent general harking back to a more traditional ‘totalitarian’ view of the nature of the relationship between the ‘leaders and led’ in the 1917 Revolution – an approach which, as we have suggested, ignores the dynamic relations between party, state, factory-committees and members highlighted by the scholarship of the 1980s. The materials in the volumes under review, however, show a complex engagement of the factory-committees with the early Soviet state, rather than acting as passive victims of it. If anything, it was the factory-committee leaders even more so than many Bolshevik leaders who were urging central regulation of the economy in order to deal with the economic chaos in late 1917/18. In many ways, this derives from their own vision of the functions of the factory-committees. What we come to see as the CommunistParty project of regulation and planning of the economy was something which the factorycommittee leaders were pushing early on in 1917 – ‘The factory-committees, as militant organisations, created by the working class for the regulation of economic life’, as the Organisation Bureau of All-Russian Conference of Factory-Committees called them (Volume 2, p. 138). Many of the materials in these volumes display the efforts of the factory-committees in organising the early regulation and management of the economy, both before and after the October Revolution. In Volume 3, we see Kaktyn’, one of the members of the CCFC and editors of the volume, argue that, after the Revolution, the 22. 23. 24. 25.

Flenley 1983, Volume 2, pp. 626–72. Brinton 1975. Goodey 1974 and 1975, arguing against Brinton 1970 and 1975. Shkliarevsky 1993.

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factory-committees had to move from the era of workers’ control to the regulation of production. Like many Bolsheviks within industry, worker-cadres in the factory-committees had supported the idea of soviet-power and socialism because it provided the opportunity to manage and regulate an economy efficiently for the benefit of all in a rational way. It would see an end to the waste, chaos and often deliberate sabotage of capitalism. As S.A. Smith remarks, ‘If one examines the debates and resolutions of the factory committee conferences it becomes apparent that the emphasis on centralised planned control of the economy became ever more pronounced…’.26 Hence, the Soviet policies of the 1920s and 1930s were not necessarily pursued on the backs of the defeat of the 1917 factory-committee movement, but, in some senses, were a fulfilment of what the factory-committee leaders had hoped for. Many of the ideas for the construction of the early Supreme Council of the National Economy, set up in December 1917 to co-ordinate the management of nationalised industry, had come from the leaders of the Central Council of Factory-Committees (Volume 3, pp. 175–6).27 Kaktyn’ argued that the committees saw themselves as ‘the basic cells of the higher regulating institutions of the national economy’ (Volume 3, p. 195). More than this, the factory-committee cadres provided a key source of scarce personnel for the management of Soviet industry. The career-patterns of many of them show a natural progression into the new economic apparatus of the Soviet state.28 In many ways, they became the natural managers of ‘socialism in one country’.29 Analysing the process of bureaucratisation involves not simply looking at the relationship between the Party and the factory-committees, but also the relationship between both of them and the ordinary workers. Here, again, the materials in the volumes reveal a complex picture. In the period up to October 1917, as indicated the materials reveal a certain merging of the factory-committees’, the Party’s and industrial workers’ views as the economic crisis develops. Throughout 1917, the Bolshevik Party and factory-committee leadership had been able to blame the economic crisis on the War, the incompetence of employers, deliberate sabotage by the latter and the irrationality and waste of capitalism itself. The solution lay in soviet-power and regulation and planning of the economy. Industrial workers came to support the idea of soviet-power to facilitate a solution to the economic crisis which would be to the benefit of themselves. This was especially urgent as the employers and the Provisional Government seemed be moving towards a solution which would be at the expense of workers, i.e. cutting back on production and curbing the labour-movement. In addition to supporting the idea of soviet-power, as 1917 wore on, factory-committee leaders displayed increasing confidence in their own ability to contribute to the management of the economy, and, indeed, the materials in these volumes reflect this. Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership shared this view. Even more than this, a positive, some would say utopian view,30 of the capacity of workers to manage the economy was continued into the 26. Smith 1983a, p. 157. 27. Chubar of the CCFC recalls developments in Narodnoe khozyiastov 1918, p. 8. 28. See, for example, the biographies in Lane 1995 – Derbyshev (Volume 1, pp. 257–8), Zhivotov (Volume 2, p. 1058) and others. 29. The Soviet historian V.Z. Drobizhev had published a number of works showing such a progression (see especially Drobizhev 1957, 1964, 1966). 30. White 2001.


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early months after October 1917. Lenin himself is seen as going through a ‘utopian’ stage in his belief in the ‘living creativity of the masses’, rather than being too hasty and prescriptive in constructing central-economic organs from above – something that even factory-leaders were urging him to do.31 In arguing with his critics at the 4 November 1917 session of the Executive Committee of the Soviet, he had urged that ‘Socialism is not created by instructions from above. Formal-bureaucratic automatism is alien to its spirit; socialism, living and creative is the creation of the masses themselves.’32 The Winter of 1917/18, however, saw a sea-change in attitudes and Volume 4 of the present materials is interesting because it captures this moment. The sixth Conference of Petrograd Factory-Committees in January 1918 is occurring at a time when the economic crisis is far worse than when the Bolsheviks took power. There is a real prospect of economic collapse, factories running out of fuel and the railways ceasing to function. Soviet-power and the management of the economy was going to be more problematic than anyone had expected. All this placed workers’ organisations in a terrible dilemma. The economic crisis meant that they could not remain aloof from management of the economy – nor, from what we have said, did they wish to. In addition, shortage of managerial personnel meant that, in many cases, factory-committee personnel actually had to take over as managers at a local level. At the sixth Conference, we see the committees resolving that, since the central authorities did not have the capacity, then the factory-committees would have to take over the responsibility for the management of nationalised factories (Volume 4). When it came to ‘central appointment’ of commissars or individual directors at factories, this often meant simply rubberstamping the former factory-committee individuals in situ. The problem was that, the more the committees participated in management, then the more they themselves became identified with the failures to deal with the economic problems. Adding to an increasing gulf between committees and members was, as Volume 4 reveals, the fact that already, by January 1918, the committees had to concern themselves with worker-discipline in the wider interests of sustaining the economy and keeping production going. They could not just articulate individual workers’ grievances against management. Not surprisingly, therefore, many workers turned away from the factory-committees, which now seemed to be behaving like the new bosses. New ‘independent’ workers’ organisations began to be set up.33 Many also turned away from the Bolshevik Party to support alternative political parties.34 What is interesting about this tide of discontent, however, is that, as William Rosenberg points out, the alternatives did not thrive in the way that alternatives to the Provisional Government and so forth had thrived in 1917. Moreover, the Bolsheviks were able to go on and win a civil war by 1921. For Rosenberg, the reasons are that the alternatives were either already discredited or not credible.35 In many ways, what was occurring across the board was a disillusionment with the promised utopia of 1917. For the factory-committees, ‘degeneration’ or ‘bureaucratisation’ occurred because of the practical dilemmas produced by the October Revolution. Managing 31. Zhivotov, President of the CCFC, recalling discussions at the time. See Ekonomicheskaya zhizn 1924, p. 3. 32. Lenin 1977, p. 57. 33. See the documents on the ‘independent’ workers’ movement in Bernshtam (ed.) 1981. 34. Brovkin 1983. 35. Rosenberg 1987.

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the ‘workers’ state’ in a period of extreme economic crisis, when the Revolution was faced by external and internal threats, forced them to choose between sitting on the sidelines, merely articulating workers’ grievances, or becoming effectively part of the economic management of the new state. The materials in these volumes show that, in making that choice, they followed their raison d’être since the beginnings of the Revolution. The factorycommittees had never been just interested in the simple representation of workers’ demands or in workers’ democracy for its own sake. They had believed that workers’ best interests were served by the committees’ involvement in keeping production going. In the end, they believed that the regulation, management and planning of production was the best solution to the practical problems of the economy, and soviet-power afforded the best possibility of this in the given extreme crisis. This, perhaps, then did more to determine the fate of the committees than any Bolshevik ‘conspiracy’, and, as a result, they must be seen as an active part of the so-called ‘bureaucratic degeneration’ of the Revolution, rather than as merely its passive victim. However, to follow Kevin Murphy’s point in his critique of the continuity-debate,36 this is not to say that the origins of Stalinism lie here. There is a huge qualitative difference between bureaucratisation and tensions in the relationships between the Party/state, factory-committees and their members in 1918 and the labour-control policies of 1929 onwards. One final consideration in reviewing these documents concerns the motivations for the initial collection and publication of the first three volumes in the 1920s. In the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s, the analysis of the history of the Revolution was very much a part of the often life-or-death political struggle over the survival, legitimacy and future development of the Soviet state itself. The reading of these volumes on the history of the factory-committee movement has to be undertaken with this in mind, i.e., why would former factory-committee leaders take time out in the 1920s for the publication of historical materials? Moreover, why would they think it important, as they suggest, that former factory-committee workers come forward with their memoirs and arrange evenings of reminiscences (Volume 3, p. 4), especially in the middle of an industrialisation-drive? One answer is that materials such as those contained in these volumes, which assert the grassroots-leadership of the Bolshevik Party, were a useful rebuff to the writings of nonBolsheviks such as Sukhanov who questioned that leadership throughout 1917.37 In addition, as we have suggested, the earliest sustained critique of the degeneration of the Bolshevik Revolution into dictatorship and the use of coercion had come from the Russian anarchists from 1918 onwards. Overall, these materials show that the factory-committees were supportive of the Bolshevik Party from early on in 1917. Moreover, they show how the factory-committee leaders contributed much in terms of ideas and effort to the early Bolshevik programme. An obvious gap in the first three volumes is the lack of materials on the factorycommittees before May 1917 – something which the original editors explain by saying that very few materials had been preserved from this first period (Volume 1, p. 8; Volume 3, p. 4). This gap, however, conveniently coincides with the period during and immediately 36. Murphy 2007. 37. Sukhanov 1955. Joel Carmichael in his preface to the 1955 edited version of Sukhanov’s work mentions the move against his interpretation by ‘Stalin’s faction’ at the end of the 1920s.


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after the February Revolution – a period when the political leadership of the workers’ movement was dominated by the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries. In writing the history of the Bolshevik Party in this period, Soviet historians from the 1920s onwards had difficulty in accounting for the apparent lack of leadership of the working class by the Bolshevik Party at this point. In particular, they had to answer the question why ‘the vanguard of the working class’ was not initially elected to the leadership of the soviets and trade-unions. One answer to this embarrassment had been to suggest that the Bolsheviks’ leadership was there, not in the soviets or trade-unions, where they would have been more visible, but more significantly working at a grassroots-level in the factories through workercadres. Helped by their omission of materials from this early period, the volumes can fit in with this interpretation which began to be promoted by Stalin within the Communist Party in 1922–3.38 The committees were – ‘led from the first days of their existence by the political vanguard of the proletariat – the Bolshevik Party’ (Volume 1, p. 40). Perhaps, however, the main purpose of the materials, especially in the late 1920s when they were published, was not to rebuff critics outside the Party but as a contribution to the political struggle within the Communist Party itself – a struggle for the soul and ultimate direction of the Party. In the 1920s, we see a variety of different memoirs and histories of the Revolution being written by leading figures in the Communist Party. This is paralleled also in the 1920s by the writing by Soviet historians of the history of the Russian labourmovement. Significant among the latter is the work of Anna Pankratova, who, in 1923, published the first study of the factory-committee movement 39 based on archival research, to be followed in 1927 by a further study of the factory-committees and trade-unions in 1917.40 The ultimate aim of herself and others, particularly her mentor at the time, the influential Mikhail Pokrovskii, head of History at the Institute of Red Professors in the 1920s, was to establish a major project on the history of the proletariat. However, this was no detached historical enterprise. She believed that the best scholarship served the needs of the Party and the working class, and, as Reginald Zelnik shows us, she and other historians were both participants in and ultimately victims of the political struggles from the 1920s onwards.41 The persecution of Pankratova in the early 1930s, the campaign against her mentor Pokrovskii and Stalin’s 1934 change of emphasis in history away from the socioeconomic approach may give us some explanation as to why the there was no Soviet attempt to continue the publication of the factory-committee materials in the volumes under review beyond 1929. In compiling their collection in the 1920s, the original editors would have been aware that they were part of the wider historical endeavour, and while ‘the Left’ was being hunted down in the academies in the mid-1920s, and ‘the Right’ in 1928–9, they must have also been mindful of the political significance of their efforts. To begin with in 1921, the Communist Party became embroiled in the struggle with the Workers’ Opposition, something which Lenin suggested threatened to split the Party. In the wake of the defeat of the Opposition, the party-leadership had also to deal with legacy of those who had 38. Longley 1992, pp. 369–70. 39. Pankratova 1923. 40. Pankratova 1927. 41. Zelnik 2005 (I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for drawing my attention to this book).

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participated in it. In particular, Alexander Shlyapnikov, one of the key leaders of the Opposition, had played a major role in the Bolshevik leadership in Russia at the beginning of 1917 while Lenin was still abroad. In addition, from 1922 onwards, Shlyapnikov was writing his own memoirs of the Revolution.42 This presented a range of dilemmas for the party-leadership. The opponents of the Bolsheviks were denying the vanguard-role played by the Bolsheviks, especially in the February Revolution and the months after. Shlyapnikov’s history asserted that there was indeed Bolshevik leadership in these early days, i.e. himself and the other party-leaders left in Russia. The key-problem was how to undercut Shlyapnikov without agreeing with the opponents of the Bolsheviks that the latter provided no leadership. The idea of worker-cadres sustaining the leadership at a grassroots factory-level therefore provided a useful alternative.43 The materials in these volumes can therefore be seen as the product of a deliberate attempt to promote this view by encouraging a range of memoirs by factory-cadres and histories of the factories and committees in the 1920s. The idea of factory-level worker-cadre Bolshevik leadership throughout 1917 from the beginning also had the advantage from the mid-1920s of undercutting Leon Trotsky’s depiction of the course of the Revolution. The latter had tended to downplay the early part of 1917, perhaps not surprisingly, since he joined the Party in August 1917. In the late 1920s, a new conflict arose in the context of the New Economic Policy. The drive to industrialise increased the pressure placed on workers to increase production. Not surprisingly, this led to strikes. The trade-unions were a useful scapegoat, even though they pursued a no-strike policy and were Bolshevik-controlled. Caught in a no-win situation, they at one and the same time had to support government-policy and management on wages etc., and yet ensure that they listened to their members’ interests. Strikes were seen a sign of their failure. At trade-union congresses, leaders such as Tomsky accused the unions of bureaucracy and being out of touch with their membership.44 The factory-committees having been incorporated into the trade-unions in 1918 as their primary organisation were the crucial link between the members and the union.45 In 1925–9, the Central Council of Trade-Unions (under whose auspices the first three volumes of these materials were published) would have had good reason to remind the rest of the Party of the democratic origins of the primary organs of the trade-unions, i.e. the factory-committees and the positive way they both represented workers’ interests and made a positive contribution to the regulation and management of the economy. Finally, the materials, as published, can be seen as part of a wider ideological struggle in the 1920s. The beginnings of the collection of the materials in 1925 and their final publication in 1927 and 1929 coincided with the development of the doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’, and, eventually, the turn towards full-scale planning and rapid industrialisation. The apparent failure of revolution in Europe for the time being, coinciding with the defeat of the Left Opposition, meant that the New Economic Policy was increasingly seen as a policy not simply for restoration of the economy after the Civil War but as the basis for the promotion of industrialisation. National Bolshevism, which had 42. Shlyapnikov 1921/22, 1923–31. 43. Longley 1992. Longley himself does not mention these volumes as part of the campaign but they fit in well with the timing and tenor of it. 44. Sorenson 1969, p. 206. 45. Sorenson 1969, p. 192.


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always been a strong current in 1917/18, would now assert itself. The implications of this were that Russia would have to begin the construction of socialism without the help of the international working class. It was therefore useful to show at such a time just how positive and visionary the working-class leaders had been so far in the construction of the workers’ state. The ideology of the factory-committee leaders fitted in well with the mood of socialism in one country. What is striking throughout these volumes is the lack of an internationalist perspective at the core of the factory-committee project. There is no sense that these labour-leaders were expecting to hold the fort until a German and international revolution. Instead, there is clear confidence that they knew how to run the national economy themselves. For them, socialism was not mainly about international revolution or even about workers’ democracy for its own sake. It was about the opportunity for rational organisation, planning and regulation of the economy in the real interests of the working class. The tragedy for some of them is that the distorted version of this vision which emerged in reality was to come to destroy them.46 Reviewed by Paul Flenley University of Portsmouth paul.fl[email protected]

References Avrich, Paul H. 1961, The Russian Revolution and the Factory Committees, Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University. —— 1963a, ‘The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control’, Slavic Review, 22, 1: 47–63. —— 1963b, ‘The Russian Factory Committees in 1917’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 11: 161–82. Bernshtam, Mikhail S. (ed.) 1981, Nezavisimoe Rabochee Dvizhenie v 1918 godu: dokumenty i materialy, Paris: YMCA Press. Brinton, Maurice 1970, The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control, 1917 to 1921: The State and CounterRevolution, London: Solidarity. —— 1975, ‘Factory Committees and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat’, Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, 4, 1: 78–86. Brovkin, Vladimir 1983, ‘The Mensheviks’ Political Comeback: The Elections to the Provincial City Soviets in Spring 1918’, Russian Review, 42, 1: 1–50. Drobizhev, Vladimir Z. 1957, ‘K istorii organov rabochego upravleniya predpriyatiyami v 1917–1966gg’, Istoriya SSSR, 3: 38–56. —— 1964, ‘Sotsialisticheskoe obobshchestvlenie promyshlennosti v SSSR’, Voprosy Istorii, 6: 43–64. —— 1966, Glavnyi shtab sotsialisticheskoi promyshlennosti. Ocherki istorii VSNKh, 1917–1932, Moscow: Izd-vo Mysl. Ekonomicheskaya zhizn’ 1924, 25 January: 3. 46. Of the original CCFC-compilers, Amosov was arrested in 1937 and died in prison; Chubar died in prison in 1939; Skrypnik committed suicide in 1933 having been accused of Ukrainian nationalism. Derbyshev was retired in 1933 and died in 1955. Zhivotov retired in 1949.

