>Ah, if only you kept your own admonition [to make it a question of
historical development and not morality] in mind in your criticism of
Lenin's writings!<
this is a joke, right? this, more than anything has been the exact substance of the criticism. to have to repeat the posts is not only tedious but for some reason, it's what you have insisted on not reading. here are the relevant excerpts (below). and anyone who's read the accusation of authorianism as anything other than the context in which it's been used througout this discussion, as a criticism of lenin's theory of workers as unable to develop revolutionary consciousness, which was disproved by the historical emergence of the revolutionary councils, by lenin's admission, and his 'reversion' to this position after 1919, through the effective dissolution of the councils, must have not been paying attention. lenin's problem, in short, is that he removes the agency of the working class, when historical conditions certainly mean it is not only the subject, but definitely in a stronger sense, the agent of the revolution. i don't expect people to pay attention. but, where i might think it a simple matter of not paying attention, you have been paying a lot of attention it seems, enough at least to comment, continuously and critically, on most of what i've written on this topic. and, you've done so pretty determined to avoid any of the issues now reiterated below whilst accusing me of ignoring them. and that, i think is a strange kind of polemic and not worthy of a mannered response after, what is it now, the sixth or seventh time you make this kind of claim?
Angela _________
>> Sent: Wednesday, 1 September 1999 1:35
it was not as if the _manifesto_ caused those events. the russian workers' council took their inspiration from the paris commune.
in _capital_ (throughout) marx writes both of the specific emergence and role of intellectual *labour* as first, the adjunct of science to the mode of production and reproduction, and second, that this passes from an adjunct to itself becoming a branch of production -- and he clearly sets these changes as internal to capitalist developments. we have already seen those changes by and large. the abolition of the distinction does not come about by rising consciousness (or even by teh expansion of a marxist consciousness) but by changes in the mode of production.
and isn't this 'trial and error' contained in class struggle and not outside of it?
not at all. it is merely a restatement of the argument made by marx and engels that the pressures of extreme class struggle on the whole of society force changes in the 'intellectual climate' and the alliances of intellectuals, as they did with lenin and his decision to enter the councils and accord them a priveliged status in the constitution of the revolution, for a short time. that is, he takes on the position he previously denounced as the 'spontaneism' of the Self-Emancipation faction.
the insurrectionary moment of the russian revolution was triggered by the rise of the most exploited section of the working class, the textile workers, and there is no evidence at all that there were bolsheviks amongst the textile workers. if you have any, i'd like to see it, seriously.
>> Sent: Wednesday, 1 September 1999 3:46
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."
the concrete history of the class struggle in russia as i said, its taking up of new and revolutionary forms (the councils)
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
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.
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_).
>> Sent: Tuesday, 31 August 1999 5:26
just as Marx wrote in 'The class struggles in France', "It is well known how the workers, with unexampled bravery and ingenuity, without a common plan, without means and for the most part, lacking weapons, held in check for five days the army, Mobile Guard...", so too Lenin was (from the distance of Stockholm) forced to praise the emergence of the workers' councils, and to seriously revise his formulation of the relation between party and masses. in a letter from Stockholm ('Our Tasks') he argues that the party is now to "clarify" the way for the "spontaneous revolutionary activity of the masses"; the party should be subordinated to the workers' councils and that the Russian social democrats should abandon their decision (a decision he had previously insisted on) to _not involve themselves_ in the councils because they were not revolutionary formations. no more claiming that 'spontaneity' is the enemy of the revolution because workers are genetically unable to accede to a revolutionary consciousness, Lenin now adopts the position of the Self-Emancipation faction he previously scoffed at: "We do not shut ourselves off from the revolutionary people but submit to their judgement every step and every decision we take, We rely fully and solely on the free initiative of the working masses themselves". but, so much has Lenin's previous position become orthodoxy, so successful was his campaign against the Self-Emancipation faction, that his letter to the party paper from Stockholm is not published (''til 1940!).
Lenin was therefore forced to change his mind, and become the 'demagogue' that he had accused others of being for insisting that the party be a mass party of workers and not a group of "ten wise men" (as Lenin had seen the party), he must adopt the position advanced by the Self-Emancipation group and subordinate the party to the workers' councils.
those dualism are only ever overcome in class struggles, which are not planned nor even necessarily admirable, but rather have often enough been forms of resistance to the planning regimes themselves, as the USSR's was been overcome by the systematic (but unofficial or criminalised) practices of absenteeism, alcoholism, shoddy production, sabotage and generalised disinterest, as Keynsianism was overcome by the 'rigidity of wages' and inflation. in each case, 'efficiency' was the casualty not of any ostensible failures in planning, but of a refusal by workers of work and of the needs that they were planned as having. that is, they struggled against specific plans but also the very practice of planning for needs by a anything which can be distinguished (state, party) from the shape and direction of class struggles. for the planners, more thought goes in to defending planning than to figuring out how class struggle, the struggle for communism, can take precedence in any planning regime without being, as it has been, cast as 'counter-revolutionary' and criminalised.
luxemburg in criticising the bolsheviks already knew that any distinction between present capitalist circumstances and a radically different future is always a temporal distinction _within_ the class struggle and not one that gets comfortably resolved by attributing the future to a consciousness which exists autonomously from or even in a priveliged relation to that (as in the party or the state)
the planning of use values, has tended to be used as a way of absorbing this temporal difference between capitalism and communism into a difference between tw0 sides of value, ie., two sides of capitalism. and here, dialectics is no longer materialist, but becomes the occassion for idealist fantasies.
>> Sent: Saturday, 28 August 1999 2:39
the topic of planning only emerges at a precise conjuncture within capitalism and within the panoply of socialist terminology: as a response to the crises of capitalism, most notably, the 1929 Crash. michael's remarks illustrate exactly this, without his asking the question of the specific conditions and meaning of that aspiration, and without considering more forcefully what the crisis in and of capitalism consists of.
there are always two sides to any consideration of a capitalist crisis such as this: crisis as a weapon (the disciplining of workers thru mass unemployment/impoverishment being one); but also the crisis as the trace of worker resistance to which the financial crisis is a response. that is, crisis is also the ongoing effect of the irreconcilable antagonism at the heart of capital. planning, by which i mean the aspiration to plan capitalism -- of which the total work society is one option and historical moment (some might call this socialism, but i don't) -- is then the desire to reconcile that antagonism within/via the state. an eminently hegelian manoevre. couldn't be done in the ussr, where 'inefficiencies' and 'layabouts' were the re-emergence of the antagonism in a new form; and couldn't be done in the Keynsian plan, where inflation is the re-emergence of the same within money. that is, each plan, whilst trying to reconcile the antagonism merely prompted its reassertion as a different kind of crisis.
>> Sent: Friday, 3 September 1999 12:17
contrary to lenin in _wtbd_, marx writes, referring to the Chartists, "In the struggle, of which we have only noted some phases, this mass unites, it is constituted as a class for itself. The interests which it defends are the interests of its class. But the struggle between class and class is a political struggle." so, once again, where lenin wants to resolve any perceived 'gap' between revolutionary consciousness/forms and (what's a word?) acquiescent consciousness/forms by attributing the former to something that already exists like a key ready to be turned (p-b intellectuals), marx always thinks that 'gap' as a temporal one, of the development of the working class. this is why the issue is one of class composition and not one of theory or theoreticians.
>>