What is to be Undone? Revisiting the Long Shadow of the Russian Revolution

It is well known that the generation of political activists in North America of the 1960s and 70s comprised a highly diverse assemblage. Some adhered strongly to the contemporary Russian state of the Cold War that claimed the mantle of “communism”, others followed a path inspired by Mao’s China. Still others followed a more critical approach, either strictly or loosely inspired by the historic opposition of Leon Trotsky [Lev Trotskii] to Joseph Stalin’s autocratic model, while still others took a path of non-state activism, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, leaning towards anarchism. The authors of this paper adhered to a tradition that sought to preserve what was seen as a Marxist commitment to working-class self-emancipation, fused with a certain loyalty to the earliest years of the Russian Revolution (1917-1929). However, among all these divisions a common point of reference for many – anarchists excepted – was a dedicated commitment to the lessons forwarded in a text titled What is to Be Done?: Burning Questions of Our Movement (Lenin [1902] 1961), written by V.I. Lenin. The text was originally written at the end of 1901 and early 1902 in preparation for a historic conference of the Russian Left that took place in 1903. It was iconic and highly influential in shaping the tasks of socialists in the last decades of the 20th and first decades of the 21st centuries in Canada and the US, as well as many other countries internationally. Lenin’s text and the political practice which ostensibly followed from it, pivotally influenced the co-authors of this paper. However, current research indicates – to borrow a concept from Charles Mills (Mills 1997) – an epistemology of ignorance, associated with the iconic status of What is to Be Done?, its author and the practice of the political tendency with which this text was associated. This framing away from knowledge, and towards ignorance, generated an epistemic collection of distorted historic realities associated with the Russian revolution while simultaneously absenting key lessons of other sections of the Left. This particularly included the Bund – the General Jewish Workers’ Association [Bund] in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia. Based on a mixed methodology including original translations from Russian texts, autoethnographic experiences over decades of activism and scholarship, and extensive personal archives, we argue that these debates have to be critically revisited if they are to have relevance for envisioning socialism today. To demonstrate this argument, this discussion proceeds in two parts. The first part highlights an example of misguided theory and practice associated with the lessons of the 1903 Congress, shared through an autoethnographic example of the distorted narrative and its negative impact on socialist practice. In the second part, we address the relationship of history and theory, revisiting the historical record of what actually happened – before, after and during the 1903 Congress to, in particular, demonstrate an elision of pivotal debates regarding the Bund in the history of the Russian revolutionary left. Overall, the paper engages in an epistemic deconstruction and reconstruction of lessons of the revolutionary tradition that have cast a long and problematic shadow over contemporary understandings, lessons that demand redress, a point to which we return in the concluding comments.