[April, 2002]
Ideas do not fall from heaven and nothing comes to us in a dream [1]
‘Bolshevism’ first emerged appeared as a distinct political trend with the de facto political split at the second congress of the RSDLP in 1903, ostensibly over the differing definitions of Lenin and Martov on the definition of party membership, a difference, in my opinion, which symbolised two fundamentally different conceptions of how the perceived coming revolution was to unfold. In this respect, therefore, Bolshevism’s ‘founding text’—even though its writing pre-dated the congress—can be seen to be Lenin’s What is to be Done? [2] Bolshevism in this form appeared as a distinct political tendency in opposition to the fundamental conceptions of the already-established Russian Marxist tradition (itself conceived of as a conscious break from Russian populism), and Lenin’s theory of the party elaborated in What is to be Done? is of fundamental significance in understanding the nature of the rupture. Of course, the full ramifications of the Bolshevik-Menshevik split were not to become apparent until later—especially the case with regard to the outbreak of the First World War and the collapse of the Second International. However, the post-1903 evolution of Bolshevism was predicated on the ramifications of the theory of the revolutionary party that Lenin elaborated in 1902 and fought for in 1903 and beyond: a conception that flowed logically from a ‘double rupture’ within the radical tradition—of Marxism from populism, and Bolshevism from ‘Russian Marxism’. [3]
Marxism as such emerged in Russia—or, more accurately, it was first propagated in exile by Russian émigrés—in the form of a conscious and deliberate break with revolutionary populism. In order to grasp the fundamental character of this ‘Russian Marxism’, therefore, it is first necessary to summarise the basic outlook of populism: a movement which, in the words of one commentator, represented ‘Russia’s first indigenous socialist ideology.’ [4] Despite the fact that ‘populism’ properly designated was a complex and heterodox concatenation of political shades, ranging from reformists to revolutionaries, propagandists and terrorists, as well as the fact that it underwent a considerable degree of evolution in its aims and outlook as it ran its course, it is nevertheless possible to outline a number of the key elements that underlay the fundamental outlook of the populism movement, and which can be traced back—in varying degrees—to the ideological founders of the tradition: Herzen, Lavrov and Chernyshevsky.
Most importantly, populism posed the possibility of a practical resolution of what had been envisaged by the radical intelligentsia of the nineteenth century as a ‘slavophile-Europeanist’ dichotomy: a basic dualism at the heart of the Russian intellectual tradition arising from the twin contrasting pressures of ‘westernism’ and ‘slavophilism’, with, almost without exception, the former painted as outward-looking, modernising and progressive, and the latter as reactionary, conservative and insular. [5] Implicit in the populist outlook was a rejection both of the idea of an inherent and backward peculiarity of Russian society and the liberal-inspired view which postulated that Russia had to undergo a European-type process of capitalist development. Rather, it was projected—most clearly by Herzen—that Russia could by-pass a capitalist stage of development altogether on the path to socialism; and fundamental in this respect was an understanding of the specific forms of social organisation in Russia, in particular the nature of the peasant commune. As populism developed into a fully-fledged—if still relatively minuscule—political movement by the 1870s, this central conception of the significance of the peasantry in the revolution, founded on the view of the peasant commune as proof of the collectivist tradition of the great mass of the Russian people, and bolstered to a certain degree by the influence of anarchist conceptions of mass spontaneity, led to the celebrated 1874 ‘turn to the people’. The spectacular and dispiriting failure of this attempt at mass propaganda, directed at a largely bewildered peasantry, prompted an advance in populist ideology along two lines: first, a focus on the need to force a confrontation with the state (increasingly viewed in populist circles as the main Russian capitalist-inducing institution); and second, on the need to develop better and more effective forms of organisation. These conceptions led directly to the formation in 1876 of Zemlya i Volya (Land and Liberty) which embraced the necessity of insurrection, and, increasingly, the efficacy of the ‘propaganda of the deed’. [6]
In 1879 the movement split, bequeathing Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will), an increasingly centralised organisation focused on acts of terrorism against state officials (which was ultimately successful in 1881 in its attempts to assassinate the Tsar himself); and the minority Chernyi Peredel (Black Repartition) group, which opposed the growing stress on armed action in favour of propaganda. This latter organisation is of particular significance for our purposes since in 1883, as a wave of state reaction threatened to crush the indigenous populist movement, an exiled group of Chernyi Peredel leaders, Plekhanov, Axelrod and Zasulich prominent among them, established themselves as the ‘Emancipation of Labour’ group and declared for Marxism.
