In the second episode of our Soviet Science series, Donald, Djamil and Rudy sit down to contextualize an infamous episode of this story: The case of T. D. Lysenko and Lysenkoism. We discuss the origins of vernalization and Lysenkoism in peasant folk knowledge and Michurin’s plant garden, how the state of Soviet scientifical structures and Soviet agriculture favored his rise, how he took advantage of the Soviet purges to solidify his standing, how he managed to absolutely ban the research of genetics in 1948, and how this ban was negotiated by other scientists, his many downfalls and rehabilitations starting in the early 1950s all the way up to the removal of Khruschev, and the shadow Lysenkoism cast on Soviet agronomy and biology for decades both internally and in the West. We also contextualize Lysenko’s agricultural and biological theories using modern knowledge about epigenetics.
Sources/Further Reading:
David Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970)
Robert M. Young, Getting Started on Lysenkoism (1978)
Levins & Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (1985)
Loren Graham, Lysenko’s Ghost (2016)
Dominique Lecourt, Proletarian Science? The case of Lysenko (1977)
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.”26This 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”.57But 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.
For the first installment of our in-depth study of Soviet Science, Djamil, Donald and Rudy sit down to discuss the scientific institutions and the practice of Science in the early Soviet Union up to the conclusion of the Stalin Revolution. They start off with a survey of the Tsarist Academy, and what kind of structures and specialists the Bolsheviks inherited. The conversation continues with the changing ways the Bolsheviks related to specialists during the Civil War and the NEP, and how they were trying to assimilate the culture of specialists when they realized it was impossible to seize cultural power, and how this relates to the present-day debate around the Professional Managerial Class. They then discuss the role of the two anti-specialist trials that kick off the Stalin revolution: the Shakhty affair and the Industrial Party Trial, and how that served to strengthen Stalin’s hand in taking over the politbureau and resulted in a culture of blaming specialists for the failure of five-year plans. They finish by analyzing the resulting academy and intelligentsia of the 1930s, fully loyal to Stalin, and how that sets the stage for the rise of someone like Lysenko.
Further reading:
Loren R. Graham – Science in Russia and the Soviet Union (1993)
Sheila Fitzpatrick – The Cultural Front (1992)
Kendall E. Bailes – Technology and Society Under Lenin and Stalin (1978)
Simon Ings – Stalin and the Scientists (2019)
James T. Andrews – Science for the Masses (2003)
Stay tuned for episodes on Lysenko, the relation of dialectical materialism to the sciences, physics, chemistry, computing, and space travel.
Donald and Lydia join human rights lawyer and fellow Marxist Anne McShane to discuss her recent PhD thesis on the Zhenotdel, the women’s department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. They discuss the origins of the Zhenotdel, how it attempted to solve the shortcomings of the women’s movement in the second international and its role in women’s liberation after the October Revolution. The conversation then pivots to the specific focus of Anne’s thesis: the changing role the Zhenotdel played in women’s emancipation in the Central Asian Republics. They discuss how the Zhenotdel related to and incorporated indigenous women into organizing, the Central Committee’s takeover of Zhenotdel policy that resulted in the hujum campaign of mass unveiling and the disastrous reaction that followed, how this campaign can be contextualized within the rise of Stalinist policies. They end the episode with the final dissolution of the Zhetnodel in 1930 and the sanitization of Nadezhda Krupskaya’s figure.
Christian and Donald sit down for a discussion on Moshe Lewin’s 1974 tome Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates. They discuss Bukharin, the Left Opposition, Stalin, Soviet reformers, cybernetic planning, and more. Our conclusion: this book has greatly humbled us, letting us know how hard actually creating a new society outside of capitalism is. Unfortunately, Lewin’s book is out of print but we recommend getting your hands on a used copy if possible. If you can’t, his book The Soviet Century is still in print from Verso Books. We hope to continue this as a reading series on the problems of building socialism. Edited by P.H. Higgins.
Translation by Mark Alexandrovich, introduction by Renato Flores.
Time motion study being performed in the central institute of labor, 1923
Nadezhda Krupskaya is unfairly remembered by the identity of her husband. A glance at her page in Marxists.org predominantly shows texts related to Lenin’s persona. One of her most detailed biographies is titled “Bride of the Revolution”. But as many women of the time who have been written out of history, she was a revolutionary in her own right, standing alongside Alexandra Kollontai or Inessa Armand. She was the chief Bolshevik cryptographer and served as secretary of Iskra for many years. She was hailed by Trotsky as being “in the center of all the organization work”. After the revolution, she contributed decisively to the revamping and democratization of the Soviet library system, always pushing for more campaigns that would increase literacy and general education.
Her persistent interest in education and organization was a result of her life story. Krupskaya was the daughter of a downwardly mobile noble family: her father was a radical army officer, who combated prosecution of Polish Jews and ended up ejected from the government service, and her mother Elizaveta came from a landless noble family. Nadezhda was provided a decent, albeit unsteady education. She was committed to radical politics early on in her life, starting off as a Tolstoyan. Tolstoyism emphasized “going to the people”, so Krupskaya became a teacher to educate Russian peasants and seasonally spend time working in the fields. However, she found it hard to penetrate the peasant mistrust for outsiders and realized this was a political dead end.
Krupskaya became a Marxist when enmeshed in the radical circles of St. Petersburg. Marxism appealed to her because it provided a methodology for revolution, with its science substituting the failures of Tolstoyan mystique. After her “conversion”, Krupskaya worked as an instructor in the industrial suburbs of St. Petersburg between 1891 and 1896. The “Evening-Sunday school” was financed by a factory owner, and provided evening classes for his workers. Although she nominally taught just reading, writing and basic arithmetic, she would also teach additional illegal classes on leftist topics and helped grow the revolutionary movement. Her first-hand experience in the factories of St. Petersburg would inform her life-long interests, heavily influencing her views on the organization of production.
In this piece, Krupskaya looks at Frederick Taylor’s principles of scientific management and shows how they could be applied to the Soviet government. The early “collegiality”-based Soviet State was leading to inefficiencies all around, which produced a stagnant and unresponsive bureaucracy. Krupskaya believed that scientifically-driven organization would alleviate these organizational problems, and at the same time raise everyone’s consciousness of the work they were doing. She provided several prescriptions for the organization of production to achieve these goals, as well as a rationale for them.
Taylorism is a dirty word in leftism today. But as Krupskaya did, we have to understand that we should not hate technology itself. Technology is deployed by certain class interests. Krupskaya mentions that workers rightly hated Taylor because the scientific organization of production had been deployed to the advantage of the capitalists. But Krupskaya also believed that Taylorism could be a weapon wielded by the Soviet State so that it could be more responsive to workers’ needs. Taylorism could even be used by the workers themselves to increase productivity and work shorter hours.
Krupskaya was not alone in her support of a Soviet Taylorism. Gastev’s Central Institute of Labor wanted the full application of Taylor’s principles to production as the best way to organize the scarce resources available. Others opposed Taylorism, understanding that it came with insurmountable ideological baggage and would alienate workers from production. This old debate sees new spins played out today in the context of automation. And while there is no longer a Soviet state to organize scientifically, we can still use the principles of Taylorism in our political organizing as Amelia Davenport recently discussed in “Organizing for Power”.
Krupskaya, date unknown
Taylor’s system and organization – Krupskaya N.
The strange thing is that every communist knows that bureaucracy is an extremely negative thing, that it is ruining every living endeavor, that it is distorting all the measures, all the decrees, all the orders, but when the communist starts working in some commissariat or other Soviet institution, he will not have time to look back, as he will see himself half mired in such a hated bureaucratic swamp.
What’s the matter? Who is to blame here – evil saboteurs, old officials who broke into our commissariats, Soviet ladies?
No, the root of bureaucracy lies not in the evil will of one or another person, but in the absence of the ability to systematically and rationally organize the work.
Management is not an easy thing to do. It is a whole science. In order to properly organize the work of an institution, you need to know in detail the work itself, you need to know people, you need to have more perseverance, etc., etc.
We, Russians, have so far been little tempted in this science of management, but without studying it, without learning to manage, we will not move not only to communism, but even to socialism.
We can learn a lot from Taylor, and although he speaks mainly about the way the work is done at the plant, many of the organizational principles he preaches can, and should, be applied to Soviet work.
Here’s what Taylor himself writes about the application of the well-known organizational principles:
“There is no work that cannot be researched to the benefit of the study, to find out the units of time, to divide it into elements… It is also possible to study well, for example, the time of clerical work and to assign a daily lesson to it, despite the fact that at first it seems to be very diverse in nature” (F. Taylor, “Industrial Administration and Technology Organization”, pp. 148).
