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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.17: Emancipation and Labor

So I’m sure you have noticed by now that this week’s episode sounds different than normal. My microphone gave up the ghost on me so I have had to improvise a temporary solution to get the job done for right now. I am going back to the United States on Wednesday morning for the Sound Education Conference and apparently buy a new microphone just got added to my list of things to do while I’m there. So this isn’t ideal, I know, but I think we can all just with it together for the moment.

In our last episode, we introduced a whole bunch of new people and new ideas, and I hope you were able to keep them all straight. We retraced the tumultuous 1870s and followed the shifts in revolutionary tactics. First, they tried to slowly and peacefully educate the peasants towards mass social revolution, as per Pyotr Lavrov. Then they switched to a quick and violent vanguard party political revolution as Pyotr Tkachev. But when People’s Will finally succeeded in killing Tsar Alexander the Second in 1881, they found that Jacobin terrorism had brought Russia no closer to socialist revolution than Lavrov’s patient school master strategy had.

So. Where do we go from here? Where can we go from here?

Well, Georgi Plekhanov, Pablo Axelrod, Vera Zasulich, and Lev Deutsch believe they have the answer. And while I’m here, I should say that I received both praise and concern over my pronunciation of Deutsch. Some people said, yeah, you nailed it; other people said in Russian, it would be more properly Deytch, but to be consistent, I’m just going to use Doiych again because he disappears after today anyway, and we won’t have to worry about it.

So we left this little group in early 1881, having found their temporary life as expats in Switzerland becoming a permanent life as exiles in Switzerland. Because the response to his father’s assassination from new Emperor Alexander the Third, the 26 year old son of the now blown to bits Alexander the Second, was uncompromising repression. His father, the Tsar Liberator, had embraced political and social reform. He had emancipated the serfs, created the semi-democratic zemstvo, built an entirely new progressive judicial system, and for his trouble, he had been targeted for death by ungrateful and probably psychopathic revolutionaries. Almost as soon as the lump of flesh that had once been his father was cold, Alexander the Third turned from reform to reaction. Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality. It was back, and it was back with a vengeance.

There will be more to talk about on this front, but of most pressing concern for us here today is the arrival of a new political police to seek and destroy the underground enemies of orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. Because remember, even before his eventual assassination, Alexander the Second had given up on the Third Section. They had been okay at monitoring the upper classes, but they were impotent in the face of underground terrorist groups like People’s Will. Russia needed a new political police for this new era, and shortly before his death, Alexander the Second mostly dismantled the Third Section and reassigned their powers to a new department of state police inside the Ministry of the Interior.

Now what replaced the dismantled third section was the infamous Okhrana. Officially known as the Department of Protecting Order and Public Peace, the Okhrana started as a small St. Petersburg office of 12 detectives that had been created back in 1866 after the first near-miss assassination attempt on Alexander the Second. Well, after the successful did-not-miss assassination attempt of 1881, Alexander the Third created two more offices in Moscow and Warsaw. To ensure nothing hindered the work of this newly reorganized secret police apparatus, in August of 1881, the tsar issued the Statute on Measures to Preserve Order and Public Peace, which gave the police broad powers of surveillance, arrest, prosecution, and punishment. The statute was meant to be a temporary measure in the emergency wake of the tsar liberator’s assassination, and it was drafted to expire after three years. But the Statute on Measures to Preserve Order and Public Peace was perpetually renewed every three years for an additional three years. And it would keep being renewed right up until 1917. So the Russian Empire was now, effectively, a police state.

The effect of all this on the People’s Will organization was swift and devastating. The burgeoning Okhrana rounded up anyone who might’ve been even tangentially linked to People’s Will, smashed their presses, hanged anyone they thought a ringleader, and exiled the rest to Siberia. In the short term, it meant that People’s Will was finished as a viable revolutionary organization. Though as we will see in a moment, it took a while to figure that out, and there were still pockets remaining out there, more committed than ever to continuing the terrorist campaign, in their bitter and hopeless desperation latching on to violence practically for the sake of violence.

