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Beyond the Spontaneity-Consciousness Paradigm: “Class Instinct” as a Promising Category of Historical Analysis
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
Abstract
Anna Krylova questions whether the spontaneity-consciousness paradigm, the standard interpretive approach toward Bolshevik thought in the field of Soviet studies, offers an exhaustive account of Bolshevik discourse. To do that she examines the centrality of V I. Lenin's What Is to Be Done? (1902) in Bolshevik thought and points to the 1905 revolution as the formative event in the Bolshevik conception of the worker. Krylova introduces an overlooked Bolshevik notion of “class instinct” (klassovyiinstinkt, klassovoe chut'ie) and argues that the notion of “class instinct” centrally informed the Bolshevik vision of the worker, structuring her article as a dialogue between scholars of Soviet history and their historical subjects. In the conclusion, she suggests the consequences that such a broadened notion of the Bolshevik conception of proletarian identity—beyond the spontaneity-consciousness paradigm—has for interpretations of Bolshevik and Stalinist culture. In “A Paradigm Lost?” his response to Krylova's essay, Reginald E. Zelnik welcomes Krylova's “class instinct” thesis as a fresh enrichment of and supplement to the spontaneity-consciousness paradigm, but, he argues, if we place this language in its early historical context, we cannot avoid the conclusion that with or without the introduction of “instinct,” Lenin and the Bolsheviks still had to face the same kind of contradictions in their conceptualization of the role of workers in the revolutionary movement. The revolutionary value of particular consciousness or particular instinct still had to be judged in accordance with an external point of reference, the nature of which remained and remains elusive. Igal Halfin, in his response, “Between Instinct and Mind: The Bolshevik View of the Proletarian Self,” argues that the Bolshevik notion of the self indeed deserves careful scrutiny. Focusing on how the official Soviet language characterized the interaction between workers’ bodies and workers’ souls, Halfin argues that the synthesis of the affective and the cerebral was key to this construction of the New Man in the 1920s and 1930s.
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References
First, I would like to thank Reggie Zelnik who provided support and inspiration for this article from its vague conception to its present form through many e-mail discussions, much critique, and helpful editing. Special thanks should go to Chad Bryant, who read, edited, and discussed the article at the moment when it was most needed. I also owe much to the stimulating intellectual community at the Institut für osteuropäische Geschichte und Landeskunde at Tübingen University where I spent the semester during which this article was written, especially to my colleagues Dietrich Beyrau, Klaus Gestwa, Dietrich Geyer, and Jan Plamper whose interest in my work, extensive discussion of my ideas, and insightful comments have shaped my engagement with Bolshevik thought. I would also like to thank colleagues and friends who read and critiqued different versions of the article: Jeffrey Brooks, Michael David-Fox, Mark Edele, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Peter Holquist, Oleg Khlevnyuk, Aleksei Kozhevnikov, Thomas Lindenberger, Lynn Mally, Galina Rylkova, Daniel Todes, and Serhy Yekelchyk.
1 Work outside the influence of the spontaneity-consciousness paradigm exceeds the focus of this article. In this regard, one needs, first, to point to the scholarship on Russian labor history that pursued a project of critically evaluating Bolshevik conceptions of workers, see Zelnik, Reginald E., Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia: The Factory Workers ofSt. Petersburg, 1855-1870 (Stanford, 1971)Google Scholar; Zelnik, , A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: TlieAutobiography of Semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov (Stanford, 1986)Google Scholar; Diane Koenker, MoscowWorkers and the 1917 Revolution (Princeton, 1981); Engelstein, Laura, Moscow, 1905: Working Class Organization and Political Conflict (Stanford, 1982)Google Scholar; Siegelbaum, Lewis H. and Suny, Ronald Grigor, eds., Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class, and Identity (Ithaca, 1994)Google Scholar. For an example of scholarship on Russian Social Democracy that carried its analysis outside the dominant paradigm, see, for example, Wildman, Allan K., The Making of a Workers'Revolution:Russian Social Democracy, 1891-1903 (Chicago, 1967)Google Scholar.
