Marxism

and

Leninism:
Different Ideologies
 Marxism
and

Leninism:
Different Ideologies
 
 
 
An Essay in the Sociology of Knowledge
 

John H. Kautsky
 
with a new introduction by the author
 
 
 
 
Originally published in 1994 by Greenwood Press.

Published 2002 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge

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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2001047645

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kautsky, John H., 1922-

[Marxism and Leninism, not Marxism-Leninism]
Marxism and Leninism: different ideologies : an essay in the sociology
of knowledge / John H. Kautsky ; with a new introduction by the author.
p. cm.
Originally published: Marxism and Leninism, not Marxism-Leninism.
Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 1994, in series: Contributions in
political science ; no. 335.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 0-7658-0911-7 (pbk.: alk. paper)
 1. Socialism—History. 2. Communism—History. I. Title.

HX73.K375 2001

335.4—dc21 2001047645

ISBN 13: 978-0-7658-0911-7 (pbk)

To the Department of Political Science at Washington University in St.
Louis
 
 
 
 
It is not the consciousness of men that
determines their existence, but, on the
contrary, their social existence that determines
their consciousness.

Karl Marx
 Contents
INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION
PREFACE

1. INTRODUCTION: TWO ENVIRONMENTS—TWO IDEOLOGIES

—ONE TERMINOLOGY

Why Bother with Dead Marxism and

Leninism?
Two Ideologies
Marx and Marxism
One Terminology
Ideology and Words

2. THE EVOLUTION OF MARXISM

Socialist Labor Movements

Origins
The Appeal of Marxism
The Social-Democratic Party in the German Empire
Growth and Weakness
Revolution and Marxism
Social Democracy since 1918

3. THE EVOLUTION OF LENINISM

Leninism and Modernizing Intellectuals in Underdeveloped

Countries
Lenin Reinterpreted
Revolutionary Modernizing
Intellectuals
The Appeal of Leninism
From Proletarian Revolution to Modernizing
Revolution
Industrialization
Anti-imperialism
 Intellectuals and Workers
Peasants and Peasant Revolution
Marx and Lenin on Bourgeois,
Proletarian, and Peasant
Revolutions
No Class Struggle in Russia
No Class Struggle in the “East”
Leninist Voluntarism and Marxist
Determinism
Leninism since Lenin
From Mao to Mengistu
The Blurring of Leninism

4. MARXISM IN THE EAST, “LENINISM” IN THE WEST

Marxism in Underdeveloped Countries

Adaptable Leninists, Doctrinaire
Marxists
The Mensheviks
“Leninism” in Western Europe
Lenin’s Marxist Words as Myths
Lenin’s Non-Leninist Followers
The French and Italian Communist Parties:
Heirs of Syndicalism
PCF and PCI: From Syndicalism to
Disappearance or Social
Democracy
Between Marxism and Leninism

5. WHY MARXISM AND LENINISM HAVE BEEN SEEN AS A

SINGLE IDEOLOGY

Ideology and Environment

Ideology: Words or Substance?
Marxists’ Un-Marxian View of Marxism and
Leninism
The Uses and Origins of the Confusion
Why Leninists in Underdeveloped Countries
and Some Western
Marxists Want To Be “Marxists-Leninists”
The Beginnings of the Confusion
Eurocentrism
 Russia: A European Country
Marxism: A Eurocentric View of History
Ignorance and Indifference
No More Excuse for Eurocentrism

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX
 Introduction to the Transaction
Edition
If, approaching age eighty, I may be forgiven some autobiographical or,
rather, autobibliographical
reflections, I can now see the beginnings of the
history of the present book in my very first book, Moscow
and the
Communist Party of India (Wiley, 1956). There I documented and analyzed
the emergence, beginning
in 1947, of a drastically changed Communist
strategy in response to the development of the Cold War and also
as a result
of the Chinese Communist revolution. The Communists’ enemy was now
defined no longer as
capitalism or fascism, but as “imperialism”—that is,
the United States. The classes whose members were to be
appealed to were
hence no longer merely the working class or the lower classes generally, but
also the
capitalist bourgeoisie. By late 1949, an authoritative Chinese
Communist statement, strongly endorsed in
Moscow, went so far as to
prescribe that the working class—that is, the Communist parties—“must
unite with
all classes, parties, groups, organizations and individuals”
opposed to imperialism.
In one paragraph, I noted that the effective substitution of the Cold War
for the class struggle was a
“complete perversion of Marxism,” but “only a
logical development of Leninism.” In Marxism, socialist parties
were tools
of the working class, while to Lenin the working class was the tool of the
Party. Other classes
could be similarly used, not only obviously the
peasantry, but even the capitalists.
Here the point I tried to substantiate in the present book is already
implicit: Marxism and Leninism are
politically quite different ideologies.
Marxism appeals to and seeks to represent the industrial working
class.
Leninism seeks to use the working class and other classes for its ends. But
what are its
ends? What interests does Leninism represent? What functions
do classes perform when they serve as tools of
the Party? There are no
answers to these questions in my first book.
What I did not yet understand, or at least express—and neither did the
Communist leaders themselves—was that
the shift from anti-capitalism to
anti-imperialism, which involved a shift from a focus on industrial Western
Europe to one on underdeveloped Asia, was more than the adoption of what
I still thought of as a mere
Communist strategy. It revealed that Leninism
was an ideology and Communism was a movement appropriate to the
politics of underdeveloped countries rather than of industrial ones.
In Russia, and then the Soviet Union, the Communist regime pursued
policies of a modernizing movement in an
underdeveloped country—above
all, the policy of rapid industrialization. But for thirty years after they
gained power, the Communist leaders in Russia, thinking of themselves as
Marxists, concentrated their efforts
to gain support abroad on converting the
workers of industrial Europe to their cause. These efforts mostly
failed, for
Soviet success in industrialization, largely at workers’ and peasants’
expense, had no appeal in
already industrialized countries.
Communist parties no doubt shifted their propaganda line from class
struggle to anti-imperialism to serve the
needs of Soviet foreign policy in
the Cold War. But in this process, they replaced the Marxist language of
proletarian class struggle against capitalism that was irrelevant to the
politics of underdeveloped countries
with the language of anti-imperialism.
It could appeal in such countries to many people regardless of their
class,
and particularly to modernizing movements aiming at rapid
industrialization. After thirty years,
Communist parties in underdeveloped
countries could at last speak a language that could be politically
effective
and was consistent with the appeal of Soviet domestic policy of rapid
industrialization.
As my research interests broadened to a study of the politics of
underdeveloped countries, and especially of
anti-colonial and anti-
traditional movements and their revolutions, I soon realized that it was not
only the
“new strategy” evolving from 1947 on, but the very nature of
Leninism that made Communism such a modernizing
movement. I
advanced and elaborated this view in my two books, Political Change in
Underdeveloped
Countries (Wiley, 1962) and Communism and the Politics
of Development (Wiley, 1968). The latter is
a collection of ten articles on
Communism I had written from 1955 to 1968. One of the earliest ones, first
published in 1957, concluded with the following paragraph, which already
outlines some of my arguments in the
present volume:
It may now be time to abandon the categories of thought in which Lenin conceived of himself
and his
revolution and in which most of his contemporaries, both friends and foes, were almost
 necessarily
entrapped… Lenin was not voicing the ideology of an industrial proletariat but was
a spokesman
of a part of the intelligentsia in an underdeveloped country, of a group in quest of
political power and in
search of a short-cut to industrialization. The Bolshevik revolution, then,
is to be understood not as the
first proletarian-socialist revolution but as the first successful
seizure of power by such an
intelligentsia…

In my next book, The Political Consequences of Modernization (Wiley,

1972), I argued that the
underdeveloped countries were not merely behind
the industrialized ones in their development, but were
following a different
historical track, and I introduced the distinction between the processes of
modernization from within and modernization from without. My analysis of
Communism was no longer presented in
a separate book or chapter or even
paragraph, but was completely integrated with the analysis of ideologies,
movements, revolutions, and regimes of modernizers that are reactions to
modernization from without and quite
different from the political
consequences of modernization from within.
So much for the evolution of my thinking on Leninism. What about my
views on Marxism as they appear in the
present book? Their history goes
back even further than to my first book, but it was to some extent
interrupted by my work on the politics of modernization. Having spent
about twenty years on the latter, I
sought to fill a gap in most of the
literature on this subject which treated a process of change without ever
dealing with the status quo ante, the condition to which the change was
relative. The result was my biggest
and, in some ways, my favorite book,
The Politics of Aristocratic Empires (University of North
Carolina Press,
1982; Transaction, 1997).
Struck by some similarities between my work here and that of my
grandfather Karl Kautsky, I decided to
produce abridged editions of his
two-volume magnum opus on The Materialist Conception of History in
German (Bonn: Dietz, 1988) and in English translation (Yale University
Press, 1988). As I note in my preface
below, I thus returned to my interest
in Marxism that had grown in my student days and culminated at Harvard
in my doctoral dissertation on the political thought of Karl Kautsky (1951).
While it contains many passages
contrasting the ideas of Marx and Kautsky
with those of Lenin, and is thus a very early precursor of the
present book,
it fails completely to explain the differences between Marxism and
Leninism with reference to
the different environments in which they grew.
In the next forty-some years, my way of viewing and understanding
politics evolved, which, with respect to
the historical role of Marxism in
general and Kautsky in particular, can probably be traced through some
articles on the latter I included in my book Karl Kautsky: Marxism,
Revolution and Democracy
(Transaction, 1994), published in the same year
in which the present book appeared. Given my understanding of
Communism as it had grown earlier and my knowledge of the Marxism
developed by Karl Marx and his followers in
the social democratic labor
movements of Western Europe, I came to the unavoidable conclusion
that
these could simply not be understood as a single movement and ideology.
To support and elaborate this
conclusion systematically, seeking not only to
point out the differences between Marxism and Leninism, but
above all, to
explain them, I wrote the present book.
As I have now referred to most of my principal writings, I am struck by
the fact that they all contradict
widely prevailing views that were, indeed,
generally accepted at the time when I questioned their validity.
My
dissertation on Karl Kautsky—written at the beginning of the Cold War—
countered the identification of
Marxism with Communism by showing that
the thinker, who was, after Engels’death, generally recognized as the
most
authoritative interpreter of Marx, was a democrat and an anti-Communist.
My contention in my early books
that Communism was not anti-capitalist
and was relevant not to industrialized societies but to underdeveloped
ones
was, to say the least, unorthodox.
My view that the process of political change which underdeveloped
countries were undergoing was different
from that in earlier periods of
European history ran counter to the widely held assumption that there was a
single road to modernization. My very attempt at the formulation of
generalizations about politics in
aristocratic empires differed sharply from
the work of political scientists whose interests are confined to
present-day
or recent politics, and of historians who, being specialists in particular areas
and periods, do
not generalize across cultures, continents and millennia. It
seems, then, that this book is very much in the
dissenting or unorthodox
tradition that, for some reason, evolved in my work.
I may add that a book manuscript, Social Democracy and the Aristocracy
(Transaction, 2002), that I
have just completed is also in this tradition. It
argues that social democratic labor movements arose and
grew as a reaction
not merely to capitalism, as has been generally thought, but also to
powerful remnants of
aristocratic institutions and ideology. It thus tries to
explain the evolution and character of social
democracy in Western Europe
and Japan and its absence in other industrialized countries like, not only the
United States, but also post-Soviet Russia and Mexico.

***

As I wanted to stress in this book the important role of words in ideology,

I explain the common confusion of
Marxism with Leninism that I attack
here as a result of both ideologies employing the same Marxist language.
That is, indeed, the source of the confusion, but another explanatory
element should be mentioned here that I
did not stress explicitly. When
Marxists and Leninists believed assertions of their “basic” unity, they could
seek and achieve some collaboration between their social democratic and
Communist parties, thus making the
assertions self-fulfilling. This, in turn,
lent support to the originally false assertion and
reinforced the confusion,
which was then no longer caused solely by the common language of the two
ideologies.
I did not pursue the resulting complex story in this book and can only
hint at it here. It is complicated, in
part, because various forms and degrees
of socialist-Communist collaboration could be partially or wholly
motivated, not by a belief in a single Marxist-Leninist ideology, but by
other factors, such as what seemed
to some as the desirability of electoral or
parliamentary alliances or pursuit of some common policy or fear
of and
opposition to a major common enemy. This was quite obvious when
Communists cooperated not only with
socialists, but with non-socialist and
non-Marxist parties in the anti-fascist popular front of the 1930s and
the
even broader national front once the Soviet Union became allied with the
Western powers in World War II.
The false belief, based on their common language, that Leninists were
Marxists and that Communists and
socialists hence had similar or even
identical goals, clearly had consequences that made it self-fulfilling.
European Communist parties typically originated in splits of socialist
parties, and both the leadership and
the rank-and-file membership of the
early CPs consisted largely of socialists who were inspired by and sought
to
support the Russian Revolution. They accepted the Bolsheviks’ claim and
belief that it was the first
Marxist and socialist revolution.
In the same belief, other socialists did not form or join Communist
parties, but did seek collaboration with
them, notably in attempts aiming at
the unification of the post-World War I successor to the old Second
International and the Communist Third International and in the formation of
the so-called two-and-a-half
International. Communists, on the other hand,
whenever they sought support in the West, looked first and
foremost to the
socialist parties. In different periods, they either tried to detach and win
over their
followers in a “united front from below” or to collaborate with
their leaders in a “united front from above.”
The differences between Communists and socialists were too great and
the various attempts at unity in the
inter-war period all came to naught;
Communist parties have generally remained tiny as compared to socialist
ones; and relations between the two have been mostly hostile. The one
major exception to these
generalizations is the role of the Communist
parties of France and Italy, which were powerful enough to make
their
complex and changing relationship with rival socialist parties significant.
The difference between
these two Communist parties and the others in
Western Europe is explained in Chapter 4, below. There I point out that,
unlike the latter, they were genuine mass
labor parties, and I argue that they
were not and could not be Leninist. They should not be considered,
therefore, with respect to the effects of the confusion of Marxism with
Leninism.
The belief in some degree of ideological or political identity of the
“socialism” of Communist
regimes and the “socialism” of Western
European social democratic parties was, after the end of the Communist
regimes, seen by some scholars as contributing to an early demise of social
democratic parties and led some
of these parties’ opponents on the Right to
try to discredit and weaken them. As it turned out, this was a
case of an
unsuccessfully self-fulfilling belief.

***

To make my argument in this book more acceptable, I must stress two

points that may not be sufficiently
emphasized in the text. One is that I link
the term Marxism to Karl Marx and his followers, especially those
whom
he and his close collaborator Frederick Engels themselves regarded as
Marxists. The Marxism I deal with
here is, then, practically the Marxism of
the Second International. To blame me for this is simply to reject
the entire
argument of my book—for once Leninism is not seen as Marxist, and if the
Marxism considered here
is the ideology of a major political movement,
there is no other Marxism than that of the West European
social democratic
labor movement.
My usage of the term “Marxist” differs from the now common much
looser one (where the word is sometimes
spelled with a lower-case “m”).
Just in the last few days, The New York Times referred to Colombian
guerrillas and to Greek terrorists as “Marxist,” to the present government of
Vietnam as “still Marxist,” and
to Angola as a “former Marxist state.” What
the four have in common to justify the application of a single
adjective to
them is by no means obvious, but it surely is not a substantial affinity to the
type of
social-analytical thought or the political goals and methods of Karl
Marx and of the major Marxist political
ideologists and leaders.
Once Marxism is divorced from Marx and is no longer clearly defined,
anyone who considers himself or herself
a Marxist can be accepted as such,
and so, for that matter, can anyone regarded by others as a Marxist, for
example, Franklin Roosevelt or Bill Clinton. Then, of course, Leninism can
be Marxism, and there can be no
serious debate on the question of the
relation between the two, and I have no argument.
Secondly, it must be kept in mind that this is a book about politics. It is
concerned with Marxism and
Leninism only as political ideologies defined
with reference to the groups and interests they seek to
represent and appeal
to in a given political environment. It is as political ideologies that I regard
Marxism
and Leninism as different. That Lenin was influenced by Marx is,
of course, obvious, and to say so would be a
gross understatement. As I
stress in this book, he was incapable of thinking in terms other than Marx’s
and
he could only speak and write employing Marx’s vocabulary. In this
sense, Lenin was certainly a Marxist, but,
when I sharply distinguish
Leninism from Marxism, I am solely concerned with the content of his
political ideology—not with the form in which it was expressed nor with
other matters not immediately
political, like philosophical questions
regarding the dialectic or materialism.
A thoughtful Swedish reviewer of my book felt it was unreasonable that I
regard the adjustment of Marxism to
the German situation as thoroughly
Marxist but its adjustment by Lenin to the Russian situation as not
Marxist
at all, that I see the late “social democratic” Marx as the real Marx and quite
ignore the young
revolutionary Marx. But revolution is a politically empty
concept, that becomes politically meaningful only
if it is specified who
makes the revolution against whom and in whose interest and who comes to
power as a
result. To the young Marx and Engels of the Communist
Manifesto the answer to these questions is obviously
the working class, just
as they later came to hope that the working class could be empowered
through
electoral and parliamentary politics. In that respect, at any rate,
their political ideology remained
unchanged, and it is this continuing link to
the working class that crucially distinguishes it from Leninism.
The German Social Democrats shared Marx’s focus on the working class,
as Lenin could not in his
underdeveloped environment, much as he
employed the “proletarian” language of Marx. Yes, Lenin was, like
Marx, a
revolutionary, but he favored and made a revolution different in content
from Marx’s, a modernizing
revolution of intellectuals supported by
peasants. Belief in revolution, regardless of its political content,
does not
make a thinker a Marxist.
Only those who think of ideology apart from the interests it represents
and to whom it appeals can consider
Marxism and Leninism as a single
ideology. If we focus on their political content, I believe that my argument
that they are distinct ideologies is persuasive and no more than common
sense. That industrial capitalism and
industrial workers occupied a central
place in Marx’s thought, but could not do so in the thought of Lenin,
and,
even less so, of his followers in countries less industrialized than turn-of-
the-century Russia—no
matter what words they used—seems to me
indisputable. That the leaders of German and Austrian social
democratic
labor parties and the leaders of revolutionary movements in Ethiopia and
Angola were inspired and
guided by the same ideology strikes me as
unimaginable. The proposition that the same ideology appealed to
both
intellectuals in underdeveloped countries with promises of rapid
industrialization and to workers in
industrialized countries with promises to
change their status is simply unbelievable.

***
I wrote the present book and its predecessors in order to create greater
clarity, first of all, in my own
mind by subjecting my thoughts to the
discipline of writing and, secondly, in the minds of
others by submitting
these thoughts and evidence supporting them to critical discussion and
controversy. To
encourage such a process, it seemed appropriate to question
the utility of approaches and the validity of
explanations that have for long
gone unquestioned. My hope, then, is to contribute to a better understanding
of both Marxism and Leninism and also of the nature of ideology.
Consequently, I greatly welcome the
republication of my book.

John H. Kautsky
 Preface
In this essay, I develop the argument that Marxism and Leninism are two
quite different ideologies and
counterpose this view to the commonly
accepted one of Leninism as simply one form that Marxism took in the
course of its evolution. That latter conception has led to much
misunderstanding of both Marxism and Leninism
and has been responsible
for great confusion in the realms of both politics and scholarship.
My effort to bring clarity into this area rests on my conception of
ideology. For the purpose of analyzing
politics, that is, conflict among
groupings of people with different interests and values, it seems to me
appropriate to define an ideology with reference to the interests and values
it expresses. I develop my
conception of ideology, and of the role of words
in it, as well as the defining characteristics of Marxism
and Leninism that
follow from it in chapter 1.
In chapters 2 and 3, employing a
sociology-of-knowledge approach, I try
to explain the appeal and the different meanings of the Marxian
vocabulary,
as it was used by Marxists and by Leninists, with reference to the position
of labor in
turn-of-the-century industrial Europe and of modernizing
intellectuals in underdeveloped countries, beginning
with turn-of-the-
century Russia. As Marx was explicitly concerned with problems of
industrialism rather than
with those of underdevelopment, it is far less
difficult to understand the appeal of his vocabulary in
industrialized
countries, like Germany and Austria, than in underdeveloped countries, like
Russia and China.
I shall therefore have to devote much less space to my
analysis of Marxism than to that of Leninism and its
non-Marxian policies
clothed in Marxian words.
In chapter 4, I point out that in industrialized countries, notably in
Germany, France, and Italy, would-be Leninists could not be Leninists,
which was true also in
the Soviet Union in recent decades. In chapter 5, I
seek to account for
the origin and the persistence of what I regard as the
misconception of Marxism and Leninism as a single
ideology.
One reason for that misconception may be that scholars have usually
discussed Leninism with reference either
to European countries, including
Russia, or to underdeveloped countries, but not to both. The former group
does not see Russia as an underdeveloped country, and the latter does not
link Marxism to Western labor
movements. I have been fortunate that my
research and teaching during the past four decades have been
concerned
with the politics of both industrialized and underdeveloped countries.
In particular, on the one hand, I have, from my intellectual beginnings,
had an interest in Marxism and
Western labor movements, some of it
concentrated on the work of Karl Kautsky, as in my doctoral dissertation
and more recently in my abridged edition of his magnum opus The
Materialist Conception of History and
my book Karl Kautsky: Marxism,
Revolution, and Democracy. I thus developed a perspective on Marxism as
quite distinct from Leninism, as it evolved from the theories of Marx and
Engels into the thought and
practice of social democracy, especially in
Germany and Austria. On the other hand, I have in several books
and some
articles sought to analyze the revolutionary politics of underdeveloped
countries, both in general
and with special reference to Communism. I thus
came to see Leninism and the Russian Revolution in that
context and as
quite distinct from Marxism.
As my argument in the present book is foreshadowed in a few of my
earlier writings, some of what I say here
rests on research done in the past. I
hope that this will explain the all too numerous footnote references to
my
own writings. Embarrassed as I am by them, I thought they were preferable
to summaries or restatements of
what I had written and of data and
literature I had referred to elsewhere. These would have been
inappropriate
in what was meant to be only a brief essay.
Finally, as this book was written and appears in the early 1990s, let me
answer a question I have been asked
a few times regarding my subject:
Don’t I know that Marxism and Leninism are now dead? Yes, I do know
that,
in important but different respects, both are substantially dead; and I
even argue that both, for very
different reasons, died long ago in most
places where they had once been strong. I hope, however, that the
entire
essay negates the implication of the question that Marxism and Leninism
are no longer worth analyzing
and explaining. I respond to this implication
specifically at the beginning of chapter 1.
Here, I offer two very general points in response. First, even if Marxism
and Leninism were
completely dead and even if they left no remnants or
effects, which is obviously not true, it would be
important to study them as
major historical phenomena that powerfully affected the world at one time.
Second,
I deal here with ideas expressed in a single vocabulary but,
analyzing their origins and appeals
sociologically, can show that these ideas
can best be seen as two quite different ideologies. My essay can
thus serve
as a case study in the sociology of knowledge, an approach that can be
fruitfully employed in the
analysis of all political ideologies. At the same
time, the essay emphasizes and examines the function
performed by words
in Marxism and Leninism, a concern that should be equally relevant to the
study of other
ideologies.

I am grateful for their encouragement to Peter Schwartz and Serenella

Sferza, who read an early draft of this
essay, and to Sanjay Seth and Gary
Steenson for their extensive critical comments on it, to which I tried to
respond with some revisions and additions. Above all, I thank Jack Knight,
Carol Mershon, and John Millett,
and my son Peter Kautsky, for giving
generously of their valuable time to help me with thoughtful
understanding
to improve my manuscript in many minor and some very major ways.
Having recently retired from, but continuing to work in, the Department
of Political Science at Washington
University in St. Louis, I dedicate this
book to the Department, a remarkable institution consistently
distinguished
both by its academic and scholarly excellence and by its humane and
pleasantly cheerful style.
I owe an immense debt of gratitude to many of my
past and present colleagues in it for offering to me,
through more than half
of my life, their warm friendship and colleagueship, their stimulation,
collaboration,
and support.
 Chapter One

Introduction: Two Environments—

Two Ideologies—One Terminology

Why Bother with Dead Marxism and

Leninism?
The scholarly and journalistic literature commonly applies the single term
“Marxism” to the thought and
practice of such political thinkers and leaders
as, among many others, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
Karl Kautsky and
Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti, Maurice Thorez
and Georges
Marchais, V. I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin and
Nikita Khrushchev, Fidel Castro and Salvador
Allende, Daniel Ortega and
Abimael Guzmán, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, Ho Chi Minh and Pol
Pot,
Najibullah, Amilcar Cabral, and Mengistu Haile Mariam.1
Calling all these people Marxists, as they have called themselves, suggests
that they share a common
ideology and represent a single movement, a
notion that appears to be widely, if vaguely, accepted. On
the other hand, it
seems obvious that huge differences divide some of these so-called Marxists,
that
particularly those near the beginning and those toward the end of the
above listing have little, if
anything, in common. Thus, it is difficult to
conceive of Karl Kautsky in the context of Afghan politics
or of an
Ethiopian army colonel leading a mass labor movement like German social
democracy.
By differentiating between Marxism and Leninism as distinct ideologies,
this essay suggests a way of
looking at this area of great intellectual
confusion that may help to explain both the major differences
among
movements and regimes commonly referred to as Marxist and the fact that
they can all think of
themselves as Marxist and all speak, at least to some
extent, the language of Marxism. I try to develop
my explanation by taking a
sociology-of-knowledge approach of relating ideology
to its social
environment, a perspective that seems generally in accord with Marx’s view
of ideology and
may thus be particularly appropriate for a discussion of the
Marxist and Leninist ideologies.
For my purposes here, I distinguish between two types of environments:
industrialized and industrially
underdeveloped. Ideologies that have proved
to be widely appealing across many national and cultural
boundaries must be
explained with reference to broad types of societies. The dichotomy I draw
between
industrial and underdeveloped societies, though it obviously
oversimplifies reality, is thus a useful one
in accounting for the two
ideologies I distinguish, each associated with one type of society. I also
mention areas neither fully industrialized nor largely underdeveloped, like
Italy of the 1920s or
mid-twentieth-century Chile, with the composite
ideologies of Gramsci or Allende that contain some
elements of one
ideology and some of the other.
I believe that my conception of two ideologies can serve to explain far
more reality, and explain it
better, and can bring more order into this area of
the history of ideas and of political movements than
can the notion of a
single Marxist ideology from Marx to Mengistu or the possible alternative
notion of
dozens of different Marxisms.
But is this analysis still of interest when the death of Marxism and of
Leninism is being proclaimed
every day? As these lines are being written,
the pictures and statues of Marx and Lenin are coming down
in much of the
world, Karl-Marx-Stadt is once again Chemnitz, and Leningrad is once again
St. Petersburg.
Is this essay then being rendered irrelevant by the dramatic
events that have been taking place in the
past few years in the Soviet Union
and its successor states and in what used to be called its Eastern
European
satellites?
First, it must be noted that my argument that Marxism and Leninism are
different ideologies implies that
whatever the fate of one may be, the fate of
the other is distinct from it. In my view, Marxism and
Leninism changed for
different reasons and in different ways, although both changed so drastically
in
important respects that one can fairly say that they have been dead for a
long time.
What little Marxism there was in Russia died with Menshevism and the
triumph of Leninism long ago. There
having been no Marxism in the Soviet
Union since then, recent events there prove nothing about the
vitality of
Marxism one way or the other. In the industrialized West, Marxism had
directed its appeal to
alienated industrial workers and promised to end their
alienation. As their alienation was ended or at
least reduced—though not
only by the policies of Marxists—Marxism lost its appeal to workers and, in
this
sense, died.2
Similarly, Leninism committed suicide in Russia by the achievement of its
goals. Leninism appeals to
alienated intellectuals in underdeveloped
countries and promises to bring them
to power and to realize the rapid
industrialization of their backward societies. When this was
accomplished
some decades ago in the Soviet Union and the other now industrialized
countries of Eastern
Europe, Leninism necessarily died.
What died only recently, then, as a result of the collapse of most
Communist regimes, is not Marxism and
Leninism but only their outward
symbols: the pictures and statues, and also—except among a few hidebound
leaders of surviving Communist parties—the vocabulary that Lenin had
taken over from Marx.3 That this Marxist vocabulary was used by both
Marxists and Leninists is the principal reason for the assumption that
Marxism and Leninism are one and
the same ideology. To demonstrate that a
single vocabulary can serve to express what are more usefully
seen as two
distinct ideologies is therefore a major objective of this essay.
Whether Marxism or Leninism is dead or alive, what I attempt here
should be of some interest, for if my
analysis is valid, it follows that a very
widely held view that links or somehow identifies Western labor
movements
and their socialism with what also came to be known as socialism in the
Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe rests on a pervasive historical
misunderstanding. This view not only has been accepted by
scholars but
came to play a prominent role in politics. On the one hand, it served the
Right to attack
the laborite and socialist Left in the West by identifying it
with Communism in the East. On the other
hand, it led some leftist
advocates of pro-labor change in the West, for example, some French
Communists
and “marxisant” intellectuals, to associate themselves with or
defend the Soviet regime. Indeed, the
peculiar character of Communist
parties in industrial Europe, as I interpret it in chapter 4, and possibly their
very existence were in good part a result of this
misunderstanding.
Communists and anti-Communists, some socialists, and many
antisocialists in the West as well as more or
less neutral observers and, of
course, the rulers of the Soviet Union, especially in its early years,
have all
helped perpetuate this misunderstanding. The misleading identification of
Marxist “socialism”
and Leninist “socialism” is likely to be with us for quite
some time. A very few in the West will argue
that labor should follow the
Leninist path, because it was not Lenin, but Stalin and/or Mikhail
Gorbachev, who failed in the Soviet Union, while very many others will say
or imply that the failure of
Communism in the Soviet Union discredits the
programs and policies of Western Social-Democratic parties.
In East
Germany, where Social Democrats were strong before 1933, they have lost
elections after the
collapse of the Communist regime, no doubt in good part
because voters resentful of that regime oppose
the “Reds” and “socialism,”
symbols that Leninists and Marxists have shared.4
In any case, a reexamination of the relationship of Marxism and Leninism
remains
appropriate and even necessary because of their historical
importance. There is a huge scholarly and
popular literature that sees Lenin
and his successors as the successors of Marx and Engels and regards
Leninist or so-called socialist regimes in underdeveloped countries,
beginning with the Soviet Union, as
somehow resting on Marx’s ideology
and therefore as in some way related to the ideology of Marx’s
Social-
Democratic successors. The conception of Marxism and Leninism as a
single ideology has been so
very widespread and influential among scholars
and intellectuals, policymakers and the newspaper-reading
public, and has
caused so much misunderstanding of both Marxism and Leninism that an
attempt to view it
as a misconception and to explain how it arose and why it
has remained so powerful would seem to be well
worthwhile.

Two Ideologies
A political ideology, as I use the term here, is a view of the political
world, involving description and
explanation that may or may not be
accurate from the perspective of an outside observer, as well as
prescription,
from a particular value position or point of view.5 In the case of any one
individual, that view may have been
conditioned by all sorts of different
factors involving the individual’s experiences and personality. A
widely held
ideology, however, must express a widely held view conditioned by factors
that affect great
numbers of people in similar fashion. A political point of
view is likely to be widely shared by people
who occupy more or less the
same position within a political and social system and share a common
attitude toward that position or a common interest in preserving or changing
it. That is the basic
assumption underlying the argument in this essay.
In the next two chapters, I will link Marxism and Leninism to their
respective social groupings in
specific social environments. Here I must
briefly define and distinguish between these two ideologies.
One is the
Marxism associated with the labor parties of the final decades of the
nineteenth and the early
decades of the twentieth century in industrial
Europe, especially the German and Austrian
Social-Democratic parties, that
is sometimes referred to as the Marxism of the Second International.
Marxism is one ideology in a broader category of laborite or social-
democratic ideologies, all of which
share a characteristic emphasis on the
industrial labor movement and the improvement of the status of
labor and on
parliamentary democracy as a method and as a goal.
What distinguishes Marxism—though not necessarily very clearly—from
other laborite ideologies, like
British Fabianism, German Revisionism, or
Scandinavian social democracy, is not only Marx’s conception of history (of
which his analysis of capitalism is a part) with its emphasis on
class struggle
and revolution, but also the specific vocabulary by which he expressed this
conception.
That vocabulary, however, employed to express a different
conception, is used by Leninism as well. As my
focus is on the distinction
between Marxism and Leninism, and not between Marxism and other
laborite
ideologies, I cannot define Marxism with reference to the
vocabulary it shares with Leninism, but I can
define it with reference to its
emphasis on labor and parliamentary democracy, which it shares with the
broader category of laborite ideologies and which distinguish it from
Leninism.
Leninist ideology is associated with revolutionary modernizing,
antitraditional, and/or anticolonial
movements in underdeveloped countries.
It first appeared in turn-of-the-century Russia and also the
Balkans, then in
China, and has since inspired revolutionary movements in such nonindustrial
countries as
Vietnam and Cambodia, Southern Yemen and Afghanistan,
Angola and Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and Ethiopia,
and, at least after the
revolution, in Cuba. Its most outstanding thinker and founding father was
clearly
Lenin, and I therefore refer to this ideology as Leninism.
Leninism is one ideology in a broader category of modernizing ideologies,
all of which share
characteristic emphases on agrarian and antiimperialist
revolution, on the key role of intellectuals, and
on rapid modernization.
What distinguishes Leninism from other modernizing ideologies, like those
represented by Jawaharlal Nehru or Carnal Abdel Nasser or, earlier, by the
Mexican Revolution, is above
all Lenin’s use of Marx’s vocabulary. Since it
obviously does not distinguish Leninism from Marxism, and
as I am not
concerned with distinguishing Leninism from other modernizing ideologies,
I define Leninism
with reference to the characteristics it shares with the
broader category of modernizing ideologies
rather than with reference to its
specific character (i.e., its vocabulary).
Leninism is, of course, all too generally referred to as Marxism, but I see
these ideologies as belonging
to two very different categories, and each of
their founding fathers is associated with one of these.
Just as the term
Leninism is, in everyone’s mind, linked to the thought of Lenin, so I am
using the term
Marxism, as it once was but is evidently no longer generally
employed, to point to a linkage with Karl
Marx’s thought. That makes it
impossible to refer to Stalin, Mao, or Mengistu as a Marxist, as is so
often
done, for the thought and the policies of such revolutionary leaders reflected
not Marx’s laborite
thought but Lenin’s modernizing one.
The following matrix may help clarify what different ideologies, including
Marxism and Leninism, have in
common and what distinguishes them.
 As I seek to explain the thought of ideologists with reference to their
sociohistorical setting rather
than their personal character or intelligence, I
am not arguing that the laborite Marxists were closer to
Karl Marx’s thought
than Lenin and his followers because they were more upright and honest or
more
insightful and scholarly. Rather, the social-democratic and laborite
Marxist ideologists were closer to
Marx than ideologists in underdeveloped
countries could be because the industrial environment to which
they were
responding was closer to the one to which Marx had responded, especially
during the last three
decades of his life. After all, ideology as a conceptual
apparatus is wedded to the ideologist’s
experience, and ideology as a moral
perspective is wedded to his or her task or mission.

