Methodological Appendix:
Analytical Tools
Regarding the French Revolution, Albert Soboul noted: “Through the recollection of struggles for freedom and for independence, as well as by its dream of fraternal equality, the Revolution, child of enthusiasm, still excites men and women, or else arouses their hatred.” The same is true of the revolution examined here. Yet it would be a mistake to think the hatred that is aroused belongs simply to those whose privileges are threatened, though there is, of course, such hatred from that source. Yet there are also some who were once touched by the enthusiasm, but who came to be bitterly disappointed, and they have advanced the belief that revolutionary illusions—from before the French Revolution down to our own time—are generally a mask for terror and tyranny. As the premier theorist of disillusionment, Max Nomad, once summarized: “The process of revolution is always the same: seizure of power; organization of a revolutionary government; its defense against the reactionaries at first; and then its consolidation against the masses as well as in the interest of a better paid aristocracy of office-holders, technicians, and other members of the educated layers of society.”1 Some speak of “Stalinism,” but in fact this notion goes far beyond the tragic despotism arising in Soviet Russia of the 1930s. It is a generalization about all of history, all of humanity, and it is an essential element in what has for many years been the dominant ideology in the United States, reflected in cynical “street smarts” as well as in the accepted wisdom of academe.
In this study, we have made use of this accepted wisdom as a prod to explore more deeply the historical process of revolution. Our focus has been on realities and events in Russia from 1917 to 1924. At the same time that we have made use of the accepted wisdom, however, we reached beyond it—in part because we are not inclined to abandon the enthusiasm inspired by the revolutionary vision. The study of such things as revolution is profoundly shaped by the assumptions and analytical constructs that one brings to that study. The sets of assumptions and constructs one uses must be made explicit in order to make clear the meaning of such a study’s results. Those who tell us that they are simply dealing with “reality” while leaving ideology to others are trying to fool us, and perhaps themselves as well. (The prevailing ideological assumptions are most effective when unconsciously absorbed by those who believe they have gone beyond ideology.) This means that critical attention must be given to the approach that we bring to this study.
The eminent historian of the French Revolution whom we’ve already cited, Albert Soboul, commented that “the history of the Revolution, like any historical subject, is structured and thus thinkable, scientifically knowable, like any other reality.” That this was not a platitude became clear with his next sentence: “The goal of the historian is to achieve, if not certitudes, at least probabilities or networks of probabilities, or even better, as Georges Lefebvre said, tendential laws.” Soboul warned against two pitfalls: “on one hand, an all-purpose schematization that impoverishes and dessicates the rich historical subject; on the other hand, a cursory empiricism that, in the name of the complexity of the real, considers and treats only one particular case.” Soboul concluded that “if the historian intends to understand and arrive at some explanation of causes and effects, it is essential to have recourse to some theory connecting ideas to the needs and pressures of society.” The Marxist influence in Soboul’s work—as in that of Georges Lefebvre and Albert Mathiez, not to mention Jean Jaurès, before him—involved an interpretive framework that brought to the fore economic relationships and development, social transformations and crises, class tensions and struggles, and revolutionary transitions from one socioeconomic system to another.2
This “historical materialist” approach is found in the present study. Of course, there are many variants of Marxism. The tradition we draw upon here is that identified with not only Karl Marx and Frederick Engels but also Rosa Luxemburg, V. I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Antonio Gramsci.3
Gramsci’s views on ideology, “organic” intellectuals, and class hegemony are particularly useful. The same is true regarding Luxemburg’s conception of “mass strike” and the interplay of mass insurgencies and socialist vanguards. Similarly, we make use in our study of Lenin’s approach to the masses-vanguard dialectic, his insight regarding the nature of revolutionary crises, and his grasp of strategic and tactical dynamics within nationally specific as well as international contexts. Of central importance to this study are Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development and his theory of permanent revolution. Hopefully none of these theoretical tools deteriorate into the “all-purpose schematization” that flattens and blurs the rich and complex historical realities, against which Soboul warned.
Although considerable attention is given to “social history” in these pages, readers can regard this largely as a work of intellectual history. It involves the study of ideas and theories, but it can also be seen as part of a long tradition of developing ideas and theories under the impact of studying revolutions.
We have noted that the manner in which revolutions are interpreted and understood often becomes intertwined with the question of whether to condemn or defend them. By the two hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, historiographical fashion tilted toward the conclusion that the Revolution began with splendid aspirations but quickly became a disaster that left France a sorrier place than it had been beforehand. Of course, this was also the argument of Edmund Burke at the time—countered by the partisan defense of Thomas Paine, who saw in it a vital affirmation of “the rights of man.”4
For that matter, the first American Revolution continues to be the subject of controversy. The “second American Revolution,” the Civil War of 1861–65, combined with the era of Reconstruction of 1865–77, has also been the focus of fierce disputes. As in the study of the French Revolution, Marxist-oriented scholars have made remarkable advances, but their interpretations cannot be said to have won universal acceptance.5
Of course, these are “bourgeois-democratic” revolutions. The “proletarian” revolutions—beginning with the Paris Commune of 1871, including the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, and often somewhat problematically involving a variety of overturns during the twentieth century—have generated even greater passions. The first great defender and interpreter of the Paris Commune was Karl Marx himself, whose pamphlet The Civil War in France was followed by the massive History of the Commune of 1871 by the Communard Prosper O. Lissagary. The first coherent account of the Bolshevik revolution was left-wing journalist John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), followed in 1932 by a participant’s unrivaled panorama—Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. Sympathetic historians have followed the lead of Reed and Trotsky, just as unsympathetic historians have followed the leads of hostile contemporaries (e.g., well-known historians Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill). A perusal of this study’s bibliography will reveal the consumption of many gallons of printers’ ink in such enterprises.6
The present study approaches revolution under the inspiration of Paine, Marx, and Trotsky. This is so not simply in regard to partisanship for the cause of human liberation, but also in regard to the quest to see reality in a new way and to further develop our analytical tools. On this last point, Paine sought the further clarification of democratic political theory; Marx sought the deeper understanding of class struggles and also of the state and its transformation; Trotsky sought a better grasp of revolutionary dynamics. The present study also seeks to advance our understanding of these and related questions.
