11.1 Why The Russian Revolution Failed (TRANSCRIPT)

BIBLIOGRAPHY Hello fellow kids! And welcome back to What is Politics!  RECAP Last time we took a look at a frequently asked question – “why are communist countries always dictatorships”? Is it because communism is inherently flawed? Is communism just... Continue Reading →

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hello fellow kids!

And welcome back to What is Politics! 

RECAP

Last time we took a look at a frequently asked question – “why are communist countries always dictatorships”? Is it because communism is inherently flawed? Is communism just incompatible with human nature? Is it because all of the communist countries just didn’t do communism right? 

And we saw that the reason that communist countries have all been dictatorships, is actually really boring and simple – they’ve all been dictatorships because they chose to be dictatorships on purpose – they all based themselves on the Soviet Union’s Marxist-Leninist model. And the Soviet Union which was based in Russia, was the first time that a group of communists took power and held it for longer than a few months.  

And they all chose to emulate that model because while it failed at delivering the freedom and worker control of industry that were the main promises of socialism – and remember that the words communism and socialism were more or less synonymous until the russian revolution – while the soviet union failed at socialism, it did succeed in other important ways.

It succeeded at industrializing a formerly poor peasant country and making it a world superpower. It succeeded at educating its population, and in providing them with services, material security and with a “2nd world” middle income country standard of living.

It succeeded in allowing the soviet union to maintain its national independence from the rich countries and avoid the country becoming a banana republic. And, even though workers in the soviet union couldn’t choose or elect the top leadership of the country, the doors were open for workers and peasants to rise through the party and government bureaucracies and to gain access to middle class positions and even topmost elite positions of power in the country.

These were very important and impressive achievements to the people in the poor countries who carried out all of the successful communist revolutions around the world.  And the only communist countries that weren’t originally poor countries were some of the eastern bloc countries like East Germany and Czechoslovakia where the governments were basically installed by the Soviet Union after World War II. 

But that brings us back to our original question.  Why did the Soviet Union fail at socialism and become a dictatorship in the first place?

The people who established the Soviet Union did not set out to create an authoritarian dictatorship. Their goal was to establish a socialist society which was supposed to end all forms of domination relationships between human beings. And remember that the words communism and socialism meant more or less the same thing before the russian revolution. 

First and foremost, socialists wanted to get rid of the employer employee relationship, where unlimited property rights give owners the dictatorial power to order around workers all day long, because the workers depend on the owner’s property to live. So socialism aimed to replace the dictatorship of the owner, with the democracy of the workers, with workers directly managing their own workplaces – electing a manager, voting on the various policies of the workplace. Similar to how a cooperative works today, except that an enterprise would also be responsible to its consumers and other stakeholders in the community. 

And socialism was also supposed to eliminate the undemocratic rule of the government by the wealthy – whether it’s the wealthy aristocracy who rules via the monarchical state or whether it’s the wealthy business class who dominate elected governments because their wealth lets them pay for campaign contributions, and armies of lobbyists, and control over the media – on top of all the bargaining power that they have vis a vis the state via their control of all the jobs and factories and other important resources the everyone depends on. 

So socialists wanted replace this dictatorship of the business class, or in the case of the russian communists – the aristocratic class – with worker control of the government. And for many socialists, including the people who founded the soviet union, worker control of government meant the immediate or eventual elimination of the state itself – because a state was seen a machine that allows a minority of people to dominate the majority of people.

But instead of eliminating wage labour the Soviet Union just turned all workers into employees of the state.  Subject to the dictatorship of the party appointed factory manager instead of the private owner.  And instead of abolishing the state, the soviet union built up an all powerful state that controlled the workers instead of the other way around – and their election system did not allow the workers – or even rank and file members of the ruling communist party – to choose the leadership of the state.

Why did this happen?

Is it because there’s something inherently flawed about the goals of socialism that necessarily lead to dictatorship? Is it incompatible with human nature? Was there something inherent to the conditions of Russia that made socialisms failure inevitable? Did the people who carried out the russian revolution have evil, non-socialist, dictatorial intentions from the getgo?  Did they have good intentions, but just royally screw up in some way?  Or was it the threat of outside capitalist forces who forced them into adopting more and more authoritarian measures to survive?

And that’s the question that we’re going to answer today and in the next episode. 

Today, we’re going to set the scene for the two russian revolutions of february and october of 1917 which resulted in the establishment of the soviet union. So we’ll be looking at the competing socialist ideas of the various people who became key players in those revolutions, their theories and strategies and ideologies, and their practical realities – their material and class backgrounds and interests – and at the same time we’ll be putting these competing ideas into context by looking at the practical, material and social conditions of russia at the time, in particular by taking a look at the material and social conditions and the ideology of the peasants of russia, who comprised the overwhelming majority of the population – 85% at the time of the revolution. 

And then, in the next episode, we’ll look at what happened when the rubber hits the road and the various socialist theories and ideas and strategies smash head on into the reality of the actual conditions of Russia – particularly it’s peasant majority.  And how the theories of the leading actors of he revolution – but also their class and cultural backgrounds shaped their reactions to the events happening all around them – and how that all of that eventually comes together and results in the Marxist Leninist one party authoritarian system that characterizes all of the longer lasting communist states of the 20th and now 21st centuries.

PREFACE

Now I imagine many of you have already read a lot about the russian revolution, and some of you are walking encyclopedias of communism. And if you’re read a lot you know that you tend to have 3 or 4 different takes on why the russian revolution became a dictatorship, and that these takes tend to reflect ideology – the point is always to blame your ideological enemies and make excuses for the historical figures that you idenitfy with. It’s the fault of communism, it the capitalist countries’ fault, it’s stalin’s fault, it’s lenin and trotsky’s fault, it’s the peasants fault, it’s nobody’s fault, just a big sad inevitable tragedy. 

Well if you’re familliar with this show, you know that I don’t suck up 3 months of my life into making these episodes just to regurgitate ideas and takes that you can get elsewhere. 

The purpose of this, like all my episodes to help you – and me – become more efficient and intelligent political actors – to make you better at being able to achieve your political goals, and less likely to pursue tactics and to support people and groups that are harmful to your goals. 

So we’re not going to cheerlead and make excuses for my favourite side in the russian revolution and then to wank you off on which good guys you should identify with or bad guys you should hate as part the stupid socialism as identity politics overgrown teenage idiot festival that the internet turns everything into.  And identity politics are toxic enough on their own – turning socialism into identity politics is almost satirically stupid. So one of the things that I want to do with these episodes is get you to divorce your identity from your ideology. 

Instead of seeing your identity as I’m an anarchist, I’m a marxist leninist, i’m a liberatarian capitalist or whatever other juvenile nonsense is in your head – think of yourself and you – a human being, who believes in anarchist ideas, or leninist ideas, or capitalist ideas or whatever else, because you think that those ideas will produce the best results.  

As a human who HAS ideas, you can change your ideas over time if you learn new things or have new experience that are compelling enough.  But as a person whose identity IS your ideology, then you become a religious lunatic who can’t be critical of your beliefs without destroying your whole personality and identity.

And I’ll be doing episodes on the psychology and evolution of identity and politics in the future, but right now, the point of me doing episodes on the russian revolution is to learn from the very real failures of ALL of the sides of the russian revolution, and to apply the lessons of those failures to today and to the future – because we don’t keep making the same stupid mistakes over and over again – which is exactly what people are setting themselves up to do when you’re still clinging to political ideologies and identities from factions of the russian revolution that happened more than 100 years ago. 

And as we go along I’m going you’ll recognize certain elements of the history that resemble things from today, and I’ll be emphasizing those points on purpose. And one of the big mistakes we’ll see is mindlessly clinging to ideas from a different time and place that don’t actually apply to your situation. hint hint.

Another of the things that we’ll learn from this story is that system-changing or world changing crises can happen all of a sudden when no one was really expecting them – and when this happens a huge window can open for major political changes. And those can be horrible changes, or wonderful changes, or the window can be closed shut before anything much changes at all – like in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crash. 

And whichever of those things happens – horrible change, wonderful change or no change – very much depends on two things: 1st – the kinds of common sense ideas are that floating out there in the minds of the general public – and 2nd, who out there is organized and ready to take advantage of the situation and of the ideas floating around in the heads of their potential supporters.  

And one of the delusionally ambitious goals I had in mind when i started this show is to reshape those common sense ideas that people have – because so many of those ideas are just confused garbage when it comes to politics – and not just in the mainstream normal world of people who think about politics casually , but also very much in academia and among people who are very politically engaged and informed and active.  

But beyond ideas, regardless of what’s in peoples’ heads, if no one out there is organized enough to take advantage of a pivotal crisis situation, then the powers that be will shut that window as quickly as possible so that nothing changes.

OK so let’s get to it and let the cartoon begin…

LAST TIME RECAP

So last time where we left off, we saw that Karl Marx and his followers, including Lenin, Trostky and Stalin and the other eventual leaders of the russian revolution, thought that socialism was not possible in poor countries with majority peasant populations – like Russia. 

According to Karl Marx and his writing partner Freddie Engels, you could only have socialism in rich countries where capitalism was highly advanced, like England and Germany. 

First of all, you needed capitalism to develop the advanced technologies and big factories and mass production that you needed for Marx’ vision of high tech socialism to be economically viable. 

And at the same time capitalism takes a population made up largely of peasants or independent farmers and then puts them out of business and pushes them into the cities to become a giant mass of physically concentrated workers who don’t own any property and who can barely make a living on the job market in very difficult conditions. And it’s these workers, which Marx called the proletariat – people who own only their children – it’s the proletariat who will make socialism politically viable once they become a significant enough majority of the population.  

The factories at the heart of the economic engine of capitalism already required communal operation by large numbers of people – it’s just that they were currently operated in an undemocratic manner, with the owners controlling all of the power and taking all of the profit. All the workers had to do was join together, and overthrow the owners and run the factories democratically – though in order to do that they also had take overthrow and smash the state powers which artificially kept the capitalists in power by enforcing unlimited property rights.  And having nothing to lose but their chains in the famous words of the communist manifesto, they could be expected to do just that, if they were properly organized.

