Seeking Allies

I my book, I talk about socialists cooperating and clashing. I don't talk so much about socialists becoming liberal (or vice versa). Re-reading for the Nth time Robert Gildea's outstanding Barricades and Borders: Europe 1800-1914, I was reminded of the case of Peter Struve:

The manifesto of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour party (RSDLP), which was penned by ...  Peter Struve after the party was formed at Minsk in March 1898, noted that Russia had escaped the 'life-giving hurricane of the 1848 revolution' that had conferred freedom of speech, writing, organization and assembly on Europe. The Russian working class had to conquer these liberties as a pre-condition of the struggle 'for its final liberation, against private property, for socialism'.

The struggle for political democracy ushered in the possibility of collaborating with other classes in Russia. Unfortunately, Struve's manifesto asserted that 'the farther east one goes in Europe, the weaker, meaner and more cowardly in the political sense becomes the bourgeoisie, and the greater the cultural and political tasks which fall to the lot of the proletariat.' The historical task of the proletariat was not only to carry out the socialist revolution but also, before that, to push the fearful bourgeoisie towards undertaking its own, democratic revolution. Struve, who saw working-class agitation decline in Russia after 1900 and, as an accomplished economist, was impressed by Bernstein's views on the improving condition of the working class and the attenuation of class struggle, began to move closer to opposition groups in the zemstvos and their administrative organs. In 1901 he launched a paper called Liberation around which all supporters of a constituent assembly in Russia might gather.

Lenin was unimpressed, and condemned Struve for his dalliance with liberals.

While Mensheviks  and Bolsheviks had similar views of the approaching revolution - they expected it to be radically democratic, but not actually socialist - The Mensheviks looked to bourgeois allies, while the Bolsheviks preferred an alliance with the peasantry. As the Bolsheviks were to find (and as Trotsky had predicted), a party couldn't easily neuter bourgeois civil society with disintegrating capitalism itself. Lenin's objective of a kind of 'state capitalism' transitional to socialism proved to be a non-starter. Instead civil society dissolved in a the cauldron of a class-based civil war, and after a tenuous pivoting around a peasant economy, the command economy took over.

Whether a liberal-socialist alliance in 1917 was ever viable is another question. Probably not, I'd say.