John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

In the pre-war years his political enemy Alexander Bogdanov had taken Bolshevik dreaming about the post-revolutionary society to its logical extreme in two SF novels about a future communist utopia on Mars, Red Star (1908) and Engineer Menni (1913). In Bogdanov’s utopia there was no state coercion, all class division and exploitation was abolished, and there was total equality of the sexes. The novels were not without complexity, as Bogdanov’s hero, a socialist who travels to Mars for a better life, discovers that the communist society is facing problems of overpopulation and environmental decay, and longer life has led to the creation of “Suicide Clinics”. The novels were reprinted in Russia after 1917 and were hugely popular with literate working-class militants looking for a concrete vision of the future. Yet as Richard Stites’s provocative work on cultural experimentation during the Russian Revolution makes clear, “When such a counter-culture did appear in the form of workers’ control, anarchism, syndicalism, and various intra-party oppositionists, it was repudiated by the Bolshevik leadership”. 4

The Bolsheviks, in their view, had created state organs that allowed the working class to participate in direct economic and social reconstruction. The most genuinely libertarian and experimental of those organs was Lunacharsky’s Nakompros. Before the war, Lunacharsky had headed a school for RSDLP workers on Capri with Bogdanov and Gorky. The kind of education offered by these independent-minded Marxists was not dissimilar to that of the Mensheviks, in that it was designed to produce working-class leaders who could think for themselves rather than parrot the orders of a Central Committee. The Marxism of this dissident fringe of the Bolshevik Party presaged by a hundred years the “autonomism” of Hardt and Negri, the “Marx and Engels of the Internet Age”. 5

Autonomism arose from the Italian radical left of the 1960s. It rejected Leninism, political parties and trade unions for a belief that the “autonomous” working class could affect political change without the hierarchical structures of the unions and the Italian Communist Party. At the core of autonomist philosophy is a broader conception of the working class than that of the traditional industrial proletariat. The Marxist economist Harry Cleaver summarised this new working class as

a loose tribe of highly mobile drop-outs, part-time workers, part-time students, participants in the underground economy, creators of temporary and ever-changing autonomous zones of social life that force a fragmentation of and crisis in the mass worker organisations of the social factory. 6

Although its analysis of capitalism as an exploitative system is not markedly different from Marx’s, autonomism is, in the words of Derek Wall, “a form of ‘subjective’ rather than ‘objective’ Marxism”. 7

Subjective Marxism calls attention to the creation of a global economy based on highly sophisticated communications technology, and the labour on which this economy intimately relies. This Hardt and Negri call “affected labour”, i.e. labour based on knowledge, networks, sharing and “the creation of social life itself, in which the political, the economic and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest in one another”. 8The priority for socialists, therefore, is to create from this affected labour a self-conscious Multitude that fights capitalist hegemony on numerous fronts, through the creation of a variety of living alternatives such as squatting, protest camps, workers’ cooperatives, flashmobs, wildcat strikes, etc. Hardt and Negri’s belief that “in the passage to the informational economy, the assembly line has been replaced by the network as the organisational model of production” 9reflects the rise of the “networked individual” as a more connected and effective anti-capitalist protestor than the rule-bound trade unionist.

The autonomist project to forge an effective anti-capitalist counter-culture is not dissimilar from the desire of dissident Bolsheviks like Bogdanov to create the conditions in which a re-educated, liberated working class is able to identify its own interests. That desire found expression in the Proletarian Cultural and Educational Organisations, or Proletkult. Proletkult was part of the Left Communist trend within the party. After October it took on organisational form as a loose federation of bodies sponsored by Nakompros. Lunacharsky himself had thrown open the gates to the cultural iconoclasm practiced by Proletkult. His first declaration as People’s Commissar for Enlightenment proclaimed:

The people themselves, consciously or unconsciously, must evolve their own culture […] The independent action of workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ cultural-educational organizations must achieve full autonomy, both in relation to the central government and the municipal centres.

When he said this he had been People’s Commissar for only three days. By April 1918 he was expressing “doubt that Proletkult is a real manifestation of spontaneous proletarian activity”. 10

Proletkult was in basic conflict with Lunacharsky’s vision of a pluralistic, progressive socialism. In 1917 it had emerged as an organised grouping that advocated a cultural version of Lenin’s The State and Revolution . Its core belief was that the “real”, class-conscious working class, concentrated in capitalism’s factory complexes, alone possessed and demonstrated the collective culture of the future. It may not have yet expressed that culture in the traditional manner–novels, poetry, plays, symphonies, etc.–but that was because capitalism’s social structure had denied it the chance to do so. Now that the bourgeoisie had been driven from power a genuine Proletarian Culture would emerge like a phoenix from the ashes. The precondition for this was the immediate expunging of the old culture.

In the first half of 1918 Proletkult received a budget of 9.2 million rubles, about a third of the total Nakompros budget for Adult Education. As the social historian Lynn Mally observed, “Although the Proletkult was autonomous it still expected Nakompros to foot the bills”. 11Nakompros provided Proletkult with a large building on Nevsky Prospect as an hq and the Prospect itself was renamed Proletkult St. By 1920 Proletkult had nearly 85,000 members running a network of 300 multi-media “studios”. These studios scorned bourgeois cultural categories (and bourgeois art in general) and aimed to produce experimental Proletarian Art across a range of visual, literary and dramatic fields. Mayakovsky, a fervent supporter of Proletkult, believed that art should be displayed “not in dead museum-temples, but everywhere–on the streets, in trams, in factories, in workshops, and in workers’ apartments”. 12

In some towns over-enthusiastic Proletkultists wanted to burn all the books in the libraries, confident that they would soon be replaced by those of proletarian writers. Proletkult, as a body, was difficult to fit into the structure of the Soviet state, and in many respects it did not want to fit. It attracted many of the dissident and unmalleable elements of the revolutionary left and offered them a semi-official organisation to work within. Inside Nakompros, one of Lunacharsky’s senior advisors, Lenin’s wife Krupskaya, constantly pressed her boss to bring Proletkult to heel.

Lunacharsky walked a tight-rope between conflicting tendencies within Bolshevism–that of Lenin and the “political” revolutionaries who saw the new Soviet state as defined by its economic and political system; and that of Left Communists who wished to advance the revolution into all spheres of social life. Lunacharsky took fire from both sides–from Lenin, who thought Nakompros too tolerant of experiments in Futurist poetry and design, and spending money on projects of no interest to workers and peasants; and from adherents of Proletkult who wanted a “cultural October”, for continuing to value and protect the legacy of pre-October art and culture. Because he went to some effort to protect the monuments, art and, to a certain extent, the artists and writers of “bourgeois culture”, Lunacharsky was attacked by Proletkult as a closet reactionary. In view of the fact that Nakompros generously funded and protected Proletkult and its studios Marcel Liebman is, again, entirely justified in finding that “the avant-gardist zeal of many of these artists was equaled only by their ingratitude”. 13