But – in poor countries, like in Russia in the 19th and early 20th centuries, where capitalism had only just begun the process of industrialization, you didn’t have the technology necessary to make socialism economically viable, nor did you have the concentrated proletariat necessary to make socialism politically viable. 

What you did have, was a country made up of 85% peasants with the rest being aristocratic landlords or bureaucrats and middle class professionals, plus a teeny tiny proletariat.  And according to Marx, and also to most urban intellectuals of his day, the peasants were just too ignorant and isolated to be capable of intelligent political acton. They were unable to imagine politics on a scale beyond their little isolated villages, and all they cared about was having more land for their own little family and having to pay less taxes or feudal dues. 

And as property owners, they would be expected have a tendency to think like little capitalists businessowners – they would want to protect private property against attempts to control it communally. And they were so ignorant that they they were liable to support monarchs and dictators like napolean and louis bonaparte, even when doing so was against their own interests. 

And we saw that Marx’ and Engels and their followers, like Gyorgy Plekhanov, the first prominent russian marxist, believed that if socialists somehow did manage to seize and retain power in a poor country like russia, that they’d up creating an authoritarian dictatorship with an urban socialist minority ruling over a giant rural peasant majority against their will and against their interests – totally defeating the purpose of socialism, which is supposed to be the “free association of the producers” in Marx’s words – meaning worker control of industry and government, not government control over producers and industry. 

So we left off with a bunch of questions:

First, if all the marxists at the time thought that you couldn’t have socialism in a poor country, then why did Lenin and Trotsky and the other leaders of the russian revolution carry out the communist revolution in the first place? 

And next, what’s the point of a even having a marxist socialist party if you’re in a country that isn’t capable of establishing a socialist economy? 

To answer these questions and to see why the russian revolution ultimately failed, we need to understand the history of socialism in russia, and the marxism in particular, and who marxism appealed to vs other versions of socialism. 

SOCIALISM COMES TO RUSSIA

So in Europe in the 19th century, socialism had the support of millions of industrial workers and artisans as well as among intellectuals, and it was the workers movement which many ways the heart of the socialist movement there. 

But in russia at the time, you barely had any working class in the sense of the proletariat, and meanwhile the vast peasant majority of the country tended to be illiterate, and isolated from the intellectual trends of europe and of russia itself. 

So socialism when socialism comes to Russia’ in the middle of the 1800s, it’s almost exlusively popular among intellectuals. And these intellectuals were the urban middle class, but also the rural middle class and there were also many aristocratic socialist intellectuals. And the line between upper middle class and aristocracy was blurry in this period as many aristocrats were middle class and even impoverished, and you could gain aristocratic status by getting certain middle class jobs. For example Lenin who was the leader of the october revolution and founder of the Soviet Union – his father became a hereditary aristocrat by becoming a director of schools in his district. 

And we see that some of the most important socialist thinkers in Russia – Plekhanov the father of Marxism, Lenin the founder of the Soviet Union, and Bakunin and Kropotkin the leading anarchists – and many others very often came from aristocratic families of one sort or another. 

And these intellectuals, despite coming from more fortunate classes, were interested in socialism because they were frustrated by the lack of freedoms and civil liberties in Russia under the extremely heavy handed and oppressive monarchy. And they were also motivated by wanting to be a cultural part of Europe, which they were cut off from in various ways, both economically but also due to government censorship. And the middle class intellectuals in particular were frustrated by their inability to find advancement in the Tsarist monarchy – and the Tsar of course was the name for the Russian King, and the word Tzar comes from the Latin Caesar. 

And given how oppressive the Tsarist regime was, the feeling of hatred against the regime was really intense and widespread among all classes. 

And among young people from these middle and aristocratic classes, there was of course a sense of idealism but also a lot of guilt – especially from the aristocratic class because these were kids reading european socialist literature about the exploitation of the working class and the peasants, while their own families were the ones directly doing the exploiting – the literal bad guys they were reading about. 

Plekhanov’s family for example – and like I said Plekhanov was the first important russian marxist – his family actually owned serfs. 

And you’ll notice that you have a lot of the same dynamics today in the United States – you have really expensive ivy league schools, where many of the socialists and various activists and supposed radical types you’ll find there are actually rich kids and trust fund children like everyone else in those schools and they spend their college years reading about how horrible capitalism is while their parents are all CEOs and corporate lawyers and while they themselves are in training to go work for those big corporations as lawyers or accountants or software developers.

Orlando Figes author of the very long but very readable book “The Peoples’ Tragedy” tells us:

 

> Guilt was the psychological inspiration of the revolution. Nearly all of these radical intellectuals were acutely conscious of their wealth and privilege. … As the children of noblemen brought up by serf domestics on the estate, many of them felt a special personal sense of guilt, since, … these ‘little masters’ had usually been allowed to treat their serf nannies and ‘uncles’ (whose job it had been to play with them) with cruel contempt.*

And if you know any rich people today you’ll notice that a lot of their parents encourage their kids to treat their filipino or latino nannies who raise them like shit – because the nannies are the ones raising their kids for them and the parents don’t want the kids to love the nanny more than the parents so they make sure that they’re regularly degraded and humiliated. And they’re also training their kids to be little employers and landlords and CEOs who are often better at making money without any silly guilt getting in the way, if they can see their employees as beneath them, and less deserving of wealth than they are.

And Figes goes on in that section to point out that 19th century RUssian literature was “dominated by the theme of repentance for the sin of privilege,” and he gives examples from Tolstoy and other important novels. 

Hmm, which annoying rich college kid trends political trends from today does the sin of privilege remind you of?  And Figes was writing this in the 1990s so he wasn’t trying to make the connection with modern privilege discourse that’s been popular over the past 10 years.  

But of course just because you’re a trust fund kid, or a literal prince like the great anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin was, doesn’t mean that you can’t be a sincere socialist – and today were do have some decent trust fund socialist kids coming from elite colleges who are doing important organizing work or writing for socialist magazines – but coming from these rich kid backgrounds very often creates various issues among even the most sincere revolutionaries in terms of what socialism actually means to them and why they want it, which we’ll look at more in a bit. 

So in this period, the 1860s to 1905 basically, you have a very small, but growing proletariat who as we’ll see later are angry at their working and living conditions, somewhat similar to the much larger working classes in western europe in the early period of industrialization, and then you have very angry and frustrated middle and aristocratic classes who are also overrun with guilt at the same time – and then you have the overwhelming mass of the population who were peasants who are barely aware of any of the political currents of the day, and they’re mostly focused on their own immediate exploitation, and their increasingly desperate and deteriorating conditions, which we’ll get back to in a bit. 

Now middle class people in Russia at the time, tended to be employed or dependent in some way on the tsarist bureaucracy – either as actual bureaucrats, or else as the professionals who served them, like lawyers, doctors, teachers and merchants. And you find these people in urban areas, but also many of them in rural areas in administrative towns. And these intellectuals who weren’t directly employed by the government were called the “third element” meaning people who were neither government employees, nor the traditional medieval aristocratic, peasant or clergy classes. And it was this “third element” class which was the hotbed of revolutionary ideas. 

And whereas you had different socialist trends and ideas among these socialist intellectuals, the most important one at this time were the “narodnik” socialists meaning the populist agrarian socialists – narod means the people and the people in russia were mostly peasants.

And the term populist is a little misleading here – populism usually refers to a left wing anti-elite sentiment coming from lower classes – basically people with less powerful coming together to defend their interests against people with more wealth and power. Like in the US in the 19th century, populists were usually farmers and working class people who were rising up against economic and governmental elites. But in Russia the populists were middle class and aristocratic people, championing the cause of peasants who barely knew that these champions or their ideas even existed. 

The populists had a mishmash of ideas, but what they had in common was that they believed in a socialism based in liberty and representative democracy, and that they shared an adoration of the peasants and peasant culture as both the embodiment of the true ideals of Russia, but also as the future material foundation for socialism in russia. 

In complete contrast to Marx and Engels’ writings of this period, the narodniks very much believed that because of its peasant charater, and especially the communistic nature of Russia’s peasantry which we’ll talk about in a minute – is what would propel Russia into socialism.  And in their view Russia would follow a very different path to development and socialism than europe would. 

Specifically, Russia would not have to go through the brutal capitalist industrialization phase that europe had been undergoing for the past century, and which Marx and Engels insisted was essential to the foundation of socialism. 

Now something very striking in this period is that even though Russia was overwhelmingly made up of peasants, and the core of the narodnik agrarian populist ideology was based on the social structure and values of the russian peasant – the narodnik intellectuals didn’t actually know very much about the peasants.

Even though a lot of the narodniks were rural intellectuals who lived geographically much closer to the peasants, they lived in rural administrative towns where they only socialized with other rural middle class and wealthier people.  The interactions they had with the peasants tended to be brief and superficial and on unequal terms.  

So like buying things from them in markets or else interacting with them clients – like when a peasant goes to see the doctor or has to register something at a bureaucratic office. Or else extremely hierarchical class relationships with peasants as nannies and servants in the case of the aristocratic classes. 

The exception to this was some rural teachers who tended to have more of an in-depth relationship with their students and their families. 

And so, the ideas that the narodnik populist intellectuals had about the peasant majority was often a bunch of common stereotypes and fantasies that urban people have about peasants or indigenous people. And while many middle class and rich people had negative stereotypes of peasants as stupid violent ignoramuses, these were populist socialist intellectuals – so their heads were full of positive stereotypes – or else what i call liberal unicorn zoo animal fetish object stereotypes, which are positive but are also infantilizing and dehumanizing at the same time. Like you’re treating people like fairy tale magical creatures. 

And of course we see a lot of this today in our era of infantile rich kid identity politics. Like I have a friend who’s a black musician and she’s always been interested in political causes – but she hasn’t been involved that much in the local activist community because when she would get invited to participate or speak at events by people related to the local music community that we’re part of, she would always be grossed out because the activist kids were treating her with a creepy worshipful reverence for being a real live black person – like oooh, the holy oppressed BIPOC stands before us, and we grovel before your lived experience – please expunge us with our shameful privileges and let us defer all of our opinons and judgment to you – unless you have opinions that diverge from our bible of correct stereotype opinions that you’re supposed to have. So she never went back to that shit and now just does political music projects of her own design and direction. 

