Lessons from exits foreclosed: An exilic interpretation of the Mexican and Russian Revolutions,1910–1924

The world-system, state (de)formation, and exile

A capitalist world-economy dominates the modern world-system, continuously expanding and incorporating more and more of the globe since the 16th century (Wallerstein 2004). To be incorporated, a nation-state is reorganized and situated within the longue durée of world-systemic processes, specifically the world-time fluctuations in capital accumulation, economic expansion, hierarchy of production processes, international division of labor, and inter-state administration (Braudel 1979; Wallerstein 1974). Yet, this does not mean that all states are the same, only that the world-system is ‘a historically negotiated and structurally heterogeneous whole’, in which ‘[the capitalist world-economy] links all forms of labor control with capital at its central axis’ (Grubačić & O’Hearn 2016: 22–23). The capitalist world-economy is reliant on the inter-state system to be the hegemonic regime for governance and bring about incorporative processes of expansion and accumulation through enclosure and dispossession but does not determine a priori a state’s specific political constitution (Wallerstein 2004).

Thus, nation-states are units within a larger inter-state system as a constituting element of the world-system. They are key actors in reconstituting subjects, transforming the division of labor and production to lead to commodification (Wallerstein 1984 (1980), 2004). How a nation-state carries out this process is dependent on its internal class structure, capacity of its bureaucracy, hegemonic capacity to maintain an integral state, the nation-state’s place within the trimodal core-semi-periphery-periphery division of labor and their production processes ability to generate surplus value. In that sense, the nation-state has an internal class struggle and an external class struggle, and the relation of the two dictates much of a nation-states operation within its sovereign territory based on class hegemony.

Importantly for this study, within each nation-state exists a dialectic of incorporation and exile due to internal class struggle, with exilic space always (re)negotiating an emancipatory political project with governments in various states of (de)formation in relation to ongoing world-time expansion and (re)organization of the capitalist world-system’s incorporative project. Grubačić and O’Hearn (2016) focus on how exile is produced territorially and structurally through a loyalty bargain based on voicing autonomy and the practice of mutual aid. Principally, exile occurs when a group of people voluntarily or involuntarily cease participating in formal, centralized political and economic processes (i.e. voice autonomy), thus disassociating themselves either territorially or structurally (or both) (see Table 1 for basic characteristics of exile and world-system).

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Table 1.

Basic characteristics of exile and world-system.

Exilic	World-system
Social reproduction based on mutual aid and substantive practice	Social reproduction based on labor exploitation and formal market
Autonomy from hierarchical organizations and administration	Inter-state hierarchical administration
Resistance against world time of the capitalist world-system and its cycles of accumulation and expansion through the construction of alternative space	Reorganization of societies through their incorporation into the capitalist world-system altering (inter)state administration

For instance, Grubačić and O’Hearn (2016) argue during the Russian enserfing of peasants in the 1500s, itself a result of world-system processes reorganizing Russian political-economy, that peasants (in)voluntarily exiled themselves to join the Don Cossacks, hence producing a pluri-ethnic egalitarian society outside of the Tsar’s influence. There they practiced escape production, specifically agriculture, a necessary element for sustaining the exilic territory, along with a geography of friction separating the Russian state from the Don Cossacks. This all occurred even while they pursued loyalty bargains with the Russian state, such as at times acting as its mercenary force (Grubačić & O’Hearn 2016; Scott 2009). Hence, a reorganization of Russian society produced a push-effect leading to the partially voluntary, partially forced construction of an exilic space. Exit, the act of exile, is then a strategy collectives can employ to resist social reorganization and voice autonomy.

Exilic space goes further than territorial exit involving a geographic separation from the incorporated state space. Grubačić and O’Hearn (2016) argue that such a restriction of exile to non-state geographic space is incapable of grasping the complexity of exit. Counter to Scott (1990, 2009) they propose that an exilic space can be established within the territorial confines of the state – a structural exit, as in Zibechi’s urban informal zones of resistance in Latin America and Gray’s (2004) work on structural exile in Jamaica. In Gray’s (2004) work, Jamaicans in urban zones are able to produce their own informal identity and substantive reproduction, a symbolic and material rupture within the territory of the state, altering social structures. They do this through utilizing informal/illegal markets, developing their own aesthetic, and seeking to avoid interactions with state personnel, such as the police. So, while yes á la Scott, the geographic friction produced by territorial separation from the state aids in maintaining exile, and agricultural production enables burgeoning substantive reproduction, the state is never a totalizing, deterministic force (see Table 2 for key concepts of exile).

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Table 2.

Key concepts for exile.

Voice	Act of autonomy against incorporative power
Loyalty	Act of acquiescence to incorporative power
Loyalty bargain	Dialectically negotiated position between voice and loyalty
Incorporation	Reorganization of a nation-state to extract surplus value and participate in the world-system’s endless accumulation
Mutual aid	Cooperative exchange as basis for social reproduction
Direct democracy	Universal suffrage, direct participation in decisions, higher burden placed on consensus
Egalitarian	Equality of opportunity and outcome, non-hierarchical society
Substantive reproduction	Economic reproduction based within social norms and values as opposed to market-dominated reproduction

So, even within state space, structural zones exist in which dominant rules are rethought and replaced, demonstrating the presence of interstices in the world-system as replenishing points for rupture (Grubačić & O’Hearn 2016). Because of this continual (de)formation of state space and the constant (re)organization of the capitalist world-system, there is a recurring (re)negotiation of what Grubačić and O’Hearn (2016) call the loyalty bargain. Utilized by factions resisting incorporation through exile, the loyalty bargain is the dialectical product of voice, the expression and establishment of autonomy, and loyalty, the expression and establishment of acquiescence (Grubačić & O’Hearn 2016; Hirschmann 1970).

For instance, Grubačić and O’Hearn (2016) describe the contemporary Zapatista Army for National Liberation’s (EZLN for Spanish acronym) loyalty bargain with international civil society as enabling their autonomy and exit from the Mexican state through the increase in the power of their expression of autonomy. The EZLN was in rebellion against the state and in order to maintain their autonomy could not rely on a loyalty bargain with the state for resources or to impede the state’s (para)military siege of EZLN territory. This made international civil society highly important for access to resources and to apply international pressure on the Mexican state to not commit human rights abuses.

While this made civil society beneficial, civil society still makes up a part of the hegemonic order, legitimating the (inter)state administrative apparatus. It does so by funneling activism into formal grievance processes or making territories in revolt dependent on populations in the Global North. As such, a loyalty bargain with civil society operates similarly to, but distinctly from, the loyalty bargain with the political state itself. International civil society, in part, is incorporated while serving the ends of exilic groups globally, especially when they maintain mutual ends, such as maintenance of human rights or developing alternative social structures (Grubačić & O’Hearn 2016).

Since the 1994 uprising in reaction to the North American Free Trade Agreement’s ratification, the Zapatista indigenous resistance, which takes its name from early 1900s Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, has worked with the anti-globalization movement to pressure the Mexican state against waging total war, as well as to construct necessary infrastructure, like irrigation systems (Ryan 2011). Rather than acquiescing to the territorial demands of the state, the EZLN resisted cooptation by international civil society, setting limits on activist participation while accepting aid and help (Grubačić & O’Hearn 2016). So, while state power is not totalizing, its ability to wage total war if so inclined puts exilic spaces up against capricious, violent whims, along with long-term, planned siege. International civil society, by bringing attention to the violations of human rights carried out by the state or providing needed resources, becomes a bulwark against siege. Because of this, challenging State hegemony requires the maintenance and production of alternative political-economic and identity structures, as well as loyalty bargains with non-state actors (Grubačić & O’Hearn 2016) (see Table 3 for the exile typology).

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Table 3.

Exile typology.

Exit-with-autonomy	Society practicing egalitarian, direct democracy, with substantive reproduction based on mutual aid
Exit-without-autonomy	Hierarchical society with substantive reproduction based on mutual aid
Autonomy-without-exit	Group within a society directly under control by world-system forces while maintaining group-level egalitarian, direct democracy, and substantive reproduction based on mutual aid

Based on this need and normative anti-capitalist, democratic, and egalitarian goals, Grubačić and O’Hearn (2016) posit three possible outcomes of exile due to the internal composition of the exilic space, as well as the loyalty bargain they have with incorporated centers of power: exit-with-autonomy, exit-without-autonomy, and autonomy-without-exit. These are ideal types, and any example only fits the type to an extent, as each case is dynamic with its own concrete, historical constitution. Therefore, we should not consider a type as absolute, but a necessary and contingent result, which we elaborate on through the examples.

