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Title: A Look at Leninism
Author: Ron Tabor
Date: 1988
Language: en
Topics: Leninism, anti-Bolshevism, critique
Source: Retrieved on 2nd December 2020 from https://libcom.org/library/look-leninism-ron-taber

Ron Tabor

A Look at Leninism

Preface

THE book in your hands was originally written as a series of articles in

the Torch/La Antorcha, a newspaper published by the Revolutionary

Socialist League, in 1987 and early 1988, The ideas presented in these

articles had been germinating in my mind for quite some lime. They were,

in particular, an offshoot of work on a previous book, Trotskyism and

the Dilemma of Socialism (with Christopher Z. Hobson), a history of

Trotskyism and a critique of Leon Trotsky’s theory of the nature of the

Soviet Union, During the course of writing that book, it became dear to

me that Trotsky’s tendency to lay the blame for the totalitarian

evolution of the Soviet regime solely at die hands of Joseph Stalin, and

to exonerate Lenin of any responsibility, was, at the very least,

one-sided. The question: What role did Bolshevik Party founder and

leader, V,l, Lenin, and his theories and practical activity play in the

establishment or that oppressive society which we call state

capitalism)?—thus presented itself.

The result was a considerable amount of additional reading on the

October Revolution, the Civil War and its aftermath, various

philosophical questions, and a re-reading of a number of works of Lenin

himself. Partial conclusions from this program were recorded in a number

of rough drafts of documents intended for internal discussion in the

Revolutionary Socialist League and in a talk presented at the 1986

convention of that organization. I was not satisfied with any of these

presents! ions or my conclusions, however.

At a certain point in my reevaluation of Leninism, it occurred to me

that the fundamental outlook and mentality of Lenin and the Bolshevik

Party as a whole were overwhelmingly authoritarian, and I could no

longer square my acceptance of Leninism with my more fundamental

commitment to a revolutionary libertarian socialism. As a major leader

of the RSL. I could not in good conscience

keep this conclusion to myself. The series of articles now compiled in

this book was my attempt to explain and motivate my thinking.

Since they were written over a period of 13 months, for a newspaper and

hence for a fairly broad audience, and often under the pressure of

deadlines, the articles are occasionally repetitive, while some issues

are covered somewhat simplistically. Moreover, a number of topics—the

attitude of Lenin toward the peasantry, for example— were omitted for

reasons of time and space Despite this, the articles represent an

accurate enough presentation of my current evaluation of Leninism to

warrant re-publication in book form. It is hoped that whatever

weaknesses the resulting book exhibits do not prevent it from being of

some value for those looking for a political outlook and strategy that

are both revolutionary and anti-authoritarian.

I would particularly like to thank Bruce Kala for his time and patience

both in typesetting the original articles and inserting the various

minor editing changes made since then. All errors, of course, are solely

my responsibility.

Introduction

IN the discussion that follows, Leninism is taken 10 mean the theory and

practice of the political tendency/faction/party within the Russian

revolutionary movement led by V.I. Lenin, from around 1900, through the

October Revolution of 1917, to the early years of the Bolshevik regime.

Although other individuals played prominent roles in various phases of

the Bolshevik tendency, Lenin was by far the dominant personality, as

theoretician, organizer and overall leader. Bolshevism was

overwhelmingly his idea. And while Lenin’s ideas and policies changed

during the course of his political career, there is sufficient unity and

continuity among them to justify describing and analyzing them as

Leninism.

This series is not meant to he a complete work on Leninism, Nor is it

intended to be a “balance sheet,” a careful weighing of pluses and

minuses. Having considered ourselves Leninists for the length of our

history as a tendency, our task now is not to look at the positive but,

in the interests of an insightful analysis, to focus on the negative, to

look for the weaknesses in Leninism. A discussion of the pluses — in the

light of the negatives — and a balance sheet can come later.

Our unifying theme, though, is not negativity per se, but a particular

question or problem. This can be described roughly as follows: What

responsibility does Leninism /Bolshevism have for the social system, and

the crimes, of what we have- loosely called Stalinism and more

accurately labelled stale capitalism?

As most readers of the Torch/La Antorcha are aware, we do not believe

that the social systems that exist in Russia. China, Cuba, Eastern

Europe. Vietnam, etc.. are socialist, moving toward socialism, workers’

states or even progressive. Instead, we consider them to be highly

stratified variants of capitalism—state capitalism. In these societies,

the workers and other oppressed people, deprived of political rights and

power over the state, are exploited by a bureaucratic elite built around

the party/state economic, political and military apparatus.

I do not intend to argue for, let alone try to prove, this position

here, (We have discussed it many times elsewhere.) It is a premise of

the series. Taking it as a starting point, I am particularly interested

in the establishment of the very first state capitalist regime— that in

Russia—which was the outcome of the October (Bolshevik) Revolution of

17. This revolution and regime were not only the inspiration and mode!

for I he revolutions and processes that established the other stale

capitalist systems. In addition, because of the nature of the October

Revolution itself, the insurrection and the Bolshevik regime it

established have been key factors supporting the illusion that the state

capitalist regimes are socialist.

We believe that the October Revolution was, to a considerable degree, a

revolution carried out by the working class and supported by the

peasantry. The Bolshevik Party, which led the revolution (along with the

Left Social Revolutionaries and various anarchist organist ions} had won

majorities in the soviets (workers’ councils set up by the workers

themselves after the revolution in February), the factory committees and

other mass organizations. Most of these soviets had passed resolutions

calling for ‘All Power to the Soviets” some weeks before the revolution.

The uprising itself was effected by a fairly broad number of workers’,

soldiers’ and sailors’ organisations, most of which were not part of the

Bolshevik Party or even under its firm control. Moreover, after i( had

occurred, the insurrection was approved by an All-Russian Congress of

Soviets and by other mass organisations. (The insurrection was also

supported de facto—indeed, made possible—by the mass of peasants, who

rose up and seized and divided the landed estates during the summer and

fail of 1917,)

The October Revolution, in other words, was not simply a Bolshevik coup

d’etat, carried out against the wishes and behind the backs of the

workers and peasants.

Despite the popular nature of the insurrection, however, the regime that

finally emerged from the revolution, the Civil War and Stalin’s

consolidation of power was a frightful totalitarian dictatorship that

had deprived the workers of any control over the factories, had taken

the land back from the peasants, had deprived both of them of control

over the state, as well as virtually ail political rights, and had

killed millions of people in the process.

In the past, we tended to pin the responsibility for [his development

on 1) Joseph Stalin, who look over the leadership of the Bolshevik

(Communist) Party after Lenin’s illness and death, and 2) objective

conditions. In other words, paraphrasing Leon Trotsky’s analysis, we

believed that certain objective conditions—the failure of workers in

other countries to carry out successful revolutions, the

counter-revolutionary attempts and imperialist interventions in Russia,

Russia’s historical backwardness and poverty, along with the disruption

and devastation brought about by World W*r I, the revolutions and Civil

Wat — prevented the Bolshevik government from evolving into a healthy

proletarian dictatorship {’“a state that is already becoming a

non-state.” a “Commune-type state,” etc.). Instead, they enabled a

bureaucracy, led and organized by Stalin, to seize power, eliminate the

last vestiges of workers’ control over the economy and state, smash the

peasants and consolidate itself as a state capitalist ruling class.

Vet, is this the whole story? Is it realty possible to place the

responsibility/blame solely on objective conditions and Stalin, and to

leave the Bolsheviks and Lenin blame-free? I don’t think so.

There arc a number of questions whose very posing suggests that the

Bolsheviks themselves (meaning Lenin and the party as a whole prior to

Stalin establishing his stranglehold over it) have at least some

responsibility for what happened. For one thing, how did Stalin get to

be the head of the party? Why was a man like that in the party in the

first place? What kind of party would enable someone like Stalin to

thrive in it, be a major leader for many years and finally establish

himself as its key leader?

Why did Lenin appoint Stalin to the Organization Bureau and Secretarial

of the Party, let alone appoint him, or allow him to become, General

Secretary of the Party? Why did so many Bolsheviks line up with Stalin

against Trotsky and against, so it would seem, the original ideals of

Bolshevism? What enabled Stalin so easily to don the mantle of Leninism?

Why didn’t more Bolsheviks organize to stop Stalin? Why did they allow

themselves to be “liquidated’’ by him without a serious struggle?

AH these questions suggest, at least to me, that there was something in

the theory and practice of the Bolshevik Party, its politics and

methods, its atmosphere and “ethos” that ]) gave rise to Stalin and 2)

helped create the circumstances that allowed him to consolidate state

capitalism in Russia,

Holding Lenin and the Bolsheviks (and Leninism) at least partially

responsible for the establishment of state capitalism flows not just

from the above questions about Stalin and the party, but even more from

an objective took at the state and society that had been established in

Russia at the conclusion of the Civil War (when Lenin was still alive

and well).

By this time, the Soviet government was a one-party regime, run totally

by the Bolsheviks, The party dominated the soviets, which had become

little more than vehicles for carrying out policies the Bolsheviks

decided rather than the arena in which the workers determined policies

and chose and controlled their leadership. Nor did the workers run the

factories or any other part of the economy. The factory committees had

long been superseded by “one-man management” — Bolshevik appointees in

no way elected or controlled by, or responsible to, the workers.

Almost all other political parties were either outlawed or barely

tolerated (until 1922 when they were outlawed) and harassed by the Cheka

(political police). After the ban on internal factions in the Bolshevik

Party was adopted in March 1921, the Cheka hounded opposition forces

even within the party. The trade unions were almost exclusively arms of

the state and while some strikes were legal under the NEP (New Economic

Policy, adopted in 1921), strikes were strongly discouraged and

strikers, and especially strike leaders, were harassed and arrested.

More broadly, the Bolshevik Party was isolated from the popular classes,

including the overwhelming majority of the workers and peasants. This is

indicated by the Bolsheviks’ suppression of the uprising at the

Kronstadt naval fortress, the mass peasant uprisings in a number of

provinces (e.g., Tambov) and the near general strike in Petrograd, which

had long been the Bolsheviks’ chief political base—all of which occurred

at the close of the Civil War in early 1921. In short, while the Soviet

state was nowhere near the Stalinist nightmare it was to become, by

1922, the foundations of a state capitalist regime had been constructed,

replete with censorship (libraries were periodically purged to eliminate

“offensive” material, including outdated Bolshevik writings), secret

police, labor camps, etc.

The point here is not that the post-Civil War regime in Russia was fully

state capitalist and totalitarian. Nor is it that the Bolsheviks were

totally responsible for the establishment of such a regime and therefore

the Bolsheviks were nothing but a state capitalist political force. (1

think the question is more complicated than this.) It is to indicate

that an objective loo]; at the problem suggests that the Bolsheviks have

to be held at least partially responsible for the establishment of state

capitalism, and the Stalinist hell-hole, in Russia. {Hopefully, just how

responsible will emerge from the series.)

Why is the question of Leninism and its relation to Stalinism/ state

capitalism so important to us. There are two interrelated reasons. 1}

When the Revolutionary Socialist League was founded, we defined

ourselves essentially as “orthodox Trotskyists” with a slate capitalist

position on the nature of Russia and the other so-called “socialist

countries.” Our Trotskyism included a belief in an orthodox Leninism and

Marxism, more or less as defined by Trotsky. We rarely posed it

precisely this way, but this is what we meant when we defined Trotskyism

as the “continuity” of Marxism and Leninism.

Unlike other left groups, however, we were not content to define

ourselves In a certain “orthodox” way and then leave our politics alone.

For a variety of reasons (one of which was the impact of the women’s and

the lesbian and gay liberation movements), we subjected our politics to

a continual questioning. In particular, we began to investigate

Trotskyism in some detail.

A key impetus for this process was internal to our theory. Specifically,

we began to realize that if Trotsky had been wrong about the nature of

Russia, this error was not likely to have been an isolated one, without

effect on other aspects of his politics and methods, Among other things,

we recognised that in addition to what we saw as the positive,

pro-socialist aspects of Trotsky’s politics (leading hint ultimately lo

call for a revolution against Stalin and to advocate a multi-party

democracy under a workers’ state), there were what we called “state

capitalist” aspects or tendencies, tendencies that justified or implied

state capitalism, it was these tendencies that led Trotsky’s followers

in the Fourth International, after the expansion of state capitalism

into Eastern Europe following World Wat II, lo capitulate and become

apologists for stale capitalism. (As this suggests, the most obvious

stale capitalist aspect of Trotskyism was Trotsky’s position that Russia

under Stalin was a “degenerated workers’ state,” and its implied

corollary that a state can be a workers* state even though it is not

controlled by—indeed, actually oppresses—the workers.)

In short, we decided that there were definite state capitalist aspects

to Trotskyism and that we should discard those, retain the

“pro-socialist” aspects, modify the others as needed, and generally move

away from an “orthodox” (formalistic, dogmatic) conception of politics

toward a more synthetic (some might say eclectic) approach. The latter

includes looking at, and borrowing from, other left-wing political

traditions, such as anarchism.

As part of our developing critique of Trotskyism, we began to pay

special attention to the period from the October Revolution, through the

Civil War, to Lenin’s incapacitation and de facto retirement in late

1922–23. This was the period, according to Trotsky, in which the

Bolshevik regime was a relatively healthy workers’ state (it had

“bureaucratic distortions,” in Lenin’s phrase). It became clear to us,

however, that this was far from the case, especially if viewed from the

Marxist ideal of a state already beginning to wither away, etc.

As has already been indicated, the soviet regime by this time was

significantly bureaucratized (stale capitalist), and much of this was

the direct result of the measures taken by the Bolsheviks themselves:

centralizing economic and political power in their own hands,

eliminating direct workers’ control of the factories, suppressing other

political tendencies, requisitioning grain from the peasants by force,

establishing a secret police, building an army along

hierarchical/bourgeois lines, etc. However much these measures were

taken in reaction to the equally harsh, if not harsher, measures taken

by the Bolsheviks’ opponents, they were nevertheless extremely

bureaucratic, coercive and brutal. In addition, the Bolsheviks justified

and even glorified them, and made no serious effort lo reverse them

(except for forced requisitions), after the Civil War was over.

Most important, these measures, for whatever reason they were taken,

whether justified or not, involved the de facto destruction of the

workers’ control over the economy and state. A consideration of this

fact at least posed the question that I am now proposing to discuss: How

much responsibility for state capitalism lies with Leninism; or, how

much state capitalism is there in Leninism?

There is a more general reason for our concern with the question of

Leninism, and it is something that has motivated our theoretical

interest from before the foundation of the RSL. This is another

question: How did revolutionary socialism, a world-view and movement

that claim to be for the liberation of humanity through a revolution by

its most oppressed classes, wind up creating one of the more oppressive,

less liberatory social systems the world has seen? Whatever the

achievements of the state capitalist countries (which we don’t propose

to dispute or discuss here), these gains have come at the suffering and

deaths of millions of people, (The estimates of the people who died as a

result of Stalin’s forced “collectivization” and the resulting famine,

along with the massive purges—not counting deaths in World War II—range

upward from 20 million. See Robert Conquest, The Honest of Sorrow,

Oxford, 1986, and The Great Terror, Macmillan, 1968. Estimates of those

who died in Mao’s Great Leap forward and the Cultural Revolution in

China run in the many millions.)

Moreover, the results of this incredible human sacrifice are not dynamic

and prosperous social systems in which people live in abundance and

security, (With one exception, these countries are now stagnating; the

exception, China, is saving itself from stagnation, at least for now, by

adopting free market, i.e., traditional capitalist, policies.) Nor are

these countries models of, or even moving toward, socialist democracy.

These facts are something that revolutionary socialists, particularly

those who consider themselves Leninists, must face up to and take

responsibility for. It will not do to pretend that the Stalinist/ Maoist

atrocities didn’t happen, to downplay their extent and gravity, to

consider them merely temporary “aberrations,” or to fool oneself into

believing that they cannot happen again. To those with open eyes and

open minds, the problem remains: The concrete historical result of the

program of socialist revolution has not led to what it promised;

instead, it has resulted in a stupendous human tragedy, (The relatively

benign character of the Cuban and Sandinista revolutions should not

blind us to the realities of Russia, China and,.. Kampuchea.)

Whatever the rest of the left may do, we in the Revolutionary Socialist

League feel we have a deep political, and moral, responsibility lo

investigate as thoroughly as we can why this happened. How can we

propose a way forward for workers and other oppressed groups, or say we

have a solution to their problems and to the crisis of world capitalism,

without investigating the reasons for the historic failure of

revolutionary socialism? It is easy to be against things—poverty, racism

and sexism, the waste and brutality of capitalism, the destruction of

tremendous human resources and the environment, the moral corruption,

etc.—without doing much theorizing. But to advocate a profound social

transformation and the creation of a new social system, and lo do this

in a responsible manner, one ought to have done a great deal of thinking

about what it is one is for and whether and under what circumstances it

will work- Simply appealing to “historical laws” or the “science” of

historical materialism is the same as the Pope appealing to “faith” and

“revelation,” and equally dangerous.

— ONE — What Kind of Revolution?

IN this installment of our series, we will focus on the question of

broad strategy, particularly—what kind of revolution did the Bolsheviks

advocate and prepare themselves for during the period prior to the

October Revolution?

Most people not very familiar with Marxist history tend to assume that

people and organizations that call themselves Marxist or Communist

always advocate and try to carry out socialist revolutions^ revolutions

to overthrow capitalism and establish socialism Yet, while such

revolutions have usually been declared the ‘‘ultimate goal” of such

groups, Marxian socialists in so-called “underdeveloped” countries have

generally advocated bourgeois (capitalist) revolutions as the “first

Stage” of the revolutionary process in their respective countries. The

Russian Marxists were no exception. Up until April, 1917, the entire

Marxist movement, including Lenin and the Bolsheviks, advocated and

sought to carry out a bourgeois (“bourgeois democratic”) revolution in

Russia.

This position was consistent with, and an essential part of, what was

considered to be “orthodox Marxism” at the time. This orthodoxy was

largely defined by the major theoretician of the international Marxist

movement of the time (the Second, or Socialist. International), Karl

Kautsky.

Based on a mechanical reading of the major texts of Marxism and a

generally formalistic mode of thought, this orthodoxy insisted that each

and every country in the world had to go through all of what were

considered to be the necessary stages—modes of production—of human

society between primitive communism and social ism/communism. These were

ancient slave society, feudalism, and capitalism.

Russia around the turn of the century clearly did not have a developed

form of industrial capitalism—there was a king, the Tsar, a landed

nobility, peasants only recently freed from serfdom and still bound to

the land by debts, a lack of political rights, etc. The Marxists of the

period considered Russian society to be, or to have just emerged from, a

form of feudalism. And the revolution they felt the country was moving

toward, and which they advocated and readied themselves for, was a

bourgeois one. That is, the revolution would overthrow the Tsar, destroy

the landed gentry, free the peasants and set up some kind of bourgeois

democratic political system that would guarantee political rights,

including the rights to strike and form political parties, freedom of

the press, etc.

Not least, the revolution would pave the way for the fullest development

of capitalism. Only after a period of capitalist development of

undetermined length, during which the country would be industrialized

and the working class would grow, organize itself and become conscious

of its position in society and of the need to establish its own rule,

would a second, socialist revolution take place. Since, according to

Marxist theory, socialism requires modern industry and material

abundance, and a socialist revolution could only be carried out by a

modern working class, the Marxists in Russia, ironically, found

themselves advocates of a bourgeois revolution and... capitalism.

With almost no exceptions (Leon Trotsky, after 1905, was one), the

entire Marxist movement in Russia subscribed to one form or another of

this theory. They not only believed it themselves, but argued vehemently

against — that is, denounced — those who disagreed with them, including

anarchists and populists, who after 1902 were organized in the Social

Revolutionary Party. Marxism, the “science of society,” “scientific

socialism”—they contended— deemed that Russia, feudal, semi-feudal, or

recently emerged from feudalism, could not “jump over” the “historical

stage” of capitalism. And anyone who said it could was a dreamer, a

muddle-head or, worse, a utopian. The coming revolution in Russia was

going to be, and had to be, a bourgeois one.

In all the debates—polemics—Lenin carried out with other individuals,

tendencies and parties, up to 1917, he never called the bourgeois nature

of the Russian revolution into question. For example, in Lenin’s debates

with his main Marxist opponents, such as the “Economists” and the

Mensheviks, the question of the fundamental (bourgeois) nature of the

coming revolution was never explicitly at issue.

In Lenin’s various books and articles on the “agrarian question,” on

which Lenin was an expert, one of his main aims was to advocate measures

that would guarantee the greatest development of capitalist relations in

agriculture. Significantly, in much of the period between 1905 and 1917,

the Bolsheviks’ main agitational slogans (directed toward the “broad

masses”), known as the “three whales” were, roughly, the eight-hour day,

land to the peasants, and a democratic republic. These are all

bourgeois-democratic demands.

It was only in early 1917, after the February Revolution had overthrown

the Tsar, that the Bolsheviks adopted the point of view that the

revolution they sought to carry out would be a socialist one. (Some have

argued that Lenin had come to this position as far back as late 1914.

While Lenin’s thinking changed significantly beginning at that time—the

outbreak of World War I and the collapse of the Second International—it

is not clear that his view of the revolution had changed prior to late

1916-carly 1917, In any case, Lenin was isolated from most of his

followers during this period and the changes in his thinking were not

likely to have affected many Bolsheviks prior to his. and their, return

Lo Russia after the February Revolution.)

I do not wish to argue the substance of the question here, that is,

whether the Russian Marxists were right or wrong in their conception.

The point I wish to stress is that throughout the entire formative

period of Bolshevism as a political tendency/movement/party, it

advocated and sought to implement not a socialist revolution, but a

bourgeois one. Given this, is it really very surprising that the

revolution that the Bolsheviks did carry out in Russia, when judged in

terms of its long-term outcome, was basically a bourgeois one, that is,

it created a kind of capitalist society, not a socialist one?

I don’t mean to be playing with words here, or to be making cheap

arguments. I am making a fundamental point. A political movement is

defined not only by its long-term proclaimed goal but also, and even

more so, by what it organizes itself around in the present and the near-

and middle-term future. What it does is more important than what it sags

it is “ultimately” for.

Revolutionary Marxists, including Leninists, have always recognized the

validity of this point when applied to the parties of the Second

International. Although these parties advocated socialism in the long

run, by and large, their day-to-day functioning was that of reformist

socialist organizations. They ran the trade unions and other mass

organizations, Fought for pro-labor and other progressive legislation in

parliament, etc. Socialism was primarily for speeches on May Day and

oilier working class holidays.

Thus, while Lenin was surprised when the Second International collapsed

at the beginning of World War I (most of its constituent parties

supported the predatory war aims of “their” respective ruling classes,

instead of opposing the war as a whole), we, looking back, can see that

this was the most likely development. And some astute contemporary

observers, such as Rosa Luxemburg, long a left-winger in the German

Social Democratic Party (the SPD), had realized the true nature of the

majority of the movement as early as 1910.

If the argument is valid vis-a-vis the Social Democracy, why does it

suddenly become false when applied to the Bolsheviks? For most of their

history, I repeat, they advocated and prepared themselves lo carry out a

bourgeois revolution. Is this significant?

The question is not whether the Bolsheviks were really reformists rather

than revolutionaries, but what kind of revolutionaries they were,

socialist or bourgeois. If we are to be consistent with our analysis of

the Second International, I think we have to answer, or at least be open

lo the idea, that the Bolsheviks were a kind (a special kind, to be

sure), of bourgeois revolutionary!

I am not raising this argument here to prove that the Bolsheviks were

really bourgeois rather than socialist revolutionaries, bur to establish

the plausibility of the contention, To me, the fact that throughout

virtually their entire history prior to the October Revolution they

advocated and prepared themselves to carry out a kind of bourgeois

revolution is highly suggestive. Among other things, it makes the

apparent paradox of how socialist revolutionaries wound up creating a

form of bourgeois society less paradoxical.

A number of arguments can be raised against the point i am trying lo

establish- One is that the composition of the Bolshevik

tendency/movement/party was primarily working class. Actually, this was

only true in certain limes, such as revolutionary upheavals. At other

times, the “class character” of the movement cannot simply be considered

to be proletarian. It had members from the working class, but it also

had many members who were part of the intelligentsia, a stratum of

intellectuals from different backgrounds, roughly the equivalent of the

modern middle class. There is also the question of what to consider

someone from a working class background who is a full-time party

functionary. On balance, throughout much of its history the class

character of the Bolshevik movement would have to be considered as

declasse, that is, as outside the class structure of Russia.

