Lenin's own narrow conception of this class struggle is conditioned by a number of factors. Firstly, the later volumes of Capital had only recently become available, a lot of their interpretation coloured by the contents of Volume I, as well as by Marx's own earlier writings such as the Communist Manifesto, much of the content of which Marx and Engels had themselves described as historical relics. Secondly, the expansion of socialised capital was still a relatively new phenomenon, and, in Russia, newer still. Finally, Lenin's position is often formed by his need to polemicise against others, here the Narodniks, and Legal Marxists, which leads him to inevitably “bend the stick” in order to make his point.
Lenin, however, does arrive at the correct conclusion that the whole point is to analyse these social developments, and thereby to precisely understand what has changed within them, what new antagonisms have arisen on the basis of them, and to explain this to workers on the basis of moving forward from them. Its on this basis that Lenin rejects Economism. The Marxists job was not to act simply as militant trades unionists, assisting the workers in their economic struggles for higher wages etc. It was to explain to workers that their exploitation resided in these specific forms of ownership and control of capital that results in these repeated skirmishes. It was to explain why that can only end when workers have ownership and control of the means of production. As Marx had put it,
““We do not say to the world: Cease struggling—your whole struggle is senseless. All we do is to provide it with a true slogan of struggle.” (letter to Ruge (dated September 1843)) (p 328)
The Narodniks, like the Sismondists, and Proudhonists, when they saw poverty only saw poverty. Looking at their writings,
“you will be astonished that socialists could be satisfied with a theory that confines itself to studying and describing distress and to moralising over it.” (p 328)
The Narodnik solution was to offer up schemas of future development that avoided the capitalist development that was proceeding apace around them, and which Engels in his letter to Danielson had said offered Russia “new hope”. But, whilst Lenin rejected the dead-end of such Utopian schemas, of alternative paths of economic development, as well as other forms of Economism, he also rejected the other extreme of constitutionalism, as represented by the Narodnoye Pravo party. As between the two, Lenin clearly sees the bourgeois constitutionalists of Narodnoye Pravo as progressive, as against the reactionary Utopians of the Narodniks. The former recognised the reality of capitalist development in Russia, and its progressive nature. They sought to follow through on that progressive development by a political campaign for the same kind of constitutional reforms and bourgeois democratic rights and freedoms that capitalist development had brought in its train in Western Europe and North America.
However, Lenin says that for the socialists to join a bourgeois party that limits itself purely to such a constitutionalist struggle would spell death to it, because the whole point of the independent organisation of the socialists is to highlight the separate and antagonistic interests of workers to those of the bourgeoisie. Here, in fact, is an early indication of the Marxist opposition to the concept of the Popular Front. The socialists could share temporary, short-term interests with the bourgeois liberals, for example, in demands for constitutional reforms, and demands for political rights and freedoms, but they could never join them in any single organisation, because their fundamental class interests were antagonistic. Indeed, in the 1890s, Lenin advocated several alliances to achieve such demands, but these were always short-term tactical alliances. And Lenin notes of the Narodnoye Pravo,
“It must, therefore, be admitted that they are taking a step forward by basing an exclusively political struggle—unrelated to socialism—on an exclusively political programme. The Social-Democrats whole-heartedly wish the Narodopravtsi success, wish that their party may grow and develop, that they may form closer ties with those social elements which take their stand by the present economic system and whose everyday interests really are most intimately bound up with democracy.” (p 331)
Lenin meant here that they were standing with those that put their faith in the development of capitalism, in Russia, as the basis of the extension of their political rights and freedoms, as against the Narodniks who were prepared to forgo any extension of political rights simply in the hope that state bureaucrats and intellectuals would return Russia to its “natural path of development”.
“The conciliatory, cowardly, sentimental and dreamy Narodism of the “friends of the people” will not stand up long when attacked from both sides: by the political radicals for being capable of expressing confidence in the bureaucracy and for not realising the absolute necessity of political struggle; and by the Social-Democrats, for attempting to represent themselves almost as socialists, although they have not the slightest relation to socialism and not the slightest inkling of the causes of the oppression of the working people or of the character of the class struggle now in progress.” (p 332)
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