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Historical Materialism #37
The October Revolution in Prospect and Retrospect: Interventions in Russian and Soviet History
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283 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 5, 2023
A Political Marxist explains the Bolsheviks and what they got wrong. It sometimes suffers from the shouting-in-your-face moralising tone of Marxist sect history and assumes you've already read a hundred books on the October Revolution, but there's lots of interest. It's actually most notable for its frontal attack on sectarian history on precisely its own terms - the Trotskyist opposition and its descendants are stringently and I think correctly criticised for their failure to adequately understand the peasant economy, and hence an obsession with the phantom danger of the 'kulaks' rather than the much more historically crucial danger of creating a bloodily coercive developmentalist dictatorship. But this harshness for the inheritors of Leninism is ameliorated elsewhere, with attacks on social historians for underrating the importance of the Bolshevik party, and a defence of Lenin against the allegedly less authoritarian (quite the reverse, says Marot) alternative of Bogdanov.
November 30, 2017
Excellent book offering a novel interpretation of the October Revolution and the social eras that preceded and followed it.
In the first two chapters the author uses Robert Brenner's concepts aka 'Political Marxism' to argue convincingly (and in contrast to most of the Bolsheviks) that Tsarist Russia was non-capitalist in both its agrarian (with a mass peasantry) and industrial (production of military goods for state expansion rather than sophisticated enterprises in price competition) sectors, and in consequence the possibility of building socialism "in one country" as the Bolsheviks committed themselves to (yes, Trotsky included) by the mid-20s was logically precluded.
Instead, Trotsky should have come to his sense and allied politically with the 'Right', Bukharin faction of the new Soviet state, in order to defeat Stalin and his "centrist" bureaucratic faction, in order to maintain the 'smychka' or worker-peasant alliance on the basis of rationing and reduced working class living standards while peasants rode out a series of bad harvests in the late 1920s. If this alliance could be maintained then the, however faint, possibility of revolution in the capitalist west - a precondition for the consensual industrialisation of Russia on the basis of imported grain and advanced means of production - could be maintained, and with it the prospect of genuine international socialism.
Instead, Trotsky, and the Trotskyists (Rakovsky, Preobazhensky, et al.) through an error of political judgement jumped into bed with Stalin's "Left turn" that imposed collectivisation on non-existent "kulaks" in the countryside and forced industrialisation on the backs of the working class. This brutal programme did not build socialism, as Trotsky believed it would (however imperfectly) but rather consolidated the rule of a new ruling class of state bureaucrats. In turn, it doomed the world revolution as Comintern policy became subordinated to the foreign policy interests of this new non-capitalist ruling class, leading to endless historical disasters (Germany, Spain, China, etcetera.), as Trotsky fatally came to realise too late.
The rest of the book is a fruitful and illuminating engagement with two strands of Russian and Soviet history: the social-historical school, which tends to underplay the key role of the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution; and the debates around Lenin's relationship to Alexander Bogdanov, his idiosyncratic socialist organisation Vpered, and philosophical views. These chapters conclusively demonstrate the silliness of "Lenin-bashing" historians of the "Left Bolsheviks" that valorise Bogdanov as some anti-determinist or anti-authoritarian Marxist, and instead prove his indefatigable intellectual and political commitment to an extremely elitist form of political activism centred on pedagoguery.
These concluding chapters are brilliantly writing and engaging but they're the only reason I remove a star since I didn't personally find them as interesting as the radically revisionist first two chapters.
In the first two chapters the author uses Robert Brenner's concepts aka 'Political Marxism' to argue convincingly (and in contrast to most of the Bolsheviks) that Tsarist Russia was non-capitalist in both its agrarian (with a mass peasantry) and industrial (production of military goods for state expansion rather than sophisticated enterprises in price competition) sectors, and in consequence the possibility of building socialism "in one country" as the Bolsheviks committed themselves to (yes, Trotsky included) by the mid-20s was logically precluded.
Instead, Trotsky should have come to his sense and allied politically with the 'Right', Bukharin faction of the new Soviet state, in order to defeat Stalin and his "centrist" bureaucratic faction, in order to maintain the 'smychka' or worker-peasant alliance on the basis of rationing and reduced working class living standards while peasants rode out a series of bad harvests in the late 1920s. If this alliance could be maintained then the, however faint, possibility of revolution in the capitalist west - a precondition for the consensual industrialisation of Russia on the basis of imported grain and advanced means of production - could be maintained, and with it the prospect of genuine international socialism.
Instead, Trotsky, and the Trotskyists (Rakovsky, Preobazhensky, et al.) through an error of political judgement jumped into bed with Stalin's "Left turn" that imposed collectivisation on non-existent "kulaks" in the countryside and forced industrialisation on the backs of the working class. This brutal programme did not build socialism, as Trotsky believed it would (however imperfectly) but rather consolidated the rule of a new ruling class of state bureaucrats. In turn, it doomed the world revolution as Comintern policy became subordinated to the foreign policy interests of this new non-capitalist ruling class, leading to endless historical disasters (Germany, Spain, China, etcetera.), as Trotsky fatally came to realise too late.
The rest of the book is a fruitful and illuminating engagement with two strands of Russian and Soviet history: the social-historical school, which tends to underplay the key role of the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution; and the debates around Lenin's relationship to Alexander Bogdanov, his idiosyncratic socialist organisation Vpered, and philosophical views. These chapters conclusively demonstrate the silliness of "Lenin-bashing" historians of the "Left Bolsheviks" that valorise Bogdanov as some anti-determinist or anti-authoritarian Marxist, and instead prove his indefatigable intellectual and political commitment to an extremely elitist form of political activism centred on pedagoguery.
These concluding chapters are brilliantly writing and engaging but they're the only reason I remove a star since I didn't personally find them as interesting as the radically revisionist first two chapters.
September 13, 2023
John Eric Marot is a dangerous psychopath. Do not read his deranged ramblings. He is a terrorist and a threat to all that is democratic, decent, moral and ethical.
January 14, 2025
great study, very informative on the various judgments and and analyses of the stalinist soviet union.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews