Reclaiming the Legacy of October Revolution in the Era of Bourgeois Hegemony[i]
Sanjay
Kumar
‘When I ask why people are poor, they call me
a Communist.’ Helder Camara
Two
days before his execution on 23 March 1931 in Lahore Central Jailtwenty three
years old Bhagat Singh asked his lawyer PremNath Mehta to bring him a biography
of Lenin. According to his nephew Jagmohan Singh, the lawyer brought him the book
the next day. Anecdotal evidence holds that he was reading Lenin’s biography
when the prison staff came to take him to the gallows.
Though
there were Communist factions in India at the time,Bhagat Singh was not a
member of any one of these. His group,the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army(HSRA)
came fromthe northern Indian revolutionary terrorist tradition. The
manifesto of the Bharat Naujawan Sabha of Lahore, the open organization of
which he was a leading member, ends with VandeMataram, a Sanskrit battle
cry of savarna Hindu radicals of the Swaraj movement in Bengal. At the age of 17 years he was writing adulatory references to Veer
Savarkar, the future leader of Hindu Mahasabha and the first Hindutva
ideologue. However, his transition towards a radical left
position is well documented. His explanation of HSRA’s political programme
given to British colonial court delineates it in clear class terms, as a system
without exploitation. His letter to ‘Young Political Organisers’ written from
prison is a succinct and precise set of suggestions for preparation of a mass
political movement along Leninist lines.
October
Revolution of 1917 was both an idea and a reality for countless left radical activists
and thinkers like Bhagat Singh world over during the ‘short’ twentieth century.
The literature from, and about the 1917 revolution, and Bolsheviks as its chief
actors, sharpened the meaning of revolution for them. The reality and success
of 1917, specifically defeating the counter revolution in thebrutal Civil War,
brought revolution from the arena of speculation to immediate practical
possibility. It is perhaps a sign
ofcurrent bourgeois political-ideological hegemony that most of the scholarly
contributions to EPW’s special issue on October Revolution shirk away from addressing
the very palpable possibility of revolutionexperienced by radicals like Bhagat
Singh which was opened by the Bolshevik revolution. Articles by Dilip Simeon (Simeon, 2017) , Marcel van der Linden (Linden, 2017) , and Rex A Wade (Wade, 2017) , work within a
liberal framework of understanding society; and despite adding new archival
data and using new arguments, arrive at fairly old conclusions. Their criticism
from ‘without’, fails to engage with the internal cognitive and moral world of
Bolsheviks. Heterogeneous groupings of radical activists gathered around Marxist-Leninist,
Maoist, or Trostkyite streamsfound definite answers to specific political
questions in the Bolshevik revolution. These answers may appear dated, and
incomplete, and their legacy questionable from the perspective of the current
century. However, this in no way implies that the questions these answers
addressed have become obsolete. The weight of the very real current bourgeois
political and ideological hegemony itself makes it mandatory to confront these
questions for any critical engagement with the present. In fact, it can be
argued that the answers arrived at by the late nineteenth, early twentieth
century revolutionary Marxists are still relevant at a meta level of
understanding.
Context
of a Revolutionary Understanding of Society
The
questions addressed by the Bolshevik political practicehad emerged during the
nineteenth and early twentieth century developments in Europe. Revolution is
foremost a question of state power, and extreme, often violent, conflict
between different expectations from and conceptions of this power.A
revolutionary crisis may be a sign of the old regime, i.e. existing ‘exploiters
..not be(ing) able to live and rule in
the old way’(Lenin, 1920) ,
however it does not mean that the erstwhile rulers lose their freedom to
maneuver. All permutations and combinations for sharing of power between the
privileged, and the not so privileged are possible. Fairytale renditions of the
‘good’ bourgeois democratic revolutions, the French Revolution of 1789, and February
Revolution in Russia, present these as almost carnivalesquecelebrations of
undifferentiated people’s power pushing awaymoribund, and decrepit regimes. For
any serious practitioner of politics willing to learn from history, their
reality was much more complex, messy and contingent. Precisely because revolutions
are moments of coming together of acute but different contradictions from
within an existing social dynamic, their outcomes are not given.Overdetermination
of arevolutionary crisis in no way implies unique resolution. The spark for the
French revolution was the refusal of aristocracy to agree to fiscal demands of
an absolutist monarchy greatly indebted to the big bourgeoisie, for which it
had to call Estates General. TheConstituent Assembly in 1791 would have been
content with a constitutional monarchy.
For
Marx and Engels, and their followers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century, the possibility of political revolution was stamped with the successes
of counter revolution; the failure of the continental scale revolutions of 1848,
andthe brutal repression of the Paris Commune in 1871 by armies of the French liberal
bourgeoisie. For Bolsheviks like Lenin, the recent betrayal of revolutionary
internationalism by larger European Social Democratic parties who supported
their countries’ war preparations inWorld War I, was almost traumatic[ii].
