"Orthodox Leninism"? [Archive]

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Communist Mutant From Outer Space

31st December 2015, 11:22

Is there such a thing as this? Or was Lenin simply a Orthodox Marxist?

The Idler

31st December 2015, 11:40

Guardia Rossa

31st December 2015, 13:20

I called myself that when I decided both Stalinism and Trotskysm sucked.
Then I switched to Neo-Leninism. Then to Pan-Leninism. And so on until I grew a brain.

DOOM

31st December 2015, 13:55

The Idler

31st December 2015, 15:12

And what would this "genuine" self-emancipation look like or is this just another abstraction without any meaning?
Well there wouldn't be a red terror, as the opposition would be of 1989-Ceaucescu-like proportions (e.g. tiny). All of the working class would be politically expressing quantifiable support for common ownership and democratic control of the means of production.

reviscom1

31st December 2015, 17:00

Lenin built on and expanded the scope of Marxism by detailing how it could be practically implemented, both as a party and a government.

He was not an orthodox Marxist in that he (wrongly) thought the liberal/capitalist phase of development could either be bypassed or compressed into a ludicrously short period of time. Self-interest was probably at the heart of this - he wanted to be in power during his lifetime.

At one point he even came up with a ludicrous formula by which a dictatorship of the proletariat would overthrow the monarchy and then - get this - hand over power to the capitalist class so that they could politely get on with their phase of history.

Fourth Internationalist

31st December 2015, 17:23

Is there such a thing as this? Or was Lenin simply a Orthodox Marxist?

By "orthodox Leninism", do you mean a tendency which claims to follow Lenin's ideas but not Stalin's nor Trotsky's ideas? The only group I know which does this is Communist Voice (http://www.communistvoice.org/). I would of course disagree and think Trotskyism is the proper continuation of Leninism, which itself is the proper continuation of Marxism.

Fourth Internationalist

31st December 2015, 17:24

Alet

31st December 2015, 17:38

He was not an orthodox Marxist in that he (wrongly) thought the liberal/capitalist phase of development could either be bypassed or compressed into a ludicrously short period of time.

Orthodox Marxists are not stagists. In fact, Marx himself wrote about Mir's chance to literally skip the capitalist mode of production - though he added that it was missed due to the agrarian reforms of 1861. Still, the point is that this (or actually, to be more precise, his conception that the Russian Revolution was a "dual" one) hardly disqualifies Lenin as an orthodox Marxist. If there was one orthodox Marxist, it was definitely Lenin.

Emmett Till

31st December 2015, 21:33

Orthodox Marxists are not stagists. In fact, Marx himself wrote about Mir's chance to literally skip the capitalist mode of production - though he added that it was missed due to the agrarian reforms of 1861. Still, the point is that this (or actually, to be more precise, his conception that the Russian Revolution was a "dual" one) hardly disqualifies Lenin as an orthodox Marxist. If there was one orthodox Marxist, it was definitely Lenin.

Good point. For those who actually read Lenin's writings, he continually refers to Marx as his guide and mentor, quoting liberally, but never out of context to distort and misuse what Marx had to say in the manner of the Social Democratic "revisionists" like Bernstein or the so-called "Marxist-Leninists" like kindly Uncle Joe.

Hit The North

31st December 2015, 21:56

The term "orthodox Marxist" should burn a hole in your tongue, it is that poisonous. It assumes that Marx (& Engels) left the world a blue-print and that any deviation from it is heretic to the orthodoxy. "Orthodoxy" is a word belonging to religion.

M&E provided the foundations for a revolutionary science of class struggle and Lenin was a link in its further development. Not only did he provide one of the most salient analyses of imperialism and its implications for global revolution, but he also led a party through incredibly hostile times to lead the first proletarian revolution of workers, peasant and soldier's councils. We can learn from his times and his attempts to grapple with issues of enormous historical importance, without doing honour to some 'ism' beyond Marxism.

...

Hit The North

31st December 2015, 22:15

Well he was certainly a departure from the self-emancipation of the working-class called for by Marxism, and on that point, the mainstream Marxists of the time were largely in agreement. Whether Lenin was a social democrat is up for discussion but does it really matter?

Yeah but the mainstream Marxists, in their majority, supported their own bourgeoisies in the Great Slaughter of 1914-18 and thus betrayed the working class FOR ALL TIME. By 1918, there was no way back for those cowards. Then, of course, they took to assassinating communists like Rosa Luxemburg, as well as denouncing the new Russian workers' state.

Meanwhile the revolution of 1917 remains the closest example of the self-emancipation of the working class that history has yet offered. Hundred of thousands of workers, soldiers and peasants organising their own local power, swung into nationwide action by the Bolsheviks who openly contested for leadership within the democratic organs of the workers movement. Down with the bourgeois government of Kerensky! Down with the imperialist war! All power to the Soviets!

Yes, I know what you're thinking: its an even more impressive display of class mobilisation than the 899 votes the SPGB got in the last General Election! Source (http://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2015/may/07/live-uk-election-results-in-full)

....

Guardia Rossa

1st January 2016, 00:51

By "orthodox Leninism", do you mean a tendency which claims to follow Lenin's ideas but not Stalin's nor Trotsky's ideas? The only group I know which does this is Communist Voice (http://www.communistvoice.org/). I would of course disagree and think Trotskyism is the proper continuation of Leninism, which itself is the proper continuation of Marxism.

Cool, I just found my "twin mind"

Thx Spktr

Rafiq

1st January 2016, 08:37

The term "orthodox Marxist" should burn a hole in your tongue, it is that poisonous. It assumes that Marx (& Engels) left the world a blue-print and that any deviation from it is heretic to the orthodoxy. "Orthodoxy" is a word belonging to religion.

In fact Orthodox Marxism is not what it sounds like, quite the opposite: Orthodox Marxism was the sophistication and discipline of the legacy of Marx and Engels into a real political, ideological force.

To that end, Orthodox Marxism was not so "Orthodox" - Orthodox Marxists regularly criticized what they perceived to be the shortcomings of Marx and Engels in relation to their own time period. The significance of "orthodoxy "was the fact that up until then, there was no consistent 'ironing out' of Marx and Engels, no consistent "Marxist" paradigm. So an orthodoxy was necessary. So much so that to be a "Marxist" before Orthodox Marxism would not really mean anything.

You are confusing Orthodox Marxism, with classical Marxism, the latter which relates solely to the works of Marx and Engels.

LuÃs Henrique

1st January 2016, 11:52

Alet

1st January 2016, 12:18

Obviously Marx was not an "orthodox Marxist".

The phrase is an oxymoron.

Luís Henrique

Depends on what you mean by "orthodox". I agree, Marxism is not a program and does not provide us a blueprint, but the necessary method to comprehend the historical tendencies of our time. Lenin defended this method against eclecticism and opportunism but he was not narrow-minded in that he uncritically took Marx's and Engels' word for it. One has to remember that Marxism goes far beyond Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as individuals just as every science is irreducible to its pioneers. Thus, "orthodox" in "Orthodox Marxism" does not mean that one relates to "Capital" as if it was God's written words. Instead, it has to be understood in relation to pseudo-Marxist tendencies, which for example Lenin criticized.

CyM

1st January 2016, 15:56

At one point he even came up with a ludicrous formula by which a dictatorship of the proletariat would overthrow the monarchy and then - get this - hand over power to the capitalist class so that they could politely get on with their phase of history.
This is nonsense of course. You're conflating Lenin with his opponents, the Mensheviks. They actually did lead the proletariat to hand power back to the bourgeois in February because, just like you, they believed that history was some sort of rigid dogmatic schema and "this is the capitalist stage".

Stalin completely agreed, and since he was in charge of Pravda, he censored Lenin's objections when he tried to get them published.

Thankfully, Lenin was able to return in April and publish the April theses. He put the whole central committee on notice that if they insist on maintaining the treacherous position of supporting the mensheviks, he would resign and campaign amongst the members against them.

Didn't come to that.

Essentially, the proletariat was already contesting for power. Only two roads were ahead of it: proletarian revolution or fascist counterrevolution. The workers were armed and running the show on the ground. Orthodox Mensheviks would have us believe that Lenin and Trotsky should have encouraged the workers not to complete the revolution, to wait their turn and give the bourgeois the time to rule because it's their stage in history.

It's nonsense. The same kind of nonsense the Stalinists brought out to justify betraying the workers in Spain, or in May 68. The workers are never ready in Menshevik eyes. And well, if the workers won't listen to their intellectual blabbing about how this is the bourgeois stage and they're not allowed to revolt, they'll bring out the Freikorps and slaughter their revolution. As the Mensheviks of the Social Democratic Party did in Germany when the workers led a revolution but were threatening to overthrow capitalism.

The freikorps of course goes on to become the germ of Hitler's SA. They cut their teeth on their first bloodbath, ordered and paid for by Mensheviks attempting to force the workers to respect the two-stage nonsense academics today want to defend.

reviscom1

1st January 2016, 21:00

Rafiq

1st January 2016, 22:07

Lenin never claimed that a proletarian dictatorship would hand over power to the bourgeoisie.

What you fail to understand is that in the early 20th century, the struggle Lenin sought to wage, that was of primacy, was the struggle for political freedom and bourgeois-democratic society. This had nothing to do with silly, superstitious notions of "stageism", it had everything to do with the fact that Marxists in the early 20th century were skeptical of the idea that they could replicate the gains of German social democracy in creating a mass movement, without the same degree of political freedom that the German Marxists were able to work with.

Lenin's point was NOT that a proletarian dictatorship would form, his point (which he abandoned) was that in order for a proletarian dictatorship to even be possible, the necessary political freedom to mobilize the proletariat in the first place was necessary. So the first Marxists, totally and fully inspired by organizations like the SPD, would support a bourgeois revolution - NOT becasue they were sacrificing a proletarian revolution, but becasue a proletarian revolution was not even close to being on the table (which is what it seemed like). Conversely, Russian liberalism, romantic-bourgeois Narodniks, etc. were already politically well-established in Russian society.

What happened afterwards is simple: Lenin recognized that the opportunity presented itself so that the organized, revolutionary proletariat could seize power. He seized this opportunity - and why? Because the point was never suppressing one's propensity to take power for a bourgeois revolution, but to do everything and anything which would bring the revolutionary proletariat to power, and before the events of 1917, Lenin among other Marxists thought that the chief means of doing this would be to wage political struggles for political freedom (so that they could educate, agitate and organize without being sent to Siberia). One of the chief distinguishing features of the Bolsheviks was their avowed rejection of economism, in fact.

But when the opportunity presented itself that the proletariat could seize power, Lenin seized it - and the lesson being that without will, without determination, there is no guarantee anything will play out in your favor - if you can seize power, then you are a coward and a scum if you don't. That is his lesson.

Dave B

2nd January 2016, 02:12

This argument is based on a misconception; it confounds the democratic revolution with the socialist revolution, the struggle for the republic (including our entire minimum programme) with the struggle for socialism. If Social-Democracy sought to make the socialist revolution its immediate aim, it would assuredly discredit itself. It is precisely such vague and hazy ideas of our “Socialists—Revolutionaries” that Social-Democracy has always combated. For this reason Social-Democracy has constantly stressed the bourgeois nature of the impending revolution in Russia and insisted on a clear line of demarcation between the democratic minimum programme and the socialist maximum programme.

Some Social-Democrats, who are inclined to yield to spontaneity, might forget all this in time of revolution, but not the Party as a whole. The adherents of this erroneous view make an idol of spontaneity in their belief that the march of events will compel the Social-Democratic Party in such a position to set about achieving the socialist revolution, despite itself.

Were this so, our programme would be incorrect, it would not be in keeping with the “march of events”, which is exactly what the spontaneity worshippers fear; they fear for the correctness of our programme. But this fear (a psychological explanation of which we attempted to give in our articles) is entirely baseless.

Our programme is correct. And the march of events will assuredly confirm this more and more fully as time goes on. It is the march of events that will “impose” upon us the imperative necessity of waging a furious struggle for the republic and, in practice, guide our forces, the forces of the politically active proletariat, in this direction. It is the march of events that will, in the democratic revolution, inevitably impose upon us such a host of allies from among the petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry, whose real needs will demand the implementation of our minimum programme, that any concern over too rapid a transition to the maximum programme is simply absurd.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/apr/12b.htm

The Idler

3rd January 2016, 21:18

Exterminatus

3rd January 2016, 22:44

I don't understand what's so terrifying about Red Terror for some communists. Is it not our goal to crush the bourgeoisie and their dogs?

Emmett Till

4th January 2016, 04:49

Remember the Red Terror that the mainstream Marxists including the Mensheviks committed? Oh no, I don't either. By all means don't follow blueprints, but that includes the Bolsheviks moreso than mainstream Marxism.

Theirs wasn't the Red Terror, but the Pink Terror.

Menshevik Georgia in fact gave Bolsheviks in Georgia pretty much the same treatment as Bolsheviks gave Mensheviks. No mass slaughter, but then Mensheviks weren't slaughtered by Bolsheviks either, at least until the late '30s, when most Bolsheviks were being slaughtered in Stalin's Great Terror, which had absolutely nothing red about it, except for the bloodstains on the NKVD dungeon floors.

The Mensheviks did carry out massacres of revolting peasants and non-Georgian national minorities in the promised land of Menshevism. For details, we have the chapter in Trotsky's excellent pamphlet about Menshevism in Georgia about the crimes of the Mensheviks against the workers, peasants and national minorities during their bloodstained rule.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1922/red-white/ch03.htm

And then of course for your real mainstream Marxists, not exotic Russian Mensheviks, we have the pride and joy of the Second International, the German Social Democratic Party.

Who, in addition to conniving at the murder of Rosa Luxemburg, sponsored a true Pink Terror in 1919, with revolting workers slaughtered all over Germany to put an end to the German Revolution in blood.

The Idler

5th January 2016, 19:14

Maybe we could have a revolution without a campaign of terror, Red, Pink, White or otherwise.

Exterminatus

5th January 2016, 22:13

If only our opponents were fluffly bears.

reviscom1

24th January 2016, 23:11

Lenin never claimed that a proletarian dictatorship would hand over power to the bourgeoisie.

This is the passage I was thinking of (Lenin, Robert Service, Chapter 10, Russia from Far and Near, 1905-1907)

"His policies, despite pointing away from conventional Marxist policies, held to the axiom that the great march to socialism would occur in two distinct stages: first a "bourgeois democratic" revolution and then a socialist one. But there were also distinct oddities in his argument. Two Tactics of Russian Social-Democracy, for example, insisted that liberals and other middle-class parties were incapable of being trusted even to bring about that first revolution. Even stranger was the project for a 'provisional revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry'. Lenin announced that such a dictatorship would exercise a powerful appeal to the lower social classes. But the Mensheviks retorted that Lenin had thrown out the two-stages concept. They rightly suggested that, if the dictatorship was going to be enormously popular, the bourgeoisie would never be able to supplant it. They also challenged Lenin's case that a dictatorial regime was the most effective way to introduce universal civic rights and a market economy. His whole project was a contradictory mish mash. Yet Lenin did not deign to respond to these attacks: he had convinced his Bolshevik followers and was unwilling to expose the flaws in his case in a general public debate. This also carried the advantage of allowing him to go on believing that he had stayed within the perimeter of conventional Marxism.........................Not all Marxists were worried about flouting convention........Trotski proposed unequivocally that the socialist parties should seize power, establish a 'workers' government' and not open themselves to replacement by liberals"

Rafiq

25th January 2016, 00:27

So did you just read "Lenin never claimed that a proletarian dictatorship would hand over power to the bourgeoisie" and come to the conclusion that I was wrong? I repeat myself:

What you fail to understand is that in the early 20th century, the struggle Lenin sought to wage, that was of primacy, was the struggle for political freedom and bourgeois-democratic society. This had nothing to do with silly, superstitious notions of "stageism", it had everything to do with the fact that Marxists in the early 20th century were skeptical of the idea that they could replicate the gains of German social democracy in creating a mass movement, without the same degree of political freedom that the German Marxists were able to work with.

