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Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism

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Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism A CRITICAL STUDY I< E VI N ANDERS 0 N Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism A CRITICAL STUDY KevinAnderson University of Illinois Press Urbana and Chicago We wish to thank the Raya Dunayevskaya Memorial Fund, 59 East Van Buren, Chicago, IL 60605, for help in making the paperback edition of this book possible. � 1995 by the Board ofTrustees of the University of Illinois Manufactured in the United States of America 12 3 45CP54321 This bookprintell iS on acidfne paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Anderson, Kevin, 1948- Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism : a critical stu�y I Kevin Anderson. p. em. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-252-02167-3 (cloth: alk. paper).- ISBN 0-252-06503-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Lenin, Vladimir Il'ich, 1870-1924. 2. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831. 3. Communism. 4. Philosophy, Marxist I. Title. HX313.8.L46A54 1995 335.43-dc20 94-45414 CIP Contents Acknowledgments vn Introduction ix A Note on Sources and Abbreviations xix Part 1: Lenin on Hegel and Dialectics 1. The Crisis of World Marxism in 1914 and Lenin's Plunge into Hegel 3 2. Lenin on Hegel'11 Concepts of Being and Essence 28 3. The Subjective Logic: The Core of Lenin's 1914 Hegel Studies 57 4. Lenin's Discussions of the Dialectic, 1915-23: An Ambivalent, Secretive Hegelianism 98 Part 2: Lenin on the Dialectics ofRevolution, 1914-23 5. Imperialism and New Forms of Subjectivity: National Liberation Movements 123 6. State and Revolution: Subjectivity, Grassroots Democracy, and the Critique ofBureaucracy 148 Part 3: Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism 7. From the 1920s to 1953: Lukacs, Lefebvre, and the Johnson-Forest Tendency 173 8. From 1954 to Today: Lefebvre, Colletti, Althusser, and Dunayevskaya 210 Conclusion: Lenin's Paradoxical Legacy 251 vi I Contents Notes 257 Selected Bibliography 297 Index 303 Acknowledgments In researching and writing this book I have accrued debts to many individuals and institutions. George Fischer, Michael E. Brown, Teru Kanazawa, and especially Raya Dunayevskaya each commented extensively on it during the years 1979-83, when I completed the first version, a dissertation at the City University of New York (CUNY) graduate school. Dunayevskaya also occasionally discussed it with me in Chicago until her death in 1987. It was she who originally proposed the topic to me and who encouraged me to work on it further. During its thesis stage, David Beasley of the New York Public Library helped me greatly in locating source material. At the same time I received, with the assis­ tance of George Fischer, a CUNY/Board of Higher Education research grant for an uninterrupted year of dissertation work, and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) generously provided me with a summer scholarship to study German in West Berlin. After 1983, as I worked further on the book, librarians at the several universities where I taught-at Indiana University Northwest, at North Central College, and especially Robert Ridinger at Northern Illinois University-spared no effortto make a large number of French, German, Italian, and Japanese materials available to me through interlibrary loan. In the 1990s, after I had reworked the entire manuscript, adding mate­ rial on Hegel and on German, French, and Italian Marxist traditions, as well as new source material on Lenin, a number of people read and commented on it once again. Robert John Ackermann,JanetAfu.ry, Peter Hudis, and Douglas Kellner read the manuscript in its entirety. Large portions of the manuscript involving several chapterswere read by Bud Burkhard, Nigel Gibson, Martin Jay, Patricia AltenberndJohnson, David .Joravsky, Andrew Kliman, Pierre Lantz, Heinz Osterle, Albert Resis, Tom Rockmore, and Lou Turner. Finally, Paul Buhle, Olga Domanski, Ted McGlone, Robert Service, Jim Thomas, and Alan Wald each read smaller vi I Contents Notes 257 SelectedBibliogrnphy 297 Index 303 Acknowledgments In researching and writing this book I have accrued debts to many individuals and institutions. George Fischer, Michael E. Brown, Teru Kanazawa, and especially Raya Dunayevskaya each commented extensively on it during the years 1979-83, when I completed the first version, a dissertation at the City University of New York (CUNY) graduate school. Dunayevskaya also occasionally discussed it with me in Chicago until her death in 1987. It was she who originally proposed the topic to me and who encouraged me to work on it further. During its thesis stage, David Beasley of the New York Public Library helped me greatly in locating source material. At the same time I received, with the assis­ tance of George Fischer, a CUNY /Board of Higher Education research grant for an uninterrupted year of dissertation work, and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) generously provided me with a summer scholarship to study Geiman in West