A century of What to do? of Lenin

A critical defense at the light of the Argentinazo

By Roberto Sáenz



101 years have passed since V. I. Lenin wrote What to do. The work referred specifically to the tasks pose for the Russian Social Democracy at the beginning of the XX century, related in the first place to the difficulties to settle down properly to the Russian revolutionary Marxism as a party. These problems were the product of the tendency to the dispersion in the vast surface of that country, from the un organize factor that meant the continuous repression of the czarist State and of the "anti-political" pressures that printed to the socialist activity the purely "economic" character of the emergent working class fight.

The lapsed century has given place to an out number of discussions and debates about the relevancy of Lenin's work for our time. For example, in a recently published book it is insisted that "should The theory and the practice of the revolution be emancipated of their Leninist inheritance, and the question What to do? supplanted for (...) what to avoid? and what must be done differently?" (1). Plus still, they end up affirming that: "could one say that the centennial of the What to do? of Lenin doesn't deserve to be celebrated" (2).

Here we will sustain the contrary thesis. We understand that although in Lenin's work, unilateral, mistaken aspects exist and / or that they remit to specific questions of the time and place in which they acted, it also contains universality elements and actual ones that have a renovated importance seen from the experience of the Argentinazo. We could even say that the process in course needs a "Leninist turn."

It doesn’t escape to us that Lenin's work exceeds the mere discussion of the What to do? However, it interests us the bound to the organization problems for the enormous present time of these problems in the Argentinazo and the "party deficit" that was expressed until the moment (3). Because we say that the problems of construction of the revolutionary organization should be put on the agenda so that the sharp polititation limits and of socialist alternative can be overcome, and that they won't be able to be resolved without confronting this pressing question.



Philosophy and class conscience in Lenin.



The most general starting point in the debate is the acquisition of the conscience of the workers' class. This same problem remits, in turn, to the conceptions on stake about the theory of the knowledge. Here it is imposed to make reference to Lenin's philosophical work: the texts Materialism and Empirical Criticism (1908) and the Philosophical Notebooks on Hegel's Logic (1914).

Obviously, the problem is too vast as to treat it thoroughly here (4). However, it cannot be started out of a shallow review of this problem, given its importance for the matter of the theoretical budgets of Lenin's conception about the acquisition of the socialist conscience, together with the polemic that these positions unraveled.

In the first work, Lenin was still part of the II International philosophical tradition, although his activist, militant approach, would define it from the beginning-not yet completely consciously-with the whole of this tradition. The second, on the other hand, is the text of philosophical rupture with this tradition of mechanical materialism and evolutionist.

The evaluation of the philosophical foundations of Lenin's thought has given place to sour disputes. There are a series of authors that center the problems of the Russian revolution in those "philosophical defects" of Lenin's work. This has been the case of, for example, Karl Korsch (in the "Anti criticism" of Marxism and Philosophy) or of Anton Pannekoek in Lenin philosopher.

This critic has been picked up recently by John Holloway in How to change the world without taking the power and for the already mentioned compilation 100 years of the What to do?. There, Mike Rooke says: "Korsch and Pannekoek identified the exactly same thought type in Lenin (that II International. RS). They sustained that Lenin's materialism (exposed in Materialism and Empirical criticism that appeared in 1908) was dualist, that leaned on in the being's objective acceptance (material) as independent of the conscience (mind). In this contemplative materialism, it is granted primacy epistemology to the material over the conscience, contradicting in a direct way Marx's consideration (...) Therefore, the theory of Lenin's knowledge militates against the unit among theory and practice that we find in Marx (...) Their conception of the theory is such that this stands in a contemplative relationship with the object, to which it is applied from outside, and the practice becomes in a result of this application. This is exemplified in the What to do? of Lenin, of 1902. The thesis of the book is an elaboration of the perspective of Plejánov that the Marxist intellectuals contribute the theory to the workers (the social democratic awareness ') from ‘outside ' (...) Here is the germ of the substitutive that later appeared in the Bolshevik party in office." (5).

We sustain that this is a totally superficial , mechanics and anti dialectic reading of how was Lenin's process and of the value (it doesn't exempt of contradictions) of his thought. Because in the measure in which his work was-as all genuinely revolutionary work - a work in course, in permanent progress and

re elaboration, it had given account of the problems of its time in an approximate way (Lenin recognized himself, in the land of the philosophy, as a simple "investigator"). From there the side sometimes faulty or fragmentary of his philosophical thought. Indeed Materialism and Empirical Criticism seem to correspond with some of the most important formulations in the What to do?, although only formally.

However, in no way it can be lost of sight that these limits and unilateral views were not only overcome by Lenin's own dialectical political practice, but-in a conscious and explicit way - in the philosophical Notebooks about Logic of Hegel. Not accidentally, several of these critics " forget" about the Notebooks and they only undertake it against Materialism and Empirical Criticism. At the same time this critic loses the correct element of this work, its materialistic foundation from the point of view of the philosophy. It could not be otherwise: to make Lenin responsible for all the luck of the Russian Revolution and in the single text of Materialism and Empirical Criticism of all the misfortunes, it doesn't stop to be a hang-over relapse in the purest idealism and the purest abstraction. Or, in fact, the lack of a true dialectical understanding, able to give account of unequal developments, disagreements, combinations and paradoxes.

The version that we believe more correct is that Lenin traveled a progression way of his own philosophical base, that without abandoning the materialism, it allowed him to tune it up and conceive it as something active, alive, that gives full role to the subjects activity.



