Marxism versus Liberalism by August H. Nimtz

Author:August H. Nimtz
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030249465
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Comparing Lenin and Weber in Real-Time 1905

Most evident about Weber’s backstory to 1905 is the absence of any sustained discussion about its essential dynamo from the very beginning in January—the unruly crowds in the streets. It gets at best cursory treatment. Bloody Sunday merits only one mention, “the slaughter of 9/22 January.” Lenin, on the other hand, argued that it was precisely the mass mobilizations throughout the year that made it possible for there to be even any consideration of a liberal option like a national zemstvo, a Zemsky Sobor, a constitutional monarchy or better, a republic. Hence, his retort in October to those who thought like Weber: “We must fight in a revolutionary way for a parliament, but not in a parliamentary way for a revolution.” And by “revolution,” he meant, again, a bourgeois democratic revolution. The near-exclusive attention to the writing of the constitution, the focus of Weber’s BDR, was for Lenin putting the proverbial cart before the horse.

There is one telling point Weber made about the constitutional drafters that Lenin would probably have agreed with: “the economic clash of interests and the class character of the proletariat is a stab in the back for the specifically bourgeois reformers; that is the fate of their work here as everywhere.”52 This reveals that Weber was not only conversant with but in apparent agreement with some of the basic premises of the historical materialist fount that informed Lenin. Liberal reformers and workers—at this stage in history—had fundamentally different and conflictual class interests. Hence, as Lenin had increasingly recognized, that is why liberals would not lead Russia’s democratic breakthrough; their visceral fear that it would aid and abet working class hegemony, “a stab in the back.” Weber, a “bürgerlich scholar,” could easily recognize and identify with that fear and, hence, I argue his reading of 1905.

Nowhere in his essay were Weber’s politics on better display than in his treatment of “The Socialist Parties.” His description of Russian Social Democracy and the Bolshevik/Menshevik split that emerged after the 1903 party congress is accurate for the most part. But his characterization of Lenin and the Bolsheviks as “putschists” is problematic—maybe the origins of this time-worn charge about Lenin. Though Weber didn’t define “putschism,” it generally meant then and now a political orientation that advocates for the overthrowing of a government by a small group of fighters—exactly why Lenin took umbrage. In 1916, a half year before he criticized Weber’s charge, Lenin offered a definition. “The term ‘putsch’, in its scientific sense, may be employed only when the attempt at insurrection has revealed nothing but a circle of conspirators or stupid maniacs, and has aroused no sympathy among the masses.”53 As already documented, nothing in his calls for an “insurrection” in 1905 ever suggested such a strategy. When he first did in August that year, after the mass uprising in Odessa, it was always about the “overthrow of the autocracy” rather than just a government. And it could be realized “only by a victorious

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.