July 26, international day of struggle!

For more than six years, the warehouses of the corporations of the logistics sector have been the stage of significant struggles for decent working conditions. In these warehouses a system of exploitation prevails, based on the outsourcing of the workforce through a complex of ‘cooperatives,’ which allows the owners to organize work by eluding any forms of protection provided for by the law and by the contract. This entails arbitrary work shifts, discriminatory repartition of working hours and consequently of the salary, job on call, and a whole series of strategies robbing the workers of the hours they have worked. The well-known ready-to-assemble furniture company IKEA did not go untouched by these struggles: in mid-October 2012 the workers of the consortium of cooperatives CGS operating at the plant in Piacenza went on strike against their meager wages and for a more equal allocation of the work loads. This struggle for the plain compliance with the collective agreement and with the most basic working rights was immediately met by the opposition of CGS and IKEA, whose decision was to allow for no concessions to the workers and to weaken the workers’ strength through punitive actions and threatening to suspend, transfer and fire the workers involved. Months of struggle followed, met by the solidarity of many workers within the logistic sector at large (Tnt, Gls, Ortofin, Dhl), organized by the grassroot union Si Cobas and with the help of many activists. IKEA was then forced to reintegrate the workers, who, after extenuating negotiations including local institutions, got back to work in January 2013.

Now the Swedish company wants its revenge: at the beginning of May 2014 the cooperative San Martino, operating in the IKEA warehouse in Piacenza, launched the owners’ counter offensive, suspending 33 among the most active and unionized workers. Immediately workers from other plants and activists in Piacenza and other cities show their solidarity, in order to give strength to the main weapon in this battle: the interruption of the circulation of commodities. Equally prompt is the construction of a network of solidarity involving several cities through flyering and pickets. Given the strength of the mobilization, the owners have been forced to organize themselves in a out-and-out ‘IKEA Party’: a ‘historic bloc’ composed of institutions, political forces both in the government and in the ‘opposition,’ and confederate unions that act together to criminalize the struggle of the workers.

The attack at the IKEA workers is an attack on each and everyone who tries to stand up and fight against a crisis that is presenting its bill to those who did not contributed to it and that is putting everybody against each other, for the great convenience of the owners’ profits. It is not a coincidence that the CEO of the Italian chapter of the Swedish company has been offered the honor of being received by the central government in Rome to discuss the events at the plant in Piacenza, obtaining from this consultation a constant presence of police forces in front of the plant.

With the help of the media, compliant unions, and the embedding of the political forces, those who exploit us want to prevent, at any cost, that we collectively organize against them—instead of fighting against each other—to get what we deserve. For this reason they get together and act at various levels—spending millions!—to crush a bunch of warehouse workers. In 2013, by getting together and acting together, we fought back and beat them. This time as well, we can and we must do the same. After all, if the owners unite and ‘harmonize’ their policies, then it should follow that we start to ‘play as a team,’ that we stop our disconnected roaming and we try to open up a collective space for sharing solidarity and information on the current struggles, strengthen them, bring them on a political level that is able to talk to all the workers.

The struggle against a future of more precarious, meager and exhausting working conditions for everybody passes through Piacenza, thus we all should support it:

• By making a donation for mutual aid;
• By spreading any update on what is happening through the press and the internet;
• By organizing the distribution of flyers and the picket lines in front of the plants in every city in Italy and internationally in the international day of struggle on July 26!

If Russia follows the path that it took after 1861, it will miss the greatest chance to leap over all the fatal alternatives of the capitalist regime that history has ever offered to a people. Like all other countries, it will have to submit to the inexorable laws of that system.

Marx, Letter to Vera Zasulich, 1881

Socialism has demonstrated its right to victory, not on the pages of Das Kapital…not in the language of dialectics, but in the language of steel, cement and electricity.

Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (1937)

Buried under almost a century of ideology, the “Russian question,” the historical meaning of the defeat of the Russian revolution, is the question that will not go away.^[1] World capitalism since the 1970s has been in a crisis without end, yet the reigning ideology, despite all the headwinds of the years since the 2007–08 meltdown, still proclaims: “get used to it; there is no alternative to capitalism.” And yet, for anyone who does think about an alternative to the disintegrating world visible all around, even in the unfathomable historical amnesia of the present, the question of “what went wrong in Russia?” is never too far from the surface. The following article is not a rehash of the debates of the 1960s and 1970s on the “class nature of the Soviet Union,” important as those debates may have been and in some way still are. In the subsequent four decades, a whole broadly-shared framework for discussing that question has been largely lost, in the contemporary world of post-history, post-modernism, identity politics, the World Social Forum and NGOs. That framework was obviously lost because it no longer seemed a viable guide to the contemporary world, especially after 1989–1991.The article had its origin in a series of talks I gave in summer 2013 on the Russian, German, Chinese and Spanish revolutions.^[2] The background (re)reading for those talks got me thinking about how the political void of the past 40 years influences our ability to relate those revolutions to present developments. Even more, it got me thinking about all the alternative currents—anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, revolutionary syndicalism, the IWW, council communism—which were effectively steamrollered by Bolshevism and by the reach of the Third International for a whole epoch, an epoch which began to end ca. 1968. In fact, the article was conceived as Part One of a three-part series which would be:

• the revolutionary epoch 1917–1923, and the ultimately disastrous international influence of the Russian Revolution, illustrated in the cases of the very early French, German, Italian and US Communist Parties
• the failed return of the “vanguard party” (Trotskyism, Maoism) in the period from 1968 to 1977 and
• the ongoing recomposition of the world working class, and forms of worker organization and self-organization, today and tomorrow.

Thinking about the historical semi-oblivion of non-Bolshevik “projects for a different society” brought me up against the (hardly original) question of why revolutionary Marxism, which (at least in the ideologized variant of the Second International), had (seemingly) been embraced by hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of working people in mass movements in the West from the 1880s to the 1920s, and had then, after the mid-1920s, increasingly become the outlook of “generals without an army,” small sects of whatever stripe existing on the fringes of the mass movements of the 1930s and 1960s, but in no way hegemonic in the way revolutionary Marxism had seemed to be just before and after World War I. Rosa Luxemburg in that earlier period had spoken all over Germany to large crowds; Angelica Balabanova similarly recounts^[3] regularly speaking to crowds of 5000 in a series of small towns in Italy in the same period. A large part (at least) of the answer to that conundrum was tied up with the “Russian question.” Not merely (to reiterate) in the finely-tuned debates of 40 years ago about whether the Soviet Union was state capitalist or bureaucratic collectivist or a degenerated workers’ state; the problem lay deeper. Virtually all the protagonists in those debates seemed to rather casually assume that Russia in 1917 was something close to a fully European capitalist society, very backward to be sure, but ultimately on a continuum with the rest.^[4] Didn’t Trotsky—whose framework shaped, consciously or otherwise, those debates more than anyone, pro or con (at least among most anti-Stalinist would-be revolutionary currents)—talk about Tsarist Russia having the largest and most modern factories in the world, alongside a vast population of petty producer peasants?^[5] Hadn’t the two dozen best-known Bolsheviks of 1917 (when Stalin was totally unknown, though already fundamental in the underground apparat^[6]) spent decades in European exile? The timing seemed too perfect: Marxism, in even ideological form, receded as a mass phenomenon in most “advanced capitalist” countries in the decade after 1917, following

• the Russian Revolution
• the emergence of mass movements of workers and still more of peasants in the semi-colonial and colonial world from China and Vietnam to Africa by way of India, and, last but hardly least,
• in the transition from the formal to the real domination of capital, which overlaps with what some people call the decadence of the capitalist mode of production.

Max Eastman wrote in his memoirs of the mind-set of Greenwich Village radicalism before 1914: “We were living in times innocent of world war, of fascism, of nazism, sovietism, the Fuehrerprinzip, the totalitarian state. Nothing we were talking about had ever been tried. We thought of political democracy with its basic rights and freedoms as good things permanently secured. Planting ourselves on that firm basis, we proposed to climb higher to industrial or ‘real’ democracy.”^[7] To this we can add, where Western Marxism was (with few exceptions) concerned, times innocent of a successful mass insurrection of three million Russian workers greatly abetted by 100 million peasants who were in fact not— pace the entirety of Russian Marxists, starting with Lenin—capitalist petty producers but living overwhelmingly in household economies only tangentially related to any market; similar movementswith even smaller working classes and larger peasantries in China or Vietnam or India; or, in our own time, mass movements in the Moslemworld ostensibly (at least) fighting for an Islamic republic or even the restoration of the caliphate.In short, pre-1920s Marxism broke up, as a mass movement in the West, on the shoals of the “Russian question,” and beyond that, the realities of the world’s huge peasant populations, in countries where capitalism had an even more tenuous hold than in Russia, and where, after 1914, little real development, and a lot of outright retrogression, took place. Looking back, it seems clear that the transformation of the work of Karl Marx into a modernization ideology for developing or backward countries, at the hands of his ostensible followers, the very people who prompted him to exclaim “I am not a Marxist,” bears an important responsibility for that crack-up. (I should make clear that I am not saying that the mainstream Marxists of the Second International “had the wrong ideas.” Their “ideas” were integral to their role in propelling capital from its phase of formal to real domination, of which more below.) We know today, more clearly than was possible in the 1960s and 1970s, that Marx himself was already deeply interested in the non-Western world,^[8] and specifically said that the theses of Capital and Theories of Surplus Value were valid only for western Europe and the United States, and that other parts of the world might well follow “different roads.” The collapse of Stalinism, the post-1978 emergence of a dynamic capitalism in China, and the ebb of “Marxism-Leninism”, Maoism and Third Worldist development ideologies in much of Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America has revealed the great diversity, and adaptability, of social formations in those parts of the world that were hidden behind the apparent march toward “modernization” under the likes of the Shah of Iran, Nasser, Nehru, or Sékou Touré. Only in 2010 did the world’s rural population drop below 50 percent of the total. The great majority of those remaining in the countryside are petty-producer peasants, artisans and rural proletarian laborers. Considering only India and China, with close to 40 percent of the world’s population between them, it is clear that the “agrarian question,” on a world scale, remains central to any possible creation of a renewed communism. This is all the more urgent in light of the one million people a day who arrive from the countryside in the world’s cities, as capitalism increasingly makes their way of life unviable and draws them into a dubious future in the world’s shantytowns^[9] or China’s 270 million migrant workers.To reconnect with the political and social realities of the world’s rural population, both historically and for today, in a project to create a viable, non-developmentalist Marxism for the world after Stalinism, Maoism and Third Worldism, also takes us back to another largely forgotten dimension of Marx: the critique of the separation of city and countryside as a fundamental alienation, the separation of the producers from their means of production in the sixteenth and seventeenth century as “the ” original alienation to be overcome in a future “activity as all-sided in its production as in its consumption,”^[10] Marx’s call for the “more even distribution of the population around the earth’s surface” (Communist Manifesto) when cities, owing their existence to the centralization of capital, can be superseded, and finally, and hardly last, the ever more pressing question of the environment. All these dimensions are opened up by an inquiry into the agrarian question in the Russian Revolution.

I. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and the Russian Peasant Commune: Origins of an Ideology

In the 1870s, Karl Marx first took a serious interest in the Russian revolutionary movement, partly through the (initially) surprising impact of his own work^[11] in a country he had previously viewed as the colossal “gendarme of Europe,” and even more so by contact with the Russian Populists, both through their impressive actions^[12] and through their correspondence with him, requesting advice on strategy and tactics. In short order, Marx set aside work on volumes 2 and 3 of Capital, taught himself Russian, and spent much of the last decade of his life studying Russian agriculture. He concealed this turn in his work from his lifelong collaborator, Engels. Aside from important correspondence with Russian revolutionaries, he never wrote a text of any length based on his new interest, but at his death left two cubic meters of notes on Russia. What ensued was a fundamental step in the transformation of Marx’s work into an ideology, one whose influence reached into the 1970s. When Engels discovered these materials after Marx’s death, and realized they were the reason that Marx had not finished Capital, he was furious, and apparently wanted to burn them.^[13] Marx, in his research on Russia (as well as on other non-Western countries and regions^[14]) had discarded his earlier claims of a single path of world capitalist development, one in which “England held up to the world the mirror of its own future,” and had also recognized that the validity of his work up to that point was confined to the conditions of western Europe. At the center of Marx’s “Russian road”^[15] was the peasant commune, or mir (also called the obschina). The mir had been studied in depth in the early 1840s by the German Baron Haxthausen, whose three-volume work of 1843 led to a controversy in Russia about the mir’s significance, involving every Russian intellectual faction from the backward-looking Slavophiles to the exile Alexander Herzen to the Westernizers.^[16] The commune then became central to the Populists’ claim that Russia could, or should, skip the capitalist “stage” of development, a sentiment reinforced by Marx’s preface to the 1882 Russian translation of the Communist Manifesto,^[17] not to mention the portrayal of real conditions in England which they found in Capital. In his discovery of the still-viable Russian commune, Marx was reconnecting with his 1840s writings about “community” (“Gemeinwesen” in German).^[18] He was reasserting that for him, communism was first of all about the “material human community,” and not about forced-march industrialization and productivist five-year plans.^[19] This debate between the self-styled Marxists of different kinds and the “romantic” “subjectivist” Populists about the viability of the mir lasted into the early 1900s, greatly skewed by Engels’ suppression of Marx’s Russian studies.^[20] Even some of the Populists who had received Marx’s letters about Russia’s unique possibilities resulting from the mir, who had then become Marxists themselves, all but participated in the suppression.^[21] Later, the Social Revolutionaries (SRs), the rivals to the Bolsheviks and many of whose members considered themselves Marxists, claimed to be the true heirs of Marx based on his suppressed letters on the mir.^[22] One should not romanticize the mir; Chernyshevsky, who had known it close up near the provincial town of his boyhood, had distinctly mixed feelings about it as a prototype for socialism, yet he was one of the first, in the 1850s, to argue that the mir, combined with Western technology after a successful revolution in Europe, could be the basis for a “communist development,” as Marx and Engels later put it in 1882. What exactly was the mir as a lived experience for Russian peasants? Franco Venturi, author of the classic study of the Russian Populist movement of the nineteenth century, wrote about how the mir figured in the modernizing plans of the Tsarist state prior to the serf emancipation of the 1861, which was intended to put Russia on the path of capitalist development, and sketched themes that would remain present right up to Stalin’s destruction of the mir in his 1929–1932 collectivizations:“The enquiry of 1836 had shown how much this spirit of equality, latent in the very forms of serfdom and peasant tradition, had in fact been undermined by the rise of a group of richer farmers who began to have considerable influence on the entire life of the obshchina [or mir–LG]. These farmers, for instance, tipped the scales of periodic redistribution in their own favor and…subjected the community of poorer peasants to their control. But the enquiry had also shown how deeply these traditional forms were rooted. The assiduous inspectors were often shocked by the disorder, the vulgarity and the violence which prevailed in the meetings of the mir, and also by its many obvious injustices. Nevertheless it was in the obshchina and the mir that the peasants expressed those ideas on land ownership which had so impressed and irritated Kiselev and Périer.^[23] It was through these organizations, the only ones at its disposal, that peasant society defended itself. The communities naturally differed from district to district, reflecting the entire range of peasant life…Yet, despite all this variety, there was one common factor; the obshchina represented the tradition and ideal of the peasant masses. How then could it be broken?”^[24] That latter question would continue to vex Tsarist planners right up to 1917, and in a different way, would be the barrier on which different Bolshevik plans for industrialization as well would break up in the 1920s. From Engels to Plekhanov, “the father of Russian Marxism,” to Kautsky and Lenin, the linear, evolutionist, “matter-motion” view of “dialectical materialism” spread worldwide as the orthodoxy of the Second International. With the consolidation of Stalinism, it became identified with “real existing socialism” itself. ‘Dialectical materialism” was in fact the vulgar recapitulation of the bourgeois materialism of the eighteenth century, and not accidentally promoted by movements and regimes which were, like the eighteenth century template, completing the bourgeois revolution, in the eradication of pre-capitalist agriculture, whatever their ideology and stated goals. Elements of this ideology persist today in various types of productivism that confuse the tasks of the bourgeois and socialist revolutions.^[25]

But a still larger context was shaping this post-Marx ideological development: the global transition from the formal to the real domination of capital. In the formal phase, capital takes over pre-capitalist production (e.g., guilds, cooperation, manufacture) without modifying them materially; in the latter, real phase, capital reduces all aspects of production, reproduction and of life generally to its adequate capitalism form. In industry, the German and American “rationalization movements” (i.e., capital-intensive innovation) of the 1920s were the cutting edge of this “materialization of a social relationship”^[26]; in agriculture, this meant, ultimately, California-style agribusiness, and comparable developments in other major grain exporters such as Canada and Australia,^[27] as well as the professional, agronomy-trained farmer who has replaced western Europe’s classical peasants since World War II. In the arc from the United States to Russia, by way of the smaller agricultures of France, Italy and Germany, one finds a near-perfect congruence of lingering pre-capitalist agriculture, i.e., the agriculture of formal domination (exemplified in the individual land-owning peasant who emerged from the French Revolution) and, later, Communist Parties: the stronger pre-capitalist agriculture, the stronger the Third International parties after 1917.^[28] Pre-1914 Social Democracy and post-1917 Communism were the adequate form of working-class organization to propel this transition, and were notably marginal in countries like the United States or Great Britain, where these tasks were complete. We can thus agree with Lars Lih when he argues^[29] that Lenin was an “Erfurtian Social Democrat” in the extreme conditions of Tsarist autocracy, as long as we recognize that Erfurtian Social Democracy in Germany,^[30] like the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, were the organizational expression for this transition. One might sketch the two phases like this:

The roots of “Erfurtian Social Democracy,” as a project for state power, then, were ultimately in the absolutist state of the 16th–18th centuries, which in its Tudor phase in England (1485–1603) had began the process of clearing the countryside,^[34] a process which then spread to the continent, in the French Bourbon state and its taxation of the peasantry, and the Prussian state, with the Stein-Hardenburg top-down reforms during and after the Napoleonic wars.^[35] Thus the linear evolutionist “matter-motion” world view developed by Engels, Plekhanov, Kautsky and inherited by Lenin, as opposed to Marx’s discovery of “another road” for Russia in the combination of the mir with a western European revolution, amounted to a latter-day “modernization” ideology for countries still dealing with pre-capitalist agriculture, a “substitute bourgeois revolution” with a key role played by the working class, a continuation of the bourgeois revolution with red flags. This was, for obvious reasons, hardly recognized or articulated at the time, and required an historical unfolding over decades of the American, German or Russian variants to become visible. Nor were these outcomes a “telos” of the earlier (Lassallean, Social Democratic, or Bolshevik) formulations on organization; the road was hardly straight and narrow and major working-class defeats were required to bring the later form to maturity. Nonetheless, looked at in comparative perspective, the road is there, as it emerged in the pre-1914 world when capitalism was converting peasants and farmers into production workers in the advanced sector,^[36] whereas after World War I and especially World War II it was increasingly using high productivity to support the rapidly growing population of unproductive consumers in the “service sector,” with production workers as a declining percentage of the total work force.

It is hardly surprising to find agriculture and the vast Russian peasantry (85–90 percent of the population in 1917) as the decisive factor in the fate of the revolution, once the anticipated world revolution that would materially aid backward Russia failed to materialize. The Reds won the civil war ultimately because they had at least the grudging support of a significant part of the peasantry against the Whites who, with their ties to the old regime, could not bring themselves to accept land reform. Stalin triumphed in the debates of the 1920s, which centered on the agrarian question.^[37] Stalin’s collectivization of 1929–1932 irreversibly ruined Russian agriculture, costing the regime the previous, reluctant acceptance by the peasantry, with ten million dead and the destruction of 40 percent of all livestock (horses, cows and pigs) by the peasants themselves. For the remaining six decades of the Soviet Union, Russian agriculture, prior to 1914 a major grain exporter to the world, never fully recovered, making impossible the decisive cheapening of food as a portion of working-class consumption that had opened the way for mass consumer durables in the West, and Russia was itself compelled to import grain by the mid-1950s.

Most Marxist attempts outside the Soviet Union to analyze the mode of production there, with the important exception of the Italian Communist Left (which had other problems), had the same urban-industrial bias as the Second International, focused on the relations between the party, the state and the working class, to the neglect of the peasantry, and in their own way embraced elements of the linear-evolutionist assumptions of the Engels-Plekhanov-Kautsky world view that emerged from the suppression of Marx’s Russian studies.

II. The Agrarian Question in the Second International and in Russia

Karl Kautsky’s 1899 book The Agrarian Question^[38] set down the “official Marxist” position on that subject for the world socialist movement prior to World War I. It is symptomatic of a whole, industry-centered sensibility that the book was largely forgotten within a decade, despite Marx’s earlier extensive comments on the agrarian world in volumes I and III of Capital^[39] and in Theories of Surplus Value, especially on the question of ground rent, and his insistence (against common coin on the left to this day) that there were three classes in society: capitalists (who live from profits), proletarians (who live from wages) and landlords (who live from ground rent). For Marx, as indicated in our preface, the violent separation “in fire and blood” of the English peasantry from its means of production, in the process of primitive accumulation, was the original separation to be overcome in communism, and the “more equal distribution of the population over the surface of the earth” (Communist Manifesto) would be the overcoming of the fundamental (and also largely forgotten) alienation between city and countryside. Kautsky’s book was, among other things, a polemic (without mentioning names) against some right-wingers in the SPD such as the Bavarian members David and Vollmar, who already in the early 1890s (following the re-legalization of the party in 1890) were calling for a peasant program.

Kautsky became known as the “Torquemada”^[40] of the SPD on the agrarian question, whose message was that the workers’ movement had nothing to say to petty bourgeois peasants, a class doomed to disappear into the polarization of a rural bourgeoisie and rural wage-labor proletariat. Peasants could at best look forward to being integrated into cooperatives after the working class seized power. A significant part of small peasant produce was for family consumption, and the sector was an important source of primitive accumulation for the system as a whole. In his early formulations, Kautsky strongly argued that in agriculture as in industry, bigger was better, and discounted the survivability of highly productive family farms. The task of socialists was to neutralize the peasantry as a social force, not to mobilize it.

Interestingly, the factions within the SPD on the question of a peasant program were not aligned in the typical left-to-right spectrum that emerged at the end of the 1890s in the “revisionism” debate or later. Left-wingers Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht both sided with Vollmar in advocating an agrarian program at the 1895 party congress, but the party supported Kautsky. Ferdinand Lassalle’s old formulation that all classes except workers are “one reactionary mass”—a view attacked in Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program —was also a backdrop to the discussion.

In the long run, Kautsky’s view of the inevitable disappearance of the smallholder peasant was refuted in the prospering modern farms of countries such as Austria and Denmark.^[41] It was far more problematic when Lenin applied it to Russia.