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Flenley, Paul 1983, Workers’ Organisations in the Russian Metal Industry, February 1917–August 1918: A Study in the History and Sociology of the Labour Movement in the Russian Revolution, Ph.D. thesis, two volumes, University of Birmingham. Goodey, Chris 1974, ‘Factory Committees and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1918)’, Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, 3, 1: 27–47. —— 1975, ‘Factory Committees and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Additional Notes’, Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, 5, 1: 85–90. Kaplan, Frederick 1968, Bolshevik Ideology and the Ethics of Soviet Labour 1917–1920: The Formative Years, London: Peter Owen. Katkov, George 1967, The February Revolution, London: Longmans. Koenker, Diane 1981, Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution, Princeton: Princeton University Press. —— 1995, ‘Men Against Women on the Shopfloor in Early Soviet Russia’, The American Historical Review, 100, 5: 1438–64. Koenker, Diane 2001, ‘Fathers Against Sons: The Problems of Generations in the Early Soviet Workplace’, The Journal of Modern History, 73, 4: 781–810. Lane, Thomas A. (ed.) 1995, Biographical Dictionary of European Labour Leaders, two volumes, London: Greenwood Press. Lenin, Vladimir I. 1977 [1917], Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [Collected Works], Fifth Edition, Volume 35, Moscow: Izd. Politicheskoi Literatury. Longley, David 1992, ‘Iakovlev’s Question, or the Historiography of the Problem of Spontaneity and Leadership in the Russian Revolution of February 1917’, in Revolution in Russia: Reassessments of 1917, edited by Edith Frankel, Jonathan Frankel and Baruch Knei-Paz, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mandel, David 1983, The Petrograd Workers and the Fall of the Old Regime: From the February Revolution to the July Days, 1917, London: Macmillan. —— 1984, Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power ( July 1917–June 1918), London: Macmillan. Maximov, Gregori 1935, Bolshevism: Promises and Reality, Chicago: Free Society Group of Chicago. Murphy, Kevin J. 2007, ‘Can We Write the History of the Russian Revolution? A Belated Response to Eric Hobsbawm’, Historical Materialism, 15, 2: 3–19. Narodnoe Khozyiastov 1918, 11: 8. Pankratova, Anna M. 1923, Fabzavkomy Rossii v bor’be za sotsialisticheskuyu fabriku, Moscow: Krasnaya nov’. —— 1927, Fabzavkomy i profsoyuzy v revolyutsii 1917 goda, Leningrad: Gosizdat. Pervyi vserossiiskii s’ezd professional’nykh soyuzov, 7–14 yanvarya 1918g, stenograficheskii otchet [1918], Moscow. Pipes, Richard 1990, The Russian Revolution, 1899–1919, London: Collins Harvill. Rosenberg, William G. 1987, ‘Russian Labor and Bolshevik Power: Social Dimensions of Protest in Petrograd after October’, in The Workers’ Revolution in Russia 1917, edited by Daniel Kaiser, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Serge, Victor 1972 [1930], Year One of the Russian Revolution, London: Holt, Reinhart and Winston. Service, Robert 1979, The Bolshevik Party in Revolution, 1917–1923: A Study in Organisational Change, London: Macmillan. Shkliarevsky, Gennady 1993, Labor in the Russian Revolution: Factory Committees and Trade Unions, 1917–1918, New York: St Martin’s Press. Shlyapnikov, Aleksandr G. 1921/22, Kanun semnadtsatogo goda, two volumes, Moscow. —— 1923–31, Semnadtsatyi god, four volumes, Moscow.


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Smith, Steve A. 1983a, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories 1917–1918, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (ed.) 1983b, Oktyabr’skaya Revolyutsiya i Fabzavkomy [The October Revolution and FactoryCommittees], London: Kraus International Publications. Sorenson, Jay B. 1969, The Life and Death of Soviet Trade Unionism, New York: Atherton Press. Sukhanov Nikolai N. 1955 [1922–3], The Russian Revolution, edited by J. Carmichael, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tsuji, Yoshimasa (ed.) 2001, Oktyabr’skaya Revolyutsia i Fabzavkomy, Volume 3, Second Edition, Tokyo: Wasada University. —— 2002, Oktyabr’skaya Revolyutsiya i Fabzavkomy: Materialy po istorii fabrichno-zavodskikh komitetov, Volume 4, St Petersburg: St Petersburg University Press. White, James 2001, Lenin: The Practice and Theory of Revolution, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Zelnik, Reginald 2005, Perils of Pankratova: Some Stories from the Annals of Soviet Historiography, Seattle: University of Washington Press.

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Latin American Neostructuralism: The Contradictions of Post-Neoliberal Development, Fernando Ignacio Leiva, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008 Abstract This review-essay offers an extended engagement with Fernando Ignacio Leiva’s Latin American Neostructuralism, one of the most important contributions to contemporary Latin-American political economy. It situates Leiva’s critique of neostructuralism against the wider backdrop of Latin America’s contradictory turn to the Left since the late 1990s, and compares the treatments of change in Latin-American capitalism over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries developed by the schools of classical structuralism, neostructuralism, and neoliberalism. The essay finds that Leiva’s critique of neostructuralism and his explanation for its influence on large segments of the region’s Left is the best work on the topic currently available in English. Leiva systematically demolishes neostructuralism’s claim to be a progressive alternative to neoliberalism. At the same time, it is argued that Leiva’s theoretical framework is compromised by its uncritical adoption of categories from French regulation-theory, and its nostalgia for elements of classical structuralism and its associated development-model of import-substitution industrialisation. Further, it is found that Leiva’s implicit attachment to certain myths propagated by the Marxism of the Second and, especially, Third Internationals regarding the national bourgeoisie’s role in Third-World capitalist development leaves him unduly dogmatic about the necessity, and unduly optimistic about the possibility, of building a progressive stage of capitalism in Latin America today. The same mythologies prevent Leiva from drawing the appropriate conclusions as regards the urgent necessity of rebuilding the socialist project in Latin America and internationally. Keywords Latin America, political economy, neostructuralism, structuralism, neoliberalism, postneoliberalism, Left

Neostructuralism, Neoliberalism, and Latin America’s Resurgent Left A new Latin-American Left In the early 1990s, the Latin-American Left had reached its twentieth-century nadir. Anyone who had predicted then that less than a decade later the region would witness a resurgence in extra-parliamentary radicalism, a tide of electoral victories for left and centre-left parties, and a renewal of debates around socialism and the future of anticapitalism, would have been subjected to mockery and ridicule – apparently with good reason. The brutality of bureaucratic authoritarianism in the Southern Cone in the 1960s and 1970s, and counter-insurgency in Central America in the early 1980s, wiped out much of the Left in these areas. The debt-crisis of the 1980s ushered in a quarter-century of neoliberal restructuring that saw labour-unions and working-class power enter steep decline. The fall of the Soviet Union and its client-states in Eastern Europe, the subsequent isolation of Cuba, and the electoral demise of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1990, made any talk of a viable socialism appear hopelessly romantic. Many social movements retreated into parochial, localised concerns at the neighbourhood- and community-levels, as the objective of conquering power on the national stage seemed far beyond reach. Non-governmental organisations, progressive intellectuals, and most left parties in Latin America turned © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010

DOI: 10.1163/156920610X532299


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sharply to the right, accepting the basic presuppositions of the Washington-Consensus as the new parameters for reasonable debate and policy-proposal. Economic growth over the course of the 1980s and 1990s – the core neoliberal epoch of Latin America’s ‘silent revolution’ – included a modest boom (1991–7), positioned between ‘the lost decade’ of the 1980s and the ‘lost half-decade’ between 1997 and 2002. The neoliberal policy-era in Latin America progressed through the ‘deep recession’ of 1982–3, the ‘false dawn’ of a temporary and meagre recovery in positive per capita growth from 1984 to 1987, the increasing depth and breadth of neoliberal policy-implementation between 1988 and 1991, and a thorough attempt to consolidate the model throughout the 1990s and early 2000s in the midst of increasing contradictions and crises – the Mexican Peso-Crisis in 1994–5, Brazil’s financial breakdown in 1998 in the wake of the Asian and Russian crises, and, most dramatically, the Argentine collapse which reached its apex in December 2001.1 Following twenty years of debt re-scheduling, the region’s total debt was approximately $US 725 billion by 2002, twice the figure at the onset of the debt-crisis.2 Poverty-rates between 1980 and 2002 increased from 40.5 per cent of the population in 1980 to 44 per cent in 2002. In absolute figures, this translated into an increase of 84 million poor people across the region, from 136 million in 1980 to 220 million in 2002.3 Latin America continued to be the most unequal part of the world, such that, in 2003, the top 10 per cent of the population earned 48 per cent of all income.4 A brief uptick in growth occurred beginning in 2004, as a result of high commodity-prices, but, with the onset of the global crisis of 2007–9, all of this has ended abruptly.5 It is now widely understood that during ‘the twenty-five years of the Washington Consensus, the Latin American economies have experienced their worst quarter century since the catastrophic second quarter of the nineteenth century’.6 Measured by Gross Domestic Product per capita, lifeexpectancy, and literacy in the twentieth century, Latin America performed best between 1940 and 1980, the era of import-substitution industrialisation (ISI). In the region’s six largest economies, annual GDP-growth in the ISI-period was over four-and-a half times greater than between 1980 and 2000, the years of orthodox neoliberalism.7 Surveying the political landscape today, the balance of social forces has clearly shifted quite dramatically since the early 1990s. Social contradictions of the neoliberal model generated a series of crises in the closing years of the 1990s and opening moments of the current decade. Popular uprisings overthrew heads of state in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, and elsewhere, as rural and urban insurrection across the region began to mitigate the impunity with which the ruling classes and imperialism had set the economic and political agenda.8 This popular discontent with neoliberalism also manifested itself through the

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Green 2003, pp. 72–118. Green 2003, p. 117. Damián and Boltvinik 2006, p. 145. Reygadas 2006, p. 122. Aguiar de Medeiros 2009, p. 132; see also Katz 2009. Coatsworth 2005, p. 137. Love 2005, p. 107. Katz 2007, p. 29.

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ballot-box, beginning with the election of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in 1998, and culminating most recently in the March 2009 election of Maurico Funes in El Salvador. However, alongside the relatively hopeful, if contradictory, Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, the so-called pink tide also includes the likes of Ignacio Lula da Silva in Brazil, Michelle Bachelet in Chile, Nestor Kirchner (and now Cristina Fernández de Kirchner) in Argentina, and Tabaré Vásquez in Uruguay, among other self-proclaimed leftists. They tend to speak out rhetorically against neoliberalism, while, in practice, enact only ‘mild redistributive programmes respectful of prevailing property relations’, and have proved capable of pushing ‘forward a new wave of capitalist globalization with greater credibility than their orthodox neoliberal predecessors’.9 In these mildly reformist cases, there has been no meaningful redistribution of income or wealth, much less a challenge to capitalist social-property relations. The ultimate trajectory of the pink tide depends on the capacities of the Left to counter belligerent right-wing oppositions and ongoing imperialist meddling in the sovereign affairs of Latin-American nations; just as crucial, though, will be the course of the battle between different currents within the Left seeking to gain hegemony over the antineoliberal bloc. Latin America ‘has moved into an historic conjuncture in which the struggle among social and political forces could push the new resistance politics into mildly social democratic and populist outcomes’, William I. Robinson points out, ‘or into more fundamental, potentially revolutionary ones’. Results ‘will depend considerably on the configuration of class and social forces in each country and the extent to which regional and global configurations of these forces open up new space and push such governments in distinct directions’.10 Historicising Latin-American neostructuralism Fernando Ignacio Leiva’s excellent Latin American Neostructuralism makes an important contribution to clearing up one component of these muddy theoretical and analytical waters by surveying the most influential paradigm of political economy that lies behind the social-democratic current within the region’s latest turn to the Left. The book sets out to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of Latin-American neostructuralism, the depth and breadth of its influence in reshaping Latin America’s political economy, its overarching implications for Latin-American politics and society, and the extent to which it represents an alternative to neoliberalism. Leiva attempts to tackle these questions ‘by systematically examining Latin American neostructuralism’s key concepts, modes of theorising, and politico-economic outcomes while locating its ascendance within the current historical context, a time of profound restructuring of Latin American capitalism and the world economy’ (p. xviii). The broader objective is to make a contribution to the revitalisation of radical-political economy in and about Latin America which has been hammered not only by neoliberalism, but also by the powerful and growing sway of neostructuralist ideas propagated by the Santiago-based United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, or ECLAC.

9. Robinson 2008, p. 292. 10. Robinson 2007, p. 148.


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Latin American Neostructuralism focuses entirely on the institutional, intellectual and policy-production generated by ECLAC and ECLAC-associated intellectuals over the last two decades. The book does not purport to situate this specifically Latin-American development within the wider international shift in economics toward a post-WashingtonConsensus, exemplified in World-Bank publications throughout the late 1990s and 2000s, the state-institutionalist sociology of Peter Evans and Atul Kohli, and the popularised writings of economists such as Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Wade, and Ha-Joon Chang, among others. The weakness of this approach is that it tends to exaggerate the particularity of what is transpiring in the field of development-economics in Latin America, and misses an opportunity to flesh-out comparisons with similar intellectual traditions developing elsewhere, particularly in East Asia. Having said that, Leiva’s choice to circumscribe his analysis to ECLAC and the Latin-American setting results in what is, to my knowledge, the most penetrating and rigorous treatment of the topic available to date in English. Drawing from Marxist traditions within both economics and literary theory, Leiva moves back and forth between the historical and material changes in Latin-American capitalism over the last three decades and the ways in which ECLAC-publications have played a central role in legitimising existing power-relations. For Leiva, ‘the historical relationship between discursive and material practices has to be firmly planted at the center of analysis’ (p. xxv, emphasis in the original). The analytical framework of Latin American Neostructuralism draws in part from the economic schools of French regulation and (its American incarnation) social structures of accumulation. The concepts of régime of accumulation, mode of regulation, and mode of socialisation, in particular, are employed to ‘help us to comprehend that economic ideas must operate beyond the strictly economic realm if societal structures are to be successfully altered in a lasting manner’ (p. 43). Leiva begins by demonstrating the importance of understanding the ideological power of neostructuralism if we are to come to grips with the contradictions inherent in Latin America’s left-turn over the last decade. Next, the analysis moves to the conceptual innovations Latin-American neostructuralism has introduced to counter orthodox neoliberalism. Particularly, Leiva weighs the meaning of the neostructuralist claim that export-oriented economic growth, equity, and democracy can be mutually reinforcing so long as the appropriate governmental strategies and institutional changes are introduced. Here, the focus is on neostructuralism’s principal theorisation of the state, as well as the paradigm’s core-concepts – systemic competitiveness, technical progress, proactive labourflexibility, concerted action, and virtuous circles. Stepping back, Leiva then historicises the development of Latin-American neostructuralism over two chapters by tracing its relationship to the long shifts in Latin-American development-strategies from ISI between the 1930s and 1970s, and export-oriented development (EOD) between the 1980s and the present, as well as the associated economic theories of structuralism and neoliberalism. Tightening the analytical lens, Leiva grounds this wider historicisation in a separate chapter devoted to a specific examination of the differentiated intellectual traditions of structuralism and neostructuralism in the cases of Brazil and Chile. He explains the theoretical variations he finds in these social formations by pointing to different facets in the politico-economic histories of each country, and their particular experiences of capitalist development and insertion into the world-market. The middle-sections of the book return to the core-concepts and claims at the heart of neostructuralism and balance them against the historical record of Latin-American

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capitalism over the last 30 years. Leiva makes a series of compelling arguments against the ‘foundational myths’ and ‘acts of omission’ in ECLAC’s publications – that LatinAmerican countries can achieve the ‘high road’ to globalisation (growth with equity) by merely adopting the right set of policies; that, through ‘open regionalism’, it will become clear that there are no contradictions between the development-needs of Latin-American majorities and the rules integrated into the World Trade Organisation, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the proliferating bilateral free-trade agreements; and that the state is a neutral actor and thus state-promotion of consensus, participatory governance, and social capital will ensure growth, equity, and harmonious societies without having to transform existing class-structures. In challenging these myths, he draws on a brief but often illuminating analysis of the ‘deep structure’ of LatinAmerican capitalism – the strategies of transnational capital in the region, new forms of unequal exchange, the relationship between financialisation and accumulation under neoliberalism, and the precarisation and informalisation of labour-capital relations. In the last three chapters of Latin American Neostructuralism, Leiva returns, first, to Chile, the paradigmatic neostructuralist success-story, and, with subtlety and skill, unveils the dark underbelly of continuity in the country’s economic policies, systems of inequality, and exploitation between Augusto Pinochet’s reign of terror (1973–89) and the string of Christian-Democratic/Socialist Concertación-governments since. Second, he revisits in more depth and detail the relationship between the neostructuralist approach to political economy and the development-strategies of various left governments in Latin America today. Finally, Leiva offers some reflections on the future of neostructuralism in the region, and the paths through which a restoration of radical political economy might be achieved in its place. He tries to show how this new radical political economy, in turn, might help to inform a more profound transformation of Latin-American politics and society by influencing the course of the most recent left-turn. Structuralism, neoliberalism, and neostructuralism An important part of Leiva’s project is to distinguish between structuralist, neoliberal, and neostructuralist schools of thought within Latin-American development-economics. The most influential figure in classical Latin-American structuralism was undoubtedly the Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch, who, in his 1949 monograph, The Economic Development of Latin America and its Principal Problems, first conceived of the unequal relationship between an industrialised centre and an agrarian, dependent periphery in the world-economy. Within this international division of labour, countries that were dependent, agricultural exporters would tend to experience declining terms of trade, structural unemployment as a consequence of the limits to growth in traditional exportsectors and subsequent non-absorption of dispossessed peasant-labour, and tradeimbalances as a result of excessive importation of industrial goods and export of only raw agricultural and mineral-goods. Prebisch headed Argentina’s first central bank between 1935 and 1943 and was widely recognised for his expertise in Keynesian economics by the 1940s, but his influence in Latin-American development-economics really came to the fore during his time as executive secretary of ECLAC between 1949 and 1963, and then


