The immigrants themselves constituted a variegated collection of people with different images of what a good society should be and what the road there should look like. There were heated clashes of opinion that culminated at the 1903 congress, held in Brussels and London. Lenin led the group that had the majority and were therefore called Bolsheviks, whereas their opponents – led by Julius Martov – correspondingly became Mensheviks, the representatives of the minority. The most important subject of contention was how the party should be governed. The year previously, in 1902, Lenin had made his position clear with the book What Is to Be Done? He argued that a group of intellectuals schooled as professional revolutionaries had to lead party work with a firm hand.17 This was far from Marx’s ideal of the revolution as the act of the working class itself, but better corresponded to the actual Russian situation with the party’s leading figures isolated in Western Europe while the people remained under the rule of the Tsar. Even among the narodniki, there had been believers that politically devoted intellectuals should lead the masses to their own liberation.
The danger of a party led by a few people holding power was not as obvious in the isolation of exile, even if it was criticized by the Mensheviks as well as by social democrats from other countries. But Lenin argued that it was he and his group who were bringing the inheritance from Marx and Engels into the new century. As we have seen, Marx had no prepared political theory, but could seek openings towards the future in shifting political forms. The same went for Engels. Lenin’s theory of the party, however, was firmly constructed.18
Marxism was for him a teleological process; step by step, Marx and Engels had revealed reality as it was and he himself could now tear away yet another corner of the veil that hid both nature and society from humanity’s gaze. In 1913, he explained in an article titled ‘The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism’: ‘The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true.’ In addition, it is ‘comprehensible and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world outlook’. The Russian original also speaks of ‘Marx’s teachings’, and there Marx thus had to bear the weight of his doctrine alone. But in this brief text, written in an effective lapidary style, Lenin also gives Engels a part of the honour through Anti-Dühring and the book on Feuerbach. The end pieces deal with politics, and there Lenin certainly knows that he himself has taken numerous steps beyond both Marx and Engels.19
But before Lenin could be content with the completed system, he had been forced to demand a course correction among his closest followers – the Bolsheviks – as well. In 1909, his most important philosophical work, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, was published. The background is an interesting one. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach (whose surname is now the unit for the speed of sound) had become a thinker who appealed to the young generation of radicals and revolutionaries. It is above all his main philosophical work from 1886, Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen (Contributions to the Analysis of Sensations), that made an impression. Mach advocated an extreme form of empiricism that anticipated the logical positivism that distinguished the Vienna Circle, asserting that the only thing that existed was sensory perceptions. From them, we construct both the external world, and the idea of our own ego and what it contains.
With his theory, Mach got into a polemic with Albert Einstein, who embraced a realist theory of knowledge: atoms had a real, independent existence.20 For Lenin, it was more important that Mach’s theses conflicted with the doctrine that Engels had worked out, which contained both a realist theory of knowledge (we can achieve real knowledge of an external world that is independent of us) and an ontological materialism (there are no idealistic magnitudes that are not grounded in some type of substance).
Many young revolutionaries, on the other hand, saw Mach’s empiricism as better suited to their cause. In the period around the turn of the twentieth century, reality itself could seem precarious. Europe was teetering on the brink of a great war, commerce was being reshaped with electricity playing a role that was hard to grasp, the economy was concentrating large capital in the banks as never before, art was seeking new forms of expression, and physics and chemistry were undergoing their great fundamental crises that would result in the theory of relativity and quantum physics. Nietzsche was capturing minds on both the left and the right. Everything seemed undefined, bordering between threatening and hopeful. Realism and materialism did not fit in such a disorganized reality.
But Lenin wanted to preserve Marxism as Engels had left it. It particularly aggrieved him that his opponents among the Mensheviks were more inclined to stick to Engels, while several of the leading young Bolsheviks followed in Mach’s footsteps. So it was, for example, with Alexander Bogdanov, a polymath who competed with Lenin for power among the Bolsheviks, and Anatoly Lunacharsky, who after the revolution would be the People’s Commissar for Education in the Soviet Union. They, and a number of other Bolsheviks, assembled at a conference that resulted in a document in which they attempted to unite Marx and Mach.
It can be seen from Lenin’s correspondence how he tried to gather his forces for a counterattack. The great deathblow would be Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, in which above all Engels was set against Mach and where his opponents were castigated in more than 300 pages. The image of a uniform Marxist outlook is constructed here, and dialectical materialism constitutes the very foundation for Lenin’s theories on society, on capitalism, and on socialism. Modify the foundation, and the whole construction falls.21
There are two reasons for Lenin’s ardour. On the one hand, he had to compete with the Marxist system that Karl Kautsky had already constructed. Lenin was not at all as much of an evolutionist and Darwinist as Kautsky; revolutionary leaps were more important to him. But the most important difference was his political theory. He put the responsibility on a revolutionary elite; Kautsky, the chief ideologist for a large, successful party machinery, looked to the future with calm confidence. Development would bring forth the socialist society just as certainly as the bud would burst forth in bloom.
