Historical Materialism Volume 18 Issue 3, 2010

Historical Materialism
ISSN 1465-4466, Online ISSN: 1569-206X

Articles

Dialectical Realism and Radical Commitments:Brecht and Adorno on
Representing Capitalism
pp. 3-24(22)
Author: Ray, Gene

Symposium on Lars Lih's 'Lenin Rediscovered'

Editorial Introduction
pp. 25-33(9)
Author: Blackledge, Paul

Reconsidering Lenin: What Can Be Said about What Is to Be Done?
pp. 34-46(13)
Author: Suny, Ronald Grigor

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: On Lars Lih's Lenin
pp. 47-63(17)
Author: Mayer, Robert

Lenin Rediscovered?
pp. 64-74(11)
Author: Harman, Chris

Text and Context in the Argument of Lenin's What Is to Be Done?
pp. 75-89(15)
Author: Shandro, Alan

Rediscovering Lenin
pp. 90-107(18)
Author: Le Blanc, Paul

Lenin Disputed
pp. 108-174(67)
Author: Lih, Lars T.

Interventions

Critical Thoughts on the Politics of Immanence
pp. 175-185(11)
Author: Mandarini, Matteo

Workerism and Politics
pp. 186-189(4)
Author: Tronti, Mario

Review Articles

Oktyabr'skaya Revolyutsiya i Fabzavkomy [The October Revolution and
Factory-Committees], edited by Steve A. Smith, London: Kraus International
Publications, 1983 Oktyabr'skaya Revolyutsia i Fabzavkomy, Volume 3, Second
Edition, edited by Yoshimasa Tsuji, Tokyo: Waseda University, 2001
Oktyabr'skaya Revolyutsiya i Fabzavkomy: Materialy po istorii fabrichno-
zavodskikh komitetov, Volume 4, edited by Yoshimasa Tsuji, St Petersburg: St
Petersburg University Press, 2002
pp. 191-207(17)
Author: Flenley, Paul

Latin American Neostructuralism: The Contradictions of Post-Neoliberal
Development, Fernando Ignacio Leiva, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2008
pp. 208-229(22)
Author: Webber, Jeffery R.

Impersonal Power. History and Theory of the Bourgeois State, Heide
Gerstenberger, translated by David Fernbach, Historical Materialism Book
Series, Leiden: Brill 2007.
pp. 230-244(15)
Author: Parker, David

Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism
pp. 245-252(8)

Notes on Contributors
pp. 253-255(3)

Back Issues
pp. 257-269(13)
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010 DOI: 10.1163/156920610X533306
Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324 brill.nl/hima
Dialectical Realism and Radical Commitments:
Brecht and Adorno on Representing Capitalism
Gene Ray
Geneva University of Art and Design
gray@fastmail.fm
Abstract
Bertolt Brecht and Teodor W. Adorno stand for opposing modes and stances within an artistic
modernism oriented toward radical social transformation. In his 1962 essay Commitment,
Adorno advanced a biting critique of Brechts work and artistic position. Adornos arguments
have often been dismissed but, surprisingly, are seldom closely engaged with. Tis paper assesses
these two approaches that have been so central to twentieth-century debates in aesthetics:
Brechts dialectical realism and Adornos sublime or dissonant modernism. It provides what still
has been missing: a close reading and immanent critique of Adornos case against Brecht. And it
claries one methodological blind spot of Adornos formalist conceptualisation of autonomy: he
fails to provide the detailed analysis of context that his own dialectical method immanently calls
for. Te paper shows how and why Brechts dialectical realism holds up under Adornos attack,
and draws conclusions for contemporary artistic practice.
Keywords
Teodor W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Marxist aesthetics, realism, modernism, the sublime,
political theatre
In twentieth-century debates over the intersections of art and radical politics,
Bertolt Brecht and Teodor W. Adorno stand for opposing productive modes
and stances within artistic modernism.
1
Brechts works were aimed at
stimulating processes of radical learning, within specic contexts of social
struggle. He based his practice on the possibility of re-functioning and
radicalising institutions and reception-situations. In this, he took arts relative
autonomy for granted, but refused to fetishise that autonomy or let it become
reied into an impassable separation from life. Adorno, in contrast, made the
categorical separation from life the basis of arts political truth-content. In its
1. I thank Steve Corcoran, Steve Edwards, Anna Papaeti and Dmitry Vilensky for their
helpful responses to drafts of this essay, which revises Ray 2010.
4 G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324
structural position in society, art is contradictory: artworks are relatively
autonomous, but, at the same time, are social facts bearing the marks of the
dominant social outside.
2
Paradoxically, only by insisting on their formal
non-identity with this outside can artworks stand rm against the misery of
the given.
3
Adornos critique of Brecht, developed most fully in the 1962 radio-talk
and essay Engagement, is notorious enough.
4
Its conclusions are dicult to
swallow: Brecht ends up as an apologist for Stalinist terror and the false
reconciliations of really-existing socialism, and his works are pronounced
politically untrue.
5
Tese damning judgements are more often dismissed than
seriously confronted; perhaps surprisingly, they still have not been convincingly
answered with the care and rigour they demand.
6
Tat is unfortunate, because
the confrontation of these two positions claries issues and problems that
remain centrally relevant to politicised art and to the urgent project of leftist
renewal. Tis is especially true with regard to the problem of artistically
representing capitalist social reality.
Tis essay reconstructs Brechts and Adornos positions, in order to clarify
what is at stake in the confrontation between them. It aims to provide what
has so far been missing: a detailed immanent critique of Adornos case against
Brecht. Te argument I unfold here proceeds in three parts. In the rst, I
characterise Brechts committed approach to representing social reality as
dialectical realism.
7
In the second, I reread Adornos critique of Brecht, and,
in the third, I consider Adornos counter-models. My conclusions are, rst,
that Adornos critique fails to demonstrate the political untruth of Brechts
work. As will be shown, Adorno does not provide the close attention to context
that his own method immanently requires; consequently, he fails to take into
account the shifting conjuncture of struggle that gives Brechts work its
2. Arts double character as both autonomous and fait social announces itself unfailingly from
the zone of its autonomy. Adorno 1997, p. 5, and 1998a, p. 16. In this and subsequent citations
from Adorno, Brecht and Max Horkheimer, I have modied the published English translation.
3. Te argument is formulated concisely in the opening paragraph of Adorno 1997, pp. 12,
and 1998a, pp. 911; standing rm [Standhalten] is thereafter a codeword by which Adorno
invokes this argument, for example in Adorno 1997, p. 40, and Adorno 1998a, p. 66.
4. Adorno 1992a and 1998b. Commitment is the standard translation of the essays title
(Engagement in the original). I use both here, treating them as a semantic pair and opting for
the one that resonates most estrangingly in any given sentence.
5. Adorno 1992a, p. 84, and 1998b, p. 419.
6. Te ad hominem aspect of Adornos attack on Brecht is easily dismissed; the critique of
Brechts works is more serious. Jameson 1998 can be read as a general answer to Adorno, but
Jameson does not provide any close engagement with the substance of Adornos arguments.
7. Brecht uses the phrase the new dialectical realism in an important letter to Eric Bentley,
written from Santa Monica in August 1946, reprinted in Brecht 1990, p. 412.
G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324 5
political force. Second, Adornos discussion of Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka
and Arnold Schoenberg in this connection does not convincingly establish a
generalised political truth-eect for their works, and therefore does not
establish them as counter-models to Brecht. In any case, the truth-eect
Adorno claims for Beckett is not one that is oriented toward a radical political
practice aiming at a passage out of capitalism. Brechts works have their
weaknesses, and Adorno has incisively exposed some of them. But Brechts
dialectical realism is open and provisional enough to turn the specic defects
of particular works into productive discussion and debate. As a model of
committed paedagogical-artistic practice, it holds up to Adornos categorical
attack.
I. Brechts dialectical realism
Tere are many roads to Athens.
B. Brecht
Brechts representations of capitalism are often rough sketches or snapshots
of the background-processes against which radical learning takes place.
Arguably, the learning process itself is almost always the main object
represented. Capitalism including fascism, one of its exceptional state- and
rgime-forms appears as the immense pressure of misery forcing the
exploited to think.
8
In discovering the social causes of their misery, they
discover themselves, as changed, changing and changeable humanity. Seeing
the world opened up to time and history in this way, Brecht was sure, inspires
the exploited to think for themselves and ght back.
As Fredric Jameson rightly points out, critical approaches to Brecht need to
periodise his production carefully, and situate each theatre-piece and other
forms of writing within the context of struggles and social convulsions in
which he worked.
9
Minimally, we can distinguish between Germany before
the Nazi-takeover, the stations of exile through the period of fascism and war,
and the years at the Berliner Ensemble after his return to a divided Germany.
Within this rough division, moreover, every work and collaboration takes
form as a specic intervention into a specic social force-eld.
8. Brecht 1967a, p. 1051, and 1992, p. 83.
9. Jameson 1998, p. 17. Te ten monadic chronologies that Jameson proposes are stimulating
and do justice to the complex historical layering of Brecht as such. Tey are more than we
need here, however, to minimally establish the practice and model of dialectical realism the
actual object, that is, which confronts Adornos modernism.
Notably, the great experiments of committed didactic theatre and lm were
produced in the three or four years just prior to 1933, a period of acute social
misery and urgent partisan struggle. In addition to the crisis in Germany
itself, where massive unemployment and the split in the German Left were
eectively exploited by the Nazis and their backers, there was the additional
problem, new and dicult, of evaluating developments in the Soviet Union
under Stalin namely the pressures of socialism in one country within a
capitalist global order, the persecution of the old Bolsheviks in opposition,
and the emergence, from 1929 on, of a leadership-cult enforced by terror. In
the stresses of these few years, Brecht and Hanns Eisler collaborated on
Te Measures Taken and Te Mother, the two most important of the learning-
plays, and Kuhle Wampe, the lm with Slatan Dudow; from these years as well
came Saint Joan of the Stockyards, the collaboration with Elisabeth Hauptmann
that is, arguably, Brechts most direct representation of capitalism as a nexus of
forces and processes.
Brechts theoretical production has to be periodised and situated in the
same way. Te major treatments of epic or non-Aristotelian theatre, developed
in the pre-Nazi German period in the wake of Te Treepenny Opera, show
Brecht opening his way to a fully committed and politicised theatre. Te
encounter with Mei Lan-Fang, Sergei Tretiakov and others in Moscow in
1935, combined with the loss of his own apparatus and public, spurs the
development of Verfremdung, or estrangement, as an organising artistic
category, from 1936 on, as well as his reconsideration of the relation between
critical thinking, feelings and pleasure in the Work Journals and Messingkauf
Dialogues. Tese would be worked out more formally in the Short Organon for
Teatre, written in Zurich in 1948, just before his return to Germany, and
would become the working programme for the Berliner Ensemble. Te retorts
to Georg Lukcs and others over the meaning of realism, which Brecht chose
to hold back from publication, were worked up from the insecurities of exile
in Denmark on the eve of war in 1938, well after Zhdanovist socialist realism
had become ocial Comintern-doctrine. Around this same time, Brecht
learned that Tretiakov and Carola Neher, among others close to his own artistic
positions, had been accused and disappeared in Stalins purges.
But, having registered the dierences in these moments, I now work back
in the other direction, and go from the particular back to the general. For,
beyond the shifts in emphasis and focus, some abiding and properly Brechtian
artistic principles are derivable. Tese can be brought together under the sign
of realism, in the precise and exible sense in which Brecht developed this
category. For reasons I now make clear, dialectical is the best term with which
to qualify Brechts notion.
In the polemics over realism, Brecht had to defend his earlier innovations
against charges of formalism and against a rigid and restricted conception of
realism based on models from the bourgeois tradition. His strategy, then, was
to broaden the category by demolishing simplistic separations of form and
content and by exposing the narrowness and rigidity of criteria derived
exclusively from particular historical forms in this case, from the bourgeois
novels favoured by Lukcs. Brecht writes:
Keeping before our eyes the people who are struggling and transforming reality,
we must not cling to tried rules for story-telling, venerable precedents from
literature, eternal aesthetic laws. We must not abstract the one and only realism
from certain existing works, but shall use all means, old and new, tried and
untried, deriving from art and deriving from other sources, in order to put reality
into peoples hands as something to be mastered.
10
Since there are many ways to represent reality as material to be mastered, as a
nexus to be grasped and changed, it is important, Brecht goes on, to encourage
artists to explore all means available in seeking eective combinations of form
and content:
For time ows on, and if it did not it would bode ill for those who do not sit at
golden tables. Methods exhaust themselves, stimuli fail. New problems surface
and call for new means. Reality changes; to represent it, the mode of representation
must change as well. Nothing comes from nothing; the new comes out of the old,
but that is just what makes it new.
11
In contrast to ocial versions of socialist realism, then, the realism Brecht calls
for is precise in aim, but exible, even experimental, in means and method. It
aims at representations of reality that are workable, operable, practicable
helpfully applicable to transformative practice and permanently open to
correction and revision.
What makes them workable is that they are de-reifying: they show society,
not as a static and naturalised fate or second nature, but as a eld of forces and
processes in motion, unfolding in time, subject to development. Te individual
appears in such representations not just as a psychological subject, but also as
a nexus or ensemble of social relations that are historical and therefore
changeable. Te name for this mode of radical thinking, this critical stance or
Haltung oriented toward transformative practice, is, of course, dialectics.
10. Brecht 1967g, p. 325, and 1992, p. 109.
11. Brecht 1967g, p. 327, and 1992, p. 110.
Brechts exible realism is dialectical, in this radical, Marxist sense. Te rst
test of dialectical realism is whether or not, in context, it produces this eect
of de-reication or estrangement. Verfremdung is, then, the general category
for all the diverse artistic techniques for producing this eect, which, in turn,
becomes a moment in a larger process of radical learning. Tese artistic
principles what I now call dialectical realism can be actualised today,
provided that artists mark the distance between Brechts time and our own and
aim their interventions at the struggles and crises that constitute the
contemporary conjuncture.
II. Re-reading Adornos Commitment
Better no more art at all than Socialist Realism.
T.W. Adorno
In Engagement, Adorno makes two kinds of arguments against Brecht. Te
rst is structural or categorical: it unfolds from Adornos analysis of arts double
character. Arts autonomy, or dierence from life, is what constitutes it in the
rst place; art cannot renounce this autonomy without at the same time
undoing itself as art. Te second kind of argument is immanent: Adorno makes
specic criticisms of Brechts works based on Brechts own political criteria. If
one takes Brecht at his word and makes politics the criterion of his engaged
theatre, Adorno concludes, then by this criterion his theatre proves to be
untrue [unwahr].
12
How are the two kinds of arguments articulated? Te mediating pivot that
joins them is an implicit distinction between artistic and theoretical
representations. Artistic representations are assessed as aesthetic instances of
non-identity, but theoretical representations have to meet the rigours of a
dierent kind of testing. Brecht chose to be governed by the criteria of
committed theory rather than those of autonomous art; in eect, he turned
Marxist theory into his formal artistic principle. For Adorno, adequate
theoretical representations of social reality have to dig out the essence of
social processes that is, their deepest logic and tendencies, what Marx called
their law of motion or movement.
13
Adorno invokes Hegel to make this
12. Adorno 1992a, p. 84, and 1998b, p. 419.
13. It is the ultimate aim of his Critique of Political Economy, Marx writes famously in the
1867 preface, to reveal the economic law of motion [Bewegungsgesetz] of modern society. Marx
1977, p. 92.
point. Hegels Logic taught that essence must appear, he notes.
14
In other
words, essence must take concrete, determinate form in time and place. To
represent the social essence in a form other than the one in which it actually
appears in history is to represent something dierent. If, in order to construct a
memorable parable, amusing satire or eective piece of agitation, a committed
writer or artist attempts to slip essence into a dierent form, Adorno concludes,
then this is a falsifying representation that is politically untrue, even if it is
produced in the name of a true cause. Why? Because the process of aesthetic
reduction short-circuits the chain of mediations that joins essence and the
social facts that are its specic appearance-form.
15
Brecht wants to foster
critical spectatorship, but the imperatives of partisan struggle lead him to
render reality as something less complex and threatening than it is. Te theory
that submits to such imperatives ends by teaching submission. For Adorno,
this is most clear when Brecht glories the Party without mediations
16
or
degrades himself as a eulogist of agreement.
17
Ultimately, this is not just
Brechts failure, Adorno argues; it is a structural problem with all committed
art that renounces its autonomy in order to instrumentalise itself politically.
Art can only do poorly what theory already does better, and dishonesty about
this becomes political untruth. Art that accepts its autonomous status only
has to answer to local aesthetic criteria and earns the medal of political truth
by insisting on its dierence from praxis and real life. But, because Brechts
art is bad theory, Adorno contends, especially given Brechts position, it
therefore fails as art as well. Adornos specic criticisms of Brechts works are
underwritten by the structural-categorical argument, but try to demonstrate it
through an immanent immersion in particular works: by showing how
particular works fail as theory and recoil into dishonesty and untruth, Adorno
also aims to show the impossibility of art merging with theory under the sign
of commitment.
Tis is the gist of Adornos critique of Brecht. It can be tested by directing
critical questions toward any of its three levels: the structural argument, the
specic criticisms, or the notion of theory on which the whole case turns.
14. Das Wesen erscheinen mu. Adorno 1992a, pp. 845, and 1998b, p. 419. Te dialectical
point, from the Doctrine of Essence, is that essence must appear as something other than itself;
that is, as a dialectical unity with a determinate appearance-form. Adorno is citing Hegel 1969,
p. 479.
15. Te process of aesthetic reduction [Brecht] undertakes for the sake of political truth cuts
truth o and leads it on a parade. Truth requires countless mediations, which Brecht disdains.
Adorno 1992a, p. 82, and 1998b, p. 416.
16. Adorno 1992a, p. 82, and 1998b, p. 415.
17. Adorno 1992a, p. 86, and 1998b, p. 421. Adorno alludes here to Te Measures Taken.
i) Te structural-categorical argument
I accept the premise of Adornos structural argument, but not the proof he
derives from it. Art under capitalism does have this double character: both
relatively autonomous and social fact. Politically, art is this contradiction
produced from an extracted social surplus: it exists only by sharing in the
general social guilt, and yet bears a radical promise of happiness that stubbornly
exceeds its saturation by exchange-value. Art is relatively autonomous, because
every artwork, despite its autonomy, remains a specic appearance of the social
essence; the master-logics of capitalist processes always leave scars traceable in
the dialectic of form and content. Moreover, art is relatively autonomous
because, despite the autonomy of specic artworks, the production and
reception of art as a whole has armative and stabilising social functions: the
compensatory virtual utopia of art captures and neutralises rebellious energies,
fostering resignation, accommodationism and conformity in real life.
18
And,
because the reception of art, even leaving ownership-issues aside, still presumes
a privileged access to leisure-time, education and dominant class-culture, it
also functions as a system of social distinctions that supports class-society.
19

For all these reasons, it is appropriate to speak of the capitalist art-system, as
well as culture-industry although Adorno does not go this far. Te crux is
this: within these institutionalised social functions, there is still enough relative
autonomy for an artwork to assume a critical stance, even a radically critical
stance. But, and here is where I part from Adorno, such a stance actualises
itself in the form of an intervention in specic moments and situations. Te
critical force and political truth-content of a work can only appear and have
eects within the openings and constraints of specic contexts or conjunctures.
Tis Adorno tends not to admit. From arts contradictory double character, he
concludes that artists either accept autonomy as such, or reject it full stop.
Any compromise of autonomy at all becomes equivalent to total surrender.
Tis does not follow, and the example of Brecht suces to demonstrate why.
Whatever Brecht may have said, in practice he never gave up an operative
relative autonomy; there was never any absolute renunciation of autonomy.
Tus, the categorical argument on its own is not a serious disqualication of
Brechts art. I will develop this point below.
18. Marcuse 1968 established the terms of this functionalist dialectic.
19. Tis is the aspect analysed in Bourdieu 1984.
ii) What form of theory?
Before addressing some of Adornos specic criticisms, I want to question the
conception of theory Adorno invokes against Brecht. Is he here invoking
radical-critical theory, as Max Horkheimer elaborated it in his programmatic
1937 essay, or is it, in fact, something more like that traditional theory
bourgeois or liberal theory which Horkheimer rejected? Traditional theory
sees its task narrowly as the production of knowledge in a form that is neutral
with regard to social conict. Accordingly, it enforces a strict separation of
facts and values. Critical theory, in contrast, has understood that in a class-
society constituted by relations of exploitation and domination, pure
knowledge is an illusion. All theory is committed, knowingly or not.
20
Adorno certainly took over this Frankfurt-Institute position and, we know,
polemicised energetically against the positivist heirs of Max Weber. But, here,
he forgets that commitment to the real struggle to change the world is precisely
what dierentiates a radical-dialectical critical theory from armative (or
non-critical) and liberal (or non-radical) forms of theory. Frankfurt critical
theory positioned itself outside party-discipline, but this was not in order to
avoid the struggle for classless society. And Horkheimer makes this point
unmistakably in his 1937 essay just as the Moscow Trials were beginning
and in the year after the new Soviet Constitution had cynically declared
socialism to be an accomplished fact. After duly noting the tensions inherent
in a critical theory that mirrors neither the existing consciousness of the
exploited nor the slogans and policies of their party-vanguard, Horkheimer
nevertheless makes clear that it is the practical orientation toward the struggle
for the future that sets it apart from theory as a reied, ideological category:
[Te critical theorists] profession is the struggle to which his thinking belongs,
not the thinking that considers itself independent and separable from that
20. See Horkheimer 2002a. Te role and responsibility of science expressed in Galileos great
mea culpa speech (Scene 14 in the post-Hiroshima versions: Brecht 1967d, pp. 133941, and
Brecht 1994, pp. 1079) draws very near to the position Horkheimer marks out in 1937:
committed, but outside church- (read: market- and party-) discipline. Arguably, Brechts
formulations of this problematic in the Short Organon are less radical in its critique of science.
Tere, Brecht having resumed the battle for a theatre worthy of the scientic age, the techno-
domination of nature inherent in the bourgeois-scientic project goes uncriticised. However,
Brechts enlistment there of Galileo, Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer for an aesthetics of the
exact sciences that makes room for the beauty and pleasure of experimental research is blown up,
perhaps intentionally, by the explosive naming of Hiroshima in Section 16, several pages on.
Brecht 1967c, pp. 6689, and 1992, p. 184.
struggle.
21
Tis struggle is imposed on theory by the social antagonisms
structured into productive relations under capitalism.
22
I quote Horkheimers own words, underscoring their repetition of the term
struggle, because this is precisely what Adorno loses sight of or disavows, in
the psychoanalytical sense in his 1962 essay.
23
Although he is criticising
works written for a real and shifting conjuncture of struggle, he elides the
concrete situations to which Brechts works respond. Te slippage comes in
the move from the empirical defects of Brechts representations to their
ostensible political untruth. Truth and untruth social and political
Wahrheit and Unwahrheit in the Marxist-Hegelian sense in which Adorno
used these terms are relational categories, actually situational evaluations
made with regard to the aim of global emancipation, classless society, what
Adorno packed into the codeword reconciliation.
24
Whatever really or
potentially contributes to the process of realising classless society is true, in this
sense; whatever blocks, sets back or endangers this process is untrue.
25
But, given the ruses of reason and ironies of history, assessing truth-content
is dicult work. And the reversals and paradoxes of the revolutionary process,
experienced as the dilemmas of disciplined militant praxis, surely constitute
one of Brechts abiding themes. Who ghts for communism, as the control-
choir in Te Measures Taken puts it, must speak the truth and not speak the
truth, as the struggle demands.
26
If a falsied or weaponised representation
contributes eectively to the revolutionary process, because it answers to an
urgent need in a context of struggle, then, false or not, it becomes politically
true. What needs might these be? All that contributes to morale and sustains a
21. Horkheimer 2002a, p. 270, and 2002b, p. 216. Or, again, Horkheimer 2002a, p. 272,
and 2002b, p. 219: Te theory that in contrast drives on the transformation of the social whole
has for now the eect of intensifying the struggle to which it is bound.
22. Disputes over the politics of the Frankfurt Institute at other moments (or the degree of
its commitment to a Marxist or Marxian critique of capitalism, and so on) need not bog us down
here. At this critical moment of 1937, struggle means class-struggle, and Horkheimers
positioning of Frankfurt critical theory commits it to the side of the working class. Frankfurt-
antifascism is not liberal.
23. I register the gap between 1937 and 1962 in passing; a full accounting of it, which would
require analysis of the Cold-War and West-German contexts, is beyond what I can do here, but
would obviously bear on the question of Adornos own commitments.
24. To be strict, reconciliation for Adorno would go beyond classless society, as usually
conceived, for it would also have to include the liberation of nature, internal and external.
However, this supplement is interpreted, it certainly includes the passage out of capitalism that
classless society entails.
25. Hereafter, when truth and untruth (and its cognates) appear in italics, it is to indicate
this special usage and underscores its dierence from others based on an allegedly value-neutral
correspondence-theory of truth.
26. Brecht 1967e, p. 638, and 2001a, p. 13.
struggle through dicult moments, for example all that inspires tenacity
and resilience, and staves o resignation and despair. Are we, then, slipping
into the abyss of apologetics for terror? We are, at least, in waters deep and
murky, and any evaluation in this direction is instantly contestable. Still, the
paradox holds: sometimes, doing bad contributes to the good, while sometimes
doing good leads to the bad. Or, in the form we are considering: artful lies and
ctions can sometimes serve the truth. It does depend on the situation. About
these kinds of problems, to paraphrase Marx, clarity only begins post festum.
iii) Te level of specic criticisms
If we grant this, then an artworks truth-content can be evaluated only on the
basis of a rigorous, detailed analysis of its context and eects. Adorno does not
provide this kind of analysis. Let us take his criticisms of Te Resistible Rise of
Arturo Ui. Tey are, on rst reading, well and cogently made. As a representation
of German fascism, Brechts satire of Hitler is indeed problematic. In place of
a conspiracy of the highly placed and powerful, Adorno writes,
we have a silly gangster organisation, the Cauliower Trust. Te true horror of
fascism is conjured away; it is no longer something incubated in the concentration
of social power, but is accidental, like misfortunes and crimes.
27

In other words, Ui misses rather than claries the essence of fascism as a
product of capitalist social logics. In so far as it re-packages this essence in a
form that makes it unrecognisable, Brechts comic parable is a falsifying
representation. Moreover, the strategy of satire and humour Brecht uses to
deate Hitler and ridicule the Nazi-leaders only trivialises both the social
forces backing the Nazis and the enormous powers of violence and terror
gathering behind the social contradictions of Weimar. But let us accept these
points. Must we then also accept Adornos summary judgement, that Ui is
politically untrue? No, for this evaluation does not necessarily follow.
Brecht and his collaborator Margarete Sten completed Ui in Finland in
April of 1941, but it was never staged or published in his lifetime a fact
Adorno fails even to acknowledge in his 1962 critique. In early 1941, Hitlers
war-machine was everywhere triumphant. Its eventual defeat could in no way
be taken for granted, then, as it could be after the belated entry of the
Americans and turning of Stalingrad in early 1943. In this light, Ui is not so
easily dismissed. Arguably, in that dark moment, this satire might have
contributed something. However, had Ui been written and staged ten years
27. Adorno 1992a, p. 83, and 1998b, p. 417.
earlier, in 1931, then Adornos criticisms would carry more weight. At that
moment, a representation of fascism that is falsifying in the ways Adorno
pointed out would also have been politically untrue, for the underestimation
of the Nazis and lack of clarity about the social forces behind them could have
had catastrophic consequences for praxis: precisely this kind of confusion
contributed to the Nazis rise to power. A sober and accurate estimation of
fascism would have claried the urgent need for a united front between
Communists and Social Democrats to bridge the split in the German Left.
Obviously, no single artistic representation can be held responsible for the
poverty and defects of political consciousness at that crucial moment. But,
possibly, if enough eyes had been opened, the Nazi-takeover might have
been averted.
However, to go beyond such an assertion and actually demonstrate the
political untruth of a given representation, it would be necessary to establish a
minimally accurate baseline against which the representation in question
could be assessed. Ten it would be necessary to demonstrate how the defects
of this representation actually damaged the antifascist struggle in the moments
of a specic and unfolding situation. Tis Adorno does not try to do. With
good reason: to do so would itself require a feat of historical representation.
For what constitutes the essence of both German fascism and fascism per se is
still a hotly debated question especially since it touches upon the relation
between fascism and capitalism and the role of anti-Semitism. And, even
within the tradition of critical Marxism, divergent theories of fascism are
continuously being revised and corrected in light of ongoing research.
28
But,
let us take it a few steps further. Assuming we can condently establish what
social forces and processes combined to produce particular forms of fascism,
we would still need to mark the dierence between our reected retrospection
and the eorts of those who had to grasp fascism from within that moment of
struggle and crisis. Representations produced under such pressures can only
be adequate in the most provisional way; to treat them as denitive would
itself be a falsifying distortion. Retrospective evaluations of Brechts works
would require a detailed discussion of both the actual social reality that forms
the context of those works and the representations of that reality available
at the time.
Strategy entails representations that interpret reality. For the working class
on the defensive, the struggle against the Nazis was above all a strategic
problem of alliances.
29
A practical unication of working-class parties and
28. A moment in this process is documented in Dobowski and Wallimann (eds.) 1989.
29. As has been amply demonstrated in autopsies of the Lefts strategic failures during those
years. See, for example, Poulantzas 1979 and Claudin 1975. Of the analyses of fascism produced
organisations should therefore have been the priority. If we accept that a united
front between the Social Democrats of the SPD and Communists of the KPD
would have been the necessary, not to say sucient, condition of blocking the
Nazis, then we would have a criterion: representations of fascism that foreclosed
the possibility of a united front, after events had claried the urgent need for
it, would be both false and untrue. But the exact point at which this urgency
became clear, or should have become clear, would be dicult to establish. It
could probably be shown that the ocial position of the Tird International
from 1928 until 1935 was both false and untrue in precisely this way. Moreover,
certain defects of the Comintern-position could probably be tracked back to
the strategic realignments compelled by the Stalinist doctrine of socialism in
one country. Te strict subordination of the parties to the imperatives of
Soviet foreign policy certainly distorted political analysis and strategy during
these years,
30
and it is there, in those distortions, where the false can be seen to
become the untrue, in Adornos sense.
But we cannot implicate Brecht in this, by simply identifying his
representations with ocial Stalinist ones at least, not without much more
evidence and argumentation than Adorno provides. Adorno seems to assume,
on the basis of Te Measures Taken, that Brecht gloried the Party blindly and
uncritically, and that there is no distance at all between his positions and
representations and the Partys. Adorno certainly does not demonstrate this,
and I doubt that it could be demonstrated, even for works produced in the
early 1930s, when Brecht was closest to the KPD. When we immerse in the
particulars, as Adorno insists we do, and work to dig out the truth and untruth
entangled in the social ow of time, then the rigours of empirical testing cut
both ways. What has been claried is that each of Brechts anti-Nazi works
from Roundheads and Peakheads, nearing completion just as the Nazis came to
power, to Fear and Misery of the Tird Reich, written in 1937, Ui of 1941, and
Schweyk in the Second World War, written mainly in 1943 each has to be
evaluated carefully in light of unfolding events and the urgent eort to
comprehend them. Tey need, that is, to be assessed as specic interventions in
specic situations.
on the Left from within that moment, Trotsky 1971 is probably the most incisive treatment of
these fatal missteps and faulty interpretations. Without doubt, it would have been extremely
dicult to overcome the historical mistrust and hostility between the SPD and KPD.
Nevertheless, that, and no less, is what the conjuncture objectively demanded.
30. As Claudin 1975 documents copiously. Obviously, this is not to imply that SPD-analyses
and responses to Nazism were any less disastrous.
A Fairytale of Horror
Roundheads and Peakheads, begun in 1931, would have been a better choice
than Ui for Adornos critical attentions. A stage-manuscript of this horror-
parable was circulating by the end of 1932. When he left Germany the day
after the Reichstag burned, Brecht took with him the proofs of a revised
version subtitled Rich and Empire Go Gladly Together. In exile, he revised it
again, with Sten and Eisler; versions in Russian and English were published
in Moscow in 1936 and 1937, and a German edition was brought out in
London by the Malik Verlag in 1938.
31
It was rst staged, with Eislers music,
in Copenhagen in 1936. Unlike Ui, then, the genesis of Roundheads and
Peakheads reaches back before the Nazi-takeover and, as a representation
of fascism, presumably bears more directly the traces of class-struggle in its
pre-1933 conjuncture.
Te epic parable focuses on the Nazi-displacement of class-antagonism into
race-antagonism. Tis displacement consists of a recoding that invests
ideological meanings in arbitrary physical attributes, destroying solidarities
and producing realignments among groups in class-struggle. Te shape of the
head becomes the marker of standing in the new rgime; those with the wrong
head-shape, purportedly evidence of foreign origins and an abject spirit, will
be dispossessed and exterminated. Te work depicts the susceptibility of the
impoverished peasantry and Mittelstand the petty-bourgeois shop-owners,
small producers and salaried employees to this ideology. Te Pachtherren, the
estate-owners, give Iberin-Hitler dictatorial powers because he alone can
repress the rebellious renters and crush their communist Sickle League; at the
same time, they think they can manage and exploit Iberins racial turn.
Roundheads and Peakheads began as an adaptation of Shakespeares Measure for
Measure. Te Verfremdungseekt of the parable derives, in large part, from the
combination of a feudal setting and elevated poetic diction with contemporary
scenes and language: in the streets of the old city, Iberins Huas or SS talk in
Nazi-jargon and Umgangssprache. However, the feudal setting is also a source
of the main defects of the work. Te altered balance of social forces and state-
crisis that conditioned the Nazi-takeover is inadequately represented. Te
Junker estate-owners are depicted, but they were only one class making up the
dominant power-bloc in Weimar the other, the grande bourgeoisie, is absent.
And with it, so is the master-logic of capital-accumulation. Te antagonism
between rural landlords and tenants cannot simply stand in for that between
31. Die Rundkpfe und die Spitzkpfe, oder Reich und Reich gesellt sich gern: Ein Greuelmrchen.
For the German, I have used the London Malik version reprinted in Brecht 1967f; for the
English, I have preferred N. Goold-Verschoyles 1937 translation, reprinted in Brecht 1966.
capital and waged labour. Te sickle is there, but the hammer is missing;
the workers and their unions and parties are absent. As a result, the real
political problem of the German Left and the working-class movement at that
moment how to overcome the SPD/KPD split and form a united front
cannot emerge.
32
Tis is, indeed, a serious fault of the work in its conjuncture,
and I doubt that allowances for the distantiations of the parable-form would
succeed in extricating it from this criticism.
In light of Adornos battery of arguments concerning the exigencies imposed
on art after Auschwitz, an additional defect must be registered. At the
beginning of the work, Brecht eectively ngers the genocidal threat of Nazi
blood-and-soil ideology. In Scene Two, an Iberin militiaman reads it aloud
from a newspaper: Iberin says expressly that his single aim is: extermination
of the Peakheads, wherever they are nesting!
33
By the end, however, this racist
aspect has become a discardable, merely opportunistic factor. Te Peakhead-
landlords are able to restore themselves to power, and the class-antagonism is
now projected outward in a war of expansion. In retrospect, at least, this
reects a fatal underestimation of the Nazi-investment in anti-Semitism. To
sum up, my reading does not so much prove the political untruth of Roundheads
and Peakheads as it shows how far truth and untruth remain entangled in it.
Te critical task is to do the untangling, not to issue a crude retrospective
condemnation of the playwright.
Adornos critique of Brecht: conclusions
All this points to a problem in the critical method Adorno develops from his
structural analysis of arts double character. Any artwork that takes a critical
stance against capitalism necessarily does so from a position of at least relative
autonomy vis--vis the dominant social totality: otherwise, such a stance
would not be possible at all. But, because Adorno does not admit that radically
committed art under capitalism entails an operative relative autonomy rather
than an utter renunciation of all autonomy, he relieves himself of the need to
investigate context and conjuncture in a more than abstract and passing way.
32. When it does nally appear, in the peat-bog soldiers, episode of Fear and Misery of the
Tird Reich, added to the work in 1945 (Scene 4 in Brecht 1967b, and 2009), it is, of course, too
late. Tere the retrospective lesson is: the united front that went unmade in the streets and
factories was realised impotently in the concentration-camps under the gaze of the SS.
33. Ausrottung der Spitzkpfe, wo immer sie nisten! Brecht 1966, p. 186, and 1967f,
p. 929. Tom Kuhns rendering (To ush out the Ziks, wherever theyre hiding!) misses the strongly
dehumanising resonance of the German. Wipe out comes closer to the sense of ausrottung, but
in combination with nesting [nisten], we have the rhetoric of pest-control, right out of Hitlers
speeches. Kuhns translation is in Brecht 2001b, p. 20.
If the social outside always shows up within artistic form, as its polemical a
priori,
34
then this structural constant cannot by itself be the basis for
dierentiation and assessment. Tis alone should point us back to the outside,
to specic eects in actual reception-situations, but Adorno declines to make
this move. He supports his conception of dissonant modernism with a formalist
tendency to discount context. But this tendency leads him to treat
representations as if each one were denitive meant to stand for all time,
rather than to intervene in specic situations. If there is a use by date, Adorno
does not notice. In the case of his critique of Brecht, this tendency becomes a
destructive avoidance. To conclude: dialectical immersion in particular works
entails a simultaneous immersion in the social contexts for which they were produced.
Te dialectical point, to which Adorno should be held, is that works do not
stand alone: the work is the work together with its context. Evaluations of the
quality of Brechts representations and the net-balance of their truth-content
cannot simply be carried out categorically. Nor do specic criticisms alone
suce to render a summary judgement, without seriously taking into account
the real context of struggle. If this is right, then Adorno has failed to back up
his judgement of Brecht in anything like an adequate way.
III. Of the radical sublime
Not even the dead will be safe from the enemy if he wins.
W. Benjamin
Te essay Engagement is also one of the places where Adorno revisits his
1951 assertion that after Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric.
35
Elaborating
this claim, he advances Samuel Beckett as the artistic counter-model to Jean-
Paul Sartre and Brecht. Without getting into all the issues and problems
opened up by this after-Auschwitz formula, I at least need to insist that
Adorno is pointing here to the catastrophic character of capitalist modernity
as a whole. Te catastrophe is the whole dialectic of enlightenment and
domination as it has unfolded and continues to unfold in the late-capitalist
era of culture-industry and administered integrations. To Adornos Auschwitz,
we need to add Hiroshima.
36
Tese two events are the test-pieces which
34. Adorno 1992a, p. 77, and 1998b, p. 410. Or again, Adorno 1992a, p. 92, and 1998b,
p. 428: Te eect-complex [Wirkungszusammenhang] is not the principle that governs
autonomous art; this principle is in their very structure [ihr Gefge bei sich selbst].
35. Adorno 1976, p. 31, and 1992b, p. 34.
36. Tis paragraph and the one that follows summarise a case I argue more fully in Ray 2005
conrm that the catastrophe is not somewhere in the future, still to be avoided,
but has already taken place and is continuing, in the sense that the global
social process that produced them continues to churn on. More specically,
they demonstrate what administered state-violence is now materially capable
of. All this conrms that social reality, unfolding as history, has killed o the
myth of automatic progress. Te future of humanity in any form, let alone
emancipated ones, is from now on open to doubt, and can no longer be taken
for granted. And this has consequences for the representation of social reality.
Crucially, these genocidal techno-administrative powers were developed in
a specic global conjuncture of class-struggle: they are products of defeats
suered by the exploited, and from now on are aimed at the exploited, as the
weapons of state-terror. It does not follow that the revolutionary process is
dead or that humanity will never reach classless society. But it does mean that,
on the side of the exploited, the political and cultural forms of class-struggle
have to process and reect these new realities. Te old postures, images and
marching music that asserted the advent of classless society as imminent,
inevitable or otherwise automatic have been falsied by history, in a very
precise sense. Auschwitz and Hiroshima are two events of qualitative genocidal
violence that cannot be folded back into any redemptive narrative of progress.
Te potentials they announce enter history as irredeemable moments that
explode toxically in every direction. Revolutionary theory and practice now
must take this into account: the qualitative event that arrives to reorder
everything is not necessarily progressive. Te Novum, or radically new, now
appears as the ambiguous Angelus novus the machine-angel or angel of
history that announces either a leap toward emancipation or else an absolute
ruination more terrible than any momentary defeat.
37
Which one, none can
and 2009a. Te critical conjunction of Auschwitz and Hiroshima remains controversial indeed,
taboo in some academic circles, but, in these texts, I show why they must be grasped together:
in dierent ways, each realises a qualitatively new power of genocidal violence. Together, both
transformations of quantity into quality are the material basis of a new logic of global-systemic
enforcement.
37. I use Novum here, as well as the more usual event, to invoke the use of this term in
Jameson 1998, pp. 125, 127 and 1758. Adorno brings in Walter Benjamins Angelus novus, the
machine angel at the end of 1992a, p. 94, and 1998b, p. 430. Jameson, ne as his book on
Brecht is, elides the catastrophe exactly at this point. What Benjamin and Adorno clarify for us
is that welcoming the new as such, as Brecht perhaps wished to, is now a dubious risk, for its
arrival may be the straight gate to self-rescue or utter obliteration; after 1945, it has objectively
changed from a symbol of political truth and progress to a problem and enigma. Tis change is
strongly intimated, though not elaborated, at the end of Brechts post-Hiroshima Galileo (Brecht
1967d and 1994).
know beforehand. Now, any representation of contemporary social reality
must also comprehend these products and meanings of capitalist modernity.
38
For Adorno, the catastrophe of capitalist modernity in this larger sense can
only be evoked in art indirectly, through the oblique dissonance of negative
representations. Becketts Endgame becomes for him the main model. Tis, I
have argued at length elsewhere, is Adornos rewriting of the sublime.
39
Sublime
representations do not have to be empirically accurate renderings of social
processes. Tey merely have to stand rm in their autonomous dierence from
the given, Adorno claims, and they will function as formal mirrors of the
social outside, whether they want to or not. Perhaps. And, perhaps, as Luke
White has argued cogently, a work like Damien Hirsts infamous platinum-
and-diamond skull is a sublime representation of capitalism along these lines.
40

Perhaps we can even, with enough ingenuity and goodwill, get from there to
the critique of capitalism as we would need to, if we would set free the
political truth locked up in the sublime. But, in general, it is clear that sublime
representations of the social given and especially those evoking the
catastrophic aspect of social relations and processes are not likely to inspire
a struggle-oriented political practice. Te sublime hits and overwhelms us, but
nothing more or specic necessarily follows from this hit. If there is a likely
political response to an enjoyable encounter with the semblance of terror, then
it is probably resignation or prudent quietude. If sublime hits are linked to a
radically critical receptive process it is by no means certain that they will be,
but if they are then representations of this kind may help us by grounding our
critical reections bodily, in the feelings and sinews, as it were. Where this
happens, it means that sublime feelings have been successfully translated into
critical consciousness.
38. Tus, it is no longer enough merely to represent capitalism per se, as if Auschwitz and
Hiroshima had not taken place, for these events clarify tendencies and potentials that belong to the
essence of capitalism as it has actually developed in time. We need to follow up seriously on
Tompson 1980 and Kovel 1983: weapons of mass-destruction have to be grasped not as things,
but as social processes. My point has been that, as potentially terminal leaps in the powers of
enforcement, these processes in turn change the state-form and the modes of capitalist social
control. Te so-called war on terror, with its politics of fear and emergency, is the contemporary
appearance-form of these processes that have become tendencies. Tere remains much work to be
done in thinking through the enforcement-functions of state-terror, grounded in the fatal merger
of science, state and war-machine. I make a beginning in Ray 2009b. And this problem of genocidal
powers of enforcement is, of course, now converging with another fruit of the techno-domination
of nature: processes of ecocide and climate-change that threaten biospheric collapse.
39. Ray 2005 and 2009a.
40. White 2009.
Tis is how Adorno thought we might respond to Beckett: an aesthetic
experience that, triggering and passing through emphatic anxiety, gives bodily
support to a radical stance against all forms of false reconciliation. Tis seems
to be the only kind of hit or eect [Wirkung] Adorno was willing to endorse.
Here is the passage where he makes the case for this sublime way of representing
post-Auschwitz capitalism. Te paradox, that for the impulse of committed
art to be fullled, art has to give up all commitment to the world, is, he
writes:
based on an extremely simple experience [Erfahrung]: Kafkas prose and Becketts
plays and his truly monstrous novel, Te Unnamable, produce an eect [Wirkung]
in comparison to which ocial works of committed art look like childs play;
they arouse the anxiety [Angst] that existentialism only talks about. In taking
apart illusion, they explode art from inside, whereas proclaimed commitment
subjugates art from outside, and therefore in a merely illusory way. Teir
implacability compels the change in behaviour that committed works merely
demand. Anyone over whom Kafkas wheels have passed has lost all sense of peace
with the world, as well the possibility of being satised with the judgement that
the world is going badly: the moment of conrmation within the resigned
observation of evils superior power has been eaten away.
41
Such an experience actualises, at the level of form, the Verfremdungseekt that
Brecht tried to install at the level of content or message. Maybe. Tis is, rst
of all, Adornos testimony about his own responses; the rest is extrapolation
dressed in categories. Let us assume these responses really can be generalised.
But, in that case, what really is the politics of all these Beckett and Kafka
readers? How many battalions are they? Will their labour produce four moons
to light the night-sky? My crude point is that the stance that appreciates
standing rm against false reconciliation is dierent from the stance seeking a
practice to restart a blocked revolutionary process. Or, in a more contemporary
idiom: these are dierent subjectivities. It is the latter stance or subjectivity
that dialectical realism on the Brechtian model would today aim to support
and foster. Not to say that the sublime is therefore worthless and should be
thrown away. We can have our Brecht and read our Beckett too. It is only
Adornos strident insistence on posing a choice between two irreconcilable
positions that justies some sarcasm.
41. Adorno 1992a, p. 90, and 1998b, p. 426.
IV. Conclusion
If a problem can be claried, the solutions are emerging.
Anonymous paraphrase of a Marxian classic
Adornos case against Brecht, then, comes down to this: art must not try to do
what theory already does better, and, in any case, preaching to the converted
does not win anyone for the revolution. For the reasons given, Adornos
preference for the sublime anxieties of uncommitted art should not scare us
away from Brecht or contemporary forms of dialectical realism. If it is the
immense pressure of misery itself that forces us to think, what we think still
needs to pass through our reections and representations. Any artistic
representation of social reality that provokes or fosters radical learning is a
contribution to emancipation. In certain contexts, and given an adequate
critical reception, sublime works and images may have this eect. Committed
works of dialectical realism are likely to be more helpful. We cannot expect
that any single representation, however ambitious and monumental, will give
us the essence of social appearance with exhaustive perfection, as Alexander
Kluges nine-and-a-half hour gloss on Eisensteins unmade lm of Capital
should remind us.
42
Such totalising nality is in any case antithetical to Brechts
conception of an open, exible and provisional dialectical realism. But, if the
pressures of crisis and war, mega-slums and absolute poverty, climate-change
and ecological degradation lead us to try again to organise a passage beyond
the master-logic of capital-accumulation, then we will need artistic as well as
theoretical representations of social reality. Te more representations the
better, then, so long as they are dialectical so long as they dissolve social facts
into processes and the logics driving them. Tis kind of radical realism will
always contribute to that Great Learning by which alone we can make our
collective leap.
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Editorial Introduction
Symposium on Lars Lihs
Lenin Rediscovered
Paul Blackledge
Leeds Metropolitan University
p.blackledge@leedsmet.ac.uk
Abstract
1
Lars Lihs study of Lenins What Is to Be Done? demolishes the shared liberal and Stalinist myth
of Leninism as an ice-cold ideology of professional and opportunistic revolutionary organisation.
He conclusively shows, not only that Lenins thought had deep roots in the democratic culture
of contemporary Marxism, but also that it was predicated upon a strong belief in the revolutionary
potential of the working class. Lihs research thus moves the debate about Lenins contribution to
Marxism on from the tired caricatures of the textbooks to focus instead upon his complex
relationship to the Marxism of the Second International. By showing that Lenins Marxism was
much more sophisticated and textured than is normally allowed, this debate opens his rich legacy
to contemporary re-evaluation.
Keywords
Lenin, Kautsky, Marxism, Second International, socialism, What Is to Be Done?
Supercially, there appears to be no very good reason why Lenins What Is to
Be Done? (WITBD?) should be numbered amongst the most (in)famous and
inuential texts of the classical-Marxist tradition. Not only did it address
specically Russian concerns at the turn of the last century, but also, within
half a decade of its publication, Lenin stressed that these concerns were of
mainly historical interest. Moreover, beyond its local polemics, the main
argument of the booklet that Russias weak and fragmented Left could be
transformed into a strong unied party through the creation of a network of
buyers and sellers of a national socialist newspaper was not particularly novel
within the international socialist movement. And, in light of the problems
1. Tis essay draws on Blackledge 2006.
26 P. Blackledge / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 2533
associated with untangling the general insights of its arguments from the
distinctly Russian colouration of their presentation, in 1921 Lenin questioned
the desirability of translating it for non-Russian Communist Parties.
2
Despite this unassuming provenance, WITBD? has come to dene
Leninism, and Lenins name has perhaps become the primary political
connotation of the phrase what is to be done?. Whatever the merits of the
book itself, this somewhat bizarre development was a product, rst and
foremost, of the power-struggle within Russia after Lenins death. To justify
their claims to power in the early to mid-1920s, the triumvirate of Zinoviev,
Kamenev and Stalin orchestrated a cult of Lenin in which they, the old
Bolsheviks, were to be the high priests. As part of this campaign, WITBD?
was deployed, for instance, by Stalin in Te Foundations of Leninism (1924)
and by Zinoviev in Bolshevism or Trotskyism? (1925), as the textual bearer of a
denitive and essential Leninism. In the context of Trotskys criticisms of the
lack of democracy within the Communist Party, the triumvirate found it
convenient to point out that, amongst other heresies, Trotsky had clashed with
Lenin over formally similar criticisms of WITBD? two decades earlier.
Consequently, for their own short-term political reasons, rst the triumvirate
and then Stalin alone promoted WITBD? as the denitive manual for their
own authoritarian model of political leadership. Unappealing as it was, this
image of Leninism was quickly embraced by Western liberals as an authentic
rendering of Lenins politics.
If the demise of this Leninist model of political organisation was widely
portrayed as a footnote to Fukuyamas End of History, the re-emergence of a
global anticapitalist movement from the late 1990s onwards reopened Lenins
question, if not his answer. For, even within the anticapitalist milieu, the
Stalinist connotations of Leninism have tended to inform a widely accepted
assumption that Lenins proposed cure to the contradictions of capitalism was
at least as bad as the disease itself.
By eectively endorsing Stalins cynical claim to be Lenins true heir, this
common-sense opposition to Leninism not only obscures the process through
which the Russian Revolution degenerated, but also that by which the
Bolsheviks had previously won hegemony on the Russian Left. As Lars Lih
argues in his magnicent study of Lenins early political thought, a key failing
of the standard interpretation of Leninism is that it is almost impossible to
conceive of how such a moribund, undemocratic, and dogmatic organisation
might have escaped the sectarian wilderness to seriously challenge tsarism.
Not only did the Bolsheviks succeed in leading this challenge, they also
2. Le Blanc 1990, p. 63.
P. Blackledge / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 2533 27
inuenced the construction of other mass-parties which posed a credible
challenge to capitalism in its European heartlands in the half decade after the
First World-War.
Tese facts alone suggest that we need an account of Lenins politics that
escapes the cardboard-abstractions of Leninism. Such a project is all the more
important given the limitations of alternative modes of political theorisation.
Commenting upon the social and political irrelevance of much of contemporary
political theory, Raymond Geuss recently suggested that if
political philosophy wishes to be at all connected with a serious understanding of
politics, and thus to become an eective source of orientation or a guide to
action, it needs to return from the present reactionary forms of neo-Kantianism
to something like the realist view, or, to put it slightly dierently, to neo-
Leninism.
3

Te limitations of mainstream (liberal) political philosophy reect deeper
problems liberalism has with the question what is to be done?. If an answer
to this question necessarily involves an assessment of where one is, a vision of
where one wants to be, and an outline of the agency to bridge the gap between
these two states, the positivism of political science lends itself to an
impressionistic reconciliation with existing power-relations while the abstract
content of political philosophys normative alternatives leaves its various
pseudo-universal oughts safely quarantined from the machinations of real-
world politics. Tese two sides to liberalism are, of course, rooted in its
naturalisation of modern capitalist social relations: because liberals assume
these to be universal, they tend to conceive radical alternatives as mere utopias
with no immanent mechanisms through which they might be realised.
Consequently, political philosophy tends to a farcical repetition of what
Fourier recognised as the moralistic impotence in action of those sections of
the Left inuenced by classical-German idealism.
4
If, as Geuss suggests, Lenins
question who whom? which Geuss expands as who does what to whom for
whose benet
5
points beyond the limitations of contemporary political
philosophy, Lih, in his demolition of the myth of Leninism, makes a
fundamental contribution to an honest historical reassessment of the political
consequences of that theoretical breakthrough.
Whatever else it does, by demonising Lenin, the liberal variant of the myth
of Leninism tends to obscure his world-historic importance. Te Bolsheviks
3. Geuss 2008, p. 99.
4. Fourier quoted in Marx and Engels 1975, p. 201.
5. Geuss 2008, pp. 2330.
led a revolution which ended the First World-War on the Eastern Front and
acted as a beacon to those who, a year later, did the same in the West. Moreover,
Lenins actions were premised on a theoretical renewal of Marxism that
re-emphasised the democratic-revolutionary core of Marxs ideas in the wake
of their debasement at the hands of the ocial leadership of the international
socialist movement in 1914.
6
Wartime-antagonists responded to this new
situation by throwing aside their old dierences in a joint eort to crush the
new workers rgime. If this act is evidence of just how much they feared the
spirit of revolution spreading from Petrograd, the consequent civil war ensured
that the new rgime was born in the worst possible circumstances.
Te importance of this context to an adequate explanation of the emergence
of Stalinism implies that it would be a mistake, as Victor Serge famously
argued, to judge Bolshevism by its eventual rotten corpse.
7
Stalins rule was
built not only on the decimation of the Russian proletariat and the defeat of
the German Revolution,
8
but also through the destruction of the Bolshevik
Party itself.
9
Tese processes have been downplayed and sometimes entirely
dismissed in an approach in which the horrors of Stalinism are easily identiable
on the pages of WITBD?: a method Lih labels Soviet history made easy.
10

Although it is unsurprising that right-wing critics of socialism skirt over the
social basis of Stalinism, it is less understandable that Serges plea for
understanding has tended to fall on deaf ears even on the radical Left where
tired clichs about the corrupting inuence of power and revolutions devouring
their children regularly act as substitutes for concrete analyses of Lenins
legacy.
Perhaps democratic centralism is the pivotal concept deployed in criticisms
of Lenins politics. Associated with Stalins authoritarianism, this concept is
typically coupled with WITBD? to portray the essence of Leninism, and
deployed to bear the weight of explanation for all that went wrong in Russia
after 1917. A key problem with this claim, as Lih points out, is that the idea
of democratic centralism is neither mentioned in WITBD? nor particularly
Leninist in its provenance. Moreover, as Paul Le Blanc arms in his
contribution to this symposium, this concept is not even a fundamental tenet
of Lenins politics. Typically, these mere facts have not been allowed to interfere
with the ideological medium through which the myth of Leninism has been
reproduced in the West: what Lih calls the textbook interpretation. According
6. Bloch quoted in Anderson 2007, p. 123.
7. Serge 1939.
8. Cohen 1980, p. 123; Harman 1982; Brou 2005.
9. Harris 1978, p. 272.
10. Lih 2006, p. 433.
to Lih, within this interpretation of Lenins legacy, the concept of textbook
operates at two complementary levels. Textbook-histories of the Russian
Revolution tend to rip WITBD? from its social context to represent it as a
textbook on Bolshevik organisation and practice. Tus represented within the
textbooks as itself a textbook, WITBD? tends to be interpreted as a Rosetta
Stone with which Soviet history is easily deciphered.
According to Lih, the substance of the textbook-interpretation of Leninism
includes, primarily, the assumption that Lenin had contempt for the intellectual
capacities of workers who, allegedly, were incapable of escaping the parameters
of bourgeois ideology. Tis intellectual litism informed his project of, rst,
building a party of professional revolutionaries whose job it was to bring
socialist ideas to the working class from the bourgeois intelligentsia, after
which, in a second moment, these revolutionaries would lead the working
class in a top-down manner. Bad enough before the Revolution, the textbooks
insist that this perspective led to Stalinism after 1917. Widespread amongst
reactionary histories of the Soviet state, this interpretation has also become
something of a commonplace across much of the contemporary Left.
11
Left-wing criticisms of Lenin tend to be framed through reference to a
supposed contradiction between Lenins conception of socialist leadership and
Marxs democratic dictum that the emancipation of the working class must be
conquered by the working class itself . While obviously true of Stalins
Marxism-Leninism, Lih points out that, irrespective of Lenins thoughts on
the subject, the claim that leadership is inimical to self-emancipation is not as
obvious as a supercial rendering of the question might suggest. On the
contrary, because Marxs vision of socialism is rooted in a model of the
democratic workers movement from below, he conceives it as emerging from
sectional and fragmented struggles that constantly tend to create and recreate
dierences between more and less advanced sections of the working-class
movement. Tis process gives rise to an organic conception of socialist
leadership. At its heart, Lenins contribution to Marxism is perhaps best
understand as the most systematic attempt to deal with this practical problem.
As Lih argues,
Sometimes the dictum [socialism is the self-emancipation of the working class] is
viewed as the opposite of the vanguard outlook, but, in actuality, it makes
vanguardism almost inevitable. If the proletariat is the only agent capable of
introducing socialism, then it must go through some process that will prepare it
to carry out that great deed.
12

11. See, for instance, the essays collected together in Bonefeld and Tischler (eds.) 2002.
12. Lih 2006, p. 556.
Te great strength of Lihs book is that, by crushing the textbook-interpretation
of Leninism beneath an avalanche of scholarship, he opens the door to a
serious engagement with Lenins contribution to such a democratic model of
socialist leadership.
Lih argues that, once adequately contextualised, Lenins argument in
WITBD? is best understood as the diametric opposite of that presented in
Russian-history textbooks. It was Lenins opponents rather than Lenin who
dismissed the socialist potential of the Russian workers accusing him of
being over-optimistic about the possibility of proletarian awareness and
organisation. Lenin replied, as Lih paraphrases him, with the claim that
worker militancy is not the problem because it is increasing in leaps and bounds
all on its own. Te problem, the weak link, is eective party leadership of all this
militancy. Iskra very properly focuses attention precisely on this problem on
Social-Democratic deciencies, not worker deciencies.
13
If the great and powerful contribution of Lihs book is its demolition of
the underlying assumptions of the textbook-interpretation of Leninism, the
debate on the pages that follow tends to focus on his claim that the
interpretations of Lenin written by what Lih calls activists he focuses on
the work of Tony Cli, John Molyneux, and Paul Le Blanc, but also mentions
important contributions by Ernest Mandel and Marcel Liebman have been
marred, at least partially, by their more or less tacit acceptance of large chunks
of the myth of WITBD?.
Tere are two key aspects to this debate. First, there is the matter of fact
about the extent to which various activists, more or less inuenced by the
writings of Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and Georg Lukcs, actually
embraced something like the textbook-interpretation. Second, there is the
more nuanced issue of Lenins relationship to Kautsky generally, and the idea
that he formulated a model of a party of a new type more specically. Here,
both sides agree that Lenin thought himself an orthodox Kauskyist right up to
1914. However, as Chris Harman argues in his contribution to the symposium,
there is a divergence between the activists and Lih about the extent to which
there was a growing practical separation between what Lenin and Kautsky did
in the two decades leading up to the First World-War a separation that was
only adequately theorised after the political split between the two at the
outbreak of war.
As to Lenins relationship to Kautskyism, it is perhaps illuminating to point
to an ambiguity in the oft-repeated claim that Lenin built a party of a new
13. Lih 2006, pp. 31617.
type. Tis seemingly innocuous phrase was never deployed by Lenin himself,
but was coined by Stalin in his History of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union (1939). According to Stalin, the ideological foundations of this new
type of party were rst formulated in WITBD? and nally realised in 1912
when the Bolsheviks purged the proletarian party of the lth of opportunism
and succeeded in creating a party of a new type, a Leninist Party.
14

Lih paraphrases this account of the model of a party of a new type as being
hyper-centralised, conned to a few professional revolutionaries recruited
amongst the intelligentsia, and dedicated to conspiracy.
15
If authors such as
Alexander Rabinowitch
16
have debunked the myth that the Bolshevik Party
was actually organised along these lines in 1917, Lih shows in exhaustive detail
that, far from having a clearly thought-out alternative to Kautskyism, Lenin
conceived his own role in the decades up to 1914 as one of applying to Russian
conditions the party-building philosophy outlined by Kautsky in the Erfurt
Programme (1891).
While Lihs general point is undoubtedly true, and despite the Stalinist
provenance of the phrase party of a new type, a number of the contributors
to this symposium point to a tacit break with orthodoxy. On the one hand,
Robert Mayer suggests that Lenins formulations opened his ideas to
authoritarian misrepresentation, while, on the other hand, the (Trotsky-
inspired) activists tend to agree that Lenin did in eect build a new kind of
party before 1914, but that this organisation had precious little in common
with Zinovievs and Stalins ideology of Leninism. Consequently, as opposed
both to Mayers claim that Lenins formations opened the door to Stalinist
distortion and Lihs suggestion of a strong continuity between Kautsky and
Lenin, the activists tend to follow Lukcs in positing deep theoretical and
political roots to the 1914 split between Kautsky and Lenin which pointed to
a new and profoundly democratic form of political organisation. Concretely, as
Alan Shandro points out in his contribution to the symposium, this division
emerged out of the struggle for hegemony against reformism economism as
its Russian variant. According to Lukcs, whereas the Second International . . .
was able to commit itself to many things in theory without feeling the least
compelled to bind itself to any particular line in practice, because Lenin
orientated to the revolution as a real living actuality rather than a far-distant
myth, the development which Marxism thus underwent through [him]
consist[ed] merely merely! in its increasing grasp of the intimate, visible,
14. Stalin 1939, Chapter 4.
15. Lih 2006, p. 17.
16. Rabinowitch 2004.
and momentous connexion between individual actions and general . . .
revolutionary destiny of the whole working class.
17

Whatever the strengths of the various contributions to this debate, one
thing is beyond doubt: Lihs formidable book opens the door to a serious
re-engagement with Lenins politics that escapes the boring clichs of the
textbooks. Tis is important because the issues Lenin engaged with are not of
mere academic interest. On the contrary, because activists are constantly
confronted with the problem of what to do, if we are to avoid the errors of the
past, we must learn from it: and, for the Left, this project includes rescuing the
real Lenin from the myth of Leninism so that we can make an honest
assessment of what is living and what is dead in his contribution to Marxism.
Addendum: Chris Harman
Chris Harmans contribution to this symposium was written before his
untimely death on the eve of his sixty-seventh birthday in November 2009.
Te arguments of this piece have roots going back at least as far as 1968 when
Harman put his PhD to one side while he engaged in a few months full-time
revolutionary activity for the International Socialists (IS). Tese few months
turned into more than four decades of full-time political activity, during which
time he played a leading role within, rst the IS, and then its successor-
organisation the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). One of Chriss earliest and
most important contributions to the IS/SWP was his essay Party and Class
published in International Socialism in 1968. Tis essay not only informed the
IS/SWPs subsequent political orientation, it also combined Harmans typically
deep understanding of the subject-matter with eminently clear and jargon-
free presentation. Te essay below marks Harmans return to the themes of
this article forty years after he rst made that fundamental contribution. We
are proud to publish it on these pages, most importantly because of Harmans
importance as a Marxist, but also because he has been a long-standing friend
of Historical Materialism. He was a regular contributor both to the journal
itself and to our annual conference. Chris was above all else a revolutionary.
Historical Materialism mourns his loss and dedicates this symposium to his
memory.
17. Lukcs 1971, p. 301; Lukcs 1970, p. 13.
References
Anderson, Kevin 2007, Te Rediscovery and Persistence of the Dialectic in Philosophy and in
World Politics, in Lenin Reloaded: Towards a Politics of Truth, edited by Sebastian Budgen,
Stathis Kouvelakis and Slavoj Zizek, Durham, NC.: Duke University Press.
Blackledge, Paul 2006, What Was Done, International Socialism, II, 111: 11126.
Bonefeld, Werner and Sergio Tischler (eds.) 2002, What Is to Be Done? Leninism, Anti-Leninist
Marxism and the Question of Revolution Today, Aldershot: Ashgate.
Brou, Pierre 2005, Te German Revolution, Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.
Cohen, Stephen 1980, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Geuss, Raymond 2008, Philosophy and Real Politics, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Harman, Chris 1968/9, Party and Class, International Socialism, I, 35: 2432.
1982, Te Lost Revolution, London: Bookmarks.
Harris, Nigel 1978, Te Mandate of Heaven, London: Quartet.
Le Blanc, Paul 1990, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press.
Lih, Lars T. 2006, Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? in Context, Historical Materialism
Book Series, Leiden: Brill.
Lukcs, Georg 1970 [1924], Lenin: A Study in the Unity of his Tought, London: New Left
Books.
1971 [1923], History and Class Consciousness, London: Merlin Press.
Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels 1970 [18456], Te German Ideology, London: Lawrence and
Wishart.
Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels 1975 [1845], Te Holy Family in Marx and Engels Collected
Works, Volume 4, London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Rabinowitch, Alexander 2004, Te Bolsheviks Come to Power, Chicago: Haymarket.
Serge, Victor 1939, A Letter and Some Notes, New International, available at: <http://www.
marxists.org/archive/serge/1939/02/letter.htm>.
Stalin, Joseph 1939, History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, at: <http://www.marxists.
org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1939/x01/>.
Reconsidering Lenin:
What Can Be Said about What Is to Be Done?
Ronald Grigor Suny
University of Michigan
rgsuny@umich.edu
Abstract
Lars Lihs explication of the intended meaning of Lenins What Is to Be Done? is not only the most
sophisticated to date, it is also unlikely to be surpassed in the foreseeable future. Lihs portrayal
of Lenin as a democratic Erfurtian Marxist undoubtedly poses a powerful challenge to those
would suggest that Stalinism can be deduced from the arguments of the book. Nonetheless,
there exists contemporary evidence to suggest that not only Mensheviks but also some Bolsheviks
interpreted Lenin in a way not too dissimilar from what Lih calls the textbook-interpretation.
Keywords
consciousness, hegemony, intelligentsia, party, spontaneity, workers
Lars Lih has written a big book about a little book, and, in doing so, has
re-opened and claried the debates that have centred on an important text
now over one hundred years old. What Is to Be Done? has been given pride
of place as the founding document of Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet system,
and international communism. Characterised by one of the most inuential
opponents of the Left (a former Communist) as containing all the essentials
of what was later to be known as Leninism and the doctrinal source of Leninist
authoritarianism, the foundation of the Soviet dictatorship,
1
the books critics
from Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky on the Left through to the Cold-War
analysts like Philip Selznik and Bertram Wolfe have credited its ideas as the
source of intellectual litism overtaking worker-initiative, a fatal evolution
from democracy to dictatorship of the party, and the degeneration of
revolutionary promise and hope into Stalinism and totalitarianism.
Te origins of the little book lie in the esoteric debates of Russian Social
Democrats, who, at the turn of the last century, were faced by a growing but
1. Conquest 1972, p. 32.
R.G. Suny / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 3446 35
disorganised workers movement. By May 1901, Lenin was working on a
synthetic statement of the position of the Social Democrats around the
newspaper Iskra [Spark] on the rle of a revolutionary Social-Democratic
party. Published in the spring of 1902, What Is to Be Done? set out to defend
the positions of Iskra against the economists and their allies, who argued that
workers were primarily interested in the daily struggles for wages and working
conditions, that, out of these struggles, they would gravitate spontaneously
toward socialism, and accused the Iskra-ites of being dogmatic propagandists
who were forcing workers into political confrontations. Lenin pleaded for an
eective Social-Democratic party, uniting the disparate activities of the dozens
of circles and organisations then functioning in an amateurish way inside
Russia. Hostile to the terrorism of the populists and the pusillanimous
moderation of bourgeois liberals, Lenin called on Russias workers to
participate in the broad social opposition to tsarism and not isolate themselves
within their own class-ghettos.
2
Castigating the economists for limiting their
attention to the working class alone, Lenin argued that Social Democracy
must lead an all-nation, all-class struggle for political emancipation. Te task
of the party was to expand the outlook of workers from a narrow understanding
of their own class-interests to an inclusive vision of the interests of the whole
society. Such an expansion could only be achieved by a struggle on the level of
theory, a struggle against the tendency of some workers to be concerned solely
with their own problems in other words, a struggle against spontaneity
[stiikhinost ] and for political consciousness [soznatelnost ].
Lenin broke with those Marxists who believed that the consciousness
generated by actually living and working under capitalism was sucient for
workers. Te history of all countries bears witness, he wrote in one of his
most dramatic but elusive phrases, that exclusively by its own forces the
working class is in a condition to work out only a tred-iunionist awareness.
3

