Class conflict, political competition and social transformation: Critical perspectives on the social history of the Russian revolution

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Class conflict, politicalcompetition and socialtransformation: Criticalperspectives on the socialhistory of the RussianrevolutionJohn Eric Marot aa Studies at UCLAPublished online: 18 Jun 2008.

To cite this article: John Eric Marot (1994) Class conflict, politicalcompetition and social transformation: Critical perspectives on the socialhistory of the Russian revolution, Revolutionary Russia, 7:2, 111-163, DOI:10.1080/09546549408575621

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Class Conflict, Political Competition andSocial Transformation: Critical

Perspectives on the Social History of theRussian Revolution

JOHN ERIC MAROT

INTRODUCTION

What determined the victory of the Bolsheviks in 1917? In the past twodecades the social historians of the labour movement in late ImperialRussia have given a novel answer and transformed the field.Speaking in the broadest of terms, the practitioners of the latest trendin scholarship have shown in rich descriptive detail how workersparticipated in the Revolution to satisfy pressing material needs andinterests rooted in their practical everyday lives. On their account, the'logic' of this multifaceted economic struggle, in the context of acuteeconomic crisis, detonated among workers a variegated process ofpolitical organisation and developing political consciousness thatculminated in a majority arriving at Bolshevik positions andsupporting the Bolshevik-led seizure of power.1 This explanatorymotif has now emerged as the standard approach to the great socialtransformation of 1917. Indeed, by exhaustively recording, facts tohand, how workers were able to develop their politics and build theirorganisations 'from within', through their self-movement aroundwages, hours and working conditions, social historians have self-consciously challenged and overturned the previously dominant'political' view that unorganised and politically undeveloped workersachieved organisation and revolutionary ideas chiefly through theactivity of radical intellectuals autonomously organised in a party and

The author thanks Leopold Haimson and Moshe Lewin for reading and generously com-menting on an earlier draft of this article. He is especially grateful to Robert Brenner, whoseincisive advice helped him sharply formulate the thesis of this essay.

Revolutionary Russia, Vol.7, No.2, December 1994, pp.111-163PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON

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112 REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA

acting 'from the outside'.2 Nevertheless, while the previous party-political centred interpretation has been deservedly dethroned, thenew orthodoxy does not offer a superior alternative to it.

Fundamentally at issue is the failure of social historians properly topose the problem of a specific political outcome to the workers'struggles to secure their material well-being. In their view, the self-developing dynamic of the labour movement in 1917 automaticallygenerated the appropriate political response to the emergingopportunity, within the context of deep economic crisis, forrevolutionary social transformation. In some contrast, I shall arguethat, while it is true the working class developed its consciousnessand its organisation in struggle, there was always, as an integral partof that struggle, a competitive party-political moment that wasautonomous. Party-political competition functioned as the selectionmechanism by means of which workers chose from among rivalpolitical solutions, advanced by competing political parties, toeconomic crisis, and responded, as well, to the associated potentialfor the transition from one type of society to another, from capitalismto socialism. Indeed, the actual evolution and outcome of theworkers' movement in 1917 is incomprehensible without theautonomous political conflicts that were an irreducible aspect of theRevolution. But social historians reduce the logic of political struggle tothe logic of the economic struggle determined by economic crisis andsocial dislocation. Owing to this reduction the social interpretation ofthe Russian Revolution suffers from certain disabling weaknesses.Above all, social historians conjure away the political alternativesavailable to workers, along with the difficult political choices they hadto make. In consequence, the issue of outcome arises in two respects.

First, the outcome of the workers' continental-wide drive in 1917-21to secure their material well-being in times of economic calamitydiffered in different countries. In Russia, a revolutionarytransformation took place and a workers' state was founded. But, inthe West, no comparable revolutionary transition to socialism andSoviet power occurred during the German Revolution of 1918-19 andthe Italian Biennio Rosso of 1919-20, when war-induced political-economic crisis drove workers, in the metallurgical industriesespecially, to organise mass strikes and to participate in huge streetdemonstrations, to occupy factories and set up factory committees,and to join revolutionary parties in the tens and hundreds ofthousands.3 Despite the pronounced similarities of working-classstruggles in Berlin, Petrograd and Turin - in method of action in

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THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 113

developing organisational structures/ and in emerging revolutionarycurrents - arising from similarly severe economic dislocationsengendered by four years of world war, a deep-rooted crisis could notin itself shape working-class political response and determineoutcome.

Second, the method of social historians to forcibly extrudeorganised political competition from the workers' movement has theironic result of effecting a rapprochement with the old politicaltradition they wish to surpass. This is because they think that politicalparties and programmes - 'high politics' - is a sphere foreign to theworkers' immediate bread-and-butter concerns. But every struggleof the working class for economic improvement is a political struggle,at every point of its economic movement there is autonomouspolitical competition between diverse parties and trends which socialhistorians miss. In their approach, social historians have run togethera correct rejection of the old 'political' historiography, where theautonomous political moment was incorrectly located outside theworkers' movement, in the 'intelligentsia', with an incorrect rejectionof the autonomy of the political moment, now correctly located insidethe workers' movement.

It is the purpose of this essay to lend force and substance to thesevery general and abstract criticisms of the school of social history byexamining, as thoroughly and systematically as possible, the clearand coherent perspective contained in Strikes and Revolution in Russia,1917 (Princeton, 1989), by Diane P. Koenker and William G.Rosenberg. This ambitious and meticulously researched work is amajor contribution to scholarship on the Russian Revolution. Itstands out as a model of social history in that Rosenberg andKoenker, without ever formally discussing parties and politics, try tounderstand and theorise 'the forces that propel revolutionaryprocesses toward one outcome or another'.5 In Part I of my essay, andusing Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917 as a template, I trace theempirical and analytical weaknesses created for the field of socialhistory by Koenker and Rosenberg's exemplary decision not toinvestigate directly the various party-political organisations andprogrammes through which class conflict was mediated. I shallchallenge their far-reaching assumption that factory-centred strikeactivism within the context of grave economic crisis led workers to apolitical consensus, to support for the Bolsheviks, and tofundamental social transformation. I shall emphasise instead how thepolitical competition between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks

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inside and beyond the factory shaped the course of class conflict atthe point of production, and in the polity as a whole. And I shallargue how Bolshevik success in this competitive political contest -and it alone - propelled the transition of urban Russia from'capitalism' to socialism.6

In Part II, I bring the labour movement in Russia and in the Westunder comparative analysis and furnish additional evidence andrelated arguments in favour of the irreducibility of political outcometo an economic substrate. The work under consideration is appositefor this comparative purpose. Unlike much of the scholarship on theRussian Revolution, which suffers badly from national insularity,Koenker and Rosenberg unhesitatingly adopt an internationalistperspective and place the workers' struggles in Russia squarelywithin the broader context of the 'explosion' of working-classmilitancy in 1917-23 in Europe and America.7 They do so for thepurpose of arguing, rightly, against an exceptionalist, providentialaccount of the Bolshevik triumph. Nevertheless, the logic of labourmilitancy at the workplace to meet basic material needs did not haveuniform political consequences because it could not determine aBolshevik-type victory elsewhere in the industrialised world. Thisvariability of outcome once again points prima facie to party-politicalcompetition as the independent, determining variable. A fullunderstanding of the Bolshevik achievement would apparentlyrequire a systematic and probing historical analysis of the politicalconflicts and party politics that drove the 1917 Revolution toward itsunique and epochal outcome.

In Part III, and with the foregoing injunction in mind, I return tothe Russian Revolution and straightforwardly narrate the mainpolitical conflicts between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks with aview to highlighting their significance in determining the end resultof the 1917 Revolution. In the process, I sketch the outlines of analternate paradigm.

I. THE SOCIAL-HISTORICAL DIALECTIC OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

The enduring social-scientific achievement of Koenker and Rosenbergand of the social historians generally has been to annihilate theconventional view of the masses as invariably acting impulsively,anarchically and shortsightedly, particularly in times of revolution. Itis this school's greatest merit. Delving closely into the chosen focus oftheir work, the 'dialectic' of the revolutionary process at the level of

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the factory, Koenker and Rosenberg unfailingly emphasise how themilitant strikes of 1917 radically enhanced the power and self-confidence of the working class, and how they also provided theindispensable practical basis upon which workers swiftly constructedthe varied superstructural institutions they required to regulate thedifferent aspects of their self-movement, trade unions, Soviets and,most especially, the factory committees.

In 1917 factory-centred strikes were the 'flashpoint of labour-management relations' and these class relations, in turn, 'constitutedthe core of the process for struggle for power in the revolutionaryarena'.8 Accordingly, Rosenberg and Koenker observe closely howeach strike victory over and against management bolstered theworkers' resolve to go further. They follow with painstakingprecision the rapid consolidation of ad hoc strike committees intopermanent, elected factory committees with growing powers ofsupervision and control over management in the most diverse areas,especially over hiring and firing. But each advance of workers' powerat the point of production, achieved through militant strike activity,was fraught with peril so long as hierarchical, 'bourgeois-democratic'relations of property were retained.

As workers developed a sense of their strength, expandedshopfloor democracy, and made despotic inroads into property rightsand managerial prerogatives, property owners and managers becameincreasingly resistant. Koenker and Rosenberg show how theyorganised in self-defence and struck back, in late summer andautumn, with closures, lockouts and outright sabotage. Not contentto use economic coercion alone, census society began to mobilisepolitically as well, through the officer corps, to reassert control. Thecumulative economic result of this intense and all-sided politicaloffensive was skyrocketing inflation, mass unemployment andcollapsing wages. For workers, then, a virtually unbroken string ofstrike victories at the point of production, from February on, far fromsafeguarding jobs, wages and working conditions had, in the end,failed to preserve even minimally adequate standards of living.

Confronted by an implacable political-economic employer offensive- a direct consequence of entrepreneurs losing interest inmaintaining, let alone expanding, production to pay for workers'economic and, above all, political gains achieved through shopfloorstruggles - workers became increasingly contentious, intransigenteven, precisely over issues of control and power on the shopfloor.Indeed, the workers' loss of faith in the viability of collective

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bargaining agreements in conditions of galloping inflation and massunemployment largely determined them, Koenker and Rosenbergargue, to take a quantum leap forward. Initially held back by the ill-defined immensity of the task, yet impelled by dire need, the workersset out in late summer and early autumn to seize the means ofproduction from the owners, to replace all organs of managerialauthority with elected bodies of the working-class, and to begin torun production themselves.

Thus, the process of conflict between labour and management inthe factories of Russia, Rosenberg and Koenker agree, had finally'encouraged both sides to coalesce' along 'class positions'. "The verypatterns of mobilisation . . . contributed to the formation of a cohesiveworking-class in Russia, conscious of its collective position in thesocial order. Each strike, whether directly experienced or only sharedthrough the press, contributed to this sense of cohesion'. 'In theeconomic conditions of 1917, with a massive decline in productivityand utter uncertainty about Russia's economic future', workers'began to see themselves as common partners in the struggle againstthis collapse'.9

Finally, beyond achieving a sense of class identity through militantshopfloor-centred actions, the steady accumulation of workers' dailystrike experience, coupled with growing economic crisis, was alsofostering a molecular transformation of property relations towardssocialism. For the workers' innumerable workplace-centred andstrike-bound actions, taken in the aggregate, were taking them,almost insensibly, towards the collective organisation, of production,through the mechanism of a democratically structured, worker-runSoviet state. Complementarily, the politically cohering effect 'above',caused by the transition to socialism implicit in the mass strikeprocess 'below', became manifest in the workers' explicit acceptanceof the crowning political measure required to complete this transition:the Soviet seizure of state power. This acceptance was expressed inworkers drawing close to and, ultimately, rallying around theBolsheviks, who, it so happened, had made 'All Power to the Soviets'the centrepiece of their political platform. The workers saw it in theirinterest - indeed, had no choice - but to support the Bolshevik-ledseizure of power if they were successfully to negotiate the difficultpassage to the new society.

The foregoing overriding 'dialectic' of the process of revolutionarysocial transformation centrally characterises social historicalscholarship on the Russian Revolution.

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Setting Up the Problem

Rosenberg and Koenker rightly hold that most workers went intomotion on the factory floor around issues of vital concern to themindependently of party prompting, and that workers sought, at first,to achieve gains within the established system of property. Theproblem is that they interpret the observed evolution of workersbeyond it, toward a democratic socialism, in terms of an explanatorymodel that grants political parties in this transition passive anddetermined roles, not determining and active ones.

Koenker and Rosenberg are undoubtedly correct to argue thatworkers became aware of their immediate interests and coalescedaround class positions, in the narrowest sense of the term, largely in amyriad of spontaneously erupting workplace struggles. And it is alsotrue that it was plainly beyond the power of any organised group orparty to determine class conflict, or the Revolution, conceived as thesum-total of these work-centred antagonisms exploding in a relativelycompressed period within the context of a profound economic crisis.In this abstract or general sense, Revolution and economic crisis wereless the willed product of the activity of politically organisedindividuals than the given background condition against which allclasses and parties acted, and in which the working-class became'largely conscious of its identity, a class formed in the process of thesestruggles at the workplace'.10 Conflict over wages, hours and workingconditions was built into the relationship between management andlabour and Rosenberg and Koenker are right to say what 'gave manyworkers (and others) a sense of who they were, or at least a sense ofwho they were not' was this conflicted relationship, not 'slogans ormore elaborate forms of ideology' generated by political parties.11

Nevertheless, the politics of the Russian Revolution were decidedlymuch more than the partyless politics of class 'identity'. Thesignificance of fuller and more complex political ideas, advanced bythe Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks notably, cannot be grasped at thislevel of abstraction.

But larger significance party-political conflict escapes Rosenbergand Koenker because they believe that the failure of 'routine' andeven 'revolutionary' factory-level patterns of strike activism tomaintain production and meet the needs of workers by itself indicatedto all workers, regardless of party affiliation or political outlook, theappropriate, politically credible alternative. By constantly stressingthat, and how, workers quickly achieved, through their factorycommittees, a hegemonic 'identity' on the factory floor, as expressed

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their willingness and ability to strike virtually at will,12 Rosenberg andKoenker unfortunately end up missing the key point that acutepolitical conflict did eventually arise between the Bolsheviks andMensheviks precisely because these working-class leadershipsexplicitly disagreed about the political implications of the workers'seemingly untrammelled power at the point of production.