In the 1890s, Lenin shared Kautsky’s views on the peasants (and just about everything else). This is particularly curious, since he spent the years 1887–1893, (after his older brother’s execution for involvement in a plot to assassinate the Tsar), in several provincial towns where apparently the last survivors of the Populist and terrorist group Zemla i Volya (to whom Marx had been sympathetic in their years of peak activity 1878–1881^[42]), and Marxists mingled in rather comradely form. (It is significant that at this time, the term “Narodnik,” which later came to be known strictly and pejoratively as the term for a pro-peasant and subjective romantic, idealizing the commune and downplaying the advance of capitalism in Russia, originally meant anyone concerned with the affairs of the common people; only after the polemics of the last phase of Populism did it acquire its negative overtones.) Lenin, opposing even his mentor Plekhanov, distinguished himself during the famine of 1891–92 by his attacks on humanitarian attempts in “progressive” circles to help the stricken peasantry, reaffirming the supposedly Marxist position that the peasantry was a doomed social class and its disappearance should not be hindered, so that capitalism could complete its work.^[43] This is especially significant because there is no doubt that Lenin had read deeply in the Russian Populist tradition, going back to the 1850s/1860s writings of Chernyshevsky^[44] and Dobrolyubov.^[45] According to different people who knew him personally, Lenin read Chernyshevsky’s proto-socialist realist novel What Is To Be Done? many times.^[46] The turgid, intentionally anti-aesthetic novel tells the story of young people of the generation of the 1860s who break with their bourgeois families to live communally, supporting themselves with Fourierist artisanal collectives. It inspired tens of thousands of readers to follow that model for their life choices in the stifling oppression of Tsarist Russia. Of further significance is the character Rakhmetov, a veritable propotype of Lenin, a full-time, austere revolutionary. The title of Lenin’s 1902 pamphlet What Is To Be Done? is an obvious homage to Cherneshevski’s book., however different the content.^[47]

Lenin spent several years in the late 1890s in Siberian exile, during which he wrote his first major work, The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), which is often mistaken for his definitive views on the peasantry, whereas they later evolved considerably under the impact of events. Lenin in this book is at pains to show that, contrary to the lingering views of the Populists, capitalism had fully triumphed in Russia. The work is deeply flawed by a largely “market” (as opposed to value) view of what capitalism is. The mir, which at the time constituted four-fifths of all cultivated land in European Russia, is barely mentioned, since for Lenin it was merely a “juridical imposition” of the Tsarist state.^[48] The large foreign loans and rapid industrial development under the management of Finance Minister Witte are also unmentioned.^[49] Lenin winds up concluding that fully 51 percent of the Russian population consists of wage labor proletarians, and that the polarization of rich peasant capitalists and rural laborers in the countryside is largely complete.^[50] Lenin includes all peasants “almost” separated from their means of production in the category of poor peasants,^[51] meaning that any peasant with a tiny plot, owning a horse and a cow, barely supporting himself and his family, and elsewhere performing occasional wage labor a few months of the year, was a “proletarian.” The large estates, for Lenin, were rapidly becoming capitalist, when in fact the big landowners were alien to any idea of accumulation and profitability of capital.^[52] Lenin also sees “technological progress” where in fact the peasants were working with very simple, primitive implements long in use. If the manorial estates were largely capitalist, how to explain the restrictions on peasants’ mobility, tying them to one place, as had always been the case with serfs? Lenin’s view of capitalism was limited to the sphere of circulation alone.^[53] Already in his first text of 1893 (“New Economic Transformations in Peasant Life”) Lenin had asserted that the mir was no obstacle to capitalism : “We are in no way interested in the form of landed property among the peasants. Whatever the form, the relationship between the peasant bourgeoisie and the rural proletariat is always the same.” During this period, according to Chantal de Crisenoy, individual peasant plots were actually in decline and the communes retained all their importance.^[54]

As Crisenoy puts it: “By denying all specificity to the mir, Lenin shows himself more attached to preconceived ideas …than attentive to existing social relations… In his analysis, we find a total inversion of reality: everything that is a factor of primitive accumulation –mandatory services, taxes—is seen as a “survival” blocking the emergence of capitalism; everything that is an obstacle to the appearance of capital—the handicraft industries, the rural commune—is designated as being “its most profound basis.”^[55]

In the 1897 article “What heritage do we renounce?”^[56] Lenin presents the mir as “a village of small agrarians”; “…when he wants to prove, against the populists, the existence of a working class in the midst of the obschina, he advances the concept of the “sedentary proletarian” and applies it to these same communal peasants… In 1899 he finds three times the number of wage workers generally accepted on the eve of 1914.^[57]

Lenin, however, was (with Trotsky^[58]) one of the few Russian Marxists who felt it necessary to devote any serious attention at all to the peasantry, against the dismissive attitude of Plekhanov. In 1902, several provinces rose up in response to famine, and Lenin at the same time drafted the first program addressed to the peasantry, “The Agrarian Program of Russian Social Democracy”^[59] adopted by the party in 1903. He remained ambivalent on the peasants’ future role, seeing them as either supporting a “revolutionary democratic” party or lining up with the “party of order.”^[60] Many Russian Social Democrats condemned the entire program, as Kautsky had done earlier in Germany. It called for cancellation of the debts from 1861,^[61] free use of land for the peasants, restitution to the peasants of the otrezki (choice strips of land that had been retained by the landowners in the 1861 reform), and cancellation of excessive rents and exploitative contracts. Lenin felt these changes would “expand the internal market,” and “raise peasant livings standards and hasten the development of capitalism in agriculture.^[62] After the 1902 uprisings, Lenin wrote “To the Rural Poor,” still maintaining his earlier views on the dynamic in the countryside. But in the article, as Kingston-Mann points out,“the repartitional commune, which had provided the institutional framework for so many of the outbreaks, was completely ignored.^[63] All in all, “Peasant action could only be…’anti-feudal,’ and feudal survivals had to be the major concern of the Social Democratic agrarian program.”^[64] In 1903, the 2nd Party Congress adopted Lenin’s agrarian program, without any mention thus far of a “worker-peasant alliance.” Lenin warned against such an alliance. To ally with the proletariat, in his view, the peasants must give up “their own class viewpoint” and adopt “that of the proletariat.”^[65]

III. 1905–1907: Ideology Meets Reality

In January 1905, Father Gapon, Orthodox priest and also Tsarist agent provocateur, led a mass worker demonstration in St. Petersburg to the tsar’s palace with petitions virtually begging the tsar to grant certain basic rights. The Cossacks fired on the crowd, killing hundreds, and the 1905–1907 revolution, the “dress rehearsal” for 1917, was on.^[66] During those years, the Russian peasants revolted as intensely as did the working class, completely upsetting the schemas by which Russian Marxism, under Kautsky’s influence, had predicted that peasants would aspire to individual private plots of land and nothing more.

The peasants in 1905 themselves submitted, all told, 60,000 petitions to the government. (The substance of numerous peasant demands for all land to the mir was not taken seriously by any Russian Marxist at this time.^[67]) The peasants invaded forests and grazing lands from which they had been excluded; they robbed stores, warehouses and manors, burning estates and killing the squires.^[68] The large majority of rural strikes in Russia in 1905–07 were strikes of peasant small holders, partly or seasonally employed. Most of these strikes were directed by the communal assemblies.^[69] In 1905, the crops had failed again in 25 of Russia’s provinces, closely linked to the locales of the uprisings.^[70] As Shanin put it “Once the tsar’s will could no longer be treated as a force of nature…the whole social world of rural Russia came apart. Everything seemed possible now.”^[71] The uprisings peaked initially in June 1905. The differentiations between wealthy, middle and poor peasants, which Lenin had so laboriously worked out in his 1899 book, seemed to recede in importance, as wealthier peasants helped poor neighbors with food.^[72] Under the impact of these events, Lenin, still in Zurich exile in the spring of 1905, prior to his return to Russia, proposed a “revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasants” to a establish a provisional government for the bourgeois-democratic revolution. “This formulation was so inconsistent with pre-revolutionary Marxist programs that Lenin would be forced to prove again and again that he had not sacrificed his Marxist principles.”^[73] Lenin’s peasant policy, during all the struggles of the summer of 1905, is summarized by Crisenoy as “support the peasant movement, but above all don’t tie one’s hands for the future. It is necessary to advance and strike hard blows for revolutionary bourgeois democracy…to march separately and strike together, not hiding divergent interests, and to watch over one’s ally one would an enemy.”^[74] There remained, she points out, still a sort of fear about peasant struggles, fear of the their spontaneity, and great contempt for the peasant’s “lack of culture.”^[75]

Meanwhile, the action of the peasants and the statements of their representatives “were a striking refutation of (Lenin’s) assessments.”^[76] In the summer of 1905, the peasants created a central organization with delegates from several provinces. The Pan-Russian Union of Peasants met for the first time clandestinely at the end of July and called for the abolition of private property and the expropriation of the big landowners; a majority favored no indemnification.^[77] The peasants did not limit themselves to the land question but also demanded free public education, amnesty for political prisoners, convocation of a Duma, and a Constitutional Assembly.^[78] Lenin conceded that the peasant congress grasped its own interests well.^[79] The Social Democrats called for the formation of revolutionary peasant committees, but they played no role in the countryside. It was young peasants back from the factories who spread revolutionary ideas.^[80] In the summer of 1905 the Bolsheviks held their Third Congress in London, with the peasant question as a major issue. They were divided, unable to foresee or control events. Lenin was torn; the party program was unsatisfactory from a political viewpoint, but perfectly founded, in his view, from a theoretical viewpoint.^[81] When the peasants went beyond the party slogan of taking over the otrezki (once again, the strips of land retained from the 1861 reform by the big landowners), and seized other lands, were they “reactionary”? There was a constant contradiction between what Lenin saw as politically necessary and his economic analysis; if he continued to defend points from his 1902 agrarian program, it was because he remained convinced of the domination of capitalism on the large estates. In March 1905 he continued to assert that “in Russia there are few vestiges of feudalism.”^[82]

On October 17 the tsar issued a manifesto in response to the months of insurrection, “speaking much about freedom and saying nothing about land—the one thing that mattered.”^[83] It had no impact, and in October 1905 “attacks on estates erupted on an unprecedented scale and rapidly turned into mass destruction of manor houses in the Black Earth belt.”^[84] This was no blind explosion; the peasants wanted to be rid of the squires and to ensure that they never returned; 2000 manor houses were destroyed. The government strategy consisted of heavy repression and ineffectual appeasement in the manifesto of November 3rd, which abolished payments still due from the 1861 serf emancipation. State repression was, however, an “orgy of brutality.”^[85] It did manage to temporarily staunch the worker uprisings but the peasant revolts did not stop, climaxing only in July 1906.The June 1906 eruptions of rural violence had been so serious that the Emperor of Austria considered military intervention. In July 1906 as well, Lenin argued that the peasantry was “revolutionary democratic,” but that the Social Democrats would fight it when it became “reactionary and anti-proletarian.” As Kingston-Mann put it, “Despite the extraordinary incisiveness of his political insight into the problems of his adversaries, the deficiencies of Lenin’s economics and sociology continued to render the concept of a Marxian peasant revolution a contradiction in terms.”^[86]

Prior to these developments, the first Duma had met in April, and had not even considered peasant demands.^[87] The movement finally ebbed, and the state and the squires regrouped. This did not prevent grazing lands from being invaded for a third time in the winter of 1906–07. Meanwhile, in April 1906, the RSDLP held a Bolshevik-Menshevik “unity conference” in Stockholm. There, Lenin called for the nationalization of all landed property.^[88] Lenin, then, favored nationalization as opening the way to capitalism; for the peasants, on the other hand, it meant expanding communal property to the national level. The Mensheviks feared that fragmenting large properties would slow down the development of capitalism. Plekhanov argued that transfer of land to the state would leave the autocracy with more land than ever before.^[89] (Kautsky, in the Second International journal of record Neue Zeit, had come out once again against any Social Democratic program for the peasantry.)_ Lenin quoted from Marx’s Capital about transferring land to the state as a bourgeois measure which would create competition, as in the American West. The Congress ultimately voted to approve the Menshevik Maslow’s plan for the municipalization of land.^[90] Lenin opposed this, saying it would only give power to local elites. The initial slogans of the peasant uprisings were expressed in a language different from that of the urban revolts, expressing a desire for political power and civil rights, land reform, “charitable government,” “liberty” and “being listened to.”^[91] In Shanin’s view, many doubted the very existence of general peasant political goals in rural Russia in 1905–07, and Lenin said in 1917 that the problem with the peasant revolt of those years was that they did not finish the job, burning down only part of the manors.^[92]

Other breakthroughs occurred in places such as Georgia, where in Guria province what Shanin called “the first case in history of a peasant rule led by a Marxist elite” held out from 1903 to 1906, and news of which moreover traveled widely. The Latvian Social Democrats led widespread attacks on manors in the Baltic provinces in a “mini-civil war” situation, during which 459 manor houses were destroyed in Latvia and 114 in Estonia.^[93] The designated enemies of the revolts throughout the Russian Empire were the state apparatus, the kulak (wealthy peasant) “commune eaters” who bought up communal lands for themselves, and the reactionary bands of the “Black Hundreds.” The 2nd Duma met in 1907, was more radical than the first, and the peasants were more anti-government. “Peasants looked at their lives in ways unthinkable before.”^[94] They were very sophisticated, and the demand for transfer of land to the peasantry and for the abolition of private land ownership was total.^[95]

Under the impact of these cumulative events, Lenin called for the revision of the RSDLP’s 1903 Agrarian Program^[96] and said, in contrast to his 1899 book, that “the economy of the squires in Russia in based on repressive enserfing and not on a capitalist system…Those who refuse to see it cannot explain the contemporary broad and deep peasant revolutionary movement in Russia.”^[97] Most Social Democrats now admitted that the 1903 program was overly pessimistic about the peasants’ revolutionary potential. This change of attitude was formulated as a call for a “democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants” that would promote an “American road” of agricultural development under a revolutionary regime.^[98] The forces of reaction also had to revise their views on the peasantry: “As manors burned and the first and second Dumas heaped abuse on the government, the commune was singled out more and more as the reason for the peasant rebellion.”^[99] This shift in perception presaged the post-1907 policy of Stolypin, who replaced Witte as Finance Minister in 1906, and attempted to undermine the communes by subsidizing individual peasants who wished to leave them and farm their own plots.^[100] The peasants did end the 1905–07 upsurge with more results than any other group. Rents went down and rural wages went up; most peasant debt was cancelled by the state. There had also been an important leap in peasant self-esteem.^[101]

IV. Years of Reaction: Stolypin’s Attempt at a “Prussian”-Style Revolution from Above

In 1906, P.A. Stolypin took over from the fallen Witte as the most powerful minister in the Tsarist government, carrying out harsh repression against the 1905–1907 revolution and simultaneously pursuing a policy of breaking up the peasant commune. His many executions of revolutionaries by hanging became known as “Stolypin’s neckties.” Under the impact of the revolution, the government almost more than the Marxists had become aware that the commune, previously viewed as a pillar of the regime, was in fact the main source of peasant radicalism. Stolypin and his advisers looked back to the Prussian reformers of the 1820s who had carried out a revolution from above to prevent a revolution from below.^[102] Private enterprise was to be promoted throughout the economy, and in agriculture this meant creating credits to enable individual peasants to leave the communes and acquire their own land, often by privatizing communal land. Stolypin was assassinated in 1911, but his policy, aimed at breaking up the commune, remained in effect until 1917, in the hope of creating a Russian “Vendée” against any future revolutionary movement.^[103]

As Crisenoy put it, “the ruling classes were not mistaken…After 1905–07, the mir become in their eyes one of the causes of peasant radicalism … We have to say that, aside from the Social Democrats, this link between the mir, the revolutionary peasant movement and its demands for land was obvious to all. But Lenin was convinced of the opposite. For him the commune was still nothing but a ‘juridical envelope maintained artificially’… For Lenin, the peasant’s call for the nationalization of land was negative, and should not mask his instinct to be an ‘owner’ … In Lenin’s view, the peasant did not know what he wanted, didn’t even know what he was saying… For Lenin, (there was) no uncertainty: the nationalization of the land necessary brings with it a capitalist agrarian organization.“^[104]

In fact, Lenin and Stolypin had rather similar views on the entrepreneurial peasant as a promoter of capitalist development in Russia. To defend this change of orientation from the one he had held from 1899 until 1905, “Lenin had to abandon his earlier claims that Russia was already capitalist.”^[105] Lenin, like Stolypin, saw the role of the Russian government as similar to the earlier Prussian model. Stolypin’s reform, in his view, would “encourage the economically incompetent landlords to be become Prussian-style bourgeois ‘Junkers.’ ”^[106] Nationalization would clear away feudal vestiges and make possible free competition, as in America.^[107] “Despite quotes from Capital and Theories of Surplus Value, Lenin was hard pressed to make the case that Marx ‘had taken pride in the economic virtues of the small farmer.’ ”^[108] As Kingston-Mann put it, ”His was a tactical move that reflected the strain which the complex reality of the Russian situation placed upon his Western-centered ideology….The commune played no role in Lenin’s plans and strategies…Lenin ridiculed the idea that the ‘medieval’ commune retained any of its equalizing functions.”^[109] “In 1907–08, Lenin argued that the process of rural differentiation had already destroyed the commune in all but name. A still functioning commune remained inconceivable to Lenin…Certain that the peasantry lacked historically significant forms of social organization, Lenin inaccurately referred to commune peasants as only the tool of the village kulak… Lenin had however moved far closer to a realistic approach than any other members of RSDLP.”^[110] Under the auspices of Stolypin’s agrarian reforms, between one-fourth and one-third of all Russian peasants, by some estimates, left the communes between 1906 and 1917. (Russia in these years became one of the world’s biggest exporters of cereals while also having terrible famines.) Communal peasants often responded to these desertions with violence.^[111] Two to three millions peasants got property in the decade after 1906, or about one-fourth of the twelve million peasant households in European Russia.^[112] Some of the obstacles to the reform were lack of roads, long winters, and the village assemblies proposing the worst and most distant lands to those who wished to leave.^[113] In Crisenoy’s view, Stolypin’s reforms also ran up against overpopulation, the lack of land, and communal tenure.^[114] She also sees Lenin’s post-1905–07 break with Second International conceptions as “very relative”; he continued, as in 1899, to confuse capitalist agriculture and commodity agriculture. In 1915, he was still writing: “The development of capitalism consists above all in the passage from natural economy to commodity economy.”^[115] To recognize his error, Crisenoy writes, would mean breaking with what he had been saying for twenty years. “By failing to recognize the attachment of the peasants to the mir, Lenin missed the reason for the failure of (Stolypin’s) reform and one of the reasons for the 1917 revolution.”^[116] In the revolutionary years 1917–1919, serious violence was still being brought to bear against “splitters-off” from the communes, and not, as Lenin’s theory would predict, between rich and poor peasants.