Thus Marxism in Russia was at birth founded on the basis of a conscious and deliberate break with populist orthodoxies; what can be seen as its founding texts—Plekhanov’s Socialism and Political Struggle (1883) and Our Political Controversies (1885) [7]—attempted to develop a scientific account of the development of Russian capitalism designed to refute the perceived errors of populism. Central to the conceptions advanced by Plekhanov was the view that Russia was a backward and barbarous country: before any idea of an advance to socialism could be even considered, a long supervening process of capitalist industrialisation and westernisation was necessary. The precondition for this was to be a bourgeois-democratic—not socialist—revolution: the working class in Russia, therefore, would be forced to play the role of supporting the liberal bourgeoisie in over-turning absolutism and establishing a constitutional, parliamentary state. Finally, the peasantry, communal or not, was seen not as a revolutionary asset in the struggle against Tsardom but as a backward and reactionary force. Thus the Marxism advanced by Plekhanov and his co-thinkers contradicted populism on practically every vital point; and the prospect of the necessity of capitalist development, the consequent class character of the revolution and the leading forces within it, and their view of the nature and role of the peasantry were to be the founding orthodoxies of Marxism in Russia.
Thus it is intriguing to note that on these questions Plekhanov was something more of an ‘orthodox Marxist’ than Marx had ever been. In a polemic directed at the populist theorist Mikhailovsky in 1877, Marx had objected to the accusation that he wanted to transpose onto Russia the process of ‘primitive accumulation’ described in Capital: ‘It is absolutely necessary for [...] Mikhailovsky] to metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historico-pilosophical theory of general development, imposed by fate on all peoples, whatever the historical circumstances in which they are placed [...].’ [8] Even more suggestively, in his 1881 letter to Vera Zasulich, Marx was to argue that:
In analysing the genesis of capitalist production [in Capital] I say:
‘At the core of the capitalist system, therefore, lies the complete separation of the producer from the means of production ... the basis of this whole development is the expropriation of the agricultural producer. To date this has not been accomplished in a radical fashion anywhere except in England... But all the other countries of Western Europe are undergoing the same process’ [...].
Hence the historical inevitability of this process is expressly limited to the countries of Western Europe. [...]
Hence the analysis provided in Capital does not adduce reasons either for or against the viability of the rural commune, but the special study I have made of it, and the material for which I drew from original sources, has convinced me that this commune is the fulcrum of social regeneration in Russia, but in order that it may function as such, it is necessary to eliminate deleterious influences which are assailing it from all sides, and then ensure for it the normal conditions of spontaneous development. [9]
Thus Marx expressed a far greater degree of flexibility with regard to the possibilities for Russian development in the light of its concrete and specific historical circumstances than did Plekhanov’s rather more abstract schemas. In fact, the rather mechanical ‘evolutionism’ being advanced by Plekhanov seemed to have more in common with the brand of Marxism that was beginning to emerge in the Second International, and which was to be, at least at first, associated with the ‘revisionism’ of Bernstein: a Marxism that was to develop the structural weaknesses that were to result in the practical disintegration of the International in 1914 and which the more mature Lenin was to be in the forefront of opposing on the international plane. Nevertheless, Plekhanov’s conceptions predominated in the nascent Russian movement, and it was out of this movement that the historic split of 1903 produced both Bolshevik and Menshevik factions.
As is well known, the split between the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions was precipitated by the debate over the two different conceptions of party membership advanced by Martov and Lenin. Respectively: ‘A member of the [...] Party is one who accepts its programme and supports it both materially and by regular co-operation under the leadership of one of its organisations’; and: ‘A member of the party is one who accepts its programme, and supports it both materially and by personal participation in one of its organisations.’ [10]
The differences between these two formulations appear to be small. Yet behind them lay fundamentally different, if as yet incipient, conceptions of the nature of the coming revolution and the role to be played by the party within it. The content of Lenin’s views as a codification of party practice were both fundamental and new, and represented the beginnings of a decisive break with not only the organisational but the political conceptions of Russian social-democracy. [11] The content of Lenin’s views as a codification of party practice were both fundamental and new, and represented the beginnings of a decisive break with not only the organisational but the political conceptions of Russian social-democracy.
