BHA: Re: Bhaskar's politics

["Sean Creaven" <seancreaven@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

Apologies for having (apparently) caused as dilemma (to post or not to post)
on the question of Lenins politics. I understand that my posts are not
strictly in keeping with the purpose of the list. Nonetheless, it would be a
pity to legislate historical matters out of bounds, as Andrew recommends.
Philosophy is always likely to make a fool of itself where it abstracts
itself from history.

Ruth, I would be happy to continue my debate with Andrew off-list. But Im
afraid Andrew does not seem particularly interested in the debate. Having
initially made the claim that Lenins government was a tyranny and simply
and straightforwardly murderous, he has made no effort to engage with my
contrary arguments, which I think were measured and constructive, even if
one wishes to dissent from them. I do not expect this situation to change at
this late stage, but you never know. This being the case, I propose to offer
a rejoinder to his latest outburst, then no more. This will be based on
quoted material from a number of historical studies, only one of which is
pro-Leninist. If Andrew wishes to reply he may do so by contacting me on
seancreaven@xxxxxxxxxxxx

Andrew remarks:

Sean Creaven, if your revolution involves killing innocent people, as Lenin
purposefully and knowingly ordered,  and if your reaction to this to all
this is that it was unavoidable, that There Is No Alternative, then stop
this bus. I want to get off.

Andrew, the first point is that we are discussing the October revolution of
1917, not my revolution, or an imaginary revolution. This revolution was
not simply made by the Bolshevik party, but by a wide layer of
class-conscious workers. This revolution was genuinely democratic, inasmuch
as it commanded the goodwill of a clear majority of the working class and a
smaller majority of the peasantry (see the accounts of Sukhanov, Service,
Martov, etc., all fierce critics of the Bolsheviks).

The second point is that Lenin simply did not purposefully and knowingly
order the killing of innocent people. I am a little worried about your
sources (assuming you have any). The most lurid first-hand accounts of Red
atrocities during the civil war have all (as far as Im aware) come from
White propagandists, and have no independent backing. If you know otherwise,
let me know. So far you have cited no historical resources to back your
assertions, and this renders rational debate difficult.

Solzhenitsyn famously claimed that the remarkably low numbers of people
incarcerated by the Bolsheviks at the height of the civil war and White
Terror (22,000) or so was a result of mass executions. This has been
disputed by McAuley (1991). There were executions, but these were not Cheka
policy and the most serious were in contravention of Cheka orders. In the
immediate aftermath of the shooting of Lenin, following the LSR revolt,
there was undoubtedly arbitrary revenge killings, but these were not
sanctioned by Lenin, and he ordered their cessation the moment he recovered
consciousness (Knightly 1986: 57-72). It is well-known that Lenin supported
executions under certain circumstances (in cases where counter-revolutionary
activities were proven beyond reasonable doubt). Lenin supported the
exercise of judicial killing during the civil war on the grounds that
imprisonment would not deter counter-revolutionaries who expected to be
released the moment their side won (Cliff 1975: 18). This may well have
been harsh, I would wish to argue otherwise, but it was not arbitrary, and
it was not a policy of deliberate killing of innocent people.

It is also well documented that Lenin intervened to redress arbitrary acts
by the Cheka. Hence his angry rebuttal of Latsiss recommendation: Dont
search the records of whether someones revolt against the soviet was an
armed or only verbal one (Lenin, Collected Works, vol.28: 389).

As Leggett (1981: 131-2) says:

He [Lenin] was concerned to establish, in each case that came to his
attention, whether the arrest had been necessary on purely pragmatic
security grounds. Why had the Kotelnichi Cvheka arrested the teacher Lubnin?
Why had the Vecheka not released Kiril Semenovich, despite assurances given
by two party members? Why had the Samara Provincial Cheka arrested the
members of an expedition of irrigation experts to Turkestan? Had the food
confiscation detachments and the Gavrilovo-Posadnaia Cheka acted correctly
in confiscating grain? Could not Viktor Ivanovich Dobrovolskii, under arrest
in Petrograd, be released? He was said to be ill, apolitical, and his
familys only breadwinner.

