Today marks the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution, and those of us who fight to end capitalism find ourselves at a unique crossroads. On the one hand, amidst the intensification of capitalist class power around the globe, we see a resurgence of far-right and nationalist movements that, if not wholly unprecedented, put to rest any fantasy of easy equivalence between immiseration and leftward radicalization. On the other hand, the anti-capitalist left is also experiencing a rejuvenation. In the United States, membership in socialist organizations has surged over the past year, and it seems that every week we read a new poll attesting to the renewed appeal of socialism among today’s youth. Some of these new forces understand socialism, either explicitly or implicitly, as a gradual reform of capitalism, rather than as the abolition of the state and capitalist social relations, and this orientation frames many discussions of left strategy today. The centenary of the Russian Revolution thus offers us an opportunity to study once more the historical convergence of factors which produced the overturning of Russian society in 1917, as well as to revisit the Bolshevik Party as an experiment which prioritized the work of organization, of articulating heterogeneous social subjects into a dynamic unity capable of seizing and practicing power.
If we conceive of communism as emerging through the social struggles of a complex and diverse working class, one which struggles in and through forms of organization to institute a deep-seated, self-governing, classless society, then the Russian Revolution, the soviets, and the Bolshevik Party remain essential reference points. But, as many of the essays below make clear, we must neither succumb to the temptation of nostalgia nor read the Bolshevik project as an invariant model for all occasions. The results of any rigorous project of inquiry will, at a minimum, illuminate the great chasms that separate us from the experiences of 1917. Our interventions can only be based upon a continually renewed strategic analysis of our own present conjuncture. And so our return to Lenin after 100 years must be a critical one, and we must remain open to new forms of struggle rather than fetishize certain organizational forms over others.
Here readers will find a selection of texts in several clusters, some new and others previously available in Viewpoint. First, we offer two new translations of essays recently penned by Antonio Negri on Lenin. Also new to Viewpoint are two introductions to the Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai’s Women Workers Struggle for their Rights, one written by Kollontai herself (1918), contextualizing the publication of that pamphlet after the Revolution, and another by Sheila Rowbotham (1971) upon its translation into English. The next two essays on Lenin and The State and Revolution by Viewpoint editor Salar Mohandesi were previously published in 2012. The subsequent three essays by Panagiotis Sotiris, Jodi Dean, and Immanuel Ness are reprinted from a roundtable on revolutionary strategy in Viewpoint’s fourth issue, The State (2014); our translation of Daniel Bensaïd’s 1968 master’s thesis, originally published in the same issue, is also presented below. From deep in our archives, Asad Haider and Mohandesi’s 2011 introduction to translations of the correspondence between Anton Pannekoek and Cornelius Castoriadis testifies to the range of responses to Lenin within the so-called “ultra-left.” And finally, we also include here Matthieu Renault’s 2015 article on Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, an understudied Bolshevik who theorized a Muslim communism which ran up against Russian chauvinism in the early USSR.
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What might “All Power to the Soviets” mean in the present moment? I sense that it means: to build a movement, to unite forces where we find them, to form coalitions, elaborate material goals to organize all those who work and are exploited, to constitute power, to articulate a hegemonic strategy.
If we want to call the “Lenin question” the problem of organization opened in the 1970s and today newly again before us, we can certainly do so, provided that it is understood that the watchword of Lenin does not mean nostalgia or organizational fetishism, but is rather a new solution for the problems that he had posed and victoriously resolved.
Kollontai’s life reflected the political turns of the revolution, just as her fame since her death has fluctuated. Our organizational reality is not hers, yet her works continue to pose key questions for women’s liberation and the revolutionary movement.
Only a radical change in the whole existence of the working class woman, in the conditions of her home and family life, as she acquires equal status with men in civil law will wipe out once and for all the barrier which to this day prevents the woman worker letting her forces flow freely into the class struggle.
Lenin always looked to accessing, articulating, and advancing the proletarian viewpoint at the level of theory. This meant closely reading the composition of the proletariat in order to discover the political project already implicit in its struggles, using that inquiry to fashion a political program capable of making that project explicit, and then concretizing that program in a way that would allow him to anticipate the next moves in the struggle. This is the real meaning of practicing the art of politics: matching an historically specific program to an historically specific class. This is what we must relearn from Lenin today.
Though my article “The Actuality of the Revolution” centered on Lenin and 1917, it was really about the present. I think this became clearer as the debate on the article progressed, encompassing questions within the Occupy movement. For this reason, I’ve decided not to quibble over details, but rather to review the history in a way that more clearly shows how this debate, and the role the Bolsheviks played in 1917, speaks to our current historical conjuncture. Since the pressing question, the one that tied all these articles together, was actually the question of the party, I will try to clarify and elaborate my analysis of the function of the party form, responding to the three critiques of my original argument.
The question of political power has returned to the forefront of political and theoretical discussion. This is not a coincidence. The acute economic crisis, its serious social consequences, the open political crisis in certain social formations, and the very sight of the overthrow of governments and regimes under the force of political mobilization – despite, in the case of the Arab Spring, the tragic end of such processes – mean that such questions are again urgent.
As it forces the matter of the political form of the people, the Paris Commune serves as a key reference point in Marxist discussions of the state. What form does the people’s self-government take? Insofar as the people precede the state, analysis of the Commune event necessarily opens up to the people’s subjectification and to the political process of which the people are the subject. And insofar as the people politicized are people divided, a part of a constitutively open and incomplete set, the place from which the people are understood is necessarily partisan. The question of the party precedes the question of the state.
The failure of socialism in the early 20<sup>th</sup> century is a product of the internal contradictions of bourgeois democracy, which permitted independent working-class organizations on condition that they did not pose a challenge to the capitalist state. In this way, the most significant historic fracture on the Left, one which remains with us today, followed the eager embrace of liberal democracy by Second International reformist socialists.
In several places throughout his work, Lenin tries to define the notion of a “revolutionary crisis,” especially in Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder and The Collapse of the Second International. However, he outlines a notion more than he establishes a concept, as the descriptive criteria that he enumerates remain subjective assessments.
Spanning an entire generation, a linguistic divide, and a geographical shift, the epistolary encounter between Anton Pannekoek and Cornelius Castoriadis in many ways marks the internal transformation of the ultra-left. But the ultra-left, far from a historical relic, is making headlines again.
Within subaltern, postcolonial, and decolonial studies, there are two heterogeneous and competing conceptions of this provincialization of Europe, whose entanglement remains a source of ambiguities. There is, on the one hand, a conception that holds provincialization to be synonymous with the particularization, and thus relativization, of “Eurocentric-European thought,” and Marxist thought in particular. There is, on the other hand, an understanding of provincialization as a stretching that underlines the need for an extension and displacement of the borders of theory beyond Europe, as a condition of possibility of an authentic universalization.
Viewpoint Magazone
Länk: https://www.viewpointmag.com/2017/11/07/comrades-rally-around-soviets-centenary-october-revolution/
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