Rosa Lichtenstein
25th December 2010, 08:52
As many of you will know, one of the most important analyses of Lenin's work -- Lars Lih's Lenin Rediscovered (http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=8AVUvEUsdCgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=lars+lih&source=bl&ots=5i9r6tAI_s&sig=nUybxz6BDBUNFrft8ORJJSMuFKI&hl=en&ei=Aq0VTdjFK860hAfo__m2Dg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&sqi=2&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false) -- was published a few years back.
This book challenged the following widespread idea (held on the right and the left) -- as John Molyneux (http://johnmolyneux.blogspot.com/2006/11/lihs-lenin-review-of-lars-t-lih-lenin.html) put things:
A line of argument was evolved. With minor variations, it went like this. Stalinism was not just the chronological successor to Leninism but its logical and necessary consequence. All the principal horrific features of the Stalinist regime – the mass murder, the gulag, the police terror, the totalitarian state and party, the intellectual and cultural tyranny - were either initiated by Lenin or, at least, present in embryo in Bolshevik practice and in Leninist ideology from the beginning. If the pre- revolutionary Lenin did not openly espouse or advocate a totalitarian vision of the future, this was either deception or self deception, for incipient totalitarianism was deeply lodged in his ideas, personality and psychology. The fundamental characteristics of Lenin and Leninism were always an utterly unscrupulous ruthlessness as to methods and a fanatical pursuit of absolute power for his party and himself.
In this indictment the key piece of evidence for the prosecution, the ‘smoking gun’ was held to be a pamphlet that Lenin wrote in 1901, when the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party barely existed and before the Bolshevik faction or party had even been dreamt of, called Chto delat? or What is to be Done? The avowed purpose of the pamphlet was to rally the then scattered forces of Russian Social Democracy into a single national party organized around a national newspaper and focused on the struggle against the Tsarist autocracy and for democracy and political freedom. To win the argument for this plan Lenin also declared that it was necessary to combat the conception of the struggle known as ‘economism’- the idea that the working class, and socialist agitation in the working class, should concentrate on economic demands, leaving the political struggle against Tsarism to the middle class liberals and intelligentsia.
The case against What is to be Done? was that in it Lenin had maintained that the working class would not develop socialist consciousness if left to its own devices; that the spontaneous tendency of the working class was only towards trade unionism (which , because it concentrated on bargaining over the price of labour power within the system, was a variation on bourgeois consciousness) and that socialism would, therefore, have to be introduced into the working class ‘from the outside’. This showed, so the argument ran, that really Lenin, behind the rhetoric, despised the working class and thought that socialism would have to be imposed on it from above. The real plan, from the beginning, was not working class power or self emancipation, but a party dictatorship over the working class. Once this was established the rest of the history of Bolshevism and the Revolution was read in this light; every quarrel, dispute, faction fight and split in the history of The Russian Social and Democratic Labour Party (especially the split at the 2nd Congress in 1903, which produced the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions) was presented as emanating from Lenin’s obsessive drive for power.
Veritable legions of academics – historians, political scientists, Sovietologists, Kremlinologists, etc – were put into the field to argue or assert this view. As in other matters, the Americans led the way and the British followed in their wake. Émigrés from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe played a prominent role. Before too long an almost unchallengeable orthodoxy, the ‘textbook interpretation’ as Lih calls it, was firmly in place.
Lih's book blew this ‘textbook interpretation’ apart.
Well, the latest edition of Historical Materialism (http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/) is devoted to a lengthy discussion of Lih's book, with contributions from the late Chris Harman, Paul LeBlanc, Robert Mayer among others, and a detailed, 70 page reply from Lih himself.
This book challenged the following widespread idea (held on the right and the left) -- as John Molyneux (http://johnmolyneux.blogspot.com/2006/11/lihs-lenin-review-of-lars-t-lih-lenin.html) put things:
A line of argument was evolved. With minor variations, it went like this. Stalinism was not just the chronological successor to Leninism but its logical and necessary consequence. All the principal horrific features of the Stalinist regime – the mass murder, the gulag, the police terror, the totalitarian state and party, the intellectual and cultural tyranny - were either initiated by Lenin or, at least, present in embryo in Bolshevik practice and in Leninist ideology from the beginning. If the pre- revolutionary Lenin did not openly espouse or advocate a totalitarian vision of the future, this was either deception or self deception, for incipient totalitarianism was deeply lodged in his ideas, personality and psychology. The fundamental characteristics of Lenin and Leninism were always an utterly unscrupulous ruthlessness as to methods and a fanatical pursuit of absolute power for his party and himself.
In this indictment the key piece of evidence for the prosecution, the ‘smoking gun’ was held to be a pamphlet that Lenin wrote in 1901, when the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party barely existed and before the Bolshevik faction or party had even been dreamt of, called Chto delat? or What is to be Done? The avowed purpose of the pamphlet was to rally the then scattered forces of Russian Social Democracy into a single national party organized around a national newspaper and focused on the struggle against the Tsarist autocracy and for democracy and political freedom. To win the argument for this plan Lenin also declared that it was necessary to combat the conception of the struggle known as ‘economism’- the idea that the working class, and socialist agitation in the working class, should concentrate on economic demands, leaving the political struggle against Tsarism to the middle class liberals and intelligentsia.
The case against What is to be Done? was that in it Lenin had maintained that the working class would not develop socialist consciousness if left to its own devices; that the spontaneous tendency of the working class was only towards trade unionism (which , because it concentrated on bargaining over the price of labour power within the system, was a variation on bourgeois consciousness) and that socialism would, therefore, have to be introduced into the working class ‘from the outside’. This showed, so the argument ran, that really Lenin, behind the rhetoric, despised the working class and thought that socialism would have to be imposed on it from above. The real plan, from the beginning, was not working class power or self emancipation, but a party dictatorship over the working class. Once this was established the rest of the history of Bolshevism and the Revolution was read in this light; every quarrel, dispute, faction fight and split in the history of The Russian Social and Democratic Labour Party (especially the split at the 2nd Congress in 1903, which produced the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions) was presented as emanating from Lenin’s obsessive drive for power.
Veritable legions of academics – historians, political scientists, Sovietologists, Kremlinologists, etc – were put into the field to argue or assert this view. As in other matters, the Americans led the way and the British followed in their wake. Émigrés from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe played a prominent role. Before too long an almost unchallengeable orthodoxy, the ‘textbook interpretation’ as Lih calls it, was firmly in place.
Lih's book blew this ‘textbook interpretation’ apart.
Well, the latest edition of Historical Materialism (http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/) is devoted to a lengthy discussion of Lih's book, with contributions from the late Chris Harman, Paul LeBlanc, Robert Mayer among others, and a detailed, 70 page reply from Lih himself.