Marx and Marxism

A few remarks are in order here to explain why I include Karl Marx’s
thought and Marxism among laborite
and social-democratic ideologies.
To associate Marx with Marxism rather than with Leninism, as I have now
defined these ideologies, I do
not need to become involved in the endless
and fruitless debates of the past hundred years as to what
constitutes “true”
Marxism. I merely need to point to the undeniable fact that most of Marx’s
work is
focused on the development of industrial capitalism and of the
industrial working class, and very little
of it on problems of
underdevelopment and colonialism, many of which did not
arise until well
after his death.6 If I refer to Marxism as “laborite” as well as social-
democratic, this is not to
suggest that it was the ideology of narrow trade
unionism, concerned only with workers’ short-term
interests, but simply to
stress its link to labor as one of the major characteristics distinguishing this
ideology from Leninism.
Marx’s attitude toward parliamentary democracy, as distinguished from
that of Marxist parties functioning
after his death, is not as clear as his
interest in the proletariat, for in his lifetime substantial
legal labor parties
hardly existed and most parliaments, including the House of Commons, were
not yet
elected by universal suffrage. The French and Swiss parliaments,
elected by universal manhood suffrage,
represented still overwhelmingly
nonindustrial populations, and the imperial German Reichstag was largely
powerless. Thus, the question of labor playing an effective role in
parliaments did not arise for Marx,
but he clearly did favor majority rule and
universal suffrage.
Friedrich Engels, who had collaborated closely with Marx for four
decades and survived him by twelve
years, was intimately involved with the
early Social-Democratic parties, especially the German party led
by August
Bebel and also the Austrian one led by Victor Adler, and approved of their
participation in
electoral and parliamentary politics.7 Marxist Social-
Democratic parties were henceforth, throughout their century-long
history,
strong advocates and defenders of parliamentary democracy with universal
suffrage.
It can be argued that Marxist ideology should not be considered
“laborite,” because to Marx and his
followers the ultimate goal was the
“emancipation” of all of humanity, not merely of the working class.
However, their concern with human liberation from all kinds of oppression
and discrimination was hardly
more than a vague ideal. It was quite
secondary to their concern with industrial labor, for they saw
human
liberation as a necessary consequence of socialism—often simply because
they defined socialism to
encompass it—and they regarded the working class
as the instrument that would bring about socialism.
Already in the
Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels saw the proletariat as the only
revolutionary
class and asserted that its victory must bring the end of the
oppression of women and of hostility
between nations. While racial and
ethnic discrimination and the position of women were given relatively
little
serious thought, the organization and education or indoctrination of labor
and the improvement of
its condition were of the greatest importance to
Marx and to Marxist parties. In this sense they were,
indeed, laborite.
Although I emphasize its laborite component here, it goes without saying
that Marx’s thought did not deal
only with the working class and that he
contributed to and influenced many intellectual currents. As a result, many
thinkers—Lenin, of course, included—some of whom might have had no
interest in industrial labor at all, could, if they so choose, trace their
intellectual descent back to
Marx. Here, however, I am not concerned with
the many ideas Karl Marx contributed or stimulated or with
the many
intellectuals who, working in different fields, may have thought of
themselves or have been
thought of as Marxists. I am not concerned with
“Marxism” in this sense.
 The Marxism that is my subject here is the broad stream of thought that
runs from Marx and Engels through
the “classical” or “orthodox” Marxism
of Karl Kautsky (who was close to Engels) and the Austro-Marxists,
like
Otto Bauer and Rudolf Hilferding (who were close to Kautsky), and through
the history of the German
and Austrian Social-Democratic Parties. Some of
the elements of this stream have been gradually diluted,
but what I regard as
its defining characteristics have never disappeared. Western Social-
Democratic
parties continue to be linked to industrial labor movements and
to champion their interests, and, of
course, to participate in electoral and
parliamentary politics. They no longer call themselves “Marxist,”
however,
and much of Marx’s vocabulary and analysis is no longer appropriate to their
needs and has been
abandoned.
Confusingly, the designation “Marxist,” given up by social democrats, has
been successfully claimed by
Leninists and, more recently, also by thinkers
often labeled “Western Marxists.”8 Marxism and social democracy, have,
then, come to be
regarded as distinct and even mutually exclusive or hostile
ideologies. I shall nevertheless refer to the
particular Western social-
democratic laborite ideology that I need to distinguish from Leninism, as
Marxism, because, across obvious differences reflecting major changes in
the position of labor in
industrial societies, there runs a straight line from
Marx and Engels to Willy Brandt and Bruno Kreisky.
On the other hand,
there is no line from Marx to Mao and Mengistu; rather, a new line begins
with Lenin
and runs to more recent revolutionaries in underdeveloped
countries. For now, I will simply assert this
certainly highly controversial
point. Much of the rest of this essay will, I hope, serve to support it.

One Terminology
That laborite Marxism and modernizing Leninism are very different is not
news. Their differences emerged
in the conflicts between Mensheviks and
Bolsheviks and became particularly clear in the polemics of
Kautsky and
Lenin during and after World War I and the Russian Revolution. Much of the
time since then,
Social-Democratic parties and Communist parties
professing to be Leninist have been bitter enemies. In
the period since the
1950s, when Social-Democratic parties have no longer
employed Marxist
terminology, the differences have been even more obvious.
 The point of this essay is not to show that Marxism and Leninism, as I
have defined them, are different
because they evolved in different directions
from common beginnings. It is, rather, to argue that, from
their respective
beginnings in Marx and Engels and in Lenin, Marxism and Leninism have
always been
different ideologies, different views shaped not just by different
interpretations of Marx’s thought but
also in response to different
environments by people in different positions. With respect to the policies
in
fact pursued by the adherents of the two ideologies, the differences between
them seem quite obvious,
but they have been concealed from the adherents
of both ideologies themselves, and from neutral as well
as biased
commentators down to the present, by the powerfully confusing fact that the
two ideologies are
couched in the same terminology.
This is, of course, due to the fact that Lenin, who formulated thoughts and
pursued policies appropriate
to a revolutionary modernizer in an
underdeveloped country, had early in his political career come under
the
influence of Marx and Engels, of German Social Democrats, and of Russian
Marxists influenced by these
Western laborite thinkers. Thus Lenin and his
followers came to use the vocabulary of Marx and to see
their
underdeveloped environment in terms of the concepts used by Marx and the
German Social Democrats
with reference to their industrial one.9 Words and
concepts like capitalism and socialism, bourgeoisie and proletariat, class
struggle and revolution are central in both ideologies, at least in the earlier
stages of their
development.
Once Lenin and his revolution had triumphed, his terminology, like his
Party, became established in a
monopolistic position. Lenin’s successors and
the new generation they created by modernizing Russia were,
as Lenin
himself had been, unable to think in any language other than that of
Marxism. All domestic and
foreign policies pursued by the Soviet
government during the next seven decades were described in Marxian
terms,
much as their substance necessarily differed from what Marx could have had
in mind. Thus, the
ruling Party was identified with the “proletariat,”
opposition to it was called “bourgeois,” and fighting
the opposition was seen
as “class struggle”; turning an agrarian into an industrial society was thought
of as “building socialism,” and the establishment of bureaucratic control
over industry and agriculture
involved in this process was called
“socialization” and “collectivization”; and the promised future
society was
always referred to as “socialism” and “communism.”
 If an ideology is defined with reference to the words and concepts it
employs, then Marxism and Leninism
are, indeed, a single ideology. For my
purposes of political analysis, however, I define an ideology differently. If
thinkers like Lenin and Kautsky could read the same words in
the same
writings of Marx and use them to justify and describe quite different
policies, I see them here
not as arriving at different and more or less
“correct” interpretations of a single ideology of Marxism,
but as thinkers in
different positions with different political needs responding to different
political
situations in different environments—in short, as representatives of
different ideologies.
That I do not define an ideology with reference to the words in which it is
expressed by no means implies
that these words are not important, that they
make no difference in politics. As I will stress in a
moment, they can be
immensely important; but if the same words and concepts, appearing in
different
environments, represent and appeal to different kinds of people, if
they serve different interests and
functions, then, according to my definition
of an ideology, the single vocabulary gives expression to
different
ideologies.10

Ideology and Words

Ideology plays a vital role in affecting and conditioning political behavior.
No one acts politically—no
one advocates a policy, becomes or supports a
politician, joins an organization, votes, rebels—without
some thought
motivating his or her behavior, and that thought is ideological, it is a
response to the
outside world from a particular political point of view. If one
sees politics, as I do, as conflict of
interest, and if one interprets interests
broadly to include relevant values, attitudes, and sympathies,
then one
cannot conceive of politics without ideology, for ideology is merely an
expression of interests.
Ideology, then, in good part explains politics, but ideology is itself subject
to explanation and can, in
good part, be explained with reference to social
structure. As a view held in common by many—though of
course not all—
people occupying similar positions in a given society, it is a necessary aspect
of a given
social structure.
Thus, the growing labor movements of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries in the most
advanced industrialized countries of Europe,
given the position they occupied in their political systems
(as I will describe
it in chapter 2), had to adhere to one
ideology or another in the broader
category of laborite ideologies. They had to be attracted by its
advocacy and
prediction of the advancement of industrial labor and of the achievement and
use of
parliamentary democracy.
Within the broader category of laborite ideologies Marx formulated a
much more specific and coherent body
of thought by linking it to ideas and
insights in the social sciences, especially economics, and to a
conception of
history, all of which made Marxism particularly attractive to intellectuals. As
his conception of history emphasized overt conflict, particularly
class
struggle and revolution, it proved to be appealing in the authoritarian
empires of Central Europe,
where the political position of the labor
movements seemed to make such concepts relevant. Thus, as I
will show in
chapter 2, it was Marxism, the laborite ideology as
expressed specifically in
Karl Marx’s thought—and in his terminology—that became influential
especially
in the German Empire. That it was influential there greatly
affected the political behavior both of its
adherents and of their opponents,
but that Marxism was influential in the German Empire was a
result of the
social structure of that empire and, more specifically, of the respective
positions in it
of labor and of the government and its supporters.
Just as European labor movements had to adopt what I define as a laborite
or social-democratic ideology
at one stage of their development, so
movements of intellectuals in underdeveloped countries had
to adhere to a
modernizing ideology, Leninism being one of these. They had to do so,
given the position
of intellectuals in their societies and given their interests
developed in response to the impact of
modernization coming to their
countries from without, as I will analyze them in chapter 3. The
revolutionary movements that accepted the Leninist ideology were a
result
not so much of this ideology as of the social structure of their countries and
the place of
intellectuals in it.
Not only ideologies but also their specific vocabulary can affect politics,
for when people think, and
thus motivate their political behavior, they shape
their thoughts in the form of words. It was not just
Marxism but the Marxian
word “revolution” that played a role in the politics of the German Empire,
mobilizing both support and opposition. The conflict between German
Marxists and Revisionists at the turn
of the century turned in part on the
questions of whether their Party was “revolutionary” and even, quite
explicitly, whether it ought to use the word “revolution” in its propaganda.
The Marxian vocabulary Lenin employed to express his modernizing
ideology also affected politics in some
ways that a different vocabulary
expressing similar modernizing ideologies did not. At least the fact
that his
thought with respect to industrialized countries was couched in Marxist
concepts had major
consequences. Lenin looked to such countries in Central
and Western Europe for support among their
workers and for opposition on
the part of their bourgeoisie, an expectation that proved to be partially
self-
fulfilling. That some workers and intellectuals in these countries now
expressed their interests by
thinking of themselves as Leninists and that
some more conservative groups expressed theirs by attacking
Leninism was
due to the fact that Lenin used the terminology of Marx. The interests these
people
expressed in this fashion were, however, shaped by their positions in
their
societies. It was these positions that made Lenin’s Marxist language
attractive or threatening to them.
Of course, there are limits to what words can do. All of Lenin’s talk about
the bourgeoisie and
capitalism could not make turn-of-the-century Russia
into a highly industrialized country, just as his
constant references to the
proletariat and socialism could not produce a highly organized mass labor
movement that could take power and then restructure Russian society in
labor’s interests. Lenin and
Leninist modernizing movements, regardless of
their vocabulary, had to react to their underdeveloped
environment much as
non-Leninist modernizing movements did.
Still, politics is carried on largely through the use of words, and those
engaged in politics respond to
each others’ words as well as to each others’
policies and behavior, which are, indeed, difficult to
distinguish from the
words used to describe them. The responses to words may consist not only
of more
words but also of substantive behavior. The mere fact that Smith
says to Jones that he will hit him, may
cause Jones to hit Smith.
Words obviously have consequences, then. If the words are descriptively
inaccurate and inappropriate, as
is the Marxian vocabulary used by Leninism
in conditions of underdevelopment, they can become myths, that
is, false
beliefs that inspire behavior on the part of those who accept them. Words
thus can even
function in self-fulfilling fashion. Lenin’s words could not
create a powerful proletariat, a proletarian
revolution, or a proletarian regime
in Russia, but they could turn some Western capitalists into his
enemies and
some Western workers into his supporters, thus fulfilling some of his
predictions. And the
behavior and the words of these capitalists and these
workers, in turn, reinforced the myth of the
proletarian character of
Leninism. This is a matter I will discuss in chapter 4.
 Chapter Two

The Evolution of Marxism

SOCIALIST LABOR MOVEMENTS

Origins
The rise of socialist labor movements in Western Europe in the
nineteenth century can be explained as a
reaction to the growth of capitalist
industry. The latter development is, no doubt, a necessary
condition for the
rise of these movements, but, as the growth of capitalist industry without a
concomitant socialist labor movement in North America suggests, it is not a
sufficient one. While
several factors help account for the absence of such a
movement in North America, it would seem that it
is only industrial
capitalism developing in a sociopolitical environment hitherto dominated
by an
aristocracy that produces socialist labor movements as a response.
The growth of new industrial classes within an agrarian society with age-
old rigid class divisions and
distinct class cultures, where individual status
was largely determined by class membership, could
hardly occur without
friction. It was a relatively smooth process for the new industrial
bourgeoisie,
initially because it grew gradually out of the established
classes of merchants and artisans and later
because its new wealth permitted
it to buy its way into the upper strata of society. Businessmen could
buy
landed estates and affect an aristocratic life-style, they could send their
children to the schools
of aristocrats and marry into their families, they
could even buy aristocratic titles. At the same
time, though often only
slowly and reluctantly, aristocrats went into business.
To some degree, then, more so in Britain than on the Continent and with
much
mutual resentment along the way, the old and the new upper classes
came to merge socially. Everywhere
in Europe they eventually merged
politically, as the bourgeoisie tended to join the aristocracy in the
face of
rising labor opposition.
The new industrial workers were recruited largely from the peasantry, the
class least prepared for
change in the preindustrial order. Abruptly,
sometimes literally overnight, transplanted into a new
urban environment
and an industrial way of life, they could not fit into any of the still accepted
class categories of the old agrarian society. Cut off physically from their
peasant roots, looked down
upon by the property-owning petty bourgeoisie
of craftsmen and shopkeepers, far removed from the
bourgeoisie and the
aristocracy, miserably poor, they were discriminated against, isolated, and
excluded from established institutions.
Unlike American workers, who developed in a society without a feudal
background, European workers were
constantly confronted by the fact that
they could not vote in elections or join certain organizations,
that they could
not attend certain schools or pursue certain careers because they were
workers.
They could thus hardly help becoming aware that they were,
indeed, workers and, as such, different from
other people. They could not
help becoming class-conscious, just as a Black person growing up in the
United States cannot avoid becoming conscious of being Black and of
having something important in
common with other African-Americans.
As a large and rapidly growing class of people, thrown together in
crowded slums and factories and
sharing certain common interests, workers
could hardly remain isolated. They responded to their
exclusion from the
established institutions of society by forming their own institutions and, to
some
extent, their own culture. Their organizations included not only (as
they did in the United States)
trade unions to represent workers as
employees in particular trades or industries vis-à-vis their
employers but
also women’s and youth organizations, sports clubs, hiking clubs and choral
societies,
educational and cultural institutions, libraries, publishing houses
and newspapers, consumer
cooperatives and political parties with active
local organizations. Many of these organizations were
overlapping and
interconnected. Many, like unions and parties, sponsored others and imbued
them with a
common ideology. All of them aimed at improving the lives of
workers not only materially but also by
giving them some sense of their
importance, power, and dignity, which the larger society denied
them.11
All such organizations may have presupposed a degree of class
consciousness in order to be established,
but, once established, they
certainly reinforced class consciousness and, indeed, helped create it for
subsequent generations of workers. In imperial Germany, it was said that
workers were born into and
died in the Social-Democratic movement,
which, far more than a mere political
party, encompassed all the many
different types of workers’ organizations. To many, it must have seemed
that to be a worker and to be a Social Democrat was one and the same
thing, that there was no
alternative to being both.

The Appeal of Marxism

In this situation in Western Europe and particularly in Germany—the rest
of the Continent was by and
large slower to industrialize—the early labor
movements, and especially intellectuals attached to them
or in sympathy
with them, could easily be attracted to Karl Marx’s thought. Itself a reaction
to early
industrialization, its view of the proletariat as a sharply distinct
class destined to play a central
role in the history of the future could seem
highly relevant to them. To a deprived, down-trodden
minority, the promise
of an inevitable victory over its enemies and a future of material abundance
and
a better life was bound to be appealing. This was all the more true as, in
an age when science in
general and Darwinist evolutionary thought in
particular enjoyed great prestige, the promise rested on
a supposedly
scientific basis and not mere wishful thinking.
Moreover, the Marxian prediction of the growth of labor in terms of
numbers, organizational strength,
and class consciousness was strikingly
confirmed by actual developments, which further strengthened its
appeal.
Now that, in recent decades, these Marxian predictions have no longer been
valid, it is all too
easy to underestimate not only the intellectual power
required to formulate them in the mid-nineteenth
century but also the
immense confidence in the inevitability of a triumph of socialism that they
could
inspire.
Marx’s prediction of the irresistible rise of labor to ultimate victory
should have met the needs of
and been appealing to the labor movement in
Britain as well as on the Continent. Indeed, the prediction
was based in part
on Marx’s study of British capitalism. But in his thought and in his
terminology—which changed less in the course of his lifetime than his
thought—the rise of labor was
associated with growing conflict—class
struggle—culminating in a violent or nonviolent revolution.
These elements
of Marxism were derived from Marx’s early experience in Germany and his
study of recent
and current French history; he was, after all, born only
twenty-nine years after the outbreak of the
French Revolution and
witnessed several revolutionary upheavals in France.
In Britain, Marx’s emphasis on class struggle and especially on
revolution seemed rather irrelevant and
hence was not appealing. Here trade
unions of skilled workers could for some time collaborate with and
work
within the business-dominated Liberal Party. When, after the rise of the
New Unionism at the end
of the nineteenth century, unions did, at the
beginning of the twentieth,
form the Labour Party to secure independent
labor representation in the House of Commons, British
workers, though
highly class conscious, had little doubt that the road to power for them was
open and
led through elections and Parliament.
The situation was different on the Continent, though of course Marxism
fared quite differently in
different countries there. I attempt here to explain
its appeal only in Germany, the country where it
was most successful. Much
of my explanation will also be relevant to Austria, parts of which became
industrialized not much later than Germany and which went through similar
political phases of an
aristocratic-military monarchy until 1918, a first
republic until 1934, a period of fascism—four years
clerical and seven
years Nazi—until 1945, and a second republic since then.
By the turn of the century, the German and Austrian Social Democrats
had grown into mass labor parties,
the only labor parties in their countries.
They were united and had explicitly Marxist programs and
leaders who
considered themselves faithful Marxists. In then industrially more backward
France and
Italy, there was no mass labor movement comparable in size and
strength to the German and Austrian
ones. French and Italian socialists had
to compete for labor leadership with nonsocialists, such as
syndicalists, and
were themselves plagued by splits and factionalism; and the socialist
leaders and
programs were not necessarily all faithful to Marxism.
The German and Austrian Social Democrats, then, were clearly labor
parties and clearly Marxist, while
the French and Italian labor movements
were not all socialist and the socialists were not all linked to
labor or all
Marxists. Since my concern here is with Marxism and, in order to
distinguish it from
Leninism, particularly with Marxism’s link to labor, the
German and Austrian labor movements are more
relevant than the French
and Italian ones. I shall turn to France and Italy in chapter 4, where I
discuss their Communist Parties to raise the question whether
there could be
Leninism in industrial Western Europe.

THE SOCIAL-DEMOCRATIC PARTY IN THE GERMAN

EMPIRE

Growth and Weakness

In the German Empire, there was no strong liberal party like the British
one, no strong commitment to
democratization in the newly growing
bourgeoisie. German unification had failed under bourgeois
auspices in
1848 and had been accomplished under Prussian aristocratic ones in 1870-
71. Big business
interests represented in the National Liberal Party were
mostly allied with the aristocratic
Conservatives in support of the imperial
government. That government rested
immediately on the military and the
bureaucracy but more broadly on the “marriage of iron and rye” of
the
“Ruhr barons” and the Prussian Junkers, based on common interests in a
protective tariff, colonial
and naval expansion, and strong opposition to the
rapidly rising labor movement.
Thus, while in Britain labor could exploit the rivalry between
Conservatives and Liberals and obtain
concessions from both, as with
respect to suffrage, in Germany labor found itself isolated not only
socially,
as it was in Britain, but also politically. Its response was the formation of an
independent
labor party. Two smaller parties, founded in the 1860s and led,
respectively, by Ferdinand Lassalle and
by Wilhelm Liebknecht and August
Bebel, united in 1875 into what became the Social-Democratic Party
(SPD),
three decades before the formation of the Labour Party in industrially more
advanced Britain.
The SPD was repressed (except in the Reichstag) under Bismarck’s anti-
Socialist law (1878–90), and it
remained discriminated against and was
treated as a semisubversive organization until the end of the
Empire in
1918.12 Its members
could not be, and its voters were not supposed to be,
civil servants, teachers, or professional
soldiers and reserve officers, and
restaurants where they met were “off limits” to soldiers for being
“frequented by prostitutes, pimps and Social-Democrats.”13 This, even
though it was the single largest party in
terms of popular votes in the
Empire beginning in 1890 and polled roughly one-third of all votes in
national elections beginning in 1903.
William II referred to Social Democrats as “vaterlandslose Gesellen,”
and German chancellors and
other politicians used similar language,
reading them out of the fatherland and, incidentally, agreeing
with the
Communist Manifesto that “the workingmen have no country [Vaterland].”
Though it
turned out in 1914 that, contrary to William and Marx and
Engels, German workers were quite patriotic,
it is not surprising that Marx’s
doctrine of class struggle, of workers having interests sharply
distinct from
those of the ruling classes, seemed relevant in the German Empire and had
wide appeal in
its labor movement.
The SPD’s remarkable growth (from about 125,000 votes, 3.2 percent of
the total vote, in 1871, to
4,250,000, 34.8 percent of the total vote, in 1912)
was made visible in the elections to the Reichstag
by universal manhood
suffrage. Its representation in the Reichstag, however, was severely limited
both
by the electoral system and by the failure to redistrict. The system of
runoff elections tended to
favor the anti-socialist parties and voters who
could combine against the SPD on the second ballot.
That electoral district
lines were not redrawn in over four decades of rapid urbanization also put
the
disproportionately urban-based SPD at a severe disadvantage.14 Thus,
the proportion of seats the Social Democrats
obtained in the Reichstag was
usually about half or one-third of the proportion of the votes it won, while
the Conservatives were significantly and increasingly
overrepresented after
all elections but two early ones; and they, as well as the National Liberals,
needed, on average, about one-third as many votes to gain one seat in the
Reichstag as the SPD.15
Even if the Social-Democratic Party had won popular majorities in
elections to the Reichstag—something
that, in fact, it never came close to
achieving—and even if it had somehow won a majority of the seats
in the
Reichstag, it is not at all clear, as it was under the British parliamentary
system, how it
could have come to power—that is, how it could have
gained control of the executive. The constitution
did not provide for such
control by the Reichstag, and in Prussia, which included nearly two-thirds
of
the population of the Empire, the blatantly discriminatory three-class
suffrage was retained until
1918.16 The monarchical
regime was determined
to keep what it regarded as the enemy of the state out of power. It was a
powerful regime that could rely on a loyal and well-disciplined military and
bureaucracy, and it
enjoyed the support not only of the agrarian and
industrial upper classes but also of broad strata in
the middle classes and the
peasantry. It derived its legitimacy both from monarchical and aristocratic
traditionalism and from the fact that both the successful unification and the
industrialization of
Germany had taken place under its auspices.
The labor movement in the German Empire, then, faced an ambiguous
situation. On the one hand, there was
its steady, impressive growth; on the
other hand, there was the powerful, indeed the seemingly
insurmountable,
opposition to the achievement of its goals. To this situation there
corresponded two
striking characteristics in the thought of Social
Democrats, particularly of their leadership and among
their intellectuals.
On the one hand, they were inspired by indomitable optimism; there was
no doubt in their minds that
they would come to power—not today or
tomorrow, but in the not-too-distant future. They simply took it
for granted
—not unreasonably, in light of their experience—that advancing
industrialization would
produce more and more workers and that these
would necessarily become Social Democrats. On the other
hand, SPD
leaders and thinkers could not visualize, let alone plan for, any way of
coming to power.
Neither the method of gradual advances through trade
union pressure and hoped-for political reforms nor
that of more or less
violent confrontations with the regime, as through mass strikes—both of
which had
advocates in the SPD at various times—offered practical
prospects of success. Paradoxically, Social
Democrats had good reason both
for their optimistic expectations and for their inability to put them
into
effect or even to know how to do so.

Revolution and Marxism

Under these circumstances the Mandan concept of revolution proved to
be particularly appealing. Of
course, not all German workers or even all
socialist workers were isolated
and alienated from the broader culture to the
same degree,17 nor was there any kind of unanimity among German Social
Democrats, either in the rank and file or among the leaders and
intellectuals, as to the SPD’s policies
and goals and its “revolutionary”
character. I am about to stress socialists’ emphasis on the latter,
only
because my object here is not to present a well-rounded picture of attitudes
prevailing among
workers or in the SPD, but to explain the appeal of
Marxism to the German labor movement and to point
out the functions that
the key Mandan concept of revolution served for it.
In Marx’s conception of history, the proletarian revolution and its
ultimate victory are inevitable, a
prediction that seemed confirmed by the
growth of the labor movement and its organizations and, in
turn, no doubt
helped promote that growth. If this promise involved in the concept of
revolution
corresponded to and also inspired the SPD’s optimism as to its
inevitable ultimate victory, the concept
was, on the other hand, sufficiently
vague to correspond to and also conceal the SPD’s uncertainty as
to how to
win that victory.
The Social-Democratic Party was a “revolutionary” party, for one thing,
because it was committed to the
achievement of “socialism.” “Socialism”
was an ill-defined concept—though perhaps not quite as
ill-defined as it has
become in the course of the twentieth century and especially since 1917—
but it
clearly suggested something very different from—indeed, in some
ways the very opposite of—the
prevailing order of “capitalism,” and
something that could not be attained by mere reforms. What the
SPD
sought, then—the change from capitalism to socialism—could be thought
of as a social revolution.
Referring to a change both drastic and far-reaching
and necessarily gradual, the word “revolution” here
has connotations
similar to those in the term “industrial revolution.”
To initiate the process of the social revolution, the Social-Democratic
Party needed first of all to
gain power. This, too, would involve a drastic but
necessarily less gradual change, and the Party was
hence committed not
only to a social but also to a political “revolution.” In the context of the
German
Empire, the SPD could hope to gain power only through a
preceding or simultaneous process of
democratization of the political order.
The political revolution, to which the SPD was looking forward,
then,
amounted to the replacement of the imperial regime by a parliamentary
democratic republic, such
as was achieved in the Revolution of 1918–19.
In Marx’s usage, too, the term “revolution” referred to both social and
political revolutions. What is
more, Marx did not consistently advocate or
predict a particular form of political revolution. He was
certain that the
proletariat would have to come to power, but not whether it would do so
suddenly or
gradually, by violent or by peaceful means.18 Thus, the SPD or
at least the Marxists in it could adopt and employ the Marxian concept of
revolution with its certainty as to the outcome of the revolution
and its
uncertainty as to its form.
On the one hand, the SPD could not rule out the use of violence. Given
its assumption of continuing
growth of the labor movement, the persistence
of bitter class conflict, and the stubborn resistance of
the regime and its
supporters to democratization and major pro-labor reforms, the occurrence
of some
kind of explosion in the future could not be ruled out. In particular,
it was always possible that a
regime founded on policies of “blood and
iron,” and fearful of a growing threat from labor, would
resort to a coup
d’état19 or
to violence to suppress labor organizations.
On the other hand, the German labor movement was obviously not a
movement that hoped for, let alone
planned, a violent revolution. Although
its organizations encouraged and inspired intense loyalty and
even
discipline, they were open mass organizations, not secret conspiratorial
ones that could have
plotted insurrection or trained and armed their
members for such purposes. A violent clash with the
regime would have
risked the very existence of these organizations that had been so
successfully built
up and that provided a sense of belonging and security for
their members and a raison d’être for their
sizable bureaucracies. Finally,
the SPD’s labor constituency, even if it was alienated, had made
sufficient
material progress, or could hope for it, to be unwilling to go to the
barricades, especially
when the prospects of success against a well-
organized, well-armed regime enjoying the strong support
of broad
antilabor strata in the population were, to say the least, dubious.
In short, the SPD in imperial Germany could well think of itself as a
revolutionary party. It was
committed to make both the social revolution of
introducing socialism and the political revolution of
coming to power and
introducing democracy, and it fully expected to do both—but, under the
prevailing
circumstances, it could not do so.
The Marxian concept of revolution was not only appropriate to describe
the German Social Democrats’
hopes and commitments along with their
uncertainty, it also served some very useful functions for their
movement.
For one thing, the promise of ultimate success provided by its determinism
justified their
optimism in the face of what could well have been seen as a
hopeless situation. That optimism was
essential if the growth and elan of
the movement were to be maintained. Though the labor movement
provided
important social, psychic, and material benefits to its members within the
existing society,
it would surely have lost much of its appeal had it
proclaimed its great goals but admitted that it had
no way of attaining them.
What made the great final goal of socialism so attractive, particularly to
those deeply discontented in
the existing society, was that it was radically
different from the latter,
and that was precisely what the word “revolution”
suggested.20 Commitment to a future society that, however vaguely,
was
expected to provide social justice and freedom, dignity and material
abundance, could be a source
of strength and pride, of solidarity and class
consciousness for workers living in an environment of
poverty and dirt, of
repression and discrimination. It could even make those at the bottom of the
social ladder feel morally superior to those at the top, who were seen as
intent only on preserving and
enhancing their privileges and their wealth.
Since the goal of socialism was associated with and was
attainable only
through the socialist party and the other organizations of the labor
movement,
commitment to the goal became commitment to the Party and
the movement and became a source of strength
for them.
The use of the word “revolution” also strengthened the SPD more
directly. In thinking of itself as a
revolutionary party, the SPD drew a sharp
line between itself and all other parties. In a multiparty
system, it was not
just one party among many; it was different from all others. They stood for
the
status quo or at most for mere reform; it stood for “revolution.” Of
course, the other parties and the
regime saw the SPD in the same light, and
this reinforced its self-image. Party leaders and Marxist
ideologues feared
that if differences between the SPD and other parties were blurred, if the
Party
watered down its “revolutionary” democratic and socialist principles,
some of its adherents might
defect. If their principal commitment was to
democratization, they might vote for left Liberals or
Progressives. If, on the
other hand, especially in the early years, the SPD seemed insufficiently
radical to them, they might be attracted to the anarchists or the anti-Semites.
At least the Marxists in the SPD felt that emphasis on its “revolutionary”
character, then, would and
should serve to keep the socialist labor
movement sharply distinct and isolated from the rest of the
political system,
and thus internally integrated and unified. That emphasis both responded to
and
reinforced the isolation of labor from the rest of German society. In a
situation in which the labor
movement could not “make” a revolution (i.e.,
could not democratize the Empire and could not come to
power), it could
only hope and wait, without knowing exactly what it was hoping and
waiting for. All it
could do in the meantime was to prepare itself for the
“revolution” by strengthening its organization,
that is, by organizing its
adherents and by attracting new ones, which in fact became its main task in
the German Empire. To the extent that the concept of revolution helped in
this process, it played an
important role in the history of Social Democracy
in that period.
There were certainly strong forces in the German socialist labor
movement that shied away from the use
of this concept. Some saw it as an
obstacle to their goal of securing support from left-liberal circles
in the
bourgeoisie and the white-collar middle class. Some wanted to extend
the
appeal of the Social-Democratic Party to the peasantry and therefore needed
to deemphasize and
dilute its proletarian character.21 To many holding
leadership or administrative positions in various labor
organizations,
strengthening these organizations within the existing society—securing
more members for
them and more subscribers to their publications, more
votes in elections and more seats in legislative
bodies—either became
virtually an end in itself or was seen as as means of securing reforms and
concessions from the regime and from employers, a means of gradually
“growing into” socialism without
any revolutionary upheaval.
In view of the fact that the German Empire collapsed and the democratic
revolution came in 1918 as a
result, in the first instance, not of SPD
pressure but of Germany’s defeat in World War I, we cannot
know whether
Eduard Bernstein’s optimistic expectation that socialism could be achieved
in this
nonrevolutionary way and his concomitant explicit demand that his
party drop all of its revolutionary
verbiage was justified.22
That the
Revisionist position could develop and had substantial support within the
labor movement is
certainly a symptom of the growing strength of that
movement and of its increasing self-confidence.
What needs to be
emphasized in our context, however, is the powerful resistance to
Revisionism within
the Social-Democratic Party, for it indicates the deep
attachment of many in it to Mandan conceptions.
Since these included not
just hidebound ideologues but also practical politicians, who had proved
their
ability to build and lead the movement in the real world of the German
Empire—above all, August
Bebel--it can be assumed that they appreciated
the useful functions Marx’s concepts served for their
movement.23
Today, Bernstein’s famous remark that the final goal of socialism meant
nothing to him, but the
movement everything,24 may
seem quite sensible.
After all, we now know that the “final goal,” as socialists conceived of it at
the
turn of the century, was never going to be reached, while the
“movement” was destined to be remarkably
successful in helping to make
the industrial world a better one for workers. In this better world,
socialist
parties can now do without “socialism” to appeal to workers (and the many
others whose votes
they now need, given the shrinkage of the industrial
working class). In the German Empire, however,
where Bernstein’s remark
was made, it overlooked the distinct possibility that the labor movement,
which meant so much to him, might have been unable to function
effectively, or even to exist as it did,
without the myth of the “final goal” of
socialism to inspire it. As Victor Adler, the leader of the
Austrian Social
Democrats in the Habsburg monarchy and, like Bebel, a very realistic
politician, said,
“All our wearisome day-to-day work derives its sanctity
and dignity from the
value it has for the achievement of our final goals.”25
Of course, faith in a socialist future was not necessarily associated with
acceptance of Marxist
theory. Many a German Social Democrat was deeply
attached to that faith, yet was in no sense or only in
a very superficial sense
of the word a Marxist. Still, to the extent that a mass party with some
diversity within it can be said to have had an official doctrine, that doctrine
was Marxism, as it was
expressed in the Social-Democratic Party’s Erfurt
Program of 1891, drafted by Kautsky with Engels’s
approval. Presumably
such a program could not have been adopted, had Marxism not been widely
regarded
in the Party as serving its needs. As we have now seen, the
position of labor in the German Empire gave
key concepts in Marx’s view
of proletarian politics—class struggle and revolution—considerable
relevance and hence great appeal.

