File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2001/bhaskar.0102, message 110


From: "Sean Creaven" <seancreaven-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: BHA: Re: Bhaskar's politics
Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2001 15:21:24 -0000


On Sunday 11 Feb, Andrew Hagen wrote:

I was not merely blaming Stalinism on Leninism. I was blaming many things on 
Lenin. My major point remains: Lenin's theory/practice inconsistency is 
indicative of a flawed praxis.

But nowhere in his reply to my post (or his original post) does Andrew 
justify this argument. It is simply an assertion. My reply to his claim was 
that Leninist political practice in the post-revolutionary context diverged 
from Leninist political principles (a multi-party soviet democracy in tandem 
with socialised production) because of the pressure of catastrophic events, 
not because of a basic inconsistency in Lenin's grasp of the theory/practice 
connection. I sought to illustrate this claim with reference to certain 
historical events. Instead of confronting this (admittedly sketchy) 
argument, Andrew simply rules it out as foul play, because 'getting beyond 
the province of the list'. This being the case, Andrew's claim that I have 
not engaged with the substance of his remarks is decidely odd. In fact, the 
boot is exactly on the other foot.

Nonetheless, having taken this step ('the mailing list is not a historical 
investigation'), Andrew is not shy about appealing to 'the plain 
[historical] facts' of the matter to support his contrary view that Lenin's 
politics are justifiably maligned. As he puts it: 'Some people will deny the 
plain facts I rely on. The fact of Lenin's tyranny remains nonetheless'. But 
the 'facts' of which he speaks are precisely the point at issue, and no 
assessment of the relationship between Lenin's theory and practice can 
sensibly be made without reference to them, as Andrew recognises in practice 
if not in rhetoric.

I pointed out that a wide range of historical scholarship has shown that 
much of the Bolsheviks' post-revolutionary policy (War Communism, penal 
policy, hypercentralisation of command, the suppression of Krondstadt, the 
dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, etc.) was unavoidable given the 
catastrophic situation of the wars of foreign intervention, the White 
Terror, and the economic collapse. Put simply, the siege economy was a 
response to a siege. The fact that these measures were lamented and seen as 
departures from political principle by leading Bolsheviks is well 
documented. Despite this, Soviet penal policy prior to the rise of Stalin 
was remarkably restrained, and not arbitrary as is often said. But don't 
take my word for it. Listers should read Rees (1997) for a detailed rebuttal 
of the 'the malignant straight line theory'(Cohen 1988) of the Bolshevik 
revolution, drawing on an impressive range of historical scholarship,liberal 
and socialist, which should also be consulted. Certainly, at the very least, 
these sources would reject the simplistic view that Lenin's government was a 
'tyranny' or simply 'murderous', as Andrew claims.

But perhaps Andrew's thought is that a socialist revolution can be defended 
against those prepared to go to any lengths necessary to drown it in blood 
without any recourse to violence or terror. My own view is that a measure of 
terror and violence was unavoidable and therefore justifiable in the context 
of the civil war, because without it the forces of White reaction would have 
destroyed the soviet democracy and workers' state, and erected in its place 
a fascistic military dictatorship. Imagine the consequences of that! The 
White generals executed more people in one year (1919) in the Ukraine than 
the Bolsheviks did during the entirety of the civil war. The White armies 
practised torture as a matter of course, the Bolsheviks forbade torture and 
strove to punish those in their ranks who did practice torture. The Whites 
imprisoned arbitrarily, the Bolsheviks did not, instead striving to do so 
only if there was clear evidence of a security risk. If the Whites had won, 
the terror would have surpassed even that of Stalin. And what of the 
consequences of that in global terms? Would Hitler, for instance, have been 
so keen to destroy a fascist Russia? If not, how might the course of World 
War II been affected?

So, in answer to Andrew's question ('Lenin had to make tough compromises?), 
the answer is obviously yes, of course he did. And perhaps he made mistakes 
as well. But, again, drawing up a balance sheet of the rights and wrongs of 
Leninism cannot be done if you take 'the fact' of Lenin's arbitrary 
practice, his tyranny, and so on, for granted.

I will conclude by making a few more critical remarks in response to 
Andrew's reply. Andrew says:

Bhaskar is a critical realist. He rejects idealism. In DPF he argues that a 
theory/practice inconsistency is the result of a badly flawed Hegelian 
dialectic. Bhaskar criticises Lenin and blames diamat on him. Would you say 
that this makes Bhaskar an idealist?

