Summary of Chapter 5: The Revolutionary Party: A Plan and a Diagnosis
The “plan” is Lenin’s high modernist revolutionism, and the “diagnosis” is the response of two of his critics, Luxemburg and Kollantay. Scott sets up the stakes:
Lenin’s design for the construction of the revolution was in many ways comparable to Le Corbusier’s design for the construction of the modern city. Both were complex endeavors that had to be entrusted to the professionalism and scientific insight of a trained cadre with full power to see the plan through. And just as Le Corbusier and Lenin shared a broadly comparable high modernism, so Jane Jacobs’s perspective was shared by Rosa Luxemburg and Aleksandra Kollontay, who opposed Lenin’s politics. Jacobs doubted both the possibility and the desirability of the centrally planned city, and Luxemburg and Kollontay doubted the possibility and desirability of a revolution planned from above by the vanguard party. (147)
Scott draws from several key writings which reveal Lenin as a High Modernist. He discusses the idea of the party as a vanguard, and the implications of the term “mass:”
Although the terms became standard in socialist parlance, they are heavy with implications. Nothing better conveys the impression of mere quantity and number without order than the word “masses.” Once the rank and file are so labeled, it is clear that what they chiefly add to the revolutionary process are their weight in numbers and the kind of brute force they can represent if firmly directed. The impression conveyed is of a huge, formless, milling crowd without any cohesion—without a history, without ideas, without a plan of action. Lenin was all too aware, of course, that the working class does have its own history and values, but this history and these values will lead the working class in the wrong direction unless they are replaced by the historical analysis and advanced revolutionary theory of scientific socialism. (150)
Thus the vanguard party not only is essential to the tactical cohesion of the masses but also must literally do their thinking for them” (151).
This is the core of Lenin’s case against spontaneity. There are only two ideologies: bourgeois and socialist. Given the pervasiveness and historical power of bourgeois ideology, the spontaneous development of the working class will always lead to the triumph of bourgeois ideology. In Lenin’s memorable formulation, ‘the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness.’ Social democratic consciousness, in contrast, must come from outside, that is, from the socialist intelligentsia.
Lenin draws on the metaphors of army, classroom, and also factory owners/executives [do we sense the disciplinary archipelago?]; and also architecture:
What the party has is the blueprint of the entire new structure, which its scientific insight has made possible. The role of the workers is to follow that part of the blueprint allotted to them in the confidence that the architects of revolution know what they are doing. (152)
It is surely a great paradox of What Is to Be Done? that Lenin takes a subject—promoting revolution—that is inseparable from popular anger, violence, and the determination of new political ends and transforms it into a discourse on technical specialization, hierarchy, and the efficient and predictable organization of means. Politics miraculously disappears from within the revolutionary ranks and is left to the elite of the vanguard party, much as industrial engineers might discuss, among themselves, how to lay out a factory floor.
Lenin’s revolutionary elite are “professionals,” not unlike those working for capitalist high modernism:
Just as Le Corbusier imagines that the public will acquiesce to the knowledge and calculations of the master architect, so Lenin is confident that a sensible worker will want to place himself under the authority of professional revolutionists. (153)
... the principle behind Lenin’s concerns ... stems from the sharply delineated, functional roles that the party and the working class each played. Class consciousness, in the final analysis, is an objective truth carried solely by the ideologically enlightened who direct the vanguard party. (154)
Lenin also uses a contagion metaphor, as in the party has to prevent the spread of dangerous ideas and practices among the proletariat, which could derail its (i.e., the vanguard’s) plan for revolution.
If we consider the vanguard party, as Lenin did, to be a machine for bringing about the revolution, then we see that the vanguard party’s relation to the working class is not much different from a capitalist entrepreneur’s relation to the working class. The working class is necessary to production; its members must be trained and instructed, and the efficient organization of their work must be left to professional specialists. The ends of the revolutionist and the capitalist are, of course, utterly different, but the problem of means that confronts each is similar and is similarly resolved. (156)
Lenin and Le Corbusier, notwithstanding the great disparity in their training and purpose, shared some basic elements of the high modernist outlook. While the scientific pretensions of each may seem implausible to us, they both believed in the existence of a master science that served as the claim to authority of a small planning elite. (157)
Both, of course, had the improvement of the human condition as their ultimate goal, and both attempted to attain it with methods that were profoundly hierarchical and authoritarian.
