Loren Goldner – The agrarian question in the Russian revolution from material community to productivism and back.odt

Loren Goldner – The agrarian question in the Russian revolution: from material community to productivism and back

"If Russia follows the path that it took after 1861, it will miss the greatest chance to leap over all the fatal alternatives of the capitalist regime that history has ever offered to a people. Like all other countries, it will have to submit to the inexorable laws of that system".
Marx, Letter to Vera Zasulich, 1881

"Socialism has demonstrated its right to victory, not on the pages of Das Kapital…not in the language of dialectics, but in the language of steel, cement and electricity."
Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, 1937

Buried under almost a century of ideology, the “Russian question,” the historical meaning of the defeat of the Russian revolution, is the question that will not go away.1 World capitalism since the 1970s has been in a crisis without end, yet the reigning ideology, despite all the headwinds of the years since the 2007–08 meltdown, still proclaims: “get used to it; there is no alternative to capitalism.” And yet, for anyone who does think about an alternative to the disintegrating world visible all around, even in the unfathomable historical amnesia of the present, the question of “what went wrong in Russia?” is never too far from the surface.

The following article is not a rehash of the debates of the 1960s and 1970s on the “class nature of the Soviet Union,” important as those debates may have been and in some way still are. In the subsequent four decades, a whole broadly-shared framework for discussing that question has been largely lost, in the contemporary world of post-history, post-modernism, identity politics, the World Social Forum and NGOs. That framework was obviously lost because it no longer seemed a viable guide to the contemporary world, especially after 1989–1991.

The article had its origin in a series of talks I gave in summer 2013 on the Russian, German, Chinese and Spanish revolutions.2 The background (re)reading for those talks got me thinking about how the political void of the past 40 years influences our ability to relate those revolutions to present developments. Even more, it got me thinking about all the alternative currents—anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, revolutionary syndicalism, the IWW, council communism—which were effectively steamrollered by Bolshevism and by the reach of the Third International for a whole epoch, an epoch which began to end ca. 1968. In fact, the article was conceived as Part One of a three-part series which would be: 1) the revolutionary epoch 1917–1923, and the ultimately disastrous international influence of the Russian Revolution, illustrated in the cases of the very early French, German, Italian and US Communist Parties 2) the failed return of the “vanguard party” (Trotskyism, Maoism) in the period from 1968 to 1977 and 3) the ongoing recomposition of the world working class, and forms of worker organization and self-organization, today and tomorrow.

Thinking about the historical semi-oblivion of non-Bolshevik “projects for a different society” brought me up against the (hardly original) question of why revolutionary Marxism, which (at least in the ideologized variant of the Second International), had (seemingly) been embraced by hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of working people in mass movements in the West from the 1880s to the 1920s, and had then, after the mid-1920s, increasingly become the outlook of “generals without an army,” small sects of whatever stripe existing on the fringes of the mass movements of the 1930s and 1960s, but in no way hegemonic in the way revolutionary Marxism had seemed to be just before and after World War I. Rosa Luxemburg in that earlier period had spoken all over Germany to large crowds; Angelica Balabanova similarly recounts3 regularly speaking to crowds of 5000 in a series of small towns in Italy in the same period.

A large part (at least) of the answer to that conundrum was tied up with the “Russian question.” Not merely (to reiterate) in the finely-tuned debates of 40 years ago about whether the Soviet Union was state capitalist or bureaucratic collectivist or a degenerated workers’ state; the problem lay deeper. Virtually all the protagonists in those debates seemed to rather casually assume that Russia in 1917 was something close to a fully European capitalist society, very backward to be sure, but ultimately on a continuum with the rest.4 Didn’t Trotsky—whose framework shaped, consciously or otherwise, those debates more than anyone, pro or con (at least among most anti-Stalinist would-be revolutionary currents)—talk about Tsarist Russia having the largest and most modern factories in the world, alongside a vast population of petty producer peasants?5 Hadn’t the two dozen best-known Bolsheviks of 1917 (when Stalin was totally unknown, though already fundamental in the underground apparat6) spent decades in European exile?

The timing seemed too perfect: Marxism, in even ideological form, receded as a mass phenomenon in most “advanced capitalist” countries in the decade after 1917, following 1) the Russian Revolution 2) the emergence of mass movements of workers and still more of peasants in the semi-colonial and colonial world from China and Vietnam to Africa by way of India, and, last but hardly least, 3) in the transition from the formal to the real domination of capital, which overlaps with what some people call the decadence of the capitalist mode of production. Max Eastman wrote in his memoirs of the mind-set of Greenwich Village radicalism before 1914: “We were living in times innocent of world war, of fascism, of nazism, sovietism, the Fuehrerprinzip, the totalitarian state. Nothing we were talking about had ever been tried. We thought of political democracy with its basic rights and freedoms as good things permanently secured. Planting ourselves on that firm basis, we proposed to climb higher to industrial or ‘real’ democracy.”7 To this we can add, where Western Marxism was (with few exceptions) concerned, times innocent of a successful mass insurrection of three million Russian workers greatly abetted by 100 million peasants who were in fact not— pace the entirety of Russian Marxists, starting with Lenin— capitalist petty producers but living overwhelmingly in household economies only tangentially related to any market; similar movements with even smaller working classes and larger peasantries in China or Vietnam or India; or, in our own time, mass movements in the Moslem world ostensibly (at least) fighting for an Islamic republic or even the restoration of the caliphate.