The Post-Marxist Challenge
The perspective that Marx and Engels sketched in the Communist Manifesto of 1848 called for workers of all countries to unite in order to lose their chains and win the world, referring to the workers’ movement as a movement of the great majority in the interests of the great majority—all of which was more a forecast of future realities than a description of what actually existed in the middle of the nineteenth century. In many ways it seemed profoundly relevant in the century following its publication, as the capitalist system secured global predominance, drawing ever-increasing numbers of people into the labor market. As Belgian economist Ernest Mandel commented in the late twentieth century: “There are today a billion wage workers in the world, incomparably more numerous and better educated than their predecessors 80, 50 or even 30 years ago.”7 This trend has not diminished as “globalization” has continued its work in the twenty-first century.
As one decade succeeded another, the organized labor movement became a force in the political life of more and more countries. What’s more, revolutions influenced by Marxism triumphed in a succession of countries—from Russia in 1917 to similar overturns through much of the twentieth century. It seemed possible, even in the late 1980s given the way things were going, that a revolutionary resurgence and triumph might be experienced in the advanced capitalist countries of the twenty-first.
Critics of Marxism, on the other hand, were able to point to an accumulation of striking contradictions and problems appearing to throw the whole perspective into question. The triumphant “Marxist” revolutions had occurred not in the most industrialized and proletarianized areas but in largely agricultural societies where the working class seemed to be a small minority. In the advanced industrial countries that the Communist Manifesto implied would see the first revolutionary triumphs, the labor movement appeared to have accommodated itself to the capitalist status quo. In the “backward” countries where revolutions occurred, serious questions could be raised regarding whether the proletariat had won “the battle for democracy” and established its own political rule, as the Manifesto had predicted, or whether power was exercised only in the name of the proletariat and the rural poor by authoritarian and increasingly bureaucratic elites.
By the 1990s and into the 2000s, it all seemed to fall apart for the Marxists. Capitalism played a colossal trick—what Marx and Engels had proclaimed in the Communist Manifesto became true for the once-confident Marxists: “All that is solid melts into air.” The revolutionary wave had run its course and now receded into nothingness. Actual or pretended Communist regimes collapsed (or, in the case of the People’s Republic of China, embraced capitalism), and the great Soviet experiment turned out to be the road to nowhere. (“What is Communism?” began one joke in the former Soviet Union. The answer: “The longest road from capitalism to capitalism.”) The working class increasingly seemed to lose its dynamism. The organized labor movement—its crimson banners fading in the sunshine of capitalist prosperity, its militants foiled and befuddled by the amazing new dynamics of “globalization” and in some cases frantically accommodating to triumphant capitalism—eroded. In some cases it collapsed and in others it morphed ever further into a bureaucratic apparatus, integrated into the capitalist status quo, on close terms with business and government elites, removed from the daily lives of ordinary workers.