Anyhow, in 19th century russia, the narodniks imagined the peasants as hard working, honest, noble, simple inherently good and wise folk, who embody the spirit of true russia and connection to the soil. 

Now you can imagine something similar in the US if you had like a big trend based on the idea of building socialism on traditional native american social structures – and actually that could be really interesting in a lot of ways – but think of how completely idiotic and obnoxious this ideology would get once it got into the hands of rich elite college kids who end up dominating all the discourse – like the explosion of all the creepy liberal stereotypes that you’d get about native american people as magical people with infinite wisdom perfectly in tune with the environment, and worshipping them and publicly flagellating themselves for being white settler colonialist allies or whatever. Like it’s better than just hateful racism, but it’s still dehumanizing and as we’ll see in a bit, this kind of fetish object worship can easily flip into hate and racism on a dime when the objects of your worship don’t fulfil the fantasy role that you set out for them.  And that’s not super surprising if you understand that those positive dehumanizing stereotypes fulfil the same function as negative racist stereotypes – the ultimate object is to enhance your own power.  

Anyhow – in russia, you had this worship of the peasant which was better than the usual stererotypes of peasants and drunken violent retarded imbeciles, but still not based on an intrumental fantasy as the peasants being the ticket to socialism for the intellectual classes. 

And the populists had good reasons to believe this – most importantly because in Russia, unlike in most of western europe, the peasant wasn’t the petit bourgeois mom n pop capitalist landowner described in Marx’ 18th Brumaire or Capital – most of the peasants of russia were already actual real communists, living on communes! They regularly redistributed their plots of land equally, and they shared various resources, and made communal decisions via patriarchal direct democracy of their communal assemblies. And this was stuff that the intellectuals did know about the peasants. 

So according to the narodnik populists, if you had some peasant literacy and communications technology to connect the peasants to the urban culture, and some improved agricultural techniques you could have a socialist society of peasant communes connected together by a democratic state staffed by the intellectual class.  

And so, given that the peasants were already communists, and that they were horribly exploited by the existing system, the narodniks believed that all the peasants needed was to be taught about socialism by the middle class and aristocratic socialist kids – and then they would surely rise up in revolt and conveniently do all the dangerous work of overthrowing the monarchy, after which the middle class and aristocratic intellectuals would of course get to occupy most of the top positions in a new socialist government. 

And always do a little thought exercise in you’re mind when you’re assessing radical intellectuals – ask yourself “where does this person see themselves in their ideal society that they’re advocating for”. Are they going to be just one of the people, or will they be in some special position of power.  Very often it’s the second type of person. And those type of people very often just see “the people” as a giant horsie or tidal wave to ride into their beautiful iron throne on – or their ergonomic iron government bureaucrat job chair or academic intellectual overlord robes.  

And people who come from social backgrounds where your wealth is based on using other people for your own benefit – like business owners and aristocrats and people who hire nannies to raise their kids for them – often tend to think of other people – particularly less wealthy people, and “the people” in a very instrumental way – as tools for enhancing their power and status – and instrumental means using something – or in this case someone – as an instrument to accomplish something.  

And keep in mind when I’m comparing radicals and activists today with their russian counterparts in the 19th and early 20th centuries, that it’s kind of unfair to the russians.  For all of their very real flaws, the russian radicals tended to be rather brave people – even the rich kid aristocrats faced serious consequences for their beliefs and actions and words, and those of them who joined labour organizations or socialist organizations put themselves at tremendous risk. But I’m focusing on the negatives here and the parallels because I want us to learn lessons and avoid their mistakes.  

GOING TO THE PEOPLE

Anyhow, in order to make their vision of peasant-intellectual socialism reality, a movement developed among the populist socialists – particularly among college kids called “going to the people” – where kids would go out into the rural peasant areas and try to convert the peasants to socialism, and they would also try to get them to rebel against the tsarist monarchy. And this peaked in summer school break of 1874, when thousands of college kids went to the people to preach the gospels of socialism and atone for their privileges and pay their dues by going to get jobs as farmhands and learning what that peasant lyfe was all about. 

Now again I’m talking shit about the socialist intellectuals, but going out and making contact with the vast majority of the population is one of the best ideas ever. Its exactly what you need to do – then as now.  And it’s really amazing to me how almost no one is doing this today.  And, as we’ll see, there was every reason for the peasants to be very, very interested in socialism, so the narodnik kids were 100% on the right track. 

However, like we just talked about, these kids knew very little about the peasants aside from their fantasy stereotypes and what they were reading in novels. And as a result, many of them approached their going to the people task like a bunch of self absorbed idiotic rich kids. They would try to dress like peasants and talk and act like peasants – and part of it was just thinking that this would make the peasants like them more, and part of it was because pretending to be a peasant was cool – like when rich suburban kids want to be poor black ghetto rappers, without any of the poverty. 

So like imagine the equivalent today – like some harvard or yale students whose parents make like 500,000 or a million dollars a year, and they go out into the poor black and latino areas surrounding the school – cause a lot of these ivy schools are right near poor neighbourhoods – and they’re like “hello fello negroes and latinx! my rap name is MC Scronch, and my pronouns is they/them, but i also accept he/him and she/her pronouns, and as a fellow marginalized identity, i understand how hard it is to be black and oppressed. I make mixed tape trap raps about it in my dad’s 2 million dollar studio from the record company he owns, but i hate him because he be wiggety wiggety wack! F capitalism yo – YT knowutimsayin? Would you like some xanax that I stole from my mom’s pharmaceutical corporation that she’s the CEO of? Socialism yo, it’s really dope, you gotta try it, it’s bussin. It’s the rebolution! So whaddaya say, you wanna overthrow the government for me so i can become secretary of anti-racism?

Now again – I’m being a little unfair because a lot of these college kids weren’t really rich – many were more like struggling downwardly mobile grad students today – and that’s a whole miserable class we need to talk about at some point – but a lot of the going to the people kids were wealthy, and either way, the peasants were decidedly not particularly impressed with them. 

Aside from the foolishness of many of these kids, the peasants had very good reason to be suspicious of them no matter how they presented themselves. In general, most outsiders that the peasants dealt with were bureaucrats, landlords and moneylenders who were try to exploit them or get something out of them in various ways, so they were suspicious of these outsider kids even when they weren’t total cosplay clowns. 

And so the going to the people movement didn’t have the immediate impact that the kids had expected. Outside of one area where one going to the people kid managed to incite a peasant rebellion against the monarchy by distributing fake manifestos from the Tsar, these going to the people efforts did not result in immediate revolution and overthrow of the monarchy that many of these kids had thought would be imminent. 

One student [S.M. Kravchinsky] remarked that:

‘Socialism’ … ‘bounced off the peasants like peas from a wall. They listened to our people as they do to the priest — respectfully but without the slightest effect on their thinking or their actions.’ 

Another disillusioned radical youth declared that

“We cannot change the thinking of even one in six hundred peasants, let alone of one in sixty” 

And that kid I just quoted, named Sergey Stepniak gave up on the peasants entirely at this point and became a terrorist, like many of his peers did at that point – and a few years later he actually managed to assassinate the head of the secret police. … 

But, some of these populist missionaries, usually young women teachers who actually had some prior relationship with peasants, or just had a better idea of how to genuinely connect with human beings, did have some real success in reaching them and gaining their trust and friendship.

These more successful efforts involved helping peasants to get information and skills that they actually wanted, versus trying to shove ideas down their throats. And this involved helping to teach them how to read, which peasants were very interested in. These kids organized mobile libraries, which the peasants voraciously gobbled up despite their reputation for being ignorant and stupid – though to the disappointment of the narodnik kids, the peasants were a lot more interested in fictional novels and reading about the french revolution than in reading about socialism and the future socialist revolution. 

And those efforts bore fruit over time. Over the subsequent 20 years or so, the areas where the narodnik kids had been the most active ended up being the areas where peasants later organized strikes and formed peasant associations and populist groups in reaction to government and landlord oppression. And the going to the people movement also coincided with a massive enrolment of peasants into rural schools, which peasants had to scrape together their meagre commune funds to collectively pay for. 

So this was definitely the way to go and we can only imagine what kind of amazing results this could have had over time had people learned from the more successful efforts and tried to build on them. 

But, trying to instigate the immediate overthrow of the Monarchy was obviously illegal – and most of the young radicals ended up being rounded up by police and often punished harshly, even executed. 

The ones that managed to persist and avoid the police were usually the ones who the peasants came to trust, and they survived in large part because the peasants hid them and protected them from the police.

But these were the exceptions. On the whole, given the risks involved, and how badly humiliated many of the kids were from being rejected by the peasants, most of them just gave up on this strategy, and the whole going to the people movement was nipped in the bud. 

Now this is a bit of a stretch because the russian kids were risking their lives, but it kind of reminds me of how all the socialist and left wing kids in the US had a tantrum and decided to give up entirely on politics after they lost with bernie in 2020. Waaain, we tried two whole times to elect a president against the organized power of the most entrenched elites and powerful corporations in the entire world and the party leaders and wealthy donors who have a zillion times more money than we have and who have all the connections and knowledge and experience, and they manipulated the rules to win, so theyre’s no point of ever trying anything ever again – even though we almost won against all those odds without barely knowing what the fuck we were doing because we only had 4 years experience.   

I went out and knocked on doors once, for 6 hours! Im never doing that again! Waain! 

Or AOC and Ilhan Omar don’t always vote courageously, and even though we keep electing more and more people who don’t take corporate money each cycle, the12 ones we have so far are not even running the whole government yet so I’m going to completely give up and just let corporations run 100% of congress, waaain. 

Like i don’t think electoralism is necessarily the best way to invest your energy – and it makes a lot more sense usually to start off building something at the local level and then move up to higher levels as your movement builds experience and support and power – but nevertheless in 2016 and 2020 people with no money or power or experience, managed to get really exceptional results in just 5 years of trying – and it created a whole new socialist movement overnight that hadn’t existed since the 1960s and now a majority of young people like socialism better than capitalism, even though they probably don’t know what either of those words really mean, but like jaysoos, it takes decades to build movements, you’re getting better results each time, and then you quit because you almost two times and the other side which is the most powerful people on earth plays dirty tricks? Have fun making more podcasts and whining to your snarky friends on twitter for the rest of your life. 

