The Soul of Faustian Marxism

Part I of the Tragedy

There is much we can learn about ourselves from the stories that resonate with us. Humanity’s interpretations of the world, which arise from needs felt in the innards and in the spirit, become woven into a world through society’s everyday activity. Myths are reasonable to people not insofar as they seem to represent a true picture of the world but as tales which rhyme with the routines, passions, and assumptions of their bustling lives.

One of the great tales of Western history is that of Faust, an elderly scholar who promises his soul to the devil Mephistopheles in exchange for the power to see, feel, and know all of the mysteries hidden within life. The origins of the story are murky, though the earliest Faust variants seem to paint an actual 15th-16th century Renaissance burgher named Doctor Faustus as a blasphemous alchemist of loose morals. After the Renaissance and Enlightenment, the character of Faust seemed to elevate into a more general type in the emerging European bourgeois civilization. The educated bourgeoisie sought to know the designs of God through nature, and derived the emerging lawfulness of civil society from the eternal principles of the created universe. Faust seemed to encapsulate their aspirations to universal knowledge and rich experience. The philosopher and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe gave the sinful scholar his most dignified expression in the play Faust: A Tragedy, the celebrated first part published in 1808 and the more puzzling second part published in 1832, the year that Goethe passed from the world.

Goethe took Faust as a personification of the central problematics of the modern world. The character was split by a central contradiction. While lamenting the emptiness of a life wasted in scholarly pursuits, his Faust declared: “Two souls live in me, alas,/Irreconcilable with one another./One, lusting for the world with all its might,/Grapples it close, greedy of all its pleasures,/The other rises up, up from the dirt,/Up to the blest fields where dwell our great forebears.”¹ Faust sought the greatest earthly experience, and yet also sought the knowledge of the cosmos. In his spirit of experimentation, of the fullest and most comprehensive lived experience, the scholar rejected the Biblical teaching that “In the beginning was the Word” and instead asserted: “In the beginning was the Deed!”² But only unlimited power would allow Faust the ability to fill his life with infinite deeds and infinite knowledge.

In heaven, the demon Mephistopheles made a bet with God that he could manipulate Faust away from righteous pursuits by means of his ambition towards infinity. Upon revealing himself in Faust’s study, Mephisto introduced himself as a “humble part of that great power/Which always means evil, always does good,” the “spirit that says no, no,/Always! And how right I am! For surely/It’s right that everything that comes to be/Should cease to be.”³ Faust made a bargain with this spirit of negation for the power to pursue his own infinite striving, promising that the demon may take his life “If ever I plead with the passing moment,/’Linger a while, you are so fair!’”⁴ Throughout the rest of the play, Faust set Mephisto’s power to work in pursuit of ecstasy and insight, while Mephisto tried to empty Faust of his original divine intentions and transform him into a man who will be content with narrow selfishness.

Faust began with a scholar’s hope to unveil the secrets of the cosmos through his own reasoning. His desire “to pass beyond mere seeming/And penetrate the heart of being” slowly led him to believe that man is the measure of all things.⁵ By the end of the story, Faust declared “Linger a while, you are so fair!” while imagining “a second paradise” for the subjects of his land, a collective working community in which one could rightfully hope “To stand with free men on ground that is free!”⁶ On dying, he both fulfilled his deal with Mephisto and vindicated God in the bet that the demon had made that Faust could be turned away from divine pursuits. A chorus of angels appeared and carried Faust’s soul to heaven, where women from his past pleaded for his sins to be forgiven. Mater Gloriosa listened to them and redeemed him. Through his commitment to rationally organize the collective efforts of society to tame the forces of nature and serve the common good of humanity, Faust’s life ascended beyond his sinful mortal existence and was absorbed into a divinity which sang: “Everything transitory/Is symbolic only;/All insufficiency/Here is made good;/The not expressible/Here is pure word;/Woman eternally/Shows us the road.”⁷

Though the ending of Goethe’s play was mystically inscrutable to many, the hope that the individual could achieve immortality through dedication to humanity as a whole would have been recognizably earthly to his audience. The Atlantic Revolutions in France and the Americas during the late 18th century had committed themselves to a humanist republicanism with much talk of the common good. Left-wing political traditions particularly drew on this spirit of the human collective. Jacobin revolutionaries had replaced the Catholic Church with the atheistic Cult of Reason and later the deist Cult of the Supreme Being in 1794. These new religions made service to humanity the realm of religious devotion.

As the wars of the Napoleonic French Empire raged through Europe, the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel reflected on the significance of reason and revolution. Humanity’s activity in history, its ceaseless toil and effort to transform the world into something accommodating for its soul, is an infinite process of coming to self-consciousness. The essence of Hegel’s philosophy was this: “Reason is Spirit when its certainty of being all reality has been raised to truth, and it is conscious of itself as its own world, and of the world as itself.”⁸ In Phenomenology of Spirit, he looked to the rise of a commercial society and civil service states as heralding a rationally organized world. The world would have to fight out its struggles, the clash of partisans of the Idea. Philosophers had to overcome the blind impulses of immediate life and its ideological abstractions in order to internalize and reflect the continuities of the World-Spirit, the active and creative mind. Ultimately, Hegel thought that reason would prevail through the construction of a legal and economic order in which each and all would be of one body and one mind in the state.

Free thinkers and communists elaborated on these rationalist and humanist convictions throughout the 19th century. The atheist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach endeavored on a critique of theology, discovering the basis for a new religion of humanity in the notion that God is simply human beings’ alienated projection of their collective human essence into a super-earthly deity. Echoing the ending of Faust, he taught his followers that “the species is unlimited; the individual alone limited.”⁹ By the turn of the century, these Faustian ambitions became attached to the unlimited power of humanity to understand and control nature through work in the European socialist movement’s interpretations of history.

The Social-Democratic movement in Germany took up the mantle of modernization in the name of Marxism. The character-type of Faust and the symbol of Karl Marx became inseparable in the minds of millions. Marxists came to believe in the inevitability of a new historical epoch, socialism, because they believed that universal history was unfolding along rational lines such that a force like capital which “always means evil, always does good.” Communists became the inheritors of the bourgeois radicals from the era of the Atlantic Revolutions. The very first modern communists in Europe were men who hoped for a rebirth of the world out of nationalist and democratic movements. Among others, they were Gracchus Babeuf, Sylvain Maréchal, Philippe Buonarroti, Charles Fourier, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Robert Wedderburn. They believed that the revolt of reason against an unreasonable world demanded a struggle against the enclosure of the world’s wealth into the property of a few instead of the common good of all.

The communists followed the patterns set by the wave of democratic and nationalist revolutions. In the French Revolution, the veracity of bourgeois theories and strategies depended on the fiery enthusiasm of the propertyless sans-culottes. Without the passions of mass politics, the visionaries could do little more than design clockwork utopias that rarely came to pass in reality. Impulse and insight united in the relationship of masses and leaders, practice and theory.

The very same duality appeared within Marxism as the intellectual vanguard of socialism. The communist philosopher Ernst Bloch described the discourse of Marxism as split into cold and warm streams. The cold stream was that of theoretical critique, a “science of conditions” which appeared “both as an unmasking of ideologies and as a disenchantment of metaphysical illusion[...]”¹⁰ The warm stream was the “liberating intention and materialistically humane, humanely materialistic real tendency, towards whose goal all these disenchantments are undertaken,” and which made its appeal to the propertyless workers as the protagonists of communist revolution.¹¹ Bloch warned: “Only coldness and warmth of concrete anticipation together therefore ensure that neither the path in itself nor the goal in itself are held apart from one another undialectically and so become reified and isolated.”¹² The promise of Faustian Marxism was that the totalizing rational machinery of science would serve to enrich the passionate striving of the dispossessed masses towards better and freer lives, and that socialism would therefore become a work of world-historical redemption in which all could hope for bread and roses.

Faustian Marxism sought to limit the immediate aims of the socialist movement to what is rational, predictable, and controllable. It asked that everything within the movement be given a reason for existing, or otherwise be done away with. There was an unreasonable nature in this. The analysis of history tended to justify events, undeniably concrete when perceived as facts, as historically progressive and therefore reasonable. This fed into the irrationality of its strategic reason, which demanded that people shut up, grin and bear the misery of history, and wait for the machinery of capitalism to do its work and prepare the optimal conditions for socialists to take over a pre-existing totalized organization of work.

There are idealist implications shadowing this belief that political leaders can count on historical progress with certainty in their planning. It temporally displaces unconsciousness and contingency to prehistory or ahistory. It is as if history is only the work of reason and the power of consciousness over the world is something that can be infinitely extended by the generations. By trying to predict and control the tendencies of history according to a preconceived plan, the leaders of the socialist movement gave their theoretical blessing to the conservative tendencies of predictability and simplicity within the movement. The result was that political impulses were often more radical than their plans, outstripping them just as Faust’s striving drove him beyond his academic career and into the cosmos.

The Passion and Science of Emancipation

From Perry Anderson to Domenico Losurdo, much has been said about Western Marxism as a failed counterpart to Eastern or Third World Marxism. Western Marxists are supposed to be airy dreamers, too lost in the effete utopian hopes of intellectuals to accomplish anything worthwhile. Eastern or Third World Marxists are supposed to be hard-nosed realists who have adapted to their situations, constructed developmentalist states, been a force that has successfully established every instance of “Actually Existing Socialism.” Or, as academic critical theorists often frame it, the Western Marxists were the naive innocents amidst a Marxist movement that got its hands dirty in the horrors of the 20th century. In either interpretation, people take it as a given that Marxism took two different paths in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution.

If we look at things from another angle, this Grand Canyon between the two Marxisms looks more like a valley in which many paths meet. We need not deny that there is a difference between Marxisms to see things differently. We only need to think in terms of body politics and languages to see what was in common across the Marxisms of the 20th century. When we think this way, we can recognize what we see as Faustian Marxism.

Faust was a man of two souls, one clinging to earthly pleasures and the other ascending through knowledge. Both were one in their aspiration to reaching immortality by discovering the Absolute Truth behind the flux of the living world. This striving for an Absolute is the soul of Faustian Marxism.

The linkage of the two Marxisms with the two souls of Faust can be demonstrated through a study of the Russian revolutionary process. The birth of a socialist republic out of the collapsing body of the Russian Empire was the remarkable crystallization of a process that had begun long before. The subterranean depths of the Russian revolutionary tradition, as they surfaced in the words and deeds of its leaders, reveal a Faustian brotherhood with the radicals of Western Europe.

The first modern revolutionary movement in the Russian Empire was also the last major alliance of Cossacks and peasants against the Imperial state: Pugachev’s Rebellion of 1773-1775. The Cossack ex-lieutenant Yemelyan Pugachev expressed the long aim of the revolutionary process in his call for the abolition of serfdom and the emancipation of the peasantry from lords. He drew further support from nomadic indigenous peoples in the Caucasus and Central Asia, who saw an opportunity to take their land back. This problem of land and liberty was the thread which united a history of struggles from Pugachev to the October Revolution. Pugachev, however, legitimized the movement by declaring that he fought against Empress Catherine the Great in the name of the late Emperor Peter III. Peter had declared the abolition of serfdom before Empress Catherine had annulled the act. She reinforced the power of the nobility in exchange for their participation in building up the Empire’s national wealth.

Pugachev further drew on the support of Old Believers and clerics by claiming to defend the dignity of the Russian Orthodox Church that Empress Catherine had dispossessed of lands and deprived of monks in order to build a more large-scale Imperial state administration. Like Peter the Great before her, Catherine the Great was a Westernizer who entertained many atheistic and radical French Encyclopedists as personal friends and inspirations. Pugachev and his allies fought against the imposition of noble class rule and Westernizing bureaucratic despotism in the name of Christianity and the Tsar. The briefest glimpse of the new order came in Pugachev’s chiliastic promise that following “the extermination of these opponents and thievish nobles everyone will live in a peace and happiness that shall continue to eternity.”¹³ Pugachev’s movement was a churning in the stomach of the Empire, a rumbling which would resonate with the long revolutionary process, but which did not yet craft a new discursive language to articulate the ideals of the new world longing to be born. Empress Catherine, with the aid of her newly-reorganized professional army, was able to capture and execute Pugachev and put down the rebellion.

The next wave of hope for change in Russia was international. The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 seemed to indicate that the world was making a new beginning. The French Revolutionaries set to work constructing a modern state from scratch, drawing from the principles of reason that philosophers had elaborated in the salons of Paris. The peasants were able to emancipate themselves from the lords and initiate a wide-scale land reform, which transformed many into smallholders for the first time. To the middle class radicals of Russia, the Revolution seemed to be the answer to their hope for a movement against autocracy. The resistance against the expansion of the First French Empire during the 1803-1815 Napoleonic Wars drove many into loyalty to their country, but a hard core of Francophile revolutionaries remained.

The poet and writer Alexander Pushkin was the most prominent of this generation of intellectuals. His life reveals the hopes and tendencies that were characteristic of his era. As a Faustian soul, his life is the story of a passage from youthful rebellion to mature reconciliation, all accomplished within the hope that rational people would remake the world in reason’s image. Born to a noble family and descended from an African freedman, Pushkin was a nationalist and a cosmopolitan in one. He hoped for the redemption of his beloved Russia from autocracy in the name of the universal principle of liberty. His bold revolutionary poetry provoked Emperor Alexander I to exile him in 1820.

In 1825, a succession crisis broke out after Emperor Alexander’s sudden death. His brother and the heir apparent, Konstantin, had renounced his claim to the throne, unbeknownst to the Russian public. Alexander’s lesser-known younger brother, Nicholas, was named as the heir in Konstantin’s place. Taking advantage of the confusion, a revolutionary conspiracy emerged into the open. The Northern Society, a secret society made up of liberal revolutionaries from military and middle class backgrounds, attempted to initiate an open rebellion against Emperor Alexander. They planned to replace his autocratic rule with a constitutional monarchy checked by a bourgeois legislature. Hundreds of the revolutionaries were arrested and put on trial or extrajudicially disappeared. As Pushkin’s associations with many of the leaders of the revolt came to light, he was called to Moscow for interrogation.

After many petitions from his friends and his family for Pushkin’s release, the poet was able to meet with Emperor Nicholas I. Pushkin was able to convince Emperor Nicholas to approve of his release, provided that his movements and publications would be strictly controlled. Emperor Nicholas was able to convince Pushkin that he was a sincere reformer, and the poet supported his Empire until the end of his life.

Pushkin’s reconciliation with the Tsar and his Empire marked the close of another generation of Russian radicalism. Pushkin himself seemed to register that some flame had gone out. He began to engage with Western culture more critically, seeing its problems as contributing to the dilemmas of the Russian intelligentsia. Like Faust, they had set out looking for an adventure, but had found themselves disappointed by the emptiness and impotence of their dreams. In Pushkin’s own 1828 interpretation of the Faust story, the scholar is stricken with an all-pervading boredom and disillusionment. Mephisto attempts to remind him of his fate: “Man’s not without limits, is he?/And to be bored, like it or not,/Is every rational being’s lot.”¹⁴ Faust, irritated, demands that the demon entertain him. He no longer finds pleasure in worldly pursuits, since “Senseless as dreams/Are wordly honors. There is, it seems,/But one real blessing: the mingling of/Two souls.”¹⁵ But by this point in the tale, Faust’s love life with the pious Gretchen has already ended in a fatal tragedy. Pushkin’s scholar has nowhere to turn but the empty spectacle of petty acts of nihillism, commanding Mephisto to torment the people around him for his own amusement. Pushkin, on the other hand, behaved more similarly to Goethe’s Faust, who sought the power to pursue his dream of dominating the forces of nature by offering his services to the Holy Roman Emperor.

The Russian intelligentsia thought they saw another glimmer of hope in the nationalist revolutions which swept Western Europe in 1830. Pushkin decided to respond by drawing their attention to Russia’s own revolutionary history. In 1833, he published the first comprehensive account of Pugachev’s Rebellion: The History of Pugachev. Carefully toeing the line of the censors, he kept his analytical remarks on the Rebellion to a minimum. At the time of writing, the Imperial police state had grown to monstrous proportions. Pushkin only went as far as saying that the movement had spread beyond the Cossacks and “gained strength because of the inexcusable negligence of the authorities[...]”¹⁶ He hovered the blame for the abuses which led to the peasant movement around Catherine the Great while focusing his criticisms on the staff of the state administration itself. Nevertheless, Pushkin’s perspective fit perfectly snugly into an old rationale: “Good Tsar, bad Boyars.” He continued to hope that the stable and orderly rule of the Emperor could secure the reforms that Russia badly needed. In his more passionate treatment of the Pugachev Rebellion in the novel The Captain’s Daughter (1836), he identified the true threat to Russia as the specter of a “senseless and merciless Russian rebellion!”¹⁷

This Russian rebellion continued to stir in the movement of the peasants against serfdom. The language of the revolution, however, would be developed by the intellectuals of noble and middle class backgrounds. In time, they would seek an alliance with the peasantry.

A passion for a comprehensive critique of the social system stirred within the new generation. Another revolutionary era was coalescing in crowds of young, well-read, disillusioned nobles and raznochintsy, educated commoners from the civil service and clergy. They began imagining ethical and scientific techniques for the reorganization of humanity. Many drew on elements of Byzantine morality—especially sobornost, the loving unity of communal all-togetherness. Western ideas of the scientific, planned organization of society continued to exert their influence. In the 1840s, the two directions came to a head. A debate broke out between backwards-looking Slavophiles, who wanted to return to the morality of Byzantium, Orthodox Christianity, or the peasantry, and the forwards-looking Westernizers, whose ambitions resonated with the reforms of Peter the Great and Empress Catherine and who drew on the passions of the European democratic revolutionaries. Intellectuals criticized the ethics of Catholicism for demanding external conformity, Protestantism for becoming lost in inner egoism, and Orthodoxy for its mystical world-weariness. On the whole, the youth turned to the West as the source of new ideas and to the peasantry as a source of mass enthusiasm and collective power.

