Notes THE PROBLEMATIC I. Certain comrades will note that I take Soviet (and Chinese) state social­ ism as being a deformed form of socialism, not a variant of capitalism; the latter view would of course lead to a different 'reading' of the col­ lapse. My position on this topic and the basic nature of state socialism may be found argued in Post and Wright 1989. 2. Prior to 1939, capital 's hegemony was virtually global; apart from Russia, the only other loss was Mongolia in 1921, where it had scarcely existed anyway . 3. The reasons for failure in Europe are examined in my companion study, Post 1997. 4. The expansion of capitalism to form the double global structure of centre and periphery cannot be dealt with here. However, two points need to be established. Firstly , the 'logic' of capital's dynamics, centred on surplus value creation and accumulation, was the same in both, but structured in quite different ways, which basically retained pre-capitalist labour and sur­ plus extraction forms on the periphery. Secondly, the 'periphery' was not marginal, as the term implies, economically, but essential to capital's workings at the centre. The marginality found expression in terms of political power, openly in the colonial form, less directly in the case of formally sover­ eign states. For more on these issues see Post 1996, especially pp. 207-18. 5. Engels to Kautsky, 12 November 1882, in Feuer (ed.) 1959, p. 452. lowe the point on the original assumption of individual working-class struggles and revolutions to Denise Avenas; see Avenas 1976, p. 26. 6. These assertions are explored on the theoretical level in Post 1996. 7. For more extended discussion see Post 1996, pp. 270-6. 8. I would, however, like to make it clear that my interpretation runs counter to the Wallersteinian 'world system' view. For the necessary arguments see Post 1996, pp. 200-2 and 206-7. 9. Quotations here and in the next paragraph from Avineri (ed.) 1969, pp. 137, 138-9 and 234. 10. See Shanin (ed.) 1983 and the discussion in Post 1997, Chapter 2. II. See the classic account of the movement led by Emiliano Zapata in Womack, Jr. 1968. A good recent general survey is Knight 1986. 12. See Esherick 1976, Shirnkichi and Schiffrin (eds) 1995 and Wright (ed.) 1968. 13. Throughout this study I prefer to speak of 'working class' rather than 'proletariat', to signify a less cohesive entity than Marx and Engels, and even more their followers , tended to assume. I thus mean all wage-earners who produce, maintain, transport and retail commodities. 14. For detailed argumentation see Post 1997, Chapters 2 and 3. 15. See Lowy 1981, pp. 1-21. This author makes a valiant effort to defend Marx and Engels against any charges of a mechanistic reading of history, 188 Notes 189 making socialist revolution dependent on industrialization and emergence of the proletariat, but has himself to admit that they are often ambiguous in their qualifications of the thesis. I am indebted to his analysis in gen­ eral, although my reading of the material may have different emphases. Moreover, it is significant of his own ultimate perspective that he speaks without qualification of twentieth-century workers' revolutions. The prob­ lem, of course, is largely that the founders' texts upon which all of us have to base arguments were political pieces of a highly conjunctural nature, not fully worked out theorizations. 16. The concept of a revolutionary terrain which has to be consciously cre­ ated by a 'war of position ' and then used in a 'war of manoeuvre' runs through my entire analysis of the Vietnamese Revolution; see Post 1989, 1990 and 1994 passim, and for a general statement, Post and Wright 1989, PI'. 49-64. As detailed there, it derives from Gramsci . It will be picked up further in Chapter 3 below. 17. As we have done until recently in terms of the feminist movement and gender. 18. Marx and Engels 1973, PI'. 84 and 85. It is noteworthy that the founders here spoke of exploitative relations among nations as a unit of analysis, anticipating the later view of whole 'proletarian nations' and the even later dependency theory. 19. A further problem I have with Lowy is that he fails to see clearly the problems of transposing historical stages into revolutionary class tasks by eliding too quickly from one to the other. 