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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.9: The Third Rome

Okay, welcome back. We have completed our introduction to Marxism and anarchism, and it is now time to turn our attention to Russia. And I am not unaware of the fact that we are now nine episodes into a history of the Russian Revolution and Russia itself has hardly been mentioned. Well, that ends today.

So, what we are going to do is commence with a run of five episodes that will give us the historical background we need to understand Russia’s descent into revolutionary chaos at the end of the 19th century, as the absolutist tsars tried to fend off a huge array of challenges from liberals, nationalists, socialists, communists, and anarchists. Now this is necessarily going to be concise summaries of Russian history, and if you’re interested, there is a straight up Russian history podcast called  The Russian History Podcast that will go into far more detail than I will here. He’s 45 episodes into it, and only at Alexander Nevsky, an amount of historical material that I am about to dispense with here today in about seven total minutes. So by all means, go check that out if you want to know more.

It’s tough to tell where to even start with all this, but by most accounts, the cultural and political identity we today call Russia started coming together in about the 880s. Now we know from the history of Rome that the 300s to 600s were a time of great population migration that severely disrupted civilizations all over Eurasia and the Mediterranean. As things reordered and reconfigured a socio-linguistic group called the Slavs started to spread from a suspected origin point around what is today the borderland between Belarus and the Ukraine. These early Slavs spread west towards Poland and Bohemia south into the Balkans, and the group that interests us are those who went east and northeast into the forested interior of what we today call Russia. Geographically what these East Slavs were settling into was the eastern portion of the great east European plane, which stretches from Poland in the west all the way to the Ural mountains. These lands were dominated by dense forest interspersed with long rivers that mostly pointed themselves south towards the Black Sea or the Caspian sea. So these main rivers, the Dnieper, the Don, the Volga, and the lakes and tributaries that fed them, were the basic settlement zones. In the northern latitudes, the forest were evergreen pine with light sandy soil which gave way to deciduous forest and richer soil as you moved south. But if you kept moving south, the ecology changes dramatically as the great forests give way to the great steppe that lay north of and between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. The steppe is unbroken semi-arid grassland and savanna well-suited for horse based pastoral nomads civilizations. The steppe lands in proximity to Russia were in fact simply the Western most extension of the great Eurasian steppe, which reaches all the way from Romania in the West to Manchuria in the far east. It was the home and origin point for the great Eurasian horse civilizations, most famously up to this point, the Huns. But these nomadic peoples mostly stuck to their migratory circuits on the steppe and ventured north into the forest only on raids for plunder and slaves. But their presence kept the eastern Slavs set back from direct contact with the great Mediterranean civilizations of the day, the Byzantine empire and the Arab caliphate.

We first get to the origin point of modern Russia in the mid 800s with the establishment of a medieval society historians now call Kiev Rus. The origins of Kiev Rus as a political entity is a mix of myth and legend and archeology that is still being argued about today. But this period is the great age of the Vikings, and the basic account is that a group of Scandinavian warriors moved across the Baltic Sea towards Lake Onega and set themselves up as a small, but dominant force in the region. The legend goes that in the mid 800s, the quote unquote native Slavic and Finnic tribes expelled these intruding Vikings. But then without the unifying leadership the Scandinavians provided, all the tribes fell back into rivalry and warring with each other. And so they invited a group of Scandinavians to come back and be their rulers, to reimpose the peace and order that they so desperately needed. Specifically the Slavs of the far north invited this guy Rurik and his two brothers to come rule them in the 860s. Which I got to tell you, as post-hoc historical propaganda to legitimize a ruling dynasty goes, this smells a lot like post-hoc historical propaganda to legitimize a ruling dynasty.

So the legendary Rurik and his followers then raided down as far as Constantinople with some of his men capturing the well situated city of Kiev along the way. Kiev was so well situated as a key point in the north-south trade route along the Dnieper River that the heirs of Rurik moved their capital there permanently a few years later. Now though Rurik himself is a somewhat quasi legendary figure, his heirs would take the dynastic name Rurikovich and they would be the dynasty that ruled various parts of Russian lands all the way until they died out in the time of troubles and pass the baton to the Romanoffs. With their capital in Kiev, historians call this new political entity Kiev Rus, which connected through feudal obligations other cities in the region, with the main access being the thousand mile or so route linking Kiev in the South to the city of Novgorod in the north.

The common people and peasants of Kiev Rus were mostly tied up in subsistence agriculture, and given the terrain and ecology, the whole region remained pretty thinly populated. But the real source of wealth was in trade. The territory Kiev Rus controlled, occupied key links in the north-south trade routes between Scandinavia and the Byzantines. And they also controlled parts of two different east-west routes that linked Europe in the West to the Arab caliphate in the south east and China in the far east. Their own contribution to this global trade network was forest products, furs and pelts, wax, honey, and of course as always slaves.

Now in the beginning, the people of Kiev Rus were still pagan, until we get to their great conversion to Christianity. This would be the moment Russia went from pagan to Christian. Now contact with the Byzantines had brought the leaders of Kiev Rus into contact with Orthodox Christianity. According to the official story, Prince Vladimir the Great, who reigned from 980 to 1015, was contemplating a religious conversion, and he sent an embassy around to visit the representatives of the Catholics and Muslims and Jews, finding each intern to be unsatisfactory. In particular, it is said that he rejected conversion to Islam because drinking was simply too much a part of their native culture to accept Muslim prohibition of alcohol.

Eventually this embassy wound up in Constantinople, where they took a service in the Hagia Sophia, and were so impressed that Vladimir converted and was baptized as an Orthodox Christian in 988. As part of this conversion process, the leaders of the Orthodox Church in Constantinople sent a metropolitan, which is kind of roughly the equivalent of an arch bishop to Kiev. This began the long and deep connection between Russia and Orthodox Christianity. And while this story is fun, when you consider the critical trade ties to the Byzantines was really the lifeblood of the Kiev Rus economy, their adoption of Orthodox Christianity makes a lot of sense.

So the reigns of Vladimir the Great and his son Jaroslav the Wise, who reigned until 1054, represented the peak of Kiev Rus as a medieval civilization. Other towns and cities and territories paid tribute and homage to the grand prince of Kiev who could claim such dependents as to make his territory one of the largest geographically in the world at the time, covering some 500,000 square miles. There was a collection of distinguished lords who would meet in a council to help the grand prince rule, administration started to become more regularized and centralized, laws and legal codes began to replace old methods of just personal vengeance. Economically, they did pretty good business, controlling and managing trade routes and kicking in their own products, and they also connected politically to the rest of the world as Yaroslav the Wise married his sisters and daughters and granddaughters across the reachable world. The princesses of Kiev were married to the Kings of France, Poland, Hungary, and Norway, as well as the Holy Roman emperor. But after the death of Jaroslav in 1054, Kiev Rus as a coherent political entity started to fracture. Other cities like Vladimir — the city, not the person — exerted their own autonomy, and persistent dynastic fights led to a slow decline of the region back into being merely a loose confederation of city states who happen to share a similar language and religion.

Now the decline of Kiev Russi unity could not have come at a worst time, because it led them straight into the monumental global event of the late 12th and early 13th centuries. And I know you all listen to Dan Carlin, so I know you know that I’m talking about the rise of the Mongol Empire and its march across the Eurasian steppe. The advance of the Mongols from the east freaked out the nomadic groups of the far Western steppe, so much so that they made a defensive alliance with the principalities of Kiev Russi. In 1223, their combined army stood against the Mongols at the river Kalka, and they were blown out of the water, they just didn’t stand a chance. Following this first encounter, Batu Khan, one of Genghis Khan’s grandsons and yes, I know Genghis Kahn is a horrible anachronism, but I just want you to know who I’m talking about, invaded the region in force in the late 1230s, bringing nothing less than the apocalypse to Kiev Rus. Every major city was overrun and sacked, Kiev fell and was raised to the ground. The death, displacement, and enslavement of the native population over the next five years was enormous, hundreds of thousands were killed and enslaved. This was a massively traumatic event for Russia. The destruction, though, was at the very end of the Mongol advance west, and famously they were approaching the Gates of Vienna in 1242 when they learned that the Great Khan back home had died and they all pulled back and went home. In Europe, the Mongol invasion is treated as one of the great what if moments in history. In Russia, it is not, there is no what if, there is only, what happened.

So after 1242, the Mongol Empire reorganized into four broad political units, with the western most unit, the part that bordered Russia, becoming known locally as the Golden Horde. The Golden Horde set up a capital city near modern Volgorad, and then continued a semi nomadic circuit along the main river valleys while requiring everyone in the vicinity to pay them tribute. And they briefly experimented with direct rule over these northern forest people, but quickly settled into a system of recognizing leaders of various tribes and cities whose recognition was contingent on collecting the requisite tribute. The Golden Horde itself was not ethnically Mongol except for an inner circle aristocratic dynasty, the rest of its population had been absorbed and incorporated subject peoples, mostly Turkic, and they collectively became known as the Tatars. But Tatars of the Golden Horde would be the ascendant power in the region for the next 200 years.

But the apocalyptic arrival of the Golden Horde was not the only thing our proto Russians were facing in the 1200s because coming out of the west, we have Catholic crusaders who are fired up with religious fervor. With the breakdown of the crusades against the eastern Muslims falling apart, some Germanic Teutonic knights turned their attention northeast, and they wanted to expand into the Baltic, against the native population that was either still pagan or Eastern Orthodox Christian. So just as the Mongols were arriving in force in the 1230s, the people around the Baltic Sea faced what is known as the Northern crusaders. In these Northern reaches of old Kiev Rus, the battle against Western Catholic encroachment was taken up by a young Prince of Novgorod named Alexander. Now, Novgorod was so far to the north that it had escaped the direct Mongol apocalypse, but Alexander still needed to acquire recognition and pay tribute to the Golden Horde, which he was fine with because he considered them the lesser of two evils as he went to face off against these invaders to the west. Now the Swedes came in first, but at the Battle of the Neva in 1240, a 19-year-old Prince Alexander drove them back, which was such a great victory that he became known forever after as Alexander Nevsky. Then a few years later he did it again, winning the Battle of the Ice in 1242 to stop the advance of the northern crusaders. The successes of Alexander Nevsky against the Germanic and Nordic invaders is what kept the future Russia firmly Orthodox rather than Catholic, and for his work, Alexander Nevsky remains one of the great national heroes of Russia.

Now setting Novgorod aside, just about every other major city of old Kiev Rus had been sacked and depopulated in the wake of the Mongol invasion, and so new cities naturally rose to fill the vacuum. The most important being: Moscow. The area where Moscow now sits had been inhabited for at least a thousand years, and mentions of a town or small city called Moscow come as early as 1100, but it was a son of Alexander Nevsky who built Moscow up and set it on its road to destiny. The grand duchy of Moscow or the principality of Moscow, depending on which book you’re reading, started out as a vassal of the city of Vladimir, and ultimately they all paid tribute to the Golden Horde. But by the mid 1300s, Moscow was becoming a stronger player through a series of deft marriages and land acquisitions, feudal alliances, and military conquests. But one of the great boons to the fortunes of Moscow was when the metropolitan of Kiev, the head of the Orthodox Church in the region, moved out of Kiev in 1299, going first to Vladimir, but then ultimately moving again to settle permanently in Moscow. And the princes of Moscow were thrilled to find themselves the host and protector of the Orthodox Church. Through the 1300s, Moscow kept growing in power and prestige and importance, so much so that in the 1370s, Grand Prince Dimitri Evanovich challenged a raiding party from the Golden Horde, challenging in effect the hegemonic power the horde had over Russian affairs. Dimitri Evanovich defeated this raiding party, and then a second force that was sent to punish him in 1380. Now in 1382, the Horde came back again even stronger end Dimitri Evanovich was forced to retreat and Moscow was burned, but the city quickly bounced back, and now stood on the brink of becoming the leading city of Russia.

So moving into the early 1400s, Moscow’s dynastic reach was coalescing just as the Golden Horde was beginning to fracture. Internal disputes left the Tatars unable to impose their will as effectively as they had in the past. And by the 1430s, the Horde was still claiming nominal sovereignty over the Russians, but in practice, many of the northern cities were breaking away, and there was nothing the horde could really do about it. This disintegration in the power of the Golden Horde came along just as the once mighty Byzantine empire was gasping its dying breaths. In 1453, the Ottoman Turks completed their envelopment and conquest of Constantinople. This not only redrew the political map of the world, it upended the trade and cultural connections that the Russians had down to their religious brethren in the Byzantine empire. And with the fall of Constantinople, the Orthodox Church lost its great capital city. So unmoored from Mediterranean power and influence, the Orthodox Church fathers in Moscow dealt with the crisis by electing their own leadership. And thus did the Russian Orthodox Church transform into its own separate and autonomous religious entity, and the princes of Moscow further relished being in direct protective alliance with the independent religious apparatus of all the Russian people. And it gave the princes of Moscow further pretensions to greatness; it made them think that maybe they should be more than that just mere princes.

So after the fall of Constantinople, we can look at the map of Eurasia and the Mediterranean world surrounding Russia and see it shaping into what would define its history right up to World War I and the Revolution. The Golden Horde of the steppe was breaking up and disappearing. The successor nomad groups would never again be powerful enough to dominate Russia politically. Down in the South, the Islamic Ottoman Turks permanently replaced the Orthodox Byzantines, but they mostly turned their attention west to the Holy Roman Empire rather than north into Russia. In the west, we begin to see the rising unified power of Poland Lithuania, who would become Russia’s great rival in the west, but not quite yet. What this meant was it in the latter 1400s, Russia was relatively free of outside encroachment, and the princes of Moscow could consolidate their rule and transform their mere principality into something greater.

So this was a transformation that really gets going under grand Prince Ivan the third, or as he is otherwise known Ivan the Great. Ivan became grand Prince of Moscow in 1462 at the age of 21, and during his long reign he really solidified central rule of Russia by Moscow. He successfully brought along all the boyars, which is the term for Eastern European landed nobles, into a functional unified system of government. Now, to ensure the continued loyalty of the boyars, and elevate loyal subjects, and enhance the defensive capabilities of his principality, Ivan doled out huge land grants, especially towards the southern reaches that approached the steppe. And though serfdom was not yet at hand, part of Ivan’s political settlements with the boyars involved more restrictions on the movement and freedom of peasants. Then he formed the nobility into their first duma or ruling council, and created a stable and permanent bureaucracy. Ivan also completely remade the Kremlin, which had been just a standard Russian citadel palace in the middle of Moscow. Well, Ivan imported, Italian architects and engineers to build something new and grand, and they built the Kremlin that we know today, which is the seat of government as we understand it today. All of this laid the permanent foundation for what would become the modern Russian state. Now during his reign, Ivan also aggressively expanded his territorial claims, nearly tripling the size of the principality of Moscow in his lifetime. And if there is a moment that you can point to and say, this is the birth date of Russia as a state, as opposed to the principality of Moscow, it was 1478 when Ivan annexed Novgorod. This unified under his rule the two most important political, economic, and cultural cities of the North. Then two years later in 1480, an army of the last remnants of the Golden Horde approached the Ugra River, still claiming nominal sovereignty over the Russians. But Ivan took an army out to meet them. After staring at each other for a few days, the horde army concluded it just wasn’t worth it, and they turned around. This event, called the Standing at the Ugra, was the end of even nominal claims to sovereignty over the Russians by the Tatars. By now, Ivan the Great was referring to himself not just as Grand Prince of Moscow, but the ruler of all Russia.

Now as often happens in cases like this, the princes of Moscow then started to get a touch of the old destiny about them. Now, Ivan the Great died in 1505 and he was succeeded by his son, Vassily. And it was during the early reign of Vassily that we get a great prophecy that became very important to later imperial legitimacy. An Orthodox monk wrote to the new Grand Prince of Moscow: “Two Romes have fallen, the third stands, and there will be no fourth. No one shall replace your Christian Tsardom.” Moscow and Russia was now on its own track of destiny. The protector of the one true faith, standing now independently and strong against Catholics and Muslims, straddling the lands between Europe and Asia, between the Mediterranean and the Arctic, Russia was its own unique thing with its own unique destiny. They were the third Rome.

This destiny would be truly consummated by the middle of the century. In 1533 young boy prince Ivan, grandson of Ivan the Great, inherited power. Too young to rule in his own right, his sovereign lands were run by his mother, and a regency council of boyars. But when Ivan came of age and was crowned in his own right, he was not crowned simply Grand Prince of Moscow, but Tsar of Russia.

Now the name tsar, of course, traces back all the way to Caesar, I mentioned this actually in the History of Rome, and it was the name the Russians had previously used for other great imperial rulers, it’s what they had called the emperor of the Byzantine Empire and the khan of the Golden Horde, and it is now what they would call their own leader. No longer grand princes, but tsars, the equals, possibly even superiors, of all the other great monarchies of the world. And the principality of Moscow was now the Tsardom of Russia.

Now you probably know of this particular Ivan of which we have been speaking, this first official tsar of Russia, because he is known in the English speaking world as Ivan the Terrible. But he was not called Ivan the Terrible during his lifetime, and even when the Russian word grozny was attached to him, the word was meant to mean awe inspiring, not terrible, as in, you know, terrible, and that’s always been a mistranslation. Now, the reign of Ivan the Fourth, Ivan the Terrible, would itself be, I don’t know, a 50 episode podcast in its own right, so I’m not going to get lost in the weeds, I just want to highlight a few things. In terms of foreign affairs and territorial growth, the Russians now moved east and south onto the steppe, taking over territory formerly controlled by the tatars and advancing the tsardom of Russia toward the Urals and Caucasus, and this brought into the tsardom of Russia a population of Muslims, without any great effort to convert them going along with it, or even make them give up their way of life or language or religion. This makes the tsardom of Russia not some national kingdom of Russian speaking Eastern Slavs, but a multiethnic, multilingual, and multi religious enterprise, which it would remain for the rest of its existence. In fact, it would only get more multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, and multi-religious. In the West, Ivan started a war in 1558 to annex Lavonia, which is modern Estonia and Latvia, triggering a long and costly war with Poland Lithuania that would be an ongoing struggle for the rest of his life and beyond. And the Russian rivalry with Poland Lithuania would be the main foreign policy concern of Russia for the next couple of centuries.

Now when the Lavonia war started to go badly, some of the boyars turned against Ivan and joined Poland in an attempt to overthrow him. This led Ivan, who was prone to fits of rage and paranoia, to completely upend the existing political order, and what he did was carve out a large administrative area he called the oprichnina in 1565, which he would control personally and use as a base of personal wealth and military power. This process involved forced relocation of entire populations, as well as the exile and murder of suspected nobles or dissenters. Ivan created a super loyal force that grew to become 6,000 strong that acted as a kind of quasi political army slash police to root out, execute, and torture anyone who opposed the tsar. This culminated in 1570 with the Massacre of Novgorod, where at least 2000 people were killed and according to some accounts, the figure was 10 times that. Now after about seven years of terrible and bloody purges, really a kind of reign of terror that was going on, Ivan abruptly abandoned the oprichnina in 1572, but it left a lasting scar on the country, so, you know, Ivan the Terrible, it’s not a totally undeserved moniker. Now, Ivan then probably set the stage for the next generation of chaos and trouble when in a fit of rage, he beat his daughter-in-law into a miscarriage, and then turned on his son, fracturing his son’s skull with a staff in the midst of a fight, and his son died a few days later. This murderous fit meant that when Ivan died three years later in 1584, the son and heir to the throne was his weak-willed and possibly mentally unfit younger son Fyodor. And this would be the beginning of the end of the Rurikovich dynasty in Russia.

Now, before we move on to the final act of this week’s episode, I have to pause and drop in the great social and economic transformation that reached its conclusion shortly after the death of Ivan the Terrible, and that is enserfment. Restrictions on the legal rights and physical mobility of the Russian pageantry had grown up organically since the reign of Ivan the Great, and it continued through the reign of Ivan the Terrible, and it reached permanent formal codification in the 1590s. Serfdom as a legal concept boils down to the peasant being bound to the land upon which they were born. Leaving that land made you a fugitive liable for criminal prosecution. So serfdom is just one steppe up from legal slavery, and it’s not a very big steppe at all. In Russian real estate transactions, just as important as the number of acres were the number of serfs that went with it. And the measure of a noble’s wealth and holdings always included the number of serfs that they owned. By 1600, probably 75% of Russian peasants were legally bound serfs.

So this leads us into the final act of this week’s introductory episode, and that is the Time of Troubles. And let me tell you, if you live through a period that later historians call the Time of Troubles, I do not envy you. Now, the Time of Troubles could probably be, oh, another 50 episodes on their own, but basically we have the death of Fyodor in 1598, giving way to twenty years of internal noble civil war over who should succeed him, which played out against the backdrop of an increasingly disastrous war with Poland Lithuania that saw Polish armies twice occupy Moscow. There was also a massive peasant uprising in the south, as those peasants sought to resist the spread of serfdom, and basically all state coherence broke down, and various armed bands of dubious political legitimacy just roamed around. Some of these claimed to be real armies of the true tsar, of which there were several men making that claim, and some of them were just bandits. It was… a time of troubles.

Now, eventually the peasant rebellion burned out and the nobility rallied to a unified national defense against the invading Poles and with Lithuanians and a volunteer army, with the help of some Swedish mercenaries, pushed them out of the country. In the midst of all this, an assembly of the land came together in 1613, with nobles and church leaders representing more than 50 different cities of the tsardom of Russia to elect ones tsar that they could all agree to follow. Now this was not about sorting out who had the best claim necessarily, so much as who they could all agree to live with on a practical basis. And the guy they landed on was a 16 year old named Mikhail Romanov. And when Mikhail Romanov was elected in 1613, that would be the beginning of the dynasty that would rule as emperors and empresses of Russia for the next 300 years. Mikhail would see Russia out of the Time of Troubles, then point them towards a coming golden age of a new Russian empire.

And next week we will talk more about that further transition and expansion from the tsardom of Russia into the Russian Empire, and next week’s episode will be bookended by a discussion of Peter the Great at the beginning, and Catherine the Great at the end. And those two great leaders would help transform russia into a great power.

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.8: Red and the Black

So we come now finally to our last episode of this opening historical and philosophical prologue to the Russian Revolution. After today, I will take a two week break, and when I come back, we will commence with a history of Russia. But before we get going today, I do want to slip in a quick plug because we just did the Paris Commune, and I have to tell you that friend of the show and creators of fine role-playing games Aviatrix Games has designed a story card game where you can play out the course of the Paris Commune. It’s called  Red Carnations on a Black Grave . So, if you want you too can play out Louise Michel and demand that if the authorities aren’t cowards that they will kill you. The game was inspired in part by the Revolutions podcast, and I will be writing the introduction or the instructions. So if that’s your jam, there is a Kickstarter for an RPG story game called Red Carnations on a Black Grave. And I will post a link to it in the show notes.

So moving on: it was fitting that the Paris Commune interrupted our march to the Marx/Bakunin showdown because it interrupted their march as well. Ever since Bakunin had joined the International in 1868, he and Marx had been circling around each other, each wielding their own vision of what the International should be. Marx and Bakunin were both preparing for things to come to a head at the annual Congress, which was scheduled for September of 1870, but that Congress was canceled on account of the Franco-Prussian War.

But though we’re going to talk today about where Marx and Bakunin disagreed, I don’t necessarily want to oversell this because they agreed on a great deal. For example, Marx and Bakunin teamed up against the anarcho mutualists who wanted to peacefully grow the new utopia by word of mouth, by convincing everyone one individual at a time. Marx and Bakunin were both convinced that mass appeals to class interest and revolutionary attacks on existing power structures was imperative. Flowers can’t grow if they are trapped under a slab of concrete. There was also a grudging admiration that they shared, and a co-mingling of ideas. Bakunin was definitely building on a lot of Marx’s historical and economic analysis, and Marx seemed to agree with Bakunin on what a post-revolutionary communist society might look like.

And this last bit is an important point in the third address of what we now call The Civil War in France. Marx wrote a full throated defense of the commune, in which he declared that the commune was the first glorious harbinger of future communism, the first expression of the great utopia to come. This is partly what makes The Civil War in France so important, because Marx is usually very cagey about what he means by the communist mode of production and the social relations that might build up around it. He was cagey about this on purpose, because first of all, he opposed on principle those who concocted elaborate utopian schemes, especially when they were concocted using capital R Reason. The disciples of capital R reason are usually just self-important fabulists. Marx, meanwhile, rooted his analysis in science and economics and history. So in comparison to his detailed descriptions of the capitalist mode of production or the feudal mode of production, he only ever offered the barest hint of what the communist mode of production would look like. Marx believed that history and the people making history would just work it out, and it was not his place to paint some kind of detailed picture. Also, once you do that, you’ve committed yourself to a lifetime of being criticized for concocting, unworkable, utopian fantasies.

But in The Civil War in France, Marx says that what the commune tried to do was something like what he ultimately had in mind. Though in The Third Address, which was written in May of 1871, Marx reviews the political history of Europe, and he lays out the steps that created the modern state, and then he says that the commune was a break from all that. It was something brand new, that it was the cry of February 1848 finally realized, that all the old institutions of power were swept away, and a new style of radical working-class democracy was born. That the people were represented by leaders who were responsible to, and could be instantly recalled by, the people that they had taken control of the city and put its resources to work for the people. Marx had hoped that the Paris commune would then be used as a model for other cities to follow, who would then link together in voluntary federation. And Marx insisted this would not be merely decentralized national federalism, because in the new era, there would no longer be an overarching national government. The communes would not be smaller gears nested against a larger national gear. There would be no larger national gear at all. There would be no army, no national bureaucracy, no single ruler. With the people sharing in ownership of the means of production and working for themselves. Government by repression would be over, and government of emancipation will have arrived. Marx further believed that with labor emancipated, with no more exploiters, with every man a working man, class would disappear, and this would be the end of class conflict.

Now, Marx says all of this because he wants to laude the commune for what they did. But in putting this all down in black and white, his vision turns out to look a lot like Bakunin’s vision. So in many ways, Marx and Bakunin shared the same end. Their great dispute was over the means of getting there.

So we will now turn our attention to where Marx and Bakunin disagreed, and this is not meant to be a definitive and comprehensive accounting of where they disagreed, I just want to touch on some of the big points with an eye on what will be relevant to the Russian Revolution.