Central to Lenin’s argument were his views on spontaneity and consciousness. The ostensible ideological target of What is to be Done? was the trend known as ‘economism’, which stressed the importance of the day to day, economic and trade union aspects of working class struggle, and thus made something of a virtue of the spontaneous development of working class consciousness. Against this conception, Lenin offered a number of critical arguments. Most importantly, he stressed that the working class, left to its own devices, was unable to develop social-democratic—meaning revolutionary socialist—consciousness, only what he termed ‘trade union consciousness’. That is, simply by virtue of its conditions of life under capitalism, there was no automatic mechanism which prompted the working class to revolutionary conclusions. Thus: ‘The working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness’, or, more strongly: ‘The spontaneous working-class movement is by itself able to create (and inevitably does create) only trade-unionism, and working-class trade-union politics is precisely working-class bourgeois politics.’ [12] Socialist consciousness had to be introduced into the working class struggle from ‘without’. This is what was most fundamental and new about Lenin’s theory, and which lay at the core of his—soon to be literally ‘Bolshevik’—politics.
However, it is instructive that Lenin used two different arguments in What is to be Done? to justify his position; that is to say, he used more than one definition of ‘within’ and ‘without’ in this sense. [13]
First, he approvingly quoted Kautsky (as he was wont to do in this period) to this effect:
Modern socialist consciousness can arise only on the basis of profound scientific knowledge. [...] The vehicle of science is not the proletariat, but the bourgeois intelligentsia: it was in the minds of individual members of this stratum that modern socialism originated, and it was they who communicated to the more intellectually developed proletarians who, in their turn, introduced it into the proletarian class struggle [...].
In this conception, ‘within’ and ‘without’ are conceived of in terms of social class, and it is the bourgeois intelligentsia alone—not the working class—that is able to develop socialist consciousness.
There is, of course, more than one way to read this argument. As a description of what had happened historically, there is a good deal of truth to it: Marxism, as a body of thought, was indeed developed by bourgeois or petty bourgeois intellectuals, albeit in concrete conditions of developing capitalism and class struggle. But it is also possible to read this argument in a prescriptive way, as a template for, quite literally, ‘what is to be done’. In this sense it is absolutely clear that it is not the case that Lenin’s intention was to argue for a party of the bourgeois intelligentsia, the better to bring to the masses socialist consciousness: far from it, his prescription was for a party of ‘professional revolutionaries’. In fact, the whole history of both Bolshevism and Lenin’s own activity would appear to rule out such a prescriptive reading of this conception.
But this is not the only argument that Lenin used. Later in the text he argued that:
The basic error that all the Economists commit [...] [is] their conviction that it is possible to develop the class political consciousness of the workers from within, [...] from their economic struggle [...].
Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers. The sphere from which it alone is possible to obtain this knowledge is the sphere of relationships of all classes and strata to the state and the government, the sphere of the interrelations between all classes. [14]
Here, ‘within’and ‘without’, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, are defined not in terms of social class but as a function of the distinction between the partial and the global. Sectional struggles, trade union struggles for example, ‘organically’ only lead to sectional, partial consciousness: what the working class needs, therefore, is a centralising, totalising instrument—effectively a revolutionary party—to unify the experiences of its multifarious, partial struggles. Since the revolution will require at some point a confrontation with the centralised state, the working class, as a consequence, needs its own instrument of political centralisation.
This was Lenin’s fundamental innovation, a re-assertion of the political element of socialist strategy, founded on the conception of the revolutionary party as a pro-active, subjective political instrument. It was this conception which marked such a sharp break with the evolutionist, objectivist conceptions developed by Russian social-democracy in its own break from populism; although it was not at this stage explicitly formulated as such: the fundamental content of the break was only to become apparent over the course of the next decade and a half.
Now, for Lenin, the guiding principle of the party was to be Marxism; and for Lenin Marxism was a science: ‘Without evolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.’ And: ‘The role of vanguard fighter can be fulfilled only by a party that is guided by the most advanced theory.’ [15] Yet these assertions, taken on their own, appear one-sided (a matter I shall return to shortly). Where does this revolutionary theory, so to speak, come from? Following the conception of the party as a centralising instrument of sectional struggles, it is reasonable to deduce that the theoretical understanding of the party is itself a product of this political centralisation. Thus, after the revolution, summarising the experiences of Bolshevism in a text directed at socialists in the new Communist Parties outside Russia, Lenin asserted that ‘Correct revolutionary theory [...] assumes final shape only in close connection with the practical activity of a truly mass and truly revolutionary movement’. [16] That the development of theory was an ongoing and a practical question is intimated by Lenin’s assertion in his own account of the proceedings of the second congress: ‘A struggle of shades is inevitable and essential as long as it does not lead to anarchy and splits, as long as it is confined within bounds approved by common consent of all party members.’ [17] That the party had to be centralised flowed from the understanding that it needed to develop a global understanding of political struggle; in order to achieve this it also had to allow for open and public discussion and disagreement—indeed, inevitably and essentially so.
