Steinberg argues, after Rancière, that the worker-writers’ difference, their ‘oddity,’ in fact serves from the margins to illuminate the experience of the class more brightly than a study of
50 Ibid, p. 311-2.
51 The quotation is from J. Rancière, The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth Century France (Philadelphia, 1989), p. 20.
40 the aimed the ‘depths of working-class culture.’52 Examination of Alekseev’s case shows that this idea too – like the workers’ ‘right to speak for themselves’ – was part of the revolutionary doctrine that influenced self-educated workers and their compositions from the 1870s to the 1920s and 1930s. Evidence suggests that ‘class consciousness’ and ‘workers’ speech’ were constituent elements in a special concept of workers’ individuality, formed in part by deduction from ideological tenets, through interactions between workers and intelligenty, and in part by political exigencies, i.e. the destruction of the workers’ circles in the period 1874-6. A passing comment of Walter Benjamin’s - that, in the Greek, the word ‘martyr’ also meant ‘witness’53 – will be the starting point in explaining this idea and some of its historiographical consequences.
Made in a review of Anna Seghers’ novel of working-class life, Die Rettung (The Rescue), Benjamin’s discussion and the comment cited shed light on Alekseev’s ‘individuality,’ its significance to the Russia working-class movement, and its place in the working-class history of which his writings (his speech and letters) were a small part. Die Rettung depicts a mining village plagued by unemployment, showing the everyday lives of working men and their families transformed: their days of hard labour were broken up by evenings of the ‘the bliss of doing nothing’; unemployment gives the torment of ‘idleness without work’: ‘they are subjected to the passage of time like an incubus that impregnates them against their will. They do not give birth, but they have the eccentric desires of a pregnant woman.’54 Benjamin discusses the representation of working-class experience and its difficulties. ‘Attempts by writers to report on the lives and living conditions of the proletariat’ (he begins) ‘have been hindered by prejudices impossible to overcome in one day.’
According to one of the most persistent of them, the proletarian is a ‘simple man of the people,’ contrasted not so much with the educated man as with the individuated member of a higher class. To see in the oppressed person a child of nature was the stock reaction of the rising bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century. After that class had triumphed, it ceased to contrast the oppressed, whose place it had now ceded to the proletariat, with feudal degeneracy, and henceforth set them in opposition to its own finely shaded bourgeois individuality. The form in which this was manifest was the bourgeois novel; its subject was the incalculable fate of the individual…55
52 Steinberg, ‘The Injured and Insurgent Self,’ p. 310 and 312; Rancière, Nights of Labor, viii-ix.
53 W. Benjamin, ‘A Chronicle of Germany’s Unemployed: Anna Seghers’ novel Die Rettung,’ Selected Writings, v.
4, 1938-40, H. Eiland and M. J. Jennings (ed.), translated by E. Jephcott and others (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), p.
129.
54 Ibid, p. 127-8.
55 Ibid, p. 127.
In contrast, in an effort to represent working-class experience adequately, Die Rettung puts itself apart from the ‘general law of the novel…[Its] medium - the character’s fate - is absent.’56 What, then, organises a novel that rejects ‘finely shaded bourgeois individuality,’ yet retains individuals and their experiences at its centre? The work contrasts reportage and theories of unemployment to the workers’ experiences of it, each abstract political or economic relation like ‘a root structure’ (‘…wherever the author gently lifts them from the ground, we find adhering to them the humus of private relationships: neighbourly, erotic, familial…’). Each anecdote or impression ‘reveals more about unemployment than any official inquiry could.’ In contrast to the ‘individuated member of a higher class’and the ‘simple man of the people,’ hazy and indistinct, these characters are witnesses and martyrs: ‘They are martyrs in a very literal sense (martyr, in Greek, means ‘witness’). The report on them is a chronicle…The book is interspersed with many stories waiting for a listener.’57 The martyr is a lightning rod for oppression aimed at victims the oppressor conceals. The shock of oppression concentrated upon one person lights up the individual for a moment, by only to reflect to his fellow victims and sympathisers suffering that is collective. Working-class suffering, softened for those outside by the abstraction of its victims, is apprehended better in the testimony of individuals whose experience is both of the class and personal. Seglers’ representation of individuals does not describe the ‘fate’ of a person around whom episodes and characters are arranged, the formation of a character and a plot at the centre rounded off in a neat ending: tragedy, fortune, death. The working-class witness, representing in himself a condition that has no ‘incalculable fate’ or end, calls also for emancipation or redemption.58 The worker, as an ‘individual,’ is thus a political figure distinct from both ‘bourgeois individuals’ and the apocryphal ‘simple man of the people.’
