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WSWS : History : 2005 SEP/WSWS Summer School

Lecture three: The origins of Bolshevism and What Is To Be Done?

Part 2

By David North
7 September 2005

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This is the second part of the lecture “The Origins of Bolshevism and What Is To Be Done?” delivered by World Socialist Web Site Editorial Board Chairman David North at the Socialist Equality Party/WSWS summer school held August 14 to August 20, 2005 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The lecture is being posted in seven installments. Part 1 was posted September 6.

This is the third lecture that was given at the school. The first, entitled “The Russian Revolution and the unresolved historical problems of the 20th century” was posted in four parts, from August 29 to September 1. The second, entitled “Marxism versus revisionism on the eve of the twentieth century,” was posted in three parts on September 2, 4 and 5. These lectures were also authored by David North.

The theoretical and political foundations for the Marxist movement in Russia were laid in the 1880s in the struggle waged by G.V. Plekhanov against the dominant influence of populism and its terrorist orientation. The essential issue that underlay the conflict between the populists and the new Marxist tendency was one of historical perspective: Was Russia’s path to socialism to be realized through a peasant revolution, in which traditional communal forms of peasant property would provide the basis for socialism? Or would the overthrow of tsarism, the establishment of a democratic republic and the beginning of the transition to socialism proceed on the basis of the growth of Russian capitalism and the emergence of a modern industrial proletariat?

In arguing against terrorism and the populist characterization of the peasantry as the decisive revolutionary force, Plekhanov—who had himself been a leading member of the populist movement—insisted that Russia was developing along capitalist lines, that the growth of an industrial proletariat would be an inevitable consequence of this process, and that this new social class would be of necessity the decisive force in the revolutionary overthrow of the autocracy, the democratization of Russia and the wiping away of all political and economic remnants of feudalism, and the beginning of the transition to socialism.

Plekhanov’s founding of the Emancipation of Labor Group in 1883, the year of Marx’s death, was an act of immense political foresight, not to mention intellectual and physical courage. Moreover, the arguments advanced by Plekhanov against the Russian populists of his day not only established the programmatic foundations upon which the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party would later be based. Plekhanov also anticipated many of the critical issues of class orientation and revolutionary strategy that would continue to bedevil the socialist movement throughout the twentieth century and, indeed, up to the present day.

Today, Plekhanov is remembered principally—but generally without sufficient appreciation—as one of the most important interpreters of Marxist philosophy in the era of the Second International (1889-1914). In this capacity, much of his work is subjected to bitter and generally ignorant criticism—especially from those who claim that Plekhanov failed to appreciate the significance of Hegel and the dialectical method. One can only wish, when reading such polemical rants, that their authors would take the time to study Plekhanov’s works before proceeding to denounce them. I will come back somewhat later to the issue of Plekhanov’s intellectual relationship to Marxist philosophy, though it must be stated frankly that this is a subject that requires more time than we presently have.

I wish, at this point, to place emphasis on another aspect of Plekhanov’s contribution to revolutionary strategy that is generally underestimated, if not ignored—that is, his insistence on the development of the proletariat’s consciousness of the significance of its independent political struggle against the bourgeoisie as a critical and indispensable driving force in the formation of socialist consciousness.

In his most important early work, Socialism and the Political Struggle, written not long after he had founded the Emancipation of Labor movement, Plekhanov opposed the views of the Russian anarchists, who rejected the importance of politics and went so far as to insist that the workers should not contaminate themselves with political interests. Plekhanov noted that “not a single class which has achieved political domination has had cause to regret its interest in ‘politics,’ but on the contrary ... each of them attained the highest, the culminating point of its development only after it had acquired political domination... we must admit that the political struggle is an instrument of social reconstruction whose effectiveness is proved by history.”

Plekhanov then traced the main stages in the development of class consciousness. A lengthy citation is justified by the intrinsic and enduring significance of this passage:

“Only gradually does the oppressed class become clear about the connection between its economic position and its political role in the state. For a long time it does not understand even its economic task to the full. The individuals composing it wage a hard struggle for their daily subsistence without even thinking which aspects of the social organization they owe their wretched condition to. They try to avoid the blows aimed at them without asking where they came from or by whom, in the final analysis, they are aimed. As yet they have no class consciousness and there is no guiding idea in their struggle against individual oppressors. The oppressed class does not yet exist for itself; in time it will be the advanced class in society, but it is not yet becoming such. Facing the consciously organized power of the ruling class are separate individual strivings of isolated individuals or isolated groups of individuals. Even now, for example, we frequently enough meet a worker who hates the particularly intensive exploiter but does not yet suspect that the whole class of exploiters must be fought and the very possibility of exploitation of man by man removed.