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first secretary-general of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) between 1964 and 1969.11 ECLAC as an institution became the established heavyweight in Latin-American economic research in the 1950s and 1960s, and generated decisive policy-advice for key figures in the region’s national banks and finance ministries over these decades. ECLACinstitutions in Chile and affiliated institutions elsewhere in Latin America developed educational programmes on structuralist thought through which they ‘trained and indoctrinated middle-ranking Latin American personnel in central banks, development and finance ministries, and university faculties’. By the 1960s, a large number of famous structuralist economists, sociologists, and political scientists taught alongside the likes of Prebisch in these programmes. The teachers included Aníbal Pinto, Jorge Ahumada, Antonio Barros de Castro, Maria da Conceição, Carlos Lessa, Leopoldo Solís, Osvaldo Sunkel, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Torcuato di Tella, Rodolfo Stavenhagen, Aldo Solari, and Francisco Weffort, among others.12 While the structuralists hardly created ISI, they did play an essential part in legitimising existing ISI development-programmes, and providing research, analysis, and a theoretical framework for pushing the model further and consolidating it throughout Latin America. US-imperialism, for its part, tried to prevent the creation of ECLAC and attempted to discredit the institution once it was established, fearing structuralist doctrine might radicalise and promote an acceleration of state-owned enterprises, provide subsidies for domestic as against foreign capital, and advocate an ever-larger sphere of state-planning within the economy. While American foreign-affairs officials opposed ECLAC, they enthusiastically promoted ISI and the opportunities it provided US-multinationals to leap tariff-walls and build protected plants oriented toward growing domestic markets.13 Structuralism, correctly constrained, in other words, congealed nicely with American capital’s objectives in the region. 11. Love 2005, p. 101. 12. Love 2005, pp. 116–18. 13. Coatsworth 2005, pp. 132–3. See also Maxfield and Nolt 1990 on US-sponsorship of ISI in this period. ‘A wave of nationalization in the 1960s and early 1970s led to state control of the strategic sectors of the economy’ across many countries in Latin America, Petras and Veltmeyer point out. ‘In some cases imperial firms were generously compensated and many found lucrative new investments. Tariff barriers fostered national industrialization but did not prevent multinational corporations (TNCs) from setting up branch plants. However, the TNCs generally had to abide with legislation relating to content, employment of nationals, and foreign exchange requirements. The TNCs’ direct investments and their repatriation of profits were also restricted, forcing them to resort to subterfuges such as transfer pricing so as to have profits surface in less restrictive economies’. Under the national-populist régimes of this period, TNCs were able to ‘make substantial profits on invested foreign capital and operations. However, in the wake of the Cuban revolution, new and more radical measures were on the agenda of many governments, creating conditions for political reaction. A new class of wealthy business operators and bankers chafed at the labor legislation and the controls placed on their capital, as well as at measures designed to redistribute productive resources such as land. This class turned towards both the armed forces and the TNCs for support in breaking the populist alliance and to secure greater overseas market shares, financing for ventures and access to new

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The hegemony structuralism enjoyed within Latin-American economic thought and policy, and the legitimacy ECLAC achieved as an agenda-setting institution, suffered massive blows with the uneven geographical expansion of neoliberalism on a world-scale beginning in the mid-1970s. At the international level, neoliberalism advanced as a political project of the ruling classes in the advanced-capitalist countries – especially in the US – to create or restore capitalist class-power in all corners of the globe in response to the crisis of embedded liberalism in the late 1960s, the decline in profitability and the growth of stagflation by the 1970s, and the rise of leftist political threats to capital in the shape of radical popular struggles, labour-movements, and peasant-insurgencies across large parts of the world during that period.14 The debt-crisis of the 1980s opened up new imperial opportunities to take advantage of the leverage over Third-World countries, including most of Latin America. The US-state, and, to a lesser but important degree, other coreimperialist powers, utilised their control of the strategic international financial institutions – commercial banks, the multilateral lending institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, and various regional banks – to push through structural-adjustment programmes (SAPs) in a vast number of countries.15 SAPs, which were often imposed by IMF- and World-Bank conditionality, typically included demands for Third-World countries to commit to fiscal austerity with minimal to zero deficits, cutbacks in spending for social services and subsidies for food and other basic necessities, reform of the tax-system, liberalisation of financial markets, unification of exchange-rates, liberalisation of trade, elimination of barriers to foreign-direct investment (FDI), deregulation of industry, and strengthening of guarantees of private-property rights.16 Against this international backdrop, virtually all Latin-American countries between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s engaged more or less rapidly in the fundamental restructuring of their economies along the lines of the Washington-Consensus, moving decisively from ISI to EOD development-programmes. In the 1980s, this transition in economics was accompanied by a shift away from authoritarian régimes toward highly constricted electoral democracies. But it is important to stress that neoliberalism was born out of Latin-American state-terror – backed by American imperial might – over the preceding decades. These systematic bloodbaths were necessary for the effective destruction of the political Left, labour-unions, and other popular class-organisations. The massmovements, and revolutionary and populist projects, that had proliferated throughout large sections of the region since the end of the Second World-War needed to be quite definitively expunged from the scene if neoliberalism was to take hold.17

technology. Thus was formed the social base for the counter-reform politics and the ascendancy of U.S. imperialism that characterised Latin American capitalism over the next two decades’ (Petras and Veltmeyer 2001, pp. 76–7). US foreign-policy makers were right to be concerned about the possibility of radicalisation within various currents of structuralism, as became clear with the migration of various former structuralists to the dependency-school in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There is no room here to deal with dependency-theory. Suffice it to say that the radical wing of dependency advocated a version of socialist revolution. 14. See Harvey 2003 and 2005; Albo 2007; Saad-Filho 2005; Gowan 1999. 15. See, among others, Soederberg 2004 and 2006; Green 1999. 16. See Williamson 1993. 17. Grandin 2005, p. 14.


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Already by the late 1980s, however, the orthodox theory and practice of neoliberalism was called increasingly into question in Latin America. Social polarisation and economic and social crises stood visibly in the way of realising the harmonious society projected by neoclassical economic theory. This trend persisted until the explosion of protests and realignment of class-forces by the end of the 1990s. It was out of the emergent contradictions of the late 1980s that neostructuralism was born in its incipient form, through ECLAC’s publication of Changing Production Patterns with Social Equity, under the leadership of Fernando Fajnzylber.18 ‘Given that the basis of a new and harmonious society did not emerge spontaneously from neoliberal structural adjustment’, the neoliberal project responded to destabilising internal contradictions and social conflicts by expanding the scope of its institutional restructuring without abandoning its ‘essential emphasis on the rationality of the market as the foremost organizing principle of social life’.19 In the course of the next decade, neostructuralism moved from the margins to the centre of political influence in the region by challenging certain assumptions of the market-dogmatism characteristic of orthodox neoliberalism, while rebuking simultaneously the core-presuppositions of classical structuralism. Neostructuralists sought to ‘renew ECLAC’s conceptual apparatus’ by ‘erasing the stigma’ of association with ISI, and ‘formulate a new set of alternative foundational ideas and action-oriented propositions seemingly capable of addressing the problems faced by Latin American countries in the era of globalization’ (p. 1). If, in the eyes of the most orthodox-neoliberal pundits, ECLAC of the 1990s remained incompletely redeemed from the legacy of ISI, the institution’s postulations on Latin-American political economy were warmly embraced by an everincreasing number of state-managers and economic policy-élites. Post-Pinochet, Chile became the paradigmatic poster-child of neostructuralism throughout the 1990s.20 Neostructuralism was also deeply influential in the ‘Buenos-Aires Consensus’ that came out of a June 1999 convention of the Socialist International, and eventually became the model of political economy for Lula’s Brazil, Kirchner’s Argentina, and Vásquez’s Uruguay. Less well known has been the way in which the key tenets of neostructuralism also extended into the first major multi-year development programmes of left governments such as Hugo Chávez’s in Venezuela and Evo Morales’s in Bolivia. In the Venezuelan case, Chávez has been famously influenced by neostructuralist economist Osvaldo Sunkel, whose edited volume, Development from Within: Toward a Neostructuralist Approach for Latin America, had a profound impact on the future president’s outlook as he read it in a jail-cell in the 1990s, and Chávez continues to call for the text to be read in schools, ministries, and elsewhere.21 Neostructuralist principles impacted heavily upon the country’s National Plan of Development for 2001–7, which called for the necessity of a small ‘social economy’ to complement rather than replace the private sector, the

18. ECLAC 1990. 19. Taylor 2009, p. 23. 20. See Taylor 2006. 21. Although, these days, Chávez also calls for Venezuelans to read Marxists such as István Mészáros.

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transformation of informal workers into ‘small managers’ through training and microcredit, and a focus on ‘endogenous development’, among other things.22 The areas of conceptual innovation at the heart of neostructuralism revolve around systemic competitiveness, technical progress, proactive labour-flexibility, and virtuous circles. In an effort to distinguish itself from orthodox neoliberalism, neostructuralism in Latin America rejects the notion that markets and competition are the exclusive channels for social and economic interaction, and replace the basic neoclassical notion of comparative advantage with systemic competitiveness. By this, neostructuralists essentially mean ‘that what compete[s] in the world market [are] not commodities per se but entire social systems’ (p. 4). While granting that the market will remain the central organising force in society, neostructuralists stress that the competitiveness of the entire system depends upon effective and thoroughgoing state-intervention in infrastructure (technology, energy, transport), education, finance, labour-management relations, and the general relationships between public and private spheres, in a way that orthodox-neoliberal theory cannot grasp (p. 4). Competitiveness on the international market, for neostructuralists, depends in the long term on ‘a broad range of structural factors, such as rates of investment, adequate institutions for education, research, and development, which [are] systematically ignored by neoliberal formulations’ (p. 6). In order to achieve systemic competitiveness, according to neostructuralism, a reconfiguration of state-theory is necessary. Whereas orthodox neoliberals in the 1970s and 1980s saw the state’s basic function as lubricating the dynamism of the market through the protection of property-rights, contract-enforcement, information-collection, and strictly delimited social provision for the destitute, neostructuralism ‘assigns the state an important auxiliary role in the search for international competitiveness’, blending economic policy on various levels, ‘with political intervention to construct a broad social consensus’ (pp. 9–10). The state is to stimulate and enhance market-based initiatives, selectively intervene in productive sectors of the economy, and supplement the invisible hand of the market with non-market forms of social, political, and economic co-ordination. In the area of trade-policy, for example, neostructuralists provide a critique of part of orthodox neoliberalism’s uni-dimensional focus on tariff-reduction. They ultimately agree that tariffs and non-tariff barriers to trade ought to be eliminated in an effort to expand export-led development, but they also call for ‘the adoption of transitory policies selectively biased in favor of non traditional exports’ (p. 15). Latin-American neostructuralism sees this sort of modest and temporary state-intervention as essential for encouraging a larger share of manufactured and valued-added exports into a country’s export-profile. A central component of the state’s role under this view is to build civil society-state relationships, public-private partnerships, and an overall social, political, and ideological consensus across social classes behind the drive for export-led capitalist growth. Technical progress refers to the neostructuralist claim from the early 1990s that ‘genuine’ gains in productivity can be achieved through the incorporation of technological advance into the overarching goal of systemic competitiveness. Technological change will foment productivity-gains and replace the ‘spurious’ increases in productivity during the era of orthodox neoliberalism, ‘gained through artificial devaluation and forced reduction in real 22. See Sunkel 1993 and Lebowitz 2006, pp. 90–3. On Bolivia, see Webber 2008.


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wages’ (p. 6). Proactive labour-flexibility pivots basically on the notion of more effectively gaining workers’ consent and submission to the model of export-led capitalist development. To this end, neostructuralism calls for a change in the character of the Latin-American labour-movement. Government-policies must focus on encouraging the labour-movement to become a stakeholder in ‘systemic competitiveness’, and, simultaneously, to abandon old-fashioned orientations toward class-struggle and ‘conflictbased traditions’. Such antiquated forms of labour-state relations will be exchanged for cross-class co-operation, negotiation and consensus-building (p. 11). Neostructuralists certainly agree with orthodox neoliberals on the necessity of maintaining and even expanding labour-flexibility, but they emphasise also ‘the need to provide training and new skills to the labor force so as to facilitate its adaptability in the productive process’ (p. 11). The state is supposed to create policies that forge consensus between the public and private sector, and workers’ and employers’ organisations, in order to advance these aims. Two of the most deleterious aspects of orthodox-neoliberal labourflexibility – wage-flexibility and subcontracting – will ostensibly be replaced through the implementation of a vague programme of so-called functional flexibility (p. 12). Systemic competitiveness, technical progress, and proactive labour-flexibility come together in the neostructuralist conceptualisation of self-reinforcing virtuous circles – ‘a sequence of mutually supportive feedback loops linking international competitiveness, social equity, and political legitimacy’ (p. 12). Whereas it was increasingly clear, by the early twenty-first century, that orthodox neoliberalism was steadily encountering problems of social and political polarisation and ideological legitimacy, neostructuralism promised ‘a synergistic relationship’ between ‘international competitiveness, greater social integration, and increased democratic political stability’ (pp. 12–13). Social dialogue and consensus are viewed as necessary for systemic competitiveness, and the way to achieve them, according to neostructuralists, is through democratic, consensus-building institutions and rapid export-led growth. Rising living standards are to work in tandem with consensusbuilding state-institutions to stem the tide of social conflict and political instability, and to help workers and managers see that they ‘now . . . share in the common interest of ensuring entrepreneurial success in the never ending race for international competitiveness’ (p. 14). Electoral democracy, internationally-competitive export-capitalism – driven by the market but supplemented by the state – workers’ rising living standards, capitalists’ profits, social consensus, and political stability are to fuse together in organic unison. For Latin-American neostructuralism, capitalist development – properly regulated by the state – is not characterised by conflict-ridden, uneven, zero-sum, and crisis-laden scenarios, but, rather, by virtuous circles in which everyone wins, eventually. Hollowing out classical structuralism The central-theoretical contribution Leiva makes in this book is his demonstration of exactly how, and to what a profound extent, Latin-American neostructuralism as a paradigm has sanitised ECLAC’s classical conceptualisations of Latin-American political economy by expunging conflict and power-relations from its analytical and policyframework. This accounts, on the one hand, for neostructuralism’s broad appeal. Centreleft governments have utilised the basic presuppositions of Latin-American neostructuralism to distance themselves rhetorically from orthodox neoliberalism, while

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continuing to promise a high road to capitalist globalisation in which a rising tide will lift all boats, and conflict, crisis, and instability will be avoided. On the other hand, the absence of conflict and power-relations from Latin-American neostructuralist theory has simultaneously exposed it to devastating internal contradictions, as the chasm between its descriptions of Latin-American capitalism, and the reality of capitalist development in the region has become increasingly profound and difficult to ignore. Latin-American neostructuralism has abandoned the pre-eminent concern of classical structuralists – ‘namely a focus on how economic surplus is produced, appropriated, and distributed within a single, world capitalist economy’ (p. xxvii). As a consequence, the school of thought ‘becomes analytically impotent in adequately explicating the scope of the qualitative transformations experienced by Latin American capitalism over the last decade’ (p. xxvii). It fails to detect transnationalising tendencies in economic, social, and political structures, the informalisation of capital-labour relations, and accelerating financialisation. Leiva convincingly illustrates how neostructuralist public policy has actually deepened and extended the processes introduced by orthodox neoliberals in the 1970s and 1980s. By setting aside analytical categories attentive to extant power-relations, ostensibly progressive policies aimed at international competitiveness and participatory governance, ‘led to the politico-economic consolidation, legitimization, and furtherance of the process of capitalist restructuring initially set in motion by neoliberal ideas and policies’ (p. xxvii). If considered seriously, Leiva’s interrogation of the concept of ‘open regionalism’ should generate considerable malaise in the ranks of neostructuralist adherents. Open regionalism, for the latter group, defines the dual strategy of unilaterally liberalising trade and financial transactions while negotiating formal bilateral and regional free-trade agreements where possible. It means explicit support for wide-scale neoliberal regional projects such as NAFTA (between the US, Canada, and Mexico), and the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), initially envisioned by the US-state to extend throughout the Americas, from northern Canada to southern Argentina’s Tierra del Fuego – with the exception of Cuba. Open regionalism conceives of transnational corporations (TNCs) as the principal agents of change and progressive-capitalist development within Latin America, and therefore encourages the construction of legal, social, political and economic environments that will be attractive to foreign capital. TNCs, on this view, play the benevolent role of supplying technology and capital, spurring appropriate domestic capitalist competition, and generally revitalising domestic Latin-American economies and societies (p. 121). Mirroring trends in institutional economics elsewhere, Latin-American neostructuralists stress that the high road to globalisation for poor countries involves principally subjective factors such as committed and effective leadership and getting the policies right, rather than relatively enduring objective structural variables – such as the deeply embedded powerrelations at the core of the world-economy and the particularities of the expansion of each country’s export-sector within the international division of labour over historical time, or the changed characteristics of the world-market since the East-Asian newly industrialised countries (NICs) charted this path of rapid late-capitalist development in the context of the Cold War and the Bretton-Woods economic system (p. 95). Through careful argumentation, Leiva illustrates how this approach, by excluding history, power-relations, and changes in the structure of global capitalism from its analytical lens, cannot fully grasp the changes to Latin-American states, class-structures,


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and the dynamics of class-formation wrought by thirty years of neoliberalism, and precisely what these changes imply for development-theory. Just as crucially, neostructuralism’s embrace of open regionalism ignores ‘the actually existing process of transnationalization’ occurring in Latin America, including ‘the vulnerability of export sector workers due to low wages and sweatshop conditions, capital mobility, and declining output/employment elasticity’, among other factors (pp. 97–8). The enthusiastic embrace of TNCs as agents of progress, furthermore, ignores, ‘the magnitude reached by the transfer of surplus in the form of remitted profits and interest payments abroad’, ‘the limits that current transnationalization imposes upon countries for moving onto the “highroad” of globalization’, and ‘the new forms of surplus extraction and transfer embedded in transnationalized production and distribution value chains’ (p. 121). Support for bilateral free-trade agreements between Latin-American countries and the US and other core-imperial powers, as well as for NAFTA and the FTAA, also openly pits neostructuralists against incipient forms and projects of anti-imperialist Latin-American integration – most notably, the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), driven mainly by Venezuela, Cuba, and Bolivia, but supported by a number of other LatinAmerican countries.23 Leiva nicely summarises neostructuralism’s refusal to confront any of the underlying processes and contradictions inherent to the operations of capitalism at a global scale and the implications of capitalist expansion and reproduction in Latin America in the neoliberal age. The implicit orientation of ECLAC toward capitalist-led regional-integration models, rather than alternative modes of integration rooted in the priorities and needs of the region’s peoples, ‘has preempted neostructuralism from addressing how the current path of globalization leads to dispossession and commoditization of ever growing aspects of social life’ (p. 101). Parallel to these general characterisations and observations regarding neostructuralism as a theory and practice in the Latin-American context, Leiva repeatedly returns throughout the text to focused examinations of the Chilean case. Here, we find various analytical gems that fundamentally call into question the frequent celebratory claims made by neoliberal and neostructuralist economists alike that regard Chile as a developmentmodel – the Latin-American ‘tiger’ – to be emulated by other Third-World countries. Leiva reveals how ‘Chile’s working class is one of the most super-exploited in the hemisphere’, a condition initially introduced by ‘neoliberalism and state terrorism under Pinochet (1973–89)’, but maintained and exacerbated by ‘the center-left, neostructuralist-inspired, civilian coalition in office from 1990 to the present’ (p. 193). He goes to great lengths to expose how flexible labour-markets have become a structural necessity to the exportoriented development-strategy associated with neostructuralism in the country, and how this has ‘steadily increased the level of precarious employment, heightening the lack of protection and vulnerability for a growing number of male and female workers’ (p. 193). Leiva shows how inequality has persisted, and even deepened, alongside bouts of macroeconomic growth. As an explanation of these trends, he points to the absence of policies that ‘target and redirect the use of social surplus’, an ‘export model whose profitability depends on deepening labor flexibility and the precariousness of workers’, and ‘the narrowed parameters for policy permitted by the source of capitalist profits under the current transnationalised and financialized export-oriented economy’ (p. 197). 23. See, for example, Kellogg 2007.