VI. Russian Peasants and the Commune in 1917 and Thereafter

Within a month of the February revolution that overthrew the Romanov dynasty, the peasantry had risen en masse. They attacked the large landowners and the commune peasants attacked the separate farms. As in 1905, the commune was at the center of peasant struggles, taking charge of confiscations and the redistribution of lands. After “reorienting” the Bolshevik Party following his return from exile and the famous “April Theses,” Lenin was arguing that the rural soviets had already shown far greater creative social imagination than the Provisional Government.^[117] A Bolshevik rural Red Guard had formed in March-April 1917. In the April 4 edition of Pravda, Lenin wrote: “If the revolution is not settled by the Russian peasant, it will not be settled by the German worker.”^[118] Lenin’s draft program in April–May 1917 was 1) nationalization of all land 2) transformation of large estates into model farms, under soviets of agricultural workers and run by agronomists. But these formulations, observed Crisenoy, were deeply alien to the peasant movement.^[119] The Bolsheviks, at this point, were still a minority, outnumbered by the Mensheviks and the SRs. Workers and soldiers had beaten up demonstrators carrying Bolshevik signs in April. By May, nonetheless, Lenin was telling the Congress of Peasant Deputies that peasants should at once seize all land, to the consternation of the Provisional Government and in particular of the SRs, who headed ministries and were prevaricating on the land question.The SR and Menshevik ministers were ready to defer any transfer of land to the peasants until a Constitutional Assembly could meet. Some SR observers noted with dismay the impact of Lenin’s appeal for land seizures and the damaging political case the Bolsheviks made against the SR ministers in the coalition.^[120] The leading SR political figure, Chernov, was assaulted by a peasant shouting “Why don’t you take power, you s.o.b, when it’s given to you?’^[121] The Congress of Peasant Deputies in fact called for soviets of peasants everywhere, and attacks on individualized property accelerated. As the Provisional Government and above all the front disintegrated in the summer of 1917, peasants were deserting the army in droves and returning to their villages to get their share of the land newly distributed from the gentry estates. This movement, like the soviets in 1905, was the work of no political party. Peasant disturbances peaked in October 1917. Immediately after overthrowing the Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks issued their Land Decree, recognizing the fait accompli of land seizures in the countryside; under the decree, peasants were free to set up communes or artels (cooperatives). The Bolshevik Land Decree was essentially the SR program. A wave of egalitarianism had swept the countryside and in 1917–1918 the peasant commune had extended beyond any previous historical frontier.^[122] The peasants distributed gentry, church and monastery lands to families based on the traditional criterion of the “number of eaters”; some independent peasants from Stolypin’s reform were forced back into communes.^[123] The confiscations were largely complete by the spring of 1918. 96.8 percent of all lands were in peasant hands, and three million landless peasants had received allotments. The commune at this point encompassed almost all rural households.^[124] Lenin, in Kingston-Mann’s account, had always insisted that the dangers involved in peasant land seizures were always outweighed by benefits from attacks on bourgeois property. The land decree of October 1917, taken from 242 peasant mandates and from the SR agrarian program, had abolished private property in land, and went against the Russian Marxist tradition in its respect for peasant communal traditions. Its terms were populist, and the non-Bolshevik left recognized its expedient, even opportunist character: “The Russian Marxist tradition was rooted in a denial of the sociological insights which Marx himself had praised in the work of populists like Daniel’son.”^[125] “Unaware that peasants re-entered the communes in increasing numbers during the pre-war period, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks found no constructive socialist significance in the peasantry’s successful efforts to return the otrubshchiki [the Stolypin-promoted “splitters off”–LG] to the communes in the course of 1917.”^[126] “[O]bsessions with capitalism in the countryside…and awareness of the individualistic property fanatics and bigots among the peasants, had blinded Russian Marxists to much evidence about the agricultural economy, about the widespread resistance to the Stolypin reforms, and about the collectivist notions of peasants who demanded abolition of private property in land…Fears of the kulak flourished in official circles, as peasant communes carried out an unprecedented equalization of land on behalf of the poor without any help from the Soviet authorities.”^[127] Early on, the Soviet government was interfering with the distribution of animals and farm materials, a policy aimed at leaving the poor peasants unable to farm and encouraging them toward the new state farms (sovkhoz). Once in power, the Bolsheviks had discouraged further destruction of estates, which the peasants, for their part, saw as a further guarantee that the former owners would never return. Bolshevik policy favored specialists in the countryside (as sovkhoz directors). At the 7th Congress of Soviets, there was already criticism of the privileges of the specialists. Sometimes the director of the sovkhoz was the former landowner! In these debates, Lenin again turned to the example of German (Prussian) state capitalism: its modern techniques were in the service of imperialism and the Junkers, but “replace ‘state capitalism’ with ‘the Soviet state’ and you have all the conditions of socialism.”^[128] But quarrels over administrative measures were soon to be greatly complicated by the drastic falloff in agricultural production. In November 1917, Russia had still produced 641 million tons of wheat. Requisitions to feed the cities began in early 1918, when already only 7 percent of the grain planned for Petrograd and Moscow was delivered. As the civil war intensified in the summer of 1918, some fertile lands fell under the control of the Whites, and famine set in. In response to requisitions, peasants cut back production to the basic needs of their families; land under cultivation declined by 16 percent by 1919. The Bolsheviks had counted on the support of the poorest peasants but land distribution had moved many of them out of that category; the committees of poor peasants had great difficulty functioning. The party cells in the countryside had 14,700 members but were mainly made up of functionaries. By 1921, after three years of civil war, harvests were at 40 percent of 1914 levels. Between 1918 and 1920, in the years of war communism, epidemics, hunger and cold killed 7.5 million Russians; four million had died in the civil war. People returned to the land to survive; of the 3 million workers who made the proletarian side of the “dual revolution” in 1917, only 1.2 million remained in the factories by 1922. By 1921, furthermore, the proletarian democracy of 1917, embodied in the soviets and workers’ councils, had been destroyed or turned into rubber stamps of the party. The left SRs, who shared power with the Bolsheviks for a few months, were suppressed in July 1918 after they assassinated the German ambassador, in an attempt to undermine the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.^[129] Repression against anarchist “bandits” had begun in early 1918. The Bolsheviks crushed the Kronstadt uprising in March 1921, and had earlier crushed the anarchist peasant Makhno movement in the Ukraine. At the 10th Party Congress, also in March 1921, internal factions within the party itself had been suppressed. That Congress also inaugurated the market-driven New Economic Policy (NEP). Oppositional currents within the Bolshevik Party, such as Miasnikov’s Workers Group or the Democratic Centralists, had been suppressed. By 1922, the remaining independent Mensheviks were offered the choice of execution or exile. From that point onward, the only open discussions remaining in Soviet Russia with any real influence over events involved a few hundred Old Bolsheviks at the top echelons of a party ruling uneasily over 150 million people, the great majority of them peasants. That party had also absorbed hundreds of thousands of new members after the October seizure of power, often people more interested in jobs and careers than in the real history and outlooks of Bolshevism.^[130] A number of former bourgeois and even large landowners rallied to the new power, often becoming directors of sovkhozes, factories and mines.^[131] The nucleus of a new ruling class was in place.^[132] Ninety percent of state functionaries were carried over from the Tsarist regime, and 90 percent of officers in the Red Army had been Tsarist officers.The legacy of modernizing Second International Marxism on the agrarian question remained the outlook of the Bolshevik Party in power. Thus the disconnect between the emerging factions of the regime—all of them—and the reality of the countryside, having the overwhelming majority of the population, remained as great as it had been prior to the Bolsheviks’ arrival in power. As historian John Marot put it, to implement the development plans of all factions—the Trotskyist left, the Bukharinist right and the Stalinist “center”—meant “to destroy the peasant way of life,”^[133] the commune. Lenin had recognized after 1905 that he had exaggerated the presence of capitalism in the Russian countryside, but, as indicated earlier, he merely set the clock back on the same dynamic. The fundamental problem was that the peasant world, centered on the mir, was not on Lenin’s timetable at all, belated, contemporary or otherwise; the owners of the newly-distributed private plots within the framework of the mir were not capitalist peasants producing for a market, but were participating in household economies, producing primarily for their own use, occasionally using markets to acquire the relatively few goods they could not produce themselves. Their surplus had previously gone to the Tsarist state through taxation to pay for industrialization, and to the landlords for their consumption. With those two burdens removed, the sole external compulsion remained the modest taxation of the Soviet state. No industrialization program assuming a peasant capitalist rationality had any chance of achieving its goals. The peasant economy, as Marot put it, was neither capitalist nor socialist, and “the peasants had little or no interest in the collective organization of production and distribution beyond the confines of the village.”^[134] By the spring of 1921, the ebb and isolation of the Russian Revolution, internationalist from the beginning in the strategic conceptions of Lenin and Trotsky (in their different theoretical frameworks; cf. below) could not have been more clear. The world revolution which had in 1917–1918 seemed weeks or at most months away henceforth had to be reckoned in years. In quick succession the spring of 1921 saw the suppression of the Kronstadt uprising, the failure of the “March Action” Germany, the Anglo-Soviet trade agreement, the implementation of the market-driven New Economic Policy (NEP), the suppression of factions in the Bolshevik Party, the Treaty of Riga, formalizing the Soviet defeat in the 1920 war with Poland, and the commercial treaty with Attaturk’s nationalist government in Turkey, which a mere two months earlier (January 1921) had murdered the entire central committee of the Turkish Communist Party.^[135] This general ebb of hopes for revolution in western Europe weakened the position of the internationalist, cosmopolitan wing of the Bolshevik Party and strengthened the position of the internal “praktiki,” the long-term veterans of the party apparatus from the years of clandestinity under Tsarist autocracy, personified of course by Joseph Stalin. The regime turned inward, and with famine still raging in the countryside, nothing had a higher priority than the peasant question. For Lenin, the Bolshevik regime was a dual revolution, based on the “democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants,” completing the bourgeois revolution of eradicating pre-capitalist agriculture. He wrote:“Yes, our revolution is a bourgeois revolution, as long as we march with the peasantry as a whole…we have said it hundreds and thousands of times since 1905…”^[136] This bourgeois revolution, in his view, could move to a socialist phase when aided, and only when aided, by revolution in the West. The alliance with the peasantry (the so-called “smychka”) remained crucial in Lenin’s strategic perspective for the rest of his political life. He would have viscerally rejected Stalin’s 1924 proclamation of “socialism in one country.”^[137]

My purpose here cannot be to put forward a specific theory of the “class nature of the Soviet Union,” harking back to the state capitalist/ bureaucratic collectivist/ degenerated workers’ state debates of the 1960s/1970s. I merely signal my agreement with some variant of the class, as opposed to workers’ state theories, but explaining my analysis in detail would further shift the focus away from my main purpose, namely tracing the impact of the agrarian question and the fate of the Russian peasant commune in shaping that outcome. I mention Trotsky and his theory of permanent revolution primarily to indicate the difference between his framework and Lenin’s, who never accepted that theory,^[138] however close they were in the spring of 1917. The Russian working class had its own thoughts about the NEP, built on the destruction of the soviets and workers’ councils they had created in 1917, and the return of the managerial elite they thought they had overthrown in that year. It waged a series of militant strikes in August and September 1923. A second Workers’ Group had formed in the spring of that year and played an important coordinating role in these strikes; according to Marot, “(it) sought out alliances with elements of previous oppositions. Denouncing the New Economic Policy as the New Exploitation of the Proletariat by bureaucratically-appointed factory managers and directors of industry, the Workers’ Group tried to recruit among party and non-party workers. It strove to lend political definition and direction to to the massive strike wave…It even looked for support abroad, among left-wing elements of the German Communist Party…and among Gorter’s Dutch Communists.”^[139] And where was Trotsky while these strikes were going on? Marot iseloquent:“Trotsky’s political opposition toward the factional activity of the Workers’ Group of 1923 outwardly expressed (his) firmly-held and ideologically internalized insistence on unitary, single-party rule…Trotsky even refused public solidarity with the over two-hundred members who dared to participate actively in the workers’ strike movement, and who had been subsequently expelled from the party…Although Trotsky did next to nothing to lend political guidance to rank-and-file dissent outside the Communist Party, he was almost always prepared to respond favorably to invitations of political co-operation by one or another of the party leadership.”^[140]

Lenin was forced by rapidly declining health to withdraw from political activity in early 1923, and died one year later. In the last months of his very reduced activity, he had planned to “throw a bomb” under Stalin at a forthcoming party congress and, in his testament, called for Stalin’s removal from the position of general secretary of the party.^[141]

The fact that Soviet Russia emerged from the civil war in 1921 with the nucleus of a new ruling class in power still leaves open the fate of the mir, in which 98.5 percent of the peasantry—itself at least 90 percent of the Russian population—lived, up to its demise in 1929–30. It is thus important to sketch out the faction fight in the “commanding heights” of the Bolshevik Party up to Stalin’s collectivizations. There was nothing foreordained about what actually happened, which transformed Soviet Russia from the “guided capitalism” of the NEP of 1921, conceived as a holding action prior to revolution in the West, into the mature totalitarian form consolidated under Stalin in 1929–32. No one in the three-way faction fight up to 1927, Stalin included, advocated the violent collectivizations that finally gave the Soviet Union the definitive contours through which it became known to the world as “communism.”^[142][143] Here is how Moshe Lewin (though offering statistics somewhat at odds with those cited previously) describes the situation of the mir, shortly before its destruction in 1929–1930:“On the eve of revolution, fewer than 50 percent of the peasants were still members of the mir…Eight million households held their land as private property, while 7.4 million holdings were still communally owned. The decay of this relic of the ancient peasant community was hastened by the increasing degree of social stratification within the peasantry. However, at the time of the revolution, the mir took on a miraculous new lease on life. The miracle can be explained by the fact that the agrarian reform, which freed the peasants from the bonds of feudalism, also evened out the differences between them to a very considerable degree. Having got rid of the pomeshchiki [the last descendants of the service aristocracy of the 16th–18th centuries–LG] and some of the kulaks, the peasants reverted to the old egalitarian relationships of the mir, and by the same token to the institution itself…Ample evidence of the…communal form of land tenure is afforded by the agrarian code of 1922, which deals with it in great detail. The Party, however, appeared to take little account of this factor, and of its possible implications…between 1922 and 1927 the village society, by virtue of the general improvement in the economy, had grown considerably in strength, its budget had increased and, despite the efforts of the authorities to encourage the [rural soviets–LG] it was the mir which continued to be the ‘sole organization in charge of the economic life of the village.”^[144] The 1921 turn to the NEP (New Economic Policy) did revive both industry and agriculture, in terms of the Bolshevik strategy of “guiding capitalism” while marking time until revolution in the West. The NEP cannot be critiqued as a “restoration of capitalism” because capitalism had never been abolished in the first place. To the charge of the Workers’ Opposition, at the 10th Party Congress in March 1921, that the Bolsheviks were creating state capitalism, Lenin replied that state capitalism would be a major step forward for backward Russia, dominated as it was by petty producers.

Under the NEP, peasant food production by 1925 approached for the first time pre-World War I levels, in contrast to the famine conditions of 1921–22. The NEP, however, also led to the famous “Scissors Crisis” of 1923 and 1925, in which the prices of industrial goods produced in the cities rose much higher than the prices for agricultural produce from the countryside, making it impossible for peasants to buy, and undermining the strategy of a controlled “socialist primitive accumulation” off the peasantry advocated by the economist of Trotsky’s left-wing faction, Evgeni Preobrazhensky.^[145] This strategy, moreover, was doomed because, as indicated earlier, nothing, short of force, compelled the peasants to interact with the urban-industrial economy on the scale envisioned by the planners of the left, or for that matter by Bukharin and the “socialism at a snail’s pace” theorists of the “right.”^[146] By the mid-1920s, it was clear that the differences between the Trotskyist left and the Bukharinist right were more quantitative than qualitative, coming down to differences over the appropriate pace of “pumping” the peasants, as Bukharin increasingly recognized the need to industrialize with a surplus taken from agriculture. Bukharin early on had prophetically written, against the left’s industrialization plans, “…Taking too much on itself, (the proletariat) has to create a colossal administrative apparatus. To fulfill the economic functions of the small producers, small peasants, etc., it requires too many employees and administrators. The attempt to replace all these small figures with state chinovniki (see footnote)—call them what you want, in fact they are state chinovniki —gives birth to such a colossal apparatus that the expenditure for its maintenance proves to be incomparably more significant than the unproductive costs which derive from the anarchistic condition of small production; as a result, this entire form of management, the entire economic apparatus of the proletarian state, does not facilitate, but only impedes the development of the forces of production. In reality it flows into the direct opposite of what was intended, and therefore iron necessity compels that it be broken…If the proletariat itself does not do this, then other forces will overthrow it.”^[147]

By the end of 1927, Stalin and his “center” had defeated, marginalized and expelled the Trotskyist left from the party, with the support of Bukharin and his faction.^[148] Even then, the left remained largely clueless about the real danger represented by this “center.” Trotsky had said, prior to his own initial exile to Alma Ata (in Kazakhstan): “With Stalin against Bukharin, perhaps. With Bukharin against Stalin, never.” What was ultimately at stake was the preservation of the “smyshka,” the worker-peasant alliance, the last pillar of Lenin’s “dual revolution,” which would not survive any concerted attempt to squeeze the peasantry harder to pay for industrialization. Many figures, across the political spectrum within the party, imagined the NEP lasting for years, perhaps decades, into the future. The break in the situation occurred with two successive years of crop failure in 1928 and 1929. Breadlines were forming in Moscow by the end of 1928, and Stalin used the emergency to launch his infamous “war on the kulak” (the wealthiest stratum of peasants, estimated at 4-5 percent of the total). Party cadre were ordered to confiscate whatever food they could find in the countryside, using “Uralo-Mongolian” (i.e., violent) methods, in what amounted to military operations going beyond anything done in the confiscations during the civil war. The fine distinctions among the peasants, which Lenin had first laboriously worked out in his 1899 book and which had never been terribly successful for political purposes such as rousing the poor peasants against wealthier strata, were largely obliterated in the frenzy to meet quotas. Further, food confiscations were combined with forcing peasants into collective farms (the sovkhoz) or into the cooperatives (the kolkhoz).The peasants resisted violently. Not only did they murder party cadre where they could, but, faced with no future but unremunerative wage labor on the collective farms, they destroyed their own crops and slaughtered something on the order of 40 percent of all livestock (horses, cows and pigs), often in order not to appear as kulaks. In many situations, far from dividing along the “class lines” predicted by misguided theory, peasants of all strata banded together in self-defense. Significantly, during a few months’ breather decreed by Stalin in the spring of 1930, many peasants rushed back into the communes, but it was not to last. By 1932, an estimated 10 million peasants had died in forced collectivizations and relocations, and all communes, 98.5 percent of all Russian rural territory in 1918, had been destroyed. Stalin, as he had done before and would do again, used the very real crop failures of 1927 and 1928 to achieve political ends, which in this case meant the destruction of the Bukharinist “right.” The smyshka, which Lenin had seen as the foundation of the regime for the foreseeable future, was at an end, and “bacchanalian planning,”with tremendous speedup, piece work, and armed GPU units overseeingwork in the factories, could begin. In conclusion, it is important to note the reaction of the Trotskyist “left”(minus, it must be said, Trotsky himself, already in exile) to Stalin’s “left” turn after 1927, in which he “crudely and brutally” took over the bulk of the left’s program. The general attitude was: Stalin is implementing our program; we must support him. Dozens, possibly hundreds of members of the left clamored for readmission to the party so they could participate in the collectivizations. Typical was the case of Ivan Smirnov, former convinced Trotskyist, who capitulated in October 1929: “I cannot remain inactive! I must build! The Center Committee is building for the future, barbarous and stupid though its methods may be. Our ideological differences are relatively unimportant compared to the building of major new industries.”^[149]

VIII. From Five-Year Plan to Final Collapse

Soviet agriculture never fully recovered from Stalin’s 1929–1932 “war on the kulak,” and thus became a permanent drag on the economy and society as a whole. The peasantry was permanently alienated from the regime. Quite apart from the huge loss of human life, the massacre of so many horses in a country with almost no metallic plows crippled the planting season for years into the future. Agricultural activity was henceforth organized in the wage-labor collective farm (sovkhoz) and the cooperative (kolkhoz), with additional small private plots, consisting of about 1 percent of all land under cultivation, and yet which over time produced a remarkable percentage of all food delivered to the cities. The low productivity of the sovkhoz and kolkhoz sectors of Soviet agriculture played a large role in the ultimate collapse of the system in 1991. After the post-World War II reconstruction period, the Soviet rate of growth was slowing from the late 1950s onward, from one five-year plan to the next. The so-called Liberman reforms of 1965 were an attempt to reverse the downward trend by a certain decentralization of the planning process to the regions and to managers at the plant level; they failed against the resistance of the bureaucracy. The planners bent over their statistics to discover the obstacles in the system, only to discover that the “plan” itself, and the bureaucracy promoting it, were the main domestic obstacles (quite aside from the fundamental alienation of the workers and peasants, and from the pressure of the capitalist world market and the Western embargo on key technologies). There was in reality no plan^[150]; the plan was more like an ideological superstructure underneath which competition between firms—above all competition for skilled labor, scarce resources and perhaps most importantly for spare parts—raged just as intensely as in any openly capitalist economy.^[151] By the 1960s at the latest, corruption was endemic and also essential to the operation of the real economy. In some Eastern European (Comecon) countries such as Poland, if not in the Soviet Union itself, the United States dollar was indispensable for managers in need of key supplies. Over time, the underground economy was to a large extent the economy that worked at all. A further albatross was the very significant military sector, which drained the best technical workers and resources for this further sinkhole of unproductive consumption. (In addition to national defense, Soviet bloc arms sales were an important source of foreign exchange.)

The 1929–32 crippling of the agricultural sector, which still included almost 40 percent of the work force (also involving huge hidden unemployment) when the system collapsed in 1991, was, however, a key factor in the overall crisis. In the West, the 1873–1896 world agrarian depression, marking the entry into the world market of the major grain and meat exporters Canada, Australia, Argentina, the United States and Russia itself, combined with the transport revolution of steamships and trains, made possible the long-term reduction of the cost of food in the worker’s wage from 50 percent ca. 1850 to substantially lower levels. This new purchasing power of workers made possible access to consumer durables (radios, household appliances, and later cars) that was a fundamental part of the phase of real domination of capital, the reduction of labor power to its abstract interchangeable form. In the postwar World War II boom in the West, the total wage bill of the productive work force (as opposed to the ever-growing population of middle-class unproductive consumers) declined as a percentage of the total social product while the material content of the average working-class wage rose.Yet after World War I, it was precisely the impact of this nineteenth century worldwide remaking of working-class consumption by the agrarian and transport revolutions that was sorely lacking in Soviet Russia. Hence the ever-increasing post-World War II demand for consumer goods ran up against the barrier of generalized low productivity and hence higher prices for food. The only alternative was to import consumer goods from the West, at the cost of ever-increasing foreign indebtedness, which was $51 billion at the time of the Soviet collapse in 1991.

VIII. Conclusion

“The multiplication of human powers is its own goal.” Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations

The peasant question, almost 25 years later, is still with us on a world scale. Space does not permit an overview of its many contemporary forms, from the rural insurgencies in India to the Chinese regime’s inability to meaningfully absorb its several hundred million remaining peasants, by way of Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Today even more than 100 years ago, the combined agricultural capacity of the United States, Canada, western Europe, Australia and Argentina, in a global order producing for use, could feed the entire world several times over. That potential, blocked as it is by capitalist social relations, hangs over the agrarian subsistence producers of much of the rest of the world like a sword of Damocles; decades of world trade negotiations (as most recently the so-called Doha round) have shattered upon it. US and Canadian agricultural exports, after the conclusion of NAFTA^[152] in 1993, swamped what remained of Mexico’s peasant economy. Today’s “Fortress Europe” (the European Union), like “El Norte” (the United States), are magnets attracting millions of people, including millions of peasants, from the devastated rural economies of Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, risking their lives to cross the Mediterranean or the Sonoran desert in hopes of joining the ranks of the sub-proletariat in the so-called developed world, providing the “reserve army of the unemployed” for capital and conveniently, in the bargain, the perfect scapegoat for whipping up nationalist/racist populism inthe indigenous working class. In this reality, emerging from the rubble of the ex-Soviet bloc as the former apparent alternative to capitalism, Marx’s decade-long fascination with the Russian peasant commune returns with all its urgency as the international left increasingly reconnects with the full dimensions of Marx’s project, first suppressed by Engels, and lost for more than a century in the Second, Third and Fourth International confusion of the developmental tasks of the bourgeois revolution and those of the proletarian revolution. That latter revolution does not “build socialism” but rather “midwifes” a higher form of social organization already present and implicit as the “determinate negation” of the moribund old order, the “real movement unfolding before our eyes,” as the Manifesto put it.^[153] For four decades, since the 1970s, world capitalism, in fits and starts, has struggled against the growing evidence of its superannuation, both for truly developing global humanity and increasingly for avoiding environmental apocalypse. China and India may have, in those decades, given rise to some tens of millions (out of, let us recall, a combined 2.6 billion people) of a newly-affluent middle class striving for a “Western life style” of consumption centered on the automobile. Nonetheless, the most elementary extrapolation of the resources and environmental destruction (pollution, atmospheric degradation, shortened life expectancy) involved in such a “life style” to the world’s 7.5 billion people (9 billion by 2050) shows its future existence as a grand “fallacy of linear composition.” And this recognition takes us to the “future past” of Marx’s vision of the re appropriation of the world’s productive forces, correcting, obviously on a far higher level, the fundamental “schism” of the expropriation which began more than 500 years ago; to the overcoming of the separation of city and countryside and hence to the more even distribution of the world’s population over the earth’s surface (in the United States, for example, 99 percent of the population currently lives on 1 percent of the land). The coming revolution will not have as its goal the elaboration of a five-year plan in order to out-produce capitalism in “steel, cement and electricity,” to return to our initial quote from Trotsky, (though it may do that, incidentally, as part of its realization of more fundamental tasks). It will rather, for starters, dismantle worldwide the several hundred million jobs, from Wall Streets “quants” to tolltakers, existing solely to administer capitalism, freeing that labor power for socially useful activity and combining it with the several billion people marginalized by capitalism altogether, to radically shorten the working day for all. With the dismantling of the car-steel-oil-rubber complex still at the center of both capitalist production and consumption (not to mention capitalism’s “imaginary”) the social labor time lost in commutes and traffic jams alone, in North America, Europe and East Asia, largely a product of the post-World War II urban, suburban and exurban development schemes framed by real estate priorities, will be regained by society; similarly with the huge expenditure of fossil fuels made necessary by the conscious suppression of mass transit by the auto and oil industries, as a cursory tour of most American cities will reveal. Unraveling the full social, material and energy costs of urban, suburban and exurban space as it currently exists will already be a giant step toward the full de-commodification of human life. Or as Marx put it 150 years ago:

…When the narrow bourgeois form has been peeled away, what is wealth, if not the universality of needs, capacities, enjoyments, productive powers, etc. of individuals, produced in universal exchange? What, if not the full development of human control over the forces of nature—those of his own nature as well as those of so-called “nature”? What, if not the absolute elaboration of his creative dispositions, without any preconditions other than antecedent historical evolution which makes the totality of this evolution—i.e., the evolution of all human powers as such, unmeasured by any previously established yardstick, an end in itself? What is this, if not a situation where man does not produce himself in any determined form, but produces his totality? Where he does not seek to remain something formed by the past, but is in the absolute movement of becoming?

Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations

1. ^[1]I am indebted to John Marot, Henri Simon, James D. White and Hillel Ticktin, in addition to friends who read various drafts, for help with this article.↩
2. ^[2]The talks on Russia and Germany are on archive.org linked from the Break Their Haughty Power website; the China and Spain talks drew from the content of recent articles on Maoism and Spain on the same site.↩
3. ^[3]In her memoirs, My Life as a Rebel.↩
4. ^[4]Lost to view by most Western Marxists was the fact that Marx, Plekhanov, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg and later Riazanov all at different times discussed the “Asiatic” or “semi-Asiatic” character of the Tsarist state. See Marx’s 1856 pamphlet “History of the Secret Diplomacy of the 18th Century.”↩
5. ^[5]Old myths die hard. British investors visiting those factories before 1914 did in fact find them to be huge, with thousands of workers, but were also shocked at the shoddy goods and by the absence of techniques, such as the Bessemer process in steel making, which had been in use in Britain since the 1860s.↩
6. ^[6]Stalin did not make even a cameo appearance in either John Reed’s 1918 classic Ten Days That Shook the World or in Max Eastman’s documentary film From Tsar to Lenin, made in the early 1920s but released only in 1937, when it was boycotted worldwide by throngs of idolizers of Stalin (DVD available via the World Socialist Website’s Mehring Books). But already in November 1917, he was one of only two people—the other being Trotsky—authorized to walk into Lenin’s office without an appointment.↩
7. ^[7]See my article on Eastman.↩
8. ^[8]See Kevin Anderson, Marx at the Margins (2010), and, before him, the work of Lawrence Krader on The Asiatic Mode of Production (1972) and his edition of Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks (1975).↩
9. ^[9]See Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (2006).↩
10. ^[10]Grundrisse, p. 325 of the 1973 Penguin edition.↩
11. ^[11]The first translation of volume I of Capital in any foreign language appeared in Russian in 1872.↩
12. ^[12]From 1878 to 1881, one faction of the group Zemla I Volya (Land and Freedom) waged a campaign of terror that virtually paralyzed the Tsarist government, culminating in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Marx supported them for waging what seemed to be the sole form of struggle available in conditions of extreme repression, and also kept at arm’s Russian self-styled Marxists who wrote learned treatises in the safety of Swiss exile. Marx, unlike his followers, was never troubled by the problem of being an orthodox Marxist.↩
13. ^[13]See James D. White, Karl Marx and the Origins of Dialectical Materialism (1994), p. 281.↩
14. ^[14]Again, see Kevin Anderson, op. cit., (2010).↩
15. ^[15]See Teodor Shanin, The Late Marx and the Russian Road (1981) and James D. White, op. cit., chapter 5.↩
16. ^[16]The anti-Enlightenment Slavophiles idealized the commune as an eternal expression of a Slavic soul; Herzen was aware that such communes had once existed in much of Europe, but thought they could be part of a Russian revolution; the westernizers tended to deride its importance as a “judicial imposition” and looked forward to its speedy disappearance with the advance of capitalism. Cherneschevski, who had written pioneering sociological works on Russian society, did not idealize the commune, which he knew from childhood experience growing up in a provincial town, but did anticipate Marx’s later view that it could, in a revolutionary upheaval, “provide the basis for a non-capitalist economic development.” See Esther Kingston-Mann, Lenin and the Problem of Marxist Peasant Revolution (1985), pp. 23–24.↩
17. ^[17]“If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement one another, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.”↩
18. ^[18]He was also reconnecting with personal memories of a similar Germanic commune near Trier, his birthplace, which had disappeared only one generation before his birth, as well as his “determinate negation” of elements of German romanticism. See James D. White, op. cit., pp. 205–206, for Marx’s letter to Engels of March 1854, in which he writes of the resilience of the communal form in Germany and elsewhere, preceding his discovery of the Russian commune by almost two decades.↩
19. ^[19]James D. White, op. cit.; Amadeo Bordiga, Russie et revolution dans la théorie marxiste (1975).↩
20. ^[20]Plekhanov refused to confront the issues of Marx’s correspondence with Daniel’son, Mikhailovski, and Zasulich. “In early writings he had referred to Marx’s favorable comments on the commune, but in Our Differences (1885) no longer did.” See Kingston-Mann, op. cit., p. 33.↩
21. ^[21]This included Vera Zasulich, who later worked with Gyorgi Plekhanov in Switzerland.↩
22. ^[22]See Jacques Baynac, Les Socialistes-Revolutionnaires (1979), volume 1.↩
23. ^[23]Key figures of the Tsar’s investigating commission.↩
24. ^[24]F. Venturi, Roots of Revolution (1960 English trans.), p. 70.↩
25. ^[25]“The Bolshevik revolution had shattered the old Marxist assumption that industrialization was the exclusive task of capitalism.” Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (1973), p. 170. Or, as Amadeo Bordiga put it more succinctly and accurately in the 1950s, responding to Stalinist propaganda: “It is exactly right that the ‘foundations of socialism are being laid in the Soviet Union,’ ” which was exactly why he considered it as a capitalist society.↩
26. ^[26]See Robert Brady, The Rationalization Movement in German Industry (1933) and Fritz Sternberg’s Der Untergang des deutschen Kapitalismus (1933). In both Germany and the United States in the 1920s, chronic unemployment remained at 8 percent or higher in the brief boom years before 1929, an unprecedented level compared to pre-1914 standards. For some material on the similar link between rationalization and structural unemployment in the United States, cf. Irving Bernstein, History of the American Worker: The Lean Years 1920–1933 (1960).↩
27. ^[27]The Argentine Raul Prebisch, founder of the 1950s and 1960s “import substitution” strategy of development and hardly a Marxist, studied the differences between Argentina, a major exporter of grain and beef by the 1880s, and similar exporters such as Australia and Canada, concluding that Argentina, unlike the British Commonwealth countries, was hobbled by the pre-capitalist legacy of Spanish colonialism in the persistence of the latifundia, into the twentieth century. Cf. E. Dosman, The Life and Times of Raul Prebisch, 1901–1986 (2008), p. 49.↩
28. ^[28]See my articles “The Non-Formation of a Working Class Party in the United States, 1900–1945” and “Communism is the Material Human Community: Amadeo Bordiga Today.”↩
29. ^[29]Lars Lih, Lenin Rediscovered (2006). “Erfurtian Social Democrat” is Lih’s term for a disciple of Karl Kautsky and pre-1914 German Social Democracy (the SPD), which Lenin surely was. Curious that Lih makes little or nothing of Engels’ critique of the Erfurt Progam, which resulted from the SPD’s 1891 congress in that city.↩
30. ^[30]See the classic on the integration of the SPD into German capitalism: Dieter Groh, Negative Integration und revolutionärer Attentismus (1973), and the earlier book of Carl Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905–1917 (1954)↩
31. ^[31]The “financial interrelations ratio” measures the total capital assets in manufacture to total assets in finance and real estate.↩
32. ^[32]The glorification of labor, common to fascist, Stalinist and Popular Front/New Deal ideology in the 1930s, was the common ideological thread that mobilized the working class for the new phase of accumulation in the interwar period. This little-studied phenomenon, expressed in the Italian dopolavoro, the Nazi “Kraft durch Freude” campaigns and in the social realist art of the Stalinist school, or in that generated by the American New Deal, was the condensed form of mass consumption which, after 1945, achieved its diffuse form in the mass-consumer ideology of the “affluent society.” (Debord)↩
33. ^[33]Absolute surplus value, for Marx, is obtained by the lengthening of the working day above and beyond the reproduction time for labor employed; relative surplus value is obtained by technical intensification of the production process, i.e., by increasing the productivity of labor.↩
34. ^[34]See Marx’s chapter on “Primitive Accumulation” in volume I of Capital and the draconian methods used by the Tudors to herd peasants off the land and into the wage labor work force, destitution and the work house.↩
35. ^[35]See Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974). Other important absolutisms in countries that later developed important Communist Parties were in Bourbon Spain, the Portugal of Pombal, and regional absolutisms (Piedmont, Naples) in what became Italy. All of them were, in different ways, involved in the capitalization of agriculture. See, again, my article on the non-formation of a working-class party in America.↩
36. ^[36]The industrial working class in both Britain and Germany peaked in the pre-1914 period at roughly 40 percent of the total work force.↩
37. ^[37]See Alexander Erlich, The Soviet Industrialization Debate (1960); see also John Marot, The Russian Revolution in Retrospect and Prospect (2012). As is generally known, three factions confronted each other in these debates: the advocates of rapid industrialization in the Trotskyist left, the “socialism at a snail’s base” Bukharinist right, and the most dangerous faction of all, the “vacillating” Stalinist “center.” The victory of the Stalinist “center” ruined communism internationally for an epoch, whereas Bukharin had rightly said, in the course of the debate, that the implementation of the left’s program would require a huge bureaucracy and that the social costs of regulation would be much greater than the potential downside of market-driven stratification of the peasantry (see below). The entire left except for Trotsky, seeing Bukharin as the threat of “capitalist restoration,” capitulated to Stalin, on a productivist basis. See the analysis of the Italian Communist Left on the 50th Anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Bilan d’une revolution (Programme Communiste, 1967–1968) for a balanced rectification of Bukharin as a “right communist” against the far more dangerous Stalin. See also Marot, (op. cit., chapter 2) for a devastating account of how the Trotskyist “left” embraced Stalin’s collectivizations. The Trotskyists to this day retain the blind spot of seeing Stalin as a “center” and Bukharin as the “right,” and as the cat’s paw of a “capitalist restoration,” as if that, had it taken place, would have been worse for world socialism than what actually happened.↩
38. ^[38]Unbelievably, translated into English only in 1988.↩
39. ^[39]Marx for example intensely studied the innovations in fertilizer of the German chemist Liebig, and their impact on higher crop yields in British and German agriculture.↩
40. ^[40]Tomas de Torquemada was a major figure in the Spanish Inquisition in the fifteenth century.↩
41. ^[41]I am indebted in the preceding paragraphs to the Shanin/Alavi preface to the 1988 English translation of The Agrarian Question, volume l, pp. xiii–xxxiii. Shanin wrote elsewhere of Kautsky’s view, as applied to Russia, that it envisioned “a ‘self-contradictory’ revolution which must and can be bourgeois only. And yet, taking place in a period when in all the rest of Europe only a socialist revolution was possible.” Teodor Shanin, Russia, 1905–1907, volume 2, p. 187. After 1905, Kautsky actually hoped that the revolutionary élan of the Russian Marxists would rejuvenate the Second International (ibid., p. 253).↩
42. ^[42]Marx called the late 1870s Russian terrorists “the leading detachment of the revolutionary movement in Europe.”↩
43. ^[43]300,000 peasants died in the famine; from 1889 to 1917 one year out of two were years of famine. See Kingston-Mann, op. cit., pp. 33–34.↩
44. ^[44]Nicolai Chernyshevsky (1828–1889) was a Populist writer who emerged in the 1850s with some of the first sociological studies of Russian society. In 1862 he was exiled for the rest of his life to Siberia.↩
45. ^[45]Nicolai Dobrolyubov (1836–1861) was a radical activist and literary figure of the 1850s. Like Chernyshevsky, he wrote for the most important oppositional journal of the day, The Contemporary.↩
46. ^[46]See for example the account of Valentinov, Encounters with Lenin (1968), pp. 63–68.↩
47. ^[47]Claudio Sergio Ingerflom, Le citoyen impossible: Les racines russes du leninisme (1988). Cherneshevski in particular had developed the notion of “aziatzvo,” the crushing “semi-Asiatic” weight of the Tsarist state which atomized the entire Russian population and made impossible any coherent popular revolt, any conscious “class for itself.” For Lenin, the working class which began to form and to rebel after the 1870s was the first force to form “outside” of this atomization, a view confirmed by the militant strikes of 1896 and thereafter. In Ingerflom’s view, Lenin, with his own What Is To Be Done?, returns to elements of his Chernyshevskian roots in attacking the narrow point-of-production focus of the Economists, calling on revolutionaries, like the literary prototype Rachmetov, to go into all classes of Russian society, to denounce all oppressions, and to thus constitute themselves as a “tribune of the people.”↩
48. ^[48]Lenin’s 1899 draft of the party program did not deal with the mass of commune peasants except to claim that most of them were “really” proletarians. See Kingston-Mann, op. cit., p. 48. Teodor Shanin points out, in volume 2 of his key 1986 book Russia, 1905–07, that the formative period of Russian Social Democracy, from the mid-1880s to 1902, was a nadir of peasant struggle, p. 146.↩
49. ^[49]The late 1890s, when Lenin was writing the book, were actually boom years for Russian industry under Witte’s management. See T. von Laue, Sergei Witte and the Industrialization of Russia (1963). Witte had become Finance Minister in 1892 and placed the tax burden for Russian industrialization on the peasantry.↩
50. ^[50]After 1905, Lenin did admit that he was wrong about this polarization (Kingston-Mann, p. 53), but did not give up the basic view of the direction of development; it had merely been an error of timing.↩
51. ^[51]Chantal de Crisenoy, Lenine face aux moujiks (1971), p. 83.↩
52. ^[52]Ibid., p. 99.↩
53. ^[53]Ibid., p. 103.↩
54. ^[54]Ibid., p. 110.↩
55. ^[55]Ibid., pp. 111–112.↩
56. ^[56]In volume 2 of the Complete Works.↩
57. ^[57]Crisenoy, p. 115.↩
58. ^[58]Trotsky said: “In the coming revolution, we have to ally with the peasantry.” Quoted in Lenin’s 1904 One step forward, two steps backward.)↩
59. ^[59]Lenin’s 1899 draft of the party program did not deal with mass of commune peasants except to claim that most of them were “really” proletarians. Kingston-Mann, op. cit., p. 48.↩
60. ^[60]Crisenoy, p. 155–156. Just before this outbreak, Lenin had written: “’We will make a last effort (with the program) to stir up the remnants of the peasants’ class hostility to the feudal lords.’ Scarcely had he written these lines when the peasants [in several regions–LG] destroyed 100 estates, seized the property of the big landowners, broke into barns to distribute food to the hungry…for the first time, they showed hostility to the tsar, meeting the Cossacks with axes and pitchforks…”↩
61. ^[61]The 1861 emancipation of the serfs had been a patchwork of changes that saddled those freed serfs receiving land with decades of debts to pay for it.↩
62. ^[62]Ibid., p. 159. Lenin went on, in the framework of his 1899 book, imagining that capital had largely conquered the countryside, saying that (in general) “support for small property is reactionary, because it is aimed at the economy of a big capital…but in the present case, we want to support small property not against capitalism, but against serfdom…” Ibid., p. 160.↩
63. ^[63]Kingston-Mann, p. 65. A “repartitional” commune was one in which lands were periodically redistributed based on peasants’ family size.↩
64. ^[64]Ibid., p. 70.↩
65. ^[65]Lenin’s agrarian program, quoted in Crisenoy, op. cit., p. 166. As she comments, p. 167, “Lenin remains close to the most orthodox positions of the Second International and the refusal of any alliance between workers and peasants.”↩
66. ^[66]In the interest of keeping the main theme of this text, the Russian peasants and the mir, I am skirting a blow-by-blow account of the 1905 revolution, which included, with prompting from no political party, the invention in praxis of the “soviet” by the working class. For an overview of the whole, see Trotsky’s 1905 (original 1907–1908, English trans. 1971).↩
67. ^[67]Ibid., p. 98.↩
68. ^[68]Teodor Shanin, Russia, 1905–07: Revolution as a Moment of Truth, volume 2, 1986, p. 84. Much of the following account of the countryside in 1905–07 is based on Shanin, Kingston-Mann and Crisenoy.↩
69. ^[69]Shanin, op. cit., pp. 85–87.↩
70. ^[70]Ibid., p. 88.↩
71. ^[71]Ibid., p. 89. Crisenoy reports, pp. 171–172: “Of 7000 actions listed by the Okhrana between 1905 and 1907, 5000 are directed against the landed estates.” In April 1905, Lenin considered the transfer of all land to the peasants, to give agrarian capitalism “a larger basis” and to hasten the transition to an “American type” agriculture. But he continued to view the large landowners as capitalists and refused to come out clearly for peasant property. On the other hand, he was lucid enough to recognize the inadequacy of the agrarian program. Ibid.,↩
72. ^[72]“Lenin’s intricate distinctions between farmhands, semi-proletarians, middle peasants, and the rural poor remained difficult even for his most loyal supporter to fully comprehend…” Kingston-Mann, p. 167.↩
73. ^[73]Kingston-Mann, op. cit., p. 79. The Menshevik conference of May 1905 criticized Lenin’s idea of Social Democrats leading a bourgeois government. Plekhanov and his allies, themselves still within the classical Kautskyian framework, criticized peasant activism, saying it could only fragment large-scale capitalist enterprises. Ibid., p. 82.↩
74. ^[74]“Social democracy and the revolutionary government,” March 1905, volume VIII of Lenin’s Complete Works.↩
75. ^[75]“General plan of resolutions at the III. Congress, February 1905, Complete Works, volume VIII.↩
76. ^[76]Crisenoy, p. 174.↩
77. ^[77]Ibid., p 175.↩
78. ^[78]Ibid., p. 176. Later, in November 1905, the peasants ran off the Tsarist civil servants and elected their own “elders” (starost). Many directly attacked the whole system, the state and its representatives: police, army, and civil servants.The police reported 1041 actions of this kind between 1905 and 1907. 1000 manors were burned, and in several provinces, all estates were destroyed. There were peasant militias in the Ukraine, Lithuania, Georgia and the Volga Region. The mir retained all its influence.↩
79. ^[79]Shanin, op. cit., p. 126.↩
80. ^[80]Crisenoy, p. 179.↩
81. ^[81]Ibid., p. 180.↩
82. ^[82]“Revolution of a 1789 or 1848 Type?,” March–April 1905, volume VIII of Lenin’s Complete Works, quoted in Crisenoy, pp. 180–181.↩
83. ^[83]Shanin, op. cit., p. 92.↩
84. ^[84]Ibid., p. 93. The Black Earth belt was the term for the most fertile lands.↩
85. ^[85]Ibid., pp. 93–95. The original emancipation of the serfs in 1861 had scheduled decades of payments to the state for the redistributed land.↩
86. ^[86]Kingston-Mann, op. cit., p. 100. Trotsky, who was the one Russian Marxist who agreed with Lenin on the importance of an alliance with the peasantry in 1903, took a different view after 1905–07, attacking Lenin’s “democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants,” and saying that peasants could not play an independent political role or form a party of their own. See Shanin, op. cit., p. 257. Trotsky felt that peasants did little of political significance in 1905, somewhat more in 1906, but that their role overall was meager. He did not bother to consider the massive 1906 vote for the Social Revolutionaries in St. Petersburg. For Shanin, “Trotsky’s harsh anti-populism and anti-peasantism put him with the most conservative of the Mensheviks,” ibid., p. 258.↩
87. ^[87]The Tsarist regime responded to the mass uprisings by conceding a series of four elected Dumas, or legislatures, each one dissolved and reconvened with fewer powers than the preceding one.↩
88. ^[88]Kingston-Mann, op. cit., p. 92. Crisenoy, op. cit., p. 192.↩
89. ^[89]Ibid., p. 93.↩
90. ^[90]Ibid., p. 95.↩
91. ^[91]Shanin op. cit., p. 100.↩
92. ^[92]Ibid., p 101.↩
93. ^[93]Ibid., p. 109.↩
94. ^[94]Ibid., p. 131.↩
95. ^[95]Ibid., p. 133.↩
96. ^[96]As Shanin put it, pp. 152–168, after 1905 Lenin’s practical orientation changed but theoretically little changed. He did not update The Development of Capitalism in Russia, on which his early agrarian program was based. Shanin credits Lenin’s “on the spot” reporting in 1905–07 and “the courage with which he championed new unorthodox tactics against his own comrades.” But he also points out that “70 years of research has not produced the name of one Bolshevik who was a peasant leader in 1905–07.” “At the peak of Russia’s largest peasant revolt in centuries, the number of peasants within the cadres of the Bolsheviks was about zero, as was the number of the Bolsheviks elected to the 2nd Duma by the “electoral college” of the peasantry. Workers and peasants, on the other hand, learned from each others’ struggles. The All-Russian Peasant Union rejected a Social Democratic worker delegation saying “We have just got rid of self-appointed teachers and supervisors.” The Congress then passed a resolution of full solidarity with our “brother workers in struggle.” Peasant participation in political parties was remarkable by its absence. The utopianism of the SRs, formulated as the “socialization of all land,” was attacked as naïve by the Social Democrats but was adopted in part or in full at the RSDLP’s 4th Congress… When Lenin said Russia was not yet capitalist, he stayed within the earlier theoretical structure but just “moved the clock back.”↩
97. ^[97]Ibid., p. 146. Plekhanov at the 4th Party Congress said that “Lenin looks at the nationalization of the land with the eye of an SR. He even begins to adopt their terminology, i.e., talks of popular creativity… Nice to meet old acquaintances but it is unpleasant to see how Social Democrats adopt populist points of view.” Ibid., p 149.↩
98. ^[98]Ibid., p. 150. Lenin was fascinated by two foreign models of agricultural development, the Prussian “revolution from above” under Bismarck and his successors, and the American policy of free land for farmers to develop the west.↩
99. ^[99]Ibid., p. 142.↩
100. ^[100]In 1906 there were mass sales of land by gentry terrified of the insurrection in the countryside; sales to peasants were facilitated by the Peasant Land Bank. D. Atkinson, The End of the Russian Land Commune, 1905–1930 (1983), p. 68.↩
101. ^[101]Ibid., pp. 197–198.↩
102. ^[102]Stolypin was remembered, in Shanin’s view, as the “last great defender of the autocracy. Stolypin was defeated by the Russian conservative lobby. He had been touted to be Russia’s “second Bismarck” [the first having been Witte–LG], Shanin, op. cit., p. 236.↩
103. ^[103]Kingston-Mann, op. cit., p. 102. The Vendée was a region of western France whose peasants had joined counter-revolutionary forces against the Jacobins in 1792.↩
104. ^[104]Crisenoy, op. cit., pp. 194–196.↩
105. ^[105]Ibid., p. 103.↩
106. ^[106]Ibid., p. 104. The Junkers were pre-capitalist landowners in Eastern Prussia who had reinvented themselves as capitalists while preserving quasi-feudal social relations on their estates. For a portrait, see Alexander Gershenkron, Bread and Democracy (1943). Lenin also felt that American farmers in the west prospered because land there belonged to the state, hence creating no superfluous expenditures for rent or purchase.↩
107. ^[107]Crisenoy, op. cit., p. 105.↩
108. ^[108]Ibid.↩
109. ^[109]Ibid., pp. 106–107.↩
110. ^[110]Ibid., pp. 107–110.↩
111. ^[111]Most recent scholarship, according to Kingston-Mann, has emphasized the ephemeral character of the reform’s impact; in 1915, two-thirds of “new proprietors” were still plowing on scattered strips intermingled with communal lands. Ibid., p. 123.↩
112. ^[112]In 1913 agriculture made up 43 percent of Russia’s national income, and grain exports sustained Russia’s balance of payments. By comparison, in 1914 60 percent of the French population was still rural but national income per capita was four times higher than in Russia. By 1914, the Russian rural population was 37 percent higher than in 1897. Atkinson, op. cit., pp. 102–104.↩
113. ^[113]Thus does Crisenoy explain this “meager result.” Crisenoy, op. cit., pp. 229–230.↩
114. ^[114]Atkinson, op. cit., p. 81, arrives at a different estimate: by 1916 16 million dessiatins (1 dessiatin = 2.3 acres) were individualized; this represented 14 percent of the 115 million dessiatins of land in communes in 1905. Peasants in 1915 owned 35 percent of the 97 millions of dessiatins of privately owned land. But collective land ownership actually rose during this period.↩
115. ^[115]Lenin’s article “New Facts,” from volume XXII of his works, quoted in Crisenoy, op. cit., p. 248. In her view, both Lenin and Stolypin have the same dream of transforming the Russian peasant into a European peasant, p. 249. “Lenin, like Stolypin, is a fervent defender of the disappearance of the rural commune,” p. 251. He remains convinced of the anti-commune sentiments of the peasant, as elaborated in his article “Our Detractors” in volume XVII, January–February 1911.↩
116. ^[116]Ibid., p. 253.↩
117. ^[117]Kingston-Mann, op. cit., p. 141.↩
118. ^[118]Ibid., pp. 142–143.↩
119. ^[119]Lenin was aware of this. A few months later, before the October Revolution, he admitted “what [the peasants] want is to keep their small property, preserve egalitarian norms and renew them periodically.” “Pages from the journal of a publicist,” Sept 1917, volume XXV, quoted in Crisenoy, p. 273. But Lenin’s realism made him admit the attachment of the peasants to the commune, and their desire to see it enlarged.↩
120. ^[120]Ibid., p. 157.↩
121. ^[121]Ibid., p. 162.↩
122. ^[122]Atkinson, op. cit., p. 174.↩
123. ^[123]Ibid., p. 176.↩
124. ^[124]Ibid., p. 185.↩
125. ^[125]Ibid., p. 173, 179, 183.↩
126. ^[126]Ibid., p. 185.↩
127. ^[127]Ibid., pp. 193–194.↩
128. ^[128]Crisenoy, pp. 277–279; the Lenin quote is from “On left infantilism and petty bourgeois ideas” in Complete Works, volume XXVII, quoted in Crisenoy, pp. 281–282.↩
129. ^[129]The Treaty of Brest Litovsk was the treaty of Soviet surrender to the Central Powers on the eastern front, signed at the end of February 1918. Under its terms, Russia ceded 34 percent of her population, 32 percent of her agricultural land, 54 percent of her industry and 89 percent of her coal mines. The Bolshevik Party decided to approve the treaty following a series of tumultuous meetings, in which a majority initially rejected it. For the basic story, see (among many other accounts), I. Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879–1921 (1980 ed.), p. 359–394. From Lenin’s viewpoint, it was a successful gamble which paid off months later when the Central Powers collapsed, nullifying the treaty. For those who opposed it, Brest-Litovsk was a first step whereby the Soviet Union placed national interests ahead of the international revolution. For an analysis of the treaty in this perspective, see Guy Sabatier’s The 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk: Curbing the Revolution.↩
130. ^[130]Charles Bettelheim, not a source I like to quote, recounts the story of the group around Oustrialov, an ex-Cadet in Paris exile, known as the Smenovekhovtsy, from the name of their journal meaning “new orientation.” This group called on any bourgeois intellectuals remaining in Russia to rally to the regime, which in their view had entered its Thermidor period. Bukharin analyzed these “friends” of a very special type, who hoped that under the cover of the “monopoly of knowledge” bourgeois power might be restored in Soviet Russia. They believed that the October Revolution had accomplished an indispensable historic task, of which a new bourgeoisie could take advantage. The revolution had mobilized “the most courageous and pitiless adversaries of the rotting Tsarist regime, crushing the corrupted strata of the intelligentsia which only knew how to speak of God and the devil…they opened the way to the creation of a new bourgeoisie.” Quoted in Bettelheim, Les luttes de classes en URSS, volume l (1973), p. 263. Bettelheim’s book, despite insights of this kind, is vitiated by his numerous bows in the direction of Mao’s China, in 1973 at the peak of its prestige in Paris.↩
131. ^[131]Crisenoy, op. cit., p. 332.↩
132. ^[132]See Simon Pirani, The Russian Revolution in Retreat, 1920–1924↩
133. ^[133]Marot, op. cit., p. 11.↩
134. ^[134]Ibid., p. 35.↩
135. ^[135]See my article “Socialism in One Country before Stalin: The Case of Turkey, 1917–1925.”↩
136. ^[136]Lenin, in “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky,” quoted in Marcel van der Linden, Western Marxism and the Soviet Union (2009 ed.), p. 16. Trotsky himself further elaborates on this in Permanent Revolution, chapter 5: “The Bolshevik slogan [of ‘democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants’–LG] was realized in fact—not as a morphological trait but as a very great historical reality. Only, it was realized not before, but after October. The peasant war, in the words of Marx, supported the dictatorship of the proletariat. The collaboration of the two classes was realized through October on a gigantic scale…And Lenin himself estimated the October Revolution—its first stage—as the true realization of the democratic revolution, and by that also as the true, even if changed, embodiment of the strategic slogan of the Bolsheviks.”↩
137. ^[137]Because Trotsky looms so large in the left-wing anti-Stalinist currents in the West, it is necessary at this point to signal his differences with Lenin’s formulation in 1917–1918; Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism also set down the framework for many would-be revolutionaries who later broke with him to declare Russia a class society (usually “state capitalist”), such as CLR James, Castoriadis, Shachtman, or Dunayevskaya.↩
138. ^[138]One good, and typical, example of a state capitalist analysis of the Soviet phenomenon that breaks with Trotsky, but which emerges directly from Trotsky’s framework, is Walter Daum’s 1990 The Life and Death of Stalinism. While generally superior to most other works in the state capitalism camp, Daum’s book never mentions the mir, and it discusses the peasantry, like most other works in the genre, only in passing as a backdrop to the 1920s faction fight.↩
139. ^[139]Marot, op. cit., p. 94.↩
140. ^[140]Ibid., p. 95.↩
141. ^[141]For a full account, see Moshe Lewin’s Lenin’s Last Struggle (1968).↩
142. ^[142]In taking this tack, I take my distance from some attitudes current in the libertarian or left communist milieu, in which I generally situate myself. I first of all reject the commonplace view one finds among anarchists, who see nothing problematic to be explained in the emergence of Stalinist Russia. Did not Bakunin already predict, in his 1860s struggle with Marx, that a Marxist-led revolution would result in the authoritarian rule of a centralizing intellectual elite? I do not believe, further, that there exists a straight line, or much of any line, from Lenin’s 1902 pamphlet What Is To Be Done? to Stalin’s Russia, especially since Lenin admitted after 1905 that he had been wrong. Such a “teleological” approach does not hold up in a close, month-to-month analysis of developments from the 1890s to the 1920s. I cannot fathom the mindset of a milieu in which it has long been fashionable to refer to C.L.R. James, or more recently, in certain circles, to Amadeo Bordiga, whereas it has been distinctly unfashionable to refer to Lenin, whom both James and Bordiga greatly admired.↩
143. ^[143]What Is To Be Done?, briefly, is as much Lenin’s anti-workerist, anti–point of production (anti-”Economist,” in the language of the day) polemic, arguing, against a narrow focus on workers’ struggles alone, that revolutionaries should carry their denunciations of oppression into all classes of society, and be “the tribune of the people,” as it is about his use of Kautsky’s notion of “bringing consciousness from the outside” and his call for a tightly disciplined elite organization of revolutionaries. It should not be forgotten that the Mensheviks, who rejected Lenin’s narrower criteria for party membership at the famous 1903 “split” conference, calmly voted those very criteria into the party statutes in 1906. Further, under the impact of 1905, Lenin wrote that the “…working class is instinctively, spontaneously Social Democratic [i.e., revolutionary–LG], and more than 10 years of work put in by Social Democracy has done a great deal to transform this spontaneity into consciousness,” in “The Reorganization of the Party,” Works, volume 10, p. 32, quoted in Daum, op. cit., p. 106. C.L.R. James wrote, in Facing Reality (1974), pp. 93–94, about the “old type of Marxist organization,” by which he meant the vanguard party: “All these beliefs led to the conclusion that the organization was the true subject… And if the organization, in philosophical terms, was the subject of history, the proletariat was the object… This conception of the organization is inherent in the extreme views that Lenin expounded in What Is To Be Done? He repudiated them later, but not with the force and thoroughness which were needed to prevent them from doing infinite mischief.”↩
144. ^[144]From M. Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization (French original 1966, English translation 1968), pp. 85–86.↩
145. ^[145]This strategy is spelled out in Preobrazhensky’s 1926 book The New Economics. Marot, op. cit., p. 39, writes: “In 1923 and 1925, factory managers and enterprising peasants respectively were redistributing the pie of goodies by gaming the market.”↩
146. ^[146]I put “right” in quotes because no one was more reactionary than the leader of the “center,” Stalin. I am here neglecting here the important foreign policy debates that were intertwined with factional positions on Soviet economic policy, starting with the failure of the aborted 1923 uprising in Germany, the failed British General Strike of 1926, and above all the disastrous Soviet intervention in China from 1925 to 1927, the latter two laid at the door of Stalin and Bukharin.↩
147. ^[147]Quoted in Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (1973), p. 140. The “chinovniki ” were originally Tsarist bureaucrats, strictly organized according to rank (“chin ” in Russian). Bukharin accused the left of advocating a “Genghis Khan” plan.↩
148. ^[148]For a full account of the faction fight, see Marot, op. cit., chapters 1–2. His book stands out, among left-wing anti-Stalinist accounts, for the devastating portrait of how the Trotskyist left (minus, it must be said, Trotsky himself) not merely capitulated to Stalin’s “left turn” beginning in 1928, but positively embraced it.↩
149. ^[149]Quoted in Moshe Lewin, op. cit., p. 377. Smirnov was executed by Stalin in 1936. See Victor Serge’s tribute.↩
150. ^[150]See Hillel Ticktin, “Political Economy of the USSR,” Critique, No. 1, 1974, for an analysis which captures many aspects of the late Soviet system, and on the basis of which Ticktin predicted its collapse fifteen years before it took place.↩
151. ^[151]Recalling, from another context, Bordiga’s remark that “The hell of capitalism is the firm, not the fact that the firm has a boss.”↩
152. ^[152]The North American Free Trade Agreement, which in reality was mainly an agreement to dismantle Mexico’s remaining barriers to untrammeled imports and investment.↩
153. ^[153]See Insurgent Notes No. 1, “The Historical Moment Which Produced Us” and the program elaborated therein for a fuller view of the “first hundred days” of implementing a communist program today.↩