There have been recent waves of disillusioned leftists and post-Marxists in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, but their contributions seem to me not to go qualitatively beyond earlier waves: a few in the 1920s, more in the 1930s and 1940s, culminating as the “established wisdom” of the 1950s, providing an analytical alternative to Marxism, developed largely by people once “infected” with some variant of Marx’s vision. Utilizing their Marxian-influenced intellectual tools, they dug their way out of earlier attachments, going on to settle accounts—sometimes bitterly, sometimes with generous nostalgia, but often perceptively—with the failed vision. In this study, it is the perspectives of these post-Marxists to which we have given attention: Selig Perlman, Max Nomad, Sidney Hook, James Burnham, Bertram Wolfe, W. W. Rostow, Daniel Bell, but there have been many others who could also be cited. There are substantial disagreements among such people (as there are among Marxists), yet there are important perspectives they shared in their maturity.8
Their general outlook has remained hegemonic in the intellectual life of the United States since the 1940s—from the extreme conservative to the extreme liberal spaces on the political spectrum—aside from a leftward vacillation in the late 1960s (and perhaps another shaping up in the early twenty-first century). One of their most effective representatives, Daniel Bell, explained that “we have all become post-Marxists,” arguing that the validity of Marx’s approach—rooting “social change in social structure or institutions” and “seeking to lay bare the sources of that determinism in social relations between men”—is combined for post-Marxists with the understanding that “the working class will not inherit the world,” making it necessary for serious thinkers to go beyond Marx.9
As a pioneering post-Marxist and labor historian, Selig Perlman was one of the first to articulate the view that Marx was wrong to see the working class as a force for socialist revolution. While agreeing with Marx that the two primary social classes of modern times consist of capitalists and workers, Perlman believed that the Marxist conception of working-class consciousness is simply the invention of intellectuals like Marx who see working people as “an abstract mass in the grip of an abstract force.” The notion of “proletarian revolution” is simply unnatural. The “homegrown” outlook of real workers, “the organic psychology of the manualist,” involves an inherent “urge towards collective control of job opportunities, but hardly toward similar control of industry.” In fact, only the capitalists have “the demonstrated capacity . . . to survive as a ruling group,” because they “know how to operate the complex economic apparatus of modern society upon which the material welfare of all depends,” and they have a psychology of “limitless opportunities” (unlike the narrow “scarcity consciousness” of the workers) and a “will to power” necessary to run industrial society. Rather than seeking to overthrow capitalism, workers naturally seek to create organizations that will struggle with capitalists only “for an enlarged opportunity measured in income, security and liberty in the shop and industry.” A modest “wage and job conscious” trade unionism—not class-conscious radicalism leading to a revolution, a workers’ state, and socialism—is the best vehicle reflecting that actual psychology and advancing the real interests of workers.10
Another post-Marxist, W. W. Rostow, noted that “Marx belongs among the whole range of men of the West, who, in different ways, reacted against the social and human costs of the drive to [economic] maturity and sought a better and more humane balance in society.” Rostow stressed both the grandeur and the immense failure in the contributions of this passionate logician of revolution: “Driven on—in his father’s phrase—by a ‘demonic egoism,’ by an identification with the underdog and a hatred of those who were top-dog, but also disciplined to a degree by a passion to be ‘scientific’ rather than sentimental, Marx created his remarkable system: a system full of flaws but also full of legitimate partial insights, a great formal contribution to social science, a monstrous guide to public policy.”11
Obviously, if the proletariat was incapable of creating a cooperative commonwealth, then the keystone of Marx’s proposals for “public policy” would fall away. What made it all truly monstrous, however, was the fact that Marx’s ultrademocratic vision became a cover for the most brutal despotism. James Burnham saw the Marxist movement of the twentieth century as a new variant of Bonapartism: “Mature Bonapartism is a popular, a democratic despotism, founded on democratic doctrine, and, at least in its initiation, committed to democratic forms.” According to Burnham, “The primary object, in practice, of all rulers is to serve their own interest, to maintain their own power and privilege. There are no exceptions. . . . The demagogues of the opposition say their victory will be the triumph of the people; but they lie, as demagogues always do.” He added: “The Marxists and the democratic totalitarians claim that freedom can now be secured only by concentrating all social forces and especially economic forces in the state which, when they or their friends are running it, they identify with the people. . . . Their arguments and programs are . . . simply myths that express, not movements for political liberty, but a contest for control over the despotic and Bonapartist political order which they . . . anticipate. The concentration of all social forces in the state would in fact destroy all possibility of freedom.”12
As the twentieth century progressed to the twenty-first, however, the shiny wonders of capitalist globalization became increasingly tarnished. Many people around the world (especially the sector identified by Marx and Engels as working class, those who make a living through selling their labor-power) have been experiencing declining living conditions, increased exploitation, growing cultural and environmental degradation, deteriorating communities, and growing social instability, not to mention the seemingly never-ending story of violence, terrorism, war. Such “Marxist” realities naturally resurrect the post-Marxist narrative.
Defining Democracy
The literal definition is simple: government by the people, or rule by the people. This is the content of what is elaborated by Thomas Jefferson in the beginning of the Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address. John Dewey, in his discussion of Jefferson, offered interesting reflections on democracy’s underpinnings:
The will of the people as the moral basis of government and the happiness of the people as its controlling aim were so firmly established with Jefferson that it was axiomatic that the only alternative to the republican position was fear, in lieu of trust, of the people. Given fear of them, it followed, as by mathematical necessity, not only that they must not be given a large share in the conduct of government, but that they must themselves be controlled by force, moral or physical or both, and by appeal to some special interest served by government—an appeal which, according to Jefferson, inevitably meant the use of means to corrupt the people. Jefferson’s trust in the people was a faith in what he sometimes called their common sense and sometimes their reason. They might be fooled and misled for a time, but give them light and in the long run their oscillations this way and that will describe what in effect is a straight course ahead.13
In contrast to this, Joseph A. Schumpeter, in his critique of democracy, has taken issue with the underlying assumption of rule by the people—that people know what they want when actually most people’s “will” consists of “an indeterminate bundle of vague impulses loosely playing about given slogans and mistaken impressions.” Schumpeter was quite willing to acknowledge that “there is truth in Jefferson’s dictum that in the end the people are wiser than any single individual can be, or in Lincoln’s about the impossibility of ‘fooling all the people all the time.’” But, he insisted, history “consists of a succession of short-run situations that may alter the course of events for good,” and that “all the people can in the short run be ‘fooled’ step by step into something they do not really want,” and such “short-run” realities recur over and over and over.14
Related to this is James Burnham’s uncompromising perspective: “‘Democracy’ is usually defined in some such terms as ‘self-government’ or ‘government by the people.’ Historical experience forces us to conclude that democracy, in this sense, is impossible.” While the quest for such democracy would lead to despotism, he insisted, liberty could be secured through the acceptance of government in the hands of a ruling class—but a ruling class divided into at least two strong factions. “Political freedom,” according to Burnham, “is the resultant of unresolved conflicts among various sections of the elite.” Hope for the future involved “a purge of the ranks of the ruling class . . . and the recruitment of new leaders” with the managerial expertise necessary “to promote those variants of the evolving social order that permit at least the minimum of liberty and justice without which human society is degraded to merely animal existence.”15
This raises a question that is a central focus of the present study: What is the relationship of democracy to the revolution under examination? I would argue that for the nonrevolutionary post-Marxists, there is a fundamental (though, in many cases, covered-over) agreement with Burnham’s views on democracy. A key to their rejection of Marxism is the conviction that—unlike the capitalists (and their managers)—the working class is incapable of ruling society. While some liberals and conservatives raise the word democracy as a banner, it is important to understand that this word has often been redefined in a way that is consistent with Burnham’s perspective. Attention to the work of different democratic theorists will help to clarify this point.