I shall argue that workers forged a dynamic and richer sense ofseparate 'identity' through manifold actions to satisfy pressingmaterial interests, and it is in relation to the complex problem ofsecuring a living wage, acceptable working conditions and reasonablehours that the relationship between party-politics and the strikeprocess must be assessed. In the section below I shall try to show theweakness of Koenker and Rosenberg's depoliticised approach to thestrike process by showing how the workers' transformation of therelations of property at the point of production and their seizure ofpower, accomplished to preserve jobs and maintain living standards,cannot be understood apart from the outcome of successive party-political conflicts inside and beyond the factory which determined thetransition to socialism by providing workers both the opportunity,and the need, to select this revolutionary course of action and,correlatively, to reject all alternatives to it.

Political Conflict and the Strike Process

Koenker and Rosenberg ably chronicle the failure of a multitude ofdiscrete, factory-centred strike processes to overcome economic crisisand meet workers' needs. But the aggregate political significance ofthese multiple failures was not self-evident to workers. In fact, it wassubject to varied interpretation by the major working-class politicalformations in play. Specifically, Bolsheviks and Mensheviksunderstood the failure of strikes to achieve their purpose incontrasting ways causing these two working-class political vanguardsto issue to workers competing 'slogans', or formulated politicalobjectives, along with a summons to choose between conflictingstrategies of action to achieve (or defend) specific goals connected tothese objectives.* Bolshevik and Menshevik workers sharply

* Political competition requires a minimum of two parties. Examining theactivity of additional parties is not necessary for the purposes of my argument. Ihave restricted my choice of parties to the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviksbecause, of all working class formations, only these trends possessed an

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divided over the broader, supra-firm significance of workers'institutionalised power at the point of production. They fought overwhich broad political objectives the working class should set foritself, and they debated how it should use its collective power torespectively achieve them. As a result, these politically committedand party-organised workers engaged in systematic and principledpolitical conflict and argument. But before one can assess therelevance of this political struggle to the outcome of the Revolutionone must first establish what the conflicting assessments and viewswere, something which Koenker and Rosenberg do not adequatelydo for reasons which will shortly become more apparent.

Both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks fundamentally agreed thatstriking alone was yielding ever-diminishing political and economicreturns, particularly in the period leading up to, and from, theKornilov rising. But, significantly, militants in both parties drew, andcontinued to draw, diametrically opposed political lessons from thisgrowing experience.

The Mensheviks responded to the disturbing failure of strikes torealise their purpose by appealing ever more strongly to workers torefrain from taking further strike action to press what they judged tobe the workers' increasingly irresponsible and unrealistic demands.In the Menshevik view, the workers were unintentionally destroyingthe economy and raising the spectre of civil war as a result of wilfulstrike action that had triggered a crisis of business confidence amongproperty owners. Consequently, to establish a political climatefavourable to business and to investment minimally required thatworking-class organs of authority at the level of the firm be deprivedof control over important areas, particularly over hiring and firing, sothat management could make profit-maximising investmentdecisions freely and confidently. Certainly, the workers should notseize power, expel management and expropriate the owners.Menshevik Minister of Labour Skobelev's oft-cited circular of 22August, 'Concerning Worker Interference in Hiring and Firing',spelled out the directly pro-management political conclusions to bedrawn from the foregoing analysis.

The Bolsheviks countered by arguing, pertinently andsystematically, that the demands of the workers around the most

independent political significance. Other working-class currents lacked eitherpolitical significance, for example, the anarchists, or political independence, forexample, the Socialist Revolutionaries.

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diverse of workplace issues were fully responsible and realisticbecause they had been raised in response to a war-induced economiccrisis that had long preceded the strikes, not arisen from them. Thefailure of management to meet the workers' claims on matters of vitalconcern to them was sufficient reason to have workers themselvesrealise their interests by supporting the Soviet seizure of power as analternate and legitimate method to ward off economic collapse. TheBolsheviks organised explicitly to advance, defend and popularisetheir minority viewpoint by participating in workers' struggles on theshopfloor, and elsewhere, and by everywhere insistently callingworkers' attention to the larger political requirement - 'All Power tothe Soviets' - for realising a 'constitutional' factory order andovercoming the economic crisis. Since most workers did not, at first,link the Bolshevik demand for Soviet power to their interests andneeds at the point of production the task of the Bolsheviks wascomplex but straightforward: 'To patiently explain' (Lenin) the natureof the connection and its political necessity and, more generally, toprovide workers with an understanding of what the Bolsheviksthought was required politically to win.

Throughout 1917, then, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks advancedcompeting, internally coherent arguments in favour of theirrespective political solutions. Both leaderships agreed that workerscould not solve their problems through shopfloor strugglesexclusively, as shown by the developing failure of narrow, factory-based, 'syndicalist' tactics to maintain production and meet the needsof workers. But, for their part, the Mensheviks proposed to restoreproduction under management control. On the other hand theBolsheviks wanted workers to think about the potential success ofanother strategy designed to have workers themselves organiseproduction collectively, and in their interests. The triumph of thisplan was accordingly geared to - because premised upon - theassociated seizure of power at all levels, especially the seizure of statepower. This strategic Bolshevik political purpose led to systematic,principled and long-term conflict with Mensheviks because the latter,mindful of the limitations set by their chosen policy of 'dual power',were always advancing a fundamentally different political solution toworkers' problems.

Clearly, most workers very quickly endorsed the political objectivesthe Mensheviks set for the working class by voting Mensheviks (andSRs) into office, from factory committee to Congress of Soviets. TheMensheviks, in their view, had embarked on the politically correct

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course to critically support the policies of the ProvisionalGovernment. The broad masses 'supported the strategy of dualpower as well as the leadership that proposed to implement it'because they believed that this was the only way to realise the 'eight-hour work day, confiscation of the gentry's land, and a democraticrepublic'.13

Conversely, a clear majority rejected the idea of the Bolsheviks totransform extant property relations and establish a socialist economyand a revolutionary government, both based on and run by Soviets,because the Bolshevik outlook did not appear to be promising, to berealistic, because it did not seem able to realise this 'three-tail'programme. In fact, dual power would not have worked for anyconsiderable length of time without the support of workers andsoldiers, and all working-class parties, including, initially, that of theBolshevik party, which offered no clear alternative to the Mensheviksin the first critical days and weeks of the revolution, when thesituation was extremely fluid, when a majority of workers had not yetfirmly committed themselves to the Mensheviks.

In sum, the response of workers to developing economic crisis was,initially and for some time, for negative and positive reasons,Menshevik. Negatively, the Bolsheviks presented no alternative tothe Mensheviks. No principled differences on the immediate courseof action taken existed in the leadership of the RSDLP. Positively, theMensheviks were able to make, and would continue to make, aconvincing case for their proposed political solutions to workers'grievances, as well as successfully to convey to workers the great andinevitable dangers they courted should they choose to ignoreMenshevik political counsel and select an alternate course of action.Still other workers listened, reserved judgement, and awaited furtherdevelopments.

If it has been necessary to dwell on how two organised working-class political vanguards sought to come to grips with - by makingpolitical sense of - the 'demonstration effect' of wilful striking onmanagers, it is only because Koenker and Rosenberg simply do notattribute much significance to these competing assessments ofworkers' power in the development of workers' power. Andunderstandably so, from their standpoint. For the causal mechanismthrough which the eventual shift of worker support to the Bolshevikswas finally effected, and the transition to socialism ultimatelysecured, lies largely outside the sphere of political competitionproper. On their account, the transition is chiefly to be sought in the

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very process of striking, within the 'specific historical conjuncture'.14

As Russian 'capitalism progressively weakened'15 and broughtfurther hardships to workers, and in light of the evident failure ofwilful striking to avert the impending catastrophe, workers wereincreasingly pressured to use their accumulated power to expropriateoutright the factory owners and run the apparatus of production byand for themselves. Since the Mensheviks had never stoppeddenouncing this, in their eyes, foolhardy and dangerous course,workers gradually became disenchanted with them. Workerswithdrew their support for 'dual power' and prepared to turn to anyparty willing to call for the seizure of undivided power by workers.As it turned out, only the Bolsheviks had been advocating preciselythis uncompromisingly revolutionary course of action. Koenker andRosenberg conclude then that workers, spontaneously impelled bygrowing, circumstantially determined economic difficulties, moved,hesitantly perhaps but in any case naturally and rationally, to supportLenin's partisans.

The probative value of the foregoing developed explanation of thesources of Bolshevik support needs to be very carefully established.

The Political Economy of Crisis

Deteriorating working conditions, longer hours, declines in realwages, hunger, the senseless slaughter of millions at the front - suchwere the devastating background conditions to the RussianRevolution, as well as its cause. But it is arguable that thesesupremely difficult socio-economic circumstances, which grew noless difficult with the passage of time, in any meaningful sense'caused' workers to endorse the Bolshevik programme and supporttheir politics, as Koenker and Rosenberg characteristically maintain.In fact, the spiralling economy actually produced, between Februaryand October, divergent political responses that were in self-consciousconflict. To seek the wellspring of Bolshevik support in theprogressive debilitation of the economy alone, outside the sphere ofpolitical competition altogether, is to get more than Rosenberg andKoenker have analytically bargained for because economic crisismotivated workers to select not just one, but multiple, andcompeting, political solutions to their problems. All reductionistexplanations suffer from a redundant causality. Koenker andRosenberg's is no exception.

From the standpoint of logical argument the analytical result ofKoenker and Rosenberg's reductionism is self-contradictory: the

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constantly worsening economic situation 'caused' workers at thebeginning of the Russian Revolution, in February-March, to supportthe Menshevik policy of dual power, just as it subsequently 'caused'them, towards the end of the Revolution, in September-October, toendorse the contrary Bolshevik call for 'All Power to the Soviets'. Fromthe standpoint of the facts, their reductionism causes them to drawno sharp distinction between determined circumstances - thehistorically given, unwilled condition of progressive economic crisis,war and Revolution, and determining ones - the consciously willedactions and ideas of political parties. The blurring of the two issues inpractice was not in an eclectic amalgam of willed and unwilleddeterminants but in a clear foregrounding of the latter. In insisting defacto if not de jure on an economic determinism, Koenker andRosenberg in practice deprive workers of a selection mechanism -political competition - by means of which they could choose fromamong different party-political responses to 'crisis'. And so, theincreasingly uniform background condition of growing economicbreakdown is foregrounded, to appear in the structure of theirexplanation as the determining determination. The workers' strengthin the factories, and the consciousness of that strength, acquiredthrough the experience of striking, in good time and in the givencircumstances, self-selected a revolutionary-socialist, Bolshevikoutcome, not a liberal-reformist, Menshevik one.

To be very specific, on Rosenberg and Koenker's empiricist accountof the Russian Revolution, the political solution to workers' factory-centred and strike-bound problems needed no autonomousconceptual specification and political definition. On the contrary, thissolution naturally suggested itself to workers because, in Koenkerand Rosenberg's view, strikes and the strike process 'did not justreflect the way workers, managers, and political figures thoughtabout social and economic relationships. Much more powerfully,they changed the way these participants perceived the politicalprocess'.16 The socialist political solution - state ownership of themeans of production - 'understandably' became attractive toworkers. In promoting it the Bolsheviks were merely telling workerswhat the workers were already telling themselves, thanks to theworkers' special insight - their direct, 'experiential' access to theirown experience. Consequently, Koenker and Rosenberg affirm theself-evidently attractive character of this solution to workers as it was'extremely likely' that the 'issues revealed in management-labourstruggles . . . propelled workers toward the Bolshevik camp and

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would have done so at this point in the revolutionary process [latespring] even had the party's own agitation efforts been less intense'.17

Indeed, the socialist solution 'became more attractive even to thosemobilised workers who were not otherwise persuaded by theBolsheviks'.18

Through these ever-so-rare and ever-so-subtle aforementionedoppositions, then, Koenker and Rosenberg discreetly affirm that theimmediate experience of strikes and their outcomes was not just asource of insight and learning for workers at any one point - anunexceptional proposition -but the very different and, I think, highlycontroversial proposition that the strike process alone ultimatelyproved to be the recurrent source of singular insight and learning -such as to render any party-political interpretation of, andintervention, in the experience of labour-management conflict largelyredundant or superfluous.

Pace Rosenberg and Koenker, no altered perception of the politicalprocess could arise directly from, or be immediately shaped by,factory-centred strike experience. The reverse was true: strikeexperience itself was (pre-)conceptualised in distinctly political ways,especially in times of revolution. In itself, or outside the politicalprocess, the experience of striking could never select its own politicalinterpretation, as Menshevik-Bolshevik political conflict over strikesignificance indubitably proves. For the workers' politicalcomprehension of the act of striking was modified only through theautonomous political competition of the Bolsheviks and theMensheviks principally - by their competing arguments about thewider, political significance of the strike process. And as the act ofstriking was inserted in society so was the workers' politicalunderstanding of social relationships modified by these two parties inequally, and equally different, political ways. This politicaldifferentiation took time to evolve. It became manifest and sharplydefined only in the period immediately leading up to, andsubsequently from, the Kornilov revolt of 25 August.

In August and especially in September, after Kornilov's defeat,when many workers began preparing overtly to realise the transitionto socialism by preparing to rapidly dismantle all organs of authoritynot accountable to them, at the level of the firm and in the polity,Koenker and Rosenberg remark parenthetically and matter-of-factlyhow these workers largely abandoned the strike tactic itself, forsookthe Mensheviks, and sought 'relief through revolutionary politics' bysupporting 'with various degrees of commitment and enthusiasm'

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the Bolshevik seizure of power.19 But Rosenberg and Koenker do notadequately explain this astonishing reversal of political strategyeffected by ever greater numbers of workers. Their just-so account ofchange in the basic orientation of workers towards the Bolshevikparty is a revelation. On the other hand, given the politicallyrestrictive premises of their approach, Koenker and Rosenberg's adhoc introduction of the Bolsheviks on to the scene should not reallycome as a surprise. They really cannot explain workers' strategic shiftaway from wilful striking and toward the willing seizure of statepower as the specific result of the Bolshevik conquest of the workers totheir politics. For in all the intense, months' long, political debatesbetween Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in factory assembly, trade unionand Soviet, Rosenberg and Koenker basically stressed what united,not divided, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks (and the SRs) withrespect to striking workers, so that they never gave themselves theopportunity properly to relate the determining political significanceof their division to the outcome of the revolution. As they say,Mensheviks and Bolsheviks 'served largely as workers and associalists rather than as party agitators'. '[PJarty labels weresignificantly absent from strike activity as it was considered a symbolof class solidarity rather than partisan policy'.20 Nevertheless, theseexclusory oppositions seem unreasonable because the specificpolitical aim each trend consistently sought to advance in variousways among periodically striking workers is unjustifiably eliminatedfrom consideration.

