Letters

Lars and Vol 38

I refer to the article, ‘A hundred years is enough’, by Lars T Lih (September 19). He starts with a remark about narrative, then engages upon one of his own!

The primary target of his polemic appears to be what he calls “confessional sects”, but he also singles out György Lukács for some reason, then fails to justify this. The common form of narrative employs formal logic, which is inadequate for historicism. As Lukács suggests (in one of those three books, cited by Lih), “For Lenin as a Marxist ‘the concrete analysis of the concrete situation is not an opposite of pure theory, but - on the contrary - it is the culmination of genuine theory, its consummation - the point where it breaks into practice’.”

Empirical investigation, which Lih suggests is appropriate, fails to be sufficient for concrete analysis of the concrete situation - the concrete has to be assembled from an analysis which employs dialectical methodology. This is why I can agree with many of Lih’s facts and some of his propositions, but certainly not his conclusions. I would suggest that he started with a narrative and then finds facts to suit - this is common practice among positivists.

In terms of Trotsky’s account, it’s entirely possible that he made assumptions about Stalin’s role in the period leading up to Lenin’s return from exile, but so what? Stalin was quite capable of recalling party policy, but never a theorist of any great merit. This is very much evident beyond 1924, when his lack of foresight resulted in wild policy changes, as he reacted to events. I doubt that I’ve actually read the third book in Lih’s trilogy, but it’s abundantly clear that the cult of Lenin was very much of Stalin’s creation - the mausoleum, the proliferation of statues, which I’m sure would have horrified Lenin, if he’d known this in advance.

If all the pieces were in place and no great effort required by Lenin upon his return, why would he have bothered writing his April thesis at all?!

The author mentions Lenin’s Philosophical notebooks, but misses the most important point: Lenin was very familiar with Hegel before the suggested epiphany in a library. He was certainly well acquainted with Marxist dialectics, as demonstrated by his “concrete analysis of the concrete situation”, and excellent at persuading others, before realising ideas in practice. The Notebooks are a systematic project of following the footsteps of Marx in the reworking of Hegel onto a materialist basis. This work is largely unknown, but of great importance. Instead we end up with a cult of Lenin, initiated by Stalin, which does carry some of its baggage into the Fourth International. Lenin’s conclusion is that dialectics is the science, the logic and theory of knowledge of modern materialism.

Probably the final project of Lenin can be found in his 1922 article, ‘On the significance of militant materialism’. A journal was established under the editorship of Abram Deborin, but, with Lenin dead, a debate ensued between the Mechanists and the Deborinists. Stalin took these two down, one at a time, culminating in the publication of Diamat - the subsumption of philosophy beneath the party. This was one of the greatest acts of sabotage by Stalin: Hegel was thrown out in favour of Heraclitus, volume 38 remained in obscurity and dialectics was reduced to ‘matter in motion’.

Some further points I must deal with before closing. The break with the Second International came about in 1914 and there was indeed a left wing before that, to which Lenin adhered. Nothing to do with libraries, but everything to do with the outbreak of war and the Second International betrayal. Evald Ilyenkov throws more light on Lenin’s Materialism and empirio-criticism. Again nothing to do with Hegel or libraries, but a very necessary defence of dialectics against Alexander Bogdanov and the Machists. Lenin regarded Georgi Plekhanov’s responses as too weak and in the Notebooks dismisses Plekhanov’s grasp of materialist dialectics scathingly. Much of this comes to light in the work of Ilyenkov, after the death of Stalin.

In conclusion, an attack on so-called “confessional sects” would be much more constructive without the accusation of “Leninist cult”. The religious analogy has some traction in the sense of appearance, but in essence the problem is dogma. Dogma stems from formal logic, Positivism and poor or absent use of dialectal reason, presented by Lenin in the obscure volume 38, practised by Marx and revived in the works of Ilyenkov.

The cult of Lenin, opportun-istically promoted by Stalin, evolved into personality cult around Stalin himself, with huge historical consequences. Lih has the wrong target for his polemic.

Joanne Telfer
email

Pondering Lars

I had a chance to ponder the Russia of Lars T Lih, thanks to that Weekly Worker article. In one essay I read on John Riddell’s website he formulates the Russian Revolution of 1917 as a democratic revolution, with not much resemblance to a fight for socialism. It’s important to see the forest through the trees, but Lars Lih’s trees are very dense.

I’m reminded of what Lenin said in a Pravda article in 1917: “In politics it is not so important who directly advocates particular views. What is important is who stands to gain from these views, proposals, measures.” Lih’s beliefs give ammunition to the demoralising view that socialism is not possible and not worth fighting for. The social class which most benefits from propagating this lie is the haute bourgeoisie. I could consider that Lih is both a nominal socialist and a bourgeois academic, until I’m proven wrong. He seems to be a champion of bourgeois democracy, not socialist democracy.

