This article continues an analysis of Vladimir Ulyanov’s (Lenin’s) famous 1902 pamphlet What Is To Be Done? Ulyanov argues that organised socialists can discharge our duties to the working class only by a fight for socialist ideas, not by just “building the movement” in a general way and hoping socialist ideas will evolve almost automatically. 17th in a series of articles around the 100th anniversary of the death of Ulyanov.
By Sean Matgamna
Ulyanov posed the conditions under which Marxism reaches workers with brutal bluntness:
“Since there can be no talk of an independent ideology formulated by the working masses themselves in the process of their movement, the only choice is — either bourgeois or socialist ideology. There is no middle course (for mankind has not created a ‘third’ ideology, and, moreover, in a society torn by class antagonisms there can never be a non-class or an above-class ideology).
“Hence, to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology”.
The falsifications of Marxism by different strands of Stalinism do and have done the same sort of thing, creating a sort of working-class “false consciousness”. And so did and does “Orthodox Trotskyism”. It sees socialist development as an allegedly mechanical process, and to a serious degree a spontaneous process (a quasi-automatic response to the supposed total impasse of capitalism), rather than the conscious process Ulyanov depicts here.
“There is much talk of spontaneity. But the spontaneous development of the working-class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology... for the spontaneous working-class movement is trade-unionism... and trade unionism means the ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie.
“Hence, our task, the task of Social-Democracy [Marxism], is to combat spontaneity, to divert the working-class movement from this spontaneous, trade-unionist striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie, and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary Social Democracy. The sentence employed by the authors of the Economist letter... that the efforts of the most inspired ideologists fail to divert the working-class movement from the path that is determined by the interaction of the material elements and the material environment is therefore tantamount to renouncing socialism”.
For decades the Orthodox Trotskyists operated on the assumption that the changing and falsification of Marxism by Stalinism, on top of the falsifications in the Socialist (Second) International up to 1914, did not change the prospects of socialism. They had to do that or “despair and die”. We can see the issues more clearly from our own situation.
“If these authors were capable of fearlessly, consistently, and thoroughly considering what they say, as everyone who enters the arena of literary and public activity should be, there would be nothing left for them but to ‘fold their useless arms over their empty breasts’ and surrender the field of action to the [bourgeois liberals, like the] Struves and Prokopoviches, who are dragging the working-class movement ‘along the line of least resistance’, i.e., along the line of bourgeois trade-unionism, or to the [attempt in Russia in 1901-3 to create police-controlled pseudo trade unions, with leaders like the Moscow policeman Zubatov]... are dragging it along the line of clerical and gendarme ‘ideology’.”
“It is often said that the working class spontaneously gravitates towards socialism”, writes Ulyanov, and continues: “This is perfectly true in the sense that socialist theory reveals the causes of the misery of the working class more profoundly and more correctly than any other theory, and for that reason the workers are able to assimilate it so easily…”
But to assimilate a theory, you have to have it available. Ulyanov continues: “provided, however, this theory does not itself yield to spontaneity, provided it subordinates spontaneity to itself... The working class spontaneously gravitates towards socialism; nevertheless, most widespread (and continuously and diversely revived) bourgeois ideology spontaneously imposes itself upon the working class to a still greater degree”.
Arguing that the educational work of Marxists was essential if the “spontaneous” working class trade “unionist” movement were to become socialist, Marxist movement, Lenin cites the experience of the German labour movement. “Recall the example of Germany. What was the historic service [the pioneer socialist] Lassalle rendered to the German working-class movement [in 1863-4]? It was that he diverted that movement from the path of progressivist trade-unionism and co-operativism towards which it had been spontaneously moving...
“A fierce struggle against spontaneity was necessary, and only after such a struggle, extending over many years, was it possible, for instance, to convert the working population of Berlin from a bulwark of the [bourgeois] Progressive Party into one of the finest strongholds of Social-Democracy.”
German Social Democracy
Though he greatly admired German socialism, Lenin knew very well that the struggle he describes is never definitively won by the Marxists, never over and done with. The labour movement lives in a hostile capitalist environment, where bourgeois ideas are, so to speak, in the very air the workers breathe. Lenin knows that the class struggle on the ideological front takes place also within the working class movement, as the controversy between the Marxists and “revisionists” in Germany, to which he has already referred, testifies. He recalls:
“Even now the German working class is, so to speak, split up among a number of ideologies. A section of the workers is organised in Catholic and monarchist trade unions; another section is organised in the Hirsch-Duncker unions, founded [in 1865] by the bourgeois [liberal] worshippers of English trade-unionism [on the principle of the ‘harmony of class interests’]; the third is organised in Social-Democratic trade unions. The last-named group is immeasurably more numerous than the rest, but the Social-Democratic ideology was able to achieve this superiority, and will be able to maintain it, only in an unswerving struggle against all other ideologies.”