The other reason for Lenin’s fervour was that a closed system could be a powerful force. If the party – or rather, its Bolshevik section – could unite around a closed ideology, that would be a strength. But if Mach is given a place in the centre of Marx’s and Engels’s theories, who would come next?
If the theory is unconditional, then one day it could become omnipotent. Lenin won the decisive battle over Bogdanov and the other followers of Mach at a meeting in Paris; Bogdanov was expelled from the party and left politics for several years.
The outbreak of war in 1914 drove Lenin to Switzerland, and there it soon turned out that he himself had not finished with the fundamentals of Marxism. He tried to deal with his disappointment over the betrayal of the European workers’ movement by grappling with one of the most demanding works of the history of philosophy, Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik (Science of Logic). The background is, of course, that he knew that the work played a large role for Marx, and he himself declared that Capital could not be understood without knowing something about Hegel’s Logic. In his notes, he emerges as an ambitious student who, with pen in hand, underlined important parts and added notes such as ‘NB’, ‘subtle and profound’, and even ‘ha ha!’ Often he got into longer commentary, agreements, or repudiations. He wrote ‘cf. Machism’ in the margins when he referred to Hegel’s reckoning with Kant; his reckoning with Bogdanov was still fresh in his memory. He also sought support in Hegel for his striving for a uniform and closed philosophy: ‘The general laws of movement of the world and of thought.’22
But Lenin’s philosophical studies, in which Hegel’s Logic constituted the natural centre, also led him out onto partially new terrain. The relationship between evolution and revolution found itself at the centre of his interest. The tendency from Engels, and more so from Kautsky, had been the emphasis on a process of continual advance. But what place do dialectical lea
ps have in such a world of ideas? Is there a place for any revolution in general? Lenin summarized his thoughts in an unfinished text titled ‘On the Question of Dialectics’. Every change is a struggle between opposing forces, and the struggle occasionally results in radical changes. In the fragment, he talks above all about human knowledge, but he found the same rhythm in the shufflings of reality.23
It would be a few years before he himself was part of creating such a radical change. Russia suffered appalling losses during the war, and the sacrifices led to the Tsar being overthrown. After the February Revolution in 1917, Lenin hastily made his way to Russia; once there, he surprised his comrades with the declaration that it was now time for the Bolsheviks to seize power. They actually succeeded, in what is called the October Revolution of 1917. It is often pointed out that it was more of a coup than a revolution. On the other hand, revolutions are rarely military events in a grand style (the Chinese Revolution of 1949 is an exception); more often they are a clever exploitation of a vacuum in power. The measure of a revolution perhaps has more to do with the extent to which a society is changed through it. In that sense, Lenin’s revolution had colossal dimensions. The storming of the Winter Palace, the centre of power, was at least a symbol that could then be used on every anniversary of the revolution up to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The Soviet Union, Orthodoxy, and Deviationists
When Lenin challenged Kautsky’s orthodoxy with his own at the beginning of the century, it seemed to be a hopeless competition with a large, successful party apparatus. Lenin only had a part of Russian social democracy, whose leading figures were in exile, behind him. But the world war changed everything. German social democrats had lost their prestige, whereas Lenin succeeded in seizing and keeping power despite opposition that long seemed to be insurmountable. Russian developments after 1917 are well known and depicted in an enormous amount of literature. These will not be described here.24
The future that the Bolsheviks were throwing themselves (and their country) into was still an unwritten page. Socialism would now be built, Lenin announced the morning after the seizure of power. There were two different power bases for the task. One was the party, governed according to Lenin’s principles, with an elite holding power at the top. The system of Soviets was the antithesis. Ordinary people would decide in these councils of workers, peasants, and soldiers. They themselves elected their leading representatives, and their mandates would vary. In the long run, it was the party that gathered more and more power into its hands. The dream of direct democracy through the Soviets remained, but increasingly in the shadow of the party apparatus.
The party, which in 1918 began calling itself Communist, encountered a hostile world: fourteen different nations sent troops to crush the new regime, but all were unsuccessful. The Communists also met domestic opposition, especially from other left-wing groups. The conflicts culminated in the Kronstadt uprising of 1922. The sailors in the Kronstadt fortress fought for Soviet power, but were mowed down by the army.
Leon Trotsky played the decisive role in this course of events. He was Lenin’s most important collaborator during the revolution and for a few years afterwards; he was extraordinarily gifted, versatile, and a brilliant speaker and writer – but also merciless towards those who offered him resistance.
When Lenin, stricken with illness, became increasingly unable to lead the party, Trotsky seemed to be the obvious candidate as his successor. But he soon met a superior opponent in Iosif Dzhugashvili, a Georgian known under his revolutionary pseudonym Stalin. Stalin did not have Trotsky’s intellectual capacity, but he was an unrivalled player at the game of power who went further in unscrupulousness than Machiavelli had ever imagined.25
Before Stalin gradually strangled all political, philosophical, and cultural debate, however, magnificent intellectual energy was developing. Experiments in form flowed freely for a few feverish years; everything would be created anew, and a new type of person would emerge from the process of re-smelting. The direction was not a given, even in the field of the economy. Lenin was still in power when the New Economic Policy, with elements of the free market, was proclaimed; Stalin put a definitive stop to it only when he pushed through his Five-Year Plan.
