Revolution

An Intellectual History

Enzo Traverso

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781839763601
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book reinterprets the history of nineteenth and twentieth-century revolutions by composing a constellation of "dialectical images": Marx's "locomotives of history, " Alexandra Kollontai's sexually liberated bodies, Lenin's mummified body, Auguste Blanqui's barricades and red flags, the Paris Commune's demolition of the Vendome Column, among several others. It connects theories with the existential trajectories of the thinkers who elaborated them, by sketching the diverse profiles of revolutionary intellectuals-from Marx and Bakunin to Luxemburg and the Bolsheviks, from Mao and Ho Chi Minh to Jos Carlos Maritegui, C.L.R. James, and other rebellious spirits from the South-as outcasts and pariahs. And finally, it analyzes the entanglement between revolution and communism that so deeply shaped the history of the twentieth century. This book thus merges ideas and representations by devoting an equal importance to theoretical and iconographic sources, offering for our troubled present a new intellectual history of the revolutionary past.

Chapter 1

The Locomotives of History

The nineteenth century, when it takes its place with the other centuries in the chronological charts of the future, will, if it needs a symbol, almost inevitably have as the symbol a steam engine running upon a railway.

H. G. Wells, Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1902)

The revolution of 1917 is a revolution of trains. History proceeding in screams of cold metal. The tsar’s wheeled palace, shunted into sidings forever; Lenin’s sealed stateless carriage … Trotsky’s armoured train, the Red Army’s propaganda trains, the troop carriers of the Civil War. Looming trains, trains hurtling through trees, out of the dark.

Revolutions, Marx said, are the locomotives of history. ‘Put the locomotive into top gear’, Lenin exhorted himself in a private note, scant weeks after October, ‘and keep it on the rails.’

China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution (2017)

The Railway Age

One of Karl Marx’s most famous sentences, appearing in The Class Struggles in France (1850), asserts that ‘revolutions are the locomotives of history.’¹ For a century and a half, innumerable critics and exegetes have ritualistically repeated this powerful definition as a colourful but (in the last analysis) incidental metaphor, without trying to interpret its multiple meanings. In fact, this reference to the revolutions of 1848 as an extraordinary moment of acceleration in historical and political change is much more than a literary trope: it unveils Marx’s culture and, beyond him, the nineteenth-century imagination. Far from being chosen by accident, the object of this metaphor points to a deep, substantial affinity between revolutions and trains that deserves to be carefully investigated. Moreover, this passage is no anomaly in writings that, from The Communist Manifesto (1848) to Capital (1867), contain recurrent allusions to trains and railroads.