Tis trade-unionism was not simply economistic but also involved a kind of
bourgeois politics, expressing workers interests within the framework of the
existing economic and political order. Te task of Social Democrats was to
assist in the development of political consciousness the awareness of the
need for the political overthrow of autocracy in the workers, something that
would not emerge simply from the economic struggle, but rather from outside
the sphere of relations between workers and employers, from the area of the
relations of all classes and [social] strata to the state and to the government
the area of the interrelations between all classes.
4
Here, the Social Democrats
had a most important rle to play.
2. Tis point is at the centre of the analysis in Tucker 1987.
3. Lih 2006, p. 703.
4. Lih 2006, p. 745.
36 R.G. Suny / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 3446
Lenin did not argue that the working class could not spontaneously gravitate
toward socialism, as many of his critics would later claim, nor did he argue
that only intellectuals could lead workers. Rather, workers easily assimilate
socialist ideas, for they are perfectly aware of their own misery, but, under the
conditions of bourgeois cultural hegemony, socialist consciousness faces
powerful obstacles. Te working class is drawn in stiikhinyi fashion to socialism,
but nevertheless bourgeois ideology, more broadly disseminated (and
constantly resurrected in the most various forms), all the more thrusts itself on
the worker in stikhiinyi fashion.
5
Social Democrats must struggle against
this kind of spontaneity in order to lead the working-class movement away
from a gravitation toward trade-unionism and bourgeois politics. Modern
socialism that is, Marx and Engelss understandings of the dynamics of
capitalism and the development of the working class was the product of
intellectuals, and Social Democrats, both intellectuals and advanced workers,
would bring that theoretical expression to the working class, which, because of
its experience, could easily assimilate it.
Lenins stark formulation that full socialist consciousness under bourgeois
hegemony required Social-Democratic intervention seemed to many of his
critics to move beyond the orthodox Plekhanovian synthesis that workers
would gravitate naturally to socialism while Social Democrats would merely
accelerate that movement. For Lenin, the party of revolutionary Social
Democrats was to act neither as a trade-union secretary advocating the
immediate material interests of workers alone, nor as disconnected leaders
independent of the workers, but as tribunes of the whole people, expounding
the need for political freedom.
6
Under Russian conditions, the party was to be
made up rst and foremost of people who make revolutionary activity their
profession, full-time revolutionaries. But Lenin was not proposing any
monopoly of decision-making by the revolutionaries by trade.
7
All distinctions
between workers and intellectuals were to be eaced.
Te organisation was to be small, as secret as possible, made up of people
who understood how to work in the dicult conditions of a police-state. Tey
had to practice konspiratsiia, the ne art of not getting arrested.
8
Lenin
concluded his essay with a call for the foundation of a central party-newspaper
that would become a collective organiser, linking up local struggles and
engaging in political and economic exposures all over Russia. Around the
5. Lih 2006, p. 712. Stiikhinyi is usually translated as spontaneous, but Lih carefully dissects
the various meanings of spontaneity and prefers to leave this word in the original Russian.
6. Lih 2006, p. 746.
7. Lih 2006, p. 464.
8. Lih 2006, p. 447. Lih shows conclusively that the Russian term konspiratsiia should not be
confused with the English word conspiracy, which is equivalent to the Russian zagovor.
newspaper, an army of tried ghters would gather, Social Democratic
Zheliabovs, made up not only of intellectuals but of Russian Bebels from
among our workers.
9
Lenins pamphlet was, at one and the same time, a relentless polemic against
the critics of Iskra, a plea for workers to reect the aspirations of the whole of
society, and an inspirational call for a new relationship between Social
Democrats and workers. Unwilling to concede that the current stage of the
average workers consciousness required socialists to moderate their tactics, he
insisted on an active intervention by politically conscious revolutionaries.
Lenin refused to confuse the present with the future or to consider the labour-
movement one-dimensionally determined by objective-economic forces or
fated to fall under the sway of the currently hegemonic ideology of the
bourgeoisie. Conscious political activity by leaders, along with changing
circumstances, oered broad perspectives for a revolutionary working class.
Blame for the failure to develop such a movement was to be placed, not on the
workers, but on Social Democrats who were unable to raise socialist
consciousness among the rank and le.
Te issues laid out in What Is to Be Done? had been widely discussed in
Social-Democratic circles, but no-one before Lenin had exposed them so
starkly. Lenins personal political style, which was to have a decisive inuence
on the Bolshevik wing of Russian Social Democracy, was expressively
demonstrated in this book. Here, sharp ideological distinctions, principled
divisions, and purity of position were made virtues. Accommodation,
compromise, and moderation were thrown aside in favour of an impatient
commitment to action. Conciliation [soglashatelstvo] was, in Lenins view, a
negative quality for a militant revolutionary. Although Bolshevism or Leninism
was not yet a fully-formed political tendency, Lenins language and proposed
practice had an immediate appeal for certain Social-Democratic activists and
bred anxiety in others. For the praktiki inside Russia, those working with
workers or underground presses, like Iosip Jughashvili (the future Stalin),
Lenins message was inspirational: You brag about your practicality and you
do not see (a fact known to any Russian praktik) what miracles for the
revolutionary cause can be brought about not only by a circle but by a lone
individual.
10
Not surprisingly, as a secret-police report noted, Lenins pamphlet
9. Andrei Ivanovich Zheliabov (185181) was a leading populist revolutionary, an adherent
of the terrorist Peoples Will, executed for participation in the assassination of Alexander II.
August Bebel (18401913), a founder of the German Social-Democratic Party, began his career
as an artisan and ended as a leading politician and theorist of Social Democracy. Te reference
to Russian Bebels was to turning workers into Social-Democratic activists.
10. Lenin 195865b, p. 107. Lars T. Lih argues convincingly that What Is to Be Done? was a
pep talk to the praktiki , a challenge to them to carry the socialist word to the masses, which in
soon made a great sensation among revolutionary activists in Russia.
11
Te
young Georgian Social Democrat Avel Enukidze remembers how he convinced
a policeman to let him keep a conscated copy of the book, which he then
smuggled into Metekhi Prison in Tiis after his arrest in September 1902.
12

His comrade Jughashvili read What Is to Be Done? sometime later, and his
subsequent writings show the profound eect it had on his thinking. Te man
who would become Stalin was one of those daring and determined young
men who found in this pamphlet a clear call to the exalted rle they were to
play. [I]t applied to all of us in those years, writes N. Valentinov (Volskii).
Daring and determination were common to us all. For this reason What Is to Be
Done? struck just the right chord with us and we were only too eager to put its
message into practice. In this sense, one may say, we were one hundred per cent
Leninists at that time.
13
At the time it was written, What Is to Be Done? was and remains even more
so today a dense and dicult text that requires deep knowledge of the
specic context in which it was written. Its sharp criticisms are directed
precisely against opponents within the Marxist movement in Russia at the
turn of the century, when dierences between various groups, newspapers,
and tendencies were often subtle and nuanced and more often exaggerated
by competing adherents. Lenin was willing to blur distinctions that future
historians would be more careful to delineate when he felt essential
characteristics revealed underlying anities between groups. As analytical and
programmatic as the pamphlet was, it was also a polemic, written with passion
and erce commitment to a particular vision of what Russian emancipation
required. What Is to Be Done? was a political intervention at a key-moment in
the formation of a Marxist opposition to tsarism autocracy, and it proved to
be both foundational in the creation of a Russian Social-Democratic Party and
ultimately fatally divisive for those who credentialed themselves as the leaders
of the working class.
For the last half century at least, What Is to Be Done? has come down to us
in what Lars Lih characterises as the textbook-version. While details and
emphases may dier among writers, the general argument centres on Lenins
pessimism about the potential of workers to become conscious, revolutionary
1902 were receptive to Social Democracy and already moving toward revolution. See Lih 2003,
p. 47.
11. Quoted in Mayer 1996, p. 311. For thoughts about why workers were receptive to Lenins
ideas, see Reichman 1996, and Zelnik 1976.
12. Enukidze 1923, pp. 1334.
13. Valentinov 1968, p. 27.
socialists. Tis worry about the workers led Lenin to emphasise consciousness
over spontaneity, leadership by the Social-Democratic intelligentsia over the
self-activisation of the workers, and the development of a party of a new type,
the tight, centralised, conspiratorial party of professional revolutionaries.
Lenins pessimism and its need for a narrow litist party is contrasted with
Martov and the Mensheviks optimism about workers coming to socialist
consciousness through their own eorts, guided and assisted by Social
Democrats, which led the more moderate wing of Russian Social Democracy
to advocate the formation of a broad, inclusive, more democratic political
organisation. Te textbook-version, then, sees Lenin and Leninism as a break
with orthodox Marxism, a populist-tinged deviation, and this deviation as
fundamental to the split in the RSDRP, the international socialist movement,
and twentieth-century Marxism more broadly. Even more damning, Lih
writes:
Tere has been a persistent eort in Western scholarship to tie Lenin as closely as
possible to the Russian revolutionary tradition and, by so doing, to distance him
as far as possible from European socialism. Te aim, one speculates, is to
Orientalise Lenin and to make him the voice of a so-called Eastern Marxism:
Marx, for all his sins, was a solid European, while Lenin the non-European
Russian misunderstood Marx so completely because he was a Russian.
14
Lih shows that Lenins alleged sympathy for the views of Petr Tkachev, the
most tting candidate for the title Russian Jacobin or Russian Blanquist, is
based on misreadings and has no basis in the extant evidence.
15
Rather, Lih
argues, Lenin was quintessentially European, in the sense that he was a fervent
follower of Karl Kautsky and German Social Democracy.
Perhaps the most impressive and inuential presentation of the textbook-
version is the now-classic work by Leopold H. Haimson, Te Russian Marxists
and the Origins of Bolshevism. Te mentor of a generation of American
historians of Russia and the Soviet Union many of whom studied the history
of the Marxist and labour-movements, among them Allan K. Wildman, Alex
Rabinowitch, Ziva Galili, William G. Rosenberg and (in the interest of full
disclosure) myself Haimson deployed a psychological framing to illuminate
how personality and politics combined to form opposing political tendencies,
Bolshevism and Menshevism. His own sympathies lay with the Mensheviks,
whose history he would continue to explore throughout his career and whose
basic contours of analysis he deftly employed in his own interpretation of the
14. Lih 2006, p. 377.
15. Lih 2006, pp. 37784.
pre-revolutionary crisis of the tsarist rgime. Haimson introduced as a central
conceptualisation the distinction embedded in the discourse of Russian
intelligenty of consciousness [soznatelnost ] versus spontaneity [stikhiinost ].
It is in this process of dissociation in the psychic life of the members of the
intelligentsia, just as much as in their alienation as a conscious minority from
the unconscious masses, it is in the contrast between the elevated sentiments
that they could incorporate in their world view and the more undisciplined
feelings that they attempted to suppress or ignore, that we should look in part for
the origin of the duality of soznatelnost and stikhiinost, consciousness and
elemental spontaneity, the two basic conceptual categories under which so many
of the intelligentsia were subsequently to subsume the conicts in their own
existence and the evolution of the world around them.
16
Haimson linked consciousness to a left position within the radical
intelligentsia, expressed in an insistence on the ability of a small elite to
remake the world in the image of its consciousness and a spontaneity to the
more adaptive position of the right that sought to fuse with the potent,
elemental spontaneous forces either of the peasants or the workers. Te father
of Russian Marxism, Georgii Plekhanov, moved from the sentiments he felt
for the peasants to a rational commitment to the proletariat as an instrument
of reason, of history, of his will, in contrast to his comrade Pavl Akselrod,
who emphasised the free development . . . free maturation of the working class
as they moved toward consciousness.
17
Lenin, like Plekhanov, attempted to
reconcile the imperious demand of his will to mould the world in his own
image with an insistence that the revolutionary adapt to the requirements of
an objective reality external to the will, external to the self .
18
But Lenin did
not share Plekhanovs condence that objective laws of history would
inexorably move that external reality toward the desired rational order. Instead,
the younger Marxist worried (unlike Martov) that
spontaneity would be a persistent element in the development of the working
class for a long and perhaps indenite period. . . . Lenins new organisational
model was designed to secure the overthrow of absolutism by harnessing the
persistent spontaneous forces in the working class movement, by insuring that
these forces would be guided and economically utilised by a conscious Social
Democratic elite.
19

16. Lih 2006, p. 8.
17. Lih 2006, p. 45.
18. Lih 2006, p. 46.
19. Lih 2006, p. 138.
Haimsons Lenin was a man of great passion, often undone by his strong
emotions, who fought with himself to restrain his aective side with his reason
and will. Te conscious historical actor, Lenin himself and right-thinking
Social Democrats, were essential for the success of the revolution. Haimson
makes a strong claim about Lenins lite leadership-rle of the Social
Democrats.
Not only was the working class incapable of developing independently a
socialist ideology but, unless the Social Democrats proved successful in their
eorts to indoctrinate it into the socialist faith, it would inevitably fall under
the spell of its enemies it would inevitably be converted to the ideology of
the bourgeoisie.
20
Haimson sees Lenins critics, like the economist Boris
Krichevskii or the left Social Democrat Rosa Luxemberg, as prophetic:
. . . implicit in the conception of spontaneity that Lenin had broadly sketched in
Chto delat? was not merely a lack of faith in the capacity of the labor movement
to grow to consciousness by its own resources, but also a basic distrust in the
ability of any man to outgrow his spontaneous elemental impulses, and to act in
accord with the dictates of his consciousness without the guidance, and the
restraint, of the party and its organisations.
21
Lih argues that every one of the contentions of the textbook-version does
violence to Lenins own intentions and ideas in What Is to Be Done?. Rather
than gloomy about the prospects for socialism and the potential of the workers
to become revolutionary, Lenin was buoyant about the possibility, and revelled
in their day-by-day, year-by-year mobilisation.
22
Where the textbook-version
sees workers as lagging behind, benighted and unable to rise to socialist
consciousness, Lih demonstrates through his extensive citations that Lenin
enthusiastically applauded the stikhiinyi podem [elemental upsurge] of the
workers, and faulted the Social Democrats for not being prepared to oer
them the needed guidance and leadership. Rather than Lenin being a pessimist,
Lih shows that it was his adversaries, the economists like Elena Kuskova
and Sergei Prokopovich, who believed that workers were only interested in
20. Haimson 1955, p. 134.
21. Haimson 1955, pp. 1389.
22. Scholars disagree over whether Lenin was fundamentally pessimistic about the workers
capability to achieve socialist consciousness on their own or optimistic about their potential but
emphasising a rle for the Social Democrats in facilitating and accelerating the development of
consciousness. For the pessimistic view, see Zelnik 2003. For the challenge to this view, see Lih
2006, pp. 15, 208. Robert Mayer argues that Lenins pessimism in What Is to Be Done? was a
momentary departure from his usual optimism about workers spontaneously generating a
socialist consciousness, a position he held before and shortly after the years 1899 to 1903 (Mayer
2006).
their material interests and had little enthusiasm for the political struggle
against autocracy or for socialism. Lih argues that, rather than deviating from
orthodox Marxism, the young Lenin enthusiastically aligned himself with the
leading German theorist, and heir to Marx and Engels, Karl Kautsky, and his
version of Second-International Marxism. Tis synthesis, which Lih labels
Erfurtianism, takes its name from Kautskys Das Erfurter Programm of 1892
and included eight principal premises: acknowledgment that the party, its
programme, and Kautskys writings were the sources of authority; commitment
to the idea that Social Democracy meant the merger of socialism and the
workers movement; dedication to the notion that Social Democracys mission
was to bring the good news to the workers of their world-historical task; the
aspiration to establish an independent class-based political party; insistence on
the priority of political freedom and democracy; the expectation that the
Social-Democratic party would become the party of the whole people; the
assertion that the workers were the natural leaders of the movement to
socialism; and advocacy of internationalism. Lenin was, Lih claims, a Russian
Erfurtian.
Like other Russian Social Democrats, Lenin saw the German Social-
Democratic Party (SPD) as the model that a Marxist party ought to emulate.
Social Democracys task was to combat certain forms of spontaneity, e.g.,
undisciplined outbursts of anger or rage, but to work with and encourage the
spontaneous upsurge of the workers movement. Spontaneity, Lih believes, is
not an accurate translation of the Russian stiikhinost and collapses many
dierent meanings of what might be called spontaneous [stiikhinyi] into a
single word. Under stiikhinyi, diverse meanings disorganised, unplanned,
chaotic, sudden, haphazard, surprising, unstoppable, explosive, elemental,
natural, occurring in various places without co-ordination can be discerned.
Te meanings are sometimes contradictory in the same text. Not only workers
suered from stiikhinost, but intellectuals as well, those who turned to
individual terrorism as a tactic, giving in to emotion and attempting to carry
on the struggle exclusively with their own forces.
Rather than favouring intellectuals over workers, Lenin was particularly
critical of the intelligenty, who often were more indecisive and wavered more
than real proletarians. Te message of What Is to Be Done?, Lih argues, is that
Social Democrats have lagged behind; they must be energised to organise and
act, to take up their historical rle in fostering the already-eervescent labour-
movement. Workers experiences do not occur in a vacuum; they must be
interpreted and explained by agitators and propagandists, by intelligentnye
rabochie [intelligentnye workers]. Social Democrats are to mediate and interpret
that experience. Lenin wrote:
Te central point is this: its not true that the masses will not understand the idea
of political struggle. Te most backward [samyi seryi] worker will understand this
idea, on the following condition: if an agitator or propagandist knows how to
translate it into understandable language while relying on facts well-known to
him from everyday life.
23

Many Social Democrats imagined three dierent kinds of workers: the gray
masses, which knew their economic interests but were not very clear about
their political interests; the middle strata, which was already interested in
politics more than merely economic interests; and advanced, conscious
workers, worker-intelligenty already dedicated to the political struggle. For the
Iskra-ites, the economists reected the views of the least advanced part of the
working class, while the Social Democrats were to represent those of the most
advanced and struggle to bring the other strata into conscious political life.
Rather than pessimism about workers, the Social Democrats believed in the
bright future of the movement, only the more attainable through the joint
eorts of the party and the workers.
For all his emotional attachment to the cause to which he dedicated his life
and energies, Lenin was a supremely rational politician. He believed that
people act in line with their interests and are even capable of heroic and self-
sacricing action. Indeed, writes Lih, the more people realise their true
interests, the more heroically they will act.
24
Workers do not act out of instinct,
but in line with interests that they come to understand from experience,
reection, and through the explanations of the Social Democrats, which can
overcome the hegemonic power of bourgeois ideology. Less-developed workers
may be mistaken or led astray, which only makes the task of the Social
Democrats even more important to guide them toward an understanding of
their true interests.
Lih has thoroughly detailed the various arguments that Lenin proposed at
the turn of the century. His explication de texte is unlikely to be repeated or
surpassed for many decades. But unravelling the layers of Lenins meanings is
only the beginning of the task. All Social Democrats understood that intelligenty
had a rle in the labour-movement. For some, it was explanation; for others,
it was guidance or leadership. Te former easily slipped into the latter, the
latter into substitution of the party for the workers themselves. Whatever
Lenin intended in What Is to Be Done?, his readers took from it dierent
emphases. And, later, the Communist Party in power would make its own
23. Lih 2006, p. 345.
24. Lih 2006, p. 397.
interpretation of the foundational text, much more in line with the textbook-
version than with Lihs more careful and nuanced reading of Lenin in context.
As soon as the text left the printing press, the struggle over its meaning began
in earnest, and Lenin was forced to defend himself against what he considered
misreadings. Some of his most loyal followers, however, understood Lenins
views in ways not much dierent from the Menshevik interpretation, though
unlike the Mensheviks they supported ideas of a highly-centralised party of
professional revolutionaries, who, by default, would largely come from the
intelligentsia and through their greater knowledge and political commitment
lead the workers movement. Lenin would be compelled to de-Bolshevise
some of the more militant Bolsheviks, most emphatically in the revolutionary
fervour of 1905.
While researching and writing the biography of the young Stalin, I have
revisited the period 19026 and come to appreciate the ongoing confusions
about what Lenin might have meant and how both opponents and supporters
interpreted his text. It is very clear that powerful and persuasive Menshevik
voices in the pivotal years 19035 have shaped the Western academic and
popular reception of What Is to Be Done? At the very moment when Bolshevism
and Menshevism were taking shape, key interventions by Pavl Akselrod, Iulii
Martov, and in the case of the South Caucasus, where Menshevism became
the dominant wing of Social Democracy Noe Zhordania dened the
dierences between the factions as more than personal or intramural
dierences. Akselrod, for example, wrote to his friend Kautsky, a gure revered
both in the German Social-Democratic Party and among Russian Social
Democrats, accusing Lenin of Bonapartist methods together with a healthy
dose of Nechaevan ruthlessness, and being a man determined to create his
own administrative dictatorship in the Party, no matter what.
25
Particularly telling is a letter from Zhordania in June 1904 announcing his
decisive adherence to the party-minority and laying out his critique of Lenins
approach.
26
He lashed out against the dominance of the Party by the
intelligentsia, rejecting Lenins formulations in What Is to Be Done?
25. Letter of Akselrod to Kautsky, 22 May 1904, Kautsky Archive, International Institute of
Social History, Amsterdam; quoted in Ascher, 1973, p. 208. For Marxists, Bonapartism referred
to deceptive dictatorial tendencies akin to the practices of Louis Bonaparte (Napoleon III, 1851
70); Sergei Nechaev (184782) was a revolutionary populist, whose slogan the end justies the
means was manifested in the murder of an associate who disagreed with Nechaevs methods.
26. RGASPI (Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History), f. 17, op. 1, d. 168, my
translation from the Georgian; GARF (State Archive of the Russian Federation), f. DP, OO,
1905 g, m d, 118, ch. 3, l. 21a, b; perlustration. My translation is from the handwritten-Russian
version in the RGASPI.
In Lenins opinion, not only socialist but political class-consciousness of the
workers is brought from outside, by other classes. . . . Tus, the proletariat must
receive everything from another, from the non-proletarian. In this way, having
degraded the proletariat and elevated the intelligentsia, the author de-valued the
economic struggle. He even denied such an indisputable fact that the economic
struggle is the best means to lead the workers into the political arena. Political
class consciousness can be brought to the workers only from outside (the emphasis
is Lenins), i.e., from outside the economic struggle . . . Lenin completely distorts
Marxism in order to raise the political element above socialism, i.e., in order to
give the party over to the intelligentsia.
27
For Zhordania, accepting Lenins vision of the party-organisation would lead
to the driving of many proletarians out of the Party and a complete dictatorship
of the intelligentsia. Fortunately, he says, the Party rejected Lenins formula.
If this plan had been adopted, then our party would have been Social-Democratic
only in name, and in fact would have turned into a closed little circle, a sect, the
master of which would have been Lenin and Company. Tat would have been a
Blanquist organisation (that is, an organisation for a tight circle of conspirators
who each minute must listen to the orders of their chief ) that would have forever
eliminated from our party its proletarian spirit.
28
Zhordania read Lenin in the spirit of Akselrod. While Lenin emphasised the
key rle of Social Democrats in the development of political consciousness
and was not particularly enamoured of intellectuals playing the rle of leaders,
nor of neglecting the vital contribution of advanced workers, Akselrod and
Zhordania, in contrast, depicted Lenin as substituting a party of intellectuals
for the workers movement. Such readings gave content to the factional split.
Tis struggle was not about the editorship of Iskra or the sovereignty of the
party-congress; the schism was presented as an epic battle between democracy
and dictatorship within the Party (and, by implication, in the future socialist
state).
Lars Lihs reconsideration and new translation of What Is to Be Done? forces
serious rethinking of what he calls the textbook-version. He opens up what
looked to many as a closed argument. Instead of deducing the Soviet future
from this 1902 pamphlet, and by doing so, avoiding the intervening history,
Lih proposes that the causes of Soviet dictatorship remain a major question.
Te arguments about democracy presented in What Is to Be Done?, Lih writes,
27. RGASPI (Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History), f. 17, op. 1, d. 168, ll.
1010ob.
28. RGASPI ll. 1717ob.
do not make Stalinist tyranny easier to explain they make it harder to
explain.
29

References
Ascher, Abraham 1973, Pavel Axelrod, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.
Conquest, Robert 1972, V.I. Lenin, New York: Viking.
Enukidze, Avel 1923, Istoriia organizatsii i raboty nelegalnykh tiplograi RSDRP na Kavkaze,
Proletarskaia revoliutsia, no. 2, 14.
Haimson, Leopold H. 1955, Te Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism, Cambridge,
MA.: Harvard University Press.
Lenin, V.I. 195865a, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, Volume 4, Moscow: Gosizdat.
195865b [1902], Chto delat? [What Is To Be Done?] in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, Volume
6, Moscow: Gosizdat.
Lih, Lars 2003, How a Founding Document Was Found, or One Hundred Years of Lenins
What Is To Be Done? , Kritika, 4, 1: 549.
2006, Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? in Context, Historical Materialism Book
Series, Leiden: Brill.
Mayer, Robert 1996, Te Status of a Classic Text: Lenins What Is To Be Done? After 1902,
History of European Ideas, 22, 4: 30720.
Reichman, Henry 1996, On Kanatchikovs Bolshevism: Workers and Intelligenty in Lenins
What Is To Be Done? , Russian History/Histoire Russe, 23, 14: 2745.
Tucker, Robert 1987, Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia: From Lenin to Gorbachev,
New York: W.W. Norton.
Valentinov, Nikolay 1968, Encounters with Lenin, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zelnik, Reginald E. 1976, Russian Bebels: An Introduction to the memoirs of the Russian
Workers Semen Kanatchikov and Matvei Fisher, Russian Review, 35, 3: 289 & 35; 4:
41747.
2003, Worry about Workers: Concerns of the Russian Intelligentsia from the 1870s to
What Is To Be Done? , in Extending the Borders of Russian History: Essays in Honor of Alfred J.
Rieber, edited by Marsha Siefert, Budapest: Central European University Press.
29. Lih 2006, p. 476.
One Step Forward, Two Steps Back:
On Lars Lihs Lenin
Robert Mayer
Loyola University Chicago
rmayer@luc.edu
Abstract
Lars Lihs Lenin Rediscovered seeks to replace the textbook-myth of Leninism with a painstaking
reconstruction of Lenins Erfurtian drama. Tat reconstruction is more accurate than the Lenin-
myth, but Lihs step forward is marred by two steps back. One is his account of Lenins worry
about workers. Te other is Lihs new translation of What Is to Be Done?.
Keywords
Lenin, class-consciousness, proletariat
For decades, the widely held view in the scholarly literature was that the basic
principles of Lenins system were set out in his pamphlet What Is to Be Done? .
1

Tis was said to be Lenins decisive work, the most important single work of
Leninist theory.
2
In it, he hammered his revolutionary philosophy into shape
and sketched out the revolutionary principles which he employed sixteen
years later. For the rest of his life he was to remain the prisoner of the ideas
expounded in What is to be Done?. Tey possessed for him a fatal nality.
3
More specically, the famous thesis about bringing consciousness from
without in the second chapter of Lenins book has been called one of the most
essential elements of his developed theory; to this fundamental theme he
returned again and again.
4
It is the most distinctively Leninist argument, the
doctrinal core of Leninism, from which his authoritarianism is said to have
owed logically.
5
1. Schapiro 1970, p. 39.
2. Childs 1973, p. 68; Utechin 1963, p. 217.
3. Payne 1964, pp. 147, 154.
4. Mirsky 1931, p. 202; Schub 1966, p. 73.
5. Van den Berg 1988, pp. 1256, 128.
48 R. Mayer / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 4763
Tat is the textbook-interpretation of What Is to Be Done? (WITBD? ). But,
in Lenin Rediscovered, Lars Lih sets out to prove that the conventional account
is deeply awed.
6
Even in 1902, Lenin was not pessimistic about proletarian
abilities, as many have claimed. Te keynote of Lenins outlook was not worry
about workers but exhilaration about workers.
7
Te Russian proletariat was
on the march in 1902, and Lenin had great faith that wage-labourers would
acquire class-consciousness and also become the vanguard-ghter in the
struggle for democracy. Despite his reputation, Lenin was in fact a passionate
advocate of political freedom, and the party he wanted to build in order to win
that freedom was well within the mainstream of European Social Democracy.
According to Lih, the future-leader of the Bolshevik faction was at this time
an orthodox Kautskyist, not a Jacobin or a nascent Stalinist, and he retained
the same Erfurtian outlook . . . at least up to 1917.
8
Tis is not the textbook-Lenin. According to Lih, that caricature was the
product of a Cold-War scholarship that ripped WITBD? from its context and
elevated a few scandalous passages into a pessimistic theory that seemed to
anticipate the despotism of later decades. Lenin, however, did not subscribe to
this textbook-theory, for his words have been misunderstood. Key terms in the
Russian text have been mistranslated, and the ideological and historical
contexts within which Lenin wrote have been forgotten. Lihs aim in this big
book is to reconstruct those contexts and to translate more faithfully Lenins
words so that we can rediscover what the author really meant. Tis book is so
big because it contains both a new translation of WITBD? and a detailed
reconstruction of Lenins thinking and polemics during the decade before the
outbreak of the 1905 Revolution. A behemoth, Lihs work will likely be seen
as an exhaustive account of the topic; certainly it will exhaust those who read
the book from cover to cover.
Lihs refutation of the textbook-interpretation of WITBD? constitutes one
step forward. His is not the rst such refutation, but it is, by far, the most
detailed. Lih is right that WITBD? is not the founding text of Bolshevism and
that the arguments in its second chapter are not the theoretical heart of
Leninism. Lenin was indeed the most Erfurtian of the Russian Social-
Democratic leaders, and his main aim at this time was to facilitate the birth of
an inclusive-democratic state in Russia. Troughout the decade covered by
this book and beyond, Lenin expressed great faith in the proletariat as an agent
of political and economic change. He did not think that the party could
substitute for the class in the revolutionary process, or that the intelligentsia
6. Lih 2006.
7. Lih 2006, p. 20.
8. Lih 2006, p. 114.
R. Mayer / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 4763 49
should seek to dominate the workers within the party. Lih is also right that
Lenins writings are lled with harsh polemics that distort his opponents views
and that Lenin was sometimes sloppy in expressing his ideas. Te scandalous
passages in the second chapter of WITBD? are a case in point, and do not
reect Lenins considered position. Lenin did not believe that workers would
xate at the stage of trade-union consciousness if left to themselves, or that the
party had to combat the spontaneous development of the class. He was an
optimist about the maturation of the proletariat, not a pessimist.
All of these claims are correct, and together they constitute one step forward
in our understanding of Lenin. Lihs proof for some of these claims could be
tighter, sharper, and supported with better evidence, but the claims themselves
are valid. However, as Lenin says in another book that got him into trouble,
One step forward, two steps back. . . . It happens in the lives of individuals,
and it happens in the history of nations and in the development of parties.
9
It
happens in scholarship too. Lih does refute the textbook-account of WITBD?,
but he then leaves the reader with the false impression that there is nothing
worrisome or unusual in Lenins view of the proletariat before 1905 (or even
1917). He exonerates WITBD? and directs all of our attention to it, but then
misses a dierent worry about workers that emerges in Lenins texts at this
time, and that will grow and remain with him after the seizure of power. Like
the textbook-dogma he refutes, Lih makes a fetish of WITBD?, and exaggerates
its importance in understanding the Lenin who will take power in 1917. But
it is not in this classic text that Lenins more important worry about workers
is expressed. Tat worry is to be found, instead, sprinkled through the minor
writings and forgotten polemics that ll the 55 volumes of Lenins Collected
Works. But we cannot see it if we allow WITBD? and its scandalous passages
to dazzle our vision. Tis failure to take notice of other ideas that emerge in
Lenins writings during this time-period, and that will endure and shape his
choices when he comes to power, constitutes one step back in our understanding
of Lenins thought.
Te other step back is Lihs translation of WITBD?. I admire the eort, and
agree that Russian terms should be translated consistently and faithfully into
English. But Lihs translation often transforms Lenins vigorous prose into a
clumsy mess of ambiguity. In a misguided eort to render Lenins scandalous
passages less scandalous, Lih substitutes constructions that are vague and
ungainly. WITBD? would never have enhanced Lenins reputation in the
underground-movement and attracted followers, as in fact it did, if the original
conveyed the impression which Lihs translation does. One of Lenins comrades
9. Lenin 1961, p. 412.
on the Iskra editorial board, A.N. Potresov, praised this text for the poetry of
some of its passages.
10
Unfortunately, Lih has purged the poetry in order to
protect Lenin from criticism. Tat is a second step back.
In the following sections, I will describe each of these steps and missteps
in greater detail. At the end, I will briey speculate about the future of
Lenin-studies.
Lenin-slips
Te really important thing to know about WITBD? is that the scandalous
passages in the second chapter are a mistake. Tey do not accurately express
Lenins considered view on the subject of working-class consciousness. Te
great irony of this text is that its most famous passages the ones thought to
be the very core of Leninism are, in fact, the sloppiest and most deceptive in
WITBD?. Tis is why Lih proposes to bracket them in his analysis of the book.
Te scandalous passages are just about the last place to look for something
genuinely revealing about Lenins outlook.
11
Lih is right that the formulations about spontaneity are not the heart
of WITBD? but a tacked-on polemical sally; they are confusing and
unedifying.
12
Lenin obscures his own view by making it sound as if he were
somehow suspicious and fearful of stikhiinost.
13
His insistence on diverting
the workers away from their spontaneous path must be adjudged a very bad
move.
14
Lenin was actually trying to arm something that was utterly non-
controversial. But, unfortunately, he did not do it very well, due to hasty
polemical improvisation, use of borrowed vocabulary, and an insistence
on equating Rabochee delo with people holding quite dierent views. Te
outcome was a sorry result.
15
In the end, the scandalous overtones of his
words arise solely from his insistence for strictly polemical motivations on
using a confusing and ambiguous vocabulary to express his accusations.
16

Such was his polemical overkill that he ended up giving the impression that
he himself held scandalous opinions. One is tempted to say serves him
right .
17
10. Lih 2006, p. 387.
11. Lih 2006, p. 396.
12. Lih 2006, p. 20.
13. Lih 2006, p. 352.
14. Lih 2006, p. 353.
15. Lih 2006, p. 395.
16. Lih 2006, p. 615.
17. Lih 2006, p. 667.
All of these assertions are correct. In fact, I said something like this more
than a decade ago in a set of articles on Lenins theory of working-class
consciousness. Against the textbook-interpretation, I argued that Lenins
pessimism in WITBD? was in fact irrelevant for an understanding of Lenins
mature theory and practice. A systematic review of the evidence indicates that
Lenins critique of spontaneity there was an aberration indeed, an error
from which he soon retreated.
18
Te text was not composed in a leisurely and
reective manner but was a polemic dashed o in the heat of battle and
should not be mistaken for a polished work of theory. Te thesis of
consciousness from without was a mistaken formulation that did not dene
the essence of Bolshevism. It was, rather, a famous failure and should not be
viewed as the doctrinal core of Leninism.
19

Te evidence for this interpretation of the scandalous passages consists of
Lenins own statements between 1903 and 1907; the testimony of other Social
Democrats, both friends and foes; and Lenins failure to employ this argument
in any of his writings after 1905. I reviewed this evidence in several articles,
and it is gratifying to see that Lih has discovered no additional evidence of any
consequence bearing on the question, despite his exhaustive search.
20
I agree
completely with his judgement that in the second chapter of WITBD?, Lenin
made a number of mistakes that is, he said or implied things that he clearly
did not believe.
21
I also agree with him that what seems to the textbook
interpretation as the very heart of WITBD? could be erased from the book
without trace by snipping a couple of paragraphs.
22
Despite challenging the centrality of WITBD? as a statement of Lenins
considered view on proletarian capacities, Lih says in the article that preceded
his book that my work leaves the textbook interpretation of WITBD? itself
untouched.
23
While I get credit for putting new source material . . . into
scholarly circulation, my mistake consists in trying to square this new material
with the standard reading of WITBD? . I do this by setting forth the double
ip-op hypothesis: Lenin had a crisis of faith immediately before WITBD?
and then had a radical change of mind very soon thereafter, thus leaving
WITBD? disconnected both to Lenins past and his future.
24

