Cecil Woodham-Smith - The Reason Why

This is a cracking history read. Cecil Woodham-Smith mined the archives, unpublished memoirs and long forgotten correspondence to retell the story of the Charge of the Light Brigade. What she brings to the story is context - and by this I don't mean the grand historical narrative of the clash of nation states and nineteenth century empires, but the context of the aristocratic world within which the Crimean War was fought and the Charge took place. It is a startlingly strange world. One where unbelievably wealthy aristocrats can do know wrong and bear no criticism. One where personal feuds are far more important than military success and Generals can lead their men to doom, but not fight with them. 

The Charge has often been discussed, and its principle figures are well known. All of them are odious, and all of them were terrible soldiers. Lord Cardigan, who commanded the Brigade and led the Charge is perhaps the most odious - that's certainly how Woodham-Smith portrays him. Vain, mean and prejudiced, its actually hard not to wish he had died under the Russian guns, or at least shot in a dark tent by his own men. But the latter would not have happened as Cardigan spent much of the War in luxury on his private yacht, missing important battles because of over-sleeping. 

Lord Lucan and Lord Raglan, are perhaps slightly less odious, though only just. Woodham-Smith would write an excellent history of the Irish Famine, but this earlier book also gives a brief account, not least because during Lucan's role as Lord Lieutenant of Mayo he evicted thousands of people during the Famine, surly condemning most of them to death. Lucan and Raglan are only slightly less awful than Cardigan, but they were also incompetent as were many of those in their class around them during the Crimea. Woodham-Smith's focus is on the Charge and the individuals in command, I'd have liked more on the British Army leadership's collective incompetence towards the whole force during the War, though perhaps Woodham-Smith's earlier book on Florence Nightingale rectifies this.

Woodham-Smith strongly implies that the communication failures that led to the Charge lie primarily in the personal hatreds at the heart of the aristocratic leadership. With her portrayal of Lord Cardigan as an incompetent buffoon she perhaps leads the reader to overly blame him as an individual for the disaster. Had the British Army got rid of Cardigan when they should have it is likely the disastrous Charge would not have taken place and we'd have all been spared that terrible patriotic poem. But the wider failures of the Army would likely still have happened, not least the failure to follow up the successes at Alma. 

That said, this is not really a book about the Crimean War, but the personalities and events that led to the Charge. As such there's surprisingly little about the ordinary soldier here. They usually appear as a victim of Cardigan's bullying and it would be interesting to read more on the War from their angle. Woodham-Smith also makes no attempt to explore the imperialist context of the war, or its consequences. But that was not her ambition. That said, this is great read - no matter how much you dislike the aristocracy and the ruling class they represented, you'll be shocked by Woodham-Smith's expose of their lives and behaviour here. Given the sort of people who ran the British Army, its seems unbelievable that the British ever had an Empire at all. As such this is an entertaining and infuriating read. But if you're looking for a deeper analysis you will have to go elsewhere.

Related Reviews

Woodham-Smith - The Great Hunger, Ireland 1845-9

V.I.Lenin - The State and Revolution

Lenin's State and Revolution is a remarkable work. It is likely the only book of Marxist theory that was written during a revolution that deals with the fundamental political questions of that revolution. It was written while Lenin was in temporary exile in Finland having fled a temporary burst of anti-Bolshevik reaction on the part of the Provisional Government in the late Summer of 1917. It bears the hallmark of intense engagement with Marx's writing on the State and the pressure of revolutionary organising.

As the title suggests the key question of the book is the state and Lenin looks at Marx's writings on two revolutionary moments - the 1848 revolution and the Paris Commune to understand the tasks of the revolutionary movement in 1917. My Penguin edition has a sneering introduction by the historian Robert Service who mocks Lenin's politics and writing in State and Revolution. Service claims that no one would have read and understood S&R in 1917 as it required an engagement with classical Marxist texts that few would have even heard about. What Service doesn't comprehend is that Lenin is clearly writing the book in order to clarify his own ideas, in order to win them within the Bolshevik party. 

As such Lenin repeatedly tackles the key question of the role of the state from different directions. He begins with Marx and Engels assertion that the state is the "product of the irreconcilability of class contradictions" and "arises where, when and to the extent that class contradictions objectively cannot be reconciled". This leads him into a critique those in the Russian Revolution who think that classes can be reconciled by the state itself, and in turn to Karl Kautsky's "distortion of Marxism" which denies that "the state is an organ of class rule." 

Lenin's discussions on the Paris Commune cannot be reduced simply to understanding the role of the state and emphasising Marx's argument that the state must be smashed. He also explores it fo context on what a workers' state must do - i.e. be "not a parliamentary but a working institution", tackling the parliamentarians who would get elected but leave the real business of the state to others, "behind the scenes" without accountability or control. Lenin writes:

The Commune replaces the venal and rotten parliamentarianism of bourgeois society with institutions in which freedom of opinion and discussion do not degenerate into deception, for the parliamentarians themselves have to work, have to execute their own laws, have to test their results in real life and to answer directly to their electors. Representative institutions remain, but parliamentarianism does not exist here as a special system, as the division of labour between the legislative and the executive, as a privileged position for the deputies. We cannot imagine democracy, even proletarian democracy, without representative institutions, be we can and must imagine democracy without parliamentarianism if our criticisms of bourgeois society are not mere empty words for us, if the aspiration to overthrow the rule of the bourgeoisie is our serious and sincere desire.

Since the state is a antagonistic institution of class rule, the workers' state is the same. Suppressing the old ruling class and the capitalists, in the interest of the majority of society (workers and peasants in the case of Russia). Here Lenin argues for the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" - the idea that in the aftermath of revolution, the reality of the socialist state is one that oppresses the counter-revolutionary minority - the old capitalist class. This concept is one that Service finds particularly repugnant. But for Marx, and Lenin, the state must whither away alongside the class antagonisms themselves. Only then can people live and become "accustomed to observing the elementary rules of social intercourse... without compulsion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for compulsion which is called the state."

Lenin's polemic, at it's heart, is a powerful working through of the Marxist theory of the state written in the midst of revolution. It is easy to bemoan what is missing - the chapters on the "Russian experience" of 1905 and 1917 were never written and one can only imagine how they might have been useful to generations of revolutionaries since 1917. But don't let this prevent you reading it - there is so much here that can guide us today. Recently I read an interview with two Sudanese socialists grappling with the same concepts that were posed to Lenin in 1917 by the actuality of revolution. In their interview they both quoted liberally from State and Revolution. No greater tribute to this work can be made.

Related Reviews

Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky
Lenin - Will the Bolsheviks Maintain Power?
Lenin - The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution 1905-1907
Marx - The Civil War in France

Kevin Murphy - Revolution and Counterrevolution: Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory

In the aftermath of the disintegration of the Soviet Union archives opened up allowing historians much easier access to a mass of material that had been collected during the Revolution and post-Revolutionary eras. Kevin Murphy's fascinating book is the result of a close study of the material pertaining to a single metalworking factory in Moscow in the 20th century. The detail is based on reports from police spies, radical newspapers, factory bulletins and personal memoires. It's a rich study of how the process of revolution, and then counterrevolution, was experienced by ordinary working people.

For revolutionary socialists the most fascinating part of the book will undoubtedly be the sections dealing with the factory workers during 1917, the year of the revolution. Due to weaknesses in organisation the Bolsheviks were less strong in Moscow than in Petrograd, and this is reflected in the politics and allegiance of the workers in the factory. In particular the Social Revolutionaries [SR] are elected as delegates from the factory. Nonetheless the workers take a full part in the revolution, striking, joining protests and forcing massive demands from their management. Murphy reproduces a 16 point list of workers' demands that demonstrate both the confidence of the workers and how economic and political issues are coming to the fore for ordinary people. The first demands if for a "permanent space" for factory meetings, lectures and "cultural-educational activities". The second is for the night-shift to only do a seven hour shift, but be paid for an eight hour day. There are demands that cover health issues - baths and steam rooms, ventilation, toilets and so on, sick pay, maternity leave and pay, and holidays. 

