Rosa Janis argues for a theory of crisis and social decay that uses elements of Marx’s Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall as well as the concept of fragility. Crisis must be understood as something not simply occurring in the economy, but the entire society as a whole. Yet the question remains whether an emancipatory politics can emerge from the stagnation and decay of civilization.
The rhetoric of civilizational decline is often associated with the radical right, as the major theorists of it, from Nietzsche to Spengler, were quite plainly reactionaries. The specific imagery that is invoked in describing civilizational decline—a once great Civilization sliding into decadence, collapsing under the weight of its moral failure, with loose references to the Roman Empire—is something that’s fundamental to the radical right to the point where many cannot think of the life cycles of empires without drawing it back to Spengler.
However, there are left-wing—in particular, Marxist—theories of civilizational decline, the obvious one being the ‘fettering thesis’ where the social relations of production are thought to be holding back the productive forces:
“At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.”
Let us turn instead towards what Henryk Grossman sees as implied by Marx’s crisis theory in Capital, Vol. 3: a theory of world-historical decline specific to capitalism. Whereas Marxist decadence theory might often be suspected as an attempt to rearticulate moralistic condemnations of degenerative culture in historical materialist terms, the law of breakdown as elaborated by Grossman is expressed purely in terms of political economy. Grossman’s theory of breakdown is based on the tendency for capitalist recovery to be less and less effective every cyclical crisis, showing a long-term tendency towards the ‘breakdown’ of social reproduction itself as it becomes increasingly impossible to extract surplus value. What I am proposing here is an alternative to Grossman’s theory and other forms of what is referred to in Marxist circles as crisis theory. It will also be proposed here that it is important to highlight the existence of Marxian theories of civilizational decline and crisis that are separate from the crude mystical understandings put forward by the radical right. In the theory that will be outlined in this article, it will primarily be a crisis of capitalism that is the trigger of this broader civilizational crisis, particularly the relationship between cheap labor and technological stagnation (something that has existed in non-capitalist societies such as the Soviet Union and ancient Rome). We will be referring to this theory as the ‘stagnation theory of crisis’ as it is primarily focused on the stagnation of production and its consequences.
Labor and The Progress of Productive Forces
In the first section of chapter 3 of Towards a New Socialism, W. Paul Cockshott and Allin F. Cottrell begin to lay out an interesting argument about labor and technological progress. They start off with speculation of the Roman Empire’s decline. It seems strange that Rome, despite possessing the key to the 18th century in the waterwheel and having a relatively advanced grasp on science for the time period, did not go into an early version of industrial capitalism. The authors explain this apparent anomaly by thinking about the class dynamics of Rome. Rome was a slave society meaning that labor was incredibly cheap, as all the owner would need to pay is the initial price for the slave and then feeding them scraps. There was no incentive for a slavery-based mode of production to use labor-saving devices such as the waterwheel since slave labor was already cheap. In this theory, if ancient Rome had not been a slave-based mode production with cheap manual labor easily available, they would be forced to advance their mode of production beyond the limits set by slavery. (pg.32)
The authors connect this observation on ancient Rome to the grievances of economic reformers in the Soviet Union. One of the criticisms made by economic reformers was that the low-level wages that were common in the Soviet Union (since the government provided basic things like housing automatically to working people) lead to labor being wasted. The Soviet Union was plagued by incredible inefficiencies of the economy. Slower technological progress compared to the West, wasted labor and constant shortages plagued the Soviet Union throughout its existence to the point where the Heterodox Trotskyist Hillel Ticktin claimed that USSR was so inefficient that it could not possibly be capitalism of any kind and that it was something wholly unique to history. For Ticktin Soviet society was defined by its inefficiencies, a “non-mode of production”. However, the authors of Towards A New Socialism offer insight into how these inefficiencies may not be completely unique to the Soviet Union.
While maintaining that Capitalist societies are more efficient modes of production than actually existing socialism or the slave-based production of Rome (since unlike those modes labor was paid for with higher wages), capitalism might still have the same fundamental problem that both those societies had, which is the continuing process of labor being devalued by the drives underlying all of these societies. Under Capitalism, there is a constant drive to pay workers less for their labor due to this being profitable in the short term and the Capitalist class is driven by profit. However, as in Rome and the USSR, this devaluing of labor has long-term consequences that the capitalists cannot perceive, as such overarching tendencies within capitalism are hard to spot in the constant struggle for profit that defines the capitalist mode of production. The long-term trend is that the devaluing of labor leads to stagnation of technological progress, which in turn becomes an issue of stagnation of the economy and the rest of society, as we have seen with the slave mode of production and what is commonly referred to as Actually Existing Socialism. The authors of towards a new socialism give an example of this process in action with IBM. IBM in the 1950s and 60s had automated the production of memory cores almost completely. In order to keep up the demand for their computers they kept on making this process even more driven by automation, yet when they were able to find factories in “the Orient” they shifted investment. While these factories were way less productive than their more automated factories, they had access to cheaper labor, making up for the inefficiency of this manual production process by being more profitable than the high-tech factories (pg 44).
This idea that capitalism still has the fundamental problem of stifling technological innovation by undermining its main incentive (i.e. reducing the amount of labor that’s needed to create things that are needed for human consumption) has merit. The authors of Towards A New Socialism proceed to argue that their ‘new’ socialism will not have this problem. This is because under their model of socialism, currency is merely a means of measuring labor time directly as it takes the form of labor vouchers. Having labor vouchers over money as we currently know it would mean that labor would be more expensive than it is under capitalism since every minute goes into the workers’ labor voucher wages rather than every 32 minutes that the worker normally gets back in wages under capitalism (which is calculated by the authors on pg 15). This increase in the price of labor would give economic planners and the workers involved with production incentive to invest in more labor-saving technologies than they would in previous modes of production.
While in Towards a New Socialism this idea of devaluing labor being a cause of stagnation is a convincing rebuttal to the usual claims thrown out by capitalists apologists about socialism lacking the incentives for innovation, there are some interesting implications that are not drawn out explicitly by the authors which ought to be explored more. Paul Cockshott, a co-author of Towards A New Socialism is a proponent of The Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPF) as being the main source of capitalist crisis, yet what he shows in Towards a New Socialism is a tendency within capitalism that goes directly against what is the fundamental drive behind TRPF, something is theorized as a counter tendency to this tendency. With Paul Cockshott and its other theorists, TRPF is based on the promises of technological innovation being incorporated into the production of commodities reducing the amount of labor going into commodities and thereby reducing their value causing the profits of overall capitalist industries to fall as a result. The independent and dependent variables of crisis are switched in these two theories. In TFRP the independent variable is automation of production while the dependent variable is expensive labor while in the prototype of the theory of stagnation that is given in Towards a New Socialism the independent variable is cheap labor and the dependent variable technology. This switching of the variables, while being motivated by the same desire on the part of the capitalists for profits in the short term, and leading essentially to the same result of slowing down of economic growth have opposite processes leading different causes with the same unintended consequences. If Labor is not too expensive for the capitalists, but actually cheaper than automation, then there is no process that gives incentive for capitalists to replace the worker with automation. Cockshott and Cottrell, while simply trying to respond to the typical capitalist argument about technological innovation under socialism unintentionally undermined their own theory of crisis and laid the groundwork for a whole new theory.
The Tendency Towards Increased Fragility
“Crisis Theory: The Decline of Capitalism As The Growth of Expensive and Fragile Complexity” from the blog Cold and Dark Stars(3), while being a short blog article, is probably one of the more interesting contributions to Crisis theory in a while. It sets to create a Marxist theory of crisis based on the growth of fragility under capitalism. The definition of Fragility that the author of the article is working with is Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s one, which is mathematically defined as harmful, exponential sensitivity to volatility. Taleb, being an expert on statistics, sees fragility in all large and complex human endeavors which leads him towards Libertarian politics. However, the author of the Cold and Dark Stars article proposes that Fragility is not something that is only created by government but by capital itself. The author provides a large amount of evidence, drawing on data coming from everything from the bloated American healthcare system to the crisis of sciences. While the author himself does not apply the categories that we are about to apply, I find it helpful to divide the kinds of fragility that he is describing into two categories. The first category is meant to describe the fragility that comes from the broader economy becoming more dependent on financial speculation and monetary liquidity, or in Marxian terms the creation of fictitious capital to hide the long-term decline in profits with short-term gains we will refer to as financialization (as it is based on the growth of the financial sector). The second category is somewhat broader in terms of its scope since it will be covering almost everything from direct production of commodities to industries like health care and education, what connects the fragility and all of these things is the expanding size of the managerial and specialist subclasses of the bourgeoisie in all of these sectors of the economy and in society as a whole.
The author provides enough evidence for the drive for short-term profits being both the underlying drive behind the growth of fragility in the entire economy and the direct cause of financialization. However, the second category of fragility that is covered in the article does not seem to be profitable either in the short term or the long term since the subclasses of managers and specialists are extremely expensive for the capitalists class. Just to give one example, in the American healthcare industry there has been a massive expansion in the number of specialists in the industry to the point where they outnumber general physicians. Yet specialists are still paid almost twice as much as general physicians even though there is a massive shortage of general physicians and the government has to pump money into the healthcare industry to keep it from collapsing (4). The same is true of Academia, which suffers from a glut of bureaucrats who are paid more than teachers that are actually needed and the government is again forced to foot the bill for all of this. Bureaucratization is not profitable even in the short term so the drive for short-term profits even though we will argue that it still remains an underlying part of the growth of all fragility in the economy. The direct cause lies in the process of acquiring cheap labor over technological innovation that happened relatively recently in history.
In the pursuit of short-term profits, the capitalist class begins to ship manufacturing jobs from the Core to the semi-periphery (to put it in world-systems theory terminology). The trade-off for this shift in investment is that in exchange for short-term profits the capitalist class has to deal with the lack of incentive for technological development and the new glut of unemployment in the core nations. The unemployment of manufacturing jobs in the core nations is a serious issue given that these manufacturing jobs were the backbone of the labor aristocracy with their high pay, good benefits and in the United States, in particular, the promise of homeownership. The capitalist class, being short-sighted up until this point, proceeds to respond to the problem that they have created with a short-term solution that is even more problematic than the one before by pushing the majority of people who once had manufacturing jobs into service work. As a response to this shift to the service sector, the capitalist class also needs more managerial people as a result of the increase in logistics that comes from having a more global system of production set in. They cannot simply expect all proletarians to simply accept their precarious job at Walmart, so they proceed to turn the educational system into a lottery for access into the managerial class, pressuring everyone in the lower classes to go to college as a means of escaping the hell that the capitalists have created. There is a relatively large number of people who end up being able to go through the crooked hoops of college and the capitalist class has to do something with these college kids so they push them into unproductive bureaucratic and specialist positions. These college kids are the lucky ones who get to be a part of the cruel ever-expanding Kafkaesque machinery, weighing down capital with every arbitrary bureaucratic position created.
As alluded earlier, financialization, the ever-increasing amount of fictitious capital that is pumped into the economy is the second form of fragility that is created by capital stagnation. The concept of fictitious capital is practically universal in all forms of crisis theory and it serves the same purpose in each form, which is to stave off whatever contradictions within the capitalist economy are leading to crisis with a constant stream of money that does not come from real growth in the economy (which can only come from the process of extracting surplus value from the producers). This stream of money comes in the form of stocks, debt, credit, loans and inflation. While financialization on paper seems to create economic growth, the fictitious nature of the capital that they are pumping into the economy will only hit the capitalists like a brick wall when they realize that they’ve invested so much money in the stock of companies that are not actually profitable and all the stuff that was bought with credit by average people (everything from apartments to cars) cannot be paid back because their wages are so utterly meager. These sort of situations that come from fictitious capital are why it is not only fictitious but a form of fragility, as it seeks to solve the problem of capital stagnation with another layer of complexity, trying to spin the plates of debt, credit, stock, etc. in order to make up for letting the plate of technological innovation drop to the ground. The Capitalists are trying to keep everyone distracted from their blithering failures by creating more problems for themselves in the future.
Before moving on from fragility we should address an argument made by the author of the Cold and Dark Stars essay against The TRPF theory of crisis, as it can be broadly applied to the theory being speculated in this paper or really any theory of that focuses on one variable of an event over others…
“The greatest flaw of the “orthodox” Marxist approach is its dependence on pseudo-aristotelian arguments. The TRPF model is based in a logical relation between very specific variables, which are the costs of raw materials and machinery (constant capital), the costs of human labor (variable capital), and the value extracted from the exploitation of human labor (surplus value). This spurious precision and logicality is unwarranted, as the capitalist system is too complex and stochastic be able to describe the behaviour of crisis as related to a couple of logical propositions. One has to take into account the existence of instabilities and shocks, as the mainstream economists do.”
This is a very weak argument, as while capitalist crisis much like any other complex process that comes under the scientific microscope, can and probably does have multiple variables. It can easily be argued that some variables are more important than others due to their directness in triggering the process that we are looking to study, and focusing more on said variables over others is not “pseudo-Aristotelian logic” but rather just a normal part of the scientific method. When we focus on technological stagnation as the main variable of our theory of crisis we are doing so not to completely discount that there could be other variables involved in the process but rather to pick out the one that is seemingly more important in the process than others and focus on that variable in relation to others.
Crisis: from the Base to the Superstructure
Often when analyzing crisis Marxist and in particular Marxian economists have a tendency to avoid talking about the implications of crisis that lie slightly outside of their field of study. If we genuinely hope to break away from the limits that are imposed by hyper-specialization on the research program of historical materialism then we must engage in not only what is considered to be the more objective “base” of society as one would do in Marxian political-economy but also it’s more subjective “superstructure”. While it may be flawed to frame anything in Marxism in such terms, we can still use this “base-superstructure” framework to help us trace how a crisis that is purely economic can spread from the base of the economic sub-structure to the superstructure throughout the whole of society. When we start to think about crisis in this genuinely historical materialist or at the very least Hegelian manner, we begin to move away from seeing the crisis of capitalism in purely economic and political terms but as a much larger disease that spreads all across the body of our society, causing everything from the stock market to the minds of next generation to rot away. Here we will map out how crisis grows into the social sphere.
Crisis starts with growth in the fragility of institutions all across society, not just the ones that can be thought of as purely economic like businesses or the stock market, but also schools, the family and the church. Starting at the home we see an established family structure that has been created by industrial capitalism in the United States, that of the nuclear family. The nuclear family structure is highly atomized compared to previous iterations of the family as an institution within society. It is generally smaller, having one caretaker (usually still a woman) for the children (instead of the extended family helping raise the children) and another who is the breadwinner, usually still a man. (4) While the numbers for these roles have started to change we need to look at why they have changed. Why was there an increase in the number of women in the workforce? ( 5) Why are birth rates are dropping? (6) Why are people getting married at later parts of their lives than they did before? (7) Some would answer these questions by pointing to the slow rise of “left-wing identity politics”, as the values that are promoted by said identity politics undermine the stability of the family. This a slightly updated version of the answer that was given by social conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly, echoing the political wave of social conservatism that came about in the 80s. This answer may make more sense today than during the period of time in which it was originally put forward, with social justice discourse being so prevalent in the media, yet it cannot explain why “left-wing identity politics” has won in the long term given how social conservatism basically dominated the 80s political and social climate.
The explanations of the political right that put politics and culture first are completely inadequate because even while they were losing ground they had cultural and political dominance over the United States.he only real explanation for the breakdown of the nuclear family along other bastions of American conservatism can be found in the economic sphere. What made the nuclear family a viable form of social life in the United States for a relatively long period of time given capitalism’s continuous instability was ironically enough something that American conservatism has been focused on destroying, the social democratic welfare state. The 4 million loans handed out by the Federal Housing Administration or guaranteed by the Veterans Administration from 1935 to 1951 along with flood of money that came from the post World War II economy, with strong unions, good-paying factory jobs and decent public schools creating a labor aristocracy that was the perfect combination of socially conservative, relatively privileged due to property ownership and white as Wonder Bread.(8, 9, 10). This created a postwar political consensus that valued anti-communism fused social reaction and Social Democratic economics over radicalism of any kind. This consensus was good for the American Empire yet went against the short-term interests of the capitalist classes as they were forced to provide more for their workers through wages, benefits and government taxes. This conflict between the short-term interests of the capitalist class with the long-term interests of the American Empire would play out over the latter half of the 20th century going into the 21st.
There were two major blows against this social conservative/economically Keynesian consensus that would lead to its downfall. First was the rise of the American civil rights movement as African-Americans, along with other minority groups who had continually been shut out of American life and enjoying the wealth created by the postwar prosperity, began to demand basic political rights along with economic reform in the late 60s early 70s. This wave of rebellion by minorities led to a retreat of the social norms that had defined American life for the longest time. The second was a global recession around the same time that was defined by Stagflation, Stagflation being a term to describe high inflation existing alongside high unemployment. The Stagflation recession of the early 70s can be seen as a relatively small side effect of the Nixon administration switching from the gold standard to Fiat currency. Keynesian economics of the time could not account for Stagflation as inflation was supposed to automatically lead to a reduction in unemployment, so this was a blow against the social democratic policies of the time. This allowed for a Capitalist offensive to be waged under the banner of conservatism, as there was the base of white labor aristocrats who were deeply frightened by their declining prospects and the gains made against their authority by the civil rights movement and liberalization of social values in general. Figureheads of the American conservatism like Reagan could provide them with a soothing narrative about an evil liberal media elite slowly destroying their way of life while undermining the existence of the base of white people that the conservative movement was trying to appeal to by removing the things that helped the labor aristocracy exist in the first place such as strong yellow unions and government aid for housing.
Helping to carry out the strangling of the nuclear family, American conservatives proceeded to break their promises about government spending and the reduction of bureaucracy. They continued to expand the size of the American military, letting bureaucracy grow in the private sector to ridiculous degrees while continuing to pour money into corporations who were abandoning the American working class, earning the Reagan administration a high deficit. (11) American conservatives along with the rest of the politicians of the ruling class are fine with Keynesianism so long as it benefits the people who are lining their pockets. This is not to say that American conservatives were the only ones who became more and more dependent on the Capitalist class to give them support as they enacted policies that would slowly aid in the annihilation of their base. Democrats had found that they could avoid having to deal with competing with Republicans over the white working class if they could feed off of the last bits of energy coming out of the civil rights movement, ignoring the economic demands of this movement as they had a vested interest in carrying out the demands of their capitalist masters. The capitalist class had been emboldened by stagflation and the recession, seeing an opportunity to devaluing labor while not being able to comprehend the long-term problems that would come with this. The overall Democratic strategy would not be viable until American conservatism proceeded to lose steam in the 90s and the last bits of social democracy were stomped out of the party by the Third way fanatics of the party. They proceeded to outmaneuver the Republican Party on issues that they traditionally were “strong on”. Crime, defunding welfare and government spending all became Democratic Party issues along with mixing the rhetoric of the civil rights movement with blatant racist dog whistles about “welfare queens”. The uncomfortable mix of wokeness and racism can be seen as sort of a transitional phase of the Democratic Party to its more modern ideology of Social Liberalism as it was still trying to win over the remnants of the labor aristocracy and petty bourgeois whites that are the core base of the Republican Party.
The nuclear family unit becomes weaker through this process of cheapening labor as their incomes drop, financial issues being one of the leading causes of divorce in the United States. (11) The time spent trying to make up for the drop in income leads parents to leave more of the important process of socializing their children to public schools which are underfunded and dominated by an ever-expanding bureaucracy. Even if the teachers want to help the children, they are incentivized to teach for a test, being less of a surrogate parent than the students might need since their parents are wrapped up in financial issues. Responsible adults that give the students the important values of compassion and kindness to their students are left in a void. If teachers, parents and other figures of authority are failing at socializing the youth then the process of socialization becomes the duty of various forms of media. The Internet in particular has become the main force behind forming how children build relationships which the whole of humanity. The Internet as a particular vector of socialization is probably one of the most damaging to society overall as it leaves children at the whims of adults who are acting completely anonymously, unable to be held accountable for their actions and allowing children with antisocial tendencies to create communities around their issues which end up being self-reinforcing. We can see social decay in the rise in the number of people diagnosed with mental illnesses in the United States (12), in particular among youth (13), with mass shootings becoming a normal spectacle in the America media. One can point to the example of the cult of personality that spontaneously formed around the recently deceased woman beating psychopathic rapper XXXTentacion. The rapper’s death was met with a wave of mourning which then turned into rioting by his young fans. (14) The youth fanbase of XXXTentacion heavily identifying with him due to his lyrics covering issues related to mental illnesses. (15)
This image of an anti-social and amoral culture can easily be dismissed as the rantings of someone who is out of touch with the culture. It can even be described as reactionary given that cries of decline are associated with the political right. However, these seemingly small and innocuous trends within our society become much more frightening when we take into account much larger developments in the political economy. When we look at the whole structure from top to bottom, we start to see that the growing sense of alienation that we feel from one another, the dread of the future that is so widespread in our culture that we have become obsessed with nostalgia, and the constant need to pop an ever-increasing amount of drugs just to get through the day, are not just irrational passing thoughts but the same kind of instincts that other animals feel before a tornado that makes them panic, primitive instincts that drive them to run from danger. We are beginning to realize that the American Empire is dying and that if the scientists who talk about climate change are right we are going to drag the whole world with us.(16)
We’re trapped in the belly of this machine and the machine is bleeding to death (17)
Alexander Gallus concludes his saga on the Bavarian Soviet Republic and tries to draw political lessons from its failures.
The leader of the Bavarian November Revolution lay on the street in his own blood. As the shocked adjutants gathered around the lifeless body of Kurt Eisner, three soldiers with rifles and hand grenades ran towards them, shouting, “And now we shall pay a visit to Parliament! Time to clean up.” Appalled at this call to revenge, one of Eisner’s associates—Benno Merkle—grabbed one of the soldiers. He pointed at the corpse, crying “Look at the one you want to avenge! If he could say any last words he would say: don’t avenge me!” 1
Renouncing violence and striving for a peaceful revolution, the pacifist followers of Eisner were outdone by the reality they had gotten themselves into. Getting a hold of the nationalist assassin Count Arco von Valley, a crowd pummeled him, shooting his throat and lodging a bullet in his skull. After being brought to the hospital unconscious, at the order of Merkle, von Arco did not stabilize to stand trial for another few months, until August of 1919. With the assassination of Eisner, revolutionary calls overflowed the streets of Munich. During a meeting of Parliament that same day, Erhard Auer—the SPD rival of Eisner—was wounded and two other members of parliament shot from the revolver of a council leader. With the remaining parliamentarians escaping from the city to northern Bavaria, it was clear that the floodgates which were opened would not be closed again any time soon.
As the local poet Oskar Maria Graf described the events following Eisner’s assassination:
The bells started ringing from all church towers, the trams stopped at once, here and there a red flag was being hung out a window with a black ribbon, and a heavy, uncertain silence came down. All people walked downtown, with grimaced faces. . . suddenly a fully laden truck with red flags and machine guns drove by, and from it loudly came calls: ‘Revenge! Revenge for Eisner!’. . . The masses started streaming through the city. This was different than the 7th of November. . . The thousand little storms became one, and a single, dull, dark and uncertain eruption started.” 2
‘Munich’s Awakening’
By all estimates, more than 100,000 of the 600,000 inhabitants of Munich marched at the funeral procession for Eisner. All those vaguely sympathetic to revolution showed up, even those who, in due time, through the extended failure of the revolution, were to be drawn into the fascist reaction around the Thule society and bribed by the German military. Many later SA members and leaders showed their support for the revolution and attended Kurt Eisner’s funeral march alongside Russian prisoners of War. As his authoritative biographer Volker Ullrich shows, Adolf Hitler was a part of the leading procession carrying Eisner’s coffin. 3 Workers and soldiers discussed emotionally how to carry forth the revolution. As it were, however, confusion, phrase-mongering, and anarchistic idealism were on the order of the day in the councils and no effective government came about from the escalation.
Late February negotiations between SPD and USPD in the northern German city of Nürnberg, came to a conclusion, after a week of intense discussion, to form a temporary coalition that was to last a mere three weeks. Feeling safe to recommence a meeting of Parliament for the first time since the tumultuous day (February 21st) of the assassination, the congregation on March 18th voted SPD’s Johannes Hoffmann as Bavaria’s Prime Minister. Within the ruling system of “dual power”, however, this government had little substantial claim to do things as it saw fit, and set its headquarters in the northern Bavarian city of Bamberg.
The eyewitness Ernst Müller-Meiningen says of those tumultuous days, “only those who were in the middle of things back then knew that the government was without real power, that the councils had all the guns, and hence the power”. 4 As mentioned in the first article, councils, despite their harboring of radical sentiment, were tolerated as a safety valve by the bourgeois, through social-democratic politicians and their military friends manipulating and fighting for their politics within them. Indeed, many social-democrats and independent social-democrats were later successful in adding workplace councils to the constitution of Germany, lasting until today.
Many prominent members of the Independent Socialists were strongly in favor of and involved in the struggle for councils, such as Däumig and Koenen nationally or Sauber, Maenner, Hagemeister in Bavaria. This was not meaningfully discouraged by those in the party who in fact feared revolution. It could actually be argued that a naive belief in councils within the party was cleverly utilized by such figures as Haase and Kautsky, who presumably never desired them at all. The belief in councils as bringing about socialism was naive precisely because the mere propagation of and even organizational work for councils (for whose creation there was much effort expended by the Bavarian revolutionaries and Communists) did little to solve the problem of the political leadership of workers. Often, throughout the Bavarian councils, their creation did nothing to further the actual political program needed to get to a system run by workers but saw opportunist demagogues like Hitler (who was as of yet still a politically unknown and awkward figure) get elected as council leaders.
In his article “Driving the Revolution Forward”, Kautsky harshly denounced the Spartacists because of their ‘street actions’ and their calls for ‘total control to the councils’; yet, not a harsh word is dealt to those leftists of his own party, who, according to historians like Morgan and Beyer, were equally or perhaps even more dedicated to the council idea and involved in its implementation than many Communists. With mass strikes in early 1919 shutting down large swaths of the country’s train system, it was the USPD’s most radical party branches which suffered and failed to send delegates to the Berlin Party Conference of March 2 to 6. Comprising roughly 20% of the party’s membership, the USPD’s largest party branch in the town of Halle (a local stronghold of the latter communist party), sent a mere 2 out of 176 delegates. Bavaria, another radical stronghold with almost 10% of the party’s members nationally, sent a meager 4 delegates. 5 The believability to which this was just mere coincidence, without foul play or party machinations, must be left to the reader’s imagination.
At the Party Congress, it was the party left’s most well-known figure, Däumig, who was elected as party chair, next to Hugo Haase. As a reminder, it was Haase who had (although, begrudgingly) stood before the Reichstag to read the Social-Democratic Party’s statement in favor of the Kaiser’s war credits… Causing an unprecedented scandal at the Berlin Congress, Haase refused to serve as party co-chair with Däumig. Morgan states, “Däumig, never one to push himself forward, then withdrew his candidacy” 6. Largely dominated by empty compromises, the party’s meetings between the 2nd and 6th of March provided no clear plan to approach the German proletariat with, nor one for the future of the party.
The fact that perhaps as many as 50% of its members were not proportionally represented at the congress, was unfortunately not exploited by Däumig and the left, who would have had great cause to stall and explode operations to win members’ sympathy for a fight against the right and ‘moderates’, and for their programmatic aspirations towards a dictatorship of the proletariat. Alas, Däumig, who had wisely called the rebelling Spartacus League a ‘suicide club’, proved himself no grander socialist and revolutionary, failing to transcend the blinding bureaucratic morass of German social-democratic tradition inherent in the USPD. Incapable of translating the urgent needs of workers into clear party program and direction, this party which was to win over a third of the SPD’s branches, failed the people at a crucial moment, when the lives of countless socialists and workers hung in the balance in the face of a militarist repression which sought to violently destroy the popular desire for socialism.
