Long Way From Home

As usual things have been very busy. My plan is to have more time for writing this summer and into next year. I finally started finishing some concluding notes on What is to be Done? as a follow up to Lars Lih’s book.

Now that some of the key points in Lih’s book have been covered it is necessary to finish with an overview of Lenin’s concept of organization in WITBD. The point is not to elevate WITBD into a set of principles that can be abstractly and universally applied. Like any work, WITBD is product of history. As Lih noted in the beginning of his book such an approach has been an evident enough problem in the history of “Leninism”. However, despite Lih’s attempt to downplay the importance of WITBD in subsequent bolshevik thinking about organization, Lenin’s work—including WITBD—continues to be a necessary reference point for rethinking the role of revolutionary organizations in our own day. By restoring the detailed context of Lenin’s concept of organization and reestablishing its connection to Kautsky, Lih provides the basis to critique Lenin and Leninism and, in doing so, makes WITBD alive again—a renewed and important departure point for thinking about revolutionary organization.

As Lih argues, the importance of WITBD was found in its generalization of already existing practices in the Russian underground, codifying and synthesizing those practices into a broad whole. The generalizing character of WITBD is what continues to make it so valuable today.
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Watching Werner Herzog’s latest documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, I couldn’t get Marx’s Grundrisse out of my head. The film focuses on the scientific investigation of Chauvet cave in southern France. It places particular emphasis on the radical difference between the paleolithic world and our own.

Central to Herzog’s movie is the idea of history. The artists of the cave painted approximately 35,000 years ago. Another series of paintings appeared again about 30,000 years ago. Therefore some 5,000 years separated the paintings in the cave, which overlap each other in complex ways. On this point Herzog comments in the documentary: “The sequence and duration of time is unimaginable for us today. We are locked in history and they were not.”

Herzog takes up a romantic standpoint. The world of paleolithic human beings is lost. However, what is more is that we experience history very differently. While history is compressed for us, moving faster and faster, Herzog seems to be saying that for paleolithic human beings it was an infinite moment–a very Marx-like notion.

Yet, for Herzog, whatever the paintings of Chauvet meant to the people who used the cave must remain unknown. While history was essentially open for paleolithic society because it did not change, for us history is a prison. What I appreciate about Herzog’s vision is his intuitive grasp of this reality, which, for me is transmitted by the way his human subjects always fill the canvas of the screen in his documentaries.
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I’ve been finishing up notes on Lars Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: What is to be Done in Context. I’ve been trying to condense Lih’s summary of the differences between Iskra and Rabochee Delo.

Those who upheld the Erfurtian consensus opposed both revisionism and economism within the Russian marxist milieu. They maintained that social democracy was a synthesis of reformism and revolution. Thus the SPD model charted a middle course between English trade-unionism and French syndicalism or marxist sectarianism. While the SPD conceived of itself as using parliament for revolutionary aims, what was critical in the debates in the Russian movement for the Iskra-ites was the role of the organization in the continuity of struggle and leadership, and the merger of economic interests with the goal of the political overthrow of the tsarist state. As Lih puts it, social democratic organization realized “the social-revolutionary energy of the proletariat [as] a political factor on a continuing day-to-day basis. No longer would the revolutionary party only emerge on days of revolution and then afterwards subside back to quiet theoretical propaganda” (232).

Lenin’s goal was to set in relief the organizational implications of revisionism and economism, but he did so in WITBD by targeting the main rival of Iskra, the journal Rabochee Delo. Rabochee Delo (Workers Cause) was a marxist newspaper that ran from 1899 to 1902. The founders of the newspaper were, up until the late 1890s united with the Emancipation of Labor Group within the Union of Russian Social Democrats Abroad, which Plekhanov’s group split from in 1898. The founders of Rabochee Delo were part of the younger generation of marxist exiles who had first-hand experience in the movement of the mid-1890s, much like Lenin and Martov. Iskra began publication in response to Rabochee Delo. The two newspapers, in effect, became rival ideological centers within the embryonic Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.

The critique of Rabochee Delo in WITBD is a complicated one. While it may appear that Lenin accused the journal of economism and even being in sympathy with revisionism, reality was something different: Rabochee Delo upheld the Erfurtian consensus. Instead, according to Lih, the main charge levelled by Iskra was that Rabochee Delo failed to understand how to correctly adapt the Erfurtian program to the Russian context. Therefore, WITBD is informed by the idea that, despite its affirmations to the contrary, Rabochee Delo failed in practice to draw sharp distinctions between social democratic orthodoxy and the double threats of economism and revisionism.
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Off an on for a couple of years I’ve been returning to all of Terry Gilliam’s movies. A while back I returned to Brazil, his best movie. It appeared in 1985, when the neo-liberal reaction was comfortably settling in the guise of Reagan and Thatcher. It is striking to what extent the movie anticipates The Matrix (and Fight Club). Only the Matrix, following the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999, picks up where Brazil left off. Neo, unlike Sam Lowry, the main character in Brazil, is able to eventually pierce the ideological dreamscape created by the machines and wake up to see the world as it really is.