Lenin's point was NOT that a proletarian dictatorship would form, his point (which he abandoned) was that in order for a proletarian dictatorship to even be possible, the necessary political freedom to mobilize the proletariat in the first place was necessary. So the first Marxists, totally and fully inspired by organizations like the SPD, would support a bourgeois revolution - NOT becasue they were sacrificing a proletarian revolution, but becasue a proletarian revolution was not even close to being on the table (which is what it seemed like). Conversely, Russian liberalism, romantic-bourgeois Narodniks, etc. were already politically well-established in Russian society.

What happened afterwards is simple: Lenin recognized that the opportunity presented itself so that the organized, revolutionary proletariat could seize power. He seized this opportunity - and why? Because the point was never suppressing one's propensity to take power for a bourgeois revolution, but to do everything and anything which would bring the revolutionary proletariat to power, and before the events of 1917, Lenin among other Marxists thought that the chief means of doing this would be to wage political struggles for political freedom (so that they could educate, agitate and organize without being sent to Siberia). One of the chief distinguishing features of the Bolsheviks was their avowed rejection of economism, in fact.

But when the opportunity presented itself that the proletariat could seize power, Lenin seized it - and the lesson being that without will, without determination, there is no guarantee anything will play out in your favor - if you can seize power, then you are a coward and a scum if you don't. That is his lesson.

Also, Robert Service:

insisted that liberals and other middle-class parties were incapable of being trusted even to bring about that first revolution

I'm honestly getting tired of reading these haughty, shit-for-brains bourgeois historians who think they're so clever in finding an 'inconsistency', which results only from their personal stupidity. The fact of the matter is that recognition that the bourgeoisie were too cowardly to bring about the bourgeois-democratic revolution, had been imprinted in the discourse of not only the Bolsheviks in Russia, but revolutionaries in Germany since the revolution of 1848. This was a commonly recurring theme in German social democracy in the late 19th and early 20th century, i.e. the cowardice of the bourgeoisie.

Again, Lenin never spoke about handing power over to the bourgeoisie. He thought that the fight for political reform is necessary for the building of a proletarian movement in the first place, and the fight against the autocracy, the bourgeois-democratic revolution was necessary for this. Nowhere did he say that the proletariat would seize power and then hand over this power to the bourgeoisie.

Even stranger was the project for a 'provisional revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry'. Lenin announced that such a dictatorship would exercise a powerful appeal to the lower social classes

And now Service seems to be just literally throwing shit around, taking phrases out of context so that they appear ridiculous. The peasantry for Lenin clearly constituted a potential revolutionary petty bourgeoisie, a vehicle for the bourgeois-democratic revolution. Not the actual bourgeoisie who were acknowledged as being too cowardly. But Robert Service's shit-for-brains understanding of Marxian phraseology leads him to believe that the 'lower classes' (including the peasantry) and the bourgeoisie are different categories, when in fact Lenin clearly designates the peasantry as a rural petty bourgeoisie. I mean Lenin SPECIFICALLY talks about the nonsensical stageism that includes aligning oneself with the liberal bourgeoisie:

One must have a schoolboy’s conception of history to imagine the thing without “leaps”, to see it as something in the shape of a straight line moving slowly and steadily upwards: first, it will be the turn of the liberal big bourgeoisie—minor concessions from the autocracy; then of the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie—the democratic republic; and finally of the proletariat— the socialist revolution. That picture, by and large, is correct, correct d la longue, as the French say—spread over a century or so (in France, for instance, from 1789 to 1905); but one must be a virtuoso of philistinism to take this as a pattern for one’s plan of action in a revolutionary epoch. If the Russian autocracy, even at this stage, fails to find a way out by buying itself off with a meagre constitution, if it is not only shaken but actually overthrown, then, obviously, a tremendous exertion of revolutionary energy on the part of all progressive classes will be called for to defend this gain. This “defence”, however, is nothing else than the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry

The fact that any idiot with access to google search can instantly make Robert Service, the 'renowned' historian look like a stupid ass, shows in fact why he is a worthless historian to begin with. The authoritative historian of Lenin in these years, is Lars Lih. End of story.

introduce universal civic rights and a market economy

Is this a joke? He calls himself a historian? Only in our disgusting era of color revolution is bourgeois-democratic revolution synonymous with 'introducing' a market economy (as if it did not already exist). He clearly lacks the adequate perspective on the political climate of the late 19th, early 20th century. Finally bourgeois-democratic revolution (which Lenin simply called the democratic revolution), is not in this context synonymous with liberal revolution.

Yet Lenin did not deign to respond to these attacks

Is Robert Service... Literally talking out of his ass at this point? A 'dictatorial' regime? Really? It was an axiom for every self-proclaimed Marxist that a 'dictatorial regime' was inevitable, for dictatorship is merely defined by class dictatorship, whether of the big liberal bourgeoisie or the proletariat&peasantry. I'm honestly at a loss for words, this basic postmodern liberal stupidity of these historians, as though historical actors are the mouthpieces for their juvenile understanding of politics. This is even a crass characterization of the Mensheviks and the argument as it pertained to them.

GiantMonkeyMan

25th January 2016, 01:17

This is the passage I was thinking of (Lenin, Robert Service, Chapter 10, Russia from Far and Near, 1905-1907)

"His policies, despite pointing away from conventional Marxist policies, held to the axiom that the great march to socialism would occur in two distinct stages: first a "bourgeois democratic" revolution and then a socialist one. But there were also distinct oddities in his argument. Two Tactics of Russian Social-Democracy, for example, insisted that liberals and other middle-class parties were incapable of being trusted even to bring about that first revolution. Even stranger was the project for a 'provisional revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry'. Lenin announced that such a dictatorship would exercise a powerful appeal to the lower social classes. But the Mensheviks retorted that Lenin had thrown out the two-stages concept. They rightly suggested that, if the dictatorship was going to be enormously popular, the bourgeoisie would never be able to supplant it. They also challenged Lenin's case that a dictatorial regime was the most effective way to introduce universal civic rights and a market economy. His whole project was a contradictory mish mash. Yet Lenin did not deign to respond to these attacks: he had convinced his Bolshevik followers and was unwilling to expose the flaws in his case in a general public debate. This also carried the advantage of allowing him to go on believing that he had stayed within the perimeter of conventional Marxism.........................Not all Marxists were worried about flouting convention........Trotski proposed unequivocally that the socialist parties should seize power, establish a 'workers' government' and not open themselves to replacement by liberals"
I would generally take anything Service writes with a grain of salt, considering he is an anti-communist who has notably in the past skewed passages from Bolsheviks in order to suit his narrative (https://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee_on_trotsky_in_ahr). To be honest, it doesn't read like Service, or yourself, have read Two Tactics. Lenin does make a distinction between a bourgeois democratic revolution and a socialist revolution if only to point out that if the former is successful then the working class would still have the task of seizing power ahead of it in order to drive for socialism. He writes: "The revolutionary period has called forth new tasks, which only the totally blind can fail to see. And some Social-Democrats unhesitatingly recognise these tasks and place them on the order of the day, declaring: the armed insurrection brooks no delay, prepare yourselves for it immediately and energetically, remember that it is indispensable for a decisive victory, issue the slogans of a republic, of a provisional government, of a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. Others, however, draw back, mark time, write prefaces instead of giving slogans; instead of pointing to the new while confirming the old, they chew this old tediously and at great length, inventing pretexts to avoid the new, unable to determine the conditions for a decisive victory or to issue the slogans which alone are in line with the striving to attain complete victory."

The whole pamphlet is a criticism of those who would strive only for a bourgeois revolution, who would hesitate and hold back the workers from insurrection, and not consider the need for the workers themselves to seize power if necessary. He is using the pamphlet to criticise the formations that would go on to become the Mensheviks who were suggesting that Russian Social Democracy shouldn't organise workers for insurrectionary actions lest the bourgeoisie be frightened by the workers' power and instead work with Tsarist reaction to suppress them. "Let the bourgeois opportunists contemplate the future reaction with craven fear. The workers will not be frightened either by the thought that the reaction promises to be terrible or by the thought that the bourgeoisie proposes to recoil. The workers are not looking forward to striking bargains, are not asking for sops; they are striving to crush the reactionary forces without mercy, i.e., to set up the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry."

I'm not sure those two quotes give a proper overview of the pamphlet and I don't want to misrepresent Lenin like Service does but I would actually suggest reading what he has written (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/tactics/index.htm) instead of relying on the distortions of bourgeois intellectuals. Suffice to say, Lenin is interested in workers power in the context of a period of potential bourgeois revolution and is critical of those who would hold workers back for fear that the bourgeoisie wouldn't come through on their end.

John Nada

25th January 2016, 03:31

reviscom1

25th January 2016, 08:30

@Rafik

Yes I did read the rest of your post. I just quoted the beginning because that was the part that pertained to my extract from Service.

But surely stageism is the whole point of Marxism. That was the entire framework around which his theories are built. It is not childish/superstitious to talk of stageism. It comes through examining history and social and economic trends. Once a certain stage of technological development is attained, an increase in the number and sopistication of a certain social class is needed in order for society and economy to function. That class therefore grows in economic and intellectual power but its political and social power lags behind. Eventually there is a revolution to make up this shortfall.

And yes liberal democratic openness is part of the reason why a bourgeois revolution must precede a socialist one but there are others as well, including:

Size, class consciousness and sophistication of the working class.
Level of sophistication of economic structures to be inherited.
Level of sophistication of political structures to be inherited.
Level of technology (brought about by Capitalist investment and money circulation).

IMO Lenin, even without the "proletarian reverse handover" idea, was utterly daft to think that the above could be bypassed or compressed into literally a few weeks.

And yes, a market economy! That fits with the above.

reviscom1

25th January 2016, 08:55

How does Robert Service get away with this shit? I know the bar's set low in his anti-communist school of thought, let alone in Soviet history, but at least with that shit about Lenin in reviscom1's post, it's just full of blatant fiction(can't imagine anything else is much better). And other nonfiction books, research papers and college theses are going to use it as a credible citation. That garbage is polluting the discourse among the intelligentsia.

You'd think the Hoover Institute and other reactionaries would've moved on now that the USSR and its allies are going and its sympathizers and their spinoffs are in shambles but no.:glare: I guess the fight against bourgeois ideologies and capitalist apologists is an unrelenting battle.

Yes Service was anti-Communist and yes that particular passage taken on its own reads like anti-Communist propaganda but in fact the picture is more nuanced. Biographers, because they live so much with their subject, are generally able to take a cold, unblinking view of both their flaws and their greatness. Here are some other extracts from the same book:

"But Richard Pipes is surely wrong to portray Lenin in power as merely a psychopath to whom ideas barely mattered and whose primary motivation was to dominate and kill"

"It is not even impossible that his memory might again be invoked, not necessarily by card-carrying Communists, in those many parts of the world where capitalism causes grievous social distress"

"If Lenin had not won the debate, there is little doubt that the Central Powers would have concluded that the Bolsheviks were no longer of any use to them. The result would have been the occupation of the Russian heartland and the collapse of the October Revolution"

"But, if Lenin's proposal lacked cerebral distinction, it nevertheless required political tenacity - and all the biographers of Lenin, despite extolling his feat in winning the Brest Litovsk dispute in 1918, have understated the equal achievement involved in introducing the NEP"

"Yet The Development of Capitalism in Russia, for all its quirks, was a tour de force. Ulyanov had the ability to drive an analysis to the most extreme conclusion and to fuel it exclusively with data that corroborated his analysis"

Sinister Cultural Marxist

25th January 2016, 12:19

But surely stageism is the whole point of Marxism. That was the entire framework around which his theories are built. It is not childish/superstitious to talk of stageism. It comes through examining history and social and economic trends. Once a certain stage of technological development is attained, an increase in the number and sopistication of a certain social class is needed in order for society and economy to function. That class therefore grows in economic and intellectual power but its political and social power lags behind. Eventually there is a revolution to make up this shortfall.

Stageism implies a kind of positivist, linear, even Whiggish notion of historical development where history has to follow a single path. The fact of the matter remains that it was a "backwards" country like Russia that saw the first successful worker's revolution, not a developed economy like the British, German or French empires. That's not to say that the revolution in Russia didn't face significant challenges due to the feudal nature of the Empire, but the Bolshevik victory challenges the basic assumptions of stageism.

Art Vandelay

25th January 2016, 13:23

And yes liberal democratic openness is part of the reason why a bourgeois revolution must precede a socialist one but there are others as well, including:

Size, class consciousness and sophistication of the working class.
Level of sophistication of economic structures to be inherited.
Level of sophistication of political structures to be inherited.
Level of technology (brought about by Capitalist investment and money circulation).

IMO Lenin, even without the "proletarian reverse handover" idea, was utterly daft to think that the above could be bypassed or compressed into literally a few weeks.

And yes, a market economy! That fits with the above.

Well Lenin was won over to the perspective by Trotsky, to be clear, who had been formulating the notion of permanent revolution for years. While Lenin was originally a proponent of the idea that the bourgeoisie would be incapable of carrying out the tasks traditionally associated with the bourgeois democratic revolution, it took till April of 1917 for him to be won to the theory of permanent revolution. You make far too many assumptions in your claims here and, quite frankly, your position is untenable to anyone familiar with the historical record.

The argument was precisely that these so called preconditions you enumerate were incapable of ripening in Russia. The bourgeoisie, in late developing capitalist states, are too weak and incapable of developing the productive forces to the point where a strong industrial proletariat will emerge. For Russia to develop economically, there were a few different things that needed to happen; some sort of agrarian reform (what they called the land question), institution of political democracy, industrialization, etc. It became clear that the bourgeoisie would not carry through a revolution to address these issues. They were incapable of doing so because the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution cannot be carried out by the bourgeoisie in decaying and reactionary stages of capitalism, ie: imperialism. Drawing upon Marx and Parvus, Trotsky theorized that these remaining unfinished tasks would be placed on the mantle of the proletariat, who would take to seeing them through to their completion; however, they would not stop there, and would carry them out concomitantly with their own socialist revolution.

The question has never been whether or not the forces of production have developed to the point where socialism can emerge within the confines of a single country, seeing as socialism in one country is impossible, but rather on a world scale. And globally, in 1917, the preconditions for socialism had come. Global capital had reached the highest stage of it's development - imperialism - and an era of proletarian revolutions was ushered in. Marxists understand that analysis begins with the balance of forces on the international level of economic and social development; national particularities are only an expression of the contradictions of the world system. It certainly wasn't an unprecedented development in Marxist thought, given that it had initially been theorized by Marx & Engels themselves. The schematic and rigid thinking of the stagists is completely alien to Marx's method. In 1917 the chain broke at its weakest link and the stagists served the reaction.

"Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West? The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development." - Marx & Engels, Preface to the 1882 Russian Edition of The Communist Manifesto.
"Now, what application to Russia could my critic draw from my historical outline? Only this: if Russia tries to become a capitalist nation, in imitation of the nations of western Europe, and in recent years she has taken a great deal of pains in this respect, she will not succeed without first having transformed a good part of her peasants into proletarians; and after that, once brought into the lap of the capitalist regime, she will be subject to its inexorable laws, like other profane nations. That is all. But this is too much for my critic. He absolutely must metamorphose my outline of the genesis of capitalism in western Europe into a historico-philosophical theory of the general course, fatally imposed upon all peoples, regardless of the historical circumstances in which they find themselves placed, in order to arrive finally at that economic formation which insures with the greatest amount of productive power of social labor the most complete development of man. But I beg his pardon. He does me too much honor and too much shame at the same time." - Marx, 1877 letter to Mikhailovsky, a leading theorist of Russian populism.

reviscom1

25th January 2016, 18:06

but the Bolshevik victory challenges the basic assumptions of stageism.