Already from this quote it is clear that one of the basic principles of F. Taylor considers the decomposition of the work into its elements and the division of labour based on this.
Let’s take the work of people’s commissariats. Undoubtedly, there is a well-known division of labor in them. There is a people’s commissariat, there is a board of commissariats, there are departments, departments are divided into subdivisions, there are secretaries, clerks, typists, reporters, etc. But this, after all, is the coarsest division. Very often there is no borderline between the cases under the jurisdiction of the commissioner, board, department. This is usually determined by somehow eyeballing. The functions of different subdivisions are not always precisely defined and delineated. There are also states. But in most cases, these “states” are very approximate. There is no precise definition of the functions of individual employees at all. Hence, the multiplicity of institutions follows. There are, say, 10 people in an institution, and their functions are not exactly distributed. Eight of them are misinterpreted, the other two are overwhelmed with work over and above measure. The work is moving badly. It seems to the head of the institution that there are not enough people, he takes another ten, but the work is going badly. Why? Because the work is not distributed properly, the employees do not know what to do and how to do it. The swelling of commissariats is a constantly observed fact. But does it work better?
The question of “collegiality and identity”, a question that has grown precisely because of the lack of division of labour, the lack of separation between the functions of the commissioner and the functions of the collegium, the lack of separation between the responsibilities of the collegium and those of the commissioner. A misunderstanding of this seemingly simple thing often leads to administrative fiction. Thus, during the period of discussion in the Council of People’s Commissars of the question of collegiality and identity, one absolutely monstrous project was presented in the Council of People’s Commissars. It proposed to destroy not only the board, but also the heads of departments and subdivisions, it was proposed to leave only the commissioner and technical officers, to whom the people’s commissar had to give direct tasks. This project revealed a complete lack of understanding of the need for a detailed and strict division of labour. The authors wanted to simplify the office, but overlooked one small detail: if there was only a commissioner and technical staff, the commissioner would have to give several thousand tasks to the staff every day. No commissioner can do that.
The division of labour in the factory is very thorough and far-reaching. There, no one will ever doubt the usefulness of such a division.
The division of labour in Soviet institutions is the most crude, and there is no detailed division of functions. It must be created. The responsibilities of each employee should be defined in the most precise way – from the commissioner to the last messenger.
The terms of reference of each employee must be formulated in writing. These responsibilities can be very complex and extensive, but the more important it is to formulate them as precisely as possible. Of course, this applies even more to all sorts of boards, presidiums, etc.
Then F. Taylor insists on an exact instruction, also in writing, indicating in detail how to perform a particular job.
Taylor means the factory enterprise, but this requirement applies to all commissariat work.
“Instructional cards can be used very widely and variedly. They play the same role in the art of management as in the technique of drawing and, like the latter, must change in size and shape to reflect the amount and variety of information it should provide. In some cases, the instruction may include a note written in pencil on a piece of paper that is sent directly to the worker in need of instructions; in other cases, it will contain many pages of typewriter text that have been properly corrected and stitched together and will be issued on the basis of control marks or other established procedures so that it can be used” (Ibid., p. 152).
Just think how much better the introduction of written instructions would be to set up a case in commissariats, how much would it reduce unnecessary conversations, how much accuracy would it bring to it, what would it be a reduction in unproductive waste of time.
Taylor insists on written instructions, reports, etc.
The written report is much more precise and, most importantly, it is recorded. The written form also facilitates control.
Separation of functions, introduction of a written instruction allow assigning less qualified people to one or another job. Taylor says that you can’t “take advantage of the work of a qualified worker where you can put a cheaper and less specialized person. No one would ever think about carrying a load on a trotter and put a draft horse where a small pony is enough. All the more so, a good craftsman should not be allowed to do the work that a laborer is good enough for” (Ibid., p. 30).
“To put the right man on the right place”, as the English say, is the task of the administrator. Most commissariats have so-called accounting and distribution departments. These departments should have highly qualified employees who know in detail the work of their commissariat, its needs, who are able to correctly evaluate people, find out their experience, knowledge and so on. This is one of the most important jobs, on which the success of the entire institution depends. Is this understood enough by the commissariats? No. This is occupied by random people.
“No people”, you have to hear it all the time. That’s what bad administrators say. A skilled administrator can also use people with secondary qualifications if he or she is able to instruct them properly and distribute the work among them. There is no doubt,” Taylor writes, “that the average person works best when he or she or someone else is assigning him or her a certain lesson, and that the job must be done by him or her at a certain time. The lower the person’s mental and physical abilities, the shorter the lesson to be assigned” (Ibid., p. 60).
And Taylor gives instructions on how the work should be distributed:
“Every worker, good and mediocre, must learn a certain lesson every day. In no case should it be inaccurate or uncertain. The lesson should be carefully and clearly described and should not be easy…
“Each worker should have a full day’s lesson…
“In order to be able to schedule a lesson for the next day and determine how far the entire plant has moved in one day, workers must submit written information to the accounting department every day, with an exact indication of the work performed” (Ibid., p. 57).
A system of bonus pay is only possible with detailed work distribution and accounting.
In commissariats, the premium system is usually used completely incorrectly. Bonuses are not given for extra hours of work or for more work given out, but are given in the form of an additional salary. One thing that indicates this is that there is no proper distribution of business work in Soviet institutions.
Of course, only those who know the job very well, to the smallest detail, can distribute it correctly.
“The art of management is defined by us as the thorough knowledge of the work you want to give to workers and the ability to do it in the best and most economical way” (Ibid.)
It would seem that this is a matter of course, yet it is almost constantly ignored. Comrades are good administrators and, in general, good workers are constantly moving from one area of work to another: today he works in the Ministry of Agriculture and Food, tomorrow in the theater department, the day after tomorrow in supply, then in Supreme Soviet of the National Economy or elsewhere. Before he has time to study a new field of work, he is transferred to a new field of work. It is clear that he cannot do what he could have done if he had worked in the same field for longer.
It is not enough to know people, to have general organizational skills – you need to know this area of work perfectly, only then you can distribute it correctly, instruct correctly, do accounting and supervise it.
Taylor’s control is particularly important. He suggests daily and even twice a day to quality control the work of workers, he insists on the most detailed written reporting, suggests not to be afraid of increasing the number of administrative personnel able to control the work. According to Taylor, the best thing would be if it were possible to organize a purely mechanical quality control (not for nothing, the control clocks are linked to the name of Taylor).
It’s vain to write laws if you don’t obey them. And Taylor understands that all the orders hang in the air, if they are not accompanied by a strictly carried out control.
Meanwhile, in terms of control in commissariats the situation is often very unfavorable.
The purpose of Taylor’s system is to increase the intensity of the worker’s work, to make his work more productive. Its goal is to change the slow pace of work to a faster pace and teach the worker to work without unnecessary breaks, cautiously and cherish every minute.
Of course, Taylor is the enemy of all the time-consuming conversations. He tries to replace oral reports with written ones. Where they are unavoidable, he tries to make them as concise as possible.
“The management system increasingly includes a principle that can be called the “principle of exceptions”. However, like many other elements of the art of governance, it is applied on an ad hoc basis and, for the most part, is not recognized as a principle to be disseminated everywhere. The usual, albeit sad, look is represented by the administrator of a large business, sitting at his desk in good faith in the midst of a sea of letters and reports, on each of which he considers it his duty to sign and initial. He thinks that, having passed through his hands this mass of details, he is quite aware of the whole case. The principle of exceptions represents the exact opposite of this. With him, the manager receives only brief, concise and necessarily comparative information, however, covering all the issues related to management. Even this summary, before it reaches the director, must be carefully reviewed by one of his assistants and must contain the latest data, both good and bad, in comparison with past average figures or with established norms; thus, this information in a few minutes gives him a complete picture of the course of affairs and leaves him free time to reflect on the more general issues of the management system and to study the qualities and suitability of the more responsible, subordinate and employees”. (Ibid., p. 105).
What business-like character would the work of commissariats take if the comrades working there would keep to the “principle of exceptions”?
Let’s sum it up. F. Taylor believes that it is necessary:
1) Decomposition of the work into its simplest elements;
2) the most detailed division of labour based on the study of the work and its decomposition into elements;
3) precise definition of the functions that fall on each employee;
4) definition of these functions in exact written form;
5) Appropriate selection of employees;
6) such distribution of work, so that each employee has as many jobs as he can perform during the day, working at the fastest pace;
7) Continuous instruction by more knowledgeable persons, if possible in writing;
8) systematic, properly organized control;
9) to facilitate its written reporting (as soon as possible);
10) Where possible, mechanization of controls.
“This is what everyone knows,” the reader will say.
But the point is not only to know, but to be able to apply. That’s the whole point.
“No system should be conducted ineptly,” notes Taylor.