In an influential study by Henry B. Mayo, An Introduction to Democratic Theory, we find respectful reference to Burnham’s perspective: “The charge of inevitable oligarchy . . . is supported by much empirical evidence” and by “impressive arguments.” In response, Mayo asserted that democratic theory can accept the necessity of “leadership” and that “democracy need not presuppose any large proportion of the politically active, or even a high proportion of voters.” According to Mayo: “Democracy obviously stands or falls by its method of selecting its leaders, and rests on the explicit assumption that elections are the best, or least bad, method of choosing the wisest and best [leaders].” Fleetingly acknowledging the possibility that “a traditional ruling class is necessary” and the fact of “the power of money to pervert administration or legislation,” he insisted that democracy involves not an attempt to achieve “the highest ideals” but rather to secure a situation which is “tolerable and . . . acceptable for the time being . . . and which the public may be persuaded to accept.16
Robert A. Dahl, in his similarly influential A Preface to Democratic Theory, offered a similarly “precise” (or narrowed) definition of democracy and of the function of elections. “We expect elections to reveal the ‘will’ or the preferences of a majority on a set of issues,” he reflected. “This is one thing elections rarely do, except in an almost trivial fashion.” Commenting that “majority rule is mostly a myth,” Dahl asserted: “Elections and political competition do not make for government by majorities in a very significant way, but they vastly increase the size, number and variety of minorities whose preferences must be taken into account by leaders making policy choices.”17
A careful reading of their works suggests that this is generally the kind of “democracy” defended by many political theorists who remain attached to the word.18
In any event, we should remember this approach to defining democracy as we critically survey Russian realities: democracy exists when the political leaders of a society conduct elections designed to persuade the populace of policies preferred by the leadership, while at the same time facilitating efforts of various minorities (or interest groups) to have leaders take their own particular concerns into consideration. Such a definition would certainly allow us to take a rather generous view of the early Bolshevik regime. Whether this in any way amounts to “rule by the people” seems highly questionable.
Approaching the question from a more historical standpoint, John Dewey, observed that “the development of political democracy came about through substitution of the method of mutual consultation and voluntary agreement for the method of subordination of the many to the few enforced from above.” C. B. Macpherson has elaborated: “It cannot be too often recalled that liberal democracy is strictly a capitalist phenomenon. Liberal-democratic institutions have appeared only in capitalist countries, and only after the free market and the liberal state have produced a working class conscious of its strength and insistent on a voice.”19
This raises the obvious question: since modern democracy has appeared only under capitalism, or is “a strictly capitalist phenomenon,” as Macpherson puts it, can democracy exist independently of capitalism? A hint is contained in what is stressed in Macpherson’s second sentence—regarding “a working class conscious of its strength and insistent on a voice,” a matter to which we must return.
