>>> "rc-am" <rcollins at netlink.com.au> 08/31/99 01:46PM >>>
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).
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Charles: What is Marx's version of the relation between the party and the masses, according to you ? To feed back to the masses in words what they are doing spontaneously ? Why was a party or Marx needed for that ? or at all ?
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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."
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Charles: What is the significance of this "going over" ? Do those who go over to the workers' side have a special role, bring something ? or do they just become a tiny few more workers, like everybody else ? How come Engels and Marx , who went over, had such a unique role in the revolutionary workers' party, introducing _The Manifesto of the Communist Party_ into the party and all ? Wasn't that a specialized role that the average worker in the movement was not doing ?
Why didn't they write _The Manifesto of the Communist Working Class_ if there is no special role for the Party ? What it the role of the Party if not intellectual leadership of the working class ?
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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_.
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Charles: You misrepresent Lenin's _witbd_. There he says that the party is part of the working class. In Lenin's theory, the party is a speicalized part of the working class: its most conscious element. Lenin does not say that the intellectuals import socialism to the working class, rather that the party intellectuals bring socialist consciousness to the working class. The working class as a whole is the only force capable of making socialism. It has to have consciousness of Marx's theory to do that.
"Party" is the same semantic root as "part". The Bolsheviks were partisans, i.e. part, of the working class.
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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.
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Charles: Look at their actions as well as their words. THEY were intellectuals ; and they acted like their intellectual products were very important for the working class masses to become conscious of.
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(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.)
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Charles: The antagonism between predominantly physical and predominantly mental labor is an ancient one. The Marxist revolution claims to resolve it along with its analogous class antagonisms. So, Marxists make the distinction with the purpose of abolishing it by exactly raising mass consciousness or participation in mental labor.
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CB
> 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.<
Angela: 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?
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Charles: Surely, I am, to the extent that _The State and Revolution_ discusses the Party. At the time of _The State and Revolution_ the working class and the Party are IN FACT as much one as at anytime in history. The theory of _What Is To Be Done ?_ is highly fulfilled in practice. _The State and Rev_ is sort of a peptalk for the insurrection, dispelling superstitious respect and fear of the authority of the state, saying it is ok for THE MASSES (not the Party by itself) to throw the rascals out, and even use violent means which are probably necessary because the essence of the state is organized violence protecting private property against the working class and masses and because of the experience of the Paris Commune.
Angela:
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.
Charles: This is a mistatement of Lenin's position in _witbd_. It is not that workers cannot spontaneously create revolutionary forms such as the Commune or the soviets. It is that they will not spontaneously develop socialist consciousness. The latter is consciousness of the need to abolish private property. The Paris Commune and soviets did not have the full consciousness of the full transformation of the mode of production. In August before the Commune, Marx told the Paris workers that any effort to overthrow the government at the time would be a folly of despair. However, once they plunged into it, he supported them fully. Marxism recognizes that experience, trial and error, teahes, but the purpose of theory is to learn by other than hardknocks. One reason Marx knew the Paris Commune would be a folly of despair was that it was not sufficiently conscious, i.e. it didn't have a communist part leading it, more fully conscious of what had to be done to eally overthrow the bou! rgeoisie.
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Charles:
>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. <
Angela: 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.
Charles: Page 62 , International edition 1969 of _witbd_:
" Are we slandering the Robecheye Dyeloites...by calling them concealed Bernsteinians... "
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Angela: 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.
Charles: Don't make me laugh. It is one of the clearest statements of the need for unity of theory and practice that there is.
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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.
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Charles: Wrong some more. The party impart socialist consciousness to the proletariat as a whole. It does not reserve it for itself. It is slander in the extreme to claim that Lenin argues in this book or anywhere that the party and intellectuals make history.
Your repeated theme that Lenin somehow peridoically becomes lucid for brief spurts just enough to get everybody to think he is an acute analyst of the situations of this period in Russian history defies common sense.
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Charles:
> 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 ?<
Angela: 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_.
Charles: This and the above do not answer my questions. Why does the class struggle "make" this marxism occur to Marx and not just directly to the working masses ? What is this "marxism" that he working class struggle makes ? Does the class struggle make this Marxism "in the whole working class" spontaneously ?
Your position is mechanical materialism , the infamous "vulgar" materialism (!). This is exactly the economism that Lenin argued against in _witbd_. The Russian economists argued for trade unionism pure and simple, confining the workers to economic, shop floor, point of production struggles only. Lenin argued against this that the working class had to be involved in politics as well as economics, because pure economic struggle would not spontaneously create socialist consciousness.
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Charles
> 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.
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Charles: This is a misrepresentation of Lenin's position in these books. Lenin's position is that the Party should be the most conscious part of the working class as a whole.
Lenin also says in _witbd_ that spontaneous working class struggles are socialist consciousness in embryonic form.
