What Is to Be Done? Leninism, Anti-Leninist Marxism and the Question of Revolution Today
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Chapter 1 What is to be Done? Leninism, anti-Leninist Marxism and the Question of Revolution today Werner Bonefeld and Sergio Tischler I Of one thing we can be certain. The ideologies of the twentieth century will disappear completely. This has been a lousy century. It has been filled with dogmas, dogmas that one after another have cost us time, suffering, and much injustice (Garcia Marquez, 1990). Amid the resurgence of anti-capitalist movements across the globe, the centenary of Lenin’s What is to be Done? in 2002 has largely gone unnoticed. Leninism has fallen on hard times – and rightly so. It leaves a bitter taste of a revolution whose heroic struggle turned into a nightmare. The indifference to Leninism is understandable. What, however, is disturbing is the contemporary disinterest in the revolutionary project. What does anti-capitalism in its contemporary form of anti- globalization mean if it is not a practical critique of capitalism and what does it wish to achieve if its anti-capitalism fails to espouse the revolutionary project of human emancipation? Anti-capitalist indifference to revolution is a contradiction in terms. Rather then freeing the theory and practice of revolution from Leninism, its conception of revolutionary organization in the form of the party, and its idea of the state whose power is to be seized, as an instrument of revolution, remain uncontested. Revolution seems to mean Leninism, now appearing in moderated form as Trotskyism. Orthodox Marxism invests great energy in its attempt to incorporate the 2 What is to be Done? class struggle into preconceived conceptions of organization, seeking to render them manageable under the direction of the party. The management of class struggle belongs traditionally to the bourgeoisie who ‘concentrated in the form of the state’ (see Marx, 1973, p.108), depend on its containment and management in the form of abstract equality. The denial of humanity that is entailed in the subordination of the inequality in property to relations of abstract equality in the form of exchange relations, is mirrored in the Leninist conception of the workers state, where everybody is treated equally as an economic resource. Hiding behind dogma, contemporary endorsements of the revolutionary party as the organizational form of revolution, focus the ‘distortion’ of socialism on Stalin, cleansing Leninism and maintaining its myth.1 Was the tragedy of the Russian revolution really just contingent on the question of leadership, a tragedy caused by a bad leader who took over from a good leader, and should Trotsky had succeeded Lenin, would his leadership have been ‘good’, rescuing the revolution from the dungeons of despair – the Gulag? Whatever difference Trotsky might have made, is revolution really just a question of personalities and their leadership qualities? Orthodox accounts do not raise the most basic question of the critical Enlightenment – cui bono (who benefits) – and, instead, show great trust in the belief that revolution has to be made on behalf of the dependent masses, so that all goes according to plan, including the planning of the economic resource labour through the workers state. Marx’s insight that communism is a classless society and that ‘to be a productive labourer is...not a piece of luck, but a misfortune’ (Marx, 1983, p.477), is endorsed in perverted form: the party’s directorship over the proletariat is a fortune for the misfortunate. Those who take the project of human emancipation seriously, will find little comfort in the idea that the party knows best. Contemporary anti-capitalism does well to keep well clear of the Leninist conception of revolution. However, its indifference to revolution belies its anti-capitalist stance. This, then, means that the ratio emancipationis has to be rediscovered. 1 See, for example, the contributions to Historical Materialism, no. 3. What is to be Done? 3 Contemporaneous critics of Lenin’s conception of revolution strongly rejected its authoritarian character, criticized its means, and berated its denial of the purpose of revolution, i.e. human emancipation. Anton Pannekoek concluded that ‘the alleged Marxism of Lenin and the Bolshevik party is nothing but a legend’ (1948, p.71). Karl Korsch (1970) who, like Pannekoek, argued from a council communist perspective, concurred, arguing that Lenin was the philosopher of an essentially bourgeois revolution. Rosa Luxemburg, aghast at the Leninist conception of revolution, charged that revolution means not the suppression of workers’ self-organization but the movement of labour. In her view, missteps that a truly revolutionary workers’ movement makes are immeasurably fruitful historically and more valuable than the infallibility of even the best ‘central committee’ (Luxemburg, 1970, p.88). The theory and practice of revolution has to be emancipated from its Leninist legacy and the question ‘what is to be done?’ has to mean ‘what is to be learned?’, ‘what is to be avoided?’, and ‘what has to be done differently?’