2 Wolfe, Bertram D., Three Who Made a Revolution: A Biographical History (New York, 1964), 156, 157Google Scholar. For another early study of Lenin that used Whatls to BeDone fas a source of Lenin's long-term political thinking, see Shub, David, Lenin: A Biography (Garden City, N.Y, 1948)Google Scholar.
3 In What Is to BeDone? Fainsod saw “elitist” and “anti-democratic” tendencies; see Fainsod, Merle, How Russia Is Ruled (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), 39–40 Google Scholar. Treadgold interpreted Lenin's 1902 booklet through the lens of a “fear” of liberal ideology; Treadgold, Donald W., Lenin and His Rivals: The Struggle for Russia's Future, 1898-1906 (New York, 1955), 92–93 Google Scholar. Haimson singled out What Is to BeDone? as the work containing the “basic tenets of the Bolshevik philosophy“; see Haimson, Leopold H., The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), 192 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 For “fear” of spontaneity, see Haimson, Russian Marxists, 215, 121, 137; for “ideological tutelage” of consciousness, see ibid., 120, 218, 188, 147, 206.
5 See Meyer, Alfred G., Leninism (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), pt. 1 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Leonard Schapiro defines What Is to Be Done? as the text of “the basic principles of Lenin's system” and bases his interpretation of the booklet on two citations regarding workers’ inability to reach class consciousness on their own. Schapiro, , The Communist Partyof the Soviet Union (London, 1960), 38 Google Scholar. John L. H. Keep refers to What Is to Be Done? as the “bible of a new revolutionary creed” and interprets Lenin's concept of a “revolutionary elite as the custodian of proletarian consciousness.” Keep, The Rise of Social Democracyin Russia (Oxford, 1963), 94. Richard Pipes posits What Is to Be Done? as the defining text of the Bolshevik worldview and explores its roots in the pre-What Is to Be Done? period. Pipes, , Social Democracy and the St. Petersburg Labor Movement, 1885-1897 (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), vii Google Scholar.
7 Keep, Rise of Social Democracy in Russia, vi.
8 The work of the decade culminated in several conferences and subsequently edited volumes. Two volumes in particular—Revolutionary Russia, ed. Richard Pipes and Oskar Anweiler (Cambridge, Mass., 1968) and Leonard Schapiro and Peter Reddaway, eds., Lenin. The Man, The Theorist, The Leader: A Reappraisal (Boulder, Colo., 1967/1987)— brought together internationally renowned teams of scholars and demonstrated an international acceptance of the Haimsonian interpretation of Bolshevik thought; see E. H. Carr, “Historical Turning Point: Marx, Lenin, Stalin,” in Revolutionary Russia; in the same volume also see Richard Pipes, “The Origins of Bolshevism: The Intellectual Evolution of Young Lenin” and comments by Isaiah Berlin. Also see Leonard Schapiro, “Lenin after Fifty Years,” in Schapiro and Reddaway, eds., Lenin; in the same volume, see also George Katkov, “Lenin as Philosopher” and J. C. Rees, “Lenin and Marxism.“
9 Halfin, Igal, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in RevolutionaryRussia (Pittsburgh, 2000), 120 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Fitzpatrick, Sheila, “The Civil War as a Formative Experience,” in Gleason, Abbott, Kenez, Peter, and Stites, Richard, eds., Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Orderin the RussianRevolution (Bloomington, 1985), 73 Google Scholar.
11 In Gleason, Kenez, and Stites, eds., Bolshevik Culture, see Abbott Gleason's “Introduction“; David Jarovsky's “Cultural Revolution and the Fortress Mentality,” in which the author explores the roots of Enlightenment distrust of the masses and simultaneous enthusiasm over the transformability of human nature through European and Russian contexts of the nineteenth century; and Robert Tucker's “Lenin's Bolshevism and a Culture in the Making,” the contribution that specifically dealt with What Is to Be Done? and its implications for postrevolutionary society and culture. For an example of cultural analysis inspired by the consciousness problematic, see the contributions by Peter Kenez and James C. McClelland in the same volume.