On the other hand, what are we to make of the diluted “democracy” that mainstream theorists have felt compelled to articulate under modern capitalism? “Owing to the dramatic growth of elite power,” Peter Bachrach has noted, traditional democratic theory (e.g., of Paine, Jefferson, and Lincoln) has come to be seen as “an anachronism,” generating “cynicism toward democracy as it becomes evident that the gap between the reality and the ideal cannot be closed.” This has required—in the view of influential theorists such as Dahl and Mayo (and among such post-Marxists as Rostow and Bell)—an effort to “recast democracy” in a manner reflecting “a receptiveness toward the existing structure of power and elite opinion-making in large industrial societies,” a way of defining the term that reflects “a profound distrust of the majority of ordinary men and women, and a reliance upon the established elites to maintain the values of civility and the ‘rules of the game’ of democracy.”20
John Dewey noted the problem as well. “After democratic political institutions were nominally established,” he mused, “beliefs and ways of looking at life and of acting that originated when men and women were externally controlled and subjected to arbitrary power, persisted in the family, the church, business and the school,” contributing to “a subtle form” of exclusion from meaningful participation in decision-making that is “perhaps economic, certainly psychological and moral. . . . Others who are supposed to be wiser and who in any case have more power decide the question for them and also decide the methods and means by which subjects may arrive at the enjoyment of what is good for them.” Such a mode of operation often “is habitual and embodied in social institutions,” seeming “the normal and natural state of affairs,” with the mass of people “unaware that they have a claim to a development of their own powers.” The persistence of such realities, he concludes with typical understatement, means the “political democracy is not secure.”21
Harold Laski highlighted some of the relevant issues with admirable clarity. Commenting that the way “in which economic power is distributed at any given time and place will shape the character of the legal imperatives which are imposed in that same time and place,” he challenged the notion that simply basing the state on the democratic principle of universal suffrage would result in “rule by the people.” Democracy means that power is exercised by the people, or at least their majority. But “power depends for its habits upon a consciousness of possession, a habit of organization, an ability to produce an immediate effect,” and even with the equal and universal distribution of the right to vote for the government’s elected representatives, “in a democratic state, where there are great inequalities of economic power,” such habits and abilities that Laski refers to are precisely what the majority of people do not have. He elaborates: “They do not know the power that they possess. They hardly realize what can be effected by organizing their interests. They lack direct access to those who govern them. Any action by the working classes, even in a democratic state, involves risk to their economic security out of all proportion to the certainty of gain.” Laski’s bluntness stands in contrast to the formulations preferred by many post-Marxist theorists:
The division of society into rich and poor makes the legal imperatives of the state work to the advantage of the rich. . . . Their power compels the agents of the state to make their wishes the first object of consideration. Their conception of good insensibly pervades the mental climate of the administration. They dominate the machinery of the state. By justice they mean the satisfaction of their demands. By the lessons of history they mean the deposit of their experience. . . . [T]he quality of public opinion depends upon the truth of the information upon which it is based, and its power to make an impression is a function of the degree to which it is organized. . . . News becomes propaganda as soon as its substance can affect policy; and, in an unequal society, the incidence of news is tilted to the advantage of the holders of economic power.22
If the first question about democracy pondered its relationship with revolution, Laski’s conclusions raise (and suggest a negative answer to) a second question: Can genuine democracy actually exist under capitalism? This second question assumes a more broadly conceived notion of democracy.
A democratic ethos is at the heart of the Marxist tradition. Revolutionary socialists in the tradition of Marx and Lenin have insisted that genuine, living democracy can only be realized by going beyond the capitalist framework, a notion also embedded in Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution.23
The classical tradition of revolutionary Marxism, indeed, holds to a vision of democracy far more expansive and demanding than is the case of many liberal-democratic theorists of the mid-to-late twentieth century. “The system of workers’ councils, the separation of state and party, multiparty representation, inner-party democracy, workers’ self-management and union rights,” in the words of Marxist theorist George Novack, identifying with the Leninist-Trotskyist tradition, “can be the keystones of a healthy postcapitalist state and the best curatives for the diseases of bureaucratism.” Novack goes further, explicitly stressing the need for such a socialist democracy to generate “the uprooting of women’s oppression” and to advance the emancipation, empowerment, and self-determination of “weak, poor, oppressed and underdeveloped nationalities” existing within society.24
Novack also stresses the necessity of freedom of expression and political pluralism, arguing that this is in harmony with the Leninist conceptualization of the revolutionary vanguard party. “A plurality of parties is not only most favorable to the political vitality of the state in the transitional period [from capitalism to socialism] but also useful to the ruling party as well,” he asserts. “The existence of competition and criticism, the presentation of alternative policies and courses, the direct confrontation of differing orientations act as a prod to keep the party from deviating too far from the correct course.” He adds, significantly: “They can prepare a peaceful and legal replacement if the vanguard should degenerate to the point of failing to fulfill its role as the best representative of the forward march to socialism.”25
From all of this we can construct a seven-point “democratic state” checklist for evaluating (for example) the extent to which revolutionary Russia achieved democracy:
As we can see, this is a more demanding definition of democracy than that culled from such theorists as Mayo and Dahl, one which obviously would be far more difficult to live up to in the real world. A somewhat similar but more modest articulation of the “concept of democracy” is offered by three other theorists, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens: “It entails, first, regular, free and fair elections of representatives with universal and equal suffrage, second, responsibility of the state apparatus to the elected parliament (possibly complemented by the direct election of the head of the executive), and third, the freedoms of expression and association as well as the protection of individual rights against arbitrary state action.” They link this with a conceptualization in their comparative analysis of the emergence of democracy in various capitalist countries, that (1) the working class (not the capitalist class) has played a central role in the process of democratization, (2) “it is the struggle between the dominant and subordinated classes over the right to rule that—more than any other factor—puts democracy on the historical agenda and decides its prospects,” and (3) democracy has historically been “a product of the contradictions of capitalism, and the process of democratization [has been] primarily a product of the action of the subordinate classes.” In his panoramic history of democracy, Brian Roper finds that this has been more generally true throughout history: “The social forces that have most consistently fought for, and defended, democracy are the ‘poor and middling folks’ in various societies: peasant citizens in the Athenian city-state; the middle classes, urban petite-bourgeoisie (sans-culottes), poorer members of the clergy, wage-laborers and sections of the peasantry in France during the 1790s; workers and peasants in Russia during the first two decades of the twentieth century; workers, students, farmers and members of the middle classes in the advanced capitalist societies during the twentieth century.” In her outstanding study The History of Human Rights, Michelene Ishay similarly demonstrates that “the struggles for universal suffrage, social justice, and workers’ rights . . . were socialist in origin.”26
In other words, while capitalism generates socioeconomic blockages to the actual realization of “rule by the people,” the development of capitalism has nonetheless generated powerful struggles for democracy, pushed forward by the laboring “lower classes.” If it turns out, however, that they prove unable to achieve and sustain the kind of rule elaborated in the seven points derived from Novack’s discussion, we are brought back to Burnham’s challenge regarding the extent to which genuine democracy can be realized at all.