When Sam Lowry finds himself in Jack Lint’s torture chamber he lets out a confused plea, “why did you do this to me?” The question goes to the heart of why, in part, this movie has the kind of staying power it has shown over the decades. Lowry’s sad appeal, suggests a displacement of agency. Palin’s own subjectivity is commanded to act against him by the bureaucracy that has reproduced itself inside of him. Yet this reproduction occurs at the very level of Lowry’s imagination. He hopes to escape his job and the mysterious struggle against the government.

Therefore it is not so much whether he can escape it. Instead it is more accurate to say that Lowry doesn’t recognize the real world. Lowry’s imagination, represented in ongoing daydream, is as displaced as his everyday self. His imagination has little relation to his everyday life, which is best dramatized in Lowry’s inablity to work out the contradiction between the “terrorist” specters and the woman he attempts to track down. His “love” for the woman is itself a symptom, both of the absent cause and a sentimentalism. A related split occurs in the heartbreaking scene when he goes to give the “refund” check to the woman.

This radical split is what marks Brazil as one of the most pessimistic movie by Gilliam. In Baron Munchausen, for example, the imagination is able to pierce the bureaucrat’s spectacle of what is “real” and then throw off his hold on the city. In Brazil, Gilliam and Tom Stoppard–who co-wrote the screenplay and brings a focus and symmetry unusual for a Gilliam movie–suggests that our daydreams have become the equivalent of the role of TV in the movie. Yet, inversely, maybe if the TV can be blown up, as it is in the beginning of the movie by the “terrorists” one of the bombings, then perhaps this kind of symptomatic day dreaming can be as well. Of course, to flip it over one more time, the fact that the only resistance we see is terrorist in fact means that a social, collective resistance is not possible, since such a strategy is one already of defeat.

With the world crisis, we are living in time when rupturing the ideological normalcy of what we are told is the “real” world–the accepted limits of what is possible, that capitalism works and the politicians are in control–is not only happening but will, for the first time in a long time, become a truly collective, mass experience. Such a situation was very far removed in 1985 or 1999. The latest form of resistance, the occupy movement, developing from the Arab revolution and the Indignados in Greece, Spain and throughout Europe, is, in terms of content, still back in 1999. However, the objective reality of the crisis means that resistance cannot and will not stay in within the imaginative framework of the 1980s and 1990s.

I’m continuing my notes on Lars Lih’s book Lenin Rediscovered. The first part of my notes is here.

Rather than a break with Social Democratic marxism, Lih says that WITBD actually represents a continuing attempt by Lenin to adapt the SPD model to Russian conditions. Lih argues that WITBD in fact upholds what he calls a “Erfurtian” position; that is the correctness of the Erfurt Program of the SPD.

Lih sees WITBD as a continuation of Lenin’s arguments in the 1890s for a social democratic organization along the lines of the SPD. Lenin first formulated the “orthodox” argument for Russian conditions in his book-length polemic, “Friends of the People,” written in 1894. Against those who said that the socialist and worker movement could not merge in Russia given the presence of an authoritarian society without political freedoms, Lenin pointed to the history of Western Europe where the socialist and worker movements were separated for decades until the German SPD emerged as uniting force for the two elements. The Germans were a particularly good example because they constructed their organization under Bismark’s anti-socialist laws, which were not repealed under social democratic pressure until 1891, protecting the rights of socialist activity. For Lenin, only the German socialists had been successful in “merging” the workers and socialist movements. It was no accident that the tactics of the Germans during this time were studied by many Russian socialists sympathetic to this view. It was also not coincidental that central to German socialist tactics was the role of exile organizations and their newspapers distributed illegally back home. Lenin obviously had this in mind with his plan for Iskra that he laid out at the end of WITBD.