Standing in line at the Huntsville Free Clinic in Alabama. A provider of last resort, the Free Clinic serves the poor and working class of Huntsville not covered by Alabama’s stingy Medicaid program. Many users of Free Clinic services work, but at jobs that don’t offer health insurance. Volunteer-run, the Free Clinic becomes the only lifeline many in this situation will have to any type of health care.

Today is one of two weekly prescription refill days. The Free Clinic contacts the free supply programs offered by drug companies to cover prescriptions for people unable to pay. This service, dubbed “compassionate access,” is not done out of either compassion or genuine access, but granted to ward off any demands for expanded state run prescription programs or price caps on soaring drug prices.

“You always can get a job you don’t want and never a job you do.”
—Overheard in Free Clinic waiting line

I’m eavesdropping on the conversation in front of me, three middle-aged men, two white and one black. They are the face of the new hidden unemployment, the disposable middle-aged men laid off or injured from jobs who can’t collect Social Security yet but who can’t get hired either. Many are unemployable because of the epidemic of diabetes, high blood pressure and other chronic diseases that especially ravages the Deep South. No jobs at the local auto plants or the booming high-tech defense-related industries that still thrive in Huntsville. Men like these survive off wives’ and girlfriends’ income from low-waged service-sector jobs at Walmart, at the fast food restaurants and dollar stores that fill working-class Huntsville strip malls along with pawn shops, Good Wills, and title and payday-loan storefronts.

The payday and auto-title loans are two modern forms of debt updating and continuing the South’s sharecropping and debt-peonage legacy. It works like this. You are hard up for cash. You borrow against your next paycheck or put your automobile title up as collateral at interest rates up to 400 percent yearly. If you don’t repay right away (and many people already teetering near the economic edge can’t), you become snared into further cycles of inescapable debt.1 The practice is perfectly legal and indeed some of the biggest banks in the country, such as Wells Fargo Bank, participate in this predatory lending, although more and more legislation is getting introduced to curb its worst excesses.2

The void—economic and otherwise—of superfluous men like this is filled by pills: Oxycontins, Lorcets, Darvocets and other prescription painkillers. Getting a steady source of prescription pain medicine becomes not only a personal way to dull the pain but an economic hustle too. Pills can be resold and thus generate pocket money. So not surprisingly talk in the waiting line turns to the latest news about what doctors “kick out” prescriptions with few questions asked.

One doctor, banned from Alabama, now practices a few miles up the road in southern Tennessee. Speaking about his exile from Alabama, one man asks incredulously, “What do they expect the man to do? Go work at McDonalds?” The others laugh at the absurdity of the thought, although none of them can get jobs at McDonalds either.

“Connecting Others to Christ One At A Time”
—One of several similar T-shirts worn inside the clinic waiting room

The more time I spend in the Deep South, the better I understand the role religion plays. Religion is not the opium of the masses or the sigh of the oppressed; religion is now, in the absence of any collective organization, their insurance policy.

Thus, in the face of hardships, God oversees and personally guides the faithful through all life’s ups and downs. In contrast to the role the black church played in the South during the Civil Rights era, today’s churches, both black and white, now reflect the individualization and fragmentation of American life, where there is no one to help you outside your immediate family and friends—assuming they aren’t drowning in their own messy, complicated personal problems. The deep roots of Southern religion remain, but its underlying social causes and thus social functions have changed.

Two women, one black and one white, part-time school bus drivers, probably not eligible for healthcare benefits and so forced to use the Free Clinic, talk across the small drab waiting room. The white driver tells of her mother’s slow death from cancer and how her mother was “tired of living, worn out by life” before she died. She then talks loudly about how God oversees her every move, personally managing her life, keeping her on the right path.

Murmurs of assent wash across the room. In some ways, this woman’s testimony is both very moving—and very egotistical. This current view of God has nothing to do with social justice or a better world in some vague way, but instead reflects how isolated and struggling so many of the working poor’s lives have become in the United States today. It looks up to the heavens for what can’t be found anywhere on earth.

This is a part of the country that the United States left, in the traditional sense, walked away from decades ago, preferring to impose change through the courts and government decree, and to withdraw into the fractured movements of identity. But Alabama, like much of the Deep South, has a rich history of class struggle. In the 1930s, the mines and steel factories surrounding Birmingham, now shut or just a shadow of their former strength, were in a virtual state of civil war, struggles more often than not shipwrecked on the reefs of race.

During the Red Scare 1950s, Alabama was run by a populist governor, “Big Jim” Folsom, a colorful, 6’6″, hard-drinking, womanizing, larger-than-life figure who openly preached interracial unity of the “branchheads” (the poor farmers and working class) against the “Big Mules,” the handful of Alabama’s land owners controlling the state (3).3

Folsom’s campaign rallies opened with him intentionally greeting and shaking the hands of black attendees in a symbolic but potent signal that blacks were welcome. Folsom famously demonstrated his disdain for the trappings of power by having himself photographed smoking a cigar, with shoeless feet propped up on the executive desk of the governor’s mansion.

Even an arch-reactionary and racist like George Wallace, who got his political baptism in Folsom’s campaigns before veering to the right, was denounced by the Republican Party when he ran for President in the late 1960s, as a “country and western Marxist” for increasing state spending and ownership and raising public sector worker salaries. After unleashing the demons of racism all his political life, Wallace, according to historian Dan T. Carter, at the end of his last term as governor, by then incapacitated in a wheelchair from a failed assassination attempt, openly worried, “I hope the rich and powerful don’t take over now.”4 This strain of populism, sails unfurled and powered with the largesse of New Deal winds, a populism contradictory, frequently nakedly corrupt and never ultimately threatening the interests of the big money men, is dead in the Deep South today.

One of the many dirty secrets of American history is that New Deal projects, along with nearly every other of the public works construction widely credited with modernizing Southern infrastructure and launching the New South, were worked by un-free labor.5 Whenever a local construction crew or farmer needed manpower, the sheriff would arrest blacks and poor whites on minor charges, with willing judges sentencing the convicted to work-gangs building roads and harvesting crops.

If slavery was the first wave of one major source of primitive accumulation of capital in the United States, the post-slavery period until WWII became the second, as former slave-owners, deprived of their biggest form of capital—the institution of chattel slavery—scrambled to reconstitute their wealth through a second wave of un-free labor, assisted by the state and the judicial system.

As Haywood Patterson, one of the Scottsboro Boys, described this system in his remarkable autobiography:

The prison farms of Alabama, there are a half-dozen going all the time, that is the business the state of Alabama is in. Many a guy on these prison road camps, he was there because some Alabama county put up a sign during harvest time. The sign said that vagrants without money must work on a prison farm or road for thirty or sixty days. These guys they arrested and stamped a crime on the fact they were broke, and puts them to working.

Besides what the state did through its prisons and farms, our rackets inside the prison were small. The prison farms of Alabama, that is the part of the old slavery that still stands down there. Today, like in the olden days, they feed a man enough to keep him alive and work him all day. Long time ago, old master, he got the take from that. Today the state of Alabama, it gets the take direct, through its prisons and the officials who run them.6

Even as late as the 1990s, people here tell me, prison chain gangs could be found working in the heat of the summer sun on highways in Bullock County, outside Montgomery. By that time, however, the effect was mostly symbolic: the resurrection of the chain gangs was a sign of being tough on crime and not as a form of economic exploitation. But in the South, symbolism becomes a potent carrier of past history, which is why skirmishes over removing Confederate era generals names from schools becomes one of the low-level signs of struggle here.

***

Triana, AL

From the late 1940s until the 1970s, the Olin Corporation, contracted by the Army on nearby Redstone Arsenal to manufacture DDT, dumped an estimated 4,000 tons of DDT into the springs feeding into the Tennessee River. The locals in this small, all-black town fished the river to supplement their diets. In the late 1970s, the Tennessee Valley Authority documented hazardous levels of DDT in the river surrounding Triana. The report was ignored. That is, until the then-mayor of Triana, concerned, asked the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to come and test Triana residents. The CDC found high levels of DDT in Triana residents’ blood. One elderly Triana man had the highest level of DDT ever recorded in the bloodstream of a living person. The subsequent disaster was so severe that Triana was dubbed the most unhealthy town in America and a “Southern Love Canal,” after the well-known 1970s environmental catastrophe in upstate New York.

In the court battles that followed, Triana’s mayor, in a decision still cited in environmental law classes, very shrewdly negotiated not only individual cash settlements (my friend in Alabama had several relatives who got them), but also won lifelong healthcare though a specially set up health clinic. It was a brilliant move that ensured people who would never get decent healthcare got it. Triana in this way became the only Southern town with guaranteed healthcare for all citizens, a rarity even outside the South.

But DDT at the time was a poorly studied poison with little-known long-term effects in humans. Only later did research discover DDT exposure was linked to heart attacks and other chronic medical conditions. So even the clinic couldn’t prevent waves of early death and disability among Triana residents, but in a losing battle just retroactively treat the illnesses. My friend’s mother’s early death in her late 40s from a heart attack he suspects was from DDT.

Triana was technically considered cleaned up after a massive infusion of Environmental Protection Agency money from the federal government—and promptly forgotten about. When I visited Triana, while muffled booming from weapon detonation in the sprawling Redstone Arsenal next door echoed in the air, I saw people fishing from the banks of the Tennessee, even though researchers have detected high levels of new carcinogens again in river waters.7

***

Did you know that Whitney Houston was secretly drowned in her hotel bathtub while members of the Hollywood Illuminati gathered in a ballroom below to steal her soul? A sign of the depths of defeat in the black working class can be seen in the widespread belief in the Illuminati. The Illuminati, a covert order of the rich and powerful who secretly manipulate and control everything from behind the scenes, once the province of white conspiracy theory, is now credited with nearly everything wrong in the world.

Though not just confined to Southern black working-class milieus, it was there that I heard the Illuminati referred to offhandedly as a fact of everyday life the most—“Oh, the Illuminati must have been behind it.”

Along with this fatalistic belief in secret control being exercised over one’s life, a control so complete that is futile to do anything about it, goes hand in hand, paradoxically, with a blind faith in Barack Obama that’s difficult to challenge. Obama becomes a mythical superhero always ready to deliver like a fantastic savior from above but forever foiled by the evil machinations of the Illuminati.

Obama gets credited with creating millions of new jobs and saving the country single-handedly from economic collapse. The plain black cell phones now available free to low-income people on social services in Alabama are widely known as “Obamaphones” because it’s assumed Obama personally ordered them given out to the poor, even though the phones are a result of a class action settlement against the major phone companies that predates the Obama presidency. An Alabama friend credits the disappearance of an old attempted murder charge from his court records as a result of Obama ordering Attorney General Eric Holder to wipe out false charges filed against black men in the South.

In this respect the fatalism of belief in the Illuminati coupled with blind faith in waiting for Obama to “deliver the goods,” although never complete, all work in the end to demobilize opposition or questioning.

***

But winds of change are now blowing through the South. Globalization—and make no mistake, the South is thoroughly caught up in the social and economic changes going along with it—has brought new fault lines—and new possibilities. In Alabama, formerly lily-white mountain towns outside Huntsvile such as Arab and Athens now draw growing Latino populations, and tiny Gunterville, population 3,000, hosts an influx of Haitian refugees who have set up shops on the main street. Whole industries such as poultry are now largely Latino worked. It is no accident, faced with this rising, visible tide of immigration—a 280 percent increase from 1990 to 2000—that Alabama passed some of the most repressive anti-immigration laws in the United States.

