Just Another Kautsky Fan: Understanding the Early Stalin

Interpreting Stalin’s fledgling revolutionary career through his later status as a brutal labor dictator obscures an early whole-hearted admiration for the works of Kautsky and Lenin. By Lawrence Parker.

Writing in 1946, Max Shachtman made an astute point about Joseph Stalin. In reviewing Leon Trotsky’s biography of Stalin, he said that “we do not recognize the young Stalin in the Stalin of today; there does not even seem to be a strong resemblance”.¹ By 1946, Stalin was the ‘generalissimus’ of the Soviet Union, heading up a brutal dictatorship over and against the working class. Little wonder it was so difficult for the left to then understand the mentality of the young Georgian revolutionary who joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) at the turn of the 20th century, particularly after Stalin’s back story had been ‘enlivened’ by a few decades of lying propaganda.

Shachtman’s own line of reasoning appears to be traceable to contradictions inherent in Trotsky’s (unfinished) biography of Stalin. We partly have the imposition of a schema, a kind of ‘original sin’ that suggests Stalin was always fundamentally bad:

Never a tribune, never the strategist or leader of a rebellion, [Stalin] has ever been only a bureaucrat of revolution. That was why, in order to find full play for his peculiar talents, he was condemned to bide his time in a semi-comatose condition until the revolution’s raging torrents had subsided.²

However, Trotsky offered other statements that make such overarching judgments problematic from the standpoint of method. He had this to say about Stalin at the beginnings of the anti-Trotsky triumvirate (which included Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev) in circa 1923:

Who could have thought during those hours that from the midst of the Bolshevik Party itself would emerge a totalitarian dictator who would repeat the calumny of Yarmelenko with reference to the entire staff of Bolshevism? If at that time anyone would have shown Stalin his own future role he would have turned away from himself in disgust.³

Now, calling someone “only a bureaucrat of revolution” is obviously a different designation to that of “totalitarian dictator”, but Trotsky does establish the important principle that historical circumstances changed Stalin profoundly, which could be taken to imply that history could have produced a number of different versions of Stalin, so to speak.

With this in mind, it might be better to view pre-1917 Stalin as a Social Democratic praktik, one of its intelligent workers involved in the running of its local and national organizations and intent on furnishing the proletariat with a deep-seated Marxist knowledge of its heroic mission to overthrow Tsarism (i.e. the active, hegemonic notion of a Marxist propagandist). As part of this role, Stalin, as a follower of Lenin, also sought to emulate the revolutionary achievements of German Social Democracy and its leaders and communicated his admiration. Subsequent Soviet notions from Stalin and others of Russian Bolshevism as sui generis, set apart from the international revolutionary movement, are invented narratives, absent from Stalin’s early work. This, I would argue, is one of the messages to be gleaned from Stalin’s pre-1917 writings.

When looking back at his own works from 1901-07, Stalin classed himself as one of the “Bolshevik practical workers”, characterized by “inadequate theoretical training” and a “neglect, characteristic of practical workers, of theoretical questions”.⁴ As Tucker has pointed out, this characterization allies itself with the mature image of Stalin as a “pragmatist”, intent on the practical effort in constructing ‘socialism’ inside the borders of the Soviet Union rather than on supposed airy-fairy ideals of ‘world revolution’.⁵ In fact, a prosaic reading of ‘practical’ (as opposed to praktik) obscures what Stalin was in these years. Tucker asserts that Stalin’s “original function as a Social Democratic ‘practical worker’ was propaganda” and that “knowledge of the fundamentals of Marxism and the ability to explain them to ordinary workers were [Stalin’s] chief stock-in trade as a professional revolutionary”.⁶ Little wonder, then, that this propagandist graduated to writing unspectacular but worthy articles for Georgian Social-Democratic newspapers such as Brdzola (The Struggle).

Stalin’s downplaying of his theoretical and literary credentials was not followed through consistently in Soviet literature. Although Stalin reduced his personal role in his edits to the 1938 Short Course on the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks)⁷, other works, for example by Soviet historian Yemelyan Yaroslavsky, offer a more realistic appreciation of Stalin popularizing the ideas of Marx, Engels, and Lenin in early theoretical writings and having the “closest affinity” with Lenin.⁸ Other assertions of Yaroslavsky, that in 1905 “Stalin worked hand in hand with Lenin in hammering out the Bolshevik line”⁹ are fraudulent. Stalin was simply a follower of Lenin in this period.

Stalin also offered a 1946 health warning on his early works (including ones up until 1917), stating that they were “the works of a young Marxist not yet molded into a finished Marxist-Leninist” and that they “bear traces of some of the propositions of the old Marxists which afterward became obsolete and were subsequently discarded by our party”.¹⁰ Stalin gave two examples: the agrarian question and the conditions for the victory of the socialist revolution. But such a warning was also pertinent to articles praising German Social-Democratic figures such as Karl Kautsky and August Bebel. The Stalin of 1946 would not have wanted communist readers thinking these were suitable figures to emulate, given the line that had emerged in his manifold corrections to the 1938 Short course, where it was argued that after Engels’ death in 1895, West European Social-Democratic parties had begun to degenerate from parties of social revolution into reformist parties.¹¹ However, at least in the terms in which he referenced German Social-Democracy, Stalin’s praise was not a facet of his own immaturity or ‘immature’ Bolshevism, given that as late as 1920 Lenin was looking back favorably on the influence of Kautsky in the early years of the 20th century: “There were no Bolsheviks then, but all future Bolsheviks, collaborating with him, valued him highly.”¹²

‘An Outstanding Theoretician of Social-Democracy’

A flavor of Stalin’s own praise can be gleaned from an article from 1906, in which he discussed German opportunists accusing Kautsky and Bebel of being Blanquists. Stalin said: “What is there surprising in the fact that the Russian opportunists… copy the European opportunists and call us Blanquists? It shows only that the Bolsheviks, like Kautsky and [French socialist Jules] Guesde, are revolutionary Marxists.”¹³

In February 1907, Stalin wrote a preface to Kautsky’s The Driving Force and Prospects of the Russian Revolution, which began unambiguously:

Karl Kautsky’s name is not new to us. He has long been known as an outstanding theoretician of Social-Democracy. But Kautsky is known not only from that aspect; he is notable also as a thorough and thoughtful investigator of tactical problems. In this respect he has won great authority not only among the European comrades, but also among us.¹⁴

In the face of such unambiguous praise, the Soviet editors of Stalin’s Works were forced to partly retract the general suggestion of the 1938 Short Course that Western Social Democracy had begun to disintegrate into reformism after the death of Engels in 1895. They argued that the likes of Kautsky had retained their revolutionary integrity a decade beyond this and that the revolutionary Russian party was, implicitly, not sui generis:

K Kautsky and J Guesde at that time [1906] had not yet gone over to the camp of the opportunists. The Russian revolution of 1905-07, which greatly influenced the international revolutionary movement and the working class of Germany in particular, caused K Kautsky to take the stand of revolutionary Social Democracy on several questions.¹⁵

But Stalin was still praising the revolutionary wing of German Social Democracy beyond 1907. In 1909 he was stating that “our movement now needs Russian Bebels, experienced and mature leaders from the ranks of the workers, more than ever before”.¹⁶ This after August Bebel, the leading German Social-Democratic parliamentarian (1840-1913). Stalin returned to the example of Bebel on the latter’s 70th birthday in 1910, discussing “why the German and international socialists revere Bebel so much”.¹⁷ He concludes:

Let us, then, comrades, send greetings to our beloved teacher — the turner August Bebel! Let him serve as an example to us Russian workers, who are particularly in need of Bebels in the labor movement. Long live Bebel! Long live international Social Democracy!¹⁸

Writing much later in 1920, Stalin was prepared to concede that figures such as Kautsky and the Russian Georgi Plekhanov had been worthy theoretical leaders of the movement. Stalin argued that these were examples of “peacetime leaders, who are strong in theory, but weak in matters of organization and practical work”, although their influence was limited to only “an upper layer of the proletariat, and then only up to a certain time”.¹⁹ Stalin added: “When the epoch of revolution sets in, when practical revolutionary slogans are demanded of the leaders, the theoreticians quit the stage and give way to new men. Such, for example, were Plekhanov in Russia and Kautsky in Germany.”²⁰ Stalin thus pictured Lenin as the successor both to theoretical leaders such as Kautsky and to “practical leaders, self-sacrificing and courageous, but… weak in theory” such as Ferdinand Lassalle and Louis Auguste Blanqui.²¹ This line of 1920 did represent a shift from Stalin’s argument in 1907, quoted above, that Kautsky had not been just a theoretical leader but also “a thorough and thoughtful investigator of tactical problems”. Nevertheless, in line with Lenin, Stalin was not yet prepared to give up his longstanding admiration for Kautsky.

Stalin Advocates the ‘Merger Theory’

Stalin gave an even more robust defense of Kautsky in May 1905 when he “recycled” the latter’s arguments in order to defend Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? against Menshevik interlocutors in Georgia.²² Stalin quoted a passage from Kautsky writing in the theoretical journal Die Neue Zeit (in 1901-02) that Lenin had used and that subsequently became infamous for apparently illustrating Lenin’s disdain for proletarian leadership abilities: “… the vehicle of science is not the proletariat, but the bourgeois intelligentsia (K Kautsky’s italics). It was in the minds of individual members of that stratum that modern socialism originated, and it was they who communicated it to the more intellectually developed proletarians…”²³ The often tedious arguments that center on this passage essentially mix up an empirical debate about the origins of proletarian class consciousness with a dialectical one about its future development. Stalin correctly understood this point as working out the difference between initial “elaboration” and the future “assimilation” of socialist theory.²⁴ Neither Kautsky nor Lenin was guilty of disdain for the proletariat because such a dynamic was always presaged on the merger of socialism and the worker movement. In other words, the future of socialism was not beholden to its debatable origins.²⁵

But what of Stalin? Surely, we might expect that someone who had, in Trotsky’s words, only ever been a “bureaucrat of revolution” to have not been in favor of any such democratic merger with the proletariat. In fact, Stalin made his positive appreciation of the merger on the very first page of his defense of Lenin, presaging his article with an (unattributed) Kautsky quote: “Social-Democracy is a combination of the working-class movement with socialism.”²⁶ This is no isolated motif from the article and Stalin elaborated on this point at some length:

What is scientific socialism without the working-class movement? A compass which, if left unused, will only grow rusty and then will have to be thrown overboard. What is the working-class movement without socialism? A ship without a compass [that] will reach the other shore in any case but would reach it much sooner and with less danger if it had a compass. Combine the two and you will get a splendid vessel, which will speed straight towards the other shore and reach its haven unharmed. Combine the working-class movement with socialism and you will get a Social-Democratic movement [that] will speed straight towards the ‘promised land’.²⁷

Stalin was convinced that the Russian proletariat would have no problem in assimilating and adopting Social-Democratic revolutionary politics. Directly opposing the line of Georgian Menshevik critics on the issue of the intelligentsia originating socialist theory, he said:

“But that means belittling the workers and extolling the intelligentsia!” – howl our ‘critic’ and his Social-Democrat [Menshevik Tiflis newspaper] … They take the proletariat for a capricious young lady who must not be told the truth, who must always be paid compliments so that she will not run away! No, most highly esteemed gentlemen! We believe that the proletariat will display more staunchness than you think. We believe that it will not fear the truth!

There is not a trace in this of any predestination towards some anti-proletarian bureaucratic hell and Stalin merely comes across as an energetic, if entirely unoriginal, supporter of Kautsky and Lenin, adept at employing their arguments against local Mensheviks in Georgia.

Stalin remembered the ‘merger theory’ when he was editing the 1938 Short Course. Among his very substantial reworking of chapter two, which dealt with the period of What Is To Be Done?, Stalin wrote that Lenin’s work: “Brilliantly substantiated the fundamental Marxist thesis that a Marxist party is a union of the working-class movement with socialism.”²⁸ He also repeated his line of 1905 in suggesting that belittling socialist consciousness meant “to insult the workers, who were drawn to consciousness as to light”. ²⁹It is a bitter irony of historiography that this quack Stalinized history, on this particular issue at least, offers more light on the topic than the vast majority of academic or Trotskyist treatments of What Is To Be Done?.

Deutscher and ‘Foreshadowing’

Stalin’s early writings have been tied up with a problem of ‘foreshadowing’, where they become a roadmap to his future career as a labor dictator. A good example of this occurs in Isaac Deutscher’s famous biography, when he discussed Stalin’s first comment on the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, made in an article entitled ‘The Proletarian Party and the Proletarian Class’ from January 1905. This piece dwelt upon the dispute over party membership that had arisen at the RSDLP’s second congress in 1903. Stalin presented Lenin’s formula as: “… a member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party is one who accepts the program of this party, renders the party financial support, and works in one of the party organizations”. The Menshevik Julius Martov’s was presented as: “A member of the RSDLP is one who accepts its program, supports the party financially and renders it regular personal assistance under the direction of one of its organizations.”³⁰³¹

Deutscher argued correctly that the Stalin piece is mostly a re-rendering of Lenin’s arguments on the subject but suggested that Stalin added his own sinister confection with an emphasis on the “need for absolute uniformity of views inside the party”.³² This “smacked of that monolithic ‘orthodoxy’ into which Bolshevism was to change after its victory, largely under Koba’s own guidance”.³³ Deutscher used the following passage from ‘The Proletarian Party and the Proletarian Class’ to illustrate the point:

Martov’s formula, as we know, refers only to the acceptance of the program; about tactics and organization it contains not a word; and yet, unity of organizational and tactical views is no less essential for party unity than unity of programmatic views. We may be told that nothing is said about this even in Comrade Lenin’s formula. True, but there is no need to say anything about it in Comrade Lenin’s formula. Is it not self-evident that one who works in a Party organization and, consequently, fights in unison with the party and submits to party discipline, cannot pursue tactics and organizational principles other than the party’s tactics and the party’s organizational principles?³⁴

‘Unity’, such as that unity gained, for example, around a democratic vote at a congress between contending factions that have argued out their differences, should not be immediately transposed into ‘monolithic unity’, particularly if one bears in mind that this is the Stalin of 1905 and not 1935 talking. Deutscher half-conceded this point almost immediately by arguing “that ‘monolithism’ was still a matter of the future”.³⁵

However, Stalin had no issue with Lenin’s formulation around acceptance, not agreement, in relation to the party program:

To the question – who can be called a member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party? – this party can have only one answer: one who accepts the party program, supports the party financially and works in one of the party organizations. It is this obvious truth that comrade Lenin has expressed in his splendid formula.³⁶

Acceptance implies diversity, in that one can clearly accept something without agreeing with everything about it.

Stalin’s real problem with Martov was over the issue of party organization and discipline. What clearly lay behind Stalin’s emphasis was the dispute at the RSDLP second congress over the appointment of the Iskra editorial board. Martov refused to serve on the three-man board that had been newly elected at the congress and joined the three former members of the board (Axelrod, Zasulich and Potresov) in declaring a boycott on their own participation in party institutions.³⁷ After a succession of maneuvers, the old editorial board rejected by the congress reconstituted itself, a move that lacked political legitimacy. Stalin remarked bitterly on this in 1905 that “these obstinate editors did not submit to the will of the party, to party discipline”. He added: “It would appear that party discipline was invented only for simple party workers like us!”³⁸ This then led to a Bolshevik emphasis on partiinost: acting like a modern political party with a sovereign congress and a disciplined membership. This was opposed to a kruzhok, or ‘little circle’, mentality that did not recognize the larger bonds of partiinost.³⁹ The apparently unmovable Iskra editorial board was clearly an example of the latter.

It therefore becomes obvious that Stalin’s ‘The Proletarian Party and the Proletarian Class’ article shared this partiinost standpoint in terms of its emphasis on working in a disciplined manner in party organizations. Stalin had previously polemicized against the restrictions involved in limiting the movement to small circles as opposed to a party, arguing that it was “the direct duty of Russian Social Democracy to muster the separate advanced detachments of the proletariat, to unite them in one party, and thereby to put an end to disunity in the Party once and for all”.⁴⁰ Stalin was thus extremely disappointed that this hadn’t been the outcome of the second congress: “We party workers placed great hopes in that congress. At last! – we exclaimed joyfully – we, too, shall be united in one party, we, too, shall be able to work according to a single plan!”⁴¹

The above offers important contextualization for the arguments offered in ‘The proletarian party and the proletarian class’. Stalin said:

What are we to do with the ideological and practical centralism that was handed down to us by the second party congress and which is radically contradicted by Martov’s formula [on party membership]? Throw it overboard?⁴²

This should not be read as some kind of paean to future dictatorship but rather a reflection of a partiinost attitude in terms of what he sees as vital to the future success of the RSDLP and annoyance with the likes of Martov that this had not been achieved. Similar conclusions should be gleaned from Stalin’s statement that: “It looks as though Martov is sorry for certain professors and high-school students who are loath to subordinate their wishes to the wishes of the party.”⁴³ This is not a universal plea for unpleasantness towards professors and students but a reflection of a practical situation in which Martov and the other Iskra editors had refused to subordinate themselves to what Stalin saw as a sovereign RSDLP congress and to submit to the same sort of party discipline that he himself was prepared to. Stalin clearly thought that had serious implications for Martov’s definition of party membership.

Deutscher’s argument that ‘The Proletarian Party and the Proletarian Class’ was the herald of future totalitarianism is a particularly lurid fantasy on his part. If anyone other than Stalin had written such an article in 1905, it is almost certain that it would be an entirely plausible and non-controversial statement of Bolshevik views in response to the situation after the RSDLP’s second congress.

Form and Content in Stalin

Given that questions of style and form cannot be mechanically separated from political ones, and considering that Stalin’s prose in the articles that have been discussed above can at best be classed as somewhat plodding, often repetitive and generally unremarkable in the canon of Marxism, does this not prove something? Does it not show that a bureaucratic soul lurked deep within what were ostensibly run-of-the-mill Bolshevik writings? I think not, but to explore this question we need to go back to Trotsky.

Trotsky was not flattering about Stalin’s early journalism, arguing it sought to “attain a systematic exposition of the theme” but such an “effort usually expressed itself in schematic arrangement of material, the enumeration of arguments, artificial rhetorical questions, and in unwieldy repetitions heavily on the didactic side”.⁴⁴ Trotsky made the harsh judgement: “Not a single one of the articles [Stalin] then wrote would have been accepted by an editorial board in the slightest degree thoughtful or exacting.”⁴⁵ Of course, this was not true of 1913’s Marxism and the national question (another work heavily influenced by Kautsky⁴⁶), which was highly esteemed by Lenin. However, Trotsky attributed any positives almost solely to Lenin’s inspiration and editing.⁴⁷ However, Trotsky did qualify his thoughts on Stalin’s early writings, stating that underground publications were not notable for their “literary excellence, since they were, for the most part, written by people who took to the pen of necessity and not because it was their calling”.⁴⁸ This sense of necessity spills over into the way Trotsky sees that these works were received by their audience:

It would, of course, be erroneous to assume that such articles did not lead to action. There was great need for them. They answered a pressing demand. They drew their strength from that need, for they expressed the ideas and slogans of the revolution. To the mass reader, who could not find anything of the kind in the bourgeois press, they were new and fresh. But their passing influence was limited to the circle for which they were written.⁴⁹

So, Trotsky seemed to conclude that Stalin’s work was mediocre, unexceptional but necessary. Similarly, if Stalin suffered an “absence of his own thought, of original form, of vivid imagery – these mark every line of his with the brand of banality”⁵⁰ then one would wonder whether this is just a paler reflection of what Lih has called Lenin’s “aggressive unoriginality”.⁵¹

Trotsky also alluded to Lenin’s unoriginality in his comments on the development of ‘Leninism’. In its Soviet bureaucratic form, ‘Leninism’ was a unique development of Marxism, or Russian Marxism sui generis; in Trotsky’s words, “trying to work up to the idea that Leninism is ‘more revolutionary’ than Marxism”.⁵² This is coded in notorious formulas such as this one from Stalin’s ‘The Foundations of Leninism’ (1924):

Leninism is Marxism of the era of imperialism and the proletarian revolution. To be more exact, Leninism is the theory and tactics of the proletarian revolution in general, the theory and tactics of the dictatorship of the proletariat in particular.⁵³

Trotsky steadfastly denied that Lenin developed anything new, stating that his former leader “was a million miles away from any thought of inventing a new dialectic for the epoch of imperialism” (which is interesting, because this tenet of ‘Leninism’ is repeated by many of Trotsky’s current epigones).⁵⁴ To underline the point, Trotsky argued that Lenin “paid his debts to Marx with the same thoroughness that characterized the power of his own thought”⁵⁵, “failed to notice his break with ‘pre-imperialistic Marxism’”⁵⁶; and that “Lenin’s work contains no new system nor is there a new method. It contains fully and completely the system and the method of Marxism”.⁵⁷ But once this idea of the absolute uniqueness of ‘Leninism’ is knocked off its pedestal and we begin to understand the power of Lenin lay in his unoriginality, we do then begin to lessen the difference between other unoriginal writings such as the early works of Stalin. This is not to equate Lenin and Stalin – the latter was simply a follower of his leader – but it is not a sin in the annals of Bolshevism to be repetitive and unoriginal, even though figures such as Lenin had more obvious theoretical power.