So the great faultline between them was of course over the matter of the state and state power. Marx’s revolutionary program required a step where the proletariat sees not just the economic means of production, but the political power of the state. Marx was convinced that there had to be a transition period where the workers would seize the state apparatus and install this thing he ominously and problematically dubbed the dictatorship of the proletariat. This was meant to be a temporary state of affairs, as seizing the means of production and altering the mode of production from capitalist to socialist and then onto communist would render state power an anachronistic relic, and it would simply wither away. But to be clear, when Marx calls for this dictatorship of the proletariat, he did not mean some small Jacobin style authoritarian committee of public safety. Marx believed that by the time the revolution came that the working class proletariat would be the vast majority of the population. That when they seized power, it would be a majority resting control of society from a tiny ruling class minority. So by dictatorship of the proletariat, Marx is envisioning something that we would call radically democratic socialism, government by the vast majority for the vast majority. And in fact, Marx believed that this would be the first time in history that society would not be ruled by a tiny self-anointed ruling class. Further, he believed that this dictatorship of the proletariat would be temporary. But that said Marx did believe that the reordering of society away from the capitalist mode of production would require the use of state power. So for Marx, seizing and wielding state power was an essential part of the revolutionary project.

Bakunin, as you might expect, was opposed to all of this. In his mind, the point of the revolution was not to seize the power of the state, but to smash the power of the state. To undermine it, overthrow it, destroy it, that was the point. And if that was not done, then it was no revolution at all, it was just meet the new boss, same as the old boss stuff. And this brings us to some of our juiciest Bakunin quotes, because Bakunin absolutely believed that institutional power corrupted anyone who tried to wield it, even if they started with the most generous and noble of intentions. Bakunin’s writings are full of denunciations of this temptation to seize state power. Bakunin says, for example, if you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year, he would be worse than the tsar himself. So Bakunin opposed all would be authoritarian revolutionaries, not just Marxists, who at least saw it as a mere step, but also Blanquists and Jacobins for whom seizing state power was an end unto itself. Bakunin says we are the natural enemies of such revolutionaries, the would be dictators, regulators and trustees of the revolution, who even before the existing monarchical, aristocratic and bourgeois states have been destroyed already dream of creating new revolutionary states, as fully centralized and even more despotic than the states we now have. He says that these revolutionaries dream of muzzling disorder by the act of some authority that will be revolutionary in name only, but will only be a new reaction because they will, again, condemn the masses to being governed by decrees, to obedience, to immobility, to death. In other words, to slavery and exploitation by a new pseudo revolutionary aristocracy. He says, it matters little to us if that authority is called church, monarchy, constitutional state, bourgeois republic, or even revolutionary dictatorship. We detest and reject all of them equally as the unfailing sources of exploitation and despotism. And then finally, when the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called the people’s stick.

So Bakunin’s big beef with Marx centers on Marx’s willingness to seize this thing called state power. Bakunin believes that once state power is seized, it will never be given up, that there will be no next step. And he scoffed at the logic of the Marxists, and he said, anarchism and freedom is the aim while state and dictatorship is the means. And so in order to free the masses, they have first to be enslaved. As for the dictatorship of the proletariat, Bakunin used the ambiguous term to great effect in his PR battles with Marx, especially because at the time, the proletariat was still a tiny numerical minority, and it was hard to believe that Marx was not calling for the authoritarian rule of a small minority of urban factory workers at the expense of everyone else.

So aside from this really big conceptual difference, there were a bunch of disputes over tactics between the Marxists and the anarchists. Going back to his early dealings with the Communist League, Marx was in favor of these working class revolutionary movements operating out in the open rather than as secret societies with clubhouses and handshakes and passwords. Marx was always a “let them tremble at our great numbers” kind of guy.

He also favored open union organizing and active participation in parliamentary politics as necessary steps to creating proletarian revolutionary consciousness. He was totally on board with the creation of some kind of labor party to run for seat in the government. And in many ways Marx saw the International as becoming an association that would be the international nucleus of this European labor party.

Bakunin meanwhile was much happier working in the shadowy world of secret revolutionary societies who would be poised to bring down the whole system the minute the time was right. And as for his work in Italy and Spain, this was not just abstract ideology. This was about practical reality. It was illegal to organize out in the open to form political parties or labor unions, so secret societies were essential, and all the Italian and Spanish sections of the international resented the call for them to come out of hiding. This was very easy to say from behind a desk in London, much harder when you’re actually working on the ground in Madrid.

Bakunin also thought that participation in respectable parliamentary politics was an unforgivable compromise, that it bought into the bourgeois power structure when that bourgeois power structure needed to be rejected, root and branch. As for union organizing and strikes, Bakunin supported all that, but not because higher wages or better conditions were good in and of themselves. He believed that mere union negotiations accepted the premise of unequal economic power structures, which he also wanted to reject root and branch. But Bakunin liked strikes and direct labor action, because when a bunch of workers are masked together and their anger and outrage is running high, that’s the perfect time to explain to them about this wonderful thing called anarchism, where we just overthrow all the bosses.

Then there’s this question of who is going to carry out the revolution. As I talked about at length last week, purposefully, because it’s going to be so important to the story of the Russian Revolution, Marx and Bakunin disagreed about who the people were who could make the revolution. Marx believed that thanks to their position in relation to the means of production that everything was going to have to be done by the urban proletariat, that the sack of potatoes out in the rural country would just have to be dragged into the future. Though I must say that in Marx’s conception, by the time the revolution comes to fruition, he expects that most of the rural population will have already been transformed by the inescapable power of urban industrial capitalism into wage workers. So he never actually saw the proletariat as representing some special minority. He expected them to be the vast majority by the time the revolution came.

Bakunin of course said, no, the revolution must be by and for everyone. Now he agreed that the urban workers would probably be the most ideologically advanced, but he believed the peasant absolutely had revolutionary potential and that they must be brought on board. Bakunin was dealing with the world as it was right then, when the urban workers were still in the minority. He did not believe that history had to wait for capitalism to turn all the rural peasants into urban wage workers before humanity could be liberated.

So those are a few of the key ideological differences that led to the split between the Marxists and the anarchists. But we can’t really do this without also talking about personality, that Marx and Bakunin just didn’t like each other. Marx and Engels and Bakunin were all expert level grudge holders and shit talkers; they all were. Marx and Engels, as we’ve seen, attacked just about anyone who disagreed with them about, just about anything. It’s why they had so few friends and allies in the 1850s and 1860s. Bakunin meanwhile was as sharp tongued.as anyone, and he questioned the motivations and sincerity of anyone who disagreed with him. He also loved mentioning to people that in 1848, he had fought on the barricades while Marx had run and hid, that in 1870 he had gone to Lyonne to start a revolution while Marx had stayed behind his desk. And then both sides believed the other was a lying hypocrite, up to some sinister plot to take over the International for their own devices. So it is impossible to map this conflict between the Marxists and the anarchists, without talking about the fact that at this point, on a personal level, Marx and Bakunin just didn’t like each other.

And it is by way of this personal fighting, backbiting, and rumormongering that we get to take a little tangent to talk about everyone’s latent antisemitism, which does need to be addressed before we move on. Now I will preface this by saying that 19th century Europe was awash in anti-Semitism. All sides of every political and economic conflict were absolutely swimming in antisemitism. Reactionary monarchists, Catholic and Protestant theologians, philosophers of every stripe, liberal democrats, socialists, anarchists, communist nationalists; all of them were perfectly comfortable identifying the alien jew as the principal source and scapegoat of all their problems. And all these European leaders and thinkers were starting to combine ancient prejudice with new forms of pseudo-scientific race science that quote unquote proved all the most vicious stereotypes about Jews were actually biological traits. It’s really nasty stuff, very gross. European civilization then and now has major issues with antisemitism.

So Bakunin’s antisemitism rears its ugly head in this fight with Marx as the fight got really heated and really personal. In the 1870s, Bakunin let fly with some pretty deep seated antisemitic rage aimed at the ethnically Jewish Marx. Bakunin says this whole Jewish world comprising a single exploiting sect, a kind of blood sucking people, a kind of organic destructive collective parasite going beyond not only the frontiers of states, but of political opinion. This world is now, at least for the most part, at the disposal of Marx on the one hand and of Rothchilds on the other.

And then he reiterate more: Marx is a jew and is surrounded by a crowd of little more or less intelligent scheming, agile, speculating jews just as jews are everywhere. Now this entire Jewish world which constitutes an exploiting sect, a people of leeches, a voracious parasite closely and intimately connected with one another, regardless not only of frontiers, but of political differences as well. This Jewish world is today largely at the disposal of Marx and Rothschild.

So this is all pretty despicable. It’s racist paranoia. And what do modern anarchists say about it? Well, first of all, they say it’s despicable racist paranoia, and thank god we don’t do hero worship over here because we’re happy to keep what we like while denouncing the disgusting views of some scruffy Russian who’s been dead for 150 years. Sympathetic biographers will point out that the sum total of Bakunin’s anti-Semitic writings come to about five total pages among the thousands upon thousands he produced during his lifetime. So hatred of the Jews was something lurking in the background, not something he obsessively organized his philosophy around.

Some will also say that all of this only comes out when Marx is trying to destroy him personally and politically, like he only said this stuff because he was really mad. But, folks, when racial slurs come erupting out of your mouth when you are angry, if you say, well, I’m not really an anti-Semite, I just rail against the Jews when I’m really mad, that’s not a great argument. So in summary, by any definition of the term, Mikhail Bakunin was an anti-Semite.

Now Marxists loved to make hay of Bakunin’s antisemitism, but they’re kind of in a similar boat. In letters to each other and in various attacks on rivals and the revolutionary left, Marx and Engels both leaned heavily into antisemitic tropes when it suited them. And I’ll just grab a few examples: in his 1844 work On the Jewish Question, Marx says, what is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly god? Money. Money is the jealous god of Israel in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man, and it turns them into commodities. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. In an 1856 article on money lending Marx wrote, thus we find every tyrant backed by a jew as is every Pope by a Jesuit. In truth, the cravings of oppressors would be hopeless, and the practicality of war out of the question, if there were not an army of Jesuits to smother thought and a handful of Jews to ransack pockets. He says, the real work is done by the jews, and can only be done by them, as they monopolize the machinery of the loan mongering mysteries, by concentrating their energies upon the barter trade insecurities. Here and there and everywhere that a little capital courts investment there is ever one of these little jews ready to make a little suggestion or place a little bit of a loan. Then in personal correspondence with Engels, when they were engaged in a bitter feud with this guy Ferdinand Lassalle, they called him the Jewish N-word and they did not write N-word. There’s more where that came from, but this is just a small sampling.

Now Marxists have answers about why Marx isn’t really antisemitic the way we understand the term today, particularly because there was no ethnic component to it and he supported Jewish political emancipation. But mostly the argument comes down to the fact that Marx was deploying Jewish stereotypes that were common currency, and he was in no way especially centrally antisemitic like true anti-semites of the 19th century of which there were plenty. And there is a little something to that. Marx and Bakunin said anti-Semitic things, they did, both in the heat of the moment and after much contemplation, there’s no getting around it. And it would be unfair to move on without pointing it out. But it would also be unfair to move on without pointing out that this kind of anti-Semitism did not make them unique, it made them utterly, depressingly ordinary. European civilization has antisemitism built into its DNA, and if you want to dismiss Marx and Bakunin, or marxism and anarchism because of this latent antisemitism, I would remind you that conservatives, liberals, monarchists, democrats, christian theologians, natural philosophers, and anyone who might call themselves a nationalist, read what they actually wrote. You’re going to find a lot of antisemitism. It’s gross. It’s everywhere. Nobody is free of sin.

So moving back to the final act of this prologue, the ultimate showdown for control of the International was triggered by a declaration from the central committee in September of 1871. It was allegedly a restatement and clarification of the aims of the International, but it included a now infamous Resolution 9, that said the formation of the working class into a political party is indispensable. This set off alarm bells among the anarchists because this is all Marx. Bakunin and the anarchists fundamentally disagree with this point. They thought embracing respectable politics would be their ruin, not their salvation. And they not only disagreed with the resolution, they believed the manner in which it was being put forth coming from a closed committee, rather than an open congress was further proof that Marx was trying to take the purposefully de-centralized structure of the International and make it a more centralized and hierarchical political structure.

Bakunin himself further stoked these fears, and was now openly warning his followers that Marx and his authoritarian communists were taking over. In September of 1872, the International met in the Hague for its first open congress since the beginning of the Franco-Prussian war. Bakunin himself was not present for the Congress, but his close associate and fellow anarchist James Guillaume was.

The majority of the Congress were aligned with Marx, and in early sessions, they resolved that the political plan, that is, having a political plan, was good, and it was now policy. The anarchists in the room objected, and they objected so strenuously that the Marxists got fed up and voted to expel the anarchists from the Congress. And then they expelled Bakunin in absentia from the International entirely.

So this is clearly a power move to consolidate the Marxist position within the International. The anarchist aligned sections of the International were appalled when they got the news about all this, as it violated the fundamentally decentralized nature of the charter, which promised local autonomy. The central committee and the congress were now trying to dictate uniform policy to everyone. These anarchist sections hastily convened a rival congress a few weeks later in St. Imier Switzerland, where they said we are the real International and it’s those guys over there, Marx and his authoritarian cronies who are expelled.

So now we have two internationals that we can distinguish by the color flags that define their movements: the red international, and the black international. Now the black flag did not become the symbol of anarchism until the 1880s, but still, the black international is far more poetic and evocative than calling it the anarchist international of St. Imier.

But it’s hardly worth caring about what we call them, because neither is going to last. The whole idea of the International was to unify everyone under a single banner. And when you’ve splintered into rival congresses issuing mutual excommunications, you’ve kind of lost the plot. Over in Germany, Otto Von Bismarck, breathed a sigh of relief when he read intelligence reports about all this. And he would later say that he trembled at the idea of the red and the black ever again joining forces. So 1872 was a pyrrhic victory for Marx. It sapped all the energy out of the movement. The red international he now led lost practically all its affiliated sections in southern Europe. So they held another Congress in September of 1873, that was very little attended, and lacked any kind of energy. Then the association lapsed into increasing dormancy as the International itself ceased to be of any real importance. For example, in Germany, it was the growing social democratic workers party that was grabbing energy and attention and funds.

The men of the red international tried one last time to hold an international congress in Philadelphia in 1876, but they were so much a ghost of their former selves, that at the end of this congress they simply voted to disband.

Meanwhile, Bakunin’s black international similarly passed into dormant irrelevancy. These anarchist revolutionaries didn’t stop organizing or writing or anything, they just became more focused on local and national issues without caring much about maintaining a strong international structure. And with Bakunin himself withdrawing to Switzerland and his health deteriorating, the black international also fell into the dustbin of history in 1877.

So it was that the first attempt to join all the working class energy of Europe under one banner failed.

The fracturing and collapse of the International closes our prologue on the Russian revolution. And we will end this by ending the lives of the guys we’ve been talking about. Mikhail Bakunin had lived a very hard life and after the breakdown of the International, his individual influence waned, and he withdrew to Switzerland with his family. There, he finally sat down to write his longer works, not just pamphlets and articles, and he produced in this period, Statism and Anarchy and God and the State. He died in Switzerland in 1876.

Marx had lived not quite as hard a life as Bakunin, but with similarly plagued by health problems near the end, both natural and of his own making — too many cigars, too much drinking and too little interest in a healthy diet. When the International fell apart, he too lost much of his active political influence and so he just kept writing and writing. He produced enough material to fill three more volumes of his series on Capital, but they were all left unfinished when he finally died in March of 1883. His old friend Friedrich Engels spent the next decade dedicated to organizing Marx’s writings, editing them, publishing collections, and generally being the elder statesman of the revolutionary left and a steward of Marx’s brand of scientific socialism. During this period, Engels exercised a great deal of editorial discretion and offered up his own interpretations of what quote unquote Marxism was, which makes Engels’s protestations that he was really just the steward of his genius friend ring a bit hollow. Engels was an active collaborator and contributor to the project of Marxism. He died in London in 1895.

So with that, we will wrap things up. We know some Marxism, we know the difference between the means of production and the forces of production and the relations of production. We know some anarchism, down with the bosses. We know that this generation of revolutionaries was appalled at the human cost of the capitalist industrial revolution. We know that they were personally stamped by the unfulfilled promise of the French Revolution, and their own dashed hopes from 1848 and then the Paris Commune. All of this would in turn shape the next generation of revolutionaries, who will aim us first at the Russian Revolution of 1905 and then the Russian Revolution of 1917. But before we can do that, we have to understand what we are aiming at. So when I come back in two weeks, we will embark on a general history of tsarist Russia.

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.68: The June Offensive

Well folks, you did it. You completely knocked it out of the park. Last Wednesday, we got the news that Hero of Two Worlds is not just on the New York Times bestseller list, it is debuting at number three. Number three! That is for all hardcover nonfiction. That’s not new releases, not just history books, but all hardcover nonfiction. Number three in the country. Incredible. We planted ourselves a flag very close to the top of the mountain. Now, there is also a different bestseller list maintained by the American Booksellers Association that is an even more gratifying accomplishment because it reports on the independent bookstore channel. You know, all the bookstores that I told you to go pre-order the book from. Uh, on that list, we are number one. Number one! You guys stepped up so huge. We were the best-selling non-fiction book in independent stores in the United States. I’m absolutely over the moon about this. I cannot thank you enough. I hope you like the book. I hope you share the book. And even though I’m taking a moment here to savor the profound sense of joy and accomplishment and gratitude that I’m feeling, I know myself well enough to know that those feelings will quickly give way to me making plans to climb the next mountain. So I hope you all enjoy Hero of Two Worlds, I certainly love this book, so let’s take a moment to enjoy the success, and then all look forward to climbing the next mountain together. 

So speaking of mountains we’re climbing that we’re not even close to the summit of, back to the Russian Revolution. Now we ended last week with the April Crises that broke the first government of the February Revolution, and led to a new coalition ministry of liberals and socialists. The entrance of a bunch of socialists into the ministry, and the endorsement of the coalition government by the Soviet seemed to signal that the fragile period of dual power was drawing to a close. The liberal and socialist wings of the revolution appeared to be combining under the banner of revolutionary unity. The man who most personally exemplified this new spirit of unity was Alexander Kerensky, who had carved out a space for himself in both camps, and was now serving as minister of war. In the spring of 1917, he was probably the single most energetically influential leader in Russia. Today, he will embark on an audacious plan he believes will permanently solidify the gains of February, rally the empire back to patriotic health, and launch a new Russia towards a glorious future. In the spring of 1917, the Russian army would launch a major offensive to prove to themselves and to the world the revolution had not weakened Russia, but instead infused her with a mighty power.

As Kerensky took over as minister of war in the first week of May 1917, the long and frozen winter approached the spring thaw, and the question of how the February revolution would impact the war now had to be answered. As we discussed last week, now ex-foreign minister Pavel Milyukov believed most of the anti-tsarist revolutionary energy that had been building since 1915 was driven by the catastrophic mismanagement of the war. And though Milyukov let this analysis take him to the unsupported conclusion that there was nothing wrong with the composition of the army or the objectives of the war — just its management — he was far from the only one who believed a better run war was meant to be one of the principle results of the revolution. Kerensky himself was committed to the same idea, but he believed the revolution would do far more than just shuffle around a few ministers and generals. In Kerensky’s view, the revolution had changed the very nature of the Russian military, infusing it with a new patriotic and democratic spirit that would propel it to glorious victory; victory not on behalf of mere imperialist greed or territorial ambition, but in the name of global freedom and global peace. 

Now, aside from the sort of grandiose and idealistic notions, there were practical reasons for launching an offensive in the spring of 1917, both in terms of domestic politics and foreign relations. On the domestic front, the provisional government was still trying to find its legitimacy. Kerensky believed there was no surer path to securing that legitimacy than leading Russia to military victory. War weariness among the civilian population was acute, but true antiwar defeatism was still a fringe position. If the newspapers were suddenly filled with stories of Russian victories, victories that would be presented as the path to adjust an honorable peace, it was hard to think of a better way to convince the people that the new Russia really was superior to the old Russia.

On the foreign relations front, Britain and France were understandably worried this new Russia would abandon the war and seek a separate piece with the central powers. They were especially worried about this because they planned a major offensive in the spring of 1917 that was premised on Russia launching an energetic operation on the Eastern Front. Those plans had been approved by the tsar. Would the provisional government follow through with them? The answer to that question would be yes. Kerensky and his fellow ministers believe that securing the future peace and prosperity of Russia meant they could not abandon their wartime commitment. After all, if Russia bailed on Britain and France, Britain and France might turn around and bail on Russia, cut their own separate peace with the central powers, and leave Russia high and dry.

There was also the very practical matter of what to do with all the demoralized, mutinous, resentful, and angry soldiers that had helped overthrow the old Russia because they were so demoralized, mutinous, resentful, and angry. They were all presently sitting around, posing a major threat to the new Russia. Kerensky and his associates looked at this problem and turned to the old maxim that idle hands are the devil’s workshop. If the soldiers stopped being an inert mass of solid resentment and were given energetic purpose, they would cease to be a threat to the provisional government and instead become their greatest ally and asset. 

Now, morale in the military was, at the moment, incredibly volatile. On the one hand, Soviet Order Number One had swept through the ranks, and nearly every unit at the front had democratized their units and set up little governing committees. They now felt empowered to determine their own fates, and certainly believe that future military operations would require their approval. The bad old days of dying for no reason, just because some despotic aristocratic officer ordered them to die for no reason were over. Now, this mile bump in spirits for the rank and file was matched by acute demoralization in the officer corps, now in many cases disarmed, and exercising only the most nominal authority over their troops. The officers lived in justified fear of being lynched by their own men at any moment, justified because that sort of thing was happening with some regularity on up and down the lines. Plus nearly every form of discipline that the officers could use to keep their men in line were now effectively prohibited. 

Now, if you’ll recall, Order Number One was issued in the context of the immediate political emergency in Petrograd in the last week of February. And it was technically only meant to apply to the soldiers of the Petrograd Garrison. But its rapid spread through the ranks could not be stopped, and in short order, the Soviet issued a further Declaration of Soldiers Rights, to prevent any of the old unpopular forms of military discipline to be reinstated. Upon taking up their posts in May 1917, the new coalition government decided to embrace the fait accompli rather than try to reverse it. They issued a statement saying, and I’m quoting here, “The strengthening of the principles of democratization in the army and the organization and strengthening of its military power in defensive and offensive operations will be the most important task of the provisional government.” The government believed in fact that if handled properly, the democratization of the military did not have to be something that inhibited the military’s power, but positively unleashed it.

The general staff considered this an incredibly dubious proposition. But at the same time, they recognized if they pushed too hard to restore the old methods of discipline and hierarchies, they might get lynched themselves. But when they went to meet with new Minister of War Kerensky and the other government leaders, they did push for an acknowledgement that in an army orders have to be followed. Allowing soldiers to take any order as a mere suggestion to be debated and then possibly declined would create paralyzing dysfunction that would make the tsar’s management of the war looked like a model of technocratic efficiency. So Kerensky responded by issuing two clarifications to the organization in the military:

First, the existing office officer corps would retain the right to pick, choose. And promote its own officers. Soldiers did not in fact have the right to elect their own officers. 

Second, despite a general ban on corporal punishment, that ban would not apply during times of combat. When the fighting started, an officer retained the right to severely punish disobedience. Opponents to Kerensky’s left, most especially the Bolsheviks, would make a great deal of hay out of this `clarification,` telling the soldiers that effectively nullified all the false promises made in the Declaration of Soldiers Rights, and that really nothing had changed at all.

Despite these clarifications, for the most part, Kerensky tried to embrace the democratization of the army and the treatment of the soldiers, so that everybody understood that they were more than just anonymous cannon fodder. And he meant for that to be understood by both the men and the officers alike. Kerensky himself knew that one of the biggest problem was that the men simply didn’t know what they were fighting for. ?”After three years of the cruelest sufferings,” Kerensky noted, “the millions of soldiers exhausted to the last degree by the tortures of war, found themselves confronted suddenly with the questions: what are we dying for? Must we die?”

Kerensky spent most of may touring the frontlines, encouraging the men to understand that they were no longer mere slaves of the tsar’s imperialist ambitions, but were instead citizen soldiers, fighting to defend their homes, their families, and the revolution that was already at that moment setting them all free. When the war was over, they would all get to return to cities and towns and villages gloriously transformed by the new order of things. But first, they had to win the war. .

Kerensky’s tour was by all accounts, a great success. Everywhere he went, he delivered passionate orations to rally the troops, and they responded with adoring cheers. As Kerensky advanced through this tour, he was convinced more than ever that the Russian army was ready to launch a great military offensive.

But unfortunately the magical enthusiasm wore off almost as soon as he departed. Kerensky was trying to convince them that before they could go back home and enjoy the fruits of the revolution, they would first have to charge forward into the cannons and machine guns and barbed wire of the enemy. And after the speeches were over, and the men went back to the trenches, the troops couldn’t quite remember why they needed to charge into battle. Surely it was within the government’s power to simply sign a peace and let everybody return home to enjoy the fruits of the revolution without anybody dying. And so, these basic questions were ultimately left unanswered: what are we dying for? Must we die?

Helping the men to not be satisfied with what Kerensky was selling were plenty of left wing organizers and literature out there, making the not inaccurate point that whatever the government said, ultimately, Russian soldiers would be sent a fight and die for the benefit of French bankers and British imperialists. When the government used the euphemism that Russia must ‘uphold treaty obligations,’ that’s what they meant: we die. They profit. These debates about the point of the war then became a major topic of discussion at the first all Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers and Soldiers Deputies. On June 3rd, 1917, just over a thousand delegates from across Russia convened in Petrograd. In total, they represented over 300 separate soviets that had self convened since February, whether by soldiers, workers, or peasants. 21 of them represented active duty troops, eight were from rear guard garrisons, and another five representing fleets in the navy. The rest were civilians from all over the empire. Of the 777 delegates whose party affiliation we know, there were 285 SRs, 248 Mensheviks, 105 Bolsheviks and 32 Menshevik internationalists, which is to say the small groups surrounding Martov. These numbers meant that a strong majority at the Soviet Congress supported the provisional government, supported the recently formed coalition, and though they supported calls for the government to make every effort to achieve a general peace, they were ultimately as patriotically committed to the war as Kerensky. When a Swiss socialist named Robert Grimm was expelled from Russia the day the Congress opened because he had come to Russia, bearing an offer for a separate peace from the Germans, the Bolsheviks kicked up quite a fuss. But the rest of the Congress voted 640 to 121 to approve of his deportation. 