The hopeful youthfulness of Pushkin’s generation returned with fresh winds from the West, blown into Russia by the 1848 democratic rebellions. Amidst the chaos of the Napoleonic Wars and the failure of the 1830s revolutions, Western European socialists had buried themselves in debates on theology and economics. They searched for some deeper conceptual basis for socialism in human existence, disillusioned as they were with the everyday conservatism of politics. This birthed a generation of revolutionary idealist intellectuals known as the Young Hegelians, who drew from the concepts of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Hegel to critique the commercialized world around them.

The most influential among them was the atheist Ludwig Feuerbach. Feuerbach’s religion of humanity gave a new passion to the French materialist critiques of religion at the same time that it gave a revolutionary significance to German idealism. Feuerbach taught that the essence of humanity was “Reason, Will, and Heart,” that these characteristics are ends in themselves that humanity freely pursues for their own sake, and that “that which exists for its own sake is true, perfect, and divine.”¹⁸ Whenever an individual person loses themselves in the passions of reasoning, willing, or loving, they are becoming an avatar for humanity as a whole. Feuerbach and his circle began to thusly articulate the role of intellectuals in a revolutionary movement. This circle of intellectuals had two Russians among its most prominent participants: Mikhail Bakunin and Alexander Herzen.

Bakunin, born into a wealthy noble family which lived off of the labor of their serfs, witnessed the autocracy of Russia from the inside. Herzen, born as the illegitimate son of a wealthy landowner, experienced both town and country in his Russian childhood. In other words, the two were typical men of the Russian revolutionaries in their day. Bakunin and Herzen had both begun their political careers as opponents of the autocracy and proponents of the Russian peasantry. They were both exiled in time to participate in the revolutions of 1848, and to feel the disillusionment of their defeat. Bakunin had attempted to spread the revolutionary wave east through nationalist pan-Slavism. The project of a Slavic unity was instead taken up by the Tsar, while democratic revolutionaries in Eastern Europe began to focus their energies on establishing independent nations, i.e. Poland. For the remainder of their lives, Bakunin and Herzen organized among the revolutionary internationalists of the West while maintaining their hopes for a large-scale peasant uprising in their Eastern home.

As an intellectual, Bakunin articulated the destructive and critical side of the Western and Russian revolutionary processes. Drawing on Feuerbach, he argued that the destruction of an individual oppressor is permissible insofar as it is done in the name of humanity as a whole. This was not a negation of humanism, but an application of it to revolutionary tactics. In each person, there “exists as a lifelong potential capacity to rise to the awareness of his humanity, even if there should be little possibility for a radical change in the social conditions which have made him what he is.”¹⁹ In a hopeful tone, Bakunin explained that the cruel characteristics one finds in the most violent of people “is not their fault, nor is it due to their nature; it is solely the result of the social environment in which they were born and brought up.”²⁰ It followed, then, that the total destruction of that environment would open up a free range for each person to cultivate their humanity. This programme could be immediately implemented in the Russian countryside, where the peasants were already fighting to destroy serfdom and defend their lands. Bakunin saw a universal, ethical, and humanist hope in these scattered fronts of struggle. Professional revolutionaries did not need to attempt to lead the peasants and dictate their course of action, but could instead best serve the revolution by fanning the flames of their discontent. The impulse to destruction, he thought, was necessarily a creative one as well. An order of social solidarity would organically emerge from the need of each to cooperate with all in order to live the fullest possible lives. This anarchist principle of Bakunin’s later became that of the revolutionary Nihilists.

Herzen, more skeptical than Bakunin, believed that the revolution would be a long, drawn out process of self-emancipation rather than a sudden outbreak of the Last Judgement. He thought not of Man, the untamed beast, but of national peoples and their destinies. To his estimation, the Russian people were “strong, vigorous, and not old—indeed, very young.”²¹ While the West had settled on the principles of the French Revolution, and the task of their socialists was only to universalize its consequences, the East had yet to set out on its new beginning. Its most embryonic rumblings were still emerging among the people of Russia, who were in their masses a peasantry struggling against the autocracy of landowners. Herzen believed that, on closer analysis, the peasants offered insight into the character of the Slavic civilization struggling to be born. While Herzen noted that Slavs had historically followed the religious and ideological conversions of their leaders, he believed that “Centralization is alien to the Slav spirit—federation is far more natural to it.”²² The hope of a Slavic federalism could only be realized through the form of national-popular struggles: “Only when grouped in a league of free and independent peoples will the Slav world at last enter upon its genuine historical existence.”²³

The peasantry already practiced communism, Herzen claimed, but they had to extend its moral principles to a universal ethic to overcome cowering submission to autocracy. The Russian intelligentsia’s role was to aid in this universalization by articulating it in literature and political reforms. Against the Westernizers, who had once counted him among themselves, Herzen argued that the “life of a people is always true to its type and cannot be false,” for “Nature produces only what is feasible under the given conditions: all that exists is drawn onwards by her creative ferment, her insatiable thirst for self-realization, that thirst common to all living things.”²⁴ When a people struggles to realize their own national characteristics against the imposition of order from above, they join the great stream of human history, which is a great struggle to live truly to oneself. Herzen’s agrarianist and populist hopes in Slavic humanity became a rhythm repeated many times in the Narodnik movement.

The contributions of the Young Hegelians, the Russian participants in particular, gave the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia a discursive language with which to articulate their vision of the path to a new world. Feuerbachian humanism permeated all of it, from its nihilist-destructive moments to its ethical-universalist clarions. The religion of humanity could be weaponized against the power of the autocracy and clergy over the peasantry at the same time that it could permeate the Christian passions of the Russian countryside with a revolutionary political content. While before, the intelligentsia felt coldly distant from the violent upheavals of Pugachev, they could now find reason to search for their hopes in the vistas of the peasant communes.

The most important intellectual to carry out the consequences of this new turn was Nikolay Chernyshevsky. Having gone to the seminary to become a theologian, he found a new faith in atheistic humanism. He turned his activities to radical literature, hoping to supply the revolutionaries of Russia with the kind of menagerie of concepts that Western European radicals drew on. For Chernyshevsky, this depended on a materialist concept of the world, in which humanity could learn the laws of nature through scientific observation, learn how to make its intentions effective in practice, and make reality conform with its plans accordingly. Drawing from Feuerbach’s analysis of religion as human self-alienation, Chernyshevsy wrote in his 1853 university dissertation that the aim of art “is to compensate man, in case he lacks the opportunity to enjoy the full aesthetic pleasure afforded by reality, by reproducing this precious reality as far as possible, and by explaining it for his benefit.”²⁵ This didactic and propagandistic role meant that the aesthetic sphere would be key for the efforts of the revolutionary intelligentsia. Revolutionary art would be like a textbook that explained, almost step-by-step, how the world worked and how to change it.

While imprisoned for revolutionary activities, Chernyshevsky attempted exactly this in his novel What is to be Done? (1863). The story followed the efforts of revolutionaries to establish a utopian commune premised on the equality of each and happiness of all on Vasilyevsky Island. If a perfect environment were set up, organizing the incentives and work of each and all so that they came together in a single plan, then the common good would become a reality. The ex-radical author Fyodor Dostoevsky objected that human beings and perfection simply do not go together. If such a utopian society were attempted, people would try to prove “that human beings are human beings and not piano keys, which, though played upon with their own hands by the laws of nature themselves, are in danger of being played so much that outside the calendar it will be impossible to want anything.”²⁶ For the sole sake of asserting their own freedom, people would stage the resistance of their own irrational impulses against the plan, which counts on their being like piano keys.

Nevertheless, Chernyshevsky’s hope of building a perfect, clockwork-like society captured the imaginations of young revolutionaries. For them, the oppressive system they resented was autocracy, which filled them with a sense of impotent loathing. Chernyshevsky’s imaginary utopia was a guidebook for how to introduce order and reason into the unreasonable world of the Russian Empire. The youth recognized him as the intellectual father of a new social movement: the agrarian socialist Narodniki. After Tsar Alexander II issued the 1861 Edict of Emancipation, abolishing the legal (if not practical) basis for serfdom, the winds of a general upheaval seemed to be blowing into the countryside. When the authorities closed Saint Petersburg University in an attempt to suffocate student organizing, the elder intellectuals initiated a student movement of Going to the People. By educating and organizing the peasants on the basis of modern, emancipating knowledge, the Narodniki hoped to birth a new revolutionary intelligentsia from the mass of “the people” themselves. They believed that they were bringing the light of science from outside to an ignorant but passionate body.

By attempting to coordinate an alliance with the peasants struggling to make the legal abolition of serfdom into a practical reality, the Narodniki became the primary Russian revolutionary movement in the second half of the 19th century. The Going to the People campaign of the 1860s and 1870s staged a decisive turn in focus from the West to the communes of the Russian countryside. Intellectuals began to study the commune and write of its significance for Russia’s path to socialism. Nikolai F. Danielson, who translated Karl Marx’s Capital (1867) into Russian, believed that the commune could serve as the basis for a socialist, rather than capitalist, industrialization.

Marx himself was asked about how this position of the Narodniki squared with the historical course of capitalist development described in Capital by Vera Zasulich, an icon of the Russian revolutionary movement. He replied that capitalist private property in Western Europe had developed on the basis of a system of private property founded on personal labor before supplanting it. As such a system was not widespread in Russia, the “‘historical inevitability’ of this course is therefore expressly restricted to the countries of Western Europe.”²⁷ In the Russian commune, where the labor of each was directly part of the general labor of the community, a different system prevailed. Marx said that the analysis in Capital alone could not reveal the future of the communes, but that he believed, after studying sources about them, “the commune is the fulcrum of social regeneration in Russia,” provided that “the harmful influences assailing it on all sides must first be eliminated, and it must then be assured the normal conditions for spontaneous development.”²⁸

While the commune became the new object of social science, young intellectuals began to find everyday life under autocracy unbearable. Many were frustrated with the sluggishness of the revolutionary process in the countryside. It did not help that liberal reformists exerted a significant influence among the Narodniki, helping to arrest the pace of change. Some began to consider what they themselves could do to initiate the collapse of the autocracy. An intellectual from an ex-serf family, Sergey Nechayev seemed to have the passion and the critical clarity to describe a path forward. In 1869, Nechayev attempted to provide an answer to this dilemma of the individual revolutionary in his Catechism of a Revolutionist. The revolutionary must be one who has “broken every tie with the civil order and the entire cultured world, with all its laws, proprieties, social conventions and its ethical rules. He is an implacable enemy of this world, and if he continues to live in it, that is only to destroy it more effectively.”²⁹ He called for the organization of guerrilla organizations, which would operate on conditions of secrecy even internally to reduce the risk posed by informants. As a network of revolutionaries, a coordination of the active minority, the guerrilla organization would set to work attacking the weak points of the system with terroristic violence. They must give their entire being over to the revolution, and even be willing to die if necessary.

Revolutionary Nihilists, inspired by Nechayev’s principles, began to coordinate a campaign of terrorism against the autocracy. Instead of the orderliness and state-building of the Westernizers, they embraced the hatred and passion of direct action. Throughout the 1860s and 1870s, they continually attempted the public assassination of bureaucrats, nobles, and even members of the ruling Romanov family. The Narodnaya Volya, People’s Will, emerged in 1879 with the determination to cause the collapse of the Empire, creating an opportunity for the peasantry to overthrow the landed aristocracy and bourgeoisie. In 1881, they successfully assassinated Tsar Alexander II, but failed to initiate a general rebellion. Alexander II had been seen by the Russian public as a reformer and a friend of the peasantry. On taking his slain father’s place, Tsar Alexander III initiated a large-scale retaliatory censorship, prosecution, and violence against students, intellectuals, and for good measure, Jews.

Russian Marxism developed into a movement under the conditions of this repression. Following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II and its bloody aftermath, there seemed to be little room for open struggle against the state. In retrospect, the Nihilists seemed to have jumped the gun, overestimating the conditions for a socio-political revolution in Russia. Hidden in the pages of law journals, the “Legal Marxists” of the 1890s began to argue that the development of industrial capitalism in Russia was an inevitability and necessity. Rather than resist the efforts of the state in this direction, and rather than defend the peasant communes, they should support the development of capitalist heavy-industry, the rise of large-scale work organization in factories, and the opening up of Russia to free commerce with the world. Some Legal Marxists, like Peter Struve, used the concepts of Marx’s Capital to argue for what amounted to a liberal reformist strategy. Others, on the basis of theories about the inevitable collapse of capitalism in a general crisis, all but spelled out their hopes that the development of capitalism in Russia would create conditions more amenable to Nihilist revolutionism. They placed their hopes in the rise of the proletariat, a class made revolutionary by the fact that it owned nothing but its own labor-power and could only take control over its conditions by taking control of the industry that it toiled for.

Well-known Russian Marxists like Lenin first cut their teeth in polemics against Narodnik political economists like Vasily Vorontsov and Nikolai Danielson, who believed that capitalism could be averted in Russia by universalizing the peasant commune. The Narodniki continued to be the main proponents for the mass-movement ethical sentiments of peasant-majority movements, finding a new life in the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1902. The Marxists, on the other hand, grew from reading circles into political organizations. Marxist activists founded their first organization in 1883 as the Emancipation of Labor. Later, the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class established a base among the factory workers of Saint Petersburg. In 1898, a multitude of Marxist organizations fused into the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), organized on the political principles of the German Social-Democrats. While the Narodniki grew into the voice of the rural movement, the Marxists grew into an urban proletarian movement.

The Russian Marxists drew on the language of the Western European social-democratic movement to articulate their reasoning for identifying the industrial proletariat as the leading revolutionary class. But at the turn of the 19th century, Western socialism was stricken by a debate that the Russians would themselves participate in. The Marxists all more or less agreed on the importance of political struggle. In liberal Western Europe, this meant something parliamentary. In autocratic Russia, this meant something more insurrectionary. The two appeared to them as merely variants on a single theme: the struggle of the proletariat for democratic political liberty, and the usage of that liberty to ascend into the political ruling class of their nation. As the Western proletariat became part of parliamentary politics and the multiclass mass cultural institutions made possible by the wealth of their cities, theorists like Eduard Bernstein began to question the need for rebellion altogether. If the expediencies of parliamentary politics could secure improvements in the conditions of the workers, why overthrow something that was working fine? This provoked a reform-or-revolution debate at the same time that it threw the theory and practice of socialism into question. The role of the intelligentsia, and knowledge itself, became controversial.

The arguments of the reformists usually rested on a pragmatic approach to politics. The movement was everything, the final goal, nothing. If something worked, if it had the force of immediately observable reality, then it held more weight than whatever speculations theoretical knowledge might spin out to envision a far-flung future society. Many of them took part in the philosophical movements of Neo-Kantianism and Pragmatism, which taught that human knowledge was limited to what is comprehensible, which provides material for us to articulate concepts that are useful for our everyday efforts.

The revolutionists sought to affirm the role of speculative theory at the same time that they argued for the relevance of communism, their ultimate goal. They began to lean on the Faustian arguments of Enlightenment bourgeois philosophers that humanity could feasibly comprehend all of nature and subject its forces to rational mastery. In this, they could lean on the authority of Friedrich Engels, the collaborator of Marx and one of the founding fathers of German Social-Democracy. Engels dismissed the thing-in-itself of Immanuel Kant, the unknowable, as only something that was not yet known to us. While humanity is faced with the Faustian dilemma that “it has to gain an exhaustive knowledge of the world system in all its interconnections, and on the other hand, this task can never be completely fulfilled because of the nature both of men and of the world system,” it nevertheless “constantly finds its solution, day by day, in the endless progressive development of humanity, just as for example mathematical problems find their solution in an infinite series or continued fractions.”³⁰

For the revolutionists, the freedom of humanity was the understanding of nature’s necessary laws. They believed that the revisionist abandonment of hope in the lawfulness of the world was opportunistic and counterrevolutionary; it was an attempt to distract the duty of the proletariat to abolish the irrational system of private property and construct a socialist world on the principles of reason.

In the setting of this dispute, Marxists began to analyze labor itself, the allotted vocation of the proletariat, in order to find a solid basis for their certainty in a socialist future. A working-class philosopher from Germany, Joseph Dietzgen, described labor as humanity’s process of unveiling the secrets of nature. While human beings began laboring only out of needfulness and dependency—being only one part of Nature’s cosmic whole—through the enlightenment of observation and experience, they became “a lamp which illuminates not only the outermost, but also the innermost of Nature.”³¹ The human mind being of one substance with its laboring body and Nature alike, “Mind is as limitless and inexhaustible in gaining knowledge as Nature is in her readiness to open her breast.”³²

Addressing the problem of the thing-in-itself, Dietzgen posited that the mind, born of Mother Nature, “penetrates with its science into the innermost of Nature, but it cannot penetrate beyond that,—not because it is a narrowly limited mind, but because its mother is Infinite Nature, a natural infinity having nothing besides it.”³³ His “Infinite Nature” was something like Goethe’s “Eternal Feminine,” which redeems Faust for remaining true to his own infinite striving after her. In Dietzgen’s Faustian tale, socialists must “reconcile the antithesis between love and selfishness; that we constitute our society on this reconciliation; that men shall join hands and with united strength and labor force Nature to yield us our daily bread in plenty.”³⁴ Dietzgen, thinking from the perspective of his own artisanal labor, thought of humanity as like a demiurge, and nature as like the power beyond all finitude that the demiurge must shape into a reasonable form.

