Civil society in a Soviet straitjacket

(For Part One, see previous issue, No. 28)

THE IDEAS OF EARLY MARXISM

After the French Revolution, the so-called third estate (i.e., taxpayers, as distinct from the nobility and the clergy) came to the fore. The transformation of this estate into a class of entrepreneurs was inseparable from the formation of the working class, i.e., proletarians deprived of the means of production. Already in the heat of the revolution there appeared groups that set themselves the goal of cutting the Gordian knot of class contradictions by abolishing private ownership.

The most famous document of revolutionary Marxism, The Communist Manifesto, appeared in the years prior to the outbreak of the European revolutions of the mid-19th-century. In this work Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels called upon the working class to establish its own dictatorship and abolish private ownership of the means of production. In the revolutionary atmosphere these ideas seemed simple and easy-to-grasp.

The essence of what the followers of Marx and Engels called “scientific” communism was the expropriation of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat, which The Communist Manifesto expresses in the following succinct phrase: “...the communists can express their theory in one phrase: abolition of private ownership.”

This phrase runs counter to the entire past history of civilization, for it was private ownership that had turned the primitive tribe into a social structure and gave rise to state principles. What could the abolition of private ownership and, hence, money commodity relations lead to? The Communist Manifesto suggests that this action would mean the birth of collective property.

In other words, the expropriation of owners was supposed to turn erstwhile proletarians into collective owners of the means of production. But collective property was a page of history that had been turned long ago. Could it be the linchpin of social development in the age of banks and railroads when it had only existed during the period of gathering and hunting?

The Communist Manifesto does not answer this question. Marx himself answered it four years before writing the manifesto. Speaking about the first communist thinkers, whom he called utopians, the 26-year-old Marx said, “This communism, inasmuch as it negates the personality of man in every sphere, is simply the logical expression of the private ownership which is this negation” (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844). In other words, Marx claimed at the time that private ownership could not be abolished — it is only the former owner who can be destroyed.

On the eve of the 1848 revolution, Marx believed that the dictatorship of the proletariat would shake up the life of society and establish, among other things, planned production and the distribution of material and cultural wealth among people according to egalitarian principles. He only acknowledged differences in the organization of consumption, depending on the amount of material values produced.

In the first phase of communism, material wealth was to be distributed according to how one works (communism of production) and in the second — according to what one needs (communism of consumption). Marxists began to identify the first phase of communism with socialism, a polysemantic idea that was popular among the masses. In contrast, non-Marxists interpreted socialism as a policy of state support for the least protected strata of society, pursued by means of additional taxation of the well-to-do.

When Marx and Engels were working on The Communist Manifesto, they were no more than young men. After completing their book, they lived for another 35 and 47 years, respectively. Those years were full of intensive work. Their books and articles, the results of this work, occupies a prominent place in the intellectual heritage of humankind. Did they find time to explain to one and all how private ownership, the cornerstone of the history of civilization, would evolve into collective, public, or communist property?

They did not find the time to do this, although they both wrote two forewords to later editions of the Manifesto, and Engels wrote five more forewords. Never eschewing the predictions that they had made in the Manifesto, they focused on exploring what they called contemporary capitalist society. But Marx’s main work, Capital, contained a fundamental postulate that negated The Communist Manifesto‘s revolutionary impatience: “Society...can neither leap over the natural phases of its development nor remove them by decree.”

THE EMERGENCE OF SOCIAL DEMOCRACY

In post-revolutionary Europe, Marxists became social democrats, i.e., they chose democratic forms of political activity. This choice had certain objective prerequisites. The state exerts pressure on the people, but organizations of citizens (or subjects who acquired the actual status of citizens in constitutional monarchies) were already able to influence the authorities. But the main thing was that the social democrats saw that, firstly, entrepreneurship is as much a creative activity as any other, and, secondly, it is much more effective to coordinate democratically the interests of labor and capital than to try to destroy capital, which is as much an agent of the production process as the labor force.