As Murphy comments:

The variety, clarity and force of demands demonstrate workers' increased confidence and organisation. The need for a regular meeting place shows that the employees' top priority was the strengthening of their own organisation and the special demands raised in the interest of women illustrate workers' willingness to be more inclusive. While revolutionary egalitarianism was an important factor in this process, a practical consideration also drove such demands: the prerevolutionary demographic trend toward a more diverse workforce continued, and by May 1917, the concerns of 439 women simply could not be ignored.

As the revolution progressed there were intense political arguments with Bolshevik workers' fighting to win the support of the wider factory. We get a glimpse of the intensity of some of these debates. In late June, SR leaders spoke on "War until Victory". A Bolshevik Rosa Zemliachka, responded "Comrades! Many voices have rung out for continuing the war. Therefore whoever wants war should immediately sign up as a volunteer for the front lines." Murphy says that "after prolonged silence, the SR leaders left the tribune in defeat." Such political principals and systematic attempts to win workers in the factory led to success for the Bolsheviks, as Murphy explains:

The Bolsheviks did not just react to events: instead the party provided leadership for the movement. After sending in several talented organisers, the Bolsheviks fought for - and won - the ideological argument for revolution and Soviet power, as they did among workers throughout the empire.

But Murphy's meticulous study of the source material also demonstrates how, as the international revolution failed to materialise and Russia was isolated the rise of a Stalinist bureaucracy led to a break with the revolutionary ideals of the past. The Civil War decimated the factory both in terms of workforce and its ability to work. For most workers it became a case of "personal survival", and as the counterrevolution triumphed workers were unable to fight for their own collective interests. During the NEP era workers did manage to keep up pressure over pay and conditions, but by 1927/1928 Stalin's solid grip of power meant that workers' were once again being driven solely for the surplus value their labour could create and dissent was crushed. There are two markers for this that I'll note. Firstly the position of women was forced backward into an subordinate one and most of the gains of the revolution were destroyed. 

Murphy documents this process:

By mid-NEP, however, party leaders at the factory level perceived the special emphasis on women's issues as an obstacle to the pursuit of their main priority. Pressured from above to meet production quotas, management and the party apparatus started to view the female workforce strictly in productivist terms and, therefore, as as problem.

But Murphy is careful to emphasis the way the women in the factory played an active role in the revolution movement that is "hidden from history" and celebrates that this took place "in a society devastated by seven years of war and foreign intervention". 

The second marker is the repression of dissent, both within the Communist party and the systematic destruction of the norms of democracy in factory meetings. The participatory (if frequently raucous) meetings of the revolutionary era are replaced by shouting down and demonization of opponents. By the late 1920s, "personal survival... had eclipsed the politics of collective action". By the 1930s the ability to collectively organise had been destroyed. The accounts from this era - of hunger, coercion and so on are painful to read, contrasting as they do with the hope of the revolutionary epoch.

By 1932 the relationship between rulers and ruled had become firmly entrenched and there would be no return to workers' militancy. The dull drone of uninterrupted productivity drives and the seemingly endless demands for more sacrifice and austerity were not ephemeral phenomena, but now comprised the basic features of the Stalinist system. The revolutionary era, during which workers had repeatedly and confidently asserted their collective power, had now come to a decisive end.

By placing the experience of workers at the point of production at the heart of the story Kevin Murphy's book is a singular account of the highest point of workers struggle in history. It is also essential in helping understand the Stalinist counterrevolution as it felt in the factory. The archives that made is possible must hold endless more fascinating material. As I write, Putin's war machine drives Russian imperialism further into Ukraine. In the run up to that war Putin made clear that he saw the Lenin era as the origins of the Ukraine problem - this work shows how different the ideas and hopes of ordinary Russians in the Revolutionary era were far from the interests of Putin and his regime. Let's hope the spirit revives.

Related Reviews

Sherry - Russia 1917: Workers' Revolution and the Festival of the Oppressed
Smith - Red Petrograd
Serge - Year One of the Russian Revolution
Trotsky - The History of the Russian Revolution

Tony Cliff - State Capitalism in Russia

If you are a socialist who spends enough time on social media it is very clear that there is a resurgence of what might be called neo-Stalinism - a celebration of the Soviet Union as a Communist society. This can manifest in something like a cult of Stalin and an absolute denigration of critics of the Soviet Union from the left - in particular vehement attacks on Trotskyism. For most of my political life this has not been a feature of any but the saddest of socialist sects. The period since the collapse of the Soviet bloc has seen the Trotskyist left try to rescue the real legacy of the Russian Revolution, and the right attempt to denigrate 1917 by suggesting that Leninism led directly to Stalinism.

However Trotskyism itself arose out of sharp ideological battles with the then dominant Communist Parties. From the 1930s, small groups of revolutionaries struggled to understand the nature of the Soviet Union and how this related to the fight for workers' power. These battles however were not just external, they were integral to the Trotskyist movement and, especially after Trotsky's death, revolutionaries argued among themselves about what sort of society the Soviet Union was. The socialist tradition that I belong to, saw Russia, not as Communist, nor as a type of workers' state, but rather as State Capitalist.

Annoyed by neo-Stalinism, I returned to Tony Cliff's classic work of Marxism, State Capitalism in Russia, in order to revisit debates and arguments about the nature of Stalinism. State Capitalism in Russia as a book evolved out of some earlier works. The one discussed here is Bookmarks' 1988 edition, published as the East European regimes were collapsing with an introduction and post-script by Chris Harman.

Cliff begins by discussing the extent to which Russia under Stalin was a break with the revolutionary society that sprang out of the Russian Revolution. Cliff demonstrates with a multitude of examples and statistics the immense gulf that there was between the two, and how this gradually developed through the 1920s. In September 1929, for instance, he quotes the Communist Party Central Committee resolving that workers' committees:

may not intervene directly in the running of the plant or endeavour in any way to replace plant administration; they shall by all means help to secure one-man management, increase production, plant development , and thereby, improvement of the material conditions of the working class.

It is a very different idea from the sense of workers' power at the heart of the Bolsheviks' arguments in 1917. Cliff finds many examples. These include the removal of safeguards for women's labour, the vast number of slave labourers in labour camps, the introduction of "turnover taxes" that Cliff argues "being an indirect, retrogressive tax, openly contradicts the original programme of the Bolshevik Party" and the "subordination of man to property" by the new economic regime whereby "it becomes clear that, in Stalinist Russia, the individual is rated much lower than property".

In Cliff's analysis of the transformation of property relations under capitalism, he juxtaposes the punishment for crimes against property and persons. I was reminded of how English capitalism introduced the Black Act to do something similar in the 18th century. Cliff comments that:

This religion of property-worship subjects even the weakest members of the community - children - to it. As we have seen, the maximum punishment of kidnapping a child, is a mere three years' imprisonment, whereas the punishment meted out to a child for stealing is much greater.

Some, of course, could steal. Cliff shows how economically and politically a new class of bureaucrats developed whom he argues drove the restoration of capitalist relations in Russia, encouraging the accumulation of wealth for the sake of accumulation. The first half of the book is a powerful depiction of how the Soviet Union broke from the past, the second half is a powerful use of the Marxist method to understand the new regime. Cliff writes:

The statistics at our disposal show conclusively that although the bureaucracy enjoyed a privileged position in the period preceding the Five-Year Plan, it can on no account be said that in the majority of cases it received surplus value from the labour of others. It can just as conclusively be said that since the introduction of the Five-Year Plans, the bureaucracy's income consisted to a large extent of surplus value.