In WITBD, Lenin, like other Kautskyite social democrats, was following Engel’s line of argument that said the proletariat is the only social class capable of leading a bourgeois-democratic revolution. The bourgeoisie, in fact, hides in the arms of the monarchical state for fear of the working class taking advantage of bourgeois rights to increase its political power. The working class not only struggles for its own rights but the freedoms of social layers in society. The end goal of this phase of the proletarian struggle was the achievement of a parliamentary regime. It was not until after the failed 1905 uprising that Russian marxists began to systematically appropriate the concept of “permanent revolution,” which emerged after the bitter defeat of the workers in the revolutions of 1848 in Germany and France, famously formulated by Marx in his “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League”. There he declared that the working class must “make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, unitl the proletariat has conquered state power.”
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I finished reading Lars Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: What is to Be Done? in Context. Lih’s book is a major reevaluation of the famous (and infamous) work by Lenin. The status of What is to Be Done? in the history of the revolutionary Left since the Russian Revolution has obscured the actual context and meaning of Lenin’s arguments on organization. While Lenin’s book became one pillar for the “vanguard party-building model”, it also evolved into a kind of shorthand for what was to become known as “Leninism”. Taking apart the myth of What is to Be Done? is the subject of Lih’s book, which consists of an almost 700 page commentary and a new translation.

Lih not only takes issue with the revolutionary Left that claims the “leninist” mantle. He also critiques those who see in What is to Be Done? the foundations of authoritarianism and one-party dictatorship. However, it wasn’t only Cold War era academics in the West who crafted this kind of argument. A highly developed form of this idea was also developed by revolutionary marxists, which has continued to characterize WITBD ever since. It is best summarized by Trotsky’s attack in 1904 that what Lenin actually proposed was “subsitutionism” in which “the organisation of the party substitutes itself for the party as a whole; then the Central Committee substitutes itself for the organisation; and finally the ‘dictator’ substitutes himself for the Central Committee”. Luxemburg brought an even more distinct leftwing critique, citing Lenin as an example of a marxist who theorized a party of “blanquist” intellectuals as the agent of history rather than the working class.

Lih calls these approaches to What is to Be Done?—whether from the left or right—the “textbook interpretation”. He defines this approach as one that sees WITBD as a break with the prevailing social democratic marxism of its time. While the rightwing use of the “textbook interpretation” argued that WITBD cast in terms of organization an authoritarian and undemocratic worldview, the leftwing use said that it showed a clear rejection of the central role of worker self-activity.

Lih equally takes to task a more subtle use of the “textbook interpretation”. He writes:

The textbook interpretation is thus, on the whole, a postwar creation. One reason for its rise is a great forgetting of what prewar international Social Democracy was all about. The principal reason for this loss of context is the watershed of the 1917 revolution, which split prewar Social Democracy in two and gave the name ‘Social Democracy’ only to the more moderate side. On the other, a number of writers with no or very shallow roots in the Second International—Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Karl Korsch—created a theory (not shared by Lenin) that Leninism was the principled rejection of the fatalistic Marxism of the Second International and of Kautsky in particular. (32)

Lih points to a version of this interpretation exists in the Trotskyist tradition, the best example being Tony Cliff’s classic four volume work on Lenin. The Trotskyist recuperation of WITBD, Lih argues, sees Lenin as establishing a real if not completely realized break with social democratic marxism. While there is no doubt, the argument goes, WITBD overstates the role of a party working on an “unconscious” proletariat, Lenin “bends the stick” back during the 1905 Revolution, to not only reinsert the category of workers self-activity into his theory of revolution, but also into his approach to organization when he castigated rank-and-file bolsheviks for not “opening up” the party to the masses of newly radicalized workers.
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I have been doing a series of readings on revolutionary organization with some comrades. We are currently reading What is to be Done? I wanted to write up some brief and accessible background notes on the Russian context of Lenin’s famous book.

It is difficult to understand WITBD without having some sense of the historical context. Lenin wrote this book for readers that were familiar with the then current debates and conditions within the Russian marxist movement. He was not thinking of potential readers of WITBD more than hundred years after it was published. For these reasons WITBD assumes a close knowledge of specific names, events and even articles.

There is an irony, then, that WITBD later became a kind of blueprint for the “leninist” party. It is the use of WITBD in the history of the revolutionary Left since its publication, by advocates and detractors alike, that has made it a critical reference point for theories of revolutionary organization.

So what is essential background knowledge to WITBD?

Up until the revolution of 1917, Russia was an autocracy ruled over by the monarchy of the Tsar. There was no political freedom, no freedom of speech, association or assembly. There would be times when the regime would selectively allow certain kinds of political speech and assembly, but for radicals there was only one answer: prison. After the assassination of tsar Alexander II, an elaborate and effective secret police sent thousands of radicals and organizers to jail for secretly meeting or even passing out a flyer.

The tsarist regime was arguably the most reactionary government in Europe and Russia the farthest behind the capitalist development of England and even countries like France and Germany. Russia remained a largely peasant and “feudal” country but had occasionally attempted to adapt modern institutions to these conditions. The city of Petersburg for example was built by the tsar Peter as a modern administrative and government center with a well developed university system and civil service. However, subsequent tsars reversed course in an effort to protect the privileges of the monarchy and the aristocracy.
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I’ve been slowly working on a critique of Lenin’s State and Revolution. I started with Lenin’s reading of the “Critique of the Gotha Program” since that goes to the heart of the problem with his important work written during the height of the Russian Revolution.