The long-term effect was that any new revolutionary organization in Russia was going to have to contend with the wily Okhrana apparatus, and they were creative about their tactics. They were not just about surveillance and arrest, they planted longterm spies and agents provocateur, they co-opted and misdirected and controlled left-wing movements with slush funds and secret financing channels that duped would be radicals into joining organizations that were actually monitored and directed by the Okhrana. We’ll talk about that all later.

So for the small cadre that formed Black Repartition, they could only watch this unfold helplessly from their new base of operations in Switzerland. And this was exactly the kind of thing they had feared from a movement built on aggressive terrorist violence: an apocalyptic state backlash.

But by the time they arrived in Switzerland, they were not only disagreeing with their estranged comrades over revolutionary tactics, but also revolutionary theory. When they organized themselves in 1879, they declared their ideological adherence to scientific socialism, which for them meant not just Marx, but the whole array of western socialists writers coming out of Germany and France and Britain. This distinguished them from People’s Will, who adhered to narodist populism, built partly on the idea that the Russian peasant was a unique and special entity on whose behalf the revolution would be staged. So this means that we’re starting to recapitulate the old westernizer/slavophile debate that had raged in the 1830s and 1840s, and which really had been an ongoing debate among educated Russians going all the way back to Peter the Great. Should Russia look to quote unquote more advanced Europe for answers, or were concepts like backward and behind meaningless because Russia was its own unique thing, playing out its own unique history?

After they arrived in Switzerland in 1880, Plekhanov buried himself in a three-year long intensive study of economics, history, philosophy, and political science to develop a new theory that would guide Russia towards its revolutionary destiny. From which he emerged convinced that the really hard work of synthesizing economics, history, philosophy, and political science into a new revolutionary doctrine had already been done by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. And that the answer to all of Russia’s problems was found in Marxism.

So Marx and Engels were already well-known in the Russian intelligentsia, both above board intellectuals and underground radicals. Most of their early work was banned of course, but the weighty tome that was Capital was legally published in Russia in March of 1872. The conclusion of the censors was that it was a doorstop, filled with boring statistical analysis that few would read, and even fewer would understand. And even if they did understand it, Capital was clearly an attack on western style industrial capitalism, and we’ve got none of that here, so it’s not like any of this is even applicable to Russia. So they let it be published. And the Russian edition was the first foreign edition of Capital ever published. Marx himself was very pleased when the initial print run of 3000 copies sold out in a single year. The reason Capital turned out to be so popular among the Russian intelligentsia was not because it described the situation in Russia, but because it was an exquisitely detailed description of the horrors of western capitalism. And as I just mentioned, one of the driving ideas behind the narodism was the belief that the existing communal spirit of the historic Russian village could be harnessed to bypass all the horrors described so eloquently by Marx. So Capital became a cautionary tale. It’s not like anybody was reading Marx as a blueprint for the Russian revolution. Plekhanov, meanwhile, read Marx and said, I have a blueprint for the Russian revolution. And that’s why Plekhanov gets to go down as the father of Russian Marxism.

But as Plekhanov and his friends turn towards Marxism in the early 1880s, they engaged in a dialogue with their still kind of comrades in what was left of People’s Will to try to reform a unified revolutionary party. They had, after all, been together in Land and Liberty right up until 1879. But neither side showed a burning desire to mend fences. Plekhanov was already developing an acid pen, and his treatment of the narodist theories and tactics that had so obviously failed was dismissive and caustic. For their part, the remaining at-large members of People’s Will dug in even harder on their Jacobin terrorism. And if this insistence on staying the course seemed crazy to the members of Black Repartition, just imagine how crazy Black Repartition’s claim that they should plot a new revolutionary course based on some old German’s analysis of industrial capitalism seemed to the members of People’s Will.

The talks went nowhere.

