Part 2 Self-Emancipation Versus Substitutionism

The next chapter and the three that follow are organized around the contrast between the two concepts around which this book is organized: self-emancipation and substitutionism. Their focus falls especially on specific instances of substitutionism and their consequences, both at the time of the 1917 revolution and in the early years of Bolshevik rule.

Chapter 4 examines a kind of substitutionism sui generis, in which the mass activity of a temporary new class—the peasants-in-uniform, a temporary class forged by the First World War—substituted for the self-activity of urban workers. This long-ignored analysis has been developed most clearly by Iulii Martov and Raphael Abramovitch, two leading members of the antiwar Menshevik-Internationalists. Both, as well as being Menshevik leaders, had deep roots in the General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia—Martov providing intellectual inspiration to the Bund in its infancy, Abramovitch providing years of organizational leadership. In the heat of revolution and civil war, both Martov and Abramovitch pointed to the influence of soldiers and the military army environment on the revolution in Russia.

In chapter 5, I attempt to get at the root of the misunderstanding of the peasants-in-uniform by investigating misunderstandings of the peasantry per se. I argue that the largely urban intellectual Left—including, but not limited to, Lenin and the Bolsheviks—had a very formulaic understanding of dynamics in the countryside, on the basis of which they developed abstract schemata that were out of sync with reality. In particular, the overwhelming tendency to see the Russian peasantry as “petit bourgeois” did not mesh with what can only be called the “patriarchal” reality of the dominant institution in the countryside—the mir.

Chapters 6 and 7 engage with the early congresses of the Communist International (Comintern)—in particular the recently published proceedings of the Third and Fourth Congresses of the Comintern. Their publication completes the record of the first four congresses of the Comintern, congresses identified by Leon Trotsky as unsurpassed in the manner with which they approached the key political issues of their time. Specifically, these chapters focus on four moments of extreme substitutionism: the Russian invasions of Poland in 1920 and Georgia in 1921 (chapter 6), and the German March Action of 1921 in which a large role was played by leaders of the failed Hungarian revolution of 1919 (chapter 7). Together, these chapters provide a critique of what was known at the time as the “theory of the offensive.” The transcripts of the early congresses reveal an incredible tension between substitutionism— acting in a “revolutionary” manner even in the absence of any real prospect of mass support and self-emancipation— and relying on the self-activity of the masses of the working class and the oppressed. Sometimes, it was the leadership of the Comintern who articulated the latter. Often it was not.