The Great Paradoxes of Marxism and Communism

The book is divided into quaternary main sections. The first defines what, in the context of turnofthe blow Russia, was the proletariat or " stimulateing class," and examines where these industrial failers came from, how they lived and worked, and how they came to regard themselves. The countenance section looks at the cultivation of a delve stool before and during the abortive first revolution of 1905. The third traces the development of unionism and workers' politics during the period of reform and legalized unionism that followed the set aside of the 1905 revolution, and into the subsequent era of repression. The fourth and final section examines the radicalized labor movement that existed on the eve of the war, and out of which the Bolshevik political party would emerge to dominate Russia after the fall of the czarist government activity three years later.

At the turn of the twentieth century, whole a very small fraction of the population of the Russian Empire were factory workers in the major cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg. The twain cities had a total of about 270,000 factory workers, or some(prenominal) less than one percent of the population of the country. A tight equal number of "industrial" workers worked in nonfactory conditions, primarily small artisanal workshops (p. 23).

In orthodox Marxist thought, as it had demonstrable at that time, it was these workers, and almost no others, who were viewed as the crucial caravan of the pr

oletariat and the crucible of revolution. These workers alone undergo the full division and concentration of labor which, in Marxist thought, led to the development and maturation of a proletarian identity, and thereof to revolutionary consciousness. Such a small pool of " avant-garde" workers, in so large and ruralized a country, were naturally snub as a force by Marxist theorists in the West. In the contemporary orthodox view, their claim to serve as a decisive social force was further weakened by the close ties that workers still had to the countryside, from which many a(prenominal) of them had come to work in the factories.

In fact, however, the very closeness to rural look of the industrial work force was a factor in its solidarity and its radicalization. Boys or young men who came to the cities to find industrial work arrived with vivid memories of the bitter conditions of life in the countryside. They found that muchestablished workers, especially those born in the cities, looked down on them as country bumpkins. A natural response of many was to adopt, all the more vigorously, the urban styles and outlook of their coworkers, so that they might blend in and be more amply accepted.

After the 1905 revolution, there was first a period of relaxation, and legalisation of labor organizations, and then a renewal of repression following the Stolypin "putsch d'etat" of June 3, 1907. The renewed repression was a classic instance of the rule of unplanned consequences: hardly anything could have been bettercalculated to strengthen the mark of the most radical wing of the labor movement  the Bolsheviks.

This was a time of labor ferment throughout the industrialized world, and Russia was non exempt from it. Some early Russian theoreticians might tolerate revolutionary salvation from the West, but the natural tendency of theorists and practical labor organizers alike was to do what th
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