Bolshevism and Stalinism in the Epoch of Imperialist World War and Proletarian Revolution (Urgeschichte)

Will Barnes

The First Study is an abridgment of first edition (1979) of Aspects of a History of Bolshevism. The Second Study reproduces Stalin and the Stalinist Era in Soviet History at its Origins (May-August 1999) in its entirety. This study draws out the implications of the first, exhibiting all the consequences of the Bolshevik failure to internationalize the revolution in the months following October 1917. A third study (Revolution and CounterRevolution in Catalonia and Spain, 1936-1939) has been removed from this text: While clearly demonstrating the counterrevolutionary nature of Stalinism, it does not fall within the purview of a work which is framed by the epoch of imperialist world war and proletarian revolution. In engaging in a crypto-Trotskyist analysis of the May Days and the POUM, and in globally decontextualizing rural anarchist collectives, it further falls below the level achieved in the first two studies.

Contents

First StudyBolsheviks and Bolshevism in Two RevolutionsHistorical Notes Theoretical Notes

Second StudyStalin and the Stalinist Era in Soviet History at its OriginsHistorical NoteRemarks

Summation and Perspective

First StudyBolsheviks and Bolshevism in Two Revolutions

IntroductionThe Prehistory of Bolshevism, 1893-1903

The initial processes of the formation of the Russian proletariat as a class for the most part neither coincided with early manifestations of its subjectivity nor, of course, with its appearance on the stage of world-history. Rather, this proletariat was called into being as an object of capitalist exploitation, and it was called into being by the action of the Tsarist autocracy in need of a modernized military on which to base itself.In the latter half of the 19th century, military expenditures consumed enormous sums, and, as a whole, the autocracy's annual military budget strained the very national economy.1 It was the peasantry who bore the burden of the State budget. The 1861 land reform, the so-called emancipation of serfs, created a new source of State revenues. Peasants were compelled to pay a "redemption" fee to landlords for the worst of lands they formerly worked as serfs. They were further forced to pay direct State taxes on this newly owned land, while indirect State taxes on primitive implements, clothing, etc. were introduced. To pay these taxes, peasants were forced to sell their meager harvests - product of both poor soils and simple tools. Thereby they were thrust into a web of market relations. Taxes, on the other hand, absorbed the entirety of their cash incomes and more: From harvest to harvest peasants accumulated new, larger debts as their returns failed to meet State-imposed tax obligations.But the taxes imposed upon the peasants could hardly generate enough revenue to keep pace with State expenditures, especially the burden of war costs as well as those involved in the merely maintaining an army and navy. The response of the Finance Ministry was to borrow - having exhausted domestic credit - on foreign money markets. Thus, for example, M.K. Reutern, Minister of Finance from 1862-1878, acquired loans totaling one billion rubles on foreign money markets during the years 1865-1875 alone.2Summarily: Barren lands and primitive farming techniques assured low productivity and inadequate agricultural surpluses; taxes on land and on these surpluses were, not surprisingly, also inadequate to the task of maintaining a modern military establishment in order to pursue imperial ambitions (and hold off the imperialist ambitions of the economically more advanced European capitalist States). Accordingly, State, primarily military, spending put enormous strains on the national economy, while the same expenditures called forth a national debt, i.e., a very real dependency on foreign finance capital.It was in this context that the autocracy drew the appropriate lesson from the defeat inflicted on its peasants armies by the militarily, in part because technologically, superior armies of the British and French ruling classes in the Crimean War (1854-1856): Either modernize the precapitalist "economy" in order to militarily defend itself against European imperialist aggressors (while, of course, carrying out its own imperial designs), or suffer the consequences of future defeats. In 1856, State finances were reorganized and a finance ministry created to provide a center from which modernization could be carried out; in 1861, as already mentioned, serfdom was formally abolished thereby further providing, in the persons of poor and landless peasants, the social base for industrialization; during the sixties, tariffs were lowered as a direct invitation to foreign capital; after 1862, rapid construction of railway system, of which the State took complete control in 1897, was undertaken; and, again, during the sixties a number of other, restriction-bound social reforms were introduced to ease the way for modernization.3But industrialization did not get underway in earnest until the last decade and a half of the 19th century. Even though by this time a steep tariff had been imposed at the frontiers to protect domestic (and especially State) industries, foreign capital poured in during this period - largely with a view to the cheap, unorganized labor force coming into being in Russia. As whole plants, built and originally located in Belgium, France, England and Germany, were

1Von Laue, Serge Witte and the Industrialization of Russia, 32.The problem of vast military expenditures plagued Russia throughout the history of Tsarism. Trotsky (1905, 8) notes during the second half of the 18th century 60% to 70% of State expenditures went for the army and navy; while in 1908, military spending consumed 40.5%, some 1018 million of 2495 million rubles, of the State budget.2Von Laue, Ibid, 11-12.3Most importantly, these reforms included the introduction of self-administering rural bodies called "zemstvos" and town councils called "dumas."

ATdismantled and transported to and reconstructed in Russia down to the last nut and bolt, foreign capital began to make its presence felt in Russia. Already the German Ludwig Knapp had given impetus to the formation of a textile industry, the Englishman H.R. Hughes to the establishment of a metallurgical industry in the south, the Swedish Nobel brothers had created an oil industry in Baku, and foreign bankers such as the German Ernst Mendelssohn dominated the financial affairs of the autocracy.Still the State remained the center from which development was carried out: With some success it regulated the influx of foreign capital, stabilized the currency, and, moreover, was the largest landowner, employer, capital investor and industrial developer, in a word the only effective socio-economic force, in Russia.By the outbreak of the first imperialist world war, the Great War, thirty years of rapid industrial expansion had brought a modern, hereditary proletariat into being.1

IAt the height of pre-revolutionary (economic) expansion in 1913, Russia exhibited a number of economic and social peculiarities.Russia's belated entry into the world capitalist system showed up in the backwardness of its industrial output. Russia generally ranked 4th or 5th in basic industrial output (steel, machine production, electricity, etc.) falling far behind the British, German and American national sectors of the world economy.2 That a basically rural, undeveloped society with a military capitalist sector was at all ranked is deceiving: Ranking was not enough, since Tsarist Russia, after all, aspired to be a world power.Backwardness, however, did not end there. Industrial centers formed tiny islands scattered throughout a vast countryside; industry itself had as its presupposition a most primitive agricultural economy; and Russian workers constituted a numerically insignificant class in the midst of a sea of illiterate, impoverished peasants. The fundamental fact of rural existence was overcrowding. As industrial and commercial activities did little to take population pressure off the land, objectively the autocracy and landlords guaranteed the stagnation of agricultural technique (through the imposition of heavy taxes and rent), thus assuring low productivity in the countryside.Rural backwardness had its urban counterpart in the failure of an enlightened and scientific culture to take hold in the cities and from there to hegemonize Russian society. Centuries-old superstitions and practices shaped the outlook of the peasantry and the autocracy alike, while the historical bearer of scientific culture, the urban bourgeoisie, was a commercial and industrial latecomer and, consequently, was politically weak: It lacked the traditions and confidence necessary to cultural creation.Unlike its Western counterparts, the Russian industrial proletariat did not have a working class past rooted in the pre-industrial (i.e., handicraft and manufacturing) eras of early capitalism. In other words, the importation and penetration of foreign capital brought with it industrial work-processes organized in the most advanced manner, viz., as large-scale factory production planned on the most modern design, and utilizing the most up-to-date techniques and processes of production.3 Crowded into workplaces under such conditions the industrial working class of Russia was, in fact, the most concentrated sector of a world proletariat.4Consider a brief statistical comparison. Trotsky notes that in 1895 of 5,612,000 German industrial workers 44% were employed in small-sized factories (6-50 worker), 46% in medium-sized (51-1,000) and 10% in large-scale factories (over 1,000 workers). In contrast, in 1902 of 1,863,200 Russian industrial workers 12.5% were employed in small-sized factories, 49% in medium-sized ones and an astonishing 38.5% in large-scale factories and plants.5 By 1913, firms with over 500 workers employed 54.5% of all industrial workers in Russia.6 Further note that large factories and plants, comprising less than 5% of all industrial enterprises in Tsarist Russia, but nonetheless employed about 67%

