Re: BHA: Re: on Bhaskar's politics

[lynne engelskirchen <lhengels@xxxxxxx>]

Thanks Sean for your post.

It seems we are asked for reasoned argument and then when it occurs it is
marked off list.

I have always operated on the assumption that errors in practice could be
traced to errors in theory.  There is a virtue to this.  For one thing it
requires theoretical work; for another, historical events used to
illustrate do not stand simply as assertions of fact, which may be
disputed, but confirm tendential necessities of a way the world is
represented and understood.

That theory/practice inconsistency should have particular purchase in
contemporary philosophy is not hard to understand: capital is through and
through a hypocritical relation.  But I wonder if it has always engaged
philosophical attention.  Aristotle talked of weakness of will, which is
something different.

Anyway, I rely on Hegel too.

Howard



At 11:39 AM 2/11/01 -0000, you wrote:
>On Sat, 10 Feb 2001, Andrew Hagen wrote:
>
>>when examining what Lenin said and did in his life, it's hard to >forget
>>all of the political murders he ordered, all the terror he >inflicted, and
>>all the ramifications of his actions that were felt by >libertarian forces
>>around the world.
>
>Andrew, I know nothing of the context of your post, having recently
>subscribed to the list, apprently at the tail end of a debate over Bhaskar's
>politics, and perhaps their relationship to Marxist politics. But it is
>decidely odd to see Bhaskar's comments on the theory/practice inconsistency
>in Hegel used in this way to attack Lenin's politics. As you put it:
>
>>Does that sound like Lenin to you [the theory/practice inconsistency]? >He
>>thinks one thing, does another, and then justifies his disreputable
>> >actions with theory.
>
>Andrew, the tone of your post recalls the worst excesses of Cold War
>anti-Bolshevik historiography. It is sad to see this being imported into CR.
>This tradition basically blames Stalinism on Lenin's political practice,
>which departed from his stated ideals. There are a number of strands here:
>
>1. The Bolshevik revolution was a coup, not an uprising validated by the
>majority support it commanded amongst the proltariat and peasantry.
>
>2. Lenin's party was undemocratic from the start of its life, and these
>authoritarian principles were inevitably transmitted into post-revolutionary
>state practices.
>
>3. The Bolsheviks' dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, conduct of the
>civil war, establishment of the Cheka, and so on, evidence the self-same
>anti-democratic principles of Lenin's politics, and their departure from his
>professed libertarian ideals.
>
>4. The logic of Lenin's political practice therefore led inevitably to 'war
>communism' and then the consolidation of Stalinism
>
>Now a range of historical resources since the 1960s (by no means all of them
>Marxist-inspired) have cast down each of these myths.
>
>1. Lenin held back the party from a 'premature uprising' in the 'July Days'
>of 1917, precisely because at this stage the party had not a won a majority
>of delegates in the soviets to a socialist revolution. Lenin was clear that
>the revolution had to have a democratic mandate, and because it did have
>this it was virtually bloodless.
>
>2. Lenin's party was from its inception dogmatic about the need for vigorous
>internal debate. Democratic centralism meant collective party debate and
>decision-making which having been formulated and ratified was then binding
>on individual members.
>
>3. The dissolution of the CA was seen as necessary because it was
>inceasingly compromised with the forces of reaction who wished to destroy
>the fledgling soviet-based worker/peasant democracy and who were mobilising
>a coup behind its cover.
>
>4. At the height of the civil war and the White Terror, where the workers'
>state was struggling to survive, there were just 100,000 people detained by
>the state, a smaller pecentage of the population than in modern Britain.
>Under Stalin millions disappeared or were imprisoned. The systematic
>degradation of prisoners was not a systematic featue of pre-Stalinist
>Russia. The 1924 Corrective Labour Code forbade handcuffing, punishment
>cells, solitary confinement, denial of food, keeping prisoners behind bars
>during conversations with visitors, etc., and this was by and large upheld,
>despite the White Terror and the economic devastation (and fears of
>'traitors' in the ranks)it wrought. Prisoners were allowed freedom of speech
>and the press. And Lenin himself intervened against arbitrary arrests by the
>Cheka. It was Leninist practice, not simply policy, that after the civil war
>emergency passed, the Cheka would be disbanded and the prisons emptied of
>most of their occupants.
>
>5. Stalinism was a qualitative break from Leninism, and one which involved
>the virtual destruction of the old Bolshevik party. Neither the forcible
>collectivisation of the peasantry, nor the denial of trade union and other
>rights, nor the radical suppression of the market, nor the introduction of
>brutal regimes of capital accumulation, were part of Leninist principle or
>practice. War Communism was a function (bitterly lamented by Lenin and other
>leading Bolsheviks)of the desperate economic and social straits of Russia
>during the civil war. And the extent of the economic and social collapse
>cannot be exaggerated; it was truly catastropic, decimating the working
>class, halving industrial production, shattering communications, and forcing
>the Bolsheviks to adopt hypercentralised control simply to survive, thereby
>substituting for the class which made the revolution.
>
>Andrew, doubtless you might be inclined to say that this is your point.
>Lenin's political practice divulged from his socialist principles. But this
>was not due to Lenin's 'incoherence'. It was due instead to the material
>circumstances in which the revolution unfolded. In the real world of
>politics, absolute consistency in terms of correspondence of practice to
>ideals, is rarely possible. This does not mean Leninism was always right,
>that major mistakes were not made. But such mistakes surely were bound to
>occur, given the circumstances. To judge Leninism only in terms of the
>question 'did his practice diverge from his theory', without proper regard
>to the world outside politics, is idealism pure and simple.
>
>By ignoring the social and economic context of post-revolutionary Russia,
>with which Leninist practice had to engage, you do nothing to develop an
>understanding of Lenin's contribution to politics, and offer nothing to a
>sober debate over the appropriate political practices of socialism in the
>future. Incidentally, this is also Bhaskar's error. He to seems to think
>that the experience of 'state socialism in Russia and elsewhere can be
>simply read-off from alleged errors in philosophy and theory, without
>considering the real messy world in which politics has to engage.
>
>This diverts attention away from the real issues: What kind of socialism?
>What kind of party? Does socialism have to be 'market socialism' or is
>democratic planning and the elimination of commodity production still
>feasible or desirable? We cannot address these issues until we get to grips
>with the real lessons of October. Because, until we do, debate will always
>take place on the terrain of the right, which suits opponents of the left,
>meaning a wider evaluation of political strategies cannot occur.
>
>Regards
>
>Sean
>
>
>
>
>
>w  AnSince I am interested in this question, I wonder if Andrew wouldn't
>mind reposting that to
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