Lecture three: The origins of Bolshevism and What Is To Be Done?
Part 4
By David North
9 September 2005
This is the fourth part of the lecture “The Origins of Bolshevism and What Is To Be Done?” delivered by World Socialist Web Site Editorial Board Chairman David North at the Socialist Equality Party/WSWS summer school held August 14 to August 20, 2005 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The lecture is being posted in seven installments. Parts 1, 2 and 3 were posted September 6-8.
This is the third lecture that was given at the school. The first, entitled “The Russian Revolution and the unresolved historical problems of the 20th century” was posted in four parts, from August 29 to September 1. The second, entitled “Marxism versus revisionism on the eve of the twentieth century,” was posted in three parts on September 2, 4 and 5. These lectures were also authored by David North.
What Is To Be Done?Lenin’s pamphlet begins by examining the demand raised by the Economist tendency—that is, the Russian followers of Eduard Bernstein—for “Freedom of Criticism.” He places this slogan—which, at first hearing, seems eminently democratic and appealing—within the context of the dispute raging within the ranks of international Social Democracy between the defenders of orthodox Marxism and the revisionists, who had undertaken a systematic theoretical and political attack on that orthodoxy.
Noting that Bernstein’s theoretical revisions of the programmatic foundations of the German Social Democratic Party found their logical political expression in the entrance of the French socialist Alexander Millerand into the government of President Waldeck-Rousseau, Lenin states that the slogan “‘Freedom of Criticism’ means freedom for an opportunist trend in Social Democracy, freedom to convert Social Democracy into a democratic party of reform, freedom to introduce bourgeois ideas and bourgeois elements into socialism.”[8]
To this demand Lenin replies that no one is denying the right of the revisionists to criticize. But Marxists, he insists, have no less a right to reject their criticisms and to fight the attempt to convert revolutionary Social Democracy into a reformist movement.
After briefly reviewing the origins of the Economist tendency in Russia, Lenin notes its general indifference to critical issues of theory. He states that the Economists’ “much vaunted freedom of criticism does not imply substitution of one theory for another, but freedom from all integral and pondered theory; it implies eclecticism and lack of principle.”[9] Lenin observes that this theoretical indifference is justified by revisionists who quote, out of context, Marx’s statement that the real practical advances of the socialist movement are more important than a dozen programs. “To repeat these words in a period of theoretical confusion,” Lenin replies, “is like wishing mourners at a funeral many happy returns of the day.”
He then declares, in words that cannot be quoted too frequently, “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. This idea cannot be insisted upon too strongly at a time when the fashionable preaching of opportunism goes hand in hand with an infatuation for the narrowest forms of practical activity.”[10] He argues that only “a party that is guided by the most advanced theory” will be able to provide the working class with revolutionary leadership, and recalls that Friedrich Engels had recognized “not two forms of the great struggle of Social Democracy (political and economic), as is the fashion among us, but three, placing the theoretical struggle on a par with the first two.”[11] Lenin quotes Engels’ statement that “Without German philosophy, which preceded it, particularly that of Hegel, German scientific socialism—the only scientific socialism that has ever existed—would never have come into being. Without a sense of theory among the workers, this scientific socialism would never have entered into their flesh and blood as much as is the case.”[12]
The second section of What Is To Be Done? is entitled “The Spontaneity of the Masses and the Consciousness of the Social Democrats.” This is, undoubtedly, the most important section of Lenin’s pamphlet, and, inevitably, the section that has been subjected to the most unrelenting attacks and misrepresentation. It is in this section, we have been frequently told, that Lenin exposes himself as an arrogant elitist, contemptuous of the mass of workers, disdainful of their aspirations, hostile to their daily struggles, lusting for personal power and dreaming only of the day when he and his accursed party will impose their iron-fisted totalitarian dictatorship over the unsuspecting Russian working class. It is worth our while to examine this section with special care.
The critical issue analyzed by Lenin is the nature of the relationship between Marxism and the revolutionary party on the one side and, on the other, the spontaneous movement of the working class and the forms of social consciousness that develop among workers in the course of that movement. He begins by tracing the evolution of the forms of consciousness among Russian workers, beginning with the initial manifestations of class conflict in the 1860s and 1870s.