Cliff points to the coercive nature of the relations between bureaucracy and worker. He notes how the industrialisation of Russia took place at a phenomenal rate, but this is comparable than the industrialisation of (say) England as capitalism developed. The key thing however are the social relations that underpin this development, and Cliff points to the human misery that has resulted in Russia from the way in which this industrialisation was driven. Cliff explains that: 

Every form of social production needs the co-ordination of the different people participating in it; in other words, every form of social production needs disciple. Under capitalism this discipline confronts the worker as an external coercive power, as the power which capital has over him. Under socialism discipline will be the result of consciousness, it will become the habit of a free people. In the transition period it will be the outcome of the unity of the two elements - consciousness and coercion.

Cliff continues that the difference in Russia is that there is no indication that the coercion element of Russian society is declining in favour of the consciousness element. As a workers' state developed you should see coercion "subordinated to elements of consciousness until such a time as social solidarity, harmonious relations between people and education will render coercion in the process of production completely superfluous.

So what sort of society was Russia after the First Five Year Plan if it wasn't a workers' state? It was at that point that 

the bureaucracy sought to create a proletariat and to accumulate capital rapidly. In other words, it was now that the bureaucracy sought to realise the historical mission of the bourgeoisie as quickly as possible. A quick accumulation of capital on the basis of a low level of production, of a small national income per capita, must put a burdensome pressure on the consumption of the masses, on their standard of living. Under such conditions, the bureaucracy transformed into a personification of capital, for whom the accumulation of capital is the be all and end-all here, must get rid of all remnant of workers control, must substitute conviction in the labour process by coercion, must atomise the working class, must force all social-political life into a totalitarian mould.

Cliff explains

Russia presents us with the synthesis of a form of property born of a proletarian revolution and relations of production resulting from a combination of backward forces of production and the pressure of world capitalism.

This last point is crucial. Under capitalism the drive to accumulation wealth for the sake of it, is caused by the competition between blocks of capital. In the Russian economy this didn't exist, but production in the Soviet Union was driven by competition with an externality - the Western economies. In particular this was military competition and Cliff shows how this transformed the Russian economy, driving accumulation. From a Marxist point of view, Cliff argues: 

The Stalinist state is in the same position vis-à-vis the total labour time of Russian society as a factory owner vis-à-vis the labour of his employees. In other words, the division of labour is planned. But what is it that determines the actual division of total labour time in Russian society? If Russia had not to compete with other countries, this division would be absolutely arbitrary. But as it is, Stalinist decisions are based on factors outside of control, namely the world economy, world competition. From this point of view the Russian state is in a similar position to the owner of a single capitalist enterprise competing with other enterprises.

He continues:

The fact that the Russian economy is directed towards the production of certain use values does not make it a socialist economy, even though the latter would also be directed towards the production of (very different) use values. On the contrary, the two are complete opposites. The increasing rate of exploitation, and the increasing subordination of the workers to the means of production in Russia, accompanied as it is by a great production of guns but not butter, leads to an intensification, not a lessening of the oppression of the people. The law of value is thus seen to be the arbiter of the Russian economic structure as soon as it is seen in the concrete historical situation of today – the anarchic world market.

Thus the nature of State Capitalist Russia arose out of the reality of proletarian revolution, and the isolation of Russia within a sea of capitalism following the failure of revolution elsewhere. The export of the State Capitalist regime to Eastern Europe did not end that isolation, because it did not create new workers' states from below, but was a top down process. The Soviet Union then became a new imperialist power, its economic priorities and nature determined by global competition.

Why is any of this important? The Soviet Union has, after all, long since vanished. There are two reasons. Firstly, as Chris Harman argued, State Capitalism was the theory that fuelled revolutionary practice. It demonstrated that revolutions had to be built from below, and arise out of the self emancipation of working people. They could not be exported from other states. Secondly it shows that Stalin was not a hero, but the living embodiment of a particular class interest that crushed working people in the interest of the bureaucratic class - certainly not a hero. Finally, State Capitalism in Russia demonstrated the power of Marxism and the Marxist method for understanding concrete situations. The book is a powerhouse of argument, bringing statistics, historical documents and revolutionary politics together. It is a testament to Tony Cliff's clarity of thought, and remains something that ought to be continue to be read by revolutionaries today - even those who have fallen into the trap of Stalinism's crude politics.

Related Reviews

Birchall - Tony Cliff: A Marxist for His Time
Cliff - Trotsky: Towards October
Cliff - Trotsky: The Sword of Revolution
Cliff - Lenin: All Power to the Soviets
Cliff - Lenin: Revolution Besieged
Tony Cliff & Donny Gluckstein - Marxism and Trade Union Struggle, The General Strike of 1926

Alexandra Kollontai - Writings from the Struggle: Selected & Translated by Cathy Porter

Alexandra Kollontai was a fascinating revolutionary. Born into a wealthy Russian liberal family, she came to embrace revolutionary Marxism and was active in both the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. During the Russian Revolution she was a leading Bolshevik agitator, active on their Central Committee, and became a trusted figure in the immediate post 1917 Soviet government. Never afraid to raise her differences of opinion and go her own way she did, on occasion, disagree fundamentally with Lenin and this led to a rift between them. A distinguished old Bolshevik, she survived Stalin's purges and murders of former comrades and served the Soviet Union as a diplomat - which perhaps explains her survival.

Cathy Porter's biography of Kollontai, recently updated and reissued - remains the single best account of her life. Now Porter has released this collection of articles and extracts by Kollontai, and they are a breathtaking insight into her ideas and the early socialist movement. Kollontai wrote leaflets, pamphlets and articles that agitated for socialist ideas - in Russia and in German exile. There are many different examples here, which showcase Kollontai's talents. But she also wrote on subjects that were rarely discussed within the socialist movement - sexuality, love and interpersonal relations. 

I enjoyed Porter's editing here, because she weaves Kollontai's work into the story of her life. Each piece is part of the wider narrative and I found it made them more accessible. All of the chosen pieces by Kollontai are fascinating, though several stand out. As someone with an interest in the German left, I was fascinated to read Kollontai's diary-like account of the outbreak of World War One and the capitulation of the German revolutionary left to its nationalist government. 

I rush to the party headquarters to ask how soon the International can be convened. Haase, the leader of the socialist group in the Reichstag, is there on his own. "Are you joking?" he says. "War is inevitable. People have gone mad, there's nothing we can do!" At the Women's Bureau, I ask Luise Zietz of the party Executive what instructions they have received... She looks at me coldly. "We've protested and demonstrated, but we must do our duty when our country is in danger," she says, and I look her in the eye and realise I am not longer a comrade but a Russian...  

With the help of Karl Leibneckt, she and her son and other Russian socialists are able to leave Germany. In Leibneckt and Rosa Luxembourg, and soon Lenin, her despair quickly turns to anger and agitation. Meeting Luxemburg a month after war broke out Kollontai describes Luxemburg's outlook: "She hasn't lost touch with the workers, and says most are against the war. Her clearsightedness is heartening, and her merciless sarcasm puts much in its proper place."

During the war Kollontai writes some of her most powerful and influential articles. A 1916 pamphlet "Who Needs the War" is read by an estimated 7 million German and Russian soldiers. Reading it in this collection its lost none of its anger and power. In fact its the enduring nature of her writing that makes much of it so exciting to read today. Kollontai's 1906 pamphlet "Who are the Social Democrats and What do they Stand For" is a brilliant introduction to revolutionary politics. It was reprinted in the midst of the Russian Revolution and used internationally to explain the politics of the Bolsheviks. Some of it could be reused today in many parts of the world to put the case for socialism, with little or no changes:

Under the capitalist system, factories produce ever greater quantities of goods in the fight for profits. Then as industries gain new world markets, nations are drawn into wars with each other to steal more colonies from which to extract unimaginable wealth. Each major capitalist power seeks a world monopoly for its goods. Imperialist wars for markets and colonies will continue so long as the capitalist system exists. And the deadlier these wars are, the more clearly workers will see that they must take the economy into their hands if humanity is to survive. The day is fast approaching when these capitalist crises and imperialist wars will force us to choose whether we perish, or we overthrow the bourgeoisie to step over the threshold into socialism.

