Rethinking Revolution

Socialist Register 2017

Leo Panitch, Greg Albo

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781583676349
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Comunismo, post-comunismo e socialismo

One hundred years ago, “October 1917” galvanized leftists and oppressed peoples around the globe, and became the lodestar for 20th century politics. Today, the left needs to reckon with this legacy—and transcend it. Social change, as it was understood in the 20th century, appears now to be as impossible as revolution, leaving the left to rethink the relationship between capitalist crises, as well as the conceptual tension between revolution and reform.

Populated by an array of passionate thinkers and thoughtful activists, Rethinking Revolution reappraises the historical effects of the Russian revolution—positive and negative—on political, intellectual, and cultural life, and looks at consequent revolutions after 1917. Change needs to be understood in relation to the distinct trajectories of radical politics in different regions. But the main purpose of this Socialist Register edition—one century after “Red October”—is to look forward, to what might happen next.

Acclaimed authors interrogate and explore compelling issues, including:

• Greg Albo: New socialist strategies—or detours?

• Jodi Dean: Are the multitudes communing? Revolutionary agency and political forms today.

• Adolph Reed: Are racial minorities revolutionary agents?

• Zillah Eisenstein: Revolutionary feminisms today.

• Nina Power: Accelerated technology, decelerated revolution.

• David Schwartzman: Beyond global warming: Is solar communism possible?

• Andrea Malm: Revolution and counter-revolution in an era of climate change.

THE DISTINCTIVE HERITAGE OF 1917: RESUSCITATING REVOLUTION’S LONGUE DURÉE

BRYAN D. PALMER AND JOAN SANGSTER

For many on the revolutionary left, 1917 is an unpleasant apparition, a ghost that haunts us still. Our perspective is different: 1917 lives in our thoughts and actions, our theories and our sensibilities, because it remains a testimony to human agency and the irrepressible potential of revolution. The Bolsheviks, so often castigated as incarcerated in their slavish adherence to the determination of objective conditions, were nothing if not believers in the importance of the subjective factor in the making of history, evident in their own trajectory. The revolution that catapulted the Bolsheviks to power contradicted the prevailing European Marxist orthodoxy which mapped an evolutionary path to revolution based on the logic of capitalist development, and followed on the heels of disastrous dissolution of the Second International as its leaders chose to abandon their anti-war stance to align themselves with their own national bourgeois states.

It is today more important than ever for revolutionary leftists to confront both the possibilities posed by the Revolution of 1917 and the ways in which its outcomes seem to have soured the meaning of socialism in the mouths of those with an appetite for a politics of emancipatory transformation. On the one hand, our times cry out for the need to transcend capitalist oppression, exploitation, and degradation. Those same needs galvanized the pre-First World War revolutionary left in Russia and elsewhere, and structured the early years of the Bolshevik Revolution. On the other hand, Revolution’s current capacities and claims, associated with 1917 being overtaken by a Thermidorian Stalinization, have seldom been held in disregard by so many, including a considerable section of the ostensible left.

As Geoff Eley writes: ‘Revolutions no longer receive a good press. The calamity of Stalinism and the ignominious demise of the Soviet Union have been allowed to erase almost entirely the Russian Revolution’s emancipatory effects.’¹ Against the sense that revolution might transform the human condition has come resignation, articulated by one militant ‘68er, Régis Debray, whose sad autobiography declared that ‘Revolution now arouses among us, not just in the lineage of its victims but that of its authors and beneficiaries too, the same repulsive images as revolt or jacquerie in eighteenth-century drawing rooms’. The revolutionary project was now written off curtly: ‘Two centuries, millions of corpses, one complete rotation: for nothing.’²

Our view of the ‘long revolution’, needless to say, differs from Debray. We also recognize that the heritage of revolution is highly differentiated: it both precedes and follows 1917, and cannot be characterized by a unitary and homogenous mobilization across time and space, for political differences between and within communism, socialism, anarchism and syndicalism, were not unimportant. Anarchism itself fragmented into disparate tendencies, some embracing revolutionary collectivist ideas, others stressing individual freedom and autonomy, though Emma Goldman perhaps embodied the coalescing of these strands. Marx and Engels railed against utopian socialists, but others combined elements of the scientific and the utopian in both analytic accents and practical orientations.

