Review: Bolshevism
Rudolph Sprenger (Helmut Wagner)
Redline Publications , 2004
Had the revolutionary forces in Germany at the end of the First
World War been successful, it is possible that Bolshevism would be no
more than a footnote in the history of the workers' movement.
However, with the defeat of the German Revolution, the triumph of the
Bolsheviks, together with the isolation of that revolution meant that
Bolshevism assumed a prominence out of all proportion to its
historical relevance.
The Bolshevik Revolution has saddled revolutionaries with two
unfortunate legacies: The notion that nationalism and socialism are
more or less identical; and, the belief that the revolution must be
accomplished by a Leninist vanguard party. It is the philosophical
basis for, and the political consequences of that belief that are the
subject of Rudolph Sprenger's recently republished pamphlet
Bolshevism.
Rudolph Sprenger was a member of the German Social Democratic
Party until 1931. After leaving the party, Sprenger moved leftward
and came in contact with council communist circles, becoming a member
of the Rote Kampfer group. In 1933, he wrote, "Theses on Bolshevism,"
under the pen name Helmut Wagner. Bolshevism was first published in
1939, but this pamphlet is the first English edition for some time
and also contains a new introduction by Adam Buick.
Sprenger's thesis is not new. He argues through the use of Lenin's
own words, that although Lenin was a revolutionary he was merely an
anti-Czarist one, not a proletarian. Furthermore, the state the
Bolsheviks established merely fulfilled the tasks of the bourgeois
revolution.
Bolshevism was in many ways, the application Marxism to Russian
condition. However, it was a Marxism that led Marx to declare himself
not to be a Marxist. The early Bolsheviks certainly borrowed from
their populist rivals, and Lenin's early conceptions of the
revolution were of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and
the peasantry and of a constitutional republic. He fiercely argued
against the immediate possibility of socialism in Russia, and it was
Trotsky who first posed the notion of the permanent revolution in
1906.
It was only after the Bolsheviks were able to seize power through
the soviets that the myth of socialism as the immediate goal came to
be forged.
Sprenger can be supported in his thesis in several ideas. The
balance of class forces was extremely unfavourable in Russia. The
working class formed a small percentage of the population, surrounded
by the peasantry. Socialists had always believed that socialism was
possible only on the basis of plenty and a developed economy - Russia
was certainly not that. But although its working class was a minority
of the population, the Russian working class was both numerically
significant and concentrated in industry. In 1905, it also gave the
world a new form of struggle, the soviet or workers' council.
Sprenger also points to Bolshevism's antecedents in the Russian
revolutionary movement in populism and the conspiratorial politics of
Nechayev There's a certain truth in this. The Bolsheviks did practice
conspiratorial politics, although perhaps this was a necessity in
Russia, and did believe it was their duty to organize and lead the
working class. There was too also a mechanical understanding of Marx
and an overvaluing of Russia's populist past. Thus, Lenin's famous
text on organization borrowed its title from Chernishevsky's populist
novel What is to be Done
However, Lenin's view on class consciousness and the relationship
between class and party was derived from the Second International
Marxism which also tended to view consciousness as a thing. Lenin's
theory of class consciousness was of an external thing brought to the
workers by his party. In many other places we have argued against
this notion, as it essentially views the working class as a passive
tool. It also contradicts Marx's notion of the working class as the
revolutionary subject.
Certainly the Bolsheviks saw the working class as subordinate to
their party. During the revolution of 1905, Bolshevik leaders viewed
with suspicion the expression of the working class outside of their
organizations. This pattern was to be repeated in 1917 when in
February Stalin infamously supported the provisional government. In
the July Days in 1917, the Bolsheviks were the force holding back
what they considered the immature working class.
The problem with Sprenger's thesis is that it rather views the
Russian events in isolation from the rest of the world economy. From
the beginning of the twentieth century, it was no longer possible to
think of the world economy as the sum of a series of national
economies. Therefore, events could no longer be viewed within
national boundaries. During the World War, the Bolsheviks were one of
the few organizations which took an internationalist position against
the war; a position which was not based on pacifism or social
chauvinism. The revolution in Russia too must be viewed in an
international context as the beginning of a world revolution.
The isolation of the revolution meant the Bolsheviks were forced
by the logic of their position and their own ideological history to
suppress independent working class activity. While some argue the
working class in Russia didn't understand socialism or wasn't ready,
Marx noted: if you wait until everyone is ready for a revolution,
you'll never see a revolution. People change themselves by changing
society. The Russian revolution was ultimately a failure, but it was
a glorious failure.
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