A Little Bit of Marxist Theory: Rosa Luxemburg against Lenin

A particular concern of my recent posts on Marxist theory has come from the Lenin-Kautsky view that “socialist consciousness is something introduced into the proletarian class struggle from without (von Aussen Hineingetragenes), and not something that arose within it spontaneously.”[1] That concern remained as we discussed the work of Rosa Luxemburg, who early on in her career distinguished herself from Lenin on this point.

Already in 1904 she saw in Lenin an “ultracentralist tendency.”[2] Lenin, she says, separates the “unorganized” revolutionary activity of the class-conscious proletariat from the discipline of a decisive central authority.[3] The social democratic movement would thus be based “either on blind obedience or on the mechanical submission of the part’s militants to their central authority.”[4]

Luxemburg countered that the social democratic movement is based “on the organization and the independent direct action of the mass,” or it is nothing at all.[5] “The most important and profitable changes of the last decade,” she says, “were not ‘invented’ [—“from without”—] by any of the movement’s leaders … but were in every case the spontaneous product of the unfettered movement.”[6] On the next page, she adds, “they are the consequence of a continuing series of great creative acts of experimental, often of spontaneous, class struggle.”[7]

This is in direct opposition to Lenin, who resisted the conception of revolutionary consciousness as the spontaneous product of the proletariat. Lenin’s problem, according to Luxembrug, is that he claims too much authority for intellectuals like himself, does not trust the mass with revolution, and consequently tends toward an ultracentralism which is “imbued, not with a positive creative spirit, but with the sterile spirit of the night-watchman state …, with narrowing and not with broadening, with tying the movement up and not with drawing it together.”[8] This betrays the very heart of the social democratic movement, which consists of the spirit of mass organization.

This concern is reflected in her pamphlet written two years later on the mass strike. The 1905 Russian Revolution, she says, shows us that “the mass strike is not artificially ‘made,’ not ‘decided’ at random, not ‘propagated,’”—that is, not made, decided, or propagated by bourgeois intellectuals![9]

Instead, she says the mass strike consists of “a multiplicity of the most varied forms of action,” taking place within a long, drawn-out class struggle.[10] It is “not a crafty method discovered by subtle reasoning for the purpose of making the proletarian struggle more effective, but the method of motion of the proletarian mass.”[11] It does not happen in a vacuum but is an event which explodes from a history of struggle. “The various undercurrents of the social process of the revolution,” she says, “cross one another, check one another, and increase the internal contradictions of the revolution, but in the end accelerate and thereby render still more violent its eruptions.”[12]

Here, Luxemburg is akin to Gramsci, who stated that the development of revolutionary consciousness is a dialectical negotiation “between the intellectuals and the masses.”[13] It is “a ‘philosophical’ event,”[14] which comes out of “a long process, with actions and reactions, coming together and drifting apart, and the growth of very numerous and complex new formations.”[15]

The point is that the mass of workers is not in need of revolutionary parents who tell them what to do in order to be liberated, who set out a blueprint for a future revolution that they must abide by in order to become free. Revolutionary impulses arise out of class struggle. Revolutionary consciousness is not a gift given from above by economic scientists, but develops out of an historical dialectic of forces.

There is an undeniable element of spontaneity in all revolutionary outbursts, precisely because, as Luxemburg says, “revolutions do not allow anyone to play the schoolmaster with them.”[16]

This conception guided Luxemburg’s assessment of the Russian revolution in 1918. She attributed the Bolshevik success to the fact that all the power rested “exclusively in the hands of the worker and peasant masses,” which “feed the revolution from a narrow blind-alley and opened up for it an untrammeled path into the free and open fields.”[17]

She further thought that power should continue to be held exclusively by the proletarian mass, and was angered by the actions of Lenin and Trotsky following the revolution, as they disassembled the Constituent Assembly which would have been made up of workers.[18] They came out against democracy as such, and so, in her words, stopped up “the very living source from which alone can come the correction of all the innate shortcomings of social institutions. That source is the active untrammeled, energetic political life of the broadest masses of the people.”[19] Her indictment of Trotsky and Lenin is quite powerful, and worth quoting at length:

“As Marxists,” writes Trotsky, “we have never been idol worshippers of formal democracy.” Surely, we have never been idol worshippers of formal democracy. Nor have we ever been idol worshippers of socialism or Marxism either. Does it follow from this that we may also throw socialism on the scrapheap … if it becomes uncomfortable for us? Trotsky and Lenin are the living refutation of this answer. 