Conclusion

This is not an exercise in rehabilitating the early career of Stalin in order to shine a light forward onto the so-called progressive aspects of the Soviet Union. After around 1928, Stalin’s bureaucratized regime was not a ‘workers’ state’ in any sense. Projecting positivity forwards would only repeat the methodological errors of ‘foreshadowing’, as Stalinists do, rather than projecting negativity backwards, as many Trotskyists do. What this article is attempting to establish is that the contours of Stalin’s early ideological development were shaped by the contours of being a Bolshevik praktik, with a consequent heavy reliance on the revolutionary ideas of the Second International’s leading thinkers. The later, ‘other’ Stalin was the product of an isolated and poverty-stricken revolution that had run out of steam by the early 1920s. There was no ideological ‘original sin’ or ‘smoking gun’ before that time.

2020.01.032020.01.05

Knowledge: Power and Emancipation

Renato Flores discusses the privatization of scientific knowledge and examines efforts of revolutionary movements to democratize this knowledge to help develop a communist approach to science.

I

The famous quote “knowledge is power” can be read in two ways. The first is that knowledge is power over nature: it gives us the ability to free ourselves from natural necessity. Knowledge is Promethean, it is the stolen fire that cooks our food and keeps us warm, the vessel that gave us civilization. The second way to read this quote is more sinister: knowledge is power over others. Advanced weaponry allowed Europe to dominate the world for centuries. Surveillance technology allows the modern state to respond to potential threats within before they become actual. Domination can be subtle: knowledge of law is reserved to lawyers, an elite professional sector of society. This means that poor people are still at a disadvantage in court because their access to knowledge is limited, even if one assumes the state to be neutral.

Marginalized communities become either mystified or suspicious of science, if not both because knowledge is used to further their oppression. But this misses the question- how was knowledge of advanced weaponry acquired? And why was it exclusive to some peoples? The popularized history of science is that a few Great Minds produced all knowledge while in the service of the State. The West was made great by Galileo’s experiments in the Venitian Arsenal and Henry the Navigator’s School of Sagres. The scientific wit of a Great Few fits perfectly in a Darwinian story of the world. Western civilization dominated the world because they were (led by) the smartest, and thus the fittest, while the rest of the world was stuck in primitive mysticism. The White man’s burden was to bring knowledge to the world.

But this history of science is a sanitized and distorted one of its material realities. Knowledge is intimately linked to labor and practice. People low in the pecking order often generate it, and it is appropriated and stolen by more reputable people or institutions. Onesimus, the slave who used ancestral African knowledge to introduce inoculation against smallpox to the New England settlers is just one example among many. We only remember his name because his owner, Cotton Mather, revealed the source of his methods. But the list of forgotten names is immense: entire fields such as pharmacology have a deep debt to the Aztecs and Incas.

A full historical account of this appropriation-privatization of science is given by Cliff Conner’s People’s History of Science.¹ Ancient scribes developed more advanced counting systems to work more efficiently, while prehistoric builders were forced to reckon with notions of geometry. With the rise of the centralized state, the power of this knowledge became more and more reserved for the exclusive use of the ruling classes. And with this privatization, knowledge was no longer linked to practice and idealism sneaked back in. The five regular polyhedra became sacred geometry. Astronomers doubled as priests to make predictions about the harvest, while the lower castes continued with their lives, now beholden to the knowledge their forefathers had generated.

The culmination of ancient idealism is Plato’s strict anti-empiricist program. The elevation and sacralization of Truth reached its extreme in The Forms, located outside the material sphere and only accessible through a learning process that would bring reminiscences of past lives. This program was not very conducive to future research: once the “official” line had been revealed, it was impossible to challenge. Aristotle, Plato’s greatest disciple, had to retreat from pure idealism to reincorporate the role of observation and experiment. But the Aristotelian system still suffered from much apriori reasoning.

Even more important for our story is that Plato was the father of an elitist cast of scientist-philosophers: the Academy. In Plato’s ideal Republic the philosophers were the kings while the other castes would only have access to a vulgarized and controlled version of the Truth. Aristotle’s Lyceum did little to change that fundamental idea of an elite which was entitled to rule because they were educated in Virtue. And through continuity and rupture, this germinal idea survives to our present day. The Hellenistic Academies passed the torch to the Christian church, the first replacement in the long chain that leads to the present.

After the fall of Rome, Europe went through a period of stagnation, where knowledge was lost. This was followed by the scholasticism of the Middle Ages, where both translations of the old, and new works from the Islamic world were received through reconquered Spain. But even scholasticism reduced the academic search for truth to commentaries of philosophers, in particular Aristotle and Averroes. It was a largely idealistic pursuit, and the Averroists were derided by Petrarch as people who “had much to tell about […] how many hairs are there in the lion’s mane”, yet “would not contribute anything to the blessed life”. While Petrarch was formulating the humanistic critique of scholasticism, as much can apply to a materialistic critique- scholarly knowledge had little to say about practical life.

In the meantime, the accumulation of material knowledge persisted outside the European sphere,. The scientific revolution could have seen its birth in the works of Ibn al-Haytham. He discovered principles of optics by combining Aristotelian systemic thinking and careful experimentation. Driven by his experience as a civil engineer, al-Haytham established one of the first known formulations of the scientific method. But the Islamic world was let down by one component. Even if European monks remained far from the generation of material knowledge, the Church and the Universities provided a structure for scientific formalization and institutional memory which was absent in the Near East. The new Academy was waiting to be born, longing for the replacement of scholastic disputations by practical treatises.

II

The Zilsel Thesis was one of the first attacks against the Official History of Science.² Zilsel claims that the Scientific Revolution was not just the product of Great Minds. It happened as two currents converged: the experimenting artisans generated the Knowledge, while sections of the Academy provided the method to organize it. The same way that the Social Democratic Party was the merger of the worker movement and socialist theory brought from without, Science was born when the rebels of the intelligentsia decided to merge their methods with the practical knowledge of the artisans. Francis Bacon supplanted the Aristotelian Organon, the par-excellence tool of scholasticism with his own Novum Organon, a new way to systematize knowledge. Bacon realized that the university-based sciences “st[ood] like statues, worshiped and celebrated, but not moved or advanced”. His project to revitalize the sciences passed through systematizing the collected experience of craftsmen to alter nature.

Bacon’s vision of the merger was twisted. The two currents would not stand equally. Instead, his utopian New Atlantis laid out a comprehensive vision of a futuristic and sanitized scientific establishment which had enthroned itself by appropriating the knowledge of the lower classes. The new philosopher-kings were in many ways the same as the old, they just operated under a new method. They had a monopoly on the access to systematized knowledge, and even had power over the State: the Scientists of the House of Solomon were even entitled to keep scientific findings for themselves. This was not a new idea – Plato had already envisioned that the populace would be taught a vulgar vision of the world, adequate to fulfill their predetermined role. But the Baconian monopoly on knowledge would now be real power: it was based on materially applicable Truth with that could bind and dominate; and not on endless disputations and annotations on the origin of the Universe.

Bacon’s ideas represented that of the nascent bourgeoisie. Despite his utopia, Bacon was no revolutionary. He was a faithful servant of the English court and was laying out a blueprint for strengthening it. His project was one of a passive revolution, which replaced one elite with another one. But during the 16th and 17th centuries, the future of Europe was contested. The Catholic church’s monopoly was finally broken, and radical and utopian projects floated in the air. Another utopian proposal, Campanella’s City of the Sun dignified all work, allowing artisans and peasants into the dreamed city. Knowledge was shared: the walls of the city were pictures of a painted encyclopedia, openly shown to everyone. But Campanella relied on an elitist conspiracy to achieve his utopia and ended up in jail most of his life.

The only radical scientist of the time to build a substantial movement behind him was Paracelsus. Rising from his experience as a medic in the mines, he gave a scholarly voice to the artisanal understanding of medicine, opposing the existing distinctions between the lowly manual surgeons and the high physicians that never touched a body. Paracelsus supported the Radical Reformation and the German Peasants War. He inaugurated a movement of folk healers for the People, which would democratize access to medicine. The Paracelsian movement would only grow after Paracelsus’ death. It was revolutionary because it sought to break the monopoly on knowledge and democratize its power. Paracelsianism would become one of Bacon’s main targets of attack, he rightly seen as a dangerous threat to the established order.

The torch of a rebel science was carried forward. In a pattern we will see emerge, every great social revolt posed the question of knowledge democratization. The Diggers, the most radical faction of the English Revolution also proposed a radical education program. Their leader, Gerrard Winstanley, demanded that an elected non-specialist would teach science in every parish and that this knowledge could be applied to the problems of everyday life. But the routing of the radicals in the English Revolution cut short this program. Baconianism would prevail, and the use of science against the people became routine. A new scientific establishment was formed in the Royal Societies, partly aristocratic, partly bourgeois. As the new Organon triumphed over the old, knowledge was accumulated, if not downright stolen from the newly colonized people. Capitalism expanded, and Science was tasked with the quest to invent more efficient machines that would replace skilled workers and increase productivity. The Enlightenment was a time to celebrate reason’s role in emancipating humanity from its immaturity. But as technology became a method for de-skilling and disciplining the workforce, Rousseau would proclaim that progress was making man less free.³

The bourgeoisie was winning the battle for ideological hegemony, and the Cartesian mechanistic view of nature became a common stance. The period leading up to the French Revolution saw the publication of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopedia, a landmark for the ascendant bourgeois Science. It was meant to change the way people thought. It actively challenged religious authority and was condemned by the Catholic church. The Encyclopedia also celebrated artisanal knowledge and sang the praise of artisans. But the twisted merger of bourgeois science repressed this side of the equation. Even as their practical knowledge was elevated, artisans themselves were excluded from the scientific community.

The French Revolution would throw the tensions between artisans and the Academy in the open. After the outbreak of the revolution in 1789, the artisans organized in free associations which challenged the Academy’s monopoly on Science. These free associations sought to democratize access to knowledge making it available for everyone. But now that the monarchy was gone the newly-freed bourgeois and aristocrats of the Academy were looking to further consolidate their powers over what was acceptable Science. This brought an inevitable conflict. The Condorcet proposal, to make the Academie an even more elitist institution, was fought tooth and nail by the sans-culotte artisans. As the revolution radicalized in 1793, the sans-culottes obtained a temporary victory. The Académie was shut down because it was rightly considered an undemocratic and aristocratic institution. Baconian science was on the run, and a popular science had its first real triumph for a brief period. Thermidor would bring an end to this, restoring the academy on even more elitist grounds.

The Thermidorian academy would accelerate specialization. Science would slowly but surely be put at the effective service of capital, while still paying lip-service to educating the lower classes. Passion, feeling, and humanism were exiled from the academy. The production of knowledge became a slave to profit while masked by scientific neutrality. However, this was just one of the possible futures. As the absolute power of the Church and the King collapsed, the French 18th century also saw rampant speculation on new world-systems and other ways of organizing knowledge. After Rousseau’s diatribe against progress, his intellectual heirs sought to recover a natural philosophy that merged all knowledge and put it to the use of mankind, rather than the use of Capital. They demanded that science must have a moral component if it was not to amount to raw weaponry in the hands of the oppressors. The common Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm of studying and understanding phenomena in total separation was in accordance with the bourgeois primacy of the individual over the collective. In opposition to this, Bernardin de-Saint Pierre best formulated an anti-reductionist science. He rebelled against the tendency to compartmentalize and specialize, highlighting the interconnectedness of the world. But his new system was coldly received by an Academy which was increasingly focused on the capitalistic use of science. Napoleon himself told him to learn calculus and to come back.

Design for a monument to Issac Newton by Etienne-Louis Boullée from the 18th century

As capital expanded, so did the working class. Utopian Socialists such as Saint-Simon attempted to alleviate the problems of capitalism by proposing a series of solutions from above. Saint-Simon saw in the industrial class the future transformers of the world, but for this to happen they would have to be properly organized. He proposed a societal organization of strict meritocracy, where scientific investigation would serve as a rational basis. Comte followed his steps and developed them further.⁴ His “scientific” positivism was something more akin to a total cosmovision where science would be used at all levels to organize society. Scientifically enlightened men should govern the uneducated, and provide mechanisms of societal cohesion for the universal wellbeing. In Comte’s Utopia, the intelligentsia would govern for the good of all. Science was for the People, but not by the People.

Comte’s writings attempted to avoid the fragmentation of knowledge into infinitely divided fields. But in his philosophy, there was still a gap between doctrine and practice. His complicated and ahistorical elaboration of the three stages of science was just a stopgap. Comte was unable to appropriately discuss the class implications of research programs. This would have to wait until the Marxist Philosophy of Science, inaugurated by Joseph Dietzgen’s writings and Engels’ Anti-Dühring and Dialectics of Nature. In contrast to bourgeois individuality, the workers’ movement approached things from a collective standpoint. And as the Second International took shape, Marxists widely polemicized about their cosmovisions. A full account of this is impossible, and Helena Sheehan’s Marxism and the History of Science provides invaluable details and names on the many Marxist philosophers up to the 1970s which strove to restore a holistic use of knowledge. The sanitized Cartesian-Newtonian world system was longing to be replaced so that science could advance further.

III

In the early 20th century, two Marxist authors stand out for the originality of their educational program. They both put forward the need for the proletariat to generate its own modes of thought before the revolution, centering the role of proletarian intellectuals in opposing the dominant ideology. They both saw how the bourgeoisie had formulated their own culture through Bacon and Diderot before taking power, and aspired to model the upcoming proletarian revolution in a similar manner.

While this idea is often associated with Antonio Gramsci, before him there came Alexander Bogdanov. Bogdanov was not only a physician but also a philosopher and a science fiction writer. Similar to the French revolutionaries, he formulated a two-fold program in pre-revolution Tsarist Russia based on a new form of education and a novel world understanding. One of his crowning achievements, tektology, was his proposal for organizing systems ranging from society to knowledge. His view of an interconnected and perfectly organized world was a new spin on an anti-reductionist science. Tektology went against Engels’ dialectics in some ways: Bogdanov sought to analyze how systems could remain in dynamic equilibrium instead of in constant dialectical evolution. It was a forerunner of the current systems theory and cybernetics.

Bogdanov was an original thinker, laying out a comprehensive vision for a Working-Class Science. He understood that the class character of science lay in “its origin, designs, methods of study and presentation”.⁵ Bourgeois science was only built for the benefit of Capital, while a working-class science would emphasize collectivity. Bogdanov’s new science would be an “organized collective experience of humanity and the instrument of the organization of the life of society”.⁶ The workers had to develop a new epistemology, throwing out the old one, and he thought that art could be an inspiration for this. Lenin polemicized against Bogdanov in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, considering that his focus on science as collective experience went against strict Marxist orthodoxy. But Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism contained many crude assumptions about Nature from which he would later walk back from.

Bogdanov proposed to organize the new science in a Workers’ Encyclopedia, which would be a harmonious system instead of just a summary of concepts. The Workers’ University would provide courses on the new unified science and serve as an education point for revolutionaries. A first attempt at a Workers University took place in Capri, where a small cohort of students were lectured by Bogdanov’s intellectual group in the hopes that they would form the nucleus of a proletarian culture. This turned out to be a very top-down approach and ultimately broke down as only one group of students graduated. While a laudable program, it was disconnected from the material realities of the time.⁷

Even if Bogdanov was a founding member of the Bolsheviks, he came further and further apart from Lenin. Bogdanov’s primacy of cultural Revolution crashed against Lenin’s program for revolution. The difference kept on growing during the prelude to revolution, Bogdanov, and others wanting immediate revolution and no participation in the Duma while Lenin saw parliamentary work as essential in a period of revolutionary ebb. When the political differences between both ended up being too large, Bogdanov was expelled from the Bolsheviks.

After the February revolution, the ideas of Bogdanov and co-thinkers like Lunacharsky saw a revival in the form of Proletkult, an organization that would create a new proletarian culture for the new workers’ state.⁸ This organization sought to be completely autonomous of the party and the state, something intolerable at a time of Civil War. Eventually, it was brought under heavy control of the party and later disbanded as the Bolsheviks centralized power.

Due to his break with Lenin and expulsion from the Bolsheviks, Bogdanov has been largely forgotten by history. In another era, he would have rightly occupied a high place in the intelligentsia. But even as he formulated a working-class science and a radical new societal organization, in his practice he ended up reproducing many of the actually existing structures of the Academy. His attempts to start a Workers’ University brought workers from all over Tsarist Russia, but layed on a rigid framework. A few lecturers, him included, would provide their vision on what the workers should be doing, instead of linking the curriculum to the material needs of the students.

Proletkult was in many ways an improvement. Because it was able to organize in the open it had stronger involvement of workers, numbering at eighty-four thousand members at its peak. Because the ultimate target was the creation of a new workers’ culture through the abolition of the intellectuals, a transitional period was necessary. Even if some programs were worker led, Proletkult was predominantly guided by Bolshevik intellectuals. These provided a guiding thought what on proletarian culture was, and how ideal workers should relate to another.

Proletkult was a massive organization in a time of convulsion, and the problems within it cannot be attributed solely to Bogdanov’s prescriptions. Its rifts appeared in a period where the workers had taken power without having produced a proletarian culture. Some of these fault lines were transcended in Gramsci’s approach to the role of proletarian intellectuals. Gramsci’s philosophical program was deeply marked by being a close witness to the rise of fascism and the failure of the Italian left to take power after the factory occupations. He is well known because of his analysis on how the dominant ideology softly persuaded people in accepting the status quo, the so called “hegemony” of thought. He set out to understand how this hegemony was created, and reproduced by the intellectuals and society.

Gramsci understood that while the traditional intellectuals of the Academy saw themselves as an elite functioning aside from society, they were embedded in the system of production and were naturally conservative in order to preserve their privileges, even if some would defect to the workers and were proletarianized themselves. But these intellectuals were not the ones bringing the dominant ideology to the masses. Another type of intellectual existed alongside the Academy: the organic intellectuals. They were consciously embedded in the process of production because they managed and coordinated the economic system. In doing so, they propagated the world view of the ruling classes throughout the population.