SOCIAL DEMOCRACY SINCE 1918

The influence of Marxism in the German labor movement must be
explained with reference to the
peculiarities of the social and political
system of the German Empire, where rapid industrialization took
place
under an aristocratic regime and aristocratic values were widely held in the
population. Socialism
and the revolution were, as Guenther Roth put it,
“anti-ideals pitted against the official values of
imperial Germany.”26 The
failure of Marxism to gain much influence in the British labor movement
suggests that had German society
and government been more like British
society and government, the influence of Marxism would have been
correspondingly smaller.
My analysis of the appeal of Marxism in Germany thus necessarily had
to concentrate on the period of the
Empire. Once Marxist influence had
become deeply rooted, however, it did not come to an end with the
Empire.
The Revolution of 1918–19 and the newly founded Weimar Republic
changed some but not all of the
conditions that had made Marxian concepts
relevant and appealing. The agrarian and industrial upper
classes that had
dominated the Empire remained powerful not only in the economy but also
in the
government of the Weimar Republic, especially in its nonelective
institutions of the bureaucracy, the
military, and the judiciary. Hence the
concept of class struggle continued to make sense and to be
attractive to
workers, and the SPD—I shall touch on the German Communists in chapter
4—continued to see itself as leading labor’s class struggle.
Socialism and thus, at least by implication, the social revolution
remained the final goal of Social
Democracy. The goal of the political
revolution, however—the establishment of a democratic republic,
within
which it could hope to come to power and to introduce socialism by
electoral and parliamentary means—had been achieved in the Weimar
Republic. Consequently, the SPD no
longer saw itself as a revolutionary
party and was no longer seen as an enemy of the existing political
system.
On the contrary, those who had—rightly—accused it of playing that role in
the Empire now blamed
it—again rightly—for being a pillar of the
established republican system.
On the other hand, under the Nazi regime, when there was obviously no
question, as there had been under
the Empire, of Social Democrats
advancing through reforms and trade union pressure, let alone through
elections and parliamentarism, the concept of revolution was strongly
revived in illegal and exile SPD
thinking and writing. Revolution now
meant not merely social revolution, and it did not mean a peaceful
and more
or less gradual conquest of power; it meant violent overthrow of the Nazi
regime. As such, the
concept may not have been relevant as a practical
policy, for this kind of revolution was hardly
possible, but it was certainly
appealing to anti-Nazis to whom no channels of opposition were open.
It was, then, not until the post–World War II period that Marxism lost its
relevance and appeal in
Germany. Socialist ideologies and the socialist
labor movement, and particularly Marxism, with its
emphasis on class
struggle and revolution, were reactions to the growth of capitalism in a
deeply
class-divided society, in which the aristocracy and its institutions
and values were still powerful. The
final destruction of the German and
especially the Prussian aristocracy by World War II and the
subsequent
inclusion of its principal territorial base in the Soviet Union, Poland, and
East Germany
were, then, an important factor accounting for the decline of
Marxist influence in Germany. Given the
widespread identification of
Marxism with Communism, and hence with the Soviet regime, fear and
resentment of Soviet influence no doubt also contributed to this decline.
But other factors resulting from changes in the nature of the economy
also worked strongly in this
direction by tending to integrate the working
class into the larger society. These factors include the
acceptance of labor as
a legitimate social partner and the extension of the welfare state and rising
living standards for workers; the diversification of the working class into
more numerous and more
specialized occupations and skill levels, with the
relative share of blue-collar workers and especially
unskilled workers
declining and that of service employees growing; resulting from these
trends, a
reduction in distinctions between workers and nonworkers; and an
increase in the white-collar, salaried,
new middle class, whose interests are
not as sharply distinct from or opposed to those of labor as were
those of
the propertied old middle class of the petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry.
With workers no longer isolated and discriminated against, their unity
and
solidarity, their feeling of having common interests different from those
of the rest of society, their
class consciousness have declined and
disappeared. It is now impossible for a socialist party to appeal
to some
perceived common interest that is specific to workers and that unites them.
And with the
proportion of labor in the population shrinking, it also is
impossible for a socialist party to gain a
majority of votes in national
elections, as it had once expected to do, by appealing only to workers—
even
if it could mobilize the support of all workers, which itself is
increasingly difficult.
On the other hand, a socialist party can now, with the growing
heterogeneity of the middle class and the
blurring of the line between it and
the working class, extend its appeal to growing nonworking-class
elements
of the population and thus change from a working-class party to a “people’s
party.” The SPD made
that change explicitly in its Godesberg Program of
1959. That the Mandan doctrine and vocabulary, with
their emphasis on
class conflict and on the unique historical role of the proletariat, are
inappropriate
for such a party in the second half of the twentieth century is
obvious. Nor are trade unions,
representing a shrinking and increasingly
heterogeneous working class, or socialist parties, now less
dependent on
and responsive to a laborite constituency than ever, likely to react to the
erosion of
labor’s gains and status in recent years by a return to Marxism.
 Chapter
Three

The Evolution of Leninism

LENINISM AND MODERNIZING INTELLECTUALS IN

UNDERDEVELOPED COUNTRIES

Lenin Reinterpreted
As Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union have
collapsed or crumbled, the historical
role of Lenin and of Leninism has
been widely reexamined and reevaluated. In this process, Lenin’s
image of
himself as a Marxist thinker and as the leader of a proletarian movement
and revolution has
often been accepted as valid. In this essay, I reject this
image and offer a more far-reaching
reinterpretation of Lenin that presents
him as one of the first ideologists of revolutionary
modernizing movements
in underdeveloped countries and as the leader of such a movement and its
revolution in underdeveloped Russia.
Contrary to a now frequently expressed view, the collapse of Communist
regimes is no evidence of the
failure of Leninism. As an ideology of
modernizing revolution, it inspired the group of modernizers who
successfully seized power in the course of the Russian Revolution and some
of whom then achieved the
principal goal of the modernizing revolution,
the rapid industrialization of their backward agrarian
country. Thus,
Leninism succeeded in the Soviet Union and also in those Balkan countries
where
Communist regimes were in their beginnings agents of revolutionary
modernization. In the process,
Leninists created industrial societies where
Leninism is no longer relevant, and that is why it is now
being questioned.
They created bureaucratic structures that may have been functional for
turning
backward agrarian societies into industrial ones but have proved to
be
dysfunctional for organizing and running an advanced industrial
economy. These structures could not
meet the demands of consumers
created by advanced industrialism, as Leninists had met the demands of
intellectuals seeking rapid modernization.
Lenin successfully performed his historical role as a modernizing
revolutionary in an underdeveloped
country. Where he failed was in the role
that he believed and claimed he was performing, that of a
Marxist leader
and theoretician. He failed as a Marxist political leader because he did not
lead a mass
working-class movement in a class struggle against capitalism
that culminated in a revolution bringing
the workingclass movement to
power; neither did he and his successors lead a government of workers
governing in the interest of workers. All of which merely says that he failed
to achieve what was
impossible in underdeveloped Russia.
Lenin failed as a Marxist theoretician because he effectively rejected the
basic assumptions of Marx’s
conception of history by substituting will
power and organizational power for the development of the
forces of
production as the dynamic element in history. Thus, he believed that
peasants, if properly
led, could make the bourgeois revolution; that the
Party could divert workers from their spontaneous
trade-unionist
tendencies; and that the Party also could make a socialist revolution where
there were
few, if any, workers. I will note all this below and also show that
Lenin’s class analysis was often
quite non-Marxian, particularly with
respect to the peasantry.
In this chapter, I shall argue that Lenin failed as a Marxist because he was
a successful revolutionary
modernizer. In his policies, he responded
effectively to the political reality of underdeveloped
tsarist Russia. He
recognized that the enemy he was fighting was not capitalism but the
aristocratic-bureaucratic regime, that the Russian bourgeoisie was too weak
to make a revolution, and
that what little working class there was tended to
become trade-unionist rather than revolutionary. On
the other hand, he saw
the revolutionary potential of the huge peasantry and, above all, the key role
of intellectuals in revolutionary politics.
All this is, of course, also to say that Lenin succeeded as a modernizing
revolutionary because he
failed as a Marxist; his policies did not rest on the
Marxist ideas to which he believed he was
devoted. According to these
Marxist ideas, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat were the most powerful
actors in modern politics; each was a revolutionary class in its time.
Intellectuals, on the other
hand, were assigned no independent role by
Marx, and peasants were treated as a minor, contemptible
remnant of the
past.
One can be a successful revolutionary modernizer in an underdeveloped
country or a Marxist, but one
cannot be both at the same time. Karl Marx’s
Marxism, after all, was
obviously concerned with an industrial environment
and appealed to labor movements in industrialized
countries. It has no
immediate relevance to modernizing movements in countries with little or
no
industry or industrial labor. Lenin merely employed Marxian concepts
and, to make them relevant to the
politics of underdevelopment, had to
pervert their original meaning, as when he said that the bourgeois
revolution
would be made by peasants and the proletarian revolution by the Party.
If I present Lenin as using Marxian words to express an ideology quite
different from Marxism, I am not
suggesting that he was too naive, let alone
too stupid, to understand Marxism or, on the other hand,
that he knew very
well that he was not a Marxist but cleverly pretended to be one by speaking
Marx’s
language. Lenin was obviously not a stupid or a naive man but a
sophisticated politician, and, equally
obviously, he did not spend his entire
adult life consciously pretending to be what he was not and
filling what
came to be some forty volumes of his collected works with deliberate lies.
And even if
Lenin had been naive or a liar, one can hardly assume the same
of other Leninists, all those who
surrounded and followed him and who
adopted his Leninist ideology as well as his Marxist language.
I touch below on why Lenin and other Russian revolutionaries at the turn
of the century were inclined
to read Marxist literature and were attracted to
the Marxist vocabulary, especially to the word
“revolution.” When they
read their Marx and Engels and, until 1914, their Kautsky, some of them
understood what they read in the light of their Russian experience and not
in the light of those
thinkers’ Western European and German experience
that had shaped their ideas. As practical
revolutionary politicians, they were
far more familiar with and passionately involved in the Russian
than in the
very different Western political environment, and it seems almost inevitable
that, reacting
to the former, they would misread the writings of thinkers
reacting to the latter and take out of them
or read into them what they
needed, ignoring what did not fit their needs. Neither deceit nor stupidity
need be assumed to explain this very common process.
 Revolutionary Modernizing
Intellectuals
I have sought to explain the development of Marxism with reference to
the changing position of labor
movements in the latter half of the nineteenth
and the first half of the twentieth century in Western
Europe and
specifically in Germany. Similarly, I must now, in order to understand the
development of
Leninism in underdeveloped countries, briefly analyze the
position of intellectuals in their political
environment, for it is intellectuals
who become the carriers of that ideology.27 While German Social
Democracy was clearly the outstanding example of a labor movement
influenced by Marxism, Leninism has
had a powerful impact on
intellectuals in underdeveloped countries around the world, beginning with
Russia. I must therefore emphasize what intellectuals in such countries have
in common rather than
discuss their position in any one country, such as
Russia or China, Cuba or Ethiopia.
As one of the early consequences of commercial and colonial contacts
between industrialized and
traditional agrarian societies, some aristocrats
and merchants in the latter may send some of their
sons to advanced
countries for a higher education, typically to the advanced country to which
their own
is linked, and eventually modem institutions of higher education
may be established in the
underdeveloped country. A small group of
intellectuals is thus likely to emerge in such countries.
As a result of their exposure to the culture of industrial society and to an
education appropriate to
such a society, natives of an underdeveloped
country may acquire not only certain modern knowledge and
skills but Also
modern views and values. They may come to believe in the benefits of
material progress
and of science and technology, in the desirability of
reducing social and economic inequality, in
public policy being legitimized
only by the representation and even participation of great masses of
people
in its formulation and execution—all values widely accepted only as a
result of
industrialization.
What must strike natives of largely traditional societies exposed to such
values is their total
irreconcilability with the status quo in their own
societies. Commonplace and generally shared as these
values are in
industrialized societies, they are deeply subversive and revolutionary in
societies
governed and exploited from time immemorial by a thin stratum of
aristocrats owning or controlling the
land with its peasants and by the
traditional military, bureaucracy, and clergy employed or formed by
aristocrats and, in more recent times, sometimes also by a colonial elite
from abroad.
Obviously, the intellectuals I have in mind here do not include traditional
ones, like Confucian or
Islamic scholars, but even those with a modern
education absorb modern values to very different
degrees. On the other
hand, these values can be acquired by means other than an advanced
modern
education, particularly by service in the higher ranks of modern
armies and bureaucracies, institutions
that may be introduced even in
industrially quite backward countries by their ruling aristocracies or
colonial powers. In underdeveloped countries, then, intellectuals, as I use
that word, are defined with
reference not to their education but to their
modem values, interests, and attitudes; they can well be
called modernizers
or modernizing intellectuals.
Modern values being revolutionary in nonmodern societies, those
committed to them in such societies are
revolutionaries. For one thing, they
stand for a social revolution, for, in
order to realize their values, they want
to convert the traditional agrarian order into a modern
industrial one.
Having seen the latter and regarding, in its light, the former as wholly
intolerable,
they want to bring about the change as rapidly as possible.
Unwilling to have the industrial revolution in their countries progress as
gradually as it did in the
West, modernizing intellectuals want to force its
pace, which can be done only by far-reaching
government intervention in
the economy. Since neither traditional aristocrats nor colonial governments
can be expected to undermine the bases of their own existence in the
agrarian and colonial economy, the
modernizers must take over the
government themselves. They are thus not merely social but also
political
revolutionaries, and they will want to use their governmental power to
mobilize and allocate
resources of labor and capital to advance
industrialization. Both to pursue that goal and to attack
their aristocratic and
colonial adversaries, they will take such measures as the expropriation of
landed estates (often called land reform) and the nationalization of colonial
industry, such as mines
and railroads (often called socialism).
Given their belief in equality, progress, and mass representation,
intellectuals think of themselves as
representing the poverty-stricken
masses. In agrarian countries, these are overwhelmingly peasants,
though
they may include a small minority of workers where industrialization has
set in, particularly in
its colonial form of the development of extractive
industries (e.g., mining and plantations) and of
means of transportation
(e.g., railroads and ports). The intellectuals’ attitude toward these masses is
typically ambivalent. On the one hand, they idealize and glorify them as
those who ought to, and
eventually will, rule and those whose interests they,
the intellectuals, serve and seek to advance.
On the other hand, intellectuals are impatient with and distrustful of the
masses, because they are
difficult to mobilize for the revolutionary cause.
Peasants, after all, having lived from time
immemorial in an unchanging
environment, in ignorance, and in the isolation of their villages, tend to
be
politically passive and, in this sense, conservative, even if they are deeply
discontented. Even
workers, who have recently been torn out of this
environment, may express their resentment of their new
urban and
industrial setting by wishing to return to their peasant existence and, in any
case, being
miserably poor, are more likely to be concerned with immediate
improvements of their situation than
with visions of a new and different
society under their own domination.
Still, modernizers may look to workers even more than to peasants for
mass support, because workers are
more accessible to them and more easily
organized, and they may be more open to promises of change and to
anticolonial views as they face colonial employers. Also, modernizing
intellectuals often think of themselves as socialists, partly because they
favor the nationalization of
industry and sometimes of land, and partly
because their teachers and models in advanced countries are
much more
likely to have been on the (anticolonial) Left than on the (pro-colonial)
Right. As
socialists, intellectuals have learned from the West, they must
have a labor following.
Along with modern views and values, Western-educated intellectuals
acquire the vocabulary associated
with Western politics and particularly
with whatever Western ideology they adopt. They thus come to
think of
politics in their own underdeveloped countries in terms of concepts that
acquired their
meaning from the politics of industrialized countries and
hence may be more or less irrelevant in their
own environment. If they act
in line with the original meaning of these concepts, they are likely to
fail
politically. If they succeed politically, it is because they have infused a new
meaning
appropriate to their nonindustrial environment into the “industrial”
concepts, but they do retain the
old terminology.
 This has been the fate of words like “nationalism,” “socialism,” and
“democracy.” Nationalism changed
from an ideology advocating that
people speaking a single language be united in a single state into a
quite
different ideology seeking to unite people, regardless of their language and
ethnicity, against
the political and economic manifestations of colonialism.
Socialism changed from an ideology advocating
equality and power for an
industrial working class to a quite different one advocating
industrialization
under the leadership of intellectuals acting through their government.
Democracy,
linked in Europe to representative parliamentary government
with universal suffrage and civil
liberties, has in underdeveloped countries
lost all meaning except that of a vague claim, available to
any leader,
movement, or regime, that he, she, or it represents the “people.”
The word “Marxism” has undergone a similar change of meaning from
the social theory formulated by Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels to
something vaguely incorporating the meanings of what “nationalism,”
“socialism,” and “democracy” stand for in underdeveloped countries. But
here it is not just a single
word being retained. A whole conceptual
vocabulary of words—”capitalism” and “socialism,” “bourgeoisie”
and
“proletariat,” “class struggle” and “revolution”—had to be retained by those
who considered
themselves “Marxists.” Yet in its original meaning, that
vocabulary did not fit the social facts they
confronted; it therefore had to be
watered down or changed in its meaning.
As intellectuals employ Western concepts, these concepts become myths
that, once accepted by them and
often also by their opponents, affect
political behavior no matter how irrelevant their original
meaning may be in
their new environment. If a politician in an underdeveloped country calls
himself a socialist or a Marxist, his policies will evoke reactions,
friendly
and hostile, at home and abroad that they might not evoke if he used a
different label, and he
in turn will respond to these reactions.
Political processes putting an end to traditional aristocratic and colonial
regimes have, more or less
clearly, occurred in virtually all underdeveloped
countries. It is a striking fact that in spite of
numerous cultural and
historical differences among such countries and in spite of the small
numbers of
modernizing intellectuals, they have played a key role in these
processes and generally been
overrepresented, at least in the first generation
of leaders forming the successor regimes in most
underdecountries.
 This is not to deny major differences in the role of the intellectuals in
different countries. Thus, in
independent countries like Russia and Ethiopia,
they see the domestic traditional ruling groups as
their principal enemies,
while in colonies like India and Indonesia, their main drive is directed at
the
colonial power. Still, they all seem to share the twin goals of
industrialization and independence,
though some may emphasize the former
and some the latter.
In some cases, as those of the Chinese Communists and the Algerian
nationalists, modernizing
intellectuals could mobilize a large mass
following in their quest for power; in others, such as in the
Egyptian and
Libyan revolutions, a relatively few army officers could remove and replace
the old
regime. That difference is, of course, related to that between
protracted guerrilla warfare and a quick
coup d’état, just two of various
forms—peaceful or violent, gradual or sudden—that revolutions of
modernizers can assume.
The new modernizing leaders also differ widely with respect to their
success in realizing their goal of
rapid and far-reaching industrialization.
The new Soviet regime, enjoying a head start as a result of
the
industrialization introduced in the final decades of tsarism, turned a
backward country into a
major industrial power; the Chinese Communists
and the newly independent Indian government, too, had
great measures of
success; other modernizing regimes were less successful, and some failed
totally.
Successful industrialization leads to the replacement of
revolutionary modernizing intellectuals as
leaders by new technocratic and
managerial bureaucrats. Failure may lead to an antimodern reaction,
such as
religious fundamentalism, or to continuing conflicts among modernizing
intellectuals, who blame
each other for the failure and who may mobilize
other groups that may come to replace those in power.
Immense as all these differences are, we need not be concerned with
them here, for our interest is not
in the general course of political change in
underdeveloped countries but in the appeal of
“Marxism-Leninism” to some
of their intellectuals.

THE APPEAL OF
LENINISM

From Proletarian Revolution to

Modernizing Revolution
 A doctrine as centrally concerned with capitalist industry and the
industrial working class as Marxism
is obviously irrelevant in countries
without or virtually without capitalist industry or an industrial
working
class. It is not Marxism, then, that has appealed to intellectuals in
underdeveloped countries
but another ideology that retained the Marxist
promise of a successful revolution. It is very appealing
to such intellectuals
and extremely relevant in traditional and colonial societies under the impact
of
modernization.
The revolution, however, now had to be divorced from the working class,
and hence from the very
foundation of Marx’s promise. He and his
followers in the Western socialist parties had never predicted
or advocated
just any kind of revolution. It is of the essence of the Marxian system of
thought that
capitalism turns the industrial proletariat into a revolutionary
class and makes its eventual victory
inevitable. Advocates of any kind of
revolution other than a proletarian one against capitalism (or, at
an earlier
stage of historical development, of a bourgeois one against feudalism)
cannot rely on Marx
for support. Marx was not an analyst or an advocate of
revolutions of one ethnic group against another,
of intellectuals against
colonialism, of peasants against landlords, even of the “masses,” the
“toilers,” or the “poor” against the rich and powerful.
In Marx, the two themes of the advancement of the working class and of
revolution are inextricably
linked. The working class cannot advance
beyond a certain point without winning its revolution, and the
revolution is
necessarily a proletarian revolution, that is, it is fought by the proletariat
and brings
the proletariat to power. In the course of the development of
Marxism, the advancement of labor became
the real content of its program
and policies, while revolution, as we saw in chapter 2, gradually changed
from a predicted event to a myth that gradually lost
its power to inspire
behavior, until the theme of revolution disappeared altogether.
It could be argued that in underdeveloped countries, the fate of the two
Marxian themes was simply
reversed. It was revolution that was the real
content of the programs and policies of movements that
thought of
themselves as Marxist, while the theme of the advancement of the working
class soon became a
myth to be eventually dropped. It must be stressed,
however, that the two themes are not equally
essential in Marx’s theory. A
movement adhering only to the laborite theme can retain its Marxian
character, while a movement adhering only to the revolutionary theme is
not Marxist, as I have defined
that term.
The advancement of labor from a state of poverty, impotence, and
degradation
to one of prosperity, power, and dignity is at the very heart of
Marx’s thought. If “revolution” merely
means the conquest of power by
labor, then the revolutionary theme is as essential as that of the
advancement of labor, simply because it is part of it. But if the theme of
revolution refers to a more
or less sudden and violent event replacing a
government, as it has in underdeveloped countries, then
that theme is a less
essential component of Marx’s thought than that of the advancement of
labor and is
separable from his theory.
In the West, it took the better part of a century for the theme of revolution
to become wholly
separated from that of the advancement of labor and to
disappear as the environment of the labor
movement changed so as to make
the concept of revolution more and more inappropriate and irrelevant. In
underdeveloped countries, too, what in the young Lenin could still be seen
as the Marxian doctrine had
to travel through some time and, even more,
through some space for the two themes to become separated,
a process in
which the laborite essence of Marxism was lost and a different ideology that
still
retained Marxist terminology arose.
To the extent that the two processes of the two Marxian themes becoming
separated are similar, one can
see tsarist Russia playing a role similar to that
of the German Empire. The labor movement in the
present Federal
Republic of Germany would have paid little more attention to Marx’s
thought than did
the British labor movement, if in its centurylong history
from Karl Marx to Willy Brandt there had not
been for nearly half a century
the German Empire, whose authoritarian government and repressive and
discriminatory labor policies kept the concept of revolution alive at least as
a relevant myth.
Similarly, revolutionary modernizing intellectuals in
countries like Ethiopia and Afghanistan would
have paid no attention to
what Marx wrote about capitalism long ago and would not have claimed to
represent an actually nonexistent working class, if between Marx and
Mengistu and Najibullah there had
not been Lenin, who employed the
language of Marx with its proletarian emphasis, and the Russian
Revolution, which was described in Marxian terms and in which real
workers played a significant role.
 The German Social-Democratic Party, from its beginnings to the present,
has maintained its concern with
the advancement of labor and thus could (if
it were so inclined) claim a certain continuity in its
history going back, in
part, to Marx, precisely because, in the period of the Empire, Marx’s other
theme of revolution also remained relevant. Similarly, revolutionaries in
underdeveloped countries
can—wrongly, in my view— see themselves as
descendants of Marx, because in Lenin and the Russian
Revolution not only
the theme of revolution but also that of the advancement of labor retained
some
relevance.
In this sense, then, turn-of-the-century Russia served a function similar to
that of the German Empire, as the former was the locus of the replacement
of Marxism by Leninism and
the latter produced the transmutation of
Marxism into modern Social Democracy. To be sure, the
industrial
proletariat in Russia constituted only a small fraction of the total
population, not
remotely close to the proletarian majority Marx had in mind
when he thought of the revolution. Also, it
consisted mostly not of workers
matured, experienced, and united in the course of long class struggles,
as
Marx imagined his proletariat, but of peasants recently displaced into
industry and discontented and
even revolutionary for that very reason. Still,
there were workers in the final decades of the tsarist
empire, and, when
Lenin thought and wrote of proletarians and even of revolutionary
proletarians, he
was not referring to a mere fiction.28
It was surely the theme of revolution that attracted Lenin, a revolutionary
intellectual, to
Marxism,29 and the existence
of real workers in Russia no
doubt helped to make Marx’s concept of proletarian revolution appear
relevant to Lenin’s needs. Thus, Lenin came to think, speak, and write the
language of Marxism, a
language appropriate to industrialized societies, just
as many intellectuals in underdeveloped
countries have come to adopt the
languages of ideologies of industrialized societies.
As Lenin functioned as an effective revolutionary politician in an
underdeveloped country, the concept
of revolution came more and more to
be divorced from the proletariat in his thought, his policies, and,
as I shall
note, even in his language. It was Lenin’s intellectual-led revolution, as
distinguished
from Marx’s proletarian revolution, that could appeal to some
other modernizing revolutionary
intellectuals in underdeveloped countries,
even if it remained clothed in the inappropriate language of
Marxism.30
 Indeed, the Marxian language lent to the prediction and advocacy of
revolution a scientific character
that impressed intellectuals in
underdeveloped countries inclined to admire Western science. Like Lenin
himself, they were attracted to the prospect and the scientific promise of
revolution, and they could
accept the Russian Revolution as a model along
with the Marxian socialist and proletarian language that
Lenin and his
successors had attached to it. They might even use the term “proletarian
revolution” for
the revolution they hoped to and sometimes did make, but in
their practice that revolution had few, if
any, links to any real proletariat,
which may not even have existed in their underdeveloped countries.
For Marx, the revolution would not be a result of revolutionary ideas held
by intellectuals like
himself, but a reaction of the proletariat to its changing
position in capitalist society. When Marx
and Engels wrote in one of their
early works that “the existence of
revolutionary ideas in a particular period
presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class,”31 they were merely
saying what was
obvious from the perspective of their conception of
history. Social classes, rooted in relations of
production, are in the base of
the historical process; ideas and ideologies are in the superstructure;
and it
is changes in the base that “in the last analysis” determine changes in the
superstructure, not
vice versa.
Thus, it could never have occurred to Marx and Engels, two intellectuals
with revolutionary ideas, to
search for a revolutionary class. To them, that
class was given, and their own revolutionary ideas were
merely a
consequence of its existence. Similarly, their followers in the next
generation, who became
leaders and ideologists of the newly emerging
socialist parties in Central and Western Europe, took it
for granted that
support for their ideas would come primarily from industrial workers. This
expectation, even if it was to some extent self-fulfilling, was powerfully
reinforced when it proved to
be largely accurate. Marxist leaders and
Marxist ideology were accepted by political parties associated
with labor
movements, and it was workers—though by no means all workers or only
workers—who provided
what mass support they enjoyed. Clearly, for
Marxists in industrialized Europe, there was no problem
finding and
identifying a revolutionary class or, rather, the revolutionary class; as Marx
and Engels
had said, their ideas, that is, their very existence as Marxists,
presupposed the existence of such a
class.
 For Lenin and Leninists in underdeveloped countries, on the other hand,
finding a revolutionary class
is a very serious problem; indeed, it is an
insoluble one. Revolutionary modernizing intellectuals in
underdeveloped
countries derive their ideas from industrialized countries. If such ideas are
to be
thought of as superstructural, their base is to be found abroad.
Revolutionary ideology in India or
Russia may rest on a base in Britain or
Germany, not in India or Russia. Thus, it is quite possible for
modernizing
intellectuals in an underdeveloped country to hold a revolutionary ideology
even though
there is no revolutionary class in their country. For many, this
presents no problem; they may be able
to mobilize support from various
discontented groups or even to make their revolution by themselves,
particularly if they control the military. But Lenin and Leninists, thinking
only in terms of the
Mandan conceptual vocabulary, felt obliged to
associate their revolutionary ideology with a
revolutionary class. The search
for such a class was a major, perennial preoccupation for Lenin.
For Marx, in industrial Europe, the answer to the question of what class
would make the next revolution
seemed so simple and obvious as to render
the question superfluous. Lenin in underdeveloped Russia, and
then his
followers in other underdeveloped countries, on the other hand,
debated
endlessly whether the next revolution would be bourgeois or proletarian, or
perhaps a little
bit of both, or begin as one and end as the other. They
worried about the roles the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat would play in
this revolution, for it could not be assumed that the bourgeoisie would be
revolutionary in the bourgeois revolution or even that the proletariat would
make—initiate and lead—the
proletarian revolution. And, more relevant in
underdeveloped countries, what role would the peasantry
play in the
bourgeois and/or proletarian revolution? Was it more bourgeois or more
proletarian, or
perhaps pettybourgeois or semi-proletarian?
Given the political situation they confronted in their underdeveloped
countries, Lenin and his
followers could never come up with definite and
consistent answers to such questions. As I hope to show
in some of the
following pages, Lenin was, in spite of his vocabulary and because of his
realism,
unable to think of politics clearly in terms of classes and of class
conflict. No doubt, this is one
major reason why Leninism, in contrast to
Marxism, proved to be relevant to the needs of revolutionary
modernizers.
 Industrialization
I must now try to explain the appeal of Leninism to modernizing
intellectuals in underdeveloped
countries and the character of Leninism as a
response to the sociopolitical environment of traditional
agrarian societies
under the impact of modernization coming from industrialized societies. If
one
defines an ideology with reference to the social groups whose interests
it represents and to whom it
appeals, then, to make the argument persuasive
that the ideology propounded by Lenin was a modernizing
one, it must be
shown that his thought represented the interests of and appealed to
modernizing
intellectuals, that the relevant attitudes characteristic of
modernizing intellectuals were also held
by Lenin.
The implications of Lenin’s thought and its differences from Marxism
have become clearer in the
thought, and especially in the political practice,
of Leninist leaders in the underdeveloped world in
recent decades than they
were in Lenin’s own thought and behavior, because Lenin was so much
closer to
Marx both temporally and geographically than they are, and
because turn-of-the-century Russia was
industrially more developed than
are their countries. If I can show that even the European Lenin, born
in
Marx’s lifetime, replaced Marxism with an ideology fitting the needs of
modernizing intellectuals in
underdeveloped countries, that Lenin was a
Leninist and not a Marxist, it will be obvious that those in
Asia, Africa, and
Latin America who think of themselves as “Marxists-Leninists” Leninists”
a century after Marx adhere to the Leninist rather than the Marxist
ideology,
and that it is Leninism and not Marxism that has had some appeal and has
survived in
underdeveloped countries.
I must, then, turn to some of the elements in Lenin’s thought, in addition
to the most obvious one of
revolution, that could appeal to the intellectuals
whose values, goals, and attitudes I briefly
described above. It will be
immediately apparent that none of these elements are present or well
developed in Marx’s thought. Rather, they all constitute additions to or
modifications of Marx’s
Marxism, and some are incompatible with it.
Having adopted Western industrial values, modernizing intellectuals
commonly feel ashamed of the
backwardness of their countries and bemoan
what they regard as their inferiority vis-à-vis the advanced
industrialized
countries. This was a common theme in the thought of intellectuals in pre-
Revolutionary
Russia and is pervasive in Lenin’s writings, where he
frequently deals with the backwardness of the
Russian peasantry and sees
the solution to the problem in rapid industrialization.32
Until 1914, Lenin still shared the Marxian assumption that
industrialization would have to be, and
would be, brought about by
capitalism, which, he thought, in Russia would require a political
revolution
to turn peasants into landowners and into a new bourgeoisie, as the existing
one was tied to
the tsarist autocracy.33
During World War I and especially
during the Revolution, Lenin decided that there was no need for
capitalism
any more, but that industrialization could be advanced through government
control if the
government, in turn, was controlled by the Party, which he
sometimes simply identified with “the
workers.”34
It was this non-Marxian idea that became a key element of Leninism and
that proved attractive to
modernizing intellectuals who were intent on the
rapid industrialization of their underdeveloped
countries and for whom the
capitalist route to industrialization that Marx had envisaged seemed neither
available nor desirable. Nor did Lenin’s naiveté and ignorance regarding
industrialization35 shock them, for these
characteristics were similar to their
own; the first generation of modernizing intellectuals in
underdeveloped
countries were typically trained as law- yers (like Lenin), physicians,
teachers, or
journalists rather than as economists, scientists, or engineers.
Like Lenin, they had little
understanding of but great faith in Western
science and technology.
Lenin expressed this faith when he said “Communism is Soviet power
plus the electrification of the
whole country…. Only when the country has
been electrified, and industry, agriculture and transport
have been placed on
the technical basis of modern large-scale industry, only then shall we be
fully
victorious.”36 In his last
article, he wrote, “we [have] to develop our
large-scale machine industry, to
develop electrification, the hydraulic
extraction of peat … etc. In this, and in this alone, lies our
hope.”37
It was principally only after Lenin’s death, under Stalin’s rule, that
industrialization was, in fact,
undertaken by the Soviet regime.38 In recent
years it became quite evident that the Soviet economy, as it was built
up and
directed under Stalin, could not meet the demands for consumer goods of
broad strata in a now
industrial society. But that should not obscure the
relevance and attractiveness of Soviet
industrialization to modernizing
intellectuals, who did not live in industrial societies or worry about
their
problems, but were eager to create such societies.
 Stalinist industrialization, as it is foreshadowed in Lenin’s thought, was
appealing to such
intellectuals because it was rapid and emphasized heavy
industry as the basis of further
industrialization, it was carried out largely
independent of Western capital, and it was directed by
intellectuals and
created new opportunities for them. Above all, it was successful in attaining
the
goal of modernizing intellectuals of turning a backward agrarian society
into a modern industrial one.
The huge price paid for this success in terms
of many millions of people being deprived both of
material welfare and of
freedom of movement, of choice, and of expression could easily be ignored
by
modernizing intellectuals and may not have seemed so great to them in
the context of the widespread
material and intellectual poverty in their own
countries and in relation to the hoped-for rewards to be
obtained at this
price.

Anti-imperialism
The emphasis in Lenin’s thought—and in Stalin’s practice—given to
rapid industrialization that proved
so appealing to modernizing intellectuals
in underdeveloped countries was a reaction to the fact that
in the early
twentieth century Russia itself was still a largely underdeveloped country.
To put it
briefly, Lenin’s thought has appealed to modernizing intellectuals
because Lenin was himself a
modernizing intellectual.
Lenin shared, however, the then widespread misconception, to which I
shall return in chapter 5, that the modernizing revolutionary movements of
Russia and Eastern
Europe were part of the international labor movement.
As a result, he saw himself not only as
functioning in his own
underdeveloped country but was also concerned with the politics of Western
industrialized countries and especially with their labor movements, though
he had little understanding
of them. When, during World War I, they
behaved in ways incompatible with his conception of Marxism, he
developed his theory of imperialism as a necessary stage of capitalism.
In this theory, Lenin was intent on explaining the War as an imperialist
one and thus on justifying his
wartime policy of revolutionary defeatism
and on denouncing Social Democrats who opposed that policy,
whether
they supported or opposed their belligerent governments. He was not
particularly interested in
the effects of imperialism on underdeveloped
countries. Tsarist Russia was in Lenin’s view one of the
imperialist powers,
even if the weakest link in the chain of imperialism, rather than a victim of
imperialism. He therefore did not think of his revolutionary struggle as one
to liberate his country
from the oppression of foreign imperialist enemies.
After the Revolution, however, Lenin identified his regime or at least saw
it as allied with the
victims of imperialism. In 1919, he declared: “It is self-
evident that this revolutionary movement of
the peoples of the East can now
develop effectively, can reach a successful issue, only in direct
association
with the revolutionary struggle of our Soviet Republic against international
imperialism.”39 And in his
last article, “Better Fewer, But Better,” Lenin
bluntly spoke of the coming “conflict between the
counter-revolutionary
imperialist West and the revolutionary and nationalist East,”40 and by
implication identified his own
revolution with the “nationalist,” anti-
imperialist one.
Lenin’s thought on imperialism has been powerfully appealing to
modernizing intellectuals who see
themselves as engaged in a struggle with
imperialism. Feeling that their countries have been exploited
and kept
backward and dependent by the colonial policies of industrialized powers,
they find an
explanation in Lenin’s theory. Often they come to regard
imperialism as representing all the complex
forces opposing them and
obstructing the attainment of their goals, as the single enemy so useful in
politics.
The fact that Lenin’s theory links imperialism inextricably to capitalism
also appeals to modernizing
intellectuals, who often oppose capitalism.
They may do so because some native capitalists in their
society can be
closely linked to the colonial economy. Other capitalists, though, may suffer
from it
and be potential anticolonial allies of the modernizers; and in any
case, native capitalists are not a
major political force in under-developed
countries. The intellectuals’ opposition to capitalism is more
likely to be
due mainly to the anticommercial prejudices of the aristocratic culture in
which they grew
up and to the attitudes they absorbed from their Western
teachers and models.
The modernizers’ anticapitalism, which, as anti-imperialism, is
concerned with the colonial impact on
the economy of the underdeveloped
country, is quite different in its motivation and its policy content
from
Marx’s laborite anticapitalism, just as nationalization of the means of
production to advance industrialization of an agrarian economy is quite
different in
form and content from Marx’s socialization designed to uplift
workers and to abolish sodal classes. But
the words and symbols of
anticapitalism and socialism have been employed by both Leninist
modernizers
and Marxist labor movements, allowing the former to think of
themselves as “Marxists-Leninists” or
simply Marxists.

