Marx and Marxism by Claeys Gregory

Author:Claeys, Gregory
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Published: 2018-04-24T04:00:00+00:00

Then came the revolutions so long anticipated. In 1904–5 a general strike in St Petersburg, naval mutinies at Kronstadt and Sebastopol, and the creation of the first Duma (assembly) apparently sounded the death knell of the old regime. Despite its inadequacies, having no legislative powers and being based on a small electorate, the Duma demanded an eight-hour day, freedom of assembly for workers, a free press, and separation of church and state. Reaction triumphed, however, and it took the First World War and massive Russian losses finally to undermine the Tsar. Following revolution in March 1917–which took the Bolsheviks by surprise–Nicholas II abdicated on the 15th, bringing the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty to an end.15 For a time the country was led by a Provisional Government representing mostly landlords, industrialists and the professional classes, headed by a moderate Social-Revolutionary, Alexander Kerensky (1881–1970). It was confronted by Soviets of workers, soldiers and peasants, amongst whom the Mensheviks and some radical Social-Revolutionaries were most influential.16 Here the Mensheviks saw themselves as a kind of ‘legal opposition’ during a supposed transitional ‘dual power’ phase of bourgeois revolution.

Exiled in Western Europe since 1900, and now in Switzerland, Lenin negotiated with the Germans to return to Russia. He famously reached the Finland Station in Petrograd (as St Petersburg had been renamed in 1914) by sealed train on 16 April. The ‘Marseillaise’ thundered out on the platform as it finally arrived, hours late. A vast throng mobbed the square as Lenin emerged, awkwardly carrying a large bouquet of flowers given to him by Alexandra Kollontai, later People’s Commissar for Social Welfare. Slowly Lenin made his way by armoured car, preceded by a searchlight and constantly surrounded by surging, impatient and by no means entirely sympathetic crowds, to the palace of the ballerina Kshesinskaya, who had been Nicholas II’s mistress. When he had moved out to the square, he announced, to the surprise of many, the collapse of capitalism and the beginning of worldwide socialist revolution. His first, two-hour speech in Russia, demanding the seizure of power, flabbergasted Marxists for its departure from every rule of materialist analysis. Lenin ignored the Constituent Assembly entirely, speaking only of the need for government by Soviets of workers, soldiers and farm labourers. The dogmas of necessary capitalist development were seemingly thrown to the winds. One Bolshevik despaired that Lenin had revived ‘the old discarded primitive anarchist notions’ of Bakunin.17 As far away as Italy the country’s leading socialist journalist Antonio Gramsci declared it to be ‘a revolution against Marx’s Capital… The Bolsheviks have denied Karl Marx, and they have affirmed by their actions, by their conquests, that the laws of historical materialism are less inflexible than was hitherto believed.’18

The politics of will now seemed triumphant, economics a distant second. Indeed Lenin presented no economic programme at all. Nor did he explain how the Soviets, representing a tiny minority, could construct socialism. The following day he sketched out his ‘April Theses’ concerning immediate progress towards socialist revolution, and supplanting a parliamentary republic with Soviet control.

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