12 As the cohort of the 1970s moved to the period of the 1920s, it further expanded the historical applicability of the spontaneity-consciousness paradigm. See, for example, another collaborative effort in which the “category of class consciousness” guided much of the interpretation of Bolshevik policies: Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch, and Stites, Richard, eds., Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture (Bloomington, 1991)Google Scholar.
13 Clark, Katerina, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago, 1981)Google Scholar. Clark, in her introduction, also mentions that the ideal Soviet man was to result from the ultimate synthesis of spontaneity and consciousness, but this observation did not inform her reading of Soviet literature.
14 See, for example, the 1991 volume on Stalinist culture edited by Hans Gunther, The Culture of the Stalin Period (New York, 1990). John McCannon and Karen Petrone, who directly draw on Clark's interpretation of Stalinist culture, acknowledge the impact of Clark's Soviet Novel; see McCannon, , Red Arctic: Polar Exploration and the Myth of the North inthe Soviet Union, 1932-1939 (Oxford, 1998), esp. 105–7Google Scholar; Petrone, , Life Has Become More Joyous,Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Bloomington, 2000), esp. 61–62 Google Scholar.
15 Kotkin, Stephen, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995), 20 Google Scholar.
16 Peter Holquist, “'Information Is die Alpha and Omega of Our Work': Bolshevik Surveillance in Its Pan-European Context,” Journal of Modern History 69 (September 1997); Hoffmann, David L. and Kotsonis, Yanni, eds., Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices (New York, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; David L. Hoffmann and Peter Holquist, Cultivating the Masses: The ModernSocial State in Russia, 1914-1941 (Ithaca, 2002); Weiner, Amir, Making Sense of War: TheSecond World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, 2001)Google Scholar; David-Fox, Michael, Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918-1929 (Ithaca, 1997)Google Scholar; Gorsuch, Anne E., Youth in Revolutionary Russia: Enthusiasts, Bohemians, Delinquents (Bloomington, 2000)Google Scholar; Clark, Katerina, Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1995)Google Scholar; Jochen Hellbeck, “Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin-Era Autobiographical Texts” and Igal Halfin, “Looking into the Oppositionists’ Souls: Inquisition Communist Style,” both in Russian Review 60, no. 3 (July 2001); Fitzpatrick, Sheila, “Ascribing Class,“ Journal of Modern History 65, no. 4 (1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Fitzpatrick, , Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Lifein Extraordinary Times. Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York, 1999)Google Scholar.
17 The literature on the constitution of the western intellectual tradition is vast. For an overview, see Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1989)Google Scholar; for a feminist critique, see Poovey, Mary, A History of the Modern Fact:Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on scientific influences in philosophy and human sciences, see Charles Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge, Mass., 1985); Ross, Dorothy, ed., Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences,1870-1930 (Baltimore, 1994)Google Scholar; for a classic discussion of positivist philosophy, see Kolakowski, Leszek, Die Philosophie des Positivismus (Munich, 1971)Google Scholar. The best analysis of the Bolshevik philosophical and political agenda as a derivative of the mid-nineteenth-century European shift toward a conscious remaking of society can be found in E. H. Carr, “A Historical Turning Point: Marx, Lenin, Stalin,” in Revolutionary Russia.
18 The years 1883 and 1895 span the period of Georgii Plekhanov's prolific writing on Marxism, a period that was denned by two works of crucial significance among Russian Social Democrats: Sotsializm i politicheskaia bor'ba (1883) and K voprosu o razvitiimonistic.heskogo vzgliada na istoriiu (1895).
