As I’ve been documenting, philosophers of science Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos had harsh things to say about Marxists' response to the Russian Revolution of 1917. I think they were wrong, and wrong because they missed important changes to Marxist theory.
I have a teensy suspicion that not many of my readers will care about developments in Marxism between 1848 and 1917 and in the aftermath of the revolution, so I’ll separate that history out here.
Forthcoming:
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Popper and Lakatos said their fictional history showed Marxist theoreticians breaking the rules of critical rationalism, their “methodology of scientific research programmes.” What does a more accurate history show?
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Is there something about their methodology that biased them toward disregarding parts of the reality?
Disclaimer
As with my earlier post on blind spot 1, I have to start by saying that my understanding of Marxist theory is extremely shallow. In a way, that bolsters my case: if even I can see the problems with Popper and Lakatos' claims, imagine what someone who really understood Marxist theory and its history could do.
Nevertheless, I should warn you that this is yet another case of a techie who’s read a little bit about a topic and fancies he understands it. “I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.” – Sam Bankman-Fried, currently inmate #37244-510 at Terminal Island Federal Correction Institution. Railroaded by the booksellers cabal!
Prediction and observation
Both Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos claimed that Marxism “predicted that the first socialist revolution would take place in the industrially most developed society” (Lakatos). The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (Philosophical Papers: Volume 1), J. Worrall and G. Currie (eds.), 1978, pp. 4-5. The first unsquashed socialist revolution happened in 1917, in Russia – which was barely past feudalism and was no one’s idea of an industrial society. Consequently (they said), Marxism was a refuted scientific theory.
About the peasantry
The part of Marx’s theory in question is called stagism. Stagism held that it was necessary for feudal societies to change to ones dominated by the bourgeoisie (capitalists) before the proletariat (primarily factory workers) could have the revolution that established socialism.
You can’t have a class of factory workers until you have factories. To Marx, the proletariat is generated by the material conditions of industrial capitalism. The phrase “material conditions” signals that Marx is on one side of a philosophical debate between materialists and idealists. Materialists thinks the world of things and actions comes first and generates ideas, whereas idealists think the reverse. Marx focuses on how the new stuff that we need to keep living is created. These material conditions come in two kinds. The first is the means of production. That includes tools, techniques, factories, land, labor, capital, and so on. The second is non-voluntary relations between people or between people and things (relations of production). In a feudal society, the landowner has a relationship to the land (which he owns). The serf has a different relationship to that same land (that of a laborer). The serf and the landowner are also related: for example, if the serf wants to leave the land or get married, he must get permission from the landowner. These two kinds of material conditions determine society: political institutions, laws, culture, morality, which social classes exist and their character, and so on. Thereafter, the logic of capitalism will lead to the proletariat becoming poorer and more desperate until they attempt a revolution. That revolution might not succeed, but if it fails, another revolution will follow, and another, and… until one finally succeeds.
The reason the revolution would (tend to) happen first in an advanced industrial society is straightforward: that’s where the mass proletariat are. Can’t run a proletarian revolution without enough proletarians.
What Russia had was peasants, and Marxism had an uneasy relationship to the peasantry. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels write that the peasantry is doomed to “decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry.“ Daniel Finn, “Marxism and the Agrarian Question,” Jacobin, 2024-08-07. And that’s what happened in the industrial nations. (In the United States today, around 1% of people live on farms.) Marx believed the vast majority of those displaced people would join the proletariat rather than ascend to the bourgeoisie. After swelling the mass of the proletariat, they could contribute to a successful revolution when things got bad enough.
In 1917, the Russian peasantry was 80-85% of the population. That sure doesn’t seem like enough proletarians for a revolution. (In contrast, the US farm population in 1920 was 26% of the total.) Germany and England – the industrial powerhouses of Europe – probably had similar numbers. That is, there were still lots of peasants. My dad was born in a peasant village in German East Prussia in 1920. They plowed their fields with oxen.
However, Marx allowed that an existing peasantry could be something of a “force multiplier” for the revolutionary proletariat. If the latter could get the former to revolt with them, the revolution could still work. Nigel Harris “The Revolutionary Role of the Peasants,” 1969-December. However, the proletariat would have to be firmly in charge because the material conditions of peasant life didn’t allow the development of a coherent and self-conscious class. Also, peasant goals stopped well short of what Marxists wanted. Peasants would be happy enough with land reform and political liberty; they aspired to the political position of the “petty bourgeoisie” (small businessmen, shopkeepers, lawyers, etc.) rather than a full-on socialist revolution. This attitude toward the peasantry was shared by Lenin. V. I. Lenin, “The Proletariat and the Peasantry,” 1905-11-12.
So, for Russian revolutionaries prior to the failed 1905 revolution and the (arguably) successful 1917 one, the question was not so much “are we a bourgeois society?” – clearly not – but “have we industrialized to the point where there’s a self-aware proletarian class who are angry enough or desperate enough to gamble on a revolution (and can get the peasantry to contribute their bodies to the cause)?”
Lenin and company said “yes.”
The scope of the revolution
Would Marx have agreed with these Russian revolutionaries? Well, as of 1877, in a letter, he declared: Kevin B. Anderson, “Marx on Communal Villages as Loci of Revolution, in 19th C. Russia & Beyond,” 2025.
All sections of Russian society are in complete disintegration economically, morally, and intellectually. This time the revolution will begin in the East, hitherto the unbroken bulwark and reserve army of counterrevolution.
Two years later, he wrote: ibid.
I am convinced that the explosion of the revolution will begin this time not in the West but in the Orient, in Russia.
But how does this square with stagism? Marx was not interested in what later came to be called “socialism in one country.” He was hoping that Europe would have a reprise of the revolutions of 1848, except this time successfully. None of the 1848 revolutions produced a socialist state, though Franch flipped from a constitutional monarchy to the Second Republic.
Marx’s theory was that socialist revolutions would spread. Each newly-socialist country would support not-yet-successful revolutions in others. Class solidarity would trump nationalism. World War I was a huge disappointment in that regard. The failure of cross-national working-class unity is actually, I think, a much better example of a refuted Marxist prediction. Russia’s revolution would trigger other revolutions, even while it was still in progress. It would become “the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both [sites of revolution] complement each other.“ Marx and Engels in the preface to the 1882 Russian-language edition of The Communist Manifesto. Thereafter, the more advanced nations could help the not-ready-yet Russia transition from semi-feudalism to socialism, leapfrogging bourgeois rule.
Coping with the aftermath
The Russian revolution of 1917 did indeed spark attempts at revolution in other countries, but they fizzled. My memory of reading Kotkin’s Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 is that many of the Russian Bolsheviks realized they were in quite the pickle. There were no proper socialist states to support them in their very non-optimal situation, and it didn’t look like any would appear. Worse, the capitalist regimes were all around them and (as had been predicted) were acting aggressively to take down the barely established state. In 1918, if there was one thing both sides in World War I agreed on, it was that they needed to send troops and materiel to the non-Bolshevik side of the Russian Civil War that the revolution had kicked off.
Leon Trotsky wanted to double down on exporting the revolution (in order to midwife the needed supportive states), but Josef Stalin outmaneuvered him and solidified Soviet doctrine as socialism in one country. The USSR would go it alone.
In effect, Stalin said: “We are going to produce an advanced industrial state as fast as we can. We don’t have the material basis for a proper Marxist revolution, so we need to create one – and fast, before the capitalists destroy us.”
Props to a monster: it worked.