The
contested character and future of state power under revolutionary conditions
comes out most starkly during civil wars, during which, the logic of
emancipatory politics for revolutionaries gets entwined with the logic of war,
i.e with the use of organized and systematic violencefor a military victoryover
erstwhile rulers and their allies. Under such situations revolutionaries of the
nineteenth and twentieth century, and before them the Jacobins of the French
revolutions, viewed their choices not in terms of violence or nonviolence, but
between revolutionary and counter revolutionary violence. The latter had the
advantage ofthe tools of governance, ideological domination, and trained human
power of the erstwhile rulers. It also gained by an instant transnational union
of the rulers of different countries, as came out openly during the French and
Russian civil wars. Nothing unties aristocracies, privileged strata, or the
bourgeoisie in our times, as quickly as the threat of a revolutionary spark in
any corner of the world. Revolutionaries respondedto counter-revolution by
raising new forms of military organisations thatgalvanised popular appeal of
the revolution’s political and social programme into a relatively egalitarian military
institution: the New Model Army of Cromwell, the French army raised during the
Convention period,( ‘the formidable child of the Jacobin Republic’, ‘in which
formal barrack military discipline was negligible, soldiers were treated as men
and the absolute rule of promotion by merit produced a simple hierarchy of
courage.(Hobsbawm, 1996, p. 73) ), the formidable Red
Army of Russia, People’s Liberation Army of armed peasantry in China, or
guerilla units in countless other revolutionary situations world over.
Already
in 1850, Marx and Engels as members of the Central Authority of Communist
League were deriving some important lessons from the failure of 1848
revolutions; which interestingly continue with Communist revolutionaries even
after a century and a half.The first lesson was that in the face of a threat of
a revolution from below, bourgeoisie have no hesitation in aligning with
autocracy and reaction. Hence, the bourgeoisie cannot be counted to move for even
the bourgeois democratic revolution that entails legal liberal freedoms of
press, assembly, and political rights. The second lesson was that working class
needs to organize itself independently, and not be led specifically by parties
dominated by petit bourgeois interests of small property owners.
Political
lessons derived by Communist revolutionaries from the history and practice of
revolutions were embedded ina number of understandings that acted at different
epistemic and practical levels. The most basic perhaps was an ontological
conception of society as a conflict ridden system, riven by a fundamental
contradiction between the exploiters and the exploited.Even while the dynamic
of the existing social system implied continued domination of the exploiters,
it also created necessary conditions for its overthrow. Revolution was both a
potential actuality and a necessary goal. Hence, revolution as an idea
represented both an objective process, as well an ethical good. In this
conception of social history, humans do make their history but according to
circumstances handed to them.
Alternativeinterpretations
of October revolution are underlain with different ontological understandings
of society. For instance, liberal understandings of society which assume that
all lines of actions are principally open to any social actor would see the
land and war policies of the Provisional Governmentof Russia between Feb to Nov
1917 as insufficient, or ‘slow to fulfill’(Wade, 2017)
roused expectations of the wide strata of society.Bolsheviks in contrast saw
these policies not as any failure, but precisely what followed from the
interests of the bourgeoisie and opportunistic petty bourgeoisie. Liberal
explanations of the failuresof the Provisional Government for them would
be political apologetics.
In
liberal conception of society, social order is created out of negotiated
settlements between ontologically free social actors. Hence, ruptures like a
revolution, or intense conflicts like civil war, are signs of political and
moral failures. Specifically in the context of Russian revolution, the
transition from the ‘massive disgust with war’, with immediate Peace being the
major popular demand between Feb to Nov 1917, to Civil War appears as an
‘enigma’(Simeon, 2017) in a liberal framework. How could
people clamouring for peace one day arm themselves for blood letting the next
day? Civil war appears an enigma because an important piece of the puzzle, the
armed counter revolution by social groups opposed to revolution, including
their international collaborators, are missing in this understanding. As for the
people, they saw no contradiction in marching for peace against an imperialist
war of aggression, and defending their new found rights gained through
revolution from counter revolutionary attacks.
The
ontological understanding of society as riven by fundamental class conflicts
was buttressed by theoretical claims. In distinction from other
revolutionaries, or others before them, Communist revolutionaries saw their
practice as a unique union of theoretical and practical labour. Three
days after his friend’s death, Engels’ short address at Marx’s grave first took
note of the theoretical achievements of ‘the man of science’ in discovering a
materialist understanding of human society, and the ‘special law of motion
governing the capitalist mode of production’. This however was ‘not even half
the man’. Science was ‘a historically dynamic, revolutionary force’ for Marx,
who ‘experienced quite another kind of joy when the discovery involved
immediate revolutionary changes in industry, and in historical development in
general’. The man though ‘was before all else a revolutionist. His real mission
in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of
capitalist society.’ For the latter, Engels recounted Marx’s central role in
International Workingmen’s Association (IWMA).