Now, the Bolsheviks were in a clear minority position during this Congress of Soviet, but they planned to use every opportunity to make themselves and their policies heard. They continued to agitate for the Soviet to quit monkeying around and assert the Soviet’s right to not just support the government of Russia, but to become the government of Russia. The coalition government was better in so far as it included socialists, but it was a deed half done but nobody else in the room thought they should go that far that fast. There was a famous moment when Irakli Tsereteli, one of the Mensheviks who was now in the coalition government defended the coalition by saying that there was no socialist party in Russia that thought it was a good idea to break the alliance with the liberals and upend the government. completely He declared, “There is not a political party in Russia, which would say, offer power to us, resign, and we will take your place. Such a party does not exist in Russia.” 

Out on the floor, Lenin, piped up and shouted, ” It does exist!”  

This triggered a great deal of laughter in the hall, both because it was kind of funny, and also because there goes Lenin again, proving he’s just a fanatical wacko on the fringes.

But Lenin was very serious. When he got a chance to make his first speech on June 4th, he exhorted the delegates to not backslide into mere parliamentary democracy. He pointed out that none of the alleged advanced western democracies had anything resembling the kind of real popular assemblies that the Soviets represented in Russia. They should not abandon this institution that represented true democracy in favor of mere bourgeois democracy. The Soviet ought to assert its right to be the sovereign assembly of Russia, not hand the keys over to bourgeois liberals who were in any case too weak in Russia actually govern on their own. Kerensky, now back from his tour of the frontlines, responded with a speech chiding Lenin for demanding wildly implausible gambits that would risk the gains of February, namely political freedom. Kerensky said if nothing else, they needed to move with deliberate caution so that, and I’m quoting, “Comrade Lenin, who has been abroad, may have the opportunity to speak here again, and not be forced to flee back to Switzerland.” This was a not too subtle reminder to everyone that Lenin was out of touch. 

Undeterred, as he always was, Lenin marched into the lion’s mouth again by rebuking any talk of a military offensive. Now he was very careful not to come off as naive or defeatist — which, hopefully as we’ve established, he was neither of those things — but he leaned hard into painting a picture of the war as fundamentally unjust. How could they possibly contemplate quote, “the continuation of the imperial slaughter and the death of more hundreds of thousands of millions of people?” The war itself was fundamentally imperialist and capitalist and could not be redeemed. It was so fundamentally unjust that it was a crime to ask more soldiers to die on behalf of it.

Trotsky, who as we’ll talk about next week had shifted back into alliance with Lenin, gave a pretty good speech, arguing that it would, yes, be good for the Russian army to go out and fight a war for revolutionary ideals, but that was hardly what was happening. Mealy mouth objectives like ‘upholding treaty obligations’ were hardly the stuff revolutions were made of. Trotsky said, “There exist, and there will exist ideas, watchwords, purposes, capable of rallying it and imparting to this army unity and enthusiasm. The army of the great French Revolution consciously responded to calls for an offensive. What is the crux of the matter? It is this: every soldier asks himself, for every five drops of blood which I’m going to shed today, will not one drop only be shed in the interest of the Russian Revolution and four in the interest of a French stock exchange and of English imperialism?”

Kerensky could only respond to this by saying the provisional government was absolutely trying to negotiate a general peace. And in fact, the Germans had already rejected two such offers. Kerensky said Germany would probably not come to the table unless they were defeated in battle, or unless the Kaiser was overthrown by the German people. And then he tossed another jab in Lenin’s direction by asking why Lenin had even come to Petrograd when he could be doing so much more to advance the cause of peace and international solidarity by getting off the train in Berlin to help his German comrades overthrow the Kaiser. 

But Lenin believed he was exactly where he needed to be, thank you very much. And as he and his comrades made speeches from the minority faction inside the Congress of Soviets, they determined to stage another armed demonstration to prove that they could not simply be brushed aside. Lenin believed in the power of action. Revolutions were ultimately made by deeds and not words. The Bolsheviks may not have huge numbers throughout the empire, but they had key strongholds in the capital, including a now heavily fortified working class district and the Kronstadt Naval Base. They had done very well recently recruiting from soldiers and workers who couldn’t care less about orthodox interpretations of thousand page tomes that said that the capitalists are the enemy, but to fulfill the prophecy of historical materialism we must also give them power. If you believe that the workers and soldiers who made the revolution should now get to lead the revolution, then the Bolsheviks were the party for you. And they were recruiting rapidly.

In the first week of June, the Bolsheviks planned to turn out 40 to 60,000 armed demonstrators as a show of force, a followup show of force to what had happened at the end of April. Maybe, if things went right, they might just go ahead and seize power from the weak willed backsliders, compromisers, and sellouts right then and there.

On June 9th, placards went up all over Petrograd calling for a mass turnout the next day. The leadership of the Congress of Soviets had been kept totally in the dark and they scrambled to head off what they believed was a dangerously de-stabilizing manifestation. As soon as they found out about it, they put up their own public call saying the Soviet did not sanction any demonstration on June 10th and everyone needed to stay home. This put Lenin and the central committee of the Bolsheviks on the horns of a dilemma, which they resolved by backing down. Their whole strategic thrust at this point was to direct the legitimacy of the Soviet towards their preferred policies, not accidentally destroy the Soviet legitimacy by challenging its authority. Now the Bolsheviks were not unanimous about this, and Stalin, for example, fumed about the decision to back down, thinking it proved the party’s lack of resolve. But Lenin and the others voted to call off the march and wait for another time.

The near miss of June 10th was the second time the Bolsheviks were suspected of aiming at an armed insurrection to seize power in something like a coup d’etat. The other socialist parties now had to decide what to do with them. They all supported the provisional goverment — hell, many of them were members of the provisional government. It had all been sanctioned by the Soviet. Where did the Bolsheviks get off thinking they could overthrow all of this in an armed insurrection? The Menshevik minister Tsereteli minced no words; in a meeting of socialist leaders on June 12th, he said, “That which has happened was nothing but a conspiracy to overthrow the government and have the Bolsheviks take power. Power which they know they will never obtain in any other way. The conspiracy was rendered harmless as soon as we discovered it. But it can recur tomorrow.” He recommended the Soviet order the Bolsheviks to disarm and hand over all their weapons. 

But the others balked. The Bolsheviks may be rash and potentially dangerous, but they were also by far the most zealously active defenders of the revolution. To disarm them would be to disarm the Soviet’s most effective soldiers, and to leave the whole shared project of revolution open to reactionary counter-revolution. So they voted a compromise: the Soviet levied a general ban on all armed demonstrations by any party that did not have the approval of the Soviet, but they did not explicitly disarm the Bolsheviks. 

With tensions mounting in the capital, and threats to the provisional government coming from multiple directions, Alexander Kerensky wound up in roughly the same place Tsar Nicholas had been in the summer of 1914, hoping that a great military offensive would rallied patriotic unity of the nation, and then when they scored victories on the battlefield, defang all critics of the regime. Lenin and the Bolsheviks would be caught out openly opposing a glorious triumph and be fatally discredited. Lenin would probably have to crawl back to Switzerland and die in the mountains somehow. Kerensky’s preferred verdict of the February Revolution was a stable alliance of liberals and moderate socialists, forging a democratic Russia. He believed nothing put that vision on firmer footing than a great military victory. In fact, in June of 1917, he started very carefully putting each and every one of his eggs in that single basket.

To prepare for the offensive, Kerensky elevated General Brusilov to be commander in chief. As we’ve seen, Brusilov was probably the single best general the Russians had. Brusilov had ably demonstrated the year before that going on the offensive was an inevitably doomed to failure; the only thing that had stopped him in 1916 was the tsar letting overly cautious generals in the north remained passively inert rather than back him up. If that didn’t happen again, there was no reason they couldn’t, like, march all the way to Vienna. And as if that was not enough to recommend his promotion, Brusilov was also doing his best to accept the democratization of the army, to try to avoid seeing it in strictly negative terms like most of his fellow senior officers. Brusilov had his reservations, of course, which frankly grew considerably as the actual date of the offensive neared, but maybe a democratic army of citizen soldiers fired up by the spirit of patriotism really could carry the day.

Kerensky try to re-inflame that spirit of patriotism by going on another tour of the front lines. The results were basically the same: almost rapturous enthusiasm when he showed up to give a speech, but then when he left the soldiers returning to their kind of self-preserving bewilderment about why on earth they needed to go fight and die. The lines were stable. The Germans were making no threatening moves, and in fact, doing everything in their power to convince the Russian soldiers on the front lines to settle into a kind of defacto armistice so the Germans could focus all their attention on the west. Now, sure, if somebody attacks us, we’ll fight a defensive war in defense of Russia. But actually going out on the attack? Why? What for? Far from being fired up by patriotic and revolutionary passion to go risk their lives in glorious battle, the overriding motivation of nearly every soldier in the Russian army was to simply live through the war.

Despite increasing warning signs that the Russian army was maybe not fit for a major offensive operation, Kerensky continued on his course. The main line of attack would be aimed southwest towards the Austro-Hungarians in Galicia, where the Russians had always had the greatest success during the war. On June 16th, 1917, they opened up a massive two-day barrage that absolutely pummeled and exploded the lines of the Central Powers. Then, at 9:00 AM on June 18th, they opened up a massive offensive charge. The main thrust southwest into Galicia was matched by offensive operations in the west and in the north to keep the Germans from reinforcing the Austro-Hungarians as they had done the year before. 

For the first two days, everything seemed to be going great, and the Russians pushed forward and the central powers fell back. But the fighting was much heavier than anticipated. The number of Russian soldiers killed and wounded mounted rapidly, and within 48 hours, those soldiers left alive, who had just watched a bunch of their friends whose only goal had been to not die, die, made them stop and wonder, what’s the point of all this? Surely we’ve done enough. How many more of us have to die?

Back in Petrograd, the leaders of the Soviet tried to steal a bit of the Bolshevik’s thunder by finally authorizing a mass demonstration in the name of revolutionary unity on June 18th. It was meant to coincide with the beginning of the offensive and something like 400,000 people turned out. But while the Menshevik and SR leaders hoped that the whole thing would be a show of support for the provisional government and for the offensive, the Bolsheviks turned it into a great PR coup for themselves by handing out banners saying things like down with the war and down with the 10 capitalist ministers, which is to say the liberals in the coalition government. So when these hundreds of thousands paraded through Petrograd, they did so shouting Bolshevik slogans and holding Bolshevik banners. The leaders of the Soviet could only smile and wave and grit their teeth. 

Now, maybe, maybe of Kerensky’s June offensive had worked, this would not have been a big deal. If the news from the front had all been happy tales of victory and triumph, the rest of 1917 would have gone very, very differently. But that was not the news from the front. After two days of heavy fighting, most of the Russian soldiers concluded they had done enough. There was no reason to keep going to risk their lives. They started stopping short, refusing to fight. There are more than a few stories of units discovering huge caches of alcohol and just saying, screw it, let’s get drunk. This stalled out the push and gave the Germans and Austrians time to muster a counter offensive. And when they charged back, the Russian army just broke and fled. Many didn’t even bother running away; they just surrendered on the spot. Again, the goal was now to live through a pointless war. Better to be alive in a POW camp than dead in the mud. 

Kerensky himself observing the campaign near the front lines was confidentially admitting by June 24th the offensive he had staked practically everything on was falling apart. He had in fact wound up staking nearly every revolutionary party to the success of the June offensive. 

Except for one, of course. 

After two probably failed attempts to seize power already behind him, Lenin licked his lips and decided maybe the third time would be the charm. After all, one thing everybody knew from French history is that July is an excellent month to launch a revolutionary insurrection. 

When we come back, we will dive headlong into the July Days, but that is going to wait a couple of weeks. I have been burning it at both ends of the candle for the past several months, both producing episodes every week and doing the kind of insane amount of work that goes into promoting a book — I’ve been doing tons of press and interviews nonstop for the past several weeks, so I have scheduled myself a breather to recharge my batteries, so there’s not going to be a new episode for the next two weeks. Now in the meantime, there’ll be lots of other podcasts where I’ll show up on, and I’ll keep trying to keep you abreast of when and where I’m doing interviews. Or you can take this time to read Hero of Two Worlds or listen to the audio book. I hear it’s pretty good, and people like it. 

So I will be back on September 27th to tell you all about how Lenin and the Bolsheviks took advantage of Kerensky’s failed offensive by launching their own… failed offensive.

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.7: The Paris Commune Revisited

This was supposed to be our last episode of this Marxist anarchist introductory prologue to the Russian Revolution. But I just realized that I am taking a two week break in two weeks, that’s going to happen, because I’m now operating more closely in tune with the French school system schedule, which is roughly six weeks on, two weeks off. After we’re done with this little Marxist anarchist prologue, we are due to shift gears to a general history of Russia. It will take us up through the assassination of the Tsar Liberator in March of 1881, at which point we will tie these two threads together and merge them into a single narrative on our way to 1905, then 1917.

But if I commence with that general history of Russia next week, then I’m just going to disappear for two weeks, and it’ll be weirdly disjointed, so much better to launch that after I come back. So that means we get to do this cool thing where we linger on the explosive and supremely relevant event that landed in the middle of the ideological and personal conflict between Marx and Bakunin the Paris commune. And since we already did a whole series on the Paris Commune, this episode will help tie together past episodes to future episodes. So this was meant to be, it’s almost like I planned it. And with that, let us get going with the Paris commune revisited.

So the first thing we should do is get everyone geographically situated. In the summer of 1870 Marx was still living in London, Engels was living in Manchester, but having sold the family business, he was on the verge of making a retirement move to London later that fall. Bakunin was living in Switzerland at the time and active in the Geneva section of the International. Now, all of Europe was aware of the tensions between Bismarck’s Prussia and Napoleon the third’s second empire. But though these tensions were well known, the sudden declaration of the Franco-Prussian War in July of 1870 surprised everyone. Even if it was also paradoxically, not unexpected. The next year, it would be a seminal period for everyone, for the great powers of Europe. It was the beginning of the destructive conflict between France and Germany that would not end until 1945. For the revolutionary left it led immediately to the Paris Commune, the first time the new world they dreamed of had poked through the lead blanket of bourgeois reactionary repression.

Now we know what Marx and Engels and Bakunin thought about events in France because it produced some of their best and most important work. Marx would wind up writing three addresses for the International at three key moments over the course of the next year. The first address was published in July of 1870, just after war was declared the second in September of 1870, just after the Battle of Sedan, the capture and abdication of Napoleon and the proclamation of the third Republic, and the third and final address in may of 1871 after the Bloody Week and the Fall of the Commune. These three addresses would be collected 20 years later and published by Engels under the title, The Civil War in France, which Engels says is the coda to the 18th Brumiere of Louis Bonaparte, and it represents some of Marx’s most important political writing. Bakunin meanwhile, wrote a pamphlet called A Letter to a Frenchman on the Present Crisis in September of 1870, so again, just after the collapse of the second empire, within which he further elaborated on his hopes and plans for a mass social revolution in France to be the end result of all this. And then he has an essay called The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State, which was composed in May of 1871. Where he too now reflected in the aftermath of yet another defeat for the forces of revolution Marx and Bakunin’s respective preoccupations analysis, hopes, fears, doubts, and conclusions are informative not just about the position of left wing revolutionaries to arguably the seminal event of left wing revolutionary history up to that point, but they also set a framework for future revolutionary arguments. The arguments over events in France in 1870 and 1871 would just keep going forever. Trust me the question of whether the peasants have revolutionary potential is not going anywhere anytime soon.

To start just after the declaration of war by France on July the 19th, 1870 Marx and Engels, heaped blame for this war on Napoleon the Third, and they predicted the war would be the end of the second empire. Ever since Napoleon’s coup in 1851, Marx and Engels had seen the dynastic and territorial ambitions of this parody second empire as the principle threat to social revolution in the 1850s and 1860s. Now they were not insensible to the machinations of Bismarck in fostering this conflict, but as they discuss the situation, they concluded, as Marx said, in a letter to Engels dated July the 20th, the French need a thrashing.

Then in a letter dated August the 15th, Engels engaged in a little game theory, and he worked out that the best possible outcome would be Prussia winning a war of national defense that would lead to the unification of Germany and the fall of the second French empire. He wrote to Marx, if Germany wins French Bonapartism will at any rate be smashed. The endless row about the establishment of German unity will at last be got rid of. The German workers will be able to organize themselves on a national scale quite different from that hitherto, and the French workers, whatever sort of government may succeed this one, are certain to have a freer field than under Bonapartism.

Though they both hoped that the nationalist fervor kicked up in Germany and France would not lead German and French workers to forget that their enemy was the bourgeoisie, not each other, in the summer of 1870 Marx and Engels had a rooting interest, and their rooting interest was down with Napoleon. Then in September of 1870, there’s this run of cataclysmic events in rapid succession: the defeat of the French army at Sedan, the capture and abdication of the Emperor, and the proclamation of the third Republic on September the Fourth, 1870.

So Napoleon has gone down. Marx and Engels were cautiously optimistic about the third Republic and now switched their rooting interest from down with Napoleon to long live the Republic. So now they’re sort of rooting for the French rather than the Germans. But they wanted working class activists and members of the International to hold off on immediately staging some kind of social revolution in France. Here they were thinking specifically of Blanqui, who would no doubt see the political chaos as an opportunity to stage a coup and forge a revolutionary dictatorship. The call by Marx and Engels to hold back was partly driven by strategic calculations, because they saw France’s capitulation to Germany as inevitable, and what Marx and Engels wanted was for the new government of national defense to become the government of national defeat, to let them be the ones who would become fatally unpopular when they inevitably sign the surrender. That is when we stage our revolution. So Engels wrote to Marx on September the 12th, whatever the government may be, which concludes peace, the fact that it has done so will eventually make its existence impossible. And in internal conflicts, there will not be much to fear from the army returned home after imprisonment. After the peace, all the chances will be more favorable to the workers than they ever were before.

What Marx and Engels wanted least and feared the most though, was a German invasion of France. If Bismarck turn this from a war of defense, into an aggressive war of conquest, it was going to have profoundly negative reverberations. But again, for now, their position was caution and support for the third French Republic.

Bakunin meanwhile had quite the opposite reaction. In his letter to a Frenchman on the present crisis, which was written at this same moment, he was positively giddy about the idea of a German invasion. When the second empire collapsed and invasion of Germany would arouse the latent energy of the people, Bakunin believed that he and his comrades could then harness this aroused energy and advance it from mere national defense to mass social revolution. So what Bakunin calls for is for socialists and anarchists to go out among the people. First, get them riled up to fight the Germans and form them into patriotic guerrilla units, then in the midst of this organization, explained to them that if they wanted, they could all just keep going and rid themselves of all their enemies, not just German invaders, but the landlords and the bankers, the bureaucrats, the aristocrats, the fat cats. And by starting with locally organized guerrilla militias, they could build from the bottom up as befit Bakunin’s vision of voluntarily affiliating local communes, overthrowing state power.

So Bakunin was not cautiously optimistic about the third Republic and he did not advise holding off on revolution. For him, the Republic was no different than the empire and the moment to crush it was here now at the moment of its birth, to make this so-called third Republic a minor footnote in history, to make the fall of the second empire the dawning of the truly new era free out rulers and hierarchies. Now Bakunin agreed with Marx that he thought the city workers had to lead. He says, only the workers in the cities can now save France. But then Bakunin throws down an ideological gauntlet: he says, faced with mortal danger from within and without, France can be saved only by a spontaneous uncompromising, passionate, anarchic, and destructive uprising of the masses of the people all over France. Because though Bakunin thinks the urban working classes will take the lead, he does not believe the urban proletariat is the only revolutionary class. He says, I believe that the only two classes now capable of so mighty and insurrection are the workers and the peasants.

Now this is a bigger deal than you might think. Bakunin is consciously arguing against what was becoming the Marxist possession that only the working class proletariat could be the revolutionary class. The proletariat’s relations to the means of production and their potential for achieving revolutionary class consciousness made them unique. The peasants on the other hand were ignorant backwards, superstitious, selfish. They were tools of reaction. They had no ability to form revolutionary class consciousness as Marx evoked with his colorful description of the peasants as quote, a sack of potatoes. So for the Marxists, the urban working classes must be the ones and the only one to stage the revolution. Bakunin absolutely 100% disagreed with this. And partly, this was because the kind of mass movement Bakunin envision required a massive people, not some narrow band of city workers who even in 1870 were dwarfed by the ranks of the rural peasantry. But he also disagreed that they were just hopelessly backwards and conservative. And so he addressed the three main complaints against the peasants: that they are fanatically attached to superstitious religion, that they are zealously committed to the emperor, and that they obstinately cling to private property. As to the religious point, well, Bakunin hates religion more than anybody. And he agreed that the peasants were backward and superstitious. But he was far more concerned about the damage that would be done by trying to abolish religion by violent decree, rather than educating the peasants and letting them shrug off religion for themselves. Bakunin says, it always angers me to hear not only the revolutionary Jacobins, but also the enlightened socialists of the school of Blanqui, and even some of our intimate friends advancing the completely anti revolutionary idea that it will be necessary in the future to decree the abolition of all religious cults and the violent expulsion of all priests.

Bakunin’s concern here is that was some people out there being so hot to recreate the revolutionary dictatorship of 1793, they will wind up making the same mistakes. And instead of getting the peasants on board with the revolution, they will trigger a new Vendée uprising. He says, you can therefore be entirely certain that if the cities commit the colossal folly of decreeing the extermination of religious cults and the banishment of priests, the peasants will revolt on mass against the cities and become a terrible weapon in the hands of the reaction.

The second point against the peasants was that they seemed in most places to always support authoritarian sovereigns: emperor, Napoleon, or the King of Prussia, or the tsar of Russia. But Bakunin says don’t be deceived, they often love the single sovereign because they hate the wider aristocracy. The rich idlers, the noble landlords, overfed bankers, the peasant hate them all. Bakunin says, they are willing to kill the rich and take and give their property to the emperor because they hate the rich in general. They harbor the thoroughgoing and intense socialistic hatred of laboring men against the men of leisure, the upper crust. And then he says further, I am not at all alarmed by the platonic attachment of the peasants to the emperor, this attachment is merely a negative expression of their hatred of the landed gentry and the bourgeois of the city. So Bakunin spied in this seemingly hopeless love of autocracy a socialistic spirit, hatred of the non laboring rich, that very much gave the peasants revolutionary potential if it was cultivated correctly.

Then finally he addresses the peasants attachment to their individual plots of land, which Bakunin both sympathizes with and wants to help them overcome, but not by imposing decrees from on high Bakunin says the peasant holds on passionately to the little property that he has been able to scrape together so that he and his loved ones shall not die of hunger and privation in the economic jungle of this merciless society. Then he says, it is true that the peasants are not communists, they hate and fear those who would abolish private property because they have something to lose, at least in their imagination. The vast majority of the city workers owning no property are immeasurably more inclined towards communism than are the peasants.

But here and elsewhere in his writings, Bakunin is clear that he does not think this can be overcome by the immediate mass confiscation of private property. That would trigger a backlash. He thinks it must happen slowly and carefully. Critically, he thinks it must be undertaken by the peasants themselves, not by outside agents or revolutionary commissars from the city. And Bakunin says that to get them on board at least initially, we just need to focus on seizing large landed estates of their rich neighbors. That they’re going to be totally on board with. And then over time, as they see the benefits of collective and cooperative work, they will lose their attachment to their own little individual plot, because that little individual plot will no longer represent the means of their very biological survival.

So how then to cultivate the revolutionary potential of the peasants correctly? Well for Bakunin, it kind of boils down to, don’t be a dick about it. The necessary alliance between workers and peasants usually fails because urban proletariat leaders are full of arrogance and contempt for the peasantry. That they took it as a matter of course that when the revolution came that the rural areas would have to be conquered, not cultivated. And Bakunin says, where do the French socialists get the preposterous, arrogant and unjust idea that they have the right to flout the will of 10 million peasants and impose their political and social system upon them? What is the theoretical justification for this fictitious right? And for Bakunin, it’s nothing but hubris and arrogance. So he advises the urban leaders to abandon the pretentious scholastic vocabulary of doctrinaire socialism, and then come to the peasants and explain in simple language without evasions and fancy phrases, what they want. Bakunin says that when these leaders come to the country villages, not as conceited preceptors or instructors, but as brothers and equals trying to spread the revolution, but not imposing it on the landed workers, when they burn all the official documents, judgments, court orders, and titles to property and abolish, rent, private debts, mortgages, criminal, civil law books, and all that, when this mountain of useless paper symbolizing the poverty and enslavement of the proletariat goes up in flames, then, you can be sure, the peasants will understand and join their fellow revolutionists, the city workers. That’s the plan, anyway.

Having written all this, Bakunin then himself packed up his bags and headed for Lyons, where he hoped to participate in the organization of a commune that would help kickstart this mass revolution. But this dream ended very quickly. On September the 28th, 1870, Bakunin and a few of his comrades attempted to seize the Hotel de Ville in Lyons and declare a revolutionary commune. But the whole thing was a dismal failure. The Lyons national guard was very much supportive of the new third Republic, Bakunin and company were promptly arrested and expelled from the city. Bakunin returned to Switzerland.

When Marx found out about this little misadventure, he was ticked off at Bakunin for jumping the gun. He wrote to his friend, Edward Spencer Beasley on October the 19th, the asses Bakunin and Cluseret arrived at Lyons and spoiled everything. So over the winter, they could all just watch from afar as the events that we covered over the rest of our series on the Paris Commune unfolded: the siege of Paris, the capitulation of the government of national defense, that happened just as Marx hoped. But it paved the way for the return of the hated Adolphe Thiers and the royalists, whose principal enemy was not the Germans, but the Paris working class. And that slogan, better Bismarck than Blanqui, was already making the rounds.

Marx absolutely subscribed to the phony war theory about the siege of Paris, that all of this was play acted by French generals and government officials to keep the workers occupied and occasionally send them more zealous of them off to certain deaths in pre-arranged massacres. Then, as Marx Engels and Bakunin observed from afar, the Versailles government attempted to seize the cannons of the Paris National Guard, triggering the declaration on the commune, its brief blaze of life, and its bloody and merciless death. And so both Marx and Bakunin came back around in May of 1871 to write their respective obituaries of the Paris Commune.

