{"id":7617,"date":"2022-09-28T22:06:03","date_gmt":"2022-09-29T02:06:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=7617"},"modified":"2022-10-05T13:30:50","modified_gmt":"2022-10-05T17:30:50","slug":"eric-blanc-karl-kautsky-and-the-democratic-road-to-socialism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2022\/09\/eric-blanc-karl-kautsky-and-the-democratic-road-to-socialism\/","title":{"rendered":"Eric Blanc, Karl Kautsky, and the democratic road to socialism"},"content":{"rendered":"

E<\/span>ric Blanc holds that the Marxism of the Second International in its classical years (1889\u20131914) remains the latest and highest stage of Marxist political theory, exemplified by the work of Karl Kautsky (1854\u20131938). In contrast, the Marxism of the Third International in its classical years (1919\u201324) was, by and large, an alien, purely \u201cRussian\u201d import, its Bolshevism rooted in and responding adequately to political struggles only in archaic, feudal, or quasi-feudal societies with \u201cautocratic\u201d regimes. Blanc concludes, logically, that Leninist strategy in advanced capitalist societies with bourgeois-democratic states was\u2014and remains\u2014irrelevant because it is inapplicable. Any attempt to universalize the Russian experience, or to use it as a model, can only bring disaster. This is Blanc\u2019s central thesis. It was also Kautsky\u2019s. In the last twenty years of his life, Kautsky shed his (ostensibly) \u201cfatalist\u201d and \u201cdeterministic\u201d politics in favor of a relentless, activist crusade against the so-called Red Menace.<\/p>\n

As a consequence, Blanc, like Kautsky, is unable or unwilling fully to address the limitations of Second International political strategy laid bare by the experience of the (initially) successful Russian Revolution in 1917, on the one hand, and the tragic, gut-wrenching failure of socialist revolution in the West in 1918\u20131923, on the other. For the fact is \u201crevolutionary social democracy\u201d\u2014Blanc\u2019s synonym for Kautskyism\u2014maintained its counter-revolutionary hegemony over the working class movement everywhere in the advanced capitalist West\u2014the very area where Kautsky\u2019s political strategy was supposed to bring victory. The reasons for that hegemony were not self-evident and required analysis. The very best representatives of the Communist, pre-Stalinist alternative to classical social democracy\u2014Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Leon Trotsky\u2014offered such an analysis. But Blanc will hear none of it.<\/p>\n

Blanc\u2019s Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics Across the Russian Empire (1882\u20131917)<\/a> is mistitled. For Blanc shows, in chapter 10, empirically, that the only social democracy in the Russian empire worthy of being called revolutionary\u2014not just in words but in deeds, not just in times of revolution but in non-revolutionary times as well\u2014was that of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP). The party was founded de facto<\/em> in 1902. Its revolutionary, Bolshevik wing, led by Lenin, emerged only in 1903.<\/p>\n

Only Lenin\u2019s partisans and those willing to follow their lead proved to be truly revolutionary, dedicated to achieving victory, at all times and everywhere. Those who did not, the social democratic parties that remained faithful to pre-1914 Kautskyist orthodoxy, turned out to be counter-revolutionary. Blanc shows this to be the case everywhere in the land of the tsars. It is the signal merit of his contribution. His book deserves the widest audience for that reason alone.<\/p>\n

At the same time, Blanc unwittingly destroys the very foundations of his argument: he proves that post-1914 \u201crevolutionary social democracy\u201d was, in practice, counter-revolutionary. It is a contradiction that lies at the heart of his account that no dialectical legerdemain can resolve into a superior synthesis. Fortunately, the contradiction exists only in Blanc\u2019s head, subjectively, owing to an incoherent analysis. However, the kernel of truth lying at the center of Blanc’s account can only be extracted by historical materialist analysis. But Blanc largely refrains from using contemporary Marxist categories of analysis because many of those categories were developed and refined\u2014sometimes created ab ovo<\/em>\u2014only after 1914 and especially after 1917. These forms of understanding came out of the need to study the \u201cmiraculous\u201d creativity of the international working class movement in 1917\u201322, to quote Lenin\u2014not in the fideist sense, but in the sense that the \u201cnatural\u201d potentialities of working creativity were far greater, richer, and multifaceted than Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, and other Marxists had earlier thought possible. For them, if not for Blanc, there was something new under the sun.<\/p>\n

What is the \u201cbourgeois-democratic\u201d revolution? What is the socialist revolution?<\/h4>\n