Lih views Karl Kautsky as the mentor of Russian political development to the point of referring to him as the “architect of October”. I have my own title for Kautsky: the ‘parliamentary radical democrat’. The logic of Lih’s thinking escapes me, but, then again, if October is seen as a bourgeois revolution, then Kautsky figures aptly in this revisionist history. Kautsky’s ultimately evolutionary - or bourgeois - parliamentary road to socialism was completely opposite to what Lenin came to espouse (and his argument against Bernstein in the Second International, 1898-99, had its limits). For Lenin, a parliament should only be used as a platform to expose the ruling class and build movements, not as a means to overthrow the state. I find it dangerous to rehabilitate Kautsky without discussing how his parliamentarism is counterproductive, really counterrevolutionary (especially during revolutionary times, where it can invite defeat; case-in-point, Allende’s Chile, 1973). I don’t believe at all that the creation of the Bolshevik revolution was due to the work and influence of Karl Kautsky.

In the early years, Lenin shared a lot of Kautsky’s views: ie, that “the state should be used for a specific form of transition from capitalism to socialism” (Lenin, December 1916) rather than to “smash” the state (Marx), but Lenin’s views evolved: Lenin said he came to realise that Kautsky always sidestepped the issue of proletarian state power. I imagine that Lenin would be rolling in his grave if he knew that the historic legacy of the October revolution was being hijacked by the ghost of Kautsky.

Lih’s views about 1917 minimise, downplay and underestimate Lenin’s role, especially about the run-up to October, specifically regarding March and April. What happened reflects a breakthrough direction from the Old Bolshevik policies of 1905 and afterwards, contrary to Lih’s view of ‘continuity’. This new direction doesn’t mean that there was a total break from the past. It’s not uncommon for societal conditions to evolve from their roots, assimilating influences. Lenin’s April theses don’t signal a rupture from the past, but it’s not a continuation either, in my humble assessment. There’s a middle ground that gave Lenin the opportunity to speed up the revolutionary momentum of a workers’ revolution.

The traditional, longstanding Old Bolshevik plan to gain leadership in a provisional bourgeois government was no longer feasible. There were leftwing or ‘new Bolsheviks’, who shared Lenin’s perspective of a new state form, made up of the existing soviets, and what followed was the slogan, ‘All power to the soviets!’ The soviets were novel and, as Lenin said, they existed nowhere else except in Russia.

The immediate and absolutely necessary task, and which would avoid an expected bloody repression, would be to transcend a struggle for proletarian control in a bourgeois government, and to achieve the soviet conquest of state power. The Old Bolshevik politics were to a good extent obsolete. A cutting-edge experiment was on the agenda. But Lih disagrees with this scenario: October is conceived of as an ahistorical bourgeois revolution without any - or any meaningful - socialism to speak of. He says: “I do think it was Old Bolshevism which came to power in 1917”; and: “I admire the October revolution more as a democratic revolution than a socialist one” (‘The ironic triumph of “Old Bolshevism”’). According to Lih, a democratic republic was the goal of the Old Bolsheviks and they were “carrying through the democratic revolution to the end”.

Lih’s depiction of Lev Kamenev, a theorist, doesn’t correlate with the record. Kamenev was an Old Bolshevik who held centrist views at times and, evidently, took a pro-war, defencist stance in 1917. He didn’t subscribe to the need, practicality and timeliness of a workers’ government, which Lenin and his partisans were campaigning for. When push came to shove in October 1917, all the Bolsheviks voted for Lenin’s advocacy of insurrection, except for two Bolsheviks - Kamenev and Zinoviev - who voted ‘no’. Lih is fine with Kamenev and Zinoviev; these are the Bolsheviks, over Lenin, who meet with Lih’s approval. (Lih doesn’t see the revolution as an ‘insurrection’. He says we shouldn’t go along with the “folklore that the Bolsheviks succeeded because they relied on ‘insurrection’ rather than ‘electoralism’” - ‘Karl Kautsky as the architect of the October revolution’, 2019)

The fact that the October revolution was accomplished so quickly from the April date may show that there was substantial agreement by April with Lenin’s radical conclusions - enough Bolsheviks shared his views or could be persuaded, and they then branched out to agitate and organise among the masses. The Bolsheviks were aware that they were in the throes of a socialist revolution. They no longer believed that socialism in Russia would have to wait for revolution in the west, but they also thought that without eventual socialist revolution in the west, the Russian Revolution, in isolation, couldn’t survive.

Lenin had abandoned the slogan of democratic republicanism and assumed the slogans of land distribution to the peasantry, an immediate end to the war and workers’ control.