And of course in the US you wouldn’t get round up and hanged or shipped off to siberia for losing the election, you just lost the election. Like try again – or try some local politics and get some rent control passed or something. So the narodniks did deserve credit for bravery and they had way more of an excuse to quit. 

MARXISM COMES TO RUSSIA

Anyhow – by the late 1870s you end up with different two major reactions to the defeat of the going to the people movement, and these reactions end up forming the main strains of Russian socialism from that point on. 

On the one hand you had a majority who continued to believe that foundation for Russian Socialism was going to be the Russian peasants and their communes. 

The lesson that they drew from the failure of the going to the people movement was that the peasants were too oppressed to revolt on their own. So now they believed that socialism could only happen if you overthrew the monarchy and liberated the peasants first, and then you would go ahead and establish a democratic republic and connect that with the peasant communes. And it was the intellectuals who were going to have to do this instead of the peasants doing it for them. And many of these populists turned to terrorism and other violent anti government activity with that goal in mind. 

And they weren’t the only ones doing terrorism – with no legal avenues to express themselves or to organize, terrorism was an extremely popular choice for frustrated young activists who didn’t have the patience or experience to do underground organizing. More than 17,000 people were killed by terrorism in the last 20 years of the monarchy before the socialist revolution – and it wasn’t just populists, it was anarchists and blanquistes and nihilists and all sorts of other frustrated intellectuals that we’ll talk about as we go. And while there were some high level assassinations like the head of secret police and even the tsar got merked in 1881 – a lot of it was just nonsense, blowing up cafés and just killing random rich people and middle class people and often their working class employees. 

And most of it just resulted in worse and worse government repression. Like tsar Alexander II gets assassinated, and then literally the same day, his much more right wing conservative son Alexander III takes power and ramps up the repression and reverses his dads liberal reforms. 

Anyhow that populist socialist branch of socialism that wants a revolution to establish a socialist democratic republic based on peasant socialism becomes the Socialist Revolutionary party or the SR’s. And not all of the SRs were in favour of terrorism, but they all agreed that you needed a revolution to overthrow the monarchy and replace it with a democratic republic before you could move to peasant based socialism. 

MARXISM COMES TO RUSSIA

Another group of socialists, particularly those going to the people kids who got rejected by the peasants, learned a different lesson from the failure of their movement.  And when rich kids – and adults – don’t get they want they often get weally, weally upset and have a big tantrum. 

So these former kids now lil adults, decided that the reason that they failed so badly was not because they were just inexperienced kids who didn’t know what they were doing yet, or because they didn’t put in the time and effort to get it right in difficult conditions – no, the reason that they failed was because the peasants were just too stupid and ignorant to know what’s good for them. 

Because the peasants didn’t fulfil the role that they had layed out for them in their fantasies, they switched on a dime from their liberal zoo unicorn positive stereotypes to the old fashioned racist style stereotypes and decided that peasants were a useless class that had no role in the socialist future and that they were in fact an obstacle to that wonderful future. 

And these angree rejected narodnik kids, found a perfect affirmation of their hatred of the peasants in the works of … you guessed it, big daddy papa smurf himself Karl Marx and Freddie Engels. Not only did Marx’s writings portray peasants as stupid obstacles to socialism – which the narodniki nudniki had experienced first hand – but they were also inspired by Marx and Engels’ confident belief that the peasants’ backwards and idiotic way of life was doomed to be swept away from history by the progressive forces of capitalism, and that their disappearance was in fact the only path to socialism. 

And just like when hillary clinton’s people blamed her election loss on the russians and james comey and racist unemployed pill addicted rust belt workers whose lives bill clinton destroyed with NAFTA instead of blaming the clintons and 40 years of democrats and republicans looting and pillaging all the gains the american working class had made since the new deal, the narodnik kids found in Marxim the perfect excuse to avoid having to look in the mirror for the source of their failure to connect the the peasants.  

And thus the first generation of Russian Marxists were born. And they were led by Gyorgy Plekhanov, whose parents owned had serfs and who was an OG disillusioned going to the people reject extraordaire.  And he hated the peasants with a passion for the rest of his life. 

These kids remind me of Martin Luther who started the protestant reformation – at one point he decided that he would go preach his amazing christianity to the jews of europe, and then he went it there, like hello fellow kids, will you accept the lord jesus christ in whose name you keep getting lynched and banned from most occupations as your personal saviour? And they chased him out of town, which he reacted to by becoming a huge jew hating anti-semite. 

But back to russian marxism. 

Although socialist activity was illegal, and texts promoting socialist activity were supposed to be censored, government censors considered Marx and Engels’ work to be “harmless abstract speculation” as opposed to the rabble rousing calls to action of the populists, and as a result most if it was allowed to be freely published and distributed.

Again, not a perfect analogy but it makes me think of the postmodernism in academia – in the 1960s and 1970s there was a big was of student radicalism as working class people entered universities on a mass scale for the first time.  And this radicalism had a very practical edge to it, and a lot of students were involved in research and ideas that would have practical applications for a more egalitarian world, and they were also engaging real world activism and organizing – often inspired by 3rd world Marxism actually. 

And this petrified university and government and business authorities in the US and other rich countries. And one of the reasons that US tuition is so absurdly high today was as a deliberate strategy to bog down working class students in so much debt that they wouldn’t have the time to do any activism.  And it would also prevent them from doing low paying public interest activist jobs and force them to do evil corporate jobs to pay their debts. 

And then fast forward to the 1990s, and all the activism and often marxism had been replaced with the radical posturing of postmodernism – except it’s all gibberish that no one can understand, and it’s main practical application is to make people too afraid to do any activism or radical social science research because foucault teaches you that any time you try to do anything to challenge power, you just mysteriously replicate oppressive power structures for no comprehensible reason.  Just voodoo.  

And the background for this is actually the soviet union and the other marxist leninist countries – there was these huge revolutions, russia and china – that were supposed to overthrow ancient power structures and replace them with freedom and equality.  But instead they replaced the old hierarchies with new ones, because magic.  That was foucault’s big contribution. And i’m showing you in these videos that it’s not magic, it’s just bread and butter practical material issues that you can actually do something about.  

And the authorities were perfectly comfortable with this postmodern nonsense because it was a bunch of theoretical excuses for not actually doing anything. And that same postmodernist phony radical culture sneered at the pracitcal activism of the 60s and 70s as naive and childish and vulgar – a bit like how David Graeber points out in Bullshit jobs that people with high paying miserable useless jobs hate people who actually do useful work for a living. It was much more sophisticated to wank around about how everything just replicates power no matter what you do, and that categories don’t exist and that nothing exists and all you could do was wank yourself off to your own gibberish and gossip about your academic competitors and then try to cancel them 30 years later when that gets invented. 

Anyhow in russia at first, marxism was kind of the postmodernism of its day – non threatening radicalism – and the authorities at first were quite comfortable with it versus the rabble rousing radical populism which they feared – and that might sound crazy given how radical marx was, but you’ll see what i mean in a few seconds. 

Very quickly Marx and Engels’ writing had a huge impact on the Russian intelligentisa – but not in ways that you might expect. 

Among the intellectuals who first became enamoured with Marx, particularly after Capital Volume 1 was translated into Russian, was not just the peasant hating going to the people rejects, but also the pro-capitalist economists and the big wealthy industrialists!

If you know Marx’s writings, you know that Marx criticizes capitalism and wants it to end, but he also portrays it as a progressive force – until it’s not. The capitalists methods are brutal and exploitative, but they generate innovations and major improvements in production of goods and agricultural techniques, and the business class which orchestrates them tends to favour civil liberties which benefit everyone. Meanwhile the economics of capitalism tear apart backwards social superstitions and conventions and cultural hierarchies, and they force unproductive peasants to become productive proletarians or productive large scale agricultural entrepreneurs. And of course, according to Marx’ writings at the time, you can’t get to socialism, without going through capitalism first. It’s capitalism that develops the infrastructure and creates the necessary economic and social conditions for socialism according to Marx and Engels. 

So in russia, which was still basically governed by a monarch with a quasi-feudal landowning aristocracy, and where capitalism was just getting started, the capitalists and liberal intellectuals were waving around Das Kapital to show how progressive they were, and why you needed to let them pay low wages and why you needed to resist the growing call for restrictions on factory labour hours and safer working conditions! 

Whether you’re a communist or a liberal, you’ll never get those liberal values that the upper classes long for, nor will you get to socialism which all those disaffected middle class and aristocratic intelligentsia desire so passionately without our wonderful ruthless exploitative capitalism and it’s horrid labour practices!

To quote Esther Kingston-Mann, from her book Lenin and the Problem of Peasant Socialism:

“Among academic economists and industrialists, there were those who found in [Marx’] Capital a source of powerful arguments for the brutally progressive virtues of free enterprise and long working hours… Moscow factory owners sponsored lectures on the Marxist “proof” that unfettered capitalist initiative represented a step forward in Russia’s historical development.” 

Of course Marx’ and Engels’ work was also extremely critical of capitalism, so their work was also popular among the Populist socialists we’ve been talking about. 

For example in 1870, when a Russian factory owner claimed that restrictions on child labor delayed civilizational advances of capitalism that would eventually benefit the factory workers, a populist narodnik socialist refuted his arguments using the descriptions of child labor the he got from das Kapital.

But if the russian populist socialists appreciated marx’ and engels’ analysis and critiques of capitalism, they were disgusted by their attitude towards the peasants. And they thought that the marxist idea that you had to just sit on your ass and wait 100 years for capitalism to do it’s dirty work for you was both cruel and cowardly. 

So for example one Russian socialist, Pyotr Tkachev who was a big inflience on Lenin, had a bitter debate with Engels about the possibility of socialism in Russia – and Tkachev was just horrified at what he considered Engels’ heartless and cowardly insistence that Russia would just have to be stuck with all the evils and horrors of capitalism for the next century or so. 

this does not disturb them [them meaning the marxists] … they will just wait. They do not lack patience! 