In any case, the nature of a political movement/party is not primarily

defined by the class its members and supporters arc part of. Most of the

members of the Democratic Party in the United States today, for example,

are probably workers, but that doesn’t make the party a working class

party.

Another argument against my hypothesis that the Bolsheviks were (despite

themselves) bourgeois revolutionaries is that they thought of themselves

as Marxists, studied Marxism, made it clear to the workers that they

were socialists, recruited people to be socialists, etc. But calling

yourself a Marxist doesn’t automatically make you one. Nor does being a

Marxist automatically make you a socialist, in the revolutionary

libertarian meaning of the term.

Most tendencies which today call themselves Marxist we consider to be

state capitalist, and their vision of socialism really a form of state

capitalism. How do we know what the Bolsheviks’ vision of socialism was?

Perhaps they did recruit people to be socialists, hold study sessions,

etc. on socialism. But if their vision of socialism was to any

significant degree contaminated by state capitalist ideas — for example,

that one party (theirs) will make the decisions for the workers—their

advocacy of what they called socialism does not make them socialists.

In fact, it is not clear how much discussion of, or education about, the

nature of socialism the Bolsheviks regularly conducted. The Bolsheviks,

like the entire Marxist movement going back to Marx and Engels, were

impatient with discussions or investigations about what socialism would

concretely look like. This was in part a reaction lo the utopian

socialists, Robert Owen. St. Simon, Fourier, etc., who drew up detailed

plans (down to who would live where) about what the ideal society would

look like, and, in some cases, actually tried to set up such

communities, Correctly sensing the totalitarian nature of such projects

(the people in those communities don’t decide how the community will be

set up; it is decided beforehand, by someone else), Marx and Engels

eschewed elaborating, or even discussing very much, their vision of

socialism.

This bent was also motivated by a conviction (with its own totalitarian

implications, as we will discuss later) that socialism was the necessary

(inevitable) outcome of history; since socialism was going to happen,

there was no point in figuring out what is would look like.

For whatever reason, then, the Marxist movement Up to and through the

period we are discussing did not generally discuss or elaborate its

conception of socialist society. Given the Bolsheviks’ contention that

the revolution “on the agenda” in Russia was a bourgeois one, and given

the fact that for most of their history they were an illegal, persecuted

group, it is not likely that they had many in-depth, detailed

discussions about the concrete nature of a socialist society,

A third argument against the contention that the Bolsheviks’ advocacy of

a bourgeois revolution in Russia was a significant, defining element of

Bolshevism is that the Bolsheviks did, prior to the October Revolution,

explicitly discuss and change their conception of the nature of the

revolution they aimed to lead. This refers to the discussion held in the

Bolshevik Party after Lenin’s arrival in Russia in early April, 1917,

and to the decision of the party, adopted at the so-called “April

Conference,” a few weeks later, to seek to seize state power at the head

of a working class socialist revolution, based on the soviets (the

workers’ councils established by the workers during and after the

February Revolution), They did, of course, have this discussion and make

such a decision, among others. But, how deep or thorough was this

discussion?

How long did it go on?

Lenin arrived in Russia after his long exile in Western Europe on April

3 (old-style Russian calendar), a little over a month after the February

Revolution, Prior to his arrival, most Bolsheviks (there were a handful

who disagreed), believed that the Bolsheviks’ main strategic task was to

carry the bourgeois revolution to completion, not to carry out a

socialist revolution. And when Lenin first arrived he shocked most

Bolsheviks who heard him (again, minus a handful) with his new position,

expressed in his “April Theses,” that (he Bolsheviks should seek to

carry out a socialist revolution. This was considered by almost ail

Bolsheviks, particularly the longtime members, the “Old Bolsheviks,” to

be very unorthodox, heresy, even anarchism.

By the end of April, however, the Bolshevik Party conference (April

24–29) voted overwhelmingly to endorse Lenin’s point of view, The

discussion over Lenin’s (unorthodox and heretical) point of view’ took

all of... three weeks. What kind of discussion could they have had in

this time? Could it have been very deep? Could it have been very

thorough? Could the Bolsheviks have even begun lo discuss what the new

position really entailed? Did they use the months between April and the

October Revolution (October 25) to continue this discussion on an

ever-deepening basis? I think the answers to these questions must be

“no.”

The Bolsheviks were in the middle of a political and social maelstrom

and had a million things to do; they were undoubtedly spending most of

their time feverishly agitating and organizing in the midst of hectic

conditions, Lenin did, during this period (he was in hiding,

mid-July-late October), write a number of works, mostly short pamphlets,

explaining what a Bolshevik government based on the Soviets would look

like and what it would do. In particular, during this period Lenin wrote

what many consider to be his greatest work, The Slate and Revolution,

which discusses his view of the nature of the dictatorship of the

proletariat, the withering away of the state, etc. Yet, given the

complexity of these issues, these investigations were really not very

detailed. Equally important The State and Revolution was never finished

and was not published until the following year. It is quite unlikely,

therefore, that the Bolshevik Party had a full discussion of either The

State and Revolution or Lenin’s pamphlets.

In short, I believe the Bolsheviks never had a thorough discussion of

the change of position adopted at the April Conference; what it really

meant, what a society based on the soviets would look like, what would

be the relationship between the soviets, factory committees and trade

unions, for example, a question that was to loom very large soon after

the October Revolution, And the course of the revolution, specifically

the success of the October insurrection, seemed to make such a

discussion irrelevant.

Probably the strongest argument that might be leveled against the tine

of thought I am outlining here is the fact that throughout most of their

history prior to 1917 the Bolsheviks did not advocate a “typical”

bourgeois revolution, that is, one led by the capitalists and their

representatives among the intellectuals, etc. Instead, beginning around

1905, the Bolsheviks advocated a bourgeois-democratic revolution that

was lo be carried out by the workers and peasants against the Tsar, the

landed gentry and (paradoxically) the capitalists (the bourgeoisie).

As a result, this argument would run, since the Bolsheviks had, since

1905, advocated a revolution carried out by the workers and peasants

against the capitalists, as well as the Tsar, landlords, etc., and had

always tried to build a base among the working class, to build a working

class party, to make the workers class conscious, etc., the switch in

strategic conceptions in 1917 was not such a big deal. Indeed, some have

argued, this fact goes a long way to explain why Lenin could change the

party’s mind, so to speak, on this question so easily.

On one level, this appears to be a substantial argument. Yet, a careful

look at the issues involved will, I believe, support and even strengthen

my contention. Let’s look at the question more closely.

Although almost all Russian Marxists agreed that the revolution they

advocated and felt was coming would be a bourgeois-democratic one, they

disagreed over the roles different classes would play in the revolution

and specifically over the tasks Social Democrats should seek to

accomplish, (They all called themselves Social Democrats then; Lenin and

the Bolsheviks took up the older name Communists in 1917,) In fact,

after questions of organization, it is fair to say that the major

differences between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks through most of their

history were disagreements over the configuration of the

(bourgeois-democratic) revolution in Russia and the role Marxists should

play in it.

(For those who don’t know, or remember, the terms Bolshevik and

Menshevik come from the Russian words Bol’shinstvo and Men’shinstvo,

meaning majorityites and minorityites, respectively. At the Second

Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, the official name

of the Marxist organization, in 1903, the delegates to the congress

split into two hostile factions, largely over questions of party

organization, questions we will get to later. On one of the crucial

votes, the forces led by Lenin won a majority. As a result, Lenin and

his followers were called, and called themselves, Bolsheviks. Those who

had lost the vote were called Mensheviks. This split was never healed,

and the Marxist movement in Russia largely consisted of two factions,

with often separate newspapers and structures, coexisting uneasily. The

two factions were formally in the same party until 1912, when the

Bolsheviks formed their own party. It is typical of Lenin’s genius, and

the Mensheviks ineffectiveness, that Lenin and his supporters kept the

name Bolsheviks, which implies strength, while the Mensheviks were

saddled with a name denoting weakness, even though the Menshevik faction

was often larger than the Bolshevik.)

The key differences between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks on the

question of bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia centered on the

role they expected the Russian bourgeoisie to play in the revolution

and, therefore, the attitude the working class and Marxists should take

toward it,

A mechanical, formalistic conception of a bourgeois-democratic

revolution would entail the view that, by definition, a

bourgeois-democratic revolution will be led by the bourgeoisie.

Specifically, the bourgeoisie, which by nature and class interests

prefers a democratic republic, will lead the other progressive forces,

including the peasants, the workers and the middle class, in a struggle

against the monarch (king, queen, Tsar or whatever), the landed nohiiity

and other feudalist forces, [t would aim to do away with feudal

privileges and all forms of servitude, to set up a democratic republic

and to establish the conditions for the fullest and freest development

of capitalism.

This was essentially the view of the Mensheviks. They therefore

advocated that the chief role of the working class and the Social

Democrats was to help the bourgeoisie carry out such a revolution, to

push ii from behind, as it were. Although advocating the independent

organisation of the workers in unions, a social democratic party and,

during the 1905 revolution, soviets (there is some evidence that the

Mensheviks were the first political group to call for a mass, city-wide

strike committee in St, Petersburg, which eventually became the

Petersburg Soviet), the Mensheviks basically felt that the workers

should subordinate themselves to the bourgeoisie, that the latter should

have overall leadership of the revolution. Some even warned of the

danger of the workers pushing loo hard (e.g., striking loo much for

higher wages, threatening to take over and run the factories, etc.),

that this would frighten the bourgeoisie and make ti pull back from a

militant struggle against the Tsar, gentry, etc.

The Bolsheviks, while accepting the bourgeois-democratic character of

the revolution, saw things differently. Instead of starting from an

abstract model of the bourgeois revolution, Lenin began with a concrete

analysis of the economic, social and political situation in Russia at

the time. He was particularly aware of certain “peculiarities” of

Russian historical development: 1) The Russian state, certainly since

around 1500, had been very strong and tended to dominate Russian

society, 2) Since the Lime of Peter the Great, roughly 1700, the state

had sought to encourage economic development, through borrowing

technology from Western Europe, as a means of defending itself, 3} As a

result, much of Russian industry was built by and/or with the support of

the state, and much was state-owned, 4) Russian industry tended lo be

concentrated in huge enterprises, often employing thousands of workers

(such as the giant Pulilov metalworking plant in St. Petersburg),

The result of these factors was that the Russian bourgeoisie tended to

be small, weak and greatly dependent upon the Tsarist state, while the

working class, in contrast, was proportionately large and

well-concentrated. Consequently, Lenin reasoned, rather than leading the

bourgeois-democratic revolution against the Tsar, the bourgeoisie, at

the first sign of independent and militant mobilisation of the workers

and peasants, would side with the Tsar and the nobility against the

workers and peasants and the revolution as a whole, (Although the

capitalists were frightened of the large, concentrated and oppressed

working class, they also feared the millions upon millions of even more

oppressed peasants, waiting to wreak vengeance upon the landlords and

seize the and, and quite willing to set fire to large portions of the

countryside to do so. This is what they did in 1917.)

The leadership of the revolution, Lenin concluded, would fall lo the

working class and, to a lesser degree, the peasants. It would be they

who would carry out the bourgeois-democratic revolution, not only

against the Tsar and the landlords, bat also the bourgeoisie.

In the eyes of the Bolsheviks, then, the bourgeois-democratic revolution

was defined primarily by the tasks that needed to be carried out. e.g.,

overthrowing the Tsar, seizing the [and from the landlords, establishing

a democratic republic, etc., rather than by being led by the

bourgeoisie.

The specific vehicle for carrying out these tasks would be what Lenin

called the “revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and

peasantry.” This was to be, roughly, a centralized, revolutionary

government, made up of parties representing the workers and peasants

respectively, and based on and supported by the masses of workers and

peasants. This dictatorship would be established by armed insurrection.

(The Bolsheviks actually attempted such an uprising during the 1905

revolution, in Moscow in December of 1905.)

Although Lenin devoted many of his writings to various aspects of the

bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia, aside from a very broad

sketch, he never put forward a worked out conception of what the

“revolutionary democratic dictatorship” would look like. His failure, or

refusal, to do so appears to have been motivated mostly by the belief

that it would be impossible to predict precisely what would happen in

the course of the revolution, that revolutionaries should not try to

cram the class struggle into some narrowly-conceived mold and that, in

any case, the Bolsheviks should remain flexible.

Yet, in light of the detail Lenin wont into on questions of program

(e.g., the “agrarian” and “national” questions), party structure (he

called for a reorganization of the party during 1905), and tactics (a

major focus of Bolshevik’ activity during 1905 was the formation of

armed squads of workers), the failure to elaborate the structure of the

“revolutionary democratic dictatorship” is significant. It is

particularly noteworthy that the relationship between the political

parties, supposedly “representing” the proletariat and the peasantry on

the one hand, and the mass organizations of these classes on the other,

was never seriously raised or investigated.

Lenin was also not very clear about what would happen to this

dictatorship once it had “carried the bourgeois-democratic revolution

through to completion,” to paraphrase the Marxist language of the

period. He seems to have had two scenarios in mind, both of which can be

inferred from 71vo Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic

Revolution, a major work devoted to his conception of the

bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia.

In one, the “revolutionary democratic dictatorship” would carry out

various steps (e.g.. overthrowing the Tsar, seizing the land from the

landlords, enacting the eight-hour workday) on its own initiative, after

which it would organize for elections, based on direct universal

suffrage, to a Constituent Assembly. Once this assembly had gathered,

approved the revolutionary measures already taken and drawn up a

constitution for a (bourgeois) democratic government, the parties

constituting the “revolutionary democratic dictatorship” would step

down, in favor of a newly-elected parliament and government. That Lenin

took this scenario seriously is suggested by various of his writings on

the agrarian question in which he advocates the relatively long-term

development of Russian agriculture on U-S.-style (small, independent

capitalist farmer) rather than on Prussian (commercial landed estates)

lines.

The second scenario follows the first, up to a point. Very tentatively,

and using only the most general terms, Lenin in Two Tactics writes that

if the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia were preceded,

accompanied, or soon followed by one or more socialist revolutions in

Western Europe, the revolutionary parties making up the revolutionary

democratic dictatorship should seek to retain power and begin taking up

socialist tasks, e.g., expropriating the capitalists, etc.

In other words, Lenin raises, very gingerly to be sure, the possibility

that under certain circumstances the bourgeois-democratic revolution in

Russia might begin to “grow over” into a socialist revolution. Although

this conception would later (during Stalin’s fight against Trotsky in

the 1920b) become recognized “Bolshevik” orthodoxy, from the lime it was

written to early 1917, it had hardly even been considered by the

majority of Bolsheviks.

Our point in discussing Lenin’s conception of the “revolutionary

democratic dictatorship” was to assess to what degree this weakens my

argument that the Bolsheviks had generally advocated and prepared

themselves to carry out a bourgeois revolution, and that this had a

crucial impact in determining the politics and methods of the Bolshevik

Party.

Specifically, it can be argued that since the Bolsheviks had, since

1905, advocated a particular version of a bourgeois-democratic

revolution, that is, one led by the workers and peasants against the

bourgeoisie, it is not quite true to say that they had always planned to

carry out a bourgeois revolution in Russia.

Indeed, it can be argued that the bourgeois-democratic revolution as

conceived by the Bolsheviks was a lot closer to a conception of a

socialist revolution than a bourgeois one. This is why, so Trotsky

insisted, the Bolshevik Party was won so easily to Lenin’s new

perspective in April, 1917.

t would contend, however, that the stronger arguments go in the other

direction: 1) That despite the new elements in Lenin’s perspective of

1917 what he advocated remained largely within the framework of his

earlier conception, in other words, a bourgeois-democratic revolution

that, under certain circumstances, “goes beyond” the

bourgeois-democratic “phase”; and 2) that what the Bolsheviks actually

did, looking at not just 1917, but the entire period from 1917 to 1921,

was to implement a version of the “revolutionary democratic dictatorship

of the proletariat and peasantry,” that is, to carry out a very

specific, and very radical, kind of bourgeois-democratic revolution.

As we know, in late October, 1917, the Bolsheviks, in alliance with the

Left Social Revolutionaries, seized political power at the head of a

workers’ insurrection (made possible by the peasants’ spontaneous

seizure of the land), and set up a centralized dictatorship. Although

this revolutionary government at first rested on and was supported by

the workers’ and peasants’ mass organizations, it was not actually

controlled by them. Believing that they were going beyond the

bourgeois-democratic revolution, the Bolsheviks sanctioned the workers’

seizure of the factories and then expropriated the capitalists

altogether. They dispersed the Constituent Assembly and, after the Left

SRs revolted against the terms of the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty,

concentrated all power into their own hands. They also, in June, 1918,

launched a campaign against the so-called “middle peasants” in the name

of extending the class struggle to the countryside. In this sense, they

did go beyond the “typical” bourgeois-democratic revolution. But they

did not succeed in creating a true proletarian dictatorship, that is, a

government actually run by the workers for themselves. Instead, the

Bolsheviks built a government they believed was acting “in the

interests” of the workers, which is by no means the same thing.

It may have rested upon the organizations of the workers, but in its

methods, e.g., its commitment to extreme centralization, its use of a

secret police to hunt counterrevolutionaries, and in its conception of

regimented, centrally-controlled economy run by decree from the top, it

was far closer to a Jacobin dictatorship (the dictatorship of

Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety, supported by the

oppressed “sans culottes” of Paris during the most radical phase of the

French Revolution) than to a true workers’ government.

The fallacy in the Bolsheviks’ theory and practice, it seems to me, is

that (even within the framework of Marxism) the methods and structure of

a socialist revolution are not merely the logical extension of the

structure and methods of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. The

dictatorship of the proletariat, supported by the peasantry, is not

merely the “revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and the

peasantry” going beyond the limits of the bourgeois-democratic

revolution.

Concretely, in a bourgeois-democratic revolution, the tasks “appropriate

to” that revolution can be carried out by a party, or parties, that

claim to represent the “non-feudal” classes, the bourgeoisie, the

peasants and the workers, if they exist. A government of revolutionary

intellectuals, for example, as long as it is supported by mobilized

masses (sans culottes, peasants, workers) can eliminate a monarchy,

sanction the peasants’ seizure of the land, the establishment of the

eight-hour day, the calling of a constituent assembly, etc.

In this sense, [his government, and the parties participating in it, if

there are any, can be said to represent the progressive classes. Once

“feudal” or “semi-feudal” institutions arc dismantled or significantly

weakened, once the major obstacles to commodity production and the

accumulation of capital are eliminated, capitalism develops

spontaneously, ensuring the ultimate defeat of the reactionary forces.

Thus, during the French Revolution, many if not most of the radical

measures taken were not implemented by the bourgeoisie, per se, but by

essentially middle class intellectuals, supported by the peasants and

sans culottes, acting independently of the bourgeoisie, And despite the

fact that the Jacobins were eventually overthrown and (he monarchy

restored, the period of reaction was temporary; capitalism continued to

develop and the monarchy was eventually overthrown.

But in a socialist revolution, it is not sufficient for a party that

claims to represent (he working class to enact measures that are

supposedly in the workers’ interests and to concentrate ail power in its

own hands, it is not, in other words, sufficient for a dictatorship of

one party to be supported by members of the class in whose interests it

claims to be acting, i.e., to rest on the mass organizations of the

workers, such as soviets,

This government, if it is to remain or, better, become, a true

proletarian dictatorship, must increasingly come under the control of

the mass, democratic organizations of the workers. Instead, the

Bolsheviks believing they represented the interests of the workers,

subordinated the soviets (and the factory committees} to themselves,

without recognizing what this meant. The result was not a revolutionary

democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry moving toward

being (he dictatorship of the proletariat, but the revolutionary

democratic dictatorship that consolidated its own power over and above

the classes it claimed to lead.

Unlike the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks managed to fight off the

counterrevolution externally and internally, and also to defeat the

efforts of the workers and peasants to free themselves from the

dictatorship that claimed lo represent them {Kronstadt, the Petrograd

strikes, the peasant uprisings of 1921). The result, in other words, was

a kind of permanent Jacobin dictatorship, a permanent “revolutionary

dictatorship of the proletariat and the the peasantry,” rather than the

dictatorship of the proletariat or the triumph of the old reactionary

classes.

Thus, a deeper look at the third and best argument against my

proposition (the anti-bourgeois nature of Lenin’s “revolutionary

democratic dictatorship”) in fact reinforces my main point, that the

Bolsheviks advocated and sought to carry out a bourgeois revolution

throughout most of their history, and that this perspective remained the

Bolshevik de facto strategy even after the April Conference in 1917.

So, we return to our main starting point, F believe it is correct to say

that throughout the overwhelming part of its history prior to the

October Revolution, the Bolshevik faction /party advocated and planned

to carry out a bourgeois revolution and that, despite Lenin’s new

perspective of 1917 and the discussions in the party, this never really

changed. Moreover, I would argue that the fundamental nature of the

party, its methods, ethos and style, were consistent with, if not

determined by, this. As we have discussed, the party was never truly

prepared to carry out a socialist revolution, not just in the sense of a

working class seizure of power but the construction of a true workers*

state; it never even had a serious discussion of the question.

More concretely, the party’s advocacy of a bourgeois-democratic

revolution had to have affected its composition. How many people were

attracted to the party specifically because they wanted to carry out a

bourgeois-democratic, rather than a proletarian, revolution? (To put it

the other way around, how many people were alienated from the

Bolsheviks, as well as the Mensheviks, because of their insistence that

the revolution had to be bourgeois-democratic; how many people joined

the various populist organizations, such as the SRs, or the anarchists,

because these advocated a full socialist, or “social,” revolution?)

How many people joined the Bolsheviks because they were basically for

economic growth and industrialization, which they perceived to be the

way to solve Russia’s poverty and backwardness, and never gave two hoots

about a truly worker-run society? How many people were attracted merely

by the thought of having power and prestige, something that was totally

closed off to them in Tsarist Russia? How many had their vision of

socialism distorted, at the very least, by the failure of the Bolsheviks

(and the Mensheviks) to elaborate a conception of a revolutionary

democratic socialist society? How many people joined the Bolshevik

Party, remained active in it through the October Revolution and the

Civil War, participated in the post-war reconstruction, and joined in

the persecution of Trotsky, only to perish at Stalin’s hands because

they were never clear about what was the difference between a workers’

state and a dictatorship of revolutionary intellectuals believing they

are acting “in the interests of’ the workers and peasants?

The point is not to try to answer these questions specifically. The

point is lo recognize that the Bolsheviks’ program, what it included and

what it excluded, had lo have had an impact on who was attracted to the

party, who remained with it, who got power in it, etc. If we keep these

questions and the point they imply in mind, we can begin to get some

answers to some of the questions raised in the First installment, such

as, how did Stalin get to be General Secretary of the Party? why was he

able to stand under Lenin’s mantle? why did so few Bolsheviks oppose

him? etc., etc.

The answer, I think, lies in the recognition that the Bolsheviks

ultimately carried out what they had planned to ...a unique, very

radical type of bourgeois revolution.

— TWO — Party, Class and Socialist Consciousness

THE subject of this article is the question of socialist consciousness,

the revolutionary party and the working class, and the relationship

among them. We will specifically focus on some of the conceptions put

forward in What Is To Be Done?, one of Lenin’s most important writings

and a major “text” of Leninism/Bolshevism. It is true that Lenin

discussed the issues raised in What Is To Be Done? in other writings and

even wrote things that appear to contradict major ideas in the book. We

will lake up this question below, but for now, we will direct our

attention to What Is To Be Done?

To understand what Lenin is getting at in his book, especially in

relation to our chief interest—socialist consciousness, the working

class, and the revolutionary party—it is essential to understand the

context in which the work appeared, what Lenin was trying to accomplish

and what those who disagreed with him were saying.

What Is To Be Done?, published in early 1902, was a crucial part of the

debate among Russian Marxists over how to build a revolutionary party,

specifically, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), in the

Russian empire in the early years of the current century. To build such

a party was not so easy, since virtually all political activity, and

certainly anything liberal, let alone revolutionary, was outlawed.

Revolutionaries of all persuasions were subject to arrest, imprisonment,

and exile in remote, forbidding places.

At the time What Is To Be Done? was written, a revolutionary Marxist

party did exist, but only in name, in reality, the Russian Marxist

movement remained what it had been for nearly ten years, a melange of

local committees. These were mostly study circles and groups devoted to

carrying out “economic*’ agitation, that is, distributing material

focusing on the workers’ wages, working conditions, etc., and supporting

various strikes. They were generally isolated from each other and

carried out their activities autonomously. In essence, the movement at

this time was a milieu, not a party.