Intellectuals and Workers

Leninist ideologists and leaders in underdeveloped countries have been
mostly intellectuals, but so
have the ideologists of Marxism and many
leaders of Marxist parties in industrial countries. The
leading role of
intellectuals in itself does not, then, distinguish Leninism from Marxism.
However,
intellectuals in the two different environments have different
values and interests, and this essay is
concerned with the values and
interests that ideologies express and with the groups associated with
these
interests. Leninism expresses values and interests of modernizing
intellectuals; Marxists, even
if they are intellectuals, represent workers’
interests.
Leninists stand for rapid industrialization of their societies, both because
they see it as bringing
progress to these backward societies and because,
like most people, they think a good society is one in
which people of their
own kind play an important role, as intellectuals expect to do in the process
of
industrialization and in an industrialized society. If and when they do
industrialize, modernizing
intellectuals or their managerial successors are
quite willing to let the price of that costly process
be paid in good part by
workers in terms of their material standard of living and of their individual
freedom. Marxist intellectuals, on the other hand, operating in already
industrialized countries, favor
greater material and cultural benefits and
more power for workers. What may well be the outstanding
example of a
government controlled by a Marxist party for a considerable period of time,
the
Social-Democratic municipal government of Vienna in the 1920s and
early 1930s, built extensive public
housing. Leninists built steel mills.
While Marxist leaders and ideologists were intellectuals, they were not,
like Leninists, modernizing
intellectuals. Certainly they were in favor of
modernity; they accepted industrialism and did not wish
to solve its
problems by a return to the simpler agrarian society. The workers they
wanted to represent
were, after all, a product of industrialization; and more
industry would be needed to produce more
workers and more wealth and to
lay the basis of the future socialist society that would provide
abundance for
all.
The creation of industry, however, was, according to Marx, the historical
function of capitalism. It
was to be accomplished by the bourgeoisie before
its domination was ended by
the victory of the labor movement, which
could itself only be a response to capitalist industry. To the
generation of
Marxists after Marx, this must have seemed like an obvious truth, for they
saw capitalist
industry and a socialist labor movement growing up all
around them. Marxists, then, did not think it
was the task of their movement
to bring about industrialization, because it was already being brought
about
by capitalism. They did not expect to come to power until industrialization
was far advanced.
They thought that they were close to this point in
Germany and Austria and that Britain, too, was near
a labor victory. Where
industry was not advanced, as in Russia and Italy, they called for patience
with
respect to the socialist revolution. Thus, as I will note in chapter
4, the
Mensheviks argued that the revolution due in Russia was the bourgeois one.
The Marxists were proved wrong in their assumption, derived from
Western experience and generally
shared in their day, that industry could be
created only by capitalism. Leninists, especially and first
in Russia, proved
that modernizers, too, can industrialize. But the point here is that Leninists
wanted
to, and did, assume responsibility for modernization; Marxists did
not. Leninists were modernizers;
Marxists were not.
Probably the most obvious reason why Leninism appeals to intellectuals
is that it is an ideology that
assigns a key role in the modernizing revolution
to intellectuals. It does so because it is itself a
response to the process of
modernization and thus recognizes that intellectuals play a key role in it.
What makes this less than obvious is merely the fact that in expressing his
ideology, Lenin employs the
language of Marxism, a different ideology
concerned with the different historical process of the
development of
capitalism and of the proletarian revolution, in which it assigns a key role to
the
industrial proletariat.
Thus, Lenin thought of his modernizing revolution as a proletarian
revolution and of workers playing
the leading role in the revolutionary
movement. They do so, however, as represented by intellectuals
or, as
Lenin put it more often, by his Party or simply by “us.” The introduction of
“the Party” is
generally seen as Lenin’s major modification of or
contribution to Marxism, but it does not merely add
an organizational
element that was absent in Marx’s Marxism. Marx’s social-democratic
successors had
added such an element long before Lenin did, but it
continued to express Marx’s concern with the
working class. The
introduction of Lenin’s “party of a new type” involves a change of the
ideology from
a laborite ideology to one of intellectuals. The Party is, and
“we” are, in Lenin’s mind clearly
distinct from the working class and must
lead that class where it would otherwise not go. In short, it
is intellectuals,
not workers, who give direction to and lead the revolutionary movement.41
As much as Lenin changed his position on other issues, he remained very
consistent on the leading role of the Party, that is, of intellectuals. Here it
will suffice if we
document this with two well-known passages from What
Is to Be Done?, his principal work
on the subject. There he argued that
workers, by their own efforts, can develop only trade union
consciousness,
but that “Social-Democratic consciousness… would have to be brought to
them from without
… by intellectuals.” What is more,
the spontaneous working-class movement is trade-unionism,… and trade-unionism means the
ideological
enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie. Hence our task, the task of Social-
Democracy, is to
combat spontaneity, to divert the working-class movement from this spontaneous
trade-unionist
striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie, and to bring it under the wing of
revolutionary
Social-Democracy.42

I noted earlier that modernizing intellectuals typically have an ambivalent

attitude toward the small
working class of their underdeveloped countries.
This is clearly true of Lenin as well. On the one
hand, like anyone who
thought of himself as a Marxist in his day, he ascribes to the working class
the
central role in contemporary and future history. On the other hand, he
obviously doubts that it can
play that role. As the passages just quoted
indicate, he views workers with considerable disdain and
distrust. A year
before he wrote these passages, he expressed that disdain for workers not
led by his
Party of intellectuals when he wrote: “Isolated from Social-
Democracy, the working-class movement
becomes petty and inevitably
becomes bourgeois.”43

Peasants and Peasant

Revolution
The modernizing intellectuals’ attitude toward the far more numerous
peasantry is politically much more
important than their attitude toward the
working class. It, too, is likely to be ambivalent, and that
was also true of
Lenin’s attitude. Just as the proletariat could be trusted only as long as it
was led
by the Party, that is, by modernizing intellectuals, so the proletariat
was to lead the
peasantry,44 meaning that,
directly or indirectly, intellectuals
must lead the peasantry, too.
By and large, before the Revolution of 1905, Lenin thought of the
peasantry as a dying class that would
become proletarianized under
inevitably coming capitalism, and he therefore favored “class struggle in
the
countryside.”45 Even
during the 1905 Revolution, he predicted a “new class
struggle between the peasant bourgeoisie and the
rural proletariar”—two
class categories quite alien to Marxism, which does not confuse industrial
and
preindustrial classes—and he noted that “the peasantry includes a great
number of semi-proletarian as well as petty-bourgeois elements.” He even
predicted that in the future
“the proletariat must accomplish the socialist
revolution, allying to itself the mass of the
semi-proletarian elements of the
population, so as to crush the bourgeoisie’s resistance by force and
paralyse
the instability of the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie.”46 This would
seem to say that the semi-proletarian
peasants are to paralyze the instability
of the peasants.
At the same time, Lenin expressed his contempt for the peasantry when,
outlining the “major social
forces,” he described it as follows: “The petty-
bourgeois and peasant section. Tens of millions. The
‘people’ par
excellence. Greatest state of benightedness and disorganization … they have
most to gain directly from the revolution. The greatest instability (today—
for the revolution,
tomorrow—for ‘law and order’ after slight
improvements).”47 Lenin was not always sure, then, whether the
peasantry
—or its semi-proletarian component—could be an ally of the proletariat,
nor did he clearly
indicate whether it could serve as such only in the
bourgeois revolution or also in the future
socialist one, when he
distinguished between these two at all. But he certainly came to see the
revolutionary potential of the peasantry in 1905.
Caught up in his Mandan categories, Lenin was emphatic that the 1905
Revolution could not be
proletarian and socialist, but only bourgeois and
capitalist. He stressed that “the immediate and
complete emancipation of
the working class [was] impossible. Only the most ignorant people can
close
their eyes to the bourgeois nature of the democratic revolution which
is now taking place.” It “will,
for the first time, really clear the ground for a
wide and rapid, European and not Asiatic, development
of capitalism; [and]
will, for the first time, make it possible for the bourgeoisie to rule as a
class.”48
But in the same pamphlet of 1905, “Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in
the Democratic Revolution,” in
which he insisted on what in Mandan
language he called the bourgeois character of the revolution, Lenin
stressed
that this revolution was made not by and for the bourgeoisie, but by the
proletariat and
especially by the peasantry: “the bourgeoisie is incapable of
carrying through the democratic
revolution to its consummation, while the
peasantry is capable of doing so.”49
Without … becoming socialist, or ceasing to be petty-bourgeois, the peasantry is capable of
becoming a
wholehearted and most radical adherent of the democratic revolution. The peasantry will
inevitably
become such if only the course of revolutionary events, which brings it enlightenment, is
not
prematurely cut short by the treachery of the bourgeoisie and the defeat of the proletariat.50

Only the proletariat can be a consistent fighter for democracy. It can become a victorious fighter
for
democracy only if the peasant masses join its revolutionary struggle. If the proletariat is not
strong
enough for this, the bourgeoisie will be at the head of the democratic revolution and will
impart an
inconsistent and self-seeking nature to it. Nothing but a
revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the
proletariat and the peasantry can prevent this.51

Looking back on the 1905 Revolution some two years later, Lenin was
quite clear on the agrarian content
of that “bourgeois” revolution. He
referred to “the peasant revolution as one of the varieties of
bourgeois
revolution” and to “the concept of peasant bourgeois revolution,”52 and
stated that “every peasant revolution directed
against medievalism, when
the whole of the social economy is of a capitalist nature, is a bourgeois
revolution.”53 He concluded
that
the agrarian question is the basis of the bourgeois revolution in Russia and determines the specific
national character of this revolution. The essence of this question is the struggle of the peasantry to
abolish landlordism and the survival of serfdom in the agricultural system of Russia and,
consequently,
also in all her social and political institutions.54

Lenin could, then, at least verbally have his Marxian cake of the
bourgeois revolution and eat it, too,
in an underdeveloped country without a
revolutionary bourgeoisie and with a potentially revolutionary
peasantry.
Taken literally, the idea of a bourgeois revolution, “at the head” of which
must not be the
bourgeoisie, a bourgeois revolution that is not made by the
bourgeoisie but by peasants led by workers,
that is betrayed by the
bourgeoisie, and that brings to power not the bourgeoisie to develop
capitalism
but a presumably anticapitalist “revolutionary-democratic
dictatorship of the proletariat and the
peasantry,” certainly is, from a
Mandan perspective, nonsense. But while Lenin’s thought as a social
theorist was fatally flawed by his application of Marx’s concepts to an
environment quite different
from Marx’s, he did not let these concepts
interfere with the pursuit of policies he considered
appropriate to his
underdeveloped Russian environment.
Lenin’s bourgeois revolution is a peasant revolution or, as he puts it,
again having his cake and
eating it, too, a “peasant bourgeois revolution”;
but the peasants must be led by the workers, who, in
turn, must be led by
the Party of intellectuals. It is, incidentally, because Lenin expects his Party,
which he sometimes identified with “the” workers, to lead both the
proletariat and the peasantry that
he does not have to explain why the far
more numerous peasants would accept the leadership of the
workers. In
short, Lenin’s bourgeois revolution turns out to be the revolution of
modernizing
intellectuals mobilizing what mass support they can among the
lower classes, that is, mostly the
peasantry. Marx’s view of class struggle,
revolutions, and historical stages derived from the
experience of industrial
Western Europe is replaced by a very different view relevant to the
experience
of underdeveloped countries but confusingly expressed in the
Mandan vocabulary.

Marx and
Lenin on Bourgeois, Proletarian, and Peasant
Revolutions
In Marx’s theory, the bourgeois revolution against feudalism and the
proletarian revolution against
capitalism are sharply distinct and separated
by a considerable period of time. The conditions for the
proletarian
revolution—the growth of industry and of the proletariat—are created only
in this period of
the bourgeoisie’s predominance following its revolutionary
victory. In Lenin’s thought, the “bourgeois”
revolution that results in the
dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry is not clearly
distinguishable from the proletarian revolution that results in a similar
dictatorship. The two
revolutions merge into one that is, in fact, neither
bourgeois nor proletarian, but is the revolution
of modernizing intellectuals.
As Lenin, somewhat like Trotsky at the time, wrote during the 1905
Revolution: “from the democratic revolution we shall at once … begin to
pass to the socialist
revolution. We stand for uninterrupted revolution.”55
His failure to think clearly in terms of two distinct
revolutions no doubt
accounts for Lenin’s indecisiveness as to the difference, if any, in the
peasantry’s role in the two revolutions.
When Lenin saw his opportunity to seize power in Russia in November
1917, he effectively decided—in the
face of opposition from those of his
followers who saw this as a startling innovation—to skip the
bourgeois
revolution altogether and to move directly to what he thought of as a
socialist revolution,
and his new revolutionary government claimed to
represent both workers and peasants.56 Looking back on his revolution two
years
later, he clearly saw it as a revolution of both workers and peasants
against both capitalism and
feudalism:
In our struggle against feudal survivals and capitalism, we succeeded in uniting the peasants and
workers of Russia; and it was because the peasants and workers united against capitalism and
feudalism
that our victory was so easy…. The Russian revolution showed how the proletarians, after
defeating
capitalism and uniting with the vast diffuse mass of working peasants, rose up victoriously
against
medieval oppression.57

The Mandan scheme of two revolutions with an intervening period of

growing capitalism and a growing
proletariat did not fit the needs of Lenin
as a modernizing revolutionary in an underdeveloped country.
Such
revolutionaries look forward to the one revolution that will put an end to the
old regime and
bring them to power to modernize their country. Like Lenin,
many of them call their revolutions
“socialist,” often because that word
links them to Marx and always because it vaguely promises a better
future,
especially for the lower classes. But such “socialist” revolutions in
underdeveloped countries,
beginning with the Russian one, were not and
could not be made by labor
movements, nor did they or could they bring
them to power.
Concern with workers and appeals to them by modernizing intellectuals,
especially those, like Lenin, in
the early twentieth century, may be due to
Marx’s influence and also that of the German
Social-Democratic Party, then
regarded as the model Marxist party. In an underdeveloped environment,
depending on whether the working-class segment of the population was
small, tiny, or nonexistent, these
appeals and concerns were more or less
irrelevant politically. On the other hand, appeals to and
concern with the
peasantry as a major ally were a response to the environment rather than to
Marxist or
SPD influence.
 Marx, with French peasants in mind, called the peasantry “the class
which represents barbarism within
civilization,”58 hardly a way
to describe
a revolutionary ally of the proletariat. The hammer and sickle would have
struck him as a
strange symbol for a revolutionary proletarian party. The
SPD, though it could have benefited from
peasants’ votes, refused and was
unable to make an effective appeal to them, because their interests
clashed
with those of its prime constituency, the working class. Marx and the SPD,
obviously, responded
to conditions in France and Germany;59 Lenin
responded to conditions in turn-of-the-century Russia.
Just as he had done in shifting the leading role in the revolutionary
movement from the proletariat to
the intellectuals, so in recognizing the
potential of the peasantry as a revolutionary ally, Lenin took
account of the
reality of the underdeveloped environment in which he operated and
implicitly
acknowledged the irrelevance of Marxism to it. He continued to
speak of the proletariat and the
bourgeoisie, but, as an effective
revolutionary politician, he recognized the key role of intellectuals
and
peasants in the revolutionary politics of underdeveloped countries. He saw
that the bourgeoisie and
the proletariat were weak and would not make
revolutions, and, while retaining their class
designations, he substituted the
peasants and the intellectuals for them.
By referring to the peasants as a “rural proletariat” and as “semi-
proletarian,” Lenin obfuscated the
difference between what to Marx was a
remnant of the preindustrial order without a revolutionary role
in capitalist
society and the industrial working class whose strength and revolutionary
class
consciousness would inevitably grow with the growth of capitalist
industry. The tremendous emphasis in
Lenin’s thought on the peasantry, like
that on the Party, that is, on modernizing intellectuals—both
elements quite
absent in Marx’s thought—make Lenin’s Leninism relevant to conditions of
underdevelopment and the needs of modernizing intellectuals, and hence
are major factors accounting for
the appeal of Leninism to the latter.60
That Lenin was realistic in putting the peasantry in a central position in
his revolutionary scheme is shown by the fact that what mass support
Leninists have actually mobilized
in underdeveloped countries has been
drawn largely from the peasantry, not only in Russia but also
notably in
China and Vietnam. Although peasants can, then, be far more numerous
supporters of
Leninist-led movements and revolutions than intellectuals and
can be crucial for their success, I have
emphasized the latter here because it
is they, beginning with Lenin, who became Leninists.
Peasants—and the same is probably true of workers—are not likely to be
caught up in the Leninist
ideology. They do not favor the rapid
industrialization of their societies independent of foreign
capitalism and
therefore mostly at the peasants’ and workers’ expense. Whatever it is,
other than
Leninism, that may motivate them to support Leninist-led
movements and sometimes to take great risks on
their behalf cannot—and
need not—be adequately dealt with in an essay on Leninist ideology.

No Class Struggle in Russia

In making intellectuals the leaders and peasants the principal allies or,
indeed, components of the
revolutionary movement, Lenin implicitly
recognized that that movement was not Marx’s proletarian
movement born
of the class struggle against capitalism. It was, rather, a modernizing
revolutionary
movement directed against the traditional aristocratic order
and—less in Russia than in many other
underdeveloped countries—against
foreign colonialism. In Lenin’s day, it was, to be sure, not possible
for him
and his contemporaries to see, let alone explicitly to describe, the situation
from this point
of view, which has become much more accessible to post-
World War II generations. This is a matter I
will touch on in chapter 5.
Modernizing revolutionary movements in underdeveloped countries are
not class movements fighting a
class struggle. Some modernizing
intellectuals do not even seek support beyond their own ranks of
students
and professionals, including modern army officers. If they do, they can,
with more or less
success, turn to all kinds of people who, torn out of their
traditional passivity and impotence by the
beginnings of modernization,
have grievances against the traditional aristocracy of big landlords, the
clergy, bureaucrats, and army officers. Supporters of the modernizers may
be recruited both from modern
strata, like the intelligentsia, workers, and
what “bourgeoisie” of businessmen there might be, and
from traditional
strata, like peasants and small traders and artisans. In opposition to
colonialism,
they may even be joined by elements from the traditional
aristocracy.
The concept of class struggle that is central to Marxism, both that of
aristocracy versus bourgeoisie
and that of bourgeoisie versus proletariat, is
largely irrelevant in the
politics of modernizing movements in under-
developed countries fighting traditionalism and colonialism.
Obviously this
is particularly true if there is hardly any bourgeoisie or proletariat in these
countries. In turn-of-the-century Russia, a bourgeoisie and a proletariat did
exist, and Lenin was much
too deeply influenced by Marx not to think of
the political conflicts he was engaged in as class
struggles. Nevertheless, his
thought undermines the Mandan concept of class struggle and is, for that
very reason, relevant to the needs of modernizing intellectuals and
appealing to them.
For one thing, there is, derived from his theory of imperialism, Lenin’s
theory of “combined
development” of the two major Mandan class
struggles, of the bourgeois-democratic and the
proletarian-socialist
revolutions proceeding simultaneously in underdeveloped countries. It
legitimizes
all sorts of alliance strategies combining and cutting across
Mandan class categories as well as
reliance by modernizing revolutionaries
on support from various groups.61
The theory of combined development is still expressed in terms of classes
and class struggles, but the
implications of Lenin’s thought are destructive
of these Mandan concepts. If it is intellectuals,
organized in the Party, that
must lead the revolutionary movement, these intellectuals need not confine
their following to workers. The Party can turn to other classes for support,
to add them to or even to
replace the working class.62
It can appeal to all
kinds of people who, if they join the Party, will, by definition, be referred to
as proletarians and, if they follow the Party, will be accepted as allies of the
proletariat. In fact,
they all constitute a modernizing movement.
This logic of Leninism has become quite manifest in so-called Marxist-
Leninist movements in
underdeveloped countries in recent decades, as I
shall note when I turn to these movements, but to a
considerable extent it
was made explicit already by Lenin himself. Most obviously, Lenin added
peasants
to workers as being mobilizable on behalf of his revolutionary
movement. But he also blurred and
watered down the concepts of classes,
as Marx had defined them, as he adjusted to the reality of
Russian politics
and, in particular, to the revolutions of 1905 and 1917.
We have already seen how unclear Lenin’s conceptions of the peasantry
and the bourgeoisie were, and I
will note in a moment that this was even
more true of his thinking with respect to underdeveloped
countries other
than Russia. More and more the proletariat, too, came to be expanded in his
mind beyond
industrial workers and to be replaced by wider and looser
categories like the “masses” and the
“toilers.”63
Marx, in an industrial environment, could imagine that the proletariat
was or soon would be the great
majority of the population. For Lenin, in
underdeveloped Russia, similarly to claim that his ideology
represented the
interests of a vast majority, the peasants had to be combined with the
workers in some non-Mandan category.64 In March 1917, he wrote that “the
Soviet of Workers’
Deputies is an organisation of the workers, the embryo
of a workers’ government, the representative of
the interests of the entire
mass of the poor section of the population, i.e., of nine-tenths of
the
population.”65 Here Lenin
conceives of workers as representing all the poor,
regardless of their class—that is, virtually the
entire, in fact still
overwhelmingly agrarian, population of Russia.
But even before 1905, Lenin had stressed that his Party had to appeal to
all classes, especially in
What is to Be Done? That this emphasis is to be
found in his principal early work on the role of
the Party suggests that
Lenin’s “classless” approach is, indeed, linked to his conception of the
leading role of intellectuals. This becomes evident when he writes: “We
must take upon ourselves
the task of organising an all-round political
struggle under the leadership of our Party in such a
manner as to make it
possible for all oppositional strata to render their fullest support to the
struggle and to our Party.”66
“The Social-Democrats must go among all classes of the population;
they must dispatch units of
their army in all directions.” “We must have
‘our own people,’ Social-Democrats, everywhere,
among all social strata.”
Lenin precedes both these sentences with statements saying this was
necessary
“to bring political knowledge to the workers,” but the second one
is followed immediately by the
statement that “such people are required,
not only for propaganda and agitation, but in still larger
measure for
organisation.”67
On the next page of What Is to Be Done?, Lenin states very bluntly that
our task is to utilise every manifestation of discontent, and to gather and turn to the best account
every protest, however small… Indeed, is there a single social class in which there are no individuals,
groups, or circles that are discontented with the lack of rights and with tyranny and, therefore,
accessible to the propaganda of Social-Democrats as the spokesmen of the most pressing general
democratic needs?
This is followed by a reference to Social-Democratic political agitation
“among all classes and
strata of the population” and the statement “that in
order to become the vanguard [of the revolutionary
forces], we must attract
other classes.”68

No Class Struggle in the

“East”
If Lenin advocated the inclusion in the revolutionary movement of
people, regardless of their dass, in
Russia, thus implicitly seeing his country
as an underdeveloped one, where Marx’s concept of dass
struggle did not
apply, it is not surprising that he did the same with respect to even less
developed
countries.
After Lenin had been in power for about two years, his hopes for
Communist
revolutions in Central and Western Europe began to fade. These
hopes had rested on the false assumption
that underdeveloped Russia and a
revolution there could serve as a model for industrialized countries.
He now
became interested in seeing in underdeveloped countries revolutionary
prospects and possible
allies for his own new revolutionary regime in
Russia and he began to emphasize the relevance and
possible appeal of the
new Soviet experience to potential revolutionaries there.69 He generally
refers to underdeveloped countries
vaguely as “the East,” and thinks
principally of Asia, for Africa south of the Sahara and Latin America
evidently remained terrae incognitae for Lenin throughout his life.
Lenin now speaks of “the revolutionary masses of those countries where
there is no proletariat or
hardly any,”70 and by
demanding the unity of these
“masses” with “the revolutionary proletarians of the capitalist, advanced
countries,”71 he calls
attention to their nonproletarian character. He refers to
them by such vague terms as “the toiling
masses,” the “working masses,”
“the whole mass of the working population,”72 “the oppressed masses of the
colonial, Eastern
countries,”73 and “the
oppressed masses, those who are
exploited, not only by merchant capital but also by the
feudalists.”74
What Lenin advocates in his statements to the Second Congress of the
Communist International of
July–August 1920, from which these phrases
are quoted, is “the closest alliance with Soviet Russia of
all the national and
colonial liberation movements … of the bourgeois-democratic liberation
movement of
the workers and peasants in backward countries or among
backward nationalities,”75 and “the closest possible alliance between the
West-European communist proletariat and the revolutionary peasant
movement in the East, in the
colonies, and in the backward countries
generally.”76
Yielding to the objections of the Indian delegate, M. N. Roy, who
evidently found it more difficult
than did Lenin to accept the idea of
Communist “active assistance” to and an “alliance” with a
“bourgeois”
movement,77 Lenin
agreed to substitute the term “national-revolutionary”
movement for “bourgeois-democratic” movement in
the final report to the
Congress. But in noting this, he immediately added that “it is beyond doubt
that any national movement can only be a bourgeois-democratic movement,
since the overwhelming mass of
the population in the backward countries
consists of peasants who represent bourgeois-capitalist
relationships”78—
though a
page and a half later he also referred to “peasant feudal and semi-
feudal relations.”
It is quite clear, then, that Lenin expected the revolutionary movement in
underdeveloped countries, as
in Russia, to include peasants—indeed, no
doubt, to consist mostly of peasants as well as, more
generally, of the
“masses”—even where, as he says, there are no
proletarians.79 Whether
Lenin
also sought to appeal to the bourgeoisie in underdeveloped countries
and perhaps thought that the
“masses” and especially the “bourgeois-
democratic” movement would be led by members of the bourgeoisie
is less
clear.
Though he had severed Marx’s immediate link between the revolution
and the working class either by
inserting the Party between the two or even
by substituting it for the working class, Lenin was still
too wedded to
Marxian conceptions to be able to conceive of revolutions as anything other
than either
bourgeois or proletarian. Still reluctant to designate revolutions
in countries without a proletariat
as proletarian, he had to identify them as
bourgeois. Thus, paradoxically, it is peasants and
even workers, or at least
their political and economic roles, that are described as bourgeois, as when,
in the passages just quoted, peasants are said to represent “bourgeois-
capitalist relationships” and
“the bourgeois-democratic liberation
movement” is described as a movement “of workers and peasants in
backward countries.” Lenin can, then, in the same breath, urge Communists
to “assist” this “bourgeois”
movement and speak of “the struggle against
the bourgeoisie” and “victory over the bourgeoisie.”80
 But if workers and peasants are “bourgeois,” what about the bourgeoisie?
Is it “bourgeois” or
anti-bourgeois? What is its role as a class vis-à-vis the
“bourgeois-democratic movement” that is
fighting “against the
bourgeoisie”? Here Lenin is, not surprisingly, ambiguous when he states
that “the
bourgeoisie of the oppressed countries, while it does support the
national movement, is in full accord
with the imperialist bourgeoisie, i.e.,
joins forces with it against all revolutionary movements and
revolutionary
classes.”81
A number of factors may help to account for all this confusion as to who
is “bourgeois.” Generally, it
results from the application of Marx’s Western
“industrial” vocabulary, the only one with which Lenin
was familiar, to
nonindustrial societies. More specifically, for one thing, Lenin, as a
practical
politician, recognized the key role of members of the privileged
classes, like himself, in the
revolutionary politics of underdeveloped
countries. For another thing, he both used the Marxian term
“bourgeoisie”
quite loosely, where it had nothing to do with capitalism, and assumed, as a
Marxian
reflex, that his own revolutionary struggle was necessarily one
against the bourgeoisie, even in
countries where there was virtually no
proletariat and virtually no bourgeoisie. Finally, the ambiguous
and even
self-contradictory last sentence quoted may be the result of an attempt to
compromise with M.
N. Roy on Communist policy vis-à-vis “bourgeois-
democratic” movements in underdeveloped countries.
Lenin also seems quite confused or inconsistent regarding the peasantry.
In
Marx’s conception of history, based on his understanding of the history
of industrial countries,
peasants do not play an important active role in the
proletarian class struggle and revolution against
capitalism. Lenin,
concerned with agrarian countries, beginning with Russia, could not ignore
or
downgrade them as easily as Marx, but he was unable to think in terms
of concepts and categories other
than Marx’s. This probably accounts for
his difficulty in maintaining a consistent characterization of
the peasantry.
As we have seen, he referred to a “peasant bourgeoisie” and a “rural
proletariat”; he
called peasants “petty-bourgeois” and “semi-proletarian,”
and included them in the “toiling masses”; he
said peasants represented
“working people,” “bourgeois-capitalist relationships,” and “feudal and
semi-feudal relations.”
All this vagueness and ambiguity, confusion and inconsistency in Lenin’s
language regarding the class
character of revolutionary movements in
underdeveloped countries casts considerable doubt on his
competence as a
Marxist theorist, but, then, he would hardly have been taken seriously as
such had he
not been a successful revolutionary.82 In that latter capacity,
however, he did not really think in terms of
classes—which accounts for his
careless use of language—when it came to the question of who could be
mobilized to join revolutionary movements. To the realist Lenin, everyone
was welcome, regardless of
class, who was willing to accept the leadership
of the Party or could be useful to it.
The Party, nevertheless, remains in Lenin’s eyes a workers’ party. It is
that regardless of whether
workers are to be found, in whatever numbers, in
its leadership or its membership, because it is
intellectuals organized in the
Party who represent proletarian class consciousness and, hence, the
workers’ “true” interests. The Leninist Party, then, is a workers’ party by
definition, and that is
true even in societies where there are no workers.83
Lenin, like all later Communists, often uses the term
“workers” or
“proletariat” as a synonym for the Party.
The Mandan class designations “proletariat” and “working class” remain
prominent in the Leninist
vocabulary, then, but they do not clearly refer to
an actual social class and particularly the class of
industrial workers, as they
did in the usage of Marx and his followers in the West, whose parties
relied
on the support of real industrial workers. The linkage between the words
and the class becomes
more and more tenuous as Leninism moves from
Russia to more underdeveloped countries.

Leninist Voluntarism and Marxist

Determinism
Without becoming involved in the philosophical complexities of
questions of determinism and free will,
I might note that there is a distinct
voluntarist flavor to Leninism that is
another element shared by the thought
of Lenin and that of other modernizing intellectuals and makes
Leninism
attractive to the latter. Like other such elements, this voluntarism stands in
sharp contrast
to Marxist determinism.
Thus, Marx and his social-democratic followers assumed that workers
would quite naturally become class
conscious, and therefore socialist, as a
response to their position in capitalist industry and society.
Lenin, on the
other hand, insisted, as he was quoted above, that social democracy had “to
combat
spontaneity, to divert the working-class movement from this
spontaneous trade-unionist striving to come
under the wing of the
bourgeoisie, and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary Social-
Democracy.”
He even felt that peasants could be mobilized to support his
revolution and then his Soviet regime.
Similarly, in the Marxist conception of history it is obvious that stages of
historical development
cannot be skipped, simply because the foundations
of each stage are created only by the preceding
stage. In particular, the
advanced industry and mature mass proletariat that make socialism possible
and, indeed, inevitable, are created only in the bourgeois capitalist stage of
history. The socialist
society could be built only on the technical and
cultural achievements of the bourgeois epoch, for
which Marx had great
admiration.
Lenin, on the other hand, having long insisted on the necessity of a
“bourgeois-democratic”
revolution—though one to be made by the
peasantry rather than the bourgeoisie—and thus on the necessity
of a
capitalist stage in Russia, once in power proceeded immediately to institute
what he considered
the socialist stage of history. His Soviet government
was to—and under Stalin did—create the industry
and the proletariat that,
according to Marx, were a prerequisite of the socialist revolution and of
socialism. As modernizers often see it, the old order of autocracy and
imperialism was simply evil and
had to be destroyed; the new order would
not grow out of it but was to be built from scratch.
To both the problems of diverting workers from their spontaneous pro-
bourgeois strivings and of
creating socialism before its prerequisites
existed, Lenin’s solution was to rely on political will,
organization, and
leadership rather than on economic change. While the contrast between
Marxist
economic determinism and Leninist voluntarism can be sharply
drawn, then, it also can be argued that
Lenin’s emphasis on will and
organization, that is, on the role and very existence of his Party, were
themselves “ultimately” economically determined. After all, almost any
new political phenomenon in
history can be traced back to some earlier
economic change, if the analyst is inclined to explain it in
this fashion and
if, as an economic determinist, he or she will search no further once some
economic
causation has been found.
The difference between Marxist determinism and Leninist voluntarism
can,
then, perhaps be better described, and certainly can be better explained,
as a difference between the
conviction that victory is inevitable because
economic development must necessarily produce the
conditions of victory,
and the conviction that victory is inevitable because the will to victory,
whether it is economically determined or not, is invincible.
When history seems to be moving in the direction one desires, it is
emotionally satisfying to think of
its evolution as inevitable. Karl Marx saw
the growth of industry and of an industrial working class in
England in his
lifetime and, not unreasonably, projected these trends as inevitable into the
future.
The next generation of social democrats witnessed the impressive
rapid growth of labor movements and
socialist parties, most notably in
Germany, and of parliamentary democracy in Western Europe. They
could
reason that the inevitable growth of industry would inevitably produce a
mass proletariat that
would inevitably become socialist and, in a socialist
party, would inevitably come to power.
Revolutionary modernizing intellectuals in underdeveloped countries,
like Lenin, cannot rely on the
visible historical dynamic of industrial and
working-class growth to inspire their optimistic
expectation of an inevitable
victory. Their own numbers and organization are small and not necessarily
growing; they often operate underground or in exile. The working class in
their countries is either
nonexistent or very small and ideologically still
close to the peasantry from which it emerged only
recently. And the
peasantry, the great majority of the population, confined in the isolation of
its
villages, is overwhelmingly politically passive and ignorant, unorganized
and unorganizable. On the
other hand, traditionalist regimes of overlapping
landowning, military, bureaucratic, and clerical
elites that persisted through
centuries and were never shaken by challenges from the lower classes, as
well as colonial regimes with their great economic and military might,
appear as quite powerful
antagonists. Revolutionary modernizers cannot
reasonably rely on inevitable historical trends to bring
them to power and
their hopes to fruition.
In underdeveloped countries there may not be much economic
development, and what there is offers no
obvious promise of inevitable
victory to modernizing intellectuals. On the contrary, they may feel that
they must first win their victory and come to power in order to initiate or
speed economic development.
Under such circumstances, revolutionary
modernizers must count on their will power rather than on
economic change
to bring about the political changes they desire.
 Karl Marx thus summarized his conception of history: “The mode of
production of material life
conditions the process of social, political and
intellectual life in general. It is not the
consciousness of men that
determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence that
determines their consciousness.”84 The German Social Democrats’ Erfurt
Program of 1891
repeatedly employed the term “necessity” and one of Karl
Kautsky’s favorite words,
Naturnotwendigkeit, meaning the necessity of
nature or natural necessity, to explain how
economic development must
produce social change and a socialist labor party.85
On the other hand, modernizers like Mao and Castro, as Stuart Schram
says of the former, “approach
problems of every sort, including economic
development … with … a conviction that he who is resolute
and fearless
must ultimately prevail.”86 As Mao wrote in one of his poems, “Under this
heaven nothing is difficult, if only
there is the will to ascend,”87 and in an
editorial, “Under the leadership of the Communist Party, as long as
there
are people, every kind of miracle can be performed.”88 Castro’s speeches
are full of phrases suggesting that
“nothing can subdue or deter the will of
the people.”89 In chapter 4, I
will quote Antonio Gramsci as saying in so
many words that men adapt brute economic facts to their
will, and “will
becomes the motor of the economy, the shaper of objective reality.”
Lenin’s voluntarism with its emphasis on the will, organization, and
leadership of a few determined
intellectuals shaping history was a response
to the situation he faced in Russia, and as such was
relevant to similar
situations in other underdeveloped countries.90 Clearly, it could be
powerfully appealing to other
revolutionary modernizing intellectuals,
while the Marxist reliance on economic forces shaping the will
and the
actions of men could not inspire them.