Thus, Koenker and Rosenberg's key notion that the Bolshevikswere merely telling the workers what the workers already intuitivelyknew, through direct experience of the strike process, is anempirically dubious proposition because it works only by arbitrarilyhighlighting the politically uncontroversial aspects of Bolshevik andMenshevik attitudes toward striking workers, by off-handedlydevaluing evidence of political struggle about strike experience, andby brushing aside the importance of argument among politicallyorganised workers assessing the larger significance of strike outcome.Against this ever-present flesh and blood political 'persuasion', whenBolsheviks and Mensheviks called on workers to exercise judgement,to choose a course of action, and to define themselves politically,Koenker and Rosenberg subtly and invariably invoke and mobilise anincorporeal 'logic' of movement toward socialism that 'followeddirectly from the cumulative economic and political experience of thepreceding months', and which caused workers to adopt increasingly

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uniform 'maximalist' (Bolshevik) positions.21 Is it any wonder, then,that they give so little critical reflection to the fact that the Bolshevikshad to argue for weeks and months on end to convince mostmobilised workers that their alternative, summed up in the slogan'AH Power to the Soviets', was indeed 'attractive', the only way out,and not one designed to bring utter catastrophe as the Mensheviksuntiringly warned?

The point is that Bolshevik-Menshevik conflict remains tangentialthroughout their account, a distant rumble, because ostensiblyoperating independently of political parties was an apolitical, non-party economic 'logic' that was progressively annealing all politicaldivisions among workers and showing them the way forward,towards workers' power and socialism. Koenker and Rosenberg strippolitical competition of any determining power of its own since theyultimately affirm a direct, unmediated connection between theimpossibility of meaningful material improvement in conditions ofeconomic crisis on the one hand, and the struggle for Soviet power onthe other: they conceptualise the Bolshevik political response apartfrom the political competition that mediated determined anddetermining components of the revolutionary process in a specific -because specifically determining - way.

Koenker and Rosenberg thus apparently assume the transition tosocialism in order to explain how all evolving (off-stage) politicaldifferences within the workers' movement in 1917 were bound to betransitory, destined to meet, merge and vanish into the Bolshevikparty. This capital assumption can again be tracked from one moreangle in the relationship Rosenberg and Koenker see between thepolitical response of workers, directly arising from the 'crisis' itself,and the movement from one set of property relations to another,towards socialism:

For Russian workers in particular, revolution meant that the'ground rules' of strikes. . . began in 1917 to dissolve . . . therange of workers' assumptions about the rules rapidly expandedas events unfolded . . . In other words the strike process itselfhelped shape a new range of beliefs, attitudes, and values in1917, for workers as well as their employers, affecting the limitsof political and economic possibility.22

Even more forcefully, the strike process itself 'mobilised workers,articulated their goals, and structured socially cohering perceptionsand identities' and, above all, 'changed the frontiers of political

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struggle' by pushing back political and economic limits, beyond thoseset by Tsarist class and property relations.23 Again, Koenker andRosenberg clearly predicate or subordinate all other aspects of therevolution, political competition included, to the strike processwhich, on their interpretation, is the final subject, the all-inclusivedriving force of social transformation.

In accordance with the foregoing conceptual schema, theoverarching political response of workers, through the strike process,to the combined weakening of capitalism and the unravelling of'routine' labour-management relations, was realised in the workers''need for state intervention' and the need for the even more radicalalternative of 'state ownership of the means of production' -socialism.24 Thus, further confirmation is hereby obtained that it wasthe ongoing critical transition 'below' from capitalism to socialismthat constituted a fundamental constraint under which needyworkers chose their political goals 'above', and, in turn, decided justhow they would respond to the Bolsheviks, and to all other politicalformations. Koenker and Rosenberg are therefore analytically poorlyplaced to see workers authentically exercising their judgement andmaking decisions in the domain of politics for these deliberativeactions were actually being overridden by an epochal transition tosocialism spontaneously emerging from workers' politicallyuncoordinated, factory-centred, disparate and elementary strikeaction. Indeed, this particularised form of social action constituted the'key element in the "particle physics" of Russia's broad revolutionaryprocess', to use Koenker and Rosenberg's memorably revelatorymetaphysical expression.25

In sum, Rosenberg and Koenker must and do interpret thetransition from capitalism to socialism as a direct consequence of thefailure of myriad of individualised actions by workers to secure theirnarrowly defined economic interests. Since out of the failure of thestrike process appropriate political lessons and political objectivesself-synthesised - emanated - Koenker and Rosenberg can neitherlogically nor empirically look upon the autonomous political debatesbetween the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks over alternate strategiesof action between February and October as anything more thandeceptive semblances, illusive shows, mere epiphenomena. Koenkerand Rosenberg deprive these ideological struggles of their intrinsiccharacter and significance, of their point, because they could not alterthe progressive weakening of capitalism that was dissolving thecapitalist 'ground rules' of strikes. All the participants could do in

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diverse political struggles was either to verbally ratify or verballycondemn the ineluctability of this process but not alter its course inany materially meaningful way. Therefore, and to avoid allanalytically and empirically self-defeating consequences for theirsocial interpretation of (off-stage) successive political conflicts, fromFebruary to October, Koenker and Rosenberg must and do confiscateany independently determining significance to the variegated andmobile political divisions within the workers' movement in 1917.More plainly, these divisions can be safely ignored for the purposesof social historical research, analysis and understanding.

Koenker and Rosenberg's Work as Representative of the Trend of SocialHistory

The external relationship posited by Koenker and Rosenberg betweenpolitical competition and the unilinearly self-developing politicaldynamic of the workers' movement is a defining feature of socialhistorical scholarship. For what distinguishes social historical analysisis not the general and correct notion that experiencing unendurablematerial conditions impelled working people to struggle in 1917, it isthe more specific and dubious idea that the masses' unwillingness tolive as before moved them independently of party-political activity in aparticular political direction. For example, in Red Petrograd: Revolutionin the Factories, one of the more illuminating and probing accounts ofthe Russian Revolution, S.A. Smith defends the ultimate reduction ofpolitics to the spontaneous drive of workers to meet materialinterests. He vigorously criticises traditional historians for not seeing'the extent to which the struggle to secure basic material needsprovided the motive force behind the radicalisation of the workersand peasants'. But, it is one thing for Smith and the social historiansto say, correctly, that the jagged crisis movements of a war-wrackedeconomy between February and October 1917 underpinned the'astonishing political developments of this annus mirabilis'.26 It is quiteanother to reductively hold that the zigzag course of the economybelow merely expressed radical social transformation and thuscomplementarity dictated the radical course of politics above in thatyear. Yet, it is the economic reductionism that symptomatically comesthrough in their accounts. Most social historians explain shifts in thepolitical support of workers from one party to another by adverting todevelopments external to the sphere of political competition proper,among the determined circumstances of war and economic crisis.Since the elemental, politically inchoate pressures of hunger and war-

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weariness provide the masses with both motive force and directionalguidance, they alone are determinative of outcome.

For example, Smith writes that the 'debates on workers' control inthe autumn of 1917 arose from the fact that the movement forworker's control had a relentless forward-moving dynamic'.27 What,however, was the nature of this imperious forward movement?Where can its origins be pinpointed? If, on Smith's view, the politicaldebates around the movement for workers' control arose from themovement towards workers' control in the autumn, then what are weto make of the debates of the spring and summer, when Smith couldfind no such unremittingly forward-moving dynamic in connection tothis issue? Given that hard and fast evidence of a relentless drive forgenuine workers' control in the spring and summer is absent, shouldwe not conclude that the debates were, as a matter of fact, aboutmoving forward, backward or standing still on the issue of the largerpolitical requirement of Soviet power to make workers' control realand effective? When, in the autumn, there did begin to appear a'relentlessly forward-moving dynamic' to fend off disaster throughthe seizure of state power is there not a reasonable basis to concludethat we are registering the effects of worker repudiation of theMensheviks effected by the Bolsheviks? For once the workers rejectedthe lead of the Mensheviks, and the Bolsheviks won them throughargument about the political significance of workers' evolvingexperience, to Bolshevik positions on workers' control, politicalcontroversy on this issue dissipated as growing numbers of workersdrew the necessary political conclusions. After all, only theBolsheviks had argued that workers could not stand still, only theyhad insisted throughout, as Smith quite rightly says, that 'workers'control implied a kind of 'dual power' in the factory which, like dualpower at state level, was intrinsically unstable and necessitatedresolution at the expense of one class or another'.28 But, to repeat, amajority of workers disagreed for quite some time with the Bolshevikimplication, or did not even understand it, and as long as this was thecase there would be no progressive dynamic towards effectiveworkers' control.

Smith's formulation of the causal mechanism underlying thedynamic of forward movement on the shopfloor (and beyond) isemblematic of the tendency of social historians to undermine thenotion that the outcome of political conflict in 1917 was choice-determining.29 His formulation is characteristically topsy-turvy, andshould be turned right-side up to read, roughly: It was because the

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Bolsheviks, in the debates on workers' control, moved steadfastly(but flexibly) forward with the politics of workers' control tied to theseizure of state power that workers, in light of the growing,empirically given failure of the Mensheviks to avert the impendingcatastrophe, and in order to resolve it at the expense of capitalists andlandlords, were won to Bolshevik positions on workers' control and,once won, began resolutely and consciously to move forwardtowards deliberate control and the pre-meditated soviet seizure ofpower in the autumn of 1917. This formulation of the inter-relationships between competitive politics, class formation and socialtransformation corresponds to all the incontrovertible facts, takensingly, unearthed by Smith, Rosenberg, Koenker and so many othersocial historians. Above all, by establishing their correct, causalinterconnection, the formulation advances an understanding of therevolutionary process in 1917 that brings irito sharp relief the elementof critical awareness and advance planning that uniquelycharacterised the October Revolution.30

But social historians are prepared to deny the uniqueness of theOctober Revolution precisely by way of formally and archetypallycounterposing the allegedly 'spontaneous' outcome of therevolutionary process between February and October to the sphere ofpolitical competition: "The end results of "Bolshevism" and "Sovietpower"' Allan Wildman concludes, 'were far more a reflection of thespontaneous forces of the revolution, as opposed to the rationalconstructs of ideologues and political leaders, than either Soviet orWestern historiography have characteristically acknowledged'.31

Wildman's unambiguous subordination of non-Bolshevik conscious-ness to Bolshevik spontaneity is supremely paradoxical. But it neatlysums up his own work, as well as the work of most social historians,of Mandel, Smith and Koenker, of Suny, Rosenberg, Galili andRaleigh, to mention but the better known.

With most social historians, then, the unconscious, unwilled,determined component of the revolutionary process systematicallyprevails over the conscious, willed, determining one making a'naturalisation' of it 'spontaneously' acceptable to many. As Smithsays, the 'attempts of workers to defend their living standards and topreserve jobs led them, to a large extent "spontaneously", to see inthe revolutionary options offered by the Bolsheviks the "natural"solution to their immediate problems'.32 But, again, the link made bythe Bolsheviks between the workers' efforts to defend their materialinterests, which were indeed largely spontaneous, and the yet-to-be-

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created political conditions under which they could do sosuccessfully, appears 'natural' only in retrospect. At the time, theBolshevik connection seemed to most workers (and not they alone)unrealistic, artificial, contrived, whereas the equally ramifiedMenshevik connection was the 'naturally' convincing, self-evidentone. Too many social historians are blind to the significance of thisstark fact for a proper understanding of the 1917 Revolution. Byspeaking of a conscious, historically specific, manifold and internallycontradictory political process as if it were a spontaneous naturaldevelopment, social historians simply impose their own ideas of whatwas natural and intuitive, and what was by design and 'artifice', whatwas practical and realistic, and what was not.

The Autonomous Significance of Politics

In a demanding and probing essay Leopold Haimson has subtly buteffectively criticised the social historians for their generalised failureto recognise that the revolutionary process in 1917 was alwaysperceived from within one of a multiplicity of autonomously formedpolitical standpoints.33 'Fundamentally at issue', wrote Haimson, wasthe full recognition that 'collective representations' of various socialclasses and groups did not 'magically spring out of the patterns oftheir own collective existence' but were consciously developed, byautonomous intellectuals most especially. These autonomousrepresentations, once formed, played a crucial role in shaping'political attitudes' and guiding political behaviour, especially duringperiods of revolution, 'when individuals and groups had to establish- indeed decide - who they were in order to determine how theyshould feel, think, and ultimately act'.34

It is not necessary, though, to endorse Haimson's larger argument,of which the foregoing view is a part, that just because the very'patterns of collective action, the attitudes, indeed the very sense ofidentity' required interpretation, that therefore these patterns,attitudes and identities were uniquely and completely constituted inthe interpretation, and thus irreducible to any empirically identifiable'set of "objective" social characteristics, however subtly defined'.35 Byconceptualising the generalising and synthesising political moment ofthe workers' movement as a phenomenon existing outside it (in aKantian demarcationist sense), in the 'intelligentsia', Haimsonreaffirms the idealism that fundamentally characterises the politicaltradition. In this regard, in his exchange with Haimson, Rosenbergquite properly noted that Haimson 'allies himself firmly if implicitly

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against' the social historians who minimally tend to 'infer attitudes ormentalities' of social classes from a given, objectively constituted'socio-economic system in which all members of Russian societyfound themselves' - not from ascriptive categories attributable tointellectuals.36

It is not the purpose of this essay to critically assess thepresuppositions that lie behind Haimson's notion, central to thehistoriographic school of which he is the most sophisticated andpowerful exponent, that the radical political ideology of the workers'movement in Russia was reducible to the discursive construct ofradical intellectuals, that the attitudes and mentalities of workersultimately vehicled or expressed the collective experience andpolitical conduct of 'those members of the educated elite who hadthemselves assumed the collective representation of an"intelligentsia"'.37 Suffice to agree with Haimson on his all-importantbut insufficiently appreciated insight: that the specific politicaloutcome of workers' struggles to satisfy needs in 1917 was not thedirect and immediate result of that struggle because the significanceof workers' drive to secure their material existence was always opento diverse and, at times, conflicting political assessments leading todiverse and, at times, conflicting political actions, whose outcomes,though not pre-determined, were determinative nevertheless. Inshort, the experience of revolutionary activity in 1917 did not contain its ownpolitical interpretation.