18. Mayer 1996, p. 308.
19. Mayer 1996, pp. 309, 315, 318.
20. Mayer 1994, 1996, 1997a, and 1997b. Several of my early articles on Lenin do adhere to
the textbook-view. It took me some time to gure out that there was a problem with this
interpretation. See Mayer 1992, 1993a, 1993b, and 1993c.
21. Lih 2006, p. 650.
22. Lih 2006, p. 646.
23. Lih 2003, p. 41.
24. Lih 2006, p. 24.
Lih has such enthusiasm for this material that he tends to imitate the
polemical methods of his subject. Te advantage of this method is that it
makes a long journey less weary. Te disadvantage is that it tends to bend the
stick. Politicians are in the business of bending sticks, but scholars are not. To
say that Lenin ip-opped twice implies that he lacked convictions, or just
said what his audience wanted to hear, or was thoughtless and confused.
Whatever else we might say about Lenin, none of those criticisms apply. Since
it is hard to think of a politician in the past century who ip-opped less than
Lenin, my double-ip-op hypothesis must seem quite ridiculous.
But I do not think that Lenin ip-opped on the topic of working-class
consciousness. Neither do I think that he had a crisis of faith in 1899 and a
radical change of mind in 1903. Te real dierence between Lihs interpretation
and mine is that I think Lenin meant what he said in the second chapter of
WITBD? and Lih does not. According to Lih,
While I emphasise polemical context, I am not making the argument often heard
in the activist tradition that polemical overkill led Lenin to bend the stick and
overstate a valid point. My argument is, rather, that when we grasp Lenins
polemical aims, we discover that he is arming something rather banal and non-
controversial for Social Democrats.
25
It was hasty carelessness
26
that accounts for the scandalous passages. Lenin
was like an undergraduate who bashes out an answer in an essay-exam and
does not realise that his sloppy formulations convey the wrong impression. He
only made the mistake here and nowhere else. Yet the textbook-interpretation
focuses only on the mistake, and treats it not as the mistake it was but as the
very essence of Leninism.
Both Lih and I think that Lenin made a mistake in WITBD?, but we
disagree about the nature of this mistake. If Comrade Martynov was still alive,
he could write a pamphlet on the controversy entitled Two Mistakes. Lih says
that Lenin was careless in his choice of words. I say that Lenin chose his words
carefully, but did not appreciate at the time how his strategy of argumentation
in responding to the economists was vulnerable to the charge of
authoritarianism and unorthodoxy.
As I have shown in detail elsewhere, beginning in 1899 Lenin formulated a
response to the economist challenge that was dierent from Plekhanovs.
27
In
a nutshell, Plekhanov said that to help workers attain consciousness sooner
25. Lih 2006, p. 615.
26. Lih 2006, p. 573.
27. Mayer 1997b.
rather than later, Social Democrats must accelerate the pace of their maturation.
Tat maturation was occurring spontaneously even now, but would reach its
goal more quickly through timely intervention by conscious Social Democrats.
Lenin, by contrast, responded to the economists by arguing that the
maturation could not happen without external intervention by those who
possessed the science of socialism. Te two ideologists were ghting a common
enemy, but adopted dierent rhetorical strategies to defeat those who (in
Plekhanovs memorable phrase) gazed in awe on the posterior of the Russian
proletariat. Lenins strategy, however, was vulnerable to counterattack, because
it seemed to express doubt about one of the holiest propositions in Marxism,
the capacity of the proletariat to emancipate itself. It took the controversy over
WITBD? for Lenin to recognise the weakness of his formula, and he then
quietly revised it. He had always believed in the holy proposition, but
inadvertently gave the impression in WITBD? that he might not. Tat was
Lenins mistake.
I doubt that it matters very much which interpretation of Lenins mistake is
correct. As I see it, Lih and I belong to the same camp, and that is why I view
this aspect of his work as a step forward in relation to the textbook-account.
But, like his subject, Lih is opposed to vagueness and the blunting of sharply
drawn boundaries.
28
So I am consigned to the textbook-camp, but deemed at
least an honest representative who does make a good faith eort to incorporate
a wider range of evidence into his interpretation.
29
Perhaps we can form
alliances for tactical purposes, even if we do not belong to the same party.
Lih thinks the mistake I identify in Lenin is a mistake because the source
from which Lenin drew his inspiration in responding to the economists was
Karl Kautsky, the premier theorist of the Second International. Kautskys
orthodoxy was beyond dispute, so, if Lenin was guided by Kautsky, the ideas
Lenin was trying to express in WITBD? must be thoroughly orthodox.
Tat is not a bad argument, but we should bear in mind three facts. First,
as I have demonstrated elsewhere, Lenin garbled Kautskys ideas.
30
Lih agrees
with this, but we might quibble about the exact details of Lenins confusion.
31
Second, as I argue in another article, the Russian orthodoxy on working-
class consciousness formulated by Plekhanov was not exactly the same as
Kautskys, and was more optimistic about proletarian capacities.
32
Lih assumes
that orthodox Social Democrats had to be Kautskyists at the turn of the
28. Lih 2006, p. 675.
29. Lih 2006, p. 555.
30. Mayer 1994.
31. Lih 2006, p. 576.
32. Mayer 1997b.
century, but European Marxism was, in fact, diverse, and the orthodoxy in the
Russian branch was a purer version of the sooner-or-later theory than
Kautskys Erfurtism. In turning to Kautsky, then, Lenin was turning away
from or ignoring the Russian Marxism of his own movement.
Tird, doubts were sometimes expressed, even by Kautskys comrades,
about the consistency of his formulation with the views of Marx and Engels.
At the Austrian party-congress in November 1901, no less a gure than Victor
Adler criticised Kautskys merger formula.
33
Adler thought Marx would have
rejected Kautskys formula because it distinguished too sharply between science
and knowledge born of practice. I agree with Adler, but Lih, curiously, chooses
to interpret the thought of Marx and Engels through the lens of Kautsky.
34
As
I see it, Kautsky got Marx wrong and Lenin, in turn, got Kautsky wrong.
Lenin would have stayed out of trouble if he had simply followed the lead of
Plekhanov.
Speaking of Plekhanov, he oers evidence neglected by Lih that casts doubt
on the hasty-carelessness version of Lenins mistake. If Lenins error was due
only to sloppiness, and not conviction, the mistake could have been corrected
by a collaborator who read the rst draft. In fact, Lenin had such a reader, but
he refused to correct the mistake when it was pointed out to him. Tat reader
was Plekhanov, and I discuss the evidence elsewhere.
35
Lenin showed the rst
few chapters of WITBD? to Plekhanov in late December 1901. Te latter
pointed out Lenins hasty carelessness to him, but Lenin failed to revise his
draft. Plekhanov complained when he saw the proofs of the pamphlet, and
P.B. Akselrod agreed with him that Lenins work in certain respects seems to
me to have important defects and to be too extreme [v svoem rode vabank].
36
In short, Plekhanov tried to save Lenin from the controversy over his
scandalous passages that would soon explode, but Lenin refused to acknowledge
the mistake. Te explanation for Lenins refusal could have been pride,
arrogance, confusion, or conviction or all of these at once. But the important
point is that the second chapter of WITBD? was a mistake which Lenin would
not repeat. You will not nd Lenin employing the arguments from that chapter
after the seizure of power, and it is therefore a serious error to interpret it as the
33. For Adlers criticism, see Mayer 1994, p. 679. In a 22 October 1901 letter to Kautsky,
Adler criticised his friends Neue Zeit article and the assertion that socialism must be brought
from without into the masses. He told Kautsky that this is a point about which I am a heretic,
but a heretic with Marx and not against him insofar as I understand him. See Adler 1954,
p. 373.
34. Lih 2006, pp. 4253.
35. Mayer 1997b, pp. 17680.
36. Berlin 1925, p. 165.
central text in Leninism. Lih makes this case forcefully in his tome, and that
is indeed one step forward from the textbook-view.
Worry about workers
Lihs suggestion that we bracket the scandalous passages and interpret the
rest of WITBD? without them is fruitful. If we do, we see that Lenin was
optimistic about the workers movement, eager to imitate the success of
Kautskys party, and a passionate advocate of political freedom. As Lih observes,
WITBDs arguments about democracy do not make Stalinist tyranny easier to
explain they make it harder to explain.
37
Tis view is correct. Aside from two perfunctory references to the
dictatorship of the proletariat, there is no trace in this book of Lenins later
ideas about the state and revolution or proletarian democracy.
38
Te kind of
democracy for which Lenin was ghting at the turn of the century is bourgeois
democracy liberal, inclusive, and competitive. A reader of this pamphlet in
1902 would have had no reason to suspect that its author would one day press
for an immediate transition to socialism in Russia on the morrow of the
bourgeois revolution; suppress a democratically chosen constituent assembly;
construct a one-party dictatorship; or establish a political police-force more
ruthless than the one he was combating at that time.
Tere is scarcely any hint of that Lenin in WITBD?. Indeed, as Lih depicts
him, the Lenin of 18941904 is progressive and democratic and wise. He is
usually on the right side in his polemics with opponents, and his polemical
methods are no worse than theirs. To be sure, Lenin could be inexcusably
misleading
39
in his counterattacks, and he did sometimes indulge in
unscrupulous and obfuscating polemics.
40
But even Rosa Luxemburg was
guilty of an unscrupulous hatchet job from time to time.
41
Tat was how
Marxists argued amongst themselves. Lenin had a sharp pen and was sometimes
sloppy in wielding it. Tat seems to be the worst one could say about him,
based on Lihs reading of this decade in Lenins revolutionary career.
But there is more going on in Lenins writings during this period than Lih
recognises. Tere is a worry about workers expressed in his articles and
manuscripts after 1898 that grows and persists during the remainder of Lenins
37. Lih 2006, p. 476.
38. On the evolution of Lenins view of proletarian dictatorship, see Mayer 1993a.
39. Lih 2006, p. 359.
40. Lih 2006, p. 384.
41. Lih 2006, p. 526.
career. Tis worry is not emphasised in WITBD?, and that is another reason
not to exaggerate the importance of this book. In directing our attention there,
Lih fails to rediscover another Lenin who will matter a lot later on.
I have developed this argument at greater length elsewhere, and will only
sketch the outlines here.
42
In the last months of his Siberian exile, Lenin began
to express the anxiety that certain fractions of the Russian proletariat were
corruptible, and could be bought o by reforms or deceived by reformist ideas.
Te result of this corruption would be to divert these workers away from the
revolutionary path being blazed by the vanguard and to divide the class against
itself. Tis fear of corruption explains why it was so important to Lenin to
wage a vigorous campaign against the Russian Bernsteins, who had become
unwitting agents of this corruption. As he explained in A Retrograde Trend in
Russian Social Democracy,
the lower strata of the proletariat may become downright corrupted if they hear
such calumnies as that the founders of Russian Social Democracy view the
workers only as a means for overthrowing the autocracy; if they hear invitations
to limit themselves to the restoration of holidays and to craft unions, with no
concern for the nal aims of socialism and the immediate tasks of the political
struggle.
43
Te uneducated workers did not know any better, Lenin warned, and, if their
leaders encouraged them to pursue material gain at the expense of the long-
term interest of their class, they were all too ready to listen. Te most
undeveloped workers, we repeat, can be corrupted. Such workers can always
be ensnared (and will be ensnared) by the bait of any dole oered by the
government or the bourgeoisie. Tey were too foolish and could not control
themselves. Tese proletarians jumped at the smallest morsels, and did not
think about the future. As organs of the lowest stratum of workers, economist
publications like Rabochaia mysl could therefore do tremendous harm, for to
reduce the entire movement to the interests of the moment means to speculate
on the undeveloped character of the workers, to play into the hands of their
worst passions.
44
Te economists were pouring ladles of tar into a barrel full
42. Mayer 1993c, 1996, and 1997a.
43. Lenin 1960, p. 283. To avoid misunderstanding, I do not think that Lenin had a crisis of
faith in 1899, or underwent a change in personality. He was the same old Lenin, but, in 1899,
he confronted, for the rst time, serious deviations within the workers movement. Until then,
his opponents had always been outsiders, like the legal populists. Bernsteinism was a much more
threatening phenomenon because it came from within the Marxian camp and could therefore
more easily pervert.
44. Lenin 1960, pp. 2805. In places, I have revised the English translation in Lenins
Collected Works.
of honey, Lenin claimed, and the time had come for the orthodox to ght this
corruption of the undeveloped workers.
Te English word corruption is the standard translation of the Russian
term razvrashchenie, which recurs again and again in Lenins texts, from this
time forward to the end of his political career. As he often does, Lih tries to
dull Lenins vocabulary by rendering the word as leading astray,
45
but, in
Russian, razvrashchenie and its cognates has a sexualised avour of debauchery.
As a verb, the term is probably best translated as to pervert. Lenin was fearful
that external forces and opportunists within the Party would pervert sections
of the working class and render them unt for revolutionary action. Tey
enticed these workers from the dicult path of struggle and encouraged them
to indulge or relax. When successful, this corruption deformed its victims and
perverted their minds so that they cooperated in their own oppression.
I submit that texts like A Retrograde Trend betray a worry about workers.
Te worry is not about the class as a whole, but certain fractions within it. In
that manuscript, Lenin worries about the corruptibility of the lowest stratum
of the class, but, in later writings, he will also warn of perversion in the labour
aristocracy. Both the top and the bottom of the class are unreliable, and can
yield to temptation. As the revolution approaches, Lenin will also speak about
the petty-bourgeois instincts of these strata, which are powerful in a peasant
country like Russia. Scratch a Russian worker, Lenin seems to say, and you
may well nd a ip-opping petty bourgeois. As he explained in Left-Wing
Communism (1920), small proprietors surround the proletariat on every side
with a petty-bourgeois atmosphere, which permeates and corrupts the
proletariat, and constantly causes among the proletariat relapses into petty-
bourgeois spinelessness, disunity, individualism, and alternating moods of
exaltation and dejection.
46
While much water will have owed under the
bridge by the time we reach the late civil-war period, I believe that the rst
traces of this rather obvious worry about workers manifest themselves in
Lenins pre-WITBD? writings.
Tis worry is important, because it is the justication Lenin will oer for
discounting the views of workers who do not follow the lead of his faction,
both before the Revolution and after. Proletarians who align themselves with
a dierent party or faction, or who fail to do what Lenin wants them to do,
will be written o as corrupted either by external forces or by the petty
bourgeois within. Tey had betrayed the class or never really belonged to it in
the rst place. Tey were not the steadfast, rock-hard proletarians, who, of
45. Lih 2006, p. 401, n. 23.
46. Lenin 1966, p. 44.
course, always supported Lenins policies. As Lenin explained in Steps, discipline
is the essential trait of the proletarian.
47
Tus, any workers who deviate from
his preferred position prove that they have lost their proletarian soul or never
possessed it to begin with.
Lenin could aord to drop the scandalous argument about consciousness
from without made famous in WITBD?, because it was unnecessary and in
fact counterproductive. Tat argument appeared to clash with the holy
proposition of proletarian self-emancipation, but the perverted and/or petty-
bourgeois formula did not. Te keynote of Lenins outlook could be
exhilaration about workers, as Lih says, because real workers always played the
role assigned to them in Lenins script. People who did not play that role were
not real workers, even if they performed wage-labour. Tey lacked the requisite
proletarian mentality [ psikhiia]. Teir views (and votes) could therefore be
discounted, because they were in fact outsiders, not insiders. Salvation did not
come from outside the proletariat, Lenin believed; that was in fact the source
of corruption, betrayal, and opportunism.
Anxiety about the corruptibility of the proletariat runs like a red thread
through Lenins mature writings. Although much of what he said about
workers and their inclinations was perfectly orthodox, a deep-seated fear of
working-class corruption was distinctive to him. It is true that one can nd
occasional expressions of this anxiety in the works of other Marxist thinkers.
Marx and Engels were the rst to make use of the concept of corruption in
order to explain the reformism of the English workers, and their argument was
certainly familiar to turn-of-the-century Social Democrats. Dissidents within
the German Social-Democratic Workers Party, for instance, employed this
rhetoric against the leadership in an 1890-campaign to wrest control from
party-moderates.
48
Among Russian Marxists, Iulii Martov in particular wrote
often of the danger of Zubatov corruption in the early issues of Iskra. But the
depth of Lenins fear, and the frequency with which he spoke of it, were
unprecedented in Russian Social-Democratic circles. Tere is simply no trace
of this anxiety in the writings of Plekhanov, Akselrod or Zasulich, either before
1899 or after. Tey did not fear that many workers were corruptible or worry
that some were insuciently proletarian to withstand temptation. Lenin alone
expressed such pessimistic sentiments and what is more drew organisational
and tactical conclusions from them.
Lih, however, misses the emergence of this worry about workers in the
phase of Lenins career which he examines. Tis worry is registered in a few
47. Lenin 1961, pp. 3879, 392.
48. Lidtke 1966, pp. 30519.
passages in the rst chapter of WITBD?, but does not surface in the more
famous second chapter. By directing our attention there, Lih fails to detect
other scandalous passages in Lenins writings that do point toward the future.
Tat counts as one step back in our eort to understand Lenin.
Ballhorning Lenin
In Chapter Tree of WITBD?, Lenin explains that Verballhornung, or
ballhorning, is a German expression that means an eort to improve that
actually makes things worse.
49
Tat is, unfortunately, an accurate description
of Lihs translation of WITBD?. While much of it is ne, where it really
matters, Lihs version makes Lenin muddled or incomprehensible. Tis is
another step back.
Part of the problem is that Lih lacks faith in his readers. In the text, he
explains what Lenin meant by the terms konspiratsiia and tred-iunionizm, but
Lih seems to think that we will forget those explanations when we read Lenins
text, and so he retains the Russian terms in his English translation. But
English-speakers are still going to think conspiracy or trade-unionism when
they run across those foreign terms and there is no reason why they should
not, as long as they bear in mind the explanation. Te untranslated words only
make Lenins text more ungainly than it actually is.
Tat is a minor problem. More serious is the refusal to translate the infamous
stikhiinost, a decisive word in WITBD?. Tat Russian word will not suggest
anything to English-speakers when they encounter it, and this may be why
Lih refuses to translate it. He wants us to draw a blank, because he thinks the
word is polymorphous, ambiguous, and confusing. Above all, we must not
think spontaneous, which is how the word is usually translated in WITBD?.
Lih devotes a dozen pages
50
to the history of the word and its various meanings
in Lenins texts, and the story is so confusing that he just throws up [his]
hands and refuses to translate the term at all.
51
Te result is that the scandalous
passages in his translation are no longer scandalous, but incomprehensible.
Tus we are sure to ignore them as we set about rediscovering Lenin.
One way to determine what the word means is to ask how Lenins Russian
readers in 1902 understood what he was saying. But Lih does not want to do
this, because many who read Lenins pamphlet thought he meant something like
spontaneity. Tat word may not be precise, but it is close enough especially
49. Lih 2006, p. 735.
50. Lih 2006, pp. 61628.
51. Lih 2006, pp. 356.
because Lenin slips in these passages. By the time we get to the translation, we
know that we must be cautious about the second chapter. No harm will be
done if the translator does his job and nds an English equivalent for us, and,
thus far, no-one has found a better equivalent than the dreaded spontaneity.
But, even worse than not translating at all is translating in ways that soften
or confuse, or render ungainly Lenins incisive style. From a purely literary
point of view, WITBD? is Lenins best book. In no other work was he so
playful with language, inventing new concepts and words that quickly entered
the Russian Social-Democratic vocabulary and set the terms of debate. Te
book made a great sensation in underground-circles in 1902, in part because
it was lively and well written.
52
But Lih dulls Lenins edge by substituting
awareness and purposiveness for consciousness; to cause to stray for to
divert; leader/guide for leader; writerism for bookishness; activeness for
activity; led astray for corrupted; and worker-class for working class. Te
translated title of chapter two is an excellent example of ballhorning: Te
Stikhiinost of the Masses and the Purposiveness of Social Democracy. Tat
title conveys no meaning at all.
Tis objection is partly stylistic, which is a matter of taste, but, in places, I
think the new terminology positively obfuscates. One example is Lihs
translation of kustarnichestvo as artisanal limitations. Te phrase is not only
awkward, but severs the connection we are meant to draw between Lenins
organisational views and the topic that engaged much of his energy during the
1890s, the development of capitalism in Russia. A kustar is a handicraft-
worker, and, all through the 1890s, Lenin engaged in a debate with the legal
populists about the fate of these labourers. Te legal populists imagined that
handicraft-industry remained outside the bounds of the capitalist system
because it was conducted on a small scale. But, in Te Development of Capitalism
in Russia and other writings, Lenin demonstrated that handicraft-production
in Russia was already a constituent-part of the capitalist system, and that the
supposed independence of the handicraftsmen was a sham. Most handicraft-
workers, were, in fact, wage-labourers in the kind of putting-out system
described by Marx in the fteenth chapter of Capital. Tey were already
proletarians of a sort, but the conditions in which they worked prevented the
kustari from recognising this or organising to improve their situation.
Encouraged by the legal populists, they dreamed of regaining the independence
and the property they had lost during the course of capitalist development and
therefore remained divided and supremely exploitable.
52. On the reception of Lenins text, see Mayer 1996, pp. 31016.
When he turned from his economic studies to organisational questions in
the late 1890s, Lenin was able to frame the problem in a way that would make
Russian Marxists sympathetic to his call for the construction of a nationwide
organisation. Lenin invented the term kustarnichestvo to describe the
fragmented and amateurish state of the movement in the absence of an
integrated party-apparatus. Te local circles were like isolated kustari, too
disorganised to ght eectively against the enemy who oppressed them. Just
as capitalism was moving forward from the handicraft to the industrial phase
of development, so too must the Party leave behind its kustarnichestvo or
handicraftism. Te implication of the term was that advocates of local
autonomy and circle-democracy were akin to the legal populists, a retrograde
and non-Marxian trend.
Handicraftism, then, is a better translation for this term than artisanal
limitations, and helps tie WITBD? more closely to Lenins earlier economic
studies. Neil Harding makes this argument in the rst volume of his great
study of Lenins thought.
53
In any case, artisan is likely to create the wrong
impression for English-speakers, because kustari tended to be unskilled, part-
time labourers and not highly skilled masters of an art.
I also think that professional revolutionary is better than revolutionary by
trade as a translation, because it suggests the source of Lenins memorable
image in the Webbs book Industrial Democracy. But I have made that argument
elsewhere, and will not repeat it here.
54
Translation is a dicult art, and Lars Lih is well-qualied to undertake this
task. He is right that the older translations are not entirely satisfactory, and
that a solid knowledge of the context is necessary to do justice to a complicated
work like WITBD?. But Lih has nonetheless ballhorned Lenin, although not
in the fashion of Martynov. Martynov tried to render Plekhanov more
profound, but Lih has succeeded in making Lenin more awkward and
confusing than he was.
What is to be done?
Despite the two steps back which the Party suered after the Second Congress,
Lenin remained optimistic about the long-term prospects of the workers
movement. At a low point in his career, with most of his former comrades
arrayed against him, a lesser man might have quit in despair. But Lenin steeled
53. Harding 1977, pp. 1368.
54. Mayer 1993b.
himself and took solace in the dialectic. History proceeds by way of
contradictions, he said.
But does scholarship? I have my doubts. Te textbook-view of Lenin
persists, despite eorts to correct it. Te mistakes have been passed down from
one generation to the next until they seem like an obvious truth. Te legend
of WITBD? endures, perhaps because it lls a need. It tells a simple story and
identies a moment when the future is foreshadowed. In this text, Lenin seems
to lift his mask and reveal to us who he will become. Te future dictator shows
himself in the scandalous passages. Unfortunately, this myth makes for a more
compelling story than Lenins Erfurtian drama, even though the latter is
closer to the truth. Te myth also has the advantage of legitimating the status
quo and discrediting alternatives to it.
For these reasons, I am not optimistic that better scholarship will succeed in
rewriting the textbook-interpretation of Lenin. It does not help that the
market for Lenin-studies has collapsed. Hardly any journals or publishers are
interested in this story, because Lenin now seems truly to be dead. Some have
spoken of the Leninist extinction. As long as his creation endured, the story
was important, but once the creature died, Lenin lost his fascination. We
know how this story ends, apparently, so who cares how it begins?
Lars Lih makes a valiant eort to get this story right. His eort is not
entirely successful, but he is certainly a talented scholar.
55
Scholarship, however,
is not always enough. Myths frequently have more power than the truth.
References
Adler, Friedrich (ed.) 1954, Victor Adler: Briefwechsel mit August Bebel und Karl Kautsky, Vienna:
Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung.
Berlin, P.A. (ed.) 1925, Perepiska G.V. Plekhanova i P.B. Akseroda Volume 2, Moscow: Izdanie
R.M. Plekhanovoi.
Childs, David 1973, Marx and the Marxists: An Outline of Practice and Teory, New York: Barnes
and Noble.
Harding, Neil 1977, Lenins Political Tought, Volume 1, New York: St Martins Press.
Lenin, Vladimir I. 1960 [1899], A Retrograde Trend in Russian Social Democracy, in Collected
Works, Volume 4, Moscow: Progress Publishers.
1961 [1904], One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, in Collected Works, Volume 7, Moscow:
Progress Publishers.
1966 [1920], Left-Wing Communism an Infantile Disorder, in Collected Works, Volume
31, Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Lidtke, Vernon 1966, Te Outlawed Party: Social Democracy in Germany, 18781890, Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
55. I highly recommend Lih 1990.
Lih, Lars 1990, Bread and Authority in Russia, 19141921, Berkeley: University of California
Press.
2003, How a Founding Document Was Found, or One Hundred Years of Lenins What
Is To Be Done? , Kritika, 4: 549.
Mayer, Robert 1992, Hannah Arendt, Leninism and the Disappearance of Authority, Polity,
24, 3: 399416.
1993a, Te Dictatorship of the Proletariat from Plekhanov to Lenin, Studies in East
European Tought, 45, 4: 25580.
1993b, Lenin and the Concept of the Professional Revolutionary, History of Political
Tought, 14, 2: 24963.
1993c, Marx, Lenin and the Corruption of the Working Class, Political Studies, 41, 636
49.
1994, Lenin, Kautsky and Working-Class Consciousness, History of European Ideas, 18,
5: 67381.
1996, Te Status of a Classic Text: Lenins What Is To Be Done? after 1902, History of
European Ideas, 22, 4: 30720.
1997a, Lenin, the Proletariat, and the Legitimation of Dictatorship, Journal of Political
Ideologies, 2, 1: 99115.
1997b, Plekhanov, Lenin and Working-Class Consciousness, Studies in East European
Tought, 49, 3: 15985.
Mirsky, D.S. 1931, Lenin, Boston: Little and Brown.
Payne, Robert 1964, Te Life and Death of Lenin, New York: Simon and Schuster.
Schub, David 1966, Lenin: A Biography, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Schapiro, Leonard 1970, Te Communist Party of the Soviet Union, New York: Vintage.
Utechin, S.V. 1963, Russian Political Tought: A Concise History, New York: Praeger.
Van den Berg, Axel 1988, Te Immanent Utopia: From Marxism on the State to the State of
Marxism, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Lenin Rediscovered?
Chris Harman
Abstract
By framing Lenins thought squarely within the mainstream of classical Marxism, Lars Lihs
Lenin Rediscovered acts as a powerful contribution to rescuing Lenins Marxism from the
condescension of the textbook-interpretation of Leninism. However, the power of Lihs book
is weakened by a failure to grasp the slippage between what Kautsky wrote and the various ways
in which his writings were interpreted within the Second International. While Lenin attempted
to apply lessons from the German Social-Democratic Party to Russian conditions, so too did
his opponents within the Russian socialist movement. Te actual degree of dierence between
what Lenin did and what Kautsky wrote became fully apparent only after the events of 1914
and 1917.
Keywords
Lenin, Kautsky, Marxism, Second International, socialism, What Is to Be Done?
Lenins short book What Is to Be Done? is one of the most maligned texts in
modern history. For liberal, social-democratic, anarchist, and conservative
historians, academic and popular alike, it has long been portrayed as the source
of the full horrors of Stalinism. It is generally claimed that Lenin laid down his
scheme for a totalitarian party which would cajole workers into acting as
cannon-fodder in his drive to establish a totalitarian state. And, should anyone
doubt these claims, they are often supported by statements from Rosa
Luxemburg and the young Trotsky.
Te essence of the hegemonic interpretation of Lenin is that he distrusted
the mass of workers, despised their spontaneity, held that they could only be
won to socialism by forces coming from outside the working class, and believed
they could only be induced to take part in revolutionary action if brought
under the control of a top-down centralised organisation of professional
revolutionaries made up of bourgeois intellectuals. Tis argument is typically
supported with selected quotations from What Is to Be Done? and the later
text, One Step Forwards, Two Steps Back.
Some on the revolutionary Left have criticised this interpretation. Tony
Cli did so in the rst volume of his biography of Lenin, Building the Party,
C. Harman / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 6474 65
as did John Molyneux in his Marxism and the Party, I did so in my little
pamphlet of 1968, Party and Class, so too did Paul Le Blanc, Ernest Mandel
and Marcel Liebman. Yet the contrary message has been so pervasive as to
have been incorporated without question into numerous works on the history
of the twentieth century, even when written by people whose sympathies are
with the far Left. It should not need adding that resisting the message has not
been made easier by the support it receives among those Stalinists who
welcomed its presumed authoritarianism.
Lars T. Lih has done historical truth a favour with this monumental
exploration of What Is to Be Done?. In 840 pages, he expounds the historical
background against which it was written, the purpose Lenin had in mind,
and what it actually said providing a new translation of the text so as to
eliminate mistaken understandings based on mistranslations of certain key
concepts. His central argument is that Lenin, far from wanting to impose
some sort of dictatorial rule on the workers movement, was in fact concerned
with how, in conditions of extreme illegality in which any activist could
expect to face arrest, imprisonment or exile within a few months, it was
possible to build the enduring elements of a workers movement capable of
being at the centre of an uprising against tsarism. He provides copious
quotations showing Lenins faith in the possibility of workers achieving this
goal. So Lenin writes in 1899:
Not a single class in history has achieved a position of dominance if it did not
push forward its own political leaders and its own advanced representatives who
were capable of organising the movement and guiding it. Te Russian worker
class has already shown that it is capable of pushing forward such people: the
overowing struggle of the last ve or six years has shown what a mass of
revolutionary forces are hidden in the worker class.
1
After a May-Day demonstration in 1900, Lenin similarly argued:
In the history of the Russian worker movement, an epoch of excitement and
outbursts has commenced, occasioned by a very wide variety of causes. . . . Tere
exists a fairy tale that says that the Russian workers have not yet grown up
enough for political struggle, that their main cause is a pure economic struggle
that will imperceptibly and bit by bit be supplemented by partial political
agitation for individual political reforms and not by a struggle against the entire
political system of Russia. Tis fairy tale is decisively refuted by the May First
events in Kharkov.
2
1. Lih 2006, p. 421.
2. Lih 2006, p. 425.
66 C. Harman / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 6474
How do Lenins much commented-on professional revolutionaries t with
this picture? Lih describes how, time and again, the tsarist secret police, the
Okhrana, would discover and destroy workers organisations by arresting
their members. What made this task easier was the amateurism of many
revolutionaries: those new to the struggle found it dicult to hide their
activities from the authorities. Tis could only be avoided by conspiratorial
methods meaning not the organisation of terrorist acts or military actions,
but the use of secrecy to hide from the authorities the organisations
propaganda and agitational activities among workers.
To achieve these goals, the principal enemy was amateurism (or, as Lih
translates Lenin, artisanal limitations) acting in a haphazard and
disorganised manner and so playing into the hands of the Okhrana. Tere
needed to be an organisation with a core of professional revolutionaries
Lih prefers the translation revolutionaries by trade who knew the
conspiratorial techniques needed to avoid arrest while organising workers
meetings, intervening in strikes, and circulating the paper. Lih shows how
widely the need for such an approach was recognised by quoting not Lenin,
but an article written for a German socialist newspaper in 1902 by Vera
Zasulich: one of the people who turned against Lenin in 1903. According to
Zasulich:
Te pressing necessity of the creation of a Central Committee, a central
organisation that would stand over and above the local organisations, is felt by
everybody, although not everybody has a clear idea of its character. We think,
however, that to some extent this central organisation will be formed and
already gradually is being formed according to the only model possible under a
regime of unlimited despotism. Tis is an organisation of carefully selected
illegal revolutionaries an organisation consisting of people for whom
revolution is, so to speak, their only trade, who devote themselves exclusively to
revolutionary activity and who are ready at any moment to change their name
or change their mode of life in order to escape from persecution and constantly
serve the cause. Only under these conditions is intensive revolutionary activity
that is measured in years thinkable in Russia. Only such people will be able to
hold out for several years, as opposed to the present time when a single
revolutionary can barely be active for a few months. Only under these conditions
will they acquire the knack for konspiratsiia, the skill in revolutionary matters,
that is unattainable in other conditions even given outstanding revolutionary
abilities.
3
3. Lih 2006, p. 485.
Tis was the message Lenin attempted to hammer home in What Is to Be
Done?. As Lih points out, the equation of professional revolutionaries with
the intellectuals involves a distortion of Lenins argument:
Tere is no textual justication for taking the alleged arguments about
intellectuals and applying them to the revolutionary by trade. Of course,
Lenin recognises that at the time of writing, most full-time revolutionaries are
not originally from the worker class. But neither then nor later is there any
logical or factual reason for us to equate revolutionaries by trade with
intellectuals. According to the study of worker membership . . . 48 percent of
pre-Second Congress [i.e. 1903] revolutionaries by trade were of worker origin.
Te same study indicates that the total number of revolutionaries by trade
during this period is quite small no more than two hundred.
4
If these gures challenge the dominant proto-totalitarian interpretation of
Leninism, a central-democratic theme of What Is to Be Done? is the need for a
revolutionary-socialist paper, printed abroad and circulated as widely as
possible inside Russia. Tis, Lenin argued, could provide the necessary
linkage between activists and workers across Russia. It could express a sense
of common purpose across the workers movement, generalise their
experiences, and orient to the goal of the uprising in each concrete situation.
Lih quotes Lenin from 1901:
If we unite our forces in producing a newspaper common to all, then this work
will prepare and push forward not only the most able propagandists, but the
most expert organisers, the most talented political leaders of the party, capable
at the right time to give the watchword for the decisive battle and to guide it.
5
Spontaneity, economism and leadership
In pulling such material together, Lih dispels the myth that Lenins practice
was in opposition to the self-emancipation of the working class. Te libel
rests on taking two paragraphs from a work of over 160 pages out of
context. Tese refer to socialism coming from outside the working class and
on spontaneity leading to subordination of bourgeois ideology. Lih gives the
two quotations in the form they appear in the usual translation:
We have said that there could not have been Social-Democratic consciousness
among the workers. It could only have been brought to them from without. Te
4. Lih 2006, p. 465.
5. Lih 2006, p. 421.
story of all countries shows that the working class exclusively by its own eort is
able to develop only trade-union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is
necessary to combine in unions, ght the employers and strive to compel the
government to pass necessary labour legislation etc. Te teachings of socialism,
however, grew out of the philosophic, historical and economic theories
elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by the
intelligentsia. By their social status, the founders of modern scientic socialism,
Marx and Engels, belonged themselves to the bourgeois intelligentsia.
6
Tere is much talk of spontaneity. But the spontaneous development of the
working-class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology to its
development along the lines of the Credo programme; for the spontaneous working-
class movement is trade-unionism, and trade-unionism means the ideological
enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie. Hence, our task, the task of
Social Democracy, is to combat spontaneity, to divert the working-class movement
from this spontaneous trade-unionist striving to come under the wing of the
bourgeoisie and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary Social Democracy.
7
Lih argues that the usual interpretation of these passages confuses the
translation of the Russian into English. Te Russian word translated as
spontaneity in the second passage, stikhiiny, does not refer to the positive
sense in which spontaneity is usually used in English. Rather, he claims, it
has the negative sense of meaning disorganised, lacking purpose.
8
He also
argues that the word translated as divert [sovlech], would be better translated
as attract away from.
9
So, the message of the second passage becomes that
disorganised, undirected action by workers can easily fall into a very narrow
form of trade-unionism that rejects political action. Or, if I can paraphrase
Lihs translation of Lenin: hitting out angrily is not good enough, you have
to direct your anger. And the job of socialists is to provide some direction for
that anger.
I do have a quibble with Lihs arguments here. I think he underestimates
the importance of Lenins struggle against economism the tendency to
reduce workers struggles to those of narrow trade-union issues. Lih argues
that, by the time What Is to Be Done? was written, economism was nished
as a tendency within Russian Social Democracy, and therefore the function
of the chapters against economism in Lenins book was not to defeat
economism but to label a non-economistic tendency, Rabochee delo, as
economistic. Lenin himself recognised in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
that the the division of Russian social democrats into Economists and
6. Lih 2006, p. 641.
7. Lih 2006, p. 614.
8. Lih 2006, p. 625.
9. Lih 2006, p. 629.
politicians has long been obsolete. . . . the ght against economism subsided
and came to an end altogether as far back as 1902.
10
But that did not mean
that economism did not continue to emerge (and does not continue to arise
today) within the wider workers movements. Te independents opposed to
the Social Democrats were, for instance, very inuential among Odessas
workers in 1903,
11
and again in St Petersburg in 1904.
12
More importantly, economism has regularly raised its head within the
international workers movement. As Gramsci pointed out, labour-power has
two faces in capitalist society: on the one hand, its exploitation is the whole
basis of that society, while, on the other, it appears on the market as a
commodity like any other commodity. Tis aspect encourages the idea
among workers that all that is needed is to negotiate harder over the terms on
which their labour-power is sold. One face leads workers in the direction of
class-struggle and consciousness, the other in the direction of subordination
to a conservative trade-union bureaucracy. Or, as Gramsci put it elsewhere
(in a passage virtually ignored by would-be Gramscian Eurocommunists and
neo-Gramscian academics), workers under capitalism have a contradictory
consciousness.
13
From this perspective, the point of revolutionary organisation
is to develop one element in this contradictory experience at the expense of
the other. Lenin, the translator of the Webbs history of trade-unionism into
Russian, may not have theorised this very well in What Is to Be Done?, but he
was absolutely aware of its consequences.
Te question of Kautsky
Tere is a more important weakness in Lihs book which confuses his otherwise
powerful reinterpretation of Lenins project. He claims Lenin was simply
following the path of pre-World-War-One German Social Democracy and its
principal theoretician, Karl Kautsky, and that it has been a mistake of
revolutionaries to argue otherwise.
Certainly, it was Kautsky who repeatedly referred to bringing socialism to
the working class from outside. So he wrote in 1901:
Te vehicle of science is not the proletariat, but the bourgeois intelligentsia:
modern socialism arises among individual members of this stratum and then is
10. Lih 2006, p. 384.
11. Schneiderman 1976, pp. 2989.
12. Surh 1989, pp. 11314.
13. Gramsci 1971, p. 641.
communicated by them to proletarians who stand out due to their intellectual
development, and these then bring it into the class struggle of the proletariat
where conditions allow.
14
According to Lih, Lenin was simply a follower of Kautsky at this time. Tis
leads him repeatedly to refer to Lenins positions as Erfurtian, after the
Erfurt Programme of German Social Democracy written by Kautsky. So
strongly does Lih adhere to this view that he criticises mercilessly those who
have drawn a strong divide between Lenins approach to politics and
Kautskys:
On the Left, a number of writers with no or very shallow roots in the Second
International Georg Lukcs, Antonio Gramsci, Karl Korsch created a theory
(not shared by Lenin) that Leninism was the principled rejection of the fatalistic
Marxism of the Second International and of Kautsky in particular. In my view,
the insistence on seeing a great gulf between Kautsky on the one hand and
Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky on the other has condemned those in the post-
war Trotskyist tradition to a deep misunderstanding of their own heroes.
15
Tat Lenin believed he was a conventional follower of Kautsky in 19023 is
not in doubt. It is a point I made in Party and Class and John Molyneux
made in Marxism and the Party. In fact, in his bitter criticism of Lenin in Our
Political Tasks, Trotsky wrote that Lenin took up Kautskys absurd idea of the
relationship between the spontaneous and the conscious elements of the
revolutionary movement of the proletariat.
16
Unfortunately, Trotsky did not
develop this claim to challenge the fundamental approach of Kautskyism.
Indeed, much of the rest of Our Political Tasks (the text in which this claim
was made) consists in a criticism of Lenin for breaking with the West-
European approach to party-building.
Lih argues that Lenins reliance on Kautskyite arguments in What Is to Be
Done? means that it is wrong to claim that his overall conception of the
relationship between party and class was dierent to Kautskys. He therefore
criticises John Molyneux for writing that Lenin in 1904 diverged in a
fundamental way from social democratic orthodoxy, but was not aware
that he did so. Lih writes, I am not sure whether we are supposed to explain
this by Kautskys deceitfulness, Lenins inability to understand what he read,
or Lenins unawareness of his own beliefs.
17
14. Lih 2006, p. 636. See also Kautsky 1910, p. 198.
15. Lih 2006, p. 32.
16. Trotsky 1904.
17. Lih 2006, p. 25.
Tis argument fails to understand how people read texts. We do so in
terms of the context in which we nd ourselves and interpret them
accordingly. Tis frequently means both that readers ascribe dierent
meanings to texts from those intended by the author and that dierent readers
interpret the same text in dierent ways without necessarily becoming aware
of these dierences. In the case of Kautsky, this was not just a problem for
Lenin. Virtually the whole of the Second International accepted Kautskys
version of orthodoxy until August 1914, with only a small group around
Bernstein publicly dissenting on one side, and an even smaller group around
Rosa Luxemburg on the other.
Te Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks, and those that wavered between them, all
believed themselves to be Kautskyists until 1914.
18
Tis did not stop their
various practices from being very dierent. Does Lih really believe the
activists can only explain this by Kautskys deceitfulness, their inability to
understand what they read, or their unawareness of their own beliefs? In
fact, we all know of cases in which people who claim to agree on a series of
texts interpret them dierently.
Te reason why so many people looked to Kautsky was that he was very
good at explaining Marxist ideas in an easily intelligible way, and using those
ideas to analyse certain long-term historical developments. His Foundations of
Christianity and two-volume work, Te Agrarian Question, are still well worth
reading a century after their publication. It is unsurprising that not only
Lenin, but also Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg were impressed by Kautsky so
long as it was a question of asserting Marxist ideas against those of liberalism
and tsarist conservatism. Te problem with Kautsky became apparent when it
came to moving from the picture of general historical trends to the role of
human action in relating to and shifting the direction of such trends from
a war of position to a war of manoeuvre to use Gramscis terminology.
Kautskys approach to politics was always paedagogic and schoolmasterish.
In his texts, theory attempts to guide practice, but practice never causes a
radical transformation of theory. Consequently, the party was always teacher
to the class; the class never the teacher of the party.
But, once the routine tempo of political life is shaken by enormous
political, social or economic crises, the paedagogical approach blurs important
issues relating to the application of abstract principles to reality. Such
blurring explains how various people in Russia who saw themselves as
Kautkyites could adopt diametrically opposed practical-political approaches
18. With the exception of a few small groups, such as the one surrounding Rosa Luxemburg
from around 1908.
in 19046 and 191214 and why the revolutionaries who had accepted the
Kautskyite theoretical approach found themselves compelled to break from it
explicitly after August 1914.
Lenins life before as well as after 1914 displayed an approach to
politics very dierent to that of Kautsky. He saw the party not merely as a
teacher, but above all as an instrument for engaging in revolutionary-socialist
action. Tat was why his supporters were known as the hard side in the rst
split with the Mensheviks in 1903. Tis was why it was the Bolsheviks, not
the Mensheviks, who organised the Moscow insurrection of December 1905.
Tis was why, as Israel Getzler pointed out in his biography of Martov forty
years ago,
19
the Bolsheviks were enthusiastic about the spontaneous irruptions
of workers anger in 191214, while the Mensheviks were afraid of their
disorderly aspect. Tis also explains why Lenin was so insistent on berating
party-members in 1905 to open up the Party to the newly revolutionary layer
of workers something Lihs work recognises as having happened, but whose
signicance he feels compelled to minimise because of his Erfurtianism-
thesis.
It took the outbreak of the First World-War to reveal to Lenin that his
interpretations of Kautskys argument had been very dierent to those of
Kautsky himself. Tis was because it was only then that the practical
implications of the Kautskyite approach became clear internationally. Until
that point, people could read what they wanted into Kautskys writings,
within certain limits.
Tis should not surprise us. You do not only judge someone by what they
say they are. You have to work out what they really are. Or, as Marx once put
it: We do not set out from what men say, imagine or conceive, nor from
men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men
in the esh. We set out from real active men . . .
20
And real, active people,
who say the same things, often behave very dierent to each other.
Lenin came to the conclusion, after reading Hegel in the rst months of the
War, that the Kautskyite orthodoxys basic form of understanding of the
world was a mechanical, rather than dialectical, version of materialism. He
wrote in his notebook, Marxists criticised (at the beginning of the 20th
century) the Kantians more in the manner of Feuerbach (and Bchner) than
of Hegel.
21
Feuerbach and Bchner were mechanical materialists and so, by
implication, was the pope of pre-1914 Marxism, Kautsky. Georg Lukcs,
Antonio Gramsci and Karl Korsch had a point which Lih fails to grasp. Te
19. Getzler 1967.
20. Marx 1970, p. 47.
21. Lenin 1961b, p. 179.
proof of the pudding, as Engels would have put it, was in the eating. Lenin
behaved very dierently in the Russian Revolution of 1917 from Kautsky and
the Kautskyites did in the German Revolution of 191823. And the theses
and resolutions of the Communist International in Lenins time were very
dierent to Kautskys Erfurt Programme.
It was not only those with no or very shallow roots in the Second
International, as Lih claims, who commented on the mechanical character
of its Marxism, as represented by Kautsky. Trotsky, writing in the immediate
aftermath of the outbreak of the First World-War, noted that Marxism
became for the German proletariat not the algebraic formula of the
revolution . . . but theoretic method for adaptation to a national-capitalist
state crowned with the Prussian helmet.
22
He later noted that:
Kautsky the propagandist and vulgariser of Marxism saw his principal theoretical
mission in reconciling reform and revolution. But he himself took shape
ideologically in an epoch of reform. For him reform was the reality. Revolution
was a theoretical generalization and a historical perspective. . . . Kautsky did not
have this indispensable living experience of revolution. He received Marxism as
a nished system and popularized it like the schoolmaster of scientic
socialism. . . . Kautsky tirelessly defended the revolutionary character of the
doctrine of Marx and Engels. . . . But politically Kautsky had totally reconciled
himself with social-democracy as it had developed . . .
23
Te same point is made in the obituary Trotsky wrote of Kautsky in 1938,
which contrasts him sharply with Lenin:
Almost up to the time of the world war, Lenin considered Kautsky as the
genuine continuator of the cause of Marx and Engels. . . . Tis anomaly was
explained by the character of the epoch, which was an era of capitalist ascension,
of democracy, of adaptation of the proletariat. . . . It was taken for granted that
with the change of the objective conditions, Kautsky would know how to arm
the party with other methods. Tat was not the case. . . . His character, like his
thought, lacked audacity and sweep, without which revolutionary politics is
impossible.
24
Neither Lenins thought nor his character lacked audacity and sweep. Tis is
why it is fundamentally misleading to portray him, as Lih does, as an
Erfurtian. He might have made use of the vulgarised and pedantic texts of
22. Trotsky 1971, p. 57.
23. Trotsky 1919.
24. Trotsky 1938.
Second-International Marxism. But he did so for purposes of his own, and put
back into them the revolutionary zest so missing from Kautsky.
Lih has written a very useful book, but come close to ruining it as various
points by trying to make Lenin into the something he certainly was not.
References
Getzler, Israel 1967, Martov, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gramsci, Antonio 1971, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Kautsky, Karl 1910, Te Erfurt Programme, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr.
Lenin, Vladimir 1961a [1904], One Step Forward, Two Steps Back in Collected Works, Volume 7,
Moscow: Progress Publishers.
1961b [1914], Conspectus on Hegels Science of Logic, Collected Works, Volume 38,
Lih, Lars 2006, Lenin Rediscovered, Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.
Marx, Karl 1970 [18456], Te German Ideology, London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Schneiderman, Jeremiah 1976, Sergei Zubatov and Revolutionary Marxism, Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.
Surh, Gerald D. 1989, 1905 in St Petersburg, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Trotsky, Leon 1904, Our Political Tasks, available at: <http://www.marxists.org/archive/
trotsky/1904/tasks/index.htm>.
1919, Political Proles (Karl Kautsky), available at: <http://www.marxists.org/archive/
trotsky/proles/kautsky.htm>.
1938, Karl Kautsky, New International, available at: <http://www.marxists.org/archive/
trotsky/1938/11/kautsky.htm>.
1971 [1914], Te War and the International, Colombo: Wesley Press.
Text and Context in the Argument of Lenins
What Is to Be Done?
Alan Shandro
Laurentian University
ashandro@laurentian.ca
Abstract
Lars Lihs Lenin Rediscovered aims to overthrow what he labels the textbook-myth of Leninism
through a comprehensive reconstruction of Lenins relationship, both to the Kautskyite
orthodoxy that dominated the international socialist movement, and more local polemics.
While the resulting rereading of Lenins early Marxism is a powerful counter to the textbook-
interpretation of Leninism, Lih has perhaps bent the stick too far in an attempt to prove
Lenins orthodoxy. Importantly, he misconstrues Lenins critique of economism through a too-
narrow reading of economism. Lih would have been better served to recognise the importance
of Lenins polemic as an attempt, not simply to paint his opponents on the Russian Left as
economists, but, more importantly, to grasp the organic nature of reformism and thus the true
scale of the diculties involved in challenging its hegemony within the workers movement.
Keywords
hegemony, economism, consciousness, spontaneity, self-emancipation
For those interested in the revaluation and reworking of the theory and
practice of the classical-Marxist tradition, Lars Lihs rediscovery of the
political context of Lenins What Is to Be Done? (WITBD?) is a work of
considerable importance. Lenins text has been a key-point of reference,
perhaps the key-point of reference, in debates around the political function of
a Marxist vanguard and the logic of political action, and hence around the
relation of theory and practice. According to the textbook-interpretation, as
Lih terms it, a reading that has passed into a broader conventional wisdom to
the extent that it has gained the status of common sense, Lenins scepticism
as to the capacity of the working class to spontaneously generate socialist
consciousness led him to assign revolutionary agency to a vanguard-party of
professional revolutionaries, rather than to the working-class movement. Te
subordination of the workers to the Leninist vanguard-party prescribed by
Lenin thus pregures, and thereby serves to provide the veneer of an
76 A. Shandro / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 7589
explanation for, the authoritarian upshot of the revolutionary process. Te
plausibility of attributing such a blatant departure from the canons of
historical materialism to a professed Marxist depends upon situating Lenins
thought in the context of the political litism and messianic voluntarism of
the pre-Marxist tradition of Russian populism. Tis depends, in turn, upon
reading Marxism (or at least the Marxism with which Lenin was familiar),
not as a guide to action, but, as the populist adversaries of Russian Marxism
did, as a conceptual straightjacket that precluded the theorisation of eective
revolutionary-political action. And, if this reading is to have any plausibility,
it must rely upon contemporary criticism of Lenin from a few minor gures
on the margins of the Russian Social-Democratic movement, from the
retrospective criticism of Lenins Menshevik adversaries, and from the later-
Leninist characterisation of Kautsky and the Mensheviks as mechanical
Marxists. Te textbook-interpretation not only serves to sustain the legend of
Lenins populism, but also to constrain debate over the logic of revolutionary-
political action within the narrow connes of an abstract opposition between
agency and structure.
Te textbook-interpretation has been subjected to serious scholarly
criticism before, notably in the rst volume of Neil Hardings Lenins Political
Tought,
1
but Lih here lays out a much more relentlessly detailed I am
tempted to say exhaustive refutation. Te theoretical and evidentiary issues
Lih addresses are complex, and he combines evidence drawn from historical,
literary and linguistic sources into a powerful multi-faceted argument that
resists brief summary. His interpretation turns upon the meticulously
argued claim that the historical narrative of the fusion of socialism and the
workers movement epitomised in Kautskys commentary upon the German
Social-Democratic Party (SPD)s Erfurt Programme, and the attempt by
Russian Marxists to situate their political aims and practice in the terms of
this narrative, constitute the context without which Lenins text cannot be
understood. Te Erfurtian narrative is shot through with biblical overtones
it is the mission of the Social Democrats to bring to the workers the good
news of the world-historical mission of the working-class movement to
seize power and establish socialism and so the political project of Social
Democracy is not premised simply upon a dryly mechanical theory of history,
but resonates with activist-evangelism. Socialist consciousness is thus to be
understood essentially in terms of the task of spreading this good news, and
an evangelical and democratic condence in the capacity of the workers to
receive it and act upon it was essential to the Social-Democratic project. Tis
1. Harding 1977, Chapters 6 and 7.
A. Shandro / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 7589 77
portrait of the political orientation of Kautskys orthodox Marxism, in which
condence in the inevitable unfolding of the historical laws of capitalism,
rather than excusing a political posture of passive expectation, sustains a
durable will to revolutionary activism, is a crucial building-block in Lihs
argumentative strategy, for it is only by contrast with a fatalistic caricature
of orthodox Marxism that Lenins advocacy of the organisation of a
revolutionary vanguard could appear heterodox. Once the caricature is
exposed as such and it is one of the signal contributions of this work to have
done so it is possible and necessary to measure WITBD? against the standard
set by Kautskys Marxism and the political project of the SPD.
How, then, does WITBD? measure up? Te strategic perspective fashioned
by Plekhanov, Lenin and their Iskra-colleagues, the hegemony of the proletariat
in the Russian bourgeois-democratic revolution, is construed by Lih in terms
of the Erfurtian narrative, and he accumulates a mass of evidence to demonstrate
the delity, not only of Lenin and Iskra, but also of the most prominent of
their polemical adversaries, to its narrative structure. Indeed, he suggests that
the Russians added little besides the term hegemony, and perhaps not even
that, to the political orientation of the SPD. If anything distinguished Lenin
in Russian-Marxist circles, in the company both of his Iskra-colleagues and of
his polemical adversaries, it was his more unyielding attachment to the theme
and the logic of the Erfurtian narrative and his correspondingly greater
condence in the political capacity of the workers to meet the demands of
revolutionary-political struggle: if Kautskys rectitude in matters of Marxist
theory made him, according to a witticism of the time, the pope of Social-
Democratic ideology, then Lenin, according to Lih, comes o as more
Social-Democratic than the pope.
2
Following Lenins commentary on the 1907 re-edition of WITBD?, Lih
insists that the pamphlet be read in connection with the concrete historical
situation of a denite, and now long past, period in the development of our
Party.
3
It was widely expected, around the turn of the century, in
revolutionary circles that the struggles of the nascent working-class movement
would serve to galvanise the opposition to tsarist rule that was welling up
throughout Russian society. But early attempts to provide the movement
with organised Social-Democratic leadership proved abortive when police-
raids decimated its central organisations and reduced the edgling party to a
mere aspiration. In the resulting atmosphere of disorientation and
demoralisation, a tendency emerged to shrink back from the revolutionary
2. Lih 2006, p. 114.
3. Lenin 1962d, p. 101.
mission of Social Democracy, to narrow its practical ambition for the
working class to a kind of Gompers-style trade-unionism pure and simple,
and to cede the political struggle against the government, and consequently
hegemony in the democratic revolution, to the representatives of bourgeois
liberalism. Lih notes, however, that by the time WITBD? was written,
although the Social-Democratic movement remained a congeries of circles,
principally those around Iskra and those around the journal Rabochee delo
[Workers Cause], loosely co-operating and, at the same time, contending for
inuence in the process of drawing together into an organised party, Lenin
was able to assume opposition on the part of his readership to this economist
tendency. Lih fails to note, however, that, at least according to Lenin,
disagreement over how this protean tendency to economism was to be
understood and consequently, how it was to be dealt with played an
important part in the contention among the Russian Social Democrats. As
we shall see, this disagreement serves as a kind of index of tensions and
ambiguities that beset the Social-Democratic project of proletarian hegemony
and the Marxist orthodoxy upon which it rested; and it is thus an index of
pervasive, if latent, dierences in approach to understanding and acting
within and upon the concrete historical situation.
On Lihs reading, the argument of WITBD? was structured in two main
ways by this situation. First, it was shaped by Lenins concern to map out a
plan for the construction of a party-organisation through the production and
distribution of a newspaper devoted largely to political agitation and thus to
sustain in practical terms Iskras bid for leadership. Te requisite organisation
would have, under then prevailing conditions, to be narrow rather than
broad, a vanguard as distinct from a mass-organisation, capable of resisting
police-repression and hence of growing roots in the working-class movement
and of focusing worker-struggles on a political assault upon the tsarist rgime.
Tus understood, the newspaper-proposal would not displace working-class
activity and consciousness, but rather serve to develop them and so enable
Social-Democratic activists to act out the Erfurtian narrative under the trying
conditions of tsarist autocracy. [T]he vanguard outlook not only does not
contradict the Marxist assumption that the emancipation of the working
classes must be the work of the working classes themselves, but is eectively
derived from it.
4
Te signicance of the newspaper lies in the need for a
vanguard-organisation of revolutionaries, this need from the exigencies of
political agitation under autocratic conditions and the need for political
agitation from the struggle for hegemony of the working class in the
4. See Lih 2006, p. 556.
democratic revolution. Tis logic governs the last three chapters of WITBD?,
which Lih terms its business part.
5
Second, however, the argument of WITBD? was subject to the political
logic of the factional struggle. Lenin was obliged by this logic to respond to a
virtual challenge from Rabochee delo to defend Iskra against charges of having
dogmatically subordinated the spontaneous struggles of the workers to an
arid theoretical purism, that is, of having abandoned the class point of view
which led him to introduce the business part of the book with two chapters
devoted, respectively, to discussions of dogmatism and freedom of criticism
and of spontaneity and consciousness. But, carried away by polemical zeal,
he was led to assimilate the stance of his opponents, who, like Iskra, situated
themselves inside the Erfurtian narrative, to that of acknowledged
economists. In so doing, a penchant for trying to bend the rhetorical tropes
of his opponents to his own purposes pushed him into a series of hasty and
sometimes ill-considered and cryptic formulations, notably in his discussion
of spontaneity and consciousness, that has become the focal point of
subsequent political and exegetical controversy. Once Lenins argument is
read in context and its practical essence distinguished from the distortions
introduced by factional polemics, Lih argues, WITBD? can be seen, not as
the site of dramatic political departures or theoretical innovations, but as
nothing more nor less in substance than a reassertion and detailed application
to the practical problems of Russian Social Democracy of the Erfurtian
perspective of orthodox Second-International Marxism. If Lih is right, the
political and theoretical controversy that has swirled around WITBD? is
simply much ado about nothing.
Any reading of a text must draw some kind of distinction between what
is essential to its meaning and what is merely incidental, between what is
of theoretical relevance and what is merely circumstantial. Tis distinction
corresponds, in Lihs work, to his distinction between the practical or business-
sections and aspects of Lenins argument, those devoted to his proposal for the
appropriate tactical, organisational and practical arrangements to give eect to
the Erfurtian perspective, itself uncontested among the Russian Marxists, and
the polemical aspects of the work, dominated by the struggle as to who, which
circle, would take upon itself the leadership of Russian Social Democracy
within the parameters of the shared Erfurtian perspective. Tis distinction
rests, in turn, upon a narrow construal of the term Lenin uses to designate
the object of his criticism, economism, as entailing a rejection of working-
class participation in the bourgeois-democratic revolution. Tus understood,
5. Lih 2006, pp. 11, 353.
Lenins attribution to Rabochee delo of an economist perspective is a polemical
distortion of little or no theoretical interest, but one that has had the
unfortunate eect of fostering the impression, among those unfamiliar with
the context of the debate, that the critique of economism signied a departure
from the canons of Marxist orthodoxy and hence of lending unwarranted
plausibility to the textbook-interpretation.
If we take Lenin at his word, however, economism is not to be understood
in such narrow terms. Te term economism, although entrenched by usage,
did not, he acknowledged, adequately convey the character of the political
trend he designated by it.
6
Understood in the broad sense of the word, the
principal feature of economism was its incomprehension, even defence,
of . . . the lagging of the conscious leaders behind the spontaneous awakening
of the masses.
7
Tus understood, the meaning of economism is subordinate
to Lenins distinction between consciousness and spontaneity, and its
signicance is to be sought in the relation between leadership and the masses.
Not only was economism not inconsistent with political activity, it was not
inconsistent with political revolution. Tus understood, the category of
economism did indeed allow Lenin to associate Rabochee delo with economism
in the narrow sense, but this does not imply that he attributed the reformist
views of the latter to the former he did not. If we turn Lihs interpretive
procedure around and assume that Lenin intended his category of economism
to designate some coherent referent, the question necessarily arises as to just
what the coherence of its referent consists in. Te coherence of economism
certainly does not consist in an agreement of ideas, but the political signicance
of an idea is not necessarily what its proponent professes it to be. It depends
upon the context in which it is professed: dierent ideas may play the same or
an analogous rle in dierent contexts, and even in the same context may
display a convergent signicance. Te connection Lenin asserts between
Rabochee delo and economism in the narrow sense is to be understood in some
such sense, not as that between dierent adherents of the same set of ideas, but
as that between variant forms of a political tendency. Judgements in matters
of this kind suppose, of course, a claim to understand, at least in its broad
outline, the strategic logic of political struggles, but that Lenin was prepared
to make such a claim is not, I think, a matter of debate.
Making sense of Lenins notion of economism thus requires us to grapple,
not only with his distinction between spontaneity and consciousness, but also
with the logic of political strategy in the democratic revolution. Te matter is
6. Lenin 1962c, pp. 3867.
7. Lenin 1962b, p. 317.
best approached by considering the latter issue rst. One of the merits of
Lihs book is to have shown that working-class participation in the struggle
for political freedom ows naturally from the Erfurtian perspective: according
to the Erfurtian narrative, it is only in the course of the struggle for political
democracy that the workers learn to wield political freedoms in their own
interests and hence develop the understanding and political capacity necessary
to assume political power and organise society along Social-Democratic lines
and, since the growing political strength of the working class tempers
bourgeois enthusiasm for democracy, leadership in the struggle for political
democracy is increasingly incumbent upon the proletariat. Tis conception
refers, on one hand, to the theme of proletarian self-emancipation, the idea
that the working class is in the course of its struggle becomes capable of
taking charge of its own emancipation and, on the other, to the idea that the
need of the working class for democracy in its struggle for a classless society
renders it the appropriate leader for the democratic aspirations and struggles
of other, non-proletarian classes and strata of society. It is thus characterised
by some internal complexity it assumes that the two tasks, self-emancipation
and democratic leadership, and two corresponding interests, class-interest
and popular-democratic interest, coincide. In Germany, where capitalism
was incomparably more highly developed than in Russia and where the
bourgeoisie had, accordingly, already been able to establish its preponderant
weight in state-aairs, the established rle of the SPD as the pre-eminent
party of opposition may have seemed, in Erfurtian eyes, to cement the
conjunction of these two terms into self-evidence.
But, in Russia, where this Erfurtian conception was translated into the
strategic orientation of proletarian hegemony in the bourgeois-democratic
revolution, the conjunction of class-interest and popular-democratic interest
was as yet only a strategic aspiration. Its translation into Russian political
reality was conditional upon successfully coping with the challenge of rival,
bourgeois, projects for hegemony in the revolutionary process. And if he is to
be taken at his word, Lenin took the threat of such projects seriously. It is
not that he feared the spectre of some latter-day revival of the Jacobin Clubs
that prospect was, indeed, historically dpass. But bourgeois hegemony
could take quite dierent forms than this. And, in the important essay, Te
Persecutors of the Zemstvo and the Hannibals of Liberalism, written just a
few months before WITBD? and reissued along with the latter in 1907, Lenin
discerned the lineaments of such a bourgeois-hegemonic project in an
attempt by Peter Struve, former Social Democrat (in fact, the author of the
manifesto that emerged from the abortive rst congress of the Russian Social-
Democratic Labour-Party [RSDLP]) and future luminary of Russian
liberalism, to use the threat of a revolutionary workers movement to urge
reforms upon tsarism: this attempt presaged a scenario in which the
revolutionary force of the masses played a necessary rle, albeit only as a kind
of stage-army with which to frighten the tsar, but which would then, when
the time came for the serious business of renegotiating the redistribution of
power, yield the political stage, willingly or unwillingly, to liberal specialists
in constitutional politics.
8
Such a scenario did not assume workers smitten
with liberal ideology; rather, it envisaged a workers movement of militant,
even revolutionary, even socialist temperament, but for which revolution was
a means to enforce its economic class-interests, narrowly construed, rather
than to transcend its interest-group limitations. Any tendency to construe the
political project of the working class in restrictive terms, even one decked out,
as in the case of Rabochee delo, in the language of revolution and claims to
vanguard-status, would play into such a scenario: at stake in Lenins critique
of economism was not only the relation of politics and economics, revolution
and reform, but also, and perhaps more basically, the relation between class-
interests and popular-democratic interests in the project of proletarian
hegemony. If, as Lih claims, there was consensus among the Russian Social
Democrats over the Erfurtian narrative and the project of proletarian
hegemony in the bourgeois-democratic revolution, then Lenins critique of
economism indicates that this project was beset by internal political, and
therefore perhaps also theoretical, tensions; hegemony could not be taken as
given, it would have to be constructed. And this suggests, in turn, that the
relation between the business- and the polemical aspects of Lenins argument
is more uid (and perhaps more productive) than Lih would have it: if we
once again take Lenin at his word and assume that a tendency exists
corresponding to his denition of economism, it could reveal itself only in the
course of polemics over what proletarian hegemony is, that is, how it was to
be constructed. Te polemical aspect plays not only a rhetorical or even
political rle in Lenins argument, but also an epistemological rle.
If the economist tendency as identied by Lenin does exist, the question
must arise as to how it is to be understood and, in this connection, recourse
to the distinction between spontaneity and consciousness is necessary. If we
retain the possibility that Lenins polemic does play a theoretical rle in his
argument, then it may, conversely, help in clarifying the distinction between
spontaneity and consciousness. It is a crucial weakness of Lihs reading of
WITBD? as an exemplication of the Erfurtian narrative that it is unable to
account for some of Lenins most noteworthy (or, at least, most noted)
formulations on the relation between spontaneity and consciousness,
8. See Lenin 1962a.
particularly his repeated claim that the task of Social-Democracy is to combat
spontaneity, to divert the working-class movement from this spontaneous,
trade-unionist striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie and to bring
it under the wing of revolutionary Social-Democracy.
9
Te logic of the
Erfurtian narrative can be stretched to accommodate a good deal of Lenins
polemic against the economist practice of subordinating consciousness to
spontaneity, but it cannot contain this crucial claim; it is a tribute to Lihs
intellectual honesty that he acknowledges this diculty. And, while Lih can
attribute the formulations in question to a combination of polemical
distortion and editorial haste, it should be noted that his procedure of
determining the meaning of key-terms in Lenins text, including spontaneity
and consciousness, by reference to common Russian usage of the time, while
necessary and sometimes illuminating, is ill-adapted to the task of discerning
their place, and hence their meaning, in the logic of Lenins argument and
therefore for determining whether or not they indicate an innovative
movement of thought.
Te rle played by consciousness in Lenins text is not to be understood,
Lih cautions, in abstraction from political practice, and since the political
practice advocated by Lenin is to be understood in terms of the Erfurtian
narrative, consciousness is construed as an awareness of the task of spreading
the good news of the fusion of socialism and the working-class movement.
Inasmuch as historical materialism supplies the theory of the historical
movement of this fusion, consciousness is to be grasped by reference to
Marxist theory. Te introduction of consciousness into the spontaneous
working-class movement from without signies, in terms of the Erfurtian
narrative, a practice of making workers aware of a goal and a direction of
their movement that is already implicit in their practice. Since the
spontaneous movement and the conscious awareness of it, practice and
theory, are congruent and harmonious, there is no need, and no theoretical
room, for a struggle between them. Tis is, indeed, the implication of the
passage by Kautsky famously cited by Lenin in his own discussion of
consciousness and spontaneity in WITBD?.
10
However, while some of Lenins
formulations can be assimilated to this logic, others, in particular those
enjoining a struggle against spontaneity, are suggestive of a dierent logic at
work in Lenins argument. Te evidence assembled by Lih renders the
textbook-interpretation unsustainable, yet the conceptual tensions upon
9. Lenin 1962c, p. 384.
10. See Shandro 1997/8.
which that reading feeds cannot be resolved absent an explanation of these
passages.
Socialist consciousness, as it gured in Lenins argument, certainly carried
an injunction to working-class solidarity in the struggle for a socialist aim
that transcended capitalism and class-society, but it also assumed an
awareness of the irreconcilable antagonism of [the workers] interests to the
whole of the modern political and social system
11
and, thus, it implied
attentiveness to the twists and turns in the path to the socialist end, that is,
to the politico-strategic logic of the class-struggle. Te irreconcilability of
class-antagonism implied that it is built into the very foundation of the
bourgeois social edice and it enjoins systematic distrust of the class-enemy;
the pervasive character of class-antagonism implied that it cannot be escaped
and argued that exclusion of any aspect of the socio-political totality from
the purview of the socialist project might concede the strategic initiative to
the adversary. Socialist consciousness could not but draw upon Marxist
theory (the theorisation of the irreconcilability of class-antagonism) and
could not be brought to bear upon the class-struggle in the absence of an
organised leadership informed by that theory and able to apply it ambitiously
and with condence.
Lenins argument distinguishes two contradictory tendencies in the
spontaneous working-class movement, that is, in the working-class movement
insofar as the consciousness of the irreconcilable antagonism of [the workers]
interests to the whole of the modern political and social system has not been
brought to bear upon it: the movement, grounded in the exploitative social
relations of capitalist production that structure the workers lives and
experience, tends spontaneously through the experience of solidarity and
struggle to engender a socialist consciousness (that is, the spontaneous
movement is the embryo of consciousness) but bourgeois ideology imposes
itself spontaneously as the frame within which working-class experience and
struggles are grasped in terms that could not shake the hegemony of the
adversary (that is, the spontaneous movement leads to a merely corporate or
trade-union consciousness). Lenins claim is that the latter tendency
spontaneously predominates over the former and that it is therefore
incumbent upon Social-Democratic consciousness or rather, those who
have achieved this consciousness, to struggle against spontaneity.
To appreciate the force of this claim, we need to look at the logic of the
interplay between these tendencies.
12
Te workers struggle spontaneously,
11. Lenin 1962c, p. 375.
12. Te point is more thoroughly argued in Shandro 1995.
and, in the course of their struggles, a combination of changed circumstances
and innovative methods of struggle may result in a challenge and even, on
occasion, a breach of the parameters of bourgeois hegemony. Spontaneous
working-class struggles may elicit not only a re-assertion of the tried and true
themes of class-rule, but also sometimes innovative attempts to reformulate
the parameters of bourgeois hegemony, that is, the reorganisation of
bourgeois strategy and the spontaneous imposition of bourgeois ideology
onto the struggle of the workers. To be eective, this kind of response must
appear in forms that have some purchase upon the spontaneous proletarian
experience of the class-struggle; indeed, bourgeois hegemony need not
depend upon denial of the class-struggle and might be most eectively
expressed in and through the political shape, organisation and direction of
the resistance of its socialist adversary. Accommodation to bourgeois
hegemony thus proceeds spontaneously, not through a failure of proletarian
commitment to the struggle for socialism, which Lenin never questioned, but
through failure eectively to mount a political project of proletarian
hegemony, that is, to contend for, establish and maintain the strategic
initiative in the struggle for hegemony in the democratic revolution. An
eective project of proletarian hegemony could not arise simply from the
workers spontaneous experience, because that experience is structured both
by the reality of class-antagonism and by the bourgeois-ideological
construction of such antagonism as somehow reconcilable. Since each aspect
of this spontaneous movement may take on novel forms beyond the current
experience of the participants, the irreconcilability of their antagonism can
only be grasped theoretically. Since attempts at class-conciliation can draw
upon ideological and political materials from anywhere in the social totality
and may do so innovatively, Marxist theory must be open to the whole of the
social order, including the open-ended logic of the struggle for hegemony,
that is to say, it must itself develop; indeed, theory and the political project
grounded in it can only be vindicated, however, through engagement with
periodically renewed attempts to reconcile class-antagonisms, including
attempts that would instrumentalise elements of socialist theory and practice
to this end.
Why could the workers themselves not grasp Marxist theory? Lenins
explicit answer was that they could do it, better in fact than the intellectuals.
Tey would do so, however, not in the mass, but as individuals, and having
become conscious, they would nd themselves in a position analogous to
that occupied by the initial, intellectual, carriers of Marxist theory,
confronting the challenge of bringing consciousness to bear upon the
contradictory logic of the spontaneous movement. Meeting it spontaneously,
they might observe the objective logic of the class-struggle and,
accommodating themselves to ow of events, no doubt participate along
with their fellow-workers in whatever struggles should arise, but forego any
pretensions to provide leadership in the class-struggle. Meeting it consciously,
they would employ Marxist theory reexively to grasp their own situation
within the spontaneously-given conjunctures of the class-struggle and, acting
from where they are, assume the burdens of leadership in the struggle for
hegemony. To assume this responsibility was to take up a sophisticated
political stance, sustaining the spontaneous struggles of the workers and
fostering the embryonic forms of socialist consciousness thrown up in the
course of them by diagnosing and combating the forms in which bourgeois
ideology spontaneously imposes itself within the working-class movement.
At stake in Lenins discussion of spontaneity and consciousness was, not an
issue in the sociology of knowledge concerning the bearer of socialist
consciousness, but the strategic, or better, meta-strategic, issue of the terms
in which Marxist political actors intellectuals or workers can come to
grips with their own situation within the class-struggle and position
themselves to act eectively upon it. Indeed, that the profound theoretical
error of Rabochee delo and other Economists had to do with just this issue,
their inability to connect spontaneous evolution with conscious revolutionary
activity,
13
is asserted by Lenin in a brief article he described as a synopsis of
WITBD?.
14
Lenins distinction between spontaneity and consciousness is not a
transposition into political terms of an ontological distinction between matter
and mind or of a social-scientic distinction between base and superstructure,
or even of a sociological distinction between workers and intellectuals. It
invokes, rather, the contradictory combination of a complex set of forces and
tendencies in a concrete conjuncture of political struggle and implicitly,
through this, the operation of a politico-strategic logic of struggle for
hegemony in relation to which the Marxist political actors are invited/
required to situate themselves. Refracted through this logic, the class-struggle
and, with it, working-class consciousness cannot but develop unevenly. Te
thesis of consciousness from without is an attempt to think through the
implication of this unevenness for political action and political leadership of
the working-class movement. It provides the conceptual underpinnings for
the distinctive Leninist injunction to concrete analysis of the concrete
situation, and it mandates, accordingly, the reexive adjustment of
13. Lenin 1962b, p. 316.
14. Lenin 1962c, p. 350.
consciousness to the shifting lines and logic of the struggle for hegemony.
Tus, paradoxically, it generates the possibility of opening up Marxist theory
to unexpected innovation and diversity in the spontaneous movement of the
class-struggle.
15
Lenins WITBD? emerges from and cannot be understood
without the context of orthodox Erfurtian Marxism, but it points beyond it.
If some such logic is at work in WITBD?, then it becomes plausible to
regard Rabochee delo and Kuskovas Credo as, not necessarily dierent
expressions of the same set of political ideas, but distinct phenomenal forms
of the same underlying political tendency. For, on this logic, political
tendencies are to be identied not only by reference to the ideas expressed by
political actors but essentially by reference to the rle ideas and actions play in
the class-political struggle for hegemony. Te economism that was the target
of Lenins critique need not imply the reduction of political to economic
struggle; indeed, it could be and often was articulated in quite revolutionary
terms. Tus, it could assume an indenite number of forms, leftist as well as
rightist, as it did during the revolution of 1905, and again, during the First
World-War, when Lenin would revive the terminology of the earlier polemic
to tax Bukharin and his co-thinkers with the charge of imperialist economism
for their refusal to recognise a right of nations to self-determination as an
essential part of a revolutionary-socialist programme.
16
Tus understood, the
economist-trend consisted in the eective concession to bourgeois interests of
areas of political debate and activity and thereby and to that extent the
restriction of working-class politics to narrowly corporate concerns and the
accommodation of socialist politics to the spontaneous movement of the class-
struggle, that is, to lines, forms and trajectories of conict prescribed by, or at
least recoverable by, bourgeois hegemony. Te struggle between political
tendencies in the working-class movement is no longer reduced to a struggle
between ideas proper to the working class itself and those proper to historically
outmoded social strata intermingled with it, but is to be understood as well in
terms of the logic of contemporary political struggles.
If some such logic underpins Lenins argument, then his critique of
Rabochee delos theoretical indierence in the rst chapter of WITBD? is not,
as Lih maintains, of merely polemical signicance but integral to his political
position, that is, to the way in which he was beginning to conceive the
hegemony of the proletariat. For knowledge of Marxist theory gures there,
not as a rigid standard of orthodox rectitude with which to chastise his
15. See Shandro 2007.
16. See Lenin 1964.
adversaries for their departures, but, more importantly, as a necessary condition
for grappling consciously with the new and in some cases unprecedented
issues posed by the struggle against the tsarist autocracy and, consequently,
for situating oneself in concrete political terrain. Te importance of theory is
enhanced for the Russian Marxists, Lenin writes, not only by the need to
settle accounts with non-Marxist trends of revolutionary thought and the
consequent necessity of a strict dierentiation of shades of opinion, but by
the need to develop the ability to treat [the] experiences [of other countries]
critically and test them independently and by the fact that the national tasks
of Russian Social-Democracy are such as have never confronted any other
socialist party in the world.
17
And this suggests, if it does not imply, that the
defence of theory requires it to be further developed by applying it to new and
as-yet unresolved questions. Rabochee delos theoretical gaes and practical
blunders are to be gauged, accordingly, not only by already-established
Erfurtian standards, but also by the task of grappling with challenges on the
frontiers of Marxist theory and practice.
Lars Lihs comprehensive demonstration that WITBD? cannot be
understood apart from the political and discursive context of Erfurtian
Marxism, and its attempted translation into Russia Social Democracy
provides an indispensable service to the historiography of Marxist theory and
practice. But, if I may borrow a Leninist metaphor, it seems that Lih has bent
this particular stick too far. Tis is most evident in Lihs narrow construal of
the pivotal concept of economism, in terms of the professed positions of only
some of the targets of Lenins polemic, although Lenin explicitly cautions his
readers against this kind of misreading. But the same sort of diculty appears
in Lihs assumptions about the status of Marxist theory in Lenins argument.
Where Lenin derived his recourse to theory from the very logic of the debate
over practical proposals the perplexity of the Economists over the practical
application of our views in Iskra clearly revealed that we often speak literally
in dierent tongues and therefore cannot arrive at an understanding without
beginning ab ovo
18
Lih subordinates the text of WITBD? to his distinction
between its business and its polemical parts, thus making it impossible to
see what of theoretical signicance could possibly be at stake in the controversy
and reading as mere rhetoric, superuous except for polemical purposes, the
necessity Lenin asserts for recourse to Marxist theory in order to understand
what is at issue in the debate over the practical project of proletarian hegemony.
In these ways, the necessary and proper concern with restoring the context of
17. Lenin 1962c, p. 370.
18. Lenin 1962c, p. 350.
WITBD?, pushed too far, actually leads to distortions of the text itself. In
eect, Lih reduces the argument of Lenins text to its Erfurtian context and
thereby misses its innovative aspect and, paradoxically, this kind of procedure
can occlude such a crucial contextual feature as the connection, designated by
Lenin, between economism as a political current and an emergent liberal-
bourgeois bid for hegemony in the democratic revolution. Where a text
challenges the terms of debate, it may illuminate unsuspected distinctions and
connections in the reality it seeks to grasp, and where that reality is the political
context within which it is written, it may change the terms in which its context
is understood; in this materialist sense, a text such as Lenins WITBD? may
re-invent its own context.
References
Harding, Neil 1977, Lenins Political Tought: Teory and Practice in the Democratic Revolution,
London: Macmillan.
Lenin, V.I. 1962a [1901], Te Persecutors of the Zemstvo and the Hannibals of Liberalism, in
Collected Works, Volume 5, Moscow: Progress Publishers.
1962b [1901], A Talk With Defenders of economism, in Collected Works, Volume 5,
1962c [1902], What Is to Be Done?, in Collected Works, Volume 5, Moscow: Progress
Publishers.
1962d [1907], Preface to the Collection Twelve Years, in Collected Works, Volume 5,
1964 [1916], A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist economism, in Collected Works,
Volume 23, Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Lih, Lars 2006, Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? in Context, Historical Materialism
Shandro, Alan 1995, Consciousness from Without: Marxism, Lenin and the Proletariat,
Science & Society, 59, 3: 26897.
1997/8, Karl Kautsky: On the Relation of Teory and Practice, Science & Society, 61, 4:
474501.
2007, Lenin and Hegemony: Te Soviets, the Working Class, and the Party in the
Revolution of 1905, in Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth, edited by Sebastian
Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis and Slavoj Zizek, Durham, NC.: Duke University Press.
Rediscovering Lenin
Paul Le Blanc
La Roche College, Pittsburgh
Paul.LeBlanc@LaRoche.edu
Abstract
Lenin Rediscovered is an important and powerful contribution to our understanding of Lenins
Marxism. However, it is also awed by an attempt to push too far the claim that Lenin was a
consistent Erfurtian or Second-International Marxist. Te dynamics of a mass political party
and social movement are very dierent from even the most representative theoretician. Te
reality of German Social Democracy was certainly more problematic than what Lenin was able
to glean from the very best of Kautskys writings. Tis became apparent to Lenin in 1914, when
he recognised that he had been building a very dierent kind of party from the actual SPD. It
may be possible that the SPD and the RSDLP (Bolsheviks) were both parties of a new type, but
it is also clear that they were not parties of the same type. Tere was much that Lenin had in
common with Kautsky and Bebel but he was doing something that was, in important ways,
quite dierent.
Keywords
Bolshevism, communism, Lenin, Marxism, party, revolution, socialism, working class
Te rst thing one must say about Lars T. Lihs massive study, Lenin Rediscovered:
What Is to Be Done? in Context, is that it is a magnicent contribution to our
understanding of V.I. Lenin, Bolshevism, Marxism, the history of the Russian-
revolutionary movement and of Communism. It stands as an incredibly
eective challenge to anti-communist and anti-Lenin dogmas and distortions
that have dominated scholarship and popular expositions since the 1950s in
the advanced-capitalist countries and, since 1990, throughout most of
the world.
Clearly written, well-reasoned, eectively documented, it is a work that no
scholar seriously examining the life and thought of Lenin will be able to
ignore. More than this, it is a gift to serious political activists seeking to draw
on traditions and lessons of the past in order to get present-day and future
possibilities into sharper focus. Although the sheer bulk of the volume (more
than 860 pages) will be daunting for many, those who seek to bridge the gap
P. Le Blanc / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 90107 91
between serious scholarship and serious activism by helping deepen their
comrades understanding through the development of more-widely accessible
educational materials will certainly want to draw on this outstanding
resource.
Lihs primary target for criticism is a strong consensus of informed experts
who, at least from the mid-1950s, have put forward a reading of What Is to
Be Done? that has found its way into textbooks of political science and of
Russian history, and, from there, into almost any secondary account that has
reason to touch on Lenin. Te two or three famous passages that form the
textual basis of this reading are endlessly recycled from textbook to popular
history to specialised monograph and back again. He sums up: Putting all the
assertions of the textbook interpretation together, we realise that WITBD? is a
profound theoretical and organisational innovation, the charter document of
Bolshevism, and the ultimate source of Stalinism
1
a set of contentions
unable to withstand this scholarly onslaught.
Lih presents a Lenin who is absolutely committed to the establishment of
political democracy as essential to the struggle for and the realisation of
socialism, a Lenin who has immense condence that the working class has a
natural capacity for absorbing revolutionary-socialist ideas and committing
itself to the struggle for a radically better world, a Lenin who is determined to
help build a broad working-class party with a principled socialist programme
owing from a Marxist understanding of the world. He demolishes the notions
that Lenin diverged qualitatively from Marx, that he distrusted the workers
and their spontaneity, that he was an litist and an authoritarian. In doing
this, Lih draws together a variety of facts and opens up certain lines of thought
that greatly add to our knowledge and understanding. It is a splendid
achievement.
Tere is, however, a problematic feature of Lenin Rediscovered that merits
critical scrutiny. A somewhat exaggerated claim and unfortunate literary
strategy are part of the structure of his argument. I would contend that this
does no harm whatsoever to the primary thrust of his work an examination
of what Lenin actually thought and said and did. But it does introduce a
distortion into secondary matters having to do with Lenin-historiography and
how Lenin has been understood by a signicant layer of pro-Lenin activists of
the twentieth century.
Lih presents his book as a boldly innovative challenge to what he calls the
textbook interpretation of What Is to Be Done?, Lenins major 1902 work on
the organisation question. Tis so-called textbook interpretation, he tells us,
1. Lih 2006, pp. 1314, 18.
92 P. Le Blanc / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 90107
is oered not only by academic specialists (Alfred G. Meyer, Adam Ulam,
Leonard Schapiro, John Keep, Samuel Baron, Allan Wildman, Israel Getzler,
Abraham Ascher, Richard Pipes, Jonathan Frankel, Herbert Marcuse,
Barrington Moore, Bertram D. Wolfe, Reginald Zelnick, and others) but
also by activists in the Trotskyist tradition (specically writers such as Tony
Cli, John Molyneux and more recently Paul Le Blanc). Te activists, he
claims, have been inclined to give too much ground to the academics positing
an litist and authoritarian content in Lenins 1902 classic. Te problem, he
suggests, is that the activists are swayed by the unfair and inaccurate anti-
Lenin polemics of 1904 advanced by Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky
(which are also employed by many of the academics).
I would insist that the argument is far too neat. Te reality is messier, more
interesting. Related to this, it is odd that Lih does not include at least brief
consideration of important discussions of Lenin and the Bolsheviks by Isaac
Deutscher, E.H. Carr, Moshe Lewin, C.L.R. James, Victor Serge, Ernest
Mandel, Marcel Liebman, and Neil Harding (only the last three are even cited
in the bibliography). To do so, however, would disrupt the neatly schematic
generalisations he makes about the interpretations of academics and
activists and would also demonstrate (in the case of most of these authors)
that Lihs interpretation is hardly the innovation that he implies it is.
2
Consider,
for example, the 1963 comment by C.L.R. James, which seems a succinct
summary of Lihs argument:
Te theory and practice of the vanguard party, of the one-party state, is not
(repeat not) the central doctrine of Leninism. It is not the central doctrine, it is
not even a special doctrine. It is not and it never was. . . . Bolshevism, Leninism,
did have central doctrines. One was theoretical, the inevitable collapse of
capitalism into barbarism. Another was social, that on account of its place in
society, its training and its numbers, only the working class could prevent the
degradation and reconstruct society. Political action consisted in organizing a
party to carry out these aims. Tese were the central principles of Bolshevism.
Te rigidity of its political organization came not from the dictatorial brain of
Lenin but from a less distinguished source the Tsarist police state. Until the
2. To Lihs credit, he does acknowledge that there exists a solid counter-tradition on
WITBD so much so that I can safely say I am rediscovering Lenin rather than presenting an
original new picture (Lih 2006, p. 22). But the counter-tradition not only excludes the three
textbook-tainted Trotskyists but also the other just-mentioned prominent scholars and activists.
It involves what early Bolsheviks (including the young Stalin) and Mensheviks, plus Kautsky,
said and did not say about What Is to Be Done?, as well as the comments of informed outside
observers such as journalist William Chamberlin, insights from two of his own teachers (John
Plamenatz and Robert C. Tucker), and good points made by a scattering of others (such as
Stephen Cohen, Moira Donald, Henry Reichman).
revolution actually began in March 1917, the future that Lenin foresaw and
worked for was the establishment of parliamentary democracy in Russia on the
British and German models. . . . Bolshevism looked forward to a regime of
parliamentary democracy because this was the doctrine of classical Marxism that
it was through parliamentary democracy that the working class and the whole
population . . . was educated and trained for the transition to socialism.
3
It is not the case that Lenin has been rediscovered only with the appearance
of this excellent new study. It takes its place as a valuable contribution to an
important body of literature defending the Leninism of Lenin from slander
and distortion.
Tis quibble with Lenin Rediscovered seems worth further elaboration, it
seems to me (perhaps not surprisingly, since I am one of its activist targets).
Lihs argument is also far too neat, I will suggest in the concluding section of
this essay, in relation to the development of Bolshevism in later years. First,
however, we should look more closely at the solid merits of this important
work.
I
What, according to Lih, was the Leninist vision of the revolutionary party as
put forward in his 1902 classic? His view of Lenins orientation could be
summarised this way: the creation of a revolutionary workers party, guided by
a serious-minded utilisation of socialist theory and scientic analysis, drawing
increasing numbers of working people into a highly conscious struggle against
all forms of oppression this could not be expected to arise easily or
spontaneously. It had to be created through the most persistent, serious,
consistent eorts of revolutionary socialists. Te working class would not
automatically become a force for socialist revolution, but it could develop into
such a force with the assistance of a serious revolutionary workers party. Such
a party making past lessons, the most advanced social theory, and a broad
social vision accessible to increasing numbers of workers would be a vital
component in the self-education and self-organisation of the working class,
helping to develop spontaneous working-class impulses toward democracy
and socialism into a cohesive, well-organised, and powerful social force.
4
3. James 1992, pp. 3278.
4. Tis is a summary of Le Blanc 1990, p. 67. Lih cites it when acknowledging that the
activists have a more accurate sense than the academics of Lenins vision of the party (Lih 2006,
p. 20).
Lih is able to demonstrate, with an almost overwhelming scholarly
thoroughness, that this vision is at the core of Lenins What Is to Be Done? and
other writings from the mid-1890s up to the revolutionary upsurge of 1905.
Tanks to his knowledge of Russian, he is able to comb through existing
English translations to identify problematic formulations not existing in the
Russian original. In fact, about one-third of the text consists of a retranslation
of What Is to Be Done?, with two sections of detailed annotations an incredible
contribution by itself. He also trawls through an immense quantity of other
Russian-language materials that he utilises to help bring the context of Lenins
writings into clearer focus than ever before. For those of us labouring without
Russian-language skills, this in itself is a precious oering.
More than this, noting that Lenin unambiguously projected a Russian
version of the German Social-Democratic Party as the kind of organisation to
bring about socialism in Russia, Lih focuses sustained attention on the German
Party and its powerful inuence on the Russian Marxists. In doing this, he
gives a well-merited respectful attention to the early contributions of Karl
Kautsky and to his importance for the revolutionary Left, Lenin most of all.
One might argue that he bends the stick too far being rather dismissive of
the powerful critique of so-called fatalistic Marxism of the Second International
advanced in the 1920s by the likes of Lukcs, Korsch and Gramsci, and not
being alert to the critical insights that Rosa Luxemburg and other revolutionary
Marxists (Pannekoek, Riazanov, Parvus, Trotsky, Radek, Rakovsky, etc.) were
developing at the time. Tese critical insights that found conrmation in the
debacle of 1914, a ghastly tragedy causing Lenin himself to revise his earlier
positive judgements and to recast and sharpen his own Marxism. But a serious
understanding of Lenin and the other Russian Marxists of the early 1900s can
be advanced by setting these matters aside in order to fully comprehend the
understanding they had at the time of the Marxism of the Second International
and of German Social Democracy. And as he does this, Lih helps us to see the
strengths and grandeur of these truly impressive entities.
He thereby helps us see that What Is to Be Done? far from representing
some single-minded determination to create a party of a new type (as Soviet
dogmatists and Western Cold-War scholars insisted) expressed the common
orientation of the great majority of Russian Social Democrats (those who
would become Mensheviks as well as future Bolsheviks) to create on Russian
soil, and under Russian conditions, a socialist workers party coming as close
to the German model as possible. Tis included that partys core-commitment
to advancing the most-thoroughgoing democracy as the essential basis for the
workers struggle to take power and initiate the socialist reconstruction of
society.
In making this case, Lih treats us to the delicious demolition of one anti-
Lenin myth after another. Consider, for example, his comments on Richard
Pipes:
Advocates of the textbook interpretation will sometimes admit that Lenin did
not explicitly advance the views attributed to him, although this fact does not
seem to worry them much. For example, Richard Pipes summarises a Lenin
article of 1899 by telling us that Lenins unspoken assumption is that the majority
of the population is actually or potentially reactionary; his unspoken conclusion,
that democracy leads to reaction. Pipes is absolutely right: these particular
assumptions and conclusions are denitely unspoken. Lenins spoken assumptions
and conclusions a subject in which Pipes shows less interest are all about the
majority of the population charging the citadel of the autocracy in order to
achieve democratic political freedom as the necessary next step toward
socialism.
5
Sometimes, what Lih is able to do along these lines has the quality of shooting
sh in a barrel.
6
He takes, for example, a sentence from What Is to Be Done?
whose meaning is consistently garbled by textbook-academics: We said that
there could not have been a Social-Democratic awareness among the workers.
Presumably translating from the original Russian, Adam Ulam has Lenin
proclaiming: Socialist consciousness cannot exist among the workers. Tis is
used to buttress the notion that Lenin believed only revolutionary intellectuals
such as himself were t to lead ignorant workers (incapable of thinking socialist
thoughts) in a socialist revolution . . . somehow. Te incoherence of such a
notion is cleared away by Lihs explanatory restatement of Lenins point: Te
Russian workers who carried out the heroic strikes of the mid-1890s did not
yet have socialist awareness nor could we have expected them to. Yet Ulams
rendition turns Lenins historical statement into a general proposition about
workers as such, everywhere, at all times. Some such misreading must be
behind some extraordinary assertions by scholars. In 1956, Alfred Meyer
wrote that Lenins generally prevailing opinion was that the proletariat was
not and could not be conscious. More recently, James D. White makes the
same point, with the assertion that in Lenins view socialist consciousness
always remained outside the working class because it could never see beyond
its narrow material class interests. It is impossible not to concur with Lihs
scornful comment: Amazing.
It is not dicult for him to direct our attention to an avalanche of words
and analyses from Lenin himself, and other original source-material as well
5. Lih 2006, pp. 234.
6. Lih 2006, pp. 6478.
(including from Lenins political opponents), to demonstrate that Lenins
central mission was to bring about a merger of socialism with the workers, and
that he did not waver from
very condent assumptions about workers receptivity to the Social-Democratic
message and about the ability of underground activists [under Russian conditions
of tsarist despotism] to build and sustain a nation-wide political organisation,
one that could both put down roots in the worker milieu and escape destruction
at the hands of the police. . . . He is always on the side making the most condent
assumptions about the empirical possibility of a mass underground Social-
Democratic movement. . . . Lenin generally argued that the advanced workers
were already committed Social Democrats and that these advanced workers were
in an ideal position to spread the message further, since they would be accepted
by other workers as their natural leaders.
7

In 1895, Lenin discussing his own draft political programme for the Russian
Social-Democratic Labour-Party explained that a particular paragraph of the
programme
is the most important and central one because it shows what should be the activity
of a party that defends the interests of the worker class and what should be the
activity of all purposive workers. It shows the way by which the aspiration of
socialism the aspiration of ending the eternal exploitation of man by man
must be merged with movement of the people that arose out of the conditions of
life created by large-scale factories and workshops.
8
Lih has little patience for even prestigious revolutionaries who indulged in
distortions of Lenins views. [Rosa] Luxemburgs prestige as an icon of the
Left has given her anti-Lenin broadside an uncriticised authority among
academics and activists, he says,
9
but I feel it is my duty as a historian to point
out that it is not a perceptive or prophetic critique but an unscrupulous hatchet
job. Tis is a harsh judgement that my own research corroborates (although I
believe that, independently of her anti-Lenin invective, there are magnicent
insights in her 1904 polemic that are more generally applicable for revolutionary
socialists). Lih also oers a scathing judgement of Trotskys anti-Lenin polemic
of 1904, Our Political Tasks although it is hardly more scathing than the
judgment of Isaac Deutscher many years ago that it required a volatile and
7. Lih 2006, pp. 78.
8. Lih 2006, pp. 1245.
9. Lih 2006, p. 526.
irresponsible imagination in the pamphleteer to show his adversary in so
distorting a mirror.
10
He also oers new information, rich insights, and challenging interpretations.
Again, some of what Lih oers has a delicious irony. For example, Rosa
Luxemburg, in arguing that Lenin was so intent on total central control that
he overlooked the creative role of the worker movement itself , made reference
to a series of unsigned articles from Iskra demonstrating spontaneous mass
actions of the workers in Rostov-on-the-Don and Lih shows us that,
unbeknown to Luxemburg, these articles had been written by Lenin himself.
11