After decades of out-migration, the South is undergoing reverse in-migration, especially among blacks forsaking the violence and disarray of Northern inner cities for what many see as a slower-paced, family-friendly South. Foreign auto transplants such as Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen and Nissan are relocating below the Mason-Dixon Line. Like the mechanization of agriculture and World War II, these developments signify, as Newsweek reporter William Emerson put it in describing earlier effects of school desegregation, “slow, mighty shifts in the sub-soils of custom, tradition and way of life.”8

Huntsville itself, for example, once a sleepy textile town where part of the Scottsboro Boys trial took place in the 1930s, is now a major center of aerospace and high-tech research and development. As the South steadily transforms, so hand in hand will its potential importance grow in US social and economic developments. This process of course is wildly uneven, with at least in the short term counter-trends likely flaring as well, but the South’s long legacy in US history as a socially backward, economically underdeveloped “other” semi-colony not quite part of the country, finally seems destined to end.

• 1Institute for Southern Studies, “Payday Lenders Target Black and Latino Communities.”
• 2“Regulators to Restrict Big Banks’ Predatory Lending,” New York Times (2013).
• 3Two excellent studies of Folsom have so far been written, Big Mules & Branchheads: James E. Folsom and Political Power in Alabama by Carl Grafton and Anne Permaloff, and, more biographical, The Little Man’s Big Friend: James E. Folsom in Alabama Politics, 1946–1958, by George E. Simms.
• 4Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (1995), p. 463. By then, Wallace had renounced his racist past and, remarkably, won 30 percent of the black vote in his last race for Alabama governor.
• 5This hidden history was unearthed in historian Douglas A. Blackmon’s 2008 bestseller, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.
• 6Scottsboro Boy, p. 114. The Scottsboro Boys, nine black youth framed for the alleged rape of two white women that later turned out false, became an international cause célèbre in the 1930s. While most of the defendants, with the notable exception of Haywood Patterson, were eventually released after years in jail, nearly all, in the little known aftermath, led tragically abbreviated lives. Patterson escaped from an Alabama prison to Michigan, where the governor refused to extradite him. However Patterson knifed a man to death in a barroom brawl in Detroit and returned to prison a few years later, where he died of cancer at age 36, having spent most of adult life incarcerated.↩

• 7Triana Justice Page.
• 8Quoted in Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945–1975 (2006), p. 115.

The black freedom movement is framed in popular memory as distinguished by nonviolent civil disobedience. Yet in multiple southern towns, black people used armed self-defense to protect their communities and lives. While it is true that this was especially done where the federal government refused to protect people of color from Jim Crow segregationist authority, where cops and Klan often went hand in hand, this aspect of the liberation struggle must also be understood as a movement for popular justice.

Black Nationalism and Pan Africanism, outlooks which elevated the idea that blacks were “a nation within a nation” and should see themselves through an African worldview fighting white supremacy and empire, highlighting questions of self-emancipation and self-government beyond the United States government, are often seen as perspectives which are more prevalent in Northern cities. Yet beyond seeking legal reform and civil rights, these radical beliefs were also found animating resistance in places such as Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Georgia.

Akinyele Umoja’s We Will Shoot Back takes the reader on a journey which re-introduces us to the Southern Freedom Movement, both in the era of the Modern Civil Rights Movement (1955–1965) and the Black Power Movement (1965–1975) by highlighting “armed resistance” in Mississippi.

Dr. Umoja, the chairperson of African American Studies at Georgia State University, sees armed resistance in a variety of ways: individual and collective use of force for protection, retaliation, guerilla warfare, spontaneous rebellion, and insurgent political action. One of the great burdens on the psyche when considering images of attacks on the black community, from rape, brutal police, lynchings, barking and biting dogs, and having the clothes ripped from one’s body by fire hoses is the myth that people of color never physically stood up for themselves. In the eyes of some, this was a concrete moral stand. But for many, such degradation without fierce resistance calls into question African American humanity and self-governing capacities. Umoja revises these memories of nonviolence, which were often produced as strategic rhetorical strategies, and known by people active in the Southern movement not to be entirely true, if only by hearsay and rumor, and offers the reader stories which not only lift up self-esteem but reveal methods of empowerment.

We learn from We Will Shoot Back that the assassinated Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers was in fact an advocate of armed self-defense and wished to see a “Mau Mau,” a reference to the Kenyan Land and Freedom Army, emerge. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) fieldworkers, often associated with leaders like James Farmer and John Lewis who advocated nonviolence, came in contact with local people who were armed and defended their voter registration drives.

Umoja highlights the tension and cooperation between black folks with different strategic outlooks. Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964 is remembered for the assassination of fieldworkers Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner. But Umoja tells us that there were informal networks of armed self-defense and a spontaneous rebellion in McComb that pressured the federal government to intervene. This led to debate within SNCC about armed self-defense. In Natchez, Mississipi, consumer boycotts were joined with guerilla warfare led by paramilitary organizations like the Deacons for Self-Defense, which originated in Louisiana. Enforcer squads made sure that the community supported the boycott and that the Klan was discouraged from obstructing the movement. Resistance to the 1970 shooting at Jackson State College is also explored.

This study highlights the activism of figures which have not come to formal national acclaim, such as Rudy Shields, Hartman Turnbow, Ralph Featherstone, Alfred “Skip” Robinson, Hollis Watkins, T.R.M. Howard, Dara Abubakari and organizations such as the Council for Negro Leadership and the United League. It also elevates Black Power organizations, which began in Northern states, such as the Revolutionary Action Movement and Republic of New Africa as influential among grassroots organizing where their roles have been previously little understood.

In the social movement history of the United States, from Detroit to Mississippi, those tangentially aware of the Republic of New Africa, its projections of provisional government for peoples of African descent in the United States, and its related heritage, have often asked why the slogan, “Free the land?” Why not “Free the people?” The reader will learn that not only the search to be self-governing on one’s own land, but mastery of rural roads and the value of having allies on black-owned lands adjacent to one another, was essential to black freedom and anti-fascist movements in the deep South. Umoja, as an historian, breathes life into the very geography and topography of the struggle for those who have never seen these communities, and conveys a striking familiarity to those who know them intimately.

From Belzoni to Yazoo City, Aberdeen to West Point, Tupelo to Jackson, remarkable stories are brought to life. “Bad Negros,” black mothers preparing firebombs in their kitchen, armed patrols in cars driven by people of color with flashing lights signaling to white racist authorities to beware, and white casualties as a result of the mistaken belief that black life was cheap and would not be defended, are all part of neglected historical and political legacies that many will be excited to read about.

Ultimately, Professor Umoja’s contribution is that he has written a book that the obscure local people of the American South, those not recorded in history, will increasingly recognize and, quiet as it is kept, already identify, as their own.

The best kept secret in US history is the resistance of southerners, and especially southern non-slaveholding whites, to the slaveholders during the Civil War. W.E.B. Du Bois, in the chapter “The General Strike” in Black Reconstruction in America, told the story of black resistance. Bitterly Divided: the South’s Inner Civil War by David Williams (New Press, 2008), while giving due weight to the resistance of black people and Indians, focuses on southern whites. Williams teaches at Valdosta State University in Georgia; this was his fifth book on this topic. He writes:

Between 1861 and 1865, the South was torn apart by a violent civil war, a war no less significant to the Confederacy’s fate than its more widely known struggle against the Yankees…

The South’s inner civil war had deep roots in the antebellum period. Many southern whites, like North Carolina’s Hinton Rowan Helper, saw plain folk as impoverished by the slave system. Slaves, too, like Frederick Douglass, were becoming more difficult to control…. By 1860, slaveholders worried that although Abraham Lincoln was a direct threat only to slavery’s expansion, his election to the presidency might give encouragement to southern dissenters and resisters…. Such fears among slaveholders…were a major driving force behind the secession movement.

But how could a slaveholders’ republic be established in a society in which slaveholders were a minority?… [S]tate conventions across the South, all of them dominated by slaveholders, in the end ignored majority will and took their states out of the Union….

Still, there was some general enthusiasm for the war among common whites in the wake of Lincoln’s call for volunteers to invade the South. Whatever their misgivings about secession, invasion was another matter. And, despite Lincoln’s promise of noninterference with slavery, “fear of Negro equality…caused some of the more ignorant to rally to the support of the Confederacy.” But southern enlistments declined rapidly after First Manassas, or Bull Run, as Yankees called the battle. Men were reluctant to leave their families in the fall and winter of of 1861–62, and many of those already in the army deserted to help theirs.

The Confederacy’s response to its recruitment and desertion problems served only to weaken its support among plain folk. In April 1862, the Confederate Congress passed the first general conscription act in American history. But men of wealth could avoid the draft by hiring a substitute or paying an exemption fee. Congress also made slaveholders owning twenty or more slaves automatically exempt from the draft. This twenty-slave law was the most widely hated act ever imposed by the Confederacy….

To make matters worse, planters devoted much of their land to cotton and tobacco, while soldiers and their families went hungry….

The inevitable result…was a severe food shortage that hit soldiers’ families especially hard….

…As early as 1862, food riots began breaking out all over the South. Gangs of hungry women, many of them armed, ransacked stores, depots, and supply wagons, searching for anything edible. Major urban centers, like Richmond, Atlanta, Mobile, and Galveston, experienced the biggest riots. Even in smaller towns, like Georgia’s Valdosta and Marietta and North Carolina’s High Point and Salisbury, hungry women looted for food. [There may well have been cases, although Williams does not make this point explicitly, where slaves ate better than the families of soldiers, since the slaves were vital to the production of cotton and tobacco, and the families of soldiers were, from the standpoint of capital, “useless” —NI]….

Desertion became so serious by the summer of 1863 that Jefferson Davis begged absentees to return…. But they did not return. A year later Davis publicly admitted that two-thirds of Confederate soldiers were absent…. Many of these men joined antiwar organizations that had been active in the South since the war’s beginning. Others joined with draft dodgers and other anti-Confederates to form tory [the Confederate term for those who oppsed secession] or layout gangs. They attacked government supply trains, burned bridges, raided local plantations, and harassed impressment agents and conscript officers….

Among the most enthusiastic southern anti-Confederates were African-Americans, especially those held in slavery…. With Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation came a promise of freedom that enslaved blacks eagerly embraced. In fact they were taking freedom for themselves long before the Proclamation… [Williams adopts Du Bois’s notion of the “general strike,” one of the few historians to do so.]

…Deserters escaping the Confederate army could rely on slaves to give them food and shelter on the journey back home. Others joined tory gangs in their war against the Confederacy…. Tens of thousands of blacks fled to federal lines and joined Union forces. Of about two hundred thousand blacks under federal arms, over three-fourths were native southerners. Together with roughly three hundred thousand southern whites who did the same, southerners who served in the Union military totaled nearly half a million, or about a quarter of all federal armed forces.

…[S]outhern Indians too were divided in their feelings toward the Confederacy…. By the winter of 1861–62, a full-blown civil war was under way among the Indians, adding a further dimension to southern disunity.

Parts of the story have been told before, some in detail, but Williams tells it more effectively than I have read elsewhere, far more effectively than the brief summary (with elisions) I have quoted from the introduction. The titles of the six chapters give more of an idea of what the book covers: “Nothing but Divisions Among Our People,” “Rich Man’s War,” “Fighting Each Other Harder Than We Ever Fought the Enemy,” “Yes, We Shall All Be Free,” “Now the Wolf Has Come,” “Defeated…By the People at Home.” (Curiously, Williams omits the story of the 1^st Alabama Cavalry Regiment, made up entirely of white southerners who opposed the Confederacy. The unit served as Sherman’s personal escort during his March to the Sea; fired by hatred of the slaveholders, it was responsible for much of the destruction along the way). The book is a vindication of the class-struggle interpretation of history. It would be useful to read it along with Marx’s articles in the Vienna Presse, especially those of November 7, 1861, and March 26, 1862 (all on the Marxist internet archive).

We wrote recently to IN‘s “man in Mexico” to ask him how he analyzed the recent privatization of PEMEX, the giant oil company nationalized by the government of Lazaro Cardenas in 1938, far and away the biggest state-owned asset in Mexico. What follows is his reply.

The Editors

In 2009, the Compañia Luz y Fuerza (or LyFC, Luz y Fuerza del Centro), a semi-state company providing electricity to Mexico City and some other states in the center of the country, was disappeared on a moonless Saturday night. On that night, soldiers who had been mobilized for the “war on drugs,” some dressed as police, assaulted the central offices of the Mexican electrical workers‘ union (Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas, SME). It was one of the oldest unions in the country, born in the heat of the revolutionary period 1910–1920, with a tradition of struggle and dissidence, partly real, partly fictitious.

On that night, the Mexican “people” were distracted, celebrating the triumph of the national soccer team (the so-called “national selection” or “el trii,” for the three colors of the Mexican flag). The assault was carefully planned. Soccer is one of the regime‘s favorite drugs for distracting people from their problems, a task carried on by the two television monopolies, Televisa and TV Azteca, two of the most powerful and noxious networks in Latin America. In the same way, the reform (privatization) of PEMEX was “approved” in Congress on the evening of December 12, 2013, the day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the sacred rite revered by a majority of Mexicans.

On that night of October 11, 2009, 44,000 workers lost their jobs (including retired workers left without pensions). The outrage was enormous and prompted huge demonstrations which, however, wound up being diversionary tactics by the leadership of the SME aimed at heading off any actions of consequence. Of course, the facts are difficult to evaluate, and radicals argued at the time that a correlation of forces existed for serious and effective action, and not “legal” actions of the type advocated by the union leadership. Nonetheless, police and military repression was already standing by and, in the conditions of a country torn apart in a kind of low-key civil war—the so-called war on the narcotraficantes—it was clear that the government would not pull back, if push came to shove, from the ultimate consequences.

Moreover, the government used a clever tactic to divide the union, issuing an ultimatum offering a significant sum of money (but one hardly adequate for the medium and long-term prospect of permanent unemployment) to all those workers who would agree to the layoffs. Within several months, the SME‘s power was seriously diminished, having lost more than half of its members. Nonetheless, less than 20,000 workers have continued this struggle.

What kind of struggle was it? It took many forms: marches, roadblocks, legal demands, hunger strikes, confused negotiations with the government, violent but isolated confrontations as well as the identification of the union with the nationalist flags of the old PRI,1 the PRD2 and, above all, with the movement led by two-time former PRD presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (popularly known as “AMLO”).

More recently, last December, the Mexican Congress approved the energy reform and eliminated the constitutional blockages to complete privatization of the most important company in the country, PEMEX. The concessions to private companies (both Mexican but primarily foreign) will now be extended to the production and marketing of oil, with gas and electricity having been opened up some time ago. The Mexican state argues that this reform became necessary because it lacked the financial resources to acquire cutting-edge technologies for exploratory drilling in deep waters (e.g., the reserves in the Gulf of Mexico). The reality is that the Mexican state, as the main national entrepreneur, is giving away these reserves, estimated at $3 trillion, money which could capitalize PEMEX, incorporate cutting-edge technologies and bolster the old nationalist dream of using oil as the pillar of accumulation for industrializing the country.

In this way, the Mexican state is giving up its oil rent precisely at a time when that rent is more lucrative than ever. This is the privatizing and foreign-oriented neo-liberalism of a Third World country, lacking a bourgeoisie that acts like one. Since 1982, and as a direct effect of its external debt, the Mexican government has been privatizing state industries (including railroads, automobiles, mines, fertilizers, the banks and telecommunications), filling the coffers of a handful of oligarchs (including Carlos Slim, who tops Fortune‘s list of the world‘s richest people, and another multi-millionaire produced indirectly by neo-liberalism: the narcotraficante “Chapo” Guzman, whose name had to be dropped from the list in order not to embarrass the Mexican government), as well as the coffers of foreign companies. The government had nonetheless kept—relatively speaking—the “crown jewel”: PEMEX, the company earmarked to service public finances (40 percent of all tax revenues come from PEMEX), and which has been systematically decapitalized for a double purpose: to cushion the effects of the world crisis, and to gradually destroy the public company by making it appear inefficient.

Nonetheless, the oil rent is so high that PEMEX has continued to be one of the most profitable firms in the world, more profitable than some of the transnationals before which it now is bowing out and in spite of being systematically decapitalized by the governments of the PAN and the PRI, both used to winning elections by buying votes and keeping the trade union mafias in tow, along with a voracious bureaucracy. One detail says everything: in more than two decades, not a single refinery has been built, allowing Mexico to export oil, in order to import gasoline from the United States (!) as well as, once again, to portray PEMEX as inefficient and unviable.

Unlike the movement of the electrical workers, the oil workers‘ union has shone by its absence. Unbelievably, and in spite of the layoffs and the loss of labor rights, the oil workers remained silent about their future. Decades of trade-union containment, combining privileges with repression against the slightest attempt at dissidence, have given the government what it wanted: the immobilization of the workers in the most important sector of the Mexican economy.

In this scenario, with an absent proletariat, opposition to the energy reform has been mounted by MORENA (Movimiento de Regeneracion Nacional), a recent split from the PRD, which it accuses of faltering in the defense of national interests and in the face of the neo-liberalism of the PRI and the PAN. The name “MORENA” (which means dark in Spanish) adds a racial element to the nationalist ideology of this party, injecting the dose of bitterness which has always characterized social conflicts in Mexico, between a mestizo majority and predominantly (but not exclusively) white elites.

How do we evaluate the stakes of this struggle from a communist perspective?

• How shall we characterize a (Lumpen) bourgeoisie which renounces the very role of a bourgeoisie—a role which only the state can play, as a collective bourgeois, given the weakness of the native bourgeoisie and the pressure of the imperialist bourgeoisie?
• How shall we define a communist position vis-à-vis the nationalism of the left, itself in reality a bourgeois nationalism (and which could be defended even by a fascist bourgeoisie: property and profit from its own assets, used to promote a virulent nationalism)?
• How shall we define a communist position when privatization means unemployment and the degradation of the situation of both workers and the majority of the population?

As for the Trotskyists, whom despite their minoritarian presence we have to recognize as practically the only communist voice in the national arena, their positions have divided into two: between those who call for joining ranks with AMLO and with MORENA (and even for reorienting the PRD), and those who call for a break with AMLO but who issue fantasy-ridden calls for general strikes and workers‘ control of the factories (this is the radical version of Trotskyism which simultaneously defends corrupt union leaders no longer of use to the bourgeoisie and who have thus been imprisoned).

To contribute to a clarification of an authentically communist position in these situations, I continue with the following thoughts:

1. The most immediate element is the degradation of working conditions; the disappearance of the company and of the union (which still exists, but now with no company and thus no jobs) means the disappearance of collective bargaining, reduction of benefits, wage levels, social security and retirement. In short, a direct attack on working conditions. Any communist has to support this kind of struggle, even if it remains strictly on the terrain of labor relations and has nothing revolutionary about it. On this level, the task is one of denouncing the maneuvers of the union leadership, a task made all the more difficult because the workers look to the union and the broader union movement as the sole protection of their existence in the individualistic void of capitalist society. On the other hand, any call for radical measures (i.e. those put into practice and not merely as a leaflet) implies becoming a target for massive repression, and what is even worse, for selective repression, which consists simply in disappearing from the face of the earth and probably turning up as a cadaver in a river or in a garbage dump on the edge of the city. The union and the state are the enemies of any economic struggle carried to this level. It is a confused struggle, involving the need to support but also to differentiate oneself, where the path is neither clear nor easy to find. This is not the case for idealist organizations like the ICC (International Communist Current3 ), for whom struggles emerging within unions are lost causes and moreover favorable to the interests of the bourgeoisie, which , for its part, carefully writes out the script for such struggles in advance. On this score, we cannot deny the political “wisdom” of the ICC. What remains unexplained is how to approach real events as they emerge in the concrete.
2. The political level of this struggle is determined by the whole situation and can be summed up as follows: nation or world revolution?

This level is all the more complex in that it poses many questions:

While it is absolutely clear that national emancipation is not a communist demand, it is also certain that the issue is by no means simple; Marxism and Marx have been sources of inspiration for both nationalist reformism and revolutionary internationalism. The Marxist theory of revolution, based in the necessity of “objective” conditions for its existence, prompted the Bolsheviks to argue for the necessity of a national capitalist development making possible the communist revolution in Russia, through a democratic- proletarian dictatorship (or something of the sort) realizing the tasks of capitalist development which the nascent Russian bourgeoisie could not achieve. In 1848, the Marxist position was to push the proletariat to push the bourgeoisie to realize the bourgeois revolution, while maintaining its political independence. From this perspective flowed articles, writings and journalistic analyses, of which I cannot give a balanced account, and in which one could see as progressive the Irish cause against Great Britain, but not that of the Balkan nations against the Ottoman Empire, and still less that of the Mexicans, faced with US invasion and the loss of half of their territory, given that the momentum and historical and economic progress at that time belonged to dynamic American capitalism and not to backward, nascent and conservative Mexican capitalism, which had resulted from a hybrid between the decadent feudal past and an impotent Spanish capitalism. In 1871, a “more mature” Marx warned the Paris Communards against the unviability of a revolution, basing his analysis on adverse “objective” conditions (a growing capitalism), while nonetheless making common cause with them, criticizing them politically while learning from their practical lessons.

The revolutionary wave of 1919–1921, as a product of the world conflagration, clarified this discussion: capitalism had reached its peak on a world scale, communist revolution was a necessity on the agenda of the day, and the level of development attained by each country was not important (and on this point we have to thank the ICC, at least in the Mexican case, for clarifying the history of capitalism and the revolutionary movement globally).

We know the subsequent history: the world revolution was strangled, Soviet Russia managed to build a dictatorship based on the necessities of survival in the most adverse conditions (war communism) as a initially highly efficient state capitalism but one totally inadequate for confronting US imperialism. This development challenged historical materialism to come to terms with a kind of forced development, which in one case led to a defeat, the USSR, and in another case to an emerging and successful capitalism, as in China.

During this trajectory, in the Third World, the world of the colonies and of the countries which, while formally independent, were economically subjugated, the national question took different forms of the struggle for national liberation, so that they could either remain under bourgeois anti-fascist governments on Moscow‘s orders (the Popular Front) or throw themselves into guerrilla wars of the tri-continental variety (Asia, Africa, Latin America).

In real terms, the problem had no solution, as the authentically proletarian world revolution remained in the past, suspended in time, and there was no way to connect with it. World revolution was reactivated as a living agenda by the permanent crisis that opened up at the beginning of the 1970s. But here we find ourselves stuck; the proletariat has not imposed its perspective, and the bourgeoisie, the ICC tells us, has not managed to get out of the quagmire. This is a thesis to be taken seriously and probably interpreted as one of the scenarios Marx called a mutual standoff between social classes, leading to the exhaustion of social and historical energies. Decomposition as a higher phase of the ICC‘s concept of decadence, a theory which led (in their case) to repeated internal crises and divisions but which we can also recognize as a general crisis and as the expression of unease inside communist groups confronted with an economic crisis and lack of social definition now lasting more than 40 years. In this situation the laws of physics are no guide, and for every action there is not a corresponding reaction of equal and opposite magnitude! The proletariat is not responding in the same form and with the same magnitude as the forces attacking it!

This being the case, does it therefore mean that these 40 years (1970s to the present) have been neither a lost time nor a mere stagnation, but rather a period in which, in the absence of a working-class response, capitalism has been preparing the conditions for a new stage of expansion? Does this mean that the operative law is one of perpetual motion and that nothing can persist in a situation permanently lacking definition?