Where do you learn to manage? “Unfortunately, there are no management schools, not even a single enterprise to inspect most of the management details that represent the best of their kind” (Ibid., p. 164).
That’s what Taylor says about industry in advanced countries.
Clearly, in Russia, we will not find any samples of the industry, not just of the industry, but of the administrative apparatuses. We need to lay new groundwork here. Through thoughtful attitude to business, taking into account all working conditions, it is necessary to systematically improve the health of Soviet institutions, to expel the shadow of bureaucracy from them. Bureaucracy is not in reporting, not in writing papers, not in distributing functions, in the office – bureaucracy is a negligent attitude to business, confusion and stupidity, inability to work, inability to check the work. You have to learn how to manage, you have to learn how to work. Of course, everything is not done in one go. “It takes time, a lot of time for a fundamental change of control… The change of management is connected with the change of notions, views and customs of many people, ingrained beliefs and prejudices. The latter can only be changed slowly and mainly through a series of subject lessons, each of which takes time, and through constant criticism and discussion. In deciding to apply this type of governance, the necessary steps for this introduction should be taken one by one as soon as possible. You need to be prepared to lose some of your valuable people who will not be able to adapt to the changes, as well as the angry protests of many old, reliable employees who will see nothing but nonsense and ruin in the innovations ahead. It is very important that, apart from the directors of the company, all those involved in management are given a broad and understandable explanation of the main goals that are being achieved and the means that will be applied.
Taylor, as an experienced administrator, understands that the success of the case depends not so much on the individual, but on the sincerity of the entire team.
Only this Taylor’s team limits itself to administrative employees. This is quite understandable. In general, Taylor’s system has not only positive aspects – increasing labor productivity through its scientific formulation, but also negative aspects: increasing labor intensity, and the wage system is built by Taylor so that this increase in intensity benefits not the worker, but the entrepreneur.
The workers understood that Taylor’s system was an excellent sweat squeezing system and fought against it. Since all the production was in the hands of capitalists, the workers were not interested in increasing labor productivity, not interested in the rise of industry. Now, under Soviet rule, when the exploitation of the labor force has been destroyed and when workers are interested to the extreme in the rise of the industry – a team that should consciously relate to the introduction of improving working methods – there should be a team of all the workers of the plant or factory. The capitalist could not rely on the collective of the workers he was exploiting, he relied on the collective of administrative employees who helped him to carry out this exploitation. Now the working collective itself has to apply the most appropriate methods of work. He only needs to be familiarized in theory and practice with these methods. This is production propaganda.
As far as the employees of Soviet institutions and people’s commissariats are concerned, it is necessary to familiarize them with the methods of labor productivity. This falls on the production cell of the collective of employees. But only by raising the level of consciousness of all employees, only by involving them in the work of increasing the productivity of commissariats – it is possible to actually improve the state of affairs and destroy not in words, but in practice, the dead bureaucracy.
Ludwig von Mises opens his 1925 article “Anti-Marxism” by stating that “In postwar Germany and Austria, a movement has been steadily gaining significance in politics and the social sciences that can best be described as Anti-Marxism.” The editor added: “In Germany, they later came to call themselves National Socialists, or Nazis.” Mises then sets out to discuss “scientific Anti-Marxism,” his term for the first fascist theorists. “The principal tie that unites them is their declaration of hostility toward Marxism,” he adds.
The title of the 1925 reply to this article by the Austrian Communist Fedor Kapelusz published in the Central Committee of the CPSU’s journal Bolshevik, “Professor Mises as a Theorist of Fascism,”1 can be read as an objective description, though there is also a double entendre. As Kapelusz writes: “Here we have right in front of us the so-called first theoretical attempt to provide a foundation for German fascism.”
One could justifiably change the title to “Mises as a Theorist of Anti-Marxism,” which would preempt the complaint of cheap usage of the label “fascist” and allow us some demarcation from the blunter approach of other critics of Mises. These critics, themselves often anti-Marxists (whether post-Keynesian or Proudhonian anarchist), correctly point to his positive utterances about “Fascism and similar movements” and his role as advisor to the Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss. The overlap between libertarianism and fascism is well-known. Let us just cite from the abstract of a chapter in Robert Leeson’s 2017 book Hayek: A Collaborative Biography: Part X: Eugenics, Cultural Evolution, and The Fatal Conceit: “Mises was a card-carrying Austro-Fascist and member of the official Fascist social club; and the tax-exempt Rothbard celebrated the first bombing of the World Trade Center. This chapter examines the influence of eugenics on Hayek, Mises, and Rothbard plus the similarities between ‘von Hayek V’ and the founder of the British Union of Fascists, Sir Oswald Mosley, sixth Baronet.” Even the mainstream The Daily Beast in 2017 noticed the coincidence, though it spoke about libertarianism merely as a “gateway” to white supremacism.
Kapelusz’s article takes into account the fact that Mises himself criticizes the various fascist theorists. One can note that today the most verbally extreme “anti-fascists” are the libertarians (from the Tea Party to Trump), who for example carried posters equating Obama to Hitler. Kapelusz takes into account that Mises strategically favored a German foreign policy geared towards non-violence, much like a German fascist today can criticize Hitler for having lost the war. Such demagogic phrase-mongering about pacifism is a prominent feature of the libertarians today (which even some self-declared Leftists appear to have fallen for).
The article’s central point, it seems to me, is that Mises criticizes fascism from the right. Mises believes that fascism isn’t Anti-Marxist enough, that it is socialist. The latter outrageous claim is only a twist on the quite common refrain found among the libertarian movement that the Nazis were socialists (or even among liberals, who often claim that fascism and communism are two sides of the same coin). What Mises in effect is saying is that the only real objectionable thing about the Nazis is that they are socialists. So when libertarians complain about the government’s fascism and encroachment on freedoms (and they thus can appear as progressive defenders of liberal rights), they really are complaining about (alleged) socialism.
The anti-Marxism of Mises ran deep. In his memoirs, he wrote: “Upon entering the university, I too was an étatist2, through and through. I differed from my fellow students, however, in that I was consciously anti-Marxist. At the time I knew little of Marx’s writings but was acquainted with the most important works of Kautsky. I was an avid reader of the Neue Zeit, and had followed the revisionist debate with great attention. The platitudes of Marxist literature repelled me. I found Kautsky almost ridiculous.” What Kapelusz writes about Mises fits many an e-celeb rightwinger today: “Viennese professor Ludwig Mises is a very angry guy and he very strongly dislikes Marx and Marxism. Just speaking between us, he shouldn’t dislike it one bit. If not for Marxism, our professor would have to beg for handouts, since he has never managed to prove himself in science. Crushing Marxism, however, is a very profitable business.”
Notably absent is a mention of anti-semitism in the articles of Mises and Kapelusz about fascism. Of course, in 1925 there was not yet mass extermination of Jews (apart from the pogroms in Ukraine during the Russian civil war), but it also seems correct (I almost said – politically correct) to avoid a definition of fascism based exclusively, or at least centrally, on antisemitism, as is popularly held. Let us just cite the remark by the Italian Trotskyist Pietro Tresso in 1938:
“Fourteen senators appointed by Mussolini were Jewish. Under Fascism there were 203 Jewish professors … at Italian universities … All of them swore allegiance to the regime … Federico Camme – a Jew – laid the legal foundations for the reconciliation with the Vatican. Guido Jung – a Jew – was a member of Mussolini’s government as Minister of Finance … The only two biographers to whom the Duce granted his cooperation were the Italian Jew Margherita Sarfatti and the German Jew Emil Ludwig. An Italian Fascist has recently issued a book on Italy’s economic development after the country’s unification – the Storia di una nazione proletaria by the Jew H. Fraenkel … The General Confederation of Industry, which at the time of the “March on Rome” had the Jew Olivetti as its President, gave Mussolini some 20 millions [of liras]. All this filled the bourgeois Jews of the whole world with joy, and they all gave Italian Fascism their praises – and their money.”3
Relevant perhaps are some words about the author. Fedor Kapelusz (Odessa 1876 – Moscow 1945) was exiled from Russia in 1895 and lived in Vienna. In 1910 he wrote an article on the history of Austrian workers, participated in the Austrian 1918 revolution, and when in Soviet Russia wrote a book on Austria (1929). He was quite familiar with Austrian Social-Democracy and bourgeois culture. He knew Hilferding from his student days, and in fact even anticipated some of Hilferding’s topics already in an 1897 article-series on “Industry and Finance,” which incidentally was picked out by Bernstein for criticism.
As for Kapelusz’s role in the Austrian revolution, I have not found more details. It is clear that he stood on the opposite side of the barricades from Mises, who has quite an inflated view about his own role in convincing Otto Bauer to save Viennese culture from “[p]lundering hordes” and terror. For more writings by Kapelusz, see his reviews of Ostrogorski’s classical work of political science and his overview of Marxist literature on imperialism.