However, as I indicated earlier, many of Lenin’s formulations appear one-sided. It is necessary to be cautious here, for we are approaching the well-travelled terrain of ‘stick-bending’. At the second congress itself, Lenin admitted to a degree of polemical exaggeration: ‘We all know that the “economists” have gone to one extreme. To straighten matters out somebody had to pull in the other direction—and that is what I have done.’ [18] While we need to be sensitive to the fact that much of Lenin’s writings were not the result of detached academic pondering but arose in the context of often over-heated polemical debate, we also need to maintain a degree of scrupulousness as to what Lenin did in fact say. It is, as a consequence, necessary to read Lenin ‘carefully’ and in context: to be aware of who he is arguing with, and why, in order to be able to extract what is fundamental in his views. On the other hand, we must not allow ourselves too much ‘leniency’, for that would lead to an under-estimation of what are real dilemmas in Lenin’s thought.
To illustrate the point: in Lenin’s conception of the party, as we have seen, there had to be room for open debate and discussion. Yet in Tsarist Russia this was clearly a problem. As Lenin points out, complete democracy requires at the minimum two conditions: full publicity, and elections to all offices. Yet in the concrete conditions this was impossible—it would simply facilitate the work of the police. Then Lenin offered a supporting argument: with strict selection of members, confidence among comrades, dedication, ‘something more than “democratism” would be guaranteed to us, namely complete, comradely, mutual confidence among revolutionaries.’ [19] The first argument—the practical one—does not cast doubt on the principle of inner-party democracy; the second one clearly does, and was a dangerous portent for the future. Lenin may well have been bending the stick here, in order to straighten it, but allowing for that must not allow us to dismiss the evident contradiction in his exposition.
Having allowed for this, however, it is essential to recognise the fundamental nature of Lenin’s innovation. In Perry Anderson’s judgement, with which I agree, Lenin’s outlook, ‘often seen as simply “practical” measures, in fact also represented decisive intellectual advances into hitherto uncharted terrain.’ Lenin ‘inaugurated a Marxist science of politics, henceforward capable of dealing with a vast range of problems, which had previously lain outside any rigorous theoretical jurisdiction.’ [20]
There is, I would argue, in this respect a direct and linear connection between the Lenin of 1902-3 and the Marx of 1844, when the latter, in the first of his Theses on Feuerbach, suggests that ‘The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism [...] is that [...] reality [...] is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively.’ Marx went on: ‘The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth—i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.’‘All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice,’ Marx continues, ending with the famous exhortation: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.’ [21]
This conception is impossible to overestimate in its fundamental importance for historical materialism. Marxism, so claimed its founders, with whom I find myself in agreement, is a science. What does this mean? Marx and Engels were always at great pains to differentiate their theoretical viewpoint from what they, in the nineteenth century, called ‘ideology’. For the founders of historical materialism, ‘ideology’ was those sets of ideas which attempted to explain reality but which were unable to do so. For Marx and Engels, what was specific to their theory was that it could paint a sufficiently accurate picture of the inner workings of human society that it could be used by humanity to change, consciously, the course of its own human history. It is this very accuracy of Marxism that makes it scientific, and it is its scientific nature that consequently makes it revolutionary, for the transition from what Marx called the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom—impossible without international, social, socialist revolution—demands a degree of accurate theoretical knowledge and consciousness historically speaking hitherto uncalled for.
But the obvious question is: where does this theory come from, and how do we know that it is true? Marx is precisely addressing this matter in 1844: he argues that a ‘correct’ theoretical understanding comes not from abstract contemplation of society from without but from the active engagement with it from within; and that its correctness is to be measured in terms of its efficacy in changing the world, in the way that theory serves as an effective weapon to this end. [22] When Marxists speak of ‘the unity of theory and practice’ it is this they should be referring to, yet it is a conception generally poorly understood.