So the members of Black Repartition decided to cut their ties and boldly move in a new direction. In September of 1883. Plekhanov, Axelrod, Zasulich, and Deustch got together in Geneva, and they formed a new society they dubbed: the Emancipation of Labor Group. The Emancipation of Labor Group would be an explicitly Marxist society. Their principle objective would be to spread Marxist ideas into Russia, to reorient the entire ideological underpinning of Russian revolution away from the failed utopianism of anarchism and narodism and toward the advanced scientific socialism of Marx. They specifically organized themselves as a propaganda operation, focused on disseminating and teaching Marx’s theory. The plan was to translate the work of Marx and Engels into Russian, and then write new books and pamphlets elaborating on their ideas to make it intelligible and relevant to a Russian audience. This kind of education-based revolution fit right in with Lavrov’s theories, and they invited him to join the group, but he declined. Lavrov was not a Marxist.

The one other guy they did get to join was this kid named Vasily Ignatov, who was able to contribute some seed money to get the group off the ground. Now, half the time, Ignatov is not even mentioned among the founders, since he contributed little more than money and then he died in 1885, but for the record, he was like the fifth beetle of the Emancipation of Labor Group.

By his own self-assertion, and the agreement of his comrades, Plekhanov would serve as an intellectual leader of the new group, and he set to work laying out their new Marx’s program for Russia in three early works. First, the official statement of principles that accompanied the formation of the new group, and also a pamphlet that was published around the same time called Socialism and the Political Struggle. Both of those were published in 1883. These were followed by a longer book called Our Differences published in 1885.

In these early works, Plekhanov staked out their position relative to previous theorists and activists, like Herzen, Bakunin, Chernyshevsky, and Tkachev, and mostly attacking the unscientific utopian fantasies of the narodists and the anarchists. And indeed the thing Plekhanov probably found most exciting about Marx was that Marx was offering a scientific theory of economics, society, and history. Plekhanov believed Marx had done for social relations what Newton had done for physics and what Darwin was doing for biology. The scientific nature of the theories is what made them so profoundly important.

The most important of these profoundly important scientific truth is that Marx had discovered, was the theory of historical materialism. Plekhanov came to believe that the stages of history outlined by Marx were inevitable and inexorable, which meant that when describing the transition from feudalism to capitalism, Marx may have been talking about the past history of places like France and Britain, but because Russia had not yet emerged from their medieval mode of production, Marx was also describing a future for Russia yet to come. He was like a fortune teller with a crystal ball. Plekhanov believed historical materialism had universal application, so while the populists and the anarchists believed that Russia could avoid the horrors of western industrial capitalism thanks to their own unique culture and history, Plekhanov said no, that is impossible. Marx has described a path of socio-economic development that cannot be avoided. You cannot skip from feudalism to socialism. Because again, when Marx said that the revolutionary class in feudal society was the bourgeoisie, and that they were the only ones who could topple feudalism and further develop the forces of production, Plekhanov believed him. And it was not until after the bourgeoisie had overthrown feudal aristocracy that the next revolutionary class, the urban proletariat, could rise up to fulfill their own historical destiny.

As a result of his belief in the scientific, universal truth of historical materialism, Plekhanov advanced the controversial doctrine of two revolutions. Because to get to the socialist revolution, they were all aiming at, there must first be a bourgeois democratic revolution, which meant the capitalist mode of production must come to Russia. Now this theory is going to be a tough sell to Russian radicals who have just spent the last few decades agreeing that the industrial capitalist mode of production sounded really crappy, and it was to be avoided at all costs. Remember: the basic premise of Tkachev’s now or never imperative was that the revolution had to be carried out before capitalism arrived in Russia, otherwise it would be too late. Plekhanov reversed that position. Capitalism had to come to Russia before the socialist revolution could be carried out. So socialists should join with the bourgeoisie in the historical materialist approved overthrow of tsarist autocracy. Then, the socialist must endure a period of bourgeois capitalist rule in order to develop the forces of production to the point where the proletarian socialists could stage their own second revolution. If this all sounds familiar, it’s because this is what young Marx was arguing during the early days of the revolution of 1848. We talked about this in Episode 10.2, that the workers must join with the liberal democrats to overthrow the monarchies of Germany before the next revolution, the workers’ revolution, could be staged, and it was a theory of Marx himself grew disenchanted with by 1849.