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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).
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Charles: As to your last parenthetical commentary, Marx and Engels mean the Communists keep their eyes on BOTH. Marx and Engels do NOTsay that Communists do not pay attention to immediate demands within capitalism. They say that Communists are unique in that they keep their eyes not only on the immediate and local demands but the larger picture. Communists are dialecticians/scientists and therefore holistic. This is exactly a distinction between the consciousness of party members ( to whom the manifesto of the party is directed) and other members of the working class.
It is false to say that Lenin did not follow this passage in theory and practice better than anybody since Marx and Lenin.
Lenin specifically says "worker-revolutionaries" should have no limit on their training and consciousness. In another essay on the party, Lenin says the goal should be to have a ratio of about 20 to one workers-revolutionaries to intellectual revolutionaries.
>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.
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Charles: If they had, you and the other anti-Leninists would be charging them with trying to take them over.
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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. ((((((((((
Charles: You try to make it sound as if they opposed the soviets before this. False. The workers in the soviets must have felt the Bolsheviks had their interests at heart since they elected them to majorities. Why shouldn't it be to the Bolsheviks credit that they gained majorities after a long period of work and struggle by which obviously they proved themselves ? This seems exactly the pattern of a very democratic, sober and fair process. The Bolshevik majorities in the soviets were of WORKERS, not intellectuals.
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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."
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Charles: But in your theory, what is the need for Bolshevik "decisions" judged by the revolutionary people ? Why not just decisions made by the revolutionary people ? Your theory makes the party superfluous, it tails the masses. What do the masses need a tail for ?
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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.
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Charles: No more of a fudge than "revolutionary people" rather than just "people". You are in error if you think Marx just endorsed as revolutionary or self-interested everything the working class did spontaneously. For example, Marx and Engels criticized the "bourgeois workers " in England and elsewhere. Your quote above from The Manifesto implies this. Those workers who are not communists may often act spontaneously based on a narrow viewpoint, such as nationalism, which are not in the best interest of the working class as a whole. Lenin urged working in reactionary trade unions, but that doesn't mean that all trade unions ( trade unions are a main example of a form spontaneously developed by the working class; in fact, Lenin says the working class can only obtain trade union consciousness spontaneously) or their spontaneous actions are endorsed by Marx or marxism.
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there are three lenins in any case,
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Charles: In your mind, speaking of idealism
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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.
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Charles: The councils were incapable of spontaneously being revolutionary. For one thing they were influenced by the Bolsheviks in their development. For another the councils themselves decided to follow the Bolsheviks as their revolutionary leaders. The workers in the councils were better able to understand the validity of Lenin's thesis than you are; and they proved it by action.
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(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.)
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Charles: The Party is the part of the working class with the Communist consciousness, just like Marx and Engels say in the quote you give above. Nobody, Lenin or Marx , uses the term "true" consciousness. That' s you slandering Lenin in the way thousands of anti-communists have.
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> 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.
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Charles: The plan is for the working class, not just the planners, to do something. The working class goes through the trial and error. It is a plan for all of society ,not just the planners.
Further, the planners include many workers in the Party; and the democratic input of the masses. The idea is a representational government, the republic. Nothing new there. Republicanism is not an anti-democratic concept.
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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.
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Charles: In writing the Party line in The Manifesto, Marx and Engels did not submit it to any workers' councils as pre-eminent and central. Their scientific theory of history, not the workers' councils was the main source of the party line.
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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.
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Charles: This is a factual misstatement. See Krupskaya on how Lenin constantly communicated with workers throughout his career and based much of his analysis on that worker practice.
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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.
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Charles: The "leadership " was not coercive, couldn't make anybody , any worker do anything. The Bolsheviks were a tiny, illegal group who didn't control anybody and were under constant danger of being imprisoned or killed by the Czarist police. Even in 1917 right before the insurrection, there was a death warrant out for Lenin from the Kerensky govt.
Lenin's leadership was basically opinions , like those expressed on these lists. And they were submitted to the working class as much as they could get the illegal newspapers and documents widely distributed. The working class had plenty of time to judge Lenin's theoretical leadership in a non-coercive existence. The working class voluntarily followed Lenin's leadership.
On recall, Lenin was removed as an editor of the Party newspaper at one point.
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_.
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Charles: To make appropriate revisions, you'd have to get his thinking right first , which you have not done. Once you get it correct, and compare it with actual history, you should have much less desire to revise it. It is not "stature" per se that defends Lenin's ideas , but their validity in practice.
I think Lenin was pretty anxious when he was young too , being sent to prison and for trying to organize unions and leafletting workers, dodging the secret police, living in exhile, wearing disguises. The name "Lenin" is a pseudonym. That should give an idea of what type of anxiety he was under all along. Isn't that why he went bald ? :>)
Charles Brown