19 Plekhanov, Georgii, Sotsializm i politicheskaia bor'ba, in Plekhanov, , Izbrannye filosofskieproizvedeniia (Moscow, 1956), 1:69Google Scholar; for more on “positivistic naturalism” and Plekhanov's “necessitarian interpretation of Marxism,” see Walicki, Andrzej, The Controversyover Capitalism: Studies in the Social Philosophy of the Russian Populists (Oxford, 1969) ,31,51, 153–65Google Scholar. On scientism and positivist traditions in Russia, see Todes, Daniel Philip, Darwinwithout Mallhus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian Evolutionary Thought (Oxford, 1989)Google Scholar; Todes, Pavlov's Physiology Factory: Experiment, Interpretation, Laboratory Enterprise (Baltimore, 2002); on the strong emphasis on natural sciences at Russian universities starting with the 1840s, see Venturi, Franco, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movementsin Nineteenth Century Russia (London, 1960)Google Scholar; on Comptean positivism and the place of Charles Darwin's and Herbert Spencer's writings in Russian educated society, see Pipes, Richard, Struve, Liberal on the Left, 1870-1905 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 30–31, 55-69Google Scholar.
20 Regarding popularization of Marx's theories for a larger intellectual community and the phase in the history of Marxism in Russia called “legal Marxism,” see Pipes, Struve,Liberal on the Left, chap. 6.
21 The conflict between the romanticist and scientific Weltanschauungen pervaded the radical intelligentsia throughout the 1880s and the 1890s. See Aksel'rod's, Pavel description of his conversion to Marxist scientism in Perezhitoe i peredumannoe (written 1923; Cambridge, Mass., 1975), 402–6Google Scholar; also Martov, L., Zapiski Sotsial-Demokrata (Cambridge, Eng., 1975), chap. 3, esp. 64–65, 84-85Google Scholar.
22 The failure to recognize the importance of the Russian working class was endemic not only to the revolutionary movement but to the entire society. See Jeremiah Schneiderman's discussion of the place and understanding of the “working question” in Russian society in the second part of the nineteenth century in Schneiderman, Sergei Zubatov andRevolutionary Marxism: The Struggle for the Working Class in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, 1976).
23 For the populist thinker Nikolai Mikhailovskii, the peasantry's distinctiveness resided in the nonalienated way of life in the Russian commune, which preserved the individual's authentic wholeness; for “revolt-ism” (buntarstvo) advocate Mikhail Bakunin, it derived from the instinctual, primordial energy that made the peasantry a natural revolutionary. For a concise discussion of the differences and similarities in conceptualizations of the peasantry, historical processes, and revolutionary agendas among such Russian populist leaders as N. K. Mikhailovskii, P. L. Lavrov, P. N. Tkachev, and M. Bakunin, see A. Walicki, Controversy over Capitalism, 34-56; as well as Venturi, Roots of Revolution; and Mendel, Arthur P., Dilemmas of Progress in Tsarist Russia: Legal Marxism and Legal Populism (Cambridge, Mass., 1961)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24 Plekhanov, G. V., Russkii rabochii v revoliutsionnom dvizhenii (1892), in Plekhanov, Sochineniia (Moscow, 1922), 3:127Google Scholar.
25 Plekhanov, Sotsializm i politicheskaia bor'ba, 108.
26 According to Plekhanov, workers could “understand abstract questions” and they knew “Ricardo though they have never even seen the title page of his collected works.“ Ibid., 89-90.
27 Nearly a decade later, in his 1892 memoirs, Plekhanov demonstrated his sustaining faith in the rationality of the working class; see Plekhanov, Russkii rabochii v revoliutsionnomdvizhenii, 127, 131-32, 140.