Photo of Ludwig Von Mises
“Anti-Marxism”: Professor Mises as a Theorist of Fascism
Viennese professor Ludwig Mises is a very angry guy and he very strongly dislikes Marx and Marxism. Just speaking between us, he shouldn’t dislike it one bit. If not for Marxism, our professor would have to beg for handouts, since he has never managed to prove himself in science. Crushing Marxism, however, is a very profitable business.
“The science of the so-called Marxists,” states Mises, “can be no more than ‘scholasticism.’” Mises talks about “men and women who are in this business” with total disregard. They beat the air, live by canonized Marxian dogmas, with their writings mattering only because it helps their political careers; their “science” only pursues party goals; and the whole argument about revisionism and dictatorship is not scholarly, but is purely political.That’s how angrily Mises talks about Marxists. But further on Mises puts himself in a very unpleasant position. It happens to be that the leading figures of German bourgeois [social] science, the representatives of the Historical School in political economy and the so-called Socialists of the Chair, borrowed a lot from Marx.Mises doesn’t dare to criticize them.
With great sadness he quotes Professor Schmollerthat Adam Smith’s school became “a doctrine of narrow class interests” and that “socialism can be denied neither its justification for existence nor that it has had some good effects.” With the same degree of sorrow Mises quotes Friedrich Engels, that Professor Wilhelm Lexis’s theory of interest merely presents the Marxist theory in different words.
But then Mises’s great anger falls on Schmoller’s students, the entire generation of the German bourgeois [social] science. He doesn’t mention names. “This generation had never been exposed to university lectures on theoretical economics. They knew the Classical economists by name only and were convinced that they had been vanquished by Schmoller. Very few had ever read or even seen the works of David Ricardo or John Stuart Mill. But they had to read Marx and Engels. Which became all the more necessary, as they had to cope with the growing social democracy. They were writing books in order to refute Marx. . . . They rejected the harshest political demands of Marx and Engels, but adopted the theories in milder form. . . . For this generation . . . Marx was the economic theorist par excellence.”
The angry professor continues to snort for a long while. But finally he finds satisfaction in the fact that the current generation, “some pupils of these pupils” [the students of Schmoller’s students], rejected Marx. Of course we are talking about bourgeois science. A new trend now appeared, anti-Marxism, which Mises talks about with such admiration. The Austrian school, Böhm-Bawerkand others, demonstrated “how petty and insignificant the role of Marx is in the history of political economy.” On his own behalf Mises also states that “those few possibly defensible thoughts” in Marx’s study of society have been analyzed much more deeply by Taineand Buckle;and his theory of the withering away of the state is “utterly insignificant for science.”(!)A poodle is barking at the elephant. Mises has not yet named the representatives of this school of “anti-Marxism.” But one should read between the lines: The professor is too modest to name himself.
What is the contribution of this school to science? What is Mises offering us? He is advocating “utilitarian sociology” and states that “the success that Marx’s study of society had in Germany is explained by the fact that utilitarian sociology of the eighteenth century was rejected by German [social] science.” That isn’t bad, is it? On the other hand, Mises – let’s do him justice – puts his own meaning (or meaninglessness) in this Stone Age “utilitarian sociology.” This meaning is – the harmony of interests. Society is founded on the division of labor, and because of this does not contain any conflicts of interest. This is a commonplace, and it is also an incorrect one. Mises, to push himself up, puts it into a Gelerterian4abracadabra:“The utilitarian social doctrine does not engage in metaphysics, but takes as its point of departure the established fact that all living beings affirm their will to live and grow.”Isn’t that metaphysics? Here is a reference to Adam Smith, “even the weakness of men was not ‘without its utility,’”and all of it for the sake of the revelation that private property is in the interests of all the members of the society. Along the way, there is such childish ignorance as the statement that “wars, foreign and domestic, (revolutions, civil wars), are more likely to be avoided the closer the division of labor binds men.”But what about trade wars of capitalism? What about the whole history of capitalism?
Here is another pearl. “Why does the conflict occur between classes, and why not within the classes?” Mises is persuaded that here he has a trump card against Marx. If there is no conflict within a class, then there can be no conflicts outside of a class, i.e., between classes. “It is impossible to demonstrate a principle of association that exists within a collective group only, and that is inoperative beyond it.” Of course this is an absolute absurdity. Quite definite, specific interests connect the working class, and not by some cloudy principle of association. “Taken to its logical conclusion, class conflict is not a theory of society but a theory of unsociability, i.e., a conflict of each against all.”This masterpiece Mises borrows from Paul Barth.5Now it is clear who are Mises’s spiritual associates in this “anti-Marxism”! One is worth as much as another. This Paul Barth has a quite deserved reputation as a desperately boring mediocrity.
And there is one more “scholar” of the same caliber and manner that our angry professor is quoting: Othmar Spann.6This Spann is an absolutely open “scholar” of fascism, spiritual leader of “national socialism.” He is a branch on the same tree as the ignoramus Hitler and philologist- historian Oswald Spengler.Spann, whose very being is a telltale proof of the class character not just of the society as it is, but of the whole of [bourgeois] science as well, states that Marx gave no definition and delineation of the notion of a class, and that the terms “class interest,” “class status,” “class conflict,” “class ideology” are imprecise and indeterminate.
Mises adds that the third volume of [Marx’s] Das Kapital abruptly breaks off at the very place where there was to be an interpretation of the meaning of “classes.” Nevertheless, as Mises sadly remarks, “the concept of a class became the cornerstone of modern German sociology.” “Dependence on Marx is the special characteristic of German social sciences. Surely Marxism has left its traces as well on the social thinking of France, Great Britain, the United States, the Scandinavian countries, and the Netherlands.”That is how Mises complains. Obviously, the state of affairs of “anti-Marxism” does not look too bright. Mises, the spiritual gendarme of the bourgeoisie, having no arguments whatsoever, is simply appealing to the interests of the bourgeoisie. Sure! This is another obvious “refutation” of Marx’s analyses of classes.
But what “anti-Marxism” is challenging is “not socialism but only Marxism.” And after his “crushing” criticism Mises gives his positive analyses. He titles it “National (Anti-Marxian) Socialism.”So here are old acquaintances: “National Socialism,” and the “national-socialistic” trend of Hitler-types. Mises unifies all of this under the umbrella of the fascist movement.
Here we have right in front of us the so-called first theoretical attempt to provide a foundation for German fascism. As for right now, this attempt by Mises looks more like a mixture of tangled amusements and contradictions; but let’s see where this beginning takes him. Now we will see that the contradictions in which Mises is entangled are not just amusing, but in a certain sense also symptomatic and characteristic.
German “étatists”(that is how for some reason Mises chooses to label the representatives of German social sciences who were taken prisoner by Marx) “see in modern imperialism of the countries of Entente the same thing as do Marxists: the development of capitalist aspiration for expansion.” Mises obviously doesn’t like this. But only in the sense that he considers the primary factor to be national hatred. Mises, the theorist of fascism, elevates national hatred to the pearl of creation. Here is his “theory”: “The Marxian socialist proclaims: The conflict of classes but not the conflict of peoples, away with imperialistic war! But having proclaimed this he adds: but always (!) civil war, revolution. National Socialism proclaims: Unification of the people, class peace; but he adds to it, a war against the foreign enemy.” So the thunder of victory can be heard.
But the World War made a breach in this Gelerterian symmetrical construction. Mises advocates the sergeant-major, Hindenburg psychology of no defeat,but at the same time he would like to use the lessons of defeat. “German theory and practice could only proclaim the principle of force and struggle. Its application isolated the German nation from the world, and led to its defeat in the Great War.” Mises wants to have his cake and eat it, too. And now Mises admits, “for the German nation a violent solution to the problem is least satisfactory.”Mises thinks, though, that the same principle of self-determination of people cannot help in those areas where Germans live together with other people and represent the minority (among Danish, Lithuanians, Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Croats, Slovenians, and French).
Obviously, one has to seek allies and coalitions. So Mises comes to what for a fascist is an absolutely unexpected conclusion: “German anti-Marxism and Russian super-Marxism are not too far from the politics of mutual agreement and alliance…In such a situation Germany could find only one ally: Russia, which is facing the same hostility as Germany from Poles, Lithuanians, Hungarians, and in some sense even Czechs, but nowhere stands in direct conflict with German interests.” Mises assures that “Bolshevist Russia, like czarist Russia, only knows force in dealing with other nations.”