Using
science for solving practical problems, i.e. a union of theoretical and
practical labour, is the hallmark of engineering. Even though the ideal of
Enlightenment rationality is more often presented in romantic and ideological
terms, its most far reaching, yet most prosaic realization is modern
technology. However, certain unique features distinguish Communist
revolutionary practices from any social engineering. Whereas all engineering
uses established ‘laws’ of science to solve practical problems, revolutionary
practice is revolutionary precisely because it attempts to change the
laws governing social reality, by changing this very social reality.If
‘science’ is the lever necessary to bring about this change, the force for
activating this lever was the working class movement. The image of working
classes armed with the lever of the science of revolutionary practice, involved
important assumptions about the nature of this social agency. The Marxist
revolutionary subject is activated not by (religious) faith, or national or any
other communitarian identity, or even ethical-moral commitments. It is the
knowledge gained from answers to questions about the why and how of social
reality that brings this subject in the arena of political struggle. As an
orgnaised force this agency is guided by definite programmes of action, meant
to take account of the specifics of a society. Bolshevik conception of the
worker-peasant alliance, and Mao’s New Democracy were unique innovations for
their time and place. The second character of working class as an agent of
change, as envisioned in Communist revolutionary practice is related to its
self-representation. Eventhough the working classis among the most destitute
and economically weakest of population segments, its self representation is not
of a victim. The beginning text of the Provisional Rules for the International
Workingmen’s Association (IWMA), whichclaimsthat the ‘emancipation of the
working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves’(Marx &
Engels, 2010, p. 14) , shuts the door on any sentimentality about
more privileged strata ‘helping’ working classes out of their misery. This is
the ‘politics of indifference’ to deprivations, and their immediate and partial
alleviation, ‘that instead of focusing on the victims of abuses (of) a class
divided society focuses on the abuse of class division itself’(Michaels, 2017) .
Another
understanding clearly articulated by Marx and Engels, and their followers was
that success in a quickly unfolding revolutionary process required ideological
and organizational preparation. Bolsheviks gained immense prestige among
Marxist revolutionaries precisely because of their success in this regard. A
global industry based on what LarsT Lih calls a ‘textbook’ interpretation of
Lenin’s ‘What is to be Done?’ has long existed that has tried to show this
professional revolutionary and party-centric preparation as a manifestation the
anti- democratic character of the Bolshevik political practice. The central
element of this Leninist core is believed to be a mistrust of the spontaneous
consciousness of the working class, and the key role of a self-appointedrevolutionary
intelligentsia to ‘divert’ it from its natural course towards a socialist
revolutionary consciousness, i.e. to ‘direct’ it from without. Ideas of a class
vanguard, and party dictatorship, etc. are believed to follow from this
elemental mistrust of the working class. However, as Lih writes, ‘itis hardly
an exaggeration to say that the textual basis for this portrait of Lenin is not
just one book, not just one chapter in this book, not just two famousparagraphs
from this chapter that are inevitably quoted, but three wordsfound in these
paragraphs: ' spontaneity', ' divert', and ' from without' (oneword in Russian
)’(Lih, 2008, p. 15) .The
bulk of the polemical text is an argument against ‘economism’, and in favour of
Social Democrats to prepare themselves for a struggle around what were
considered ‘bourgeois democratic’ political demands. As for a revolutionary
consciousness ‘from without’, that was awell established orthodox position,
first articulated by Marx and Engels and later by Kautsky, the most respected
theoretician of German Social Democracy.Important points of distinction are
drawn in the Communist Manifesto itself in thesection Proletarians and Communists: ‘The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically,
the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of
every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand,
theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage
of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the
ultimate general results of the proletarian movement’ (emphases added).
How
can such claims be squared with the earlier deeply democratic claim that the
emancipation of the working classes will be achieved by them alone?It seems
hegemony is the key term on which the answer turns, even though it is not
clearly articulated in the writings of Marx, or even Lenin. Hegemony of the existing
modes of understandings and behaviours is the first hurdle in the path of any
transformative politics, whether feminist, anti-caste, anti-race or the
socialist struggle for the emancipation ofworking people. It is a fact that a
significant majority of white women in the US ‘freely’ voted for a misogynist
like Donald Trump. Rephrasing the Provisional Rules of IWMA quoted earlier, if
a democratic feminist believes that ‘the emancipation of women must be conquered
by the women themselves’, then the hegemony of patriarchy on women is the only
understanding that keeps ‘optimism of the intellect’ intact, and allows for an
understanding that majority of them will break this hegemony. An
‘advanced’ and ‘resolute’ Communist (or feminist) vanguard is envisaged as a
practical necessity that supposedly is free from the hegemony and through its
political leadership can help break the spell of hegemony. At least that was
the self-perception of Communist revolutionaries.Once again,conceptions of a
vanguardand hegemony would be foreign to liberal ontological understandings of
society, which imagine the consciousness of all social actors to be freely
self-evolved.