Later she continues on the power of the working class:

As the proletariat grows larger, industry is run by ever fewer capitalists. Most workers have never so much as glimpsed their employers. Modern production methods are making the gentlemen entrepreneurs' role in the factories increasingly irrelevant, and most are run now by foremen, managers and engineers. The less spiders there are, the easier to destroy their webs. If the bosses should all drop dead one fine day, the world would barely notice. Whereas when workers decide to strike, life comes to a stop, as happened in 1905, when strikers brought the autocracy to its knees.

But Cathy Porter shows that Kollontai was more than a polemicist. In fact she is a deeply thoughtful and original thinker. Her writings on sex and relationships were often too much even for the revolutionaries, as they saw them as a distraction. Though Kollontai saw them more in the context of winning women to the revolutionary movement by talking about the sort of future that they might have under a socialist society. This is a future where women have been liberated from the drudgery of life through the socialisation of child care and food preparation. Kollontai was attacked by some who thought that the "Bolsheviks would take away their children", but this is crude and far from Kollontai's real ideas. Two pieces in this collection illustrate this well, one an essay from 1913 "The New Woman". Porter explains the significance, "people's longing for more fulfilling sexual relationships could only be realised when they were free from the alienation born of capitalist property relations." The New Woman piece explores this by examining in detail the changing way that women were depicted in Russian literature and then contrasting this with the reality of working class life.

A second example is a short story Three Generations published in the aftermath of 1917. In it she depicts the contrasting experiences of two women from the revolution, a woman and her daughter, the latter of whom is enjoying multiple sexual encounters with different partners. Her mother is perplexed. Innovatively Kollontai places herself in the story, and the reader can see this both as a description of life after 1917 in a rapidly changing world and one were Kollontai is also working through the meaning of 1917 for working class women. It's a fascinating and thoughtful conclusion to a collection of essays that everyone interested in revolutionary thought should read. Cathy Porter's work in putting this together should be celebrated and I highly recommend the book.

Related Reviews 

Porter - Alexandra Kollontai: A Biography
Davis - A Rebel's Guide to Alexandra Kollontai
Allen - Alexander Shlyapnikov 1885-1937: Life of an Old Bolshevik

  

V.I. Lenin - The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution 1905-1907

In the aftermath of the 1905 Russian Revolution revolutionary socialists engaged in major debates about the nature of the Revolution and its politics. A significant discussion took place around the nature of agrarian change. Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks, argued that because Social Democrats had the wrong position on the agrarian question they were unable to lead the peasant masses during the 1905 Revolution, and significantly undermined the whole movement. This short book is Lenin's exploration of the debates within Social Democracy (by which he means the broad revolutionary movement) and his polemical response. Unfortunately for the movement, all but one copy of the book was destroyed by the Tsarist censor and the text available today was only published in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917, because of the continued significance of agrarian discussions.

He is very clear on the importance of discussions about agrarian change. Arguing that there are two "streams" of agrarian evolution - that of Peasant and Landlord farming - Lenin says

The conflict of interests between the peasants and the landlords which runs like a scarlet thread through the whole history of Post-Reform Russia and constitutes the most important economic basis of our revolution, is a struggle for one or the other type of bourgeois agrarian evolution. Only by clearly understanding the difference between these two types and the bourgeois character of both, can we correctly explain the agrarian question in the Russian revolution and grasp the class significance of the various agrarian programmes put forward by the different parties.

The "pivot" Lenin argues is the "feudal latifundia", these will either eliminated in a revolutionary manner by peasant farmers or they will be gradually transformed into Junker estates".

In making his argument Lenin deploys an incredible array of arguments. He begins with a historical overview of the agrarian question, then summarises Marx's discussions on surplus value, rent and agriculture and, following this, critiques the multiple positions within the Russian political system, including his own comrades. In particularly he challenges leading Marxist intellectuals like Kautsky and Plekhanov, as well as a number of others whom he has less time for. 

Given the urgency of the issue it might seem strange that Lenin (and indeed other Marxists) devoted such time and space to complex discussions around Marxist concepts like differential and absolute rent from land. The importance however lies in the implications of theoretical conclusions for revolutionary practice. Lenin chastises other social democrats for ignoring the Marxist concept of absolute rent (crudely the rent accrued as a result of monopoly ownership of land). Lenin points out that 

The repudiation of absolute rent is the repudiation of the economic significance of private land ownership under capitalism. Whoever claims that only differential rent exists, inevitably arrives at the conclusion that it makes not the slightest different to the conditions of capitalist farming and of capitalist development whether the land belongs to the state or to private persons.

The significance of these debates lies in the wider discussions within the Marxist movement about the nature of revolution at the time in Russia. Almost everyone, Lenin included, believed that the coming Russian Revolution would be Bourgeois, and usher in capitalism. This, following a crude stagiest argument, would then lead to a future socialist revolution. Unlike most others though, Lenin though that the working class and peasantry needed to play a much more central and dynamic role in the revolution, pushing forward their own independent demands to strengthen the fight for socialism in the future.

For Lenin then, nationalisation of the land was not an abstract demand, but one that would both allow the peasantry and workers' movements to develop and to give them independence from the capitalist class.

The proletariat can and must support the militant bourgeoisie when the latter wages a really revolutionary struggle against feudalism. But it is not for the proletariat to support the bourgeoisie when the latter is becoming quiescent. If it is certain that a victorious bourgeois revolution in Russia is impossible without the nationalisation of the land, then it is still more certain that a subsequent turn towards the division of the land is impossible without a certain amount of “restoration”, without the peasantry (or rather, from the point of view of the presumed relations: farmers) turning towards counter revolution. The proletariat will uphold the revolutionary tradition against all such strivings and will not assist them.

Lenin's position then is not to ignore the two possible evolutionary routes for agrarian society under Russian capitalism. Instead he argues that the workers' movement cannot be "indifferent" to "one or other" outcomes:  

In fighting for a favourable outcome of the revolution we must spread among the masses a very clear understanding of what keeping to the landlord path of agrarian evolution means, what incalculable hardships (arising not from capitalism, but from the inadequate development of capitalism) it has in store for all the toiling masses. On the other hand, we must also explain the petty-bourgeois nature of the peasant revolution, and the fallacy of placing any “socialist” hopes in it.

As with much of Lenin's writing, his work on the Agrarian Programme, must be understood in the context of the moment when it was written and the debates he was having inside the revolutionary socialist movement. But reading this book today is far more than a history lesson. Russia in 1907 was a tremendously unequal society, as Lenin himself showed, "ten and a half million peasant households in European Russia own 75,000,000 dessiatins (1.09 hectares) of land. Thirty thousand... landlords each own over 500 dessiatins - altogether 70,000,000 dessiatins."

Such rural inequalities remain in many parts of the world today, and Lenin's arguments about the relationship of the workers' movements and socialists to the "peasant revolution" remain crucially important for building revolutionary Marxist organisation in the 21st century. This book thus repays reading, especially given contemporary debates about agriculture and the environment.

Related Reviews

Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky
Lenin - Will the Bolsheviks Maintain Power?
Krausz - Reconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual Biography
Kautsky - The Agrarian Question - Volume 1

Larissa Reisner - The Hammer and the Anvil

Larissa Reisner was a phenomenal Russian revolutionary activist, author and journalist. She is perhaps best known to English speaking socialists through her wonderful book Hamburg at the Barricades which is based on her experiences in Germany in the latter part of the Revolution there. Despite dying at a young age, Reisner's output was enormous, though little of it has been translated. This new collection of writing is based on new translations of her collected work kept in the British Library and is a must read for any socialist interested in the Russian Revolution and the aftermath.