Why?
“But why, the reader will ask, does the spontaneous movement, the movement along the line of least resistance, lead to the domination of bourgeois ideology? For the simple reason that bourgeois ideology is far older in origin than socialist ideology, that it is more fully developed, and that it has at its disposal immeasurably more means of dissemination.”
Today variants of bourgeois ideology fill the social atmosphere even more, through schools, universities, social media, television, advertising, and much more.
Lenin now discusses more concretely the political characteristics of his opponents in the Russian socialist movement.
“Rabochaya Mysl does not altogether repudiate the political struggle; the rules for a workers’ mutual benefit fund published in its first issue contain a reference to combating the government.
“Rabochaya Mysl believes, however, that ‘politics always obediently follows economics’ (Rabocheye Dyelo varies this thesis when it asserts in its programme that ‘in Russia more than in any other country, the economic struggle is inseparable from the political struggle’).
“If by politics is meant Social-Democratic [Marxist socialist] politics, then the theses of Rabochaya Mysl and Rabocheye Dyelo are utterly incorrect.”
Varieties of labour movement
Ulyanov is writing long before such 20th century experiences as a Peronist labour movement in Argentina, but he understands how such hybrids could develop. The economic struggle of the workers can be linked to many variants of anti-Marxist, anti-socialist, bourgeois politics too. And after Ulyanov, there would be powerful Stalinist trade unions which advocated totalitarianism, that is, were politically reactionary even compared to liberals because they accepted the leadership of Stalinists and a Stalinist model of a desirable society.
“The economic struggle of the workers is very often connected (although not inseparably) with bourgeois politics, clerical politics, etc., as we have seen.
“Rabocheye Dyelo’s theses are [only] correct, if by politics is meant trade union politics, viz., the common striving of all workers to secure from the government measures for alleviating the distress to which their condition gives rise, but which do not abolish that condition, i.e., which do not remove the subjection of labour to capital.
“That striving indeed is common to the English trade-unionists, who are hostile to socialism, to the Catholic workers, to the [police-run] “Zubatov” workers [organisation in Russia], etc. There is politics and politics.
“Thus, we see that Rabochaya Mysl does not so much deny the political struggle, as it bows to its spontaneity, to its [lack of scientific socialist] consciousness.
“While fully recognising the political struggle (better: the political desires and demands of the workers), which arises spontaneously from the working-class movement itself, Rabochaya Mysl absolutely refuses independently to work out a specifically Social-Democratic politics corresponding to the general tasks of socialism and to present-day conditions in Russia…”
A critic had said of a leading article in Rabochaya Mysl that it had been written in a “sharp and fervent” manner.
“Every man with convictions who thinks he has something new to say writes ‘fervently’ and in such a way as to make his views stand out in bold relief.
“Only those who are accustomed to sitting between two stools lack ‘fervour’; only such people are able to praise the fervour of Rabochaya Mysl one day and attack the ‘fervent polemics’ of its opponents the next.”
Subservience
Ulyanov now discusses another “Economist”-leaning text, the Appeal of the Self-Emancipation of the Workers Group (March 1899).
“The authors of the ‘Appeal’ rightly say that ‘the workers of Russia are only just awakening, are just beginning to look about them, and are instinctively clutching at the first available means of struggle’.
“Yet they draw from this the same false conclusion as that drawn by Rabochaya Mysl, forgetting that the instinctive is the unconscious (the spontaneous) to the aid of which socialists must come; that the ‘first available means of struggle’ will always be, in modern society, the trade union means of struggle, and the ‘first available’ ideology the bourgeois ([narrow] trade unionist) ideology…”
“That the mass movement [the great strike movements of the 1890s] is a most important phenomenon is a fact not to be disputed. But the crux of the matter is, how is one to understand the statement [from Rabocheye Dyelo] that the mass working class movement will ‘determine the tasks’? It may be interpreted in one of two ways.
“Either, it means bowing to the spontaneity of this movement, i.e., reducing the role of Social-Democracy to mere subservience to the working-class [trade-unionist] movement as such (the interpretation of Rabochaya Mysl, the Self-Emancipation Group, and other Economists).