William Morris captured something of this combination in his defence of revolution in the 1880s. It was Morris’s purpose, whether he addressed audiences large or small, to ‘stir [them] up not to be contented with a little,’ to persuade them that they must either struggle to be free or remain mired in enslavement.³ It was the duty of those ‘who believe in the necessity of social revolution . . . first to express their own discontent’, drawing in others, second ‘to learn from books and from living people’, and third ‘to join any body of men honestly striving to give means of expression to revolutionary discontent and hope’. Lenin and the Bolsheviks separated themselves from such utopian socialist appeals, but the world communist movement spawned by 1917 did not entirely abandon these sensibilities. No advocate of Lenin, E.P. Thompson staked out the ground of widening revolutionary struggle in Out of Apathy (1960):

The point of breakthrough is not one more shuffle along the evolutionary path, which suddenly sinks the scales on the socialist side . . . Certainly, the transition can be defined, in the widest historical sense, as a transfer of class power: the dislodgment of the power from the ‘commanding heights’ and the assertion of the power of socialist democracy. But this point cannot be defined in narrow political (least of all parliamentary) terms; nor can we be certain, in advance, in what context the breakthrough will be made. What it is more important to insist upon is that it is necessary to find out the breaking point, not by theoretical speculation alone, but in practice by unrelenting reforming pressures in many fields, which are designed to reach a revolutionary culmination. And this will entail a confrontation, throughout society, between two systems, two ways of life.⁴

However divergent the lines between various revolutionary projects, Thompson, like many nineteenth-century socialist figures and twentieth-century dissident communists, embraced revolution as ‘immediacy’; as the necessary project of posing radical, root-and-branch, social transformation as essential to human liberation, indeed survival.

In the pages that follow we address the heritage of 1917 and its broadened understanding of revolution, exploring themes such as women’s liberation, sexuality, reproduction, and the family, as well as campaigns for racial equality, class mobilizations, and the complex representation of resistance and struggle in various artistic and literary genres. While not everything we discuss bears the direct and unmediated imprint of 1917, it is difficult to imagine the range of resistance and the richness of varied developments without appreciating the heritage of revolution. We explore such themes in specific historical periods where the impact of 1917 registered in different ways. Whatever the peculiarities of these local manifestations, however, our outline could well be generalized to other national and regional contexts. As co-authors we actually disagree on important aspects of what might fall under the discussion of 1917’s meanings,⁵ but in such contention lies the real political scene of the current left; our differences are an acknowledgement of the theoretical and practical divisions that plague socialists serious about the project of replacing capitalism with a realizable social order that can deliver the necessary utopian promise of revolution.

REVOLUTIONARY REVERBERATIONS I: GENDER

From the time of Flora Tristan, the French socialist and feminist who in 1840 lamented her exile from civil society as a ‘pariah’ because she believed in the emancipation of both women and the working class, to later experimentation within socialist communes and organizing by anarchists, syndicalists, communists and defiant sex radicals, revolution provided a hopeful pathway to sexual and gender equality. After 1917, Russia was initially a model against which all defined themselves. Without experiencing an intense bourgeois or social democratic struggle for suffrage, as happened in many European countries, the Bolsheviks moved swiftly from proclaiming women’s equal citizenship to a social revolution. In no small part because of pressure from feminist revolutionaries like Alexandra Kollontai, who saw familial and sexual liberation as a sine qua non of social emancipation, and Clara Zetkin’s previous success with semi-autonomous organizations of socialist women, the Bolsheviks set in motion a massive educational campaign to bring women to political consciousness through a Women’s Commission or Zhenotdel.

By 1920, this work was also internationalized when women from nineteen countries met to discuss a lengthy set of ‘Theses on the Communist Women’s Movement’, a blueprint for the emancipation of women within communism. Soviet reforms abolished illegitimacy and provided women with access to divorce, birth control, abortion, equal pay, and land and property rights. There were even legislative changes that advanced sexual freedoms dramatically, such as the decriminalization of sodomy in 1922, a remarkably progressive attitude to homosexuality given the prevailing European repression of same-sex practices. At the core of this revolutionary programme was the understanding that sexual practices had to be freed from the conservatizing clutches of church and state and that fundamental to the liberation of humanity was the alteration of women’s labour: women’s paid work was a means to economic independence and socialized domestic labour – communal kitchens, laundries, and crèches – would challenge women’s oppression within the family.