The first of these constitutes the normatively anarchist ideal result as it couples escape from capitalist domination with the institution of cooperative and non-hierarchical alternatives. And this is key for Grubačić and O’Hearn (2016), who consider exile as based on mutual aid (solidarity practices built on the commons), egalitarianism (as opposed to hierarchy), direct democracy (as opposed to reified power), and substantive reproduction (as opposed to formal, market reproduction). The focus on egalitarianism and direct democracy are points where they once again add to Scott’s (2009) formulation of non-state spaces, as non-state spaces can themselves reproduce hierarchies that lead to oppression and domination. Grubačić and O’Hearn (2016) argue that autonomy, the right to self-governance, is a key part of exilic space and its ability to sustain itself, with being non-state alone insufficient to guarantee equality.

Apart from the EZLN, another example of possible exit-with-autonomy is the Western region of Kurdistan (northern Syria), known as Rojava. Ali (2016) describes Rojava as operating on a democratic-confederalist model based on municipal self-governance that builds up from the commune as the unit of political power. This political model is buttressed by the Kurdish Democratic Union Party’s (PYD) ability to maintain control over a geographic territory and for the Kurdish population to reproduce itself substantively through economic organizations like cooperatives and horizontal decision-making, insofar as this is possible (Knapp et al. 2016).

This is not an absolute situation, with a war going on that tends to reproduce centralized, authoritarian structures, such as decision-making about the production of wheat and diesel (Knapp et al. 2016). Furthermore, a fundamental contradiction exists within the Rojava Revolution in that its militants have, with ebbs and flows, made loyalty bargains with US and Russian imperialist powers, largely out of necessity and a desire to survive. These loyalty bargains, made as well as with Assad’s Damascus-based regime, run the risk of leading to a reincorporated Rojava. Despite these conditions, there are real movements toward a withering away of the state and the construction of a socialist economy beyond the authoritarian hegemony of the PYD, Assad, the United States, Russia, and Iran, such that Rojava can be considered to straddle the line between exit-with-autonomy, exit-without-autonomy, and incorporation (Ali 2016; Knapp et al. 2016). As such, this example demonstrates that elements of a multitude of exilic types, even incorporative elements, can be present, making the task of case typing dependent on grounded investigation.

The second type, exit-without-autonomy, refers to an exit from the state or the world-system that reproduces social inequality and exclusion internally, which in the case of the Cossacks led to an ethnic and cultural homogenization of the population weakening them in relation to the incorporative power of the Russian state (Grubačić & O’Hearn 2016). While the krugs did operate as egalitarian, direct democracy political institutions, over time ethnic homogenization, reproduced a more centralized, exclusionary decision-making process. Because of the Cossack case changing type from its inception to incorporation, it is a persuasive reason for why we should think of exile as a continuum. The situation in Rojava is similar. The Cossacks started as exit-with-autonomy and became exit-without-autonomy overtime due to internal changes to their political and cultural composition and then finally were incorporated into the world-system (Grubačić & O’Hearn 2016).

Another example could be Cuba, which has maintained a powerful state, while at the same time maintaining a certain exilic-incorporative relationship to the world-system (Eckstein 1982). There are definitive mutual aid interactions among the population, as well as substantive reproduction of the economy outside formal market decisions (Powell 2008). These occur at the same time there still exist class differentiations and a non-democratic political structure. However, Cuba being an example of exit-without-autonomy is a theoretical conjecture because, as will be discussed later in reference to Russia, there is an important, unresolved debate as to the relationship of these non-capitalist nation-states to the world-system (see, for instance, Chase-Dunn 1980). Exile is a contingent and emergent process, and no faction, territory, or structure should be considered exilic until demonstrated to be so in its structure and institutions (Grubačić & O’Hearn 2016).

The third, and final, type of exile means having an ‘autonomous’ status while actually being integrated into the capital-state system (typically under highly repressive conditions), such as prisoners in solitary confinement creating an identity around mutual aid against the repressive system. In these instances, a subsistence mode of production and solidarity is created that enables reproduction of a shared cultural identity that has the capacity to resist repression (Grubačić & O’Hearn 2016; O’Hearn 2009). This type of cultural exile is exhibited by Irish political prisoners or American prisoners in solitary, who develop shared modes of being in resistance to the oppressive practice of identity stripping implemented by the brutal, carceral systems they exist within (Grubačić & O’Hearn 2016; O’Hearn 2009). Thus, autonomy-without-exit is less about material conditions for reproducing a collective’s exile and more about their cultural capacity to reproduce themselves once stripped of their subjectivity within the dominant system (Grubačić & O’Hearn 2016).

To repeat, at all times, the level of exit and autonomy is a matter of the actual structure and institutions of the exilic space and the loyalty bargain. Each type of exit and/or autonomy represents a point (re)negotiated with the dominant state and world-system, a place where capital accumulation is slowed to a halt

Rupture, factions, state (de)formation, and exile

Our concern in this article is to apply this exilic typology and theory to factions in the Mexican and Russian Revolutions. In this way, instead of focusing on a specific group that has produced an exilic space over the longue durée of the world-system, we focus on revolutionary factions that have advanced, to differing degrees, exilic practices and political-economy during those moments when alterations to the state are imminent, up to its possible abolition. We focus on the loyalty bargains these exilic factions maintain during revolution and the effect this has on subsequent (re)incorporation. That (re)incorporation is tied into exile-in-rupture’s closure and the establishment of hegemony while also securing certain autonomy for constructing exilic spaces in the future.

Exile-in-rupture is distinct from exilic space in that we are analyzing the state when it is in disarray and opportunities for mass alterations are more possible (i.e. the state during social revolution, see Table 4). Over world time, exilic factions play key parts in inciting such explosions when structures are de-territorializing and their future construction is in process (Stafford and Shirley 2015). During this exile-in-rupture, the loyalty bargains exilic factions make can catalyze and maintain state deformation, as well as foreclose it. Those loyalty bargains shift over the course of revolution, which in the case of Mexico and Russia, turns into civil war and then an eventual resolidification and institutionalization of the post-rupture incorporated state. The loyalty bargains shift because factions are only exilic or incorporative based on their actual characteristics at any given moment, rather than exile or incorporation being essential and ahistorical. As such, exile-in-rupture is an emergent and contingent processual revolutionary event in which factions are typed as exilic and incorporative and their changing loyalty bargains and characteristics structure the (de)formation of the state.

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Table 4.

Rupture and exile.

Exilic faction	Faction representing one of the exilic types during exile-in-rupture based upon existence of mutual aid, egalitarian direct democracy, and/or substantive reproduction
Incorporative faction	Faction representing incorporation during exile-in-rupture based upon role in reinserting the nation-state into world-system dynamics of capital accumulation
Exile-in-rupture	An emergent and contingent processual revolutionary event in which factions are typed as exilic and incorporative and their changing loyalty bargains and characteristics structure the (de)formation of the state
Social revolution	‘rapid, basic transformation of a society’s state and class structure … basic changes in social structure and in political structure occur together in a mutually reinforcing fashion’. (Skocpol 1979: 4–5)

In terms of the state, what occurs at these moments of rupture is the loss of hegemony as the integral state disintegrates. This breakdown of hegemony, what Gramsci (1971) describes as the ‘consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group’, is compounded by a loss of ‘state coercive power’ (p. 12). The conditions for this breakdown are recognized to be ‘economic or fiscal strain … alienation and opposition among the elites … revolutionary mobilization … linking and mobilizing diverse groups … [and] favourable international relations’ (Goldstone 2014: 16–19). For instance, leading up to the Mexican Revolution, we see the gradual loss of land by peasants and indigenous communities, the breakaway of an elite faction, the Constitutionalists, the mobilization of multiple factions in a coalition, and even a US government supportive of certain revolutionary factions, especially incorporative factions.

