Bolsheviks

The road to Bolshevism: the Narodnik labour movement

Third in a series around the anniversary of the death of Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) in 1924 Franco Venturi (in his book Roots of Revolution ) quotes a police report on the state of things in the St Petersburg working class after the impact of the populists (Narodniks. “The gross, vulgar methods employed by factory employers are becoming intolerable to the workers. They have obviously realised that a factory is not conceivable without their labour... Without workers [the employers] can do nothing. “A realisation of this has now given rise to that spirit of solidarity among the workers which has...

The road to Bolshevism: Narodniks and workers

Second in a series around the anniversary of the death of Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) in 1924. In the first instalment of this series ( Solidarity 697 ) I traced in broad outline the populist revolutionary environment in and from which Russian Marxism emerged. In the mid 19th century a great wave of radical, leftist, rebellion developed among the educated youth of Russia. It was “populist” in the sense of oriented to the working people as a whole, in the first place the mass of peasants and only secondarily the wage-workers. In 1874-6 the populists “went to the people” in the countryside with...

The road to Bolshevism

First of a series of articles around the 100th anniversary around the death of Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin), on 21 January 1924 The October Revolution of 1917 seemed to many observers to be an attempt to stand Marxism on its head. Those who said that included George Valentinovich Plekhanov and Pavel Borisovich Axelrod, the founders of the Russian Marxist movement, and Karl Kautsky, the most authoritative Marxist of the Second International (1889-1914). To others, who supported it, it seemed to have succeeded in turning on its head the Marxism long dominant in some labour movements. Antonio Gramsci...

Letter: Why you should read Eric Blanc

When the Labour Party left was at its height in the early 1980s, the SWP's critique was that this left was doomed by its wish to win elections, which would make it adapt to un-radical opinion. We replied that revolution required winning elections, in workers' councils even if not in parliament. Today the SWP's model of revolution remains one of lots of strikes and demonstrations, plus a "disciplined" party which will eventually be strong enough to defeat the bourgeois state. The issue of how the working class can become organised and aware enough to become a ruling class – through workers'...

Revolution: the “Finnish road” vs "the Russian"

There is much to be gained from reading Eric Blanc’s Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics Across the Russian Empire (1882–1917) . But within the valuable information and explanation of what some lesser-studied parties were doing is an argument in favour of what Blanc refers to as “orthodox Marxism” which doesn’t hold. Blanc’s central thesis is simple: up to 1914, there was a classical Marxism of the Second International, exemplified by Karl Kautsky, its most able theorist. At the end of the war, the Russian Revolution provided a “Bolshevik” model, then promoted by the...

Larisa Reisner a Bolshevik, revolutionary life

Larisa Reisner (1895-1926) lived an extraordinary life. She fought for working-class socialism at its high point a century ago, but died just before Stalin snuffed out the workers ’ state she had fought to defend. Cathy Porter’s newly updated Larisa Reisner: A Biography captures Reisner’s passion and sheds new light on her life. EARLY LIFE Larisa Reisner was born on 2 May 1895 in Lublin, then in tsarist Poland. (Both her names are often misspelt with two “ss”.) In 1898, her father Mikhail Reisner was exiled to Siberia for his political activities and for the next five years the family lived in...

Queer life in the Soviet Union

In May 1934, Joseph Stalin received a letter from a Scottish communist called Harry Whyte. Whyte was a journalist, working for the USSR ’s English-language paper in Moscow. He was also a gay man whose boyfriend had recently gone missing. His letter opened with a question, whose answer would shape the future of the Soviet gay community: “can a homosexual be considered a worthy member of the Communist Party?” Whyte’s decision to move to the Soviet Union in 1932 had partly been an attempt to escape Scotland’s anti-sodomy laws. The world’s first socialist state had removed all homophobic laws...

Letters: Hands off Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg

I was nauseated by Eric Lee’s unwarranted attack on Clara Zetkin in Solidarity 664 . Zetkin was an outstanding revolutionary socialist, feminist and fighter for working class politics over 50 years, whose mistakes towards the end of her life did not make her a loyal Stalinist. Zetkin’s incredible life (1857-1933) and record deserve to be better known. She joined the German Social Democratic Party in 1878 and became one of its most prominent leaders. They built a mass working class party of one million members, a model followed by the best socialists of that epoch, including the Bolsheviks...

Revolutions, socialist and other

Mahalla textile strikers, in the Egyptian revolution of 2011 How can the working class becoming politically aware, organised, cohesive and self-confident enough to become society’s new ruling class, overthrowing the capitalists in favour of collective ownership with democratic self-rule? That is the decisive question about socialist revolution. But Socialist Worker ’s explanation of “revolution” ( by Isabel Ringrose, 4 December ) ducks it in favour of advocating more militancy in general, plus the presence, in the wings, of a fiercely-organised “revolutionary party”. Ringrose deserves credit...

Letter: Not in a single jump

Aso Kamal ( Solidarity 642 ) is right that revolutionary socialists internationally are not strong enough to sway the Ukraine war one way or another. In fact, the much bigger nominally-Marxist movement of 1914 was not in a position to stop World War One — even in countries (Russia, Serbia), where the socialists held to internationalist principle. The Bolsheviks were not able to extract Russia from World War One until after taking power. The question is how to build a movement from where we are. That can’t be done by wishing for a sudden jump to a movement stronger than 1914 or 1917. It can be...

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