His formulations on the matter of a party of a new type and vanguard party
12

are provocative and illuminating:
As we set about the task of rediscovering Lenins actual outlook, the terms party
of a new type and vanguard party are actually helpful but only if they are
applied to the SPD [Social-Democratic Party of Germany] as well as the
Bolsheviks. Te SPD was a vanguard party, rst because it dened its own mission
as lling up the proletariat with the awareness and skills needed to fulll its own
world-historical mission, and second because the SPD developed an innovative
panoply of methods for spreading enlightenment and combination. Te term
vanguard party was not used during this period (I do not believe the term can be
found in Lenins writings), but vanguard was, and this is what people meant by
it. Any other denition is historically misleading and confusing.
13
Let us build a party as much like the SPD as possible under underground
conditions so that we can overthrow the tsar and become even more like the
SPD, was Lenins perspective, Lih tells us. He gave advice on how to build an
eective party in the underground, but the reason he wanted an eective party
was to be able to leave behind forever the stiing atmosphere of the
underground.
14
Tis was the orientation of the Mensheviks as well. So what explains the
devastating 1903 Bolshevik/Menshevik split in the RSDLP? Te problem, Lih
accurately notes, was the development and implementation, at the 1903
Second Congress of the RSDLP, of democratic rules and structures that
stepped on the toes of old and respected comrades. As he puts it,
old habits die hard, especially for individualistic intellectuals. Te old Iskra editors
felt that [they] had a personal right to the editorial chairs of the party newspaper.
10. Deutscher 1954, p. 95.
11. Lih 2006, pp. 2067.
12. Lih 2006, p. 556.
13. Ibid.
14. Lih 2006, p. 557.
Tey felt they had a right to advocate whatever policies they felt best, even if
those run directly against the policies of the Congress. Tey were eager for the
authority conferred by the Party, but had no time for the discipline that went
with it.
15
What happened next owed from this litist impulse. Te indignant aristocrats
rebelled against the democratic decisions of the Congress. Since the old Iskra
board had split ve against one, the ve were able to accuse the one [Lenin] of
dictatorial ambitions all the while acting as a compact oligarchy and taking
one high-handed action after another. Between the worthy ideals of a national
democratic organisation and the continuity and prestige of the top leaders,
they felt the second must not be trumped by the rst in the manner that Lenin
had insisted on. Lih goes on to stress that it was not Lenin but the Mensheviks
themselves who chose the label the minority (which is what Menshevik
means) because of their feeling that minority signied a progressive
vanguard leading the way, that going along with the majority meant being
conservative and in the tail of the movement, instead of acting as a minority
that advanced new and broader tasks. Related to the new and broader tasks
was the campaign blueprinted by Menshevik-elder Pavel Akselrod to lobby
liberal political gures for a zemstvo campaign to broaden democracy,
introducing a worker-bourgeois class-collaborationism, a new political note
that Lih unlike Lenin, who favoured a worker-peasant alliance does not
seem to catch.
16
What Lih does emphasise, most interestingly, is that Lenin often accused
of reverting from Marxism to nineteenth-century conspiratorial traditions of
Peoples Will [Narodnaia volia] was actually the defender of Social-
Democratic orthodoxy. Tis becomes clear in his proposal that a member of
the RSDLP be someone who agrees with the party-programme, pays dues,
and is an active member of the organisation. In contrast, Martov proposed a
loose denition of membership as someone who agreed with the programme
and gave the RSDLP regular assistance. It was Martovs formulation that
represented the spirit of Narodnaia volia, Lih tells us, and Akslerod explicitly
brought up Narodnaia volia as a positive model that exemplied Martovs
logic. Commenting from afar, Kautsky also sided with Martov because of
the special circumstances of the Russian underground. In the case of a party
operating under political freedom, Lenins formulation would be preferable.
Lenins formulation, more in line with the statutes of the SPD, was voted
down at the 1903 Congress, and most textbook-historians have made much
15. Lih 2006, p. 500.
16. Lih 2006, pp. 5019.
of it (contrasting the authoritarian Lenin with the democratic Martov),
falsely identifying it as a reason for the Bolshevik/Menshevik split although
the Mensheviks themselves adopted Lenins formulation within a couple of
years.
17
One of the most interesting points highlighted in Lihs account of the 1903
split and its aftermath is the place of the practical workers [ praktiki] of the
RSDLPs underground-committees in the swirl of polemics. I nd it so
interesting that I will give-in to the temptation of simply quoting it at
length:
Te bitterness and contempt toward the party praktiki is another striking feature
of the Menshevik polemics in 1904. While ocially the abuse is directed at
Lenins supporters, it is not counterbalanced by any praise or encouraging words
for Menshevik praktiki. One discerns a feeling of exasperation on the part of the
educated and cosmopolitan migrs toward the young, semi-educated and
provincial praktiki in Russia. Te most thorough-going expression of this attitude
is a series of articles published in 1905 by Potresov. Tese articles portray the
history of the Russian revolutionary underground as a series of misadventures by
the utterly provincial and comically self-absorbed praktiki. Lenin acquired
inuence among the praktiki because he shared and faithfully reected these
delusions.
Tere is nothing similar to this in Bolshevik polemics, which are directed solely
against the Iskra editors and allies such as Trotsky. Oliminskii and Bogdanov
[leading Bolshevik activists] quickly picked up on this feature of Menshevik
writings. Olminskii even took his pseudonym from a remark in this vein by
Martov, who attributed Lenins success to his pandering to the cheap seats
[ galerka]. Tus Olminskii signed his pamphlets Cheap Seats, while Bogdanov
adopted the pseudonym Rank-and-Filer [Riadovoi ]. Tey portrayed the party
split as a clash of the party aristocracy and of prestigious migr writers on the
one side and the party plebians and the rank and le on the other.
18
What has been summarised here consists of only a modest sampling of the
riches oered in Lihs ne volume. Some of us will certainly be going through
it again and again to nd valuable nuggets and to ponder challenging
conceptualisations. It is unfortunate, however, that amid the myth-busting
and stimulating new interpretations, Lih employs his critical-minded and
creative intelligence to create his own little myth of activists in the Trotskyist
tradition (Cli, Molyneux, Le Blanc) who choose to link themselves with the
textbook interpretation of anti-Lenin academics.
17. Lih 2006, p. 519.
18. Lih 2006, pp. 5067.
II
One way of puncturing the mythic conceptualisation of the activists which
Lih presents is to provide some autobiographical information on how I came
to engage with What Is to Be Done? and to develop the understanding of Lenin
that culminated in my study Lenin and the Revolutionary Party. I would
imagine that the story of Cli and Molyneux would have to be dierent,
particularly since, despite much common ground, there are dierences
between their interpretations and mine.
When I was very young, I discovered that the admirably idealistic views of
my parents and favourite relatives were under sustained assault from the
dominant culture in the United States, including from such publications as
the Weekly Reader, which we got every week in my junior high-school social-
studies class (displaying portraits of a noble George Washington and a sinister
V.I. Lenin under the heading Democracy Means Freedom and Communism
Means Tyranny). Tere were also the somewhat-more sophisticated and
richly-illustrated Life-magazine expositions on Communism, not to mention
the crude assaults by J. Edgar Hoover of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in
the reasonably-priced paperback-edition of his book Masters of Deceit.
My father was a dedicated trade-union organiser who had been in and
around the Communist Party from the early 1930s to the early 1950s. He saw
unions as a coming-together of the workers to struggle for a better life for
themselves and their families in the face of the tyranny of selsh and powerful
proteers who own and control the capitalist workplaces and economy. Unions
meant workers sticking up for each other and struggling for a better future. I
knew, by the time I was 13 years old, that he believed in socialism or communism
(these were synonyms for him) which he viewed as people sharing the abundant
resources of society so that each and every person could have all their basic
material needs met, with possibilities opened up for free and creative lives
not just for a lucky few, but for each and every person.
I asked him one day: What about Lenin? And he explained to me that
Lenin was for the workers, that things like oppression and exploitation made
him very angry, and that he was a very tough man, tough in a good way
tough-minded about how to organise to change the world. From that time
onward, I saw Lenin as representing something very positive.
In 1962, in the small Pennsylvania-town where I lived, I found and
immediately bought a small, densely-packed, and (again) reasonably-priced
paperback-book by the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills entitled Te
Marxists. Mills, not at all hostile to Lenin, presented me with what Lih calls
the textbook interpretation, writing that one distinctive feature of Lenins
outlook was favouring a disciplined, tightly organised party of professional
revolutionaries [that] represents (or replaces) the proletariat as the
spontaneous historical agency of this [socialist] revolution. I accepted this for
good coin, until I immersed myself in the writings of Isaac Deutscher a couple
of years later rst the biography of Stalin, then the Trotsky-trilogy, which
gave a vibrant sense of the Russian-revolutionary movement and early
Bolshevism. Te understanding of Lenin conveyed there was quite inconsistent
with the textbook interpretation. Tis along with a reading of Te State and
Revolution and a few other, short writings by Lenin, and Hal Drapers seminal
Two Souls of Socialism (placing Lenin rmly and unambiguously in the
tradition of uncompromisingly democratic revolutionaries) prepared me for
my rst reading of the notorious What Is to Be Done?, but there was one more
crucial inuence.
While still in high school, I had been drawn to the rising New Left and, in
my senior year, joined Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In 1965, I
went on to help organise an SDS-chapter at the University of Pittsburgh, and,
in the summer of the following year, I worked in the SDS national oce in
Chicago. Tese were exciting times, and SDS was beginning to experience a
very dramatic growth. While working in the national oce, however, I was in
a position to see, up close and personal, the utter inadequacy of the national-
organisational structure fragmented and all-too-amateur which would
contribute, given the tidal-wave of new members, to a small but promising
organisation turning into an utterly chaotic national disorganisation incapable
of doing much more than spinning out of control while being swept along by
turbulent events.
At the end of the year, I picked up Lenins What Is to Be Done? and devoured
it. By then, I was also encountering versions of the textbook interpretation
oered by the likes of the bitter ex-Leninist Bertram D. Wolfe, and I rejected
that with utter contempt. For me, What Is to Be Done? was an illuminating
and inspiring revolutionary text that tted together with State and Revolution
to form a dynamic and vibrant whole. Over the next couple of years, I
supplemented this with One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, plus such splendid
shorter works of Lenins as Te Urgent Tasks of Our Movement and Karl
Marx. Helpful in contextualising these writings was the account by his
companion Nadezhda Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin. By the early 1970s,
I was engaging with the intensive and instructive discussions of Leninism of
Leon Trotsky (post-1917), Ernest Mandel (especially his Leninist Teory of
Organization), and blended with the rich traditions of American
radicalism James P. Cannon. It all made sense to me, and it had nothing to
do with the textbook interpretation. Te Trotskyist movement, into which I
was drawn, followed Trotsky in dismissing his 1904 anti-Leninist polemic Our
Political Tasks, and, while we greatly respected Rosa Luxemburg, we rejected
her early attacks on Lenin as well.
Before the 1970s were over, I came across other interpretations of Lenin
that seemed a cross between the one I had embraced and the textbook-
hostility of Bertram Wolfe. In particular, there was Marcel Liebman, who, in
Leninism Under Lenin and other writings, saw two souls of Leninism: one
tending toward sectarianism, dogmatism, and authoritarianism, the other
wonderfully creative, revolutionary, democratic. According to Liebmans
inuential exposition, elements of the bad Lenin were reected in What Is to
Be Done?, but the revolutionary events of 1905 brought the good Lenin to the
fore. Te hard times of 190712 caused Lenin to revert to the negative qualities
of earlier times, but 1917 once again brought forth the positive qualities. Te
isolation and agony of the early Soviet Republic predictably caused a swing
back toward the dark side, and the crystallisation of Stalinism, after Lenins
death, resulted in the murderous elimination of Leninisms brighter side within
the Communist mainstream.
Far more satisfying to me was Tony Cli s extensive and overwhelmingly
positive assessment of Lenin. But I did not accept his less-than-positive
assessment of my beloved What Is to Be Done?, and more to my liking was the
stress by Neil Harding, in Te Political Tought of Lenin and other works, on
the consistency of Lenins orientation (including that of 1902) with Marxism
pure and simple.
19
In the 1980s, under the inuence and at the urging of George Breitman
(best known for editing and explicating the works of Malcolm X and Leon
Trotsky), I wrote Lenin and the Revolutionary Party. Our particular corner of
the Trotskyist movement was being severely damaged by a presumed Leninism
gone terribly wrong. One of the primary purposes of the book was to recover
genuine Leninism in a way that would be helpful for present-day and future
revolutionaries. Concepts and quotations from What Is to Be Done? and Lenins
other early writings are peppered through the early chapters, with texts related
to contexts, in a positive exposition of what Lenin thought and said.
Given all of this, it should not be surprising that my conclusions on What
Is to Be Done? do not quite match what Lih describes as the position of the
activists. Tese conclusions approximate to Lihs own:
19. Te earlier Harding seemed to like both Lenin and Marxism, but, in later years, he
stressed the same point (Leninism is fully grounded in Marxism) with a negative twist brought
on by apparent disillusionment.
Te general arguments it contains despite polemical exaggerations remain
reasonable and valuable for later periods, including our own. . . . In recent years
some left-wing writers have felt a need to distance themselves from what Tony
Cli, for example, has called Lenins . . . mechanical over-emphasis on organisation
in What Is to Be Done?, but the powerful stress in that work on the practical
implementation of revolutionary perspectives continues to have an impact after
eight decades. . . . It is worth repeating that Lenin shared this orientation with all
those gathered around Iskra. . . . As it turned out, however, Lenin was one of the
few leaders of the Iskra current who was prepared to follow the implications of
the orientation through to the end.
20
Tis view has been carried over by me into later studies, From Marx to Gramsci
and Marx, Lenin, and the Revolutionary Experience, although as part of an
increasingly critical exploration, which seems to me to be consistent with the
Leninist spirit.
III
What is of primary importance, however, is not the minor matter of a
mischaracterisation of the activists, but the understanding of the Leninism of
Lenin to which Lih makes such an outstanding contribution.
Te present study is neither pro-Lenin nor anti-Lenin, he tells us. Its aim
is to give an accurate account of Lenins outlook and his empirical judgements.
21

Except as a literary device to establish an image of scholarly objectivity,
however, this seems an odd thing to say, given the overwhelmingly pro-Lenin
tone of the entire work. In fact, a pro-Lenin orientation, in the hands of a
capable scholar, can have the eect of providing a sympathetic reading
yielding a far more coherent and insightful account than the hostile sort of
scholarship predominant among anti-Communists both during the Cold
War and since the collapse of the USSR.
Such a work as this, which goes against the stream of standard-interpretation
and also refuses to conform to dominant fashions and moods, runs the risk of
being dismissed, distorted, or treated as if it had never been written. But such
works sometimes appear at a time when dominant ideologies and scholarly
paradigms are challenged by political and social crises generating insurgent
forces that are ready to connect with these challenging works. It is possible
that Lihs book comes to us on the eve of what may be a Lenin-revival to
which it will contribute and from which it will benet.
20. LeBlanc 1990, pp. 645, 678.
21. Lih 2006, p. 29.
If this is the case, then we may see new works inspired by, responding to,
and taking issue with various aspects of Lihs interpretation of Lenin and early
Bolshevism. In the hope that this will turn out to be so, I want to conclude by
touching briey on some areas of potentially fruitful exploration and
engagement.
Tere may be a tendency in Lihs study to idealise the praktiki who lined up
with Lenin. A lengthy extract from the reminiscences of Lenins companion
Krupskaya highlights some of the problems:
Te organisations in Russia denitely existed already in the shape of illegal local
committees, which were obliged to work under extremely dicult conditions of
secrecy. As a result, these committees everywhere practically had no workers
among their membership, although they had a great inuence on the workers
movement. Te committees leaets and instructions reected the mood of the
working-class masses, who felt that they now had a leadership. . . .
Te committeeman was usually a rather self-assured person. He saw what a
tremendous inuence the work of the committee had on the masses, and as a rule
he recognised no inner-Party democracy. Inner-Party democracy only leads to
trouble with the police. We are connected with the movement as it is, the
committeemen would say. Inwardly they rather despised the Party workers
abroad, who, in their opinion, had nothing better to do than squabble among
themselves they ought to be made to work under Russian conditions. Te
committeemen objected to the overruling inuence of the Centre abroad. . . .
Te opposition to this Centre was headed by Bogdanov.
22
Krupskaya adds that
they did not want innovations. Tey were neither desirous nor capable of
adjusting themselves to the quickly changing conditions. Te committeemen
had done a tremendous job during the period of 19045, but many of them
found it extremely dicult to adjust themselves to the conditions of increasing
legal facilities and methods of open struggle.
23
Tis nds corroboration in memoirs from activists on both Bolshevik and
Menshevik sides of the split.
24
Amid the turbulence, upsurge, and opportunities
of 1905, Lenin felt it necessary to write to his praktiki comrades:
Be sure to put us in direct touch with new forces, with the youth, with newly
formed circles. . . . So far not one of the St. Petersburgers (shame on them) has
22. Krupskaya 1970, pp. 124.
23. Krupskaya 1970, p. 125.
24. Trotsky 1967, pp. 618; Schwartz 1967; Broido 1967; Bobrovskaya 1976.
given us a single new organisation. . . . Its a scandal, our undoing, our ruin! Take
a lesson from the Mensheviks, for Christs sake!
25

Nothing in Lihs study quite prepares us for any of this.
Aspects of the committeeman-mentality contained seeds of a future
factional struggle led by Bogdanov that unfolded in 190711 within the
Bolshevik current that ultimately resulted in a split. Krupskaya commented:
A Bolshevik, they declared, should be hard and unyielding. Lenin considered this
view fallacious. It would mean giving up all practical work, standing aside from
the masses instead of organising them on real-life issues. Prior to the Revolution
of 1905 the Bolsheviks showed themselves capable of making good use of every
legal possibility, of forging ahead and rallying the masses behind them under the
most adverse conditions. Step by step, beginning with the campaign for tea
service and ventilation, they had led the masses up to the national armed
insurrection. Te ability to adjust oneself to the most adverse conditions and at
the same time to stand out and maintain ones high-principled positions such
were the traditions of Leninism.
26
Tis suggests a greater complexity, a greater messiness in the story of Lenin
and early Bolshevism than is conveyed in Lihs account. In his defence, we
should note that he stops the story before such complexities become clear. Te
same can be said for other matters that complicate the unnished story that he
presents. For example, his argument that the Social-Democratic Party of
Germany is the Leninist party of a new type par excellence seems to hold up
relatively well if we stop the story in early 1905, and it allows Lih to have fun
at the expense of one of the activist-writers:
Te activist writers also talk as if they knew Lenins beliefs better than he did
himself. John Molyneux writes, for example, that Lenin at this stage [1904] was
not aware that he diverged in any fundamental way from social democratic
orthodoxy and therefore incorrectly identied himself with the mainstream of
SPD luminaries such as Karl Kautsky and August Bebel. We are left with the
following picture. Tere was probably no one in Russia who had read Kautskys
voluminous writings so attentively, extensively and admiringly as Lenin, yet he
remained completely unaware that he diverged in fundamental ways from
Kautsky. I am not sure whether we are supposed to explain this by Kautskys
deceitfulness, Lenins inability to understand what he read, or Lenins unawareness
of his own beliefs.
27
25. Quoted in Le Blanc 1990, p. 117.
26. Krupskaya 1970, p. 167.
27. Lih 2006, p. 25.
Tis is certainly not a highpoint in Lenin Rediscovered. Te writings of a
capable theoretician such as Kautsky are not necessarily the same as the
complex dynamics of a mass political party and social movement. Te reality
of German Social Democracy was certainly more problematic than what Lenin
was able to glean from the very best writings of Karl Kautsky. Tis became
clear to Lenin himself in 1914. At that point, it became obvious that Lenin
had been building a very dierent party than the actual SPD. Te point was
made again by actual historical developments in the period 191720. It
may be possible that the SPD and the RSDLP (Bolsheviks) were both parties
of a new type, but it is also clear that they were not parties of the same type.
Here, Molyneux is much more on target. Lenin did not understand in 1904
what he understood in 1914. People learn even Lenin. And this all has
interesting implications that Lih seems inclined to turn away from. Tere was
much that Lenin had in common with Kautsky and Bebel but it turns out
that what he was doing was, in important ways, quite dierent. Tis obviously
merits further exploration.
Similarly, while the Lenin of 1904 seemed to have far more in common with
Kautsky and Bebel than with Luxemburg and Trotsky Lih certainly makes
that crystal-clear the unfolding of reality suggests a dierent truth. By 1917,
this had become clear to Lenin himself. It is worth giving greater attention to
such commonalities and convergences with Luxemburg and Trotsky than Lih
seems inclined to oer in this work. For that matter, his dismissive attitude
toward Georg Lukcs and Antonio Gramsci strikes this reviewer as o-base.
Tey were not only prominent theorists but, in the 1920s, practical, party-
building revolutionary activists working very much in the Leninist tradition.
Much can be learned from them, as well as from Luxemburg and Trotsky, by
those who would seek to explore the continuing relevance of Lenins
revolutionary orientation.
While these and other pathways of exploration must be taken up by those
(including Lih himself ) who wish to further advance our understanding,
Lenin Rediscovered makes a powerful, very substantial contribution to those
who would comprehend the life and thought of this great revolutionary.
References
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Bolshevik, Chicago: Proletarian Publishers.
Broido, Eva 1967, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cannon, James P. 1962, Te First Ten Years of American Communism: Report of a Participant, New
York: Lyle Stuart.
Cannon, James P. 1971 [1968], Te Vanguard Party and the World Revolution, in Fifty Years of
World Revolution (19171967): An International Symposium, edited by Ernest Mandel, New
York: Pathnder Press.
Carr, Edward H. 1950, Te Bolshevik Revolution: 19171923, three volumes, London:
Macmillan.
. 1979, Te Russian Revolution: From Lenin to Stalin, New York: Te Free Press.
Cli, Tony 19759, Lenin, four volumes, London: Pluto Press.
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1967, Stalin, A Political Biography, Second Edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Stanford: Hoover Institution Press.
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1996, Leninism, Durham, NC.: Duke University Press.
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Luxemburg Speaks, edited by Mary-Alice Waters, New York: Pathnder Press.
Mandel, Ernest 1994, Te Leninist Teory of Organization, in Revolutionary Marxism and
Social Reality in the 20th Century: Writings of Ernest Mandel, edited by Steve Bloom, Atlantic
Highlands: Humanities Press.
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Molyneux, John 1978, Marxism and the Party, London: Pluto Press.
Schwartz, Solomon C. 1967, Te Russian Revolution of 1905: Te Workers Movement and the
Formation of Bolshevism and Menshevism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Serge, Victor 1980 [1937], From Lenin to Stalin, New York: Monad Press.
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1967 [1941], Stalin, An Appraisal of the Man and His Inuence, New York: Stein and Day.
Wolfe, Bertram D. 1948, Tree Who Made a Revolution, New York: Dial Press.
Lenin Disputed
Lars T. Lih
Montreal, Quebec
larslih@yahoo.ca
Abstract
Critical discussion of Lenins What Is to Be Done? is hindered by a series of historical myths. Issues
such as the following need to be studied more empirically and more critically: Did the attitudes
of early readers of WITBD? reect Lenins alleged worry about workers? Did the events of 1905
cause Lenin to renounce his earlier views about the workers and about party-organisation, giving
rise to disputes with Bolshevik activists? Did either Lenin or Trotsky ever rethink and reject the
ideological positions that Karl Kautsky defended before World-War I? Tese and related issues
are addressed with close attention to source-material.
Keywords
Lenin, Bolshevism, Trotsky, Kautsky, Menshevism
Te principal aim of Lenin Rediscovered was to allow and encourage people
to shift their attention away from a relatively narrow set of passages from What
Is to Be Done? towards a much broader range of historical data. People have
been focusing so intently, and for so long, on what I term the scandalous
passages that my aim of shifting attention could not possibly succeed unless I
provided a great deal of historical data. Tis necessity is the cause of the books
immoderate length. One central aim of my book is negative and polemical,
namely, to challenge the textbook-interpretation of Lenins worry about
workers in all its varieties. But, once the blinders imposed by the textbook-
interpretation have been removed, what do we see? I would stress four themes
that emerge from the material presented in the book.
Te rst is the vast inuence of what I call Erfurtianism on Russian Social
Democracy and on Lenin personally. Erfurtianism was a complex but coherent
outlook that combined the world-historical narrative set out in the writings of
Marx and Engels, an idealised model of the German Social-Democratic Party,
and an ideological self-denition set out to greatest eect in the writings of
L. T. Lih / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 108174 109
Karl Kautsky. As often in such cases, outsiders such as the Russian Social
Democrats were the most purs et durs Erfurtians of all.
Te party-model inherent in Erfurtianism was summed up by Kautskys
merger-formula: Social Democracy is the merger of socialism and the worker-
movement. Behind this ideological formula lies the scenario of the inspired
and inspiring leader. To use an image found in both Kautsky and Lenin, the
Social Democrat preached the good news of socialism in the condent
expectation that the workers would respond. Te spread of socialist awareness
was seen as so powerful that the workers were assigned the rle of leader (or
hegemon) of the people as a whole.
For the Russians, acceptance of this party-model implied a whole political
strategy: Let us build a party as much like the German SPD as possible under
the autocracy so that we can overthrow the tsar and build a party even more
like the SPD. Tis Erfurtian strategy had an enormous impact on many levels.
It led to the creation of an underground of a new type. It gave Russian Social
Democracy its most urgent goal, right up to 1917: to overthrow the tsar
and introduce the political freedom needed for the full SPD-model. Finally,
it explains many developments even after the party emerged from the
underground among others, the vast propaganda and agitational campaigns
undertaken by the new Soviet state.
Te original Erfurtian party-model grew up in countries with relative-
political freedom. Te second main theme of my book is the way the Russian
underground grew up as the result of an empirical search for ways to apply
the Erfurtian model under repressive underground-conditions a search
undertaken by a whole generation of anonymous Russian Social-Democratic
praktiki. Te innovative set of institutions that was built up step-by-step
starting in the early 1890s was an underground of a new type. Te old Russian
underground aimed at a successful conspiracy [zagovor] in lieu of a mass-
movement that was deemed impossible. Te new underground aimed at
creating as much of a mass-party as was possible under tsarist absolutism. Tis
kind of underground required a culture of konspiratsiia, which can be dened
as the ne art of not getting arrested. Te two types of conspiracy zagovor
and konspiratsiia implied two vastly dierent types of underground.
Tis Erfurtian underground (no longer an oxymoron) also required
a functional equivalent of the full-time party-workers that constituted
the backbone of European Social Democracy. Lenin christened this type
the revolutionary by trade [revoliutsioner po professii or professionalnyi
revoliutsioner]. Te name and the type caught on with all factions of the
110 L. T. Lih / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 108174
Russian underground. Neither konspiratsiia nor revolutionary by trade was a
distinctive feature of Bolshevism.
WITBD? did not set forth a new and innovative party-model, but, rather,
presented an idealised version of the empirical creation of the praktiki. In
1905, when the fervent Bolshevik M.G. Tskhakaia described his reaction to
reading WITBD?, he stressed that he had found nothing earth-shaking or
requiring special attention. Nevertheless, he was highly pleased that a decade
of the practical experience [praktika] of Russian Social Democracy had not
gone to waste. It had found a worthy expression of itself on organisational,
tactical and overall party-issues an expression that summed up all of Russian
practical experience.
1
A third theme of my book is the insistence that the proper way to grasp
Lenins individual outlook is not to become obsessed about abstract generalities
concerning spontaneity and consciousness, but, rather, to examine Lenins
concrete views about the actions of the Russian working class during the years
1895 to 1905. When these views become the centre of attention, Lenins
romantic optimism about the working class becomes glaringly obvious. Lenin
wrote WITBD? at a time when the revolutionary temperature in Russia was
rising rapidly and the upsurge in worker-militancy was noted by all observers.
Furthermore, in the various disputes within Russian revolutionary circles,
Lenin is always on the side with the most optimistic assumptions about
the revolutionary fervour of the workers, the organisational potential of the
Russian underground, the willingness of other classes to follow the lead of the
workers, and so on. Why did Lenin strive for an organised, centralised,
eciently-structured party that was staed with people who knew their
business? Because he had given up on the masses and was looking for a
substitute? Just the opposite: Lenin wanted all these things because he thought
he saw the masses on the move.
Finally, I argue that Lenin understood his own basic outlook and remained
loyal to it. Anyone who thinks this assertion is anodyne and uncontroversial
will change their mind once they have read my critics. It is an article of faith
for many on the Left and on the Right that Lenin was fundamentally opposed
to basic features of what I call Erfurtianism and, if Lenin himself insisted on
the opposite, he was mistaken. Many people also believe that Lenin continually
bent the stick from one extreme to the other, leading to various breakthroughs
to a fundamentally new vision of things if not in 1902, when he published
WITBD?, then during the revolution of 1905 or after the outbreak of war
in 1914. And, if Lenin insisted that he was the one who remained loyal to the
1. Tretii sezd RSDRP: Protokoly 1959, p. 340.
old orthodoxy and his opponents were the renegades well, once again, he
was mistaken.
Te standard textbook-interpretation of WITBD? puts Lenins alleged worry
about workers at the centre of things. When I wrote Lenin Rediscovered,
I thought of the textbook-interpretation as a global approach to WITBD?,
Lenin and Bolshevism. WITBD? showed worry about workers, which meant
that Lenin was worried about workers throughout his career, which meant
Bolshevism as a whole was worried about workers. Although my study focused
sharply on WITBD?, the ultimate target was the worry-about-workers approach
to Lenin and Bolshevism generally.
One thing I learned from my critics was that the textbook-interpretation
comes in an extensive range of partial applications. Robert Mayer, for example,
accepts a worry-about-workers approach both regarding WITBD? and
regarding Lenin generally. According to Mayer, Lenin thought that any worker
who disagreed with him must have lost his proletarian soul or never had
it to begin with. Tis attitude nds expression in WITBD? s controversial
formulations. Where Mayer diers from the mainstream is his insistence
that WITBD? is not the most important or inuential expression of Lenins
worries. A more revealing clue to Lenins feelings is his use of the word
razvrashchenie [corruption or perversion], which showed that he felt that the
outlook of most workers had been corrupted, and that they were therefore
useless as revolutionaries. Mayer does no more than tweak the standard
textbook-interpretation.
Ron Suny accepts my argument that Lenin himself did not intend WITBD?
to communicate worry about workers. Yet, for Suny, Lenins own intentions
are almost irrelevant, since everybody else read WITBD? along the lines of the
textbook-interpretation: Mensheviks, Lenins Bolshevik-followers and the
Communist Party in power. Tus the standard-scholarly textbook-interpretation
is a perfectly accurate description of the historical impact of WITBD?.
John Molyneux,
2
Chris Harman and, to a lesser extent, Paul Le Blanc reject
the textbook-interpretation for Lenin generally, yet mainly accept it for
WITBD? itself. As they see it, Lenin renounced the worry about workers found
in WITBD? only under the impact of unexpected (to him) worker-militancy
in 1905. In their version of events, WITBD?s avid Bolshevik readers were so
infected with worry about workers that even in 1905 they resisted allowing
workers on local Social-Democratic committees! Tese writers also duplicate
another feature of the textbook-interpretation: the desire to dig as deep a gulf
as possible between Lenin and other Social Democrats, particular Karl Kautsky.
2. See Molyneux 2006.
Paul Le Blanc and Alan Shandro are inuenced by the textbook-interpretation
in a more subtle way. Tough they do not portray Lenin as hand-wringingly
worried about workers, nor as pessimistic about their revolutionary inclinations,
they do present Lenin as centrally concerned about protecting the worker-
outlook from malign inuences. Le Blanc emphasises Lenins views about the
need to educate the workers through long years of hard work, while Shandro
emphasises Lenins vigilance about combating attempts at bourgeois hegemony
over the workers. In my view, their picture is both accurate and misleading:
accurate, because Lenin really did hold these views; misleading, because it
distorts what is distinctive about Lenin. Not only did Lenin share these views
with other Social Democrats, but Lenins opponents often insisted on them
with even greater emphasis. Lenins most characteristic arguments and policies
stemmed, rather, from enthusiasm and exhilaration about the current state of
the Russian and European workers outlook.
With the partial exception of Ron Suny, none of my critics pay me the
ultimate compliment of having changed their minds. I am praised when I
conrm what the author in question has long believed on the subject. I am
complimented on my industriousness and gently chided for overstating my
originality. I am then put on notice that I have bent the stick too far at
precisely the point where I challenge each authors long-held beliefs. Like
Lenin in this respect, I do not see myself as bending the stick too far, but
rather as straightening-out a stick bent out of true alignment by others. My
critics themselves rightly stress the importance of their remaining disagreements
with me. Tese disagreements all stem from continued loyalty to some aspect
of the textbook-interpretation, which I reject lock, stock and barrel.
I approach these questions as a historian whose only concern is to be true to
the evidence. Reading over my critics, I have come to believe that the greatest
stumbling block to protable discussion is adamant loyalty to a number of
historical myths. Te best use of the space accorded me, therefore, is to
summarise the evidence against these various myths and ask my critics as
rmly as possible to engage with this evidence.
3
Each of the following nine
topics is treated in Lenin Rediscovered, but, in all cases, I have added new
evidence, with occasional retraction of some mistakes in my book.
3. In the interests of making the evidence widely available, all Lenin-citations in this essay are
to the English-language Collected Works. Actual quotations have been checked against the
Russian-language texts, as found in Lenin 195865a, 195865b and 195865c.
I. On translation
Tere are two ways of approaching the translation of a literary, philosophical
or political classic that originates in a culture with outlooks and assumptions
very dierent from our own. One is to make familiar: to make the translation
as painless to read as possible. A translation adopting this strategy strives to
replace strange idioms and turns of speech with local equivalents, even if only
approximate. Such a translation would certainly not retain unfamiliar foreign
words. Te other strategy is to make strange: to embed the work in its own
culture, and emphasise the gap between our automatic assumptions and those
of the author. In such a translation, certain expressions or revealing key-terms
will often be kept in the original language.
Tere already exist several translations of WITBD? that follow the making-
familiar strategy. For a variety of reasons, I chose the path of making strange
for my new translation. Robert Mayer is so hostile to the result that he thinks
it cancels out any merits of my commentary, and contests some of my
translation-choices for key-terms. In self-defence, I could cite the words of
Tatyana Shestakov, a reviewer who is a native Russian speaker and who
sympathises with my approach to translation:
Lih does not try to domesticate the source and the target texts, he courageously
leaves foreign elements (in this case Russian words and exclusively Russian
notions of that particular epoch) untouched, but he doesnt leave his reader alone
with them: he explains, contextualizes them and thus makes his reader familiar
with the reality of the Russian historical, social, and political situation in the
beginning of the twentieth century. Tis model is more characteristic of the
Russian and German schools of translation. . . .
By introducing dierent options of translation of the same words and
explaining his choices, Lih engages his reader in an active intellectual participation
in the process of discovering the real intentions of Lenin, and the social and
political situation in Russia and in Europe at the beginning of the last century. . . .
Being born in Russia, I have a direct access to the source text and can attest that
Lars T. Lih grasps even the slightest subtleties in the meaning of Russian words as
Lenin uses them. . . .
Usually, in discussing a translated text, scholars argue about how much has
been lost in translation. In case of Lars T. Lih and V. Lenin, we can certainly talk
about how much Lenins work has gained after Lars T. Lihs interference. As a
native Russian speaker, who grew up in Moscow being forced to read and reread
Lenins works in Russian, I can say that in this book Lih has managed not only to
rediscover but also to liven up Lenins dicult-to-absorb oeuvre. He makes Lenin
sound not only polemical but also surprisingly absorbing.
4
4. Shestakov 2005.
I should note that my translation-choices were made for the specic purpose
of a scholarly translation of WITBD?. I think that revolutionary by trade is a
somewhat more accurate translation than professional revolutionary, but I
often nd myself speaking or writing in contexts where it is inconvenient to
explain why, and so I use professional revolutionary. I think spontaneous is
a misleading translation of stikhinnyi. I prefer elemental, although there were
reasons (distorted by Mayer), particular to What Is to Be Done?, why elemental
could not be used. For this and other reasons, therefore, I kept stikhinost in
Russian. I am condent that anyone who reads all of WITBD? in my translation
will get a good idea of what the word means, even without taking advantage
of my commentary. But, in many other contexts, I cannot expect such devotion
to the issue, and so I use the word spontaneity in order to communicate with
my audience.
5
According to Mayer, my translation is ugly and grating, not only because I
have a tin-ear, but because I have an ideological agenda:
Lihs translation often transforms Lenins vigorous prose into a clumsy mess of
ambiguity. In a misguided eort to render Lenins scandalous passages less scandalous,
Lih substitutes constructions that are vague and ungainly. . . . Lih has purged the
poetry in order to protect Lenin from criticism.
Here, I think, we see the reason why Mayer reacts so violently to my translation-
strategy. He has his own denite interpretation of the books scandalous
passages, and my translation evidently weakens its plausibility. Let us compare
the standard translation and my translation of one such passage. I choose this
particular passage because Alan Shandro strengthens his critique of my book
by citing it in the older translation (without noting the fact or explaining why
he rejects my rendering).
Standard translation:
Hence, our task, the task of Social Democracy, is to combat spontaneity, to divert
the working-class movement from this spontaneous, trade-unionist striving to
come under the wing of the bourgeois, and to bring it under the wing of
revolutionary Social Democracy.
5. Mayer also argues that One way to determine what [stikhinost] means is to ask how Lenins
Russian readers in 1902 understood what he was saying. But Lih does not want to do this
because many who read Lenins pamphlet thought he meant something like spontaneity. In
other words, I avoid looking at reader-reactions to WITBD? in order to suppress inconvenient
evidence. A glance at my Index under What Is to Be Done?, reactions by, however, reveals entries
for An (Zhordania), Gorev, Krupskaya, Lenin, Luxemburg, Martynov, Miliukov, Nadezhdin,
Olminskii, Parvus, Plekhanov, Potresov, Radchenko, Stalin, Trotsky, Tskhakaia, Valentinov, and
Vorovskii.
My translation:
Terefore our task the task of Social Democracy consists of a struggle with
stikhinost, consists in causing the worker movement to stray away from this
stikhiinyi striving of tred-iunionizm toward accepting the leadership of the
bourgeoisie and in causing the worker movement to go toward accepting the
leadership of revolutionary Social Democracy.
6
My translation is undoubtedly more ungainly, and reads less smoothly. In my
view, these defects are amply compensated by a greater accuracy that enables
the serious student of Lenin to avoid common misreadings.
Te Russian word rendered by to combat is borba, the word ordinarily
used to render struggle, as in class-struggle.
Combat spontaneity is often read in the manner of Bertrand Wolfe, for
whom Lenin was the self-proclaimed enemy of spontaneity, the natural
liberty of men and classes to be themselves.
7
By retaining the idiosyncratic
Russian word stikhinost with its connotations of primitiveness, uncontrolled
impulsiveness, lack of organisation and purposeless violence I make it less
paradoxical that all Russian Social Democrats wanted to overcome the
initial stikhinost of the Russian worker-movement. Indeed, as noted in
Section IV, the Mensheviks were probably more wary of stikhinost than were
the Bolsheviks.
I substituted cause to stray for divert, because cause to stray is closer to
the Russian idiom here invoked (straying from the path of righteousness).
Furthermore, this rendering allows me to bring out the signicant parallelism
Lenin establishes between getting the worker-movement to move away
[otvlech] from tred-iunionizm and getting it to move towards [privlech] Social
Democracy.
Spontaneous, trade-unionist striving is simply inaccurate, since it says that
the workers are striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie. Lenin
does not say trade-unionist striving, but the striving of tred-iunionizm.
Tred-iunionizm is an ideology, whose alien nature was signalled to the
Russian-reader by its ostentatiously English origin (which is one reason I
have merely transcribed it back from Russian). Lenin is therefore saying
that tred-iunionizm, a bourgeois ideology that rejects the need for a Social-
Democratic party, has a stikhiinyi striving to seduce the worker-movement.
Social Democracy must struggle against it.
6. Lih 2006, p. 711 (see pp. 65867 for discussion).
7. Wolfe 1984, p. 30.
I translated the literal expression under the wing according to the meaning
of the idiom. I make no great claims for this decision, but I think it adds
clarity.
8
In order to really understand what is going on in this passage, the reader also
has to know that Lenin has sarcastically borrowed the term divert/cause to
stray from the people he is attacking. In fact, the key-term stikhinost is so
prominent in WITBD? only because it was used in a polemical attack on
Lenins faction that was published a few days before Lenin sat down to write
his book. Lenins cut-and-thrust polemical style creates problems for a
translation. Lenins original reader may have enjoyed his polemical sarcasm,
but, by the time the joke is explained to the modern reader, the humour is
inevitably lost.
Mayer further castigates me for losing the poetry of WITBD?, that is, the
rousing eloquence that inspired many of its earliest readers. In my opinion,
WITBD? s poetry simply does not reside in Lenins crabbed polemical
formulae, eective as they were in their way.
9
Typical of Lenins whole approach
to politics is a combination of obsessive polemics and inspiring vision. Te
polemics are usually front and centre, while the inspiring parts of Lenins
writings are harder to nd. Lenins enthusiastic vision of the workers leading
the anti-tsarist revolution is all over his writings, but it is almost never set out
systematically it just pops out here and there, often in the nal paragraph or
two of an article.
A scrupulously accurate translation can also convey the eect of these more
inspirational passages. When Lenin really becomes eloquent, he does not need
the specialised jargon, often borrowed from the very people he is attacking,
that he uses when refuting detailed arguments. Tis following passage from
WITBD? invites the local activist to see herself as part of a vast crusade against
tsarism. Lenin speaks directly, without resorting to the polemical vocabulary
over which Mayer and I clash:
If we genuinely succeed in getting all or a signicant majority of local committees,
local groups and circles actively to take up the common work, we would in short
order be able to have a weekly newspaper, regularly distributed in tens of
thousands of copies throughout Russia. Tis newspaper would be a small part of
a huge bellows that blows up each ame of class struggle and popular indignation
into a common re. Around this task in and of itself a very small and even
8. For the reasoning behind my somewhat unidiomatic worker movement, see Lih 2006,
pp. 6870.
9. As shown in Section V, many Bolsheviks declared their admiration for Lenins book despite
the clumsiness of some of these formulae.
innocent one but one that is a regular and in the full meaning of the word common
task an army of experienced ghters would systematically be recruited and
trained. Among the ladders and scaolding of this common organisational
construction would soon rise up Social-Democratic Zheliabovs from among our
revolutionaries, Russian Bebels from our workers, who would be pushed forward
and then take their place at the head of a mobilised army and would raise up the
whole people to settle accounts with the shame and curse of Russia.
Tat is what we must dream about!
10
II. Perverting the worker-outlook
According to Robert Mayer, the controversial formulation in WITBD? about
from without is indeed an expression of Lenins worry about workers, but
Lenin quickly realised this formulation was impolitic and dropped it. No real
ip-op in Lenins outlook was involved, however, because his worry about
workers is revealed in another series of texts starting in 1899.
11
Te essential
clue hidden in these texts is the word razvrashchenie, variously translated as
corruption, perversion, or leading astray (my translation). Tus, the
textbook-interpretation is correct about Lenins outlook and mistaken only in
seeing WITBD? as the classical formulation of it.
Mayer says that I have overlooked this evidence. I can assure him that I read
his provocative article with great interest, weighed his arguments with care,
and examined all the Lenin texts he cited to back up his case. In the rst draft
of Lenin Rediscovered, I included a ten-page section explaining why Mayers
own evidence led me to reject his conclusions. Tis section hit the cutting-
room oor in a last-minute drive to make my book less of a behemoth (as
Mayer describes it).
Te excised section explained at length why I adopted the translation
leading astray. Te denition of razvrashchenie found in Dals nineteenth-
century dictionary, plus the usage of the word in texts of the time, convinced
me that the word did not have exclusively sexual connotations, but also
referred to false doctrine.
12
I searched for a translation that, as I put it,
preserved the overtones of vice without overemphasising it.
10. Lih 2006, p. 828. (Zheliabov was a leader of Narodnaya volya, the organisation that
assassinated Tsar Aleksandr II. August Bebel was the worker who became the leader of the
German Social-Democratic Party.)
11. I was therefore mistaken in labeling Mayers interpretation double ip-op (Lih 2006,
p. 24).
12. In a book published in America in 1919, the following conversation between Lenin and
Raymond Robins is recorded. Lenin says, Te American government is corrupt. Robins
responds, You cannot call the American government a bought government. Lenin explains:
I should not have used the word corrupt. I do not mean that your government is corrupt
My aim was not to dull Lenins vocabulary, as Mayer assumes. In fact, it
seems to me that leading astray is more overtly sexual than corruption. But
there is no need to argue about how to translate razvrashchenie. After reading
Mayers present critique, I decided that the term he often uses there, perversion,
is the best translation. Furthermore, after consulting modern dictionaries and
observing usage, I conclude that perversion can refer both to sexual debauchery
and false doctrine. Te Russian and the English terms are also etymologically
similar.
Now that we have a mutually acceptable English equivalent, let us turn to
the substantive issues. Does Lenins use of perversion betray a distinctive
worry about workers that led him to write o large sections of the working
class as lacking a proletarian soul, as Mayer claimed?
Te heart of Social Democracys self-appointed mission was to bring the
socialist message to the working class, to merge socialism and the worker-
movement. At any one time, there would be workers who had already accepted
the message and those who had not. Social Democracy was pleased to call the
former category advanced and the latter backward.
Of course, Social Democracy was not the only force trying to inculcate a
particular world-outlook in the workers. From the point of view of the forces
of order, Social Democracy was trying to pervert the naturally healthy outlook
of the otherwise-loyal worker, so they put a great deal of energy into propagating
a less subversive world-outlook. Naturally, Social Democracy was well-aware
of this threat and took it very seriously indeed. As Wilhelm Liebknecht said in
1875, Our most dangerous enemy is not the standing army of soldiers, but
the standing army of the enemy press.
13
Te forces of order were not the only perceived threat to the correct worker-
outlook. Te most common mutual accusation among Social Democracy and
its rivals on the Left, and among Social Democrats themselves, was that ones
opponents were corrupting the class-awareness of the workers. Naturally
enough, all Social Democrats were anxious about this situation. Tey saw
attempts to inculcate hostile world-views as a serious threat, they were not
complacent about the possible damage this could do to Social Democracy, and
they were determined to ght back vigorously. On this meaning of anxious,
it is misleading to say (in Mayers words) there is simply no trace of this
anxiety in the writings of Plekhanov, Akselrod or Zasulich, either before 1899
or after.
14
Lenin is in no way unique when he talks about the backwardness of
through money. I mean that it is corrupt in that it is decayed in thought . . . It is, therefore,
lacking in intellectual integrity. (Williams 1919, pp. 1401.)
13. Steenson 1981, p. 129.
14. See the discussion in Sections III and IV.
some Russian workers, and warns about the dangers of adjusting to their level
instead of ghting against their nerazvitost, their lack of development.
What is the proper Social-Democratic reaction to the danger of the
perversion of the worker-outlook by hostile or misguided opponents?
Obviously, to roll up ones sleeve and get down to the job of spreading what
one believes is the correct socialist message to the undeveloped strata, and of
subjecting to critique the perverted doctrine being foisted on them by others.
In Lenins view, counteracting attempts at perverting worker-outlook required
vigorous polemics, often against fellow Social Democrats or allied anti-tsarist
revolutionaries. Other Social Democrats felt that the take-no-prisoners
rhetorical style of Lenin and his fellow Iskra-colleagues was outrageously
intolerant, dogmatic, and uncomradely. In response, Lenin polemicised in
favour of vigorous polemics for example, in the rst chapter of WITBD?.
Tis is the context justifying combative polemics in which we most often
nd him writing about attempts at ideological perversion.
Lenin was typically condent that such polemics would lead to a successful
and fairly speedy end-result. Mayer denies the presence of this optimism. On
the contrary, he tells us, Lenin washed his hands of such workers and wrote
them out of the proletarian family. Any worker who disagrees with Lenin can
be written o as corrupted. For Lenin, any workers who deviate from his
preferred position prove that they have lost their proletarian soul or never
possessed it to begin with. . . . Lenin alone expressed such pessimism and
what is more drew organisational and tactical conclusions from them.
15
Mayer and I thus have very dierent readings of Lenins reaction to worker-
backwardness. Oddly enough, we use exactly the same texts to make
our respective cases. A key-text for Mayer is the unpublished 1899 essay,
A Retrograde Trend in Russian Social Democracy. I, too, have a high opinion
of this essay. In Lenin Rediscovered, I commented that it contains some of the
most eloquent assertions of his basic beliefs and I particularly recommend it as
the most revealing of Lenins early writings.
16
Tis essay makes clear Lenins extravagant admiration for the advanced
workers: their hunger for knowledge, their devotion to socialism, their
heroism in the ght for Russian freedom, and their ability to lead less advanced
workers. Te advanced workers, as always and everywhere, determined the
character of the movement, and they were followed by the working masses
because they showed their readiness and their ability to serve the cause of
15. Te corruption which Lenin confronted was therefore more disgusting and more
dangerous [because associated with moral perversity], a disease which had to be purged from the
body of the movement through renovation (Mayer 1993, p. 642).
16. Lih 2006, p. 140.
the worker class, because they proved able to win full condence of the mass
of workers.
17
For Mayer, Lenins views about the advanced workers are irrelevant. But
does Lenin dismiss the backward worker as irredeemable? On the contrary,
reaching the backward worker is a major theme of this text. Lenin felt that
Rabochaia mysl (the only Russian-underground Social-Democratic newspaper
in 1899) was pitching its message to the backward worker. Seeking to attract
this audience was valuable and indeed absolutely essential work, that is, until
this newspaper put forth a programmatic philosophy about limiting the Social-
Democratic message to what these lower-strata could grasp immediately. Tese
programmatic claims spoiled the good work it was doing.
According to Lenin, an ocial Social-Democratic newspaper should aim
instead at the advanced workers. When and if the intellectual demands of this
stratum of advanced workers are met, it will take the cause of the Russian
workers and, consequently, the cause of the Russian revolution, into its
own hands.
18
Perhaps backward workers will probably nd such a newspaper
well-nigh incomprehensible, but this is nothing to get upset about. Even in
Europe, many loyal Social-Democratic voters do not read Social-Democratic
newspapers. All it means is that other ways of approach should be used, such as
oral agitation or leaets on local problems. Lenin demonstrates by giving what
he calls Kautskys superb description of the technique of oral agitation.
Lenin turns the necessity of reaching out to the lower strata into yet one
more argument for moving to a nation-wide revolutionary party. Tose who
restrict themselves to local economic struggles deprive themselves of even an
opportunity of successfully and steadily attracting the lower strata of the
proletariat to the cause of the working class.
19
If, on the other hand, the eld
is left exclusively to non-revolutionary socialists such as Rabochaia mysl, the
backward workers might very well fall under the inuence of various baneful
bourgeois prejudices.
Let us next turn to something that all Social Democrats regarded as a direct
and conscious attempt to pervert the outlook of the workers: the Zubatov
police-unions. Zubatov was the police-ocial who, during the Iskra-period,
tried to convince workers that they could have eective economic unions if
they only renounced the project of overthrowing the tsar. In WITBD?, Lenin
actually argues that Social Democrats should welcome Zubatov-type organisations
as ultimately working to the advantage of the Social Democrats of course, on
17. Lenin 19608a, p. 260.
18. Lenin 19608a, p. 281.
19. Lenin 19608a, p. 283.
the assumption that the Social Democrats do their job of exposing Zubatovs
attempts at perversion.
20

In January 1905, Father Gapons Zubatov-like organisation led the workers
of St. Petersburg in a massive demonstration that turned into the massacre of
Bloody Sunday. Lenins immediate response was to claim that his argument in
WITBD? had been conrmed.
21
Because Lenin uses the word perversion,
Mayer actually cites the following passage as evidence for Lenins pessimistic
worry about workers:
A legally-permitted and Zubatov-type worker-society, sponsored by the government
in order to pervert the proletariat by systematic monarchist propaganda, rendered
no little service in organising the movement in its early stages and in expansion.
What happened was something that the Social Democrats had long ago pointed
out to the Zubatovists, namely, that the revolutionary instinct of the worker-class
and the spirit of solidarity would prevail over all the petty ruses.
Even the most backward workers would be drawn into the movement by the
Zubatovists, and then the tsarist government would itself take care to drive
the workers further; capitalist exploitation itself would turn them away from the
peace-preaching and utterly hypocritical Zubatovshchina toward revolutionary
Social Democracy. Te practice of proletarian life and proletarian struggle would
prove superior to all the theories and all the vain eorts of the Zubatov-crowd.
22
After the 1905 Revolution, Lenin often used the imagery of ideological
perversion to describe the attempts of bourgeois liberals to win hegemony
over the peasants. What organisational and tactical conclusions (Mayers
words) did Lenin draw from bourgeois attempts at perversion? Lenin concluded
that the main task of Russian Social Democracy was to wrest hegemony over
the peasants from the liberals. Tis strategy rested on a highly optimistic reading
of the Social-Democratic solidarity of the workers, as well as the ultimate
rationality of the peasant-outlook and its democratic nature. Te Mensheviks
simply threw up their hands at the romanticism of the whole strategy. Tis
reaction is understandable when one reads a passage such as the following,
which comes from the very same paragraph as a sentence referred to by Mayer
because it contained the word perversion:
20. Lih 2006, pp. 4023, 595, 7789.
21. As we shall see in Section VII, this is the sort of passage that is often used to show how far
Lenin moved away from his WITBD?-outlook during 1905. Yet Lenin explicitly cited WITBD?
in order to document the continuity in his views (Lenin 19608e, p. 115).
22. Lenin 195865b, pp. 2201; Lenin 19608e, pp. 1145 (January 1905); cf. Mayer
1993, p. 642, n. 30.
By the heroic struggle it waged during the course of three years (190507), the
Russian proletariat won for itself and for the Russian narod gains that took other
peoples decades to win. It won the liberation of the labouring masses from the
inuence of treacherous and contemptibly powerless liberalism. It won for itself the
role of hegemon in the struggle for freedom, for democracy, as a precondition
of the struggle for socialism. It won for all the oppressed and exploited classes of
Russia the ability to wage a revolutionary mass struggle, without which nothing
of importance in the progress of mankind has been achieved anywhere in the
world.
23
Lenins political strategy in the 191418 period civil war instead of
imperialist war, and so forth was similarly based on a cluster of very
optimistic (from the revolutionary point of view) assumptions. By 1920, it is
true, Lenin was worried about how to proceed in Russia, and for once Mayers
citation (from Left-Wing Communism) is apposite. Lenin found himself in a
situation he never predicted, precisely because some of his earlier key-
assumptions turned out to be over-optimistic. Nevertheless, Left-Wing
Communism shows abundantly that Lenin could not envisage a successful
revolution without the full support and participation of the masses, in the
manner of 1917.
Te standard version of the textbook-interpretation fetishises a single word:
spontaneity/stikhinost. It insists that the key-question to ask is, What is Lenins
relation to spontaneity?, and focuses on drawing vast conclusions from his
not-very-frequent use of the word. Mayer attempts to re-establish the textbook-
interpretation by fetishising a dierent word: perversion/razvrashchenie. He
draws vast conclusions from what he takes to be the exclusively sexual
connotations of this word, and shows no interest in the actual arguments
Lenin is making in the various texts in which this word is found. Anyone who
actually examines the texts themselves will conclude that Mayers worry-
about-workers-Mark-II is a non-starter.
III. WITBD? and the Mensheviks
Ron Suny states a widespread belief with the following words: It is very clear
that powerful and persuasive Menshevik voices in the pivotal years 19035
have shaped . . . the Western academic and popular meaning of What Is To
Be Done? .
In Lenin Rediscovered, I put forth a very dierent thesis about the relation
of Menshevik polemics in 1904 and the historiography. Te textbook-
23. Lenin 19608j, p. 387 (1910); cf. Mayer 1993, p. 643, n. 37.
interpretation of WITBD? did not arise out of Menshevik polemics rather,
scholars imposed the textbook-interpretation on Menshevik polemics and,
as a consequence, thoroughly misread them. According to the textbook-
interpretation, WITBD? was the basic cause of the party-split in 19034.
Historians begin with the assumption that Mensheviks reacted in horror to
the heresies of What Is to Be Done?. And, since the textbook-interpretation also
tells them what they needed to know about Lenins argument, they are able
to deduce the views of the Mensheviks, almost without the need of textual
evidence.
Clarity on this point is essential if we are to grasp the real nature of the split
within Russian Social Democracy. In this section, I will review the factual
diculties with the standard version of events. In Section IV, I will examine
some of the real dierences between Menshevism and Bolshevism.
According to the textbook-interpretation, Lenin endorsed intelligentsia-
domination of the party. Terefore, the Mensheviks must have been hostile to
Bolshevik glorication of the intellectuals. But I presented evidence showing
that the Bolsheviks attacked the leadership-role of intellectuals in 19045,
while Menshevik spokesmen and defenders such as Akselrod, Trotsky and
Luxemburg justied this role.
24
According to the textbook-interpretation, Lenin was against democracy in
the Party on principle. So the Mensheviks must have defended democratism.
But I presented statements by Mensheviks that condemned democratism
(invocation of democratic principles in inappropriate contexts) and by
Bolsheviks defending party-democracy.
25
According to the textbook-interpretation, Lenin was obsessed with
professional revolutionaries. So the Mensheviks must have denounced
professional revolutionaries. But I presented endorsements of the professional
revolutionary by Mensheviks such as Pavel Akselrod, Vera Zasulich, and
Georgii Plekhanov, among others. Of course, the Mensheviks did not want to
restrict the party to professional revolutionaries. But then, neither did the
Bolsheviks. Te professional revolutionary was a type common to all the
underground-parties of the era and played an equivalent role in each.
26
24. Te evidence mentioned in the following paragraphs can be found in Lih 2006, Chapter
Nine (After the Second Congress), pp. 489553. (Trotskys views are discussed in Section IX.)
25. For Bolshevik views on party-democracy before and during the 1905 Revolution, see
Section IX.
26. Very instructive in this regard is the chapter Professional Revolutionists in Moissaye
J. Olgin, Te Soul of the Russian Revolution (Olgin 1917, pp. 32134). Tis chapter (written in
1917) relies completely on novelistic portraits of a well-known social type. Tis type was not
restricted to any one party or faction (Olgin does not even mention Bolsheviks or Mensheviks).
Neither the term nor the type is associated by Olgin with Lenin in any way.
According to the textbook-interpretation, WITBD? is a blueprint for
Soviet tyranny. So Menshevik attacks on Lenin must have been a prophetic
protest against Soviet tyranny. But I presented evidence showing that the
Mensheviks such as Akselrod attacked the Bolsheviks for their exclusive
focus on achieving political freedom as opposed to inculcating a specically
socialist class-consciousness.
According to the textbook-interpretation, WITBD? was a founding
document of Bolshevism. Terefore the Mensheviks must have aimed their
polemics at WITBD? and its heresies from the very beginning. But I presented
material showing the limited and ambiguous role of WITBD? in Menshevik
polemics.
At the Second Congress in August 1903, the economists Aleksandr
Martynov and Vladimir Akimov attacked the scandalous passages in What
Is to Be Done? as part of their attack on the Iskra-group as a whole. Te
textbook-interpretation does owe a debt to this critique.
27
At that time, either
because of conviction or as an act of Iskra-solidarity, the future Menshevik
leaders all defended Lenin and his book. Although they were soon attacking
Lenin personally, they were loath to backtrack on their defence of WITBD?.
In Section IX, I give passages from Trotskys Menshevik manifesto Our Political
Tasks (1904) in which he presents WITBD? as an acceptable, if crude,
presentation of Akselrods outlook during the period 19003. According to the
Menshevik leaders, Lenins problem in 19034 was his refusal to move on to
the new tasks of the present stage of the movement.
Only a full year after in the Second Congress, in August 1904, did Plekhanov
bite the bullet: he strongly condemned WITBD? for its ideological heresies
and (feebly) explained away his own earlier defence. After Plekhanovs
intervention, WITBD? did become a standard talking-point for Menshevik
polemicists. Yet the most prominent spokesman for Menshevism in 1904
Pavel Akselrod never, as far as I know, attacked WITBD? or traced the conict
with Bolshevism to ideological heresies of any kind. In fact, in his foundational
Iskra-articles of early 1904, he explicitly endorses the orthodoxy of Lenins
Marxism.
28
27. I base my reading of the Menshevik view on the writings of the Iskra-editors and other
migr pamphleteers. Suny quotes a letter of June 1904 from the Georgian Menshevik Noe
Zhordania that suggests that Menshevik praktiki in Russia itself may have been more directly
inuenced by the earlier economist critique. For example, Zhordania writes that Lenin even
denied such an indisputable fact that the economic struggle is the best means to lead the workers
into the political arena. Zhordanias (shaky) critique is not in the spirit of Akselrod, but rather
in the spirit of earlier opponents of Iskra such as Martynov and Krichevsky of Rabochee delo.
28. To complete its malicious irony, history will perhaps place at the head of this bourgeois
Te scholarly view of the party-split owes much to Abraham Aschers
description of what Ron Suny terms the spirit of Akselrod. Aschers Pavel
Axelrod and the Development of Menshevism (1972) is the one scholarly account
of Akselrods writings in any language. Following Ascher, Suny tells us that
Akselrod depicted Lenin as substituting a party of intellectuals for the worker-
movement and depicted the factional split as an epic battle between democracy
and dictatorship within the Party (and, by implication, in the future socialist
state). I agree about Akselrods importance and disagree completely about his
actual views.
Let us look at a document highly relevant to this dispute. Suny mentions a
letter that Akselrod sent to Kautsky in summer 1904 describing the factional
split. Kautsky wrote back saying that he still could not perceive any substantive
dierences and that the split seemed based on misunderstandings. Akselrod
therefore wrote a second letter to Kautsky in order to set him right about the
dispute. He then published this letter in Iskra and republished it in 1906.
29

Tus, Akselrods second letter to Kautsky is a carefully considered and
authoritative statement of his view of the party-split.
Yes (Akselrod says to Kautsky), the split is based on misunderstandings on
the part of the majority of Russian praktiki, who support Lenin. Lenin himself
knows exactly what he is doing. He challenges us Mensheviks on organisational
grounds, simply because he knows he can get no mileage on anything more
substantive. Not that Lenin does have any real organisational plan or any
talent as an organiser. No, Lenin is unique only in this: his complete demagogic
unscrupulousness. He was the only one of us who was able to use for his
advantage precisely the weak sides of our movement, in particular, the sense of
helplessness felt by our praktiki. Indeed, perhaps even from the very beginning
he systematically exploited it.
Lenin, aided and abetted by his agents and minions, uses banalities
about the centralism acknowledged [as a value] by all of us, in order to
become the idol of the majority of the party and to increase the chaos in
their heads. What these praktiki seem incapable of understanding is that our
party is still much too primitive for genuine centralism. Russian Social
Democracy is not yet a political party in the real sense of the word. Te
mission of the minority [menshinstvo] is constantly to point this out to the
local activists. But the disorganising methods of Lenin and Co. and their
revolutionary organization, not just a Social Democrat, but the very one who by origin is the
most orthodox. Lenin is not named, but the allusion was unambiguous (Lih 2006, p. 551).
29. Iskra No. 68 (25 June 1904); Iskra za dva goda 1906, pp. 14754. For further discussion,
see Lih 2003, p. 14.
systematic casting of suspicion on our critical and positive explanation is
threatening the Party with ruin.
You, my dear Kautsky, have trouble gasping our diculties because party-
conicts in the West usually involve genuine programmatic and tactical
dierences. Not in our case. All we have is organisational fetishism, that is,
the pathetic daydreams of powerless praktiki. Te result in practice cannot be
compared to Jacobins or to Blanquists, who were, despite everything, real
revolutionaries. No, the dreams of the Russian praktiki are merely a limp
parody of the tsarist bureaucracy.
So goes Akselrods explanation of party-dierences. Akselrod tells Kautsky
that the split in Russian Social Democracy reects the primitive problems of a
primitive party in a primitive country. Lenin is an unscrupulous nonentity
and nothing else, his migr admirers are agents and minions, his Russian
admirers are simple-minded praktiki aicted by a psychological complex that
prevents them from attending to the wisdom dispensed by the Menshevik
spokesmen.
30
Akselrod does not in any way suggest that the split is based on
principled dierences of vast signicance for the future socialist state that stem
from Lenins ideological heresies in WITBD?.
Ascher almost literally turns this crucial document on its head when he tells
the reader that the letter stressed ideological dierences, contained no personal
attack on Lenin, compared Bolshevism to Jacobinism, and so on.
31
Te same
comment can be made about Aschers entire interpretation perforce
inuential, since it had no rivals of the spirit of Akselrod. Ascher was not
able to take in what he was reading because he was in thrall to the textbook-
interpretation of WITBD? as the ultimate source of Soviet tyranny. Terefore,
Lenins foe Pavel Akselrod had to be opposing Soviet tyranny, as foreshadowed
in WITBD?.
32
Another eloquent illustration of the gulf between the textbook-interpretation
and the actual Menshevik interpretation of Bolshevism comes from Martovs
writings after 1917. In 191718, Martov wrote a history of Russian Social
Democracy in which he talked about WITBD? in its time and place. Yet, in
1919, in his book World Bolshevism, WITBD? is not even mentioned. Indeed,
Martovs explanation of the origins of world Bolshevism makes no reference
30. I discuss the content of the Menshevik message in Lih 2006, pp. 50917.
31. Ascher 1972, p. 211.
32. Bolshevism took shape as the bearer of predominantly general-democratic and political
tendencies of the movement, and Menshevism as the bearer predominantly of its class and
socialist tendencies. Tus wrote Fyodor Dan in 1945 in his Origins of Bolshevism (cited in Lih
2006, p. 553). Dan, one of the principal Menshevik leaders in 1904, is summarising Axelrods
critique. Te emerging postwar scholarly consensus took no notice of this central aspect of the
actual spirit of Axelrod.
whatsoever to prewar Bolshevik ideology. World-Bolshevism is shown to be
the product of impatient activists, cut o from the tradition of Social
Democracy by the crisis of the War, brutalised by wartime-psychology, and
resorting to stikhiinyi explosions of anarcho-Jacobinism. Te only role
assigned to the ideology of Bolshevik leaders is the existence of Marxist scruples
against giving in completely to demagogic exploitation of these stikhiinyi
passions.
33
For the textbook-interpretation, WITBD? is the ultimate source of world-
Bolshevism. In Martovs interpretation of world-Bolshevism, even though he
was as familiar with it as any man living, WITBD? is the book that did not
bark eloquent by its absence. For Martov, WITBD? is a footnote in the
history of Russian Social Democracy, but plays no role in the explanation of
the Bolshevik Revolution and its European aftermath.
IV. Distinctiveness of Bolshevism
In late 1901, a Russian Social Democrat accused a rival Social-Democratic
faction of giving too much scope to the spontaneity [stikhinost] of the worker-
movement. In his opinion, the worker-movement would go astray unless the
Party takes upon itself the immediate guidance of the economic struggle of
the proletariat and by so doing turns it into a revolutionary class struggle. Of
course, the workers do not need Social Democracy in order to undertake an
economic struggle. Nevertheless, without the inuence of Social Democracy
this struggle has a stikhiinyi character. Often workers, aware of only their
transitory and special interests, act in opposition to the interests of the working
class as a whole. Tere have been and there continue to be cases where the workers
themselves demand longer shifts and non-compliance with factory-laws. Tere
have been and there continue to be times when their boiling rage unleashes itself
against Jews . . . against foreigners, and so on. By taking into its hands the guidance
of this struggle, Social Democracy signicantly widens it and, most of all brings
into it light and awareness.
34
In 1902, this same Russian Social Democrat spelled out his vanguardist
convictions even more explicitly. He told the workers that the enemy the
autocratic government and the exploiting lite had the experience, knowledge
and organisation that the workers did not have. Individual workers certainly
33. World Bolshevism and other relevant writings have been recently reprinted in Martov
2000. Martovs views are further discussed in Section IV.
34. Quoted in Lih 2006, pp. 3945.
could not work out the necessary socialist science on their own. Fortunately,
the socialist intelligentsia, devoted to the proletariat and in part itself emerging
from its ranks, esh of its esh, using the knowledge of the present century
and the experience of proletarian struggle, succeeded in working out a socialist
science. Only the Social-Democratic Party embodied this socialist science,
only this party is capable of creating and of guiding the liberation struggle of
the working class, only this party is capable of guiding the proletariat at the
present moment of revolution.
35
Who expressed this worry about workers, this anxiety about the spontaneous
development of the workers struggle? Aleksandr Martynov, Lenins principal
polemical target in WITBD? and, later, a vociferous anti-Lenin Menshevik.
Leopold Haimson describes Martynovs views in 19012 as follows: workers
by their own devices would be able to set their own political objectives, rather
than having them dictated to them by outside political actors.
36
Why does
this respected historian give such a distorted picture of Martynovs views? For
the same reason that Abraham Ascher distorted Akselrod, Haimson is in thrall
to the textbook-interpretation of WITBD?. According to the textbook-
interpretation, Lenin argued that the political objectives had to be dictated
to workers by outside-political actors. Martynov was a foe of Lenins who
mounted a critique of WITBD?. Terefore, he must have been in favour of
leaving workers to their own spontaneous devices.
Te textbook-interpretation thus creates a very problematic contrast
between Lenin and his economist opponent Martynov. Two of my critics,
Alan Shandro and Paul Le Blanc, present the heart of Lenins message in a way
that does not fully escape the same framework.
Alan Shandro argues that
To assume [the burdens of leadership in the struggle for hegemony] was to take
up a sophisticated political stance, sustaining the spontaneous struggles of the
workers and fostering the embryonic forms of socialist consciousness thrown up
in the course of them by diagnosing and combating the forms in which bourgeois
ideology spontaneously imposes itself within the working-class movement.
Paul Le Blanc, for his part, argues that
Te creation of a revolutionary workers party, guided by a serious-minded
utilisation of socialist theory and scientic analysis, drawing increasing numbers
of working people into a highly conscious struggle against all forms of oppression
35. Lih 2006, p. 556.
36. Haimson 2004, p. 60 (emphasis in original).
this could not be expected to arise easily or spontaneously. It had to be created
through the most persistent, serious, consistent eorts of revolutionary socialists.
Te working class would not automatically become a force for socialist revolution,
but it could develop into such a force with the assistance of a serious revolutionary
workers party.
37
I accept these formulations as accurate statements of important aspects of
Lenins outlook. Now, let us ask the question: would Martynov, set up by
Lenin as a model economist, have disagreed with them? Not at all. No doubt
Haimsons Martynov would have disagreed, since he wanted to leave the
workers to their own devices, and thus negated any need for leadership by a
Social-Democratic party. Te Martynov described by Haimson had no motive
for worrying about bourgeois inuence on the workers. But Martynovs
Martynov would certainly have agreed with the formulations of Le Blanc and
Shandro in fact, he insisted upon them. Since Lenin and his most
irreconcilable foe agree on these basic points, I conclude they are part of a
broad Social-Democratic consensus. Tey do not tell us what is distinct about
Lenin or Bolshevism.
Shandro disagrees and points particularly to Lenins comment that the task
of Social Democracy is to combat spontaneity.
38
Shandro comments: Te
logic of the Erfurtian narrative can be stretched to accommodate a good
deal of Lenins polemic against the economist practice of subordinating
consciousness to spontaneity, but it cannot contain this crucial claim; it is a
tribute to Lihs intellectual honesty that he acknowledges this diculty.
My actual argument is somewhat dierent: the most important thing to
keep in mind about the scandalous passages [is] that Lenins aim is not to
assert a bold new proposition, but to make his opponents look marginal by
claiming that they reject a universally accepted commonplace.
39
Are Lenins images of combating and diverting indeed incompatible with
Erfurtianism? Lenin certainly did not think so. He immediately illustrates his
point about combating spontaneity by evoking the example of Germany.
Lassalle carried out a desperate struggle with spontaneity with excellent results.
Te SPD still today carries out unremitting struggle with ideologies that
emerged from the worker-movement, such as those propagated by Catholic
37. Le Blanc 1990, p. 67 (also quoted in his essay supra).
38. For unexplained reasons, Shandro chooses to cite this crucial Lenin passage in an older
translation. I discuss the relevant translation-problems in Section I. In this Section, I follow
Shandros choice of translation.
39. Lih 2006, p. 394. Where I found Lenin less than convincing is his claim that his
opponents did reject these commonplaces.
and monarchical trade-unions.
40
Lenins style of argument here Remember
the example of Germany is extremely typical. He knew the history of the
European worker-movement and Social Democracy after 1848 backwards and
forwards. For both Martynov and Lenin, a central aspect of the rle of Russian
intelligenty was to inform the Russian workers about the achievements of the
European workers.
Kautskys formulations were crucial for Lenin, because they showed him
how the actual history of European Social Democracy could be viewed as a
conrmation of the Communist Manifesto. According to Shandro, however,
Kautsky himself felt no need for combating spontaneity:
Te introduction of consciousness into the spontaneous working-class movement
from without signies, in terms of the Erfurtian narrative, a practice of making
workers aware of a goal and a direction of their movement that is already implicit
in their practice. Since the spontaneous movement and the conscious awareness
of it, practice and theory, are congruent and harmonious, there is no need, and
no theoretical room, for a struggle between them. Tis is indeed the implication
of the passage by Kautsky famously cited by Lenin in his own discussion of
consciousness and spontaneity in WITBD?.
At the highest level of abstraction, Marx and Engels certainly did claim that
their mission was to make workers aware of the goal already implicit in their
practice. Kautsky and Lenin undoubtedly believed this as well. But it does not
follow that Kautsky, for instance, did not combat spontaneity in the relevant
sense, that is, vigorously warning against and subjecting to critique tendencies
that emerged from the practice of the worker-movement. Kautsky systematically
covers a whole range of such phenomena, from the continual inux of new
workers from the countryside to the formation of labour-aristocracies, from
Nur-Gewerkschaftlerei (the principled restriction of worker-activity to trade-
unions) to violent anarchism.
In the rst chapter of WITBD?, Lenin calls (not for the rst time) for a
creative application of Marxist theory to the unprecedented problems of the
Russian movement. Russian Social Democracy needed to nd answers to
questions such as these: how can we merge socialism with the worker-
movement, given the entire lack of political freedom? How can we achieve the
necessary political freedom? How can we get other classes to see the workers as
the leaders in the ght for democracy? In other words: how do we achieve
basic Erfurtian goals in an extremely hostile environment?
40. Lih 2006, pp. 7112. For evidence that the German Party saw the issue in similar terms,
see Bebels comment in Lih 2006, p. 406.
Shandro points to the rst chapter of WITBD? as a crucial breakthrough,
since he sees creativity and Erfurtianism as incompatible. If Lenin is not
content with a rigid standard of orthodox rectitude or with already-established
Erfurtian standards, if he is open to unexpected innovation and diversity
in the spontaneous movement of the class-struggle, he is ipso facto moving
beyond Erfurtianism. I think this is too narrow a denition of Erfurtianism.
In any event, as we shall see in Section VIII, Lenin specically praised Kautskys
writings during the decade 18991909 precisely for his creative openness to
new developments, and in particular, his appreciation of the innovations
arising out of the workers struggle in Russia.
For Paul Le Blanc, the heart of Lenins message in WITBD? is that purposive-
revolutionary struggle could be expected to arise easily or spontaneously,
but only through long, hard eort. And, of course, Lenin believed this very
deeply but he was not alone. As Le Blanc puts it: Lenin was one of the few
leaders of the Iskra-current who was prepared to follow the implications of the
orientation through to the end.
41
As we have seen, Lenin shared this orientation
not only with his fellow Iskra-editors, but with economists like Martynov and
indeed all of Social Democracy. But, according to Le Blanc, the Mensheviks
did not follow-out the implications of this perspective, that is, they forgot that
the working class was not automatically or spontaneously a force for socialist
revolution and that only persistent and serious eorts by socialists made it
such a force.
Te Mensheviks did not forget these truths indeed, they made them the
centre of their critique of Bolshevism. A typical analysis of events by the
Menshevik leader Iulii Martov runs something like this: yes, Bolshevik policies
are more popular with the workers, but that is because so many workers are
backward, subject to inuence from other classes, demoralised by economic
constraints, and so on. Te Bolsheviks cannot resist the temptation to pander
demagogically to the workers mistaken outlook. In response, we must put all
our attention toward bringing correct class-awareness into the working class.
A very revealing sample of Menshevik reasoning is a short tactical platform
written by Martov and other leading Mensheviks (including Martynov) in
1907.
42
Tis platform is a critique of Bolshevik tactics (too much suspicion of
urban-democratic classes and not enough suspicion of peasant-democratic
classes), although the Bolsheviks are not mentioned. According to the platform,
41. Le Blanc 1990, pp. 648, also quoted in his essay supra.
42. Te platform was published as a separate pamphlet with the following title: A Tactical
Platform for the Upcoming Congress, worked out by Martov, Dan, Starover [Potresov],
Martynov and others, with the participation of a group of Menshevik praktiki. Te text can be
found in Trotskii 1993, pp. 1747. See also Lenins dissection in Lenin 19608h, p. 24964.
the workers themselves have these incorrect tactical views and they are therefore
not yet ready to fulll their historical mission of leading the Russian revolution.
Te implication is that the Bolsheviks merely reect the mistaken outlook of
the workers.
Te platform sets up the issue just the way Alan Shandro would like:
Te proletariat can fulll the role [of leader of the Russian revolution] only to the
extent that it steps forward as a political force that is conscious of its own position
among the conicting classes, of its urgent and nal goals, and of the paths
leading to them only to the extent that it conducts an independent class-policy,
free from subordination to the leadership of other classes.
43
Unfortunately (the platform continues), the proletariat is not free from the
inuence of other classes that threatens to divert the proletariat from the path
dictated by its class-interests (this is exactly the same idiom that seemed so
shocking when used by Lenin in WITBD?). Overreacting to lack of support
during the 1905 Revolution from the urban-democratic classes, the Russian
proletariat tends in its hostility to underestimate the progressive-historical rle
of these classes. And, because a signicant portion of the Russian proletariat
still retains ties with the village, the workers are infected with peasant-violence
and utopian thinking. Tis problem is compounded by the worrisome
inroads among the workers of propaganda emanating from the Socialist-
Revolutionary Party.
According to the platform, the spontaneous/stikhiinyi inuences emanating
from the workers social environment are not meeting enough resistance from
the advanced, vanguard-elements of the proletariat the ones with sucient
socialist consciousness to grasp the historical mission of the proletariat.
44
Te
immediate task is, therefore, to gather these elements together, so that they
can collectively full their task of leading the mass-movement. Only in this
way can they counteract the spontaneous emergence of an economic struggle
independent of Social Democracy.
Te argument of the Mensheviks should sound very familiar. It shows that
both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks were solid Erfurtians, but that Mensheviks
were typically sceptical about actual developments and the Bolsheviks typically
sanguine.
45
Te Russian historian N.A. Kazarova has recently summed up
Martovs experience with these words: Since he understood that Social
43. Trotskii 1993, p. 175.
44. Te platform uses the term peredovye or advanced workers; this term is sometimes
translated as vanguard in the English-language Collected Works of Lenin.
45. For another sample of Martovs analysis, see his provocative 1919 description of world
Bolshevism (Martov 2000, pp. 393434).
Democracy in Russia did not possess a suciently powerful social base, he
aimed at creating one, using all possible means for developing the self-activity
of the proletariat and its class-consciousness.
46
My dispute with Alan Shandro and Paul Le Blanc is on a dierent level
than the other issues treated in this essay. Each of them has zeroed-in on
something true and important about Lenin. Nevertheless, they distort
historical perspective when they claim that they have identied what is
distinctive about Lenin either because he was moving beyond the Erfurtian
consensus, or because he remembered what other Social Democrats forgot.
A foundational outlook such as Erfurtianism needs to be applied to an
empirical reality, and legitimate dierences can arise about how to view the
facts of the case. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were typically optimistic about the
implications of the facts. Drop the needle on a typical Bolshevik-Menshevik
dispute, and you will hear the Bolsheviks berating the nedoverie, the lack
of faith, of their opponents.
47
Conversely, their opponents were the ones who
typically stressed the need for patient consciousness-raising and the dangers of
ideological infection from other classes.
V. Did Lenin ever renounce or distance himself from the arguments in
WITBD?
Partial answers to this question are scattered throughout Lenin Rediscovered.
48