Back in revolutionary Bavaria, Eisner’s USPD successor and delegate Ernst Toller (who had foiled an early assassination attempt on the Prime Minister), scrounged a fighter plane and WWI ace fighter pilot in a last-ditch attempt to reach the Berlin conference. Recounting what was then a novel human experience, Toller wrote:
“Under southern blue skies we start. I sit behind the pilot in a small space. Through a small square hole on the floor bombs had been thrown on human beings and houses during the war, now it serves as my window to the disappearing earth. It’s my first flight. The black forest, the green fields, the tan mountains and valleys become flat, colorful, fenced in squares from a kids toybox, bought in a store, put together from kids hands. Suddenly clouds tower over us, the earth is covered in fog, strangely pulling me to it. The desire to fall, to sink comfortably, confuses my senses. […] Suddenly the airplane swoops down, sinking, and before I can put on my safety belt the machine whizzes down vertically towards the earth and drills its nose into the field.”7
Surviving the crash landing in rural Bavaria with mere bruises and bloody noses, Toller and his pilot stumbled through the field to take shelter at a restaurant, ominously filled with conservative peasants, before hijacking a train and returning to Munich. Returning for the all-council congress, Toller reacted harshly to his party colleague Felix Fechenbach’s speech, which warned of an impending civil war and urged them to further negotiate with the bourgeois government of Parliament. Two days later Ernst Toller was elected head of the USPD in Bavaria. Splitting the party from the national USPD, he promised in a lofty speech to abandon its prior cooperation with the SPD, to not participate in Parliament, intending instead to work towards establishing a dictatorship of the Proletariat and cooperating with the Communist Party, (KPD), which began to have a local presence with the opening of their Münchner Rote Fahne on February 28th. It, in turn, had no intention of cooperating with the soft-hearted successors of Eisner.
Eugen Leviné
At the beginning of March, the Berlin Central Committee of the KPD sent, among others, the Russian born revolutionary Eugen Leviné to Bavaria (not to be confused with the ‘idol’ of Bavarian communists, Max Levien). Upon his arrival in Munich, Levine commented in a letter to his wife that “my friends here are most childish.” Against their “naive” support for the anarchists and idealistic council leaders, he strove to tactfully educate the local KPD members. Valuing the importance of making clear to workers certain necessary goals of struggle through speeches and articles, introducing cadre building to the KPD local – and setting a strong contrast to the vague prophetic moralism of Eisner and his successor – he, not unlike many of his party comrades, neglected the importance of other matters of politics. Before being sent to take over the Münchner Rote Fahne, Leviné had tremendous success agitating for the KPD in the Rhineland at the onset of the November revolution, but was of the minority KPD delegates at its founding congress which voted to boycott working for the advancement of communist views within both parliament and the reformist trade unions
Beside the eternal debates within Munich’s councils, the SPD government of Hoffman was busily consolidating its power in northern Bavaria with the Army, reneging on its pledge to keep various USPD members on its cabinet. The independent organization of right-wing death squads, such as the Knight von Epp’s Freikorps division, meanwhile accelerated. Incidentally, one of von Epp’s local Munich recruits was the rapist Josef Meisinger, later executed Second World War criminal and “Butcher of Warsaw” as he was to be known in his employ as Commander for the Nazis. The declaration of a Soviet Republic in Hungary on March 21st of 1919, with the communist Bela Kun at its head, only accelerated the revolutionary ambitions of the mass of workers and soldiers, and also the activity of this reaction.
Communist poster from revolutionary Bavaria: ‘For 8 hour work day, higher wages and development of social laws’
With the victory of the communist-led council revolution of Hungary, revolutionary dreams became very widespread in Bavaria. Just six days before Hungary’s new declaration, the Soviet government of Ukraine sat in Kiev after the Bolshevik’s successful military offensive against the German puppet regime there. That meant that only Austria – where the tremendous level of working-class organizing in Red Vienna saw solidarity calls for a Soviet government, and massive socialist demonstrations grew larger daily – stood in the way of the Bavarian Soviets having a land connection to Soviet Russia. Lenin promised to send three million Russian soldiers to secure the European revolution.
While the Munich KPD was busily responding with an excited and optimistic communique to the Hungarian revolutionaries, Eugen Leviné was not unaware of the leviathan and consuming struggle in Russia as well as the danger of the Bavarian situation:
“It seems to me that in Munich far too much importance is placed on high politics and that an excessive preoccupation with the problems of a great future results in neglecting the essential tasks of the moment, vital for establishing that future. True, we defend the principles of the Soviet system but we have yet to create the prerequisites to guarantee the establishment of that system. These prerequisites do not exist, and, while at the Bavarian Soviet Congress, Comrade [Max] Levien advocated and defended on principle the Soviet system, he will surely share my opinion that the proclamation of a Bavarian Soviet Republic under the prevailing conditions of the country, would be disastrous and would have disastrous consequences.” 8
These “prerequisites” to him were not just the consolidation of the Communist Party to win a stated majority in Soviets, but for communists to actually enhance their activity in, and themselves further the building of councils. His belief was that Communists ought to “speed up the building of revolutionary workers’ organizations[!]. . . We must create workers’ councils out of the factory committees and the vast army of the unemployed.” The indecisiveness of such vague terminology by Levine was unfortunately not restricted to mere rhetoric. It was more so the highest expression of communist politics in revolutionary Bavaria.
The reality and actual situation of “high politics” in Germany and Bavaria were, however, that overall a third of all parliamentary votes went to the SPD and another two-thirds to liberal and conservative parties, with marginal (yet not insignificant) votes for the USPD. The Munich KPD and Levine’s approach – of on the one hand attempting to criticize left illusions, while on the other encouraging it in its active delusions, ordering workers and party members in Munich to organize councils – was contradictory and, indeed, dangerous and reckless; This is simply because of the immense size and domineering strength of that camp in Germany which infamously advertised themselves making “Sausages out of Spartacists”.
Calls by the 1st Bavarian infantry regiment and worker demonstrations for a pronouncement of a Soviet Republic of Bavaria rose to a fever pitch in the first week of April. SPD delegates from nearby Augsburg, compelled by the general mood and at their members’ forceful insistence, were sent to Munich with the demand to proclaim a Soviet republic. Emerging coalition talks in Munich by representatives of the USPD, SPD, Farmers’ Union, and anarchists were all joyously unified in their desire to fulfill the goal of creating a Soviet Republic after the model of Hungary. Dreading the growing influence of the KPD, military leader Schneppenhorst, the ‘Noske of Nürnberg’, and the SPD, participated in this ‘council republic’ from above in order to manipulate proceedings, stall and buy time for their military consolidations.
Asserting that this premature “seizure of power” by the Soviets would play directly into the hands of their more nefarious enemies and drown the councils in blood, Levine unpopularly interrupted the second coalition meeting with a speech denouncing the proclamation of this ‘pretend Soviet Republic’, refusing any cooperation in the government. Spending the last of Rosa Levine’s savings on taxi fares, the KPD sent speakers throughout the city for two days, trying to warn the people of the inevitable and dangerous failure of this proposed republic. Regardless, two days later, on April 7th, the people of Munich woke up to the news that they were, as of midnight, now living in a “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”. On the same day, most large cities and provinces of the state of Bavaria proclaimed their allegiance to this new “era of the end of Capitalism” as well.
It did not take long for this sham Soviet republic to be exposed as such, and the Rote Fahne fervently expressing the Communists’ desire to build a ‘real soviet republic’. Nürnberg’s central council had voted to oppose joining the Soviet Republic, hence giving the SPD government of Hoffman a last refuge in the state, and a base to organize against the frivolous revolution. Quickly, within just two days, the central councils in city after city were being overrun and rendered useless by counter-revolutionary students and soldiers. In Munich the SPD was split in half on a vote whether to support or abstain from the ‘Revolutionary Central Council’ government it had two days earlier encouraged the creation of, at the cynical initiative of Schneppenhorst.
Nonetheless, the new Soviet government, with Toller and his isolated Bavarian Independents at the helm, went about holding erratic meetings and signing declarations. With lots of discussions and ‘little positive constructive work’ as anarchist leader Mühsam later honestly reflected, discontent and confusion widespread among workers and soldiers. Levine’s biting critiques of the sham soviet republic very well held back little in his articles. Moreso, however, his articles heated up the Bavarian situation – a situation that was politically hopeless. Perfectly aware of the Freikorps organizing, the German Army’s rustling, and the SPD’s brutal consolidation of power throughout the country with Noske’s martial law over Germany, he agitated for a day where, “soon”, the actual Soviet Republic was to come.
One of the ‘sham’ Soviet Republic’s ministers sent a message to Lenin in Moscow, describing an almost magical unity of social-democrats, independents and communists. While this was not untrue for some of the parties’ members, it ignored the fact that this utilitarian unity of circumstance had in fact not been a long fought out, sober, and principled unity en masse, but a hair-brained and dysfunctional unity achieved among an absolute minority facing dire odds. The arming of the working class, it was concluded, was to not be pursued on a systematic level. Implicitly, though not explicitly, this was the case because people like Toller were aware of their weak situation, that the German political majority of Social-Democrats and conservatives held sway in Bavaria, even if it could not show its strength openly at the moment.
The aggregate of relentless school-boy communist agitation and speechifying for a ‘real’ council republic resulted in a peculiar situation during a worker council meeting at the Mathaeser Brau beer hall; being allotted the council meeting opening speech, Levine’s words against the sham council republic and Ernst Toller were very heated. Things escalated to such an extent, that, by the end of the evening, the Communists declared the central council to be deposed, arrested Toller in the beer hall and declared yet another “revolutionary” general strike. Attempting to disarm the revolutionary guard by the next morning, the Communists are then faced with a strong will by these decried “petty-bourgeois” revolutionaries. Fist fights break out between the communist, USPD/SPD, and other workers. A warning shot is fired into the ceiling of the Mathäser by the government’s revolutionary guard. The general tumult and threats of the revolutionary guard to arrest the communists, in turn, are only pacified by the released Toller, whose futile attempts the next day to agitate against the communist general strike cannot stop the inevitable dynamics.
Meanwhile, Levine, in a private conversation with Mühsam, stated that the council republic was thoroughly stuck in the mud. As a matter of course, he said, one should not let Hoffmann take over or negotiate, but should work to get the council government out of the mud. Instead of acknowledging the utter hopelessness of the situation, communicating it emphatically to the people and entering into negotiations for the survival of the revolutionary movement, the Communists and left Independent Socialists continued to sow illusions in the working class by agitating and organizing for a better, more “communist” council system.
On the night of April 12th, Palm Sunday, the government of Hoffmann staged a Putsch against the Soviet republic. This was the instigator for a mass of outrage among workers. Mostly led by the KPD, workers took to themselves arms and ammunition. Spontaneously mixed together in action, workers from SPD, USPD and the KPD successfully disarmed a larger troop of counter-revolutionaries in a restaurant by noon of the next day. 9 After heavy fighting for the rest of the 13th, the revolutionary workers of Munich, led by the communist sailor Egelhofer, were the uncontested, and now armed, power in the capital city.
Thereafter, the revolutionaries disbanded the previously elected council leadership and formed a council’s Revolutionary Action Committee, with Levine at its head and two of its five seats handed to left Independents. Simultaneously, an advance of counter-revolutionary white troops marched towards Munich from the north, quickly cutting through scattered resistance. Ernst Toller caught word of the attack and, grabbing some comrades and supplies, headed towards the front in the nearest automobile. Reaching the suburb of Allach they encountered their men fleeing and a few isolated reds fighting back. Returning with heavy machine gun fire of their own and giving chase on horses, the red soldiers won back the main street and town of Allach. Roughly 10 kilometers and two towns had been won in two days of fighting before successfully driving back the white soldiers, beyond a creek and swamps by Dachau and the people disarming them in the town.
Declaring a six-day long strike for the workers to organize into a Red Army, the new central council, or Revolutionary Action Committee, was aware that, at this point, there was little way out except war. They had drawn blood, embarrassed the enemy (prideful German soldiers) by winning the battle of Dachau and formally organized a formidable Red Army, outnumbering all reactionary Bavarian military and paramilitary forces. Yet not even the seizure of power by the reds could change the ruling political balances in the land or the country; nor could the Soviet Republic of Bavaria convey the certainty of scientific socialism to the hearts and minds of Germans generally overnight through leaflets and propaganda, had they even had the organization or resources to carry out such campaigns. Bavaria was, in the overly-optimistic minds of a few (looking to its neighbor Austria and Red Vienna), to become the center for ‘carrying Bolshevism to Europe’. But as Levine had accurately described and predicted earlier, a truly revolutionary and communist Bavaria would be isolated. With none of its bordering states or nations continuing trade with the state, the economy would wither and its people starve.
In contrast to its two predecessors, the new government was at least able to introduce some routine under Levine’s leadership. However, this “routine” was strained to maintain a serious and confident character, given that there had been no preparations by the KPD to rule. Essential operations like telephone services were out of order after employees joined the bourgeoisie, with red soldiers wasting valuable days attempting to scrounge capable personnel, not just in idle telephone operations. At its headquarters in the former royal family’s Wittelsbach Palace, the Communist government was overrun by and felt compelled to listen to the fantastic plans of countless ‘dreamers and cranks’, in the hopes of winning administrative support and technical knowledge from the people. A task that apparently had been considered or planned for by the Communists as little as it had by the Independent Socialists.
Since March the miniscule KPD had refused cooperation with the USPD, on the grounds that that party was unsure of what it wanted and deluded by idealism. While this characterization by Levine was not inaccurate, the Communists themselves were just as deluded about the prospects of the revolution. In a speech to Berlin workers in 1917, Levine stated:
“The USPD hung around our necks like a millstone. . . We must put an end to this unnatural alliance, this marriage of fishes and young lions. We cannot possibly act the part of the whip that drives the independents to the ‘left’. How can there be an alliance between a whip and a donkey which digs in its heels and declares: ‘You can go on whipping, but I won’t budge.’ If we continue to ally ourselves with the USPD we shall be the donkeys!”10
In reality, the Communists were just as much cripplingly dragged towards the earth by the USPD’s adventurist or conciliatory millstones on their own as they would have been if they were working side by side. It is clearly more effective to challenge someone’s views within institutions that purport to have a democratic culture when standing close to them, being able to reference commonly known principles and norms. The fact is that Levine failed to understand that while one may not be able to move a set Party anyway one wishes, one can influence its members and win influence over certain elements in a party’s leadership if that party is not yet clearly delineated for or against socialist revolution.
Long awaited, the final crackdown of the German reaction came upon Bavaria in the last week of April and the first week of May. Closing in around the capital, White Army forces, commanded by SPD military leader Noske from Berlin, committed many indiscriminate massacres with impunity. Executions of 30 Red prisoners in Starnberg on April 29th, a suburb 25 kilometers southwest of Munich, sparked outrage and tough fighting for the next few days on Munich’s western suburbs. While many of the most violent massacres were in fact perpetrated by the Freikorps groups, such as that of von Epp, it was the SPD leaders’ Army directives and ‘Execution Orders’ which provided the legal framework and policy for the ensuing slaughter. Lenin’s speech in Moscow on the 1st of May, proclaiming that the international day of Labor was being celebrated not just in Soviet Russia but also Soviet Bavaria, was not entirely up-to-date with developments.
A week-long civil and armed resistance by the Augsburg workers 60 kilometers west of Munich had been put down by the German Army on April 23rd. As a result of these experiences, White Army soldiers became increasingly frustrated at the guerrilla tactics of their enemies. In response to the grisly murders in the town of Starnberg, Munich city and Red Army commander Rudolf Egelhofer executed ten hostages from royal families and the Thule society, being held at the Luitpold Gymnasium in Munich. Used unanimously, by virtually all newspapers except the communist papers, as the only verifiable propaganda piece against the ‘bestial’ Soviet Republic, the unfortunate executions proved further fervor for the hatred of German Army soldiers against the ‘Bolshevik hordes’, leading to, among many others, 53 Russian POWs being murdered in the tiny suburb of Gräfelfing. It had been the German Army which introduced the execution of hostages and prisoners of war in the course of WW1. If anything, the Luitpold executions showed the weakness and lack of authority which the Red Army command had. For 30 Reds murdered in Starnberg by the whites (among many others), only 10 Thule Society reactionaries were executed. Hardly a punishing response.
Nevertheless, resistance against the whites was fierce, especially in Dachau, where the Red Army had proven itself capable of winning in battle. By April 30th, however, Egelhofer had reversed the ordered offensive from Dachau to take the adjacent northern German airport of Schleissheim and ordered a complete retreat to the city. More and more red officers at this point had defected, discipline within the Republic’s forces weakened by the failing course of events. Many returning soldiers from Dachau simply abandoned their post and duty due to demoralization at the ongoing political disputes between the USPD and KPD.
With the entrance of the Army into the city, pockets of armed resistance within the small area of Munich’s city’s limits lasted for three days, seeing bomber planes, artillery, flamethrowers, and conventional military and machine gun weaponry unloaded on the last fighters in the city. For weeks, public opinion was ruthless towards the ‘Spartacists’, with Army soldiers beating and killing many thousands, many victims completely unrelated to the Soviet Republic’s organization or its defense – Red soldiers, Catholics, Jews, Russians, older women, younger women, and older men, it did not matter to the German soldier. Once the rules of war were unleashed by the nation and turned inward, it proved hard to stop the killing, for another generation.
“Everywhere there were long moving rows of arrested workers, beaten bloody and bruised, with their hands in the air. To their sides, behind and in front of them, soldiers marched, yelling when a tired arm wanted to fall, rifle butting their ribs, thrusting blows with their fists on those trembling. […] They are all my brothers, I thought contritely. […] They had all been dogs like myself, had to submit and cower their wholes lives, and now, because they wanted to bite, they are beaten to death. […] For days, all one heard were the arrests and executions. […] The Soviet Republic had ended. The Revolution was defeated, the firing squads at work industrially…” 11
The German November and Bavarian revolutions had drawn to it large segments of the population which had been pushed to their brink physically and mentally through the experiences and consequences of the war, returning to an incredibly unequal and corrupt capitalist society. Many participants had little theoretical education on or understanding of socialism. With the dragged out failure of the revolution, its eventual bitter defeat and the physical destruction of its strongest leaders, many of its followers sought promise and leadership elsewhere. Enlisting as a Red Army soldier in April for the communist Bavarian Soviet Republic, and fighting for it, Julius Schreck became a close confidant of Adolf Hitler as well as the founding leader of the SS. Schreck went on to practice his revolutionary experience as an organizer for the Nazi’s infamous 1923 ‘Beerhall Putsch’ in Munich. 12
Red Army commander Rudolf Egelhofer’s execution
The cooption of the German worker movement’s aesthetic and socialist rhetoric for Fascism was not an invention of Hitler’s. Rather, it came from the cynical businessmen of the Thule Society and other bourgeois in the form of the DAP (German Worker’s Party) and was a clear tool used by these terrified gentlemen to reign in the mass discontent among the people. In fact, instead of joining the Thule Society inspired Freikorps groups which were mobilizing and attacking the Soviet Republic and Communists (such as Röhm, Wessel or even Strasser), the little clues left of Adolf Hitler’s activity point to an undecided man; one who participated in the revolution and who in July of 1919 was told to infiltrate the DAP for the German military who kept him employed. The rest of that story is well known.
Eugen Levine’s comment that there was too much focus on “high politics” (a reference to prolonged USPD/anarchist negotiations with the majority SPD and bourgeois representatives) was a curious comment in retrospect and one which, among other actions, shows his sectarianism and leftist deviation. The Munich Communists had a deep-seated tradition of tailing party-advertent anarchists who, as Hans Beyer says, might have been subjectively ‘real’ revolutionaries, but whose actions objectively thwarted the survival and success of the revolution. It was, in fact, the culturally dominant political trend of socialist idealism within the Munich left which was responsible for many of the aggressive and fatal delusions so deeply entrenched in the minds of the Bavarian militant minority, not the realistic “high politics” of “moderate” Independent Socialists like Felix Fechenbach.
An unfortunate comment by Munich’s later Communist Party chief, Hans Beimler, addressed to the Nazis, that ‘We will see you again in Dachau!’, was sneeringly pounced upon and paraded by the Bavarian bourgeois press when their Heinrich, Heinrich Himmler, founded Nazi Germany’s first concentration camp in the bastion of Bavarian socialism, Dachau. In 1933, on his way to being detained to the concentration camp, Felix Fechenbach was shot by the SS for ‘attempting to escape’. Thankfully history is not static, however, and the final words at the camp were spoken from behind an assembly of Springfield and M1 Garand rifles. Yet, the real story and significance of Dachau have, as a consequence, yet to be told.
The tragic destiny of all the promising revolutionary leaders – from Levine, Egelhofer, Fechenbach to even the young Toller, but especially the thousands of nameless Republican defenders who paid the ultimate price, as well as innocent bystanders – should not be ours to embrace and elevate, but one to mourn, remember and learn from. Revolutionary adventurism and immature politics, both outside, but especially within its ranks, was not thoroughly confronted by the KPD, making the consequences of failing to circumvent and warn of the pompous and sardonic schemes of the willing and unwitting agents of capital long lasting and painful. Unlike few other places and moments in the chronology of the worker’s movement, the revolution of Bavaria displays clearly the importance of an intelligent socialist politics, and ought to be heeded as an ominous warning and lesson of history.
Amelia Davenport interviews Hugo Souza, a militant in the Brazilian left, on organizing, the right-wing Bolsonaro’s campaign that is taking aim at state power with a reactionary neo-liberal agenda, and advice for leftists in the USA.
A messiah for the right?
AD: So to start, can you introduce yourself?
HS: My name is Hugo Souza, I’m a leftist from Brazil who belonged to an anarchist collective for a couple years and self-identified as a Marxist-Leninist for a decade before that.
AD: What anarchist collective were you involved with?
HS: Coletivo Mineiro Popular Anarquista, Compa, a branch of CAB (Coordenação Anarquista Brasileira – Brazilian Anarchist Coordination) which organizes in the especifista/platformist group Anarkismo.
AD: So what sort of organizing work did you do with them?
HS: I was a member of 3 movements. The first was MPL, or Movimento Passe Livre which was an organization that sought to fight mercantilization of public transport and promotes a self-managed, horizontal, cooperatively run model of public transportation. It was federated itself nationally and the Sao Paulo branch started the June 2013 protests.
I was also a member of MOB, Movimento de Organização de Base, which is a community organizing group also nationally federated that promotes community organizing. They mostly deal with illegal settlements, which are the initial stages of slums but not exclusively.
Last, I was a member of the Committee for Solidarity with the Popular Kurdish Resistance, which sought to bring awareness to the Kurdish cause.
In these three movements I took organizing roles, such as helping set up meetings, protests and such, took media roles, such as creating websites, facebook pages and publicity pieces in general, helped shape, reshape, found and design multiple organizations and also had a diplomatic role inside CAB and with regard to other organizations in Brazil as well.
AD: Shifting gears a bit, what do you make of the general state of politics in Brazil?
HS: Worrisome. We are going to have a fascist elected in a couple weeks.
AD: Brazil had previously been considered a part of the ‘Pink Tide’. What do you think changed to shift the electorate so far to the right?
HS: A combination of multiple factors. I believe the main one is a perception of an economic and moral crisis that was hammered by the media and the judicial caste, which portrayed the Worker’s Party (PT) as responsible for everything wrong in people’s lives. The media bombarded the public with negative information about the Worker’s Party. This fostered a sentiment known as ‘anti-petismo’ here. Neoliberal authors claim PT mismanaged the economy and public companies like the oil giant Petrobras. Petrobras is a matter of pride in Brazil since a nationalist campaign in mid 20th century called ‘the oil is ours’ made the issue crystalized in the public’s’ mind. PT was accused of robbing the government, trying to ‘Mexicanize’ (institute a PRI like dominance) Brazilian politics and hire their cronies to positions within the state.
People, in general, are afraid of Brazil becoming a new Venezuela, even though that is decidedly not the Worker’s Party intent, and there are also conspiracy theories about a sort of tropical Soviet Union known as ‘ursal’ which are widespread.
The scenario shifted gradually from pro-PT views to anti-PT, with the help of groups trained and funded by Steve Bannon and the Koch Brothers, decidedly through Whatsapp fake news posting. They created a sense of impending doom and presented a messiah to solve all the country’s issues: Jair Messias Bolsonaro. There is a history of messianic beliefs in Brazil dating back to the Portuguese Empire when a Portuguese king disappeared fighting the Moors and Portugal ended up being ruled by Spain. In the resulting power struggle, the Portuguese establishment tried to fight it by creating a “king in the mountain” lore. It is a phenomenon culturally relevant to the entire Lusophone world, known as Sebastianism. Sebastianism had a clear manifestation in a monarchist insurgency of poorer people in the 19th century against the newly established republic. In the 19th Century, they thought the lost king would return to save Brazil. The first choice for vice president for Bolsonaro was the ‘heir Prince of the Brazilian monarchy’, but he declined. Brazilians have a weird combination of an anti-authoritarian outlook in life with an acceptance of an authoritarian delegation of a carte blanche for politicians to do as they please as long as there are results.
AD: So you’re saying that a big factor here is a political belief in a Messiah figure. Did Lula play a similar role in the past?
HS: Yeah. The judicial caste sought to punish the Worker’s Party disproportionately, even arresting Lula without non-circumstantial evidence, and tarnished Lula’s image gradually. Lula still has such an image in the northeast of the country, but I believe in most of the country he is more rejected than supported, which does not mean he has little support nationally.
AD: What sort of response is PT mounting to Bolsonaro?
HS: Ciro Gomes was polling ahead of Bolsonaro. The PT response was to delay their candidacy as much as possible to 1 month before the election by making a bogus ballot with Lula as president, considering there is a constitutional amendment saying people with convictions are ineligible for 8 years I think, passed by PT itself, and spreading the word people should vote on whomever Lula decided.
Best case scenario they were relying on vote transfers to happen fast and there would be no time for a counter campaign, worst case scenario and my actual opinion is that they knew they could not win and were only competing with the Ciro Gomes campaign for a spot in the second bout of elections so they could lead the opposition and not lose hegemony as their right-winged rival PSDB did.
They sabotaged Ciro Gomes campaign by alienating parties from his campaign and fighting internal PT members who considered the thought of allying with him in the elections. We estimate PT controlled unions will become more radicalized again once they have to fight for their lives, but only to a certain point. PT has a good number of congressmen overall, enough to be a nuisance to a Bolsonaro presidency.
AD: If PT does not have an interest in socialism, either of the Bolivarian model or the old Soviet one, why are the Brazilian media and political establishment so hell-bent on their destruction?
HS: PT is currently dominated by Lula’s current which is similar to British New Labour in outlook, but there are more radical elements with no expression within the Worker’s Party. They also have a history of radical rhetoric so the establishment can frame it that way. And the Brazilian establishment does not wish to cede an inch of privilege.
They are literally bothered by poor people on airplanes.
AD: So the issue is not preserving capitalism but rather the position of established old money?
HS: No. PT has support from some of the oldest money there is. Agrarian elite, banks, international manufacturers…the Brazilian middle class does not wish to share places with people who were poorer before. Brazil before Lula had the worst GINI coefficient in the world, Lula changed it with very little effort, they invested more in photocopies than in social programmes and people thought they were bankrupting the country with welfare programmes. People were bothered with the ascension of the dirt poor to a less poor status… Literally bothered they were able to go to university and buy airline tickets.
AD: So it’s a reaction of the middle classes then? Would that be small and medium business owners or professionals in Brazil?
HS: Liberal professionals, medium business owners, a varied class. But small businesses are mostly proletarianized.
AD: Why do you think that the Haute Bourgeoisie backs PT despite their anti-elite rhetoric, and the liberal professionals back Bolsonaro despite his rhetoric against the “establishment” they seem to make up?
HS: The haute is divided. Some of it made more money than ever during PT, and is resilient about Bolsonaro, other parts of it embraced full-blown fascism because they can make more money. The middle classes think this crisis is PT’s fault. This section thinks it can make more.
AD: Interesting. What sort of response has the left given so far?
HS: They are making meetings all over the country, broad left meetings, to discuss strategy and support the Haddad campaign in neighborhoods. But I believe it will not be enough.
The Brazilian left abandoned a long time ago base work, and Pentecostals started doing it. The main Pentecostal leader in Brazil supports Bolsonaro and has put the weight of his church behind him
AD: Oftentimes the rise of fascism is accompanied by street violence. Has that happened much in Brazil?
HS: Yes.
AD: Is it organized or mostly “lone wolf attacks”
HS: There are hundreds of reported cases of LGBTQ+, women, black people and merely people with the #elenão hashtag on their bodies being attacked by Bolsonaro supporters. 3 Bolsonaro supporters carved a swastika on a woman with an #elenão bottom’s belly and the police claimed it was a Buddhist symbol. A woman was spray painting the hashtag #elenão near her place and got arrested, the police immobilized her violently took her to the station cuffed her from behind stripped her naked and told she’d only get out if she apologized and said ‘Ele Sim’ (slogan of Bolsonaro campaign). So there are lone wolf attacks, far right groups doing it and sometimes the police do it or cover it up, like in the Marielle case of which we suspect a police hit squad did it for 50k USD.
