Re: The Revolutionary Significance of What is to be Done?

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Edward George:
>Central to Lenin's argument were his views on spontaneity and consciousness.
>  The ostensible ideological target of What is to be Done? was the trend
>known as 'economism', which stressed the importance of the day to day,
>economic and trade union aspects of working class struggle, and thus made
>something of a virtue of the spontaneous development of working class
>consciousness.  Against this conception, Lenin offered a number of critical
>arguments.  Most importantly, he stressed that the working class, left to
>its own devices, was unable to develop social-democratic -- meaning
>revolutionary socialist -- consciousness, only what he termed 'trade union
>consciousness'.  That is, simply by virtue of its conditions of life under
>capitalism, there was no automatic mechanism which prompted the working
>class to revolutionary conclusions.  Thus: 'The working class, exclusively
>by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness', or,
>more strongly: 'The spontaneous working-class movement is by itself able to
>create (and inevitably does create) only trade-unionism, and working-class
>trade-union politics is precisely working-class bourgeois politics.' [11]
>Socialist consciousness had to be introduced into the working class struggle
>from 'without'.  This is what was most fundamental and new about Lenin's
>theory, and what lay at the core of his -- soon to be literally 'Bolshevik'
>-- politics.

I disagree. Nearly every one of the "Leninist innovations" were simply
elements from social democracy adapted to the Russian scene.

Lenin's key contribution, the need for a working-class vanguard, was not
his innovation at all. It merely represented mainstream thinking in
European Social Democracy. Eighteen years before the publication of "What
is to be Done?", George Plekhanov stated that "the socialist
intelligentsia...must become the leader of the working class in the
impending emancipation movement, explain to it its political and economic
interests and also the interdependence of those interests and must prepare
them to play an independent role in the social life of Russia."

In 1898, Pavel Axelrod wrote that "the proletariat, according to the
consciousness of the Social Democrats, does not possess a ready-made,
historically elaborated social ideal," and "it goes without saying that
these conditions, without the energetic participation of the Social
Democrats, may cause our proletariat to remain in its condition as a
listless and somnolent force in respect of its political development."

The Austrian Hainfeld program of the Social Democrats said that "Socialist
consciousness is something that is brought into the proletarian class
struggle from the outside, not something that organically develops out of
the class struggle." Kautsky, the world's leading Marxist during this
period, stated that "socialism and the class struggle arise side by side
and not one out of the other; each arises under different conditions.
Modern socialist consciousness can arise only on the basis of profound
scientific knowledge."

The most detailed presentation of Lenin's concept of a vanguard occurs in
the section of "What is to be Done" titled "The Working Class as Vanguard
Fighter for Democracy". The notion of a vanguard emerges out of Lenin's
struggle with the "economists", *not* the "Mensheviks". Those
"Marxist-Leninists" who use the pamphlet as some kind of organizing
handbook often neglect this fact.

As opposed to Martynov the Economist who expects the class political
consciousness of workers to develop from within their economic struggle,
Lenin argues that "class political consciousness can only be brought to the
workers from without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle,
from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers." In
this he was merely expressing conventional social democratic thinking.

The Social Democrat should not aspire to be a trade union secretary, but
instead the "tribune of the people." This tribune will "react to every
manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no
matter what stratum of people it affects; who is able to generalize all
these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and
capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every event,
however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions
and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the
world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the
proletariat."

Lenin's example of one such tribune is the German Social Democratic leader
Wilhelm Liebnecht. The German Social Democracy was Lenin's *model* for what
was needed in Russia. This type of party did not exist in Russia and it was
his goal to build one. It was never his intention to build a "Leninist" party.

Social Democracy would fulfill the role of vanguard insofar as it was able
to act as such a tribune and develop class political consciousness among
the proletariat. Rather than relying spontaneous struggles at the plant
gate over economic issues to generate such consciousness, the Social
Democracy would import these political lessons into the class struggle from
the *outside*.

The clearest statement Lenin makes on behalf of this approach is the
following: "Why is there not a single political event in Germany that does
not add to the authority and prestige of the Social-Democracy? Because
Social-Democracy is always found to be in advance of all the others in
furnishing the most revolutionary appraisal of every given event and in
championing every protest against tyranny...It intervenes in every sphere
and in every question of social and political life; in the matter of
Wilhelm's refusal to endorse a bourgeois progressive as city mayor (our
Economists have not managed to educate the Germans to the understanding
that such an act is, in fact, a compromise with liberalism!); in the matter
of the law against 'obscene' publications and pictures; in the matter of
governmental influence on the election of professors, etc., etc."

So the vanguard in Lenin's view would embrace bourgeois progressives in a
fight with a royalist, the rights of artists to publish smut and the power
of the academy to choose its own academicians. What this sounds like to me
is a prescription for a militant Socialist Party that fights on all fronts
in the most uncompromising and non- sectarian manner. I agree with this
concept of a vanguard.


Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org



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