Very interesting. It is difficult to judge Korsch, Pennekoek, or Lenin
from these fragments alone. A more detailed study of all three is
indicated, I see. Just a few hurried notes on the Korsch piece.
He never conceived of the difference between the "historical materialism"
of Marx and the "previous forms of materialism" as an unbreachable
opposition arising from a real conflict of classes. He conceived it rather
as a more or less radical expression of one continuous revolutionary
movement. Thus Lenin's "materialistic" criticism of Mach and the Machians,
according to Pannekoek, failed even in its purely theoretical purpose
mainly because Lenin attacked the later attempts of bourgeois naturalistic
materialism not from the viewpoint of the historical materialism of the
fully developed proletarian class, but from a proceeding and
scientifically less developed phase of bourgeois materialism.
There is an obscurity here in delineating the precise relationship between
the development of materialism and class conflict.
He fully acknowledges the tactical necessity, under the conditions in
pre-revolutionary Czarist Russia, of Lenin's relentless fight against the
left bolshevik, Bogdanov, and other more or less outspoken followers of
Mach's ideas who in spite of their good revolutionary intentions actually
jeopardised the unity and weakened the proven revolutionary energy of the
Marxist party by a revision of its "monolithic" materialistic ideology.
Korsch cites Pannekoek's view, which seems from an intellectual standpoint
lacking in integrity, and then disagrees with it politically:
In fact, Pannekoek goes somewhat further in his positive appreciation of
Lenin's philosophical tactics of 1908 than seems justified to this writer
even in a retrospective analysis of the past. If he had investigated, in
his critical revision of Lenin's anti-Machist fight, the tendencies
represented by the Russian Machists as well as those of their German
rnasters he might have been warned against the unimpeachable correctness
of Lenin's attitude in the ideological struggles of 1908 by a later
occurrence. When Lenin, after 1908, was through with the Machist
opposition which had arisen within the central committee of the Bolshevik
party itself, he regarded that whole incident as closed.
Then a recitation of the sins perpetrated later by other Leninists in
comdemning Bogdanov, which are redolent of Stalinist rhetoric. The
description of Bogdanov's philosophical position is no more
edifying. Korsch laments Lenin's attack against positivism as a
development of materialism. Furthermore, he judges it to be opportunistic:
This fallacy is that the militant character of a revolutionary materialist
theory can and must be maintained against the weakening influences of
other apparently hostile theoretical tendencies by any means to the
exclusion of modifications made imperative by further scientific criticism
and research. This fallacious conception caused Lenin to evade discussion
on their merits of such new scientific concepts and theories that in his
judgement jeopardised the proved fighting value of that revolutionary
(though not necessarily proletarian revolutionary) materialist philosophy
that his Marxist party had adopted, less from Marx and Engels than from
their philosophical teachers, the bourgeois materialists from Holbach to
Feuerbach and their idealistic antagonist, the dialectical philosopher
Hegel. Rather he stuck to his guns, preferring the immediate practical
utility of a given ideology to its theoretical truth in a changing world.
This doctrinaire attitude, by the way, runs parallel to Lenin's political
practice.
Indeed, such instrumentalism is fallacious, but is this a correct portrayal
of Lenin's attitude towards scientific developments? I would add that one
of the problems with the Marxist tradition is the general problem of the
uneven development of science with respect to philosophy. A person that
knows only one of these is generally ill-equipped to tackle the other. The
moment Marxism was established institutionally as a body of thought,
largely in the hands of the German Social Democrats, this problem was
created, not by them specifically, but by the overall social fragmentation
responsible for the fragmentation of intellectual trends. Further, the
problem of uneven development was exacerbated by the importation of Marxism
into backward Russia.