So if you will recall, the Paris Commune was made up of a mix of Proudhonists, Blanquists, and neo Jacobins. Some of them were International men, men who were members of the International Working Men’s Association, but despite accusations at the time, the International was not some secret guiding hand to all this. Remember since the beginning of the siege of Paris back in September, it was incredibly difficult to even exchange letters with Parisians, let alone puppet master a revolution. Then, if you will further remember, one of the great divergences within these groups was over the question of what the commune even was. What was this all about? For the Proudhonists, and I’ll just quote my own self here from episode 8.6, the commune was about moving forward with the anarchist dream of creating a non-state or an anti-state. The replacement of the heretofore unchallenged assumption that political power, whatever it’s based and whatever its goals, could only be expressed through coercion and force.

In a sense, the Paris Commune was supposed to be something wholly new in the world. And then I said, but as the Proudhonists look towards a utopian future, the Blanquists and the Neo Jacobins look to revive a glorious past. For them, the Paris Commune was the direct descendant, the full revival, in fact, of the original Paris, commune that had existed from 1789 to 1795. With Robespierre and the Committee of Public safety as their acknowledged idols, their vision of the commune was 180 degrees different from the anarchists. They wanted the commune to be a revolutionary dictatorship.

And we know who won this fight: after a few military setbacks in April of 1871, the communal council voted to form a five man committee of public safety, a revolutionary dictatorship that would rule by absolute decree.

So Bakunin’s spends a great deal of time in his essay, the Paris Commune and the Idea of the State, lamenting this unfortunate turn of events. And he now used the unfortunate example of the commune to draw further distinctions between his stateless socialism and the authoritarian tendencies of his revolutionary rivals. He says, in the proletariat of the great cities of France and even of Paris, still cling to many Jacobin prejudices, and to many dictatorial and governmental concepts, the cult of authority has not yet been completely eradicated in them. Giving into these prejudices meant that we would wind up with a political dictatorship, the reconstitution of the state with all its privileges, inequalities, and oppressions. By taking a devious, but inevitable path, we would come to re-establish the political, social and economic slavery of the masses.

Now granted even the anarchists of the Paris commune believed that with the armies of Versailles at the gates that they needed clear leadership. But still, they wound up with the complete opposite system of what they wanted. They were not boldly embracing new forms of emancipatory liberty, but recreating old forms of dictatorial power. Bakunin was bitterly disappointed to say the least.

Now for his part, Marx agreed that this obsession with recreating the past was hugely counterproductive. He had personally given up that ghost in 1849. And he wrote in his third address to the International, in every revolution there intrude, at the side of its true agents, men of a different stamp, some of them survivors and devotees of past revolutions, without insight into the present movement. These types are guilty of repeating year after year the same set of stereotype declarations against the government of the day. And so he goes on to say, after March the 18th, some such men did also turn up. As far as their power went, they hampered the real action of the working class, exactly as men of that sort have hampered the full development of every previous revolution. They are an unavoidable evil. With time, they are shaken off, but time was not allowed to the commune.

So though Marx is always going to believe that the workers must seize the state before they can slough off the state, by dictatorship of the proletariat he never meant anything like a compact one party rule vanguard slavishly cosplaying Robespierre. He imagined something new, which we will talk more about next week.

Aside from these ideological issues, Marx and Bakunin also shared a couple of tactical criticisms. Both agreed that the idea that the commune could avoid war with the Versailles government by being nice and not making trouble or not provoking a war was insane naiveté. No matter what the commune did, Versailles would be bringing war.

So in those opening days, right after the showdown over the cannons, the national guard should have marched on Versailles while the government was wobbly and their army demoralized. But instead, the men of the commune turn their attention to holding elections, not making war. And it was a fatal error. They also criticized the leaders of the commune for not seizing the bank of France and instead, simply negotiating loans from it. Bakunin of course is always going to want to destroy every bank he finds, while Engels had an additional comment in his postscript to The Civil War in France, he wrote, the hardest thing to understand is certainly the holy awe with which they remain standing respectfully outside the gates of the bank of France. This was also a serious political mistake. The bank in the hands of the commune, this would have been worth more than 10,000 hostages. It would’ve meant the pressure of the whole of the French bourgeoisie on the Versailles government in favor of peace with the commune. Marx and Bakunin and Engels also agreed though that the commune fell in part because the men and the women of the commune were simply too decent. Bakunin writes, yet, precisely because they were men of good faith they were filled with self distrust in the face of the immense task to which they had devoted their minds in their lives. They thought too little of themselves. And then Marx wrote a letter to a comrade in April of 1871, so just after the commune’s failed March on Versailles. He writes, it appears that the defeat of the Parisians was their own fault, but a fault which really arose from their too great decency. So far from this image of the communards as being bloody-minded animals, they were in fact not executing hostages willy nilly, like the Versailles government was, they were not going out of their way to plunder and burn, they were doing everything they could to avoid or end a civil war to simply be allowed to live and let live. It was Adolphe Thiers and his government who would not have it. They were the bloody-minded animals in all this. And a large part of The Civil War in France is Marx deploying the full venom of his poison pen against the monstrous gnome Adolphe Thiers who more than anyone else was to blame for everything. As for accusations against the so-called barbarian incendiaries who burned down chunks of Paris. Marx says that in war, armies have always used fire and destruction, and it was only considered beyond the pale now because this was done in the name of the powerless against the powerful, not the powerful against the powerless.

He writes, the working men’s Paris, in the act of its heroic self holocaust, involved in its flames buildings and monuments. While tearing to pieces the living body of the proletariat, its rulers must no longer expect to return triumphantly into the intact architecture of their abodes. The government of Versailles cries, incendiaryism, and whispers this cue to all its agents down to the remoteness hamlet, to hunt up its enemies everywhere as suspect of professional incendiaryism.” And Marx finishes contemptuously, “the bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar. For Marx and Engels and Bakunin, the Paris Commune was the last great revolutionary uprising of their lifetimes. The last time they had a chance to put theory into practice. And it was like every other revolutionary uprising of their lifetimes, a bitter disappointment.

But the Paris Commune had given them a concrete example of what a more just society in the future might look like. And it would give the next generation of revolutionaries something to point to and study and say yes, that, something like that is what we want. And so I’ll wrap this up today with the fitting closing line from Marx’s third address: working men’s Paris with its commune will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priests will not avail to redeem them.

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.67: The April Crisis

So I apologize for this episode being a few days late. Pub week for Hero of Two Worlds has been insanely hectic. But I have done a bunch of other podcast interviews, uh, including Based on a True Story, My History Can Beat Up Your Politics, Tides of History, Chris Rambax [???] conversations podcast as well as a thing on the radio, which is also up on YouTube with KPFA, for their Letters and Politics show. I have even more interviews upcoming, including one with Ben Franklin’s World, Deeper Social Studies and Lit Hub’s Keen On podcast. So, even though I’m a little late on this podcast episode, if you go out to anyone else’s podcast episodes, you’ll probably find me popping up. And for all the ones that I’ve just mentioned that are already out, I’ll drop the links to it in the show notes, and you can listen to it at your leisure.

I also won’t belabor this point, but it has been a great week; I’m just so excited and thrilled that Hero of Two Worlds is finally out there and everybody can get their hands on it. Uh, people have been sharing photos of them with the book, and I can promise you, I will never get tired of looking at those photos. I have an insatiable appetite for all genres of book pictures, including Hero of Two Worlds in front of the indie bookstore where it was purchased at; Hero of Two Worlds with your adorable family pet; Hero of Two Worlds with your alcoholic beverage of choice, that’s a particularly popular one; and of course Hero of Two Worlds in an appropriately beautiful, natural setting. I love them all. I thank you all very, very, very, very much. And with that, on with the show. 

Now last time, we brought Lenin back into the fold, ending with him getting off the train at Finland Station with his fellow emigre Bolsheviks on April 3rd, 1917. When he returned, he was clutching a draft of what became known as The April Theses, a blunt, 10 point plan that he believed should guide the party now that the February Revolution was an accomplished fact. Now, as we’ve seen nearly all the revolutionary socialist leaders in Petrograd during the February Revolution wound up going along with the general plan of coming together inside the Soviet while nominally supporting the provisional government as the legitimate government. Even the Bolshevik’s paper Pravda, which had recently passed into the editorial hands of a guy we haven’t introduced yet named Kamenev, and then, a guy we have introduced, Joseph Stalin, acknowledged the strategic value of allying with the other socialist parties and recognizing the legitimacy of the provisional government, at least for the time being. When they received Lenin’s first letter from afar, they heavily edited it to take out all the parts recommending intransigent hostility to the government and then published it. When the second letter appeared, they read it and did not publish it at all. Concerned that Lenin’s attitude was disastrously out of touch with the real situation in the capital. And there’s a fun anecdote where Lenin disembarks at Finland Station and he sees Kamenev and he waves a copy of Pravda that Lenin had gotten his hands on and said, “what nonsense is this I’m reading.”

The next day, Lenin delivered a speech to an assembly of all Social Democrats at the Tauride Palace — not just Bolsheviks, but also Mensheviks and other unaligned independents — because as I mentioned, there was a lot of talk at this point of reuniting the party and ending the formal Bolshevik/Menshevik rift. Lenin, as usual, was very interested in party unity, as long as that party unity happened under his new 10 point plan, which he believed they must put into effect immediately. Now point one tackled the question of the war head on: it said, “in our attitude towards the war, which under the new government of Lvov and company, unquestionably remains on Russia’s part a predatory imperialist war owing to the capitalist nature of that government and not the slightest concession to revolutionary defensivism is permissible.” Point three bluntly said, “no support for the provisional government.” And this was a direct contradiction of the agreed policy of, like, everybody in the room. Point 5 said that backing a constituent assembly that would likely enshrine a parliamentary system would be an unacceptable step. He said, “to return to a parliamentary Republic from the Soviet of worker’s deputies would be a retrograde step.” Because in Lenin’s mind, the future basis of revolutionary socialism in the hands of the workers and the peasants was already in place with the Soviet.

Now, all of this flew in the face of the conventional Marxist interpretation of history, and Lenin was constantly interrupted by booing and cat calls. The audience positively hooted at Point 2, which said, “the specific feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants.” Now is Lenin out here saying that the entire democratic bourgeois stage of history, which is surely supposed to take years, or even decades, is already over after a matter of weeks? One fellow Bolshevik called it nothing less than the ravings of a madman. Even Krupskaya appears to have been somewhat surprised to find out what her husband had been so busily working on during the train rides from Switzerland to Russia. She remarked to a comrade, “it seems Ilyich is out of his mind. Even years later, she wrote in her memoirs, “the comrades were somewhat taken aback for the moment. Many of them thought that Ilyich was presenting a case in too blunt a manner, and that it was too early to speak of a socialist revolution. When new foreign minister Pavel Milyukov got a report of the speech, he was delighted to hear Lenin was blowing up all his credibility. Milyukov said, “Lenin made his case with such an effrontery and lack of tact that he was compelled to stop and leave the room amidst a storm of booing. He will never survive it.”

With the general consensus that Lenin had revealed himself to be an out of touch lunatic who could be safely ignored, the real leaders of the Russian Revolution went back to work. And they were now joined by many other older emigre leaders. Lenin was not the only one getting off a train. In their desire to prove that Russia was turning a page from despotism to freedom, the provisional government issued a more or less blanket amnesty for Russian exiles, and they all started streaming home. On April 8th. For example, the great SR leader and intellectual Victor Chernov arrived. A few days later, the positively legendary SR leader Breshkovskaya returned. Mensheviks like Martov and Axelrod would whine their own way home in the first week of May, and then Trotsky, who was off in New York, would get temporarily jammed up for a month by the British authorities until the Russian provisional government, under pressure from the Soviet, told the British that they should release Trotsky and allow him to come home.

As these emigres streamed home, the dual power arrangement that had sprung up in the immediate wake of the February Revolution was about to crash into its first major reef. And it was not over the question of political freedom or land reform or workers’ rights, but foreign policy. The question that consumed the leaders of both the Soviet and the provisional government in April 1917 was how does the revolution affect this giant war, we’re still mired in? Are we still going to do the war? Are we going to change the nature of the war? Are we going to change our aims in the war? Are we going to sign a separate peace? Are we going to March on Berlin?

At first, the revolution meant… nothing. Nothing changed. Pavel Milyukov took over the foreign ministry under the assumption that the revolutionary energy that had carried him to power was mostly generated by a kind of outraged patriotism. That the revolutionary break had come because Nicholas and Alexandra were losing the war, not because the war itself was bad. So when he took up office, he cabled the allies on March 4th, saying Russia is going to continue to meet all its existing treaty obligations and redouble its efforts to win the war. This meant honoring all agreements the tsar had made with Britain and France about colonial annexations and financial indemnities that they planned to impose on the central powers when the war was won. It also meant maintaining the tsar’s own official war aim of claiming Constantinople and the Turkish Straits for the Russian Empire. In Milyukov’s mind, the only thing about the war that the revolution changed was how well it was waged.

But Milyukov plan to leave the tsarist war policy effectively untouched was not going to fly with the leaders of the Soviet. Nor even his fellow ministers in the provisional government, most especially Alexander Kerensky. The revolution could not mean nothing changes about the war. Now, to be very clear, none of these guys are antiwar, or defeatists, or eager to sign a separate piece with Germany. But they did want to reorient wartime policy to reflect that the brutal stalemate everyone was stuck in needed to end, and more importantly, it needed to be ended by the people of Europe, not by the chauvinistic capitalist imperialists who had gotten them all into this. 

On March 14th, the Soviet issued an “appeal to the peoples of the world,” in which they said, “Russian democracy has shattered in the dust, the age old despotism of the tsar, and enters your family of nations as an equal, and as a mighty force in the struggle for our common liberation.” It went on to say, “conscious of its revolutionary power, Russian democracy announces that it will, by every means, resist the policy of conquest of its ruling classes, and it calls upon the people of Europe for concerted decisive action in favor of peace. We are appealing to our brother proletarians of the Austro-German coalition, and first of all, to the German proletariat. From the first days of the war, you were assured that by raising arms against autocratic Russia, you were defending the culture of Europe from Asiatic despotism. Many of you saw in this a justification of that support which you were giving to the war. Now, even this justification is gone. Democratic Russia can not be a threat to liberty and civilization.”

And then more broadly the Soviet addressed everyone: “We hold out to you the hand of brotherhood across the mountains of our brothers corpses, across rivers of innocent blood and tears, over the smoking ruins of cities and villages, over the wreckage of the treasuries of civilization. We appeal to you for the reestablishment and restrengthening of international unity. In it is the firm pledge of our future victories and the complete liberation of humanity.”

So, what they’re calling for here is for the people of Europe on both sides to turn to their governments and say, we must end this war. And when the war ends, we must do it without conquest, without victors. It must be a negotiated peace where no one wins and no one loses. That the colonial imperial ambitions of the powers that started this war must be abandoned in the interest of peace. And that for its part, the people of Russia would not let their government continue to wage a war on the basis of the tsar’s bloody-minded imperialist ambitions. 

Now, as I said, the leaders of the Soviet are not defeatist, nor are they peacenik, and they’re not going to unilaterally quit the war. And in fact, they stood ready to support ongoing fighting if the leaders of Germany and Austria continued to threaten Russia. But, this new statement put them at direct odds with Milyukov’s vision of totally unaltered war aims, symbolized most of all by the continued claim to Constantinople. 

Milyukov’s vision in fact put him at odds with just about everybody, even the genial prime minister prince Lvov. Lvov had been involved in the war effort from day one and knew full well the alleged dream of annexing Constantinople was not just impractical, it was probably impossible. So when the Soviet started leaning on the provisional government to change its war policy, Prince Lvov was a hundred percent interested in maintaining the tenuous alliance with the Soviet, which he thought indispensable to the functioning of the government, and 0% interested in wrecking that alliance for the sake of Milyukov’s impossible dream of Constantinople. Under unanimous pressure from his fellow ministers, Milyukov drafted a new statement of war aims for Russia, which announced that Russia rejected annexations and indemnities as war aims, at least for itself, but it reiterated the need to maintain their treaty obligations.

Now, this does not go nearly as far as the Soviet’s appeal. In fact, it wasn’t clear it went anywhere at all, especially because Milyukov gave a press conference on March 23rd welcoming the United States into the war and echoing President Wilson’s call for the Allies to orient the future peace in the direction of national self-determination. Milyukov floated the novel argument that Russia claiming Constantinople did not fall under the category of Imperial annexation at all, but would instead be an act of liberation for the native Orthodox Christians from the foreign occupying Muslim Turks, who had been squatting in the city for 500 years. It was also noticeable that Milyukov addressed his allegedly revised declaration of war aims to the people of Russia, rather than making it an official statement of policy from the Russian foreign ministry to the other governments of Europe. So, when this was published on March 27th, his watered down formulations weren’t even policy yet, they were just words.

The leaders of the Soviet read this and determined that at a minimum they could not let Milyukov get away with this no annexations or indemnities policy not actually being policy. For the next two weeks they exerted pressure on the provisional government to circulate Milyukov’s March 27 declaration as an official statement of policy. When Milyukov held out, Kerensky leaked to the press that the provisional government was on the verge of making it policy. Which wasn’t true, but he hoped that it would force Milyukov to cave. Which is more or less what happened. Even though the other ministers were furious at this misinformation Kerensky had leaked to the press, none of them wanted to die on the hill of Constantinople. So on April 18th, they gathered to draft a revised revised declaration of war aims that Kerensky said he believed should have satisfied the most violent critics of imperialism.

But in reiterating its commitment to winning the war, the statement also said that the allied war aims were liberatory in nature and thus compatible with the aims of the Russians. It also pledged to recognize, and I’m quoting here, “those guarantees and sanctions which are necessary for the prevention of new bloody conflicts in the future.”

When the leaders of the Soviet got a copy of this draft, they were not mollified, they were not satisfied. They were angry. This revised revised draft was just a giant exercise in obfuscation. It recast British and French post-war plans as liberations not annexations, and redefined indemnities and sanctions not as punitive and vengeful extensions of the imperial conflict, but as some kind of medicine that would prevent future wars from breaking out. Nothing was changing here. The text was not well received by the military sections especially, who felt, not unjustifiably, that the government is trying to hoodwink them into resuming the war on behalf of the same old capitalist imperialists, and not on behalf of the freedom and peace of Europe. 

So this brings us to the April Crisis. The first true task for the provisional government. The first true test for the Soviet. The first true test of the revolution.

Now possibly the April Crisis was also Lenin and the Bolshevik’s first attempt to seize power. But the record is so muddled and everyone so thoroughly and immediately declaimed responsibility that whatever evidence exists for this is circumstantial and hearsay and it’s hard to make a definitive determination as to the premeditated involvement of Lenin and the Bolshevik central committee. But what we do know, is that on April 20th, 1917, the revised war aim started getting published in the paper, and a member of the Soviet’s military section went around stirring up angry discontentment and saying we need to march in the streets to protest this. And not only that, we need to march out under arms, so they know that we’re not kidding. Those who came out tended to come from areas and sections where the Bolshevik presence was strong, and once it got going, Bolshevik party members were quick to get out in front and encourage others to join the protests. But where are Lenin and the other members of the central committee? They stay off the streets and well away from events. So opponents of Lenin are going to say, absolutely, this was his first attempt at a coup and it didn’t work while defenders of Lenin are gonna say, wow, this is just something the Bolsheviks kind of got caught up with that was spontaneous, and went to land and himself did not orchestrate as a power grab.

But what’s not in dispute at all is that starting on April 20th, armed protesters are marching through the streets of Petrograd and that’s a major test for the legitimacy of the provisional government and also of the Soviet. Now the new military governor of Petrograd, General Kornilov, wanted to bring out his own troops to restore order, but the prime minister Prince Lvov and the rest of the provisional government did not want to resort to the same old tsarist tactics. They wanted instead to rely on persuasion and popular cooperation to diffuse the demonstration, at least disarm it. What good was a revolution if it just turned around and started murdering its own people? Events then became very complicated when, a few hours later, a counter demonstration showing support for Milyukov also spontaneously formed and started marching around Petrograd. Events like this convinced Kerensky that in his estimation, the two greatest dangers to the Russian Republic were, and I’m quoting here, “followers of Milyukov and those of Lenin.” Koretsky believed they now represented the two radically uncompromising poles of the revolution that would wreck everything while everyone else was trying to make a good faith effort to reach a unified compromise. 

That night, the leaders of the Soviet and the provisional government met to figure out how they could resolve the polarizing conflict. The general sense on both sides was Milyukov needed to back down. All they needed to do to resolve the crisis was let the revolution be a thing and revolutionize Russia, not just domestically, but internationally. I mean, why not commit to peace without annexations and indemnities, especially if not making that commitment would wreck revolutionary unity and invite their collective downfall?

Viktor Chernov, who was there at this meeting, made a joke that everyone could nod along with, that Constantinople was a question of geography, best left to the minister of education, not a question of statecraft in the hands of the foreign minister. They came to no firm resolution that night, but when the armed demonstrations continued the next day and in fact got worse, they recognized it as a challenge not just to the authority of the provisional government, but to the Soviet’s authority as the sovereign voice of the people. With clashes breaking out all over the city and a couple people winding up dead, the Soviet issued an order declaring these protests did not have the Soviet sanctions and they must cease at once. They instructed all citizens to disarm and go home, and that everyone must maintain order, peace, and discipline. And this mostly did the trick: the workers and the soldiers did believe the Soviet had some kind of legitimate authority. And then, if we follow the story that Lenin and his comrades were behind all of this, their own line was that the Soviet was the legitimate authority, and to rack that legitimate authority by contesting the order would have long-term strategic consequences. Lenin wanted to take over the Soviet, not wreck it. 

So the two days of armed demonstrations in Petrograd came to an end. 

When the crisis passed, the provisional government issued a declaration on April 25th, emphasizing that they did not want to have to turn to tsarist tactics to keep order, and they were essentially pleading with the people to please remain orderly and peaceful. “The provisional government,” the statement read, “believes that the power of the state should not be based on violence and coercion, but on the consent of free citizens to submit to the power which they themselves created. Not a single drop of blood has been shed through its fault, nor have restrictive measures been established against any trend of public opinion.”

They also warned of the dangers of allowing the destructive and chaotic impulses of the people to get the better of them. “They should avoid the path,” and I’m quoting here, “well known to history, leading from freedom through civil war and anarchy to reaction and the return of despotism.” 

Now, this is a path that we hear on the Revolutions podcast also know quite well, but in this case is specifically referring to the French Revolution, which everybody who’s involved in the Russian Revolution knows all about. The provisional government concluded with a promise to bring in more constructive elements into the government to focus on fulfilling the promise of the revolution and earning the trust of the people. But in the meantime, everybody should be patient. If given a chance, everyone will see that everything is cool and good and on track.

Now what they meant by bringing more constructive elements into the government was something the leaders of the Soviet had been resisting since day one: a coalition government of socialists and liberals. Remember, for the past eight weeks, the leaders of the socialist parties have been purposefully trying to stay out of the government, both for the ideological reason that the bourgeoisie are supposed to rule, so you guys rule, but also for the very practical reason that the government was bound to make itself unpopular, and they didn’t want to be the ones being blamed when things went badly, they wanted to be the ones doing the blaming. But after the April Crisis, prince Lvov went back to the Soviet and pressed them to join a coalition that would unite the liberal and socialist wings of the revolution, end dual power, and hopefully prevent the collapse of the revolution. The SRs now took this offer seriously and believed they could do a great deal with the power being offered to them. The Mensheviks were more reserved, as they still really liked the idea of letting the liberal bourgeoisie have power during their appointed historical hour, so that later the socialists could overthrow them and have power during their appointed historical hour. And most of the Bolsheviks though not all of them were hostile to the notion of a coalition government as Lenin was busy making his program the program of the whole party. When the executive committee of the Soviet voted, they voted against forming a coalition. 

Alexander Kerensky, meanwhile, who had been trying to be the bridge between the two sides was now starting to despair. He had kept his head down during the April Crisis, but now re-emerged having lost some of his energetic optimism. He gave a speech where he despaired at the chances of the Russian people peacefully coming together rather than violently breaking apart. He said, “at the present moment with the victory of new ideas and the establishment of a democratic state in Europe, we can play a colossal part in world history if we can encourage other peoples to follow our path, if we oblige our friends and our enemies to respect our freedom. But if like worthless slaves we are not an organized strong state then a dark and bloody period of internecine strife will ensue, and our ideas will be cast under the maxim of state: might is right.”

He then went on to the more famously quoted portion of the speech where he says, “I regret that I did not die then, two months ago. I would have died with the great dream that a new life had been kindled in Russia once and for all, that we could respect one another in the absence of whips and sticks and could administer our own state not as the former despots ruled it.” 

He was no longer sure that was possible, and he said, “comrades, you could be patient and silent for 10 years. You were able to carry out your obligations imposed on you by the old hated government. Why do you have no patience now? Surely the free Russian state is not a state of rebellious slaves.” 

Over the next few days, the leaders of the Soviet received many telegrams, petitions and letters from comrades and supporters across the empire, all of those provisional Soviets that had been forming out there, for example, and they were all saying, we should form a United coalition government. That’s what we want you to do. That’s what’s best for the revolution. That’s what’s best for Russia. So on May the first, the executive committee of the Soviet reconvened, and this time they voted 44 to 19 in favor of forming a coalition with the liberals. They hoped this would offer the necessary legitimacy to the government that would get them all through to the constituent assembly, which remember everyone still expects to be the great national democratic assembly that would settle the permanent constitution for post-revolutionary Russia. In fact, ensuring the constituent assembly wasn’t put off indefinitely was one of their key demands for joining a coalition government. Another of their demands was of course changing the Russian government’s war aims, which they now insisted would be pursuing a general peace as relentlessly as possible without signing a separate peace with Germany.

Meanwhile, the liberal Kadets had their own demands, one of which is that they wanted to maintain a majority inside the ministry. And the Mensheviks in particular leapt at the opportunity to agree to this demand, because it meant that when things went bad — and things would go bad — they could say, hey, we’re not the majority here. It’s not our fault.  

