Does the Revolution Eat Its Children?

Nathaniel Flakin and Doug Enaa Greene 

July 11, 2023

An interview with historian Doug Greene about his new book on Stalinism, The Dialectics of Saturn.

Your new book is called The Dialectics of Saturn. There is a picture of Lenin and Stalin on the cover. When I first got my hands on a copy, I wondered, What does Saturn have to do with Stalinism?

The title refers to a quote from the Great French Revolution of 1789: the revolution was devouring its own children like the god Saturn from Greco-Roman mythology. This phrase was uttered both by counterrevolutionary ideologues like Jacques Mallet du Pan and by revolutionaries such as Georges Danton (who was guillotined by the Jacobins). Despite the hopeful and egalitarian beginnings of the French Revolution, it ended with a reign of terror and the transformation of revolutionaries into new oppressors, such as Robespierre and Napoleon. The later detractors of the Russian Revolution saw it undergoing a similar “dialectic of Saturn”: with the rise of Stalinism, the children of the revolution were being eaten. Conservatives, liberals, and reactionaries believed it was written into the stars that all revolutions are destined to follow the “dialectics of Saturn.”

The Italian Marxist scholar Domenico Losurdo used the phrase “dialectic of Saturn” in his book Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend (2008). Losurdo claims that both the French and Russian Revolutions began with universalist and egalitarian visions that inspired the people. Yet the messianic radicalism embodied by Leon Trotsky was unsuited to the construction of socialism. In Losurdo’s view, socialism had to give way to the realism, conservatism, and pragmatism represented by Stalin. Losurdo argues that Trotsky did not understand this requirement of history and was necessarily swept away. He uses the “dialectic of Saturn” to argue that Stalin did not betray the Russian Revolution but was actually its savior. Losurdo himself is part of a long line of figures in the Communist Parties and Western Marxism who believed that Stalinism was historically necessary to reach communism.

There are right- and left-wing positions that use the dialectic of Saturn to explain Stalinism, but the two camps are not so far apart. Both share the same underlying historical fatalism: Stalinism was the inevitable result of the Russian Revolution, and no alternatives were possible. There is, however, another position, one that rejects this “unity of opposites”: Trotsky’s theory of “proletarian Jacobinism.” Like all other Bolsheviks, Trotsky saw the Russian Revolution through the prism of its French precursor, which provided historical examples to both emulate and avoid. Trotsky used this approach to develop an alternative program to the bureaucratization of the Soviet Union and to understand the material conditions that led to the rise of Stalinism. He concluded that there is no mystical “dialectic of Saturn.” Above all, he showed that Stalinism was historically unnecessary to reach communism.

It’s almost “common sense” to say that the Russian Revolution led directly to Stalinism. Defenders of bourgeois society claim that every violent revolution is only going to lead to more violence. Now. I know you just wrote a whole book on the topic, but can you very briefly explain where Stalinism came from?

First, we should provide a brief definition of Stalinism. It is the rule of a bureaucracy over collective property relations that were originally meant to produce proletarian democracy. The reigning ideology of Stalinism was the theory of “socialism in one country.” This national parochialism stood in stark contrast to the proletarian internationalism of Bolshevism in Lenin’s time. In fact, Stalinism represented the antithesis of Leninist communism.

Second, Stalinism was a result of the concrete material conditions stemming from the isolation of the Russian Revolution. Russia suffered from economic underdevelopment, the decimation of the working class during the civil war, and the atrophy of the workers’ councils, i.e., the soviets. In this political void, the Soviet bureaucracy centered around Stalin managed to solidify its rule. After taking power, the Stalinists purged, imprisoned, and murdered many of the best communist militants of the Russian Revolution. This counterrevolutionary process was vividly described in Trotsky’s magisterial work The Revolution Betrayed.

Contrary to conservative or social democratic claims, Stalinism was not the fulfillment of Bolshevism. It was a betrayal of its commitments to workers’ power and international revolution.

Stalin’s rule was so terrible — purges, gulags, mass deportations, and shameless distortions of the truth — that some socialists say it was just another form of capitalism. How would you respond to that?

As the Belgian Marxist Ernest Mandel who once said, many communists look at everything that was wrong with the USSR and want to condemn it as the worst thing we can think of: capitalism. This is perhaps understandable, since there is much about the Stalinist-era USSR that has little to do with socialism. Yet if we look soberly at the USSR, we can see that these “new class” theories do not illuminate how it functioned.

Take the example of Tony Cliff, a leader of the International Socialist Tendency, who argued that the USSR became state capitalist circa 1928. Cliff believed that the USSR underwent rapid industrialization and capital accumulation to establish itself as a military power to compete with imperialism. He saw the USSR as essentially one big factory that was compelled to accumulate and match its productivity levels to that of its rivals, like any other capitalist business.

There are several problems with Cliff’s analysis. First, the political and economic structure of the USSR was largely the same before and after 1928. This state capitalist counterrevolution is supposed to have occurred without any fundamental change in how the society functioned. Cliff’s theory cannot explain how ownership relations were suddenly overthrown, which he pictures as happening like a thief in the night. Second, the USSR lacked key features of capitalism: there was no generalized commodity production, labor was not bought and sold like a commodity, and the social surplus was not appropriated by the capitalists for profit. It is true that the law of value existed in the USSR, but it was not dominant in society; it was constrained by the state and the planned economy. Third, the central plan did not operate according to the imperatives of profit, and it avoided the periodic crises that characterized capitalism. Fourth, the bureaucracy lacked many of the attributes of other ruling classes: they were unnecessary to the productive process but parasitic upon it. The bureaucrats did not own the means of production, and they could not transmit property to their children. Finally, if the USSR was already capitalist in 1928, then what happened to its economy in 1991? Did the country just go from capitalism to capitalism?