In Italy, an academic philosopher came to many of the same conclusions of Dietzgen by other means. While Dietzgen reflected on labor with the concepts of German idealism and vitalist monism, Labriola reflected on the concepts of philosophy with the activity of labor. After researching the lives and work of Marx and Engels, he came to the conclusion that Marxism was first and foremost a philosophy of praxis. For him, this implied conclusions somewhat distinct to the infinite science of the German revolutionary Social-Democrats. While they attacked the gall of Bernstein’s efforts to revise Marxism, Labriola taught that a schema like Marxism “should not be considered as a fixed entity, but as a function. For such terminal concepts are valuable only in so far as they help us to think now, while we are actively engaged in proceeding with new thought.”³⁵ His fellow academics and intellectuals wanted to pretend that science “consists wholly of materialised knowledge instead of being mainly a skill in directing the formation of knowledge, give offhand answers and thereby frequently succeed in satirising themselves, after the manner of that delightful Mephistopheles in the guise of a master of all four faculties.”³⁶ Labriola, following Hegel, considered thought to be a kind of labor. It therefore demanded a patient process and an effort of sticking with the object of thought. Only then, and only “if you will give me an infinite number of years, and an infinite capacity for methodical work, I might extend my knowledge almost indefinitely.”³⁷ Marxists had to remember that “In the beginning was the Deed.”

Through this thread, Labriola conceived of human history quite differently to many Social-Democrats. Instead of an infinite, linear progression of the productive forces to greater and greater scales, Labriola said that history was “the crossing of forces which combine, complete and alternately eliminate one another.”³⁸ In this history, humanity stumbles, falls, and gets up; it educates itself. True knowledge “leads first from life to thought, not from thought to life. It leads from work, from the labor of cognition, to understanding as an abstract theory, not from theory to cognition. It leads from wants, and therefore from various feelings of well-being or illness resulting from the satisfaction or neglect of these wants, to the creation of the poetical myth of supernatural forces, not vice-versa.”³⁹ Science could only serve the effort of Social-Democracy’s laboring humanity to dominate nature if it remembered that striving is what inspires Faust with the strength to dedicate himself to science, and that the deepest of his knowledge began from experience. In Labriola, intellectual labor sought the realization of its hope for power in the hands of manual labor.

In the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, the lines of struggle fell differently than in the West. Many agreed on the significance of theory and praxis alike, but did not think in the same terms as the Westerners. The German socialists associated pragmatism and moralism with reformism, while they associated science and intransigence with Marxism. Many of the Russian socialists thought more like Labriola. On the basis of their very revolutionary striving itself, they dismissed the need for scientifically penetrating into the unknowable and allowed for the role of myths. Alexander Bogdanov and Anatoly Lunacharsky were prominent among this tendency. For them, Faustian Marxism had to be a passion in order for it to be a science. Bogdanov, who had dedicated his life to working as a doctor, wrote that two “aspirations are ‘competing’ in the human soul: suppose, to serve the God or mammon.”⁴⁰ While God represents collective humanity as the highest ideal, mammon represents acquisitive egoism’s surrender to mere things. Labor is a universally organizing power, a cosmic force which humanity attributes to God. Socialist salvation lies in the fact that “the universal role of labour in the technological process is that relating to the organization of people and, in correspondence with its needs, labour creates the organization of things, organizes nature for people.”⁴¹ Beginning from a passionate idealism, laboring humanity can set to work against nature and the mammon of private interests to organize the world reasonably. This line of thought was ordered similarly to the Narodniki, who believed that the revolt of the masses was the condition for establishing the scientifically-designed new society.

Other Russian Marxists intervened to argue in favor of the Western revolutionary approach. Georgi Plekhanov, the son of a noble family who had been introduced to revolutionary thought through the work of Chernyshevsky, believed that Bogdanov’s approach would undermine the enlightening role of Marxist science. Rather than labor being primarily a power to organize nature, it was also a power to peer into the laws of the cosmos and master them. Thinking of the raging disputes over the development of capitalism in Russia, Plekhanov argued that ”any increase in productive forces implies a diminution in absolute ignorance. Natural phenomena which man does not understand and therefore cannot control give rise to various kinds of superstition.”⁴²

Like the Westernizers among the Narodniki, Plekhanov believed that intellectuals had a unique class role to play among the workers. Instead of subsuming themselves into blind idealism, they had to teach the principles of scientific analysis to the workers so that they could understand what their allotted role was in the progression of history. On this basis, he allotted a certain role for great men in history: “A great man is great not because his personal qualities give individual features to great historical events, but because he possesses qualities which make him most capable of serving the great social needs of his time, needs which arose as a result of general and particular causes.”⁴³ Rather than provide the masses with ideals, intellectuals had to lead them, and to lead them, they had to truly understand how to serve the needs of the moment.

This dispute soon carried over into a debate about the very role of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in politics. The debate touched on the same questions that had followed the entire Russian revolutionary process. What was the significance of unplanned, spontaneous rebellions and class organizations for political organizers and their plans? What was the role of the revolutionaries and their underground organizations in the struggle against autocracy? How should Marxist intellectuals behave towards the proletariat? How should intellectuals conceive of theory and its use?

A young Lenin tried his hand at addressing these questions in his book What Is To Be Done?: Burning Questions of Our Movement (1902), titled in homage to Chernyshevsky’s novel of the same name. Central to the book was “the question of the relation between spontaneity and consciousness.”⁴⁴ On the basis of the limited aims and victories of the Russian strike waves in the 1890s, Lenin argued that, taken alone, the immediate struggles of workers for their everyday needs would go no further than “trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labor legislation, etc.”⁴⁵ Echoing Chernyshevsky and Plekhanov, he believed that scientific-revolutionary consciousness “could only be brought to them from without.”⁴⁶ Socialism, Lenin continued, “grew out of the philosophic, historical and economic theories that were elaborated by the educated representatives of the propertied classes, the intellectuals.”⁴⁷

Thinking like the trained lawyer he had been, Lenin imagined the revolutionary intelligentsia as the dedicated public servants of the working people. The intelligentsia, standing above the fray of everyday class struggles, was part of the “sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge,” a “sphere of relationships between all the classes and strata and the state and the government, the sphere of the interrelations between all the classes.”⁴⁸ Only the intellectuals-turned-professional revolutionaries could provide the totalizing vision that was necessary for an all-round revolution: “Without a revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement.”⁴⁹ But to educate and lead the workers, they had to create the means for a sustained, standardized contact with them. They needed an organization.

In Russia, the radical intelligentsia had been pushed from liberal reform to underground revolutionary organizing. It lacked a united organization to coordinate this organizing, and many Marxists feared that this decentralization would leave them with little choice but to turn back to Nihilist terrorism. Lenin believed that this underground work had to be linked up with a more general organizational culture, and that it therefore needed to meet with aboveground, legal work. The two would come together in “common institutions, i.e., not merely a common title of ‘Union’ but genuinely common work exchange of material, experience and forces, distribution of functions not only by districts, but specializing them on a city-wide scale.”⁵⁰ Each revolutionary would become “a participant in an extensive enterprise that reflects the whole general revolutionary attack on the autocracy.”⁵¹ But this could only be accomplished by a strict internal discipline and division of labor in which each has their tasks and sticks to it. For “the more perfect the finish of each cog, the larger the number of detail workers engaged in the common cause, the closer will our network become and the less will be the consternation in the general ranks resulting from inevitable police raids.”⁵² Like the German Social-Democrats, the party would be a state within the state. It would be a state organized as the unity of all with a shared consciousness and shared political aims.

In this total working-organization, the vanguard party, theory and practice could both play their role. Intellectuals could lead the workers, while the organizational autonomy of the workers could continue to prevail where it was not realistic to expect all of them to be committed and educated communists. Lenin did not dismiss the role of intellectual ideals altogether in this work, but believed that the Faustian striving of Bogdanov and others could find its place in a careful critique of social reality. They would be dreamers who take careful note of everyday life, working to realize their dreams wherever possible. Lenin believed that “Of this kind of dreaming there is unfortunately too little in our movement. And the people most responsible for this are those who boast of their sober views, their ‘closeness’ to the ‘concrete,’ the representatives of legal criticism and of illegal tail-ism.”⁵³ Even if all had to subordinate their activity to the party organization in order for the party to succeed in its work of accomplishing its plans, each could also find the satisfaction of their personal needs in the party. They could freely express the objections of their conscience, as long as they did not break up the working unity of the party’s actions. Just as Bogdanov laid his hope in the organizing power of labor, Lenin staked his bets on the unifying power of theory and organization.

Lenin’s philosophy of organization drew on a long history of Enlightenment thought. Baruch Spinoza, the17th century prince of modern philosophers who drew out the intellectual consequences of the Renaissance, taught that the “order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things,” as all are one in God.⁵⁴ When all is taken together, he held, Substance and Subject are identical—but this can only be established by the free reasoning of each and all. In the highest rational state, “all men agree[...] to act—but not to judge or think—according to the common decision.”⁵⁵ Lenin altered this line of thought into a kind of dialectical monism, in which consciousness and reason must struggle as a centralizing party for victory over the decentralizing forces of unconsciousness and anarchy. The ultimate goal is a common body and common mind, a Substance that is also Subject. In this aim to make a party into an entire world, the idealism of the intellectual was on full display.

Even Lenin’s critique of Bogdanov and others in the epistemological disputes of the 1900s revealed this common consensus grounding the argument. This informed his approach to philosophical disputes In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909), Lenin argued against Neo-Kantian skeptics that “the thing-in-itself is objectively real, fully knowable and this-sided, that it does not differ fundamentally from appearances that it becomes transformed into appearance at every step in the development of the individual consciousness of man and the collective consciousness of mankind.”⁵⁶ Unlike Bogdanov, Lenin insisted that “the laws of thought reflect the forms of actual existence of objects, fully resemble, and do not differ from, these forms.”⁵⁷ Both sought after humanity’s conquest of reality, but Lenin believed this could only be accomplished when human beings took stock of the whole world that exceeded and even resisted their subjective will. Theirs was a dispute over the most strategically viable means to conquer reality, fought out in the domain of epistemology.

By the early 20th century, Russian Marxism across all of its factions had become Faustian. They all acted, thought, and spoke in the terms of dominating nature and transforming it into the image of a plan. This Faustianization stemmed far back in the Russian revolutionary process, and was even foundational to the participation of intellectuals. But the Russian Marxists weren’t everyone. There were alternatives to their Faustian approach from the ethical-universalist tendency of the Russian revolution. Leo Tolstoy, a Christian anarchist from a noble family, had promoted a vision of a universal community in his writings throughout the 19th century. He believed that this utopia, free of property, classes, and authority would be realized by people treating each and every life, human and non-human, with the utmost respect. Tolstoy practiced vegetarianism on the basis of these Byzantine Christian principles. He believed that moral reform and self-transformation could prevent the need for a revolutionary upheaval, and could peacefully isolate and abolish the authority of the ruling classes.

Other revolutionaries echoed Tolstoy’s ethical universalism without committing themselves to his pacifism. Peter Kropotkin, a scientist and anarcho-communist organizer from an aristocratic background, argued that the realization of communism was immediately attainable. He believed that communization, the direct seizure of private property and distribution of wealth to each and all, would itself be the main method of revolution rather than either pacifist moral reform or the iron discipline of organization. Kropotkin argued that the necessity of cooperation was an organic tendency of all sociality, animal and human, on the basis of intra- and inter-species dependency itself. In Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), he made his own scientific case for communism. While competition existed, it was mutual aid which secured “the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.”⁵⁸ While the self-assertion of the individual also has its role in history, it is mutual aid that makes the wealth and intellect of each and all possible. In class society, these powers of the general wealth are hoarded by a few, to the detriment of the species. By overthrowing the reign of private property in the name of general flourishing, the needs and aspirations of each and all can be cared for.

Kropotkin’s vision of solidarity as an organic force inspired another vision of humanity’s role in the cosmos than that of the Faustians. J. Howard Moore, an American socialist intellectual and vegetarian, believed that Kropotkin’s observations on cooperation served to favor animal liberation. In The Universal Kinship (1906), he argued that human liberation would be illusory without animal liberation. As long as humanity has treated the world around it as only an instrument of use to be mastered, it has acted only according to the self-preservation of a predator species. Its pretending to be universal is a dream, an ideological excuse to forget what it does. The very same ideological function appears in racism, patriarchy, and class exploitation. It has not yet become reasonable, and is therefore incapable of being a universal species until it overcomes its need to dominate everything around it.

Moore understood that a body encompasses many impulses, many possibilities. Self-preservation, competition, altruism, and solidarity are all truly organically immanent to a creature’s existence. When we remember that we are animals, that our lives begin from needfulness and self-preservation and that our bodies are made up of the same stuff as other animals, we begin the long path to universal ethics. Moore declared: “The great task of reforming the universe is, therefore, since the world is so steeped in selfishness and hate, the task of endowing beings, or the task of stocking the universe with beings, with dispositions to get out of themselves.”⁵⁹ Only by embracing the tendency of life to unite with life in order to enhance itself, the principle of cooperation and altruism, can humanity become truly universal. It is solidarity that makes humanity universal, not knowledge or labor alone. Through the universalism of anti-imperialism, racial liberation, feminism, socialism, and animal liberation, humanity strives towards the universal kinship of all life in one great association.

This warm stream of socialism waged a critique of the Marxists’ claim to holding a piece of absolute knowledge. They stressed that their knowledge was premised on an active forgetfulness, and that this subordination of ethics to knowledge and power kept humanity as nothing more than a devouring beast. To pretend that the partiality of the human knowledge of nature was good enough to master and plan the cosmos would be to follow the same pattern of thought that justifies class society. There are no absolutes to rely on. Not even in the collectivity of the human species. Humanity has to actively strive to transform both the world and ourselves rather than put off the question of either for the sake of the other. This approach became a forgotten alternative as the Marxists won out in the race to build political institutions. The organizations saw more usefulness in those lines of thought that justified self-preservation rather than challenged it, since the survival of the formal organizations themselves depended on actualizing their self-preservation through the behavior of the members. This warm stream within the Russian revolution would not disappear, but it would lose its words to the oblivion of forgetting amidst struggle.

In 1905, the outbreak of large-scale rebellion came as a surprise to many Russian Marxists. Rather than a general working class upheaval, the revolt began from the efforts of middle class liberals for a representative parliament, the turn of workers to political demands after the police had attacked them for striking, the desperation of peasants for food after their land allotments had proved insufficient to support them or hold the tide of commercial agriculture, the efforts of colonized peoples to assert their independence against Russification, and the resistance of students to the regimentation of the education system. When the army fired on a crowd of strikers outside of the Tsar’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, a general upheaval broke out and spread across the Empire. Marxist organizers, most prominently Leon Trotsky, quickly set to work trying to radicalize the revolt and link up economic demands with political demands. The inexperienced Tsar Nicholas II, surprised by the hatred unleashed against his state, scrambled to offer concessions. He initially tried to limit this to a commission investigating the cause of discontent in St. Petersburg. After his uncle was assassinated, he expanded the concessions to scaling back censorship and lessening the burden of debt on the peasants. When liberals continued to pressure him for reform, he allowed for the creation of a consultative assembly. The formation of the St. Petersburg Soviet was quickly followed by a declaration of a general strike, while peasants in the countryside began expropriating land. Feeling sick about his decision the whole while, Tsar Nicholas signed the liberal October Manifesto, authorizing the creation of a new constitutional system based on the incorporation of civil rights into law, the right to universal suffrage, and a congressional system in which the Duma would be the legislature and political parties would have the right to openly organize.

The 1905 revolution marked a significant shift in the countryside. New life flowed into the Zemstvo, a peasant council institution established in 1864 to replace the power of the landlord in the system of serfdom. Prime Minister Peter Stolypin sought to destroy the peasant commune and replace it with a system of commercial smallholders. He implemented reforms from 1906-1914 which entrenched the peasants in a kind of state capitalism based on petty property ownership. Some peasants benefited from this system of commercialized homesteads, while others had no choice to address their continuing poverty but to work for the well-off peasants. The ascendancy of small property in the countryside would pose a significant problem for the revolutionaries, who had staked their hopes on either the decisive victory of the peasant communes over commercialization or on the total ruin of peasant smallholding by agricultural capitalists.

Tsar Nicholas could not understand how his people could have turned against his state. He and his family found a comforting explanation in antisemitism. A few years earlier, his secret police had begun spreading a fabricated document titled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903) alleging to uncover an international Jewish conspiracy to take control of the world through controlled chaos. In order to counteract the supposed conspiracy, the Tsar and his allies sponsored antisemitic ultranationalist movements like the Black Hundreds. Pogroms grew into a constant in the countryside.

The Marxists struggled to develop a language to comprehend the new order. Even before the outbreak of rebellion, their short-lived unity had fallen apart. At the Second Congress of the RSDLP in 1903, arguments over political organization culminated in the split of the Party. It was replaced by the Mensheviks, who defined all who worked under the Marxist organization and its fronts as members of it, and the Bolsheviks, who defined only the fully committed, formally affiliated participants of party organizations as members. The Mensheviks, focusing on the problems of the Empire writ large, believed that theirs was a primarily democratic task of political reform and capitalist development in order for the proletariat to find favorable conditions for its ascendancy. The Bolsheviks believed that the party should take on the role of an active minority, searching for ruptures in the system wherever they showed themselves while preserving their independence from the day-to-day struggles of the proletariat. Theoretical disputes over the significance of 1905 and the path forward for organized Marxists deepened the split. Some believed that the creation of the Duma and legalization of trade unions created an opportunity for parliamentary work, while others believed that the bourgeoisie would be satisfied with the recognition of its institutions and that socialists had to break with the moderate democrats.