LENINISM SINCE LENIN

From Mao to Mengistu

When Lenin was concerned with Russia, as he was in most of his
thought, and much as he emphasized the
peasantry, he could still refer to
real workers, different as they were in numbers and character from
those
Marx had had in mind. Even when, in the 1920s, Li Li-san and M. N. Roy
insisted that the
proletariat was the leading revolutionary class, they could
still point to real workers in China and
India, although these constituted a
tiny proportion of the population of their overwhelmingly agrarian
countries
and a tiny proportion of Communist Party members.
Within two or three years after Lenin’s death in 1924, Mao broke the
remaining link of Leninism with an
actual working class by relying on an
exclusively peasant mass base in rural areas of China.91 One striking
passage from Mao’s
famous Hunan Report suffices to illustrate his oft-
repeated emphasis on the revolutionary potential of
the peasantry and
particularly of the poor peasantry:
This leadership of the poor peasants is absolutely necessary. Without the
poor peasants there can be
no revolution. To reject them is to reject the revolution. To attack them is
to attack the revolution.
Their general direction of the revolution has never been wrong.92

To be sure, the substitution by the Communist Party, that is, the

intellectual leadership of the
modernizing revolutionary movement, of a
peasant following for a proletarian following can be partly
obscured by
calling the Party “the working class” and by referring to the peasantry or the
poor
peasantry, as Lenin had already done, as a “rural proletariat.” The
Marxian term “proletariat” is thus
retained, but it is deprived of its Marxian
meaning, for Marx had assigned a key role in history to
industrial workers,
not because they were, like peasants, poor and oppressed but because of
their
central role in industry.93
During the war with Japan, Mao expanded the range of classes that his
Party claimed to represent by
adding to the proletariat and to the peasantry
not only the petty bourgeoisie but also the “national
bourgeoisie” to form
his “bloc of four classes.”94 The inclusion of the “anti-imperialist”
bourgeoisie in
this bloc is significant in our context, not because it might
attract capitalists to join the Communist
Party,95 but because, once
the Party
sees itself as the representative of both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, it
effectively
recognizes that the Marxian class struggle is not central in the
politics of underdeveloped
countries96 and opens the
door to the inclusion of
people in the revolutionary movement without to class.97
The Maoist approach of mobilizing the broadest possible range of
supporters against the Japanese
invaders of China was also appropriate to
Soviet needs in the period of the Cold War, and hence to
Sovietguided
Communist parties throughout the underdeveloped world. This was
proclaimed when the
Soviet-sponsored World Federation of Trade Unions
held a conference in Peking in November 1949. Here
Liu Shaochi declared
the “Chinese path” to be obligatory for the Communist parties of
underdeveloped
countries and defined it primarily as one in which “the
working class must unite with all the other
classes, political parties and
groups, organizations and individuals who are willing to oppose the
oppression of imperialism and its lackeys.”98 This formula, at the time
endlessly repeated in Communist policy statements
throughout the
underdeveloped world, seems to go as far as possible in obliterating the
class character
of the Communist party, telling “the working class,” that is,
the Communist parties, to unite with
“all” classes.
This united front of all classes, now advocated from Moscow as well as
Peking, was different from
earlier ones, in which the Communist party,
claiming to represent workers and also peasants, sought
agreements “from
above” with “bourgeois” parties, as in the periods of Chinese Communist
collaboration with the Kuomintang and, primarily in Europe, of the Popular
Front of the 1930s and the National Front of World War II. Now the
Communist parties, in opposition to
“bourgeois” parties, appealed “from
below” directly to, and sought to unite with, the bourgeoisie and
its
individual members and claimed to represent their interests and, indeed,
those of all classes. The
Communist party became the party of the
exploiters as well as of the exploited.
This shift in the Communists’ conception of the nature of their parties
could be documented at great
length with quotations from Communist
writings in the 1950s,99 but this is not the place to do so. Nor is it necessary
to trace the development of Leninist ideology beyond the point it had
reached at midcentury100 in order to show that it is
an ideology appropriate
to revolutionary anticolonial movements in underdeveloped countries rather
than
to labor movements in industrialized countries.
I may just note that in the course of the 1950s Communist parties in
underdeveloped countries moved,
under Soviet pressure responding to the
Cold War, from opposition to support of the governments of
their
“neutralist” countries, governments of non-Leninist modernizing
movements that Lenin used to call
“bourgeois-democratic.” Effectively,
they gave up on “revolution,” as they had earlier on “class
struggle,”—or,
rather, the revolution they now desired was not the one that would bring the
Communist
party to power, but the modernizing, anticolonial revolution
that had in most cases already taken
place.
There were even suggestions from Moscow that underdeveloped
countries could evolve along “socialist”
lines under the leadership of their
existing modernizing regimes. Here I will quote only Nikita
Khrushchev
himself. When he visited Nasser’s Egypt in May 1964, he repeatedly
referred to it as
“embarked upon the road of socialist development.” Half a
year earlier, in response to questions posed
by Algerian, Ghanaian, and
Burmese newspapers, he endorsed “socialism of the national type” and
praised
“revolutionary-democratic statesmen” who “sincerely advocate
non-capitalist methods for the solution of
national problems and declare
their determination to build socialism. We welcome their
declarations.”101
More generally, in the early 1960s, Communist parties were urged to
subordinate themselves to what were
then called regimes of “national
democracy,” defined as anti-imperialist regimes led by “bourgeois”
nationalists, that is, to the major non-Leninist modernizing movements.
Communist parties and trade
unions even came to merge with, and be
submerged by, those of non-Communist revolutionary regimes, like
Castro’s in Cuba,102
Nasser’s in Egypt, and Ben Bella’s in Algeria. Single
parties of such regimes in Ghana, Guinea, and
Mali were recognized as
quasi or substitute Communist parties, for example, by having their
delegates
attend the Soviet Communist Party Congress of 1961.103 In more
recent years,
single parties and their regimes that have no historic links with
Communism at all, like those of
Ethiopia and some other African countries,
have called themselves Marxist-Leninist.

The Blurring of Leninism

That the bourgeoisie could lead a society to socialism would have struck
Marx and even Lenin as
utter.nonsense. And Lenin would have been
shocked by Communist parties giving up their independence.
His draft
statement to the Second Congress of the Communist International stressed
that “the Communist
International must enter into a temporary alliance with
bourgeois democracy in the colonial and
backward countries, but should not
merge with it, and should under all circumstances uphold the
independence
of the proletarian movement even if it is in its most embryonic form.”104
Still, the startlingly un-Mandan
directive of 1949 to Communist parties to
unite with all classes merely repeats almost verbatim Lenin’s
demand in his
What Is to Be Done? of 1902, quoted above, that, for purposes of agitation
and
organization, Social Democrats must “go among all classes of the
population” and “among all classes and
strata of the population,” and must
appeal to “individuals, groups, or circles” in all social classes.
Lenin, under the influence of West European culture and politics,
especially of Marx’s thought, and
operating in a country in the early stages
of industrialization, could not and did not need to develop
Leninism
consistently as an ideology of modernizing intellectuals in underdeveloped
countries. It took
a few more decades and the development of some tiny and
some eventually powerful Communist parties in
underdeveloped countries
for Leninism to emerge in full bloom as an ideology of modernizing
movements.
The character of Leninism as such an ideology was now more
and more confirmed both by Leninist
Communist parties becoming like,
supporting, and even merging with non-Communist modernizing
movements
and by some of the latter thinking of themselves as Leninist.
The distinction between Communist and
non-Communist modernizing
movements became less and less clear, even where it persisted on an
organizational level.
If the relevant implications of Lenin’s thought did not become fully
apparent until Leninism moved from
Russia into even more underdeveloped
countries, it is still clear that the crucial elements shared by
the ideologies
of modernizing, anticolonial movements are present in Lenin’s thought.
These are the
hope for revolution with its twin goals of rapid, noncapitalist
industrialization and of
anti-imperialism; the insistence on the central role
of intellectuals in the revolutionary movement,
and the concomitant
disregard of class and class struggle in the formation of this movement; the
emphasis on the importance of including the peasantry in the movement;
and an
ambivalent attitude toward both workers and peasants as admirable
yet not trustworthy allies. Lenin
shared all these views with intellectuals
leading modernizing movements—and none of them with Marx and
Marxists.
Leninism, then, can be seen as one ideology in the broad category of
ideologies of antitraditional and
anticolonial movements in underdeveloped
countries that are characterized by these views. It used to be
distinguished
from other ideologies in this broad category by its employment of the
language of Karl
Marx and by its association with Communist parties. Both
of these distinguishing characteristics of
Leninism, significant as they were
in Lenin’s own eyes, have gradually been eroded.
As to Marxian terminology, I have already noted how the term
“revolution”—never an exclusively Marxian
one in any case—was retained
as highly relevant to the needs of revolutionary intellectuals in
underdeveloped countries. But it referred no longer, as it had for Marx, to
the culmination of the
proletarian class struggle; rather, it referred to the
victory of the modernizing movement, a
revolution by now associated with
the past as much as with the future.
The concepts of class and class struggle, without which Marx’s Marxism
is unthinkable, have more or
less vanished from the thought and vocabulary
of Leninism as have both the contestants of Marx’s class
struggle. The
proletariat was replaced by “the masses” already in Lenin’s own thinking
about
underdeveloped countries and has since tended to be merged in the
even less Marxian category of “the
people.” The bourgeoisie, too, has
tended to disappear, partly when its members (if there are any),
comprised
in “the people,” participate in the modernizing movement, and partly
because Marx’s domestic
“capitalism” has been replaced by Lenin’s foreign
“imperialism” as the enemy.
While Leninists, beginning with Lenin, changed the language of
Marxism to adapt it to the political
reality of underdeveloped countries,
non-Leninist modernizing intellectuals, responding to the same
reality, have
employed much the same language. They, too, think of themselves and their
policies as
“revolutionary”; they, too, glorify and claim to represent the
“masses”; and, above all, they, too,
define their chief enemy as
“imperialism.” When Kwame Nkrumah entitled one of his books
Neo-
Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism, he obviously had Lenin’s
Imperialism, the
Highest Stage of Capitalism in mind. Other modernizing
intellectuals, for example, Sukarno, have
spoken and written as Leninists
had come to speak and write, simply because their ideologies were
similar
or identical. The language of Leninism is no longer distinguishable from the
language of
modernizing movements in general, because the ideology of
Leninism is no longer distinguishable from
other ideologies of modernizing
movements.
The link between Leninism and Communist parties, too, has, at least
since the
mid-twentieth century, been broken. In countries where the
struggle against the forces of
traditionalism and/or colonialism has been
largely won, Leninism as an ideology of that struggle has
become
irrelevant, the more so the more industrialization has advanced. Communist
parties in such
countries do not necessarily disappear, but they are no longer
led by or represent revolutionary
intellectuals, and they no longer stand for
what Leninism stood for, though they may long retain the
language of
Leninism, that is, the modified language of Marx.
This is true of Communist parties in power and out of power. Among the
latter, the parties in Chile,
Greece, Spain, and Portugal (relevant here to the
extent that traditional elements remained strong in
these countries in recent
decades) and the two Communist parties of India represent various interests
in their now more or less modernized societies, but they are no longer part
of a modernizing movement
and hence no longer Leninist.
The ruling Communist parties of China, North Korea, and the Soviet
Union; of Poland, Hungary, and
Yugoslavia, of Romania and Bulgaria were
themselves more or less responsible for turning their
underdeveloped
countries into modern ones and thus rendering Leninism obsolete. They,
too, came to
represent interests characteristic of modern societies, largely
those of the bureaucracy and
technocracy; but even where their rule has not
collapsed, as it has more or less in Eastern Europe and
in some of the
successor states to the Soviet Union, and still seems secure, as in China and
North
Korea, they are no longer Leninist.
On the other hand, modernizing ideology is alive and well where
intellectual-led modernizing movements
still perceive threats from
traditional and/or colonial forces and where industrialization has barely
begun or has not advanced successfully—but it is not necessarily Leninism
or identified with Communist
parties. In the few corners of the world where
significant elements of traditionalism, like big
landownership or strong
monarchical institutions, still persist or where colonialism is still
influential
and where these are fought by modernizing movements—as in the
Philippines and Nepal, in
Guatemala and El Salvador—Leninists may be
part of these movements, but they may be allied with
non-Leninist
modernizers to whom Leninism should be equally relevant if, indeed,
Leninists and
non-Leninists can be distinguished at all.105
Leninism remained more or less relevant also for modernizing
movements that came to power but have not
achieved their objectives. This
is true where these movements took the form of Communist parties before
or after their revolutions, as in Mongolia, Vietnam, Albania, and Cuba.106 It
is also true where they did not call themselves
Communist but proclaimed
their adherence to Marxism-Leninism, as in Southern Yemen and Ethiopia,
Benin and the Congo, Angola and Mozambique. In many such cases,
the
regimes’ professions of Marxism-Leninism were primarily verbal, its
symbols being appealing,
especially to the ruling intelligentsia, or they were
linked to dependence on economic and military aid
from the Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe. These professions could fairly easily be dropped when
changed
foreign-policy needs required it.107
The Ethiopian Marxist-Leninist regime, on the other hand, unlike the
others and like the Bolsheviks,
came to rule not a former colony but a
former native empire. It imitated Leninist practice to the
extent of
collectivizing agriculture, which involved the compulsory resettlement of
hundreds of
thousands of peasants, and nationalizing what little industry
there was. In May 1991, President
Mengistu was overthrown, but the new
rulers had themselves earlier proclaimed their
“Marxism-Leninism.”108
Leninism and Communism have become separable and often separated,
then, the former being an ideology of
modernizing intellectuals while
Communist parties can come to represent a variety of interests in
different
societies.109 (I
will deal with Communism in Western Europe in chapter 4.)
There
are now Communists who are not Leninists, though most of them still
use that label to describe
themselves, and there are Leninists who are not
Communists. Lenin himself, in whose thinking the Party
was central, could
hardly have imagined its divorce from his ideology, but as one of the early
ideologists of the modernizing movement in underdeveloped countries, he
laid the foundation for this
development.
 Chapter Four

Marxism in the East, “Leninism” in

the West

MARXISM IN UNDERDEVELOPED
COUNTRIES

Adaptable Leninists, Doctrinaire

Marxists
So far, I have analyzed Marxism as a product of industrialized societies
with a background of
aristocratic rule and Leninism as a product of
underdeveloped countries under the impact of
modernization from without.
An obvious objection to my argument would seem to be that there have
been
adherents of Marxism in underdeveloped countries and people who
have thought of themselves as Leninists
in industrialized ones.
We need not explain why there may be a few such intellectuals, for
individual intellectuals might for
any number of reasons be influenced by
ideologies that are quite irrelevant to the environments in
which they live.
The question here is whether Marxism and Leninism have had numerous
adherents and
played a significant role in the politics of countries where,
according to my argument, they should
have little or no appeal.
To explain the presence of Marxists in underdeveloped countries, we
might first recall that modernizing
intellectuals in such countries are always
influenced by some variety, Marxist or not, of Western
democratic ideology.
It is to destroy the antidemocratic elements of traditionalism and
colonialism
that they hope to, and often do, make their revolutions; in some
vague way, they associate
democratization with modernization.
Many modernizing intellectuals, often those in the military, expect to
bring modernity and democracy to
the masses of peasants and workers from
above. They may be Leninists and are,
in any case, like Leninists in that
they both feel that they represent the masses and distrust them.
Other
modernizers, however, expect the active participation of these masses in
their revolutionary
endeavors. It is only when they confront not merely the
active resistance of their traditional and
colonial antagonists but also, more
surprising to them, the passive resistance or indifference to their
schemes of
rapid modernization of great masses of people that some of these
modernizers adapt their
Western thinking to the reality of
underdevelopment.
Such modernizers are then no less convinced than before that, in working
for and making their political
and social revolutions, they represent the
interests of workers and peasants. They now feel, however,
that they must
act on behalf of these masses, to lead them where they would not go
without the
intellectuals’ leadership, that they may even have to force the
masses to act in what the intellectuals
see as their true interest. If they
employ the Mandan vocabulary, such modernizers become Leninists.
But not all modernizing intellectuals who had faith in the masses undergo
this kind of transformation.
Some, having been powerfully exposed to
Western democratic thought and values, refuse to abandon these
and to
recognize their irrelevance in their underdeveloped environment. One can
speculate that some
such persistent Western ideologues are to be found in
all modernizing movements. Most of them, being
politically ineffective, fall
by the wayside before the movement comes to power and never gain much
prominence. Some may share in the victory of the revolution but are soon
eliminated by the more
adaptable victors, as was true of Manuel Urrutia and
José Miró Cardona, who found themselves in exile
along with the erstwhile
enemies of the Cuban Revolution. Some, like Kofi Busia in Ghana and
Sutan
Sjahrir in Indonesia, may even come to head postrevolutionary
governments for some time. But all of
them fail to turn their countries into
Western democracies. They fail because it is impossible to
realize, in their
premodern environment, goals and ideals that had gradually grown out of a
very
different modern environment in the West.
The history of Marxism in underdeveloped countries is but part of this
more general history of modern
Western ideas in non-Western countries.
Before World War I, Marxism remained, to all intents and
purposes,
unknown in the underdeveloped world, except in the then mostly
underdeveloped parts of
Europe, that is, in the Balkans and, above all, in
Russia, to which I will turn in a moment. After
World War I and especially
after World War II, Marxism had become an ideology of labor movements
well
integrated in their advanced industrialized countries. As such, it had
little or no appeal in
underdeveloped countries. Then it was only Mandan
terminology as employed by
Leninism that reached and appealed to
modernizing intellectuals.
Jawaharlal Nehru, particularly the Nehru of pre-independence India, was
one of the few prominent
political leaders in an underdeveloped country
who was influenced by Marxism rather than Leninism.
Still, even Nehru did
not turn the Indian National Congress into a social-democratic movement or
spread
Marxist ideology in India. In Indonesia, Sutan Sjahrir, strongly
influenced by Dutch democratic
Marxism, lost his power to Leninist
Communists and eventually to the non-Leninist modernizer Sukarno.
Marxism, with its focus on the advancement of labor and its mass base in
labor movements, could not be
widely accepted in countries where there
were no or very few industrial workers and where it was not
class conflict
between labor and capital that divided society but the revolt of modernizing
forces
against still powerful traditionalism and colonialism.

The Mensheviks
Turn-of-the-century Russia was close enough to Western Europe and had
enough industrial capitalism and
industrial labor to make Marxist thought
seem relevant to some of its revolutionary intelligentsia.
Thus, in the
country where and at the time when Lenin converted the Marxism he
received from Marx and
German Social Democrats into an ideology of
modernizers in underdeveloped countries, there were also
intellectually and
politically significant Russians who kept the Marxism they received from
the West
substantially intact.
G. V. Plekhanov was first and foremost among these Russian Marxists,
and his outlook, as it concerns
us, was generally typical of the Menshevik
wing of Russian Social Democracy. He was convinced that
Russia,
backward as it still was, was by the late nineteenth century firmly on the
path of development
of Western capitalism and that Marx’s analysis and
predictions, derived from Western history, applied
to Russia. The coming
revolution in Russia could only be a bourgeois-democratic one, like the
French
Revolution. It was to be followed by a period of the rapid growth of
capitalism and of the proletariat
and a socialist labor movement, which
would eventually come to power in a second, socialist revolution.
When,
like Lenin, Plekhanov used the term “bourgeois democracy,” he meant,
unlike Lenin, bourgeois
democracy. It would be the result of the necessarily
impending bourgeois revolution carried out with
strong working-class
support, not of a peasant revolution resulting in Lenin’s revolutionary
dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.
Plekhanov recognized that, as in Germany, the bourgeoisie in Russia was
not eager to make a revolution
against the existing autocratic regime and
thought that the working class
would have to play a major role in the
overthrow of that regime. The immediate task of Russian
socialists was to
help workers become an independent class-conscious force ready to play
that role and
to support bourgeois democracy. In the 1905 Revolution,
Plekhanov feared that revolutionary workers,
possibly seeking to bypass the
bourgeois revolution on the road to socialism, had gone beyond what
economic conditions permitted and might have unnecessarily frightened the
bourgeoisie. As for the
peasantry, he saw it mostly as backward and
reactionary and as a basis of tsarist autocracy; in the
1905 Revolution, he
discounted its potential as an ally of the proletariat.
Above all, Plekhanov, an economic determinist, stressed the limits
imposed on political change by
social-economic backwardness. This had
been a major theme in Marx’s thought, but Lenin, as an
ideologist of
intellectuals dedicated to bringing about massive changes in backward
countries, could
not abide by it. When Plekhanov argued that Russia was
not ripe for socialism, he was obviously right,
for he defined socialism, as
did Marx and the Marxists, as involving majority rule by an industrial
working class. To Lenin and his successors in underdeveloped countries, he
was wrong, for to them
socialism meant rule by revolutionary modernizing
intellectuals, for which Russia was ripe.
Plekhanov and the Mensheviks argued, then, that the socialist revolution
could be made only by a strong
labor movement, which could grow only in
a capitalist and democratic environment that, in turn, could
only be the
result of a bourgeois-democratic revolution. Lenin counted on his party of
intellectuals,
supported by the revolutionary “masses,” that is, mostly
peasants, to come to power in what turned out
to be a single revolution and
then to industrialize backward Russia. The Mensheviks, on the other hand,
required two revolutions to bring about socialism, one bourgeois and one
proletarian, with an
intervening period of capitalism that would produce
industrialization. Clearly, they were faithful
disciples of Marx.
Being good Marxists, however, the Mensheviks were poor politicians,
for, like Marx and unlike Lenin,
they relied on a bourgeoisie and a working
class, which were weak in Russia, and, like Marx and unlike
Lenin, largely
ignored the peasantry110 and intellectuals, who had strong revolutionary
potential in Russia. They assumed
that the West European pattern of
history, as Marx had distilled it mostly from a combination of
British and
French experience, would necessarily, mutatis mutandis, be repeated in
Russia and,
presumably, eventually in even more backward countries.
By now it has become evident that this pattern of a bourgeoisie that had
become independent of the old
aristocracy, realizing capitalist
industrialization and thereby creating a strong labor movement, has,
in a
world historical perspective, been quite exceptional and that the
underdeveloped countries, beginning with Russia, have been moving on a
different track of historical
change.111 At the turn of
the century, this could
not be known, neither by Marxists, in the West or in Russia, nor by Lenin.
Neither Lenin nor the Mensheviks clearly perceived that Marx’s analysis of
history did not apply to
underdeveloped Russia; both were caught up in
Mandan terminology. Indeed, it was precisely because
Bolsheviks and
Mensheviks professed adherence to the same ideology that each could
explain the others’
different policies only as acts of treason.112
Still, when it came to a choice between adherence to the Marxian
analysis and an effective response to
political reality, the Mensheviks
tended to choose the former and Lenin the latter. Not surprisingly,
the
politicians who responded to the reality of underdevelopment, no matter
how inappropriate their
Western vocabulary may have been—Lenin and the
Bolsheviks, like Castro, Sukarno, and Nhkrumah—came to
power, while
those who not only spoke but thought and tried to act like Western
politicians—Plekhanov
and the Mensheviks, like Urrutia and Miró, Sjahrir
and Busia—failed.
There is no question that there have been Marxists in underdeveloped
countries, certainly in Russia
until Lenin and his followers eliminated them.
Their appearance in such countries does not invalidate
my argument that
Marxism is a response of workers and intellectuals to the development of
industrial
capitalism in countries with a history of aristocratic rule in
Central and Western Europe. It merely
demonstrates that Marxists in
underdeveloped countries, under the influence of Marx and of Western,
especially German, Social Democrats, responded to this Western European
capitalist environment rather
than to their own underdeveloped one.

“LENINISM” IN WESTERN EUROPE

Lenin’s Marxist Words as Myths

How can one account for the appearance of Leninists in industrial
Western Europe if Leninism is a
product of underdevelopment? I shall not
argue that those who thought of themselves as Leninists were
responding to
the Russian environment rather than their own Western one, for Lenin,
using the
vocabulary of Marx, could not convey the underdeveloped reality
of Russia to them. On the contrary,
that vocabulary concealed this reality
and misled some Western socialists to believe that Lenin, like
them, was
fighting the proletarian class struggle against capital and had led a
proletarian revolution
to success.
The role, self-conception, and possibly the very existence of Communist
parties in industrial Europe
illustrate the powerful influence words can have
in politics that I noted in
chapter 1. To show that words alone, regardless of
policies, can
have major consequences, let us for a moment suppose that the
revolutionaries who seized power in
Russia in November 1917
subsequently pursued substantially the same policies that were in fact
pursued
under Lenin and Stalin, but that they had never heard of Karl Marx
and used not his language but that
of liberal Western democracy.
Imagine that these revolutionaries called their party “Democratic” or
perhaps “Nationalist,” but not
“Socialist” or “Communist.” They claimed to
represent the “people,” not the “workers.” When they
repressed all
opposition and erected a highly centralized single-party regime, they called
it
“democracy,” not a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” When they seized
foreign-owned and domestic-owned
industry, they did it in the name of
“democratization” and “industrialization,” not to fight
“imperialism” or
“capitalism.” When they imposed their control on agriculture, they called it
“land
reform,” not “collectivization.”
In short, these imaginary revolutionaries in Russia both acted and spoke
as many real modernizing
revolutionaries have done in other
underdeveloped countries. Above all, they never once suggested, as
Lenin
constantly did, that theirs was a revolution relevant to industrialized
countries, that they were
the leaders of an international revolutionary
working-class movement aiming at the overthrow of
capitalism and of the
established political order in the West.
Is it not quite probable that the Russian revolutionary regime we have
imagined would have aroused
little more fear and hostility among
conservative propertied and other groups in the West than the
regime of Sun
Yat-sen, Kemal, or Cárdenas? There were many reasons for the four
decades of the Cold
War, but the mutual fear and hostility, distrust and
dislike that underlay it, beginning with the
Russian Revolution, were
strongly conditioned by the myths created by Lenin’s use of Mandan
terminology
and accepted, partly in self-fulfilling fashion, both by Lenin
and his followers and by their
opponents.113
A revolutionary regime in Russia pursuing Lenin’s policies but not
employing Marx’s terminology not
only would have failed to produce the
anti-Communism of the past three quarters of a century but also
would have
failed to produce Communism. The same Marxist words that aroused the
fear and hostility of
some attached to the status quo in the West aroused the
sympathy and support of some opposed to that
status quo. Each side
accepted the proletarian-revolutionary myths conveyed by the Marxist
words
emanating from Russia in part because of the reaction of the other
side to them.
Had the November Revolution not been made in the name of an ideology
of the Western labor movement,
intellectuals and workers in the West who
hoped for a proletarian socialist revolution would no more have looked to
Lenin as a leader and to his revolution as a model than they
looked to Sun
Yat-sen, Kemal, or Cárdenas and the Chinese, Turkish, or Mexican
revolution. I can argue,
then, that the Communist parties in the West
perhaps would not have developed when and would certainly
not have
developed as they did, had Lenin not used the vocabulary of Marx.

Lenin’s Non-Leninist Followers

While there were Marxists in underdeveloped countries, there have been
no Leninists in Western Europe,
though many have applied that term to
themselves. Leninism, after all, is not identical with Communism.
If
Communist parties in underdeveloped countries, like Russia, ceased to be
Leninist as their countries
became industrialized, Communist parties
established in already industrialized countries never were
Leninist.
Most of the self-professed Leninists in Western Europe are or were found
in the two major West European
Communist parties, those of France and
Italy (PCF and PCI) and, in the interwar period, in the German
Communist
Party (KPD). I will deal here only with the PCF and PCI and, in passing,
also with the KPD to
make the point that these parties are not, and never
were, Leninist. This is true also of the Party in
Czechoslovakia, the only
other industrialized European country with a Communist party of any
significant strength that did not result principally from Soviet occupation
after World War II.
Otherwise, in Europe, Communist parties have at
various times been of some political significance only
in less industrialized
countries: in Iceland and Finland, in Spain and Portugal, in Hungary and
Bulgaria, in Greece and Cyprus. Since my concern in this chapter is with
the question of Leninism in
industrialized countries, I can ignore these
Communist parties, though I will very briefly note some
similarities
between the history of the Spanish Party and that of the PCI and PCF.
European Communist parties typically originated as factions splitting off
from existing socialist
parties in the immediate post–World War I period.
What soon came to define all these early Communist
parties was their
loyalty to the Soviet Union. It was their common belief in the socialist,
proletarian
character of the Bolshevik Revolution that held together the new
Soviet government and the various
Communist parties, all organized in the
Third International. The Western Communist parties were, then,
in good
part founded on what I am here analyzing as the misunderstanding of the
identity of Marxism and
Leninism or, more generally, of the relevance of
the revolutionary politics of Russia, an
underdeveloped country, as a model
for the politics of labor movements in industrialized countries.
Convinced that they had made a proletarian revolution in Russia, Lenin
and
the other Bolshevik leaders, especially in the early years after their
revolution, relied heavily on
hopes of proletarian support in the West and
especially in Germany. On the other hand, they felt
entitled—indeed,
obliged—to give direction to parties in the West intent on making
proletarian
revolutions of their own. Impressed by their own success, they
insisted that these parties adopt the
revolutionary methods and approaches
that had so successful in Russia.
 Communist parties gladly subjected themselves to directives emanating
from Moscow, for only individuals
who believed in the socialist proletarian
character of the Russian Revolution and the relevance of
Bolshevik
methods to their own needs would join a Communist party or would long
remain in one.
Acceptance of Soviet leadership seemed to them to promise
success at home; its rejection was tantamount
to isolation from what they
saw as a world revolutionary movement that had already triumphed in
one-
sixth of the globe and was bound to triumph soon in the rest of the world,
particularly in Germany
with its labor movement.
There thus arose a situation where political parties in industrialized
countries, which in the cases of
Germany, France, and Italy at various times
had substantial labor support, were directed by and
intensely loyal to the
leaders of a revolutionary movement in an underdeveloped country. It was a
situation hardly conducive to the success of the Western Communist parties.
Since this could not be
acknowledged or even recognized, however, their
failures were typically explained by the “betrayal” or
“deviation” of their
leaders, who were then purged.
The leaders in Moscow, beginning with Lenin, had all their lives
responded to, and finally succeeded
in, their underdeveloped environment.
They had far less familiarity with Western politics and
particularly with the
politics of labor movements, which had no relevant equivalent in
underdeveloped
Russia. But, thinking in terms of Marxian concepts, they
regarded themselves as labor leaders and
experts in the politics of labor.
Because, imbued with their Marxist internationalist notions, they
expected
the Western proletariat to support revolutionary Soviet Russia against the
threats they
perceived as emanating from the West, they were deeply
interested in Western Communist and labor
politics and in the prospects for
proletarian revolution in the West, especially in Germany.
Nevertheless, the Bolshevik leaders were inevitably preoccupied with the
overwhelming problems at home
that confront revolutionaries who come to
power expecting and pledged to create in short order a wholly
new society
with liberty, justice, and prosperity for all, especially for the impoverished
masses. As
is not unusual in the postrevolutionary period in underdeveloped
countries, bitter conflicts divided
the leaders of the successful revolutionary
party over how to introduce the new society, primarily over alternative
policies of industrialization and of controlling
agriculture.
 The ups and downs of various Bolshevik leaders and factions were
reflected in the ups and downs of
leaders and factions in the Western
Communist parties who were associated with particular Bolshevik
leaders
and factions. Thus, the repeated splits and purges that beset the German
Communist Party in the
1920s and finally culminated in its “Stalinization”
were the result primarily of conflicts in
underdeveloped Russia over
problems arising there and irrelevant to the politics and the labor movement
of industrial Germany.
In this peculiar sense, it could be argued, the German Communist Party
and also the other Western
Communist parties were Leninist, for in some of
their behavior they responded to conditions of
underdevelopment. It is no
doubt also true that some of their leaders shared the Leninist belief that
they, as intellectuals, represented the true proletarian class consciousness
that the mass of workers
could not develop by themselves and that they
were therefore called upon to instigate the proletarian
revolution, which the
proletariat would not make without their leadership.
Nevertheless, if Leninism is seen as an ideology of revolutionary
modernizing intellectuals in
underdeveloped countries in the early stages of
modernization, it is obvious that no party in a country
like Germany, not
even a Communist party guided from Moscow, for a time by Lenin himself,
could be
Leninist. The KPD could not advocate the rapid industrialization
of already industrialized Germany; it
could not seek to develop a mass base
among peasants who were not potentially revolutionary; it could
not
broaden its appeal to all classes, including capitalists, in a struggle with
nonexistent
colonialist and imperialist enemies.
For my argument here that Communist parties in the West were not and
could not be Leninist, it suffices
to make these obvious points; it is not
necessary to explain at any length the appeal they did have in
industrialized
countries in spite of the irrelevance of Leninism there. I will touch on the
appeal of
the PCF and PCI in a moment; in Germany, the KPD attracted
elements—intellectuals to its leadership and
manual workers, especially
unemployed ones, to its mass following—that had been radicalized by their
opposition to World War I and then to the parliamentary Weimar Republic,
in particular to the
nonrevolutionary Social-Democratic Party identified
with the latter. They were or became Communists
responding to inflation
and depression, to right-wing reaction and the rise of Nazism. In the
absence
of such factors in the post–World War II West German Federal
Republic, the KPD virtually disappeared.
The confusion of Leninism with Marxism, the myth of the proletarian
character of the Russian Revolution
and of the Soviet regime, must surely
be a key element in any explanation of
the appeal in the West of parties
describing themselves as Leninist. It was intellectuals dedicated to
the
socialist revolution and frustrated by its failure to occur in the West who
thought they discovered
the road to it in Russia and thus became
Communists. And it was workers, long exposed to vague vistas
of a
socialist revolution that would solve all their problems, who turned to the
Russian Revolution as
the realization of these vistas and became
Communists.