Whether this “new class” approach uses the labels of “state capitalism,” (Tony Cliff), “bureaucratic collectivism” (Max Shachtman), or “social imperialism” (Maoists), it is always rooted in subjective moralism, surface-level empiricism, and extreme voluntarism. None of these versions of they theory can scientifically grasp the USSR’s genuine laws of motion that occurred due to the contradiction that existed between its nationalized economy and the bureaucratic caste. Moreover, many of these new class theories capitulate to right-wing anticommunism by arguing that the USSR was objectively worse than imperialism.

After Stalin’s death in 1953, there was a certain liberalization in the Soviet Union: political prisoners were released, and the mass murders ended. Some thinkers from the Trotskyist movement, such as Isaac Deutscher, thought this meant that the Stalinist states could finally start moving toward socialism. Why didn’t this happen?

Deutscher believed that democratization should’ve come from the Trotskyist opposition, but they were largely wiped out as a coherent and organized force during the Great Terror. As a result, the only conceivable force for de-Stalinization could not come from below but from above, inside the Communist Party. This is what happened after Stalin’s death with Khrushchev’s Secret Speech. While Khrushchev’s reforms ended mass terror and allowed for more liberalization, there were always limits to how far he was willing to go. For example, Khrushchev said all the crimes of Stalinism came from the “cult of personality,” but he nonetheless defended Stalin’s campaigns against oppositionists. He condemned only Stalin for turning against fellow comrades, absolving party bureaucrats of any complicity. This allowed him to preserve the legitimacy of the Soviet bureaucracy while blaming everything bad on Stalin.

The Secret Speech failed to account for the material conditions that allowed Stalinism to emerge. To do otherwise could raise dangerous challenges to the whole system of bureaucratic rule, and this was something Khrushchev was unwilling to do. While Khrushchev and other reformers in the Eastern bloc were willing to end the most egregious practices of Stalinism, they were unwilling to do anything that would endanger their bureaucratic privileges. When reforms went too far and led to mass upheaval in both Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, the USSR sent in tanks to crush them. In the end, bureaucratic self-reform always had a built-in limitation: the reformers tried to maintain the overall system without involving the masses from below, since that could bring down the whole apparatus.

Today, there are very few Stalinist states left. But Stalinism still divides the Left. Why is this debate still relevant? Some socialists say we should move on.

To start, I would not discount the People’s Republic of China, where the Communist Party still claims to be following Marxism-Leninism. This matters because China is the most populous country in the world, with a massive economy. Therefore, it remains important to pay attention to China and its impact on contemporary understandings of socialism. Beyond that, there are non-ruling Communist Parties that claim allegiance to Marxism-Leninism, i.e., Stalinism. In Chile, Portugal, South Africa, Greece, India, and Japan, these parties are not sects but genuine mass organizations. So it is worth paying attention to Stalinism, since it is still a significant force on the broad left.

There is, however, another reason to pay attention to Stalinism in contemporary debates on socialism. Even though the USSR is gone, it casts a long shadow on any discussion on the nature of socialism. Well-meaning people who are interested in an alternative to capitalism will ask Marxists, Won’t socialism just end in Stalinist terror? It is imperative to answer that question. Even after wiping away all the anticommunist distortions about the Soviet past, we should be able to explain how Stalinism’s crimes are not those of socialism. In other words, Stalin’s record is something communists must explain — rationally and accurately — but I don’t think we need to own him or his crimes.

Every once in a while, you will see an online Stalinist defending the unhinged conspiracy theories behind the purges. They will claim that anti-Stalinist communists like Trotsky were collaborating with the Nazis. How would you respond to this?

To start, there was the sectarianism of the Communist International’s third period line in Germany. The Communist Party labeled the Social Democrats “social fascists,” saving their vitriol for them rather than the Nazis. This not only left the Nazis alone as they gained in power and strength, but also alienated workers who still had faith in the SPD. The alternative, as Trotsky argued, would have been trying to win them over to a united front against fascism. The third period line may not have directly led to Hitler’s rise to power, but it did next to nothing to stop it. The Comintern leadership under Stalin should bear its share of responsibility for the disaster in Germany.

Many arguments favoring Stalin’s historical necessity claim that his policies industrialized the USSR and led the country to militarily defeat Nazi Germany in World War II. But the experience of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939–41 undermines many of those claims. For one, the USSR collaborated with the Third Reich in dividing up Poland and Eastern Europe between them. This was supposedly to create a buffer zone for the Soviet Union and buy time before an eventual war. Yet the USSR provided vital raw materials to the Nazi war machine. While Germany benefited from this trade, Hitler did not want to remain beholden to Stalin and believed he could gain even more resources by conquering the Soviet Union. Stalin honored those trade agreements even as the Third Reich was massing its troops on the border. In one grotesque act of collaboration, Stalin sent several hundred German and Austrian anti-fascists living in Soviet exile back to the Third Reich, even though there was no provision in the pact for a prisoner exchange. This was viewed as a “gift” by the USSR to Germany. Despite all this collaboration under the pact, the world’s Communist Parties were compelled to defend the Soviet agreement with their avowed fascist enemies.

Furthermore, the pact did not buy needed time for the USSR to prepare for war. Stalin expected a long war in the West, and Hitler basically defeated France in six weeks. This meant that war with the USSR was on the near horizon. To maintain the pact and appease Hitler, Stalin willfully ignored intelligence reports about an imminent German invasion. The Red Army was also out of position, when the Germans attacked and many of its best commanders, such as Mikhail Tukhachevsky, had been killed in the military purges. As a result, the Germans achieved some stunning victories when their soldiers invaded the USSR. We can conclude that Soviet collaboration with Nazi Germany did a great deal to discredit socialism and nearly doomed the USSR in 1941.

The most unhinged conspiracist theorist of them all is a medieval literature professor named Grover Furr who claims to have discovered evidence that all of Stalin’s accusations were true. You are probably one of very few serious historians to have read Furr. What is his argument?