The people’s grief, the people’s tears are not their grief, their tears! Why should they compromise themselves in risky enterprises [meaning revolutionary activity]? They want to act only when it is a sure thing.

[But] it is impossible to act now and to be certain. We, all the revolutionaries, understand this very well, and they [the marxists] understand it better than we. But we are not afraid of the risk. Neither we, nor the people have anything to regret, anything to lose!

And the populists also found the russian marxists to be much too friendly to the bourgeoisie and to capitalism. 

For example, Plekhanov the father of russian marxism was running around chastizing the proletariat for not being supportive enough of the bourgeoisie’s social and legislative goals because in his mind advancing the goals of the bourgeoisie was the only way to eventually achieve the workers’ goals, as well as his own goals. 

It’s like today when you have all these comfortable self satisfied dorks telling you that you can’t have rent control, you need let landlords evict your entire neighbourhood because that will incentivize more housing which will eventually benefit all renters with lower rents in 200 years.  Meanwhile until then you’re working 60 hours a week just so that you can live under your mom’s bed until you die. 

Pyotor Struve who started out as am important Marxist, loved the bourgeoisie / business class so much, that he bought the company – and by that I mean that he ended up founding Russia’s main liberal business class party – the constitutional democrats or Kadets for short. And they’ll play a big role in the russian revolution as we’ll see next time. 

Later in his life Struve pointed out that the Russian Marxists of this period were actually playing the same role that the bourgeois liberal intellectuals had played in western europe in the early years of capitalism, in the sense that they were arguing for and providing intellectual justifications for the goals of the business class – like turning the peasants into landless prolatarians, and the establishment a representative democracy that will be dominated by the business class. 

And he pointed out that in general, the marxists in russia were more interested in attacking people who defended the peasants and their communes than they were in attacking the business class!

Ironically the marxists were on the same side as the monarchy in this respect – in the early 1900s peasant unrest was growing and the monarchy introduced capitalist reforms specifically to destroy the peasant communes and to turn the communist peasants into the petit bourgeois entrepreneur type peasants that existed in western europe and the united states. The government hoped that this would make the peasants more conservative and interested in defending private property and in siding with the government. 

Many marxists supported those government reforms because the faster the peasants could be ripped away from their communes and then turfed out into bankruptcy and into the cities, the more their proletarian base would grow and the faster their socialist future would come.  

For example, Nikolai Ziber, the first big russian marxist economist insisted that russian peasants needed to be “cooked up in the industrial boiler” until they became proletarians for russia was to have any future.

And Vladimir Lenin, the future leader of the communist revolution thought along those same lines when he was a young man. There was a serious famine 1891 in rural areas, and at that time Lenin was against the idea of humanitarian aid to the peasants.  Why was the future leader of 3rd world communist against helping peasants avoid startvation?  Because the famine would force millions of peasants to escape to the cities and become proletarians, which would is what you need for socialism according to his hero Karl Marx.  If you helped the peasants not starve to death, and if you try to help them remain on their communists communes, then you’re just slowing down the forward march of progress and history and communism!

Again, ask yourself – why does this person want socialism? Does this person really have deep empathic feelings for the liberation of the oppressed groups of humanity, or is it something else? 

And frankly this is a very human trait – we often view people in terms of how they can benefit us, but when it’s divorced from actual connections with real human beings and it becomes abstractions, it can reach really horrid proportions of psychopathy. And it’s worse when you’re young and don’t have as much experience with people and also all your empathy neurons haven’t grown into your brain yet…

And speaking of little rich shits as the core of socialism in Russia and trust fund socialists in the US today – during that same 1891 peasant famine when Lenin is advocating for letting peasants be destroyed by famine, he sued his own peasant neighbours for causing damage to the family estate. Meanwhile he would be writing scathing articles against “gentry capitalism” while all of his income was from rents and interest derived from the sale of his mother’s estate.

So at this time, the populist socialists were sharply criticizing the marxists for being cheerleaders of the bourgeoisie and cheerleaders for capitalism, and cheerleaders for the inhumane destruction of the peasants and their communes. 

PARTIES

In 1898, the Marxists decided to organize, and they form a political party called the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which is what most socialist parties in most countries at that time we called.    

And today we think of the word “social democratic” as meaning basically a capitalist state with welfare programs, like Sweden or Denmark. But that’s a legacy of the fact that it was socialist parties called social democrats who introduced all of those social programs into capitalism in the early 1900s before they ended up giving up on socialism in later decades, especially the 1980s and 90s. 

And this brings us back to one of our big questions asked at the beginning – if karl marx and marxists in general didn’t believe that you could have socialism in a peasant country like Russia, then why on earth would they start a Marxist Social Democratic Labour Party in Russia to begin with? 

So the idea behind the marxist party in russia, was that as capitalism would progress, the party would help organize the growing number of proletarian workers who would be thrown out of peasant life and into the cities. The party would help organize them into unions, and help them organize to overthrow of the tzar together with the business class. 

And keep in mind that socialist political parties are illegal during most of this period, and there’s no democratically elected parliament or anything except for a couple of years after an attempted revolution in 1905, so all of these political parties are underground activist organizations for most of their existence until we get to the revolution of 1917 – they weren’t boring had social climber corruption engine political parties the way we think of them today. They were more like the Black Panthers or like Hizbullah or something before they became an electoral party – they were organizing outside of the state but with the goal to eventually take over the state or at least participate in it. 

And of course since socialism was impossible in Russia, the marxists expected that the first revolution – the one which would overthrow the Tzar and the aristocracty – would be a bourgeois capitalist revolution, which would result in a democratic capitalist republic like what we have today in europe, with power in the hands of the big business class. 

And the socialists could then be a legitimate legal political party with nice jobs in the legislature, representing the factory workers, and advancing their rights and advocating for them to have the best possible conditions that labourers could have in capitalism – an 8 hour work day, the right to unionize, an end to child labour, rights for women etc – maybe even some old age insurance or injury insurance. And then after a hundred years or so, when the workers would be a large enough majority the party would lead the workers through another revolution, this time to usher in socialism. 

Unsurprisingly, given their ideology, the marxists had very little support outside of the big urban areas. And the support that they did have was limited mostly to intellectuals and the small, but growing number of proletarian factory workers – and even among them they were mostly only popular with those workers who were more skilled and more literate than most, rather than the majority of workers who had just come from the farm recently, and many of them were still members of their communes, going back the farm every harvest season to help out the family and the commune. 

ANARCHISM

Now at the same time as you had Populism which was the vast majority of the socialist movement, and Marxism which was a small minority, you also had an anarchist movement in Russia. And like we went over last time, the anarchists were socialists who believed that you absolutely need to abolish the state from the getgo for any kind of real socialism to happen. For the anarchists, the state is not a neutral tool that can be good or bad depending on who’s running it.  It’s an institution, which can only exist to prop up the ruling class, whether that class be the monarchy, the capitalists or socialist intellectuals.   It can’t be used by the people for the people, because once people get into office, they become a ruling class with different material interests from the people who elected them.    

And the anarchists saw all the politcal parties, whether the marxists or the socialist revolutionaries as mainly vehicles for middle class and aristocratic intellectuals to advance their own insterests in the name of the people – whether it be the peasants in the case of the populist socialist revolutionaries, or whether it be the proletarians in the case of the marxist social democrats.  The peasants and the proletariat are the horsies that will ride the socialist intellectuals into the iron throne or whatever. 

And in this sense the anarchists were more marxist than marx himself – and what I mean by this is that marx was very keen to identify different classes of people as behaving according to their material interests – and the whole point of dividing people up into different class categories is to predict how they’ll be likely to act in terms of them being allies or enemies on the road to socialism – yet Marx had this huge blind spot when it came to the idea that intellectuals, or state representatives might have different material interests than the people that they claimed to represent. Last time I quoted Bakunin’s famous predictions about this, and next time we’ll see how this blind spot in Marxism expands to galactic proportions when we get to Marx’ russian followers in the period of and after the russian revolution. 

Now where Marx and his followers felt like their socialism was unique in that it had science and the supposed laws of history behind it – and Engels obnoxiously called Marxism “scientific socialism” – the russian anarchists, many of whom were followers of Pyotr Kropotkin who was a biologist, also felt like they had science and the trajectory of history and material conditions on their side. They just had a different assessment of how things were going to play out and the balance of material forces than Marx did. 

Kropotkin noticed that social animals could only live by working together and helping eachother, and that humans were more social than most. And Kropotkin noted that the intensifying autocracy and absolutism of the past couple of hundred of years looked like a temporary aberration in human history. In the middle ages, and in indigenous societies, just as among the russian peasantry of his day, humans prospered by forming voluntary associations and working together, and they tended more often than not to live communally.  This was the natural state of humanity for Kropotkin and it had only been temporarily usurped in recent centuries by absolutist monarchs.  And the natual spirit of mutual aid and decentralized cooperation was reasserting itself in part via movements to overthrow autocracy and establish democracy and then socialism over the previous 100 years or so.

Unlike the marxists, but like the populists, the anarchists believed that a peasant country was no obstacle to socialism. Peasants would be convinced to adopt socialism because it was in their own interest to do so. And given that Kropotkin’s vision of socialism was based on small scale production, and it did not necessitate the giant advanced industry or the proletarianization of the peasants the way that Marxism did, this wasn’t an unreasonable expectation. 

But what’s really interesting about the anarchists is just how not popular they were in Russia. 

Aside for a couple of years around the 1905 attempted revolution anarchism was almost non existent in russia until the revolutions of 1917. They had zero adherents among the peasants, and barely had any in the intellectual circles either.  Like you’ll read histories of anarchism and the author is like ‘anarchist societies flourished in the lead up to the february revolution of 1917 – they had 100 members in Petrograd and 70 in moscow – cities with a million people in a country with 100 million people.   

And this is really remarkable for two big reasons. For one, arguably the top two anarchist thinkers ever, Bakunin and Kropotkin were russian. Yet anarchism had no traction outside of the revolutionary periods of 1905 and then 1917 and its aftermath. Bakunin and Kropotkin’s ideas became popular and inspired important long lasting social movements and huge organizations of anarchist peasants and factory workers in southern italy and france and especially in spain – but in russia crickets. 