In 1877 Alekseev was both a ‘martyr’ and a ‘witness.’ His position somewhere between the indistinct mass and the individuated ‘higher classes’ was immortalised in the speech by which both functions were fulfilled. A similar, impoverished individuality, bound to the functions of representing, embodying and testifying to working-class experience, was fixed in the hyphenated categories, ‘worker-intelligent,’ ‘developed worker,’ ‘conscious worker,’ that identified Alekseev, Smirnov, Aleksandrov, Gerasimov, Obnorskii and the others. Alekseev’s ascent from mass man to martyr-witness was rooted in the conflict between his movement and the autocracy. Resignation to personal catastrophe – the mark of the publicists-turned-radicals
56 Ibid, p. 129.
57 Ibid, p. 128-9.
58 Ibid, p. 132.
42 in the 1860s – became a strategy. Revolutionaries imprisoned and tried made themselves into martyrs. Reducing themselves to the universal power to testify, they also became ‘witnesses.’
The existence of a lower-class apparently invisible to the classes above, knowledge of its condition among radicals, and the central tenet of workers’ self-emancipation’ in combination suggested to the social-revolutionaries of the 1870s the ‘worker-orator,’ who would speak for his class, make those above conscious of it, and act as a witness to suffering that would otherwise sink into historical obscurity. Alekseev filled the empty space opened by the amalgamation of revolutionary practice and the doctrines of narodism. It was his function to be a martyr and a witness to the condition of the working-class, on the public stage inviting down upon himself autocratic repression in order to reveal, in microcosm, the wider class-repression that underpinned his particular trial and punishment. The success of this depended upon Alekseev’s ability to hold in balance his particular life with the class experience supposedly determining of his actions and his thought. The speech is written testament to Alekseev’s attempt, a ‘collective testimony’ possible of a personal or an impersonal reading, but in fact designed to falsify the distinction: ‘We, the working millions…’ (Alekseev, Appx. A: 277) This function and the balancing act necessary to it were thought up and executed at a specific moment and in a particular, political setting. Yet, in formulating and committing his speech to paper, Alekseev’s temporary embodiment of class experience was carried beyond the courtroom and its immediate audience, and transferred into the historiography of the Russian working-class. A contradiction between the situation that had made Alekseev the workers’ martyr-witness, and the moment in its performance that lit up the particular life within and behind his
‘collective testimony,’ was latent in the speech’s political function. Alekseev’s role as a witness implied a certain individual presence that now invites biographical questions, but did not and does not, by necessity, deliver the ‘substance’ that would allow this moment of the role to be
‘filled out’ and made concrete. Valorisation by publication and republication reproduced and revealed the tension across all of Alekseev’s writings and all documentation of his life. This was equally the position of the worker-revolutionaries who were called upon – or felt compelled – to preserve their experiences and stories for posterity in the decades after Alekseev.
Perhaps more than any other social group of the time, the worker-revolutionaries were in history haunted by the social and intellectual categories that had once classified them socially and economically. Thus, the same tension between particular workers and their class - between the particular experience, the common experience, and their historical or poetic representation -
is found in the historical studies that have drawn upon their writings in pursuit of the Russian working-class. That the term ‘workers’ writing’ is still immediately intelligible - even unremarkable - as an historiographical category is evidence of how the role of martyr-witness was taken on (or imposed upon) those men and women identified as ‘workers’ or ‘working class,’ particularly those who by documentation were able to preserve for history their own, particular lives. Workers’ historical writings, nominally autobiographical, were for a time treated by Soviet and social historians as Alekseev’s speech had been by his revolutionary contemporaries. Early historical studies reduced worker-writers to exemplars of an experience that, for being general to their class, could not really be theirs. Personal experience was documented as testimony to a social process and a history, the impersonal or universal moments of which were considered by historians to be primary. That this history was supposed to be the
‘workers’ own’ did not mean that past events, relations, struggles or experiences would be appropriated by workers by the act of giving testimony. ‘History,’ as the relations, events and people that now framed their own pasts, would not be transformed by these workers through writing or retelling into ‘personal experience,’ in the sense of the Russian perezhivanie (‘to live through’ and also ‘to leap over/overcome’). Individuality would be reduced in historical testimony to the fact of having knowledge regarding an abstract ‘class history’ whose moment of universality was emphasised. Valorisation of the ‘access’ of worker-writers to this abstraction through their direct experience of class oppression and class struggle was affirmative rather than critical of class categorisation. Individual stories, particular lives, subjective impressions and self-reflections - all nominally definitive of genres of historical writing in which the author and his or her ‘fate’ was central - were subsumed under the categories that workers readily offered in their writings: ‘We, the workers…,’ ‘I was a worker…,’ ‘I was born to a poor joiner….,’ etc (see Appx. A-D: 277, 281, 290). All such categories, mentioned almost in passing, further explanation apparently unnecessary, functioned as hallmarks of authenticity. Historians used these hallmarks to make judgements regarding the historical value of particular documents, the information they contained, and of their authors as
‘witnesses.’