Furr has spent several decades defending Stalin, stating in 2012, “I have yet to find one crime — yet to find one crime — that Stalin committed. … I know they all say he killed 20, 30, 40 million people — it is bullshit.” His most well-known book is Khrushchev Lied (2011), in which he argues that the Secret Speech is a complete fabrication and a rehashing of bourgeois and “Trotskyite” lies.

Throughout Furr’s writings, he argues that the Moscow Trials of the 1930s were not frame-ups but that the defendants were guilty of collaborating with foreign powers. He uses hearsay, half-truths, and rumors to bolster his case since there is no documentary evidence. The only “evidence” that Furr can rely on is the confessions of the defendants at the Moscow Trials. According to Furr, the defendants were telling the truth when they confessed, and no torture was involved. Yet we know that the USSR routinely practiced various forms of coercion to extract confessions that included physical torture and threatening the victims’ families. For example, the signed confession of Mikhail Tukhachevsky was covered in bloodstains. Furr thinks these might have come from a pricked finger and not a beating. In other words, Furr’s justification for the Moscow Trials is based on leaps of logic and pure fiction.

In addition, Furr claims that Khrushchev could take power owing to underlying historical and ideological weaknesses in the USSR. He says that these weaknesses were inherent in the idea of a transitional socialist stage itself. Since Soviet socialism contained material inequality, privileges, and wage differentials, it did not lead to communism but back to capitalism. Furr concludes by rejecting socialism and stating that society must go straight to communism by immediately abolishing money, markets, and inequality. On the surface, it may seem paradoxical that Furr justifies Stalin’s repression alongside a quasi-anarchist rejection of socialism. But these positions naturally go together since implementing sweeping changes right away would require massive force. The implication is that the people cannot reach communism on their own, but it must be beaten into them. This is why Furr celebrates Stalin’s use of state power and police repression, since it showed the type of ruthlessness needed to achieve communism.

In the end, Furr acts as a Stalinist Jesuit who gives the appearance of rigorous research and documentation by fiercely defending the faith from all heretics. For Furr, the old orthodoxy on Stalin must be upheld at all costs. Anyone who questions its catechisms is automatically viewed as an anticommunist enemy. His approach is deceptive to many new audiences who don’t have much background, and it appeals to Stalinist dogmatists who want someone to “prove” their faith. This is not to say, however, that Furr has no useful attributes. If we want to do a serious historical materialist analysis of the USSR and Stalin, then Furr’s work serves as a magnificent example of what not to do.

Your book has been published by an academic publisher, and it is rather expensive. How can people get a copy?

Please help generate support for a paperback version by asking your library to order a copy, writing reviews, doing interviews, and writing to the publisher. Thanks for your support!

Douglas Greene, foreword by Harrison Fluss, Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn: Anticommunism, Marxism, and the Fate of the Soviet Union (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2023), 402 pages, $125 / $50.



Nathaniel Flakin
Nathaniel is a freelance journalist and historian from Berlin. He is on the editorial board of Left Voice and our German sister site Klasse Gegen Klasse. Nathaniel, also known by the nickname Wladek, has written a biography of Martin Monath, a Trotskyist resistance fighter in France during World War II, which has appeared in German, in English, and in French. He is on the autism spectrum.


Doug Enaa Greene
Doug is an independent communist historian from the Boston area. He has written biographies of the communist insurgent Louis Auguste Blanqui and DSA founder Michael Harrington. His forthcoming book, The Dialectics of Saturn, examines Marxist debates about Stalinism.

 

Marx on communal villages as loci of revolution in Russia and beyond

By Kevin B. Anderson

Published 12 December, 2025

First published at New Politics. Excerpted with permission from chapter 6 of The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism. 

Two years before his 1879–82 notebooks on communal social forms around the world, Marx begins to see an uprising in Russia as the most likely starting point for a wider European revolution. For example, in remarks on the Russo-Turkish War (the “oriental crisis”) in a letter of September 27, 1877, to the New Jersey communist Friedrich Sorge, Marx views Russia as a cauldron of revolution:

That crisis marks a new turning point in European history. Russia — and I have studied conditions there from the original Russian sources, unofficial and official (the latter only available to a few people but got for me through friends in Petersburg) — has long been on the verge of an upheaval. The gallant Turks have hastened the explosion by years with the thrashing they have inflicted, not only upon the Russian army and Russian finances, but in a highly personal and individual manner on the dynasty commanding the army (the Tsar, the heir to the throne and six other Romanovs). The upheaval will begin secundum artem [according to the rules of the art] with some playing at constitutionalism and then there will be a fine row. If Mother Nature is not particularly unfavorable toward us, we shall still live to see the fun! The stupid nonsense which the Russian students are perpetrating is only a symptom, worthless in itself. But it is a symptom. All sections of Russian society are in complete disintegration economically, morally, and intellectually. This time the revolution will begin in the East, hitherto the unbroken bulwark and reserve army of counterrevolution. (Marx-Engels Collected Works [hereafter MECW], 45: 278)

In this period, the last years of Marx’s life, I know of no other consideration of revolutionary possibilities in any other country equivalent to what he is expressing here concerning Russia. This is illustrated in how, in the very same letter, Marx dismisses the prospects of revolution in France, still suffering under the wave of reaction that set in after the defeat of the Paris Commune, and where the republicans were battling the threat of a military dictatorship: “The French crisis is an altogether secondary affair compared with the oriental one. Yet one can only hope the bourgeois republic wins” (MECW 45: 278). In the event, Russia defeated Turkey the following year, thus attenuating for the moment the internal crisis Marx foresaw in 1877. But he did not alter his position on the underlying issues eating away at the Russian social order. This is seen in a letter to Wilhelm Liebknecht four months later, in which he remarked that, while Turkey’s defeat had for the moment forestalled a revolutionary outbreak, he continued to believe that “all the elements are present in abundant measure” for a “social revolution” in Russia “and hence radical change throughout Europe” (Letter of February 4, 1878, MECW 45: 296).