The book focuses on a key battle in the Russian Civil War when the Red Army managed to turn the tide against the Whites. It was a gruesome conflict which saw the White counter-revolutionaries commit mass murder against anyone suspected of Communist sympathies, including non-combatants, women and children. Reisner reported on this war, but also took part. There is an incredible story of her own escape from interrogation by the Whites while spying on them. She also details the trials of being a refugee following the fall of Kazan, and refers in passing to many key Bolshevik fighters of the era. Her accounts of naval engagements are both exciting and moving, as she describes the bravery and horror of the underequipped, outnumbered Red Army forces inspired by revolutionary ideals to defend their revolution. This is revolutionary history that never forgets the role and the sacrifices of ordinary people.

In fact, her introduction, a deeply moving piece is geared precisely toward telling the story to those who weren't there and cannot comprehend what took place. She dedicates it to the "students of the Workers Faculty" who are, she speculates more mechanical in their understanding of revolutionary politics... and she urges them to "read to the end how it really was, from Kazan to Enzeli, the roar of victory,. the pain of defeat. On the Volga, on the River Kama and on the Caspian Sea during the Great Russian Revolution. That's all."

In his autobiography Leon Trotsky wrote about Reisner, that she "flashed across the revolutionary sky like a burning meteor, blinding many... Her sketches about the civil war are literature. With equal gusto she would write about the Ural industries and the rising of the workers in the Ruhr. She was anxious to know and to see all and to take part in everything."

The Hammer and the Anvil certainly demonstrates this. One thing that stands out is the way that Reisner shows the Revolution as a mass event - involving enormous numbers of people and ideas that swell in the hearts of millions. But she also knows that the individuals who make up the masses matter. 

There is no history whch reflects upon and appreciates the great and small feats performed daily by the sailors of the Volga Military Flotilla. The names of those who by their voluntary discipline , their intrepidity and modesty helped to created a new fleet are hardly even known. 

Of course, individuals do not make history. However, in Russia we had so few people and characters of his calibre by and large. It was so difficult for them to break through the undergrowth of old and new bureaucracy that they rarely found themselves in the real-life, life-and-death struggle... it's because the Revolution had men like this, men in the highest sense of the word, that Russia is able to rally and recover... At decisive movements they stood out from the general mass, and all of them displayed an authority - a full, genuine authority. They were aware of their heroic task and by their actions were able to rouse the rest of the wavering and pliable masses.

Reisner's genius is to make this sweeping statement real by then telling the reader of a few such individuals, such as "easy-going" Yeliseyez, "who hit a boat at a twelve mile distance from a long-range gun. With his blue eyes, and no eyelashes - singed every time the gun discharges - always fixed upon somewhere far in the distance."

Readers familiar with Trotsky will find in these pages more information on key figures - like the sailor Comrade Markin - who is referred to in Trotsky's account of these battles. In addition to writing by Reisner, the book includes other material, including biographical material on key figures, poetry and the relevant section of Trotsky's biography (particularly the famous section on his military train). The defence of Sviyazhsk, a last ditched fight against the Reds, which Trotsky played a key role in, forms a central part of these extracts and Reisner's account. It's interesting to read them side by side.

If I have one criticism of this collection its that I wanted to read more Reisner - though I appreciated the other material gathered here. Socialists interested in revolutionary history and the Civil War in particular will find much new material here. But in Reisner's writing they'll also find inspiration and, it must be said, a lesson in revolutionary journalism.

Related Reviews

Hear the editor and translator speak about Larissa Reisner and the book here.

Reisner – Hamburg at the Barricades
Serge - Memoirs of a Revolutionary
Serge - Revolution in Danger
Serge - Year One of the Russian Revolution

Leon Trotsky - Terrorism and Communism

It is fair to say that Terrorism and Communism is not one of Leon Trotsky's greatest works. That stems to my mind from the conditions in which it was written. First published in 1920 it was written in the during the hellish fighting that marked the Civil War in Russia. Following the Russian Revolution of 1917 counter-revolutionary White Armies of former Tsarist loyalists and Imperial troops from a dozen nations invaded Russia to attempt to destroy the Revolution.

Trotsky wrote Terrorism and Communism in part as he led the fight of the Red Army against the Whites. The tension, stress and heart-ache come through on every page of this polemic as he counters those socialists, in particular Karl Kautsky the leading German socialist and former revolutionary, who are effectively siding with the counter-revolutionary armies.

Kaustky argued that the Bolshevik's were wrong to seize power, that the new society was undemocratic, and that the masses in Russia were incapable of running society. His alternative view was that Russian society should have had time to develop it's economy and its democracy and experience a latter transition to socialism. Trotsky dismisses Kautsky as Utopian. The capitalist class aren't willing to give up their wealth, and in fact had engaged in a murderous war to protect it.

As for the bourgeoisie of the victorious countries, it has become inflated with arrogance, and is more than ever ready to defend its social position with the help of the bestial methods which guaranteed its victory. We have seen that the bourgeoisie is incapable of organizing the division of the booty amongst its own ranks without war and destruction. Can it, without a fight, abandon its booty altogether? The experience of the last five years leaves no doubt whatsoever on this score: if even previously it was absolutely utopian to expect that the expropriation of the propertied classes – thanks to “democracy” – would take place imperceptibly and painlessly, without insurrections, armed conflicts, attempts at counterrevolution, and severe repression, the state of affairs we have inherited from the imperialist war predetermines, doubly and trebly, the tense character of the civil war and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Kautsky himself was no longer the socialist leader he once was,

The imperialist war, which killed every form of vagueness and brought mankind face to face with the most fundamental questions, exposed all the political bankruptcy of Kautsky. He immediately became confused beyond all hope of extrication, in the most simple question of voting the War Credits. All his writings after that period represent variations of one and the same theme: “I and my muddle.” The Russian Revolution finally slew Kautsky. By all his previous development he was placed in a hostile attitude towards the November victory of the proletariat. This unavoidably threw him into the camp of the counter-revolution. He lost the last traces of historical instinct. His further writings have become more and more like the yellow literature of the bourgeois market.

Much of the book is a defence of Marxism and the revolutionary practice of Bolshevism in the face of Kautsky's criticism. There's an intriguing chapter on Marx and the Paris Commune where Trotsky shows precisely how Kautsky had abandoned his Marxism.

But for me the most interesting parts were those were Trotsky, speaking as a leading figure in the Revolution defends the practices of the Revolutionary government. For instance, he defends something that Kautsky is unable to contemplate - compulsory labour. Here is Trotsky:

The very principle of compulsory labour service is for the Communist quite unquestionable. “He who works not, neither shall he eat.” And as all must eat, all are obliged to work. Compulsory labour service is sketched in our Constitution and in our Labour Code. But hitherto it has always remained a mere principle. Its application has always had an accidental, impartial, episodic character. Only now, when along the whole line we have reached the question of the economic re-birth of the country, have problems of compulsory labour service arisen before us in the most concrete way possible. The only solution of economic difficulties that is correct from the point of view both of principle and of practice is to treat the population of the whole country as the reservoir of the necessary labour power – an almost inexhaustible reservoir – and to introduce strict order into the work of its registration, mobilisation, and utilisation.

Trotsky shows how compulsory labour isn't the draconian forced labour that Kautsky and others imply, but it is a system that does direct labour and on occasion, has to use compulsion. But, he points out, this is in the context of the great urgency caused by the economic destruction of Russia by the counter-revolutionary forces. What is interesting, and Trotsky emphasises the point, is that by and large workers (especially former soldiers) tend to be willing participants in the process - this is, of course, because they are part of an entirely new social formation. It's this latter point that Kautsky is unable to grasp - that something fundamental had changed in Russia after 1917 and that the old ways of doing things no longer fitted.

My edition of the book (Verso 2017) contains a useful, if idiosyncratic foreword by Slavoj Žižek. Žižek argues that while it is easy to crudely argue that this book demonstrates a continuum from Lenin and Trotsky to Stalin, in fact Trotsky's method in the book (and Bolshevik practice) is the exact opposite. Žižek makes a note about the "democracy" that Kautsky is obsessed with.