The two sides spent the next several days hammering out a deal and assigning new seats in the ministry. Many of the existing ministers remained inside the government, they just switched portfolios. The most consequential switch was Kerensky moving from minister of justice to minister of war. Prince Lvov had sounded out the front commanders about this and determined that they were on board. Kerensky had given several speeches clearly advocating for continuing and winning the war, and his name meant something to the rank and file in the army and in the navy. The position of the senior commanders was that Kerensky at the ministry of war meant that they would be able to reassert something like discipline on the rank and file.

The most important new member of the government was the SR party leader Victor Chernov. After decades in the revolutionary underground, he was now suddenly made minister of agriculture, a pretty great place for an SR to be, as they always wanted to win over the peasants and implement the kind of truly revolutionary land redistribution that they’d been talking about for more than 20 years. 

The biggest departures from the government were Alexander Guchkov, the progressive bloc leader who had played such a huge part of the opposition movement that ousted the tsar; he resigned believing that Russia was now headed for disaster. The other was Pavel Milyukov. His bumbling of the foreign policy question had gotten this whole mess going in the first place, and he resigned from the government after being asked to move from the foreign ministry to the education ministry, where the matter of Constantinople was best addressed. After a lifetime in politics and a lifetime of trying to carry out a liberal revolution in Russia, Pavel Milyukov was spat out the other side in exactly eight weeks. 

In total, the first government of post-revolutionary Russia lasted for just about two months before it fell into this new coalition government, which is going to last for almost exactly the same amount of time before it too collapses in the wake of the July Crisis. Because if there’s one thing you can say about 1917, it’s that the engine of the revolution runs on two month cycles. Every two months, there’s a peak and a crash, a peak and a crash. And this will continue from now until October.

This week’s episode is brought to you by Audible. Listening makes us smarter, more connected people. It makes us better partners, parents, and leaders, and there’s no better place to start listening than Audible. Audible members now get more than ever before. Members choose three titles every month, one audio book, plus two Audible originals that you can’t hear anywhere else. There are also exclusive sales and 30% off all regularly priced audio books. Members also have unlimited access to more than a hundred audio guided fitness and meditation programs to explore all the ways listening on Audible can help improve your mind, body, and soul with entertainment, information, and inspiration. Since we’re wrapping up our little introductory run of episodes on Marxism and anarchism, I thought it would be helpful to point out that you can get a lot of Marx on Audible: the first volume of Capital, the collected writings of Marx and Engels, that sort of thing. These writings can be sloggy at times, which is one of the things that makes audio books so great. Having it read to you out loud often makes it much easier to actually get through the material. I also searched around for Bakunin, and you can get God and the State, so it’s good and fun to read this stuff. And then you can decide for yourself what all the fuss is about. So start listening with a 30 day Audible trial and your first audio book plus two Audible originals are free. So visit  audible.com/revolutions or text revolutions to 500, 500. That again is audible.com,  audible.com/revolutions, or text revolutions two five zero zero five zero zero.

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Episode 10.6: True Liberty, True Equality and True Fraternity

Last time we did the life of Mikhail Bakunin, the professional Russian revolutionary who began his career as a pretty standard issue socialist and nationalist, but who then returned from a long period of confinement, and one circumnavigation of the globe, as a committed anarchist. Today, we are going to discuss the basic tenants of Bakunin’s anarchism, how he came to hold these ideas, the end state he was working towards, and the means by which he hoped to achieve it, leaving off for next week the main compare and contrast session between Bakunin’s anarcho-collectivism and Marx’s scientific socialism.

Okay. So the first thing we need to do is establish what we mean by anarchism and anarchy. Well, it is a word constructed using some good old fashioned Greek, which is what we always love to do when it comes to political terms. Where monarchy is rule of the one, and oligarchy is rule of the few, anarchy is rule of the none. It can be literally translated as the absence of a ruler.

Now because anarchy means absence of a ruler, it is common to use the term as a synonym for chaos or disorder, but this is not what anarchists mean by anarchy. And they will tell you, frankly, that if you think absence of a ruler necessarily means violent chaos, then that means that you have been brainwashed by the ideological heirs of Thomas Hobbes, who believed that absent the iron hand of Leviathan, life will be nasty, brutish and short.

Anarchism does not mean disorder and chaos. Anarchists are not opposed to associations or organizations or administrations, quite the opposite. They just don’t want any more rulers. No more hierarchies, no more inequality, no more exploitation, no more bosses.

Anarchism emerged from the attempt to answer the social question in the wake of the French Revolution. Running from the early utopian socialists through Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who was the first to call himself an anarchist, these early anarchists believed that the real problem was coercive hierarchies, whether political, economic, or social. That the unequal distribution of wealth and power led to a few being masters while everyone else was a slave.

So they wanted to create new forms of economic and political organization that stressed voluntary association and mutual cooperation, where all the members would be free and equal. No one person could own all the means of production or claim the lion’s share of the produce; instead, everyone would share equally in the bounty of their collective labor.

Now there’s a branch of anarchism that runs from this guy Max Sterner through Benjamin Tucker that is called individualist or egoist anarchism, but that’s not the branch we’re going to be talking about today. We will instead be dealing with the communitarian branch of anarchism that Bakunin was a part of.

Though these guys stressed the fundamental sovereignty of the individual, they believed that the proper place of humans was in a group, mutually cooperative and sharing in the burdens of producing and distributing the necessities of life. And Bakunin’s version of anarchism designated as anarcho-collectivism, is going to be a major influence on all the anarchists who are active in the Russian Revolution. And that is why we are focusing so much on him in particular.

So to open this up, I want to go back to the French Revolution. The failures and disappointments of the French Revolution pop up repeatedly in Bakunin’s writings, and especially the failure to truly realize the mythical triad of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. And so I want to start here by framing his theories as an earnest attempt to reconcile the contradictions and unfulfilled ambitions of this mythical triad.

Bakunin’s diagnosis of what went wrong in the French Revolution is very similar to Karl Marx’s: that the rising capitalist bourgeoisie had engaged in a great revolution in pursuit of their own political liberty, but that when they achieve this political liberty for themselves, the quote unquote equality that followed came only in the form of equal political rights and the equal application of the laws, that is, no more feudal privileges. Then they dusted their hands and said, right, we’ve done it, everyone is now free.

But by ignoring the social and economic relations of society, these bourgeois revolutionaries made liberty and equality impossible for the vast majority of the population. Because where was liberty to be found in a world of economic exploitation? Where was equality to be found in a world where so few had so much and so many had so little? This in turn made a mockery of fraternity, which Bakunin calls a naked lie. He says, I ask you whether fraternity is possible between the exploiters and the exploited, between oppressors and oppressed. What is this? I make you sweat and suffer all day and night, and when I have reaped the fruit of your sufferings and your sweat, leaving you only a small portion of it so that you may survive, that is, so that you may sweat and suffer a new for my benefit tomorrow, at night, I will say to you, let us embrace, we are brothers?

But Bakunin still wanted Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. He just wanted it for everybody, and was serious about trying to figure out how to get it. And one of his most basic principles is that true liberty is only possible if everyone is free, that if only a few people have liberty, then liberty does not exist, only privilege exists. He expresses the sentiment all over the place and it was central to his whole philosophy.

He says, “If there be a human being freer than I, than inevitably, I become his slave. If I be freer than he, than he will be mine.” He also said that, “Man is truly free only among equally free men, that slavery of even one human being violates humanity and negates the freedom of all.” So this is a fundamental condition of liberty: that it must be shared and equally. Even one unfree person negates the freedom of the rest.

To achieve this universal liberty, you thus need some measure of equality. For Bakunin, mere political equality was not enough to guarantee true liberty only economic equality could do that. Because for Bakunin, poverty is slavery. A hungry person is not a free person. He believed people must realize that and I’m quoting now, “the first condition of their real emancipation or of their humanization is above all a radical change in their economic situation. The question of daily bread is to them justly the first question. For as it was noted by Aristotle, man, in order to think, in order to feel himself free, in order to become man, must be freed from the material cares of daily life.”

So it becomes essential to guarantee equality of economic means, to liberate people from the slavery implicit in a life lived on the knife’s edge of poverty, where all manner of degradation and enslavement must be endured to acquire simple bread and shelter.

So to create equally free individuals, to create universal liberty, you must eradicate the unequal distribution of wealth. For Bakunin, the connection between liberty and equality, and the thing that would guarantee both of them was the third part of the triad: fraternity. To achieve universal liberty and economic equality, communal fellowship cannot be paper thin lies that cover up exploitation and injustice, but the real cement that guarantees our healthy, free and equal flourishing. He says this solution, which is so greatly desired, our ideal for all, is liberty, morality, intelligence and the welfare of each through the solidarity of all; in short, human fraternity.

About this fraternity, Bakunin agrees with Marx that going back to the dawn of time, humans have been fundamentally social and cooperative creatures, always working in groups. Bakunin despised Rousseau, who he called the most malevolent writer of the past century in part for helping popularize the insane notion that a free person in the state of nature was just all by themselves. Bakunin believed arguments that idealized and lauded egocentric individualism were ignorant of nature and history. For Bakunin, Rousseau’s idea that the act of coming together in a social group was the moment humans lost their liberty was preposterous. Bakunin says society, far from decreasing their freedom on the contrary, creates the individual freedom of all human beings. He says, society is the root, the tree, and liberty is the fruit.

But how can this be? Surely in coming together, we limit some measure of our own individual autonomy. Well, Bakunin says, imagine a person endowed with the most inspired powers by nature, cast out from all human society into a desert since infancy. If they do not miserably perish, which is the most probable result, they will become nothing but a bore, an ape lacking speech and thought.

So the individual outside of society is not living a life of free liberty, they are most likely already dead, and if not, they are ignorant brutes slaves to mere instinct and hunger, without the ability to form complex thoughts. Bakunin says only in society can they become a human being, that is, a thinking, speaking, loving, and willful animal.

So to wrap up this section, Bakunin says, what we demand now is the proclaiming anew of the great principles of the French revolution, that every human being should have the material and moral means to develop all their humanity. And that what he wants is to, and I’m quoting here again, to organize society in such a manner that every individual, man or woman, should find upon entering life, approximately equal means for the development of his or her diverse faculties and their utilization in his or her work.

So Bakunin has no problem with the unequal distribution of talent or intelligence or gifts. He does not expect or want people to become hive insects. I mean, he’s an anarchist, that’s not what he wants at all. He in fact wants to eliminate political, economic and social inequality because those things tend to prohibit the free exercise of all those individual talents and gifts. So what Bakunin wants for every individual person is to live in a society of universal liberty, made possible by economic equality, working in a spirit of human fraternity. Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. This is the essence of his anarcho-collectivism.

So we move now to how Bakunin hopes to bring this about. What needs to happen, what needs to be torn down, and what needs to be built up in its place? To start this discussion, we need to go back to Bakunin’s early student days, and his initiation into the mysteries of German philosophy. As I said last week, Bakunin discovered Hegel while he was still a student in Moscow. And he was so taken, that he was the first person to translate some of Hegel into Russian. Then Bakunin went off to Berlin in the early 1840s to dive even deeper into the mysteries of German philosophy, but he wound up, like his slightly younger contemporaries Marx and Engels, following the more progressive and radical path of the young Hegelians.

Now there’s just too much to say about all this, but I want to draw out two main points: first, again like Marx and Engels, Bakunin was specifically influenced by their slightly older, philosophical, contemporary Ludwig Feuerbach, and came away a convinced materialist atheist. He believed the material world and its physical and social manifestations were the key to understanding everything. So Bakunin is a materialist.

The other point is that like Marx and Engels, Bakunin also emerged strongly influenced by dialectical reasoning, but he was mostly fascinated with the second step of the process: the negative, the negation, the antithesis. And he came to associate the existing conservative states of Europe with the positive thesis, and revolutionary, such as himself with the negative antithesis.

He also disagreed with Hegel and Marx on one critical point: both Hegel and Marx presumed that the concluding synthesis would retain elements of the conflicting thesis and antithesis, that there would be some measure of preservation. Bakunin did not. He believed there conflict would result in the mutual destruction of both with something wholly new emerging from the aftermath.

So his was a dialectical process of mutual destruction, allowing for the emergence of a transcended novelty that preserved nothing of either. For Bakunin the process of destroying the inert immobile and oppressive political and economic regimes of Europe must be total. As long as any detritus or fragment of the old world remained, the new world could not be born. And he assigned to himself and his followers, the historical task of being this all obliterating antithesis.

So part of Bakunin’s desire to wipe the world clean of all existing political, economic and social structures comes from this early Hegelian philosophy, but it also comes from his materialist and proto sociological understanding of society.

He believes that quote, every human individual is the involuntary product of a natural and social environment within which they are born. And Bakunin very much believes that the existing social environment within which humans are currently born is very bad. See, Bakunin has this optimistic view of humans. He did not believe that humans were inherently wicked. He saw wickedness, such as it existed, as being the result of the unjust, hierarchical, and oppressive social institutions within which we are forced to live. And on this one very specific point, he agrees with Rousseau’s famous declaration that man is born free, and everywhere is in chains. Though for Bakunin, the problem was not society, which he viewed as natural and necessary, but structural inequalities of wealth and power. He is in fact, so generous with his understanding of the plight of individuals within these oppressive institutions that he doesn’t even blame the oppressors for what they do.

He says all the revolutionaries, the oppressed, the sufferers, victims of the existing social organization, whose hearts are naturally filled with hatred and a desire for vengeance, should bear in mind that the kings, the oppressors, exploiters of all kinds, are evildoers who are not guilty. Since they too are involuntary products of the present social order.

So this is very hate the sin, not the sinner stuff. And the sin is power, inequality, the state, the church, and the institutions that support them.

So this puts Bakunin in an interesting place, because as he has made this diagnosis, that humans are basically good, but the social hierarchies are evil, he aimed all of his revolutionary energy at the social institutions that bound everyone together in an unjust system, not the people who benefited from those systems. And he was actually critical of those who wanted to aim their revolutionary energy at people, not institutions. He saw this as immoral, unfair, counterproductive, and not even historically sound. In a discussion of the violence in the course of the French Revolution, he says, in general, we can say that carnage was never an effective means to exterminate political parties. It was proved particularly ineffective against the privileged classes since power resides less in men, themselves than in the circumstances created for men of privilege by the organization of material goods. And then he says further, the dreadful guillotine of 1793, which cannot be reproached with having been idle or slow, nevertheless did not succeed in destroying the French aristocracy. The nobility was indeed shaken to its roots, though not completely destroyed, but this was not the work of the guillotine. It was achieved by the confiscation of their properties. And I don’t think he’s wrong about this. The confiscation and redistribution of the national land, which became such an issue after the Restoration, did far more to undermine the feudal aristocracy than the guillotine, which we must also remember was usually used against peasant and middle-class rebels, not the high nobility.

So Bakunin concludes from this, to make a successful revolution, it is necessary to attack conditions and material goods, to destroy property and the state. It will then become unnecessary to destroy men.

So this means there are a lot of institutions that need to be destroyed. And he lists them in various manifestos and programs. And I’ll just give you a full stream blast of all of this, and then pull out two particular points for special attention. So when the revolutionaries begin their run of institutional destruction, Bakunin says we must tear down all governments, all existing criminal, civil, and legal codes, any centralized bureaucracy, all permanent armies and state police. We must put an end to established religion in all forms, and if churches exist, they ought not have political rights, tax exemptions, nor be given control of education. Bakunin called for the abolition of what he called the legal family, which was built around oppressive and unjust systems of marriage and inheritance.

He called for the mass cancellation of private debt, the abolition of all taxes, he wanted to burn all property titles and deeds of inheritance. He wanted to confiscate the means of production, all church property, all state property, and any precious metal held by individuals and families and hold all of that together in common ownership. Anything that contained any seed of coercive hierarchical relations had to be destroyed.

So that’s uh quite a list. But I want to highlight two things, one economic and the other political. On the economic front, a big thing that Bakunin harps on is the necessity of abolishing inheritance. He says, quote for so long as inheritance exists, there will be hereditary economic inequality, not the natural inequality of individuals, but the artificial inequality of classes. And the ladder will always beget hereditary inequality in the development and shaping of mind, continuing to be the source and consecration of all political and social inequalities.

So for Bakunin, if there was a critical moment in history that undermined the natural equality of humans, it was surely that moment in misty prehistory when some stronger or more ruthless families started not just hoarding a disproportionate share of the wealth, but passing it down to their offspring intact. This created perpetual states of generational inequality. And I think if you ask Bakunin, look, you can’t have everything all at once, just pick one thing you would do that would do the most to accomplish your ultimate goals, he would say: abolish inheritance. This one simple change would negate the possibility of generationally entrenched economic inequality, and go the furthest towards realizing his dream of true liberty, true equality, and true fraternity.

Politically, I must point out that Bakunin bore a special hatred for this thing called the state, which he saw as the abstracted political power structure that pretends to be simply an expression of communal society, but is in fact a thing unto itself with its own interests. He saw all presently existing states in Europe as a form of monarchy, that is, rule by the one, because the state itself, whether an authoritarian, dictatorship, or a liberal parliamentary democracy holds all power and course of authority, and then ruthlessly steamrolled everyone in pursuit of its own interests.

Bakunin says there is no horror, no cruelty, sacrilege or perjury, no imposture, no infamous transaction, no cynical robbery, no bold plunder or shabby betrayal that has not been, or is not daily being perpetrated by, the representatives of the states. Under no other pretexts than those elastic words, so convenient and yet so terrible, for reasons of state.

For Bakunin, states were criminal enterprises, they were founded by crimes. They were perpetuated by still more crimes. And even a post French Revolution society that had created the concept of citizens and civil rights, that was still no good, because Bakunin saw citizenship as an artificial designation that negated true humanity. He called it mere citizenship. By forming itself only of citizens and caring only about its obligation to people as citizens, the state denied its duty to people as human beings, and certainly took no moral interest in them at all, if they were not citizens. So for Bakunin, the state, therefore is the most flagrant, the most cynical and the most complete negation of humanity. It shatters the universal solidarity of all men on earth and bring some of them into association only for the purpose of destroying, conquering, and enslaving the rest. So Bakunin hates the state. He hates state power. It’s why an alternative name for his program is stateless socialism. And it’s part of the crux of his coming beef with Marx, who Bakunin believed was a proponent of state socialism.

So we’ll end today with what Bakunin thought the alternative to all this was. What an anarcho collectivist stateless socialism would look like, once all the old systems of power had been destroyed. And he did have a number of thoughts about this, most succinctly sketched out in the revolutionary catechism and the program of the international brotherhood, which were both written in Italy in the 1860s.

To begin with, because top down authoritarian structures were the problem, the new order must be built from the bottom up from, summit to base. So the core unit of an anarcho collectivism was the autonomous commune, formed voluntarily by the capital P People. These anarchic communes, really just the existing cities of Europe, would cease to recognize all existing authority and law and reform themselves on the basis of collective ownership, collective labor, and collective decision-making.

Bakunin believed these anarchist communes would have direct elections of functionaries by universal sufferage from both sexes. And as you can imagine, Bakunin was very, very excited about the Paris Commune, which we’ll talk about next week, because Bakunin was a very involved in revolutionary events in France in 1870 and 1871.

Bakunin thought these autonomous and anarchist communes would then federate with each other into larger networks, but all the while recognizing no higher authority than themselves. And eventually. They would federate all the way to a national and international level though those terms would become meaningless. What would emerge from these voluntary linkages and alliances would be an inverted pyramid power structure where power rested not with a minority ruling class ensconced in some far off capital, but, with the individuals in their local communities. Anyone to sent off to work on these larger connections and alliances would be trusted servants, never powerful authorities.

These communes though, could not operate properly if they did not respect individual liberty, nor if they did not provide equally for all its members. Remember, liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice. Socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality. So there would be a vast array of social and political rights, for example: the right of every man and woman to upkeep, clothes, food, shelter, care, guidance, and education.

Since Bakunin is naturally an enemy of patriarchy and the subjugation of women by men, he emphasized all the time that there would be equal political, social, and economic rights as well as equal obligation for women. He also hated the tyranny of adults over children and believed in equal rights for adolescents, though they would be naturally guided while children. There of course must be freedom of movement, association, press, speech, morality, conscience, with no coercive prohibitions beyond public approbation and condemnation. So he says, for example, to combat charlatans who spouted lies or pernicious associations that might threaten the commune, that would be the special affair of public opinion.

Most importantly, a member of the commune would have the right to leave or secede at any time. No part of the new federation of anarchist communes could keep or hold or prevent a person’s desire to remove themselves and depart if they were dissatisfied with how things were being run. Economically, these new anarchist communes would have already seized the means of production and property and held them collectively, hence the name, anarcho collectivism. The commune would be required to, as I say, provide upkeep, clothes, food, shelter, care, guidance, and education to its members. But, and this is really important, these rights would only be available to those who provided labor. An individual member would only be able to enjoy the fruits of the community’s labor only in so far as they contributed to the creation of those fruits. This was a measure aimed at non laboring landlords and aristocrats and capitalists who sat around doing nothing while the wealth created by other people’s labor piled up in their coffers.

But this sets Bakunin up for a contrast with the later anarcho communism of Kropotkin. Kropotkin does not agree with Bakunin’s formula to each according to their labor. Kropotkin believes, in to each according to their needs. This labor requirement also opened up all kinds of problematic questions about how to quantify and evaluate the amount and type of labor being provided. Bakunin thought that a new system of labor notes, replacements for bourgeois money, would be issued that could then be converted in some market of exchange for the necessities of life.

But this raises a bunch of other issues. Who gets to decide the quality and quantity of labor necessary to acquire access to their rights as members of the commune, or determine what the value of different types of labor are? Digging a ditch is quite a bit different from being an astrophysicist. So Bakunin suggests maybe some democratic committee would be in charge of those decisions, except whoops, now you’re vesting authoritative power in some small group who is deciding who is worth what. This is the kind of thing anarchists are still arguing about to this very day.

Now, everything I just said raises a million and one objections. Every one of Bakunin’s suggestions have sparked debate, mockery and argument from the moment they were proposed. And I am here just trying to give you a very brief and very imperfect summary of what Bakunin thought came next when theory was put into practice. The devil was always in the detail in these things, and Bakunin is always a bit better when he’s giving the object towards which everyone should aim, rather than some detailed schematic they needed to follow. Especially because in the end Bakunin’s own philosophy was so much based on people working out solutions to problems in mutually satisfactory ways, rather than slavish following a list of suggestions from some bushy headed Russian revolutionary. But Bakunin definitely envisioned a network of voluntarily linked autonomous communes built from the bottom up and rejecting the authority of anyone over anyone else. Then they would share in the collective fruits of their collective labor.

And we can sum this up by asking Bakunin what he wants. And he says, first of all, the end of want, the end of poverty, and the full satisfaction of all material needs by means of collective labor, equal and obligatory for all. And then, as the end of domination and the free organization of the people’s lives in accordance with their needs, not from the top down as we have with the state, but from the bottom up, an organization formed by the people themselves, apart from all governments and parliaments, a free union of associations of agricultural and factory workers, of communes, regions, and nations, and finally, in the more remote future, the universal human brotherhood triumphing over the ruins of all states. That is the dream that Bakunin dreamed.

Next week, we will close out this little prologue section of the Russian Revolution with Marx and Bakunin both in the International Working Men’s Association, where they were both dreaming the same dream, but arguing, fiercely over strategy and tactics, methods, organizations, and then ultimately, personalities.

It was an argument they would still be having right up to the moment of their deaths. Their dreams never realized, but also not dying with them.

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This week, I am going to recommend a book that I’m a little late to, since I’ve been busy with other things, but I finally cracked The Fate of Rome by Kyle Harper and holy smokes. It’s great. It is a wonderful new addition to the 501 reasons why the Roman empire collapsed and it is by far the best and most comprehensive explanation for climatic, biological and geologic factors. It is not obtuse geographic determinism, uh, it simply lays out clearly how the natural setting of the Roman empire was an active player, not just a passive setting for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, it’s just, it’s really great. I’m loving it.

So, to start your membership, visit audible.com/revolutions or text revolutions to 500 500. That again, visit audible.com/revolutions. Or text revolutions to 500, 500.

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Episode 10.46: the Permanent Revolution

Last time, we talked all about the arguments and differences between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. But one of the things they all agreed on was the two-stage revolutionary process necessary to move the medieval tsarist empire to a future socialist republic. They also agreed that what we now call the Revolution of 1905 was that first bourgeois democratic stage. They simply disagreed about whether this stage required the social democrats to support and follow the liberal bourgeoisie, or whether in the Russian case, it could be accomplished by a coalition of workers and peasants acting as much against those liberals as against the tsar.

Today, however, we are going to talk about the novel theory proposed by Leon Trotsky, which incorporated, expanded, and at times contradicted these ideas, and which subsequently entered the lexicon as the theory of permanent revolution.

Now, just to catch up with Trotsky, since we haven’t really talked about him since, before I went on hiatus, remember that when the Revolution of 1905 broke out, he was one of the few émigré intellectuals to race back home. He then ran around doing clandestine work and wound up one of the leaders of the St. Petersburg Soviet by the end of the year. He celebrated the October Manifesto, and was then dramatically arrested in December, 1905 when the first wave of reaction came, Trotsky got tossed in prison and remained in limbo for just under a year before being sentenced to exile in Siberia at the end of 1906.

But, as these things go in Siberia, his actual confinement was very loose. He faked an illness and then bribed an alcoholic coachman to take him west. After weeks on the road, he passed through St. Petersburg on his way to Finland before anyone even knew he was gone. After reconnecting with Martov and Lenin in Finland — separately, mind you, because they were enemies, even though they were also at this point, practically neighbors — he went on to London with everybody else for the Fifth Party Congress. In London, Trotsky tried to stay detached from the Bolshevik-Menshevik factionalism — he himself was ideologically disposed towards the Bolsheviks, but was personally more connected to the Mensheviks –, but Trotsky could never simply be a peacemaker, and more often than not, he felt into the scrum is a wild card more than he elevated himself up to play the role of conciliator.

In the midst of debating all the agenda items at the congress in London, in the spring of 1907, Trotsky was at one point afforded about fifteen minutes, where he briefly outlined an idea he had been tinkering with since at least 1904, but which he fully flushed out while he was in prison in 1906. It was a rethinking of potential strategies, tactics, and goals for the party based on what he considered to be a more precise analysis of Russian historical development and the current state of the global economic and political system.

