Petty-Bourgeois Revolutionism

Boris Leibson's book rests on a single claim, made in its opening pages and never afterwards doubted. Comparing Maoism with anarchism and with Trotskyism, he writes, "we find that, despite some differences between them, they all belong to the same species."

Everything follows from that. Bakunin's secret Alliance inside the First International, the Barcelona anarchists of 1873, Trotsky's trade-union theses of 1920, the Fourth International's open letters to Peking, the Red Guards of 1966 and the students on the Paris barricades of 1968 are all specimens of one disorder - "petty-bourgeois revolutionism" - which Leibson treats less as a political tendency than as an epidemiological fact, using the language of disease, diagnosis and epidemic throughout. It is an extraordinarily ambitious piece of classification.

The volume tells us almost nothing about its author beyond "D. Hist." and a lectureship, but the footnotes are not reticent. They cite the Comintern Executive's October 1930 letter on the Li Li-san group, the stenographic report of the Sixth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, the 1934 Moscow collection on Comintern strategy in the national-colonial revolution. These are the working materials of a Comintern historian with access to party archives.

That is what gives the book its value as a source. Its Chinese material in particular deserves attention: this is a serious Soviet dossier on the Cultural Revolution as Moscow understood it in 1970, assembled by a historian who knew the archives, and some of its judgements have worn better than the Western enthusiasms of the same year.

Translated by Donald Danemanis. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.