I would submit that it re-inforces it, because (a) it was not very proletarian (b) went very badly wrong (c) and most importantly, failed, and Russia reverted to its bourgeois stage anyway.

Here is something I posted on another thread:

"Anyway, my overarching theory is this:

Pre-revolutionary Russia, China, Vietnam and Cuba did not have developed enough capitalist systems to attempt Socialism. They should all have undergone a prolonged Capitalist, bourgeois, liberal phase first.

Unfortunately, the lack of development also meant that the pre-revolutionary establishment in these countries was ripe for overthrow - corrupt, antiquated, inbred and primitive. And Capitalism was just far enough advanced to make their overthrow possible.

What we are seeing now, then, is the long delayed bourgeois phase re-asserting itself. It looks, oddly enough, like Marxism in reverse - a bourgeois revolution after a Socialist one.

What it actually is, though, is the correction of an historical anomaly"

Rafiq

25th January 2016, 18:55

But surely stageism is the whole point of Marxism.

No, it isn't. It completely anti-Marxist and unscientific. The notion of stageism, essentially, ossifies and formalizes retrospective analysis of the development of societies up until then, turns them into a framework that is deemed to represent the universal trajectory path of every single human society, independent of scientifically assessing the concrete circumstances of that particular society. It is wholly and completely superstitious, because it substitutes concrete analysis with some kind of panacea formula of:

"Well this is what is going to happen, cuz no matter the particular concrete social/historic circumstances of a society, it must fit this magical panacea formula drawn out over the course of hundreds of years - society just 'naturally' evolves towards this, that's what god wills of humans"

The fact of the matter is that, just as it was in China the Russian big bourgeoisie had absolutely no predisposition toward the necessary bourgeois-democratic revolution. This is because, just as the more powerful bourgeoisie of absolutist England, their success, basis of power an existence was built around adjusting to the conditions of combined and uneven development (in England's case, conditions of absolutism). It is not even inevitable that European history had to play out the exact way it did - in this historical development, sometimes you find world-changing outcomes, from how battles are fought, from very arbitrary factors that could have led to an entirely different scenario. The reason why that is irrelevant, is because historical materialism is retrospective- we are looking at WHAT HAPPENED (and why), not what HAD to happen in every circumstance because divine will, or 'history' is some force that marches on at the expense o the real humans constituting it.

The idea that courses of development that specifically pertain to one's strategic, and then tactical imperatives should be dictated by specific historical trajectory paths drawn out over the course of centuries, immersed in chaos and totally meaningless, arbitrary zigzags, should be a model for a revolutionary is ridiculous. The whole point of Marxism, in fact, was to traverse and 'manipulate' social processes, not sit back and watch them 'organically' be drawn out. There is no such thing as the 'organic' development of society, as Lenin understood, this is undialectical, and anti-materialist. The point is quite simple: when one becomes conscious of historic processes (Marxism) one acts upon that knowledge, you do not superstitiously sit back and "wait" for society to develop in the exact way that France did for centuries (especially when there is no reason to think it will develop in this way). Stageism has nothing to do with historical materialism - the trajectory path of slave society, then feudalism, then capitalism, etc. was telling us how European society, which was absolutely at that point the vehicle of world-historical development, was shaped, not how every human society will inevitably be shaped by merit of god's divine plan. There are no empirical dogmas in Marxism, there are no ossified, formal 'rules' about what a society WILL do. The necessity of a bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia, was owed to Russia's immersion already in the world-totality, it was owed to the necessity of politically bringing it up to the standards in place that were world-historical. Russia is a beautiful example of what is happening today, capitalism developing on 'different' lines, alternate modernity, and so on, in other countries.

The whole notion of stageism is superstitious because it abstracts the subject from the historical domain, speaks of what "society" needs to do while you sit and watch. This is ridiculous, because as a Marxist, as a revolutionary, one BECOMES a (potential) real historical, material force themselves already, because of scientific knowledge of social processes. It's not like in France during the July revolution for example, there were a bunch of Marxists who held back practical knowledge so that society can develop 'organically'. That would be the epitome of ridiculousness. That is like saying disease and viruses throughout history must 'organically' spread, that plagues must 'organically' cause so much ill upon people before you, who has knowledge of how to make a vaccine already, should deploy your vaccine. If you have knowledge of how to cure a virus, then it is nonsense to speak of how this 'virus' must spread and kill many beforehand, just because other vaccines were developed because of that specific trajectory path of how plagues are stopped.

Eventually there is a revolution to make up this shortfall.

Again that is even a wrong assessment. The matters you are describing are infinitely more complex than this, class struggle in history takes many forms, it does not automatically entail political revolution, sometimes it entails a victorious class arising out of some destructive war, famine or event, sometimes classes rise to power for totally arbitrary reasons, sometimes classes simply rise to power at the expense of other ones in a peaceful way as a result of certain developments. There is no panacea formula about how class struggle moves history that is written in the cosmos, the point of class antagonism being the moving force in history does not necessarily entail history being driven by civil war between two different constituent social formations, it just means that class tension, antagonism, irreconcilability moves history (because history is nothing more than men and women and the social formations they are constituted in).

Marxism is not an ossified, formal set of rules. Historical materialism is not built upon any set of empirical dogmas (just the disavowal of superstitions, themselves obviously unjustified empirically).

And yes liberal democratic openness is part of the reason why a bourgeois revolution must precede a socialist one

I addressed this in my previous post, strange to see this argument pop up again. Perhaps it was a typo on your part.

The fact of the matter is that 'liberal-democratic openness' was not possible in autocratic Russia through the big liberal bourgeoisie. Such reforms were not even possible in Germany, by its bourgeoisie, Germany which was infinitely more advanced than Russia. Of course, this was fought for, by Lenin and the social-democrats, because it was a pre-requisite to any real political activity and to building their very own German SPD in Russia, which was their model. The Bolsheviks therefore were willing to fight alongside liberals in enacting certain reforms, but never did they assume that these would culminate in a liberal democracy, as the big liberal bourgeoisie did not have the courage, determination, or propensity to what was 'extremism' to do this. The peasant masses could not be proletarianized by 'organic' means either, because of the peculiar and particular character of the peasantry in Russia, compared to England.

Size, class consciousness and sophistication of the working class.

Which is why Lenin refers to the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, which would allow for development on proletarian lines to occur. Of course it became clear of the necessity of revolution in the imperialist states as well, and no matter the chances it was a risk worth taking to seize poewr anyway - because such opportunities are rarities and may never present themselves again.

Level of [x]

What is lacking here is recognition of the fact that Russia was already part of the world-totality, with Western Europe, etc. - it did not exist in a vacuum. The conditions of combined and uneven development in Russia were absolutely relating themselves to the conditions of advanced capitalism in Europe, so the idea that the wheel needed to be re-invented, is simply a baseless one. The Bolsheviks were already equipped with world-historical consciousness, developed in (or in relation to) Europe, and were already able to disseminate this among the Russian proletariat. So the factors, in fact, which were necessary for the development and shaping of European society, are not as applicable as you would like to think, because Russia's course of development was already RELATING ITSELF to Western European history. It was not on another planet, devoid of any relation to historical processes as they developed in Europe. It is not like Russia needed to "do what western europe did" - Russia was built off of its relationship to what happened in Western Europe (liberalism, industrial capitalism, etc.). Everything else was a matter of willful political and then economic struggle.

the "proletarian reverse handover"

Here is an example of the use of phrases to accommodate to characterizations that have no basis of existence in the first place. Talk of a 'reverse handover' is pointless because there is no 'handover' to use as a reference point to begin with. This was a made up allegation that has already been discredited.

to think that the above could be bypassed or compressed into literally a few weeks.

What does time have to do with it? There are societies, whose historical trajectory path has been compressed into a matter of a 'few weeks' compared to what would have otherwise taken thousands of years many times in the course of history (including the diffusion of technical knowledge, i.e. neolithic). Again, this is a totally unscientiifc assumption, one that is baffled by the idea that yes - history is full of arbitrary and meaningless zigzags, setbacks, enclosed loops (i.e. for example hunter-gatherer societies that remained unaltered), that have no meaning at all. That is because nothing, except the antagonisms within these societies, were 'guiding' their paths of development. But nevermind that.

All of the 'factors' you mentioned were already possible, and addressed, without need for a liberal-democratic society. You again ignore Lenin's crucial argument here:

By participating in the provisional government, we are told, Social-Democracy would have the power in its hands; but as the party of the proletariat, Social-Democracy cannot hold the power without attempting to put our maximum programme into effect, i.e., without attempting to bring about the socialist revolution. In such an undertaking it would, at the present time, inevitably come to grief, discredit itself, and play into the hands of the reactionaries. Hence, participation by Social-Democrats in a provisional revolutionary government is inadmissible.

This argument is based on a misconception; it confounds the democratic revolution with the socialist revolution, the struggle for the republic (including our entire minimum programme) with the struggle for socialism. If Social-Democracy sought to make the socialist revolution its immediate aim, it would assuredly discredit itself. It is precisely such vague and hazy ideas of our “Socialists—Revolutionaries” that Social-Democracy has always combated. For this reason Social-Democracy has constantly stressed the bourgeois nature of the impending revolution in Russia and insisted on a clear line of demarcation between the democratic minimum programme and the socialist maximum programme. Some Social-Democrats, who are inclined to yield to spontaneity, might forget all this in time of revolution, but not the Party as a whole. The adherents of this erroneous view make an idol of spontaneity in their belief that the march of events will compel the Social-Democratic Party in such a position to set about achieving the socialist revolution, despite itself. Were this so, our programme would be incorrect, it would not be in keeping with the “march of events”, which is exactly what the spontaneity worshippers fear; they fear for the correctness of our programme. But this fear (a psychological explanation of which we attempted to give in our articles) is entirely baseless. Our programme is correct. And the march of events will assuredly confirm this more and more fully as time goes on. It is the march of events that will “impose” upon us the imperative necessity of waging a furious struggle for the republic and, in practice, guide our forces, the forces of the politically active proletariat, in this direction. It is the march of events that will, in the democratic revolution, inevitably impose upon us such a host of allies from among the petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry, whose real needs will demand the implementation of our minimum programme, that any concern over too rapid a transition to the maximum programme is simply absurd.

So the point, clearly, was never that the socialist revolution was going to proceed the democratic one as you insinuate, but that the democratic revolution will not be carried out by the bourgeoisie, but purportedly by an alliance between the peasantry (rural petty bourgeoisie) and the proletariat. The fact that the conditions in Russia were backward, were not yet the basis for superseding capitalism as such, was recognized by everyone. But Russia already had a proletariat, it was not tribal afghanistan. The problem was one of combined and uneven development. In the mind of the pseudo-Marxist philistines at the time, the goals of the proletariat should have been cut short because it was an impediment to the imaginary liberal-democratic revolution that was prophesied to come. This is nothing short of utter class betrayal, and the highpoint of philistinism. Communism derives from the antagonisms as they are accentuated, the Bolsheviks and the Bolsheviks alone were the party of the proletariat of the Russian empire for this reason. The Bolsheviks represented the only force of Communism in the Russian Emprie, unto the conditions of the Russian Empire.

Of course, some might think to themselves that the manipulation or altering of god's divine plan for humanity is an atrocity. Thankfully we Marxists are atheists.

And yes, a market economy! That fits with the above.

Yes indeed, in our color-revolution model of a bourgeois-democratic revolution in the early 20th century, where 'market economy' is quite simply synonymous with opening to late 20th/early 21st century globalization and more often than not domination by US monopolies, transnational corporations and finance. But I contest the notion that this is an appropriate description of what would come from a bourgeois-democratic revolution, because Tsarist Russia was already a market economy. The whole dichotomy of 'market' vs 'non-market' economy in these circumstances are quite ridiculous, it is totally ideologically confounded to the political standards of the very late 20th, not early 20th century. Again, Russia was already a 'market economy'. How else would, in your mind, an actual proletarian demographic had been possible, no matter how small?

Here are some other extracts from the same book:

If this qualifies as a standard for a "cold, unblinking view", I would love to see what qualifies as an impassioned, 'blnking' view in your mind. In fact snipets like this:

Ulyanov had the ability to drive an analysis to the most extreme conclusion and to fuel it exclusively with data that corroborated his analysis

Alone discredit this qualification. In your mind this is a a "cold, unblinking view"? Congradulations for Service giving us such 'cold, unblinking' banalities which you could find from wikipedia, congratulations for this shit-for-brains pseudo-historian for restraining himself from saying Lenin ate babies for breakfast. That does not make him any less a worthless, garbage historian, it does not make him any less bellow the standards even of bourgeois historiography. The description he provides, far from a neutral 'cold, unblinking view' (which is not possible for the matters he is describing) are basically banalities. Recognizing that Lenin was skilled, or that he was important, is something shared by any person. That is literally a meaningless qualification to saying this is a "cold, unblinking" view.

I would submit that it re-inforces it, because (a) it was not very proletarian

So besides having the overwhelming support of the actual proletariat, besides being carried out by the militant proletariat themselves, and their self-mobilization, I wonder what is the qualification for something to be 'proletarian' in character. The October revolution was 100% purely a proletarian affair, even during the civil war, it was common among peasants to accuse the Bolsheviks of putting the interests of the industrial workers over them. Anyway I already addressed the matter at hand: Once this proletarian revolution failed, the bourgeois revolution began. You are wrong in saying:

What it actually is, though, is the correction of an historical anomaly

You are wrong. Nothing was "delayed" at all, because the predispositions to real capitalist development in any of the countries you mention, was beforehand impossible, owing to real conditions (i.e. colonialism, uneven development, ETC.). What you fail to acknowledge is the necessity of the socialist revolution in Vietnam, Cuba, etc. in destroying politically old social bonds so as to make room for capitalist development. This was necessary as a pre-requisite to the capitalist development you are seeing now. Russia is exceptional because it was an actual proletarian revolution, but one that failed to sustain itself (because, basically, the revolution did not spread), which is also why we see a peculiar type of capitalism in Russia today, which is deformed.

Hit The North

25th January 2016, 22:07

And yes liberal democratic openness is part of the reason why a bourgeois revolution must precede a socialist one but there are others as well, including:

Size, class consciousness and sophistication of the working class.
Level of sophistication of economic structures to be inherited.
Level of sophistication of political structures to be inherited.
Level of technology (brought about by Capitalist investment and money circulation).

IMO Lenin, even without the "proletarian reverse handover" idea, was utterly daft to think that the above could be bypassed or compressed into literally a few weeks.

And yes, a market economy! That fits with the above.

Good grief! Even taken at face value this is a pathetic series of arguments.

When Marx was writing and fighting, Britain, the most bourgeois of nations, the most economically developed, did not allow the vast majority of people the vote. Do you think he considered this home of "liberal democratic openness" to be a great model of democracy that workers must live through before they can raise the necessary consciousness? In fact, like Lenin, like Trotsky, Marx argued that only a workers revolution could realise the universal, democratic promise of the Enlightenment. Read what Marx really thought about the piss-poor democratic credentials of bourgeois revolutions after 1848.