Theory of the knowledge.



Let us start out approaching the elements of the theory of the knowledge present in the true Lenin. Let us say that the theory of the knowledge moves between two general limits. On one hand, the knowledge should remit to a certain reality that is independent of the subject of the knowledge, this is, to who it knows. The knowledge is not, and can not be a mere disquisition in the emptiness , in the abstract or purely subjective. Because a dialectical relationship settles down among the one that knows and the reality, a certain relationship between subject and object.

However, it is not a passive version or a mere reflection or a copy of the reality such like (this is the slackest aspect in Materialism and Empirical Criticism). The process of the knowledge means a certain elaboration, a certain construction by part of the one who knows. This is, an action for which the acquisition of the knowledge demands an active practice, of elaboration and reflection about what is known. The subject’s activity is indeed the mediation between the object and the subject, and it is this mediation, this practice, the unit moment between subject and object.

These two levels have their importance when they try to settle down the relationship with the theories of the knowledge in vogue in time of Lenin. On one hand, in Materialism and Empirical Criticism the polemic was centered in Bogdánov, that sustained a conception that combined raw materialism with an idealistic subjectivism. Against Bogdánov, Lenin correctly affirmed the materialist point of view that the knowledge is something referred to an "independent" reality of the subject that knows. It is this reality the one that the philosophical mentors of Bogdánov (Mach and Averanius) tended flat and flatly to abolish.

For Lenin, on the contrary, an "external" reality exists, that however is given to the thought know. He affirms that there is no unbeatable barrier between our sensations and the real world. That some type of "correspondence" exist among both, a relationship between the process of the thought and the real world. Bogdánov (to the way of Kant) didn't leave place to any conception of the truth that was based on the conformity between our judgment and that independent reality. But, in their vulgar idealism, all this escaped to our critics.

The problem of Lenin's focus began when he moved beyond the defense of the materialism to give a positive formulation of the Marxist philosophy. Here it did, it impacted the world of the II International Marxism negatively. Because Lenin assumed with weapons and bagages a conception reductionism and passive of the knowledge: the theory of the knowledge like copy or reflection of the reality. Lenin insisted that the theoretical representations in our head were simple copies of the real world.

And indeed this was clearly opposed to the conception of the knowledge in Marx. It is the very well-known case of the Theses Feuerbach , where it is insisted in the critical practical asset aspect of the knowledge like construction process where the subject has a decisive role in his interaction with the real world.

On the other hand, Lenin fell in a raw mechanical materialistic theory of the knowledge, leaning on the bourgeois materialists of the XVIII century and going back regarding the dialectical of Hegel and of his assimilation for Marx. Lenin seemed to believe that the knowledge of the world was simply reached by a mental reproduction of its immediate appearance, losing from sight that what is on stake in the knowledge are not the forms of showing of the things, but its internal connections. This epistemological conception finish being, paradoxically, contradictory with its own conception of the acquisition of the conscience manifested in the What to do?, with the deepest of this work because there Lenin shows how the spontaneous appears as the embryonic form, not elaborated, of the conscience that requires a more complex elaboration moment to rise at the level of conscience socialist politics. There is where it becomes indispensable the metabolism of the working class with the party.

Because a theory of the knowledge for "correspondence"-some version of which is essential for any materialism should give space for a specific effort of interpretation, for a theoretical element that intervenes between the perception and the conscience, overcoming the fetishistic character of the reality. In the "theory of the reflection", on the other hand, the conscience is reduced to the mere perception, and this active elaboration process, this metabolism, disappears.

What Lenin's critics prefer to pass on, in an act that speaks bad of their intellectual honesty, is that years later, amid the crisis that produced in him the sinking of II International and after a revision of Hegel's Logic, Lenin rediscovers the active side of the thought, the active side of the knowledge, the subject’s active side. Here operates an overcoming of the mechanical materialism of the II International. Just as mention Raya Dunayevskaya and the own Karl Korch, Lenin ends up saying that "the man's conscience not only reflects the objective world but rather he creates it" (Philosophical Notebooks) (6).

Lenin rediscovers the critic to the vulgar materialism and he insists now in the fact that Plejánov ignored Hegel's more important texts, mainly those referred to the theory of the knowledge. Now he affirms: "the dialectical is the theory of the knowledge of Hegel and the Marxism" (7).

In the Notebooks, Lenin points out:

"1. Plejanov criticizes to the Kantismo (...) more from the vulgar materialistic point of view than from a materialistic dialectical point of view (...) 2. The Marxists criticized (at the beginning of the XX century) to the Kantians and the pupils of Hume, rather the way of Feuerbach (...)than that of Hegel. It is totally impossible to understand Marx's Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having studied and thoroughly understood all Hegel's Logic. Consequently for half century, no Marxist has understood Marx!" (8).

As we already point out above, this overcomes to the Theses about Feuerbach. Because Marx had pointed out there with all clarity that the problem of the materialism of Feuerbach is that it lost the active side of the knowledge, present in Hegel. At the same time, when affirming that "the educator should be educated", it broke up with all possible externality at the time of the acquisition of the knowledge and the conscience. But it is a fact that Lenin didn't know this text, published years later. This doesn't make more than to outline the merit of his Philosophical Notebooks, where he ends up outlining that "the change as a result of the fight among opposed (...) is not external, but rather it points to the internal contradiction, to the self movement" (9).