Earlier, four years before What Is To Be Done? was written, an attempt

had been made to remedy this situation. At the so-called First Congress

of the RSDLP, held in Minsk in March 1898, a manifesto was adopted, a

structure was decided upon, leaders were elected and a decision to

publish a party newspaper was made. But the Tsarist political police

(the Okhrana) arrested (he participants of the congress soon afterwards

and, as a result, the state of the movement remained virtually

unchanged. (None of the nine delegates to that First Congress played a

major role in later Russian events.)

This attempt to organize a party occurred against the background of a

growing wave of workers’ strike activity. Beginning in the early 1890s,

the still small and very young working class in the Russian empire

launched strike struggles that eventually shook the major cities,

Working conditions were terrible: hours were dreadfully long, pay was

hardly existent, maiming accidents were common, the workers were subject

to fines for “poor work” and other infractions, the overseers were

brutal, etc. Spurred in part by an economic upturn in the 1890s,

desperate workers went out on strike to improve their conditions. These

strikes were “spontaneous,” insofar as they were not planned or led by

organized revolutionaries, although individual revolutionaries

undoubtedly look pan.

It was in (his situation that a young (25 years old) Lenin had played

his first major role in the Russian Marxist movement. In 1895 he and

Julius Martov, the future leader of the Mensheviks, put together a

22-person group that soon called itself the Si. Petersburg League of

Struggle for the Emancipation of Labor. Lenin urged his immediate

colleagues and other Marxists to orient toward the workers’ mass strike

movement, writing broad agitational literature directed at the workers.

(Prior to this, most Marxist activity had consisted of study circles

among a very small number of “worker-intellectuals,” some of whom

opposed the orientation to mass agitation.)

In December 1895 Lenin and nine others in the group were arrested and

tried. Lenin was sentenced to one year in prison followed by three years

in Siberia. He was released in January 1900 and went into exile in

Western Europe. There he met with the “founding fathers” of Russian

Marxism, specifically G.V. Plekhanov, Vera Zasulich, and Paul Akselrod,

in order to win them over to his plan to rebuild the RSDLP following the

disastrous aftermath of the First Congress.

Lenin’s plan, first put forward publicly in some articles in 1900, had a

number of aspects. Probably most important, he proposed to rebuild the

RSDLP around an “All-Russian” newspaper. This was to be a newspaper

directed to all the nationalities and regions of the Russian empire, in

contrast to local journals directed toward single cities. This paper

would be written and published abroad, in the safety of exile, and

smuggled into Russia by various means. Such a newspaper would provide

the Marxists in Russia and those others who read it with a national (in

fact, transnational, since Russia consisted of many nations) point of

view, rather than a local one.

Equally, this All-Russian newspaper would provide the basis to build an

organizational structure, an apparatus, around which to rebuild the

RSDLP. Specifically, Lenin proposed [hat this apparatus focus on

smuggling the paper into Russia and distributing it to the workers and

other interested people. The nuclei of this network would be local

committees, all of whose members would be underground, that is, without

legal identity, and would be paid, meagerly to be sure, by the party.

This network/apparatus would be as centralized as possible and united by

an “iron discipline” (firm adherence to agreed-upon rules of operation).

Overall national (All-Russian) positions on various political and

programmatic questions would be determined by periodic delegated

congresses and, between these gatherings, by elected leaders living

abroad, not by local and regional committees.

Lenin was particularly concerned to build a strong, well-functioning

organization that could resist Tsarist repression. He attributed the

failure to build a party up to that point to what he considered the

“amateurishness” of the Russian Marxists, including parochialism, sloppy

methods, lack of a serious division of labor, etc. To counter this, he

called for “professionalism” and a party of professional

revolutionaries. This was meant in two distinct but interrelated senses.

One was the general meaning of professional— using unified, tested

methods, training experts in various phases of revolutionary activity.

The second sense of “professionalism” was narrower and quite literal. As

we noted, the party, at least initially, would consist exclusively of

underground operatives, full-time people, paid by the party and living

clandestinely.

An additional aspect or Lenin’s strategy was that the All-Russian

newspaper, and the party as a whole, would emphasize what Lenin called

‘‘political agitation”: articles and exposes addressed primarily to

political, a$ opposed to “economic” issues (wages, working conditions,

strike struggles), A focus on political questions, Lenin argued, would

tend to raise the workers’ consciousness from its current level (the

workers were, after all, already carrying out spontaneous strikes over

local “economic” issues) to a higher, more political level, and at the

same time encourage them to think in terms of the whole Russian empire,

not just their own locality.

With the support of Plekhanov, Akselrod and Zasulich, Lenin, Martov and

V, Potresov launched this All-Russian newspaper, called Iskra (Spark) in

December 1900, and began to build a following, and an apparatus. A

companion theoretical journal, Zarya (Dawn), was launched in April 1901.

Of course, not all of the people, committees, etc,, in the Russian

Marxist movement agreed with Lenin’s conception. To simplify, we can

note that the opposition to the ideas of the Zarya-ists focused on two

points. One was that the Iskra-ists ignored the “economic” struggle —

the workers’ struggles over wages, working conditions, etc. The other

was that the Iskra-ist emphasis on centralized structure and

decision-making violated the autonomy of the local committees, (hat is.

that it was undemocratic.

We do not wish to debate here the merits and demerits of the

Lenin/Iskra-ists’ strategy nor of the arguments of their opponents. Our

concern is to sketch the context in which What Is To Be Done? was

written and within which its contents must be understood, What Is To Be

Done? was an attempt to defend the ideas behind the Iskraists’ strategy

and to win supporters to it; a second congress of the RSDLP was being

planned for the following year and Lenin fell very strongly (as he did

about nearly everything), that the approach he advocated was the only

way to build, and maintain, a truly revolutionary Marxist party in

Russia. What Is To Be Done?, then, was both a defense of his

strategic/organizational conception for building the RSDLP and an

elaboration of it.

Typical of the Marxist polemics of this period (and most others),

Lenin’s arguments about how to build the party are buttressed by

discussions of fundamental theoretical questions, such as the nature of

socialist consciousness and how it is created, to which we now turn.

(Incidentally, the name of the book, What Is To Be Done?, comes from the

title of a famous novel, written by the Russian populist N.G.

Chernyshevsky in 1362, considered one of the key manifestos of Russian

populist thought.)

For other purposes, the chief import of What Is To Be Done? is that it

elaborates a conception of the political consciousness of the working

class and how it develops, and the role of a revolutionary party in that

process, that had a fundamental, indeed defining, impact on the

development of Leninism/Bolshevism, Although, as we mentioned, Lenin

occasionally said other things about the question, the theory elaborated

in What Is To Be Done? represented a major ideological assumption of

Bolshevism, underpinning the Bolsheviks’ conception of the nature of the

party, its relationship to the working class, its strategy, tactics and

methods. This conception, moreover, remained central despite the various

changes in Lenin’s/the Bolsheviks’ ideas. And, I would argue, this

conception has a fundamentally totalitarian/state capitalist

implication.

The relevant passage from What Is To Be Done? is as follows:

We have said that there could not yet be Social-Democratic consciousness

among the workers. It could only be brought to them from without. The

history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by

its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e.,

the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the

employers and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour

legislation, etc, (Trade unionism does not exclude “polities”

altogether, as some imagine- Trade unions have always conducted some

political |but not Social-Democratic] agitation and struggle.) The

theory of Socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical

and economic theories that were elaborated by the educated

representatives of the propertied classes, the intellectuals.

There are two distinct, but related, points here. One is that the

working class, by itself, meaning the mass of workers in the absence of

an organ nation of Marxist revolutionaries, is only capable of

developing trade unionist consciousness, e.g., understanding the need to

organize unions, 10 organize and strike for higher wages, better working

conditions and other benefits. By themselves, in other words, I he

majority of workers will not, and cannot, come to socialist conclusions,

that is, recognize the need to unite as a class and to rise up,

overthrow capitalism and build a socialist society.

The second key point is that “social democratic” consciousness, what we

call revolutionary socialist consciousness, something developed and

maintained by socialist intellectuals, must be brought to the workers

from “without,” from a party that stands on these ideas, that is, a

Social Democratic Party.

Before proceeding to our discussion of the state capitalist implications

of these theses, it is worth making a number of preliminary comments

about them. First, these ideas were not unique to Lenin, As he himself

said, this was the conception of the major theoretical leader of the

international Marxist movement of that time, Karl Kautsky, Lenin,

seeking to convince the majority of Russian Marxists of his strategic

and organizational ideas, sought to justify them with arguments of the

most “orthodox” of Marxists. Whether or not ail, or even most, members

of the Social Democratic movement agreed with Kautsky is a different

matter. It was convenient to quote from the “Pope of Marxism,”

Second, we doubt that Karl Marx would have agreed precisely with

Kautsky’s formulation. Although Marx well knew how much work socialist

intellectuals (particularly himself) had put into elaborating socialist

ideas and theory, I suspect he fell that what he had done was to

recognize, elaborate and put into writing something that was happening,

or would happen, independently of his consciousness, that is, among the

working class Itself, But this is a point for another, much larger,

discussion.

Third, there is some truth in what Kautsky/Lenin wrote. During

non-revolutionary periods„ that is, outside of mass revolutionary

upheavals, most workers are not revolutionary socialist (we are

accepting, for the moment, the equation between “social democratic” and

“revolutionary socialist”).

During “normal” times, most workers are trade unionist, if they are

that, and many workers may not even recognize that they are members of a

common social stratum, (In the U.S. most workers probably consider

themselves part of an amorphous “middle class.”) At best, only a small

number of workers consider themselves revolutionary socialists and they

are, by and large, outside the ongoing life of the majority of workers.

Insofar as they, along with middle class revolutionaries, convince other

workers to be revolutionary socialists, they are bringing socialist

consciousness to the workers “ from without.” Even in revolutionary

periods, the revolutionary consciousness that many workers develop may

not be “truly” revolutionary, in the Marxist sense. It might be

anarchist, anarcho-syndicalist. revolutionary populist, or some other

kind of consciousness that most Marxists have considered to be not

“proletarian.”

Fourth* a!though the conception that Lenin defends has strong state

capitalist/totalitarian implications* it does have a positive, that is,

democratic and even libertarian, aspect as well. (This is probably one

of the things that has helped obscure the state capitalist implications

for many people, including this writer.) This is the idea that

socialists should be open and straightforward about what they believe.

They should try to convince people (workers and others) to be

revolutionary socialists, openly and honestly. They should not hide

their ideas, pretend to be something else, and come up with some trick

or scheme that will convince people to be socialists in the absence of

dialogue and rational argument. In this sense, revolutionary socialists

do, and should, bring socialist consciousness to the workers. As Leon

Trotsky said, revolutionaries should “say what is,” i.e., tell the truth

to the workers.

This is in contrast to other approaches which are, Tn fact, dishonest

and manipulative, One of these is the reformist approach Lenin argued

against in What Is To Be Done?, that if the workers are just encouraged

to fight reform struggles they will automatically come to socialist

conclusions. In this conception, there is no need for socialists to

argue openly and explicitly for (perhaps unpopular) socialist ideas, and

to convince people. Rather they should pretend to be simply “militant

unionists” or militant whatevers, that is, something other than what

they are. (In fact, if you cease to advocate socialism and function like

a reformist, you become a reformist, regardless of what you call

yourself.) Not only is this dishonest, it winds up strengthening

reformist ideas among the workers and building a reformist workers’

movement, not a revolutionary one. In this sense Lenin’s conception was

superior to that of his reformist (“Economist”) opponents.

Another approach which doesn’t argue openly for socialism motivates many

people who pursue a terrorist strategy. People are asleep, this

reasoning often goes, numbed by the mass media, habit, fast food or

“repressive desublimation” (in the conception of Herbert Marcuse), and

the job of revolutionaries is lo wake them up. Hence, the use of bombs.

One doesn’t argue for socialism, one tries to “galvanize” the people.

Both these approaches* in failing to openly argue for socialist ideas,

failing to “bring socialist consciousness to the working class” (using

these words loosely) are dishonest and manipulative. They too have a

state capitalist implication: the workers are too stupid to be

convinced; an elite has to trick them into fighting for socialism.

All this being said, we now turn to the question of the state

capitalist/totalitarian implications of Lenin’s formulations on

socialist consciousness and the role of the party in What Is To Be Done?

By state capitalist/totalitarian implications we mean explicit or hidden

conceptions and/or tendencies that imply, point to, or justify state

capitalism—the rule of an elite over the working class in the name of

socialism.

Perhaps the best way to approach this is to list a number of

interrelated ideas that follow from the What Is To Be Done?

formulations. If the workers are able, by themselves, to come only to

trade union consciousness, and socialist consciousness must be brought

to them from “without,” by revolutionary intellectuals/the revolutionary

party, then:

The source, repository and guarantee of socialist consciousness are

socialist intellectuals/the revolutionary party, not the working class.

What ultimately matters, in terms of a socialist revolution, is that

state power is seized by the revolutionary party; the bottom line of

what constitutes socialism/the dictatorship of the proletariat is that

the slate is ruled by a revolutionary party.

In any conflict between the revolutionary party and the working class,

the revolutionary party is right, and the party has the right, even the

duty, to rule “in the name of,” “in the interests of,” the working

class.

Prior to the seizure of power by a revolutionary party, these state

capitalist/totalitarian implications are not very clear; they represent

a kind of hidden potential. After all, the party is trying to “reach”

the working class, carry out propaganda and agitation, form various

organizations, etc.—in general, trying to create socialist consciousness

among the workers. If the workers don’t care to listen, if they refuse

to be socialists, the party remains relatively isolated and small.

Moreover, one can conceive, in theory, of a relationship between the

working class and the revolutionary party, during and after the seizure

of power, in which the party does not rule over the working class, but

provides the leadership for the class rule of the workers.

But things are always more complicated in reality than in theory.

Socialist theory, in particular, has a tendency to assume that the

workers’ “true” or “appropriate” consciousness (truly “proletarian

consciousness”) is socialist ideology. This leads directly to the idea

that once the working class becomes socialist, certainly once a working

class insurrection is carried out. the workers will not have any

fundamental disagreements with the revolutionary party.

But what if this isn’t true? What if, after certain developments

following a workers’ insurrection, the workers no longer fully support

the revolutionary party? What if they cease being revolutionary? What if

they remain revolutionary, but their notion of being revolutionary

differs from that of the revolutionary party? What if workers and the

party remain in basic agreement, but develop strategic, tactical or

organizational differences, which in conditions of upheaval, can become

divisive and quite bitter?

In all these circumstances, the logic of Lenin’s formulations in What Is

To Be Done? implies, points toward, and justifies, the rule of the party

over the workers. In other words, it implies, points toward, and

justifies state capitalism. In shorty the state capitalist/totalitarian

implications of these formulations can become explicit once a working

class insurrection takes place.

This is not inevitable. As we noted, one can conceive of a

democratic/socialist relationship between the working class and one

revolutionary party during and after the seizure of power. But a state

capitalist outcome is highly probable.

This is especially true if the party has been built around the idea that

it, and only it, is the true repository and guarantee of socialist

consciousness, and that every other political organization is, at

bottom, ultimately bourgeois and counterrevolutionary. Unless the

revolution goes almost perfectly and is beset by few obstacles (and this

is not likely), almost all the training and ways of thinking and acting

of its members will push that party toward ruling “in the name of,” “in

the interests of,” the working class.

In fact, the state capitalist/totalitarian implications of the ideas in

What Is To Be Done? go deeper than this. While What Is To Be Done? says

that the revolutionary intellectuals/the revolutionary party is the

source of socialist consciousness, it also defines the revolutionary

party as “professional revolutionaries,” the full-time party apparatus.

Adding this thought into the hopper, we get the additional implication

that the ultimate source, repository and guarantee of socialist

consciousness is the party apparatus, the functionaries. And, by logical

extension, after the seizure of power, the only guarantor of the

proletarian or socialist nature of the state is the rule of the party

apparatus, the bureaucrats.

This implies that when conflicts develop between the party and the mass

organizations of the working class {the workers’ councils (soviets),

factory committees, trade unions, workers’ militia, etc.). the party is

right and takes precedence. It has the right to make the decisions and

rule over the working class. And, in turn, when conflicts develop

between the party apparatus and other sections of the party, the party

apparatus is right and takes precedence. It has the right to make the

decisions and rule over the rest of the party (and, of course, the

working class). This is what happened in Russia after the October

Revolution.

One does not need to argue that Lenin explicitly held and defended the

state capitalist/totalitarian conceptions that are implied in What Is To

Be Done? (He probably thought that once the workers had become

socialists and had followed the party in carrying out the revolution,

the issue of the party ruling over the workers would never even arise.)

For now, all we need to note is that the formulations in What Is To Be

Done? do contain such implications.

In fact, Lenin elsewhere wrote things that implied the direct opposite

of the passages in What Is To Be Done? In an article called The

Reorganization of the Party, written in late 1905, just after the most

radical events of the (unsuccessful) 1905 Revolution, Lenin wrote: “The

working class is instinctively, spontaneously social democratic,” (Once

again, this meant revolutionary socialist, since Lenin and the

Bolsheviks still called themselves Social Democrats). This article was

written to argue for admitting workers “at the bench” (workers who had

normal jobs, like in factories) into the party, and reorganizing and

broadening the party accordingly, Lenin was trying to overcome the

resistance of some party members who were afraid that admitting members

who were not full-time, paid functionaries would dilute the

revolutionary character of the party.

That Lenin would write something the the sentence cited above during the

1905 Revolution makes perfect sense. There was a revolution going on and

the workers, without any help from the revolutionary organizations, had

become quite militant and revolutionary. (All the revolutionary

organizations, including the Bolsheviks, were small and relatively

marginal to the revolutionary goings on. Leon Trotsky played an

important role as chairman of the St. Petersburg soviet, but as an

individual figure, not as a member of a party-type organization.)

The Bolsheviks at this time were still organized as an underground

apparatus of professional operatives. Hence Lenin’s proposal to open up

the party to “non-professionals.” Hence, Loo, his argument against those

who resisted his proposal, in essence, “the workers are already

revolutionary.”

Despite this article, the conception put forward in What Is To Be Done?

remained, I would contend, the dominant one among the Bolsheviks. What

Is To Be Done? was essentially the founding document of the Bolshevik

faction/party, with elaborate discussions of fundamental issues in

socialist theory and practice. The Reorganization of the Party was in no

way comparable; it was a minor piece. While we do not know for sure, we

can guess that new members of the Bolshevik faction/party were urged,

probably required, to read What Is To Be Done? soon after, maybe even

before, joining. Older members probably went back and reread it, to

refresh their memories. It is almost certain, however, that this was not

true of The Reorganization of the Party.

Maybe even more important, central leaders of the Bolshevik Party,

including many “Old Bolsheviks” such as Joseph Stalin, were trained in

the ideas and practices of What Is To Be Done? Some went back to the

original Iskra period and the period from the Second Congress of the

RSDLP in 1903 to the 1905 Revolution. Others were trained in the years

after 1905–06 when the workers became politically quiescent and

conservative and all the revolutionary organizations shrank drastically.

The Bolsheviks, as much by necessity as by choice, became little more

than a professional underground apparatus, and sometimes barely this.

This remained the case roughly until the outbreak of the February

Revolution in 1917.

Later Bolshevik leaders, recruited and seasoned under these conditions,

would almost automatically agree with the conceptions in What Is To Be

Done? And all would be prone to act according to its implications

before, during and after the October Revolution.

The most convincing evidence of the impact of the state

capitalist/totalitarian implications of the ideas in What Is To Be Done?

is what actually happened after the October Revolution, particularly

during the Civil War. As we have mentioned the Bolsheviks centralized

all political power in their own hands. This included subordinating the

soviets, factory committees, unions, militias, and other mass

organizations {where these had not been disbanded) to their direct

control and “discipline.” These measures were certainly taken under

specific conditions, including internal counterrevolutionary uprisings,

foreign intervention, incredible devastation and poverty.

And perhaps the Bolsheviks would have preferred not to have taken them

(although many of the measures were praised, even glorified, by N.I.

Bukharin, the party’s major theoretician).

Yet, the steps taken were totally consistent with the conceptions put

forward in What Is To Be Done? They were justified by leading

Bolsheviks, including the not very “Old Bolsheviks” Leon Trotsky and

Karl Radek.

The party [is] entitled to assert its dictatorship even if that

dictatorship temporarily clashes] with the passing moods of the workers’

democracy It is necessary to create among us the awareness of the

revolutionary, historical birthright of the party. The parry is obliged

to maintain its dictatorship, regardless of temporary wavering in the

spontaneous moods of the masses, regardless of the temporary

vacillations even in the working class. (Trotsky)

The Party is the politically conscious vanguard of the working class.

We are now at a point where the workers, at the end of their endurance,

refuse any longer to follow a vanguard which leads them into battle and

sacrifice. Ought we to yield to the clamours of workingmen who have

reached the limit of their patience but who do not understand their true

interests as we do? Their state of mind is frankly reactionary. But the

Party has decided that we must not yield, that we must impose our will

to victory on our exhausted and dispirited followers. (Radek)

And needless to say, these steps were warmly embraced by Stalin and

other “Old Bolsheviks” who took the ball and kept running. Is this

purely a coincidence?

— THREE — The “Ethos” of Bolshevism

IN this article, 1 will discuss what might be called the “ethos” of

Bolshevism, By “ethos,” I mean the overall outlook, attitudes and

style—the culture, roughly—of the faction and party that has come to be

known as Bolshevik. “Ethos” is a somewhat vague term. Nevertheless,

there are certain fairly definite characteristics of the Bolsheviks,

both as individuals and as a tendency/party, and of their political

outlook, that can be discerned.

One of the most salient aspects of the ethos of the Bolshevik tendency

is what might be called the cult of the “hards.” The Bolsheviks prided

themselves on their toughness. They even referred to themselves as “the

hards.” This was in contrast to what they derided as the “softness” of

the Mensheviks. As the Bolsheviks saw it, they were strong, tough and

unhesitating: the Mensheviks weak, soft and indecisive. The Bolsheviks

prided themselves on their skill in functioning “underground” and on

their willingness to endure the hardships this entailed. They considered

the Mensheviks as less capable of working under conditions of

clandestinity and too anxious to function legally, no matter what

restrictions this entailed. The Bolsheviks also saw themselves as more

proletarian than the Mensheviks, whom they considered more middle class

(even when this was not strictly true).

Even more important, the Bolsheviks viewed themselves as being more

politically intransigent than the Mensheviks, more hostile to the Tsar,

landlords and capitalists, more suspicious of the bourgeois liberals.

This intransigence, or political “hardness,” referred both to political

stance and to the question of methods. In general, the Bolsheviks*

political program was more radical than the Mensheviks; they had a more

radical position on the agrarian question, one of the main issues in

Russia.

The Bolsheviks were also more willing to advocate and use violent

tactics. During the 1905 Revolution, for example, one of the Bolsheviks*

main emphases was on organizing armed fighting squads with the idea of

carrying out an armed insurrection.

In this cull of “hardness,” political position and personai style,

faction policies and personal characteristics, were considered

integrally connected, even if this was not true of every individual in

the faction. (For example, Grigorii Zinoviev, a leading Bolshevik, was

well-known among the Bolsheviks for his vacillating temperament and even

cowardice.)

However true or false this conception was in general, it did tend to

reflect the personal characteristics of the main leaders of the

Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, Yuri Martov and V.I. Lenin, respectively,

Martov appeared to be physically weak, somewhat slovenly, overly

cautious politically and an undisciplined thinker and speaker. Lenin, on

the other hand, gave the impression of personal strength and energy; he

was also neat, very decisive politically and an incisive thinker and

speaker.

The Bolsheviks* conception of themselves as the “hards” reflected their

ideal, or model. This was, as we discussed in our last article, the

professional, full-time revolutionary. He (and, by and large, he was a

he) was illegal. He lived and worked “underground,” without permanent

home, hiding and often running from the police. He subsisted on very

little and could look forward to periods of jail and exile. He was

totally devoted to his work. He was a professional, a skilled operative.

Almost anybody who survived such an existence for any period of lime had

to be, or had to become, “hard,” or tough. (The Bolsheviks, by the way,

tended to wear black leather jackets and coats, which became kind of a

badge with them.)

There are two aspects of the question of “hardness” that are worth

noting. One is the question of “discipline.” This was meant both in a

political or party sense, and in a personal and Individual sense.

Discipline in the political sense meant a total commitment to the

principles and the policies of the party. Whatever one might think of

these, even if one had disagreements with the policies, or “line,” of

the party, one firmly defended them and carried them out. Raising one’s

differences was reserved for specific periods, and even then, solely

within the party or faction. The Bolsheviks often used the term “iron

discipline” as something to strive for.