And maybe it’s not so surprising that anarchism wasn’t so popular among the middle class and aristocratic intelligentsia – after all the intellectual class doesn’t really play any special role in anarchism. They need to like get a job and participate in the economy like everyone else.  There’s no horsie to ride to power on.  And also, you might have to change your lifestyle in unfamilliar ways vs other types of socialism where you’d still get to be a bourgeois lifestyle intellectual after the revolution.  

But it is really remarkable that anarchism made no inroads in the giant peasant population of russia. And the reason that this is so remarkable is because anarchism is in many ways the perfect the ideology for peasants in general, and for Russian peasants in particular. 

You see aspirations that resemble anarchism in peasant movements throughout history around the world. The english peasants revolt of 1381 that i’ve talked about before aspired to a stateless christian commonwealth, the Zapata rebellion in Mexico in the early 20th century and then again in the 1990s had similar aims. And anarchism was popular among peasants in italy and spain, where in the 1930s the peasant and urban anarchists together managed to make a revolution for two years or so. 

But Russia in particular had a history of all sorts of peasant religious sects, and peasant uprisings which had aims similar to anarchism over the centuries. 

For example the Dukhobor sect, which are sort of like Russian amish people – one Dukhobor speaking from prison in 1791 told his captors:

“The children of God have no need either of tsars or ruling powers or of any human laws whatsoever.

Peasants tended to conceive of land as something that could only belong to God, or to nobody, or to the state – and they tended to imagine the state as a giant commune of communes – similar to the anarchist federation ideal. 

In the lead up to the almost revolution which happened in 1905, a peasant represantative of the national peasants union which the peasants had formed declared that

“Land is the mother of us all. It is not the product of human hands, but of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, it must not be bought and sold.” 

And a majority of the assembled delegates supported abolition of private land ownership and their transfer of existing landholding to the population on the basis of family size.

And the great 19th century Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy was famously a sort of christian anarchist and his ideas did have many adherents in Russia and around the world, though it wasn’t a revolutionary political type of anarchism that planned to overthrow the government and give power to the peasants – it was a pacfist spiritual movement that was much less of a threat to authority, even though they rejected both the state and the orthodox church.   

According to Paul Avrich one of the leading historians of anarchism:

“Leo Tolstoy and his followers … began to form anarchistic groups during the 1880’s in Tula, Orel, and Samara provinces, and in the city of Moscow. By the turn of the century, Tolstoyan missionaries had spread the gospel of Christian anarchism with considerable effect ,throughout 1 the black-earth provinces 

Yet, despite all of this, avrich continues:

Notwithstanding this rich legacy left by the peasant revolts, the religious sects and Tolstoyan groups, the Petrashevtsy and Slavophiles, and Alexander Herzen, no revolutionary anarchist movement arose in Russia before the twentieth century—not even in the heyday of Bakunin during the late 1860’s and early 1870’s.

And we see that when anarchism does come to the Russian empire, it’s most powerful impact is among peasants from the south of Ukraine, and some of the urban workers and sailors in moscow and saint petersburg, but not among the giant majority of central russian peasants.  ANd that is an incredible failure of the russian anarchist movement. 

WHO ARE THE PEASANTS? 

Now to understand why anarchism is such a natural fit for peasants around the world, and to understand why socialist anarchism never got anywhere in Russia, we need to understand a bit about who peasants are in general and who the russian peasants were in particular, and then we need to understand who the russian anarchists were. 

First of all, what the hell is a peasant?

A peasant is a lot like an indigenous subsistence farmer – and peasants and indigenous subsistence farmers have a lot in common – they are small communities of people who live from their agricultural labour – but there are two main things that separate them. First of all, what makes a peasant a peasant and not an indigenous subsistence farmer is that the peasant community has been conquered by a more powerful force and then gets exploited by them. 

Where the indigenous farmer works to provide food for their family and their community and their cultural and religious activities, and often for trade – the peasant has to do all of those things but also has to give a significant portion of their produce to the conquering power. And these conquering powers usually organize themselves into a state precisely in order to effectively maintain their relations of exploitation and domination over the peasants. 

The classic example of an early state is when a group of pastoralist raiders would conquer local farmers. Patoralists are nomadic people who live from their animal herds, like the mongolians with their horses, or the Nuer with their cattle or the beduin with their camels. And pastoralists are usually great warriors, because they have to constantly defend their herds from other pastoralists, and they’re constantly trying to steal animals from their neighbours to increase their herds. And they’re good at conquering peasants because peasants are stuck on their plots of land, while pastoralists are nomadic and free to go anywhere with grasses to graze.

Now when pastoralists unite together into large groups – often under a great religious leader who can unite the factious warring tribes – they become a fearsome conquering army. And they often figure out that instead of living a precarious life doing pastoralism plus agriculture, it’s a lot easier for them to just conquer a bunch of sedentary farmers who are stuck in one place all year and then just live from the peasants labour. So once they unite, they can end up conquering vast territories of helpless subsistence farmers very easily – think of the mongol empire or the great arab expansion over huge continents. And if the conquest is of a large enough scale, they’ll form a state and even a vast empire to manage their exploitation of the peasants.

And then their descendants end up being lazy corrupt shit heads and fancy lads and lassies who live entirely from exploitation and who’ve never done a day of work in their life, like most ruling classes.

This is why Marx and many socialists in the 19th and early 20th centuries thought that the state existed exclusively for the exploitation of one class by another. Because that’s exactly why most states came into existence for most of human history. And before the era of universal suffrage and mass democracy where people actually started getting services from their governments, states were just very obvious exploitation machines – using your taxes to maintain the ruling class’ exploitation of you. 

And as a result, most peasants around the world have historically hated the state. Before the era of mass democracy and social programs, all the state did was take a giant chunk of their labour to enrich the ruling class, while supplying nothing in return. The state judged them in courts run by and for the ruling classes and subjected them to police who enforced the rules that exploited them for the ruling class. And once the ruling class would become too rich and lazy to do any actual fighting, the state would start to conscript the peasants sons into the army and force them to fight and die for faraway causes and wars that only benefited their rulers. 

And peasants tend not to have any interest in wars because there’s often barely any difference in being in conquered by one state versus another state – one year you’re subjects of the austro hungarian empire, the next year the germans, the next year russian tsar, and not much changes.

And before the era of mass literacy and mass media, peasants had no sense of nationalism or national identity. National identity and nationalism – the idea of your identity being connected to people you’ll never meet and territories that you’ll never visit – are very much products of the imagination, which are made possible by literacy and mass media – in the 19th century that was newspapers, novels – to put those imaginary ideas in your head – and they tend to be an urban phenomenon, promoted by ruling classes who aspire to control and unite larger territories under their rule. 

Today we’re plugged in to mass media all day long which expands our social horizons in real and fictional ways, and we get our identities from media and live half of our lives as part of real and imaginary social communities – but the world of the historic pre-democracy peasant was limited to the real world, plus their religions and gossip – and their real worlds tended to be quite small. 

They’d be stuck on a plot of land and spend most of their lives in the same village aside from festivals and markets without much connection or information about the outside world besides gossip and conversations had at those special occasions. As a result, their collective identity was often just with their village or their commune, or sometimes their region. The only time they would meet outsiders besides festivals and markets was landlords and tax collectors, or be if they got conscripted into a war, or if the were forced to work part of the year in an urban factory.

And that brings us to the other great division between peasants and indigenous agriculturalists. And that is religion. Indigenous subsistence farmers usually have their own belief system which is adapted to their social and environmental worlds and their local indigenous social hierarchies or lack thererof. But peasants are usually subject to the religion of the ruling class, which is one of the main ways that ruling classes maintain control over their peasants – and in this way they’re culturally integrated them into the broader hierarchy of the exploitation state. 

But peasants don’t usually just accept the religion that’s handed to them by elite clergy of the ruling class – religion and ideology have to make sense and fit within the material and practical conditions of peoples’ lives in order for them to take it seriously long term. So peasant versions of religion will often be a really a interesting mix of the official state religion transformed by their own previous indigenous customs and their value system – it’s called “syncretism” in anthropology – and we have classic examples this in latin america where you have ancient mayan rituals practiced but with catholic saint imagery and icons all blended in. 

And that’s typical of peasant religion.  And the word “pagan” or paganus in latin means a person from the country! In the first centuries of christian expansion, the true christian religion was thought to exist in the cities and monasteries, and the peasants were seen as impure corrupters of the religion. Religion in states was always a tool of empire but of the city over the peasant. 

And among peasants where there are no traces of the indigenous religion left – like in 19th century russia, you’ll still have very distinct changes to the religion among peasants to make it fit with in with the values which are derived from their every day lives, and economy. So like when we looked at the english peasants of 1381, we saw that although the peasants were devout christians, their version of christian values were in total opposition to the state’s version. The state religion placed the king above the nobility who were above the peasants as the natural order of the world. But the peasants understood the bible in a way that rejected the nobility and saw them as parasites and ungodly people who don’t do any labour. When Adam Delved and Eve span, who was then a gentleman? went the refrain – meaning when adam plowed the fields and even spun yarn, there were no social classes, no nobility, everyone worked for a living as equals. That’s God’s way. 

But while the english peasants rejected the nobility, whom they knew from experience to be parasites, they they still revered the king – who they didn’t have any contact with, and who was just this figure of imagination that they could fill up with any ideals that they wanted to – and they saw him as legitimately appointed by God and as a sort of religious leader. And we saw how that belief ended up destroying the peasant’s revolt in the end. 

WHO ARE THE RUSSIAN PEASANTS?

So what are the conditions and beliefs and ideals of the peasants in Russia in the late 1800s and early 1900s, which is when the different types socialism are picking up steam and gaining traction among the urban and rural intelligentsia? 

In terms of beliefs, most of the peasants of Russia had that sort of natural christian quasi anarchism that we saw with the peasants of 1381 and that we see so often with peasants. They believed that landlords, and moneylenders, and police, and bureaucrats and aristocrats and private land ownership should not exist. And their ideal world is one where everyone makes an honest living by working the land in their communes, which are divided up equally so everyone gets an equal piece of land – which was also the vision of the far left in the french revolution of 1789 incidentally. And you’d also have crafts and people trading in markets for things that they need that they don’t make locally. 