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As the arguments throughout Latin American Neostructuralism would suggest, the disconnection between neostructuralist ideology and the material evolution of capitalism on Chilean soil is beginning to generate tangible social contradictions and renewed classstruggle from below. Between the end of April and mid-June 2006, radical high-school student-protests against the deterioration of public education erupted in several cities. These were violently repressed by police, stoking further radicalisation and the wider participation of education-workers and working-class parents throughout different parts of the country. These were the biggest demonstrations in the country since the popular struggles for democracy in the Pinochet-era.24 The student- and worker-agitation against the privatisation of education was indicative of a spreading disgust with many of the basic continuities in Chile’s social structure and political economy between the time of Pinochet and Michelle Bachelet, the latest president of the country, leader of the Concertación-coalition, and head of the Socialist Party. These demonstrations were followed in August and September of the same year by a successful miners’ strike at Escondida, the world’s largest copper-mine, situated in the Atacama desert of Chile’s far north. The battles in the mining zones then found their echo in May 2007 in the forest-industry of the south, where a militant worker in a timber-strike was shot dead after he tried to drive a tractor through a police-barricade, stimulating wider community-support for the forestry-workers and their martyr. Also in 2007, subcontracted garbage-workers engaged in a successful strike in Santiago. It is worth noting that these movements are illegal, and represent the first important strikes in industrial sectors where the workforce has been dispersed and fragmented through waves of subcontracting. The atomised, overworked, underpaid, and precarious labour-force in these sectors is characteristic of the world of work more generally in Chile in the current period.25 While missing an opportunity to delve very deeply into the dynamics of these diverse elements of a new, and still incipient, militancy from below, Leiva is able to register their basic potential significance for neostructuralism as theory and praxis. ‘After seventeen years of a neostructuralist-inspired Concertación coalition’, Leiva suggests, ‘the case of Chile already foretells some of these nodal points around which such contradictions will emerge’ (p. 187). He argues that new articulations of an autonomous civil society will emerge as an antithesis to ‘an institutionalized and hegemonic form of participation that subordinate[s] civil society and the socio-emotional component of social relationships to the requirements of globalisation and the capitalist profit rate’ (p. 187). Leiva perceives in this expansion of social-movement struggle the strengthening capacities of the popular classes for building on their every day sociability and historical memory to defend their rights and challenge capital and the state or the destruction of their social fabric, grassroots dynamics, and leaderships through state-designed and NGO-enforced social programs and civil society-state alliances. (p. 187.) For Leiva, neostructuralism in Chile and elsewhere will continue to engender

24. See Sepúlveda 2006. 25. Oriesco 2007, pp. 7–8.


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struggles over whether the objectives of strengthening social solidarity should be to increase the power of the dispossessed and exploited or to provide an individualized and symbolic more than material sense of security so that citizens do not rebel against a daily existence made more precarious by the expansion of capitalism. (p. 187.) The recent activities of the students, timber-workers, copper-miners, and garbage-collectors are meaningful signals of initial steps toward rebuilding rebellion against the expansion of capitalism. ‘Ultimately’, Leiva contends, ‘the question is what purposes are being served by increasing coordination among the state, markets, and existing networks’ as neostructuralism advocates. ‘Is it to raise profits and the self-expansion of capital, or is it to increase the satisfaction of human needs and human dignity?’ (p. 187). A return to structuralism and progressive capitalism? A number of comparatively minor analytical weaknesses in Latin American Neostructuralism diminish some of the text’s basically persuasive central claims and theoretical logic around the theme of neostructuralism. To begin, Leiva adopts uncritically several of the conceptual categories of the French regulation-school without engaging with their most serious Marxist critics. For example, almost twenty years ago, Robert Brenner and Mark Glick argued persuasively that regulation-theory suffers from a ‘failure to take adequately into account the broader system of capitalist social-property relations that forms the backdrop to their succession of institutionally defined phases’.26 In addition to stressing the importance of the broad framework of social-property relations, and especially intercapitalist competition, Brenner and Glick also successfully take regulationists to task for their neglect of the disciplining impact of the world-economy on local, regional, and national institutional configurations, or ‘modes of regulation’. They point to the shared participation of every part of the capitalist world – if not to the same degree – in the expansion before World-War I, the interwar-depression, the post-World-War II boom, and the structural crisis since the late 1960s. ‘Despite the heterogeneous modes of regulation of its constituent parts’, Brenner and Glick contend, the world economy as a whole [since at least 1900] has possessed a certain homogeneity, indeed unity, in terms of its succession of phases of development. The world economy has, it seems, been able to impose its general logic, if not to precisely the same extent, on all of its component elements, despite their very particular modes of regulation.27 There has also been a distinctive drift within regulation-theory from an early consistency with core-Marxist insights into the dynamics of capitalism, toward an increasingly Keynesian bent, particularly since the early 1980s in the French case, which tends to differentiate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ varieties of capitalism, and sees a compromise between capital and labour as both tenable and desirable.28 Leiva seems unaware of this 26. Brenner and Glick 1991, p. 108. 27. Brenner and Glick 1991, p. 112. 28. Husson forthcoming.

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trajectory and, within it, his own positioning. The regulation-school’s core-treatments of the post-WWII boom in the United States celebrated to some degree the social-democratic Rooseveltian compromise between labour and capital, and saw a return to such a compromise as the necessary exit to the structural crisis since the late 1960s. Capitalists would submit to wage-increases and elemental features of the welfare-state in pace with and in exchange for productivity increases on the part of workers. Brenner and Glick show how, apart from the question of its desirability, such a social-democratic compromise was unviable because, ‘capitalists, facing continuing pressure on their profits, could not, even if they wished to, viably promise workers, in exchange for involvement, secure employment and enriched jobs, or even a share of the returns from productivity growth’.29 They correctly point out that for workers further to involve themselves in ‘the team concept’ is merely to tie their fortunes ever more closely to ‘their own’ firms, to set themselves ever more directly against their fellow workers across the industry, and to undermine what is left of their collective union power. If the crisis deepens, no amount of goodwill on the part of their employers will save their jobs. And to the extent they have ‘involved’ themselves with their own companies, to that extent they will destroy their own ability to defend their condition.30 In some respects, Leiva’s actual employment of regulationist categories is rather understated when he discusses structural changes in Latin-American capitalism and the theoretical and political engagement with these changes by neostructuralist thinkers and institutions. The concepts are set up more as a frame for the discussion, often to have little subsequent bearing on the treatment of the empirical matters at hand. Many of the negative characteristics of the regulation-school therefore do not find their full expression in Latin American Neostructuralism, but the problem with theoretical clarity on these matters persists. Leiva’s relationship with classical structuralism at times closely mirrors contemporary regulation-theory’s relationship with Keynesianism – an underlying longing for its resurgence and concomitant return of related forms of regulated capitalism, whether it be the ISI of Latin-American structuralism or the post-WWII welfare-state of Keynesianism in advanced capitalist countries. While recognising some of the limitations of classical structuralism, Leiva is not consistently willing to transcend them. The classical LatinAmerican structuralism of Prebisch and Furtado, Leiva argues, for example, has been justly criticised ‘for lacking a coherent analysis of the capitalist state, for underestimating the role of class struggle in shaping economic development, or for not paying enough attention to the production of surplus’, but it did deal extensively, in Leiva’s view, with the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus, and ‘at least had a much more grounded understanding of the role that power played in socioeconomic development’ than does neostructuralism (p. 33).

29. Brenner and Glick 1991, p. 116. 30. Brenner and Glick 1991, p. 119.


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On the one hand, Leiva acknowledges that classical structuralism focused methodologically on the sphere of circulation to the exclusion of production, and lacked any notion of exploitation (pp. 25–30). Nonetheless, he argues that by locating the problems of development within the context of [a] single world economy, Latin American development thinkers of the structuralist and dependency schools were able to analyze trade, investment, and technology patterns within a systemic perspective. Challenging mainstream approaches of the time, they conceived ‘development’ as a holistic process characterised by profound inequalities rooted in the development of capitalism itself on a world scale. (p. 28.) Leiva’s partial defence of classical structuralism coincides with a certain nostalgia for the ISI-period in Latin America, and the assumption about this epoch of a ‘shared interest between capitalists and labor unions in expanding the internal market, which for decades served as the basis for the multiclass support for the national-developmentalist project’ (p. 55). In this passage and others, Leiva implicitly invokes a set of three presuppositions on the role of national capitalists in the Third World, commonly held within various currents of the Marxist tradition over the course of the twentieth century, but particularly those of the Second and Third Internationals: (1) that national capitalists have an interest in rapid economic growth and the expansion of capitalist relations because the domestic market is their source of profits, and that they therefore are crucial to the multiclass-drive for national development; (2) that they will lead the drive against precapitalist social relations because this is a necessary precondition for the expansion of capitalism; and that (3) they will oppose foreign economic imperialism because they depend on the domestic market, which, at the same time, distinguishes them from Third-World domestic ‘compradors’ who, because of their imbrications with metropolitan capital, will align with imperialism.31 In the 1960s, Leiva contends that Latin-American capitalist-classes were ‘stratified and split’ as different fractions supported two very different and opposing strategies for overcoming the crisis of the previous ISI model. One fraction wavered toward supporting national developmentalist and income redistribution measures defended by progressive coalitions. The other supported a programme of liberalisation, deregulation, and privatisation that tended to further concentrate income and expand luxury consumption. (p. 109.) As we will see in a moment, in our discussion of Bolivia and Venezuela, Leiva appears intent to hold onto the possibility of a progressive fraction of the domestic-capitalist class, the national capitalists, realigning itself with a renewed developmentalism that might transform the status quo and successfully challenge neoliberalism. His brief discussion of the EastAsian tigers similarly corresponds to such ideas, and closely echoes the consensus-story told by state-institutionalist economists and sociologists, stressing ‘a state with a level of 31. Chibber 2004, pp. 227–8.

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autonomy that enabled it to discipline both capital and labor’ and ‘a domestic entrepreneurial class willing to assume risks, invest productively, and innovate’ (p. 95). ‘Looking back today from the ruins of the neoliberal revolution’, Vivek Chibber points out, it is understandable that there may be a certain nostalgia toward the developmentalist era, and toward that storied class, the national bourgeoisie. The intervening years seem to have left us with a sturdy mythology about the period, one in which states had the power and the vision to navigate a path to autonomous development, in which the business class hitched its wagon to the national project, and labour had a place at the bargaining table.32 But the political coalitions that made the developmentalist project possible, in fact contributed to the consistent ability of national bourgeoisies to inhibit the projection of state-power in the form of economic planning, and the equally consistent subordination, repression, and demobilisation of labour. Risks were socialised and profits privatised on an enormous scale, contradictions that eventually contributed to the implosion of ISI. Rather than states disciplining capital by directing domestic private investments into economic sectors with high social returns, capital consistently disciplined the state, directing investments and state-subsidies into areas of enormous profits and low social return.33 As Chibber points out, whereas [state] planners saw ISI and industrial policy as two sides of the same coin, for capitalists, ISI generated an incentive to reject the discipline of industrial policy. Those institutions intended to further the subsidisation process were supported by capital; but dimensions of state-building aimed at enabling planners to monitor and regulate firms’ investment decisions were stoutly resisted. At the surface level, the conflict between the national bourgeoisie and the economic planners was not always apparent. It was common to find industrialists joining the chorus calling for planning, economic management, and the like. But what they meant by this was a process in which public monies were put at their disposal, and at their behest. To them planning meant the socialisation of risk, while leaving the private appropriation of profit intact.34 Additionally, as a condition for the national bourgeoisie’s purported support for the developmentalist project of the nation, state-managers participated in the concerted emasculation of labour-movements. At the same time, the declining power of labour was often amplified by ‘labour’s own seduction by the rhetoric of national development and planning. Too often, unions reposed an altogether unwarranted confidence in the state’s ability to protect their interests, to discipline the capitalist class, and to manage class conflict through an adroit manipulation of plan priorities’.35

32. 33. 34. 35.

Chibber 2004, p. 242. Chibber 2004, p. 229. Chibber 2004, p. 233. Chibber 2004, p. 243.


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There is no reason to believe that, in today’s context, a Latin-American reincarnation of a necessary ‘progressive stage’ of capitalism prior to a transition to socialism – based on a multiclass-coalition with an emphasis on renewing national-bourgeois capacities – will end very differently than the failures of ISI in the past. However compelling the ISI-model appears when juxtaposed to neoliberalism, the myths of the national bourgeoisie ought to be decisively countered both within Marxist theory and socialist praxis. The tendencies toward nostalgic relapse in Leiva’s text – an orientation toward multiclass-developmentalist coalitions, a renewal of ISI-objectives, and an insufficiently critical theoretical evaluation of classical structuralism – helps to explain Leiva’s disappointing treatment of Bolivia and Venezuela under Evo Morales and Hugo Chávez toward the end of the book. Apart from providing only the most cursory overview of economic trends in the two countries, based on a limited range of sources, Leiva accepts uncritically Heinz Dieterich’s dictum that ‘There are no objective conditions for socialism at present. They must be developed in accordance with democratic developmentalism’ (p. 228). And, to the extent that an authentically socialist project exists today in Latin America, it is only a ‘politically underdeveloped’ and ‘latent alternative’, which ‘has not yet shown itself capable of becoming more than just the aspiration of small political groupings, movements, and radical intellectuals’ (p. 225). With the possibility of socialism thus set aside for the moment, it is much easier to celebrate quite uncritically Venezuela’s ‘twenty-first century’ version, which Leiva acknowledges operates ‘within a capitalist economy, without aiming to end private ownership of the means of production, the profit motive, or capitalist competition’ (p. 228). Similarly, Bolivia’s ‘Andean-Amazonian capitalism’ under the Morales administration is praised as a ‘formulation for an alternative to the present order . . . based . . . on strengthening the capacity of the state to capture via the tax system part of the nation’s economic surplus and redirect it toward micro and small producers in rural areas and cities’ (p. 228). ‘Though not oriented toward eliminating capitalist competition as some would expect’, Leiva asserts, ‘the newly emerging alternatives [in Venezuela and Bolivia] actively and methodically seek to constrain it within certain boundaries so that society and equity may thrive’ (p. 231). However, today as before, the socialist alternative is not a Keynesian programme which seeks merely to allay the worst manifestations of market-trends. It is, rather, ‘a platform to overcome the exploitation and inequality inherent in capitalism’, as the Argentine economist Claudio Katz has recently argued. ‘It seeks to abolish poverty and unemployment, eradicate environmental disasters, and put an end to the nightmares of war and the financial cataclysms that enrich a miniscule percentage of millionaires at the expense of millions of individuals’.36 The comparatively low level of productive forces and material resources available to most Latin-American countries has led some to argue that a progressive stage of capitalism is required prior to a transition to socialism, as the quotation from Heinz Dieterich attests. Leiva adopts this position as his own, and implicitly relegates an immediate strategic path toward socialism, however attractive in theory, to the small, insular circles of utopian dreamers. ‘But currently it is evident that the impediments to developing a competitive capitalist system in countries such as Bolivia’, Katz reminds us, ‘are at least as great as the obstacles to initiating socialist transformations. One need merely imagine the concessions that the large foreign 36. Katz 2007, p. 26.

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corporations would demand for participation in their project, and the conflicts that these commitments would generate with the popular majorities’.37 Such a transition will never last in an isolated peripheral country, or even bloc of such countries, in competition with the imperialist powers who have so long asserted control over the world-market. Therefore, the socialist endeavour urgently demands building toward a ‘continuous sequence of processes that undermine global capitalism’, eventually on a world-scale. Leiva’s periodic retrogression into some of the myths of classical structuralism and the possibility of a progressive capitalism effectively removes this strategic orientation from the horizons of the socialist project in Latin America today. Finally, there is the issue of neoliberalism. Leiva defines it in a ‘tightly restricted sense of denoting a particular set of ideas and policies’ (p. xxxv). The more encompassing system that is commonly associated with the term ‘neoliberalism’, ‘the “new economic model” that replaced ISI in most countries in the region’, is referred to in the text as an ‘exportoriented regime of accumulation’ (p. xxxv). With this distinction in hand, Leiva is able, on a general level, to contend that with the change in the specific set of ideas and policies associated with the early Washington-Consensus, to those of neostructuralism, Latin America has undergone a ‘post-neoliberal’ turn without having altered its export-oriented regime of accumulation (p. xvii). Neostructuralism is ideationally distinct from neoliberalism, and has its own set of policy-strategies, but, ultimately, supports the existing régime of accumulation. Defining neoliberalism exclusively along the lines of discourse and tactics, or ideas and policies, makes for sometimes confusing and even contradictory claims as Leiva’s argument progresses. For example, most of chapter one carefully sets outs the conceptual innovations of neostructuralism vis-à-vis orthodox neoliberalism. And yet, in Chapter Eight, we encounter the following phrases: Instead of an ‘alternative’ to neoliberalism, [neostructuralism] should be seen as playing a complementary role, making decisive contributions toward the construction of capitalist hegemony by enabling the subordination of the extraeconomic realm to capitalist profitability and abetting the expanding colonization of the public sphere by the rationality of transnational capital. Thus, instead of seeing them as opposing paradigms, neoliberalism and neostructuralism should be seen as part of a tag team. (p. 188.) The real insights that Leiva is providing here could be more lucidly captured, in my view, if we conceptualise neoliberalism not as a set of ahistorical ideas and policy-prescriptions associated with the Washington-Consensus, but, rather, as a ‘historical, class-based ideology that proposes all social, political, and ecological problems can be resolved through more direct free-market exposure, which has become an increasingly structural aspect of capitalism’.38 Neoliberal ideology is certainly undergirded by a purist theory of free-market economic fundamentals, but this is best understood as a flexible tool-kit used to justify the class-project of restoring capitalist class-power.39 The extent to which actually existing state-policy has adhered to these fundamentals has varied quite widely between different 37. Katz 2007, p. 28. 38. Marois 2005, pp. 102–3. 39. See Harvey 2005.


