The moment Lenin missed: what kind of labor?

And for Lenin there was no philosophic moment insofar as organization was concerned.
--Raya Dunayevskaya

As Marx and Dunayevskaya experienced their "philosophic moments" respectively in 1844 and 1953, so too did Lenin experience something akin in 1914-15, when he turned to his study of Hegel's Science of Logic in order to resolve the crisis in Marxism brought on by World War I and the collapse of the Second International. In each of the volumes of her "trilogy of revolution," Dunayevskaya reconstructs the crucial differences it made to Lenin's subsequent itinerary once he became "the first Hegelian Marxist of the twentieth century."[1] To discover these differences, one need only compare What Is to Be Done? (1902) and Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908) with Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), The State and Revolution (1917), and the other writings that come after what Dunayevskaya called his "philosophic reorganization."

The State and Revolution is not only among Lenin's most important theoretical writings, but, centering on "the tasks of the proletariat in the revolution" (as its subtitle indicates), it comes as close as anything he wrote to what Dunayevskaya called the dialectics of organization and philosophy. "Those who recognize only the class struggle are not yet Marxists," he writes; "Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat."[2] Yet in the last analysis, Lenin's heroic attempt, by way of restoring dialectics, to overcome the distortions of Marxism that had come to prevail in the period of the Second International, falls tragically short of repairing the "duality in [his] philosophical heritage," the "philosophic ambivalence" he experiences between the pull of Plekhanov and his own independent discovery that "'understanding the dialectic' had become the pons asini." "Too short were the years between 1914 and 1917, between 1917 and 1923" for Lenin to bring his own philosophic moment home to the dialectics of organization.[3]

For Dunayevskaya, "the full organizational expression" of Marx's philosophic moment of 1844 did not come about until "the last decade, especially the 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program," a text Lenin likewise interprets in State and Revolution. Yet despite Lenin's recognition of the signal importance of the Critique of the Gotha Program to the revolutionary "tasks of the proletariat," Dunayevskaya writes that "for Lenin there was no philosophic moment insofar as organization was concerned."[4] By the time she writes Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution (1982), Dunayevskaya explains the "tragedy" of Lenin's failure to reorganize himself more profoundly--that is, all the way through to the dialectics of organization and philosophy--by putting it this way: "Unfortunately, Lenin's philosophic reorganization dealt with the concept of the revolutionary smashing of the bourgeois state, not with the other crucial factor in Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program: the inseparable relationship of philosophy to organization itself. That means that Lenin's philosophic reorganization remained in a separate compartment from the concept of the party and the practice of vanguardism."[5]

PHILOSOPHY AND ORGANIZATION

By 1987 she was even more sharply critical: "Lenin did return to Marx's roots in Hegel, and did see that the Critique of the Gotha Program had never really been concretized as the smashing of the bourgeois state, without which you could not have a revolution. In a word, he certainly worked out the dialectics of revolution, and made it be in Russia. But, but, but--he too didn't touch the question of the party. On the contrary, it didn't even go as far as his own varied critiques of What Is to Be Done?, once the Bolsheviks gained power."[6]

For Dunayevskaya, then, the dialectics of organization and philosophy is an "untrodden path."[7] In Philosophy and Revolution, she names the stakes: "With the death of Lenin, there waited in the wings that terrible twin trap: at one end a theoretic void, which Leaders stood ready to fill with Alternatives, and at the other end a new statist lifeline of capitalism."[8] Even within her own News and Letters Committees, as late as 1987, the "terrible twin trap" had not been surmounted and the "untrodden path" was still the road not taken. In recent years (in annual "Perspectives" and other writings), News and Letters Committees, searching for a philosophically grounded alternative to capitalism as an integral element of the dialectics of organization and philosophy, have taken steps to project such an alternative on the ground of the Critique of the Gotha Program, especially Marx's presentation in it of the lower and higher phases of communism. The superiority of the News and Letters account of these phases over Lenin's in State and Revolution is that Marx's theory of value as he works it out in Capital makes no appearance whatsoever in Lenin's exegesis and commentary. It could be argued that Lenin's interest in the Critique of the Gotha Program is circumscribed by the subject-matter of his work as a whole, i.e., the theory of the state, its revolutionary "smashing," its post-revolutionary "withering away," and the transitional "non-state" of the dictatorship of the proletariat modeled after the Paris Commune of 1871. It is therefore a work of politics rather than economics. But, if nothing else in State and Revolution, Lenin aims for a standard of textual fidelity to the works of Marx and Engels in order to correct the distortions of various opportunists, anarchists, revisionists, and so forth, in the spirit of which it is crucial to recognize that Marx's "new continent of thought and revolution" transforms the meaning of both politics and economics. Accordingly, the Critique of the Gotha Program is best read as a "concretization," neither of politics nor of economics, and neither of theory alone nor of practice alone, but of "the philosophic moment" that is the "determinant" for every subsequent development in Marx's thought.