In such dynamic times where the situation is 'open' and extremely unstable, the role of the Communists is not to passively 'reflect' the opinion of the majority, but to instigate the working classes to mobilise their forces and thus to create a new majority.

It's precisely this dynamic that Kautsky cannot grasp, which ends up with him in the Bourgeois camp.

Sadly this isn't Trotsky's best work, in part because it is so polemical and it is very much of the moment. Trotsky is writing at the lowest moment of the counter-revolution and the Revolutionary government is, at times, close to being destroyed. Trotsky's arguments reflect that situation.

That's not to say however that the book is not worth reading. On the contrary, for those attempting to understand the fate of the Russian Revolution, this is powerful argument from one of the leading Bolsheviks in defence of the Revolution whose faith in the revolutionary masses remained undiminished.

Related Reviews

Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky
Kautsky - The Agrarian Question - Volume 1
Cliff - Revolution Besieged

Helen Rappaport - Caught in the Revolution

The Russian revolutionary year of 1917 was a world historical event that has been the subject of countless books at articles. Some of the most important works have been those that focus on the revolutionary process, bringing to life the events that took place and the role of ordinary people; workers, peasants and soldiers in making the revolution. Chief among these for those of us on the left are Leon Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution and US socialist journalist John Reed's eyewitness reportage Ten Days that Shook the World.

Less well know however are the countless reports, books and memoirs made by another group of eyewitnesses in Petrograd - the foreign communities that were there, often as part of Western diplomatic missions or representatives of foreign business interests. Some of these left detailed accounts, photographic records and even films of 1917 and many of them form the basis for Helen Rappaport's book written for the centenary year.

As a result much of the eyewitness accounts in this book will be completely new to those of us who have read lots of books about the Russian Revolution. Unfortunately those who know little about 1917 or pick up this in the hope of learning about this important event will be given a distorted view of the Revolution, mainly written by those who did much to try and stop it proceeding.

The book is at it's best when it gives a sense of the mass involvement in the Revolution. The first chapters deal with the outbreak in February, with numerous individuals swept up in the mass protests and demonstrations as strikes exploded in factories across Petrograd. The accounts of these demonstrations, pouring through the city streets, dragging these watchers with them and then confronting the state's forces - principally the Cossacks - are breathtaking to read. They give a real sense of the spontaneity, the confidence of the protesters, and the speed with which the old order was brought to its knees. The collapse of the old order is fascinating to watch through the eyes of Rappaport's commentators, not least because the majority of them are individuals who had, a few week's earlier, been enthralled to be invited to the Tsar's balls and lavish parties.

Here in lies the problem. Rappaport's eyewitnesses are precisely the class that feared genuine revolution. Most are pleased by the prospect of a "democratic" transition in Russia, but they, are universally keen to ensure that the new Russia maintains its old commitments - principally it's involvement in World War One. They fear the radicalisation of the Revolution precisely because they fear it will pull Russia out of the War and challenge their wealth and privilege.

This is very noticeable when it comes to the reports of General Kornilov's attempted coup against Kerensky. The diplomats, their wives, friends and acquaintances all want Kornilov to succeed, precisely because he will put an end to the Bolsheviks. As Florence Harper, a Canadian journalist in Petrograd wrote after Kornilov's defeat, "I was filled with blind rage. We all knew it was the last chance., The Bolsheviki were armed; the Red Guard was formed. The split was definite; Kerensky was doomed."

The problem is that Rappaport share's these prejudices. She begins by arguing that the October Revolution was a coup, and repeatedly portrays the Bolsheviks as a bloodthirsty minority who somehow trip the mass of the population into following them. Of course, given their politics and class position, those who she relies on for eyewitness accounts, tend to highlight the bloodshed, violence and killing that takes place. But rarely do they (or Rappaport) mention the poverty and hunger that drives the Revolution. Violence is solely blamed on bloodthirsty revolutionaries, and never on the oppressed who are sick to death of being exploited and treated like dirt. Given the reality of Russian society prior to 1917 it's no surprise that so many policemen were killed - but its mostly blamed on blood-lust.

Throughout 1917 Russia's continued involvement in the War helped radicalise the revolution. But rather than seeing this as a result of a country sick to death of death and suffering at the front, and privation at home, Rappaport blames this on the agitation of Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

Sadly, and this again is a consequence of her chosen source material, what is almost completely missing from this account is a sense of what the masses were doing, saying and thinking. Did none of the journalists Rappaport quote join in a meeting of the soldiers or workers? The only mass conference discussed here is one organised by Kerensky, which most of the eyewitnesses thought was dull - but why would it be anything else given it was mostly pompous establishment figures denouncing the revolutionaries. On occasion we get a glimpse of what ordinary people wanted (such as two servant girls demanding two hours off every day so they can go to the cinema). But all too frequently the eyewitnesses denounce these individuals, or the masses in general as ill-educated fools who know and understand little about events around them. The book cried out for the authentic voice of the working class Russian - not just descriptions of mass protests, but the sense of what was happening in the workplaces and barracks. Readers will have to look elsewhere for that.

Sadly this book is ruined by the anti-Bolshevik outlook of its author and the eyewitnesses she quotes. While there are occasional glimpses of wider political events, the book fails to give a real sense of the Revolution as being made by ordinary people. As such we lose the essence of the Revolution and the book becomes little more than another attack on 1917, such as those written by many of Helen Rappaport's eyewitnesses when they returned to their privileged lives back home.

Related Reviews

Smith - Red Petrograd
Rodney - The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World
Trotsky - The History of the Russian Revolution
Trotsky - Lessons of October
Sherry - Russia 1917: Workers' Revolution and the Festival of the Oppressed
Smith - Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis 1890-1928
Lenin - Will the Bolsheviks Maintain Power?
Serge - Year One of the Russian Revolution
Serge - Revolution in Danger: Writings from Russia 1919-1921

Emma Davis - A Rebel's Guide to Alexandra Kollontai

Alexandra Kollontai was one of the most fascinating and inspiring revolutionaries of the 20th century, yet today she is almost unknown. So it is marvellous that the latest in the excellent Rebel's Guide series is a short introduction to Kollontai's life and politics.

Born into the "progressive" aristocracy in Russia in 1872 she was unorthodox from a young age. She recalled she "criticised the injustice of adults and I experienced as a blatant contradiction the fact that everything was offered to me whereas so much was denied to the other children". Sent to Paris by her family who hoped it would distract her from an unsuitable marriage to an engineer, she discovered the works of Marx and Engels and began a lifelong commitment to revolutionary organising.

Key to Kollontai's life was the Russian Revolution and the politics of Lenin's Bolsheviks who led the workers to victory in 1917. Emma Davis describes who Kollontai's life was intertwined, even when living in exile, with these revolutionary politics. In particular Kollontai was one of the few who resolutely opposed World War One. Her 1915 pamphlet Who Needs War? was printed in millions of copies to agitate among workers and soldiers against the conflict.

But the most important aspect of Kollontai's activism and writing was her work on women's liberation and her development of ideas linking sex and society. Kollontai was a radical part of the women's liberation movement, but because she insisted that this movement had to recognise the class nature of women's oppression she was frequently at odds with the movement's middle class dominated leadership. This understanding of class also shaped how she understood sex. Following Marx and Engels she saw "bourgeois love" as arising out of the alienating nature of life under capitalism, and that relationships were both a solace and source of confrontation for workers. Davis quotes Kollontai:

Man experiences this 'loneliness' even in towns full of shouting, noise and people, even n a crowd of close friends and work-mates. because of their loneliness men are apt to cling in a predatory and unhealthy way to illusions about finding a 'soul mate; from among the members of the opposite sex.

But even attempts to challenge this through "experimental relationships" were doomed under capitalism, because as Davis explains, Kollontai thought

women were still subject to double standards. Men had a certain freedom to act without moral judgement from society; women did not. So Kollontai was scathing of those middle class proponents of 'free marriage' or 'free love' (having sexual relationships without the ties of marriage or partnership_ in the her and now who didn't recognise the inequalities of class and gender.

