Lenin and "Bakuninism"

[Caj]

So I began reading Sam Dolgoff's Bakunin on Anarchy yesterday and in the introduction I came across this:



Lenin . . . was so adroit at speaking like an anarchist that he even deceived some anarchists, while men of his own party accused him of "Bakuninism"


I was just curious if anyone knew which Bolsheviks specifically accused him of this.

[Tommy4ever]

The State and Revolution was actually rather libertarian.

More importantly Lenin abandoned central ideas of Marxism up to that point and took on ideas that had previously been associated with the Anarchist followers of Bakunin:

The possibility of Russia moving straight from semi-feudalism to socialism - something Marxist tradition had denied as impossible up to that point.

Cruicially, the advocation of a violent revolution through insurection. Remember, by this stage, Marxism was identified with Social Democracy as the followers of Kautsky in Germany. Ideas of gradual progression, democracy and waiting for conditions to ripen on their own were widespread.

Lenin came in and started talking the radical language of the Anarchists and this made a good number of people think he had actually become one - or atleast moved towards the ideology.

[Dave B]

At the time of the Bolshevik-Menshevik split the old guard and orthodox Marxists like Plekhanov and Vera 'Trigger' Zasulich accussed the Bolsheviks of 'Bakuninism'.


Bakuninism being a generic term of abuse in Marxist terms for conspiratorial insurrectionism of secret brotherhoods etc

[Zanthorus]

I was just curious if anyone knew which Bolsheviks specifically accused him of this.

As Dave B said, it wasn't just the Bolsheviks. 'Bakuninism' was a pretty generic term of abuse among Marxists at the time. If you read Paul Avrich's book on Russian Anarchism he has one of the exact quotes, it's in pdf form on libcom so you can search for 'Lenin' and 'Bakuninism' yourself. I'm too lazy to do it myself :tt2:


The possibility of Russia moving straight from semi-feudalism to socialism - something Marxist tradition had denied as impossible up to that point.

Wrong. Marx and Engels had posed the possibility that a socialist revolution in Europe would allow for the development of pre-capitalist communal social forms such as the Russian mir into fully developed socialist structures without the need for an intervening period of capitalism. In the immediate aftermath of the 1905 Russian revolution the idea that in Russia the revolution wouldn't stop at the bourgeois stage but would end up with the formation of a workers' government supported by the peasantry gained a certain traction among revolutionary Marxists. The most famous example is Parvus and Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, but even Rosa Luxemburg and Kautsky in the period before he became a worthless centrist husk had ideas revolving around that theme. And in fact it should be noted that Lenin never actually said anything about Russia moving straight from 'feudalism' (Lenin thought that Russia had already developed capitalism to a certain degree anyway) to 'socialism' and neither did Trotsky, Parvus or Luxemburg. The idea was always the formation of a workers' state which would link up with the world revolution, not a national Russian transition to socialism. The idea that a workers' state or the transition to socialism can only be effected in countries with a high degree of capitalist development is a Menshevik distortion of Marxism which is only tenuously linked to the textual orthodoxy of Marx and Engels.

[Dave B]

Whilst I can agree with much of what Zanthorus said I can not agree with the implication of the following;


the idea that a workers' state or the transition to socialism can only be effected in countries with a high degree of capitalist development is a Menshevik distortion of Marxism which is only tenuously linked to the textual orthodoxy of Marx and Engels.

The Menshevik stageist approach, and in fact the othodox Marxist one, was that feudal Russia would have to and must pass through the capitalist stage before socialism could become a possibility.

Thus from Lenin in 1905;



Marxism has irrevocably broken with the ravings of the Narodniks and the anarchists to the effect that Russia, for instance, can avoid capitalist development, jump out of capitalism, or skip over it and proceed along some path other than the path of the class struggle on the basis and within the framework of this same capitalism.