Less sweeping than Burnham’s universal rejection of democracy’s possibility is the rejection of democracy’s universal applicability. There is the question, raised by conservative scholars such as Howard J. Wiarda, of whether such things as democracy can be “exported” or expected to flourish in all cultures. Others have responded that this “cultural relativist” approach in fact serves US foreign policy inclinations to side with traditionalist elites and “modernizing” authoritarians who are willing to accommodate the interests of elites within the US political economy. Some social scientists argue that, given the achievement of an “economic threshold” and a “sociocultural,” or “literacy threshold,” democracy—while not inevitable—is possible.27 Harold Laski emphasized a sort of “general education threshold” in his primer on politics: “Knowledge is essential, and the right to education is therefore fundamental to citizenship. For without education, at least as a general rule, a man is lost in a big world he is unable to understand. He cannot make the most of himself; he cannot be critical about the meaning of experience. The uneducated man amid the complexities of modern civilization is like a blind man who cannot relate cause and effect.”28 Regardless of what geographical location or which people we have in mind, then, this suggests that if such “thresholds” are realized, rule by the people could be a practical possibility. It also suggests that without their realization, Novack’s Marxist vision of what genuine democracy looks like cannot be achieved. On the other hand, Novack himself acknowledges that such democratic principles cannot be realized under all conditions.
“Scrupulous as a workers’ regime may be in observing the rights of the people,” he tells us, “its democratic functioning will be vitiated in the long run unless and until two fundamental tasks are solved.” One task, we will see, was not solved in Russia during the period covered in our study: “The productivity of labor must be developed to the point where enough goods are available for everyone’s needs, there are no sharp divisions between the haves and the have-nots, and penury, misery and gross inequality are overcome.” The other task, according to Novack, is even more decisive in “fortifying the processes of democratization,” though it also remained unrealized—“a series of victories for the working class over capitalism in the industrialized metropolises where the greatest powers of production are concentrated and the greatest enemies of socialism are located.” Some might understandably respond: if these are seen as preconditions for securing democracy in early Bolshevik Russia (or anywhere else), then democracy is inevitably doomed.29
Nonetheless, a focal point of this study involves an exploration of the extent to which actual democracy can be said to have been realized, or not realized, in Bolshevik Russia. This is rooted in an acceptance of the vision to which such revolutionaries as Marx and Engels, Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky, and Gramsci committed their lives. And it connects with the belief that if popular revolutions—such as the Russian Revolution of 1917—have resulted in bureaucratic dictatorships instead of socialist democracies, this can best be explained not by the abstract “impossibility” of socialism or democracy but by specific historical circumstances, which can be understood and ultimately overcome.
Politics of Uneven and Combined Development
Marxism fuses together a view of history, an engagement with current realities, and a strategic orientation for replacing capitalism with socialism. The dominant interpretation of history shared by Marxists of the early twentieth century went something like this: since the rise of class societies (with small, powerful upper classes of exploiters enriched by vast laboring majority classes), there have been a succession of historical stages characterized by different forms of economy—ancient slave civilizations giving way to feudalism, which has given way to present-day capitalism.30
The growth of capitalism was facilitated by democratic revolutions that swept away rule by kings and the power of landed nobles, making way for increasingly democratic republics and market economies. The victory of the capitalists (bourgeoisie) paves the way for the triumph of industrialization and modernization. This creates economic productivity and abundance making possible a socialist future (a thoroughly democratic society of freedom and plenty, in which there will be no upper class and lower class). Capitalism also creates a working-class (proletarian) majority that potentially has an interest in, and the power required for bringing into being, a socialist future.
Many Marxists consequently believed that there must first be a bourgeois-democratic revolution, followed by industrialization and modernization, before the necessary preconditions for a proletarian-socialist revolution can be created. There was a crying need for such a bourgeois-democratic revolution in an economically “backward” country such as Russia in the early 1900s, oppressed by the tsarist autocracy and landed nobility (to which capitalists were subordinated as junior partners), with a small working class and a large impoverished peasantry. Many Marxists concluded they should fight for the triumph of such a revolution, so that capitalist development could eventually create the economic and political preconditions for a working-class revolution that would eventually bring about socialism.