Women were at the forefront of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Kollontai, who by then was on the leadership of the Bolsheviks, became responsible for advancing women's liberation inside the new society. Revolutionary newspapers aimed at women were produced and Kollontai drove forward attempts to collectivise the production of food and childcare. She, alongside Lenin, challenged the fears of some that this was about the state taking away children, showing that this was about freeing women from the primary burden of childcare and reproducing the family. It is perhaps these sections of the book that are most inspiring as we learn about radical attempts to transform society, in the midst of appalling counter-revolution and civil war. Davis explains:

In her role of Commissar of Social Welfare Kollontai helped to write the groundbreaking decrees that opened the way for liberation. Hereditary laws were abolished, as was the authority of men in the family. Divorce was legalised and the distinction between 'legitimate; and 'illegitimate;' children was removed. Marriage ceremonies were simplified so any man of 18 and woman of 16 could marry through a short civil ceremony. Kollontai and Dybenko were the first couple married under the new law.

Given how backward pre-Revolutionary Russia was, these were amazing transformations. But the rise of Stalin and the isolation of Russia meant that these victories were rolled back. Sadly, as Davis shows, Kollontai was unable to break completely from Stalin and ended up in the 1940s praising his celebration of motherhood and traditional women's roles. But as Davis stresses, the key thing to remember about Kollontai was her revolutionary activism and organising in the run up to and during the Russian Revolution. As Davis says, "Kollontai's writings on sexual liberation point towards a world where people's relations... are free from the obligations of economic necessity."

This Rebel's Guide is an excellent introduction to Kollontai's life and politics. I highly recommend it and hope that Emma Davis' book leads to many more activists and revolutionaries learning from and developing Kollontai's revolutionary socialism.

Related Reviews

Porter - Alexandra Kollontai: A Biography
Prasad - A Rebel's Guide to Martin Luther King
Hamilton - A Rebel's Guide to Malcolm X
Mitchell - A Rebel's Guide to James Connolly
Brown - A Rebel's Guide to Eleanor MarxCampbell - A Rebel's Guide to Rosa Luxemburg
Orr - Sexism and the System; A Rebel's Guide to Women's Liberation
Choonara - A Rebel's Guide to Trotsky
Bambery - A Rebel's Guide to Gramsci
Birchall - A Rebel's Guide to Lenin
Gonzalez - A Rebel's Guide to Marx

Peter Binns, Tony Cliff & Chris Harman - Russia: From Workers' State to State Capitalism

Having spent some of the Russian Revolution's centenary year reading books about 1917, the years 2018 onward bring a whole host of opportunities to read about what happened afterwards. I thought it would be useful to recap on the development of the International Socialist traditions views on Russia in the aftermath of the revolution.

This short 1987 collection of essays brings together four short pieces by leading British Marxists of the International Socialists and the Socialist Workers' Party. Only the first, an introductory piece by the Palestinian Jewish Marxist Tony Cliff is new for this piece, the others are from various other socialist journals and books. Cliff's piece is short and the meat of the argument is presented by Chris Harman's pieces which deal with the defeat of the Russia Revolution and the nature of Russia and its satellite states. The first Harman piece How the Revolution Was Lost (online here) is one of the clearest arguments about why Russia, first through isolation and the defeat of the post-World War One European Revolutionary movements and then the development of a new bureaucratic class, led to the defeat of the Revolution itself. It's a classic article that I have read numerous times and which I highly recommend to socialists.

Harman's second piece can be seen as a basic introduction to the idea that defines the International Socialist tradition, that Russia was State Capitalist. Because of the origin of the articles as separate pieces there is some duplication, but again, Harman's argument is clear and accessible and like the following Peter Binn's article he returns first to a study of what capitalism is, before showing what Russia was/is. Harman shows how the basic dynamics of capitalism existed in pre-1989 Russia (and the Eastern bloc countries), showing how they could not possibly be socialist:

whereas under pre-capitalist societies production is determined by the desires of the ruling class and under socialism by the desires of the mass of the population, under capitalism the nature and dynamic of production results from the compulsion on those who control production to extract a surplus in order to accumulate means of production in competition with one another. The particular way in which the ruling class owns industry in Russia, through its control of the state, does not affect this essential point. That is why the only meaningful designation in Marxist terms of the society that has existed in Russia for the last forty years [Harman means since the 1920s] is 'state capitalism'.

Peter Binn's piece The Theory of State Capitalism (which can be found online here) is an extremely good short introduction to the idea. Like Harman he develops this through a study of capitalism, with frequent references to Marx's Capital. Crucially he shows how accumulation is a central feature of the economy of Russia, and this is because Russia is not an isolated economic system but one in intense competition with the Western Powers. This competition, like the competition between rival capitalists, drives the economic accumulation. Binns shows that this is true by showing how even within the developed capitalist powers, where the concentration and monopolisation of capitalism has meant that frequently only a single multinational dominates its sphere of production, yet these remain capitalist systems. State ownership, and indeed the existence of state planning, does not undermine this dynamic.

Central to all four pieces is a study of the rise of the bureaucracy in Russia. This came initially from the reality of the young, isolated Revolution which had experienced a decimation of the revolutionary working class. But eventually this bureaucracy became a class for itself, organising in its own interests and striving to extract the maximum surplus from the workers and peasants.

A few years after this book was published, the State Capitalist regimes of Eastern Europe and the USSR collapsed. As pointed out by Tony Cliff, in none of these supposed "workers' states" did workers collectively lift a finger to protect them. I was struck reading this that the essential arguments where proved by the nature of the end of the Eastern States. While it suited the capitalists to label these as socialist and the process from 1989 to 1991 as "the end of socialism", in reality this was capitalism reforming itself to try and deal with its inherent contradictions. Why does this matter today? After all these regimes haven't existed for almost thirty years. Binns and Harman both make the point that firstly the clarity provided by returning to the basic ideas of Marxist theory helped ensure that some revolutionary socialists weren't distracted by the idea of "actually existing socialism" and secondly, because if the Revolution of 1917 could be defeated by counter-revolution and the rise of a bureaucratic class then future revolutionaries must guard against the possibility.

Related Reviews

Sherry - Russia 1917: Workers' Revolution and Festival of the Oppressed
Trotsky - Lessons of October
Birchall - Tony Cliff
Cliff - Trtosky 1923-1927: Fighting the Rising Stalinist Bureaucracy
Cliff - Trotsky 1927-1940: The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Star

Leon Trotsky - The History of the Russian Revolution

I chose to re-read Leon Trotsky's The History of the Russian Revolution over November 2017, exactly one hundred years since the all to brief triumph of the Revolution it discusses. Doing so allowed me to reflect on what that Revolution meant, but also how it has been portrayed, interpreted and understood since.

You don't have to read much of Trotsky's book to see how inadequate the coverage of 1917 has been for the centenary. Trotsky's work is a masterpiece of literature, powerful writing combined with a Marxist clarity that gives an unrivalled historical perspective on the events of the Revolutionary year. As a result The History of the Russian Revolution reads like a novel, in fact its very structure feels at times like a fictional account as the author builds tension towards the climatic seizure of power. The book teams with passages that are quotable, but take this section describing the situation as power decisively shifts away from the "compromisers" and towards the Bolsheviks:

Kerensky... was confidently calculating that in case of danger the Central Executive Committee, in spite of all family misunderstandings, would come to his aid in time. It was so in July and in August. Why should it not continue so? But now it is no longer July and no longer August. It is October. Cold and raw Baltic winds from the direction of Kronstadt are blowing through the squares and along the quays of Petrograd.

Junkers in long coats to their heels are patrolling the streets, drowning their anxiety in songs of triumph. The mounted police are riding up and down, prancing, their revolvers in brand-new holsters. No. The power still looks imposing enough! Or is this perhaps an optical illusion? At a corner of the Nevsky, John Reed, an American with naïve and intelligent eyes in his head, buys a brochure of Lenin’s entitled 'Will the Bolsheviks Be Able To Hold the State Power?' paying for it with one of those postage stamps which are now circulating in place of money.

