Decides Between Mao and Khrushchev
ON THE METHODOLOGY OF “SECTARIANISM"
By P. L. Carp
1.
The newest politico-=philosophical essay by Georg Lukd&es(1) is a truly amazing document! It may be considered a faithful reflection of the anxieties and the mqods which agitate and torment the Communist intelligentsia in Eastern Europe, Unfortunately -- this reflection is more distressing than 1 comforting, awakens more apprehensions than hopes. 2 6 « _ a or Luk4os starts out with. ‘the: harshest possible condemnat ion. of the Stalinist regime which (in his words) "systematically and con- -temptuously rendered null and: void even.the barest. minimum requisites of humanity" [emphasis added], and under which the very "reality of personal Thre perspective was turned into an illusion without basis," What an agony of despair (and shame) is. expressed in these bitter words}
. Luk&es is, of course, not deluded by the hypocritical official interpretation of the Stalin era, Tq-call:all this the "cult of personality" -- he cryptically remarks -- “is not at all adequate to the tasks of discovering the depth and breadth of the reality." The essential causes of the tragedy must lie deeper, much deeper! But where? Here we face our first disappointment: As a true ideologist, although one using excellent Marxian formulas, Lukd&cs contents hinself with substituting one ideological explanation for another =» in place of the alleged "cult of personality" we are offered the ~ innate tendency towards "sectarianism" which has plagued the workingclass movement from its very beginnings and which, in His view, reached its elimax with the advent of Stalinism, Unsatisfactory as this explanation is, it is still on a higher level than the miserable phrase of the "oult of personality"; all the more so, since as an outstanding theorist and an adroit debater, Lukd&cs is able to-present some illuminating thoughts, even while defending a wrong cause,
This applies especially to those passages of his essay which deal with the methodology of “sectarianism in the history of the working-olass movement. Luk&cs proves here convincingly that the main "vice" and the greatest weakness of "sectarianism" consists in its "intelleotual structure," in its inherent inability to apply the dialectical method, and espooially the categories of "mediation"
"Reflections on the Sino-Soviet Dispute," Studies on the Left, Winter 1964, pp, 22-38,
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without which it is impossible to connect the "abstract" with the "conorete," the "principles" with socio-historical reality, AIL this is very true (although its connection with the Sino-Soviet dis-~ pute seems highly dubious); and in. this respect Lukdcs! philosophical remarks offer a fine example of Marxian thinking.
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However, even the dialectical method has its limitations and . can easily be misused, .A good example of it is Luk4&cs! essay in which the methodological neglect of the categories of "mediation" | is ascribed solely to "sectarianism" and in which the other side of the coin is conveniently overlooked,
This other side of the coin is, of course, reformism in all its manifestions, Whereas sectarianism "always and everywhere attaches particular actions directly to the movement!s ultimate w«and thus necessarily abstract -- principles" [emphasis added], discarding in the process “all the dialectical mediations between principle, strategy and tactics" (Lukd4cs), reformism discards all — mediations for just the opposite reason: because its adherents lose | themselves entirely in "particular actions" and because there remains nothing with which. these actions can be "mediated" (aside from some . rhetorical generalities, void of any reality and content), It was the leading theorist of social-democratic reformism, Eduard Bern- : stein, who coined the famous phrase: "The aim is nothing, the movement everything}" In this phrase the "aim" and the "movement" are conceived of as two absolute opposites, separated from each other by an unbridgeable gulf. And in this contraposition lies the very essence and the whole philosophy of reformism -- which never recog-= nized the necessary dialectical interrelation between the "aim" and the "movement" and never understood that the "movement" can derive its inner impulse and its content solely from the "aim," whereas the “agim" itself must be constantly rectified and enriched by the "movement," Thus, reformism, instead of "mediating" between the aim and the movement, degenerates into pure empiricism; it places its faith in the intrinsic wisdom and self-propelling power of the "move ment" and relegates the “aim't ad_kalendas graecas Lto the Greek calends]. o 28 7
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. But what did reformism mean by "the movement"? Certainly, not only the everyday struggles which brought about political and sconomic reforms in the fabric of capitalism, but -= above all mw. the mighty trade-unionist and. party organizations which the working class was able to build in relatively: tranquil periods under the conditions of bourgeois democracy, Hence the "organizational fetishism" which characterized the policies and pervaded the mentality of the West European Social-Democratic parties in- the epoch of the second International and which contributed ‘So greatly to their shameful collapse during the, First World War. Leon Trotsky therefore
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wrote as early as October 1914:
"Condemned for decades to a policy of opportunist waiting, the Party took up the cult of organization as an end in itself, Never was the spirit of inertia produced by mere routine work so strong in the German Social Democracy as in the years immediately prooeding the great catastrophe, And there can be no doubt that the question of the preservation of the organizations, treasuries, People's houses and printing presses played a mighty important part in the position taken by ve fraction in the Reichstag toward the War."(2) [Emphasis added.
