robbo203 wrote: It was thus

January 27, 2012 at 9:30 pm #87652

Anonymous

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robbo203 wrote:

It was thus for pragmatic rather than ideological reasons that Lenin favoured this model.

Doesn’t it really come down to the same thing in the end; faced with the circumstances in which Lenin and Bolsheviks found themselves in 1917 wasn’t it inevitable that the pragmatic circumstances would give rise to the ideological reasons?

robbo203 wrote:

What is to be Done (1902) does contain that notorious statement that has often been seized upon as evidence of Lenin’s intrinsic elitism: “We have said that there could not have been Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without” Hal Draper, in his classic paper The Myth of Lenin’s “Concept of The Party” or What They Did to What Is To Be Done? (1990), asks rhetorically whether it was really the case that Lenin was saying that here that ” the workers cannot come to socialist ideas of themselves, that only bourgeois intellectuals are the carriers of socialist ideas” to which he gives the following answer:”Not exactly. The fact is that Lenin had just read this theory in the most prestigious theoretical organ of Marxism of the whole international socialist movement, the Neue Zeit. It had been put forward in an important article by the leading Marxist authority of the International, Karl Kautsky. And this was why and how it got into WITBD” (http://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1990/myth/myth.htm#section1)There are also direct quotes from Lenin that cast doubt on whether he stood straightforwardly for a kind of centralised conspiratorial Blanquist type organisation as opposed to a broad mass democratic open party. For instance, in his letter in late 1916 to P.Keivsky he asserts that “socialism can be implemented only through the dictatorship of the proletariat, which combines violence against the bourgeoisie, i.e., the minority of the population, with full development of democracy, i.e., the genuinely equal and genuinely universal participation of the entire mass of the population in all state affairs and in all the complex problems of abolishing capitalism” (Proletarskaya Revolutsi Nos. 7 (90), 1929). Similar sentiments can be found in his more well known work The State and Revolution written in 1917.

In What Is To Be Done? (1902) Lenin said: “the history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own efforts, is able to develop only trade union consciousness”. Lenin argued that socialist consciousness had to be brought to the working class by professional revolutionaries, drawn from the petty bourgeoisie, and organised as a vanguard party.John Reed, a sympathetic American journalist, whose famous account of the Bolshevik coup, Ten Days That Shook The World, was commended in a foreword by Lenin, quotes Lenin in a speech he made to the Congress of Peasants’ Soviets on 27 November, 1917:“If Socialism can only be realized when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see Socialism for at least five hundred years…The Socialist political party – this is the vanguard of the working class; it must not allow itself to be halted by the lack of education of the mass average, but it must lead the masses, using the Soviets as organs of revolutionary initiative…” (Reed’s emphasis and omissions, Modern Library edition, 1960, p.15).But in 1879 Marx and Engels issued a circular in which they declared:”When the International was formed we expressly formulated the battle cry: The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves. We cannot, therefore, co-operate with people who openly state that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must be freed from above by philanthropic big bourgeois and petty bourgeois.”Nor is this an academic point, since the history of Leninism in power shows that allowing elites to rule ‘on behalf of’ the working class is always a disaster. Working class self-emancipation necessarily precludes the role of political leadership.In State and Revolution (1917) Lenin said that his “prime task is to re-establish what Marx really taught on the subject of the state”. Lenin argued that socialism is a transitional society between capitalism and full communism, in which “there still remains the need for a state… For the state to wither away completely, complete communism is necessary”. Furthermore, Lenin claimed that according to Marx work and wages would be guided by the ‘socialist principle’ (sometimes this is reformulated as: “to each according to his work”.) Marx and Engels used no such ‘principle’; they made no such distinction between socialism and communism. Lenin in fact did not re-establish Marx’s position but substantially distorted it to suit the situation in which the Bolsheviks found themselves. When Stalin announced the doctrine of ‘Socialism in One Country’ (i.e. State Capitalism in Russia) he was drawing on an idea implicit in Lenin’s writings.In State and Revolution, Lenin gave special emphasis to the concept of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. This phrase was sometimes used by Marx and Engels and meant working class conquest of power, which (unlike Lenin) they did not confuse with a socialist society. Engels had cited the Paris Commune of 1871 as an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat, though Marx in his writings on this subject did not mention this as an example, since for him it meant conquest of state power, which the Commune was not. Nevertheless, the Commune impressed itself upon Marx and Engels for its ultra-democratic features – non-hierarchical, the use of revocable delegates, etc. Lenin, on the other hand, tended to identify democracy with a state ruled by a vanguard party. When the Bolsheviks actually gained power they centralised political power more and more in the hands of the Communist Party.For Lenin the dictatorship of the proletariat was “the very essence of Marx’s teaching” (The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, 1918).As head of the new government Lenin was preoccupied with the chaos produced by an external war with Germany and an internal civil war. His response was to re-emphasise “democratic centralism” in which the “dictatorship of the proletariat” came under the increasingly totalitarian control of the vanguard party. However, since the number of people in any country who wanted socialism was very small (Russia especially), the Bolsheviks had no choice but to develop some form of capitalism. With his concepts of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and the leading role of the vanguard party, and a transitional society of ‘socialism’, Lenin distorted Marxism and thereby severely damaged the development of a socialist movement. Indeed, Leninism continues to pose a real obstacle to the achievement of socialism.