28 Over the decade, the “conscious worker” advanced from an individual phenomenon into the “Russian working class.” For one of the first famous cases of individual consciousness among workers, see G. Plekhanov, “Predislovie k chetyrem recham rabochikh,” malin Plekhanov, Sochineniia, 3:20; also Aksel'rod, P., “Politicheskoe probuzhdenie russkikh rabochikh i ikh pervomaiskii prazdnik 1891 goda” (1892), in Aksel'rod, P. B., Rabochii klassi revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1907), 25, 31Google Scholar. For one of the best Social- Democratic documents that granted Russian workers their recognition as class conscious en masse, see Doklad predstavlennyi delegatsiei Russk. Sotsial Demokratov Mezhdunarodnomu sotsialisticheskomurabochemu kongressu v Londone v 1896 (Geneva, 1896), 5.
29 For Plekhanovite undercurrents in the writings of the other two major leaders of Russian Social Democracy, Iulii Martov and Aleksandr Bogdanov, see Martov, Iu., “Vsegda v men'shinstve: O sovremennykh zadachakh russkoi sotsialisticheskoi intelligentsii,” Zaria, 1901, nos. 2-3:201,197–98Google Scholar. Here Martov argues that the “development” of the clear consciousness of the proletariat is the crucial task of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers Party and a central aspect of working-class identity. Aleksandr Bogdanov also did not escape the influence of the 1880s’ Marxist discourse. Contrary to Marx's reservations, he saw an unproblematic connection between the workers’ collectivist consciousness and their workplace, Bogdanov, A., A Short Course of Economic Science (Westport, Conn., 1979), 276, 375Google Scholar.
30 Lenin, V., “Ot redaktsii” (1900), in Bol'shevistskaiapechat': Sbornik materialov. VypuskI (1895-1903) (Moscow, 1959), 122 Google Scholar; for Lenin's image of a worker persistently striving for political knowledge, see V. Lenin, “S chego nachat'?” (Iskra, May 1901), ibid., 132-33; for Lenin's argument for the necessary transformation of a “modest peasant into a conscious worker” and for the worker's ability to “see” and to arrive at “conviction,” see V. Lenin, “Tsennoe priznanie” (Iskra, July 1901), ibid., 136-38. For Lenin's earliest and most unproblematic analysis of the development of workers’ class consciovisness in the course of their strike experiences, see Lenin, V., “O stachkakh” (written 1899; first published 1924), in Lenin, , Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 51 h ed., 55 vols. (Moscow, 1955-58), 4:288–98Google Scholar.
31 For the first critique of positivism and Marxism that originated with the 1860s' and 1870s’ revival of the neo-Kantian tradition and targeted the positivist theory of knowledge that presupposed the mind's ability to access reality directly, see Kohnke, Klaus Christian, ed., Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus: Die deutsche Universitdtsphilosophie zwischen Idealismus und Positivismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1986)Google Scholar; see also Pipes, Struve, Liberalon the Left, 53-55. Walicki also argued that “Marxist revisionism appeared in Russia so early, earlier than in Germany.” Walicki, Controversy over Capitalism, 170. See also Kindersley, Richard, The First Russian Revisionists: A Study of “Legal Marxism” in Russia (Oxford, 1962)Google Scholar. For a contemporary critical analysis of the revisionist challenge, see Potresov, A., “Evoliutsiia obshchestvenno-politicheskoi mysli v predrevoliutsionnuiu epokhu,” in Martov, L., Maslov, P., and Potresov, A., eds., Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie v Rossii v nachaleXX-go veka (St. Petersburg, 1909), 1:563–89Google Scholar.
32 Started in 1899 by Petr Struve and Mikhail Tugan-Baranovskii, the journal Nachalo became a stronghold of Russian revisionism. For the first revisionist work, see Petr Struve, “Protiv Ortodoksii” (1899) and “Die Marxistische Theorie der sozialen Entwicklung“ (1899) and Tugan-Baranovskii, “Osnovnye oshibki abstraktnoi teorii kapitalizma Marksa“ (1899), all discussed in Pipes, Struve, Liberal on the Left, 221-25. The term embourgeoisement was coined by another ex-Marxist, N. Berdiaev; see Potresov, “Evoliutsiia obshchestvennopoliticheskoi mysli,” 590-91.
