But Proudhon's dialectic is neither Hegelian nor Marxist. It is neither the rational unfolding of The Idea, within the mind, nor the unfolding of actually existing contradictions, in the real world. It is simply a Kantian dialectic of the process, in his own mind, of seeking to achieve The Kingdom of Heaven, to arrive at a given moral objective, driven by the categorical imperative, he has set for himself, and the set of solutions he must advance to resolve the contradictions that result from it in his mind. It is the method of all petty-bourgeois, moral socialists, down to this day.
“Indeed, from the moment the process of the dialectic movement is reduced to the simple process of opposing good to bad, and of administering one category as an antidote to another, the categories are deprived of all spontaneity; the idea “ceases to function"; there is no life left in it. It is no longer posed or decomposed into categories. The sequence of categories has become a sort of scaffolding. Dialectics has ceased to be the movement of absolute reason. There is no longer any dialectics but only, at the most, absolutely pure morality.” (p 106)
But, such pure morality, when it comes to practical action, in the real world, necessarily, is wracked with contradictions, and ceases to be absolute, becoming relative, as manifest in the many instances where the petty-bourgeois moralist is led into lesser-evilism, and “my enemy's enemy is my friend”. On this basis, it not only finds itself aligned with all sorts of reactionary forces, simply on the basis of seeking to find support against some other “bad”, which its moral imperative forces it to do, but it also drives it to become reactionary itself, as Marx described with Sismondi and Proudhon, Lenin identified with the Narodniks, and Trotsky identified with the Third Camp of Burnham and Shachtman.
Proudhon had begun by saying,
“that he did not want to give history according to the order in time, that is, in M. Proudhon's view, the historical sequence in which the categories have manifested themselves. Thus for him everything happened in the pure ether of reason.” (p 106)
In other words, Proudhon rejected the materialist dialectic, of studying the movement in the real world, and, instead, talked in terms only of a logical progression. By this means, any actual development, in the real world, can be dismissed as an aberration, a diversion from the true path. Liberals use this argument to explain the existence of monopoly, and the Narodniks used it to argue that capitalism represented a divergence from the true path for Russia, and the petty-bourgeois Third Campists used it to deny the existence of a Workers' State in Russia, on the basis that the deformed and disfigured reality of that state did not conform to their “ideal type” of what such a state should be.
As Trotsky sets out, the Stalinists also applied this method in their “stages theory”, which they shared with the Mensheviks, in which every society must pass through stages of historical development (i.e. teleology), so that the concept of permanent revolution is denied, and countries, like China or Spain, going through a process of bourgeois revolution, had to complete that revolution, before the question of proletarian revolution could be considered. That meant that the working-class had to subordinate itself, its interests and organisations to those of the bourgeoisie.
In Russia, in 1917, that was to Kerensky's Provisional Government, in China, it was the “bloc of four classes”, and subordination to the Kuomintang, in Spain, it was the Popular Front government, and so on. The same is seen, today, for example, with, on the one hand, the USC's “bloc of four classes” with the Ukrainian oligarchs, their state, and NATO, and, on the other hand, the bloc of Pro-Putin Stalinists and petty-bourgeois socialists with the Russian oligarchs and their capitalist state.
The Stalinists turned permanent revolution into a sterile concept, by which, once the process of bourgeois revolution started, proletarian revolution followed on, at some point in time, as the next stage, and so, whatever happened to workers along the way, such as the massacre of thousands of communist workers in Shanghai, in 1927, by the KMT, was just a part of this process, and its ebb and flow. It turns a dialectical movement, into a series of discrete events, like a series of still pictures rather than a moving image. But, for Marx and Engels, as set out in Marx's 1850 Address, and for Lenin and Trotsky, as set out in the theory of Permanent Revolution, in Lenin's April Theses, and its application in The Theses On The National and Colonial Questions, this is totally wrong, and disastrous.
No comments:
Post a Comment