So the socialists never denied either market or money commodity relations. They could call for increased state control of enterprises, the redistribution of budgetary funds in favor of low-income individuals, or even the nationalization of the means of production. But they regarded these and other socialist measures simply as methods for defusing social tensions. They considered private enterprise the most important sphere of activity that made it possible to implement socialist ideas.

The European socialists’ democratic choice was broadly defined in the following aphoristic expression coined by Eduard Bernstein, the closest associate of Engels: “To me, that which is generally called the ultimate aim of socialism is nothing, but movement is everything.” Engels considered it unnecessary to reject revolutionary Marxism. Among those who supported him in this regard was Karl Kautsky, who persuaded the German social democrats to adopt the Erfurt Program in 1891. This document declared that the ultimate goal of the social democratic movement was the socialization of the means of production and the replacement of market anarchy with the centralized distribution of products.

Therefore, the means of production were to become public, i.e., collective, property. The Erfurt Program, as well as The Communist Manifesto, which had been written 43 years earlier, failed to explain the mechanism of transforming property. Yet the two documents differed in principle: Kautsky’s program called for reforms, rather than a revolution, in order to achieve the final goal of the social democratic movement.

RESUSCITATING THE IDEAS OF EARLY MARXISM IN A CRISIS SITUATION

Bernstein and the other European social democratic leaders rejected The Communist Manifesto‘s dogmas because they saw the possibility of establishing social peace. The founders of Marxism did not argue with their pupils about this, but they could not overcome the views they had formulated before the 1848-49 revolutions.

Yet there were some pupils, especially in the camp of the Russian social democrats, who ignored the postulate that it is impossible to leap over the natural phases of development by means of a revolutionary decree. They resuscitated the dogmas of early Marxism and attempted to put them into practice, taking advantage of the First World War.

It is no accident that the first global war in history broke out at the very beginning of the 20th century. Nor were its root causes accidental. In the second half of the 19th century the advanced Western countries had entered the industrial phase of development, which was characterized by the emergence of well-developed machine-aided production. For the first time, state institutions, whose character had not undergone any major qualitative changes, had an opportunity to mobilize colossal resources. The state was making the fullest use of these new opportunities to perform its principal — military — function. Very soon those in power resorted to this in order to settle the never-ending interstate disputes by force.

It was the battlefield that most clearly illustrated the qualitative leap forward in the development of the forces of production. The war ceased to be a series of local campaigns waged by a limited number of professional armies. It was now a trench war, with trenches forming a continuous line, sometimes several rows deep. There were millions of soldiers in these trenches, who needed to be furnished with clothing, weapons, and food, and to be taught how to handle arms. It was constantly necessary to make up for losses in the armies that had been destroying each other for years.

One of the first 20th-century thinkers who noted the new role of the state in a war like this was Nikolai Bukharin. One can find the following penetrating statements in his The Politics and Economics of the Transition Period (1920): “The 1914-1918 war bluntly raised the question of state power. As soon as the imperial state threw tens of millions of people onto the stage of history and immediately showed its colossal importance as an economic factor, the analysis of state power became a matter of theoretical and practical debate. The life of a state-run organization that had absorbed everything — the life of the state, not of society — came to the fore. While old Hobbes had written in his Leviathan that there is no power that can equal the power of the state, his Leviathan would look like a puppy in comparison with the terrible strength that the state apparatus of financial capital has shown” (Nikolai Bukharin, Selected Works, Moscow, 1990, c. 91).

Small wonder, then, that the global armed conflict abruptly tipped the balance between the state and society. It is also clear that the war wreaked the greatest havoc in the Russian Empire, where acute social contradictions were fully exposed in 1905-07. Bukharin should not have shifted the blame to the countries of “financial capital.” It was in his country that state institutions had firmly established their omnipotence.