Another aspect of “discipline*’ consisted of personal dedication and

single-mindedness. This included a kind of asceticism, a pride in being

able to do without luxuries and things most people take for granted,

including family and a social life.

This asceticism was not something we merely point to in hindsight; it

was explicitly held up as an ideal, Lenin was known for his frugality,

his lack of affectation and a willingness to live without luxuries. {He

did live considerably better than mast peasants and workers, however.)

Significantly, the name of Lenin’s book What Is To Be Done?, as we

mentioned, was borrowed from the title of a book by N.G, Chernyshevsky.

Written in solitary confinement in 1862, this book was virtually the

bible of the young, mostly middie-class and upper-class radicals of the

1860s who “went to the people” (the peasants) to bring them

enlightenment and radical ideas. A striking figure in the book is a

young man, Rakhmetov. Of plebeian origins, Rakhmetov is a tower of

strength. He believes only in the cause and is totally devoted to the

“people,” Not least, he prepares himself for the coming struggle

(implicitly, a vast upheaval) by sleeping on a bed of nails and

otherwise toughening his body and mind. The connection between

Rakhmetov’s style and that of the Bolsheviks was no accident. Now, there

is much that is positive about the Bolsheviks’ stress on “hardness,”

both politically and personally. It is good for revolutionaries to be

radical, intransigent, decisive and loyal to one’s organization and its

policies. It is also positive to be dedicated, skillful and willing to

endure hardships, lo suffer for the cause. “Hardness,” in this sense, is

one of the things that enabled the Bolsheviks to survive the stresses of

Tsarist repression and the revolution, to lead the October Revolution

and prevail during the Civil War. Certainly, any serious revolutionary

organization needs a good dose of this.

Yet, “hardness” can be taken loo far. And a cult of “hardness” can lead

to serious distortions. On a minima! level, it can become a kind of

revolutionary puritanism which condemns even modest common comforts as

luxuries and frivolities, and sneers at people who want lo live normal

lives, not totally dedicated to the cause. It may also entail a

hostility toward the “loo open” expression of the “positive”

emotions—love, joy, happiness, etc. —and to a denigration of pleasurable

activities as “decadent” or “bourgeois.” It can thus become very

“macho,” implicitly or explicitly looking down on women, gay people, and

on anything we might call sexual liberation.

A cult of “hardness” can also lead to a willingness to advocate, even

prefer, brutal, coercive methods, and to an insensitivity to human

suffering.

Had ‘‘hardness” remained a question of individual style or altitude, or

had it been part of an ethos of a party that remained out of power, a

cult of “hardness” might not amount to much. What makes a cult of

“hardness” in a political organization potentially dangerous is the

possibility that it becomes part of a state ideology.

If a party priding itself on its “hardness” becomes the sole political

power in a state, the party may tend to impose its hardness on everybody

else. Then what started out as the personal puritanism of members of a

faction or party before the revolution becomes a kind of state

puritanism, imposed by the various means at the disposal of a state

afterward. The result can be regimentation and a punitive attitude

toward classes, groups and individuals who oppose or do not fully agree

with the goals and methods of the ruling party.

More generally, just as the “puritan ethic” of the 16^(th) and 17^(th)

centuries reinforced the capitalist dictum “accumulation for the sake of

accumulation” on the part of individual capitalists, so does a state

puritanism lend itself to the same dictum on the part of the state.

This, in fact, is the ethic of state capitalism.

Most ominously, a state cull of “hardness” can lead quite logically to

the idea that if brutal coercive methods are justified before and during

a revolution, they are also justified afterwards. But the ability to

utilize such methods will have been enormously increased, since the

party now has the vast power of the state (police, prisons, armies,

etc.) at its disposal. Thus, if it is okay to sacrifice individuals in

the name of the cause, it is also okay, and possible to justify

sacrificing even more people, perhaps whole classes, if it serves the

interests of the great cause of socialism and the liberation of

humanity.

Another aspect of the “ethos” of Bolshevism worthy of note is what can

be called a cult of centralism and centralization.

Generally speaking, the Bolsheviks strongly favored centralism over

decentralism, which they saw in a negative light. This attraction to

centralism had a number of roots, not all of which are clear. As an

organizational principle for their faction/party, the Bolsheviks

advocated what they called “democratic centralism.” This was, in fact, a

necessity largely imposed on them by the circumstances under which they

operated for most of their history’: they were an outlawed group,

subject to arrest, imprisonment, exile, etc., if caught. To build a

strong organization that could resist repression, that is, survive, they

adopted centralism.

Yet, the Bolsheviks revered centralism far beyond the necessities of

underground existence. They seemed to have considered it not only

stronger organizationally than decentralism but also inherently more

democratic. Some of the Bolsheviks’ reverence for centralism appears to

have come from their admiration of capitalist-industrial technique and

structure. One of their main criticisms of Russia was its backwardness

—what we would call the underdeveloped character of its economy. The

Bolsheviks saw the capitalist factory, run on a centralized basis, as a

progressive institution, technically speaking.

Lenin, for example, constantly held up the highly centralized and

hierarchical German postal system and German industry as a whole as an

example for the Russians to adopt. Thus, after the October Revolution,

Lenin defined the creation of a highly centralized economic apparatus as

a major goal of the Soviet state.

The organization of accounting, the control of large enterprises, the

transformation of the state economic mechanism into a single huge

machine. into an economic organism that will work in such a sway as to

enable hundreds of millions of people to be guided by a single plan—such

was the enormous organizational problem that rested on our shoulders,

(Political Report of the Central Committee to the Extraordinary Seventh

Congress of the RCP(B), delivered March 7. 1918. Collected Works, Vol.

27. pp. 90–91.)

Lenin’s commitment to, virtual adoration of, centralism can be seen in

his fairly frequent recommendation that the economy, revolutionary army,

and soviet state be “subordinated to a single will” {presumably his, but

that, for the moment, is not the point we are stressing).

Here it is worth citing a fairly long passage in order to get a

relatively broad feel of Lenin’s thinking on the question.

...it must be said that large-scale machine industry—which is precisely

the material source, the productive source, the foundation of socialism

— calls for absolute and strict unity of wilt, which directs the joint

labours of hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands of people. The

technical, economic and historic necessity of this is obvious, and all

those who have thought about socialism have always regarded it as one of

the conditions of socialism. But how can strict unity or will be

ensured? By thousands subordinating their will to the will of one.

Given ideal class-consciousness and discipline on the part of those

participating in the common work, this subordination would be something

like the mild leadership of a conductor of an orchestra, II may assume

the sharp forms of a dictatorship if ideal discipline and class

consciousness are lacking. But be that as it may, unquestioning

subordination to a single will is absolutely necessary for the success

of processes organised on the pattern of large-scale machine industry.

(“The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government” written March-April,

1918. Collected Works, Vol. 27, pp. 268–269.)

In the previous paragraph, Lenin writes “There is, therefore, absolutely

no contradiction in principle between Soviet (that is, socialist)

democracy and the exercise of dictatorial powers by individuals.” [P.

268.]

Thus, in Lenin’s view, extreme, even absolute, centralization was far

from being antithetical to socialist democracy. It was perfectly

compatible with it, in some sense, its perfect embodiment.

(t is not my point, here, to prove that a commitment to centralism,

seeing it as an intrinsically progressive and even proletarian form, is

per se state capitalist. But it is fairly easy to see that a political

party whose commitment to centralism became virtually a point of

principle would resort to extreme centralist measures (backed by “iron

discipline”) to preserve what it considered to be the dictatorship of

the proletariat. It is also easy to see why such a party would not

recognize that extreme centralism would eventually destroy—by choking

off real workers’ control and democracy—the proletarian state they

thought they were defending. And why, later on, such a party would

revert to extreme centralist measures as the main way to industrialize

the country.

Part of the Bolsheviks’ cult of centralism was an infatuation with

(economic) planning. To the Bolsheviks, and to all too many Marxists,

the essence of socialism is economic planning. This is in contrast to

capitalism which, on the whole, is chaotic, working through the free, or

partially free market.

But there is planning and there is planning. It depends on who is doing

it and how it is done. Today’s Russian economy is supposedly planned,

bu! anyone who knows anything about how it actually works knows that it

is an unplanned mass of chaos. What is “planned” and what happens have

little relation to each other. Planning by a bureaucratic state

capitalist class that exploits the working class is not the same as

democratic, socialist planning by the workers. The Bolsheviks were never

clear about this and tended to conflate the two ideas.

Part of the responsibility for this rests with Marx and Engels

themselves. They contrasted the chaos and anarchy of the capitalist

market to the supposedly planned nature of production inside the

factory.

Perhaps a small factory, the kind that Engels managed for many years, is

really planned. But a huge capitalist combine, such as General Motors,

has many divisions, sub-divisions, bureaucracies, etc., competing for

resources, recognition, etc.. While more planned than the market, it is

not truly planned. Like the modem Russian economy as a whole, such a

firm is closer to marginally managed chaos than real planning. And to

the degree any given Factory is planned, such planning is based on

brutal regimentation. A whole society built around the bureaucratic and

hierarchical principles of a capitalist corporation would not be

planned; it would be a stifling, bureaucratic nightmare.

Like Marx and Engels, the Bolsheviks tended to equate socialist planning

with the planning typical of capitalist firms. Planning was to be done

by economic expense in a supposedly “scientific” manner, based on the

complete nationalization (centralization) of industry. It was not

supposed to be a question of politics subject to discussion and debate

by the workers.

As a result, workers’ control of factories and industry as a whole,

which the Bolsheviks advocated during 1917, was seen by them as a

stepping-stone, a transitional measure, lo something else, something

“more socialist”: nationalization of industry and so-called “socialist”

planning. The Bolsheviks did not conceive of socialist planning as being

compatible with the direct workers’ control of the factories, which they

saw as an anarchist idea. They were therefore for “workers’ control”

during 1917 only insofar as it led “further” (and because during and

after the February Revolution the workers had occupied the factories and

established their control).

Thus, as soon as they were able, the Bolsheviks subordinated the factory

committees to other institutions (the trade unions) and ultimately

effectively did away with them altogether. They were replaced by

“one-man management.” While this has often been explained as motivated

by necessity (the onset of the Civil War, the drastic decline of the

economy, etc.), and this is true to a degree, it was also totally

consistent with the Bolsheviks’ pre-existent ideas and leanings,

particularly their idolization of centralism.

As we have mentioned, one source of the Bolsheviks’ commitment to

centralism was a belief in the inherent progressiveness of bourgeois

technology. Bourgeois technology, and its corollary, industrialization,

were also virtual cult objects on the part of the Bolsheviks.

Although they were fiercely opposed to traditional capitalism,

capitalist corporations and banks and individual capitalists, the

Bolsheviks were extremely fond of bourgeois technology, particularly the

techniques of capitalist industry.

But their attachment was not limited to merely the industrial processes,

as such— technology in the narrow sense of the term— but to the overall

methods and even structure of capitalist industry. This included the

centralization, the hierarchical structure of management, piecework and

other facets of {bourgeois) “scientific management” (e.g., Taylorism).

Lenin actually believed that the overall structure and methods of

capitalist industry could be taken over, in total, by a proletarian

state. To Lenin, all that mattered to make this type of structure

proletarian was that it be controlled by a state based on soviets. Thus,

in May, 1918, Lenin wrote:

Here (in Germany) we have “the last word” in modern large-scale

capitalist engineering and planned organization, subordinated to

Junker-bourgeois imperialism. Cross out the words in italics, and in

place of the militarist. Junker, bourgeois, imperialist state put also a

state, but of a different social type, of a different class content — a

Soviet slate, that is, a proletarian state, and you will have the sum

total of the conditions necessary for socialism. {”‘Left-wing*

Childishness and the Petty Bourgeois Mentality,” Collected Works, Vol.

27, p. 334.)

(It is worth noting that many of the arguments in Lenin’s articles and

speeches we have cited, as well as others from the period, were intended

to refute those, both outside the Bolshevik party and inside it, who

disagreed with the course Lenin advocated. This is an indication that

not ail Bolsheviks agreed with Lenin, and that the specific aspects of

the Bolshevik ethos we have been discussing do not comprise the sum

total of Bolshevism.)

Lenin did not see that industrial technique, organizational structure

and methods are not purely scientific questions, politically neutral; he

did not realize that they have a definite class content. Specifically,

Lenin did not recognize that the German industry, and capitalist

industry as a whole, of his time, was a thoroughly bourgeois institution

in every facet. Merely subordinating a capitalist economic apparatus to

soviets (assuming the soviets are controlled by the workers), does not

automatically make the appparatus proletarian. It has to be thoroughly

revolutionized by the workers themselves.

It is understandable why the Bolsheviks would consider bourgeois

industry to be progressive in and of itself. From their position within

Tsarist Russia, the main problem was the poverty, ignorance, disease,

etc., of the workers and peasants. And this, it appeared to them, was

caused primarily by the economic, political and cultural backwardness of

Russia. Within this context, capitalist technology and capitalist

managerial techniques, etc., were easily seen as progressive per se.

What Russia needed, so it seemed, was a thorough-going economic

transformation, a basically capitalist industrialization.

This was one motivation for the view they held throughout most of their

history that the revolution on the order of the day in Russia was a

bourgeois one, not a socialist one. And, as we saw in the second

installment in this series, the main goal of this revolution would be to

dear the way for the fullest development of capitalism in Russia.

When the Bolsheviks altered their strategy in April, 1917, and oriented

themselves toward a working class revolution and the establishment of

what they saw as a proletarian dictatorship, their commitment to

bourgeois technology — industrial methods and managerial structure—did

not really change. They felt: 1) since industry, etc., was now

controlled by a soviet government, that is, a workers’ slate, it ipso

facto served the interests of the working class (and peasants), 2) the

main task within Russia was to build up the industrial apparatus and the

economy in general, to industrialize the country. This would lay the

material basis for establishing socialism and, eventually, communism.

As a result, they became even more committed to the centralization,

hierarchy and discipline of capitalist industry, and paid no attention

at all to developing a system of direct working class control over the

economy. If anything, the fact that this industry was now under their

control, which they assumed meant the control of the working class, led

them to discard whatever objections to centralization, hierarchy and

dictatorial management they might have have had.

The Bolsheviks did not merely justify these steps by citing the

intensification of the economic crisis and [he onset of the Civil War in

1918. They also advocated, justified anti defended them as a point of

principle, as steps toward socialism. One of N.I. Bukharin’s main

theoretical works written during the Civil War, The Economics of the

Transition Period, was a virtual hymn to centralization, And Bukharin

was the Bolsheviks’ major theoretician.

Here we can see a direct basis for both the aims and the methods of

Stalin’s program of forced industrial teat ion. Once it became clear

that the post-war wave of workers’ revolutions had been defeated, and

since the working class as a whole had “shown” that it lacked the

revolutionary will (the Kronstadt uprising, the Petrograd general

strike), it seemed logical that the chief task of the party was to force

the workers and peasants to industrialize the country.

Based on bourgeois technology and centralized planning,

industrialization, Stalin thought, would create abundance, the material

basis for communism, thus opening up the road to the next stage of human

society. But with the workers and soon the peasants deprived of any

control over the means of production, the cults of centralism and

bourgeois technology and, as we will soon discuss, coercive methods,

left them subordinated, exploited and decimated. Given Stalin’s

assumptions, many of which were taken over from Bolshevism, the result

was, and could only have been, a state capitalist industrialization.

An additional feature of the Bolshevik ethos was a belief in the

efficacy, even desirability, of coercive, brutal methods. I mentioned

this above in the section on the cult of hardness, but there are

additional points to be made.

When I refer to the Bolsheviks’ attraction to coercive methods, 1 am not

just repeating the standard bourgeois reproach of Marxism that “(he end

justifies the means.’’ (In fact, (he capitalists themselves believe that

the end, e.g., profits, the defense of capitalism, does justify the

means — injurious working conditions, the death penalty, chemical

warfare, nuclear weapons—but this is too long a discussion to embark

upon here.) Nor do I reject violent methods in total, I am not a

pacifist. In general, I accept Marx’s conception that a revolution

necessarily entails violence, but by and large this is, or should be,

the violence of the overwhelming majority against a very small minority

of exploiters and their agents. So, the problem is not one of

coercion/violence in the abstract.

There seems to me to be two issues involved. The first is whether those

who are resorting to coercive measures are aware that using them entails

a cost: that they can undercut the goal they are purportedly being used

to reach, and that at some point such measures can actually preclude the

reaching of that goal.

What I am getting at is that brutal methods tend to demoralize and

dehumanize those who employ them. It seems to me that if we seek to

build a more humane society than capitalism, then we should always

attempt to use methods that are more, rather than less, humane than

those of the capitalists.

The other issue involved in the question of the use of coercion/

violence by revolutionaries is: against whom are the coercive measures

directed? If the vast majority of workers and other oppressed people use

violence against the capitalists and their hangers-on, that is one

thing, if a relatively small minority of revolutionaries winds up

employing brutal methods against large numbers of workers, etc., then

this is something else.

All this being said, I would argue: 1) that the Bolsheviks were overly

inclined to advocate coercive/brutal methods, in general; 2) that they

seemed to be unaware that this might undermine the very goal they

claimed to be fighting for; and, 3) that, at least implicitly, these

coercive measures would logically wind up being directed against

members, even large sectors, of the working class, whose vanguard the

Bolsheviks claimed to be.

Since this is such a strong charge {and a charge typically raised by

opponents of socialism), it is worth citing some passages from Lenin’s

writings and speeches to substantiate it, The three 1 have chosen were

written or spoken in April and May of 1918, This was after the October

Revolution but before the onset of the Civil War (which was really to

get underway in June, 1918).

In this period, the new Soviet government, consisting of the Bolsheviks

and the Left Social Revolutionaries, was faced with fairly rapid

economic decline and [he onset of social and economic chaos. The

government had also recently signed the onerous Brest-Litovsk treaty

with the Central Powers, which had entailed the loss of a great deal of

Russian territory and industry. We say this both to give the context of

Lenin’s comments as well as to present them in the best possible light.

In ”Left-wing” Childishness and the Petty Bourgeois Mentality (May 5,

1918 Collected Works, Vol. 27, p, 344) Lenin wrote: “Another thing is

that the courts are not sufficiently firm, Instead of sentencing people

who take bribes to be shot, they sentence them to six months’

imprisonment.”

Here. Lenin is demanding that people who take bribes be shot.

The death penalty for taking bribes certainly appears very harsh to me,

especially since it is not ipso facto an act of active

counter-revolutionary behavior.

Even more important, it is worth recognising that at this point in the

Russian Revolution, bribe-taking was pandemic to Russian society. (The

normal practices of peacetime had been greatly extended by the World

War, the revolution and a devastating economic crisis.) To shoot all

those who accepted bribes would be to execute a hell of a lot of people,

not all of who were actively counterrevolutionary or even bourgeois.

Moreover, it is reasonable to assume that Lenin thought similar

punishment should be meted out to other “people who infringe the

measures passed by the Soviets” (quote from the same passage). Well, by

this time, the soviets had outlawed private trade. But with the

breakdown of the economy, and the little time since the seizure of

power, the state trade network was very new and extremely inefficient.

In fact, it hardly existed. In this situation, many ordinary workers and

peasants engaged in private trade just to survive. So we can see that

Lenin is advocating, however implicitly, shooting a very, very large

number of people.

Perhaps Lenin thought such “firm” measures would actually suppress

bribe-taking. If so, he was only deluding himself. In conditions of

extreme scarcity and chaos, people will do what they have to do to eat

and feed their families, even if they face the supreme penalty if

caught. They did so in Russia.

So, here we see an example of Lenin’s preference for brutal methods,

coupled with a belief in their effectiveness. Not only is his choice of

methods excessively brutal, it also entails coercion against workers and

peasants, not just a handful of oppressors. Even more frightening, such

measures have a tendency to create enemies of [hose who use them.

Thus in the above example, as I have indicated, most of those who look

bribes or engaged in private trade were not counterrevolutionaries. At

most, to use Bolshevik terminology, they were only “objectively”

counterrevolutionary.

But, I would argue, shooting people engaged in bribe-taking or private

trading is the surest way lo turn those not yet caught into “subjective”

counterrevolutionaries, And this is indeed what happened.

Beginning in the summer of 1918, the Bolsheviks “brought the revolution

to the countryside’* (as they called it), and began the forced

requisitioning of grain front the so-called middle and rich peasants.

This measure turned millions of peasants against the new Soviet regime,

led to a vast contraction of cultivated land and food production, and a

consequent famine, and resulted in a bloodbath in the countryside.

Of course, the Bolsheviks were not solely to blame for this. The White

armies were probably even more brutal than the Bolsheviks, But the

Bolsheviks’ policy of trying to suppress all private trade shared a

great deal of the responsibility for what happened. It also made it

virtually certain that the vast majority of peasants would be, and would

remain, deeply hostile to the Bolshevik regime.

(The Bolsheviks’ agrarian policy, as well as others pursued by the

Bolsheviks in the early years of the revolution, is discussed and

criticized by the basically pro-Soviet Russian dissident historian, Roy

Medvedev, in his recent book, The October Revolution.)

Another passage from Lenin’s writings and speeches in this period

illustrates the problem even more clearly.

In his speech in the Moscow Soviet of Workers’, Peasants’ and Red Army

Deputies, of April 23, 1918, Lenin said:

This country, which the course of history has advanced to the foremost

position in the arena of the world revolution, a country devastated and

bled while, is in an extremely grave situation and we shall be crushed

if we do not counter ruin, disorganisation and despair with the iron

dictatorship of the class conscious workers. We shall be merciless both

to our enemies and to all waverers and harmful elements in our midst who

dare to bring disorganisation into our difficult creative work of

building a new life for the working people. [Collected Works, Vol. 27,

p. 233.]

Here, two points are worth stressing. First, not only arc the Bolsheviks

to be “merciless” toward their enemies, they will also be so toward

“waverers” and “harmful elements in our midst.” “Waverers” and “harmful

elements” arc very broad words and, in the circumstances of the time,

probably encompassed a lot of people.

And Lenin is not only threatening (at least implicitly) many ordinary

workers and peasants with Bolshevik mercilessness (probably execution),

he is also threatening those elements within the Bolshevik Party who

disagree with the need for this kind of “mercilessness.” This is merely

the broad version of Lenin’s demand to shoot those caught taking bribes

and engaging in private trading.

Second, in this passage, Lenin advocates the “iron dictatorship of the

class conscious workers.” Here, in Lenin’s mind, Marx’s conception of

the dictatorship of the proletariat (a dictatorship of the entire, or

almost the entire, working class), has become the dictatorship of part

of the proletariat, the “class conscious” workers, who are, by Lenin’s

definition, the members of the Bolshevik Party.

And the task of these workers is to impose their “iron dictatorship” not

only on class enemies (capitalists, landlords, Tsarist officers, etc.),

but also on those workers who are not class conscious, as the Bolsheviks

define such consciousness. That is, on those workers who do not agree

with what they are for. That is, the rest of the working class.

Right here is the theoretical blueprint for what was to exist by the end

of the Civil War in early 1921. By that time, the Bolsheviks had imposed

their “iron dictatorship” on the rest of the working class, supposedly

in the interests of that class. But these workers did not agree about

who represented their true interests: in March, 1921, to show their

opposition to Bolshevik “mercilessness,” they paralyzed Petrograd, the

capital, with a general strike.

The next passage (a short one), I wish to cite poses Lenin’s attitude

toward the question of methods quite succinctly. It is also from

“Left-wing” Childishness and the Petty Bourgeois Mentality,

“...we must not hesitate to use barbarous methods in fighting

barbarism.” (P. 340.)

To me, this pretty much sums up the issue underlying all the questions

we have been discussing. It sums up all too much of what I have called

the Bolshevik “ethos.” And, it sums up what was, and I think could only

have been, the logical outcome of a revolution led by a party with that

“ethos.” For, it seems to me, if one sets out to use barbarous methods

to fight barbarism, the result can only be...barbarism.

The main point I have been trying to establish is that there were many

aspects of the style and culture of the Bolshevik Party that pointed in

the direction of stale capitalism. These were tendencies that implied

the establishment of a dictatorship of a self-proclaimed socialist elite

over the workers and peasants “in the interests of* those classes and

“in the name of” socialism and communism.

It is not that objective conditions—poverty, the destruction of war and

revolution, political isolation—did not play a part in the establishment

of such a dictatorship. They certainly did. But what the Bolsheviks

thought and did (and did very’ aggressively), greatly contributed, in

the context of those conditions, to that same outcome.

