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Understanding of Karl Marx

Sidney Hook

Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx

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Chapter VII: Lenin: The Return to Marx and Forward

Even before Sorel had elaborated his syndicalist philosophy, a counter-tendency to the official Social-Democratic reformism had made itself felt from another quarter. In Germany this tendency was represented by Rosa Luxemburg, in Russia by Ulianov-Lenin. It was free from anti-intellectual demagogy and yet quite sensitive to every manifestation of revolutionary sentiment among the masses. Its interpretation of Marx differed as much from Sorel’s as it did from Bernstein’s. It reproached the syndicalists for overlooking the fact that every class struggle is a political struggle, for their refusal to make revolutionary use of parliamentary activity, and for their fetishism of violence. It criticised even more severely the supine parliamentarianism of the socialist parties, their naive conception that every parliamentary debate was a class struggle, and their fetishism of non-violence.

As early as 1901 Lenin had taken the field against that variety of economism in Russia – ostensibly Marxian – which declared that the daily economic struggle must be left to produce simultaneously its own political activity and political leadership. As ‘tail-enders’ [1] they held that to attribute to a political ideology any directive power upon mass movements was inconsistent with the theory of historical materialism. The political consciousness of a country can be no riper than its economic development. Arguing against this underestimation of revolutionary intelligence, Lenin writes:

They fail to understand that an ideologist is worthy of that name only when he marches ahead of the spontaneous movement, points out the real road, and when he is able ahead of all others to solve all the theoretical, political and tactical questions which the ‘material elements’ of the movement spontaneously encounter... It is necessary to be critical of it [the movement], to point out its dangers and defects, and aspire to elevate spontaneity to consciousness. To say that ideologists cannot divert the movement created by the interaction of environment and elements from its path is to ignore the elementary truth that consciousness participates in this interaction and creation. [2]

In a similar vein, but not so clearly by far, after the experiences of the Russian Revolution of 1905 Rosa Luxemburg wrote in her Massenstreik, Partei und Gewerkschaften:

... the task of the Social-Democracy consists not only in the technical preparation and guidance of these strikes but, above all, in the political guidance of the entire movement. The Social-Democracy is the most enlightened, the most class-conscious vanguard of the proletariat. It cannot and must not wait with folded hands fatalistically for the appearance of the ‘revolutionary situation’ – wait until that spontaneous people’s movement may descend from heaven. On the contrary, in this case, as in all others, it must keep ahead of the development of things and seek to accelerate this development. [3]

The consciousness to which Lenin and Luxemburg appealed was not mystic intuition but scientific knowledge. But scientific knowledge was not merely a disinterested report of objective tendencies in the economic world but a critical appreciation of the possibilities of political action liberated by such knowledge. The spontaneity which the syndicalists exalted at the cost of reflection was not enough. Unless a militant ideology or theory directed that spontaneous will, its energies would run out in sporadic and futile strike tactics. The proper direction of the labour movement implied the existence of a special class of professional revolutionists – a part of that movement and yet distinct in function – to make whatever spontaneity arose more effective. Marx was such a professional revolutionist. It was the height of absurdity on the part of those who sought to be orthodox to expect the course of economic development automatically to produce socialism. It could only produce by its own immanent movement the presuppositions of socialism. Power is bestowed neither by God nor the economic process. It must be taken. When Marx spoke of communism as being a result of a ‘social necessity’, he was referring to the resultant of a whole social process, one of whose components was the development of objective economic conditions, the other, the assertion of a revolutionary class will. The task of a political party of professional revolutionists was to mediate these two interacting factors, to act as both vanguard and general staff of the revolutionary class struggle. The class struggle was not a simple, causal function of the tempo of economic development. That would mean fatalism. Economic forces and revolutionary organisation, Lenin insisted, are not related to one another as mechanical cause and effect but are independent components of a dialectical whole – a dialectical whole being one which is continuously developing and whose parts are interacting with one another. To minimise the efficacy of the revolutionary idea which anticipates in present action the future direction of things on the basis of what they were and what we, as conscious willing beings, are, is to fall a victim to a bourgeois ideology. [4] Far from being Marxian it epitomises all the policies of drift, compromise and caprice against which Marx waged war to the end.

Primitive economism has not reflected upon the real goal of the working-class movement. It has consequently confused means and ends. In so doing it has adopted the same passive attitude as the revisionists to the revolutionary class struggle. Theoretically the anarcho-syndicalist left and reformist-socialist right join hands. ‘That struggle is desirable which is possible, and the struggle which is possible is the one going on now’, wrote the Rabochaya Mysl, the organ of economism, in words which sounded quite similar to those of the ‘legal’ Marxists, the Russian variant of revisionism.