Marxist-Leninism allowed the early worker-intelligenty both complete identity with, and significant distinction from, the Russian working class. Identified as the prototypical workers’
vanguard, their historical role as embodiments of the working-class experience and representatives of the working-class interest were underpinned by an ideology stretching back
44 into the 1830s and from there into the beginnings of the social-revolutionary movement in Russia. Soviet historical science was formed within a wider conceptual universe that reified social categories in its adherence to a ‘monism’ whose aim was to explain everything by a single principle, ‘from the elementary biological level right up to the level of human history.’59 Engel’s extension of Marx’s work into the fields of natural science and, beyond its ‘limited,’
‘bourgeois’ version, to Nature itself, linked the dialectic laws governing natural processes with the dialectical laws governing the developments in human history and society. In Hegelian fashion, Engels and his many followers in the European socialist movement (including Plekhanov and Lenin) identified the ‘finite’ with fleeting and superficial appearances of things viewed in isolation, the force within the birth, life and decay of things - their ‘becoming’ – then baptised as the material dialectic. Appropriating the Hegelian schema, Engels gave the semblance of materialism to an understanding of nature and society that was more or less idealist. Things in isolation (as ‘bourgeois scientific understanding’ saw them), when viewed dialectically (or ‘speculatively’), were seen as instances - the finite realisations - of an immanent, dialectical law. Now Hegel’s system was based around the notion that the concept of a thing, the thing as it was in thought, was its truth, and its material form a mere body inhabited by the Absolute in its inner compulsion to ‘realise itself.’ Thus, Hegel could argue consistently that grasping a thing (forming a concept of a thing; abstracting from its particular, finite form to comprehend its essence), and grasping it as an instance of a ‘law’ (in this case, the law-governed development of the Absolute) realised its truth by returning it to thought from which it was alienated. Engels, a confessed ‘materialist,’ giving primacy to the laws of matter, thus created a system in which ‘matter’ itself was split in two – an outer husk of finite appearances and an inner kernel of dialectical law. To grasp this law then revealed the truth about the material world, but only in the sense that law was already there, in things, and could be grasped by a mind attuned to the dialectic, but still existed independently of human thought. ‘Law,’ an abstraction formed in and by thought, became reality itself, and at exactly the point where it was made a marker of the development of ‘human consciousness.’ Thus, as Lucio Coletti has shown, Plekhanov and Lenin, following Engels, were able to copy passages wholesale from Hegel and tout them as both dialectical and materialist without turning the method, or the imagery, or the conceptual scheme informing either, ‘on their heads.’60
59 L. Coletti, ‘Introduction,’ K. Marx, Early Writings (London, 1975), p. 9; see also J. J. O’Rourke, The Problem of Freedom in Marxist Thought: An Analysis of the Treatment of Human Freedom by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Contemporary Soviet Philosophy (Dordrecht, 1874), p.1-2.
60 L. Coletti, Marxism and Hegel, translated by L. Garner (London, 1979), p. 24-5.
Thus, Hegel’s metaphor of the dialectic - the seed as ‘in itself’ (a flower potentially) and the blossoming flower as ‘for itself’ (realised and now in decay) – was readily applied to human affairs, even to the formation of classes. The formation of a workers’ intelligentsia and a workers’ Party that represented the interests of the working class was the class become ‘for itself.’ Prior to this, the class was only in-itself – a class only potentially. What this ‘potency’
might actually consist in was explained by the ‘materialist dialectic’: it was both the intellectuals’ ‘grasp’ of a class interest or class position by means of concepts (‘Marxism’ as a theory) and an objective part of reality itself, whether ‘grasped’ or not. Thus, in 1902, Lenin argued in Chto delat’? (What is to be Done?) that the peasants, peasant-workers and hired labourers’ machine-breaking, ‘spontaneous’ disorder, rioting, and reactive strike activity through the 1860s to the 1880s were the ‘embryonic forms’ of class struggle that would develop, under the guidance of intellectuals of the working and educated classes, into conscious, political forms of class struggle.61 The notion of the ‘embryonic form’ in Lenin’s famous pamphlet demonstrates the contradiction of a system of thought in which consciousness was both necessary and epiphenomenal to human progress. Whether particular workers or poor peasants were conscious of the class meanings of their actions, they still had determinants in
‘objective class conditions.’ Consciousness of class would then be the objective, social process
‘realising itself’ in thought, through the intellectuals, the worker-intelligenty, and the workers’
Party. Similarly, Plekhanov could argue that the practice of the pre-Marxist groups of the late 1870s and early 1880s were correct, reflecting the objective conditions of their time, but that their consciousness – their own rationalisation for their actions – was wrong, backward.
