Planning; or marx versus lenin versus lenin

rc-am rcollins at netlink.com.au
Tue Aug 31 10:46:51 PDT 1999


Chaz wrote:


>Assuming arguendo that Marx and Lenin are different as you say, in
fact and life, Lenin's theory and practice seem more united than Marx's because Lenin's theory was coincident with a revolution and Marx's wasn't. Marx's theory fails his own primary test of practice, when separated from Lenin.<

i said merely that until lenin's _state and revolution_, until that is the workers' councils show lenin that he was wrong in _what is to be done?_, his version of the relation between the party and the masses is not a marxist position (and it reverts to his kautskyism later). this is a point for marx not the intellectualist lenin of _what is to be done?_. in the _communist manifesto_, marx and engels wrote: "Finally in times when the class struggle nears the decision hour, the process of dissolution going on within the ruling class -- in fact, within the whole range of old society -- assumes such a violent, glaring character that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joining the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in aprticular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole."

so, whilst marx and engels certainly have a notion of bourgeois intellectuals as capable of comprehending "the whole" (which remains contradicted by other statements they make elsewhere), they clearly do not see intellectuals as importing socialism to the working class as lenin does in _wtbd_, but rather regard intellectuals as capable of an alliance with the working class given the extreme pressures of the working class movement on the society as a whole. this is the reverse of lenin's position in _wtbd_. and this pretty much is the only time they give any credence to the communist character of intellectuals, where it is almost entirely a matter of disparagement. (tangentially, all this raises the question of whether such a distinction between intellectuals and workers is possible, especially during the phase of real subsumption which marx writes of in _capital_ and elsewhere. but that, whilst connected, is perhaps another post.)


> You have to go through a lot of contortions to explain how Lenin
completely changed his theory, but it seems simpler to say , as most people do, that the Russian Revolution took place because of Lenin's theoretical and practical approach.<

no contortions at all, but the concrete history of the class struggle in russia as i said, its taking up of new and revolutionary forms (the councils), though inspired more by the Paris Commune than anything the bolsheviks did or wrote up to this point, including lenin's _what is to be done?_. surely you aren't claiming that _what is to be done?_ articulates the same theory of the relation b/n party and masses as _state and revolution_ does? if lenin was correct in _wtbd_ about the inability of workers to spontaneously create revolutionary forms for struggle, then there would have been no revolutionary workers' councils.


>Your argument here is Bernsteinist: "The movement is everything. The
goal is nothing." This was a main target of Lenin's _What Is To Be Done ?_, where Lenin said "Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement, " demanding unity of theory and practice, contra your claim above. <

the principal target of _what is to be done_ is the (as it was characterised) 'spontaneism' of the rest of the russian left, including other factions in the russian soc dems, not bernstein. frustrated as he was by the seeming stillness of the class struggles in russia, of the apparent limits of this. this is the meaning of lenin's "without revolutionary theory" line, and it takes a contortion to read this as a claim about the unity of theory and practice.

second, to insist on the pre-eminence of the movement is not thereby to reduce the goal to nothing a la bernstein. it is rather to insist that class struggle is the motor of history and it is the masses who make history. not the party and certainly not intellectuals. moreover, lenin does not in _wtbd_ advocate a unity of theory and practice, but rather the pre-eminence of theory and the party defined as having true consciousness. he abandons the practical implications of this position for a short (and his best) period, but without abandoning the central thesis: that the party embodies true proletarian consciousness. he returns to this thesis and its implications in _left-wing communism_. the claim here is that without his having abandoned the line of _wtbd_ in favour of "all power to the soviets", lenin would likely have been a leader of nothing but a faction in the russian soc dems.


> Also, if theorists and intellectuals have no special role or unique
contribution to make, why is Marx so special ? Why does the working class need Marxism , which is a theory developed by a petit bourgeois unemployed professor, when it can just proceed spontaneously ?<

see above. the working class struggle made and makes marxism. to say otherwise is not a materialist position, but an idealist one derived from the lenin of _wtdb_.


