Paul Flewers

Marxism and Counterfactual

History
This article appeared in New Interventions, Volume 11, no 4, Autumn 2004. Key
words — counterfactual history, Marxism, Andrew Roberts, October Revolution, the
individual in history.
Note on the author — Paul Flewers is a socialist historian and a member of the
Editorial Boards of New Interventions and Revolutionary History. His book The New
Civilisation? Understanding Stalin’s Soviet Union, 1929-1941, was published in 2008 by
Francis Boutle.
***
The appearance of a collection of counterfactual essays under the editorship of
Andrew Roberts, What Might Have Been: Imaginary History From Twelve Leading
Historians (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004), provoked an angry response from the
radical academic Tristram Hunt in the Guardian on 7 April. Branding, slightly
inaccurately, the contributors as ‘a ragged bunch of right-wing historians’, Hunt
accuses them of presenting ‘history as wishful thinking, providing little insight into
the decision-making processes of the past, but pointing up preferable alternatives
and lamenting their failure to come to pass’.
Roberts’ collection is not the most inspiring of its kind, and does not measure
up in depth to, for example, Niall Ferguson’s much more substantial collection
Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (Macmillan, 1998). It does show the
prejudices of its ‘young fogey’ editor, as Roberts, like Ferguson before him, and
seemingly using the same quotes as Ferguson from EH Carr and Eric Hobsbawm
(the one from EP Thompson was in too unparliamentary language to be repeated
here, Roberts says), rails against Marxists for having the cheek ‘to denounce the
concept of imaginary pasts’ when we peddle ‘the most ludicrous of all imaginary
futures’, where the state withers away ‘leaving the dictatorship of the very class of
people least qualified to exercise power’. Leaving aside his snobbish assertion about
the congenital inability of workers to wield power, and also his ignorance of basic
Marxism — it is painful to have to tell a learned historian that Marx and Engels
considered that the dictatorship of the proletariat withers away alongside the state,
and that communism emerges as the state and the division of humanity into social
classes disappear — it must be emphasised that authentic Marxism does not rule out
the possibility of alternative courses of history.
Of course, if one restricts oneself to Plekhanov’s terribly mechanistic view in
The Role of the Individual in History, whereby if Robespierre or Napoleon keeled over,
another one would come along in a minute — the individual in history as a London
bus — and the Stalinist view that history inexorably led up to Stalin (or Mao, or
Hoxha), then ‘Marxism’ might be interpreted thus. However, in his key work The
Third International After Lenin, Trotsky provides a different perspective. After

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venturing that the October Revolution was ‘the result of a particular relation of class
forces in Russia and in the whole world’ and their particular development within the
process of the First World War, he declared:

Nevertheless, there is no contradiction whatever between Marxism and

posing, for instance, such a question as: would we have seized power in
October had not Lenin arrived in Russia in time? There is much to
indicate that we might not have been able to seize power.