Thought, Plekhanov claimed in his first ‘Marxist’ works of 1883-6, would take time to catch up to and bind itself with reality. The practical activities of the workers’ movement of the 1870s – including the workers’ circles in which Alekseev had taken part, and the key ideas of Alekseev’s speech - were closer to expressing the true interests of the Russian working-class (and thus of Russian society as a whole) than the doctrines of the ‘Populists.’ Having been forged by direct experience of class oppression rather than ‘abstract theory,’ the actions and ideas of worker-revolutionaries and worker-intelligenty could not help but express the shared interests of their class, and thereby express and realise the ‘laws’ of social development in their own actions. A privilege of ‘speech’ (the role of witness) was recognised in workers at the same
61 Lenin, ‘Chto delat’?,’ March, 1902, Soch. 5, p. 346-47/ CW: 5, p. 374-5.
46 time as the privilege of ‘experience’ formed a link between ‘material life’ and the choices, thoughts and behaviour of the ‘workers’ vanguard.’
Plekhanov’s early Marxist writings demonstrate the continuity of the social-revolutionary attitude to worker-intelligenty as harbingers of workers self-emancipation and, by extension of the basic tenet, of workers’ expression (including speeches, programmes, writings) as the authentic voice of social-revolutionism, from the decades immediately following the Emancipation to the process if the establishment of a ‘workers state’ between 1917 and 1928.
The continuity of the central tenet held across the ideological boundaries that Plekhanov had helped establish in the early 1880s: from the mixed socialist-anarchist groups of the late 1860s and early 1870s, to the anarchistic and ‘populist’ groups of the late 1870s and 1880s, to the Marxists/Social Democrats (SDs) and Socialist-Revolutionaries (SRs) of the late nineteenth century and beyond. Plekhanov also provides a more explicit link between the speech of Alekseev as a foundational document of a ‘workers’ history’ and the collection and production of workers’ memoirs, related to the period 1869-1900, after the October Revolution. Though a few observational studies of the Russian working class had been published by radicals in the late 1860s – V. V. Bervi-Flerovskii’s Polozhenie rabochego Klassa v Rossii (The Condition of the Working Class in Russia, 1869), for instance -and more were planned by circles in the early 1870s, Plekhanov’s was the first to write a detailed study of the revolutionary movement that specifically took the culture, the process of radicalisation, and the subsequent activities of historical worker-revolutionaries as its theme and focus: Russkii rabochii (see Appx. E for translated extracts). Shortly before its publication, Plekhanov had written a short introduction to Alekseev’s speech, then being republished by his Osvobozhdenie Truda (Emancipation of Labour, hereafter: OT) group. When Soviet historians came to study the period again in the 1920s, Plekhanov’s was still the best (and the most ‘sound’) text, its reference points and observations, if not already established as ‘definitive’ in the radical working class histories of the pre-revolutionary period, reproduced as a sort of canonical framework by which to approach workers’ radicalisation, the workers’ split from the ‘Populist’ intelligentsia, and the birth of Russian Marxism in the 1870s and 1880s. Moreover, when workers came to write or record their own memoirs of the period, it was partly against these reference points of Plekhanov’s.
Diakov Smirnov, sought out by the journal Krasnyi Letopis’ (Red Chronicle) to give his testimony, was asked specifically to comment upon the Plekhanov’s portrayal of him in Russkii Rabochii. Several other questions were derived from concerns that had figured heavily in
Plekhanov’s memoir and in his early theoretical works: what was the relation of the radical workers to intelligentsia? What sort of things did the workers read in their circles? What sort of
Plekhanov’s memoir and in his early theoretical works: what was the relation of the radical workers to intelligentsia? What sort of things did the workers read in their circles? What sort of