To change the world, Gramsci, like Bogdanov, required the creation of a new generation of organic intellectuals from the proletariat. Gramsci saw the potential in everyone, writing that “all men are intellectuals”. They just needed to be given the means to actualize this potential. Their schooling must relate to everyday life and transform them into individuals capable of thinking, studying and ruling. These proletarian organic intellectuals would collect and systematize folk knowledge to represent the excluded groups of a society. Gramsci’s intellectuals would fight a cultural war, to generate an alternative system of perceiving the world. With Gramsci’s incapacitation through incarceration, he was never able to put his program into practice. His notebooks are incomplete, and naturally invite speculation of what he meant. We cannot speculate how his Italian Proletkult would have looked like and what problems it would have come across.

Unlike Bogdanov, who saw the task of proletarian revolution as immediate, favoring a rapid political seizure of power by a Proletarian dictatorship, Gramsci’s organic intellectuals would have a long war ahead of them, synthesizing and spreading a proletarian hegemony before the revolution. Because of Gramsci’s prediction of a long “war of position” that lay ahead, he has often been read in a reformist light. If intellectuals had to occupy more space within the existing institutions, the question of power could be indefinitely be put off. Gramsci, as Marx and many others, was tamed.

Alongside these two thinkers stands Christopher Caudwell, who did not formulate an educational program but wrote much on Science. Caudwell is an underappreciated figure, a British Marxist who died very young in the Spanish Civil War. He, like many others in his time, understood that bourgeoise science was reaching its limit, and that technological progress would mean each successive day would be more alienating, rather than empowering. Only a communist society would cure the maladies of science. His communist utopia was one where the intellectuals would learn from the workers, as much as the workers would get guidance from the intellectuals.

Caudwell saw science in a similar way to Bogdanov, as the historical and collected experience of production.⁹ But unlike Bogdanov, he did not attempt to prescribe what the culture of the workers should look like. Nor would the workers be tasked with generating a new culture, as this was already happening every day. The dominated class, which carried out the production, would slowly gather more and more experience, finding better ways to organize society and knowledge. The ruling class, which had first organized society in a progressive manner, along its own rules, would slowly see the steam fade. Cracks would appear, such as the new doctrines by Marx, as the superstructure showed itself incapable of adapting to the new methods for producing knowledge. The workers would slowly move to adopt their self-produced organizational systems as their new guiding principle, as they moved to turn the world upside down once again. Once the tension became too large a revolution would take place. The old way of organizing society would be replaced by a new one, which was both a continuity and a rupture from the previous one. But Caudwell saw that despite the revolution, there was a degree of continuity in the new superstructure. He understood that if the bridge between intellectuals and workers was not built after the revolution the cycle would continue.

The similarities between these three thinkers are immense. Bogdanov, Caudwell, and Gramsci all saw that the seeds for a new method of organizing knowledge was within the workers themselves, either as a collective, through folk tales or both. Their notions of pedagogy and the role of culture finds echoes in many decolonial thinkers such as Franz Fanon, Mao Zedong, Amilcar Cabral, and Paulo Freire, who, within their differences, formulated the need for education and the development of a national or class culture as a precondition for developing a liberatory program among the colonized and dispossessed.¹⁰

Bogdanov and Caudwell knew that a radical rethinking of science and knowledge was needed, otherwise a permanent and trained bureaucracy, wielding the powers of the State for the good of the proletariat would arise. This would be the Saint-Simonian, or Comptian utopia: a dictatorship of the technocracy, where the power of knowledge would not be radically redistributed. In more than one way, he foresaw the development of the technostructure in the Actually Existing Socialist countries. We return to Revolutionary Russia below and analyze how the first Workers’ state put into practice a revolutionary education.

IV

With Marxism in power, a unique challenge would appear. The revolutionary masses required the power of knowledge to run the country, but with the sophistication of technology, this power could only be gained after a long education. The nascent Soviet Republic was faced with a difficult disjunctive: either strike a deal with the existing technostructure, the “bourgeois specialists”, despite their questionable class loyalties, or repress them and to rapidly form a new class of experts from a proletarian origin to replace the existing specialists.

At first, Lenin was particularly conciliatory towards the bourgeois specialists.¹¹ His policies included paying extra to specialists, but this caused resentment from the workers. He was repeatedly criticized by the Workers Opposition and other left wing groups. After all, the workers who had fought the civil war remained under the same technostructure. But Lenin repeatedly noted that without machines, without discipline, it is impossible to live in modern society. It was necessary to master the highest technology or be crushed.¹² Lenin’s policy of conciliation was especially prominent during the New Economic Period, where the old technocracy occupied significant positions in the planning apparatus.

Poster from the Soviet Union, caption reads as “Knowledge for all”

Lenin never moved beyond the concept of “using” the specialists, despite the accusations of excessive conciliation. It was always a temporary evil brought about by the circumstances. And after his death, the existing specialists started to fall under the control of new “Red Directors”: workers without a significant formal education which were loyal party members. Stalin’s faction achieved greater control over the old specialists and began the process of slowly replacing them with the newly educated red specialists.

Up to 1928, there was a period of uneasy peace between workers, Red Directors and the old specialists where each faction fought for either preservation or supremacy. The first real disciplining moment for the old intelligentsia was the Shakhty affair. In 1928, fifty-three engineers and managers were arrested and put on trial for sabotage. This spectacle-cum-trial was the first instance where Stalin declared that sabotage was being used by the bourgeoisie as a method of class struggle. The full disciplining of the old Academy and the specialists would slowly follow, as Stalin would whip up class resentment against the better-paid managers.

For the Red Directors to consolidate their power over the specialists, a new generation of proletarian intelligentsia had to be educated in an accelerated manner. This debate trickled down to the admission criteria for universities. The number of places was limited, so this scarce resource somehow had to be distributed. Admissions based purely on test scores would naturally benefit those who had previous access to cultural capital and would tend to perpetuate a better-off technostructure. Class origins were made a factor depending on the year, which lowered admission requirements and at the same time forced the watering down of the curriculum. With an accelerated education, which now also required political education, narrow specialization became unavoidable. Lunacharsky, a close associate of Bogdanov, pushed for a more comprehensive and humanistic vision of education. But as Stalin’s faction came to dominate, education became focused on churning out STEM graduates. Education was “a weapon” to be wielded by the proletariat for its emancipation via the growth of productive forces. The humanistic aspect of the scientific merger was lost, and instead a more-perfect Academy was to replace the existing bourgeois one.

A second show trial in 1930, known as the Industrial Party trial, saw another group of scientists and engineers being accused of plotting a coup against the government. This was a definite watershed moment that curbed the remaining cultural capital of the old specialists. Engineers, especially those of bourgeois origin would be progressively made scapegoats for the failure to achieve unrealistic targets. This culminated in the Great Purges: a whole generation of intellectuals would be replaced by the new engineers and academicians of proletarian origin. They would be tasked with progressively more important tasks in the running of industry, and occupy the levers of power. STEM education was overemphasized to the expense of other disciplines. The ossification and rigidization of cultural studies followed suit, as the development of Marxism was considered finalized. Philosophical speculation would be reserved to Stalin himself, a philosopher-king atop the proletarian academy.

Stalin’s line became identical with the proletarian line. Nominally, class origins would determine truth. However, this was a proxy for ideological battles. The case of Lysenko, the agricultural engineer who rejected genetics in favor of acquired characteristics became emblematic of this period. Class origin became a stand-in for loyalty to the party, specifically loyalty to Stalin. Lysenko gained the upper hand not by scientific investigation, but by repression. Vavilov, the president of the Agriculture Academy was sent to die in prison, and thousands of biologists were fired from institutions. Research in genetics was completely frozen until Stalin’s death.

The proletarian technocracy grew in power, becoming more separate from the class from where it originated. In 1936, Stalin recognized the existence of a “working intelligentsia” existing alongside the peasants and the proletariat. After Stalin’s death, the Red-and-expert directors would fully flourish and run the country and military uniforms were replaced by suits. This was Bacon’s utopia, painted in red. Khruschev’s time had arrived. The old technocracy had simply been replaced by a new one, which was in many ways as elitist as the Tsarist one. Education meant specialization and a job, with which came certain privileges that were available at the end of training.

A comparable pattern took place in the cities of Maoist China. Lenin and Mao both came from a similar place: they looked West for ideas to modernize their “backward” countries and catch up. Lenin was obsessed with Taylorism and scientific management and repeatedly rallied against fideism and the orthodox church. He saw education from a perspective that did not break much with radical liberalism, where granting access to education for all was a radical reform. Mao’s political origins were in the May Fourth Movement which sought to replace China’s existing culture based on scholastic learning with something more practical. But he would progressively radicalize his program, especially after the Sino-Soviet split and his growing suspicion of the Soviet technocrats.

In 1949, the victorious People’s Liberation Army had to strike an uneasy peace with the existing intelligentsia. The capitalist development of the 20th century had created a technocracy of upper-class origin that possessed the technical knowledge required to run the country. The Chinese Communist Party was forced to be conciliatory at first as it educated its own cadres and borrowed others from the USSR. Communist China wrestled with the same Soviet problem: to generate the technocracy a new society required modernizing education. But as in the Soviet case, resources such as teachers and schools were not readily available, and the new rulers were forced to rely on the old technostructure. The scarcity of education forced tough decisions between admitting students from a lower-class background who possessed less cultural capital, or a pure “meritocracy” of test scores that benefited students from better-off backgrounds who did have access to this capital.

Up to the Cultural Revolution, education policy oscillated between radical egalitarianism and technocratic orientations depending on the faction of the Chinese Communist Party that was in the drivers’ seat. Mao relentlessly pressured to popularize education, especially as he became more and more suspicious of the new technocratically bent Soviet republic. During the Great Leap Forward, an initial attempt at reform was made. Two parallel tracks were created, the elite one designed to create the technical intelligentsia, and a popular one that would bring education to the masses. But this trend led to the replication of the old differences, now under a different guise. Many aspects of the Great Leap Forward were not very different from Stalin’s cultural revolution of the 1930s; it was mainly a top-down approach. The most infamous example is the Four Pests Campaign, a program to exterminate sparrows which ended up hurting agricultural production badly when it turned out that sparrows provided natural pest control.

Mao learned from his failures, and a second, even greater leveling experiment took place during the Cultural Revolution. In the same way as in the USSR, the desire was to produce engineers who had to be both an expert, and a red. Without going deeply into the entire history of the Cultural Revolution, more practical assignments were added to the curriculum, and class origins became an important criterion for admission. Professors were expected to merge into the masses and become part of the people, while students had to spend time in factories, or the countryside to gain practical experience and connect to the masses. Entire sections of the population became mobilized in producing and applying knowledge. Mao had learned from the failures of Lysenkoism, and scientific debate and experimentation became encouraged.¹³

Mao’s evolution can also be traced through his attitude towards healthcare in the countryside. At first, Mao was aware of the dire state of healthcare in the rural areas and during the Great Leap Forward a medical reform program was started where thousands of medical workers were deployed to the countryside to combat schistosomiasis. But this was not enough, as there were not enough medically-educated city dwellers for the entire countryside, and the rural countryside remained underserved. Furthermore, the doctors were not used to treating diseases common in the countryside. During the Cultural Revolution, education was provided for a new generation of “barefoot doctors” that totaled over one million. After a brief training, they would return to their villages and provide basic healthcare for the peasant commune, becoming more effective patient advocates than the medical workers of the Great Leap Forward as they were used to dealing with the diseases they were familiar with. The barefoot doctors also experimented with mixing Traditional Chinese medicine, which was less resource-draining, with Western treatments, developing indigenous treatments for diseases.

Indeed, the Cultural Revolution represents a pivotal moment in educational experiments that broke the mold. As the student-worker-soldiers set out to the countryside, new schools were built and peasants who never had the right to education saw themselves able to attend school. The movie “Breaking with old ideas” from the time is a perfect reflection of the utopia the GPCR tried to achieve: not only a class but a world of “red-and-experts”. Admission to the new universities was granted by the calluses of the hands, and the curriculum was intimately tied to the productive needs. The communist utopia would use education as a leveler. It was the culmination of the Enlightenment project, a true Science for the people.¹⁴

But these experiments would barely survive the Cultural Revolution. In the cities, the focus on generating a “Red-and-expert” technocracy would end up replicating many of the problems with the technocracy in the Soviet Union.¹⁵ Once the Cultural Revolution ebbed, the new technocracy was in a prime position to enter government. As Mao passed away and the Gang of Four were removed, Deng would use the new experts to create a technocratic China. It is hardly surprising that the Dengists were made of the same steel as the Kruschevites. Both revolutions had followed very similar paths in generating a red technocracy. And this red technocracy would be elevated to the highest position once their original patrons were gone. They would both aspire to a Red Plenty, even if the means they deployed would be different: socialist planning in alliance with the proletariat or controlled markets in alliance with a supervised bourgeoise.

“Learn from the Soviet Union and its approach to science” Chinese poster, 1958

V

Once revolutionaries take power, radical programs to increase literacy usually follow. To understand why it is so appealing, we can revisit an old story by Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, a historian who wrote on the ways Spaniards used knowledge to dominate the Incas. In his story, the foreman of a hacienda asked two Incas to deliver ten melons and a note to the Spanish Conquistador who was the owner of the farm. The foreman warned the Indians that the paper would reveal the destinatary the truth in case the melons were missing. The Incas ate two of them but did so far away from the paper in the hopes that the paper would not notice them. When they handed the eight melons to the Spaniard, he asked for the two missing ones. The Indians then stood in awe of the power of the written word and thought the Spaniards semi-divine.

In revolutions outside of the imperial core, literacy programs are a way for people to break down old barriers. Where the ruling class has used complicated legal frameworks to ensure its domination, literacy campaigns such as those conducted in Cuba, Nicaragua or Burkina Faso help in leveling the playing field and have an impact beyond a single generation. However, it is not enough to teach the dispossessed the tools of the ruling class. We have to stop and ask ourselves, what is being taught? These programs can be contained within radical liberalism, which is not to say that they are bad but insufficient. We have to understand that the roots of the public school in the imperial core, or the birth of the Autonomous Universities of Latin America, were the achievement of radical liberal programs. But programs like “Indian Boarding Schools” also fall into this category. Leveling the playing field is essential- but we must go further if we do not want to replace one system of distributing power for another one.

The fight against this elitist science is multifold because of the different actors taking place. Plebeians within a dominant community often fight for a science for the people, without questioning the existing cosmovision that organizes society and production. A good example of challenging the power structure of Science is the Health Program of the Black Panthers.¹⁶ In the late 1960s, the healthcare structure in the black community was in an extremely dire state. The Panthers set out to build people’s clinics, in an attempt to democratize the access to healthcare. If they had limited themselves to opening new clinics, staffed with doctors who learned “official medicine” from respectable schools, this program would remain outside of the control of the people. Nothing would have been done to empower them or to tap into their knowledge. The same way that the teachers of a public school still remain bound to a curriculum outside their control, the People’s doctors would remain bound to the authority of a “neutral” medicine.

But The Panthers went further and were able to transcend liberalism. Imitating Mao’s “barefoot doctors”, they allied with radical scientists and with other radical groups such as the Young Lords to form a real program of “Medicine for the People”. The Panthers would place community experts as equals to the medical experts and merge their knowledge to address the health problems of the community. They attempted to make explicit the racism of “official” medicine so they could break it. They conducted a massive campaign around Cystic Fibrosis, a disease that mainly affects people of African origin, which despite a high rate of incidence was never seriously researched. They denounced stories of racist abuse by medical professionals, such as the case of Henrietta Lacks, which made explicit the structural racism in medicine. The Young Lords would go as far as temporary occupying Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx to denounce the medical mistreatment of blacks and Latinxs. They were evicted by riot police but negotiated a space with the hospital where they set up a People’s Program for several years. As part of this program, the Young Lords set up a clinic for detox while providing political education. They assisted the doctors with interpreting services, building on their understanding of their communities’ problems. The Peoples’ Program would be put to a violent end by Mayor Ed Koch in 1978 after several years of success.

Young Lords agitprop against Lincoln Hospital

In the context of settler-colonialism, Marxism too often forgets that it was born of European Origins and that there are other ways of organizing the collective knowledge and experience of society. The knowledge produced by Euroamerican capitalism has been arranged towards two main motives: increasing the productivity and profit of capital, and the development of weapons to bring capitalism on a gunboat. This is reflected in an educational system that values technical and “hard” science above all, where Goldman Sachs executives question whether it is profitable to research the cure to certain diseases instead of treating the symptoms in perpetuity.

Programs for an emancipatory science must understand that they have to serve the entirety of those dispossessed, or will end up perpetuating the colonial structures that are ingrained in Science due to its dual role in society: both an episode in the growth of human knowledge in general, and a product of the Western capitalist societal organization. Education and Science can be used for assimilation as well as for empowerment.¹⁷ The dispossessed should not simply be assimilated into the existing framework because this will mean epistemicide. A radical education program must take into account not only the material conditions of the people it is seeking to liberate but must also ensure that their cosmovisions are respected. A decolonized science must challenge the entire cosmovision of the settler class.

As an example, Amerindian Traditional Ecological Knowledge is of real interest to Euroamerican science due to its utility in ecological management. But simply absorbing this knowledge as better ways to manage a farm or a forest into our system is trying to fit a piece in a different puzzle. First of all, knowledge isn’t granted for “safekeeping” and assimilation in a supposedly more advanced cosmovision. But even if we’re willing to ignore this, TEK is incommensurable to Western Science. We have to understand how deeply connected TEK is to the cosmovision of Amerindians, who value the connection to the land above all.¹⁸ While the West has striven towards speed and productivity assuming it can bend nature towards its will, Amerindians have organized their knowledge towards a homeostatic relationship with nature, recognizing that it is part of the world-system. In this context, it is not strange that one of the first rebels against the Cartesian science, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, was a fine botanist.

One cannot simply look at TEK and think that Western Science can absorb an entire complex cosmovision as a subcompartment of a capital-oriented science labeled ecology. Denoting Indian Science as primitive, or less advanced simply ignores the ways different people have chosen to arrange their collective experience around certain priorities. Marxists must understand that there are many ways of arranging knowledge, all subordinate to the criterion of truth-through-practice, instead of granting preference to a single one.¹⁹ We must fight, as the Zapatistas say, for a world where multiple cosmovisions fit. In Settler-Colonial lands, if we do not clearly understand the dual nature of Science, we risk occupying sacred land to build a telescope without understanding why this is wrong.

Hero twins Hunahpú and Xbalanqué play an important role in the Mayan Cosmovision outlines in the Popol Vuh

VI

Galileo did not teach much to the weaponry makers of the Arsenal, he just systematized their knowledge. Since then, science has moved far, and the gunboats stand in stark contrast with the weapons of mass destruction that have been made available in the 20th century. The nuclear bomb, if anything else, stands as a monument in the emancipation of pure science. Without equations and abstractions, without decades of work in modern physics, it would not have been possible to release such destructive force.

Such potential has of course not passed unnoticed. Today, the University in the United States maintains deep ties to the defense establishment and the military industry, being a prime recipient of military Keynesianism. Military R&D accounts for nearly half of total R&D expenditures in the United States, and they were an even higher portion during the Cold War.²⁰ The fight for permanent technological supremacy requires the power of knowledge, and the careful cultivation of a specialized technocracy that adequately leverages the division of labor.

While some scientists refuse to work with military contractors, and radical associations can agitate the scientific community to make it aware of its collaboration with destruction, the effect is meager. Indeed, most scientists are aware that they are not working for the benefit of mankind, but end up rationalizing away their job as one more cog in the brutal system of imperialism. To quote Stafford Beer at length,

“We have to find a way by which to turn science over to the people. If we can do that, the problem of elitism disappears. For surely I do not have to convince you that the man in the white laboratory coat is human after all, and would rather use his computer to serve you than to blow the world apart? Then for God’s sake (I use the phrase with care) let us create a societary system in which this kind of service is made even possible for him, before it is too late. At the moment, the scientist himself is trapped by the way in which society employs him. What proportion of our scientists are employed in death rather than life, in exploitation rather than liberation? I tell you: most of them. But that is not their free choice. It is an output of a dynamic system having a particular organization.”