Furthermore, coalitions are crucial during social revolution. This is why a factional understanding of revolution through loyalty bargains allows for a more nuanced interpretation of cross-class alliances during exile-in-rupture (see Foran 1991; 2005). For example, in the case of Mexico, Goldfrank (1975) and Easterling (2012) show that the alliance among Maderista hacendados, peasants, lumpen proletarians, and the proletariat enabled the revolution and its success against the Porfiriato. Classes themselves are represented by specific groups, such as the Constitutionalists or Villa’s División del Norte (DN). The constellation of these factions is then a key description necessary for understanding social revolution, as seen in numerous studies.

While bourgeois and Marxist scholarship on revolutions demonstrate the need to mobilize resources, the condition of popular anger, the political opportunity structure, and class struggle, among other necessary conditions and processes, the research has largely avoided studying the exact organizations and institutions necessary for bringing about social justice with normatively anarchist goals. For example, both Skocpol (1979) and Goldstone (2014) take as given that the purpose of revolution is a reconstitution of the state, rather than its abolition. By doing so, anti-systemic movements are reduced to the creation of a better variety of state, rather than a transition to another system entirely; or, more exilic factions are reduced to appendages of more incorporative factions (for example, see Skocpol (1979), where Mahkno’s army is only mentioned once and in relation to its defeat). What is lost is exactly how exilic factions are defeated and what is gained from their presence during social revolution, especially in terms of more egalitarian, autonomous goals.

In part, this is due to the 20th-century revolutions terminating in passive revolutions and/or reincorporation into the world-system through party dictatorship. A passive revolution is part of the ‘bourgeois hegemonic project for an entire historical period’, but one that operates distinctly dependent upon the national context and how any nation-state relates to other nation-states within a world-historical system (Gramsci 1971; Morton 2007; Thomas 2009: 147). Passive revolution becomes especially important to understanding capitalist development in peripheral and semi-peripheral countries whose revolutions become opportunities for asserting political-economic projects that attempt to carry forward bourgeois revolutions which alter the position of a nation relative to the international system while not altering the balance of class forces within the national context (Morton 2007; Thomas 2009).

For instance, Morton (2010a: 318, 2010b) and Hesketh (2010) demonstrate how in Mexico a passive revolution occurred, whereby an ‘insurrectionary mass mobilisation from below … [is] restricted’ because the ‘emergent bourgeois class’ curtails more radical demands by ‘drawing in subaltern classes while establishing a new state based on the institution of capitalism … or the expansion of capitalism’. For Morton (2010b), this meant that the institutional phase of the Mexican Revolution is actually when the new bourgeoisie ascends to power and establishes hegemony through the construction of an integral state uniting the political apparatus with civil society. By doing so, the ascendant bourgeoisie is able to utilize the one-party state to dictate the terms of the social structure. During this post-rupture phase, the revolutionary bourgeoisie still had to respond to demands brought about by the Mexican Revolution, idealized in the expansion and maintenance of the ejido system of communal land and in the development of a welfare state. They responded to those demands while developing an economic nationalist project of import-substitution development and reincorporation into the world-system that involved subsuming the proletariat and peasantry into bourgeois-led capitalist development (Hesketh 2010; McMichael 2012).

In the case of Russia, while the state did not institute capitalist accumulation at the level of the nation-state with its state-owned firms and collectivized farms, in their interaction with the larger world-system the focus was on the export of agriculture and raw materials to bring about import-substitution industrialization (Chase-Dunn 1980). Thus, the intellectuals and skilled workers that organized the dictatorial party-states reincorporated their nation-states into the capitalist world-system, while making their states ‘upwardly mobile semi-peripheral states’ (Chase-Dunn 1980: 518). The Russian case demonstrates clearly that each scale becomes important, international/world-system and national, for understanding both state (de)formation processes and the process of exile-in-rupture. This is a sentiment shared by the Gramscians, as well as by Grubačić and O’Hearn (2016), demonstrating the complexity involved in properly typing outcomes for analytical purposes and the importance of comparative historical methods for understanding qualitative processes.

In either case, whether through bourgeois passive revolution or through one-party state organization of international trade, 20^th-century revolutions terminated in reincorporation and strong states. This meant that anarchist questions on the dismantling of the state as revolutionary goal were largely ignored, especially within the academy. Despite the failures of past revolutions, the historical evidence clearly points toward the necessity of theorizing and demonstrating a praxis of exilic spaces, whereby attempts are made to escape the system as now constituted on self-determinant and autonomous terms.

For instance, we take recent calls for ‘an anarchism with principles’ forwarded by Andrew Cornell (2016), Kevin Van Meter (2016), and other scholars as an adherence to non-dogmatic positionality amid the ideological hardening of leftist theories following the financial crisis of 2008. In his essay, ‘Insurgent Islands’, Van Meter (2016) points to apparently isolated structures of left-wing spaces and organizations like infoshops, federations, and movements as

the expression of innumerable activities (or self-activity as articulated in Autonomist Marxism) – including everyday resistance (work refusal, sabotage, counter-planning on the ‘shop floor’ and the ‘kitchen’; feigning illness, theft, stealing time, slowdowns), wildcats, communication and mutual aid amongst the general population, creating means for survival, reproduction, and education outside and against capitalism and the state.

That these forms of everyday resistance are linked to alternative structures which provide an affirmative and alternative model of social reproduction evidences that they may also be exilic (Van Meter 2016).

Historically, exilic institutions, such as the obshchina and soviets in Russia or the ejidos and rational schools in Mexico, have been these insurgent islands. They are organizations rooted in specific social relations of substantive reproduction, mutual aid, and in some cases egalitarian, direct democracy. Goldfrank (1979), following Wolf (1969), labels this a tactical mobility, offering people a place to resist from. We argue, following Grubačić and O’Hearn (2016), that these exilic institutions and their factions dictate the specific form that state (de)formation takes, because as non-state, non-commodified spaces (to an extent), they are most capable of resisting incorporation, increasing autonomy, and increasing exit.

For example, while the Zapatistas, the Makhnovists, and anarchist federations seek an autonomous exit from capitalism and the state, incorporative factions seek to coopt or outright suppress such threatening movements in order to protect fundamentally oppressive organizational principles for society. In Mexico, Madero and the Constitutionalists – the latter forming part of the ‘United Front’ with Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata to defeat General Victoriano Huerta, who had overthrown Madero – play the part of incorporative factions arrayed against the Zapatistas and anarcho-communist revolutionaries of the Mexican Liberal Party (PLM), whereas in Russia the Bolsheviks sought to incorporate anarchists, workers, and peasants into state capitalism, in parallel to the rightist White reaction that sought to reverse all the gains of the Revolution – precisely via the Civil War that raged between Red and White. In the latter case, they utilized the Civil War as a justification for terror through arguments about War Communism, which also allowed them to dictate the terms of peasant production and distribution of food (Bukharin 2008 [1921]). In both cases, it is the repression of exilic options that lead to the post-Revolutionary state, a formation that does adopt certain exilic demands, such as the communal landholdings (ejidos) won in the Mexican Revolution.

Mexico: from La Revolución to the Revolutionary Nationalist State, 1910–1920

The Mexican Revolution saw millions of oppressed proletarians and peasants rise up against feudalism, capital, and authority (Gilly 2007). The human toll of the Revolution was devastating, with up to 2 million Mexicans, about 12% of the population, perishing, and many more injured and disabled (Cockcroft 1998). The revolt was against the Porfiriato, a liberal dictatorship led by Porfirio Diaz starting in 1876. During the Porfiriato, legislation solidified the private property rights of large landowners who had, in some cases, stolen the land outright from peasant communities and indigenous towns (Ohmstede 2010). Furthermore, rupture’s likelihood increased as class conflict arose between a mestizo middle-class filling administrative roles and a largely white-skinned burgeoning bourgeois class with links to international capital. Overtime, Porfirio’s ability to navigate a compromise between them deteriorated (Goldfrank 1975, 1979). The Revolution deposed Porfirio Díaz in 1911, ending his capitalist project, which had increased foreign control of the economy, increased the concentration of land in the hands of fewer parties, and increased inequality (Hermosillo et al. 1980; Montalvo 1978).

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Table 5.

Factions in the Mexican Revolution and exilic characteristics.

