Sweden On The One Hand And Russia On The Other

Every country has its own socialism. But things did not differ greatly from the English paradigma in those continental countries whose contributions to humanity’s fund of cultural values is so strikingly out of proportion to their size—the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries in particular. Take Sweden for an instance. Like her art, her science, her politics, her social institutions and much besides, her socialism and her socialists owe their distinction not to any peculiar features of principle or intention, but to the stuff the Swedish nation is made of and to its exceptionally well-balanced social structure. That is why it is so absurd for other nations to try to copy Swedish examples; the only effective way of doing so would be to import the Swedes and to put them in charge.

The Swedes being the people they are and their social structure being what it is, we shall have no difficulty in understanding the two outstanding characteristics of their socialism. The socialist party, almost always ably and conscientiously led, grew slowly in response to a very normal social process, without any attempt to push ahead of normal development and to antagonize for the sake of antagonizing. Hence its rise to political power produced no convulsions. Responsible office came naturally to its leaders who were able to meet the leaders of other parties on terms of equality and largely on common ground: to this day, though a communist group has of course developed, the differences in current politics reduce to such questions as whether a few million kroner more or less should be spent on some social purpose accepted by all.

And within the party, the antagonism between intellectuals and labor men only shows under the microscope precisely because, owing to the level of both, there is no great cultural gulf between them and because, the Swedish social organism producing a relatively smaller supply of unemployable intellectuals than do other social organisms, exasperated and exasperating intellectuals are not as numerous as they are elsewhere. This is sometimes described as the “enervating control” exerted by trade unions over the socialist movement in general and over the party in particular. To observers steeped in the phraseology of current radicalism, this may well seem so. But this diagnosis entirely fails to do justice to the social and racial environment of which not only the labor men but also the intellectuals are the products and which prevents both of them from exalting their socialism into a religion. Though room might be found in Marx’s teaching for such patterns, the average Marxist cannot of course be expected to look with favor upon a socialist party of the Swedish type, or even to admit that it embodies a genuine case of socialist endeavor.

Swedish socialists in turn were very lightly tinged with Marxism though they frequently used language that conformed to what was then considered socialist etiquette, especially in their international relations with other socialist groups.

On the other end of the scale, in Russia, we find a socialism that was almost purely Marxist and hence enjoyed that favor to the full, but is no less easy to understand from its environment. Tsarist Russia was an agrarian country of largely pre-capitalist complexion. The industrial proletariat, so far as it was accessible to the professional socialist, formed but a small part of the total population of about 150 millions. 7 The commercial and industrial bourgeoisie, correspondingly weak in numbers, was not much more efficient than was anyone else, though capitalist evolution fostered by the government was rapidly gathering momentum. Inserted into this structure was an intelligentsia whose ideas were as foreign to the soil as were the Paris dresses of Russian society women.

To many of the intellectuals, the form of government then prevailing— an absolute monarch (autocrator) heading a huge bureaucracy and allied with the landed aristocracy and the church—was of course abomination. And public opinion all over the world has accepted their reading of history. Even writers most hostile to the regime that followed upon that of the tsars invariably make haste to assure their readers that they are duly horrified at the monstrosity of tsarism. Thus the simple truth has been entirely lost in a maze of cant phrases. As a matter of fact, that form of government was no less appropriate to the social pattern that had produced it than was the parliamentary monarchy in England and the democratic republic in the United States. The performance of the bureaucracy, considering the conditions under which it had to work, was far above what the world has been made to believe; its social reforms, agrarian and other, and its halting steps toward a diluted type of constitutionalism were all that could have been expected in the circumstances. It was the imported radicalism and the group interest of the intellectuals that clashed with the spirit of the nation and not the tsarist monarchy which on the contrary had a strong hold upon the vast majority of all classes.

From this, two conclusions follow which at first sight seem paradoxical though no serious student of history will consider them so. On the one hand, any big or sudden move in the direction desired by those liberal lawyers, doctors, professors and civil servants that formed the Kadet party (the party of the Constitutional Democrats) was impossible not so much because their program was inacceptable to the monarchy as because they were so weak.