This is confirmed by the subsequent historical experience of theworkers' movement in Italy and Germany in the 1920s, in France andSpain in the 1930s, (the list of countries and periods could easily belengthened), which has shown that class conflict in the midst ofprofound social crisis and economic dislocation has never provided(and never will provide) workers with a direct and indubitable basisupon which to anchor a course of action irrevocably committing themto a democratic socialist transformation of extant class and propertyrelations. For the best way to respond to the material interests of theworking-class (and of other classes) is always worked up andtransformed - mediated - in competing ways, by competing politicalparties, competing programmes of social change, and competingstrategies of political action.

Social historians, then, must deepen their broadly materialistapproach by discovering, extracting, and valorising analytically thematerialist kernel embedded in the peculiarly 'intelligent idealism'(Lenin) espoused by Haimson. For it was the autonomous movement

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of politics that opened the possibility for the transition to socialism: thedirect intervention of the masses over matters of great concern to them,their massive break from the infernal monotony of exploitation, andtheir difficult and open-minded search for political solutions toproblems of social existence. In 1917 workers were free to choose whichparty and programme to follow, and which to reject and, as a rule, theychanged their minds and their course of action mainly because, amongthe competing political formations, one would, through action andrational argument, convince workers of the objective politicalsignificance of workers' revolutionary practice and experience, andthereby attract their support. In times of revolution free political activity- the action of parties - is the determining determination.38

Initial Assessment and Balance Sheet

The discussion may be summed up at this point by way of aprovisional and relatively complete conclusion. Koenker andRosenberg illuminate flawlessly the manner in which organised andmobilised workers collectively created the necessary politicalconditions to make possible a pro-working-class solution to themanifold crises that threatened to overwhelm them. But they (andsocial historians) move too quickly from the plausible proposition thatworkers possessed a capacity to act politically in these difficultconditions to the very different proposition - which they tacitlydefend - that these conditions determined workers to act politically inone way, that they motivated workers to use their capacity for freepolitical action in a single direction, towards the organisation ofproduction in their own interests and under the aegis of a workers'state and, correlatively, away from the resumption of productionunder the control of management and the protection of a liberal-democratic state. Thus, and in conformity with the secondproposition, which is the operating one and is the Achilles' heel of theentire trend of social history, Koenker and Rosenberg see the politicalsignificance of developing crisis evolving of itself and graduallybecoming manifest to workers. No complex and concertedinterpretation of it by representatives of competing politicalorganisations was necessary. Since the Bolsheviks and theMensheviks only make cameo appearances in the transition fromcapitalism to socialism we are naturally given to understand that theywere not really needed, that workers were not really required tochoose among truly conflicting alternatives, to make difficult,sometimes wrenching, political decisions. In other words, the success

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of the Bolsheviks in winning workers to their programme forworkers' power did not determine the motion of workers towardsocialism. Rather, because the experience of economic upheavalcarried its own (Bolshevik) response, the workers' success inindependently moving toward socialism - independently, that is, ofthe appeal of Bolsheviks and their programme - endeared workers tothe Bolsheviks' political platform. The Bolsheviks have a purelyformal, ratificatory, 'cheerleading' function to perform from thesidelines, as workers parade by, straight towards socialism. Lenin'spartisans are empirically associated, in time and place, with thishistoric movement but no causal, determinative connection existsbetween the ideas and activity of the Bolshevik party andfundamental social transformation. On the contrary, according to thelogic of the argument of the social historians, the non-partisan'radicalisation' of workers in pursuit of material salvation was fated toassume the shape of Bolshevism, while the Bolsheviks, theirprogramme and activity, became mere means by which theabstraction of workers' needs and wants vested itself with politicalreality. The Bolsheviks did not determine the transition to socialism,they were determined by it.

Finally, having given the distinct impression that effectivelysatisfying workers' needs, wants and aspirations in a revolutionarysituation was, at best, only marginally connected to the problem ofoffering workers effective political leadership in the most varied offorums and around the most diverse of issues, Rosenberg andKoenker implicitly pose the problem of what political leadership iseffectively about. In this connection they limit themselves to blandlystating that 'what might be described as an advance guard ofpolitically conscious, experienced, and militant worker activistsclearly existed in 1917 quite apart from strike activity, working in tradeunions, factory committees, or local Soviets, and expressing theirmilitancy in party work and political demonstrations'.39 But if, as Ihave argued, they hardly see the political purpose of the Bolsheviks(and Mensheviks) in strike activity specifically, if they close their eyesto the different roles the Bolsheviks (and Mensheviks) played in thevarious workers' struggles generally, if, in sum, the Bolsheviks arenot particularly relevant and necessary to meeting the felt needs andwants of workers, then whose wants and needs are the Bolsheviksspecifically expressing in militant party-political demonstrations?Koenker and Rosenberg, and most social historians, having uttered'A' to 'Y', are reluctant to say 'Z', to say what other historians are

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prepared to say. Masquerading as political leaders of the workingclass, the Bolsheviks camouflaged interests and goals of their own and,as the subsequent rise of Stalinism would allegedly show, in deadlyconflict with those of their popular constituency.40 The ostensibleideological differences that inhere in a 'political' versus 'social'approach to the Russian Revolution, highlighted by Suny notably,cannot conceal the fact that both approaches understand the workers'movement and the sphere of political competition to be external toone another. Social and political history, as they have beentraditionally practised in the field of late Imperial Russian history, arenot mutually exclusive but condition and supplement each other'from below' and 'from above' respectively.41

The social histories of the Russian Revolution, then, are nothistories with the politics 'left out', a widespread, partially correct butultimately superficial view. They are, in fact, histories with thepolitics of Bolshevism 'left in', or insinuated into the revolutionaryprocess, to cover developments that the social historical model ofsocial transformation cannot otherwise adequately explain.42 Onthese accounts, at every critical juncture in the workers' self-movement in 1917, when the flux and reflux of events compelledworkers to take a course of action, the workers always seem torespond in a quasi-Pavlovian manner, almost reflexively, so that theinner logic of the workers' participation in the revolutionary struggleappears to be devoid of much conscious political decision-making.Embedded in social historical analysis, concealed in the very structureof its paradigm, is a denial of all real value and significance to politicalchoices facing workers: the masses would only heed what 'logic' and'circumstances' told them, regardless of what leading political partiessaid and did, and were bound to get the political leadership to tellthem what they wanted to hear and do. In light of currentpreoccupation with 'historical alternatives' inside and outside theformer Soviet Union, how paradoxical it is that the social historiansshould generally hold fast to the notion that the outcome of theRussian Revolution was inevitable. Indeed, never has serendipityworked so determinedly on behalf of the masses, nor fortune smiledso good-naturedly on the Bolsheviks: the social historicalinterpretation of the Bolshevik triumph is suffused with anunderlying teleological determinism.43

In sum, social historians do not sufficiently take into account theintervention of different working-class parties, through concertedagitation and propaganda, in differentially shaping the political

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understanding and actions of workers. Either they neglect outrightthe mediation of specific political ideas, programmes andorganisations through which workers interpreted and responded totheir changing experience, or they reduce politics to economicsaltogether, or they view politics as a partyless, non-competitive,'cultural' phenomenon alone.44 In every case, their self-consciouslyrevisionist efforts to understand the evolution of labour movement in1917 directly, apart from its relationship to diverse political parties,flows from their bedrock assumption that pressing and profoundsocial problems select their own political resolution. Ironically, inattempting to write politics out of the revolutionary process they haveended up surreptitiously reintroducing the politics of Bolshevism thatdetermined the particular outcome of the class struggle in Russiabetween February and October 1917. Specifically, toward the end oftheir work, when Koenker and Rosenberg drew Bolshevik politicalconclusions from their analysis of strikes in 1917, they did so onlybecause at the beginning of their scholarly enterprise theyunwittingly adopted the Bolshevik political standpoint in divining thestrikes' ultimate, collective, political significance: Rosenberg andKoenker unconsciously stand as historians upon the same viewpointas that which the Bolsheviks consciously stood as politicians.

II. ORGANISATION, BUREAUCRACY AND POLITICAL LEADERSHIP: THE -RUSSIAN LABOUR MOVEMENT IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

The socio-historical account of the workers' political response inRussia to endemic economic crisis falls apart if only because theeconomic impasse that is imputed to be the cause of the Bolshevikvictory can be shown to produce very dissimilar political effects inother countries where very similar conditions obtained. Foreverywhere else in the industrial world the workers failed concretelyto realise, through the seizure of state power by means of their own,class-based institutions, the abstract 'logic' of the mass strike processfor higher wages, better working conditions and job security outright.In light of this diversity of outcome the triumph of the Bolsheviks 'upabove' cannot actually be explained just by appealing to an abstract,unilinearly developing political dynamic ostensibly inherent ineconomic struggles 'down below'.

Rosenberg and Koenker rightly adopt an internationalistperspective to better understand the 'special nature of strikes inrevolutionary situations throughout the industrial world'.45 But they

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wrongly understand the nature of revolutionary, massively strike-bound situations specifically because they neglect the role of politicalcompetition responsible for the very different political course takenby the workers' economic movement outside Russia. To explain,therefore, the different political outcomes to similar revolutionaryprocesses operating in Russia and the West in this period minimallyrequires coming to terms with the contrary political results ofautonomous political conflicts in the two regions. To put it as sharplyand meaningfully as possible: why is the autonomous moment ofpolitical competition in the West bereft of a Bolshevik-type partycarrying out Bolshevik-type politics? An answer to this questionpreliminarily requires solving a host of intermediate problems andissues, and the answer I ultimately venture in turn raises the issue ofRussian 'exceptionalism' that would apparently exempt analyticallythe Russian labour movement altogether from a comparativeperspective owing precisely to the singularity of the OctoberRevolution: it is, after all, an unduplicated original. Nevertheless, Ibelieve analysis can resolve these complexities.

Organisation and Political Leadership: General Observations

Organisation-building by workers was the necessary complement toresource-mobilisation and, later, to successful struggle for practicalrights and powers. This view, basic to Rosenberg and Koenker'saccount, fits the Russian situation splendidly. There, workers built anarray of institutions, from factory committee to Soviet, to run theirown affairs destroying, for good measure, Robert Michels' 'iron lawof oligarchy'. Mass organisation tended to empower and mobiliseworkers. However, because Koenker and Rosenberg develop theview that workers' empowerment and mobilisation dependedexclusively on their organisation without paying due attention to theautonomous, goal-shaping political conflicts inside the workers'organisation, they unwittingly establish the symmetrical contrary ofMichels' law: organisation as such empowers and mobilises,regardless of political objectives set by leadership in the politicalarena. But the political success of the workers' movement, whiledoubtless dependent on successful institution-building, on theshopfloor and beyond, is not assured merely by such innovatoryorganisational achievements. Above all, it is a question of the finaloutcome of class conflict, the seizure of state power, which Rosenbergand Koenker run together with the successful establishment ofworking-class organisations, from factory committee to Soviets. The

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two must be adequately distinguished. Failing to make the distinctionsharp enough leads Koenker and Rosenberg to imply that workers'organisations in general promoted workers' struggles - animplication that seems to hold true in Russia only because, as I haveargued, the political agency of Bolshevism was underhandedlystructured into or simply assimilated with the organisation quaorganisation of workers. But Rosenberg and Koenker's lightningsurvey of the Western European and American labour movementsclearly reveals that the traditional organisations of the working-classthere did everything to dz'sempower the. working-class, a fact forwhich Rosenberg and Koenker offer no adequate explanation.

Thus, Koenker and Rosenberg write revealingly, if perfunctorily,about how major strikes took place in the US 'often in sharpopposition to national trade-union policy' as the 'national unionsparticipated in a state sponsored mediation effort to quell labourmilitancy'. In Britain national labour organisations entered intopartnership with the state and used their power to oppose 'growinglabour militancy and autonomous movement toward direct action',leaving 'rank-and-file militants without effective nationalorganisations' to lead them. In Germany, as well, the trade unionsmade a pact with the state T ut at the local level workers engaged indirect action and militant politics' that threatened this pact. In Italy,too, labour militancy culminated in the Biennio Rosso of 1919-20 whenthe workers of Milan and Turin defied their leaderships and occupiedthe factories to press their demands while, in France, 'labourmilitancy reached unprecedented levels, largely outside theleadership of traditional labour organisations'.46 Haimson acutelysummarised the two key features of the workers' movement in thisperiod as 'that of initiatives from below bringing to the surface,through new forms of collective action, the hitherto unrecognisedgrievances of large masses of unorganised workers, and of organisedworkers rebelling against their leaderships'.47

It is true that in Russia and in the West militant mass strikes, streetdemonstrations and other extra-electoral and extra-parliamentaryactivities led to explosive confrontations with the state and theemployers, involving hundreds of thousands of organised andunorganised workers. And Koenker and Rosenberg are surely rightto bring to the fore these broad similarities to compensate for thefailure of most historians to note them in the first place, let aloneremark upon their significance in a comparative perspective. Still,Rosenberg and Koenker overlook the startling contrasts which were,

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I shall argue, the direct consequence of the contrasting outcomes ofcompeting reformist and revolutionary politics and parties, in Russiaand the West.

