Philosophy of Revolution: Towards a Non-Leninist Marxism

Philosophy of Revolution

Towards a Non-Leninist Marxism

by Lenny Flank

© Copyright 2008 by Lenny Flank

All rights reserved

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Contents

Introduction

One: Fundamentals of Marxian Philosophy

Two: Fundamentals of Marxian Economics

Three: Fundamentals of Leninism

Four: Transition to Socialism

Five: Hegemony and Counter-Hegemony

Six: Critique of Leninism

Seven: The Worker’s Council

Eight: Revolutionary Action

Conclusion

Introduction

After the success of the 1917 Revolution in Russia and the rise of the Third International, the Leninist model of socialism and revolution enjoyed widespread acceptance. Nearly every revolution, rebellion or revolt that has occurred over the past hundred years has been Leninist in inspiration and in structure.

The recent collapse of these countries, however, has made clear the weaknesses and deficiencies in Leninist theory and practice. The death of the Leninist nations and their overthrow by popular rebellions were visible examples of the bankruptcy of the Leninist organizational and political model.

In the period between the World Wars, however, an entirely different trend of socialist thought had briefly flowered in Europe and the United States, a trend which rejected the Leninist model of revolutionary organization and which affirmed the complete self-emancipation of the working class from capitalist domination. This movement was council communism—the idea that the workers themselves should control their destiny, free from the domination of any boss or any political faction. In Europe, this movement was inspired and led by the writings of Pannekoek, Gorter, Korsch, and Gramsci. In the United States, the council movement was represented by the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), or Wobblies. In the 60’s and 70’s, council ideas took the form of militant direct actions, particularly as put forth by the urban guerrilla school of Renate Curcio, Carlos Marighella and Abraham Guillen.

With the rise of Leninist and Stalinist regimes in Russia and elsewhere, the Leninist conception took on the air of Holy Writ, and the dissenting council communist movement was hounded, harassed and eventually broken.

Today, however, as the fundamentals of Leninism are discredited and rejected, the theory and practice of the council communists have increasing relevance. Syndicalist and worker council theories played a large role in the Hungarian workers’ revolution of 1956, in the armed struggles which took place in Italy in the 1970’s, and in the revolts in Eastern Europe in 1989 (spearheaded by the Polish Solidarity labor union) which swept away the Leninist dictatorships. As the major capitalist nations continue to face yet another period of economic slowdown and crisis, the theory and practice of council communism will grow in importance and relevance.

The purpose of this book is, therefore, to present a synopsis of the goals and actions of the non-Leninist council communist movement. And since, in my opinion, the council movement is the most complete expression of the outlooks and insights of Marxian philosophy, it also serves as a synopsis of the thoughts and actions of Karl Marx. Despite its mistakes and inaccuracies, the Marxian framework is important in understanding the functioning of the capitalist system.

Those who are looking for mere intellectual abstraction and theory, however, will not find it here. The council communist movement is above all a practical movement, and finds its purpose in direct working class action. Like Marx, we disdain to conceal our views, and we openly declare that our goal is that of revolution, of the overthrow of the capitalist system and its substitution by worker-managed socialism. Between philosophy and revolution, the council movement emphasizes the need for both.

ONE:

Fundamentals of Marxian Philosophy

In his philosophical inquiry, Marx set out to answer essentially the same questions asked by Hegel; What is the nature of human social reality? and What is the source of human social reality?

From the earliest days of human history, people have attempted to explain the source of reality by referring to a force or being which stood outside of reality and directed it according to some supernatural plan. Thus, ancient peoples presented the notion that reality is controlled by the gods, and that the actions of the gods could be interpreted and explained through the medium of religion.

The idea that supernatural forces and religious thought were the directors of reality was strong in Marx’s time (and still is today), and Marx devoted a considerable amount of effort to refute this notion. Criticism of religion, wrote Marx, is in the main complete, and the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism.