After reading my critics, I realise the issue requires more direct treatment. In
particular, this issue determines our view of how Lenin reacted to the events
of 1905 (as discussed in Section VII). To a varying extent, the interpretations
of Robert Mayer, Ron Suny, Chris Harman and John Molyneux, and Paul Le
Blanc all depend on a positive answer to this question.
In 1907, Lenin republished WITBD? in a collection of his writings entitled
During Twelve Years. In his preface to this edition, he makes the following
points about WITBD?, which I will paraphrase in the following words:
What I meant to say in the controversial formulations of WITBD? is clear enough
if you take into account the argument and spirit of the book as a whole. And
when understood properly, these formulations are only a restatement of
universally-accepted axioms of Social Democracy. In fact, the same basic idea is
46. Kazarova 2006, p. 363.
47. In particular, Lenins use of the word hegemony points not primarily to Lenins anxiety
about the distorting inuence of bourgeois hegemony over the workers, but rather to his daring
project of exercising proletarian hegemony over the peasantry.
48. Further material on this topic can be found in Lih 2003.
found in the party-programme of the RSDWP: Social Democracy organises [the
proletariat] into an independent political party . . . guides all manifestations of its
class-struggle . . . and explains to it the historical signicance and necessary
conditions of the social revolution that stands before us.
I must admit, however, that the actual formulations given in WITBD? are clumsy
and not particularly successful in conveying what I meant to say. Nevertheless, it
hardly elevates party-debate to nitpick about the exact wording, draw absurd
conclusions, and dream up non-existent dierences. Even those who grasp what
I meant to say should remember that I was responding to a particular challenge
to Social-Democratic orthodoxy, namely, economism. I was not doing what I have
often done elsewhere, namely, putting forth comprehensive-programmatic statements
of the Social-Democratic outlook as a whole. No, I stressed only those parts of the
Social-Democratic outlook that were appropriate to the task at hand.
49
Lenin also expressed this last point about responding to a particular
challenge by using the image of bending the stick. Te image comes at the
beginning and end of a daisy-chain of polemical outbursts. A correct reading
of several documents cited by my critics depends on inserting them into their
proper place in this polemical chain. It is important to note the dates of the
various pronouncements listed below, since there exists a myth that the events
of 1905 refuted in some way the arguments of WITBD? and that Lenin
recognised this.
At the Second Congress in August 1903, the Iskra editorial board makes
common cause in defending Lenins book against economist critics. In
particular, Plekhanov points out that the book was aimed at economists
who (allegedly) denied the need for Social-Democratic leadership. In
response (continues Plekhanov), Lenin properly stressed the need for
leadership. Lenin makes the same point using the bend-the-stick metaphor:
the economists bent the stick away from the centre, so we should bend it
back, in order that our stick will therefore always be straight as possible and
as ready as possible for action.
50
Tus, the bend-the-stick imagery was not
created in reaction to the events of 1905 or in reaction to Menshevik critics,
but rather as part of a general Iskra-rebuttal of economist critics.
For a full year after the beginning of the party-split, WITBD? plays a very
minor rle in intra-party polemics.
51
Finally, in July/August 1904, Plekhanov
49. Tis paraphrase is based on Lenin 19608i, pp. 1068. Here, Lenin says only that his
WITBD?-formulation is reected in the party-programme. Te actual quote from the programme,
as well as the words dreaming up imaginary dierences, come from the 1905 Lenin/Vorovsky
article discussed below.
50. Lih 2006, p. 27; Lenin 19608c, p. 491.
51. Tis point is discussed further in Section III.
(who, by this time, sides with the Mensheviks) reverses direction and writes
an extensive article attacking WITBD?, arguing that Lenin was no Marxist
and that the weakest aspects of the book were precisely what made it popular
among the praktiki (whom Plekhanov obviously despised). According to
Plekhanov, Lenins formulation implied that socialist ideas came about in
complete isolation from social practice (a point later taken up by writers
such as John Molyneux). Plekhanov sharply contrasts Lenins heresy with
Kautskys orthodoxy. Without mentioning that he himself had made a
similar point in Lenins defence, he took up Lenins bend-the-stick metaphor
as proof that Lenin had semi-recanted: Lenin himself . . . admitted that in
the dispute with the economists he went too far and bent the stick in the
other direction (Plekhanovs emphasis). Crucial here is the contrast between
going too far (Plekhanovs reading of what Lenin said) and Lenins actual
emphasis on making the stick as straight as possible.
52
In the autumn of 1904, the Bolshevik pamphleteer Mikhail Olminsky
comments on the over-the-top nature of Plekhanovs rhetoric and mocks
the idea that Lenin really believed that the intelligentsia developed in
complete isolation from the worker-movement (One has to wonder how it
is that Lenin doesnt know what everybody else in the world knows).
Olminsky observes that, when Plekhanov defended WITBD? at the Second
Congress, he described its formulations as a not very happy presentation of
what were nonetheless correct ideas.
53
In another pamphlet around the
same time, Olminsky explains why Lenins WITBD? formulations did not
give a full account of the rle of stikhinost. He and other Iskra-authors were
writing at a time when the worker-masses were ahead of many Social-
Democratic intellectuals in acknowledging the need for anti-tsarist political
action. Terefore one should not look upon WITBD? as a complete
catechism for Social Democrats nor as a full expression of the opinions of
its author.
54
In early 1905, a local Menshevik committee issued an attack on Lenin that
relied heavily on Plekhanovs article. Lenin and his lieutenant Vlatislav
Vorovsky used this as an excuse to respond directly to Plekhanov, in an
article drafted by Vorovsky, with corrections and additions by Lenin. Tis
article dismissed Plekhanovs picture of Lenin as a demagogic caricature
52. Plekhanov 19237, p. 138 (originally published in Iskra [now edited by the Mensheviks],
25 July and 1 August 1904). John Molyneux dismisses my attempt in Lenin Rediscovered to sort
out what Lenin meant by bend the stick as too complicated, so I have tried to make the contrast
as clear as possible.
53. Olminskii and Bogdanov 1904, pp. 818.
54. Olminskii 1904b, p. 7.
carried out for purely factional motives. In response to Plekhanovs attempt
to dig a gulf between Lenin and Kautsky, Vorovsky claimed that the alleged
Leninist heresy was nothing more than a restatement of the ideas of the
principal theorists of socialism (a formulation meant to include Kautsky)
and especially Marx himself. To support this claim, Vorovsky brought forth
passages from the Communist Manifesto and Poverty of Philosophy. Te salt,
the core, of Lenins WITBD? argument was the merger-formula Social
Democracy is the merger of the worker-movement with socialism as
explicitly stated in the rst issue of Iskra by a joint statement of the entire
editorial board.
55
Vorovsky responded to Plekhanovs charge that Lenin saw socialist thought
as something isolated from worker-practice by arguing there was no need to
state the obvious (material in brackets added directly by Lenin): It would
be ridiculous in a work discussing the burning questions of our
movement
56
if Lenin were to start demonstrating that the development
of ideas, and in particular the development of scientic socialism, took
place and takes place in close historical connection with the development of
productive forces, [in close connection with the growth of the worker-
movement in general]. Lenin added another sentence stating that his aim
was a straightforward [nekhitryi] reminder to the economists about the
duty of a socialist to bring in awareness from without.
57
In April 1905, at the Tird Congress, Bolshevik M.G. Tskhakaia
compliments WITBD?, but adds Of course, he makes mistakes, untrue or
unsuccessful formulations, and he himself, no doubt, would now better
formulate and support the very same ideas that he set out in WITBD? .
(Tese remarks were made in Lenins presence.)
58
In early 1905, the Georgian Menshevik Noe Zhordania publishes an attack
on WITBD?. Zhordanias critique is evidently inuenced by Plekhanov,
since he argues that the ght against economism gave rise to another
extreme.
59
In other words, he takes a going too far reading of the bend the
stick metaphor.
An extensive response to Zhordanias articles was written by a fellow-
Georgian, the young Bolshevik praktik Iosif Dzugashvili (Stalin).
60
Stalins
55. Vorovskii 1955.
56. Burning Questions of Our Movement is the subtitle of WITBD?.
57. Vorovskii 1955.
58. Tretii sezd RSDRP: Protokoly 1959, p. 341.
59. Stalin 194652, p. 96 (Stalins counterblast is my only source for Zhordanias article). For
Zhordanias anti-WITBD? comments in a private letter written in Summer 1904, see Ron Sunys
contribution to this symposium.
60. Stalin 1952, pp. 90132, 16274.
defence tied Lenins formulation very closely to Kautsky and to the merger-
formula from the Erfurt Programme (and not specically to the Kautsky
passage cited in WITBD?, although Stalin also cites this passage with
approval). (It is pleasant to think of the diligent Soviet reader in the 1940s
learning from Stalin what a great Marxist theoretician Kautsky was.) Stalin
makes much use of an argument found in Kautsky but not in Lenin, namely,
that workers sooner or later would come to socialism without Social
Democracy, but only after much avoidable travail and error. According to
Stalin, Plekhanovs 1904 article was the result of a desperate search by the
Mensheviks to nd some substantive disagreement to justify their takeover
of the Iskra editorial board. Tey searched and searched until they found a
passage in Lenins book which, if torn from the context and interpreted
separately, could indeed be cavilled at. But, (continues Stalin) if we look at
Lenins actual position, we see that, in fact, Plekhanov does not disagree
with [the Bolsheviks] and with Lenin. And not only Plekhanov. Neither
Martov, nor Zasulich, nor Akselrod disagree with them.
61
Stalin listed a number of lies about Lenins position. Te truth? Lenin did
not say that only intellectuals can bring socialist awareness to the workers.
Why do you think that the Social-Democratic Party consists exclusively of
intellectuals? Do you not know that there are many more advanced workers
than intellectuals in the ranks of Social Democracy? Cannot Social-
Democratic workers introduce socialist awareness into the worker
movement?
62
Lenin did not want to limit party membership to professional
revolutionaries or to committee-members. Lenin did not say that socialist
thought arose in isolation from the worker-movement. Lenin did not deny
the historical inevitability of socialism. Lenins proposed denition of party-
membership does not discourage worker-enrolment into the Party (with
some glee, Stalin cites Plekhanov himself on this point).
63
We can debate whether Stalin has described Lenins position accurately
(I believe he is more-or-less accurate). Nevertheless, Stalins article indicates
that highly committed Bolsheviks such as Stalin did not read WITBD? in
the way suggested by the textbook-interpretation.
64
In October 1905,
Lenins party-newspaper Proletarii had a discussion of the Georgian party-
newspaper that had published Stalins articles. Lenin himself wrote the
page-long paragraph that discussed Stalins second article. He praised the
article for its excellent presentation of the notorious issue of bringing in
61. Stalin 194652, pp. 127, 122.
62. Stalin 194652, pp. 1667.
63. Stalin 194652, pp. 16274.
64. For Ron Sunys claim to the opposite eect, see Section III.
awareness from without . He then summarised Stalins argument and
concluded: What does Social Democracy meet in the proletariat itself,
when it goes to the proletariat with its preaching of socialism? An instinctive
urge [vlechenie] toward socialism.
65
In other words, in October 1905, in the
midst of a grandiose general strike, Lenin explicitly endorsed WITBD? s
argument about bringing awareness from without.
We nally arrive back at our starting point, namely, the 1907 introduction
to the republication of WITBD?. Here, Lenin referred with some irritation
to the way Mensheviks used his bend-the-stick comment as an admission
of error. On the contrary, the sense of these words is clear: WITBD? was a
polemical correction of economism and to consider its content outside
this task of the book is incorrect.
66
A couple of comments on this polemical daisy-chain. To grant that WITBD?
is one-sided and therefore incomplete is not the same as conceding that Lenins
outlook during the Iskra-period as a whole is similarly one-sided. Lenin wrote
on a variety of topics that brought out dierent aspects of the Social-Democratic
outlook, and he also participated in the creation of the RSDWP party-
programme. Indeed, what all contributors to this debate overlooked was that
an evocation of the other side of the Social-Democratic synthesis can be found
in WITBD? itself, in the small but signicant section devoted to critique of the
individual terrorist who despaired of the mass-movement.
67
Also noteworthy is the way that Karl Kautsky served as ideological gold-
standard for everyone in the debate: Lenin, Plekhanov, Olminsky, Vorovsky,
Zhordania, Stalin, and even Trotsky (as shown in a later section). Te
Bolsheviks pushed Lenin and Kautsky closer together, the Mensheviks pulled
them apart. (Perhaps the emphasis on Kautskys merger-formula in particular
was a distinctive feature of Bolshevik polemics.)
Only recently, I have become aware of one source of confusion about this
whole issue. Te English-language edition of Lenins Collected Works does not
provide a literal translation of Lenins use of bend the stick in relation to
WITBD?. Lenins comment at the 1903 Second Congress is translated as
follows:
65. Lenin 19608f, p. 388. A verb with the same root as vlechenie is used in WITBD? in a
passage quoted by Stalin. In my translation, the relevant passage runs: It is often said: the worker
class is drawn to socialism in stikhinnyi fashion. Tis is completely true (Lih 2006, p. 712).
66. Lih 2006, p. 27; Lenin 19608i, pp. 1068.
67. Lih 2006, pp. 5835, 7414.
We all know the economists have gone to one extreme. To straighten matters out
somebody had to pull in the other direction and that is what I have done. I am
convinced that Russian Social Democracy will always vigorously straighten out
whatever has been twisted by opportunism of any kind, and that therefore our
line of action will always be the straightest and the ttest for action.
68
Given the notoriety of the bend-the-stick metaphor, it is unfortunate that the
standard translation hides its presence. On the other hand, this translation
accurately presents the gist of Lenins remark. Lenins motto was not bend the
stick, but straighten out whatever has been twisted.
We can see, then, that there are two ways of interpreting the bend-the-
stick comment. According to the Mensheviks, Lenin admitted going too far,
for which he was properly chastised by Plekhanov. Many years later, Trotsky
set forth this Menshevik interpretation: according to Lenin,
revolutionary awareness was brought into the proletariat from without by
the Marxist intelligentsia. . . . Te author of WITBD? himself subsequently
acknowledged the one-sidedness and therefore the incorrectness of his theory. . . .
After his break with Lenin, Plekhanov came forward with a belated but all the
more severe critique of What Is to Be Done?.
69

Writers in the Trotskyist tradition such as Liebman, Cli, and Molyneux are
still loyal to this Menshevik reading.
According to the Bolsheviks including not only Lenin himself but, oddly
enough, Plekhanov at the Second Congress Lenins argument straightened
out a stick that had been bent out of alignment by the economists. Tus
Lenin did not acknowledge the incorrectness, but only the incompleteness of his
argument: it was not a complete catechism of the Social-Democratic outlook,
nor was it meant to be. Te WITBD?-formulations did not set forth a new
theory, but, rather, a straightforward [nekhitryi] restatement of a basic Social-
Democratic axiom. Plekhanovs caricature was due solely to partisan nitpicking.
If Lenins clumsy wording gave rise to ridiculous misapprehensions, this was
cause for apology and regret and not the result of systematic exaggeration in
order to get the point across.
70
68. Lenin 19608c, p. 491; see also Lenin 19608i, p. 107, and compare with Lenin 1958
65a, p. 272 and 195865c, p. 107. (Brian Pearces edition of the Second-Congress minutes
evidently keeps the literal bend-the-stick image.)
69. Trotskii 1996, p. 91. Te word one-sidedness [odnostoronnost ] has been misleadingly
translated as bias. Although he gets factual details garbled, Martovs history of the Party follows
the same line (Martov 2000, p. 65).
70. Te apologies started early, since even in the Foreword to WITBD?, Lenin apologises for
Taken in the main, my account supports the Bolshevik reading of the bend-
the-stick comment and the status of the scandalous passages. Of course,
WITBD? had many other arguments besides the scandalous passages. (In fact,
these passages were a last-minute addition.) Contrary to the myth that Lenin
distanced himself from WITBD? in 1905, he actually endorsed other specic
WITBD? arguments fairly often after Bloody Sunday (9 January 1905). Tese
include:
endorsement of the Zubatov-paradigm. Lenin referred to What Is to Be
Done? s discussion of this topic on a number of occasions;
71
pride that WITBD? had already broached the topic of armed insurrection;
72
self-quotation (without explicit citation) of the WITBD? formulation many
people, but no people [massa liudei, a liudei net];
73
armation of earlier arguments about the impossibility of applying the
elective principle under underground-conditions;
74
armation of the call in WITBD? for a wide variety of organisations, from
very broad to very secretive, in explicit connection with an armation of
the famous denition of party-membership put forth by Lenin at the
Second Party-Congress;
75
insistence that his call for workers to be enlisted into the local committees
was a reection of a long-held stand (see Section VII);
nally, besides these comments from 1905, Lenin insisted in his 1907
introduction to these collected writings that WITBD? did not exaggerate
the rle of the revolutionary by trade. Rather, WITBD? insisted on a
necessary truth against those who just didnt get it. Tis correct way of
accomplishing organisational tasks was now accepted by both Social-
Democratic factions (and indeed, by all underground-parties).
76
As Robert Mayer and I have both documented, WITBD? was then more-or-
less forgotten until after Lenins death.
77
Tis fact is completely compatible
the many inadequacies in its literary presentation. I was forced to work at the highest possible
speed along with interruptions from all other sorts of work (Lih 2006, p. 678).
71. For Lenins 1905 endorsement of WITBD? on this topic, see Section II and Lih 2006,
pp. 4013.
72. Lenin 19608e, p. 142.
73. Lenin 19608e, p. 144.
74. Lenin 19608f, p. 167, Lenin 19608g, pp. 301 (see Section VII on de-
Bolshevisation).
75. Lenin 19608e, p. 444.
76. Lenin 19608i, pp. 1014.
77. Mayer 1996; Lih 2003.
with the Bolshevik defence that I have just described. From the Bolshevik
point of view, why would anyone read WITBD? after 1905? It did not advance
any new theories or make any points that could not be found in what remained
the Bolshevik party-textbook, Kautskys Erfurt Programme. Its restatement of
these basic axioms was admittedly clumsy. Its practical arguments were very
dated. Why bother to argue that a party-newspaper would be a good way to
set up as-yet-nonexistent central party-organs? WITBD? was a good book for
its time, but its time had past. It applied some basic Social-Democratic truths
to a specic situation, but now the task was to apply these and other truths to
more current problems.
Such was the Bolshevik view of WITBD?: neither embarrassment nor
founding document.
VI. Did Lenin have a bend-the-stick theory of leadership?
Any polemicist will aim his remarks at the people against whom he is
polemicising.
Similarly, any political leader who advocates a particular policy at a particular
time will use only arguments that show the advantages of that policy. Anyone
seeking to understand the world-view of the polemicist or political leader
would be ill-advised to take advocacy of any one polemic or policy as a full
expression of her practical views. A full range of her writings or leadership-
activities should be considered.
Tese are very elementary rules of historical interpretation. An energetic
protest should be lodged against the violation of such axiomatic rules. But this
protest need not and should not be based on an alleged bend-the-stick-
approach unique to Lenin. Tere is nothing special about Lenins polemics
and policy-advocacy in this regard. As I have shown in Section V, Lenin
himself used the bend-the-stick metaphor to make this point about elementary
fairness in interpretation. He was trying to say: When I wrote WITBD?, I was
straightening the stick bent awry by one particular set of opponents, I was
advocating one particular set of policies appropriate for that moment, as any
responsible Social-Democratic leader would do, In any such case, it is
inaccurate and unfair to deduce an entire worldview without a further range
of evidence.
Writers such as Tony Cli and John Molyneux agree with Plekhanovs
reading of the bend-the-stick metaphor: Lenin admitted going too far. He
overstated his point, he took an extreme position, he was obsessed about one
particular aspect to the exclusion of all else:
After the event, [Lenin] would say: We overdid it. We bent the stick too far, by
which he did not mean that he had been wrong to do so. To win the main battle
of the day, the concentration of all energies on the task was necessary. . . . He
always made the task of the day quite clear, repeating what was necessary ad
innitum in the plainest, heaviest, most single-minded hammer-blow
pronouncements. Afterwards he would regain his balance, straighten the stick,
then bend it again in another direction.
78
We are furthermore told by Molyneux that this alleged procedure on Lenins
part is a good thing a necessary and eective tool for leaders of revolutionary
parties. Unless you exaggerate and become obsessed, you will not overcome
the inertia of the rank and le. Bending the stick, going too far, is like the
proverbial whack on the head of the donkey: rst, you have to get peoples
attention. Of course, once the activists are pushed in one direction, they will
inevitably end up going too far, and so they must be yanked back by
exaggerating and obsessing in some other direction.
According to Tony Cli, this is exactly how Lenin operated. In Lenin
Rediscovered, I reviewed Cli s description of Lenin from 1895 and 1905, and
remarked that Cli s portrait of Lenin as a leader is a rather unattractive one.
79

An audience at the Marxism 2008 conference was told by John Molyneux that
I objected to Cli s portrait because it showed Lenin changing his mind, and
I was duly reminded that there is nothing wrong in changing ones mind where
circumstances warrant.
Given this misunderstanding of my observation, I am compelled to explain
at greater length the deciencies of Cli s portrait. As we follow Cli s Lenin
from year to year, we nd that he continually veers back and forth on
fundamental questions. Back in 1895, we nd Lenin propagating the idea that
class consciousness, including political consciousness, develops automatically
from the economic struggle.
80
In 1899,
it was fear of the danger to the movement occasioned by the rise of Russian
economism and German revisionism in the second half of 1899 that motivated
Lenin to bend the stick right over again, away from the spontaneous, day-to-day
fragmented economic struggle and towards the organisation of a national political
party.
81

78. Cli 1975, p. 67.
79. Lih 2006, p. 25.
80. Cli 1975, p. 52. Cli also writes, In November 1895, in an article called What are our
ministers thinking about? Lenin urged the expediency of leaving the tsar out of the argument, and
talking instead about the new laws that favoured employers and of cabinet ministers who were
anti-working class. Tis assertion is entirely without factual basis.
81. Cli 1975, p. 69.
Also in late 1899, however, Lenin sharply contradicted his later statements
in What Is to Be Done? on the relation between the spontaneous class struggle
and socialist consciousness.
82
In 1902, Lenin bent the stick right over to
mechanical over-emphasis on organization in What Is to Be Done? . Tis
operation, however, was quite useful operationally . . . the step now necessary
was to arouse, at least in the politically conscious section of the masses, a
passion for political action. Lenin had so far forgotten the views he held a year
or two earlier that Cli is forced to lecture him solemnly: many economic
struggles do spill over into political ones.
83
But did the stick need to be bent in this way at this particular time? Did the
masses lack any passion for political action? Evidently not, since Cli informs
us that the economism that Lenin attacked so sharply in What Is to Be Done?
was already on the decline and practically nished by the time the pamphlet
saw the light of day. . . . During the years 19013, workers became the main
active political opponents of Tsarism.
84
In 1905, Lenin was singing a dierent
tune. . . . Te unfortunate Lenin had to persuade his supporters to oppose the
line proposed in What Is to Be Done?. . . . Lenin now formulated his conclusion
in terms which were the exact opposite of those of What Is to Be Done?.
85

My main problem with this description of Lenins description is that it is
incorrect: Lenin did not hold these extreme positions and certainly did not
veer from one to the other. At all times, Lenin realised that economic struggles
often lead to political struggles, especially in Russia. At all times, Lenin gave
an essential rle to Social Democracy in bringing organisation and insight.
Cli s mistake arises from the same source as those of many academic historians:
they focus exclusively on one sentence by Lenin and do not bother to look at
the argument in the surrounding paragraph, much less the entire article. Tis
procedure is especially problematic with Erfurtian Social Democrats such as
Lenin, since they consciously fought a two-front polemic war against both
those who pinned their hopes on the worker-movement in isolation, and those
who pinned their hopes on the socialist movement in isolation.
Let us assume for purposes of argument that Cli s portrait is an accurate
one. I nd Cli s Lenin unattractive for the following reasons:
Stick-benders seem to come in two types, manipulative (consciously
exaggerating to get the attention of activists) and self-deceiving (sincerely
82. Cli 1975, pp. 808.
83. Cli 1975, p. 82. If Cli had looked at Lenins many Iskra-articles of 19002, he would
not have been so condescending.
84. Cli 1975, pp. 978.
85. Cli 1975, pp. 171, 1756 (these assertions are examined in Section VII).
veering from one operationally useful extreme to the other). I am not sure
which of these two types is the least attractive. In any event, Cli s Lenin
deceives himself.
Te various positions taken by Lenin are incorrect, as even Cli states.
Class-consciousness does not develop automatically from the economic
struggle. Mechanical over-emphasis on organisation is not a defensible
position. Excluding workers from local committees is not a defensible
policy. Indeed, these various positions are not simply incorrect, they are
extremist and rather stupid.
As Cli accurately points out, the rapid rise of worker-politicisation in the
years 19003 was a crucial development in Russian politics. As shown in
Lenin Rediscovered, all participants in the polemics of 1901 took this new
phase of the worker-movement for granted. Yet Cli s justication for
Lenins exaggerations in his book of 1902 is that the workers needed to be
politicised. It would seem that Lenin was so ill-informed that he bent the
stick precisely where it was not needed.
Cli asks us to forgive the inadequacy of Lenins stated positions because of
the operational advantages of bending the stick right over from one
extreme to the other. But he overlooks the many operational disadvantages
of stick-bending. For a start, if Lenins position in WITBD? was as extreme
as Cli says, he gave his factional opponents a justiable talking point:
Lenin had gone too far and overreacted to economism. Plekhanov very
properly pointed this out. Lenins stick-bending thus led to confusion and
defensiveness on the part of his own supporters.
86
Another operational disadvantage of Lenins stick-bending, if Cli s account
is to be believed, is that the Bolshevik praktiki considered it their duty to
exclude workers from local committees. Indeed, they were so committed to
this policy that even Lenin could not bend the stick back again in Spring
1905. Bolshevism in the period 19025 was therefore objectively anti-
worker in organisational terms, thanks to Lenin.
In the midst of revolution in 1905, Lenin had to lose precious time trying
to undo the damage of his previous ideological extremism.
Although Cli pictures the Bolshevik activists as stodgy and not over-bright,
surely even they would start, at some point, to discount Lenins exhortations
as just the latest bending of the stick nothing to get excited about. Stick-
bending seems doomed to diminishing returns.
86. As shown in Section V, Lenin was aware that his less-than-successful formulations had led
to confusion in his own ranks and regretted the fact.
Tese are the reasons leading me to conclude that over-frequent recourse to
the bend-the-stick-type of explanation ends up making Lenin look like a
rather incompetent and incoherent leader.
87
Cli s Lenin stands for nothing
denite, and his habit of jerking his followers around had many practical
disadvantages, even if one overlooks the disrespect involved.
Lenin used the metaphor of bending the stick to defend the theoretical
formulae of WITBD? as an incomplete but thoroughly mainstream statement
of basic Social-Democratic truths. He believed he had a duty to straighten out
what others had bent awry, but he did not think that going too far was a
necessary or attractive part of leadership.
VII. Lenin vs. the Bolsheviks: WITBD? and the Revolution of 1905
A very dramatic story is often told about Lenins relation to the praktiki of his
own faction during the Revolution of 1905 a story that provides considerable
support to the textbook-interpretation of WITBD? A good title for this story
is Lenin vs. the Bolsheviks. It can be paraphrased as follows:
Lenins What Is to Be Done?, published in 1902, propagated distrust of
worker-spontaneity and suspicion of party-democracy. Lenins book
successfully too successfully imbued local Bolsheviks with these
attitudes. But the revolutionary militancy of the workers in 1905
showed the inadequacy of Lenins arguments. Lenin himself was open
and exible enough to admit this, and the tone of his writings changed
completely. Now, for the rst time, he argued for recruitment of
workers to local party-committees and for the maximum practicable
extension of party-democracy.
Unfortunately, no other Bolshevik shared this exibility. Te local
Bolshevik praktiki remained loyal to WITBD?, and, therefore, fought
Lenin tooth and nail in 1905, quoting WITBD? against its straying
author. Lenin was compelled to ght a year-long battle against his
own party. In April 1905, at the Bolshevik Tird Party-Congress,
Lenin fought unsuccessfully for recruitment of workers to party-
committees. In November 1905, Lenin returned to the attack and
called for opening the gates of the party.
A striking feature of this story is the way it foreshadows Trotskys relationship
with the epigones and party-bureaucrats in the 1920s. In each case, the great
87. Lih 2006, p. 25.
leader is frustrated by the unimaginative stodginess of the middle levels of the
Party and longs for union with the masses against the conservative and routine-
bound praktiki. We should therefore not be surprised that the writers who
insist on Lenin. vs. the Bolsheviks in 1905 tend to be admirers of Trotsky:
Marcel Liebman, Tony Cli, John Molyneux, Chris Harman and Paul Le
Blanc. Te commitment of writers in the activist-tradition to Lenin vs. the
Bolsheviks is a major reason why I count them as supporters of the textbook-
interpretation of WITBD?, despite their pro-Lenin attitude in general. If
Lenin was so worried about workers in 1902 that only the volcanic events of
1905 persuaded him to allow them on party-committees if he had done such
a thorough job of imbuing his followers with similar worries that even in 1905
they were determined to keep the workers out of party-committees then
Lenin must really have been one worried guy! Of course, the activist-account
goes on to tell us how the great leader Lenin later rises above these limitations,
and in a satisfyingly ironic sort of way loses his personal worries in 1905,
even while his followers are displaying theirs.
Te story of Lenin vs. the Bolsheviks shows its kinship with standard anti-
Lenin academic stories in yet another respect. In both cases, Lenin is the
sole creator of the Bolshevik faction, whose members are dened by the
attitudes allegedly propagated by WITBD?. His followers (I had almost said,
his minions) are thoroughly unable to think for themselves. Any change
in their outlook has to come from above (in the bend-the-stick manner
discussed in Section VI).
Elements of this story can indeed be found in academic scholars as well.
88

For example, Leopold Haimson also remarks on Lenins inebriation with the
spontaneous labor movement which led to dramatic changes in his view of
the party. To which my response was and is: Lenin indeed may have been
inebriated in 1905, but he was hardly sober before.
89
But the overlap between
the activist-writers and academic historians such as Haimson is no coincidence,
since the story told by the activist-writers is taken directly from academic
historians indeed, strongly anti-Leninist historians.
88. In his contribution to this symposium, Ron Suny writes Lenin would be compelled to
de-Bolshevise some of the more militant Bolsheviks, most emphatically in the revolutionary
fervour of 1905. He does not elaborate, but I learn from later discussions with him that he
means primarily Bolshevik attitudes toward the revolutionary soviets of 1905. Tis is a separate
and rather complicated issue, so I will just say here that I do not see anything in WITBD? that
contradicts enthusiasm about the soviets, so that, in my opinion, the term de-Bolshevisation
sows more confusion than light. (Te term de-Bolshevise evidently goes back to Trotsky in
1917, explaining why he could now join with Lenin. Exactly what Trotsky meant is unclear from
the reference in Deutscher 1965, p. 258. Te term was taken up by Marcel Liebman to describe
opening up the Party in 1917 [Liebman 1975, pp. 15761].)
89. Haimson 2005, pp. 10; Lih 2006, p. 430.
Tis observation is a correction to my account in Lenin Rediscovered, since
I thoroughly misunderstood the historiography of this issue. Misled by Tony
Cli s idiosyncratic footnote-practices, I was under the impression that he had
consulted primary, Russian-language sources, and so I made him my principal
interlocutor. I now realise his remarks have no independent value.
Here are the facts of the case. In 1963, John Keep published Te Rise of
Social Democracy in Russia. Keep is a respected academic historian who is
intensely hostile to Lenin personally.
90
In 1967, Solomon Schwarz published
Te Russian Revolution of 1905. Schwarz was a Bolshevik in 1905 but moved
to the Mensheviks soon thereafter. His account is more a monograph than
a memoir.
In 1973, Marcel Liebman published Le lninisme sous Lnine. Liebman is
the real creator of the Lenin vs. the Bolsheviks story. Without access to
Russian-language sources, Liebman relied heavily on Keep and Schwarz,
particularly in his account of the dramatic episode of the Tird Congress.
Liebman wove their material into a story that was much more hostile to
the Bolshevik praktiki than either of his two main sources. In his book,
Lenin stands as an isolated gure of wisdom within the Bolshevik faction
throughout 1905. Liebmans contemptuous attitude toward the Bolshevik
praktiki contrasts with his treatment of the Menshevik activists, to whom he
accords a good deal of praise. Liebmans list of supporting anecdotes and Lenin
citations forms the basis of later accounts in the activist-tradition.
In 1975, Tony Cli published Lenin: Building the Party. Cli took over the
Liebman-story, but he also went directly back to Keep and Schwarz and
I mean directly. Keep describes Bolshevik activists at the Tird Congress (as
it happens, without any factual basis) as follows: Buttressing themselves
with quotations from What Is to Be Done?, they called for extreme caution
in admitting workers into the committees and condemned playing at
democracy. In Cli, this becomes: Buttressing themselves with quotations
from What Is to Be Done?, they called for extreme caution in admitting
workers into the committees and condemned playing at democracy.
91
No
footnotes, no attribution. Cli takes several pages to describe the debate at the
Tird Congress, during which he gives substantial excerpts, all footnoted to
the original Russian-language sources. Te entire section is lifted almost word
for word from Solomon Schwarz.
92
90. Sample: Uppermost in his mind [at the Tird Congress], as always, was the question of
power. He reasoned that the untutored workers suddenly brought into the Party could serve as
an instrument for the leaders to crush the opportunist intellectuals (Keep 1963, p. 211). Keep
clearly had direct access to Lenins mind, since the documents do not reveal this reasoning.
91. Compare Cli 1975, p. 175 to Keep 1963, p. 210. If Cli had actually consulted the
original source, he might have realised that Keeps assertion is baseless.
92. Compare Cli 1975, pp. 1735, to Schwarz 1967, pp. 21719.
Anyone who looks at the footnotes in the relevant chapters in Cli s
biography will get the impression that Cli had consulted many arcane
Russian-language sources from the 1920s and the like. I, personally, would be
surprised if any of these attributions were not taken from secondary sources. I
have no wish to impose what may be inappropriate academic standards on
Cli. Nevertheless, it must be realised that the activist-account, especially in
regard to the Tird Congress, originates in the (as it happens, deeply distorted)
interpretations of John Keep and Solomon Schwartz.
As their contributions to this symposium and elsewhere show, John
Molyneux, Chris Harman and Paul Le Blanc are also committed to Lenin vs.
the Bolsheviks.
93
I tacked Chapter Nine on to my already long book partly to
address this issue. In this chapter, I document the actual Bolshevik reading of
WITBD? and show the errors of Cli and other activist-writers about the
Tird Congress. For reasons I can only guess at, none of my critics have even
acknowledged the existence of these arguments, much less responded to them.
I must therefore once again address this issue as forcefully as I can.
Did 1905 cause a fundamental change in the tone of Lenins writings?
John Molyneux writes that in 1905, in the face of the enormous and
spontaneous revolutionary achievements of the Russian working class, the
tone of Lenins writings changes completely.
94
As we have seen, Leopold
Haimson concurs, speaking of Lenins inebriation with the spontaneous labor
movement. Te question asked by Molyneux and Haimson is: are Lenins
pronouncements about the workers in 1905 consistent with what we ourselves
feel are the implications of his WITBD? formulations? A better question to ask
is: how do Lenins pronouncements about the Russian workers in 1905
compare with what he was saying about the Russian workers earlier? Te
answer to this more concrete question is scattered throughout Lenin
Rediscovered. Gathering this material together, we nd the following picture.
In 1896, the Petersburg-workers carried out strike-actions that amazed
Russian society. Lenins reaction? Tese events show that the Russian workers
are moving rapidly toward purposive anti-tsarist revolutionary action, thus
93. In Paul Le Blancs version of Lenin vs. the Bolsheviks, WITBD? is not explicitly
mentioned. Nevertheless, we are told that Lenin quickly perceived the need for a shift away
from an organisational model in which professional revolutionaries demanded absolute
obedience. In 1905, Lenin himself bent the stick away from one of the formulations of 1902,
that is, from What Is to Be Done? (Le Blanc 1990, pp. 117, 121). Le Blancs hostile attitude
toward the Bolshevik praktiki in this period comes out not only in Le Blanc 1990 but in his
contribution to this symposium.
94. Molyneux 1978, pp. 5963.
confounding the sceptics. Te weak link is us, the Social Democrats. We are
falling short of what the workers ask of us. We need to redouble our eorts to
bring enlightenment and organisation so that the revolutionary fervour of the
workers will become more eective.
95
In 1900, May-Day demonstrations by workers in Kharkov inaugurated a
new stage of political protest in the Russian worker-movement. Lenins
reaction? Tese events show that the Russian workers are moving rapidly
toward purposive anti-tsarist revolutionary action, thus confounding the
sceptics. Te weak link is us, the Social Democrats. We are falling short of
what the workers ask of us. We need to redouble our eorts to bring
enlightenment and organisation so that the revolutionary fervour of the
96
In the so-called spring-events of February/March 1901, workers went out
on the street to support student-protests. Lenins reaction? Tese events show
that the Russian workers are moving rapidly toward purposive anti-tsarist
revolutionary action, thus confounding the sceptics. Te weak link is us, the
Social Democrats. We are falling short of what the workers ask of us. We need
to redouble our eorts to bring enlightenment and organisation so that the
revolutionary fervour of the workers will become more eective.
97
In May 1901, striking workers fought a pitched battle with police that
became famous as the Obukhov-defence. Lenins reaction? Tese events show
that the Russian workers are moving rapidly toward purposive anti-tsarist
revolutionary action, thus confounding the sceptics. Te weak link is us, the
Social Democrats. We are falling short of what the workers ask of us. We need
to redouble our eorts to bring enlightenment and organisation so that the
revolutionary fervour of the workers will become more eective.
98
In November 1902, worker-demonstrations in Rostov-on-Don turned into
a massive general strike. Lenins reaction? Tese events show that the Russian
workers are moving rapidly toward purposive anti-tsarist revolutionary action,
thus confounding the sceptics. Te weak link is us, the Social Democrats. We
are falling short of what the workers ask of us. We need to redouble our eorts
to bring enlightenment and organisation so that the revolutionary fervour of
the workers will become more eective.
99
In the summer of 1903, massive strikes rolled across the cities of South
Russia. Lenins reaction? Tese events show that the Russian workers are
95. Lih 2006, pp. 1256, 641.
96. Lih 2006, pp. 4246.
97. Lih 2006, pp. 4267.
98. Lih 2006, pp. 2023.
99. Lih 2006, pp. 2036.
moving rapidly toward purposive anti-tsarist revolutionary action, thus
confounding the sceptics. Te weak link is us, the Social Democrats. We are
falling short of what the workers ask of us. We need to redouble our eorts to
bring enlightenment and organisation so that the revolutionary fervour of the
100
In 1905, a wave of strikes and demonstrations culminates in the massive
general strike of October and armed insurrection in December. Lenins
reaction? Tese events show that the Russian workers are moving rapidly
toward purposive anti-tsarist revolutionary action, thus confounding the
sceptics. Te weak link is us, the Social Democrats. We are falling short of
what the workers ask of us. We need to redouble our eorts to bring
enlightenment and organisation so that the revolutionary fervour of the
101

Do Lenins comments in 1905 reveal a complete change of tone from years
past? In no way. Lenins exhilaration with worker-militancy in 1905 was
preceded by his exhilaration with every indication of worker-militancy since
1895. Lenins enthusiastic insistence on the revolutionary fervour of the
workers does not contradict his insistence on the necessity of the party. Te
two are part and parcel of the same outlook.
Did Bolsheviks learn worry about workers from Lenin?
We have examined the continuity between Lenins pre-1905 views and his
outlook during the Revolution. Let us now turn to the other protagonist in
this story, the Bolshevik praktik. Did Bolsheviks in Russia pick up worry-
about-workers attitudes from Lenin or from WITBD? In my book, I discuss
the views of Aleksandr Bogdanov, M. Liadov, Vlatislav Vorovsky, Iosif
Dzugashvili (Stalin), I.I. Radchenko, M.G. Tskhakaia, among others all
Bolsheviks, all militant, all admirers of Lenin (although they did not like to
think of themselves as Lenins minions in the style of Akselrod and later
historians), all attentive readers of WITBD? Teir views provide no support
for Lenin vs. the Bolsheviks.
Here is one more instructive example. In 1904, the Bolshevik pamphleteer
Mikhail Olminsky sketched Lenins political physiognomy. What is crucial
for the issue before us is not the adequacy of his portrait of Lenin, but the
mere fact that one of his ardent followers pictured Lenin in this way in autumn
100. Lenin 19608c, pp. 51516 and 19608d, pp. 199202. See also Lih 2006, p. 185,
where an Iskra-article by Plekhanov from summer 1903 is quoted.
101. See, for example, Lessons of the Moscow Uprising, Lenin 19608i, pp. 1718
[1906].
1904 that is, prior to the events of 1905. Olminsky cited the following
Lenin-pronouncements to back up his admiring portrait.
102
In 1901, Lenin wrote Before our eyes, the wide masses of urban workers
and simple folk [ prostonarode] are straining at the bit to join in struggle
and we revolutionaries appear to be without a sta of leaders and organizers.
103
In 1902, Lenin criticised inappropriate and immoderate application of the
electoral principle. Olminsky emphasised the words inappropriate and
immoderate to show that Lenin was not opposed to the electoral principle
per se. Olminsky further quotes Lenin to the eect that the estrangement of
workers from active revolutionary work was one of the principal defects of
party-organisation at present.
104

In 1903, Lenin asserted that in order to become a party of the masses not
only in words, we need to enlist ever wider masses in all party aairs. Steps
should be taken so that the experience of the workers in struggle and their
proletarian sense of things teach us a thing or two. Lenin also insisted that
it is necessary to do everything possible, up to and including some deviations
from beautifully centralized organizational charts, from unconditional
subordination to discipline, to give to groups [within the Party] the freedom
to speak out.
105
Olminskys Lenin-citations show us the kind of thing that really inspired
the praktiki not worry about workers, but, rather, faith in the revolutionary
fervour of the workers and the historic mission of the Party.
Olminsky went on to predict that, if Lenin acted consistently with his
printed statements, he could be counted on to advocate expansion of the
electoral principle whenever circumstances warranted. He noted Lenins 1903
call for wide glasnost within the Party, to the extent consistent with konspiratsiia
and tactical secrecy. Olminsky himself argued that the principle of freedom of
press within the Party should be introduced now, to the extent practicable
otherwise the Party would be bankrupt when freedom of press was won for
Russia as a whole.
Troughout this pamphlet, Olminsky made clear his own views about
party-democracy. He insisted that, for any consistent Social Democrat,
partiinost and democratic organization of the party are two inseparable
concepts. Te party-ideal should be centralized democracy. True, the
environment of the underground forced many painful compromises all
the more reason to insist on any democratic procedures that were possible.
102. Olminsky 1904a (I have provided references to Lenins Collected Works).
103. Lenin 19608b, pp. 1324.
104. Letter to a Comrade, in Lenin 19608c, pp. 23152.
105. Lenin 19608d, pp. 11518.
Olminsky was condent that the Party would not reject the democratic
principle until the second coming of Christ.
In looking back at party-history, Olminsky insisted that the workers had
moved forward more quickly toward open political struggle than economists
from the intelligentsia. Te workers themselves seized the rst opportunity to
demonstrate openly in the streets, despite the scepticism of their own leaders.
According to Olminsky, the triumph of Iskra-ism owed much less to the
talented editors of Iskra than to the reaction of the Russian workers themselves
to changing circumstances.
106

Would Mikhail Olminsky have been surprised or upset by Lenins outlook
in 1905? Did Lenin need to wean Olminsky away from his sectarian and
litist views about party-democracy and worker-recruitment? Hardly. We
may therefore conclude that neither the textbook-interpretation nor the story
of Lenin vs. the Bolsheviks gives us even a clue about the outlook of Lenins
most committed followers.
Lenin vs. the praktiki at the Tird Congress (April 1905)
According to Lenin vs. the Bolsheviks, this is what happened at the Bolshevik
Tird Congress: Lenin saw that the surprising worker-militancy of 1905
required a change of outlook, and so he, and only he, insisted that workers be
allowed entry to the party-committees. Most other Bolsheviks were dead set
against this, since they remained loyal to WITBD? and even quoted it against
its baed author. Te anti-worker praktiki won hands down.
107
Here is what the factual record shows. At the Congress, Lenin bragged that
his published writings showed that he had been the one Russian Social-
Democratic leader who had always openly called for more workers in the
committees, and other speakers conrmed this claim. WITBD? was not
mentioned in the debate. Everybody at the Congress agreed that the local
committees needed to recruit more workers the only question was how. Te
resolution submitted jointly by Lenin and Bogdanov was criticised by praktiki
because it merely armed an axiomatic goal (worker-recruitment) without
showing ways and means. Te people most informed about the situation on
the ground activists who had recently visited a number of local committees
in Russia opposed Lenins resolution as impracticable at the present time.
After Lenins resolution was defeated by a close vote (Lenin was not isolated on
106. Olminsky 1904a.
107. Liebman 1975, pp. 846; Cli 1975, pp. 1719; Molyneux 1978, pp. 5963; Le Blanc
1990, pp. 11619.
this issue), the Congress passed another resolution on the topic which tied
worker-recruitment to concrete solutions.
108
Te activist-view of the Tird Congress pictures Lenin battling stick-in-the-
mud komitetchiki [members of local committees]. Te opposite view of the
dynamics of the congress was provided by a participant, M. Liadov (not a
komitetchik), looking back in 1911: Look at the proceedings of the Bolshevik
Tird Congress and you will immediately see the extent to which the lower
ranks [nizy] had overtaken their leader at that time.
109
Rejecting the completely erroneous standard account of the Tird Congress
is very important. Anyone who maintains that one of Bolshevisms most
inuential texts turned local Bolshevik activists into fanatic opponents of
putting workers on party-committees does not understand Bolshevism.
Lenins article on party-reorganisation (November 1905)
In late 1905, Lenin, newly arrived in Russia, wrote an article on party-
organisation that called for fundamental changes to party-institutions: more
sweeping application of the electoral principle, greater eorts at mass-
recruitment into the Party, and more open party-conferences, congresses, and
so forth.
110
Tis important article has been misused in a number of ways to
support the story of Lenin vs. the Bolsheviks.
First, Lenins slogans are often cited as evidence of a fundamental turnaround
in his views on party-organisation, caused by his new enthusiasm for worker-
militancy.
111
Tis interpretation is based on a fundamental misreading of the
historical situation. In October 1905, the tsar issued a manifesto granting a
certain measure of political freedom. Tis manifesto, plus widespread pressure
from below, led to a very short-lived situation that became known as the days
of freedom. In the opening words of Lenins article: Te conditions in which
our party is functioning are changing radically. Freedom of assembly, of
108. Lih 2006, pp. 5404. Lenin certainly felt that praktiki were not doing enough to recruit
workers to local committees. Tis attitude was partly motivated by factional competition with
the Mensheviks. I see no reason to assume that the migr Lenin had a more realistic view of
actual conditions in Russia than Bolshevik praktiki such as Lev Kamenev and Rosalia Zemliachka.
In her memoirs, Krupskaya loyally supports Lenins view of the matter. (Note that the English
translation muddlies Krupskayas point [see Lih 2006, p. 541].) Krupskayas overall judgment on
the praktiki does not lend much support to Lenin vs. the Bolsheviks.
109. Liadov 1911. In his memoir written in the 1920s, Liadov is, of course, less condescending
to Lenin, but still stresses the active initiative shown by the praktiki-delegates. Liadov views the
Tird Congress as the real founding congress of Bolshevism (Liadov 1956, pp. 803).
110. Lenin 19608 g, pp. 2939.
111. Examples include Cli 1975; Haimson 2005; Le Blanc 1990.
association and of the press has been captured.
112
And since de facto political
freedom had been acquired, vast changes in party-organisation should follow.
Was this a new position, a change of heart? Of course not! In my book, I
sum up Lenins pre-1905 political strategy in this way: Let us build an
underground-organisation as much like the German SPD as possible so that
we can overthrow autocracy in order to obtain the political freedom that we
need to build a party even more like the German SPD. For one brief shining
moment, it looked as if political freedom had been won, and Lenin acted
immediately to cash in his revolutionary chips and put the Party on the more
ecient and more mass basis he had always dreamed about. As I put it in
Lenin Rediscovered: Lenin gave advice on how to build an eective party in the
underground, but the reason he wanted an eective party was to be able to
leave behind forever the stiing atmosphere of the underground.
113
Lenins article has also been tied to the story of the Tird Congress in a way
that suggests a year-long ght against the party machine.
114
As Cli describes
it, it was not characteristic of Lenin to give up a ght, and a few months after
the third Congress, in November 1905, he returned to the issue with increased
vigour.
115
Tis is the reverse of the truth. Lenin says in the article of November 1905
that we Bolsheviks have always recognized that in new conditions, when
political freedoms were acquired, it would be essential to adopt the elective
principle. Te minutes of the third Congress of the RSDWP prove this most
conclusively, if, indeed, any proof is required.
116
Compare Le Blanc, who
quotes Lenins November article and then says At the Tird Congress, in April
1905, the Bolshevik committeemen had revolted against such ideas.
117
Tus
Lenins armation of continuity with earlier Bolshevism and his specic
endorsement of the Tird Congress is turned into its opposite.
Te issue over which Lenin found himself in conict with many praktiki at
the Tird Congress in April 1905 was substantially dierent from the issue at
stake in November 1905. In the spring, the problem was worker-recruitment
to local party-committees under conditions of a konspiratsiia-underground. In
the autumn, the problem was worker-entry as general party-members under
conditions of rapidly expanding political freedom.
112. Lenin 19608g, p. 29 (emphasis added).
113. Lih 2006, p. 557.
114. Molyneux 1978, pp. 5963.
115. Cli 1975, p. 177.
116. Lenin 19608g, p. 30. Lenin also continues to insist that full democracy within the
Party is impossible without political freedom, that is, in the underground.
117. Le Blanc 1990, p. 118. Le Blanc also erroneously suggests that Lenin discussed the rle
of professional revolutionaries in this article.
Finally, one particular sentence in this article is taken to be a repudiation of
Lenins earlier outlook. Lenin writes: Te working class is instinctively,
spontaneously Social Democratic, and more than ten years of work put in by
Social Democracy has done a great deal to transform this spontaneity into
consciousness.
118
Does this statement really bend the stick away from Lenins
earlier standpoint, as Cli and Le Blanc assert?
119
Even on a purely verbal level,
Lenins 1905 formulation does not dier in essential ways from his WITBD?-
formulations. He says, in WITBD?, that, while, it is completely true that the
working class is spontaneously drawn toward socialism, Social Democracy is
not thereby excused from its leadership-role.
120
More substantively, Lenins
statement of November 1905 reects his life-long assumptions about the
receptivity of the workers to the socialist message.
In his text, Molyneux cites Lenins statement in WITBD? that the working
class exclusively by its own eorts is able to develop only tred-iunionist
consciousness. He then comments: Tis is not, and was not, true witness
the Paris Commune and Lenin saw with his own eyes that it was not true in
1905, hence his statement then that the working class is spontaneously social
democratic.
Tis is a curious observation. Does either the Paris Commune in 1871 or
worker-militancy in 1905 show us workers achieving socialist insight without
socialists? By 1871, socialists had been at work in Paris for at least a generation.
As for Russia, Molyneux himself states Lenins view of the matter: Te open-
ended expansion envisaged by Lenin in the revolutionary period was possible
only on the basis of the solid preparation of the party beforehand.
121
Chris Harman sees Lenins article of November 1905 as proof of his
revolutionary and therefore (in Harmans view) non-Erfurtian political
outlook: Tis is also why Lenin was so insistent on berating established party-
members in 1905 to open up the Party to the newly revolutionary layer of
workers something Lih recognised happened, but feels compelled by his
Erfurtianism-thesis to minimise its signicance. Tis statement is triply
misleading. First, I do not minimise the signicance of this article but see it as
118. Lenin 19608g, p. 32.
119. Cli 1975, p. 176 (Lenin now formulated his conclusion in terms which were the exact
opposite of those of What Is to Be Done? ); Le Blanc 1990, p. 121.
120. Lih 2006, p. 712 (translation adjusted by using standard renderings).
121. Molyneux 1978, pp. 5963. Mikhail Pokrovsky cites a comment of Lenin from 1908:
In the summer of 1905, our party was a union of underground groups; in the autumn it became
the party of millions of workers. Do you think, my dear sirs, this came all of a sudden, or was the
result prepared and secured by years and years of slow, obstinate, inconspicuous, noiseless work?
(Pokrovsky 1933, pp. 1934).
an important conrmation of my general view of Lenin.
122
Second, Lenins
call for party-democracy in conditions of political freedom stems from his
Erfurtian outlook. Tird, Lenin was not berating party-members in this
article, in which he says that he was profoundly convinced that these proposals
would be accepted by local committee-members.
123
Lenins endorsement of WITBD? arguments in 1905
Contrary to the myth that Lenin distanced himself from WITBD? in 1905, he
actually endorsed many specic WITBD? arguments fairly often after Bloody
Sunday (9 January 1905). Besides the issues treated in Section V, we nd the
following.
Endorsement of WITBD? s bring-it-on attitude toward police-socialists
such as Zubatov. Lenin referred to his discussion of this topic in WITBD?
on a number of occasions in 1905.
124
Pride that WITBD? had already broached the topic of armed insurrection.
125
Self-quotation (without explicit citation) of the WITBD? formulation
many people, but no people [massa liudei, a liudei net].
126
Armation of earlier arguments about the impossibility of applying the
elective principle under underground-conditions.
127
Armation of the call in WITBD? for a wide variety of organisations, from
very broad to very secretive, in explicit connection with an armation of
the famous denition of party-membership advocated by Lenin at the
Second Party-Congress.
128
Insistence that his call for workers to be enlisted into the local committees
was a reection of a long-held stand (as noted in this section).
Finally, besides these comments from 1905, Lenin insisted in his 1907
introduction to this collected writings that WITBD? did not exaggerate the
role of the revolutionary by trade. Rather, WITBD? insisted on a necessary
truth against those who just did not get it. Tis correct way of accomplishing
organisational tasks was now accepted by both Social-Democratic factions
(and, we might add, by all underground-parties).
129
122. Lih 2006, p. 473.
123. Lenin 19608g, p. 30.
124. See Section II and Lih 2006, pp. 4013.
125. Lenin 19608e, p. 142.
126. Lenin 19608e, p. 144.
127. Lenin 19608f, p. 167; 19608g, pp. 301.
128. Lenin 19608e, p. 444.
129. Lenin 19608i, pp. 1014.
Lenin and the praktiki
Te story told by a number of activist-writers, Lenin vs. the Bolsheviks, needs
to be replaced with a new story, Lenin and the praktiki, one that goes
something like this.
By 1902, owing to the collective and anonymous work of Social-Democratic
activists all over Russia, an underground of a new type had been created in
Russia one based on imaginative adaptation of Erfurtian principles to the
alien environment of tsarist Russia. Lenins WITBD? painted an idealised
portrait of these underground-institutions and inspired local activists with a
vision of the miracles of leadership they could perform, given the revolutionary
fervour of the workers. Te Bolshevik praktiki choose Lenin as their spokesman
because he was the migr leader who best understood their practical problems
and who had the most optimistic vision of what they could accomplish.
Both Lenin and the praktiki saw the events of 1905 as a giant conrmation
of their general outlook. Tey had wagered on the workers as leaders of the
Russian revolution, and (so it seemed to them) the wager was paying o
handsomely. Te interaction between leader and party in 1905 was complicated,
sometimes conicted but on the whole productive. Neither side monopolised
the initiative in this interaction. Sometimes, Lenin showed symptoms of
migr disconnection from Russian realities (as in his unrealistic demands for
immediate and massive worker-recruitment to party-committees in April
1905). Sometimes, the enthusiasm of leader and locals were mutually
reinforcing. Tere was nothing resembling a year-long battle of Lenin against
the praktiki.
At no time did Lenin repudiate the arguments of WITBD? or substantially
change the tone of his writings. On the contrary, he specically endorsed
WITBD? s arguments throughout the year. In November 1905, he armed
his Erfurtian credentials by calling for thorough-going party-democracy under
the conditions of the short-lived days of freedom.
A centrally dening feature of Bolshevism in post-revolutionary years
(190717) was the assertion that the 1905 Revolution had conrmed the
political and organisational outlook of old Iskra, that is, Iskra prior to the
Menshevik/Bolshevik split. Lenin regarded WITBD? as a succinct expression
of many aspects of that outlook. He attacked all those who would liquidate
the heritage of the prerevolutionary underground.
VIII. Lenin and Kautsky when he was a Marxist
In a last-minute addition to WITBD?, Lenin cited a passage from an article
that had just been published by Karl Kautsky. A huge amount of attention has
been given to this passage and its relation to Lenins outlook (as illustrated by
this symposium). A principal aim of my book is to shift the focus away from
Lenins ad hoc use of Kautsky to bolster a passing polemic, and toward the rle
Kautsky played in Lenins outlook for the entire rst decade of his revolutionary
career, 18941904.
Tree key-components of Lenins revolutionary activity have deep roots in
Kautskys writings:
the merger-formula (Social Democracy is the merger of socialism and the
worker-movement). As shown in Section V, Lenin saw his WITBD?
formulations as a clumsily-worded restatement of the merger-formula. In
fact, the merger-formula is central to all of Lenins programmatic writings
during this decade. For Lenin, the merger-formula is K. Kautskys expression
that reproduces the basic ideas of the Communist Manifesto.
130
Te primordial importance of political freedom. As Kautsky wrote in the
Erfurt Programme, basic political freedoms are light and air for the
proletariat; he who keeps the proletariat from the struggle to win these
freedoms and to extend them that person is one of the proletariats worst
enemies.
131
Kautsky explained why the proletariat needs political freedom,
namely, in order to organise and educate itself on a national scale. Te
urgent priority of political freedom is what made Russian Social Democracy
into a revolutionary party.
Te hegemony-scenario, in which the Russian workers lead the entire
Russian narod to overthrow the tsar. Te hegemony-scenario was part of
Lenins outlook from the very beginning, but it only became central to his
political activity in the decade 190414. Accordingly, Kautsky became a
sort of honorary Bolshevik during and after the 1905 Revolution.
132
Lenins debt to Kautsky on these three points the heart of his political
outlook is manifest and explicit. Of course, this does not mean Lenin got his
Marxist outlook from Kautsky. On the contrary, Lenin was exceptional in his
130. Lih 2006, p. 147.
131. Lih 2006, p. 89.
132. Lenin in 1909 writes: Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Kautsky Social Democrats who
often write for Russians and to that extent are in our party have been won over ideologically
[ideino], despite the fact that at the beginning of the split (1903) all their sympathies were with
the Mensheviks (Lenin 19608j, pp. 589).
comprehensive knowledge of the writings of the Masters.
133
Lenin read Marx
and Engels, he read Kautsky, and he concluded that Kautsky had got Marx
and Engels right, particularly on points with the greatest practical implications
for Russian Social Democracy.
My exploration of Kautskys rle runs right into the deeply-ingrained desire
of much of the Left to dig as deep a gulf as possible between Lenin and
Kautsky. In order to brush away the inconvenient fact that Lenin himself was
unaware of any such gulf, many writers of the Left resort to the idea that Lenin
had unconsciously or semi-consciously broken with Kautsky. In this, they
join anti-Lenin scholars who have their own reasons for digging the gulf deep
and wide.
John Molyneux states the case with admirable explicitness. Lenin rebelled
at rst instinctively and politically, and then philosophically against Kautskys
ideological position.
134
True, the citations of Kautsky as the marxist authority
are legion in Lenins works at this time and remain so throughout the pre-war
period.
135
Lenin was still not aware that he diverged in any fundamental way
from social democratic orthodoxy.
136
Te mechanistic, fatalistic and passive
nature of Kautskys Marxism escaped his attention. But in 1914 the scales fell
from Lenins eyes regarding Kautsky, Bebel and the rest and theory caught up
with a vengeance (see Imperialism Te Highest Stage of Capitalism, Imperialism
and the Split in Socialism, the Philosophical Notebooks, Marxism on the State,
Te State and Revolution and much else besides).
137
In my book, I pointed out the logical implications of this kind of formulation:
either Lenin misunderstood Kautsky, or he misunderstood himself, or both.
Tis observation evoked much criticism on the part of Harman, Le Blanc and
Molyneux (who, despite the fact that he was the nominal target of my remark,
responded in a comradely way).
138
133. Tis point is well documented in Nimtz 2009 (unfortunately Nimtz seems to be under
the impression that I argue that Lenins knowledge of Marx was mainly through Kautsky).
134. Molyneux 2006.
135. Molyneux 1978, pp. 567.
136. Molyneux 1978, pp. 52, 56.
137. Molyneux 2006.
138. Paul Le Blanc defends Molyneux against my criticism, and yet I rather doubt he actually
agrees with Molyneuxs view of the Kautsky-Lenin relationship. Instead, Le Blanc points out that
the Russian Bolshevik Party and the German SPD were quite dierent from each other an
observation that is very true, very obvious, and very irrelevant to the dispute about Lenins
relation to Kautskys theoretical framework. As Le Blanc himself has pointed out, Kautsky was
unhappy with many developments in the German Party (Le Blanc 2006, pp. 65, 259). When
Lenin later criticised the German Party for succumbing to opportunism, he was using a concept
that he shared with Kautsky, as he himself stated more than once after 1914 (see the Kautsky-as-
Marxist database discussed below).
My critics point to Lenins later break with Kautsky and argue more-or-less
the following: Lenin broke decisively with Kautsky in 1914 and this break led
to a root-and-branch rejection of Kautskyism in general. So why is Lih making
such heavy weather about the alleged logical diculties of the earlier situation,
when the paths of the two men began to diverge, even though Lenin was not
yet fully aware of the fact? Perhaps Lihs presentation of Lenin as an Erfurtian
has some merit, but his exclusive focus on this earlier period has caused him
to bend the stick too far. By overlooking the later break, he fundamentally
distorts the Lenin-Kautsky relationship.
My critics are justied in challenging me on this point, since I said nothing
in my book about the Lenin-Kautsky relationship after 1914. It remains to be
seen whether I can meet this challenge. In 1914, Lenins attitude toward
Kautsky as a person and toward his current writings changed drastically. But
this change still leaves open the most relevant question: did Lenin change his
attitude toward Kautskys prewar-writings and his prewar-outlook? According
to Tony Cli, Lenin had to admit that he had been wrong, terribly wrong, in
his approbation of Karl Kautsky not only about Kautsky as a person, but
also Kautskys brand of Marxism.
139
Did Lenin in fact ever admit he was
mistaken about Kautskys theoretical framework? Or did he arm the opposite
in the strongest possible terms?
In a letter written to Aleksandr Shliapnikov in the rst shock of what he
took to be Kautskys betrayal, Lenin wrote I hate and despise Kautsky now
more than anyone, with his vile, dirty, self-satised hypocrisy. Tis sentence
has often been quoted (not least by Trotsky in 1932).
140
But, surely, for those
interested in the intellectual connection between Lenin and Kautsky, more
informative is this sentence from another letter to Shliapnikov written a few
days later: Obtain without fail and reread (or ask to have it translated for you)
Road to Power by Kautsky [and see] what he writes there about the revolution
of our time! And now, how he acts the toady and disavows all that!
141
In order to answer the essential question on a rm documentary-basis, I
compiled a database containing all comments on Kautskys prewar-writings
made by Lenin after the outbreak of war in 1914. I would like to thank my
critics for provoking me into compiling this material, since I garnered enough
research-leads to last me a long time.
142
Here, I will only touch upon the
main points.
139. Cli 1976, p. 6.
140. Trotsky 1970, p. 607.
141. Lenin 19608n, pp. 16772.
142. A talk based on this research (Lih 2008) has been published by International Socialist
Te number of references by Lenin to Kautsky when he was a Marxist is
truly amazing. I have collected more than eighty comments. Examples come
from every year from 1914 to 1920 (after that, Lenins obsession subsides and
both positive and negative comments are infrequent). Most of these are passing
comments on the fact that Kautsky was once an admirable Marxist, but there
are also a number of substantive discussions.
143
Lenin cites Kautsky on a wide
range of issues and refers to a long list of Kautskys works (most coming from
the decade 18991909). In many cases, Lenin had recently re-read the work
in question. We must therefore conclude that the opinions expressed by Lenin
after 1914 about Kautsky when he was a Marxist are the outcome of
considerable thought, graced with the advantage of hindsight, and based on a
recent examination of relevant texts.
What picture of the prewar-Kautsky emerges from this material? I composed
the following portrait, based entirely on Lenins pronouncements after his
break with Kautsky in 1914:
Karl Kautsky was an outstanding Marxist who was the most
authoritative theoretician of the Second International and a teacher
to a generation of Marxists. His popularisation of Das Kapital has
canonical status. He was one of the rst to refute opportunism in
detail (although he hesitated somewhat before launching his attack)
and continued to ght energetically against it, asserting that a split
would be necessary if opportunism ever became the ocial tendency
of the German Party. A whole generation of Marxists learned a
dialectical approach to tactics from him. Only vis--vis the state do
we observe in him a tendency to restrict himself to general truths and
to evade a concrete discussion.
Kautsky was also a reliable guide to the revolutionary developments
of the early twentieth century. His magisterial work on the agrarian
question is still valid. He correctly diagnosed the national problem (as
opposed to Rosa Luxemburg). He insisted that Western Europe was
ripe for socialist revolution, and foretold the connection between war
and revolution.
Kautsky had a special relation to Russia and to Bolshevism. On the
one hand, he himself took great interest in Russian developments,
Review and is available online; the full database is available on the Historical Materialism website:
<www.historicalmaterialism.org>.
143. Te most important of these are contained in the 1914 article Dead Chauvinism and
Living Socialism, the 1917 discussion in State and Revolution, and the 1920 discussion in Left-
Wing Communism.
and endorsed the basic Bolshevik view of the 1905 Revolution. On
the other hand, the Russian revolutionary workers read him eagerly
and his writings had greater inuence in Russia than anywhere else.
Tis enthusiastic interest in the latest word of European Marxism is
one of the main reasons for Bolshevisms later revolutionary prowess.
Such is Lenins portrait of Kautsky when he was a Marxist, a portrait from
which he never diverged. Of course, this portrait needs to be extracted from
the voluminous abuse hurled at Kautskys current writings by Lenin after 1914.
Te reader of the English-language Collected Works is also easily misled by
Lenins polemic against Kautskyism. Kautskyism, however, translates
kautskianstvo, a term that is not an ism that is, it does not mean the system
of ideas associated with Kautsky (Lenin could have used the term kautskizm,
a perfectly possible neologism in Russian). Rather, kautskianstvo means acting
in a revolutionary crisis the way Kautsky is now acting more precisely, using
revolutionary verbiage to disguise a refusal to act in a revolutionary way.
Accordingly, Lenin applies the term to people whose views at the time were
not at all similar to those of Kautsky. Te term is applied, for example, to Lev
Trotsky and to Christian Rakovsky. Paradoxically, then, Trotsky in 1916 is a
kautskianets, but Kautsky in 1906 is not.
144
Chris Harman writes:
But, once the routine tempo of political life is shaken by enormous political,
social or economic crises, the paedagogical approach blurs important issues
relating to the application of abstract principles to reality. Such blurring explains
how various people in Russia who saw themselves as Kautskyites could adopt
diametrically opposed practical-political approaches in 19046 and 191214
and why the revolutionaries who had accepted the Kautskyite theoretical approach
found themselves compelled to break from it explicitly after August 1914.
145

