Social History and Its Categories

Abstract

Sheila Fitzpatrick attempts to develop a synthesis of class, politics and culture as they emerged out of the October Revolution and civil war and as they developed during the early years of NEP. Her argument runs as follows. The Bolsheviks, consisting of workers and intellectuals, made the revolution in the name of the class, created a working-class state, but quickly found that a conscious no longer existed because of the social upheavals of war and revolution. Fitzpatrick places identity and conflict at the center of civil war debates within the party. According to this view the primary opposition movements within Bolshevism-the Workers' Opposition, the Democratic Centralists, the Military Opposition, were above all directed against the dilution of the content of the new revolutionary party-state by intellectuals and bourgeois specialists. By 1921, Bolshevik faith in the had turned to skepticism. The party leadership, including Lenin, saw the as declasse. Yet this attitude was short-lived since the party had no other option for a real or imagined social base or for ideological legitimation. The party therefore returned to praise of the and even before Lenin's death developed a new expanded definition of that included all the beneficiaries of social mobility who had moved up into management or into the apparats. This, for Fitzpatrick, was the solution to the long-standing problem of proletarian identity. One could now be proletarian, by virtue of involvement in building the new society, whether at the workbench or not. Along the way Fitzpatrick also discusses culture, and specifically proletarian culture. Here the argument centers on Proletkul't, the network of organizations created in 1917 to further the cause of a proletarian culture distinct from that of the dominant of the Old Regime. As is well known, Proletkul't had its party enemies, and neither the party-state nor the was able during the civil war to define a clear vision of what constituted proletarian culture. Since there was in effect no class, Fitzpatrick argues, there could be no working-class culture. Since Proletkul'tists demanded a certain independence from the party-state, their organizations were looked upon with hostility by most party leaders, especially Lenin himself. Fitzpatrick is right to argue that social tensions and divisions existed within the Bolshevik party (and in revolutionary society) and that the party faced a serious dilemma in relations in what purported to be a working-class state engaged in the project of building socialism. Yet the argument appears to confuse the terminology used by contemporary Bolsheviks in their debates, polemics, and propaganda with the social realities and dynamics of the period. The thrust of her argument seems to be that there was no during the civil war. Fitzpatrick wants to have it both ways. Class and analysis is problematic for her since the realities did not conform to the models. Yet her own argument depends heavily on the very same categories. Though the working class was not a with a clear identity, she goes on to make conflict between intellectuals, specialists, and the the cornerstone of her view of the evolving revolutionary society. This adds up to social conflict, but, since neither in a theoretical sense nor the constituent social groups that are comprised in these classes are defined or discussed in any concrete way, it is hard to move beyond the categories and terminology used in some (and by no means all) of the contemporary debates and, indeed, in some of the older works on Soviet politics that