File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2001/bhaskar.0102, message 86


Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2001 01:28:15 -0500
From: lynne engelskirchen <lhengels-AT-igc.org>
Subject: Re: BHA: Re: on Bhaskar's politics





Thanks Sean for your post.

It seems we are asked for reasoned argument and then when it occurs it is
marked off list.

I have always operated on the assumption that errors in practice could be
traced to errors in theory.  There is a virtue to this.  For one thing it
requires theoretical work; for another, historical events used to
illustrate do not stand simply as assertions of fact, which may be
disputed, but confirm tendential necessities of a way the world is
represented and understood.  

That theory/practice inconsistency should have particular purchase in
contemporary philosophy is not hard to understand: capital is through and
through a hypocritical relation.  But I wonder if it has always engaged
philosophical attention.  Aristotle talked of weakness of will, which is
something different.

Anyway, I rely on Hegel too.  

Howard



At 11:39 AM 2/11/01 -0000, you wrote:
>On Sat, 10 Feb 2001, Andrew Hagen wrote:
>
>>when examining what Lenin said and did in his life, it's hard to >forget 
>>all of the political murders he ordered, all the terror he >inflicted, and 
>>all the ramifications of his actions that were felt by >libertarian forces 
>>around the world.
>
>Andrew, I know nothing of the context of your post, having recently 
>subscribed to the list, apprently at the tail end of a debate over Bhaskar's 
>politics, and perhaps their relationship to Marxist politics. But it is 
>decidely odd to see Bhaskar's comments on the theory/practice inconsistency 
>in Hegel used in this way to attack Lenin's politics. As you put it:
>
>>Does that sound like Lenin to you [the theory/practice inconsistency]? >He 
>>thinks one thing, does another, and then justifies his disreputable 
>> >actions with theory.
>
>Andrew, the tone of your post recalls the worst excesses of Cold War 
>anti-Bolshevik historiography. It is sad to see this being imported into CR. 
>This tradition basically blames Stalinism on Lenin's political practice, 
>which departed from his stated ideals. There are a number of strands here:
>
>1. The Bolshevik revolution was a coup, not an uprising validated by the 
>majority support it commanded amongst the proltariat and peasantry.
>
>2. Lenin's party was undemocratic from the start of its life, and these 
>authoritarian principles were inevitably transmitted into post-revolutionary 
>state practices.
>
>3. The Bolsheviks' dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, conduct of the 
>civil war, establishment of the Cheka, and so on, evidence the self-same 
>anti-democratic principles of Lenin's politics, and their departure from his 
>professed libertarian ideals.
>
>4. The logic of Lenin's political practice therefore led inevitably to 'war 
>communism' and then the consolidation of Stalinism
>
>Now a range of historical resources since the 1960s (by no means all of them 
>Marxist-inspired) have cast down each of these myths.
>
>1. Lenin held back the party from a 'premature uprising' in the 'July Days' 
>of 1917, precisely because at this stage the party had not a won a majority 
>of delegates in the soviets to a socialist revolution. Lenin was clear that 
>the revolution had to have a democratic mandate, and because it did have 
>this it was virtually bloodless.
>
>2. Lenin's party was from its inception dogmatic about the need for vigorous 
>internal debate. Democratic centralism meant collective party debate and 
>decision-making which having been formulated and ratified was then binding 
>on individual members.
>
>3. The dissolution of the CA was seen as necessary because it was 
>inceasingly compromised with the forces of reaction who wished to destroy 
>the fledgling soviet-based worker/peasant democracy and who were mobilising 
>a coup behind its cover.
>
>4. At the height of the civil war and the White Terror, where the workers' 
>state was struggling to survive, there were just 100,000 people detained by 
>the state, a smaller pecentage of the population than in modern Britain. 
>Under Stalin millions disappeared or were imprisoned. The systematic 
>degradation of prisoners was not a systematic featue of pre-Stalinist 
>Russia. The 1924 Corrective Labour Code forbade handcuffing, punishment 
>cells, solitary confinement, denial of food, keeping prisoners behind bars 
>during conversations with visitors, etc., and this was by and large upheld, 
>despite the White Terror and the economic devastation (and fears of 
>'traitors' in the ranks)it wrought. Prisoners were allowed freedom of speech 
>and the press. And Lenin himself intervened against arbitrary arrests by the 
>Cheka. It was Leninist practice, not simply policy, that after the civil war 
>emergency passed, the Cheka would be disbanded and the prisons emptied of 
>most of their occupants.
>
>5. Stalinism was a qualitative break from Leninism, and one which involved 
>the virtual destruction of the old Bolshevik party. Neither the forcible 
>collectivisation of the peasantry, nor the denial of trade union and other 
>rights, nor the radical suppression of the market, nor the introduction of 
>brutal regimes of capital accumulation, were part of Leninist principle or 
>practice. War Communism was a function (bitterly lamented by Lenin and other 
>leading Bolsheviks)of the desperate economic and social straits of Russia 
>during the civil war. And the extent of the economic and social collapse 
>cannot be exaggerated; it was truly catastropic, decimating the working 
>class, halving industrial production, shattering communications, and forcing 
>the Bolsheviks to adopt hypercentralised control simply to survive, thereby 
>substituting for the class which made the revolution.
>
>Andrew, doubtless you might be inclined to say that this is your point. 
>Lenin's political practice divulged from his socialist principles. But this 
>was not due to Lenin's 'incoherence'. It was due instead to the material 
>circumstances in which the revolution unfolded. In the real world of 
>politics, absolute consistency in terms of correspondence of practice to 
>ideals, is rarely possible. This does not mean Leninism was always right, 
>that major mistakes were not made. But such mistakes surely were bound to 
>occur, given the circumstances. To judge Leninism only in terms of the 
>question 'did his practice diverge from his theory', without proper regard 
>to the world outside politics, is idealism pure and simple.
>
>By ignoring the social and economic context of post-revolutionary Russia, 
>with which Leninist practice had to engage, you do nothing to develop an 
>understanding of Lenin's contribution to politics, and offer nothing to a 
>sober debate over the appropriate political practices of socialism in the 
>future. Incidentally, this is also Bhaskar's error. He to seems to think 
>that the experience of 'state socialism in Russia and elsewhere can be 
>simply read-off from alleged errors in philosophy and theory, without 
>considering the real messy world in which politics has to engage.
>
>This diverts attention away from the real issues: What kind of socialism? 
>What kind of party? Does socialism have to be 'market socialism' or is 
>democratic planning and the elimination of commodity production still 
>feasible or desirable? We cannot address these issues until we get to grips 
>with the real lessons of October. Because, until we do, debate will always 
>take place on the terrain of the right, which suits opponents of the left, 
>meaning a wider evaluation of political strategies cannot occur.
>
>Regards
>
>Sean
>
>
>
>
>
>w  AnSince I am interested in this question, I wonder if Andrew wouldn't 
>mind reposting that to
>_________________________________________________________________________
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>
>
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