This absurdity and slander is not Mises’s original concoction; the tales about our “Red imperialism” are blossoming in bourgeois Europe. But how he plans to combine, in this case, an alliance with Russia after he has just proclaimed the rejection of the politics of force, well, this remains Mises’s secret. The following is also amusing: The reconciliation of German “anti-Marxian nationalism” (which is fascism) with the anti-Marxian nationalism of so-called Fascist Italy, as well as with the awakening of Hungarian chauvinism, is not possible, according to Mises, because German national interests come into conflict with Italian interests in South Tyrol and Hungarian interests in western Hungary.
Even here in the arena of national politics Mises has his “theoretical” trump card against Marx. This is the problem of immigration. According to Mises, it is an essential question for the Germans, and he is indignant at the fact that in the entire pre-war German literature there is no published research analyzing the limitations and restrictions on immigration. “This silence, better than anything else, reveals the Marxian bias in social literature.” Mises also refers to the Congress of the Second International in Stuttgart in 1907, where there was passed the compromising resolution in reference to the immigration of colored workers. The Austrian representative stated that the majority of the Austrian Labor party is against such immigration. Mises keeps discussing the fact that the U. S. trade unions are undertaking “class conflict” not against their own employers but against European workers and Negroes.He conscientiously closes his eyes to the fact that those trade unions are yellow Gomperists,anti-Marxian, and that the Communist International makes as its cornerstone exactly the international solidarity of all workers and of all races, and gives special significance to the people of the Orient.
Mises presents the issue as if the whole social problem has its modern roots in the impossibility of free immigration, while in his own German fatherland everything is fine concerning this matter. In fact, immigration for Mises serves as a channel to fulfill the economic interests of the German bourgeoisie, though it wraps it in the cloths of “national socialism.” Marx irrefutably proved that the laws of the growth in population are dependent upon the economic system; the overpopulation of Germany, which makes the country seek colonies, is a pure capitalist population problem, the result of capitalist exploitation.
In this context, Mises’s argument has the purpose of hiding the real reasons: the wounding of the imperialist interests of the German bourgeoisie as a result of the World War. So, Mises’s “national socialism” is socialism without Marxism, and is nothing but a mask to cover the class interests of the bourgeoisie. Here, as before, “anti-Marxism” is one more confirmation of Marxism. By the way, to where did Mises’s much-praised “utilitarian sociology” disappear, his theoretical heavy artillery? It happens to be that his “harmony of interests” exists only in the national arena among the employers and workers of the same nation, but in the international arena even workers go against workers—that’s what Mises states based on the practice of the yellow unionism of Gompers (his “workers aristocracy”); this is the fruit of imperialism.
In one way or another, Mises assures that “a violent solution (of the national problem) is even less applicable today than it was in prewar Germany.”The fascist in the role of peacemaker, isn’t that a spectacle for the gods? But the solution is quite simple, and Mises shows his own cards. In Czechoslovakia the German minority has to fight for its democracy and freedom from state interference in economic life; the same as in other countries where Germans are in a minority. How can we, he openly admits, combine it with the politics of intervention in Germany itself!
Mises also finds shortcomings in the newest, but very anemic and weak, “anti-Marxism.” The representatives of anti-Marxism, Mises says, are satisfied with criticizing the political conclusions of Marxism, but they don’t challenge the sociological doctrine behind Marxism. Who are those representatives? Mises actually only mentions Spann. Forgive us this vulgar joke: The whole “Spanna”7of the German fascists found their “theorist” in this one and only Spann. This Spann, believe it or not, attacks Marxism because Marxism is “a product of Western individualism, which is foreign to the German spirit.” (By the way, when did Germany become the East?) Mises suggests that this attack, and the fact that Spann identifies Marxism with liberalism and individualism, have purely political motives, resulting from Spann’s hostility toward liberalism.
“It is illogical,” says Mises, “to deduce a similarity of the two from an opposition to both.”Let’s put aside here the fact that Mises, in his turn, identifies social democracy with Marxism, and has not yet been persuaded that social democracy is completely harmless. But it is very characteristic that Mises aspires to make peace between democracy (liberalism) and fascism. We have partly observed and are still observing the similar process in Italy. Fascism, being purely a bourgeois movement, needs liberalism: scorpions for the workers, but liberalism for the bourgeoisie, since the bourgeoisie needs liberalism for protectionism and the internationalism of the state.
Mises and Werner Sombart are two aggressive warriors of “anti-Marxism”. But Mises is not happy with Sombart. He considers Sombart, who was the first “to introduce Marx to German science,” still to be a prisoner of Marx. It is very instructive that Mises talks about Sombart’s hidden sympathies that one can find when reading between the lines. It happens to be that Sombart dreams about the Middle Ages and an agrarian state. He is the enemy of modern industrialism, the enemy of “railroads and factories, steel furnaces and machines, telegraph wires and motorcycles, gramophones and airplanes, cinematography and power stations, cast iron and aniline colors.”Mises gives this quote from Sombart, as an enumeration of what the socialist critics “have not yet once accused capitalism.” It looks like cast iron and aniline colors didn’t please Sombart. . . . It is wonderful that for Spann, the leader of nationalistic anti-Marxism, the social ideal also is “a return to the Middle Ages.” This confession by Mises is very interesting. The state of affairs in Mises’s camp is very sad; the “theorists” of German fascism are probably simply not very healthy people. And Mises reproaches Sombart for “a sickly weakness of nerves,” in the inability to preserve spiritual stability even among gramophones and airplanes.
But Sombart and Spann are precisely those who advertise Teutonic strength and fortitude; Mises hits them at their weakest point. He hits them from the perspective of their own sergeant-major psychology, pointing to the fact that without steel furnaces and airplanes Germany will find itself helpless if confronted with the foreign enemy. Sombart is dreaming “pre-proletarian utopianism” with its “bucolic” character. Mises’s response to him is that with the establishment of a bucolic agrarian state in our own time they should kiss goodbye any dream of domination. The conservatism of Sombart and Spann reflects their retrograde ideal of a Prussian landlord – the diehard; Mises “corrects” this ideal on behalf of the bourgeoisie, with its imperialistic tendencies.
Mises accuses his colleague Sombart that in his two-volume book of one thousand pages on Proletarian Socialism (1924) he never gives “a precise definition of the concept of socialism.”Sombart interprets the argument about socialism not as a discussion about “economic technology” but as an argument either for God or for Satan. According to Sombart, socialism wishes to throw the source of all the evil in the world, money, “into the rain,” like the rings of Nibelungs.Those pitiful phrases that can impress a young fascist student makes Mises reproach Sombart bitterly for the fact that he does not speak against socialism as a whole, but only against proletarian socialism, against Marxism. But Mises himself is also a follower of “national socialism.”…This is too much of contradictions and confusions.
A little further on, Mises finds that Sombart admits that socialism is in accordance with the interests of the proletariat. The struggle against “proletarian socialism” appears to be a hopeless affair, and Sombart himself becomes an unconscious Marxist. This is what Mises, the keeper of anti- Marxian purity, asserts. Really, Sombart wants to overcome class conflict through ethics and religion; but in that case, according to Mises, Sombart is admitting that class conflict exists. As a result, Sombart has to appeal to God, which is more of a confession than a statement of science, and thus, as a result, provides no proof. That is how Mises dethrones Sombart in order to retain the laurels for himself as the only actual “anti-Marxist” and theorist of fascism.
Abdullah Smith argues that the USSR’s relation to Palestinian national liberation was more about realpolitik than earnest dedication to the cause of the Palestinian people.
Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine propaganda, 1973, reads: “The left path is the path to triumph”
The relationship between the Soviet Union and the Palestinian national liberation struggle was a highly ambivalent one set against the backdrop of the Cold War. As the Western and Eastern Blocs vied for influence in the Middle East, the Soviet Union proclaimed in the late 1960s that they would resolutely support — materially, diplomatically, and ideologically — the Palestinian people in their war of national liberation, and the broader Arab world against “imperialism and Zionism.” This position, they proclaimed, stemmed from the Marxist-Leninist positions of “proletarian internationalism” and “self-determination of nations.” However, like much of Soviet foreign policy, reality was far different from rhetoric. Upon further examination of Soviet actions toward Palestine, this supposed solidarity with Palestinian revolutionaries was not one of revolutionary internationalism and anti-imperialism, but was, in fact, simply a cover for the realpolitik the Soviet Union utilized to make the Middle East one of its spheres of influence, with the Soviet Union often sidelining Palestinians in favor of keeping allied Arab states within their orbit. Even at the height of Soviet aid to the PLO, the relationship was one of conditional love and, in some ways, borderline cruelty in its pragmatism.