“Little by little, however, the process of generalization takes effect, and the oppressed begin to be conscious of themselves as a class. But their understanding of the specific features of their class position remains too one-sided: the springs and motive forces of the social mechanism as a whole are still hidden from their mind’s eye. The class of exploiters appears to them as the simple sum of individual employers, not connected by the threads of political organization. At this stage of development it is not yet clear in the minds of the oppressed... what connection exists between ‘society’ and ‘state.’ State power is presumed to stand above the antagonisms of the classes; its representatives appear to be the natural judges and conciliators of the hostile sides. The oppressed have complete trust in them and are extremely surprised when their requests for help remain unanswered by them. Without dwelling on particular examples, we will merely note than such confusion of concepts was displayed even recently by the British workers, who waged quite an energetic struggle in the economic field and yet considered it possible to belong to one of the bourgeois political parties.

“Only in the next and last stage of development does the oppressed class come to a thorough realization of its position. It now realizes the connection between society and state, and it does not appeal for the curbing of its exploiters to those who constitute the political organ of that exploitation. It knows that the state is a fortress which the oppressed can and must capture and reorganize for their own defense and which they cannot bypass, counting on its neutrality. Relying only on themselves, the oppressed begin to understand that ‘political self-help,’ as Lange says, ‘is the most important form of social self-help.’ They then fight for political domination in order to help themselves by changing the existing social relations and adapting the social system to the conditions of their own development and welfare. Neither do they, of course, achieve domination immediately; they only gradually become a formidable power precluding all thought of resistance by their opponents. For a long time they fight only for concessions, demand only such reforms as would give them not domination, but merely the possibility to develop and mature for future domination; reforms which would satisfy the most urgent and immediate of their demands and extend, if only slightly, the sphere of their influence over the country’s social life. Only by going through the hard school of the struggle for separate little pieces of enemy territory does the oppressed class acquire the persistence, the daring, and the development necessary for the decisive battle. But once it has acquired those qualities it can look at its opponents as at a class finally condemned by history; it need have no doubt about its victory. What is called the revolution is only the last act in the long drama of revolutionary class struggle which becomes conscious only insofar as it becomes a political struggle.

“The question is now: would it be expedient for the socialists to hold the workers back from ‘politics’ on the grounds that the structure of society is determined by its economic relations? Of course not! They would be depriving the workers of a fulcrum in their struggle, they would be depriving them of the possibility of concentrating their efforts and aiming their blows at the social organization set up by the exploiters. Instead, the workers would have to wage guerrilla warfare against individual exploiters or at most separate groups of those exploiters, who would always have on their side the organized power of the state.” [3]

The struggle waged by Plekhanov defined the essential tasks of those who would call themselves socialists—to concentrate all their efforts on the development of the political class consciousness of the working class and to prepare it for its historical role as the leader of the socialist revolution. Implicit in this definition is the historical significance of the party itself, which is the instrument through which this consciousness is aroused and developed and organized on the basis of a definite political program.

The writings of Plekhanov threw the populists into crisis. By the late 1880s they were clearly on the defensive before the blows of the man they had just a decade earlier denounced as a renegade from the “people’s” cause. The political bankruptcy of terrorism was becoming increasingly evident. Showing that the aim of terrorism was to frighten the Tsarist regime and persuade it to change its ways, Plekhanov and the growing legion of Marxists dubbed the terrorists “liberals with bombs”—a description which is as apt today as it was a century ago. Moreover, Plekhanov insisted their terrorism, which ignored the protracted struggle to raise the consciousness of the working class, instead, in striving to electrify the masses with the avenging blows of heroic individuals, served only to stupefy and demoralize them.

To be continued

Notes:
[3] Selected Philosophical Works, Volume I (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), pp. 76-80.

See Also:
Socialist Equality Party and WSWS hold summer school in US
[29 August 2005]
Lecture one: The Russian Revolution and the unresolved historical problems of the 20th century
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4
Lecture two: Marxism versus revisionism on the eve of the twentieth century
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
Lecture Three: The origins of Bolshevism and What Is To Be Done?
Part 1 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7