“Or, it means that the mass movement places before us new theoretical, political, and organisational tasks, far more complicated than those that might have satisfied us in the period before the rise of the mass movement.
“Rabocheye Dyelo… has argued constantly as though the ‘mass movement’ relieves us of the necessity of clearly understanding and fulfilling the tasks it sets before us.
“We need only point out that Rabocheye Dyelo considered that it was impossible to set the overthrow of the autocracy as the first [prime] task of the mass working-class movement, and that it degraded this task (in the name of the mass movement) to that of a struggle for immediate political demands”.
In a footnote, Ulyanov says that the article by B Krichevsky inRabocheye Dyelo repeats these mistakes.
“Krichevsky, protesting against what he regards as the absolutely unfounded charge of Economist heresy, pathetically exclaims: ‘What Social-Democrat does not know that according to the theories of Marx and Engels the economic interests of certain classes play a decisive role in history, and, consequently, that particularly the proletariat’s struggle for its economic interests must be of paramount importance in its class development and struggle for emancipation?’”
Ulyanov comments: “The word ‘consequently’ is completely irrelevant. The fact that economic interests play a decisive role does not in the least imply that the economic (i.e., trade union) struggle is of prime importance; for the most essential, the ‘decisive’ interests of classes can be satisfied only by radical political changes in general.
“In particular the fundamental economic interests of the proletariat can be satisfied only by a political revolution that will replace the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie by the dictatorship of the proletariat. Krichevsky repeats the arguments… that politics follows economics, etc... of the Bernsteinians of German Social-Democracy [the ‘revisionists’, who formulated their idea as ‘the movement is everything, the end, nothing’]… that the workers must first of all acquire ‘economic power’ before they can think about political revolution”.
Tactics
Ulyanov then takes up an argument about “tactics as plan” and “tactics as process”.
The “Economist” journal Rabocheye Dyelo had seen a “diametrical contradiction” between two statements in Iskra, the Marxist newspaper which Ulyanov, with Plekhanov, Martov, and others had been publishing from exile since December 1900.
One: “Social-Democracy does not, tie its hands, it does not restrict its activities to some one preconceived plan or method of political struggle; it recognises all means of struggle as long as they correspond to the forces at the disposal of the Party” (Iskra no.1.)
Two: “‘Without a strong organisation skilled in waging political struggle under all circumstances and at all times, there can be no question of that systematic plan of action, illuminated by firm principles and steadfastly carried out, which alone is worthy of the name of tactics” (Iskra, no.4).
Objecting to the “systematic plan of action”: “Rabocheye Dyelo... has made the remarkable discovery that ‘tactics-as-plan contradicts the fundamental spirit of Marxism’... that tactics are ‘a process of growth of Party tasks, which grow together with the Party’... This remark has every chance of becoming a celebrated maxim, a permanent monument to the Rabocheye Dyelo ‘trend’.
“To the question, whither?... [it] replies: Movement is a process of changing the distance between the starting-point and subsequent points of the movement.
“This matchless example of profundity is not merely a curiosity (were it that, it would not be worth dealing with at length), but the programme of a whole tendency…”, expressed also in Rabochaya Mysl as: “That struggle is desirable which is possible, and the struggle which is possible is that which is going on at the given moment”.
Ulyanov comments: “This is precisely the trend of unbounded opportunism, which passively adapts itself to spontaneity.”
Iskra and the associated journal Zarya have been working to a “systematic plan” of reorganising the existing Marxist circles into a coherent party around a newspaper published abroad and smuggled into Russia.
Now we hear: “Tactics-as-plan contradicts the whole spirit of Marxism!”.
Ulyanov responds: “This is a libel on Marxism. It means turning Marxism into the caricature held up by the Narodniks [populists] in their struggle against us [when the populists censured the Marxists as people waiting on a hypothetical mass workers’ struggle while they, the populists, went ahead with definite plans, e.g. to assassinate Tsarist officials].
The libel “means belittling and restraining the initiative and energy of class-conscious fighters, whereas Marxism, on the contrary, gives a gigantic impetus to the initiative and energy of the Social-Democrat, opens up for him the widest perspectives, and (if one may so express it) places at his disposal the mighty force of many millions of workers ‘spontaneously’ rising for the struggle.
“The entire history of international Social-Democracy teems with plans advanced now by one, now by another political leader, some confirming the far-sightedness and the correct political and organisational views of their authors and others revealing their short-sightedness and their political errors”.
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