33 A. Martynov, “Glavneishie momenty v istorii russkago marksizma,” in Martov, Maslov, and Potresov, eds., Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie v Rossii v nachale XX-go veka, 2:319.
34 Lenin, Chto delat“? in Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 6:36, 40-41.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid., 6:72-73; see also 6:63, 89.
37 V. Lenin, “Doklad ob ob“edinitel'nom s“ezde RSDRP” (1906), “Revoliutsiia uchit“ (1905), and “Uroki Moskovskikh sobytii” (1905), all in Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 13:33,11:133, 11:140, and 11:376.
38 Lenin, V., “Dve taktiki Sotsial-Demokratov v demokraticheskoi revoliutsii” (1905), in Lenin, , Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 11:3, 4 Google Scholar. See also “Uroki Moskovskikh sobytii,” where Lenin refers to the working class as the “foremost class in the struggle for liberty,” 11:377. In “Revoliutsiia uchit,” the workers figure as the revolutionary class and the “advanced class,” 11:135, 137. For the continuation of the essentialist discourse of the “true” and “real” nature of classes, see V. Lenin, “Armiia naroda,” ibid., 13:282.
39 For Lenin, the workers’ decisive and energizing role in the events of 1905 served as a strong argument against revisionist critique. Lenin spent much time in his writings in 1905 and 1906 refuting Bernstein by relying on the events of the 1905 Revolution; see Lenin's report on the 1906 United Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party in “Doklad ob ob˝edinitel'nom s˝ezde RSDRP,” 13:351.
40 Lenin, “Revoliutsiia uchit,” 11:140; Lenin, “Uroki Moskovskogo vosstaniia,” in Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 13:396-70; “Uroki Moskovskikh sobytii,” 11:387.
41 Lenin, “Dve taktiki,” 11:5; Lenin, “Uroki Moskovskogo vosstaniia,” 13:178, 172.
42 Lenin, “Dve taktiki,” 11:17-18.
43 Lenin, “Uroki Moskovskogo vosstaniia,” 13:173. Lenin also described the transition that occurred as “breaking out” of the working-class movement “with elemental and irresistible force” from “these narrow bonds” of the strike struggle towards the “highest form of struggle—an uprising,” ibid., 13:171. For more on “class instinct,” “revolutionary creativity,” and the “senses” (chut'ie) and “feeling” (chuvstvovat’) of the working class, see Lenin's articles “Obostrenie polozheniia v Rossii,” “Pervaia pobeda revoliutsii,” “Nashi zadachi i sovet rabochikh deputatov,” “Rospusk dumy i zadachi proletariata,” and “Pered burei,” all in Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 12:24, 12:32, 12:65, 13:315 and 325, and 13:337; see also his articles “Tsar’ batiushka i barrikady” and “Revoliutsionnaia armiia i revoliutsionnoe pravitel'stvo,” both in Bolshevistskaia pechat': Sbornik materialov. Vypusk II(1905-1907) (Moscow, 1960), 28 and 98.
44 Plekhanov, Sotsializm i politicheskaia bor'ba, 51-52. See, for example, Martov's notions of workers’ identity that did not allow for anything but a rational actor identical with other rational actors in society; Martov, “Vsegda v men'shinstve.“
45 “Ot izdatelei” (Rabotnik, 1896, nos. 1-2), in Bol'shevistskaia pechat', Vypusk I, 32. The 1898 Manifesto of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party captured the recurrent contradiction of die Social-Democratic discourse when, on the one hand, it hailed the transition of the Russian working class into its conscious “epoch” and, on the other hand, it announced that “all” workers’ organizations in Russia had “always conducted their activities in the spirit” of Marxist thought, whether they acted “consciously or unconsciously,“ in “Manifest Rossiiskoi Sotsial-Demokraticheskoi rabochei partii” (Listok rabotnika, 8 June 1898), in Bol'shevistskaia pechat', Vypusk I, 66-67. The press of the economist movement, with its focus on proletarian “energy,” “inner strength,” and “revolutionary spirit,” constitutes, Uien, a development of a latent Social-Democratic vision of the working class. Martynov, A., “Oblichitel'naia literatura i proletarskaia bor'ba,” Rabochee delo, no. 10 (10 September 1901): 38, 40–42, 49, 52Google Scholar.