One of the other big things that drew Plekhanov to Marx was that Marx positively savaged the ideological fixation on the revolutionary potential of the peasants. Personal experience had turned Plekhanov into a convinced skeptic of the revolutionary potential of the peasant, and he found in Marx the theoretical justification for this conclusion. So Plekhanov fundamentally disagreed with Lavrov about this. He believed there was no hope in trying to educate the peasants to revolution, it can’t be done! And more importantly, it didn’t need to be done. Because according to historical materialism, what was going to happen was that the centralizing forces of capitalism were going to draw the peasants from their rural villages into the cities, where they would be turned into the urban proletariat, and thus become the future revolutionary class. Because unlike the hopeless sack of potatoes that was the peasantry, you could cultivate the revolutionary class consciousness of the urban proletariat. Thus the anarchist’s claim that the Russian peasant villages were the future of Russia was all wrong. Those villages were in fact, in archaic relic of the past that had to be destroyed.

Now, as we saw last week, this disenchantment with the peasants was shared by Pyotr Tkachev. But Plekhanov and Tkachev drew different tactical conclusions. As we talked about last week, Tkachev said the peasants are hopeless, that’s why we need a vanguard party of hyper disciplined revolutionaries to do the work of toppling the tsar. Plekhanov blasted this because, first of all, it tried to do an end run around historical materialism. A small group of terrorists could not initiate a socialist revolution by blowing up the tsar. Feudalism could only be toppled by the historical forces of bourgeois capitalism, that was how the first revolution had to go. And even when it came time for the second socialist revolution of the proletariat, that had to be carried out as a mass movement of workers once they had to become the largest class of boardwalk capitalist society. The dictatorship of the proletariat was not a dictatorship in the sense that Blanqui or Tkachev used the term, a tiny all-powerful revolutionary committee, but it was instead a true democratic majority capturing control of the state from the minority bourgeois capitalists.

So in the debate between mass movement versus small vanguard party, the Emancipation of Labor Group were firmly in the mass movement camp. So all of these beliefs and positions we’ve just talked about mean that the Emancipation of Labor Group is mostly in alignment with German social democrats. Now, the definition of social democrat and social democracy has changed a bit over the years, but in the terminology of the 1870s and 1880s, it meant socialists who were willing to engage in parliamentary politics. To build so-called labor parties. To stand for election. To advocate democratic civil rights, like freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of association. They also agitated for practical labor reforms, safer conditions, higher wages, the eight hour day. Now this kind of activity was scorned by more radical socialists and especially the anarchists, who thought this kind of political work granted legitimacy to the bourgeois state, and that supporting labor reforms would sap the necessary revolutionary energy of the working classes without actually emancipating them. Social democrats, the Emancipation of Labor Group among them, believed that the state could and should be engaged with, especially as a necessary step in the doctrine of two revolutions.

So in the initial proclamation of principles for the emancipation of Labor Group, they said that the first goal would be establishing a democratic constitution for the state. This was also important not just as a step in historical materialism but also because of the Emancipation of Labor Group held democratic principles. They did not advocate small dictatorial committees. Again, when they advocated for the dictatorship of the proletariat, they meant majority rule democracy. The Emancipation of Labor Group was conscious of the disdain held by radical Russian revolutionaries of this watered down German social democracy, and it’s partly why they called themselves the Emancipation of Labor Group, and not the more obvious, and more accurate, Russian social democrats.