Berlin. After 1983, as I worked further on the book, librarians at the several universities where I taught-at Indiana University Northwest, at North Central College, and especially Robert Ridinger at Northern Illinois University-spared no effortto make a large number of French, German, Italian, and Japanese materials available to me through interlibrary loan. In the 1990s, after I had reworked the entire manuscript, adding mate­ rial on Hegel and on German, French, and Italian Marxist traditions, as well as new source material on Lenin, a number of people read and commented on it once again. RobertJohn Ackermann,Janet Afury, Peter Hudis, and Douglas Kellner read the manuscript in its entirety. Large portions of the manuscript involving several chapters were read by Bud Burkhard, Nigel Gibson, MartinJay, Patricia Altenbernd Johnson, David Joravsky, Andrew Kliman, Pierre Lantz, Heinz Osterle, Albert Resis, Tom Rockmore, and Lou Turner. Finally, Paul Buhle, Olga Domanski, Ted McGlone, Robert SeiVice, Jim Thomas, and Alan Wald each read smaller viii I Acknowledgments parts. I am most grateful to each of these readers for their comments and criticisms. I would also like to thank my editor at the University of Illinois Press, Richard Martin, who has been most helpful and support­ ive during the review process. An earlier version of chapter 7 appeared in 1992 as an article in Studi.es in Saviet Thought (44:79-129; © 1992 Kluwer Academic Publishers; printed in the Netherlands), and I would like to thank Kluwer Aca­ demic Publishers for allowing this material to be reprinted. Introduction This book paints a picture of Lenin different from the one found in most discussions of Marxism. Looking closely at his 1914-15 Hegel Notebooks, I will argue that Lenin's post-1914 work, especially oq the dialectic, places him closer to key Hegelian or "Western" Marxists such as Georg Lukacs and the members of the Frankfurt School than to orthodox Marxists, including official Soviet Marxist-Leninists. I am by no means the first to arguethis point, but I believe that this study is the first book-length treatmentof Lenin to place such considerations at its center. In 1980 the prominent Marxist sociologist Alvin Gouldner pointed to two traditions within Marxist theory, which he termed critical and scientific Marxism. Gouldnerplaced a number of Hegelian, existentialist, and humanistic Marxists in the former category, while he located a group of structuralist Marxists in the latter. Far from placing Lenin among the scientific Marxists, as many lesser scholars would have done, Gouldner wrote: "before Lukacs and Korsch, it was Lenin who launched the movement toward a critical Marxism. (Launched but did not pur­ sue it)"l Gouldner was presumably referring both to Lenin's 1914-15 Hegel Notebooks andto his subsequent failure publiclyto discuss them very much, a problem that the Hegelian Marxist Raya Dunayevskaya has termed Lenin's "philosophic ambivalence."2 During the 1970s and early 1980s in the United States, and earlier in Europe, heated debates over the nature of Marxist theory raged among the various Marxist traditions that Gouldner had analyzed as constituting these two Marxisms, especially in journals such as Telos, New Left Review, and Theory and Society. By the 1990s the intellectual ground had shifted, and Marxism itself was increasingly being called into question even by radical intellectuals, not least because of the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and x I Introduction Russia. Marxism was deemed a fuilure at a political level because it had helped to bring about totalitarianism and economic collapse. Attacks were leveled not only at the authoritarian and vanguardist side of Lenin's thought but also at his more "utopian" writings on the state and revolution, on direct democracy by soviets of workers, peasants, and soldiers. In 1991 the leftist theorist Martin Jay, best known for his work on the Frankfurt School, summed up some of these critiques of Marx­ ism in a mordant essay entitled "No Power to the Soviets." Although he fuiled to address the side of Lenin's thought that advocates soviets, or workers' councils,Jay's essay sums up well some of the 1990s-era objec­ tions to radical revolution, even if it were from "below" through direct democracy: For Leninism was not the only socialist casualty of the recent events; no less called into question, at least implicitly, was another model of emancipatory organization, and one which had occupied a central role in the socialist imaginary for more than a century.This alternative model was that of the workers council or soviet, which has often functioned as the utopian counterpoint to the "realistic" Leninist stress on the party. Preserved in name only in the title of the Soviet Union, it remained nonetheless a vital rallying point for libertarian socialist critic\ of authoritarian, bureaucratic, statist communism. Rooted in the syndical­ ism of the 19th century, councils became historically important at various moments in the revolutions of our own-1905 and 1917 in Russia, 1918 to 1920 in Germany, Austria and Italy, and 1956 in Hungary...
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