Admitting them to power would have meant admitting an element that commanded not more but less support among the masses and was not more but less in sympathy with their feelings and interests than were the groups that ran tsarism. There was no scope for a bourgeois regime let alone a socialist one. And there was no analogy between the French situation of 1789 and the Russian situation of 1905. The social structure that crumbled in 1789 was obsolete, stood in the way of almost everything that had any vitality in the nation, and was unable to cope with the fiscal, economic and social problems of the hour. This was not so in the Russia of 1905. There had been loss of prestige owing to the defeat suffered at the hands of Japan and there were disaffection and disorder in consequence. But the state proved itself equal to the tasks not only of suppressing the disorder but also of attacking the problems behind it. In France the result was Robespierre, in Russia it was Stolypin. This would not have been possible if the life had gone out of tsarism as it had gone out of the French ancien régime. There is no reason for assuming that, but for the strain the World War put upon the social fabric, the Russian monarchy would have failed to transform itself peacefully and successfully under the influence of, and in step with, the economic development of the country.8

8 This analysis, of course, raises questions of great interest concerning the nature of what we are in the habit of calling historical necessity on the one hand and of the role in the historical process of the quality of individual leadership on the other. It would, I think, be difficult to hold that Russia was driven into the war by inexorable necessity. The interests at stake in the Serbian quarrel were not of vital importance, to say the least. The domestic situation in 1914 was not such as to enforce a policy of military aggression as a last resort. The former no doubt actuated nationalists, the latter some (not all) of the extreme reactionaries, and both a number of individuals and groups with axes to grind. But a modicum of common prudence and firmness in the last of the tsars could no doubt have averted participation in the war. It would have been more difficult, but it cannot be called impossible, to avert catastrophe later on when the situation had declared itself and when, after the battle of Gorlice, all hope for military success had gone. Even after the downfall of the monarchy, it is by no means certain that the Kerensky government could not have saved the situation by carefully husbanding its resources and refusing to yield to the importunity of the Allies instead of ordering that desperate last attack. But tsarist society before the bourgeois revolt, and bourgeois society after it, watched the approaching doom in a state of paralysis that was as unmistakable as it is difficult to explain. Now the presence of groupwise incompetence in the one camp and of ability and energy in the other cannot of course be attributed to chance. But in this case, the incompetence of the old regime merely amounted to its being not equal to a situation of complete disorganization and this situation could doubtless have been avoided.

The reader will hardly expect to find that my analysis of Russian socialism and its environmental conditions agrees with Trotsky’s (History of the Russian Revolution, English translation by M.Eastman, 1934). All the more significant is the fact that the two do not differ toto coelo and that, in particular, Trotsky considered the question what would have happened if the revolutionary movement had impinged upon a “different tsar.” It is true that he dismisses the obvious inference from considerations of that order. But he recognizes that the Marxist doctrine does not constrain us to neglect the element of personality, though he does not seem to admit the full importance of it for a diagnosis of the Russian revolution.

On the other hand, it was precisely because of the fundamental stability of the social structure that the intellectuals, who could not hope to prevail by anything like normal methods, were driven into a desperate radicalism and into courses of criminal violence. Theirs was the kind of radicalism whose intensity is in inverse proportion to its practical possibilities, the radicalism of impotence. Assassinations might be futile and productive of nothing but repression but there was not much else to do. The brutality of the methods of repression in turn produced retaliation and thus that tragedy unfolded, the tragedy of cruelty and crime incessantly reinforcing each other, which is all that the world saw and felt and which it diagnosed as we should expect.

Now Marx was no putschist. For some of the antics of Russian revolutionaries, especially for those of the Bakunin type, he harbored as much hatred as is compatible with contempt. Moreover, he should have seen—perhaps he did see—that the social and economic structure of Russia failed to fulfill every one of the conditions which according to his own doctrine are essential for the success and even for the emergence of his type of socialism. But if, on logical grounds, this should have prevented the Russian intellectuals from embracing his teaching, we shall understand readily why, on the contrary, it was a tremendous success with them. They were—more or less seriously—revolutionaries and they were at loose ends. Here was a revolutionary gospel of unsurpassable force. Marx’s glowing phrases and chiliastic prophecy were exactly what they needed in order to get out of the dreary desert of nihilism. Moreover, this compound of economic theory, philosophy and history suited the Russian taste to perfection. Never mind that the gospel was quite inapplicable to their case and really held out no promise to them. The believer always hears what he wants to hear, no matter what the prophet actually says. The further removed the actual situation was from the state of maturity which Marx visualized, the more ready were the Russian intellectuals— not only the professed socialists among them—to look to him for a solution of their problems.

Thus, a Marxist group emerged as early as 1883, to evolve into the Social Democratic party in 1898. Leadership and, at the beginning, membership were primarily intellectual of course, though sufficient success attended the underground organizing activity among the “masses” to enable sympathetic observers to speak of a fusion of labor groups under Marxist leadership. This accounts for the absence of many of the difficulties met by other Marxist groups in countries with strong labor unions. In any case at first, the workmen who entered the organization accepted the intellectuals’ leadership with the utmost docility and hardly even pretended to decide anything for themselves.