In his criticism of religion, Marx leans heavily on the concept of alienation. All religious thought, Marx points out, was made and produced by humans: humans wrote the major religious texts, humans devised the various myths and legends which describe the gods, humans perform the tasks of interpreting these religious beliefs. Thus, all religious thought is the product of human thought—humans are not made in the image of God; rather, god has been made by humans in the image of humans. The basis of irreligious criticism, Marx writes, is, man makes religion; religion does not make man. Religion is the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself again.

Religious thought, however, is unable to conceive of itself as being merely distorted human thought which has been transported to an other-worldly or supernatural plane. Religion, despite the fact that it was itself created by human thoughts and actions, continues to view itself as a separate and distinct entity with no connection to human thought, will or agency. Although religious thought is a human-made creation, it is treated as though it were capable of creating humans and controlling their actions. Similarly, a human who carves a wooden idol may give that idol supernatural powers and fall down and worship it, never realizing that the object of his religious fervor was created by human hands and has no power in itself.

Marx thus concluded that religious thought was merely human thought which has been separated or alienated from the human reality which created it; it was merely human thought which has been given the appearance of an independent existence. As such, it cannot be the source of reality, since it itself is not real, and has its origin in the human thoughts from which it has become alienated. The task of history, therefore, Marx concludes, once the world beyond the truth has disappeared, is to establish the truth of this world. The immediate task of philosophy, which is at the service of history, is to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms.

Up to this point, Marx has not left the framework established by Hegel. Hegel, too, viewed religious thought as an illusory abstraction from human thought. Hegel’s criticism of religion led him to the realm of philosophy known as idealism. If religion is simply alienated human thought, Hegel concluded, then the source of social reality must lie in the human ideas from which religious thought is abstracted. Hegelian dialectical idealism is based on the conclusion that the source of human social organization lies in the ideas of that social group of humans.

It did not take Marx long to reject this notion. The complicated and high-sounding philosophical treatises of the Hegelians, Marx concluded, themselves have no connection to reality; they exist only in the intellectual sphere. Like the religious thought which was criticized by Hegel, the philosophers had transformed their thought into an independent realm, free of connections to the real world. Hitherto, Marx wrote, men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be . . . The phantoms of their brains have gotten out of their hands:

For philosophers, one of the most difficult tasks is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world. Language is the immediate actuality of thought. Just as philosophers have given thought an independent existence, so they had to make language into an independent realm. This is the secret of philosophical language, in which thoughts in the form of words have their own content. The problems of descending from the world of thoughts to the actual world is turned into the problem of descending from language to life. . . The philosophers would only have to dissolve their language into the ordinary language, from which it is abstracted, to recognize it as the distorted language of the actual world, and to realize that neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own, that they are only manifestations of actual life.

Ideas and philosophy, Marx concluded, cannot be the source of reality, because these ideas are themselves abstracted from human existence and experiences. Philosophical language and thoughts are merely the idealized expressions of actual human experiences within an existing social reality. In claiming that these ideas are the moving force behind social reality, the philosophers fail to mention that these ideas must first themselves be produced, and that the philosophers who attempt to educate us to them must first themselves be educated; that is, they must receive their ideas from some source.

Since philosophers live within existing social reality, Marx postulated, the source of their ideas and philosophy must also lie in their social surroundings. If human ideas are to be fully understood, the material realities and social circumstances which produce them must be understood as well. As Marx puts it:

One has to leave philosophy aside, one has to leap out of it and devote oneself like an ordinary man to the study of actuality. . . Philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relationship to one another as masturbation and sexual intercourse.

Marx’s rejection of Hegelian idealism led him to begin the study of the materialist school of philosophy, which holds that reality is the product of a mechanistic chain of cause and effect. In effect, the materialists assert, the universe is a giant machine which runs according to eternal and unalterable natural laws. Humans are powerless to avoid these laws, and the universe operates independently of the actions or will of humans.

In particular, Marx studied the writings of Ludwig Feuerbach, himself a student of Hegel who had rejected Hegelian idealism. Marx found himself quickly disappointed. While idealism tended to emphasize the action of human ideas on the structure of social reality, materialism tends to reduce humanity to a cog in an impersonal machine, in a deterministic social situation about which humans can do little.

Marx strongly