Marx’s
theory of socialist revolution is grounded on the fundamental
principle that “the emancipation of the working class must be
the
work of the working class itself”. Marx held to this view
throughout his entire forty years of socialist political activity,
and it distinguished his theory of social change from that of both
those who appealed to the princes, governments and industrialists to
change the world for the benefit of the working class (such as Robert
Owen and Saint Simon) and of those who relied on the determined
action of some enlightened minority of professional revolutionaries
to liberate the working class (such as Buonarotti, Blanqui and
Weitling).
Conscious
Self-emancipation
Marx
saw that the very social position of the working class within
capitalist society as a non-owning, exploited, wealth-producing class
forced it to struggle against its capitalist conditions of existence.
This “movement” of the working class could be said
to be
implicitly socialist since the struggle was ultimately over who
should control the means of production: the minority capitalist class
or the working class (i.e. society as a whole). At first the movement
of the working class would be, Marx believed, unconscious and
unorganised but in time, as the workers gained more experience of the
class struggle and the workings of capitalism, it would become more
consciously socialist and democratically organised by the workers
themselves.
The
emergence of socialist understanding out of the experience of the
workers could thus be said to be “spontaneous” in
the sense that
it would require no intervention by people outside the working class
to bring it about (not that such people could not take part in this
process, but their participation was not essential or crucial).
Socialist propaganda and agitation would indeed be necessary but
would come to be carried out by workers themselves whose socialist
ideas would have been derived from an interpretation of their class
experience of capitalism. The end result would be an independent
movement of the socialist-minded and democratically organised working
class aimed at winning control of political power in order to abolish
capitalism. As Marx and Engels put it in The Communist
Manifesto,
“the proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent
movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense
majority”.
This
in fact was Marx’s conception of “the
workers’ party”. He did
not see the party of the working class as a self-appointed elite of
professional revolutionaries, as did the Blanquists, but as the mass
democratic movement of the working class with a view to establishing
Socialism, the common ownership and democratic control of the means
of production.
Lenin’s
Opposing View
This
was Marx’s view, but it wasn’t Lenin’s.
Lenin in his pamphlet What
Is To Be Done?, written in 1901-2, declared:
“The
history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by
its own efforts, 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. 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” (Foreign Languages Publishing
House
edition, Moscow, pp. 50-51).
“Class
political consciousness can be brought to the workers only
from
without, that is, only from outside of the economic struggle,
from outside of the sphere of relations between workers and
employers” (Lenin’s emphasis, p.133).
“The
spontaneous working class movement by itself is able to create (and
inevitably creates) only trade unionism, and working class trade
unionist politics are precisely working class bourgeois
politics”
(pp. 159-60) .
Lenin
went on to argue that the people who would have to bring
“socialist
consciousness” to the working class “from
without” would be
“professional revolutionaries”, drawn at first
mainly from the
ranks of the bourgeois intelligentsia. In fact he argued that the
Russian Social Democratic Party should be such an
“organisation of
professional revolutionaries”, acting as the vanguard of the
working class. The task of this vanguard party to be composed of
professional revolutionaries under strict central control was to
“lead” the working class, offering them slogans to
follow and
struggle for. It is the very antithesis of Marx’s theory of
working
class self-emancipation.
The
Bolshevik Coup
The
implication of Marx’s theory of working class
self-emancipation is
that the immense majority of the working class must be consciously
involved in the socialist revolution against capitalism. “The
proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of
the immense majority in the interest of the immense majority”.
The
Bolshevik coup in November, 1917, carried out under the guise of
protecting the rights of the Congress of Soviets, did not enjoy
conscious majority support, at least not for socialism, though their
slogan “Peace, Bread and Land” was widely popular.
For instance,
elections to the Constituent Assembly, held after the Bolshevik coup
and so under Bolshevik government, gave them only about 25 per cent
of the votes.
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 as replying to this kind of
criticism 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).
Compare
this with a passage from the utopian communist, Weitling: “to
want
to wait...until all are suitably enlightened would be to abandon the
thing altogether!” Not, of course, that it is a question of
“all”
the workers needing to be socialists before there can be Socialism.
Marx, in rejecting the view that Socialism could be established by
some enlightened minority, was merely saying that a sufficient
majority of workers would have to be socialists.
Lenin’s
Legacy
Having
seized power before the working class (and, even
less, the 80
per cent peasant majority of the population) had prepared themselves
for Socialism, all the Bolshevik government could do, as Lenin
himself openly admitted, was to establish state capitalism in Russia.
Which is what they did, while at the same time imposing their own
dictatorship over the working class.
Contempt
for the intellectual abilities of the working class led to the claim
that the vanguard party should rule on their behalf, even against
their will. Lenin’s theory of the vanguard party became
enshrined
as a principle of government (“the leading role of the
Party”)
which has served to justify what has proved to be the world’s
longest-lasting political dictatorship.
The
self-emancipation of the working class, as advocated by Marx, remains
on the agenda.
(March
1990)
|