Factions	Support	Loyalty bargain with	Mutual aid	Direct democracy	Egalitarian	Substantive reproduction	Exilic type
Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM)	Some peasantry, indigenous, exiled Mexicans	Haphazard loyalty bargains and direct conflict	Y	Y	Y	Y	Exit-with-autonomy to autonomy-without-exit
Casa del Obrero Mundial	Urban labor, especially in Mexico City	Constitutionalists	Y	Y	Y	N	Autonomy-without-exit to incorporative
Ejército Libertador del Sur	Indigenous peasantry of southern Mexico	División del Norte and Constitutionalists	Y	N	N	Y	Exit-without-autonomy
Villa and the División del Norte	Peasantry and lumpen	Constitutionalists and Ejército del Sur	N	N	N	Y	Incorporative to exit-without-autonomy
Madero/Constitutionalists	Urban workers, peasantry, certain members of the oligarchy	División del Norte, Ejército del Sur, and COM	N	N	N	N	Incorporative
Porfirian	Oligarchy	United States, small factions in military and oligarchy	N	N	N	N	Incorporative
Huerta	Oligarchy and certain factions in military	Oligarchy and military	N	N	N	N	Incorporative

Y: exists, N: does not exist.

The Revolution was advanced by several different factions that committed loyalty bargains and broke them throughout the course of exile-in-rupture. The social forces driving the transformations from the Mexican Revolution largely comprised dispossessed indigenous peasants and rural proletarians who instituted exit by communizing lands and other means of production formerly held by private, oligarchical interests (Goldfrank 1979; Wolf 1969). The revolution went through several phases, starting with the initial uprising in 1910, followed by Madero taking power in 1911, the resurgence of revolutionary struggle against Madero by Zapata and the Southern army in 1912, and then the 1913 coup by Huerta deposing Madero and installing a new dictatorship, itself overthrown in 1914, followed by a struggle of all revolutionary factions between 1915 and 1917, at which time the Constitutionalists solidified control, leading to the Institutionalist phase of the Revolution that continued until 1940.

Expropriation of land found its ideological precursor in the anarchist Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM), which had advocated for the expropriation of the means of production, such as land and factories (Magón 2002 [1910]). By means of commanders such as Praxedis Guerrero, Jesús Rangel, Hilario Salas, and Cadido Padua, the PLM organized guerrilla fighting units in much of the northern, central, and southern regions of Mexico before and during the Revolution. Indeed, the persistent struggle of PLM guerrillas supported by indigenous communities in southern Veracruz during the Revolution speaks to the failure of the Maderista regime to address inequality and landlessness, a struggle that intensified with Huerta’s coup d’etat, supported as it was by the military old guard, the Mexican upper classes, the US embassy, and transnational investors (Azaola Garrido 1982; Lomnitz 2014).

In the early stages of the revolution, the PLM took over Baja California establishing a commune (Cockcroft 1998). For 6 months in 1911, before being compelled to surrender by Madero’s troops, an internationalist and multi-racial coalition of PLM units, Anglo members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), ‘committed anarchists’, ‘adventurers’, and African American and indigenous fighters had liberated Tijuana and Mexicali from Porfirian control (Lomnitz 2014; Struthers 2013). It was following the defeat of the ‘Baja Raids’ that the PLM’s Junta published its explicitly anarchist September 1911 manifesto endorsing expropriation and social revolution by proclaiming ‘Land and Freedom’. In 1913, a group of PLM leaders signed a manifesto in Veracruz calling for continued armed struggle against General Victorian Huerta’s dictatorship, but the movement’s exilic potential was rapidly blunted by the rise of self-destructive internecine violence (Azaola Garrido 1982). Accounting for all this, the PLM was a clear example of exit-with-autonomy in the Mexicali region; although many PLM members lived involuntarily in the United States without means of production, subsisting on loyalty bargains with left-wing Americans and thus represented autonomy-without-exit.

Exilic factions, such as the PLM, were challenged by discontented hacendados and other members of the bourgeoisie. While participating in the revolution, these bourgeois factions pushed forward incorporation in places like the Yucatán as they confronted the current order of price-rigging by oligopolistic hacendados and the US International Harvester Company (Hart 1978; Montalvo 1978; 1988). The Revolution brought into power these incorporative factions represented by the upper-class Francisco I. Madero, who was assassinated in 1913, and then the Constitutionalists General Venustiano Carranza and General Álvaro Obregón. These incorporative factions consciously sidelined the PLM’s anarchist program and revolutionary syndicalism.

Constitutionalists-Maderistas were always avowed supporters of a liberal capitalist order, incipient leaders of a passive revolution, one that reinforced private property rights, maintained the hacendado system, and did not disrupt commodification (Hesketh 2010). In fact, Madero had ties to Standard Oil, the Pearson Corporation, and (initially) the US government. Madero even sided with the Corral Nuevo hacienda in Veracruz against the claims of landless peasants from Soteapan (Azaola Garrido 1982). This incorporative faction was able to maintain their power through the loyalty bargain into which they coerced the exilic factions of the Mexican Revolution, especially the urban proletariat (Cockcroft 1998). They also demonstrate that participating in a revolution does not automatically make any faction exilic.

Within the Constitutionalist–Maderista faction was its own conflict, one on display in debates over the expropriation of land, a principal promise made to the peasants in the south. While Zapata and the peasants revolted against Madero for reneging on land redistribution, internal to the Constitutionalists, representatives like Luis Cabrera advocated for expansion of the ejidal system as one of the most important policies to undertake (Cabrera 2002 [1912]; Womack 2002). The question of land remained key to each upsurge of the revolution. As Madero was attacking Zapata and the peasants in the south, seeking to quell the rebellion against his administration’s failure to follow through with land redistribution, his General Huerta overthrew him with the aid of the United States.

The best approximation of exit-without-autonomy is represented by Emiliano Zapata and the indigenous militants comprising the ELS. We consider them exit-without-autonomy for their support of community control over the means of production, while not practicing egalitarian, direct democracy, and also their call for a strong, central state that allowed for municipal autonomy (Brunk 1993; Womack 1968). The ELS took up the slogan of ‘Land and Freedom’, redistributing the former and instituting the latter throughout much of Morelos, Puebla, and Guerrero states. This was done in accordance with the Plan de Ayala, proclaimed in 1911 in response to General Victoriano Huerta’s command for the military to open fire on peasant militants (Zapata and Montaño 2002 [1911]). Those peasants had just disarmed following the orders of the victorious Madero (Hart 1978). The Plan de Ayala (Zapata et al. 2002 [1911]), co-authored by former PLM militant Juana B. Gutiérrez de Mendoza together with Zapata, stipulated exilic demands that agricultural lands should be considered as belonging to those who worked them, enshrining the PLM slogan of ‘Land and Freedom’. Little surprise then that Magón described Zapata as an ‘anarchist in practice’ (Acri & Cácerez 2011).

Anarchism and urban class struggle advanced importantly during the Revolution in Mexico City as well, particularly through the work of the Casa del Obrero Mundial (COM), founded in 1912. COM was developed from its predecessor, the anarchist group Luz. After Díaz’s fall, Luz founded the Casa del Obrero (CO) together with an Escuela Racionalista dedicated to workers’ education, in accordance with the autonomist–anarchist methods developed by Francisco Ferrer. They published a newspaper, Luz, promoting the perspectives of Magón and the PLM. They also put out an Anarchist Manifesto that proclaimed, among other things, freedom, redemption, enlightenment, and the establishment of ‘the universal nation where all can live in mutual respect’ (Cockcroft 1983: 108; Hart 1978).

Like Magón in Regeneración, Luz (later renamed Lucha) identified the church, state, capital, landowners, caciques (feudal bosses), overseers, and hitmen as the principal enemies of the people (Hart 1978). As Lucha, moreover, the group began actively to organize federations of anarchist unions as an exilic counter-power opposed to the Maderista regime. Using direct action, COM became the largest labor organization in Mexico during the first half of the Revolution, adding the Mundial (‘International’) to its name in the wake of the 1914 May Day actions taken against the Huerta dictatorship that overthrew Madero the year before. However, the COM, as an autonomy-without-exit faction, working within the world-system with an egalitarian politics, could not sustain substantive reproduction and thus incapable of maintaining exile. As such, its radical vision was suppressed by the political imprisonment of its leadership on Huerta’s orders, who ordered the COM shuttered in order to ensure the advance of incorporation.