And Lenin somewhat later (1915) put the same observation into a deeper philosophical context:
"An instructive picture," he wrote, “These people have become so corrupted and so stupefied by bourgeois legality that they are not even able to grasp the mere thought of the necessity of other, illegal organizations, destined to lead the revolutionary struggles. ... Here you have before you the living dialectics of opportunism: the mere growth of legal organizations, the simple habit of narrow-minded but consoientious philistines creates a situation where in a time of crisis these same conscientious philistines become traitors whose only aim is now to strangle the revolutionary energies of the mass~ es."(3). [Emphasis added, ] De
In other words: To the social-democratic and union leaders of that time the evolutionary, peaceful growth of their organizations became imperceptibly an "end in itself" and therefore incomparably more important than the hazy socialist “aim proclaimed ritually on festive occasions, .. . Here we see again that the lack of "media-« tions betweon principle, strategy and tactics" characterized == contrary to Lukdos -- not only the "sectarians," but even more so their very antipodes: the worshippers of the "movement," the reformists!
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Up to this point we have confined ourselves to a puroly "ideological" sphere because what was said above referred: to tho Social Democracy prior to the First World War and could therefore be still regarded as phenomena inside the working-class movement, However, even before that war there emerged in every Social-Democratic party of the West a powerful party apparatus which began to manipu-= late and dominate the membership and which gradually reduced inner "party democracy" to a mere shadow, (How well we know this process from the experiences of the English and continental trade-union move~ ment!) And this alone sufficed to bring about a qualitative change,
(2)Leon Trotsky: The Bolsheviki and World Peace, pp. 2045,
(S)nenin: Collected Works, Vol, XVIII, p. 315.
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since every apparatus has a life of its own and tends to become independent of the social forces which created it, -Now the party hierarchy felt no need for any mediation between the "aim" and the "movement," On the contrary, the “aim itself became imperceptibly a mere abstraction as the "movement" (i.e., the apparatus) accommodated itself more and more to the existing social order and acquired a "vested interest" in its preservation.,(4) This development became sufficiently clear after the First World War, when the Social-Democratic parties had to assume "the heavy burden of responsibility" and participate in the local, provincial and national governments; with this, the party and union apparatus became even more estranged, “alienated" from the masses, and ever more part and parcel of the state ~- this "most alarming of all fetishes, with the great knife between its teeth. .." (Trotsky.) ~"
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But how does all this apply to the Communist movement which was born out of the struggle against Social-Democratic reformism and whose aim was the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist order?
The answer to this.question goes to the very heart of the dialectical method. Lukdcs stresses repeatedly in his essay how in the process of socio-historical development ever "new mediations appear as the old ones lose their validity, or undergo more or less essential modifications," What he fails to stress, however (and what is even more important), is that in this continuous process of change not only the old "husks" are being discarded, but also new "kernels" .come into being! He who would not take into account the necessity of ever new "mediations" would certainly be a poor Marx= ist; but he would be even poorer if it escaped him that in the his-. torical development of society every form and function oan grow into a new "oontent," essentially different from the previous one, Thus, in the process of dialectical change, the old Social Democracy ceased to be the working-class party it had once been; thus, although for differont historical reasons, the Russian Communist party, too, lost
(4) Paul M, Sweezy relates the following story about the well-known Social-Democratic theoretician, R, Hilferding, as told by a Marxist writer who was a close acquaintance of Hilferding in 1933: "I remem ber distinctly," says this writer, "having spoken to him a few days after Hitler was appointed chancellor and. asking him whether he thought that the time was ripe for the unions to call a general strike, Even then, in the first days of February 1933, he was site ting in a comfortable easy chair with warm felt slippers on his feet and remarked with a benign smile that I was a young firebrand and that political skill consists of waiting for the right moment, After all, he said, Hindenburg is still the President, the government is a coalition government, and while Hitlers come and go, the ADGB [the German trade-union federation] is an organization that should not risk its entire existence for a fleeting political purpose, It was only a
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with the passage of years its revolutionary character and became an instrument of entirely new social forces. . ..