Not that it really mattered. It is safe to say that initially, this all landed somewhere between a thud and a whimper. Mostly, it just didn’t land at all. Those revolutionaries still left in Russia were all still with People’s Will, whether out of stubbornness or true belief. And the scathing attacks from Plekhanov were not going to coax anyone towards his new ideas. Even without the acerbic language, he was still advocating literary study and propagandizing, not direct revolutionary action one. Old Bakuninist veteran scoffed that they weren’t even revolutionaries anymore, they were sociologists. Old Lavrov, meanwhile, was livid at their activities because he believed that in these difficult post-assassination years, that the remaining revolutionaries had to focus on maintaining a broad platform of unity that kept everybody together. The Emancipation of Labor Group seemed to focus on sharpening and exacerbating internal divisions.

Meanwhile, those who got past all of that still couldn’t quite grasp how Marxist doctrine was ever going to work in Russia. Or this argument about how we have to embrace the horrors of western capitalism? I mean, dude, I’m a revolutionary because that’s what I’m opposed to, not because I want to invite it into my backyard.

Striking out at home, the Emancipation of Labor Group also got very little love from western socialists in Germany and France and Britain, who were equally frustrated that they were focused on the wrong things. From the perspective of western socialists, Russian tsardom meant only one thing: it was the war chest, arsenal, and bunker of last resort for reactionary conservatism everywhere in Europe. The tsar had agents in every capital, money was paid to western politicians to oppose socialism and anarchism and even liberalism. Marx personally hated the tsar so much that he believed every single conspiracy theory about malevolent Russian interference, no matter how farfetched. Not that Russian diplomacy wasn’t heavy on supporting reactionary politics in the west, it was. It’s just that it wasn’t all true. I mean, Marx openly believed that William Gladstone had been on the tsar’s payroll.

So what the western socialists wanted revolutionaries in Russia to do was toppled the tsar. That’s it. That’s all they really cared about. Peasants, workers, mass movements, small vanguard parties, we don’t care, just get it done. So they were happy to support a movement like People’s Hand, which had a singular focus on toppling the tsar. They didn’t want to hear about the slow process of historical materialism needing to play out in Russia, especially not from the Emancipation of Labor Group, whose attacks on their former comrades threatened the unity of the Russian revolutionary underground.

Arguably the most disheartening thing of all though, was the attitude of Marx and Engels themselves. They’re still alive and kicking out there. At various points in the late 1870s and early 1880s, Vera Zasulich exchanged letters with both men, and their replies were not exactly encouraging. For one thing, Marx and Engels were among those western socialists who just wanted the hated tsar to fall by any means necessary. For the good of humanity, that, and that alone, needed to be the focus of the revolutionaries in Russia. But on top of that, Marx and Engels also tended to believe that Russia was not on the same historical materialist path as western Europe, and they considered the kind of arguments Plekhanov would be making in the 1880s and 1890s a misuse of their work. And they said so. Marx warned Zasulich not to mix western theory with Russian culture and history. Russia was not even in the feudal mode of production at the moment. Politically and economically, feudal culture is a transactional arrangement between autonomous families and a landowning aristocracy. Russia had never had these kinds of transactional arrangements. Russia had always been the tsar’s property, everyone else just lived there.

What Marx and Engels believed was that Russia was off on this dead end of evolutionary historical development called the Asiatic mode of production. And I mentioned this mode very briefly in Episode 10.4, when I was introducing the stages of historical materialism, and I’ll just quote myself here to remind you: there are slightly modified versions that involve an Asiatic mode and a barbarian mode that existed in the area between tribal and ancient. But I’ll set those aside for now.

Well, the time has come to pick them up, at least the Asiatic mode.

Marx and Engels only discuss the Asiatic mode of production in a few scant and not very deep passages. But they dubbed it Asiatic because they were trying to describe certain civilizations that grew up on the Asian continent after the Neolithic revolution in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, the Indus Valley, and China. Politically the Asiatic mode was defined by a ruler presented as the theocratic incarnation of the gods on earth. Economically, this god king owned all the land, and was able to marshal huge workforces to build large capital cities, huge monuments, and infrastructure projects, most especially, large and complex irrigation systems to make the land more productive. Technological and cultural progress would have given the Asiatic civilizations, writing, mathematics, record keeping, calendars, and sophisticated engineering, all of which would be utilized by a central bureaucracy that ruled a population, mostly confined to small communities that knew only their own timeless little village, and whose only political role was total obedience to the god kings. This sense of eternal timelessness pervaded this alleged Asiatic mode of production, and lacking the willingness or the desire to further develop the forces of production, which remember for Marx, is the motor force of history, the Asiatic civilizations eventually decay and pass away, even if it takes thousands of years. Now, I’m not endorsing any of this as a theory, I’m just saying this was an idea Marx and Engels had been kicking around since the 1850s.