The category \u201cbourgeois-democratic revolution\u201d only makes cameo appearances in Blanc\u2019s work. It appears most often under other names, usually the \u201cdemocratic revolution.\u201d This term abstracts from the difference between bourgeois-democratic and socialist revolutions, together with forms of party-political organization and strategies specific to each\u2014distinctive forms and strategies that only a critical study of the 1917 Russian Revolution revealed. Whenever Blanc, like his mentor Lars Lih, abstracts out of his analysis these specificities by using the category \u201cdemocratic revolution,\u201d it is impossible to tell what kind of revolution he is talking about.<\/p>\n

Blanc, again following Lih, holds that Kautsky\u2019s political strategy could simply be modified or adjusted to Russian conditions so that \u201crevolutionary social democratic\u201d politics could be deployed to destroy the feudal or quasi-feudal tsarist state and replace it with a capitalist state. \u201cOn the whole, the approaches of imperial Russia\u2019s radicals reflected an implementation and development of orthodox Second International Marxism far more than a break from it. The roots of 1917 lie firmly in revolutionary social democracy.\u201d (p.11.)<\/p>\n

But how can this be? Does Kautsky\u2019s strategy cater only to Western conditions of political struggle, as Blanc insists, or does it encompass non-Western conditions, as well, so that Kautsky becomes the \u201carchitect\u201d of the October Revolution, with Lenin\u2019s Bolsheviks using Kautsky\u2019s political writings as guide? It must be one or the other but not both. For no social democrat conceived of Kautsky\u2019s strategy so expansively and so abstractly as to cover both feudal or semi-feudal Russia and the capitalist West. Kautsky, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, and just about every pre-1917 social democrat thought far more concretely, recognizing qualitative differences between the two, whereas Blanc\u2019s account, like Lih\u2019s, gets lost in abstraction.<\/p>\n

\"Photograph
Blanc\u2019s argument regarding a democratic road to socialism is largely based on the short-lived experience of the Finnish Revolution and civil war of 1918. Photo<\/a>, by Herald Netvig, \u00a0shows a White Guards firing squad in L\u00e4nkipohja<\/span>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For pre-1917 revolutionary social democrats\u2014Kautsky, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky\u2014 the specificities of Russian society and its autocratic state could not be deduced from an analysis of capitalist society and the capitalist state. It required fresh study. Kautsky was certainly the most read foreign Marxist theoretician among Russian social democrats but he had little to say about Russia beyond broad sociological assessments. The most read Russian Marxist among Russian social democrats was Georgi Plekhanov. But Blanc ignores his contribution to the Marxist analysis of tsarist Russia, developed in opposition to the Populist alternative that dominated Russian revolutionary thought in the 1880s and 1890s.<\/p>\n

Plekhanov sketched out the basics, later endorsed by Kautsky. In tsarist Russia, the \u201cdemocratic revolution\u201d was an anti-feudal one, whereas in the West it was an anti-capitalist one. So, in the West, democratic revolution meant something completely different: it directly meant socialist revolution and building socialism, whereas in tsarist Russia it directly meant the bourgeois-democratic revolution to overthrow the feudal state, establish a capitalist state, ideally a democratic republic, thereby offering the working class the best possible political conditions under which to advance and defend its class interests over and against those of Russia\u2019s emergent capitalist class. This is how all social democrats understood matters; it was the key to understanding what social democrats were doing, or thought they were doing.<\/p>\n

Kautsky, the so-called pope of Second International Marxism, spelled out in many books, encyclicals, and articles how social democratic parties in the West could use the already existing capitalist state, specifically its legislative arm, in its various forms\u2014parliament, Congress, chambers of deputies, the Knesset, and so on\u2014to bring the working class to power by winning a majority in these bodies. The party would then pass legislation to expropriate the capitalists and socialize production.<\/p>\n

In tsarist Russia, however, there was no capitalist state and no parliamentary road to establish. First because there was no parliament (Duma) until 1906. Even then, after 1906 and given the continued presence of autocratic rule, Russian social democrats split over whether the Duma was a real parliamentary form, as the Mensheviks believed, or an illusory one, as the Bolsheviks held. Yet, defying all evidence, Blanc\u2019s \u201cdemocratic revolution\u201d is, apparently, a revolution against \u201ccapitalism\u201d in the West and tsarist Russia. Again, how can this be?<\/p>\n