Date: Mon, 11 Nov 1996 21:44:49 -0500 (EST) From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena) Subject: Re: M-I: The Search for a Western Proletariat: Lukacs, Korsch, Gramsci & Modernity Dave is not at all sure what I mean by: >>Lenin applied the term [proletariat] to the most versatile and dynamic of all the classes. I was of course drawing a distinction between the proletariat (defined here as that class of industrial worker poised on the front line of the class struggle at the "point of production") as it existed in Lenin's time, and the "proletariat" of our own day. Need I once again point out the obvious difference? Lenin's ideas were formed at the very peak of Western industrialization and machine-power, when the proletariat was growing exponentially both in numbers and political power, when virtually every public issue from health to transportation was obsessed with the salient social fact of this power. If industrialization was the talisman for less advanced countries in Europe and Asia to achieve a status comparable with that of Britain or Germany, the industrial working class and its development was seen as its indispensable concomitant. Today, we exist in a far different era. We in the West have shifted to a new form of capitalism --to the ephemeral, decentralized world of technology, consumerism and the culture industry, in which the service, finance and information industries triumph over traditional manufacture, and classical class politics yield ground to a diffuse range "identity politics." The "proletariat" of Lenin's day is in steep and irreversible decline, locked in the throes of epochal change, in a depthless, decentered, ungrounded descent into near oblivion. It is not, by all accounts, the leading force in history. Its historic role has been, clearly, one of reformism, not revolution. Can it continue to play even that limited role on the world stage? And I of course quarrel with your categorical statement that the "industrial proletariat" "led" the masses of poor peasants during the October Revolution. I am much more congenial to the view of E.H. Carr that the "party", rather than the peasants or the proletariat, were the main actors in 1917. I do, however, share your endorsement of Trotsky's *History of the Russian Revolution*. Unlike most of his followers, Trotsky is always worth listening to even when he's wrong. And he was wrong at fairly short intervals. Turning to Justin Schwartz: >I have a few cavils, one of which is quite important. This is Louis' >identification of the proletariat in Marx and some of these other thinkers >with the specifically industrial working class. I think if you re-read my post, you will notice that I quote the *Cambridge Companion to Marx* (an excellent little volume edited by Terrell Carver and published last year [2nd ed] by Cambridge University Press) to the effect that Marx's definition of the proletariat was a bit more inclusive. At the risk of having you all slump forward in your chairs, here is the full quote: "Despite his emphasis on the industrial factions, Marx intends the class terms *simpliciter* to extend much farther than the industrial qualified ones. In the *Communist Manifesto*, his discussion of the organizing effects of industry is continuous with a description of a revolutionary triumph, possibly imminent, that will constitute both proletarian rule and "winning the battle of democracy" -- hardly the rule of a small fraction of a class. In later writings on important social actions, including his great narratives of the Parisian working class, Marx often uses the word *proletariat* to embrace garment workers, construction workers, and others who do not employ industrial equipment. In practice, the notion he uses in strategic inquiries isthat of people whose way of making a living encourages support for the industrial proletariat in its struggles" (p. 63). Moving on to Lukacs, Justin wonders: >I am not sure I grasp Louis' distinction between the proletariat and "the >class": what class? Is his idea that the proletariat as he conceives it is >only part of the working class? Or that without consciousness it is not >yet the working class? I am echoing Lenin's dictum that, left to its own devices, the working class would develop --through its historic struggles with the bourgeoisie-- only a "trade union" consciousness. This struggle would never become a genuine *class struggle* until *true* class-consciousness was implanted from the proletariat from without by an organized revolutionary party. Gramsci himself, in hailing the October Revolution, frankly asserted that this event was a revolution *against* Marx's *Capital*, that it showed "the canons of historical materialism are not as iron-clad as....it has been thought," and clearly refuted the "positivist and naturalist incrustations" that often sullied Marx's own writings (*Pre-Prison Writings* ed by Richard Bellamy [Cambridge, 1994: Cambridge University Press], p. 40). For Lenin (and Gramsci) , the notion of the proletariat as subject to the rigid compulsion of external realities--even if they are the realities created by bourgeois society itself, was anathema. Class-consciousness, implanted in the minds and wills of the proletariat by the vanguard party, was the political impetus that allowed it to fulfill its historic role. >Louis gets Lukacs dead to rights, Hegelian abstraction and unsolved >central problem both. Though I would say that coming down to earth from >the "Hegelian" abstraction involves looking, as Gramsci di[d], at [cultural] >as well as economic factors. Also I think that Lukacs' abstraction is more >Weberian than Hegelian. Weber was a friend and strong influence, and his >idea of the ideal type is crucial for Lukacs' early work. That may heklp >account for why Lukacs' abstract proletariat is _so_ abstract. One can always juxtapose Lukacs drunk with Lukacs sober. In the