Lenin, now a leader among the Bolsheviks, cautioned that the proletariat should not be aloof from the bourgeois-democratic revolution, but that it should not wait for the bourgeoisie either. Writing in Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution (1905), he laid down the future tasks of the Marxists in the Bolshevik faction. He called for socialists to push democratic struggles to the point of revolutionary rupture, for the emergence of “consistent proletarian democracy” in socialism rather than mere political reforms within the scope of bourgeois rule.⁶⁰ While the Bolshevik revolutionaries “cannot jump out of the bourgeois-democratic boundaries of the Russian revolution,” they could “vastly extend these boundaries, and within these boundaries we can and must fight for the interests of the proletariat, for its immediate needs and for the conditions that will make it possible to prepare its forces for the future complete victory.”⁶¹

The Bolshevik case for radicalizing the democratic revolution strengthened their commitment to the urban proletariat as the subject of revolutionary struggle. They looked on the peasantry with growing suspicion, wondering to what extent they could understand the method of uniting political and economic struggle. The communist novelist Maxim Gorky described the dilemma in his literature throughout the remainder of the decade. In Mother (1906), Gorky weaved a tale of a proletarian mother becoming an organizer in the revolutionary movement. Depicting a conversation of revolutionary organizers, one imagines: “When the peasants rise up, they’ll overturn absolutely everything! They need bare land, and they will lay it bare, tear down everything.”⁶² An organizer of an urban background glumly counters: “And then he will get in our way,” while the rural organizer promises: “It’s our business to prevent that. We are nearer to him; he trusts us; he will follow us.”⁶³

On the other hand, Gorky ascribed a heroic role to the proletariat in The Confession (1908). He believed that enlightened workers would “free the souls of their neighbors from the yoke of darkness and superstition and unite them and disclose to them their own secret physiognomy, and aid them to recognize the strength of their own walls and teach them the one and true path to a general union for the sake of the great cause, the cause of the universal creating of God.”⁶⁴ This novel sparked great controversy among the Bolsheviks for its vision of Godbuilding. While the intellectuals condemned Gorky for his insufficient atheism, his passionate hope was closer to the pulse of those intellectuals than they realized. In the proletariat, they sought a people that would make a world, and in making a world, make the communist ideal into a reality. Soon, sooner than they knew, the opportunity to make this grand effort would present itself to them.

The World Revolution and the Conquest of Reality

The outbreak of a World War in 1914 initiated a world crisis. The crisis fused the problems of East and West, imperialism and self-determination, mass and nation, reason and irrationality, and self and world into a common political conjuncture. Some looked to the war for the renascence of the world’s most virile forces in the mobilization of peoples for struggle. Others looked on the war as the tragic slaughter of workers by workers, and as the time for revolutionary forces to make its stand against war, capital, and reaction.

The leaders of German Social-Democracy chose to collaborate with their country’s war effort in order to push the proletariat to the leading class of the nation through its playing a leading part in defensive warfare. For them, building up a nation state and building up a class could be conceived of as a single process. Both meant institutionalizing the class, treating it as the Fourth Estate of the nation.

This nationalist-socialist strategy, which culminated in 1914, had a long history within German Social-Democracy. Ferdinand Lassalle, the mid-19th century founding father of the movement, had spoken against the “opposition of the personal interest of the higher classes to the development of the nation in culture,” and taught the workers that “to strive constitutes all true morality.”⁶⁵ For the workers, who had no property to limit the scope of their egoism to self-preservation in the narrowest sense, there was no contradiction “between personal interest and the development of the nation in culture.”⁶⁶ The aim of the workers and the civil service was the same: making the nation into the only true political reality. By the late 19th century, Bavarian Social-Democrat Georg von Vollmar had begun advocating for socialism to be realized in a single country by elevating the workers to the national ruling class through democratic reforms.

Against the militarists, Lenin initiated a polemic. He considered them to have fundamentally betrayed Marxism. Rather than explaining this betrayal along purely ideological lines, he evaluated it as a result of the recuperation of socialism into the politics of imperialism. The imperialist era of capitalism, which Lenin dated the beginning of to the 1898 Spanish-American War, was characterized by the power of global monopolies, the socialization of labor into gigantic corporate scales by the monopolies, the partition of the world between them, and the reduction of official politics in the metropolitan world to disputing the management and distribution of imperial spoils.

Even metropolitan workers became involved in imperialist politics through the rise of public institutions and consumer norms made possible by imperialist wealth, and by the careerism of labor politicians. The construction of institutions of mass politics, mass culture, and professional politicians “created political privileges and sops for the respectful, meek, reformist and patriotic office employees and workers, corresponding to the economic privileges and sops.”⁶⁷ Lenin believed that truly revolutionary socialism could only remain politically viable through an internationalist struggle. Against the nationalist reformists he affirmed: “In real life the International is composed of workers divided into oppressor and oppressed nations. If its action is to be monistic, its propaganda must not be the same for both.”⁶⁸

The Bolsheviks were distinguished by their intransigent opposition to the war. In this, they resonated with the anti-collaborationist stance of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Lenin, however, insisted on splitting from the “revisionists” and “social-imperialists” of Social-Democracy, while Luxemburg sought to preserve the unity of the movement as long as possible. Luxemburg, like Trotsky, called for revolutionary opposition to imperialist war to be paired with defense of the national territory from invaders, while Lenin advocated for an all-round revolutionary defeatism.

A battle of principles broke out in the socialist movement. The world crisis threw the old consensus of institution-building into question. The differences among socialists became more stark as they made their cases for increasingly disparate visions of political strategy. Intellectuals began the whole world-historic significance of revolution from the ground up, in a work of self-clarification. Lenin headed a call to return to Marx in order to wage an ideological struggle against the faction which claimed to be the direct heirs of Marxism’s founding father, the Social-Democratic Party of Germany. While in exile in Bern, Switzerland in 1915, Lenin began to study Hegel. From this, he learned a systematic way to think about his own thinking and exposit the meaning of socialism for human history.

While the intellectuals debated and struggled for control over Marxism, workers and soldiers began making a stand. While the official labor unions made their peace with the state in the name of civic loyalty, workers across the world staged wildcat strikes against the imposition of military discipline and deprivation. After years of thousands of lives being ruined and wasted in the trenches, mutiny grew among war-weary soldiers. By 1917, things had begun to come to a head across the world.

Tsar Nicholas of Russia had discredited himself for the public by taking personal command of the army in 1915 and shouldering personal responsibility for its failures. Hyper-inflation made the cost of living unattainable for many, ruining small-scale commercial farmers and forcing many peasants to rely on subsistence farming. Factory workers began to demand higher pay in order to continue affording life in the cities. Food shortages plagued the army and cities alike, while the state’s grain requisitioning at fixed prices left peasants with few options. Much of the army was made up of draftees who had been thrown from the small world of the countryside into the incomprehensible hell of the trenches. Among the Muslims in Central Asia, revolts against conscription in the Russian army. The war had given the Imperial state an opportunity to reintroduce severe repressive measures on a pervasive scale, reversing many of the gains of 1905 while leaving almost no institutional outlets for outright discontent.

In February of the Russian calendar, women workers in St. Petersburg headed a movement demanding bread, forging an alliance with striking workers. The Tsar attempted to quell the uprising as he had before: by brute force. He commanded soldiers to fire on the crowd, but they either hesitated or refused. Many began to revolt, joining working class rioters throughout the city in tearing down symbols of the Tsar and autocracy. By the beginning of March, Tsar Nicholas was forced to abdicate. Without anyone willing to succeed him, the Duma seized control of the state and declared the rule of a Provisional Government. Nicholas and his family were placed under house arrest.

While the Provisional Government attempted to restore law and order in the centers of state power, multiple movements competed to realize their aims. In Saint Petersburg, a Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies formed as an alternative to the liberal- and reformist-dominated Provisional Government. It was made up of councils, which workers and soldiers directly elected deputies from among themselves to. The deputies had to remain in constant dialogue with the assemblies they had been selected from, or else lose their positions. The Soviet and the Provisional Government were soon locked in mutual dependency and mutual struggle for the power to govern.

The council movement began to spread throughout the cities of Russia as an organ of struggle against militarism, law-and-order, and capitalist authority. In many of the urban centers of the Asian and Caucasian colonies, intellectuals and workers initiated attempts to break off from Russia. After the Provisional Government democratized the rural Zemstvos, landlords and peasants began to struggle for participation in national institutions, autonomy from the state, and everything in between. Many supported the Socialist-Revolutionaries, who continued the Narodnik promise of democratic liberty and land reform. But the SRs themselves split, with the Right-SRs remaining in the Provisional Government and supporting war obligations and the Left-SRs seeking an immediate end to the war and an uncompromising land reform.

The Provisional Government’s vision of a republican society premised on the rule of law, legislated by an All-Russian Constituent Assembly, both expanded the prospects of politics in Russia and limited them to the interest of preserving stability, even if it meant reinforcing the existing social order. When they neglected the problem of land reform and continued to compel national participation in WWI, they began to draw the ire of many. In the July Days, the Provisional Government repeated Tsarist methods of brutality against rebelling soldiers and workers. Meanwhile, the Tsar and his reactionary allies were showing all the signs of planning a coup and the total restoration of the autocracy.

Returning from exile in Europe, Lenin believed that the Bolsheviks had to lead a class seizure of power while the moment was ripe. In the April Theses, he called for revolutionary defeatism, the overthrow of the Provisional Government by a government of soviets, the abolition of the police, army, and bureaucracy, the nationalization of all lands in the hands of agrarian soviets, the nationalization of banks under the control of the soviet government, the governmental command of the soviet government over all production and distribution, and the formation of a new revolutionary International. Plekhanov, one of Lenin’s former mentors, accused him of adhering to the fantasies of Bakunin and the Nihilists. But when General Lavr Kornilov, commander-in-chief of the Russian army, attempted and nearly succeeded at overthrowing an impotent Provisional Government and replacing it with military rule, the power to govern was thrown up into the air. By October of the Russian calendar, discontent had reached a boiling point, and Lenin’s propositions no longer seemed so disconnected from the sentiments of the propertyless masses.⁶⁹

The Bolshevik slogan of “Peace, Land, Bread” articulated the needs of the time. In the soviets of Saint Petersburg and Baku, the heart of urban Russia and the heart of the urban Caucuses, the Bolsheviks grew to predominance. Lenin’s call of “All Power to the Soviets!” was growing into a feasible possibility. While in April, the Bolsheviks had estimated Lenin as over-eager, they now intended a military uprising against the Provisional Government. The arrival of Bolshevik sailors to Saint Petersburg and their agitation among the soldiers gave the Bolsheviks the masses they needed for victory. Red Guards marched into the Winter Palace, where the Provisional Government was seated, and arrested the representatives in the name of a soviet government. The Bolsheviks had seized power in the name of the soviets.

The Bolsheviks initially maintained power as the ruling party only through rhetoric. They by no means exercised the power of consensus in Russia; no one did. The Bolsheviks thought of their struggle as that of proletarian democracy, represented by the soviets, against bourgeois democracy, represented by the Constituent Assembly. Thinking that the soviet form had accomplished an alliance of workers and peasants, Lenin said that “a republic of Soviets is a higher form of democracy than the usual bourgeois republic with a Constituent Assembly.”⁷⁰ They had largely ignored the peasantry for most of their existence, being a primarily urban party. In the soviets, many supported the Left-SRs rather than the Bolsheviks. When the Bolsheviks oversaw elections to the Constituent Assembly, the Socialist Revolutionaries (Left and Right, since they were not distinguished on the ballots) won the majority of the vote. The Bolsheviks dissolved the Constituent Assembly altogether, replacing its functions with the soviets. Few mourned the loss of the Constituent Assembly save politicians, while pro-SR peasants cared more for local political concerns than the urban Constituent Assembly. The Bolsheviks and the left-SRs formed an alliance and became the sole ruling factions of the country.

This ruling arrangement represented the conquest of the central state administration by urban workers, soldiers, and intellectuals. In short, it was something that many in the Russian revolutionary process had fought for in a generations-long effort. The conditions of its realization were not inevitable and certainly not guaranteed, but the leaders came into power with expectations and intentions that had been built up long before them. Lenin had attempted to craft a comprehensive vision out of these plans just before October, a guide for the left-wing of the revolution, which he titled The State and Revolution (1917).

Lenin framed the book as a critique of Social-Democracy and a clarification of the Marxist theory of social revolution. While they made the accomplishment of parliamentary democracy within the existing state their main political aim, Lenin sought to defend the necessity of smashing even a democratic state like the Russian Republic and building a new state of soviet power in order for the workers to become the ruling class of society. In Lenin’s theory, the state, made up of “special bodies of armed men,” is an instrument of class rule wielded in a more or less veiled way by the ruling class.⁷¹ Even the most advanced democratic republic, if it fails to fundamentally challenge the capitalist property regime, “is always hemmed in by the narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation, and consequently always remains, in reality, a democracy for the minority, only for the propertied classes, only for the rich. Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave-owners.”⁷²

The democracy of a Constituent Assembly only veiled this reality by abstracting the participants into citizens, building class rule into the protections of property, monopoly power, and special interests provided by the law. The disenfranchisement of the non-working citizens by soviet government only made the rule of a particular class explicit and transparent, it gave class struggle an explicitly political character. When the proletariat takes power over society, it must smash this state, do away with the roles of its politicians, bureaucratic staff, army, and police. While the “exploiters are naturally unable to suppress the people without a highly complex machine for performing this task,” the dictatorship of the propertyless masses constitutes only a semi-state, since they can do with “a very simple ‘machine,’ almost without a ‘machine,’ without a special apparatus, by the simple organization of the armed masses (such as the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, let us remark, anticipating somewhat).”⁷³

This simple state machinery would initiate the transition from capitalism to communism. This would, first of all, require that that state power be made up of a strictly united activity. Lenin asked his federalist opponents “if the proletariat and the poorest peasantry take state power into their own hands, organize themselves quite freely in communes, and unite the action of all the communes in striking at capital, in crushing the resistance of the capitalists, and in transferring the privately owned railways, factories, and so forth to the entire nation, to the whole of society—will that not be centralism?”⁷⁴ Centralism would itself become the watchword of political reorganization, as the workers would transform “the whole of society” into “a single office and a single factory, with equality of labor and equality of pay,” even if that “is by no means our ideal, or our ultimate goal.”⁷⁵ The workers would begin to “reduce the role of the state officials to that of simply carrying out our instructions as responsible, revocable, modestly paid ‘foremen and bookkeepers’ (of course, with the aid of technicians of all sorts, types and degrees).”⁷⁶

This centralizing offensive against the capitalists and bourgeois state would have to take advantage of all centralist tendencies that they find ready-to-hand from capitalist production. Lenin stated that organizing “the whole national economy on the lines of the postal service, so that the technicians, foremen, bookkeepers, as well as all officials, shall receive salaries no higher than ‘a workman’s wage,’ all under the control and leadership of the armed proletariat—this is our immediate aim.”⁷⁷ What was before the revolution state-capitalist monopoly would have to be converted into a socialist monopoly which would adhere to the economic and political plans of the working nation.

Even this would not yet be the accomplishment of a mature communism. Lenin believed that in communism’s first stage, socialism, that there would remain for a while “not only bourgeois right, but even the bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie!”⁷⁸ The transitionary state would enforce the “equality of labour and equality of wages,” which would remain a bourgeois-democratic right rather than the communist rule of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”⁷⁹ Only after eliminating the resistance of its opponents and overcoming the last vestiges of capitalism—distribution according to labor-time, division between intellectual and manual labor, bureaucratic hyper-specialization—would the state begin to wither away, and with it, democracy. In its place would appear a New Man, as free distribution of society’s products according to need would allow people to “gradually become accustomed to observing the elementary rules of social intercourse that have been known for centuries and repeated for thousands of years in all copybook maxims; they will become accustomed to observing them without force, without compulsion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for compulsion which is called the state.”⁸⁰

This stateless, self-regulating communist society would only come after a long struggle. In the meantime, the vanguard party which seized power in October had the task of “assuming power and of leading the whole people to Socialism, of directing and organizing the new order, of being the teacher, the guide, the leader of all the toilers and exploited in the task of building up their social life without the bourgeoisie and against the bourgeoisie.”⁸¹ Through a military offensive against the opponents of the October Revolution and a technological offensive against inefficiency and decentralization, Lenin hoped to begin working on building socialism.

In the early years of the revolution, the Bolsheviks expressed the universality of their revolution in the necessity of world revolution. Their hope depended on the consensus of a common body and a common mind, united through technological rationality and the primacy of politics over the economy. The high modernism of this vision appeared most clearly in his statement: “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country, since industry cannot be developed without electrification.”⁸² Like Catherine the Great before him, Lenin sought to accomplish the gains of bourgeois society—in her day identified with a national bureaucracy and commerce, in his day identified with the disciplined organization of Fordism and Taylorism—without the bourgeoisie. What motivated his work was a Faustian humanism, a hope that collective power and rational knowledge would guide the oppressed to abundance and freedom.