Again, at the height of the civil war, when the survival of the soviet
regime was threatened by, frankly, fascist forces, who were practising
arbitrary murderous terror, slaughtering innocent workers and peasants on
sight, and unleashing anti-Jewish pogroms, even at this juncture the soviets
did not practice arbitrary terror as state policy. This is not to say that
the Reds on the ground did not sometimes commit arbitrary killings. This
was inevitable given the ferocity of the life-and-death struggle against the
White forces. Rather, it is to say that arbitrary killings were not policy,
were not officially sanctioned, and were punished where they were brought to
light.

Consider the example of the penal system during the civil war. Medvedev
(1979) argues that the systematic degradation and torture of prisoners was
not a feature of pre-Stalinist Leninist Russia, though it became as such
under Stalin. The Corrective Labour Code of 1924 stated:

The regime should be devoid of any trace of cruel or abusive treatment, the
following by no means permitted: handcuffs, punishment cells, solitary
confinement, denial of food, keeping prisoners behind bars during
conversations with visitors (Medvedev 1989: 502).

Medvedevs research indicates that in most cases this code was observed at
the time (Medvedev 1989: 502). Prisoners were allowed freedom of speech
and of the press. They often produced their own journals which expressed
views hostile to the government. In Irkutsk prisoners produced Thought
Behind Bars, in Vitebsk, Omsk and elsewhere Prisoners Thought appeared
and in Kharkov, Penza and other places The Prisoners Voice was produced
(Rees 1997: 52, basing his account on Kagarlitsky 1988). Despite the ravages
of the civil war, soviet penal policy was actually less repressive than most
of the advanced capitalist states.

All of this seems light years away from Andrews extraordinary clam that
Leninism was basically about the arbitrary execution of people on grounds of
their class membership (Take at least 100 small business owners, line them
up against the wall, and kill them by firing squad, with at least 100
underlined three times). Are you citing a real order by a leading
Bolshevik? Did Lenin say it? Or is it simply something plucked from your
imagination?

In answer to Andrews question (Would I give the order to kill civilians
arbitrarily in a  revolutionary situation?), the answer is of course no.
Quite how answering in the negative furthers our debate is unclear. No I
would not, and nor would, or did, Lenin.

But Andrews broader point seems to be that a socialist revolution is
possible without recourse to violence or killing. This was not Marx's view.
In response to the counter-revolution in France, Marx said that there was
'only one means to curtail, simplify, and localise the agony of the old
society and the birth pangs of the new, only one means - the revolutionary
terror' (cited in Rees 1997: 49). Nonetheless, this view doubtless informs
Andrew's point in asking me whether or not I would sanction arbitrary
killing of civilians. But nowhere does Andrew consider the issue of the
relationship between objective constraints and subjective or political
choices in post-revolutionary Russia during the civil war. Instead he
contents himself with the abstract contextless generalisation that there is
always a choice. But what was this third way between war communism,
centralised command, the exercise of a measure of terror, on the one hand,
and defeat and rightwing military dictatorship, on the other, given the
circumstances? Andrew does not trouble himself to say.

In the judgement of Lenin, and in fact most of the party membership, not to
mention the revolutionary workers, there was no practical alternative to the
policies that were undertaken, though they were bitterly lamented Given the
fact that Russia was being crushed between 14 foreign armies numbering
200,000 troops, given the fact that Russia had already suffered three
million dead in the First World War, and was in the process of losing
millions more, given the fact that the White armies were attempting (with a
large measure of success) to terrorise the peasantry into submission, given
the fact that steel production was just 12% of the pre-war period, iron ore
just 12.3%, coal just 42%, railway track just 4%, and given the fact that
the working class was decimated by the war, and all of this in an already
underdeveloped country (Rees 1997: 31), is it really good enough to simply
invoke the principle of choice, and thereby dissolve the social and
material context of state decision-making? Perhaps the Bolsheviks were
wrong. But invoking existential principles does not demonstrate that they
were. It should go without saying that the emergent properties of agency are
not so robust that they can override those of structural constraint in every
conceivable circumstance. To believe otherwise is to collapse social
analysis into voluntarism and subjectivism.