Extensive studies have examined the rise and demise of women’s Soviet emancipation, including the immense barriers to any transformation of gender roles: the resilience of patriarchal social norms and religious belief, the hard reality of civil war and lack of economic resources, and the prioritization of other political issues over gender equality. By the end of the 1920s, equality, other than encouraging women’s labour force participation, was on the backburner; the Zhenotdel was abolished, and the International Women’s Secretariat came under the rigid control of an increasingly Stalinized Comintern Executive. A singular emphasis on women’s integration into productive labour left Russian women with both a double day and a double sexual standard.

Yet as Eley notes, the Bolshevik reforms initially conveyed a salutary lesson: this was ‘Western feminism’s maximum program to which no government in the West ever came close’ to realization.⁶ Even if the revolutionary left’s faith in change ultimately exceeded what had been achieved, the Bolshevik Revolution unleashed an unprecedented debate both within the wider left and throughout communist parties themselves. The apparent Soviet commitment to thoroughgoing change, especially the recognition that housework had to be transformed and sexual freedom addressed, was seen as an important feminist ‘breakthrough’.⁷ The revolution electrified socialist, communist, and even some liberal women who saw it as proof that transformative change was possible: if an underdeveloped country could take such extraordinary steps, why not Western industrialized ones?

Political tourists to the Soviet Union already committed to communism were usually uncritical acolytes of changes to women’s status, but socialist and liberal women also wrote convincingly about the possibilities they glimpsed inside the new Russian society, from socialized childcare to family planning and opportunities for higher education. This positive assessment, even on the part of liberals, galvanized right-wing opponents in the United States, including a contingent of conservative women who took up the political cudgels of antifeminism paired with gendered understandings of class struggle: ‘Miss Bolsheviki has come to town, / With a Russian cap and a German gown, / In women’s clubs she’s sure to be found, / For she’s come to disarm America.’ Assaults on the ostensible ‘nationalization of women’ and stereotypical Soviet-inspired ‘Bureaus of Free Love’ were of a piece with the infamous ‘Spider Web Chart’, first published in Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent (1924), that linked liberal women’s groups to a network of Bolshevik-connected clubs, causes and campaigns.⁸ Right-wing women’s anti-Bolshevik, anti-socialist and anti-pacifist mobilizations had some success stalling and rolling back moderate feminist social reforms.

The equality ledger in the USSR was increasingly contested as Stalinism was consolidated, but the revolution nonetheless inspired imitations, departures and elaborations. Interpretation of women’s emancipation varied according to different national contexts, histories, cultures, and the strength of particular national communist parties, as well as their relationship to rivals on the social democratic left. In Mexico, the Communist Party did not even attempt to establish a women’s department until 1931 due to other organizing priorities and Mexican communists’ complex tussle for ‘revolutionary authenticity’ with the nationalistic Partido Revolucionario Institucional [PRI] and its ‘revolutionary’ state.⁹

In the smaller Canadian and American parties, directives from the International Women’s Secretariat were seen as welcome advice from seasoned revolutionaries, though instructions were refracted through local conditions and needs, and sometimes stymied by leadership apathy. Nonetheless, for women recruited from previous suffrage and socialist activism, international revolutionary direction provided hope for those who longed for a new politics that promised to transcend a past littered with the dead ends of bourgeois or social democratic feminisms, constrained as they were by discourses of individual liberal rights or a parliamentary preoccupation with protecting the working-class family through legislative enactments.

Soviet inspiration, advice, and prodding helped to bring into being a new semi-autonomous Canadian organization of left-wing women, the Women’s Labor Leagues; an agitational women’s paper, The Woman Worker, that addressed issues of social/sexual as well as material subordination; and perhaps most importantly, advocacy for the legalization of abortion and birth control, issues largely side-stepped by the earlier Canadian socialist left. Birth control issues were similarly brought to the fore in the UK by birth-control advocate and communist Stella Browne, who was ultimately disappointed to discover that the British Communist Party did not welcome a revolution in familial and sexual roles as promoted by Alexandra Kollantai.

Many American feminist historians have been highly critical of the revolution’s impact on the women’s equality debate within the Communist Party USA, claiming that issues of emancipation and women’s special oppression suffered at the hands of an apathetic Party leadership given to sexist denigrations and masculinist understandings of politics. Others, however, concede that the early Bolshevik experiment ‘empowered’ new female converts to revolutionary communism. Housewives mobilized around cost-of-living issues, women contributed to campaigns of solidarity such as Friends of Soviet Russia, and women workers organized in the needle and garment trades. Moreover, in the 1920s the...