In other words, neither Capital nor the Critique of the Gotha Program can be taken as Marx wrote them except as they are determined by the moment that unifies and integrates Marx's thought as a whole, the "philosophic moment" of 1844 in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts to which Lenin never had access. Holding in State and Revolution that The Poverty of Philosophy and the Communist Manifesto were the "first works of mature Marxism," he could not have known better.[9] Yet the perceptual illusion of Marx's development that follows from missing the philosophic moment is no minor detail.

RELATIONS AT POINT OF PRODUCTION

For example, with respect to Capital, Dunayevskaya writes in Marxism and Freedom that it is "wrongly considered to be 'a new political economy.' In truth, it is a critique of the very foundations of political economy which is nothing else than the bourgeois mode of thought of the bourgeois mode of production." Dunayevskaya explains the revolutionary difference between, for example, Ricardo's Principles and Marx's Capital by this preeminent characteristic: "By introducing the laborer into political economy, Marx transformed it from a science which deals with things...into one which analyzes relations of men at the point of production....To separate the essence--the social relations--from the appearance--the exchange of things--required a new science that was at the same time a philosophy of history. That new phenomenon is Marxism."[10] Moreover, Marx's projection of lower and higher phases of communism in the Critique of the Gotha Program is based on the proximate and remote consequences and implications of the revolutionary uprooting of the law of value as it determines the basic social relation at the point of production. But if Marx's value theory itself is imbued in every aspect with the subjectivity of working people, then so too is his 1875 Critique. As to Dunayevskaya's own project, in her June 1, 1987, "Presentation," while summarizing her philosophic moment (achieved in two "Letters" of May 1953), she writes, "In a word, I was looking for the objectivity of subjectivity."[11]

What difference does it make to State and Revolution, which aims so ardently to be true to the word and vision of Marx and Engels, especially after 1871 and the Paris Commune, that Marx's philosophic moment is missing from Lenin's work? The full-dress account that would be required cannot be given here, but an index lies close at hand. In Lenin's case, reading State and Revolution, one has the sense that almost his most prominent concern for the day after the revolutionary seizure of state power, even with respect to his reading of the Critique of the Gotha Program, is that working people will have to acquire the "factory discipline" and "habits" necessary for "Accounting and control--that is mainly what is needed for the 'smooth working,' for the proper functioning, of the first phase of communist society. All citizens are transformed into hired employees of the state, which consists of the armed workers." The state is a "parasitic excrescence" (quoting Marx from The Civil War in France), but once it is "amputated," "we want the socialist revolution with people as they are, with people who cannot dispense with subordination, control, 'foremen and accounts.'"[12] By contrast, in Marxism and Freedom, Dunayevskaya writes that in 1844, "when Marx wrote his Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts [, he] posed dialectically the fundamental problem--what kind of labor--which is today being battled out the world over....In 1844 Marx made this ... question pivotal, the new theoretical response to the workers' revolt against the tyranny of factory labor."[13]