When the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, making peace with Germany to end Russia’s part in the war in exchange for territorial concessions, political divides began to erupt. For the left-wing of the Bolsheviks, it marked the betrayal of the world revolution by giving up the opportunity of a revolutionary war. Anarchists and left-SRs looked on the single-party rule of the Bolsheviks as an ominous sign of a new autocracy. After the left-SR Fanny Kaplan attempted to assassinate Lenin in late 1918, the Soviet state reintroduced capital punishment in order to legitimize the Cheka’s intentions to execute her. The Bolsheviks immediately commenced a Red Terror against counterrevolutionaries and their revolutionary opponents alike.

The failure of the world revolution in 1918-1919 seemed to further seal the fate of a conservative turn in the Russian Revolution. For the Allies, who had now lost the support of Russia in World War I, this marked the Soviet Republic as a rogue state. Many Western European Social-Democrats and Russian Mensheviks believed that attempting a socialist revolution where industrialization had not sweeped throughout the society, and where the proletariat did not constitute a democratic majority, would necessarily force Lenin and the Bolsheviks to become despotic. The 1917 formation of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police, seemed to confirm their suspicions. Liberal critics looked on the October Revolution as the work of dangerous maniacs, Reactionaries thought they were perhaps even agents of International Jewry who sought to drain Russia dry before taking over the world.

Soon, the opponents of the Bolsheviks in Russia and abroad forged alliances and began fighting directly against the new regime. They garnered support from many of the Western states, who directly supported their campaign against Bolshevism. As the Bolsheviks had not yet reached the strength of consensus and legitimacy throughout a still fragmented society, the attacks and invasions commenced a years-long Civil War. In 1918, the Council of People’s Commissars, the soviet administration, ordered the return of military discipline through the organization of a Red Army. Leon Trotsky set to work rallying and organizing his forces into fighting shape to take on the anti-Bolshevik White Army.

The 1918-1922 Civil War took a severe toil on an already exhausted society. The White Army carried out a campaign of terror that claimed many peasants, workers, and Jews as victims. The Red Army, in turn, retaliated against suspected allies of the Whites. The Bolsheviks had to implement a strict militarized state nationalization over most of the economy known as War Communism in order to supply their war effort. When they revived the Tsarist policy of grain requisitioning, many peasants felt angry and betrayed. This fed the rise of the Makhnovshchina, the territory held by Nestor Makhno and the Black Army which sponsored the operations of party-less free soviets, and the emergence of the Green rebellion, who resisted all factions of the Civil War, opposed requisitioning, and sought more or less Narodnik aims in the countryside. In Central Asia, the Muslim nationalist Basmachi movement sought an independence for Asians that would be free from atheists, Russians, and communists. Just as Catherine the Great had done against Pugachev’s rebellion, the Bolsheviks had to mobilize brutal military methods reminiscent of the World War to repress the peasants and Basmachis. Meanwhile, the restriction of the political power of the soviets by the state administration and the enforcement of work quotas alienated many workers, who could not understand fighting for the freedom that they believed in through unfree means. The soviets had admittedly been inefficient compared to the managerial discipline of War Communism, but their organizational aim was a moral one first and foremost.⁸³ As the Civil War reached its final years, this moral aim began to make itself felt—albeit, under conditions of political fragmentation.

In the young Soviet Republic, politics were looked upon as a moral crusade. The country was not thought of as a territorial nation, but as a hub for the world revolution. Whatever was proletarian was good, true, and vital; and vice versa. Whatever was bourgeois was bad, false, and decadent; and vice versa. Lenin described the proletariat as “hundreds of thousands of disciplined people expressing a single will,” a general will welded by shared living conditions “in the factories and the cities.”⁸⁴ He spoke of the peasantry, by contrast, as split between two souls, “partly property-owners and partly labourers,” facing them with the attitude that “working people will always be working people to us; but as for the peasant proprietors, we have to fight them.”⁸⁵ The peasants, on the other hand, looked on the urbanites as an old evil threatening them with arbitrary intervention in their lives.

The Workers’ Opposition within the Bolsheviks castigated the introduction of one-man management in the place of collective Factory Committees as a betrayal of the moral imperative of the soviets. Writing in Terrorism and Communism (1920), Trotsky dismissed these criticisms and defended “the militarization of labour,” without which “the replacement of capitalist economy by the socialist will forever remain an empty sound.”⁸⁶ He believed that military discipline in the factories by managers and People’s Commissars was not only an economic, but a moral necessity to forging political uniformity. He described capitalism as “anarchical,” aimlessly distributing labor-power according to the advantage of competing firms, while socialism would realize the organizational principles of monopoly.⁸⁷ Even compulsory labor would be justified by the moral need for political and economic uniformity in the young Soviet Republic; “For we can have no way to socialism except by the authoritative regulation of the economic forces and resources of the country, and the centralized distribution of labour-power in harmony with the general state plan. The labour state considers itself empowered to send every worker to the place where his work is necessary. And not one serious socialist will begin to deny to the labour state the right to lay its hand upon the worker who refuses to execute his labour duty.”⁸⁸

The Bolsheviks, who by 1920 had begun consolidating an exclusive one-party rule, believed that they, as a faction, had an elevated insight into the political situation of the young Republic and its path forward. Marxism was the consciousness of the proletariat embodied in the unitary vanguard party, the brain of the proletariat. The Bolshevik idea of politics superseding and controlling the economy was to send People’s Commissars to oversee capitalist management, but even this took a back seat over time to methods that were considered more conducive to meeting the productivity quotas of the administration’s economic plans. Leading Bolsheviks understood that this posed a challenge. Lenin opposed Trotsky’s call for the “bureaucratic harassment of the trade unions,” and called for introducing a multi-interest system of incentives to address their situation: “We now have a state under which it is the business of the massively organised proletariat to protect itself, while we, for our part, must use these workers’ organisations to protect the workers from their state, and to get them to protect our state.”⁸⁹

Lenin advocated this concession to the trade unions only as a means to ensure a more smooth, realistic path to centralization for the party. Rather than substitute the actions of the ‘worker’s state’ for the direct actions of the class, expressed in institutional form as trade unions, Lenin sought to address the state’s “complex arrangement of cogwheels which cannot be a simple one; for the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be exercised by a mass proletarian organisation.”⁹⁰ In order for the rule of the Bolshevik party to truly pervade society, they needed “a number of ‘transmission belts’ running from the vanguard to the mass of the advanced class, and from the latter to the mass of the working people.”⁹¹ Criticizing the “syndicalists” who advocated for the revival of management of industries by elected Factory Committees, Lenin countered that “the workers have not yet learned enough from the bourgeoisie.”⁹² He believed that collective management “involves a tremendous waste of forces and is not suited to the rapid and accurate work demanded by the conditions of centralised large-scale industry.”⁹³ Only one-man management could ensure conformity to the national plan, while collective management introduced the decentralizing sectoral interests of workers in individual firms into the economy.

The effectiveness of a united will in organization was the measure of civilization for the Bolsheviks, and when the soviets failed to meet their standards for this in 1917-1918, the Soviet state imposed one-man management.⁹⁴ Though Lenin initially stipulated that managers should be elected from among the workers, enshrining a transition from workers’ control to workers’ self-management, the Bolsheviks treated even this as optional. In order to maximize efficiency and centralization under a “single will,” to make more time available for the work of governance, “there must be a transition from the mixed form of discussions, public meetings, fulfilment—and at the same time criticism, checking and correction—to the strict regularity of a machine enterprise.”⁹⁵ The original hope of the soviets, to merge political and economic power in one, was now being suppressed in favor of the centralization of political power in the party and economic power in a managerial class mediating between the state and the workers. This turn from proletarian self-emancipation to the singular will of the executive, institutionalized in state planning and the rule of law, marked a turn of the revolution to perfecting the state machinery.

The greatest political-moral opposition that the Bolsheviks ever faced came in March of 1921, at Kronstadt. There, soviet sailors and others rebelled over the repression and restriction of starving demonstrating workers who were seeking to receive more supplies and rations from the state, or at least have the right to procure them independently. Repression only politicized their economic demands, culminating in revolutionary sailors, many of whom had participated in the revolution since October, demanding reforms against bureaucratization. They called for the end of Bolshevik monopoly over administration, the election of non-sectarian soviets, freedom from requisitioning, quotas, and managerialism for workers and peasants, and the destruction of the bureaucratic-military apparatus developed under War Communism.

Lenin dismissed the demands of the rebels as “simply a case of discontent among some foolish sailors, and this discontent is being utilized by some Czarist officers, reactionaries, Mensheviki, social revolutionaries and foreign Powers. Behind them all, I know, is the collective, consummately crafty and profoundly hostile intellect of the whole capitalist world, which would sooner see 10,000,000 deaths in Russia than the continuance into the next stage of the sole socialist State in the world.”⁹⁶ The Red Army, under the leadership of Trotsky, demanded their surrender, and when they did not receive it, the Army shot and arrested a few thousand of the rebels. Lenin justified the repression, declaring that the rebels and their allies posed a false alternative, and that in reality “there is nobody to take our place save butcher Generals and helpless bureaucrats who have already displayed their total incapacity for rule.”⁹⁷ Though the political-economic reforms that the Kronstadt rebels demanded did not come to pass, moral and economic reforms did become the very first thing on the agenda for the young Soviet Republic’s peacetime reconstruction.

To alleviate the famine of 1921 and end the instability of Soviet society, Lenin declared the beginning of a New Economic Policy (NEP). It allowed privatization, replaced requisitioning with taxes, permitted free commerce within limits, and opened the Soviet Republic up to foreign investors. The state administration hoped that this would help alleviate the famine and prevent future rebellions. Lenin described it as a “strategic retreat,” one which would salvage the endangered Soviet Republic in an effort to “retreat and reorganise everything, but on a firmer basis.”⁹⁸ The NEP would bring the proletariat back to its pre-Civil War levels, re-employing workers who had been thrown into pauperism. This would be an opportunity to “learn from [the capitalists] the business of running the economy,” undergoing “this training, this severe, stern and sometimes even cruel training, because we have no other way out.”⁹⁹

This new turn came with hopes for the revitalization of politics, which had been silenced during the Civil War. Lenin believed that, under the highly bureaucratized conditions of War Communism and its aftermath, the communists “are not directing, they are being directed.”¹⁰⁰ They had to learn to govern, to manage themselves and their society. The NEP would “direct capitalism along state channels and to create a capitalism that will be subordinate to the state and serve the state.”¹⁰¹ This state would be transformed and generalized through the education of the masses. Lenin believed that the “ability to read and write must be made to serve the purpose of raising the cultural level,” that this would make civic engagement and reduction of bureaucratic wastefulness possible, but only “if the masses of the people help.”¹⁰² This socialist education, as a campaign against bureaucracy, “means practical results, it means teaching the people how to achieve these results, and setting an example to others, not as members of an Executive Committee, but as ordinary citizens who, being politically better educated, are able not only to hurl imprecations at red tape—that is very widely practised among us—but to show how this evil can really be overcome.”¹⁰³ If the people could learn to do most things themselves, being skilled, self-aware, and self-disciplined enough that they would not need bureaucratic management, then this state apparatus could be reduced to an absolute minimum, as Lenin had hoped in 1917.

Lenin did not act only against bureaucracy and expertise. He also reinforced it through his fixation on formally organizing all of society into a lawful system. This manifested most prominently in the policy of bringing in foreign experts to implement factory management techniques. Lenin greatly admired the scientific management of Frederick Winslow Taylor. By carefully tracking the movements of each worker, Taylor was able to identify subtle ways that their labor went to waste. Lenin found his techniques of maximizing worker efficiency and reducing working time promising for the construction of the new economic system. While in capitalist society, it spelled exploitation and unemployment, in a socialist society it would mean “six hours of physical work daily for every adult citizen and four hours of work in running the state.”¹⁰⁴ The Soviets learned from the methods of Henry Ford, who oversaw the creation of the mass assembly line and the culture of corporate loyalty.¹⁰⁵ The Bolsheviks believed that their people would learn the techniques of the capitalist managers and begin to use them for their own needs, and those of the state, which was to become more of their own self-governance the more that they would learn to manage themselves. They assumed that technology was basically neutral to the division of labor, owing to the universality of rational knowledge and the omnipotence of collective labor.

Soviet culture set its efforts on the birth of a New Man. Lenin had written in his 1915 study of Hegel that “that the world does not satisfy man and man decides to change it by his activity.”¹⁰⁶ In this effort, the “‘objective world’ ‘pursues its own course.’ and man’s practice, confronted by this objective world, encounters ‘obstacles in the realisation’ of the End, even ‘impossibility....’”¹⁰⁷ This was the condition faced by the Bolsheviks in the early 1920s. They would have to make a conquest of reality in order to make their hoped-for world an actuality. Godbuillding returned in the new Soviet avante-garde. The Futurists described the new industries as birthing a mechanical human being, creating a world totally free of blind nature. Faustian humanity seemed to be appearing as a mass subject.

In the educational sphere, the Faustian vision was spread among the Soviet citizenry. As the People’s Commissariat for Education, Lunacharsky wrote that the meaning of Goethe’s Faust was that the “collective ‘We’ outgrows the individualistic ‘I,’ which was the center of the world in the first part of Faust, and the human collective is proclaimed the center of all being.”¹⁰⁸ Lunacharsky believed that intellect and passion had to be united in one. He criticized Chernyshevsky as guilty of an intellectual’s idealism. Like a Jacobin, he brought “the existing order of things before the court of reason, rejecting everything which reason finds worthless trash, and keeping everything which it finds advantageous for the people. The whole problem lies in cognition, judgement and the realisation of a rational plan,” one “whose strength is its convincingness, its rationality.”¹⁰⁹

Historical-political situations, as well as the irrational passions of a people, demand more from this picture. Lunacharsky weighed composer Richard Wagner as providing another necessary side of the new culture, having portrayed his themes “in great, commanding images and raised them to such generalisations as to make the emotions he described all-meaningful.”¹¹⁰ From his love of Wagner, Lunacharsky taught that “a revolutionary is he who wishes and is able to change the world, i.e., to complete it in a humane way, to transform this would-be arena of happiness into a true arena of happiness.”¹¹¹

Lunacharsky searched for a new culture among the proletarians themselves. He believed that theirs was a creative, constructive task. While the proletariat “can never come to terms with capitalist reality. But its struggle is not an expression of despair: it does not seek a way out by unleashing anti-social, destructive forces. To capitalism, it opposes its own positive and creative world outlook.”¹¹² This new world outlook would not be passively Romantic, hoping only for “the state of a naked man on the naked earth.”¹¹³ It would be a campaign to “renew the culture of mankind, but in deep-rooted connection with and dependence on the culture of the past[...] a Faustian renewal of youth with new strength and a new future—retaining the memory of all that has been, but not feeling it as a drag upon the soul.”¹¹⁴ The new proletarian culture would be a high culture. It would elevate the proletariat to the Faustian task of conquering nature in the name of a fuller humanity. Lunacharsky sponsored a system of polytechnic education in order to mold people who would be up to this task. In the Soviet education to govern, the collective worker became a political and moral subject.

The Soviet Republic realized the old hope of the Fourth Estate, that the workers would become the leading citizens of the nation. In this, the Russian Revolution continued many of the traditions of Social-Democracy, which had hoped for the very same. This Social-Democracy without Social-Democrats was not the whole of the Bolshevik tradition, but was a significant part of it. They tried hard to break with it by renaming themselves into the Communist Party and founding the Communist International in 1919. Nevertheless, they were one possible consummation of the European socialist movement, which had been a democratic, workerist, and Faustian movement.

A series of debates throughout the 1920s began to distinguish the concerns of the Bolsheviks from those of the Western socialists. The intelligentsia disputed the positions of mechanism and dialectics in the question of how Marxists should approach ‘bourgeois science.’ The mechanists argued that Marxism had to follow the empirical findings of the hard scientists as proving that everything must conform to its causes. They represented the more pragmatic, cautious, and conservative side of the intelligentsia. The dialecticians argued that conscious reflection plays a part in making possibilities into realities, and that dialectical contradiction can be demonstrated as a law of nature. They represented the more dynamic, ambitious side of the intelligentsia. Both were concerned with world revolution primarily through the concerns of their situation.

Another debate revealed the specificities of the Soviet situation. The main problem facing the new Soviet Republic was the relationship between workers, peasants, and the state. To rebuild their ruling coalition, they would somehow have to create an arrangement that would balance and reconcile all of them in mutual rights and duties. They described this as the alliance of workers and peasants, the alliance being their mutual commitment to each other’s welfare in the Soviet state. But the Soviets were divided over how this alliance would be accomplished. This debate was given an urgency behind it by the 1923 Scissors Crisis, in which industrial recovery was slower and took more state investment and protection than the recovery of agriculture, leading to industrial prices soaring above agricultural prices. This led many peasants to stop selling owing to the low prices that their product yielded. The Soviets were pushed to reflect on how they could prevent such a crisis in the future.

Maxim Gorky represented the extreme workerist position. He believed that the Russian peasantry was lost amidst the power of nature, living in a world where “Man is overcome by indifference, which kills his ability to think, to remember what he has seen, to generate his own ideas from his experience.”¹¹⁵ On the other hand, in the industrial society of the Western world, labor lived in a world created by itself: “the whole of Europe is closely covered by the grandiose incarnations of the organised will of the people, a will which set itself a proud aim: to subordinate the elemental forces of nature to the rational interests of man. The land is in the hands of man and man is its real ruler.”¹¹⁶ Gorky hoped that the Soviet proletariat, by behaving in a paternalistic way towards the peasantry as its leader and educator, would bring it along the way to this rationalizing task.

