http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2012\11\14\story_14-11-2012_pg3_6 Wednesday, November 14, 2012 COMMENT : Revolution betrayed or revolution derailed/aborted — II — Dr Saulat Nagi
Later on, Bolshevism was declared a degenerated form of Marxism not only by Karl Korsch and Anton Pannekoek but the Frankfurt School as well It is hard to disagree with Deutscher suggesting that under the Soviet bureaucracy, “The order of priorities was as it were reversed. The forms of socialism had been forged before the content...and as the content was being produced, the forms deteriorated or were distorted. At first the socio-political institutions created by the revolution towered high above the actual level of the nation’s material and cultural existence; then, as that level rose, the socio-political order was depressed beneath it by the sheer weight of bureaucracy and Stalinism.” But did the relations of production really alter at any stage of this development even after paying a substantial human cost? Perhaps they did not. The state-capitalist commodity production by wage labour continued, and the reduction in working hours (the primary condition of Marxism) could never materialise. However, this does not mean that the Russians had no right to try to forge socialism in their backward society. They failed, but at least they tried. No one can blame them for idleness. In the Soviet Union, the war economy remained the basic model of the planned economy. They pursued a range of ambitious projects such as making a nuclear bomb, putting the first human into space, rapid industrialisation, etc, without considering the associated costs. What was socialist about this? Any other bourgeois state would have equally yearned to achieve these targets. The party nationalised the means of production and distribution, but capitalist commodity production by wage labour persisted. The state became the personification of capital, and “though it tried...it could never get out of the catch-22 implicit in trying to fit markets into a bureaucratic command structure,” Hobsbawm wrote. Danial Latifi, a Marxist leader, while expressing his opinion about the demise of the Soviet Union said, “Socialism did not ‘fail’ in the Soviet Union because it never existed there.” The demise of state capitalism cannot be declared as the end of history. The champions of the bourgeoisie are learning 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall that nothing is settled as yet and nothing will be settled as long as human existence (and human labour) continues to be objecti?ed, and exhausts itself, in alien and alienable things. Until that day, as argued by Herbert Marcuse, the way will not open for the mutual recognition of humans as free individuals, and the free market does not provide this scope. The term Marxism-Leninism and its legitimacy remain debatable in certain distinguished Marxist quarters. Rosa Luxemburg was the first to challenge the concept of a vanguard party and the hierarchical system instituted by the Bolsheviks on the basis of ‘democratic centralism’. Her trust in the consciousness of the working class was enormous and unshakable, so much so that she did not hesitate to suggest, “The masses are in reality their own leaders, dialectically creating their own development process.” She warned the Bolsheviks about the dangers to the revolution lurking behind their coercive attitude, which rather than a historical need was internalised more or less from the repressive baggage of the previously dominated society. Rosa, being an apostle of democracy, was not prepared for the terror that sometimes piggybacks the revolution. She questioned, “Terror has not crushed us. How can you put your trust in terror?” She further added, “Socialist democracy begins simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule and of the construction of socialism. It begins at the very moment of the seizure of power by the socialist party. It is the same thing as the dictatorship of the proletariat. But this dictatorship consists in the manner of applying democracy, not in its elimination.” Furthermore, “Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.” For the aims she aspired to achieve, her thoughts were vividly clear. She stated, “The dictatorship of a class — yes, but not the dictatorship of a party over a class.” The latter is, ultimately, what it turned out to be. Later on, Bolshevism was declared a degenerated form of Marxism not only by Karl Korsch and Anton Pannekoek but the Frankfurt School as well. Even Gramsci thought differently. His concept of ‘elite organic intellectuals’ emanates from the working class itself and does not come from somewhere outside courtesy of the petit-bourgeois wanderers/adventurers waiting in the wings to seize the opportunity. To some critics the term ‘Marxism-Leninism’ is fiction. On the contrary, in the present scenario, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Marxist theory advanced by Marx himself is validated. Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution has gone, using his own words, “into the dustbin of history”, although this expression was used by him for the Russian bourgeoisie and not for his theory. He and Lenin wanted to build socialism without the material means of achieving it. In the exigency of implementing socialism in a backward society, they probably overlooked the “materialist conception of history”. As articulated by Marx himself, “No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation...At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or — this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms — with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.” Not any time before or a moment later! According to Gramsci, “An alternative hegemony — the consensual basis of an existing political system within civil society — was necessary before one could even hope for a ‘complete’ revolution, one that brings to power a coherent class formation united behind a single economic, political and cultural conception of the world.” And we learn why that was impossible from his analysis of the Russian state: “In Russia the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous. In the west, there was a proper relation between the state and civil society. When the state trembled, a sturdy structure of the civil society was at once revealed. The state was the only outer ditch behind which stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthwork. The Russian state was not modern but a mechanical block of social groups, only in the west the state is what may be called as the first appearance of the whole reality.” For Gramsci, hegemony and dominance were two different concepts. Prior to dominance, any state bourgeoisie or proletariat has to be hegemonic by advancing its culture. He states, “In a hegemonic system democracy between the ruling group and the ruled exists to an extent that the development of the economy and therefore the legislation which expresses that development holds open the channels for the ruled to enter the ruling group.” This remained a mirage in the Soviet Union. To gain a functional equivalent of hegemony, the Soviet bureaucracy pretended to exercise its power in the name of a class that in reality it did not represent. Hegemony with coercion could not last beyond six decades. Rosa rightly pointed out: “It was a proletarian revolution with bourgeois duties and problems or, if you wish, a bourgeois revolution waged by the proletariat.” Hence, it was not socialism but a bourgeois revolution that collapsed under its own weight. Mark Twain satirically advised politicians to “Get the facts first. You can distort them later.” This is the near fact. Let us not distort it any further. (Concluded) The writer is based in Australia and has authored books on socialism and history. He can be reached at [email protected] [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