Of course, Lukdcs will not agree, with the last assertion, In his eyes, the Khrushchev regime is the legitimate heir of the October Revolution and its policies a "realistic" continuation of Marxism Leninism, Never mind, To refute him, we have to proceed from his own premises and to show how these premises are constantly at odds with the political conclusions which he draws from them,
Lukd&cs postulates that, in accordance with true dialectical thinking, “particular actions" must be always directed by the "aim and the aim must be realized by the actions, But what is in truth . the "gim" of the present-day Soviet regime and how do its actions correspond to this aim?
According to the official doctrine, the aim of the Soviet regime has been and still is the establishment of a communist soolety throughout the world, But who does not perceive that for the Soviet leadership this: professed aim has become indistinguishable from the concrete aims of the Soviet state? And who can deny that the policies of the Soviet government serve exclusively national Russian interests, regardless of the needs . of the international workings class movement?!.
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Here we must resume our previous argument, The founders of the Soviet state, Lenin and Trotsky, conceived of it primarily. as an instrument for promoting the European socialist revolution; after achieving this goal, the Soviet state was expected to gradually “wither away" -- the sooner, the better.(5) When, however, the hopes for a revolution in the West began to fade in the mid-twenties, this primary.aim of Bolshevism retreated more and: more into an indefinite future and the specific Russian interests and problems were placed in the forefront, Now again, although imperceptibly and , behind the smokesoreen of clumsily construed Lenin quotations, the "aim" became "nothing" and the preservation of the Soviet state --= Neverything' |
few days later that he was hiding at some friend's house being al-~ ready sought by the Gestapo." [Emphasis added,] (In the. book: Ke Marx and the Close of His System, p, XVIII.) (5)Now we are, of course, told by Soviet ideologists: "It is only the modern Revisionists who maintain that the problem of the dying away of the state is the most important and most basic question on which the future of socialism depends," [Emphasis added,] (Qsnovy sovetskoy filosofii, 1960, p. 535,) New times, new songs. « « «
A corresponding transformation overtook the original Bolshe-~ vik party, We have stressed how greatly the growth of the party apparatus contributed to the degeneration of Social Democracy, In the Soviet Union, however, the party apparatus, with the victory of . Stalinism, became identical with and indistinguishable from the _ state machinery -- and this added to it an entirely new quality. It is relatively easy to endure the manipulating practices of the party or union bosses, as long as they are not endowed with coercive means (such as police, prisons and the like), But what endless misery when both »= the monopolistic party apparatus and the state machin= ery =~ fuse together into one totalitarian system!(6)° Where this happens -= as it unfortunately happened in Russia -- there. cannot exist any other "aim" than that of the omnipotent party~state appar~ atus, to whose power every individual and every social group is. mercilessly subjected, . . .. Oe
Of course, Lukdcs does not and perhaps even cannot see it this way. For him the whole twenty«five-year period of Stalinist rule is an endless chapter of "dogmatic," ultra-leftist “seotarianism" -- motivated, to be sure, by. the best of intentions, but nevertheless bent to apply, ruthlessly and mercilessly, “always and every~ where," the "methods of the civil war" (which, incidentally, ended in Russia in 1921)! Yes, he even manages to depict the inglorious role of the Hungarian Rakosi as a period, "when the selection of Party cadres, » »« was carried out in accordance with revolutionary catch phrases derived from civil-war conditions,."(7) In other words: Here survives the legend of the "staunch revolutionary Marxist," Stalin, whose only fault was his "subjective dogmatism" and his strange pre= dilection for "compulsory measures", , .. Whereas, in reality, Stalin was -- and had to be! -- an arch-"revisionist" and the main corrupter of and “deviator™ from the ideas of Marx and Lenin! Simply beeause his "aim" and his "historical function" was not the promotion of international socialist revolution, but the preservation (and expansion) of the existing Soviet state, Of course, from a historioal viewpoint even the degenerated Soviet State represented a tremendous step forward; despite Stalin's crimes, Still the bitter truth cannot be concealed even under the smoothest "dialectical" verbiage. . ...