Evgeny Preobrazhensky, articulating this vision in the field of economics, explained that while the proletariat “is not an exploiter of the peasant but a collaborator with him in deductions made for the expansion of reproduction, which is needed not only by him but by the whole of Soviet society, by all the toiling classes,” at the same time “exploitation of one system by another remains, since there is alienation of surplus product from one form of production to another.”¹¹⁷ The nationalized sector would exchange unequally with the peasant farmers, subsidizing the growth of urban industries and gradually inducing the industrialization of agriculture through the force of competition.

Alexander Chayanov represented the more optimistic position towards the peasantry. Chayanov believed that, in spite of the Stolypin reforms, capitalist organization had not penetrated very deeply into peasant communities, but only vertically concentrated scattered peasant households into its circuits of commodities through commercializing agricultural products and providing credit to the peasants. In the on-the-ground organization of agricultural labor and cooperation between peasants, a wide variety of organizational methods appeared. They included individual subsistence plots, shared commons between family plots, commercial farms, commercial cooperatives, and radically socialized communes.

Chayanov acknowledged the cultural concerns of the Soviet leadership in the peasantry’s governing abilities, saying that “in those cases where the collective’s managerial will is weak and where labour incentives are also relatively weak, collective farms will stand to lose least in those regions where the forms of production are simple and mechanical and where the opportunity to make widespread use of tractors and agricultural machinery will have a disciplining effect on the workforce concerned.”¹¹⁸ He warned that such an industrialization “must be done not merely by applying the rules and guidelines of capitalist agriculture, but by developing the kinds of autonomous creativity which stem from the organizational foundations and principles of collective farms.”¹¹⁹ These collective farms were part of a cooperative movement which had as its foundation “the spontaneous initiative of the population. The local co-operative unit is the primary source of co-operative life. It is here that new plans come into being. It is here that co-operative life is created.”¹²⁰

Chayanov hoped for the principles of soviet governance to be realized in the countryside, believing that the orientation of peasants towards laboring for their own need rather than a property owner prepared them for self-governance. There were dual threats to this cooperative life from bureaucratic administration and capitalist competition. The higher administrative levels of the cooperative would have to be organized on the “the principle of the direct responsibility of the organs of a co-operative organization to the members which it serves,” as without such a principle, “parectively ceases to be co-operation.”¹²¹ In order to prevent the cooperative becoming merely another firm exploiting its members to accumulate capital, “we must take adequate steps to ensure that no one within our ranks ever forgets that co-operation is not merely a co-operative enterprise: it is also co-operative movement.”¹²²

The worker-peasant debate would live long in Soviet history through the problems of cultural transformation and the reorganization of agriculture. While the Soviet state pursued state-managed agriculture in units called sovkhozy, peasants organized collective farms for their collective needs called kolkhozy. While one was directly available to state appropriation, the other was indirectly available through taxes and requisitioning. In the management system of firms, the Soviet state struggled against patriarchal customs in the election of managers. Blat, a system of personal favors, had begun to emerge as a means of distributing goods, supply lines, information, and positions.¹²³ Each person was supposed to provide favors to the other in a reciprocal relationship. This interfered with the state’s need for impersonal, meritocratic selection in order to realize a maximum efficiency of production and governance. Achieving predictability, standardization, and unification were the tasks of the day. In short, old Russian problems remained.

Two visions of politics competed in the Soviet Union; the many and the one. Anarchists and Left-SRs had long challenged the exclusive political rule of the Bolsheviks. Makhno had sponsored free soviets which excluded political parties altogether. The Soviets had a more unitary view, believing that politics was about all in a party sharing commitment to a rationally established worldview. On the one side, this invigorated Bolshevik crusades against antisemitism and misogynistic violence. On the other side, when articulated in the context of the Civil War, this led to the 1923 ban on factions within the Communist Party. The Workers’ Opposition, led by Alexander Shliapnikov and including many disillusioned workers, was forcibly subordinated to the prevailing line of the Central Committee. This heralded the rise of the party-state.¹²⁴ The dialogue and contestation of politics was subsumed into the monovocal call to the administration of people.

The Soviet revolutionary process began to appear like Faust and Mephisto in its outlines. By focusing on the necessities of state-building, it incorporated all into the character of a general will and collective worker. It elevated the principle of “active labour, as [the] connecting link between subjective and objective. Labour has as its aim to satisfy subjective particularity. Yet by the introduction of the needs and free choice of others universality is realized. Hence rationality comes as an appearance into the sphere of the finite. This partial presence of rationality is the understanding, to which is assigned the function of reconciling the opposing elements of the finite sphere.”¹²⁵ To reconcile all in a comprehensible vision of a world, a world mastered through labor, they turned to the history of bourgeois civilization.

The Bolsheviks identified the materialism of the French Encyclopedists as the model of a scientific vision of the world which had to be spread throughout ‘backwards’ and ‘superstitious’ Russia. Lenin declared that “to shun an alliance with the representatives of the bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century, i.e., the period when it was revolutionary, would be to betray Marxism and materialism.”¹²⁶ Bolsheviks worked to ‘civilize’ the Soviet Union. They sent intellectuals to promote the mechanical materialist atheism of the 18th century radical bourgeoisie in the Russian countryside, in the steppes of Central Asia, and in the snowy landscapes of Siberia. In all places, like bourgeois professional states do when they are struggling for legitimacy, they struggled against mediators like shamans in order to promote the direct, universal authority of the civil state. Marxism became the promotion of a cold, all-pervading clockwork system of knowledge and action.

The warm stream of Marxism did not disappear from history. A warm, non-Faustian alternative to Bolshevism appeared concurrently to these Soviet debates and campaigns in the council communist movement. Franz Pfemfert, editor of the German Expressionist and communist magazine, Die Aktion, promoted a Romantic view of life to workers and intellectuals. He believed that they should struggle for the fullest life possible. He disagreed with the Social-Democrats, who promoted Goethe as the model for the acculturation of the German proletariat to bourgeois society. Against Goethe’s vision of culture in Faust, Pfemfert argued that for the old Weimar bourgeois “a work of art was the coffin of an idea, and if he heard something stirring in it, then he fled from it in horror, he shuddered at those buried alive.”¹²⁷ He criticized Goethe for having “created God and the devil in his image. There is God’s wisdom to let things be; and the devil’s wisdom not to spoil it with God, because he is a noble lord after all.”¹²⁸

Pfemfert criticized Goethe’s Faustian vision as a dissection of reality into fragments of dead anatomical knowledge: “He studied life in its limbs, in its individual organs and drew them very correctly, as in the best anatomical copper plates. Of course, you will find everything in his writings, hand and foot, torso and skull, heart and kidneys; but just put them together, make a living person out of them, if you can!”¹²⁹ As a conservative and bourgeois, Goethe “would have liked to have nailed time to space,” restricting the dynamism of life into something that would be stable and controllable.¹³⁰ Pfemfert believed that those driven by the passions of life, erupting beyond work-worshipping seriousness, had to revolt against those who believed that whatever willed evil did good by mastering things.

The critique of bourgeois and Social-Democratic disciplinarians extended to critiques of civilization. Franz Jung, a council communist, wrote that the reciprocity within people’s everyday lives was a ‘living truth, because it is a shared rhythmic communal experience.”¹³¹ People are frightened by this solidarity beyond the self, working against this very part of themselves which is not only themselves in order to kill “the living thing in life, our organic self, which wants to resonate with the world around it, which stretches itself in order to be able to breathe.”¹³² They “throw themselves into work, cling to their profession, pray to God and are faithful servants of their state, we poor desperate fools!”¹³³

A young Austrian psychoanalyst and sexologist, Wilhelm Reich, extended these ideas into a critique of the nuclear family, the parental ownership of children, adult imposition of bourgeois morality on children, and sexual repression. Reich believed that this politics of desire had a natural place in the self-declared materialist communist movement, since it touched on the question of “whether one believes that the body builds the soul or vice versa.”¹³⁴ Reich believed that only the liberation of love from marriage, sexual reproduction, and authoritarianism would make a free human being possible.

Though these views began to proliferate within the socialist movement, the mainstream grew increasingly Bolshevik. Lenin complained to the German communist Clara Zetkin that sexual liberation “can very easily contribute towards over-excitement and exaggeration in the sexual life of some of [the youth], to a waste of youthful health and strength.”¹³⁵ Speaking like a true believer in the nuclear family, he declared that “in love two lives are concerned, and a third, a new life arises. It is that to which gives its social interest, which gives rise to a duty towards the community.”¹³⁶ Lenin believed that all efforts had to be focused on constructing a system of “the rights of the individual and the rights of the whole, in the duties of individuals.”¹³⁷ The individual had to be subordinated and incorporated into the whole through a system of work and social responsibility. The worldwide vision of socialism in the future would narrow to the Bolshevik language of collective responsibility, design and plan, organizing chaos into a cohesive whole.

In the final year of his life, Lenin wrote that the true significance of their revolution was that it proved that, while bourgeois civilization was necessary for a socialist revolution, the Bolsheviks had proved that one could start by “by first achieving the prerequisites for that definite level of culture in a revolutionary way, and then, with the aid of the workers’ and peasants’ government and Soviet system, proceed to overtake the other nations[...]”¹³⁸ For the Bolsheviks, this meant that they had to improve their developmentalist state by cutting it down to maximum organizational efficiency.

Lenin called for a Cultural Revolution, universalizing education and political participation, to address the fact that the Soviet state “has only been slightly touched up on the surface, but in all other respects it is a most typical relic of our old state machine.”¹³⁹ To strengthen the will of the people in politics and reduce the role of the managerial bureaucracy in politics, Lenin called for the Central Control Commission to merge with the Workers’ and Peasants Inspection into a check on the managerial power of the Communist Central Committee. They would “form a compact group which should not allow anybody’s authority without exception, neither that of the General Secretary [Joseph Stalin] nor of any other member of the Central Committee, to prevent them from putting questions, verifying documents, and, in general, from keeping themselves fully informed of all things and from exercising the strictest control over the proper conduct of affairs.”¹⁴⁰

While these problems of democracy and organization concerned the Soviets, the communists abroad focused on interpreting the significance of the October Revolution. Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci described it as a revolution against the fatalism of capitalist development, teaching that “revolutionaries themselves will create the necessary conditions for the complete and full realisation of their ideal.”¹⁴¹ For the Bolsheviks of the world, it had proven that rather than the ‘subjective’ factor of the revolutionary party being left to merely respond to events, they had to activate a revolutionary situation by uniting it into a single will and disciplining it along a plan of action.

Lenin argued that there “is no such thing as an absolutely hopeless situation,” and that the revolutionary parties of the Third International “must now ‘prove’ in practice that they have sufficient understanding and organisation, contact with the exploited masses, and determination and skill to utilise this crisis for a successful, a victorious revolution.¹⁴²” Against those who argued that non-Western societies were not ready for socialist revolutions, Lenin argued that “the idea of the Soviets is understood by the mass of the working people in even the most remote nations, that the Soviets should be adapted to the conditions of a pre-capitalist social system, and that the Communist parties should immediately begin work in this direction in all parts of the world.”¹⁴³ Though the Bolsheviks were focused on consolidating their state, their revolutionary experience would continue to be a source of political and moral support for the efforts of world revolutionaries.

As the Bolsheviks turned inwards to organize an entire society on the principles of Taylorism and Fordism, the consequences of the revolution reverberated throughout the world. The Soviets worked to forge their Union; counterrevolutionary forces around the world worked to disorganize revolutionary power. White Russian emigres abroad called for the destruction of Bolshevism. Communists were persecuted, imprisoned, and massacred throughout the world. In Italy, the Fascists rose to power in 1922 with the promise that they would combat Bolshevism with radical means. By the latter half of the 1920s, fascism and communism increasingly appeared as the powers that would inherit the world. They would do so by completing the Faustian tasks of striving to dominate nature and organize the world through the two paths of renewal: revolution and counterrevolution. The Soviet Union became the symbol of all who strived towards the new world, while the fascists became leaders in hardening the old one.

A Total Humanity

Amidst the brutality and disillusionment of World War I, scores of European intellectuals hailed the Russian Revolution as a renaissance of civilization. Both sides of World War I blindly obeyed the particularistic interests of strategic alliances between states and the acquisitive impulse for carving up territory between empires. Radicals of the intelligentsia, who sought a world where morality and reason would reign, began to search for a haven, for a fuller and more meaningful life. The warm stream of passion drove many into new theoretical horizons. In this era, the Faustian soul of Marxism found its greatest advocate in a man who, in his character, already quite resembled Faust as a bourgeois who found little satisfaction in wealth or scholarly prestige. From the intellectual circles of Central Europe, the Hungarian Jewish modernist Georg Lukács emerged into a leading face of the world revolution.

As a man, Lukás united the false dichotomies of East and West, official and oppositional Marxism, Old and New Left. While he was from the ‘Eastern’ society of Austro-Hungarian Empire, he was part of the ‘Western’ culture of German-speakers. While he was a loyal member of the Communist International, he often advocated positions which contradicted the party line. While he wrote histories of socialism and Marxism back into the 19th century, he identified with the very same youthful rebellion and hope for a fuller human being which inspired the New Left. In 1967, he described his youthful self as like Faust, encompassing “two souls,” hovering “between the acquisition of Marxism and political activism on the one hand, and the constant intensification of my purely idealistic ethical preoccupations on the other.”¹⁴⁴ Though he felt that he had come far from his youthful left-communism, he had done so as the intellectual exponent of the thread of Faustian conceptual and civilizational continuity in Marxism. He provided the most comprehensive philosophical articulations of Marxism as a discourse and movement, seeking to craft it into an all-encompassing worldview. He was the very face of Faustian Marxism’s soul.

The concerns of the young Lukács gravitated around the old problem of Romanticism: how to reconcile the self and the world? As a literary critic and sociologist, Lukács believed that every lived experience is split between “two types of reality of the soul: one is life and the other living[...] Ever since there has been life and men have sought to order life, there has been this duality in their lived experience.”¹⁴⁵ Life is a thing, while living is the struggle of the will or Spirit to transform that thing into a dynamic and moldable relationship. There is the cold and the warm, order and striving. The two cannot be reconciled without “a world-view, a standpoint, an attitude vis-à-vis the life from which it sprang: a possibility of reshaping it, of creating it anew.”¹⁴⁶ Only this worldview of a new world could renew a cosmos that had aged and hardened into an established order.

After the outbreak of World War I, Lukács set to work elaborating his critique of bourgeois modernity. Lukács’ The Theory of the Novel (1916) elaborated the central problematics with which he would occupy himself for the remainder of his life. Through the prose of a poet, he described a cosmos “wide and yet like a home, for the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars; the world and the self, the light and the fire, are sharply distinct, yet they never become permanent strangers to one another, for fire is the soul of all light and all fire clothes itself in light.”¹⁴⁷ In the earliest history of the Western world, the Hellenes had experienced the cosmos as a closed, enchanted world. Each people had its place, its fate written in the stars. Epic literature spoke not of the fate of persons, but of entire peoples.

But this “completeness, the roundness of the value system, which determines the epic cosmos creates a whole which is too organic for any part of it to become so enclosed within itself, so dependent upon itself, as to find itself as an interiority i.e. to become a personality.”¹⁴⁸ Ethics can only conquer the world if every soul is treated “as autonomous and incomparable,” a person who can shoulder the responsibility to treat each and all as ends in themselves.¹⁴⁹ The closed world could not last; it collapsed in the face of expanding Empires. In the place of the democratic community grew the inner life of the soul. Philosophy emerged as “a symptom of the rift between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, a sign of the essential difference between the self and the world, the incongruence of soul and deed.”¹⁵⁰

This soul, however, does not find the pure inner repose of contemplation satisfying. It sought a world of its own. Lukács identified the novel as the literary form of this “adventure of interiority,” telling “the story of the soul that goes to find itself, that seeks adventures in order to be proved and tested by them, and, by proving itself, to find its own essence.”¹⁵¹ Humanity, emancipated from the closed cosmos, set to work transforming and dominating nature according to its own intentions. This Faustian task was the long arc of Western bourgeois civilization. When the inner soul set out into the world in the picaresque journey of modernity, it found a world made by human hands, yet turned against human souls. The world built by commerce and the state was a “second nature,” “a complex of senses—meanings—which has become rigid and strange, and which no longer awakens interiority; it is a charnel-house of long-dead interiorities; this second nature could only be brought to life—if this were possible—by the metaphysical act of reawakening the souls which, in an early or ideal existence, created or preserved it; it can never be animated by another interiority.”¹⁵² This weight of history could only be set back into motion through the great creative endeavor of many souls together.

Lukács sought reconciliation in a new whole, a new totality which all could find themselves in. He believed that the experience of the “the unity of the personality and the world” is of a “subjectively constitutive, objectively reflexive essence,” and that the “subject’s return home to itself is to be found in this experience” of many souls united into one dynamic and fluid world, “just as the anticipation of this return and the desire for it lie at the root of the experience of hope.”¹⁵³ Instead of a return to nature, he argued that the social world made by humanity had to be made “really adequate to man,” becoming “his necessary and native home” by elevating the power of a united will over the cosmos.¹⁵⁴ Drawing from Goethe’s humanist vision of education, in which youths would be brought to maturity through mastery of themselves, Lukács envisioned a transformation of people to make them adequate for this task of transforming the world. Humanist education would itself have to walk the line of soul and form, demanding “a balance between activity and contemplation, between wanting to mould the world and being purely receptive towards it.”¹⁵⁵ While he wrote of this as a contribution to debates about the function of literature in cultural reform, he would soon extend this principle to his work in revolutionary organizing.

