social history and its categories

Social History and Its CategoriesAuthor(s): Daniel OrlovskySource: Slavic Review, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Winter, 1988), pp. 620-623Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2498182 .

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DANIEL ORLOVSKY

Social History and Its Categories

Sheila Fitzpatrick attempts to develop a synthesis of class, politics and culture as they emerged out of the October Revolution and civil war and as they developed during the early years of NEP. Her argument runs as follows. The Bolsheviks, consisting of work- ers and intellectuals, made the revolution in the name of the working class, created a working-class state, but quickly found that a conscious working class no longer existed because of the social upheavals of war and revolution. Fitzpatrick places class identity and conflict at the center of civil war debates within the party. According to this view the primary opposition movements within Bolshevism-the Workers' Opposition, the Democratic Centralists, the Military Opposition, were above all directed against the dilution of the class content of the new revolutionary party-state by intellectuals and bourgeois specialists. By 1921, Bolshevik faith in the working class had turned to skepticism. The party leadership, including Lenin, saw the working class as declasse. Yet this attitude was short-lived since the party had no other option for a real or imag- ined social base or for ideological legitimation. The party therefore returned to praise of the working class and even before Lenin's death developed a new expanded defini- tion of working class that included all the beneficiaries of social mobility who had moved up into management or into the apparats. This, for Fitzpatrick, was the solution to the long-standing problem of proletarian identity. One could now be proletarian, by virtue of involvement in building the new society, whether at the workbench or not.

Along the way Fitzpatrick also discusses culture, and specifically proletarian cul- ture. Here the argument centers on Proletkul't, the network of organizations created in 1917 to further the cause of a proletarian culture distinct from that of the dominant classes of the Old Regime. As is well known, Proletkul't had its party enemies, and neither the party-state nor the working class was able during the civil war to define a clear vision of what constituted proletarian culture. Since there was in effect no work- ing class, Fitzpatrick argues, there could be no working-class culture. Since Prolet- kul'tists demanded a certain independence from the party-state, their organizations were looked upon with hostility by most party leaders, especially Lenin himself.

Fitzpatrick is right to argue that social tensions and divisions existed within the Bolshevik party (and in revolutionary society) and that the party faced a serious di- lemma in "class" relations in what purported to be a working-class state engaged in the project of building socialism. Yet the argument appears to confuse the terminology used by contemporary Bolsheviks in their debates, polemics, and propaganda with the social realities and dynamics of the period. The thrust of her argument seems to be that there was no working class during the civil war. Fitzpatrick wants to have it both ways. Class and class analysis is problematic for her since the realities did not conform to the class models. Yet her own argument depends heavily on the very same categories. Though the "working class" was not a class with a clear class identity, she goes on to make class conflict between intellectuals, specialists, and the working class the corner- stone of her view of the evolving revolutionary society. This adds up to social conflict, but, since neither class in a theoretical sense nor the constituent social groups that are comprised in these "classes" are defined or discussed in any concrete way, it is hard to move beyond the categories and terminology used in some (and by no means all) of the contemporary debates and, indeed, in some of the older works on Soviet politics that

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Social History and Its Categories 621

have no social history agenda at all. Fitzpatrick's terminology and conclusions, for ex- ample, are almost identical to those of Isaac Deutscher in the first chapter (especially pp. 5-14) of The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky: 1921-1929.' Fitzpatrick and Deutscher agree on the vanished working class of 1921. The difference seems to be that Deutscher had a stronger belief in the existence of such a class before 1921.

Fitzpatrick is really writing about the social and political dynamics of revolution, state building, and cultural transformation, but the argument is constructed out of cate- gories and sources that cannot produce a new synthesis. For example, the entire tale is told in terms of Bolsheviks, workers, and intellectuals. Now it is possible that Fitz- patrick wants to reproduce the contemporary discourse, but that is unclear. In any case we must try to get behind these labels to the bedrock of social and cultural reality that they represent. The processes of state building and social revolution embraced many social identities and political discourses set in specific historical situations. The Bol- sheviks should not be treated as a unified historical actor or subject. The Bolsheviks in 1918-1921 consisted, as Fitzpatrick herself admits, of a great many nonproletarian elements. But it was not simply a case of intellectuals vs. workers or both vs. the bour- geois specialists. In fact the emerging party-state comprised large cadres of white- collar workers, protoprofessionals, lower-level and middle-level service personnel drawn from the pre-revolutionary, public, private, and state sectors. These people did not belong, as Fitzpatrick claims, to the privileged classes or to "propertied" society. In fact before 1917 and during the revolution itself, these groups made up a vast in- frastructure that by and large was populist or socialist in orientation, but in any case was anticapitalist. These types were readily absorbed into the growing Bolshevik move- ment and the new state that itself was created out of the old bureaucracy, the public organizations (zemstva, war industries committees, and the like), cooperatives, trade unions, factory committees, and the soviets. They were the very Bolsheviks, who in the name of proletarian purity, were attacking the bourgeois specialists as members of the privileged classes.