They believed that decision making should be communal and democratic, though it would be also be patriarchal – which is how decisionmaking was made in russian peasant communes. And their idea for russia as a whole is that it would be one giant commune of communes, and the federal government would be like one big direct democratic peasant assembly. The only major ways that they really differed from general ideas of anarchist socialism was the patriarchy and that they were were deeply in religious and they thought the Tsar was their Little Father, appointed by god to be a sort of non-authoritarian symbolic embodiment of all of their values. And that sounds incompatible with anarchism, but we’ll see later that when the tsar and the church don’t act according to their values, the peasants were very quick to ditch both of them.  And surprisingly, we’ll see later than when the peasants started forming revolutionary assemblies they often insisted on women’s right to vote in them.  

In terms of social structure, like I mentioned earlier, the peasants lived on communes, which had communal property but also private property, and separate plots of land for each family, though care was taken to make sure that each plot was always equal. 

To quote from the sociologist of peasants Teodor Shanin from his book Late Marx:

each household held unconditionally only a small plot of land, i.e. house and garden plus its livestock and equipment. The use of arable land was assigned to a family on a long-term basis by its commune, the meadows were reassigned annually and often worked collectively, the pastures and forest were in common use. … Many vital services were run collectively by the commune: a village shepherd, the local guards, the welfare of the orphans, and often a school, a church, a mill, etc. An assembly of heads of the households controlled and represented communal interests : decided about the services, elected its own officers, and collected its informal taxes or dues … the assembly also periodically redivided the arable lands in accordance with some egalitarian principle, usually in relation to the changing size of the families involved. 

There was some economic inequality on the commune, and the Marxists tried to make a lot of this in order to argue that peasants were little capitalists at heart and the commune wasn’t really communist – but this was almost entirely a factor of which part of their life cycle a family was in. When an adult son got married and had children, the commune would give him a small plot of land and they would be poor relative to the rest of the commune. But as the kids grew up and contributed to the economy, they gained more land and wealth and they’d be rich relative the the commune, until it was time to divide up their land again as the kids got married. And if you had more kids doing more productive labour you’d be more rich, but then you’d end up poorer as there was more land to be divided. So from generation to generation the poorest families became the richest ones and vice versa. Even though peasants participated in and were in favour of the market economy, there was no way for great wealth inequality to build because of the mechanics of the commune system kept redistributing the wealth, thereby eliminating the worst aspect of the market economy and keeping its benefits. 

And there were some families who employed wage labour – but it wasn’t the richest families, which is what the Marxists thought – it was people whose kids had gone to war or were sick or died or had to leave the village to look for work so they needed help to do the basic work needed to survive. And usually wage labour was temporary labour. The only people who employed wage labour for profit were aristocratic landowners, or entrepreneurs. The capitalist peasant that we’ll see Lenin and later Stalin talking so much about, who was exploiting all of his neighbours barely existed in most of russia, aside from the aristocratic landlord class who were not peasants.  Economic inequality existed between communes but was mostly the result of geography.  And aside from peasants who were closer to the urban centres, most of russias peasants were extremely poor and their conditions were getting worse. 

In terms of material conditions, russia was a huge empire with different conditions in different places, but for the vast majority of the ethnically russian peasants of this period there was an extreme and increasingly worse land shortage and overpopulation crisis. I didn’t see this indicated in any of the stuff I’ve been reading, but I would imagine that this crisis was in part related to medical advancements of the 19th century which were reducing infant mortality and changing demographics across europe at the time.  Whatever the reason, you just had too many peasants and not enough land – and specifically not enough land to support people according to the extremely primitive agricultural techniques that the peasants were still using at the time, and they way behind other parts of the world. 

SERFDOM 2.0

Ironically this land shortage was made worse by the end of serfdom which happened in russia by decree in 1861. 

Supposedly, the Tsar justified the end of serfdom saying 

“There are rumors that I want to announce the emancipation of the peasants. I will not say to you that I am completely against this. We live in such an age that this has to happen in time. I think that you agree with me. Therefore, it is much better that this business be carried out from above, rather than from below.”[7]

As is always the case where you get liberation from above rather than below, freedom from serfdom was almost as bad as serfdom itself – or maybe even worse, as the emancipated peasants were forced to compensate the their poor boo boo landlords for the loss of “their” lands – even though they had been basically stealing from the peasants for centuries. And those compensation payments were either huge massive amounts of cash – often double what the land was actually worth on the market – which often left the tenant in debt to the landlord for life – or else the payment would be made by giving the landlord a big chunk of the land which you had formerly used to cultivate to feed yourself and your landlord.

And what the peasant had leftover for himself usually wasn’t enough to survive on, so of course they had to borrow from money lenders in order to survive – and their former landlords who had plenty of cash sloshing around were happy to start new careers as money lenders. So you still had almost the exact same dependence and exploitation relationship after “emancipation” as you had before. 

As a result of this new debt serfdom, each administrative region had a small number of moneylenders and merchants who took advantage of the peasants desperation to exploit them even further.  Merchants for example would buy the peasants grain cheap in the fall when the peasants needed to pay tax and debt obligations – and then they would sell them back the exact same grain for double the price in spring when the peasants ran out of grain to feed themselves with. 

And the peasants called this class of vampire squid moneylenders and merchants kulaks – meaning closed fists, ruthless money grubbers. 

And as the overpopulation crisis increased the moneylenders and merchants became ever more ruthless, causing more and more peasants to have to go to give up their land as payment, and then go off to look for work and hired help for peasant families or landlord families, or more often to the cities. And once you lost your connection to your commune you couldn’t just go establish yourself somewhere else, you basically lost your entire social network and financial support and you were completely adrift and subject to the whims of the labour market. 

And as a result of this, the peasants were increasingly ready to revolt. And their number one desire was to take their land back from the parasite aristocrat landlords, and also from the church – and to redistribute it equally amongst themselves.

And while the Peasants had a traditional belief that the Tsar was their little father and protector, this belief was seriously frayed by the Emancipation decree.  

When state officials read out the decree to the peasants and it was clear that this would leave them enslaved to their landlords by debt, in many areas, the peasants thought that the officials who were reading it were lying.  Like the peasants of 1381, the peasants believed that their little father Tsar surely wanted to give them all of their land.  

So there were over 2000 revolts as a reaction to being “freed” from serfdom, into debt bondage.  

And of course the Tsars armies were called in to put down these revolts by bloody force.  So the Peasants monarchist beliefs were deeply shaken in many places, though in many others the Peasants continued to believe that this was all the doings of the landlords and the nobles, and the Tsar was still a good guy. 

So in terms of their social structure, their desperate material conditions and their belief system, the peasants were just perfect material for some kind of revolutionary socialism, and especially some kind of libertarian, anti authoritarian, anti-state socialism, aka anarchism. 

Now in 1905 you have whats called the revolution of 1905 – which wasn’t really a revolution because the monarchy remained firmly in place by the end of it, though for a couple of years it allowed a democratically elected parliament to operate. And during that revolution, peasant unrest played a big role, and the peasants started self organizing and connecting with the urban and rural socialist intellectuals – which very much scared the shit out of the rural aristocracy and also the monarchy. 

And the lesson the ruling classes learned was that the peasant commune was a dangerous locus of rebellion which needed to be eliminated. And so the prime minister at the time, Stolypin, instituted a bunch of reforms which we call the Stolypin reforms, which were aimed at doing just that. And the idea was to incentivize the peasants to break up their communes into independent family farms like in western europe where market forces would turn the communist peasants into petit bourgeois entrepreneurs who would be concerned with increasing their wealth and protecting private property instead of with having solidarity with their neighbours and trying to form peasant brigades to take land away from the landlords by armed rebellion. 

And the Stolypin reforms were mostly a big failure on that front. There was almost no incentive for peasants to break up their communes in that way, and almost no one did, aside from a small number of families in more prosperous areas, closer to the cities. 

But although the reforms were a failure, the government did what governments often do – especially non democratic governments who can control the media – they lied – and the press would regularly report about how these wonderful modernizing reforms were turning stupid backwards communist peasants into smart savvy industrious little capitalist entrepreneurs. And this had a really awful effect on the socialist intellectuals as we’ll see because they tended to believe this propaganda. 

THE PARTIES AND THE PEASANTS

So back to the anarchists: how is it that anarchism never took off among the peasants despite how well suited it was to peasant ideology and peasant discontent?

The number one reason is that the anarchists like all the other socialists were generally urban people or rural intelligentsia from the administrative towns – and they just never put in any serious efforts to actually go out and connect to the peasants. There was no going to the people anarchist movement. 

In spain, where you had anarchist missionaries going from village to village preaching their ideas, you ended up with a huge anarchist movement and even an anarchist revolution in the 1930s – but in Russia, the closest you got to the peasants was some rural intelligentsia circle jekrs on kropotkin’s estate. 

One factor was that there just weren’t even enough urban anarchists to form a proper going to the people movement. And I mentioned before that maybe one reason anarchism wasn’t big in among the intellectuals was because it didn’t promise them any special positions in government after the revolution.  

But maybe an even more important reason why the anarchists weren’t very popular even among the intelligentsia was because the majority of anarchists during this period belonged to insane terrorist organizations who just ran around blowing up cafes and killing as many people as possible.  I think killing random people is always morally wrong, but sometimes terrorism can maybe achieve political goals.  But in this case, none of it accomplished anything except attracting more psychos to the movement, and increasing government repression and helping the media around the world associate anarchism with mindless murders and terrorism.  Many anarchists were of course against terrorism, but they were a bit less than half of the anarchists in russia at this time, and the terrorist ones of course got 100x more attention.

MARXISM VS MARX

OK, so the anarchists are not really important on the russian scene until we get to the revolution itself – so let’s get back to the Marxists who are the ones who lead the revolution and who do take power. 