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Latin-American countries since the 1980s, but it is nonetheless legitimate to talk of a pattern of neoliberal transformation that restructured the entire region, apart from Cuba (which went through its own distinct special period of the 1990s). As was suggested at the outset of this review, the neoliberal project in Latin America and elsewhere has been a failure in terms of stimulating economic growth, but has had wild success in terms of the restoration of capitalist class-power and the accelerated redistribution of wealth from the popular classes to a tiny élite. Nonetheless, its implementation has precipitated increasingly glaring social contradictions, and this has led to a popular rejection of neoliberalism in many parts of the world, with Latin America at the leading edge of this resistance. In Latin America, even the parties of the far Right must rhetorically commit to overcoming the model if they are to stand any reasonable chance in electoral competitions.40 Neostructuralism, therefore, is best understood as a tactical response of the ruling classes to adjust to the social contradictions generated by the implementation of the neoliberalism in the region while preserving the underlying class-project and the successes it has enjoyed. Neostructuralism’s discursive innovations operate within the parameters of actually-existing neoliberalism. Understanding this transition at the level of ideas in such a manner, we are better able to appreciate the extent to which deep continuities in the overarching structures of neoliberal political economy in most of the region persist, and the true weight of the challenges still facing the Left.41

Conclusion This review-essay has sought to delineate the major contributions made by Fernando Ignacio Leiva’s Latin American Neostructuralism to the renewal of radical-political economy in Latin America, while, at the same time, documenting specific serious theoretical and political shortcomings. The book punctures many of the prevailing myths regarding neostructuralism in mainstream social science by managing to weave together a close analysis of over two decades of ECLAC, and ECLAC-related publications and documents, and an examination of the historical and material changes to the structure of LatinAmerican capitalism over the corresponding period. This is no small feat, and economists, political scientists, sociologists, and activists on the Left will mine this resource for years to come. Leiva has produced the best book on the subject available in English, in my estimation. In spite of the real weaknesses in aspects of its political orientation which I documented above, I heartily recommend this text to all those hoping to get a better grasp on the complexity of the turn toward neostructuralism in Latin-American economic thought over the course of closing decades of the twentieth century. Reviewed by Jeffery R. Webber Queen Mary, University of London jeff[email protected] 40. See Robinson 2007 and 2008, and Sader 2008. 41. For an incisive discussion of ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘post-neoliberalism’ in Latin America, see Taylor 2009.

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References Aguiar de Medeiros, Carlos 2009, ‘Asset-Stripping the State: Political Economy of Privatization in Latin America’, New Left Review, II, 55: 109–32. Albo, Gregory 2007, ‘Neoliberalism and the Discontented’, in Panitch and Leys (eds.) 2007. Brenner, Robert and Mark Glick 1991, ‘The Regulation Approach: Theory and History’, New Left Review, I, 188: 45–119. Chibber, Vivek 2004, ‘Reviving the Developmental State? The Myth of the “National Bourgeoisie”’, in Social Register 2005: Empire Re-Loaded, edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, New York: Monthly Review Press. Coatsworth, John H. 2005, ‘Structures, Endowments and Institutions in the Economic History of Latin America’, Latin American Research Review, 40, 3: 126–44. Damián, Araceli and Julio Boltvinik 2006, ‘A Table to Eat On: The Meaning and Measurement of Poverty in Latin America’, in Latin America After Neoliberalism: Turning the Tide in the 21st Century?, edited by Eric Hershberg and Fred Rosen, New York: The New Press. ECLAC 1990, Changing Production Patterns with Social Equity, Santiago: ECLAC. Gowan, Peter 1999, The Global Gamble: Washington’s Faustian Bid for World Dominance, London: Verso. Grandin, Greg 2005, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Green, Duncan 1999, ‘A Trip to the Market: The Impact of Neoliberalism in Latin America’, in Developments in Latin American Political Economy: States, Markets and Actors, edited by Julia Buxton and Nicola Phillips, Manchester: University of Manchester Press. —— 2003, Silent Revolution: The Rise and Crisis of Market Economics in Latin America, second edition, New York: Monthly Review Press. Harvey, David 2003, The New Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— 2005, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Husson, Michel forthcoming, ‘The Narrow Path of Marxist Economics in France’, Historical Materialism. Katz, Claudio 2007, ‘Socialist Strategies in Latin America’, Monthly Review, 59, 4: 25–41. —— 2009, ‘Codicia, regulación o capitalismo’, Observatorio Social de América Latina, 25: 27–47. Kellogg, Paul 2007, ‘Regional Integration in Latin America: Dawn of an Alternative to Neoliberalism?’, New Political Science, 29, 2: 187–210. Lebowitz, Michael 2006, Build It Now: Socialism for the Twenty-First Century, New York: Monthly Review Press. Marois, Thomas 2005, ‘From Economic Crisis to a “State” of Crisis?: The Emergence of Neoliberalism in Costa Rica’, Historical Materialism, 13, 3: 101–34. Love, Joseph L. 2005, ‘The Rise and Decline of Economic Structuralism in Latin America: New Dimensions’, Latin American Research Review, 40, 3: 100–25. Maxfield, Sylvia and James Nolt 1990, ‘Protectionism and the Internationalization of Capital: U.S. Sponsorship of Import Substitution Industrialization in the Philippines, Turkey and Argentina’, International Studies Quarterly, 34, 1: 44–81. Panitch, Leo and Colin Leys (eds.) 2007, Socialist Register 2008: Global Flashpoints, Reactions to Imperialism and Neoliberalism, New York: Monthly Review Press. Petras, James and Henry Veltmeyer 2001, Globalization Unmasked: Imperialism in the 21st Century, London: Zed. Reygadas, Luis 2006, ‘Latin America: Persistent Inequality and Recent Transformations’, in Latin America After Neoliberalism: Turning the Tide in the 21st Century?, edited by Eric Hershberg and Fred Rosen, New York: The New Press. Riesco, Manuel 2007, ‘Is Pinochet Dead?’, New Left Review, II, 47: 5–20.


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Robinson, William I. 2007, ‘Transformative Possibilities in Latin America’, in Panitch and Leys (eds.) 2007. —— 2008, Latin America and Global Capitalism: A Critical Globalization Perspective, Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. Saad-Filho, Alfredo 2005, ‘From Washington to Post-Washington Consensus: Neoliberal Agendas for Economic Development’, in Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader, edited by Afredo Saad-Filho and Deborah Johnston, London: Pluto. Sader, Emir 2008, ‘The Weakest Link? Neoliberalism in Latin America’, New Left Review, II, 52: 5–31. Sepúlveda, Orlando 2006, ‘Chilean Students Launch Mass Protests: Biggest Mass Movement Since Pinochet’, International Socialist Review, 49, available at: . Soederberg, Susanne 2004, The Politics of the New International Financial Architecture: Reimposing Neoliberal Domination in the Global South, London: Zed Books. —— 2006, Global Governance in Question: Empire, Class and the New Common Sense in Managing North-South Relations, London: Pluto. Sunkel, Osvaldo (ed.) 1993, Development from Within: Toward a Neostructuralist Approach for Latin America, Boulder: Westview Press. Taylor, Marcus 2006, From Pinochet to the Third Way: Neoliberalism and Social Transformation in Chile, 1973–2003, London: Pluto. —— 2009, ‘The Contradictions and Transformations of Neoliberalism in Latin America: From Structural Adjustment to “Empowering the Poor”’, in Post-Neoliberalism in the Americas, edited by Laura Macdonald and Arne Ruckert, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Webber, Jeffery R. 2008, ‘Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia. Part III: Neoliberal Continuities, the Autonomist Right, and the Political Economy of Indigenous Struggle’, Historical Materialism, 16, 4: 67–109. Williamson, John 1993, ‘Democracy and the “Washington Consensus”’, World Development, 21, 8: 1329–36.

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Impersonal Power. History and Theory of the Bourgeois State, Heide Gerstenberger, translated by David Fernbach, Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill 2007. Abstract Heide Gerstenberger’s book offers a comparative view of the origins and emergence of the bourgeois state in England and France. Both, according to her, emerged out of ancien-régime type structures which were themselves distinct from feudalism. Whilst recognising the value of Gerstenberger’s attempt to avoid economic reductionism when explaining changing powerstructures, it is suggested that analytical tools such as ‘class’, ‘mode of production’ and the ‘state’, which she confines to capitalism, do have considerable utility for the analysis of precapitalist régimes. More importantly, it is suggested that her attempt to maintain that in England, as in France, an ancien-régime type society endured at least to the end of the eighteenth century obscures the fundamentally divergent paths taken by the two countries. This is compounded by her rejection of the idea of a French absolutism and an underestimation of the extent to which power-structures in England were modified by the precocious development of capitalism. Whilst suggesting that a bourgeois public space was able to develop in the interstices of structures of the ancien régime, Gersternberger fails to recognise the extent to which this had transformed the English polity by the mid-seventeenth century. Keywords feudalism, ancien régime, absolute monarchy, the state, gentry, nobility, bourgeoisie

Theoretical starting points Heide Gerstenberger’s comparative study of the origins and emergence of the bourgeois state in France and England is an ambitious and provocative work; but, since its first appearance in 1990, it has found its main audience amongst political theorists with an interest in the state, whilst making a negligible impact on historical studies. It was perhaps not a propitious moment for the dissemination of a grand synthetic narrative covering a thousand years or so framed by a Marxist problematic. A lengthy German text with a high level of theoretical abstraction no doubt also contributed to its lack of impact on either French or ‘Anglo-Saxon’ historiography, despite Gerstenberger’s reliance on both. Be that as it may, I was unfortunately unaware of this work in 1995 when I was completing the final draft of State and Class in Ancien Régime France, which, despite having a much shorter time-frame, also sought to illuminate the evolution of the French state through a comparison with England.1 Those who have read both works will discern a fair amount of common ground in our attempts to establish explanations for changing methods of rule which are not simply dependent on mechanisms of surplus-extraction, class-conflict or the balance of classforces. For Gerstenberger, the structural dynamics of precapitalist régimes flowed from a competition for power (pp. 22, 644) which may have had an effect on struggles for appropriation of wealth but was not reducible to a contest for a larger share of the peasanteconomy (604–5). Decisive for the possession of power were success in war, marriage, inheritance, the favour of a powerful lord and other such factors. Her view that, during the ancien régime, ‘generalised rule . . . was organised in the form of competition of clientele 1. Parker 1996. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010

DOI: 10.1163/156920610X532307


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groups’ (p. 449) has particularly close affinities with my depiction of the forces which gave rise to French absolutism: firstly, large-scale warfare and, secondly, the ‘intense competition for place, influence and profit which was fuelled by the channelling of unprecedented riches through the growing state apparatus’.2 Gerstenberger, however, goes much further in rejecting the utility of classical tools of Marxist analysis for understanding precapitalist society and, indeed, for explaining the ultimate triumph of capitalism. The mode of production, productive forces and class are effectively discarded for historical analysis (pp. 8–9, 21). Gerstenberger is even uncomfortable with the notion that ‘extra-economic coercion’ satisfactorily encapsulates feudal mechanisms of appropriation (p. 4). The structural separation of the political and the economic is something that arrives only with the emergence of the bourgeois state and should not be read back into earlier periods. Power under feudalism was personal ‘as there was not yet a sphere of rule that existed independently of concrete personal relationships’ (p. 665) The state did not exist (pp. 633, 639, 645, 410). Indeed, ‘for the period after the millennium’, one should not really talk about society at all in the modern sense. Despite the presence of mechanisms of integration such as the armed pursuit of power, the rule of the Church and canon-law, those ‘by which functional connections are reproduced in modern societies were lacking’ (p. 634). It is even a mistake, according to Gerstenberger, to apply the notion of separate spheres of state and society to the France of Louis XIV (pp. 407–8). The ancien régime differed from the feudalism out of which it emerged by virtue of ‘the practice of generalised personal power’ (p. 653). The ‘key structural characteristic of the developed ancien régime’ was ‘the integration of personal possession of rule [by which Gerstenberger means lordly power – D.P.] into the generalised monarchical power’ (p. 410). This integration resulted in an estate-structure which characterises all society of the ancien-régime type (p. 76), one dominated by privileged orders whose rights and obligations were structured and sanctioned by the generalisation of royal rule (p. 453). However, given the unceasing competition for power, these developments did open up the possibility of its depersonalisation and the creation of an adequate public space for the emergence of bourgeois ideas (pp. 28, 229, 665). These were the essential preconditions for the emergence of a bourgeois state, which is the ultimate product of the contradictions of feudalism. Gerstenberger claims that, in contrast to the anachronistic application of Marxist analytical categories, her own overarching concept of the competition for power is ‘based on a developmental dynamic specific to the particular epoch’ (p. 632). She more or less relates everything else to this: the constitution of privileged estates, social position in general, patterns of judicial authority, the rights of guilds and even the concentration of landholdings (pp. 151, 368, 410). The argument is pushed to the point at which it acquires a questionable circularity, replacing an economic reductionism with one of a different sort (p. 21). So, although one may find ‘class-type’ relations in pre-bourgeois régimes, they were ‘as a rule an element in relations of power’; because the developmental dynamic of both feudalism and the ancien régime ‘was determined in the first place by competition for power it is not analytically helpful to describe these as class societies’ (pp. 21, 22). 2. Parker 1996, p. 267.

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English and French ancien régimes Gerstenberger’s conceptual framework makes better sense of French developments than English ones. The emergence of a fiscally and judicially privileged estate of nobility from around 1400 and its integration into a system of generalised power is clear enough. Whilst the formulation that the nobility ‘of the ancien régime arose from [my italics] generalised personal power’ offers a somewhat partial causality, the description of the ancien régime as ‘a conflictual matrix of individual and generalised personal rule’ (p. 360) is very apt. The passages dealing with the structural blockages which precipitated the end of the French ancien régime are a very useful addition to the growing body of work which disputes the revisionist tendency to reduce the outbreak of the Revolution to immediate and contingent causes. The discussion of the significance of the destruction of the old venal financial administration, the parlements and other corporate bodies, followed by the creation of a public service, offers a forceful reminder of what was revolutionary about the Revolution. Gerstenberger’s view of French developments does, however, raise two major problems. The first is the inference that the integration of the judicial and material powers of the seigneurs into a generalised system makes it inappropriate to describe them as feudal. This appears to be a further piece of circular reasoning rooted in the idea that, whereas feudalism was based on direct relations of force, the ancien régime involved ‘objectified social relations’ (pp. 647, 648). The assertion that seigneurial appropriation changed its character because it now existed ‘in connection with generalised princely power’ suggests that empirical observation has been jettisoned in favour of sociological theorising. Even historians who propose (unconvincingly, in my view) that seigneurial and feudal dependencies were distinct phenomena recognise that the former continued to function as a primary mechanism for surplus extraction down to the Revolution. More critically for Gerstenberger’s argument, their integration into a generalised system of power was severely limited in this particular regard, leaving virtually untouched the authority of seigneurs in matters relating to their lands, revenues, perquisites and the obligations of their dependents. The tendency in the sixteenth century towards a theoretical separation of fief and justice was arrested by a growing insistence on the patrimonial character of the latter which was widely cherished as the most distinguishing feature or the most important attribute of a fief.3 The second problem is bound up with Gerstenberger’s reluctance to recognise Louis XIV’s political régime as a ‘state’ even though, from the sixteenth century, the term was increasingly detached from the personalised notion of the ‘estate of the King’.4 It is true that the stability of the régime depended hugely on the sacral aura and personal attributes of the monarch. As I have said elsewhere, it was indeed ‘constrained by the hierarchical and patrimonial devolution of power and privilege’ so that ‘neither the fiscal nor the legal system was able to constitute a clearly defined public arena’.5 The private and public remained inextricably confused in a system as dependent on patrimonial as much as on 3. Parker 2003, esp. pp. 76–84. 4. Louis XIV variously spoke of ‘my state’ and ‘the state’ and contemporary writers often used the latter as a matter of course. 5. Parker 1996, p. 278.


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bureaucratic mechanism for its operation. But it defies empirical common sense not to describe the thousands of financiers, tax-collectors and judges, venal though their offices were, together with burgeoning central ministries, the intendants and royal armies as constituting a state. As Benno Teschke has contended, to recognise the reality of precapitalist states does not mean that they are not amenable to Marxist interpretation.6 Gerstenberger’s analysis of English developments raises even greater difficulties. As she acknowledges, it is only possible to view these through the prism of the ancien régime by using the concept at ‘a high level of abstraction’ (p. 64). An extremely flexible definition of a privileged estate is also required to accommodate the limited formal privileges acquired by the English landed classes. Indeed, Gerstenberger does not appear to offer a succinct definition of privilege until she has moved on from England to France. It is then said to be constituted of ‘all those forms of material and symbolic privileging – extremely varied in their particulars – that the generalised power guaranteed’ (p. 360). Privileges are subsequently described as ‘opportunities for the provision and enrichment that were sanctioned by power, rights that represented a particular kind of private property’. This amounted to a form of appropriation which was neither feudal nor capitalist, sanctioning the power of the lords especially in the form of seigneurial and church-rule (p. 453). Gerstenberger dates the formation of the ancien régime in England, where, in contrast to France, a generalised monarchical power already existed, from the constitution of two distinct noble estates in the fourteenth century. The first was the result of the successful struggle by the peerage, particularly for the right to be called to parliaments and to act as judges (pp. 76–105, 601). The second noble estate was created by the remaining members of the knightly class, who consolidated their control of local office as sheriffs and Justices of the Peace and over the acquisition of gentry-status. The elasticity of these definitions allows Gerstenberger to extend the English ancien régime well into the nineteenth century. She is very reluctant to give it a definitive burial, noting that the arrival of bourgeois society and state has variously been ascribed to 1649, 1688, 1832 and ‘sometimes to the third round of electoral reform of 1884–5’ (p. 270). The formation of a public administration in which the office became more important than the office-holder awaited the mid-nineteenth century, an argument illustrated by reference to the Poor Law Reforms of 1834 (p. 288), and the slow pace of change in the army and navy (pp. 282–4). There is an obvious contrast between the abrupt demise of the French nobility in 1793 (despite the odd ‘Count’ who can still be found maintaining an ancestral château or two) and the slow decline of the English aristocracy. Yet, as Gerstenberger observes, the fact that nobility and hereditary membership of the House of Lords lasted until the twentieth century can hardly be used to deny that bourgeois society had long arrived or to sustain the claim that twentieth-century Britain was ruled by an ancien-régime style estate. ‘The English form of bourgeois revolution’ she concludes ‘is the transformation of members of the ruling estates of the ancien régime into privileged members of interest groups in bourgeois society’, a process underway in the eighteenth century but ‘easily disguised by the phenomena of oligarchy, deference and the religious establishment’ (p. 248). Indeed, ‘the stability of the ancien régime in the eighteenth century is quite astonishing’ (p. 253). This is explained by 6. Teschke 2003, p. 146. Curiously, Teschke reverts to Gerstenberger’s preferred formulation of ‘generalised personal domination’ in his discussion of French absolutism, see p. 169.