The actual revolutions of 1917 did not correspond with the plan Lenin had laid out in What Is to Be Done? “The high-modernist scheme for revolution was no more borne out in practice than were high-modernist plans for Brasilia and Chandigarh borne out in practice.” Obviously, Lenin and the Bolsheviks did not bring the revolution about; [to the contrary, they showed up late and derailed it]. “What Lenin did succeed brilliantly in doing was in capturing the revolution once it was an accomplished fact” (158).
What followed in the years until 1921 is best described as the reconquest, now by the fledgling Bolshevik state, of Russia. The reconquest was not simply a civil war against the ‘Whites’; it was also a war against the autonomous forces that had seized local power in the revolution. (159)
The model for the vanguard party depicted so sharply in What Is to Be Done? is an impressive example of executive command and control. Applied to the actual revolutionary process, however, it is a pipe dream, bearing hardly any relation to the facts. Where the model is descriptively accurate, alas, is in the exercise of state authority after the revolutionary seizure of power.
What What Is to Be Done? was in fact used for, was the creation of an official mythology after the fact, based on the glorious leadership of Lenin, etc.
It is perfectly natural for leaders and generals to exaggerate their influence on events; that is the way the world looks from where they sit, and it is rarely in the interest of their subordinates to contradict their picture.
After seizing state power, the victors have a powerful interest in moving the revolution out of the streets and into the museums and schoolbooks as quickly as possible, lest the people decide to repeat the experience. (160)
This altered story is told in such a way as to give it a sense of inevitability, thus diminishing both the actual contingency of events, and the spontaneous actions that played a large role:
It is exceptionally rare to find any historical account that stresses the contingencies. The very exercise of producing an account of a past event virtually requires an often counterfactual neatness and coherence. Anyone who has ever read a newspaper account of an event in which he or she participated will recognize this phenomenon. (390n37)
S next turns to the Lenin of State and Revolution, from 1917. Lenin here echoes the egalitarian positions of the anarchists and of Luxemburg (and Marx, as S also points out), but only strategically, as he wants to undermine the Kerensky regime; nevertheless his “high-modemist convictions still pervade the text” (161). Lenin was a fan of Fordism/Taylorism; he argued that capitalist infrastructure, bureaucracy, and technology simplify administration sufficiently, so that anyone can do it with basic enough training:
the great majority of functions of the old ‘state power’ have become so simplified and can be reduced to such simple operations of registration, filing, and checking that they would be quite within the reach of every literate person, and it will be possible to perform them for working men’s wages, which circumstance can (and must) strip those functions of every shadow of privilege and every appearance of official grandeur. (Lenin, quoted on p. 162)
The next source is Lenin’s Agrarian Question; more high modernist stuff, celebrating the inevitability of a centralized factory system imposed by capitalism (which is then to be taken over by the revolutionary proletariat). Lenin is a fan of electrification, in the sense of a centralized network that delivered power and efficiency everywhere: “The way that electricity worked was very much the way that Lenin hoped the power of the socialist state would work” (167).
Rosa Luxemburg (168ff) offered a very different view of revolution. “Luxemburg differed most sharply with Lenin in her relative faith in the autonomous creativity of the working class” (168). Luxemburg was nevertheless still a vanguardist, like Lenin:
Neither Lenin nor Luxemburg had what might be called a sociology of the party. That is, it did not occur to them that the intelligentsia of the party might have interests that did not coincide with the workers’ interests, however defined. They were quick to see a sociology of trade-union bureaucracies but not a sociology of the revolutionary Marxist party. (169)
Luxemburg, like Lenin, also used the metaphor of the party as like a factory manager, issuing orders which the worker should follow, because the manager/party sees the big picture, which the worker does not. However, this supremacy is not taken as far as in Lenin’s thought: “For Luxemburg, the party might well be more farsighted than the workers, but it would nevertheless be constantly surprised and taught new lessons by those whom it presumed to lead.” “Eschewing military, engineering, and factory parallels, she wrote more frequently of growth, development, experience, and learning.” Illustrating this is Luxemburg’s view on the role of strikes, standing in contrast to Lenin’s top-down view:
A strike or a revolution was not simply an end toward which tactics and command ought to be directed; the process leading to it was at the same time shaping the character of the proletariat. How the revolution was made mattered as much as whether it was made at all, for the process itself had heavy consequences. (170)
Per Scott, Luxemburg found Lenin’s “hierarchical logic” to be “both utterly unrealistic and morally distasteful.” ... “even if such discipline were conceivable, by imposing it the party would deprive itself of the independent, creative force of a proletariat that was, after all, the subject of the revolution.”