All these principles of Marxism have been proved and explained over and over again in minute detail in general and with regard to Russia in particular. And from these principles it follows that the idea of seeking salvation for the working class in anything save the further development of capitalism is reactionary. In countries like Russia, the working class suffers not so much from capitalism as from the insufficient development of capitalism.

The working class suffers not so much from capitalism as from the insufficient development of capitalism. The working class is therefore decidedly interested in the broadest, freest and most rapid development of capitalism. The removal of all the remnants of the old order which are hampering the broad, free and rapid development of capitalism is of decided advantage to the working class. The bourgeois revolution is precisely a revolution that most resolutely sweeps away the survivals of the past, the remnants of serfdom (which include not only autocracy but monarchy as well) and most fully guarantees the broadest, freest and most rapid development of capitalism.


That is why a bourgeois revolution is in the highest degree advantageous to the proletariat. A bourgeois revolution is absolutely necessary in the interests of the proletariat. The more complete and determined, the more consistent the bourgeois revolution, the more assured will be the proletarian struggle against the bourgeoisie for Socialism. Only those who are ignorant of the rudiments of scientific Socialism can regard this conclusion as new or strange, paradoxical. And from this conclusion, among other things, follows the thesis that, in a certain sense, a bourgeois revolution is more advantageous to the proletariat than to the bourgeoisie.


http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/tactics/ch06.htm


And the same from 1914;

Left-Wing Narodism and Marxism
Published: Trudovaya Pravda No. 19, June 19, 1914.




The economic development of Russia, as of the whole world, proceeds from feudalism to capitalism, and through large-scale, machine, capitalist production to socialism.


Pipe-dreaming about a “different” way to socialism other than that which leads, through the further development of capitalism, through large-scale, machine, capitalist production, is, in Russia, characteristic either of the liberal gentlemen, or of the backward, petty proprietors (the petty bourgeoisie). These dreams, which still clog the brains of the Left Narodniks, merely reflect the backwardness (reactionary nature) and feebleness of the petty bourgeoisie.
Class-conscious workers all over the world, Russia included, are becoming more and more convinced of the correctness of Marxism, for life itself is proving to them that only large-scale, machine production rouses the workers, enlightens and organises them, and creates the objective conditions for a mass movement.

When Put Pravdy reaffirmed the well-known Marxist axiom that capitalism is progressive as compared with feudalism,[1] and that the idea of checking the development of capitalism is a utopia, most absurd, reactionary, and harmful to the working people, Mr. N. Rakitnikov, the Left Narodnik (in Smelaya Mysl No. 7), accused Put Pravdy of having undertaken the “not very honourable task of putting a gloss upon the capitalist noose”.

Anyone interested in Marxism and in the experience of the international working-class movement would do well to pander over this! One rarely meets with such amazing ignorance of Marxism as that displayed by Mr. N. Rakitnikov and the Left Narodniks, except perhaps among bourgeois economists.

Can it be that Mr. Rakitnikov has not read Capital, or The Poverty of Philosophy, or The Communist Manifesto? If he has not, then it is pointless to talk about socialism. That will be a ridiculous waste of time.

If he has read them, then he ought to know that the fundamental idea running through all Marx’s works, an idea which since Marx has been confirmed in all countries, is that capitalism is progressive as compared with feudalism. It is in this sense that Marx and all Marxists “put a gloss” (to use Rakitnikov’s clumsy and stupid expression) “upon the capitalist noose”!
Only anarchists or petty-bourgeois, who do not under stand the conditions of historical development, can say: a feudal noose or a capitalist one—it makes no difference, for both are nooses! That means confining oneself to condemnation, and failing to understand the objective course of economic development.

Condemnation means our subjective dissatisfaction. The objective course of feudalism’s evolution into capitalism enables millions of working people—thanks to the growth of cities, railways, large factories and the migration of workers—to escape from a condition of feudal torpor. Capitalism itself rouses and organises them.

Both feudalism and capitalism oppress the workers and strive to keep them in ignorance. But feudalism can keep, and for centuries has kept, millions of peasants in a down trodden state (for example, in Russia from the ninth to the nineteenth century, in China for even more centuries). But capitalism cannot keep the workers in a state of immobility, torpor, downtroddenness and ignorance.

The centuries of feudalism were centuries of torpor for the working people.
The decades of capitalism have roused millions of wage-workers.


http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/jun/19.htm

Jumping around a bit.


There was in fact an association between ‘Bakuninism’ and ‘Narodism’ going all the way back to the 1850’s +. Thus from Karl;

The Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy;




Schoolboy stupidity! A radical social revolution depends on certain definite historical conditions of economic development as its precondition. It is also only possible where with capitalist production the industrial proletariat occupies at least an important position among the mass of the people. And if it is to have any chance of victory, it must be able to do immediately as much for the peasants as the French bourgeoisie, mutatis mutandis, did in its revolution for the French peasants of that time. A fine idea, that the rule of labour involves the subjugation of land labour!

But here Mr Bakunin's innermost thoughts emerge. He understands absolutely nothing about the social revolution, only its political phrases. Its economic conditions do not exist for him. As all hitherto existing economic forms, developed or undeveloped, involve the enslavement of the worker (whether in the form of wage-labourer, peasant etc.), he believes that a radical revolution is possible in all such forms alike. Still more! He wants the European social revolution, premised on the economic basis of capitalist production, to take place at the level of the Russian or Slavic agricultural and pastoral peoples, not to surpass this level [...] The will, and not the economic conditions, is the foundation of his social revolution.


http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1874/04/bakunin-notes.htm




As Zanthorus points out in the 1880’s Karl became convinced by reports coming out of Russia that a substantial section of the peasantry with their ‘Mir’ and ‘artel’ systems were already primitive communists and could therefore theoretical become absorbed into a communist revolution elsewhere in the advanced ‘countries’ or ‘world’ etc.


Later in 1894 Fred dropped the idea as in;

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894/01/russia.htm


As did Kautsky in 1905, and Lenin took his position from that;



But a condition of this was that socialism in the rest of Europe should become victorious during the time that the village communities still had a vital strength in Russia. This at the begin- fling of the eighties appeared still possible. But in a decade the impossibility of this transition was perfectly clear. The revolution in Western Europe moved slower and the village communities in Russia fell faster than appeared probable at the beginning of the eighties, and therewith it was decided that the special peculiarity of Russia upon which the terrorism and the socialism of the Narodnaya Volya was founded should disappear, and that Russia must pass through capitalism in order to attain socialism and that also Russia must in this respect pass along the same road as had Western Europe. Here as there socialism must grow out of the great industry and the industrial proletariat is the only revolutionary class which is capable of leading a continuous and independent revolutionary battle against absolutism.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1905/xx/rsdlp.htm


The actual position and facts of the Mir and artel system and whether or nor it was really primitive communism was hotly contested and highly politicised over the period say of 1870- 1910 and perhaps onwards.

Some said that the Mir system was nothing more than an appendage of the Feudal state which just found it convenient to allow the feudal peasants to organise their own necessary labour time.

And was, to use perhaps a spurious analogy, nor more communism than the state utilising charities to perform useful social functions for capitalism.

I hesitate now and am not certain whether or not it evolved into that or just from it.


It was heavily mixed up at the time with slavophile nationalistic notions of noble communist culture etc etc.

The radical intelligentsia tended, it would seem, to some to put a self deluding gloss over its nature.

This kind of idealism had a bit of a knock back when in the 1870’s university students went out to meet the real ‘workers’ and communists to work on the farms etc.

Only to become disillusioned, for some anyway, to find that these Mir peasants were ‘News of the World’ reading bigoted idiots who thought the Tsar was great and loved them really etc etc.

Shortly after the Russian revolution Kautsky after previously spinning like a top returned to the old Iron laws of Marxism re feudalism- capitalism and only then socialism, as did others like Ottto Ruhle.