In today’s academia, very few scientists can work in what they desire to work if they are to remain employed. They are instead forced into avenues decided by funding programs or private corporations. In the age of austerity, where the pressure to secure funding is growing as fast as research budgets are decreasing, military funding provides an easy solution.

At the same time, seeds for a scientist revolt are being planted in the new class of precariously employed academics. A system where the apprentices labor and produce knowledge while the masters take the credit has been around Academia for years – Tycho Brahe’s observatory was staffed with his own workers who produced the observation tables for which he became famous. But in the present, this antagonism has become extremely exacerbated as the number of doctoral degrees awarded grows without bounds, and the amount of professorships has stagnated. It appears as if Capitalist R&D is simply subcontracted to graduate students, with everyone along the line take a cut. Knowledge production is still linked to industry and hence labor, but produced in a more exploitative way, by specialist but proletarianized scientists. Funding incentives have set up a system where a few professorial “supermanagers” accumulate the little money that is going around, permanently sub-contracting an underpaid class of graduate students and post-doctoral researchers who suffer grave problems of stress, poverty wages and high incidence of mental illness.

A class wedge is arising, where a whole layer of academics can no longer pretend to stand outside society and are instead joining the fight for unionization and for maternal leave. Associations such as Free Radicals and the revitalized Science for the People are taking up the baton dropped by previous generations of radical scientists. Transcending economism, they instead propagandize for a democratized and liberatory science, actively questioning the neutrality of knowledge. The de-ideologization of science is crucial to propagating the hegemony of the bourgeois worldview. But the “traditional intellectuals” in the Gramscian sense are being proletarianized, and are throwing their lot with the forces for change. The radicalizing surplus “overqualified and underemployed” intelligentsia is a luxury compared to the problems of the nascent Soviet republic.

Flashpoints for the organization of a new society are appearing. The scarcity of educational resources has been considerably reduced with the advent of the internet. Resources like Khan Academy provide basic education to millions around the world despite its ideological limits. The tools for a collaborative understanding of the world and a collective organization of knowledge dreamt by Caudwell and Bogdanov already exist. Wikipedia casts a light towards what is possible in a Workers’ Republic, an emancipatory tool in-waiting. Knowledge is the living memory of our collective experience as a species won through the labor of our ancestors. It is the God humans are building. Using it as power over others is the ultimate sin.

2019.11.15

Revolutionary Reels: Soviet Propaganda Film and the Russian Revolution

Shalon Van Tine provides an overview of Soviet Film and its development in relation to the politics of the USSR and Bolshevik Revolution.

The Rise of Soviet Film

In 1896, the Lumière brothers visited Saint Petersburg to present their collection of moving pictures to a small Russian audience, marking the first viewing of film in Russia.¹ The first film to be made in Russia was during the same year: a filming of the coronation of what would be Russia’s last monarch, Tsar Nicholas II.² It would take nearly a decade for Russia to have its own film studio, and the advent of World War I slowed the influx of foreign cinema, leaving Russia to launch its own film industry instead of relying predominantly on foreign film distributors.³ Once established, Russia’s film industry grew, and, by 1914, about half of Russia’s urban population regularly attended the movies.⁴

However, the Bolsheviks would revolutionize Russian cinema as leaders recognized the potential of film propaganda as a way to influence the political and social attitudes of the people.⁵ Vladimir Lenin clearly understood the power of film, as he stated, “Of all the arts, for us, cinema is most important.”⁶ The Bolsheviks nationalized the film industry in 1919, giving the People’s Commissariat for Education control over film production, with a mandate to use cinema to promote the Communist cause at home and abroad.

Before delving into Soviet film in particular it is crucial to first understand why film stood out as a key propaganda tool in the early twentieth century. Film was a new medium. While propagandistic images had been used in various ways throughout history, moving images offered something fresh. One of the most well-known tales in film history about the impact of film on early viewers is that, upon watching Lumière’s Arrival of the Train, audiences shrieked in horror at the train coming directly towards them from the background of the image.⁷ Even though this story may have been embellished, early audiences were intrigued by film’s ability to animate real-life imagery. Thus, film offered unprecedented realism beyond the traditional effect of pamphlets, posters, and even photography. Furthermore, since a majority of Russia’s population were illiterate peasants, film could reach a widespread audience who would not have responded as well to written propaganda.⁸

The Bolsheviks focused their film industry on promoting specific communist themes among the Russian people and around the world. Different times meant different goals. During the years from the 1917 Revolution to the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, Soviet propaganda adjusted to reflect the needs of the party in three periods: the Revolution, the Civil War, and New Economic Policy (NEP) (1917–1927); Stalinization, modernization, and the Great Purges (1927–1938); and the prewar, World War II, and postwar years (1938–1953). Over the course of these periods, Soviet film focused successively on the following key objectives: enshrining the ideals of the Revolution; solidifying the Bolsheviks’ version of history and justifying Bolshevik leadership; promoting international revolution and calling on workers everywhere to unite against their oppressors; demonstrating the power of the people working together; elucidating the concept of the “New Soviet Person” and of the cultural revolution; showing the ongoing struggle against class enemies; promoting the controversial policy and methods of collectivization; demonstrating how industrialization would improve the lives of ordinary people while bringing society closer to the communist ideal; and celebrating Stalin as the strong leader of the Russian people and justifying questionable means to protect the people from enemies foreign and domestic. In short, Soviet film propaganda evolved in both content and style to reflect the changing political goals of the party during these periods.

Soviet Film Propaganda during the Revolution, the Civil War, and NEP

The tumultuous period from 1917 to 1927 began with a Tsar who ruled over the Russian Empire and ended with a Communist Party leader who exercised unrivaled control over the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). During this time, the Bolsheviks grew from being one of many political parties agitating for revolution into the only party—the Communist Party—which would wield power until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.⁹ These years would shape Soviet leadership and would see the development of a new, impactful style of propaganda film: Soviet montage.¹⁰ The radical filmmakers of these years would advance an innovative film style to capture the spirit of a revolutionary age.

The February Revolution of 1917 saw the collapse of the Tsarist government, which was replaced by the Provisional Government, in which power was shared between various political factions, chiefly through the bourgeois-dominated legislature, the Duma, and the councils of workers and soldiers, the Soviets.¹¹ Alexander Kerensky, one of the leaders in the Duma who supported the February Revolution, rose to prominence in the Provisional Government and, after the July Days, became the effective head of state. The Provisional Government sought to balance the interests of competing factions of Russian society until elections for a constituent assembly could be held. In the meantime, it continued to honor Russia’s war commitment to the Allied Powers, seen by many workers and soldiers as a betrayal of the February Revolution, which had been precipitated largely by the fury of the hungry women of Petrograd who had had enough of the horror of World War I. ¹² The Bolsheviks, who early in 1917 were just one of a variety of socialist workers’ parties, adopted the slogan “peace, land, and bread,” and by autumn 1917, they gained the majority in the Petrograd Soviet. The Bolsheviks argued for an end to dual power, embodied in the slogan “all power to the Soviets,” and they organized Petrograd workers to seize power from the Provisional Government in the October Revolution of 1917.¹³ The Bolsheviks declared the Soviets to be the sole organ of power, and thus began the Soviet Union, marking the first time in history that workers seized and held power for themselves. This momentous event would be celebrated in many Soviet films—first from the Bolshevik point of view, later with a Stalinist interpretation.

The Bolsheviks ended Russian involvement in World War I with a treaty in March 1918, but the fight to consolidate Soviet power had just begun. The Civil War broke out between the White Army of anti-communists and the Red Army of the Bolsheviks and their allies, such as the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries, whose members would later be either absorbed or purged.¹⁴ In 1923, after years of fighting, social and economic upheaval, famine, brutal tactics to crush counterrevolution, conscription, nationalization of industries, crop seizures, and millions dead, the Bolsheviks achieved a ruinous, costly victory, and the future of Soviet communism and of all that they had fought for was far from certain. Lenin instituted the New Economic Policy (NEP), a “strategic retreat” from many of the communist policies of the Civil War and a partial, temporary reinstitution of a market economy.¹⁵ NEP probably saved the Soviet Union from economic disaster and allowed the Bolsheviks—renamed the Communist Party in 1918—to solidify their control.

During the 1920s, the Communist Party launched a great propaganda campaign to win the hearts and minds of the Russian people—and to stir workers throughout the world to revolution.¹⁶ Lenin, the preeminent leader of the Bolsheviks, died in 1924, and party leaders contended to fill the power vacuum. Stalin consolidated power within the party bureaucracy, and, by 1927, emerged as the head of the party. Stalin’s rivals, chief among them Leon Trotsky, were purged from the party, and their roles in history were often diminished or distorted in Stalinist propaganda.¹⁷ But in the years before Stalin crushed all opposition and stifled both political and creative freedom, groundbreaking master filmmakers, such as Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, and Vsevolod Pudovkin, invented an exciting Soviet cinema unlike anything produced in the world thus far. In the first Soviet decade, these innovators brought to the silver screen—and, thereby, to the world—the spirit of the Revolution and a vision of its fruits.

Sergei Eisenstein changed the way filmmakers edited film, and, in doing so, increased the excitement and effectiveness of propaganda film. Eisenstein was influenced by some of his Soviet contemporaries who were experimenting with film montage, which he referred to as the “dialectical process that creates a third meaning out of the original two meanings of the adjacent shots.”¹⁸ While there was some disagreement among Soviet filmmakers as to the most effective way to use montage, Eisenstein developed his own theories that proved to have an authoritative impact on propaganda films. His expert use of montage in Strike (1925) and Battleship Potemkin (1925) illustrated the powerful role that film could play in communicating the theory and ideals of the Revolution.

In Battleship Potemkin, Eisenstein created a dramatized version of the mutiny that occurred on the Russian battleship Potemkin during the 1905 revolution, engaging the viewer’s sympathies with exaggerated characters (one might call them “Marxist archetypes”).¹⁹ The film starts by setting the stage for revolt. In the “Men and Maggots” scene, Eisenstein introduces his viewers to his rapid style of cutting from image to image. The film shifts between shots of the distressed sailors and the spoiled meat to the maggots and the conniving expressions of the evil leaders.²⁰ With this tactic, Eisenstein accomplishes two important things: he wins the viewer’s loyalty to the sailors and he establishes the Tsarist leaders as a force that must be eliminated. Eisenstein displays his montage techniques again during the “Drama on the Quarter Deck” scene when he cuts quickly from the commander’s orders to kill the sailors, to the faces of the distraught sailors, and then to the action shots of the chaos.²¹ With this style of fast-paced editing between images, Eisenstein establishes a sense of expressive panic and disorder to communicate his themes on both an intellectual and a gut level. Louis Giannetti notes on Eisenstein’s editing that “Eisenstein believed that the essence of existence is constant change. He believed that nature’s eternal fluctuation is dialectical—the result of the conflict and synthesis of opposites.”²²

The most effective and famous scene in Battleship Potemkin is the “Odessa Steps” sequence, in which soldiers march down the steps in an inhuman, almost robotic display of oppression, slaughtering droves of innocent people and culminating in a bloody massacre.²³ One of the most powerful series of images is the distinction between the machine-like, faceless Cossacks pitted against the helpless Russian people, such as the mother holding the child walking up the steps towards the soldiers in a desperate, doomed plea for mercy. Eisenstein mastered the editing and the sound precisely so that the viewer felt a sense of panic and fear while being fed such formidable imagery.²⁴ Battleship Potemkin became the film to capture the spirit of the Revolution—not just in Russia in 1905 or in 1917, but the universal Revolution of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, international and timeless. To Russians it was a call to embrace the vision of communism; to workers around the world it was a call to follow the example of their brothers and sisters in Russia.

After the Bolsheviks’ costly victory in the devastating Civil War, they had to deal with the reality that the country faced severe social and economic problems.²⁵ Russian society was fragmented, and the Bolsheviks needed to demonstrate the power of the people working together rather than through individual action. The portrayal of collective action—a cornerstone of communist ideology—is evident in many of the propaganda films of the 1920s. Eisenstein’s Strike begins with a quotation from Lenin: “The strength of the working class is organization. Without organization of the masses, the proletarian is nothing. Organized it is everything. Being organized means unity of action, unity of practical activity.”²⁶ The film shows a workers’ strike in pre-Revolutionary Russia and the violent suppression of the strike by the capitalists, famously illustrated through Eisenstein’s montage of murdered workers and slaughtered cows.²⁷ Throughout the film, the workers are shown working together in groups, not as individuals—so much so that individuals are hard to tell apart and receive almost no unique characterization. Strike served a couple purposes at the time. First, it called on workers worldwide to unite to throw off the yokes of their oppressors. Even though the Russian Revolution had already happened, the Soviet Union still had to promote unity among the proletariat. Second, it promoted a “continuing revolution,” that is, the expansion of an international proletarian brotherhood, rather than the “socialism in one country” of later years.²⁸

The Bolsheviks needed to address another concern: justifying their continued leadership. The death of Lenin caused the Bolsheviks to worry about the exhaustion of the revolution, so they felt the need to continue to take advantage of the power of propaganda to keep those fires burning.²⁹ These fears were tackled in both Vsevolod Pudovkin’s The End of St. Petersburg (1927) and Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov’s October: Ten Days the Shook the World (1928). Both films were released near the ten-year anniversary of the Revolution, hence their propagandistic portrayal of the historical events and the Communist Party’s declaration that the films were intended to honor “the Bolshevik completion of the Russian Revolution.”³⁰ In The End of St. Petersburg, audiences were reminded of the suffering of the Russian people before the October Revolution and the need for the Bolsheviks’ bold leadership.³¹ In October, Eisenstein and Aleksandrov place the Bolsheviks in the highest regard, showing them as righteous revolutionaries with the people’s mandate to overthrow the Provisional Government.³² Several scenes in October, particularly scenes involving crowds, are so realistic that they appear almost like documentary footage, blurring the line between history and propaganda.³³

In addition to casting the Bolsheviks as the heroic leaders of the proletariat, October is also a noteworthy example of rewriting history to portray Lenin, Stalin, and Stalin’s allies in a positive light while portraying Stalin’s enemies in a negative light. When filming began in early 1927, Trotsky was still a leader of the Communist Party, though he was already at odds with Stalin. By December 1927, at the Fifteenth Party Congress, Trotsky and his faction had been purged from the party.³⁴ Stalin then stepped up his campaign to discredit Trotsky—not only by branding him a traitor in the present but also by falsely diminishing Trotsky’s important role in the October Revolution and in the Civil War. When it was not possible to eliminate Trotsky’s role entirely, he was instead made to look foolish, inept, or even traitorous in the retelling of historical events. At Stalin’s insistence, October had to be recut to remove most of Trotsky’s role in the portrayal of the October Revolution.³⁵ Only one scene with Trotsky remains: at a meeting of the Bolsheviks, Trotsky is shown opposing Lenin’s brave plans to seize power in the name of the proletariat. Additionally, October emphasizes the role of individual leaders far more than the earlier Strike and Battleship Potemkin, marking the beginning of the shift from celebrating collective action to celebrating the great leader. Lenin becomes memorialized as almost godlike, and Stalin is cast as his chosen successor.

October displays yet again Eisenstein’s successful use of montage and powerful symbolism. An early sequence depicts the people tearing down a statue of the Tsar—his head topples, then the orb and scepter, then the arms, and then the whole statue falls. Later, when Kerensky’s imperial ambitions threaten the revolution, Eisenstein cuts to the statue sequence in reverse—the Tsar, piece by piece, flies back onto his pedestal.³⁶ These images are quickly intercut with intertitles expressing the imminent need to save the Revolution from traitorous reactionaries.

Kerensky’s place in history is certainly open to debate. One could argue that Kerensky was an honest caretaker in a tight spot doing his best to balance the interests of many different groups in Russian society during a time of tremendous uncertainty. The Provisional Government was only supposed to be a temporary custodian until elections could be held for the constituent assembly in November 1917.³⁷ Those elections were held, and while the Bolsheviks won 25 percent of the popular vote, they placed second to the Socialist Revolutionaries who got 40 percent of the vote.³⁸ To the Bolsheviks in 1917, as well as to Stalin in 1927, Kerensky’s role was necessarily fixed as a villain—a traitor to the February Revolution who sided with the Western imperialist powers against the suffering people of Russia—and the only legitimate election was through the workers’ and soldiers’ Soviets, which had, in October 1917, chosen the Bolsheviks to lead the workers’ seizure of state power.

Clearly, from the point of view of the party in 1927, these events required some finessing. The Bolsheviks could contend with some justification to be the representative of the urban proletariat by October 1917, and they chiefly relied on this constituency for their claim to power.³⁹ Still, the Bolsheviks would look much better cast as heroic saviors of the people’s Revolution from the betrayal of a new Tsar (or a new Napoleon) than as one political party among many who seized an opportunity. To that end, the story of the Great October Socialist Revolution had to be told as the triumph of the people—led by the Bolsheviks—over the monarchical aspirations of a traitor—Kerensky.

October demonstrated the Bolshevik fear that their Revolution would lead to a new Napoleon. In the film, the audience is shown flashes of Napoleon’s statue with cuts to Kerensky contemplating over a chessboard. Later, a similar scene cuts between images of Napoleon to Kerensky standing in a Napoleonic pose.⁴⁰ The Bolsheviks had long been concerned that, after a successful revolution, a Napoleon-like leader might arise:

They had learned the lessons of history and had no intention of letting the Russian Revolution degenerate as the French Revolution had done when Napoleon Bonaparte declared himself Emperor. Bonapartism—the transformation of a revolutionary war leader into a dictator—was a danger that was often discussed in the Bolshevik Party… It was assumed that any potential Bonaparte would be a charismatic figure, capable of stirring oratory and grandiose visions and probably wearing a military uniform.⁴¹

The message of this sequence in October is clear and compelling: Kerensky was a would-be Bonaparte, and allowing him to remain in power would have been to surrender the promise of the February Revolution. Concurrent propaganda painted Trotsky in a similar light. Ironically, it was not Kerensky, Trotsky, or any other leader who became the dreaded Napoleon, but Stalin himself (an identity cemented in George Orwell’s Animal Farm)—which made it all the more essential to paint Kerensky in that role.⁴²

Soviet Film Propaganda during Stalin’s Revolution and the Great Purges

The years from 1927 to 1938 saw Stalin wield near-absolute power over the Soviet Union. To maintain control and crush dissent—real or imagined—millions of citizens were executed or sent to the Gulag where many died, and any group within the Communist Party which looked like it might form a faction was purged.⁴³ Fear of attack from the West spread, and hoped-for revolutions in Germany and other Western nations failed. Stalin, therefore, shifted rhetoric and policy from the traditional Marxist aim of international proletarian revolution to “socialism in one country,” which bore a striking resemblance to nationalism, a very un-Marxist concept.⁴⁴ In effect, this meant less talk about workers throughout the world and more talk of the Russian people—and of their heroic leader. The cult of personality around Stalin grew, and propagandists analogized to great leaders from Russia’s past, like Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible. If Stalin’s measures were iron-fisted, it was because Mother Russia was threatened by invasion, by spies, and by other class enemies.