Master Moa do Katende, capoeira master, was stabbed 12 times in a bar after declaring he was not going to vote for Bolsonaro.
AD: So the police are firmly in Bolsonaro’s camp. What about the Gendarmes?
HS: We refer to the gendarmes as police here. The entire police military establishment is in Bolsonaro’s camp and he has connections to cop mafias in Rio known as milicias (militias).
AD: Does the left have any armed street presence?
HS: None. Gun control is really restrictive here.
AD: What about unarmed street defense?
HS: Leftist Brazilians are mostly hippies. Unions and some social movements have security though.
AD: There are some groups that have talked about base building on the Brazilian left like the Brigadas Populares. Have they been successful? If not, why so in your view?
HS: They have been successful with their proposal that was dealing with illegal settlements, but this right winged wave swore to sweep settlements down.
AD: Illegal Settlements?
HS: Yes. Proto-slums. Bunch of people invade a property and build houses. We call them occupations
AD: How did the Brigades relate to them?
HS: They mostly do the judicial aspect of their defense, but some Brigadas members in my city have criminal lawsuits on them accusing them of planning such settlements.
AD: So you’ve said the Brazilian left has mostly focused on the Haddad election campaign but that this won’t be enough. What do you think needs to be done?
HS: First I think the Worker’s Party and specifically Lula’s current needs to go. I will never forgive them for trying to blackmail the country into voting and supporting them with the threat of fascism. Second, the left needs to get back to doing base work and organize itself in perhaps a new formation without the vices of the old one. Brazilians will suffer a lot in the coming years, but maybe hard times can make harder people.
AD: Will it be possible to do the necessary work under fascism?
HS: It was possible in the dictatorship and it is possible now, the left just needs to get smarter, more organized and set their eyes on community organizing.
AD: Which groups would you identify with having the best chance of returning to community organizing? Or do you think entirely new formations are needed?
HS: Some groups like Brigadas, PCR, and CAB already do it, they could expand or a new formation could arise. I don’t know.
AD: As an American, Brazilian politics seem remote, is there anything you think left formations here could do to support the movement there?
HS: Funnelling money to organizations you choose and perhaps helping out refugees, although I’m not sure if that is possible under Trump. The Brazilian left desperately needs training in diverse skills too, such as digital marketing.
AD: Okay last question, do you have any advice for American communists and radicals dealing with conditions under Trump?
HS: The biggest lesson in both Trump and Bolsonaro is that people do not necessarily prefer centrist candidates over right or left ones. Moderation does not please more people. The right is not afraid to radicalize. Do not fear that either. Radicalize.
AD: Well put. Thanks so much for taking the time to be interviewed Do you have anything else you’d like to add?
HS: Yes. Bolsonaro is projecting himself as a new Pinochet. Neoliberals are siding with him over that. His minister of the economy will be a famous neoliberal economist and have free reign. There is a small chance the Worker’s Party wins. A recent poll was a technical tie of 52-48%. 3 million voters mostly in the Northeast which is a PT stronghold had their voting card nullified because they didn’t register their biometric information, and those 3 million were the difference for PT in the last election, so PT would have to turn even more the tide. Assuming PT wins, there is a risk of a full-blown military coup, already announced by many partisans of Bolsonaro including his vice president who is a retired military general.
And you are welcome. Thank you for having an interest in Brazil.
Louis August Blanqui was a key revolutionary leader in the French Socialist movement. Yet when the Paris Commune erupted in 1871, Blanqui was in prison, leaving his core of followers without leadership. Failing to defeat inevitable counter-revolution, this experiment in social emancipation was crushed in blood. How would have Blanqui’s leadership affected the outcome of the Commune? Doug Enaa Greene, author of ‘Communist Insurgent: Blanqui’s Politics of Revolution’ weighs in.
Barricades of the Paris Commune
Rosa Luxemburg, reflecting on the lessons of the defeated 1919 Spartacist Uprising, wrote in one of her last articles:
The whole path of socialism, as far as revolutionary struggles are concerned, is paved with sheer defeats. And yet, this same history leads step by step, irresistibly, to the ultimate victory! Where would we be today without those “defeats” from which we have drawn historical experience, knowledge, power, idealism! Today, where we stand directly before the final battle of the proletarian class struggle, we are standing precisely on those defeats, not a one of which we could do without, and each of which is a part of our strength and clarity of purpose.1
While penning those words, Luxemburg must have pondered the fate of the Paris Commune of 1871, history’s first socialist revolution. The failure of the Commune has haunted generations of revolutionary, who have wondered what it could have done differently to survive. Karl Marx believed that any uprising in Paris would fail, but when the Commune was proclaimed, he hailed them for “storming the heavens.” Yet the Commune did not last – it was isolated from the rest of France, hampered by its own indecisive leadership, and crushed by the overwhelming power of the counterrevolution. Due to the proletariat’s immaturity and inexperience, the Commune was premature and its defeat was unavoidable. However, the sacrifices of the Commune were not in vain, the Bolsheviks learned important lessons from its failure and were able to successfully take and hold power.2 Yet was the Commune destined to be just another ‘glorious defeat’ in the annals of revolutionary history, or was victory actually possible? In order for the Commune to prevail, any strategy would have to overcome two problems. First: the weaknesses of the National Guard – the main military force of the Commune – who not only never became an effective military force, but missed their best chance in the revolution’s opening days to take the offensive against the weakened counterrevolutionaries at Versailles. Secondly: there was no clear and decisive leadership in the Commune. One figure who could have overcome both these weaknesses to provide the needed military and political leadership for the Commune was Louis-Auguste Blanqui. Blanqui was the most legendary and uncompromising revolutionary in nineteenth-century France. Blanqui believed that a revolution needed to take the offensive to be victorious. He also possessed the prestige and moral authority capable of rallying both the National Guard and the Commune to his leadership. At best, a victory for the Commune would only be a military triumph. Since Blanqui neither appreciated nor understood the socialist potential of the Commune, its final shape would likely resemble the Jacobin dictatorship of 1793.
The Significance of the Paris Commune
Lasting only 72 days, the Paris Commune was a courageous effort by the oppressed to overturn social, economic and political inequality. In its place, the Commune created new institutions of collective power which broke the existing repressive and bureaucratic state apparatus in favor of a state based on universal suffrage, instant recall of delegates, modest pay for elected officials, and the fusion of legislative and executive functions. It replaced the standing army with the people in arms. The Commune attacked the militarism of French society, putting its faith in the unity of all peoples and internationalism. The Commune fulfilled a number of promises during its short existence: it separated church and state, nationalized church property, instituted free, compulsory, democratic and secular education, made strides toward gender equality, and encouraged the formation of cooperatives in abandoned workshops. The revolutionary principles embodied in the Paris Commune continue to inspire revolutionaries across the world.3
The National Guard and the Seizure of Power
The main military force of the Paris Commune was the National Guard with 340,000 members in March 1871 – nearly the entire able-bodied male population of Paris. The National Guard possessed a long and proud history – its origins lay in 1789 Revolution when it was created by Lafayette as a citizen-militia. According to Robespierre, the National Guard defended the “citadel of the Revolution and the pure and upright citizens who conduct the revolutionary chariot.”4 During the Restoration (1815-1830) and the July Monarchy (1830-1848), the National Guard lost its revolutionary character. When the Second Republic (1848-1851) was proclaimed in 1848, the National Guard was rebuilt with a bourgeois leadership and was used during the June Days to suppress the Parisian proletariat. Under the Second Empire (1851-1870), Napoleon III again allowed the Guard to languish.
However, the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 meant that the National Guard was revived. In August 1871, as the Prussians advanced, the government enrolled most of the Parisian male population into the Guard. As the war turned against France, the National Guard became more and more indispensable to the defense of the capital. Following the devastating French defeat at Sedan in September and the capture of Emperor Napoleon III, a Third Republic was proclaimed. The Republic proceeded to expand the size of the National Guard to 90,000 and now with most of the French Army captured, they were the only organized force capable of defending the besieged capital.
Yet the Republic was frightened of this democratic armed force based among the workers. The National Guard was different than normal armies with their elitist and hierarchical ethos. All officers of the National Guard were elected (except for the government-appointed commander-in-chief) and subject to recall (allowing the battalions to reflect the ever-changing popular mood). Although revolutionary influence was limited in the National Guard, workers were already growing suspicious and hostile to the government due to its greater fear of the armed workers than of the Prussians. Government hostility was compounded by the desperate siege conditions in Paris. The Prussian blockade had cut off food supplies, completely ruined the economy, brought wide-scale unemployment for most of the middle class. Furthermore, the government did little to organize relief efforts since they were hampered by their belief in the principles of economic freedom and, according to Robert Tombs, they were “reluctant to cause public alarm or provoke the disappearances of food stocks underground into a black market. So it introduced a bare minimum of requisition and rationing. Government policy was incoherent and less than efficient. Requisitions and controls brought in piecemeal, often too late.”5 The burden of shortages, price rises, and long queues fell heaviest on working-class families (particularly women).6 During the siege, speculators amassed enormous profits, which only made the populace more receptive to revolutionary demands for price controls and social justice.
Throughout the winter of 1870-1 conditions in Paris deteriorated even further as temperatures dropped to subzero levels. During Christmas, while people in working-class neighborhoods were dying of starvation, the wealthy districts and restaurants held festive celebrations with plenty of food. The Germans made sure Paris was reminded of war by periodical bombardment. By the time the Prussians lifted the siege in March, it was estimated that there were 64,154 deaths. According to Donny Gluckstein: “Workers suffered disproportionately, their death rate being twice that of the upper class.”7 The Republic maintained the National Guard out of necessity, and despite the low pay for Guardsmen, employment in the Guard for families could mean the difference between food on the table or starvation. As the siege progressed, more than 900,000 people became dependent in one form or another on the National Guard.
In January, the Republic concluded an armistice, which not only cost the country a large indemnity (to be paid on the backs of the workers), but surrendered the provinces of Alsace-Lorraine to the Germans. In February, elections to the National Assembly returned a monarchist majority who proceeded to approve the Armistice terms by a vote of 546 to 107. The National Assembly also appointed Adolphe Thiers as the President of the Third Republic. Thiers had a long career serving every French government since the 1830s. Under the Orleanist dynasty, he was Minister of the Interior (and later premier) where he had ruthlessly crushed the Parisian uprising of 1834. He had helped bring down the Second Republic by assisting Louis Bonaparte to attain the throne and became a deputy under during the Second Empire. Although Thiers was an early advocate of war against Prussia, he spoke out against the war when it was already lost. Through careful political maneuvering, Thiers distanced himself from the Government of National Defense when the armistice was signed. Despite Thiers’ service to so many different French governments, he appealed to almost every political faction. Thiers would be responsible for orchestrating the repression and the bloodletting of the Paris Commune. Paris was outraged by this armistice and the elections. They had suffered heavily in the war, only to see the Republic prostrate itself before the invaders instead of rallying the people in arms to fight. The elections also raised the specter of a royalist restoration feared by Red and Republican Paris. In a further blow to national pride, the National Assembly permitted the Germans to parade 30,000 troops through the capital on March 1. The National Guard called for continued resistance to the Germans and reorganized themselves by electing a Central Committee. Massive patriotic demonstrations were held on February 24 to mark the anniversary of the 1848 revolution. Parisians seized arms and ammunition to prepare for a final battle with the Germans. However, the First International, Vigilance Committees and other popular groups in Paris warned the National Guard against provoking a confrontation with the Prussians. Eventually, the Central Committee relented and the popular organizations decided to passively boycott the Germans. Communard participant and historian Pierre-Olivier Lissagaray offers this colorful description of how Germans were greeted when they entered Paris:
they were assailed only by the gibes of guttersnipes. The statues on the Place de la Concorde were veiled in black. Not a shop or cafe was open. No one spoke to them. A silent, mournful crowd glowered at them as if they had been a pest of vermin. A few barbarian officers were permitted a hasty visit to the Louvre. They were isolated as if they had been lepers. When they glumly retired, on March 3, a great bonfire was kindled at the Arc de Triomphe to purify the soil fouled by the invader’s tread. A few prostitutes who had consorted with Prussian officers were beaten, and a cafe which had opened its doors was wrecked. The Central Committee had united all Paris in a great moral victory; even more, it had united it against the government which had inflicted this humiliation.8
Before France signed the treaty, the National Guard and the revolutionaries in Paris were caught in a bind over how to back the war effort without also supporting the government. After the peace treaty was an accomplished fact, that problem was gone and nothing remained to distract the Parisians from confronting the government.
The National Assembly passed two provocative and vindictive decrees that brought antagonisms in Paris to the boiling point. First, the National Assembly moved to Versailles, fearing the insurrectionary mood in Paris. To all Parisians, this was a blow to the prestige of the capital. Secondly, during the war there had been a moratorium on debt repayment, which the National Assembly lifted on March 13. This struck hard both the impoverished working class and small shopkeepers. Lissagaray describes the impact: “Two or three hundred thousand workmen, shopkeepers, model makers, small manufacturers working in their own lodgings, who had spent their little stock of money and could not yet earn any more, all business being at a standstill, were thus thrown upon the tender mercies of the landlord, of hunger and bankruptcy.”9 Now the broad masses of Paris were united against the government in Versailles. Disorder continued to rise in Paris, frightening the bourgeoisie and causing approximately 100,000 of them to leave before the revolution. The National Guard was no longer under government control, their newly appointed commander-in-chief viewed as a royalist and a defeatist.10 Versailles saw the National Guard was now a threat to their authority, property and social order. The National Assembly wanted to preserve order in the capital, but only had 12,000 regular soldiers under their command. Thiers wanted the Guard disarmed, but had to move carefully to avoid provoking an armed confrontation. On March 18, Thiers sent troops into Paris to retake 400 cannons under National Guard control. For the Guard, these guns were symbols of the independent power of Paris and its revolutionary people.11 Initially, everything went according to plan and the soldiers seized the cannons. However, no one thought to bring horses to carry away the heavy weapons. So the soldiers waited, but word spread across Paris that they were being disarmed. The population gathered around the soldiers – who were miserable, demoralized and tired of war. Lissargaray describes how this confrontation led to the outbreak of the revolution:
As in our great days, the women were the first to act. Those of the 18th March, hardened by the siege — they had had a double ration of misery — did not wait for the men. They surrounded the machine guns, apostrophized the sergeant in command of the gun, saying, ‘This is shameful; what are you doing there?’ The soldiers did not answer. Occasionally a non-commissioned officer spoke to them: ‘Come, my good women, get out of the way.’ At the same time a handful of National Guards, proceeding to the post of the Rue Doudeauville, there found two drums that had not been smashed, and beat the rappel. At eight o’clock they numbered 300 officers and guards, who ascended the Boulevard Ornano. They met a platoon of soldiers of the 88th, and, crying, Vive la République! enlisted them. The post of the Rue Dejean also joined them, and the butt-end of their muskets raised, soldiers and guards together marched up to the Rue Muller that leads to the Buttes Montmartre, defended on this side by the men of the 88th. These, seeing their comrades intermingling with the guards, signed to them to advance, that they would let them pass. General Lecomte, catching sight of the signs, had the men replaced by sergents-de-ville, and confined them in the Tower of Solferino, adding, ‘You will get your deserts.’ The sergents-de-ville discharged a few shots, to which the guards replied. Suddenly a large number of National Guards, the butt-end of their muskets up, women and children, appeared on the other flank from the Rue des Rosiers. Lecomte, surrounded, three times gave the order to fire. His men stood still, their arms ordered. The crowd, advancing, fraternized with them, and Lecomte and his officers were arrested.12
After the mutiny, Generals Claude Martin Lecomte and Jacques Léonard Clément-Thomas were executed by their own men (despite efforts by the National Guard to prevent the executions). Those soldiers who did not join the revolutionary crowd escaped from the city and retreated to Versailles. Now the Central Committee of the National Guard was the sovereign power in Paris. However, the exhilaration of revolutionary triumph would prove to be short-lived, as a civil war was about to begin.
The Weakness of the Commune and National Guard
On the morrow of the revolution, Blanquists in the National Guard, such as Émile Duval, argued for an immediate offensive against Versailles. The Blanquist Gaston Da Costa wrote in retrospect, “political and social revolution still lay in the future. And to accomplish it the assembly that had sold us out had to be constrained by force or dissolve…. It would not be by striking it with decrees and proclamations that a breach in the Versailles Assembly would be achieved, but by striking it with cannonballs.”13The Blanquists argued that the counterrevolution had to be militarily defeated before any lasting social change could occur. The chances for a swift Commune victory appeared promising since they possessed a potential military force of nearly 200,000 National Guardsmen.14
According to the historian Alistair Horne, Versailles no longer had many loyal National Guard units under their command: “the ‘reliable’ units of the National Guard in Paris, which under the siege had once numbered between fifty and sixty battalions, could now be reckoned at little more than twenty; compared with some three hundred dissident battalions, now liberally equipped with cannon.”15 Thousands of regular troops were still German POWs, while those remaining to Versailles lacked discipline and there was a danger of them being susceptible to revolutionary propaganda. Despite the National Guard’s disorganization, their enemy was in even worse state and a swift blow could topple them. Instead of going on the attack, the National Guard relinquished their power and called for an election on March 26 to legalize their revolution by electing a commune. On March 30, the Commune abolished conscription and the standing army. With an offensive now ruled out, the Commune began negotiations with Versailles hoping to avoid bloodshed and secure municipal liberties.16 This was a forlorn hope since Thiers and Versailles recognized at the very onset that this conflict was a civil war and only side or the other would triumph. Moderates in both the Commune and the National Assembly made several futile, almost comical, efforts to broker a compromise. The negotiations and the Commune’s indecisiveness gave Thiers valuable time to rearm, organize, and negotiate with the Prussians to release French POWs and bolster his forces. At the beginning of April, Versailles began skirmishing on the outskirts of Paris. The population was roused to a feverish state and was eager to fight. The majority of generals, including the Blanquists Duval and Eudes, supported an offensive sortie to take Versailles. After much hesitation, the Commune launched their first offensive in April, but Versailles was more than ready: “Thiers, having scraped the bottom of the barrel, having brought in Mobiles from all over the provinces and mobilized the gendarmes and ‘Friends of Order’ National Guards [National Guard members loyal to Versailles] escaped from Paris, managed to muster over 60,000 troops at Versailles.”17 By contrast, Lissaragay describes the deplorable state of the National Guard: “They neglected even the most elementary precautions, knew not how to collect artillery, ammunition-wagons or ambulances, forgot to make an order of the day, and left the men for several hours without food in a penetrating fog. Every Federal chose the leader he liked best. Many had no cartridges, and believed the sortie to be a simple demonstration.”18 The National Guard was poorly-led, organized and lost the battle. Now, Versailles besieged Paris, cordoning off the city from the rest of the country as they amassed troops for an assault. If the Commune was to survive, they needed to create a centralized and organized army to challenge Versailles. Potentially, the Commune had a popular army who were willing to fight for a political and social ideal to the last drop of blood. The problem was that this energy could not be channeled into an effective fighting force. However, in two months, the Commune went through five War Delegates who could not overcome the inherent disorganization of the National Guard and implement an agreed-upon strategy. No leadership was forthcoming from the ruling Communal Council who were divided into several competing factions – Jacobins, Blanquists, Internationalists, and Proudhonists. The Blanquists and Jacobins supported tighter security, centralization and an emergency dictatorship to wage war, while the Proudhonist majority (and many Internationalists) opposed and any thought of “Jacobin centralism.” The Commune’s lack of leadership, inconsistent strategy and factionalism all served to benefit Versailles:
Thus, from the day it assumed office, the danger was apparent that the Commune might be overloaded, indeed overwhelmed, by the sheer diversity of desires as represented by so polygenous a multitude of personalities, ideologies, and interests. And there was no obvious leader to guide the multitude. Had Blanqui been there, it might have been quite a different story. But Blanqui was securely in the hands of Thiers, while Delescluze, the only other possible leader, was so ailing that he would have preferred nothing better than to have retired from the scene altogether. Thiers, it now seemed, had at least made two excellent initial calculations; one was the seizure of Blanqui, and the other had been to force the Communards to commit themselves before either their plans or their policy had time to crystallize.19
Following the April victory, Thiers tightening the noose around Paris. The Commune never overcame its weaknesses and broke the siege. In late May, a French Army of 170,000 men moved into Paris and crushed the revolution in a horrendous bloodbath that killed at least 20,000 Communards.
Partisans of the Commune fight to the death during the infamous ‘bloody week’
Louis-Auguste Blanqui
Could the Commune’s fate have been avoided? The presence of the sixty-six-year-old Louis-Auguste Blanqui could have changed everything. Blanqui (1805–1881) was one of the most revered, dedicated, and uncompromising communist revolutionaries of nineteenth-century France. He had participated in five abortive revolutions from 1830 to 1870. Blanqui’s revolutionary strategy was decidedly simple: a secret conspiracy, highly organized in a hierarchical cell structure and trained in the use of arms and the clandestine arts, would rise up on an appointed day and seize political power in Paris. Once the revolutionaries had power, they would establish a transitional dictatorship which would accomplish two things: serve as a police force “of the poor against the rich” and educate the people in the virtues of a new society. Once these twin tasks were completed, the dictatorship would give way to a communist society. Every French government since 1830 had seen fit to lock him up, hoping to silence his uncompromising voice of class war. Despite constant failure and imprisonment, Blanqui emerged from the dungeons every time to continue fighting. Blanqui was mainly a man of action with no coherent theory, but a mishmash of eclectic ideas. Despite his theoretical weaknesses, Blanqui did have a keen grasp of insurrectionary tactics that came from his long days as a Parisian street-fighter. In 1868, Blanqui wrote a treatise on urban warfare, Manual for an Armed Insurrection. Blanqui had a thorough knowledge of the methods of street fighting, understanding the importance of organization: “There must be no more of these tumultuous uprisings of ten thousand isolated heads, acting randomly, in disorder, with no thought of the whole, each in his own corner and according to his own fantasy.”20 Organization, coordination, and concern for the larger picture would replace disorder, randomness, and individualism if a revolutionary insurrection was to prevail. He knew that insurgents who are motivated by an idea can be more than a match for a better-armed adversary: “In the popular ranks…what drives them is enthusiasm, not fear. Superior to the adversary in devotion, they are much more still in intelligence. They have the upper hand over him morally and even physically, by conviction, strength, fertility of resources, promptness of body and spirit, they have both the head and the heart. No troop in the world is the equal of these elite men.”21 Blanqui’s ethic is – if you lack the will to win or hesitate in carrying out what the revolution demands of you, not only will you lose, but you are a traitor to the cause you claim to serve. These lessons were not understood by the Paris Commune. Yet Blanqui’s approach to revolution was voluntaristic – neglecting the role of the masses in their own liberation and placing almost superhuman faith in the ability of arms and organization to succeed, regardless of the objective conditions. He wrote once that “Armament and organization, these are the decisive agencies of progress, the serious means of putting an end to oppression and misery.”22 He believed that due to the unstable contradictions of bourgeois society that revolution could be launched at any time, provided there was a combat organization with a clear plan of battle and the will to win against insurmountable odds can unveil unseen roads to communism. However, Blanqui was not simply a man of action and an insurrectionist, but a symbol. Alain Badiou argued that emancipatory politics is “essentially the politics of the anonymous masses,” it is through proper names such as those of Blanqui where “the ordinary individual discovers glorious, distinctive individuals as the mediation for his or her own individuality, as the proof that he or she can force its finitude. The anonymous action of millions of militants, rebels, fighters, unrepresentable as such, is combined and counted as one in the simple, powerful symbol of the proper name.”23 For members of the ruling class like Alexis de Tocqueville, he was the very personification of the radicalism of the dangerous classes who threatened their property. When de Tocqueville first saw Blanqui, his very appearance “filled me with disgust and horror. His cheeks were pale and faded, his lips white; he looked ill, evil, foul, with a dirty pallor and the appearance of a mouldering corpse… he might have lived in a sewer and just emerged from it.”24 According to the novelist Victor Hugo, Blanqui was “no longer a man, but a sort of lugubrious apparition in which all degrees of hatred born of all degrees of misery seemed to be incarnated.”25Blanqui was a specter whose every word and deed portended the end of order, property, and privilege. Marx recognized that Blanqui was a symbol of terror to the capitalist class and the beacon of hope for the working class: “the proletariat rallies more and more around revolutionary socialism, around communism, for which the bourgeoisie has itself invented the name of Blanqui.”26
Portrait of Louis August Blanqui
The Blanquist Party
During the latter days of the Second Empire, Blanqui’s revolutionary vision and stature attracted many workers and students who formed conspiratorial organizations to bring down the government. The Blanquists launched two failed coup attempts in August and October of 1870. When the Commune was proclaimed, they had members in the National Guard and the Communal Council. They were seemingly well-positioned to play a commanding role in the Commune. So what happened? For one, they lacked the leadership of Blanqui himself who was in one of Thiers’ jails for the duration of the Commune. Yet only a few months before in September and October of 1870, Blanqui had offered “critical support” for the Republic’s war effort in his journal La Patrie en Danger. Blanqui’s support for the Third Republic confused and disoriented his party. According to the Blanquist militant Da Costa argues, “We cannot say this often enough: since the besieging of Paris by the Prussians, the Blanquist party had sent its men into the battalions of the National Guard, and in doing so lost all cohesion…. Blanqui’s cry of ‘the fatherland in danger,’ as meritorious as it was, was also a disintegrating factor for the revolutionary forces it disposed of until then.”27 Blanqui wanted a more vigorous military effort with a levée en masse and the creation of a revolutionary regime like the Jacobins to fight the Prussians. However, the Republic was unwilling and unable to implement these measures, so Blanqui turned against it and participated in a failed coup attempt of October 1870.28 When the coup collapsed, the Republic placed a bounty on his head and had to go into hiding. Eventually, Blanqui was captured by Versailles on March 17, the day before the foundation of the Commune. In a cruel twist of fate, Blanqui missed the revolution which he had worked for decades to achieve and his party was left leaderless at the critical hour. Although the Blanquists held several leadership positions within the Commune and the National Guard, the historian Patrick Hutton says they “did not act as a consolidated interest group.”29 Without Blanqui at the helm, his party was incapable of acting effectively and decisively. The Blanquists failed to convince the Commune to in launch a first strike against Versailles,. They also lost their chance to take military leadership of the Commune during the opening days. The Blanquist general Eudes proposed constructing a revolutionary army led by Blanquist commanders (Duval, Chauviere, Ferre, and himself), but this plan was quashed by the Central Committee of the National Guard.30 Secondly, the Blanquist faction’s proposed emergency measures to fight Versailles were resisted by the Communal Council – who believed these would violate the principles of the revolution and democracy by instituting a one-man dictatorship and Jacobin terror. As the military situation continued to worsen during April, the calls grew louder from many outside the Blanquist ranks to create a Committee of Public Safety – harkening back to its 1793 predecessor which saved the First Republic from foreign invaders and counterrevolutionaries. It was hoped that the success of the original Committee of Public Safety could be repeated. Eventually, a majority on the Communal Council supported the creation of a Committee of Public Safety.31 However, it was not led by capable men who did not use the unlimited powers theoretically at their disposal. Instead, the Committee of Public Safety added to the organizational confusion of the Commune and was unable to prevent the final debacle.