This being the case, we should not accept, once again, the rudimentary, simple and unilateral theory of decadence of the ICC (which we criticize repeatedly here as a point of reference for theoretical clarification and to pinpoint the critique of that organization). This means that the development of capitalism in the post–World War II era was not solely based on capabilities facilitating the reconstruction of Europe and Japan (i.e., the expansionary wave of 1945–1968/70). This means that crises do not result from the lack of “realization” (à la Rosa Luxemburg) of excess surplus value and that their solution does not take place solely through the artificial and temporary stopgap of credit, but that they have their roots in the lack of “creation” of surplus value (à la Grossmann and Mattick), and their solution emerges from a restructuring of the conditions of accumulation (e.g., the cheapening of variable capital and of constant capital, for example, and other countervailing tendencies).

If capitalism is able to regenerate and relaunch itself on a world scale, it will do so through the economies that have taken the lead in this process, and the current, long crisis will not have been a global, terminal crisis of civilization with no exit in capitalist terms, but will be reduced to a crisis of hegemonic accommodations which may or may not require a Third World War. If we communists cannot demonstrate (as the ICC does in its rudimentary way) that a national capitalist development is neither possible nor viable, then nationalist options of such development, and the cases of Lula‘s Brazil, of Korea and the other Asian tigers and dragons, not to mention the best example of all, China, emerge as the sole “real” alternatives to the now-diluted specter of communism. In this case, the working class might as well align itself with the current “progressive,” simultaneously nationalist and globalizing bourgeoisies, neo-liberal or statist as the case may be, instead of continuing to dream of illusory world revolutions.

Returning, now, to the original point, Mexico, NAFTA and privatizations:

—The question of NAFTA is not worth much more clarification (we can pile up more and more statistics). For myself, I don‘t understand what some people do not get: Mexico is sinking into an irreversible social crisis of an enormous magnitude. Its most important expression is not to be found in economic but rather in social statistics, in violence, in migration, in recurrent political crises and in hopeless poverty. Violence has taken many forms and it is the expression of, and safety valve for, unemployment and a total lack of perspectives for large swaths of the population. This is the true result of NAFTA. We cannot think of NAFTA as an “economic” treaty separate from its “extra-economic variables,” to use the false and stupid jargon of the specialists. Although the issue of the narcotraficantes is usually treated as a form of criminality quite separate from the trade agreements, one does not have to be a Marxist to listen to the Colombian academics who have said that the disaster of the Mexican countryside, resulting from NAFTA, is the deepest cause of the growth of the drug trade. But other points converge with this one: NAFTA was previously spelled out and finalized practically through the sale of the electric and petroleum infrastructure—although increasingly in a purely formal way—in the hands of the state. Further, NAFTA was crowned by political-military treaties (of submission) through ASPAN4 and the Plan Merida (the Mexican version of the Plan Colombia) for the purpose of creating and consolidating the security perimeter of the United States. These imply the opening up and provision of energy resources (and other raw materials) to US companies as well as to firms of some secondary imperialisms, to which the United States offered concessions in its back yard (e.g., the United Kingdom, Spain and Canada). For all this, the war on the narcotrafico has been an essential instrument for creating social paralysis through direct violence and the fear it causes (it remains to be analyzed to what extent the current war on drugs is an induced and programmed war—conspiracy theory?—and to what extent it is a natural product of the social dynamic set in motion by the crisis of capitalism; the answer might well be both, though it is not clear what proportion each element contributes).

—On one hand, NAFTA, as a springboard to restart the economies of the United States and Mexico, has had a twofold result: it has made possible the consolidation of a strategic area, the North American bloc (the United States, Canada and Mexico) vis-à-vis the regional blocs of the EU and of the Asia-Pacific zone. On the other hand, American firms have access to cheap Mexican labor and to the markets and resources of Mexico. Trade has become intra-industrial. For Mexico, this dynamism has been limited to certain sectors and regions, while the larger part of the country has lost its stability and the equilibria attained during the postwar era, up to the 1970s.

—In political and ideological terms, the privatization of PEMEX amounts to giving away the last and most valuable asset sustaining the dream of an independent Mexican capitalism. What never existed has been erased forever. This is the death of the most valuable heirloom of the Mexican Revolution and its most accomplished expression: cardenismo5 and the nationalization of oil.

—With this, all discussion of the defense of the nation and the possibility of an independent national development has been definitively closed off.

—This scenario is of great help to Mexican communists (do they exist?): the whole prior debate has been superseded by the facts. There are no longer state enterprises of any importance, and soon any decent labor contracts will be destroyed. The situation is clear. There is no further need for a discussion having no real object. There will be no state enterprises to defend. Furthermore, the Mexican government has handed the petroleum rent to foreigners. This rent allowed it to maintain a welfare state (one increasingly on paper) and in recent years to offer crumbs in the form of social programs, as well as to buy off opposition and intellectuals. But the government coffers will be increasingly empty and the social stakes will also be closer to the bone. Fewer unions will be receiving official bribes to compromise their loyalties. Once again, the Mexican government is hoping that Uncle Sam will rescue the economy and will propel it into an economic growth creating jobs and neutralizing social conflict. This will not happen; Uncle Sam and the world capitalist economy will not reward the privatizing generosity of the Mexican government. The United States will aim solely at extracting the highest possible profits, in conformity with its nature and general mode of behavior. From now on, to close the gap between the promise and the reality, the government will have only one argument: force and repression.

—Finally, as a product of this scenario, the nationalist movement championed by AMLO or some other leader will probably gain traction. If this happens, the discussion about economic nationalism will gain new ground; AMLO will wrap himself in the authority of Lula and Brazilian example (Chavez now being out of the picture) and we communists will have to know how to respond.

—How can we communists respond clearly if our every word and every step require a balance sheet covering the whole development and phases of capitalism from the nineteenth century to the present? No right-wing or center-left organization does anything similar to justify or to oppose the privatization of a petroleum company!

—The answer is so materialist that it even ends up on the terrain of empiricism: we have only to return to reality, to learn the steps taken by our class, to make conscious the meaning and value of those steps, even as we confront it critically to expand consciousness and advance its independence as a class. Layoffs, inflation, tax increases, rollbacks of labor rights, industrial and ecological disasters are all immediate causes requiring us to defend the survival and unification of struggles, whatever form they may take and however dispersed they may be. As a first step, the Mexican proletariat and the popular sectors on its periphery have to become conscious of the strength and energy squandered in their submission to the lost cause of the nation and its leaders (both the false ones and the messianic ones). For this, there is more than enough political and historical speculation; it will suffice to take hold of matters where they begin, in the immediate struggle over the conditions of life. To give a direct example: in December the “left-wing” government raised the cost of urban transport and in particular of the Mexico City subways, a measure affecting millions of people. A small group of young people, belonging to a generation which has never known “secure” employment and the manna of the oil wealth, attempted mobilizations, hoping that they would echo the mobilizations in Brazil in summer 2013. The balance sheet was rather negative; the proletariat was unaware of its own power. Not only was the result another economic setback, but another opportunity was lost to built classwide links within the working class and those on its periphery. This kind of scenario, in which division and class indifference predominate, was the previous situation which led to the subsequent events.

—In 2006, two large vectors converged and shook up the political scenario in that presidencial election year. On one hand, miners‘ strikes spread throughout the country, during which confrontation with the forces of repression resulted in the deaths of two steel workers in the port of Lazaro Cardenas, in the state of Michoacan; on the other hand, the resistance of the peasants of Atenco (located in the middle of the country) against the expropriation of their lands linked up with the isolated and cornered little island of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, resulting in a violent repression and the imprisonment of its leaders, while in the southern state of Oaxaca, a teachers‘ strike, which initially fought off the attempt to repress it, attracted the support of wide sectors of the population and established, for a few months, popular power as the Oaxaca Commune. The Oaxacan experiment wound up being crushed by forces from the navy, since the federal government feared that army troops, largely made up of Oaxacans, would not respond with the necessary aggressiveness. This was the popular-proletarian vector. Of course, its political expression was at no time communist, but rather a trade unionist, populist and even nationalist mix. But its composition and its demands were proletarian. The other vector was the electoral struggle of the PRD and of AMLO, which never lent support to any of these causes but rather turned its back while trying to enlist them in the “realistic” and “peaceful” road of electoral change.

—The result was thus that the regime, following orders from the United States, blocked any access to power by a left-nationalist alternative (as did emerge in South America). The simple truth is that Mexico is the fundamental base of US imperialism in the Americas, and the geographic corridor running from the Mexican border to Colombia is its basic and impenetrable security zone. Most recently was the electoral fraud6 and its aftermath, the call for the so-called “war on drugs” whose real meaning has been the militarization of the country and the violent disappearance of any attempt at social resistance. This “realistic” and “peaceful” path resulted in a grim accounting of the dead, ranging from 60,000 to 100,000 during Calderon‘s presidency (a figure far exceeding the 30,000 murders committed by the Argentine dictatorship in the same number of years).

—Thirdly, and incomprehensibly, other unions sacrificed during the Calderon presidency from 2006 to 2012 such as the Mexicana de Aviación (which also disappeared overnight), the electricians of the SME and the unprecedented resurgence of the student movement, wound up placing their hopes in the legal and electoral struggle.

—Both on the economic front (with privatization and the sell-off to foreigners of the main assets of the country) and politically (the checkmated option of a nationalist government), the Mexican proletariat finds itself up against a situation of perfect “revolutionary defeatism.” The bourgeoisie has spoken clearly. The bourgeoisie has clarified the terrain of class struggle. It only remains for the proletariat to understand this, to leave behind all its illusions and to recognize the fact that the other forces in play depend on its strength and not the other way around. Once again, this “weak” link in the world capitalist chain seems headed for a social explosion. Let us hope that, this time, it connects up with the multi-racial American proletariat, of which Mexican workers form a fundamental part, once merciless imperialist competition eliminates the last remaining privileges of the United States and returns it to a position like the one it occupied in the nineteenth century, when it was a beacon to the international proletariat.

• 1Partido Revolucionario Institucional, the statist-nationalist development party which ruled Mexico from 1930 to 2000, and which recently returned to power.
• 2Partido Revolucionario Democratico, a center left party which has mobilized hundreds of thousands of supporters against probable fraud in the last two national elections.
• 3The ICC is a left communist group with branches in approximately fifteen countries, including Mexico.
• 4The Alliance for the Security and Prosperity of North America was created in Waco, Texas, on March 23, 2005, by the United States, Canada and Mexico. The contents of the agreement were kept secret from that time onward, and culminated in the August 2007 meeting of George W. Bush, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican president Felipe Calderon. A watchdog group used the US Freedom of Information Act in November 2006 to obtain some of the confidential documents from a closed meeting of September 2006 in Alberta (Canada). Present were top-level representatives of the private sector of the three countries; the meeting formulated 51 recommendations for increasing the competitiveness of North America.
• 5Lazaro Cardenas was president of Mexico from 1934 to 1940 and used the impending crisis leading to World War II to expropriate US and British oil interests in Mexico. He remains a symbol of a potent nationalist statism.
• 6In the 2006 presidential election, Federico Calderon of the PAN supposedly defeated AMLO by an extremely slim majority, and many Mexican relieve that the result was a fraud. AMLO mobilized his PRD supporters for weeks of demonstrations in the streets of Mexico City, but did no more, and the result stood.

J. Arch Getty is the author of a number of books on the Stalinist era in the former Soviet Union, primarily of the 1930s. In this book he seriously enlarges his scope, and attempts to situate Stalinism in a “long view” of Russian and Soviet history. The key concept for this enlargement is what he calls “patrimonialism,” a term most associated with the German sociologist Max Weber; indeed, Getty asserts that “we are all Weberians” now. Patrimonialism refers to informal “old boy networks” existing behind and around any more formal organizational schema, which are the “real story” behind any such formalities. Getty wishes to demonstrate a continuity of patrimonial networks at the highest levels of Russian and then Soviet society, starting with the early modern boyars (a group resembling but not identical with a western European nobility). These networks and their practices, for Getty, even with a total change of personnel and of explicit policy, survived through the arc of 500 years of Tsarist autocracy from the Muscovite period (the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries), the Romanovs (the seventeenth century to 1917) and were then reconstituted by the “Bolshevik elite” after 1917. Getty musters powerful elements for his argument, one which certainly initially appeals to any anti-Stalinist view of the Russian Revolution. “Powerful pre-modern elements” were present in Stalinist practice; Getty invokes Boris Souvarine’s 1935 biography of Stalin, in which Souvarine writes of Stalin as the “historical atavism of ancient Muscovy.” The key to the old “aristocracy,” especially of the early modern Muscovite period after 1480, was brought to its paroxysm by Ivan IV (the Terrible), who in 1569–70 staged collective public confessions and gruesome collective public executions of elements of the boyar elite and of his closest courtier intimates that anticipate nothing so much as Stalin’s terror and the Moscow Trials of 1937–38. What characterized the “nobility” in the Riurikid dynasty of Ivan’s era was its character as a “service class” which “owned” their landed property only on the whim of the Tsar, in exchange for sometimes very considerable and lengthy military and bureaucratic service, while property, wealth and position could be taken away as whimsically as they were given. At bottom, in contrast to western European absolutisms, in which monarchies had to wage decades, sometimes centuries of warfare to bring the landed nobility to heel, in the Russian autocracy the Tsar was the owner of all land. An oligarchy already existed behind the scenes of the patchwork of power in the early Kievan period (the tenth through thirteenth centuries) when the Mongols occupied Russia in 1237–40, and after the Mongols’ tributary rule crumbled 250 years later, a figure such as Ivan IV imposed himself by reminding the boyars “what chaos and lawlessness was like without a strong monarch.” The Bolsheviks as well, for Getty, thought of themselves as “the elite, as a corporate group and privileged breed apart” which was uniquely able to “ward off chaos” after they seized state power in October 1917. Bureaucracy, for Getty (again following Weber) is a rational, rule-bound practice quite distinct from patrimonial power, where personal connections predominate. A “set of practices becomes part of the social structure when its original purpose is no longer recalled.” The Bolsheviks, Getty argues, could have opted for “modern, bureaucratic tools of rule,” but they did not. They ceded, instead, to what Getty calls the “deep structures” of centuries of earlier Russian practice. (An extreme case of such “deep structures” would be North Korea, a (“communist”) “hereditary monarchy,” in which senior officials are patriarchically designated as “father,” “brother,” “uncle” and so on). Letters of appeal to Stalin for correction of injustices were almost identical to similar appeals to seventeenth-century tsars and earlier. Ancient forms were filled with new content and the ancient Russian hero fighting the Mongols became a story of the Civil War hero Chepaev. Stalinism replicated Peter the Great’s famous Table of Ranks (1714), which spelled out in detail sixteen ranks of the elite, connected, again to service, which the Stalinist regime supplemented by medals, titles and status orders. Centuries before Stalinism, Russian Orthodox Christianity had developed the concept of “sins of thought.” Eleventh-century law already held communities collectively responsible for crimes, and the responsibility to inform also had deep roots in Russian history. In the seventeenth century, intending to commit a crime was the same as committing it. “Faces, discourse and ideology changed,” writes Getty, but “positions and rules did not.” The Bolshevik “mestnichestvo,” (a term designating an early modern form of ranking aristocrats by blood ancestry) was based rather on years of membership in the party. In party culture, ultimately, “everything was personal.” Getty quotes French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, clearly a major influence on his work, to the effect that “What is essential goes without saying because it comes without saying: the tradition is silent, not least about itself as tradition.” In the Lenin mausoleum, the display of Lenin’s embalmed body was in continuity with archaic Orthodox practices of saints, based on the “undamaged body as a magical aura of holiness.” Getty has a remarkable chapter on the embalmed bodies of the likes of Lenin and later Stalin. In the West, above all in the paradigmatic monarchy of France, the king had “two bodies,” his personal body and his body as the head of state. In Russia, this separation did not exist; “the state and (the tsar’s) body were inseparable…there was no state until a new tsar ruled…These sacred images are the tangible symbols of the person-state in Russia.” Such a ruler, “sacralized by God made no sense without land and people,” understood as the tsar’s property. The Muscovite service nobility designated Muscovy itself in their wills as their votchina, their inheritable patrimonial estate, since the state was identified with the person of the tsar, as in Russian law “the owner of the house is identified with the house.” The later Enlightened despot, Peter the Great (tsar from 1696 to 1725), also ultimately saw the state as his personal patrimony, and the throne as his votchina to pass down. Much later, in the 1897 census, Tsar Nicholas II (ruled from 1894 to 1917) listed his occupation as khoziain (owner, proprietor, landlord) of the Russian lands, a term which Stalin’s lieutenants in the 1930s used to refer to the dictator. In imperial as in Stalinist times, “monarchical proximity” to the ruler was more important than any formal position. Getty applies his framework to the history of the Bolshevik Party, claiming that prior to 1917 party organization “was more a wish than a reality”; there was, in his view, no party apparatus at all. After the October Revolution, the party, which had 27,000 members at the beginning of 1917, was flooded with hundreds of thousands of new recruits, necessarily including time-serving opportunist elements with little relationship to party ideology and history. In this situation, for Getty, “the personal, non-institutional Old Bolshevik noble system predated Stalin’s rise to power by several years… and the patrimonial understanding it reflected predated him and his cronies by centuries.”

“Russia has always been ruled this way,” writes Getty. The pre-1917 elite, veterans of the underground and Lenin’s comrades in arms, “felt themselves awash in the sea of new party recruits and as a generational cohort” and “must have felt things slipping from their control.” This, for Getty, has great implications for the famous factional struggles of the 1920s, involving Trotsky, Stalin, Bukharin and Zinoviev, in questions of industrialization and policy in the Third International. Getty asks how all this was perceived in the provinces and in the party as a whole. “Party members out in the wild…could not worry too much about policy.” To them, these battles looked like personal struggles, colored by ideology. Getty quotes the memoirs of Dimitrov,1 who recounts a conversation in which Stalin told him: “Why did we prevail over Trotsky and the rest? Trotsky, as we know, was the most popular man in our country after Lenin…We were little known. But the middle cadres supported us, explained our positions to the masses…the middle cadres decided the outcome of our cause.”Such, along with detailed chapters on the functioning of specific party offices based on original research, is Getty’s portrait of post-1917 Russia and its continuities with a distant past.Confronted with such a mass of material and a convincing argument for continuity, one hardly knows where to begin with a critique. Where, for Getty, are the fifteen years of faction fights between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, of such a complex nature that the grey eminences of the Second International were baffled by them?Where in all this are the soviets and workers’ councils, first created in 1905 and then reappearing as the forms of working class power from 1917 to 1921? Where, in fact, is any relationship of the “Bolshevik Old Guard” to the Russian working class, which, we should remind ourselves, it successfully won over from all other parties between the spring and fall of 1917? Where are Lenin’s “April Theses,” derided as Bakuninist madness by the overwhelming majority of the party, including the elite, when Lenin returned to Russia from fifteen years of exile? Where is the failure of the world revolution, which the Bolsheviks said a thousand times was fundamental to their survival? Such “policy” questions seem to interest Getty as little as they interested the provincial party functionaries during the debates at the top in the 1920s. The struggle by which the soviets and workers’ councils were eviscerated between 1917 and 1921, as told in many sources (most recently in Simon Pirani’s The Russian Revolution in Retreat, 1920–1924), going back to those years, is nowhere for Getty. True, he is not writing a history of the Russian Revolution, but the aplomb with which he asserts, without argument, the continuity of elite practices pre-and post-1917, while neglecting these questions, is somewhat breathtaking. Getty seems to have the problem of the Bourdieu school generally, where everyone is so busy reproducing themselves that in the end nothing ever seems to change, or in which change, when admitted, seems almost inexplicable. It is hardly the case that the practices of elite rule do not exist or are not important, and surely they have been neglected or downplayed in much of the post-1917 decades of debate over exactly when the Russian Revolution was defeated (a question that seems outside Getty’s universe; defeat? what defeat? who was defeated?), or whether the emerging new regime was “state capitalist,” “bureaucratic collectivist” or Trotsky’s “degenerated workers’ state,” viewpoints which have animated hundreds of books over the decades. Yet it is only in some periodization of the intense events between 1917 and Stalin’s final victory ca. 1927 that the content (a non-category in Getty’s universe) of the practices described becomes comprehensible. For Getty, there are no modes of production or true factional antagonisms or class interests. The “deep structures” and long historical view of centuries of Russian history might well supplement some of the earlier, “classical” analyses produced over the decades by anarchists, council communists, Bordigists, Trotskyists, Bukharinites, Mensheviks, Social Democrats and nostalgic liberals, but, standing by themselves, they fall far short.

• 1Gyorgi Dimitrov (1882–1949), Bulgarian Communist and prominent Stalinist of the 1930s and 1940s.

Editors’ Note: This review is part of an on-going series of articles in Insurgent Notes by Matthew Quest on the life and politics of C.L.R. James.

Scholarship on CLR James, the Pan African and independent socialist, often takes the tone of a thin cultural studies where political insight is minimal and factual detail rooted in archival sources is negligible. Grasping James’s role in intellectual and social movement history requires resisting the tendency to group him narrowly in the fields of “Marxism” or the “Black radical tradition.” These are invented frameworks, shorthand which obscures a limited knowledge of James’s actual innovation and creativity, in contrast to other representative figures, but also mystification of the reality of elite party politics and the self-directed liberating activity by ordinary people in insurgent movements regardless of color. An original work on James stimulates the reader to grapple with fragments of Western societies and the Third World. We are compelled to see the search for identity of the colonized and workers’ self-emancipation in conversation. If James believed civilization was in decline, he also insisted that we do not understand it properly if we cannot see how autonomous struggles of labor have democratized civilization and that the purported underdeveloped countries have something to teach us about modern politics and struggles for self-emancipation in imperial nations. For James, “civilization” was never owned by racists and imperialists, and everyday people (if intermittently) were the chief actors that deposited contributions to world heritage whose weight dwarfed those of aspiring rulers on a world scale.

Christian Høgsbjerg’s C.L.R. James in Imperial Britain sets a new standard in James Studies for he has combed key archival sources bringing increased insight and factual detail to considerations of his life and work. By focusing on his first sojourn to Britain (1932–1938), the author wishes to explore how James left Trinidad with ambitions to be a literary man, marked by an obscure liberal humanism (the author emphasizes the influence on James of Matthew Arnold), but soon became transformed into a partisan of the anti-colonial and international labor movements.

In this period James prodigiously published volumes and edited publications which transformed how we comprehend the rise and fall of Communist Internationalism and advanced understanding of the African Diaspora. Yet Høgsbjerg shows that it was James’s migrations through cricket-grounds, meeting halls, bohemian spaces, bookshops, museum exhibits, working-class flats, the homes of elites, and comparatively provincial tea shops that gave him an audience with diverse thinkers whereby he interacted and they mutually cultivated each others’ global insights.

