Papers by John Eric Marot
Revolutionary Russia, 1994
... as a template, I trace the empirical and analytical weaknesses created for the field of socia... more ... as a template, I trace the empirical and analytical weaknesses created for the field of social history by Koenker and Rosenberg's exemplary decision not to investigate directly the various party-political organisations and programmes through which class conflict was mediated. ...
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Philosophical Debate in Russian Social Democracy A voluminous literature of uneven quality exists... more Philosophical Debate in Russian Social Democracy A voluminous literature of uneven quality exists in the West on the philosophical controversy that erupted in 1909 between Lenin and the 'Machists', much of it naturally centered on Lenin's written intervention, Materialism and Empirio-criticism. 1 Unfortunately, the substantive issues over which Russian Social Democrats disagreed, and the reasons for this disagreement, are still not easily grasped since most historians and philosophers have been less concerned convincingly to present both sides of the debate as they have been to take up sides in the debate and 'do combat with a point of view' 2-Lenin's point of view above all. My purpose therefore is to present the philosophical dispute between the 'Machists' and Lenin in a new light simply by reconstructing the arguments on each side, especially Lenin's side-as clearly and as
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The October Revolution in Prospect and Retrospect, 2012
This chapter proposes to re-evaluate the political character and historical significance of the L... more This chapter proposes to re-evaluate the political character and historical significance of the Left Opposition through a detailed assessment of Tony Cliff's Fighting the Rising Stalinist Bureaucracy and The Darker the Night the Brighter the Star , which are respectively the third and fourth volumes of his Trotsky biography. Trotsky developed a critique of the popular-front strategy in France and Spain after the Left Opposition had rallied to Stalin and, toward the end of his life, pursued his struggle against Stalin by founding the Fourth International in 1938. He clearly formulated the general political perspectives of the Left Opposition in the Soviet Union with respect to Stalin's policies, and its leadership acknowledged Trotsky as primus inter pares. Trotsky's 'conciliationism' was systematically biased in favour of the partystate because the latter, somehow, was representative of the working class, despite its objectively anti-working-class policies. Keywords:conciliationism; Left Opposition; Stalinist bureaucracy; Tony Cliff; Trotsky
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The October Revolution in Prospect and Retrospect, 2012
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The October Revolution in Prospect and Retrospect, 2012
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Canadian Slavonic Papers, 1991
Bolsheviks struggled to determine the political direction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor ... more Bolsheviks struggled to determine the political direction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. In 1909 a third tendency emerged, Vpered, whose chief theoretician and representative was Alexander Bogdanov. Bogdanov and the Vperedists opposed both the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks on fundamental questions of the revolutionary movement. Bogdanov was also a prominent exponent of neo-Kantianism or "Machism" in Russian Social Democracy and, along with other Social Democrats, had developed the epistemological implications of recent discoveries in the natural sciences for the social sciences and, thus, for Marxism.1 But despite philosophical disagreement with Lenin, Bogdanov had collaborated closely with the philosophically "orthodox" Bolshevik leader between 1904 and 1908 because both men had agreed on the necessity of building the Party to bring "from the outside" revolutionary consciousness to workers. The experience of the 1905 Revolution convinced Lenin to revise sharply the theses of What is to be Done? on this point. That same experience, on the other hand, led Bogdanov energetically to reaffirm in 1909 his tutelary conception of the Party in the workers' movement.2 In this essay I attempt to establish the nature and reasons for the tutelary role of the Party vis-a-vis the working class. My methodological point of departure seeks to grasp Bogdanov' s views in philosophy and political economy in relationship to his political practice in Vpered because he wanted to help workers contest the coming domination of capitalist society, specifically, the impersonal rule of the market and the attendant ideological mystification engendered by its operation bourgeois ideology. The ideological restructuring of workers' consciousness, if successfully accomplished by Vpered, would shorten the era of bourgeois ideological
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Russian Review, 1995
In "Revision and Retreat in the Historiography of 1917: Social History and Its Critics"... more In "Revision and Retreat in the Historiography of 1917: Social History and Its Critics" (Russian Review, April 1994), Ronald G. Suny adamantly defends the still dominant "social" interpretation of the Russian Revolution against a resurgent "political" interpretation of it, advanced by Richard Pipes most notably. At the same time, and in a spirit of reconciliation, Suny invites both political and social historians to acknowledge and overcome their respective weaknesses and to work together toward a superior "postmodern" synthesis of the rival historiographic trends. Only on this basis, Suny avers, can scholars move forward to a truer understanding of the Russian Revolution.
