At 06:54 AM 05/23/2000 +1000, you wrote:
>Nice post, Rod! And I tend to side with Barkley on the SR Constituent
>Assembly, too - which seems to me to have been a more promising midwife for
>the sort of transformations you discuss (especially in light of the
>resolutions they were passing in their last days) than the dictatorship of
>a vanguard -> substitutionalist elite.
I'm not sure that the Constituent Assembly would have dealt well with the
issue of ending WW I the way Lenin did for Russia -- or with continuing to
fight the war, the way Karensky wanted to do. Would it have dealt well with
violent opposition or civil war or imperialist invasion? or the extreme
poverty of Russia at the time? the division between the peasants and the
workers -- and the difficulty of keeping peasants united once they've
grabbed land for themselves?
This is not to apologize for Lenin (since I'm no Leninist). But I think
that the objective conditions of 1917-18 in Russia were such that nice
social democrats were unlikely to take power (or stay there, if you
consider Karensky to be a social democrat). I think that these conditions
bred substitutionism more than it leapt full-grown from Lenin's head. (Many
of the SR's were more substitutionist in that many believed in the
"propaganda of the deed." Lenin was a moderate compared to the
bomb-throwers among the anarchists, who were strong substitutionists.)
Substitutionism takes hold when the working class is poorly organized and
less than class conscious. (It can be seen in the form of various lobbyists
and lawyers who are substituting for the US working class in most struggles
these days.)
It's important to notice how Lenin's ideas change with circumstances in
Russia. After he initially flirted with Kautsky's top-down "workers can
never be socialist" perspective in WHAT IS TO BE DONE?,[*] he became less
"vanguardist" and less "substitutionist" as the Russian workers movement
grew in number and depth. Then, after October 1917, once the popular
revolution begins to fade, the grass roots being torn apart by civil war,
urban/rural conflict, etc., his ideas veer toward top-downism.
I guess my conclusion is the opposite of Leninism, in that I see Lenin as
more of a dependent variable than an independent one. He, like Woodrow
Wilson, may have seen history as being on his side (as Brad asserts), but
he was wrong. Wilson maybe was right, since his flavor of hypocrisy seems
to rule these days (bombing Serbia to "make the world safe for democracy").
[*] Hal Draper's article reprinted in the recent HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
makes a convincing case that it was Kautsky who developed the top-down
(vanguardist) conception of the party, while Lenin never went all the way
(contrary to the strange consensus among Stalinists and Cold Warriors, who
all agreed that Lenin = Stalin).
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~JDevine
