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> Some time ago, someone posted something on this list along the lines
> of "Wouldn't it be nice if we actually knew somethign about the class
> origins of [left leaders or something like that]." I think the
> specific context was Leninism.
>
> I remember noting at the time that at least some study had been done,
> but I couldnt' remember the title. Thanks to the power of Telnet, I
> can now refer whoever it was to:
>
> _The Roots of Russian Communism_, by David Lane (1968).
>
> (This is "David Stuart Lane" if you're searching a catalog.)
>
> Despite its pretentious title, this slim volume is actually an analysis of
> Tsarist police records of political arrests and
> surveillance from 1897 to 1907, the period of differentiation of the
> Russian Social Democratic Labour Party into different trends and
> eventually into different parties. Since the Tsarist empire placed
> people's class or estate on their passports, Lane is able to show
> exactly what kind of people and of what nationality were involved in
> at least those left-wing activities which drew the attention of the
> police.
>
> As you might expect, given the high level of illiteracy, 12-hour days
> in industry, etc., typical of Tsarist Russia, the bulk of visible
> leaders in the movement were "intellectuals" of one sort or another.
>
> Lane demonstrates that the demarcation between Bolshevik and
> Menshevik intellectuals roughly followed the lines of their class
> origins. The Mensheviks were more likely to be "townsmen", with ties
> to bourgeois (I'm using this term in a descriptive sense, not a
> pejorative one) liberal circles. The Bolsheviks were more likely to
> be from the "gentry" or civil service "nobility", people who had
> severed their ties to the old Tsarist society from which they came
> but had none to the emerging capitalist society.
>
> By 1907, this split at the leadership level had also led to a
> differentiation at the rank-and-file level. The Bolsheviks were the
> dominant force among Great-Russian workers, in the newly emerging
> industrial areas, and in the Baltic region. The Mensheviks dominated
> among sectors of the intelligentsia and in Georgia and Armenia.
>
> If my memory of reading Lane's book is right (it's been some years), he leaves
> off in 1907
> on the eave of the reunification of the two factions, but shows that
> the seeds of permanent split were present already in their
> differentiated leadership and base. I don't think this book deals
> with the question of the "tertiary" nationalities (to coin a phrase),
> but I may be wrong. In any case, the Bolshevik workers of
> Great-Russian origin were the later organizers of, for instance,
> Turkish and Iranian immigrant workers in the Baku oil fields who the
> Mensheviks couldn't organize because of their links to Armenian
> chauvinism. (Cf. the earlier discussion about "identity politics".)
>
> In 1913, Lenin also wrote a very brief piece on the changing composition of
> dissent in Russia. The article is entitled "The Role of Social
> Estates and Classes in the Liberation Movement" (V.I. Lenin,
> Collected Works, Vol. 19, pp. 328-331. This is a statistical
> analysis of the background of persons charged with "crimes against
> the state" from 1827 to 1908, drawing on a law journal article not
> cited. Lenin's primary interest in the growing involvement of the
> peasantry in protest movements (and the need to increase it), as well
> as the decreasing role of the nobility (a term which in Russia
> encompassed a lot more people than we would think of in more Western
> context)--from 76% of those arrested in the period 1827-46 to 9.1% of
> those arrested in 1905 to 1908.
>
> Similarly with occupatinal statistics (availabel only later). In
> 1884-90, three-quarters of those charged with state crimes were drawn
> from either the "liberal professions and students" or "no defiin8ite
> occupation or no occupation". By 1905-08, that had dropped to 22.9%
> for professions and students, 5.5% for declasse elements.
>
> Not sure exactly what value this is to anyone, but it seem to me to
> an important part of figuring out what we've done, where we've come
> from, where we're going.
>
> Tom
>
> Tom Condit
> <tomcon...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> 1801-A Cedar Street
> Berkeley, California 94703
> 510-845-7251
The Internationale
* Subject: The Internationale
* From: Tom Condit <tomcon...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
* Date: Tue, 23 May 1995 09:01:53 -0700
I have always assumed that Pottier's formulation "the
International shall be [is "become" a better translation?] the
human race" to mean that he expected the whole of humanity to be
brought into the struggle, and to see a merging of "party" and
"class". Different translations have this as "international
party," "international soviet", "international working class",
"industrial union", etc., depending on the politics of the person
involved. I've always liked the formulation "the international
working class shall free the human race" because it doesn't imply
that everyone in the world is or will become a worker, but does
say that all will be freed with the end of capitalism (even the
capitalists, who are presently chained to their bank accounts).
Daniel DeLeon's translation, which I haven't seen in many years,
has (aside from DeLeon's usual wooden prose) a line about "galley
slaves" which I'm willing to bet is directly from the original.
The version I posted on this list on May Day is based on the
translation by Charles H. Kerr, as mutated through the I.W.W.
songbook. (The line "let us stand in our place" is Marsha
Feinland's resolution of the perennial struggling with the use of
"his" as generic for all humanity. Many contemporary versions
have the "politically correct" but grammatically hideous "let
each stand in their place".) Both DeLeon and Kerr may very well
have known Pottier personally, since he emigrated to the United
States after the Commune according to an earlier post whose
author I've forgotten (Chris Burford?).
In the discussion of the Internationale, I don't quite understand
the statements from several people about the working class being
smaller than it was in Marx's time. It's far larger and a far
greater percentage of the population. The tens of millions of
French peasants and English countrymen have been
"proletarianized", the millions of servants who made up the
single largest occupational group in 19th-century European cities
have been replaced by laundromats and pizza deliverymen, and
certainly artisanal production has been reduced to a minimum.
Moreover, the wage-labor system is now predominant in the
majority of countries, rather than being confined to Europe and
some of its colonies as it was in Marx's time. The largest
single strike in history was a general strike in Brazil a few
years ago which encompassed 20 million workers. A smaller
working class? Maybe in university towns.
Tom Condit
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