Vulgar materialists might wish to exclude the role of individuals within historical
processes, but Marxism does not deny the role of individuals in history; it rather
attempts to explain their role within the general course of the historical process, to
comprehend how the actions of an individual at a certain juncture can affect the
course of history. The role of Lenin in Russia in 1917 is a case in point.
As luck would have it, Roberts — or Andrei Simonovich Robertski, as he
somewhat excruciatingly calls himself at one point — tackles this very topic, and has
Lenin assassinated by a certain ‘Lev Harveivic Oswalt’ (no, it actually gets worse) on
his return to Russia in April 1917. Roberts’ course of events is, one must admit,
imaginative. We have the Provisional Government, led by Kerensky and including
Prince Lvov, Miliukov, Guchkov and the rest, withdrawing from the First World
War in April 1917, renouncing its territorial claims upon Turkey, permitting the
peasants to seize the land, giving the workers’ councils legal parity with the
industrialists, and jailing employers who staged lock-outs. The Bolsheviks
themselves lined up with the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries behind the
government, and, in the hopeless atmosphere of a burgeoning liberal democracy,
disbanded their party in the mid-1920s. And with a sense of humour that clearly has
not risen above that of an undergraduate rag-mag (I did warn you), he has Trotsky
ending up flogging mountaineering equipment in Mexico.
Counterfactual history, however, only makes sense if the imaginary events
following the breaking-point from real history bear some realistic relationship with
what was likely to occur. Roberts himself is aware of this, saying that ‘characters in
What Ifs must act according to their true personalities’. Yet Roberts does precisely
the opposite. The idea that Miliukov would have dropped Russian claims upon the
Straits, that the Provisional Government would have so rapidly dropped out of the
war, that Kerensky would have championed militant peasants and workers, is
risible. To proceed from characters to broader factors, whilst it is true that Lenin
steered his party towards accepting the idea of the seizure of power, not all leading
Bolsheviks would have meekly dropped behind the moderate socialists. The depth
of class conflict in Russia did not depend upon Lenin’s presence and ability to steer
his party. Under the conditions that pertained in Russia in 1917, workers would have
fought for their demands and imposed their authority within the workplace and in
the political arena, and the peasants would have seized the land, without any by-
your-leave from the Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks, or anyone else.
Roberts is only half right about the Bolsheviks rapidly tail-ending the
Mensheviks. In Lenin’s absence, the likes of Kamenev, Rykov and Tomsky would
have gravitated towards the left-wing Mensheviks, perhaps even joining the
Provisional Government. The more impulsive ones, such as Bukharin, would have
taken a more militant line, and without Lenin’s restraining influence would almost
certainly have joined with anarchists and other maximalists to launch ill-prepared
and ill-fated putsches. In short, the Bolsheviks would have split in two, probably

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with Trotsky vainly attempting to hold both halves together, but without the
authority or mechanism to do so.
Russia was undergoing a deep and worsening crisis throughout 1917. The
Provisional Government was facing economic collapse, military failure, sharp class
conflict in both urban and rural areas, and territorial disintegration. How could any
government successfully deal with all that within the framework of a liberal
democracy? The only thing that rescued the reputation of liberal democracy in
Russia was that the Bolsheviks seized power before its bankruptcy was fully evident.
Had the Bolsheviks failed to seize power, the severe and deepening crises affecting
Russia in the agricultural, industrial, national and military spheres would have been
well beyond the capability of a parliamentary regime to deal with. Even as the
Provisional Government was floundering around and Bolsheviks were gearing up
for power, the right-wing was mobilising, and, in the absence of a government based
on the soviets, it is far more likely that Russia would have faced becoming a harsh
right-wing dictatorship than a liberal democracy. The sorry fate of parliamentary
democracy in Eastern and Central Europe during the interwar period gives a clue to
what would have happened in Russia, where social contradictions were
considerably more acute.
Despite their deep differences, Roberts and Hunt are both wrong. Hunt is
wrong to say that counterfactual history is necessarily synonymous with the ‘great
men’ theories of history, or incompatible with theories of history that base
themselves upon an investigation of deep-running social forces. And Roberts is
wrong to consider that Marxism excludes the idea of different courses in history.
History is full of opportunities that were lost, courses that were not taken, and who
can deny that on many occasions the reason that history went one way rather than
another was because of the actions of one or another important figure in a key
position.
In his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky made the point that the driving
force of the Russian Revolution was the power of the militant masses, but that power
had to be guided, as with steam in a cylinder, if it wasn’t to be dissipated. We can
add that the cylinder needed a hand on the regulator to control the steam, that is, to
guide the masses. That regulator was the Bolshevik party, and Lenin had his hand
on the regulator at a crucial point in history. Without him, the course of world
history would have been very different. One cannot accurately understand history if
one views (to use Hunt’s words) ‘the rigorous, data-based study of class, inequality,
work patterns and gender relations’ and the ‘story of what generals, presidents and
revolutionaries did or did not do’ as polar opposites, rather than being intertwined
in a complex relationship.