1From 1890 to 1913, this proletariat grew in absolute size from 1,425,000 to 2,931,300 workers. S.O. Zagorsky, State Control of Industry in Russia During the War, 5.2P.I. Liashchenko, History of the National Economy of Russia, 688, 690.3Emile Vandevelte, Three Aspects of the Russian Revolution, 35.4Vandevelte, Ibid, notes that in Petrograd the vast factories and plants that made up individual enterprises employed more men on average than equivalent firms in the United States.5Trotsky, Ibid, 21.6Zagorsky, Ibid, 10.

of the country's industrial workers.1 The Russian industrial working class numerically three times smaller than the German class had a full 40% more industrial workers employed in large-scale enterprises in sectors of the economy, not surprisingly, directly related to the production of armaments and military supplies. By 1900, many plants, such as the Petersburg Metallurgical works, Obukhov works, mills and factories in the St. Petersburg area, the Emil' Tsindel factory and Prkhrov-Trekhgornoi's in Moscow, all employed between 2,300 and 5,000 workers; and still others, such as Putilov Works in St. Petersburg, employed over 10,000 workers.While the Russian industrial proletariat in manufacturing, transportation and commerce numbered by 1913 some 3,000,000 out of a total population of 153,000,000,2 its numerical insignificance did not address the question of its political weight. Because Tsarist Russia was a backward nation belatedly entering the capitalist world, a nation nonetheless caught up in a tangle of inter-imperialist rivalries moving this world headlong toward global conflagration, it was also a nation frantically seeking to build up basic industries, an arms industry, textiles and a modern communications system (rails, telegraph). While Russia lacked a politically independent and strong bourgeoisie, its proletariat was highly concentrated and strategically situated in all vital industrial centers, worked and lived in the most intolerable conditions of daily existence, and constantly confronted a State which refused this class recognition of even the most elementary human rights historically connected to proletarian forms of life. In such a nation under such conditions, a tiny proletariat would at once possess enormous political weight and be forced to move against autocratic social relations and the military capitalist sector embedded in them.

IIThe peculiarities of the development of capitalism in Tsarist Russia should not be allowed to obscure the reality and unity of capitalism as a world system. One of the most striking features of this unity during the period 1880-1917 was the structural identity of leading sectors of different national working classes.With a view to the internal organization of the various national proletariats as objects of capitalist exploitation, there was little difference between industrial workers in St. Petersburg, Turin, Glasgow, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Chicago or St. Louis.3 St. Petersburg itself was the center of the most concentrated and advanced Russian industries, a microcosm of Russian industry as a whole and mirror of the structure of developed sectors of the world economy from the late 1880s down to 1917.The major industries of St. Petersburg were to found in metalworking and textiles. Metalworking industries included machine construction, shipbuilding and munitions, and steel production and rail construction, that is, all the industries materially prerequisite to the formation of a modern army and navy. These industries were dominated by large specialized enterprises which, relatively and historically speaking, were capital intensive with high organic capital compositions and which primarily employed an elite of highly skilled, specialized workers. Nationally forming a mere 4% of the working class, skilled workers in St. Petersburg made up nearly one-half of the labor force.4 Thus, within the national economy of Tsarist Russia as a whole, a "mass, relatively speaking, of unskilled workers were preponderate. These workers were found universally in industries, especially textiles, where the utilization of primitive machinery dominated and, consequently, the organic composition of capital was low. Still textile workers and the textile industry were just negatively related (as unskilled opposed to skilled workers and as textiles other than metalworking) to the military capitalist sector: In producing troop clothing, both workers and industry were objectively related to this sector as its material prerequisite.This internal division among Russian workers assumed still other forms different from that based on skilled. On the one side, skilled workers possessed advanced education (e.g., fluency in 2-3 languages), and as a rule were 1Richard Pipes (Social Democracy and the St. Petersburg Labor Movement, 2, n. 1), citing the Russian historian A. Einitskii. By 1913, this percentage had been reduced to 54.5; however, in the all-important metalworking industries 171 firms (in 1910) employed 264,281 workers, an average of 1545 per firm. Zagorsky, Ibid.2Zagorsky, Ibid, 13.3Chris Goodey, "Factory Committees in the Russian Revolution (1918)," 30-34; and also Sergio Bologna, "Class Composition and Theory of the Party at the Origin of the Workers-Councils Movement," 7.Bologna exhibits the connections - constituted at the levels of objectivity (structure of the class as an object of capitalist exploitation), subjectivity (political composition of the class) and action (strike movement, insurrection, production of new social forms) - between leading sectors of what, on the basis of these connections, can legitimately be characterized as a world working class.4The Soviet historian, Julius Netesky, cited by Leopold Haimson, "The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia." Slavic Review, 23, 635.

extremely literate; they required technical training based on lengthy apprenticeship; and, it goes without saying, they were better and more regularly paid.1 Their skills, moreover, allowed them to form a relatively non-alienating relation to their equipment and machinery; and, thereby, they exercised real control over and developed an understanding of the labor processes.On the other side, the "mass" of unskilled workers were invariably illiterate, and very poorly and irregularly paid. They included large numbers of children and women; were generally fresh from the countryside; and, having very recently broken with their serf, semi-serf or poor or landless peasant past, they found their ghettoized urban life both bewildering and intolerable. Dominated by a production process over which they had no control and of which they understood frightfully little, working long and exhausting hours, these "masses" were concentrated primarily into textile factories (such as Thorton's in St. Petersburg) known solely for their deplorable working conditions.The distinction, then, between the unskilled masses and a numerically small, worker elite was not superficial. It ran quite deep, cut across the class, was a moment of the subjectivity of both strata, and even found expression in everyday speech: Skilled workers were employed in plants (zavody), while unskilled workplaces were referred to as factories (fabriki).

IIIThe earliest (1884-1894) form of workers activities in Russia consisted in study circles (kruzhki). The circles unified workers and student intellectuals (intelligenty) in a project of worker enlightenment called propaganda. The circles were tightly knit and secretive due to the danger of police arrest, were confined to small groups of workers, generally included a single intellectual, and were scattered throughout industrial Russia.Most often intellectuals involved in circle activity would develop a program for workers that included a study guide and reading list. The program ranged from training in elementary arithmetic operations, reading, and writing to a history of civilization that included scientific study, political economy, analysis of Russian society, and socialist theory.Until the late 1880s, students engaged in the circles participated on an individual basis remaining unorganized; workers, on the other hand, having already organized themselves into circles, thereafter began to centralize their activities.2 By 1890, workers and student intellectuals had their own organizations. Throughout their existence, the study circles remained under the jealously guarded hegemony of workers. The principle of hegemony was in fact motivated by worker suspicion of intellectuals. This distrust had a class basis, i.e., was internally linked to a worker teleology that encompassed a practical attitude quite different from that of revolutionary intellectual:3 Though abstractly accepting the necessity of a distant socialist society, skilled workers saw circle activity as a way to escape the drudgery and hopelessness of proletarian existence through personal cultivation based on intellectual and moral enlightenment, cultivation which might lift them out of the working class by opening up an opportunity of a different order of work. On the other hand, student intellectuals viewed the circles as a means of instilling a socialist perspective in workers, training propagandists, and thereby obtaining access to greater numbers and strata of workers. (Well take up the underlying motives of intellectuals in Part I, below.)Students did not have a clear perspective on how the circles would achieve the purpose they imputed to them. Much of their vagueness was grounded in implicit, internal and undisputed ideological differences. Up until the split in 1894 between social democrats and populists (narodniki), a split over the fate of capitalism in Russia (i.e., over the question of the agency of change) and one in which differences were sorted out and perspectives purified, both groups of intellectuals worked side by side without clarity or ideological dispute.

1To anticipate, this discussion tacitly raises the question of the relevance and import of the concept of a labor aristocracyAs a class stratum, highly skilled workers in the era of imperialist world war and proletarian revolution exhibited contradictory behavior. Though in, say, 1915, Lenin may have adequately characterized a privileged stratum of the western European proletariat (or, for that matter, the organized manufacturing proletariat of societies of capital in the era of cold war so-called), as labor aristocrats, it was the same well-paid, skilled stratum, largely metalworkers who, constituting an internal class vanguard, spearheaded the revolutionary upheavals that swept Russia and Europe from 1917 to 1923.2Alan Wildman, The Making of a Workers Revolution, 29-30.3To wit, workers had a difficult time accepting the straightforwardly given reasons for student presence since, from the workers standpoint, it was hard to imagine rejecting a students prospects for work a life trajectory without the oppressive presence of capitals representatives, without long and hard hours, and without the prospects of material comforts and financial security for a political commitment to revolutionizing society.