Europe of 1920-- and after the experience of the abortive Hungarian revolution of the previous year-- the proletariat had somehow to be brought to earth, and theory attuned to practical experience. In this deperate period, revolutionary idealism was still a living force. Lukacs could still hail the Soviets as the form of organization through which the proletarait would attain class-consciousness, and so liberate itself and society as a whole >from the rule of the bourgeoisie and the capitalist system. Two or three years later, with the decay of the Russian Soviets and a succession of revolutionary defeats in Western Europe, and especially in Germany, the vision had begun to fade. In 1922, in an article on the problem of organization, Lukacs devoted some embarassing paragraphs to the role of the Communist Party. "The pre-eminently practical character of the communist party," he explained, "the fact that it is a fighting party, presupposes its possession of a correct theory." Proletarian class-consciousness must necessarily be "reflected in the organized form of that class-consciousness, in the communist party". It is not difficult, by using a little hindsight, to imagine where these arguments would lead, and Lukacs never appears to have returned to them in so explicit a form (Lukacs, *History and Class-consciousness* [London, 1971: Merlin Press Ltd)]. Turning to Gramsci, Justin tells us: >I am less happy with Louis' treatment of Gramsci. On one hand I learned >something from Louis' discussion of a market socialist Gramsci. I had >never looked at G in that light, but as a a market socialist I am happy to >have Gramsci in the club. This is an odd statement. True, Gramsci favored free trade and stood foursquare against protectionism (as did Marx), and he favored the semi-autonomy of the Workers Councils, which the unions eyed with some chagrin. But to equate his Proletarian State with "market socialism" is surely a flight of fancy. His was a radical model of bottom-up democracy, nevertheless hierarchically organized and administering, through the Councils and their derivative structures, a fully unified economic plan. His plan leaned heavily on the existence of a strongly disciplined Communist Party as indispensable during the transitional period of the "dictatorship of the proletariat", though the Party would flourish within the Councils by its "prestige" rather than brute force. The coherence of Gramsci's position rested largely on the holistic ontology that underpins most "organic" theories of the State. He assumed, in other words, that within his fully developed communist society the different activities of the productive process, which he came close to identifying with the entire life of the community, would be inherently complementary and harmonious. He would have recoiled at the very premise of what we in the West briefly toyed with in the 1980s as "market socialism." Justin is skeptical: >On the other hand, Louis does not address the central role in Gramsci's >thought of the concept of hegemony and of the role of hegemony in the >formation of the proletariat. G views hegemony, crudely, as rule by >consent as opposed to coercion and locates it, most oif the time, in >"civil society" as opposed to the state. In this regard, it is important to note that the concept of hegemony or *gegemoniya* had a long history in the Russian labor movement going back to the writings of Plekhanov. Within this tradition it had been used to refer to the need to form a revolutionary awareness and political will among the proletariat that went beyond their narrow corporate interests, but it did not have the additional meaning Gramsci gave it to describe the mechanisms of ideological consensus within a developed political system. Lenin himself had adopted the term from the Russian Social Democrats and it was employed in the documents of the Third International, from which source Gramsci almost certainly picked it up. However, the term also has an Italian lineage in the writings of the nineteenth-century philosopher Vincenzo Gioberti, who used it in an analogous manner to signify the "moral primacy" one province within a national grouping might exert over others. To Gramsci, for the proletariat to become the ruling or dominant class, it must first "succeed in creating a system of class alliances that allow it to mobilize the majority of the working population against capitalism and the bourgeois State." (Gramsci, *op cit*, p. 316). Gramsci, too, was writing of "peripheral capitalist states" like Italy where the proletariat was still largely undeveloped and politically static. Finally, Justin wonders: >... whether Louis' treatment of the proletarit in G is >accurate. For Louis, G's proletarian is a Turino factory worker, sober, >serious, devoted to self management. That's one of the types that G deals >with, but G's analysis is remarkable for the fine detail and >differentiation between lots of groups and for locating them in their >historical context. This is true. I was speaking here of Gramsci's "ideal proletarian" --which bears an uncanny resemblance to the "ideal proletarian" of the historicism of Croce as well as to that of the "actualism" of Gentile. This reflected his (and their) outspoken criticisms of the low level of contemporary Italian cultural life, which each of them attributed to the corruption of the Italian political system. Gramsci shared the contempt of liberals (like Croce) and Fascists (like Gentile)alike; he merely radicalized their criticisms. Gamsci, in fact, was at least as strongly influenced by Sorel as he was by Marx in formulating his theories of the modern proletariat, something you should bear in mind before reifying him. >So, there's alot more to G's >proletariat than Louis lets on. Undoubtedly. Louis Godena --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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