Comments on: Silences on the Suppression of Workers Self-Emancipation: Historical Problems with CLR James's Interpretation of V.I. Lenin

By: Mikey

Mikey — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 16:04:48 +0000

I agree with Ken that it’s about picking sides. For me the sides to choose between are on the one hand, the experimentation of the working class with forms of self-management and, on the other, the preservation of the revolution at all costs. To me, Lenin chose the latter – he crushed that experimentation to preserve the revolution. The revolution was too important to let some people, who anyway didn’t have the proper consciousness, fuck it up. In the process, ironically enough, he vacated the emancipatory potential within the revolution. He ensured that what remained would not overthrow value-production in Russia or elsewhere.

I think the anarchist critique that Ken mentions here suggests not only that this was the wrong move but also that it was inherent within Marxism.

So will someone please deal specifically with these questions – (1) which side would they have chosen in Lenin’s shoes? (2) Is the fact that Lenin chose the preservation of the revolution over the very thing that Marx says is the essence of the revolution – the self-emancipation of the working class through its own actions – indicative of something about Marxism?

Ken seems to say, in response to question 1, that he would do what Lenin did (“we have to choose sides”). Even by the standards of the Marxism that stresses “alienation” and “dialectics” over the Stalinist version, this seems a fatal decision. Hence, Lenin is either a Marxist, in which case he wouldn’t crush forms of working-class experimentation, or he is not and would do so. But he is a Marxist, and he did crush the movement of working people to emancipate themselves. So what does that mean?

By: Ken Lawrence

Ken Lawrence — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 12:23:43 +0000

In my opinoin, Matthew achieved less than he set out to accomplish with this essay, although he has revisited and summarized every long-established anarchist critique of Bolshevism with the exception of Emma Goldman’s. For completion’s sake he might have added Rosa Luxemburg’s libertarian communist critique too.
In the magnificent motion picture The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo fully explored all the bad things the FLN did, as well as the French atrocities, but every viewer knows that Pontecorvo passionately supported the war for Algerian independence. In interviews afterward, Pontecovo (who had led a unit of anti-fascist Partisans in northern Italy during World War II) called his method “the dictatorship of truth.” He explained that in war and revolution all sides do bad things. That doesn’t relieve each person of her/his obligation to choose sides, even though you must acknowledge all those bad things perpetrated by the side you support.
In my experience CLR James always did both: acknowledged unpleasant facts (not in every lecture or essay, but always when questioned or challenged); and chose sides. There’s no other way to read the Black Jacobins.
Some of Nello’s choices vexed or distressed his followers, even leading Marty Glaberman todissolve the Facing Reality organization contrary to Nello’s wish.
Were Willie Gorman still alive, he would respond to Matthew’s essay by chronicling every well-documented atrocity and counter-revolutionary betrayal by the Russian anarchists and left SRs. That’s not my metier, but every reader ought to be aware that it’s a dreary and deadly story, one that every anarchist ought to explore before choosing the anti-Bolshevik side, or scolding CLR for having done so.