To gain an understanding of Soviet rhetoric concerning Palestine, one must take into account two major tenets of Marxist-Leninist doctrine: the concepts of proletarian internationalism and self-determination of nations. Proletarian internationalism is the notion that, as Marx and Engels said in the Communist Manifesto, “the working man has no nation” and that the interests of the international proletariat take priority of the interests of one’s own nation. At the same time, Marxism-Leninism espouses that all nations have a right to determine their own destiny without fear of intervention from imperial and colonial powers. From its birth, the Soviet Union — at least ostensibly — believed that it, as a nation, had a duty to stand in solidarity with the anti-colonial and national liberation struggles of the Third World.
According to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s official policy, Zionism was “the most reactionary variety of Jewish bourgeois nationalism” and “distracts Jews from class struggle because it treats Jewish workers and bourgeoisie as both having the same interests.”1 While Jews were an officially protected national minority with their own small autonomous oblast in the Russian Far East and antisemitism was heavily disdained in Soviet discourse, Jews were not seen as a coherent nation-state with distinct ties to a particular region of the world. As such, the idea of a Jewish homeland within Palestine was, in a Soviet Marxist framework, completely unacceptable and could only act as an imperialist project for capitalist powers against the colonized Arab peoples. Soviet Jewish organizations, following the party line, were resolute in their opposition to Jewish migration to Palestine.
After World War II, however, pragmatism trumped principles. Reeling from the Holocaust and still unsure of how to deal with the massive displaced populations of Jewish survivors in the Eastern European states it had liberated from Nazi rule, the Soviet Union decided to recognize the State of Israel in 1948. The motive for this was two-pronged: the first reason was to appease the United States. Soviet leader Josef Stalin knew that the alliance with the West forged during the war would not last much longer, that a long Cold War was coming, and that he needed to buy time to prepare for the protracted confrontation. The second reason was to push the British out of Palestine and keep in check any further British or French colonial ambitions in the Middle East. Nevertheless, the Soviets were strong believers in the need for both a Jewish state and an Arab state with Jerusalem serving as the capital of both, and they opposed the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Israel in al-Nakba of 1948.2
The honeymoon period between the USSR and Israel was extremely short-lived. By the end of the year, 200,000 Jews had emigrated from the USSR and Soviet-occupied countries to Israel. The Soviets quickly feared strengthening Zionist organizations within their borders, and in 1949 the Soviet press denounced Zionism once more as “bourgeois nationalism.” Diplomatic ties between the USSR and Israel were broken in the 1967 war.
Across the 1950s and ’60s, with Nikita Khrushchev at the helm of the Kremlin, Moscow threw an enormous amount of investment and advisement into Egypt and Syria, particularly during the United Arab Republic period, as well as Iraq to a lesser extent. This was primarily donein order to curry the favor of these countries’ governments and convince them of the superiority of a socialist-based economy and the advantages of staying within the Soviet camp, albeit keeping class struggle by local communist parties on the sidelines of this broader strategy. For nearly fifteen years, the Soviet Union kept the Palestinian question as a minor one of little consequence to their broader Middle Eastern strategy, with only the occasional statement about the “legitimate rights of Palestinian Arabs” to a right of return.3
In 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in Cairo, Egypt, as a coalition of Palestinian armed groups and political parties dedicated to the liberation of Palestine from Israeli occupation. While most anti-colonial and national liberation organizations during this period were greeted with enthusiasm by the Soviets, the proclamation of a new chapter in the struggle for Palestinian self-determination was met with icy silence. The Soviets, it seemed, could not have cared less about the foundation of the PLO, and in UN meetings concerning the matter would only speak about the problem of Palestinian refugees and the right of return for Palestinians to their ancestral lands.4 If one were to take the USSR’s anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist credentials at face value, one might find this silence around the matter to be puzzling.
The warming up of relations between Moscow and the Palestinians was extremely gradual. The Soviets began to grant scholarships for members of the General Union of Palestinian Students and the General Union of Palestinian Women to study at universities in the USSR. However, even as late as the end of 1968, the Soviets openly chastised the PLO. Groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, despite themselves being Marxist-Leninist organizations, were particularly criticized for being too close with the Chinese and for their guerrilla warfare tactics, which were labeled “adventurist” and “ultra-leftist.”5 Indeed, nations like China, Cuba, East Germany, Romania, North Vietnam, and even North Korea were more happy to supply material aid to the PLO and were more vocal in their support of the Palestinian national liberation movement at large.6 Nearly all early PLO delegations to Moscow were neither officially hosted by the Soviet state nor by the Communist Party, but by the “Soviet Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee” in order to maintain an appearance of a diplomatic disconnect, where support for the Palestinian struggle arose from Soviet citizens who were party activists, not from state conduits.7
1977 East German art made for PLO, “Revolution until victory”
It was not until the defeat of the Arab states in the Six-Day War of 1967 that the Soviets realized that the PLO could become a useful tool in countering Israeli — and thus, by extension, US —aggression against their three main Arab client states. In 1969 the Soviets officially hosted PLO leader Yasser Arafat at a reception for Egyptian president Gamel Abdel Nasser, whom he was accompanying on the journey.8 This trip to Moscow by Arafat still did not seal the deal, however — the Soviets acknowledged the PLO’s existence but did not recognize it as the international representative of the Palestinian people. Indeed, when the Syrian Communist Party began to enthusiastically back the PLO in 1971, Moscow almost immediately told the SCP to cease such endorsements and bluntly brushed off any discussion of Soviet support for a new Palestinian homeland. The establishment of serious Soviet-Palestinian ties was further stalled when the Palestinian Black September Organization murdered eleven Israeli athletes and diplomats at the 1972 Munich Olympics, an event which the Kremlin strongly condemned and implicated the PLO in being complicit in.9
By 1974, after the defeat of the Arab states once more in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Soviets realized just how desperately they needed the PLO within their Middle East machinations, and began to treat the PLO as the de facto representative of the Palestinian people on an international level (although they did not officially declare this until 1978, in response to the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt).10 Egyptian president Anwar Sadat began to cool relations with the Soviets after the Yom Kippur War and made significant overtures toward the US that same year. Without Egypt in its orbit and their relationship with Syria also strained, the Palestinians seemed like the logical choice as a group to support to keep Israel in check.11
With the friendship between the Kremlin and the PLO finally cemented after almost seven years of protracted back-and-forth, the Soviets maintained a clear policy: that the goal of any Palestinian national liberation struggle they supported would result in a two-state solution. The PFLP and DFLP’s refusal to relinquish their demand for the dismantlement of Israel and for a multinational socialist republic to take its place was admonished by the Soviets, who firmly planted their support in both rhetoric and financial/military aid behind Fatah, Arafat’s party which commanded the majority of the PLO. Fatah was also important to the Soviets not just because Fatah was the largest faction in the PLO, but because it was also the most likely of the PLO parties to be conducive to a two-state end to the conflict. Furthermore, Moscow understood Fatah as the “bourgeois-nationalist” faction of the PLO most likely to lean towards the West in the distant future; as such, Fatah became their biggest ally and their greatest liability in establishing themselves as allies of the Palestinian people.12
When the Lebanese Civil War broke out in 1975, the Soviets found themselves juggling three allies now at odds with one another: the Syrians, the PLO, and the Lebanese Communist Party. During the first year of the war, the Soviets were comfortable in the ability to support the PLO-LCP united front.13 With Syria’s intervention into the conflict in 1976 resulting in the bloodshed of Palestinians, however, the Soviets began to feel a great sense of confusion and discomfort. Soviet newspapers such as Pravda began issuing criticisms of the Syrian role in the conflict and the Soviet Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee released a statement calling on all progressive forces in the region to support the Palestinians. Leonid Brezhnev, then General Secretary of the Communist Party, sent a letter to Syrian president Hafez Assad demanding a withdrawal of all Syrian troops from Lebanon. When Syria refused to back down from its commitment to Lebanon, however, Moscow relented, deciding that it had little to gain from the situation. From 1977 onward, the Soviets kept a mostly hands-off policy toward the Lebanese crisis, pulling away aid from all sides after realizing that taking a position in the fight could be a liability to them.14
“(We) hail the courage and resolution of the Palestinian people!”
Despite the Soviet Union’s abandonment of the PLO in Lebanon, the two sides continued to work with each other in other endeavors, with the Soviet Union hosting a major official PLO delegation in November of 1978.15 After the Camp David Accords, the Soviets began to escalate public rhetoric in support of the PLO and to paint itself as the great ally of the Palestinian, and other Arab, peoples. The Soviets spoke of being “consistent advocates of the Arab people”16, began throwing even more financial and military aid toward Fatah, and recognized the Palestinian Communist Party’s induction into the PLO in 1982.17 In 1983, Communist Party leader Yuri Andropov brokered a deal between the PLO and Syria in Lebanon that staved off further bloodshed between the two parties.18 Finally, it seemed, the Palestinians had found a true friend in the Soviet Union.