For example, if one effect of the objective conditions is to undermine

(he institutions of workers’ control over the economy and state, then

what the Bolsheviks did in the context of those conditions worked to

further those tendencies rather than to counter them.

Moreover, once the dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party had been

established, it is not clear to me that, even had there been successful

workers’ revolutions in Western Europe, the Bolsheviks would have

reestablished real proletarian democracy, including legalizing other

left tendencies. Nor is it obvious that, given their infatuation with

centralization and “scientific” planning, they would have tried to set

up real workers’ control of the factories and the economy as a whole. In

the past, 1 used to think so, Today, I am not so sure.

In sum, I believe that the Bolshevik ethos, and particularly the

mind-set of Lenin, its creator and major leader, was laced with

tendencies, altitudes and conceptions that pointed in the direction of

state capitalism. Even if they do not add up to state capitalism

entirely, they certainly helped lay the basis, and provided the

justification, for the direction Stalin took after Lenin’s death.

In conclusion, let me quote, once again, from Lenin’s writings from the

spring of 1918- (We have already cited a part of this passage.)

White the revolution in Germany is still slow in “coming forth,” our

task is to study the state capitalism of the Germans, to spare no

effort, in copying it and not shrink from adopting dictatorial methods

to hasten the copying of it. Our task is to hasten this copying even

more than Peter (Tsar Peter the Great—Ri) hastened the copying of

Western Culture by barbarian Russia, and we must not hesitate to use

barbarous methods in fighting barbarism.

With or without the objective conditions, this looks to me like a recipe

for state capitalism.

THIS installment of our series on Leninism will focus on The State and

Revolution. Written in the summer of 1917 during the Russian Revolution

itself, this is one of Lenin’s most important works.

In many ways, this installment is the most difficult for me to write.

The State and Revolution was one of the first, if not the first, of the

works of Lenin I ever read. This relatively small book had a profound

effect on a teenager coming of age in the early ’60s.

— FOUR — State and Revolution

While my family was radical (the word used then was “progressive”), The

State and Revolution convinced me to become a Leninist and to want to be

a professional revolutionary “when I grew up.” Here, it seemed to me,

was a revolutionary and democratic vision worth devoting my life to. t

read The State and Revolution at least once a year for many years

thereafter.

And in many ways, The State and Revolution is Lenin’s most libertarian

work. Here was Lenin breaking decisively with the reformist and statist

conceptions of the Second (Socialist) International, demanding a return

to the much more radical ideas put forward by Karl Marx in his writings

on the Paris Commune. Here was Lenin elaborating a notion of a

revolutionary society based on soviets (workers’ councils) and other

institutions of direct workers’ rule. Here was Lenin emphasizing that

the ultimate goal of proletarian revolution is the withering away of the

state.

For many years, The State and Revolution was the foundation stone on

which I elaborated my politics. It was what I pointed to in arguing

against liberal and reformist positions. It was what I used as the

starting point for fighting my own (and others’) illusions in the

so-called “socialist countries.” And it was what I kept coming back to

in an attempt to develop a revolutionary, democratic conception of

socialism that remained within the overall framework of Leninism (via

Trotskyism, for example),

It was also the one work of Lenin’s in which I had the most difficulty

discovering what I have been calling “state capitalist tendencies.” The

book seemed so revolutionary, so anti-state, that for the longest time I

could not see any foreshadowings of Stalinism/state capitalism in it. It

was probably this, as much as anything else, that prevented me from

recognizing the role that Lenin (and Leninism) had in creating Stalinism

and state capitalism. After all, if Lenin’s vision of 1917 was as

democratic and anti-state as it seemed, then it seemed logical to blame

what happened in Russia on “objective conditions” — and on Stalin. That

is, on anybody and anything but Lenin.

Yet, recognizing the state capitalist tendencies in The State and

Revolution is crucial to coming up with a realistic assessment of

Leninism, if Leninism is significantly statist, it ought to be apparent,

or at least discernible, in this book. If it is not, then perhaps

Leninism isn’t as statist as the anarchists, anti-authoritarians and

libertarians contend.

The often heard argument from many anarchists, libertarians, etc., that

Lenin stole the ideas in The State and Revolution from the anarchists

only muddies the waters, it accepts that the book is a truly libertarian

document and then avoids a serious analysis of how Lenin, the

arch-statist, could come up with it by claiming that he really didn’t.

A meaningful analysis would at least attempt to show the different

degrees of continuity and discontinuity between The State and Revolution

and Lenin’s other works. It would also analyze the circumstances that

would induce Lenin to write such a work and, most important, would

attempt to elucidate whatever slate capitalist tendencies are present in

the book, however modest or hidden they may be.

On its own terms, the argument that Lenin lifted much of The State and

Revolution from the anarchists seems implausible to me, I do not mean to

deny the possibility that Lenin might have been influenced by anarchist

ideas in this period (he certainly began to see the ulterior motives

behind the reformists’ attacks on anarchism). But I don’t think this

tells us much. Unfortunately, Lenin had little but contempt for

anarchism, the anarchist movement and anarchist thinking: he generally

debunked it as a form of petty bourgeois ideology, whatever he might

have thought of individual anarchist militants.

The genesis of The State and Revolution is more reasonably explained by

(wo factors:

The collapse of the Second {Socialist) International at the outset of

World War I caused Lenin to take a very critical look at what had been

considered “orthodox Marxism” at the time. In this rethinking, involving

a reading of some of the works of the philosophical forerunner of Marx,

G.W.F. Hegel, Lenin broke out of the mechanistic siage-ism of Social

Democracy.

He began to see Russia as a part of a world capitalist system that was

suffering a serious global crisis. This opened him up to the idea that

the Russian Revolution need not be limited to a bourgeois-democratic

stage until the victory of one or more socialist revolutions in Europe

and led him to think in terms of a worker-led revolution in Russia that

would be the first battle in an international socialist revolution.

Equally important, the form of this revolution in Russia, and of the

revolutionary government that would emerge from it, was suggested by the

course of the class struggle itself. By the time Lenin arrived in Russia

in early April 1917, the workers and soldiers had not only

(spontaneously) toppled the Tsar. They had also set up mass democratic

institutions (soviets, factory committees, etc.), and were, to a

considerable extent, running Russian society through them. Between his

theoretical reconsiderations of basic questions of Marxism and the

imposing reality of the achievements of the Russian workers, Lenin did

not need to borrow, or steal, from the anarchists, to come up with The

State and Revolution, In my opinion, then, The State and Revolution is

the organic result of the development of Lenin’s thinking. That it is as

libertarian as it is is a reflection of the libertarian impulse in

Marxism and the even greater libertarian impulse of masses of workers

attempting to carry out a social revolution.

Despite all this, however, there are state capitalist tendencies in The

State and Revolution. And those who want to evaluate Leninism from a

libertarian point of view ought to be able to reveal them and analyze

them.

One reason The Stare and Revolution appears to be so libertarian is that

it proclaims that the main goal of Marxists is the establishment of a

stateless and, of course, classless society. The goal of the socialist

revolution, Lenin insisted, was the establishment of communism, a

society without social classes and without a state of any kind. Nor was

this meant to be in the far distant future. Because of the world crisis

of imperialism, this goal was an immediate, practical one.

This may seem obviously Marxist to those who have read Marx and Engels.

But at the time, Lenin’s assertion was seen as quite radical because the

Socialist International had quietly shelved such ideas (reserved for May

Day speeches, at best) as part of the “utopian ” and unrealistic dreams

of Marx and Engels in their younger years. The actual goal of Social

Democracy was increasingly a democratic capitalist welfare stale. For

Lenin to resurrect and even to emphasize Marx and Engels’ radical and

apparently anti-statist vision (and to call attention to the fact that

this was expressed as “late” as 1871 in Marx’s writings on the Paris

Commune) was almost heretical.

Despite how anti-statist the call for a revolution to establish a

classless and stateless society may sound, a careful reading of The

State and Revolution shows that the book is not nearly as anti-state as

it seems. In fact, it is quite pro-state, but in a hidden sort of way.

The source of this paradox is the notion of the withering away of the

state. In Marxist theory, the state, after a successful socialist

revolution, is not abolished. It withers away: it disappears gradually.

This flows, supposedly, from the very nature of the form of government

established by a successful proletarian uprising. The proletariat rises

up, smashes the old bourgeois state, and builds a new state based on

workers’ councils and other democratic institutions of the working class

and other oppressed classes. The job of this state is primarily to

defeat counterrevolutionary attempts, to complete the destruction of the

bourgeois slate, to finish suppressing the capitalist class and other

oppressor classes, and to draw the masses of workers and other oppressed

people into the day-to-day management of society. To the degree these

tasks are accomplished, and relative scarcity, the material basis of

class society and the state, is overcome, there is no need for such a

state and it will gradually wither away.

This flows from the nature of the state itself. Under class societies,

such as ancient slave systems, feudalism, capitalism, etc., the state is

an instrument of a tiny minority to maintain its rule over the exploited

majority. Given the disparity in the sizes of the oppressor and

oppressed classes respectively, this task requires a large and elaborate

apparatus ultimately based on coercion and consisting of “bodies of

armed men, prisons, etc.”

The stale after a successful proletarian revolution, on the 01 her hand,

is not an instrument of a tiny minority over the vast majority, but the

reverse. It is a weapon of the vast majority to suppress the former

ruling and exploiting minority. Thus, as its tasks are completed, it no

longer has any purpose and gradually disappears.

While this seems to make sense, in fact it contains a number of

fallacies. In order to SCO them, it is worth considering what this

conception of the nature of the revolutionary stale and its eventual

withering away means in terms of the tasks facing revolutionaries. In

other words, how would revolutionaries holding to this theory of the

slate and Its eventual elimination think of what they should do during

and after a revolution?

The practical application of this theory, it seems to me, is that the

key job of revolutionaries after a successful proletarian revolution is

not to do away with the state, but to build a new one. Moreover, in

order to suppress the bourgeoisie and the other exploiters most

efficiently, this state should be as strong and alt-embracing as

possible. Finally, since this new “proletarian” state will “inevitably”

wither away once the exploiters and counterrevolutionaries are

suppressed and the workers are drawn into administering society, there

is no need to safeguard the workers, the revolution or the

revolutionaries themselves from “their own” state.

This is the crux of the paradox I mentioned above. The very

revolutionaries who claim that they are against the state, and for

eliminating the state, who say they are the only ones who can do away

with the slate, etc., see as their central task after a revolution to

build up a state that is more solid, more centralized and more

all-embracing than the old state.

This, it seems to me, is the key problem with The State and Revolution

and, in fact, the entire Marxist theory of the state. In this theory,

the key goal for one of them), the elimination of the state, supposedly

happens by itself; it is taken care of by the “historic process,” Human

beings don’t have to worry about it; what they have to worry about is

building up a new state.

But what if the historic process doesn’t work out as Marx and Engels and

Lenin thought it would? What if, instead of withering away, the

revolutionary slate sticks around? What if some individuals or groups of

individuals in powerful positions in that slate decide they don’t want

the state, and their power, to wither away?

The result, even under optimal conditions, is likely to be a

“revolutionary” society governed by a large, power fill and omnipresent

stale apparatus, which is justified by the absurd notion that the

purpose of such a state is to eliminate the state, We call this state

capitalism.

On one level, the underlying fallacy in the theory of the state put

forward in The State and Revolution can be described by the common

phrase “It looks good on paper, but...” In other words, it is wishful

thinking; it assumes the best.

On a somewhat deeper level, the problem is the belief that the theory

has captured the full reality of the state, its essence, purpose, and

historical direction. And since the theory declares that the “logic” of

this essence, purpose and historical direction is that the state will

eventually be eliminated, “negated,” “transcended” via a “dialectical”

(apparently contradictory) process, this is what will inevitably happen.

The fallacy, in other words, is that the theory has reduced historical

development to a (dialectical) logic that it declares to be inevitable,

even if this may not be so.

Those who detect a criticism of Hegelian thinking here are correct. In

my view, the Marxist theory of (he state and its eventual withering away

is essentially Hegelian. Although Man: and Engels felt that they had

broken decisively with their philosophical mentor, the Marxist world

view—from its conception of history, to Capital to its underlying

philosophical outlook—is fundamentally Hegelian, And even though Marx

and Engels described their viewpoint as a materialism, in contrast to

Hegel’s idealism, their world view remained, in my opinion, as

idealistic as Hegel’s, although unconsciously so.

The so-called “laws of history,” as expressed in “historical

materialism,” are a kind of logic, or thought. And it is this logic that

ultimately determines human history. This is idealism.

Marx and Engels, or maybe just Engels, occasionally described what they

had done as turning Hegel on his head, or standing an upside-down Hegel

on his feet. But Hegel turned upside down or right side up is still

Hegel.

Lenin’s (and Marx and Engels’) theory of the state, to repeal, is based

on the notion that the (dialectical) logic of the slate (and of history)

guarantees that (he slate under a revolutionary society will disappear.

But what if this dialectical logic is too neat? What if this view of the

state (and history, human society, etc.), ignores or defines our of

existence other aspects of the slate (and history, human society, etc.),

that are not reducible to logic {even dialectical logic)? If, however

brilliant it might be, the theory is not 100% correct {and no theory can

ever be 100% correct), the stage might just be set for Marxist

revolutionaries, fervently believing Marxist theory, and organized in an

extremely disciplined and well-organized party, to create a

“dictatorship of the proletariat” that might not wither away as it was

supposed to.

1 think this is, at least in part, what happened after the October

Revolution. The Bolsheviks sought to build up a strong state apparatus,

based on the soviets, trade unions and factory committees. Convinced

that the stronger, more efficient and more centralized this apparatus

was, the easier it would be to smash the old state and ruling classes,

defeat the counterrevolutionary attempts and draw the workers into

administering society, and convinced that once these tasks were

accomplished and other revolutions had succeeded in the West, the state

would wither away, the Bolsheviks gave no thought to the other,

supposedly higher goal of doing away with the state. Although they

proclaimed their goal to be the elimination of the state, their de facto

goal was to build a new, more efficient, more centralized one. They

succeeded.

The point is not that the workers and other oppressed people should not

build up a strong set of organizations during and after a revolution to

manage the economy and society, defend their gains and suppress the

exploiters, etc. But they also need to take steps to prevent a new state

from arising and oppressing them. That is, they need to figure out

concretely how they arc going to build a stateless society.

The Marxist theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as elaborated

in The State and Revolution, “arms” the revolutionary party with the

need to build up a new, revolutionary state, but it disarms the workers

about the need to fight against a new state forming.

At this point (if they haven’t already), someone will protest that

Lenin, citing Marx, talks about the dictatorship of the proletariat

being a state of the armed workers, the proletariat organized as the

ruling class, a state that is already beginning to wither away, a state

that is already in the process of becoming a non-state, etc.

Yes, someone else will say, and he also included detailed discussions of

various measures to maintain the workers’ control over their state, for

example, having the soviets combine legislative and executive powers,

having the workers’ delegates be subject to immediate recall, having all

mate officials receive no more than an average worker’s salary, etc.

This is certainly true, although how detailed these discussions are and

how effective the measures proposed would be can be disputed (leaving

aside the question of whether the Bolsheviks ever seriously tried to

implement them).

The problem, however, is not that Lenin gave no thought to how the

workers might control the new state apparatus, but that his very

conception of that apparatus was bourgeois. In the previous installment

of this series, I discussed Lenin’s infatuation with bourgeois

technology, centralization, technocratic planning, etc. Lenin seemed to

assume that capitalist industry, managerial techniques, etc., were

class-neutral, that is. that what made them bourgeois was that they were

controlled by the bourgeoisie and were used to further its interests.

He therefore assumed that after a revolution, the workers could lake

over this industry, technology, etc., more or less as is, and put it to

work for themselves. Ail that was necessary, he thought, was that the

workers needed to be able lo control it (although by 1915, in my

opinion, he seemed to think that control by the Bolshevik party was

sufficient to guarantee working class control; in 1922–23, he seems to

have changed his mind, but by that time it was too late).

It did not occur to him that capitalist industry, technology, managerial

techniques, etc., are bourgeois through and through, in their very

structure. The same mistake is apparent in The State and Revolution.

To be specific: as we know, Lenin was very impressed with the German

postal system and believed that its class content did not reside in its

form of organization, but in the fact that it was subordinated to a

landlord-Junker state. This idea appears in The State and Revolution. It

is worth citing a passage at some length:

A wise German Social-Democrat of the seventies of the last century

called the postal service an example of the socialist economic system.

This is very true. At the present the postal service is a business

organised on the lines of a state-capitalist monopoly. Imperialism is

gradually transforming all trusts into organisations of a similar type,

in which, standing over the “common” people, who are overworked and

Starved, one has the same bourgeois democracy. But the mechanism of

social management is here already to hand. Once we have overthrown the

Capitalists, crushed the resistance of these exploiters with the iron

hand of the armed workers, and smashed the bureaucratic machine of the

modem state, we shall have a splendidly-equipped mechanism. Freed from

the “parasite,” a mechanism which can very well be set going by the

united workers themselves, who will hire technicians, foremen and

accountants, and pay them all, as indeed all “state” officials in

general, workmen’s wages. Here is a concrete practical task which can

immediately be fulfilled in relation to all trusts, a task whose

fulfillment will rid the working people of exploitation To organise the

whole economy on the lines of the postal service... all under the

control and leadership of the armed proletariat—this is our immediate

aim. This is the state and this is the economic foundation we need.

(Collected Works, Vol. 25, pp. 426–7, emphasis in original.)

Reading this in light of everything that has happened in the state

capitalist countries (and refusing to give Lenin the benefit of the

doubt, as I used to do), I find this passage truly frightening. Lenin

wanted to organize all society along the lines of the German postal

system, replete with bourgeois technicians, foremen, etc., under the

illusion that this structure could be effectively controlled by the

workers. Even if all the measures Lenin proposed were implemented, this

apparatus would eventually wind up dominating the workers rather than

the other way around.

This is because the apparatus itself, the way it is organized, its

structure, its mode of operation, etc., is bourgeois (the German postal

system was probably partly feudal). And as it operates, it reproduces

bourgeois social relations within it; this is the very condition of its

operation. Even granting Lenin the best intentions, an entire society

built along the lines he is describing looks more like a bureaucratic

nightmare than a society moving toward eliminating the state.

Unfortunately, this was the model Lenin and the Bolsheviks used to

reorganize Russian society in the spring of 1918 and after. It explains

why they subordinated the factory committees to the trade unions, why

they instituted one-person management, why they built a standing army

with traditional discipline, officered by Tsarist generals, etc., etc.

You cannot blame this all on the economic crisis, the counterrevolution,

the revolt of the Left SRs, etc. While the specific measures may have

been determined by these objective conditions, the overall bent, the

overall orientation, is present in The State and Revolution, written

when Lenin was optimistic about the Russian Revolution and the

international revolution.

A few other passages from The State and Revolution will help to flesh

out Lenin’s vision of the revolutionary state/society.

“Until the higher phase of communism arrives, the socialists demand the

strictest control by society and by the state over the measure of labour

and the measure of consumption...” (Page 470, emphasis in original.)

According to Lenin, the “vital and burning qustion of present-day

politics” is: “the expropriation of the capitalists, the conversion of

at! citizens into workers and employees of one huge syndicate— the whole

state...” (Page 470.)

A few pages later Lenin predicts: “The whole of society will have become

a single office and a single factory....” (Page 474.)

To be sure, Lenin always emphasizes that the “control” must be exercised

“not by a slate of bureaucrats, but by a state of armed workers.(page

470), that the work of the “syndicate” be completely subordinated “to a

genuinely democratic stale, the state of the Soviets of Workers’ and

Soldiers’ Deputies” (page 470), etc., etc.

But the point made earlier about the German postal system applies here

as well, if the institutions of the revolutionary society, such as the

economy, are organized along what are essentially bourgeois lines (one

huge factory, one huge office, with foremen, accountants and bourgeois

technicians), then that society will remain bourgeois. Ft will be only a

matter of time before the bourgeois social relations, continually

reproduced and reinforced within the very heart of society, will

undermine the control of the “armed workers” and the “Soviets of

Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.”

At its best, the workers’ control that Lenin talks about is entirely

external to the apparatus. But if the workers continue to live and, even

more important, work in an environment, in a structure, that is

bourgeois, their own activity and their consciousness will revert to

being bourgeois. Although true social liberation cannot be achieved all

at once, it cannot be compartmentalized either.

If the workers arc to control the post-revolutionary society, they have

to control it at all levels, especially at the immediate levels of their

own lives. Lenin seems to believe the workers can continue to work under

what are essentially bourgeois conditions while somehow exercising

control over this bourgeois apparatus. This is, at best, wishful

thinking.

Although 1 think the theoretical point has been made, I cannot resist

the temptation to point out what kind of vision these passages suggest.

Although Lenin talks in democratic terms, his conception is very

hierarchical and very regimented. There is virtually no room for

individual difference and creativity, let alone people just goofing off-

With the whole of society organised as one big factory and one big

office, liberation is defined as being a disciplined member of an

industrial army.

This jibes with the infatuation with economic growth and modernization

that i discussed in our last installment as being central to the

Bolshevik ethos. It also points directly toward Stalin’s commitment to

industrialization “by any means necessary.” It is not yet, not

explicitly, as inhumane as Stalin’s, but it certainly gels the ball

rolling in that direction.

This brings me to the next slate capitalist aspect of The State and

Revolution that I wish to discuss here. This is the fact that although

Lenin talks about workers’ control, winning the battle for democracy,

the proletariat organized as the ruling class, uniting legislative and

executive functions in individual governing bodies, etc,, nowhere in the

work do we get an idea that the workers will discuss, decide and carry

out political decisions. If anything, Lenin seems to think that after

the revolution, the questions facing the workers will be overwhelmingly

administrative.

Accounting and control — that is mainly what is needed for the “smooth

working.’’ for the proper functioning, of the higher phase of communist

society, (Page 473.)

When the majority of people begin independently and everywhere to keep

such accounts and exercise such control over the capitalists {now

converted into employees) and over the intellectual gentry who preserve

their capitalist habits, this control will really become universal,

general and popular-... (Pages 473–4.)

From the moment all members of society, or at least the vast majority,

have learned to ad minister the state themselves, have taken this work

into their own hands, have organised control over the insignificant

capitalist minority, over the gentry who wish to preserve their

capitalist habits and over the workers who have been thoroughly

corrupted by capitalism—from this moment the need for government of any

kind begins to disappear altogether. (Page 474. emphasis in original)

Throughout this lengthy passage, and throughout The State and Revolution

as a whole, there is no mention of the need for the mass of workers to

make political decisions. The workers’ tasks, it seems, are

predominantly to suppress and/or “control” the Former capitalists, the

gentry, etc., and to “keep accounts.” These are basically administrative

tasks. Somehow, political decisions, political discussion and debate are

absent. Lenin seems to assume that once the dictatorship of the

proletariat is established, political discussion — political debate,

political conflict, politics period — is transcended, (Either that or

political decisions are reserved exclusively For the revolutionary

party, the truly class conscious workers.)

As with much of The State and Revolution, it is not obvious that Lenin’s

conception is undemocratic. It looks democratic: he talks of workers’

control, workers administrating the state, a state of the armed workers,

etc., etc., but the meat, the content—workers directly and immediately

running society, workers, not bourgeois specialists and political

leaders, making the political and economic decisions — is just not

there.

This helps to explain one of the outstanding features of The State and

Revolution, in this case an omission. There is no discussion of the

revolutionary party in this work, let alone of a multiparty system. 1

think this is very significant.

After all, Lenin spent most of his adult life building, or trying to

build, a revolutionary party. Building such a party was the central

strategic task of revolutionaries short of carrying out a successful

working class revolution. In fact, the existence of such a party was,

for Lenin, the necessary condition for such a revolution to succeed.

Moreover, it is the revolutionary party, we will remember, that is the

source and guarantor of socialist consciousness. Without the party,

Lenin wrote in What Is To Be Done?, the working class can only attain

trade unionist, reformist consciousness. For Lenin to omit a discussion

of the revolutionary party in as central a work as The State and

Revolution means something.

There are, among others, two plausible explanations for this. One, Lenin

felt that the revolutionary party would continue to exist and lead the

workers. Indeed, its authority would be undisputed, owing to the success

of the revolution, etc. Two, Lenin felt that the party would not be

needed and would dissolve.

I personally feel that the first explanation is the likely one. Given

Lenin’s entire conception of consciousness and leadership, I do not

think he could conceive of the dictatorship of the proletariat without

the “leading role” of the revolutionary party.