From an inner search for meaning, Lukács turned outward to search for the certainty of meaning in the world itself. He sought to reconcile his finite, precarious inner self with the greatness and wholeness of the outer world in a relationship of completion. His Faustian striving pushed him towards conceptual thought and historical analysis as a means of finding spiritual continuity in the world and carrying through a reconciliation of the world’s passionate impulses with its rational designs. Like the Young Hegelians of Germany, and like the Russian revolutionaries of the 19th century, Lukács felt the spiritual longing of a civil service intellectual who the established order had given no cause to serve but to pursue a own profession and fall in line. They hoped to unite with their own efforts, expressed in their philosophical schemas, with the striving of a mass humanity for a new world.

In 1962, Lukács criticized The Theory of the Novel as the product of an attitude typical of politically isolated intellectuals at the time. Somewhat unfairly to himself, he claimed that “nothing, even at the level of the most abstract intellection, helped to mediate between my subjective attitude and objective reality,” and that the book attempted to fill this gap by generalizing a few examples and proceeding “by deduction from these generalisations to the analysis of individual phenomena, and in that way to arrive at what we claimed to be a comprehensive overall view.”¹⁵⁶ He did not, however, reject the basic hopes of the book, so much as he believed that they had to be mediated by commitment to a social movement. When revolution broke out in Russia in 1917 and Germany in 1918, Marxism seemed to prove itself a viable candidate for a grounding of his personal ethics in a greater historical process.

Lukács initially sought to join the world revolution in Germany in 1918. He had learned much of his early Marxism from the writings of the German communist Rosa Luxemburg, who later led the Spartacist Rebellion in 1919 before being murdered by Social-Democratic and reactionary counterrevolutionaries. When Lukács failed to secure a position in Heidelberg, he instead threw his lot in with the Hungarian Communist Party (HCP). He soon became a theoretical writer for the Party, elaborating the political-philosophical significance of the great questions of the day.

Seeking to clarify the role of his party, he wrote in 1919 that the tactics of an organization are “a link connecting ultimate objective with reality,” but within this link “fundamental differences arise, depending on whether the ultimate objective is categorized as a moment within the given social reality or as one that transcends it.”¹⁵⁷ Lukács sought to bridge both positions with a concept of strategy. Socialists must learn to determine what is objectively possible in their day-to-day efforts to realize socialism. The socialist ideal, the call to change the entire course of the world, teaches that “morally correct action is related fundamentally to the correct perception of the given historic philosophical situation, which in turn is only feasible through the efforts of every individual to make this self-consciousness conscious for himself.”¹⁵⁸ In this work, the partisans had to be willing to give their own lives over to the cause, joining the common historical consciousness of the party. For “just as the individual who chooses between two forms of guilt finally makes the correct choice when he sacrifices his inferior self on the altar of the higher idea, so it also takes strength to assess this sacrifice in terms of the collective action.”¹⁵⁹ This spiritual duty to the greater good is the only means for partisans to become moral, as “only he who acknowledges unflinchingly and without any reservations that murder is under no circumstances to be sanctioned can commit the murderous deed that is truly—and tragically—moral.”¹⁶⁰

The personal and moral self-sacrifice of socialist militants is the only way for them to become part of a greater historical process. And in its highest form, this selfless commitment to the cause appears as a “consciousness which recognizes its world-historical mission; this consciousness alone is cut out to become the intellectual leader of society.”¹⁶¹ Lukács recognized Lenin as the legitimate leader of the world proletarian revolution because he believed that he was the greatest articulator of this mission to struggle for political power. Though Lukács recognized a leadership principle, he only did so insofar as the leader was the self-consciousness of the will of the whole working people. Seeking to define “Orthodox Marxism” as something which could bridge partisans into political unity, he declared that it is the “unconditional hegemony of the totality, of the unity of the whole over the abstract isolation of the parts, which constitutes the essence of Marx’s social theory, the dialectical method. To adhere to this method (and not just to regurgitate individual phrases) is to be an orthodox Marxist.”¹⁶²

By spring of 1919, the Social-Democrats and Communists had secured a shaky alliance while all other factions of society fell into disunity. The conditions seemed ripe for the sort of activation of a revolutionary situation that Lenin had described to the Communist International. When the Hungarian Soviet Republic seized power over central and western Hungary in March of 1919, they set to work building a new social order on the basis of soviet power. Just as the Republic was proclaimed, Lukács was telling a class in a public lecture hall: “With the Aufhebung [transcending] of human isolation and of anarchic individualism, human society will form an organic whole; its parts—individual members and products—will support and magnify each other in the service of the common goal—the idea of further human development.”¹⁶³

Like the German Revolution a year prior, the Hungarian Revolution initially erupted as a democratic and anti-militarist revolt amidst the collapse of empires into national republics. The revolution gradually radicalized into a social revolution through the mass actions of workers and intellectuals. Lukács looked upon the alliance of Communists and Social-Democrats with caution, believing that the latter would lack the ambition necessary to fight for a well-rounded social revolution. He had already begun to warn against “the exclusive acknowledgement of immediate economic interests as it finds expression in so-called social-democratic Realpolitik.”¹⁶⁴ The accomplishment of the proletarian revolution’s task of class dictatorship required a well-rounded worldview, mediated with the situation through tactics, not the narrow sphere of opportunistic expediency. The Social-Democrats could only join the communists “if they could convince themselves that conditions had actually reached that critical stage of maturity, then—and only then—was union possible.”¹⁶⁵ For Lukács, this maturity of conditions was the significance of Lenin’s identification of imperialism with the era of world revolution. He began to pursue a clarification of communism as something distinct from reformist Social-Democracy.

With his intellectual background, educational commitment, and partisan experience, Lukács seemed to be the perfect candidate to become People’s Commissar for Education and Culture. He set to work making polytechnical and cultural education widely available for the working class, providing sexual education, and criticizing conservative and bourgeois morality. His position was analogous to Lunacharsky in the Soviet Union. The two men were like Prometheus, distributing the knowledge of the bourgeoisie freely to the masses so that they might become the gods of industrial civilization.

Echoing the rhetoric of Proletkult, Lukács called for the destruction of the old culture and the old classes, by terror if necessary. By May, Lukács became a People’s Commissar in the Hungarian Red Army. He enacted an iron discipline over his unit, even executing some soldiers for insubordination. He justified such actions as necessitated by the fact that the proletariat “exercises dictatorship even against itself” through “a legal order by means of which the proletariat compels its individual members, the proletarians, to act in accordance with their class interests.”¹⁶⁶

This echoed Lenin’s contemporary rationales for the rise of Bolshevik one-party rule. For Lukács, the necessity for an active minority organized in a formal party was the external expression of the fact that the “proletariat was becoming too strong to withdraw from political activity, which at that time related so immediately to its many interests. On the other hand, however, the proletariat was not yet strong enough to impose its will and its interests on society.”¹⁶⁷ According to Lukács’ standpoint epistemology, “[e]very proletarian is an orthodox Marxist by nature of his very class position,” but without a class organization strong enough to take over political rule, it would be left without a clear class consciousness bridging the personal and sectional interests of workers.¹⁶⁸ The class needed a party to tactically and strategically tie day-to-day struggles to the goal of communism. The party, on the other hand, had to overcome the ideological illusion of aspiring to “represent the interests of the ‘whole society’ and not just those of the individual classes.”¹⁶⁹ The party had to be the united mind of the class body’s general will. In the beginning of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, the “so-called ‘leaders’ were merely the executors of this will, the source and goal alike of which is unity.”¹⁷⁰ The party and the class would be reconciled in the dictatorship of the proletariat as “the unified proletariat, as a ruling class in society.”¹⁷¹ In a moment of revolutionary enthusiasm, Lukács declared that the Hungarian proletariat had overcome the need for a party dictatorship by acting for itself out of sheer unity of will, overcoming the role of the party as a faction among factions “made up of different classes, aiming by all kinds of violent or conformist means to realize some of its aims within class society.”¹⁷²

Following this triumphalist assessment of Hungary as the next herald of the world revolution, Lukács set to work envisioning the path of the proletariat towards communism. All communist revolutionaries “who are fighting for the victory of the proletariat are without exception—the corrupted victims of capitalism.”¹⁷³ The proletariat had to overcome its own dependent existence as the instruments of another’s will and begin to organize production for the needs of humanity. By reorienting production to needs rather than accumulation, the proletariat would make political morality—the sense of the Good—the highest principle of the economy. This implied a process of abolishing all classes, and with it, itself as a class, because “the power of morality cannot become effective, even given a decisively affirmative answer, as long as there are still classes in society,” since class society organizes the world through groups with antagonistic interests.¹⁷⁴ In a society with opposing classes, “it is inevitable that the function of regulating social behaviour will be fulfilled by law, and not by morality.”¹⁷⁵ This notion extended far beyond Lukács in the history of socialism. During the 1960s debate about the organization of the economy in Cuba, Ernesto “Che” Guevara called for the use of not merely material, but moral incentives, considering it “a matter of making the individual feel more complete, with much more inner wealth and much more responsibility.”¹⁷⁶

Law could only be enforced by the external compulsion of the state, apparently standing above the particular interests of all classes and representing the general interest of society itself. The Soviet jurist Evgeny Pashukanis described the securing of capitalist class power through ‘free’ contract with workers as proving that in bourgeois society “legal ideology becomes the ideology par excellence, and defending the class interest of the exploiters appears with ever increasing success as the defence of the abstract principle of legal subjectivity.”¹⁷⁷ Only when individual and social interests are reconciled would one be able to “present a social function as it is, simply as a social function, and a norm simply as an organisational regulation[...]”¹⁷⁸ Pashukanis, Lukács, and other Bolsheviks looked to proletarian class rule to carry this out.l In the dictatorship of the proletariat, the particular interest of a propertyless class would extend into the universal goal of the “victory of the idea over the egoistic will of individual human beings[...]”¹⁷⁹ Class morality would bridge personal selfishness and otherworldly morality.

This required individuals to subordinate their whims to their “real interests,” which lay in “increased production, a rise in productivity and a corresponding strengthening of labour discipline.”¹⁸⁰ Only abundant wealth and the Faustian domination of (outter and inner) nature could make communism possible. If this productivism was a moral rather than legal task, if the proletariat disciplined itself at work out of a moral commitment to the victory of the revolutionary struggle, “then the external compulsion of the law will automatically cease with the abolition of the class structure of society.”¹⁸¹ Each proletarian must feel that “it is he himself; his everyday work performance, which will determine when the truly happy and free epoch begins for mankind.”¹⁸² On the creation of a common social will through the ascendancy of moral duty over law, economics, and institutions, communism would finally be achieved, and the real history of united humanity would begin.

In this vision of communism, Lukács set out to accomplish the humanist hopes of the German idealists—just as Lenin accomplished the ambitions of the Russian Jacobins. Lukács freely admitted that, in the immediate struggle of the proletariat for power, “at best one can speak of those cultural values from the old society which may be appropriate to the essence of the new framework and thus which can be adopted and developed further by it. For example, the idea of man as an end in himself—the fundament of the new culture—is the legacy of classical 19th century idealism.”¹⁸³ The idealists sought to elevate the conscious will of humanity over unconsciousness, existing in an external form as nature, through the power of rational self-consciousness. Lukács shared the very same goal, seeking to accomplish it through the world-building power of the revolutionary proletariat.

Lukács drew heavily from the critique fielded against bourgeois society by the Jacobin-nationalist Fichte. Fichte thought of bourgeois society as thoroughly rotten by corrupt licentiousness and avariciousness. Before turning to a more conservative nationalist philosophy, Fichte hoped for a French-style revolution in which “the will of the inciters will be confirmed (by the will of the populace, declared after the fact) as the true common will; it will become clear that the inciters’ will contains the content of right, and it will acquire the form of right (which it still lacks) from the assent of the populace.”¹⁸⁴ A new state had to be constructed in which the governing class would be “subject to the common purpose of the State, which is determined by the general wants of the Community; and it must apply all its powers, without exception or reserve, directly to the attainment of this purpose; just as the other Classes have to dedicate their labour indirectly to the attainment of the same purpose[...]”¹⁸⁵ The ruler of this state would be a citizen “just as much as the others but in no higher degree.”¹⁸⁶

By working towards a perfect society through the power of social planning, this state would prepare the conditions for its own withering away. Once people learn to govern themselves without an external authority in the form of the state, “in place of strength or cunning, Reason alone shall be acknowledged as the supreme judge of all[...]”¹⁸⁷ Insofar as “free reciprocal activity is the positive character of Society,” human beings “cannot be true men” until they realize the universal moral harmony of each and all.¹⁸⁸ While Fichte believed that class distinctions and property ownership posed no necessary problem to this achievement as long as all were committed to the people’s state, Lukács considered the abolition of class society and socialization of property through proletarian dictatorship to be its precondition.

Despite high hopes for the proletarian dictatorship of Hungary, the Soviet Republic fell to the counterrevolution in August of 1919. Lukács and other communists were forced into exile, searching elsewhere for suitable terrain to continue their work towards communism. In Vienna, Lukács joined the German-speaking communist movement while remaining in contact with the left-wing of the Hungarian Communist Party. He began work on charting a path forward for the world revolution, refusing to give up hope or reconcile with the prevailing counterrevolutionary order. As the German communists fiercely debated whether to participate in parliamentary elections in the liberal and Social-Democratic Weimar Republic, Lukács contributed his own thoughts. He argued that as parliament was “the bourgeoisie’s very own instrument, [it] can therefore only ever be a defensive weapon for the proletariat.”¹⁸⁹ Even within this limited parliamentary activity, corruption by political careerism and policy expediency threatened to divorce parliamentary representatives from the class movement. Parliament “must therefore be sabotaged as parliament, and parliamentary activity propelled beyond mere parliamentarianism.”¹⁹⁰ By contrast, Lukács believed that workers’ councils could serve an educational function as an active critique of the bourgeois world: “Whereas in parliament it is quite possible to conceal actual opportunism behind revolutionary slogans, the workers’ council is compelled to act—otherwise it ceases to exist.”¹⁹¹ He continued to think in terms of a rigid antithesis between the revolutionary proletariat and the bourgeois world, refusing to register the winding down of world revolution by the beginning of 1920.

Lukács’ attempt to maintain a revolutionary stance in a non-revolutionary situation, where the wave of councils had subsided, led him to once again reflect on the meaning and role of the communist party. He looked to the Bolshevik practice of volunteer work as a potential inspiration, proving that “freedom cannot be regarded simply as a fruit, a result of historical development. There must arise in that development a moment where freedom itself becomes one of the driving forces.”¹⁹² The voluntarist element of the proletarian revolution found its organizational expression in the party, the formal embodiment of its Idea of freedom.

Lukács turned this vision against both the ultra-left and the Social-Democrats. Neither “are unable to understand the revolution as process,” and so they either fetishize the opportunistic self-preservation of the formal party organization or treat it as the Demiurge of revolution.¹⁹³ The Social-Democrats institutionalized the former in the parliamentary system of the Weimar Republic, while the ultra-leftists attempted the latter in such failed adventures as the Bavarian Soviet Republic. Unlike either the opportunists or the putschists, communists had to understand the party organization as “not the prerequisite of action, but rather a constant interplay of pre-requisite and consequence evolving during action.”¹⁹⁴ While the putschists had more justification than the opportunists, “if armed uprisings are seen as necessary stages along the route—in certain situations even absolutely necessary stages—but essentially and certainly in principle no different from the other stages, the entire rationale of putschism is shattered[...]”¹⁹⁵ Lukács believed that the “economic, scientific reality of the class is of course the starting-point for tactical considerations,” and that the proletariat could only make the class into an authentic reality through revolutionary action.¹⁹⁶

Lukács theory of class consciousness was also a theory of how the propertyless compose themselves into a moral and political faction. The entire revolutionary process was a matter of uniting the will of the proletariat, preparing it to make a society in its own image through an education in self-consciousness. As the party educates the proletariat in a critique of bourgeois society, “the ideological sway of bourgeois ideas and prejudices over the proletariat [may] be broken and make way for a fruitful critique that leads to action.”¹⁹⁷ The value of each revolutionary action along the route to the united proletariat is that it “diminishes the tension, the gulf between economic being and active consciousness of the proletariat. Once this consciousness has reached, penetrated and illuminated being, it is immediately possessed of the power to overcome all obstacles and to complete the process of revolution.”¹⁹⁸

With this logic, Lukács evaluated the German left-communist project of revolutionary terror in the 1921 March Action as an educational experiment. In the context of day-to-day class struggles, “the party is a power which can accelerate and provoke development, but only within a movement which will—in the last analysis—progress independently of what the party decides. The party can therefore in no sense take a real initiative.”¹⁹⁹ Spontaneous rebellions typically erupted against particular grievances and abated when those grievances were addressed. How could the party make a broader revolutionary struggle conceivable? Through direct action. Lukács considered such an organizational, rather than only intellectual, intervention. This would not be an initiative to take power for itself; it would “p​​roduce little that is new; its function will be rather to make the motives which led to the party’s decision to go over to the offensive wholly conscious for the party itself and fully intelligible to the masses.”²⁰⁰

This did not mean an endorsement of adventurism, but an endorsement of action as a technique of education. In 1922, Lukács clarified the necessity for mass politics as the grounding force of a party. As the HCP called for a mass movement in Hungary to be conjured from thin air, Lukács began to critique the tendency in socialist organizations to blind self-preservation. He criticized the HCP for a verbal adventurism that veiled “the soullessness of bureaucracy.”²⁰¹ Behind the call for a mass party was the practice of establishing front organizations “which from the very outset are so designed that they can never become anything more than impressive facades with nothing behind them.”²⁰² This blind actionism created a centralism that did not express the general will of a class, but the self-aggrandizement of professional activists. As “the excessive expectations” of a party leadership “cannot always be satisfied by promises and accusations, sham results are necessary. And herein lies the greatest danger of the central committee’s organizational principles. Such an organization is by its very nature susceptible to corruption.”²⁰³ The party had to remain in dialogue with a class movement, or else it would express no more than the self-preserving will of its own leadership. It would occupy its members in an endless cycle of empty actions, performed only to keep the formal organization alive. For Lukács, the party had to instead be the embodiment of class consciousness, the organizational unity of Marxists.