In his distinctive conceptualization of uneven and combined development, Trotsky rejected this “pedantic schematism” as a distortion of the realities experienced by “the backward countries” of the world. “Under the whip of external necessity their backward culture is compelled to make leaps,” he argued. “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 separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms.”31
Particularly in the 1960s and ’70s, this perspective became an issue in debates over dependency theory in Latin America. Marxist theorists, in many cases associated with Communist Parties in Latin America, argued that most of Latin America was economically equivalent to a semifeudal stage of development, and that there was a need for a profound bourgeois-democratic makeover (led through a coalition of workers, peasants, and progressive capitalists)—which would someday pave the way for a transition to socialism. There were also nonsocialist “modernization theorists” such as W. W. Rostow who advanced a different variant, through which foreign aid from more advanced countries such as the United States could help the underdeveloped countries “mature” through social and economic modernization, paving the way for democracy and abundance (and no need for socialism).
Other theorists, supportive of revolutionary strategies, advanced what was termed “dependency theory,” in some cases utilizing a variant of the theory of uneven and combined development. Its application to twentieth-century realities was summed up, during the debate, in this way by Timothy Harding: “Capitalism as it spread everywhere across the world swallowed up earlier systems without totally destroying them and employed them in modified ways for the capitalist purpose of commodity production for profit.” The economically less advanced areas would be blocked from developing in the way that the more advanced (and now dominant) areas had developed. This approach differed profoundly from the “orthodox Marxist” (and later Rostow’s) “orderly pattern of historical development,” as Trotsky put it, “according to which every bourgeois society sooner or later secures a democratic regime, after which the proletariat, under conditions of democracy, is gradually organized and educated for socialism” (or in Rostow’s case, for “post-maturity” and “high mass consumption”). The “orthodox” perspective “considered democracy and socialism, for all peoples and countries, as two stages in the development of society which are not only distinct but also separated by great distances of time from each other.”32 Given the dynamics that Trotsky perceived, however, the old schema was profoundly unrealistic.
Many Russian Marxists (especially the Mensheviks, influenced by “the father of Russian Marxism,” George Plekhanov) disagreed, insisting on the long-held understanding that Russia must first have a bourgeois-democratic revolution, which would clear the way for extensive economic, social, and political developments eventually culminating in the possibility for a proletarian-socialist revolution. For the Mensheviks, this meant building a worker-capitalist alliance to overthrow tsarism. Lenin and his Bolsheviks—revolutionary Marxists, profoundly skeptical of the revolutionary potential of Russia’s capitalists—called instead for a radical worker-peasant alliance that would carry the anti-tsarist struggle to victory. But even they did not question the “orthodox” schema: first a distinct bourgeois-democratic revolution paving the way for capitalist development; later—once conditions were ripe—a working-class revolution to bring about socialism.
Yet from a Marxist point of view, this schema provides a theoretical and political puzzle. If the working class is as essential to the democratic revolution as the Mensheviks claimed, and their direct exploiters are the capitalists with whom they are engaged in class struggle that is “constant, now hidden, now open” (as the Communist Manifesto tells us), then how can these mortal enemies be expected to link arms as comrades in a common struggle? And if—as Lenin insisted—the workers must, in fact, turn their backs on the capitalists (in alliance with the peasantry) to overthrow tsarism, what sense would it make for them in the moment of victory to turn power over to their exploiters?
It was Trotsky, Michael Löwy has noted, who was best able to dramatically “grasp the revolutionary possibilities that lay beyond the dogmatic construction of the democratic Russian Revolution which was the unquestioned problematic of all other Marxist formulations.” One can find anticipations of this in other Marxists, and Trotsky himself insisted that his “permanent revolution” conception overlapped with perspectives of others. It flows naturally from the revolutionary conceptualizations inherent in the analyses and methodology of Marx himself. “Trotsky is deeply committed to one element in classical Marxism,” as Isaac Deutscher has observed, “its quintessential element: permanent revolution.” Revolutionary-minded theorists and activists—seeking to apply such Marxism to the world around them—will naturally come up with formulations going in a “permanentist” direction.33
In Trotsky’s sparkling prose we see several interrelated elements formulated more clearly and boldly than can be found in other theorists. Trotsky’s formulation linked the struggle for democracy—freedom of expression, end of feudal privilege (especially land reform), equal rights for all, rule by the people—with the struggle for socialism, a society in which the great majority of people would own and control the economic resources of society to allow for the full and free development of all. It also linked the struggle for revolution in Russia with the cause of socialist revolution throughout the world.
Trotsky’s version of the theory contained three basic points: (1) The revolutionary struggle for democracy in Russia could only be won under the leadership of the working class with the support of the peasant majority. (2) This democratic revolution would begin in Russia a transitional period in which all political, social, cultural, and economic relations would continue to be in flux, leading in the direction of socialism. (3) This transition would be part of, and would help to advance, and must also be furthered by, an international revolutionary process.