Size, class consciousness and sophistication of the working class. The Russian working class in the first two decades of the C20th was numerically smaller than Western European proletariats but is was much more combative and class conscious than its more "sophisticated" counterparts. And what does sophistication mean when it comes to class? Do you mean, more educated, more integrated into the social order? What is your model of a sophisticated working class?

And even taking this list of factors at the face value of its crude positivism, how does it explain the defeat of the German revolution, among the most educated, most cultured workers in the world, sitting within a highly developed capitalist society with markets and everything? How does it explain the absence of revolutionary effort among the workers of Britain and America?

The point which escapes you, as it escaped Kautsky and the other sorry imperialist war-collaborators , was that the revolution was international. It happened first in the weakest chain of world imperialism, the Russian empire - precisely because of its backwardness. Point being, that revolutions erupt during serious social and economic crises, not when the proletariat have become suitably "sophisticated". The Bolsheviks were not staging a national revolution. As far as they were concerned they belonged to an international revolutionary movement and their revolution was to be a staging post in the international revolution. Unfortunately, it was a movement which had become politically bankrupted by large swathes of opportunism. Imagine, if those most sophisticated leaders of the 2nd International had not caved into the war aims of international capital. Imagine, if the SDP had put its shoulder to the wheel and followed the example of the Russian workers and fought for revolution in 1918, and not, to their eternal shame, fought against it.

We'd be living in paradise, brother!

IMO Lenin, even without the "proletarian reverse handover" idea, was utterly daft to think that the above could be bypassed or compressed into literally a few weeks.So the revolution in the Russian empire happened in less than desirable circumstances. But this is because history happens like that, throwing up paradoxes and contradictions, including the shit of happenstance, not because a particular list of abstract factors has been ticked off.

John Nada

26th January 2016, 05:30

This is nonsense of course. You're conflating Lenin with his opponents, the Mensheviks. They actually did lead the proletariat to hand power back to the bourgeois in February because, just like you, they believed that history was some sort of rigid dogmatic schema and "this is the capitalist stage".

Stalin completely agreed, and since he was in charge of Pravda, he censored Lenin's objections when he tried to get them published.

Thankfully, Lenin was able to return in April and publish the April theses. He put the whole central committee on notice that if they insist on maintaining the treacherous position of supporting the mensheviks, he would resign and campaign amongst the members against them.
Well Lenin was won over to the perspective by Trotsky, to be clear, who had been formulating the notion of permanent revolution for years. While Lenin was originally a proponent of the idea that the bourgeoisie would be incapable of carrying out the tasks traditionally associated with the bourgeois democratic revolution, it took till April of 1917 for him to be won to the theory of permanent revolution. You make far too many assumptions in your claims here and, quite frankly, your position is untenable to anyone familiar with the historical record. http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1047/bolshevism-was-fully-armed/ If this translation and conclusion is accurate, it supports other Bolsheviks' contention that Lenin didn't break with the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry formula and "come over" to Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution.
Pre-revolutionary Russia, China, Vietnam and Cuba did not have developed enough capitalist systems to attempt Socialism. They should all have undergone a prolonged Capitalist, bourgeois, liberal phase first.Incidentally this is the exact line of the renegade Kautsky, Mensheviks and Dengites. So you now have China claiming in a hundred years, the time might be ripe for the proletariat. Which happens to be the same timescale as the American, French or Saudi Arabian governments' plan towards socialism.:laugh:
Unfortunately, the lack of development also meant that the pre-revolutionary establishment in these countries was ripe for overthrow - corrupt, antiquated, inbred and primitive. And Capitalism was just far enough advanced to make their overthrow possible.

What we are seeing now, then, is the long delayed bourgeois phase re-asserting itself. It looks, oddly enough, like Marxism in reverse - a bourgeois revolution after a Socialist one.

What it actually is, though, is the correction of an historical anomaly"Or as it's also called, a counterrevolution.
The fact of the matter is that, just as it was in China the Russian big bourgeoisie had absolutely no predisposition toward the necessary bourgeois-democratic revolution. This is because, just as the more powerful bourgeoisie of absolutist England, their success, basis of power an existence was built around adjusting to the conditions of combined and uneven development (in England's case, conditions of absolutism). It is not even inevitable that European history had to play out the exact way it did - in this historical development, sometimes you find world-changing outcomes, from how battles are fought, from very arbitrary factors that could have led to an entirely different scenario. The reason why that is irrelevant, is because historical materialism is retrospective- we are looking at WHAT HAPPENED (and why), not what HAD to happen in every circumstance because divine will, or 'history' is some force that marches on at the expense o the real humans constituting it.Combined and uneven development is a theory Trotsky formulated in the 1928. Not that it's wrong, though it might contradict the two-phase bourgeois-democratic followed quickly by a proletarian socialist revolution in the rest of your argument.
The laws of history have nothing in common with a pedantic schematism. Unevenness, the most general law of the historic process, reveals itself most sharply and complexly in the destiny of the backward countries. Under the whip of external necessity their backward culture is compelled to make leaps. From the universal law of unevenness thus derives another law which, for the lack of a better name, we may call the law of combined development – by which we mean a drawing together of the different stages of the journey, a combining of the separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms. Without this law, to be taken of course, in its whole material content, it is impossible to understand the history of Russia, and indeed of any country of the second, third or tenth cultural class. https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/ch01.htm

Lenin theorized on the law of uneven development and a global imperialist system, but the theory on it being combined came later from Trotsky in the wake of the complete train-wreck that was the Chinese Revolution. This was the main core dispute between Stalin and Trotsky. Yet even Wikipedia(shitty primary source as always) redirects to combined and uneven development (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uneven_development):confused:
Yes indeed, in our color-revolution model of a bourgeois-democratic revolution in the early 20th century, where 'market economy' is quite simply synonymous with opening to late 20th/early 21st century globalization and more often than not domination by US monopolies, transnational corporations and finance. But I contest the notion that this is an appropriate description of what would come from a bourgeois-democratic revolution, because Tsarist Russia was already a market economy. The whole dichotomy of 'market' vs 'non-market' economy in these circumstances are quite ridiculous, it is totally ideologically confounded to the political standards of the very late 20th, not early 20th century. Again, Russia was already a 'market economy'. How else would, in your mind, an actual proletarian demographic had been possible, no matter how small?Most of the "color revolutions" could more accurately be described as another faction of the comprador-bourgeoisie launching a coup. Though in the case of Egypt and Nepal actually came pretty close to a February Revolution-type situation if the subjective forces of the proletariat were either stronger or not led by downright treacherous Communist Parties respectively.

Really in spite of the name, in the epoch of imperialism the proletariat must be the leading class in the bourgeois-democratic revolutions to insure that it won't be a coup and a continuation of neo-colonialism just in a neoliberal form. Then not only consolidate the gains of bourgeois-democratic revolution against semi-feudal despotism and neo-colonialism, but take it further to a proletarian socialist revolution.
You are wrong. Nothing was "delayed" at all, because the predispositions to real capitalist development in any of the countries you mention, was beforehand impossible, owing to real conditions (i.e. colonialism, uneven development, ETC.). What you fail to acknowledge is the necessity of the socialist revolution in Vietnam, Cuba, etc. in destroying politically old social bonds so as to make room for capitalist development. This was necessary as a pre-requisite to the capitalist development you are seeing now. Russia is exceptional because it was an actual proletarian revolution, but one that failed to sustain itself (because, basically, the revolution did not spread), which is also why we see a peculiar type of capitalism in Russia today, which is deformed.Russia strikes me as a modern equivalent of what Lenin called the poor people's imperialism (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/aug/x03.htm) in reference to Italy, with China roughly occupying the role of Imperial Russia as an investment funnel for other imperialists.

reviscom1

26th January 2016, 08:20

GiantMonkeyMan

26th January 2016, 14:45

@ Hit the North

"And even taking this list of factors at the face value of its crude positivism, how does it explain the defeat of the German revolution, among the most educated, most cultured workers in the world, sitting within a highly developed capitalist society with markets and everything?"

Again, because they had only had their bourgeois revolution 3 years before. It needed a lot longer than that to work itself through (say, a century?)

Plus, as you describe, Capitalism was strong and healthy at that point. It was at its peak. It needs to start degrading before there is a revolution.
The modern bourgeois state was ultimately formed in Germany in 1848. Just like any revolutionary movement, there was a counter-revolution that reversed a lot of the gains of the revolutions of 1848 but it was in that period that we see the middle classes essentially overtake the aristocracy as the movers and shakers of German politics.

It was actually Lenin and friends who were taking a mechanistic, literalist view of Marxist theory.

They seemed to think that the bourgeois revolution was some sort of stage to be mechanically completed and then as soon as it was, purely by virtue of having happened, they could then go on immediately to the next ordained stage, which was Workers' revolution.

In fact the bourgeois revolution was not there as some sort of meaningless token that gave permission to hold a workers' revolution. It would lead to a workers' revolution because (eventually) it would nurture the social and economic conditions for such a revolution.

There would have been a revolution in the UK had not the ruling classes implemented the "welfare" state and advanced workers' rights after the second world war. The current ruling classes are now (foolishly) trying to cut both of those things back.
I think it more mechanistic to think that an arbitrary number of years, you suggest a century, would have to pass before the conditions would be in place for class society to end. Marx and Engels literally first published the Communist Manifesto two days before the first stages of the 1848 revolutions. They thought that the conditions of society were ripe for communism before the bourgeoisie had even solidified their power across Europe.

And just like Marx and Engels, Lenin and the Bolsheviks recognised that it wasn't the bourgeoisie that was necessary for a socialist revolution but rather the mobilisation of the working class. The social and economic conditions are already present, you don't need a formal stamp to say 'this period of history is over, you can begin the revolution now', all you need is the masses to arise with the goal in mind.

RedMaterialist

26th January 2016, 19:36

But surely stageism is the whole point of Marxism.

So your advice to Lenin would have been to allow Tsar Alexander to remain in power, to return the land to the landowners and Kulaks, force the peasants to remain in serfdom, allow the capitalists to retain control of industry and then wait 200 yrs for the whole thing to evolve into socialism?

Stageism does involve the progress from one stage to another. But there is nothing to prevent some of the transitions from being abrupt and violent. The French Revolution destroyed what was left of feudalism overnight. Should the French have waited another 100 yrs for feudalism to gradually develop into capitalism? The US version of slavery was destroyed in a violent, bloody civil war. Should Lincoln have waited for slavery to evolve into feudalism and then into capitalism?

reviscom1

26th January 2016, 20:49

So your advice to Lenin would have been to allow Tsar Alexander to remain in power, to return the land to the landowners and Kulaks, force the peasants to remain in serfdom, allow the capitalists to retain control of industry and then wait 200 yrs for the whole thing to evolve into socialism?

Stageism does involve the progress from one stage to another. But there is nothing to prevent some of the transitions from being abrupt and violent. The French Revolution destroyed what was left of feudalism overnight. Should the French have waited another 100 yrs for feudalism to gradually develop into capitalism? The US version of slavery was destroyed in a violent, bloody civil war. Should Lincoln have waited for slavery to evolve into feudalism and then into capitalism?

I am not talking about evolving gradually, nor am I objecting to revolution. But the revolution should be, and can only be, the final expression of economic and social changes.

In talking of Russia, you omit to mention that before the Bolshevik revolution there was a bourgeois one that ended Feudalism, implemented liberal democracy and removed the Tsar from power. I would absolutely have advised Lenin not to seize power after it, though.

The French did wait (more than) a hundred years for feudalism to develop into Capitalism and then had a revolution at the end of that period which set the seal on the transformation.

reviscom1

26th January 2016, 21:04

I think it more mechanistic to think that an arbitrary number of years, you suggest a century, would have to pass before the conditions would be in place for class society to end.

And just like Marx and Engels, Lenin and the Bolsheviks recognised that it wasn't the bourgeoisie that was necessary for a socialist revolution but rather the mobilisation of the working class.

Specifying a century was my sly way of saying we are due for a European revolution soon (I did toy with the idea of adding a ;)in fact)

Of course the bourgeoisie are not necessary for a socialist revolution, I never claimed they were. I was arguing that a bourgeois revolution is necessary before a Socialist one.

Thanks for your earlier links. I have read similar about Service before, and I can certainly agree that the Lenin biography I referenced is quite poorly written and structured.

Am dipping into Lenin's over-sized "pamphlet" and will respond fully when I have read more. He does seem to be arguing that a bourgeois stage is necessary, though, as far as I can make out (beginning of chapter 5)

Rafiq

26th January 2016, 21:49

you omit to mention that before the Bolshevik revolution there was a bourgeois one that ended Feudalism

Yet the qualifications for what constitutes "ending feudalism", or older pre-capitalist bonds might be a tad bit different, from that held by Marxists. The impotence of the February revolution to even defend itself against impending monarchists, in addition to its refusal to abstain from the war - this 'revolution' couldn't have been defended. But as I've already argued, it is ridiculous to think there is any parallel between a bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia, compared to - say - France. The French did not have Marxists organized into a mass movement abstain from taking power because "they knew the bourgeoisie had to have their turn" being the most obvious example.

He does seem to be arguing that a bourgeois stage

And regarding Lenin as a whole, you don't seem to be keeping up with this thread.

Rafiq

26th January 2016, 21:54

Combined and uneven development is a theory Trotsky formulated in the 1928. Not that it's wrong, though it might contradict the two-phase bourgeois-democratic followed quickly by a proletarian socialist revolution in the rest of your argument.

What it emphasizes is the inability for the Russian big bourgeoisie to carry out a bourgeois-democratic revolution. I always love to refer back to Lenin, who spoke of how "pure capitalism" is nonsense - it is always inter-mingled with "feudalism, philistinism or something else". This is a perfect assessment of our present predicament.

Though in the case of Egypt and Nepal actually came pretty close to a February Revolution-type situation if the
subjective forces of the proletariat were either stronger or not led by downright treacherous Communist Parties respectively.

I would consider the Arab Spring and Nepal to, respectively, be different in this case. The liberal wings (however small) of the Syrian and Libyan insurrections respectively apply, though.

Russia strikes me as a modern equivalent of what Lenin called the poor people's imperialism in reference to Italy, with China roughly occupying the role of Imperial Russia as an investment funnel for other imperialists.

I think a crucial point that must be emphasized, however, is what Russia represents as it relates to global reaction. China attempts to be more 'pragmatic', but Russia is a hotbed for world reaction. It is quite something, for example, when you have Putin openly admiring Donald Trump (and vice versa).

Hit The North

26th January 2016, 22:28

I am not talking about evolving gradually, nor am I objecting to revolution. But the revolution should be, and can only be, the final expression of economic and social changes.

Says you. History says differently. Otherwise you'll be able to point out the pure, ripe revolution that took place as a "final expression of economic and social changes," whatever that is.

In talking of Russia, you omit to mention that before the Bolshevik revolution there was a bourgeois one that ended Feudalism, implemented liberal democracy and removed the Tsar from power. I would absolutely have advised Lenin not to seize power after it, though.
The "bourgeois revolution" didn't have time to "end feudalism" or implement a liberal democracy. There was a war on and instead of ending it these democractic heroes of yours decided to prosecute the war with increased vigour. Their problem, of course, was that the troops were abandoning the front line in their thousands and the Worker's soviets were refusing to release resources to the government. There was a situation of dual power. People were pissed off with the carnage and sacrifice, the deprivations and economic collapse and the Kerensky government was demanding further pain and suffering.

Of course, your advice to Lenin and the Russian workers would presumably be, "One last push, boys! For the Russian liberal democracy!" I think their response would have made your cheeks pink.

The French did wait (more than) a hundred years for feudalism to develop into Capitalism and then had a revolution at the end of that period which set the seal on the transformation.
You have a nerve to deride Lenin for having a mechanical view when you come out with pearls of wisdom like the above!