Fifteen months later, in a letter to French socialist Jules Guesde dated May 10, 1879, which has come to light only recently, Marx writes in a similar vein concerning the world revolution starting in Russia. But, here, he details how it might reach Western Europe and the obstacles it would face there:

I am convinced that the explosion of the revolution will begin this time not in the West but in the Orient, in Russia. It will first impact the two other harsh despotisms [illegible word], Austria and Germany, where a violent upheaval [bouleversement] has become a historical necessity. It is of the highest importance that at the moment of this general crisis in Europe we find the French proletariat already having been organized into [constitué] a workers’ party and ready to play its role. As to England, the material elements for its social transformation are superabundant, but a driving spirit [l’esprit moteur] is lacking. It will not form up, except under the impact of the explosion of events on the Continent. It must never be forgotten that, however impoverished [misérable] the condition of the greater part of the English working class, it takes part nonetheless, to a certain extent, in the British Empire’s domination of the world market, or, what is even worse, imagines itself to be taking part in it.1

As in the 1877 letter to Sorge and the 1878 one to Liebknecht, Marx sees the revolution breaking out first in Russia.

But, here, sounding notes similar to those in the Confidential Communication on Ireland of 1870, he expresses strong, perhaps even stronger, reservations about the level of class consciousness among English workers, here stressing their affective ties to the Empire. This should not, however, be taken to mean that Marx has given up on the English working class, any more than in the Confidential Communication of nine years earlier. Also, as in 1870, he sees France in a crucial role but provides more details. His failure to mention the Paris Commune in a letter that would likely have been read by the French police may be due to ongoing political repression of those associated with it. And, in a way, Russia is now a replacement for Ireland, as the land where the revolution is most likely to detonate first. Different, of course, is the lack of Russian working-class immigration, of anything similar to the Irish subproletariat in Britain, and the fact that Russia is not under colonial domination. The letter constitutes a multifaceted sketch of how the next European revolution would likely break out and move forward, written from a seamlessly internationalist perspective that also takes very specific account of local and national circumstances. Editor Jean-Numa Ducange is absolutely correct to refer to “France,” the “Orient,” and the “West” in his title for the article containing the letter. It should also be noted that, in his response, Guesde shows a narrow focus on France, responding only to remarks by Marx about various socialist tendencies in his country, not even mentioning Marx’s key point about the European revolution breaking out first in Russia. Here, not only can we discern a Western disinterest in revolutionary movements emanating from the non-industrialized societies to the East, but we are also on the road toward the Second International’s focus on socialist parties in each nation operating quite separately from each other, joined together only in a loose federation.

In this 1878–79 correspondence, Marx does not mention Russia’s communal villages. It is only in his very last publication that Marx finally combines these two elements, Russia as starting point for a new round of revolution in Europe and the Russian village commune as source of resistance to capital, of revolution, and of communism. He does so in a new preface, coauthored with Engels, to the 1882 Russian edition of Communist Manifesto. This brief preface, drafted in December 1881, adds discussion of both the US and Russia, each of them hardly mentioned in 1848 but since then having risen to great prominence, the US for its surging industrial economy, and Russia for its plethora of revolutionary movements.

Without being aware of the letter to Zasulich and other discussions by Marx of the Russian village commune, all of which lay unpublished in 1882, the reference to these communes as loci of revolution might have been easy to miss, especially given its brevity:

Can the Russian obshchina, a form, albeit heavily eroded, of the primeval communal ownership of the land, pass directly into the higher, communist form of communal ownership? Or must it first go through the same process of dissolution that marks the West’s historical development? The only answer that is possible today is: Were [wird] the Russian revolution to become the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West [im Westen], so that the two fulfill [ergänzen]2 each other, then the present Russian communal landownership may serve as the point of departure [zum Ausgangspunkt] for a communist development. (Late Marx and the Russian Road, edited by Teodor Shanin, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983 [hereafter SHN]: 139; MEGA2 I/25: 296)

Neither in the above lines in the 1882 preface to the Manifesto nor in his correspondence with Russians in his last years does Marx acknowledge a change of position. Still, the changes since the 1840s and early 1850s are clear. For, in the earlier period, he viewed Russia as an utterly reactionary power, but, by now, Russia had become for him the likely starting point of a wider revolution.

Interestingly, the last clause of the above was altered in the hand-written original, with a different wording crossed out, presumably at the end of the process of writing the preface. With the crossed-out text intact, the preface would have ended with the phrase “communal land- ownership’s ruin may be avoided” (MEGA2 I/25: 974). If, as is then likely, the substitute phrase about the commune “as the point of departure for a communist development” was added at the last minute, this heightens the possibility that the final wording constituted a theoretical innovation on Marx’s part.

The above sentences — in what was Marx’s last publication — exhibit a complex and intricate dialectic that needs to be unpacked. It is important to note that the quest for the free development of the Russian commune is not unconditioned, a point that is made explicit here, versus being left only implicit in the 1881 drafts of the letter to Zasulich. Russia can avoid the dissolution of its rural communes and the destructive process of the primitive accumulation of capital if the effort to do so is accompanied by a “proletarian revolution in the West.”

There are two contingencies here, which form part of a totality riven with contradictions and various possibilities. Were a Russian revolution to break out ahead of one in the West — likely on the basis of a revolution rooted in the rural communes and their resistance both to the state and to capitalist incursions — then a wider European revolution would be touched off not in Western Europe but in Russia. In this case, Russia’s Indigenous form of rural communism would become the spark, “as the point of departure” for a wider revolution and transition to a modern, positive form of communism. Thus, there could be no successful transformation of the Russian communes into a modern communism without a proletarian revolution in Western Europe, but the strong possibility also existed that a revolution in Russia could touch off such an event in the West.