The first point in the theory is quite suggestive when one examines the actualities of Russia’s 1917 revolution. While the bourgeoisie tended to be too weak and compromised to lead the militant struggle necessary for a triumphant democratic revolution, the same was not true for all other social layers. Majority sectors of the population—the newly proletarianized labor force, the impoverished peasant masses, aspiring and democratic-minded elements among the petty bourgeoisie (artisanal, petty commercial, and professional layers)—did have a vital interest in the achievement of the democratic tasks. Among these forces, the urban working class had sufficient cohesion, leverage, and (through educational and organizing efforts of the revolutionary socialist movement) the necessary consciousness and will to provide consistent leadership in the democratic struggles. An alliance with the massive Russian peasantry would, of course, be a precondition for victory—but so would proletarian leadership. This would consequently give the revolution a dual character. “So far as its direct and indirect tasks are concerned,” Trotsky wrote, “the Russian revolution is a ‘bourgeois’ revolution because it sets out to liberate bourgeois society from the chains and fetters of absolutism and feudal ownership. But the principal driving force of the Russian revolution is the proletariat, and that is why, so far as its method is concerned, it is a proletarian revolution.” This working-class hegemony in the struggle had a logic, Trotsky insisted, that “leads directly . . . to the dictatorship of the proletariat and puts socialist tasks on the order of the day.”34
By dictatorship of the proletariat, of course, Marxists have not meant authoritarian rule by an elitist dictatorship, but rather political rule by the working class (often conceived as involving greater actual democracy, as we have seen, than does political rule by the capitalist class). Nor did it exclude other (nonproletarian) layers of society. “The dictatorship of the proletariat in no way signifies the dictatorship of the revolutionary organization over the proletariat,” Trotsky insisted. He quoted Marx’s description of the Paris Commune as “the true representative of all the healthy elements of French society, and therefore the truly national government.” He argued that in Russia “the dictatorship of the proletariat will undoubtedly represent all the progressive, valid interests of the peasantry—and not only the peasantry, but also the petty bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia.” The broad social alliance that brought the revolution to victory would, he felt, probably be reflected in the composition of the new revolutionary government. Instead of dictatorship of the proletariat he was quite willing to utilize other labels: “workers’ democracy,” or “dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the peasantry,” or “coalition government of the working class and the petty bourgeoisie.” But he insisted that the reality must involve the “dominating and leading participation” of the working class, “the rule of the proletariat.”35
The second point in Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution—involving a transition period going in the direction of socialism—requires more careful examination. Some partisans of Trotsky’s perspective have assumed that the establishment of proletarian rule must coincide with the rapid replacement of a capitalist economy with the nationalization of the means of production and centralized planning (as opposed to maintenance of market mechanisms) in order to ensure the meeting of society’s needs. Seeming confirmation of this assumption exists in the form of historical experience: within months of the Bolsheviks coming to power in Russia, sweeping nationalizations destroyed capitalism in that country. This is not consistent, however, with the actual thrust of Trotsky’s theory.
Under the impact of the 1905 revolutionary upsurge in Russia, and partially through restudying the experience of history’s first “proletarian dictatorship,” the Paris Commune of 1871, Trotsky made the obvious point that the dictatorship of the proletariat is not premised on the establishment of a collectivized, planned economy. He believed the reverse to be true: “The Paris Commune of 1871 was not, of course, a socialist commune: its regime was not even a developed regime of socialist revolution. The commune was only a prologue. It established the necessary premise of the socialist revolution.”36 Trotsky believed that national-democratic struggles in “backward” capitalist countries would result—if carried out in a consistent, uncompromising manner under proletarian hegemony—in the establishment of working-class rule and would move in a socialist direction. But he did not believe that this would necessarily mean rapid nationalizations of the various sectors of the economy.
On the contrary, Trotsky insisted that “it would be absurd to think that all the proletariat has to do is acquire power and it can replace capitalism by socialism by means of a few decrees. . . . A government of the proletariat does not mean a government of miracles.” He envisioned substantial reforms, such as the eight-hour work day and a heavily progressive (comparatively speaking) income tax, and also some nationalizations “with those branches which present the least difficulties.” But for all practical purposes, he envisioned a form of mixed economy, a significant public sector but also a large private sector, with proletarian controls but a substantial degree of capitalist enterprise: “In the first period the socialized sector of production will have the appearance of oases connected with private economic enterprises by the laws of commodity exchange.”37 While Trotsky believed that the revolution would not be stabilized at this “mixed economy” stage, he insisted that—particularly in a country with such “underdeveloped” technology and productivity as Russia—it would not be possible to move forward to the realization of socialism in a single country.
This brings us to the third essential point in Trotsky’s theory. “The Russian proletariat . . . will be able to carry its great cause to its conclusion,” he stressed, “only under one condition—that it knows how to break out of the national framework of our great revolution and make it the prologue to the world victory of labor.” Many critics and some would-be defenders of Trotsky’s theory fail to give sufficient attention to this key international factor: “A national revolution is not a self-contained whole; it is only a link in the international chain. The international revolution constitutes a permanent process, despite temporary declines and ebbs.” In fact, the theory loses coherence without this dimension. As he put it in 1929, the Marxist approach to socialist construction is grounded in the class struggle “on a national and international scale.” In a world dominated by the capitalist economy, a socialist revolution in one country “must inevitably lead to explosions, that is, internally to civil wars and externally to revolutionary wars.” Far from being an afterthought, this was at the heart of Trotsky’s perspective. “Therein lies the permanent character of the socialist revolution as such,” he explained, “regardless of whether it is a backward country that is involved, which only yesterday accomplished its democratic revolution, or an old capitalist country which already has behind it a long epoch of democracy and parliamentarism.”38
There is a significant corollary to this third point. A failure to break out of the national framework, Trotsky ultimately concluded, would result either in the overturn of the revolution in a country such as Russia or in its bureaucratic degeneration.