The French and Italian Communist

Parties: Heirs of
Syndicalism
Like the German Communist Party, the French and Italian ones had their
origin in the immediate post–War
War I era, but far from disappearing after
World War II, like the KPD, the PCF and PCI became major
mass parties
then, even surpassing their socialist rivals in voting strength, which the
KPD never did.
Was Leninism, then, more relevant in France and Italy than
in Germany?
Seeing Leninism as associated with underdevelopment, I must first note
that in the West European
context, particularly compared with Britain and
Germany, both Italy and France were, indeed, relatively
underdeveloped in
the interwar and immediate post–World War II period. This means that their
agrarian
sectors remained quite strong and that much of their industry was
relatively small-scale. On the whole,
Italy was industrially less developed
than France, but it is quite superficial to speak of Italy as one
entity in this
respect. Much of its North was, even in the 1920s, modern and
industrialized, while the
South had much in common with what have come
to be known as underdeveloped countries. With the
exception of these
underdeveloped parts of Italy, there was, however, in Italy as well as in
France,
more industry and more of an organized labor movement than in
underdeveloped countries, and, especially
in France, much of the peasantry
was not landless and impoverished.
 To the extent that, in Lenin’s lifetime, Italy occupied an intermediate
position between the industrial
West and the underdeveloped world,
Leninism and the Russian Revolution might not have been wholly
irrelevant there. In contrast with Germany and the rest of Western Europe,
the peasantry was not
conservative, and some agricultural laborers may
have been potentially revolutionary; and much of the
intelligentsia was
alienated from society. Still, generally, the early Italian Communists were
not
Leninists—I will touch on Gramsci in the final section of this chapter—
they were not intellectuals who,
as Leninists would have done, attempted to
mobilize not only workers in the North but also peasants in
the South to
rebel against their domination by aristocratic landowners and the Church.
In fact, in Italy as well as in France, the Communist Parties grew out of
the
socialist parties that were close to labor. What they derived from Lenin
was not the substance of his
ideology but the Mandan language in which he
expressed it. They took it for granted that their
constituency consisted
primarily of workers rather than of peasants, that their enemy was
capitalism
rather than preindustrial forces. Associated with labor
movements from their beginnings, the Communist
Parties of France and
Italy could not be parties of revolutionary intellectuals leading, with what
support, especially among poverty-stricken peasants, they could mobilize,
movements for rapid
modernization and against native traditional and
foreign colonial rulers.
What the relative underdevelopment of France and Italy—and,
incidentally, that of Norway—did entail,
however, was the fact that, at the
time of the Russian Revolution, much of the labor movements of these
countries had not fully emerged from the anarcho-syndicalist phase of labor
development. That phase,
with its small, highly decentralized unions,
corresponds to the early small-scale character or uneven
development of
capitalist industry and typically precedes the social-democratic or Marxist
phase of
labor development. Because of the more far-reaching industrial
development of Britain and Germany, the
anarcho-syndicalist phase had
been much briefer and weaker in these countries.
Syndicalism can be seen as a reaction of a weak labor movement to its
inability to bring about
improvements in the status and conditions of labor.
Where the trade unions are still small and weak,
the early socialist parties
lack a substantial constituency. Thus being weak themselves, they are
subject to factionalism and splits, which make them even weaker. They are,
then, ineffective in serving
the labor constituency they would like to
represent and fail to attract much support from the
relatively few workers
and unions there are.
As I noted in chapter 2 with respect to Germany, so in France and
Italy
the small, new working class that arose by the late nineteenth century
suffered from
discrimination and exclusion from the institutions of
established society. By the beginning of the
twentieth century, revolutionary
syndicalists responded by rejecting that society and its institutions,
including the “state” itself, and by refusing to participate in politics through
political parties,
even socialist ones, elections, and parliaments. All of these
were regarded as instruments of the
bourgeoisie; labor could act only
through organizations peculiar to it, that is, trade unions, and
through trade
union methods, especially strikes culminating in a revolutionary general
strike.
As in the German Empire, then, early labor in France and Italy reacted to
its exclusion from
established society by adopting a strongly oppositional
attitude often expressed in revolutionary
terminology. In Germany,
however, with rapidly growing industry and hence a rapidly growing
working class, the labor movement expected to benefit from the
introduction of
parliamentary democracy. It formed a powerful political
party, vigorously participated in electoral
politics, and demanded the
democratization of the Empire. In France and Italy, on the other hand,
parliaments and elections—with mostly quite weak socialist parties
participating in them—were part of
the system the syndicalists rejected.
In the French Third Republic, there was universal manhood suffrage,
which was not instituted in Italy
until 1919. Universal suffrage, however,
held out little promise to workers whose numbers remained
small in largely
nonindustrial societies with slow economic growth and with strong peasant
and
petty-bourgeois antilabor majorities. The process of bargaining and
compromising in a parliament could
not be attractive to a group with little
bargaining strength. Thus, while the SPD in Germany stood for
democracy,
the revolutionary syndicalists in France and Italy saw it as just another
bourgeois scheme
to be rejected along with all governmental institutions.
Syndicalism, with its antinationalist and antimilitarist commitments, was,
especially in France,
gravely weakened by World War I, a development to
which the influx of unskilled labor into industry may
have contributed. Still,
deep-seated syndicalist attitudes did not disappear in a few years and came
to
benefit the new Communist Parties of France and Italy after World War I.
In some respects, these Communist Parties would seem to stand for the
very opposite of syndicalism.
Syndicalism is but another word for trade
unionism, but to Lenin, as quoted above, “trade-unionism
means the
ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie.” Why would
trade unions that had
rejected links to any party and insisted on their
autonomy and decentralization now submit to the
highly centralized
Communist Party? Why would syndicalist or formerly syndicalist workers,
who had
refused to support socialist or any other parties before the War,
now join the Communist Party? Why
would they, who had trusted only
workers, and certainly not intellectuals, to lead them, now accept
intellectual Communist leaders? Had syndicalists not counted on the
revolutionary spontaneity of the
workers to join a general strike that would
put an end to bourgeois society, while Lenin said it was
the task of his Party
“to combat spontaneity, to divert the working-class movement from this
spontaneous trade-unionist striving to come under the wing of the
bourgeoisie”?
Still, there were similarities that could make the early Communist parties
attractive to revolutionary
syndicalists. Lenin’s reliance on a small, tightly
organized party, mostly of intellectuals, assumes
that the “masses” would be
ready to respond to its calls to revolutionary action, calls like the ones
the
early KPD in fact issued a number of times, only to be disappointed by
most workers’ failure to respond. Like the Communists, the syndicalists, in
their small unions,
constituted an organized minority that assumed it could
lead the unorganized majority of workers. Also,
the Leninist emphasis on
intellectual minority leadership may have appealed to those under the
influence of remnants of Jacobinism and Blanquism in the French socialist
tradition.
Other ideological similarities between syndicalists and early Communists
involved their antimilitarism
and their insistence that class divisions
superseded national divisions. The rejection of the state and
of “bourgeois”
parliamentarism in the early Soviet Union may well have appealed to
syndicalists
—Lenin’s The State and Revolution of 1917 contains strong
anarchosyndicalist elements--and the
ostensible reliance on soviets, that is,
workers’ councils, may have appeared to some of them as the
realization of
their dream of a decentralized society run by trade unions.
 What must have attracted alienated workers to revolutionary syndicalism
were, however, not so much the
finer points of its ideology— which, in any
case, were never clearly elaborated—as its total opposition
to the existing
social, economic, and political system. This total opposition role of
syndicalism was,
after World War I, assumed by the new Communist
Parties. They alone were not tainted by collaboration
with the bourgeois
enemy, they alone were “revolutionary.” It is here that the principal
explanation
for the French and Italian Communist Parties becoming the
successors to syndicalism is to be found.
While the appeal of revolutionary syndicalism to workers alienated from
their own societies was largely
negative, it also involved hope of a different
and better stateless society. That society would be
achieved by the workers
through the general strike, a prospect, however unrealistic, that served as a
powerful myth inspiring workers’ confidence and solidarity. After World
War I, the Russian Revolution
took the place of the general strike. Like the
latter, the proletarian character of that revolution and
of the new Soviet state
was a myth; but, unlike the general strike, the revolution had really taken
place and the Soviet state did really exist, which lent great additional
inspirational strength to the
myth.
The reality of the Russian Revolution as a modernizing revolution in an
underdeveloped country, led by
intellectuals and not bringing workers to
power, and the reality of the Soviet regime as one of
modernizers, first
revolutionary and then managerial, carrying out rapid industrialization,
largely at
the expense of workers and peasants, could do little to weaken the
myth. Even the leaders of the
Revolution, beginning with Lenin, and many
of their followers in the Soviet Union were caught up in the
myth of their
proletarian socialism and therefore reinforced it daily by their words, if not
by their
deeds. The constant attempts of conservative and other opponents
of Western European labor movements to identify these with the Soviet
Union also strengthened the myth.
It is not surprising, then, that workers in France and Italy who knew little
of what actually happened
in faraway Russia and did not really care to
know, remained attached to the myth. Intellectuals might
lose faith as a
reaction to certain events—the crushing of the Kronstadt uprising, the great
purges,
the Stalin-Hitler pact, the Soviet invasions of Hungary and
Czechoslovakia—but workers continued to
believe, because they wanted
and, given their alienation, needed to believe.
 The power of myths, certainly of the one in question here, is a function
not so much of their closeness
to or distance from reality as of their ability
to fill strong psychic and social needs. As long as
French and Italian
workers felt like deprived and underprivileged aliens in their own countries,
they
needed the satisfaction of believing that they had a powerful fatherland
of their own on the other side
of Europe and the hope this implied for a
drastic, if ill-defined, future change in their own
countries.
Because Communist parties used to follow directives from Moscow, they
were commonly seen as tools of
the Soviet Union. That view, however, did
not explain why they followed these directives so willingly
and even
eagerly. To explain that, one must understand that the Soviet Union was
also a tool of the
Communist parties in the sense that its existence served
the needs of their members and that the
parties’ Soviet links were therefore
a source of strength to them.

PCF and PCI: From Syndicalism to

Disappearance or Social
Democracy
The Communist Parties of France and Italy, claiming to represent the
policies of the Russian Revolution
and the Soviet state in their own
countries, became the successors to the syndicalists, as the myth of
the
proletarian socialist nature of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet state
became the successor to
the myth of the general strike. To alienated
workers, the Communist Parties now served the same
function the
syndicalists had served, to provide for them a society in which they could
feel at home,
within and opposed to the hostile larger society.
The PCF and, when it was not suppressed by Fascism, the PCI served
that function in the interwar period
and the first post–World War II decade
on a larger scale and in more highly organized fashion than the
syndicalists
had ever done before World War I. Unlike the syndicalists, they participated
in elections
and parliaments and refrained from the use of violence,
reflecting the fact that the still alienated
workers they represented were
already strong enough to compete on more even terms with socialist and
“bourgeois” parties and already had made gains not to be risked in
violent
confrontations. In France, the Communists could also see the Russian
Revolution as a
continuation or fulfillment of the French Revolution and
thus could link themselves to the French
revolutionary tradition.
 The role of the PCF and the PCI in their first four decades (except under
the Vichy and Fascist regimes
and Nazi German occupation) was, then,
somewhat similar to that of the Social Democrats in imperial
Germany.114
Like the SPD,
the two Communist Parties provided a counterculture and a
countersociety for their constituency,
alienated from the dominant culture
and society, yet they participated in the existing political
system. Just as the
Mandan vocabulary of class struggle and revolution was, as I stressed in
chapter 2, attractive to the SPD’s constituents then, so it was now to the
PCF’s and PCI’s constituents.
That these two Communist Parties became the effective representatives
of the more alienated sections of
the French and Italian working classes was
not due to Leninism as an ideology of revolutionary
intellectuals in
underdeveloped countries. It was, rather, due to the fact that this ideology
was
expressed by Lenin in the Marxian terminology quite inappropriate to
his situation and his policies.
That, in turn, permitted representatives of
industrial workers, for whom the laborite terminology of
Marx was quite
appropriate, to identify themselves with Lenin and his revolution.
Like the SPD before World War I, the PCF and PCI thus benefited from
the appeal of Mandan conceptions
but, unlike the SPD, they could also
associate themselves with a successful revolution. Because this
revolution
was such a powerful myth, it did not matter that it was, in fact, irrelevant as
a model in
France and Italy and that, like the SPD in imperial Germany, the
PCF and PCI did not know how to make
the revolution they kept talking
about.
Both their association with Marxism through the Mandan terminology
and with the Soviet Union were
sources of strength for the PCF and PCI as
long as much of French and Italian labor was alienated.
Beginning in the
1950s, France and Italy underwent rapid industrialization. The industrial
working
class gained in numerical and organizational strength, and the
antilabor peasantry and petty
bourgeoisie shrank, their members joining the
working class or the white-collar middle class, which are
not clearly distinct
and share many interests. Workers, no longer weak and isolated but
materially
better off, better represented in government, and more and more
integrated into the larger society, had
less and less reason to feel alienated.
This new situation confronted the PCF and PCI with a choice. They
could continue their association with
Marxist terminology and with the
Soviet Union, though more and more workers, now feeling at home in their
own country, no longer needed that distant mythical workers’
fatherland.
The Parties could thus remain the home of a now shrinking alienated
constituency and retain
what they could regard as their ideological purity at
the cost of growing weakness. Or they could
change as their laborite
constituency changed; they could, like the SPD in the Weimar Republic,
engage
in coalition politics and, like the SPD in the present Federal
Republic, turn from a workers’ party
into a “people’s
The Italian Communists have followed the latter course with remarkable
consistency, to the point where
they explicitly renounced their association
with Lenin and the Soviet Union. In early 1991, they
replaced the hammer
and sickle with an oak tree that is far more Green than Red, and even gave
up the
“Communist” label for that of the Democratic Party of the Left
(PDS). While it was to become a new,
broader political formation of the
Left, a more orthodox faction split off to form Rifondazione
comunista.
In the 1960s and especially the 1970s, the French Communists moved in
the same direction, then called
“Eurocommunist,” but subsequently
reversed their course and took the alternative route of retreat into
a
shrinking proletarian ghetto. As a result, especially now that their workers’
fatherland in the East
has disappeared, they seem well on the way to
changing from a mass party into an outdated sect, a trend
likely to be
accompanied by internal divisions and conflict.
Italy and France having become fully industrialized, their labor
movements have passed from the
syndicalist into the social-democratic
phase of labor development, although minorities within them may
still be
attached to syndicalist notions of extraparliamentary action. The first half-
century of the
Italian and French Communist Parties proved to be a
transitional period between these two phases. The
PCI has been sufficiently
flexible to become a “people’s party” and, in the future, in one form or
another and under whatever name, the party of Italian social democracy or a
major element of it. The
PCF has been unable to adapt, and it is the French
Socialist Party that has, at the PCF’s expense, come
to represent the social-
democratic segment of the electorate, which, as in Germany and Italy,
extends
well beyond the shrinking labor movement.
This is not the place to try to explain why the PCF and the PCI have
pursued such different policies
with such different results in recent years. I
suspect that the PCI’s longer experience with Fascism;
its role in writing
Italy’s more durable post-Resistance constitution; its deeply entrenched
position,
crossing class lines, in the society and in the local governments of
central Italy; the existence of a
left, laborite wing among its clerical
opponents; and the relative weakness of the Italian Socialists
have attracted
the Italian Communists far more than the French ones to attempts to
broaden their appeals and to enter coalitions with other parties.
However that may be, it is obvious that both in Italy and in France, now
that they are advanced
industrialized countries, Leninism is irrelevant. My
point here was to show that it had been irrelevant
to the PCF and the PCI all
along, even when they thought of themselves as Leninist but were in fact
first the heirs of syndicalism and then played a role akin to that of the Social
Democrats in the
German Empire. They were, after all, genuine workers’
parties, while Leninism is an ideology of
intellectuals who may think of
themselves as representing workers and hence employ the language of
Marxism, but function in an environment where workers hardly exist.
If the Russian Communists wrongly believed they were Marxists when
they were really modernizing
Leninists, the French and Italian Communists
believed they were Leninists when they were really
laborite Marxists, at
least when and to the extent that they favored not only labor but also
parliamentary democracy. If Mandan terminology could appeal to Leninists
who thought it turned them
into Marxists, it is not surprising that, coming to
them via Lenin, it could also appeal to Marxists
who thought it turned them
into Leninists. To be sure, the more they— especially in the PCI—came to
believe in parliamentary democracy, the less they thought of themselves as
Leninists.
Parenthetically, I may here briefly note that there are certain parallels
between the history of the
PCF and especially that of the PCI, on the one
hand, and, on the other, that of the Spanish Communist
Party (PCE), a party
we can otherwise ignore here, for it never achieved much popular strength.
Though
Spain could once be regarded as an underdeveloped country with
powerful traditional forces, and
Leninism was hence to an extent relevant
there, the Spanish Communist Party, like its two larger sister
parties, never
was a party of revolutionary intellectuals seeking to mobilize a mass
modernizing
movement with peasant and bourgeois support.
In the 1920s, when the PCE was established, much of Spain, like much
of Italy, was industrially
underdeveloped. Like the PCI, the PCE, however,
did not take a Leninist course but attached itself to
the labor movement.
There being even less industry in Spain than in Italy (though it, too, was
regionally concentrated), the working class was small and syndicalism was
strong in it, as was
anarchism in some of the rural population.
Unlike the PCF and PCI, the PCE could never take the place of
syndicalism, but could only exist side by
side with it as a weak competitor.
In the Spanish Civil War, it was greatly strengthened, much as the
PCF and
PCI were during the World War II Resistance. But these two Parties
emerged victorious and
powerful from this period into one of parliamentary
democracy. They were soon
larger than their socialist rivals and well
established as their countries underwent rapid
industrialization. The Spanish
Civil War, on the other hand, was followed by nearly four decades of
Franco’s dictatorship, from which the PCE emerged with about one-third
the of the Socialists.
Like the PCI, the PCE has responded to the rapid industrialization of its
country by pursuing
“Eurocommunist” and coalitional policies. Unlike the
PCI, however, being weak, it has as a result
suffered from splits and internal
conflicts. The discrediting of the Soviet Communist Party and the
failure of
its coup attempt in 1991 contributed to the weakness and division of the
PCE—and, indeed, of
the PCF. Not only did Communist parties in Western
Europe remain identified with the Soviet Union in
the minds of some
people who might otherwise have joined them or voted for them, but some
of their
leaders continued to link themselves to certain factions or
tendencies within Soviet Communism and then
suffered from their defeats.
It is probably still a little too early, but it seems not unreasonable to
predict that Communism in
France and Italy may be disappearing—in
France because the Party may be shrinking to political
insignificance, in
Italy because it may be dissolving into a larger, less well-defined entity. A
hundred years after syndicalism became an influential factor in the French
and Italian labor movements,
the conditions that gave rise to it have
disappeared, and with them their result—an alienated segment
of the
working class.
That segment was long the core of the PCF’s and the PCI’s mass
constituency (though my exclusive
emphasis on it here is, no doubt, an
oversimplification) and, while that was the case, the Parties had
to retain
their Marxist vocabulary and their attachment to the Soviet Union. As that
core has declined
and disappeared, and its members in the Party have either
been replaced by nonalienated workers and,
more and more, by
nonworkers, as has happened in Italy, or have not been replaced at all, as
has been
true in France, the Parties have become doomed to disappear.
Since World War lithe PCF and the PCI have been the only Communist
parties of major significance in
Western Europe. If they do disappear as
such (and as the Communist parties of East Germany, Poland, the
Czech
Republic, Hungary, and perhaps Croatia and Slovenia disappear or change
their character),
Communist parties with any popular strength under
whatever name will remain only in some underdeveloped
countries and, in
Europe, in some that were underdeveloped when the Communists came to
power there: the
former Soviet republics, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and
what is left of Yugoslavia, particularly
Serbia.
The PCF, the PCI, and also the Czech Communist Party—and, until the
1930s, the KPD—were the only
Communist parties that were genuine labor
parties, not merely parties that
professed to represent the working class.
With their disappearance, the link between Communism and
labor is
broken. There never was a necessary link between Leninism and labor; only
the verbal link
between them may remain. Only in nonindustrial countries,
where there are few or no workers, may
Communist and non-Communist
Leninists claim to represent the mostly nonexistent working dass. Since, on
the other hand, the historic link of labor to Marxism and its social-
democratic successor movements in
the West is beyond doubt, it is
becoming dearer and clearer that the link between Marxism and Leninism
is
merely a verbal one, that substantively they are quite different ideologies
representing quite
different interests in different environments.

BETWEEN MARXISM AND LENINISM

I have now dealt with industrialized and underdeveloped countries and
argued that Marxism is an ideology
appropriate to the former and Leninism
is appropriate to the latter. But what about countries that are
still more or
less underdeveloped, yet already to some degree industrialized? Is there an
ideology
intermediate between Marxism and Leninism, sharing some
characteristics of each, that is appropriate to
such countries? Do
intellectuals in them respond to their underdevelopment, like Leninists, in
the
fashion I described in chapter 3 and yet simultaneously respond to
the
existence of a native bourgeoisie and especially a native labor movement as
Marxists did in Europe
and as I indicated in chapter 2?
 Unlike the modernizing intellectuals in underdeveloped countries who
have often called themselves
“Marxists-Leninists,” though they are simply
Leninists, such intermediate figures would be the only ones
who truly
deserve to be described as “Marxists-Leninists.” While my object here is to
distinguish between
Marxism and Leninism, the possibility of elements of
both of these ideologies being combined needs to be
at least briefly
explored to see if the gap between them can be bridged. A quick look at the
ideologies
of the Chilean Left and of Antonio Gramsci may throw some
light on the problem.
Chile could be described as a country sharing features of capitalist
industrialism with Western Europe
and of a colonial-agrarian order with
some of the industrially more backward countries of Latin America.
By the
mid-twentieth century, Chile had almost as large a percentage of its labor
force in manufacturing
as Italy, and hardly a larger percentage engaged in
agriculture than France and a much smaller one than
Italy. Its industry was
based on powerful native capitalism, and about a third of its industrial labor
force and a fifth of its total work force was organized in trade unions. On
the other hand, a major
segment of its economy was “colonial,” for the
copper and nitrate mining industries were owned first by
British and then
by American firms. Agricultural landownership was highly
concentrated, as
is often true in underdeveloped countries under traditional rule, but there
was
considerable overlap between the industrial and the landed
oligarchies.115
Corresponding to this ambiguous situation, what was commonly
described as the “Marxist” Left in Chile,
made up of the Communist and
Socialist parties, can be said to have been half Marxist and half Leninist—
or “Marxist-Leninist”—in its programs and policies. The two parties were
the main components of the
Popular Unity coalition government headed by
Salvador Allende from 1970 to 1973. Like Marxists, in
opposition to the
native bourgeoisie, that government was pledged to and did raise the
standard of living
of the working class through social welfare measures and
the encouragement of trade unionization, and it
favored and carried out the
nationalization of banks, public utilities, and monopolies. Like Leninists,
it
sought to and did nationalize the foreignowned extractive industries and to
expropriate and divide the
large landed estates. The Allende coalition, in
sum, adopted the pro-labor policies of Marxism and the
anticolonial and
antitraditional policies of Leninism.116
 Italy in the 1920s was also partly underdeveloped and partly
industrialized. Lenin’s Italian contemporary
and admirer, Antonio Gramsci,
a native of underdeveloped Sardinia active in industrial Turin, was a
“Marxist-Leninist,” though perhaps more of a Leninist than a Marxist.
Indeed, with regard to the Leninist
reliance on the power of the will,
Gramsci was far more explicit, more Leninist, than Lenin. Much more
openly than Lenin could have done, the young Gramsci, not yet tied to a
party line, writing immediately
after the Bolshevik seizure of power, could
hail the October Revolution as “the revolution against Karl
Marx’s Capital”
and could proclaim that “will becomes the motor of the economy, the
shaper of
objective reality, which lives and moves and acquires the
character of volcanic matter in eruption that
can be channeled where the
will likes and as the will likes.”117
Also like Lenin, Gramsci emphasized the importance of a disciplined
vanguard party led by
intellectuals,118 but he was
evidently more concerned
with mass participation in the party, and his intellectuals were not only, like
Lenin’s, an outside force acting on the proletariat but also the proletariat’s
own “organic”
intellectuals linked with the masses.
Gramsci’s masses are, much more like Marx’s and unlike Lenin’s,
industrial workers. Like Lenin, he hopes
that workers can lead the peasants
into a revolutionary alliance, but his principal concern is with the
workers
of industrial northern Italy, not with the peasants of the underdeveloped
South. The workers are
to express and act on their solidarity in factory
councils, the organizational base both of the
revolution and of the future
society. Here Gramsci is closer to the syndicalist tradition than to Lenin’s
reliance on the Party or to the Marxist emphasis on parliamentary,
democracy,
which he, like both Lenin and the syndicalists, rejects.
On the other hand, Gramsci’s conception of cultural and intellectual
“hegemony” to be attained by the
future proletarian ruling class in a “war of
position” to overcome bourgeois hegemony seems to imply a
gradualist
conception of the revolution much more akin to the Marxist tradition of
labor movements in
industrialized countries than the Leninist one of
revolutionary intellectuals in underdeveloped
countries. Undeniably, both
Leninist and Marxist—and also syndicalist—elements are intermingled in
Gramsci’s thought.
The central difference between Marxism and Leninism is the political
one, that is, the difference between
the interests represented by them. On
this key point, Gramsci remains inconsistent. He favors as the
agent of
revolution and as the central institution of the future society both the
Leninist
intellectual-led disciplined vanguard party and the factory councils
that would represent organized as
well as unorganized workers regardless of
their party affiliation.
These incompatible positions can perhaps be reconciled verbally, but in
practice they are irreconcilable,
a problem Gramsci himself did not have to
confront. Lenin, once in power in underdeveloped Russia,
quickly
abandoned the workers’ soviets (councils) and erected a Party dictatorship
that subsequently
advanced industrialization in good part at workers’
expense. Gramsci’s Italian Communist Party, on the
other hand, adapting to
Italy’s rapid economic development and parliamentary government after
World War
II, eventually abandoned the Leninist format of the party
(though a syndicalist council-oriented strand
remains significant in what
was the PCI) and became a laborite social-democratic party in the Marxist
tradition. Responding to their different environments, Lenin followed one
course and the PCI the other,
but Gramsci’s combination of laborism and
Leninism was not viable in either an underdeveloped or an
industrial
environment.
An ideology cannot be “Marxist-Leninist,” then; it can be Marxist or
Leninist but not both. It can
represent only workers in industrialized
countries or intellectuals in underdeveloped countries, because
these
groups, facing wholly different problems in different environments, have
quite different interests.
Like Gramsci, some intellectuals on the Chilean Left could, no doubt,
ignore these differences. They
could claim to favor both workers and
peasants, though many interests of these two classes are different.
They
could attack both the bourgeoisie as the workers’ antagonist and the
landlords as the opponents of
the modernizing intelligentsia by lumping the
two upper classes together as the “oligarchy” (not a term
Marx used),
because in Chile they were, in part, composed of the same people. They
could stand for
nationalization of industry as a general principle, though it
serves quite
different functions for Marxists and Leninists. In the Marxist
tradition, which does not contemplate
foreign-owned, colonial industry, the
socialization—not necessarily in the form of nationalization —of
domestic
industry is designed to empower workers. To Leninists, nationalization of
foreign-owned industry
is meant to provide independence from colonial ties
for a government of modernizing intellectuals, and
nationalization of any
industry by such a government in an underdeveloped country is to advance
its
program of industrialization, not to improve the status of labor.
Because Marxism and Leninism are so very different, elements of both
are usually not adhered to by the
same individuals, as they were to some
extent by Gramsci. Even in Chile, where a combination of such
elements
was relatively easy, different individuals and different parties evidently
inclined more to
Marxism or to Leninism. Any generalization in this regard
about the two major parties is bound to
oversimplify a complex situation,
especially with respect to the Socialist Party, which had a history of
splits
and factionalism and whose leader, Allende, was closer to the Communists
than to many Socialists.
It seems by and large true, however, that the
Socialist Party, or at least its wing that sympathized with
Castro, tended to
be more Leninist, while the Communist Party, perhaps somewhat closer to
organized labor
and forming the more moderate, “reformist,” and gradualist
wing of the Popular Unity coalition, tended to
be more Marxist.
Turn-of-the-century Russia was not as advanced industrially as Italy in
Gramsci’s day or, certainly, as
Chile in Allende’s. Still, industrialization
was progressing and an industrial proletariat was growing
rapidly enough to
make the laborite Mandan ideology attractive to some intellectuals. On the
other hand,
the impact of modernization on underdeveloped Russia
produced as a reaction a movement of modernizing
intellectuals, of
Leninists. Marxists and Leninists soon formed two distinct antagonistic
political
groupings, the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. Initially, however,
confronting the common enemy of the
tsarist autocracy and anxious to
distinguish themselves from other Russian revolutionary movements,
Marxists and Leninists were not clearly aware of what separated them from
each other. All of them thought
of themselves as Marxists and all of them
adopted the vocabulary of Karl Marx, mental habits they
retained even
when they came to fight each other bitterly.
In Russia, Italy, and Chile, in the different time periods I have referred to,
there was room for both
Marxist and Leninist ideology. Since the adherents
of both shared their opposition to the status quo and
even thought of
themselves as “revolutionary,” they could at times overlook or minimize
their
differences, especially because they used the same terminology. In
highly industrialized societies,
however, there was room only for Marxism,
in underdeveloped countries only
Leninism is appropriate, and thus the
difference between the two ideologies is very clear. That they
employ the
same language and that, in the fairly exceptional thought of Gramsci or the
Chilean Left,
elements of both ideologies precariously coexisted need not
confuse us into seeing the two as one. The
presence of some industry and
some workers in Russia did, however, allow Lenin to think of himself as a
Marxist and to build a verbal bridge between Marxism and his own quite
different ideology of Leninism.
 Chapter Five

Why Marxism and Leninism Have

Been Seen as a Single Ideology

IDEOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENT

Ideology: Words or Substance?

My argument that Leninism is not identical with Marxism, or is not one
variety or interpretation of it,
or even a deviation from it seems fairly
obviously supported by their different histories. That they
have appealed to
different kinds of people confronting different problems has become
increasingly clear
from their beginnings, respectively in Lenin and in Marx
and Engels, down to the present. Having argued
this point at great length, I
nevertheless cannot reasonably expect it to be widely accepted.
The belief that Marxism and Leninism are a single ideology is too deeply
rooted to be easily given up
and is widely held among people who consider
themselves Leninists or Marxists and by others who see
themselves as anti-
Leninists and anti-Marxists and, most important to me, by scholars who
have studied
Marxism and Leninism, not to mention journalists and those
who read their writings. To make my argument
more persuasive, then, I
must attempt to answer the question why a view I have tried to prove wrong
or
at least inappropriate for purposes of political analysis is so deeply
rooted and so widely held.
Whether one sees Marxism and Leninism as one ideology or two distinct
ones depends on one’s conception
of ideology. I could insist that they are
two ideologies, only because I define an ideology with
reference to the
interests and functions it serves in a specific political and social
environment.
There is, however, a strong tradition in the study of political
thought that ignores or minimizes the
effects on ideas of their social
context. Seen in this light, Marxism and
Leninism may appear much more
closely related than I see them.
Often the history of political thought is written as the history of ideas
developed by individual
thinkers, more or less completely ignoring the
societies and the conflicts within them, to which the
thinkers in question
responded, and the social groupings with which they were associated and
which
their thoughts represented and appealed to. Some treatments of Plato
or Aristotle barely mention the
Athenian society that must have shaped their
thought; Hobbes or Locke is sometimes discussed without
any reference to
the English Civil War and its consequences. Ideas taken out of their social
context
can be treated as if they were absolutely valid or eternally relevant.
Concepts divorced from their
original context can be transferred from one
context to another. Aristotle’s views of slavery or
democracy can, at least
implicitly, be seen as if they necessarily applied to or in the United States.
Since students of ideas are quite generally and quite naturally more
interested in ideas than in
social, political, and economic conditions, they
may be inclined to explain ideas in terms of ideas.
They think of political
ideas as developing out of other political ideas independently of, or merely
as
a cause of and not as a reaction to, environmental political conditions.
They see a thinker not so much
as deriving his or her ideas from the
surrounding world as from the ideas of other thinkers. Thinkers
themselves
may attribute their ideas to the influence of other thinkers. Obviously, such
an explanation
of a particular thinker’s ideas may be more or less valid, the
effect of the environment and the
influence of other ideas on a thinker being
a matter of degree and not mutually exclusive.
In this essay, I have not been interested in the ideas of two individuals,
Marx and Lenin, as such, nor
do I question the obvious fact that Lenin was
influenced by Marx. Rather, I am concerned with two
ideologies, with how
Marx’s and Lenin’s ideas reflected certain interests in particular types of
societies and were adopted by certain people because they served a certain
function in these societies.
This essay is meant to be a contribution not to a
history of political thought that traces ideas from
one thinker to another, but
to an explanation of the appeal and relevance of ideas to in certain
situations in certain times and
In considering an ideology and its relevance and appeal in certain
conditions, it is important to
distinguish between its words and its
substance. For example, the single word “proletariat” stands for
a different
substance in Marxist and in Leninist ideology. Both the words and the
substance of ideas
can be passed from one thinker to another if they live in
the same kind of environment. Both can also
be transmitted to thinkers who
ignore their own different environment or misinterpret it in the light of the
ideas that influenced them. Those thinkers’ ideas are then not
likely to be
very influential in their own environment, except among a relatively few
who are, in turn,
willing and able to ignore or misinterpret it.
Thus, when ideas are transplanted from one environment to a very
different one, their words and their
substance can be retained, but they will
then not have broad appeal. Or their words can be retained,
but in response
to the new environment a new substance can be infused into them; and that
new
substance, if it is relevant to the environment, can, along with the old
words, become a widely
appealing ideology.
Earlier, I noted how, when Mandan ideas arrived in Russia, their words
and substance were retained by
the Mensheviks and their words were
retained but their substance was replaced by Lenin. The Mensheviks
failed
and Lenin succeeded in Russia, and Leninism as an ideology spread
through the underdeveloped
world, while Marxist Menshevism never found
any resonance there. Another example of the substance of
words changing,
while the words have not, that is even more telling, because it involves
changes across
millennia rather than a century, is the fate of the Bible. The
words of the Old and New Testament have
remained unchanged through all
this time, but how they have been understood, what has been believed and
acted upon, has differed widely from time to time, from place to place, from
social group to social
Were no new substance ever infused into old words, these words might
eventually die as they become
irrelevant, but with their new substance they
can survive into new times and new environments. Words,
then, have a way
of lasting longer or spreading farther than the substance they were
originally
associated with. Perhaps for that reason or perhaps because to
some the words may be more interesting
than the substance, both observers
of and participants in the evolution of ideologies have often
focused on the
former at the expense of the latter. Certainly words tend to conceal
differences in
substance, and it is far easier to trace the persistence of words
than the often more subtle changes in
substance. Furthermore, politicians,
generally reluctant to admit to themselves and to others that they
have
changed their positions, tend to assert their orthodoxy by clothing new ideas
or policies in old
words.
Those who use the same words, regardless of substance, come, then, to
be designated by the same label,
particularly if they claim that label for
themselves. Thus, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas,
Innocent III and
Martin Luther, Orthodox bishops in Russia, Baptist preachers in Alabama,
liberation
theologians in Latin America, and the Coptic clergy in Ethiopia—
they are all “Christians.” And all the
people I listed at the beginning of this
essay, from Marx and Luxemburg
through Gramsci and Lenin and Mao to
Pol Pot and are all “Marxists.”
Marxism and Leninism are one ideology, if an ideology is defined in
terms of its words rather than its
substance and if its history is seen as that
of its words being passed from one thinker to another, for
example, from
Marx to Lenin, regardless of the different environments these thinkers
responded to. If
Lenin is read without regard to the fact that he was the
product of late-nineteenth-century Russia, he
may well appear as a Marxist
—not a profound or consistent Marxist theorist, but a Marxist politician
writing about the development of capitalism and the position of the
bourgeoisie and the proletariat,
about class struggle and revolution.
Analysts may, then, contrary to my view, see Marxism and Leninism as a
single ideology for two quite
different reasons, one involving a
misunderstanding on their part, the other the employment of a
definition of
ideology different from mine. In the one case, they may simply fail to see
the
differences between Marxism and Leninism. They may read Marx into
Lenin and his followers, which is
easily done because Leninists frequently
quote Marx in support of their positions. They may also read
Lenin and
Leninists into Marx, ascribing views of the former to the latter. They are
deceived by the
common words and ignore the difference in substance,
because they do not relate the ideologies to their
énvironments.
Other analysts, however, may regard Marxism and Leninism as one and
the same ideology because they
define an ideology in terms of its
vocabulary. If Lenin and Leninists inherited Marx’s terminology,
then, by
that definition, they inherited his ideology. Such analysts may or may not be
aware of
differences between Marxism and Leninism, they may put more or
less emphasis on the different substance
expressed by the common words,
on the different social environments to which Marxism and Leninism
responded, on the different needs, interests, values, policies, and goals they
represented. The more
they emphasize these, the closer they come to my
view of the relationship of Marxism to Leninism. They
might even agree
with almost everything I have written here, but prefer to see the differences
I have
stressed as occurring within a single ideology.
It is not wrong, and may well be useful for certain purposes, to define an
ideology by the words it
employs. Coptic priests, liberation theologians, and
Baptist preachers do have something in common,
and, if that is to be
emphasized, it makes sense to call them all Christians. But attaching the
same
label to them will not help explain—indeed, it will tend to conceal—
their vastly different political
roles in their different societies. In a study of
Christian theology, the professed beliefs of various
kinds of Christians and
the words they use to profess them, rather than their political roles, are
central, and their common beliefs may well be used to define the Christian
religion. But in a study of political ideologies, it is far more useful to define
ideologies by their
substance than by their words.
For purposes of political analysis, then, I believe that it is preferable and
simply more
straightforward and sensible to regard two sets of very
different ideas, even if they employ the same
words, as two ideologies; to
ascribe not one but two ideologies to two very different types of
movements
functioning, with very different interests and policies, in two very different
types of
societies. Seeing the two ideologies as one makes it more difficult
to explain or even to recognize
these differences.
Lenin’s role in history as a successful revolutionary in underdeveloped
Russia is difficult to
understand if we see him as a champion of industrial
workers in a class struggle with capitalism, even
if he did see himself in this
light. Karl Marx, writing in nineteenth-century England about
contemporary and future industrial capitalism, will be misunderstood if he
is seen as an analyst of
anticolonial and antitraditional modernizing
revolutions in underdeveloped countries or as an advocate
of the kind of
single-party system that has typically emerged out of such revolutions.
Surely those who would understand the policies of self-professed Marxist
regimes in China and Cuba, in
Afghanistan and Ethiopia, will gain as little
insight by reading Marx or Engels as those who look for
an explanation of
the history of German Social Democracy in the writings of Mao Zedong or
the speeches
of Fidel Castro. Only those who confuse Leninism and
Marxism and their very different concepts of
revolution could think, as
some writers do, that it was puzzling or paradoxical that Leninist
revolutions could occur in underdeveloped countries when Marx had
expected revolutions in advanced
industrial ones.