While students engaged in circle activity were representative of the different strata and classes constituting the intelligentsia,1 worker participation in the circles was based almost exclusively on the thin layer of skilled proletarians. Their position in production and the technical training as well as already acquired literacy allowed these workers to develop aspirations that projected them beyond the immediacy of their day-to-day situations, aspirations of lifting themselves out of the class through personal cultivation.Thus, the earliest forms of workers activity in Russia confirmed among a small stratum of workers an awareness, albeit largely individualistic, of the possibilities of transcending the proletarian quotidian. These forms, however, gave no indication of the constitution of a subjectivity informed by revolutionary aspirations. If circle activity did not generate insight into the necessity of revolutionary change, this insight itself (as well as the recognition that circle activity was reaching very limited numbers of workers) was only produced by social democratic intellectuals against the double background of an upsurge in strike activity among the unskilled worker masses and the success achieved with agitaitonal techniques by social democrats in Poland and the Jewish Pale.2

IVIn the ten years from 1884 to 1893, the average yearly number of strikes came to nearly 31; in 1894, 41 strikes occurred, 1895 saw 68, and 1896 118 strikes.In the midst of a 25-30 year period of rapid industrialization, the three years from 1984 to 1896 witnessed the concentration of a mass of unskilled workers in industrial centers such as St. Petersburg, Kiev, Katerinoslav, Moscow, and Nizhni-Norgovod among others. During the same period, social democratic groups, composed now of ex-student intellectuals, students, and a few young social democratic workers, began to shift from propaganda to agitation, away from the worker elite toward the worker-masses.The worker-masses were originally poor and landless peasants who, under pressure of financial obligation generated by the system of direct and indirect taxes (pressures intensified by and accelerating the expansion of market relations into the countryside), were differentiated out of a socially amorphous serf populace. As landless, land-hungry tenant farmers and poor peasants, they were en masse forced into urban industrial centers by overcrowding and famine in the countryside.The term "masses" is itself revealing: Taken over from classical physics, it refers to the undifferentiated level of skill, interchangeability within labor processes, and the numerical weight the characterized the unskilled Russian proletariat. The term's anonymity is the other side of the lived reality it inadequately catches and fixes: The worker-masses toiled thirteen hours and more daily; without prior cultural preparation, they were subjected to rapid, repetitive machine rhythms; wages were extremely low and irregularly paid (e.g., instead of the promised twice monthly, sometimes as little as 3 or 4 times yearly); bosses, such as foremen, had the arbitrary power to and often did impose excessive fines for countless petty offenses; constant harassment from the same sources characterized the limited exchanges between supervisory personnel and workers; and, heat and dust constituted a real attack on worker health, not the least because medical facilities were altogether lacking, medical care was poor and sanitary precautions were unheard of.3 Women, who had a large presence among the unskilled, found these conditions of daily work particularly oppressive: Young women, in particular, experienced regular sexual harassment and were often confronted with the choice of sexually submitting to male supervisors or facing job loss.Housing conditions were wretched.4 In small industrial areas, such as the village of Zuero (7,000 inhabitants) near Moscow, workers rented at high prices shacks old, rotting and often near collapse. Sewer systems and often outhouses simply did not exist for these workers. Discarded rubbish, its presence and odor, was a constant feature of the daily environs. In large industrial centers, such as St. Petersburg, housing conditions were no better. In the

1Universities drew their students primarily from the families of landowners, professionals and high-ranking bureaucrats. Technical schools (e.g., the Technological Institute in St. Petersburg) drew their students from the urban, lower middle classes, petty gentry, lower ranking officials and the Cossacks.2Polish students, especially those who settled in the western town of Vilna and worked among Russified Jewish craftsmen, came to the larger universities, penetrated social democratic circles and brought with them an understanding of agitation developed on the soil of a politically more advanced working class movement. Wildman, Ibid, 38.3Theodore von Laue, "Russian Labor between Fields and Factories," 56-57, 63.4"Ibid," 60-62.

Peterhof part of the city, hovels were continuously erected where the city slop and garbage were dumped to bring the ground above a swamp. In these conditions, cholera ran wild yearly until the frost came.Most of the large industrial companies were legally compelled to provide workers with factory owned housing without charge. The women and men making up the worker-masses were crammed into this barrack type housing adjacent the factories. Bedbugs, lice, poor construction, and crude latrines were its general features. Crowding, in fact, was endemic to all forms of housing, rent free or not. Beyond this, what was left for the worker-masses in the way of cultivation were taverns.

VThe unskilled, worker-masses lived through and endured these conditions, but underneath felt injustices were accumulating and periodically exploded outward in unmediated outbursts of element violence. The violence, destructive in form, included breaking factory windows, smashing machines, breaking into administrative offices and destruction of furnishings and books therein, and the looting of company stores and the beating of unpopular supervisory personnel. Toward the middle 1890s i.e., as the concentration of worker masses increased), these outbursts occurred with greater frequency.Social democrats began to take notice of these activities and the numbers involved, and were able to reorient their activities away from the study circles and to make contact with the large numbers of the unskilled. They were helped by an analysis developed on the most advanced, western Russian terrain.In 1894, a pamphlet entitled Ob agitatsii (On Agitation) appeared. It expounded the theoretical basis of agitation and procedurally summarized approaches to the worker masses. Agitation was premised on the view that opposition to capital and the State are implicit in the conditions of the daily work of the work masses; that, consequently, large numbers of workers could best be approached and recruited strictly on the basis of those lived contradictions experienced at the point of production.Agitational work itself consisted in gathering detailed information on those abuses motivating an ongoing strike; drawing out of these abuses a list of demands aimed at immediately ameliorating the factory conditions responsible for the abuses in the first place; publishing these demands in handbills with exhortations to build solidarity, not to engage in trashing of equipment and plant and to hold out for improved working conditions; and, in planting these handbills around the factory were strike action was underway. This was, at any rate, the paradigmatic form of agitational work. Thus, as a form of activity aimed at the worker masses, it raised economic demands for the improvement of daily working conditions.1In the three years under discussion, social democrats assimilated the doctrines propounded in Ob agitatsii and refined and perfected agitational methods. They were further able to build up a small periphery of worker committees among the worker masses, committees directed by those skilled, socialist workers who (along with social democratic intellectuals) made the turn from the circles to agitation.The success of this work can be gauged by the impetus it gave to the strike wave in the late nineties. But this success cannot be understood in terms of organizational leadership of actual workers struggles. To the contrary, social democrats were simply not in the position to be directing or organizing those struggles in the day-to-day, tactical sense suggested by Stalinist historiography: Their organizations were scattered, small and without real presence anywhere in the class. Rather, their leadership, valuable as it was, was in an attenuated, mediated sense directional, i.e., they articulated the latent aspirations of workers, gave those aspirations coherent form, allowing for the emergence of overall sense (sens): What these Marxists did was to clearly and concisely formulate the demands of striking worker; to encourage workers to act in an unified and disciplined manner, while constantly pointing to their strength in and possibility of victory through collective action; and, because, they did this, gradually over time social democratic intellectuals assisted those workers they were more closely involved with in developing for themselves a theoretical mediation in and through which they were able to in the long run raise to the level of consciousness their thoroughly antagonistic relation not only to employers but to the autocracy as well. In St. Petersburg, in particular, the local social democratic organization (the Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of Labor of which Martov and Lenin were leading members) had gained considerable respect from workers for their agitaitonal work.

1For descriptions of agitational work, we have relied on Pipes, Ibid, 52-65; and, Wildman, Ibid, 61-66, 70.