“We have never been idol worshippers of formal democracy.” All that that really means is: We have always distinguished the social kernel from the political form of bourgeois democracy; we have always revealed the hard kernel of social inequality and lack of freedom hidden under the sweet shell of formal equality and freedom—not in order to reject the latter but to spur the working class into not being satisfied with the shell, but rather, by conquering political power, to create a socialist democracy to replace bourgeois democracy—not to eliminate democracy altogether. 

But socialist democracy is not something which begins only in the promised land after the foundations of socialist economy are created; it does not come as some sort of Christmas present for the worthy people who, in the interim, have loyally supported a handful of social dictators. Socialist democracy begins simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule and of the construction of socialism. It begins at the very moment of the seizure of power by the socialist party. It is the same thing as the dictatorship of the proletariat. 

Yes, dictatorship! But this dictatorship consists in the manner of applying democracy, not in its elimination, in energetic, resolute attacks upon the well-entrenched rights and economic relationships of bourgeois society, without which a socialist transformation cannot be accomplished. But this dictatorship must be the work of the class and not of a little leading minority in the name of the class—that is, it must be under their direct influence, subjected to the control of complete public activity; it must arise out of the growing political training of the mass of the people.[20]

By taking exclusive political power away from the mass of workers and placing into the hands of a central authority, Lenin and Trotsky eliminated an essential element of social democracy. Did they not open the door for the authoritarianism of Stalin?

Lenin himself saw this toward the end of his life, and urged that Stalin be deposed and the Central Committee made up of workers and peasants. But the damage was already done. One wonders if Stalin’s dictatorship would have been avoided had Luxemburg’s democratic vision been realized instead of the Lenin-Trotsky centralism.


Notes:
[1] Kautsky, quoted in V. I. Lenin, “What is to be done?” in Essential Works of Lenin, ed. Henry M. Christman (New York: Bantam Books, 1966), 82.
[2] Rosa Luxemburg, “Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy,” in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, eds. Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), 250.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid., 252.
[5] Ibid., 251.
[6] Ibid., 254.
[7] Ibid., 255.
[8] Ibid., 256.
[9] Rosa Luxemburg, “The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions,” in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, 170.
[10] Ibid., 173.
[11] Ibid., 192.
[12] Ibid., 182.
[13] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 334.
[14] Ibid., 325.
[15] Ibid., 395–396.
[16] Luxemburg, “The Mass Strike,” 198.
[17] Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution,” in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, 287.
[18] Ibid., 299.
[19] Ibid., 302.
[20] Ibid., 308.

A Little Bit of Marxist Theory: Gramsci on Common Sense vs. Good Sense

In my last post, I covered Lenin’s essay “What is to be done?” where he claims that workers must have Socialist theory introduced to them without because it would not be introduced to them organically from within. I claimed that this way of rendering things is elitist and problematic. Here, I will demonstrate why I think Gramsci’s theory of common sense vs. good sense is a better alternative.