Marxists’ Un-Marxian View of Marxism

and Leninism
No widely appealing ideology, as distinguished from an individual
thinker’s work, can be explained
without reference to its social context, but
it is particularly ironic that Marxism has often been
dealt with in this
fashion. After all, one of Marx’s central ideas and one of his most fruitfully
suggestive ones is his view of ideology as superstructural, that is, as
explicable with reference to a
social and economic base. Marx’s theory and
the sociology of knowledge that he influenced see
ideologies not as
arbitrary products of the human mind but as responses to the social
environment in
which they are produced and received.
Anyone touched by the approaches of Marxism and/or of the sociology
of knowledge ought at least to view
with some suspicion daims that leaders
and ideologists of very different movements in different types
of societies
adhere to the same ideology, that a single ideology was widely accepted by
great numbers
of people occupying very different positions in countries at
very different levels of economic
development.
That labor movements in industrialized countries and modernizing
movements in
underdeveloped countries, representing quite different
interests and pursuing quite different goals,
could be inspired by the same
ideology, seems, on its face, improbable. Such a coincidence would surely
call for an explanation, especially by Marxists, as it is incompatible with
Marx’s conception of
history and of ideology. Yet Marxists and non-
Marxists alike have generally accepted it without
question as a fact, simply
because the ideologists of some labor movements and those of some
modernizing movements employ a similar vocabulary. Thus, many a book
on Marxism contains chapters on
Lenin, and many a book on Leninism or
even on Soviet politics begins with a chapter on Karl Marx’s
thought.
Even authors who regard themselves as Marxists of one variety or
another often discuss and contrast the
ideas of thinkers, like Kautsky and
Lenin, without so much as noting the very different environments in
which
such thinkers functioned.119They treat their ideas not as relative to their
environments but as absolutely
true or false. If Lenin and Kautsky
disagreed—for instance, if Lenin said that the dictatorship of the
proletariat
was rule by the Communist party and Kautsky said it was parliamentary
democracy—one must,
in that view, be right and the other one wrong. Such
thinkers are then seen as if they were not
ideologists but natural scientists
who, starting out from an agreed-upon body of knowledge and
assumptions,
seek to extend the range of their science in ways that other scientists, in the
light of
accepted theory and evidence, or not as valid.
A book on the history of “Marxism”—and there are many such books—
with chapters on Marx and Engels,
Kautsky, Lenin, Mao, and probably
other Marxist and Leninist thinkers is not like a book on the history
of
physics with chapters on, say, Newton, Faraday, Bohr, Einstein, Planck, and
others. The latter deals
with the contributions of different individuals to the
understanding of a single set of phenomena
employing a single terminology
with agreed-upon meaning. That these individuals lived in different
times
and different countries is irrelevant to an appreciation of their contributions,
though it may
well have affected their ability to make these contributions.
A book on the history of “Marxism,” on the other hand, deals with the
thought of different individuals
on different phenomena designated by the
same words. That these thinkers lived in and responded to
different
environments is hence vitally important for an understanding of their
thought, which cannot,
like propositions about the physical universe, be
said to be absolutely valid or invalid.
All too often the authors and the readers of books on the history of
“Marxism,” of “Marxism-Leninism,”
or of Communism may think of them
as if they were books on the history of natural science, as if they dealt with
the evolution of a single ideology (or even a single science). To
my way of
thinking, this is confusing, but it is particularly inexcusable in the case of
writers and
readers who regard themselves as Marxists. They should not
analyze what they should view as the
superstructural element of ideology
without reference to the socioeconomic base that, according to
Marx,
accounts for it.

THE USES AND ORIGINS OF THE

CONFUSION

Why Leninists in Underdeveloped

Countries and Some
Western Marxists Want To Be “Marxists-Leninists”
 Why would politicians and ideologists facing quite different problems in
quite different environments
want to think, speak, and write employing the
same concepts and words? Why would they want to use words
with an
original meaning quite clearly irrelevant to them, like the words
“proletariat” and “workers”
in a society without workers? Why would they
want to see themselves and to be seen as adherents of the
same ideology? I
shall try to answer this question in the next section specifically with
reference to
the time when Leninism and its differences from Marxism first
appeared, by showing why it was difficult
for those on each side, even
when they were in conflict, not to think of themselves and of each other
as
Marxists. Here, I want to deal with the question more generally and, to do
so, merely need to recall
some points made above.
Why would Leninists want to think of themselves as Marxists? Western-
oriented and, in this sense,
modernizing intellectuals in underdeveloped
countries typically attach themselves more or less
consistently to some
Western ideology, and nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals, being
geographically and culturally relatively close to Western Europe, did so in
great numbers. Every
Western European ideology, from anarchism through
socialism and liberalism to conservatism, had
adherents in Russia. As, by
the turn of the century, there were some capitalist industry and the
beginnings of a labor movement in Russia, it is not surprising that some
Russian intellectuals adopted
Marxism as their ideology and the newly
powerful German Social-Democratic Party as their model.
Once Lenin was in power, and especially when he was succeeded by
Stalin, their revolution became the
first major successful modernizing
revolution in an underdeveloped country. The policies and
institutions
associated with the industrialization of the Soviet Union—the centralized
single party,
the five-year plans, collectivization of agriculture, anti-
Westernism—were all clothed in the Mandan
vocabulary that had arrived in
Russia in the late nineteenth century. Just as Leninism became the official
ideology, the language of Marxism became the official and sole
language of
the Soviet regime. The Marxist-Leninist vocabulary long survived the
replacement of the
Leninist revolutionary substance by a technocratic-
managerial one, for words often survive, and thereby
help conceal, in
substance.
As Soviet policies and institutions were relevant and attractive to
revolutionary intellectuals in
underdeveloped countries, the latter also
accepted the language in which they were clothed. That
Marxist language,
too, was attractive to them, all the more so as it had been adapted by Lenin
to the
reality of underdevelopment. Revolutionary modernizing intellectuals
in underdeveloped countries, then,
wanted to be Leninists, not Marxists.
Most of them, no doubt, knew little of Marxism or of Marx, who
had little
to say that was of interest to them. But as Lenin thought he was a Marxist
and used the
language of Marx, the intellectuals who wanted to be followers
of Lenin also thought of themselves as
Marxists or as “Marxists-Leninists”
and used Marxist
Marxism and Leninism are merged into a single ideology not only in the
minds of Leninists in
underdeveloped countries who think of themselves,
and talk like, Marxists but also in the minds of
would-be Marxists who
think of themselves, and talk like, Leninists—and,’ in fact, are not Leninists
and may not be Marxists either. This, too, I have already touched on.
There is not only a historical pattern of alienated modernizing
intellectuals in underdeveloped
countries looking to the West for models for
their salvation; there is also one of alienated socialist
intellectuals in the
West looking to underdeveloped countries for the realization of their hopes
and
dreams. Frustrated because the socialism they had expected had not
come to their own countries, they
have, since 1917, successively turned to
and then been disillusioned by Lenin’s and even Stalin’s
Russia, Cardenas’
Mexico, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, Ho’s North Vietnam, Nyerere’s
Tanzania, Ortega’s
Nicaragua, and other revolutionary regimes in
underdeveloped countries.120It is ironic that many such intellectuals think of
themselves as followers of Marx, who insisted that socialism would be a
necessary consequence, and
therefore only a sequel, of advanced industrial
capitalism.121
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some intellectuals
and many workers in Western
Europe had come to expect a socialist
proletarian revolution. Disgusted with the failure of their
socialist parties to
make such a revolution, they wanted to associate themselves with a
successful
revolution that claimed to be proletarian and socialist. Thus,
some of those who desired a workers’
revolution in the West were attracted
to think of themselves as Leninists by the fact that Lenin
inaccurately
described his revolution in Mandan terms as one of workers and
by the fact
that his myth was supported by the role played in the revolution by real
workers.
 The resulting identification of Marxism with Leninism was reinforced in
two ways: Lenin and his
comrades in the new Soviet regime, believing that
they had made a workers’ revolution, thought they
needed, and expected,
the support of workers in the West. They therefore labeled the new
Communist
parties, which did support the Soviet regime, both Marxist and
Leninist.
These same labels were applied to the Communists by their opponents on
the political Right. By having
them linked to the Soviet regime, they could
be discredited as alien and unpatriotic and as proponents
of policies being
pursued in the Soviet Union. Both Communists and conservatives in the
West, then, as
well as the Soviet government and its Third International had
an interest in believing that Marxism and
Leninism were the same thing;
and, by proclaiming it, each of them confirmed in the minds of the others
that this was, indeed, the case.

The Beginnings of the

Confusion
Clearly, there have been many people in all parts of the world since the
Russian Revolution who have
had the personal and larger political need to
see Marxism and Leninism as a single ideology and to
ignore the obvious
differences between them. But historically the identification of the two
ideologies
goes back to the fact that Lenin and his small group of supporters
had considered themselves Marxists.
Why, then, did Lenin and his
comrades, even when they argued with the Mensheviks and when they
finally
broke openly with the social-democratic Marxism of the Second
International in 1914 and still more
drastically in 1917, not recognize that
theirs was and always had been a different ideology and why did
their
social-democratic antagonists not recognize it?
Violently as the two sides denounced each other, they never questioned
that both of them were or had
been Marxists. They explained their
differences as resulting from their antagonists’ misinterpretations
and
distortions of Marx’s doctrine, from their failure to understand and act upon
a common theory, and,
above all, from betrayal and “renegadism” —in
brief, as due to intellectual and moral shortcomings of
those they disagreed
with. Though they were, of course, aware of differences between the
Russian and
the West European environments, they did not ascribe their
ideological differences primarily to them.
They had all studied their Marx
and fired quotations from his writings at each other, but they forgot
that,
according to him, different socioeconomic conditions should produce
different ideologies, and
they believed that the same Marxism could
flourish in Holland and Bulgaria
and, above all, in Germany and Russia.
As far as Lenin and the Bolsheviks are concerned, the question of why
they saw themselves as Marxists
probably can be answered quite simply.
They had joined the Russian Mandan movement and they were
committed
revolutionaries. As Marxists in the West and especially in the SPD also
proclaimed their
commitment to revolutionary principles, the Bolsheviks
could easily assume that they themselves, too,
were Marxists. They
probably could not, and certainly did not want to, see that the word
“revolution”
could have different meanings in different environments.
Once committed to what they regarded as Marxism, Lenin and the other
Bolsheviks, like most people and
certainly like most politicians, very
probably believed, and surely wanted others to believe, that they
remained
consistent and faithful to their principles. If they felt good about themselves
and thought
they gained politically by asserting their consistent Marxism,
they could, by the same token, weaken
their Marxist opponents by accusing
them of being renegades. That, as Leninists, they themselves were
not
Marxists simply did not and could not occur to them. It was only after
Lenin’s death that Leninists
came sometimes to refer to their ideology not
simply as Marxism but as Marxism-Leninism, thus
suggesting that Lenin
had added something to Marxism, but presumably something wholly
consistent with
it.
If Lenin and the early Leninists had an obvious interest in thinking of
themselves as Marxists, why did
their Marxist opponents not clearly dispute
their daim to that label? Why did they at most argue that
Leninists had
abandoned Marxism, but not that Leninists had never been Marxists? Here,
one must first
recall that, before World War I, the line between Leninism
and Marxism had not been as clearly drawn as
it was later and as I have
sought to draw it here. The issues in the conflicts between Bolsheviks and
Mensheviks had not been well defined and had often seemed to involve
mostly organizational questions
and even Lenin’s personal style of
leadership. To Marxists in the West, these conflicts remained
largely
incomprehensible and appeared to be a peculiarly Russian phenomenon,
perhaps to be explained by
the conditions of illegality and secrecy in which
Russian Marxists and Leninists had to function.
Since, apart from some
possible parallels in the Balkans, Leninism was, in fact, still a uniquely
Russian phenomenon, there was no way they could see it as a distinct
ideology, as we can now see it in
retrospect.
It is also worth recalling that the Russian Social-Democratic Party,
including its Bolshevik wing, was
regarded, both in the West and in Russia,
as part of an international labor movement. Different as it
was
organizationally from the Western social-democratic parties, it was, until
World War I, linked to
them in the Second International. What is more, the
leaders and ideologists
of all these parties, including the Russians, many of
whom spent years in exile in Western Europe, read
each others’ writings,
met frequently, and talked to each other. Since they used the same words,
they
believed that they meant the same things, that they stood for the same
interests, fighting the same
enemies. No doubt all of them, but particularly
the Russians, who represented a weak party, wanted to
believe it, because
they derived a feeling of strength and confidence from their association
with a
large international movement.
When these personal and organizational links were finally broken, as
Communist parties seceded from
socialist ones and the Third International
was formed in opposition to the Second, and when the
differences between
the two sides became very clear, neither could revise its past views and
admit that
it had been mistaken in believing that both adhered to the same
ideology. Each could accuse the other
of betraying and abandoning
Marxism, but neither questioned that the other had once been Marxist.
Traitors and renegades, after all, must be former comrades.
Another factor contributing to Marxists’ and Leninists’ belief, especially
in the first few decades of
the twentieth century, that they shared or had
shared the same ideology may have been their conception
of ideology.
Marx had argued that different classes have different ideologies, at least
when they
become class-conscious. There was some capitalism in Russia
and there were some workers, and it was
taken for granted by Marxists and
early Leninists alike that these would grow in strength. Lenin’s
belief that
he represented Russian workers, which was neither wholly unreasonable
nor even wholly
wrong, could be accepted by those who represented
Western workers, and it seemed to follow to both
Marxists and Leninists
that, representing the same class, they held the same ideology.
There is, however, also the question of the extent to which they regarded
their ideologies as
ideologies at all. Marxists and the early Leninists who
were educated as Marxists were keenly aware of
other people’s views being
conditioned by their social position, but, like everyone else, they believed
that their own views were simply true. They saw their Marxism or what
they regarded as their Marxism as
the ideology of the proletariat in the
sense that it would appeal to the proletariat rather than to
other classes, but
to them it was not a class-bound ideology; it was objectively true, that is, it
was
science. Now while there can and even must be different ideologies in
industrial Germany and agrarian
Russia, because there are different classes,
there can be only one physics and one biology and,
similarly, only one
Marxism. This view, too, surely contributed to the belief in the identity of
Marxism and Leninism.

EUROCENTRISM

Russia: A European Country

Lenin and the early Leninists on the one hand and their Marxist
antagonists in Russia and in the West
on the other could not see Leninism
and Marxism as different ideologies, as I do, because the
perspective that
allows me to distinguish the two was not available to them. This
perspective, which
sees the world as divided broadly into two types of
societies, one industrialized and the other
nonindustrialized, each type with
its own pattern of political change, developed only in the second
half of the
twentieth century and has, in one form or another, been widely accepted as
analytically
useful.
Before World War I, in the period of concern to us here, continental
European intellectuals saw the
world as divided differently. On the one
hand, there was Europe and also the countries settled by
Europeans,
especially in North America; this was thought of as the civilized world. On
the other hand,
there was the rest of the world, presumably uncivilized.
About its societies, even highly educated and
sophisticated intellectuals,
apart from a few specialists and adventurous travelers and explorers, knew
and cared very little.122
One difference between the two views of the world—industrial and
nonindustrial on the one hand,
European and non-European on the other—is
crucial in our context. In the former view, tsarist Russia is
separated from
Western and Central Europe and analytically linked to underdeveloped
Asia, Africa, and
Latin America; in the latter view, it is linked to the rest of
Europe. Before World War I, Russia was
generally regarded as a European
country, different but not wholly different, from Western Europe and
certainly not from the two big military-bureaucratic empires of Central
Europe.
No geographical feature clearly divides Europe and Asia, nor does any
political boundary separate them.
Mongol and Turkic people from Asia
moved into and occupied or ruled parts of Europe and, in more recent
centuries down to the present, Russia and Turkey have consisted of
territories on both continents.
Still, by the nineteenth century, Russia was
clearly a European country. Its rulers and armies had long
been involved in
European politics; it was, like some other European countries, Christian and
Slavic;
its intellectuals were imbued with Western culture and values; its
scientists, writers, and musicians
made major contributions to European
science, literature, and music.
By the late nineteenth century, Russian industrialization, much of it
financed by Western European
capital, was rapidly progressing, linking
Russia even more to the rest of Europe and making it more
like the rest of
Europe. All this was taken for granted by intellectuals in the West, at a time
when
the non-European world, with the possible exception of North
America, was
still largely ignored by them. Russia’s peasants, nine-tenths
of its population, may have had more in
common with Chinese and Indian
than with French and German peasants, but it was unthinkable for Western
and Russian intellectuals to link in their minds a country where men had
light skins and wore proper
Western suits or uniforms with countries where
they had darker skins and wore pigtails, turbans, or
loincloths. Russia was
in Europe and therefore assumed to be understandable; the rest of the world
was
far away and very strange and, no doubt for that reason, was held to be,
at least vaguely,
inferior.123

Marxism: A Eurocentric View of

History
Western Marxists and Russian Marxists and would-be Marxists were at
least as Eurocentric in their
outlook as other European intellectuals. They,
too, paid little attention to the history and politics
of non-European
countries, not only because they had little relevant factual knowledge but
also because
the Mandan categories with which they operated were ill-
suited for gathering and organizing such
knowledge.
To be sure, Marx’s materialist conception of history seeks to provide a
very general framework for an
explanation of all human history with its
conception of the forces of production and, corresponding to
them, the
relations of production or property relations constituting a base on which
rises a legal,
political, and ideological superstructure. But even the
assumption of this scheme that the forces of
production are a dynamic
element, which is thus ultimately responsible for all change in history, is
derived from certain phases of European history. It does not in fact apply to
traditional aristocratic
empires, where the forces and hence the relations of
production and with them the political and
ideological superstructure may,
sometimes for millennia, remain stable.124
The progressive stages of history and modes of production—notably the
feudal, the bourgeois, and the
future socialist one, which Marx saw as
growing out of the tensions between the dynamic forces of
production and
the conservative property relations and out of the conflict between the
classes
associated with these—are clearly derived from his view of
European history. He envisaged a pattern of
history according to which a
bourgeoisie evolves under aristocratic rule and replaces the latter
through a
bourgeois revolution. It then develops capitalist industry to such an extent
that the new
industrial working class becomes numerous and powerful
enough to replace bourgeois rule and introduce
socialism.
At a time when, to European intellectuals, history effectively meant
European history, Marxists vaguely
assumed, when they thought of the non-
European world at all, that these stages of history applied to
it, too. It is
only more recently, mostly in the second half of the twentieth century, that
it has
become quite evident that the pattern outlined by Marx could be seen
as
valid, if at all, only in Western Europe, at best as partially valid in
Central Europe, and not at all
valid in Eastern Europe and the rest of the
world.
Marx himself, perhaps because, unlike his future followers, he lived in
England with its extensive
commercial and colonial contacts in Asia, had
some doubts about the universal validity of his scheme of
stages of history.
In some suggestive passages, he introduced the concept of an “Asiatic mode
of
production” that does not fit into this scheme but, being overwhelmingly
concerned with past and future
European history, he never developed this
concept systematically. While Marx thought of the Asiatic
mode of
production and of “Oriental despotism” mostly in connection with China
and India, Plekhanov
applied these concepts to past Russian history, too.
But, like Marxists in the West, he came to assume
that modern Russia
would follow the course of Western European history.
Generally Marxists and would-be Marxists in Russia and in the West,
being Eurocentric, showed little
interest in Marx’s Asiatic mode of
production. They thought of Russian history as European, because
they had
no other way of thinking of it, and conceptualized Russia’s past and
especially its future in
terms of the Europe-oriented Marxian stages of
feudal, bourgeois-capitalist, and proletarian-socialist
predominance. This
was true even of those, including Lenin, who sometimes referred to Russia
as
“semi-Asiatic,” for they had no non-European paradigm by which to
understand Asia.
To be sure, Marxists and early Leninists were not quite comfortable in
applying the scheme of the
feudal, capitalist, and socialist stages to Russia,
for most of them had little faith in the
willingness or ability of the Russian
bourgeoisie to overthrow the tsarist regime and replace it with a
“bourgeois-
democratic” one. After all, even the German and Austrian bourgeoisies had
not successfully
attacked and replaced their monarchical regimes. Still, so
wedded were they to Marxian concepts that
they were convinced that there
had to be a bourgeois revolution even if there was no revolutionary
bourgeoisie to make one.
Thus, until 1917 there were extensive debates and disagreements among
Marxists and Leninists as to who
would make the bourgeois revolution.
Lenin, as we have seen, made his Party, that is, revolutionary
intellectuals,
with its presumed proletarian following the active revolutionary force, but
to make the
“bourgeois-democratic” revolution, it would rely heavily on the
peasantry. Trotsky thought that what
might begin as a bourgeois revolution
would, through a “permanent revolution” and with the support of
the
Western proletariat, turn immediately and without an intervening capitalist
stage into a
proletarian revolution and result in the establishment of a
dictatorship of the proletariat. The Mensheviks hoped for a bourgeois
revolution but thought that the working
class would have to play a major
role in it, even before it grew powerful in the subsequent capitalist
and
democratic stage. Kautsky suggested that the inevitable bourgeois
revolution would have to be made
by the proletariat allied with the
peasantry. It was only when Lenin saw his chance to take power that
he
effectively decided to skip the bourgeois revolution altogether and to call
his revolution a
socialist proletarian one.
While there were disagreements among both Marxists and Leninists on
just what stage of history Russia
was in, on problems of the transition from
each stage to the next, and on the role of the various
classes, none of them
questioned the relevance to Russian history of the European concepts of
feudal,
bourgeois, and proletarian stages. In their thinking on Russia, they
put tremendous emphasis on two
relatively small and weak classes, the
industrial bourgeoisie and the industrial working class, because
these had
come to play major roles in Western European politics. Russia, however,
was overwhelmingly
agrarian, the great majority of its population consisted
of peasants, and the major active contestants
in its politics consisted, on the
one hand, of the overlapping old aristocratic ruling groups of the
tsarist
court, the landowners, the bureaucracy, the military, and the Orthodox
Church and, on the
other, the revolutionary intelligentsia. Lenin did adjust
his thinking to this reality of Russian
underdevelopment and thereby
replaced Marxism with Leninism, but he concealed this adjustment and
replacement from himself and from Marxists in Western Europe by his use
of Marxian terminology.
Having only European history available as a model of historical
development, the Eurocentric Marxists
expected Russia to develop as
Western Europe had, just as, in more recent decades, Eurocentric
intellectuals, including American ones, have often, more or less explicitly,
thought of underdeveloped
countries as merely “behind” the West in a
process of “political development” or “Westernization.” In
particular,
Marxists and Leninists regarded the Russian revolutionary movement as a
European
revolutionary movement. Before, during, and after the Russian
Revolution, parallels were constantly
drawn with the French Revolution,
that is, the great bourgeois revolution, and the Paris Commune,
supposedly
the first proletarian revolution.125 Who and what in the Russian Revolution
represented Jacobinism, Thermidorianism,
and Bonapartism were widely
debated among Marxists and Leninists.126

Ignorance and Indifference

 It is not surprising that people who could think only in European terms
accepted the Marxian words of
Lenin as Marxian substance. Being
unfamiliar with the revolutionary politics of underdeveloped
countries, they
had no way of understanding Leninism as a distinct ideology
characteristic
of such politics.
At the time, this was inevitable, because no pattern of revolutionary
politics in underdeveloped
countries had yet emerged. The modernizing,
anticolonial and antitraditional revolutionary movements,
with which we
have become so familiar in the second half of the twentieth century, were
mostly unborn
or in their infancy and could be only dimly recognized.
Lenin could not yet be compared with Mao or
Nehru, Ho or Sukarno in East
and South Asia; Mossadegh, Nasser, or Ben Bella in the Middle East and
North Africa; Nkrumah, Touré, or Nyerere in Africa south of the Sahara;
Paz, Castro, or Ortega in Latin
America, to name but some of the more
prominent leaders of modernizing movements to emerge after World
War I
and mostly only after World War II.
It is also true, though, that Marxists and early Leninists, because of their
Eurocentrism, paid very
little attention to the underdeveloped world, even
when revolutionary events did occur there or were
foreseeable. The
Socialist International, at its 1896 (London), 1900 (Paris), and especially its
1904
(Amsterdam) and 1907 (Stuttgart) congresses, held debates and
passed resolutions on the colonial
question, but these were primarily
concerned with the socialist parties’ attitude toward the colonial
policies of
Western European governments and hardly with the nature and prospects of
the colonial
societies. Die Neue Zeit, the outstanding Marxist international
journal of its time, published a
total of only about twenty-five articles on
the domestic politics of underdeveloped countries other
than Russia in the
more than three decades from its establishment in 1883 to the outbreak of
World War
I.127 In the same period,
it published over 170 articles on Russia.
No wonder Marxists were predisposed to see Lenin in a
European light
(whether as a Robespierre, a Blanqui, or a Bebel) and Leninism as
Marxism.
Lenin himself wrote virtually nothing on what he usually called the
“East” until 1908, the one
exception being an article concerned with the
effects of the Boxer Rebellion on Russia and its working
class.128 It took up
6
pages out of the approximately 7,000 pages of Lenin’s writings from 1893
to 1907 (in the first 14
volumes of his Collected Works). In two brief
articles in 1908,129 Lenin commented sympathetically but hardly
analytically on revolutionary upheavals in Persia, Turkey, China, and India,
and beginning in July 1912
he reacted in two short articles130 to the Chinese
Revolution that had broken out in the preceding year. He linked
these Asian
revolutions to the Russian Revolution of 1905 but, far from thereby
associating Russia with
the underdeveloped world, he reached the
conclusion “that the East has definitely taken the Western
path, that new
hundreds of millions of people will from now on share in the struggle for
the
ideals which the West has already worked out for itself.”131
To the extent that domestic politics in underdeveloped countries is
analyzed
by Lenin at all, it is by the application of Mandan class categories.
Revolutions in these countries
are designated as “bourgeois,” but, as he had
in Russia, Lenin links or even identifies the
bourgeoisie, in a quite un-
Mandan manner, with the peasantry. Thus, he says: “The chief
representative,
or the chief social bulwark, of this Asian bourgeoisie that is
still capable of supporting a
historically progressive cause, is the
peasant.”132
One reason why European Marxists and Leninists paid so little attention
to the non-European world is no
doubt that, keenly aware of political and
social change in Europe, they had the impression that there
was little or no
change in the rest of the world. But only extreme Eurocentrism can account
for the
fact that Lenin would, between 1911 and 1917, when he wrote
hundreds of articles, devote only two brief
pieces totaling eight pages and a
very few scattered remarks elsewhere to the Chinese Revolution, one
of the
great revolutions that brought down one of the longest-lasting empires in
history. Die Neue
Zeit under Kautsky’s editorship published two substantial
articles analyzing the Chinese
Revolution,133 but Kautsky
himself wrote
nothing on the subject at the time.
However slightly, Lenin at least reacted to the Chinese Revolution. The
Mexican Revolution was
evidently totally ignored by him. If he was aware
of it at all, he must have considered it irrelevant
to his interests. In
retrospect, it seems truly amazing that “a man who for twenty-four hours of
the
day is taken up with the revolution, who has no other thoughts but
thoughts of revolution, and who,
even in his sleep, dreams of nothing but
revolution,” as Pavel Axelrod said of Lenin,134 would have no comment at
all, from its
outbreak in 1910 until his death in 1924, on one of the greatest
revolutions in history, a massive
upheaval that lasted ten years and cost
about a million lives.135 Die Neue Zeit published one article on the
Mexican
Revolution,136 but
Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, and Gramsci,137 and
probably most contemporary European Marxists,
similarly paid no attention
to it.
It is a fascinating fact that both Marxists and Leninists, who were so
concerned with the phenomenon of
revolution and eagerly analyzed the
prospects for revolutions in Europe, showed no or very little
interest when
two huge revolutions occurred. No doubt, they were not very well informed
about events in
China and Mexico, but their minimal reactions prove that
they were not wholly ignorant of them—the
three articles in Die Neue Zeit
alone provided quite a bit of information—and they could surely
have
learned more had they really pursued the matter.
One cannot help concluding that, before World War I, Marxists and
Leninists had generally not only
little knowledge of but also little interest in
the world outside Europe. It must have seemed to them
quite irrelevant to
their concerns. As late as July 1916, Lenin could write: “A blow delivered
against
the power of the English imperialist bourgeoisie by a rebellion in
Ireland
is a hundred times more significant than a blow of equal force
delivered in Asia or Africa.”138 Both Marxists and Leninists
thought of the
non-European world, if at all, mostly as an object of colonialism; and its
people, often
described indiscriminately as “the natives,” were not political
actors to them. If they considered the
domestic politics of underdeveloped,
non-European countries at all, they tended to use Marxian class
categories
in their analyses—or substitute them for analysis—putting special emphasis
on the least
relevant ones, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

No More Excuse for

Eurocentrism
Marxists, being interested in the prospects for the working class coming
to power in industrialized
countries, could at least, quite rightly, feel that
nothing happening in underdeveloped countries, like
China and Mexico,
could be relevant as a model for them. Leninists did not even have that
excuse. It
was only the Eurocentrism and the Marxian language they shared
with the Marxists that kept them from
seeing the relevance of revolutions in
underdeveloped countries to their concern with a revolution in
Russia.
Lenin could identify with Bebel and, until 1914, Kautsky, the principal
leader and the principal
theoretician of the Marxist labor movement in
Wilhelmine Germany, because he considered himself a
proletarian
revolutionary leader. He could not identify with Sun Yat-sen, whom he
considered a
bourgeois revolutionary.139
In fact, in Russia and in China and
in underdeveloped countries generally, the Bebels and Kautskys, if
they
have existed at all, have not come to power. There have been no proletarian
revolutions there and
no bourgeois ones either. There have been
modernizing revolutions led by intellectuals like Lenin and
Sun; and
Lenin’s role in history, though not his vocabulary, is much closer to that of
Sun than that of
Bebel or Kautsky.
Revolutions like the Chinese and the Mexican ones can generally be
described as directed against
traditional regimes recently modified by
modernization from without, revolutions led by men inspired by
modern
Western ideologies and gaining mass support in an impoverished peasantry
and a small class of
former peasants radicalized by having recently been
turned into workers. That description fits the
Russian Revolution, too, and
Leninism is, as I have tried to show, precisely a response to the
situation it
refers to.
With their view of history essentially confined to Europe and with what
little they knew of the
non-European world cast in terms of European
history, pre–World War I Marxists and Leninists could not
see the Russian
Revolution—either the one of 1905 or the coming one of 1917—in the light
of revolutions
in underdeveloped countries. It evidently never occurred to
them that the
long-drawn-out, confusing events of the Chinese and Mexican
revolutions could turn out to be models for
European Russia. The many
other revolutions in underdeveloped countries, beginning with the one in
Turkey, that have opened up this perspective to us did not occur until after
World War I.
Under these circumstances, it was all but impossible for both Marxists
and Leninists before World War I
to link Leninism to the politics of
underdevelopment and thus to distinguish it from Marxism. That
Marxists
and Leninists themselves failed to do this has, not surprisingly, helped to
mislead most
analysts down to the present to identify Leninism with
Marxism.
The confusion of Leninism with Marxism may have been excusable and
even inevitable before World War I,
and then it became useful for quite
different interests to maintain that confusion. Those with deep
emotional
commitments to certain symbols—perhaps mostly some Communists and
some anti-Communists—may
even now need to perpetuate the
identification of Marxism and Leninism. But for most people with any
scholarly interest in the subject, there seems for some time now to have
been no good reason for
confusing two such different ideologies. To suggest
that the German Social-Democratic Party, on the one
hand, and the
Ethiopian Workers Party or the Congolese Labor Party, on the other, have
some common
background or that the study of one will provide an
understanding of the other seems manifestly
nonsensical.
Even Eurocentric Lenin began to look to the “East” for revolutions to
occur when he was disappointed by
the failure of revolutions in the West to
follow his own revolution. In one of his last pieces of
writing, he
recognized clearly, if only halfheartedly and hesitatingly, that the Russian
Revolution had
something in common with revolutions in underdeveloped
countries that distinguished it from Western
European revolutions:
Because Russia stands on the border-line between the civilised countries and ... all the Oriental,
non-
European countries, she could and was, indeed, bound to reveal certain distinguishing features;
although these, of course, are in keeping with the general line of world development, they distinguish
her revolution from those which took place in the West-European countries and introduce certain
partial
innovations as the revolution moves on to the countries of the East.140

Of course Lenin could not, or at least not explicitly, admit that Leninism
must therefore also be
distinguished from Marxism; but if he himself could
come at all close to recognizing this, we should
have no difficulty doing so.
Lenin concludes his remarkable article with these words:
It need hardly be said that a textbook written on Kautskian lines was a very
useful thing in its day.
But it is time, for all that, to abandon the idea that it foresaw all the
forms of development of
subsequent world history. It would be timely to say that those who think so are
simply fools.141