With the rise of Gorbachev in 1986, Arafat and Gorbachev realized that both the USSR and PLO were in significant decline in terms of prestige in the Middle East: both had alienated many of their Arab allies and failed to construct new relations with other political trends within the region. The communist movement in the Arab world was nearly moribund, and the Soviets had only one socialist ally in the entire region: the relatively quiet and non-strategic South Yemen. While the PLO still received praise in the press of left-wing parties around the world, Arab state sponsorship of the Palestinian cause was at an all-time low due to the PLO’s refusal to relinquish the use of terrorism as a major tactic in armed struggle against Israel. Now, more than ever, it seemed that the USSR and PLO needed each other on the global stage if both were to maintain relevance in the region.19
In 1989, as the USSR was unraveling and communism was collapsing in the Eastern Bloc, the Soviets and the PLO seemed to continue their firm relationship and the Soviet Union seemed guaranteed a decisive role in the peace process, particularly with the 1988 First Palestinian Intifada uprising having made headlines due to its dramatic scope and scale. At first, Moscow was at first content with the Intifada, primarily due to it being a spontaneous uprising not initiated by the PLO, but the Soviets soon grew uneasy as the PLO became more tied to the uprising and Gorbachev gradually became more interested in ending to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through negotiations rather than armed struggle. Mixed feelings toward the trajectory of the Palestinian national liberation movement is noticeable in the Soviet press of the time, which extensively covered the Intifada but did not paint it in an enthusiastically positive light. The Intifada was, however, spun as a symptom of America’s insufficient work within the peace process: indeed, coverage of the Intifada was more anti-American than it was anti-Israel or pro-Palestine, and was meant to tout the USSR as the only trustworthy broker for peace in the region.20
Rekindled ties between Moscow and the PLO soured quickly in 1990 when, in response to rocky relations between the PLO and the US, Arafat aligned the PLO with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. When the Gulf War broke out in August of the same year, the USSR backed the anti-Iraq coalition forces, causing a great deal of consternation within the PLO. Indeed, the resentment towards the Kremlin became so sharp that when the August 1991 putsch by Party hardliners against Gorbachev was attempted, the PLO hailed the abortive coup against “the renegade” Gorbachev. The Palestinians were no longer simply displeased or disappointed: they felt unrelenting antagonism and antipathy towards the Soviets.21
With the USSR fully in tatters, in September of 1991 Gorbachev set into motion a policy of allowing full freedom of immigration for Soviet Jews to Israel. By the end of the USSR’s existence on December 25, 1991, the PLO viewed the Kremlin as an enemy of the Palestinian people, with the PLO seeming to only understand Moscow’s true intentions toward them once the Soviet Union was on its deathbed.22 In the end, it is clear that the Soviet Union was never truly the “consistent advocate” of the Palestinian people that Moscow so enthusiastically touted in its media. Indeed, compared to their support of national liberation struggles like East Asia and Africa (e.g. Vietnam, Laos, Angola, Mozambique, etc.), the Soviet Union’s support of the Palestinian national liberation movement is glaringly half-baked. It is an obvious fact that the USSR was a fair-weather friend only interested in realpolitik, and without concern for the well-being of the Palestinian people, much less for a legitimate peace in the Middle East.
Translation of and introduction to Amadeo Bordiga’s “The Solution of Bukharin” by Leon Thalheimer.
Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin persists as a somewhat elusive character in the history of the Russian Revolution. Overshadowed by the figures of Stalin and Trotsky and their “mythic” conflict in the 1920s, the name of Bukharin was either forgotten or universally cursed until the 1970s. The study of the man and his ideas had an ambiguous meaning: on one hand, it represented the beginning a more honest and open study of the Revolutions of 1917 and their consequences. On the other hand, Bukharin was appropriated by a generation of reformers in the Eastern Bloc who turned him into the prophet of a project nothing short of bourgeois democracy and liberalism.
This tendency became more or less noticeable both in supporters and opponents of this “Bukharinism”. His most famous biographer, Stephen Cohen, seemed to find Bukharin in all attempts to reform the Eastern Bloc., from the Nagy cabinet to Dubček. The prominent Portuguese Communist Francisco Martins Rodrigues considered Bukharin to be no more than a bourgeois democrat. The appropriation of Bukharin’s legacy by the likes of Gorbachev further helped settle this image.
Nikolai Bukharin and the “Right” Opposition were accused of everything: defending the kulak, proposing the abandoning of the proletarian class party, capitulating to bourgeois democracy, fighting for capitalist restoration, and nurturing a renewed narodism [populism]. These accusations still echo for many and the history of Bukharin stays tarnished.
Amadeo Bordiga is seen in a vastly different light. Accused by all of being inflexible, unpractical, intransigent (a characterization that he himself came to partially admit, although proudly), he became the most famous name of the so-called Italian Communist Left, and more specifically of Programmismo tendency. His linear, almost mechanical writing style was entangled with a taste for poetic figures of speech, a very peculiar form of expression that suited his simultaneously dialectical and intransigent defense of Communism. The most superficial presentations of his work — such as this one, ironically — could leave no doubt: there is nothing farther apart from each other than Bordiga and Bukharin.
However, a more careful analysis would reveal the facts to be more complex. There is a much to be discovered in the depth of Bordiga’s thinking, such as his capacity to go beyond appearances and give life to Marxism in the concrete situation (much like Lenin). Both Bordiga and Bukharin were strongly grounded in Lenin’s final writings, appealing repeatedly to articles such as On Cooperation, Our Revolution and The Tax in Kind. However, as Bordiga himself admits, much of this wasn’t even Lenin’s original thought, but was already present in Marx, pointed out by Lenin in Our Revolution. The translation we now present is clear evidence of this fact.
Despite a great number of differences that undoubtedly exist between the two communists, this exact translation is important because it reveals a notable point of convergence and its numerous consequences. The importance of the worker-peasant alliance, the quickest route to complete the agrarian revolution, the best way to avoid bureaucratization and maintain proletarian power in the condition of international isolation and imperialist encirclement: these were all worries shared by Bukharin and Bordiga.
Furthermore, Bordiga, to the surprise of many, would go as far as saying that Bukharin’s “compromise” with the kulak, represented by the famous “Enrich yourselves!” was a truly Leninian compromise as outlined by Lukács in his Lenin.
The translation that follows is a very short extract of Amadeo Bordiga’s Economic and Social Structure of the Russia of Today [Struttura Economica e Sociale della Russia d’oggi]. This work is of great importance and represented the highest point of Bordiga’s intriguing analysis of the Russian Revolution, with its double character as a bourgeois and proletarian rev with its isolation leading to the strangling of the proletarian one. The chosen segment is very short, but crucial nevertheless, as it contains key parts of the whole argument. We recommend, after reading this extract, reading the larger translation made available by Libri Incogniti.
The Solution of Bukharin by Amadeo Bordiga, 1956-12
Translation of the chapters 111, 112 and 113 of Economic and Social Structure of the Russia of Today, Amadeo Bordiga. Traduction française: STRUCTURE ÉCONOMIQUE ET SOCIALE DE LA RUSSIE D’AUJOURD’HUI. 2° partie : “Développement des rapports de production après la révolution bolchevique” (1956-57). Published in italian in Il Programma Comunista N° 25 (december 1956). When later Stalin was asked which fraction was worse, Left or Right, he replied that they were both worse and he made it clear that his plan was to crush both of them. In the meantime, what was the “Stalin” fraction? It was the one that consisted in not having a tendency, in not respecting principles, in administering the state for the state, in governing Russia for Russia, in replacing the position of class and the international position with a national and then imperial position: even assuming that neither Stalin nor his followers were originally aware of it.
It seems strange to those who write History “by taking an interest in people” that, from 1927, the right and the left came together to engage in an unequal struggle against the “leadership”. It would be strange to think that in insulting Stalin (ten times less than it should have), the Left was insulting a Right deviation in the theses from which Stalin, true weather vane of politics, had drawn before drawing, as we shall see, from the doctrine and theses of the Left But it is not strange if one makes history by the school of Marx and Lenin and not in the manner of Tecoppa. The explanation does not lie in Joseph Stalin’s “maffioso character”, but it rather another proof that the revolution had been historically “shortened” from a double revolution to a bourgeois-only revolution, wherein the latter the leaders cut each other’s heads to steal ideas and brains.
Trotsky himself, tied to the traditions of this struggle, devalued the “Right” even in his subsequent works, and he failed to understand the truth: that the Left and the Right were both on the ground of the Marxist principles, and that the “Center”, in each of its successive turning points in Russian as well as international politics, moved away a little more each time.