46 Aksel'rod, “Politicheskoe probuzhdenie russkikh rabochikh i ikh pervomaiskii prazdnik 1891 goda,” 28-29.
47 Lenin, Chto delat“? 40, also 71.
48 I do not mean to imply that the categories of “instinct” and “spontaneity” had acquired clearly differentiated meanings by 1902-1903, with the former implying acting in accordance with history and the latter implying an anarchic response. Throughout the pre-1917 period, the two terms were often used interchangeably, with the meaning to be derived from the context.
49 See Lunacharskii, A. V., “Osnovy positivnoi estetiki,” in Lunacharskii, A. V., Sobraniesochinenii, 8 vols. (Moscow, 1963-67), 7:52–56, 71Google Scholar; see also Lunacharskii, “Dachniki“ (1905 review), ibid., 2:28; A. M. Kollontai, “K voprosu o klassovoi bor'be,” in Kollontai, hbrannyestat'iirechi (Moscow, 1972), 20-21, 24. On neo-positivist trends at the turn of the century in Russian and Social-Democratic literature and philosophic writings, see Lifshits, M. A., “Vmesto wedeniia v estetiku A. V. Lunacharskogo,” in Lunacharskii, , Sobranie sochinenii, 7:587–613 Google Scholar.
50 Lunacharskii, A. V., “Samodovol'nye fliugera” (Vpered, no. 6, 1 February 1905), in Bol'shevistskaia pechat'. Vypusk II (1905-1907), 44 Google Scholar.
51 In “Korotko o nashikh raznoglasiiakh” (1905), Stalin repeatedly restates Lenin's dictum from What Is to BeDone? that “the working class is spontaneously striving toward socialism.“ He attributes Lenin's failure to deal with the statement in detail to Lenin's disinterest in “proving what has already been proven,” in Stalin, I. V., Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1953), 1:98,103, 104, 107 Google Scholar.
52 G. Zinov'ev, “Chto zhe dal'she?” (Sotsial-Demokrat, 1911), and Kamenev, L., “Dve partii: Predislovie avtora k pervomu izdaniiu,” both in Zinov'ev, G. and Kamenev, L., Otrotskizme (Moscow, 1925), 97 and 129Google Scholar; Sverdlov, la.M., “Proklamatsiia po povodu smerti L. N. Tolstova” (1910), in Sverdlov, la. M., Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow, 1957), 32 Google Scholar; for more on the “unconscious guidance” of class interests, see A. M. Kollontai, “Vvedenie k knige ‘Sotsial'nye osnovy zhenskogo voprosa’ (1907),” in Kollontai, Izbrannye stal'i i rechi, 78; and Trotsky, L., “My Speech before the Court (1907),” in Trotsky, , 1905 (New York, 1971), 392 Google Scholar.
53 In 1917 the logic, scenarios, and actors learned in 1905 reappeared. “True instincts of the oppressed classes” helped Lenin analyze the revolutionary situation and counteract the “insufficient class consciousness” of workers; see V. Lenin, “Znachenie bratan'ia (The significance of fraternization) (1917),” “O dvoevlastii (The dual power) (1917),” and “Uroki krizisa (Lessons of the crisis) (1917),” all in Lenin, Polnoe sobraniesochinenii, 31:459-61, 31:145-48, and 31:324-27. For more on the latent strivings and talents of the working masses after October 1917, see Lenin, “Kak organizovat’ sorevnovanie (How to organize competition) (December 1917),” in Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 35:195-205.
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