Planning; or marx versus lenin versus lenin

Jim heartfield jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk
Thu Sep 2 15:06:17 PDT 1999


In message <005201bef3d8$cf02b820$b7e13ecb at rcollins>, rc-am <rcollins at netlink.com.au> writes
>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.

I don't think that Angela's attempts to reinvent Marx as an anti- Leninist carry a lot of water.

Here is Marx giving the original of Lenin's comment about socialist ideas coming from outside:

'The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart is the proletariat. Philosophy cannot realise itself without the transcendence of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itself without the realisation of philosophy.' Critique of Hegel's Phil. of Right. Introduction. Early Writings. Penguin ed. P257

In his life of course, Marx acted according to this dictum. He did not hold back from bollocking out working class leaders from Silesian Weavers' leader Wilhelm Weitling ('ignorance never helped anyone' he said, banging the table after a frustrating evening trying to explain 'radical chains'), to French socialist Prudhon (was anyone ever so viciously abused), to English Trade Unionist John Weston ('friend Weston'). With Engels, Marx joined the back of a TU march for higher wages carrying a banner between them that read 'abolish the wages system!'

Furthermore, the whole party idea was not Lenin's but Hegel's. Lenin, who was no great Hegel reader only got it through Marx: 'Without parties no development, without division no progress', wrote Marx (quoted in Hook, Hegel and Marx, p 18). Engels repeats the point in a letter to Bebel, 'For the rest, old Hegel has already said it: A party proves itself a victorious party by the fact that it splits and can stand the split. The movement of the proletariat necessarily passes through stages of development; at every stage one section of the people lags behind and does not join in the further advance; and this alone explains why it is that actually the "solidarity of the proletariat" is everywhere realised in different party groupings which carry on life and death feuds with one another..' (20 June 1873)

And this is all really that Lenin means by the party. The party is the highest level of consciousness in the proletariat. It necessarily must abstract itself from the mass as a party, to hold up a mirror to the masses. And all this is so because the ruling ideas of each age are the ideas of the ruling class, and working class consciousness, by contrast is fragmentary and differentiated.

'the proletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century criticise themsleves constantly, interrupt themselves, continually in their own course' writes Marx, unlike bourgeois revolutions which can depend upon the spontaneous reproduction of capital to keep them on the straight and narrow. Working class spontaneity, by contrast, will always tend to reconcile the movement to capitalism, only a rational will to go beyond wage bargaining makes working class revolution possible, and that, as Marx explains, is why 'Without parties no development, without division no progress'

Equally wrong-headed is the desire to make Marx into an anti- authoritarian. Marx was an extreme authoritarian, in his actions and in his theory. Engels explains as much in his article 'On Authority' 'A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will on the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon'. It was Marx, after all, who first coined the phrase 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat', not Lenin.

Again, in his practical political activities, Marx dedicated probably the greatest effort and time to the struggle against the anrachists in the first international, who first made the arguments that Angela puts here. You can make an argument for a libertarian communism, but you cannot make Marx make it. -- Jim heartfield



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