Andrew says:

Instead of degeneration, Bhaskar implies that the Bolshevik revolution
could not have properly germinated as a revolution, when Bhaskar in DPF p.
15 links Hegel, Lenin, and diamat.

But surely the radical distance separating Lenin and Stalin, from the young
workers soviet democracy that briefly flowered before the civil war to the
bureaucratic statified ruling class which usurped power from the mid 1920s,
does evidence a qualitative break. This is conceded by liberal historians
such as Cohen (1985), who refers to the contrary view as the malignant
straight line theory of history (associated with right wing historians). As
Cohen says:

Stalins new policies of 1929-33, the great change as they became known,
were a radical departure from Bolshevik programmatic thinking. O Bolshevik
leader or faction had ever advocated anything akin to imposed
collectivisation, the liquidisation of allegedly prosperous peasants
(kulaks), breakneck heavy industrialisation, the destruction of the entire
market sector, and a plan that in reality was no plan at all, only
hypercentralised control of the economy plus exhortations. These years of
revolution from above were, historically and programmatically, the birth
period of Stalinism (Cohen 1985: 62).


Cohen again:

Official ideology changed radically under Stalin. Several of those changes
have been noted by western and Soviet scholars: the revival of nationalism,
statism, anti-semitism, conservative, or reactionary cultural or behavioural
norms; the repeal of ideas and legislation favouring workers, women,
schoolchildren, minority cultures, and egalitarianism, as well as a host of
revolutionary and Bolshevik symbols; and a switch in emphasis from ordinary
people to leaders and official bosses as the creators of history. They were
not simply amendments but a new ideology that was changed in essence and
that did not represent the same movement as that which took power in 1917
(Cohen 1985: 52).


Clearly, it is legitimate to speak of degeneration in this context. Andrew
himself offers no substantive argument in defence of Bhaskars position,
which he himself describes as merely implication. Bhaskar has very little
to say about the relationship between Hegel and Lenin. Yet Andrew is right
to say that Bhaskar does not assert that Lenin had a T/P inconsistency,
though it is legitimate to hold that Bhaskar does believe this, given that
he says that Lenin shared Hegels cognitive triumphalism.

I have argued that it is scarcely plausible to reduce Stalinism to
philosophical errors in Hegel. It would be nice if Andrew would see fit to
offer a contrary argument instead of merely an aside from Bhaskar. I find
little evidence from my own readings of Lenin of cognitive triumphalism,
or of his uncritical digestion of Hegelian philosophy. I would say,
moreover, there is a correspondence between Marxs dialectical method in
Grundrisse and Capital and Lenins dialectical method in his
Philosophical Notebooks, his most developed statement of dialectic. Both
attempt to detach the fundamental principles of Hegels dialectic -
totality, contradiction, change and mediation - and situate them in a
critical materialist framework which is anti-teleological. Both stress the
open-ended and indeterminate nature of dialectical processes. Both stress
the difference between subjective and objective dialectics. Both are clear
that dialectical processes in society unfold only by virtue of agential
struggles which are never fixed in advance.

A final word. Lenin had read Hegel by the end of the 1890s. He had also read
a number of other philosophers, including Kant and the Enlightenment
mechanical materialists. Arguably, the latter figured more importantly in
his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism than Hegel. I would say that Lenin
did not really digest Hegel until after his re-reading (which became the
basis of the Philosophical Notebooks). This obviously occurred after Lenin
had read Marx. So I would say that Andrews claim that Lenins reading of
Marx was refracted through Hegel is rather tenuous.

Regards

Sean

_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.



    --- from list bhaskar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---