...

RedMaterialist

27th January 2016, 05:33

I am not talking about evolving gradually, nor am I objecting to revolution. But the revolution should be, and can only be, the final expression of economic and social changes.

In talking of Russia, you omit to mention that before the Bolshevik revolution there was a bourgeois one that ended Feudalism, implemented liberal democracy and removed the Tsar from power. I would absolutely have advised Lenin not to seize power after it, though.

The French did wait (more than) a hundred years for feudalism to develop into Capitalism and then had a revolution at the end of that period which set the seal on the transformation.

Sorry, I meant Nicholas. It's true that he abdicated but that was only a technical move; he would have returned immediately if he thought it had been safe. Also, when he abdicated it only meant that his son became his successor.

Russia in 1917 was both a feudal and capitalist economy. According to your theory the Menshevik revolution should not have happened until the final expression of the economic change of feudalism into capitalism which would have taken at least another hundred yrs.

If the French waited more than a hundred yrs until feudalism had developed into capitalism then why have a revolution at all? Why all the bloodshed just to have a seal of approval.

Marx and Engels "said" that revolutions are the engines of historical development. Aren't you saying that these engines should be replaced by notary seals? :unsure: And in another context, they also said that some socialists want the benefits of revolution but not the dangers that necessarily come with the revolution.

Finally, it was Kerensky and the Mensheviks who wanted to continue the slaughter of WWI. The war, of course, was the expression of capitalist imperialism, which is exactly, I think, what you would have advised Kerensky to continue. After all, after feudalism comes capitalism, then imperialist capitalism; only much later socialism. I just don't think the Russian people were ready to endure another ten yrs of war and starvation.

John Nada

27th January 2016, 17:50

What it emphasizes is the inability for the Russian big bourgeoisie to carry out a bourgeois-democratic revolution. I always love to refer back to Lenin, who spoke of how "pure capitalism" is nonsense - it is always inter-mingled with "feudalism, philistinism or something else". This is a perfect assessment of our present predicament.Shit if you have to wait for "pure capitalism", the US, with vestiges of settler-colonialism, feudal slavery(in the form of prison labor and racism) and even Native American/Alaskan Native pre-capitalism, it still might not be ready:laugh: Yet anyone who speaks of the US(the most advance imperialist-capitalist country) needing a bourgeois-democratic revolution and a democratic dictatorship, as opposed to a proletarian socialist revolution and DotP, is way "behind the times".
I would consider the Arab Spring and Nepal to, respectively, be different in this case. The liberal wings (however small) of the Syrian and Libyan insurrections respectively apply, though.Of course. Nepal and Arab countries are very different. Uneven development, but not so combined as to abolish distinctions. Nor had either exhausted a possible democratic revolution supported by the broader masses(proletariat, peasantry, semi-proletariat, lumpenproletariat, petit-bourgeoisie and even rival sections of the middle bourgeoisie however flimsy and likely seeking to be the new big comprador-bourgeoisie), though only the leadership of the proletariat could've taken it further. With Egypt more or less having an elemental insurrection as part of a greater "spontaneous" rebellion in the Arab world and Nepal having a decade-long people's war. Though in the case of Nepal, the Communist Parties did exactly what reviscom1 proposes with some god-knows-how-long bourgeois-democratic stage against semi-feudalism before another bourgeois-democratic revolution against imperialism(maintaining said semi-feudalism) some time in the distant future, with predictable disastrous results.

I bring those two countries up because unlike "color revolutions" following the "Prussian path", these were close to going along the "American path". In reference to Russia's possible direction of agrarian revolution, Lenin outlined the two possible paths:
Those two paths of objectively possible bourgeois development we would call the Prussian path and the American path, respectively. In the first case feudal landlord economy slowly evolves into bourgeois, Junker landlord economy, which condemns the peasants to decades of most harrowing expropriation and bondage, while at the same time a small minority of Grossbauern (“big peasants”) arises. In the second case there is no landlord economy, or else it is broken up by revolution, which confiscates and splits up the feudal estates. In that case the peasant predominates, becomes the sole agent of agriculture, and evolves into a capitalist farmer. In the first case the main content of the evolution is transformation of feudal bondage into servitude and capitalist exploitation on the land of the feudal landlords—Junkers. In the second case the main background is transformation of the patriarchal peasant into a bourgeois farmer. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1907/agrprogr/ch01s5.htm Many of the supposed "color revolutions" went along the "Prussian path" of another comprador or bureaucratic bourgeois faction implementing reforms(perhaps initially for anti-corruption, anti-nepotism or meager bourgeois-"democratic" rights, but nothing long-term and quickly reverts to more of the same) from above, yet preserving the essence of neo-colonialism and bureaucratic capitalism(either or both being the problems faced in many of those nations, though rarely articulated except by leftist who may not be dominate). The "American path" would be an actual social revolution smashing the old order and laying the foundation for a socialist revolution. The "Prussian path" occurring under the watch of imperialist and liberal bourgeoisie,the "American path" among the proletariat, poor peasantry and semi-proletariat.

A problem seems to be that a lot of events like the Arab Spring do have a class angle not unlike the Revolutions of 1847 onward(which Marx and Engels beautifully illustrated the class struggle as the motor of history), yet for some reason this seems to get obscured for some nebulous focus on foreign policy implications or the actions of the bourgeois factions (mis)leading it from above. With absurd claims that the proletariat isn't involved, even if it's working against its own long-term interests(by tailing a bourgeois faction) or in an elemental level of consciousness. Doesn't help that the bourgeois media focuses on the individual group identity(ethnicity, region, religion, income or bourgeois parties) and downplays any anti-capitalist and/or proletarian character, rather than class in Marxian terms.
I think a crucial point that must be emphasized, however, is what Russia represents as it relates to global reaction. China attempts to be more 'pragmatic', but Russia is a hotbed for world reaction. It is quite something, for example, when you have Putin openly admiring Donald Trump (and vice versa).I think Russia's trying to turn the American strategy of indirect rule, "soft power" and "color revolutions" back against it. Like any imperialist, they're siding with reaction, just like the US/UK supported Nazbols and Islamist(via Saudi Arabia) in Russia. And they reciprocate it.

China's "pragmatism" is more opportunism. Actually economically it's closer to plain old imperialism than Russia(which depends on it's military might, influence of the fSU and natural resources). Not just exploiting "their own" proletariat, semi-proletariat and poor peasantry, but superexploiting the 3rd-World. In a way worse due to the environmental damage and it's a convenient path for other imperialist investing in China. Like France and the UK investing in Imperial Russia, which in turn exploited Turkestan for raw material, Poland as a workshop, and China and Persia for both markets and sources. Only this workshop is the Han nation and not a colony.

Putin will likely regret supporting Trump, because both are opportunists and Trump, with his big ego, will not deescalate the current bad blood and likely take the interimperialist fight to foolishly dangerous levels. He's simply not that progressive to pursue a peace with Russia against the US's inherent imperialist tendencies. This interimperialist war is worrying because Russia's ace up its sleeve is its massive nuclear arsenal. And neither will support anything progressive to "stick it" to the other, but only the most reactionary.

reviscom1

27th January 2016, 18:22

Says you. History says differently. Otherwise you'll be able to point out the pure, ripe revolution that took place as a "final expression of economic and social changes," whatever that is

Er, every successful bourgeois revolution that has ever occurred. I explained what "that" is in previous comments on this thread. A particular class grows in economic and intellectual power in response to developments in technology and changes to economic structure. But the political and social power of this class lags behind. Eventually a revolution makes up this shortfall.

these democractic heroes of yours

What a singularly daft and unscientific thing to say. They are not heroes of mine. I was responding to a post that implied that Russia leapt straight from Tsarism to Bolshevism. I was merely pointing out that there was a bourgeois revolution in between, that had already achieved some of the things that the OP was claiming for Lenin.

The "bourgeois revolution" didn't have time to "end feudalism" or implement a liberal democracy

Yes it did. And I am not referring to the actions and legislation of the provisional government here, I am referring to the historical effects of the Revolution itself.

You have a nerve to deride Lenin for having a mechanical view when you come out with pearls of wisdom like the above!

What was mechanical about the above? If you want it explained see my first para above. Whereas my point about Lenin was that he didn't have explanations. He just seemed to think that, ludicrously, as soon as a bourgeois revolution happened that meant that Marxist box could therefore be ticked off, and a Socialist revolution could immediately follow.

reviscom1

27th January 2016, 18:36

If the French waited more than a hundred yrs until feudalism had developed into capitalism then why have a revolution at all? Why all the bloodshed just to have a seal of approval.

Because the political and social system had not changed with the economic system. That is what the French Revolution corrected.

It's true that he abdicated but that was only a technical move; he would have returned immediately if he thought it had been safe. Also, when he abdicated it only meant that his son became his successor.

None of that is the case. Look it up.

Marx and Engels "said" that revolutions are the engines of historical development. Aren't you saying that these engines should be replaced by notary seals?

No. Where did I say that? In fact I think conditions are ripe for Socialist revolution round about now. I just don't think they were in early 20th Century Russia. Just to repeat, I have absolutely no objection to Revolution. Indeed it is necessary. But they happen when they happen, spontaneously, not through the conscious agency of a small group of strong willed individuals.

Finally, it was Kerensky and the Mensheviks who wanted to continue the slaughter of WWI. The war, of course, was the expression of capitalist imperialism, which is exactly, I think, what you would have advised Kerensky to continue

No, I wouldn't. Lenin was right about WWI. That said I can understand the pressures on Kerensky against surrender. In fact Lenin in power had a real job to get the surrender past even the Bolshevik leadership, and only managed to do so after the Germans actually launched an invasion of Russia. That is why Lenin was great and Kerensky and most of the rest of the Politburo weren't. But the arguments against surrender need not be Imperialist - Germany was a right wing monarchy, what sort of settlement would it have imposed on Russia? Would it try and occupy Russia or impose a government on it? Restore the Romanovs? How would the patriotic sections of the population and the working class view an abject surrender? What exact terms should be negotiated and what was the line in the sand as far as concessions were to be made?

Russia in 1917 was both a feudal and capitalist economy. According to your theory the Menshevik revolution should not have happened until the final expression of the economic change of feudalism into capitalism which would have taken at least another hundred yrs

Good point. I will think further on it.

reviscom1

27th January 2016, 21:24

@Rafik

Here is an example of the use of phrases to accommodate to characterizations that have no basis of existence in the first place. Talk of a 'reverse handover' is pointless because there is no 'handover' to use as a reference point to begin with. This was a made up allegation that has already been discredited.

Actually the jury is still out on that. But that is why I said "even without"

What does time have to do with it?

Because historical processes take time.

If this qualifies as a standard for a "cold, unblinking view", I would love to see what qualifies as an impassioned, 'blnking' view in your mind. In fact snipets like this:

Ulyanov had the ability to drive an analysis to the most extreme conclusion and to fuel it exclusively with data that corroborated his analysis

Alone discredit this qualification. In your mind this is a a "cold, unblinking view"?

I said about the "cold, unblinking view" specifically in response to a couple of comments implying that Service's biography was merely anti-Communist propaganda. I was just saying that, on the contrary, that critical passage was just a biographer taking a cold, unblinking view of his subject. I then quoted the other passages to show that at other times the book is complimentary to Lenin, my point being that the book is not just a hatchet job and therefore that passage I quoted may have some validity.

I wish you would pay attention to the context in which I say things.

Hit The North

27th January 2016, 23:22

Er, every successful bourgeois revolution that has ever occurred. I explained what "that" is in previous comments on this thread. A particular class grows in economic and intellectual power in response to developments in technology and changes to economic structure. But the political and social power of this class lags behind. Eventually a revolution makes up this shortfall.

But which revolutions do you consider to be "successful"? The French revolution which began in 1789; that was usurped by Napoleon in 1799; replaced in 1814 by the Bourbon restoration which, itself was overthrown in 1830, to be replaced by the July Monarchy in 1845?

You see, even the quintessential bourgeois revolution takes place over a long period of time where there are twists and reversals; moments when history seems to be going backwards. There is rarely some glorious coup de grace which unproblematically ushers in a new social order; which is what you seem to have expected from Lenin and the Bolsheviks, given your criticisms of October.

What a singularly daft and unscientific thing to say. They are not heroes of mine. I was responding to a post that implied that Russia leapt straight from Tsarism to Bolshevism.

What has science got to do with anything? I was ridiculing your reactionary position re. the Russian revolution in that you have plainly indicated that you would have supported the bourgeois assembly over the workers' soviets.

I was merely pointing out that there was a bourgeois revolution in between, that had already achieved some of the things that the OP was claiming for Lenin.

But you are wrong about this, as I pointed out in my previous post. The fatally compromised government which emerged from the February revolution, was too weak, too preoccupied, and too brief to "end Feudalism" or the other things you claim for it.

Yes it did. And I am not referring to the actions and legislation of the provisional government here, I am referring to the historical effects of the Revolution itself.

Then you will need to spell out those effects and their roots in the outcome of the February revolution, won't you?

What was mechanical about the above? If you want it explained see my first para above. Because you summon up the absurd picture of the French waiting around for history to arrive. "They waited a hundred years," you claim, for feudalism to turn into capitalism, as if they were waiting for a bus. It is mechanical because it sets up a gulf of contemplation between objective circumstances, human consciousness and human action.

Whereas my point about Lenin was that he didn't have explanations. He just seemed to think that, ludicrously, as soon as a bourgeois revolution happened that meant that Marxist box could therefore be ticked off, and a Socialist revolution could immediately follow.

But this is an interpretation of Lenin which is unique to yourself. And, of course, it is without merit because you don't provide textual evidence for it beyond a clunky paragraph from the ever unreliable Robert Service, and you ignore the historical record. Read the April Thesis, read Lenin's State & Revolution, read his work on Imperialism, and then come back and tell me that Lenin had no argument to back up October.

Finally, you are mired in confusion. It was not Lenin in 1917 who thought we needed to tick off the box of a bourgeois revolution - THIS IS YOUR POSITION! You are the tick-box king:

...
But surely stageism is the whole point of Marxism. That was the entire framework around which his theories are built. It is not childish/superstitious to talk of stageism. It comes through examining history and social and economic trends. Once a certain stage of technological development is attained, an increase in the number and sopistication of a certain social class is needed in order for society and economy to function. That class therefore grows in economic and intellectual power but its political and social power lags behind. Eventually there is a revolution to make up this shortfall.

And yes liberal democratic openness is part of the reason why a bourgeois revolution must precede a socialist one but there are others as well, including:

Size, class consciousness and sophistication of the working class.
Level of sophistication of economic structures to be inherited.
Level of sophistication of political structures to be inherited.
Level of technology (brought about by Capitalist investment and money circulation).

IMO Lenin, even without the "proletarian reverse handover" idea, was utterly daft to think that the above could be bypassed or compressed into literally a few weeks.

And yes, a market economy! That fits with the above.

Rafiq

27th January 2016, 23:35

I think something might be wrong with your computer screen. You are abstracting phrases and words out of context and responding to them as though I haven't justified them already (and you don't even bother to deal with these justifications). It seems like your screen is blocking off my posts so that only small portions of them are actually visible. It is a common problem for certain types of users here. I recommend getting your computer screen fixed as fast as possible. Also, it seems like you are making a number of typos, which means you also need a new keyboard.

Actually the jury is still out on that.