GG
USA

Old Aunt Lars

As last observations on Lars T Lih’s ‘A hundred years is enough’ let us look at the question of his methodology.

In argumentations some set up an ‘old aunt Sally’ - or a ‘straw man’, to use a non-sexist term. For instance, to ridicule Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution we hear that it proposes simultaneous revolution on a global - or at least a wide regional - scale instead of a revolution on a national scale as part of a period of a rising tide of global radicalisation, which will have its own national time scales within that. Similarly, Louis Shawcross (Letters, October 3) has the man who thinks polar bears wander the streets of Glasgow as a typical representative of the entire working class, displaying his own contempt for that class.

So, on to Lars T’s stages in revolution; Lenin saw the February 1917 revolution as a ‘stage’ in the same revolution that culminated in October, whereas Kamenev and Zinoviev saw it as a separate historical stage: a bourgeois and then a socialist revolution in the indefinite future - the standard Stalinist concept. That worked well in South Africa, didn’t it - now the most unequal country in the world after its ‘successful’ bourgeois revolution brought us those ‘Black Economic Empowerment’ millionaires and one black billionaire (president Ramaphosa’s brother-in-law)? But, because Lenin was no anarchist, he understood that the socialist revolution could not be achieved until they had won the backing of the working class via the soviets, thus resolving the stage of dual power that began in February in favour of the working class. The straw man methodology of Lars T equates the two opposing positions, because they both contain stages, so there were no differences between Lenin and Kamenev, and Lenin’s April theses were a waste of time and effort.

As for Lenin’s time studying Hegel in Berne before returning to Russia, Lars T tells us: “As usual, the claims about Lenin’s rupture with the Marxist past are presented by means of a piquant story, which I call the ‘Lengel legend’ (my label ties together Lenin and Hegel). According to this legend, Lenin is devastated by social democracy’s failure to condemn the imperialist war in 1914. He feels completely isolated, even from Bolshevik comrades. He realises that Marxism needs to be rethought top to bottom, and so he holes up in the public library in Berne, Switzerland. There he abjures politics for a time and embarks on a serious study of the most abstruse book of the most abstruse philosopher, Georg Hegel’s Science of logic. Through diligent note-taking, he discovers the profound essence of the dialectic that eluded him heretofore.”

I have two copies of Lenin’s volume 38, his Philosophical notebooks (one of them Vanessa Redgrave’s, containing her notes on the study of that volume, which was mandatory in Gerry Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party - one of that organisation’s many strengths, despite its weakness and Healy’s personal degeneration). Lenin did not discover “the profound essence of the dialectic that eluded him heretofore”: he deepened and developed that knowledge, which did assist him in making the October revolution.

He didn’t repudiate all his previous understanding of the dialect and Marxism; this is a real ‘old aunt Sally’/’straw man’. He was already a sophisticated dialectician before that study. He didn’t have to repudiate his 1908 book Materialism and empirio-criticism, but he certainly came to understand better what was insufficient and wrong with Kautsky, Plekhanov and others even back then. Lenin had already understood the difference between the German SPD’s ‘party of the whole class’ and Lenin’s revolutionary party after that blackest day in the history of the working class - the SPD’s voting for war credits to the kaiser on August 4 1914.

There is a world of difference between Lenin discovering “the profound essence of the dialectic that eluded him heretofore” and developing and refining that understanding.

Gerry Downing
Socialist Fight

Slogan fetish

As the person who at the last aggregate of the CPGB proposed drafting a statement on the war in Ukraine in order to seek closer cooperation with others on the left, I must register my disappointment with the text drafted by the Provisional Central Committee and published in last week’s Weekly Worker (‘Establishing a principled left’, October 3). It should be obvious that I am not criticising the PCC for taking this initiative - quite the opposite. I am, however, critical of its execution.

There is clearly a lot of political overlap between a number of groups currently operating on the British left. It is important to find out where we agree and where perhaps we disagree, hopefully with a view to sharing joint campaigns and achieving unity beyond this issue.

It is vital to clarify differences on the war in Ukraine, especially as there is a lot of confusion on the left over this. Many groups have adopted a social-pacifist position (Stop the War Coalition, Corbynites, etc), and then there is the social-imperialist camp (supporting Ukraine/Nato/US, like the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty), while a few groups like George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain even think that socialists should support Russia, because it is the lesser evil.

But the text produced by the PCC is not a statement. It is a long article with numbered paragraphs, with much unnecessary detail. A statement should be short and sharp, and concentrate on the political principles. I proposed to the PCC to delete, as a minimum, points 1-10 and point 19. This would have helped to make the text into an actual statement and would mean the reader would not have to wade through all sorts of paragraphs about this or that weapons system.