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the establishment, in the aftermath of the Restoration, of the institutional autonomy of local government run by Justices of the Peace, who governed almost without control, thus creating an environment in which the rise of the middle classes could be absorbed without strain. Only with the introduction of a property-qualification for JPs in 1732 and the abandonment of rank-order among the members of the county-bench in 1753 did the state end its support for the ‘estate character’ of the JPs’ rule. An institution which had hitherto permitted ascent into the nobility now developed into one through which the dissolution of estate-society could be facilitated (pp. 256–7) ‘A major part of the “bourgeois revolution” was achieved in England by the changing social composition of the Commissions of the Peace’ (p. 623).

Gentry, peasants and the transition to capitalism What, then, had been achieved by the seventeenth-century revolutions? No more, apparently, than ‘a partial depersonalisation of the Crown’ (p. 227). Although the gentry were the prime beneficiaries of the seventeenth-century revolutions, they were not the bearers of a bourgeois revolution directed against the monarchy and feudalism. They are best considered as a lesser nobility whose estate-rule was consequently consolidated (pp. 221–7, 237, 605). In any event, the ‘emancipation of the public from the context of personal rule does not strand in any causal connection with the implementing of capitalist forms of production and circulation’ (p. 619) These sweeping claims are fraught with difficulties. The first, as John Cannon has observed, is that the gentry were not normally thought of as nobles and it is confusing to pretend they were.7 The gentry had no formal ranks and no formal privileges, and movement in and out of it was extremely fluid. Gerstenberger knows this and the result is a marked degree of inconsistency. Having declared that, under the ancien régime, ‘social positions were constituted by power to a more or less high degree’ (p. 150), a few pages later the force of this statement is diminished by the acknowledgment that ‘direct sanctioning of social hierarchy by power in England remained confined [my italics] to the higher nobility’ (p. 154). Indeed, she not only recognises that social selectivity was the key to membership of the privileged ‘estates’ but that a precondition of ascent, particularly into the gentry, was the acquisition of wealth. In contrast with the situation in France, where certain offices conferred noble status, in England the attainment of office presupposed the necessary social position. Furthermore, because of a diminution of manorial power by the end of the fifteenth century, ‘within the gentry, lordly status was largely reproduced via economic exploitation of the land monopoly’ (p. 602). The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw a considerable numerical expansion of the gentry, confirmation of which depended solely on the autonomous judgement of the College of Heralds. There occurred a simultaneous transformation of the notion of honour, a shift towards a culture of ‘hospitality’ and the acquisition of an education through University and the Inns of Court (pp. 154–61). These elements in Gerstenberger’s own account not only appear to contradict the initial insistence on power as the prime determinant of social position, but they also sit very uncomfortably with her view that the transformation of the gentry into an agent for the 7. Cannon 1995, p. 55.


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dissolution of the ancien régime did not occur until the eighteenth century. To sustain her view of the longevity of estate-rule, she relies on Michael Bush’s claim that, although there was no formal qualification for dérogeance in England, social discrimination was even more effective; she also appeals to the critique of the conventional perception of an open élite offered by Lawrence and Fawtier Stone.8 The argument is rounded off with the suggestion, presumably also derived from Bush, that ‘it is analytically advisable to consider the English nobility as a single estate’ as they ‘collectively . . . held considerable parts of the generalised power in their possession’ (p. 162). Apart from the fact that this appears to contradict her references to two distinct noble estates, it brings further substantive problems. As Cannon has said, the most that can be drawn from the work of Stone is that access to the higher nobility was more difficult than access to the gentry and insisting on a ‘gentry-peerage’ conjunction masks the significance of the permeable membrane at the bottom.9 It is also perhaps worth pointing out that the Stones, despite their denial of its open character described ‘an economic and status elite . . . from whose ranks were drawn the ruling class that ran both the counties and the country’.10 At many points in Gerstenberger’s own account, ‘class’ could very reasonably be substituted for ‘estate’. The description of the lower nobility as a ‘possessing estate’ which had ‘appropriated the generalised power of public order’ (p. 99, cf. p. 107) surely invites translation into ‘class’. ‘The far reaching social unity of the English ruling estate’ which had adopted ‘unconcealed strategies of estate rule’ against ‘the economically and socially advancing urban population’ comes as close to talking about class-interests as one can get without actually using the word (p. 226). Gerstenberger’s recognition of the significant part played by the acquisition of landed wealth in preparing access to the gentry also makes it incumbent on her to consider their economic character and to place them in the context of English agrarian relations. The result is a disappointingly brief ‘digression’ into what she considers to be the mistaken Tawney-Hill view of the gentry as a bourgeoisie. Certainly, Hill stuck to his view derived from Marx that ‘the gentry became a bourgeoisie of its own particular kind’ dependent on capitalist relations of production.11 It is a view shared by others, notably E.P. Thompson, who otherwise disagreed with Hill about the form and chronology of the bourgeois revolution. Gerstenberger’s treatment is, however, perfunctory, alluding only to Hill’s 1940 booklet and to his recognition in 1981 that the controversy over the rise of the gentry had involved ‘generalisations about an ill-defined social class’ which were ‘tossed backwards and forwards’ (pp. 187–8). In this very article, Hill, in fact, significantly broadened his picture of the class-alignments in town and countryside. The gentry were no longer set against the rest but the gentry together with some yeomen, some merchants, and some artisans against the rest.12 Hill was arguably slower than some others to bring into focus the significance of the increasing prosperity the English yeomanry and better-off husbandmen for English economic development. He was much given to stressing the ultimate dispossession of 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Bush 1984; Stone and Fawtier, 2001. Cannon 1995, p. 56. Stone and Fawtier 2001, p. 9. Hill 1980, p. 130. Hill 1981, p. 122.

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the English peasantry by reference to the failure of the Leveller-demands for security of tenure – despite Thompson’s enjoinders about the slowness of the process.13 Gerstenberger is even less convincing, as she is, on the one hand, unwilling to see the gentry as bearers of capitalism but, on the other, goes along with a view of its progress in which the peasantry only appear as victims or potential victims. Well-to-do peasants and yeomen make only the most fleeting of appearances (pp. 138, 156). Gerstenberger relies entirely on Robert Brenner’s well-known top-down, landlord-driven view of capitalist development and also on the work of John Martin, for whom the endemic and widespread unrest of the sixteenth century and early seventeenth century was merely testimony to a ‘process of agrarian transformation, which culminated in the defeat of the peasantry and the release of the land for the further advance of capitalism’.14 In company with these historians, Gerstenberger passes over the abundant evidence that for a crucial period – roughly, from the mid-sixteenth century to the late-seventeenth century, a significant class of small and medium-sized farmers enjoyed a degree of security and prosperity which enabled them to play a vital part as producers, consumers and employers of labour in the transition to the classical three-tier agrarian structures of the eighteenth century. I brought some of this evidence together in 1996 and nothing encountered since undermines the observations made at that time: copyholders were remarkably successful in defending their titles at law, obtaining confirmations of custom, the conversion of copyhold into freehold, and fending off exorbitant increases in entryfines and other deprivations of aggressive landlords.15 To the works then cited, three major studies should be added: Roger Manning’s meticulous study of village-revolts, Robert Allen’s ‘masterpiece of economic history’ analysing of four centuries of agrarian change in the south Midlands and Jane Whittle’s study of Tudor Norfolk, one of the most marketoriented agricultural regions.16 The first shows how the persistence, extent and success of peasant-action both judicial and extra-legal contributed to the blurring of the customary and freehold tenure.17 The second reinforces these conclusions with a lucid summary of the jurisprudence and judicial processes, which, between the late fifteenth and late sixteenth centuries, transformed the legal position of both copyholders and beneficial lessees so that they acquired a substantial proprietary interest in their holdings. Freedom to sell, protection against eviction, the enforcement of the principle that custom must be ‘reasonable’ (which virtually converted life-tenancies in the Midlands into freeholds) resulted in a substantial increase in the acreage farmed by owner-occupiers.18 If Allen is here simply underlying the findings of other scholars, he then goes on to provide unsurpassed data to sustain the view that significant increases in agricultural productivity did not depend on enclosure but could and did take place on the open-field holdings of England’s yeomenfarmers, for whom the early seventeenth century was a golden age.19 Whilst it may never be possible demonstrate with scientific certainty a direct causal link between security of tenure 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Parker 2008, p. 53. Martin 1983, p. 216. Parker 1996, pp. 232–7. Manning 1988: Allen 1988; Whittle 2000. The quote is from Boyer 1993 p. 923. Manning 1988, for example pp. 133–5, 141, 144–5, 152–3. Allen 1988, pp. 71–7. Allen 1988, especially Part II.


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and the undoubted increase in grain-yields, their co-existence, so diametrically opposed to the situation in France, strongly suggests that this was more than a happy coincidence. Jane Whittle has little doubt that the significance of the period between 1440 and 1580 . . . lies in the freedom, prosperity, and, in Norfolk, the lack of landlordly interference experienced by the rural population, and in the fact that an economy generated by small landholders unburdened with heavy exactions by state or landlord could promote the development of capitalism.20 It should be stressed that none of those who take issue with Brenner’s or Martin’s view of the dynamics of agrarian change suggest that there were not losers; this was the inexorable consequence of the ever-widening differentiation of the peasantry which had been going on since at least the thirteenth century and now stretched from substantial yeomen with over 200 acres to the near landless.21 Allen is clear that ‘English agrarian relations followed two contrasting paths of development in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the most famous of which was enclosure, and which ‘resulted in the elimination of peasant farming’.22 Moreover, the depopulating enclosures which characterised the period 1450–1524, and which caused small family-farms to be thrown together into huge sheep-pastures, often let to capitalist tenants and, frequently, on short-term leases ‘represented a precipitous leap into capitalist relations’.23 However, the other path, which involved ‘the consolidation of farmers’ property rights in open field villages’ was more common.24 Departing from Martin’s opinion that the pace of enclosure in the Midlands was sustained through the sixteenth century, Allen identified three waves of enclosure (1450–1524, 1575–1674, and 1750–1849), with a slowdown in the sixteenth century.25 In any event, the pattern in the Midlands was not characteristic of the rest of the country, where the extent of enclosing in the sixteenth century was even lower.26 He concludes that the dramatic increase in protection afforded by the law-courts to the peasantry was itself a manifestation of the anxiety generated by the first wave of enclosures and contributed to the fact that it was not until the late seventeenth century that the yeomanry began to be put to the test by the introduction of the modern mortgage. This enabled landlords to buy freeholds, dispense with copyholds and beneficial leases and amalgamate their land into large farms.27 Whatever the merits of this particular argument, Roger Manning has accurately noted that, ‘[m]ost historians of English agriculture agree that the decline of the smallholder became pronounced only in the late seventeenth century in corn growing regions, while smallholders actually increased in many sylvan-pastoral regions’.28 Gerstenberger is evidently unaware of the accumulating evidence, which has left Brenner somewhat isolated in his unwillingness 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

Whittle 2000, p. 315. Whittle 2000, Chapter 4 and p. 312. Allen 1988, p. 76. Allen 1988, p. 66. Allen 1988, p. 76. Allen 1988, p. 30. Allen 1988, p. 31. Allen 1988, pp. 71, 102–3. Manning 1988, p. 152; cf. Parker 1996, p. 236.

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to recognise the positive as well as the negative aspects of the differentiation within the peasantry.29

The English state and French absolutism No doubt, she would point out that it was not her intention to do more than deal with ‘conditions of reproduction exclusively from the standpoint of their being sanctioned by the ruling power’ (p. 137). Yet, even from this perspective, Gerstenberger sees only the limitations on the ability of the crown to protect the peasantry. Even if it were granted that the slowing down of the rate of enclosure after 1524 had nothing to with the government’s anti-enclosure policies and that these could be weakened in parliament and obstructed in practice, such an argument misses the point that the transformation of tenurial law was the work of the courts and the common lawyers.30 Developing from the principle enunciated at the end of the eleventh century that all freemen were the king’s tenants, the common law inserted itself between his tenants in chief and their dependents. Given Gerstenberger’s intention to analyse and explain the emergence of bourgeois society by reference to power and power-relationships, it is extraordinary how little attention is given to the common law. It does not warrant inclusion in the index alongside international and Roman law, and is not specifically mentioned until page 593 with a reference to the reign of Henry II. Its subsequent development and significance for English property-relations is passed over.31 Yet it contributed to a path of development utterly different from that in France, where the judicial authority of seigneurs over their dependents remained fundamental to the ‘conditions of reproduction’. It is also remarkable, given Gerstenberger’s insistence that warfare was a basic mode of appropriation in feudal conditions, that she largely misses the significance of the huge contrast between a demilitarised pre-Civil-War England and the growth of a burdensome military apparatus in France. Gerstenberger certainly notes that the nobility retained its warlike character much longer in France than in England (p. 371). Moreover, she has little doubt that the ‘“absolutist” state in France was in no way a vehicle for economic development but rather an instance for organising the destruction of people and the results of production in wars’ (p. 462). There is even a belated suggestion that ‘the comparatively weaker state “apparatus” in England . . . made the development of capitalist production easier in England’ (p. 609). Yet the significance of these observations is not developed. Indeed, the increasingly divergent paths followed by England and France are obscured with the statement that, ‘in the late sixteenth century when the military potential of the kingdom was fully deployed the English crown was in fact somewhat superior to other ruling houses in military strength’ (p. 116). Indeed, England’s lack of involvement in large-scale warfare with its concomitant burdens not only served to liberate the productive forces but was critical in explaining why she did not follow France down the absolutist road. Gerstenberger, however, does not believe in absolutism and claims that historians have abandoned the concept (pp. 6, 451, 751). Even in 1990, such a perception rested heavily 29. Brenner 2001 and the critique by Byres 2006. 30. Allen 1988, p. 72. 31. Cf. Parker 1996, pp. 232–3.


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on the ultra-revisionist work of Roger Mettam.32 Gerstenberger does not really give those who have taken a contrary view their day in court. Richard Bonney’s important study of political change in France is relegated to a footnote as ‘still marked by the concept of absolutism’ (p. 751).33 William Beik’s influential analysis of Languedoc’s ruling class is treated in similar fashion – in this case, as an ‘untypical Marxist interpretation’ (p. 751).34 There is no reference at all to my own Making of French Absolutism.35 Seventeen years later, there remains no justification whatsoever for the retention of an index-entry to ‘Absolutism – abandoned as a concept’ (p. 791).36 Gerstenberger is, of course, right in thinking that historians had almost universally abandoned a vulgar conception of absolutism, incarnated in an all-powerful monarch who brought the old nobility to heal and managed the realm with bureaucratic efficiency (p. 403). By the early 1980s, it was entirely possible to incorporate a considerable body of work into a Marxist view of French absolutism which both dispensed with the old voluntarism and also avoided the perils of economic reductionism. The unfortunate irony is that, had Gerstenberger engaged with the perspectives offered by Beik and myself, she would have found much support for her view that that absolutism cannot be explained by reference to the interests of two competing classes in the style of Engels (p. 21). Although the French régime fulfilled an unmistakable class-function, the dynamics which formed it are indeed to be located in the pressures of war, religious antagonisms, the tensions engendered by dispersed loci of power and competition between sections of the upper classes. Absolutism, in Beik’s view, was ultimately a form of social collaboration; in mine, a mechanism for regulating the intense rivalries which, for decades, had destabilised the French régime or, as Victor Kiernan suggested many years ago, a device for saving the feudal nobility from themselves.37 Some of Gerstenberger’s own observations about the nobility are strangely reminiscent of the more traditional view of the subordination of the nobility. The ‘court confinement of the high nobility’ she remarks was ‘a process set in motion by armed force and money centuries before’ and ‘increasingly formalised in the judicial authority of the Crown’; a process of ‘integration continued by ‘a combination of 32. Mettam 1989; see also Henshall 1992. 33. Bonney 1978; see also his 1989 work simply entitled L’absolutisme amongst many others. Gerstenberger uses ‘annotated’ bibliographical notes to provide both references and summaries of historical research. The result is 200 pages of notes in addition to 687 pages of text, some but not all of which are critical to her central arguments. Apart from the opening theoretical section of the book, no attempt has been made to update the references to take account of work that has appeared since 1990. This is not surprising given the vast range of issues which are tackled, but it is not without consequence for any attempt at a critical evaluation of the historical arguments. Historians with a forensic interest in the empirical basis of Gerstenberger’s views may also find it irritating that numerous references give only author and publication date. In the absence of a conventional alphabetical bibliography, there is no easy means of locating some titles, a difficulty which should not have eluded the publishers. 34. Beik 1985. 35. Parker 1983. 36. For recent discussions of the topic and its historiography, Cosendey and Decsimon 2002; Beik 2005. 37. Kiernan 1995, p. 29; for an attempt to apply this view to European absolutist regimes in general, Parker 2001.

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repression and gratification’ (p. 507). Such formulations do not convey the importance of the nobility themselves as agents in the creation of Louis XIV’s régime, a complex process requiring both a shift in their own culture, greater self-discipline and a reassertion of their ideological hegemony. Gerstenberger does alight on the growing emphasis on order for order’s sake (pp. 484–5), but her statement that ‘the cultural forms of the educated classes proceeded via measures of repression and regulation’ (p. 503) misses the way in which they created and internalised the cultural ethos of the absolutist régime.38 The seemingly top-down perspective of her observations makes it difficult to understand the simultaneous reluctance to accept the reality of the absolute state, particularly as Gerstenberger also recognises that ‘royal rule was not limited by general “representative bodies” but by the structure of its own executive apparatus’ (396–7). Its absolutist character lay, it would now generally be agreed, not in the king’s ability always to have his way, but in the combination of his personal, military, judicial, and patrimonial attributes themselves embedded in a system in which executive, administrative, fiscal and judicial powers were undivided. Taxes could be introduced or increased without consent over most of the realm; the king as represented by the royal council could overrule custom by virtue of his legal sovereignty and his role as supreme judge and arbiter responsible to God alone. Gerstenberger may (one hopes) be right that ‘scarcely anything remains of the view that absolutism marked the beginning of the modern state’ (p. 407), but the term has not lost its utility.39 Much of its value is precisely that it throws into sharp relief the divergent paths of followed by France and England between the Reformation and 1700. Gerstenberger appears, at times, to acknowledge this, accepting Hill’s view that, in England, ‘the monarchy in the traditional sense’ came to an end in 1688 (p. 235), and that, more precisely after 1690, sovereignty no longer lay with the crown. Monarchical power was transferred to the state. She also recognises the significance of the creation of the Bank of England and the national debt, the steps taken to free the fiscal administration from private interests and the beginnings of a professional civil service. Yet none of this persuades her that what had emerged was a bourgeois form of state-power: ‘Generalised power was still reserved to members of the ruling estates’ which had not yet evolved into a class and whose hegemony would not be dented for another hundred years (p. 237). She also insists that the events of 1688 ‘did not take place in the context of a revolutionary public’ (p. 234), a statement designed to both sustain and reflect her wider argument that ‘it is through discourse in the public sphere that transformation of power acquires its bourgeois character’ (p. 665). The space for such a discourse is opened up not by conflict between clearly defined economic classes but between those competing for power. Gerstenberger’s analytical point is well made but once again the periodisation is open to challenge on the grounds that a bourgeois public sphere developed in England much earlier than she allows. 38. Cf. Parker 1996 Chapter 5. 39. I say ‘one hopes’ because the impact of my critique of the ‘modernity’ of the French state, although substantially incorporated into Brunno Teschke’s recent work (2003), may turn out be quite limited in historical circles. It certainly runs contrary to French scholarship as exemplified by Le Roy Ladurie’s bullish view of the French monarchy (1966). Colin Jones’s best-selling study of eighteenth-century France (1992) has not helped, whilst some historians even remain attached to modernisation-theory, taking Louis XIV’s régime as an exemplar.