But on some level, it really doesn’t matter which explanation is more

plausible because they both imply the point made earlier—in Lenin’s

conception the mass of workers do not make political decisions, either

because they are reserved for the party (the workers’ delegates can

“discuss” and approve party decisions in the soviets), or because they

no longer need to be made.

It is tempting to belabor this point, to try to prove it rather than

just suggest it. But I don’t think it can be proven directly. Those who

fed that Lenin believed in true workers’ democracy, where the workers

discuss and carry out the political and economic decisions of society,

will read The State and Revolution in that light. After many readings of

the book, and much thought, I do not believe Lenin believed in what we

would call workers’ democracy. Direct workers’ control over the

factories and workers’ democracy are, to Lenin, stepping stones, part of

a transitional stage, toward a very abstract “higher democracy,” what is

in fact a very centralized, hierarchical, bureaucratic, regimented

“dictatorship of the proletariat.”

This point can perhaps be better made the other way around. Lenin docs

not seem to recognize that the socialist revolution must involve, at its

very core, a change in social relations, a change in how people relate

to each other. This change has to start right from the beginning; it

cannot be delayed until some indefinite point in the future, say, the

so-called “higher phase” of communism.

Under capitalism, people by and large relate to each other in a

competitive, alienated manner. Cooperation exists, of course, but it

tends to be subordinated to the competitive, hierarchical structure and

ethos of capitalism. Social ism is a society in winch cooperation —

people helping each other, trying to work together, trying to live

together — becomes predominant. People still compete, but this

competition is primarily constructive, it remains within the framework

of people cooperating.

During a revolution, the new. cooperative social relations have to begin

appearing among the workers and oppressed classes right away. The

workers have to learn how to relate to each other in this new way. They

learn this through reorganizing their work situations, and through

directly governing society at all levels, They have to learn how to

manage all of their affairs through cooperation. And they (we) can only

learn this by doing it directly.

This dimension of the socialist revolution seems to be totally lost on

Lenin. The socialist revolution, in his conception, is largely a change

in form. But much of the content of the old society—bourgeois

technology, bourgeois managerial techniques, hierarchical structures,

factory discipline and, I would suggest, bourgeois social relations —

remains.

In fact, the whole human dimension is lacking from The State and

Revolution. True, Lenin is writing theory and theory is abstract. But

somehow his theory about what ought to be one of the profoundest

transformations of human society, of human social relations, of the

human personality is disturbingly flat, non-human. At times, Lenin seems

to get excited, but his vision is so abstract that it ail rings hollow

to me, at least now.

I suspect that this flatness reflects a far deeper problem in his

thinking and in much of Marxist theory in general. Somehow, people,

concrete human beings, are not quite real. The real reality is the

social and historical categories, social classes, states, forces and

relations of production, modes of production.

These categories may or may not be useful in analyzing history and human

society. But they are not themselves that history, that society, that

human reality. Human beings (and human history) cannot be reduced to

purely logical categories. They are more complicated than that, This is

what makes them interesting, unique, lovable, hateable, etc. And it’s

what makes human beings and human societies ultimately unpredictable-

Without this unpredictability, without the special dimension of people

that cannot be reduced to categories, to abstractions, there is no bfe.

The fundamental fallacy of The State and Revolution, much of Marxism and

much of most of what passes for sociology and social theory, then, is

that it takes itself too seriously. It believes that the abstractions,

the categories, the theories are the real reality, and the concrete, the

non-reducible, is some kind of epiphenomenon, something derivative and

not quite real. These theories may or may not be true (meaning, roughly,

approximately true), but they are not the reality. Concrete people,

concrete history—life—is the reality,

Seeing Marxist theory as the underlying reality, Lenin, in The State and

Revolution and elsewhere, conceived of a vision of the revolutionary

society I hat constrains human beings and human life within what arc

ultimately dead abstractions. With a fundamental approach and mindset

like this, is it any wonder that the movement Lenin buiit and ted

created a society that squelches out life in the interest of dead

structures, categories and ideology?

By way of conclusion, I want to repeat a point I’ve made periodically. I

am not trying to prove that everything Lenin did or wrote is

undemocratic, state capitalist or totalitarian. Nor am I suggesting that

Lenin willfully, knowingly, was an undemocratic person (like, say, Adolf

Hitter, who knew exactly what he was doing). I think Lenin saw himself

as being very democratic, very committed to workers’ rule, etc. Yet, his

underlying conception and vision of the dictatorship of the proletariat,

or a worker-run society, were undemocratic.

A lot of the reason for this had to do with the fact that he was a

product of his lime and place; backward, undemocratic Russia of the late

19^(th) and early 20^(th) centuries, with a tiny, very young working

class surrounded by millions of illiterate peasants, etc. Part of the

reason had to do with Lenin’s own upbringing and personality.

But I think most of the reason for Lenin’s ultimately undemocratic

vision was his belief that Marxism was a science, which, to him, meant

that it was absolutely true. If the theory is True, and it says that a

workers’ revolution and a workers’ society will take such and such a

form and do such and such a thing, then there is no place for real

democracy. Since it is all inevitable, there is no room for choice or,

if there is choice, it is the prerogative of those who understand the

Science, who have access to the Truth, that is, the revolutionary party.

This will be the theme of the next installment.

— FIVE — Lenin’s Theory of Knowledge — Part I

IN this installment of our series on Leninism, I propose to take up

Lenin’s conception of human knowledge and truth.

This is a complicated subject which would be very difficult to write

about even if I were an expert. Since I am not, and since I am writing

to an audience made up of readers with different levels of philosophic

(and other) knowledge, and since 1 am writing a newspaper article, not a

hook, my task is not easy. I say this by way of an apology right at the

outset: 1 am sorry if my discussion is not as lucid as it might be.

However, I really have no choice but to make the attempt to explain

these matters since I believe they are the heart of the problem this

series is meant to Investigate.

And this is, to repeat, to what degree is the theory and practice of

Leninism responsible for the establishment of state capitalism in

Russia? Or, putting the question somewhat differently, what aspects of

the theory and practice of Leninism point to, or presage, state

capitalism?

Contrary to my usual procedure, I will slate my conclusions first,

I am convinced that Lenin and the Bolshevik Party as a whole

believed: 1) that there is an absolute truth (I mean by this that

reality is determined and predictable); 2) that absolute knowledge, that

is, perfect knowledge of that truth, is possible; 3) that such truth and

knowledge exist in respect to human society and history; 4) that Marxism

is the knowledge of this truth; and 5) that within Russia, Lenin and the

Bolsheviks were the only real Marxists.

I am also convinced that these propositions are the philosophical

foundation of state capitalism, that they, when combined with the

Marxist call to carry out its program through the seizure of state

power, point directly to the establishment of state capitalism. I do not

insist that a party holding to these or similar propositions wilt

inevitably create state capitalism, only that if it does seize stale

power, it is highly probable that it will.

If there is one and only one (political! truth, and if your party, by

virtue of its ideology and program, is the sole possessor of that truth,

then you are not going to think very highly of political debate,

political pluralism, and the right of other parties and organizations to

exist, organize themselves and openly propagate their views. You might

not always be against these things, but they wilt never be the top

priority.

Since you already have the truth, politically and otherwise, you don’t

need a dialogue/debate with other forces to obtain it. And if you have

seized power and things gel rough, political pluralism and debate will

seem like downright luxuries that can, and should, be done away with, if

“only temporarily,” Which, to a great degree, was done by the Bolsheviks

under Lenin’s leadership, not Stalin’s, in Russia.

! do not contend that Leninism and Marxism are the only world views that

hold to notions of absolute truth and knowledge. Probably most people in

the world—certainly in the West — believe in absolute truth and

knowledge, in the sense that there L? an absolute truth, and absolute

knowledge of that truth, at least in some domains, is possible.

I am also not arguing that a belief in absolute truth and knowledge

necessarily equals a totalitarian ideology. Albert Einstein, the author

of the theory of relativity, believed that the uni verse is

deterministic, (hat is, that there is an absolute truth in respect 10

the structure of the universe. He also believed that science is capable

of comprehending it, in other words, that an absolute knowledge of that

structure is possible. Yet, Albert Einstein was one of the least

totalitarian-minded people of lit is century.

I do suggest, however, that the belief in absolute truth and knowledge

is the kernel of a totalitarian ideology and that every world view or

ideology based on such a belief has a totalitarian potential.

The chief Western religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, are good

examples. They are al! based on a belief in both absolute truth and

absolute knowledge of this truth (not that they are always internally

consistent about this). And they all contain totalitarian

potentialities.

Look at Islam, not only in Iran, whose current rulers hold to a

particularly fundamentalist version of that religion, but elsewhere,

book at Judaism, not only right-wing fanatics, such as Meir Kahane, but

also mainstream Zionism. Look, too, at the fundamentalist Christian

groups in the U.S. which, taken as a whole, are very large, very rich

and very powerful and scare me to death: they want to impose their very

narrow and reactionary ideology on everybody in the country.

Not least, look at the Catholic Church. For a variety of reasons, the

totalitarian potential of Catholicism (which, as such, is neither

greater nor less than that of Protestantism, Islam or Judaism} is

particularly apparent. Catholicism has a dictator (the Pope, God’s

representative), a very defined and narrow dogma and regulations, from

which dissent is not allowed (Pope John Paul II reminded U.S. Catholics

of this in his recent tour), a huge political apparatus, including

courts and a secret police.

In the past, the Church also attempted to set up actual totalitarian

societies. In Western Europe during the Middle Ages, it came quite close

to doing so, at least as close as one could get given the limited

technology available. It owned between 1/2 and 1/4 of the land and

exploited thousands of serfs. It imposed a nearly complete ideological

(religious) monopoly on the entire society. Jews were sometimes

tolerated (under special restriction), but often massacred, as during

the Crusades, Pagan traditions were snuffed out or coopted. And the

Inquisition, in its various versions, investigated, exposed, tortured

and killed heretics.

In fact, the Church, under the aegis of the arch fanatical Jesuits (the

Society of Jesus), did build a totalitarian society in Paraguay, where

it ruled over and exploited large numbers of the indigenous people (in

the interests of their salvation, of course).

These examples suggest, at least to me, that the belief in absolute

truth and knowledge is the underlying core of totalitarian worldviews.

In and of itself, however, such a belief does not necessarily add up to

totalitarianism, in order for a world view to be such, it must also

believe that absolute truth and knowledge are possible in respect to

human society, that is, economics and politics, that it (the particular

world view} itself embodies the sole knowledge of that truth, and that

this world view, and an economic, political and social program

reflecting it, should be imposed on society.

Although 1 believe all these characteristics pertain to Leninism, I

would particularly like to focus on one, Lenin’s conception of truth and

knowledge.

Lenin, like most people of his day, believed in absolute truth and

knowledge, that is, that the world has a definite, determined structure,

and that precise, absolute knowledge of that truth is possible. He wrote

an entire book devoted to defending this proposition (although he hedged

his words), along with his interpretation of dialectical materialism,

which he considered to be the philosophy of Marxism.

The book is Materialism and Empirio-criticism, published in 1909, and it

is this work that I wish to discuss at some length.

Materialism and Empirio-criticism was written as a polemic against

Anatoly Bogdanov and Aleksandr Lunacharsky, two Bolsheviks who were

attracted to the ideas of Ernst Mach and Richard Avcnarius, Henri

Poincare and other scientists, mathematicians and philosophers who were

the precursors of a school of philosophy called logical positivism.

Bogdanov and Lunacharsky had been interested in the ideas of Ernst Mach

(the most influential of these thinkers) for some lime and in 1903

published a book that contained contributions from Mach and others.

Lenin went to London in that year, spent a lot of time studying the

literature and came out with Materialism and Empirio-criticism the

following year.

Although Lenin had expressed concern about Mach’s influence earlier In

the decade, his decision to write a book attacking him was motivated

primarily by internal Bolshevik factional politics. (When Bogdanov and

Lunacharsky agreed with Lenin—indeed, for a while they were his main

stalwarts—you can be sure he did not publicly attack them for

philosophical heresy. It was only when they disagreed with him that he

did so. What this means about Lenin’s methods I will leave to the

reader’s interpretation.)

The circumstances of the dispute were these. In the aftermath of the

Revolution of 1905, which was defeated, a great demoralization set in

among the working class and the revolutionary movement. The Bolsheviks

were not unaffected by this. Like the other groups, they lost their mass

base, were hit by mass defections and dwindled away almost to nothing.

The Bolsheviks’ underground apparatus almost ceased to exist.

During this period, Lenin sought to take advantage of whatever scraps of

legal activity the Bolsheviks could engage in. One of these was running

for and participating in the Duma, a semi-legislative body, elected in a

highly indirect and undemocratic manner, that Tsar Nicholas II had

conceded at the height of the revolution.

At first, Lenin opposed running in the elections for the Duma and

participating in its deliberations. The Mensheviks, who were still in

the same party, generally favored participation. Later, when it had

become dear that the revolution was over and a reactionary period had

sot in, Lenin changed his mind and wanted the Bolsheviks to participate

to gain whatever space for conducting revolutionary agitation this

allowed, no matter how limited.

Within the Bolshevik faction, Lenin was isolated, opposed by his former

allies, including Bogdanov and Lunacharsky. (There were a variety of

tendencies among the Bolsheviks on this issue. Some favored an

out-and-out boycott of the elections and the Duma itself. Some favored

participating in the elections, but then, after presenting some kind of

ultimatum, walking out. Later some wanted to recall the delegates that

had been elected. But the differences are not very significant, at least

not today.) Since Lenin fell strongly about the issue, the discussion

was heated.

In addition to their “boycottism,” Lunacharsky and Bogdanov, along with

others, including (he writer Maxim Gorky, were playing around with

creating a kind of proletarian religion, as a way of competing with the

established churches for the minds of the demoralised workers.

Lenin opposed this “God-building,” along with “boycottism.” Writing

Materialism and Empirio-criticism was thus a convenient way to discredit

Bogdanov and Lunacharsky. It was also a good way lo defend what he saw

as Marxist orthodoxy and thus firm up the faithful during a particularly

rough period.

Although Materialism and Empirio-criticism is directed against a number

of thinkers, I would like to focus on Ernst Mach (1838–1916), since he

was probably the most important of Lenin’s targets.

Mach was an Austrian scientist and philosopher, and the author of a

number of well-respected books on such topics as dynamics and optics.

Like most physical scientists of his day, Mach was particularly

concerned about a number of contemporary developments that violated the

strictures of the accepted physics of his era. In fact, these

developments were to lead to the collapse of the entire edifice of

classical physics (built up over a period of over three hundred years),

and a conceptual revolution in science, exemplified by the theories of

relativity and quantum mechanics.

Mach’s proposal to deal with the developing crisis was to radically

apply what has long been a fundamental postulate of scientific thinking

— economy of thought—e.g., a simple theory is better than a complex one;

if a particular idea is not essential to explain something, discard it;

the less speculation the better, etc. (The French mathematician and

scientist Laplace, when asked by Napoleon why he had not included God in

his theory of planetary motions, replied that he “had no need of that

hypothesis.”)

Mach proposed to take this dictum as far as possible, doing away with

all conceptions that were not capable of direct experimental

verification. He was, in fact, skeptical of all scientific laws, which

he considered at worst to be improvable metaphysical speculations, and,

at best, convenient devices for organizing data that the human mind was

too lazy to remember in any other way,

Mach was particularly critical of theoretical mechanical models, such as

the etherial continuums that were then used to explain the phenomena of

light, electricity and magnetism. Insofar as he accepted scientific

laws, these were mathematical/statistical models, such as the laws of

thermodynamics, which establish general relationships among observed

phenomena, without necessarily entailing a specific model of what

actually happens on the micro level.

Mach, for example, never accepted the atomic theory’ of matter, since he

couldn’t see atoms and their existence had not yet been experimentally

demonstrated. In this, he was to be proven dreadfully wrong.

However, Mach also rejected the idea of absolute space and time, a

fundamental tenet of classical (Newtonian) physics. The young Albert

Einstein was a follower of Mach and even though he eventually abandoned

Mach’s approach, Mach had a profound influence on the development of the

theory of relativity. (Ironically but consistently, Mach never accepted

that theory.)

Philosophically speaking, what Mach’s approach entailed was to establish

immediate sense experience, that is, what we sense, in the most

immediate and narrow terms, with our eyes, ears, senses of taste, smell

and touch (and, by extension, through experimental apparatuses), as the

only basis of real knowledge, the only reality that we are justified in

accepting or discussing. Since one can’t truly know anything beyond our

immediate sense data, it is futile, indeed self-indulgent, to try to

conceptualize it.

The idea, however, leads to, or implies, that there is no reality beyond

what our senses immediately perceive. This, in turn, implies that being

and perceiving are inextricably linked. Put another way, Mach’s approach

implies (hat nothing exists unless it is perceived, that there is no

objective reality separate and apart from a perceiving subject.

Now (his, in its essence, was the position of the Anglican Bishop,

George Berkeley, an 18^(th)-century cleric and philosopher, who based a

proof of the existence of God on it, (Nothing exists unless it is

perceived. Since there are clearly things that continue to exist when

human beings cease to look at them, this is the proof that there exists

an omnipresent perceiver—a mind that perceives everything, that is,

God.)

(It is worth noting, before we go on, that the idea that being and

perception are inexorably linked, that at least on the subatomic level

the act of perception determines to some degree what is being perceived

is—rightly or wrongly, philosophically-spiking—a fundamental conclusion

of the most widely accepted interpretation —the so-called “Copenhagen

interpretation”—of quantum mechanics, one of the chief pillars of 20ih

century physics,

(It is also worth noting that in contemporary theoretical physics,

mathematical models have replaced mechanical ones. This is particularly

true of atomic physics: Werner Heisenberg, a major figure in (he

development of quantum mechanics, wrote in 1945: “The atom of modem

physics can be symbolized only through a partial differential equation

in an abstract space of many dimensions. All its qualities are

inferential; no material properties can be directly attributed to it.

That is to say, any picture of the atom that our imagination is able to

invent is for that very reason defective,” [Quoted in A History of the

Sciences, by Stephen F, Mason, p, 502.]

(In short, whatever we may think of the philosophical implications of

Mach’s ideas, they have become far more influential in 20^(th) century

science than Lenin could have surmised.)

The implied logic of Mach’s ideas that I have sketched was, in fact, the

main target of Lenin’s attack on him and the other “Empirio-critics”

(the term was Avenarius’) in Materialism and Empirio-criticism. Mach’s

assertion that all (hat we can know is the immediate data of experience

(only the facts” are real), Lenin argued, leads directly to the

rejection of objective reality (a reality that exists independently of a

perceiving subject —a fundamental proposition of Marxism) and to the

philosophy of Berkeley and religion (what Lenin calls “fideism,” from

Latin for “faith”). If one gives one inch of ground to (he ideas of

Mach, Avenarius and the others, Lenin insists, one abandons dialectical

materialism in favor of one or another variety of idealism and bourgeois

philosophy.

I believe Lenin’s specific critique of Mach’s position is basically

valid. Yet, in attacking Mach, Lenin goes too far in the opposite

direction. Where Materialism’s scientific laws only a pragmatic,

militarian validity (i.e., they are convenient for organizing the facts

or data), Lenin sets up scientific laws as virtually absolute, as

directly reflecting (or corresponding to) objective reality. Despite

many caveats and obfuscations, in other words, Lenin argues for the

possibility of absolute knowledge.

A careful reading of one of the key passages of Materialism and

Empirio-criticism will show this, the following paragraph (from VI.

Lenin, Collected Works, Vol 14, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1968, p.

326) is a kind of summation, a brief statement of what Lenin is

advocating in Materialism and Empirio-criticism and elsewhere:

Materialism in general recognises objectively real being (matter) as

independent of the consciousness, sensation, experience, etc., of

humanity. Historical materialism recognises social being as independent

of the social consciousness of humanity. En both eases consciousness is

only the reflection of being, at best an approximately true (adequate,

perfectly exact) reflection of it. From this Marxist philosophy, which

is cast from a single piece of steel, you cannot eliminate one basic

premise, ore essential pan, without departing from objective truth,

without falling a prey to a bourgeois-reactionary falsehood.

To me, the most striking thing about [his passage is its dogmatism.

Immediately after writing that consciousness (and hence, knowledge) can

only “at best” approximate “being” (reality), Lenin pens what can

essentially be paraphrased as “and if you question one phrase of what I

have written here (that is, my interpretation of Marxism), you are

wrong, have departed from ‘objective truth’ and are promoting

‘bourgeois-reactionary falsehood.’” In other words, while

consciousness/knowledge in general may be only approximately true,

Marxism (rather, Lenin’s interpretation of it) is absolutely true. And

Materialism and Empirio-criticism as a whole is written to discourage or

prevent any questioning of Marxism in light of the developments in

physics that were to culminate in a profound revolution in scientific

though!. This, I argue, is the real message of the book. (In fact, there

is a lot wrong with Lenin’s paragraph, even from a Marxist framework,

but we will get to that later.)

Elsewhere, Lenin lets the cat out of the bag: “Human thought then by its

nature is capable of giving, and does give, absolute truth, which is

compounded of a sum-total of relative truths. Each step in the

development of science adds new grains to the sum of absolute truth, but

the limits of the truth of each scientific proposition are relative, row

expanding, now shrinking with the growth of knowledge.” (P. 135.) On the

next page, Lenin writes: “Front the standpoint of modern materialism,

i.e., Marxism, the limits of approximation of our knowledge to

objective, absolute truth are historically conditional, but the

existence of such truth is unconditional, and the fact that we are

approaching nearer to it is also unconditional,”

These passages are Lenin’s attempts to elucidate a passage he has just

cited from Frederick Engels’ Authority, Although our purpose here is not

to discuss Engels’ (or Marx’s) views of truth and knowledge, it is worth

citing the critical passage at some length. What follows are Engels’

words as quoted by Lenin (Materialism and Empirio-criticism, same

edition, pp. 133–134):

“Now we come to the question whether any, and if so which, products of

human knowledge ever can have sovereign validity and an unconditional

claim {Anspntch) to truth” (5^(th) German ed, p. 79). And Engels answers

the question thus:

“The sovereignty of thought is realised in the cries of extremely

unsovereignty-thinking human beings; the knowledge which has an

unconditional claim to the truth is realised in a series of relative

errors: neither the one nor the other (i.e., neither absolutely true

knowledge, nor sovereign thought) can be fully realised except through

an unending duration of human existence.

“Here once again we find the same contradiction as we found above,

between the character of human thought, necessarily conceived as

absolute, and its reality in individual human beings, all of whom think

only limitedly. This is a contradiction which can only be (solved in the

infinite progress, in what is—at least practically for us—an endless

succession of generations of mankind- In this sense human thought is

only as much sovereign as not sovereign, and its capacity for knowledge

just as much unlimited as limited. It is sovereign in its disposition

(Antage), its vocal ion, its possibilities and its historical ultimate

goal; it is not sovereign and it is limited in its individual

realisation and in reality at each particular moment.”

Without analyzing this passage in any depth, it is necessary to note

that Engels, while admitting the possibility of absolute, “sovereign”

knowledge, hedges his bets quite a bit. (In my opinion, he fudges the

question.) To say that absolute knowledge is possible through an

“unending duration of human existence” and/or the “endless succession of

generations of mankind,” or that “human thought is only as much

sovereign as not sovereign” is not making a very decisive case. And is

quite a bit different from saying that “Human thought then by its nature

is capable of giving, anti does give, absolute truth, which is

compounded of a sum-total of relative truths.”

Although Engels is pushed in the direction of saying that approaching

the truth “in the infinite progression” (that is, say, the way a

hyperbola approaches its asymptotes) eventually adds up to absolute

knowledge, he tries to hold himself back. Lenin, on the other hand, at

best gives Lip service to the idea that knowledge at any given time is

relative, and jumps over the “asymptotic gap” as if it had no relevance

whatever,

Engels at least had an excuse for believing that knowledge could be

compared to a smooth curve, that it increasingly approached absolute

truth. He was living in the last stage of an era that had seen the

sciences expand more or less continuously and smoothly for a few hundred

years. Until the latter part of his life, and certainly during his

formative period, scientific developments seemed to fit neatly into the

general framework that had reached a polished and elegant form at the

time of Isaac Newton (1642–1727), Of course absolute knowledge, as the

gradual addition of relative truths, seemed possible.

Lenin, living at the time of a scientific revolution that would overturn

the old framework, had no such excuse. And despite this, his views are

less tempered than Engels’.