On top of its own organizational difficulties, the Commune had to contend with real threats of subversion and deal with a hostile press. While many Communards believed repressive organs were unnecessary, the Blanquist Raoul Rigault who headed the Communards’ police force knew stern measures were needed to combat the counterrevolution. Rigault was a seemingly unlikely police chief, who began his political life during the Second Empire as a young flamboyant Bohemian and atheist militant in the Parisian student quarter. Yet he managed to expose police informers in the Blanquist organization of the 1860s. Blanqui praised Rigault’s talents: “He is nothing but a gamin, but he makes a first-rate policeman.”32 When Rigault banned four hostile papers on April 18: Le Bien Public, Le Soir, La Cloche, and L’Opinion, his actions were protested in the Communal Council and led to calls for his resignation, but he managed to stay on. Rigault went after suspected counterrevolutionaries such as the clergy and investigated monasteries and churches, believing that they held arms and hidden treasure. However, these repeated searches turned up nothing substantive. Although Rigault possessed a fierce revolutionary drive to do what the situation required, he was viewed by many as a “lazy and conceited, a man who reveled in the perquisites of office without being willing to face the responsibilities… Rigault continued to pass his afternoons in the cafes of the Left Bank, as had long been his custom, and left the bulk of the work to his subordinates.”33 Rigault’s fervor was not shared by the majority of the Commune and there was no structure to utilize him, so his talents were left without effective direction. Rigault and the rest of the Blanquists recognized the fatal weaknesses afflicting the Commune and believed that the imprisoned Blanqui could overcome them and lead the revolution to victory. To that end, Rigault spared no effort to free Blanqui and once declared that: “Without Blanqui, nothing could be done. With him, everything.”34 Blanqui’s prestige extended far beyond the Blanquists, the rest of the Commune viewed him with awe. Initially, he was elected to the Communal Council (in absentia) and there was a motion in the Commune to make him honorary President (instead that honor fell to Charles Beslay).35 After these failures, the Commune negotiated with Versailles to free Blanqui, offering the Archbishop of Paris, their most valuable hostage in exchange. Thiers refused and the Communards made a desperate offer to trade all 74 hostages in exchange for Blanqui. Thiers did not budge. Karl Marx said that for Thiers, it was a wise decision to keep Blanqui under lock and key: “The Commune again and again had offered to exchange the archbishop, and ever so many priests into the bargain, against the single Blanqui, then in the hands of Thiers. Thiers obstinately refused. He knew that with Blanqui he would give to the Commune a head…”36 In the end, Blanqui remained in jail as his comrades were massacred on the streets of Paris. Despite the Blanquists occupying a number of key positions, they were unable to act in a coordinated or decisive manner to shape either the Commune’s military strategy or its political policies. Without Blanqui, no one in his party possessed the same stature to provide the needed leadership and discipline.
The Choice
If Blanqui had managed to avoid arrest on March 17, what would he have done at the Paris Commune? Based on what know, Blanqui would have argued for a first strike against the routed and demoralized forces of Versailles. The brief window of two weeks before Versailles reorganized in early April was the one time when the Commune had a clear military advantage. Marx lamented that the Commune failed to go on the offensive:
If they are defeated only their ‘decency’ will be to blame. They should have marched at once on Versailles, after first Vinoy and then the reactionary section of the Paris National Guard had themselves retired from the battlefield. The right moment was missed because of conscientious scruples. They did not want to start a civil war, as if that mischievous abortion Thiers had not already started the civil war with his attempt to disarm Paris! Second mistake: The Central Committee surrendered its power too soon, to make way for the Commune. Again from a too ‘honourable’ scrupulousness!37
Blanqui knew that at the beginning of an insurrection, it was necessary to take the offensive or risk losing everything. While other Blanquists were ignored when they made the same case to the Commune and the National Guard, they may have listened to Blanqui with his tremendous moral authority. The National Guard did not attack when it had the advantage over a completely disorganized adversary, and the Blanquists were uncoordinated and leaderless. Blanqui’s presence and leadership could have provided the missing link needed to sway the National Guard and lead the Blanquists to launch an immediate offensive which could well have succeeded. There has been endless speculation by historians on whether the Commune could have succeeded considering its own manifold disorganization and the forces arrayed against it and on Blanqui’s potential role in the revolution. Hutton argues that the Blanquist hope in their leaders was “a temptation to fantasy. In clinging to a myth of the Commune’s enduring viability in the face of its obvious failings, the Blanquists passed the frontier into that imaginary land wherein they could fulfill the aspirations of their aesthetic reverie free from the intrusion of harsh realities.”38
However, others beyond the ranks of the Blanquists have also stated that Blanqui could have provided the necessary leadership to overcome the divisions which plagued the Commune. For instance, the Communard Minister of War Gustave-Paul Cluseret who believed that: “If Blanqui were at Paris he might save the Commune. He would have taken the political conduct of affairs into his own hands, and have left me free to devote myself to the military defence of Paris. Accustomed to discipline, he would have disciplined his people, and would have allowed me to discipline mine.”39 The French historian, Maurice Dommanget, author of innumerable works on Blanqui, speculates that his presence at the Commune could have proven decisive: “With his organizational and military abilities, with his lucidity, the prestige that was attached to his name, Blanqui would rapidly have become the leader and the spirit of the insurrection. Jaclard believes that he would have the necessary resolution and sufficient authority to command the march on Versailles on March 19, this would obviously change the face of things.”40 Many Marxists have argued that Blanqui was the natural leader of the Commune. As mentioned above, Marx saw Blanqui as the Commune’s head. The Marxist Victor Serge lamented Blanqui’s absence from Paris: “The misfortune of Blanqui, a prisoner during the Commune, the head of the revolution cut off and preserved in the Chateau du Taureau at the very moment when the Parisian proletariat lacked a real leader, still troubled us as the worst kind of ill luck.”41 While Blanqui had little military experience beyond conspiratorial organization and street fighting, but then again, how much training did Leon Trotsky have when he organized the October Revolution and the Red Army? The Belgian Trotskyist Ernest Mandel says Blanqui was not only “ the greatest French revolutionary of the 19th century” but added:
Everyone, including Karl Marx, considered him the natural leader of the Commune, in which his followers formed a minority around Vaillant. The Paris-based revolutionary government proposed to Thiers that he be freed in exchange for the release of all the Commune’s hostages, including the archbishop of Paris. But Thiers refused, demonstrating the extent to which the French bourgeoisie feared the organisational and leadership capacities of the great revolutionary, and the impact his political gifts could have had on the outcome of the civil war.42
Assuming that Blanqui was able to lead the Commune to victory over Versailles, this is only the beginning of their struggles. Here we enter the realm of pure speculation. A triumphant Commune would have to win over the rest of France. In reality, there were other communes in France in 1871, but they were revolutionary islands surrounded by a hostile countryside and peasantry opposed to the “Reds” and continuation of the war. If the Commune held onto power, they faced a prospect of renewed war with Prussia, which could be even bloodier. They would need to win over enough of the general staff, and although many of the officers may have opposed the Red Revolutionaries, they may have supported a new government committed to doing everything possible to achieve victory. Perhaps, Blanqui’s Commune would become a “French Yenan” – a liberated zone which rallies the people in arms against a foreign invader. Yet the needs of fighting a war would mean that those alternative voices for social change such as radical workers, Proudhonists and Internationalists would likely be drowned out (or perhaps silenced by a new Committee of Public Safety?). It seems unlikely that the Commune’s advanced social ideas would survive the grim trial of war, assuming France prevailed at all. Any victory for a Blanquist-led Commune would not have been a triumph for the socialist aspects of the Commune. Blanqui and his followers saw the Commune as a repetition of the Paris Commune of 1793, and not as the beginning of modern socialist politics. The Blanquists neither appreciated nor understood the socialist potential of the Commune. They failed to recognize the creative aspects of proletarian self-emancipation and mass organization which it represented. Blanquists such as Gaston Da Costa denied any socialist possibility for the Commune:
The insurrection of March 18 was essentially political, republican, patriotic, and, to qualify it with just one epithet, exclusively Jacobin… It is nevertheless impossible to argue that socialist ideas, if not doctrines, were not spoken of within the assembled Commune, but these affirmations remained verbal, platonic, and in any case foreign to the 200,000 rebels who on March 18, 1871, slid cartridges into their rifles in indignation. If they had truly been socialist revolutionaries, which our good bourgeois like to believe, and not indignant Jacobin and patriotic revolutionaries, they would have acted completely differently…. Neither Blanqui, if he would have led us, nor his disciples dreamed of creating this environment in 1871. At that time the Blanquists were the only thing that they could be: Jacobin revolutionaries rising up to defend the threatened republic. The idealist socialists assembled in the minority were nothing but dreamers, without a defined socialist program, and their unfortunate tactics consisted in making the people of Paris and the communes of France believe that they had one.43
While the Commune echoed back to the Jacobins by reviving the revolutionary calendar and creating its own Committee for Public Safety, it also marked the entry of the working class onto the stage of history as an independent actor. In this sense, the Commune was a harbinger of the future. The Blanquists could only commemorate, venerate and honor the revolution of 1871 as a holy relic like they did with the bourgeois revolution of 1789. For socialist revolutionaries such as Franz Mehring, the Commune raised new questions of socialist politics and mass working class organization far different than those of Blanquist conspiracies:
The history of the Paris Commune has become a touchstone of great importance for the question: How should the revolutionary working class organize its tactics and strategy in order to achieve ultimate victory? With the fall of the Commune, the last traditions of the old revolutionary legend have likewise fallen forever; no favorable turn of circumstances, no heroic spirit, no martyrdom can take the place of the proletariat’s clear insight into…the indispensable conditions of its emancipation. What holds for the revolutions that were carried out by minorities, and in the interests of minorities, no longer holds for the proletariat revolution…In the history of the Commune, the germs of this revolution were effectively stifled by the creeping plants that, growing out of the bourgeois revolution of the eighteenth century, overran the revolutionary workers’ movement of the nineteenth century. Missing in the Commune were the firm organization of the proletariat as a class and the fundamental clarity as to its world-historical mission; on these grounds alone it had to succumb.44
For revolutionaries such as Lenin, the many errors and missteps of the Commune – not crushing the counterrevolution, not organizing a disciplined party and army, building an alliance with the peasantry, or taking the commanding heights of the economy – were studied so that they would not be repeated. The example of 1871 enabled the Russian Revolution of 1917 to succeed: “without the lessons and legends derived from the Commune, there would probably have been no successful Bolshevik Revolution of 1917…”45 Lenin had a good reason for dancing in the snow when the Soviet Republic reached its 73rd day and outlasting the Commune.
Although Blanqui and his party did not grasp the Commune’s socialist potential, they do represent a choice that could have won a military victory. Whatever the faults of Blanqui, he understood that revolutionaries must launch a swift offensive to win. If Blanqui was present at the Commune with his leadership, revolutionary will, and moral standing, he would have championed that option.
M.A. Iasilli on what Bolshevik militant Nadezhda Krupskaya can teach us about education and labor.
Krupskaya gives a speech during the Civil War in 1920.
Since researching the stages of national development in the Soviet Union, I came across a very interesting trend that places the female subject front-and-center in Soviet political history. Not only do women play a critical role in the Russian Revolution that brought forth the first socialist experiment in world history, but women are able to enhance their labor and educational agency post-Russian Civil War in ways that propel them into high places. For one, women are key players in the agricultural sector, and become the teachers for future generations of Soviet citizens, using their vocation as a political revitalization agenda. Policies such as eight-week paid family leave and universal access to education are instituted. Yet, they became ingrained among a generation of women who identify as political radicals committed to building a state of collective equality.
Notwithstanding, these developments did not happen in a vacuum. Women took constitutional priority in 1917 and were able to vote in the Constituent Assembly. Beyond that, the Soviet government launched a campaign in the 1920s called Zhenotdel, which aimed at improving the lives of women through education.1 While Zhenotdel was established by Inessa Armand and Alexandra Kollontai, the framework of this movement comes from a long strain of theory written by Nadezhda Krupskaya, Vladimir Lenin’s wife. Her insights into education and labor and ‘how women can help,’ is a crucial contribution to history glossed over by too many.
Male-driven focuses in Soviet history tend to oppress and distort extant historical records of female contribution and thought, as well as their interaction with state-formation and national development in Soviet studies. Likewise, Krupskaya is often portrayed as ‘the wife caught in the middle’ of the affair drama between Lenin and his mistress, Inessa Armand. Krupskaya has also suffered in Soviet historiography because of rather splashy attention placed on women like Alexandra Kollontai who — while serving as the Commissar of Social Welfare — wrote a lot about sex, which has naturally attracted more intrigue from scholars and readers.
Krupskaya was a radical revolutionary whose ideas on education and labor were monumental in Soviet state formation. While serving as one of the head editors of Iskra (translation, “Spark”), she was appointed the secretary of the publishing organization and worked tirelessly with her husband to ensure the publication was thorough and prompt in terms of distribution and engaging clarity. This position fit her well, as Iskra dealt primarily with mobilizing and educating activists and workers on the socialist movement happening in Russia. The publication would be one of the most marked variables in consolidating and directing the revolution. Krupskaya was able to utilize her specialization in education to propel her activism and later contributions to Soviet policymaking. Her political work was a proven success, as she was appointed to the position of Deputy Minister of Education in 1929 and served until her death in 1939.
Generally speaking, my hope is that this conversation brings additional inquiry into the subject of Soviet women, more broadly, while also revitalizing Krupskaya as a founding mother and leading voice in determining the political culture of Soviet civic life.
What seems most prescient is Krupskaya’s view on social relations, power, women, and labor. In her philosophy, Krupskaya recognizes how a lack of class consciousness can lead to an apolitical labor force with an apathy toward civic engagement. In fact, Krupskaya places education at the center of all these important matters; her theories on creating a civically engaged culture revolves around a public and private merging — a polytechnic process that engages dialectical materialism and vocation. This is historically relevant since the Soviet Union had been in a unique stage of state-formation where the threat of Western capitalist subversion was pervasive, and liberal compromise seemed imminent from provisional government sympathizers.
This should prompt thinking on how Krupskaya’s underestimated history can help us in today’s political battles. In the post-Janus age, workers are mobilizing in massive numbers to ensure they maintain viability and rights within the professional structures they operate in. Teachers, in fact, are leading the charge by becoming more political inside and outside the workplace to counter forces of privatization. This includes demonstrating for fair pay and the right to strike but also advocating better quality of education for their students. The recent movements in West Virginia, Arizona, Kentucky, etc., perfectly demonstrates this.
But the political and historical significance should be worth elaborating; teachers have historically been a leading voice for political change and continue to be in that effort — and this is a good thing for building connections within communities and with institutions.
Krupskaya’s writings can teach us a lot in terms of enhancing modern civic engagement along with encouraging curiosity for workplace politics. Public and private merging had mainly been a theory applied to women and youth. What makes this such a powerful notion is that it moves beyond the typical liberal “glass ceiling” rhetoric that tends to isolate women (and other marginalized groups) in a capitalist framework.
Mothers can still be mothers. She goes on to say:
We should try to link our personal lives with the cause for which we struggle. . . One has to know how to merge[emphasis added] one’s life with the life of society. I once heard a woman addressing her work-mates say: ‘Comrades working women, you should remember that once you join the Party you have to give up husband and children.’ Of course, this is not the approach to the question. It is not a matter of neglecting husband and children, but of training the children to become fighters for [socialism]. . . The fact of this merging, the fact that the common cause of all working people becomes a personal matter, makes personal life richer.2
This perspective reflects the notion of “praxis” as elaborated by Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed: ‘Through the tangible experience of struggle, the individual develops a keen awareness of their condition and overcomes colonization within the mind.’ This “liberation” brings forth a reexamined (and enlightened) sense of self, but one that is tied to the betterment of society. Furthermore, Krupskaya addresses her audience by emphasizing the training of children. She compels the future to see youth as the most valued recipients of her future solutions in education, to inspire them, and to bring awareness to the “gap” that exists between their personal lives and “that of society.”3
Contemporary liberals argue that women who are single mothers must often consider individualist pursuits that fall within the “American Dream” myth, ‘Get rich! No matter the cost!’. Though, as Nicole Aschoff points out in The New Prophets of Capital, all too often, this neoliberal narrative tends to further marginalize working-class single mothers from breaking out of capitalism and achieving the kind of social mobility that benefits them, their families, and their community. She states, “Today’s new, elite storytellers present practical solutions to society’s problems that can be found in. . . profit-driven structures of production and consumption.” In other words, women must accept the parameters placed around their agency by market-based forces and seek to modify their personal lives merely within those structures, without seeking to change capitalism itself. However, being conscious of the social class dilemma allows those dominated by the forces of capitalism to break out of the chains of material culture. Krupskaya emphasizes this constantly.
A Polytechnic Education
So how does education sit in the center of this? Lately, calls have been made to reform education to include programs like work-preparedness for higher education and the addition of vocational schools to accommodate more technically-inclined students. For Krupskaya, education is both ideological and technical. Children do not learn simply from a curriculum, but also acquire knowledge by exploring the world around them through work. One could observe how this reflects Plato’s classical theory of eudaimonia, where experience builds character and, in turn, brings forth the fulfillment of happiness. But Krupskaya’s theory is rather in the vein of Robert Owen’s utopian theory of nineteenth-century communal education. Like Owen, Krupskaya believed that children will absorb and mimic their elders as they watched them work and would gradually begin to assist as they grew older. This kind of observational behavior is imperative for cognitive development.
Understanding how vocation intersects with standardized pedagogy (as we know it) upends the traditional educational process and prompts new mechanisms of learning. It also urges parents to be part of their children’s education and children to eventually grapple with the idea of social class. This is why she emphasized “polytechnics.” Krupskaya states,
The difference between polytechnical and vocational schools is that the former’s centre of gravity is in the comprehension of the processes of labour, in development of an ability to combine theory with practice, to understand the interdependency of certain phenomena, whereas in vocational school the centre of gravity is the acquisition by pupils of working skills.4
Work-preparedness, henceforth, is fixed with a comprehensive education in both political awareness and technical practice.
‘Woman, learn to read and write! – Oh, Mother! If you were literate, you could help me!’ A poster by Elizaveta Kruglikova advocating female literacy, 1923.
In 1923, Krupskaya helped commission a campaign called Down With Illiteracy!. Her push for national education reform catalyzed government programs and nation-wide propaganda to help move her initiative along. The long-term effects would appear groundbreaking, as the program resulted in over 60 million adults being taught to read and write between 1920 and 1940. This work is what led to her being appointed to the position of Deputy Minister of Education.5
Long-term data illustrates that 65% of Soviet women in 1960 were serving as teachers, university graduate assistants, librarians, and cultural education workers. Wages for teachers gradually increased in 1932 across the board, and workers and peasants began enrolling in pedagogical colleges, thus, increasing their status in society. Also, the growth in educational and professional attainment meant college-ready women on collective farms could achieve an urban education, an affirmative action goal of the state. 6
Krupskaya specifically believed women should carry out mobilization tactics among other women workers and peasants who were unable to conceive class consciousness through a means of education. In fact, through the aggressive implementation of Krupskaya’s re-education theories and writings concerning labor productivity, women began commanding respect within the agricultural space and other sectors of the economy. 7
Most would argue that capitalism historically produced a greater share of equality, across categories of race and gender. However, in the 1940s, the contrary was true. For instance, 15% of Soviet women in 1941 were engineers, as opposed to 1.2% of women in the United States in 1950. Another data point illustrates how 15% of Soviet women were lawyers in 1941 as opposed to 3.5% in the United States during 1950. Soviet women and American women in both 1941 and 1950 share a significant presence in the teaching profession with Soviet women obtaining almost 50% of teaching positions. 8
Not only were these reforms meant for the educational and professional advancement of individual women, but also to help bolster the goals of the greater community. These programs helped in fulfilling state-wide goals that led to industrialization, which had been lacking under the previous Tsarist regime. Not to mention, it also paved the way for a stronger institutionalization of Soviet governance and identity. Women had been at the center of these efforts and were consequential actors in bringing about such change, even during the more conservative years of the late 30s and 40s.
Building Socialism Through Building Community
Aspirations for the future encompassed collective goals of building the socialist state in romantic ways that sometimes seemed quixotic, but always found the individual possessed with personal ambitions to help achieve goals larger than themselves. Through memoirs, we can discover that passions of romance and self-gratification delayed for determination to build an idealistic future. Merging was a socio-cultural process as well. In that, it meant engaging in rhetorical and practical methods to achieve knowledge of humanity. For example, often times immigrant students teamed up with Soviet students to fully grasp new academics and understand Soviet culture in greater depth.9 Thus, merging becomes the catalyst that drives socialist political culture forward for the Soviet Union.
In an increasingly atomized society, the idea of merging assists in mitigating the alienation that manifests within unbridled capitalism. This should teach us an invaluable lesson about some of the goals of socialism, broadly. More so, learning about how socialism built a pedagogy that harnessed community and employed political introspection for the sake of enriching labor capacities is beneficial in today’s late-stage capitalism. There is a dual motivation in education, as taught by Krupskaya — one residing in the ‘awareness of class consciousness and the other concerning ‘activism or civic engagement’ en masse, a public and private merging. This merging as outlined by Krupskaya is a method that can result in the advancement of those most alienated in society today, as women’s contributions in the Soviet Union transcended every application of the social process.
The system described here was not always perfect. Certainly, the Soviet Union experienced many tumultuous periods, especially seen in Stalin’s consolidation of power. These occurrences are well documented in a spate of research that is most common. The point of this piece, however, is to refrain from exhausting the scholarly consensus in liberal discourse that can sometimes oppress the progressive nuances in Soviet history. Every nation’s history contains periods of injustice. Of course, these moments cannot be overlooked. Yet, it is also noted that Russian history and culture have suffered greatly from the perennial Cold War polemic, Communism’s shadow, and Russophobic attitudes in the West. All of which have hampered a great amount of scholarly exploration that deserves greater attention, and perhaps, recognition. No one need not look beyond Edward Said’s insight into the patronization of Eastern identities by Western superiority to understand this simple defense.
At the bare minimum, therefore, I want to demonstrate how education and labor can coexist at the center of society and drive some of the most transformative social change the world has ever seen. And that can come from any determined society seeking to strengthen the bonds of community.
Jean Allen reviews L.A. Kauffman’s Direct Action, a history of the protest movements that filled the gap between the New Left and the modern left that are often ignored and forgotten. Allen argues that these movements cannot be understood strictly in terms of their theory, but by grasping the realities that they faced as organizers.
For those of us on the left, the last year has brought a series of strange emotions. We have felt fear at the surge of nationalism, anger at the further retrenching of austerity policies, at the possibility of a war, at the possibility of more deportations, less welfare, a destruction of the environment and of the people. But the last year has also brought an unexpected amount of hope: organizing efforts have begun to come together in an inspiring way, and despite the disappointments of the Sanders campaign, this year has seen what the media is constantly calling the “revival of socialism”.
This is not fully accurate, since we have not seen just the revival of a homogeneous single ‘socialism’. What we have instead seen is the revival of a massive number of competing ‘socialisms’. To quote Endnotes:
One becomes a communist or an anarchist on the basis of the particular thread out of which one weaves one’s banner (and today one often flies these flags, not on the basis of a heartfelt identity, but rather due to the contingencies of friendship). However, in raising whatever banner, revolutionaries fail to see the limits to which the groups they revere were actually responding — that is, precisely what made them a minority formation. Revolutionaries get lost in history, defining themselves by reference to a context of struggle that has no present-day correlate. They draw lines in sand which is no longer there.
That is, the revival of socialism has not just come in the form of a new project; because that project coexists with the rebirth of a dozen old socialisms. It is in this environment that the publishing of L.A. Kauffman’s Direct Action is of particular importance. Because of all the radical histories revived, all of the ‘red threads’ of history which are being picked up, the one radical history which is almost universally derided is the one we immediately came from. This is not accidental: the rise of idiosyncratic leftist sects has happened precisely because of these escapes to the past promise an easy fix to the boring and difficult work of organizing.
This illusion, that the issues of the left have entirely to do with the annoyances of consensus decision making, affinity groups, or spokes councils, and that we could fix them by merely accepting some superior organizational form—or even worse, some obscure historiography—is idealistic crankism at its worst. Yet that idealism has had real effects: the disdain to which the newest generation of leftists have towards many of the struggles from the generation before them, cherry-picking specific movements they like, presuming that the period between the Vietnam War protests and Occupy was a vacuum of radicalism in which very little of value occurred.
Direct Action is a massively ambitious text, aimed at showing the origins and development of strategies and tactics we’ve come to see as the norm and the ways these tactics connected movements we have previously seen as separate. As far as I am aware, it is one of the first texts to deal with this topic in such a systematic way and, for all its flaws, it needs to be lauded. Without texts which contextualize our tactics and strategies, we are left with a kind of idealized history of struggle where practices and movements emerge from the ether. Without knowing the ways that past movements interacted and connected, we are left relearning the past and projecting present biases onto our forebears. We need work like this to illuminate our real history.
The text begins with what is simultaneously an obscure event and one of the largest mobilizations in American history, the May Day protests of the early 1970s. Mobilized to stop the Vietnam War, the movement was mostly composed of counter-cultural hippies and former members of the student movement. While there was some participation from the ‘Old Left’, the protest was most notable as the gathering ground of the white elements of the (then) ‘New Left’. This mobilization was met with escalated violence, as President Nixon brought in the National Guard, the Marines, and even sent in tanks and armored vehicles to oppose a series of long-haired free lovers.
The 1971 May Day protests are a good point to start a text like this, as it comes at the end of a long period in leftist organizing and the beginning of another period—fragmented both in fact and in self-understanding. There was a push towards decentralization and against the idea of mass organization itself, which had been a major goal through the 60s. Shortly before the event, a Bay Area group wrote a text which would come to define the struggles of the 70s and 80s: Anti-Mass. In Anti-Mass, the fragmentation of the Left’s unitary goals was a positive rather than a negative, an aspect of the subversion of mass society and the building of something else.
The book illustrated the mood of the times, which brings us back to the opposition between ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ histories: the period from the 70s to now is often viewed as merely a series of fragmented movements each aimed at supporting its own particular form of identity politics. These advocates for unity often call for some form of labor universalism, where a reborn union movement allows for a way out of the dismal situation we have now. This is another example of ‘ideal history’: it sees current affairs merely as a series of contemporaneous mistakes in theory, rather than as a situation that has evolved over a generation of organizing. In doing this, this workerist position understates both the difficulty of rebuilding a radical labor movement and the reasons that these identity movements had for working on their own.
Direct Action shows why women, people of color, and gay/lesbian people felt the need to work on their own through this period. For one, many of these movements had a patronizing view of people of color. The Anti-Nuclear Movement’s own guidebooks suggested that the reason for their movement’s blinding whiteness was due to the ignorance of black people of the importance of anti-militarism and the possibilities of nuclear warfare. These patronizing attitudes continued on despite the nominal anti-racism of 80s activism, with white organizations infamously requesting the assistance of black or Latino organizations with actions after they had already been planned.
The status of women within these movements was yet more circumspect. Even in the growing galaxy of black and Latino organizations, women were often treated as mere grunts, if not as sexual objects. In that context, the creation of groups such as the Combahee River Collective made perfect sense. For all the attacks on the ‘particularism’ of the period, what can be seen with a deeper look is not a shallow desire for fragmentation but real disagreements: between the ‘universal’ white man and the difference in his shadow, between the possibilities of industrial growth and the critique of its environmental costs. These differences were—and are—real, and the attempt to do away with them by pretending that they are the creations of mistaken theorists is utterly foolhardy.
Going beyond a discussion of what motivated the identitarian turn, Direct Action turns to discussing the strategies and tactics which came out of—and benefited from—this activist landscape. Affinity groups, once an insurrectionary form used to organize in a way which avoided police infiltration, turned into a way to utilize the diversity of radical spaces. Blockades, which were a major aspect of the early anti-nuclear movement as a nonviolent tactic, were refined through the Earth First! and anti-globalization years, becoming a major tactic of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Kauffman’s book shows one other major theme: the transition of the protest form from being a tactic used in certain situations to being a strategy in and of itself. The major battles of the New Left period occurred in marches and protests, and as early as 1980 there were questions of “who we were doing this for”. This question, asked during a feminist protest of the Pentagon, was answered in a way that would become common through the period into now: “We were doing it for ourselves”. With the slow surrender of the left’s goal of creating a counter-culture—and the slide of the left’s counter-cultural elements into subcultural ones)—this explanation increasingly represented a surrender, an acceptance that the Left was merely one subculture among many. As the 70s turned to the 80s, the Left’s knee-jerk willingness to protest often led it into costly clashes with the police, clashes which would strain the already rough relationship it had with non-white movements.
This focus on the general development of strategies and tactics allows Kauffman to avoid the usual problems of histories of this era, which often replicate the perceived fractured nature of the left by focusing on a single group or cause. This tends to lead to major gaps or abrupt stops when a group is dismantled or a cause takes a lower priority. However, there was far more continuity than fragmentation on the individual level, with the same people moving from cause to cause, developing their tactics with an aim towards building a movement which had a space not just for socialism but for feminism, anti-racism, and LGBT issues.
While they did not succeed, this is no reason to cast this whole generation of radicalism into darkness to not be looked upon or learned from. Despite and because of its failure, the New Left still has many lessons to teach us. These lessons cannot be imparted if we view the period as merely a series of failed experiments or through a series of limited intellectual perspectives. We need to expand our lens both within these groups by looking at them as something more than the struggles of a few individual leaders and intellectuals; and across these groups to understand that the New Left was not the fractured mess it is often depicted, but was rather a continuous period of a group of people who fought for a variety of causes.