Marx lived in the railway age, whose advent and diffusion he observed from London, its crucial starting point. The triad of iron, steam, and telegraph, which so profoundly shaped the nineteenth-century take-off of industrial capitalism, framed his way of thinking and his vision of historical change. When he wrote this passage in The Class Struggles in France, the first, ‘heroic’ period of railways had just finished and locomotives had become both a privileged topic of discussion in the public sphere and a common figure of speech in British and European literature. Following the opening of the first line between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830, railroads saw astonishing development, with a strong impact on England’s economy and society. In twenty years they increased from under 100 miles to 6,000 miles, most of them built between 1846 and 1850. Passenger traffic grew simultaneously, far beyond the expectations of the earliest promoters who had conceived this means of transportation primarily for goods and minerals. In 1851, the Great London Exhibition attracted more than 6 million visitors, many of them arriving in the capital by train from the most remote corners of the country. The railway boom engendered strong economic growth by stimulating the production of iron, which increased from 1.4 million tons in 1844 to 2 million tons in 1850.² Railways necessitated the construction of lines, stations and bridges, requiring the labour of hundreds of thousands of workers. Trains broke the erstwhile quietness of the country with the passage of smoking, shrieking machines. They transformed the urban landscape as well, soon dominated by imposing stations that attracted tens of thousands of travellers daily and became convergence points for road networks and telegraph lines. Smoky clouds cloaking buildings and people in cities and leaving streaks in the country sky regularly appear in nineteenth-century paintings, from J. M. W. Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed (1844) to Edouard Manet’s The Railway (1873) to Claude Monet’s The Gare Saint-Lazare (1877). Railways quickly became a very profitable business that, monopolized by a small number of companies, attained a prominent role in the national economy. Attracting the investment of many rich landowners, they were the site of a new symbiosis between the old aristocracy and the newly ascendant bourgeois classes. The Victorians who created this industry, Michael Robbins writes in The Railway Age, looked like ‘a race imbued with some daemonic energy’³ which did not falter in the following decades, exerting a contagious effect on the global scale. In continental Europe, the rail network increased enormously between 1840 and 1880: by the end of the nineteenth century, a passenger could travel by train from Lisbon to Moscow and beyond.⁴ A similar growth took place in the United States, where, at the end of the Civil War, railways became the symbol of the transformation of the country into a world industrial power. In the thirty years between the opening of the first track in 1838 and the completion of an integrated network joining the North and the South with the West in 1869, they increased from 2,765 to 56,213 miles while gross investment in this economic sector grew from $927 million in 1850 to $2 billion in 1870, reaching $15 billion at the end of the century.⁵ Thanks to the railroad, the inexhaustible lands of the Far West were expropriated and American capitalism took off. The myth of railways joined that of the Frontier, with analogous providential narratives of its ethical mission to unify a gigantic country into a single community blessed by God and racing towards progress. John Ford would celebrate this new mythology in The Iron Horse (1924), a movie that describes the building of the transcontinental railroad between 1862 and 1869.

This spirit was the subtext of Marx and Engels’s famous passages in The Communist Manifesto where they celebrated the ‘revolutionary role’ played by the bourgeoisie in history. Modern industry, they wrote, had established the world market, which had given

an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.⁶

Like a train disrupting a peaceful rural landscape, capitalism had destroyed ‘the most slothful indolence’ inherited from the Middle Ages and, by creating the world market, had ‘given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country’.⁷ The bourgeoisie, they added,

has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.⁸

As a self-expanding economic system based on a continuous process of accumulation – the transmutation money-commodity-money – capitalism does not know objective ‘limits’ (Schränke) but only ‘barriers’ (Grenze) to breach and overcome. ‘Commodities as such’, Marx writes in the Grundrisse (1857–58), ‘are indifferent to all religious, political, national and linguistic barriers. Their universal language is price and their common bond is money.’⁹ For the capitalist, ‘the world market is the sublime idea in which the whole world merges.’ In this way it builds a peculiar form of cosmopolitanism, ‘a cult of practical reason’ which progressively destroys ‘the traditional religious, national and other prejudices which impede the metabolic process of mankind’. Therefore capitalism ‘feels itself to be free, unconfined, i.e. limited only by itself, only by its own conditions of life’.¹⁰

When Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto that the bourgeoisie had ‘accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals’,¹¹ one may suppose they were thinking of the spectacular railway bridges which so powerfully struck the Victorian imagination and filled the illustrations of popular magazines, as well as of the majestic stations that appeared in the big cities and which their architects conceived of as modern Gothic cathedrals. In the age of steel and steam, the ruling classes did not wish to break their link with the past; station halls and platforms were spacious and functional, but the façades displayed columns, rose windows, arcades, domes and towers. They were the visual evidence of what Arno J. Mayer has called ‘the persistence of the old regime’, the hybrid social form of a century that merged tradition and modernity, in which aristocratic institutions, customs, style and mentalities extended to the new ascending financial and industrial elites.¹²

Railways in the Thirties: Sankey Valley Viaduct, Lancashire, England. Postcard.

St Pancras Station, London, in the Nineteenth Century. Postcard.

