An Open Critique of Bolshevik Leninism:
Why is Freedom on the Right, and the Left, Dead?
Spontaneity would dictate to us that, ‘the Right,’ or ‘Conservatives,’ have stolen, or appropriated, the values and aims of the left, which they now wield against ‘us,’ to ‘trick’ the common folk into following them. This is, of course, the purest of unthinking idealism, and worse, thinks of common, normal people (aka workers, the left’s central audience) the most base and vapid stupidity. Rather, the appropriation of mere ideas, mere signifiers by those ‘dishonest’ variety of (conscious or unconscious) conservatives is not the outcome of ‘corrupted interest’ of some covert plot of the ‘ruling class,’ but rather, of the entire central edifice of the left’s adopted, orthodox theory; that of Bolshevist Leninism, or uncritical Marxism.
Lenin and Marx, the German and Russian Proletariat, given the real, civil-social limits their movements had, developed theory that gripped their masses, to the greatest degree possible, dealing, primarily, but not only (or rather, separately), with the revolutionary-political tasks of their day (international political unity on the basis of the labor movement, and democratic modernization). But, the culmination of their movement, of their theory of the Class struggle for Socialism, ended precisely in the October Revolution, and the formation of the world’s first Worker’s State, the Soviet Union. This State, in every right an echo and development of the Paris Commune, showed and demonstrated to the world, much more clearly, the limits of the later. We see from the Commune, a Worker’s Government[1], in it’s extension beyond the initial massacre into the Worker’s State of the Soviet Union, the culmination of the highest implementation of its principle programme; the smashing of the old state via the implementation of a workers government, and the abolition of property by it’s nationalization in the hands of that government.
This program, however, is fundamentally incomplete, as while it correctly constitutes a government on the basis of the only civil society organs worker’s have, their organic combinations, or unions, it never transfers civil society, stolen from the proletariat by ruling class machinations, back to it’s citizen constituents. The classic, ‘orthodox’ worker’s government fails, fundamentally, to respect and implement the right of it’s worker-citizen constituents to equal social property, via it’s annual General Division by the government[2]. It only universalizes the obligation for wage labor, but in so doing, creates in the state bureaucracy the bases for the restoration of classes in the social revenues it is entitled to manage and plan; profits and rent.
As a direct consequence, an increasingly malignant, bureaucratic caste grows to fill the void that the continued lack in property, and civil society, poses. This void is present, and develops, not only in the proletarian dictatorship, but also in the parties and agencies, any worker’s organ or combination, that form the prelude to class dictatorship; in whom begin to prepare various, multiform stages of opportunist betrayal; in disruption, lumpenization, and sabotage of the only civil society the proletariat is afforded, that of bourgeois society. Absent the leadership of a real, vital alternative, for the creation of a state of equal right to civil society (socialism), the masses are forced to turn, at first with reluctance, but eventually, with great enthusiasm, towards the vanguard, instead, of reaction; of liquidationism, and restorationism, into the standing-posts of the old, bourgeois society, in order to secure any place at all in it.
Hence develops the basis for both the ‘revisionist’ crisis in Marxism, and the crisis of leadership more broadly, experienced most acutely by the Bolsheviks, and their practical-ideological descendants. Such opportunism is only overcome in brief interludes, when the proletarian masses intervene, politically, upon the stage of history (such as in the Commune and October). But such interventions only deepen, and further develop, the crisis in leadership, and as such, necessitate correct developments in theory and program, on the basis of organizational clarity of the classes’ position in history, and of the central tasks such history poses. But most crucially, on the correct negation of false consciousness; on the negation of the political and theoretical defeats and failures of the past, towards the necessity of the permanent termination of the leadership crisis by the final victory of human civilization; of civil society and socialism.
