Angelus Novus:
I think, basically, for the past 150 years or so, Social Democracy (I include Leninism, Maoism, Trotskyism, etc. under this term) has gotten Marx distorted, wrong, incomplete. ---snip [WS:]
Interesting. I think this statement is both right on the target and utterly confused.
Tahir: See below for an alternative to both of your viewpoints (both of which I partly agree with).
You are right on the target saying that Marxism has been distorted by the scores of nationalist leaders in Eastern Europe and Third World countries. I am currently reading a biography of Pol Pot by Philip Short which claims that the Khmer Rouge leadership had little interest or understanding of Marxist theory. All they cared about was a guide on strategy how to build a successful nationalist movement against the French, the Vietnamese, the Thai and the internal enemies. Their reading of "Marxism" was limited to strategy guidelines by Stalin or Mao.
Tahir: I have no doubt that this is true. But what about Stalin and Mao themselves? How much of Marx were they familar with at first hand? My guess is very little.
Alexander Gerschenkron (_Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective_) makes a similar claim about Russian "Marxism." He argues that the goals of the Bolshevik leadership were centered on nation-building and modernization, and to that end they followed institutional models developed earlier in capitalist France, Germany or Meji Japan. The "Marxism" they adapted was basically a "managerial ideology" - a combination of selections from scientific literature and popular wisdom put together to legitimize the manager's (or ruler's) claim to power.
Tahir: Undoubtedly true. I find myself amazed at the vulgarity of some of Lenin's notions. Like: socialism = soviets plus electrification or: socialism = the banks taken over by the people's state, etc.
The Soviet 'Marxism" was really a variation on the traditional Russian peasant populism and collectivism, peppered with pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo lifted from popular texts on political economy of the times.
Tahir: I'm not sure that this part is true at all. Peasant populism? Where do you find this in Lenin, for example?
When you seem to go completely haywire is equating social democracy with Third World revolutionary nationalism.
Tahir: Right up until the revolution and even after, the bolsheviks themselves continued to call themselves social democrats. But you're onto something, I think, see below.
The fundamental difference between the two lies in what Gramsci called "civil society." Many Third World countries were basically backward feudal fiefdoms with despotic and incompetent overlord class ruling over illiterate peasantry and very little in between - whatever little industrial classes (proletariat or bourgeoisie), merchant or artisan classes there were - they were largely of foreign stock (Cambodia at the turn of the century was probably a good example).
Tahir: I'm not sure what clarity "civil society" brings to this matter. And rather than Gramsci, I think it is Bordiga, his less pliable predecessor at the head of the Italian CP, that brings clarity to this matter. Where I agree with you is that the bolshevik project was essentially capitalist in nature, and as such it quickly became nationalistic (ostensibly due to the "failure" of the German revolution to happen on time, blah blah). What is essential here is the fact that Neither Russia, nor China, Cuba, Vietnam, Korea, Albania, etc., as well as the many other countries in which leninism has had some appeal, had gone through a thoroughgoing bourgeois revolution. They were thus ripe for a substitute bourgeois revolution. This means that they needed to go through a revolution that was firstly and most importantly anti-feudal and anti-autocratic in nature. Secondly they needed to go through a process of rapid capitalist modernisation if they were to "catch up" with their capitalist rivals. Who could lead this? Not the pusillanimous liberals of course, but rather those who were made of sterner stuff, while being without any individualistic liberal scruples, the communists of course! If we read bolshevik writings carefully now (including Trotsky) this confusion, or better conflation, of the communist project with the capitalist modernisation one gradually comes into focus. Its ultimate destiny is captured in such moments as the collapse of the Berlin wall, Gorbachev's own abandonment of communism (ironically in favour of "social democracy"), Yeltsin, Deng's satement about it not mattering whether the cat is black or white as long as it catches the mouse, etc, etc. These men were not so much "revisionists" as men who in a sense grasped the real trajectory of their countries' history: the "communist path" to capitalism. That the leninists of today still cannot see this real trajectory is an index of the stupefying power of leninist dogma. I remember watching a South African TV debate circa 1990 between the late Joe Slovo, secretary-general of the SACP, and Pik Botha, the apartheid foreign minister, in which Slovo actually tried to argue that Gorbachev hand not abandoned "socialism", but was in fact leading the SU towards "democratic socialism. This was 1990! just months before the final demise of the SU. Pik ridiculed him. As foreign minister he knew way more about what was really going on in the SU than the SACP honcho. I've never forgotten that. Today the SU is gone and Slovo lived just about long enough to see its demise. (Pik is today a card carrying member of the ANC and has been for a number of years).
In such "social vacuum" the nationalist activists and reformers could take a "designer" approach to social change. Their main task was to overthrow the feudal autocracy - and once that had been accomplished they felt that they could design new social institutions by fiat, as there had not been any historical institutional path that could serve as the backbone, prototype or starting point of the new social order.
Tahir: They could and did. But those institutions were only suited to the temporary project of building capitalism. At a certain point those institutions have served their purpose and the country can emerge from its state of semi-autarky into the blinding light of capitalist modernity, if still a little bit rustic and backward when compared to the most advanced capitalist states. If they were always part of the capitalist project, they were only so in the very specific way that I described above. And a key to understanding that lies in two texts that were not available to the bolsheviks. One is the "unpublished 6th chapter" of Capital which talks about the real subsumption of labour, and the other being the "fragement on machines" (page 700 or thereabouts of the Grundrisse). The SU could not make it as a successful capitalist state because it could not complete the transition from the formal to the real subsumption of labour, and because it did not raise the "general intellect" (see the "fragment") through science and technology as the West had done. The key to this is productivity. The West had made a full transition to the relative surplus value strategy, and through ICTs had begun to liberate the subjective conditions for heightened productivity. The paternalistic SU could not revolutionise the subjective condition of the worker in this way; thus it could not compete and became a fetter on the further development of captitalism. Those institutions that had defined it had to go, successful as they had been earlier. BTW I'm not claiming that the two texts I mentioned are the only routes to understanding these facts. Some thinkers, such as Bordiga and Pannekoek, had already understood aspects of this in the twenties, which is why Lenin had to write his appalling papal bull against them.
The Khmer Rouge decision to dismantle the budding urban strata in Cambodia and implement their vision of rural "utopia" is a good example of this situation, but Trotsky (_Results and prospects_) takes a similar approach to the Russian situation.
However, more developed countries (especially western Europe) had a rich network of intermediary "civil society" institutions, which as Gramsci observed, made a "designer" approach to social change (i.e. overthrow of autocracy followed by building of a revolutionary social order form scratch) a losing proposition in such countries. In that context, social democracy i.e. counterbalancing market relations with democratic social and political institutions is probably as close to a Marxist vision of social organization as it gets.
I understand that "wimpy" social democratic institutions have zero appeal sanguine revolutionary fundamentalists (and even smack of treason) - but by now we have plenty of historical evidence that revolutionary fundamentalism of any stripes never leads to anything good.
Wojtek
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