Intense debates were conducted in the field of fundamental Marxist theory as well. How would a society actually develop after a proletarian revolution? Did culture, philosophy, and politics not also have to be transformed? Or was that something that more or less occurred by itself?
Quite simply, the debate concerned the issue of determinism. A battle was brewing; not with weapons, but with words. The main combatants were Abram Deborin on one side, and on the other a group of ‘mechanists’ who asserted that after the revolution, the alteration of the whole of society would run more or less automatically. Nikolai Bukharin was relatively close to the latter group.
Deborin – who was Plekhanov’s confidant before the revolution – emphasized the leap in development, the unpredictable. Bukharin, who had a central position in the party – he was its darling, as Lenin phrased it – emphasized that the course of events conformed to laws, and pointed out the danger of a dialectic run wild that gave too much space to ideas, and perhaps passing fancies. Deborin tried to bring Lenin – who had a weakness for Hegel’s Logic – to his side, but Lenin was already out of the running.
The central point of the debate was over the question of whether there had to be a unique cultural revolution after the October Revolution. Deborin said yes; his opponents said no. But the showdown also revealed that Lenin’s assertion about Marxism constituting a closed system did not add up. On the contrary, there could be disagreement about central issues such as determinism and the dialectic.
It was that type of uncertainty that Stalin saw as a direct threat to the power he was on the verge of establishing. In field after field, he therefore staked out a general line that no one could deviate from. In philosophy, this took place in late 1930 to early 1931. A resolution from the main philosophical organs came out in December; on New Year’s Day 1931 Mark Borisovich Mitin – one of Stalin’s closest men in the field – gave a lecture in which he critiqued Deborin and also Bukharin. On the other hand, he called attention to The Foundations of Leninism, the document in which Stalin codified the term ‘Leninism’. Engels’s The Dialectics of Nature had been published in the 1920s and was now, in all its incompleteness, a part of the orthodox arsenal. The laws of the dialectic were exactly three, not two or four as Engels had also ventured.
Neither dialecticians nor mechanists were awarded the victory in Mitin’s lecture. If anything, the general line entailed a middle way: the dialectic was given a place, but on the foundation of strict materialism. Development has its leaps – but in moderation. More important was that Mitin (and through him Stalin) demanded that the general line should permeate all scientific research. As we have seen, this had fateful consequences in genetics in particular.
The distance between Marx’s incessant reappraisals and new orientations and this closed system – open only to the arbitrariness of those in power – is tremendous.26
The Range of Deviationists
The Soviet Union survived its first period of upheaval. Most observers believed that the revolutionary outbreak would be put down as quickly as it had been in Hungary, Bavaria, and other places where uprisings had broken out in the shadow of the world war. But the Soviet Union endured, and after a few tumultuous years it emerged as a stable country. It was particularly so when the capitalist world entered deep crisis around 1930. Unemployment was epidemic, and many people were radicalized. The Soviet Union appeared for many as a safe path towards a better, more just future. Eric Hobsbawm – whose same admiration led him to became a communist – wrote in his masterly 1994 book about the twentieth century, Age of Extremes, about how the world appeared to young radicals in crisis-stricken Europe. Hobsbawm’s reaction was not unusual. An intellectual elite was also attracted. In Great Britain – the country that Marx finall
y gave up hope on – as well as in the United States, France, Germany, and Italy, brilliant young minds gathered around the dry catechism of Marxism–Leninism. They saw misery, poverty, and hopelessness in their own suffering countries, and imagined the realization of their ideal in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Long afterwards, it is easy to forget the enthusiasm that the country to the east could arouse in the strongholds of capitalism. Marxism–Leninism was not seen as a distortion of Marx’s work, but its completion.27
Lenin had created a Third – Communist – International, and it was steered with a tight rein from Moscow. Exiled by Stalin, Trotsky created a Fourth International, offering through it an ideological home for those who had turned away in horror from Stalin’s collectivization, show trials, and mass purges.
But the Soviet Union remained a powerful centre for Marxist–Leninist propaganda up until its dissolution in 1991. The production of books, articles, and films was immense. Those who considered themselves followers of Marx but critical of the Soviet system – wherever they lived in the world – became deviationists from the norm that political power had created.
As soon as an orthodoxy is established, revisionists and heretics turn up. A Kautsky requires a Bernstein. Bernstein revised Marx, it is said; but Marx’s theories did not suddenly become a monolith on the day he died. Lenin’s system, which Stalin codified as Marxism–Leninism, invariably made revisionists out of everyone who tried to think further on their own.
Rosa Luxemburg herself had attacked Bernstein’s revisionism. With her studies of the development of finance capital, she passed on the inheritance from Marx in an independent fashion. Early on, she had criticized the Bolsheviks’ ideas of a ruling party elite, and when after the October Revolution Lenin drove out all competing tendencies from the power apparatus, Luxemburg was merciless in her criticism. But she was soon silenced by a right-wing militia that murdered her and Karl Liebknecht on 15 January 1919.28
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