Date: Fri, 22 Nov 1996 21:44:50 -0500 (EST)
From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
Subject: M-I: Re: The Search for a Western Proletariat: Leninism v. Marxism 



Kelly Dumont asks:

>..[W]ouldn't it be more accurate to say that "Marxism" itself has been 
>wholly irrelevant up 'til now,  and that it will remain so until a 
>certain level of productive capacity has been reached [under
>capitalism]?    In this view,  long-winded explanations about the
>failure of the Western Proletariat ("faceless and docile") are premature
>and,  finally,  unnecessary.


I think you are guilty,  perhaps,  of an overstatement here,  but no more so
than those who take the opposite and hackneyed view that Leninism is Marxism
in the age of imperialism.    I've heard it said that the main difference
between the two stems from the fact that Lenin held power and Marx did not.
However,  the foundation of a good deal of Lenin's thinking had been laid
before he held power so that comparison is not altogether valid.

I would propose that this dichotomy between Marx and Lenin that some insist
on discerning is derived from the circumstances of revolutionary Russia
itself.     You will recall that the Russian Revolution was the first great
revolution in history to be deliberately planned and carried out.    The
English revolution received its name *ex post facto* not from the
politicians who made it,  but from the intellectuals who theorized about it.
The men and women who brought about the French revolution did not want to
make a revolution; the Enlightenment was not in intention or in essence a
revolutionary movement.     The self-declared revolutionaries appeared only
after the revolution had begun.    The revolution of 1848 was a conscious
imitation of the French Revolution: this is presumably why they called it a
"revolution of the intellectuals".    Its one positive achievement was to
extend to some parts of Central Europe some of the fruits of the French
Revolution.

The Russian Revolution was also a revolution of intellectuals,  but of
intellectuals who not only sought to make a revolution,  but to analyze and
prepare the conditions in which it could be made.    It is this element of
self-consciousness that renders intelligible the intellectual gulf between
Marx and Lenin.    Although nearly everything that Lenin wrote can be
supported by quotations from Marx,  the differences between them were
profound and significant.    Leninism is Marxism of the epoch no longer of
objective and inexorable economic laws,  but of the conscious ordering of
economic and social processes for desired ends.

Here we come to Lenin's most distinctive innovation in revolutionary theory
and practice--the substitution of party for class as the motive force of
revolution.    It is largely for this reason,  in fact,  that the "Marxist"
revolution reached the peoples of Asia and Africa in its Leninist
incarnations.    The Marxist denouement,  having proved barren in Western
Europe after 1917,  flourished in the fertile soil of Asia and,  following
the Second World War,  in parts of Africa,  as well.    Industrialization
had to be pursued in these countries in conditions far closer to those
experienced in the Soviet Union than to those envisaged by Marx.    More
significant still was the weakness,  or sometimes total absence,  of a
bourgeoisie or of any of the concepts of bourgeois society.    Here the
Russian problem was reproduced in an extreme form,  and could be met only by
the Leninist solution of a small intellectual elite to assume the leadership
of the revolution.

Kelly,  I think you should post your full comments to the list,  rather than
to me privately.    I am sure there are many people who could argue your
points with more aplomb than I.    I am just beginning to learn.

Louis Godena



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