(6)in this respect, our best witness may be Lukdcs himself who until the death of the tyrant had to insert into his even most scholarly works (such as his treatise on the young Hegel) the most humiliating eulogics to Stalin and the crudest recriminations against his adversary Trotsky. ...
(7) Thore is, of course, a grain of truth in this contention -- since the Stalinist regime meant a perpetual administrative war not only against the unfortunate peasantry, but also against the nominal bearer of the state power, the industrial working class. But this was quite a different "civil war" than Lukfcs has in mind,
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But did not Stalin at times also pursue "“ultra-leftist" policies? Such as his dreadful forced collectivisation of the peasantry er his identification of Social Democracy with Fascism? Here we see again how easily dialectics can be turned into pure sophistry, (&) In a genuine working=class movement "right" and "left" tendencios are something natural, growing out of the organic development of the movement itself, They are, therefore, in a sense healthy phenomena, signs of the vigor and strength of the movement (even if they must sometimes be considered “infantile maladies"), Quite different, . however, are the administrative "zigzags" of the degenerated party= state apparatus which has become an "end in itself," Since they do not reflect the spiritual growth of the working-class movement, but solely the transient needs of the apparatus, they acquire a new character which makes it impossible to equate them with scemingly Similar phenomena of the past or to see in them a somewhat modified rebirth of the “traditional division between Right, Center and Left"(9)t (Alas, the sophist is always afraid of the infinite riche ness and diversity of the "concrete," or -- to put it in Lassallets words =- he suffers from an intellectual "horror pleni," He there» fore anxiously sticks to formal analogies and old labels, even if these labels have lost all their meaning. ...
Unfortunately, this is also true of Lukd&cs: Just because he clings desperately to the old symbols, he has to confine himsclf to an abstract investigation of the methodological roots of various political trends, completely ignoring their incomparably more impor~ tant social roots, As a result, the materialist dialectician Lucdcs offers an essentially ideological -- and idealistic -- interpretation of the Sino»Soviet dispute! On reading his essay one could assume that the bitter quarrel between the Russian and the Chinese governments does not at all stem from the specific material (social as well as political) interests which divide both adversaries -~ but merely from their ability (or inability) to find proper dialectical "medias tions", . . . Thus, all the conereteness, diversity and complexity of the real relationships between the degenerated Soviet state, the Chinese bureaucracy, the working class and national liberation moves ments and Western imperialism is reduced to a scholastic squabble about the real or imaginary sins of "sectarianism"!
2/Lenin defined as "sophist" a way of thinking which is bent to stress the “external similarities of various cases, torn apart from the inner coherence of the events," [Emphasis added, ]
(2 )We quote here Isaac Deutscherts essay “Three Currents in Communism," - printed-in the same issue of Studies on the Left, (In Deutsoher'ts eyes Khrushchev is the representative of the "Center," and the Stalinist "diehards" Molotov, Malenkov and’ Kaganovitch. ... representatives of the "Left"! )
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But why this lacuna in:Lukdos! reasoning? The answer is . simple? However much he detests and abhors the Stalinist past, . -- Lik&es still rejects only the results and Symptons of Stalinism, but not its essence -- the nationalist doctrine of the "“coristruction of socialism~in one country." He may therefore well admit that the Stalinist system (10) represented "a gigantic, strictly centralized apparatus, ora pyramid. consisting. from the top down of ever smailer Stalins"; but. he will never concede that this "pyramid" only reflected the ascent of a new social stratum -- the party and state bureaucracy; a stratum which for stringent historical reasons succeeded in the midstwéfhties in replacing the short-lived rule of-the Russian working class, and whose’ ‘power was literally built on_ the bones: of a whole generation of the old Bolsheviks. ... It is evidently still. too-early to’call this stratum a social “class in the Marxian sense of the: word $--we- ‘do- not yet. know‘whether it is a progenitor of. a new social: formation ‘or merely a tetiporary parasitic growth, (This fateful question can be decided only by the development of the class struggle on a world =scalé,.).. But-whatever may be the future of the party~state bureaucracy, without acknowledging its existence and:-its paramount role it is impossible to understand what goes on in the so-called Soviét Orbit, In this respect, howéver, Lukdcs! dialectics and Lukacs' Marxism | are indeed very Poor Fools sss « (11)