Those struggles were of an extremely primitive character, involving the destruction of machinery by workers. Driven by desperation, lacking any awareness of the social and class nature of their revolt, these spontaneous eruptions manifested class consciousness only in an “embryonic” form. The situation that developed three decades later was significantly more advanced. Compared to the early struggles, the strikes of the 1890s manifested a significantly higher level of consciousness among the workers. The strikes were far more organized and even advanced quite detailed demands. But the consciousness exhibited by workers in these struggles was of a trade unionist rather than social democratic character. That is, the strikes did not raise demands of a political character, nor did they express an awareness of the deeper and irreconcilable nature of the conflict between the workers and the existing socio-economic and political order. The workers, rather, sought only to improve their situation within the framework of the existing social system.
This limitation was inevitable, in the sense that the spontaneous movement of the working class could not develop on its own, “spontaneously,” social democratic, i.e., revolutionary, consciousness. It is at this point that Lenin introduces the argument that has provoked so many denunciations. He writes:
“We have said that there could not have been Social Democratic consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labor legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals. By their social status, the founders of modern socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia. In the same way, in Russia, the theoretical doctrine of Social Democracy arose altogether independently of the spontaneous growth of the working class movement; it arose as a natural and inevitable outcome of the development of thought among the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia.”[13]
In support of his interpretation of the relationship between Marxism and the spontaneously developing trade unionist, i.e., bourgeois, consciousness of the working class, Lenin cites—along with approving comments by Karl Kautsky—the draft program of the Austrian Social Democratic Party:
“The more capitalist development increases the numbers of the proletariat, the more the proletariat is compelled and becomes fit to fight against capitalism. The proletariat becomes conscious of the possibility and necessity for socialism. In this connection socialist consciousness appears to be a necessary and direct result of the proletarian class struggle. But this is absolutely untrue. Of course, socialism, as a doctrine, has its roots in modern economic relationships just as the class struggle of the proletariat has, and, like the latter, emerges from the struggle against the capitalist-created poverty and misery of the masses. But 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. Indeed, modern economic science is as much a condition for socialist production as, say, modern technology, and the proletariat can create neither the one nor the other, no matter how much it may desire to do so; both arise out of the modern social process. The vehicle of science is not the proletariat, but the bourgeois intelligentsia [K.K.’s italics]: it was in the minds of individual members of this stratum that modern socialism originated, and it was they who communicated it to the more intellectually developed proletarians who, in their turn, introduce it into the proletarian class struggle where conditions allow that to be done. Thus, socialist consciousness is something introduced into the proletarian class struggle [von Aussen Hineingretagenes] and not something that arose within it spontaneously [urwuchsig]. Accordingly, the old Hainfeld program quite rightly stated that the task of Social-Democracy is to imbue the proletariat [literally: saturate the proletariat] with the consciousness of its position and the consciousness of its task. There would be no need for this if consciousness arose of itself from the class struggle.”[14]
Lenin draws from this passage the following conclusion:
“Since there can be no talk of an independent ideology formulated by the working masses themselves in the process of their movement, the only choice is—either bourgeois or socialist ideology. There is no middle course (for mankind has not created a ‘third’ ideology, and, moreover, in a society torn by class antagonisms there can never be a non-class or above-class ideology). Hence, to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology. There is much talk of spontaneity. But the spontaneous development of the working class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology, to its development along the lines of the Credo program; for the spontaneous working class movement is trade unionism, is Nur-Gewerkschaftlerei, and trade unionism means the ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie. Hence, our task, the task of Social-Democracy, is to combat spontaneity, to divert the working class from this spontaneous, trade unionist striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie, and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary Social-Democracy.”[15]
To be continued
Notes
[8] Collected Works Volume 5 (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1961), p. 335.
[9] Ibid, p. 369.
[10] Ibid, p. 369.
[11] Ibid, p. 370 (italics in the original).
[12] Ibid, p. 371.
[13] Ibid, pp. 375-76.
[14] Ibid, p. 383-84.
[15] Ibid, p. 384 (italics in the original).
