Was the Russian Revolution a Proletarian Revolution?

CENTENARY OF THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION

Mon, 23 Oct 2017 12:00 AM Last update on: Mon, 23 Oct 2017 1:06 PM

Bolshevik (1920), by Boris Koustodiev

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Bolshevik (1920), by Boris Koustodiev

On November 2, 1977, as the sixtieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution approached, French historian Georges Haupt delivered a provocative speech at the Fernand Braudel Center in Binghamton, New York. The title was borrowed from this speech. Haupt said he also received the title of other members of the “Marxist and non-Marxist left” who had raised the issue for most of the past sixty years. Writing a hundred years after the event that shook the world, I can hardly say today that the terms of the debate have really changed much. I can only add that the dissolution of the USSR has made it a little more vehement, if not more topical. I also remember Georges Haupt qualifying his title a little more: “In what sense and to what extent was the Russian revolution a proletarian revolution?” (Haupt 1979: 21).

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So let me start at the beginning. It is interesting that a future Italian internationalist and communist leader Antonio Gramsci, then barely known beyond his native country, in making his first comments on the events in Russia which overthrew the Tsarist autocracy posed the same question: “Why was the Russian revolution a proletarian revolution?” (Gramsci 1977: 28).

“The Russian Revolution,” Gramsci notes in writing on April 29, 1917, “destroyed authoritarianism and replaced it with universal suffrage, extending the vote to women as well. It replaced authoritarianism with freedom, the Constitution with the free voice of the universal conscience. “” Why aren’t the Russian revolutionaries Jacobins, “Gramsci continued,” in other words, why haven’t they too replaced the dictatorship of one man with the dictatorship of a daring minority ready for anything? to ensure the victory of the program? “(Gramsci 1977: 29).

Wives of soldiers demand increased rations at a demonstration along Nevsky Prospect following the celebration of International Women’s Day, February 23, 1917. (Photo by K. Bulla. Courtesy permission of the Central State Archives of Kino-Photo-Phono Documents, St. Petersburg.)

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The response Gramsci gave straight away is no less relevant today. “It is because they pursue goals common to the vast majority of the population. They are certain that when the entire Russian proletariat is asked to make its choice, the answer is beyond doubt. It is in everyone’s mind, and will turn into an irrevocable decision as soon as it can be expressed in an atmosphere of absolute spiritual freedom, without the vote being perverted by police interventions and the threat of gallows or exile. (Gramsci 1977: 29).

There is indeed good food for thoughtful historians here. For my part, I almost shuddered at the first meeting with Antonio Gramsci making this daring comment, barely two months after the February revolution; for it was no less prophetic than the famous April thesis of Vladimir Lenin. October was still a long way off. “Even culturally,” Gramsci noted, “the industrial proletariat is ready for the transition; and the agricultural proletariat too, which is familiar with traditional forms of communal communism, is prepared for the change to a new form of society.” The prophecy was nonetheless written in this commentary from Gramsci: “Socialist revolutionaries cannot be Jacobins: in Russia, at present, all they have to do is make sure that the organs bourgeois (the Duma, [or the Russian parliament] the zemstvo [or the local government body]) do not indulge in Jacobinism, in order to obtain an ambiguous response of universal suffrage and to divert violence to their own ends ”(Gramsci 1977: 29).

“Compared to the proletariat of the industrially advanced nations of Europe, the Russian industrial working class was still a young race, no doubt. But in 1917, this fact did not prevent a young working class from playing a leading role in the revolution. How was that possible?

Another series of important events, which the bourgeois newspapers hardly noticed, caught Gramsci’s attention. “The Russian revolutionaries,” Gramsci unequivocally noted following the first of the two revolutions of 1917, “have not only freed political prisoners, but also common criminals. When common criminals in a prison learned they were free, they responded that they felt they had no right to accept freedom because they had to atone for their crimes. In Odessa they gathered in the prison yard and of their own accord swore to become honest men and resolved to live on their own labors “(Gramsci 1977: 29).

“From the point of view of the socialist revolution,” comments Gramsci, “this news is even more important than that of the dismissal of the Tsar and the Grand Dukes. Why ? – we ask. “The Tsar”, for Gramsci, “was also deposed by bourgeois revolutionaries. But in the eyes of the bourgeoisie, these condemned men would always have been the enemies of their order, the robbers of their wealth and their peace. For us their liberation has this meaning: what the revolution has created in Russia is a new way of life. She not only replaced one power with another, she replaced one way of life with another. It created a new moral order, and in addition to the physical freedom of the individual, it established freedom of the spirit ”(Gramsci 1977: 29-30).

