Eric Blanc's Revolutionary Social Democracy is an important book that everyone with an interest in Soviet history, Marxism, the political sociology of class, and prospects for working-class organization should read. It seeks to challenge “long-held assumptions about the Russian Revolution and the dynamics of political struggle in autocratic and parliamentary conditions,” (1) and succeeds brilliantly in fulfilling its ambitious agenda. It does so by extending the coverage of social democratic party history to include Latvian, Polish, Ukrainian, Jewish, Georgian, and especially Finnish organizations; recasting Second International “orthodoxy” as “revolutionary;” and thereby stressing continuities between the 1905 and 1917 revolutions.
Over ten chapters ranging in length from twenty to sixty pages, Blanc addresses just about every issue that arose among the empire's social democrats—from tensions between workers and intellectuals within respective party organizations, to disruptions caused by frequent arrests of leading cadres, the efficacy of various forms of protest and mass actions including the general strike, the Menshevik-Bolshevik split, class collaboration and attitudes towards liberals, the comparative advantages of pursuing a united front versus maintaining factional autonomy, reactions to the war, and the big one: whether in circumstances of state implosion to attempt to seize power and whether it was possible to eliminate capitalism in “backward” Russia.
“Ho hum,” the reader might say. Hasn't this been thrashed out many times before? To be sure, Blanc summons much of the historiography produced over several generations. But as an historical sociologist whose target audiences are both scholars and activists, he infuses discussion of the issues with both fresh insight and some bold assertions. These include but are not limited to the paramountcy of leaflets as opposed to other forms by which socialists communicated with workers; Mensheviks (in November 1905) as the source of the concept of democratic centralism; Rosa Luxemburg's intransigence and authoritarianism in dealing with rival Polish social democratic fractions; Vladimir Lenin's early (pre-1905) support for a “bloc with the progressive bourgeoisie” (175); “the fact that [in 1917] Bolsheviks saw themselves—and acted—as an orthodox Marxist current seeking to unite all class-struggle SDs” (281); the revolution of 1905 as more advanced in the sense of worker hegemony than that of 1917; and, rather than a zero-sum game, class and national liberation as mutually reinforcing.
Many of these points are related to the author's emphasis on the importance of Karl Kautsky to Russia's social democrats and positive reassessment of his revolutionary credentials. Far from being a “revisionist” Marxist, Blanc's Kautsky emerges as “the most influential theorist of a ruptural anti-capitalist approach” (285) within the Second International. Blanc also credits him with having overcome the tendency among social democrats (including Lenin and Lev Trotskii) before 1905 to treat workers’ revolution “as a discrete process occurring within the bounds of individual countries” (335) rather than as an interconnected whole. From this insight came the argument Kautsky made in 1904 that “proletarian revolution would likely break out in world capitalism's weakest link” (336). Here and in some other respects, the author is (explicitly) indebted to the “iconoclastic research” (13) and perseverance of Lars Lih.
The other, perhaps even greater, contribution this book makes is that by including the borderlands as an essential part of the story, it recasts Bolshevism as less exceptional or, from another point of view, less aberrant. Drawing on sources in eight (!) different languages, Blanc amply demonstrates the variety and complexity of positions advanced by different party factions, thereby better situating among a broader range of possibilities those adopted by the center. Or rather, the impression one gets is that there really was no “center.” Within this panoply, the Finnish social democrats easily win the prize for exceptionality. Like several other parties in the Baltic and Caucasus regions, Finnish socialists sought to—and briefly did—set up an anti-capitalist government during 1917–18. But the Finns were the only ones to do so within what had been a parliamentary system of government that Blanc characterizes as similar to that of imperial Germany. Immersion in parliamentary and trade union politics moderated most German SDs, but for reasons Blanc discusses at some length, their Finnish counterparts went in the other direction.
Revolutionary Social Democracy concludes by arguing that the cry for “all power to the soviets” never meant a socialist revolution but at best could provide the impetus for one that would be international in scope. More than a century on, the world is paying an ever-bigger price for “the borderlands . . . constituting more of a barrier than a bridge” (393) to the revolution's spread. The depredations of capitalism against which revolutionary social democrats fought in imperial Russia have only intensified and expanded, threatening nothing less than the survival of the species.