The Soviet Union recognized that it was isolated, and that, if the communist ideal was to be achieved, the Russian people would have to do it themselves. The wave of European proletarian revolutions they had hoped for had not occurred. Modernization was a precondition for communism and necessary for defense against invasion, and, in 1928, Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan made modernization the Soviet Union’s top priority.⁴⁵ There were three key components to this drive: collectivization, industrialization, and the cultural revolution.⁴⁶ Collectivization meant modernization of agriculture. Peasant farmers were forced to reorganize their farms into kolkhoz (collective farms).⁴⁷ Industrialization meant building many new factories, increasing output, and bringing backward agricultural practices into the machine age.⁴⁸ The USSR wanted to beat the capitalist West at what the West did best, and the USSR knew this would require a herculean effort. Finally, if the Soviet people were to transform their nation and its production, they would also need to transform themselves. Illiterate workers and superstitious peasants would need to improve themselves: they must strive to achieve the ideal of the “New Soviet Person.”⁴⁹ Propaganda was essential to show that these three aspects of modernization would improve life immediately (many films from this era include scenes simply showing machines at work, with a celebratory atmosphere) and would help to usher in the new age of communism.

Before Stalin took full control of the party, many Soviet propaganda films dealt with the themes of continuing the ideals of the Revolution, unifying the people, and preserving Bolshevik leadership. Films such as Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Mother (1926), Dziga Vertov’s Forward, Soviet (1926), Esfir Shub’s The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927), and Alexander Dovzhenko’s Zvenigora (1928) all reminded the audience that the revolution was necessary and justified in order to continue towards the goal of communism.⁵⁰ Some of these themes would continue into the Stalin years, but the focus shifted towards ideas about the “New Soviet Person,” the cultural revolution, and the continued fight against class enemies.⁵¹

This persistent battle against class enemies was evidenced in the propaganda films that emerged in the early years of Stalin’s leadership, most notably in Pudovkin’s Storm Over Asia (1928), which takes place in Mongolia circa 1918–20, and involves a struggle between indigenous Mongols—the oppressed people with whom the audience is meant to identify—and two class enemies: British imperialists and capitalists, and Buddhist priests and other Mongol elites. These class enemies work together to exploit the honest and noble people of the eastern steppe.⁵² In Storm Over Asia, Pudovkin promotes several themes of Soviet propaganda: the continuing, international spirit of the Revolution; the ongoing struggle against various class enemies, at home and abroad; and the need for modernization to lift the people out of the darkness of superstition and religion.

Two scenes mocking religion and priests are worth noting. Early in the film, a Buddhist priest says prayers over a sick man in a humble hut. The priest employs various superstitious trinkets and noisemakers to heal the sick man—not medicine, just idle noise. In thanks for this dubious service, a family member offers the priest a fur as a “gift for the temple.” When the priest decides that the gift is not valuable enough, he seizes a second fur. The son of the family (the main character in the film) tackles the priest, who ends up running away like a thief caught in the act and lucky to get away with his own hide.

Later in the film, there is a compelling sequence cutting between two scenes: preparations for a Buddhist festival and a British commandant and his wife dressing up to meet the Grand Lama at that festival. The festival shows priests dressing up in colorful, shiny, and “primitive” outfits; meanwhile, the proud British commandant dresses in his fancy and medal-clad uniform, his wife in a gown and jewels. Both sets of costumes require the assistance of servants. Intertitles are unnecessary: the message is clear that both the religious elites and the Western capitalists are class enemies, oppressors of the unpretentious, working people. As the British join the festival and make a grand entrance into the temple, Western pomp meets Eastern pomp, both meant to disgust the viewer. There is a moment of surprise when the Grand Lama—hailed as wise and revered by the priests—is revealed to be a baby sitting on a throne. A priest explains that, “Though the Great One does not speak, still he sees all, hears all, knows all.”⁵³ The British commandant hesitates for a moment, and then bows solemnly. Again, the message is clear: the Western capitalists will play along with superstitious nonsense if their collaborators require it.

One of the most effective uses of montage in Storm Over Asia occurs in a key scene in which a British fur trader cheats the main character, a poor Mongol. A brawl ensues, and it ends with the Mongol pulling out a knife and cutting the dishonest trader’s hand. The Mongol runs off. The British fur trader holds up his bloody hand, which is followed by an intertitle reading, “Avenge the white man’s blood!”⁵⁴ Pudovkin rapidly cuts between close-ups of the bloody hand, images of capitalists shouting for vengeance, and troops marching in. As the Mongols flee, Pudovkin shows a row of riflemen, weapons aimed, advancing on the people who flee before them. In the end, the British commandant announces, “If within twenty-four hours the criminal is not surrendered the entire population will be fined and punished by example.”⁵⁵ The sequence ends on another shot of the soldiers aiming their rifles, preparing to fire. Taken literally, the sequence presents a choppy narrative, but it is meant as a visual argument demonstrating the arrogance and racism of the Western capitalists who “buy cheap and sell dear” and the ruthlessness of “those who guard the interests of capitalism.”⁵⁶

The fruits of modernization, and especially of collectivization, is the main theme of Eisenstein and Aleksandrov’s The General Line (1929). The film also tackles the need for the New Soviet Person to cast off the superstitions and backwardness of the old days. In The General Line, poor peasants with small farms are shown struggling due to drought. The peasants follow gaudy Orthodox priests, idols in hand, in a procession up to a hilltop. There the priests pray to heaven, asking for rain, while the peasants grovel in the dirt.⁵⁷ Eisenstein cuts between the people groveling and sheep—thirsty sheep, panting mindlessly. The people catch a brief glimpse of hope when they see a cloud, but, alas, there is no rain, because the priests are frauds (and, of course, they are also exploitative class enemies).⁵⁸ In the next scene, the peasant farmers have formed a dairy collective, and a new, shiny machine has arrived which efficiently churns milk into butter. The people are skeptical: they have been fooled before. They watch the machine work. An intertitle asks, “deception or progress?”⁵⁹ As the machine churns, the people see that it works, and they rejoice in their newfound prosperity. Much of the rest of the film celebrates the workings of a collective farm with similarly happy results. Production of The General Line began before Trotsky was purged from the party, and so the film was reedited to eliminate any references to him. It was released under the appropriate title The Old and the New.⁶⁰

The reality of collectivization fell far short of what was promised to the peasants, and it was a disastrous failure, largely responsible for famine and the deaths of millions.⁶¹ These embarrassing failures of the Communist Party’s policy made its defense in propaganda that much more important. Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930) celebrates life, death, the harvest, the power of the people working collectively, and the coming of the new world promised by the Revolution, all with striking visual poetry. It shows the clash of old and new—oxen versus tractor, class structure versus communism, religion versus atheism, and the individual versus the collective.⁶² The past is frequently contrasted with the imagined future, a future in which the proletariat’s work, joined with the power of the machine, would bring prosperity. Unlike the harsh reality of collectivization in the present, this beautiful film was intended to reassure the people of the new future that collectivization would (supposedly) soon bring them.

The key to the cultural revolution was the development of the New Soviet Person—a person who had shaken off the shackles of the old world (such as religion, superstition, and traditional bourgeois social values) and who embraced the new, modernized Soviet world. As Sheila Fitzpatrick explains:

The kind of renunciation that most interested Soviet authorities was when priests renounced the cloth. Such renunciation, if done publicly, provided dramatic support for the Soviet position that religion was a fraud that had been discredited by modern science. Signed announcements that a priest was renouncing the cloth “in response to socialist construction” appeared from time to time as letters to the editor of the local press during the Cultural Revolution.⁶³

Whether such renunciations were real or coerced by Stalin’s operatives, they were useful in promoting the break with old values. These anti-religious themes are on display in films like Storm Over Asia, The General Line, Earth, and also in Eisenstein’s Bezhin Meadow (1937). In the film, a farmer, angry at the government, attempts to destroy the crops, and his son tries to stop him to protect the Soviet state.⁶⁴ The father, an enemy of the state, is often shown alongside religious icons. Eisenstein provides a contrast between religion and modernization, between the old world and the new. The son is a prime example of the New Soviet Person: someone born into a new generation and free from the baggage of the old regime. These themes are also explored in Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), which has no narrative plot, but instead employs modernist themes of speed and movement, and documents the Soviet world of the new generation—a place where the confinements of the old world had withered away and industrialization had created a new, promising life.⁶⁵

Soviet Film Propaganda in the Prewar, World War II, and Postwar Years

The period from 1938 to 1953 was, of course, defined by World War II—or, as it is known in Russia, the Great Patriotic War. The Nazi invasion devastated the USSR, which suffered more casualties than any other European country.⁶⁶ Relations between the Soviet Union and the West improved temporarily as they joined against their common enemies, the Axis Powers. Film propaganda from these years focused on the war—as it did in other countries as well—and on Stalin himself, the great leader. Soviet films from the 1940s bear little resemblance to the brilliant montage of the 1920s. Different messages called for different film methods: instead of quick cuts, swift movement, and groups in action, these later films have longer takes showing brave individuals holding the line. The evolution of the work of the preeminent Soviet filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein, demonstrates this shift: Strike and Battleship Potemkin (both 1925) focus on groups—the proletariat collectively is the protagonist—while Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible, Part I (1944) focus on individuals—one strong ruler is the protagonist.⁶⁷ With these films, international socialism has been replaced by nationalism and totalitarianism. Gone is the battle cry “workers of the world, unite”; it is replaced with a call to follow the great leader Stalin and to defend Mother Russia against Western invaders. German soldiers are no longer class brothers—they are Teutonic Knights, come to pillage Russia.

Was the Revolution now complete, as Stalin claimed, or had it been betrayed, as Trotsky, Orwell, and others believed? If a filmmaker wanted his work to be seen, he had better take Stalin’s side, and make sure that any hint of criticism was very cleverly veiled. For example, whether or not Eisenstein intended Ivan the Terrible, Part II (1946) as a criticism, it was perceived as such, and it was not released until 1958. Not until the thaw following the death of Stalin in 1953 and Khrushchev’s policy of destalinization would filmmakers, as well as musicians, writers, and other artists, find a little more freedom of expression.

Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938), a great historical epic, depicts the thirteenth-century battle on the frozen lake, in which Alexander Nevsky led the Russians against the invading Teutonic Knights.⁶⁸ Released in 1938, as Hitler was swallowing up Austria and the Sudetenland, it is no mistake that Eisenstein’s subject was a great Russian victory over German invaders. The film even ends with an explicit declaration that any who would attack Russia will be defeated, the warning painted across a vast throng of Russian soldiers. One of the Germans in the film even wears a design that highly suggests the swastika. The film was very successful in the Soviet Union, but Stalin pulled it from circulation in 1939 when he signed his pact with Hitler. Two years later, when Hitler invaded Russia, Alexander Nevsky went back into widespread circulation.

Alexander Nevsky is quite different from Eisenstein’s 1920s films. First, there is a shift in story-telling: whereas Strike, Battleship Potemkin, and October feature the proletariat collectively as the main character, in this film, Alexander Nevsky is the hero. The common people are still featured, but they support the great leader and follow his commands. This, of course, echoes the rise of Stalin as dictator. Second, gone is the fast-cutting of Eisenstein’s signature montage. This is at least partly due to Stalin’s insistence that the arts be accessible to the common public. Eisenstein had been severely criticized for being too artsy in his previously aborted film, Bezhin Meadow. For this film, Eisenstein was closely watched, and any “formalist” excursions were reined in by Communist officials.

Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible is a two-part historical film about Ivan IV of Russia. Stalin commissioned the film because it emphasizes a single, strong leader: a Tsar from Russia’s autocratic history. “Socialism in one country,” effectively a nationalistic ideology, had completely replaced the international ideology of Marxism. Like Stalin, Ivan is an iron-fisted ruler only because he must be for the good of the Russian people. Russia is surrounded by foreign enemies, and is threatened from within by spies and scheming Boyars.⁶⁹ At one point Ivan leaves Moscow, only to return when the people beg him to come back. The point is clear: in times of crisis, a strong leader is needed, and ruthless tactics are justified to protect the country and its people from enemies.⁷⁰

Part I won critical acclaim—even winning the Stalin Prize—but Part II was suppressed, and was only released after Stalin’s death during the Khrushchev thaw.⁷¹ Did Eisenstein depict Ivan as too terrible? Was there too much religious iconography? Was Eisenstein dabbling in too much experimental “formalism,” rendering his work unsuitable for the masses? It is unclear why Part II was suppressed, and also what Eisenstein’s true political views were. Regardless, both the content and the method of film had evolved dramatically from 1925 to 1946 to suit the changing needs of the Communist Party.

The Legacy of Revolutionary Soviet Film

During the Khrushchev thaw, censorship in the Soviet Union was relaxed somewhat, and Russian filmmakers had more freedom in their cinematic expression.⁷² Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev eased travel restrictions and created cultural festivals that allowed an influx of diverse works from writers, artists, and filmmakers to come into the Soviet Union. ⁷³ Thus, Soviet cinema took new forms. For instance, Mikhail Kalatozov’s 1957 film The Cranes Are Flying tells a story of the Great Patriotic War, but instead of the prior patriotic Soviet take, the movie depicts the psychological damage of the war on the Soviet people, especially women.⁷⁴ Similarly, Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1962 film Ivan’s Childhood also deals with the effects of World War II on the mind of a child.⁷⁵ Soviet filmmaker Sergei Parajanov embraced this new artistic freedom in The Color of Pomegranates (1969), a picture that focuses on the life of a poet almost exclusively through experimental imagery.⁷⁶ This period demonstrated the diversity of Soviet filmmakers, who began to focus on the personal and the psychological rather than the collective and the political.

While the films during the thaw went a variety of new directions, during the years from the 1917 Revolution to the death of Stalin in 1953, Soviet film propaganda evolved in both substance and form to reflect the changing goals of the Communist Party. Soviet film went through three major periods during those years: The Revolution through the end of NEP, Stalin’s Revolution and modernization, and the Great Patriotic War years. The Communist Party focused on fundamental themes including memorializing the Revolution, rallying the international proletariat, celebrating Bolshevik leadership, uniting the people, promoting the politics of the cultural revolution, and justifying Stalin’s leadership and methods. Through the vivid power of film, great filmmakers promoted the changing policies of the Communist Party to audiences across Russia and throughout the world.⁷⁷

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‘Evolution of the National Question’ and ‘The East and Revolution’ by Safarov

Translation and Introduction by Medway Baker.

Safarov (upper right) with Ural Regional Soviet, circa 1918.

Georgy Safarov was born in St. Petersburg in 1891. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1908, and from 1910 spent many years exiled in Switzerland, returning to Russia alongside Lenin in 1917. Despite spending most of his political career up until the revolution in Western Europe, he took a keen interest in the national question, especially the plight of the Muslim population of Russian Central Asia. He was sent to Soviet Turkestan in 1919 to aid in the establishment of soviet power and the fight against the counterrevolutionary Basmachi movement. The complexity of carrying out these tasks—establishing soviet power, winning over the oppressed masses, building socialism, and combatting both counterrevolutionary nationalism and Russian chauvinism—led Safarov to engage in a comprehensive study of Central Asian economic and social conditions. The two pieces we present below were written around the time that Safarov was engaged in a struggle with Mikhail Tomsky, who also had come to hold a leadership position in Soviet Turkestan. Tomsky, as Matthieu Renault elaborates in his essay Revolution Decentered: Two Studies on Lenin, wished to transplant the methods used with regard to the peasantry in the Russian core—the tax-in-kind, etc.—directly to Turkestan, without consideration for the national chauvinism and economic dominance of Russian peasants, workers, and administrators, and the resentment of the native population towards these colonisers. To this proposal, Safarov counterposed the establishment of committees of the poor peasants and distribution of the lands of the large landowners to these peasants, in order to encourage class conflict within the Muslim population, against both their own elites and the Russian colonisers. As Renault demonstrates, Lenin—eternally concerned with Great Russian chauvinism and bureaucratism—attempted to mediate between the two, but clearly sided with Safarov. This was a struggle that he and Safarov were to lose.

The first essay, The Evolution of the National Question, published in the French publication Bulletin communiste in early 1921, is a brief sketch of the development of the national question throughout the revolutionary period, and concludes with a list of problems and a set of prescriptions for the Soviet government to act upon. The style, structure, and content suggest that it was rather hastily written as a call to action, a feature that we have attempted to preserve in this translation. The second, The East and Revolution, published in Bulletin communiste a few months after (and having been published in German in late 1920), greatly elaborates on the content of the first article, with references to anthropological, economic, and historical studies, especially of the Central Asian peoples of the Russian Empire. In the spirit of scientific inquiry, Safarov examines the nature of imperialism, its effect on the economies and societies of colonised nations, the changes in the global and Russian situations since the beginning of the First World War, and the experiences of the national-democratic and proletarian revolutions occurring worldwide in the wake of the war. He then discusses solutions to the national question, in an earnest attempt to resolve the tensions inherent to the national-democratic and socialist revolutions in Russia, and by extension the world.

A key part of his solution is the soviets, which he identifies as “a class organisation borrowed from the proletariat of the advanced countries.”

But the importance of the soviets, for Safarov, is not the particularities of the soviet form as manifested in Russia in 1917 (he in fact refers also to the anjoman, a type of revolutionary council that emerged during the Persian Constitutional Revolution of 1906-09). Rather, it is their status as popular organs of the revolutionary masses, created in the actual process of the class struggle, and as anti-agreementist organs from which the exploiting strata are excluded. For Safarov, the significance of the soviet form is not in their size, nor in their organisational norms; it is in their class composition. Only the class-independence of the labouring masses (the proletariat, the peasantry, and the petty producers alike) from their exploiters can fully carry out the project of national liberation from imperialism. The native exploiters, Safarov demonstrates, will inevitably betray the interests of the majority of the nation in favor of their own class interests, and in so doing will side with imperialist dictatorship.

It is crucial to note that Safarov does not at any point confuse national liberation with the transition to communism, nor does he advocate liquidation of the proletarian struggle against exploitation into the pure struggle for national liberation. On the contrary, he stresses that “this entire programme [for national liberation] has not a single communist element,” and insists on the necessity of “conserving at all price the independence of the workers’ movement, even in its embryonic form.” For Safarov, the struggle for national liberation is a necessary component of the progression towards communism, of the development of the exploited masses’ revolutionary consciousness — but national-democratic revolutionaries are not to be confused with communists, and it is the duty of communists to struggle against these elements in order to win over the exploited masses.

It is notable that for Safarov, the national policy he proposes “coincides with another [task]: that of winning the masses of petty producers, the middle peasants of Central Russia to soviet rule.” In effect, the alliance of the Russian workers and peasants with the toiling masses of the oppressed nations is mirrored by the alliance between the proletariat and the peasanty (the smychka). Just as the Russian proletariat was incapable of exercising power without the support and active participation of the peasantry (unless they wanted to wage a brutal war against the countryside), it was also unable to exercise power without the participation of the exploited strata of the oppressed nations. Safarov, clearly referencing the Basmachi movement, insists that attempting to exercise proletarian power over the oppressed nations, without taking into consideration their particular conditions and tasks, “can obtain but a single result: to unite the exploited masses with their exploiters in a common struggle for the freedom of national development” — that is, a struggle against the Soviet Republic. This applies not only to the Soviet Republic internally, but also to the international revolution. Even Soviet economic policy is mirrored in Safarov’s vision for the global socialist economy: the peasant soviet republics of the once-oppressed nations, he says, will trade raw materials to the proletarian soviet socialist republics in exchange for manufactured goods and technical expertise, just as the New Economic Policy was founded upon equal exchange between the workers and the peasants. Safarov claims that this will allow the peasant soviet republics to develop at their own pace, so that they can “prepare for communism.”

The tendencies that Safarov identifies constitute an early version of a thesis later elaborated upon by postcolonial revolutionaries and scholars, such as Frantz Fanon. The thesis rejects both stageism—the idea that the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions are and must be entirely distinct events—and the notion that proletarian revolution must be directly transplanted to the colonies by the advanced proletariat of the imperial core, to the exclusion of a native, national-democratic revolution. These two stages of revolution—national and socialist—are not identical, but neither can they be isolated from each other.

We thus present these works as not only a part of the Bolsheviks’ debate on the national question, but also as a study on the dynamics of national oppression and revolution. We contend that these articles are not only a historical curiosity, but can provide insight into questions of imperialism, uneven economic development, and national oppression even today, along with the larger body of scientific study on the national question.