Further on, Lenin is even more explicit. In discussing the role of

practice, and after a typical caveat to the effect that practice can

never “...either confirm or refute any human idea completely” (his

emphasis), Lenin writes: “If what our practice confirms is the sole,

ultimate and objective truth, then from this must follow the recognition

that the only path to this truth is the path of science, which holds the

materialist point of view” (p. 141).

And still further, denouncing Bogdanov’s willingness to recognize Marx’s

theory of the circulation of money as an objective truth only for “our

time,” and refusing to attribute to this theory a “superhistorically

objective truth,” Lenin tells the whole story (all emphasis is Lenin’s):

The correspondence of this theory lo practice cannot be altered by any

future circumstances, for the same simple reason that makes it an

eternal truth that Napoleon died on May 5, 1821. But inasmuch as the

criterion of practice, i.e.. the course of development of all capitalist

countries in the last few decades, proves only the objective truth of

Mara’s whole social and economic theory in general, and not merely one

or the other of its parts, formula!ions, etc., It is clear that to talk

here of the “dogmatism” of the Marxists is to make an unpardonable

concession to bourgeois economics. The sole conclusion to be drawn from

the opinion held by Marxists that Marx’s theory is an objective truth is

that by following the path of Marxian theory we shall draw closer and

closer to objective truth (without ever exhausting it); but by following

any other path we shall arrive at nothing but confusion and lies. (P.

143.)

This, I believe, should be enough Lo demonstrate that Lenin believed in

absolute truth (if the words themselves don’t convince you, the tone

ought to), not only in general, but also that Marxism is the truth, in

particular.

— SIX — Lenin’s Theory of Knowledge — Part II

IN our last installment or this series, I began to discuss the question

of absolute truth and knowledge and Lenin’s attitude toward it. In

particular, I mentioned that I feel that a belief in absolute knowledge

represents a “totalitarian kernel,” a potential for a totalitarian

ideology. And through a cursory sketch of Lenin’s book on the question

of knowledge, Materialism and Empirio-criticism, I showed that despite

some hedging Lenin did believe in absolute truth and the possibility of

absolute knowledge.

What I would like to do in this installment is to discuss Lenin’s theory

of knowledge, particularly its failure to recognize that the

mind/knowledge is active; sketch how this conception led him to

misunderstand, and in fact to oppose, the scientific revolution going on

at the time; and suggest how his belief in absolute knowledge {embodied,

at least as far as society and history are concerned, in Marxism) helped

pave the way for the establishment of state capitalism in Russia.

In Materialism and Empirio-criticism, Lenin puts forward a theory of

knowledge that, at least at that time, underlay his belief in absolute

truth and knowledge. This theory can be expressed in a few

propositions: 1) reality is nothing but matter in motion; 2) human

knowledge is a reflection of that reality and corresponds to it; 3) the

truth of any given thought, idea, theory, etc., is proven or disproven

through experiments that test predictions deduced from the theory, as

well as the general success of the theory in terms of developing

technology and furthering science.

Despite the apparent plausibility of this view (it is a kind of

common-sense viewpoint), it really can’t stand up to a serious

investigation of the issue.

In the first place, it is contradicted by other ideas about knowledge

and consciousness that Lenin himself held. Lenin, like most

Marxists, believed in the notion of “false consciousness.’’ This is a

consciousness (a view of the world, a set of values, etc.), held by

certain people in society that does not “correspond” to their class

position.

For example, to Marxists, the “true” consciousness of members of the

working class, true “proletarian consciousness,” is Marxism, or at least

some commitment to revolution and socialism. Yet, most workers are not

revolutionary socialists; they do not have “proletarian consciousness.”

Instead, they share the world views of other, non-proletarian classes,

such as the ruling class or sections of the middle class. The workers

have “false consciousness.”

This is not just the result of the bourgeois media, bourgeois education,

etc., although they certainly contribute. It also is more than the

effect of the “hegemony” (a kind of cultural leadership) of the ruling

class, in the sense described by the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci.

The workers’ “false consciousness” comes from the on-going reality of

their daily lives, that they are workers who work at such and such

workplaces, sell their labor-power for wages, etc., and enter into

certain relations with their co-workers, management, merchants,

representatives of the state and (more indirectly) other capitalists.

Their “false consciousness” flows out, is a part of, the web of

day-to-day social relations that they arc enmeshed in. Their

consciousness “reflects” these relations.

But this raises a bit of a problem. If “false consciousness” is a

reflection of (social) reality, how do we get knowledge, if it, too, is

a reflection of reality? Or, if knowledge is the result of the

reflection of reality in the mind, where does “false consciousness” come

from? Clearly, there is something missing, some “middle term,” in

Lenin’s theory of knowledge. Lenin has two poles, reality and knowledge,

one of which reflects the other. But the nature of that reflection must

be different between true knowledge on the one hand and false knowledge

on the other. Why and how this happens have to be explained.

in fact, the theory of knowledge that Lenin puts forward is considerably

less sophisticated than that of Karl Marx, whose theory Lenin thought he

was propounding. (Lenin’s conception is basically a throwback to the

French materialists—Diderot, d’Alembert, for example—of the 18^(th)

century.)

To Marx, reality (natural or social) and consciousness/know ledge are

not two polar terms with nothing between them (one merely re-fleeting

the other). He saw them as different aspects, two facets, of a social

process (“practice,” or “praxis” in Greek), in which humanity transforms

both itself and reality through work.

(Lenin talks about “practice” in Materialism and Empirio-criticism, but

he tends to reduce it to a narrow form and to ignore its fundamental

content for Marx, the social process through which humanity creates

itself.)

In Lenin’s presentation, reality is basically given, stolidly present;

human consciousness just reflects it. For all of his talk about

dialectical materialism, Lenin fails to see the “dialectic” where it can

most truly be said to exist—in the process of the reciprocal

transformation of humanity and nature through labor.

Marx, in contrast, realized that reality, natural as well as social, is

as changed by this process as human beings are. One aspect of this

change is obvious; society evolves, and as it does so the world/ nature

is transformed by the development of technology, the impact of human

society on nature (not always to the good, clearly), etc.

But there is another facet to this idea, one not so easily grasped. And

this is that nature, as it is present to human beings, as human beings

perceive and confront it, changes. The nature that primitive peoples

perceived, their image of it, is different from that of modern humanity.

Some of this change is immediately technical; the universe that

contemporary humanity perceives through modern instruments, including

radio telescopes, planetary probes, etc., is a lot different from the

universe primitive people could see with the naked eye.

But there is a social/cultural difference as well. The universe that was

populated and moved by specific gods and spirits is a different universe

from that conveyed by the idea that space is most accurately presented

as a non-Euclidean geometry’ and sub-atomic particles by a series of

partial differential equations.

It is not that the “ultimate nature” (whatever that might be) of the

universe has necessarily changed, only that nature, “reality,” is not

just given—presented in total and as it “really is”—to humanity, so that

the human mind simply reflects it. What Lenin didn’t understand (at

least when he wrote Materialism and Empirio-criticism) is that the human

mind (human consciousness, knowledge), taken individually and socially,

is active. It does not just passively reflect reality; it changes how

reality is presented to it, how it perceives reality.

We can clarify this some more by looking at the question a bit

differently, Lenin says that the mind reflects reality, but a look at

how an individual (or a group of individuals) perceives reality at any

given level suggests that this view is simplistic.

Even if we assume that the mind is like a camera, in that it records

without alteration the (visual) information it receives, we can easily

see that it is not purely passive. A camera has to be pointed in a

certain direction; and, with all but primitive cameras, it also has to

be focused (manually or automatically). In other words, we have to

choose to look at something. We don’t just open our eyes and take

everything in in 360 degrees, at all distances, etc. This choosing is

active. It is not purely passive, like a mirror.

In fact, this activity involves processes a lot more complicated than

aiming and setting a focal length. For example, the mind has to

interpret what it sees, to arrange the infinite amount of data that

enters it into patterns. A baby not only has to learn how to point

his/her eyes in a certain direction and to focus them, lie/she also has

to learn what the patterns of different colors and shapes mean, which of

those colors and shapes “belong together” (e.g., as a material object,

as a person, etc.).

Even after we have learned how to recognize patterns and shapes, there

always remains the question of relevance. At any given time and place,

we have to decide which of all the things we see are relevant to us. If

we are in a coffee shop and are sealed at a table, the styrofoam cup in

front of us is more important than the moving cars in the street

outside. But when we are crossing that street a bit later, we’d better

be paying more attention to the cars than to the styrofoam cup lying in

the gutter.

Just considering the question of one sense, that of sight, we can

recognize that a lot more is involved than the eye merely reflecting

reality. The visual function involves, requires, the selection and

interpretation of the data that impinges on the eye. This is an active

process, not a passive process of reflection.

In a recent discussion about his participation in a group of scientists

and others searching for fossils in East Africa, Stephen Jay Gould, the

Harvard paleontologist and science writer, expresses this point in a

somewhat different context. Explaining that while some searchers have a

sharp eye for fossil fragments and others can piece them together, he

only finds snails, Gould writes:

All field naturalists know and respect the phenomenon of “search

image”—the best proof that observation is an interaction of mind and

nature, not a fully objective and reproducible mapping of outside upon

inside, done in the same way by all careful and competent people- In

short, you see what you are trained to view—and observation of different

sorts of objects often requires a conscious shift of focus, not a total

and indiscriminate expansion in the hopes of seeing everything. The

world is too crowded with wonders for simultaneous perception of all; we

learn our fruitful selectivities. (Natural History, May, J9&7, p, 27.)

If the operation of a single sense is active, isn’t it obvious that

processes as complex as consciousness and knowledge entail activity?

Scientists do not just take in all the data that present themselves to

them. They have to choose what data are relevant to them. At the

broadest level, this involves choosing the very field any given

scientist will study and investigate, or the given problem within the

field he/she will investigate.

More specific still, as they seek to investigate a specific phenomenon,

scientists have to choose a way of approaching the investigation. to

decide What kinds of experiments they will carry out to collect what

kind of data* And even when these experiments have been carried out and

the data recorded, the collected data does not in and of itself suggest

the new concept or theory that will explain the phenomenon under

investigation.

At this point what is required Is an intuitive leap, an inspired guess,

that posits a new conception, a new way of looking at the problem, no

matter how far-fetched, Albert Einstein described the process this way:

For the creation of a theory, the mere collection of recorded phenomena

never suffices—there must always be added a free invention Of the human

mind that attacks the heart of the matter. (The Cosmic Code, by Heini R.

Pageis, p 141.)

Now. science is a social process; it involves many people communicating

with each other, over extended periods of time. As such, it is subject

to social and cultural influences. Scientists, like the rest of us, live

in the societies of their time and place. They have been, by and large,

members of specific social classes, etc. And they live in, and to a

great extent are created by, specific cultures. All these influences

affect scientific knowledge.

Thus, it is not an accident that the physics (hat emerged from the

so-called Copernican Revolution envisaged the universe largely in

mechanical terms, as, say. a huge clock that was created and set going

by a Creator who then sat back to watch the clock work in a beautiful

simplicity and regularity. This particular physics was developed during

the early stages of the development of capitalism, itself based on the

creation and utilization of mechanical devices* The society, (he

technology and the science were part of a single, very complex social

process, each creating the means for the development of the others.

The conceptions of the sciences in that period did not just reflect

nature, they actively conceptualized nature in a certain way. Such

conceptualizations vary greatly in different times. Today, the dominant

conceptions of physics are no longer mechanical.

Specifically, by the latter part of the 19^(th) century, mechanistic

explanations of phenomena were no longer sufficient to answer the

problems that physicists confronted. A new revolution in physics took

place that to roughly changed the way scientists look at the universe.

As a result, today the predominant conceptions of physics are

mathematical, Space (Einstein called it space-time) is conceived as a

(non-Euclidean) geometry; the structure of the atom as a set of complex

mathematical equations.

The main point I am trying to establish here is that the mind, human

consciousness, taken individually and collectively, is active, not

passive. It chooses to look at /investigate certain things and not

others. It sees some things as more important, more relevant than

others, it interprets what it sees; indued, the very act of seeing

entails this interpreting. As a result, all knowledge has a degree of

subjectivity that cannot be eliminated.

This is why different people see reality differently (sec a “different

reality”). Older people, on balance, see reality differently from young

ones. Artists tend to see reality differently from scientists. People in

die ruling class see reality differently from working class people.

People whose goal in life is to make money see reality differently from

people who live for a cause. Not least, people from different countries

and cultures sec reality differently from each other.

Scientists, unlike artists, have a mutually agreed-upon method of

determining which theory, which interpretation, is right. This is

through experimentation and other forms of testing theory. As a result,

science often appears to embody or lo approach absolute knowledge (at

least until the next scientific revolution occurs). Nevertheless, even

in science, the subjective element of knowledge, I he effect of the fact

that the mind is active, is not eliminated.

If the mind/human consciousness is active in the sense 1 have discussed,

what does it mean to say, as Lenin does, that knowledge “reflects”

reality? Not a whole lot. Obviously, there is some connection, some

“correspondence” between reality and knowledge (otherwise, the human

race would probably be extinct). But it is certainly not mere

reflection. Lenin could put forward his view that knowledge was a simple

reflection of reality because he did not understand that the human mind,

individually and collectively, as consciousness in general and

specifically as science, is active.

Lenin’s one-sided and mechanical conception of human

consciousness/knowledge (and his dogmatism) is what made him miss the

significance of the scientific developments that were going on at the

very time he was writing. Yes, he does have a chapter (Chapter Five) on

the “recent revolution in natural science” in Materialism and

Empirio-criticism. But Lenin denies that the revolutionary developments

in the natural sciences of his time in fact represent any real challenge

to traditional scientific conceptions.

Instead, he accuses those scientists grappling with Lite meaning and

implications of these new developments of failing, when they

philosophize, to abide by what Lenin considered to be the de facto

dialectical materialism they practice when they function as scientists.

In other words, Lenin charges them with a kind of failure of nerve.

Lenin basically believed that the philosophical answers to the problems

the physicists and other scientists were struggling with had already

been given (by dialectical materialism), and that if the scientists

stopped being tempted by idealism and “fideism” everything would work

out fine. But it was precisely the traditional conceptions of science,

including Lenin’s (and Frederick Engels’) notion of dialectical

materialism, that could no longer provide satisfactory answers to the

questions being posed by the latest scientific discoveries. As a result,

Lenin winds up denying the very existence of the revolution in the

natural sciences that he claims to be discussing.

That Lenin did not understand what was actually happening in physics al

Lite time is revealed by his attempts lo discuss them concretely.

Consider the following two sentences:

Natural science was seeking, both in 1872 and 1906, is now seeking, and

is discovering—or least it is groping its way towards—the atom of

electricity, the electron, in interdimensional space. Science docs not

doubt that the substance it is investigating exists in three-dimensional

space and, hence, that the particles of that substance, although they be

so small that we cannot see them, must also “necessarily’’ exist in this

three-dimensional space. (Materialism and Empirio-criticism, pp,

180–181.)

Leaving aside the question of “substance,” Lenin was as wrong as he

could be regarding the question of three-dimensional space, Lenin was

writing after Albert Einstein had published his paper on the Special

Theory of Relativity (1905) which posited the local-ness and variability

of time, thus establishing it as a kind of fourth dimension. (Locations

in space—what Einstein called space-time—are defined mathematically by

four numbers, three representing the traditional dimensions plus a

fourth representing time.) Today, cosmologists, those who investigate

and speculate about the ultimate structure of the universe, are thinking

in terms of theories that posit that the universe has many more than

four dimensions. How about, say, 10?

(Is it perhaps unfair to berate Lenin for not being totally up-to-date

about the developments of physics of the time, particularly when

Einstein’s theory’ was relatively little known, unaccepted and in no way

confirmed? I don’t think so. Who asked Lenin to write a book about

problems of philosophy in light of the scientific revolution then

underway? Lenin hangs himself because he raised the issue.)

Not accidentally, the person Lenin is polemicizing against with the

sentences quoted is none other than Ernst Mach, whom Einstein credited

as being one of his major early influences. Although 1 cannot do it

justice in so limited a space, it is worth looking at the issue more

closely. This is because the question Mach was raising was to become a

fundamental concern of 20^(th) century physics.

In this section of his book, Lenin is discussing Mach’s rather hesitant

suggestion that physicists should question, and perhaps abandon, the

Newtonian conception of absolute space and time:

In modern physics, he [Mach] says, Newton’s idea of absolute time and

space prevails (pp. 442–444), of time and space as such. This idea seems

“to us” senseless, Mach continues..,. But in practice, he claims, this

view was harmless (S. 442) and therefore for a long time escaped

criticism. (Materialism and Empirio-criticism, p. 179.)

To Lenin, this suggestion is “harmful” and must be rejected. Why?

Because “Mach’s idealist view of space and time... opens the door for

fideism and... seduces Mach himself into drawing reactionary

conclusions,” (Materialism and Empirio-criticism, p. 179.) Just what are

these reactionary conclusions?

For instance, in 1872 Mach wrote that “one does not have to conceive of

the chemical elements in a space of three dimensions.” (Erhattung dec

Arbeit, S. 19, repeated or S. 55.) To do so would be “to impose an

unnecessary restriction upon ourselves. There is no more necessity to

think of what is mere thought (das bloss Gcdachle) spatially, that is to

say, in relations to the visible and tangible, than there is to think of

it in a definite pitch.” (27) “The reason why a satisfactory theory of

electricity has not yet been established is perhaps because we have

invariably wanted to explain electrical phenomena in terms of molecular

processes in a three dimensional space” (20). (Materialism and

Empirio-criticism, p. 180.)

To Lenin this is an absurdity.

The argument from the standpoint of the straightforward and un-muddled

Machism which Mach openly advocated in 1872 is quite indisputable: if

molecules, atoms, in a word, chemical elements, cannot be perceived,

they are “mere thought” (das bloss Gedachic). If so, and if space and

time have no objective reality. It is clear that it is not essential to

think of atoms spatially. Let physics and chemistry “restrict

themselves” to a three-dimensional space in which mailer moves; for the

explanation of electricity, however, we may seek its elements in a space

which is not three-dimensional! (Materialism and Empirio-criticism, p.

130.)

In fact, wherever he was coming from philosophically, Mach’s suggestion

(remember he writes “perhaps”) that scientists not restrict themselves

to the traditional Newtonian conception of space and time was profoundly

prophetic. Today, it is a fundamental tenet of physics. The theory of

relativity, with its positing of time as a fourth dimension, was, as we

have said, directly influenced by Mach. In quantum dynamics and its

later embodiments (quantum electrodynamics, quantum chromodynamics)

atoms and their constituent parts cannot be conceived spatially, time is

reversible and traditional logic does not apply.

What would Lenin say?

The point is not that Maeh’s philosophy was right and that Lenin’s was

wrong. The point is:

Lenin was not cognizant of the true nature of the “revolution in

natural science” that he was writing about and which so concerned the

people he was politicizing against.

Even more important, Lenin allowed his philosophical preconceptions to

prevent him from even considering, let alone accepting, an idea (hat

would become a fundamental tenet of this century’s physics. Because, in

Lenin’s view, Mach’s view “opens the door for fideism” and “seduces Mach

himself into drawing reactionary conclusions,” Lenin condemns

out-of-hand Mach’s suggestion that scientists “not restrict themselves”

to the traditional view of space and time and refuses even to consider

that reality might have other than three dimensions.

(I think this is the germ of the attempt to use ideology to tell

scientists what to do and how to think that would run rampant in Russia

under Joseph Stalin (with resultant punishment, including execution, for

those scientists who would not buckle under). If a given theory,

proposition or assumption is not consistent with (someone’s conception

of) dialectical materialism and/or if it leads to “reactionary

conclusions,” it is a priori wrong and cannot even be considered. In the

name of science, ideology is raised above science and presumes to

dictate to it.)

(Whether Lenin himself ever tried to tell scientists how to think and

what to do is not relevant. What is, is that when a party with Lenin’s

conception of philosophy and science comes to power, it is highly likely

that someone in that party will, sooner or later, try to tell scientists

what to do and how to think.)

But Lenin’s comment about reality only having three dimensions involves

more than ignorance and (can I say it?) arrogance. It implies a certain

conception of the relation between knowledge and truth, theory and

reality.

This is a tendency toward what I like to call the “hypostatization of

theory,” By this huge word (I can barely pronounce it) I mean a tendency

to believe that theory, concepts, are more real, have more substance,

than the reality they purport to explain.

This is the opposite of the way Ernst Mach tended to lean, Mach thought

of scientific concepts and theories as “mere thought,” as kinds of

conveniences, ways for the human mind to organize sensations, or data;

the question of whether they were true or not, in the traditional sense

of the term, was irrelevant. The only meaningful question to ask is—Docs

a given theory organize the data conveniently? Or, negatively, does any

of the data fall outside the confines of the theory? This is a kind of

denigration of theory, a denial of the reality or truth of theory.

In contrast to this, Lenin tends to ascribe to theory a greater truth or

substantiality than it can reasonably claim. Once a given theory or

concept has been proven “true,” in Lenin’s view, it has more truth to it

than the reality it is meant to describe.

This can be seen in his view that reality is, and can only be three

dimensional. That reality could have more than three dimensions seems

totally bizarre lo him. This is because Lenin doesn’t realize that

dimensionality is a concept—specifically, a geometry—an invention of the

human mind.

(“Ordinary” reality, that is, reality that is generally present to human

beings, may be almost perfectly definable/explainable in terms of three

dimensions. But that doesn’t mean that reality has, and can only have,

three dimensions. By the same token, the universe can today best be

described by the theory of relativity that describes space (spaec-time)

in terms of four dimensions, but that doesn’t mean reality has, and can

only have, four dimensions.)

Lenin takes the concept (in this case, three dimensionality) and makes

it the reality; This tendency to “hvpostatize theory” can be also seen

in his comment, cited in our last installment, about Marx’s theory’ of

money having an eternal truth comparable to the fact that Napoleon died

on May 5, 1821, (We shall leave aside a discussion of the question of

how well this latter “fact” stands up in terms of the theory of

relativity: what was a specific date for the Earth and its vicinity was

many different dates for other parts of the universe. In some parts of

the universe, Napoleon has not yet died. In others, he has not yet been

born.)

Now, Marx’s theory of money is a brilliant theory (as is his analysis of

capitalism, in my opinion), but to claim it has an eternal truth, isn’t

that going a bit too far? Even Marx, arrogant as he was, only claimed a

kind of “epochal” truth for his theory, that is, that it is only valid

for a specific historical epoch.

But, assuming that Lenin basically meant that Marx’s theory of money is

absolutely true, I don’t think this can be seriously maintained today,

For one thing, it has a philosophical content (about the nature of human

beings, that the existence or money reflects their alienation from each

other and this true nature), which can neither be proved nor disproved.

Far more important, I don’t think the existence of absolute truth and

knowledge (which, of course, is what saying Marx’s theory of money has

eternal truth means) can be reasonably asserted.

This is suggested by one of the main achievements of physics in this

century, the theory of quantum mechanics, which has been very successful

in explaining and predicting atomic and sub-atomic phenomena. One of the

tenets of this theory’ is that it is impossible simultaneously to

exactly measure the velocity and position of a sub-atomic particle, for

example, an electron (or a photon of electromagnetic radiation). The

more accurately one measures its position, the greater variability of

values for its velocity one gets. If one measured an electron’s velocity

exactly its position could not be measured at all.

This is not, according to the theory, simply something that results from

the limitations of our minds and our ability to measure. There is a

certain randomness, a certain indeterminism in the nature of atomic and

sub atomic phenomena. The more one attempts lo gain certainty about one

aspect, the less certain others become.

Another aspect of the theory is that sub-atomic particles have a

two-sided character. Some or their behavior can be explained by assuming

they are particulate, that they are simply particles. Other aspects of

their behavior arc explainable by assuming that they have wave

characteristics. Moreover, these distinct behaviors/characteristics are

not combinable. They either exhibit one form of behavior/characteristic

or the other; they never exhibit both at the same time. Which

characteristic is exhibited depends on the experiment one carries out to

look for it.

One explanation for this confusing situation, the one that seems to be

the most accepted by modern physicists (insofar as they conceptualize

these things: one can simply use the equations—we’re talking high level

math here—without worrying about what they “mean”), is that the wave

characteristics represent an indication of the probability of finding a

given particle there at any given time.

The main point is that at the atomic and sub-atomic level, there is a

degree of randomness or uncertainly about what goes or at any given

lime. At least at this level, reality is not determined. There is no

absolute truth; reality is not precisely this and not that. It can be

both and/or neither.