The “Critique” consists of “marginal notes” on the proposed political program of the Socialist Workers Party of Germany (SAPD), the forerunner of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). The SPD was to become by Lenin’s time the largest and most powerful Socialist party in Europe. Marx originally sent his notes to August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, two leaders of the Eisenach faction, cautioning them about merging with the followers of Lassalle from the General German Workers’ Association (ADAV) in order to create the SAPD. Marx’s intervention made little impact on the outcome of the Gotha Program. As Franz Mehring noted, one of the main reasons the “Critique” was “silently ignored” was probably “the fact that it went above the intellectual level of the members of the Eisenach faction even more than it did above that of the Lassalleans” (509). The “Critique” was not published until 1891 under the influence of Friedrich Engels when the Gotha Program was being replaced by the Erfurt Program in the SPD. Despite its publication, however, Marx’s “marginal notes” were rarely referenced by the SPD or the larger socialist movement. Therefore, like his return to Marx’s writing on the Paris Commune, Lenin’s turn to the “Critique” was in some sense a provocative move as he searched for a ground upon which to theorize the form of the revolutionary popular democracy emerging in Russia.
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Been thinking about two of my favorite Miyazaki movies lately. Princess Mononoke makes James Cameron’s Avatar look like the symptom that it is. In Spirited Away, Miyazaki seems to separate two principles that were combined in the character of Ashitaka from Princess Mononoke. He is the character that makes it possible for the world to heal and he is a figure of fate. He gets the curse/gift and is compelled to leave his village to enter into the tragic violent world in the West. In Spirited Away, Ashitaka is split between Chihiro and Haku. Chihiro heals No-Face and keeps the tragic world of the bathhouse from imploding while Haku is finally freed as an imprisoned water spirit.

I’ve finished the last installment of notes on Kevin Anderson’s Marx at the Margins for now. The other parts are here and here.

Anderson speaks of a multi-linear theory of history emerging in Marx’s work, which gradually displaces the unilinear concept that had characterized his earlier thinking. Anderson argues that this new line of thought begins to fully take shape in the Grundrisse. He quotes Raya Dunayevskaya, who notes that the “historic sweep” of the Grundrisse “allows Marx, during the discussion of the relationship of ‘free’ labor as alienated labor to capital, to pose the question of, and excursion into, pre-capitalist societies” (155). Similarly, Anderson contends, the “subtext” of Capital implicitly suggested “how the very existence of these noncapitalist societies implied the possibility of alternative ways of organizing social and economic life,” allowing Marx “to elaborate modern, progressive alternatives to capitalism” (181).

By raising the idea of a multi-linear theory of history, Anderson infers that Marx’s “excursion” is about far more than distinguishing the particular form of labor in capitalist society. Instead, as Dunayevskaya’s insight suggests, Marx was searching for a total conception of human history, where the successive alienated forms of social existence made up a single arc from so-called called primitive communism, an original egalitarian society with little social division of labor, to communism in its “higher phase”—a post-capitalist society.

Placing capitalism in relation to other modes of life that exist contemporaneously and in the past allowed Marx to historicize capitalism. Bourgeois thought naturalizes capitalist social relations, making their existence given, pre-determined and eternal. For this reasons bourgeois thought has a unilinear conception of history that sees the destruction of other types of society as progressive development. By historicizing capitalism, Marx is able to show how it is a transitional society, subject to historical development, generating the subjects whose activity constantly revolts against it and thereby brings it to an end. Humanity exists and has existed, Marx argues, in other social forms besides capitalist relations. Those modes of life serve as “alternatives to capitalism,” as Anderson puts it, precisely because they are social forms in which the relation between the creation of uses and their appropriation is not severed. There is a direct link between labor and the means of production. In many ways, therefore, for Marx this represents a qualitatively higher moment of realization of human existence than capitalist society, which destroys the connection to the production of uses and their direct appropriation by the producers.

For this reason Marx often drew attention to the retrogression of capitalism, nowhere more emphatically than the course of primitive accumulation. Anderson contends that when looking at colonialism in India in the early 1860s there is no longer any sense in Marx, as he was to note of the condition of Ireland, that “truly capitalist relations were beginning to develop in India, or that however painfully, some sort of progressive modernization was taking place; rather, there is a sense of reaching an historical impasse, as the old forms disintegrated without progressive new ones being able to form and develop” (165). This impasse is not limited to primitive accumulation. Capital not only periodically destroys the conditions of labor, ever increasing the level of exploitation of existing workers, but creates a massive surplus of laborers, separated from the land or other means or production yet who can never be regularly employed.
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