Whereas Lenin privileges a group of bourgeois intellectuals with the ability to arrive at and introduce truth, Gramsci claims that every person is an intellectual:

"Each man … carries one some form of intellectual activity, that is, he is a “philosopher”, an artist, a man of taste, he participates in a particular conception of the world, has a conscious line of moral conduct, and therefore contributes to sustain a conception of the world or to modify it, that is, to bring into being new modes of thought."[1]

Every person is committed to a philosophy, and each person’s philosophy has some kind of logic to it, a logic that is not completely lost on them. The critical theorist’s challenge, then, is not to teach her truth to passive workers waiting to be taught by intellectuals, but the true challenge lies

in the critical elaboration of the intellectual activity that exists in everyone at a certain degree of development, modifying its relationship with the muscular-nervous effort towards a new equilibrium, and ensuring that the muscular-nervous effort, … which is perpetually innovating the physical and social world, becomes the foundation of a new and integral conception of the world.[2]

In other words, the critical theorist sublimates unquestioned common sense (or, “spontaneous philosophy”[3]) by preserving the good sense within it and transforming it into a more excellent mode of thought, “to make it a coherent unity and to raise it to the level reached by the most advanced thought in the world.”[4]

Gramsci further expresses that the process of leading a mass of people to this level of thought “is a ‘philosophical’ event far more important and original than the discovery by some philosophical ‘genius’ of a truth which remains the property of small groups of intellectuals.”[5] This is in contradistinction to Lenin’s theory of the bourgeois intelligentsia. This is not the introduction of advanced modes of thought to the working class from without, but the transformation of thought from within, using the established common sense as a starting point.

We are still talking about intellectuals like Gramsci (and, indeed, Lenin) leading laypeople from “their primitive philosophy of common sense” to “a higher conception of life.”[6] Gramsci still advocates for “the creation of an elite of intellectuals,” because a mass of people “does not become independent in its own right without … organising itself; and there is no organisation … without the theoretical aspect of the theory-practice nexus being distinguished concretely by the existence of a group of people ‘specialised’ in conceptual and philosophical elaboration of ideals.”[7]

This is not an imposition of thought from without. Here, there is a more organic and democratic understanding of the development of the higher conception of life. He describes it as “a dialectic between the intellectuals and the masses.”[8] It begins with the cultivation of the “good sense” already present within the spontaneous philosophy of the workers. “The [theoretical consciousness of the] active man-in-the-mass,” he says,

can indeed be historically in opposition to his activity. One might almost say that he has two theoretical consciousnesses (or one contradictory consciousness): one which is implicit in his activity and which in reality unites him with all his fellow-workers in the practical transformation of the real world; and one, superficial explicit or verbal, which he has inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed.[9]

There is already present within the consciousness of the worker the material necessary for cultivating a new and coherent alternative to common sense—that is, there is within common sense “good sense.” Good sense “is common sense’s ‘healthy nucleus.’”[10] Furthermore, the cultivation of good sense entails the “diffusion in a critical form of truths already discovered, their ‘socialization’ as it were.” [11]

Tilling this ground, furthermore, is not simply the business of intellectuals teaching the masses, but requires time, commitment, and, let’s be real, luck. He refers to it as “a ‘philosophical’ event.”[12] He says, “creating a group of independent intellectuals is not an easy thing; it requires a long process, with actions and reactions, coming together and drifting apart and the growth of very numerous and complex new formations.”[13]

The class struggle is, in fact, a struggle. It is a war of position, not a plow-through-it-quickly war of maneuver. Gramsci’s theory is not incongruous with reality, nor is it overly idealistic and presumptuous. He realizes that he is up against a system, a system which is pervasive in everyday life, its claws running deep into the lives of a mass of people. The answer to this system is not simply the pedagogy of an enlightened group of intellectuals, but the organic, dialectical struggle of outing the truth.


Notes:
[1] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 9.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid., 323.
[4] Ibid., 324.
[5] Ibid., 325.
[6] Ibid., 332.
[7] Ibid., 334.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid., 333.
[10] Jan Rehmann, “The Relevance of Gramsci’s Theory of Hegemony for Social Justice Movements,” in Pedagogy of the Poor: Building the Movement to End Poverty (New York: Teachers College Press, 2011), 118.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Gramsci, 325.
[13] Ibid., 395–396.