That must be a typo, because the matter has quite sufficiently been resolved already for everyone whose bothered to keep up with the thread at hand. The case is closed. The notion that it is somehow still mysterious, what Lenin was trying to say, when what he was saying was quite plain and clear for anyone with a rudimentary understanding of the context of his statements. If you have some fresh, new empirical evidence wherein Lenin, defying all standards of reason, claims that "power should be handed over" to the bourgeoisie, you're free to provide it. You haven't though, because no such 'evidence' exists. That you actually are telling yourself the "jury is still out" on this, is not simply baffling because of all the presented evidence to the contrary, it is baffling because it is sweepingly made without any consideration whatsoever for the counter-arguments which directly address the manner. For someone to say that "the jury is still out" on the matter, that would mean that they are making pretenses to an asserted ambiguity of Lenin's argument - but there isn't, because nowhere, NOWHERE, did Lenin speak of, OR INSINUATE that power would be "handed over" to the bourgeoisie. In fact on the contrary, Lenin quite clearly stated that the big liberal bourgeoisie were not going to be agents of revolution, and would have no basis of existence in a proletarian & peasant dictatorship, let alone having "power' handed to them. What Lenin did say, was that insofar as his party would constitute a minority (if it couldn't get as big as was necessary), it was willing to cooperate with a provisional government that would topple the Russian autocracy. that has nothing to do with making pretenses to the notion that power would be seized only to hand power over to the class enemy. That is simply a ridiculous and totally unfounded accusation, and there was absolutely no reason it should have been made - even if you were ignorant about the matter, the very fact that you knew you weren't qualified to make this judgement, makes this statement totally unjustified and completely groundless. The propensity for people to make judgements about things they have no real intricate or detailed notion of, regarding Lenin, stems from the haughty kind of arrogance which assumes that Lenin does not have to be afforded much thought to be understood. I mean it is inconceivable that anyone who put in the time to actually try and understand Lenin, would come to the conclusion - or even suspect teh conclusion - that "power was going to be handed over to the bourgeoisie". It is such a monstrously blasphemous, totally almost shocking statement that it alone is grounds for dismissal of the person in question accusing Lenin of saying this.

But I'm sure it was a typo.

Because historical processes take time.

Another typo, dear fried, because I quite clearly addressed the manner in its entirety. Speaking of "paying attention". Perhaps you, by some miraculous mistake, decided to read "what does time have to do with it" and then decide that you have the necessary knowledge of my argument to bestow us with your great , profound response: historical processes take time. Actually no, historical processes are congruent with 'time' - because time isn't something that you can abstract yourself from. No but you're right, god's divine plan has set specific, allotted amounts of time for historical processes to come into fruition. God said "Let feudalism last quite less than a millenia - let capitalism last a few hundred years" and so on.

This ladies and gentlemen is the superstitious, idealist narrative of not only history, but change in general. For the bourgeois ideologue, qualitative change is inconceivable - instead, everything results from slow, gradual, cumulative change. This is how these 'moderates' think. They make pretenses to the 'ripening' of society, yet provide no scientific or theoretical insight as to why this ripening is necessary. For example, we can measure the ripening of plant organisms in a scientific way, by explaining exactly why it takes the exact amount of time for the change to occur. This thoroughly reactionary narrative of change, is literally laughably inconsistent with the actual previous historical development they make pretenses to. Capitalism alone led to more rapid exponential changes, then all of the tens of thousands of years of human existence alone, in a meager few centuries. These past decades alone are similar in that way. The fact of the matter is that no, historical processe only "take time" insofar as real men and women are immersed in them. Men and women, are not altered on a physiological level through the course of history, there is no extra-empirical process which explains historical change, except changes in the social dimension that which men and women alone are constituted in. There is no god who sais "This must take a hundred years!" - that assumes that historical processes are meaningful, when in fact, they are chaotic, arbitrary and meaningless. It is not for any "grand plan" that we are living in capitlaism today, for example, it has nothing to do with the necessity of sitting back and waiting for your bread to bake - humans are "this bread". Again, it is a thoroughly anti-democratic notion - why doesn't Rafiq 'need time' to ripen to become a Communist? Of course Communism will not happen over night - but the accusation that historical processes that took hundreds of years cannot be condensed into a few weeks, and that this argument is "ridiculous" is a totally worthless and baseless one. Yes, historical processes can be condensed in a few weeks: To put it as Lenin put it, there are weeks were decades happen and decades where weeks happen. That is because "time" is not some external thing, that literally conforms men and women to some pre-ordained course of historical development, because god said so, time merely measures change (in this case, relating to the Earth's orbit of the sun). So the notion that Russia needed a hundred years before socialism, a totally nonsensical and thoroughly discredited claim, makes a pretense to the notion that specific processes at hand had to come to fruition that would take that long. But you aren't specifying that. Instead you're saying "Just give it time bro, it needs time".

I was just saying that, on the contrary, that critical passage was just a biographer taking a cold, unblinking view of his subject.

And I quite thoroughly demonstrated you were wrong. You have not addressed that, however - HE ISN'T TAKING A COLD, UNBLINKING VIEW ON THE SUBJECT, and your EXAMPLES of him "complementing" Lenin DID NOT CORROBORATE this assertion, they, on the contrary, were just as ideologically immersed as the next. Sorry, did you even read my post? Did you even read what the argument at hand? The point is that IT WAS NOT a cold, unblinking view, it was a completely ideologically engaged view, and the 'compliments' afforded to Lenin so generously were 'compliments' that could be afforded by a Jewish historian to Hitler. That is to say, they were not controversial statements, they were merely banal statements that you do not need to be a historian who makes pretenses to being able to interpret empirical historical data in a manner that is sufficient enough to form the conclusions they make: They were uncontroversial truisms. It sais nothing that Lenin was skilled, it sais absolutely nothing, because Lenin - after all - led the Bolshevik party to power. That service restrains himself from saying Lenin ate babies, does not say anything about a "cold, unblinking view", saying that he has a "cold, unblinking view" emanates base ignorance of the actual partisan nature of his accusations. The quote in question, for example:

Ulyanov had the ability to drive an analysis to the most extreme conclusion and to fuel it exclusively with data that corroborated his analysis

This is the passive knee jerk reaction of any philistine ideologue, assuming that the standards for the "extreme" are uncontroversial, accusing Lenin of only paying attention to data that 'fits his agenda'. There is nothing about this that is cold and unblinking, it is the most overused, worthless and disgusting bourgeois cliche's, as though Service has access to "data" that can challenge or uncorroborated Lenin's analysis - as though such "data" even exists insofar as it concerns the topics of Lenin's analysis. Lenin was a great world-historical figure. That cannot be disputed by ANYONE, not even a Fascist. So what we are seeing here is a shoddy, pathetic and desperate attempt to explain away what is essentially Lenin's genius, in the most juvenile and crude terms. It is a crass and pathetic attempt, one that I might add which is not uncommon for the bourgeois ideologue, to attempt to grasp and ground Lenin's theoretical prowess into something they are more familiar with, something that conforms to their base standards of philistinism - the purported propensity for individuals to come to "extreme" conclusions and not take "balanced" views of things. Lenin's whole epistemological point actually was directly attacking this notion of taking a "balanced" view - that partisanship, taking a side, "extreme" or otherwise, and properly assessing circumstances were one and the same. But this is not even acknowledged or outhce upon - how can a historian who professes to have an adequate understanding of the subject in question, so much to the point where they will qualify individuals like Lenin at the level of theoretical judgement, have such a piss-poor, non existent understanding of Lenin? Because this shit-for-brains historian, smugly and confidently sits back, the philistine he is, and assumes that he has conquered the enigma of the phenomena of "Lenin" (the October revolution) which exceeds the grasp of conventional common sense philistinism. They can explain away this enigma all they like - from some erroneous predisposition in Marxism, from the "human propensity to be too engaged in things, an extremist" (i.e. filthy western buddhist logic), or even antisemitism. It does not matter, because Marxists, and Marxists alone are capable of understanding Lenin in practical terms. The bourgeois ideologues, shit-for-brains worthless pseudo-historians like Service, these maggots, can only worm their way in after they have derived confidence - from for example the collapse of 20th century socialism - that they have already conquered and can therefore condescendingly assess the general phenomena of Communism, including Lenin.

Indeed it is necessary. But they happen when they happen, spontaneously, not through the conscious agency of a small group of strong willed individuals.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, this is where we have reached the epitome of superstitious ridiculousness. "Revolutions happen when they happen" only insofar as they are immersed in the context of a lack of historical self-consciousness. A proletarian revolution cannot, and never will be spontaneous, because there is nothing in the 'natural' trajectory course of our historical development that is going to lead people to unconsciously become Communists, because all Communism means, all it refers to is consciousness of social processes. Engels spoke of SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM, not "socialists who happen to have a scientific outlook". There is no "socialism" outside of this social and historical consciousness. And your argument deals with a straw man anyway, because as it happens, the reason why your argument is insinuated to be 'reasonable' is because the dichotomy lies between the broad masses, spontaneously becoming revolutionaries from their ass, and a conscious group of strong willed individuals. This is a false dichotomy, and only anti-democratic, reactionary ideologues could buy into this shit. The reality is that not even since the German social democracy, but since LASSALLE has the task of disseminating scientific consciousness among the broad masses, been incorporated into the basic prerogative of every single Marxist. The assumption that the broad masses cannot be conscious of their own conditions of life that they themselves are immersed in, is a baseless one, an anti-democratic and reactionary notion. If the masses of people cannot be socially conscious, THERE CAN BE NO COMMUNISM. Do you think Communism is magic? Do you think it's some autonomous process that will just "work itself out"? HOW? AND WHY? Of course, it's a baseless assumption, a superstitious one - Communism WILL NOT "work itself out", Communism refers only to historically conscious men and women determining their own conditions of existence. What you say is so tasteless and disgusting, especially in our present predicament. A socialist revolution is inevitable, it will just "happen when it happens"? HOW? WHAT REASON does ANYONE have to think this? HOW WOULD THIS HAPPEN? How is it that people can literally just SPONTANEOUSLY adopt ideas, consciousness? That is just as nonsensical as the assumption that people can just "spontaneously" have knowledge of evolutionary processes, of biology, without consciously investigating, observing and putting into practical use this prerogative - it is totally ridiculous and unthinkable that people will "spontaneously" adopt socialism. Even when socialism was more vague as a movement, NEVER was it "spontaneously" adopted, the reality was that people became socialists, just as they become anything else, because of controversies that pertain to their consciousnesses. You say that people will spontaneously become Communists, when in fact the working people will only ever be spontaneously inclined to trail behind reaction in this day and age, and a basic assessment of the conditions at hand prove that. There is no such thing as "spontaneity", NOTHING is spontaneous, everything can be traced back to rationally conceivable processes which deal with the consciousness of the subjects that the 'spontaneous' impulse pertains to - spontaneity is the epitome of superstition, irrationalism and filth. As though revolutions "spontaneously" happen for reasons that will indefinitely be unknown, for some superstitious, external reason that it outside the relations of men and women that can be totally consciously and rationally understood. The INSISTENCE upon spontaneity is itself an illogical monstrosity, because you are SHAMELESSLY asserting a superstition. It is so pitifully ironic that this kind of crude, crass disgusting determinism (i.e. as though the relations of life are some separate "determining" sphere from men and women) comes from a self-proclaimed theist. The fact of the matter on the contrary is that. Yes from at this point, man's social being determined his consciousness in a way that he was not conscious of. Man's consciousness is determined by his material conditions. THE WHOLE POINT of Marxism is that WE CAN BE CONSCIOUS of these social processes that "determine" man's consciousness, because the only reason they "determine" man's consciousness (ideology, religion) is because of this LACK of consciousness of the processes at hand - it's not like the "base" is some external magician that waves its wand and determines how people think in some A-B manner. No, that is a crude, and crass understanding of historical materialism that - while unsurprising from you - is an atrociously nonsensical bastardization of Marxism.

But I digress. Reviscom is allowed to sit back and wait for his "revolution to happen when it happens". How convenient for him. But for the rest of us, we must be actively struggling to concretely assess our predicament in a practical way, engage willfully and consciously, to organize, educate and agitate, just as those who preceded us did. They did it WILLFULLY, nothing determined Lenin's existence, made it inevitable. Nothing made October 1917 inevitable. Let us horrify the reviscom's of the world, by defiling sacred 'nature', the 'organic' paths of development. Every bourgeois historian, those disgusting philistines, they speak of how their qualm with the Bolsheviks was their attempt to push society, force society, out of its 'natural' capacities - they are so horrified by historical self-consciousnesses. We DESTROY nature, this superstition, there is no 'organic' or 'spontaneous' EVERYTHING is totally arbitrary and chaotic. Human will is to make from what was arbitrary and chaotic, meaning. Human will and human will alone can do this. As Fascism gains momentum, we are led to believe that this is ebcasue it's soceity's "natural course". You know how disgusting this logic is? As though the Nazi's were some inevitability of history, that "society needed this before socialism". Can you even answer this? Was Nazism something that society needed "naturally" before a revolution was possible, why is Nazism some intrusion upon the "natural" trajecotry paht of society, but not - say - liberalism? Why? How is this justified?

IT CANNOT BE. Because the pretense to a 'natural' course of historical development is a superstitious, baseless and unscientific one. Again:

That is like saying disease and viruses throughout history must 'organically' spread, that plagues must 'organically' cause so much ill upon people before you, who has knowledge of how to make a vaccine already, should deploy your vaccine. If you have knowledge of how to cure a virus, then it is nonsense to speak of how this 'virus' must spread and kill many beforehand, just because other vaccines were developed because of that specific trajectory path of how plagues are stopped.

reviscom1

1st February 2016, 09:03

What has science got to do with anything? I was ridiculing your reactionary position re. the Russian revolution in that you have plainly indicated that you would have supported the bourgeois assembly over the workers' soviets.

Because I was examining the 2 revolutions of 1917 scientifically, in terms of what they meant historically. In saying "this is what the Provisional Government did..." I was examining the PG's place in history. Then you turned round and said they were my heroes, which would be like saying to a biologist "oooh you and your chromosome heroes!"

But which revolutions do you consider to be "successful"?

Ones in which the revolutionaries end up replacing the government rather than on the gibbet.

Finally, you are mired in confusion. It was not Lenin in 1917 who thought we needed to tick off the box of a bourgeois revolution - THIS IS YOUR POSITION! You are the tick-box king

No I am not the box ticker because I explain the reasons behind my position. A box ticker just ticks the box and then thinks the job is done. Like those who think that once the bourgeois stage is reached that box is safely ticked and they can move on to the socialist stage.

Because you summon up the absurd picture of the French waiting around for history to arrive. "They waited a hundred years," you claim, for feudalism to turn into capitalism, as if they were waiting for a bus.

Well obviously not consciously waiting. In fact I think I was using the words of the person I was responding to. The context was that the OP said "should the French have just waited around for 100 years for Capitalism to replace Feudalism?" and I responded that they in fact did. The revolution was a symptom of that change, not the cause, and came near the end of it, not the beginning.

Hit The North

2nd February 2016, 17:59

Because I was examining the 2 revolutions of 1917 scientifically, in terms of what they meant historically. In saying "this is what the Provisional Government did..." I was examining the PG's place in history. Then you turned round and said they were my heroes, which would be like saying to a biologist "oooh you and your chromosome heroes!"

The problem is that it is not a scientific analysis just because you say it is. Science demands evidence and you are short on that. In fact, you are operating on an extremely superficial level where you've decided to label February as a bourgeois revolution and so ascribe the classical tasks of a bourgeois revolution to it. But where is the evidence that the short-lived settlement of February revolutionised the countryside? Where is the evidence that it took any steps towards ending Feudalism, except for the abdication of the Tsar (which is a necessary but not sufficient step)? Which successful policies are you referring to?

