For a Concrete Theory of Transition: The Political Practice of the Bolsheviks in Power

Abstract

Robert Linhart’s translated 1966 text provides a framework for examining the Soviet transition as an overdetermined development, drawing a balance sheet of the strategy and tactics of the New Economic Policy (NEP). Reading Lenin’s shifting practical analyses of the situation from 1918–23, Linhart takes a thorough inventory of the principle (between the proletariat and the peasantry) and secondary class struggles—a “complex system of alliances”—and discerns the “thresholds” beyond which changes in the conjuncture imposed strategic turns and alternatives. Informed by a conception of a complex social formation in transition as unevenly articulated and marked by intense contradictions, Linhart analyzes the NEP as a revolutionary strategy that responded to and reconstituted the “disrupted equilibria” of social forces, operating (subjectively) against objective limitations. This necessitated not only the political transformation of state apparatuses but also, for Linhart, crucially emphasized a necessary Cultural Revolution to socialize the productive forces (popular control and accounting of production, circulation, and distribution).