Tis statement is triply misleading. If we use Kautskyites the way Lenin used
it after 1914, then no-one thought of themselves as a Kautskyite before 1914.
Harmans statement is equally misleading if we understand Kautskyite in the
way he evidently intends, namely, someone who shares Kautskys theoretical
approach. From 1905 on, Kautsky was, in fact, much closer to the Bolsheviks
144. Lenin 19608k, pp. 31112.
145. Harman also argues that Lenin and Kautsky applied the same general positions in
very dierent ways (we all know of cases in which people who claim to agree on a series of
texts interpret them dierently). I very much sympathise with this way of putting things and
I use it, for example, when talking about Bolsheviks and Mensheviks (see Section IV). But this
is a very dierent approach from claiming that Lenin rejected these general positions, which he
never did.
and to Trotsky than to the Mensheviks. Both factions were aware of this.
Finally, I doubt whether any Russian Social Democrat broke explicitly with
the Kautskyite theoretical approach after 1914, even when they did break
with Kautsky himself. Certainly, Lenin did not.
Another factor easily overlooked is Kautskys continued status as a Marxist
authority even after the Bolsheviks took power. Paradoxically, at the very same
time Kautsky was penning savage polemics against Soviet Russia, his prewar-
writings were held in greater esteem in that country than anywhere else in the
world. If Lenin actually realised that he fundamentally disagreed with the
prewar-Kautsky, then, clearly, it was his bounden duty to wean party-members
away from this profoundly erroneous world-view. After all, Kautskys writings
had been ideological mothers milk to the pre war Bolsheviks, as stressed by
Lenin himself.
Not only does Lenin fail to take up this task, but he actually continues to
invoke Kautsky when making a case to Bolshevik and other sympathetic
audiences. Lenin used Kautskys prewar-writings to bolster his argument in
remarks before the following audiences: Swiss workers in January 1917,
Bolshevik party-conference in April 1917, congress of peasants in November
1917, Executive Committee of Congress of Soviets in April 1918, Eighth
Party-Congress in March 1919, Adult-Education Congress in May 1919,
Lenins ftieth birthday celebration in 1920, and Second Comintern-Congress
in 1920.
146
Te extent of Kautskys continued authority in Bolshevik Russia is
demonstrated by the invaluable appendix provided by Moira Donald listing
Kautskys works published in Soviet Russia. Donald informs us that
when Lenin died in 1924 his library contained more works by Kautsky than by
any other author, Russian or foreign, apart from his own work. Surprisingly,
perhaps, of the eighty-nine titles listed, more were ocial Soviet publications
dating from 1918 onwards than were published abroad or in Russia before the
Bolshevik Revolution.
147
Renegade Kautsky this epithet was not chosen lightly. A renegade is
someone who renounces the truths he earlier supported. When Lenin called
Kautsky a renegade, he was, at the same time, arming his own continued
loyalty to these truths. Lenin almost never changed his mind about Kautskys
writings. What he likes the rst time he read it, he continued to like. What he
disliked the rst time he read it, he continued to dislike.
146. For references, see the Kautsky-as-Marxist database.
147. Donald 1993, p. 247.
Tere is therefore no escape-clause from the dilemma that presents itself
to those who wish to dig a gulf between Lenin and Kautsky. If Lenin
disagreed fundamentally with Kautskys brand of Marxism as expressed in his
voluminous prewar-writings, then either Lenin misunderstood Kautsky, or he
misunderstood himself, or both, throughout his revolutionary career. Tose who
wish to dig a gulf between Lenin and Kautsky must claim, and must back up
their claim, that either they understand Kautsky better than Lenin did, or they
understand Lenin better than Lenin understood himself.
Another tactic used by the gulf-diggers is to paint Kautsky as a mediocre old
duer who had nothing in common with revolutionaries who had red blood
in their veins. Chris Harman paints Kautsky as someone who wrote a few
elementary textbooks back in the 1890s and lived o them for the rest of his
career. Molyneux tells us that Kautsky saw ideas in total isolation from social
practice, that he saw the job of a socialist as representing the present state of
the working class, and so on and so forth.
148
On the basis of the Kautsky passage in WITBD?, for example, Molyneux
concludes that for Kautsky, science develops in complete isolation from social
life.
149
Harmans portrait of Kautsky as someone stuck in the 1890s is equally
far from the truth. As my database brings out, the writings by Kautsky that
Lenin found most impressive were those from 1899 to 1909, the reason being
precisely because of what Lenin believed to be Kautskys revolutionary response
to the new developments of the early twentieth century. Te eort to glorify
Lenin by rubbishing Kautsky can easily backre. At the Essen Conference on
Lenin in 2001, Slavoj iek could hardly nd words to express his contempt
for Kautsky and especially for his 1902 book Social Revolution. However,
Lenin himself had a well-documented and life-long admiration for Social
Revolution.
150
148. Molyneux 1978, pp. 469, 52, 54, 72, 75.
149. Molyneux 1978, pp. 469. As shown in Section V, this charge goes back to Plekhanov
in 1904 and was immediately denied by Bolshevik writers.
150. Immediately after Kautskys Social Revolution was published in 1902, Lenin arranged for
a Russian translation. In 1907, he devoted an article to praising Kautskys new introduction to a
second edition of Social Revolution, in which Kautsky summed up the lessons of the 1905
Revolution. In early 1917, he reread it and immediately quoted it approvingly in a lecture on the
Revolution of 1905: Te case of the Russian revolution of 1905 conrmed what K. Kautsky
wrote in 1902 in his book Social Revolution (by the way, he was then still a revolutionary Marxist,
and not a defender of social-patriots and opportunists, as at present) (Lenin 19608l, pp. 249
50). In State and Revolution, he criticised it for not taking up the question of the state, but also
stated that the author gives here a great deal that is extraordinarily valuable (Lenin 19608m,
p. 479). On several occasions in 1917, 1918 and 1919, Lenin cites Social Revolution approvingly
in speeches (see Kautsky-as-Marxist database).
Fortunately, there is a heartening movement to re-examine Kautsky undertaken
by writers such as Moira Donald, Paul Blackledge, Alan Shandro, Paul Le
Blanc, Jean Ducange, Daniel Gaido and myself.
151
I predict that those who are
compelled by their ideology to dig a deep and impassable gulf between Lenin
and Kautsky will soon nd themselves on the dust-heap of historiography.
IX. Trotsky as witness
An important topic brought up by my critics that warrants further examination
is Trotskys relation to Kautsky, which naturally varied over the years.
What Kautsky wrote in the earlier the better! period of his scientic and
literary activity . . . was and remains . . . a complete theoretical vindication of the
subsequent political tactics of the Bolsheviks[.]
152
In 1904, when Trotsky was a principal spokesman for the Mensheviks, he
published a violently anti-Lenin pamphlet entitled Our Political Tasks.
Although this pamphlet was published at about the same time as Plekhanovs
anti-Lenin articles discussed in an earlier section, the inuence of Plekhanovs
polemics on Trotskys argument, if any, is very slight. Toward the end of his
life, Trotsky made a comment on WITBD? that reproduced Plekhanovs
critique. We shall examine these two pieces of evidence in turn.
After taking a careful second look at the WITBD? references in Trotskys
Our Political Tasks, I nd that I have to correct what I said in my book on the
subject: Trotskys pamphlet connes its critique of WITBD? to a few passing
pot-shots at some of Lenins obiter dicta.
153
In reality, Trotsky gives some very
conditional praise to WITBD? as a serviceable statement of what needed to be
done back in 1902. Lenins problem, Trotsky tells us, is that he has refused
to move on, as shown by his deeply reactionary 1904 pamphlet on the party-
crisis, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back.
Our Political Tasks has a strangely split personality. Te rst half of the
pamphlet is a relatively calm polemic about what was to be done in 1904.
Trotsky consciously tried to build on the accomplishments of the earlier pre-
congress period and not simply reject it as mistaken. Te second half of
Trotskys pamphlet is a relatively unhinged polemic inspired by the recently
published One Step Forward (What indignation seizes you, when you read
151. For an excellent introduction to the current discussion on Kautsky, see Blackledge
2006.
152. Trotsky writing in 1922, as cited in Gaido 2003, p. 80.
153. Lih 2006, p. 28.
these monstrous, degenerate and demagogic lines! . . . Truly, one could not
approach the ideological heritage of the proletariat with more cynicism than
does Lenin!).
154
Te second half is also lled with venom toward a majority of
his own partys praktiki. Comments concerning WITBD? are mostly in the
relatively calm rst half.
To a surprising extent, Trotskys overall argument in this rst half of Our
Political Tasks can be summed up: what Pavel Akselrod says, goes. During the
period of the old Iskra (19003), Akselrod best understood the tasks of the
movement and set the tone that was followed by the other editors. In 1903,
Akselrod realised it was time to move on and managed to convey this to
the future Mensheviks (in face-to-face encounters, not published articles).
Unfortunately, Lenin stopped being a pupil of Akselrod, stayed true to the
outlook of the old Iskra, and carried along a majority of the Party in his
reactionary stubbornness. Tings will be set right once the minority is able to
reorient the Partys outlook along Akselrodian lines. (Among other things, this
narrative justies control of the ocial party-newspaper by a self-proclaimed
minority.)
Trotsky slots WITBD? into this narrative, as shown by the following passages
from Our Political Tasks:
Any kowtowing before the stikhinost of the worker movement, says the author of
What Is to Be Done?, thereby popularising Akselrod and Plekhanov, signals just
by itself the strengthening of the inuence of bourgeois ideology on the workers.
155

Lenins organisational plan if we keep in mind not the bureaucratic prose of his
Letter to a Comrade, but the article Where to Begin? or the pamphlet What Is to
Be Done? was not, of course, any big discovery, but it gave a successful answer
to the question: where to begin? what was to be done in order to bring together the
scattered elements of the future party organisation and therefore make possible
the setting of broad political tasks? . . . I repeat, the so-called organisational plan
embraced and Lenin himself understood this, as long as he was carrying out
progressive work not the party building itself, but only the scaolding.
156

When Lenin palmed o on Kautsky [his own] absurd presentation of the relations
between the stikhinyi and the purposive elements in the revolutionary movement
of the proletariat, he simply depicted the task of his period with crude strokes.
157

In this last comment, Trotsky is saying that Kautsky is not to blame for Lenins
theoretical crudities. Tis remark perhaps shows the inuence of Plekhanovs
154. Trotskii 1904, p. 75 (Trotsky is referring here to Lenins criticism of intellectuals, for
which, see below).
155. Trotskii 1904, p. 3; cf. Lih 2006, p. 708.
156. Trotskii 1904, p. 34.
157. Trotskii 1904, p. 20.
anti-WITBD? article that made a strong contrast between Kautskys orthodoxy
and Lenins heresy. Misled by the highly inaccurate English translation available
on the Marxists Internet Archive, Harman incorrectly states that Trotsky
criticised Kautsky in Our Political Tasks.
158
What Trotsky sees (inaccurately) as Lenins exaltation of the intelligentsia
in 1902 is, for him, a peccadillo compared to the degenerate demagoguery
of Lenins 1904 attack on the intelligentsia. Because of the prominent rle
he assigns to the intellectuals, Trotsky is infuriated by Lenins intelligent-
baiting. Trotsky rejects with sarcastic wrath Lenins 1904 suggestion that the
proletariat can give lessons in discipline to its intellectuals. On the contrary,
says Trotsky, the Russian proletariat goes through the school of political
life only under the leadership good or bad of the Social Democratic
intelligentsia.
159
In 1939, when writing his biography of Stalin, Trotsky returned to the
subject of WITBD?. Trotsky portrayed Stalin as a deeply provincial praktik
who defended WITBD? in 1905 even though the author of WITBD? himself
subsequently acknowledged the one-sidedness and therefore the incorrectness
of his theory.
160
Trotsky is here giving the standard Menshevik reading of
Lenins 1903 statement about bending the stick. Trotskys 1939 comment
therefore adds nothing new to the discussion.
Kautsky and permanent revolution
While sitting in prison in 1906, Trotsky produced a translation-cum-
commentary of Kautskys seminal article Driving Forces and Prospects of the
Russian Revolution.
161
Trotsky not only announces complete solidarity
between Kautskys argument and his own theory of permanent revolution, but
he even gives Kautsky priority:
If the reader will take the trouble to read through my article Results and Prospects,
he will recognise that I have absolutely no reason to repudiate any of the positions
contained in the [present] article by Kautsky that I have translated, since the train
of thought in both articles is completely the same. . . .
158. Te MIA-translation says: Lenin took up Kautskys absurd idea of the relationship
between the spontaneous and the conscious elements of the revolutionary movement of the
proletariat.
159. Lih 2006, p. 535. See Section III for further discussion of Mensheviks vs. Bolsheviks on
the rle of the intellectuals.
160. Trotskii 1996, p. 96.
161. Trotskys rendition was published in 1907. It was republished in the invaluable Russian-
language collection Trotskii 1993 (Permanentnaia revoliutsiia), put out by the Iskra Research-
Group based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A translation of this important and revealing
document can be found in Day and Gaido (eds.) 2009.
Kautsky refuses to call this political domination of the proletariat a dictatorship.
I usually avoid this word in the same way, but in any event, the social content of
proletarian domination is completely the same with me as with Kautsky. . . .
Kautsky, who very rarely speaks of dialectical materialism, but does an excellent
job of applying its method for the analysis of social relations. . . .
Meanwhile, this is not the rst time Kautsky has expressed these thoughts.
Here [in this article] he only brings them together in one place.
162
In his own Results and Prospects (1906), the link to Kautsky is hardly less clear,
since Trotsky gives page-long quotations from Kautsky on a number of
occasions. After citing Kautskys statement in 1904 about the very real
possibility of Russia taking the lead in international socialism, Trotsky notes
that the theorist of German Social Democracy wrote these words at a time
when for him it was still a question whether or not the revolution would break
out earlier in Russia or in the West.
163
In a personal letter to Kautsky in 1908,
Trotsky told him that Kautskys Driving Forces and Prospects is the best
theoretical statement of my own views, and gives me great political satisfaction.
164

In 1922, looking back, Trotsky rearmed this solidarity in a comment that is
close in spirit to Lenins attitude toward Kautsky when he was a Marxist:
At the time, Kautsky himself fully identied himself with my views.
165
Like
Mehring (now deceased), he adopted the viewpoint of permanent revolution.
Today, Kautsky has retrospectively joined the ranks of the Mensheviks. He wants
to reduce his past to the level of his present. But this falsication, which satised
the claims of an unclear theoretical conscience, is encountering obstacles in the
form of printed documents. What Kautsky wrote in the earlier the better!
period of his scientic and literary activity . . . was and remains a merciless
rejection of Menshevism and a complete theoretical vindication of the subsequent
political tactics of the Bolsheviks, whom thickheads and renegades, with Kautsky
today at their head, accuse of adventurism, demagogy, and Bakuninism.
166
Writers on the Left, such as Molyneux and Harman, also want to reduce
Kautskys present to the level of his [post-1914] present. Not only that, they
claim that Lenin and Trotsky agree with them on this issue. But they, too, are
encountering obstacles in the form of printed documents.
162. Trotskii 1993, pp. 1228, order of passages changed.
163. Trotskii 1993, p. 168. Actually, as Lenin was aware, Kautsky made similar comments in
1902 in the article Slavs and Revolution. Lenin gave long citations from this article on more
than one occasion in 1920.
164. Donald 1993, p. 91.
165. An interesting way of putting it. Many people, after reading Trotskys words at the time,
would say that Trotsky fully identied himself with Kautskys views.
166. Gaido 2003, p. 80.
In 19067, the connection with Kautsky was an asset. After the Bolshevik
Revolution, it became more and more of a liability. Accordingly, Trotskys
unambiguous statement of 1922 is an anomaly, and he more often pictures
Kautskys relation to the 1905 Revolution and to permanent revolution in
the most grudging way possible. In particular, Trotsky describes Kautsky as
nothing but a talented commentator who was briey and supercially
radicalised by the Russian Revolution of 1905 a thesis that is widespread
today on the Left. Trotsky clearly did not see things this way back in 19068,
but perhaps he changed his mind for better reasons than polemical
convenience.
Nevertheless, there is a stark contrast between Lenins and Trotskys
retrospective assessment of Kautsky precisely on this point. Tere seems to be
no trace in Lenins writings of the radicalised-by-1905 scenario. On the
contrary, Lenin pictures Kautsky as someone who responded with innovative
revolutionary insight to the new developments of the early-twentieth century
on the European and global level.
Trotskys personal relations with Kautsky before the War
In the years after 1905, Trotsky was much closer personally to Kautsky than
was Lenin. He corresponded regularly with Kautsky and, in fact, was one
of his principal sources of information about Russian aairs (to Lenins
annoyance). He was a regular contributor to Kautskys journal Die Neue Zeit,
as described by Isaac Deutscher:
[Trotsky] turned these friendships and contacts [among German Social
Democrats] to political advantage. In Neue Zeit, Kautskys monthly, and in
Vorwrts, the inuential Socialist daily, he often presented the case of Russian
socialism and explained, from his angle, its internal dissensions. . . . Trotskys
manner of writing was undogmatic, attractive, European; and he appealed to
German readers as no other Russian Socialist did. His German friends, on the
other hand, occasionally contributed to his Russian migr paper, helping to
boost it.
167
In March 1914, Trotskys journal Borba published the following statement:
On 16 October of this year Kautsky will celebrate his 60th birthday. Socialists
of all countries will honor on that day the most brilliant personality in the
International. Te day will certainly not pass unnoticed by Russian workers,
whose best friend Kautsky has been and remains.
168
167. Deutscher 1965, p. 182; see also Donald 1993, pp. 1689, Gaido 2003, p. 88.
168. 2 March 1914, as quoted in Donald 1993, p. 183.
Trotsky does not give any sense of this closeness in his post-revolutionary
comments. He pictures himself as quickly seeing through Kautskys supercial
good nature and observing him thereafter with contemptuous eyes and a
sardonic smile.
169
Trotskys retrospective comments seem less than candid.
Trotsky on Kautskys organic opportunism
As Trotsky points out, he was more intimately involved with the German
Party before the War than was Lenin. Partly for this reason, his post-1914
dissection of Kautsky contains a more searching critique of Kautskys function
within the German Party than we nd in Lenins writings. According to
Trotsky, Kautsky papered over the growing reformism of the German Party
with revolutionary generalities. As the Party split wide open, this operation
no longer worked. Te organic opportunism of Kautskys personality and
his situation meant that he was incapable of striking out on his own in a
revolutionary way, and so he gradually collapsed into a dithering, hand-
wringing mass of confusion. Tus he was only half a renegade after 1914.
While he did betray his principled revolutionary ideology, he remained true
to his practical opportunism.
170

Tis is not the place to evaluate this explanation of Kautskys actions,
an explanation that strikes me as insightful but one-sided and therefore
erroneous. For our purposes, two points need to be made. First, Lenin had no
theory of this kind. Trotskys observations cannot tell us anything about how
Lenin saw things.
Second, and more importantly, Trotskys explanation of why Kautsky fell
from grace gives no support whatsoever to the scales-fell-from-Lenins-eyes
scenario. Indeed, in all of Trotskys postrevolutionary polemics against Kautsky,
I see no indication that Trotsky has any problem with Kautskys revolutionary
generalities as such. On the contrary, he stressed that there was a time when
Kautsky was in the true sense of the word the teacher who instructed the
international proletarian vanguard and that Kautsky tirelessly defended the
revolutionary character of Marx and Engels.
171
Kautskys pronouncements
were indeed objectively hypocritical, since the German Party failed to live
up to them, but certainly, in Trotskys opinion, the Party should have lived
up to them.
169. Trotsky 1919; Trotsky 1938.
170. Trotsky 1919; Trotsky 1938.
171. Tese descriptions come from Trotsky 1919 and Trotsky 1938.
Lenins and Trotskys postrevolutionary attitude to Kautsky compared
On the most important point, Trotsky and Lenin agree: they both see Kautsky
as a renegade from his prewar principled revolutionary ideology. If told by
their present-day admirers that they had earlier failed to understand Kautskys
prewar-writings, Lenin and Trotsky would have snorted angrily: We understood
perfectly well what he was saying, and he did not live up to his own pronouncements.
Why do you defend this man by claiming against the evidence that he was
consistent?
Lenin and Trotsky both armed their solidarity with Kautskys prewar-
writings, but with a dierent range of ideas and with a dierent intensity.
Kautskys 1906 article Driving Forces and Prospects was seminal for both,
although they drew dierent conclusions from it.
172
On my present knowledge
of the evidence, Trotsky lacked Lenins intense involvement with either
the merger-formula or Kautskys later views on colonialism, national self-
determination and the oncoming age of wars and revolutions, as set forth in
Kautskys Road to Power (1909) and many other writings. Trotsky did not
match the intensity of Lenins involvement with Kautsky indeed, this was
hardly possible. Accordingly, Lenin gave much more of his post-1914 time
and energy to the issue of Kautsky when he was a Marxist.
Trotsky had a more fully worked-out theory of the personal and institutional
reasons for Kautskys fall from grace. He therefore added the proviso that
Kautsky was only half a renegade, since he was true to his earlier practical
opportunism. Lenin advanced no such theory.
Concluding remarks
Te aim of this essay has been to debunk a number of historical myths that
stand in the way of a full rejection of the worry-about-workers interpretation
of Lenins outlook. Lenins alleged rejection of workers whose outlook had
been perverted, inaccurate contrasts with alleged Menshevik optimism, the
story of de-Bolshevisation in 1905, the desire to dig as deep a gulf as possible
between Lenin and Kautsky all of these issues are barriers to a more
empirically-grounded appreciation of the historical Lenin.
My ght against the remnants of the textbook-interpretation, spread out over
so many pages, may have left a misleading impression of my relation to the
other participants in the present HM-symposium. With the exception, perhaps,
of Robert Mayer, all of us are agreed in rejecting the textbook-interpretation
172. Donald 1993, pp. 913.
in fundamental ways.
173
Many of my present critics have been ghting the
good ght for years. Troughout this essay, I have quoted only those passages
from my critics with which I disagree. Anyone who reads the other contributions
to the symposium will realise that they also contain some very generous
assessment of Lenin Rediscovered, for which I am very grateful. Indeed, this
essay is an expression of my gratitude, since I believe that all my critics share
with me a desire to get Lenin right.
Looking ahead, I stress that the textbook-interpretation of WITBD? has
served as a distorting mirror for much wider topics the nature of the split in
Russian Social Democracy, the rle of the konspiratsiia-underground as a
factor in Russian history, the real impact of Bolshevik ideology on the
revolution of 1917 and its outcome, to name but three. All of these issues oer
a wide scope for rethinking and re-examination to me and my fellow
historians.
I also believe that much of the dispute between myself and writers in the
activist-tradition is unnecessary. For various accidental reasons, these writers
have ended up committed to historical myths that stem originally from
academic historians of a very dierent political outlook. Tese myths can be
jettisoned without any damage to the political values of the activist-tradition.
Te irony is that these myths that are defended with such fervour by pro-
Lenin writers end up by tarnishing Lenins image. If Lenin shuttled back and
forth between one ideological extreme and another, if he established a faction
whose original hallmark was suspicion of workers in the Party, if he had a life-
long admiration for the writings of a passive, mechanical fatalist then Lenin
is just that harder to admire. Te activist-tradition has some great strengths in
its approach to Lenin, and it will only become stronger by rethinking these
superuous positions.
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Critical Toughts on the Politics of Immanence
Matteo Mandarini
Queen Mary University of London
m.mandarini@qmul.ac.uk
Abstract
Tis intervention aims to question the opposition between a politics of immanence and a
politics of transcendence through a critical assessment of some contemporary philosophical
approaches to politics and a reappraisal of Mario Trontis account of the autonomy of the
political. I shall argue that the contrast between immanence and transcendence is ultimately
politically disabling, as it fails to provide an adequate position from which to situate a political
thinking and practice.
Keywords
political philosophy, autonomy of the political, immanence, transcendence, operaismo, Tronti
Te aim of this brief intervention will be to question the theoretical operation
that opposes a politics of immanence to one of transcendence. Te easy
slippage so characteristic of contemporary philosophys approach to politics
from immanence to molecular to bottom-up (or vice versa), and their evil
twins used to condemn modernity itself, fails to grasp the specicity of the
delimited elds within which these notions are inscribed or, and more crucially
for our purposes, to be of any service to the political.
Te attempt to oppose a politics of immanence to one of transcendence is
seductive and, perhaps, has some utility in signalling certain forms of allegiance.
But I will claim that this is ultimately politically disabling, as it fails to provide
an adequate position from which to situate a political thinking and practice.
To put this another way, one can have immanence and transcendence, but in
neither case does one have a politics specic to either term. Tey are two concepts
that remain trapped in their inarticulate, voluble one-sidedness. To remain
caught within their double-pincer (or on one side or the other, which is the
same thing), leaves us with ethics in the guise of politics; and, while it has the
attraction of simplicity that characterises all Manichean dualities, it takes us
no further along the path to renewing political thinking.
176 M. Mandarini / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 175185
Teorising politics
What I intend to do in the course of this intervention is to outline a series of
positions that have been taken on the notion of the political and show the
inability of the immanence/transcendence conceptual pairing to shed light on
those positions or their consequences. Tat is, my discussion will demonstrate
the inability of this dichotomy to adequately trace the contours of what is
at stake.
In Peter Tomass typically combative article in a recent issue of Radical
Philosophy, Gramsci and the Political, he outlines three contemporary
positions on the the political. Te rst, which he traces back to the work of
Carl Schmitt, understands the political as foundational of politics since
politics, for Schmitt, is, in Tomass words, the conjunctural instantiation of
a structure of the political that necessarily and always exceeds it.
1
Tus the
political is autonomous both from all other realms such as the social, the
aesthetic, the ethical as well as from politics itself, which only exists as such
insofar as it participates in the political that founds it. For this current,
Tomas suggests that the political is to be understood in the Platonic sense of
an essence that founds politics. Tis is where Tomass account of Schmitt is at
its least convincing, since this purported Platonism sits uneasily with Schmitts
emphasis on the concrete, existential political decision over the exception as
the origin of the politico-juridical order. As Carlo Galli writes in his
monumental Genealogia della politica, for Schmitt order is not a foundation
but an abyss, it is precisely the concrete and contingent crisis, radical
disorder . . . and hence the practice that opens over that abyss is not a calculation
but a leap, the adoption of risk.
2
Unfortunately there is not the space here to develop Gallis account of
Schmitt. It should, however, be clear that although there are many things that
can be said about the viability of Schmitts theorisation of the political, Platos
transcendent theory of Ideas fails to adequately account for the opacity of this
concrete, contingent exception that lies at the core of Schmitts thinking.
Te second approach to the political usefully outlined by Tomas, and
which he associates with the names of Alain Badiou and Slavoj iek, in
contrast to the former emphasis on its autonomy, seeks the immanent conditions
of possibility for radical political engagement
3
in existing (social) antagonisms
to which a true politics would provide a resolution. Both of these currents are
then contrasted although this contrast is the least well-developed, being
1. Tomas 2009, p. 27.
2. Galli 1996, pp. 3356.
3. Tomas 2009, p. 27.
M. Mandarini / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 175185 177
relegated to a note with Antonio Negris position, in which politics is
said to be immanent-imminent, that is requiring more to be revealed than
reconstituted.
4
An improbable philosophical precursor to this latter position
is Heidegger; improbable but useful for indicating one particular consequence
of this position namely that politics is, for Negri, that which must be
uncovered, brought out from the stratied forms within which it is caught.
Although Marxist and Hegelian notions of de-mystication might be more
obvious and are clearly present it seems to me that the radical dichotomy
between meditative and calculative thinking, employed by the later
Heidegger, is actually more in tune with what Negri means here than the
dialectic of truth in falsity that characterises the dialectical tradition.
5
For
Negri is specically interested in a dierence in kind here.
Summarising Tomass account, then, we could say that there are three
contrasting positions: a iekian/Badiousian construction of a true politics
from the conditions of antagonism; a revealed politics, in Negri, which calls
rather upon a process of composition; and an originary one in Schmitt that is
decided upon on the basis of a conditioning nothingness. We can leave
Tomass paper aside now though it should be widely read for its fascinating
account of Gramsci as the thinker who demands that politics be put to work
at the heart of philosophy, rather than allowing what is, for Tomas, the
ultimately bourgeois notion of the political to overdetermine concrete
political practices.
Immanence and transcendence as political categories
It seems clear to me that to assign to these respective positions the labels
immanence or transcendence sheds no light on either the operation of the
political or on their respective political consequences.
Let us take, for example, Schmitts decision over the exception that originates
the political order. To what might the decision be said to be transcendent or
immanent? To order and disorder? What dierence would this make to such
a decision, given that the decision operates within contingency, within the
opacity of the concrete which it alone can order? But regardless, since the
decision lies at the origin of the distinction of order and disorder, it cannot be
understood by reference to the terms decided upon and hence whether it is
immanent or transcendent to them reveals little. Although Galli argues that
4. Tomas 2009, p. 35, n. 3.
5. On Heideggers use of this opposition in relation to Italian political thought of the 1970s,
see Mandarini 2009, especially pp. 434.
the notion of order becomes transcendental rather than transcendent in
the sense that order is the transcendental of every form of politics . . . in that its
absence demands its realisation . . . as a duty;
6
that transcendental notion
of order cannot be presupposed, since it is an entirely concrete transcendental,
only functioning as the eect of a specic concrete decision in the face of
the contingency that threatens it. Tat is not to say that transcendence for
Schmitt plays no role; it plays a role to the extent that political order is not
overdetermined by a divine plan, and hence, in genealogical terms, it is crucial.
7

But transcendence or immanence, for that matter has no specic political
function. It is, rather, the contingent, unconditioned, concrete nature of the
decision that marks the innovation of the Schmittian position: whether the
secularisation of theological categories of which Schmitt speaks is tantamount
to resolving the transcendent in the immanent, or whether the sovereign
decision indicates the spectral persistence of transcendence within immanence,
has a genealogical importance but no political consequences. Tat is, the terms
become redundant within political modernity, foreclosing their use for the
determination of specic political orientations or concepts. What of the true
politics that constructs or translates the social antagonism into an organised
force for social transformation? To what might its truth be transcendent? To
the states partition of the situation? Or is it the states partitioning of the
social body that transcends the unfolding of the true political sequence?
Truths irreducibility to the situation, its exteriority to it, is all that is required
for it to play the role asked of it.
Tere are surely other distinctions and commonalities that help shed
light on the politics that emerge from the respective positions. So, for example,
all three positions place some version of the notion of antagonism at the heart
of their accounts although, while iek, Badiou and Negri draw upon pre-
existing antagonisms that need to be organised, Schmitt demands that they be
decided upon. Is not the existential irrationality of the latter what makes this
position tendentially fascistic rather than any purported sympathy for the
transcendent?
8
Consider then that Badiou and Schmitt emphasise the act or
decision as the core political moment. Is it not this which draws out the
resonance of all these thinkers with a non-statist conception of politics, and
which goes some way towards explaining the contemporary revival of Schmitt
by the anti-state Left rather than the interestingly diverse theological
6. Galli 1996, pp. 3545.
7. Indeed, the whole of Schmitts Political Teology is a meditation on this question.
8. Te crucial place for the critique of Schmitt in these terms is to be found in Lwith 1995;
see also Tronti 2006 and Mandarini 2008.
resonances of their positions? Schmitt and Negri see the decision as the
moment or mechanism that forms a political collectivity, whereas iek and
Badiou see the decision as one that arms a specic political truth (or
sequence) that one avows and from which organisational consequences follow.
Tis marks the anti-sociological position common to all their conceptions of
politics. Where they stand on transcendence helps not a jot. On the other
hand, one may argue that Negris emphasis on revelation, in contrast to
Badious notion of true political sequences, demonstrates the formers
continuing debt to a modied-Marxist account of de-mystication, just as
it reveals Badious Blanquist tendencies. Te contrast of immanence and
transcendence as a conceptual pairing used to distinguish political positions
persists, but these terms have no substantive political pertinence.
Te autonomy of the political in Italy
Te lack of political purchase of these two categories can be brought out
further by a turn to the concept of the autonomy of the political as developed
by Negris erstwhile collaborator, Mario Tronti. Te reason for choosing this
specic topic is that the divergence between Negri and Tronti has, in the
course of the intervening decades, come to epitomise the conict between a
supposed politics of immanence and one of transcendence. It should be noted
that the distinction between a politics of immanence and one of transcendence
is in no way present in the original debate. Rather, the development of the
notion of an autonomy of the political was a response to a completely dierent
series of specically political problems, irreducible to the categories under
which it has since been relegated. With these concerns, we begin to see what a
properly revolutionary notion of the political might look like.
In his thinking of the 1970s, Tronti directly confronted the concept of the
political not only as the point of intervention and of active transformation of a
reality in which the driving-force of the economic as he saw it had ceased
to oer an adequate conceptualisation of social change. More importantly, he
recognised that the eld of the political had been left in the hands of capital
for too long. At a time when the new footing on which capitalist development
had been placed in the middle of the twentieth century (as exemplied by
Roosevelts New Deal and the so-called Fordist-Keynesian compromise) was
running out of steam, it was necessary for the Party to take up the reins of
social transformation. In other words, the political was to be the new terrain of
victory or defeat in conditions where the social struggle had been isolated
and was increasingly overdetermined by the capitalist restructuring that was
breaking the centrality of the factory as a site of political struggle. Class-
struggle was the terrain of the economic struggle, the space of spontaneity in
which the fate of politics was to serve the immediate struggle, but the shifting
terrain called upon the struggle to attain its properly political dimension. Tis
is expressed most forcefully in Trontis demand for the development of a
concept of political rationality that is completely autonomous from everything,
independent even of class-interests.
9
It was through a reappraisal of German Social Democracy, as well as of the
political signicance of Lenin, that Tronti began to develop a radically
innovative conception of politics. Te brilliance of German Social Democracy
was, he argued, that it was able to keep tactically united the two aspects of its
politics: a quotidian Menshevik tactic and an ideology of pure principle
10

which is to say, workers struggles within given conditions but in view of their
amelioration, and the revolutionary refusal of those conditions themselves.
In contrast, the genius of Lenin was to refuse to reduce the party to the role
of passive subject of even the highest level of worker-spontaneity i.e. a
spontaneity that was not in contrast to an internal moment of organisation
and direction. Tronti summarises Lenins innovation as follows:
To actively mediate in complete fashion the complex real whole of the concrete
situation, where workers struggle never operates alone in pushing in a single
direction, but is always interwoven with the political response of capital, with the
latest results of bourgeois science, and with the levels of organisation achieved by
the workers movement.
11
To irt with Heideggers terminology, we might say that the metaphysical
problematic of immediacy, of presence, and its concomitant rational deduction
of organisational forms, would result in politics being fatally contained. Or, as
Tronti states in the brief introduction appended to the publication of his
lecture and seminar discussion, Lautonomia del politico: we cannot go back
to the philosophy of the economy what Antonio Peduzzi calls the rst
philosophy of vulgar Marxism.
12
And so, to counteract the metaphysical
closure, it was necessary to leap to another plane. What was at stake, then, in
his reassertion of the role of the Party, was not a mere genuection before the
Great Lenin (an armation of some form of hyper-orthodoxy), but rather a
call to recognise the need for a new terrain of struggle.
9. Tronti, 1971, p. 277.
10. Tronti 1971, p. 279.
11. Tronti 1971, p. 281.
12. Tronti 1977, p. 6 and Peduzzi 2006, p. 14.
To continue with this interweaving of Marxist categories with those of the
critique of metaphysics, what Tronti was pointing to was the need to refuse
the notion of the metaphysics of the base, that is, the metaphysical deceit or
conceit that presents a univocal, spontaneous determination of the present
state or the state of the present, by the metaphysical. Instead, what Tronti saw
emerging in the 1970s was a lag, a being out of synch, between the economic
and the political; a lag that was functional to capital, that is, which enabled the
state to absorb and temper socio-economic conicts.
13
It was precisely because
the form they took on the political plane in this period was retarded that is,
out-of-synch with those struggles that the system was able to absorb them.
Te eectiveness of this operation by capital was evident and it explained the
persistence of capitalism, as becomes clear when confronted with Trontis
account of Marxs reading of the manner in which capitalism was to be
brought to an end:
If we bring it about that the two-class system, from a purely economic struggle is
raised to the level of confrontation, i.e. becomes a political fact, then the system
has reached the conclusion of its cycle; and in this way one is able to move
beyond it. In other words, it was precisely the . . . political unfolding of the class-
contradiction, the process of moving from the relations of production to
power . . . that was to lead the capitalist system to its death.
14
Te lag, then, that emerges between the planes (and it is not always the political
that lags behind as Tronti indicates when discussing the New Deal),
15
the
discontinuity produced, is precisely functional to the continuity of the system
as a whole.
16
Te eect of it is that, however advanced the class-struggle is, to
the extent that it sees the shift to the plane of politics as a deduction following
from the correct organisation of socio-economic contradictions, its struggle
remains discontinuous with the political that is, it remains isolated, caught up
within the objective, unable to attain political subjectivity.
17
It is not the
failure of immanence to attain the correctly vertical, transcendent, standpoint
of intervention (for example, taking state-power); neither is it a case for the
transcendent level of the state to be dissolved in immanence (for instance, via
an exodus that leaves the transcendent to rotate idly in the void). It is simply
that to treat the non-homologous as homologous, in this case, means condemning
13. Tronti 1977, pp. 1013.
14. Tronti 1977, pp. 1213.
15. Tronti 1977, p. 13.
16. Tronti 1977, p. 12.
17. Tis what Tronti calls a dietto soggettivo, that is, a deciency of subjectivity, Tronti
1977, p. 14.
them to inecacy by blocking the dierent articulations they are required to
take on the dierent planes of their intervention. In such cases, the non-
coincidence becomes dangerously structural in that, paradoxically, it is
precisely this non-coincidence that prevents any hope in the automaticity or
spontaneity of crisis.
18
Tis assessment of the structuring relations opens the route to the political
being understood as that theoretical practice that sets out from the proper
recognition of this non-coincidence and of politics as the practice of negotiation,
manipulation, and intervention opened up by that recognition. Moreover, it is
clear that the space of the political itself is produced through shifting relations
between politics and the socio-economic.
19
What becomes crucial, however, is
the careful work of assessment of the levels of autonomy reached by the various
strata of social organisation and their shifting articulations; as well as the
evaluation of the points of fragility of the class-enemy and of the dispersal and
disposition of forces that is opened up by this shift of terrain; an opening not
only for the autonomy of the political but something usually forgotten in the
bitter disputes between the dierent strands of operaismo also for the
autonomy of class-struggles on the terrain of production, of social struggles on
those of the social, and so on.
In the nal article in the 1971 edition of Operai e capitale, Tronti writes:
He who delays loses. And take care: it is not a case of hurrying to prepare the
response to the bosses move . . .; one must rst foresee their move, in some cases
suggest it, in every case anticipate it with the forms of ones own organisation so
as to render it not only politically unproductive for capitalist ends but productive
of workers aims.
20
Tis denition of revolutionary political action rearms the political as against
any attempt to isolate the political within the state or, for that matter, to
reduce revolutionary political struggle to direct confrontation within the
immediate process of production. Te political response can vary: it can
sometimes involve holding the planes apart and articulating struggles upon a
specic terrain on which ones own forces have greater possibility of winning;
at others, it is the confusion of terrains that becomes essential so as to combine
18. Tronti 1977, p. 14.
19. As Tronti writes, it is a case of reconstructing a process . . . of distinction and separation
that instead of coming to an end, deepens its historical rationale . . . It is a process that, on the one
hand, capital grants, and on the other hand, undergoes (Tronti 1977, p. 16). To that extent,
I think that perhaps surprisingly Trontis position is not so dierent from the one that
Tomas tries to extract from Gramsci.
20. Tronti 1971, p. 307.
forces or to play-o a divided class-enemy. It may be the case that one can
only speak of a revolutionary situation that is, a total social transformation
when autonomy, non-coincidence is eroded, since, in revolution, struggle
expands beyond a specic plane to aect all areas of the social order. But it is
clear that one cannot always hope to advance through a mere refusal of non-
coincidence. Te decision on specic practices can only follow from a careful
assessment of these various elements.
Tinking politics beyond immanence and transcendence
What use, then, do the concepts of immanence and transcendence have as
political categories? Immanence and transcendence become entirely redundant
when assessing the political even if we allow, which I would not that class-
struggle dictating political struggle captures what we understand by a politics of
immanence, whereas by a politics of transcendence we understand Trontis
idea of the autonomy of the political struggle from that of the class. Tat is to say,
there is a rigidity (and one-sidedness) to the notion of immanence and
transcendence that fails to grasp that politics is always uid, contingent, and
must be responsive in its forms and interventions to the concrete conditions
of its operation.
To that operation which deploys these categories for the purposes of
thinking politics, we might respond with Marxs words from his Moralising
Criticism and Critical Morality. He writes there that:
. . . where it succeeds in seeing dierences, it does not see unity, and that where it
sees unity, it does not see dierences. If it propounds dierentiated determinants,
they at once become fossilised in its hands, and it can see only the most
reprehensible sophistry when these wooden concepts are knocked together so
that they take re.
21
So, while it is perfectly possible indeed justied to speak of the immanent
emergence of transcendence, I am not sure it gives us any more than is said by
the materialist genealogy of the ideal. Ultimately, however, I am not sure what
either of these gives us in terms of the political.
How, then, are we to think of revolutionary politics beyond immanence
and transcendence? I think we can extract a set of conditions from what has
been said that might help towards such a rethinking.
21. Marx 1976, p. 320.
1) Political organisation cannot slavishly follow struggles within the
immediate process of production let alone as generalised socially, and
vice versa.
Such struggles take their character from the changes in capitalist
restructuring and are, therefore, inevitably behind the curve they are
politically retarded.
2) Workers struggles have always been formidable information conduits
for capital. It is not always clear they have been for the Left who tend
to use them (at best) as a material force to be organised.
22
To that extent,
bourgeois science is often ahead of thinking on the Left .
23
3) Te weakening (if not disappearance) of struggle from the advanced
sectors of the economy heightens ignorance regarding the status of the
system for both capital and labour.
24
To adapt a well-known saying of Kants, we can summarise these conditions
in the following formula: Without struggle politics is empty. Without politics
struggle is blind. But more crucially, beyond immanence and transcendence,
the specicity of the political is linked to the emergence of a tendency towards
a separation of planes upon which it is then asked to operate. It is to this
present condition, not to a disguised ethics of immanence or transcendence,
that politics must respond.
References
Galli, Carlo 1996, Geneaologia della politica, Bologna: Il Mulino.
Lwith, Karl 1995, Te Occasional Decisionism of Carl Schmitt, in Martin Heidegger and
European Nihilism, edited by R. Wolin, New York: Columbia University Press.
Marx, Karl 1976, Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality, in Marx Engels Collected Works,
Volume 6, London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Mandarini, Matteo 2008, Not Fear but Hope in the Apocalypse, Ephemera, 8, 2: 17681.
22. As Tronti writes in 1971: Workers struggles are an irreplaceable instrument of capitalist
self-consciousness; without them, capital cannot see, cannot recognise its adversary, and so fails
to know itself (Tronti 1971, pp. 2845).
23. For this reason, the disengagement from the workers inquiry method of co-research
[conricerca] by later operaismo is deeply troubling, as it fails to advance an adequate revolutionary
epistemology.
24. It would be interesting to test this hypothesis to nd out to what extent the current crisis
can be linked to the lack of information being passed on to capital regarding the material
conditions of the exploited in the wake of the dismembering of organised worker-resistance.
2009, Beyond Nihilism: Notes Towards a Critique of Left-Heideggerianism in Italian
Philosophy of the 1970s, in Te Italian Dierence, edited by Lorenzo Chiesa and Alberto
Toscano, Melbourne: re.press.
Peduzzi, Antonio 2006, Lo Spirito della politica e il suo destino, Rome: Ediesse.
Tomas, Peter 2009, Gramsci and the Political, Radical Philosophy, 153, Jan/Feb: 2736.
Tronti, Mario 1971, Poscritto di Problemi, in Operai e Capitale, Turin: Einaudi.
1977, Sullautonomia del politico, Milan: Feltrinelli.
2006, Politica e destino, in Politica e destino, Rome: Sossella Editore.
Workerism and Politics
Mario Tronti
Centro per la Riforma dello Stato
tronti@libero.it
Abstract
Tis is the text of Mario Trontis lecture at the 2006 Historical Materialism conference. It provides
a brief, evocative synopsis of Trontis understanding of the historical experience and contemporary
relevance of operaismo, a theoretical and practical attempt, embodied in journals such as Quaderni
Rossi and Classe Operaia, to renew Marxist thought and politics in the Italy of the 1960s through
a renewed attention to class-antagonism and the changing composition of labour.
Keywords
capitalism, communism, factory, Italy, labour-power, workerism
First, what is workerism? It is an experience that tried to unite the thinking
and practice of politics, in a determinate domain, that of the modern factory.
It looked for a strong subject, the working class, capable of contesting and
putting into crisis the mechanism of capitalist production.
I underscore its character as an experience. Young intellectual forces were
involved, encountering the new levies of workers, introduced especially into
the large factories of the Taylorist and Fordist phase of capitalist industry.
What had taken place in the thirties in the US was happening in the sixties
in Italy.
Te historical context for workerism was precisely that of the sixties of the
twentieth century. In Italy, that period witnessed the take-o of an advanced
capitalism, the passage from an agricultural-industrial society to an industrial-
agricultural one, with the migratory displacement of labour-power from the
peasant South to the industrial North.
Tey called it neo-capitalism. Mass-production and mass-consumption,
social modernisation with the welfare-state, political modenisation with
centre-left governments. Christian Democrats plus Socialists, a mutation in
customs, mentality, behaviour. We were moving towards 68, which in Italy
was to be 689, youth protest plus the hot autumn of the workers, which
M. Tronti / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 186189 187
saw a great shift in the balance of power between workers and capital, with
wages impacting directly on prots.
And this could happen also because of workerism, with its stress on the
centrality of the factory and of the working class in the general social relation.
Workerism was, therefore, a political experience, which mattered historically,
that is in a determinate historical situation.
It was a question of giving a new theoretical and practical form to the
fundamental contradiction. Te latter was identied from within the capital-
relation, namely in the relations of production, that is in what we called the
scientic concept of the factory. Here, the (collective) worker, if he fought, if
he organised his struggles, potentially held a kind of sovereignty over
production. He was, or better, he could become a revolutionary subject.
Te central gure was the worker on the shop-oor, the assembly-line
worker, within the Fordist organisation of the productive process and within
the Taylorist organisation of the labour-process. Here, the alienation of the
worker reached its peak. Not only did the worker not love his work. He hated
it. Te refusal of work became a lethal weapon against capital. By making itself
autonomous, labour-power, as an internal part of capital, variable capital as
distinct from constant capital, evaded its function as productive labour,
planting its threat in the heart of the capitalist relation of production.
Te struggle against work sums up the meaning of the workerist heresy.
Yes, workerism is a heresy of the workers movement. It should be rigorously
conceived as internal to the great history of the workers movement, not
outside, never outside. One of the many experiences, one of the many attempts,
one of the many headlong rushes, one of the many generous revolts and one
of the many glorious defeats.
Following the example of Marx, who studied the laws of movement of
capitalist society, we went to study the laws of movement of workers labour.
Workers struggles have always pushed forward capitalist development, forcing
capital to innovation, technological leaps, social transformation. Te working
class is not the general class. Tat is how the parties of the Second and Tird
International wanted to represent it. Marxs phrase was right: the proletariat,
emancipating itself, will emancipate the whole of humanity. Tis process has
already happened, limited to the West alone.
If emancipation is progress, modernisation, auence, democracy, all of this
is there, but in the service of a great conservative revolution, of a process of
stabilisation of the capitalist system, which today, following its original
vocation, takes on the dimensions of world-space; a world-order of domination
that comes down from the heights of Empire, but also rises from below,
incorporated by the bourgeois mentality of the majority.
188 M. Tronti / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 186189
Today, democratic political systems provide the tribune for free consent to
voluntary servitude.
Workerism, the claim of the centrality of workers [centralit operaia] in the
class-struggle, came up against the problem of the political.
In the middle, between workers and capital, I found politics: in the form of
institutions, the state, in the form of organisations, the party, in the form of
actions, tactics and strategy.
Modern capitalism would never have been born without modern politics.
Hobbes and Locke come before Smith and Ricardo.
Tere would have been no primitive accumulation of capital without the
centralisation of the state under absolute monarchies. Te history of England
teaches us this. Te rst English revolution, the ugly one of Cromwells
dictatorship, and then the beautiful, glorious one of the Bill of Rights,
correspond to the two phases dictated by Machiavelli: the conquest of power
and its administration are two dierent things. For the rst, you need force;
for the second, consensus. Free and competitive capitalism needed the liberal
state, the capitalism of welfare needed the democratic state. Ten, after the
(provisional) solution of totalitarianism, fascist and Nazi, the synthesis of
liberal democracy stabilised the domination of capitalist production.
And, now, we are in the phase in which the model is exported on a global
scale. Not everything works according to capitals plans. Today, what is
most interesting politically is the world. Te great transformation, to use
Polanyis expression, concerns the shift of the global centre of gravity from
West to East.
Internally, our European countries oer little of interest. It is dicult to
feel a passion for politics with the likes of Blair or Prodi.
But capitalism is an order and today, as Marx predicted, a world-order,
continually revolutionising itself. And this is the interesting point.
Look at the revolution it has brought to the world of work. To respond to
the threat posed by the centrality of workers, it decided to destroy the centrality
of industry and it abandoned, or revolutionised, the industrial society which
had been the reason and the instrument for its birth and its development.
When the assembly-island replaces the assembly-line in the great automated
factory and we enter the post-Fordist phase, all other work changes with it, in
the classical passage from the factory to society.
Tis is the question of the day: Does the working class still exist? Te
working class as the central subject of the critique of capitalism. Not a
sociological object but a political subject. And the transformations of work,
and of the gure of the worker, from industry to service, from employment
[lavoro dipendente] to self-employment [lavoro autonomo], from security to
M. Tronti / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 186189 189
precarity, from the refusal of work to the lack of it, what does all this mean
politically? It is this that we need to discuss.
Workerism was the contrary of spontaneism. And the opposite of reformism.
Closer, then, to the initial communist movement than to the classical or
contemporary social democracies. Creatively, it renewed the link between
Marx and Lenin.
I ask myself if, in the changed conditions of contemporary work
fragmentation, dispersion, individualisation, precarisation and of the gures
assumed by the worker we can once again, here and now, articulate the analysis
of capitalism with the organisation of alternative forces. And I do not have an
answer.
What I do know with certainty is that, without organisation, there will be
no real, serious struggle, capable of victories. Tere is no social conict capable
of defeating the class-adversary without a political force.
Tis is what we have learned from the past.
If the new movements do not pick up the legacy of the great history of the
workers movement, to take it forward in new forms, they have no future.
Look. Capitalists are afraid of the history of workers, not of the politics of
the Left. Te rst they cast down among the demons of hell, the second they
welcomed into the halls of government.
And we need to make the capitalists afraid. It is time that another spectre
start to haunt not just Europe, but the world. Te resurrected spirit of
communism.
!"
Review Articles
Oktyabrskaya Revolyutsiya i Fabzavkomy [Te October Revolution and Factory-Committees],
edited by Steve A. Smith, London: Kraus International Publications, 1983
1
Oktyabrskaya Revolyutsia i Fabzavkomy, Volume 3, Second Edition, edited by Yoshimasa
Tsuji, Tokyo: Waseda University, 2001
2
Oktyabrskaya Revolyutsiya i Fabzavkomy: Materialy po istorii fabrichno-zavodskikh komitetov,
Volume 4, edited by Yoshimasa Tsuji, St Petersburg: St Petersburg University Press, 2002
3

Abstract
Te article re-examines the key debates concerning the relationship between the Russian factory-
committee movement and the Bolshevik Party and Soviet state in 191718. It does so with
reference to a four-volume collection of documents in Russian on the history of the factory-
committees in 1917/18 which rst began to be published in 1927 and completed publication in
2002. Rather than the traditional totalitarian view of a movement which was cynically
manipulated and dominated by an authoritarian party, what emerges is a much more complex
and dynamic relationship. Te article in particular argues that the so-called bureaucratisation of
the factory-committee movement after the October Revolution emerged out of the practical
dilemmas faced by the committees in the economic chaos of 1917/18 and the factory-committee
leaders own desires to promote a rational, planned alternative to that chaos.
Keywords
Russian Revolution, factory-committees, workers control, historiography of the Russian Revo-
lution, bureaucratisation, Bolshevik Party
1. A republication with notes and introduction of Volumes 1 and 2 of Oktyabrskaya revolyutsii
i fabzavkomy, edited by P.N. Amosov, Moscow: VTsSPS, 1927. In the text below referred to as
either Volumes 1 or 2.
2. A republication with introduction of the rst edition of Oktyabrskaya Revolyutsiya I
fabzavkomy, Volume 3, edited by P.N. Amosov et al., Moscow: VTsSPS, 1929. In the text below
referred to as Volume 3.
3. In the text below referred to as Volume 4.
192 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 191207
Te Factory-Committees and the Struggle over the Fate of the 1917 Russian
Revolution
4
Nationalisation of the banks, state-intervention in industry, credit-crisis, workers
occupation of factories these have been headline-phrases of the current economic crisis.
While attempts to draw parallels with Russia in 1917 may be overblown, it is interesting to
note from recent events how concepts which are normally associated with revolutionary-
left ideology can rapidly be adopted as part of the common language in an economic crisis
and, in some cases, such as nationalisation of the banks, can even be advocated by
mainstream-politicians. Tere are several lessons that can be derived from this recent
experience which do have parallels with the experience of Russia in 1917. For political
activists and historians, one lesson is that economic and social crises create situations where
radical shifts in thinking can happen almost overnight, and the unthinkable becomes
mainstream. In the case of the recent factory-occupations (Visteon, Vestas) and the
establishment of factory-committees and factory-seizures in 1917, another lesson is that
people at a grassroots-level are often capable of resorting to radical action and developing
new types of politics outanking the conventional thinking of political and labour-leaders,
especially when their jobs and livelihoods are at stake. For historians of the Russian
Revolution of 1917, recent events give us some insight into how the social and economic
crisis of 1917 provided the context in which the radical-socialist ideas of the Bolshevik
Party nationalisation of the banks, industry and workers control and soviet-power very
quickly became acceptable as logical solutions to the problems of ordinary people.
Tis latter point, concerning the relationship between the radicalisation of workers and
the Bolshevik Party and its ideology, has been at the centre of the debate among historians
of the Russian labour-movement in the 1917 Revolution since the 1920s. As we shall see,
the debates about the factory-committee movement, in particular, revolve around three
elements the nature of the relationship between the Bolshevik Party and the factory-
committees, the motivations behind the development of the committees and the nature
and causes of bureaucratic degeneration of the labour-movement after the October
Revolution.
Insights into all these debates and parallel examples of the lessons mentioned at the
beginning can be found in the series of documents covering the development of the Russian
factory-committee movement in 1917/18, which are under review here. Te project to
publish these documents was started in the 1920s. Te rst three volumes were originally
compiled by former leading members of the Central Council of Factory-Committees of
Petrograd under the auspices of the Commission for the Study of the History of the Trade-
Union Movement in the USSR. Volumes 1 and 2 were originally published in 1927 on the
tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. Teir re-publication in Russian in 1983 by
Kraus International Publications was undertaken under the auspices of the UK Study
Group on the Russian Revolution. Te editor, S.A. Smith, one of the leading Western
historians of the Russian workers movement, provides extensive notes and an initial
introduction to the volumes. Contained in them are the proceedings of the rst four
4. I am grateful to the anonymous Historical Materialism reviewers of my original review-
article for their comments and suggestions. However, responsibility for the views and comments
made here is entirely mine.
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 191207 193
conferences of the Petrograd Factory-Committees from May to October 1917, and the rst
All-Union Conference of Factory-Committees held on 1722 October, just before the
Bolshevik Revolution.
Volume 3 was originally published in 1929 and was republished by Waseda University
Press in Japan in 2001 with an introduction by Dr. Yoshimasa Tsuji, also a leading historian
of the subject and a regular participant in the above Study Group. Tis volume consists of
the proceedings of the fth Conference of Petrograd Factory-Committees held on 1516
November 1917. In the conference-reports in all three volumes, not all speeches are
published in full. Te original compilers blame technical reasons (Volume 1, p. 78), e.g.
failure by speakers to provide full summaries of their speeches. S.A. Smith, the later editor
of Volumes 1 and 2, suggests that there has been some tampering with the speeches,
especially those of non-Bolshevik activists. However, he suggests that this is far too
inconsistent to suggest wilful political censorship (Volume 1, p. xxviii). Both Bolshevik and
non-Bolshevik speeches are truncated and some non-Bolshevik speeches are reported at
length. In addition, these volumes include a wide range of materials related to the
development of the factory-committees in 1917, including resolutions and extracts from
the protocols of other conferences, such as those of representatives of the factories of the
artillery-department (Volume 1, pp. 2831, Volume 2, pp. 97103), various guidelines on
how factory-committees were to be organised, reports of meetings at individual factories,
instructions by the Central Council of Factory-Committees (CCFC) and, especially in
Volume 3, guidelines from various institutions, trade-unions, the CCFC and the new
Soviet government to factory-committees on how to go about the execution of workers
control after the Bolshevik Revolution. Te sources for most of these extra materials are
contemporary reports in newspapers and journals, especially Novyi Put, the journal of the
CCFC. According to the original 1920s compilers, the most important source of materials
was the former archive of the CCFC, held at the Communist Academy after the CCFC was
abolished.
Te original CCFC-compilers argued that the rather ad hoc nature of much of the
collection is largely a consequence of the desire to publish what was available in that archive
rather being due to systematic censorship. However, as Diane Koenker, another leading
historian of the Russian labour-movement, has pointed out, reports submitted from below
and selected for publication were most likely to be the ones which best reected the values
and expected behaviour of the time. Tey would be the reports which conformed to
Bolshevik assumptions about the nature of the working class and its activists.
5
One can see
that the materials in these volumes do reect the productivist ideology of Soviet socialism.
In the reported debates, except for concerns about food-distribution, there is little or no
reection of the ordinary life [byt] and concerns of workers beyond the organisation of
work, labour-organisations and the production-process. In addition, apart from reference
to pay-levels of unskilled workers, there is also little reection of other divisions and
conicts in the workplace whether generational or gender-based or problems such
as alcoholism, housing, health etc. While it is true to say that the Revolution- and Civil-
War cohort of 191721 was likely to be dierent in its preoccupations from those
before or after,
6
it seems unlikely that, during the chaos of revolution, these wider issues of
5. Koenker 1995, p. 1440.
6. Koenker 2001, p. 809.
concern would be entirely submerged by a commitment to politics, ideology and the
work-process.
Volume 4 of the materials is rather dierent from the other volumes in that it is not part
of the original series compiled by the CCFC-leaders in the 1920s, but has been edited by
Dr Tsuji and published by St. Petersburg University with the support of Waseda University
in 2002. In addition, unlike the other volumes, it is based on the full stenographic report
of the sixth Petrograd Conference of Factory-Committees held between 22 and 27 January
1918. In this case, we have a much more complete record of the proceedings than with the
other conferences. Taken together with the other volumes, we now have a series of
documents which chart the development and fate of the factory-committees either side of
the October Revolution and give us insights into the development of the revolution
from below.
Although, as indicated above, the volumes were re-published in the West from 1983
onwards, the materials in Volumes 1 and 2 consisting of factory-committee conference and
congress-protocols, had been available and used earlier by Western and Soviet historians.
7

In researching for his dissertation on the factory-committees in Russia in 1917, Paul Avrich,
the historian of Russian anarchism, made use of some of the materials.
8
His work formed
an important part of the libertarian or anarchist interpretation of the labour-movement in
the Russian Revolution. In his dissertation and in further articles,
9
Paul Avrich argued that
the factory-committee movement had been motivated by a vision of building a workers
self-managed society from the bottom up based on the factory-committees. Tis view had
been articulated by Russian anarcho-syndicalist activists within the factory-committee
movement itself in 1917/18 such as Gregori Maximov. In his work, Paul Avrich had, in
some ways, taken Maximovs and other such views as the authentic independent voice of
the factory-committee movement. Paul Avrichs interpretation was taken up in the early
1970s by Maurice Brinton who further laid out the libertarian perspective on the Russian
Revolution.
10
For Brinton, the anarcho-syndicalist dream of the factory-committees was
ultimately undermined by the centralism of Lenin and the Bolshevik Party. Te Bolsheviks
took over the leadership of the factory-committees in 1917 in part by deliberately allowing
the Bolshevik policy on workers control to be confused with the anarchist slogan on
workers control during most of 1917 in order to gain support. For Lenin and the Bolsheviks,
however, the factory-committees were merely useful vehicles for smashing the old rgime
and for coming to power. Once in power, the centralist, statist nature of Bolshevik ideology
revealed itself. Te new Soviet government argued that the committees were contributing
to the economic chaos and sought to bring them and the wider workers movement under
state-control. Firstly, they brought the committees under the control of the trade-unions at
the beginning of 1918 and then they tied the unions themselves to the state. In 1918,
therefore, the workers movement was eectively bureaucratised as part of the new state-
apparatus, expected to enforce management and state-policies rather than represent
workers interests. Te origins of bureaucratisation and dictatorship lay in Bolshevik politics
7. Kaplan 1968.
8. Avrich 1961.
9. Avrich 1963a, Avrich 1963b.
10. Brinton 1970.
and ideology a view shared at the time by some of the earliest critics of the way the
Russian Revolution was developing such as Victor Serge and Gregori Maximov.
11
While coming from a radical perspective, the conclusions of this libertarian critique
ultimately coincided with the conclusions of the dominant Western Cold-War view of the
Revolution. Te latter has sometimes been called the liberal perspective, but it ts well
within the overall paradigm of the totalitarian view which dominated mainstream Western
interpretations of the Soviet Union. Like the libertarians, the totalitarian view was that the
origins of the degeneration of the Revolution lay with the Bolshevik Party and its assertion
of dictatorship and control from above very soon after October 1917. Te key dierence
between them was that the totalitarian perspective tended to concentrate on the leadership
of the revolution. Workers were a rather undierentiated mass at best, manipulated by
political leaders rather than having their own independent aspirations. Te Bolshevik Party
had largely seized power in an unrepresentative left-wing coup, or, at best, on the backs of
a mass-support which had been duped into thinking that they stood for further
democratisation. Possibly the best, most recent example of this view was put forward by
Richard Pipes. For him, the Bolshevik Revolution was a coup by a small minority without
widespread social support.
12
Given the Cold-War context for much of this writing, it is
perhaps not surprising that the mainstream totalitarian Western view concluded that the
Soviet system, right from the beginning, was established through control and coercion
from above and hence lacked any legitimacy. Unlike the libertarians, the totalitarians
tended to reject the idea that there was a genuine grassroots-revolution with its own
motivations, ideals and agenda. Even if they did recognise grassroots-unrest, they argued
that it had little to do with the transfer of power. Rebellion had been a feature of Russian
history for centuries. It was the behaviour of the lites that counted for Revolution, whether
the mistakes of the existing political lite or the leadership of the oppositional intellectual
lite.
13
In the late 1970s and 1980s, further research and publications began to emerge which
challenged not only this dominant totalitarian view, but also the less well-known libertarian
perspective by re-examining the revolution from below, and, in this context, the documents
under review play an important role as a key-source. Overall, the totalitarian model of the
Soviet Union and its origins had been too simplistic. Its emphasis on control and coercion
from above had obscured the complexity of Soviet society and did not seem to explain why
the system had survived so long, let alone been able to establish itself in 1917 and survive
a civil war and external intervention. Equally, it had left academic research rather blinkered.
Why bother to study Soviet trade-unions in great detail, when we all knew the answer, i.e.,
that they were tools of control from above by the Party? Similarly, the terror and purges of
the 1930s had been seen as manifestations of Stalins paranoia. Paradoxically, in their views
of the extent of social control from above, the totalitarians had produced a mirror-image
of what the Soviet state said about itself, i.e., that the Soviet Party and society were united
and there was no signicant social conict within it. Te 1970s, however, saw a change in
attitudes towards the USSR. Many scholars became less convinced of the absolute
11. Serge 1972; Maximov 1935.
12. Pipes 1990.
13. An extreme example of this emphasis on conspiracy at the top can be seen in George
Katkovs study of the February Revolution (Katkov 1967).
dierences between the democratic West on the one hand and the totalitarian Soviet
Union, on the other. Some even talked of convergence of the two systems. Te Vietnam-
War and the civil-rights movement had also meant many were now more critical of
democracy in the West. In addition, dtente in the 1970s itself gave some degree of
legitimacy to the Soviet state. Te Helsinki-Conference of 1975 was indicative of a new
bi-polar world in which the US and the Soviet Union would manage their relationship
through mutual recognition of spheres of inuence. One of the consequences of this period
was greater mobility of academics between the USSR and the West, and the limited opening
up of Soviet archives to Western scholars. Intellectually, it meant that certain academics
were more open to the idea that the Soviet system was established and survived through
more than just coercion and terror and that perhaps also it was a far more contradictory
beast, riven with political and social tensions.
Te new research on the Russian Revolution from below which emerged from all this
proposed a view of the relationship between the Bolshevik Party/Soviet state, on the one
hand, and the working class, on the other, which was much more complex than either the
libertarians or the totalitarians had proposed. In studying the grassroots-revolution in the
factories, historians made use of some of the materials in these volumes under review. In
particular, S.A. Smith, Diane Koenker and David Mandel argued that the increasing
radicalism among workers in 1917 was not so much inspired by a grand project for workers
self-management in its own right, but was more of a response to a worsening economic
situation.
14
Workers control was seen as a practical solution to their problems. Te
increasing support for the Bolshevik Party from the factory-committees was not due to
manipulation but because the Bolsheviks were more eective in articulating workers anger
and channelling it into a political programme. More than that, the concept of a division
between party and class was a misrepresentation by both the libertarians and the
totalitarians. What was proposed was a more dynamic relationship between party and
class. Tis is brought out most clearly in the work of Robert Service.
15
After the collapse of
the autocracy in February 1917, the more open political atmosphere meant workers from
the factory-committees and shop-oor began to join the Bolshevik Party. In doing so, they
not only changed the social composition of the Party, but they shifted the centre of gravity
of the Party to a more radical perspective. At the beginning of 1917, the Left Bolsheviks in
local areas like the Vyborg-region of Petrograd and Lenin in exile had been rather
marginalised within the Party with their calls for a break with the Provisional Government,
All Power to the Soviets and nationalisation of signicant parts of industry. By the middle
of 1917, these ideas had become mainstream. Tis was not just to do with the persuasive
powers of Lenin over his colleagues or, indeed, merely because the economic crisis was
worsening, but to do with the fact that the Bolsheviks had become a more proletarian party
at its base, and the pre-1917 intellectual old guard, such as the more conservative Kamenev,
were now swamped by the new, more radical recruits from the factories.
What emerges then in this later work is a much more dialectical relationship between
party and class. Te Party gave some kind of ideological and programmatic form to the
fears and aspirations of workers, while, at the same time, worker-activists were radicalising
the Party from below. We see this throughout 1917 and into the post-October period. After
14. Smith 1983a; Koenker 1981; Mandel 1983; Mandel 1984.
15. Service 1979.
the October Revolution, Sovnarkom, the new government, advertised its policy of legalising
workers control via the Decree on Workers Control. Tis meant that, for most of industry,
private owners were supposed to stay in situ, but the factory-committees had a right to
check on what they were doing and examine their accounts, etc. Only certain large-scale
syndicates and key sectors would actually be nationalised. In practice, at a local level,
workers and local party-activists often went beyond this and interpreted the October
Revolution as meaning that they had carte blanche to take over the whole of industry. In
the Urals, in particular, a stronghold of Left Communism within the Bolshevik Party,
workers undertook wholesale nationalisation.
16
In this and other areas, the grassroots-party
was often more radical than the centre and dictating the pace of developments.
Te materials contained in these volumes tend to support this much more dialectical
view of the relationship between the Bolshevik Party and the factory-committees. We see
how the factory-committees ideas of workers control and greater intervention in industry
became more radical as the economic situation worsened through 1917, and, from May
onwards, there is majority-support for Bolshevik proposals at the factory-committee
conferences in Petrograd. Te materials in Volume 1 initially display more conciliatory
attitudes to employers. In the Spring of 1917, the committees put forward workers
economic demands, asking to be consulted on the hiring and ring of workers and setting
up commissions to assist in obtaining supplies of fuel, etc. Only in the state-factories where
there is a vacuum of management is there more active workers management. However, the
later materials in Volume 1 and through Volume 2 show that as the economic crisis
deepened from the early Summer, support grew for more interventionist control the right
to look at the nancial books of factories, control of the movement of materials at the
factory-gates, demands for more state-regulation and intervention. Tis occurs in an
atmosphere of suspicion that employers are sabotaging industry and now deliberately
targeting the workers movement a Bolshevik interpretation of the crisis which seemed to
make sense of what was happening.
One key-emphasis which emerges from the material in all the volumes is the positive
contribution made by the factory-committees to the maintenance of production in
1917/18. Te committees are shown trying to protect factories against economic sabotage
(Volume 3, pp. 22440), helping to stave o the economic crisis of 1917 (Volume 2, pp.
7181) or trying to tackle unemployment (Volume 3, pp. 24452). Tis positive
contribution is emphasised by the original editors themselves (see Kaktyn in Volume 3,
p. 195). In part, this was deliberate. A major debate in the labour-movement at the time,
and a key-theme running through these documents, concerns the relations and tensions
between the trade-unions and the factory-committees. Te February Revolution had seen
not only the establishment of factory-committees for the rst time, but also saw the revival
of the trade-unions. Troughout 1917, there was tension between the activists in both
organisations over their relative roles.
17
Trade-unionists such as Veinberg of the Metalworkers
Union and Lozovsky had justied their own institutions by suggesting that the factory-
committees were highly localised and therefore could not represent the broad interests of
workers across an industry. Te factory-committee leaders, as evidenced in these materials,
16. Flenley 1983, pp. 43670.
17. See a full debate on the problem on 20 October 1917 at the rst All-Russian Conference
of Factory-Committees (Volume 2, pp. 18895).
protested that through their city-wide conferences, and through organisations such as the
Central Council of Factory-Committees, they were well capable of taking a co-ordinated
approach. In fact, they could represent workers as a whole, unlike the trade-unions which
represented particular sectors of industry. As 1917 drew on, however, it became obvious
that having two separate labour-organisations was a luxury. Moreover, the heightened
economic crisis meant that there was increasing overlap between them. Earlier, the trade-
unions had claimed that their particular contribution was the ability to negotiate wages
across an industry rather than in individual factories. In the Summer of 1917, ination
began to undercut this function as the economic crisis meant that the key issue was keeping
industry going and trying to regulate production. Both institutions had an interest
in this.
An understanding of this conict provides the context for much of the debate at the
sixth