The truth is that the February settlement was unable to establish a liberal state because, from its very beginning, it did not adequately exert its authority over either the state or the nation because of war, internal political instability, and dual power. The state, both administrative and military, that was inherited in February was already disintegrating.

If you are intent on "doing" science, then you will have to do much better. Your so-claimed "scientific method" fails to even take account of the imperialist war that was raging - or any other actual event for that matter.

But which revolutions do you consider to be "successful"?

Ones in which the revolutionaries end up replacing the government rather than on the gibbet.
This still doesn't tell me which revolution(s) you are referring to. In France, the revolutionary leadership all ended up kissing Madame Guillotine. In Russia, the Bolshevik leadership were all mostly executed by WW2. So which revolution are you mindful of?

Finally, you are mired in confusion. It was not Lenin in 1917 who thought we needed to tick off the box of a bourgeois revolution - THIS IS YOUR POSITION! You are the tick-box king

No I am not the box ticker because I explain the reasons behind my position. A box ticker just ticks the box and then thinks the job is done. Like those who think that once the bourgeois stage is reached that box is safely ticked and they can move on to the socialist stage.So who are these box-tickers who don't even pretend to advance an argument? Certainly not Lenin. The silly notion that the February revolution had accomplished the tasks of the bourgeois stage and so we could now safely move to the the socialist stage is not an argument advanced by Lenin or anyone in this thread, as far as I can see. Again, I say to you, read Lenin's April Theses, if you want to understand Lenin's actual argument. Even better, read this: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/tasks/index.htm

LuÃs Henrique

3rd February 2016, 15:57

I am not talking about evolving gradually, nor am I objecting to revolution. But the revolution should be, and can only be, the final expression of economic and social changes.

This poses a flowchart problem.

If the revolution only comes as the final expression of economic and social changes, what is the revolution for? Or, on the other hand, what are those economic and social changes that happen before a revolution, but are not, in themselves, a revolution?

In talking of Russia, you omit to mention that before the Bolshevik revolution there was a bourgeois one that ended Feudalism, implemented liberal democracy and removed the Tsar from power.

But, according to your previous paragraph, we would expect the bourgeois revolution - I suppose you mean the February revolution that happened in March - to be the final expression of economic and social changes. Or, in other words, that the February revolution implemented liberal democracy and removed the Tsar from power, not end feudalism (which should have happened as those economic and social changes that precede the revolution).

I would absolutely have advised Lenin not to seize power after it, though.

I doubt he had many options, though. The provisional government was unable to extricate Russia from WWI, and the Russian military were unable to effectively confront the German/Austrian troops. So what we had, in practice, was a continued slaughter of Russian soldiers, to no military gain at all, and a continuous deflection of Russian peasants and workers from their peace time activities into war, positing the very real and very immediate risk of widespread shortages of everything.

If the Bolsheviks had not take power when they did, in all likelyhood Russia would be badly defeated in the battlefields and would have gone through a complete economic paralysis, which we would now remember as an extremely bloody disaster.

The French did wait (more than) a hundred years for feudalism to develop into Capitalism and then had a revolution at the end of that period which set the seal on the transformation.

It has already been pointed, but the French didn't "wait" out of discipline (and they did involve themselves in several jacqueries in the meanwhile), but out of inability of toppling their government before 1789. Besides, while the history of France between its foundation and the fall of Louis XVI was certainly marked by several economic and social changes, it was still a feudal monarchy when its last and unfortunate king was toppled; the social and economic changes that turned it into a bourgeois republic were only possible after the revolution cleared the way for them, consciously extirpating the several feudal fetters that obsted the development of capitalism in France (this is the general rule also; in England, in the Netherlands, in Switzerland, in all countries that were to be at the vanguard of capitalism in its early phase, bourgeois revolutions preceded, not followed, the actual development of capitalism).

Luís Henrique

Blake's Baby

3rd February 2016, 20:37

... you are operating on an extremely superficial level where you've decided to label February as a bourgeois revolution and so ascribe the classical tasks of a bourgeois revolution to it. But where is the evidence that the short-lived settlement of February revolutionised the countryside? Where is the evidence that it took any steps towards ending Feudalism, except for the abdication of the Tsar (which is a necessary but not sufficient step)? Which successful policies are you referring to?...

I think I have to take issue with this. Why is the abdication of the Czar "a necessary but not sufficient step [towards ending Feudalism]?" Does this mean that feudalism in Germany was only ended in 1918 with the abdication of the Kaiser (even though Germany was one of the top 3 capitalist nations at the time), and feudalism still hasn't ended in Britain or Japan, despite their status as leading capitalist nations (in Britain's case, capitalist-nation-par-excellence for about 150 years up to the point 'feudal' Germany overtook it)?

Feudalism in Russia ceased to exist when the feudal basis of the economy ceased to exist - in 1861. After that point - 'feudal survivals' if you like but not 'feudalism', much as the United Kingdom(s) did not somehow revert to a feudal economy when the Stuart monarchy was re-established after the bourgeois 'Commonwealth'.

... The truth is that the February settlement was unable to establish a liberal state because, from its very beginning, it did not adequately exert its authority over either the state or the nation because of war, internal political instability, and dual power. The state, both administrative and military, that was inherited in February was already disintegrating...

The truth is that the February settlement was unable to establish a liberal state because governments (weak or strong) do not establish the character of countries.

The truth is that the Russian bourgeoisie was unable to establish a liberal state because it was weak. 'The State' however was strong in Russia - as in Germany, Russia was economically interventionist and promoted capitalist development. 'State capitalist' one might almost call it. This, in my opinion, was a response to being 'late to the table' of imperialist adventures (so, again like Germany).

The logic is something like this: ""We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make up this gap in ten years. Either we do it or they will crush us." A massive industrialisation campaign was launched by Czar's government that brought foreign investment into Russia and began to build an advanced capitalist economy - else, where did the millions of proletarians come from that actually took part in the revolutions of 1905, February 1917 and October 1917?

The fact that capitalism was ushered in via the actions of the state, and utilising foreign investment, explain why the Russia bourgeoisie was weak. Marx made the observation about the German bourgeoisie after the abortive revolutions of 1848 that it was too weak for its historic tasks - in Germany, it was the intervention of the 'Bismarckian' state (under the Kaiser of course) more than anything else that 'revolutionised' Germany. In Russia the same process was going on, with a slightly later time-frame. Again, it was the state-sponsored development of capitalism that was going on Russia, not the entrenchment of feudalism. Feudalism was gone long before February 1917 - except to the extent that it still existed (and indeed exists) in Germany, Britain and Japan.

Hit The North

3rd February 2016, 22:34

I think I have to take issue with this. Why is the abdication of the Czar "a necessary but not sufficient step [towards ending Feudalism]?" Does this mean that feudalism in Germany was only ended in 1918 with the abdication of the Kaiser (even though Germany was one of the top 3 capitalist nations at the time), and feudalism still hasn't ended in Britain or Japan, despite their status as leading capitalist nations (in Britain's case, capitalist-nation-par-excellence for about 150 years up to the point 'feudal' Germany overtook it)?

I wasn't talking about Germany or the Kaiser, or Britain; I was talking about Russia's particular situation. But, yes, you are right, theoretically it might have been possible for a settlement of a constitutional monarchy - if the bourgeoisie had been strong enough, or their government. In fact, if October had never happened, this might have been the outcome - in fact, it would probably have been demanded by the victors of the war (which would not include Russia).

Feudalism in Russia ceased to exist when the feudal basis of the economy ceased to exist - in 1861. After that point - 'feudal survivals' if you like but not 'feudalism', much as the United Kingdom(s) did not somehow revert to a feudal economy when the Stuart monarchy was re-established after the bourgeois 'Commonwealth'.And you are right again, saying that the removal of the Czar was "a necessary step" is overstating the case, as I recognise that Russia was no longer a feudal economy, but one with backward remnants.

The truth is that the February settlement was unable to establish a liberal state because governments (weak or strong) do not establish the character of countries.To be more precise, governments do not establish the mode of production, but surely, whether the capitalist state is liberal or not will depend on the actions and policies of political actors?

The truth is that the Russian bourgeoisie was unable to establish a liberal state because it was weak. 'The State' however was strong in Russia - as in Germany, Russia was economically interventionist and promoted capitalist development. 'State capitalist' one might almost call it. This, in my opinion, was a response to being 'late to the table' of imperialist adventures (so, again like Germany).I have no argument with your class analysis, but to argue that the Russian state was not weak in 1917 defies the evidence, I think.

....

LuÃs Henrique

4th February 2016, 11:33

I have no argument with your class analysis, but to argue that the Russian state was not weak in 1917 defies the evidence, I think.

It was a very rigid State, which means in situations in which it was not challenged it gave the impression of being extremely strong (while in turn, in situations when it was effectively challenged it revealed brittle, not strong).

Luís Henrique

John Nada

4th February 2016, 23:20

The problem is that it is not a scientific analysis just because you say it is. Science demands evidence and you are short on that. In fact, you are operating on an extremely superficial level where you've decided to label February as a bourgeois revolution and so ascribe the classical tasks of a bourgeois revolution to it. But where is the evidence that the short-lived settlement of February revolutionised the countryside? Where is the evidence that it took any steps towards ending Feudalism, except for the abdication of the Tsar (which is a necessary but not sufficient step)? Which successful policies are you referring to?

The truth is that the February settlement was unable to establish a liberal state because, from its very beginning, it did not adequately exert its authority over either the state or the nation because of war, internal political instability, and dual power. The state, both administrative and military, that was inherited in February was already disintegrating.Reviscom1's confused notion of the February and October Revolutions, or democratic and socialist revolutions in general aside, the "February settlement" was considered an actual democratic revolution. It overthrew the the Tsar, feudal landlords and the feudalist bureaucracy. The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and bourgeois landlords, and the dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry were side by side in a "dual power" arrangement. And a lot of workers died to accomplish this(Trotsky claimed over 1,400 in the preceding month).

.The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/tasks/index.htm) and the April thesis (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/04.htm) does not contradict this.

The problem with reviscom1's position is that he/she thinks the minimum program of the Bolsheviks(or anyone) for a democratic revolution was some "checklist" that had to be perfect to the letter before establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat. In actuality it was descriptive and not prescriptive. There was no reason for the proletariat(which had something like a "dictatorship of the San-Culottes" situation) to have a cease-fire with a warmongering imperialist-bourgeoisie presiding over a "prison of nations" and defending British and French imperialism. Even if the provisional government and bourgeoisie was actually going to carry progressive reforms to completion and wasn't at risk of counterrevolution, the bourgeoisie is still the main class enemy of the proletariat. As Lenin wrote in his famous polmic against Kautsky(who later supported a self-inflicted hundred years of capitalist masochism):
Beginning with April 1917, however, long before the October Revolution, that is, long before we assumed power, we publicly declared and explained to the people: the revolution cannot now stop at this stage, for the country has marched forward, capitalism has advanced, ruin has reached fantastic dimensions, which (whether one likes it or not) will demand steps forward, to socialism. For there is no other way of advancing, of saving the war-weary country and of alleviating the sufferings of the working and exploited people.

Things have turned out just as we said they would. The course taken by the revolution has confirmed the correctness of our reasoning. First, with the “whole” of the peasants against the monarchy, against the landowners, against medievalism (and to that extent the revolution remains bourgeois, bourgeois-democratic). Then, with the poor peasants, with the semi-proletarians, with all the exploited, against capitalism, including the rural rich, the kulaks, the profiteers, and to that extent the revolution becomes a socialist one. To attempt to raise an artificial Chinese Wall between the first and second, to separate them by anything else than the degree of preparedness of the proletariat and the degree of its unity with the poor peasants, means to distort Marxism dreadfully, to vulgarise it, to substitute liberalism in its place. It means smuggling in a reactionary defence of the bourgeoisie against the socialist proletariat by means of quasi-scientific references to the progressive character of the bourgeoisie in comparison with medievalism.Bold mine: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/prrk/subservience.htm

Either the Bolsheviks, proletariat and poor peasantry could've hit the ground running towards a proletarian socialist revolution, or sit back and wait for a weak bourgeoisie to turn towards counterrevolution. This is what was at stake. Had Lenin and the Bolsheviks capitulated to the bourgeoisie, I think the workers and poor peasants would've either just shunned them and someone else would've taken their place[for worse(likely) or better(who knows?)]. Or Russia would've became fascist or split into a bunch of colonies. We sure as hell now know how stopping halfway turned out in Germany.
I think I have to take issue with this. Why is the abdication of the Czar "a necessary but not sufficient step [towards ending Feudalism]?" Does this mean that feudalism in Germany was only ended in 1918 with the abdication of the Kaiser (even though Germany was one of the top 3 capitalist nations at the time), and feudalism still hasn't ended in Britain or Japan, despite their status as leading capitalist nations (in Britain's case, capitalist-nation-par-excellence for about 150 years up to the point 'feudal' Germany overtook it)?The British and Japanese bourgeois revolutions were the English Civil War and Mejin Restorations(though this is more controversial). The nobility themselves were bourgeoisified(out of decimation in wars, intermarriage, ect in Britain and self-imposed due to pressure from rival colonial powers in Japan). These nations are bourgeois-democracies and have a capitalist base, even if the superstructure has some pre-capitalist traditions(just like wedding rituals or religions which dates back to the Roman Empire).

Russia and Germany had no such revolution before the early 20th century. The landlords and militarist-feudal bureaucracy held much greater power beyond just old traditions, particularly in Russia. As late as 1891 Engels wrote that feudalistic elements still persisted in even Germany:
First of all that which follows is an economic fact, which should be explained in economic terms. The expression “domination of the individual owners” creates the false impression that this has been caused by the political domination of that gang of robbers. Secondly, these individual owners include not only “capitalists and big landowners” (what does the “bourgeoisie” following here signify? Are they a third class of individual owners? Are the big landowners also “bourgeois"? And, once we have turned to the subject of big landowners, should we ignore the colossal survivals of feudalism, which give the whole filthy business of German politics its specific reactionary character?). Peasants and petty bourgeois too are “individual owners”, at least they still are today; but they do not appear anywhere in the programme and therefore the wording should make it clear that they are not included in the category of individual owners under discussion.
The political demands of the draft have one great fault. It lacks precisely what should have been said. If all the 10 demands were granted we should indeed have more diverse means of achieving our main political aim, but the aim itself would in no wise have been achieved. As regards the rights being granted to the people and their representatives, the imperial constitution is, strictly speaking, a copy of the Prussian constitution of 1850, a constitution whose articles are extremely reactionary and give the government all the real power, while the chambers are not even allowed to reject taxes; a constitution, which proved during the period of the conflict that the government could do anything it liked with it. The rights of the Reichstag are the same as those of the Prussian chamber and this is why Liebknecht called this Reichstag the fig-leaf of absolutism. It is an obvious absurdity to wish “to transform all the instruments of labour into common property” on the basis of this constitution and the system of small states sanctioned by it, on the basis of the “union” between Prussia and Reuss-Greiz-Schleiz-Lobenstein, in which one has as many square miles as the other has square inches.Bold mine: http://marxists.catbull.com/archive/marx/works/1891/06/29.htm
Feudalism in Russia ceased to exist when the feudal basis of the economy ceased to exist - in 1861. After that point - 'feudal survivals' if you like but not 'feudalism', much as the United Kingdom(s) did not somehow revert to a feudal economy when the Stuart monarchy was re-established after the bourgeois 'Commonwealth'. Which part of Russian Empire? In Russia proper the peasant-landlord relations persisted in the countryside(where the vast majority of Russians lived) in spite of de jure abolition of serfdom. And Russian colonies like Turkestan were even more backward. That 1861 feudal reform from above was but a step towards capitalist development.
The fact that capitalism was ushered in via the actions of the state, and utilising foreign investment, explain why the Russia bourgeoisie was weak. Marx made the observation about the German bourgeoisie after the abortive revolutions of 1848 that it was too weak for its historic tasks - in Germany, it was the intervention of the 'Bismarckian' state (under the Kaiser of course) more than anything else that 'revolutionised' Germany. In Russia the same process was going on, with a slightly later time-frame. Again, it was the state-sponsored development of capitalism that was going on Russia, not the entrenchment of feudalism. Feudalism was gone long before February 1917 - except to the extent that it still existed (and indeed exists) in Germany, Britain and Japan.The superstructure often lags behind the base of society. The states of Germany and Russia were dominated by a feudalistic bureaucracy to a much greater degree than modern UK or Japan. It was not feudalism, but a semi-feudal capitalist absolutism, capitalism in transition. Like France before the French Revolution, which didn't just turn from feudalism to capitalism the moment the King got decapitated.