After Huerta was overthrown in mid-1914, a new spat of factional civil war broke out between a Zapata–Villa alliance, represented in the Sovereign Revolutionary Convention, against the Carrancista Constitutionalist faction (Womack 1968, 2002). Villa’s DN was at its most exilic in this period, confiscating rural lands for eventual distribution to his largely proletarian army (Womack 2002). This contrasts with their earlier incorporative role as they fought alongside Madero. The alliance between Villa and Zapata was unable to maintain the levers of power, such as keeping the capital, Mexico City (Knight 1990). In-fighting between their ideologues, such as Zapata’s ‘City Boys’ and the organic intellectuals that arose from the peasants, also drove wedges within factions (Brunk 1993). Without a national project, a town–country split increased, which aided the Constitutionalist incorporative faction.

This conflict introduced a dynamic whereby Lucha began to feel increasing affinities with Carranza and Obregón after their forces vanquished Huerta in a ‘united front’ together with the armies led by Zapata and Pancho Villa in 1914. The approximation of Lucha and COM with the Constitutionalist regime – a bond that would prove infamously decisive for the future of organized labor in Mexico, shackled as it would be to the state – can be explained in part as a reflection of the departure from the group of several agraristas, who had abandoned the cities to join Villa and Zapata. This was compounded by the considerable cultural divergence between the Zapatistas and the rationalist urban syndicalists, who held the former’s religious devotion in contempt. Even more, the COM feared political marginalization were Zapata or Villa to prevail against the Constitutionalists in the Revolution.

Hence, owing in part to intercultural conflict and an allegiance to the Constitutionalist ‘liberators’, the affiliates of the COM fatally decided to provide six ‘Red Batallions’ to Obregón for the counter-insurgent campaign to suppress the Zapatista army after the Constitutionalists split from Villa and Zapata in the wake of the Aguascalientes Convention of 1914. Providing some 12,000 soldiers who comprised about one-fourth of the COM’s total membership, this ‘massive augmentation’ of Obregón’s army effectively destroyed the chance for the Revolution to culminate in a truly systemic rupture, which was to be enacted by the rural and urban workers against the bourgeoisie and landowners in unison (Lomnitz 2014). Through this arrangement, the COM effectively mystified the class enemy (Ribera Carbó 2008). In that sense, the conflict between factions representing exit-without-autonomy and autonomy-without-exit, along with the peasant–proletarian split, benefited incorporative factions, in this case the Constitutionalists under Obregón.

As part of their loyalty bargain with the state, COM members were provided leeway with which to expand their organization: by 1915, Casa affiliates had been founded in dozens of Mexican cities, including Oaxaca, Puebla, Querétaro, Aguascalientes, San Luis Potosí, Guadalajara, and Hermosillo, among others. With the intensification of economic crisis in 1915 and 1916, COM syndicates similarly intensified their labor militancy, leading to various work-stoppages, including two general strikes in Mexico City. The first, in May 1916, ended up accelerating state domination of the unions, with the second, from 31 July to 1 August 1916, ending in defeat for the COM, whose members defied the declaration of martial law Carranza made in response, leading thereafter to the COM’s prompt disarticulation (Cockcroft 1968, 1983).

Readily and cynically was the COM discarded following the reactionary services it had rendered to the Constitutionalists against Zapata and Villa. This unfortunate turn of events echoed the early phase of the Revolution, when Madero, ever the liberal authoritarian, suppressed the threat to his left posed by the PLM, wielding the federal army he inherited from Díaz to reincorporate Tijuana and Mexicali. Madero then mandated the arrest of Prisciliano Silva and several other PLM commanders following the support they had provided his own forces against Díaz – all of this in addition to the Maderista regime’s reactivation of diplomatic channels with the United States to have the exiled members of the PLM’s Junta imprisoned.

It is clear, then, that the radical potential of the Mexican Revolution was actively defeated: the enormous sacrifices of the Revolution and Civil War left the peasantry debilitated, the labor movement tied largely to the state, and the bourgeoisie victorious. Although the inhibition of the vast possibilities opened by the Revolution was prosecuted consciously by the privileged classes, it is a scheme with which the putatively radical labor movement, represented by the COM, fatally conspired. The anarchist and Zapatista vision of a mass-movement of workers and peasants instituting exile and remaking society from below continues to retain much of its relevance today – much as the repeated reports of sightings of Zapata’s white horse in the hills of Morelos stand in for the people’s deep connection with the general and the demand for ‘Land and Freedom’ as an exilic return of the repressed.

Instead of this end – the very dream of cataclysmic social revolution and exile-in-rupture which had inspired Magón and his PLM comrades – Mexican society was subjected to the rule of the bourgeois-landowner Carranza – for Magón, ‘another Díaz’ and another ‘lackey of the White House’ who would work to ‘subject the Mexican proletarian and turn him [sic] over to the foreign and domestic capitalist class, hand and foot’, and who in fact instituted the death penalty both in the Army, as a response to the COM’s general strike of 1916. Yet, Mexican society also ‘gained’ the 1917 Constitution, which admittedly does integrate a number of progressive demands, such as universal secular education, equal rights for women, and recognition of the ejido system and indigenous self-determination – while clearly falling short of what likely could have been achieved.

Thus, to summarize, the failure of the proletarians and peasants to unite in Mexico led to the establishment of a caudillo order, whereby the revolutionary potential of exile instead became centralized in state-controlled unions and semi-autonomous ejidos whose property rights were state-dependent, thus reducing their counter-hegemonic effectiveness. Therefore, we find agreement with Hesketh (2010) and Morton (2010b) on the Mexican Revolution terminating in a passive revolution. Without the exilic factions to continue to make incorporation a precarious, indeterminate conclusion, the ascendant bourgeoisie represented by the Constitutionalists was able to carry out a project of capitalist development through the integral state they formed post-1917 providing them hegemonic control. This leads us to argue that either exilic factions exist or do not, and if they do not, then a fundamental condition for constructing a non-capitalist structure is absent. Therefore, the only option becomes incorporation into the world-system because exile is a determinant of other worlds being possible.

Yet, it is exile and exilic factions during rupture that made possible a more just order, even one under an authoritarian political apparatus. By maintaining autonomous structures capable of reproducing alternative systems, demands can be made against the hegemonic order that reduce human misery and suffering while expanding the capacity to resist. This, most likely, is the more important exilic lesson to draw from an interpretation of the Mexican Revolution. It could be said that the modern Zapatista movement is the product of the space produced by the Mexican Revolution, an argument made in part by Grubačić and O’Hearn (2016). As such, state (de)formation is then a contest of ever evolving loyalty bargains producing the space in which we act.

Russia: from popular revolution to counter-revolution, 1917–1924

Rupture occurred with the February Revolution of 1917, initiated through the mobilization of the starving masses of Petrograd to expropriate food stores crying, ‘Down with Tsarism! Down with the War! Long live the Revolution!’ (Voline 1975: 130–133). As in the 1905 Revolution that anticipated it, this mass-mobilization comprised hundreds of thousands of striking workers and mutinous soldiers, particularly from the Petrograd garrison, who reconstituted soviet democracy as a counter-power to the Duma (Figes 1996). Deprived of the armed forces’ loyalty, and thus the means with which to suppress the uprising, Nicholas abdicated in favor of his younger brother Mikhail. Mikhail was in turn convinced by Alexander Kerensky – soon to become leader of the new Provisional Government – to refuse power, hence bringing an end to the Romanov dynasty (Figes 1996). All of this was achieved spontaneously by the people together with the mutinous army (Voline 1975).

At this moment, with the peasantry’s mass seizure of lands and the reconstitution of the soviets, we consider the Russian Revolution of 1917 to have entered a break with the ancien régime, thereby creating the conditions for exile-in-rupture (Voline 1975). Yet, the balance of factional power at this point anticipated the Revolution’s subsequent deterioration, in that the resurrection of the soviets spoke to the marked absence of worker organizations and syndicalism in Russia, and hence the susceptibility of the Revolution to party domination (Voline 1975). These soviets had great exilic potential by allowing workers and peasants to manage production themselves, thereby negating formal market production in favor of substantive reproduction based on direct, democratic, and egalitarian control. However, they had no specific political ideology and were not inherently organisms of class struggle for-itself.