Of course not. Perhaps Bhaskar is an idealist, perhaps not, but this is 
irrelevant to my argument. In fact, one can be an idealist and accept CR, 
for example by accepting the stratification of nature, the reality of the 
world beyond human thought, yet holding that the most basic stratum is God. 
In any case, I am criticising you not Bhaskar. But I would say that Bhaskar 
is wrong to blame vulgar Stalinist diamat on Lenin. I would also say, 
incidentally, that a reconstructed diamat is defensible, anti-reductionist 
and compatible with CR, as I argue in my Marxism and Realism (ch.1). Since 
the point at issue is precisely whether or not there is a theory/practice 
inconsistency inherent in Leninism, it does not get us anyplace making the 
obvious point that 'Bhaskar is a critical realist', or asking the rhetorical 
question: 'Is Bhaskar an idealist?' Bhaskar is undoubtedly a realist, he 
does believe there exists a theory/practice inconsistency in Lenin, but that 
does not mean that Lenin is guilty as charged, or offer any support for your 
own belief that Lenin is guilty as charged.

Andrew asks:

Just what were Lenin's contributions to politics?

Have you read the 'The State and Revolution', Andrew? if not, you might find 
it an illuminating read. What about Lenin's theory of the party? Democratic 
centralism? Perhaps you think these can be simply discarded. Perhaps they 
ought to be, but few would deny that these are Lenin's contributions to 
politics. What about the manner of his application of Trotsky's theory of 
combined and uneven development to Russian conditions? This allowed Lenin to 
argue for the viability of socialist revolution in backward Russia, without 
his politics collapsing into voluntarism, whilst at the same time preserving 
the decisive role of agency in epochal transformation. Again, perhaps 
Lenin's political strategy here was misguided, but it was undoubtedly a real 
contribution to socialist politics.

Andrew asks:

Where does Bhaskar make this error [of reading off the errors of Stalinism] 
from alleged errors in philosophy and theory? It would be interesting to 
hear exactly where. For the life of me, I don't think you can back up this 
claim, however.

Andrew, I would not wish you to forfeit your life simply for being mistaken 
on this matter. But Bhaskar does say:

This is not the least of my differences with Hegel, who, although a more 
sophisticated exponent of cognitive triumphalism, Prometheanism, or 
absolutism, nevertheless is a conduit directly connecting his older 
contemporary Pierre de Laplace to Lenin and thence diamat and the erstwhile 
command economies of the omniscient party states (Bhaskar, in Archer et al. 
1998, p. 576).

If this (amazingly reductive and sweeping) sketch does not qualify as a 
statement of how misguided philosophical ideas or positions (in this case 
'cognitive triumphalism')translate directly into repressive political 
practices, it is hard to see what would! But I would like to make the 
obvious qualifying point that I am not saying that philosophical errors do 
not have pernicious political effects. All I am saying is that a 
consideration of the relationship between philosophy and politics is not 
generally adequate to the task of understanding the trajectory of politics 
or society, because more often than not the actual development of social and 
political structures is shaped rather more by contingent and conjunctural 
real world events and circumstances than by errors in theory. My contention 
is that real-world circumstances and events, not theoretical errors internal 
to Leninism, or Lenin's failure to think out adequately the relationship 
between theory and practice, explain the degeneration of the Bolshevik 
revolution.

But it is interesting to see how historical understandings of the 1917 
revolution are refracted through the dominant political paradigms of the 
day. In the 1960s and 1970s, the 'malignant straight line' view was rightly 
subjected to detailed critique by Marxist, socialist and libertarian 
historians and analysts, who recognised the Cold War agenda of 'orthodox' 
Russian historiography and sought to challenge it. Today, however, following 
the collapse of the Eastern bloc, and with the spectre of 'communism 
repentant', many on the left who once crudely identified authoritarian state 
control with socialism have lost their political bearings and critical 
faculties. The result has been the dominance of liberal social thought in 
the academy, the effects of which include the expansion of Cold War type 
accounts of the Russian Revolution beyond their traditional right-of-centre 
constituency.

This is the context informing my observation that a socialist political 
practice has to base itself on a sober balance sheet of the lessons of 
October, and not a mere regurgitation of right wing myths. In other words, 
the critic has to assess the lessons of October through a broad range of 
competing perspectives, if a judgement of the competing claims of each is to 
be made. This does not necessarily mean that Leninist organisation is still 
appropriate today, that is another debate. But it does mean that we cannot 
have a sensible debate about the merits or demerits of Leninism if we allow 
Cold War myths to go unchallenged.

The fact that Andrew is not open-minded on this question, and has not 
properly researched his argument, is revealed by the way he has conducted 
our debate. For you, Andrew, to question a particular right wing 
interpretation of the Bolshevik revolution is to reveal a 'Leninist 
mentality', to defend 'Lenin's political murders', to be 'dogmatic', to come 
'out of the woodwork' in order to defend a 'creed'. You have even had this 
to say to another Lister:

By the way, I happen to think you are a very thoughtful intellectual who 
would be worth reading even if you did happen to be a Leninist.

Steady on! This tone suggests to me a lack of confidence in the arguments 
you are proposing. Note I have not accused you of having a particular 'mind 
set', of defending a 'creed' or crawling 'out of the woodwork'. All I have 
suggested is that you have fallen under the sway of a particular and 
extremely powerful ideology of anti-Bolshevism, which works basically by 
abstracting Bolshevik practice from its socio-economic context. There is no 
shame in that.

Regards

Sean
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