The contrasts may be summarised as follows: in Russia, theBolshevik party imparted to the workers' economic struggles arevolutionary direction which abolished 'bourgeois' relations ofproduction and established, however fleetingly, a workers' state. Inthe West, the reformist parties directed workers' activity intoparliamentary-electoral channels which bypassed, and thus leftintact, private property in the means of production, along with thepolitical integument of this form of property, the capitalist state. InRussia, the leadership of all workers' institutions, from soviet downto factory committee, gave free and public access to the Bolshevikparty, a minority revolutionary organisation. In the West, theleaderships of workers' organisations everywhere attempted toundermine, even physically repress, minority revolutionary currentsrapidly emerging from among their mobilising rank and file. InRussia, the revolutionary (Bolshevik) rank and file minority becamethe majority in the workers' institutions democratically, through theballot-box, in a series of open electoral contests that removed thereformist (Menshevik) leaderships from office, from factorycommittee on up to Soviet. In the West, the reformist leadershipseverywhere ultimately maintained their grip on the traditionalorganisations of the working-class. The question is posed: why didreformist politics and reformist organisations emerge triumphant inthe workers' movement in the West?

The Reformist Politics of Party and Trade Union Bureaucracies in theWestern Labour Movement

Generally speaking, the creation of working-class political parties andtrade unions, or their qualitative transformation, has come about inspurts, at high points in the class struggle, through explosive andmilitant direct action by hitherto unorganised or badly organisedworkers. It is in the course of actually constituting themselves as aclass through struggle that workers form class organisations able toforce concessions from the state and the employers. Indeed, 'as arule, it is only when workers have in fact broken through their ownpassivity, created new forms of solidarity, and, on that basis,amassed the power needed to confront capital, that the goals ofreform and revolution premised upon collective, class-based action canappear at all relevant and practical'.48 The source of workers' strengthhas lain not in their organisation as such but in their ability to

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mobilise through increasingly powerful direct actions on the streets,in the neighbourhoods, in the offices and on the shopfloor. In thiscentral respect there is little to distinguish the Russian workers'movement from that in the West. In both, trade unions and politicalparties were initially established through the onset of mass struggles.However, in the West, workers' organisations continued system-atically to develop even in the absence of sharp class conflict. But therelatively prolonged periodic declines in working-class militancy,conditioned by relative economic prosperity, changed the character ofworking-class organisation in the West by generating a phenomenonunknown in Russia: massive and solidly entrenched labourbureaucracies.

Robert Michels, on the basis of the study of a relatively limitedhistorical period, roughly 1880-1914, and geographical area,principally Western Europe and the USA, and using the GermanSocial Democratic Party, of which he was a member, as a template,characterised the trade union and party bureaucracies in the workers'movement as a distinct social layer with distinct social position, formsof activity, and political outlook potentially at odds with those of therank and file. 'The party is endowed with a bureaucracy . . . thetreasuries are full, a complex ramification of financial and moralinterests extends all over the country'.49 Above all, the leadership nolonger worked alongside the rank and file and had consequentlydeveloped a new way of life and different social interests and,critically, had come to identify these interests and that way of lifewith the organisation they worked for, not the membership theyrepresented. Organisational self-preservation became the all-encompassing aim and last word of the bureaucratised party andtrade-union leadership. The organisation had become an end in itself.

Given the priority of the labour bureaucracy in protecting theircorporate organisation as the material basis of their livelihoods andtheir distinctive modes of life, Michels continued, the leadershipwould systematically oppose all such revolutionary practices engagedby workers in periods of acute class struggle as would endanger andcompromise the reformist organisational 'work of many decades, thesocial existence of thousands of leaders and subleaders, the entireparty'. It will suppress 'bold and enterprising' tactics such as massstrikes, street demonstrations and other forms of activity the rank andfile periodically develop, particularly in times of economic crisis, todefend their conditions of life against increasingly well-organisedemployers. It will react 'with all the authority at its disposal against

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the revolutionary currents which exist within its own organisation'for the advocacy, by radicalised rank and filers, of extra-parliamentary and extra-legal, revolutionary methods of struggle, ifacted upon, invites state repression -jeopardising the very existenceof the organisations from which the leadership draws its lifeblood.'[I]n the name of the grave responsibilities attaching to its position',the leadership 'now disavows anti-militarism, repudiates the generalstrike, and denies all the logical audacities of its past'.50

Only heightened class conflict activates the latent differences ofpolitical outlook and social interest between the rank and file and theleadership. In Germany these differences first became evident in1905, when masses of workers, organised and unorganised, movedahead of the leadership and developed their militancy, self-organisation and political consciousness. This created the potentialfor the transformation of workers' consciousness in a radicaldirection. But the labour bureaucracies in party and trade unionmoved swiftly to contain the struggle and to channel it into the classicforms of reformist activity. It was then that the cleavage between thereformist and revolutionary wings of the German Social DemocraticParty acquired practical and not just theoretical importance.51

In broadly reformist periods, however, the conflict of interestbetween the bureaucracy and the rank and file is hidden for anidentity of interests apparently exists between the two stemmingfrom their common recognition that the unfavourable balance of classforces places reform on the agenda, not revolution. Moreover,localised and partial struggles of workers in times of relativeeconomic prosperity and stability can yield limited but positive gains,strengthening the reformist outlook among both workers and theleadership.52 This said, the following generalisation may be venturedabout the relative strength of revolutionary and reformist currents inthe labour movement in the West. In the West, the revolutionaryminorities operated within what in practice were mass reformistorganisations. Left-wing militants were therefore generallystraitjacketed by the reformist leadership of the organisation sincethat leadership could very often depend on a purely electoralmobilisation of the passive, reformist-minded, dues-paying majorityto curb the advocacy of revolutionary politics, especially in non-revolutionary periods. But the failure of Western revolutionaries tobecome organisationally independent of the reformist parties meantthat they could not free themselves politically from the reformistmajority belonging to these parties. In other words, had these

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militants followed the example of the Bolsheviks and organised theirown party they would have been able deliberately to use theirfreedom of action to compete for influence through their distinctlyminoritarian revolutionary politics, and potentially win the rank andfile majority away from the reformist leadership of the organisation, aconquest feasible only in broadly revolutionary situations.

But the Western revolutionaries did not create their own party.Under these chosen, organisationally and politically self-limitingcircumstances, radicals were not really able sharply and integrally todevelop and publicise revolutionary practices and understandingamong themselves, and in relation to the working class at large and,in this objective way, prepare for the next revolutionary upturn. As aresult, when revolution did break out, in Germany and elsewhere,millions of workers and thousands of radicals were suddenly thrustin a revolutionary situation, began to engage in revolutionarypractice, but without having thought matters through very much orvery clearly. Revolutionaries did campaign for their views among theworking-class, but only with the greatest of difficulty, diffusedly andhaphazardly, and always in relationship to the bureaucratisedleaderships of working-class parties and the trade unions who werepast masters in organising reformist politics. The latter jointly andspeedily mobilised for their political viewpoint, and fought fiercelyfor their reformist ideas and practices, especially in this ominouslyrevolutionary situation. But no authoritative revolutionary party haddeveloped, or could be improvised on the spot, to provide theworking-class a relatively well-thought-out and credible politicalalternative to the traditional leaderships. Never having achievedorganisational independence, the revolutionaries were very poorlyprepared to compete politically. As a consequence, the existingreformist leaderships were able to channel the radicalisation of therank and file in a reformist direction and the opportunity - notinevitability - for the revolutionary seizure of power by the working-class, in Germany and Italy especially, was momentarily lost.53

If the distinctive features of the Western labour movement helpexplain the absence of a well-formed revolutionary party and thefailure of revolution in the immediate post First World War period,then the presence of a sharply-defined revolutionary party and thesuccess of revolution in Russia reveals something distinctive aboutthe labour movement there. The following considerations may bebriefly advanced with respect to the peculiar conditions of politicalstruggle in Russia.

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Despite the Herculean efforts of the Mensheviks to establish them,mass reformist workers' organisations never took root in Russiabecause to operate regularly they normally require an environmentgenerally characterised by the lack of sharp class conflict, a situationwhich never stably existed under Tsardom. Tumultuous workers'struggles were always clearly and closely associated with theworkers' drive to organise because the systematic maintenance ofworking-class association in late Imperial Russia was virtuallyimpossible apart from comparatively high, indeed, revolutionary orquasi-revolutionary levels of rank and file militancy, and thereforethe political consciousness of such associations tended to be entwinedwith a powerful development of the Bolshevik trend. The formationand development of trade unions and the rapid growth of the RSDLPinto a small mass party were immediate by-products of revolutionarystruggle in 1905-7. Whenever the Tsarist state periodicallysuppressed rank and file militancy, as in 1907-12, so was, for allpractical intents and purposes, the organisation itself, whether partyor trade union, along with any would-be labour bureaucracy. As therevival of the workers' movement from 1912 to the outbreak of theFirst World War once again confirmed, sustaining workers'organisations and achieving reforms once more required organisingincreasingly militant, increasingly illegal, increasingly class-wide,increasingly politically-defined confrontations with the employersand the state. In this period of resurgence the Bolsheviks ousted theMensheviks from their leadership positions in the open and legallabour movement.54

Russian Exceptionalism?

The Bolsheviks, then, unlike their partyless, politically disorganisedcounterparts in the West, never had to face a conjuncturally limitedbut viable and potent reformism among broad layers of workers, letalone have to master and overcome the organised reformist politics ofpowerful, materially privileged labour bureaucracies. But the mererecognition of this fact should not be construed as a manifestation ofRussian 'exceptionalism' that renders any comparative descriptiveanalysis nugatory for want of common reference points. For moregeneral and pertinent considerations - commonalties - emergethrough the very distinct experiences of the labour movement in bothregions. They may be summed up as follows.

First, the political judgement of any working class, taken as a wholeand no matter what its national, cultural, ethnic and so on,

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peculiarities may be, is always inwardly riven and heterogeneous andso can never determine, under any given circumstance, thisleadership, that political outlook, one modality of political action. TheMensheviks, the Bolsheviks, the Socialist Revolutionaries and sundryother political trends and formations in Russia, as well as the manyparties and currents in the West, are sufficient proof of this. Thesehad at all times to exercise judgement and choose a course of actionbecause the interests of the working class, what they are and howthey can best be met, is always a matter of competing analyses andpolitics, neither of which would be possible or meaningful wereobjective conditions truly able to select their own political assessmentand impart to all workers the corresponding course of political action,as we are led to believe by social historians.

Secondly, if, in Russia, the revolutionary wing of the organisedworkers' movement tended to prevail over and against the reformistone, the Bolsheviks over the Mensheviks, the capital fact remainsthat, East or West, the organised workers' movement itself, all wingsconfounded, always developed its politics in relationship to non-working classes whose parties often appealed to broader, supra-classinterests, on the basis of other, non-class ties, national ones above all,as with the Kadets in Russia, for instance. Their potential for successis never to be excluded out of hand. These parties, then, will alsocompete in the political arena to determine an outcome favourable totheir interests, an outcome which may well be opposed to theinterests of the working class, or at least opposed to parties claimingto represent its interests. This is broadly true of most periods,whether peacefully parliamentary and reformist, or militantlyrevolutionary, and of different regions, whether in Russia or theWest.

Thirdly, the discontinuity of the labour movement, the veryvolatility of working-class struggles, adds to political competition themost important dimension, common to both the West and Russia.Revolutions suddenly awaken to public life hundreds of thousandsand millions of workers who normally, in non-revolutionary periods,are not politically active, however much a political order may(apparently) facilitate such activity, as in a democratic republic, or(really) restrain it, as in an autocracy. Workers' political instructiononly begins in earnest when workers sense it makes, or can make, areal difference in their lives, when their material and moral well-beingappears to depend on active participation in public affairs. Inrevolutionary situations the generality of the working class must now

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confront new issues and solve new problems raised by its nowqualitatively heightened, collective self-movement. And because thisis a learning process hitherto politically inexperienced working menand women may well be open, at first, to ideas and modes of politicalaction that a majority of politically experienced workers have alreadytested, found wanting, and rejected. But such politically seasonedworkers will, at first, inevitably constitute only a small, agitatingvanguard, in relation to the general working class public. In otherwords, the Bolsheviks could not exempt the broad masses fromhaving to learn politics anew, in 1917. They could not substitutethemselves for the class and act on its behalf. Nor could thepredominantly revolutionary past of the organised vanguard of theRussian working class alone determine the future Bolshevik successof 1917 simply because mere tradition could not automatically solvethe new problems which the Bolsheviks had to solve for themselvesin the unprecedented conditions of 1917. And so it was that theBolsheviks, finding themselves in the minority in all the institutionsof the working class at large in the spring of 1917, once again faced, atthat moment, the daunting task of achieving what they had achievedin the summer of 1914, under entirely different circumstances andonly among a minority of workers, that is, among the systematicallypolitically active: a majority position. Now, in 1917, the Bolsheviksneeded to win a majority of the working class as a whole to realise theirnew programme, 'All Power to the Soviets'.

Out of the failure of revolution in the West in 1917-23 and itssuccess in Russia came a further development (and, perhaps,completion) of revolutionary theory, one aspect of which was the'Leninist' view of the party. It held that the mass reform party and theadvanced revolutionary party could not be permanently combined sothat it was necessary to build a 'vanguard' organisation whosemembers would accept the fact that for part of its existence the partywould be recruiting and organising only those workers who had, orwere developing, a revolutionary worldview, which of course wouldbe a minority. Premised on - but not determined by - the ideologicaland political heterogeneity of the working class, the party wouldenable revolutionised workers collectively to develop their ownunderstanding, to analyse past experience, and to prepare for thefuture with non-revolutionary workers by systematically engaging injoint activity with them - 'united fronts' - in order to develop theirconsciousness, to struggle with them and, in the very process ofstruggle, to win them over to a revolutionary perspective. The

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Bolsheviks masterfully executed this united front policy in Russia,between February and October, validating the united front strategy.In times of revolution, then, the activity of a minority revolutionaryparty could quickly transform it into a majority revolutionary party,and determine political outcome.55

Informed by the social-scientific accomplishments of the socialhistorians, and with a view to outlining a new and, I think, morepowerful paradigm, I return to the Russian Revolution and survey itsoverarching political conflicts by specifically examining, successively,the political motivation of Bolshevik and Menshevik policies, theconditions that made their consolidation possible and, lastly, thefoundations for the success of the Bolsheviks and the failure of theMensheviks.