Now, this was a brief address, it was only about fifteen minutes and it had little impact on the immediate proceedings. But in time it came to loom very large, and so I want to take this opportunity to explain it all in full.

First, let’s talk about the origin of the phrase, permanent revolution. So far as I can tell, Karl Marx first used the phrase in 1844 in his book, the Holy Family, but he was using it in the concept of Napoleon’s hijacking of the French Revolution, and transforming it from permanent revolution into permanent war, and how they needed to go back to permanent revolution. But he then returned to the phrase in 1848 and again in 1850, in the context of how German workers should respond to the Revolution of 1848. Assuming that that revolution would usher in a period of bourgeois liberal rule, Marx told the workers to maintain their own independent organizations with their own leaders and their own goals. The ascendant liberal bourgeoisie would surely try to co-op the working classes, using phrases and languages of reform to coax the workers into dissolving their own groups, merging into the liberal parties and becoming merely an electorate, providing votes to liberal politicians. In this context, Marx talked about the program of permanent revolution and making the revolution permanent by maintaining their own parties and structures and goals to keep pushing the liberals through this stage to policies that tended to grow the political power of the workers and undermine the political power of the liberals, rather than the other way round. In this way, they would hasten the advent of the second socialist revolution.

But though we see this phrase ‘permanent revolution’ bandied about in the mid-19th century, this is not really the way Trotsky will be using it in the early 20th century. And to get to Trotsky’s conception, we need to briefly detour through an émigré living in Berlin, who was a leading Russian Marxist intellectual at the time, and who will eventually play one enormously pivotal role in the history of the Russian Revolution of 1917 whenever we finally get there. His birth name was Israel Lazarevich Gelfand, but in his political life, he was known by several different pseudonyms, most generally, and by me here today, as Alexander Parvus.

Parvus was a Lithuanian Jew born in 1867 and the son of a family of artisans. In the mid 1880s, he went off to university in Switzerland where he encountered socialism and Marxism for the first time. He graduated with a doctorate in political economy in 1891, but had his degree flagged and formally diminished by the university administration, who were displeased that he deployed Marxist analysis in his dissertation. After graduating, Parvus did not return to Russia, but instead settled in Berlin, where he became active in the left wing of the German social democratic party, and became good friends, allies, and collaborators with people like Rosa Luxemburg and Wilhelm Liebknecht. Evolving into an erudite, cultured, and occasionally brilliant writer, Parvus was a respected Russian socialist, both among his fellow Russians and among European socialists generally. After Iskra started, Parvus became a regular contributor, with his columns invariably featured on the front page. His reputation then skyrocketed in 1904, when at the beginning of the Russo-Japanese war, Parvus predicted both defeat for Russia and resulting domestic upheavals, at a moment when everyone, conservatives, liberals, and socialists alike, assumed Russia would trounce the Japanese and emerge stronger than ever. When all of his predictions came true, Parvus suddenly enjoyed the reputation of being a brilliant prophet.

Now, during the summer of 1904, as the first inkling that all his predictions were about to come true filtered back from the far east, Parvus opened his doors to Trotsky. In the wake of the original Bolshevik-Menshevik split, trotsky found himself homeless, both politically and also literally, and he moved in with Parvus in Berlin. Living together for the next several months, they conversed and debated and collaborated with each other. Trotsky left this period taking with him a few ideas imprinted upon him by Parvus that he later developed in his own creative and idiosyncratic way. One was the firm belief that European capitalism had successfully advanced to becoming a truly international force above and beyond national boundaries. Marx may have said that the struggle for socialist revolution would first be national and then international, but that was fifty long years ago, and the capitalist bourgeoisie had long since broken out of their national borders. The fight now, today, would be international, whether they liked it or not.

Parvus also seems to have given Trotsky the basic conception of what the tsarist apparatus actually was. Its nature, its origin and its purpose. Parvus argued the tsarist empire was different from western monarchies, which grew organically as expressions of the feudal estates. In Russia, the tsarist regime developed principally to resist encroachments from their more economically and technologically advanced neighbors like Sweden and Poland and Lithuania. It was thus a military bureaucracy that combined ancient Asiatic despotism with modern western armies, which as we will see in a moment becomes meaningful to Trotsky’s analysis of the nature of revolution in Russia.

Both of these notions Trotsky carried with him going forward, as both he and Parvus departed for Russia when the revolution of 1905 got going. Tossed in prison by the end of the year, Trotsky had lots of time to think more, read more, and start putting new ideas down on paper, specifically in a pamphlet he wrote in prison called Results and Prospects.

But before we get to Results and Prospects, we need to talk about one of the other big concepts that undergirds the theory of permanent revolution. And that is the theory of uneven and combined development. This is a very important concept about which entire books can and have been written, and which I will now try to sum up in like two paragraphs.

Basically the theory of uneven and combined development says that with the spread of European imperialist capitalism across the globe, a process that was clearly complete by the dawn of the 20th century, from China to Africa, to South America, it was impossible to ever again, consider national regional, or even local economic and social development in isolation. Now using quotes around the terminology employed by Trotsky and historical materialists, the spread of colonialist capitalism meant that the development of so-called primitive, or backward, or pre-modern societies would never progress along their own natural and organic paths. The encounter with technologically advanced capitalism simply precluded it.

Now what the lingo ‘uneven and combined’ means, is that societies on the periphery of the European capitalist empire, those colonized parts, now contained a bizarre mix of the very old and the very new, the very primitive, and the very advanced. You had rivers with both rafts and steamboats. Transportation networks that saw railroads chugging alongside donkeys. The latest in futuristic technology existing alongside the oldest traditional ways of life. And usually the way this played out is that specific geographic pockets of those societies would become very technologically advanced, because of the arrival of colonial capitalism was mostly about resource and raw material extraction. So areas with mines, oil fields, timber forests, or places where you could mechanize cash crop farming, would all become rapidly modernized and industrialized, while  maybe just a few miles away, people were still living just as their ancestors had lived for thousands of years. But as the specific sectors and geographic areas saw their advancement accelerated fantastically, the encounter with European capitalism would also hinder and disrupt the natural growth of other sectors as the European capitalists look to dump their manufactured goods on colonial consumers, basically pouring acid all over various nascent sectors of the local economy before they had a chance to blossom.

This also meant that in many ways, the whole course of modernization in any society that encountered such European colonial capitalism could be compressed, because all the technological components and social modes of behavior already existed. They just needed to be adopted, rather than slowly developed over time.

So now we can return specifically to Russia, because Trotsky absolutely considered Russia to be one of these colonized areas on the periphery of western European capitalism that was undergoing uneven and combined development. They were simultaneously primitive and advanced. And indeed because the Witte program of the 1890s was importing the very latest in technological advances, in steel working, in mining, and railroad construction, those parts of the Russian economy were actually among the most advanced in the whole world, because they were ordering the latest and the best out of the Western catalog. This, even as their agricultural sector was amongst the most backward on the planet. Uneven and combined development.

Trotsky believed this state of affairs meant Russia could plot a different and more direct course through the democratic revolution to the socialist revolution, which he outlined in a pamphlet he wrote in prison in 1906 called, as I said, Results and Prospects. This pamphlet was not published until much later, but it clearly spells out Trotsky’s ideas at the time, ideas that would play a huge role in the Bolshevik approach to the revolution of 1917, and so we’re going to spend the rest of today’s episode just kind of working our way, through it.

In the first sections, Trotsky lays out how the actual course of Russian history meant that the theoretical course of historical materialism could not, and would not, play out the way it had in the west. In the first chapter, Trotsky expanded on Parvus’s ideas about the history of the tsarist apparatus, that its existentially threatening encounters with Sweden and Poland and Lithuania starting in the 1500s forced the tsars to adapt, to protect their territory. The tsarist state then started gobbling up nearly all the surplus produce of its empire to feed and fund their large armies. This not only turned the Russian state into a centralized military dictatorship, it also short-circuited the development of any potential Russian bourgeoisie, because excess wealth did not accumulate in private hands, it all went to service the state and the army.

Trotsky continues this theme in the second chapter on the development of Russian cities and towns. Rather than being early centers of trade and industry and commerce like in the west, russian towns were little more than administrative outposts, either serving a military function, or as a home base for tax collection. They produced almost nothing and were neither economically creative nor producers of independent wealth. This Trotsky contrasted with western examples, where the towns created both the large bourgeoisie, the great merchants and the bankers, but also the petty bourgeoisie, the shopkeepers and artisans and small time traders, who would eventually, at least in France, fill out the energetic ranks of the sans-culottes. This just didn’t happen in Russia. And that meant that when modern capitalist development finally did take place in Russia, it was not an outgrowth of, and funded by, those commercial towns of the medieval period, it was actually financed by foreign capital. Bourgeois democratic revolution is premised on the existence of an energetic, wealthy, and ambitious bourgeoisie ready to burst out of the fetters of feudal constraint. But that class simply did not exist in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. But, Trotsky said, a class that did exist in Russian towns at the beginning of 20th century thanks to uneven and combined development was a disproportionately large class of proletarian workers. So observing the historical development of Russian towns and cities led Trotsky to the conclusion that there was now at the beginning of the 20th century, at least, a unique imbalance between the strength of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. And this is key to Trotsky’s whole program.

Trotsky then proceeded to a discussion of the three big revolutionary debates that must be understood: 1789, 1848 and 1905. Trotsky in that in 1789, the very strong French bourgeoisie became the leaders of an entire national struggle against the Ancien regime. They guided this struggle, and they gave everyone national slogans and direction and purpose. 1789 is essentially the model bourgeois democratic revolution that everybody looked to.

But then when it came time for central Europe to be hit by the bourgeois democratic revolution in 1848, Trotsky found the liberal bourgeoisie wanting to be leaders of the national revolution, I mean, most of them were literally classified as liberal nationalists, but they were not strong enough or decisive enough to accomplish this task on their own. With the specter of the French Revolution hanging over everyone’s head, they both needed the urban proletariat workers, and the petty bourgeoisie tradesmen, and the peasants to make their struggle successful, but these liberal bourgeoisie so deeply feared the forces they were unleashing, that at the decisive hour they retreated from revolution rather than pursue it. In essence, Trotsky said, they feared autocracy less than the people, and so their revolution failed.

Then finally the Russian revolution of 1905 mostly followed the German trajectory, rather than the French trajectory, but even more so, because the Russian bourgeoisie was even weaker and more dependent than the Germans had been in 1848. Now true, the Union of Liberation linked businessman and professionals and workers in a cross class alliance that culminated with the general strike of October 1905, but then the bourgeoisie went into full retreat, and refused to pursue one of the most basic democratic boardwalk demands: the arming of the national guard. As we have seen many, many times over the course of the Revolutions podcast, national guards are supposed to be the shock troops for a liberal bourgeois revolutionary action against absolutism, but the Russian bourgeoisie, too few in number knew that this meant they would have to arm workers and peasants, and this they did not want to do, again, fearing the people more than they feared the tsar.

After this historical survey, Trotsky concluded that the specific nature of Russian economic, social, and political development meant that ironically enough, the late developing and relatively small Russian proletariat wielded potentially decisive weight inside the system. He scoffed at those who said the rise of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat were always and inevitably synchronous. That if the Russian bourgeoisie was weak, it meant axiomatically the Russian proletariat must be weak. But as Trotsky believed he had shown, the strength of the Russian proletariat was actually untethered from the strength of the bourgeoisie, especially because most industrialization in Russia was state directed and financed by foreign banks. So the previous fifteen odd years of economic development, what we know as the Witte boom, had seen an explosion in the size and strength of the industrial workers, even as the bourgeoisie remained small and weak.

Trotsky also argued that the nature of the Russian economy at that moment, meant even though they were relatively few in numbers and still dwarfed by the rural peasantry, the Russian proletarian workers wielded potential power that far outpaced the power of the larger and quote unquote more advanced working classes of Britain and France and the United States. Their western cousins had to contend with incredibly powerful bourgeois elements who were able to push back against them. The Russian proletariat did not have to contend with any such power at all. And on top of that, even though they remained a quantitative minority, their qualitative strength was enormous. Uneven and combined development meant that with some segments of the economy very, very industrialized, the industrial workers in those segments could, if they wanted to, affect the entire operation of the Russian empire. What, after all had sparked the general strike of October, 1905? A few thousand railroad workers, who brought the entire empire grinding to a halt.

So the proletariat’s position that close to the actual gears of the Russian economy gave them enormous disproportionate power to bring absolutism crashing down. And in the absence of a bourgeoisie or a peasantry capable of carrying out the democratic revolution, they must be left to the proletariat. And then, they would simply accomplish the tasks that were always assumed to be the work of the bourgeoisie. Politically, that meant democracy, civil rights, national self-determination, and in the Russian sense, an end to tsarist absolutism. Economically, it would mean an end of medieval property relations, land reform and redistribution, and the further acceleration of industrial development to create the economic and material basis for future socialism. In Russia, the bourgeoisie could not do this, and so Trotsky said, the proletariat would have to do it.

When he takes his next step though, Trotsky starts drifting way outside of what anybody considered Marxist orthodoxy. Because what he was proposing is that the proletariat sees power directly from the tsar, and form the dictatorship of the proletariat.

But remember Marx’s concept is that this would happen only after a majority of the population had been proletarianized, and converted from rural peasants, into urban wage workers. The workers quote, unquote seizing power to create a quote unquote dictatorship was simply describing a process whereby the majority of the population would assume power over itself. That infamously misunderstood phrase dictatorship of the proletariat was supposed to simply mean rule of the many, rather than rule of the few. But Trotsky is here actually proposing a small minority of well-positioned and politically conscious workers taking the lead in seizing power over the state right now, here today, not waiting until they formed a majority.

But at least in the beginning, Trotsky did not anticipate trouble, because he figured the vast majority of the population, that is the peasants, would undoubtedly support the new revolutionary proletarian government, because that government would be the entity advancing and guaranteeing what the peasants wanted most out of the revolution: the destruction of medieval property relations and the redistribution of rural land. This could and would be done by the workers on behalf of the peasants, and thus the peasants would look to the workers rather than the bourgeoisie as their liberators. Once this stage had been accomplished, the Russian proletariat seizing power directly from the tsar, we get to the permanent revolution part of the theory of permanent revolution. Having accomplished the tasks of the democratic revolution, the proletariat must not give up power. They must not hand things over to the liberal bourgeois parties and retreat, and wait until conditions were ripe for socialism. Trotsky thought that that would be an insane blunder, especially in the Russian context, where most of the capitalist and industrial development was already being directed by state forces anyway. Instead, the workers must stay in power and use that state power to advance Russia towards socialism. Instead of two discrete stages of revolution, one led by the bourgeoisie, the second led by the proletariat, Trotsky is instead proposing the proletariat make one sustained push through the creation of democracy to the further economic development of Russia, and then straight onto socialism without ever giving up power. It would be one permanent revolution.

Trotsky was not insensible to the difficulties that might obstruct this one sustained push, and in fact, addressing those difficulties was the core part of the other major component that made the permanent revolution permanent. And that was that it could never stop at the borders of Russia, it must absolutely be carried out to the rest of Europe, and the rest of the world. Trotsky saw zero chances for success of any Russian revolution, democratic or socialist, if it did not trigger socialist revolution in the west, and then get cover and support from those new socialist governments. Trotsky saw major reactionary dangers from both conservative forces that would seek to restore the tsar, but also from the peasantry, once the proletarian government moved from the democratic tasks on to the socialist tasks. Trotsky took it as an essential point that land must be collectivized, and its productive power concentrated to create the material basis of socialism and actually make Russian agriculture productive enough to feed everybody.

But this process would almost certainly lead to a breach with the peasantry. Now Trotsky advised taking things slow and piecemeal: first only collectivize large noble estates, and leave communal land and individual small pieces of property alone. He said it would be a huge blunder, in fact, if they did everything all at once, because it would just make the peasants immediately counterrevolutionary, rather than saving all that for later. But they were probably going to wind up fighting against the proletarian government one way or the other.

So Trotsky concluded Results and Prospects by taking a stab at predicting the likely course of events once the proletariat sees power in Russia and found themselves facing these two great threats. In front of them, the full force of the reactionary powers of Europe, trying to restore those are, and behind them, angry peasants, potentially furious about plans to nationalize and collectivize the land. Trotsky thought that though this put the proletariat government in an incredibly precarious position, it would only be temporary, because Trotsky was also convinced the revolution in Russia would be the first domino of European socialist revolution. It would be the signal, the starting gun, whatever metaphor you want to use. And he actually laid out exactly how he thought it was going to go: it would start with that great lynch-pin of European history, Poland. Once the tsar and his armies had been removed from the picture, you could pretty much guarantee a revolution in Poland would follow quickly. But this meant that the Germans and the Austrians would be unable to tolerate such a revolution in neighboring Poland, and they would surely march their armies to the border. This would have two effects: first, the very idea of German and Austrian armies marching east would induce the Russian armies, now commanded by a proletarian government to march west, not to conquer Poland, but to defend it. But the second effect was even more important, because once this conflict got going, socialists and workers in Germany and Austria would recognize the golden opportunity to rise up and seize power once their militaries were occupied off on the Polish frontier. So rather than enlisting and fighting their proletarian cousins in Poland and Russia, they would instead go into insurrection and overthrow their own government.

Meanwhile, the bourgeois government of the French third Republic would already be in a massive crisis, because of the Russian proletariat, having seized power in St. Petersburg would of course repudiate all the debt that Russia owed to French banks, which would crash the French economy and open up space for the French socialists and workers to seize power. So by this very simple act of the proletariat knocking over the tsar, would create an inevitably predictable sequence of events that would lead to socialist governments controlling all of western and social Europe, and then being able to return, and offer aid and support to the Russian comrades as they continued the permanent revolution onto socialism, QED.

This obviously is not how it went. Nor was it even close to how it went. Because though it appeared on paper to be an obvious straight line, Trotsky was sketching all this out in 1906 and 1907 on the assumption. An assumptions shared by all his fellow Marxists who were busy arguing strategy and tactics and alliances in May 1907, that the revolution in Russia was still very much an ongoing concern. They were shocked and horrified to discover that just a few weeks after departing London, Prime Minister Stolypin successfully launched his coup against the Second Duma, rewrote the Russian Constitution, and the Russian people hardly made a peep of protest.

So instead of striding back into Russia to become the vanguard of European socialist revolution, they all had to scatter back into their lives as émigrés. Lenin and Krupskaya wound up in Switzerland for the next decade; Martov went off to Paris and even though he was broke refused to leave; Trotsky wound up bouncing around here and there, still carrying his notion of permanent revolution in his head, and believing its two main components were still true: that the proletariat in Russia could and should seize power directly from the tsar, and then carry out one sustained permanent revolution that then must link with a wider international revolution, or be doomed to failure.

Obviously though, a lot is going to happen over the next several years to upend a lot of socialist theory, ideology, predictions, and prognostications. But Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution is going to adapt, and its resiliency will carry all the way through to the Revolution of 1917, when the Marxists would get the band back together, and try again.

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Episode 10.5: The Adventures of Mikhail Bakunin

We have spent the last three episodes focusing on Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and the revolutionary philosophy they developed together, first as young radicals and then as aging exiles. But if you go back to episode 10.1, on the founding of the International Working Men’s Association in 1864, you will remember that there were a lot of other people in the room representing a lot of other different philosophies. And that was fine, because that was the whole idea. Sure, they might disagree about some details, but everyone shared a common enemy: the conservative rulers of Europe.

This early solidarity though, would not hold together. In just a few years, the International would be doomed by an irreconcilable difference of opinion about both means and the ends of revolutionary struggle, and more specifically, between the scientific socialists and the anarchists. And though he was not in the room in 1864, did not even join the International until 1868, the anarchist faction would be led by the subject of today’s episode, who also happens to be the founder of Russian anarchism: Mikhail Bakunin.

Mihail Bakunin was born in 1814 in what is today the Kuvshinovsky district of Russia and yes, of course, God help us with the Russian pronunciation. His father was a minor noble and diplomat in the Russian foreign service, who did his time in France and Italy and who indulged in liberal politics and who would be adjacent to the circles involved in the Decemberist revolt of 1825, which I promise we will talk about. Bakunin’s mother was 24 years younger than his father, and she had older relatives who were also involved in the Decemberist revolt.

Now, though his family pulled back from politics, especially after 1825, it was a liberal and literate household that Mikhail grew up in. And he was exposed at an early age to, for example, French enlightenment philosophy. He then followed the generic path of a son of minor nobility and spent his teen years as a cadet officer in training. But his heart was not in army life. Not only did Bakunin have a terminal aversion to being bossed around, he had an active searching and curious mind. This active searching and curious mind ignited that most dreadful of passions: an interest in philosophy. Defying his father’s wish that he either serve in the army or pursue a job in the civil service, Bakunin went to Moscow in search of the truth. Diving into German philosophy, he went from Kant to Fichte to Hegel and was entranced most especially by Hegel. At some point in here, he met and became friends with Alexander Herzen, who sometimes wears the title father of Russian socialism, and whose name I think is more properly in Russian something along the lines of Alexander Keert-zen, but I’m going to go with the anglicanized Herzen. Anyway at this point, neither of them are old enough to be the fathers of anything, they were unruly intemperate kids playing with very dangerous ideas.

In 1840, Bakunin received permission to move to Berlin, to continue his studies in philosophy, and like Marx and Engels, who were kicking around the city at the same time, he fell in with the more progressively radical young Hegelians. Bakunin became drawn to the negation side of the dialectics, and he famously said in an essay he wrote in 1842, that the desire for destruction is at the same time a creative desire too. So he was a budding young revolutionary.

In 1842, he moved to Dresden where he went further down the revolutionary line. He became interested in socialism, but even more, he became interested in liberation nationalism, particularly in liberating the Slavic peoples from the tyrannical hand of the Holy Alliance powers, Russia and Austria and Prussia. Bakunin’s politics derailed his chances for a university job, as he had now been identified as a dangerous malcontent by the Russian foreign service. He then moved up to Switzerland, met some exiles connected with the League of the Just, and started referring to himself as a communist. The Russian ambassador to Switzerland ordered him to return to Russia and threatened to confiscate all his property back home, and facing potential arrest, he moved to Brussels where he fell in with a crowd of Polish nationalists trying to restart the revolutionary struggle for national liberation, a cause that as I said would be close to Bakunin’s heart for the rest of his life.

After a brief stint in Brussels, he moved on to Paris in 1844, arriving just a few months after Marx and his family, and they wound up in the same social circles. At that point, Marx was working with a mutual friend they had named Arnold Ruger on a journal called the German-French Annals, which was meant to create a political and intellectual bridge between French and German radicals, but the French took very little interest in it, and all the contributors wound up being German. This included an essay from Engels, which is how Marx and Engels became truly acquainted with each other. The only non-German author published in the journal before it folded was Bakunin.

And Bakunin also forged a personal and ideological bond with Proudhon, and so the seeds of his future anarchism were planted. And if we glance at the three pillars of Marxism, Bakunin is already sharing two of them: German Hegelian philosophy and utopian French socialism. But at this point, Bakunin did not get into the third pillar, which was English economics. Indeed. Bakunin later wrote of his first encounters with Marx, as far as learning was concerned, Marx was, and still is, incomparably more advanced than I. I knew nothing at that time of political economy. I had not yet rid myself of my metaphysical observations. He called me a sentimental idealist and he was right. I called him a vain man, perfidious and crafty. And I also was right.

In December of 1844, the tsar made another move against the wayward Bakunin, formally stripping him of his noble privileges and sentencing him in absentia to exile in Siberia. But as Bakunin had yet broken no French laws, the French did not expel him from the country.

At least not yet.

In November of 1847, Bakunin took part in a meeting commemorating the Polish uprising of 1830. And at this party, he gave a speech brazenly denouncing the despotism of the tsar and calling openly for a people’s revolution. Now considered a very dangerous element, he finally received his expulsion order from Mr. Guizot. So he moved back to Brussels where Marx and Engels and a bunch of other radicals who had been booted out of Paris wound up.

So this puts Bakunin in Brussels when the revolution breaks out in Paris in 1848. And in case I haven’t emphasized this enough, the revolution of 1848 is the seminal event for this entire generation, for liberals, for conservatives, for democrats, for socialists. I mean, it’s just a footnote these days, but at the time it was the volcanic eruption they had all either been fearing or anticipating. And no less than Marx and Engels, Bakunin was convinced, right, this is it, this is our French Revolution.

Once the revolution really got going in the spring of 1848, Bakunin supported his friends Georg and Emma Herwegh in their attempt to raise a Legion in France to go join with Friedrich Hecker’s uprising in April of 1848, we talked all about this in episode 7.20. Bakunin’s supported this effort, while Marx thought the whole project suicidal folly. It led to a minor personal falling out that contributed to future enmity between the two. Bakunin later wrote, I must openly admit that in this controversy Marx and Engels were in the right. With characteristic insolence though, they attacked Herwegh personally when he was not there to defend himself. In a face to face confrontation with them, I heatedly defended Herwegh, and our mutual dislike began then.

Using connections he had to guys who were now in the French provisional government, Bakunin secured funds to advance a project of Slavic liberation in central and Eastern Europe. He tried to get to Poland, but Prussian officials stopped him in Posen and he was forced to bounce over to Prague, where he had heard things might be heating up. Bakunin arrived in Prague just in time for the Pan-Slavic Congress that we talked about in episode 7.24, and he inserted himself as a self appointed delegate representing Russia. This meant he was also there when the Prague uprising began, and when it was immediately crushed, forcing Bakunin to flee the city, and he ultimately settled in the town of Colton. In the fall of 1848, he wrote An Appeal to the Slavs, calling for a pan-Slavic uprising to join with Germans and Italians and Hungarians to overthrow the Hapsburg Empire and the Russian Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia, to replace the tyrannical Holy Alliance with democratic nation states.

But of course we fast forward just a little bit, and where are we? That’s right. We’re at episode 7.31. It’s now May of 1849 and we’re at the final uprising in Dresden. Bakunin joined his acquaintance and comrade Richard Wagner in erecting barricades in the city and doing their best in a doomed effort to fend off the Prussian army. And though there is of course mutual dislike between Marx and Bakunin at this point, Marx does comment on events in Dresden by saying that in Bakunin, the people of Dresden had a cool and competent leader. It would however later become the stuff of intersectional backbiting that Bakunin had gone and fought on the front lines while Marx fled the scenes, just as it was time to mount the barricades.