A Little Bit of Marxist Theory: Lenin on How to Inspire a Revolution

In “What is to be done?” Lenin argues against the idea that revolution just happens, that resistance manifests itself spontaneously among the working class. Lenin saw this view espoused in the paper Rabochaya Mysl. An article in this paper claims that “The virility of the labor movement is due to the fact that the workers themselves are at last taking their fate into their own hands, and out of the hands of the leaders” (quoted on p.78). Lenin explains that those who espouse such views “imagine that the pure and simple labor movement can work out an independent ideology for itself, if only the workers ‘take their fate out of the hands of the leaders’” (p.81).

Lenin calls this “a profound mistake,” because it neglects the all-too-important aspect of ideology, the way that the masses are manipulated into embracing the status quo. “Consciousness was completely overwhelmed by spontaneity,” he claims (p.79).

Not only do the theorists Lenin criticizes neglect ideology, but they actually put down theorists like Lenin for “exaggerating the role of the importance of ideology” (p.81). They assume the revolutionary consciousness will organically develop amid the working class. As Karl Kautsky explained, they “believe that Marx asserted that economic development and the class struggle create not only the conditions for socialist production, but also, and directly, the consciousness of its necessity” (quoted on p.81). What is neglected, then, is the way ideology reinforces the status quo, and promotes complacency among the working class. Furthermore, the necessity of a counter-claim, of a subversive ideology, is neglected as well.

Lenin’s concerns, then, should easily be appreciated. We cannot downplay ideology in a resigned, “It will work itself out” mindset regarding revolution. We are up against a vast apparatus designed to pacify the masses. We cannot assume that revolutionary consciousness will just happen. (After all, in our own time the struggles of a good portion of the working class have led not to revolutionary consciousness but to Donald Trump!) What is needed is a Social-Democratic consciousness, and this does not organically arise from the workers, according to Lenin.

The workers are limited to “trade union consciousness,” which only leads to “fighting against the employers and for striving to compel the government to pass necessary labor legislation, etc.” (p.74). Trade union consciousness is that which is still compatible with the status quo. The theory of socialism, however, is a different matter—and it “grew out of the philosophic, historical and economic theories that were elaborated by the educated representatives of the propertied classes, the intellectuals” (p.74). Kautsky similarly states that “Modern social consciousness can arise only on the basis of profound scientific knowledge” (quoted on p.82).

So, according to Lenin and Kautsky, Social-Democratic consciousness was arrived at by intellectuals who followed the right path through reason, and they in turn introduce it to the proletariat, who can then be equipped to apply it. Thus, as both Lenin and Kautsky state, “socialist consciousness is something introduced into the proletarian class struggle from without (von Aussen Hineingetragenes), and not something that arose within it spontaneously” (quoted on p.82). Resistance is inspired by the philosophical and theoretical wisdom provided by those like Lenin and Kautsky.

This, however, is where Lenin, in my mind, takes a wrong turn. His is a highly romantic rendering of intellectuals, no doubt stemming from Enlightenment ideals similar to those of Immanuel Kant. In “What is Enlightenment?” Kant states that the masses are too fond of their tutelage to enlighten themselves, so that each has become “really incapable of making use of his reason, for no one has ever let him try it out.” Thus, “the public can only slowly attain enlightenment.” They need help from free intellectuals like Kant in order to be free. The Enlightenment intellectuals are like the philosophers from Plato’s cave analogy, leading the deceived cave dwellers (who cannot lead themselves) to the light of day.

This is the ideological tendency Lenin displays in his essay. On the one hand, he has a consciousness which is sensitive to the interests and needs of the working class (after all, he is a communist); but on the other hand, he displays an elitist and privileged understanding of the theory of resistance. While we cannot depend on the working class organically developing its own revolutionary consciousness, we can no more depend on the reasoning of intellectuals being charitable and just.

Lenin demonstrated with his appointment of Stalin as General Secretary that intellectuals cannot be depended on for doing what is best for the masses. Lenin's philosophy too easily made way for the authoritarian regime of Stalin. And so the idol of the Intellectual Messiah totters.


Page numbers from: V. I. Lenin, “What is to be done?” in Essential Works of Lenin, ed. Henry M. Christman (New York: Bantam Books, 1966).