> Part of the proof that you are wrong that Marx and Lenin differed on
these issues is that the Marx wrote , with Engels, _The Manifesto of the Communist PARTY_. Marx thought there should be a working class party guided by the theory of Marxism. Marx's activities and arguments in the First International and relation to the Paris Commune comports more with Lenin's approach than yours, contra your claim below.<

i'm not against communist parties. far from it. nor do i think that council communism is axiomatically preferable. the argument here is more specifically about what the positions on the relation between party and masses in marx and lenin are, and the implications of this. for marx, the very idea of separating class and party (and priveliging the latter) is absurd; whereas for the lenin of _wtdb_ and _lc_, it is a precondition of revolution and an epistemological assumption. mario tronti put the issue more specifically as the need to derive the party from the given composition of the class, and this is certainly closer to marx than is lenin. NB: in the _communist manifesto_ M&E write: "the communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working class parties. They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement." they then go on to make two distinctions between communists and other working class parties: communists are not nationalists but proletarian internationalists; they represent the interests of the movement as a whole (ie., they keep their eye on the potentiality of communism and not on immediate demands within capitalism).


>Of course, Lenin's view of the role of the Party in leading and
bringing theory to the masses was not as you portray it in this post. For example, the soviets or workers councils were a form spontaneously developed by the masses of workers that was championed by the Bolsheviks.<

not true. the bolsheviks did not as a group enter into or champion the councils 'til quite late in their development, as lenin (in 'Our tasks') and trotsky (in -1905) both admitted, and as Deutscher and Carr both acknowledge. even as late as 1917, the bolsheviks do not play an important role in the councils (other than in moscow) and were a minority. its not 'til June of 1917 that the bolsheviks gained a majority of the workers' sections of the councils. and, it was precisely because they subordinated the party to the soviets that they were able to do so. lenin's best moment, in the unpublished (till 1940) letter "Our Tasks and the Soviet of Wokers Deputies" says: "We do not shut ourselves off from the revolutionary people but submit to their judgement every step of the way and every decision we take. We rely fully and solely on the free initiative of the working masses themselves." here, lenin is a marxist, and to be admired in any case for recognising (as marx and engels also wrote) giving "an account of what passes before their [intellectuals'] eyes" rather than a utopian theory or independant science concocted "in their own minds" (_Poverty of Philosophy_).


> Lenin was completely open to spontaneously developed forms that were
truly worker based and in their interests.<

if the qualification there (truly worker based and in their interests) means to fudge the issue, it is still not quite true. there are three lenins in any case, before the soviets, after the 1919, and the anxious lenin of the later years, writing works like _ better fewer but better_ (his final work) as a revision of his previous adherence to taylorisation. in any case, the lenin of _wtbd_ wrote explicitly against the spontaneity of the masses being able to develop revolutionary forms: "class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without... from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers." this is what he means by spontaneous trade union consciousness, which he claims is incapable of being revolutionary. the councils are a direct falsification of this. (anyway, the qualification -- of "truly worker based", etc -- is exactly an inflection that allows lenin (and would-be-leninists) to pick and choose what is true since the party is after all the one with true consciousness.)


> Lenin's idea was not planning or Party planning out every last detail
of the fight to overthrow the government or the building of socialism. <

by 1920, unfortunately it is. trade unions are transmission belts between party/state and masses for accomplishing this (see "The role and functions of the trade unions under the bolsheviks"), much like it is for recent social democratic governments.


> The planning Lenin champions is like any theory that must be tested in
practice, and modified by that trial and error.<

but it is the 'trial and error' and the practices of the planners, the social engineers in your preferred usage, not the working class. it's only between 1905 and around 1919 that lenin admits the centrality and pre-eminence of the autonomous and revolutionary councils in determining the line of the party. this is the only time that 'practice' comes to mean something beyond the practices of the intellectuals, and the last time that, given the abandonment of the constitutive authority of the class struggle, lenin can be said to be a leader and not simply a self-legitimating authority. at no other time does lenin submit his 'leadership' to the decision of the class, let alone hold to the position advanced in _state and revolution_ that workers must have the power to recall their delegation of authority. after 1919, lenin reverts to the theory of the vanguard as legitimated not by the decision of the class but because the vanguard just knows best, or rather has true proletarian consciousness. if lenin had lived longer than he did, perhaps the anxiety of his later years would have seen a reversion to something like _state and revolution_?

i don't see why it would be a problem, even for the stature of lenin in the marxist canon, to acknowledge revisions in his thinking, that is, of the specific relation between his theories and the state of the class struggles, unless that, of course, contradicts a premise that socialist intellectuals are truly prone to the autonomous development of ideas, as lenin himself supposed in _wtbd_.

Angela _________



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