Also, there are omissions that I find rather puzzling. Ever since I joined the CPGB some 25 years ago, the organisation has distinguished itself by stressing the need for a politically independent, working class position in a war between two reactionary sides. As internationalists, we have a particular responsibility to deal with our own ruling class (particularly in this war, where the British government and the media are acting as willing lapdogs to the US in its efforts to keep this bloody conflict going as a proxy war against China). Not because we are nationalists or believe in socialism in one country, but because this is where we can confront most directly a section of the international ruling class.

The concept of ‘revolutionary defeatism’ and the slogan, ‘The main enemy is at home’, are crucially important in this context. The PCC says these ideas are implicit in the text and the request to make them explicit is a sign of “fetishism with words”. I find that claim even more puzzling. Have we not fought tooth and nail to keep the name ‘CPGB’ alive? Is that fetishism? How about our insistence on reclaiming ‘communism’ and stripping it of its Stalinist heritage? How about ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’? I really cannot see why we should abandon ‘The main enemy is at home’. It is succinct, understandable, recognisable, it speaks to our political history and our political practice, and it sums up what we fight for - in stark contrast to much of the left.

Also missing is the necessity of establishing a workers’ militia - another long-established key weapon in the CPGB’s propaganda arsenal. I have been told that this was left out on purpose, implicitly and explicitly, as “some of the other groups would never agree to it”.

Now that is a new one on me. Since when have we dropped political demands that we believe to be correct, because others might not agree with them? Should we not at least try to convince those groups and win them over? Especially as we could have a very useful and important public discussion around some of those (possibly) disputed questions.

Along with deleting unnecessary sections of the PCC’s statement, I propose the following should be added: “Our position is for revolutionary defeatism. The main enemy is at home. Therefore, we fight for a Communist Party and a workers’ movement capable of overthrowing the capitalist state. Towards this goal we support the democratic republican principle of the replacement of the standing army by a popular militia and support strikes, boycotts and actions by trade unions to disrupt the military supply chain.”

This is, incidentally, taken almost word for word from a statement that the PCC produced in cooperation with the Dutch Communist Platform and which appeared in the Weekly Worker on February 2 2023. The last half-sentence has been added by me to flesh out what we actually mean by revolutionary defeatism. It is more than the hope that ‘our side loses’. It is a strategy for the working class to become the hegemon of society - here, today.

Lastly, I do think that CPGB members should at least have had a chance to see and amend the text before it was sent to other groups. We are, after all, not interested in building a ‘follow the leadership’ sect. We want to build a real Communist Party, with fully engaged and active members.

Carla Roberts
email

Second coming

Oh dear. Eddie Ford displays the one-dimensional thinking which reflects the old partyist dogma of ‘trade union consciousness’, which determines for us that trade unionists are doomed only to a myopic political vision (‘Davos on the Mersey’, October 3). This is the kind of formula generally associated with the anti-working-class deviants of council communism or ultra-leftist factions of anarchism.

Eddie makes the discovery that Sharon Graham et al regulate the rate of exploitation, and the entire history of the working class could be seen as an attempt to change the degree and rate of capitalist exploitation. We would hardly be much good to the working class, if we didn’t get involved with the nuts and bolts of here and now, and instead confined ourselves to the higher intellectual theories of political thought. Better wages, shorter hours? Nah, mate - I’m holding out for the international victory of the working class and can’t be bothered with reformist, short-term measures like that.

What earthly use would such attitudes be to actual workers? The dynamic, revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World used to engage in on-the-spot bargaining of wages and conditions, while inscribing of their banners ‘Abolition of the wages system’. We engage with the employer to win the best terms in the here and now, while discussing with our mates the possible future without capitalism, without wage-slavery.

Eddie puts me in mind of a born-again Christian coalminer I worked with. He refused to pay the mineworker’s pension, because he believed the day of judgement and the second coming were at hand. It would be a waste of money, he argued. Eventually I convinced him he might have the dates wrong, and a few quid wouldn’t much make difference when it arrived. He’s been drawing his pension 35 years now - though still waiting for Jesus.

Class-consciousness does not require a special sort of organisation. It’s perceived quite independently of the form of organisation where it is achieved and, when needs must, a trade union, a community action group, a secular religious body or indeed a mass party of the working class can be utilised and adapted.

Unions are less under rank-and-file direction these days and suffer from a whole layer of middle class civil servants - apart from the bureaucratic tendencies of ‘jobs for life’ leaders - but without them we would be utterly defenceless. So let’s not sneer at the unions: they are still by and large the first line of defence and the advanced guard of the worker in moving forward. They can likewise be weapons in the fight for class power.

David Douglass
South Shields