III. CLASS CONFLICT, POLITICAL COMPETITION, AND SOCIALTRANSFORMATION: THE COURSE OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION,

FEBRUARY-OCTOBER 19175*

In 1917 workers, as well as peasants and soldiers, sought to improvetheir lot in accordance with their past experience and with whatpresently made sense to them. The demands of the peasants, workersand soldiers for land, bread and peace determined no politicallyunequivocal answer to the question of the best political programmewhich would permit the realisation of these urgent and universallyadmitted needs. The Bolsheviks soon raised this question in adistinctive manner: indefinitely defer their satisfaction by supportingthe Provisional Government, or immediately create the politicalconditions permitting their realisation through the Soviet seizure ofpower. Their programme, summed up in the demand 'All Power tothe Soviets', gave the abstraction of workers' needs and wantsconcrete political definition and institutionally specific means ofrealisation. In the Bolshevik view, 'All Power to the Soviets' had tobecome the demand of the working class in order to establish thepolitical conditions under which its needs and wants could be met.Worker political opinion quickly divided in response, shaped, as itwas, by workers' divided understanding of the new circumstances.And these multiple understandings in turn had been moulded byprevious political experience (or lack thereof) so that bearing in thegiven conjuncture was a complex of historically formed politicalassessments that, though not reducible to the conjuncture, none the

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less quickly developed further only in 1917, thanks to the powerfulconsciousness-raising dynamic of serried political competition.

All major political formations organising to achieve politicalobjectives in 1917 drew principally on the experience of the 1905Revolution, when the various methods of action and variousaspirations of the different classes were displayed and subsequentlysubjected to intense scrutiny and analysis by all political activists,revolutionaries and non-revolutionaries alike. The Bolsheviks judgedthat the workers' independent political action in 1905, the OctoberGeneral Strike above all, had pulled the rest of the otherwisepowerless opposition behind the struggle to overthrow Tsarism andestablish a republic. They concluded that, short of the victory of the'bourgeois-democratic' revolution, any reform under Tsarismbenefiting workers had been and would be the by-product of theworkers' revolutionary struggle, not the direct result of reformistbargaining with Tsarist authorities, or of electoral pressures on them,let alone of agile parliamentary manoeuvring in the newly-createdDuma. The Bolsheviks therefore chose to resist any encroachment onthe political independence of the working class by other politicalformations, the Kadets above all. The leading liberal party of Russiawould seek to waylay the workers' struggles for reforms andrevolution into reformist, quasi-parliamentary channels, in theBolshevik view. Accordingly, solid unrelieved 'Kadet-eating'polemics featured prominently in the arsenal of Bolshevik politicalpractice.

When the mobilised working class alone overthrew Tsarism inFebruary and set up Soviets to guide their subsequent movement,Lenin developed his 'April Theses' to interpret the significance of theworkers' actions, and to develop the appropriate politics. He arguedthat the workers had revealed not only their immense power, theyhad also laid bare the inactivity and impotence of liberalism andreformism - and vindicated the long-standing Bolshevik analysis ofthe balance of forces between revolution and reformism. Further,whereas in 1905 nearly a year had separated the mass strikes ofJanuary 1905 and the formation of the St Petersburg soviet, in 1917barely a week had elapsed before Soviets were created in virtually allthe cities of Russia. In independently moving ahead and establishingSoviets everywhere workers were setting up, had set up, a workers'state, Lenin announced. Lenin interpreted the soviet as havingbecome in the eyes of workers a matter-of-fact institutional basis forfurther historic action, hence Lenin's call for 'AH Power to the

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Soviets'. Above all, Lenin continued, workers, through their Soviets,were implicitly challenging the existence of the ProvisionalGovernment, along with the propertied classes on whose politicalsupport it counted. This democratic revolution, Lenin now declared,was proletarian, socialist and international, not 'bourgeois-democratic' and national. Thus, the 'April Theses' centrally reflectedthe workers' heightened appreciation of the power of the soviet formof organisation.

Lenin's theses also took into specific and close consideration thefact that the Bolshevik rank and file, of the Vyborg district notably,had from the very start expressed opposition to dual power and tocompromise with census society. In this the Vyborg workers weremerely expressing standard anti-Kadet, anti-liberal, anti-reformistBolshevik politics. In the 'April Theses' Lenin synthesised theelement specific to the Bolsheviks - anti-Kadetism - with the elementgenerally recognised by workers - the power of the soviet. Thisspecific, superior synthesis determined the popularity of Lenin'sprogramme among a significant, organised minority of workers,among worker-Bolsheviks. Within a matter of weeks Lenin sweptaside a purely doctrinal defence of the 'bourgeois-democratic'revolution theory mounted by Bolshevik Party VIPs and, stronglysupported by the rank and file of Vyborg, who backed Lenin'sstrategic outlook because it accorded so well with theirs, rearmed theBolshevik party. Party members derived from their new analysis ofthe current situation a politics developed most clearly and trenchantlyby Lenin, designed to reveal the anti-working class nature of theKadet-led Provisional Government, and to offer a positive alternativeto it.

Against the efforts of the Provisional Government to appearresponsive to the needs of workers, peasants and soldiers theBolsheviks developed a strategy of action to actually be responsive,by explicitly calling for 'All Power to the Soviets'. In the process theypolitically challenged the Mensheviks, who denied any fundamentalconflict of interest between defending the interests of workers,peasants and soldiers and critically supporting the policies ofProvisional Government, a denial that was initially accepted by themasses. In this regard, Menshevik policy, too, was neither a purelypragmatic, conjunctural adaptation to circumstances, nor adoctrinaire inflexible response to them but was, like that of theBolsheviks, the independent working out of a long held anddiametrically opposite understanding of the dynamics of class

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conflict, of the relationship between reform and revolution, of themoving forces of the Revolution.

The Mensheviks had long regarded the liberal opposition asleading the 'bourgeois-democratic' revolution and in the interests ofsecuring its co-operation the Mensheviks had historically beenprepared to channel or otherwise attempt to direct the activity of theworking class as a whole within bounds acceptable to theirprospective political partners, the Kadets. This meant working forreforms through reformist, non-revolutionary, 'Western' methodsand institutions, especially after the defeat of the 1905 Revolution.Because Lenin's partisans believed otherwise, believed that reformscould be achieved only through the revolutionary self-activity of theworking class, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks had to compete forpolitical influence among workers.57

The Mensheviks pursued and developed their reformist policy in1917. Of course, their views were in accord with a quarter-century ofSocial Democratic orthodoxy regarding the 'bourgeois-democratic'nature of the revolution, but this did not determine their politics sincethe Bolsheviks, who were equally orthodox on this point for anequally long time, developed a very different politics, while theSocialist Revolutionaries, who were hostile to Marxist sociologyaltogether, allied politically with the Mensheviks. Historically, then,politics was not reducible to sociology.

To safeguard the gains of the February revolution the Mensheviksargued that the needs and wants of workers, peasants and soldierscould be satisfied only on condition that the newly anddemocratically established soviet support the ProvisionalGovernment's attempt to consolidate a liberal democratic state, andto that end they progressively realised their long-standingcommitment to ally with the Kadets. 'Dual power', they reasoned,was the necessary institutional framework that could reconcile theconflict of interests between industrialists and workers over issuesthat determined the very survival of workers, such as the length ofthe working day, the speed and pace of work, payment for work, andthe hiring and firing of workers. As they enjoyed majority support inthe Soviets, universally recognised by workers as their owndemocratically elected institutions, the Mensheviks were in a positionto set soviet policy.

Meanwhile, having adopted the 'April Theses' to guide theirpolitical activity, the Bolsheviks anticipated the political result bysubordinating their will to the practical requirements of achieving

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their purpose. This inverted causality, or finalism, set into motion aprocess of political self-definition that thrust the Bolsheviks into theminority, where they remained so long as most workers continued toidentify their interests with the Menshevik policy of continuedsupport, however critical, of the Provisional Government and itspolicies. Bolshevik willingness to abandon the apparent safety ofnumbers and court unpopularity undercuts the key notion of thesocial historians that Bolshevik political success was merelypredicated upon a responsiveness to workers' perceived needs,aspirations and wants, upon 'their boldness in adopting theprogramme of the masses without qualification'.58 This simplerelationship is plainly incorrect because its converse is demonstrablyfalse: these same masses, far from willingly adopting the programmeof the Bolsheviks, rejected it outright for the better part of the periodbetween February and October. Bolshevik motions on the broaderpolitical questions of the day - on the war, on the coalitiongovernment, on state power — were systematically voted down byworkers because the Bolshevik platform as a whole did not appear tocorrespond to their interests and aspirations.

But the Bolsheviks did not jettison their autonomously arrived atpolitical agenda just to be responsive. They did not indiscriminatelymould their politics to conform to whatever transitory majoritypolitical stands workers adopted, otherwise they could hardly haveadopted the 'April Theses' to guide their political activity. (The sameheld true for the Menshevik leadership, which would stick to thepolitics of 'dual power' to the end, even when popular support forthem declined, indeed, especially then.) The task confronting Lenin'spartisans was to change what most workers understood to bepolitically sufficient to meet their interests and wants, whileresponding to those very interests and needs to impel them to makethe required change of their own free will. Towards this principledgoal the Bolsheviks acted. However, the Bolsheviks could not realisethe soviet seizure of power by simple appeal to principle, but bypolitical means, by removing the Mensheviks from leadership of theSoviets via the mechanism of political competition. Three oft-described episodes of Bolshevik-Menshevik competition stand out:the cancelled demonstration of 10 June and the permitteddemonstration of 18 June; the July Days; and the Kornilov rising.

On 20-21 April unorganised anti-war demonstrations by largenumbers of indignant workers and soldiers erupted spontaneously toprotest against Miliukov's publicly declared support for the war aims

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of the defunct monarchy. An armed regiment made ready to stormthe Mariinskii Palace, seat of the Provisional Government. As theprotests subsided a political crisis developed, and Miliukov resignedhis post as foreign minister. In response the Mensheviks, not boundby rigid adherence to a fixed doctrine, unceremoniously tossed asidetheir cherished and long-held policy of non-participation in bourgeoisgovernments, and entered a coalition ministry. With the approval ofthe soviet majority, on 6 May six socialists took cabinet seatsalongside ten other 'capitalist' ministers in the ProvisionalGovernment. The Mensheviks had acted quickly to establish closerties with the Provisional Government in the firm belief that defendingthe revolution and advancing the interests of workers, soldiers andpeasants required closer collaboration with census society, a moreintense search for common ground.

Although the personnel of the Provisional Government hadchanged, its policies had not, the Bolsheviks explained. After duediscussion the Bolsheviks sought to lend political definition to therecently expressed anti-war sentiment by means of a peaceful massdemonstration, to be held on 10 June, demanding the transfer ofpower to the Soviets. Through their first major initiative to popularisethis key demand, and to compete for working-class support, theBolsheviks compelled the Menshevik-SR dominated CentralExecutive Committee of the Petrograd soviet to respond and todeclare itself politically in relation to this demand and, through thisrelation, to the working class at large. The soviet leadership did so byprohibiting the planned march on the grounds that the Bolshevikswere raising the spectre of martial strife. The Bolsheviks agreed tocancel because not they but the Mensheviks were threatening civilwar.

The Mensheviks could not ban mass dissatisfaction with thepolicies of the Provisional Government, especially in relation to thewar, which workers correctly sensed stood in the way of a better life.And the Bolsheviks could not be ignored. The Bolshevik initiative hadcompelled the Mensheviks to respond, and the response had openeda gap between Menshevik words in favour of peace and democracy onthe one hand, and their action against Bolshevik action in favour ofpeace and, above all, the democratic right to publicly organise suchaction. The Mensheviks tried to close this discrepancy between wordand deed through action on their own terms, by organising ademonstration in support of the 18 June offensive against the Germanarmies, a military operation that would, the Mensheviks vaguely

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hoped, win the peace by winning the war. It would also, collaterally,keep the Bolsheviks at bay. The Bolsheviks, undeterred by theirrecent setback, decided to participate in the planned march.

On 18 June nearly half a million demonstrators marched peacefully.The Bolsheviks had expected their politics to be well represented inthe march. Even so, they could scarcely conceal their astonishmentwhen the great majority came out to carry aloft Bolshevik bannersdemanding 'All Power to the Soviets', 'Down with the 10 CapitalistMinisters', 'Down with the Politics of the Offensive', and otherplacards calling for the eight-hour day, higher wages, and workers'control over the factories. Only a minority held up the largely moreabstract, less pointed, less immediately current and therefore lessquickly politically committing Menshevik demands for 'UniversalPeace', a 'Democratic Republic' and 'Immediate Convocation of aConstituent Assembly'. Tellingly, the Mensheviks did not demandsupport for the Provisional Government, that is, for the Mensheviks'own policy.

The undeniable success of the 18 June demonstration from thestandpoint of the Bolsheviks was the result of past action, in wordand deed, in its favour. Having been held, the march secured apotential for future action in four interrelated respects.

First, having gauged the scope and depth of support for theirviews, Bolshevik workers in and out of uniform developed thenecessary self-confidence to ardently promote them on the shopfloor,in the offices, in the neighbourhoods, and at the front. Second, theBolshevik slogans combined respect for the Soviet as the authorisedsupreme political decision-making body of the working class on theone hand, with criticism of the decisions made there by theMensheviks and SRs on the other. Bolshevik agitation andpropaganda to separate support for the institution of the soviet fromsupport for the policies of its Menshevik leadership brought moreworkers to distinguish between the two, to think in a new way aboutthe relationship between a political party and the institutions itoperated in, to think more deeply and thoroughly about theconnection between their desire for peace on the one hand, and thepolicies of a leadership to actually realise peace on the other. TheBolsheviks showed how these distinctions could be made in practiceby participating in what was, after all, a soviet-sanctioned,Menshevik-SR sponsored march. Third, the political result of the 18June demonstration was to begin to make clear to many more workersthe practical differences between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks,

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to press them to compare words with deeds and, on this basis, todecide which political formation could in practice advance theirinterests, and which could not. Fourth, the march itself, animpressive public and concerted display of a broadly held politicaloutlook, was bound selectively to impress the least committed ormost indifferent of worker by eliciting from the 'man in the street' aninterest in the interrelationships between the 'high political' solutionsproposed by the marchers, and the problems of everyday life. TheBolsheviks combined the four aspects to advance a particular lessonin political science among workers.