In 1923, Lukács attempted to systematize articles from his Marxist conversion into a comprehensive philosophy of Marxism. He titled this project History and Class Consciousness. This book became the classical mission statement of Faustian Marxism. Lukács was the first (and almost the only) Marxist to attempt to explain how and why the proletariat, after seizing power, would abolish itself as a class. As in his earliest Marxist writings, this was an attempt to “reconcile the dialectical conflict between immediate interests and ultimate goal.”²⁰⁴ After establishing Lukács’ conception of Marxist theory, the book traced the passage of the proletariat from its existence as a thing, the commodity labor-power, to its immersion into communist humanity.

Unlike the Bolsheviks, who thought of everything through the worker-peasant relationship, Lukács assumed a situation where no economic organization except that of capitalism. In capitalist society, the entire world is quantified into commodities, exchangeable things. Each thing is abstracted into merely so much of a quantity of value, of society’s labor-time. The individual proletarian, who works to augment the very thing that exploits them—capital, the power of the owner over them—initially experiences their world as a “personality [who] can do no more than look on helplessly while its own existence is reduced to an isolated particle and fed into an alien system.”²⁰⁵ In this situation of helplessness, the existing order is reified—hardened into the form of a thing. This thing is the commodity-form, which appears as a power over and against people through the organization of the world according to the needs of capital accumulation. The world of commodities constantly induces a false consciousness in atomized individuals. But this all-pervading capitalist society also produces the possibility for its own destruction. This lies in “the split between subjectivity and objectivity induced in man by the compulsion to objectify himself as a commodity,” to become a proletarian, which makes the situation into “one that can be made conscious.”²⁰⁶

The dead existence of objects must be converted into the living dynamism of process. By passing from their lived experience to an awareness of what the commodity-form is, and the significance of capital to the existence of the proletariat, the workers make class action possible. As individual worker reflects on their conditions, they realize that their immediate existence as a commodity “turns out to be the consequence of a multiplicity of mediations, once it becomes evident how much it presupposes, then the fetishistic forms of the commodity system begin to dissolve: in the commodity the worker recognizes himself and his own relations with capital.”²⁰⁷ The reification of capitalist power as a commodity, which all experience unconsciously, comes into light as a relationship of exploitation between property and the propertyless.

Over time, as workers come together on the basis of a common interest and common conditions to stage sectional, then trade, then mass actions to assert their own needs against those of capital, the unconscious and quasi-automatic routine of commodity society “now awakens and becomes social reality.”²⁰⁸ As the struggle reaches more and more universal forms, “its surpassing of immediacy represents an aspiration towards society in its totality, regardless of whether this aspiration remains conscious or whether it remains unconscious for the moment.”²⁰⁹ This collective standpoint of the proletariat is “the identical subject-object of the social and historical processes of evolution.”²¹⁰ The entire society is summarized in it as it transforms its existence as a commodity, the universal form of capitalism, into the social and political dynamic of class struggle. The movement of the propertyless class finds its universal aims in class consciousness, in the need to remake the entire world, and the “self-understanding of the proletariat is therefore simultaneously the objective understanding of the nature of society.”²¹¹

The antidote to reification is class consciousness. But class consciousness is not automatic; it requires a work of partisan consciousness-raising and a critique of everyday life appropriate to it. Marxism must be understood not as a dead dogma, but as a method of critiquing the frozen, reified world of capitalism and revealing the opportunities for free self-determination to burst forth. This point of Lukács’ encouraged a new generation of Marxists to endeavor critiques of the quotidian world of commodities, the rise of a consumer culture, and all methods for the bourgeoisification of the proletariat. World revolution had come and gone because the reified world kept people locked in the passivity of immediate appearances and immediate interests. Only the invigorating and educational experience of collective struggle, its universal significance articulated in Marxist analysis, could overcome the appearance of an unchangeable world. Theory and praxis are not mutually exclusive opposites, as “the essence of praxis consists in annulling that indifference of form towards content,” doing away with all situations in which the world seems to simply exist in-itself, as the way of the world.²¹² In this conception, the role of the party becomes that of theorizing the Faustian imperative of praxis.

The party is the organizational form of class consciousness. In order for it to function strictly as a organ of class consciousness, a strict centralism must reign within it. Being only a factional organization, the ”only decisive weapon it possesses is its ability to draw together all the party members and to involve them in activity on behalf of the party with the whole of their personality.”²¹³ This total engagement forges their many personalities into the single will and mind of an organization. Only the absolute moral commitment of each and every member’s life to the work of the party would ensure a disciplinary unity between “the will of the members and that of the party leadership, and will ensure that the will and the wishes, the proposals and the criticisms of the members are given due weight by the party leaders.”²¹⁴

With this total engagement, the leadership would have to explain each and every decision to the members, and ensure the continued existence of the party as an organ of consciousness. The more an individual member is absorbed into this organic unity of consciousness, “the more it will be able to make use of him, bring him to a peak of maturity and judge him.”²¹⁵ This total centralism would not be despotic, according to Lukács, because “true democracy,” defined as “the abolition of the split between rights and duties,” is not merely “formal freedom but the activity of the members of a collective will, closely integrated and collaborating in a spirit of solidarity.”²¹⁶ Capitalist society fragments people into many helpless personalities, while communist organization must unify people into one struggling humanity.

Lukács looked on the workers’ councils as a practical critique of capitalist society. The organ of a soviet “spells the political and economic defeat of reification.”²¹⁷ Socializing along soviet lines is a method of struggle against capital and a method in self-emancipation. By uniting economics and politics, by abolishing the separation of powers in the bourgeois state, the council embodies the general will of the class. It makes society transparent to its members, allowing workers to subject the entire world to the conceptual thought and discussion of the councils. From the quantity of commodities emerges the quality of the united class, organized into a government of councils. By organizing the general will into a form which can reorganize society as a whole along its own lines, the council-form proves that the “proletariat only perfects itself by annihilating and transcending itself, by creating the classless society through the successful conclusion of its own class struggle.”²¹⁸

While “reality is the criterion for the correctness of thought,” “reality is not, it becomes—and to become the participation of thought is needed.”²¹⁹ Only the dynamism of conceptual thought and comprehension creates a living reality. According to this, Lukács believed that “the merely objective dialectics of nature” characteristic of the Comintern’s Marxism could not comprehend all of social reality, because “in the dialectics of society the subject is included in the reciprocal relation in which theory and practice become dialectical with reference to one another.”²²⁰ For alienation and reification to be superseded, each person should be able to completely, consciously, coherently comprehend what they are doing in a common conceptual thought and have control over themselves by working together.

To be master of the cosmos, the human personality must become both subject (consciousness), and object (being) in one moment. Only if the subject “moved in a self-created world of which it is the conscious form and only if the world imposed itself upon it in full objectivity, only then can the problem of dialectics, and with it the abolition of the antitheses of subject and object, thought and existence, freedom and necessity, be held to be solved.”²²¹ In a repetition of his workerism on a higher scale, Lukács imagined that humanity’s knowledge of itself, a part of the cosmos, would supersede the unconscious needfulness of animal life. Humanity would enclose everything within its comprehension and plan it rationally, according to its highest aspirations. Human history in this light “is the history of the unceasing overthrow of the objective forms that shape the life of man.”²²² For Lukács, communism meant the transformation of history into nothing except for the self-consciousness of Absolute Reason.

Labor is an infinite striving, and it strives infinitely towards “the active engagement of the total personality.”²²³ In capitalist society, this personality is broken up into the isolated self and the alienated commodity; necessity is limited to the needs of keeping a wage-worker available and to the needs of capital accumulation. The abolition of capitalist private property, which confronts the laborer with their own product as the objectified form of the will of another, also does away with the alienation of labor’s product into something standing over and above the labor process. Necessity is now understood as the needs of humanity as a whole. In communist society, necessity passes from a positive fate to be accomplished to an impediment to be fought and limited to a minimum. As the conscious and efficient usage of the productive forces according to a rational plan is perfected, necessary labor is reduced and free time is augmented. Humanity begins to use its wealth to pursue the fullest experience of life possible, for the total mastery of its creative powers. The two souls of Faust return together in this laboring communist humanity.

Lukács’ vision of communism, though it articulated the highest hopes of Faustian Marxism, annoyed the leaders of the Marxists. In 1920, Lenin set his sights on what he considered the left-wing deviations of the European communist movement. He considered these to be growing pains, to be expected as the communists charted an independent course from the rightist Social-Democrats, but nevertheless as problems. Amidst his critiques of the left-communists, Lenin attacked Lukács’ anti-parliamentarian article as “very Left-wing, and very poor. Its Marxism is purely verbal; its distinction between ‘defensive’ and ‘offensive’ tactics is artificial; it gives no concrete analysis of precise and definite historical situations; it takes no account of what is most essential (the need to take over and to learn to take over, all fields of work and all institutions in which the bourgeoisie exerts its influence over the masses, etc.).”²²⁴

While Lukács began his tactical considerations with the proletariat’s strength of will, seeing in it the identical subject-object of history, Lenin advocated for communists to remember that “temper alone is not enough to lead the masses in a great revolutionary struggle, and that such and such mistakes that very loyal adherents of the cause of the revolution are about to commit, or are committing, may damage the cause of the revolution.”²²⁵ Scientific analysis, necessary for an organization to become a vanguard party, required a more holistic perspective. It “demands that account be taken of all the forces, groups, parties, classes and masses operating in the given country, and that policy should not be determined only by the desires and views, by the degree of class consciousness, and the readiness for battle of only one group or party.”²²⁶ Only in a general crisis, where subjective and objective factors meet, “when the ‘lower classes’ do not want the old way, and when the ‘upper classes’ cannot carry on in the old way—only then can revolution triumph.”²²⁷ This, Lenin thought, would require a mass democratic force only made possible by seeking alliances with non-proletarian classes like peasants and urban petit-bourgeoisie. After all, he had stressed time and time again that the proletarian revolution can only emerge as a radicalization of democratic struggle within capitalist society.

After the publication of History and Class Consciousness, Lukács profile elevated higher than that of another left-communist. At the 1924 Fifth Congress of the Communist International, Grigory Zinoviev, then chairman of the Comintern, set to work Bolshevizing the communists of the world. Against Lukács and the German Marxist philosopher Karl Korsch, whom the Comintern leadership considered ultra-leftist idealists, Zinoviev declared: “If we got a few more of these professors spinning out their Marxist theories, we shall be lost. We cannot tolerate such theoretical revisionism of this kind in our Communist International.”²²⁸ For Zinoviev, true Marxism was a simple, immediately comprehensible system of objective laws of development that could be memorized by rote repetition. Lenin, on the other hand, thought that “Intelligent idealism is closer to intelligent materialism than stupid materialism.”²²⁹

While Lenin’s criticisms of Lukács had been more intellectually subtle, they were collapsed into Zinoviev’s mindless conformism by their shared Bolshevik fixation on political consensus. Lukács would have to choose between being an independent political leader and being part of global Communism. In line with his character, he conformed with the crude and despotic methods of Zinoviev and other Bolsheviks in order to remain part of a greater totality.

This has often been interpreted as a betrayal of Lukács’ preceding line of thought. He turned his praise of councils as a means of making society transparent to itself towards the vanguard party instead. Later council communists, like the Situationists of 1960s France, attempted to salvage and revitalize this interpretation of the councils as the organizational manifestation of an identical subject-object. Guy Debord thought that “what was described as actual virtues of the Bolshevik party were in fact everything that the Party was not,” while workers’ councils must transform the entire world “if it aspires to be recognized—and to recognize itself—in a world of its own design.”²³⁰ Lukács’ turn to the vanguard party was, however, justified by his own commitment to a conscious moral totality. Internalizing Lenin’s criticisms of his workerist voluntarism, he wrote in 1924 that “the party, on the basis of its knowledge of society in its totality, represents the interests of the whole proletariat (and in doing so mediates the interests of all the oppressed—the future of mankind), it must unite within it all the contradictions in which the tasks that arise from the very heart of this social totality are expressed.”²³¹ In this vision, the vanguard party becomes the planner of the revolution, a “tribune of the people,” as Lenin had once said.²³²

As the organizational expression of the proletariat’s universal mission, the party demanded conformity of each and all to its work in order for its plans to be effective. For the Soviets, this would increasingly mean one-man management; for Lukács, it meant the existence of Marxism in a universal institution. They believed that the brain of the revolution always knows better than its individual organs and cells. Revolution in the vision of the Comintern was reduced to the creation of a general will and common mind where one does not already manifest. Regardless of the political form of the new state, Lukács and others of his generation swallowed their hopes of a council republic and began to regard the state of the Soviet Union as the institutional expression of this general revolutionary will. The movement crystallized into a thing, and moral duty hardened into loyalty to an apparatus.

Next: Mephisto, Lord of This Earth, Part II of the Tragedy

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146. Lukács, Soul and Form, p. 8.

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159. Lukács, “Tactics and Ethics,” in Tactics and Ethics, p. 10.

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170. Lukács, “Party and Class,” in Tactics and Ethics, pp. 34-35.

171. Lukács, “Party and Class,” in Tactics and Ethics, p. 30.

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174. Lukács, “The Role of Morality in Communist Production,” in Tactics and Ethics, p. 48.

175. Lukács, “The Role of Morality in Communist Production,” in Tactics and Ethics, p. 48.

176. Ernesto Guevara, “Socialism and Man in Cuba,” March 1965, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1965/03/man-socialism.htm.

177. Evgeny Pashukanis, The General Theory of Law and Marxism, ed. Chris Arthur, trans. Barbara Einhorn (Transaction Publishers, 2002), p. 45.

178. Pashukanis, The General Theory of Law and Marxism, p. 104.

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182. Lukács, “The Role of Morality in Communist Production,” in Tactics and Ethics, p. 52.

183. Lukács, “The Old Culture and the New Culture,” p. 30.

184. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Foundations of Natural Right, ed. Frederick Neuhouser, trans. Michael Baur (Cambridge University Press, 2000), p.161.

185. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Characteristics of the Present Age, ed. Danel N. Robinson (University Publications of America, 1977), p. 172.

186. Fichte, Characteristics of the Present Age, p. 172.

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188. Fichte, The Vocation of the Scholar, p. 31.

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192. Georg Lukács, “The Moral Mission of the Communist Party,” in Tactics and Ethics, 1919-1929: The Questions of Parliamentarianism and Other Essays, trans. Michael McColgan (Verso Books, 2014), p. 55.

193. Georg Lukács, “Opportunism and Putschism,” in Tactics and Ethics, 1919-1929: The Questions of Parliamentarianism and Other Essays, trans. Michael McColgan (Verso Books, 2014), p. 72.

194. Lukács, “Opportunism and Putschism,” in Tactics and Ethics, p. 73.

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197. Georg Lukács, “The Question of Educational Work,” in Tactics and Ethics, 1919-1929: The Questions of Parliamentarianism and Other Essays, trans. Michael McColgan (Verso Books, 2014), p. 94.

198. Lukács, “Opportunism and Putschism,” in Tactics and Ethics, p. 79.

199. Georg Lukács, “Spontaneity of the Masses, Activity of the Party,” in Tactics and Ethics, 1919-1929: The Questions of Parliamentarianism and Other Essays, trans. Michael McColgan (Verso Books, 2014), p. 98.

200. Lukács, Spontaneity of the Masses, Activity of the Party,” in Tactics and Ethics, pp. 104-105.

201. Georg Lukács, “The Politics of Illusion—Yet Again,” in Tactics and Ethics, 1919-1929: The Questions of Parliamentarianism and Other Essays, trans. Michael McColgan (Verso Books, 2014), p. 117.

202. Lukács, “The Politics of Illusion—Yet Again,” in Tactics and Ethics, p. 120.

203. Lukács, “The Politics of Illusion—Yet Again,” in Tactics and Ethics, p. 122.

204. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (Foreign Languages Press, 2021), p. 97.

205. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 109.

206. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 202.

207. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 203.

208. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 204.

209. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 209.

210. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 180.

211. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 180.

212. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 151.

213. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 375.

214. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 376.

215. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 379.

216. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 378.

217. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 97.

218. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 97.

219. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 244.

220. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 248.

221. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 172.

222. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 223.

223. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 358.

224. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “Kommunismus: Journal of the Communist International,” June 12, 1920, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/jun/12.htm.

225. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder (Foreign Languages Press, 1970), p. 64.

226. Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism, p. 65.

227. Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism, p. 70.

228. Grigory Zinoviev, “From Fourth Congress to Fifth Congress,” in Fifth World Congress of the Communist International: Abridged Report of Meetings Held at Moscow June 17th to July 8th, 1924 (Communist Party of Great Britain, 1924), p. 37.

229. Lenin, “Conspectus of Hegel’s Book The Science of Logic,” p. 274.

230. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Zone Books, 1995), p. 81, 127.

231. Georg Lukács, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought (Verso Books, 2009), p. 34.

232. Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, p. 82.