This new understanding of the relationships between essence and appearance was fundamental for the new conception about the relationship between thought and reality. Its epistemology won, this way, in two decisive aspects at the moment of the understanding of the problem of the acquisition of the political conscience of class: on one hand, it won in the explanation of the distinction among the immediate conscience (union leader) and the mediate conscience (politics). Because the knowledge requires an active process of abstraction (that is to say, an elaboration) able to discriminate between essence and appearance. This throws new light on some of the most important theses in the What to do. And on the other one, because it helped to overcome the passive character and "from outside" of the acquisition of the conscience that was a very important limit of the What to do?

We reiterate, then, that starting from this renovated point of view Lenin developed a more active and more independent role for the conscience that the one that contributed the outline of Materialism and Empirical Criticism. And it is this kind of rupture or critical overcoming of its previous frame, philosophical frame, the one that the critical councilmen, autonomist and "antiparty" tend to ignore (10).



Class conscience and party



As we said, these philosophical questions and general epistemologies are related with the problems of the acquisition of the socialist conscience of the working masses. Related, not equal, because the problem of the knowledge, although it remits to the scientific knowledge, requires a grade of complexity and specificity that is different to the problem of the acquisition of the political conscience. Science and politic have different tools and media, independently that also the acquisition of the class conscience and socialist demands a certain level of understanding about the determinations of the reality.

The acquisition of the political conscience refers to, in an important measure, to the problem of the political-practical knowledge, guided by the activity, of the entirety of the class relationships in the society.

But a difficulty arises. As Alan Shandro it synthesizes. "the story of Lenin of the history of the Russian labor movement describes a dialectical of resistance, awareness, fights and organization. This spontaneous dialectical is identified like an embryonic conscience that faces with a limitation that cannot surpass by itself. Lenin defines this limitation in two ways: first for the negative, in terms of conscience socialist: the strikers of the ninety ‘were not, and they could not be aware of the irreconcilable antagonism of their interests with the group of the modern political and social system '. And then for the positive one, in terms of the self conscience of the workers: ‘the history of all the countries attests that the labor class, exclusively with its own forces, is only in conditions of elaborating an union conscience ' (...) the restriction to the development of the socialist conscience of the labor class is understand not as a specific problem of the Russian workers situation, but as a general limit to the spontaneous dialectical of the fight of the labor class" (11).

What does this difficulty in the acquisition of the conscience of everything consist in ? Lenin gives us a hint:

"Frequently it is heard: the labor class tends spontaneously toward the socialism. This is very fair in the sense in which the socialist theory reveals, with more depth and precision that any other one, the causes of the calamities that the labor class suffers, and for that reason the workers assimilate it with so much easiness (...) The labor class tends in a spontaneous way to the socialism, but the bourgeois ideology, the most diffused one (and that always arises again in the most diverse ways), is imposed, nevertheless, spontaneously to the worker more than to anybody" (12).

This obstacle refers to the fetishist character, "invested", deformed of the social relationships in the society. If this is this way, it is not given to the workers to acquire a clear and deep conscience about the circumstances of their exploitation and oppression more than by means of an elaboration, a process in which the inherited fight traditions of previous generations intervene, their own action "spontaneous", the learning elements that come or accumulate as experience (13) and-in the limit-the absolutely necessary metabolism with the revolutionary organization, without which one cannot obtain this socialist political conscience completely.

This is very well developed by Georg Lukács in History and Conscience of Class, where it outlines that "the tactical theses of the III Congress (of the International Communist) underline (...) that ‘all great strike tends to become in a civil war and in an immediate fight for the power '. But it only tends. And the ideological crisis of the proletariat in fact consists in that, that tendency has not arrived to reality, although in several cases the economic and social budgets of its realization were given. This ideological crisis is manifested, on one hand, in the fact that the situation of the bourgeois society, objectively extremely precarious, continues being reflected in the heads of the proletarians as if it had its old solidity, in the fact that the proletariat continues intensely prisoner in the intellectual and emotional forms of the capitalism" (14).

Similarly, we could say that the Argentinazo lives today its own "ideological crisis", expressed in the enormous difficulties of the working masses to reach radical conclusions of its action starting from the 19 and 20 of December. And, more in general, in the "party deficit" that we come pointing out, reflect of this same problem: the working masses can spontaneously, for themselves (and the Argentinazo demonstrates it once again) create and develop self-determination organisms or democracy of base – these are popular assemblies, unemployed workers' movements or occupations of factories-, but they cannot arrive by themselves at the level of the conscience of class, socialist , of the necessity of the complete transformation of the society. In this it is absolutely indispensable the metabolism of the masses and the vanguard with the party.



But let us return to our critics of Lenin. John Holloway, in his last book, differentiates the correctly "fetishism" as a close topic, of a conception of the continuous development in the society of a fetishist process. However, this is used to try to demonstrate that it would be possible to leave the party out in this necessary metabolism with the class at the time of the acquisition of the conscience and of the social transformation (15).

Indeed, if the fetishism was a totally closed circle, there would be no form of escaping from it, not even with the best party. But the very correct understanding that what exists is a continuous fetishism process-that by definition is open-it doesn't mean that you can overcome or break without the complex metabolism of the socialist conscience that necessarily implies the relationship of the party with the vanguard and the masses.

For Cajo Brendel, "If the division of the work between party and union would have its sense in placid times, it would become in an ideology in revolutionary periods, since the unit of the economic fight and the political fight would really be constituted. In this period the separation between the economic thing and the political thing would be dissolved and both would fuse into one. This self created unit would also give as result another organization form" (16) But the experience of the Argentinazo shows a much more complex path. The tremendous pressures for reinvindications and economic-corporate that are lived in the vanguard and in their diverse movements hinder this progression of the conscience, although it is a dialectical process where there is difficulty , but also the learning and partial overcoming of the fetishism.