The Russian offensive, launched the very next day, 19 June,postponed the political crisis that would have immediately resultedfrom the demonstrated lack of popular support for the war, and alliedMenshevik policy. Yet, even as the military operations turned into arout, the empirically given and growing failure of the Mensheviks tosatisfy the deep-seated and long-standing desire of the masses forpeace and for an improvement in their material conditions of life didnot of itself drive workers to forge a unified political response. Nocommonly accepted political alternative to support for the Men-sheviks and the Provisional Government spontaneously emerged.Thanks only to Bolshevik agitation, a minority of workers did opt forthe response proposed by Lenin's partisans, and from the end ofApril to the end of June party membership doubled to 32,000, whilesupport for its positions grew as well, perhaps to be embraced by abare majority of workers in the capital. But, remarkably, theBolsheviks had yet to win to their viewpoint the majority of workersin the country at large, let alone of the peasant-soldiers at the front,where defencist sentiment still ran high. In the trenches the extantMenshevik-SR leaderships remained especially wedded to the fullestimplementation of the policy of critical support for the ProvisionalGovernment, upon ever closer collaboration with it, so convincedwere they that their ability to satisfy the material interests of theirgrey-coated constituency, above all, their desire for peace, waspredicated upon this very policy, and no other. Finally, at theopposite end of the political spectrum, in the capital, an impatientminority of workers and soldiers struck out on its own to end the warand save the revolution by attempting on 3-4 July to directly imposethe soviet seizure of power on the Menshevik leadership. This action,arising from news of fresh disasters at the front, created anotherpolitical crisis, the 'July Days'.

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The spontaneous, unorganised and agonisingly long exertion of3-4 July was destined to fail in its ultimate purpose for it had beenundertaken without an integral understanding of the Bolshevikprogramme, whose realisation required the approval of the majorityof the working-class, an approval that had not yet come. Even so, theBolsheviks attempted, in vain, to give this armed expression ofminoritarian impatience an organised, peaceful and disciplinedcharacter. This impatient minority mistook Bolshevik action as abetrayal of the Bolsheviks' declared goal of the seizure of power bythe Soviets, and resisted it. The Mensheviks interpreted the Bolshevikmove politically to guide this armed minority as just another deviousmanoeuvre to seize power directly, forcefully, undemocratically, andthat justified the repressive measures subsequently taken againstLenin's partisans. In the aftermath of the July Days Bolshevik leaderswere jailed, the Bolshevik press was shut down, and Bolshevikworkers were physically assaulted in the streets for daring to voicetheir political opinions.

The movements of 20-21 April and of 3-4 July were similar. Bothwere spontaneous outbursts of popular discontent. But the acuity ofthe conflict between the demand for peace, land and bread on the onehand and the political requirements to satisfy it, on the other, hadgrown sharply from April to July, the Bolsheviks argued.59 For, in theinterim, the Mensheviks had committed themselves more deeply tothe war effort. By joining the Provisional Government in early May,they had now, by their actions, translated their support in words tosupport in deed. Moreover, they had taken the necessary ancillarymeasures to make this political support practically effective. Whereas,in June, the Mensheviks had merely threatened to resist Bolshevikefforts to organise anti-war resistance, by July the threat hadmaterialised in the Menshevik-sanctioned use of force against theBolsheviks. Whereas, in June, the Bolsheviks had successfullyavoided a showdown while still winning many workers over to theirviewpoint, by July they had won over so many workers that a restlessminority among them independently decided to move ahead andimmediately realise the Bolshevik programme. Coming at the end of astring of Bolshevik successes, the July Days triggered a precipitousdecline in Bolshevik fortunes that at one point threatened to plungethe revolutionary movement as a whole into headlong retreat andultimate destruction.

General Kornilov calculated that the time to strike a decisive blowagainst the Revolution and the Provisional Government had arrived

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in late August, and would not soon return. Having reconnoitred thegeneral political situation and obtained political reconnaissancereports sent by interested quarters, the General made ready to marchon the capital, and workers decided to resist him. Faced withimminent overthrow, the Provisional Government ordered theBolshevik leaders released from prison. The Bolsheviks then played aleading role in organising the defence of the Revolution. Theimmediate, cross-party mobilisation of workers against Kornilovswiftly won immense numbers over to the Bolsheviks and theirpolitical programme, and for good reason.

Of all the parties in play, only the Bolsheviks had clearly said theProvisional Government could not be trusted to maintain ademocratic order. They alone had consistently attacked theMenshevik policy of growing support for the Provisional Govern-ment, with or without reservations. Only Lenin's partisans hadsystematically argued that this policy could not respond to thematerial interests of workers, or defend their democratic rights. Onlythey had unceasingly urged workers to be vigilant, to organiseagainst the Provisional Government and its supporters on the basis ofthe demand 'All Power to the Soviets'. And when Kornilovchallenged the workers to defend the Revolution, the Bolsheviksunhesitatingly rose to the occasion, demonstrating thereby theirwillingness and ability to back up their political programme withdecisive and consequent political action, and inspiring confidence ofvictory among ever broader layers of workers. In sum, the Bolshevikshad politically predicted and prepared for a Kornilov-type coup allalong. When the prediction came true, workers recognised Bolshevikprescience by rallying to them. Kornilov's desperate gambleconfirmed for a clear majority of workers, dramatically and withcondign finality, that the Bolshevik analysis of the policies of theProvisional Government and of the Mensheviks had been politicallycorrect all along.

Had the Bolsheviks not provided an (initially) unpopularalternative to the policies of the Mensheviks, the majority of workerswould have been strung along by the Mensheviks to the bitter end,politically disarmed before the covert support given to the Kornilovrising by the Provisional Government, in turn supported by theMensheviks. Had the Bolsheviks rejected the April Theses theOctober Revolution would not have taken place for in the absence ofthe Bolshevik alternative the failure of the Mensheviks to meet theneeds and wants of workers, soldiers and peasants would have

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brought ultimate demoralisation and defeat to the revolutionarymovement. Indeed, without the Bolsheviks the Menshevik objectiveof establishing a liberal democratic state would still not have beenrealised either, for the February revolution itself would have beenreversed by Kornilov's victory.

By October, the Bolshevik programme of the seizure of power bythe Soviets had at long last gained the clear-cut support of a majorityof workers, as expressed in the election of solid Bolshevik majoritiesto virtually all the institutions of workers' power, the factorycommittees, the trade unions, the soldiers' committees, and theSoviets. This happened not only or even primarily because of theorganisational superiority of the Bolshevik party, although itsdemocratic cohesiveness was indispensable for it to fulfil its tasks, asAlexander Rabinowitch has shown. It happened because of Bolshevikpolitics. Seeking first and foremost to meet the needs and interests ofthe working class in the context of acute class conflict and sharpeconomic crisis, the Bolsheviks were able to persuade workers toadopt political demands to accord with those needs and interests. TheBolsheviks were better able to comprehend and predict the course ofthe class struggle, to politically provide for it and, in so far asprovided for, to shape its evolution and guide it to a victoriousdenouement. Through political competition workers developed theirpolitics and reached a political consensus on the need to seize power.

Social historians have emphasised how a majority of workers neededto connect their material self-interest to the vision of a democraticsocialism to assure the political success of the Bolshevik-led Sovietseizure of power. This is undoubtedly true. But it is also crucial torecognise the other side of the medal: that most workers initiallyopposed the Bolshevik programme of 'AH Power to the Soviets'because they did not, at first, understand what the Bolsheviks aloneeventually led them to understand, namely, that workers' needs andinterests could not be met so long as there was a conflict between thedemand for soviet power, and the perceived interests and aspirationsof the workers. The Bolsheviks alone determined a favourableresolution to this conflict, steered the revolutionary process to asuccessful conclusion, and made history.

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NOTES

1. Ronald Grigor Suny, 'Toward a Social History of the October Revolution',American Historical Review 88 (1983), pp.31-52.

2. Leopold Haimson, The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism (Boston, MA,1955); Adam Ulam, The Unfinished Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1960); RichardPipes, Social Democracy and the St. Petersburg Labor Movement, 1885-1897 (Cam-bridge, MA, 1963); J.L.H. Keep, The Rise of Social Democracy in Russia (Oxford,1963); Allan K. Wildman, The Making of a Workers' Revolution, Russian Social Democ-racy, 1891-1903 (Chicago, IL, 1967); Robert Daniels, Red October, The BolshevikRevolution of 1917 (New York, 1967).

3. Leopold Haimson and Charles Tilly (eds.), Strikes, Wars, and Revolutions in an Inter-national Perspective: Strike Waves in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries(New York, 1989)

4. For an explicit example, see J.L.H. Keep, The Russian Revolution: A Study in MassMobilization (New York, 1976).

5. Strifes and Revolution in Russia, 1917 (Princeton, NJ, 1989), p.299. Henceforth thiswork will be referred to as SRR.

6. The following works represent a fairly unified conceptualisation of their subject:Allan K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ,1981, 1987); Diane Koenker, Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution (Princeton, NJ,1981); David Mandel, The Petrograd Workers and the Fall of the Old Regime: From theFebruary Revolution to the July Days, 1917 (London, 1983); David Mandel, The Petro-grad Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power (July 1917-June 1918) (London, 1984); S. A.Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories 1917-1918 (Cambridge 1983); RonaldGrigor Suny, The Baku Commune, 1917-1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revo-lution (Princeton, NJ, 1972); Donald J. Raleigh, Revolution on the Volga, 1917 inSaratov (Ithaca, NY, 1986); Ziva Galili, The Menshevik Leaders in the Revolution: SocialRealities and Political Strategies (Princeton, NJ, 1989); Rex A. Wade, Red Guards andWorkers' Militias in the Russian Revolution (Stanford, CA, 1984).

As with any homogeneous trend in historical scholarship, each work has acharacter of its own - angles of approach to the subject matter differ, primarysources vary, foci contrast. SRR, however, is the only work where I will lay out asfully as possible the authors' line of reasoning by means of which certain analyt-ically crucial conclusions common to the school of social history were reached. Ishall have occasion to refer directly to a few of the above-listed works to sub-stantiate the representative character of SSR with respect to interpretation andconclusion.

7. SRR, pp.11-13. Extensive comparative references may also be found in Smith's RedPetrograd . . ., the cousin work to SRR.

8. SRR, p.329.9. SRR, p.328.

10. SRR, p.32711. SRR, p.1512. SRR, p.326. Rosenberg and Koenker calculate that 2.7 per cent of all strike partici-

pants in 1917 lost strikes outright, an astonishingly low percentage. Ibid., p.79.13. Galili, The Menshevik Leaders . . . pp.64-5.14. SRR, p.31815. SRR, p.32316. SRR, p.326 (emphasis in the original).17. SRR, p.205 (emphasis added).18. SRR, p.323 (emphasis added).19. SRR, pp.324, 325.20. SRR, p.328 (emphasis added).

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21. SRR, p.276 (emphasis added).22. SRR, p.13.23. SRR, p.299.24. SRR, p.323.25. SRR, p.299. 'For social historians, the dissection of what has been called the "ele-

mental" social forces or Trotsky's "molecular mass" into smaller, identifiableaggregates, has permitted new and deeper understanding of the revolutionaryprocess'. Ibid.

26. Smith, Red Petrograd . . . p.145.27. Smith, Red Petrograd . . . pp.184-5.28. Ibid., p.185.29. In his review of Mandel and Smith (The Russian Review, Vol. 44. No. 3 (July 1985)

pp.309-311), Raleigh accurately reported that Smith offered a 'picture of workers'efforts to curb economic disaster and how struggles in the factories promotedrevolutionary consciousness more than anything the Bolsheviks said and did', adepiction which Raleigh finds on the whole 'convincing' and largely correct(emphasis added). What Raleigh says of Smith in particular is true of social histor-ians generally.

30. Smith's position merits further analysis. Social historians rightly see the rationalpursuit of material interests as the animating force of workers' conscious activity.However, in a review essay of Koenker's Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution(Princeton, NJ, 1981), Smith dissented from what he took to be her 'rather un-ilateral emphasis on "rationality"' because it wrongly suggested that workerswere exclusively 'governed by hard-headed calculation of ends and means'. Theworkers' rationality, Smith cautioned, 'was deeply imbued with idealism andeven utopianism. Revolutionary consciousness had moral and emotional as wellas rational bases, but very little of this is conveyed in Koenker's narrative'. Smith,'Moscow Workers and the Revolutions of 1905 and 1917' (Soviet Studies,Vol.XXXVI, No.2 (April 1984), pp.282-9). Nevertheless, Smith is ambiguous onthe relationship between the workers' putative utopianism and idealism on theone hand (for which, curiously, little evidence is to be found in his own book),and the workers' undoubted calculating rationality on the other. I believe theambiguity stems from Smith's reluctance fully to recognise and analyse the deter-mining substance of political competition. Indeed, that Koenker never reached thedimension of political competition in her study of the workers' drive to securetheir material well-being was apparently not crucial to Smith, for in his critical re-marks Smith leaped over that dimension altogether by attributing extra-rational,emotional bases to workers' consciousness and activity, and extra-material, ideal,even Utopian, interests. In his commendable desire to make the worker more thana homo economicus Smith still made him less than a zoon politikon.

31. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army. Vol.11, p.402 (emphasis added).32. Smith, Red Petrograd . . . pp.2-3. By placing quotation marks around the indicated

words, Smith lets the reader know that their strict meaning is not intended,though what is intended is left in abeyance. In effect, Smith perhaps senses that,in this instance, the terms may not be quite right.

33. Leopold H. Haimson, 'The Problem of Social Identities in Early TwentiethCentury Russia', Slavic Review (Spring 1988), pp.1-20.

34. Ibid., pp.1-4.35. Ibid., p.336. Rosenberg, 'Identities, Power, and Social Interaction in Revolutionary Russia',

Slavic Review (Spring 1988), pp.21, 23.37. Haimson, op. cit., p.4.38. 'I now know how it is possible in the course of half an hour to leave not the slight-

est trace of the most hollow defencism' among workers. So wrote Lunacharskii of

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a factory meeting at which he and other Bolsheviks had spoken. Literaturnoe nas-ledstvo (Moscow, 1971) No.8 p.341; cited in Mandel, The Petrograd Workers . . .p.124.