Kauffman’s willingness to connect and analyze these ‘gaps’ in our knowledge has its flaws but is a crucial first step towards understanding the period. Direct Action’s flaws just show that we need to look deeper into this period, not just at the level of individual academics studying the thought of individual organizations or intellectuals, but analyzing the continuity between these groups across the whole spectrum of the period.
Any text which strives for greatness is inevitably going to be disappointing to some degree: disappointment comes from the ambition of a text more often than any specific failings. The ambition and realization at the center of Kaufman’s Direct Action—that there is a whole history of the left that has gone without systemic analysis—could never be achieved in any one book, let alone one that’s a lean 256 pages long. The thing that Direct Action left me wishing for in the end was a longer and more comprehensive text. In this, Kauffman achieves what she set out for: piquing interest in a period that remains understudied.
There are points where the gaps are particularly painful, though. For a text that seeks to show that even in the ‘gap years’ between movements there was still organizing being done by a series of people aiming at a fuller emancipatory project, it is painfully telling that the ten years between the anti-Iraq War protests and Occupy pass by in almost as many pages. Even if we accept that nothing was really going on, that ‘nothing’ is still massively significant.
As someone who came into activism at the end of the Bush years, you could feel the effects of that ‘nothing’ everywhere you went. I distinctly remember an utterly normal meeting where my college group was discussing absolutely abstract questions where, nonetheless, fully half of the older members felt the need to take their SIM cards out of their phones for fear of people listening in. Yes, this came partially out of the sense of self-importance activists usually have—but it also came from a paranoia kindled by the very real repression activists suffered during the Bush years. Groups did multiple things to try to ‘get around’ this, from the sense of paranoia I encountered in my time on the student left to attempts to moderate—either in fact or in a false way—through the use of front groups. Or they embraced this creeping sense of nihilism; the 90s and 00s were the heydays of the post-left. Regardless of the individual choices of groups, the repression of the Bush-era worked: both at the level of the base—in that we’re starting from essentially zero with contemporary attempts to organize—and at the level of the superstructure—where leftists are working from an utterly fragmented place. Even in the case of this ‘nothing’ that was the decade between September 11th, 2001 and September 17th, 2011, there are still things we can learn.
Although the text is titled Direct Action and is specifically about the tactics developed around direct actions, the book also opens up a massive space. Just as the direct action movements of the 70s-00s are under-analyzed, the mutual aid and cooperative movements of the same period receive no mention virtually anywhere—only rare sideways glances at them in texts not devoted to the topic. In David Graeber’s book of the same name, Graeber talks about the long and dramatic history of radical spaces and venues in New York City and their attempts to stay open in a rapidly gentrifying city. This history has had real effects but has been virtually destroyed through activist turnover and lack of interest. Nearly every city in the Northeastern United States has some form of a community center which is usually known by locals as a punk venue, and nearly every one of these community centers has either a radical history or is currently staffed by radicals. Yet if you asked those radicals about the history of the center, you can rarely get a straightforward answer. The same can be said for community gardens, a major focus for environmentally-focused groups in the 80s that could lead to conflicts with the nominal landowners or with developers. Those gardens that survived being transformed into luxury apartments are still with us today, and yet the radical history of these spaces we walk by day after day barely receives thought—let alone books.
The text also brings up another fault, this time not so much with the book itself as with the entirety of our studies of the New Left. The amount of nitty-gritty archival work done of these organizations is severely lacking, which is a large part of why the studies of these groups tend to come across as being relatively shallow. Compared to the movements of the last century, which have been sifted through and worked over, the small details of the decision-making processes of these groups are rarely explored—outside of hyper-specific texts like Graeber’s work of the same name. This kind of work is of relatively massive import: I would argue that archiving and secondary analysis of that archiving is one of the most important things that we can do on the left today. These little details are more than just trivia—they’re the foundation of actually building a plausible sense of what we can learn from these movements—how we can replicate the things that worked and avoid the things that didn’t. It’s literally impossible to ask this of the text without it transforming into a 5000-page compendium, but it brings up this frustration never the less.
This complete lack of history cannot be disconnected from—on the one hand—the short lifespans of your average activist organization, and—on the other—the consistent repression that these groups have faced. This lack of history still haunts us. When I said that the Left was starting from zero, that was only halfway right: we are now starting now from less than zero from the Bush years. While I believe the era of activism Direct Action covers has come to a close, we are still working with the tactics inherited from the period. Unlike the period from the 90s to the 00s, we are recycling these tactics without knowing their history.
Precisely because of this, Direct Action is an excellent start at surfacing a deeply under-analyzed history. It succeeds precisely in what it meant to do, with even the frustrations further cementing its importance. At its core, it asks us to direct our attention away from the imagined histories which can so easily be used to bracket the past and to look towards a real history with many lessons yet to give. For that, it deserves none but the highest praise.
Ira Pollock examines the difficulties of left electoral strategy regarding the question of imperialism and affirms the importance of upholding strong anti-imperialist principles in electoral campaigns. Otherwise, the left itself can become an arm of the imperialist state.
The Left on Elections
The issue of electoral politics has long divided the Left. In contemporary discourse, the most visible dispute concerns the proper strategy for conducting campaigns. Within the Democratic Party, centrists and left-leaners disagree over the best way to win elections: should the party press leftward and focus on working-class struggles, or appeal to a moderate base, win over fence-sitting independents, and snag Republican defectors? For them, it’s largely a matter of strategy.
As you move to its left fringes and beyond the Democratic Party, the conflict morphs into a question of what core principles leftists should compromise to take state power. For instance, one debate within the ranks of DSA hinges on whether the organization should require endorsees to take a hard stance against the occupation of Palestine. In other words, it’s a question of strategy versus principles.
But all of this is only the tip of the iceberg. To even accept the terms of these debates, one must hold a matrix of positions that are by no means orthodoxy on the Left. Many socialists balk at the prospect of spending limited capacity on elections in the first place. For these leftists, to participate in electoral politics is to already lose the struggle for working-class power, to engage with it on the wrong terrain.
Sophia Burns, an incisive theorist and practitioner of revolutionary politics, offers a compelling articulation of why “building institutions outside of the state and against it offers a more effective road to social power than protests and elections.” The issue cuts deeper than just the most effective way to build power. It concerns whether it’s even possible for the working class to take power through elections. Burns’s is one of the more thoughtful accounts of why it isn’t, but some leftists are less sophisticated in their analysis.
Consider the circulation on social media of the following Rosa Luxemburg quote, taken radically out of context to justify electoral abstentionism:
“The entry of a socialist into a bourgeois government is not, as it is thought, a partial conquest of the bourgeois state by the socialists, but a partial conquest of the socialist party by the bourgeois state.”
Once you get this far left, the electoral debate is no longer one of strategy or principle, but one of power and agency. The crux of the question boils down to this: can proletarian agency be developed through electoral campaigns? That is, can the working class, broadly defined, build power through elections?
Questions of Agency
The first part of the electoral question asks whether an elected official can actually make their own decisions while embedded within the state apparatus. Once elected, do the parameters of the game so determine and channel the actions of participants that their discretion vanishes? Do elected officials actually wield state power or are they simply interchangeable cogs in the state machinery? An optimistic answer to this question is a premise of electoral work, an assumption baked into the whole project.
The second question is whether an elected official can exercise specifically proletarian agency through the state. Can they exercise that agency as a proxy for the working class and oppressed? Or has their social position changed such that any action they take serves some facet of capital or empire? For electoral campaigns to build proletarian agency, they must be able to partially capture the state by embedding a proletarian agent (the elected official) within it and build proletarian power enough outside the state to hold the elected official accountable to the interests of the working class. The only alternative is to bank on the ongoing moral fortitude of the candidate. So, can the agency of elected officials be proletarian in nature? Socialist electoral politics presupposes an affirmative answer to this question.
Though it is by no means a given, let’s grant that elected officials maintain their agency and that they can act as agents of the proletariat. What new dynamic do they acquire by wielding state power? One thing is certain: by capturing a piece of the state, the power of a leftist acquires a new, imperialist dimension.
Alternative Practice
Returning to Burns’s point concerning alternatives to electoral politics, her preferred strategy is called base building. This approach to building power is gaining steam on the Left. DSA Refoundation Caucus explains base building as follows:
Base building means constructing stable institutions that can bind our base together [by] building roots in the day-to-day fights of the broadest layer of the working class and oppressed…This means far more than just being able to move people to the polls. It means being able to move entire workplaces, neighborhoods, and campuses into fights on a day-to-day basis.
Refoundation does not explicitly oppose electoral politics but does favor an approach that builds working-class power independent of elected officials and outside state channels.
Sophia Burns identifies base building as one of four tendencies on the Left. These tendencies are 1) government socialists, 2) protest militants, 3) expressive hobbyists, and 4) base builders. These tendencies generally coexist and overlap within the same organization, but the schema is useful; it roughly coincides with different analyses of power and how to build proletarian agency. Electoral politics is the bread-and-butter of government socialists. It is, almost by definition, what they do.
Anti-imperialism exists within all of these tendencies. A promising example of such work within the base-building paradigm is the Tech Workers Coalition and its efforts to purge tech companies of Pentagon and ICE contracts. Another compelling example, one that incorporates aspects of both protest militancy and base building, was the 2008 dockworkers strikes, a show of structural power to demand an end to the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
Among these four tendencies, government socialism is unique in regards to the question of imperialism. Unlike the other three, successful government socialism, at least at the national level, endows its practitioners with an imperialist dimension to their agency. It gives them a seat at the table of global empire. Without great care, electoral work can turn leftists into actual, practicing imperialists.
Agency of Empire
Imperialism isn’t, strictly speaking, a capitalist endeavor. Capitalism often drives empire, but imperialist domination is not unique to capitalism; it is unique to statehood. The logic of capital accumulation and the logic of imperial expansion are often intertwined, though not identical. States of all types, capitalist and non-capitalist alike, have engaged in modern projects of imperialism. Accordingly, being anti-capitalist doesn’t necessarily entail being anti-imperialist. However, being a socialist does.
Socialism is intrinsically anti-imperialist because it is intrinsically internationalist. Marx declared “Workers of the world unite,” not just workers in the core of empire. The proletariat can’t be free as long as it is under the yoke of the bourgeoisie or of an imperial oppressor. Accordingly, when playing the game of state entryism, being anti-capitalist isn’t enough. We must oppose empire if we are to sit at its helm.
By entering into the state apparatus, a candidate necessarily takes on a role in the operations of Empire. A federal politician must regularly decide how the world’s primary imperialist state acts on the global stage. From controlling military spending to authorizing new presidential war-making powers, it’s part of the job to make decisions with an intrinsic imperial dynamic. Nowhere else does a successful campaign endow leftists with the power to serve as architects of empire. Dockworkers can block shipments of munitions. Tech workers can pressure their employers to drop Pentagon contracts. In these spaces, leftists can be anti-imperialists, but they can’t accidentally take the reigns of empire and wage imperialist wars. When candidates in national campaigns succeed, they do gain this power. Where a weak commitment to internationalist principles might make poor socialists of other leftists, it makes active imperialists of elected officials.
Rules for Electoral Practice in the Core of Empire
To qualify for an endorsement from a leftist organization such as DSA, a candidate in a U.S. election should commit to internationalist principles. Particularly at the federal level, where a successful candidates agency can acquire an imperial dimension, this should be the top priority. Leftists can organize for other priorities at other levels of government and through alternative avenues without directly confronting the question of empire. At the federal level, the question is front and center.
At a bare minimum, when vetting potential national candidates, organizers should ask for an express commitment to anti-imperialism and to opposing U.S. wars. Any federal-level candidate that declines to make such a commitment should be disqualified from endorsement considerations.
A second level of vetting should concern specific issues. Does the candidate support eliminating military aid to Israel until it ends the occupation of Palestine? Does the candidate support legislation to end U.S. involvement in the Saudi war on Yemen? Does the candidate support a drastic reduction in military spending? Does the candidate support revoking the president’s authorization to wage the War on Terror indefinitely? For national-level candidates, the answers to these questions should be weighted at least as heavily as to those concerning domestic issues such as Medicare for All and housing.
Finally, and this is good practice for sub-national candidates and on domestic issues as well, consult the candidate’s record (if they have one). For federal candidates, closely scrutinize their record on foreign policy. Did they vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq? Have they voted to fund the occupation on an ongoing basis? Have they voted to increase the military budget? Did they vote in favor of a resolution to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital? This record, if it exists, should be weighted more heavily than the candidates professed values. A federal candidate that has consistently supported military adventures, an expanded Pentagon budget, colonial repression overseas, or any number of other imperialist projects, should not receive leftist support regardless of their stated principles or credentials on domestic issues.
These guidelines should be a bare minimum for socialists practicing electoral politics in the heart of Empire. We cannot sacrifice the lives and dignity of those outside our borders for the sake of domestic priorities. Electoral socialists are playing with fire; they run the unique risk of becoming imperialists by virtue of their success. They must take this danger seriously. Medicare for All in the U.S. is not a victory if we must wage genocide in the Middle East to get it. Let’s not burn the world down to warm our home.
What political lessons can be learned from the failed Bavarian Soviet Republic? Alexander Gallus takes a deep dive into the history of this famous moment from the German workers’ movement and aims to draw contemporary lessons for revolutionary Marxist politics.
As World War I came to an end, it became clear, contrary to the Kaiser’s war propaganda, that Germany was losing and would concede losses to the Allies. Changes would come and were already coming to Germany. However, the Social-Democratic Party of Germany, which had irresponsibly betrayed its foundational principles to overthrow capitalism and its state order, by supporting the Kaiser’s war, became the main political benefactor of the eventual German Revolution. Discontent and horror at the practical dictatorship of the wartime Army were widespread, and a multiplicitous opposition within the SPD split into an Independent Socialist Party, or USPD. While still small in 1917 at its inception, it was to gain a third of all branches from the SPD within three years. In Bavaria, the Independent Socialists became famous for agitating the January Munitions strike in which 8,000 workers organized in an attempt to thwart military production.
While the USPD had many tendencies and was not certain in its political mission, it became a politically relevant party that genuinely threatened the SPD from the left. While the senseless war which had already been lost continued, zealous Generals still demanded soldiers to fight and give their lives for the pride of the nation. In response to the Navy’s order on October 24th to take to high seas once more, the rebellion of sailors in northern Germany to take over the Kiel navy base instigated what was to become the German ‘November Revolution’. Counterintuitively, it was in conservative Bavaria where, with the SPD dominating the USPD’s smallest local, Germany’s first monarchy was overthrown. Beginning at the expansive Theresienwiese and site of the yearly Oktoberfest, the revolutionary procession of November 7th was planned and instigated by the local offshoot of the SPD, the Independent Socialists, and radicals around Eisner. Having been a powerful leader of the Social-Democratic Party before and at the outset of the war, Eisner fell out with the right-wing leadership of the party over his war-opposition and was labeled a left-wing detractor, later to join the founding congress of the USPD.
The Bavarian revolution spanned from November 1918 to May 1919.
USPD election poster
Kurt Eisner had just been released from Stadelheim prison a few days ago. It had been half a year that he had endured in the Bavarian King’s jails for supporting the January Munitions strike. Many of his incarcerated comrades had not. Clara Zetkin and Eisner had mourned deeply over their friend Sonja Lerch’s suicide inside the prison, that fiery woman whom the bourgeois press called the Russian ‘steppe fury’ and understood that “she roused the workers stronger than Eisner”. (Gerstenberger, pg. 295) Every day since the sailor’s mutiny a week before, the tension and excitement among Munich’s people and socialists rose as the size of the demonstrations grew. Two nights ago Eisner felt compelled to send the crowd home, promising more within ’48 hours’. Now here he was, standing in the sunlight under the towering Bavaria statue, looking over the gathering on the Theresienwiese. There were significantly more people assembled here today, by all estimates 10%-20% of Munich’s population.
Auer, the local SPD leader, had been compelled by his members to organize and attend this anti-war and hunger protest on November 7th, assuring the Imperial Minister of the Interior that he would maintain control of the situation. As ever more people came to listen to the speakers it quickly became clear that most had no time to spare for Auer’s empty promises of a future peace and distant socialism, and that the SPD orderlies had no control over the free movement of the crowds. Sailors, soldiers on leave, as well as soldiers who simply left their garrisons, came armed and mixed with the workers. It was Eisner who felt the mood of the crowd and followed it. A soldier’s call to his peers of “All soldiers to Eisner!” is dutifully followed as Eisner’s speaker section fills up. (Schmolze, pg. 89) Discussions about the seriousness of the situation are conducted among the crowd. As the revolutionary conviction and excitement grew, the growing calls of “Peace!” and “Up With the World Revolution” are met with heckles and jeers from the SPD section. There is a moment of silence. The tension is great and only interrupted by Felix Fechenbach’s (Eisner’s USPD associate) decisive call to march on the barracks as had been planned two days prior by the local USPD leadership.
How much longer were they expected to suffer kill and die for the luxuries of the royal families? The winter of 16/17 had starved tens of thousands of Bavarians to death, mostly the vulnerable, young and old. And now with the Spanish flu raging at the start of the next winter the nation was still sending all its resources to the front. They had enough. Today they were not going home. Following Fechenbach’s call and the lead of the group around Eisner, the procession marches northwest. Barracks after barracks sees the soldiers join the revolutionary march and the police pressed against the wall. Knocking on the doors of the ‘Türken barrack’ no one opens and the revolutionaries expect resistance when suddenly a young conscript’s head pops out of an upstairs window and asks “What’s up?”. “What do you think is up? Revolution!” (pg.91)
In response, the Imperial Bavarian military was trying not to lose total control over their Bavarian regiments. After tens of thousands of Munich and surrounding Army forces proved rebellious they had only two reliable divisions left to send to Munich, one being Prussian. A Bavarian division en route to the Alps of the Tyrolean war front was turned around midway and sent back towards Munich. On its way back to mute the burgeoning worker-peasant and soldier councils, this Bavarian division’s shock troops were met not by one but two whole revolutionary automobiles which successfully disarmed them. The incoming Prussian division was similarly met with red guards laced with belts full of hand grenades and rifles slung over their backs, on the outskirts of Munich, informing them not entirely soberly that “Brothers, Comrades, it’s over with the Slavery – don’t raise your weapons against your brothers, throw them away!” (pg. 120) And in unison they did.
Of all states, the Bavarians were the most conservative of Germans, yet they were the first to overthrow the dynasty and proclaim the Republic, in which the revolutionary councils were to take a leading role. While the Munich Independent Socialists (USPD) indeed had very few members in October of 1918 (Morgan, pg. 156) there is reason to believe that the release from prison of the popular January strike organizers, including Eisner and his colleagues (as well as the USPD left around Fritz Sauber and August Hagemeister), led to a rapid increase in worker membership, numbering in the multiple thousands by the time of the revolution. The party local had numbered in the thousands earlier that year, and now the size of the demonstrations and participation of workers, and especially soldiers, grew exponentially every other day in the week since the prisoners’ release.
After the idealistic intellectual leaders successfully took power, the Bavarian November revolution had the historic fortune of firstly being underestimated, and secondly evading immediate military repression. Having been mostly composed of bohemian intellectuals and poets which gathered at pubs and cafes, the group around Eisner and himself (which included a popular blind peasant leader) were apparently significantly out of touch with the realities of politics.Being hopelessly outnumbered by the size of the SPD, the USPD had an ill-fated future if it was to rely on the working class to successfully wield power. The strength of Eisner’s personality, however, dedication to pacifism, intellectual ability, and radical turn to the revolutionary mood of the time all resulted in his popularity; his relatively uncontested stature among revolutionary socialists and rebellious workers in Munich resulted in a situation where there was no serious socialist rival to decide the course of the November revolution. This is, at least, so far as existing historical record is concerned.
Invited to Berlin in 1898 by Wilhelm Liebknecht to improve qualitative content, Eisner’s chief editorial position at the SPD party newspaper Vorwärts ended after 5 productive years when he refused to publish two polemical statements by then party chair August Bebel, who reacted with a healthy temper. (Gerstenberger) Refusing to accept the reality of the harshness and skullduggery of party politics, Eisner moved back to Bavaria to write about the virtues of a libertarian socialism and poetry, as well as warning against a coming war in the Bavarian Social-democratic newspaper. While not being unjustly labeled as a revisionist by the Orthodox Marxists of the SPD, Eisner’s views fit no existing mold. Alongside his colleague Karl Kautsky, Eisner energetically countered Bernstein’s views that socialism could not be scientific and that the party ought to focus on the betterment of workers’ lives in the present instead of distant social goals.
Retaining that a scientific socialism was vital to the worker movement, Eisner’s personal philosophy was however influenced by the “ethical” ideas of Kant and hence differed with Kautsky’s principally causal moral, implicit in the philosophy of historical materialism. After taking the city of Munich by storm and holding a vote in the Mathäserbräu Beerhall on the night of November 7th, the revolutionaries elected Eisner to head the new government. His signed public proclamation was printed on the 8th, including, amid phraseology, that “order will be maintained by the worker and soldier councils”, and, “that the security of persons and property is guaranteed”. (Weidermann, pg. 23)
While the national USPD in its majority at the time of the November revolution certainly rejected capitalism and aimed to replace it with “socialist construction” (Morgan), Eisner’s group thought it better under the circumstances not to verbalize this traditional principle of the workers’ movement once in power. The egregious logic of this example points towards a strategy of appeasement to the authority of the SPD and in this case the actual owners of property. The SPD, as a matter of course, had a dedication to the governance of a capitalist constitution. Instead of denying legitimacy to the wishes of the bourgeois ruling class and SPD leaders, on the basis of their murderous betrayal of principle and irresponsibility, no thorough challenge to the authority of the social-democratic leaders was posed. This meant that when it actually came time for the USPD to govern (if one can call it that, as it was so without plan or routine) the Bavarian council republic ended up asking the SPD to occupy half the government’s ministries.
Although Eisner genuinely strived towards an international rule of councils, he saw no alternative to inviting the SPD if peace was to prevail. Peace at any price, that was Eisner’s mission, even if it meant more workers had to endure being ruled by those who had destructively sold them out. Consequently, the Independent government let itself be dominated by the majority Social-Democratic ministers, who turned to the existing bourgeois-monarchical bureaucratic apparatus for help. (Beyer, pg. 21) The Eisner government thereby threw itself into political paralysis, with hopes that the heterogeneous array of over 600 councils would spontaneously act to help or that the “struggle for the souls” would bear fruit and (almost divinely) intervene. What resulted was a dysfunctional and powerless government, where no one party (neither the alliance of the SPD with the bourgeois-monarchy, nor the USPD and councils) was able to exercise power. The USPD’s hope in councils acting to successfully challenge the dominance of the SPD had failed.
Even dominant soviets or councils, however, in and of themselves clearly don’t lead to successful worker government. First, one should be aware that worker councils initially appeared mostly at workplaces with very large workforces like factories, where large strikes led to sit ins, sit ins to committees for workplace occupation and their interconnection. While frequently effective at the management of workplace production, the efficacy of a system of councils for regional, or even nationwide governance, hinges not on the abstract desirability of workers having more direct involvement in deciding production and their representation, but technical knowledge and the political question. Simply being involved in the act of producing a commodity in return for a wage does not indicate one’s level of education or understanding for what is necessary and beneficial for the working class programmatically. There is also the problem that councils of large and smaller industry, where unionization is high and militant tradition strong, leaves a large part of the population outside the realm of the decision-making process and representation.
The downward trending growth of capitalist production, its tendency to be more and more artificially upheld and the developing “fourth industrial revolution” have seen through western “deindustrialization”, making the vision of soviets universally liberating us from capitalism thoroughly blurred. Naturally, pursuing a hopeful policy of creating councils and pushing it on the mass of people (or rather, pushing the mass of people on to councils…) could result in their more widespread creation beyond large industry etc. If these soviets were more widespread, it would however already imply a significant influence of proletarian ideas on the mass of people and yet still leave the flaws of councils unaddressed. Romanticizing “direct democratic” worker councils as a vehicle for revolution not only is a cheap attempt to tackle the task of representation, it is a dangerous ideal and a potentially fatal mistake for Socialists to engage.
National Assembly elections of late January 1919, although a disastrous humiliation for the USPD, showed that almost 40,000 of the Munich population voted for the party. (Beyer, pg. 42) By this point, while the local USPD right pressured Eisner to step down, the left removed themselves from more party activity. Instead of utilizing the newly won unprecedented freedoms like those of the press and challenging the party’s failed Eisner-leadership from the left, Sauber and others chose to abort the struggle for leadership of members and dived into the councils, later to join the KPD’s adventurism. The experience of many socialists within councils enthralled them at the perception of having found a mass organization of direct democratic control. But in reality, these councils, which were bestowed with so much hope, were nothing more than impotent theaters of mere congregation absent an actual political struggle for authority. The Bavarian Imperial Army officers understood this docile and manipulatable vulnerability of the popular councils, calling on the help of SPD men and soldiers in attempts to control and project their power through them. (Schmolze; Beyer) The diminutive KPD’s founding congress cry of “All Power to the Councils!”, in this light, appears perhaps as delusional as the politics of Eisner’s government.
Leading up to the January electoral defeat, Eisner was increasingly pushed into insignificance by the reality of class struggle. The SPD’s open trend to the right was “countered by a trend to the left among the militants of all the socialist parties, especially in Munich. The Independents, pulling away from Eisner’s moderating influence, consolidated their alliance with the groups to their left, especially after the Berlin disturbances of early January, and the activity of all these groups increased” (Morgan, pg. 161) As Bavaria did not yet have a Communist organization until December 11th with the local emergence of a few inexperienced Spartacists, most of the working class discontent either ran into the befuddled hands of anarchists like Mühsam, politically disinterested syndicalists or isolated communists.
For up to four months Bavaria was in this particular state of paralysis. Whereas Munich was to become the hotbed of right-wing extremism over the next twenty years and the birthplace of Nazism, Bavaria, unlike the rest of Germany, did not yet have an organized Freikorps (mercenary paramilitary group). The bourgeois had failed to organize a counter-revolutionary force in Bavaria for months, turning to the SPD for help in building a “citizens” militia forming as late as December 27th. This maneuver was struck down, and dozens of its members arrested, after USPD delegate Ernst Toller reported on its plans to machine gun the ministry building of Eisner.
Suspended in this fluid and economically unresolved situation, where the Proletariat were tied by the hip to class collaborationists (as in the rest of Germany), little record of an organized public opposition to Eisner from the left exists within this period, although spontaneous actions such as the December occupation of half-a-dozen slanderous bourgeois newspapers did occur (Schmolze pg. 189, organized by soldier council head Sauber [USPD] and others who began a loose, council communist movement). Kautsky himself (perhaps not surprisingly) did not challenge the illusory zeal for and hope in councils of his party’s left, saying in the same breath as defending the genuineness of the SPD’s revolutionary posturing, “…their [the councils’] control made it possible for the old state apparatus to continue to function without bringing about the counter-revolution.” (Kautsky pg. 3)
Systems of communication among the local USPD and communists were unfortunately extremely poor. While numbering at half a dozen Bavarian newspapers later in the year of 1919, the USPD’s own newspaper in Munich, “Die Neue Zeitung”, was founded on December 20th of 1918. (Beyer pg. 35) As a tool of Eisner and those nationally regarded as the party center, it refused to follow the dominant social-democratic agitation against the Spartacists. Proclaiming their paper’s mission to ‘fight against the press’, against bourgeois defamations and prejudices, the Bavarian Independents’ efforts were the most successful of all the country, numbering only a few hundred members for most of 1918, to 40,000 by September of 1919. The success of USPD locals in winning over SPD members was seen principally there where daily papers were established, as the researcher Hartfried Krause shows.
Using Marx to justify the view that capitalist industry had to be rebuilt before socializing it, to then “grow into socialism”, Eisner’s revisionism was never deconstructed before the Bavarian public. To his credit, however, as the political situation in Berlin became more desperate and the Bavarian left radicalized, Eisner’s later statement in support of the workers’ growing frustration and council movement’s desire for power, was, “We have no more patience to push our dreams of Socialism into the distant future; today we live and today we want to act”(Schmolze pg.201) Within this environment of the absolute freedom of the press, a lack of clear proletarian leadership, nor an armed working class, the bourgeois inciters were the benefactors. The Thule society and other splintered anti-semite and nationalist groups flourished in Munich, preying on the ignorant and fearful. One of these pre-fascist types was Count Arco von Valley who wrote in his journal “I hate Bolshevism, I love my Bavarian Volk […] he [Eisner] is a Bolshevik. He is a Jew, not a German. He betrays the fatherland — so…”(Schmolze, pg. 228) On his way to declare his official resignation, after being forewarned by his associates not to walk from the Ministry over the public street, Eisner was shot twice from behind and immediately dead. It was to be the first shots of the reaction, instigating the second stage and radicalization of the revolution of Bavaria. For now, however, it was the Social-Democratic party which was preparing counter-revolution.