In short, pre-1920s Marxism broke up, as a mass movement in the West, on the shoals of the “Russian question,” and beyond that, the realities of the world’s huge peasant populations, in countries where capitalism had an even more tenuous hold than in Russia, and where, after 1914, little real development, and a lot of outright retrogression, took place.

Looking back, it seems clear that the transformation of the work of Karl Marx into a modernization ideology for developing or backward countries, at the hands of his ostensible followers, the very people who prompted him to exclaim “I am not a Marxist,” bears an important responsibility for that crack-up. (I should make clear that I am not saying that the mainstream Marxists of the Second International “had the wrong ideas.” Their “ideas” were integral to their role in propelling capital from its phase of formal to real domination, of which more below.)

We know today, more clearly than was possible in the 1960s and 1970s, that Marx himself was already deeply interested in the non-Western world,8 and specifically said that the theses of Capital and Theories of Surplus Value were valid only for western Europe and the United States, and that other parts of the world might well follow “different roads.” The collapse of Stalinism, the post-1978 emergence of a dynamic capitalism in China, and the ebb of “Marxism-Leninism”, Maoism and Third Worldist development ideologies in much of Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America has revealed the great diversity, and adaptability, of social formations in those parts of the world that were hidden behind the apparent march toward “modernization” under the likes of the Shah of Iran, Nasser, Nehru, or Sékou Touré.

Only in 2010 did the world’s rural population drop below 50 percent of the total. The great majority of those remaining in the countryside are petty-producer peasants, artisans and rural proletarian laborers. Considering only India and China, with close to 40 percent of the world’s population between them, it is clear that the “agrarian question,” on a world scale, remains central to any possible creation of a renewed communism. This is all the more urgent in light of the one million people a day who arrive from the countryside in the world’s cities, as capitalism increasingly makes their way of life unviable and draws them into a dubious future in the world’s shantytowns9 or China’s 270 million migrant workers.

To reconnect with the political and social realities of the world’s rural population, both historically and for today, in a project to create a viable, non-developmentalist Marxism for the world after Stalinism, Maoism and Third Worldism, also takes us back to another largely forgotten dimension of Marx: the critique of the separation of city and countryside as a fundamental alienation, the separation of the producers from their means of production in the 16th and 17th century as “the ” original alienation to be overcome in a future “activity as all-sided in its production as in its consumption,”10 Marx’s call for the “more even distribution of the population around the earth’s surface” (Communist Manifesto) when cities, owing their existence to the centralization of capital, can be superseded, and finally, and hardly last, the ever more pressing question of the environment.

All these dimensions are opened up by an inquiry into the agrarian question in the Russian Revolution.

I. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and the Russian Peasant Commune: Origins of an Ideology

In the 1870s, Karl Marx first took a serious interest in the Russian revolutionary movement, partly through the (initially) surprising impact of his own work11 in a country he had previously viewed as the colossal “gendarme of Europe,” and even more so by contact with the Russian Populists, both through their impressive actions12 and through their correspondence with him, requesting advice on strategy and tactics.

In short order, Marx set aside work on volumes 2 and 3 of Capital, taught himself Russian, and spent much of the last decade of his life studying Russian agriculture. He concealed this turn in his work from his lifelong collaborator, Engels. Aside from important correspondence with Russian revolutionaries, he never wrote a text of any length based on his new interest, but at his death left two cubic meters of notes on Russia.

What ensued was a fundamental step in the transformation of Marx’s work into an ideology, one whose influence reached into the 1970s. When Engels discovered these materials after Marx’s death, and realized they were the reason that Marx had not finished Capital, he was furious, and apparently wanted to burn them.13

Marx, in his research on Russia (as well as on other non-Western countries and regions14) had discarded his earlier claims of a single path of world capitalist development, one in which “England held up to the world the mirror of its own future,” and had also recognized that the validity of his work up to that point was confined to the conditions of western Europe.

At the center of Marx’s “Russian road”15 was the peasant commune, or mir (also called the obschina). The mir had been studied in depth in the early 1840s by the German Baron Haxthausen, whose three-volume work of 1843 led to a controversy in Russia about the mir’s significance, involving every Russian intellectual faction from the backward-looking Slavophiles to the exile Alexander Herzen to the Westernizers.16 The commune then became central to the Populists’ claim that Russia could, or should, skip the capitalist “stage” of development, a sentiment reinforced by Marx’s preface to the 1882 Russian translation of the Communist Manifesto,17 not to mention the portrayal of real conditions in England which they found in Capital.