In roughly six years, James accomplished the publishing of the following: The Black Jacobins (1938), the classic account of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution; a theatrical play starring Paul Robeson on this same topic; World Revolution, the first anti-Stalinist account in English of the Communist International; a translation from the French of Boris Souvarine’s Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism; Minty Alley, the first novel of Caribbean yard life; a short biography The Life of Captain Cipriani, a labor leader in Trinidad of the late 1920s and early 1930s; the pamphlet The Case for West Indian Self-Government, and the small but influential book A History of Negro Revolt (later re-published as A History of Pan African Revolt in 1969), which remarkably highlighted the independent thought and labor actions of African and African Diaspora peoples against slavery and colonialism.

While he brought his Caribbean manuscripts, besides The Black Jacobins, with him to Britain, he found publishers for seemingly everything even by accident. He also edited International African Opinion, the journal of George Padmore’s International African Service Bureau (1937–1939), and Fight, a journal of the fledgling Trotskyist movement in Britain. Høgsbjerg discusses these publications in various ways but it is the intellectual and social movement context the author brings to these works, which continue to animate critical minds today, that makes the reader pause and delight. Let me mention some of these details with particular attention to teasing out the origins of James’s libertarian and romantic socialist impulses that are often neglected, and challenge as well the notion that James was always a paradoxical Pan African with a Eurocentric disposition.

James had a little-known dispute about the meaning of anthropology for the self-governing and creative capacities of Black people in 1933 in a newspaper where a critic holds an exhibit of African art in contempt. Stanley Casson judged African artists as having the primitive minds of children. Notably, Casson was an expert on the sculpture of James’s beloved Ancient Greeks. James not only referenced the self-governing attributes of obscure African tribes, to his European audience, like the Bushongo of Central Africa, and the latest anthropology theory by the likes of Franz Boas, but he said true connoisseurs of art know it is a creative asset to see the world through the mind of a child. This suggested that not only was James’s adversary intellectually biased toward African cultures but he was not up to date in aesthetic theory. This is a profound early story for those who persist in seeing James’s affinity for the experiment in democracy in Athens being a permanent blind spot on an African worldview.

James was reading not just Marx, Lenin and Trotsky in 1933–34, but equally Henri Bergson, Oswald Spengler, and Jules Michelet—while not feeling the need to endorse their politics. The latter three would have given him a greater sense of the hidden depths, latent understanding, and creative genius of ordinary people and the notion that socialism was not synonymous with the welfare state but a certain variant of civilizational ethics. James subsequently brought this sensibility to his unique Hegelian Marxist approach to working-class self-activity in his first American years.

He was in dialogue with the German anarchist bookseller Charles Lahr and became fond of Peter Kropotkin’s account of the French Revolution. James was in touch with George Orwell whose account of the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia, shaped his understanding of social revolution as necessarily a revolt not just against conservatives, but against progressives. His anti-Stalinism and anti-fascism, and his insights about the weaknesses of parliamentary politics, were reinforced by witnessing workers fighting in the streets in France, where he had traveled to research The Black Jacobins. During this time he collaborated with Eric Williams, later the first prime minister of Trinidad and author of Capitalism & Slavery, and Léon Damas, the famous Negritude poet, in his archival and translation work. James’s public lectures and meetings with the Irish, Scottish, and Nelson, Lancashire, working class clarified to him that while London-based intellectuals had some important revolutionary theory to offer, those whom he met elsewhere that had experienced general strikes and armed struggle had deeper experiences that radicals must meditate on.1

Whether in Paris or provincial Britain, James was aware that even well meaning Europeans, at that time, had little experience with African and African Diaspora people in interpersonal terms. When they did, preconceived notions of African primitiveness, exotic character, and their supposed lack of facility in modern languages and politics held sway. James often reminded them that it would be peculiar if he did not speak well in English and French, and did not know European literature, history, and philosophy intimately. He was raised on them, learned them in school, and used to teach many of these subjects in Trinidad at the Oxbridge high school Queens Royal College. A skeptical acquaintance from Nelson, who was fond of James but found it questionable whether James was a representative man of people of African descent, had the chance to visit the West Indies, and reported back that “they are not all like James” and his patron Learie Constantine, the cricket star. Of course all Europeans are not Shakespeare either and both James (and some of his new friends) somewhat had to be deflowered of illusions about the gap between the best of the intellectual heritage of Western societies and ordinary Europeans’ facility (or lack thereof) in these ideas. This was not to mention those who fancied themselves “intellectuals.”

Still, James learned, especially from the Nelson working class (though he had instincts in this direction before arriving in Britain) that if civilization was in decline per Spengler, toilers had democratized it—which Spengler would not concede. He would always insist even in the Age of Black Power and the Third World that it is a mistake to equate the politics of imperialist governments with the working classes below them in metropolitan centers. Remarkably, James gave a public lecture in Nelson challenging the working class there to consider the African peasantry in comparative light to the culture of rural toilers in Britain. Militants of the Nelson working class, who had experienced the British General Strike of 1926 and the rise of the Labor Party, chided James not to expect that Fabian welfare state politicians would more consistently oppose empire than more conservative capitalists.

Høgsbjerg also makes a persuasive case that, especially in the first edition of A History of Negro Revolt, James had an eye for African general strikes as well as an openness to African epistemologies and theologies which was far ahead of his time. One can make a case, in contrast to the author’s claim, that it was this book, just as much as The Black Jacobins, which later influenced the most radical voices of militant labor within Detroit’s League of Revolutionary Black Workers.2

This was because the focus on Toussaint, as well as later Black Power personalities like Huey Newton and Angela Davis, made James’s critique of post–civil rights, post-colonial state power unclear (despite condemning the nation-state in absolute terms elsewhere), whereas A History of Negro Revolt, which focused on the self-activity of Black toilers without exhibiting a welfare state of mind, anticipated the social motion later to be found in James’s Notes on Dialectics.

Høgsbjerg’s discussion of James’s leadership in the International African Friends of Abyssinia (1935–1936), which took up defense of Ethiopia from invasion and occupation (1935–1941) by Mussolini’s Italy, is a tremendous contribution to restoring and advancing this neglected aspect of the James heritage with primary sources—though future scholars can still push further. The reader will note the contrast between a little-known essay on slavery by James, written in 1933, and his disposition toward Ethiopia solidarity in 1935–1936. James, responding to the 100th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Britain, spoke about the memory of a former slave in his family in Trinidad. He also accepted uncritically at that time that the League of Nations and the British government had a mandate to fight against slavery and for human rights in the world. His survey of the slave trade in Liberia, Saudi Arabia, and Ethiopia in the 1930s accepted the identity of Haile Selassie as a modernizer. Høgsbjerg argues persuasively that James’s early collaboration with Harold Moody’s League of Colored Peoples (LCP), which in many ways uncritically accepted imperial Britishness, was a sign of a lack of political clarity by James in the early 1930s, though the League published writings by him still valuable and to their Left. But James sided with the West African Student Union (WASU) in Britain when it was revealed that the LCP was collaborating with the British state to place the West African anti-colonial students under surveillance.

Yet when James was compelled to take up Ethiopia solidarity in 1935–1936, he worked with Jomo Kenyatta, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Ras Makonnen, J.B. Danquah, Isaac Wallace Johnson, Chris Braithwaite and others to mobilize anti-imperialist sentiment—at first in solidarity with Emperor Haile Selassie but soon with discomfort. George Padmore would arrive in Britain shortly after the highpoint of this social motion. He had been purged when Moscow’s Popular Front policy betrayed movements for colonial freedom (this began between 1933 and 1935 in different sectors of the globe). Høgsbjerg could have done a better job in highlighting the complex politics of coalitions in the 1935–1936 period. But this is understandable as it is difficult to shift constantly between intellectual history and social movement history which a study of James requires.

James, as the author shows, worked in coalition with the Ethiopian diplomat Dr. Charles Martin (Warquenah Eshate) and also colonial seamen who worked the coasts of both the West African and East African Diasporas. Between them, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Jomo Kenyatta, Ras Makonnen and others, represented different political outlooks on what to do. The key difference here was the following. Did anti-imperialism mean unity with aspiring statesmen in the periphery where lobbying the Western imperialists to maintain the precepts of international law aided the aspirations of these rulers? Or did opposition to empire mean international unity of toilers in center and periphery to overturn all hierarchies and domination? Self-determination either means the right of equality among aspiring capitalist rulers or support for the autonomy of oppressed people to govern themselves under the assumption that capitalism is the denial of ordinary people to directly govern. The historical evolution of “Marxism” would make this unclear if it was ever crystal clear in the first place.

James was fast moving to the far left, by experience not dogmatic ideology, and came to publicly denounce League of Nations sanctions and instead advocated “workers sanctions”—the idea that industrial workers and maritime workers could implement economic sanctions through direct action but nation-states including Britain and Stalinist Russia could not be trusted. The Soviet Union actually traded oil to Mussolini’s Italy as the Italian air force dropped poison gas on Ethiopian villages.

James came to fraternally critique the Pan African George Padmore (despite the fact that he liked the factual data gathered in How Britain Rules Africa, remembered fondly their childhood friendship, and remained friends with him for many years), and, more harshly, the Fabian politician Stafford Cripps, for both advocating “anti-imperialist” perspectives which advocated coalition with benevolent-minded imperialist politicians promoting human rights and development. These conflicting tendencies were not merely intellectual but a tactical conflict that foreshadowed problems of post-colonial freedom.

James was also among the most prominent advocates of the plan for an African Diaspora voluntary militia to come to the aid of Ethiopia. This would have been consistent with the international brigades in the Spanish Civil War. But Dr. Martin, the Ethiopian diplomat, and really Haile Selassie, discouraged this. Instead they accepted the human rights lobbying framework of Sylvia Pankhurst and the diplomatic courtesies of Imperial Britain, who did not immediately resist Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany, but allowed Selassie asylum.

Yet James, beginning in 1935–1936, never accepted this linkage between the government of the British empire and anti-colonial politics, even though his Pan African comrades largely did. He presented himself in an open letter ready to join the Ethiopian resistance and reminded that he would also fight for democracy in Ethiopia not just anti-colonial revolt. This was a tactic of denouncing Martin and Selassie, though in later recollections James suggested Martin was a nice guy. But notably, even in the revised edition of A History of Pan African Revolt, James did not mention the Ethiopia solidarity movement or a critique of Haile Selassie—they were absent from the narrative.

Høgsbjerg suggests that The Black Jacobins, the book, not the play on Haiti, shifts from an incomplete break from Toussaint, as equivalent to a Black Napoleon, toward the greater centrality of African and Caribbean workers in anti-colonial revolt. This suggests another conceptual leap by James from 1936–1938. The author does not mention that, in the conclusion of The Black Jacobins, Dessalines is finally crowned leader of Haiti with the blessing of the Anglo-American empire. This was James’s way of foreshadowing in 1938 the return to the throne of Selassie in 1941 blessed by Britain and the American ruling elites. Yet his theatrical play emphasized more Toussaint as akin to Napoleon and perhaps, for popular audiences of the original script, Haile Selassie. In decades to come there were revised drafts and performances of the play in other global locations that emphasized Moisie, a major dissident of the Haitian Revolution found in The Black Jacobins, anticipating better post-independence politics.

Nevertheless, Høgsbjerg does a good job in placing questions of human trafficking and modern development in conversation with empire and resistance in the 1930s in a manner which complicates the search for autonomy beyond the shadow of state power. His discussion of Trotsky’s theories of permanent revolution and combined and uneven development’s influence on James is valuable as is his attention to Fabians like Beatrice and Sidney Webb’s, GDH Cole’s, and Harold Laski’s being taken in by the Soviet Union’s first Five Year Plan’s claim to have overcome unemployment during the Great Depression as the meaning of “socialism.” While unclear in this study, Høgsbjerg seems to say both it is a good thing for the working class when any nation-state tries to create jobs when there is a scarcity of them, while at the same time this cannot be the meaning of a future socialist society where labor must directly hold the reins. Is the self-organization and self-emancipation of the working class an end in itself? Or is it something Leninists/Jacobins must observe closely in order to cultivate a certain type of capitalist development called “socialism”? James, as I have shown elsewhere, fumbled this question himself in World Revolution but did better in his first American years when he developed state capitalist theory with the Johnson-Forest Tendency.

This seems a good moment to return to Høgsbjerg’s emphasis on Matthew Arnold and the elusive search of many scholars to document the rebel seed within James’s early Victorianism. Was James a Victorian? Or was he raised among Victorians?

Arnold was an elitist who believed that the masses needed more “sweetness and light” through culture. He was trying to discipline and correct what he saw as “anarchy”—the potential of the untutored masses to stir up chaos, not workers’ self-emancipation for a stateless society. Perhaps literary and artistic circles in colonial Trinidad were Arnoldian and James certainly read and quoted Arnold.3 But was Matthew Arnold the rebel seed or was it William Hazlitt, William Thackeray, or William Shakespeare? An argument can be made for many Williams. But what of a Gilbert who also played with themes of “anarchy” on occasion?

The late James D. Young, in his neglected but important study The World of CLR James: His Unfragmented Vision, searched in vain for the origins of his unique creative radicalism in his intellectual legacies in Trinidad before 1932, specifically for signs of his Third Camp or libertarian socialism. Still Young’s basic impulse to inquire along this path was a valuable probing.4 This would suggest that, while James did bring some notions of parliamentary socialism to Britain with him, it is proper to inquire about the early signs of his libertarian socialism or his critique of the vanguard party. Høgsbjerg seems to be looking for the origins of James’s affinity for Lenin and Trotsky. James’s Minty Alley, with its interest in the common people of the Caribbean yard, also looks at the dilettante qualities of a middle class intellectual who identifies awkwardly with marginal women in slum life. Høgsbjerg discusses this dilettante quality in his allusion to James’s assessment of Ishmael in Melville’s Moby Dick (in Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, published at the end of James’s first American years) as a possible model for the youthful James. The author documents James’s fondness for alluding to Arnold, but also a youthful politics that goes beyond people who wish to bring philosophy and culture to the proletariat—clearly in colonial Trinidad even as he began to observe the Caribbean labor movement he was not sure what these politics should be.

The mature political James would make perennial criticism of intellectuals who see themselves as the embodiment of culture in both imperial and peripheral nations. I have shown in my own scholarship the tension between James’s direct democracy and workers self-management and his Jacobinism/Leninism of which he learned aspects of all in his first British years.5 There is a certain continuity between Arnoldism and aspiring to be a Leninist vanguard or a Popular Front welfare stater. But there is nothing Arnoldian about an appreciation for the instinctive genius and latent understanding of the working class which holds vanguards in contempt. Did James start to pick this latter thread up only in his first British years as Høgsbjerg suggests from romantic and libertarian socialists there?

As James’s Beyond A Boundary makes clear, where he makes allusions to many British and European literary figures that were on his mind in his youth, the origins of James’s rebel seed in colonial Trinidad is that he was far less of a Victorian than most have realized. In fact he grows up around Victorians, but he was born in the Edwardian Age. He became a scholarship boy excelling in literary criticism, the social background of the novel specifically. There was one literary critic the young James was exposed to that did anticipate his romantic and libertarian socialist impulses. James learned contempt for the welfare state of mind and progressive intellectuals who could not see that commoners could directly govern themselves and had an instinctive genius. That was Gilbert Keith Chesterton.6 As Høgsbjerg notes in passing, James read the historical narratives of G.K. Chesterton and his partner in polemics, Hillaire Belloc, who wrote The Party System and The Servile State. These without question anticipated James’s later original analysis of state capitalism which held the welfare state and electoral party politics in contempt. Some radical Marxists offer criticism of liberals today but rarely the welfare state or electoral politics—in fact most wielders of state capitalist theory are not opposed to the welfare state but wish to enhance it and advise its aspiring rulers. When especially people of color or women run for office as bourgeois democrats, it is fashionable for most “socialists” these days to hide under the bed—this has a genealogy on a world scale.

Chesterton taught James to listen to ordinary people’s stories just as much as Marx’s Workers Inquiry. James’s Chesterton recognized only a madman would chastise commoners for having two eyes because they don’t have two hundred. Chesterton was the source of James having no use for hegemony or false consciousness theory. Chesterton and Belloc were inconsistent and sometimes flat wrong on matters of racism and colonialism—Chesterton’s followers on the eve of his death supported Mussolini’s Italy and some of his writings had led them there. Chesterton’s and Belloc’s impact on James needs to be analyzed further. But they were not simply right-wing Catholic intellectuals—perhaps this suggests a new spin on the allusion found in James’s Beyond A Boundary that “Caliban” had to pioneer fields “that Caesar never knew.”7 For what George Bernard Shaw called “the chesterbelloc” was always fond of the progressive character of the Roman Empire in history. Nevertheless, Chesterton’s intellectual legacies for James overturned and smashed up “imperial Britishness” from the perspective of ordinary people within Britain itself (or at least created mediated narratives so it appeared to be so in a stylized vision).

James’s Beyond A Boundary, his autobiographical meditation on the game of cricket, re-phrased Rudyard Kipling’s adage, as “what do they know of cricket” who cannot see that it is, in embryo, the world of the working class and the colonized. Høgsbjerg makes clear the origins of this perspective in the 1930s experience for James. Chesterton’s rephrasing in Heretics was somewhat different: “what do they know of England who only know the world”? Arnold claimed to know the world in his imperial Britishness and believed ordinary people needed a little more culture—this anticipated the consciousness raisers of today who are asleep at the wheel in their own right.

James was never a progressive. In fact the young colonial James bragged he was a republican. For James’s Chesterton, this was not an American reference but a claim on a heritage which fused a peculiar reading of the Roman Empire and the French Revolution. Casting aside the triumphant Whig narrative that celebrated the Constitutional Monarchy of Britain, it included a House of Commons which betrayed the real commoners.

Chesterton’s notion of the commons “with a small c” can be found in James’s early American Trotskyist labor writings. James embraced in The Black Jacobins Belloc’s idea of the instinctive capacity of the masses for a direct democratic type of revolutionary organization in the French Revolution—but James offered one correction. Belloc was wrong to think this behavior peculiarly French. James argued the Haitians who were formerly enslaved possessed the same qualities as the most advanced workers in Paris.8 Chesterton often remarked that sojourners leave England to marvel at the religion, gendered, and ritual life of Asia and African peasants as exotic and this discovery appears to humanize them. Yet Chesterton argued in contrast if they would visit the corner pub down the street and talked with the British commoners, or understood their own family better, they would also find folklore to consider that they often held in contempt. An Arnoldian James likely would have not sought out the cricket players, Calypso singers, or the Nelson working class to interrupt them as they were drinking liquor to offer them soap. Chesterton helped James work his way out of Victorianism, middle class racial uplift ideology, and any impact of Social Darwinism. James, aware of such critiques, was prepared to leave behind the elitism of the colonial middle classes when he left for Britain, because his rebel seed was that the obscure local people had something to teach him about his own self-government.

If he also had to learn to cultivate the popular will to assist in either seizing or smashing state power it was questionable that even the young colonial James ever believed his task was to bring sweetness and light to everyday people. For the scholarship boy that enjoyed Thackeray, Dickens and Shakespeare was reading the expert literary criticism of G.K. Chesterton (who famously wrote whole books about each of them). And like James’s own writings and speeches, Chesterton was always (when he wasn’t talking about God) writing about the centrality of the ordinary people to civilization with a sense of wonder and astonishment—in long meandering narratives surprising the reader as he left behind references to the original topic only to return to it to fashion a whole.

Perhaps this is why the James who went to Britain left for America, as Høgsbjerg suggests, prepared to enchant the movements against empire and the struggle of social classes. If James, despite our discontents with him, continues to be a majestic personality, the author, as a great story teller, draws us into an intimate encounter with a figure whose archive and politics are just now surfacing to critical attention not just acclaim. We find Christian Høgsbjerg’s C.L.R. James in his study literally on fire, not merely researching revolutionary history and writing cricket columns. With his sweater accidentally aflame from the heater in his small room, smoke fills the home where he is a guest but he doesn’t notice. Someone has to tell him: “Nello you are on fire.” James doesn’t understand at first, and then anxiously replies: “Oh my goodness, oh my goodness!” This is an apt tale to advertise the vibrant quality of C.L.R. James in Imperial Britain.

• 1Nelson, Lancashire, England in 1932 was a small town of about 38,000 people set among the Pennine hills and built around the cotton industry. It was known as “Red Nelson” or “Little Moscow,” but was not so much rooted in Moscow-oriented politics. It had many libertarian and romantic political tendencies and traditions including a democratic outlook rooted in religious non-conformism and an independent Methodism. Its politics ranged from Gladstonian liberalism to the ideals of the new Independent Labor Party. An autonomous culture of women weavers also distinguished the local experience. See Christian Høgsbjerg, C.L.R. James in Imperial Britain (2014), pp. 39–41.
• 2I am indebted to discussions with Modibo Kadalie, who was in the leadership of the Detroit-based League of Revolutionary Black Workers, for this insight. See Modibo Kadalie, “From One Generation to the Next: The Enduring Legacies of Kimathi Mohammed,” Introduction to Organization & Spontaneity (2013), pp. 11–30; Modibo Kadalie, Interview with Matthew Quest, November 12, 2010, Southern Labor Archives. Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University, Atlanta.
• 3See C.L.R. James, “Discovering Literature in Trinidad: the 1930s,” (1969), in Spheres of Existence: Selected Writings (1980), pp. 237–244. It is notable that this reminiscence by James does talk about Matthew Arnold’s idea of “sweetness and light.” Yet James’s tone suggests his literary circle’s desire to transmit knowledge to commoners, whom his circle believed were backward, was mistaken. It is clear James did not especially believe they were backward. Also most of the period James speaks of here is before the 1930s. He was describing more his social background than his own singular disposition. In 1932 he left for Britain.
• 4See James D. Young, The World of CLR James: His Unfragmented Vision (1999), pp. 18–22, 24–33.
• 5See Matthew Quest, “Silences on the Suppression of Workers’ Self-Emancipation: Historical Problems with C.L.R. James’s Interpretation of V.I. Lenin,” Insurgent Notes #7 (October 2012); Matthew Quest, “Every Cook Can Govern:” Direct Democracy, Workers Self-Management and the Creative Foundations of C.L.R. James’s Political Thought,” The CLR James Journal, vol. 19, 1 & 2 (Fall 2013), pp. 374–391.
• 6C.L.R. James, Beyond A Boundary (1963, 1994), p. 214. It is in the chapter entitled “The Welfare State of Mind,” where he underscores the problem of the welfare state for creativity, where James mentions the importance of Chesterton. He also makes clear that he grew up actually in the Edwardian Age, which he frames here as 1890–1914 and where creative intellectuals were contributing to the break-up of the Victorian Age. James was born in 1901.
• 7See the preface to C.L.R. James, Beyond A Boundary (1963, 1994). It is less than a page and is not paginated.
• 8C.L.R. James, “In the American Tradition: The Working Class Movement in Perspective,” in C.L.R. James and Revolutionary Marxism: Selected Writings of C.L.R. James, 1939–1949, Scott McLemee and Paul LeBlanc, eds. (1994), p. 146; C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins (1938, 1963, 1989), p. 243.