In fact the bourgeois specialists were usually nonparty middle or higher mana- gerial or professional personnel co-opted into the economic administration. It is impor- tant to distinguish between party intellectuals (professional revolutionaries) of various secondary occupations at some point in their lives; the bourgeois specialists, who ap- peared as highly paid holdovers of the Old Regime; and the various lower-middle layers of the towns and villages who held a variety of occupations outside factory and field, who along with blue-collar workers and peasants made the revolution and secured the Soviet victory in the civil war.

Fitzpatrick's argument that the Workers' Opposition and Democratic Centralists were concerned essentially with class issues (proletarian purity vs. intelligentsia) illus- trates the ambiguity of her categories. Fitzpatrick says the class issue was more impor- tant than bureaucratization or centralization and criticizes Leonard Schapiro and Robert Daniels (the only two western authors cited) as typical of western scholarship on this point. The proclamation of proletarian interests was often a mask behind which other social groups fought for power and status. The Democratic Centralists, for example, did criticize the excessive centralization of the new apparatus, but in so doing they were advancing the social and political agenda of the provincial lower-middle strata in the soviets and other organs of power. Even the Workers' Opposition signified some-

1. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmned: Trotsky: 1921-1929 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959).

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622 Slavic Review

thing more than a spirited defense of proletarian creativity. Workers' Oppositionists desired also power for autonomous trade unions, or at least a sharing of power between the party, the soviets, and the unions. The trade unions themselves were bastions of white-collar social strength. By 1919, most unions had mixed white-collar and blue- collar membership and the bureaucratized unions themselves were chief suppliers of new upwardly mobile cadres for the state and party administrations. Whether the chief issue was class or power, the historian's task is to get at the social dynamics that inform the rhetoric of these debates.

Robert Daniels himself had formulated Fitzpatrick's position twenty-eight years ago when he quoted Engels's The Peasant War in Germany on the need of leaders of extreme parties to "defend the interests of an alien class," while feeding their own class with "phrases and promises, with the assertion that the interests of that alien class are their own interests." Daniels wrote,

As a capsule analysis of Soviet Russia, this would be hard to improve upon. What is the alien class whose interests are defended? This is a complex question, but perhaps the most apt answer is that suggested in many Communist writings of the period-the "technical intelligentsia."

A revolutionary dictatorship identified with the workers, but accommodating itself to the social paramountcy of the experts, the administrators and the police- men-such was the sociological basis of the crisis which shook the Communist Party late in 1920 and early in 1921. As the price of survival, the Soviet Regime was accepting a managerial order.2

Fitzpatrick's comments on occupation and class position are very suggestive. In fact occupation was a key to identity and ultimately to consciousness. If indeed, class position, or what one did in the past (or at time of entry into the party), as opposed to what estate one was born into, became the standard measure of social identity during the later 1920s and 1930s, then it could be interpreted as a clever move on the part of the lower-middle strata to assert their occupations and indeed social origin as a legiti- mate substitute for worker or peasant ancestry.

Like her example of the early Soviet use of "then and now" in determining pro- letarian identity, Fitzpatrick's essay does raise "potentially complex theoretical ques- tions about class consciousness and class culture." But without a firm definition of class and a clear map of the social terrain, the synthesis remains unachieved. Fitz- patrick has not exploited the rich historiography of the European or Russian working class and working-class cultures. Is working-class culture something that is only im- posed or imagined by Proletkul'tists or the state or does it emerge from the subjective experience of specific social groups in concrete historical situations? Can we write of party and class during the formative years of Soviet power without giving equal atten- tion to the state and state building? It was the state, after all, that became the mecha- nism for the social mobility at the core of Fitzpatrick's argument and a major determi- nant of consciousness or identity. This new kind of state absorbed not just the traditional bureaucratic structures of the Old Regime and Provisional Government, but also all the private sector, public organizations, and organs of revolutionary mobilization as well. Erik Olin Wright has recently shown that in advanced capitalist societies, as well as under "state bureaucratic socialism," productive assets may include skill assets and

2. Robert Vincent Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), p. 136.

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Social History and Its Categories 623

organization as well as the traditional Marxist category of labor power.3 It might be helpful to take this into account when charting class identities during this period. For Wright, socialist revolution may increase and strengthen, rather than eliminate, in- equalities of effective control over organizational assets. Both proletarian identity and the identities of technocratic, managerial, and white-collar groups were uniquely shaped by this umbrella state, just as these emerging social groups placed their imprint upon the state.

Finally, the work of numerous western historians of early Soviet Russia should not be neglected. The growing body of social, institutional, and political history is sen- sitive to the cultural dimension of revolutionary change. These scholars shed light on Fitzpatrick's themes.4 We can only hope that she and other researchers will use all the available tools in terms of theory, comparative history, recent scholarship, and em- pirical data to produce a history of early Soviet society that transcends the time-worn categories of the past.

3. Erik Olin Wright, "What is Middle About the Middle Class?" in John Roemer, Ed., Analytical Marxism (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 114-140.

4. I have in mind here the work of Lynn Mally and James McClelland on Proletkul't, William Husband on nationalization in the textile industry, V. Brovkin on opposition to the Bolsheviks in the soviets, Malvin Helgesen on Soviet construction, and Diane Koenker on the printers and on working-class culture under NEP.

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