> Date sent: Wed, 10 Dec 1997 13:25:01 -0500
> Send reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> From: Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: re: dialectics, etc.
> Ricardo:
>
> >That's just what Marx hoped for, but the fact is that workers have
> >shown little inclination to "create themselves" into Marxists.
> >That's why Lenin wrote What is to be done?
> >
>
> This is silly. Lenin wrote this in order to help construct a socialist
> party in Russia based on the German model. He and Plekhanov struggled with
> the Economist tendency which resisted a national organization. There is
> nothing really new in this article, as scholars such as Neil Harding have
> pointed out. All of the ideas are imported from Western Europe and adapted
> to Russian conditions.
No, What Is to Be Done? is Lenin's most original political text;
indeed it is the foundation of Bolshevism: the working class
movement does not have a revolutionary consciousness of its own; left
to itself, such movement will never develop beyond trade-union
consciousness. A marxist consciousness can only be brought
from the outside by a centralized party.
What worries marxists about this text is that Lenin is right.
Luxemburg is wrong. A centralized party, like the Bolshevik Party,
which claims to have a "true" understanding of the interests of the
working class, is a must. The workers themselves are incapable of
marxist consciousness, incapable of knowing their "real" interests.
> For example, Lenin's concept of a vanguard represented orthodox social
> democratic thought.. George Plekhanov, eighteen years before the
> publication of "What is to be Done?" stated that "the socialist
> intelligentsia...must become the leader of the working class in the
> impending emancipation movement, explain to it its political and economic
> interests and also the interdependence of those interests and must prepare
> them to play an independent role in the social life of Russia." In 1898,
> Pavel Axelrod wrote that "the proletariat, according to the consciousness
> of the Social Democrats, does not possess a ready-made, historically
> elaborated social ideal," and "it goes without saying that these
> conditions, without the energetic participation of the Social Democrats,
> may cause our proletariat to remain in its condition as a listless and
> somnolent force in respect of its political development." The Austrian
> Hainfeld program of the Social Democrats said that "Socialist consciousness
> is something that is brought into the proletarian class struggle from the
> outside, not something that organically develops out of the class
> struggle." Kautsky, the world's leading Marxist during this period, stated
> that "socialism and the class struggle arise side by side and not one out
> of the other; each arises under different conditions. Modern socialist
> consciousness can arise only on the basis of profound scientific knowledge."
This is true, and Lenin himself cites Kautsky and others to
justify his position. But Lenin went further by concluding that
the workers simply are unable to develop a socialist consciousness
and are bound to remain trap within bourgeois consciousness without a
party acting as a vanguard. Morevoer it has to be acknowledged that
his concept of party ORGANIZATION went beyond anything previously
argued by marxists. How else to we explain
the Bolshevik- Menshevik split in 1903?
> Lenin was responsible for many positive innovations in Marxist thought such
> as his understanding of the national question, but "What is To Be Done"
> contains no new ideas.
What Is to Be Done is no pamphlet; it is a political document of
enormous historical significance, more so than the Prince.
ricardo
> Louis Proyect
>
>
>