It was Rosa Luxemburg who delivered the classic attack against revisionism from the standpoint of dialectical Marxism. The attack was at the same time an implied indictment of the official doctrinal orthodoxy. She began her famous pamphlet, Reform oder Revolution, by pointing out that there was a shadow of justification for Bernstein’s refusal to take the professed goal of the socialist movement seriously. For after all how was that goal conceived by the ‘orthodox’? Generally as an economic collectivism of indeterminate organisational structure, with all sorts of features added by the private conceits of those who drew the picture. What organic connection, indeed, could exist between such Utopian constructions and the exigencies of the daily class struggle! No wonder that Bernstein confessed that the goal was nothing, the movement everything. The trouble was that both Bernstein and those who opposed him shared the same mistaken premise about the goal of the proletarian movement. That goal was not the organisation of a socialist commonwealth (whose problems could only be intelligently met when they arose) but the conquest of political power. Like Lenin she held that only the presuppositions of socialism are automatically generated by the processes of capitalist production. The active seizure of power, however, which in a revolutionary crisis would put the working class at the helm of state, depended primarily upon political intelligence, will and organisation. The revolutionary dictatorship of the working class, ruling in the transition period from capitalism to socialism – only that could be the realistic goal of the movement. Here was an end which was organically related to the means used in the daily struggle. The ends must be recognised in the choice and character of the means employed. And there could no longer be any serious dispute about the means; they could not be of a kind that hindered the fulfilment of the end. [5]

The consequence of this shift of emphasis from a future state of society to a present struggle for power was impressive and far reaching. At one stroke it cut the roots from under those who believed in a Kompensationspolitik. There had been Social-Democratic deputies who had been willing, as one reformist declared, ‘to vote appropriations for cannon in exchange for the people’s electoral rights’. And if the goal of the movement was socialism, regarded as an immanent phase of the economic development, there could be no objection to this exchange in principle. No matter how many cannon the Kaiser’s army had, no matter how strong the existing state was, it could do nothing against the inevitable march of events. Why the same logic did not militate against the demand for electoral reform was a mystery. But the suicidal character of such horse-trading tactics was not a mystery when, instead of the nebulous goal of socialism, there was substituted for it the conquest of political power and the dictatorship of the proletariat. If the state had to be captured, it was sheer insanity to begin by strengthening it.

The logic of the dilemma which Luxemburg and Lenin hurled at the official Social-Democracy was clear. If practical reforms are the be-all and end-all of the movement, emphasis upon the goal conceived as the conquest of political power is bound to get in the way. When such emphasis is taken as something more than poetic myth, it becomes an irrelevant intrusion into the specific tasks in hand. One cannot significantly relate a struggle, say, for a two cent per hour increase in wages or a Saturday half-holiday with the conquest of political power. Bernstein was right in claiming that he had given theoretical expression to the reformist practices of German Social-Democracy. If, on the other hand, the goal is the conquest of political power, reforms are to be regarded as the by-products of the class struggle. Immediate demands are not thereby stricken from the programme – this was one of the errors of Daniel de Leon, the most orthodox of American Marxists – but are made the springboards of political agitation. No issue then could be too small if it served to intensify the class struggle. But every class struggle must be regarded as potentially a political struggle. It is directed not only towards improving the condition of the masses – which is important enough – but towards wresting control of the state from the hands of the dominant class.

The work of Luxemburg and Lenin marked, so to speak, the beginning of the Marxian reformation. [6] The texts of Marx and Engels were to be read in the light of the original spirit behind them. In refusing to be ‘orthodox’ at any price, Luxemburg and Lenin claimed to be more faithful to the ideas and methods of the men who originally inspired that orthodoxy than the formula-ridden pedants who anathematised them as heretics. The course of events has contributed to bringing these two Marxian interpretations into sharp opposition. One group was responsible for the German Republic; the other for the Russian Revolution. So wide did the rift grow that it became possible for the leaders of the first group to boast that they saved Western civilisation from the chaos and barbarism advocated by the second; and for the leaders of the second to denounce the first as apostates to the cause of the working classes.