So Wagner managed to escape the uprising and Dresden, but Bakunin was not so lucky. He was captured about 60 miles west of the city and taken into custody. He would not taste freedom again for 12 long years. Sentenced to death, the punishment was suspended and he sat in prison in Saxony for the next 13 months. In June of 1850, he was transferred to direct Austrian custody, they immediately re-sentenced him to death, but again, the sentence was not carried out. Instead, the Austrians are arranged to transfer him to Russian custody in May of 1851. And at that point Bakunin was moved to St. Petersburg and received yet another sentence of death, which was also not immediately carried out. Instead, he got something quite a bit worse. He spent the next six years in the dungeons of Imperial Russia. Life was intolerably difficult. He contracted scurvy and all his teeth fell out. Bakunin begged for his life. He also begged his brother to slip him some poison.

After eight total years in various prisons and dungeons, it looked like he might be coming due to have his sentence commuted. But Tsar Alexander the Second, the Tsar Liberator, explicitly struck Bakunin’s name from the amnesty list. Only after the tireless efforts of his mother was Bakunin finally led out of the dungeons in 1857 and sentenced to exile in Siberia, forever the dumping ground for whoever happens to be dissenting against whatever Russian government happens to be controlling Russia.

He landed first in a work camp in Tomsk and did what he could to make a life for himself. He met the daughter of a Polish merchant named Antonia, and they got married. Then his prospects brightened a bit more. Bakunin’s still had sympathetic, liberal relatives, people who favored leniency and reform generally and wanted to help their revolutionary cousin. They arranged to get him a commercial job working in Irkutsk, which gave him something resembling a regular daily life after so many years of just being in prison.

Upon arriving in Irkutsk, he came to find that many of the local officials did not like the domineering attitude of the central government back in St. Petersburg. And they themselves were quite sympathetic to critiques of the regime and everyone and everything that surrounded it. So they were very tolerant of the exiled radicals. Bakunin could pretty much read what he wanted and say what he wanted, he could send and receive correspondence, and though his resources were limited and his audience was small, he was able to restart his intellectual life. And I should mention, before we move on that this is the same group of tolerant officials in air quotes, who would play a role in Kropotkin’s advancement from socialism to anarchism just a few years later, but that is a story for another time.

Though Bakunin was tolerated and even got some special treatment, he was not interested in spending the rest of his life in isolated exile. In 1861, he managed to get himself a travel pass to leave Irkutsk and travel down the river to the coast as long as he promised to be back by the time the winter ice set in. This was not a promise Bakunin had any interest in keeping. So in June of 1861, he sailed away.

Down at the port of Olga, he talked his way onto an outbound American ship slipping out of Russian waters and landing in Japan in August. There, he was greeted by a small community of European political exiles, but Bakunin was also not going to spend the rest of his life as an isolated exile in Japan. Instead, he secured himself passage on a ship bound for California, which landed in San Francisco on October the 15th.

But is Bakunin going to settle down in San Francisco and go off and like pan for gold? No, sir, he is not.

First, he took a ship down to Panama. Then he tracked the Overland trail from Panama city to Cologne, where he caught a ship to New York. Upon arrival in New York, he spent a little bit of time meeting back up with former comrades, 48ers who had quit Europe and moved to the United States. Now some of these old 48ers still had an eye on Europe, but many more had given up on the old country. They had gotten into American politics, abolitionism, and were now in meshed in the just months old American Civil War.

So did Bakunin join up, was his destiny there among the other German officers who served in the union army? No, it was not.

He traveled up to Boston and then took a ship to sunny old England landing in Liverpool in late December, 1861. Then he went down to London where he quite literally just showed up on the doorstep of his old friend, Alexander Herzen, in the middle of their family dinner. Between his arrest in Saxony in May of 1849 and his arrival in England in December of 1861, Bakunin completed almost a complete circumnavigation of the globe.

So it has now been just shy of thirteen years since Bakunin had been a part of the revolutionary community in Europe, and he found it very different than when he left. He remade connections from the old days, but while he had been in prison and exile, they had spent the last decade under the banal but oppressive weight of conservative government. They had seen a series of last hopes die, one by one. They saw friends and comrades emigrate or give up or sell out. But Bakunin had been isolated in prison and then banished to the other side of the world. He had survived and fought his way back, and when he came back, he discovered that his own thinking had gone quite a bit beyond even the most radical of them. Marx himself famously commented on this in a letter to Engels, approvingly remarking that when he saw Bakunin in London, on the whole, he is one of the few people who might find not to have retrogressed after 16 years, but to have developed further.

Bakunin now had some pretty funky ideas about the nature of power and authority. Possibly thanks to his prolonged imprisonment, his socialism now had a distinctly libertarian flair. The liberation of the human spirit more than anything else was now the object of his revolutionary ambitions, but he was also still committed to his nationalism, and his belief that people deserved self-determination. And Bakunin saw nation in a fact as the individual of the world stage. He wrote, I feel myself, always the patriot of all oppressed fatherlands. Nationality is a historic local fact, which like all real and harmless facts, has the right to claim general acceptance. Nationality is not a principle, it is a legitimate fact just as individuality is. Every nationality, great or small has the incontestable right to be itself, to live according to its own nature. This right is simply the corollary of the general principle of freedom. But that said, Bakunin was a believer in the liberating power of nationalism, and he was always on guard against the idea that one ascendant liberated nation should be able to turn around and use their new found self-determination and freedom to oppress members of minority nationalities. So this still at the forefront of his mind, when he returned to Europe, Bakunin reconnected with those liberation nationalist roots.

During his time in Siberia, he had, for example, heard about Garibaldi, the great Italian freedom fighter, and now send him admiring letters in London. He became friendly with the now aging Mazzini, no longer the spry young leader of young Italy and young Europe, but the doyenne of emigrate democratic Republican nationalists. But Bakunin’s particular cause was that of the Slavs generally, and Poland in particular, and so Bakunin was naturally thrilled when Poland went into revolt in January 1863. He immediately made his way to Copenhagen to try to travel to Poland to join the cause, but he was unable to pass through the lines. The blow of the setback though, was lessened by the fact that his wife Antonia was finally able to get out of Siberia and join him after nearly two years of separation.

By the end of 1863, Bakunin was making plans to go off and live in Northern Italy where he hoped to promote a Slavic Italian Alliance against the Habsburgs. And when he departed in November of 1863, he carried letters of introduction from Mazzini, though they would soon have an ideological falling out. Marx somewhat anticipated this falling out, and he bid a fond farewell to Bakunin, who had this massive intellect and was a powerful force for social revolution, and Marx saw Bakunin making a headquarters in Italy as the perfect way to counteract the narrow-minded limitations of  Mazzini’s mere political revolution.

So in January of 1864, Bakunin arrived in northern Italy in what was now officially the kingdom of Italy. And it was here that Bakunin really and truly started to advance his own distinct anarchist theories. Most of the ideas we’ll be talking about next week come from this final thirteen or so years of his life, between his arrival in Italy in 1864 and his death in 1876. We’re going to talk all about it next week, but just to cut to the chase, Bakunin is now opposed to all forms of authority and coercion wherever he finds them: capitalists, the state, the church, anything that claimed coercive power over free people was the enemy of the full development of full human life.

And just to give you some flavor of where his head is at now, Bakunin will say for example, the trouble lies not in any particular form of government, but in the very existence of government itself. He also flipped one of Voltaire’s old, witty aphorisms on its head: Voltaire had said, if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. Bakunin meanwhile said, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.

Ultimately, what Bakunin wants to do is reconcile the apparent contradiction between liberty and equality, to transcend the dangers implied by both on their own and form them into a synthetic combination. As he famously wrote, liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice. Socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.

While in Italy, Bakunin founded his own organization to propagate his new anarchist principles. This group is sometimes called the International Brotherhood, the International Fraternity, or the Alliance of Revolutionary Socialists. And it is the formation of this group that led to his break with Mazzini because it was from the old groups that Mazzini had cultivated that Bakunin’s started converting adherents from democratic republicanism to full-blown anarchism. In Mazzini’s eyes, Bakunin had just used the letters of introduction Mazzini had given him to steal all of Mazzini’s disciples.

The founding of this international organization is nearly simultaneous with the founding of the International Working Men’s Association up in London in September of 1864. Bakunin’s group had a more ideologically coherent program, though. It was meant to advance Bakunin’s anarchism, not be a catchall umbrella group. It was also purposefully more secretive and conspiratorial than the international. Bakunin was happy to tap into the tradition of secret societies in Italy that went back to the days of the Carbonari, and Bakunin’s program of collectivist anti-authoritarian anarchism started to find ready adherents in Italy and then across Southern Europe.

Bakunin sponsored a tour through Spain of an Italian comrade named Giuseppe Fanelli who spread this new anarchist gospel and found a ready audience, planting the seeds of what would become the largest flowering of European anarchism.

While this was all going on, tensions were rising between Napoleon the Third’s French empire and Otto Von Bismarck’s Prussia. War seemed imminent. And so a movement began to join together a bunch of different pacifist voices to try to diffuse tensions. And this became a group called the League of Peace and Freedom. The League was joined by liberals like John Stuart Mill, radical Democrats like Jules Favre, moderate socialists like old Louis Blanc and Alexander Herzen, and nationalist freedom fighters like Garibaldi. Bakunin and his anarchists answered the call and signed onto a petition by the League that was making the rounds in 1867.

Now the League of Peace and Freedom was hoping to get the International Working Men’s Association to sign up, but Marx guided the response of the central committee to say, of course, as individuals, you can go join up, and we in principle support the aims of the League of Peace and Freedom, but the whole point of the International is to be the top of all pyramids, and as an organization, we will not work in affiliated alliance with other international organizations. And Marx even said, if you really support peace and freedom, you will join us, not the other way around. But plenty of members of the International did join the League of Peace and Freedom, and there was a big congress in Geneva with many famous attendees among them, Bakunin and Garibaldi, now both legendary revolutionaries and they famously embraced each other to a thunderous standing ovation.

But though many of the radicals and socialists and anarchists who joined the league came in with high hopes, they found themselves outnumbered by more tepid political liberals and democrats who were not interested in letting this peace project be turned into a vehicle for social revolution

So disillusioned, Bakunin and his anarchists wound up seceding in 1868. And what they wanted to do now was take Marx’s advice and join the International Working Men’s Association. To do this, they formed a group called the Alliance of Socialist Democracy and petition to affiliate it with the Geneva section of the International. But the response from the central committee in London was in the same vein as their response towards the league of peace and freedom, we don’t associate with other international organizations, our whole point of being is to be the one great international organization. Everybody else joins us, that’s the whole point. And there’s actually a copy of the marginal notes Marx made when he read the organizing charter of the Alliance of Socialist Democracy, where he’s written things like, what modesty! They establish themselves as the central authority, clever lads. And, they want to compromise us under their own patronage. And then bluntly, the international association does not admit any international branches. So the response was, if you guys want to join us, that’s fine, that’s awesome, let’s do it. But you have to dissolve this intermediary international committee that you’ve set up, and each section needs to join the international individually as an individual group. One central committee, one annual Congress, that’s the point.

Bakunin decided he could live with these terms and knew that the number of followers he was bringing in would give him plenty of weight to bargain about the direction, policies, and goals of the international. So in 1868, the Alliance of Revolutionary Socialists dissolved almost as quickly as they had been formed, and all the national and local sections affiliated directly with the International. As too did Bakunin himself, who was now for the first time, officially a member. This meant that when you looked at the affiliated roles of the International, most of the Italian and Spanish sections were in collectivist anarchist groups operating under Bakunin’s intellectual and political auspices, rather than scientific socialists operating under Marx’s intellectual and political auspices.

So we’ll leave it off there for now with Bakunin joining the International. This also happens to be just when all those peace initiatives are failing, and the Franco-Prussian war is about to erupt. And the lightning run of events to follow — the defeat of France, the fall of the second empire, the founding of the third republic, the Paris Commune, and the Bloody Week — are going to ignite fierce debates inside the international about how to respond, what to do, who to support and why. And these years would ultimately crack the movement into and spell the end of the First International, who’s divergent and still combative heirs would have to pick up the baton in the next generation to carry the great work of social revolution forward.

But that will be in two weeks, because next week we are going to turn to the actual philosophy and programs of Bakunin’s anarcho collectivism, and Bakunin’s anarcho collectivism was different from the anarcho mutualism of Proudhon that preceded him, the scientific socialism of Marx that was contemporary with him, and the anarcho communism of his younger countrymen Kropotkin, which would be developed after Bakunin’s death. So next week it’s an anarcho collectivism, and then in two weeks, the showdown between the Red and the Black.

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Episode 10.4: Historical Materialism

One of my hobbies is studying historiography and the philosophy of history. I don’t like just studying history, I like studying the history of history. It’s why, for example, the first appendices in the History of Rome was about the ancient Greek and Latin historians. I enjoyed the history of history in all of its meta glory. And you can’t really do the history of history without devoting a lot of space to the Marxist historiographic revolution, which opened up a whole new theoretical approach that tied the course of history, not to great ideas or great men, or divine Providence, but rather to economics. That how a group of humans produces the material means of their biological survival, those base elements at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, food, drink, clothing, shelter, that is the base structure upon which the rest of the cultural superstructure is built. Religion arts, literature, politics, science, all of it is rooted in how we produce the means of our survival. And it is changes and conflicts in that base that determines the course of human history. That is the basic premise of historical materialism, and it is the subject of today’s episode.

Starting in the 1840s, certainly no later than his arrival in Paris, Karl Marx started considering the course of human history and what causal mechanisms might be at work. He did this because he was beginning to conceive of a new kind of scientific socialism, and he wanted to put it on a solid foundation. But because he had this fundamentally materialist philosophical outlook, when Marx went looking for these causal mechanisms, he did not plumb the depths of human reason like the utopian socialists did. Instead he studied economics and politics and the actual events of actual history going back to the dawn of time.

Marx begins with the idea that the thing that makes humans different from animals is that we come together to produce the means of our survival. We don’t just passively depend on what nature provides, we actively produce the necessities of life. We grow food, make shelter, weave cloth; that’s what makes humans human. With this idea in mind, Marx comes to believe that society is defined by the manner in which it does this production. This is the stuff we talked about last week, we’re talking about the forces of production and the relations of production, and more specifically the combination of those two concepts into the grand concept mode of production: how a society produces its material needs.

This base mode of production is what defines all the other parts of the society’s cultural superstructure. As I just said, art, religion, philosophy, politics, science forms of media, everything, and we can lump all of that stuff together and call it the ideology of the mode of production.

Now though Marx believes that the material base defines the cultural ideology, he recognizes that it’s a feedback loop between the base and the superstructure and that each maintain and reinforce the other. Just as the prevailing mode of production shapes legal, artistic, and religious institutions,  the resulting law and art and religion serves to justify and maintain the prevailing mode of production.

Now for Marx, the really frustrating part of this is that the organizing ideology of a mode of production is always synonymous with the ideology of the ruling class in that mode of production. So right and wrong, good and bad, who gets what and why, essentially all the prevailing morality is the morality of the ruling class imposed on everyone else, instilling in the exploited, a set of beliefs designed to do little more than rationalize the fact that they are being exploited and why that’s fine, actually.

The ruling ideology of a given era imprints itself and makes it seem like this is the way it’s always been and will always be. Marx further believes that humans are fundamentally conservative creatures who prefer routine habit and continuity to novelty and change, and that this social imprinting is very difficult to undo.

But for Marx history is progressive. It moves in an evolutionary way from the simple to the complex, it does change and grow and evolve. So how then do we move from one mode of production to the next, from small hunter gatherer groups walking around to these huge industrial cities linked by railroads? Well, for Marx it clearly comes down to changes in the means of production, right, those are the tools and the subjects of labor. So we invent a better bow for hunting, maybe discover a technique for preserving food in the winter, learn how to domesticate some wild plant. And this is fundamentally a concept that we would call the development of the productive forces. Which can partly be understood as a measure of human power over nature. And if you survey human history, you can trace the development of our productive forces: new tools, new techniques, new technologies, lead to new ways of social organization, all with the aim of producing more of the necessities of life more efficiently. This can happen both slowly with refinement of technique, or it can happen all at once with some breakthrough discovery or invention. But the tendency to develop the productive forces is clearly present.

Now, because he’s working in a dialectical tradition, Marx sees things evolving through a process of action and reaction, and he has this theory that changes in the forces of production developments in the forces of production will ultimately seek to create new relations of production to continue that development. This is one of the underlying tensions in history. What if the developing productive forces start slipping out from under the prevailing ideological superstructure? Put in another way, if the existing ideological and cultural superstructure starts to become a hindrance to the further development of the forces of production, then we have a major problem on our hands, and society is either headed for revolution or complete social collapse. When this happens, the inhibited forces of production will of necessity burst asunder, as Marx likes to put it, and reorganize as a new mode of production, better suited to continue the development of the productive forces. Marx thinks that these moments of revolution or social collapse occur when a society is ready to transition from one overarching mode of production to its successor. And as Marx says in The German Ideology, and I’m quoting here, at a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters, then begins an era of social revolution. End quote. To use metaphors invoking industrial imagery, then, revolution is thus the motor force of history.

 One of the most important tensions and contradictions that exist in a society is how the development of these forces of production produce different classes that are defined by who is doing the labor and who is reaping the rewards, who is the laboring class, and who is the ruling class, who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed. Now the development of the ruling class, freed from the drudgery of manual labor to produce the necessities of life, is not just how we come to have lords and priests, who were the first two groups to say, no, actually you work, I’ll just be over here. chillin’, it also brings us all the things we associate with that cultural superstructure: art music, philosophy, science, sports, all of it.

But for nearly all of human history, the production of culture, as we understand it, has been the province of a small minority inside or adjacent to the ruling class who do not have to labor to survive. And this tension between the laborers and the non laborers, between the oppressed and the oppressors, will naturally create tension, class conflict, and class struggle. And that class conflict is central to the course of history. Marx opened the Communist Manifesto by stating boldly, the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. And then he goes on to say, freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeymen, in a word oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

Now I am leaving a lot of nuance out of this, but before we move on, I want to say that Marx does not think human beings are mere passengers in history. They are not carried along by some mystical force of history outside of free will. And this makes sense for a guy like Marx, who is at heart, a passionate, energetic, revolutionary activist who doesn’t want to just interpret the world, he wants to change it. And so though sometimes he gets carried away and uses phrases like inevitable to describe the triumph of the working class, he doesn’t actually think this. But he does believe that the conditions within which humans live at any given moment limit the scope of available action. Individual humans are rooted in history. Early hunter gatherers could not invent capitalism because the technological level of their means of production simply did not allow it. It was impossible for the levelers and the diggers to usher in communism during the English Revolution, because the mode of production and level of technology did not allow it. And Marx summed this up and I heartily endorse this sentiment, by the way, he says this in The 18th Brumiere of Louis Bonaparte, men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please. They do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an Alp on the brains of the living. And that is a million percent true.

So we will now move on to the stages of historical materialism. Marx divided the eras of human history up by their prevailing mode of production. And he was here working in the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment tradition. The Scottish Enlightenment guys, like Adam Smith, had come up with their own progressive stages of economic development and defined them as hunting, pasturage, agriculture, and commerce, and so Marx has his own version of this. To keep things simple, I will keep it restricted to what is now the accepted canon: first, tribal or primitive communism, then ancient or slave mode of production, then the feudal mode of production, then the capitalist mode of production, and finally, the socialist mode of production. There are slightly modified versions of this that involve an asiatic mode and a barbarian mode that exists in the area between the tribal and the ancient mode of productions, but I will set those aside for now. The basic questions we are going to be asking ourselves are: what are the means of production, who owns or controls the means of production, what are the relations of production that surround and enable those means? Where’s the surplus production going? What is the class conflict? How are the forces of production being developed? Those are the fundamental questions. And I should stress though, before we get into this, that Marx never really grappled with East Asian or South Asian history, and he gets pretty fuzzy about everything the further you get from say the Rhine River. And so what follows amounts to mostly in accounting of European history from pre-history.

Okay. So we begin with primitive communism or the tribal mode of production, or as it is commonly known, hunter-gatherer society. Now, the first thing we should say is that for the materialist historian, the big thing that advances proto-humans beyond their initial animal state is not that they had big brains, but instead that they decided to adopt bipedal locomotion, which freed up their hands to use tools, and that is what allowed their brains to grow big and smart. Remember: always material development first, ideas second. You can disagree with that, but this is what the materialists say.

The other big things humans have going for them is cooperative labor. We always find humans working in groups together. So those early modern and Enlightenment era depictions of man as a solitary creature in the state of nature that you find in like Rousseau and Locke and Hobbes, that is all wrong. Humans were never solitary creatures. We were always in groups. Sharing and cooperative dependence are the essential survival skills of the human species, not self-reliance and independence.

So the means of production in this first mode are just rudimentary tools and available natural resources, so axes and spears, baskets, knives, they tame fire, wear simple animal skin, clothing, they live in rudimentary shelter, and both the means of production and the production itself is shared in common by the group.

The relations of production are: kinship groups, with a loose and fluid division of hunter-gatherer labor without a great deal of specialization. And since this is a very hand to mouth existence, there is no surplus to cream off that would allow a non-laboring life, so everyone is working. This means there is no class, there’s no state property, money, kings, aristocrats, any of that stuff. There was no class, and so there was no class conflict, and the forces of production basically stayed the same, that is, they were not developing, for hundreds of thousands of years. For the majority of human existence, I mean, just by sheer number of years, this primitive communist mode of production has been the prevailing mode of production.

Then about 10 or 12,000 years ago, give or take, human society underwent what has been dubbed the Neolithic Revolution. This is when the ancient aliens came down from the heavens, messed with our DNA and taught us how to be farmers. The forces of production developed from hunting and gathering to settled agriculture and animal husbandry. Our new found ability to domesticate plants and animals to produce the necessities of life changed how and where humans lived. This material change altered our social relations. Some societies stopped being nomadic and started to live in permanent settlements. Harnessing the productive power of farming also introduced a truly transformative element: surpluses. These societies could produce so much food that some people didn’t have to devote themselves to productive labor. So we have the origins of class between a laboring majority and a non laboring minority. This non-laboring minority becomes the ruling class, who initially through sheer physical intimidation are able to command and control the surplus production.

The free time of this non-laboring ruling class allowed for even greater developments in the productive forces, but also everything else we think of as culture. All the elements of what we now call civilization become present as a result of surpluses. So this neolithic revolution is arguably the single most important event in human history.

This revolution takes us from the tribal or primitive communist mode of production to the ancient or slave mode of production, which at its highest state is basically synonymous with Greco Roman civilization. The means of production now include large scale settled agriculture, the extensive use of animals for power, the beginnings of industry, mining, and craft work in cities and advanced large scale trade networks.

We also have the arrival of legal private property: this field is mine, not yours, and because we now have a surplus that can be allotted to a non-laboring ruling class, we also have advancements in the cultural superstructure. The development of the intellectual means of production: writing, cataloging, archiving, math, calendars, science, weights, and measures, all of which will be handled by a new professional class: engineers, lawyers, architects, traders, artisans, musicians, actors, and teachers. Real permanent specialization of labor starts to set in.

But the defining feature of the ancient mode of production is the arrival of the slave. With warfare now a much larger scale proposition, captured prisoners can be brought home and put to work: get them, not us, to do the productive labor. For Marx, the defining class division then in the ancient mode of production is not necessarily between ruler and ruled, but between free individual and slave. And it’s these free individuals who are gobbling up the surplus created by the laboring class of slaves who were the private property of another human being no less than the hammer or the scythe. Now, this is a very general depiction of like a thousand years or more of Mediterranean history with the ancient mode of production again just sort of being a picture in the mind’s eye of a timeless Roman empire.

Now from the materialist perspective, the big thing that wrecked the ancient mode of production was the decrease in supply of cheap slaves. From about the end of the Punic Wars up through the disaster in the Teutoburg Forest, the Roman legions steadily expanded Rome’s borders and its population of slaves. But after this, the Roman empire stopped expanding, aside from a few side projects and the ambitions of Trajan. This meant that slaves became dearer and more expensive, and eventually it’s going to make sense to stop using slaves and start using again some version of non-owned people. When this happens, the transition from slave society to feudal society oh so imperceptibly began. Now, we actually mapped a lot of this transition out during the history of Rome, right, starting with the Crisis of the Third Century, the large, broad and safe empire started to become internally isolated. Big walls along the frontiers were replaced by walls around cities. The inability of the central government to guarantee safety raised the power of local nobles. Labor was willing to send its surplus, not to some central state bureaucracy, but to the local lord, who promised to actually defend them.

And this is the origins of lord and serf. State taxes levied on commerce by the later emperors tended to make those rising feudal lords say, well, screw it, I’ll just make it myself rather than buying it on the open market. And this developed internal self-sufficiency. All of this makes late antiquity a great transition phase from the ancient mode of production to the feudal mode of production, but this is not accompanied by a revolutionary reconstruction of society at large. But rather this other thing: the common ruin of the contending classes. In this case, the ancient mode of production was tottering and decrepit. And when the great migrations came through, they swept aside the Roman Empire, and what was left was those proto-feudal relations.

According to historical materialism, this switch from the ancient to the feudal mode of production was a regression for society, it was a step back. The forces of production were still defined by agriculture manual and animal labor with some technological help from things like water mills. But the technological level went backwards, or at the very least did not advance. And this is also not happening in a huge linked together empire of trade and distribution, but rather local self-sufficiency. And more importantly, most importantly perhaps, the slaves were now gone. They were replaced by serfs out in the field, ostensibly non-owned individuals who were nonetheless legally bound to the land.

And this is the fundamental class antagonism during the feudal mode of production between the productive serfs and the non laboring nobility. In the cities, crafts were made by free artisans who eventually organize themselves into guilds. The surplus went to the new class of feudal nobles, the cast of warrior families who entered into complex reciprocal contracts with each other and claim most of the land for themselves. But it is important to note that in the feudal mode of production, the artisan owned all his own tools, the means of production, and thus the products of his labor. And the peasant, while they had to give some designated portion of the produce of their land to the local lord, the rest was theirs to live on. There was a direct relationship between the labor invested and the produce consumed.

For a long time, the forces of production were not really developing at all. In fact, they were producing less than the Roman Empire had at its height. And this went on for a thousand years. Around these feudal forces of production came a monotheistic Catholic Church and a hierarchical monarchy with divinely ordained kings that preached a timeless chain of being.