Bolshevik poster in Russian and Uzbek text, 1920, reads: “life of the eastern masses of the Soviet Union”

The Evolution of the National Question

Translated from “L’Évolution de la question nationale,” Bulletin communiste 2, no. 4 (January 27, 1921).

I

The experience of the revolution has not been sufficiently instructive with regard to the national question. At the beginning of the October Revolution this question had not been posed as concretely, nor with such tangible importance and keenness as today. In the first year of soviet power, the right of oppressed peoples to self-determination manifested itself above all as the liquidation of the colonial heritage of the old Russian Empire. Tsarist Russia oppressed and enslaved the “allogenous peoples” (inorodtsy). Soviet power gave them national equality, up to and including the right to create an independent state. The needs of the struggle against internal counterrevolution made this question a problem of prime urgency. Thanks to the concentration of the proletariat in the big cities and the industrial regions of Central Russia, to the favourable strategic position inhabited by this proletariat over the course of Russian history, the seizure of power could not have been easier. But these same circumstances determined in advance the historic path of the Russian counterrevolution, bourgeois and aristocratic, a path travelling from the outer provinces towards the centre. All the preceding history of Russia had been the history of Russian colonisation, and this fact distinguished itself from the moment of the proletariat’s seizure of power: it brought us face to face with the necessity of overcoming the existing antagonism between the Russian proletarian centre and the outer provinces, which are neither Russian nor proletarian; between the Russian city and the non-Russian country. The key to victory was in the resolution of the national question. But obtaining this resolution has not been easy. It has been necessary, firstly, to educate the Russian proletarian masses, infected—at least among their backwards sections—by an unconscious nationalism that makes them see the Russian cities as the focal point of the revolution, and the non-Russian villages as the focal point of the petite bourgeoisie; this leads them to apply the same methods of attack against these villages as are employed against capital. It has been necessary on the other hand to overcome the age-old distrust of the non-Russian villages towards the Russian cities and factories. The cities and the factories were developed and fortified on the immense expanses of the peasant world, as centres of Russian colonisation. The Bashkir knows this all too well, as the factories in the south Urals took away all their wealth and land; the nomadic Kirghiz knows it all too well, and looks askance at the Orenburg, Kazalinsk, Petrovsk, and Tashkent railways, which have always been nests of the scorpions called “police”; the poor Ukrainian peasant, too, knows it all too well. The assault against capital, advancing beyond the outskirts of the city, encounters an environment where the classes were not distinguished. It comes up against an impassable wall of national distrust. The primary attitude of the oppressed, non-Russian countryside was above all the desire for the Russian cities to finally cease commanding them, and to let the oppressed nations freely pursue their proper path towards national development. The poor sections of the oppressed nations considered soviet power to be a force hostile to their national character. The well-off sections and the nationalists of the intellectual stratum, having become the direct object of requisitions and confiscations, as well as of the struggle against counterrevolution, speculation, and sabotage, saw soviet power as a direct menace to their class domination or to their privileges as intellectual workers. This state of mind naturally facilitated, in a large way, the projects of the Russian counterrevolution. Crushed in the first declared encounter, they naturally seized upon the principles of separation, decentralisation, and independence. Kolchak, “Supreme Leader of the Russian Forces,” and Denikin, leader of “Russia One and Indivisible,” are figures of the second period of the Russian counterrevolution. Before selling their beloved “Fatherland” on the global market, where the demand was not yet enough, the counterrevolution first engaged in business among themselves, in the outer provinces of the old Russian Empire.

The experience of the civil war taught the labouring masses of the oppressed nations that the Ukrainian Rada led to Hetman Skoropadskyi and the German general Eichhorn, which wasn’t far from Kolchak’s Alash Orda or the Musavatist government of the English oil barons. The masses of Russian proletarians inhabiting the frontiers understood, too, that without the middle peasant it was impossible to hold firm against the aristocrats and the generals, that without the allogenous peoples it was impossible to create global proletarian power. The immediate collision of Soviet Russia with international imperialism compelled the oppressed nations to stand with the Russian proletariat against imperialist dictatorship, since the latter excluded all possibility of democracy and national liberty. The civil war was terrible, but it made the peoples of Russia pass through entire eras of history. Over the course of the civil war the possessing classes of the oppressed nations demonstrated to even the most backwards their internal, profound impotence in maintaining their positions of national independence in the struggle between capital and the soviets.

The conclusion of this experience has been clear and indubitable: all the bourgeois-national movements, led by the ruling class, have a natural tendency to adapt to imperialism, to enter into the imperialist system of the great powers, the buffer states, and the colonies. The natural tendency, unconscious from the first, of all national-revolutionary movements, is, by contrast, to draw on the revolutionary governing organisation of the proletariat of the more advanced countries, in order to obtain, by this course, their freedom to develop their nation in the global socialist economic system presently being constructed. The structure of the Federation of Soviets of Russia, the decisions of the Congress of the Peoples of the East, the existing alliance with the eastern revolutionary movements with the European revolutionary proletariat, are proof of this.

Three years of soviet power have presented the national question on a global scale, as a question of class struggle.

II

We can thus say that soviet power is the algebraic formula of revolution. The Second Congress of the Communist International recognised this, in concluding that the backwards peoples, with the aid of the proletariat of the more advanced countries, and by means of the formation of soviets, can jump over the capitalist stage to immediately prepare for communism. This is not a rationale understood by the “socialist colonisers,” who proclaim all national features to be counterrevolutionary prejudices, and who recognise nothing other than the national prejudices of the dominant nations. Our Russian colonisers in no way differentiate themselves from the bourgeois socialists of the Yellow International. To combat them is to combat bourgeois—however radical it appears—influence on the proletariat. If we transplant the communist revolution, unaltered, to the backwards countries, we can obtain but a single result: to unite the exploited masses with their exploiters in a common struggle for the freedom of national development. In these countries all the nationalisations and socialisations have about as much a basis as the nationalisation of the small peasant’s minuscule exploitation, or that of the cobblers’ awls. But the soviets are the class organisational form which permits the smooth advancement to communism, starting from the lowest stages of historical development. The semi-proletarian Kirghiz, the poor Bashkir, the Armenian peasant, each has wealthy classes in their country. These wealthy strata take away the former’s right to freely dispose of their labour, they enslave them as agrarian serfs, they divest them of the products of their labour, which they appropriate as a usurer’s profit; they keep them in ignorance; they maintain for themselves a sort of monopoly on the national culture, supported by the Mullahs, the Ishans, and the Ulamas. For the labourers of the backwards countries, bourgeois democracy can represent nothing other than a reinforcement of traditional domination, half-feudal, half-bourgeois. The brief experience of the “Kokand Autonomy”—which had more partisans among the Russian police than among the poor Muslims—, the experience of Alash Orda, the experience of Musavatist rule in Azerbaijan and Dashnak rule in Armenia, the recent experience of the pseudo-nationalist government of the Tehran merchants, taught in the imperialist countries of Europe, can all testify to this in perfect clarity. Six years of turmoil, 1914 to 1920, have brought hardship to the labourers of the backwards countries. The Kirghiz who were mobilised in 1916 to dig trenches have even now not been able to recover their lands, once given by the tsar to the rich peasants of Russia. The name “Kolchak” is well-known to the old allogenous peoples. The economic crisis, the absence of flour and cloth, has significantly exacerbated the subjugation of the poor class among the Kirghiz, in Bashkiria, in Turkestan, etc.… The lack of land, far from being resolved, has done nothing but grow, as the shortage grows, and as the nomads are forced to become sedentary. In the countries of the East, placed between life and death by the yoke of English imperialism, the crisis clears the market of European products, but at the same time it augments the appetites of the Western generals, the adventurers and the national usurers. The only remedy to all these afflictions is the labourers’ soviets, which by grouping the exploited together must end class inequality, give the land to the poor, free the artisan from the usurious intermediaries, liberate the toilers from drudgery and taxes, begin the education of the masses and the radical betterment of their conditions of existence, all at the public expense. This entire programme has not a single communist element. It is only after its realisation that the preparation for communism can begin among the backwards peoples. Here, as everywhere, we must terminate that which has not terminated — which has been incapable of terminating — capitalism. The communist revolution, throughout its entire course, must struggle against the exploiters of all historic periods and all types. The soviets are the revolution’s primary weapon, the universal form of this struggle.

III

Soviet power has become the form by which the right of the oppressed peoples to self-determination manifests. The soviet organisation of the oppressed peoples, from the national point of view as from the political point of view, sets itself against a slew of practical barriers, arising from class inequality and from traditional injustices.

There are enormous spaces, populated by the nations formerly oppressed by tsarism, a great distance away from the railroads. A characteristic example: the Semirechye line, impossible to construct, although the remoteness of this region with respect to Turkestan proper permits the large Russian peasants to maintain an autonomous existence. The nomads fear the city, because they see it as an erstwhile nest of police.

There are no Muslim printed letters, because printing was the privilege of the dominant nation.

There is no one literate in the native language; in Turkestan the cantons are forced to lend secretaries between each other for their executive committees.

There are no specialists for intellectual labour, and intellectuals count only in the dozens. There is no one who can teach others to read and write. This summer in Turkestan we trained a thousand Muslim schoolmasters, but even in just the already-existing schools, we are still missing about 1500.

As regards Russian specialists, we can employ them in the colonial provinces only with the utmost precaution, as they were all more or less agents of the colonial yoke—the colonial plunder. Their distinctly Russian sabotage, which they decorate with bureaucratic scruples and references to decrees, carries a criminally systematic character.

Finally, white-Russian “internationalism” has not yet been completely uprooted in the Communist Party.

The application of all these measures comes up against obstacles: the absence of primers, of scholars, of native specialists, etc.

The Communist Party must clearly understand these facts. It must declare that the soviet autonomy of the oppressed nations is an urgent task for the Communist Party and for soviet power. We must concentrate the attention of the labouring masses, of the proletarian vanguard, and of the entire soviet and communist apparatus on this problem, as we have done in the past in regard to the middle peasant. The liberation of the East, where there is more national and class slavery than anywhere else, is today the centrepiece of our international policy — the international policy of the socialist proletariat. It is there that we will practically address the problem of organising the International Republic of Soviets and the global socialist economy. In three years of soviet power, the national question has undergone many changes. Declarative formulas have passed into the practical organisation of nations. From the military struggle with the national counterrevolution, we have passed to soviet autonomy. From the struggle with the internal counterrevolution we have passed to global policy. The conclusions that present themselves must be taken up by the Commissariats of Agriculture and of Procurement, the Supreme Council of the National Economy, and all the other relevant organs, so that an excessive zeal to execute our labour mobilisations, our taxes-in-kind, etc., will not generate a so-called “counterrevolution.” Our entire party must be mobilised morally to the service of the national liberation of the oppressed.

Soviet poster from Baku, 1920, text in Azeri, reads: “Through their strong union, workers and peasants destroy oppressors.”

The East and Revolution

Translated from “L’Orient et la Révolution,” Bulletin communiste 2, no. 17 (April 28, 1921). Originally appeared in German in Die kommunistische Internationale, no. 15 (December 1920).

The Second Congress of the Communist International recognised that “the masses of the backwards countries, led by the conscious proletariat of the developed capitalist countries, will arrive at communism without passing through the different stages of capitalist development.” We came to recognise this principle through the experience of the national soviet republics in the territory of the former Russian Empire, and through the revolutionary awakening of the colonial peoples and the oppressed nationalities of the East: India, China, Persia, Turkey, etc.… These peoples were cut off from the course of their historical development by European imperialism. They found themselves excluded from the technical revolution, from the rupture with the old social forms, and from the progress of civilisation. European capitalism did not at all revolutionise the mode of production in these countries. It did nothing but erect its own superstructure—in the form of an imperialist bureaucracy, of a commercial agency of European capital and a European “importation” industry—upon the feudal-patriarchal regime which had constituted itself over the course of centuries. It reinforced the exploitation of the agrarian population, by seizing the best lands, the sources of materials and fuel, but did not eliminate the old, reactionary feudal forms of exploitation. Where it could, for example in the Indies, it destroyed the local industry of petty artisans, by saturating the native markets with items manufactured in Europe, outcompeting the locally-manufactured items. Labour, rendered unoccupied by the elimination of petty production, became employed in agriculture. The establishment of industrial hegemony, and the military and political dictatorship of European capital in the colonies, led the great majority of the native population to become “attached to the land” so to speak, and inevitably also to emigration of the surplus population to the industrial centres (such as the exodus of Persians, reduced to finding work in Baku), and the horrific mortalities that periodically desolate certain countries in times of scarcity (India).

The Role of European Capitalism

Therefore, European capitalism has retarded the economic development of the colonies, just as much as it has the development of culture; it has artificially maintained the old social forms and the old reactionary ideology. Certainly, it could not have manifested otherwise in this part of the world and, all things considered, it has fulfilled its role as unconscious revolutionary agent. Friedrich Engels himself recognised this “civilising mission,” even as it concerns former tsarist Russia. In a letter to Karl Marx on May 23, 1851, he wrote, “Russian rule, despite its wickedness, despite its Slavic dirtiness, has a civilising influence on the Black and Caspian Seas and on Central Asia, on the Bashkirs and Tatars.” But here he misses the point. Capitalism of “importation” has the particularity that, in the colonies, it does not in practice follow the same method as in Europe and America. It does not develop the land for capitalist production. The colonialists burn the land to clear it for agriculture, they grow all sorts of grains until the ground is rendered completely barren, and then they abandon it for new lands. It is intensive cropping in all its rapacious brutality. The ruined artisan is not transformed into the industrial proletarian, but is rather transported by force to the countryside, where he has to work as a half-serf day labourer, and becomes literally the rich landlord’s or director’s workhorse, a slave to European exploitation. The nomad who lost his herd meets the same fate. The autonomous petty producer, who does not go to sell his labour on a capitalist farm, is reduced to misery, and becomes the insolvent debtor to the local usurer and to the European commissioner. At the same time that it destroys the native small industry and ruins the agrarian economy, European capitalism reserves all the offices, all the honours and all the important posts to the bearers of “high culture”, to Europeans.

The European is engineer, overseer, commissioner, administrator; the native, labourer and farmer. Just as in capitalist society, the development of the productive forces is accomplished through the intensification of the dominion of capital over labour, in the colonies this development has augmented the class antagonisms between the dominating nation and the oppressed nation. European capitalism barely disturbed the native elites, nor the exploiters of the peoples it oppresses. The big landlords, the merchants, the native usurers, the clergy, and even the police are left at their posts, legitimised by habit, by religion and by history. Only, above them, new figures appeared; the representatives of the imperialist bureaucracy and European capital, the Christian missionaries and the commercial agents. To the feudal exploitation of the peasant by the big landlord, the usurer, and the despotic state was added the oppression of the whole nation by foreign capital. In addition, the European yoke, far from destroying the backwards civil and familial customs, the traditional ancestral ideology, did nothing but consolidate them, by making them dear to the oppressed masses, who see in them a form of conserving their national culture, as well as a weapon in their struggle for political autonomy and their own culture, against the violent assimilation by European capital. This is what explains the strength of pan-Slavism, pan-Mongolism, pan-Asianism (“Asia for Asians!”), and other analogous movements that tend to consolidate the position of the possessing classes in the oppressed nationalities.

“The desire to safeguard the old, backwards forms of production from the invasion of capitalism: this is the economic base that has realised, without difficulty, the unification of the immense masses dispersed across the continents of Asia, Africa, and Europe.”¹ Pan-Islamism as well as other, analogous movements are prominent examples.

European capitalism has not yet had the time to dissolve in the industrial furnace the population of the colonies and the half-enslaved peoples of the East, which the communist revolution and the European proletariat will break open. This is the fatal consequence of this imbalance in the development of different parts of the global economy, an imbalance that constitutes the very essence of the capitalist mode of production. Capitalism has dug an abyss between developed industry and the backwards rural economy. Capitalism has created a contradiction between the production of articles of consumption and the production of the means of production themselves. It has created a collision between the industrial progress of Europe and the backwards economic state of the colonies. It is exactly the transformation of industrial capitalism into imperialism that has caused the world war.

During the imperialist war, many colonial peoples were forced to provide military contingents and working-class armies for the war in Europe. The imperialist war brought the national question to the forefront, on a world-historic and world economic scale. Relying on Turkey, German imperialism attempted to draw into its camp the peoples of the East. The Entente’s imperialism, by virtue of its international situation, naturally had to speculate instead on its relationship with the Latin and Slavic peoples of Europe.

The Military and Political Dictatorship of Conquest

The imperialist war stripped away from the colonies all the “advantages” of their connection with European capital—commodities, the technical and capital means of the Europeans—and at the same time added cannon-fodder and a multitude of raw materials to the usual colonial tribute. The political yoke was equally strengthened. The result of the war was, on the one hand, the spoils of Versailles, and on the other hand the proletarian revolution in Russia and the revolutionary crisis in Europe. Thus, the march of the revolution in the East was predetermined. The war inhibited the base, the foundation of the capitalist mode of production, not only for the national economy of each country in particular, but for the entire global economy. In Europe, the industrious and enterprising capitalist of peacetime—who, hiring labour everywhere and constantly searching for new available capital, would constantly flood the market with streams of commodities—has been replaced with the speculator, declared enemy of large consumption, conscious protagonist of the continual reduction of social production; likewise, in the East, the European travelling salesman, the “peaceful conqueror” has been replaced with the true conqueror, the peacemaker with gold epaulettes, clad in menacing armour made in the European military style, and equipped with a “mandate” for an indeterminate number of colonial slaves and for limitless territory. In Europe, civil war has created an economic necessity for military dictatorship. The awakening of the oppressed peoples of Asia to the struggle for their national existence has equally created an economic necessity of the strengthening of capital’s doctrine of conquest in the East. The military dictatorship in Europe, and the doctrine of conquest in Asia, have been the only means for capitalism to enlarge its base of production, amidst the global disorganisation and the general revolutionary crisis. Looting one to make gifts for the other, making gifts to this one to loot a third, and so on, without end: this is the real essence of the politics of international imperialism, obligated to zig-zag before the proletarian revolution in Europe and the colonial revolution in Asia.

From this peril emerges the community of interests and solidarity in the struggle. The alliance with the European communist proletariat has emerged as an urgent historical necessity for the peoples of the East. The grand course of world history has seen the collision of capitalism with its direct successors—the revolutionary proletarians—and with its bastards—the oppressed peoples. Capitalism has divided humanity into dominant and oppressed nations. The revolution has brought about the union of the workers of the dominant nations with the majority of labourers in the oppressed nations.