Blake's Baby

5th February 2016, 01:34

...
Russia and Germany had no such revolution before the early 20th century. The landlords and militarist-feudal bureaucracy held much greater power beyond just old traditions, particularly in Russia. As late as 1891 Engels wrote that feudalistic elements still persisted in even Germany: Bold mine: http://marxists.catbull.com/archive/marx/works/1891/06/29.htm ...

So, you think that Germany, at the point where it was the most productive capitalist nation on earth, was actually feudal? Stupid old Karl and Rosa, instead of having a proletarian revolution, they should have been trying to build weak and frightened German capitalism against the nasty Junkers. Stupid old Lenin and Trotsky - instead of having a revolution against capitalism they should have been trying to introduce a liberal republic. Because that wasn't an obsolete policy by 1848, don't know what you're talking about lalalala.

I said that feudal elements still existed in Germany and Russia - as they do to this day in Japan and the UK. That doesn't make these countries any more 'feudal' than Russia was in 1917 though.

...
Which part of Russian Empire? In Russia proper the peasant-landlord relations persisted in the countryside(where the vast majority of Russians lived) in spite of de jure abolition of serfdom. And Russian colonies like Turkestan were even more backward. That 1861 feudal reform from above was but a step towards capitalist development.The superstructure often lags behind the base of society. The states of Germany and Russia were dominated by a feudalistic bureaucracy to a much greater degree than modern UK or Japan. It was not feudalism, but a semi-feudal capitalist absolutism, capitalism in transition. Like France before the French Revolution, which didn't just turn from feudalism to capitalism the moment the King got decapitated.

'The superstructure often lags behind the base of society...'.

Just take a moment to think about tha .

So if the superstructure acknowledged feudalism was dead by 1861, what year was feudalism actually dead?

Te bourgeois revolution in France (as the bourgeois revolution in Britain) was the culmination of the bourgeoisie taking power from the aristocracy. You know, when the old society becomes a fetter on the new society with which it is pregnant and all that?

John Nada

5th February 2016, 06:33

So, you think that Germany, at the point where it was the most productive capitalist nation on earth, was actually feudal? Stupid old Karl and Rosa, instead of having a proletarian revolution, they should have been trying to build weak and frightened German capitalism against the nasty Junkers. Stupid old Lenin and Trotsky - instead of having a revolution against capitalism they should have been trying to introduce a liberal republic. Because that wasn't an obsolete policy by 1848, don't know what you're talking about lalalala.If it came across like I was claiming Germany was feudal, no it was imperialist-capitalist. Well mainland German was. It's colonies, no. Rather, the absolutist of imperialist-capitalist Germany at the time were described by Karl Liebknecht:
It must not, however, be forgotten that militarism is also directed against the nationalist and even the religious enemy [27] at home – in Germany for example against the Poles [28], Alsatians and Danes – and even finds employment in conflicts between the non-proletarian classes [29]; that it is a phenomenon which takes many forms and often changes its character [30]; and that Prussian-German militarism has blossomed into a very special flower owing to the peculiar semi-absolutist, feudal-bureaucratic conditions in Germany. This Prussian-German militarism possesses all the evil and dangerous qualities of every form of capitalist militarism, so that it is well qualified to stand as a paradigm of contemporary militarism, in its forms, methods and effects. Just as it is said, to use the words of Bismarck, that no one has been able to imitate the Prussian lieutenant, so indeed no one has been able to imitate Prussian-German militarism, which has become not simply a state within the state, but actually a state above the state. https://www.marxists.org/archive/liebknecht-k/works/1907/militarism-antimilitarism/pt1-ch2.htm#1-2-3 And while you mentioned Japan:
Japan, which stands on about the same capitalist-feudal level of development as Germany, has also in recent years – in spite of its land position similar to that of Britain, and indeed in consequence of the tension in its external position – become a true counterpart of Germany in relation to militarism, apart perhaps from the better military training of its forces. https://www.marxists.org/archive/liebknecht-k/works/1907/militarism-antimilitarism/pt1-ch2.htm#1-2-4 Karl Liebkncht almost seems like he predicted fascism. Even quoted a militarists who envisioned a "national socialism" with society ran like the military! Sad thing is the teens and young adults of that generation he proposed reaching out to before German militarism indoctrinates them, were likely among the Freikcorps.

Anyway on Russia, according not "stupid" Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky, and just about everyone but some Narodniks, Russia's revolution was going to be a bourgeois revolution, but led by the proletariat.
The Russian revolution has for first task the abolition of absolutism and the establishment of a modern bourgeois-parliamentary constitutional state. It is exactly the same in form as that which confronted Germany in the March 1848 Revolution, and the Great French Revolution of the end of the eighteenth century. But the condition, the historical milieu, in which these formally analogous revolutions took place, are fundamentally different from those of present-day Russia. The essential difference is that between those bourgeois revolutions in the West, and the current bourgeois revolution in the East, the whole cycle of capitalist development has run its course. And this development had seized not only the West European countries, but also absolutist Russia. Large-scale industry with all its consequences – modern class divisions, acute social contrasts, modern life in large cities and the modern proletariat – has become in Russia the prevailing form, that is, in social development the decisive form of production.

The remarkable, contradictory, historical situation results from this that the bourgeois revolution, in accordance with its formal tasks will, in the first place, be carried out by a modern class-conscious proletariat, and in an international milieu whose distinguishing characteristic is the ruin of bourgeois democracy. It is not the bourgeoisie that is now the driving force of revolution as in the earlier revolutions of the West, while the proletarian masses, swamped amidst a petty-bourgeois mass, simply furnish cannon-fodder for the bourgeoisie, but on the contrary, it is the class-conscious proletariat that is the active and leading element, while the big bourgeois turns out to be either openly against the revolution or liberal moderates, and only the rural petit-bourgeoisie and the urban petit-bourgeois intelligentsia are definitively oppositional and even revolutionary minded. https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1906/mass-strike/ch07.htm "Bourgeois revolution in that 80% of the people were not workers but peasants, petit-bourgeoisie and semi-proletarians, and there was still democratic tasks in addition to(but not to the exclusion) to socialist tasks. And there was zero reason to support a liberal-"democracy" afterwards except fear of civil war. Where in every other case of trying to avoid revolutionary terror resulting in even more suffering, "White Terror" and not just by dooming the Russian Revolution, but capitalism's continued fucked up shittyness.
I said that feudal elements still existed in Germany and Russia - as they do to this day in Japan and the UK. That doesn't make these countries any more 'feudal' than Russia was in 1917 though.Then the tiny minority of the proletariat in modern Japan, Germany, Russia, and the UK must align with the peasants supermajority against the oppressive landlords and carry out the agrarian revolution in lieu of the weak bourgeoisies. The Kaiser, Queen, Tsar and Empirer despotic rule won't come down by itself, with its support from French, Belgium and Swedish imperialism.:rolleyes:

It's absurd to claim an absolutist monarchy with semi-feudal class relations and a peasant supermajority, is as semi-feudal as those modern, very power, imperialist-capitalist nations with productive forces that Marx and Engels couldn't have dreamed of and for all practical purposes has no pre-capitalist productive relations beyond ceremonial roles. Was Colonial India or the Ottoman Empire just as capitalist or just as feudalist as the US? No to both.There's less pre-capitalist relations in the Third-World now than in many imperialist powers of the 19th-early 20th century. Good part is this gives a new wave of proletarian-socialist revolutions a much greater chance than anytime in the past.

Russia was a big ass state. Much of Turkestan, the Caucasus region, Siberia, ect. was literally pre-capitalist. The main industrial centers were not unlike plain old capitalism, except with an absolutist state. But even in much of Russia proper the countryside was way behind Germany and England. It was not like having a constitutional monarchy and the bourgeoisie having noble titles out of "tradition". The nobles, monarchy, feudal bureaucracy, landlords and clergy had absolutist power far beyond Germany, even Japan, let alone Britain proper(these nations' colonies are another story). This was common sense amongst socialist around the time of the October Revolution. Russia was semi-feudal imperialism, capitalism in the cities, feudalism in the countryside, imperialism abroad. Worse of all worlds.
'The superstructure often lags behind the base of society...'.

Just take a moment to think about tha .

So if the superstructure acknowledged feudalism was dead by 1861, what year was feudalism actually dead?

Te bourgeois revolution in France (as the bourgeois revolution in Britain) was the culmination of the bourgeoisie taking power from the aristocracy. You know, when the old society becomes a fetter on the new society with which it is pregnant and all that?Is that a paraphrase from Capital Vol. I?
The different momenta of primitive accumulation distribute themselves now, more or less in chronological order, particularly over Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England. In England at the end of the 17th century, they arrive at a systematical combination, embracing the colonies, the national debt, the modern mode of taxation, and the protectionist system. These methods depend in part on brute force, e.g., the colonial system. But, they all employ the power of the State, the concentrated and organised force of society, to hasten, hot-house fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition. Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm That fucking nightmare of primitive accumulation at the end of Capital which no one with any empathy would wish on anyone(except the bourgeoisie, of course).

On the so-called full capitalism by decree of Alexander II, Lenin wrote:
The “great Reform” was a feudal reform; nor could it be anything else, for it was carried out by the feudal landowners. But what was the force that compelled them to resort to reform? It was the force of economic development which was drawing Russia on to the path of capitalism. The feudal landowners could not prevent the growth of trade between Russia and Europe; they could not bolster up the old, tottering forms of economic life. The Crimean war demonstrated the rottenness and impotence of feudal Russia. The peasant “riots”, which had been growing in number and intensity in the decades prior to emancipation, compelled Alexander II, the country’s biggest landowner, to admit that it would be better to emancipate from above than to wait until he was overthrown from below.

“The Peasant Reform” was a bourgeois reform carried out by feudal landowners. It was a step in the transformation of Russia into a bourgeois monarchy. In substance the Peasant Reform was a bourgeois measure. The less the amount of land cut off from the peasants’ holdings, the more fully peasant lands were separated from the landed estates, the lower the tribute paid to the feudal landowners by the peasants (i. e., the lower the “redemption” payments) and the greater the extent the peasants in any locality were able to escape the influence and pressure of the feudal landowners—the more obvious was the bourgeois essence of the Reform. To the extent that the peasant extricated himself from the clutches of the feudal landowner, he became a slave to the power of money, found himself living in the conditions of commodity production and dependent on rising capitalism. After 1861 capitalism developed in Russia at such a rapid rate that in a few decades it wrought a transformation that had taken centuries in some of the old countries of Europe. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1911/mar/19.htm

The superstructure absolutely was still feudalistic absolutism in 1860s Imperial Russia, as was the base, though it embarked on the capitalist path. And the superstructure, being not God but the state, culture and ideology primarily determined by the economic base, acknowledged nothing but loyalty to the God, King and country. Yet revolutions in productive forces and antagonism amongst not just the proletariat and bourgeoisie(main on of this day and age), but in the past the aristocracy and bourgeoisie. In France, the bourgeoisie seized political power from the feudal classes, which is what I meant by the superstructure lagging behind.

LuÃs Henrique

5th February 2016, 10:21

So, you think that Germany, at the point where it was the most productive capitalist nation on earth, was actually feudal?

You know, certain tasks are better performed with a lancet than with an axe.

Russia was a society transitioning between feudalism and capitalism. Petrograd and Moscow were certainly centers of capitalist production. The countryside not so much; certainly there was capitalist production of commercial crops, but there were also plenty of feudal relations, semi-servitude, payments in work or in natura, susbsistence production, closed autarchic or quasi-autarchic productive units, etc.

The Russian State on the contrary was still a feudal State. It had no equality under law, but several different "states" (in the acception of First, Second, and Third "states" in the French Revolution) with different rights and privileges. There was an active feudal nobility, and that nobility had a monopoly over the senior civil service positions. There was no parliament, except when in times of crisis it become convenient to make concessions; and then as soon as the situation was normalised, the Duma would be again closed, and back to absolutism we went.

All State structure and machinery in Tzarist Russia was still, not just semi-feudal, but actually feudal. But that was a feudal State that had traditionally played a great power role in European international politics, that had no intent of stopping doing that, and that had already realised that playing a great power role in European politics was increasingly difficult with a belated economy that couldn't produce modern weaponry.

So it was a feudal State striving to obtain the bright side of a capitalist economy (big guns with which to defeat foreign armies in the battle field) without the dark side (destruction of the idyllic relations in the countryside, dismantling of the nobility as a feudal order, modern proletarian class struggle, a constitution that made the State responsive to the needs of the bourgeoisie instead of the landed nobility, etc). Which means, a (feudal) State striving to attain self-contradictory aims (which translates into Leninese as "the weakest link in the imperialist chain"). A feudal State trying to become a bourgeois State without becoming a bourgeois State, to make a "revolution from above", ie, a revolution without a revolution.

All this is very similar to the German situation if we only look at the formal aspect of the issue. There too, a feudal State was attempting a "revolution from above" and to become a bourgeois State without becoming a bourgeois State. There too, you had an economy in transition between feudalism and capitalism, with Berlin and Munich (and Koeln, and Stuttgart, and Frankfurt, and Hamburg, and Luebeck, etc.) being centers of capitalist production, while in the countryside there still were Junkers exacting labour rents from "their" peasants.

But there were enormous differences in the real situation. Russia was a mixed economy where the capitalist side was weak and deeply penetrated by foreign capital (mainly French though also British, and, to a lesser degree, even German). It was a transitional State that was still an absolutist feudal State without a professional bureaucracy, without political representation, and without a bourgeois legal order. Germany was a mixed economy with a much stronger, and predominantly national, capitalist side, in great part due to the fact that "Germany" was larger than "Prussia", and its Western side was much more advanced than belated Brandenburg, and a transitional State (in that an absolutist "House" still kept power - and not merely nominal power - in direct continuation to Prussian absolutism) much more transformed by bourgeois reforms. The feudal system of different legal orders and particularist rights and privileges had been mostly dismantled, there was an effective parliament with regular and fair elections, there was a professional bureaucracy in place, etc. (The Army, of course, was an exception, and was still very much controlled by the Junker nobility, a situation that was only terminated by the defeat in WWII.)

So that is it. A bourgeois revolution in Germany would topple the Hohenzollerns, of course, and reform the Army into a modern professional armed service and perform a land reform no doubt. But a bourgeois revolution in Russia would have to do much more, reforming the whole State bureaucracy, establishing a parliament and regular elections, performing a much more radical and comprehensive land reform, dealing with the centennial delay in the development in the economy, abolishing an enormous system of legal privileges, and, in the end of all this, it would still face the unsurmountable problem of imperialist penetration of its economy. Why do all this, if in the end the main profits would go to Anglo-French capital, not to the Russian bourgeoisie?

Luís Henrique