Despite being published in Russian and soon after in German, the 1882 preface was almost completely forgotten. This forgetting — by the “post- Marx Marxists, beginning with Frederick Engels,”3 in Dunayevskaya’s pungent formulation — can be seen in Engels’s letter to Karl Kautsky two years later, on February 16, 1884:

[In Java] today, primitive communism (so long as it has not been stirred up by some element of modern communism) furnishes the finest and broadest basis of exploitation and despotism, as well as in India and Russia, and survives in the midst of modern society as an anachronism (to be eliminated or, one almost might say, turned back on its course) no less than the mark communities of the original cantons. (MECW 47:103)

In the above, Engels places so much emphasis on the need of these pre-capitalist communes, whether the village communes of Java or the traditional German/Swiss “mark community” or village commune, to be “stirred up by modern communism” that the 1882 preface recedes almost to the vanishing point. Instead, unlike Marx, he seems largely to have maintained their Eurocentric positions of the 1850s, which held that these kinds of communal forms were the foundation of “Oriental despotism.” It seems, therefore, that Engels never changed his position on the Russian village commune very much.

The newness of Marx’s 1882 formulation can also be seen when compared to the drafts of the letter to Vera Zasulich written nine months earlier, in March 1881. As discussed in previous chapters, in those drafts Marx saw the Russian village commune as something distinct from Western European villages. In the West, individuals and family groups, or agricultural laborers working for wages, worked specific plots of land, which were held as private property or at least with possessory rights held by families. In the Russian village, both work groups and property relations were instead organized communally, with individual families having a share in the commune as a whole but not receiving ownership or even long-term possession of a specific piece of agricultural land.

But the Zasulich texts comprised letters and drafts, not programmatic texts, unlike the 1882 preface to the Manifesto. Here, albeit briefly, Marx looks through a wider lens, incorporating the Russian village into the system of global capitalism and its dialectical opposite, the movements of revolution and resistance by a wide variety of social groups throughout that system, from London and Paris to Saint Petersburg. In this way, he makes his theorization of revolution in Russia and Western Europe clearer than anywhere else, despite the brevity of the text.

Some forty years ago, as the late Marx was being first put forward on an international level as a topic of research by those like Dunayevskaya and Shanin, three different lines of interpretation could already be discerned. First, in Shanin’s 1983 volume, Late Marx and the Russian Road, an essay by the British Marxists Derek Sayer and Philip Corrigan took the position that there was nothing really new here, “that Marx’s late texts represent not so much a radical break as a clarification of how his ‘mature’ texts should have been read in the first place” (SHN: 80). This approach continues today among those who acknowledge the originality of the late Marx but see it as simply continuous in this respect with the young Marx and with the mature Marx of Grundrisse and Capital. In other words, Marx remains brilliant but there are no fundamental changes in the period 1869–82.

A second and seemingly more fruitful approach, also found in the Shanin collection, acknowledges important changes of perspective by Marx after 1869, so much so that they constitute a break in his thought. This is the position of Shanin himself in 1983. This approach is also found in the essay by the Japanese Marx scholar Haruki Wada, who carries out a deep textual analysis. Nearly a decade before the collapse of the Soviet Union and even before the ascendency of Mikhail Gorbachev, Wada had managed to obtain access to some of Marx’s papers in Moscow, something almost invariably denied to researchers from outside the Soviet bloc. Wada begins by discussing some of Marx’s statements in the drafts of the letter to Zasulich about the possibility of a revolution emanating from the Russian village communes — “a Russian revolution is required, if the Russian commune is to be saved” — and contrasts them with Marx’s earlier judgments from the 1850s to the effect that the communes were conservative and that radical change would need to come from outside, from the Western proletarian revolution (SHN: 67). Wada also notes that Marx has by now become a supporter of the Russian Populists and their idea of a peasant revolution and direct attacks on the autocratic state. Wada writes that this contrasted with those around Zasulich, who awaited the development of an industrial proletariat for a revolution. Finally, Wada observes that Engels never really changed regarding their old view of Russia from the 1850s, and he notes Marx’s declining health by late 1881, when the request for a new preface arrived.

Wada also notes that the surviving draft of their introduction to the Manifesto was in Engels’s handwriting. From all this, Wada concludes Marx must have “asked Engels to make a draft, and put his signature to it” (SHN: 70). This seemingly rigorous argument is less convincing than it seems. I am aware of no case — as seen most clearly early on in their collaboration in 1847–48 on the Communist Manifesto, and for which Engels’s early draft has been preserved — in which Marx was not clearly the senior author in any of their joint writings. More substantively, Engels never wrote anything similar to the 1882 preface after Marx’s death, even though he quoted it on one occasion, as he continued to view the Russian commune as something backward and without any revolutionary potential. Thus, Marx is almost certainly the author of the 1882 preface.

At a more general level, Wada’s argument lends itself to the notion that Marx saw the Russian commune as an autonomous force of revolution that could establish a society that could recede from world capitalism and build a viable socialism on its own resources, not only without leadership from the “Western” proletariat but also without even their participation or that of already industrialized societies. In short, we do not need the working class for radical, anti-capitalist revolution. Here too, a variety of thinkers, from Maoists of the 1960s and ’70s (as Wada himself was at the time) to radical ecologists in more recent years, have picked up on this strand of argument, not always to good effect.