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A bourgeois public space Gerstenberger herself dwells on the importance of the public discourse generated from the 1530s by the Reformation (p. 194). In the mid-seventeenth century, this extended beyond the propertied classes, notably embracing the revolutionary debates of the Levellers (pp. 211–12, 620). She further notes the extent of public involvement in the many petitions submitted to parliament in 1641–2 and refers to the social criticism provoked by enclosures, monopolies and other forms of royal patronage (pp. 198, 178–9). Attention is drawn to the particular significance of the attempts by MPs to use the public as an instrument of their own policy (p. 198) and the debate over the extent to which parliament should itself be an expression of the popular will (pp. 198–9). A long and discursive passage on ‘good order’ also contains a passing mention of the Stuarts’ attempts to manipulate popular culture (pp. 169–70) Gerstenberger remarks that the Laudian efforts to legitimise the absolute state in sacerdotal fashion had the opposite effect (pp. 183, 193). These observations lead to the somewhat surprising conclusion that the underlying cause of a deepening cultural crisis was an ‘intensification of generalised monarchical power’ which although it ‘violated estate interests’ and aroused opposition to its unpopular policies did not lead to criticism of generalised power itself (pp. 180, 184). ‘The King’s servants in the counties’ it is somewhat opaquely claimed ‘did not take a great interest in the constitutional struggles over the extent of the prerogative’ (p. 183). Accepting the revisionist argument that parliament still remained the king’s parliament (p. 175), Gerstenberger reflects nothing of Charles’s own sense that the country was slipping away from him and nothing of the way in which the widespread concern for the destiny of Parliament was rooted in the conviction that it was the guarantor of the liberties of the nation and the principal agency through which the fears and aspirations of the population were expressed. All that the Revolution of 1649 achieved was a ‘partial constitutionalisation of monarchical power’ (p. 199). This ‘left the King with a large part of his prerogative’ (p. 200) and ‘from 1660 to 1688 the English Kings had more power at their command than did their predecessors’ (p. 233). Such a view reduces the real and ideological significance of the destruction of the prerogative courts, the accompanying enhancement of parliamentary authority, of both statute and common law and the successful assertion by 1678 of the Commons’ right to initiate money-bills. More significantly, it minimises the high risks involved in the efforts of the later Stuarts to re-assert the fullness of their power, which turned into a disaster and finally left James II utterly isolated. It comes as something of a surprise when Gerstenberger remarks, alongside her claim that there was no revolutionary public in 1688, that the events of that year shook the pillars of the conventional discourse about the royal prerogative (p. 234). The ideology which furnished the justification for the new régime did not drop out of the sky. Locke’s decidedly subversive views about the origins and nature of political authority had been penned several years earlier. In doing so, he brought together ideas of natural equality, the notion that civil society was established for the preservation of private property and the widespread assumption that the royal prerogative was not unlimited. Locke does not appear in Gerstenberger’s work; nor does Hobbes, nor Chief Justice Coke, nor economic thinkers like Mun, Missenden and Petty, nor Milton or Newton. The relationship between common law, statute-law and the royal prerogative is not discussed.

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The innumerable works of Christopher Hill on the connections between religious, economic, social and political thought are ignored. There is no place for Johann Somerville’s demolition of the revisionist claim that there were no long-term ideological causes of the Revolution or Joyce Appleby’s demonstration of the progress of individualism in economic thought and attitudes.40 The non-revisionist work of Sachs on localism, (p. 192), Derek Hirst’s study of parliament (p. 720) and Richard Cust’s important article on the transmission of news (p. 721) are all mentioned, but the last two only in annotated footnotes and with little sense of what they tell us about the exceptionally precocious nature of English political culture.41 A recurrent theme of political discourse was the fear of going down the French road, most famously associated with popery and wooden shoes, but also with emergency-taxes made permanent by unaccountable government. The understanding that England’s political régime was different from France can be traced back at least to Sir John Fortescue in the 1460s.42 Locke thus encapsulated long and deeply-held convictions when he remarked that absolute monarchy was ‘no form of monarchy at all’ since the monarch was exempted from the rule of the public law.43 As Bill Speck concluded, what triumphed in England was ‘a version of the rule of law which saw the King as beneath not above it’.44 The English polity now had virtually nothing in common with that of France as both Montesquieu and Voltaire were soon to recognise. Gerstenberger is right in thinking that the emergence of the bourgeoisie and bourgeois polity in England cannot simply be located in a simple class-confrontation. Hill’s original notion of the transfer of class-power in the 1640s probably oversimplifies a more protracted process. The English bourgeoisie, just like Thompson’s working class and Louis XIV’s nobility, was present at its own making. But the triumph of agrarian capitalism was more rapid and more complete than Gerstenberger allows, as was the development of a bourgeois public space. The transformation of England’s ruling class and its values was to provide a challenge to the French ancien régime of an entirely new sort, contributing directly to its demise in 1789. Gerstenberger’s desire to avoid an economic reductionism translates into a rejection of analytical tools that help to illuminate key facets of these diverging evolutions. Recasting a thousand years of history within a new conceptual framework is also a huge undertaking, which leaves one torn between admiration and doubts about how far it is possible for a single individual to accomplish such a task whilst doing full justice to the historical literature. Some collective endeavour might be appropriate. Reviewed by David Parker University of Leeds [email protected]

40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

Sommerville 1986; Appleby 1978. Sacks 1986; Hirst 1975; Cust 1986; Parker 1996 pp. 241–4. Parker 1996 pp. 244-6, 259–60. Cited by Parker 1996, p. 256. Speck 1989, pp. 164–5.


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References Allen, Robert C. 1992, Enclosure and the Yeoman: The Agricultural Development of the South Midlands, 1450–1850, Oxford: Clarendon. Appleby, Joyce 1978, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Beik, William 1985, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France. State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— 2005, ‘The Absolutism of Louis XIV as Social Collaboration’, Past & Present, 188: 195–224. Bonney, Richard 1978, Political Change in France Under Richelieu and Mazarin 1624–1661, Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— 1989, L’absolutisme, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Boyer, George R. 1993, ‘England’s Two Agricultural Revolutions’, The Journal of Economic History, 53, 4: 915–23. Brenner, Robert 2001, ‘The Low Countries in the Transition to Capitalism’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 1, 2: 169–242. Bush, Michael 1984, The English Aristocracy: A Comparative Synthesis, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Byres, Terence J. 2006, ‘Differentiation of the Peasantry Under Feudalism and the Transition to Capitalism: In Defence of Rodney Hilton’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 6, 1: 17–78. Cannon, John 1995, ‘The British Nobility 1660–1800’, in The European Nobilities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries edited by H.M. Scott, 2 vols., London: Longman. Cosendey Fanny and Robert Descimon 2002, L’absolutisme en France: histoire et historiographie, Paris: Seuil. Cust, Richard 1986, ‘News and Politics in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, Past & Present, 112: 60–9. Henshall, Nicholas 1992, The Myth of Absolutism: Change and Continuity in Early Modern European Monarchy, London: Longman. Hill, Christopher 1980, ‘A Bourgeois Revolution?’, in Three British Revolutions, edited by J.G.A. Pocock, Princeton: Princeton University Press. —— 1981, ‘Parliament and People in Seventeenth-Century England’, Past & Present, 92: 100–24. Hirst, D. 1975, The Representative of the People? Voters and Voting in England under the Early Stuarts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jones, Colin 1992, The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon, London: Penguin Press. Kiernan, Victor G. 1965, ‘State and Nation in Western Europe’, Past and Present, 31: 20–38. Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel 1966, The Ancien Régime. A History of France, 1610–1774, Oxford: Blackwell. Manning R.B. 1988, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England 1509– 1640, Oxford: Clarendon. Martin, John E. 1983, Feudalism to Capitalism: Peasant and Landlord in English Agrarian Development, London: Macmillan. Mettam, Roger 1989, Power and Faction in Louis XIV’s France, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parker, David 1983, The Making of French Absolutism, London: Edward Arnold. —— 1996, Class and State in Ancien Régime France: The Road to Modernity?, London: Routledge. —— 2001, ‘Absolutism’, in Encyclopaedia of European Social History edited by Peter N. Stearns, Section 9, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. —— 2003, ‘Absolutism, Feudalism and Property Rights in the France of Louis XIV’, Past & Present, 170: 60–95.

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—— 2008, Ideology, Absolutism and the English Revolution: Debates of the British Communist Historians 1940–1956, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Sacks, D.H. 1986, ‘The Corporate Town and the English State: Bristol’s “Little Businesses” 1625–1641’, Past & Present, 110: 65–105. Stone, Lawrence & Jeanne C. Fawtier 1986, An Open Elite?, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sommerville, Johann 1986, Politics and Ideology in England 1603–1640, London: Longman. Speck William A. 1989, Reluctant Revolutionaries. Englishmen and the Revolution of 1688, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Teschke, Brunno 2003, The Myth of 1648. Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International Relations, London: Verso. Whittle, Jane 2000, The Development of Agrarian Capitalism: Land and Labour in Norfolk, 1440– 1580, Oxford: Oxford University Press.


brill.nl/hima

Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism The Imaginary A: al-ḫayālī. – E: the imaginary. – F: l’imaginaire. R: mnimoe, voobražaemoe. – S: lo imaginario. C: xiangxiang, xugou 想象、虚构 According to the Enlightenment, the imaginary was the non-real or fictitious, which should be replaced by a rational knowledge of reality. For the romantics, it was a productive force, which, by imagining the world as completely different from the factual world, had the power to change it. Marx understood the imaginary as a reality sui generis: the way in which the capitalist mode of production ‘appears’ and by which it convincingly ‘works’. Clarification about the imaginary is necessary in order to know the world of capitalism in its reality – as an inverted [verkehrte] reality. Ernst Bloch tried to reintegrate the imaginary as a productive force into Marxism: as the ‘warm stream’ which inspires the ‘cold stream’ of Marxist analysis (Bloch 1986), instead of undermining it by otherworldliness. The productive moment of the imaginary is also stressed by Jean-Paul Sartre who published his phenomenological treatise of the same name during the German occupation. If the imaginary supposes a free consciousness, nevertheless the imagined Unreal is always constituted ‘on the ground of the world that it denies’ (2004, 186). Every ‘concrete and real situation of the consciousness in the world is pregnant with imagination’ (ibid.). The subversive message is that, even in a situation of defeat, individual consciousness has the possibility to negate this new world. Louis Althusser was the first theorist who elaborated the imaginary as a constitutive category of Marxist theory itself. The imaginary is a ‘misrecognition’ and, at the same time, a © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010

‘recognition’ of reality, that is, of a original relation of humans to reality that can be theoretically understood but not overcome. Only on this condition will it be possible to make the imaginary productive as a specific ‘battlefield [Kampfplatz]’ for the transformation of social relations. 1. The term ‘Einbildungskraft’ in German was intensified by romanticism. It derives from the Greek phantasia and the Latin imaginatio, and was translated into English and the Romance-languages with ‘imagination’. It is an indispensable productive force for the concept of alternative designs of another world. ‘L’imagination au pouvoir’ was the slogan of Paris students during May 1968; it became the ‘signature of an epoch’ (Barck 1993, 1). In Discours préliminaire to the Encyclopédie, the imaginary, together with art, was seen as productive labour and participated in the unfettering of productive forces. ‘The defamation of fantasy or its relegation to a special domain, marked off by the division of labour, is the original phenomenon of the regression of the bourgeois spirit’ (Adorno 1976, 51). Charles Baudelaire, who defended the imaginary against the realistic battle cry of ‘Copiez la nature’ as ‘reine des facultés’ (1859/1971, 24), confronted the fierce opposition of all the theories of art that wanted to force the imagination into the chains of aesthetic rules. On the other hand, when the imaginary lacks an orientation towards the social reality for which the productive relation to the infinity of the possible has to prove itself, what remains is only a path towards the internal [Innerlichkeit]. The sufferings of Anton Reiser, the protagonist of Karl Philipp Moritz’s novel of the same name, living in material constraint and pious bigotry, appear to him as ‘the sufferings DOI: 10.1163/156920610X533324

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[. . .] of a vivid imagination’ that deprive him of the joys of his youth (Moritz 1926, 77). The imaginary does not remain untouched by the productivity of imagination. Be it a plebeian hero like Eulenspiegel, who holds up a mirror to the duped mass, giving the imaginary a moment of self-knowledge, or the memory that provides the mirror to establish a sense of community – the imaginary is always a mode of mis/recognition. 2. Marx uses the word for the first time in his critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right and its left-Hegelian continuation. Hegel’s method of resolving the problem of a bourgeois-civil society whose competition threatens to destroy it ‘from above’ by defining the state as ‘the reality of the ethical idea” (PR, § 257), according to Marx, is a speculative reversal of what really occurs. The conclusions of such a procedure are, by necessity, imaginary: ‘the actual relation of family and civil society to the state is conceived as its internal imaginary activity. Family and civil society are the premises of the state; they are the genuinely active elements, but in speculative philosophy things are inverted’ (Marx 1975a, 8) The ‘realisation’ of this speculative philosophy is the bourgeois state, which can declare all its citizens free and equal by abstracting from social reality. In this way, the state itself is ‘imagined’ as the realm of freedom and equality. In this realm, the human being is ‘the imaginary member of an illusory sovereignty, [. . .] deprived of his real individual life, and endowed with an unreal universality’ (Marx 1975b, 154). The question of the foundation of the ‘efficacy’ of the imaginary is seen as already answered by Feuerbach. His critique of religion ‘has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain’. The task now is to consider critically reality itself, ‘so that [man] will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower’ (Marx 1975c, 176). Marx emphatically demonstrates an understanding of the reason why human beings imagine a better world: ‘religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress’ (175). In the critique of political economy, Marx encounters the phenomenon of the imaginary

once again. ‘Things which in and for themselves are not commodities, things such as conscience, honour, etc., can be offered for sale by their holders, and thus acquire the form of commodities through their price. [. . .]. The expression of price is in this case imaginary, like certain quantities in mathematics. On the other hand, the imaginary price-from may also conceal a real value-relation or one derived from it, as for instance the price of uncultivated land, which is without value because no human labour is objectified in it’ (Marx 1976, 197). This imaginative dimension characterises the conceptuality of political economy itself, which becomes the object of his critique: ‘In the expression “value of labour”, the concept of value is not only completely extinguished, but inverted, so that it becomes its contrary. It is an expression as imaginary as the value of the earth’ (677). Thus, the imaginary concerns not only a form of thinking but the way in which reality itself appears: ‘These imaginary expressions [. . .] are categories for the forms of appearance of essential relations’ (ibid.). The imaginary in this case is not a product of subjective imagination but ‘objective’: not just ‘semblance [Schein]’, but ‘appearance [Erscheinung]’. ‘That in their appearance things are often presented in an inverted way is something fairly familiar in every science, apart from political economy’ (ibid.) The point of Marx’s critique is to break the persuasive power of the imaginary by the power of science. However, because what appears consists in a ‘reversal’ of ‘things’, scientific clarification reverses this only theoretically. The discovery of its imaginary character, while destroying ‘the semblance of the merely accidental determination of the magnitude of the value of the products of labour’, ‘by no means abolishes that determination’s material form’ (168) because the imaginary, which appears here, ‘represents’ the very real power of capital. 3. Ernst Bloch follows Marx’s critique of the imaginary character of the bourgeois state, the division of bourgeois and citoyen. ‘The citoyen [. . .] was conceived as a member of a nonegotistical and therefore still imaginary polis’ (Bloch 1986, 932). However, this citizen who

D. Boer / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 245–252 precedes the ‘guiding image of the comrade’ (933), according to Bloch, is not only an abstraction that distracts from reality and therefore has to be exposed. ‘Guiding images’, ‘despite their class basis’, still retain an appeal ‘as if the virtue desired in them was not yet wholly done or done for’ (932). Here there is ‘a possible heritage’ that causes ‘a kind of loss, a kind of rediscovery, a kind of obligation which arouses longing’ (ibid.). The imaginary, conceived in this way, is ‘productive’: ‘wishful portraits of being truly human [. . .] in experimenting variety, in exemplariness which is not anywhere discharged’ (ibid.). That is, admittedly, valid only if the ‘cold stream’ of Marxist analysis is supposed to set this ‘warm stream’ of the utopian on the firm ground of the reality of class-society. But the other way around is valid as well: without utopian, imaginary ‘guiding images’ like that of the citoyen, the analysis is only cold and it will be difficult to spur the people: ‘Never without inheritance, least of all without that of the primal intention: of the Golden Age. But Marxism, the coldest of detectives in all its analyses, takes the fairytale seriously, takes up the dream of a Golden Age practically’ (1458). The imaginary flower of romanticism should not simply be plucked but ‘inherited’ as well. 4. Louis Althusser understands the category of the imaginary as the original relation of the human being to reality. Before we recognise reality scientifically, we already have an idea, an image [imago] of it. But there is no ‘afterwards’: the imaginary relation is constitutive for being human; it can be recognised but not overcome. As such, it is the ‘place’ of the ideological: ‘Ideology is a “Representation” of the Imaginary Relationship of Individuals to their Real Conditions of Existence’ (Althusser 1984a, 36). Apart from his theory of ideology, Althusser also has another approach to the problem of the imaginary: the art that by consciously working with images is able to play with them and to assemble them in such a way that the dominant ideology is dismantled. 4.1. Spinoza initially became important for Althusser (cf. FM and RC) because the distinction between ‘imaginatio’ and ‘ratio’