And where there is no absolute truth, in the sense that reality is not

precisely determined, there can be no absolute knowledge. Ail one can

have is approximate knowledge. One cannot know for certain what will

happen, all one can have is varying degrees of probability that

something will happen. This probability may be very high, but it is

always a question of probability, not certainly.

Now, while this to me implies that all of natural reality exhibits

probabilistic behavior and that knowledge of “macro” phenomena can also

only approximate (in many cases, the variability is too small to be of

practical impact), many physicists appear to compartmentalize reality.

On the sub-atomic level, there is indeterminism and probabilities. On

the supra-atomic level, there is determinism and absolute

predictability. Yet, in the past few years.

physics has become more concerned with the investigation of random

processes, processes that are inherently random and unpredictable,

“chaotic.” I suspect that over the next few years more and more

processes previously perceived as being determined and predictable will

wind up in the random or at least somewhat indescribable category.

What I am really trying to get at here is that between the undetermined,

probabilistic nature of reality and the initiations of our ability to

measure and our minds, all knowledge of the natural world is, at best,

approximate, probabilistic. There is no absolute knowledge. One gets

greater or lesser probabilities. In some cases, the probability is so

high as to be almost certain, but it is still not certain.

At the risk or simplifying, perhaps ii is better to say that reality is

always more complicated than any given theory. Reality entails change,

novelty. Theory, perhaps because of the nature of the human mind,

entails uniformity, or to use a term very much in vogue in physics these

days, symmetry. Now, there is clearly symmetry in nature, otherwise

scientific theories would no! be as successful as they have been.

But what if (as I suspect) reality is not totally symmetrical? What if

it is not uniform? What if at some basic level it is asymmetrical? Then,

there will always be some aspect of reality that will not be incorporate

into theories which, by their nature imply uniformity, symmetry, even if

it is a “broken” one. If so, this means that at some point any given

theory, no mailer how successful in predicting phenomena, no matter how

perfect it may appear, will eventually come across some kind of

phenomenon which it has not explained or predicted and cannot do so. Or,

to put it the other way around, sooner or later scientists will discover

a phenomenon which is unexplainable by, and incompatible with, current

theory.

(If this is so. Lenin’s hypostatization of theory is in fact a form of

that very idealism that Lenin hated so much. Theory is an idea, a

concept. To believe that scientific theories represent the real reality,

truer than the concrete reality we see, hear, and touch, is to believe

that ultimate reality is ideal, not material.

(Lenin says unite rial reality consists of ” matter in motion,” But the

motions of this matter are governed by the “laws of motion” discovered

by science. In other words, the structure of this mailer, and the

structures that are comprised of mailer, are determined by those “laws

of motion.” But these laws of motion are a kind of logic. To Lenin,

then, the real reality, the defining structure of reality, is the logic

defined by these “laws of motion.” This is a form of objective idealism.

Unbeknownst to himself, Lenin was an idealist.)

Now, if on the level of natural reality, all knowledge is approximate,

probabilistic, are we to seriously think that absolute knowledge is

possible when it comes to social reality, to history, economics,

politics, etc.—in short, lo people? I don’t think so. In fact, I think

the very idea is absurd.

It is precisely the development of the human mind/human consciousness,

which so greatly multiplies the complexity of motivation (including

doing things out of spite, out of sheer perversity, just for the hell of

it, etc.), that makes people so unpredictable. As a result, absolute

knowledge of human beings and human society is out of the question.

But Lenin did believe such a knowledge is possible, indeed, that it

existed...in the form of Marxism.

From this Marxist philosophy, which is cast from a single piece of

steel, you cannot eliminate one basic premise, one essential part,

without departing from objective truth, without falling prey to a

bourgeois-reactionarv falsehood. (Materialism and Empirio-criticism,

Collected Works* Vol. 13, p. 326.)

... the criterion of practice, i.e., the course of development of all

capitalist countries in the last few decades, proves only the objective

truth of Marx’s whole social and economic theory in general, and not

merely one or the other of its parts, formulations, etc (P. 143)

And this, as 1 wrote in our last issue, is the philosophical root of

state capitalism. If a party which believes that its ideology is the

absolute truth (and every other ideology is a “bourgeois reactionary

falsehood”) comes to power in an armed revolution, it will not put too

much of a priority on maintaining the democratic rights of other

political parties.

More than this, if the rule of that party is threatened, it will not set

too great a priority on maintaining the democratic rights of the class

that it claims to represent especially if or when members of that class

start to behave in a way they arc not “supposed to.” After all, it is

that party that represents the “true consciousness” of the working

class. Thus, those workers who support other parties of organizations

will be “under the influence of non-proletarian ideologies.”

And their political rights will have to be repressed in order to defend

the “rule of the working class.”

And if the entire working class ceases to support that party, the party

will politically disfranchise it in the name of the “historic interests

of the working class.” In other words, the ideal, abstract working class

of Marxist theory will be elevated above the concrete workers and will

become an instrument in the workers’ re-enslavement. This, in a

nutshell, is what 1 believe happened in Russia.

Postscript. During World War I, Lenin read Hegel, particularly his

Logic. While this study was to have a significant impact on Lenin’s

thought, it is not likely to have lessened his belief in the possibility

of absolute knowledge. If anything, it probably strengthened it, Hegel’s

philosophy is centered around the idea that not only is absolute

knowledge possible, but that Hegel’s system is that absolute knowledge.

Conclusion

BY now, I suspect that my general assessment of Leninism is pretty

clear. While I believe that Leninism is not entirely, 100%

authoritarian, that is, that there are some truly liberatory and

democratic impulses, I believe these impulses are far outweighed by

those that point toward and imply state capitalism. Moreover, these

latter are so strong that they distort the democratic impulses

themselves, rather than merely overshadowing them. For example, the

advocacy of a classless and stateless society in The State and

Revolution is turned into its opposite by Lenin’s conception of how to

achieve it, e.g., through braiding a strong centralized state modeled

after the German postal system.

Even though most of the series focused on the state capitalist elements

in Leninism, it is probably worth summarizing my views or them, i

believe that of the various tendencies within Leninism that point toward

state capitalism, the most import ant are three:

First is (he fact that although Leninism advocates (he establishment of

a stateless society, ii not only proposes to use the state to achieve

this goal, it sees the use of the state as the main way to accomplish

this. Not least, although this state is said to be a proletarian state,

a dictatorship of the proletariat, it is to be structured, with

relatively minor exceptions, along hierarchical and bureaucratic. that

is, capitalistic, principles. Given this, is it any wonder that the

outcome of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 was not classless, stateless

societies, but monstrous, class divided, stale-dominated, social

systems?

The second state capitalist tendency within Leninism that 1 believe to

be decisive is i|s advocacy of coercive, ruthless methods. While some

kind of armed force/coercion is inevitable in almost any revolution,

Lenin almost revels in it: the need to be ‘ ‘ruthless toward our

enemies,” “not to shrink from the most ruthless measures,” lo “shoot and

shoot and shoot some more.” Since morality lies within, is immanent in,

history, that is, morality finds its fruition in the outcome of history

(as Marx, following Hegel, argues), there is no need to act morally,

there is no morality, in the sphere of politics. But outside of

Marxian/Hegelian (or any other comparable) metaphysics, how can moral

neutralism lead to a moral society? It can’t and hasn’t.

The third fundamental state capitalist tendency in Leninism, and tying

alt three together, is Lenin’s belief in determinism and absolute

knowledge. Physical and social/historical reality is absolutely

determined, Marxism represents true knowledge of this reality (it ever

increasingly approaches this reality), the Bolshevik faction/ party

holds the only correct interpretation of Marxism —these are fundamental

tenets of Bolshevik thinking. And they point directly toward the

establishment of a dictatorship of the party over the proletariat in the

name of the proletariat itself. If the Bolsheviks alone understand

Marxism, then only they have true proletarian socialist consciousness;

they are the spiritual representatives of the proletariat. When the

proletariat disagrees with the Bolshevik Party, it has come under the

influence of non-proletarian classes; it no longer is the true

proletariat. With this idea firmly engraved in their minds, the

Bolsheviks’ suppression of all opposition parties and the outlawing of

opposition factions even within the Bolshevik Party was almost

inevitable.

This last factor looms even larger when it is realized that this

attitude, this total belief that they and only they represent the

proletariat — history, morality and truth — was fundamental to the

mentality of the Bolsheviks. It created a psychological and moral

culture—a ruthless, party-oriented fanaticism—that engulfed everything

and drained of all content even the formally democratic aspects of

Bolshevik theory. It was from this culture that a man like Stalin

emerged, and it is because of this culture that the Bolshevik Party was

not able to stop him. While Stalin is of the past, the possibility of

new Stalins remains because the intellectual/moral culture of Leninism

remains what it has always been.

These three tendencies (along with the others discussed in previous

articles), explain what I believe to be the fundamental problem with the

strategy and tactics the Bolsheviks pursued after the October

Revolution. This was a failure to maintain, a failure even to try to

maintain, what I call the united front character of the Russian

Revolution.

The Russian Revolution, including the February Revolution and the one in

October, had a united front character. By this I mean that like ail

popular revolutions, it was the outcome of more or less distinct

movements of different classes, groups and political organizations that

joined forces to overthrow an oppressive regime and social order. The

main classes were the workers and the peasants. Many different

nationalities, e.g., Ukrainians, While Russians, Finns, Georgians, etc.,

etc., fought for freedom from Great Russian rule. Various socialist

organizations were involved.

While this was obviously true of the February Revolution, it was also

true of the October “Bolshevik” Revolution, While workers and soldiers

{mostly peasants in uniform) carried out the revolution in the cities,

the peasants, intensifying an uprising that had begun during the summer,

carried out the insurrection in the countryside, running out the

landlords, burning their estates and seizing the land. {The importance

of this part of the struggle is not always recognized.)

The revolution also entailed the continuation of the revolt of Live

oppressed nationalities. And the organized political forces that led the

revolution, insofar as it was led at all, consisted of not only the

Bolshevik Party, but the left wing of the Social Revolutionary Party

(the “Left SR’s”), and various other left socialist and anarchist

organizations.

Although it is not clear whether the revolutionary forces could have

held out, given the revolution’s isolation, the poverty of the country,

etc.. the key to their survival, it seems to me now, lay in the

maintenance of the revolution’s united front character, that is, its

character of being a kind of coalition of different classes,

nationalities, and organizations. This would have meant working out

certain rules for political functioning in the soviets, workers’

councils, and other mass organizations. Most important, it would have

required a commitment on (lie part of the major political parties,

particularly the Bolsheviks, not to try to squeeze out or suppress the

other organizations.

Unfortunately, the Bolsheviks did not pursue such a policy. They didn’t

even try lo pursue it. From virtually the very beginning, the Bolsheviks

worked to concentrate as much political power in their hands as

possible. Although they maintained the formal united front with the Left

SR’s for seven or eight months, ii seems to me that they expected this

alliance lo fall apart at some point and made little effort to keep it

together.

The first major dispute between the Bolsheviks and the Left SR’s was

over the signing of a peace treaty with the Germans and Austrians in [he

late winter of 1918. In the political debates within the Bolshevik Party

over signing a treaty (the party almost split over the issue), little or

no consideration was given, by Lenin or anyone else, over what the

impact would be on the Left SR’s, who opposed signing a treaty. In fact,

in Lenin’s speeches and writings on the question, he virtually assumes

that the Left SR’s are irrelevant and that it is only a matter of time

before the alliance breaks down.

The Left SR’s were pretty sectarian themselves, however, and since the

whole question of whether to sign the treaty is problematical, how the

Bolsheviks behaved on this issue doesn’t prove a great deal. But a lot

more can be said about the way the Bolsheviks related to the peasants in

the late spring and early summer of 1918.

As we noted above, the October Revolution was the outcome of a dual

struggle, carried out by the workers (about three million}, on the one

hand, and the peasants (many millions), on the other. The Bolsheviks

tried to cement this alliance right after the October insurrection by

decreeing that the land belonged to the peasants. (They really had no

choice. The peasants had seized the land themselves and the Bolsheviks

had almost no organization or base of support in the countryside.)

It seems to me that the only potential guarantee for the revolutionary

regime to survive was to maintain the alliance between the workers and

the peasants. But, beginning in June of 1918, the Bolsheviks, under the

guise of “bringing the revolution to the countryside,” launched a

broadside attack on the peasants. In the belief that the kulaks (the

better-off peasants, wealthy enough to hire other peasants as laborers),

were hoarding grain from the cities threatened with starvation, the

Bolsheviks led armed detachments of workers out to the villages to seize

supposedly hoarded grain by force. The Bolsheviks also believed that

there was a substantial layer of poor peasants (peasants who did not

have enough land and who, as a result had to hire themselves out as

laborers to the kulaks) who would support the Bolshevik policy. But in

fact, after the land seizures of late 1917, almost all the peasants were

so-called middle peasants (peasants who had enough land lo maintain

themselves and their families, but who were not wealthy enough to hire

outside help). There were virtually no kulaks or poor peasants,

The Bolsheviks’ policy, as ii turned out, was not to “bring the class

straggle to the countryside,” but an outright assault on the vast

majority of peasants and a severing of the alliance between the workers

in the cities and the peasants in the countryside, It was this tactic

that finally broke the Bolsheviks’ alliance with the Left SR’s and gave

the counterrevolutionary forces (at that point virtually defeated) a maw

base of support.

The result was a bloody civil war that lasted over two and a half years,

virtually destroyed the Russian economy, and devastated the countryside.

When the Bolsheviks finally won (the peasants preferred them, who at

least let them keep the land, to the White counterrevolutionaries who,

when they conquered a territory, took it away), they were hated by

almost everybody.

It has sometimes been argued that the Bolsheviks had no choice but to

seize the grain because the people in the cities were starving and had

nothing to sell to the peasants in exchange for the grain. But the

answer to this is that in 1921, after the civil war, after the country

was laid waste, when the cities had even less to offer the peasants in

exchange for the grain, the Bolsheviks, at Lenin’s urging, adopted the

New Economic Policy (NEB) that allowed the peasants the right to trade

grain freely, after they had paid a “tax in kind” to the state. Had this

policy been pursued in 1918, much if not most of the destruction of the

civil war would have been avoided! The counterrevolutionary forces would

have been without a substantial base of support.

In my view, the Bolsheviks’ course was not just an error. It followed

logically out of the Bolsheviks’ basic outlook and politics,

particularly the state capitalist tendencies mentioned above. The

Bolsheviks’ main concern after the October Revolution was not to

maintain the united front character of the revolution. Their main

interest was to consolidate as much political power in their bands as

possible and to hold onto it by any means necessary, whether or not such

means undermined the popular democratic character of the revolution

itself.

Since, in their view, the working class is the only consistently

revolutionary class, since only the Bolsheviks, with the only true

interpretation of Marxism, really represent the working class, since the

chief political task is the seizure and maintenance of state power, and

since brutal methods are not only allowed but preferred. the Bolsheviks,

after the October Revolution, subordinated every other concern to one—to

maintain their hold over the state.

I used to believe that the main reason the Bolsheviks did what they did

was the result of external factors, particularly the poverty of the

country, the fact that there were no successful workers’ revolutions in

the more economically developed countries, etc. I now believe that had

there been such revolutions, the outcome, at least in Russia, would not

have been much different than it was. The country would not have been

destroyed and perhaps Bolshevik rule would have beer more benign. But

Russia would still have been ruled by the Bolsheviks and the social

system that would have been established would be state capitalism, not a

libertarian socialism. This is because the fundamental, underlying

politics of the Bolsheviks, particularly the focus on using the state

and their belief that they possessed absolute knowledge of history,

society and politics, were state capitalist.

It is one thing to analyze and criticize Leninism, however, it is

another to come up with a new set of political ideas, one that avoids

the regressive tendencies of the past. This new task that the

Revolutionary Socialist League faces is made a bit feasible if we

recognise one fundamental characteristic of the history and evolution of

our organ bat ion. This is the fact that while our politics have

evolved, the underlying set of values that our politics have been meant

to represent have remained the same, or to be more accurate, have

evolved at a far slower pace. To put it perhaps a bit simplisticaily, I

still believe, and I hope the RSL still believes, that world capitalism

is both an unjust and dangerous system that needs to be, and can only

be, eliminated by an international revolution carried out by the vast

majority of working and oppressed people. The goal of this revolution is

to set up a democratic and egalitarian social system, a society governed

directly and democratically by the members of the formerly oppressed

classes, that has eliminated the extremes of wealth characteristic of

previous social systems and in which the state and other authoritarian

institutions have been eliminated.

Up until two years or so ago, I believed that Lenin’s interpretation,

theory and practice, of Marxism represented an embodiment of this ideal

that was both loyal to the ideal and also represented a practical means

of achieving it, I did not see Leninism as perfect, but given the

alternatives, as I understood them, it seemed to offer the best

foundation upon which to elaborate a consistent set of politics.

Such an elaboration is what I think the RSL has tried to do over the

last 15 years. In short, we sought to develop an interpretation of

Leninism (we never accepted anyone else’s) that both represented our

fundamental ideals and yet stayed within the formal bounds of Leninism.

I don’t think this was all wrong, totally inconsistent or ridiculous. It

is easy to look back after you’ve been through some experiences and say

that what we used to believe was silly. But that type of thinking

ignores the very process of learning that has enabled one to transcend

the earlier ideas.

Given where we were coming from (in the sense of coming out of the

student movement of the 1960s), and the fact that there was no

significant organized libertarian trend (either revolutionary democratic

socialist or anarchist/anti-authoritarian), our political orientation

and evolution make a lot of sense. And our politics were, I still

believe, the best around. Perhaps if we had been political geniuses we

would have been able lo come up with a totally new set of politics that

went way beyond the political material that we had to work with. But

virtually no set of ideas evolves this way; even the greatest of

intellectual achievements is synthesized out of previous currents.

With the benefit of hindsight, 1 think out main theoretical error was to

misread Lenin in a revolutionary democratic direction. We tended to

overemphasize those elements in Lenin’s outlook and practice (which do

exist) that point in a democratic direction and underplay or explain

away the authoritarian elements.

For example, we gave greater weight to The State and Revolution than it

actually had for the Bolsheviks themselves. We also tended to overlook

or downplay those aspects of that work that are authoritarian.

White this was, I now think, a misinterpretation of Leninism, it was not

totally without merit, methodologically speaking. Again, given where we

were coming from and what the apparent alternatives were, to try to

“bend” the framework of our formal politics to accommodate an

increasingly consistent libertarian instinct is quite logical, even

prudent. Eventually, however, one must resolve contradictions that have

become ever more glaring. One must make some “large” decisions. This is

how I think we should look at our political evolution.

If the RSLs history is seen in this light, 1 think certain things

follow: One, the way to proceed is not to throw everything up for grabs

and try to develop a set of politics totally from scratch.

There are a lot of things we have long believed and which I still

believe to this day.

As I mentioned above in a different form, I don’t think capitalism is a

fair or very viable system. I don’t think it can be reformed. I think

humanity needs and ought to try to establish a truly democratic,

cooperative and egalitarian social system.

If we sit down and think through the implications and ramifications of

these few sentences, 1 think we’ll soon realize how much of our previous

politics we in fact retain. I would certainly describe them differently

than we have in the past and place ourselves differently in terms of

historical political currents. Hut if we look for it, I think we will

see a great deal of continuity in our political thinking and evolution.

I, for one. am not ready to become a Christian socialist or a pacifist,

even though 1 believe we have things to learn from and should be willing

to work with people in these currents.

The second point I think we should keep in mind as we redefine ourselves

is that we should resist moving to the right. Right now the political

climate in the United States and internationally is conservative,

although that is beginning to change.

(One of the reasons for this conservatism is that previous

rationalizations were based on ideologies, such as the various forms of

Leninism, that were in fact authoritarian and hence ultimately

conservative. The rationalizations thus laid the basis for their own

demise.)

In such a period, a political current like ours, especially when it

seeks to redefine itself, comes under great but often invisible pressure

to move right. This rightward pressure can affect a political tendency

in a number of ways. Since in periods like the one we are in. radical

and revolutionary ideas in general are in small favor, there is a lot of

pressure to discard maximal, “utopian” visions and to advocate piecemeal

reforms. Since so few people today believe that a global classless and

democratic society is possible, it sometimes seems easier to agree with

people on the need for some “realistic” changes. In short, in limes such

as these there is a lot of pressure to become reformist, to lessen one’s

revolutionary opposition to capitalism (as well as state capitalism). I

think we should resist this.

Given the crisis of AIDS, there Is also a strong pull to become more

conservative on sexual/gender questions and related issues that are

generally perceived as “civil libertarian.”

Lastly, given the quiescence of the working class, especially the

poorest layers of especially oppressed groups (Latins, Blacks, women,

gays, the physically afflicted), it is easy to get influenced by the

(usually self-centered) fads of the middle class (New Age idiocy, an

obsession with personal health, the assault on smokers). Whatever

individuals think or however they want to live their lives, we should

resist having such concerns shift our focus away from the basic source

of social ills, capitalism, and the struggle to overthrow it.

The chief way to resist the pressure toward the right, in my opinion, is

to move the organization to the left. This is also consistent with our

revaluation of Leninism. In my view, the problem with Leninism is not

that it is too radical, too revolutionary, It’s that it is not radical

or revolutionary enough. It makes too many compromises with capitalism,

embodies too many capitalist ways of thinking and acting lo be a truly

revolutionary force.

For example, although it claims to want to abolish the state in the long

run, it seeks to build it up and strengthen it in the short. It claims

to want to build a society that is democratic and cooperative, but

emphasizes methods that are authoritarian and coercive.

Most important, while it claims to wish to establish a truly free

society, it believes that its ideology, its interpretation of Marxism,

represents the sole correct interpretation of history (and everything

else), thus rejecting the ultimate foundation of freedom, the right lo

think and believe differently—intellectual and spiritual freedom, I

think the way to proceed in redefining ourselves politically is

three-fold. First, we should elaborate a vision of freedom, to develop

our conception of what a truly democratic, cooperative and egalitarian

society might look like, (including alternative solutions to various

problems).

In fact, we have done this throughout our history (e.g., our

achievements in the area of gender and sexual liberation), although we

have not always been conscious of what this has meant. More recently, we

have more consciously developed our vision of a libertarian society. We

should continue to develop our ideas in this area and to publicize them

in various ways.

This elaboration of a vision of a free society is quite definitely

anti-Marxist, In opposition to the so-called Utopian Socialists, Marx

and Engels refused to elaborate a vision of the future society. This was

primarily because, in their view, the future society would emerge out of

the class struggle: that society, to use philosophical jargon, is

immanent in history. This view was closely linked to Marx and Engels’

belief that history is determined and that the establishment Of

socialism is “historically necessary,” in the sense of being inevitable.

If it is, why bother to elaborate a vision?

Today, I no longer believe this. 1 do not believe history is determined

and even if it is, I don’t believe we can know what it is that will

happen, lit other words, 1 don’t believe I here is absolute knowledge.

Moreover, if history were determined and socialism inevitable. the

result would not be freedom, because inevitability, historical

necessity, does not result in freedom but enslavement to the

historically necessary. A free society can only be possible if there is

the possibility of choice, of humanity choosing to be free rather than

enslaved or annihilated.

The result of all this, it seems to me, is that socialists who believe

in a libertarian socialism, must believe in freedom, must believe that

there is choice ill history, that history is not determined or

“necessary,” Socialism can only happen if the majority of humanity

decide to want such a society and consciously and democratically set out

to build it. The job of socialists^ therefore, ts to try to convince

workers and other oppressed people that they should fight to establish a

libertarian socialism. Essential to this is to develop a vision of such

a society that shows, as concretely as possible, how such a society

could be run, and how various problems bequeathed lo us by capitalism

might be solved.

The second part of redefining ourselves is to think through our

strategy, tactics, organizational principles and methods and modify them

so that they are consistent with our vision, in my opinion, the main

change that this involves vis-a-vis our former conception is in the

tactic of the united front. To Leninists, the united front, along with

the corresponding tactic of critical support, is meant to win over the

base of a rival political organization and to discredit and destroy the

rival political leadership. In other words, it’s a policy of trying to

stab some people in the back, in some cases, e.g., reformist

bureaucrats, this is warranted. But the Bolsheviks believed that only

they represented the true interests of the workers and therefore arty

rival organization, no matter how revolutionary, was ultimately an agent

of the bourgeoisie.

Today, since we no longer believe in absolute truth and that we, by

ourselves, have access to it, we should see the united front as a way to

work together with other organizations and individuals, to engage in a

dialogue with them, and to seek to learn from them. Perhaps we will team