In consequence, developments in doctrine and in action were on strictly Marxian lines and on a high level. Naturally this drew the blessings of the German defenders of the faith who, beholding such disarming virtue, evidently felt that there must be some exceptions to the Marxian thesis that serious socialism can spring only from full-fledged capitalism. Plekhanov, however, the founder of the group of 1883 and the leading figure of the first two decades, whose able and learned contributions to Marxist doctrine commanded universal respect, really accepted this thesis and therefore cannot have hoped for the early realization of socialism. While valiantly fighting the good fight against reformism and all the other contemporaneous heresies that threatened the purity of the faith, and while upholding belief in the revolutionary goal and method, this true Marxist must have felt early misgivings at the rise, within the party, of a group that seemed bent on action in the immediate future, though he sympathized with it and with its leader, Lenin.

The inevitable conflict that split the party into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks (1903) meant something much more serious than a mere disagreement regarding tactics such as the names of the two groups suggest. At the time no observer, however experienced, could have realized fully the nature of the rift. By now the diagnosis should be obvious. The Marxist phraseology which both groups retained obscured the fact that one of them had irrevocably broken away from classical Marxism.

Lenin had evidently no illusions concerning the Russian situation. He saw that the tsarist regime could be successfully attacked only when temporarily weakened by military defeat and that in the ensuing disorganization a resolute and well-disciplined group could by ruthless terror overthrow whatever other regime might attempt to replace it. For this contingency, the likelihood of which he seems to have realized more clearly than did anyone else, he was resolved to prepare the appropriate instrument. He had little use for the semi- bourgeois ideology about the peasants—who of course in Russia constituted the relevant social problem—and still less for theories about the necessity of waiting for the workmen to rise of their own initiative in order to accomplish the grand revolution. What he needed was a well-trained bodyguard of revolutionist janissaries, deaf to any argument but his own, free from all inhibitions, impervious to the voices of reason or humanity. Under the circumstances and in the requisite quality such a troop could be recruited only from the intellectual stratum, and the best material available was to be found within the party. His attempt to gain control of the latter therefore amounted to an attempt to destroy its very soul. The majority and their leader, L.Martov, must have felt that. He did not criticize Marx or advocate any new departure.

He resisted Lenin in the name of Marx and stood for the Marxist doctrine of a proletarian mass party. The novel note was struck by Lenin. Since time immemorial, heretics have invariably claimed that they were not out to destroy whatever gospel they found in possession but, on the contrary, that they were trying to restore its pristine purity. Lenin, adopting the time-honored practice, exalted and out-Marxed Marx instead of renouncing allegiance. At the most, he gave the lead implied in the phrase that became so popular with Trotsky and Stalin, “Marxism in the epoch of imperialism.” And the reader will readily see that, up to a certain crucial range, it was not difficult for Lenin to adopt both form and matter of unadulterated Marxism. Yet it is no less easy to see that from this stronghold he sallied forth to occupy an essentially un-Marxian position. Un-Marxian was not merely the idea of socialization by pronunciamiento in an obviously immature situation; much more so was the idea that “emancipation” was to be not, as the Marxist dogma has it, the work of the proletariat itself but of a band of intellectuals officering the rabble. 9 This meant more than a different view about agitatorial practice and compromises, more than a disagreement on secondary points of Marxist doctrine. This meant divorce from its innermost meaning. 10

9 As a matter of fact, contact with criminal elements was formed, though not by Lenin himself but by (he lieutenants on the spot. This led to the activity of the “ex’s” (shock groups engaged in practical “expropriations,” i.e., holdups) both in Russia proper and in Poland. This was pure gangsterdom though western intellectuals swallowed an apologetic “theory” of it. 10 For our purpose it is not necessary to comment further on the details of a well-known story. The following remarks will suffice. Lenin did not succeed in subjugating the Russian socialist party whose leaders on the contrary drew away from him as time went on the difficulty of their situation, arising from their wish to keep up something like a united front without jettisoning their principles, is well illustrated by Plekhanov’s vacillations. But Lenin did succeed in keeping his group together, in curbing it into obedience and in adjusting its course to the problems raised by the revolt of 1905 and its aftermath, including the presence of a Leninist element in the Duma. At the same time, he succeeded in keeping contact with, and standing in, the Second International (see below) of which he attended three congresses and in whose bureau he for a time represented the Russian party. This would hardly have been possible if his views and activities had been allowed to impress the representatives of the other nations as they impressed the majority of Russian socialists. As it was, that body, and western socialist opinion in general, looked upon him simply as the outstanding figure in the left wing of orthodoxy and bore with him and his unbending extremism, admiring him in some respects and not taking him too seriously in others. Thus in his sphere of politics he played a double role that was not without analogy with the double role of the tsarist regime whose international attitudes (as exemplified by its sponsoring international arbitration and security) also differed considerably from its attitudes at home.

Neither these achievements nor his contributions to socialist thought—most of them distinctly mediocre (as, by the way, were those of Trotsky)—would have secured him a place in the front rank of socialists. Greatness came after Russia s breakdown in the World War and was as much the result of a unique combination of circumstances that made his weapons