It is through the proletarian revolution in Russia that the global revolutionary crisis has begun. The victory of the proletariat in the empire of the tsars, this “prison house of nations,” has given this alliance a concrete manifestation. The Russian revolutionary A. I. Herzen wrote, “The Europeans consider Russia to be Asia; the Asians, for their part, consider Russia to be Europe.” This was the situation of tsarist Russia. In Europe, it fulfilled the role of the international gendarme; in Asia, it conducted the power politics of European bandits. As strange as it may seem, this ancient formula, if turned on its head, characterises the present situation. To the eyes of Europe, the bankers and the big proprietors, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic appears as the propagator of a terrible infection called “Asiatic bolshevism.” In the East, Russia finds itself as the bearer of the ideas of European communist revolution. It is in this phenomenon that we find the revolutionary importance of our geographic position between the East and the West. The Russian proletariat, the vanguard, had to practically resolve the accession of the masses of petty producers to the communist revolution; it had to resolve the question of the transformation of national movements from national-democratic into socialist-revolutionary…. The past march of historical development will sweep them to victory. Concentrated in the great halls of large industry, able to animate immense spaces, the proletariat, from the first, finds itself in a strategic position more advantageous than that of its enemies; the counterrevolution had to take the offensive from the outer reaches of the country, where it has attempted to draw upon the possessing and exploiting strata, upon the nations once oppressed by tsarism. In effect, all the prior history of Russia has been the “history of colonisation”!²

One of the first acts of the proletarian government was to enact “the declaration of the rights of the peoples of Russia” (2 November 1917), in which it recognised the right of self-determination, up to and including the right of separation from Russia—the right to form a distinct national state—for all the peoples of the old tsarist empire. Be that as it may, to manifest the right to national autonomy in the soviet form, it is necessary above all to overcome the historical contradiction between the Russian city and the non-Russian village, deprived of all national rights. It is necessary to win the confidence of the toiling masses of the oppressed nations, by eliminating the unconscious nationalism with which the backward elements of the Russian working masses are imbued; and by clearly demonstrating to the oppressed masses the true nature of soviet power, the power of the toilers. In truth, this task coincides with another: that of winning the masses of petty producers, the middle peasants of Central Russia to soviet rule; and it is this that will enable the solution. The counterrevolution will help to unmask bourgeois democracy before the eyes of the middle peasant, who sees, hiding behind the grand rhetoric of revolutionary socialism, a new landlord. The counterrevolution will contribute to eliminating the illusions of the labourers of tsarist-oppressed nations in national-bourgeois democracy. In effect, during the civil war, the counterrevolutionary nationalists have swerved to march openly behind the bellicose nationalist intellectuals, who present themselves as the old Russian police, as flag-waving Russian patriots, as European imperialists. Kolchak, Denikin, Mannerheim, Skoropadskyi, and the Allied and German generals have thus unmasked the Kirghiz “Alash Orda,” Petliura’s Ukrainian partisans, and many others.

The Separation of Classes

We can say without exaggeration that the separation between the classes of the oppressed nations has occurred only over the course of the civil war. It is through direct struggle, as class interests collide, that the masses have acquired revolutionary experience; and because of this revolutionary experience, they have moved on to new forms of social organisation. The Kirghiz steppes gave birth to “Alash Orda,” declared partisan of the Constituent Assembly in Samara which brought about the rise of Kolchak; and it was under Kolchak’s boot that the labouring Kirghiz masses consciously rallied to soviet power. Bashkiria underwent the same experience. Ukraine had to pass through an even longer series of successive stages: in the first place, the struggle between the Rada and soviet power put pressure on the new workers; next, the German general Eichhorn, in league with the ataman Pavlo Skoropadskyi; after them, Petliura and the French generals took their turn; then, the brief establishment of soviet power, overthrown by the unrest of the rural magnates and Petliura’s partisans; after that, the representative of a Russia “one and indivisible,” Denikin; and lastly, through the inevitable logic of the events, Ukrainian soviet power. Vynnychenko’s metamorphosis from leader of the bourgeois Rada to the vice-president of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic is the most telling of all these displays.

It is over the course of the civil war between the dictatorship of the proletariat and imperialism that soviet power has become the form of national autonomy and of class differentiation among the toiling masses of the oppressed nations. On the territory of the old Russian Empire, the alliance of the oppressed peoples with the revolutionary proletariat has taken shape in the form of the socialist federation of national soviet republics. The soviet revolution among the peoples of the East, who once formed an integral part of the Russian Empire, has bridged the gulf between the communist West and the revolutionary East.

The Russian proletariat knew to take advantage of their special situation, to simultaneously challenge the imperialism of millions of communists—of the European proletariat—and the threatening wall that is the revolting toilers in the East. Comrade Lenin well noted the international significance of various essential traits of our revolution, when he spoke of “the inevitable historical repetition, on the international scale, of what has occurred here.”³ Soviet power, that is the state form of the labouring masses, has been victoriously tested in practice in the revolutionary industrial city of Petrograd, as well as in the Russian hamlet of the Vyatka Gubernia; among the Tatar peasants dwelling on the Volga, as in the Ukrainian villages; in the East so strongly attached to its national customs, in the East where patriarchy reigns and where blood ties are still so important to everyday life, in the lands of the Kirghiz, in Bashkiria, in Turkestan and Azerbaijan. Everywhere, soviet power has demonstrated its strength. Karl Marx already noted this peculiarity of proletarian government in his critique of Paris Commune. “The multiplicity of interpretations to which the Commune has been subjected, and the multiplicity of interests which construed it in their favour, show that it was a thoroughly expansive political form, while all the previous forms of government had been emphatically repressive. It was essentially a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour.”⁴

The revolution accelerates the progress of events to the highest point. It accentuates class contradictions to the extreme, even in the most backwards areas. The long, historic learning process makes way for a learning process governed by the revolutionary method. Peoples and social classes develop, over the course of a few months, more than over dozens of years of normal development.

Oppressors and Oppressed

The world revolution against imperialism places the oppressors and the oppressed on the same level.

The transformation of bourgeois-national movements into social-revolutionary movements has its origins in the conflict of class interests—conflict that manifests with a particular acuity among nations engaged in the struggle for independence, and which can equally be provoked by an external influence: that of the international situation. The elimination of bourgeois domination in the advanced nations necessarily pulls the more backwards nations along the road of the soviet revolution. The counterrevolution then involves itself as an aggressor.

The dictatorship of imperialism unmasks bourgeois nationalism in the West as well as in the East. The dominant strata of the oppressed nations endeavour immediately to seize control of the state machinery and their class victims. For them, the national revolution is the expansion of the national foundation of exploitation. This expansion consists in the manufacturer, the merchant, and the large landlord expelling the foreign interlopers and creating their own state apparatus of class oppression. On the other hand, at the same time, “a class of intellectuals develops and their own written language transforms into a necessity of the national culture, even if in substance this culture had to be very international. And if a nation feels the need for a national intelligentsia, this class, in turn, feels the need for a great, intellectually developed nation.”⁵

The national bourgeoisie and the bourgeois intellectual class want to have their market, their stock exchange, their bureaucracy, their officer corps, their writers and journalists, their ministers, their representatives, their teachers and their musicians. At the start, their national need finds its expression in bourgeois development. But this need, in the global economic disorganisation and revolutionary crisis, inevitably falls into class contradictions in a nation that has won its national independence. Democracy, in the name of the national interest, transforms into a national bourgeois dictatorship. Finland, a country with ancient democratic traditions, is a poignant example. “It seemed to us,” writes Comrade Kuusinen, on the beginning of the revolution in Finland, “that parliamentary democracy opened a wide and straight path for our workers’ movement, leading right to our aim. Our bourgeoisie had neither army nor police; what’s more, it didn’t even have the possibility of organising them legally, as to do so they would need the assent of the socialist majority in parliament.”⁶ And nevertheless, the bourgeoisie organised its white guard and defeated the Finnish working class with the aid of the German imperialists.

Bourgeois democracy is now unable to ensure national peace in the countries that have become independent and which contain national minorities. This is the practical experience of Ukraine: “Petit-bourgeois democracy cannot maintain its power in Ukraine, as the internecine struggle fractures it into hostile parties.”⁷ The intelligentsia and the bourgeoisie, in a nation that frees itself, profess an aggressive bourgeois nationalism, and this leads them to betray the cause of national liberation, to pass into the camp of the imperialists, from which they buy their bourgeois domination at the price of national freedom. The examples are legion: Latvia, Ukraine, Finland, Poland, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, Georgia, the Musavat government in Azerbaijan, Greece, “the Israelite state of Palestine,” the pseudo-national state of Persia which, in fear of its soviet revolution, has thrown itself into the arms of the British, etc. The aggressive nationalism of the oppressed nations’ bourgeoisie and large landlords makes their countries into buffer states of the imperialist powers against the revolution. As a result, social conflict—class antagonism—manifests first of all in the domain of the national interest: the labouring masses reclaim their national independence from the yoke of the imperialists; the exploiting strata cling to their class privileges and, because the foreign yoke was, up until that moment, a powerful means of conserving the most reactionary forms of exploitation—in the east, feudal and patriarchal customs—, the revolutionary awakening of the labouring masses transports the revolution from the national terrain to that of social relations. The national question is raised as one of class inequality. The reason is perfectly clear: if industrial capital and the intelligentsia are, in the early stages, the protagonists of national liberation, the big landlords and the native bureaucracy are the declared partisans of European assimilation. The national revolution, waged against the foreign invaders and the native big landlords, therefore pushes the merchant class into the camp of imperialist puppets. Thus we reach this general conclusion: all the bourgeois-national movements led by the possessing strata—by the exploiting strata—have an objective tendency to adapt to imperialism, to enter into the imperialist system of the “great powers,” to transform into “buffer states” and colonies. At the outset, the strictly historic, unconscious tendency of all national-revolutionary movements of the labouring masses, in the colonies and in the half-enslaved countries, is to draw on a revolutionary state organisation, a class organisation borrowed from the proletariat of the advanced countries, to ensure the freedom of national development in the forming global socialist economy.

The advent of organs of autonomous revolutionary management—the anjoman of the first Persian Revolution, the experience of the eastern national soviet republics, the beginning of the revolutionary peasant movement in the East, the birth of communist movements in Persia, in Turkey, in China, and in the Indies—all this proves that the labouring masses of the East are marching towards the international federation of national soviet republics.

For the Grouping of Communist Elements

It was in understanding the above that the 2nd Congress of the Communist International decided to support national revolutionary movements in the colonies and in the backwards countries, but under the express condition that the truly communist elements of the future workers’ parties in these countries are grouped together and instructed in their special tasks, in the necessity that they combat the bourgeois-democratic movement in their own nations; the Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonies and the backwards countries, nevertheless without ever fusing with it; and in conserving at all price the independence of the workers’ movement, even in its embryonic form. In the East, as in the West, the way to soviet power has been paved by the process of capitalist development itself. In the West, it was paved by the transformation of “peaceful” industrial capitalism, of imperialism and bourgeois democracy into military dictatorship; in the East, by the implantation of capitalism as a foreign organisation of class domination, as a superstructure over the native society. In India, as the Indian communist Comrade Roy noted, “we are seeing, for the first time in history, an entire people being economically exploited by a true state power.”⁸ But it is not thus only in India. Russian Turkestan, up until the revolution, was in the same situation. Still today, we see the same state of affairs in Persia, in China, in all the colonies. As for the governmental organisation of the native exploiters, this is relatively weak in the East, where it adopts a purely feudal character.

On the subject of Persia, Victor Bérard had this to say: “Persia is neither a state nor a nation. It is the strange combination of a feudal anarchy and a centralised taxation system, the unstable mix of nomadic tribes and barely settled farmers, Moluk-us-Sawaif, as the natives say, monarchical federation or, more precisely, royal flock of nations.”⁹

The oppressive and exploitative character of state power is evident here. The base of all social life is the small farmer, ferociously exploited by the feudal state, by the large landowner, and by commercial capital, the true usurer.

The fact that, in the East, state power—as much the native feudal power as the power of the “invaders,” the European imperialists—manifests above all as the immediate exploiter of the population in the economic domain, has an immense political importance: no political revolution is possible in this situation without an economic revolution. Experience confirms this. “Just like their Western counterparts, the exploiting plutocracies of the Near-Eastern countries make every effort to give their rule the appearance of popular rule. The introduction of parliamentarism in Turkey and in Persia, as well as the transformation of Georgia (under the leadership of the Mensheviks), Armenia (under the leadership of the Dashnaks), and Azerbaijan (under the leadership of the Musavatists) into democratic republics, took place under the slogan of ‘Liberty and Equality.’ Nevertheless, every one of these politicians was incapable of providing even the illusion of democracy. The masses of people drown in unbelievable misery, while the agents of foreign imperialism swim in opulence. The land remains in the hands of its old owners, the old fiscal system remains in place, bringing immeasurable harm to the labourers, and the state not only tolerates, but encourages usury.”¹⁰

The Form of the Revolution in the East

The “bourgeois-democratic” revolution, in the East, inevitably takes the form of a dynastic revolution: it expands the privileges of the exploiters, but does not alleviate the burden of exploitation for the oppressed one bit. Native feudalism does nothing but assume the cast-offs of “European democracy.”

The East is living history. In some places, we still find remnants of the primitive communitarian society (clan, patriarchy), where patriarchal and feudal customs are conserved in full force. The religion of the East is simultaneously social and political. It consecrates the existing civil and familial order. It is the direct support for social inequality. It plays about the same role as Catholicism in the Middle Ages. “From the point of view of the orthodox Muslim, the theocratic Muslim state is the community of believers, of which the earthly representative is the ‘sultan’ (sovereign, leader); he is no more than the representative of God on Earth, a representative with a mission to take care—in conformity with the exigencies of ‘sharia’ (religious law)—of the civil and religious affairs of the community entrusted to him by God. To accomplish this, he, the ‘amiliami’ (the collectors of the ‘zakat,’ a ritual tax), and other civil servants receive a modest compensation of forty kopeks per day. The ‘zakat,’ which is meant to be used to help the poor, orphans, and invalids; to wage war against the infidels; in short, to serve the needs of society and the state, has become, in the hands of the latest Muslim sovereigns, a personal revenue that they use as they please, without any control and in an absolutely illegal fashion; the troops and even the popular militia, created to war against the infidels, to propagate Islam by force of arms, and to protect the community from outside enemies, are transformed bit by bit into the sovereign’s bodyguards, used to oppress the people and serving exclusively the personal or dynastic interests of these sovereigns. The Muslim community has been transformed into rayat, into herds of docile, mute slaves.”¹¹

The centuries-long domination of the total surplus-value of labour was necessarily an obstacle to the expansion of social production, and it hindered all technical and economic progress. The primitive hoe (ketmen) and plough (omach) are still practically the only agricultural tools of the Central Asian farmer. There, capital is naturally stalled in its development; it has not gone further than usury and the sale of produce at the bazaar.

Religious law (sharia) defines property rights thus: “Property (mulk) is all that man possesses, whether it be the thing itself or its fruits.” This definition is the loyal reflection of primitive forms of production: religion recognises the proprietor’s right to sell the things that belong to him, as well as its “fruits”; it recognises his right to dispose of the surplus product of his natural goods.

A multitude of peoples in the East have not completely reached agricultural life in their evolution (the Kirghiz, the Turkomans, the Arabs, the tribal peoples of northern India, the Kurds, etc.). Nevertheless, among these peoples the survival of the primitive communal society has, over time, become a source of exploitation of the poor majority by the rich clan leaders. For example, we will look at the Kirghiz of the steppes. “Possessors of an extensive economy, the rich Kirghiz has already completely renounced physical labour; he is no more than the manager, the administrator; those who do the work are the day-labourers. The number of these labourers varies on average from seven to nine by economy, but there are economies where twenty labourers are exploited, or even more. A curious phenomenon to observe in the economy of the rich Kirghiz is the union of traits characteristic of modern capitalism with those of primitive nomadic society… The clan, despite its evident decomposition, still remains the legitimate proprietor of a given territory in the Kirghiz consciousness. The rich Kirghiz, abiding by this boundlessness of the right to use the land, covets considerable advantages: he puts to pasture his numerous herds without obstacle on all the territory of his relatives. Even up to the present, he has nothing pushing him to close off his land from that of the mass of the Kirghiz people.”¹²

The Task at Hand

From the above, we can easily understand why the Congress of the Revolutionary Peoples of the East (Baku, September 1920) recognised that “the soviet system is the only one which truly gives the labouring masses the possibility of taking power from their natural enemies, the upper classes (large landowners, speculators, high functionaries, officers), and to determine their own fate. Only soviet power empowers the poor labourers to take and keep the land from the landowners. The amalgamation of the soviets in large federations, and their autonomy within the framework of these federations: this is the only means for the toilers of different countries, who once warred among each other in the East, to pursue a peaceful existence, to destroy the foreign and native oppressors’ power, and to defeat all attempts by these oppressors to restore the old state of things.” To the forceful organisation of petty production and exploitation from above, the revolution substitutes the autonomous revolutionary organisation of the petty producers—the half-workers—in the form of the workers’ soviets. “Eliminate the prime cause of all oppression and exploitation—the power of the invading foreign capitalists and native tyrants (sultans, shahs, khans, beys, with all their bureaucrats and parasites)—seize power and exercise it in all domains (administrative, economic, and financial); refuse to fulfil any obligations to the feudal landlords and overthrow their authority; eliminate all personal and economic dependence on the landlords; abolish the large estates, under whatever legal form they may take; take the land from the large landlords without compensation or indemnities, and share it among the peasants, the farmers and the day-labourers who cultivate it”¹³: this is the task at hand. The alliance between the peasant soviet republics of the East with the soviet socialist republics of the West: this is the path that communism must pursue, to take hold of the entire global economy.

The proletariat of the West will help the toilers of the East with their knowledge, their technical expertise, and their organisational forces. The peasant soviet republics will provide the socialist industry of the West with the raw materials and fuel that it needs. Such an international division of labour between the city and the village, on the basis of amicable collaboration, is necessitated by the logic of the struggle against global economic disorganisation—the evident manifestation of capitalism’s decomposition. It is solely by this division of labour that we can eliminate the dependence of the Eastern people’s economy on the guardianship of the European and American banks, trusts, and syndicates.

The path to salvation of European industry, which suffers from a lack of raw materials and fuel necessary for its development, is the socialist industrial colonisation of the East. The soviets are not a repressive regime against the national customs and traditions of the peoples of the East; they will not drag these peoples by force into the kingdom of liberty. On the contrary, they will make them find their own path towards communism, by the cooperation of petty producers, by the organisation of public works (irrigation systems), and the formation of state enterprises.

2019.05.122019.06.07

Leon Trotsky and Cultural Revolution

Doug Enaa Greene argues that in Trotsky’s work a theory of cultural revolution can be found, one which differs from Mao Zedong’s that was developed in the context of the Russian Revolution and its struggle against bureaucracy.

The argument that a “cultural revolution” is a necessary part of a socialist revolution is generally associated with Mao Zedong and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) that he initiated in China. However, Leon Trotsky, in a vastly different way than Mao, stated that Russia needed a cultural revolution. According to Trotsky, a cultural revolution was needed along with industrialization to construct socialism. Trotsky’s industrialization plan for Russia would increase the social weight of the proletariat. A cultural revolution would raise the masses’ cultural level by eradicating mass illiteracy and superstition and change their habits and customs, which would make the working class fit to rule society.

The Heritage of Underdevelopment

According to Marx, socialism would develop first in industrialized capitalist countries with their vast productive powers and rich cultural heritage that the working class would use to build a new order. Contrary to Marx, the Bolshevik Revolution occurred in a backward country, which complicated matters in regards to cultural transformation. Although the major urban centers were “islands of capitalism” with a high concentration of workers in modern factories, large portions of the countryside were just emerging from feudalism. As the Bolsheviks recognized, Russia did not possess the material and cultural conditions needed to overcome capitalism on its own. Both Lenin and Trotsky believed that one of the tasks of the new Soviet republic was to begin the process of creating them. However, the low levels of culture, technical skill, etc., for most of the population along with the isolation of the revolution meant that options were limited.

For Lenin, questions of culture and ideology were intimately connected with the goals of communism – how to overcome the legacy of capitalism and class society. According to Georg Lukács, Lenin’s cultural strategy had three goals:

To abolish the difference between village and city, to abolish the difference between physical and intellectual labour, and to restore the meaningfulness and autonomous nature of labour. Here, too, economic construction and cultural revolution appear inseparable. The electrification of the village, the mechanisation of agricultural production, and such like, directly serve purely economic goals: increased production. However, this increase is not achievable by means other than continuously raising the cultural level of the village; so, too, it requires that agricultural production draw ever closer to the principles of planned factory-production, to principles supported by the latest achievements of science, which master nature ever more thoroughly, and which demand of the labour-force scientific capabilities.¹

Lenin’s vision, shared by Trotsky, was that the working class had to not only master the achievements and culture of bourgeois society but overcome their limitations in the construction of socialism. The development of a socialist planned economy coincided with not only economic modernization, but also cultural transformation. Modernization and the increase of productive forces were not seen as ends in themselves – this would merely reinforce the inequalities of capitalism – but were part of an all-around transformation of the conditions of life.