Dunayevskaya articulates a third kind of argument concerning the late Marx. As a relative outsider to the Marxist intellectual establishment of the time, she was not invited to contribute to the Shanin collection, but, in this period, she addresses not only the late Marx on Russia but also the Ethnological Notebooks. Overall, she sees both “new moments” and continuities in Marx’s late writings, writing that, in the Ethnological Notebooks, “he was completing the circle begun in 1844” and “was diving into the study of human development, both in different historic periods and in the most basic Man/Woman relationship.”4 All this was couched in terms of Marx’s concept of “revolution in permanence,” as put forth in the 1850 “Address to the Communist League,” and which is seen to have marked his entire work thereafter.5 The 1844 reference concerns the startlingly radical paragraph from the 1844 Manuscripts on gender with which de Beauvoir ended The Second Sex, as discussed in chapter 2. Whether in Marx’s notes on Morgan, as discussed in chapter 1, or in the late Marx on the Russian communal village, Dunayevskaya stresses not only the ways in which Iroquois clans or Russian village communes offered an alternative to capitalism but also how even these precapitalist forms of communism exhibited social contradictions, including over gender. Moreover, these were, for her, not just historical but contemporary issues:

These studies enabled Marx (Marx, not Engels) to see the possibility of new human relations, not as they might come through a mere “updating” of primitive communism’s equality of the sexes, as among the Iroquois, but as Marx sensed they would burst forth from a new type of revolution.6

In this sense, Marx’s exploration of gender in the Ethnological Notebooks was connected to those on the Russian village commune, and to gender in other clan and communal societies Marx studies in his last years, with all this connected to “a new type of revolution.”

Dunayevskaya also finds deep connections between what was going on in Russia and the capitalist societies of Western Europe. Thus she stresses, with regard to Russia, that it would be

a capitalist world in crisis . . . which creates favorable conditions for transforming primitive communism into a modern collective society: “In order to save the Russian commune there must be a Russian Revolution.” In a word, revolution is indispensable, whether one has to go through capitalism, or can go to the new society “directly” from the commune.7

In commenting on the 1882 preface, she writes that it “projected the idea that Russia could be the first to have a proletarian revolution ahead of the West.”8 That is, a Russian revolution could surge ahead of one in the West, forming a starting point, but it could not remain alone if it were to be successful. It could not win out in long-term isolation from the Western proletariat.

I took a position similar to that of my mentor Dunayevskaya on the 1882 preface in Marx at the Margins, noting that “a Russian revolution based upon its agrarian communal forms would be a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for the development of a modern communism.”9 It would be necessary, though, to shake the Western proletariat out of the doldrums into which it had descended with the defeat of the Paris Commune, and soon after, of Reconstruction in the US. This amounted to the setting in of a global era of reaction in the West, after the revolutionary period of the 1860s through the early 1870s. That is why I began the present chapter with Marx’s Ireland essay on the interrelationship of the agrarian periphery’s revolutionary struggles to that of the working class in the metropole. That is also why I took up Marx on the “Western” Paris Commune, also in this chapter, just before considering Marx on the Russian commune. Still, the Russian commune and similar social forms around the world were, in Marx’s eyes, crucial “starting points” for global revolution and also points for the conceptualization of an alternative to capitalism. His interest in Russia deepened as it became the first country where Capital was translated (in 1872), and where, unlike in Germany, the book was extensively discussed by the intellectuals, and where a vibrant, youthful revolutionary movement — composed of students and young intellectuals who sought to stir up a peasant revolution based upon the village commune — was growing by leaps and bounds.

It must be underlined that Marx, while rejecting unilinear notions of progress and development, was calling neither for the preservation of these village communes nor for their return to a “purer” state than the one presently under capitalist encroachment. Nor was he calling for a revolution based upon rural Russia alone. Instead, all this was part of a broader, global strategic view of revolution, around the “agrarian question,” something that dogs the left to this day. This problem is addressed by the French Marxist thinker Isabelle Garo:

Thus, the traditional commune is to be conceived not as a model to be generalized but as the possible social and, above all, political lever of an alliance between the working class and the exploited peasant class, a lever at once indispensable and extremely difficult to construct.10

The young Brazilian economist Guilherme Nunes Pires cautions that for Marx, “only with the Western proletarian revolution and the incorporation in the rural commune of the most advanced techniques of production” could a “transition by a non-capitalist road . . . to a classless society” take place.11 These are valid points, but, at the same time, it should be noted that Marx is reversing the directionality of the European revolution in his 1877–78 letters and in the 1882 preface to the Manifesto when he writes of revolution in Russia based on the commune as such as a revolution’s “point of departure.”

Looking at the problem in this more general, global sense, I would argue that Marx’s writings on the Russian village commune and revolution, especially the 1882 preface to the Manifesto, are just the tip of the iceberg. They form part of a vast project in which, as we have seen, he made hundreds of thousands of words of notes on anthropological and social history studies of India, Indonesia, North Africa, precolonial and colonial Latin America, Russia, ancient Rome, precolonial Ireland, and a variety of preliterate societies, from the Indigenous clans of the Americas to the Homeric Greeks. These notes also deal extensively with gender, especially in Greece, Rome, Ireland, and the Americas.

These voluminous notes are deeply connected to Marx’s new notions of revolution. To be sure, we cannot know what he would have done with this material, including how he would have incorporated it into subsequent volumes of Capital. Still, it may be worthwhile to sketch the kind of globalized theory of revolution and of the alternative to capitalism that might have flowed out of these studies in his last working years, 1879–82.