World War I should be regarded as a crisis of civilizations. Somewhat later, in a different historical dimension, this crisis took the shape of the Great Depression of 1929-1933. Like the late-18th and mid-19th-century revolutions, the cataclysms of the first half of the 20th century were the catalyst for the transition from a traditional society to a civil one. Yet in the countries that were unable to respond convincingly to the challenges of history, these cataclysms triggered a mutation of state and society. The European continent took on red and brown colors and was hurled into a new world war, which far outstripped the previous one in terms of scale and tragic consequences.

The dividing line in World War II proved to be extremely favorable for the “golden billion” countries. They were in very good starting positions in the transition from the industrial to the post-industrial stage of development, and had managed to shake off the fetters of colonial empires. The war was also fateful for the peoples of the Soviet Union, which made a decisive contribution to the victory over Nazism. At the same time, the Soviet political regime, which was incompatible with a true civil society, got a second wind.

THE SOVIET FACTOR IN THE REVOLUTION

How did this incompatibility come about? Let us analyze the origins and nature of Soviet power. To begin with, we should answer a specific question: what was the Russian Revolution of 1917 in reality? We should distinguish between myth and reality and take another look at what was called, until recently, the Great October Socialist Revolution.

The task of deconstructing the Soviet concept lies in the separation of artificially linked notions and the unification of artificially discrete ones. We should in fact separate/unify a number of universally-known events three times. First, we must separate the Russian Revolution from the revolutions that took place in the national regions of the empire that broke up in 1917.

Second, we must unify two artificially separated events — the so-called February and October revolutions, whose names derive from the months of the Julian calendar.

Third, we must separate the Russian Revolution, with all its regional modifications, from the communist revolution that began in Central Russia after it was seized by the Bolsheviks and which embraced almost all the far-flung areas of the former empire. The communist revolution was far more radical than all previous revolutions. This is why the communist transformation should be called a revolution.

But it had nothing to do with the usual social cataclysms that bring about a change of power and owners. This was a planned, not spontaneous, revolution that lasted for an entirely different period of time because it consisted of reforms that the state imposed on society. Incidentally, the technique of “reforms from above” was well known in Russia since the times of Peter I.

The communist revolution lasted for two decades, until World War II. It looked like two separate onslaughts divided by quite a long respite — the New Economic Policy. The Leninist onslaught of 1918-20 was dubbed “war communism” well after its completion. The Stalinist onslaught of 1929-32 reached the stage of stabilization in 1933-36 and ended with the immense “purges” of 1937-38, known as the Great Terror.

The transition from a traditional to a civil society could only be effected in a revolutionary way in Russia. The empire had lagged behind its European neighbors for more than 50 years in terms of revolutions. For this reason, the objective development of market relations brought to the fore the people’s “lower strata,” which was op­pressed by the “upper strata” (jointly with the bourgeoisie), rather than the bourgeoisie supported by the imperial “upper strata,” as the vanguard of the transformational process.

It was the working class and the soviets that it formed, which played a key role in the revolutionary events of 1905. The soviets emerged as general strike committees and had no analogues in European practice. (In Europe, strikes were organized by trade unions, which were banned in Russia.) The peasant “lower strata” were too disunited, owing to the very particularities of farming, to pose a serious threat to the empire.

At the same time, the peasantry had a special score — economic and psychological — to settle with the landlords and the state. First of all, the peasants were forced to accept the worst conditions of leasing landowners’ land to keep their families well-fed. Second, serfdom had been abolished just 50-odd years earlier, and millions of peasants remembered the slave-like status of their families and friends.

The political situation changed radically in 1917. A formidable new adversary had appeared on the historical stage — that same peasantry, which for the first time was united in companies and battalions, armed, governed by the practices of an armed struggle and a clear reluctance to die on the battlefield in the name of foreign ideals. The soviets of soldiers and workers’ deputies became the dominant political force, especially in large cities with large rear-line garrisons, where reinforcements were trained for combat.