VIIn May 1896, the governor of St. Petersburg decreed a one-day paid holiday in honor of the coronation of Nicolas Il for workers employed privately owned factories and a three-day paid holiday for workers in State owned factories and plants.1 Workers employed in privately owned factories stayed out for the entire three days believing they would get holiday pay for their time out. When refused payment, they went out on strike. The walkout, news of which was conveyed by agitators, quickly spread throughout the cotton mills and textile factories of the city. In two days the entire industry was closed down, upward 35,000 workers were out on strike.The strikers engaged in neither trashing their respective factories nor did they exhibit any drunkenness. Rather, in a display of spontaneous sophistication and organizational skill, workers from each factory elected representatives, a hundred of which gathered in a St. Petersburg park.2 Here they drew up a list of seven demands headed by a call for a shortened working day (down to 11 hours). The demands were mimeographed by the Union for Struggle at the workers request. Some money was collected throughout the city, especially from workers in metalworking and machine construction (whose solidarity, however, did not extend to a sympathy strike), and through social democratic parties in Europe. But the money was either too little or too late. The autocracy at this point unyieldingly attempted to starve workers out; and, after two full weeks striking workers, without wages and with limited financial support, returned to work. In July, mass arrests of strike leaders were made.Prior to their return to work, the autocracy had promised striking workers a review of their demands. By the end of the year no review had been forthcoming, so workers left their shops again in January (1897).3 The autocracy immediately declared starting in April the working day would be shortened nationally to 11 hours. Nonetheless, strikers stayed out a full week and won additional concessions. This was a major class victory.The 1896-1897 strikes were of historical importance to the entire Russian proletariat for the following reasons:Striking workers once and for all ended speculation as to whether or no industrial workers in Russia could, in an overwhelmingly rural society, play a major role in societal change. The autocracy, to be sure, had taken note of them.Striking workers demonstrated to themselves and to other workers capacities for action and self-organization. Their victory promoted recognition of the solidarity of working class interests, that is, their social power as a class.

1For the following, see Pipes, Ibid, 101-102.2So disciplined, this is, of course, the proletariat as bourgeois intellectuals in the workers movement would have it, but it is not characteristically proletarian: For what is far more true to type is a class dynamic that at once expresses socially unrestrained violence, upwelling and overwhelming class anger, and an intersubjective, social self-control. Bourgeois intellectuals do not know this, and fear it when they see it (though organic intellectuals inseparably bound to the wage relation understand it): Workers struggle with their activity (abstract labor), hate the arbitrary authority, its incompetence and petty tyranny, and hate the managers, bosses, employers and capitalists who are capricious, incompetence and despotic and most of all hate them all as each of us lives and feels our lives slipping away in our abysmal subordination to capital It is inevitable that, in any revolutionary situation, we, workers, will wreck our vengeance on these very real, very immediate personifications of capital. The anarchist workers in Barcelona and its environs who, following the late July 1936 defeat of the generals uprising, took recalcitrant bosses, managers not just owners, outside in the yards of their respective workplaces and shot them, are merely a well known instance of this behavior, expressing the class dynamic. Bourgeois intellectuals are horrified after all, the petty tyrants whether foreman, specialists or administrators so-called are necessary to restart production. Thus, they display in an era when the suppression of work has become the battle cry of communism their (especially those who deem themselves close to and part of the workers movement) productivist appetites. For the same reason, the same social layer rejects genuine, because primordially passionate, worker opposition to capital, say as in the Luddites. The bourgeois intellectual, like layers attached to the business classes generally, has learned to sublimate his aggressive impulses in the compulsive manner of the bourgeoisie, starting with the aesthetization of sexuality, as in acquisition and accumulation, say for example of books. As a compulsion, this is harmless but it has not lost its character as such, as bourgeois. Among proletarians the intersubjective, social discipline displayed in the textual discussion above is far more typical the other side of the class dynamic For workers exhibit personal compulsions only when they have ceased to be fundamentally proletarian, i.e., when their culture has become that of capital itself (embourgeoisment).Among bourgeois intellectuals, a visceral response of horror and disgust at elemental worker violent renders them no different than the simple moralistsWorkers differ from bandits or social outcasts in recognizing this is the lived reality embedded in the situation of abstract labor, in precognitively knowing and coming to understand that this personal reality, this visceral hatred of capitalism, has social foundations, that it is underpinned by a structural, necessary condition of capitalism (exploitation, extraction of surplus value), that these structural foundations must be transformed, and that capitalist development itself has produced, at least in principle, in us as workers an agency capable of effecting that change.3Wildman, Ibid, 76-77.

The victory of striking workers also gave confidence to organized social democrats and greatly enhanced their local and international reputation.4

VIIThe enormous encouragement the textile workers strike gave to other Russian workers can be read off the strike figures for the following years. Throughout 1897, 1898 and 1899, the strike movement gained ground: From 118 strikes in 1898, to 145 in 1897, 215 in 1898 and slowing down somewhat in 1899 with 189.This slowdown, a temporary pause in which a different layer of the class prepared itself for a qualitative reorganization of activity manifested in political strikes beginning in late 1900, took place in the context of an economic downturn and in the face of severe repression.In these years the secret police (Okhrana), intensified its efforts, systematically seeking out, arresting and imprisoning or exiling leadership elements among strike workers and social democrats. This was, in fact, the political response of the autocracy to the level of working class activity achieved in and through the strike movement.In social democratic circles, the strike movement gave birth to discussion of and efforts to form a nationwide organization unifying the various, mostly unconnected local groups. The first such, unsuccessful effort was the Minsk conference in March 1898. It brought together representatives from five different organizations and a newspaper. The conference set up a loosely structured, all-Russian organization and produced a manifesto, but no party platform. By July, police roundups had destroyed the national center created at the conference, carrying out the largest single, successful assault on social democracy ever experienced in the Russian movement. Over five hundred of the most active worker- and intellectual-social democrats from all major groups were arrested.From the strike movement and police repression another characteristic feature of the period arose. A number of workers-intellectuals, generally with their roots in the skilled stratum of the class and theoretical training dating back to the earlier study circles, began to move away from social democratic circles while continuing to play leading roles (as agitators) in the waves of strikes as they unfolded. Equally dissatisfied, those remaining inside social democracy along with sympathetic ex-student intellectuals began to conduct an unorganized and unsystematic struggle against the leadership of social democratic groups. This struggle took shape in the efforts of worker-intellectuals to draw out and clearly articulate the political perspective implicit in and guiding agitation from the outset. That perspective was designated and has come to be known as economism.24Contrary to Leninist as well as Stalinist historiography, the Union of Struggle did not call workers out for, plan, or direct the strike. Thus, in the ill-defined Leninist sense the strike was spontaneous. Nonetheless, the Union of Struggle did play a role, and, in the longer view, a crucial role in the strike.First, the St. Petersburg group had distributed in the early months of 1896 a pamphlet entitled Robochii Den (The Working Day) which gave a vivid account of the relation between the length of the working day and poor health, accident rates, child labor, low wages, etc. The pamphlet, moreover, explicitly called for workers to strike to compel the government to create factory laws limiting the hours of the working day. Since some of the striking workers were familiar with the pamphlet, it is plausible to conclude the pamphlet, and thus mediately social democrats, assisted workers in drawing up a number of their demands.Second, the Union of Struggle distributed literature, pamphlets such as Rabochii Den, throughout the two week strike to workers through their strike committee. The literature was read by striking workers, or read out loud by a literate worker to others, at daily gatherings the time for which was created by the strike.In the longer view, the Union of Struggle had (as did other social democrats in similar situations) helped to prepare the ground for the strike through its constant agitation during the course of the previous two years (See Wildman, Ibid, 74-76). In this sense the strike was thoroughly umediated, i.e., unspontaneous.2Most strikingly characteristic of this form of organizing work is the detailed attention paid to workers' daily concerns, those taking shape at the point of production, specifically those countless abuses long hours, poor ventilation, extreme heat or cold, etc., that were the daily concerns of workers in the sphere of economic relations with employers.For the agitaitonal perspective the very economic struggle would teach the worker to stand up for his own interests, [elevate] his courage, [give] him confidence in his strength, consciousness of the necessity of unity (Ob agitatsii, 16, cited in Wildman, Ibid, 82).At stake is the formation of revolutionary subjectivity. According to the early thinking (1895) of no less than Lenin, "class consciousness" begins to take shape in the economic struggle itself, through generalization of the struggle at the point of production. The mass ... learn from this struggle, firstly, how to recognize and to examine one by one the methods of capitalist exploitation workers learn to understand the significance and the essence of exploitation as a whole, learn to understand the social system based on the exploitation of labor by capital in the process of this struggle the workers test their strength, learn to organize, learn to understand the need for and significance of organization this struggle develops the workers' political consciousness. ... The workers struggle against the factory owners for their daily needs automatically and inevitably spurs the workers on to think of state, political questions... (Collected Works, II, 115).