Historical accuracy demands, before we close this chapter, that we indicate some of the important differences which, for all their common opposition to Marxian orthodoxy, separated Lenin and Luxemburg. Lenin drew the proper logical conclusions from his rejection of the theory of spontaneity in so far as they bore upon the question of organisation. If the political party was to be the vanguard in the struggle for social revolution, it could not risk compromising its leadership by destroying its own organisational autonomy in relation to either the trade unions or the proletariat as a whole. Luxemburg demanded a form of organisation which would more democratically reflect the masses outside of the party. This was a justified claim in so far as it was directed against the bureaucracy of the German party which not only lagged behind the radical sentiments of its members and working-class sympathisers but acted as a brake on their movement towards a more revolutionary position. It was unjustified, however, in so far as it was universalised to hold for all countries, especially Russia, where such a form of organisation would involve the danger that the party might be taken in tow by unripe elements. Similarly, in her opposition to any alliance between the workers and the peasants in a revolutionary dictatorship, and in her slighting of the national question (for example, in her belief that in the era of monopoly imperialism national wars were no longer possible) there was revealed a too great reliance upon the theory of mechanical spontaneity. Perhaps her most significant difference from Lenin flowed from her analysis of imperialism. In her Akkumulation des Kapitals [7] she contended that, with the exhaustion of the home market, capitalism must stride from one colonial country to another and that capitalism could only survive so long as such countries were available. As soon as the world would be partitioned among the imperialist powers and industrialised, the international revolution would of necessity break out, since capitalism cannot expand its productive forces and continue the process of accumulation indefinitely in any relatively isolated commodity-producing society, no matter how large.

Lenin denied that capitalism would ever collapse in any such mechanical fashion. Whoever believed that capitalism, no matter how severe its crisis, had no way out, was being victimised by the fatalistic pseudo-science of orthodox German Social-Democracy. Without an international organised revolution, capitalism would never collapse unless it pulled the whole of civilisation down with it in bloody war:

Above all we must point out two widely-spread errors. On the one hand bourgeois economists represent this crisis simply as a ‘maladjustment’, as the elegant expression of the Englishman has it. On the other, revolutionists attempt to prove that there is absolutely no way out of the crisis. That is an error. There do not exist any positions from which there is absolutely no way out. [8]

Peculiarly enough Lenin overlooks the incompatibility between his political activism and its underlying dynamic philosophy of interaction as expressed in What Is To Be Done?, and the mechanical correspondence theory of knowledge – defended so vehemently by him in his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Here he follows Engels word for word in the statement that ‘sensations are copies, photographs, images and mirror-reflections of things’, [9] and that the mind is not active in knowing. He seems to believe that if one holds: 1) that mind enters as an active factor in knowing, conditioned by the nervous system and all of past history, then it follows that one must believe; 2) that mind creates all of existence including its own brain. This is the rankest idealism and idealism means religion and God. But the step from proposition 1) to 2) is the most glaring non sequitur imaginable. As a matter of fact, in the interests of his conception of Marxism as the theory and practice of social revolution Lenin must admit that knowledge is an active affair, a process in which there is an interaction of matter, culture and mind, and that sensation is not knowledge but part of the materials with which knowledge works. This is the position that Marx took in his glosses on Feuerbach and in his Deutsche Ideologie. Whoever believes that sensations are literal copies of the external world, and that of themselves they give knowledge, cannot escape fatalism and mechanism. In Lenin’s political and non-technical writings there is no trace of this dualistic Lockean epistemology; as we have seen above, his What Is To Be Done? contains a frank acceptance of the active role of class consciousness in the social process. It is in these practical writings in which Lenin concerns himself with the concrete problems of agitation, revolution and reconstruction, that his true philosophy is to be found.

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Notes

1. Tail-enders were those who believed that the political struggle is an automatic reflection of economic development, that a political party should follow, not lead, a mass movement.

2. A Conversation with Defenders of Economism, Works, Volume 4, English translation, p. 67 [V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 5, available here. – MIA]

3. Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike. – MIA

4. ‘What Is To Be Done?’, Works, Volume 4, p 121 [VI Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, Collected Works, Volume 5. – MIA

5. The organic unity of means and ends was a part of dialectical materialism. The proper analysis of the relation, distorted of course by an idealistic ontology, had already been made by Hegel (Encyclopädie, Section 212; Wissenschaft der Logik, Volume 2 (Lasson edition), p. 344), whom the Social-Democratic theoreticians, with the exception of Plekhanov, Lenin and their circles, ignored.

6. This figure of speech is merely a development of the metaphor which Engels himself used when he referred to Marx’s Capital as the Bible of the international working class. Cf. one of his reviews of Marx’s Capital, reprinted in Marx-Engels Archiv, Band II, p 445; Engels’ preface to the English translation, Volume 1 (Kerr edition), p. 30. [see here. – MIA