It was up to the parliamentary faction leaders and front commanders-in-chief to decide whether or not the monarchy should be abolished, but they did so with due account of the situation. The situation was that the Romanov monarchy crumbled within eight days. The fall of the autocracy led to the unheard-of unity of Russia’s political forces. The fear of the destructive Soviet factor rallied former adversaries — the parties of liberal and socialist democracy. The same fear compelled the counterrevolutionary forces to support liberal democracy.

THE SOVIETS AND THE BOLSHEVIKS

What was the Bolsheviks’ attitude to the soviets? In October 1905 the elements of two political systems-alternatives to autocracy-emerged: the legislature known as the State Duma and the soviets of workers’ deputies. The former cleared the way to the development of a civil society, while the latter blocked this path. Tellingly, the leader of the Bolsheviks, Vladimir Lenin, called upon the soviets to take power. He regarded Soviet power as a cover for the dictatorship of his party, because the “vanguard of the proletariat” (he applied this clever name only to the Bolsheviks) was supposed to form the majority of the soviets on all levels, up to and including general state ones.

This meant that the new government was to be formed not by the will of voters who delegated their representatives to the soviets but by the will of the political force that offered voters its own candidates. The Bolsheviks did not regard the masses, which were taking part in the campaign to elect members of soviets, as a sovereign force that gives rise to power.

As soon as Lenin returned from exile to revolutionary Petrograd in April 1917, he offered a set of slogans in the form of theses. The first half of these “April Theses,” beginning with the pivotal one — “All power to the soviets!” — explained the way the Bolsheviks could establish their dictatorship. Then it was explained why dictatorship was necessary to build communism. The Bolsheviks were to rename their party as the Communist Party, adopt a new communist program, establish a commune-state, and organize a new, communist International. The program of establishing a commune-state was drafted in the spirit of mid-19th-century revolutionary Marxism: nationalizing land, turning landlords’ estates into Soviet farms, establishing Soviet control over social production and distribution, and merging all banks into a single national bank.

Lenin was convinced that the Bolsheviks would easily oust the rival socialist parties of the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries from the soviets. He did not hesitate in proclaiming the slogan “All power to the soviets!” at a time when the latter were controlled by his rivals. Out of all the political parties, only the Bolsheviks demanded the implementation of the Soviet slogan calling for the immediate expropriation of large landowners — the bourgeoisie and landowners.

Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks’ clout in the soviets grew very slowly. They spent more resources on propaganda than all the other parties combined. But not all their slogans suited the “lower strata.” Like all the previous revolutions in the world, the Russian Revolution lacked a communist component. For this reason, in August 1917 the Bolshevik leader decided to abandon his slogans temporarily and focus on the soviets.

The popularity that the Bolsheviks won after August 1917 is usually ascribed to their role in suppressing the Kornilov mutiny. But the change of slogans by the Leninist party had an incomparably greater effect on subsequent events. In September the soviets of Petrograd, Moscow, and Kyiv passed the Bolsheviks’ resolutions on power. Relying on the Petrograd soviet headed by Leon Trotsky, the Bolsheviks resorted to manipulating the representation criteria and thus formed a suitable party faction at the 2nd All-Russian Congress of Soviets and staged a coup d’etat.

The English historian E. H. Carr had grounds to call the Russian Revolution a Bolshevik one. In the final analysis, it was the Bolsheviks who painted it in their own colors. But one Ukrainian revolutionary leader, Volodymyr Vynnychenko, also with good reason, called the Bolshevik coup a workers and peasants’ revolution.

The Russian Revolution began in March 1917 as a Soviet one and continued in November of the same year as a Soviet one, too. By that time, the Bolsheviks had already begun to “trickle” into the soviets. Very soon, under pressure from the Chekists, there was nothing left of the soviets but the external packaging. Workers and soldiers were forced to vote in a disciplined fashion for candidates selected by Bolshevik party committees. Small wonder, then, that the Russian Revolution was extinguished by mid-January 1918, when the Constituent Assembly was disbanded.