Petrograd Factory-Committee Conference (227 January 1918) which is contained in
Volume 4. Speakers at the earlier rst All-Russian Congress of Trade-Unions (714 January
1918) had criticised the factory-committees for lacking discipline and pandering to the
whims of workers. Tat congress resolved that the solution to this and to the conict of
interests should be that the committees be subordinated to the trade-unions.
18
For many,
this marked the end of the independence of the factory-committees.
19
Indeed, for the
libertarian view, this was a key part of the Bolshevik scheme for post-October control of
the labour-movement subordination of the committees to the trade-unions and the tying
of the unions to the state.
20
Dr Tsuji in his introduction to Volume 4 also seems to subscribe
to the view that the committees eectively committed suicide.
21
For him, the sixth
Conference of Petrograd Factory-Committees at the end of January 1918 was the last
conference imbued with a spirit of freedom (Volume 4). However, the protocols of the
sixth Petrograd Factory-Committee Conference in Volume 4 reveal a very dierent picture
to the above views. Te Conference was, in many ways, the committees response to the
trade-unions. Te committees reject the accusations made against them and agree to merger
on the basis that it is the trade-unions which have changed their behaviour and become
acceptable partners. As we see in this and the earlier volumes, the committees had long
since been concerned with the organisation of production. Now that the trade-unions were
also focussing on this, merger became possible. Moreover, the debates at the Conference
show that the committees were not cowed in their radicalism. Tere were many calls for the
conscation of factories where necessary, and nationalisation of large-scale industry and
also general support for the more radical interpretation of workers control put forward by
the Central Council of Factory-Committees as opposed to that put forward by the trade-
union dominated All-Russian Council for Workers Control. Tis meant that, even after
the merger, the factory-committees would still exercise control and regulation in industry.
In many ways, it could be said that the situation re the relative powers of the two labour-
organisations was the opposite of what is generally presented. It was the trade-unions who
had lost their original role and whose organisations had been weakened by loss of personnel.
Rather than the factory-committees committing suicide, the incorporation of the
18. Pervyi vserossiiskii sezd professionalnykh soyuzov, 714 yanvarya 1918g., pp. 2368.
19. Ferro 1980, pp. 1737.
20. Brinton 1970, p. 32.
21. Tsuji in the introduction to Volume 4.
committees into the structure of trade-unions would actually breathe life into the empty
shells of the trade-unions.
22

Tis latter point returns us to a key element in the historiographical debate about the
Russian labour-movement the nature and origins of the bureaucratisation of the
Revolution. In the early 1970s, a debate opened up in the pages of the journal Critique
concerning the relations between the Bolshevik Party and the factory-committees. Part of
this focused on the origins of the bureaucratic degeneration. Maurice Brinton pursued a
libertarian perspective, as mentioned earlier. For him, the origins lay in Bolshevik politics
and tactics as they deceived, took over and nally controlled the factory-committee
movement.
23
For Chris Goodey, however, the relationship between the Party and the
committees was much more intertwined, and, if one is going talk about the process of
bureaucratisation, then it has to include the factory-committees themselves as active
participants in the process rather than passive victims. After all, they urged central regulation
of the economy and indeed many of their leaders ended up as managers of the Soviet
economic apparatus.
24
In attempting to explain the reasons for this complicity of the
factory-committees in the Soviet project of centralisation and control, Shkliarevksy argued,
in a book published in 1993, that the factory-committee leaders have to be seen as a separate
grouping in their own right. In the conicts of 1917, especially with the trade-unions,
they found that alliance with Lenin and the Bolsheviks strengthened their position.
However, after October, this turned into a fatal embrace and they found themselves isolated
both from their members and from other revolutionary activists. As a consequence, they
were dependent on the Bolsheviks and vulnerable to incorporation into the new
state-apparatus.
25

Shkliarevskys view could be seen as part of a recent general harking back to a more
traditional totalitarian view of the nature of the relationship between the leaders and led
in the 1917 Revolution an approach which, as we have suggested, ignores the dynamic
relations between party, state, factory-committees and members highlighted by the
scholarship of the 1980s. Te materials in the volumes under review, however, show a
complex engagement of the factory-committees with the early Soviet state, rather than
acting as passive victims of it. If anything, it was the factory-committee leaders even more
so than many Bolshevik leaders who were urging central regulation of the economy in order
to deal with the economic chaos in late 1917/18. In many ways, this derives from their own
vision of the functions of the factory-committees. What we come to see as the Communist-
Party project of regulation and planning of the economy was something which the factory-
committee leaders were pushing early on in 1917 Te factory-committees, as militant
organisations, created by the working class for the regulation of economic life, as the
Organisation Bureau of All-Russian Conference of Factory-Committees called them
(Volume 2, p. 138). Many of the materials in these volumes display the eorts of the
factory-committees in organising the early regulation and management of the economy,
both before and after the October Revolution. In Volume 3, we see Kaktyn, one of the
members of the CCFC and editors of the volume, argue that, after the Revolution, the
22. Flenley 1983, Volume 2, pp. 62672.
23. Brinton 1975.
24. Goodey 1974 and 1975, arguing against Brinton 1970 and 1975.
25. Shkliarevsky 1993.
factory-committees had to move from the era of workers control to the regulation of
production. Like many Bolsheviks within industry, worker-cadres in the factory-committees
had supported the idea of soviet-power and socialism because it provided the opportunity
to manage and regulate an economy eciently for the benet of all in a rational way. It
would see an end to the waste, chaos and often deliberate sabotage of capitalism. As S.A.
Smith remarks, If one examines the debates and resolutions of the factory committee
conferences it becomes apparent that the emphasis on centralised planned control of the
economy became ever more pronounced.
26
Hence, the Soviet policies of the 1920s and
1930s were not necessarily pursued on the backs of the defeat of the 1917 factory-committee
movement, but, in some senses, were a fullment of what the factory-committee leaders
had hoped for. Many of the ideas for the construction of the early Supreme Council of the
National Economy, set up in December 1917 to co-ordinate the management of nationalised
industry, had come from the leaders of the Central Council of Factory-Committees
(Volume 3, pp. 1756).
27
Kaktyn argued that the committees saw themselves as the basic
cells of the higher regulating institutions of the national economy (Volume 3, p. 195).
More than this, the factory-committee cadres provided a key source of scarce personnel for
the management of Soviet industry. Te career-patterns of many of them show a natural
progression into the new economic apparatus of the Soviet state.
28
In many ways, they
became the natural managers of socialism in one country.
29
Analysing the process of bureaucratisation involves not simply looking at the relationship
between the Party and the factory-committees, but also the relationship between both of
them and the ordinary workers. Here, again, the materials in the volumes reveal a complex
picture. In the period up to October 1917, as indicated the materials reveal a certain
merging of the factory-committees, the Partys and industrial workers views as the
economic crisis develops. Troughout 1917, the Bolshevik Party and factory-committee
leadership had been able to blame the economic crisis on the War, the incompetence of
employers, deliberate sabotage by the latter and the irrationality and waste of capitalism
itself. Te solution lay in soviet-power and regulation and planning of the economy.
Industrial workers came to support the idea of soviet-power to facilitate a solution to the
economic crisis which would be to the benet of themselves. Tis was especially urgent as
the employers and the Provisional Government seemed be moving towards a solution
which would be at the expense of workers, i.e. cutting back on production and curbing the
labour-movement.
In addition to supporting the idea of soviet-power, as 1917 wore on, factory-committee
leaders displayed increasing condence in their own ability to contribute to the management
of the economy, and, indeed, the materials in these volumes reect this. Lenin and the
Bolshevik leadership shared this view. Even more than this, a positive, some would say
utopian view,
30
of the capacity of workers to manage the economy was continued into the
26. Smith 1983a, p. 157.
27. Chubar of the CCFC recalls developments in Narodnoe khozyiastov 1918, p. 8.
28. See, for example, the biographies in Lane 1995 Derbyshev (Volume 1, pp. 2578),
Zhivotov (Volume 2, p. 1058) and others.
29. Te Soviet historian V.Z. Drobizhev had published a number of works showing such a
progression (see especially Drobizhev 1957, 1964, 1966).
30. White 2001.
early months after October 1917. Lenin himself is seen as going through a utopian stage
in his belief in the living creativity of the masses, rather than being too hasty and
prescriptive in constructing central-economic organs from above something that even
factory-leaders were urging him to do.
31
In arguing with his critics at the 4 November 1917
session of the Executive Committee of the Soviet, he had urged that Socialism is not
created by instructions from above. Formal-bureaucratic automatism is alien to its spirit;
socialism, living and creative is the creation of the masses themselves.
32

Te Winter of 1917/18, however, saw a sea-change in attitudes and Volume 4 of the
present materials is interesting because it captures this moment. Te sixth Conference of
Petrograd Factory-Committees in January 1918 is occurring at a time when the economic
crisis is far worse than when the Bolsheviks took power. Tere is a real prospect of economic
collapse, factories running out of fuel and the railways ceasing to function. Soviet-power
and the management of the economy was going to be more problematic than anyone had
expected. All this placed workers organisations in a terrible dilemma. Te economic crisis
meant that they could not remain aloof from management of the economy nor, from
what we have said, did they wish to. In addition, shortage of managerial personnel meant
that, in many cases, factory-committee personnel actually had to take over as managers at
a local level. At the sixth Conference, we see the committees resolving that, since the central
authorities did not have the capacity, then the factory-committees would have to take over
the responsibility for the management of nationalised factories (Volume 4). When it came
to central appointment of commissars or individual directors at factories, this often meant
simply rubberstamping the former factory-committee individuals in situ. Te problem was
that, the more the committees participated in management, then the more they themselves
became identied with the failures to deal with the economic problems. Adding to an
increasing gulf between committees and members was, as Volume 4 reveals, the fact that
already, by January 1918, the committees had to concern themselves with worker-discipline
in the wider interests of sustaining the economy and keeping production going. Tey could
not just articulate individual workers grievances against management. Not surprisingly,
therefore, many workers turned away from the factory-committees, which now seemed to
be behaving like the new bosses. New independent workers organisations began to be set
up.
33
Many also turned away from the Bolshevik Party to support alternative political
parties.
34
What is interesting about this tide of discontent, however, is that, as William
Rosenberg points out, the alternatives did not thrive in the way that alternatives to the
Provisional Government and so forth had thrived in 1917. Moreover, the Bolsheviks were
able to go on and win a civil war by 1921. For Rosenberg, the reasons are that the alternatives
were either already discredited or not credible.
35

In many ways, what was occurring across the board was a disillusionment with the
promised utopia of 1917. For the factory-committees, degeneration or bureaucratisation
occurred because of the practical dilemmas produced by the October Revolution. Managing
31. Zhivotov, President of the CCFC, recalling discussions at the time. See Ekonomicheskaya
zhizn 1924, p. 3.
32. Lenin 1977, p. 57.
33. See the documents on the independent workers movement in Bernshtam (ed.) 1981.
34. Brovkin 1983.
35. Rosenberg 1987.
the workers state in a period of extreme economic crisis, when the Revolution was faced
by external and internal threats, forced them to choose between sitting on the sidelines,
merely articulating workers grievances, or becoming eectively part of the economic
management of the new state. Te materials in these volumes show that, in making that
choice, they followed their raison dtre since the beginnings of the Revolution. Te factory-
committees had never been just interested in the simple representation of workers demands
or in workers democracy for its own sake. Tey had believed that workers best interests
were served by the committees involvement in keeping production going. In the end, they
believed that the regulation, management and planning of production was the best solution
to the practical problems of the economy, and soviet-power aorded the best possibility of
this in the given extreme crisis. Tis, perhaps, then did more to determine the fate of the
committees than any Bolshevik conspiracy, and, as a result, they must be seen as an active
part of the so-called bureaucratic degeneration of the Revolution, rather than as merely its
passive victim.
However, to follow Kevin Murphys point in his critique of the continuity-debate,
36
this
is not to say that the origins of Stalinism lie here. Tere is a huge qualitative dierence
between bureaucratisation and tensions in the relationships between the Party/state,
factory-committees and their members in 1918 and the labour-control policies of 1929
onwards.
One nal consideration in reviewing these documents concerns the motivations for the
initial collection and publication of the rst three volumes in the 1920s. In the Soviet
Union of the 1920s and 1930s, the analysis of the history of the Revolution was very much
a part of the often life-or-death political struggle over the survival, legitimacy and future
development of the Soviet state itself. Te reading of these volumes on the history of the
factory-committee movement has to be undertaken with this in mind, i.e., why would
former factory-committee leaders take time out in the 1920s for the publication of historical
materials? Moreover, why would they think it important, as they suggest, that former
factory-committee workers come forward with their memoirs and arrange evenings of
reminiscences (Volume 3, p. 4), especially in the middle of an industrialisation-drive? One
answer is that materials such as those contained in these volumes, which assert the
grassroots-leadership of the Bolshevik Party, were a useful rebu to the writings of non-
Bolsheviks such as Sukhanov who questioned that leadership throughout 1917.
37
In
addition, as we have suggested, the earliest sustained critique of the degeneration of the
Bolshevik Revolution into dictatorship and the use of coercion had come from the Russian
anarchists from 1918 onwards. Overall, these materials show that the factory-committees
were supportive of the Bolshevik Party from early on in 1917. Moreover, they show how
the factory-committee leaders contributed much in terms of ideas and eort to the early
Bolshevik programme.
An obvious gap in the rst three volumes is the lack of materials on the factory-
committees before May 1917 something which the original editors explain by saying that
very few materials had been preserved from this rst period (Volume 1, p. 8; Volume 3,
p. 4). Tis gap, however, conveniently coincides with the period during and immediately
36. Murphy 2007.
37. Sukhanov 1955. Joel Carmichael in his preface to the 1955 edited version of Sukhanovs
work mentions the move against his interpretation by Stalins faction at the end of the 1920s.
after the February Revolution a period when the political leadership of the workers
movement was dominated by the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries. In writing
the history of the Bolshevik Party in this period, Soviet historians from the 1920s onwards
had diculty in accounting for the apparent lack of leadership of the working class by the
Bolshevik Party at this point. In particular, they had to answer the question why the
vanguard of the working class was not initially elected to the leadership of the soviets and
trade-unions. One answer to this embarrassment had been to suggest that the Bolsheviks
leadership was there, not in the soviets or trade-unions, where they would have been more
visible, but more signicantly working at a grassroots-level in the factories through worker-
cadres. Helped by their omission of materials from this early period, the volumes can t in
with this interpretation which began to be promoted by Stalin within the Communist
Party in 19223.
38
Te committees were led from the rst days of their existence by the
political vanguard of the proletariat the Bolshevik Party (Volume 1, p. 40).
Perhaps, however, the main purpose of the materials, especially in the late 1920s when
they were published, was not to rebu critics outside the Party but as a contribution to the
political struggle within the Communist Party itself a struggle for the soul and ultimate
direction of the Party. In the 1920s, we see a variety of dierent memoirs and histories of
the Revolution being written by leading gures in the Communist Party. Tis is paralleled
also in the 1920s by the writing by Soviet historians of the history of the Russian labour-
movement. Signicant among the latter is the work of Anna Pankratova, who, in 1923,
published the rst study of the factory-committee movement
39
based on archival research,
to be followed in 1927 by a further study of the factory-committees and trade-unions in
1917.
40
Te ultimate aim of herself and others, particularly her mentor at the time, the
inuential Mikhail Pokrovskii, head of History at the Institute of Red Professors in the
1920s, was to establish a major project on the history of the proletariat. However, this was
no detached historical enterprise. She believed that the best scholarship served the needs of
the Party and the working class, and, as Reginald Zelnik shows us, she and other historians
were both participants in and ultimately victims of the political struggles from the 1920s
onwards.
41
Te persecution of Pankratova in the early 1930s, the campaign against her
mentor Pokrovskii and Stalins 1934 change of emphasis in history away from the socio-
economic approach may give us some explanation as to why the there was no Soviet attempt
to continue the publication of the factory-committee materials in the volumes under review
beyond 1929.
In compiling their collection in the 1920s, the original editors would have been aware
that they were part of the wider historical endeavour, and while the Left was being hunted
down in the academies in the mid-1920s, and the Right in 19289, they must have also
been mindful of the political signicance of their eorts. To begin with in 1921, the
Communist Party became embroiled in the struggle with the Workers Opposition,
something which Lenin suggested threatened to split the Party. In the wake of the defeat of
the Opposition, the party-leadership had also to deal with legacy of those who had
38. Longley 1992, pp. 36970.
39. Pankratova 1923.
40. Pankratova 1927.
41. Zelnik 2005 (I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for drawing my attention
to this book).
participated in it. In particular, Alexander Shlyapnikov, one of the key leaders of the
Opposition, had played a major role in the Bolshevik leadership in Russia at the beginning
of 1917 while Lenin was still abroad. In addition, from 1922 onwards, Shlyapnikov was
writing his own memoirs of the Revolution.
42
Tis presented a range of dilemmas for the
party-leadership. Te opponents of the Bolsheviks were denying the vanguard-role played
by the Bolsheviks, especially in the February Revolution and the months after. Shlyapnikovs
history asserted that there was indeed Bolshevik leadership in these early days, i.e. himself
and the other party-leaders left in Russia. Te key-problem was how to undercut Shlyapnikov
without agreeing with the opponents of the Bolsheviks that the latter provided no leadership.
Te idea of worker-cadres sustaining the leadership at a grassroots factory-level therefore
provided a useful alternative.
43
Te materials in these volumes can therefore be seen as the
product of a deliberate attempt to promote this view by encouraging a range of memoirs by
factory-cadres and histories of the factories and committees in the 1920s. Te idea of
factory-level worker-cadre Bolshevik leadership throughout 1917 from the beginning also
had the advantage from the mid-1920s of undercutting Leon Trotskys depiction of the
course of the Revolution. Te latter had tended to downplay the early part of 1917, perhaps
not surprisingly, since he joined the Party in August 1917.
In the late 1920s, a new conict arose in the context of the New Economic Policy. Te
drive to industrialise increased the pressure placed on workers to increase production. Not
surprisingly, this led to strikes. Te trade-unions were a useful scapegoat, even though they
pursued a no-strike policy and were Bolshevik-controlled. Caught in a no-win situation,
they at one and the same time had to support government-policy and management on
wages etc., and yet ensure that they listened to their members interests. Strikes were seen a
sign of their failure. At trade-union congresses, leaders such as Tomsky accused the unions
of bureaucracy and being out of touch with their membership.
44
Te factory-committees
having been incorporated into the trade-unions in 1918 as their primary organisation were
the crucial link between the members and the union.
45
In 19259, the Central Council of
Trade-Unions (under whose auspices the rst three volumes of these materials were
published) would have had good reason to remind the rest of the Party of the democratic
origins of the primary organs of the trade-unions, i.e. the factory-committees and the
positive way they both represented workers interests and made a positive contribution to
the regulation and management of the economy.
Finally, the materials, as published, can be seen as part of a wider ideological struggle in
the 1920s. Te beginnings of the collection of the materials in 1925 and their nal
publication in 1927 and 1929 coincided with the development of the doctrine of socialism
in one country, and, eventually, the turn towards full-scale planning and rapid
industrialisation. Te apparent failure of revolution in Europe for the time being, coinciding
with the defeat of the Left Opposition, meant that the New Economic Policy was
increasingly seen as a policy not simply for restoration of the economy after the Civil War
but as the basis for the promotion of industrialisation. National Bolshevism, which had
42. Shlyapnikov 1921/22, 192331.
43. Longley 1992. Longley himself does not mention these volumes as part of the campaign
but they t in well with the timing and tenor of it.
44. Sorenson 1969, p. 206.
45. Sorenson 1969, p. 192.
always been a strong current in 1917/18, would now assert itself. Te implications of this
were that Russia would have to begin the construction of socialism without the help of the
international working class. It was therefore useful to show at such a time just how positive
and visionary the working-class leaders had been so far in the construction of the workers
state. Te ideology of the factory-committee leaders tted in well with the mood of
socialism in one country. What is striking throughout these volumes is the lack of an
internationalist perspective at the core of the factory-committee project. Tere is no sense
that these labour-leaders were expecting to hold the fort until a German and international
revolution. Instead, there is clear condence that they knew how to run the national
economy themselves. For them, socialism was not mainly about international revolution or
even about workers democracy for its own sake. It was about the opportunity for rational
organisation, planning and regulation of the economy in the real interests of the working
class. Te tragedy for some of them is that the distorted version of this vision which emerged
in reality was to come to destroy them.
46
Reviewed by Paul Flenley
University of Portsmouth
paul.enley@port.ac.uk
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Latin American Neostructuralism: Te Contradictions of Post-Neoliberal Development,
Fernando Ignacio Leiva, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008
Abstract
Tis review-essay oers an extended engagement with Fernando Ignacio Leivas Latin American
Neostructuralism, one of the most important contributions to contemporary Latin-American
political economy. It situates Leivas critique of neostructuralism against the wider backdrop of
Latin Americas contradictory turn to the Left since the late 1990s, and compares the treatments
of change in Latin-American capitalism over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-rst
centuries developed by the schools of classical structuralism, neostructuralism, and
neoliberalism. Te essay nds that Leivas critique of neostructuralism and his explanation for
its inuence on large segments of the regions Left is the best work on the topic currently
available in English. Leiva systematically demolishes neostructuralisms claim to be a progressive
alternative to neoliberalism. At the same time, it is argued that Leivas theoretical framework is
compromised by its uncritical adoption of categories from French regulation-theory, and its
nostalgia for elements of classical structuralism and its associated development-model of
import-substitution industrialisation. Further, it is found that Leivas implicit attachment to
certain myths propagated by the Marxism of the Second and, especially, Tird Internationals
regarding the national bourgeoisies role in Tird-World capitalist development leaves him
unduly dogmatic about the necessity, and unduly optimistic about the possibility, of building a
progressive stage of capitalism in Latin America today. Te same mythologies prevent Leiva
from drawing the appropriate conclusions as regards the urgent necessity of rebuilding the
socialist project in Latin America and internationally.
Keywords
Latin America, political economy, neostructuralism, structuralism, neoliberalism, post-
neoliberalism, Left
Neostructuralism, Neoliberalism, and Latin Americas Resurgent Left
A new Latin-American Left
In the early 1990s, the Latin-American Left had reached its twentieth-century nadir.
Anyone who had predicted then that less than a decade later the region would witness a
resurgence in extra-parliamentary radicalism, a tide of electoral victories for left and
centre-left parties, and a renewal of debates around socialism and the future of anticapitalism,
would have been subjected to mockery and ridicule apparently with good reason. Te
brutality of bureaucratic authoritarianism in the Southern Cone in the 1960s and 1970s,
and counter-insurgency in Central America in the early 1980s, wiped out much of the Left
in these areas. Te debt-crisis of the 1980s ushered in a quarter-century of neoliberal
restructuring that saw labour-unions and working-class power enter steep decline. Te fall
of the Soviet Union and its client-states in Eastern Europe, the subsequent isolation of
Cuba, and the electoral demise of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1990, made any talk of
a viable socialism appear hopelessly romantic. Many social movements retreated into
parochial, localised concerns at the neighbourhood- and community-levels, as the objective
of conquering power on the national stage seemed far beyond reach. Non-governmental
organisations, progressive intellectuals, and most left parties in Latin America turned
sharply to the right, accepting the basic presuppositions of the Washington-Consensus as
the new parameters for reasonable debate and policy-proposal.
Economic growth over the course of the 1980s and 1990s the core neoliberal epoch
of Latin Americas silent revolution included a modest boom (19917), positioned
between the lost decade of the 1980s and the lost half-decade between 1997 and 2002.
Te neoliberal policy-era in Latin America progressed through the deep recession of
19823, the false dawn of a temporary and meagre recovery in positive per capita growth
from 1984 to 1987, the increasing depth and breadth of neoliberal policy-implementation
between 1988 and 1991, and a thorough attempt to consolidate the model throughout
the 1990s and early 2000s in the midst of increasing contradictions and crises the
Mexican Peso-Crisis in 19945, Brazils nancial breakdown in 1998 in the wake of the
Asian and Russian crises, and, most dramatically, the Argentine collapse which reached its
apex in December 2001.
1
Following twenty years of debt re-scheduling, the regions total debt was approximately
$US 725 billion by 2002, twice the gure at the onset of the debt-crisis.
2
Poverty-rates
between 1980 and 2002 increased from 40.5 per cent of the population in 1980 to 44 per
cent in 2002. In absolute gures, this translated into an increase of 84 million poor people
across the region, from 136 million in 1980 to 220 million in 2002.
3
Latin America
continued to be the most unequal part of the world, such that, in 2003, the top 10 per cent
of the population earned 48 per cent of all income.
4
A brief uptick in growth
occurred beginning in 2004, as a result of high commodity-prices, but, with the onset of
the global crisis of 20079, all of this has ended abruptly.
5
It is now widely understood
that during the twenty-ve years of the Washington Consensus, the Latin American
economies have experienced their worst quarter century since the catastrophic second
quarter of the nineteenth century.
6
Measured by Gross Domestic Product per capita, life-
expectancy, and literacy in the twentieth century, Latin America performed best between
1940 and 1980, the era of import-substitution industrialisation (ISI). In the regions six
largest economies, annual GDP-growth in the ISI-period was over four-and-a half times
greater than between 1980 and 2000, the years of orthodox neoliberalism.
7
Surveying the political landscape today, the balance of social forces has clearly shifted
quite dramatically since the early 1990s. Social contradictions of the neoliberal model
generated a series of crises in the closing years of the 1990s and opening moments of the
current decade. Popular uprisings overthrew heads of state in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador,
and elsewhere, as rural and urban insurrection across the region began to mitigate the
impunity with which the ruling classes and imperialism had set the economic and political
agenda.
8
Tis popular discontent with neoliberalism also manifested itself through the
1. Green 2003, pp. 72118.
2. Green 2003, p. 117.
3. Damin and Boltvinik 2006, p. 145.
4. Reygadas 2006, p. 122.
5. Aguiar de Medeiros 2009, p. 132; see also Katz 2009.
6. Coatsworth 2005, p. 137.
7. Love 2005, p. 107.
8. Katz 2007, p. 29.
ballot-box, beginning with the election of Hugo Chvez in Venezuela in 1998, and
culminating most recently in the March 2009 election of Maurico Funes in El Salvador.
However, alongside the relatively hopeful, if contradictory, Bolivarian Revolution in
Venezuela, the so-called pink tide also includes the likes of Ignacio Lula da Silva in Brazil,
Michelle Bachelet in Chile, Nestor Kirchner (and now Cristina Fernndez de Kirchner) in
Argentina, and Tabar Vsquez in Uruguay, among other self-proclaimed leftists. Tey
tend to speak out rhetorically against neoliberalism, while, in practice, enact only mild
redistributive programmes respectful of prevailing property relations, and have proved
capable of pushing forward a new wave of capitalist globalization with greater credibility
than their orthodox neoliberal predecessors.
9
In these mildly reformist cases, there has
been no meaningful redistribution of income or wealth, much less a challenge to capitalist
social-property relations.
Te ultimate trajectory of the pink tide depends on the capacities of the Left to counter
belligerent right-wing oppositions and ongoing imperialist meddling in the sovereign
aairs of Latin-American nations; just as crucial, though, will be the course of the battle
between dierent currents within the Left seeking to gain hegemony over the anti-
neoliberal bloc. Latin America has moved into an historic conjuncture in which the
struggle among social and political forces could push the new resistance politics into
mildly social democratic and populist outcomes, William I. Robinson points out, or into
more fundamental, potentially revolutionary ones. Results will depend considerably on
the conguration of class and social forces in each country and the extent to which
regional and global congurations of these forces open up new space and push such
governments in distinct directions.
10
Historicising Latin-American neostructuralism
Fernando Ignacio Leivas excellent Latin American Neostructuralism makes an important
contribution to clearing up one component of these muddy theoretical and analytical
waters by surveying the most inuential paradigm of political economy that lies behind
the social-democratic current within the regions latest turn to the Left. Te book sets out
to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of Latin-American neostructuralism, the depth
and breadth of its inuence in reshaping Latin Americas political economy, its overarching
implications for Latin-American politics and society, and the extent to which it represents
an alternative to neoliberalism. Leiva attempts to tackle these questions by systematically
examining Latin American neostructuralisms key concepts, modes of theorising, and
politico-economic outcomes while locating its ascendance within the current historical
context, a time of profound restructuring of Latin American capitalism and the world
economy (p. xviii). Te broader objective is to make a contribution to the revitalisation of
radical-political economy in and about Latin America which has been hammered not only
by neoliberalism, but also by the powerful and growing sway of neostructuralist ideas
propagated by the Santiago-based United Nations Economic Commission for Latin
America and the Caribbean, or ECLAC.
9. Robinson 2008, p. 292.
10. Robinson 2007, p. 148.
Latin American Neostructuralism focuses entirely on the institutional, intellectual and
policy-production generated by ECLAC and ECLAC-associated intellectuals over the last
two decades. Te book does not purport to situate this specically Latin-American
development within the wider international shift in economics toward a post-Washington-
Consensus, exemplied in World-Bank publications throughout the late 1990s and 2000s,
the state-institutionalist sociology of Peter Evans and Atul Kohli, and the popularised
writings of economists such as Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Wade, and Ha-Joon Chang, among
others. Te weakness of this approach is that it tends to exaggerate the particularity of
what is transpiring in the eld of development-economics in Latin America, and misses
an opportunity to esh-out comparisons with similar intellectual traditions developing
elsewhere, particularly in East Asia. Having said that, Leivas choice to circumscribe his
analysis to ECLAC and the Latin-American setting results in what is, to my knowledge,
the most penetrating and rigorous treatment of the topic available to date in English.
Drawing from Marxist traditions within both economics and literary theory, Leiva
moves back and forth between the historical and material changes in Latin-American
capitalism over the last three decades and the ways in which ECLAC-publications have
played a central role in legitimising existing power-relations. For Leiva, the historical
relationship between discursive and material practices has to be rmly planted at the center
of analysis (p. xxv, emphasis in the original). Te analytical framework of Latin American
Neostructuralism draws in part from the economic schools of French regulation and (its
American incarnation) social structures of accumulation. Te concepts of rgime of
accumulation, mode of regulation, and mode of socialisation, in particular, are employed
to help us to comprehend that economic ideas must operate beyond the strictly economic
realm if societal structures are to be successfully altered in a lasting manner (p. 43).
Leiva begins by demonstrating the importance of understanding the ideological power
of neostructuralism if we are to come to grips with the contradictions inherent in Latin
Americas left-turn over the last decade. Next, the analysis moves to the conceptual
innovations Latin-American neostructuralism has introduced to counter orthodox
neoliberalism. Particularly, Leiva weighs the meaning of the neostructuralist claim that
export-oriented economic growth, equity, and democracy can be mutually reinforcing so
long as the appropriate governmental strategies and institutional changes are introduced.
Here, the focus is on neostructuralisms principal theorisation of the state, as well as the
paradigms core-concepts systemic competitiveness, technical progress, proactive labour-
exibility, concerted action, and virtuous circles. Stepping back, Leiva then historicises the
development of Latin-American neostructuralism over two chapters by tracing its
relationship to the long shifts in Latin-American development-strategies from ISI between
the 1930s and 1970s, and export-oriented development (EOD) between the 1980s and
the present, as well as the associated economic theories of structuralism and neoliberalism.
Tightening the analytical lens, Leiva grounds this wider historicisation in a separate
chapter devoted to a specic examination of the dierentiated intellectual traditions of
structuralism and neostructuralism in the cases of Brazil and Chile. He explains the
theoretical variations he nds in these social formations by pointing to dierent facets in
the politico-economic histories of each country, and their particular experiences of
capitalist development and insertion into the world-market.
Te middle-sections of the book return to the core-concepts and claims at the heart of
neostructuralism and balance them against the historical record of Latin-American
capitalism over the last 30 years. Leiva makes a series of compelling arguments against the
foundational myths and acts of omission in ECLACs publications that Latin-
American countries can achieve the high road to globalisation (growth with equity) by
merely adopting the right set of policies; that, through open regionalism, it will become
clear that there are no contradictions between the development-needs of Latin-American
majorities and the rules integrated into the World Trade Organisation, the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the proliferating bilateral free-trade
agreements; and that the state is a neutral actor and thus state-promotion of consensus,
participatory governance, and social capital will ensure growth, equity, and harmonious
societies without having to transform existing class-structures. In challenging these myths,
he draws on a brief but often illuminating analysis of the deep structure of Latin-
American capitalism the strategies of transnational capital in the region, new forms of
unequal exchange, the relationship between nancialisation and accumulation under
neoliberalism, and the precarisation and informalisation of labour-capital relations.
In the last three chapters of Latin American Neostructuralism, Leiva returns, rst, to
Chile, the paradigmatic neostructuralist success-story, and, with subtlety and skill, unveils
the dark underbelly of continuity in the countrys economic policies, systems of inequality,
and exploitation between Augusto Pinochets reign of terror (197389) and the string of
Christian-Democratic/Socialist Concertacin-governments since. Second, he revisits in
more depth and detail the relationship between the neostructuralist approach to political
economy and the development-strategies of various left governments in Latin America
today. Finally, Leiva oers some reections on the future of neostructuralism in the region,
and the paths through which a restoration of radical political economy might be achieved
in its place. He tries to show how this new radical political economy, in turn, might help
to inform a more profound transformation of Latin-American politics and society by
inuencing the course of the most recent left-turn.
Structuralism, neoliberalism, and neostructuralism
An important part of Leivas project is to distinguish between structuralist, neoliberal, and
neostructuralist schools of thought within Latin-American development-economics. Te
most inuential gure in classical Latin-American structuralism was undoubtedly the
Argentine economist Ral Prebisch, who, in his 1949 monograph, Te Economic
Development of Latin America and its Principal Problems, rst conceived of the unequal
relationship between an industrialised centre and an agrarian, dependent periphery in the
world-economy. Within this international division of labour, countries that were
dependent, agricultural exporters would tend to experience declining terms of trade,
structural unemployment as a consequence of the limits to growth in traditional export-
sectors and subsequent non-absorption of dispossessed peasant-labour, and trade-
imbalances as a result of excessive importation of industrial goods and export of only raw
agricultural and mineral-goods. Prebisch headed Argentinas rst central bank between
1935 and 1943 and was widely recognised for his expertise in Keynesian economics by the
1940s, but his inuence in Latin-American development-economics really came to the
fore during his time as executive secretary of ECLAC between 1949 and 1963, and then
rst secretary-general of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development
(UNCTAD) between 1964 and 1969.
11
ECLAC as an institution became the established heavyweight in Latin-American
economic research in the 1950s and 1960s, and generated decisive policy-advice for key
gures in the regions national banks and nance ministries over these decades. ECLAC-
institutions in Chile and aliated institutions elsewhere in Latin America developed
educational programmes on structuralist thought through which they trained and
indoctrinated middle-ranking Latin American personnel in central banks, development
and nance ministries, and university faculties. By the 1960s, a large number of famous
structuralist economists, sociologists, and political scientists taught alongside the likes of
Prebisch in these programmes. Te teachers included Anbal Pinto, Jorge Ahumada,
Antonio Barros de Castro, Maria da Conceio, Carlos Lessa, Leopoldo Sols, Osvaldo
Sunkel, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Torcuato di Tella, Rodolfo Stavenhagen, Aldo
Solari, and Francisco Weort, among others.
12
While the structuralists hardly created ISI,
they did play an essential part in legitimising existing ISI development-programmes, and
providing research, analysis, and a theoretical framework for pushing the model further
and consolidating it throughout Latin America. US-imperialism, for its part, tried to
prevent the creation of ECLAC and attempted to discredit the institution once it was
established, fearing structuralist doctrine might radicalise and promote an acceleration of
state-owned enterprises, provide subsidies for domestic as against foreign capital, and
advocate an ever-larger sphere of state-planning within the economy. While American
foreign-aairs ocials opposed ECLAC, they enthusiastically promoted ISI and the
opportunities it provided US-multinationals to leap tari-walls and build protected plants
oriented toward growing domestic markets.
13
Structuralism, correctly constrained, in other
words, congealed nicely with American capitals objectives in the region.
11. Love 2005, p. 101.
12. Love 2005, pp. 11618.
13. Coatsworth 2005, pp. 1323. See also Maxeld and Nolt 1990 on US-sponsorship of
ISI in this period. A wave of nationalization in the 1960s and early 1970s led to state control
of the strategic sectors of the economy across many countries in Latin America, Petras and
Veltmeyer point out. In some cases imperial rms were generously compensated and many
found lucrative new investments. Tari barriers fostered national industrialization but did not
prevent multinational corporations (TNCs) from setting up branch plants. However, the
TNCs generally had to abide with legislation relating to content, employment of nationals, and
foreign exchange requirements. Te TNCs direct investments and their repatriation of prots
were also restricted, forcing them to resort to subterfuges such as transfer pricing so as to have
prots surface in less restrictive economies. Under the national-populist rgimes of this period,
TNCs were able to make substantial prots on invested foreign capital and operations.
However, in the wake of the Cuban revolution, new and more radical measures were on the
agenda of many governments, creating conditions for political reaction. A new class of wealthy
business operators and bankers chafed at the labor legislation and the controls placed on their
capital, as well as at measures designed to redistribute productive resources such as land. Tis
class turned towards both the armed forces and the TNCs for support in breaking the populist
alliance and to secure greater overseas market shares, nancing for ventures and access to new
Te hegemony structuralism enjoyed within Latin-American economic thought and
policy, and the legitimacy ECLAC achieved as an agenda-setting institution, suered
massive blows with the uneven geographical expansion of neoliberalism on a world-scale
beginning in the mid-1970s. At the international level, neoliberalism advanced as a
political project of the ruling classes in the advanced-capitalist countries especially in the
US to create or restore capitalist class-power in all corners of the globe in response to the
crisis of embedded liberalism in the late 1960s, the decline in protability and the growth
of stagation by the 1970s, and the rise of leftist political threats to capital in the shape of
radical popular struggles, labour-movements, and peasant-insurgencies across large parts
of the world during that period.
14
Te debt-crisis of the 1980s opened up new imperial
opportunities to take advantage of the leverage over Tird-World countries, including
most of Latin America. Te US-state, and, to a lesser but important degree, other core-
imperialist powers, utilised their control of the strategic international nancial institu-
tions commercial banks, the multilateral lending institutions such as the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, and various regional banks to push through
structural-adjustment programmes (SAPs) in a vast number of countries.
15
SAPs, which
were often imposed by IMF- and World-Bank conditionality, typically included demands
for Tird-World countries to commit to scal austerity with minimal to zero decits, cut-
backs in spending for social services and subsidies for food and other basic necessities,
reform of the tax-system, liberalisation of nancial markets, unication of exchange-rates,
liberalisation of trade, elimination of barriers to foreign-direct investment (FDI),
deregulation of industry, and strengthening of guarantees of private-property rights.
16
Against this international backdrop, virtually all Latin-American countries between the
mid-1970s and the mid-1990s engaged more or less rapidly in the fundamental restructuring
of their economies along the lines of the Washington-Consensus, moving decisively
from ISI to EOD development-programmes. In the 1980s, this transition in
economics was accompanied by a shift away from authoritarian rgimes toward highly
constricted electoral democracies. But it is important to stress that neoliberalism was born
out of Latin-American state-terror backed by American imperial might over the
preceding decades. Tese systematic bloodbaths were necessary for the eective destruction
of the political Left, labour-unions, and other popular class-organisations. Te mass-
movements, and revolutionary and populist projects, that had proliferated throughout
large sections of the region since the end of the Second World-War needed to be quite
denitively expunged from the scene if neoliberalism was to take hold.
17
technology. Tus was formed the social base for the counter-reform politics and the ascendancy
of U.S. imperialism that characterised Latin American capitalism over the next two decades
(Petras and Veltmeyer 2001, pp. 767). US foreign-policy makers were right to be concerned
about the possibility of radicalisation within various currents of structuralism, as became clear
with the migration of various former structuralists to the dependency-school in the late 1960s
and early 1970s. Tere is no room here to deal with dependency-theory. Suce it to say that the
radical wing of dependency advocated a version of socialist revolution.
14. See Harvey 2003 and 2005; Albo 2007; Saad-Filho 2005; Gowan 1999.
15. See, among others, Soederberg 2004 and 2006; Green 1999.
16. See Williamson 1993.
17. Grandin 2005, p. 14.
Already by the late 1980s, however, the orthodox theory and practice of neoliberalism
was called increasingly into question in Latin America. Social polarisation and economic
and social crises stood visibly in the way of realising the harmonious society projected
by neoclassical economic theory. Tis trend persisted until the explosion of protests
and realignment of class-forces by the end of the 1990s. It was out of the emergent
contradictions of the late 1980s that neostructuralism was born in its incipient form,
through ECLACs publication of Changing Production Patterns with Social Equity, under
the leadership of Fernando Fajnzylber.
18
Given that the basis of a new and harmonious
society did not emerge spontaneously from neoliberal structural adjustment, the
neoliberal project responded to destabilising internal contradictions and social conicts
by expanding the scope of its institutional restructuring without abandoning its essential
emphasis on the rationality of the market as the foremost organizing principle of
social life.
19
In the course of the next decade, neostructuralism moved from the margins to the
centre of political inuence in the region by challenging certain assumptions of the
market-dogmatism characteristic of orthodox neoliberalism, while rebuking simultaneously
the core-presuppositions of classical structuralism. Neostructuralists sought to renew
ECLACs conceptual apparatus by erasing the stigma of association with ISI, and
formulate a new set of alternative foundational ideas and action-oriented propositions
seemingly capable of addressing the problems faced by Latin American countries in the
era of globalization (p. 1). If, in the eyes of the most orthodox-neoliberal pundits, ECLAC
of the 1990s remained incompletely redeemed from the legacy of ISI, the institutions
postulations on Latin-American political economy were warmly embraced by an ever-
increasing number of state-managers and economic policy-lites. Post-Pinochet, Chile
became the paradigmatic poster-child of neostructuralism throughout the 1990s.
20

