Nature of the Industrial Proletariat

One of the great paradoxes of Marxism and Communism is that the first Communist revolution and the first regime constructed on Marxist principles appeared not, as Marx had assumed, in the most advanced industrial countries  in Britain, Germany, or perhaps the United States  but in the vast, backward, semifeudal, barely industrialized empire of Russia. Marx, like other early theorists of socialism, viewed Russia as a land of peasants, not industrial workers. They thought of it as the champion of the old order and the enemy of progress, never as the place where their own ideas would first be tried.

In Roots of Rebellion, Victoria Bonnell seeks to resolve this paradox, at least in part, by closely examining the nature of the industrial proletariat as it existed in the chief Russian cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and how this proletariat became a champion of radical socialist ideology during the turbulent years between the turn of the century and the outbreak of World War I in 1914. She suggests, in brief, that the radicalization of the workers' movement in these cities was precisely due to the backwardness of Russia as a whole, and the consequent weakness of liberal and reformist movements or parties that might have channeled the demands of workers into reformist socialism  as happened, for t

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, and therefore to revolutionary consciousness. Such a small pool of "vanguard" workers, in so large and ruralized a country, were naturally ignored as a force by Marxist theorists in the West. In the contemporary orthodox view, their claim to serve as a decisive social force was further weakened by the close ties that workers still had to the countryside, from which many of them had come to work in the factories. In fact, however, the very closeness to rural life of the industrial work force was a factor in its solidarity and its radicalization. Boys or young men who came to the cities to find industrial work arrived with vivid memories of the bitter conditions of life in the countryside. They found that moreestablished workers, especially those born in the cities, looked down on them as country bumpkins. A natural response of many was to adopt, all the more vigorously, the urban styles and outlook of their coworkers, so that they might blend in and be more fully accepted. This was a time of labor ferment throughout the industrialized world, and Russia was not exempt from it. Some early Russian theoreticians might await revolutionary salvation from the West, but the natural tendency of theorists and practical labor or
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Approximate Word count = 1284
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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