File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1996/96-11-25.113, message 70


Date: Sun, 24 Nov 1996 20:40:04 -0500 (EST)
From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
Subject: Re: M-I: Re: The Search for a Western Proletariat: Leninism v. Marxism


        
Richard asks:

>... Why is it a hackneyed view that Leninism is Marxism in the age
>of imperialism? Do I understand correctly that you are saying that
>because conditions in Asia and Africa are comparible to those of Russia
>at the time of it's revolution; Leninism is valid there, but less so in
>the advanced capitalist countries? 

Lenin was in one respect deeply rooted in Marx's nineteenth century.   While
he proclaimed the need to instruct and influence the masses,  he continued
to believe in instruction by rational persuasion or by force of experience.
By the middle of the twentieth century this belief had become rather quaint;
it had lost much of its validity in the Soviet Union and just about
everywhere else.    This was perhaps the fundamental difference that marked
the transition from Lenin to Stalin.    Lenin regarded persuasion or
indoctrination as a rational process in the sense that it sought to
inculcate a rational conviction in the minds of those to whom it was
directed.    Stalin regarded it as a rational process only in the sense that
it was planned and conducted by a rational elite.     Its aim was to induce
large numbers of people to behave in a desired way.    How to achieve this
aim was a technical problem,  which was the object of rational study.    But
the most effective means to employ in achieving this aim did not always,  or
not often,  appeal to reason.     It would be erroneous to suppose that this
transition from rational persuasion to technical indoctrination was peculiar
to the USSR or to Stalin or to any particular form of government.    It is
merely a feature of the inexorable transition from liberal democracy to mass
democracy that has found its reflection in both Russia and the West.    So
it is an anachronism to speak of "Leninism" in the strict sense in which it
was understood in 1917 Russia,  or even as Lenin would have himself
understood it.

Richard continues:

>When I re-read Lenin I find him as valid today as he was in the early
>part of this century precisely because he understood the development of
>imperialism and capitalism in it's modern forms. Concepts of proletarian
>internationalism become even more important with the move towards global
>capitalism.


I have already mentioned how the Marxist revolution reached the peoples of
Asia and Africa in its Leninist incarnation.    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.    In these countries,
the bourgeois revolution,  still unfinished in the Russia of 1917,  had not
even begun.    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.     Many of these new leaders
had received their education and made their first acquaintance with Marxism
in Western countries or under Western auspices.    But,  in practice,  local
conditions made Marxism applicable only in its Leninist transformation.

What is clear is that the Russian Revolution had triggered off a
revolutionary movement of revolt against the capitalist order,  in which the
challenge is directed not against its exploitation of the industrial workers
of the advanced countries,  but against its exploitation of backward
colonial peoples.     It never occurred to Lenin (and was never admitted
later) that a revolution under these auspices,  although it might be
directed against capitalism and have aims that could be described as
socialist,  had moved far away from the Marxist premises.     The
post-Leninist reorientation of the socialist revolution on neo-Marxist or
non-Marxist lines implied that the final overthrow of capitalism would be
the work not of its proletarian victims in the advanced countries (who had
in the meantime become its staunchest allies),   but of its colonial victims
in the undeveloped countries,  and that it would be the work not of an
economic class,  but of a political movement.

The era of the French Revolution ended in 1917,  and a new revolutionary
epoch opened.    We may debate whether that epoch ended in 1949,  when the
Asian and African revolutions effectively began,  or whether these events
signaled a somewhat unorthodox prolongation of the Russian Revolution.
It is around these questions,  including those posed by Louis P's seminar on
the proletariat,  that call most urgently for the attention of
revolutionaries everywhere.   

Louis Godena


        



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