I am puzzled by the following argument:
It is a long way from Lenin's violent philosophical attack on Mach and
Avenarius's "idealistic" positivism and empiriocriticism to that refined
scientific criticism of the latest developments within the positivist camp
which was published in 1938 in the extremely cultured periodical of the
English Communist party.[8] Yet there is underlying this critical attack
on the most progressive form of modern positivistic thought the same old
Leninist fallacy. The critic carefully avoids committing himself to any
school of philosophical thought. He would most likely agree with Ludwig
Wittgenstein who in his final phase dealt with all philosophy as a curable
disease rather than a series of problems. Yet he bases his whole argument
against modern positivism on the assumption that the vigorous fight waged
by the old militant positivism against all philosophy was founded on the
very fact that this old positivism had started from a distinctly
philosophical creed itself. When therefore the latest and in some respects
most scientific school of the modern "Logical Positivists" as represented
by R. Carnap recently withdrew temporarily from the "philosophical"
attempt of constructing "one homogeneous system of laws for the whole of
science," and instead concentrated on the more modest task of establishing
a "unity of the language of all science"[9] it would follow from the
argument brought forward by their pseudo-Leninist critic that by the same
process by which they abandon their former philosophical basis they must
necessarily weaken also the crusading ardour of their former
anti-philosophical fight. "The positivist who disturbed every
philosophical backwater with rude cries of nonsense," says the critics,
"is now reduced to saying, in the mildest and most inoffensive manner,
nonsense is my language". It is easy to see that this argument can be used
in a twofold manner, as a theoretical attack against the confusion between
philosophy and science underlying the earlier phases of positivism, and as
a practical justification for keeping up that philosophical basis in spite
of the belated discovery of its scientific unsoundness. However, the whole
argument is not founded on any sound logical or empirical reasoning. There
is no need either for the modern bourgeois scientist or for the Marxist to
stick to an obsolete (positivistic or materialistic) "philosophy" for the
purpose of preserving his full and unbroken "militancy" in the fight
against that necessarily in all its forms "idealistic" system of ideas
which during the last century under the name of "philosophy" has widely
(though not completely) replaced medieval religious faith in the ideology
of modern society.
What exactly is Korsch asserting here?
Pannekoek, although not fully abandoning the belief in the need of a
"Marxist philosophy" for the revolutionary struggle of the modern
proletarian class, is aware of the fact that present-day Leninist
"materialism" is absolutely unfit to serve this purpose. It is rather a
suitable ideological base of that no longer essentially anti-capitalistic
but only "anti-reactionary" and "anti-fascist" movement which has recently
been inaugurated by the Communist parties all over the world under the new
slogans of a "People's Front" or in some cases even of a "National Front."
Natural-scientific materialism may be the basis for a proper world view,
even a vaguely or liberal progressive one, but in an by itself how could it
possibly constitute a philosophical basis for revolutionary proletarian
struggle? The nature of its unfitness needs to be specified.
This present-day Leninist ideology of the Communist parties which in
principle conforms to the traditional ideology of the old Social
Democratic party does no longer express any particular aims of the
proletarian class. According to Pannekoek, it is rather a natural
expression of the aims of the new class of the intelligentsia i.e., an
ideology which the various strata belonging to this so-called new class
would be likely to adopt as soon as they were freed from the ideological
influence of the decaying bourgeoisie. Translated into philosophical
terms, this means that the "new materialism" of Lenin is the great
instrument which is now used by the Communist parties in the attempt to
separate an important section of the bourgeoisie from the traditional
religion and idealistic philosophies upheld by the upper and hitherto
ruling strata of the bourgeois class, and to win them over to that system
of state capitalistic planning of industry which for the workers means
just another form of slavery and exploitation. This, according to
Pannekoek, is the true political significance of Lenin's materialistic
philosophy.
This was exactly the position of the Johnson-Forest Tendency in STATE
CAPITALISM AND WORLD REVOLUTION, except that Lenin was exempted from this
accusation. In her later work, Raya Dunayevskaya canonized Lenin's
Conspectus on Hegel while decrying MAEC. CLR James never made this latter
move, but other writings indicate his indifference to dialectics of nature
and criticism of Trotsky's crudity. I like the original JFT argument,
which you can now find in the MIA archive:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/1950/08/state-capitalism.htm
My problem is that these _specific_ critiques of Lenin (i.e. not referring
to the work of Pannekoek or Korsch as a whole) don't completely articulate
the issues for me.
At 01:09 PM 5/26/2005 -0400, Jim Farmelant wrote:
Karl Korsch wrote a response to Pannekoek in his
*Lenin as Philosopher*. See:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/korsch/1938/lenin-philosophy.htm
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