Not accidentally Lenin pointed out in 1903 that "the more powerful is the spontaneous ascent of the masses and the movement enlargement, bigger is the speed with which the necessity of a high conscience increases." In the same sense, even during 1905 he pointed out that "of course that the masses and the party will learn of the revolution. The problem is if we will be able to teach it something."



Lenin is not Kautsky



The critics that we are mentioning take the most superficial and formal aspect in Lenin's definition that the socialist conscience should come "from outside" of the working class, to argue that if one has a conception of "self emancipation" one cannot have a firm and systematic conception at the same time about the necessity of the party.

As it is clear, we say with Lenin the opposite.

Continuing in this point Daniel Bensaid’s suggestive analysis, let’s say that in Lenin's conception two levels appear. On one hand, the classic allusion that the socialist conscience should come "from outside" of the relationship between bosses and workers. Here there was-indeed-a misunderstanding regarding the reading of Kautsky, for who the conscience should not only come from outside the most immediate activity of the working class, but rather was contributed by another class or class fraction: the small bourgeois intellectuals as such, as a deus ex machina placed above the own class.

Bensaïd says: "Lenin tries to but can not always measure the size of his own innovations. This way, believing to paraphrase a canonical text of Kautsky, he modifies it in an essential way. Where Kautsky writes that ‘the science ' arrives to the proletarian ‘of the exterior of the fight of classes ' introduced by the bourgeois intellectual ‘', Lenin translates that ‘the political conscience (not the science) ' comes from the exterior of the economic fight (and not of the fight of classes that is as political as social), not carried by the intellectuals as sociological category, but by the party as specific actor" (17).

Lenin's own text in the What to do? is contradictory. Mentioning Kautsky textually, he says: "But it is not the proletariat the carrier of the science, but the bourgeois intellectuality (...) so the socialist conscience is something introduced from outside in the fight of classes of the proletariat" (18). However, something very different is said later on: "the conviction that it can develop the political class conscience of the workers from inside, to say it in a way, of their economic fight, that is to say, only taking (or at least, mainly) that fight like starting point and being only based (or at least, mainly) in that fight (...) it is false from base (...). The political conscience of class can only arrive to the worker from the exterior, that is to say, from a field located outside of the economic fight, to the margin of the sphere of the relationships between workers and bosses. The only sphere of which you can extract these knowledge is that of the relationships of all the classes and layers with the State and the government, the sphere of the relationships of all the class between themselves (...). To endow political knowledge to the workers, the social democrats should go to all the population's layers, they should send the posses of their army to all parts" (19).

Lenin's concern (even defectively formulated) pointed to a real problem, in the measure in which the acquisition of the conscience requires a certain elaboration of the experience that cannot be processed in a simple and direct way by the whole of the class (not even by the whole of the vanguard) but rather it demands the mediation of some element that has accumulated or incorporated the tools for that acquisition of the conscience: this is, the party as a specific synthesis of the theory and the practice of the fight of classes.

Because in this field, Lenin's relevancy has to do with the understanding that the full conscience about the self action and the conditions of the action, requires-we insist-an elaboration. And this elaboration that mentions to an impossibility of explaining the conscience like mere reflection or copy of the reality, it in fact points out the role of the party in its metabolic relationship with the class and the fight of classes.

This conception concentrates a double critical implicitly to the philosophical base of Lenin’s Materialism and Empirical Criticism. Because the acquisition of the conscience is a process that has to do with the social relationships "objective" that determines it, but at the same time it is an active elaboration (not mere copy), through an action (not a mere passive reflection) that gives place to the role of the party, as well as to the self action or experience in the reality that at the same time transforms those subjectively relationships into "objectives."

The acquisition of the conscience requires to see more clearly the "method of the abstraction". At the same time, the conscience should be based on the practical activity that will give the test to what grade our conceptions of the world are adjusted.

The "pattern" of the dialectical process of the knowledge goes from the live perception to the abstract thought and from there to the conscious practice, where a coalition of the intellectual understanding operates and the objective existence. Because in the human activity the abstraction of the thought is overcome. Because in the practice, there is a point where the theory and the class conscience meet. It is the point where the objective and the subjective thing fuse at the time of transforming the reality, and of that same subject at the moment of transforming it.

Therefore, the own Marxist method, the own materialistic dialectical, implies the political activity. Because it can only be really kwon in the course of that activity.

And for this reason Lukács was hostile to the passive theory of the "photographic" knowledge, to the danger of the fatalistic reductionism of the thoughts to the reality. Because if the thought simply reflects reality, what role can the conscience have in the reality transformation? The reality is not, but rather becomes that thing. And, in becoming, the thought participation is necessary. The self conscience is an active part of the reality.

For the Lenin of the philosophical Notebooks, the practice surpasses the distinction between "subjectivity" and "objectivity", the distance between essence and appearance. And the field for this discovery was established by Lenin's theory of party, always the most dialectical and most important element in his Marxism.

Because the necessity of "being part" and at the same time of "being specific" regarding the total of the masses, demands a dialectical that allows to understand the unit of the opposed ones. And this is, in fact, what arises from the most concrete determinations in Lenin's conception of party.