What is so new about the “new moral order” then? Today, even such journalistic impressions of an Antonio Gramsci can hardly be dismissed as a utopian variant of bourgeois idealism. Let me add why. “The [Russian] the revolutionaries, our Italian revolutionary wrote in all candor, were not afraid to put back into circulation men whom bourgeois justice had labeled the infamous “old delinquent”, men whom bourgeois justice had categorized as various types of criminal delinquents. It is only in an atmosphere of social turbulence that such an event can occur, when the lifestyle and the dominant mentality are changed. Freedom sets people free and broadens their moral horizons; it makes the worst criminal under an authoritarian regime a martyr for the cause of duty, a hero for the cause of honesty ”(Gramsci 1977: 30).

What happened? “It is said in a report, writes Gramsci, that in a prison these criminals rejected freedom and elected themselves guardians. Why had they never done such a thing before? Because their prison was surrounded by massive walls and their windows were barred? the men who went to release them must have looked very different from the court judges and prison guards, and these common criminals must have heard very different words than they were used to, for their conscience to be like that. transformed, for them to suddenly become free enough to be able to prefer segregation to freedom and to voluntarily impose an atonement on themselves. They must have felt that the world had changed, that they too, the segregated, had the freedom to choose ”(Gramsci 1977: 30).

This century-old Italian article, Notes on the Russian Revolution, concluded with this laconic verdict: “It is the most majestic phenomenon that human history has ever produced.” It is no more an observation than that of John Reed, more famous Ten days that shook the world. I have quoted this piece at some length because I have barely met the reference in a hundred books and essays crushed in our staple mills. Even commendable historians more often get lost in a carnival of fact.

“As a result of the Russian Revolution,” Gramsci concludes, “the man who was a common criminal became the kind of man that Immanuel Kant, the theorist of absolute ethical conduct, had called – the kind of man who says: the vastness of the heavens above me, the imperative of my consciousness within me. “How important are these brief novelties? What they ‘reveal’ to us, as Gramsci puts it,” it is a liberation of the spirit, the establishment of a new moral conscience. It is the advent of a new order, which coincides with all that our masters have taught us. “That the Western world, supposedly, did not understand it was quite clear.” And that ‘ is once again from the East, could not help but launch Gramsci, let the light shine on the old Western world, which is stunned by events and can only oppose them with the banalities and nonsense of his hack-writing ” (Gramsci 1977: 30).

Bolshevik forces marching in Red Square.

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Bolshevik forces marching in Red Square.

What is there so proletarian in Kantian man? As Georges Haupt pointed out, whom I will invoke for my own benefit, that both the Paris commune of 1871 and the Russian revolution of 1917 were called “revolutions in workers’ clothing”. “The problem,” he writes, “is to see what’s behind the clothes,” what it means to be a revolution in workers’ clothing. We have seen Gramsci use the word “revolution” in the title of his newspaper article. But it was about the February Revolution. Georges Haupt claims that the word “revolution” was never used during the October Revolution itself. The days of “October” themselves, despite their upsetting character, were seen by contemporaries more as a continuation than a radical upheaval of February.

A more interesting question awaits us here: How did October, when it finally called itself a “revolution within revolution”, survived its many trials and tribulations? A proletarian revolution as a concept, according to Haupt, has not been encountered before in the European revolutions of 1848. Moreover, it was not in the foreground at the time, in any of the European centers, neither in France nor in Germany. Georges Haupt quotes Marx and Engels. Karl Marx wrote, vintage 1848: “Even if the proletariat overthrows the political domination of the bourgeoisie, its victory could only be fleeting, nothing but a fleeting moment in the service of the bourgeois as in Anno 1794. Frederick Engels also admitted:” If the proletariat came to power now, it could only carry out petty-bourgeois measures, but not directly proletarian measures. Our party can take the government only when the conditions allow us to realize this idea ”(Haupt 1979: 25-26).

Compared to the proletariat of the industrially advanced nations of Europe, the Russian industrial working class was still a young race, no doubt. But in 1917, this fact did not prevent a young working class from playing a leading role in the revolution. How was that possible? It is up to us to take a little detour through the first years of the twentieth century if not much earlier.

Bolshevik forces marching in Red Square.