[… to be continued]
References:
Gerstenberger, Günther. Der Kurze Traum vom Frieden. Germany, Hessen: Verlag Edition AV, 2018
Schmolze, Gerhard. Revolution und Räterepublik in München 1918/19 in Augenzeugenberichten. Germany, Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1978
Morgan, David W. The Socialist Left and the German Revolution. UK, London: Cornell University Press, 1975
Donald Parkinson dives into the historiography of the Russian Revolution and argues that the Red Terror was not an ideological outgrowth of communist ideals. Rather, the red terror must be understood through a materialist lens that sees its roots in social environment rather than ideology.
Banner reads “long live the red terror!”
Introduction
A sort of ‘common sense’ has slipped into the public consciousness regarding revolutions and their dangers. Revolutions, the cynics say, will always lead to atrocity and despotism. This is because they aim for a goal of total human emancipation, and with a goal this noble any kind of mass murderand bloodshed becomes acceptable to win. This thesis, which I hope to weaken the validity of, is best summed up by Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt:
To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize such a term probably has certain incalculable effects such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an enemy of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity.1
In other words, no struggle is more prone to becoming oppressive than the struggle to emancipate humanity. Has the violence of democratic and communist revolutions been a product of these ideologies’ very ideals and content? Modern ‘common sense’ seems to be very skeptical of revolution as having any potential progressive impact. The fact that these ideas have become a sort of neo-liberal ‘common sense’ is reflected in historians of revolution, who see the ideology of human emancipation as impossible to achieve and inherently leading to mass terror. This tendency to reduce revolutionary terror as a symptom of ideology is reflected in the highly regarded work of Richard Pipes on the Bolshevik Revolution, and acts as an explanatory narrative for why the revolution led to the infamous red terror. Similar claims are made about the French Revolution, enlightenment ideology, and the Reign of Terror by other historians like Francois Furet and Simon Schama. For this essay the focus will be the Russian Revolution, looking at how historians have contextualized and understood as the causes of the terror and ruthless violence that occurred in the Civil War that raged from approximately 1918 to 1922. Rather than focusing on the terror itself, the focus will be on the historical narratives that developed regarding the terror.
After the Bolsheviks seizure of power in 1917, a series of events would throw Russia into a Civil War where political terrorism became rampant. While many historians argue the Bolshevik Revolution was a coup, it is more accurate to view it as an alliance of the Bolsheviks and Left-SRs winning a political victory in the Soviets (mass democratic workers councils) to form a government. Yet the actual revolution had only begun; it needed to be consolidated against counter-revolution and establish Soviet and eventually Bolshevik Party authority around the whole country. This process happened through the Civil War, which eventually consolidated into the New Economic Policy after the economically difficult times of “War Communism”.
In the actual Civil War, the Bolsheviks fought not only against the reactionary Whites, who were funded by imperialist powers determined to crush the Bolsheviks, but also spontaneous peasant revolts, which historians like Brovkin have labeled the Green movement. At this time, where food conditions were scarce and much of the state’s energy was dedicated to simply keep people in the cities fed and production going, War Communism was a time of austerity for all, as well as a grim atmosphere of generalized political terror, both systematic and spontaneous.
Historians of Bolshevism have tried to grapple with the realities of the political terrorism that was used by all sides in the Russian Civil War, Red, White, and Green, aiming to explain to the excessive use of political terrorism that marked Bolshevik Rule in the period from 1918-1922. In this period the Bolsheviks endured massive opposition from all elements of society and battled to hold onto power against all odds. This even meant mass opposition from the working class itself, leading the Bolshevik regime to use political terror against other socialists in some cases. What emerged was an incredibly complex conflict simplified for the purposes of myth-making. While historians like Vladimir Brovkin have focused on the role the Civil War played in building the mythology of the Soviet State, the legacy and historical understandings of the red terror have also been simplified in a way that serves the needs of the US state and its free-market ideology that it hopes to extend worldwide.2For the officials of the US state-department and their allies, the story of the revolution was one of red terror, inspired by the murderous ideology of communism. This is found in much of the scholarship regarding the Russian Civil War, as we shall see, whose approach puts the ideology of the Bolsheviks as the motor force of the revolution much in the way revisionist historian Francois Furet put the Enlightenment ideology of the Jacobins as the motor force behind the Reign of Terror.
We should call this story for what it is: an idealistic and politically charged historical narrative used to completely squash the hope of human emancipation and blackmail supporters of a better world. One simply can bring to mind the barbarism of the Russian Revolution to dismiss hopes that social revolution can be beneficial, making a myopic focus on the terror. It corresponds with the needs of capitalist ideology to maintain the illusion of capitalism as a permanent system. Yet it cannot merely be questioned on ideological grounds, and one must show the flaws in the bourgeois historical narratives that go beyond their basic intentions by providing historical counterfactuals.
By looking at the historiography of the red terror in the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War in general I will trace out two competing historiographical narratives regarding the red terror, an ‘orthodox’ and a ‘heterodox’ school. Then we shall see how the claims of the ‘orthodox’ school stand up to the ‘heterodox’ school. In the ‘orthodox’ narrative the excesses of Red Terror are interpreted as a product of a certain ideological zealotry that intellectuals with utopian fantasies imposed on the masses to rebuild society in their image, or as a product of the base instincts of the masses being unleashed. Also raised are questions related to the equivocations of Lenin and Stalin. These interpretations of history are used as the ultimate example against any kind of social revolution, where a new boss simply comes into power who is worse than the old and despotically oppresses the people in the name of freedom. In this essay, I aim to look at the historians who make these claims and put them against competing narratives from other historians.
Arno Mayer in his work The Furies, a comparative study of terror in the French and Russian revolutions, traces out two main historical approaches to revolutionary terror: a genetic approach and environmental approach. The genetic approach focuses on the role of ideology, with Mayer noting that it is usually an approach to terror accompanied a “turn of mind predisposed to unqualified condemnation.”3On the other hand is the environmental approach, which gives primacy to social factors outside the control of individual actors. For Mayer the environmental approach to the terror tends to be willing to consider revolutionary terror as a “legitimate child of extreme necessity”.4The debate can be summed up in terms of how much weight historians and social theorists give to ideology vs. environmental factors.
For the purposes of debate regarding the Russian Revolution, one can say that the “genetic approach” has become the basis of the ‘orthodoxy’, seeing the Revolution as a product of Lenin’s particularly violent understanding of Marxist ideology. A key historiographical question regarding the terror that invariably pops up is whether the terror of Lenin and Stalin are to be equivocated; a question that runs through the works of everyone from Solzhenitsyn to Stephen Cohen. For the ‘orthodox approach or what Mayer calls the “genetic school”, the answer is that a common undeniable thread connects the two, with Stalin merely continuing and then intensifying the policies that Lenin pursued. By highlighting the commonalities between Lenin and Stalin, one would have the ability to make a stronger case that the main force in creating the dynamics of terror was ideology, as both actors were self-described partisans of Marxist ideology.
Another claim made by ‘orthodox’ historians that reflects the genetic school’s reliance on idealism is that Bolshevik policy regarding grain requisitions was inspired by a mere hatred of the peasantry and ideological zealotry, hence making red terror necessary to suppress the peasants and requisition grain. The actual grain crisis facing the population and what means the Bolsheviks had to solve it are not taken into account; there is an assumption that the Marxist ideology of the Bolsheviks drove them into unnecessary conflict with the peasants that created the crisis situation the terror was a response to. There is also the notion of a ‘monolithic’ Bolshevism where the party lacked any opposition or debate due to its very design, leading it to use terror to enforce an ideological uniformity. When faced with historical counterfactuals these claims lose explanatory power, hence weakening the ‘orthodoxy’. Heterodox historians have all helped shed light on how seriously one can take these claims
Pipes’ Orthodoxy
Richard Pipes is certainly a political partisan, a raging Cold Warrior who aimed to use his history as an instrument of the US intelligence service. However, this as such isn’t a reason to discredit his work. Rather than for ideological presumptions that we agree with, materialists should seek in historians what actual explanatory value their narratives have in giving causality to historical events and their dynamics. The problem with Pipes is that he doesn’t provide a historical narrative that looks at the complex interplay between social factor ofs, instead looking at history as a matter of people coming into situations of power and trying to put their ideas into practice. To the extent there are environmental factors for Pipes’ they come down to a sort of national essentialism, focusing on the despotic nature of Russia over history. For Pipes all that changes with the Russian Revolution is the ideology behind the despotism, in this case, an ideology that due its very nature leads to unhinged levels of despotism. This approach is inherently idealistic, but before dismissing it on these grounds it must be unpacked.
Pipes in fact blames the tyranny of the red terror partially on the ‘patrimonial tradition’ in the Russian state, which gave state bureaucrats an autocratic control over their spheres of authority. The Russian state according to Pipes has in it ingrained a fear of popular participation in the activities of the state. One is reminded of theories of “asiatic despotism”, and as far Pipes goes in exploring environmental factors this is all he seems to take into account. What happened in the October revolution, which he describes as merely a coup, was that a certain strain of extremist socialist intelligentsia were able to take over the state and impose their ideas on society using the autocratic traditions of the patrimonial state, becoming Red Czars of sorts. In Pipe’s vision of history, the craving of power within the intelligentsia are the motor force in history, at least when it comes to revolution. The Russian Revolution, and the red terror that followed, are explained by an ideological tradition that goes all the way back to the Enlightenment for Pipes:
“Communism failed because it proceeded from the erroneous doctrine of the Enlightenment, perhaps the most pernicious idea in the history of thought, that man is merely a material compound, devoid of either soul or innate ideas, and as such a passive product of an infinitely malleable social environment. This doctrine made it possible for people with personal frustrations to project them onto society and attempt to resolve them there rather than in themselves.”5
This theory essentially sums up why Pipes sees the terror as an inevitable product of revolution and contained within it the genetic structure of its accompanying ideologies. Terror was a product of revolution because it aimed to achieve the enlightenment goal of creating a more perfect humanity, with revolution inherently leading to a dictatorship of intellectual overlords who will use force and terror to mold humanity into their ideal. Class struggle is simply reduced to “under-achievers” who are tricked into the idealistic philosophies of declasse intellectuals, to become their dupes in a utopian vision to improve humanity. This interpretation is used to absurd degrees. For example, when explaining why the system of War Communism developed, Pipes essentially blames the influence of communist intellectuals who were attracted to the “sophisticated nonsense” of Marx because they were “radical intellectuals who neither had money nor knew how to earn it, but craved the power and pleasure it affords”.6In another instance Pipes claims that the brutality of the Cheka was due to Dzerzhinsky’s Polish nationalist resentment against Russia, hence why Lenin chose him to punish and terrorize Russians.7Yet anyone with a knowledge of Dzerzhinsky’s political history would know that he was no fan of Polish nationalism. Pipes essentially draws a narrative where an old regime, incapable of modernizing, comes into the hands of dangerous intellectuals with inherently destructive ideas. The narrative, while giving some level of causality to environment in the form of a national essentialism of sorts, is perfectly representative of what Arno Mayer critiques as the genealogical narrative of terror that is prone to treating ideas as a motor force in history. In the narrative created by Pipes, the source of these ideas is in the Enlightenment project itself, a product of a flawed notion that a fallible humanity could improve itself and become a master of its own conditions. For Pipes, the red terror is essentially an expression of the total development of the ideas of the Enlightenment, which tragically have become the ruling ideology of those who hold state power.
The problem with this narrative is not necessarily that it is politically loaded, but gives extraordinary historical causality to the power of ideas and leaders, a theoretically flawed approach for this reason alone. As I will later demonstrate, it is a narrative that is proven overly simplistic when presented with historical counterfactuals. Pipes’ analysis also gives a sort of all-powerful role to the intelligentsia, ignoring the complexities of bureaucracy in how state policies are determined and executed. The dubious assertion that Lenin apparently had a “genocidal hatred of the bourgeoisie equivalent to Hitler’s hatred of Jews”, does not explain the brutality of on the ground actions by Red army leaders, soldiers, and Cheka agents.8This vision presents a characterization of the Bolshevik party as a purely monolithic party, where debate and discussion on policy never opposed the dictates of the central committee. This model shows power and policy purely coming from the top-down, not something that is mediated and determined through complex social factors as political institutions react to new challenges and unexpected developments in global politics. This claim, that the Bolshevik Party was from its onset authoritarian, would be backed up by historians like Pipes using a specific interpretation of ‘What Is To Be Done?’ as containing the seeds of a new authoritarian Bolshevik ideology.
Other Orthodox Works
This orthodoxy, best represented by Pipes, would find its tropes repeated through other histories of the Civil War. In W. Bruce Lincoln’s Red Victory, while more willing to give currency to environmental factors and willing to recognize the realities of the White terror, still puts the primary impetus that led to the Bolsheviks pursuing a course of terror in their “instinctive hatred of privilege” and desire for a just world. For this they “killed willingly and justified their cruelest acts animated by a belief that any amount of brutality could be justified in the name of the masses.” As in the narratives of Pipes the terror flows directly from the ideology of the Bolsheviks being put into practice, which presents a narrative where red terror is the natural end result of any attempt to secure a more equal humanity. While doing much to document the brutality of the terror, with an emphasis on Bolshevik brutality, W. Bruce Lincoln offers little in explaining the terror beyond the simple “genealogical narrative” promoted by Pipes.9
Orlando Figes takes a slightly more nuanced perspective on the social origins of the red terror, admitting that it did have a populist aspect. For Figes a traditional Russian hatred of the elite within the nation made many common Russians more than willing to join Lenin’s war to “expropriate the expropriators” and exact revenge on their former exploiters. The “plebian war on privilege” was merely being put into practice by the Bolsheviks, and the results as to be expected were an exterminatory attitude to the bourgeoisie.10
While this approach does admit that the terror of the Bolsheviks was fueled to some degree by popular support as well peasant tradition, it also blames the excesses of the terror on the attempt of the unwashed masses to apply socialist doctrines to their country. Figes’ narrative is essentially elitist, seeing the masses as a resentful mob that must be kept down and policed to prevent them from seeking revenge against their exploiters. The Russian masses, in particular, can never be allowed close to political power. The terror of course was fueled by a desire for revanchism among the masses, but these desires for revenge were often based on reactions to the enemies own crimes in the process of different forces battling in civil war; war intensified people’s willingness to commit atrocities. For example, white terror against workers such as massacres of entire towns led to a desire for reds to have revenge and murder prisoners of war, creating a dialectic of violence.
In fact, Figes goes as far to admit that “the terror erupted from below” and that the “Bolsheviks did encourage but did not create” this mass terror.11While not departing from an ideological “genetic view” of the terror, Figes departs from Pipes in that he sees the terror as a result of the ‘plebeian masses’ absorbing certain ideas with approval from the state rather than something enforced by the state purely from the top down. Figes also points out that the Cheka, before the late summer of 1918, was an “extremely decentralized” institution, meaning that local populations were able to exercise control over who Cheka offices would choose to target. For Figes, one could summarize his narrative on the red terror as follows: The Bolshevik revolution’s ideals of class warfare were picked up by the mass populace to then be systematized by Bolshevik authority as forms of ensuring rule while consolidating authority. While Pipes puts more blame on individual leaders, Figes sees how it was possible that policies of terror would be taken up as popular policies by certain sections of society. However, one cannot say this approach necessarily departs from the genealogical approach, as it sees the terror flowing from the masses taking up a Marxist class struggle oriented ideology as opposed to simply just the Bolshevik Party. Marxist ideology gave permission to what Figes sees as barbarous practices of the peasantry to express themselves fully.
For the purposes of critical revolutionary theory, the genealogical approach to terror serves as a general orthodoxy in the historiography of the Bolshevik Revolution that needs to challenged by a heterodoxy. This is partially because of political motivations from historians and partially due to the simplicity of the explanation that bad ideas led to a bad situation. It is quite easy to find quotes from Lenin and Trotsky justifying revolutionary terror, and it is indeed hard to see large scale social conflict not ensuing after a Marxist party seizes power. What is being questioned is not whether Lenin and the Bolsheviks embarked on a policy of terror, but to what extent this policy of terror was simply driven by the ideological precepts of Bolshevism. For these reasons in popular discourse the orthodox interpretation best represented by Pipes has become commonly accepted.
Challenges to Orthodoxy
While Pipes’ genetic, ideas-driven approach stands as an orthodoxy, many historians have poked holes in this narrative and provided feasible challenges to it, without minimizing the extent to which Bolshevik terror reached unnecessary excesses. A variety of historians who approach the issue of the terror from often completely different perspective all looked to find alternatives to the simplistic narratives of Pipes and similar historians, looking at Environmental factors and the nature of the Bolshevik Party before 1917. Some of these key historians, who have attempted to go beyond the ‘orthodoxy’ include the aforementioned Arno Mayer, Stephen Cohen, Lars T. Lih, and Marcel Liebman. What unites all these historians is that their works provide a way to escape simplistic narratives of the terror that gives proper due to social factors and historical contingency. From their work, I will extract various counter-claims to the claims the ‘orthodoxy’ stands on.
An important counter-claim to the notion that Bolshevik terror was ideologically fueled can be found in Marcel Liebman’s Leninism Under Lenin which is an early attempt at a counter to prevailing orthodoxy underlying the Bolshevik revolution. This work can be seen as an attempt to reevaluate the Bolshevik experience from the perspective of Anti-Stalinist Marxism. Liebman devotes a whole section of his book regarding the terror, pointing out that the initial response of the Bolsheviks to their opposition was not to launch campaigns of extermination as Pipes would have you believe. According to Liebman “it would be wrong, however, to suppose that, starting from a theoretical opinion about the role of force in history….the Bolsheviks proceeded to impose immediately upon coming to power, a reign of terror direct against the old order. On the contrary, the period in which the revolution experienced its ‘honeymoon’ was also a period of relative but genuine moderation in the repression of counter-revolutionary elements.”12
For Liebman the period following the revolution was not an immediate outburst of Bolshevik fueled violence, providing examples of repression being dealt with in far more humane ways. One example that Liebman uses is the treatment of officer cadets who had previously been hostile combatants during the initial seizure of the Winter Palace. According to Liebman, “A few days later the same bodies of Cadets organized an armed rising in the capital” overcome by the Bolsheviks who would once again release them as prisoners. Liebman also cites the fact that in the initial three months after the revolution death sentences were not released by the state. While this, of course, ignores the reality of extra-judicial killings “from below” it does show that the Bolsheviks were not committed to a course of excessive revolutionary violence from day one. Rather, for Liebman, the resort of the Bolshevik government to terror amplified as counter-revolution and foreign intervention amplified. For Liebman, inspired by EH. Carr, September 1918 represents a turning point in the terror, which was primarily fueled by reprisals by the Whites and an attempted murder on Lenin by the SRs, their left wing now going on a campaign of terror against the Bolsheviks instead of serving as their coalition partners.13In Liebman’s interpretation, qualitative differences exist between the terrors of Stalin and Lenin, and that it was more “environmental” rather than “genetic” factors that led the Bolsheviks to embark on a course of terror.
Stephen Cohen also would argue a qualitative difference between the terrors of Lenin and Stalin, most clearly in his essay “Bolshevism and Stalinism”. 14Cohen argues that the red terror in the Civil War period was qualitatively different than the purges and show trials of the Stalin Years (1928-53). Cohen explains how the equivocation of Bolshevism with Stalinism ignores the surrounding conditions that informed them and that this was essentially an unquestioned axiom in the historical sciences. For Cohen, this “continuity thesis” is one which “rests on a series of dubious formulations” that has prevented historians from “studying Stalinism as a distinct phenomenon with its own history.”15While Cohen does not deny the “seeds” of Stalinism can be found in Bolshevism, and that elements of continuity exist, these observations verge on the painfully obvious. For Cohen such generalizations say nothing about the actual historical forces that drive events, and that the break from wartime terror to terror in an ostensible peacetime situation is a qualitative break in policy. In his own words, “Stalinism was excess, extraordinary extremism in each. It was not, for example, merely coercive peasant policies, but a virtual civil war against the peasantry, not merely police repression, or even a civil-war style terror, but a holocaust of terror that victimized tens of millions of people.”16 These policies were imposed on the population from above, not exigencies to survive in a Civil War. For Cohen, saying that there are continuities is merely stating the obvious; continuities exist throughout history, yet the goal of historians is not to merely point them out but show where changes in continuities lie.
One aspect that Cohen points out as a falsehood is the notion of the Bolshevik parties as a monolithic organization without internal democracy, which he argues it became by the ascendance of Stalinism. Adherence to the ‘orthodox’ perspective would have it that the Bolshevik party was a monolithic and overly centralized party from the beginning, this truth being revealed in Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?. 17The argument of a monolithic and dogmatic political party coming to power fueled by an anti-democratic Marxist ideology is greatly disputed by Lih’s work. The scholarship of Lih not only addresses the internal regime of the Bolshevik Party (in Lenin Rediscovered and Bread and Authority in Russia: 1914-1921). Lih in Lenin Rediscovered is primarily focused on debunking the notion that within What Is To Be Done? The recipes for Leninist authoritarian and red terror are laid out. For Lih, What Is To Be Done? is to be put into the context of trying to apply the orthodox Marxism of the SPD to Russian conditions. Lih consistently demonstrates that Lenin’s prime concern in this era is with political freedom and that in no way did his existing ideology as such reject political freedom. Rather, Lih works to present Lenin as a partisan of political freedom in Russia and dedicated to fighting for it to the maximum degree possible. He also dispels the myth of the Bolshevik party as a monolithic entity that lacked internal debate, following a bureaucratic centralist model from the very beginning.
The Food Supply Dictatorship
In Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914-1921 Lars T. Lih traces out a broader thesis that a “wrecked Russia” was what produced Bolshevism rather than the other way around. The conditions that led to economic collapse at the regime of war communism were already essentially in motion due to the difficulty of securing the food supply using state authority. For Lih, the year 1917 saw a breakdown in the food supply and therefore a crisis of authority as such. The actions of the Bolsheviks during the Civil War years were based around a) reconstituting the food supply and b) reconstituting central authority. The war years are years of extreme difficulty and brutality because the Bolsheviks are struggling to reestablish the food supply and reconstitute political authority, with the solution to the food supply problem ultimately being found in the NEP. Under these circumstances it is understandable why Lenin would call for the hoarders of grain to be shot; his motivation was not to terrorize so much as to feed the country. For Lih, the “destructive force” that the Bolsheviks played in the Civil War Years and Red Terror ultimately was a “reconstitutive force” leading up to the workable solution of the NEP.18 Lih does make the mistake of ignoring peasant resistance to Bolshevik authority during the “reconstitutive period”, which can be seen as a driving force for what made the Bolshevik Government both resort to terror and take up the NEP. Lih almost writes off the problem of peasant resistance, saying that “the primary incentive for the peasant producer who remained was continued survival for himself and his family. Insofar as the Bolsheviks stuck to their promise of taking only the surplus above the amount needed for personal consumption and continued production, this primary incentive was not damaged” while also admitting than even Lenin said more than this amount was taken in certain situations.19 While Lih does a good job at showing the challenges the Bolsheviks had in procuring food supply and how this drove their policy into certain directions, the dynamic created by peasant rebellions against Bolshevik grain policies is largely ignored. This dynamic is well documented by Vladimir N. Brovkin in his work Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War which documents the massive peasant discontent in many regions throughout Russia as well the massive “Green” movement of peasants aligned with neither the Whites or Reds.20While Lih presents the “food-supply dictatorship” established by the Bolsheviks between May and June 1918 as an almost logical response from new authorities to secure order, the extent to which these policies were unpopular with the peasantry and the role this played in driving the Bolsheviks to terror isn’t fleshed out, merely admitting it created a ‘partisan challenge’.21
Yet by placing the Russian Civil War and Red Terror in terms of the challenges of securing food supply, Lars T. Lih offers a substantial challenge to those who would put genetic over environmental factors in explaining the dynamics of terror. Peter Holquist, in Making War, Forging Revolutions: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis 1914-1921 examines how Bolshevik authority was influenced by the general problems posed by World War 1. Holquist is neither a pure “environmentalist” or “geneticist”, taking influence from both schools by claiming “Bolshevik Russia was a product neither of pure ideology nor simply of the circumstances of 1914-1921”.22Yet Holquist offers many important insights into the structural factors that led the Bolsheviks to terror, noting that the general situation and crisis of WWI was a major factor in driving Bolshevik Policy. His work focuses in particular on the Don Region, which saw a severe lack of popularity for the Bolsheviks. For Holquist the Bolsheviks were tasked with re-ordering a society ravaged by WWI, a task that won them support from non-Bolshevik technocrats but was still structured by their Marxist ideology.23What distinguished Revolutionary Russia was that these military-style institutions to rebuild society would become the basis of a new state. The Don region is chosen for focus simply because of its utter lack of popularity for the Bolsheviks. The “environmental factors” that played a role in forming the state are the crisis situations created by WWI, which different regimes tried to answer. The strongest argument for this explanation comes from the claim that Bolshevik grain procurement policy was in fact planned to be put into operation by the Provisional Government, but was possible until “under the Soviet Power” where “the moment of compulsion increased by a unprecedented degree.”24 If one wishes to blame Bolshevik ideology entirely on the course of events (land policies leading to peasant resistance hence terror) one would have to admit that these policies were not unique to the Bolshevik Party and in fact, were designed before they came to power to some extent. This lends credibility to the argument of Lih that grain requisitions were essentially a policy pursued for pragmatic ends rather than a product of “communist mania”. However, Holquist sees the dogmatism of the Bolsheviks and their hostility to the peasants as a key factor in determining how these policies would be executed. Yet as far as the actual policies were defined, they existed in continuity with the needs of Wartime Russia, with no fundamental break in policy. What did change were the political authorities and how they aimed to solve the crisis. As a result, the violence and destruction of the Russian Civil War can be seen not in isolation from the devastation that began in 1914 Europe but as a continuation of it.
Conclusion
The historiography the Russian Civil War is understandably ridden with controversy, considering the political nature of the questions at stake. With historians such as Pipes, the red terror is evidence of the enlightenment’s destructive ideas when put into practice and evidence to throw them out altogether. On the other hands, historians like Liebman and Lih are asking for a reconsideration of Bolshevism as a progressive force in history. Posing a heterodoxy to the orthodoxy of Pipes, historians offered counterfactuals to the notion of a monolithic Bolshevik party and the idea that terror was an immediate solution to the opposition in the Bolsheviks. They also theorized that environmental factors essentially drove a Bolshevik Party initially committed to democracy onto an anti-democratic road of ruling through terror, such the need to reconstitute political authority and re-establish the food supply while fighting a civil war in the ruins of World War I. With an orthodoxy that emphasized “genetic” factors and a heterodoxy that emphasized “environmental” factors the heterodoxy is the field which actually leaves room for interesting historical questions while still containing its own flaws.
The heterodoxy, of course, leaves the historian with a more interesting set of questions, but a proper narrative regarding the red terror must take into account a factor that neither group of historians really touch on: the role of violence in political change as such, explored in the works of Franz Fanon and Arno Mayer. While Fanon was theorizing decolonial revolution rather than socialist revolution, he theorized the violence played a role for the colonized subject that allowed them to reclaim their humanity after years of oppression. Years of Czarist oppression, especially for those under the yoke of landlords and oppressed nationalities under Russian domination, gave the masses a true desire to seek violent retribution on those oppressors who for so long used violence to deny them their humanity. For Fanon a revolution was a “war of liberation” that allowed the oppressed masses to form a collective identity, cause, and destiny and create a sense of historical purpose after being denied their humanity by colonial masters.25
While not all the workers and peasants that participated in the revolution were a colonial subject like the Algerians who inspired Fanon, Russia was itself a “prisonhouse of nations” with many oppressed nationalities and widespread anti-semitism. Because of this, his theory of revolutionary violence seems to explain in part why the red terror was so bloody. Both Bolsheviks and opponents of the Bolsheviks that favored a different form of socialism saw the revolution as an attempt to reclaim their humanity after years of Czarist oppression. Violence against class enemies, which was essentially anyone opposed to the revolution, as tragic and excessive as it was, was the long-repressed rage of the masses against everything that oppressed them. This violence would extend to the Bolsheviks themselves at many times, who were seen as betraying the true cause of Soviet Power. This was not the result of a “class war” ideology imposed on the masses as Figes suggests, but the end result of years of Czarist oppression. Real experiences of exploitation and oppression were dehumanizing for a vast majority of Russians, so one can only imagine the desire of the masses for revenge against anything they saw as replicating the old regime, even the Bolsheviks themselves.