. II The working class has ‘no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant’ (Marx, 1948, p.58). Adam Smith was certain in his own mind that capitalism creates the wealth of nations. Hegel concurred but added that the accumulation of wealth renders those who depend on the sale of their labour power for their social reproduction, insecure in deteriorating conditions. He concluded that despite the accumulation of wealth, bourgeois society will find it most difficult to keep the dependent masses pacified, and he saw the form of the state as the means of reconciling the social antagonism, containing the dependent masses. Ricardo formulated the necessity of capitalist social relations to produce ‘redundant population’. Marx developed this insight and showed that the idea of ‘equal rights’ is in principle a bourgeois right. In its content, it is a right of inequality (see 4 What is to be Done? Marx, 1968). Against the bourgeois form of formal equality, he argued that communism rests on the equality of the individual, that is, the equality of individual human needs. During the last decade we have seen the deep recession of the early 1990s, the European currency crises in 1992 and 1993, the plunge of the Mexican peso in December 1994 which rocked financial markets around the world, the Asian crisis of 1997, the Brazilian crisis of 1999, the Argentinean crisis of 2001. Japan teeters on the edge of depression and then there is the speculative bubble in the New York Stock Exchange and the dramatic global slowdown. As Itoh (2000, p.133) comments, ‘the nightmare of a full-scale world economic crisis cannot easily be excluded’; indeed, there is hardly a day without warnings about the immanent burst of the bubble and a world wide depression. And then there is war. How many wars have been fought since the end of the cold war and how many will follow in the years to come? And then there is terrorism. September 11 demonstrated with brutal force the impotence of sense, significance, and thus reason and ultimately truth. The denial of human quality and difference was absolute – not even their corpses survived. And the responds? It confirmed that state terrorism and terrorism are two sides of the same coin. Between them, nothing is allowed to survive. Against the background of the global crisis during the inter-war period, Paul Mattick suggested in 1934 that capitalism had entered an age of permanent crisis: The periodicity of crisis is in practice nothing other than the recurrent reorganisation of the process of accumulation on a new level of value and price which again secures the accumulation of capital.2 If that is not possible, then neither is it possible to confirm accumulation; the same crisis that up to now had presented itself chaotically and could be overcome becomes permanent crisis. In contrast to previous crises of capitalism, which had always led to a restructuring of capital and to a renewed period of accumulation, the crisis of the 1930s appeared to be so profound and prolonged as to be incapable of solution. Crisis, Mattick suggested, had ceased to 2 This part draws on Bonefeld and Holloway (1996). What is to be Done? 5 be a periodically recurring phenomenon and had become an endemic feature of capitalism. Mattick’s suggestion, pessimistic though it was, turned out to be far too optimistic. The crisis was resolved, in blood. Capital was restructured and the basis for a new period of accumulation created. Post-war capitalism figures now as a distant ‘golden age’, and the blood-letting through war and gas is a mere memory. Once again it would seem that we are in a situation of permanent crisis, a crisis that is not caused by globalization but, rather, of which globalization is an expression. It is possible that the crisis will be permanent, with a progressive deterioration of conditions. It is possible too that the crisis will not be permanent, that it will in fact be resolved: what the resolution of ‘permanent crisis’ can mean stands behind us as a warning of a possibly nightmarish future. ‘We know how rapidly an epoch of global prosperity, underpinning prospects of world peace and international harmony, can become an epoch of global confrontation, culminating in war. If such a prospect seems unlikely now, it seemed equally unlikely a century ago’ (Clarke, 2001, p.91). The gloomy prospect that this comparative perspective summons, is not inevitable. The struggles in which capitalist development is ‘embedded and the outcomes to which those struggles give rise are not imposed by any economic logic’ (ibid.). Contemporary anti-capitalist movements, from Chiapas (Holloway and Peláez, 1998) to the Piqueteros of Argentina (Dinerstein, 1999), from Seattle to Genoa (de Angelis, 2001; Federici and Caffentzis, 2001) and beyond, gives ground for optimism (Leeds, 2001).