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BOOKS How do socialists avoid compromise?

ANDREW MURRAY recommends a penetrating historical survey of the many socialist movements of the early 20th century, and the light it casts on present-day events

Revolutionary Social Democracy
by Eric Blanc
Haymarket Books, £40

ERIC BLANC, doctoral student at New York University, asks the right questions: “How can socialists help build powerful workers’ organisations without these becoming excessively conservative?”

And “how can socialists forge electoral majorities and pass transformative reforms without excessively moderating their policies in the process?”

Blanc acknowledges that “if there were easy answers to these questions, socialism would have been established a long time ago.”

Indeed.  Blanc’s contribution to finding the answers is this book, which looks at the history of the workers’ movement in pre-revolutionary Russia, with a particular focus on socialists working in the borderlands of the tsarist empire — Poland and Finland above all.

It is a fruitful approach, and allows a new look at very well-worn themes regarding the Bolsheviks’ strategy, their relationship to the orthodoxies of Karl Kautsky and European social democracy, and the implications of their struggle for socialists more than a century later.

He disputes that Lenin’s faction every really constituted a separate party before 1917 and illustrates the fluidity of alignments among socialists across the empire.  

It is worth recalling that the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, however distinct, were not the only socialist parties in tsarist Russia. The mainly peasant Social Revolutionaries also contested leadership on the left.

And there was the Jewish Bund, as well as distinct formations in Finland, Latvia and Poland, the latter having several such groupings. These often faced different environments and political problems.

Finland, for example, had a functioning parliament and broad political liberties unavailable elsewhere in the tsar’s realms.

The Finnish socialists therefore tried to synthesise parliamentary and insurrectionary tactics in their bid for revolution after tsarism’s fall, ending in bloody defeat.

One of the revelations of Blanc’s research regards the authoritarianism and sectarianism of the Polish SDKPiL, the party led from exile by Rosa Luxemburg.

Luxemburg’s extreme hostility to democratic nationalism in Europe is well-known, but the rigidity of her inner-party regime conflicts with the more libertarian image handed down to history.

Other passages cover more familiar ground, including the argument that Kautsky and his followers remained orthodox Marxists, but that Kautsky himself compromised with the right-wing trade union and parliamentary bureaucracy in the German SPD, after 1909 at least, to the detriment of his reputation.

And he disputes that Lenin’s famous April Theses of 1917 constituted a rupture with the previous Bolshevik position, or were a call for explicitly socialist revolution. He makes the case well.

Blanc surveys the attitude of socialists towards working-class unity and collaboration with the liberal bourgeoisie, as well as mass action and the nature of the party.

There is particular contemporary interest in his survey of how the different groups responded to the rise of Ukrainian nationalism during and after WWI.

The Bolsheviks were the most supportive on the whole, while a resolution from the Ukrainian Social Revolutionaries in 1918 has at least some relevance: “The alliance of the Ukrainian government with German militarism, inexcusable and criminal from the point of view of international socialism, has opened a wide field in the Ukraine for the activities of international reaction.”

Likewise, the Georgian Menshevik leader Noe Zhordania stated: “I would prefer the imperialists of the west to the fanatics of the east.” So today among sections of the liberal left.

Blanc’s excellent book is only marred by the author abruptly outing himself as a counter-revolutionary nearly 400 pages in, when he states that democratisation of the Bolshevik regime would have risked the end of the revolution which with hindsight “would have been less damaging to the world socialist movement than the rise of Stalinism.”

Since peak “Stalinism” involved a third of the world overturning capitalism and imperialism, this suggests that Blanc may not be entirely serious about finding the answers to the questions he poses so acutely, and more comfortable dissecting working-class struggle from a distance.

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