Neostructuralism was also deeply inuential in the Buenos-Aires Consensus that came out
of a June 1999 convention of the Socialist International, and eventually became the model
of political economy for Lulas Brazil, Kirchners Argentina, and Vsquezs Uruguay.
Less well known has been the way in which the key tenets of neostructuralism also
extended into the rst major multi-year development programmes of left governments
such as Hugo Chvezs in Venezuela and Evo Moraless in Bolivia. In the Venezuelan case,
Chvez has been famously inuenced by neostructuralist economist Osvaldo Sunkel,
whose edited volume, Development from Within: Toward a Neostructuralist Approach for
Latin America, had a profound impact on the future presidents outlook as he read it in a
jail-cell in the 1990s, and Chvez continues to call for the text to be read in schools,
ministries, and elsewhere.
21
Neostructuralist principles impacted heavily upon the
countrys National Plan of Development for 20017, which called for the necessity of a
small social economy to complement rather than replace the private sector, the
18. ECLAC 1990.
19. Taylor 2009, p. 23.
20. See Taylor 2006.
21. Although, these days, Chvez also calls for Venezuelans to read Marxists such as Istvn
Mszros.
transformation of informal workers into small managers through training and micro-
credit, and a focus on endogenous development, among other things.
22
Te areas of conceptual innovation at the heart of neostructuralism revolve around
systemic competitiveness, technical progress, proactive labour-exibility, and virtuous
circles. In an eort to distinguish itself from orthodox neoliberalism, neostructuralism in
Latin America rejects the notion that markets and competition are the exclusive channels
for social and economic interaction, and replace the basic neoclassical notion of
comparative advantage with systemic competitiveness. By this, neostructuralists essentially
mean that what compete[s] in the world market [are] not commodities per se but entire
social systems (p. 4). While granting that the market will remain the central organising
force in society, neostructuralists stress that the competitiveness of the entire system
depends upon eective and thoroughgoing state-intervention in infrastructure (technology,
energy, transport), education, nance, labour-management relations, and the general
relationships between public and private spheres, in a way that orthodox-neoliberal theory
cannot grasp (p. 4). Competitiveness on the international market, for neostructuralists,
depends in the long term on a broad range of structural factors, such as rates of
investment, adequate institutions for education, research, and development, which [are]
systematically ignored by neoliberal formulations (p. 6).
In order to achieve systemic competitiveness, according to neostructuralism, a
reconguration of state-theory is necessary. Whereas orthodox neoliberals in the 1970s
and 1980s saw the states basic function as lubricating the dynamism of the market
through the protection of property-rights, contract-enforcement, information-collection,
and strictly delimited social provision for the destitute, neostructuralism assigns the state
an important auxiliary role in the search for international competitiveness, blending
economic policy on various levels, with political intervention to construct a broad social
consensus (pp. 910). Te state is to stimulate and enhance market-based initiatives,
selectively intervene in productive sectors of the economy, and supplement the invisible
hand of the market with non-market forms of social, political, and economic co-ordination.
In the area of trade-policy, for example, neostructuralists provide a critique of part of
orthodox neoliberalisms uni-dimensional focus on tari-reduction. Tey ultimately agree
that taris and non-tari barriers to trade ought to be eliminated in an eort to expand
export-led development, but they also call for the adoption of transitory policies
selectively biased in favor of non traditional exports (p. 15). Latin-American
neostructuralism sees this sort of modest and temporary state-intervention as essential for
encouraging a larger share of manufactured and valued-added exports into a countrys
export-prole. A central component of the states role under this view is to build civil
society-state relationships, public-private partnerships, and an overall social, political, and
ideological consensus across social classes behind the drive for export-led capitalist
growth.
Technical progress refers to the neostructuralist claim from the early 1990s that genuine
gains in productivity can be achieved through the incorporation of technological advance
into the overarching goal of systemic competitiveness. Technological change will foment
productivity-gains and replace the spurious increases in productivity during the era of
orthodox neoliberalism, gained through articial devaluation and forced reduction in real
22. See Sunkel 1993 and Lebowitz 2006, pp. 903. On Bolivia, see Webber 2008.
wages (p. 6). Proactive labour-exibility pivots basically on the notion of more eectively
gaining workers consent and submission to the model of export-led capitalist
development. To this end, neostructuralism calls for a change in the character of the
Latin-American labour-movement. Government-policies must focus on encouraging the
labour-movement to become a stakeholder in systemic competitiveness, and,
simultaneously, to abandon old-fashioned orientations toward class-struggle and conict-
based traditions. Such antiquated forms of labour-state relations will be exchanged for
cross-class co-operation, negotiation and consensus-building (p. 11).
Neostructuralists certainly agree with orthodox neoliberals on the necessity of
maintaining and even expanding labour-exibility, but they emphasise also the need to
provide training and new skills to the labor force so as to facilitate its adaptability in the
productive process (p. 11). Te state is supposed to create policies that forge consensus
between the public and private sector, and workers and employers organisations, in order
to advance these aims. Two of the most deleterious aspects of orthodox-neoliberal labour-
exibility wage-exibility and subcontracting will ostensibly be replaced through the
implementation of a vague programme of so-called functional exibility (p. 12).
Systemic competitiveness, technical progress, and proactive labour-exibility come
together in the neostructuralist conceptualisation of self-reinforcing virtuous circles a
sequence of mutually supportive feedback loops linking international competitiveness,
social equity, and political legitimacy (p. 12). Whereas it was increasingly clear, by the
early twenty-rst century, that orthodox neoliberalism was steadily encountering problems
of social and political polarisation and ideological legitimacy, neostructuralism promised a
synergistic relationship between international competitiveness, greater social integration,
and increased democratic political stability (pp. 1213). Social dialogue and consensus
are viewed as necessary for systemic competitiveness, and the way to achieve them,
according to neostructuralists, is through democratic, consensus-building institutions and
rapid export-led growth. Rising living standards are to work in tandem with consensus-
building state-institutions to stem the tide of social conict and political instability, and
to help workers and managers see that they now . . . share in the common interest of
ensuring entrepreneurial success in the never ending race for international competitiveness
(p. 14). Electoral democracy, internationally-competitive export-capitalism driven by
the market but supplemented by the state workers rising living standards, capitalists
prots, social consensus, and political stability are to fuse together in organic unison. For
Latin-American neostructuralism, capitalist development properly regulated by the
state is not characterised by conict-ridden, uneven, zero-sum, and crisis-laden scenarios,
but, rather, by virtuous circles in which everyone wins, eventually.
Hollowing out classical structuralism
Te central-theoretical contribution Leiva makes in this book is his demonstration of
exactly how, and to what a profound extent, Latin-American neostructuralism as a
paradigm has sanitised ECLACs classical conceptualisations of Latin-American political
economy by expunging conict and power-relations from its analytical and policy-
framework. Tis accounts, on the one hand, for neostructuralisms broad appeal. Centre-
left governments have utilised the basic presuppositions of Latin-American
neostructuralism to distance themselves rhetorically from orthodox neoliberalism, while
continuing to promise a high road to capitalist globalisation in which a rising tide will lift
all boats, and conict, crisis, and instability will be avoided.
On the other hand, the absence of conict and power-relations from Latin-American
neostructuralist theory has simultaneously exposed it to devastating internal
contradictions, as the chasm between its descriptions of Latin-American capitalism, and
the reality of capitalist development in the region has become increasingly profound and
dicult to ignore. Latin-American neostructuralism has abandoned the pre-eminent
concern of classical structuralists namely a focus on how economic surplus is produced,
appropriated, and distributed within a single, world capitalist economy (p. xxvii). As a
consequence, the school of thought becomes analytically impotent in adequately explicating
the scope of the qualitative transformations experienced by Latin American capitalism over the
last decade (p. xxvii). It fails to detect transnationalising tendencies in economic, social,
and political structures, the informalisation of capital-labour relations, and accelerating
nancialisation.
Leiva convincingly illustrates how neostructuralist public policy has actually deepened
and extended the processes introduced by orthodox neoliberals in the 1970s and 1980s.
By setting aside analytical categories attentive to extant power-relations, ostensibly
progressive policies aimed at international competitiveness and participatory governance,
led to the politico-economic consolidation, legitimization, and furtherance of the process of
capitalist restructuring initially set in motion by neoliberal ideas and policies (p. xxvii).
If considered seriously, Leivas interrogation of the concept of open regionalism should
generate considerable malaise in the ranks of neostructuralist adherents. Open regionalism,
for the latter group, denes the dual strategy of unilaterally liberalising trade and nancial
transactions while negotiating formal bilateral and regional free-trade agreements where
possible. It means explicit support for wide-scale neoliberal regional projects such as
NAFTA (between the US, Canada, and Mexico), and the Free Trade Area of the Americas
(FTAA), initially envisioned by the US-state to extend throughout the Americas, from
northern Canada to southern Argentinas Tierra del Fuego with the exception of Cuba.
Open regionalism conceives of transnational corporations (TNCs) as the principal
agents of change and progressive-capitalist development within Latin America, and
therefore encourages the construction of legal, social, political and economic environments
that will be attractive to foreign capital. TNCs, on this view, play the benevolent role of
supplying technology and capital, spurring appropriate domestic capitalist competition,
and generally revitalising domestic Latin-American economies and societies (p. 121).
Mirroring trends in institutional economics elsewhere, Latin-American neostructuralists
stress that the high road to globalisation for poor countries involves principally subjective
factors such as committed and eective leadership and getting the policies right, rather than
relatively enduring objective structural variables such as the deeply embedded power-
relations at the core of the world-economy and the particularities of the expansion of each
countrys export-sector within the international division of labour over historical time, or
the changed characteristics of the world-market since the East-Asian newly industrialised
countries (NICs) charted this path of rapid late-capitalist development in the context of the
Cold War and the Bretton-Woods economic system (p. 95).
Trough careful argumentation, Leiva illustrates how this approach, by excluding
history, power-relations, and changes in the structure of global capitalism from its
analytical lens, cannot fully grasp the changes to Latin-American states, class-structures,
and the dynamics of class-formation wrought by thirty years of neoliberalism, and
precisely what these changes imply for development-theory. Just as crucially,
neostructuralisms embrace of open regionalism ignores the actually existing process of
transnationalization occurring in Latin America, including the vulnerability of export
sector workers due to low wages and sweatshop conditions, capital mobility, and declining
output/employment elasticity, among other factors (pp. 978). Te enthusiastic embrace
of TNCs as agents of progress, furthermore, ignores, the magnitude reached by the
transfer of surplus in the form of remitted prots and interest payments abroad, the limits
that current transnationalization imposes upon countries for moving onto the highroad
of globalization, and the new forms of surplus extraction and transfer embedded in
transnationalized production and distribution value chains (p. 121).
Support for bilateral free-trade agreements between Latin-American countries and the
US and other core-imperial powers, as well as for NAFTA and the FTAA, also openly pits
neostructuralists against incipient forms and projects of anti-imperialist Latin-American
integration most notably, the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), driven
mainly by Venezuela, Cuba, and Bolivia, but supported by a number of other Latin-
American countries.
23
Leiva nicely summarises neostructuralisms refusal to confront any
of the underlying processes and contradictions inherent to the operations of capitalism at
a global scale and the implications of capitalist expansion and reproduction in Latin
America in the neoliberal age. Te implicit orientation of ECLAC toward capitalist-led
regional-integration models, rather than alternative modes of integration rooted in the
priorities and needs of the regions peoples, has preempted neostructuralism from addressing
how the current path of globalization leads to dispossession and commoditization of ever
growing aspects of social life (p. 101).
Parallel to these general characterisations and observations regarding neostructuralism as
a theory and practice in the Latin-American context, Leiva repeatedly returns
throughout the text to focused examinations of the Chilean case. Here, we nd various
analytical gems that fundamentally call into question the frequent celebratory claims made
by neoliberal and neostructuralist economists alike that regard Chile as a development-
model the Latin-American tiger to be emulated by other Tird-World countries.
Leiva reveals how Chiles working class is one of the most super-exploited in the hemisphere,
a condition initially introduced by neoliberalism and state terrorism under Pinochet
(197389), but maintained and exacerbated by the center-left, neostructuralist-inspired,
civilian coalition in oce from 1990 to the present (p. 193). He goes to great lengths to
expose how exible labour-markets have become a structural necessity to the export-
oriented development-strategy associated with neostructuralism in the country, and how
this has steadily increased the level of precarious employment, heightening the lack of
protection and vulnerability for a growing number of male and female workers (p. 193).
Leiva shows how inequality has persisted, and even deepened, alongside bouts of
macroeconomic growth. As an explanation of these trends, he points to the absence of
policies that target and redirect the use of social surplus, an export model whose
protability depends on deepening labor exibility and the precariousness of workers, and
the narrowed parameters for policy permitted by the source of capitalist prots under the
current transnationalised and nancialized export-oriented economy (p. 197).
23. See, for example, Kellogg 2007.
As the arguments throughout Latin American Neostructuralism would suggest, the
disconnection between neostructuralist ideology and the material evolution of capitalism
on Chilean soil is beginning to generate tangible social contradictions and renewed class-
struggle from below. Between the end of April and mid-June 2006, radical high-school
student-protests against the deterioration of public education erupted in several cities.
Tese were violently repressed by police, stoking further radicalisation and the wider
participation of education-workers and working-class parents throughout dierent parts
of the country. Tese were the biggest demonstrations in the country since the popular
struggles for democracy in the Pinochet-era.
24
Te student- and worker-agitation against the privatisation of education was indicative
of a spreading disgust with many of the basic continuities in Chiles social structure and
political economy between the time of Pinochet and Michelle Bachelet, the latest president
of the country, leader of the Concertacin-coalition, and head of the Socialist Party. Tese
demonstrations were followed in August and September of the same year by a successful
miners strike at Escondida, the worlds largest copper-mine, situated in the Atacama
desert of Chiles far north. Te battles in the mining zones then found their echo in May
2007 in the forest-industry of the south, where a militant worker in a timber-strike was
shot dead after he tried to drive a tractor through a police-barricade, stimulating wider
community-support for the forestry-workers and their martyr. Also in 2007, subcontracted
garbage-workers engaged in a successful strike in Santiago. It is worth noting that these
movements are illegal, and represent the rst important strikes in industrial sectors where
the workforce has been dispersed and fragmented through waves of subcontracting. Te
atomised, overworked, underpaid, and precarious labour-force in these sectors is
characteristic of the world of work more generally in Chile in the current period.
25
While missing an opportunity to delve very deeply into the dynamics of these diverse
elements of a new, and still incipient, militancy from below, Leiva is able to register their
basic potential signicance for neostructuralism as theory and praxis. After seventeen
years of a neostructuralist-inspired Concertacin coalition, Leiva suggests, the case of
Chile already foretells some of these nodal points around which such contradictions will
emerge (p. 187). He argues that new articulations of an autonomous civil society will
emerge as an antithesis to an institutionalized and hegemonic form of participation that
subordinate[s] civil society and the socio-emotional component of social relationships to
the requirements of globalisation and the capitalist prot rate (p. 187).
Leiva perceives in this expansion of social-movement struggle the strengthening
capacities of the popular classes for
building on their every day sociability and historical memory to defend their
rights and challenge capital and the state or the destruction of their social fabric,
grassroots dynamics, and leaderships through state-designed and NGO-enforced
social programs and civil society-state alliances. (p. 187.)
For Leiva, neostructuralism in Chile and elsewhere will continue to engender
24. See Seplveda 2006.
25. Oriesco 2007, pp. 78.
struggles over whether the objectives of strengthening social solidarity should be
to increase the power of the dispossessed and exploited or to provide an
individualized and symbolic more than material sense of security so that citizens
do not rebel against a daily existence made more precarious by the expansion of
capitalism. (p. 187.)
Te recent activities of the students, timber-workers, copper-miners, and garbage-collectors
are meaningful signals of initial steps toward rebuilding rebellion against the expansion of
capitalism. Ultimately, Leiva contends, the question is what purposes are being served by
increasing coordination among the state, markets, and existing networks as neostructuralism
advocates. Is it to raise prots and the self-expansion of capital, or is it to increase the
satisfaction of human needs and human dignity? (p. 187).
A return to structuralism and progressive capitalism?
A number of comparatively minor analytical weaknesses in Latin American Neostructuralism
diminish some of the texts basically persuasive central claims and theoretical logic around
the theme of neostructuralism. To begin, Leiva adopts uncritically several of the conceptual
categories of the French regulation-school without engaging with their most serious
Marxist critics. For example, almost twenty years ago, Robert Brenner and Mark Glick
argued persuasively that regulation-theory suers from a failure to take adequately into
account the broader system of capitalist social-property relations that forms the backdrop
to their succession of institutionally dened phases.
26
In addition to stressing the
importance of the broad framework of social-property relations, and especially inter-
capitalist competition, Brenner and Glick also successfully take regulationists to task for
their neglect of the disciplining impact of the world-economy on local, regional, and
national institutional congurations, or modes of regulation. Tey point to the shared
participation of every part of the capitalist world if not to the same degree in the
expansion before World-War I, the interwar-depression, the post-World-War II boom, and
the structural crisis since the late 1960s. Despite the heterogeneous modes of regulation
of its constituent parts, Brenner and Glick contend,
the world economy as a whole [since at least 1900] has possessed a certain
homogeneity, indeed unity, in terms of its succession of phases of development.
Te world economy has, it seems, been able to impose its general logic, if not to
precisely the same extent, on all of its component elements, despite their very
particular modes of regulation.
27
Tere has also been a distinctive drift within regulation-theory from an early consistency
with core-Marxist insights into the dynamics of capitalism, toward an increasingly
Keynesian bent, particularly since the early 1980s in the French case, which tends to
dierentiate between good and bad varieties of capitalism, and sees a compromise
between capital and labour as both tenable and desirable.
28
Leiva seems unaware of this
26. Brenner and Glick 1991, p. 108.
28. Husson forthcoming.
trajectory and, within it, his own positioning. Te regulation-schools core-treatments of
the post-WWII boom in the United States celebrated to some degree the social-democratic
Rooseveltian compromise between labour and capital, and saw a return to such a
compromise as the necessary exit to the structural crisis since the late 1960s. Capitalists
would submit to wage-increases and elemental features of the welfare-state in pace with
and in exchange for productivity increases on the part of workers. Brenner and Glick show
how, apart from the question of its desirability, such a social-democratic compromise was
unviable because, capitalists, facing continuing pressure on their prots, could not, even
if they wished to, viably promise workers, in exchange for involvement, secure employment
and enriched jobs, or even a share of the returns from productivity growth.
29
Tey
correctly point out that
for workers further to involve themselves in the team concept is merely to tie
their fortunes ever more closely to their own rms, to set themselves ever more
directly against their fellow workers across the industry, and to undermine what
is left of their collective union power. If the crisis deepens, no amount of
goodwill on the part of their employers will save their jobs. And to the extent
they have involved themselves with their own companies, to that extent they
will destroy their own ability to defend their condition.
30
In some respects, Leivas actual employment of regulationist categories is rather understated
when he discusses structural changes in Latin-American capitalism and the theoretical and
political engagement with these changes by neostructuralist thinkers and institutions. Te
concepts are set up more as a frame for the discussion, often to have little subsequent
bearing on the treatment of the empirical matters at hand. Many of the negative
characteristics of the regulation-school therefore do not nd their full expression in Latin
American Neostructuralism, but the problem with theoretical clarity on these matters
persists.
Leivas relationship with classical structuralism at times closely mirrors contemporary
regulation-theorys relationship with Keynesianism an underlying longing for its
resurgence and concomitant return of related forms of regulated capitalism, whether it be
the ISI of Latin-American structuralism or the post-WWII welfare-state of Keynesianism
in advanced capitalist countries. While recognising some of the limitations of classical
structuralism, Leiva is not consistently willing to transcend them. Te classical Latin-
American structuralism of Prebisch and Furtado, Leiva argues, for example, has been
justly criticised for lacking a coherent analysis of the capitalist state, for underestimating
the role of class struggle in shaping economic development, or for not paying enough
attention to the production of surplus, but it did deal extensively, in Leivas view, with the
production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus, and at least had a much more
grounded understanding of the role that power played in socioeconomic development
than does neostructuralism (p. 33).
On the one hand, Leiva acknowledges that classical structuralism focused methodologically
on the sphere of circulation to the exclusion of production, and lacked any notion of
exploitation (pp. 2530). Nonetheless, he argues that by
locating the problems of development within the context of [a] single world
economy, Latin American development thinkers of the structuralist and
dependency schools were able to analyze trade, investment, and technology
patterns within a systemic perspective. Challenging mainstream approaches of
the time, they conceived development as a holistic process characterised by
profound inequalities rooted in the development of capitalism itself on a world
scale. (p. 28.)
Leivas partial defence of classical structuralism coincides with a certain nostalgia for the
ISI-period in Latin America, and the assumption about this epoch of a shared interest
between capitalists and labor unions in expanding the internal market, which for decades
served as the basis for the multiclass support for the national-developmentalist project
(p. 55). In this passage and others, Leiva implicitly invokes a set of three presuppositions
on the role of national capitalists in the Tird World, commonly held within various
currents of the Marxist tradition over the course of the twentieth century, but particularly
those of the Second and Tird Internationals: (1) that national capitalists have an interest
in rapid economic growth and the expansion of capitalist relations because the domestic
market is their source of prots, and that they therefore are crucial to the multiclass-drive
for national development; (2) that they will lead the drive against precapitalist social
relations because this is a necessary precondition for the expansion of capitalism; and that
(3) they will oppose foreign economic imperialism because they depend on the domestic
market, which, at the same time, distinguishes them from Tird-World domestic
compradors who, because of their imbrications with metropolitan capital, will align with
imperialism.
31
In the 1960s, Leiva contends that Latin-American capitalist-classes were stratied and
split as
dierent fractions supported two very dierent and opposing strategies for
overcoming the crisis of the previous ISI model. One fraction wavered toward
supporting national developmentalist and income redistribution measures
defended by progressive coalitions. Te other supported a programme of
liberalisation, deregulation, and privatisation that tended to further concentrate
income and expand luxury consumption. (p. 109.)
As we will see in a moment, in our discussion of Bolivia and Venezuela, Leiva appears intent
to hold onto the possibility of a progressive fraction of the domestic-capitalist class, the
national capitalists, realigning itself with a renewed developmentalism that might transform
the status quo and successfully challenge neoliberalism. His brief discussion of the East-
Asian tigers similarly corresponds to such ideas, and closely echoes the consensus-story told
by state-institutionalist economists and sociologists, stressing a state with a level of
31. Chibber 2004, pp. 2278.
autonomy that enabled it to discipline both capital and labor and a domestic entrepreneurial
class willing to assume risks, invest productively, and innovate (p. 95).
Looking back today from the ruins of the neoliberal revolution, Vivek Chibber
points out,
it is understandable that there may be a certain nostalgia toward the
developmentalist era, and toward that storied class, the national bourgeoisie. Te
intervening years seem to have left us with a sturdy mythology about the period,
one in which states had the power and the vision to navigate a path to
autonomous development, in which the business class hitched its wagon to the
national project, and labour had a place at the bargaining table.
32
But the political coalitions that made the developmentalist project possible, in fact
contributed to the consistent ability of national bourgeoisies to inhibit the projection of
state-power in the form of economic planning, and the equally consistent subordination,
repression, and demobilisation of labour. Risks were socialised and prots privatised on an
enormous scale, contradictions that eventually contributed to the implosion of ISI. Rather
than states disciplining capital by directing domestic private investments into economic
sectors with high social returns, capital consistently disciplined the state, directing
investments and state-subsidies into areas of enormous prots and low social return.
33
As Chibber points out,
whereas [state] planners saw ISI and industrial policy as two sides of the same
coin, for capitalists, ISI generated an incentive to reject the discipline of industrial
policy. Tose institutions intended to further the subsidisation process were
supported by capital; but dimensions of state-building aimed at enabling
planners to monitor and regulate rms investment decisions were stoutly
resisted. At the surface level, the conict between the national bourgeoisie and
the economic planners was not always apparent. It was common to nd
industrialists joining the chorus calling for planning, economic management,
and the like. But what they meant by this was a process in which public monies
were put at their disposal, and at their behest. To them planning meant the
socialisation of risk, while leaving the private appropriation of prot intact.
34
Additionally, as a condition for the national bourgeoisies purported support for the
developmentalist project of the nation, state-managers participated in the concerted
emasculation of labour-movements. At the same time, the declining power of labour was
often amplied by labours own seduction by the rhetoric of national development and
planning. Too often, unions reposed an altogether unwarranted condence in the states
ability to protect their interests, to discipline the capitalist class, and to manage class
conict through an adroit manipulation of plan priorities.
35
32. Chibber 2004, p. 242.
33. Chibber 2004, p. 229.
34. Chibber 2004, p. 233.
35. Chibber 2004, p. 243.
Tere is no reason to believe that, in todays context, a Latin-American reincarnation of
a necessary progressive stage of capitalism prior to a transition to socialism based on a
multiclass-coalition with an emphasis on renewing national-bourgeois capacities will
end very dierently than the failures of ISI in the past. However compelling the ISI-model
appears when juxtaposed to neoliberalism, the myths of the national bourgeoisie ought to
be decisively countered both within Marxist theory and socialist praxis.
Te tendencies toward nostalgic relapse in Leivas text an orientation toward
multiclass-developmentalist coalitions, a renewal of ISI-objectives, and an insuciently
critical theoretical evaluation of classical structuralism helps to explain Leivas
disappointing treatment of Bolivia and Venezuela under Evo Morales and Hugo Chvez
toward the end of the book. Apart from providing only the most cursory overview of
economic trends in the two countries, based on a limited range of sources, Leiva accepts
uncritically Heinz Dieterichs dictum that Tere are no objective conditions for socialism
at present. Tey must be developed in accordance with democratic developmentalism
(p. 228). And, to the extent that an authentically socialist project exists today in Latin
America, it is only a politically underdeveloped and latent alternative, which has not
yet shown itself capable of becoming more than just the aspiration of small political
groupings, movements, and radical intellectuals (p. 225).
With the possibility of socialism thus set aside for the moment, it is much easier to
celebrate quite uncritically Venezuelas twenty-rst century version, which Leiva
acknowledges operates within a capitalist economy, without aiming to end private
ownership of the means of production, the prot motive, or capitalist competition (p. 228).
Similarly, Bolivias Andean-Amazonian capitalism under the Morales administration is
praised as a formulation for an alternative to the present order . . . based . . . on strengthening
the capacity of the state to capture via the tax system part of the nations economic surplus
and redirect it toward micro and small producers in rural areas and cities (p. 228). Tough
not oriented toward eliminating capitalist competition as some would expect, Leiva asserts,
the newly emerging alternatives [in Venezuela and Bolivia] actively and methodically seek
to constrain it within certain boundaries so that society and equity may thrive (p. 231).
However, today as before, the socialist alternative is not a Keynesian programme which
seeks merely to allay the worst manifestations of market-trends. It is, rather, a platform to
overcome the exploitation and inequality inherent in capitalism, as the Argentine
economist Claudio Katz has recently argued. It seeks to abolish poverty and
unemployment, eradicate environmental disasters, and put an end to the nightmares of
war and the nancial cataclysms that enrich a miniscule percentage of millionaires at the
expense of millions of individuals.
36
Te comparatively low level of productive forces and
material resources available to most Latin-American countries has led some to argue that a
progressive stage of capitalism is required prior to a transition to socialism, as the
quotation from Heinz Dieterich attests. Leiva adopts this position as his own, and
implicitly relegates an immediate strategic path toward socialism, however attractive in
theory, to the small, insular circles of utopian dreamers. But currently it is evident that
the impediments to developing a competitive capitalist system in countries such as
Bolivia, Katz reminds us, are at least as great as the obstacles to initiating socialist
transformations. One need merely imagine the concessions that the large foreign
36. Katz 2007, p. 26.
corporations would demand for participation in their project, and the conicts that these
commitments would generate with the popular majorities.
37
Such a transition will never
last in an isolated peripheral country, or even bloc of such countries, in competition with
the imperialist powers who have so long asserted control over the world-market. Terefore,
the socialist endeavour urgently demands building toward a continuous sequence of
processes that undermine global capitalism, eventually on a world-scale. Leivas periodic
retrogression into some of the myths of classical structuralism and the possibility of a
progressive capitalism eectively removes this strategic orientation from the horizons of
the socialist project in Latin America today.
Finally, there is the issue of neoliberalism. Leiva denes it in a tightly restricted sense of
denoting a particular set of ideas and policies (p. xxxv). Te more encompassing system
that is commonly associated with the term neoliberalism, the new economic model
that replaced ISI in most countries in the region, is referred to in the text as an export-
oriented regime of accumulation (p. xxxv). With this distinction in hand, Leiva is able, on
a general level, to contend that with the change in the specic set of ideas and policies
associated with the early Washington-Consensus, to those of neostructuralism, Latin
America has undergone a post-neoliberal turn without having altered its export-oriented
regime of accumulation (p. xvii). Neostructuralism is ideationally distinct from
neoliberalism, and has its own set of policy-strategies, but, ultimately, supports the existing
rgime of accumulation. Dening neoliberalism exclusively along the lines of discourse
and tactics, or ideas and policies, makes for sometimes confusing and even contradictory
claims as Leivas argument progresses. For example, most of chapter one carefully sets outs
the conceptual innovations of neostructuralism vis--vis orthodox neoliberalism. And yet,
in Chapter Eight, we encounter the following phrases:
Instead of an alternative to neoliberalism, [neostructuralism] should be seen as
playing a complementary role, making decisive contributions toward the
construction of capitalist hegemony by enabling the subordination of the extra-
economic realm to capitalist protability and abetting the expanding colonization
of the public sphere by the rationality of transnational capital. Tus, instead of
seeing them as opposing paradigms, neoliberalism and neostructuralism should
be seen as part of a tag team. (p. 188.)
Te real insights that Leiva is providing here could be more lucidly captured, in my view,
if we conceptualise neoliberalism not as a set of ahistorical ideas and policy-prescriptions
associated with the Washington-Consensus, but, rather, as a historical, class-based
ideology that proposes all social, political, and ecological problems can be resolved through
more direct free-market exposure, which has become an increasingly structural aspect of
capitalism.
38
Neoliberal ideology is certainly undergirded by a purist theory of free-market
economic fundamentals, but this is best understood as a exible tool-kit used to justify
the class-project of restoring capitalist class-power.
39
Te extent to which actually existing
state-policy has adhered to these fundamentals has varied quite widely between dierent
37. Katz 2007, p. 28.
38. Marois 2005, pp. 1023.
39. See Harvey 2005.
Latin-American countries since the 1980s, but it is nonetheless legitimate to talk of a
pattern of neoliberal transformation that restructured the entire region, apart from Cuba
(which went through its own distinct special period of the 1990s).
As was suggested at the outset of this review, the neoliberal project in Latin America
and elsewhere has been a failure in terms of stimulating economic growth, but has had
wild success in terms of the restoration of capitalist class-power and the accelerated
redistribution of wealth from the popular classes to a tiny lite. Nonetheless, its
implementation has precipitated increasingly glaring social contradictions, and this has
led to a popular rejection of neoliberalism in many parts of the world, with Latin America
at the leading edge of this resistance. In Latin America, even the parties of the far Right
must rhetorically commit to overcoming the model if they are to stand any reasonable
chance in electoral competitions.
40
Neostructuralism, therefore, is best understood as a tactical response of the ruling
classes to adjust to the social contradictions generated by the implementation of the
neoliberalism in the region while preserving the underlying class-project and the successes
it has enjoyed. Neostructuralisms discursive innovations operate within the parameters of
actually-existing neoliberalism. Understanding this transition at the level of ideas in such a
manner, we are better able to appreciate the extent to which deep continuities in the
overarching structures of neoliberal political economy in most of the region persist, and
the true weight of the challenges still facing the Left.
41
Conclusion
Tis review-essay has sought to delineate the major contributions made by Fernando
Ignacio Leivas Latin American Neostructuralism to the renewal of radical-political economy
in Latin America, while, at the same time, documenting specic serious theoretical and
political shortcomings. Te book punctures many of the prevailing myths regarding
neostructuralism in mainstream social science by managing to weave together a close
analysis of over two decades of ECLAC, and ECLAC-related publications and documents,
and an examination of the historical and material changes to the structure of Latin-
American capitalism over the corresponding period. Tis is no small feat, and economists,
political scientists, sociologists, and activists on the Left will mine this resource for years
to come. Leiva has produced the best book on the subject available in English, in my
estimation. In spite of the real weaknesses in aspects of its political orientation which I
documented above, I heartily recommend this text to all those hoping to get a better grasp
on the complexity of the turn toward neostructuralism in Latin-American economic
thought over the course of closing decades of the twentieth century.
Reviewed by Jeery R. Webber
Queen Mary, University of London
jeeryrogerwebber@hotmail.com
40. See Robinson 2007 and 2008, and Sader 2008.
41. For an incisive discussion of neoliberalism and post-neoliberalism in Latin America,
see Taylor 2009.
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Impersonal Power. History and Teory of the Bourgeois State, Heide Gerstenberger, translated
by David Fernbach, Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill 2007.
Abstract
Heide Gerstenbergers book oers a comparative view of the origins and emergence of the
bourgeois state in England and France. Both, according to her, emerged out of ancien-rgime
type structures which were themselves distinct from feudalism. Whilst recognising the value of
Gerstenbergers attempt to avoid economic reductionism when explaining changing power-
structures, it is suggested that analytical tools such as class, mode of production and the
state, which she connes to capitalism, do have considerable utility for the analysis of
precapitalist rgimes. More importantly, it is suggested that her attempt to maintain that in
England, as in France, an ancien-rgime type society endured at least to the end of the eighteenth
century obscures the fundamentally divergent paths taken by the two countries. Tis is
compounded by her rejection of the idea of a French absolutism and an underestimation of the
extent to which power-structures in England were modied by the precocious development of
capitalism. Whilst suggesting that a bourgeois public space was able to develop in the interstices
of structures of the ancien rgime, Gersternberger fails to recognise the extent to which this had
transformed the English polity by the mid-seventeenth century.
Keywords
feudalism, ancien rgime, absolute monarchy, the state, gentry, nobility, bourgeoisie
Teoretical starting points
Heide Gerstenbergers comparative study of the origins and emergence of the bourgeois
state in France and England is an ambitious and provocative work; but, since its rst
appearance in 1990, it has found its main audience amongst political theorists with an
interest in the state, whilst making a negligible impact on historical studies. It was perhaps
not a propitious moment for the dissemination of a grand synthetic narrative covering a
thousand years or so framed by a Marxist problematic. A lengthy German text with a high
level of theoretical abstraction no doubt also contributed to its lack of impact on either
French or Anglo-Saxon historiography, despite Gerstenbergers reliance on both. Be that
as it may, I was unfortunately unaware of this work in 1995 when I was completing the
nal draft of State and Class in Ancien Rgime France, which, despite having a much shorter
time-frame, also sought to illuminate the evolution of the French state through a comparison
with England.
1
Tose who have read both works will discern a fair amount of common ground in our
attempts to establish explanations for changing methods of rule which are not simply
dependent on mechanisms of surplus-extraction, class-conict or the balance of class-
forces. For Gerstenberger, the structural dynamics of precapitalist rgimes owed from a
competition for power (pp. 22, 644) which may have had an eect on struggles for
appropriation of wealth but was not reducible to a contest for a larger share of the peasant-
economy (6045). Decisive for the possession of power were success in war, marriage,
inheritance, the favour of a powerful lord and other such factors. Her view that, during the
ancien rgime, generalised rule . . . was organised in the form of competition of clientele
1. Parker 1996.
groups (p. 449) has particularly close anities with my depiction of the forces which gave
rise to French absolutism: rstly, large-scale warfare and, secondly, the intense competition
for place, inuence and prot which was fuelled by the channelling of unprecedented
riches through the growing state apparatus.
2
Gerstenberger, however, goes much further in rejecting the utility of classical tools of
Marxist analysis for understanding precapitalist society and, indeed, for explaining the
ultimate triumph of capitalism. Te mode of production, productive forces and class
are eectively discarded for historical analysis (pp. 89, 21). Gerstenberger is even
uncomfortable with the notion that extra-economic coercion satisfactorily encapsulates
feudal mechanisms of appropriation (p. 4). Te structural separation of the political and
the economic is something that arrives only with the emergence of the bourgeois state and
should not be read back into earlier periods. Power under feudalism was personal as there
was not yet a sphere of rule that existed independently of concrete personal relationships
(p. 665) Te state did not exist (pp. 633, 639, 645, 410). Indeed, for the period after the
millennium, one should not really talk about society at all in the modern sense. Despite
the presence of mechanisms of integration such as the armed pursuit of power, the rule of
the Church and canon-law, those by which functional connections are reproduced in
modern societies were lacking (p. 634). It is even a mistake, according to Gerstenberger,
to apply the notion of separate spheres of state and society to the France of Louis XIV
(pp. 4078).
Te ancien rgime diered from the feudalism out of which it emerged by virtue of the
practice of generalised personal power (p. 653). Te key structural characteristic of the
developed ancien rgime was the integration of personal possession of rule [by which
Gerstenberger means lordly power D.P.] into the generalised monarchical power
(p. 410). Tis integration resulted in an estate-structure which characterises all society of
the ancien-rgime type (p. 76), one dominated by privileged orders whose rights and
obligations were structured and sanctioned by the generalisation of royal rule (p. 453).
However, given the unceasing competition for power, these developments did open up
the possibility of its depersonalisation and the creation of an adequate public space for the
emergence of bourgeois ideas (pp. 28, 229, 665). Tese were the essential preconditions
for the emergence of a bourgeois state, which is the ultimate product of the contradictions
of feudalism.
Gerstenberger claims that, in contrast to the anachronistic application of Marxist
analytical categories, her own overarching concept of the competition for power is based
on a developmental dynamic specic to the particular epoch (p. 632).
She more or less relates everything else to this: the constitution of privileged estates,
social position in general, patterns of judicial authority, the rights of guilds and even the
concentration of landholdings (pp. 151, 368, 410). Te argument is pushed to the point at
which it acquires a questionable circularity, replacing an economic reductionism with one
of a dierent sort (p. 21). So, although one may nd class-type relations in pre-bourgeois
rgimes, they were as a rule an element in relations of power; because the developmental
dynamic of both feudalism and the ancien rgime was determined in the rst place
by competition for power it is not analytically helpful to describe these as class societies
(pp. 21, 22).
2. Parker 1996, p. 267.
English and French ancien rgimes
Gerstenbergers conceptual framework makes better sense of French developments than
English ones. Te emergence of a scally and judicially privileged estate of nobility from
around 1400 and its integration into a system of generalised power is clear enough. Whilst
the formulation that the nobility of the ancien rgime arose from [my italics] generalised
personal power oers a somewhat partial causality, the description of the ancien rgime as
a conictual matrix of individual and generalised personal rule (p. 360) is very apt. Te
passages dealing with the structural blockages which precipitated the end of the French
ancien rgime are a very useful addition to the growing body of work which disputes the
revisionist tendency to reduce the outbreak of the Revolution to immediate and
contingent causes. Te discussion of the signicance of the destruction of the old venal
nancial administration, the parlements and other corporate bodies, followed by the
creation of a public service, oers a forceful reminder of what was revolutionary about the
Revolution.
Gerstenbergers view of French developments does, however, raise two major problems.
Te rst is the inference that the integration of the judicial and material powers of the
seigneurs into a generalised system makes it inappropriate to describe them as feudal. Tis
appears to be a further piece of circular reasoning rooted in the idea that, whereas
feudalism was based on direct relations of force, the ancien rgime involved objectied
social relations (pp. 647, 648). Te assertion that seigneurial appropriation changed its
character because it now existed in connection with generalised princely power suggests
that empirical observation has been jettisoned in favour of sociological theorising. Even
historians who propose (unconvincingly, in my view) that seigneurial and feudal
dependencies were distinct phenomena recognise that the former continued to function
as a primary mechanism for surplus extraction down to the Revolution. More critically for
Gerstenbergers argument, their integration into a generalised system of power was
severely limited in this particular regard, leaving virtually untouched the authority of
seigneurs in matters relating to their lands, revenues, perquisites and the obligations of
their dependents. Te tendency in the sixteenth century towards a theoretical separation
of ef and justice was arrested by a growing insistence on the patrimonial character of the
latter which was widely cherished as the most distinguishing feature or the most important
attribute of a ef.
3
Te second problem is bound up with Gerstenbergers reluctance to recognise Louis
XIVs political rgime as a state even though, from the sixteenth century, the term was
increasingly detached from the personalised notion of the estate of the King.
4
It is true
that the stability of the rgime depended hugely on the sacral aura and personal attributes
of the monarch. As I have said elsewhere, it was indeed constrained by the hierarchical and
patrimonial devolution of power and privilege so that neither the scal nor the legal
system was able to constitute a clearly dened public arena.
5
Te private and public
remained inextricably confused in a system as dependent on patrimonial as much as on
3. Parker 2003, esp. pp. 7684.
4. Louis XIV variously spoke of my state and the state and contemporary writers often used
the latter as a matter of course.
5. Parker 1996, p. 278.
bureaucratic mechanism for its operation. But it dees empirical common sense not to
describe the thousands of nanciers, tax-collectors and judges, venal though their oces
were, together with burgeoning central ministries, the intendants and royal armies as
constituting a state. As Benno Teschke has contended, to recognise the reality of precapitalist
states does not mean that they are not amenable to Marxist interpretation.
6
Gerstenbergers analysis of English developments raises even greater diculties. As she
acknowledges, it is only possible to view these through the prism of the ancien rgime by
using the concept at a high level of abstraction (p. 64). An extremely exible denition
of a privileged estate is also required to accommodate the limited formal privileges
acquired by the English landed classes. Indeed, Gerstenberger does not appear to oer a
succinct denition of privilege until she has moved on from England to France. It is then
said to be constituted of all those forms of material and symbolic privileging extremely
varied in their particulars that the generalised power guaranteed (p. 360). Privileges are
subsequently described as opportunities for the provision and enrichment that were
sanctioned by power, rights that represented a particular kind of private property. Tis
amounted to a form of appropriation which was neither feudal nor capitalist, sanctioning
the power of the lords especially in the form of seigneurial and church-rule (p. 453).
Gerstenberger dates the formation of the ancien rgime in England, where, in contrast to
France, a generalised monarchical power already existed, from the constitution of two
distinct noble estates in the fourteenth century. Te rst was the result of the successful
struggle by the peerage, particularly for the right to be called to parliaments and to act as
judges (pp. 76105, 601). Te second noble estate was created by the remaining members
of the knightly class, who consolidated their control of local oce as sheris and Justices
of the Peace and over the acquisition of gentry-status.
Te elasticity of these denitions allows Gerstenberger to extend the English ancien
rgime well into the nineteenth century. She is very reluctant to give it a denitive burial,
noting that the arrival of bourgeois society and state has variously been ascribed to 1649,
1688, 1832 and sometimes to the third round of electoral reform of 18845 (p. 270).
Te formation of a public administration in which the oce became more important than
the oce-holder awaited the mid-nineteenth century, an argument illustrated by reference
to the Poor Law Reforms of 1834 (p. 288), and the slow pace of change in the army and
navy (pp. 2824).
Tere is an obvious contrast between the abrupt demise of the French nobility in 1793
(despite the odd Count who can still be found maintaining an ancestral chteau or two)
and the slow decline of the English aristocracy. Yet, as Gerstenberger observes, the fact that
nobility and hereditary membership of the House of Lords lasted until the twentieth
century can hardly be used to deny that bourgeois society had long arrived or to sustain the
claim that twentieth-century Britain was ruled by an ancien-rgime style estate. Te English
form of bourgeois revolution she concludes is the transformation of members of the ruling
estates of the ancien rgime into privileged members of interest groups in bourgeois society,
a process underway in the eighteenth century but easily disguised by the phenomena of
oligarchy, deference and the religious establishment (p. 248). Indeed, the stability of the
ancien rgime in the eighteenth century is quite astonishing (p. 253). Tis is explained by
6. Teschke 2003, p. 146. Curiously, Teschke reverts to Gerstenbergers preferred formulation
of generalised personal domination in his discussion of French absolutism, see p. 169.
the establishment, in the aftermath of the Restoration, of the institutional autonomy of
local government run by Justices of the Peace, who governed almost without control, thus
creating an environment in which the rise of the middle classes could be absorbed without
strain. Only with the introduction of a property-qualication for JPs in 1732 and the
abandonment of rank-order among the members of the county-bench in 1753 did the state
end its support for the estate character of the JPs rule. An institution which had hitherto
permitted ascent into the nobility now developed into one through which the dissolution
of estate-society could be facilitated (pp. 2567) A major part of the bourgeois revolution
was achieved in England by the changing social composition of the Commissions of the
Peace (p. 623).
Gentry, peasants and the transition to capitalism
What, then, had been achieved by the seventeenth-century revolutions? No more,
apparently, than a partial depersonalisation of the Crown (p. 227). Although the gentry
were the prime beneciaries of the seventeenth-century revolutions, they were not the
bearers of a bourgeois revolution directed against the monarchy and feudalism. Tey are
best considered as a lesser nobility whose estate-rule was consequently consolidated (pp.
2217, 237, 605). In any event, the emancipation of the public from the context of
personal rule does not strand in any causal connection with the implementing of capitalist
forms of production and circulation (p. 619)
Tese sweeping claims are fraught with diculties. Te rst, as John Cannon has
observed, is that the gentry were not normally thought of as nobles and it is confusing to
pretend they were.
7
Te gentry had no formal ranks and no formal privileges, and movement
in and out of it was extremely uid. Gerstenberger knows this and the result is a marked
degree of inconsistency. Having declared that, under the ancien rgime, social positions
were constituted by power to a more or less high degree (p. 150), a few pages later the force
of this statement is diminished by the acknowledgment that direct sanctioning of social
hierarchy by power in England remained conned [my italics] to the higher nobility (p.
154). Indeed, she not only recognises that social selectivity was the key to membership of
the privileged estates but that a precondition of ascent, particularly into the gentry, was
the acquisition of wealth. In contrast with the situation in France, where certain oces
conferred noble status, in England the attainment of oce presupposed the necessary social
position. Furthermore, because of a diminution of manorial power by the end of the
fteenth century, within the gentry, lordly status was largely reproduced via economic
exploitation of the land monopoly (p. 602). Te sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw a
considerable numerical expansion of the gentry, conrmation of which depended solely on
the autonomous judgement of the College of Heralds. Tere occurred a simultaneous
transformation of the notion of honour, a shift towards a culture of hospitality and the
acquisition of an education through University and the Inns of Court (pp. 15461).
Tese elements in Gerstenbergers own account not only appear to contradict the initial
insistence on power as the prime determinant of social position, but they also sit very
uncomfortably with her view that the transformation of the gentry into an agent for the
7. Cannon 1995, p. 55.
dissolution of the ancien rgime did not occur until the eighteenth century. To sustain her
view of the longevity of estate-rule, she relies on Michael Bushs claim that, although there
was no formal qualication for drogeance in England, social discrimination was even more
eective; she also appeals to the critique of the conventional perception of an open lite
oered by Lawrence and Fawtier Stone.
8
Te argument is rounded o with the suggestion,
presumably also derived from Bush, that it is analytically advisable to consider the English
nobility as a single estate as they collectively . . . held considerable parts of the generalised
power in their possession (p. 162). Apart from the fact that this appears to contradict her
references to two distinct noble estates, it brings further substantive problems. As Cannon
has said, the most that can be drawn from the work of Stone is that access to the higher
nobility was more dicult than access to the gentry and insisting on a gentry-peerage
conjunction masks the signicance of the permeable membrane at the bottom.
9
It is also perhaps worth pointing out that the Stones, despite their denial of its open
character described an economic and status elite . . . from whose ranks were drawn the
ruling class that ran both the counties and the country.
10
At many points in Gerstenbergers
own account, class could very reasonably be substituted for estate. Te description of
the lower nobility as a possessing estate which had appropriated the generalised power
of public order (p. 99, cf. p. 107) surely invites translation into class. Te far reaching
social unity of the English ruling estate which had adopted unconcealed strategies
of estate rule against the economically and socially advancing urban population comes
as close to talking about class-interests as one can get without actually using the word
(p. 226).
Gerstenbergers recognition of the signicant part played by the acquisition of landed
wealth in preparing access to the gentry also makes it incumbent on her to consider their
economic character and to place them in the context of English agrarian relations. Te
result is a disappointingly brief digression into what she considers to be the mistaken
Tawney-Hill view of the gentry as a bourgeoisie. Certainly, Hill stuck to his view derived
from Marx that the gentry became a bourgeoisie of its own particular kind dependent on
capitalist relations of production.
11
It is a view shared by others, notably E.P. Tompson,
who otherwise disagreed with Hill about the form and chronology of the bourgeois
revolution. Gerstenbergers treatment is, however, perfunctory, alluding only to Hills
1940 booklet and to his recognition in 1981 that the controversy over the rise of the
gentry had involved generalisations about an ill-dened social class which were tossed
backwards and forwards (pp. 1878). In this very article, Hill, in fact, signicantly
broadened his picture of the class-alignments in town and countryside. Te gentry were no
longer set against the rest but the gentry together with some yeomen, some merchants, and
some artisans against the rest.
12
Hill was arguably slower than some others to bring into focus the signicance of the
increasing prosperity the English yeomanry and better-o husbandmen for English
economic development. He was much given to stressing the ultimate dispossession of
8. Bush 1984; Stone and Fawtier, 2001.
9. Cannon 1995, p. 56.
10. Stone and Fawtier 2001, p. 9.
11. Hill 1980, p. 130.
12. Hill 1981, p. 122.
the English peasantry by reference to the failure of the Leveller-demands for security of
tenure despite Tompsons enjoinders about the slowness of the process.
13
Gerstenberger
is even less convincing, as she is, on the one hand, unwilling to see the gentry as bearers of
capitalism but, on the other, goes along with a view of its progress in which the peasantry
only appear as victims or potential victims. Well-to-do peasants and yeomen make only
the most eeting of appearances (pp. 138, 156). Gerstenberger relies entirely on Robert
Brenners well-known top-down, landlord-driven view of capitalist development and also
on the work of John Martin, for whom the endemic and widespread unrest of the
sixteenth century and early seventeenth century was merely testimony to a process of
agrarian transformation, which culminated in the defeat of the peasantry and the release of
the land for the further advance of capitalism.
14
In company with these historians, Gerstenberger passes over the abundant evidence that
for a crucial period roughly, from the mid-sixteenth century to the late-seventeenth
century, a signicant class of small and medium-sized farmers enjoyed a degree of security
and prosperity which enabled them to play a vital part as producers, consumers and
employers of labour in the transition to the classical three-tier agrarian structures of the
eighteenth century. I brought some of this evidence together in 1996 and nothing
encountered since undermines the observations made at that time: copyholders were
remarkably successful in defending their titles at law, obtaining conrmations of custom,
the conversion of copyhold into freehold, and fending o exorbitant increases in entry-
nes and other deprivations of aggressive landlords.
15
To the works then cited, three major
studies should be added: Roger Mannings meticulous study of village-revolts, Robert
Allens masterpiece of economic history analysing of four centuries of agrarian change in
the south Midlands and Jane Whittles study of Tudor Norfolk, one of the most market-
oriented agricultural regions.
16
Te rst shows how the persistence, extent and success of
peasant-action both judicial and extra-legal contributed to the blurring of the customary
and freehold tenure.
17
Te second reinforces these conclusions with a lucid summary of the
jurisprudence and judicial processes, which, between the late fteenth and late sixteenth
centuries, transformed the legal position of both copyholders and benecial lessees so that
they acquired a substantial proprietary interest in their holdings. Freedom to sell,
protection against eviction, the enforcement of the principle that custom must be
reasonable (which virtually converted life-tenancies in the Midlands into freeholds)
resulted in a substantial increase in the acreage farmed by owner-occupiers.
18
If Allen is here
simply underlying the ndings of other scholars, he then goes on to provide unsurpassed
data to sustain the view that signicant increases in agricultural productivity did not depend
on enclosure but could and did take place on the open-eld holdings of Englands yeomen-
farmers, for whom the early seventeenth century was a golden age.
19
Whilst it may never be
possible demonstrate with scientic certainty a direct causal link between security of tenure
13. Parker 2008, p. 53.
14. Martin 1983, p. 216.
15. Parker 1996, pp. 2327.
16. Manning 1988: Allen 1988; Whittle 2000. Te quote is from Boyer 1993 p. 923.
17. Manning 1988, for example pp. 1335, 141, 1445, 1523.
18. Allen 1988, pp. 717.
19. Allen 1988, especially Part II.
and the undoubted increase in grain-yields, their co-existence, so diametrically opposed to
the situation in France, strongly suggests that this was more than a happy coincidence. Jane
Whittle has little doubt that
the signicance of the period between 1440 and 1580 . . . lies in the freedom,
prosperity, and, in Norfolk, the lack of landlordly interference experienced by
the rural population, and in the fact that an economy generated by small
landholders unburdened with heavy exactions by state or landlord could promote
the development of capitalism.
20
It should be stressed that none of those who take issue with Brenners or Martins view of
the dynamics of agrarian change suggest that there were not losers; this was the inexorable
consequence of the ever-widening dierentiation of the peasantry which had been going on
since at least the thirteenth century and now stretched from substantial yeomen with over
200 acres to the near landless.
21
Allen is clear that English agrarian relations followed two
contrasting paths of development in the fteenth and sixteenth centuries the most famous
of which was enclosure, and which resulted in the elimination of peasant farming.
22

Moreover, the depopulating enclosures which characterised the period 14501524, and
which caused small family-farms to be thrown together into huge sheep-pastures, often let
to capitalist tenants and, frequently, on short-term leases represented a precipitous leap
into capitalist relations.
23
However, the other path, which involved the consolidation
of farmers property rights in open eld villages was more common.
24
Departing from
Martins opinion that the pace of enclosure in the Midlands was sustained through the
sixteenth century, Allen identied three waves of enclosure (14501524, 15751674, and
17501849), with a slowdown in the sixteenth century.
25
In any event, the pattern in the
Midlands was not characteristic of the rest of the country, where the extent of enclosing in
the sixteenth century was even lower.
26
He concludes that the dramatic increase in protection
aorded by the law-courts to the peasantry was itself a manifestation of the anxiety
generated by the rst wave of enclosures and contributed to the fact that it was not until
the late seventeenth century that the yeomanry began to be put to the test by the
introduction of the modern mortgage. Tis enabled landlords to buy freeholds, dispense
with copyholds and benecial leases and amalgamate their land into large farms.
27
Whatever
the merits of this particular argument, Roger Manning has accurately noted that, [m]ost
historians of English agriculture agree that the decline of the smallholder became
pronounced only in the late seventeenth century in corn growing regions, while smallholders
actually increased in many sylvan-pastoral regions.
28
Gerstenberger is evidently unaware of
the accumulating evidence, which has left Brenner somewhat isolated in his unwillingness
20. Whittle 2000, p. 315.
21. Whittle 2000, Chapter 4 and p. 312.
22. Allen 1988, p. 76.
23. Allen 1988, p. 66.
24. Allen 1988, p. 76.
25. Allen 1988, p. 30.
26. Allen 1988, p. 31.
27. Allen 1988, pp. 71, 1023.
28. Manning 1988, p. 152; cf. Parker 1996, p. 236.
to recognise the positive as well as the negative aspects of the dierentiation within the
peasantry.
29
Te English state and French absolutism
No doubt, she would point out that it was not her intention to do more than deal with
conditions of reproduction exclusively from the standpoint of their being sanctioned by
the ruling power (p. 137). Yet, even from this perspective, Gerstenberger sees only the
limitations on the ability of the crown to protect the peasantry. Even if it were granted
that the slowing down of the rate of enclosure after 1524 had nothing to with the
governments anti-enclosure policies and that these could be weakened in parliament and
obstructed in practice, such an argument misses the point that the transformation of
tenurial law was the work of the courts and the common lawyers.
30
Developing from the
principle enunciated at the end of the eleventh century that all freemen were the kings
tenants, the common law inserted itself between his tenants in chief and their dependents.
Given Gerstenbergers intention to analyse and explain the emergence of bourgeois society
by reference to power and power-relationships, it is extraordinary how little attention is
given to the common law. It does not warrant inclusion in the index alongside
international and Roman law, and is not specically mentioned until page 593 with a
reference to the reign of Henry II. Its subsequent development and signicance for English
property-relations is passed over.
31
Yet it contributed to a path of development utterly
dierent from that in France, where the judicial authority of seigneurs over their dependents
remained fundamental to the conditions of reproduction.
It is also remarkable, given Gerstenbergers insistence that warfare was a basic mode of
appropriation in feudal conditions, that she largely misses the signicance of the huge
contrast between a demilitarised pre-Civil-War England and the growth of a burdensome
military apparatus in France. Gerstenberger certainly notes that the nobility retained its
warlike character much longer in France than in England (p. 371). Moreover, she has
little doubt that the absolutist state in France was in no way a vehicle for economic
development but rather an instance for organising the destruction of people and the results
of production in wars (p. 462). Tere is even a belated suggestion that the comparatively
weaker state apparatus in England . . . made the development of capitalist production
easier in England (p. 609). Yet the signicance of these observations is not developed.
Indeed, the increasingly divergent paths followed by England and France are obscured with
the statement that, in the late sixteenth century when the military potential of the kingdom
was fully deployed the English crown was in fact somewhat superior to other ruling houses
in military strength (p. 116). Indeed, Englands lack of involvement in large-scale warfare
with its concomitant burdens not only served to liberate the productive forces but was
critical in explaining why she did not follow France down the absolutist road.
Gerstenberger, however, does not believe in absolutism and claims that historians have
abandoned the concept (pp. 6, 451, 751). Even in 1990, such a perception rested heavily
29. Brenner 2001 and the critique by Byres 2006.
30. Allen 1988, p. 72.
31. Cf. Parker 1996, pp. 2323.
on the ultra-revisionist work of Roger Mettam.
32
Gerstenberger does not really give those
who have taken a contrary view their day in court. Richard Bonneys important study of
political change in France is relegated to a footnote as still marked by the concept of
absolutism (p. 751).
33
William Beiks inuential analysis of Languedocs ruling class is
treated in similar fashion in this case, as an untypical Marxist interpretation (p. 751).
34

Tere is no reference at all to my own Making of French Absolutism.
35
Seventeen years later,
there remains no justication whatsoever for the retention of an index-entry to Absolutism
abandoned as a concept (p. 791).
36
Gerstenberger is, of course, right in thinking that
historians had almost universally abandoned a vulgar conception of absolutism, incarnated
in an all-powerful monarch who brought the old nobility to heal and managed the realm
with bureaucratic eciency (p. 403). By the early 1980s, it was entirely possible to
incorporate a considerable body of work into a Marxist view of French absolutism which
both dispensed with the old voluntarism and also avoided the perils of economic
reductionism.
Te unfortunate irony is that, had Gerstenberger engaged with the perspectives oered
by Beik and myself, she would have found much support for her view that that absolutism
cannot be explained by reference to the interests of two competing classes in the style of
Engels (p. 21). Although the French rgime fullled an unmistakable class-function, the
dynamics which formed it are indeed to be located in the pressures of war, religious
antagonisms, the tensions engendered by dispersed loci of power and competition between
sections of the upper classes. Absolutism, in Beiks view, was ultimately a form of social
collaboration; in mine, a mechanism for regulating the intense rivalries which, for decades,
had destabilised the French rgime or, as Victor Kiernan suggested many years ago, a device
for saving the feudal nobility from themselves.
37
Some of Gerstenbergers own observations
about the nobility are strangely reminiscent of the more traditional view of the subordination
of the nobility. Te court connement of the high nobility she remarks was a process set
in motion by armed force and money centuries before and increasingly formalised in the
judicial authority of the Crown; a process of integration continued by a combination of
32. Mettam 1989; see also Henshall 1992.
33. Bonney 1978; see also his 1989 work simply entitled Labsolutisme amongst many others.
Gerstenberger uses annotated bibliographical notes to provide both references and summaries
of historical research. Te result is 200 pages of notes in addition to 687 pages of text, some but
not all of which are critical to her central arguments. Apart from the opening theoretical section
of the book, no attempt has been made to update the references to take account of work that has
appeared since 1990. Tis is not surprising given the vast range of issues which are tackled, but
it is not without consequence for any attempt at a critical evaluation of the historical arguments.
Historians with a forensic interest in the empirical basis of Gerstenbergers views may also nd it
irritating that numerous references give only author and publication date. In the absence of a
conventional alphabetical bibliography, there is no easy means of locating some titles, a diculty
which should not have eluded the publishers.
34. Beik 1985.
35. Parker 1983.
36. For recent discussions of the topic and its historiography, Cosendey and Decsimon 2002;
Beik 2005.
37. Kiernan 1995, p. 29; for an attempt to apply this view to European absolutist regimes in
general, Parker 2001.
repression and gratication (p. 507). Such formulations do not convey the importance of
the nobility themselves as agents in the creation of Louis XIVs rgime, a complex process
requiring both a shift in their own culture, greater self-discipline and a reassertion of their
ideological hegemony. Gerstenberger does alight on the growing emphasis on order for
orders sake (pp. 4845), but her statement that the cultural forms of the educated classes
proceeded via measures of repression and regulation (p. 503) misses the way in which they
created and internalised the cultural ethos of the absolutist rgime.
38
Te seemingly top-down perspective of her observations makes it dicult to understand
the simultaneous reluctance to accept the reality of the absolute state, particularly as
Gerstenberger also recognises that royal rule was not limited by general representative
bodies but by the structure of its own executive apparatus (3967). Its absolutist
character lay, it would now generally be agreed, not in the kings ability always to have his
way, but in the combination of his personal, military, judicial, and patrimonial attributes
themselves embedded in a system in which executive, administrative, scal and judicial
powers were undivided. Taxes could be introduced or increased without consent over most
of the realm; the king as represented by the royal council could overrule custom by virtue
of his legal sovereignty and his role as supreme judge and arbiter responsible to God alone.
Gerstenberger may (one hopes) be right that scarcely anything remains of the view that
absolutism marked the beginning of the modern state (p. 407), but the term has not lost
its utility.
39
Much of its value is precisely that it throws into sharp relief the divergent paths of
followed by France and England between the Reformation and 1700. Gerstenberger
appears, at times, to acknowledge this, accepting Hills view that, in England, the monarchy
in the traditional sense came to an end in 1688 (p. 235), and that, more precisely after
1690, sovereignty no longer lay with the crown. Monarchical power was transferred to the
state. She also recognises the signicance of the creation of the Bank of England and the
national debt, the steps taken to free the scal administration from private interests and
the beginnings of a professional civil service. Yet none of this persuades her that what had
emerged was a bourgeois form of state-power: Generalised power was still reserved to
members of the ruling estates which had not yet evolved into a class and whose hegemony
would not be dented for another hundred years (p. 237). She also insists that the events of
1688 did not take place in the context of a revolutionary public (p. 234), a statement
designed to both sustain and reect her wider argument that it is through discourse in the
public sphere that transformation of power acquires its bourgeois character (p. 665). Te
space for such a discourse is opened up not by conict between clearly dened economic
classes but between those competing for power. Gerstenbergers analytical point is well
made but once again the periodisation is open to challenge on the grounds that a bourgeois
public sphere developed in England much earlier than she allows.
38. Cf. Parker 1996 Chapter 5.
39. I say one hopes because the impact of my critique of the modernity of the French state,
although substantially incorporated into Brunno Teschkes recent work (2003), may turn out be
quite limited in historical circles. It certainly runs contrary to French scholarship as exemplied
by Le Roy Laduries bullish view of the French monarchy (1966). Colin Joness best-selling study
of eighteenth-century France (1992) has not helped, whilst some historians even remain attached
to modernisation-theory, taking Louis XIVs rgime as an exemplar.
A bourgeois public space
Gerstenberger herself dwells on the importance of the public discourse generated from the
1530s by the Reformation (p. 194). In the mid-seventeenth century, this extended beyond
the propertied classes, notably embracing the revolutionary debates of the Levellers
(pp. 21112, 620). She further notes the extent of public involvement in the many petitions
submitted to parliament in 16412 and refers to the social criticism provoked by
enclosures, monopolies and other forms of royal patronage (pp. 198, 1789). Attention is
drawn to the particular signicance of the attempts by MPs to use the public as an
instrument of their own policy (p. 198) and the debate over the extent to which
parliament should itself be an expression of the popular will (pp. 1989). A long and
discursive passage on good order also contains a passing mention of the Stuarts attempts
to manipulate popular culture (pp. 16970) Gerstenberger remarks that the Laudian
eorts to legitimise the absolute state in sacerdotal fashion had the opposite eect
(pp. 183, 193).
Tese observations lead to the somewhat surprising conclusion that the underlying
cause of a deepening cultural crisis was an intensication of generalised monarchical
power which although it violated estate interests and aroused opposition to its unpopular
policies did not lead to criticism of generalised power itself (pp. 180, 184). Te Kings
servants in the counties it is somewhat opaquely claimed did not take a great interest in
the constitutional struggles over the extent of the prerogative (p. 183). Accepting the
revisionist argument that parliament still remained the kings parliament (p. 175),
Gerstenberger reects nothing of Charless own sense that the country was slipping away
from him and nothing of the way in which the widespread concern for the destiny of
Parliament was rooted in the conviction that it was the guarantor of the liberties of
the nation and the principal agency through which the fears and aspirations of the
population were expressed. All that the Revolution of 1649 achieved was a partial
constitutionalisation of monarchical power (p. 199). Tis left the King with a large part
of his prerogative (p. 200) and from 1660 to 1688 the English Kings had more power at
their command than did their predecessors (p. 233). Such a view reduces the real and
ideological signicance of the destruction of the prerogative courts, the accompanying
enhancement of parliamentary authority, of both statute and common law and the
successful assertion by 1678 of the Commons right to initiate money-bills. More
signicantly, it minimises the high risks involved in the eorts of the later Stuarts to
re-assert the fullness of their power, which turned into a disaster and nally left James II
utterly isolated. It comes as something of a surprise when Gerstenberger remarks,
alongside her claim that there was no revolutionary public in 1688, that the events of that
year shook the pillars of the conventional discourse about the royal prerogative (p. 234).
Te ideology which furnished the justication for the new rgime did not drop out of
the sky. Lockes decidedly subversive views about the origins and nature of political
authority had been penned several years earlier. In doing so, he brought together ideas of
natural equality, the notion that civil society was established for the preservation of private
property and the widespread assumption that the royal prerogative was not unlimited.
Locke does not appear in Gerstenbergers work; nor does Hobbes, nor Chief Justice Coke,
nor economic thinkers like Mun, Missenden and Petty, nor Milton or Newton. Te
relationship between common law, statute-law and the royal prerogative is not discussed.
Te innumerable works of Christopher Hill on the connections between religious,
economic, social and political thought are ignored. Tere is no place for Johann
Somervilles demolition of the revisionist claim that there were no long-term ideological
causes of the Revolution or Joyce Applebys demonstration of the progress of individualism
in economic thought and attitudes.
40
Te non-revisionist work of Sachs on localism,
(p. 192), Derek Hirsts study of parliament (p. 720) and Richard Custs important article
on the transmission of news (p. 721) are all mentioned, but the last two only in annotated
footnotes and with little sense of what they tell us about the exceptionally precocious nature
of English political culture.
41
A recurrent theme of political discourse was the fear of going down the French road,
most famously associated with popery and wooden shoes, but also with emergency-taxes
made permanent by unaccountable government. Te understanding that Englands
political rgime was dierent from France can be traced back at least to Sir John Fortescue
in the 1460s.
42
Locke thus encapsulated long and deeply-held convictions when he
remarked that absolute monarchy was no form of monarchy at all since the monarch was
exempted from the rule of the public law.
43
As Bill Speck concluded, what triumphed in
England was a version of the rule of law which saw the King as beneath not above it.
44
Te
English polity now had virtually nothing in common with that of France as both
Montesquieu and Voltaire were soon to recognise.
Gerstenberger is right in thinking that the emergence of the bourgeoisie and bourgeois
polity in England cannot simply be located in a simple class-confrontation. Hills original
notion of the transfer of class-power in the 1640s probably oversimplies a more
protracted process. Te English bourgeoisie, just like Tompsons working class and Louis
XIVs nobility, was present at its own making. But the triumph of agrarian capitalism was
more rapid and more complete than Gerstenberger allows, as was the development of a
bourgeois public space. Te transformation of Englands ruling class and its values was to
provide a challenge to the French ancien rgime of an entirely new sort, contributing
directly to its demise in 1789. Gerstenbergers desire to avoid an economic reductionism
translates into a rejection of analytical tools that help to illuminate key facets of these
diverging evolutions. Recasting a thousand years of history within a new conceptual
framework is also a huge undertaking, which leaves one torn between admiration and
doubts about how far it is possible for a single individual to accomplish such a task whilst
doing full justice to the historical literature. Some collective endeavour might be
appropriate.
Reviewed by David Parker
University of Leeds
D.Parker@Leeds.ac.uk
40. Sommerville 1986; Appleby 1978.
41. Sacks 1986; Hirst 1975; Cust 1986; Parker 1996 pp. 2414.
42. Parker 1996 pp. 244-6, 25960.
43. Cited by Parker 1996, p. 256.
44. Speck 1989, pp. 1645.
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Te Imaginary
A: al-hayl. E: the imaginary. F: limaginaire.
R: mnimoe, voobraaemoe. S: lo imaginario.
C: xiangxiang, xugou
According to the Enlightenment, the imagi-
nary was the non-real or ctitious, which
should be replaced by a rational knowledge of
reality. For the romantics, it was a productive
force, which, by imagining the world as com-
pletely dierent from the factual world, had
the power to change it. Marx understood the
imaginary as a reality sui generis: the way in
which the capitalist mode of production
appears and by which it convincingly works.
Clarication about the imaginary is necessary
in order to know the world of capitalism in its
reality as an inverted [verkehrte] reality. Ernst
Bloch tried to reintegrate the imaginary as a
productive force into Marxism: as the warm
stream which inspires the cold stream of
Marxist analysis (Bloch 1986), instead of
undermining it by otherworldliness.
Te productive moment of the imaginary is
also stressed by Jean-Paul Sartre who pub-
lished his phenomenological treatise of the
same name during the German occupation. If
the imaginary supposes a free consciousness,
nevertheless the imagined Unreal is always
constituted on the ground of the world that it
denies (2004, 186). Every concrete and real
situation of the consciousness in the world is
pregnant with imagination (ibid.). Te sub-
versive message is that, even in a situation of
defeat, individual consciousness has the pos-
sibility to negate this new world.
Louis Althusser was the rst theorist who
elaborated the imaginary as a constitutive cat-
egory of Marxist theory itself. Te imaginary
is a misrecognition and, at the same time, a
recognition of reality, that is, of a original
relation of humans to reality that can be theo-
retically understood but not overcome. Only
on this condition will it be possible to make
the imaginary productive as a specic battle-
eld [Kampfplatz] for the transformation of
social relations.
1. Te term Einbildungskraft in German
was intensied by romanticism. It derives
from the Greek phantasia and the Latin imagi-
natio, and was translated into English and the
Romance-languages with imagination. It is
an indispensable productive force for the con-
cept of alternative designs of another world.
Limagination au pouvoir was the slogan of
Paris students during May 1968; it became
the signature of an epoch (Barck 1993, 1). In
Discours prliminaire to the Encyclopdie, the
imaginary, together with art, was seen as pro-
ductive labour and participated in the unfet-
tering of productive forces. Te defamation
of fantasy or its relegation to a special domain,
marked o by the division of labour, is the
original phenomenon of the regression of the
bourgeois spirit (Adorno 1976, 51). Charles
Baudelaire, who defended the imaginary
against the realistic battle cry of Copiez la
nature as reine des facults (1859/1971, 24),
confronted the erce opposition of all the
theories of art that wanted to force the imagi-
nation into the chains of aesthetic rules. On
the other hand, when the imaginary lacks an
orientation towards the social reality for which
the productive relation to the innity of the
possible has to prove itself, what remains is
only a path towards the internal [Innerli-
chkeit]. Te suerings of Anton Reiser, the
protagonist of Karl Philipp Moritzs novel of
the same name, living in material constraint and
pious bigotry, appear to him as the suerings
Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism
246 D. Boer / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 245252
[. . .] of a vivid imagination that deprive him
of the joys of his youth (Moritz 1926, 77).
Te imaginary does not remain untouched by
the productivity of imagination. Be it a plebe-
ian hero like Eulenspiegel, who holds up a
mirror to the duped mass, giving the imaginary
a moment of self-knowledge, or the memory
that provides the mirror to establish a sense of
community the imaginary is always a mode
of mis/recognition.
2. Marx uses the word for the rst time in his
critique of Hegels philosophy of right and
its left-Hegelian continuation. Hegels method
of resolving the problem of a bourgeois-civil
society whose competition threatens to destroy
it from above by dening the state as the
reality of the ethical idea (PR, 257), accord-
ing to Marx, is a speculative reversal of what
really occurs. Te conclusions of such a proce-
dure are, by necessity, imaginary: the actual
relation of family and civil society to the state
is conceived as its internal imaginary activity.
Family and civil society are the premises of the
state; they are the genuinely active elements,
but in speculative philosophy things are
inverted (Marx 1975a, 8) Te realisation of
this speculative philosophy is the bourgeois
state, which can declare all its citizens free and
equal by abstracting from social reality. In this
way, the state itself is imagined as the realm
of freedom and equality. In this realm, the
human being is the imaginary member of an
illusory sovereignty, [. . .] deprived of his real
individual life, and endowed with an unreal
universality (Marx 1975b, 154).
Te question of the foundation of the e-
cacy of the imaginary is seen as already
answered by Feuerbach. His critique of reli-
gion has torn up the imaginary owers from
the chain. Te task now is to consider criti-
cally reality itself, so that [man] will shake o
the chain and pluck the living ower (Marx
1975c, 176). Marx emphatically demonstrates
an understanding of the reason why human
beings imagine a better world: religious dis-
tress is at the same time the expression of
real distress and also the protest against real
distress (175).
In the critique of political economy, Marx
encounters the phenomenon of the imaginary
once again. Tings which in and for them-
selves are not commodities, things such as
conscience, honour, etc., can be oered for
sale by their holders, and thus acquire the
form of commodities through their price.
[. . .]. Te expression of price is in this case
imaginary, like certain quantities in mathe-
matics. On the other hand, the imaginary
price-from may also conceal a real value-rela-
tion or one derived from it, as for instance the
price of uncultivated land, which is without
value because no human labour is objectied
in it (Marx 1976, 197). Tis imaginative
dimension characterises the conceptuality of
political economy itself, which becomes the
object of his critique: In the expression value
of labour, the concept of value is not only
completely extinguished, but inverted, so that
it becomes its contrary. It is an expression as
imaginary as the value of the earth (677).
Tus, the imaginary concerns not only a form
of thinking but the way in which reality itself
appears: Tese imaginary expressions [. . .] are
categories for the forms of appearance of
essential relations (ibid.). Te imaginary in
this case is not a product of subjective imagi-
nation but objective: not just semblance
[Schein], but appearance [Erscheinung]. Tat
in their appearance things are often presented
in an inverted way is something fairly familiar
in every science, apart from political economy
(ibid.) Te point of Marxs critique is to break
the persuasive power of the imaginary by the
power of science. However, because what
appears consists in a reversal of things, sci-
entic clarication reverses this only theoreti-
cally. Te discovery of its imaginary character,
while destroying the semblance of the merely
accidental determination of the magnitude of
the value of the products of labour, by no
means abolishes that determinations material
form (168) because the imaginary, which
appears here, represents the very real power
of capital.
3. Ernst Bloch follows Marxs critique of the
imaginary character of the bourgeois state, the
division of bourgeois and citoyen. Te citoyen
[. . .] was conceived as a member of a non-
egotistical and therefore still imaginary polis
(Bloch 1986, 932). However, this citizen who
D. Boer / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 245252 247
precedes the guiding image of the comrade
(933), according to Bloch, is not only an
abstraction that distracts from reality and
therefore has to be exposed. Guiding images,
despite their class basis, still retain an appeal
as if the virtue desired in them was not yet
wholly done or done for (932). Here there is
a possible heritage that causes a kind of loss,
a kind of rediscovery, a kind of obligation
which arouses longing (ibid.). Te imaginary,
conceived in this way, is productive: wishful
portraits of being truly human [. . .] in experi-
menting variety, in exemplariness which is not
anywhere discharged (ibid.). Tat is, admit-
tedly, valid only if the cold stream of Marxist
analysis is supposed to set this warm stream
of the utopian on the rm ground of the real-
ity of class-society. But the other way around
is valid as well: without utopian, imaginary
guiding images like that of the citoyen, the
analysis is only cold and it will be dicult to
spur the people: Never without inheritance,
least of all without that of the primal inten-
tion: of the Golden Age. But Marxism, the
coldest of detectives in all its analyses, takes the
fairytale seriously, takes up the dream of a
Golden Age practically (1458). Te imaginary
ower of romanticism should not simply be
plucked but inherited as well.
4. Louis Althusser understands the category
of the imaginary as the original relation of the
human being to reality. Before we recognise
reality scientically, we already have an idea,
an image [imago] of it. But there is no after-
wards: the imaginary relation is constitutive
for being human; it can be recognised but not
overcome. As such, it is the place of the ideo-
logical: Ideology is a Representation of the
Imaginary Relationship of Individuals to their
Real Conditions of Existence (Althusser
1984a, 36).
Apart from his theory of ideology, Althus-
ser also has another approach to the problem
of the imaginary: the art that by consciously
working with images is able to play with them
and to assemble them in such a way that the
dominant ideology is dismantled.
4.1. Spinoza initially became important
for Althusser (cf. FM and RC) because the
distinction between imaginatio and ratio
(Ethics II, prop. 40, schol. 2) oered him the
possibility to distinguish between Marxian
theory, as scientic, and ideology. Spinoza
with his theory of the dierence between the
imaginary and the true [. . .] explains to us
why Marx could not possibly become Marx
except by founding a theory of history and a
philosophy of the historical distinction
between ideology and science (Althusser &
Balibar 1979, 16 et sq). Te practical-political
meaning of this dierence was to create space
within the Stalinist-dominated Communist
movement for a free science. But, at that time
already, his concern was not only to reject the
theoretical claims of ideology but also to rec-
ognise its practical function (Althusser 1997,
229). Since his work on the ideological state-
apparatus (ISA) in 196970, at the latest, the
importance of Spinoza for Althusser is above
all that he developed the rst theory of ideol-
ogy ever thought out (Althusser 1976, 135),
a theory of ideology in which the imaginary is
not seen as a psychological category but as
the category through which the world is
thought (Althusser 1996b, 114). Althusser
thinks in the rst place of what Spinoza in the
Ethics says about the rst level of knowledge,
the imaginary: the fantastic idea (imaginatio)
that all natural things act on account of an
end as they [men] themselves do, that all the
things that happen, happen on account of
them (Ethics I, appendix). However, the idea
of human beings that the world turns around
them and around that which is useful and
agreeable for them certainly has a connection
with reality in the form of a corpus externum,
but mediated through the ideas of aection of
its body [corporis] (Ethics II, prop. 26, dem).
As Althusser interpreted the type of knowl-
edge of the imaginary, it is not at all [. . .] a
piece of knowledge, but [. . .] the material
world of men as they live it, that of their con-
crete and historical existence (Althusser
1976, 136).
Spinozas theory of the imaginary was,
above all, a critique of religion with its idea
that God has made everything on account
of man (Ethics I, appendix). Tis theory
was interesting for Althusser as a critique
of the fantastic idea of modern, bourgeois
man, as if the whole world turns around his
I formulated conceptually by Descartes
with the cogito, ergo sum. Spinoza rejected
what was seen as the origin of all western phi-
losophy (Althusser 1996b, 115). Tis is the
concrete imagination that Althusser has in
view in his theory of ideology, even when he
deals with ideology in general.
Althusser found in Spinoza an ideology-
theoretical relevant application of his concept
of the imaginary, namely, in his reections
the Jewish State and its ideology in the Teo-
logical-Political Treatise (TTP) (Althusser
1982, 19 et sq.). Here, in the history of the
Jewish people, the imaginary works in a prac-
tical form (Althusser 1976, 136). He refers
here to Spinozas positive interpretation of the
prophets in Israel who by their power of imag-
ination [potentia imaginandi] are qualied to
tell the people (which only can be approached
by images) stories that give them the possibil-
ity to organise themselves as a society with
xed laws without which human beings can-
not live securely and in good health (Spinoza
2007, 46 et sq.) a desire that, admittedly, is
not the highest (the knowledge of truth for its
own sake), but which is the only thing that
counts for the people and which is the condi-
tion of the freedom of thought for the seeker
of truth (the philosophers) (Ch. XX). What
distinguishes the Jewish people in this rela-
tionship is that its religion, its belief in what
God wants and demands is so exclusively
political, directed to the organisation of the
state (Ch. XIX). Teir religion, therefore, is no
less fantastic than what other peoples believe,
though considerably more useful and thus
more eective. Human beings imagine pre-
cisely the world that is useful for them and
agreeable. In the Teological-Political Treatise,
the extent to which this imagination can be
meaningful becomes clear: as a political ideol-
ogy, which does not locate the goal of the
imaginary at the end of or beyond history, but
seeks it in politics itself.
Tis application of the imaginary is to be
found again in Althussers considerations on a
proletarian ideology. Tis is an ideology of a
political character; the dominant idea is that
of the class struggle which envisages the aboli-
tion of classes and the establishment of com-
munism (Althusser 1983, 463). However,
unlike Spinoza, the imagining subject is not
the human being or the people, but the
members of the working class imagining a
world that is useful and agreeable especially
for them. Tis ideology constitutes them as a
ghter-subject (462) which, informed by the
experience of class-struggle and the Marxist
science of history, rejects the imagination of a
sovereign and autonomous ruling subject (of
the great God of religion or the little bour-
geois god of bourgeois ideology) and opposes
to it the fantastic sentence from the Interna-
tionale: No saviours from on high deliver /
No trust we have in prince or peer / Our own
right hand the chains must shiver/ Chains of
hatred, greed and fear (Althusser 1995, 234).
Te image that human beings make of their
world is thus not simply one to which they
have to subjugate themselves. Tey search for
images in which they can recognise them-
selves. Tese images are not just invented but
always already connected with existing images.
4.2. As clear as it is that Althusser owes his
concept of the imaginary to psychoanalysis, it
is nevertheless dicult to determine exactly
how he uses it. Te text in which he published
his theory of ideology (Althusser 1984a,
160) claims a relation between Freuds prop-
osition that the the unconscious is eternal and
his own proposition: ideology has no history.
Althusser even calls this relation theoretically
necessary but leaves open how the connection
can be thought (35). He does not refer back to
the brief attempt at clarication he made in
Freud and Lacan (1964). Althusser deleted
the relevant sections in the original version
of Ideology and the Ideological State Appara-
tuses (published posthumously in 1995).
Obviously, he was not sure of the matter. Nev-
ertheless, from this text and others published
after his death, it is possible to make a recon-
struction regarding how he was feeling his way
towards this relation.
What interested Althusser in psychoanaly-
sis in the rst place was its analysis of the
anthropogenesis that precedes the conscious
existence of human beings [bewusstes Mensch-
sein]: the unconsciousness and its laws (Althus-
ser 1984a, 156). Humanisation runs through
the symbolic order, by which the biological
human child is inserted into an already ruling
order (166). Tis symbolic order can only suc-
ceed because the child rst receives an image
of itself: the imaginary order (161 et sq.). It
will nd its place in the world necessarily
through images; its relation to reality its
own and of others is essentially imaginary.
Althusser follows here Lacan (Lacan 1977,
6 et sqq) in his presentation of the moment in
which the child receives an image of itself and
recognises: that is me a recognising that, at
the same time, is a misrecognising: it is only
an image of the I. Tis original recognising/
misrecognising-structure situates the agency
of the ego, before its social determination, in a
ctional direction, which always be irreducible
for the individual alone (2). To this extent,
this explanation applies to ideology in general:
what is meant is an eternal constellation, not
a specic ideology.
However, the supposedly generalised valid-
ity of the psychoanalysis of anthropogenesis is,
in fact, very specic. Althusser also cannot
negate this specicity: in the imaginary order,
there already appears the mother who holds
up the mirror for the child, therefore deter-
mining this order as an Oedipal one (Althus-
ser 1984b, 162). Te human child falls into
the immediate familial milieu, not into society
in general or culture in general (Althusser
1996a, 71). Whatever Althusser may claim,
the structure of the symbolic can only be
localised in the specic forms of the reality of
the familial environment (73). Te fantasies
of the child are caught from the beginning in
a family ideology (Althusser 1984a, 50). Te
familial constellation seems therefore to be an
original moment in the reproduction of social
relations. Althusser went in this direction by
coupling the school, which he thought to be
dominant, with the family, without working
out this connection further (31).
At least once, however, he did indicate the
individual-historical primary meaning of the
family. He illustrates the thesis that ideology
in general always already interpellates indi-
viduals who are always-already subjects
(Althusser 1995, 229) with the help of the
development of the little Louis (!) who, inter-
pellated as a subject by one or another ideol-
ogy, is always-already a subject, i.e., already a
familial subject (ibid.). Of course, he also
cancelled this passage in the published ver-
sion. He does not want to say it, but says it
nevertheless. At the same time, with this, he
also suggests that ideology in general, despite
its general claim, in fact does hint at this spe-
cic socialisation. Te imaginary relationship
of human beings to their real conditions of
existence is always their relation to this condi-
tion of existence, the condition of the family.
Te relationship between psychoanalysis and
ideology-theory could then be thought in
the following way: psychoanalysis explicates
the eternity of ideology from the fact of the
always-already of this social relation. A de-
nition that Althusser himself gave also goes in
this direction, although it apparently says the
contrary: one cannot produce a theory of psy-
choanalysis without founding it in historical
materialism (on which the theory of the for-
mations of the familial ideology are dependent
in the last instance) (Althusser 1993, 54).
Only historical materialism can explicate
familial ideology as a moment within the
reproduction of society as a whole, which in
its turn is the real condition of existence of the
family. However, because Althusser founds
psychoanalysis in historical materialism and
does not dissolve it, he also implicitly states
that it explicates something that only it and
no another analysis is able to explicate: the
paradoxical phenomenon that culture pre-
cedes itself (1996b, 91). It is the law of cul-
ture, that is, the Oedipal, familial constellation,
that a priori conditions all the inculturation
of this small human being (81). Psychoanaly-
sis, in this way, helps historical materialism to
understand a fundamental dimension of
socialisation. To this extent, psychoanalysis is,
in the words of Althussers student Michel
Tort, a component discipline on the conti-
nent of historical materialism (Tort 1970; cf.
Ghisu 1995, 127 et sqq.).
If psychoanalysis is right in this respect,
however, the question is whether the notion
that social being [gesellschaftliches Sein] determines
consciousness [Bewusstsein] does not lose its
emancipatory sense. How will human beings
ever liberate themselves from this original
constellation this structure of submission
that exists already before the individual sub-
ject exists (Althusser 1994, 73)? Does this
not presuppose a determinism that treats the
individual as an eect of the structures that
precede it and found its existence (74)?
Althussers answer remains vague: Tus one
of the most noble concerns of our theory is to
reduce a little the theoretical distance between
the determining and the determined (74). In
the theory of ideology he did publish, he only
thematised the class-struggle as the outside of
ideology that provides for a movement against
the dominant ideology from within it (Althus-
ser 1984a, 59).
Via psychoanalysis, however, Althusser
indicates an outside of ideology that brings
familial ideology in particular into permanent
disorder: the unconscious. At stake here is the
abyss [abme] that goes alongside the Ich
(Althusser 2003a, 78), a something that
ghts against this order, a war that is lost by
most people they are in order but for
some people (ghters!) (Althusser 1984b,
21) never nishes. However, Althusser did
not make this war productive for the ideologi-
cal struggle, as he did with class-war perhaps
because these ghters, in their resistance, were
too destined to remain patients. He did give
an indication: the unconscious may be xed to
images oered by ideology, but it can play
with them (Althusser 1993, 109). Althusser
sees how a oppressing ideology (e.g., Nazism)
permits and manipulates this play (fantasies of
violence). From his perspective, however, a
playing with oppressing ideology itself is also
conceivable: the unconscious selects within
the ideological imaginary the forms, elements
or relations that t it (ibid.). However
authoritarian ideology always-already may
be, the selection of its counter-ideology can
turn out to be very anti-authoritarian. Te
imaginary is thus a battleeld.
4.3. Te critique that Althussers theory of
ideology eternalised socialisation from above
is also connected to the way in which he han-
dled psychoanalysis. He comes to the concep-
tion, one of resignation for historical
materialism, of leaving responsibility for the
ideological in general to psychoanalysis, can-
celling the deconstruction of the ideological
out of the Marxist research agenda (PIT 1979,
203). It seems, however, to be more likely that
Althusser managed to avoid the threat of a
resigned conception by eventually not making
psychoanalysis the foundation of his theory of
ideology in general, but by leaving it as an
analogy between the two. Otherwise, he
would have needed to make familial ideology,
as the rst representation of the imaginary
relation of human beings to their conditions
of existence, the centre of his theory of ideol-
ogy. He did not do this, perhaps because he
could not see how, in that case, an ideological
struggle with a perspective of liberation would
still be possible. Tat does not make this cri-
tique obsolete. In particular, if one, dierently
from Althusser, understands ideology in gen-
eral as the generality of this particular ideol-
ogy, the question remains of whether ideal
socialisation from above (PIT 1979, 181) is
not absolutised by the fact that resistance can
only modify it, but never bring about its
breakdown. Here, we need the analytical sep-
aration of general-historical functions and their
historically changing implementation, specic
for a determinate social formation (PIT 1979,
179). Should not the generality of the Oedi-
pal-familial constellation be put into question
as an impermissible generalisation of a tem-
porally and culturally situated phenomenon
(cf. Haug 1993, 17 passim)? Could one not
think of a generality more general than this
one: a relation between parents/elders and
children in which the elders pass down to the
youngsters their equality? If we think this way,
then, of course, it is under the concrete his-
torical condition of an unequally organised
society, even only as the imagination of a
world in which things would run totally dif-
ferently, a world of which we have an image
but that still awaits its realisation. Tis image
is necessary because it mobilises the longing
for this world. And it is possible: because of
this something that from the beginning on
ghts against the law of culture.
4.4. To (de)mobilise imagination con-
sciously is the peculiarity of art. Art plays
with words, with images (Althusser 1994/5,
594). It plays ideology, it makes the (world-)
picture of the dominant order attractive, but it
can also play with ideology, take advantage of
the playing ground that ideology oers to
imagination. Tat is authentic art that main-
tains a certain specic relationship with ideol-
ogy (Althusser 1984c, 174). Art produces an
internal distance, which gives us a critical
view of [ideology] (177). It shows the ideo-
logical of ideology so the spectators (observ-
ers, reader) can dissociate themselves from
ideology (Althusser 1979, 219). Te theatre of
Brecht oers an example of this. Te audience
goes into a theatre to let a mirror of reality be
held up to them, a mirror that meets the ideo-
logical expectation of the spectators: Tats
exactly right! How true! (Althusser 2003b,
146). Brecht, however, shows what games are
played with us (142). Te mirror has to be
shattered: the theaters object is to destroy this
intangible image, to set in motion the immo-
bile, the eternal sphere of the illusory con-
sciousnesss mythical world. Tat is the task of
theatre for the sake of the production of a new
consciousness in the spectator (Althusser
1997, 151). Art, however, is only able to fulll
this task insofar as human beings longing for
change and their imaginary relation to reality is
open to something new that never was before.
Ten, the imaginary becomes a battleeld,
the imagination, a productive force.
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Psychanalyse, Paris.
Dick Boer
Althusserianism, Enlightenment, expression,
image, dialectical theatre, knowledge, appearance/
form of appearance, eternity, family, ction,
Freudo-Marxism, humanist controversy, ego,
ideology-theory, ideological state-apparatuses/
repressive state-apparatuses, illusion, inner, critique,
art, Lacanianism, fairytales, anthropogenesis,
fantasy, psychoanalysis, critique of religion, being/
consciousness, play, Spinozism, subject-eect,
symbolic order, theatre, unconscious, alienation,
inversion, truth, reection, reality, science.
Althusser-Schule, Aufklrung, Ausdruck, Bild,
dialektisches Teater, Erkenntnis, Erscheinung/
Erscheinungsform, Ewigkeit, Familie, Fiktion,
Freudomarxismus, Humanismus-Streit, Ich, Ideolo-
gietheorie, ideologische Staatsapparate / repressi-
ver Staatsaparat, Illusion, Innerlichkeit, Kritik,
Kunst, Lacanismus, Mrchen, Menschwerdung,
Phantasie, Psychoanalyse, Religionskritik, Sein/
Bewusstsein, Spiel, Spinozismus, Subjekt-Eekt,
symbolische Ordnung, Teater, Unbewusstes,
Verfremdung, Verkehrung, Wahrheit, Widerspie-
gelung, Wirklichkeit, Wissenschaft.

Historical Materialism Volume 18 Issue 3, 2010

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Historical Materialism Volume 18 Issue 3, 2010

Cargado por

Copyright:

Formatos disponibles

Historical Materialism

ISSN 1465-4466, Online ISSN: 1569-206X

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