But around about 1300, something started to happen, most probably rocketed forward by the Black Death, which swept through Europe and killed a third of the population. Suddenly, the oppressed peasants could demand better pay and conditions and terms of service. Land that had previously been owned by people who were dead were claimed by people who were living, growing their landholdings and creating something like a wealthy peasant class or an emerging gentry. In the cities, the merchants and traders were able to assert more autonomy and weight against the land-based feudal aristocracy. And these guys were the burghers, basically the urban oligarchs. And it is from that title burgher that Marx dubs them, the bourgeoisie, a class that was destined to develop the forces of production more than any other group since at least the ancient aliens who taught us how to farm.

By the 1400s, you start getting real developments in modern banking techniques of pooling and investing in lending capital, the printing press is invented then the Americas were discovered — the whole world was discovered — Constantinople fell and Islamic civilization was pushed out of Spain, leading to European rediscovery of ancient philosophy and knowledge on a wide scale.

So inside late feudalism, the forces of production began to change. Industry started to become larger, more cooperative and more centralized. The old guild system came under pressure from larger scale investments based off of pooled capital, and the historical role of capitalism was to concentrate all the scattered means of production spread out across a bunch of mostly self-sufficient local regions and start producing goods on a massive scale. This goes hand in hand with a change in mentality: production now is not just for use, but for sale in a consumer economy. And that sale was meant to create a monetary profit for the capitalist investor.

Now, of course, people had always produced things that people need, but this was taken to a whole different level, and a consumer economy organized around profitable commodities produced on a heretofore unimaginable scale was born. The old feudal culture was replaced by new concepts: rationalization of processes, training efficiency, and discipline. The division of industrial labor, that is, the production of goods, rather than just food had mostly been between guilds — as in you make shoes, I do hats — this was replaced by a division of labor inside the shop itself. You cut leather. I pound nails, we can make way more stuff.

So this is clearly a major development for the forces of production. But it was running up against a feudal system that was not fit for this next stage of development. And just to take one example, serfdom was tying people to the land, and so they weren’t allowed to move to the cities to become workers, or you have archaic tax and tariff systems that inhibited the free movement of mass produced goods. So this brings us basically to the beginning of the Revolutions podcast because in the historical materialist conception, the English Revolution and the French Revolution are both major bourgeois revolutions, the forces unleashed by the bourgeoisie bursting asunder against the old funeral aristocracy. Or, if you like, the new capitalist base trying to shake off a now thoroughly ill-fitting feudal superstructure to build a capitalist society on top of the capitalist forces of production.

Now in France, things were set back a bit by the fall of Napoleon, but the July Revolution 15 years later was explicitly and nakedly a bourgeois revolution. There’s a quote from Jacques Laffitte where he says, now the bankers will rule.

So we talked about some of the hallmarks of the capitalist mode of production last week: labor has now been collected and socialized, but the means of production: the tools, the natural resources, and eventually the factories, are owned by a single individual or a small collection of investors who claim all the profit from the commodities produced. And everything is now organized around the principle of producing commodities for profit, and more specifically exploiting labor to extract profit from the produce of that exploited labor. And as Marx sees it, this upends the intuitive old style of market economics, where you sell a commodity to get some money so that you can go buy a different commodity that you need, but do not have. So you make a table, sell it for money so you can go buy some clothes.

Under capitalism, there’s a new version where you take your money, use it to make a product, so you can sell that product to get more money. And this whole new conception of reality starts to attach itself to everything, and everything becomes abstracted into a commodity that can be bought and sold inside the market. And the market used to be just this ancillary piece of society, and now it’s the whole obsessive focus. No one, certainly not the historical materialist, denies the results: once unleashed the capitalist mode of production advanced the productive forces further than all of human history put together. It is practically as significant as the Neolithic revolution.

This new mode of production created a fundamentally new class struggle. No longer between the noble and the serf, but between the capitalist and the worker, between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, a new class of laborers who own nothing and can only sell their labor for wages. And the etymology of proletariat, just so you know, comes from an old Roman census designation for a landless citizen who fell well short of all property qualifications for real citizenship and participation in civil society.

Now as we discussed two episodes, back Marx the young revolutionary identified a restrained bourgeois class that was both suffering under the fetters of feudalism and who had unique power, thanks to their position inside the developing forces production to stage a revolution. They were the revolutionary class. And when he went looking for a group that fit these parameters inside the new capitalist mode of production, he landed on this previously unidentified, and unknown working class: the proletariat. Their misery and exploitation was such that they would desire revolutionary emancipation, and their proximity to and position within the new capitalist means of production placed them in a unique position to have a real revolutionary impact on the economic base of society.

And Marx further believed that these proletarian forces, the forces that would destroy the bourgeoisie, had been summoned by the bourgeoisie themselves. That like the sorcerer’s apprentice, they had conjured forces they could not control. And that in the end, the bourgeoisie ultimately produced, above all, their own grave-diggers.

Now, when the proletariat overthrew the bourgeoisie, it would usher in a new socialist mode of production. Now I will say though, that both Marx and Engels are very vague and cagey about what this new socialist mode of production will look like. And partly this is because they don’t want to be dreamy, utopians building castles in the sky, but they do think that something is going to happen and that it will be socialism.

They hint that it will probably unfold in two stages, a lower transitionary phase and a higher stage. And this is sometimes divided between socialism and then full communism, but Marx often just uses the terms lower and higher socialism. In this new mode of production, the means of production will be owned by the workers themselves. They will be the beneficiaries of their own labor, rather than seeing it creamed off and hoarded by a small minority of exploitive rulers. He also thinks that this will bring about the end of all class distinctions, which dated back to the dawn of agriculture. Since the Neolithic revolution, every mode of production has been dominated by a minority ruling class, living off the produce of a majority laboring class.

Now that this has been upended with the majority laboring class, now the new ruling class, all class distinctions will evaporate because there will be no more oppressor and no more oppressed. All of the surplus will be shared in common. In fact, there will be such an abundance thanks to the productive powers consolidated during the capitalist mode of production, a post-scarcity society will not require oppressor or oppressed, it all becomes irrelevant. Who’s fighting for control of the necessities of life, they are in abundance. Everyone can share. From each according to their abilities, and to each according to their needs.

So that is the materialist conception of history. And that is the trajectory that Karl Marx believed human civilization is on. And this is going to be picked up by his successors, because Marx has sketched out an idea that by necessity the working class proletariat and only the working class proletariat is the revolutionary class. And that in the transition phase between capitalism and socialism, they are going to have to seize revolutionary power and impose what Marx problematically dubbed, the dictatorship of the proletariat.

And so next week we are going to set Marx aside, and we are going to turn to the philosophy of people who rejected all of that, who thought that this was not the stuff of emancipation, but the stuff of further tyranny. And just as we did with Marx and Engels, next week, we will cover the life and times of Mikhail Bakunin, their ideological opponent in the battle for control of the First International, and for the revolutionary future of all of Europe.

 I will end though, by reminding everybody that I will be at the Intelligent Speech conference in New York on June the 29th, a bunch of us podcasters will be there. You can meet us. We can hang out all day. I will be doing a presentation called What is the Point of All This? And then later in the day, I’ll sit for a round table discussion about whatever we decide to round table discuss. It is going to be great, and I very much hope to see you there.

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Episode 10.3: The Three Pillars of Marxism

Before we get going this week. I want to thank you everyone who came out to Waterstone last Tuesday night, it was fantastic. I had a great time, hope you did too, and then I want to remind everybody that I will be flying to New York in a couple of weeks to take part in a really cool event called Intelligent Speech, which is bringing together a lot of podcasters and specifically history podcasters to talk about what we do, why we do it, and maybe how you can do it too.

This is all happening at the Center for Social Innovation in Chelsea on Saturday, June the 28th, 2019, the details are at intelligentspeechconference.com and I put a link to it in the show notes. And I hope to see you there because I’ll be there all day talking about what I do and why I do it and how maybe you can do it.

But getting back to the show. Last time we talked through the lives of Marx and Engels. Long story short, they were would-be revolutionaries whose revolution came and then went and then deposited them in exile. In England, Marx lived in London, writing articles and continuing his study of political economy.

Engels lived in Manchester, working for the family business. Ostensibly he had given up his radical ways, but he too continued to research and write. Marx and Engels maintained an almost daily correspondence where they further discussed and elaborated the basic ideas they had come up with in the 1840s. And their work in the 1850s and 1860s and then into the 1870s was about fully developing and proving those ideas, ideas that coalesced into the philosophic, economic and political system that is today known as Marxism.

Today, we are going to talk through some of Marxism and it will almost certainly wind up being an inadequate introduction, but we have to start somewhere. Now, since we are moving towards the Russian Revolution, I thought I might start by borrowing an idea that Lenin promoted to frame our discussion of a few of the more important Marxian ideas. Lenin says that Marx quote was the genius who continued and consummated the three main ideological currents of the 19th century as represented by the three most advanced countries of mankind: classical German philosophy, classical English political economy, and French socialism combined with French revolutionary doctrines in general, end quote.

So we might call these the three pillars of Marxism. German philosophy, specifically the German philosophy operating in the aftermath of Hegel, English economics in the classically liberal tradition though, really it’s British economics because the Scot Adam Smith looms so large, though Marx is most often grappling directly with David Ricardo, and then finally French utopian socialism, saint-Simone, and Fourier, who were dead by the time Marx was encountering them in the early 1840s, but also Prodhoun and Louis Blanc, who were very much alive and working.

And the thing here is that Marx being Marx, he was not going to build his own philosophy by simply taking what he had found and then continuing to build in the same direction at his predecessors. Instead he would challenge, critique and attack them. They were the thesis. He was the antithesis. Marxism was the synthesis.

So first we have the German philosophy component, which as you know, from last week was Marx’s first passion. He was for sure, aiming to become a professor of philosophy until the ideas he embraced and the friends that he kept made him toxic to the German universities. As we also talked about last week, young Marx, like every philosophy student in Germany at the time, was working in the shadow of Hegel.

But specifically Marx was working in one part of the shadow, amongst the young Hegelians who were rejecting many of the conclusions that have been reached by the great old man. The biggest conclusion Hegel had reached that Marx thought wrong became the most basic component of Marx’s philosophy.

Hegel was an idealist, and Marx was a materialist. Idealism here does not refer to a belief in lofty morals and ideals, but rather the philosophic position that what we encounter as existence is not actually a world of things, but a world of ideas. Everything comes down to ideas and the ideas we have about those ideas. The material world, if such a thing, even exists, is entirely secondary. For an idealist like Hegel, the mind and objects of the mind are the central subjects, not just a philosophy, but of existence itself. That what the thinking mind thinks is real life is really just a manifested projection of some ideas held by the thinking mind. But a branch of the young Hegelians started to turn this upside down. To say no, wait a minute. The material world is really primary and all of our ideas about it are secondary.

They come as sense impressions or reflections on those sense impressions. Even ideas themselves are the product of matter acting upon matter in the neurochemistry of the physical brain. It’s all physical, it’s all material substance. They believed in the centrality of the material world and Marx from a very young age was a confirmed materialist. And it became the great building block upon which he piled a bunch of other building blocks.

But though he was starting from the opposite conclusion about the very nature of reality, by his own forthright acknowledgements, Marx drew very useful structures and tools and vocabulary from Hegel, even if ultimately Marx thought Hegel had everything stood on its head. For example: we have dialectics. You have probably encountered dialectics at some point, even if you don’t know it. It’s an adversarial system of progressive reasoning that passes through three stages usually described as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. It’s the formula I used just a minute ago to foreshadow where we were headed.

First, a thesis is presented. Then comes the antithesis, that would seem to negate that thesis, and then the tension is resolved by a conclusion: the synthesis, which is the transcended union of the apparent opposites, keeping the good, shaking loose the bad. It’s a dynamic form of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction.

Now, a few necessary caveats about this: this dialectical form of reasoning and investigation goes way back to the beginning of recorded history, and enjoyed wide use in both ancient and medieval philosophy. So dialectical reasoning is not some brand new thing that was invented by Hegel. The second, Hegel himself, nor Marx for that matter, really ever used the terms, thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, that’s just the way we conceive of it today. And then finally, we must say that Hegel did not think dialectics needed to be universally applied in rigidly dogmatic ways. And in fact, he derided those who wanted to rely on mechanical formulas to answer every problem.

But still, dialectical reasoning was imported from Hegel to Marx, and from Marx into Marxism. This re-innovation in dialectical reasoning was exciting to early 19th century German philosophers, because it seemed a necessary antidote to what had built up during the Renaissance and the enlightenment and the scientific revolution when philosophers started relying on different methods of investigation and experimentation. These new methods isolated and examined individual variables to understand all the different little bits that made things what they are. They collected, separated and analyzed. They arranged things into orders, classified them into complex schemes, and then took the component parts of the component parts and further isolated and documented those. Everything was put in a specimen jar and labeled. This was done, not just for things in the material world, but also for ideas and concepts. They divided them up, yes and no true and false, positive and negative, cause and effect. But they struggled, because sometimes a thing is not just one thing at a time.

It was many different things. And often, apparently contradictory things. Causes or effects, effects or causes. They couldn’t be stuck permanently into separate specimen jars because they were infused with the essence of many different things Then those who supported dialectical reasoning said these metaphysicians made the further mistake of trying to get everything to stop moving, so that properties and things and ideas could be described once and for all in their rigid, fixed, and eternal ways. But nothing is ever rigid, fixed and eternal. The universe and everything in it is in constant motion. It’s forever changing, evolving, interacting, appearing, and passing away. Grappling with a constantly changing constantly in motion universe is not a problem for dialectics, nor was it concerned about the myriad and troublesome contradictions. In fact, it positively thrived on those contradictions. Dialectics say, yes, not only are these things opposite and contradictory, but their opposition brings them into union. The apparent contradictions are needed to advance, develop, evolve, and change to take the simple and make it complex. And so we, as humans need to understand the dynamic dialectical process of unfolding transformative conflict between opposites as the path to understanding the true nature of it existence.

Marx then took his materialism and these dialectics and combined them with another of Hegel’s big ideas, and then really ran with it. That the confrontations in conflict between apparently contradictory forces was the driver not just of philosophical advancement, but of human history. So now we have the foundational concepts that allowed Marx to develop the core philosophy that underlay all of his future research and political activism: dialectical materialism.

Shut out of the ivory tower and forced into the grubby world of being a political journalist and activist, Marx took his materialism, and these dialectical patterns of reasoning, and applied them to the grubby world within which humans actually lived. And in so doing, he started having epiphany after epiphany. First, thanks to his understanding of flux and change becoming and passing away, he advanced beyond the materialism of guys like Newton, who were always trying to fix and pin down immutable laws for eternal bodies. Marx’s materialism on the other hand embraced flux and growth and change birth and death and evolution. We’re going to spend a whole episode on this next week, but Marx believed he had cracked the secret of history. That the underlying economic structure of society, the means by which humans produce the necessities of life, defined everything else. And that you could not understand the world and certainly not change the world unless you understood how the material economic sub-structure operated and how conflicts within it were the fundamental drivers of history.

So armed with these concepts from German philosophy, when Marx arrived in Paris in 1843, he was ready to start a thoroughgoing investigation of European political economy to understand that economic sub-structure. This is a project that would remain ongoing for the rest of his life until his death in 1883. When he was doing his work in political economy, Marx was grappling with correcting and expanding the work of the classical liberal economist, Adam Smith, and Smith’s disciple, David Ricardo, as well as contemporaries like John Stuart Mill. And though in the modern popular imagination, Adam Smith and Karl Marx are considered polar opposites, never the two shall meet, but Marx for one did not think of himself as the enemy of Adam Smith. And most of Marxian economics is working in the tradition of Smith and Ricardo, even if, as in all things, Marx was aggressively critical of everyone who came before him.

So this transitions us from Marx the philosopher to Marx the economist, from the German philosophy pillar to the English economics pillar, as Marx attempted to understand the material substructure of civilization.

And when you read Marx the economist, you get hit with a lot of jargon-y concepts, most of which sound indistinguishable from some of his other jargony concepts, mode of production, factor of production, means of production, means of labor, subjective labor, instruments of labor. How is one to tell all of these things of production and things of labor apart? Well, Marx himself is never a hundred percent consistent in his usage of these terms, but they can be arranged into what I like to call the tree of labors and productions. And it’s important to pick through this mostly so you have a clear idea of what Marx means by the umbrella concept mode of production, which is very important to his historical materialism and thus very important to the Russian Revolution.

So as befits Marxian analysis, we will start at the bottom and move our way to the top. And we shall begin with the marriage of the instruments of labor and the subjects of labor. The instruments of labor are just what you think they might be: the tools of labor in the ordinary sense. Hammers, lathes, needles, just the ordinary tools that one might need to produce some product.

And in the larger sense, this also includes infrastructure and factories. But those instruments are used on what? Correct: they are used on the subject of labor, which you would consider the natural resources or raw materials: wood, metals, textiles, the stuff a product is made out of. And if you take the instruments of labor, and you use them on the subjects of labor, you can make a thing. You can produce a product. Then if you take those two concepts, the instruments of labor, plus the subjects of labor and put them in a box together, you would label that box the means of production. And spoiler alert, who owns the means of production is a very, very, very important question to answer

But, okay, the means of production is just a combination of the instruments of labor and the subjects of labor, but it does not include the labor. The means of production are inanimate and are not productive in and of themselves. You need animate energy provided by a human being to produce the product. And when you combine those inanimate means of production with the animate human labor, you get the concept of forces of production or productive forces, or sometimes factors of production. So again, this combined mix of the tools to do the work, the raw materials, the work will be done on, and the workers who will be doing the work are the forces of production. We can now really produce a product. So far, so good.

But this does not get us all the way to the top of the tree of labors and productions. To get to the top, we need to combine those forces of production with something called the relations of production, which can be described, and I’m quoting here as, “the sum total of social relations that people must enter into in order to survive, to produce, and to reproduce the means of their life.”

Now, the relations of production are very important because they don’t just include things like the division of labor in a factory, or how a corporation’s org chart is drawn up, it includes the totality of the social relations that swirl around the forces of production. Some of these relations are entered into voluntarily, some of them are compelled and involuntary. They involve hierarchical relations, political relations, family relations, social and economic class. Basically all the myriad ways humans come to relate to one another to employ the forces of production to produce the means of their subsistence, and then distribute it to the members of society. Now, Marx and Engels themselves mostly deployed this term in service to their political and economic analysis. Who owned what specifically the means of production, what the law said about who owned what, who controlled who, who was the boss, what were the social classes, where was their cooperation, where was their competition, where was their conflict? Their totality of all these relations of production constituted, a society’s social structure, and it was the part that determined how income and products and assets would be distributed. And according to Marx, this was all ultimately rooted in servicing the forces of production, whatever those happened to be. But to take a step back for one minute, beyond the economic and political implications, the analysis of the relations of production was a fairly profound and novel idea, and it opened up vast exploratory possibilities, and made Marx one of the founders of a whole new field of social science called sociology.

But getting back to it, when you combine the relations of production with the forces of production, which remember are just the tools, material, subjects, and labor of a society’s economic production, we have basically a total description of how a society organizes itself to produce and distribute the means of its subsistence, which is after all the point of all this. Marx called this final concept, the mode of production. And it’s very important, because there have only been a few modes of production in human history and we’re going to discuss that at length next week. But there’s the primitive mode, the ancient mode, the feudal mode and the capitalist mode. The point of Marx’s politics was to advance society from the prevailing capitalist mode of production to a new socialist mode of production. That is the great historical work to be done.

So, how does Marx start coming around to that idea? Well, as a young man, he really started taking stock of the world he was living in. And he felt that something was very wrong and off about it, and this is where the third pillar of Marxism comes into the picture because he started being introduced to French socialism and studying revolutionary French ideas, because the French socialists were also very critical of modern society. And they had developed this social question and were trying to provide answers for it. But given his dialectical materialism. Marx was none too impressed with the life of the mind utopian socialists, who were trying to establish fixed and eternal laws of justice and retreating to pure reason to solve all the world’s problems, when really what they needed to be doing is studying history, economics, and politics. How are you going to answer the social question if you don’t understand the question?

 So Marx took these three pillars, German philosophy and English, economics, and French social theory, and started to try to build his own answer to the social question. It was obvious that the capitalist mode of production had serious flaws that needed to be addressed, but how to address them. What even needed to be addressed? What made this new era of modern economics different from previous periods of history?

Now we’re going to talk more about this next week, but clearly the profit motive as the central organizing principle of economic life was a defining feature of the new capitalist mode of production. The idea that the point was not just to produce the necessities of life, but to produce commodities that could be sold at a higher price than it took to produce them. And then have this profit seeking commodity exchange, not just confined to small local town markets, but to envelop every aspect of social and economic life. This led Marx to ask, well, where does profit even come from? And to answer this question, Marx developed the labor theory of value, which basically says that the root source of value and thus profit is labor.

Labor is the magical ingredient, which allows one to purchase a bunch of inanimate instruments of labor and subjects of labor, and then later sell the product that those instruments of labor had turned the subjects of labor into for a higher price. For a profit. And Marx says even more specifically and emphatically that this is a process of exploitation.

Basically he sees things going like this, at least theoretically: the cost of securing one day’s labor from a worker must at least be equal to the cost necessary to keep that worker alive for one day, the food drink and shelter and clothes. You got to keep the worker alive. But let’s say you bring a bunch of laborers together to make some shoes. And let’s say that after four hours on the clock, the workers have used the instruments of labor on the subjects of labor to produce enough shoes that when sold, will generate the revenue necessary to supply the workers with the means of that daily subsistence. This will come to them in the form of wages. But you’re not going to blow the whistle and call it a day after four hours, no, you’re only at the break even point. This is the capitalist mode of production and you want profit. So, you’re going to keep working them for another four hours, maybe another eight hours, maybe since this is the 1860s and there are literally no regulations about this stuff, another 12 hours. And all the shoes produced after those initial first four hours, this is surplus labor, creating surplus value, and that is where profit comes from. And the profit goes to the capitalist owner. Now, granted that capitalist owner has lots of costs beyond just labor, but according to the labor theory of value, the source of profit is the exploitation of surplus labor. Paying less for the labor than the labor was ultimately worth. And in Marx’s estimation, this exploitation is terrible from a social and humanitarian perspective.

Now it gets really interesting because Marx has this further insight based off of a reading of John Locke-style theories of property that were so central to the founding of modern, liberal, economic, and political theory. According to this theory, something becomes your property when you infuse it with your labor, whether it is literally a craft that you made at some home workshop, or a field that you plowed, if you worked on it, built it improved, it shaped it, it became your property. This is how the abundance of things out in the state of nature can plausibly and morally and legally be recognized as personal property.

And to take just a recent example from the Revolutions podcast, at the end of the Mexican Revolution, one of the ways land could be nationalized under Article 27 of the new Mexican Constitution was if you weren’t doing anything with it, if it was just sitting there, quote, unquote unimproved or quote unquote unproductive. This is Lockean theories of property at work. You can’t own it something if it’s just sitting there and you’re not doing anything with it.

 Well, what Marx saw in capitalism was a contradiction, a bastardization of this principle. Because under old modes of ancient and feudal production, the individual artisan would take raw materials, the subject of labor, use his tools, which are the instrument of labor, and apply his individual labor to take those raw materials to a finished product. In this sense, it was his or her personal property and not even a Marxist has a problem with that kind of personal property.

The problem is that in capitalism, many people are being brought together. They are doing individual little parts of the total necessary labor, but not every part. The division of labor inside a factory  means that no one person can point to the finished shoe and say, that’s mine, I made it. It is in every way, the product of group effort, social labor. And this includes not just the blue collar workers, but white collar employees in the marketing department and sales department, accounting, human resources, but the profits don’t come back to these workers. They are instead held by the owner, who claimed these profits as his or her individual property by right, not because he helped make the shoe or sell the shoe, but because he owned the means of production. He owned the tools and the raw materials and the factory and thus, anything that was produced by those tools and factories. So what Marx saw is the owner still claiming the right of Lockean ownership, even though the capitalist mode of production had really moved beyond the very thing that made Lockean ownership comprehensible, that individual labor created individual property. The capitalist system had replaced that individual labor with social labor, but the ownership and the property and the profits still remained individualized. And this really chapped Marx’s hide.

Now is any of this true? Is this really how it works? Is this the final word on how value and profits are created in the marketplace? Did Marx have everything correct about the relation between labor and profit? Is this really how the capitalist system works? The answer is, kind of yes, and kind of no. I am not an economist. My habits and mindset are of course focused on political history, but I know enough to know that a strict interpretation of the labor theory of value would not just be a controversial position to take, but probably an incorrect position to take, because there’s a lot more going on. Even those working inside a Marxist tradition who are sympathetic to Marx’s theories and want to salvage them as best they can have over the past 150 years refined and updated his ideas, as you would expect. And as I expect Marx would expect, given that everyone now has 150 more years of data to work from. But there is definitely still some element of truth to all this.

The point though, is that politically, these are incredibly powerful ideas. The pitch here is that your fat capitalist owner is literally on purpose and by necessity exploiting you, the worker, that the capitalist makes you endure horrible conditions while you provide all the essential labor, which is remember the only thing that gives a commodity its value and thus creates profit, and then cuts you the worker out of that profit. The capitalist, hoards it all for himself. All you get is these piddly wages. And even the notion of the necessary labor, the stuff that precedes the surplus labor that is supposed to be keeping you alive, well that amount that you get is squeezed and squeezed. Just how little nourishment is enough to keep a human being alive? What counts as a shelter? In the lived experience of the workers, the plan always seemed to be drive down labor costs as low as humanly possible, because when you add it all up, profit comes from the gap between how low your labor costs are, and how high a price you can charge for the commodity that labor produces. And the idea is, if you explain it to the workers in just this way, that they will rise up in revolution.

Now according to Engels, this theory of surplus value and the exploitation of the worker was one of the two most important discoveries made by his friend, Karl Marx. It’s what made his system superior to the French socialists and the utopians who did not understand the realities of economic life. They did not understand the nature of economics, the factors of production, the relations of production, and so they would never understand how to change things. This is what set the scientific socialism of Marx apart from the mere utopian socialism of his predecessors. We will spend next week on the other great discovery, historical materialism. This is what makes Marx’s work not just a guide to understanding the world, but a roadmap for how to change it.