In his discovery of the still-viable Russian commune, Marx was reconnecting with his 1840s writings about “community” (“Gemeinwesen” in German).18 He was reasserting that for him, communism was first of all about the “material human community,” and not about forced-march industrialization and productivist five-year plans.19

This debate between the self-styled Marxists of different kinds and the “romantic” “subjectivist” Populists about the viability of the mir lasted into the early 1900s, greatly skewed by Engels’ suppression of Marx’s Russian studies.20 Even some of the Populists who had received Marx’s letters about Russia’s unique possibilities resulting from the mir, who had then become Marxists themselves, all but participated in the suppression.21 Later, the Social Revolutionaries (SRs), the rivals to the Bolsheviks and many of whose members considered themselves Marxists, claimed to be the true heirs of Marx based on his suppressed letters on the mir.22

One should not romanticize the mir; Chernyshevsky, who had known it close up near the provincial town of his boyhood, had distinctly mixed feelings about it as a prototype for socialism, yet he was one of the first, in the 1850s, to argue that the mir, combined with Western technology after a successful revolution in Europe, could be the basis for a “communist development,” as Marx and Engels later put it in 1882.

What exactly was the mir as a lived experience for Russian peasants? Franco Venturi, author of the classic study of the Russian Populist movement of the nineteenth century, wrote about how the mir figured in the modernizing plans of the Tsarist state prior to the serf emancipation of the 1861, which was intended to put Russia on the path of capitalist development, and sketched themes that would remain present right up to Stalin’s destruction of the mir in his 1929–1932 collectivizations:

"The enquiry of 1836 had shown how much this spirit of equality, latent in the very forms of serfdom and peasant tradition, had in fact been undermined by the rise of a group of richer farmers who began to have considerable influence on the entire life of the obshchina [or mir–LG]. These farmers, for instance, tipped the scales of periodic redistribution in their own favor and…subjected the community of poorer peasants to their control. But the enquiry had also shown how deeply these traditional forms were rooted. The assiduous inspectors were often shocked by the disorder, the vulgarity and the violence which prevailed in the meetings of the mir, and also by its many obvious injustices. Nevertheless it was in the obshchina and the mir that the peasants expressed those ideas on land ownership which had so impressed and irritated Kiselev and Périer.23 It was through these organizations, the only ones at its disposal, that peasant society defended itself. The communities naturally differed from district to district, reflecting the entire range of peasant life…Yet, despite all this variety, there was one common factor; the obshchina represented the tradition and ideal of the peasant masses. How then could it be broken?”24

That latter question would continue to vex Tsarist planners right up to 1917, and in a different way, would be the barrier on which different Bolshevik plans for industrialization as well would break up in the 1920s.

From Engels to Plekhanov, “the father of Russian Marxism,” to Kautsky and Lenin, the linear, evolutionist, “matter-motion” view of “dialectical materialism” spread worldwide as the orthodoxy of the Second International. With the consolidation of Stalinism, it became identified with “real existing socialism” itself. ‘Dialectical materialism” was in fact the vulgar recapitulation of the bourgeois materialism of the eighteenth century, and not accidentally promoted by movements and regimes which were, like the eighteenth century template, completing the bourgeois revolution, in the eradication of pre-capitalist agriculture, whatever their ideology and stated goals. Elements of this ideology persist today in various types of productivism that confuse the tasks of the bourgeois and socialist revolutions.25

But a still larger context was shaping this post-Marx ideological development: the global transition from the formal to the real domination of capital. In the formal phase, capital takes over pre-capitalist production (e.g., guilds, cooperation, manufacture) without modifying them materially; in the latter, real phase, capital reduces all aspects of production, reproduction and of life generally to its adequate capitalism form. In industry, the German and American “rationalization movements” (i.e., capital-intensive innovation) of the 1920s were the cutting edge of this “materialization of a social relationship”26; in agriculture, this meant, ultimately, California-style agribusiness, and comparable developments in other major grain exporters such as Canada and Australia,27as well as the professional, agronomy-trained farmer who has replaced western Europe’s classical peasants since World War II. In the arc from the United States to Russia, by way of the smaller agricultures of France, Italy and Germany, one finds a near-perfect congruence of lingering pre-capitalist agriculture, i.e., the agriculture of formal domination (exemplified in the individual land-owning peasant who emerged from the French Revolution) and, later, Communist Parties: the stronger pre-capitalist agriculture, the stronger the Third International parties after 1917.28 Pre-1914 Social Democracy and post-1917 Communism were the adequate form of working-class organization to propel this transition, and were notably marginal in countries like the United States or Great Britain, where these tasks were complete. We can thus agree with Lars Lih when he argues29 that Lenin was an “Erfurtian Social Democrat” in the extreme conditions of Tsarist autocracy, as long as we recognize that Erfurtian Social Democracy in Germany,30 like the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, were the organizational expression for this transition. One might sketch the two phases like this: