What is to be Done? Leninism,anti-Leninist Marxism and theQuestion of Revolution today
Werner Bonefeld and Sergio Tischler
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Of one thing we can be certain. The ideologies of the twentiethcentury will disappear completely. This has been a lousy century.It has been filled with dogmas, dogmas that one after anotherhave cost us time, suffering, and much injustice (Garcia Marquez,1990).
Amid the resurgence of anti-capitalist movements across theglobe, the centenary of Lenin’s
What is to be Done?
in 2002has largely gone unnoticed. Leninism has fallen on hard times – and rightly so. It leaves a bitter taste of a revolution whoseheroic struggle turned into a nightmare. The indifference toLeninism is understandable. What, however, is disturbing isthe contemporary disinterest in the revolutionary project. Whatdoes anti-capitalism in its contemporary form of anti-globalization mean if it is not a practical critique of capitalismand what does it wish to achieve if its anti-capitalism fails toespouse the revolutionary project of human emancipation?Anti-capitalist indifference to revolution is a contradictionin terms. Rather then freeing the theory and practice ofrevolution from Leninism, its conception of revolutionaryorganization in the form of the party, and its idea of the statewhose power is to be seized, as an instrument of revolution,remain uncontested. Revolution seems to mean Leninism, nowappearing in moderated form as Trotskyism. OrthodoxMarxism invests great energy in its attempt to incorporate the
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What is to be Done?
class struggle into preconceived conceptions of organization,seeking to render them manageable under the direction of the party. The management of class struggle belongs traditionallyto the bourgeoisie who ‘concentrated in the form of the state’(see Marx, 1973, p.108), depend on its containment andmanagement in the form of abstract equality. The denial ofhumanity that is entailed in the subordination of the inequalityin property to relations of abstract equality in the form ofexchange relations, is mirrored in the Leninist conception ofthe workers state, where everybody is treated equally as aneconomic resource.Hiding behind dogma, contemporary endorsements of therevolutionary party as the organizational form of revolution,focus the ‘distortion’ of socialism on Stalin, cleansingLeninism and maintaining its myth.
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Was the tragedy of theRussian revolution really just contingent on the question ofleadership, a tragedy caused by a bad leader who took overfrom a good leader, and should Trotsky had succeeded Lenin,would his leadership have been ‘good’, rescuing the revolutionfrom the dungeons of despair – the Gulag? Whateverdifference Trotsky might have made, is revolution really just aquestion of personalities and their leadership qualities?Orthodox accounts do not raise the most basic question of thecritical Enlightenment –
cui bono
(who benefits) – and,instead, show great trust in the belief that revolution has to bemade on behalf of the dependent masses, so that all goesaccording to plan, including the planning of the economicresource labour through the workers state. Marx’s insight thatcommunism is a classless society and that ‘to be a productivelabourer is...not a piece of luck, but a misfortune’ (Marx, 1983, p.477), is endorsed in perverted form: the party’s directorshipover the proletariat is a fortune for the misfortunate. Thosewho take the project of human emancipation seriously, willfind little comfort in the idea that the party knows best.Contemporary anti-capitalism does well to keep well clear ofthe Leninist conception of revolution. However, itsindifference to revolution belies its anti-capitalist stance. This,then, means that the
ratio emancipationis
has to berediscovere
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