The socialist politics as practice of the entirety



"The revolutionary social democracy always included (...) in their activities the reformation fights. But uses the "economic" agitation not only to claim the government all kinds of measures, but also (and in first term) to demand to stop being an autocratic government. They also consider their duty to introduce to the government this demand, not only in the economic fight field, but also in all of the manifestations of the social life and politics. In a word, as the part to everything, it subordinates the fight for the reformations to the revolutionary fight for freedom and socialism" (20).

This seems to be written for the Argentinazo itself, although our critics don't like it because, in fact, they register in the "economic" tradition (21).

Because, indeed, one of the problems of the current process is the fragmentary character, "corporate", of the fights and the social movements. It is the problem that instead of being subordinated the part to the whole, the " conquest" many times are obtained to the expense of the same process ( see the case of the nullity of the laws of impunity in the Congress and the politics of IU (United Left) regarding this, or of the agreements signed with the government to carry out "productive enterprises" by different parts of the unemployed workers movements).

This atomization process and fragmentation is a pressure that comes from below, of the own necessities and recoveries of the sectors that come out to the fight, and it combines with the inability of seeing from a more groupal perspective, the one of putting an end to the social order if it even seeks to solved "elementary" questions as the work problems.

In their polemic with the "economists", Lenin categorically differentiates union political (reduced to pure economic recoveries in the political field, as laws, etc.) of political social democrat that refers to the elevation from the class to the all, to intend group answers for the whole society.

This had a deeply practical and material objective: "to force" the class and their vanguard from its own narrowness. "To force" the class to the practical learning that means to make contact with the other social classes, this way enlarging their horizon. This is, Lenin outlined as practical orientation the education of the working class in being interested in all the problems of all the classes, for all the problems of the society. And when being located from a total social point of view, to truly think about the problem of the political power. What implies-for the proletarians, from the proletariat-to go to all the layers of the society.

It is a practical orientation, material, not simply of "ideas" or "concepts" that " come from outside" of the class, because the acquisition of the political conscience on the part of the workers (which is not the same thing that the Marxist formation), cannot be purely something "ideal" or "intellectual" assimilated mechanically "from outside." It is to become material of the middle conscience by its own political experience.

Then, the central question is how the workers move from the conscience of every day towards the conscience that it is possible to change the tremendous conditions in which they live. But how to overcome in the conscience the fetishism and the alignment? How to overcome the common sense? (22)

Here is where the metabolic relationship of the party enters with the class, because the "general limit" to the development of the conscience cannot overcome by means of the mere spontaneous activity of the own working class. Here the revolutionary socialist politics enters as entirety and as practice of the entirety.

Because, as Lenin said, "in fact, one can 'elevate the activity of the labor mass ' if we don't limit ourselves to the ‘political agitation in the economic field '. And one of the essential conditions to achieve that indispensable extension of the political agitation is to organize political accusations that embrace all the aspects. The masses can only be educated in their political conscience and in their revolutionary activity on the base of those accusations (...) The conscience of the labor class cannot be an authentic politics conscience if the workers are not accustomed to hear all the echoes of all the cases of outrage and oppression, of all type of violence and abuses, whatever classes are affected (...) The conscience of the labor masses cannot be an authentic class conscience if the workers don't learn, on the base of the facts and concrete political events and also of present time, to observe each of the other social classes in all the manifestations of the intellectual, moral and political life, if they don't learn how to apply it in the practice, the analysis and the materialistic appreciation of all the aspects of the activity and of the life of all the classes, layers and population's groups. Who concentrates the attention of the labor class, their observation capacity and their exclusively conscience or although it is only a preferable form in itself, it is not a social democrat, because the knowledge of itself on the part of the labor class is linked, in inseparable form, not only to an absolutely clear theoretical compression-or rather, not so theoretical as practice-of the relationships among all the classes of the current society, acquired understanding through the experience of the political life (...). To become a social democrat, the worker should form a clear idea of the economic nature and the social physiognomy and the landowner's politics and of the priest, of the dignitary and of the peasant, of the student and the vagabond (...) But this clear idea cannot be obtained in the books: it can only arise from the reality" (23).



Class and party



The elements that we come developing regarding the theory of the knowledge and the acquisition of the conscience are bound, in a double sense to a certain conception about the relationship between the party and the masses. Because if the problems of the knowledge and of the acquisition of the conscience have this complexity, it is evident that it is necessary some specific organization that facilitates, that takes as part of their practical and theoretical tasks, that acquisition of the conscience on the part of the working masses.

Of this theoretical and political reality (and not of a supposed "Jacobin" vocation or "white" of Lenin) the organization questions arise. Because if the reality is that the working masses by their single spontaneous activity cannot arrive to the level of the socialist conscience, it is necessary a factor that should be active in this sense and that moves completely from the perspective of the whole, of the entirety of the social change, that is necessary to put an end to the condition of exploited and oppressed class. A specific factor that is not "external" but of the own working class.

Lenin points out:

"If the concept of ‘economic fights against the bosses and the government ' coincides for a social democrat with that of ‘political fights', it is natural to think that ‘organization of revolutionaries ' coincides more or less with that of ‘organization of the labors '" (24).

But

"The political fight of the social democracy is wider and more complex than the economic fight of the workers against the bosses and the government. In the same way (and as consequence of it), it is unavoidable that the organization of a revolutionary social democrat party is of different type than the organization of the workers for the economic fight. The organization of the workers (...) should be the widest thing possible. On the contrary, the organization of the revolutionaries should include mainly and above all, people whose profession is the revolutionary activity (that is way I speak of an organization of revolutionaries, and I refer to the revolutionary social democrats) (...) Let us imagine people absorbed 99% by ‘the economic fight against the bosses and the government '. During the whole period of their activity (...) some of them will never think of the necessity of a more complex organization of revolutionaries" (25).