Operative in this perspective is the view that the objective course of events, underneath everything the movement of capital, draws workers into a struggle against their own exploitation and the State supporting it. It would be, then, quite easy on this view to reduce the activities of social democracy, as the author of Ob agitatsii himself put it, to continuous agitation among factory workers on the basis of their everyday petty needs, to collapse the programmatic elaboration of a politics into the economic struggle, and thereafter to lose complete sight of the broader dimensions of the class struggle, that is, the political arena of relations of all classes to one another and to the State as Lenin later put it. For revolutionary intellectuals, two great crimes were committed in holding and advocating this perspective: First, in foregoing the work of building a revolutionary organization, this work would be dissolved into tasks set by the mass movement; and, second, by limiting agitation to demands aimed at satisfying everyday (economic) needs of workers, the proletariat would be encouraged to lose sight of its political character as a potentially hegemonic class.This was, at any rate, the view of the revolutionary intelligentsia, a view codified in What is to be Done? and one which comes down to us as part of the patrimony of Leninism. But this 1902 perspective on the recent social democratic past constituted and one-sided account, a polemic generated by the exigencies of building an organization of professional revolutionaries, of a reality that did not so facilely fit Lenins schematic categories. For most worker intellectuals and, in fact, for most of the movement in the period 1896-189, the formulation of economism was inextricably bound up with and perhaps even primarily a question of organizational equality and parity, of relaxing rigidly fixed positions within the movement:Under conditions of illegality and in the years of worker and intellectual interaction, a rather detailed division of labor had grown up within which each group had precise, qualitatively differing tasks in social democratic groups. Workers, whether engaged in recruitment, the securing of secret meeting places, etc., almost exclusively performed executive tasks and played at best an advisory role vis--vis social democratic intellectuals. The latter, whether seeking outside financial support, producing literature, making extra-local contacts or, above all, debated the course of action in a given situation, the direction of the movement and its character, held leading positions and played decision making roles. The arrangements may have been, (and if so, then merely de facto), sanctioned by the conspiratorial nature of organization work rooted in the constant threat of disruption through police arrest. But these very conditions of illegality and repression had forced workers to develop some autonomy in relation to their centers. The periodic arrest of leading social democratic intellectuals and worker militants put the remaining organized and organizing workers in a position in which it became imperative to function at intervals without a directive center.Thus, by the late 1890s those workers already engaged in social democratic activity were prepared to assume leading organizational positions. However, the rabid opposition of intellectuals to any challenge to their hegemony embodied in and shaping the very organizational structure of social democracy in Russian frustrated efforts of these workers to overturn the fixed relations between the two groups.If agitation was from the outset informed by a latent economist perspective, the dissatisfaction experienced by departing social democratic workers provided the occasion for its explicit formulation. For, if the objective course of events compelled workers to become fully conscious of themselves as a class act accordingly, then what need was there for an organization of a conscious vanguard, i.e., why couldnt social democratic groups pass into the hands of workers themselves, or why couldnt workers themselves rise to a status as decisive components of this vanguard? What the intelligentsia at this point desperately required was a body of doctrine that would permit them to beat back this challenge. Such was largely the purpose of Lenins 1902 textBy 1900, economism was a dead issue in the workers movement. Its only, still very lively existence lay in the internal debates among social democrats. The disappearance of economism as a perspective embedded in workers activities was not, however, fortuitous. From the fall of 1899 onward economic downturn began to take the wind out of the sails of the strike movement. The threat of unemployment, which massive layoffs had already made a reality for

The elaboration of revolutionary subjectivity is specified in terms of the development of "political consciousness, i.e., awareness of the possibility and necessity of overthrowing the autocracy. "Political consciousness" is just as inevitable as the confrontation with the State, the autocracy. The former flows from the latter, the latter develops out of the struggle against the employers: Spreading out as it progresses, embracing entire industries instead of separate factories, the [economic] movement collides with government authority at every step. The lessons of political wisdom occur more frequently, and each time their strict morality is stamped more forcefully into the minds of the workers. Thus their class consciousness matures ...(Ibid, 117).

many workers, is given expression in the strike figures for these years. The strike level fell from 189 in 1899 to 125 in 1900, 164 in 1901 and 123 in 1902.

VIIIThe severe repression the strike movement had provoked was generalized by the autocracy in the late nineties to include the entire spectrum of oppositional elements in Russian society. In November 1896, a student demonstration in St. Petersburg was greeted by police violence and more than 700 arrests. By the 1898 academic year, student confrontation with university officials had become a near everyday occurrence. In February 1899, the rector of the university of St. Petersburg called in police to break up a mass meeting of students. The police forcefully closed down the assembly. In response, students went out on strike, sent out a call for support and within two weeks some 25,000 students from thirty universities, technical schools, and other similar institutions joined the strike.1The activity of students as well as the waning strike movement assisted in giving birth to the Liberation movement which by 1902, because liberal-democratic in aspiration, had developed an anti-autocratic content. The Liberation movement was formed on the basis of a coalition between two groups, the urban and radical non-social democratic intelligentsia and rural zemstvo activists. Themselves heterogeneous, these groups functioned as the dual leadership of a broadly based alliance of largely middling social strata consisting, on the one hand, of the classless intelligenty (i.e., liberal and technical professionals, white collar intellectuals and students) and, on the other hand, the zemstvo people, that is, landowning small nobles and middle peasants whose unity was constituted through the project of overthrowing the autocracy and, though there were differences here, establishing in its place a representative assembly underpinned by a democratic constitution and elected on the basis of universal male suffrage.2 Almost exclusively noble, zemstvo activists would recoil when confronted with each revolutionary turn (e.g., autumn 1905); yet their opposition to the autocracy was real enough: It was grounded in the impoverishment they experienced under conditions of rapid industrialization. The radical intelligentsia was considerably more progressive, for the very conditions of its full historical existence depended upon democratic rights, viz., on freedom of speech, assembly, publication without censorship, etc., as well as on the possibility of governmental service and a major role in the formation of public opinion denied it by the autocracy.The Liberation movement developed autonomous forms of expression and organization (e.g., the Writers Union, study circles, public lectures, publications, rallies), and at times right down to 1905 it overshadowed the workers movement. It was students who served to catalyze and launch the former, and it was student activities which presented a medium in which the latter reappeared in a novel form.The February-March 1899 general strike of students brought sympathetic workers out in support in the university town of Kharkov. Workers took to the streets after a procession of students had been broken up by police. Together workers and students refused to disperse and openly clashed with police throughout the day of 4(17) March. In Vilma, on May Day 1899 workers marched and, as in Kharkov two months earlier, sang the Marseillaise and shouted down with the autocracy. Coupled with activity whose content went beyond economic demands, a new spirit of militancy was forming inside the class. Through the economic crisis was taking its toll and the strike movement was waning, workers were slowly, perhaps imperceptibly and to a large extent merely locally, beginning to demonstrate solidarity in their actions and to challenge the police and Cossack forces of the autocracy.In Kiev in the following year (April-May 1900), a thousand bakery workers went out on strike and a thousand more local workers joined them in support. In May at Novyi Gorod (near Vilna), a group of workers attacked a police station in order to liberate fellow workers being held as prisoners. On May Day 1900, a large strike in Kharkov took place in which explicitly political demands were clearly raised.All these acts were political in content; nonetheless, they remained localized occurrences generally not attracting nor involving massive number of workers. The students still held center stage, and it took their forward movement to bring workers out visibly as a class.The autocracys bureaucracy, in the person of N.P. Bogolyepov (Education Minister), had reacted to the student general strike of 1899 in its typically retaliatory and stupid manner: Students expelled for their parts in the strike were

1Shmuel Galai, The Liberation Movement in Russia, 90-91.2Ibid, 126-127.

drafted into the army under newly promulgated temporary regulations.1 After another year of activism, more than 200 students were again conscripted in autumn 1900. Students were incensed. On 14 (27) February, an ex-student, Peter Karpovich, assassinated Bogolyepov. Within ten days street demonstrations organized by students took place in Kharkov, Kiev, Moscow and other university towns. In Moscow, students were joined by tens of thousands of workers who fought Cossacks across barricades set up in the streets. From the liberal standpoint, the entire wave of demonstrations culminated in St. Petersburg on 4 (17) March where forty thousand demonstrators, including all categories of students and leading liberal-democratic intellectuals, rallied at Kazan Square to protest the temporary conscription regulations. Red flags and cries of down with the autocracy were once again met by police and Cossacks with brutality and approximately 1,500 arrests.2 This single event against the openly repressive background of Tsarism literally launched the Liberation.