The problem with Fanon’s defense of revolutionary violence as rooted in a need for psychological self-liberation for the dehumanized is that this is more a description of something than a moral justification for the mass violence committed by revolutionaries. It is quite possible to posit that the psychological need to liberate the mind from an embedded repressive authority could be channeled in other ways that are more constructive towards building a socialist society. Thus it is important to not fall into a fetishization of violence and terror as virtues with inherent value and a necessary means of liberation. This leads to the kind of metaphysics of violence that one finds in MLM groups who glorify Sendero Luminoso.
Arno Mayer, on the other hand, sees the red terror as a sort of “dialectic of violence” where the Reds and Whites competed to claim hegemony over political authority. For Mayer:
Violence is inseparable from revolution and counter-revolution as these are from each other. Violence has of course many faces and purposes. Certainly not all violence in Revolution is ideological and, by that token, excessive and boundless. Although violence is inherent to revolution, it is not unique to it. Nor is it as rare as revolution itself. Violence is basic to society and polity, especially to their foundation and consolidation. At the creation there is often recourse to war, which, like revolution, “is inconceivable outside the domain of violence.26
This approach sees violence and terror as inevitable parts of a revolution matched by a counter-revolution, which is both ideologically inspired and outgrows from revanchism from the oppressed classes (and revanchism against the revolution itself). Violence is basic to political order, and the crisis of 1917 saw two poles form opposing political authorities: The Red and the Whites. Ultimately the two would contest for legitimacy and find terror a tool in this contest. The Bolsheviks were certainly ideologues and armed with an ideology that made no qualms about using political terror. While initially committed to democracy in theory, the Bolsheviks had no doubt they would have to command state repression in order to consolidate rule. The turn to terror became a weapon against the counter-revolution, but excesses alienated potential supporters from the regime at the same time. Yet in the end, in periods of intense crisis, social order sometimes is only weakly held together through blunt repression.
Yet the excesses of the terror cannot simply be based on the fact that the Bolsheviks came to terms with this ideologically – there is no evidence that the Bolsheviks initially planned to use terror to legitimate their rule to the extent that they did. Rather, it is clear that Bolshevik intellectuals like Trotsky’s polemic in favor of red terror, Terrorism and Communism, tended to intellectually justify terror after the fact. To understand how the situation of Bolshevik rule resting upon mass terror developed, taking into consideration environmental factors is a necessity. So is an understanding of the core role of violence in revolutionary upheavals and state-building, as pointed out by the likes of Fanon and Mayer. Violence outpours in revolutionary times not because of the proclamations of ideologues, but rather from a reaction to the class divisions and marginalization that the exploited and oppressed people experience. Crises in state legitimacy caused at their root by economic issues destabilize states and strip them of legitimacy, creating voids in political authority. These voids lead to mass terror and violence then attempts by new competing authorities to channel and control this violence against enemies and challenges to their authority. While both sides battle in a dialectic of terror eventually one is able to secure a relative monopoly on the use of legitimate force and proclaim itself the sovereign authority. Terror was a political weapon in a war for political dominance between the Reds and Whites, with terror from both sides fueling one another. Reds would massacre White political prisoners in response to a town of workers being massacred by the Whites; the terrors of one side led to those of the other.
The fanaticism of the masses cited by the likes of Figes is a real thing, but it grew out of the desperate struggle to defend the revolution and gave individual red army soldiers and Cheka members a sense of duty to defend their society from the barbarism of the whites. The fear of white terror was real because it had touched much of the working class. There are the infamous stories of Chekist being handed a list of prisoners to be released but instead shot them out of fear of releasing “enemies of the revolution”. Yet this fear wasn’t based on paranoid fantasy, but the massive pogroms and massacre of the most barbaric nature that were occurring all through the Soviet Republic. It is a classic tactic of anti-Communists to ignore the crimes of the Whites or even downplay them, yet even an American anti-communist American General William S. Graves who travelled to Russia to fight with the the Whites made the observation that the Whites were more savage and inhumane than the reds: “I am well on the side of safety when I say that the anti-Bolsheviks killed one hundred people in Eastern Siberia to every one killed by the Bolsheviks.” Any history that downplays the history of the Whites and the utter devastation brought upon the communities of the working class, Jews and other oppressed nationalities in the Russian Civil War cannot possibly understand why the Bolsheviks would embrace mass terror against their enemy.
Yet is it inevitable that this battle between revolution and counter-revolution lead to the excesses of the red terror in Russia? Obviously, there is no way to guarantee that there will not be mass revanchism from the masses against those they define as their enemy, especially if there is a crisis of state authority. Yet one could say that the massive excesses in the Russian terror were partially due to the difficulty of getting peasants to co-operate in maintaining a food supply during conditions of social breakdown. The reality of the peasantry being an unreliable ally to the working class was most dramatically exposed in the red terror which took on its most cruel and excessive proportions in the countryside when Reds fought against Greens. Today the need for such a worker-peasant alliances doesn’t exist today in most countries. This doesn’t mean that mass revolutionary violence is no longer a possibility, but to use its existence to decry the very project of human emancipation as Pipes or Figes does is to imagine an ideal world where Czarism could’ve gradually transformed into a liberal democracy, and instead was averted from this “natural course” by bloodthirsty revolutionaries and then make. Then one would take this specific historical experience and make a universal law of society that revolution is purely destructive. The truth is that WWI was already an expression of the mass terror of the bourgeoisie and one that dwarfed the red terror in size and scale. If life was cheap to the Bolshevik worker, it was because the world bourgeoisie had cheapened their life by turning them into cannon fodder for imperialism. It was in the ruins of WWI that something like the Red Terror happened. The red terror was brought about by the terror of the existing system more than anything else. To quote Mark Twain:
THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
Unfortunately, the Soviet State would descend into another kind of terror, more similar to the “long terror” Mark Twain describes. It was one not related to fighting enemies in a civil war but to purify the state apparatus under the rule of Joseph Stalin. The ‘Great Terror’ and its surrounding years are hard to even rationally understand, especially when one takes into account that popular participation was a factor. Mass conspiracy theories fueled all layers of Soviet society to turn on each other and create a paranoid mass phenomena that even Stalin had to prevent from getting out of hand. While the Red Terror in the years of Lenin could be comparable to the Jacobin terror, Stalin’s purges seem something almost completely unique in history.
To decry the Red Terror, while minimizing the White Terror and the years of oppression it sought to restore, is simply irresponsible. In a Civil War where Jews faced ethnic cleansing and barbarous armies of counter-revolution murdered off workers, the Red Terror was a means to an end of weakening the enemy opponent who would have turned Eastern Europe into a gigantic pogrom. Yes, the Bolsheviks held to power through brute force in the Civil War, but the alternative was a brutal reactionary rampage that would have quite plainly turned Eastern Europe into a reactionary hellhole. Pipes and Figes take an obsession with the violence of the Bolshevik worker, but not with the pogromist white guard. This is not a call to glorify revolutionary terror, but rather to understand it as a product of certain historical circumstances and carve out the social forces that drive revolutions into something like the “red terror”.
Stani Bjegunac takes a look at different approaches to the national question by historical communists and how we may approach issues of national oppression in a 21st-century context.
FLN partisans fight for national independence in Algeria.
Preface
It should not be surprising that the reason I chose to take part in this publication was due to my disappointment with the left in my country. I assume for the purposes of discussion, that the circle associated with this publication is of a communist sentiment and adopts a broadly materialist view of both history and studying the contemporary world. The topic I wish to discuss is one which inspires in me both unsurprised disappointment and even disgust, as well as constant fascination: the communist stance towards the national question. With that said I think the Left, at least those who consider themselves “revolutionary” has mostly gotten the national question wrong, which leads to all kinds of questionable politics, such as leftist support for Rojava, the Assad government in Syria (or the nationalist and Islamist opposition groups), North Korea’s right to own nuclear weapons and the Bolivarian “revolution” in Venezuela. I think this is so important considering how there still exist objectively unresolved national questions, like the oppression of Palestinians. Furthermore, agreement on the national question is of such importance to communist strategy because it includes two central issues, namely what our stance is vis-a-vis the bourgeois state and internationalism: that the revolution that overthrows capitalism must be international or it is a failure, and thus that we aim for the unification of the proletariat internationally across the many borders that divide it.
Introduction
The left has a problem with the national question. Apart from simple lack of debate, agreement, formulation and fresh theorization of the issue as it concerns the present, the actual positions that are offered are often flawed: from anarchists who talk about “Solidarity with Rojava”, to a whole swag of activists — leftist and otherwise — who “support” Palestinian, West Papuan or even Novorossian independence. On the other hand, the minuscule and historically marginal left communist sects which have been largely critical of the support of “socialists” for national liberation. These groups and circles of theorists, while often having thought-provoking positions and theories reading the question of nationalities (due to a commitment to principle and empirical analysis), are limited by naive reasoning that is both mechanical and lacking in nuance. These left communists have also been naïve insofar as they often ignore the actual practical implication of their own positions.1
This essay is not intended to pick apart a bunch of positions and say why they are wrong. This leads to wasting time with a variety of particular opinions and unproductive sect-bashing. The purpose of this essay is, instead, to critique and clarify the basis on which the national question may be discussed by leftists and to make a fresh contribution to the communist understanding of the national question which is relevant to the 21st century, rather than something pulled straight out of 1917 or from boring Comintern sloganeering. Along the way, some proposals will be stated about particular topics that need to be studied more carefully.
The first section will be about 20th-century national liberation movements. I will draw out some of the general characteristics of the wave of nationalism of the 20th century as qualitatively distinct historical phenomena from the wave of bourgeois revolutions that struck Europe in the 19th century and earlier. Note that the epochal divide does not need to be drawn at 1900 exactly (or 1914 for the decadence theorists), perhaps it even goes back to the “New Imperialism” of the late 19th century. A historical periodization needs to be drawn up of 20th century nationalism.
In the second section I go back to Marx (and Engels) and review very briefly their support for nationalisms in their time. It is important to question why these important “founding fathers” of communism were such enthusiastic supporters of bourgeois causes. Were they wrong or were they right? What view of world history guided them to think this way? And were their views consistent with their self-professed “historical materialism”? I also look into some examples of how the national question has been argued by communists critical of the classic Comintern formulation on national liberation. This includes left-communists such as the International Communist Current (ICC) and International Communist Tendency (ICT) who take a hard stance against all nationalism based on an argument about the overall trajectory of capitalism. Other theorists such as Mike Macnair for example would not dismiss the progressive nature of national aspirations in many situations, but uses Marx’s statements about the necessity of class independence to argue against alliances with bourgeois nationalists for an approach of invariant class independence. The ICC on the other hand has a more elaborate approach of decadence theory that shapes its view of the of the national question. They use a historical periodization in which nationalism of different eras has different qualities depending on whether capitalism is ascendent and still progressive or in its decadent phase and therefore to be destroyed, having outlived its progressive characteristics. Decadence in this theory begins post-1914, which entails all national struggles can only have a reactionary anti-proletarian character and are not deserving of communist support like in the way. Marx is excused of his support for national struggles because he was living when capitalism was still ascendant and progressive. This distinguishes an invariant view based on basic principles of how the class struggle of the proletariat relates to the national bourgeoisie, and a more historically contingent view, both of which may arrive at similar political conclusions for present conditions.
In the third section, I will critically look at the actual practice of leftist groups in support of this or that nat lib or “anti-imperialism”.2 I call this “remote control activism” and argue that it is ineffective.
In the fourth section, I will deal with the claims of oppressed nations and “progressive” nationalisms. Although national liberation is a faulty program for communists, we should not dismiss national oppression, and we should develop nuanced reasons for its “continuing appeal”.3
Next I look at the indigenous question in white settled states, like Australia or New Zealand. Communists have undertheorised the “indigenous question” and this I hope is a start. I write this mostly from my knowledge in my own country (Australia) and find the proposals of various leftists and indigenous activists (e.g. vague ideas about “decolonization”, “recognition”, “sovereignty”, “treaty”, land rights etc.) to be quite deficient. With this in mind, please consider the situation of the indigenous question in other places might be quite different. I conclude that communists need to think programmatically about the indigenous question from a resolutely proletarian internationalist perspective that accounts for the dispossession and systematic racism that indigenous peoples have experienced historically and continue to experience. In other words, what can a communist movement do for the indigenous people in the event of a proletarian revolution, and in the build-up to it? It is a serious issue in some countries that will not automatically go away and in the event of a global revolutionary wave it will have to be resolved or else capitalism will deal with it “blindly and bloodily”.4
The 20th Century: Nationalism Returns
A mural is painted with the words: “PLO IRA ONE STRUGGLE.” Painted by the Irish Republican Youth Movement.
At that time, I supported the October Revolution only instinctively, not yet grasping all its historic importance. I loved and admired Lenin because he was a great patriot who liberated his compatriots; until then, I had read none of his books.
After the Second World War, the world settled into a Cold War that would last four and a half decades. This split the international state system into two sides based on political allegiances, trade, and military might. From 1945-1991, this is how we should see geopolitics. The period after the war was a time when the major colonial empires had already broken up or were at the very least shadows of their former selves and in a state of decay. Even during the war, a number of nationalist movements in the former colonies (in which an important part of the war was fought) had become invigorated and some had even come to power like in Indonesia in 1945.
This is essentially the era that leftists around the world today — a diverse crowd who call themselves anti-capitalists, communists, socialists, anarchists, Marxists, anti-imperialists etc. — use as a reference point for their position on nationalism, in particular, the question of national oppression and support for national liberation. Arguably this reference point also extends back to the nationalist movements occurring at the time of the the revolutionary wave of 1917-1923 (e.g. the Chinese Civil War), when the Comintern supported “revolutionaries” outside of Russia, only to have these intrigues backfire against them anyway (e.g. Shanghai in 1923 or, less well known, Turkey in 1921).5For such leftists, Lenin’s “Imperialism: The Highest Form of Capitalism” and the position of the Bolshevik party on the “right of nations to self-determination” are the theoretical and political guides to anti-imperialism. If they are not so sophisticated, those who fetishize third world nationalism do not bother with citing historical examples and give in to the liberal mode of political discourse, moralising: who is the aggressor, who is the most “progressive” force, who is resisting imperialist domination, who is the “representative” of an oppressed people, who is the greater or lesser evil,6etc. This all, of course, disregards the complexities of the historical socialist debates about the national question.
These leftists who were enchanted by national liberation in the countries of the “imperialist core”, during the New Left, looked on these national liberation movements with reverence. Vietnam, China, Cuba, Algeria, Angola, Palestine, Nicaragua etc. Leftists disappointed with the “labor aristocracy” and low class-consciousness of their own country’s working class, who were allegedly “bought off” by imperialists, could see an image of themselves in the armed mass movements in other countries which were fighting the good fight, “surrounding the cities”, taking power, throwing out foreign imperialists, and apparently creating a new society, the living proof, if there ever was, of an alternative to the capitalist global order.
A simple historical analysis of the facts, in other words, an empirical argument against national liberation, is enough for communists to achieve clarity on this issue with regards to this era of “national liberation” nationalisms. To make things transparent, I have no illusions in the possibility of “socialism in one country”, a position which Marx and Engels did not hold to.7 In the 20th century, national liberation generally took these following characteristics.
Political Economy of Colonialism: Exclusionary and Exploitative Models of Colonization
Marxists have distinguished two basic models of colonisation. In both models the indigenous people are dispossessed. However, in one model — the exploitative model — they are reintegrated economically as the main source of labour-power. The political economy of this model depends on exploitation of the labour of the indigenous people. In the second model — the exclusionary model — the settlers’ political economy does not depend significantly on indigenous labour-power, so the indigenous people are excluded: pushed aside, ethnically cleansed, and in some cases (as in Tasmania) exterminated. This distinction between two models of colonisation goes back to Marx, who made it en passant, and was theorised by Karl Kautsky.
As should be clear to any Marxist, the distinction between these two types of colonisation, with their very different political economies, is absolutely fundamental. It has many crucial consequences. In exploitative colonisation, the settlers are a small minority, and usually form a dominant exploiting quasi-class. This was the case, for example, in Algeria and South Africa. In contrast, wherever exclusionary colonisation took place, the settlers formed a new nation. Such was the case in North America, Australia and New Zealand. In fact, I do not know of any exception to this rule.
In the same interview, it is also noted that anti-colonial movements only succeeded in countries where the exploitative model of colonialism had been in operation. The problem of exclusionary colonialism and the indigenous population, in the case of white settler states, will be discussed later. It is fair to say that the material conditions resulting from an exploitative model of colonization allowed anti-colonial movements to arise and succeed while in the lands where the exclusionary model was in operation, this possibility was cut off by the absolute destruction of the native population through massacres, disease, and land-grabs.
Class Structure: Bourgeoisie (or Lack Thereof), Peasantry, Proletariat
In the colonies of the modern colonial empires (British, French, Dutch, Portuguese) the colonizers met the most variegated societies they had ever seen. Marxists to this day debate about whether the Incas or the Mughal Empire constituted a kind of “Asiatic mode of production”. These civilizations had a considerably different class structure to what was seen back in the Old World, yet with hierarchies that made them intelligible to foreigners upon contact: kings at the top; peasants and slaves at the bottom. On the other hand, the Australian aborigines and certain peoples in North America, were classless, tribal, living off the land as nomads, or engaging in small amounts of cultivation and fish-farming here and there.8These things are historically worth seeing in terms of how the colonial systems were built, especially the way that colonizers acted with regards to the existing social structures they had found: making deals with local rulers and tapping into existing markets without fundamentally altering the mode of production (British India), conducting massacre and enslavement of the native population on plantations and mixing royal families (Caribbean, Mexico), or flat-out war of destruction and expulsion after treaties proved to be worthless (Australia, New Zealand, USA’s westward expansion in the 19th century).
Beyond all these particularities, by the beginning of the 20th century there was a world system of capitalism that had reached much of the Earth. Even in non-capitalist regions the global market was not far, and by the end of the century it would pull almost everyone into its orbit. Factories in Russia, funded by foreign capital, were forging steel for use in armaments which went into the First World War; British and German Banks were issuing notes in China; textile and garment workshops in India were exporting to the world. In the countries in which the decolonial movements occurred in the 20th century, which were as mentioned before, run on the exploitative model of colonization, it is safe to generalize that proletarians were in the minority and that peasants made up the bulk of society.9
National Liberation Party-Form
What restrains state rackets from mutual extermination is their awareness that cohesion and self-control assure their mutual survival. Below them, there’s the mass of humanity enclosed by exploitation and national frontiers. Dominant rackets have learned to negotiate and tolerate each other by coexisting in the state. The role of national mediation alters their function, from private looting to large scale administration and bureaucratic (and legal) access to the national treasure. In this form, modern politicians and functionaries buy themselves national pedigree, legitimacy, and incomes. But the racket remains the underlying state module. Dominant classes secrete them constantly, and in a democracy, this tendency is generalized in civil society. The fragmentation of commodity society and its consequent ‘war of all against all’, creates a fertile soil for rackets. As long as a strong Leviathan is not disturbed and undermined by this, rackets are tolerated even if legally proscribed.
Political rackets are informal specialist bodies, usually legal and aspiring to state domination. However, their reduced size forces them to an unstable and precarious existence. At most, they become pressure groups for parties that have gone beyond the racket stage. The larger the racket, the more it approximates a party, which contains a few rackets called tendencies or factions. Only extraordinary world and national events propel rackets to become mass parties and even attain state power. But these moments are few and far between. Most rackets have a relatively short existence. A few last for years, as torture chambers for their members…
Though political rackets seldom attain their goal of state power, their internal organisation mimics statist functions. The membership of the racket is its proletariat, and the leaders constitute a sort of portable mini-state. Rackets are essentially conservative, even if some of them, the Marxist and anarchist ones, spout radical or emancipatory messages.
In the countries in which decolonial movements grew and took power, there was invariably a party or at least a coalition of parties that had independence and their goal and aimed to lead that struggle. These parties engaged in “anti-imperialist” or “national liberation” fronts that encompassed organizations of a range of political positions; for example, the National Liberation Front (NLF) in Vietnam did not just contain the “communists” around Ho Chi Minh. These “fronts” were never quite so perfect, with different factions — “communist”, “anti-communist”, and others — fighting and murdering each other even after a period of cooperation, a most egregious example being the killing off of other political leaders by the Khmer Rouge before they had taken power.10 In the countries in which “socialism” was a decolonial force, the communist parties that came to power were “armed to the teeth” and politically and logistically supported by the USSR and its allies. It is hard to imagine the Vietnamese NLF or Castro’s revolutionaries coming to power without the tremendous force of arms. No amount of national will can make AK-47s materialize out of nowhere. Power does in a sense come out of the barrel of a gun.
These national liberation fronts and parties by their nature always involved the combination of people of a variety of class backgrounds: peasants of varying propertied status, proletarians, bourgeoisie. This, for example, found its expression in Mao’s theory of the “Bloc of Four Classes”. “Intellectuals” or the “intelligentsia” are not a class as such — they could be autodidact proles or petit-bourgeois professionals for example — however, their importance in certain movements should not be dismissed (e.g. the participation of Frantz Fanon in the Algerian independence movement) as often they rose to positions of leadership and were heavily involved. It is helpful, but not enough, to point to the class breakdown of the membership of these movements. The local football club is mostly made of working-class people, but that does not make it a proletarian organization that fights for the class as a class. It is thus important to see what their program was. Program, in this case, is not necessarily the stated goals of an organization or movement, but what its practice actually moves towards and achieves — its political content or movement. To judge this part of history we need to prioritize the assessment of actions over words.
National Liberation: Power and Program
Whether you consider the 20th-century national liberation movements to be strictly bourgeois revolutions or not, they were nonetheless bourgeois in their content.11 What made the French revolution and the bourgeois revolutions before it different to the 20th century national revolutions was that the contradiction of civil society (i.e. between the proletariat and capital) had not yet emerged, and the proletariat was simply existing in the folds of the “Third Estate”. The French revolution was a milestone event, partly because it was the last democratic bourgeois revolution to occur before this class contradiction emerged, which it did in 1848, where the bourgeoisie was triumphant but the communist movement was not.12
Trotskyists continue to repeat the outdated refrain about how, in the backward countries, the bourgeoisie is/was too weak to complete the bourgeois revolution. However, the history of 20th century decolonization and developmentalism tells us that one way or another these “weak” bourgeoisies successfully completed it, albeit by calling upon their allies, by being heavily armed and by the use of a wide-sector of society (proletarians, peasants, intellectuals, petit-bourgeois) as their support in national liberation fronts. They may not have been very democratic and peaceful about it but they did the job (when has the bourgeoisie ever secured its political dominance without force?). For those that went under the banner of “socialism”, “socialism” was just the better model of modernization to the competing model of “Western” capitalism. The problem was never that the proletariat’s job was now to complete the bourgeois revolution, rather it was that the bourgeoisie conducted it and smashed what little proletarian autonomy there was in the process.
They not only conducted (to varying degrees) the political programme (the establishment of bourgeois state institutions) but a bourgeois agrarian programme of capital: land to the peasants, which helped to win the peasantry over to their side. However, in some cases (China and Vietnam) the victorious regime expropriated the peasants in the form of forced collectivization. 13Resistance to collectivization was ruthlessly crushed. The Chinese collective farms were no idyllic paradise. One way or another this agrarian program expands that part of the population which is “doubly free” in Marx’s sense, setting the conditions for more comprehensive development, like industrialization, in attempts to “catch up” with the more developed countries. Until the end of the 20th century, developmentalist programs like nationalization of large capital and the transformation of class struggle into development could ensure some measure of class peace, as a kind of third world counterpart to social-democracy.14 Arguably this pattern has been repeated recently with the “petro-Peronism” of Chavez’s Venezuela.15
In any case, we do not live in such a world of peasant countries, colonial empires and “weak bourgeoisies” anymore: there is no room for additional bourgeois revolutions. Even in some middle-eastern countries where there are monarchs or dictators in charge, where bourgeois revolutions have never truly occurred and democracy is “foreign”, capital is nonetheless everywhere, and the proletariat makes up the mass of the population.16 We should have no illusions about the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie inevitably bringing with it democracy. Liberalism never lived up to its own promises of universalism and equality anyway.
Where the proletarians got in the way of the “anti-imperialist” “revolutionaries” they were ruthlessly repressed. Examples are abound:
Vietnam: Suppression of the Saigon Commune of 1945 by the Viet Minh and later the massacre of Vietnamese Trotskyists by the Stalinists of the NLF.17
Angola: Suppression of the Luanda dockers’ strike of 1975 by the MPLA-led state.18
China: The Shanghai massacre of 1927 conducted by the Koumintang after the Communist Party had behaved as “bag-carriers” for the nationalists.19
Cuba: The coercion of unions into not striking in the name of the “revolution”, the integration of the dictatorship into the union apparatus, persecution of the anarcho-syndicalists, many of whom were forced into exile by the new Castro government. The torture and killings of political opponents and a variety of other measures of terror against the working class.20
National liberation movements, furthermore have created states which have gone on to engage in wars and oppress national/ethnic minorities. Indonesia, which won independence in 1945 from the Dutch empire, now conducts a policy of genocide in West Papua. In response, the Free Papua Movement has appeared. China, once part of the center of the “anti-imperialist” “socialist” bloc, is now ethnically repopulating Tibet with a mass influx of ethnic Han people. Vietnam went to war too with China and Cambodia after its reunification. Although a great number of Khmers were killed, Vietnamese, Chinese and muslim minorities were particularly targeted by the Khmer Rouge during the Cambodian Genocide, until the Vietnamese forces put an end to it. If there is one special thing Uncle Ho could be commended for it was putting an end to a genuinely reactionary and genocidal anti-colonial nationalist movement.
Thus if we look at the history of nation-forming, it shows us that “anti-colonial” movements expelled their colonial rulers only to deepen and extend the modernization social process that began with colonization, including the very idea of nationality, onto themselves under a native ruling class.21 These movements were undoubtedly “progressive” in general because they overthrew colonial forms of exploitation — slavery or otherwise forced-labor, and wholesale plunder of the colony’s wealth for the metropole — and built the preconditions for communism (i.e. they kickstarted capitalist development).
Gender and National Liberation
Palestinian Motherhood by Sliman Mansour
An aesthetic element that has recently captivated foreign leftist supporters of national liberation movements, has been the image of women with guns. This gives a feminist cover to these national liberation movements — femme-washing them. There is some truth here, because women may find the movement as a method of escape from particularly backward patriarchal traditions, as we have seen with some of the women fighters in the YPJ, who have escaped arranged marriages.22 But recent feminist theory which demands a closer examination of the nation-state as an organizer of gender relations points to a contradictory dynamic:
As postcolonial feminism in particular has compellingly showed, the nation-state as capital’s chief political form is not thinkable without the oppression of women. This occurs in a twofold manner. On the one hand, the nation as the allegedly homogenous community, with a common origin/destiny and kinship that is “attached” to the state, can only think of women as its symbolic markers as well as cultural and biological reproducers. This is true not only for ethnic conceptions of the nation as Kulturnation and Volknation, but also in those cases in which the nation as such is the driving force of liberation movements. Even when nationalism has played the role of a liberating force, such as in the context of the decolonization, and the issue of women’s rights has accompanied that of national independence, the results for women have often been disappointing. After independence, women’s role has frequently been reaffirmed as that of biological reproducers of the (new, liberated) nation. For instance, despite their key role during the Algerian war of independence from France and in the National Liberation Front, at the end of the conflict Algerian women did not gain the equality and rights they had wished for. One of the reasons for this limitation was, as Moghadam argues, that the struggle was one for “national liberation, not for social (class/gender) transformation.” In other words, the nation – any nation – cannot do without exercising its control over women’s bodies and women’s child-raising role, because the very future of the nation depends on them.23
If nationalist movements have progressed in gender relations by smashing archaic forms of colonial exploitation and undermining traditional gender relations, they do so only to reconstitute gender in a more modern order. With this in mind, it will not be surprising to see the Kurdish women disappointed by a new patriarchal normality if a Kurdish nation-state is formed when they are no longer needed as soldiers, but as wives, mothers and wage-workers who will rebuild the fledgling nation.