Marx devoted the greater part of his efforts following his theoretical breakthroughs of the 1840s to developing an analysis of the then existing social phenomena: trapped as he and Engels were within the given conditions of the time, they did not develop sustained reflection on the central ideas of the Theses on Feuerbach: they did not elaborate substantially on the relation between theory and practice: they did not, in short develop a theory of politics. For classical Marxism, that was to come later. And it came in the form of the revolutionary current within the socialist movement of the Russian Empire, of Bolshevism. Lenin’s profile within the received wisdom of Marxism—itself echoing bourgeois commentary— is very much that of the ‘practical politician’ rather than the theoretical innovator. Yet to deny the fundamental role of Lenin’s work in the development of Marxist theory is to seriously debase the latter. If the Marxism of Marx and Engels lacks a theory of politics (understand in the terms that they would themselves understand it, within the parameters of the final Theses on Feuerbach), this was to be supplied by Bolshevism, and by Lenin.
Note—For the works of Marx cited below, the references are to Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 47 volumes (London, 1975-), abbreviated hereafter for convenience to MECW; references to citations of Lenin throughout are to the English version of the fourth Russian edition of the Collected Works, 47 volumes (Moscow, 1960-1970), abbreviated to LCW.
[1] Antonio Labriola, Essays on the Materialist Conception of History (Chicago, 1985), 155.
[2] ‘What is to be Done?’, LCW, vol. 5, 347-529.
[3] I am therefore not in agreement with the view, most clearly expressed by Neil Harding (Leninism (London, 1996), 7-10), that the origins of ‘Leninism’ are to be located solely by reference to Lenin’s response to the outbreak of the First World War, significant though this was.
[4] Teodor Shanin, Russia as a ‘Developing Society’(London, 1985), 213.
[5] See, for a classic exposition, Bertram D. Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution: A Biographical History (London, 1956), 23-24.
[6] See the account in Teodor Shanin (ed.), Late Marx and the Russian Road (London, 1983), 8-13.
[7] Georgi Plekhanov, ‘Socialism and the Political Struggle’, Selected Philosophical Works, 5 volumes (Moscow, 1974-1980), vol. 1 (1974), 49-106; ‘Our Political Controversies’, ibid., 107-352.
[8] ‘Letter to Otechestvenniye Zapiski’, MECW, vol. 24 (1989), 200.
[9] ‘Marx to Vera Zasulich’, MECW, vol. 46 (1992), 71. Earlier drafts of this letter are to be found in Karl Marx, ‘Drafts of the Letter to Vera Zasulich’, MECW, vol. 24 (1989), 346-371.
[10] Cited in E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth, 1973), 41.
[11] And, as Carr insists, the relationship between Lenin’s formulation and his theories on party organisation was both understood and acknowledged at the congress (The Bolshevik Revolution, 41)
[12] ‘What is to be Done?’, 375, 437.
[13] For an excellent discussion of Lenin’s arguments in What is to be Done?, see Norman Geras, Literature of Revolution: Essays on Marxism (London, 1986), 177-193.
[14] ‘What is to be Done?’, 421-422.
[15] Ibid., 369, 370.
[16] ‘“Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder’, LCW, vol. 31 (1966), 17-118 (25). Perry Anderson draws out the full significance of the formulation: ‘Every clause [...] counts. Revolutionary theory can be undertaken in relative isolation—Marx in the British Museum, Lenin in war-bound Zurich: but it can only acquire a correct and final form when bound to the collective struggles of the working class itself. Mere formal membership of a party organisation [...] does not suffice to provide such a bond: a close connection with the practical activity of the proletariat is necessary. Nor is militancy in a small revolutionary group enough: there must be a linkage with the actual masses. Conversely, linkage with a mass movement is not enough either, for the latter may be reformist: it is only when the masses are themselves revolutionary, that theory can complete its eminent vocation.’ (Considerations on Western Marxism (London, 1976), 105-6.)
[17] ‘One Step Forwards, Two Steps Back’, LCW vol. 7 (1965), 347.
[18] ‘Speech on the Party Programme’, LCW, vol. 6 (1961) 491.
[19] ‘What is to be Done?’, 476-480, quotation on 480.
[20] Anderson, Considerations, 11-12.
[21 ]‘Concerning Feuerbach’, in Karl Marx, Early Writings (Harmondsworth, 1975), 421-23.
[22] As Marx wrote a year earlier: ‘Clearly the weapon of criticism cannot replace criticism of weapons, and material force must be overthrown by material force. But theory also becomes a material force once it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses when it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp things by the root.’ ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction’, in Early Writings, 251.