Confronting
the Present
One
hundred years after the anti-capital Bolshevik revolution, capitalism has come
to dominate all aspects of human life and society. Opposition from all pre,or
non capital political forces, feudal, anti-imperialist, nationalist, or
socialist, has been overcome. Not only communist and socialist parties, trade
unions too have collapsed. Globally the writ of capital over state finance runs
unchallenged. Under the current neo liberal mode of regulation, capital has
begun to transform human subjectivity at the mass scale. This perhaps might be
its most far reaching, yet little appreciated change. The subjection of human
productive labour to the demands of capital at work place is complete. Workers
may seethe over their increased exploitation, temporary nature of their jobs,
and the loss of employment,but with the decline of trade unionsthere is no site
of solidarity and organizational alternative to suffering daily humiliations
individually. Even deeper changes have taken place at the level of consumption.
For a significant number of humans in rich economies, and professional strata
of poorer countries, their immediately felt interaction with material
culture as consumers is guided by satisfying wants and desires, rather than
meeting necessities of life.Atomisation, fragmentation and depoliticisationis a
natural consequence of the process that focuses human consciousness on the
self, rather than the surroundings in which it is placed, and its commitments
to this wider field(Streeck, 2017, p. 107) .
Meanwhile
external contradictions of capital with society and ecology, as seen in the increasingly
obscene inequalities and the threat to the ecological basis of human species,
are intensifying. Capital’s internal contradictions too keep on recurring in
periodic crises. Mass political parties and public provision of essential
services, which formed the basis of political success of bourgeois liberal
democratic regimes, have atrophied. Liberal democracy is no longer a political
project, but a mode of governance, pure and simple. The ascent of racist,
communal and proto fascist extreme right wing is a sign of its turning into a hollowed
out shell.
Revolutionary
Marxism as a political programme in late nineteenth and early twentieth century
had developed in response to capitalism that had not yet come to dominate
society and economy. Actually in many ways, it was a critical and practical continuation
of the socialist currents of the early nineteenth century Western Europe, just
when capitalism was emerging with all its brutalities, and had not yet shaped
society and human subjectivities in its own image. Revolutionary Marxism
developed into a world scale phenomenon in the twentieth century due to certain
understandings that went much beyond the limitations of the conditions of its
birth. Nevertheless, these expansions too were limited to conditions of underdeveloped
capitalism. Revolutionary Marxists must confront and clarify their basic
understandings against the current phase of capitalism. Three of these seem
most appropriate on the occasion of the centenary of the Bolshevik revolution.
One, the ontological understanding of society as an objectivesystem riven
by class contradictions;two, the necessity of the union of theoretical and
practical labourto the practical political task of overthrowing this complex
system, and three, the necessity of prior ideological and organizational
preparation for the task at hand.
It
is evident that as capitalism has come into its own, it is creating societies
which are becoming increasingly unequal. Societies may not be congealing into the
image of a simple two class formula with a pauperized proletariat on one side
and a rich bourgeoisie on the other, yet it is recognized even at the mass
popular level that the system basically runs for the benefit of a tiny fraction
of the superrich. Objectivity of this system is felt in the form of political
helplessness. Theory is the use of abstract human thinking to uncover aspects
of a complex reality which are not obvious. As commodity fetishism acts to
obfuscate the structure of domination inherent in capitalism, it is more than
ever necessary to unite theoretical knowledge of the system with the practical
task of confronting it.As for prior preparation, the bitter experience of the
most recent popular upheaval, the Arab Spring, only reconfirms its necessity.
Brave urban educated, largely secular youth from professional strata spearheaded
the revolt. Their movement remained amorphous with only a rudimentary
organization necessary to organize demonstrations. When it came to settling down
to a post upsurge state in Egypt, Muslim Brotherhood, the oldest mass
organization, much persecuted by the series of dictatorial secular regimes,
emerged the winner. It should be obvious to any student of current politics, as
it was to Marxist revolutionaries of earlier generations, that multiple
interests do come into play at the time of crisis of a complex system, and only
those forces which have ideological clarity and organization can hope to win
the day.
(Sanjay
Kumar teaches Physics at St Stephen’s College, Delhi)
[i]This
article was written as a response to the EPW issue on the centenary of the
Bolshevik Revolution, and submitted for the Discussion section of the journal.
It was withdrawn due to lack of response from the journal.
[ii]To the
socialist it is not the horrors of war that are the hardest to endure ... but
the horrors of the treachery shown by the leaders of present day socialism, the
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