In fact Lenin, in advocating state capitalism after feudalism, never really did break the Marxist economic iron rule, only the political one of a workers party running capitalism.

Or as he put in 1922 ‘state capitalism under communism’ which as he admitted had no precedent in Marxism.

To follow on the association of Bolshevism with Bakuninism by the Mensheviks anyway was reported by the Leninist historian E.H. Carr chapter 2 volume one, ’The Bolshevik Revolution’,



Lenin was now declared guilty of fostering a ’sectarian spirit of exclusiveness’. In an article entitled ‘Centralism or Bonapartism?’ he was accused of ‘confusing the dictatorship of the proletariat with the dictatorship over the proletariat’, and practising ‘Bonapartism, if not absolute absolute monarchy in the old pre revolutionary style’. His view of the relation of the professional revolutionary to the masses was not that of Marx, but of Bakunin.

Martov, reverting to the idea which he had propunded at the congress, wrote a pamphlet on ‘The Struggle Against Martial Law In The Russian Social Democratic Workers Party’. Vera Zasulich wrote that Louis XIV idea of the state was Lenins idea of the party. The party printing press, now under Menshevik auspices, published a brilliantly vituperative pamphlet by Trotsky entitled ‘Our Political Tasks’; the present Menshevik affiliations of the author were proclaimed by the dedication..…….Lenins methods were attacked as a ‘dull characture of the tragic intransigence of jacobinism’ and a situation predicted in which , ‘the party is replaced by the organisation of the party, the organisation by the central committee and finally the central committee the dictator’.

The final chapter bore the title ‘The Dictatorship Over The Proleteriat’.

[Kiev Communard]

As Dave B said, it wasn't just the Bolsheviks. 'Bakuninism' was a pretty generic term of abuse among Marxists at the time. If you read Paul Avrich's book on Russian Anarchism he has one of the exact quotes, it's in pdf form on libcom so you can search for 'Lenin' and 'Bakuninism' yourself. I'm too lazy to do it myself :tt2:

The term "Blanquism" could be more accurate to characterize Lenin's concept of the revolution, as the Blanquists' state-oriented views on the transition to communism (socialism) were pretty closer to Leninist ideas on revolution. As for Bakuninism proper, it was not "conspiratorial", whatever Marx and Engels were willing to believe, as Bakunin's concept of revolutionary organization and economic struggle was much closer to later platformist/anarcho-syndicalist concepts than to "propaganda-of-the-deed" anti-organizational bomb-throwing anarchism of the 1880s to 1890s, with which Kautsky and others were glad to identify Bakuninism.


Wrong. Marx and Engels had posed the possibility that a socialist revolution in Europe would allow for the development of pre-capitalist communal social forms such as the Russian mir into fully developed socialist structures without the need for an intervening period of capitalism. In the immediate aftermath of the 1905 Russian revolution the idea that in Russia the revolution wouldn't stop at the bourgeois stage but would end up with the formation of a workers' government supported by the peasantry gained a certain traction among revolutionary Marxists. The most famous example is Parvus and Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, but even Rosa Luxemburg and Kautsky in the period before he became a worthless centrist husk had ideas revolving around that theme. And in fact it should be noted that Lenin never actually said anything about Russia moving straight from 'feudalism' (Lenin thought that Russia had already developed capitalism to a certain degree anyway) to 'socialism' and neither did Trotsky, Parvus or Luxemburg. The idea was always the formation of a workers' state which would link up with the world revolution, not a national Russian transition to socialism. The idea that a workers' state or the transition to socialism can only be effected in countries with a high degree of capitalist development is a Menshevik distortion of Marxism which is only tenuously linked to the textual orthodoxy of Marx and Engels.

Yes, I agree. The Menshevik-style assertion of the direct correlation between the level of development of the forces of production and the readiness to revolution flies into face of all historical evidence of the 20th century.