It is around this that took place the debate with Martov about who should be considered militant of the party. Because of this theoretical and political understanding of the relationship among the activity of the workers and their conscience organizational consequences were detached. This is, to collaborate for the acquisition of the socialist conscience of the workers, it was necessary a political organization of the revolutionaries, different to the organization of the daily fight of the workers, this is, different from the unions and specifically separated from them.

This was the practical conclusion that came off of this analysis of the acquisition of the conscience and of the necessity of carrying out not a union politics, but a true socialist politics.

Martov tended to confuse the self organization of the workers by their more immediate necessities with the organization of a specific sector of them, that thought about the perspective of a transformation of whole of the society. It was out of sight that the party should operate by selection and differentiation, where the vanguard was not diluted in the rearguard (like it happens in the unions and / or the movements of masses). Because a separation of principles should be established between party and movement, differing the union militant from the political militant. This is, a process should have taken place of selecting, hierarchically and promoting those workers and students that stood out of the rest to "professionalize" them, to make the socialist activity the center of their life and activity. Because only this way, "dividing" first, it could later unite the knots more firmly between the party and the organizations of the workers' fight.

Therefore, the conception of party of Lenin had two dialectically united poles:

a - the strict selection of the members of the party on the base of their class conscience.

b -The total solidarity and the support to all the oppressed and exploited, in the center of the capitalist society.

Because he insisted in that it was not necessary to mix different things: it was militant of the organization the one that indeed assumed an organized political commitment.

"In virtue of what cause, of what logic, can one deduce, for the fact that we are a class party, the conclusion that it is not necessary to distinguish among those who are part of the party and who are linked to it? Very on the contrary: in fact to exist a difference as for the grade of conscience and of activity, it is also necessary to establish a difference as for the grade of vicinity to the party. We are a class party, reason for which, almost the whole class (...) should act under the direction of our party (...) but it would be to incur in ‘manilovism ' and in ‘successionism ' to think that the whole class or almost the all of it can, under the capitalism, rise up to the grade of conscience and activity of its posse of vanguard, of its social democrat party. No sensible social democrat doubts that under the capitalism, not even the union organizations (that are more elementary and more affordable to the grade of conscience of the undeveloped layers) can embrace all the labor class or almost all of it. To forget the difference that exists among the posse of vanguard and the group of the masses that gravitates toward it, to forget the constant duty of the posse of vanguard to rise to more and more wider groups to their own level of vanguard, only means (...) to close the eyes in the immensity of the tasks" (26).

This is the political content (and not merely organizational) that was behind the discussion on the militant approach in the congress of 1903. Not for quite well-known the debate stops having enormous present time, as the Argentinazo experience shows and of the development of politicize movements and its relationship with the parties.

Lenin stood against the mixture without principles: the "movement" is defined by its partial recovery character, while the party is defined for its total program and of group. And this engenders-we insist-to different types of militant and of activity.

Because to stand from the perspective of the whole, is not something that comes out "automatically" from the economic or recovery fight, but rather, on the contrary, that fight operates in a contradictory way: at the same time that it liberates the entrance to the political life of millions, it generates certain pressures, linked to the immediate material necessities and to the class or class fraction depending which one it is. And it is not so simple, then, to stand from the perspective of the social transformation, that is to say, not in an immediately recovery, from the group of the working class and the popular sectors necessities and not simply from the own "corporation." Of this problem we have also had enough examples in the Argentinazo.

In Lenin, the "political" mentions to a global environment, of the relationships of the group of all the classes of the society that don't come off mechanically from the economic relationships.

Daniel Bensaïd underlines this when he points out that the party should not decrease the environment of the representation of the simply economic interests of the class, but to its historical interests more of group. It is necessary to avoid all economic and / or social reductionism of the revolutionary politics.

Bensaïd says: "More than a discipline form or of centralization, Lenin's rector alert idea about the ‘confusion between the party and the class ', qualified confusion as ‘disorganizing '. The introduced distinction of this form between class and party, is registered in the big polemics of the socialist movement of the time. And, more specifically in Russia, it becomes against the populist currents, ‘economists ' and Menshevik’s (...) Lenin opposes himself, in an original way for that time, to this reduction of the political to the social thing (...) He understands that the economic and social contradictions are not directly expressed, but under a specific, deformed and transformed form, the politics (that) condenses and reveals a global latent crisis of the social relationships (...) This question is what is in the heart of the famous debate on the statutes of the party (...) The definition of the member of the party (...) is the delimitation of the party in front of the class. It is in fact the party form the one that allows to intervene on the political field (...) not to suffer passively the flows and the refluxes of the fight of classes (...) By the light of the experience of 1905, Lenin insists (...) in the fact that the party, the more defined it is, lives in an exchange and permanent dialogue with the experiences of the class (...) What remains, beyond these shades and variations, is that the party is not an organization form among others, union or associative, but a specific form under which the fight of classes registers in the political field" (27).

Or, in words of Lenin:

"Rab. Misl doesn't reject the political fight completely: in the statutes of the boxes, published in their first number, it is spoken of the fight against the government. However he believes that ‘the politics always continues meekly to the economy ' (...) These theses (...) are completely false, if we understand for politics that of the social democrats (...) (it) it gives up completely to elaborate a specific social democrat political that corresponds to the general objectives of the socialism and the current conditions of Russia, independently" (28).