Conclusions and Directions for Further Study
With this brief overview of 20th-century national liberation movements there are a few major conclusions I wish to make:
20th-century national liberation carried out a bourgeois program and was thoroughly anti-working class in character despite being progressive due to the overthrow of colonial forms of exploitation. The anti-imperialist fronts were heavily involved in the geopolitics of the time which played out as opposition between the Western/liberal/capitalist camp on one side and the “socialist” camp on the other.
A balance sheet of 20th-century national liberation is still required to understand precisely what it achieved and how it differed from country to country. What has been written here is at best a starting point but it is not a comprehensive historical analysis colored with detail and nuance. Revolutionaries need to see how the poison of nationalism has been sowed in the hearts of the working class in every country in order to better combat it in particular situations.
We need an understanding of how decolonization influenced the composition of the working class in these countries, especially now since the demise of the old developmentalist dictatorships. As these nations were formed through liberation from colonization this might have the effect of tightly binding proletarians to their nation-state.
Perhaps the phenomenon of the national liberation party-form should also be more thoroughly investigated. Why was this a recurring pattern? How did these parties navigate their road to power? What can we learn about them now that we live in a world where various nationalist movements are on the rise? Not in order to copy them but to develop counter-strategies in the event that similar situations might emerge, which seems inevitable considering all the war that emerges out of a continuing capitalist crisis.
An investigation is required into what are the implications of the end of the peasant question on contemporary and future nationalism? National liberation movements of the 20th century occurred in backward countries and relied on a peasant base, especially to form their armies, and carried out the aforementioned “agrarian program”. Obviously contemporary separatist movements do not have this resource at hand anymore.24
Back to Marx: Progress and Class-Political Independence
Battle at Soufflot barricades at Rue Soufflot Street on 24 June 1848 by Horace Vernet
In Germany, finally, the decisive struggle now on the order of the day is that between the bourgeoisie and the absolute monarchy. Since the communists cannot enter upon the decisive struggle between themselves and the bourgeoisie until the bourgeoisie is in power, it follows that it is in the interest of the communists to help the bourgeoisie to power as soon as possible in order the sooner to be able to overthrow it. Against the governments, therefore, the communists must continually support the radical liberal party, taking care to avoid the self-deceptions of the bourgeoisie and not fall for the enticing promises of benefits which a victory for the bourgeoisie would allegedly bring to the proletariat. The sole advantages which the proletariat would derive from a bourgeois victory would consist
(i) in various concessions which would facilitate the unification of the proletariat into a closely knit, battle-worthy, and organized class; and
(ii) in the certainly that, on the very day the absolute monarchies fall, the struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat will start. From that day on, the policy of the communists will be the same as it now is in the countries where the bourgeoisie is already in power.
It is quite an interesting thing that Marx and Engels, the key thinkers of communism, had lived in a time of bourgeois revolution. The bourgeoisie, at least in Europe and the Americas, was smashing the aristocracy or slavocracy, pronouncing liberty, equality and fraternity, conquering new lands, and “civilizing” the world under its order.
Neil Davidson very clearly summarizes the perspective they took which informed what they thought the position socialists should take towards nationalist movements:
Where Marx and Engels have important things which are directly about nations is in relation to the attitude socialists should take towards specific national movements. At heart, their attitude is based on whether the success of any movement – secessionist or irredentist – is likely to advance the possibility of the socialist revolution, although this was often in indirect ways. Essentially, they saw nationalism, in the sense of political movements leading to the establishment of nation-states, as part of the process of bourgeois revolution which would sweep away pre-capitalist forms and enable the conditions for the creation of a working class. This is the context in which they decided which nationalisms to support and which to oppose. Poland and Ireland are respectively oppressed and held back in developmental terms by the British and Russian Empires, and so had to be supported. Equally, national movements which relied on the great empires for their existence, such as pan-Slavism in 1848, had to be opposed. It is, of course, possible to agree with the latter conclusion with[out] accepting the mystified nonsense about “non-historic nations” that Engels sometimes used to support it.25
Paul Mattick’s essay “Nationalism and Socialism”, which gives a good commentary on 20th-century national liberation, also summarizes it well:
“Progressive nations” of the last century [19th century] were those with a rapid capital development; “reactionary nations” were those in which social relationships hindered the unfolding of the capitalist mode of production. Because the “next future” belonged to capitalism and because capitalism is the precondition for socialism, non-utopian socialists favored capitalism as against older social production relations and welcomed nationalism in so far as it served to hasten capitalist development. Though reluctant to admit this, they were not disinclined to accept capitalist imperialism as a way of breaking the stagnation and backwardness of non-capitalist areas from without, and thus to direct their development into “progressive” channels. They also favored the disappearance of small nations unable to develop large-scale economies, and their incorporation into larger national entities capable of capitalist development. They would, however, side with small “progressive nations” as against larger reactionary countries and, when suppressed by the latter, would support the former’s national liberation movements. At all times and on all occasions, however, nationalism was not a socialist goal but was accepted as a mere instrument of social advancement which, in turn, would come to its end in the internationalism of socialism. Western capitalism was the “capitalist world” of the last century. National issues were concerned with the unification of countries such as Germany and Italy, with the liberation of such oppressed nations as Ireland, Poland, Hungary, Greece, and with the consolidation of such “synthetic” nations as the United States. This was also the “world” of socialism; a small world indeed viewed from the twentieth century. While national questions that agitated the socialist movement in the middle of the nineteenth century had either been resolved, or were in the process of being resolved, and, in any case, had ceased to be of real importance to Western socialism, the world-wide revolutionary movement of the twentieth century opened the question of nationalism anew. Is this new nationalism, which sheds Western dominance and institutes capitalist production relations and modern industry in hitherto under-developed areas, still a “progressive” force as was the nationalism of old? Do these national aspirations coincide in some manner with those of socialism? Do they hasten the end of capitalism by weakening Western imperialism or do they inject new life into capitalism by extending its mode of production all over the globe?
The position of nineteenth-century socialism on the question of nationalism involved more than preferring capitalism to more static social systems. Socialists operated within bourgeois-democratic revolutions which were also nationalist; they supported national liberation movements of oppressed people because they promised to take on bourgeois-democratic features, because in socialist eyes these national-bourgeois-democratic revolutions were no longer strictly capitalist revolutions. They could be utilized if not for the installation of socialism itself, then for furthering the growth of socialist movements and for bringing about conditions more favorable to the latter.
Marx and Engels supported certain nationalist movements, like German unification and Polish independence, insofar as they quickened the development of the pre-conditions for communist revolution. They were not interested in moralizing about oppressed nations or nationalism for nationalism’s sake and would have had no time for the intellectual advocates of so-called “national-cultural autonomy”, who do not seem to see a problem with the possibility of nationalities existing after the establishment of socialism.26
It is also important to note Marx’s support for the Union side in the American Civil War.27The USA was already the most advanced capitalist nation of its time, but it was faced with a slaveholders’ rebellion in the South. It seems like one of the last examples Marx saw of the bourgeois state acting in a revolutionary capacity, in this case crushing the leftovers of the slave system, allowing the workers’ movement to progress, regardless of the intention of the statesmen, soldiers, and generals on the Union side.28 Also worth noting is that Marx and Engels did not frame their support for nationalism in moral terms like the “rights” of the category of “oppressed” nations which Lenin talked about. Indeed, they supported the Hungarian national revolution, but as Rosa Luxemburg noted, the Magyar ethnic minority were known at the time for their oppression of the other nationalities/ethnic groups.29 Their perspective was not about national oppression, but about bourgeois revolution accelerating the conditions which would make communism a possibility. It is worth mentioning that Rosa Luxemburg also takes on Marx and Engel’s approach in her methodology of looking at the class forces at work in specific cases (e.g. in Poland) to determine if socialists should support national independence.30
Is there a tension between their advocacy for bourgeois causes and, at the same time, their stated commitment to the necessity of proletarian class-political independence as necessary for communist strategy? For some communists who dealt with this question, history is split into two phases, one where it is okay to support the bourgeois-democratic revolution, and the other when it is time to fight for the proletarian revolution, which the Engels’ quote above suggests, although it would, of course, be adjusted to the varying situations of different countries: not all countries experience capitalist development in the same way and some had a bourgeois revolution before others. Can there be, however, a line that can be drawn when it is no longer viable for communists to support nationalist movements and what are the criteria for it? For certain Marxists, particularly left-communists, that hold to a strict decadence theory, a world-historical line is drawn at 1914, when the capitalist world went into decay. One of the strategic implications of decadence theory is that communists, to be true internationalists, must not support any nationalist movements — in other words, our era is qualitatively different.
I think some convincing criticisms have been made of this kind of decadence theory and so I am not going to deal with this any further.31
In short, anti-national communists can argue the national question problem from three main perspectives (which are not necessarily mutually exclusive):
Decadence theory or something which gives alternate historical periodization or directionality to world capitalist development.
An empirical statement of the anti-proletarian character of national liberation struggles, which has been presented above.
From the perspective of an invariant communist principle of proletarian class-political independence, such as that advocated by Mike Macnair of the CPGB. His argument, learning from 20th-century national liberation relies on a pretty simple observation:
…the class contradiction between the working class and national bourgeoisie of the oppressed countries is stronger than the national contradiction between the bourgeoisie of the oppressed country and the bourgeoisie of the imperialist country. Notice that I am not saying that there is no such thing as imperialism, or that there is no such thing as national oppression: just that the class contradiction tends to be more fundamental, and that consequently, the anti-imperialist united front fails.32
The last stance seems the most convincing to me. Regardless of whether Marx was right to support the nationalisms of his time, the age of bourgeois revolutions is over, the bourgeoisie has fulfilled its “historic mission” internationally and capitalism has conquered the world so much more thoroughly than it had in Marx’s time, that it is absurd to ask for more capitalist “progress”, especially when it seems like more of it will only lead to more of the war, ecological destruction, and misery which we are experiencing now, which you do not need a decadence theory to explain. The objective conditions for communism — the international spread of the capitalist mode of production, the immense forces of production based on mechanization (and now automation), and the international proletariat, the class which has nothing to lose but its chains, and which is the negation of all classes — have been ripe for a long time. Nothing lacks but a revolutionary movement.
Remote Control Activism
The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
— Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)
There is no shortage of leftists who assemble in the streets in protest against this or that act of imperialism. When a new war starts or a new country enters a war, you are bound to observe all kinds of ridiculous signs, slogans, leaflets, and cartoons at such protests. “Victory to the Iraqi Resistance” or something similar was in fact spouted by the SWP and the Stop the War Coalition in the UK in protests against the Iraq War. Leftists of all stripes take particular positions: who to denounce, who to “critically” or “unconditionally” support. Often their logic is that of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, in which case so-called “socialists” should really have no problem marching with Islamists — we are all fighting imperialism, right?33 Anti-war coalitions will desperately seek support from whoever: businesspeople, politicians, foreign policy experts, and people who they would otherwise hate for their politics. With the seriousness of generals, they perform this farce as if they actually have any relevant outcome on conflicts happening thousands of kilometers away. The best these activist groups get out of it is some more paper sales and more recruits to keep these political rackets going. Left organizations need something horrific to be indignant about to keep their blood pumping. It makes people feel like they are doing something.
These rituals of opportunism simply save the consciences of activists from the inevitable fact that many will perish in bloodthirsty massacres, regardless of what slogans and marches are organized absent the international proletariat instaurating a dictatorship of the proletariat.
If we put the nonsense of their “positions” and slogans aside, and use, as a kind of reference point, the protests against the Iraq War, then it is pretty clear that this kind of “anti-imperialist” practice of protest is ineffective.
Before the Iraq War was launched, millions poured into the streets around the world in protest. It all came to nothing. The simple fact is that it was impossible to stop the Iraq War without overthrowing the state. Did we see any concrete attempts to foster resistance to the war inside the armed forces? It seems like the answer is no. It is not surprising, because the difference between the days of the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War and now is that the invading force in Vietnam tried to fight a colonial war with an unreliable conscript army, which was receptive to the anti-war sentiment of the population back at home. But a gigantic modern military machine like that of the USA, staffed completely by professional enlisted personnel cannot be stopped by good old-fashioned civil disobedience. To be realistic, anything short of a dictatorship of the proletariat, with significant portions of the military splitting to the proletarian side, will mean the continuation of the war and crisis that is occurring across the globe.
Oppressor and Oppressed
As a postscript I’d like to answer a question before it is asked. The question is: “Don’t you think a descendant of oppressed people is better off as a supermarket manager or police chief?” My answer is another question: What concentration camp manager, national executioner or torturer is not a descendant of oppressed people?”
— Fredy Perlman, The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism (1984)
It is pretty easy to see that the left sees the national question through a moralistic lens of “oppressor”, “imperialist” and “first world” nations against “oppressed”, “third world nations”. If any serious theory is cited it is simply to confirm existing biases and such theory e.g. Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism is simply accepted uncritically and out of historical context. The nationalism of an oppressed nation (e.g. the Palestinians) just as much implies class collaboration as that of the chauvinistic nationalism of oppressor nations (e.g. Israel). However, when internationalists make our anti-national critique we should be sensitive to nuances. We do not deny that there is oppression on the basis of nationality, otherwise, we would not have to deal with this question in the first place.
In the case of Israel and Palestine, it is clear that the Israeli military is engaging in a military occupation over Palestinian lands — it is doing the oppressing — and is armed with tanks, an air force, heavy artillery etc. while the Palestinian resistance fighters are simply armed with rocks, homemade weaponry, and some small arms — in other words, the forces are massively disproportionate. For these reasons, the left is quick to condemn, for example, Israel’s military crimes but will turn a blind eye to the repression of workers’ strikes and the murderous racketeering of Hamas or the idiotic adventurism of Stalinist national liberation fronts like the PFLP.
While we communists can say that: in war, the proletarians of various nations slaughter each other (that is to say, go against their class interest), and that “the main enemy is at home”, this should not hide us from the fact that proletarians who engage in nationalist causes often do with very real material pressures motivating them to act in the ways they do. They know what it is like to be under military occupation, to be dispossessed of their home, and turn into a desperate refugee. The Kurds and Yezidis who have rapidly joined the YPG and YPJ, have done so because they are afraid of the genocidal terror perpetrated by ISIS, whether or not they seriously believe in all the ideological stuff spouted by Ocalan. In Indonesia, the formerly colonized have become the colonizers: with the Dutch gone, the West Papuans are left to the mercy of the Indonesian army. The Palestinians live under direct military occupation and outside the edges of Israeli settlements, so it is no surprise that ordinary people will throw stones and physically confront the security forces. While we should not forget the power of nationalist parties, with their patronage links and their armed thugs, we should also realize that not every part of a resistance to military occupation is a conspiracy controlled by a nationalist racket. We communists would be the last to condemn anyone who takes up arms to defend themselves or their family.
In the West Papuan example, there is plenty of resistance that falls outside of the well known Free Papua Movement34: there are the tribal warriors in the remote jungle who spear Indonesian soldiers, the youths who throw rocks at cops, the rioters in the streets. We cannot just shrug off the people who engage in this activity as having “false consciousness” because they happen to not be acting as a class and are instead fighting against their oppression as an oppressed nation or ethnic group. They are not under “nationalist illusions”; they are directly reacting to material pressures, fighting for survival in many cases. We cannot ignore these facts. Without any powerful organized internationalist proletarian alternative to the barbarisms that surround them, an alternative beyond nations, what other hope do these people have?
The programmatic implications for communists are as follows:
Maintaining class-political independence will be especially difficult in countries under military and colonial occupation. The reality of their daily oppression will mean that many workers will identify with a nationalist cause before they start to unite on a class basis and fight against their own bourgeoisie and those foreign to them. In addition, the repression that proletarians would face as a result of efforts to organize as a class would be intense. Principled communists in such oppressed nations would refuse to engage in opportunistic entryism into nationalist movements to “turn them to the left”. Their best hope lies in the class-struggle breaking out nearby to challenge the state regionally and internationally.
In countries in which there are significant national or racialized minorities (e.g. Romas in Europe, African-Americans in the USA, Kurds in Turkey, Maoris in New Zealand), and where the situation requires it, communists should advocate for special caucuses within working class institutions to ensure that these minorities are included in class organization and are better placed to overcome language barriers and combat racism and nationalist chauvinism. This is not an argument for separatism, on the contrary, it would help national and racialized minorities abandon a nationalist consciousness in favor of integration through class struggle. In some countries, such a strategy is simply not necessary (e.g. in ethnically homogenous Japan and Korea), so it needs to be applied carefully to particular circumstances.
Forming solidarity between workers of the oppressor and oppressed countries that goes beyond mere symbolic actions. To make such solidarity more effective across borders would require a better understanding of how migration affects class struggle and what dominant supply chains are liable to disruption along multiple points. What the BDS campaign against Israel lacks is understanding of how vast modern supply chains are: boycotts will not cut it.
Given sufficient power of a communist movement to enact these tasks:
Initiating campaigns to resist conscription if it is ever introduced.
If possible, demand democratic reform of the military. Governments would be very reluctant to grant such demands, but in the case of a revolutionary situation, it is at least a good guarantee against the troops being used against workers, and would make foreign military interventions much more difficult.
Spreading defeatist propaganda, and encouraging and facilitating defection amongst the soldiers of all forces, and the split of the military along class lines.35
Strategic blockages and sabotage of the key logistics and military industry.
An unapologetically universal end to national borders and the end of intra-national borders (e.g. the hukou system). Intra-national borders also effectively divide the working class, based on geography, into citizens and non-citizens. Freedom of movement for all.
Demand the end of oppressive laws that target people based on national, ethnic or racial status e.g. the “race powers” in Section 51 (xxvi) of the Australian constitution which allow the government to produce special laws for certain races.36
A realistic strategy must acknowledge that without an international dictatorship of the proletariat, imperialist wars will continue to ravage the world. Refuse to settle for any half-measures.
The Indigenous Question in (Settled) Settler-Colonial States
Aboriginal Australia. Cultural-linguistic groups are shown in different colors.
We have taken away their land, have destroyed their food, made them subject to our laws, which are antagonistic to their habits and traditions, have endeavoured to make them subject to our tastes, which they hate, have massacred them when they defended themselves and their possessions after their own fashion, and have taught them by hard warfare to acknowledge us to be their master.
In the Territory the mating of an Aboriginal with any person other than an Aboriginal is prohibited. The mating of colored aliens with any female of part Aboriginal blood is also forbidden. Every endeavor is being made to breed out the color by elevating female half-castes to the white standard with a view to their absorption by mating into the white population.
—Northern Territory Administrator’s Report, 1933, p 7.38
In spite of efforts to euphemize and hide pre-colonial history, it is no secret that in white settled countries (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, USA) the nation-state was founded on the dispossession and destruction of the indigenous population, and that many years after these countries have been invaded, the surviving indigenous people are subject to the most shocking conditions of life, as the most marginalized in a white supremacist society.39There is a clear international pattern that indigenous people in these countries experience without exception: disproportionately lower life expectancy,40 poorer health outcomes,41 poorer education, higher incarceration rates,42 lower employment rates, disintegration of family ties, higher incidence of drug abuse, and higher suicide rates compared to the general (largely white) population. This is not a coincidence. This section will concern matters associated with the indigenous question in Australia, the situation will obviously differ from country to country, where the history is different, although commonalities will exist.
To seek justice and remedy the racial inequality experienced by indigenous Australians (that is Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples), indigenous activists and the left have proposed a variety of demands of which there is no general consensus (and which are not necessarily mutually exclusive, best seen as a bundle):
Land rights (not simply the existing native title scheme)
Parliamentary representation (a separate indigenous parliament that works with the Australian government, in order to better represent indigenous people)
Indigenous independence or regional self-government (e.g. articulated in the form of indigenous regional autonomy (“sovereignty”) as part of more complicated Australian federation)43
A treaty or multiple treaties between indigenous and non-indigenous people.44The treaties will formalize a collection of rights and responsibilities between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians e.g. to care for sites and artifacts of cultural significance, to maintain a standard of housing, health, and education for indigenous people or whatever else the treaty might specify. The treaty is best seen as a form of constitutionalism that will establish an institutional framework in the state for further reforms that are meant to be beneficial for indigenous people.45
I do not propose to have all the answers. It is clear that it cannot be dealt with in the same way as the national question. I think communists have to really think hard about how to programmatically confront the indigenous question, just as we have to think hard about the national question or the question of whether to conduct electoralism. One thing that is clear however is that existing proposals do not fundamentally challenge the sovereignty of the Australian state, they are all essentially about how the state deals with this “racial problem”, how its “people” are represented, and they do not seem to assume or propose a break with the nation-state and capitalism.
It will be interesting to observe which sections of the indigenous population will reap the benefits of land settlements. It will be interesting to see, if it is implemented, regional indigenous governments as part of an Australian federation, with indigenous politicians who represent their people and set economic agendas, indigenous capitalists, indigenous cops and so on. Localist “sovereignty” schemes should be met with extreme skepticism for the possibility of the formation of an enriched stratum of the indigenous population, a “Black Bourgeoisie”. Remote regional governments would have to deal with economic development (this is a stated goal of treaty advocates by the way) one way or another, maybe requesting that resource-extraction or energy companies invest in their “communities” to produce “jobs” for people whose labor-power capital already mostly deems unnecessary. Plans for autarky (or “self-reliance”) in the bush are plain fantasy. Rights and responsibilities are the currency of a bourgeois state: formalized changes to land tenure, political administration and representation are things that, even if difficult, are totally achievable within its framework, but whether they actually have a positive effect on the lives of the majority of indigenous proletarians is another matter.
I would highly recommend that leftists in Australia, New Zealand, and other settled countries read a great text written about the relationship between class struggle and indigenous struggle in Hawaii—“Hawaii: Class Militancy or Cultural Patriotism?”—that deals with these kinds of problems. The promotion of shared culture by aspiring indigenous “community leaders” is something that should be criticized if it promotes an identity that undermines class solidarity.
Examples of what happens in NZ and Canada with indigenous people, where there are treaties and institutional frameworks that are more “progressive” and which activists in Australia are demanding a move towards, should also provoke criticisms. Indigenous people in NZ and Canada are still racially marginalized and worse off in every regard compared to whites. A recurring problem in the political consciousness of people in Canada is how they compare themselves to the USA to show “how much better things are than in the US”, the same applying for New Zealanders with Australia.
It is an undertheorised issue. The left often does not give enough criticism to these proposals, giving things over to aboriginal elders, “representatives”, and “leaders” to speak on behalf of “their people” at meetings and at rallies, and does not engage in any clear programmatic debate, preferring to engage in representations of white guilt and shouting slogans that sound right instead and expecting change to come about. Perhaps this is for fear of being labeled as uncaring or racist. This would go along with changes in anti-racist discourse towards standpoint epistemology in recent years. I will leave this issue with a few points for consideration:
Indigenous Australians, and many indigenous populations throughout the world, are thoroughly proletarianized and highly urbanized.46 This is the result of a gradual process of colonization. In colonial Australia there was a genuinely colonial settled or semi-settled region with a frontier, beyond which was simply a grand “unexplored” continent populated with indigenous people who still lived in traditional ways, albeit at war with settlers. That is no longer the case. Eventually, settler-colonies stop being colonies and actually complete themselves as settled nation-states, this was completed sometime in the 20th century. The last uncontacted people were found in 1984. More recently, an important effect of the Northern Territory (NT) Intervention was to remove children from their families, depopulate remote communities, and accelerate the urbanization of the indigenous population. The benefits for capital are obvious: this makes it easier for mining companies to get their hands on valuable land.
Indigenous people are frequently used as an experimental population for the testing of welfare policies before they are implemented on wider society, e.g. income management and cashless welfare cards. The state can act with the utmost cruelty against them and get away with just as it has done with the NT Intervention. It is no secret that as a result of their exclusion from working life, many indigenous people are dependent on the dole — this is a tendency seen consistently since early colonialism. As a result, an important element of racism in Australia has been the resentment towards indigenous people for being “unproductive” and “lazy”, and this has always manifested itself among the resentful white working class time and again. More attention needs to be given to struggles centered around welfare, attempts at sabotaging or blocking such welfare experiments, and demands for dole freedom.47Rather than supporting policies by “progressive” politicians that will promise “development” and jobs for indigenous people on national parks, mines, oil/gas refineries or government admin (i.e. jobs for jobs sake), should we instead focus on fighting for the unemployed, and those deemed unnecessary by the labor market? This is a key element of the integration that would help to bring down resentful racist divisions in the working class.
Some things are not salvageable. The disconnection of indigenous people from their traditional mode of living is real and mostly permanent. Some cultural practices remain but they are relics disconnected from the society that produced them. There is no way that people can go back to pre-colonial existence. To propose that you can, after a magical process of “decolonization”, is pure voluntarism, and radically understates the effects of colonization, and the permeation of the market into every aspect of life. Modernity must be accepted as the starting point of our politics. Proposals for some sort of infra-political cultural revival (like that advocated by Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance48) within a perspective of “decolonization” will be at best futile in uniting and liberating indigenous people from racial oppression and at worst reactionary and have little relation to the reality of the largely proletarianized and urbanized indigenous people, creating a cultural veneer on the same capitalist social relations seen everywhere.
The best thing a communist program can do for indigenous people in white settler states is, in addition to destroying the nation-state and its repressive apparatus in the dictatorship of the proletariat, is to meet universal demands — housing, healthcare, education, safety from violence, and others — that serve to eradicate uneven development, which is currently experienced most acutely along racial divisions. We are concerned here with lifting the status of the most excluded section of the proletariat, whose basic needs are hardly being met and who are faced with the violence of the state on a daily basis. No amount of infra-political “cultural” revival will deal with that. Just as the programs to lift the global south out of underdevelopment will be something that will need to start in the “first hundred days” of world revolution, so will the dictatorship of the proletariat have to give priority to pour a lot of resources into addressing the uneven development within a rich country like Australia, giving indigenous people for once, the real benefits of modernity that they have been excluded from. Modernity, socialist central planning, and the scientific mastery of nature are the ways to achieve this, not separatism and a return to tradition. These measures, however, must be implemented in a way in which the indigenous communities have control over how it is done, and this is compatible with the “self-government of localities” that is an essential part of communist republicanism. A degree of cultural autonomy is also compatible with this, for example, school lessons in the language, songs, and history of the local indigenous community.
A Fresh View
What matters for a communist organization and the development of our political positions is to prioritize programmatic unity over theoretical unity. This means that as long as we can practically work together, share a common set of basic positions and have a minimum basis for productive dialogue, having different theoretical explanations for different political “questions” is fine.
It is not enough to take the right “positions” and then to go into fruitless activism. The state machine is too powerful for large protests to stop wars. The state machine at the very least needs to be threatened to halt a war, but ultimately the state must be smashed and the rule of the bourgeoisie brought to an end in order to bring an end to war. The dictatorship of the proletariat that smashes it will be international and anti-national, not producing new national sovereignties, or it will fail.
Programs for returning what was “stolen” to “rightful owners” as a way of dealing with the national question has nothing to do with communism. It reduces a question of democratic rights to a question of land redistribution. If anything it has more in common with the Proudhonism which Marx critiqued in The Poverty of Philosophy. Communists do not wish to return lands to “rightful owners” any more than we want proletarians to reverse the passage of time and go “back to the land” as their peasant ancestors used to live. Rather we wish to abolish property, and nations. It should not be controversial for us to say that we want anyone to live wherever they damn well please. Yes, this means Africans and Arabs living in Europe, just as much as Jews living in Palestine. We have no place for reactionary appeals to ancestry or tradition, and ethno-racial claims to land. A socialist cosmopolitanism is essential, especially in an epoch where right-wing nationalism is in the ascendancy.
We wish to do away with the nation-state, something that some advocates of “decolonization” wish to do, but that does not mean that we advocate for backward social forms and petty localism e.g. tribal “self-rule”.49The communist goal is the universal liberation of humanity. With the overcoming of the capitalist system, there is no reason to group people into clans, tribes, nations, races and so on. National and racial oppression can only be finally overcome by negating the material conditions that enable them, not by fostering new nationalisms to compete with existing ones.
Even if previously it may have been justified for communists to make exception to their guiding principle of class-political independence of the proletariat and to support the bourgeois revolution, which took a national form, it is not the task of communists to liberate or build nations, in other words, to conduct the program of the bourgeoisie. Just because a certain historical endeavor (liberation of the colonies) was progressive did not mean that communists should necessarily have supported it, because ultimately it is our duty to take the side of the proletariat wherever it is. Bourgeois progress has been done enough and trying to further it would get in the way of our task, which is to participate in and enhance the international proletariat’s struggle to overthrow this system once and for all.