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(Ethics II, prop. 40, schol. 2) offered him the possibility to distinguish between Marxian theory, as scientific, and ideology. Spinoza with his ‘theory of the difference between the imaginary and the true [. . .] explains to us why Marx could not possibly become Marx except by founding a theory of history and a philosophy of the historical distinction between ideology and science’ (Althusser & Balibar 1979, 16 et sq). The practical-political meaning of this difference was to create space within the Stalinist-dominated Communist movement for a free science. But, at that time already, his concern was not only to reject the ‘theoretical claims’ of ideology but also to recognise ‘its practical function’ (Althusser 1997, 229). Since his work on the ideological stateapparatus (ISA) in 1969–70, at the latest, the importance of Spinoza for Althusser is above all that he developed ‘the first theory of ideology ever thought out’ (Althusser 1976, 135), a theory of ideology in which the imaginary is not seen ‘as a psychological category’ but as ‘the category through which the world is thought’ (Althusser 1996b, 114). Althusser thinks in the first place of what Spinoza in the Ethics says about the ‘first level of knowledge’, the imaginary: the fantastic idea (‘imaginatio’) that ‘all natural things act on account of an end as they [men] themselves do’, ‘that all the things that happen, happen on account of them’ (Ethics I, appendix). However, the idea of human beings that the world turns around them and around that which is useful and agreeable for them certainly has a connection with reality in the form of a ‘corpus externum’, but mediated ‘through the ideas of affection of its body [corporis]’ (Ethics II, prop. 26, dem). As Althusser interpreted the type of knowledge of the imaginary, it is ‘not at all [. . .] a “piece of knowledge”, but [. . .] the material world of men as they live it, that of their concrete and historical existence’ (Althusser 1976, 136). Spinoza’s theory of the imaginary was, above all, a critique of religion with its idea that ‘God has made everything on account of man’ (Ethics I, appendix). This theory was interesting for Althusser as a critique of the fantastic idea of modern, bourgeois man, as if the whole world turns around his

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‘I’ – formulated conceptually by Descartes with the ‘cogito, ergo sum’. Spinoza rejected what was seen as ‘the origin of all western philosophy’ (Althusser 1996b, 115). This is the concrete imagination that Althusser has in view in his theory of ideology, even when he deals with ‘ideology in general’. Althusser found in Spinoza an ideologytheoretical relevant application of his concept of the imaginary, namely, in his reflections ‘the Jewish State and its ideology in the Theological-Political Treatise’ (TTP) (Althusser 1982, 19 et sq.). Here, ‘in the history of the Jewish people’, the imaginary works ‘in a practical form’ (Althusser 1976, 136). He refers here to Spinoza’s positive interpretation of the prophets in Israel who by their power of imagination [potentia imaginandi] are qualified to tell the people (which only can be approached by images) stories that give them the possibility to organise themselves as ‘a society with fixed laws’ without which human beings cannot live ‘securely and in good health’ (Spinoza 2007, 46 et sq.) – a ‘desire’ that, admittedly, is not the highest (the knowledge of truth for its own sake), but which is the only thing that counts for the people and which is the condition of the freedom of thought for the seeker of truth (the philosophers) (Ch. XX). What distinguishes the Jewish people in this relationship is that its religion, its belief in what God wants and demands is so exclusively ‘political’, directed to the organisation of the state (Ch. XIX). Their religion, therefore, is no less fantastic than what other peoples believe, though considerably more useful and thus more effective. Human beings imagine precisely the world that is useful for them and agreeable. In the Theological-Political Treatise, the extent to which this imagination can be meaningful becomes clear: as a political ideology, which does not locate the goal of the imaginary at the end of or beyond history, but seeks it in politics itself. This application of the imaginary is to be found again in Althusser’s considerations on a proletarian ideology. This is ‘an ideology of a political character’; the dominant idea is that ‘of the class struggle which envisages the abolition of classes and the establishment of com-

munism’ (Althusser 1983, 463). However, unlike Spinoza, the imagining subject is not ‘the’ human being or the ‘people’, but the members of the working class imagining a world that is useful and agreeable especially for them. This ideology constitutes them as a ‘fighter-subject’ (462) which, informed by the experience of class-struggle and the Marxist science of history, rejects the imagination of a sovereign and autonomous ruling subject (of the great God of religion or the little bourgeois god of bourgeois ideology) and opposes to it the fantastic sentence from the Internationale: ‘No saviours from on high deliver / No trust we have in prince or peer / Our own right hand the chains must shiver/ Chains of hatred, greed and fear’ (Althusser 1995, 234). The image that human beings make of their world is thus not simply one to which they have to subjugate themselves. They search for images in which they can recognise themselves. These images are not just invented but always already connected with existing images. 4.2. As clear as it is that Althusser owes his concept of the imaginary to psychoanalysis, it is nevertheless difficult to determine exactly how he uses it. The text in which he published his theory of ideology (Althusser 1984a, 1–60) claims a relation between ‘Freud’s proposition that the the unconscious is eternal ’ and his own ‘proposition: ideology has no history’. Althusser even calls this relation ‘theoretically necessary’ but leaves open how the connection can be thought (35). He does not refer back to the brief attempt at clarification he made in ‘Freud and Lacan’ (1964). Althusser deleted the relevant sections in the original version of ‘Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses’ (published posthumously in 1995). Obviously, he was not sure of the matter. Nevertheless, from this text and others published after his death, it is possible to make a reconstruction regarding how he was feeling his way towards this relation. What interested Althusser in psychoanalysis in the first place was its analysis of the anthropogenesis that precedes the conscious existence of human beings [bewusstes Menschsein]: ‘the unconsciousness and its laws’ (Althusser 1984a, 156). Humanisation runs through

D. Boer / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 245–252 the symbolic order, by which the biological human child is inserted into an already ruling order (166). This symbolic order can only succeed because the child first receives an image of itself: the imaginary order (161 et sq.). It will find its place in the world necessarily through images; its relation to reality – its own and of others – is essentially imaginary. Althusser follows here Lacan (Lacan 1977, 6 et sqq) in his presentation of the moment in which the child receives an image of itself and recognises: that is me – a ‘recognising’ that, at the same time, is a ‘misrecognising’: it is ‘only’ an image of the ‘I’. This original ‘recognising/ misrecognising’-structure situates ‘the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction, which always be irreducible for the individual alone’ (2). To this extent, this explanation applies to ideology in general: what is meant is an ‘eternal’ constellation, not a specific ideology. However, the supposedly generalised validity of the psychoanalysis of anthropogenesis is, in fact, very specific. Althusser also cannot negate this specificity: in the imaginary order, there already appears the mother who holds up the mirror for the child, therefore determining this order as an Oedipal one (Althusser 1984b, 162). The human child ‘falls’ into the ‘immediate familial milieu’, not into ‘society in general or “culture” in general’ (Althusser 1996a, 71). Whatever Althusser may claim, the structure of the symbolic can only be localised ‘in the specific forms of the reality of the familial environment’ (73). The ‘fantasies’ of the child are caught from the beginning in a ‘family ideology’ (Althusser 1984a, 50). The familial constellation seems therefore to be an original moment in the reproduction of social relations. Althusser went in this direction by ‘coupling’ the school, which he thought to be dominant, with the family, without working out this connection further (31). At least once, however, he did indicate the individual-historical primary meaning of the family. He illustrates the thesis that ‘ideology in general always already interpellates individuals who are always-already subjects’ (Althusser 1995, 229) with the help of the ‘development’ of the little Louis (!) who, inter-

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pellated as a subject by one or another ideology, is ‘always-already’ a subject, i.e., ‘already a familial subject’ (ibid.). Of course, he also cancelled this passage in the published version. He does not want to say it, but says it nevertheless. At the same time, with this, he also suggests that ideology in general, despite its general claim, in fact does hint at this specific socialisation. The imaginary relationship of human beings to their real conditions of existence is always their relation to this condition of existence, the condition of the ‘family’. The relationship between psychoanalysis and ideology-theory could then be thought in the following way: psychoanalysis explicates the ‘eternity’ of ideology from the fact of the ‘always-already’ of this social relation. A definition that Althusser himself gave also goes in this direction, although it apparently says the contrary: ‘one cannot produce a theory of psychoanalysis without founding it in historical materialism (on which the theory of the formations of the familial ideology are dependent in the last instance)’ (Althusser 1993, 54). Only historical materialism can explicate familial ideology as a moment within the reproduction of society as a whole, which in its turn is the real condition of existence of the family. However, because Althusser founds psychoanalysis in historical materialism and does not dissolve it, he also implicitly states that it explicates something that only it and no another analysis is able to explicate: the paradoxical phenomenon that ‘culture precedes itself ’ (1996b, 91). It is ‘the law of culture’, that is, the Oedipal, familial constellation, that a priori ‘conditions all the inculturation of this small human being’ (81). Psychoanalysis, in this way, helps historical materialism to understand a fundamental dimension of socialisation. To this extent, psychoanalysis is, in the words of Althusser’s student Michel Tort, ‘a component discipline on the continent of historical materialism’ (Tort 1970; cf. Ghisu 1995, 127 et sqq.). If psychoanalysis is right in this respect, however, the question is whether the notion that social being [gesellschaftliches Sein] determines consciousness [Bewusstsein] does not lose its emancipatory sense. How will human beings

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ever liberate themselves from this original constellation – this structure of submission that exists already before the individual subject exists (Althusser 1994, 73)? ‘Does this not presuppose a determinism that treats the individual as an effect of the structures that precede it and found its existence’ (74)? Althusser’s answer remains vague: ‘Thus one of the most noble concerns of our theory is to reduce a little the theoretical distance between the determining and the determined’ (74). In the theory of ideology he did publish, he only thematised the class-struggle as the ‘outside’ of ideology that provides for a movement against the dominant ideology from within it (Althusser 1984a, 59). Via psychoanalysis, however, Althusser indicates an ‘outside’ of ideology that brings familial ideology in particular into permanent disorder: the unconscious. At stake here is the ‘abyss [abîme]’ that goes ‘alongside the Ich’ (Althusser 2003a, 78), a ‘something’ that fights against this order, a war that is lost by most people – they are ‘in order’ – but for some people (‘fighters’!) (Althusser 1984b, 21) never finishes. However, Althusser did not make this war productive for the ideological struggle, as he did with class-war – perhaps because these fighters, in their resistance, were too destined to remain patients. He did give an indication: the unconscious may be fixed to images offered by ideology, but it can ‘play’ with them (Althusser 1993, 109). Althusser sees how a oppressing ideology (e.g., Nazism) permits and manipulates this play (fantasies of violence). From his perspective, however, a playing with oppressing ideology itself is also conceivable: the unconscious ‘“selects” within the ideological imaginary the forms, elements or relations that “fit” it’ (ibid.). However authoritarian ideology ‘always-already’ may be, the ‘selection’ of its counter-ideology can turn out to be very anti-authoritarian. The imaginary is thus a ‘battlefield’. 4.3. The critique that Althusser’s theory of ideology ‘eternalised’ socialisation from above is also connected to the way in which he handled psychoanalysis. He comes ‘to the conception, one of resignation for historical materialism, of leaving responsibility for the

ideological in general to psychoanalysis, cancelling the deconstruction of the ideological out of the Marxist research agenda’ (PIT 1979, 203). It seems, however, to be more likely that Althusser managed to avoid the threat of a resigned conception by eventually not making psychoanalysis the foundation of his theory of ideology in general, but by leaving it as an analogy between the two. Otherwise, he would have needed to make familial ideology, as the first representation of the imaginary relation of human beings to their conditions of existence, the centre of his theory of ideology. He did not do this, perhaps because he could not see how, in that case, an ideological struggle with a perspective of liberation would still be possible. That does not make this critique obsolete. In particular, if one, differently from Althusser, understands ideology in general as the generality of this particular ideology, the question remains of whether ‘ideal socialisation from above’ (PIT 1979, 181) is not absolutised by the fact that resistance can only modify it, but never bring about its breakdown. Here, we need the ‘analytical separation of general-historical functions and their historically changing implementation, specific for a determinate social formation’ (PIT 1979, 179). Should not the generality of the Oedipal-familial constellation be put into question – as an impermissible generalisation of a temporally and culturally situated phenomenon (cf. Haug 1993, 17 passim)? Could one not think of a generality more general than this one: a relation between parents/elders and children in which the elders pass down to the youngsters their equality? If we think this way, then, of course, it is under the concrete historical condition of an unequally organised society, even only as the imagination of a world in which things would run totally differently, a world of which we have an image but that still awaits its realisation. This image is necessary because it mobilises the longing for this world. And it is possible: because of this ‘something’ that from the beginning on fights against the ‘law of culture’. 4.4. To (de)mobilise imagination consciously is the peculiarity of art. Art ‘plays’ – ‘with words, with images’ (Althusser 1994/5,

D. Boer / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 245–252 594). It plays ideology, it makes the (world-) picture of the dominant order attractive, but it can also play with ideology, take advantage of the ‘playing ground’ that ideology offers to imagination. That is ‘authentic art’ that ‘maintains a certain specific relationship’ with ideology (Althusser 1984c, 174). Art produces an ‘internal distance’, ‘which gives us a critical “view” of [ideology]’ (177). It shows the ideological of ideology so the ‘spectators’ (observers, reader) can dissociate themselves from ideology (Althusser 1979, 219). The theatre of Brecht offers an example of this. The audience goes into a theatre to let a mirror of reality be held up to them, a mirror that meets the ideological expectation of the spectators: ‘That’s exactly right! How true!’ (Althusser 2003b, 146). Brecht, however, shows what games are played with us (142). The mirror has to be shattered: ‘the theater’s object is to destroy this intangible image, to set in motion the immobile, the eternal sphere of the illusory consciousness’s mythical world’. That is the task of theatre for the sake of ‘the production of a new consciousness in the spectator’ (Althusser 1997, 151). Art, however, is only able to fulfill this task insofar as human beings longing for change and their imaginary relation to reality is open to something new that never was before. Then, the imaginary becomes a ‘battlefield’, the imagination, a productive force. Bibliography: T. Adorno 1976, ‘Introduction’, in Adorno et al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, London; L. Althusser 1979, ‘Cremonini. Painter of the Abstract’, in Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, London; L. Althusser 1976, ‘Elements of Self-Criticism’, in Essays on Self-Criticism, London; L. Althusser 1982, Montesquieu – Rousseau – Marx. Politics and History, London; L. Althusser 1983, ‘Appendix: Extracts from Althusser’s Note on the ISAs, in Economy and Society Vol. 12 Nr. 4; L. Althusser 1984a, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Essays on Ideology, London; L. Althusser 1984b, ‘Freud and Lacan’, in Essays on Ideology, London; L. Althusser 1984c, ‘A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspré’, in Essays on Ideology, London; L. Althusser 1993, Écrits

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sur la psychanalyse. Freud et Lacan, ed. by. O. Corpet & F. Matheron, Paris; L. Althusser 1994, Sur la philosophie, ed. by P. Sollers, Paris; L. Althusser 1994/5, Écrits philosophiques et politiques, ed. by F. Matheron, 2 vols, Paris; L. Althusser 1995 (1969), Sur la reproduction, Paris; L. Althusser 1996a, ‘Letters to D.’, in Writings on Psychoanalysis, New York; L. Althusser 1996b, Psychanalyse et sciences humaines: Deux conferences (1963–1964), ed. by O. Corpet & F. Matheron, Paris; L. Althusser 1997, ‘Marxism and Humanism’, in For Marx, London; L. Althusser 2003a, ‘Three Notes on the Theory of Discourse’, in The Humanist Controversy and other Writings (1966–1967), London; L. Althusser 2003b, ‘On Brecht and Marx’, in W. Montag, Althusser, Hampshire; L. Althusser & E. Balibar 1979, Reading ‘Capital’, London; K. Barck 1993, Poesie und Imagination, Stuttgart-Weimar; C. Baudelaire 1971, ‘Salon de 1859’, in Ecrits sur l’art, vol. 2, ed. by Y. Florenne, Paris; E. Bloch 1986, The Principle of Hope Vol. 3, Cambridge, MA.; S. Ghisu 1995, Ewigkeit des Unbewussten – Ewigkeit der Ideologie. Psychoanalyse und historischer Materialismus bei Althusser, Hamburg; W.F. Haug 1993, Elemente einer Theorie des Ideologischen, Hamburg; G.W.F. Hegel 1991, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (PR), Cambridge; J. Lacan 1977, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I As Revealed in Psychological Experience’, in Écrits. A Selection, New YorkLondon; K. Marx 1975c, ‘Contribution to Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction’, in Marx Engels Collected Works Vol. 3, London; K. Marx 1975a, ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’, in Marx Engels Collected Works Vol. 3, London; K. Marx 1975b, ‘On the Jewish Question’, in Marx Engels Collected Works Vol. 3, London; C.P. Moritz 1926, Anton Reiser. A Psychological Novel, Oxford; Projekt Ideologie-Theorie (PIT) 1979, Theorien über Ideologie, Hamburg; J.-P. Sartre 2004, The Imaginary: a Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, New York-London; B. Spinoza 2007, Theological-Political Treatise, ed. by Jonathan Israel, Cambridge; B. Spinoza 2000, Ethics, ed. and trans. by G.H.R. Parkinson, Oxford; M. Tort 1970, ‘La psychanalyse dans le matérialisme historique’, in Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse, Paris.

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Dick Boer Althusserianism, Enlightenment, expression, image, dialectical theatre, knowledge, appearance/ form of appearance, eternity, family, fiction, Freudo-Marxism, humanist controversy, ego, ideology-theory, ideological state-apparatuses/ repressive state-apparatuses, illusion, inner, critique, art, Lacanianism, fairytales, anthropogenesis, fantasy, psychoanalysis, critique of religion, being/ consciousness, play, Spinozism, subject-effect, symbolic order, theatre, unconscious, alienation, inversion, truth, reflection, reality, science.

Althusser-Schule, Aufklärung, Ausdruck, Bild, dialektisches Theater, Erkenntnis, Erscheinung/ Erscheinungsform, Ewigkeit, Familie, Fiktion, Freudomarxismus, Humanismus-Streit, Ich, Ideologietheorie, ideologische Staatsapparate / repressiver Staatsaparat, Illusion, Innerlichkeit, Kritik, Kunst, Lacanismus, Märchen, Menschwerdung, Phantasie, Psychoanalyse, Religionskritik, Sein/ Bewusstsein, Spiel, Spinozismus, Subjekt-Effekt, symbolische Ordnung, Theater, Unbewusstes, Verfremdung, Verkehrung, Wahrheit, Widerspiegelung, Wirklichkeit, Wissenschaft.

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