Lenin comes across as a rigid schoolmaster with quite definite lessons to convey—a schoolmaster who senses the unruliness of his pupils and wants desperately to keep them in line for their own good. Luxemburg sees that unruliness as well, but she takes it for a sign of vitality, a potentially valuable resource; she fears that an overly strict schoolmaster will destroy the pupils’ enthusiasm and leave a sullen, dispirited classroom where nothing is really learned. (171)
A footnote provides insight into Luxemburg’s [enlightenment] view of the transformation of proletarian consciousness through political action:
“...[The awakening of revolutionary energy could be effected] only by an insight into all the fearful seriousness, all the complexity of the tasks involved, only as a result of political maturity and independence of spirit, only as a result of a capacity for critical judgment on the part of the masses, which capacity was systematically killed by the social democracy for decades under various pretexts.” (Luxemburg, quoted in 393n79)
The mass strike, then, was not a tactical invention of the vanguard party to be used at the appropriate moment. It was, rather, the "living pulse-beat of the revolution and at the same time its most powerful driving-wheel, . . . the phenomenal form of the proletarian struggle in the revolution.” (172)
Luxemburg’s understanding of the revolutionary process, curiously enough, provided a better description of how Lenin and the Bolsheviks came to power than did the utopian scenario in What Is to Be Done?
Luxemburg argued that the Bolsheviks’ “dictatorial methods and their mistrust of the proletariat made for bad educational policy. It thwarted the development of the mature, independent working class that was necessary to the revolution and to the creation of socialism” (173).
Thus she attacked both the German and Russian revolutionists for substituting the ego of the vanguard party for the ego of the proletariat—a substitution that ignored the fact that the objective was to create a self-conscious workers’ movement, not just to use the proletariat as instruments.
Luxemburg wrote that the “collective ego of the working class” had to make its own mistakes to “learn the historical dialectic by itself,” not just be led by the vanguard party.
She believed that Lenin and Trotsky had completely corrupted a proper understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat. To her, it meant rule by the whole proletariat, which required the broadest political freedoms for all workers (though not for enemy classes) so that they could bring their influence and wisdom to bear on the building of socialism. It did not mean, as Lenin and Trotsky assumed, that a small circle of party leaders would exercise dictatorial power merely in the name of the proletariat. (173-4)
L and L had fundamentally opposing understandings of socialism:
Lenin proceeded as if the road to socialism were already mapped out in detail and the task of the party were to use the iron discipline of the party apparatus to make sure that the revolutionary movement kept to that road. Luxemburg, on the contrary, believed that the future of socialism was to be discovered and worked out in a genuine collaboration between workers and their revolutionary state. … The openness that characterized a socialist future was not a shortcoming but rather a sign of its superiority, as a dialectical process, over the cut-and-dried formulas of utopian socialism. (174)
Scott notes how similar her view is to Malatesta’s. Her criticisms of Lenin were very prescient:
Unless the working class as a whole participated in the political process, she added ominously, “socialism will be decreed from behind a few official desks by a dozen intellectuals.”
Scott now turns to the writings of Alexandra Kollontay in support of the short-lived Worker’s Opposition within the Bolshevik party; her arguments are similar to those made by Luxemburg; only the working class could create actual communism, it could not be imposed from above by bureaucrats
Her experience of being patronized and condescended to as a representative of the women’s section seems directly tied to her accusation that the party was also treating the workers as infants rather than as autonomous, creative adults. (176)
Summarizing the link between the viewpoints of Lenin and Le Corbusier: “Each of these schemes implies a single, unitary answer discoverable by specialists and hence a command center, which can, or ought to, impose the correct solution” (178). In contrast, Scott finds in Luxemburg’s and Kollontay’s bottom-up visions of revolution the theme of mētis, which will be the ultimate lesson of this book:
Kollontay's point of departure, like Luxemburg’s, is an assumption about what kinds of tasks are the making of revolutions and the creating of new forms of production. For both of them, such tasks are voyages in uncharted waters. There may be some rules of thumb, but there can be no blueprints or battle plans drawn up in advance; the numerous unknowns in the equation make a one-step solution inconceivable. In more technical language, such goals can be approached only by a stochastic process of successive approximations, trial and error, experiment, and learning through experience. The kind of knowledge required in such endeavors is not deductive knowledge from first principles but rather what Greeks of the classical period called mētis, a concept to which we shall return. Usually translated, inadequately, as “cunning,” mētis is better understood as the kind of knowledge that can be acquired only by long practice at similar but rarely identical tasks, which requires constant adaptation to changing circumstances. (177-8)
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