And so, when Marx and Engels looked at Russian tsardom, they saw the Asiatic mode of production: isolated, timeless communities acting as obedient slaves to a god king who exercises power through a central bureaucracy, and a society with no strong concept of private property. They were very skeptical of guys like Bakunin who argued that the timeless Russian commune could be the basis of future socialist society, because Marx and Engels believed those communes were part of the foundational essence of a dead end Asiatic civilization. And they were skeptical of anyone who argued a robust bourgeois class could emerge out of this environment. The pieces just weren’t there, culturally, economically, or psychologically.

Now Marx and Engels did provide a preface to a new Russian translation of the Communist Manifesto Plekhanov drafted in 1882. And they said that toppling the tsar through violent insurrection was possible, and might hopefully serve as a “signal for a proletarian revolution in the west.” And if it did, then it was possible that the effects of that proletarian revolution in the west would rebound back to Russia, and allow the economic forces underlying their historical commune to develop, and serve as the basis of Russian communist society. But there is no hint that they thought Russia was itself on some inexorable road to proletarian revolution. Now Marx died in March of 1883, just before the Emancipation of Labor Group was officially formed, but Engels kept right on living. And throughout the 1880s, this very first Russian Marxist society did not exactly earn his hardy approval or endorsement.

So it was rough going in the early years. The Emancipation of Labor Group had no real allies, they had no contacts in Russia to spread their work, they were all dirt poor and struggling to feed themselves and their families. But they kept at it. Zasulich translated Marx’s own works to make sure the primary source material was available. Plekhanov wrote his pamphlets and books, explaining why they were right and everyone else was wrong. Axelrod studied western labor movements and developed personal working relationships with German social democrats like Edward Bernstein and Karl Kautsky. And finally, Lev Deutsch was the logistical organizer, fundraiser, and chief smuggler.

But the results were discouraging. Deutsch returned from one trip to Russia saying that there were less than ten people in the whole empire who cared about what they were doing. Then in 1884, the group was dealt a serious setback, when Deutsch was arrested in Germany on a smuggling run. It was general policy not to extradite political targets back to Russia, but Deutsch still had an attempted murder charge on his head, making him a little more than a common criminal. Extradited back to Russia, he was tried and sentenced. But surprisingly, he wasn’t hanged; he was sent into perpetual exile in Siberia. His devastated comrades in Switzerland assumed they would never see him again. Though, spoiler alert: he would later write a memoir called 16 Years in Siberia, in case you’re wondering exactly how long his perpetual exile wound up lasting.

But really for the rest of the 1880s, it was down to just the three of them. Plekhanov, Zasulich, and Axelrod. Now, they were not totally friendless. Younger Russian students studying in Switzerland were interested in their ideas. But it’s fair to say that by the dawn of 1890, the Emancipation of Labor Group had zero influence on socialist politics at home or abroad. But much to everyone’s shock, the forces of history turned in their favor. Plekhanov suddenly appeared to be a mad prophet who had predicted a great flood, and who everyone had laughed at, and then the flood suddenly came.

And next week, we’re going to talk about that flood. Because while the industrial capitalist mode of production was going to have trouble coming around on its own, if it was spurred by, say, an energetic finance minister who was tasked with modernizing Russia so it can compete with western rivals economically and politically, if that happened, then the resulting industrial boom might look exactly like the historical materialist transformation Plekhanov had been talking about, and many up and coming radicals would look around and agree that the growing urban proletariat, not the dying rural peasantry, was the revolutionary future of Russia.