IXFrom the workers standpoint the wave of student demonstrations did not, however, consummate itself in catalyzing the Liberation movement. Rather, it pointed elsewhere. Witnessing working class demonstrations and strikes throughout the country, May Day 1901 was the occasion for a strike of metalworkers at the large St. Petersburg munitions plant, Obukhov Works. Efforts to break the strike took on the character of a military siege as workers stood firm and battled police. Six were killed, 80 wounded and 800 arrested in what rapidly became known as the Obukhov Defense. Social democratic and worker presses were quick to spread news and the lesson of this event: If elementary strike demands were to be met, and if the blood of comrades was not to be shed in the streets, the autocracy would have to go.Although the strike movement was not to recover and go beyond its 1897 level until 1903, slowly, led by the skilled proletariat in the large urban centers, new categories of workers were beginning to be drawn into a different, reoriented form of strike activity, and on these foundations to develop, experience, class-based awareness. From this viewpoint, a part of the class was beginning to give expression to the yet incipient and inchoate impulse of revolutionary subjectivity. Spring 1901 marked a turning point. Thereafter, strikes for wage increases often called forth demands for release of arrested comrades, the rescission of fines, etc., while solidarity strikes often translated themselves into demands for wage increases or improvements in working conditions. The real breakthrough came, however, in late 1902. In Rostov, in November, Russian workers forged a new weapon in their struggle against capitalist social relations and the autocracy. It was here they discovered the general strike.3The Rostov general strike took shape as a solidarity action carried out by the citys industrial proletariat after railway workers struck for high wages and amelioration of intolerable working conditions. The strike was characterized by mass meetings, bringing together upward 40,000 people, in which social democrats and other speakers called for the overthrow of the autocracy. The Rostov general strike was an economic strike of revolutionary significance: For the first time bourgeois-democratic political liberties including freedom of speech and assembly were won, and there were not legally instituted, but achieved in a fait accompli manner. They were won through proletarian activity. The strike generated such popular sympathy that the public meetings that drew listeners from all urban classes lasted nine full days before local police and Cossacks felt confident enough (and then only on orders from St. Petersburg) to attempt to smash the strike. The repressive onslaught killed six and wounded twelve workers; however, it only drove railwaymen to increase their demands. In part consisting of a 20% wage increase and a nine-hour day, these demands were assured widespread dissemination by social democratic, liberationist and social revolutionary presses. Thereafter, they became the basic demands of a newly unfolding strike movement.Political strikes and demonstrations dropped off and disappeared as an economic strike wave mushroomed: From 123 in 1902 strikes rose 550 in 1903. More than 300 of these strikes, many of them general, occurred throughout the spring and summer in the industrial centers and port cities of the south such as Baku, Batum, Eaterinoslav, Kiev, Odessa and Tiflis.

1Ibid, 113-114.2Ibid.3For a brief account of the strike, see Wildman, Ibid, 246.

There was little consistency in the roles played by local social democratic groups in the massive strike wave of 1902-1903.4In Rostov, the local organization was caught unawares but quickly recovered, producing and successfully distributing piles of leaflets and assuming the platform to make warmly greeted political speeches. The all-Russian pre-party formation, the Organizing Committee, instructed other local committees to take notice of and emulate the response to the Rostov events. But the call produced at best mixed results: The general strike in Odessa (July 1903) and the Baku strike - by upward 40,000 oil and railway workers lasting almost two full weeks (in June 1903) and shutting down all essential public services demonstrated workers were moving, but the shift form political back to economic strikes, some revolutionary in the sense of Rostov, left many committees ill-prepared or merely confused.In Nikolayev, the local committee formulated a plan modeled on other recent social democratic responses to strike, but the local military commander was able to frustrate the project. In Ekaterinoslav, social democrats were rapidly out distanced by workers but eventually became leaders of the strike. In Kiev, the local committee had difficulty deciding whether to support an economic strike in a political period, and as a result was unable to give any direction to the ongoing action. And in Odessa, social democrats shared speechmaking with numerous other groups at a mass meeting similar to those in Rostov nine months earlier, yet workers simply refused to allow any group to exercise hegemony over the strike.

XThe Second Congress of the RSDLP, which took place in London in July 1903, was symbolically suggestive of the turn relations of social democrats to Russian workers would soon take. At the Congress, 9 of 37 sessions were devoted to the question that precipitated the actual party split, and question of the relation of party to class - its activities and organization were not taken up until the final session.2 This lack foreshadowed the mostly non-existent relation of social democrats to workers during the next two years, a phenomenon having its roots in the Iskra organization built by Lenin, Martov and Potresov.While in exile and against the background of the mass arrests of 18971898, Lenin had time to reconsider the period defined by agitaitonal activity. His entire approach constituted a thoroughgoing, if not head-on critique of the organizationally emphasized deficiencies of this activity. He conceived the Iskra organization as a specifically preliminary form leading to creation of a nationwide party. Drawing on the populist tradition, he argued for a tightly knit organization of selfless individuals, professional revolutionaries, whose entire existence would be consumed in exhausting party work. In his writings of this period, especially Where to Begin and What is to be Done?, Lenin stressed over and again the need for a highly centralized, conspiratorial organization if stability and leadership continuity were to be maintained under conditions of illegality.First issued in 1900, Iskra was an all-Russian newspaper whose raison dtre lay in carrying out a relentless struggle against all tendencies diluting the revolutionary content of social democracy and in the expression of the will of an authoritative center capable of welding together dispersed local organizations.The editorial board of Iskra consisted of Lenin, Martov and Potresov living abroad in Mnchen. Their directives were carried out be agents inside Russia who were hand picked on the basis of loyalty, dedication and adherence to the Iskra perspective. A number of agents were later co-opted to form a pre-party formation, the all-Russian Organizing Committee, which operated under the sole guidance of the Iskra editorial board.The militantly political, anti-autocratic tone set by Iskra began to win for it a large following among radicalized workers and social democratic intellectuals after the events of spring 1901. Local committees, seeing the tactical line of Iskra actually anticipated and illuminated ongoing events, starting calling for and attempted to organize and direct political demonstrations not only among workers but also radical students, the liberal intelligenty and zemstvo activists. Iskra editors at once began to set their plan to capture local committee leaderships in motion. But it was not until late 1902 as demoralization set in due to the evident failure of what became an inflexible Iskra inspired program of 4This summary can be read off the report of the director of the political police, Lopukhin, on social democratic activities during the period. See Ibid, 247-248.2Examine the resolutions of the party Congress: It was held from 4 (17) July to 28 July (10 August) 1903. The resolution On the Trade Union Struggle was taken upon on the final day. See Program of the RSDLP in Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Vol. 1, 40-54.

political demonstrations in the face of severe repression and the upsurge of economic strikes, the consequent unwillingness of leading workers to continue executing the directives of local committees, the desertion of numerous members of the periphery, e.g., students, to the newly formed Social Revolutionary party, and the drying up of funds from liberal circles which now devoted their attention to the Liberation movement that Iskra agents were able to penetrate and assume control over local committees.The programmatic effort to build a movement around political demonstrations once again transformed relations between social democratic intellectuals and militant workers, leading to the resurgence and aggravation of a problem that plagued past phases of the movement. The tension created by the problem, a question of who was to exercise hegemony over (social democrats) or within (workers) the movement, had existed in different forms in the study circle and agitaitonal periods. But hitherto it had bee mitigated through mediation by organizational structures such as the circles and workers committees, structures that had allowed workers to exercise some autonomy and self-direction. The program of political demonstrations to the extent it was organized by a rigidly centralized political form, however, made these organizational structures irrelevant by rendering them at once impediments and superfluous. Instead of the continuous contacts between social democratic intellectuals and organized workers that were required by propaganda and, particularly, agitation, political demonstrations minimized all contact and merely required workers to distribute literature at appropriate, pre-determined times and places. Social democratic workers, who no longer were struggling against committee intelligentsia for preeminence but in order to assume their rightful places alongside party intellectuals, were reduced to appendages of the committee controlled intelligentsia who itself was largely a transmission belt for directives from the center. It is hardly surprising, then, that many social democratic workers abandoned the movement in its Iskra dominated form and showed in the economist Zubatovist unions during the first months of 1905.1

XICaught up in factional strife, social democrats were on the eve of the first Russian revolution further removed from the life of the working class than they had ever been. Even though the intelligentsias perspective on its own social democratic activity had prevented it from establishing a strong presence among the Russian proletariat, the workers movement could not have been the effective social force it was without the theoretical mediations articulated, and the political support provided, by social democratic intellectuals. The solidarity of workers with students, the political strikes and actions they undertook in support of one another and the 1902-1903 general strikes of revolutionary import surely would not have occurred on the scale they did without socialist perspectives, and given this the orientation toward a conscious practice centered on changing conditions of work, workers assimilated and internalized in and through their contact with the social democratic intelligentsia. If, as E.P. Thompson argued, the English working class was present at its own making,2 in our view the same can be said with the following proviso for Russian workers: The social democratic intelligentsia was co-present and provided ideal and organizational (in action) assistance among the most advanced layers of Russian workers engaged in self-making as a class. The historical significance, then, of social democracy in the pre-1905 period lay in the crucial role it played in the formation of a conscious, albeit thin layer of socialist workers in the class.3 With the advantage of hindsight, it is easy to understand the centrality of the social democrats in the strike wave of the late 1890s and the general strikes of 1902-1903 (extending into 1904) and in opposition to the perversion of pre-Bolshevik Russian history by Stalinist historians, it would be far too facile to simply dismiss this achievement: The socialist current was central, for it formed an oppositional culture to the absolutist culture of Tsarist society; and, it must be stressed that a proletarian oppositional culture as such constituted the infrastructure supporting the daily activities of workers as the historical agency of change, and thus underpinned all later revolutionary advances.

1Zubatovshchina, so-called after the Tsarist police agent Sergei Zubatov who founded them in 1901, was the name given to police unions of an economic nature; that is, to trade unions under autocratic conditions set up by Tsarist police agents in order to take control of the workers movement and confine it strictly to the most narrow of day to day issues. See Jeremy Schneiderman, Sergei Zubatov and Revolutionary Marxism.2The Making of the English Working Class, 9.3As Trotsky pointed out, this thin layer of socialist workers was composed primarily of highly skilled metalworkers. Thus, for example, nearly 150 of the 251 deputies to the revolutionary Petersburg soviet in October 1905 were metalworkers. Trotsky, Ibid, 250.

In retrospect, the leaps in activity, self-organization and consciousness taken by workers following the decline of the economic strike wave of 1896-1898 constituted the outward explosion of a molecular cognitive development, the accumulation of insights into their relation to employers and the autocracy. But if workers contact with social democratic intellectuals assisted them in developing the awareness that these insights cohered into, it was the intolerable conditions of their daily life that made it absolutely necessary for them to understand these conditions in order to change them.Beyond this, the prehistory of Bolshevism shows the enormous capacity of Russian workers of this period for self-organization. It also demonstrates a non-linearity in the development of their consciousness as a class. Mediation by social democratic theoretical categories allows the passage from economic to politics to appear necessary under autocratic conditions, i.e., under conditions of the illegality of workers organizations and the consequent constant with the forces of State repression. The rapid passage from politics back to economic struggle waged on a new level, that is, waged by a more conscious proletariat, was the likely outcome given both these mediations and the lived reality of daily working and living conditions. This twin negotiation merely proves the absurdity of a hard and fast distinction between the two forms of struggle.

Part IFrom Sect toward Mass Workers' Party, 1902-1905

Throughout 1905, particularly in the months of January-February and again from September through December (i.e., in the months of feverish working class activity reaching revolutionary proportions), the Bolshevik faction grew little as an organization. It remained a small group without influence in the class; objectively, a sect. Forgetting the movement in which they were rooted and absolutizing their own perspective, Bolsheviks isolated themselves from revolutionary workers; in a word, their practice was sectarian. This specific practice had its origins in policy concerning autonomous non-party working class organizations that sprang up during the year.Deutscher has, for example, pointed out the soviet was not a Bolshevik creation; rather, Bolsheviks "viewed it with suspicion as a rival to the party.1 But that tells very little of the story. Bolsheviks demonstrated a basic hostility toward all major proletarian organizations that workers created in 1905, viz., toward the Gaponist associations (January and not before), the Shidlovsky Commission (February) as well as the strike wave of January and February, trade unions which began to openly appear in the fall, and the soviets dating from the same period. In order to exhibit the political perspective underlying this hostility, we wish to examine the Bolshevik response to one of these organizations - by far the historically most significant, namely, the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers' Deputies.

IThe St. Petersburg Soviet grew up as a response to ongoing events. On 13 (27) October, Menshevik agitators called together leading militants from area plants to form a strike committee. The strike committee was formed to give direction to and generalize in St. Petersburg and its environs a nation-wide strike called for by the railway union. Workers of the city were asked to elect delegates from their workplaces to the committee. But in this act the strike committee as a strike committee began to transcend itself, to function as an organ of the entire St. Petersburg proletariat, in order words, as a nascent council.Its first political act, that is, its first act as a soviet (council), was to issue a call for a general strike to force the autocracy to convene a constituent assembly. Frightened and confused, the autocracy promulgated (18 (31) October) a constitutional manifesto. But the manifesto was merely a series of vague promises without specification of either the form of or timeline for the realization of those promises. The issuance of the manifesto signified only a partial victory: The autocracy had not been dismantled and retired from the historical stage. Instead, it was temporizing, seeking a breathing space in which to regroup.The bourgeoisie was only too anxious to accept the manifesto a face value. To have wage a determined fight would have meant bringing the other urban classes and poor land-hungry peasants under its wing. Economically weak, lacking a long standing, tested political party and having never created a hegemonic urban culture, consequently lacking moral authority, the bourgeoisie would not have been capable of controlling the forces it would have unleashed had it sought an alliance with the industrial proletariat and oppressed rural strata. With the appearance of the manifesto, the bourgeoisie merely faded from the scene.Industrial workers assumed center stage through their soviets. Soviets, some thirty in approximately the same number of cities,2 sprang up in the large urban areas where, though never constituting an overwhelming majority of the populace, the political weight of industrial workers was enormous. Because these same urban areas were centers from which the autocracy militarily exercised control over the whole of the country, and because the bourgeoisie was politically cowardly and the peasantry was at this juncture in Russian history incapable of developing its own political representative (a peasant party), the retreat of the autocracy temporarily and objectively created a situation in which the proletariat was the only class not only in a position but with the capacity to exercise power. In this context, each action of the soviets - the totality of which was identical with their self-formation and the constitution of workers as a class - was a step in the direction of political hegemony, sharpened antagonisms with the autocracy, and intensified a struggle of growing revolutionary proportions.In St. Petersburg, the Soviet passed a resolution on 19 October (1 November) appropriating for itself the rights of the Tsarist censor. Henceforth the revolutionary press appeared legally for the first time in Russian history. At the end of October (early November), martial law was declared by the autocracy in Kronstadt - to suppress a sailors' uprising, in 1Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, 125.2Solomon Schwarz, The Russian Revolution of 1905, 178 (n. 5), citing the work of the Soviet historian V.I. Nevsky.

Poland, and in a number of rural provinces where peasant unrest was at its height. On the call of the Soviet, St. Petersburg workers responded with a political general strike until martial law was lifted. In early November (O.S.), the Soviet added revolutionary legality to a working class action aimed at winning an eight-hour day: To generalize the movement, the Soviet encouraged workers to enforce the eight-hour day without recourse to legal sanction (and without prior arrangement with employers) by walking off the job en masse after eight hours of work.1These actions concretely demonstrated the potential of Russian workers for hegemony as a class; the Soviet, after all, was de facto carrying out State functions. Soviet activity, to be sure, had as its presupposition the enormous respect of individual proletarians. This respect was ultimately grounded in the fact that the soviet was a class wide organ - one uniting workers across factory and plant, craft and industrial lines, and not merely in the fact of its proletarian social composition.As a class-wide organ, the Soviet went beyond all other, previous working class organizations in Russian history.