These two paragraphs demonstrate a couple of things about Trotsky's book. First is the way he manages to get across a real sense of the balance of class forces and how they shift and change throughout 1917. Secondly is the way that Trotsky builds tension and drama - the raw winds blowing from the base of the revolutionary sailors at Kronstadt towards Petrograd aren't just about the weather, and secondly Trotsky's ability to build narrative tension as the crisis deepens in Russia.

But it is Trotsky's historical account that is most important. Despite portraying himself in the third person (a writer's master stroke in my opinion) Trotsky eschews any attempt at an independent historical narrative - this is polemic. But it is polemic for two reasons - the first, and most obvious is that it is designed to arm and give confidence to socialists who are trying to build revolutionary organisation and look to the Russian Revolution for inspiration.

Closely linked to this is Trotsky's battle with Stalin. The History of the Russian Revolution was written towards the end of the 1920s and finished in 1930 and comes immediately after Trotsky's defeat by Stalin and his exile. Thus the book has to be understood as reassertion of Trotsky's principle political arguments against Stalin, in particular Trotsky's argument that "socialism in one country" was impossible. Thus some of the most important sections of the book do not actually deal with 1917 but with the historical context of Russia's economic development to the revolutionary years.

Trotsky explicitly sets this out in several appendices which he hopes that a tenth or hundredth of his readers will read in addition to the main account. Trotsky was setting out on his new task of finding handfuls of supporters who could rebuild the international socialist movement. His focus on the role of the Bolsheviks' here and how they related to the mass movements on the streets is a key part of the story and his polemic.

But the majority of readers will, as Trotsky acknowledged, read this book for its unrivalled historical account of 1917. It is a long and detailed book, which seems to have penetrating insights on every page. But it's length shouldn't intimidate - Trotsky's writing is clear, passionate and at times very funny. Take his hilarious thumb nail portraits of the Russian generals who would go on to form the basis of the counter-revolutionary White Terror:

An army is always a copy of the society it serves – with this difference, that it gives social relations a concentrated character, carrying both their positive and negative features to an extreme. It is no accident that the war did not create one single distinguished military name in Russia. The high command was sufficiently characterised by one of its own members: “Much adventurism, much ignorance, much egotism, intrigue, careerism, greed, mediocrity and lack of foresight” – writes General Zalessky – “and very little knowledge, talent or desire to risk life, or even comfort and health.” Nikolai Nikolaievich, the first commander-in-chief, was distinguished only by his high stature and august rudeness. General Alexeiev, a grey mediocrity, the oldest military clerk of the army, won out through mere perseverance. Kornilov was a bold young commander whom even his admirers regarded as a bit simple; Kerensky’s War Minister, Verkhovsky, later described him as the lion heart with the brain of a sheep. Brussilov and Admiral Kolchak a little excelled the others in culture, if you will, but in nothing else. Denikin was not without character, but for the rest, a perfectly ordinary army general who had read five or six books. And after these came the Yudeniches, the Dragomirovs the Lukomskies, speaking French or not speaking it, drinking moderately or drinking hard, but amounting to absolutely nothing. First time readers might be surprised that some of the most fascinating chapters are those that deal not with the revolution but with the ruling class that was overthrown - Trotsky showing why their regime was ripe for collapse.

But ultimately this is a description of a year of revolutionary upheaval that involved millions of people in action. Trotsky never loses sight of that key fact - that the revolution was made by ordinary men and women, and he celebrates this fact at every stage. In fact by focusing on the ideas, slogans and demands of the factories and streets Trotsky is able to get to the heart of why the Bolsheviks were able to lead the working class to victory. This is a celebration of mass democracy, participation and revolutionary dynamism.

No other author does it as well as Trotsky's history and no one trying to understand 1917 can avoid reading this book. I first read this as a young socialist some 25 years ago. Re-reading it again a quarter of a century later I was struck by how fresh it felt, but also, how much of it I had retained and learnt from. Perhaps that's Trotsky's true legacy.

In the course of 2017 I've read or re-read a number of books related to the Revolutionary Year of 1917. Those reviews can be found here.

Related Reviews

Trotsky - On Britain
Trotsky - Lessons of October
Trotsky - 1905
Trotsky - An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed and Exhausted Peoples of Europe
Cliff - Trotsky: Towards October

Dave Sherry - Russia 1917: Workers' Revolution and the Festival of the Oppressed

I've already reviewed Dave Sherry's new book on the Russian Revolution for Socialist Worker, and I hope you'll read that in conjunction with these additional comments. Having read Sherry's book for a second time I wanted to add a few more thoughts.

As the centenary progresses, more and more books are being published. But Sherry's book is by far the best I've read. In part this is because he puts great emphasis on the role of ordinary people in the Revolution. But it is also because he gets across the grand sweep of events - the way in which the Revolution was a process, where things happened and peoples ideas changed. Political organisations that failed to grasp this, were unable to adapt to new circumstances lost their ability to shape things as their support vanished. Take this summary of the February events:

For the Mensheviks, years of mechanical adherence to the orthodox formula, that Russian socialism would have to wait until capitalism was fully developed and assumed complete political power, blinded them to the developing situation. Their attempt to half the revolution... left the Mensheviks into supporting the new capitalist government... The paradoxical character of the February Revolution, a bourgeois' revolution undertaken by workers and soldiers, brutally exposed the social weakness of the bourgeoisie, once the crutch of the Tsarist state had been knocked out from under it.

In a sense the Revolution fed itself. As workers and peasants collectively began to understand their immense power. The "act of ridding Russia of its monarchy gave people a sense of how society can be changed, and when the Provisional government refused to stop the war, it failed to stop the momentum for revolutionary change."

Sherry explains this process well, and shows how the Bolshevik party led by Lenin, were able to both shape and learn from the movement. This wasn't inevitable and the party almost made the same mistake as the Mensheviks in the post-February period. Sherry shows that Lenin's arrival in Russia in April led to a row that redirected the Bolshevik organisation towards workers' revolution. But crucially this could only happen because the Party was so rooted in working class organisations and struggles. It was the reality of revolution as experienced by the working class, principally in Petrograd, that meant Lenin's instincts were accepted by the bulk of the Bolshevik Party.

Towards the end of the book, after summarising the numerous revolutions and mass working class actions that have taken place world wide since 1917, Sherry reminds us that only the Russian Revolution in 1917 led on to a workers' state, albeit briefly. As he writes:

Without Lenin and the Bolsheviks it is inconceivable that a coalition of workers, soldiers and peasants would have taken power in 1917. The absence of revolutionary leadership and such a bold socialist workers' party in all the other revolutionary upheavals that have challenged capitalism through the last 100 years, explains why 1917 is unique. Times change but we can still learn from the past. That is why it is such a tragedy that Lenin's real legacy has been hidden or distorted by what passes for bourgeois scholarship.

And there has never been such a need for such revolutionary organisation. The Russian Revolution matters not because of historical curiosity, but because "it provides an alternative view of what is possible when society polarises and socialists organise to offer hope and unity in place of fear and division". If you only read one book on 1917 it should be this one, because these lessons are crucial today for a new generation of socialists. As Dave Sherry concludes:

Across the world there is a revolt against the people at the top of society - the one percent. It can go left or right and it is the job of all of us who want a better, safer world to shape it and pull it in a socialist direction.

Related Reviews on 1917

Smith - Russia in Revolution
Lenin - Will the Bolsheviks Maintain Power?
Serge - Year One of the Russian Revolution
Cliff - Lenin: All Power to the Soviets
Smith - Red Petrograd
Trotsky - Lessons of October

Related Reviews of books by Dave Sherry

Sherry - Empire and Revolution: A Socialist History of the First World War
Sherry - John Maclean
Sherry - Occupy!