This question--"what kind of labor" should a human being do--is nowhere to be found in State and Revolution. The "parasitic excrescence" is excised, but otherwise it begins to appear that alienated labor would persevere and even thrive under Lenin's account of the dictatorship of the proletariat and its immediate measures (for how long a period he cannot speculate). Here, the point is that it was precisely because Lenin, though he turned to Hegel, had failed to recover (let alone re-create) Marx's philosophic moment, that not only is that moment missing from State and Revolution, but so too is "the fundamental problem" with which Marx grappled across four decades. "In Hegelian dialectics, the philosophic moment is a determinant," and it "remain[s] the element that govern[s] the concretization that follows." Moreover, "To this day 1844 was the philosophic moment of Marx's discovery of that whole new continent of thought and of revolution that 'Marxism' certainly lacked, and instead singled out one of the developments--economics--so that we didn't know 'new humanism' until the Depression. But in fact it is that which was the ground for organization throughout his life, from the moment he did 'experience' the philosophic moment [to the Critique of the Gotha Program]."[14] Whether the singled out moment is "economics" (as in the misreading of Capital), "politics" (as in State and Revolution), or some other fixed particular, what is missing is the integrating principle of Marx's thought as a whole and of Marxism in its totality. First, that principle is philosophical. Second, the philosophical first principle--in any case, of the Marxism of Marx--is humanism, especially at the point where what is human--subjectivity, personality, and the active potency for freedom--is most profoundly alienated and dehumanized, mechanized and automated, the social relation at the point of production. This is the import of the question, what kind of labor, about which, when Lenin (almost) comes to it, he is not only disappointing but chilling.

In State and Revolution, Lenin writes, "A witty German Social-Democrat of the seventies of the last century called the postal service an example of the socialist economic system. This is very true....To organize the whole economy on the lines of the postal service...is our immediate aim." More chillingly, he writes, "The whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory, with equality of labor and equal pay." As if an apology were owed, however, he immediately launches into one: "But this 'factory' discipline, which the proletariat, after defeating the capitalists ... will extend to the whole of society, is by no means our ideal, or our ultimate goal. It is only a necessary step for thoroughly cleaning society of all the infamies and abominations of capitalist exploitation, and for further progress."[15] Lenin has the higher phase in view, but how it is to materialize from the organization of society as a gigantic factory where factory discipline prevails (with the difference being "armed workers" in place of capitalists) is anyone's guess, neither plausible nor persuasive.

This one aspect of the dialectics of organization and philosophy may shed some light on some part of Dunayevskaya's contention that "for Lenin there was no philosophic moment insofar as organization was concerned." In lacking the philosophic moment, Lenin's Marxist encounter with Hegel was finally unfulfilled. Concerning Marx himself, by contrast with Lenin, in 1875, after the French edition of Capital is finished and the year he writes the Critique of the Gotha Program, not only is "philosophy spelled out in the most concrete terms from fetishism of commodities to the new passions and new forces that go against the accumulation of capital," but Marx also "has the experience now of both political parties and forms of organization emerging spontaneously from the masses, plus philosophy."[16] In other words, this "plus" in Marx is the "minus" in Lenin. The difference it makes is the question one asks. Meanwhile, the "terrible twin trap" still waits in the wings and the challenge remains. The philosophy is the humanism of Marx's 1844 Manuscripts, which is in turn the standard bearer of the new society and the telos of the dialectics of organization, raising a question that could not be more acutely posed: what kind of labor?

NOTES:

1. See Kevin Anderson, Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism: A Critical Study (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 65; and in Dunayevskaya, see Marxism and Freedom, Chapter X, "The Collapse of the Second International and the Break in Lenin's Thought," Philosophy and Revolution, Chapter 3, "The Shock of Recognition and the Philosophic Ambivalence of Lenin," and Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution, 58-65 and 156-58.

2. Lenin, The State and Revolution: The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution, unabridged in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Lenin Anthology (New York: Norton, 1975), 334.

3. Dunayevskaya, Philosophy and Revolution, 119, 117; for her explanation of what she calls "the tragedy," see 117-120.

4. Dunayevskaya, "Presentation on Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy of June 1, 1987," in The Philosophic Moment of Marxist-Humanism (Chicago: News and Letters, 1989), 3-4, 16.

5. Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution, 157.

6. Dunayevskaya, "Presentation of June 1, 1987," 17.

7. Ibid., see 17-20.

8. Dunayevskaya, Philosophy and Revolution, 120.

9. See Lenin, The State and Revolution, 325.

10. Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom, 106.

11. Dunayevskaya, "Presentation of June 1, 1987," 10; and for her summary, see 7-12.

12. Lenin, The State and Revolution, 383, 346, 344.

13. Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom, 54-55.

14. Dunayevskaya, "Presentation of June 1, 1987," 7, 4-5.

15. Lenin, The State and Revolution, 345-46, 383.

16. Dunayevskaya, "Presentation of June 1, 1987," 16, 6.

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