It is at the same time the socialist party the one that is called to present these group interests, at the same time makes part-and cannot stop making it, so punishes of becoming a sect or an apparatus-of a wider system of labor and popular organizations.

On the other hand, the development of the class conscience is always unequal; the emergency of a clear awareness never happens of a single blow and in a coherent way. It is the task of the revolutionary organization to collaborate to the overcoming of this inequality.



Marx and Lenin



This discussion has had another turn in the critics of Lenin's work as in organization material, they have wanted to establish a contrast with the appointment and experience of Marx (and Rosa Luxemburg) (29) in the field of the organization.

Some convincing arguments point out that Marx was related (in different periods) with four different party types: the League of the Communists (a small German "sect" during the decade of the 40’s); the beginnings of the Social Democracy in Germany (decades of the 60’s, 70’s and beginnings of the 80’s); the experience of the 1 International and the first sketches of the Labor Party in England.

At the same time, it is broadly well-known its definition of the Communist Manifesto: "The communists don't form a separated party, opposed to the other workers parties. They don't have any interests which is not the interests of the whole of the proletariat. They don't proclaim special principles to those that wanted to accommodate the proletarian movement. The communists are only distinguished of the other proletarian parties in which (...) in the different national fights of the proletarians, they highlight and make the common interests be worth to the whole proletariat (...) in which, in the different development phases by which the fight, between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, passes, they always represent the interests of the movement as a whole."

However, a supposed opposition between Marx and Lenin on this base is not able to be sustained. It is true that Marx tended to sustained in a nearer party idea to an arisen organization of the self direct experience of the workers. But in Lenin the party idea is more elaborated, expressing a different historical period to the lived by Marx. In a context that had changed, Lenin breaks up with the dominant tradition of the socialist movement of the time, even without realizing it. With the entrance in scene of a socialist labor movement of masses at the end of the XIX century, the "socialist party of masses" appeared like a kind of political incarnation of the class. The idea was inspired by Marx's formulas that insinuate that the progressive organization of the proletariat in political party and in class would be synonymous: its social being and its political being united in the party.

Lenin underlines the opposite: the rupture of the continuity between the immediate economic and the mediate political conflict. He looked to avoid the confusion problem of the classes and the parties, this is, the social content and their political expression. Because the fight of classes should not decrease to the worker's fight against the boss, but rather it should embrace the fight against the whole capitalist class and its State. This way, the revolutionary socialism-as political party- should look not only to represent the working class in their relationships with a given group of employers, but with all the classes of the contemporary society and the State.

At the same time, Lenin's continuous insistence in differentiating party and class leads logically to the thought of a representation plurality. If the party is not of class, it is understood that that same class can be politically represented through several political parties. And it comes off that the representation of the social and the political thing also implies the existence of a series of rules and institutions, among which are the own fight organisms and the workers' self organization, so essential for the revolutionary fight. This is clear in the debate of 1905 with the members of their party: under the sectarian alternative of "Soviet or party", Lenin replied affirming the perspective of "Soviet and party."



Lenin and the Argentinazo



The same thing fits today when some currents outline as excluding option "movements or parties." We say, with Lenin: movements and party. Although on condition that at the same time we affirm and let us reaffirm with clarity that it is necessary to strengthen the pole of the party in the current moment of the process, because professedly what one lives is a "party deficit" and of policalization

The synthesis made by Lenin underlines the false of this opposition among organizations of different nature. Such as the organizations of masses like the party are indispensable, but in any case those "movements" can replace or have the role of the parties. Because as the experience of the Argentinazo is demonstrating, the fact is that the parties are the only ones that focus from a general perspective, above any demand partial revindicative.

The partial revindications can only be axis of organizations of masses like the unions or the diverse movements of workers. But when it is the revolutionary party, what commands is the point of view of the entirety, the group of the immediate and historical interests of the class. And these interests can only be resolved by means of the social revolution.



Notes



(1) " A hundred years of the What to do?. Leninism, Marxist criticizes and the question of the revolution today. Werner Bonefeld and Sergio Tischler, p. 11. Herramientas Editions, 2003.

(2) Idem, p. 9.

(3) We consider this article as part of an integral elaboration together with both previous published in the last two numbers (12 and 13) of SoB: " Reforms, revolution and socialism at the beginning of the XXI century" and "Unique Front, movements and party." The first one, referred to some aspects of the theory of the revolution in the alive experience of the first phase of the Argentinazo, and the second, to the relationships among the different organizations that act in and/or represent the masses or sectors of them. Here we concentrate in the party problem as such. This insistence requires an explanation. We believe that the process in course is categorically demonstrating that the problems of the construction of the revolutionary organization should be put to the agenda so that the politicalization limits that the same Argentinazo shows can be overcome. Plus still in the case of our own construction experience, where important forces have been invested in the construction of one of the main expressions of the movement of unemployed workers, the Front of Combative Workers, what can not be confused in any case with the construction of the party as such.

(4) In this whole point we have mainly followed chapter 4, "Lenin and the philosophy", of John Rees’s book The algebra of the revolution that we find a solid contribution to the dialectical Marxist's understanding (in our previous edition we publish part of the introduction). Soon in our magazine we will publish a translation of the complete chapter.

(5) Mike Rooke, "The dialectical of the work and the human emancipation", in TO 100 years of the What to do?, p. 127.