1. As Marx states explicitly, resistance on the part of Russia’s communal villages to capitalist encroachment could form the “point of departure” for a European revolution if it developed links to the Western proletariat. This is connected to the fact that, by the late 1870s, he saw Russia as the country with the greatest level of revolutionary unrest, with the most determined revolutionary movement, with the greatest interest in Capital, and therefore the most likely starting point for a wider European revolution. He sees its villages as more communistic in their internal relations than the Western European village under feudalism or capitalism.
2. In his notes on Algeria’s clans, communal villages, and their resistance to French imperialism, Marx connects the fear of the metropolitan French ruling classes over this anti-colonial resistance to their fear of the modern communism of the Paris Commune that broke out under their very noses in 1871. Here, something similar to his 1882 preface is evident, the relationship of the Algerian anticolonial and Indigenous struggles against French colonialism to those in the metropole, which, in this period, experienced the Paris Commune, a unique social revolution that moved toward a non-statist form of communism on the largest scale attempted anywhere up to that point. Moreover, Marx singles out the heroism of the women Communards, as well as the ways in which French colonialism deepened patriarchal domination in Algeria, signs of the importance of women’s struggles to revolutionary and anticolonial movements.
3. In his notes on precolonial and colonial Latin America, Marx singles out the persistence of Indigenous communal social structures even after the establishment of Spanish colonialism, also noting that Spain’s relatively underdeveloped capitalism did not undermine these structures as radically as did British colonialism in India. He also notes that these communal societies were much more resilient than modern capitalism in terms of sustainable agriculture and safeguarding food supplies and other necessities of life in anticipation of natural disasters and crises of other kinds. He singles out as well the prominent position of women in these networks of sustainability.
4. In his notes on the Indian Subcontinent, the area of the world he covered most extensively in the 1879–82 research notebooks at the center of this study, Marx writes of the persistence, albeit with important evolutionary changes, of communal social structures that persisted for millennia. Important communal elements remained even after these structures were severely undermined, and sometimes destroyed, by capitalist “modernization” policies imposed in the 1790s under British colonialism. Thus, these clan and communal structures underlay the late seventeenth-century uprising led by Maratha rebel Shivaji against the Mughal Empire, and they continued as the Marathas fought the Mughals and then the British, through Marx’s own time. In addition, he points to “rural communes” as sources of resistance to British colonial rule and to its imposition of capitalist social relations. Moreover, despite the longstanding suppression of women’s rights on the part of Hindu religious authorities during the precolonial and colonial periods, Marx also notes that women emerged as military leaders during the massive anticolonial Sepoy Uprising of 1857–59.
5. In his 1881 notes on communal and clan structures in precolonial Ireland, Marx emphasizes the persistence of these social forms through his own time. He also stresses how, even before the arrival of British overlords, who imposed feudal social relations, the ancient communal forms were being undermined by incipient class structures among the Celts themselves. He also singles out the social power women held in the days before the British conquest, and how this was expressed in ancient Irish clan law. Had he taken up Ireland and revolution in the 1880s, he would likely have brought this research on communal forms and gender into his theorization of agrarian resistance to colonialism and class rule by aristocratic landlords.

In any or all these ways, Marx may have been intending to connect his research on communal and clan societies to specific areas of the world that were experiencing struggles against colonialism and class rule, as he did in the 1882 preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto.

Can the extensive notes on Native American societies, especially in the Morgan notes, also be fitted into the framework outlined in the 1882 preface? Here, any relationship would have to be seen at a higher level of generalization. In both sets of notes, gender comes to the fore as a central social category. In the case of Morgan and Native American societies of North America, this involves studying how gender subordination was at the root of many other forms of social hierarchy. At the same time, Marx investigates relative gender equality in Indigenous America, while not adhering to the idyllic portraits of these societies found in Morgan, or, for that matter, Engels. One can say, based on our present evidence, that it is likely that, after grappling with Morgan and critically absorbing his data, Marx would have centered gender in new ways had he ever written up the results of his 1879–82 notebooks more fully.

The notes on Morgan especially, but also those on ancient Greco-Roman society, as well as those on Ireland, investigate the origins not only of patriarchy but also of slavery and of class society. At the same time, these notes, especially those on Morgan, show alternatives to the forms of patriarchy and class rule prevalent in Marx’s lifetime. In this sense, they contribute to his theorization of alternatives to capitalism. Löwy addressed this problem nearly three decades ago: “The idea that a modern communism would find some of its human dimension from the ‘primitive communism’ destroyed by the civilization founded upon private property and the state” was a major theme for the late Marx.12

Finally, it should be noted that, in a number of the cases Marx explores — India after Britain’s undermining of the communal village, Latin America after the arrival of Spanish colonialism, Ireland under British rule, Algeria under French rule, or the Russian village commune under pressure from capitalism — he sees the communal forms within these societies as taking on especially revolutionary dimensions in times of social stress and crisis. Thus, it is not the preservation of these communal forms so much as their role in a global revolutionary movement — of English factory workers, of Irish tenant farmers, of impoverished Irish workers in Britain, of Algerians struggling against French domination, of Russian villagers seeking to defend their way of life in the face of capitalist penetration, of Indian villagers and clans using remnants of older communal formations to struggle against dynastic or colonial oppression — that, heterogenous as it was, offered real possibilities of a transformation that was as global as was capitalism itself. It cannot be stressed enough that unrest and uprisings, as in Russia, often broke out only after the communal forms had, to a great extent, disappeared, at least on the surface, and struggles based upon or influenced by these social forms intersected with more modern-facing ones. Thus, it was not so much defense of these forms as they were, as seeing them as elements of revolutionary energy and renewal of society on a totally new basis.

As we have seen in this chapter, in his last years, Marx developed three new concepts of revolution alongside that of a united working-class uprising. First, in 1869–70, he conceptualized a British workers’ revolution sparked by an uprising in France and especially by an agrarian national revolution in Ireland, which would shake up the quasi-racist false consciousness of English workers and unite them with their immigrant Irish coworkers. Second, in his writings on the Paris Commune and his Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx theorizes working-class forms of revolution against capital that also target and abolish the modern centralized state while moving toward an emancipatory alternative. Third, Marx writes of revolutions beginning in non-capitalist agrarian societies like Russia that were imbued with communal village systems, which, in resisting capitalist encroachments, could become the base for a large social revolution. These movements could also connect to the revolutionary labor movement of Western Europe and North America, and they would, if victorious, be able to build on their archaic forms of communism as part of the struggle for a modern, democratic form of communism. In each of these struggles, groups subject to super-oppression, whether women or oppressed minorities, would likely play leading parts.

These three kinds of revolutions are a most important legacy of the late Marx, with equally important insights for today. This is the case, whether in analyzing the structures of oppression and domination, in conceptualizing all the multifarious forces of liberation that are in a position to challenge them, including all their contradictions with each other, and in theorizing what a real alternative to the exploitative, racist, sexist, heterosexist world of capitalism and its class domination would look like.