The factions during this period represented both exilic and incorporative social forces, with factions changing their exilic type over the course of the Revolution. The principal factions are the Bolsheviks/Red Army that begins as an exit-without-autonomy faction and ends as an incorporative faction, the Left Social Revolutionaries (Left-SR) that are an autonomy-without-exit faction, and the White Army that is a definitive incorporative faction. Other important factions are the Mahknovists representing an exit-with-autonomy faction and ending as an autonomy-without-exit faction, the Austrian-Hungarian and German Army as incorporative factions, the Anarchists as an autonomy-without-exit faction, and the Greens as an exit-with-autonomy faction ending as an autonomy-without-exit faction. This is not an exhaustive list of factions, but one that serves our current purposes.

During the early period of the Russian Revolution, Left factions maintained loyalty bargains as they overthrew the despotic monarchical orders. The Bolsheviks, along with the Left-SRs and anarchists, grew ever more popular as World War I raged due to their uncompromising call to end the war that the Provisional Government had continued (Rabinowitch 2017). Their call to have all power be devolved to the soviets was in accordance with the exilic proclivities of the Russian masses who were demanding a more egalitarian, direct democracy (Maximoff 1979 [1940]; Rabinowitch 2017; Voline 1975). Also, Kornyushin clarifies that many of the land occupations and peasant uprisings that followed the February Revolution legitimized themselves through the peasantry’s fear that the post-Tsarist state would not justly redistribute land until after withdrawing from World War I (Posadskii 2016; Rabinowitch 2017). Thus, Lenin’s October 1917 Land Decree proclaiming the confiscation of landed estates and the abolition of private property merely represented an acknowledgment of the exilic activity already being engaged in by peasant obschina. These early stages then represent an exilic Bolshevism with majority support as the Provisional Government is dissolved in November 1917 (known as the October Revolution due to the use of the Gregorian calendar at the time).

However, the Bolsheviks, together with some anarchists, played an increasingly incorporative role. The Bolsheviks ushered in a reified, despotic state, the very negation of the exilic openings seen in the 1905 and 1917 Revolutions. Reducing the Marxian concept of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ to Bolshevik hegemony over the state apparatus, Lenin and party leaders came to consider all other groups and classes – particularly exilic ones – as enemies and ‘counter-revolutionaries’. Insisting on the need for Bolshevik supremacy through one-party dictatorship, Lenin and Trotsky rejected the Menshevik Yuli Martov’s proposal to form a democratic left-wing coalition government. This is encapsulated in the infamous call Trotsky made at the Smolny Institute in November 1917 for the non-Bolshevik opposition to direct itself ‘into the dustbin of history’.

In this way, November 1917 constituted a resurgence of incorporation within the exile-in-rupture initiated by the February Revolution. The Reds took advantage of the situation to monopolize power and crush exilic movements emerging through the Revolution. This can be seen in such moves as removing soviet autonomous control over production in factories as the revolution and civil war raged on, as bureaucratic, managerial power was asserted (Brinton 2009 [1970]). By forgoing direct democracy and egalitarian politics, key elements of autonomy, the Bolsheviks reinstituted a bureaucratic mode of production that did not institute substantive reproduction or sustain mutual aid outside of the state (Brinton 2009 [1970]). That is, Bolsheviks maintained political hierarchy, as well as the instrumental logic of capitalist production, cutting off opportunities for a more fundamental exile from the world-system.

Kropotkin (2005 [1919]) gave an apt description of central control’s relation to worker and peasant councils: ‘(they) obviously lose all significance’ under such a structure (p. 331). As such, we argue that typologically the Bolsheviks represent an exit-without-autonomy that turns into an incorporative faction, which ultimately led to a reincorporation into the world-system.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 6.

Factions in the Russian Revolution and exilic characteristics.

Revolutionary factions	Support	Loyalty bargain with	Mutual aid	Direct democracy	Egalitarian	Substantive reproduction	Exilic type
Red Army/Bolsheviks	Soldiers, urban workers, Left-SRs, peasantry	Makhnovists, Anarchists, and Left-SRs	N	N	N	N	Exit-without-autonomy to incorporative
Anarchists	Workers, peasantry	Bolsheviks, Greens, and Makhnovists	Y	Y	Y	N	Autonomy-without-exit
Left-SRs	Narodniki (Populists), workers, peasantry	Bolsheviks and Anarchists	Y	Y–N	Y–N	N	Autonomy-without-exit
Mahknovists	Ukrainian peasantry	Bolsheviks	Y	Y	Y	Y	Exit-with-autonomy to autonomy-without-exit
Greens	Peasantry	Anarchists and peasants	Y	Y	Y	Y	Exit-with-autonomy to autonomy-without-exit
White Army	Ex-tsarist officers, Cossacks	International reaction	N	N	N	N	Incorporative
Austrian–Hungarian and German Army	No internal support	International reaction	N	N	N	N	Incorporative

Left-SR: Left Social Revolutionaries; Y: exists; N: does not exist.

These incorporative moves were not uncritically accepted: masses of workers, soldiers, and sailors petitioned the Bolsheviks, calling on them to reconsider their actions, while a minority of Bolshevik leaders resigned in protest, remarking that this action presaged the coming terror and the ‘destruction of the revolution and the country’ (Figes 1996: 512). The sole group with which the Bolsheviks were initially willing to share power, the Left-SRs, made for strange partners, given their fundamental disagreement with Lenin’s politics. Seeking exit-with-autonomy, the Left-SRs instead advocated direct democracy through a decentralized governance structure based on the soviets, supported the peasant commune and industrial syndicalism, and defended civil liberties (Maximoff 1979 [1940]). The tensions between the Left-SRs’ exilic tendencies and the Bolsheviks’ incorporative methods would soon come to a head, leading to a broken loyalty bargain.

Ironically, in light of the denouement of the Revolution, many anarchists initially found themselves in a loyalty bargain with the Bolsheviks in the struggle for stateless socialism. There was a great deal of overlap in demands between Lenin and the libertarians upon the former’s return to Russia after February. This was such that anarcho-syndicalists voted with Bolsheviks in factory committees to advocate workers’ control of production, some participated in the storming of the Winter Palace, and it was the anarchist Kronstadter Anatol Jelezniakov who dissolved the Constituent Assembly in January 1918 (Avrich 1970: 61–62; Goodwin 2010: 45; Voline 1975: 238–239). The libertarian Anatolii Gorelik observes that the surge in anti-authoritarianism among the Russian masses after February compelled the Bolsheviks to

throw the greater part of their Marxist, even Leninist, baggage overboard and to begin to speak of ‘Bakuninism’, of federalism, of the negation of state power, of free initiative, of the self-initiative of the masses, of power in the provinces […] (Goodwin 2010: 45–46)

Moderate Social Democrats denounced Lenin’s call for immediate revolution through the overthrow of the Provisional Government and the devolution of power to the soviets as a regression from Marx to Bakunin that ignored the various necessities stipulated by the stages theory of history. Leading intellectuals like Plekhanov, Martov, and Maxim Gorky criticized Lenin on these grounds. Thus, a very real loyalty bargain existed between the Bolsheviks and anarchists during the revolution’s initial stages.

Yet, whereas overlap in ideology bargains brought some anarchists into a loyalty bargain with the Bolsheviks, others delineated their clear differences with Lenin through an exilic, anti-statist critique that stressed that the future society should be based on communal self-government, or exit-with-autonomy, while yet others directly took up arms against the nascent dictatorship (Goodwin 2010: 46–50). These contradictions built up overtime, until eventually the loyalty bargain between the Bolsheviks and other Left factions, like the anarchists, was dissolved.

In April 1918, the Bolsheviks directly broke the loyalty bargain, striking out against the anarchists directly. They began raiding and employing artillery against dozens of libertarian social centers in Moscow associated with the anti-authoritarian press and the Black Guards, an anarchist self-defense organization that had arisen since the Revolution to advance its exilic trajectory. In parallel to the case of anarchist commander Gratchov, who was executed for having distributed arms to workers in Moscow, the Extraordinary Commission (CheKa) accused the Black Guards of plotting an ‘anarchist counter-revolution’ and during this repressive wave imprisoned hundreds of militants and shuttered several anarchist publications (Figes 1996; Voline 1975: 306). Thus, following the irruption of the revolution, anarchism ‘strengthened and became widespread’ in Russia until the Bolsheviks consciously stamped it out, ‘deliberately, aggressively’ (Goodwin 2010: 6; Voline 1975: 192).

