I have now come to some certain conclusions about my last post — the first being is that I lack a natural flair for dialectics but rather aim in the dark when concerning negations, totalities, etc. The second conclusion I have reached is one pertaining to the central question of ‘post-Soviet’ Marxism — do we repeat Lenin?
Marxism is a political science in the strictest sense of the world. It follows from data to hypotheses from hypotheses to theories. Marxism draws its ‘political’ aspect from its historical and economic conclusion. Like other sciences, when Marxism encounters a flaw in itself it must critically analyze itself and from the analysis comes a higher understanding of Marxism. What is the ‘Marxist’ critique of Lenin? Is it in his theory of imperialism? No, Lenin’s theory of imperialism is quite accepted even amongst most anarchistic leftists and most social democratic capitalists. Does it come from his concept of centralizing the means of production? Perhaps it is a controversy but only the most childish anarchists desire disordered municipal production. Then where must it come from?
Second—win over and bring under the leadership of the Communist Party, the revolutionary vanguard of the proletariat, not only the entire proletariat, or its vast majority, but all who labour and are exploited by capital…[1]
Yes, the ‘Communist Party, the revolutionary vanguard of the proletariat’, surely this must be the flaw in Leninism. Surely, the failure of Maoist China, Stalinist Russia, Castroist Cuba, etc. must have proven vanguardism defeat. Of course, it must be that simplistic — surely, Thermidoric reaction, fascistic terror and counter-revolution, and backwardness of regions of the country can have no factor. Everything must boil down to a single thing; “there are no totalities!” screams the left-‘communist’.
But let us analyze the latest left-communist folly — the glorious CPE Revolution! The universities occupied, the streets clogged, business stopped, and dare I say it — a few bricks thrown. I stated in The Damnable French “Through the synthesis of the riot and the revolution, the organization of spontaneous rebels.” Please don’t laugh at my dialectical ignorance. Of course I know better now, the dialectical negation of spontaneity is of course not organization but consciousness.
There is a long process of reaching consciousness from spontaneity; Ernest Mandel put it to the effect of “action → experience → consciousness” [2]. Now the French have taken quite a bit of action and gained quite a bit of experience, but then where is French consciousness?
Here in lies the problem with the French ‘mass movement’: a revolution is the merging of action of the masses and the revolutionary nuclei combined with the consciousness of the vanguard and the advanced workers. The build up of a mass movement is the build up of trade union or ‘concessions consciousness’.
The CPE riots prove this — the masses took action and the CPE was repealed but then what happened? The masses returned to their daily lives. So the question of ‘vanguardism’ is answered here — revolution’s are not mass movements alone but rather a combination of the mass movement with the revolutionary nuclei — the Communist Party.
[1] Lenin, V. (1920, July 4). Theses on Fundamental Tasks of The Second Congress Of The Communist International. Retrieved April 15, 2006, from http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/jul/04.htm
[2] Mandel, E. (1970). The Leninist Theory of Organization. Retrieved April 15, 2006, from http://marxists.org/archive/mandel/196x/leninism/index.htm