The Worker’s State, coming out of October, preceded only to manage the state capitalist proprietary relations it had inherited. But these self-same relations, isolated from both the greater capitalist world, and the direct ownership of the class whom forms their constituency, begin only to incubate the growth of the old society, ideology, and sentiments, anew, in the forms of revisionism and conservatism, the ‘left’ and the Right. Without the mediating factor of larger civil society, would-be state property administers, managers, and planners are forced into the same capitalist social-speculation as the external ruling classes, creating a strong impetus and basis in motive for class-collaborationism. This entire bureaucratic edifice, which culminated in the Revisionist, Bureaucratist, and eventually Stalinist (proletarian Bonapartist) betrayal of world revolution, in the interests of it’s own, narrow state-management, founded the impetus for the Right’s split from the worker’s movement (the Second International), in the forms of Fascism, and latter, Neoliberalism, both varieties of semi-bourgeois (all Fascisms constitute a split, a clean break, from the organic worker’s movement, of the demoralized masses, given an ‘out’ by finance capital; hence the inanity of it’s identification with every Bonapartist republicanism) and bourgeois, Bonapartism (national restorationism, or regenerationism). Given the reality of the objective crisis in leadership, the proletarian masses, absent a civil society of their own, had no choice but to follow the Bonapartist hegemony, into not the left, but the right. Anything less, was to compromise what little Right, to Life and Property, the demoralized masses had left, under the victorious edifice of bourgeois government and society. Such are the dialectics of defeat, failure, and uncritical repetition.
The ‘left,’ a zombie of it’s former selves, is frozen in an endless dress-rehearsal for a moment that will never come to it; it fundamentally cannot understand the essence of it’s own, theoretical-political failings, and hence, can never assume true leadership. It betrays only itself, as it buries itself, apart from bourgeois society, in an open, subcultural grave; it’s greatest aspiration no longer guidance, nor leadership, but only to leave an educative death note to the subsequent generations, in hopes only of gaining adherents, and growing a membership, to it’s unique practice and vision; it’s ideological regeneration. Abandoned is the task of raising itself to the level of Hegemony, in organic bourgeois civil society; the ‘left’ would rather talk to, and stare endlessly at, it’s own, sorry reflection! Abandoned is the Political Revolution; the ‘left’ vastly prefers the apparent safety and predictability of pseudo-politics in it’s own, pseudo-political, ‘organic community’s’ brand of ‘Visionism!’ Fundamentally, the Left refuses to turn to it’s own Source; the theoretical Origins of it’s movement in a vital, living Civil Society based in the American, Colonial (and hence immature-bourgeois, yet no less necessary) relative equality in land division (leading, in it’s culmination, to the revolutionary civil-social movements of 1776; 1789 in France; 1791 in Haiti; 1828 in Philadelphia and New York, founding the world’s first Worker’s Parties; 1836 in English Chartism; in 1861 the American Civil War; and finally, in 1871, the Paris Commune) that only the General Division of Property by Government can grant!
The lesson, that all our prior History screams at us Now, Today, is merely this; that there is no competent basis in bourgeois government, or society, for the Permanent Resolution of the crisis of leadership; only a Worker’s Government, through the enactment of a Party of Labor (the Class’s own, genuine and organic Leadership[3]), can Civil Society be granted, again, and anew, to the Proletarian masses; through the Class-independent enactment of the General Division of Property; through the Constituent Assembly of all the world’s Independent Worker’s Societies, Parties, and Governments; whom will agree to that basic protocol, and principle, of facilitating the Permanent Division of Property by a Common World Republic! Forever shall Live the Proletariat’s Inalienable Right, to a Common, Equal, and Normal Government securing it’s Life, through seizing it’s civil social Liberty, and establishing, finally, a General (and therefore, equal) Right to Property! A New World awaits us all; our final task can only be to break Free from the Bourgeois Chains preventing us from seizing it!
[1] For the concept of the Worker’s Government, see ‘The Civil War in France’ (1871), by Karl Marx
[2] For principles of the General Division, see ch. 4 of ‘The Right of Man to Property’ (1828), by Thomas Skidmore
[3]For general principles of leadership, see ‘Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International’ (1938), by Leon Trotsky