IIAt the outset, Bolshevik policy toward the St. Petersburg Soviet must be disentangled from attitudes toward Mensheviks. At first Bolsheviks viewed the Petersburg Soviet as a new Menshevik "intrigue" whose purpose was to lay the groundwork for a broad-based non-party organization. They refused to enter.2 Very soon, the Bolsheviks realized, however, to abstain from participation in the Soviet would have been tantamount to complete isolation from a revolutionary mass movement. Thus, in mid-October (O.S.), they entered the Soviet with the intention of holding its function down to that of a strike committee and carrying out a struggle against Menshevik tendencies.3In the course of ongoing work, much of the animosity abated. Bolsheviks proved themselves quite capable of doing day-to-day work alongside other political tendencies in the Soviet. Strategically though their intentions remained unchanged. Bolsheviks still hoped to keep the level of Soviet development to that of a strike committee, while, of course, using it as a means to propagate their views. Solomon Schwarz, a Menshevik historian of the revolution, cites B.N. Knuniants who, as a leading Petersburg committeeman and leader of the Bolshevik faction inside the Soviet, formulated the underlying perspective of the faction very clearly:

The Party had to ask itself whether the proletariat would emerge from the evolutionary storm conscious enough to realize that an independent political party was the only effective form of organization for it and the program of international Social-Democracy was its own class program. The existence of the Soviet, an organization politically amorphous (from a programmatic point of view), standing outside the party, could be a poor asset in the future work of rallying the whole proletariat around Social-Democracy. Under the impact of demagoguery [i.e., Menshevik ideas] many backward elements among the workers might see the Soviet as the germ of an "independent labor party" as opposed to socialism.No matter how sharply the Soviet's policy differed from the "Independents'" [i.e., the Zubatovists'] policy or how revolutionary was the mood of the masses, the mere existence of an informal, non-socialist political organization of the proletariat could look like something of a menace to the free development of the class movement toward Social-Democracy.4

Perhaps the Petersburg proletariat would not have "emerge[d] from the revolutionary storm conscious enough" to recognize its organizational form consisted in an "independent political party," but consciousness was not, then, the issue. Petersburg workers were, after all, "conscious enough" to carry out a political general strike for a Republic. The Bolshevik concern was misplaced, a screen for fear of loss of control over the "revolutionary storm" on the horizon.

1For these events, see Trotsky, 1905, 123-186.2Schwarz, Ibid, 175.With the exceptions of Parvus and Trotsky, Mensheviks were committed to bourgeois hegemony and, concomitantly, to parliamentary democracy as the necessary outcomes of the revolution. Consequently, they wished to build a mass labor party on the western European model into which they would have dissolved the RSDLP. In the soviets, they say the embryo of such a party. This party, as the party of the extreme opposition, would, it was believed, then provide the social base from which the liberal bourgeoisie could be pressured into a real fight against Tsarism and, in the course of successful struggle, into instituting a transitional political form (a "revolutionary provisional government") which would take as its task preparation for full establishment of a parliamentary regime.3Ibid, 175-177. Schwarz cites the Soviet historian E. Drivosheina.4Ibid, 179-80. Knuniants was a political pseudonym for B. Radin. (Emphases in the original.)

But not simply a screen. Ideational elements, moments of a different (theoretical) order with in part a different validity,1 were wedded to an interest in domination of the workers' movement. In this respect, the ossified categories of the 1902 analysis were decisive. What else is the crude antithesis of an "independent political party" to an "informal, non-socialist political organization" other than the organizational translation of the equally crude and falsely opposed categories of social democratic and trade union consciousnesses? Knuniants' analysis rested on the abstract, obfuscating, paired, and undialectical categories of "consciousness" and "spontaneity.

IIITwo peculiar phenomena character What is to be Done? First, it was written at a time when economism, the "opportunism" Lenin was so eager to displace, no longer mediated practice within the workers' movement. Economist workers' activity had begun to disappear in late 1899 and had exhausted itself by no later than spring 1901. Yet Lenin, fully aware of its demise,2 wrote his pamphlet in late 1901 and published it in March 1902. Second, there is the question of the non-Marxist character of the central theses of What is to be Done?The meaning of the first phenomenon is clear enough. Lenin was not addressing himself to the movement as a whole, merely to its detached "vanguard." Understood in this manner the appearance of What is to be Done? was a decisive event in a struggle for hegemony inside social democracy in order to be in a better position to exercise control over the workers' movement. Strict centralism was the instrument for securing and exercising this control at both levels. An examination of the second phenomenon will shed light on and given substance to these claims.Summarily, Lenin attempted to theoretically underpin and legitimize his organizational views by grounding them on the following theses:

a. Not only is class consciousness not achieved at the point of production, the proletariat is simply incapable of becoming conscious of itself as a class;b. since left to themselves workers as a class will conduct their struggles economistically, struggles whose meaning and significance remain immanent to bourgeois society, the awareness necessary for action in accordance with their historical interests must be inculcated from the outside by members of another class; and,c. since socialist theory develops independently of the workers' movement, as a product of the activity of members of that other class (bourgeois intellectuals), it is only through the concerted efforts of those revolutionary intellectuals that the proletariat will be organized to challenge capitalist society as a whole.3

What has been said here? Most strikingly, the working class cannot achieve a subjectivity which is revolutionary. In Marxist terms its historical mission, universal human emancipation through the abolition of classes and the exploitation of man by man, more properly belongs to a revolutionary layer of (disenfranchised) bourgeois intellectuals. The proletariat is not the subject of history, but merely another historical product and object.4 As such, the working class has neither the capacity to contest all forms and manifestations of exploitation and oppression nor to practically reconstruct society as a whole on a democratic and egalitarian basis. It is assimilated to the mass of urban and rural petty bourgeoisies, i.e., to the middle classes and the peasantry. Like the petty bourgeoisie, it is 1See Theoretical Note 1, below.2Lenin, Collected Works, V, 25-30 ("Another Massacre"). This article appeared in Iskra, no. 5, June 1901.Hereafter, Lenin' s Collected Works will be referred to as CW and will be cited along with the appropriate volume and page numbers.3Lenin goes on to remark that, "the sphere from which alone it is possible to [achieve class consciousness] is the sphere of relationships of all classes and strata to the state CW, V, 423. Lenin may well in fact be right: If, in coming together in exchange, capitalists pursue only their only egoistic interests and objectively pit themselves against one another in the marketplace, it is politically in the arena of the State that capitalist class unity is forged. Accordingly, class consciousness, as the sense become conscious of the historical mission of workers as a class, entails recognition of the necessity of destruction of the State of the bourgeoisie. If this is so, such awareness can only be achieved in confrontation with the State, and its agents, as it explicitly operate in defense or pursuit of capitalist interests. Having said this, we also note it does nothing to change the view developed above.4As Vladimir Akimov, the archetypical "economist," pointed out, the absence of proletarian subjectivity was incorporated into the very language of the draft programme for the 2nd Congress (language that, in turn, found its way into the Congress resolution). "But how did it come about an orthodox Social-Democratic programme, stating the basic premises of socialism, did not find it necessary to note the consciousness, revolutionary and class character of the proletarian struggle?" He goes on to say exactly "why": "This cannot be, and is not, an accident. It fully corresponds to the view of one of the authors of the draft, comrade Lenin, who regards the proletariat as a passive medium in which the bacillus of socialism, introduced from without, can develop." Vladimir Akimov on the Dilemmas of Russian Marxism ("Problems of the Programme"), 115. (Emphasis added.)

politically characterized by vacillation (between "a trade unionism subordinated to the bourgeoisie and the 'revolutionary' consciousness given to it by intellectuals"1). This follows inescapably from Lenin's theses, and, just as inescapably, they are not Marxist. In fact, Lenin' position, and particularly his view of a revolutionary layer of intellectuals as conscious agency and as the independent elaborator of socialist theory, is much closer to the position of the latter day bourgeois social theorist Karl Mannheim regarding a free-floating intelligentsia.2What is to be Done?, then, abandons the point of view of independent proletarian politics. Instead, Lenin projects a revolutionary intelligentsia wielding together the disparate elements composing the "laboring masses" into a fighting unit to overthrow the autocracy. Because the proletariat does not go beyond other classes in society, i.e., because like other oppressed classes it merely becomes increasingly "dissatisfied with the existing order"3 without raising this dissatisfaction to level of consciousness, because in a word it merely revolts; it, thus, cannot act independently in relation to other classes and strata, viz., it cannot politically organize itself to give them direction and take the lead in a struggle against the autocracy. The revolutionary intelligentsia has, consequently, no choice but to wield these disparate groups together because their differing and antagonistic class interests impede the formation of any alliance.Politically speaking, this is sort of a Jacobin populism; and, strict centralism is the necessary organizational outcome of the populist politics of Lenin's professional revolutionaries, i.e., of disenfranchised, radicalized and politically organized bourgeois intellectuals. Yet striped of the pseudo-Marxism underpinning it, and the class interest motivating its construction, strict centralism was the historically most likely outcome in the face of autocratic repression. This is not, however, to assert that from an emancipatory perspective, Lenin's centralism had no principled justification; or, at least to assert such would be to engage in an ahistorical analysis of party-for