Trotsky has the immense merit of having, since 1923, individualized this demonstration which was to kill the Marxist party which alone had seized power: the handling of the apparatus of State, cruel and cold machine built to exert the terror on the class enemy, against the party apparatus – and such a pathological crisis stemmed from the retreat of the external revolutionary forces and the mistrust of an overwhelming non-proletarian population towards these revolutionary forces. On this question, the Italian left was completely with Trotsky – but for motives that have nothing to do with later “Trotskyism”. These episodes of abuse did not hurt the non-Marxist demand for “democratic respect for grassroots consultation”, they hurt the Marxist doctrine that the revolutionary dictatorship does not have as physical and concrete subject the people, nor even the national working class in general, but the international and historical communist party.
The path of the revolution that retreated from the socialist revolution to the bourgeois revolution was then marked by the maneuvers inflicted by history – and not by the caprice of the “non-collegiate” Stalin, nor by the defamed “capitulators of the Right” – at the machine of the Russian state. When Right and Left saw that most of the Bolshevik tradition and world communism was in danger, they united, but belatedly, after having suffered the end of the Curiatii – in the order Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin – in the struggle against the Stalinist counter-revolution that ultimately killed them.
So let us not be astonished if we rehabilitate Bukharin, not of the accusation of having been an agent of the foreign bourgeoisies — a charge that the disgusting exterminators themselves had to swallow as the insane who eat their own shit — but of the strong criticisms that Trotsky himself addressed to the famous “Enrich yourselves!”.
Soviet collective farmers
Marxist Appeal to the Dialectics
The first exigence of the Soviet Republic was to survive, either by means of the world revolution or by the “existential” means of the Russian State and the people of Russia; and this demand dominates the terrible historical dilemma of 1926. We showed in due time that if Bukharin followed Stalin in this historical orientation it was because he conceived of this withdrawal as a strengthening of Russia in view only of a gigantic “revolutionary” war against all the capitalist states that were trampling on the European working class. And it must be said that even Stalin proclaimed such a perspective on the eve of the Second Imperialist Conflict in which he had the brilliant idea of applying the same policy against the imperialist states as he had used against the internal “fractions”: exterminate them in several stages and remain the sole victor like Horatius Cocles! Strayed out of the way of the party and of the doctrine towards which he manifested a congenital impotence once he could no longer “steal” the ideas from the corpses, Stalin, once dead, paid dearly for all this by the humiliation that he received from those who the State Monsters of Capital did not want to kill but to imitate in a common race to the exploitation of the world, hand in hand, even if they have the faith of the thieves of Pisa .
So the economic problem is to survive. Which means, as we have said, finding a formula to truly connect industry and land — and we know the meaning of the transition from the formula of War Communism to the formula of the NEP, from the first to the second stage. It is now a question of understanding the development between the second and the third stage, stages of which we have given this series.
Center, Left, and Right were, in 1927, firmly attached to the theory of Lenin: that agriculture under the form of small enterprises is the death of the socialist revolution.
Lenin was indeed forced to accept, from a Marxist viewpoint, the anti-Marxist programme of the Socialist-Revolutionaries. He accepted this without hiding it, without ceasing to show that it was radically anti-Marxist. Only then were the Bolsheviks able to take power and lay the bases for the foundation of the Communist Parties of the world — Paris was well worth this Mass. However, the system of petty production had expanded by itself; which means that the potential of the countryside had taken huge steps backward, both technical and political.
The formula of slavery of the peasants by the workers’ state, foolishly advanced by some members of the “Left”, had failed. From one who does not produce, first because he cannot, then also because he does not want, nothing can be gained; neither by coercion nor by expropriation nor by murder.
And yet the dilemma remained: either starve or break out of rural fragmentation.
The nationalization of the land, and even more the statization of land ownership, serves only to prevent the formation of a new agrarian “great property”. Unfortunately, for the same reason, it ends up preventing the passage of the small to the big “enterprise”, and it locks the land in the technical limitations of its culture. But everyone wants the big agricultural enterprise that the industry could develop by providing it with new equipment – on the condition that the industrial workers be fed!
Trotsky and Zinoviev remain on the ground of Lenin: to pass, without coercion if possible, the very small peasant enterprise to enterprises where the collective work is directed by the State (the sovkhozes), that is to say with the State-owned land and the State’s exercise of capital (and so they are for intense industrialization).
Stalin wants to allow, by denationalizing the land, the reform of vast land possessions where a big farmer organizes collective production, obviously with employees, the rent going to the owner.
Bukharin, Stalin, and Voroshilov among a group of delegates to the Fourth All-Union Congress of Soviets, Moscow 1927
“Enrich yourselves!”
Bukharin defends, like the Left, the legal nationalization and is not for free property. The latter is a safeguard position not to fall back into the past and not lose power. But he understands that for big industry you need big capital. He sees that the industry can hardly start producing manufactured consumer goods (in addition to the production of goods for military use, necessary for the coming conflict, for him “offensive” – his dream rejected by Lenin at the time of Brest-Litovsk), at most it can produce capital goods to expand the industry itself, but not to transform agriculture. His formula is that the land remains in the state but the agrarian capital is formed outside of it.
Trade and the N.E.P. had already given rise to capital accumulation, but in the hands of traders, speculators who were no longer legally smugglers but Nepmen, hated by the peasants (but mostly because of the reactionary attachment of the latter to the management of the plot). This capital, threatened both socially and politically, is sterile from the point of view of production and the improvement of its technical potential.
Bukharin, who was often mocked by his master Lenin, knows his Capital perfectly. He knows that the classical primitive accumulation was born of the agrarian rent, as in England and elsewhere, and it is from this origin that the “bases” of socialism were born. He is nourished by other correct theories: that it is madness to think of having a tremendously expanding business, to treat in a mercantile form, as Trotsky justifies it, the industrial production itself, and not to see the growth of capitalist forms, state or private, but always capitalist. If in industry passing from private forms to state forms represent a progress in the countryside, yet there is no capital, neither private nor owned by the State, it is laughable to think that one can have not only socialism but even simply the statization of capital.
Bukharin is in line not only with Marx but also with Lenin. In the countryside you have to go from form 2 to form 3: from peasant petty production to private capitalism.
The land remains in the State, and the peasant rich “in land” disappears (it is not true that Bukharin and his people defended the kulak), but it is the “farmer of the State” that appears and the latter, with its working capital and its employees (in forms which are not radically different from the wage-earning of State-controlled and then owned factories), it produces on its own land a very large mass of products for the general economy, and it pays the rent to the state and no longer to the former landowner.
For the size of the average enterprise to grow it is needed, clearly, that the average enterprise capital grows as well as the number of rural proletarians. This result cannot be achieved if the agrarian entrepreneur does not accumulate and become larger. Another correct thesis, firm in the intelligent mind of Bukharin, was this: no State has the function of “building” and organizing, but only of forbidding, or of stopping forbidding. By ceasing to forbid the accumulation of social agrarian capital (Marx: the capital that is accumulated by individuals is only part of the social capital) the communist state takes a shorter route to climb the scale of forms, the ladder of Lenin.
The formula, the form of social structure that emerged from history, the kolkhoz, leads less rapidly from peasant fragmentation than the solution proposed by Trotsky (and Lenin), and especially that of Bukharin – and by affirming this we do not say that there was a choice between three possibilities when the controversy exploded. And this formula of the kolkhoz was not invented by Stalin, who was only a fabricator of formulas a posteriori with demagogic effect in which there is no genius (which needs parties and not heads in modern history, and perhaps ever) but great political force.
Yes, the brave Bukharin shouted: “Enrich yourselves!” But Stalin did much worse and was about to shout: “Make money from the land! Leave us only the industrial State, the armed force!”. He did not understand that whoever has the land has the State.
The phrase of Bukharin, which everyone remembers without being able to reconstruct its doctrine (it is difficult to do so from the texts), has this scope: “We open the doors of the land of the State to you; enrich yourselves with capital of the agrarian enterprise, and the moment we expropriate you from what you have accumulated will arrive more quickly, passing also in the countryside to step four: State Capitalism”.
For the fifth step, Socialism, one needs neither laws nor Congress debates, but only one force: the World Revolution. Bukharin did not understand it then and this was serious.
Stalin used Bukharin’s thesis to defeat the Marxist Left. When Bukharin saw that history pushed Stalin not to choose routes to economic Socialism but to bring the political state back to the capitalist functions, both internal and external, there was no longer any difference between the Right and the Left, nothing remained right of the Center, and all the revolutionary Marxists were, for reasons of principle much deeper and more powerful, against Stalin. They were certainly vanquished, but they belong to the fertile series of all crushed revolutions whose revenge will come, a revenge that can only be global.