Trotsky and the Proletkult

The Russian Revolution not only brought the working class power, but unleashed great artistic and cultural creativity. Among the changes there were assaults on the traditional family, divorce was made easy, women expanded their horizons, social privilege was rejected, new laws put national equality in place of Great Russian chauvinism (anti-Semitism was outlawed). There was social experimentation in everything from factory organization to education. The Revolution saw the flowering of the artistic avant-garde, as can be seen in the symbolic image of the “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge” or the emblem of the hammer and sickle that are powerful representations to convey the values of the revolutionary cause to communists, artists, and workers. Lastly, there was the Proletkult, a movement of Bolshevik intellectuals, artists and workers inspired by the ideas Alexander Bogdanov and Anatoly Lunacharsky, who rejected class culture and wanted to create a culture, science, and art based on the values of internationalism, materialism, and atheism. A new proletarian culture, stripped of bourgeois influences, would be the basis of modern socialist society.

Lenin did not think very highly of the Proletkult movement, stating:

Proletarian culture is not something that suddenly springs from nobody knows where, and is not invented by people who set up as specialists in proletarian culture. Proletarian culture is the regular development of those stores of knowledge which mankind has worked out for itself under the yoke of capitalist society, of feudal society, of bureaucratic society.²

Lenin’s negative view of the Proletkult movement was shared by Trotsky, who argued that

It is fundamentally incorrect to contrast bourgeois culture and bourgeois art with proletarian culture and proletarian art. The latter will never exist, because the proletarian regime is temporary and transient. The historic significance and the moral grandeur of the proletarian revolution consist in the fact that it is laying the foundations of a culture which is above classes and which will be the first culture that is truly human.³

According to Trotsky, every class creates its own art and culture, but bourgeois culture developed in a protracted period of several centuries before taking power, while the proletariat did not develop its own culture before the revolution. Furthermore, a proletarian dictatorship was transitory (lasting years or decades) and during that time, the attention of the working class would mainly be absorbed in fierce political struggles. There would be no development of a distinctive proletarian culture, since the dictatorship of the proletariat leads to the end of class distinctions and the creation of a universal human culture. Considering the backwardness of the Russian proletariat in regards to culture, Trotsky said they needed to critically appropriate, absorb and assimilate the old culture. According to Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky said the working class

ought to view the cultural legacy dialectically and see its historically formed contradictions. The achievements of civilization had so far served a double purpose: they had assisted man in gaining knowledge and control of nature and in developing his own capacities; but they had also served to perpetuate society’s division into classes and man’s exploitation by man. Consequently, some elements of the heritage were of universal significance and validity while others were bound up with obsolete or obsolescent social systems. The communist approach to the cultural legacy should therefore be selective.⁴

Cover of Furnace, an official organ of Proletkult, designed by Aleksandr Zugrin

Economic Development and Cultural Revolution

Trotsky’s conception of a cultural revolution involved the proletariat eliminating illiteracy, superstition and raising their cultural level, so they would be fit to rule. However, Russian backwardness meant that different and contradictory conceptions of the world coexisted together among the people, even among communists:

A man is a sound communist devoted to the cause, but women are for him just “females,” not to be taken seriously in any way. Or it happens that an otherwise reliable communist, when discussing nationalistic matters, starts talking hopelessly reactionary stuff. To account for that we must remember that different parts of the human consciousness do not change and develop simultaneously and on parallel lines. There is a certain economy in the process. Human psychology is very conservative by nature, and the change due to the demands and the push of life affects in the first place those parts of the mind which are directly concerned in the case.⁵

A resolute struggle was needed to raise the cultural level of the proletariat and peasantry so they wouldn’t reproduce systems of oppression and domination under a socialist veneer. The battle against backward ideas and attitudes was not simply a struggle for ideas, habits, and attitudes needed to be connected with uprooting the material conditions that engendered them.

Socialism would overcome those conditions by creating modern industry, improving the standard of living and increasing the weight of the proletariat in Soviet society: “The decisive factor in appraising the movement of our country forward along the road of socialist reconstruction, must be the growth of our productive forces and the dominance of the socialist elements over the capitalist—together with an improvement of all the conditions of existence of the working class.”⁶ At the same time, the bureaucracy who ruled had to be combated and the workers needed to be in firm control of the Soviets, trade unions and the Party. Although Trotsky did not believe that the USSR would be secure until the worldwide victory of socialism, they had a task to hold out until they could receive aid from revolutions abroad. Ultimately, the worldwide victory of socialism, the development of industry and culture would free the proletariat from the shackles of feudalism, make them fit to rule.

Trotsky’s ideas on cultural revolution and developing industry formed a single integrated strategic vision:

even the slightest successes in the sphere of morals, by raising the cultural level of the working man and woman, enhance our capacity for rationalizing production, and promoting socialist accumulation. This again gives us the possibility of making fresh conquests in the sphere of morals. Thus a dialectical dependence exists between the two spheres.⁷

A cultural revolution could not be delayed until the productive forces were already developed but needed to be done simultaneously, otherwise, old customs, relations, habits of Russian backwardness would engulf the revolution.

Soviet underdevelopment meant the bureaucratization of the party and state were real and pressing problems. There was a tendency among the bureaucracy to protect its monopoly to information from the working class. As Marx said, the bureaucracy “is a hierarchy of knowledge.”⁸ The Soviet bureaucrats did not want the masses involved in the life of the country:

What is the use, they say, of wasting time in discussions? Let the authorities start running communal kitchens, creches, laundries, hostels, etc. Bureaucratic dullards usually add (or rather imply, or say in whispers—they prefer that to open speech): “It is all words, and nothing more.” The bureaucrat hopes…that when we get rich, we shall, without further words, present the proletariat with cultured conditions of life as with a sort of birthday gift. No need, say such critics, to carry on propaganda for socialist conditions among the masses—the process of labour itself creates “a sense of socialness.”⁹

Trotsky said this problem would not be solved by replacing the “bad” bureaucrats with “good” ones, but the working class taking charge in the construction of socialism.

Trotsky’s approach to the bureaucracy was guided by several considerations:

1) The party and state could not possibly know everything. Bureaucrats tend to be inert and distrust initiative, but socialism requires the masses taking conscious leadership to solve the problems of economic development and cultural change.

2) Socialist consciousness will not emerge in a spontaneous way. Although the “state can organize conditions of life down to the last cell of the community,” but unless the workers themselves were involved in the process, then “no serious and radical changes can possibly be achieved in economic conditions and home life.”¹⁰ Whereas the previous generation of workers learned communism through class struggle and revolution, the next generation will learn “in the elements of construction, the elements of the construction of everyday life. The formulas of our program are, in principle, true. But we must continually prove them, renew them, make them concrete in living experience, and spread them in a wider sphere.”¹¹ While the state will play a major role in constructing socialism, the masses had to be the guiding force: “The proletarian state is the structural timber, not the structure itself. The importance of a revolutionary government in a period of transition is immeasurable… It does not mean that all work of building will be performed by the state.”¹²

3) The course of socialist development meant that change could not from enlightened bureaucrats, but through coordination of local needs within an overall plan. Ultimately, socialism requires revolutionary practice by the working class and not administration by bureaucrats.

Although the party needed to promote their own cultural workers (artists, writers, etc), this did not mean that the party had a monopoly on knowledge. A cultural revolution needed pluralism and competing currents of artistic and literary schools – save for those who were openly and unambiguously counterrevolutionary. While the party should provide guidance in the realm of culture, it should not enforce a state-led cultural revolution. According to Trotsky: “The state is an organ of coercion and for Marxists in positions of power these may be a temptation to simplify cultural and educational work among the masses by using the approach of ‘Here is the truth – down on your knees to it !”¹³

Trotsky rejected the claims of the Proletkult that Marxism was a universal system which provided a master key for every problem. According to him,

The Marxian method affords an opportunity to estimate the development of the new art, to trace all its sources, to help the most progressive tendencies by a critical illumination of the road, but it does not do more than that. Art must make its own way and by its own means. The Marxian methods are not the same as the artistic. …The domain of art is not one in which the Party is called upon to command. It can and must protect and help it, but it can only lead it indirectly….And at any rate, the Party cannot and will not take the position of a literary circle which is struggling and merely competing with other literary circles.¹⁴

Trotsky’s plan for a cultural revolution and economic development was to realize the communist dream where “free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”¹⁵ A communist society would mean a transformation in the arts where “technique will become a more powerful inspiration for artistic work, and later on the contradiction itself between technique and nature will be solved in a higher synthesis.” Art and culture would be cleansed of the inequities of class society and flourish under communism. People would finally be free to develop their capabilities to the fullest. In a lyrical passage, Trotsky described the untold possibilities of cultural development under communism:

It is difficult to predict the extent of self-government which the man of the future may reach or the heights to which he may carry his technique. Social construction and psychophysical self-education will become two aspects of one and the same process. All the arts—literature, drama, painting, music, and architecture will lend this process beautiful form. More correctly, the shell in which the cultural construction and self-education of Communist man will be enclosed, will develop all the vital elements of contemporary art to the highest point. Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser, and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.¹⁶

Construction on White (Robot), by Aleksandr Rodchenko 1920

Trotsky and Mao

At the 1942 Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art, Mao rejected Trotsky’s approach to culture as one of “dualism” or “pluralism” which confined the party’s leadership extended to “politics,” while art remained “bourgeois” (a mischaracterization of Trotsky’s position):

Party work in literature and art occupies a definite and assigned position in Party revolutionary work as a whole and is subordinated to the revolutionary tasks set by the Party in a given revolutionary period. Opposition to this arrangement is certain to lead to dualism or pluralism, and in essence amounts to “politics–Marxist, art—bourgeois”…¹⁷

For Mao, art and culture needed to be subordinate to the requirements of politics, since they

are part of the whole revolutionary cause, they are cogs and wheels in it, and though in comparison with certain other and more important parts they may be less significant and less urgent and may occupy a secondary position, nevertheless, they are indispensable cogs and wheels in the whole machine, an indispensable part of the entire revolutionary cause. If we had no literature and art even in the broadest and most ordinary sense, we could not carry on the revolutionary movement and win victory. Failure to recognize this is wrong. Furthermore, when we say that literature and art are subordinate to politics, we mean class politics, the politics of the masses, not the politics of a few so-called statesmen.¹⁸

While art and culture had previously served the bourgeoisie, now Mao said both would serve the proletariat.

Since art and culture were stamped by class and politics, reactionary ideas needed to be struggled against. Like Trotsky, Mao does not believe the working class should reject art from previous epochs, stating

We should take over the rich legacy and the good traditions in literature and art that have been handed down from past ages in China and foreign countries, but the aim must still be to serve the masses of the people. Nor do we refuse to utilize the literary and artistic forms of the past, but in our hands these old forms, remoulded and infused with new content, also become something revolutionary in the service of the people.¹⁹

It was the task of revolutionary artists, cultural workers, and intellectuals to take the stand of the working class and the masses, not those of the elite. Art had to be produced for the masses and taken up by them as a weapon of struggle. In order for writers and artists to accomplish this, their primary task was to know the people (their daily lives, “common sense,” feelings, struggles, etc) and develop the cultural forms created by the people and tease out the elements of “good sense.” Art and culture must reflect the problems and aspirations of ordinary people and not the aspirations of the old ruling classes. Mao’s conception of culture was successfully able to mobilize millions to take the fight against the Japanese and the People’s Liberation.

There was a potential for abuse in Mao’s conception of culture, which can mean cultural control by the party – who could determine what was or was not revolutionary. In contrast, Trotsky granted a greater scope for culture outside of the control of the party (save for openly counterrevolutionary voices).

Mao’s theory behind the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was that a series of cultural revolutions were necessary to “continue the revolution” since bourgeois survivals remained in both the economy and the superstructure that conflicted with new political, cultural and ideological ideas. According to Mao, the superstructure did not automatically change in response to developments in the base, rather there was a lag as the old culture lingered. A conscious effort is needed through mass campaigns and action. If a conscious effort is made to change the superstructure, this would in turn spur development of the economic base as encapsulated in the slogan “grasp revolution, promote production.”

Since the People’s Republic was a transitional society, the birthmarks of capitalism continued to exist and were reproduced – such as the law of value, disparities in decision-making, inequality, access to resources, education, culture, and the persistence of patriarchy which encouraged a breach between the party and the masses. Mao feared that these tendencies would lead to the growth of capitalist restorationist elements within both the party and state.

The Cultural Revolution rejected the premise of developing the productive forces and recognized that the class struggle continued under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Only the continuing revolutionizing of the productive relations would increase the control of the masses in society, overcoming capitalist economic relations and the ideological and political relations which reproduce them, in order to continue on the socialist road.

The Cultural Revolution was launched in May 1966 a call to the masses, inside and outside of the party, to overthrow the “capitalist roaders” in the party and state, and root out old ideas and culture:

Although the bourgeoisie has been overthrown, it is still trying to use the old ideas, culture, customs and habits of the exploiting classes to corrupt the masses, capture their minds and endeavour to stage a comeback. The proletariat must do the exact opposite: it must meet head-on every challenge of the bourgeoisie in the ideological field and use the new ideas, culture, customs and habits of the proletariat to change the mental outlook of the whole of society. At present, our objective is to struggle against and overthrow those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road, to criticize and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois academic “authorities” and the ideology of the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes and to transform education, literature and art and all other parts of the superstructure not in correspondence with the socialist economic base, so as to facilitate the consolidation and development of the socialist system.²⁰

The Maoist vision of Cultural Revolution was voluntaristic and idealistic with an under-estimation of the weight of economic factors. While socialists need to reject economism, this doesn’t mean socialism can be built by political will regardless of unfavorable conditions. The ultimate criteria for determining the capitalist or socialist character of a society was whether or not it followed the correct political line (in this case, Mao Zedong Thought). This can lead to declaring that the class character of the party and socialism have little to do with the working class, but that socialism is solely determined solely by ideology and political line.

The Soviet Cultural Front

Although Trotsky was ousted from power, at beginning of the Five Year Plans, the USSR did embark on its own cultural revolution. The Soviet cultural revolution opened vast avenues of educational and cultural mobility for the working class throughout society. According to the historian Sheila Fitzpatrick, the purpose of the cultural revolution was “both asserting party control over cultural life and opening up the administrative and professional elite to a new cohort of young Communists and workers.”²¹ Although the Soviets had a long-standing policy of placing workers into administrative positions, this was done on an unprecedented scale during the cultural revolution. According to Fitzpatrick: “Of the 861,000 persons classified as ‘leading cadres and specialists’ in the Soviet Union at the end of 1933, over 140,000- more than one in six had been blue-collar workers only five years earlier. But this was only the tip of the iceberg. The total number of workers moving into white-collar jobs during the First Five-Year Plan was probably at least one and a half million.”²² Furthermore, the numbers of workers receiving higher education swelled: “About 150,000 workers and Communists entered higher education during the First Five-Year Plan, most of them studying engineering since technical expertise rather than Marxist social science was now regarded as the best qualification for leadership in an industrializing society.”²³ These newly educated workers and administrators rejected the claims of bourgeois experts to leadership in production, leading them to view some elements in the party “as protectors of the bourgeois intelligentsia, over-reliant on the advice of non-party experts, complacent about the influence of experts and former Tsarist officials within the government bureaucracy, and prone to infection by ‘rotten liberalism’ and bourgeois values.”²⁴ The Soviet cultural revolution (whatever its limitations) struggled against bourgeois values, intellectuals, culture, elitism and bureaucracy in all aspects of society. The cultural revolution fired the imaginations of young party members and workers who were encouraged to attack any manifestation of liberalism or capitalism, “but at the same time they were instinctively hostile to most existing authorities and institutions, which they suspected of bureaucratic and ‘objectively counter-revolutionary’ tendencies.”²⁵ Many of the cultural revolution’s initiatives were spontaneous and outside of party control, but their ideas “were also taken seriously, receiving wide publicity and also, in many cases, substantial funding from various government agencies and other official bodies.”²⁶

Despite the great advancements in education and upward mobility for the Soviet working class during the 1930s, the same period also saw the growth of the bureaucracy and a “cult of personality” surrounding Stalin. In the USSR, the traditions of Marxism mixed uneasily with those of Tsarism and Greek Orthodoxy. As time passed, the structure of the Communist Party and society more and more resembled the spirit of the Orthodox Church with its dogmas, orthodoxy, heresies, and inquisitions (most grossly on display during the Purge Trials). Furthermore, the social weight of the peasantry and backwardness took their revenge as beliefs in “primitive magic” found expression in the party and state. According to Deutscher, primitive magic was common amongst the peasantry and “expressed man’s helplessness amid the forces of nature which he had not yet learned to control; and that, on the whole, modern technology and organization are its deadliest enemies. On the technological level of the wooden plough primitive magic flourishes.”²⁷ Initially, the Bolsheviks spoke a language of reason to the peasantry, but as the revolution’s emancipatory energies were exhausted, the party “lost the sense of its own elevation above its native environment, once it had become aware that it could only fall back on that environment and dig itself in, it began to descend to the level of primitive magic, and to appeal to the people in the language of that magic.”²⁸ Nothing exemplifies the Soviet embrace of primitive magic more than the cult of personality surrounding Stalin, who was seen as the all-knowing and all-wise leader. In the later Stalin years, rampant chauvinism was fostered in the USSR “to convince the Soviet people that the Russians, and the Russians alone, had been the initiators of all the epoch-making ideas and of all the modern technical discoveries…[which] goes back to that remote epoch when the tribe cultivated a belief in its own mysterious powers which set it apart from and above all other tribes.”²⁹

By the time of the Great Purges, the sheer weight of Russian backwardness and isolation took their toll as the cultural revolution and emancipatory initiatives were rolled back. In their place, the Soviets reasserted old moral and cultural values, a need for order, authority and social hierarchy, promotion of the traditional family and increasingly, Russian nationalism. The USSR shed its iconoclasm in the cultural sphere and promoted “Socialist Realism” which glorified the achievements of the Soviet state and society. According to the Marxist cultural critic Ernest Fischer, Socialist Realism was a “tendency to control the arts, to administer and manipulate them, to drive out the spirit of criticism and free imagination, and to transform artists into officials, into illustrators of resolutions.”³⁰ Trotsky viewed Socialist Realism as a symptom of Thermidorian decline, disillusionment, and a move towards conservative uniformity:

The style of present-day official Soviet painting is called “socialist realism.” The name itself has evidently been invented by some high functionary in the department of the arts. This “realism” consists in the imitation of provincial daguerreotypes of the third quarter of the last century; the “socialist” character apparently consists in representing, in the manner of pretentious photography, events which never took place. It is impossible to read Soviet verse and prose without physical disgust, mixed with horror, or to look at reproductions of paintings and sculpture in which functionaries armed with pens, brushes, and scissors, under the supervision of functionaries armed with Mausers, glorify the “great” and “brilliant” leaders, actually devoid of the least spark of genius or greatness. The art of the Stalinist period will remain as the frankest expression of the profound decline of the proletarian revolution.³¹

Conclusion

Trotsky’s vision of a cultural revolution, just like that of industrialization, was connected with questions of working-class emancipation and socialism. Economic development would increase the proletariat’s social weight in society. The proletariat would need to assert their own interests by controlling both the party and state (meaning both had to be democratized). To enable the working class to rule, the USSR had to build a modern society with education, social provisions, and raise the standard of living. Therefore, a cultural revolution was necessary to raise the spiritual and cultural level of the working class so they could consciously create socialism.