(6) Raya Dunayevskaya, Philosophy and revolution, XXI Century, p. 104.

(7) Dunayevskaya, op cit. It is necessary to remember that from the beginning León Trotsky had another philosophical base, superior to that of Lenin. Being in prison, he had the opportunity to study Antonio Labriola, an Italian Marxist philosopher at the ends of XIX century, who had the courage to act in the wrong direction from the main trunk of the most passive materialistic philosophical tradition and mechanics of II International. Labriola claimed a much more tributary Marxist philosophy regarding Hegel's thought.

(8) Philosophy and revolution, p. 101.

(9) Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks.

(10) Significantly, in none of the 300 pages of TO 100 years... a reference is made to the Philosophical Notebooks.

(11) Alan Shandro, "The conscience from outside: Marxism, Lenin and the proletariat", in Building another future, p. 67.

(12) V. I. Lenin, What to do?, Complete Work, Volume 5, Buenos Aires, Carthage, 1971, p. 441.

(13) See R Sáenz, "Traditions, spontaneity, experiences and awareness", in Socialism or Barbarism Nº 4.

(14) G. Lukács, "Method Observations about the problem of the organization", in "History and class conscience", Mexico, Grijalbo, 1985, p. 222.

(15) "If inside the capitalism the fetishism is something stable and fixed, then we return facing the Leninist problem of how we conduct the fetishistic masses toward the revolution. The hard concept of fetishism takes us toward the obvious dilemma: if under the capitalism people exist as objects, then how can the revolution be conceived? How is the criticism possible?", John Holloway says in Changing the world without taking the power, p. 127. Holloway rejects the outline of the "hard fetishism" as form of justifying the reject to the party idea, according to him "a historically closed problem (...) it is no longer a significant figure and it cannot carry out the paper that had in the discussion of Lukács." It would be necessary to calculate the hope, on the other hand, in a classic question and expensive to those "councilmen": "The Commune of Paris analyzed by Marx, the labor advices speculated by Pannekoek, the communal advices of the Zapatistas (...) all are experiments in the movement against the fetishism, in the fight for the collective flow of making, for the self-determination" op cit., p. 159). This ideology loses of view the specificity of the political fight of "party" (this is, organized) even inside the institutions that are mentioned and it doesn't give any account of the fact that this political fight (or, in wider sense, of "conceptions of the world") is totally unavoidable, and it is also shown, in multiple ways, the experience of the Argentinazo.

(16) D. Behrens, "Political Perspectives of the left", in 100 years of the What to do?, p. 54.

(17) D. Bensaid, "Lenin and the politics of the broken time", in Marxism, Modernity and Utopia, Xama, 2000, p. 181.

(18) What to do?, p. 439.

(19) Idem, p. 476.

(20) Idem, p. 460-1.

(21) The "economicism" was a current of the Russian labor movement that Lenin combated at the beginning of the XX century. This current, in Lenin’s words, "it exalted the lowest forms of activity of the proletariat." For this position, they were the first ones in accusing Lenin of "replacement", of being against the "self emancipation of the work." But the perspective of "the workers' liberation by the same workers" doesn't imply a simplistic road where it gets out of sight the necessary articulation of organizations of this same class, the inequalities between sectors of vanguard and rearguard, the tensions among "the Kingdom of the necessity" and the socialist objectives, etc. And this metabolism cannot be without the party nor, much less, of the directly political fight.

(22) To his way, Gramsci also questioned the conception "thing", closed, of the conscience. In this frame, it is very useful and elucidating regarding the integral elements of the concrete conscience of the popular sectors (and, in particular, in the unemployed worker’s movements in the Argentinazo), the analysis of Gramsci regarding the elements of "common sense" and "good sense" in the conscience of the masses: "The active man in the masses has a practical activity, but he doesn't have a clear theoretical awareness of his practical activity. They have two theoretical consciences (or a contradictory conscience). An implicit one in their activity that unites them with their partners in the transformation of the real world. And another superficial and verbal, inherited from the past and accepted with no criticism (...) The populism, the social banditry, the millenarianism and the mysticism in the field; the urban insurrectionalism, the utopian socialism (...) these spontaneous and impure forms of conscience mix elements of common sense ‘' and of good sense ‘'." There is always a combination of the elements of progressive conscience won in the experience of the daily fight with elements that come from the past, assimilated with no criticism. The populist conscience (dominant in most of the members of the movements of unemployed workers) is a formless mixture of all this. There is where the Marxists intervene to help to the formation of a more coherent conscience of class.

(23) What to do?, p. 467-8.

(24) Idem, p. 505.

(25) Idem, p. 506 and 507.

(26) V. I. Lenin, A step ahead, two steps behind, Complete Works, Volume 7, Buenos Aires, Carthage, 1971, p. 288.

(27) Daniel Bensaid, op cit., pp. 178-180 (underlined RS).

(28) What to do?, p. 442.

(29) The particular relationships between Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg were given in "Present time of the organization problems", Socialism or Barbarism Nº4. There we outlined the necessity of the establishment of a fertile dialogue between both revolutionaries as regards organization. We believe that this continues being valid when it is taken into account the widest area in the conception about the group of organizations and institutions that are part of the democracy of the workers and of the problem of the fair relationships of the party with the class (critic of the apparatus, the substitutive and the exterior). However, here we specifically see the problems of the revolutionary organization as such. In this field, and in particular under the current conditions of the Argentinazo, we believe necessary on this matter to incline the balance toward a recovery of Lenin's thought.



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