20. I recognize that middle-strata employees might be said by Marxists to produce no surplus value from their surplus labour , i.e. their labour is 'unproductive', which differentiates them clearly from workers and in itself would be enough to explain their lesser revolutionary propensity. How­ ever, this whole theoretical issue is very complex; do not engineers , for example, contribute to surplus value? My rather bland textual formulation is deliberately intended to dodge the issue. It should also be noted that I term these 'middle' elements a set of strata rather than a class, precisely because their ambiguous position in terms of sale of labour power leaves them with no clear material class basis of their own. 21. 'Regime' is used here to mean the overall distribution of power in a given social formation, anchored by the state. The latter has a variety of aspects often masked in discussion, but key ones here are that it is: a governing apparatus; a concentration of resources; a source of authority; and an arena in which various groups seek access to policy-making. Particularly in terms of the last, we may also conceptualize a 'power bloc' of elements drawn from the dominant class(es), or at least acting as their agents, which have direct access to/control over policy decisions. For an extended discussion of these' concepts see the seventh essay in Post 1996. 2 EXPANDING TO THE EAST 1. I derive this point from a critique of Lenin's earlier analysis of capitalism in Russia in Avenas 1976, p. 27. 190 Notes 2. For a useful discussion see Larrain 1989, pp. 62-72. We must also remember that Lenin in particular acknowledged a debt to the work of I.A. Hobson, a non-Marxist critic of imperialism. 3. Suny 1972, p. 13, with calculation; Bennigsen and Wimbush 1979, p. 151. The latter source speaks of 100000 Muslims in the Baku area alone (p. 10); much may depend on how 'Baku' is defined. It should also be noted that Azerbaijanis were categorized as 'Tatars' by the Russians at that time (Suny 1972, p. 16). 4. Bennigsen and Wimbush 1979, p. 10. I have drawn heavily on this study for data and quotations, but it should be noted that it is an anti-socialist work. Moreover, it very curiously makes no attempt to situate 'national communism' in relation to the evolution of Comintem policy, with which, I shall argue, it was less at variance than the authors suggest in their general comments (see, for example, their reference to 'Leninism' on p. 54). 5. For a discussion of these categories and the process of incorporation into the USSR, see Carr 1966, vol. I, Chapter 13. 6. Quoted, Bennigsen and Wimbush 1979, p. 209. I have slightly adapted this quotation, since one braids rather than weaves ropes. 7. Lenin 1953(c), pp. 322-3 and 329, original emphasis. For Luxemburg's views on the national question see Nettl 1966, passim and especially Appendix 2. 8. Sultan Galiyev 1919, pp. 131-2 . Next two paragraphs based on ibid., pp. 132-5. 9. Ibid., p. 136. As is shown by the inclusion of the economically unimpor­ tant Afghanistan, he was obviously influenced by his origin as a Muslim in the tsarist empire, but the generalization here admits China at a later point in the article, as well as Black Africa. The latter was viewed by Sultan Galiyev along with North and South America as forming the origi­ nal base for imperialism after which it shifted to Asia; this gives us the leeway to bring in Latin America as part of the periphery envisaged as the key to world socialist struggle by him as by the present author. 10. Quotations in the previous paragraph and this one cited by Bennigsen and Wimbush 1979, pp. 169, 170, 171 and 172. In the third quotation I have replaced 'unique' with 'single' as a clearer translation, although I have not seen the original. Bennigsen and Wimbush reproduce the 1921 pro­ gramme in Appendix E; here see p. 168. The complaint, for example, was that cotton cultivation was still made compulsory at the expense of grain and rice, leading to famine when central Russia could not ensure supplies, as in 1917-18 (pp. 168-9). 11. For discussion on the period prior to this see Persits 1981. 12. Lenin 1953(0, p. 423, original emphasis, also following quotations . 13. I have tried in summarizing the views of Lenin and Roy to reconstruct their original formulations before coming to the final results, based on Carrere d'Encausse and Schram 1969, Section III, documents 2-4, espe­ cially the notes to these. I have omitted detailed references to save space; interested readers are urged to go back to these documents. The cited editors seem to have done a careful job in putting together various sources, and also to have observed E.H. Carr's warnings about these in Carr 1966, vol. III, nn. 3 and 4, p. 254. I have benefited from the discussion in Notes 191 Claudin 1975, pp. 260-6, although my emphases and interpretations are not always his, and Datta Gupta 1980, pp. 15-44, is also valuable.