These moves only give further evidence of the Reds’ clear adoption of incorporative methods designed to crush exilic alternatives and assert the ability of the state to administrate the territory under its control. They ultimately reflect the incommensurability of the political philosophies espoused by Bakunin and Lenin, the similarities between these two disingenuously emphasized by more conservative Social Democrats notwithstanding. As such, it is over the course of the Russian Revolution that we see a foreclosure of the already limited exilic proclivities of the Bolsheviks, who practiced substitutionism in considering themselves, not the masses, the drivers of the revolution, leading them to become an evermore incorporative faction (Voline 1975).

In July 1918, Left-SR activists assassinated the German ambassador in Moscow to protest the Brest-Litovsk Treaty negotiated by the Bolsheviks. They considered this peace treaty a betrayal of revolutionary war against the imperialist powers, because it ceded territory to Germany. Thereafter, they organized an uprising in Moscow that could well have overthrown the Bolshevik regime (Figes 1996). Thus, the loyalty bargain between the Left-SR and Bolsheviks disintegrated, which operated to the detriment of the Left-SRs. The Left-SRs were more interested in catalyzing a general uprising against the Bolsheviks, rather than using their temporary military advantage to seize power directly. For this reason, they were readily defeated, their party banned, and their militants subsequently neutralized (Figes 1996; Voline 1975).

This failed uprising further strengthened the grip of the CheKa and gave rise to the Red Terror, directed against the SRs, the anarchists, other leftists, the peasantry, and parts of the proletariat. The commencement of the Red Terror was accelerated by the SR Dora Kaplan’s attempt to assassinate Lenin in August 1918. It formed a key part of the Bolsheviks’ strategy for victory in the Civil War that had been launched by the White Army with the forces of international reaction behind them.

In response to the Civil War, the new rulers coercively extended their reach over the countryside through the imposition of ‘War Communism’ (Figes 1996; Skirda 2004). Knowing that their power base was mostly limited to the major cities of central Russia, the Bolsheviks did not wish to repeat the experience of the isolated Paris Commune. The Bolsheviks instituted a policy of forced grain requisitioning and conscription from the peasantry. This grain-requisition and mass-conscription regime used to supply the Bolshevik constituency of urban workers and the burgeoning Red Army, which by 1919 had grown to 3 million soldiers, including 30,000 ex-tsarist officers, greatly strained the loyalty bargain between the Reds and the peasantry. In addition to the thousands of workers and peasants killed while seeking exit and autonomy through revolt against the Red and White Terror alike, several hundred Tolstoyans were executed and imprisoned by the Bolsheviks for resisting conscription, thus anticipating this movement’s annihilation under Stalin (Edgerton 1993; Voline 1975).

Bukharin (2008 [1921]) points out that the Bolsheviks considered such subjugation of the peasantry proper, as the proletariat was building a class dictatorship. They then made a distinction between classes in rural towns and fields on strategic grounds that were structural-functionalist relating class to political beliefs (Lih 1984). By doing so, they removed autonomy from peasants that had originally been an impetus for peasants to support the Bolsheviks.

Ironically, as early as 1918, Lenin had begun to appropriate the term ‘state capitalism’, which he had previously launched as invective against reformists to describe the ‘present case’ of Bolshevik economics. ‘If in approximately six months’ time state capitalism became established in our Republic’, Lenin (1973b) declared, ‘this would be a great success and a sure guarantee that within a year socialism will have gained a permanently firm hold and will have become invincible in our country’ (p. 330). Arguing that ‘one possible way to proceed to communism is through state capitalism’, Lenin engineered a financial system consisting of a state bank to aid a surge in heavy industry (Lenin 1973a: 404).

This was hardly the system revolutionaries had envisioned, as evidenced by the prior invectives. Yet, the pogroms and plundering engaged in by the White Cossacks, the most incorporative faction, utterly alienated the peasants of central Russia. The peasants feared, rightfully so, the return of feudalism championed by the Whites more than they disliked Red authoritarianism – however much they rebelled against the Bolshevik state. It was in no small part due to the Whites’ dismissal of the land question, an exilic question par excellence, that these reactionary armies could find so little support in the region (Maximoff 1979 [1940]).

Official Soviet statistics speak to the degree of exit sought by the peasantry during the Civil War: they show that there were 245 peasant uprisings in 1918 and 99 in the first half of 1919 (Figes 1996; Maximoff 1979 [1940]). The vast majority of these rebellions were responses to the demands of conscription and requisition – ‘organized robbery’, in the words of one commissar – and they were in turn cruelly suppressed, as in the Tambov region, where the Reds massacred thousands of insurgents and civilians alike, burning down entire villages, and displacing tens of thousands more, thus preparing the ground for the devastating famine of 1921, which took the lives of more than 5 million Russians and Ukrainians.

Among the millions of conscripts who chose exile by deserting service in the Red and White Armies during the Civil War, a significant portion became ‘deserter comrades’ who joined the Green partisans, who were so named for the extensive forests and marshlands from which they operated to champion armed self-defense of the local peasant revolution against Reds and Whites alike (Posadskii 2016: 8, 11). During the years of the Civil War, the Greens, who counted with anarchist participation, ‘became a weighty power’ in favor of exit-with-autonomy, being a vast all-Russian mass-movement supported by considerable portions of the peasantry in Belorussia, the Volga River basin, and the Urals, among others, both as a survival strategy and as a reaction to invasion by outsiders (Posadskii 2016: 4, 7–8). Driven by hatred of debt-slavery, feudalism, and state exploitation, the Greens presented an exilic alternative to Red and White despotism which inspired its reported thousands of brigades and millions of participants and supporters. Posadskii in fact compares the Green rebellion to the Pugachëvshchina, a vast rebel-peasant insurrection that threatened Catherine II’s reign in the eighteenth century. Yet, while being a mass-movement, the Greens were, like the anarchists, poorly organized, and they too faced severe repression from the Red Army, which employed scorched-earth tactics against districts supportive of the Greens, defamed by the Bolsheviks as ‘political bandits’ and ‘kulaks’ (Maximoff 1979 [1940]; Posadskii 2016: 4–14).

In Lenin’s dichotomous view, either the peasants ‘wholeheartedly’ supported the Reds or they were White-guardist agents who had to be ‘ruthlessly destroyed’ (Figes 1996: 658, 756). In reality, though, as the Greens show, many of the rebel-peasant uprisings advanced the exilic concept of the Third Revolution, struggling under the slogan ‘Soviet Power without the Communists’ (Figes 1996: 98). The Tambov rebellion, for example, had begun after the White defeat in resistance to the imposition of a new grain levy, with peasants organizing entire rebel armies under red banners. Left-SR Alexander Antonov came to command the revolt, and it developed into what Lenin would consider the greatest single threat to his rule. Considering the mass-insurrection in the countryside directed by the rebel-peasant armies against the state, Bolshevik power had been eliminated in several such regions by early 1921 (Maximoff 1979 [1940]). In this way, apart from the White Army threat which had by this time been defeated, Red schemes for incorporation faced severe resistance from below, as exilic peasant collectives mobilized in favor of autonomous substantive reproduction to be achieved through a rupture with the state system.

In parallel, workers in Petrograd, Tula, Moscow, and Astrakhan struck in 1919, demanding food and civil liberties, but they were met with imprisonment and bullets; thousands were murdered in this way by the CheKa (Figes 1996). To uphold state capitalism, the Bolsheviks ‘persecute and wipe out […] everyone who will not bend to their will [… and] fill the prisons and places of exile; they torture, kill, execute, assassinate’ (Voline 1975: 255, 358). Alternatively, striking workers were transferred to the war front, compelled to perform forced labor, or incarcerated in the newly constructed concentration camps (Maximoff 1979 [1940]). A similar fate lay in store for the Russian cooperative movement, which was destroyed for its exilic potential, being affiliated with non-Bolshevik socialists (Figes 1996). Indeed, by spring 1918, Lenin had decided that syndicalist self-management of the factories was unacceptably unruly, so he increasingly subjected workplaces to statist control, simultaneously reintroducing the bourgeois policy of one-person management and debilitating the trade unions (Brinton 2009 [1970]).