39. SRR, p.302.40. For a shrill restatement of this view see Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution

(London, 1990). Keep shares Pipes' general outlook. In his review (American His-torical Review, June 1991, Vol.96, No. 3, p.918) of SRR, Keep criticised Koenker andRosenberg for believing that the Bolsheviks 'merely reflected] the masses' ownelemental aspirations'. Keep is correct on this crucial point. However, Keep wenton to predictably but falsely deduce that in giving political form and meaning tothese aspirations the Bolsheviks must therefore have falsified them and (super-)imposed the 'ulterior goal' of socialism, thereby depriving the masses of thatliberal democracy and free enterprise to which they, presumably, ideally aspired -a presumption of Keep's that, if acted upon politically, would take away the rightof the people to take matters into their own hands and vote for a political party oftheir own choosing on the grounds that the masses might not know what is bestfor them. In other words, the line of reasoning espoused by Keep has been used tojustify dictatorship over the people, for the good of the people.

41. In his review essay 'Toward a Social History of the October Revolution', AmericanHistorical Review 88 (1983), pp.31-52, Suny declined to characterise J.L.H. Keep'sstudy of the Russian Revolution as genuine 'social history' owing to Keep's keynotion that the Bolsheviks exploited their putative estrangement from theworkers, to the detriment of workers. Suny countered Keep's central idea by see-ing in the workers' 'autonomy' and self-enclosed 'rationality' defensive barriersthat, fortunately, autarchically shielded workers (at least in 1917) from unduedirecting influence by parties of calculating radical intellectuals. But Suny'scounterposition is a mirror image of Keep's basic position - with Suny merelyattaching different political values to it. In Keep's, and that of most political histor-ians, the image of exteriority is accompanied by imprecations against theBolsheviks specifically. In Suny's, and that of most social historians, the image ofexteriority is accompanied by studied moral-ideological praise of workersgenerally, especially when they are free or can be made to appear free of whatmost historians, social and political alike, tend to regard as la politique politiciennepractised by party revolutionaries. (This image of party politics is so widespreadand pervasive that, in my view, it is less a summary conceptualisation of revo-lutionary politics, in Russia or elsewhere, than a commentary by proxy on themanipulative techniques and false advertising of contemporary mass electoralpolitics.) Cutting across and standing independently of Suny and Keep's diver-gent moral-ideological evaluations of workers and (Bolshevik) politics, then, is theexternal relationship they both posit between the domain of party-political com-petition, on the one hand, and the workers' movement, on the other.Unfortunately, Suny missed this distinction and, in line with his notion that sep-arating political beliefs from an impartial treatment of the Russian Revolution wasnot truly feasible, dragged in political values (in this case, his own) to depriveKeep's work of the title 'social history'.

42. Mutatis mutandis, some social historians of Stalinism may frontally eject politicsand the Stalinist state from their accounts - only to have both covertly reappear,disguised as collectivisation and industrialisation, 'social' processes centrally com-manded into existence by a coercive State. See Vladimir Brovkin, 'Stalinism,Revisionism and the Problem of Conceptualisation: A Review Article', SovietStudies, VoI.XLI, No.3 (July 1989), pp.501-; Geoff Eley, 'History with the PoliticsLeft Out - Again?' Russian Review, Vol.45 (1986), pp.385-94.

43. In an empirically distinct though analytically analogous context, Reginald Zelnikhas also targeted for criticism 'circumstantial explanations' advanced by Rosen-

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berg specifically. In 'Commentary: Circumstance and Political Will in the RussianCivil War', Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War (eds.), Diane P.Koenker, William G. Rosenberg, Ronald Grigor Suny (Indiana, 1989) (pp.374-81)],Zelnik advised historians to avoid all one-sidedness by 'working through a com-plex dialectic of ideology and circumstance, consciousness and experience, realityand will, a dialectic that can never be reduced to a catchy formula, and certainlynot a formula that awards a golden certificate of causal primacy'.(p.379). Never-theless, while Zelnik does point to the real weaknesses of the social historians, hedoes so from a general position that risks an equally serious misconceptualisationof the historic process. As an alternative to the objectivist, Pavlovian determinismof the social historians, Zelnik advocates, in practice, a subjectivist, ideologicallydriven determinism, by attributing causal primacy de facto to Bolshevik politicalwill as the effective agent of twentieth-century Russian history, a notion re-valorised and popularised by the work of Sheila Fitzpatrick notably, where thecivil war mentality of Bolshevism is identified as a (the?) transcendent ideologicalmainspring of social transformation, under Stalinism. See, for example, her essayThe Civil War as a Formative Experience' (A. Gleason et al. (eds.), Bolshevik Cul-ture, Bloomington, IN, 1985).

44. Mandel devotes an entire introductory chapter to 'types of political culture' thatcoincided with three types of workers, the skilled, the unskilled and the 'labouraristocracy' (printers and small property owning workers mainly). According tohim, the 'cultural traits and dispositions' of each group of workers 'filtered per-ceptions and shaped responses' to events so that it formed a 'necessary point ofdeparture to understand political consciousness'. Op. cit., Vol.1, p.9. But, in hisconclusion, he rejects the notion that 'cultural factors' were determining in them-selves. In fact, he says, they only 'acted as intervening variables between theactors and the objective situation'. 'The main practical import of political culture in1917 itself was to accelerate or retard the radicalisation process'. As conclusiveproof he emphasises that the 'marked differences in political culture among theworkers' proved no obstacle to the February revolution and dual power mustering'broad support' among workers, just as the victory of the October Revolution andSoviet power was only made possible thanks to the 'virtual unanimity' of workersin favour of it. Op cit., Vol.2 p.416. The analytical implication here is that politicalposition, and shift in political position, were not reducible to fixed cultural type.But Mandel does not fully realise the implication as he rejects the empirical pre-mises of his own conclusion and, in practice, at every point in the body of hiswork, tries to 'explain' the shifting political practices and outlooks of each grouplargely by reference to that group's relatively stable cultural peculiarities, traitsand dispositions. What he actually engages in is reductionist historical descripti-vism, not causal analysis.

On an analytically related point, it should be noted in passing that Koenker andRosenberg reject, rightly, sociologically reductionist explanations of the propen-sity of workers to strike in 1917. The specific economic position of each industry. . . fails to explain differences in strike propensity' (p.303); 'It would seem theattributes of skill alone . . . did not necessarily predispose workers to strike in 1917(p.309);'. . . it is still not certain that the size of an enterprise alone was more sig-nificant in fostering strikes than other factors . . .' (p.312); 'In sum, we cannotspeak of a strike vanguard at all in terms of social indices, since there are no reallyconsistent patterns', (p.318). Koenker and Rosenberg's summation calls attentionto another implied and broader analytical problem, that of disaggregating the poli-tical moment of the workers' movement so as to speak of it exclusively in terms ofsocial indices, that is, wage-level, industry, gender, skill-level, literacy, locality,factory size, or any combination thereof. In other words, while the politicalmoment doubtless contains these and other indices, it cannot be indexed under

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any of them: Politics forms a category apart. Competition between political van-guards functions to determine the workers' movement's own path. It is a functionthat cannot be carried out by, substituted for, exchanged with, reduced to orindexed under any other part of the workers' movement.

45. SRR, p.22.46. SRR, pp.12-13.47. Leopold Haimson and Charles Tilly (eds.). Strikes, Wars, and Revolutions in an Inter-

national Perspective: Strike Waves in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries(New York, 1989), 'Introduction', p.43 (emphasis added.)

48. Robert Brenner, 'The Paradox of Social Democracy: The American Case', The YearLeft (London, 1985), p.40.

49. Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies ofModern Democracy (New York, 1962), p.338.

50. Ibid., p.337. cf. Brenner, op. cit., pp.43-51. Elisabeth Domansky has amply docu-mented the conservatism of trade union leaderships in a case study, 'TheRationalisation of Class Struggle: Strikes and Strike Strategy of the German Metal-worker's Union, 1891-1922', pp.321-355 in Strifes, Wars, and Revolutions . . . Thebureaucratic suffocation of the labour movement has perhaps found its con-summate expression in the United States. For a probing contemporary analysis,see Kim Moody, An Injury to All: The Decline of American Trade Unionism (NewYork, 1988).

51. Carl Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905-1917 (Cambridge, MA, 1955). RosaLuxemburg presented the views of the revolutionary wing, in 1906, in The MassStrike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions (New York, 1971).

52. Brenner, pp.41-42.53. Pierre Broué, Revolution en Allemagne, 1917-1923 (Paris, 1971). In Italy, the workers

of Turin and Milan experienced the especially bitter lessons of trying to move therevolution forward in 1919-1920 merely by occupying the factories. GwynWilliams, Proletarian Order: Antonio Gramsci, Factory Councils and the Origins of Com-munism in Italy, 1911-1921 (London, 1975); Paolo Spriano, The Occupation of theFactories (London, 1975). In light of the Italian failure, Rosenberg and Koenker'sview that 'the extension of workers' power within the workplace . . . was clearly ameans of moving the revolution forward' and of ultimately forcing the 'trans-formation of the state' in Russia (SRR, p.236) requires further specification, that is,specifically Russian (Bolshevik) politics.

54. Leopold Haimson, 'The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905-1917',Stoic Review (December 1964 and March 1965). It is beyond the scope of this essayto explain why a material basis to reformism in the Russian working class waslacking, a basis which capitalism periodically provides by virtue of its uniquepower to periodically develop the forces of production on a colossal scale andmake possible a rise in the standard of living of the working-class, thereby obtain-ing the workers' generally free and willing acceptance of this mode of production.Suffice to say that a central component of a possible explanation, in my view,would have to come to terms with extant characterisations, (ex-)Soviet and West-ern alike, of Russia's developing industrial economy as capitalist, and its politicalorder as feudal, a growing 'contradiction' that blew up in 1917, tearing the Tsaristorder asunder. An alternate conceptualisation of Russia's 'modernisation' wouldflatly deny the contradiction by denying that capitalism, with which modernisa-tion is equated, was in fact developing in Russia. In this view Russia'sindustrialisation was proceeding quite apace, along alternate, ancien regime linesand consequently in fundamental harmony with the needs and interests of thefeudal Tsarist state, not with the growth requirements of a modern capitalisteconomy nor, ceteris paribus, with the needs and interests of a capitalist politicalorder. Subordinating Russia's industrialisation to political requirements of self-

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preservation, the Tsarist state adopted economic polices which, taken in theaggregate, were inimical to the systematic productive investment of surpluses,thorough specialisation of productive techniques and regular technical innovationcharacteristic of a capitalist economy. The consequence, most evident in agricul-ture, was a general inability to powerfully raise the productivity of labour and soprovide the material basis - a rising standard of living of the direct producers - forreformism. More familiarly, this interpretation would centrally target for criticismthe standard argument that a true 'civil society' in the 'Western' (and onlymeaningful) sense of the term was ostensibly emerging in Russia but that it couldnot mature owing to the constraints imposed on its free and full development bythe existing, non-Western political order. Perry Anderson has written a limpidsummary of this conventional view in Lineages of the Absolutist State (London,1975), esp. pp.353-360; Tim McDaniel has independently developed it in Auto-cracy, Capitalism, and Revolution in Russia (Berkeley, CA, 1988), and LauraEngelstein has recently restated it, in novel form, in 'Combined Underdevelop-ment: Discipline and Law in Imperial and Soviet Russia', American HistoricalReview 98 (April 1993), pp.338-53.

55. V. I. Lenin, 'Left-Wing' Communism: An Infantile Disorder (Moscow, 1920).56. Alexander Rabinowitch has exhaustively chronicled the activity of the Bolshevik

party specifically, between February and October, in Prelude to Revolution: ThePetrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising (Bloomington, IN, 1968); The BolsheviksCome to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd (New York, 1976). It is categor-ically not my intent, in the concluding pages of this essay, to add empirically tothis work, whose signal achievement was successfully to counter the traditionalimage of the Bolshevik party as undemocratic and conspiratorial. Thanks largelyto Rabinowitch's scrupulous scholarship, the open and deliberative character ofthe Bolshevik party in 1917, so controversial when Rabinowitch first broadcast it, isnow widely accepted, conventional perhaps. We can now move on to examine thenature and function of party-politics in general. My purpose here is stringent: tocorroborate empirically my thesis about the autonomous significance of politics,as against any reductive notion of social determination, by so conceptualising themeaning of party-political activity in the period from February to October.

57. Conventional scholarship regularly fails to grasp the distinction between thestruggle for particular reforms, and the struggle against the political strategy of re-formism. Following the lead taken by the Bolsheviks' contemporaneousMenshevik opponents, modern scholars often portray the Bolsheviks as beingagainst reforms and for some sort of millenarianism simply on the basis of the Bol-sheviks' hostility to the Mensheviks and reformism. Had the Bolsheviks trulyacted on this understanding they would never have obtained between 1912 and1914 the support of the majority of politically active and organised workers whowere struggling for reforms, for the eight-hour day, for employer-funded healthcare, for social insurance, and for a Republic, for revolution and democracy. In thesame period, the Mensheviks did act on that understanding, polemicised againstthe Bolsheviks, who did not share it, and counterposed the struggle for reforms tothe struggle for revolution - and lost worker support because the Menshevikscould get no significant reforms by observing Tsarist legality, by relying on theDuma to act as an effective reformist counterweight to the reactionary Tsaristbureaucracy, by looking to the Kadets for innovative political leadership, and soon. For a detailed and illuminating account of Menshevik-Bolshevik political con-flict in connection to the struggle for one reform, see Sally Ewing's exemplaryessay, 'The Russian Social Insurance Movement, 1912-1914: An Ideological Analy-sis', Slavic Review 50 (1991), pp.914-926.

58. Wildman, The End of the Imperial Russian Army, p.404.

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59. The basic Bolshevik argument is developed and summarised by Lenin in 'Con-stitutional Illusions', Collected Works, Vol.35, pp.196-210. My paragraph is asynopsis of pp.205-10 espedally.

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Documents

Class conflict, political competition and social transformation: Critical perspectives on the social history of the Russian revolution