A few years after The Communist Manifesto, Michel Chevalier, a disciple of Saint-Simon who became an advisor to Napoleon III, published an essay on railways that srikingly echoed the prose of Marx and Engels. He compared ‘the zeal and the ardour displayed by the civilized nations of today in their establishment of railroads with that which, several centuries ago, went into the building of cathedrals’.¹³ For the Saint-Simonians, railways possessed a mystical character as connectors of nations, to the point of creating a universal community based on cooperation and industrialism. If ‘it is true’, he wrote, ‘that the word “religion” comes from religare, to “bind” … then the railroads have more to do with the religious spirit than one might suppose. There has never existed a more powerful instrument for … rallying the scattered populations.’¹⁴ Marx avoided the mystical tones of the Saint-Simonians and other adepts of industrialism, but he shared their belief in the cosmopolitan mission of railroads, the symbol of the new industrial age.

No obstacle could resist the inexorable advance of capitalism, which brought modernity and destroyed the vestiges of feudalism like a running train eclipsing the pitiful, derisory slowness of horse-drawn carriages. Marx’s words in The Communist Manifesto can be read as the analytical equivalent of a contemporary imagination that found in Dickens its most brilliant literary interpreter. The train, we read in Dombey and Son (1846), was ‘defiant of all paths and roads, piercing through the heart of every obstacle … through the fields, through the woods, through the corn, through the hay, through the chalk, through the mould, through the clay, through the rock’; ‘breasting the wind and light, the shower and sunshine’, flying in and out of fields, bridges and tunnels.¹⁵

In the second half of the nineteenth century, railway fever had infected Russia, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. In India, the first lines connecting Bombay, Calcutta and Madras opened in the early 1850s. Ten years later, the sub-continent had a railway network of 2,500 miles, nearly 4,800 in the 1870s, and 16,000 miles in 1890. For Marx, the development of Indian railways was a powerful illustration of his vision of traditional and archaic social forms shattered by the advent of modern, conquering industries. ‘Indian society’, he wrote in 1853 in the New York Daily Tribune, ‘has no history at all, at least no known history.’¹⁶ Its providential destiny was to be ruled and, from this point of view, the British Empire, as violent and brutal as it was, would undoubtedly have more fruitful consequences than its competitors, the Russian and the Ottoman empires. In India the British colonizers had two missions, ‘one destructive, the other regenerating: the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia.’¹⁷ Steam had severed the sub-continent from ‘the prime law of its stagnation’ by connecting it with the advanced world. Very soon, he predicted, this joining with the West through ‘a combination of railways and steam-vessels’ would demolish the bases of Oriental despotism.¹⁸ Railroads were destroying the archaic social system of the country, which was grounded on the ‘self-sufficient inertia of the villages’. The article’s conclusion swept away any doubts: ‘The railway-system will therefore become, in India, truly the forerunner of modern industry.’¹⁹

It is known that, at the end of his life, in his correspondence with his Russian translator, Nikolai Danielson, and particularly with the famous populist leader Vera Zasulich, Marx had contemplated the possibility of a transition from the Russian agrarian commune (obschina) to modern socialism without passing through the ‘Caudine Forks’ of the capitalist system; but the realization of this hypothesis needed a socialist revolution.²⁰ Since the abolition of serfdom in 1861, Tsarist Russia had gradually taken the path of capitalism and the social premises of this synthesis between ancient and modern, pre-capitalist and post-capitalist collectivism, had begun to disappear. In 1894, ten years after Marx’s death, Engels cited the development of Russian railways as proof that the romantic possibility his friend had envisaged had finally vanished. After the Crimean War, only one road was open to the Russian empire: the transition from a backward economy to capitalist industry. This conflict had dramatically exposed the weakness of the Tsarist army, which only a significant development of the railways could overcome. But creating an extended and solid railway system in such an immense country required rails, locomotives, rolling stocks, etc., and this meant developing a domestic industry. In a short while, Engels concluded, all the foundations of the capitalist mode of production were laid in Russia, with their inevitable consequences: ‘the transformation of the country into a capitalist industrial nation, the proletarianization of a large portion of the peasantry and the decay of the old rural commune.’²¹

Creating the world market, modern capitalism connected cities and nations into a single gigantic network, comparable to the map of a continental railway. Because of its division of labour and its standardized and synchronized production, modern industry...