As we’ve seen, the Marxists at this point are so busy having their heads up their asses and mindlessly following Marx’ writings like a bunch of braindead cult losers, that they are completely oblivious to the socialist potential of this giant mass of angry desperate peasant communists staring them straight in the face.  And while the peasants are just waiting to revolt and to be connected to an urban movement to help them achieve their goals, the Marxists are cheering on the advance of capitalism and the destruction of the peasant commune and attacking anyone who wants to protect it.

As inherently ridiculous and shameful as this was, what’s even more ridiculous and shameful about it, is that the Marxists kept believing this stuff even though Karl Marx himself had changed his opinions on the peasants at this point, and had come to adopt a point of view similar to the populist socialists!

MARX 2.0

Around 1870 the time of the Paris Commune, Marx became acquainted with the work of Nikolai Danielsson, a Russian socialist who had translated Das Kapital into Russian, and who had been compiling the latest statistics and quantitative data about the russian peasants that had not previously been available, and writing popular language books on the subject.

Marx was particularly fascinated by this new body of scientific research which argued that contrary to popular belief, the russian peasant communes were not actually disintegrating under market forces. Rather, despite the deplorable conditions of most of the peasants, the  peasant commune was in fact alive and well and was apparently quite resistant to market forces and to attempts by the monarchy to push the peasants into more individualized western capitalist forms of land holding. 

Marx was so interested in this, and in the idea that these communes could be a potential alternative path to socialism, that he learned how to read Russian just so that he could read the relevant literature first hand. He became pen pals with Danielsson, and corresponded with him extensively for the rest of his life. Marx accumulated a library of over 200 russian language books many of them provided to him by Danielsson, and Marx wrote and theorized extensively about the Russian commune and its implications for an alternative path to socialism in russia in his voluminous notes – lots and lots of notes people.

In the first edition of Capital Vol I which was first published in 1867, Marx shits on people for defending the russian peasant commune.  But in the 1873 second edition, he deleted those parts and instead he flipped them around, and critiqued the class interests and the motivations of those socialists who were critics the Russian commune!

Teodor Shanin, the sociologist of peasantry writes about Marx’ shift on the issue of peasants in his book Late Marx

“…Marx came to see the decline of the peasant commune in Western Europe and its crisis, in Russia, not as a law of social sciences – a spontaneous economic process – but as the result of an assault on the majority of the people, which could and should be fought

 The main limitation of the rural commune, i.e. their isolation … could be overcome by the popular insurrection and the consequent supple­menting of the state … by ‘assemblies elected by the communes – an economic and administrative body serving their own interest’. That is … peasants running their own affairs, within and as a part of socialist society. 

Moreover, that may make some chiefly peasant countries ‘supreme in that sense to the societies where capitalism rules’. That is, indeed, why ‘the Western precedent would prove here nothing at all. ‘” 

In other words, Marx not only thought that peasant socialism possible, but that it might be a better bet than advanced industrial socialism!

In 1872, Marx told Danielson that he planned to devote a whole section of Capital Vol. III to the topic of Russian property.  

But unfortunately, despite this, Marx never ended up publishing anything on the issue besides a short preface to the 1882 edition of the communist manifesto.  

And that passage itself is rather reserved:

“Now the question is: can the Russian commune … a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or … 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 … the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development”.

In other words if events in russia like the overthrow of the monarchsy inspire revolution in the west, then the communist west can help russia build socialism on a peasant economy. 

It’s hard to know why Marx never wrote anything on the subject despite devoting so much time and energy learning and thinking about it, but although he wrote 30,000 pages of notes from 1871 until his death in 1883, he barely published anything at all on any subject at all aside from various letters.  

The reasons for his relative silence in the last phase of his life are subject to debate, and there are some interesting theories on this for another time.  

But, when it comes to the potential for peasant socialism, I get the sense from reading some of his correspondence on the subject, and from the manifesto preface, that Marx was afraid to be too bold and that he kept toning down his more enthusiastic thoughts.  He was shifting his opinions on a lot of things in this era, and quietly backtracking on some of the brash self confident positions he’d been making for much of his life, so maybe he lost his nerve a little and was afraid to contradict himself too obviously. 

For example in 1881 Marx had corresponded with a young Russian Marxist and disciple of Plekhanov named Vera Zasulich. Zasulich asks Marx if there is any hope of socialism in russia without having to go through an extended capitalist phase,

Zasulich writes

“the personal destiny of our revolutionary socialists depends on what you have to say on this question. One of two things: either this rural commune … is capable of developing along the socialist path… In this case the revolutionary socialist must sacrifice all his strength to the liberation of the commune and to its development.

If, on the contrary, the commune is doomed to perish, there remains nothing for the socialist, as such, to do but devote himself to more or less arbitrary calculations in order to learn in how many decades the land of the Russian peasant will pass out of his hands and into those of the bourgeoisie, in how many centuries, perhaps, capitalism will reach in Russia the development it has attained in Western Europe. 

They will then have to conduct propaganda only among the workers of the towns who will be continually swamped in the mass of peasants who, as a result of the dissolution of the commune, will be thrown on the streets of the big cities in the search of hire.

In recent times we often hear it said that the rural commune is an archaic form which history, scientific socialism, in a word, everything that is beyond dispute, has condemned to doom. The people who preach this call themselves your preeminent disciples: “Marxists.” Their strongest argument is often: “Marx says so.”

And Marx reply is really interesting because he writes four drafts. And you can see his hesitance to assert anything too forcefully by the progression of the drafts – he starts with a long several pages response, and then ends up with a short response about a page long.  I’ll link to all the versions in the bibliography – in one of the drafts he says

“in Russia, thanks to a singular combination of circumstances, the rural commune, still established on a national scale, can gradually extricate itself from its primitive characteristics and develop directly as an element of collective production on a national scale.

the common ownership of the land permits it to transform piecemeal and individualistic agriculture directly and gradually into collective agriculture, and the Russian peasants already practice it …; the physical configuration of its soil invites mechanized exploitation on a vast scale; the familiarity of the peasant with the artel contract facilitates for him the transition from piecemeal to cooperative work, and finally Russian society which has so long lived at his expense, owes him the advances necessary for such a transition. 

And an artel contract was a cooperative organization that you established to form some kind of collective activity like mining, or a rural urban trade cooperative.  And Marx continues: 

On the other hand, the contemporary existence of Western production, which dominates the world market, permits Russia to incorporate in the commune all the positive acquisitions elaborated by the capitalist system without passing through its Caudine forks.

And that’s a reference to a famous Roman battle where the Romans had to surrender without even fighting because they were just trapped – the idea is that the market forces of capitalism conquers people without having to use weapons. So it seems here like Marx really sees a lot of potential for the russian commune to be the foundation of socialism in russia. 

Marx continues

If the revolution takes place at an opportune time, if it concentrates all its force to assure the free upswing of the rural commune, the latter will soon develop as a regenerating element of Russian society and as an element of superiority over the countries enthralled by the capitalist regime

Weirdly he leaves most of this out in his final response, in which tells Vera Zasulich that:

the special study I have made of it, including a search for original source​ material, has convinced me that the commune is the fulcrum for social regeneration in Russia. But in order that it might function as such, the harmful influences assailing it on all sides must first be eliminated, and it must then be assured the normal conditions for spontaneous development.

So basically Marx is adopting the general position of the populist socialists in Russia that we’ve been talking about. The commune can be the foundation for socialism in russia, but first the monarchy and the landlords have to be overthrown. 

But Marx seems hesitant to really make strong pronouncements on this, and he totally tones down his own enthusiastic letter. Maybe he was afraid of contradicting himself, or maybe he felt like he just didn’t understand the material well enough to have a strong opinion.

Either way, note that even his totally toned down response is still the exact opposite of what the so-called Marxists like Plekhanov were arguing! They were saying that russians have to sit on their asses for a hundred years before they can even think of socialism!

And it was during this period and in reaction to the mindless followship of the Plekhanov types that Marx famously quipped “I am not a Marxist”.  

According to Esther Kingston Mann

Marx advised his Russian admirers to carry out their own economic investigations of the Russian scene instead of relying on Capital, or on the lessons of England’s experience. Marx’s own investigations of the Russian data led him to question whether peasantries were inevitably doomed, or whether peasant and non-peasant societies might in fact coexist – like consecutive geological strata in the earth’s surface. Like many of Russia’s leading professional economists and statisticians, Marx had become an agnostic rather than a true believer in the unique historical mission of the bour- geoisie in the modern world.

And elsewhere Marx points out that

‘the English system is completely incapable of fulfilling the conditions on which the development of Russia’s agriculture depends’ (Kingston-Mann, 1999: 132).

So Marx is basically telling his Russian followers that the european road to socialism is not really compatible with Russia’s material conditions, and that he sees a lot of potential for socialism in Russia to be based on the peasant commune but that his followers should make efforts to find out what they can learn for themselves about all of this so that they can develop the appropriate strategies based on the realities of the situation, which they’re in a better position to do than he is.  

And go learn what you can about the situation before deciding what to do is always the best policy for people who want major long term revolutionary changes!

But instead of doing that, Marx Russian followers just ignored him, and then tried to suppress any of his thoughts on the subject!  Peasant-hating Plekhanov made sure that none of Marx correspondence on these issues was published in Russia.  

In Teodor Shanin’s words 

“Already in Marx’s own generation there were marxists who knew better than Marx what marxism is and were prepared to censor him on the sly, for his own sake. 

And next time we’ll see that after the russian revolution when the soviet government does publish some of Marx’s letters on the subject, they attribute his opinions to Marx becoming senile!

Now as a result of this censorship, the young generation of up and coming marxists, including Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the future leaders of the Russian revolution that we’ll talk a lot about next time – they never learn about Marx’ change of opinion on peasant socialism, and they never take the time to investigate the issue in depth.  And even though Lenin and Trostky are more flexible and creative thinkers than Plekhanov and they understand that conditions are different in russia than in europe, and that the peasants are ready to revolt and it would be crazy to just sleep on that and wait around for 100 years, they continue to base all of their theories and strategies on outdated and factually incorrect ideas about the russian peasantry which they got from earlier Marx, from urban stereotypes, and from the fake news spread by the Russian government. And the consequences of this are going to be a spectacular earth shaking disaster as we’ll see next time…