Such an incorporative turn anticipated the full-blown militarization of labor advocated by Trotsky at the Third All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions in 1920, where the Red Army commander observed that since Russia had now supposedly become a ‘workers’ state’, there was no longer any need for laborers to have independent unions. By now, the Bolsheviks had become a fully incorporative faction, attested to by this strict hierarchy of control over labor. The workers in turn resented the perpetuation of such industrial despotism after the defeat of the Whites in the Civil War, and three-quarters of Russia’s factories were gripped by strikes in 1920 (Heath 2010[1918]).

In this way, hegemony was being established through the spontaneous consent of masses in fear of a return of the feudal order, qualified and intermittent support for the Bolsheviks in urban centers, and through coercion of those masses in revolt. As such, incorporation is a violent process of subjugation, not a mere bureaucratic reorganizing of society, with support of such tactics by certain groups who link their interests to the interest of the party. Bolshevik substitutionism as a strategy and a practice meant that exilic factions and class collaboration were reduced until they became insignificant factors. From their reduction, an incorporative state was formed, although without a traditional bourgeoisie, and instead administration carried out by politicians, bureaucrats, and military officers.

At least theoretically, another path was possible during exile-in-rupture, if highly improbable. Retrospectively, Voline (1975) speculated that the anarchists would have needed more time to educate the people, displace regnant statism, and expand into a mass-movement. The lack of an established working-class movement prepared to implement anarchism in Russia before the Revolution opened the field to Red October, thus making exile quite utopian. This does not mean that in Russia such exilic demands were absent, with certain segments of the ‘toiling masses themselves’ increasingly ‘calling for freedom of initiative and action’ (Voline 1975: 301). Rather, it demonstrates that exile-in-rupture is not in-itself sufficient, but that a material and ideological basis for exile must exist prior. There are instances of such bases in Russia and Ukraine.

Nikolai Rogdaev, an anarchist organizer among both workers and peasants known as ‘Uncle Vanya’, had moved from Moscow east to the city of Samara in 1919 to assist with the exilic project of organizing the Samara federation of anarchist communists, which along with Left-SRs, had participated in an uprising the previous year that effectively wrested the city from Bolshevik administration via democratic control of the Provincial Soviet Congress (Skirda 2004). Meanwhile, in Ukraine, where Rogdaev’s work had also been crucial in organizing the anarchist movement, Nestor Makhno and the anarchist Insurgent Army fought in alliance with the Red Army against the Whites, inflicting significant losses against the forces of Generals Denikin and Wrangel.

A true exilic figure, Makhno heralded the slogan of ‘Land and Liberty’, creating communes in Gulyai Polye and Yekaterinoslav, expropriating large landholdings, and leaving local organization and administration of the areas he cleared of the invading German and White Armies up to self-determination (Guérin 2005). Directing themselves to urban proletarians, the Makhnovist insurgents called on workers to ‘join hands with us’. At the Second Regional Congress in Gulyai Polye in 1919, anarchist insurgents called for the radical multiplication of libertarian-communist soviets; the congressional resolution encouraged workers and peasants to unite exilically to advance social revolution, in parallel to a declaration made by the Insurgent Army that same year, which explicitly hails the emerging Third Revolution and advocates the expansion of artels (cooperatives) and the devolution of land ownership from the Red state directly to the peasantry itself (Makhno 1934; Skirda 2004). In parallel, the Ukrainian Nabat (‘Alarm’) Confederation emerged after the Revolution to unite anarchists of all tendencies (Voline 1975).

To help formulate new anarchist systems, Makhno attempted to bring Rogdaev to Ukraine, but the Bolsheviks intercepted the courier and turned against the Makhnovists. Lenin held Rogdaev in Moscow in attempts to convince him to take up command of the Western Army and incorporate Makhno into Red hegemony, but Uncle Vanya refused and became persona non grata (Skirda 2004). No matter the contributions the Makhnovshchina had made to the defeat of the White reaction, the exilic anarchist model Makhno and his followers instituted was an unacceptable threat to Lenin and Trotsky’s vision of state capitalism, and as such had to be suppressed (Voline 1975).

When Makhno himself visited with Lenin, he reports that Lenin could never accept the role of the peasants in establishing an emancipated society in the ‘here-and-now’ (Makhno 2005 [1918]: 511–512). Instead, he considered them, and anarchists more generally, ultra-left utopians who needed to be brought to heel (Makhno 2005 [1918]). So, once Wrangel had been defeated, the Bolsheviks broke their loyalty bargain turning against the Makhnovists, criminalizing ‘banditry’, banning the planned 1920 pan-Russian anarchist congress in Kharkov, ordering Makhno’s arrest as a ‘counter-revolutionary’, and forcefully putting an end to this libertarian-federalist experiment in Ukraine that sought exit with autonomy (Figes 1996; Skirda 2002, 2004).

A similar calculus governed the Reds’ reaction to the Kronstadt Commune, which developed spontaneously among the very sailors who had for Trotsky previously been the ‘pride and glory of the Revolution’ within the context of intense strike waves in Petrograd and Moscow in early 1921 that openly called for the Bolsheviks to be overthrown (Avrich 1970). The exilic Petropavlovsk resolution endorsed by the Kronstadt sailors demanded freedom of speech and assembly for workers, peasants, anarchists, and socialists, the liberation of political prisoners, the halting of grain requisitions, and a return to the mass-democracy of the soviets (Avrich 1970; Maximoff 1979 [1940]).

Like the Makhnovists, then, the Kronstaders sought to clear the way of the Bolshevik autocracy and so allow for the self-determination of the Russian people to reassert itself – as through the Third Revolution. In sum, they too desired exit-with-autonomy from the Red state. Worried, then, that the rebellion would spread to the mainland and inspire further mutinies in the armed forces, the Reds forthrightly responded by declaring martial law in Petrograd, ordering the CheKa to fire on any solidarity demonstration in the city, and taking relatives of the mutineers hostage (Maximoff 1979 [1940]). Trotsky issued his famous ultimatum warning that the sailors would be ‘shot like partridges’ if they did not immediately surrender unconditionally; thereafter, the Bolsheviks launched an invasion force to suppress the Commune, killing some 18,000 rebels in the process (Avrich 1970; Figes 1996). On 18 March, the day after the fall of Kronstadt, the Bolsheviks in Petrograd held a rather inappropriate celebration marking 50 years since the Paris Commune.

In parallel, Lenin at the 10th Party Congress of March 1921 sealed the fate of the Revolution by momentously banning factions within the Bolshevik Party. Declaring ‘we have had enough of opposition’, Lenin effectively outlawed the semi-exilic ‘syndicalist deviation’ represented by the urban-based Workers’ Opposition led by Alexandra Kollontai and Alexander Shliapnikov (Avrich 1970: 182–183, 222–229; Guérin 1970). Now, only the Central Committee of the Party would be empowered to decide policy. In this way, not one of the demands raised by the Kronstadt martyrs were met; instead, totalitarian rule was only further entrenched, and Stalin’s subsequent rise to power made possible.

Against Trotsky, it was the Bolsheviks’ incorporative disruption of the revolutionary process which led to Stalin, not Stalin who disrupted the falsely emancipatory revolution directed by the Reds (Voline 1975: 419). Even the New Economic Policy that came after War Communism showed a considerable lack of exilic vision, as it resorted back to market mechanisms and even went so far as the ‘restoration of capitalism’ (Lenin 2002 [1965]). By the early 1920s, there is little doubt that the ‘socialist’ state was becoming fully incorporated into the world-system, even if on its own terms in relation to the burgeoning world superpower, the United States. When Stalin takes full power, the legacy of the revolution had become nothing more than an avenue for industrialization, rather than exilic emancipation.

Ultimately, the myriad exilic collectives and factions of the Russian Revolution could not unite in confluence to achieve exit-with-autonomy from state terror precisely because they were crushed by the incorporative Reds. As the loyalty bargains on the Left were broken, the state’s (de)formation process during exile-in-rupture led to Bolshevik hegemony that raised Russia’s position in the world-system but foreclosed exile for its population. Thus, world time continued apace with all the rhetorical flourishes of communism, and none of its classlessness or social structure.

An exilic research agenda

We propose four avenues for future research into exile – by no means exhaustive:

As we confront social and ecological crises, this work becomes more important. Exilic space, exilic factions, exile-in-rupture – each forms a part of a growing body of literature on what social conditions are necessary to build autonomy and an egalitarian society. Each exilic study also acts as evidence that other worlds are possible.