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Russian Review, 1990
The defeat of the Revolution of 1905 and the ensuing reflux of the revolutionary workers' mov... more The defeat of the Revolution of 1905 and the ensuing reflux of the revolutionary workers' movement set the stage for a crisis in the Bolshevik leadership of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party about what to do politically to move forward again. In 1909, Alexander Bogdanov emerged as the chief spokesman of a dissident group of Bolsheviks. He and his partisans launched a campaign to shift the axis of the RSDLP's political activity. For Bogdanov, the old tasks of building the Party, of agitation and propaganda in the mass movement, seemed more and more irrelevant with the decline and eventual disappearance of that movement. The new conditions persuaded Bogdanov to attempt to deploy a strategy to prepare workers to seize power by creating "an all-embracing proletarian culture, hic et nunc, within the framework of the existing society" by means of educating the working class in "proletarian universities" run by socialist intellectuals.' Bogdanov recognized no national limitations to his strategy. In his view, the politics of creating "proletarian culture" were valid not only for Russia but for all countries where the modem working class movement had come into existence.
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Studies in East European Thought, 1993
L'A. etudie le conflit opposant Lenine et Mach en 1908-1909 sur la question du materialisme d... more L'A. etudie le conflit opposant Lenine et Mach en 1908-1909 sur la question du materialisme dans les sciences, contre l'empiriocriticisme prone par Mach. L'A. tente de donner objectivement les arguments de chacun, et de rendre intelligibles les remous provoques dans le monde culturel russe de l'epoque
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Russian Review, 1990
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The October Revolution in Prospect and Retrospect
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The October Revolution in Prospect and Retrospect
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The October Revolution in Prospect and Retrospect
John Marot tracks the development of Bolshevism from its inception in 1904 to the October Revolut... more John Marot tracks the development of Bolshevism from its inception in 1904 to the October Revolution in 1917. In the post-October period, the author, drawing on the work of Robert Brenner, shows that any NEP-premised programme of economic advance was destined to fail.
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The October Revolution in Prospect and Retrospect, 2012
John Marot tracks the development of Bolshevism from its inception in 1904 to the October Revolut... more John Marot tracks the development of Bolshevism from its inception in 1904 to the October Revolution in 1917. In the post-October period, the author, drawing on the work of Robert Brenner, shows that any NEP-premised programme of economic advance was destined to fail.
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The October Revolution in Prospect and Retrospect, 2012
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The October Revolution in Prospect and Retrospect, 2012
John Marot tracks the development of Bolshevism from its inception in 1904 to the October Revolut... more John Marot tracks the development of Bolshevism from its inception in 1904 to the October Revolution in 1917. In the post-October period, the author, drawing on the work of Robert Brenner, shows that any NEP-premised programme of economic advance was destined to fail.
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Revolutionary Russia, 1996
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Historical Materialism, 2014
Lars Lih has contributed to our knowledge of Russian Social Democracy lately. However, serious me... more Lars Lih has contributed to our knowledge of Russian Social Democracy lately. However, serious methodological flaws bedevil this advance in knowledge. Lih’s overall approach displays a very static understanding of political ideas in relation to political movements. In the first section, ‘Lenin, the St Petersburg Bolshevik Leadership, and the 1905 Soviet’, I challenge Lih’s position that Lenin never changed his mind about bringing socialist consciousness into the working class ‘from without’. In the second section, ‘Lenin, “Old Bolshevism” and Permanent Revolution: The Soviets in 1917’, I challenge Lih’s revisionist view that Old Bolshevism’s pre-1917 goal of ‘democratic revolution to the end’ drove Lenin’s partisans to make a working-class, socialist revolution in 1917. On this singular account, Lenin’s April Theses, which called for the overthrow of the Provisional Government and the transfer of all power to the soviets, was merely a further expression of Old Bolshevik politics, no...
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Papers by John Eric Marot