Marxism and the class narrative
The Soviet Union's vision of the journey's end - socialist society - was in many respects the common property of the European Left as a whole. The distinctive contribution of the Marxist tradition to the new revolutionary regime in Russia was a narrative about how socialist society would come to be. Marxism described the protagonists whose interaction would result in socialism, their motivations, the tasks they set themselves and the dramatic clashes between them that propelled society forward.
Marx shaped the Soviet Union's constitutive narrative in three crucial ways. First, the narrative was about classes. The Marxist understanding of 'class' is deeply shaped by seeing classes as characters in a narrative, with motivations, will, purposes and the ability to perceive and overcome obstacles. The role of 'scientific socialism' was to give a strong underpinning to this narrative. The doctrine of surplus value, for example, demonstrated the unavoidable conflict between proletariat and bourgeoisie and this in turn gave the proletariat as a class its essential motivation.
Second, the central episode in Marx's world-historical narrative portrays the process by which the industrial proletariat recognises, accepts and carries out the historical mission of taking political power as a class and using it to introduce socialism. This central episode is summed up by the phrase 'dictatorship of the proletariat'. The proletariat needed political power in order to carry out its mission for two sets of reasons: the defensive/repressive need to protect socialism from hostile classes and the constructive need for society-wide institutional transformation. Although a class dictatorship was only possible when the class in question was in a position to carry out its class interest fully and without compromise, Marx always assumed that the proletarian class dictatorship would rest securely on the voluntary support of the other non-elite classes.
Third, Marx brought the world-historical narrative home by assigning a mission here and nowto dedicated socialist revolutionaries. 'The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.' The famous motto of the First International can be understood in two ways. On one reading, the motto tells revolutionaries from other classes to clear off: the emancipation ofthe working class is the business of the workers and no one else. The motto was understood in this way by the French Proudhonists who were perhaps the most important constituency within the First International.
On another reading, the motto not only refuses to close the door to non- proletarian revolutionaries but actually invites them in. If only the workers themselves can bring about their liberation, then it is imperative that they come to understand what it is they need to do and that they obtain the requisite organisational tools. This mission of preparing the working class for its mission was incumbent upon any socialist who accepted the Marxist class narrative, no matter what his or her social origin.
Revolutionary Social Democracy: 'The merger of socialism and the worker movement'
The basic self-definition of the Bolsheviks was that they were the Russian embodiment of 'revolutionary Social Democracy'. Their angry rejection of the label 'Social Democracy' in 1918 was meant to be a defiant assertion of continued loyalty to what the label once stood for. When the pioneers of Russian Social Democracy looked West in the 1890s, they saw a powerful, prestigious and yet still revolutionary movement. They saw mass worker parties, inspired by the Marxist class narrative, that continued to advance despite the persecutions of such redoubtable enemies as Chancellor Bismarck. They saw a set of innovative institutions - a party of a new type - that set out to bring the message to the workers and instil in them an 'alternative culture'.[350]
The man who gave canonical expression to the elaborated class narrative of Social Democracy was Karl Kautsky. Kautsky is remembered as the most influential theoretician of international Social Democracy, but in certain key respects - particularly in the case of the fledgling Russian Social Democracy - Kautsky's role went beyond influence. In 1892, Kautsky wrote The Erfurt Programme, a semi-official commentary on the recently adopted programme of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). This book defined Social Democracy for Russian activists - it was the book one read to find out what it meant to be a Social Democrat. In 1894, a young provincial revolutionary named Vladimir Ul'ianov translated The Erfurt Programme into Russian just at the time he was acquiring his lifelong identity as a revolutionary Social Democrat.
In The Erfurt Programme, Kautsky defined Social Democracy as 'the merger [Vereinigung] of socialism and the worker movement'. This slogan summarised not only the proletarian mission to introduce socialism, but also the Social Democratic mission of filling the proletariat with an awareness of its task. Kautsky's formula also provided Social Democracy with its own origin story. According to the merger formula, Social Democracy was a synthesis. As Kautsky put it, each earlier strand of both socialism and the worker movement possessed 'ein StUckchen des Richtigen', a little bit of the truth.[351] This little bit of truth could be preserved, but only if its one-sidedness was transcended. In this way, the merger formula implied a two-front polemical war against all who defended the continued isolation of either socialism or the worker movement. The technical term within social democratic discourse for the effort to keep the working-class struggle free from socialism was Nurgew- erkschaftlerei, 'trade-unions-only-ism'. (Since England was the classical home of this anti-Social Democratic ideology, the English words 'trade union' were used by both German and Russian Social Democrats to make an '-ism' that was equivalent for Nurgewerkschaftlerei. To render Lenin's epithet tred-iunionizm as 'trade-unionism' is really a mistranslation, since it implies that Lenin was hostile towards trade unions rather than towards a specific ideology that denied the need for a Social Democratic worker party) A corresponding 'Nur term could have been coined for bomb-throwing revolutionaries who continued to think that it was a waste of time to propagandise and educate the working class as a whole prior to the revolution.
By assigning the task of introducing socialism to the working class itself, the merger formula implied an exalted sense of a world historical mission. The most powerful source for this aspect of the Social Democratic narrative was Ferdinand Lassalle, the forgotten founding father of modern socialism. The cult of Lassalle that was an integral part of the culture of the German Social Democratic Party was based on his thrilling insistence during his brief two years ofproto-Social Democratic agitation (1862-4) that the workers, the despised fourth estate, accept the noble burden of an exalted mission. 'The high and world-wide honour of this destiny must occupy all your thoughts. Neither the load of the oppressed, nor the idle dissipation of the thoughtless, nor even the harmless frivolity of the insignificant, are henceforth becoming to you. You are the rock on which the Church of the present is to be built.'[352] Anyone who pictures Social Democracy as based on dry and deterministic 'scientific socialism' and overlooks the fervent rhetoric of good news and saving missions has missed the point.
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Vernon Lidtke,
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