~~ This-manifest-weakness- of Lukdcs! analysis is all the- more.disturbing when we.measure his latest.essay against his early work Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, [Histor and Class Consciousness, |] It was in this brilliant work that Lukdcs interpreted and developed Engelst idea of the "false consciousness" which characterizes .the thinking of all ruling classes, From him we learned that the con-= sciousness of the bourgeois class -~- sharp and lucid as long as it ‘faces the tasks of organizing the capitalist rule and of subjecting to it the precapitalist forms of production == becomes by necessity
1LO)But what about Khrushchev? (11)We are not sure whether the same does not apply also to Isaac Deutscher!s views, Although Deutscher is the author of a brilliant. biography of Trotsky, he never shared Trotsky!s interpretation of the social. role and significance of the Soviet bureaucracy. On the con" trary: he always tended to explain the advent of Stalinism in an. essentially idealistic manner either as a "revenge" taken by the prerevolutionary past on the revolutionary internationalism of Lenin or as the "relative eclipse of European Russia in favor of the “backward” Asiatic and semi-Asiatic periphery." To him "Stalin, like Dostoyev= sky's Grand Inquisitor represented the Church in revolt: against the Gospel," — [Emphasis added.| (Isaac Deutscher: Stalin: .A Political Biography, pp. 3602 and 382=3,) And to us such impressionistic literary images are even less satisfactory and less palatable than the emaciated post-Stalinist dialectics of Lukd&cs. ...
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dimmed and obscure when it encounters problems which transcend the limits of capitalism and whose solution demands a new social order,(12) But does not the same -- mutatis mutandis -- also apply to the Soviet bureaucracy? Can we expect it to have a real, "genuine" understanding | of: the historical development and of its own social role? The obvious answer. is -—« mo. As the main-beneficiary of the regime and the sole possessor of the state power, the Soviet bureaucracy must seek the perpetuation of its econdémic privileges and its political domination.- Hence its deeply ingrained conservatism, which manifests itself not only in its predilection for the ™ Status quo" and for the "inherited" national borders (even if these borders were "inherited" from’Russian Czarism), but also in its incessant quest for all sorts of "eternal values" in every sphere of intellectual life -~ in cores sociology, economics, philosophy, morals, arts, and in the entire social superstructure; a quest which strikes even an inexperienced eye and which contrasts so grotesquely with the cultural Sturm und~ Drang of the twenties(13). ... . To demand from this social stratum | a genuine dialectical thinking ~~ which, in Marx's words, "regards every. historically developed social form as in fluid movement" and "is in its. essence critical and revolutionary" (14) ) [emphasis added] = is to demand the impossible, The Soviet bureaucracy, as it.is today, cannot but have a "false™ consciousness of the contemporary. world, cannot but deceive itself and others with petty-bourgeois illusions. And if Lukd&es does not see this, we can only repeat his own sad. words: "How much more readily are things lost than regained, "(15) [Emphasis added,
of. G. Lukd&cs' Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, pp. 65-6, (13)0f. course, every ph hilistine- will tell you that. all this-is -onLy - "natural" and’ that, after passing its stormy years, every revolution | has to "settle. down" and to accept a set of "established truths and values. But, even if this were so =- why do these "values" resemble so much the. petty bourgeois values of the existing capitalist society, with its idolatry of the state, » its rabid nationalism, its stuffy philistine| morals, etc., ete. 2° (14)k, Marx, Capital, Vol. I, pp. 25-6,
(15)tThe quoted essay in Studies on the Left. We have not dealt with the exoteric part.of Lukes! essay in which he tries to provide a | "ohilosophical". interpretation of Khrushchev'!s policies, Here his argument runs as follows:
_ "at the time of the First World War, Lenin accurately affirmed the indissoluble connection of imperialism ‘and war, ‘The Khrushchev speech in 1956, offering as it did the perspective that world wars were no longer inevitable, was just as sharp a break with the Lenin thesis as the Lenin thesis was a break with the thesis of Marx that proletarian revolutions can occur only. in the most: developed countries (and then successfully only on an international scale), Lenin depar=
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