• 1

  Jean-Numa Ducange, “Une lettre inédite de Karl Marx à Jules Guesde sur la France, l’‘Orient’ et l’ ‘Occident’ (1879),” ActuelMarx73 (2023), p. 112.

• 2

  Could also be translated as “complement” or “complete,” the latter a stronger term that I have rendered here a bit more colloquially as “fulfill.”

• 3

  Raya Dunayevskaya, RosaLuxemburg,Women’sLiberation,andMarx’sPhilosophy of Revolution, second edition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press [1982] 1991), p. 175. This is particularly poignant given the fact that the original manuscript of the 1882 preface is in Engels’s hand (MEGA2 I/25: 297). Engels quotes the 1882 preface in full in his 1890 preface to a new German edition but does not discuss its implications, and he otherwise restricts the rest of his preface to Western Europe and North America (MECW 27: 53–60).

• 4

  Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, pp. 188, 190.

• 5

  Ibid., p. 186.

• 6

  Ibid., p. 190.

• 7

  Ibid., p. 183.

• 8

  Ibid., p. 187.

• 9

  Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [2010] 2016), p. 235.

• 10

  Isabelle Garo, Communism and Strategy: Rethinking Political Mediation (London: Verso, [2019] 2023), p. 214.

• 11

  Guilherme Nunes Pires, “Marx and Russia: The Russian Road and the Myth of Historical Determinism,” Ciencias Humanas e Socais, Vol. 1 (2023), p. 74.

• 12

  Michael Löwy, “La dialectique du progrès et l’enjeu actuel des mouvements sociaux,” Congrès Marx International. Centans de marxisme. Bilan critique et perspectives (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996), p. 200.

 

The spectre of revolution: The 1917 Russian revolution failed, but its influence remains strong even now

By Boris Kagarlitsky

Published 9 November, 2024

[Editor’s note: On the occasion of the anniversary of 1917 Russian revolution, jailed Russian Marxist Boris Yulievich Kagarlitsky sent the following text addressing fundamental questions of revolutionary development. Kagarlitsky is currently in a Russian penal colony serving a five-year sentence for speaking out against the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. To support the campaign for his release visit freeboris.info.]

First published in Russian at Rabkor’s Telegram channel. Translation and footnotes by Dmitry Pozhidaev for LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal.

This year, on November 7, public interest, regardless of political views, is not focused on the anniversary of the revolution but on the results of the elections in the United States. This is, in essence, correct. No matter how much we respect history, we must live in our time with its problems, passions and contradictions. However, if we are to speak about the 1917 Russian revolution, does it belong exclusively to history? The fact that even today people argue, debate, and even quarrel over assessments of those events proves that the topic has not lost its relevance.

I have said it many times before and will now repeat my thesis that the process initiated on November 7, 1917, is far from complete. The revolution failed, but its spectre still wanders — primarily in Russia.

In using the word “failure”, I risk provoking a wave of indignant comments pointing to the victory of the Reds in the Civil War, the successes of the first Five-Year Plans, and so on. Therefore, it is necessary to clarify. If the historical mission of October 1917 was to launch a process of socialist transformations in Russia and the world, we must unfortunately acknowledge that even where the political victory of the Bolsheviks and their followers seemed indisputable for a long time, capitalism now prevails. This applies to China as much as it does to the states that emerged from the former USSR.

The success of the Russian Revolution and other early socialist revolutions, including the Chinese, Vietnamese and Cuban, lies in the radical modernisation of various aspects of life in the societies that experienced them. Moreover, modernisation occurred everywhere at a rapid pace and on a scale that is virtually unattainable for countries that avoided revolutionary upheavals.

Thus, the successes are indisputable. Just as indisputable (at this moment) is the defeat. The society formed as a result of these upheavals did not become the realisation of a socialist project, did not provide for democratic self-governance of the working people, and did not create a mechanism for systematically addressing the problems and tasks of development recognised by humanity. The restoration of capitalism (whether official, as in Russia, or bashfully disguised under red flags, as in China — complete or partial) became nothing more than a consequence of this failure.

However, revolution is not merely the seizure of power by the left, the proclamation of slogans, or the re-labelling of ideologies. It is a substantive, albeit painful, resolution of capitalism’s accumulated contradictions, a transition to a new phase of development. The practice of contemporary capitalism shows that revolutionary tasks are still on the agenda.

I risk repeating myself (for I have spoken and written about this many times), but the revolutionary process, as we see from past experience, goes through several stages. From democratic popular mobilisation led by moderate reformers, through to the dictatorship of the revolutionary party (the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks), and then Thermidorian-Bonapartist regimes, to restoration. In fact, we are now in a phase of restoration, which has certainly stretched out but is inexorably approaching its end.

The content of the future era will be what is referred to in English history as the Glorious Revolution, when society again returns to the path of development marked by the original revolutionary upheavals, but without the excesses and extremes that characterised them previously.

A new era of reforms and revolutions is inevitably approaching. The only question is whether we can rise to the challenges posed by history.

Otto Rühle

From the Bourgeois to the Proletarian Revolution

1924

Table of Contents:From the Bourgeois to the Proletarian RevolutionForeword
1. The Bourgeois Revolutions
2. The Russian Problem
3. The Bourgeois-Capitalist State
4. Parliament and Parties
5. The Trade Unions
6. The Last Phase Of European Capitalism
7. Factory Organisation And Workers' Union (1)
7. Factory Organisation And Workers' Union (2)1. The Origins of the Unionist (Arbeiterunion) Movement
2. Nature and Goal of the AAUD-E
3. Structure of the Betriebsorganisation (Factory Organisation)
4. Structure of the Union (Councils' Organisation)
5. Tactics
6. Nature of Administration
7. Membership
8. The Councils' System
9. The Proletarian Revolution
Footnotes