If by “a textbook written on Kautskian lines” Lenin refers to Karl Kautsky’s

and other Marxists’—and,
indeed, also his own—Eurocentric views, he is
quite right. Having gone in the opposite direction by
interpreting Lenin as
an ideologist of the non-European or, rather, the nonindustrial, world, and
therefore as a Leninist rather than a Marxist, I hope that the John Kautskian
lines expressed in this
essay will not deserve similarly harsh comments.
 Notes
1. In Peru, “Abimael Guzmán Reynoso … who founded and leads the
Shining Path … bills himself
as ‘The Fourth Sword of Marxism’ “ after Marx, Lenin, and Mao. New York
Times, April 7, 1992, A6.
As but one of innumerable examples of the loose use of the term “Marxism, ”
one may cite the New
York Times, December 28, 1989, 7, which, reporting on warfare in Ethiopia,
referred to Colonel
Mengistu as “one of the most hard-line Marxist rulers left in the world” and to the
Tigrean People’s
Liberation Front as seeking to “replace him with its more rigid version of
Marxism-Leninism, ” while
“the other major rebel group, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front … is also
Marxist.”
2. As an approach to social analysis—a matter I do not deal with here—
Marxism has for a century
remained stimulating and influential in different areas of social science and is,
in this sense, alive or at
least not dead.
3. In the post-Communist era, some of those in the former Soviet Union
and in Eastern Europe who
feel that they lost political power, supported by some of those who feel
materially worse off or are
nostalgic for their former security, may express their opposition to the new
order by employing
Leninist symbols. To the extent that that new order is being justified in terms of the
symbols of
capitalism, Lenin’s Marxist anticapitalist symbols lend themselves well to that purpose. In
fact,
however, such a revival of Marxist and Leninist symbols, perhaps in defense of the interests of
present
and former bureaucrats and technocrats, has nothing to do with a revival either of laborite Marxism
or
of modernizing Leninism, as I shall define them in this essay.
4. In late 1991, in an interview with an East German newspaper, the
chairman of the Social-
Democratic parliamentary caucus in Bonn said that the SPD should “review its
terminology” and stop
using the word “socialism.” This Week in Germany (New York), December 20,
1991, 2.
5. My concept of ideology is what Martin Seliger calls an “inclusive”
one. It “covers sets of factual
and moral propositions which serve to posit, explain and justify ends and means of organized social
action, especially political action,
irrespective of whether such action aims to preserve, amend, destroy
or rebuild any given order.” Martin
Seliger, The Marxist Conception of Ideology (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1977), 1. See
also Martin Seliger, Ideology and Politics (London: Allen
and Unwin, 1976).
6. Marx did produce some significant writings relevant to these
problems, conveniently collected in
Shlomo Avinieri, ed., Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday,
1968); Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, On Colonialism (New York:
International Publishers, 1972);
Karl Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (New York:
International Publishers, 1965). His
insights in this area, notably his concepts of Oriental despotism and
the Asiatic mode of production,
are, however, marginal to the main body of his thought and had little
influence on Leninism.
7. For a careful study of Engels’ relation with the early German,
Austrian, French, and Italian
socialist parties, see Gary P. Steenson, After Marx, Before Lenin. Marxism
and Socialist Working-Class
Parties in Europe, 1884–1914 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,
1991).
8. That term refers to such writers as Lukacs, Korsch, Gramsci,
Marcuse, Sartre, and members of
the Frankfurt School, all marginal to or outside the mainstream of the
development of Western
European Social-Democratic thought. In their hands “Marxism became a type of theory
in certain
critical respects quite distinct from anything that had preceded it.” Perry Anderson,
Considerations on
Western Marxism (London: NLB, 1976), 25. See also Gareth Stedman Jones, Western
Marxism. A
Critical Reader (London: NLB, 1977); Ben Agger, Western Marxism. An Introduction
(Santa Monica,
Calif.: Goodyear, 1979); Russell Jacoby, Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western
Marxism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
 9. John Plamenatz says of Lenin that he repeated Marx’s “phrases and
hurled them at his enemies;
they passed so often through his mind and came so readily to his pen that it
never occurred to him that
he did not understand them. They were familiar to him; and, being a simple man,
he made the mistake
of thinking that what is familiar is understood.” John Plamenatz, German Marxism and
Russian
Communism (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 250. One need not think of Lenin as “a simple
man” to
appreciate why Marx’s phrases were so familiar to him, yet not understood by him. His dual
environment can account for both: On the one hand, he moved in Marxist circles, read Marxist
literature,
engaged in polemics with Marxists. On the other hand, he wanted to be, and turned out to be,
an effective
revolutionary politician in an underdeveloped country; as such, he could not afford to
“understand” the
Marxian phrases in their original meaning.
10. That Lenin’s Marxian vocabulary expresses an ideology different
from Marxism is indicated by
the fact that Leninist modernizing movements and regimes, like those in
Russia, China, Vietnam, and
Cuba, are, in some respects, remarkably similar to non-Leninist modernizing
ones that do not employ
the Marxian terminology, like those in Mexico, India, Algeria, and Egypt.
In my “Comparative Communism Versus Comparative Politics, ” Studies in Comparative
Communism 6, nos.
1 and 2 (Spring/Summer 1973): 135–70, I attempted to demonstrate that all
Communist regimes, just because
they are Communist, are not alike or different from all non-
Communist ones. In
my Patterns of Modernizing Revolutions: Mexico and the Soviet Union, Sage
Professional Papers in
Comparative Politics, 5 (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1975), I elaborated on
similarities in the
prerevolutionary, revolutionary, and postrevolutionary development of Mexico and
Russia.
11. An Austrian Socialist writes about his Party in the 1920s:
“Almost every field of activity of the
individual was integrated in the Party. Cyclists and lovers of
music, amateur botanists, chess-players
and mountaineers, bird-fanciers, football players, wrestlers, and
singers formed groups of their own
within the movement. Tens of thousands of children belonged to the
groups of ‘Children’s Friends’ and
‘Red Falcons’…. The Socialists had hundreds of their own libraries. They
had their own study groups
in sociology, psychology, literature and philosophy…. They hired trains and
chartered ships to go on
holiday in far-away countries.” Julius Braunthal, In Search of the
Millennium (London: Gollancz,
1945), 253–54. There was also the Federation of Freethinkers and the
(smaller) Federation of Religious
(i.e., Catholic) Socialists, the Workers’ League of Abstainers (from
alcohol), and the Workers’
Association “Flame” (advocating and practicing cremation). These and numerous
other working-class
organizations were represented in the exhibition “Mit uns zieht die neue Zeit.
Arbeiterkultur in
Oesterreich, 1918–1934, ” in Vienna in 1981.
For a good brief description of the Social-Democratic working-class subculture in one small
German town in
the Weimar period, see William Sheridan Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power (New
York: New Viewpoints,
1973), 15–16. For a careful study of German labor movement associations,
their club life and festivals,
songs, poetry, drama, and educational activities, see Vernon L. Lidtke, The
Alternative Culture.
Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
See also Richard J.
Evans, “Introduction: The Sociological Interpretation of German Labour History, ”
in Richard J. Evans, ed.,
The German Working Class, 1888–1933 (London: Croom Helm, 1982), 19.
12. For a detailed account of bureaucratic and legal obstructionism
and police harassment of Social
Democrats, see Alex Hall, Scandal, Sensation and Social Democracy
(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1977), 41–112, 120–42. See also W. L. Guttsman, The German
Social Democratic
Party, 1875–1933. From Ghetto to Government (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981), 132–41.
13. Quoted in Dieter Groh, Negative Integration and
revolutionärer Attentismus. Die deutsche
Sozialdemokratie am Vorabend des ersten Weltkrieges (Frankfurt
am Main: Ullstein-Propyläen, 1973),
37–38. See also Hall, Scandal, 119.
14. In 1874, when there were, on the average, about 21, 000 eligible
voters in each of 397 electoral
districts, there were 44 districts with fewer than 16, 000 eligible voters
and only 9 with more than 32,
000. In 1912, however, when, on the average, there were about 36, 000
eligible voters in each district,
there were 97 districts with fewer than 24, 000 voters and 32 with more
than 60, 000, 2 of them with
more than 200, 000. Gerhard A. Ritter, Wahlgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch
(Munich: Beck, 1980), 98.
See also Stanley Suval, Electoral Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (Chapel
Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1985), 229; Bernhard Vogel, Dieter Nohlen, and Rainer-Olaf
Schultze, Wahlen in
Deutschland (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1971), 99–100; and Max Schwarz, ed., M.d.R.
Biographisches
Handbuch der Reichstage (Hannover: Verlag für Literatur and Zeitgeschichte, 1965), 123.
15. These are from tables in Vogel et
al., Wahlen, 290–93.
16. The SPD did not participate in the elections for the Prussian
parliament through 1898. In the
elections of 1903, 1908, and 1913, the conservatives and the Social
Democrats won the percentages of
the popular vote and of seats shown below.

Source: Ritter, Wahlgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch, 146–47.

17. This is emphasized in Lidtke, The Alternative Culture,

3–6.
18. “Someday the worker must seize political power in order to build
up the new organization of
labor…. But we have not asserted that the ways to achieve that goal are
everywhere the same.” From a
speech by Marx at Amsterdam, September 8, 1872, in Robert C. Tucker, ed.,
The Marx-Engels Reader
(2d ed., New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 523.
19. On the extent to which Bismarck and his successors considered a
coup d’état because of their
fear and loathing of the Social Democrats, see Guenther Roth, The Social
Democrats in Imperial
Germany (Totowa, N.J.: Bedminister Press, 1963), 67–84; and the German works on
the subject cited
in Hall, Scandal, 201, n. 23. In a letter of 1888 to the future Emperor William
II, Bismarck quoted with
approval the old rhyme “Gegen Demokraten helfen nur Soldaten” (against democrats,
only soldiers are
effective); Roth, The Social Democrats, 78. In 1910, Elard von
Oldenburg-Januschau, the leader in the
Prussian House of Representatives of the Conservatives, the largest
party, said in the Reichstag: “The
King of Prussia and German Emperor must be able at any moment to say to
a lieutenant: ‘Take ten
men and shut the Reichstag down.’” Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau,
Erinnerungen (Leipzig: Koehler
& Amelang, 1936), 110. Schorske quotes this statement but,
evidently misreading the German
schliessen as schiessen, translates the emperor’s order as “shoot
the Reichstag.” Carl F. Schorske,
German Social Democracy, 1905–1917 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1955), 168.
20. “ ‘Revolution’ and ‘revolutionary’ … tended to become a slogan
and an attitude of mind, an
expression of the antagonism to the existing society rather than a method to be
employed to bring
about radical change.” Guttsman, The German Social Democratic Party, 72.
21. The peasantry in Germany was, of course, very different in its
status and attitudes from the
peasantries Leninists had to deal with, as we shall see in chapter 3. Collaboration of the SPD with other
parties and reformism were strongest in
the three southern states of the German Empire, where
urbanization and
industrialization, especially with respect to heavy industry, were least advanced, the
Catholic Church was
strong, and the SPD was relatively weak.
22. Bernstein wrote in 1899 that those opponents of Social Democracy
who recognized that
political concessions must be made to it would be much more influential “if the social
democracy
could find the courage to emancipate itself from a phraseology which is actually outworn and if
it
would make up its mind to appear what it is in reality to-day, a democratic, socialistic party of
reform.”
Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism (New York: Schocken Books, 1961), 197.
23. That it was not just the leadership and the intellectuals, but
the rank- and-file members (at least
in some areas), to whom the emphasis on revolution appealed is an
important conclusion reached by a
study of local SPD history: “Düsseldorf, like Berlin, found the Kautskyan
synthesis of revolutionary
theory, reformist tactics and isolation appealing … because it offered an
analysis of and means to deal
with the ambiguous, stalemated society that was Imperial Germany.” Mary
Nolan, Social Democracy
and Society. Working-Class Radicalism in Düsseldorf, 1890–1920 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University
Press, 1981), 89.
24. Bernstein’s statement, to which he referred in Evolutionary
Socialism, 202, is rarely quoted in
full. It reads as follows: “I openly confess that I have
exceedingly little sympathy for and interest in
what is commonly thought of as the ‘final goal of
socialism.’ That goal, whatever it may be, is nothing
at all to me, the movement is everything. And by
movement, I mean both the general movement of
society, i.e., social progress, and the political and
economic agitation and organization to bring about
this progress.” Eduard Bernstein, “Der Kampf der
Sozialdemokratie and die Revolution der
Gesellschaft, ” Die Neue Zeit 16/1 (1898): 556.
25. Victor Adler, “Der Dresdener Parteitag, ”
Arbeiter-Zeitung (Vienna), September 13, 1903,
reprinted in Aufsätze, Reden and Briefe
(Vienna: Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1929), vol. VI, pt. 1,
253. Otto Bauer, the Social-Democratic leader in
the First Austrian Republic, said of Adler: “It was a
thought he often repeated that one could bear the
difficult duties of day-to-day work only if one’s eyes
remained fixed on the great, inspiring historical
future goal.” Otto Bauer, “Einleitung, ” ibid., xxxiii.
And the British socialist Brailsford wrote of the
Austrian Social Democrats: “Behind their day to day
politics they had a view of life and a conception of
the meaning and processes of history which
inspired all their thinking and gave them even in misfortune and
defeat an enviable serenity and the
assurance of ultimate victory. This Marxist interpretation of history
gave them the same sense that
destiny was behind them in their struggles, which the invincible Puritans of
the Commonwealth
possessed, because they trusted the promises of God.” H. N. Brailsford, “Introduction” to
Braunthal, In
Search of the Millennium, 9.
It is interesting to note that Kautsky, Bernstein’s principal opponent in the debate about
Revisionism,
stated quite explicitly that the function of the “final goal” was to maintain the unity of the
labor
movement in the face of both the tendency of its specialized branches to pursue their tasks as
ends in
themselves and divisions caused by those who, in response to changing conditions, accuse the
Party of being
too moderate or too radical. Karl Kautsky, “Die Revision des Programms der
Sozialdemokratie in Oesterreich,
” Die Neue Zeit 20/1 (1901): 69–70.
 26. Roth, The Social Democrats,
318.
27. In several earlier books and articles, I have dealt with the
politics of modernization in
underdeveloped countries and the role of intellectuals in it. See particularly
my The Political
Consequences of Modernization (New York: John Wiley, 1972; reprint, Huntington, NY:
Krieger,
1980) and Communism and the Politics of Development (New York: John Wiley, 1968). Some of
the
next few paragraphs rest in good part on what I discussed there at much greater length.
28. With reference to Lenin, Benjamin Schwartz could still write:
“the a priori belief in the organic
connection between the Communist Party and the proletariat lies at the
very heart of the faith. The faith
does, however, require certain visible signs. However little the party
may heed the will of the actual
proletarians, the existence of an industrial proletariat, however small,
and the existence of some actual
relationship between the proletariat, or part of the proletariat, and the
party are considered essential to
the party’s continued existence.” Benjamin I. Schwartz, Chinese
Communism and the Rise of Mao
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951), 119.
29. “From what we know of his early years he seems to have become a
Social-Democrat only after
satisfying himself that the party, and the doctrine on which it was based, held
out the only realistic
hope for revolution in Russia. For Lenin, to be a Marxist meant to be a
revolutionary.” James E.
Connor, “Preface, ” in James E. Connor, ed., Lenin on Politics and
Revolution (New York: Pegasus,
1968), xviii.
30. “In Mao’s case, … the impulse to revolution came before the
commitment to Marxism as an
intellectual system.” Stuart A. Schram, The Political Thought of Mao
Tse-tung (New York: Praeger,
1963), 17.
31. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology. Parts I
and III (New York: International
Publishers, 1947, 40.
32. Indeed, it has been argued “that there is a coherence of
viewpoint and purpose throughout
Lenin’s theoretical writings, and that they do provide a dear guide to his
intentions. Lenin’s political
thought had its focus in the problems of modernization of Russia.” S. T.
Glass, “The Single-
Mindedness of Vladimir Bich Ulyanov, ” History of Political Thought 8, no. 2
(Summer 1987): 277–
87, at 277. This argument is supported with references to three dozen pieces of writing
by Lenin, from
his early “On the So-Called Market Question” (1893) to his last essay, “Better Fewer, but
Better”
(1923).
33. See, notably, “The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the
First Russian Revolution,
1905–1907” (1908), in V. I. Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1960–70), XIII,
esp. 239–40, 296, 321–22, 346–54, 423. Lenin’s Collected Works will
henceforth be cited as CW.
34. “We, the workers, shall organise large-scale production
on the basis of what capitalism has
already created, relying on our own experience as workers, establishing
strict, iron discipline backed
up by the state power of the armed workers.” “The State and Revolution”
(1917), CW, XXV, 431.
(Words in italics in this and in all subsequent quotations from Lenin appear
in italics in the original.)
Lichtheim refers to the Stalinist “idea of a social order created by force
[as] perhaps the most ‘un-
Mandan’ notion ever excogitated by professed Marxists.” George Lichtheim,
Marxism. An Historical
and Critical Study (New York: Praeger, 1961), 370.
35. “Capitalist culture
hascreatedlarge-scale production, factories, railways, the postal service,
telephones, etc.,
andon this basisthe great majority of the functions of the old ‘state power’ has become
so
simplified and can be reduced to such exceedingly simple operations of registration, filing and
checking
that they can be easily performed by every literate person.” “The State and Revolution”
(1917), CW,
XXV, 425–26. “It is quite possible, after the overthrow of the capitalists and the
bureaucrats, to proceed
immediately, overnight, to replace them in thecontrolover production and
distribution, in the work
of keeping account of labour and products, by the armed workers, by the
whole of the armed
population…. The accounting and control necessary for this have been simplified
by capitalism to the
utmost and reduced to the extraordinarily simple operations-which any literate
person can perform—of
supervising and recording, knowledge of the four rules of arithmetic, and
issuing appropriate receipts.”
Ibid., 478. See also “The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It”
(1917), ibid., 323–69. Both this
pamphlet and “The State and Revolution” were written by Lenin a few
weeks before the Bolshevik seizure of
power.
36. “Report of the Work of the Council of People’s Commissars” (to
the Eighth All-Russian
Congress of Soviets, December 22, 1920), CW, XXXI, 516.
37. “Better Fewer, But Better” (1923), CW, XXXIII, 501.
38. At the Fourteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union (CPSU) in 1925, Stalin
said: “The conversion of our country from an agrarian into an industrial
country able to produce the
machinery it needs by its own efforts—that is the essence, the basis of our
general line.” And later he
commented on his statement of 1925: “The industrialization of the country would
insure its economic
independence, strengthen its power of defence and create the conditions for the victory
of Socialism in
the USSR.” History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks). Short
Course (New
York: International Publishers, 1939), 276.
39. “Address to the Second All-Russia Congress of Communist
Organisations of the Peoples of the
East” (1919), CW, XXX, 151.
40. “Better Fewer, But Better” (1923), CW, XXXIII, 500. Lenin
defines the “East” as “India, China,
etc.” (ibid., 499), but then says that “in the last analysis, the
outcome of the struggle will be determined
by the fact that Russia, India, China, etc., account for the
overwhelming majority of the population of
the globe” (ibid., 500). He thus associates Russia with the
“East.”
41. I discuss Lenin’s view of intellectuals as a response to his
political needs in underdeveloped
Russia in my essay “Lenin and Kautsky on the Role of Intellectuals in the
Labor Movement: Different
Conceptions in Different Environments, ” in my Karl Kautsky: Marxism,
Revolution, and Democracy
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1994). It was in order to
elaborate the conclusions I
reached in that article that I wrote the present book.
42. “What Is to Be Done?” (1902), CW, V, 375, 384-85. See
also ibid., 426, 437, 475.
43. “The Urgent Tasks of Our Movement” (1900), CW, IV, 368.
44. “The Aim of the Proletarian Struggle in Our Revolution” (1909),
CW, XV, 362–63.
45. See “The Workers’ Party and the Peasantry” (1901), CW,
IV, 420–28; “The Agrarian
Programme of Russian Social-Democracy” (1902),
CW, VI, 105–48, esp. 146–47.
46. “Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution”
(1905), CW, IX, 17, 98, 100.
47. “Sketch of a Provisional Revolutionary Government” (1905),
CW, VIII, 536.
48. “Two Tactics of Social-Democracy” (1905), CW, IX, 28–29,
48.
49. Ibid., 99.
50. Ibid., 98.
51. Ibid., 60. Lenin frequently emphasized the need for a
“revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of
the proletariat and the peasantry” in this period, for instance,
ibid., 56, 84, 112, 128–29; “The
Revolutionary-Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the
Peasantry” (1905), CW, VIII, 293–
303; “The Proletariat and Its Ally in the Russian Revolution”
(1906), CW, XI, 374; “The Agrarian
Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution
(1908), CW, XIII, 353; “The Aim of
the Proletarian Struggle in Our Revolution” (1909), CW,
XV, 360–79.
52. “The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian
Revolution, 1905–1907”
(1908), CW, XIII, 353; see also ibid., 349.
53. Ibid., 351.
54. Ibid., 421.
55. “Social-Democracy’s Attitude Towards the Peasant Movement”
(1905), CW, IX, 236–37.
56. Just before leaving Switzerland for Russia in April 1917, Lenin
still wrote: “We know perfectly
well that the proletariat of Russia is less organised, less prepared and
less class-conscious than the
proletariat of other countries…. Russia is a peasant country, one of the most
backward of European
countries. Socialism cannot triumph there directly and
immediately. But the peasant character of the
country, the vast reserve of land in the hands of the
nobility, may, to judge from the experience of
1905, give tremendous sweep to the
bourgeoisdemocratic revolution in Russia, and may make our
revolution the prologue to the
world socialist revolution, a step toward it.” “Farewell Letter to the
Swiss Workers” (1917),
CW, XXIII, 371.
57. “Address to the Second All-Russia Congress of Communist
Organisations of the Peoples of the
East” (1919), CW, XXX, 160–61. In March 1919, Lenin wrote: “In
October 1917 we seized power
together with the peasants as a whole. This was a bourgeois revolution,
inasmuch as the class struggle
in the rural districts had not yet developed.” “Eighth Congress of the
R.C.P.(B.)” (1919), CW, XXIX,
203.
58. In his The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850, Marx
thus characterized the French peasants’
vote for Louis Napoleon in 1848: “The symbol that expressed their
entry into the revolutionary
movement, clumsy but cunning, rascally but naive, oafish but sublime, a
calculated superstition, a
pathetic burlesque, an inspired but stupid anachronism, a momentous, historic
piece of buffoonery, an
undecipherable hieroglyph for the understanding of the civilized-this symbol bore
unmistakably the
physiognomy of the class which represents barbarism within civilization.” Karl Marx,
Surveys from
Exile (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 72.
59. While Marx and Engels could not regard the peasantry as an ally
of the proletariat in the coming
socialist revolution, they saw it as the “natural ally” of the bourgeoisie in its revolutions against the
aristocracy. They said so in strikingly
similar language: Marx, with the revolutions of 1789 and 1848 in
mind, in an article in Die Neue
Rheinische Zeitung, July 30, 1848, in Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels,
Werke, V (Berlin: Dietz
Verlag, 1959), 283; and Engels, referring to the revolutions of 1525 and 1848,
in “The Peasant War in
Germany, ” in Friedrich Engels, The German Revolutions (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1967),
118. See also Engels’ introduction to the first English edition (1892) of his
Socialism, Utopian and
Scientific (New York: International Publishers, 1935), 18, on the crucial role of
the peasantry in the
bourgeois risings of the German Reformation and the English and French
Revolutions.
Karl Kautsky, who played a key role in blocking an SPD appeal to the peasantry-see Ingrid Gilcher-
Holtey,
Das Mandat des Intellektuellen. Karl Kautsky und die Sozialdemokratie (Berlin: Siedler
Verlag,
1986), 103–18—saw the Russian peasantry as an ally of the proletariat in its revolution against
tsarist
autocracy, but not in a socialist revolution. See his “Triebkr\:afte und Aussichten der russischen
Revolution, ” Die Neue Zeit 25/1 (1906): esp. 332. Lenin, in his preface (1907) to the Russian
translation of this article, CW, XI, 408–13, enthusiastically used Kautsky’s views to legitimate his
own
and to attack Plekhanov and the Mensheviks. See also Lenin’s “The Proletariat and Its Ally in the
Russian Revolution” (1906), CW, XI, 365–75; “The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the
First
Russian Revolution” (1908), CW, XIII, 353–54 (where Lenin calls the publication of Kautsky’s
article
Bolshevism’s “greatest ideological victory in international Social-Democracy”); and “The Aim
of the
Proletarian Struggle in Our Revolution” (1909), CW, XV, 375–77.
60. George Lichtheim, in his classic work Marxism, says “the
uniqueness of Lenin—and of the
Bolshevik organization which he founded and held together—lay in the
decision to make the agrarian
upheaval do the work of the proletarian revolution…. Throughout his career …
he conveys a sense of
determination to put a radical solution of the agrarian problem foremost among the
tasks of the
revolution. This was more than ordinary tactical realism; it reflected an order of
priorities—ultimately
a hierarchy of values—different from that of the average city-bred, radical.” Unlike
me, Lichtheim
holds that Lenin’s central concern with “the agrarian problem … did not make him less of a
Marxist,
but it gave an emphasis to his cast of mind, which, to say the least, was unusual among
Social-
Democrats.” Lichtheim, Marxism, 333–34.
Lichtheim also refers to Trotsky as writing that Lenin “staked everything on a radical solution of the
peasant problem—to the extent of virtually identifying the ‘bourgeois revolution’ with the agrarian
revolution.” Ibid., 344. The reference is to Trotsky’s introduction to the first Russian edition of his
The
Permanent Revolution, published in Berlin in 1930, where he says: “For Lenin, the liberation of
the
productive forces of bourgeois society from the fetters of serfdom signified, first and foremost, a
radical solution of the agrarian question in the sense of complete liquidation of the landowning class
and
revolutionary redistribution of landownership.” Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution and
Results and Prospects (New York: Merit Publishers, 1969), 127; see also Trotsky’s The Permanent
Revolution (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1931), xxviii.
In a later essay, Lichtheim says that the replacement of the industrial proletariat by the peasantry as
the
revolutionary class “represents a complete break with Marxism, a circumstance
that has not
prevented some of its defenders from claiming the inheritance of Marx on the grounds that
revolutionaries must always side with the exploited, whether they be slaves, serfs, or peasant
proprietors
victimized by colonial relationships. Admirable in its resolute disregard of all but moral
considerations,
this doctrine seems closer in spirit to Tolstoy or Gandhi than to the founders of modern
socialism.” While
I regard this “complete break with Marxism” as Lenin’s, Lichtheim sees it “as a
consequence of the Maoist
retreat from Marxism-Leninism.” George Lichtheim, Imperialism (New
York: Praeger, 1971), 104–05.
61. Alfred Meyer comments: “All of Lenin’s pragmatism, all his
readiness to try methods
previously scored by the Marxist movement, all his contempt of the Menshevik
preoccupation with
accepted means and traditions of the workers’ movement … [h]is elitism and his shifting
attitude
toward the various classes, his attitude toward national movements … every one of these formulas
and
devices, which arose as ad hoc changes in Marxist orthodoxy and could at first be justified only
by the
needs of the moment and the peculiarities of the. Russian conditions …
could be justified by the law of
combined development, which converts the experience of western Europe,
hitherto considered the
standard pattern of development, into nothing but a unique, perhaps even a marginal
one. Specifically,
it becomes clear in the light of this hypothesis why the leaders of a revolutionary
party in a backward
country could adopt and develop the most radical ideology that had originated in an
advanced society,
why, in short, backward nations could become carriers of ‘proletarian class
consciousness.’” Alfred G.
Meyer, Leninism (New York: Praeger, 1962), 268–69.
62. Franz Borkenau noted this briefly already in 1939, when he
wrote: “Lenin’s revolution is
essentially not a proletarian revolution, it is ‘the revolution’ of
the intelligentsia, of the professional
revolutionaries, but with the proletariat as their chief ally.
Allies, however, are exchangeable. The
course of the Russian dictatorship has proved that instead of the
proletariat other groups could step in.”
Franz Borkenau, World Communism. A History of the Communist
International (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1962), 44.
63. Meyer notes that for Lenin “after 1905, the very word
‘proletariat’ gradually acquired a broader
meaning, to include all those who sell their labor power to
capitalists, including not only rural labor but
even the intellectual proletariat. At the same time, the
term ‘proletariat’ was more and more neglected;
in its stead Lenin began to speak of the masses, the poor,
the have-nots, or the toilers…. Both in Russia
and elsewhere, Leninism after 1905 became a movement which
based its strategy on the broad masses
of the population, deserving the name ‘proletariat’ only in a wide
sense, because they were composed
more of peasants than of workers.” Meyer, Leninism, 127–28.
64. Marx objected even to the term “the working people” (das
arbeitende Volk) in the Gotha
Program, when he wrote: “The majority of the ‘toiling people’ in Germany
consists of peasants and not
of proletarians.” Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program (New York:
International Publishers,
1938), 16.
65. “Letter from Afar” (1917), CW, XXIII, 304.
66. “What Is to Be Done” (1902), CW, V, 428.
67. Ibid., 422, 429.
68. Ibid., 430, 431. “The more we
confine the membership of such an organization to people who
are professionally engaged in
revolutionary activity… the greater will be the number of people from
the working class and from
the other social classes who will be able to join the movement and perform
active work in it.” Ibid.,
p. 464; last italics added.
69. Speaking of “the Russian Communists’ practical activities in the
former tsarist colonies, in such
backward countries as Turkestan,” Lenin—very clearly indicating that the
“we” he had in mind are not
workers—says: “There is practically no industrial proletariat in these
countries. Nevertheless, we have
assumed, we must assume, the role of leader even there…. The practical
results of our work have…
shown that… we are in a position to inspire in the masses an urge for independent
political thinking
and independent political action, even where a proletariat is practically non-existent….
The idea of
Soviet organization is a simple one, and is applicable, not only to proletarian, but also to
peasant feudal
and semi-feudal relations.” “Report of the Commission on the National and the Colonial
Questions”
(1920), CW, XXXI, 242–43. “The ideas and principles of Soviet government are understood
and
immediately applicable, not only in the industrially developed countries, not only in those which have
a social basis like the proletariat, but also in those which have the peasantry as their basis.” “Report on
the Work of the Council of People’s Commissars” (to the Eighth All-Russia Congress of Soviets)
(1920),
CW, XXXI, 490. See also Lenin’s earlier “Address to the Second All-Russia Congress of
Communist
Organisations of the Peoples of the East” (1919), CW, XXX, 151–62.
70. “Report on the International Situation and the Fundamental Tasks
of the Communist
International” (1920), CW, XXXI, 232.
71. Ibid.
72. “Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and the Colonial
Questions” (1920), CW, XXXI,
146, 148.
73. “Report on the International Situation and the Fundamental Tasks
of the Communist
International” (1920), CW, XXXI, 232.
74. “Report of the Commission on the National and the Colonial
Questions” (1920), CW, XXXI,
243.
75. “Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and the Colonial
Questions” (1920), CW, XXXI,
146.
76. Ibid., 149.
77. Ibid., 149,150. In November 1919, Lenin had advised Communists
whom he described as
representing “… the peoples of the East[:]… You will have to base yourselves on the
bourgeois
nationalism which is awakening, and must awaken, among those peoples, and which has its
historical
justification.” “Address to the Second All-Russia Congress of Communist Organisations of the
Peoples
of the East” (1919), CW, XXX, 162.
78. “Report of the Commission on the National and the Colonial
Questions” (1920), CW, XXXI,
241.
79. In 1919, he said to “Communist comrades representing [Communist]
Moslem organisations of
the East”: “… the majority of the Eastern peoples are typical representatives of
the working people—
not workers who have passed through the school of capitalist factories, but typical
representatives of
the working and exploited peasant masses who are victims of medieval oppression…. You
must be
able to apply that theory and practice [of communism] to conditions in
which the bulk of the
population are peasants, and in which the task is to wage a struggle against medieval
survivals and not
against capitalism.” “Address to the Second All-Russia Congress of Communist
Organisations of the
Peoples of the East” (1919), CW, XXX, 151, 161.
80. “Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and the Colonial
Questions” (1920), CW, XXXI,
149, 148.
81. “Report of the Commission on the National and the Colonial
Questions” (1920), CW, XXXI,
242.
82. “Lenin was not a philosopher or social theorist of even
secondary importance. To think
otherwise is quite to mistake the nature of his genius. His more theoretical
works, had anyone else
written them, would now be read by no one.” Plamenatz, German Marxism, 221.
83. See the explanation offered in a discussion in the Soviet
Academy of Sciences of why Mongolia
could have a proletarian government even though, admittedly, there was
no proletariat in Mongolia.
“Discussion of the Character and Effect of People’s Democracy in the Orient,”
translated in Current
Digest of the Soviet Press 4, no. 20 (June 28, 1952): 5, 7.
As John Plamenatz wrote very bluntly at about the time of this discussion, “If the ‘party of the
proletariat’ can make a ‘proletarian’ revolution without greatly caring what the workers think, if it can
know what is good for them better than they know it themselves,… why should it not act on their
behalf even
before there are enough of them to constitute an important class in society? … The later
Communists have
improved on Lenin. They have formed parties of the proletariat where no proletariat
exists; they have done
it in China and Yugoslavia. The members of those parties are nearly all
intellectuals or peasants, but
their avowed purpose is to establish a proletarian state. They first make a
revolution and then set about
creating the industries without which, according to Marx, no proletarian
state can exist. They first
capture the ‘superstructure’ and then use it to transform the ‘foundation’—so
that ‘proletarian
revolution/from being an effect of mature industrialism, becomes a prelude to it.”
Plamenatz, German
Marxism, 238.
Plamenatz also said of Lenin that “he saw, more clearly than any other Marxist, that a band of
revolutionaries might, in a backward country already deeply affected by industrialism and western
ideas,
exploit the ambitions, hatreds and fears of all classes and political groups to so good effect as to
be
able to take power in the name of the proletariat; and he found it possible to persuade himself and
others
that this seizure of power would be a proletarian revolution.” Ibid., 221.
84. Karl Marx, “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy, in Karl Marx,
Early Writings (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 425. I have
slightly corrected the translation.
85. The Erfurt Program and a number of earlier drafts are reprinted
in an appendix to Gilcher-
Holtey, Das Mandat, 332–51. I am not suggesting that Marxist determinists,
like Marx and Kautsky,
held the nonsensical view often ascribed to them, especially to Kautsky, that
history is some kind of
force that proceeds independently of the will and actions of men. It was Marx who
wrote “Men make
their own history”; he added, however, “but they do not make it just as they please; they
do not make it
under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances
directly found, given and
transmitted from the past.” Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte (New York:
International Publishers, n.d.), 13. In an earlier work, Marx and Engels had
written: “History does
nothing, it ‘does not possess immense wealth,’ it ‘fights
no battles’! It is, rather, man, real, living man
who does all this, who possesses and
fights; it is not ‘history’ that uses man as a means to pursue its
goals—as if it were an individual
person—but it is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his goals.”
Friedrich Engels and Karl
Marx, “Die heilige Familie,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, II
(Berlin: Dietz Verlag,
1962), 98.
Kautsky, in his commentary on the Erfurt Program, wrote: “When one speaks of the irresistibility
and
natural necessity of social development, one obviously presupposes that men are men and not dead
puppets;
men with certain needs and passions, with certain physical and mental powers that they seek
to use in their
own interest…. We consider the collapse of present-day society inevitable, because we
know that economic
development produces, with natural necessity, conditions that compel the
exploited to fight against private
property.” Das Erfurter Programm (19th ed.; Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz
Nachf., 1974), 102.
86. Stuart R. Schram, “On the Quotations,” in Mao Tse-tung,
Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-
tung (New York: Bantam Books, 1967), xi.
87. Translated in Jerome Ch’en, Mao (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1969), 113.
88. “Bankruptcy of the Idealist Conception of History” (September
16,1969), in Mao Tse-tung,
Selected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1954–56), V, 454. In
November 1938, Mao had
written: “Every Communist must grasp the truth: ‘Political power grows out of the
barrel of a gun.’ “
“Problems of War and Strategy,” ibid., II, 272.
89. Martin Kenner and James Petras, eds., Fidel Castro Speaks
(New York: Grove Press, 1969),
278.
90. An interesting study of revolutionary development in Ethiopia
points out that Soviet ideologists
could justify a socialist revolution in that country “by arguing that
Lenin himself came out
categorically against overemphasis on technical-economic prerequisites as well as
against rigid,
deterministic political preconditions for socialist revolution.” Edmond J. Keller,
Revolutionary
Ethiopia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 197–98.
A historian of Cambodia states that the Communist leadership’s choice “to wage revolution
everywhere in
Cambodia did not spring from a study of Cambodian social conditions… but from a
conviction… that a
recognizably Communist revolution needed to be waged. If the right preconditions
did not exist, that
problem could be overcome by revolutionary fervor. The absence of a proletariat in
Cambodia, for example,
was not seen as an impediment to progress.” David P. Chandler, The Tragedy
of Cambodian History (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 239. In a footnote, ibid., 364, he
quotes Kathleen Gough, “Roots of
the Pol Pot Regime in Kampuchea,” in Leland Donald, ed., Themes
in Ethnology and Culture History
(Meerut, India: Archana Publications, 1987), 139–41, listing as one
of the bases of Cambodian Communist
ideology Maoism’s “utopian and idealist disregard of material
and objective conditions; an apocalyptic
voluntarism.”
91. As Stuart Schram put it: “If Lenin arbitrarily identified the
Communist Party with the true will
of the real proletariat Mao and his friends
affirmed that the Party can substitute itself for a virtually
nonexistent proletariat as the leader of the
agrarian revolution.” Schram, The Political Thought of Mao
Tse-tung, 78.
Benjamin Schwartz wrote in 1951: “Chinese Communism in its Maoist development demonstrates
in fact that a
communist party organized along Leninist lines and imbued with a sincere faith in certain
basic
Marxist-Leninist tenets can exist quite apart from any organic connection with the proletariat.
The
experience of Chinese Communism thus casts a doubt on the whole organic conception of the
relation of party
to class.” Schwartz, Chinese Communism, 191.
Commenting on this last sentence, Stuart Schram wrote in 1963: “This is the basic question raised
not only
by Mao’s thought, but by that of Lenin and by the whole history of Communism for the past
half century. It
is incontestable that, as Schwartz has put it, Mao has marched through doors that Lenin
only opened.
Whether Mao, in carrying one step further the divorce between Party and class initiated
by Lenin in What
Is To Be Done?, has contributed to the ‘decomposition’ of Marxism, or whether he is
merely enabling it
better to exploit the reactions of protest in agrarian societies exposed to the impact
of
industrialization, is another question.” Schram, The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung, 36–37.
92. “Report of an Investigation into the Peasant Movement in Hunan”
(1927), Mao, Selected Works,
I, 32. For the 1951 edition of his works, Mao amended passages in this
1927 report, which suggest that
poor peasants take the initiative in the revolution, by adding: “They
accept the leadership of the
Communist Party most willingly.”
Schram, stressing the voluntarist character of Leninism, comments on the Hunan Report: “It is
essentially
a-Marxist. But at the same time it reveals vividly Mao’s ‘natural Leninism,’ which…
manifests itself… in
the firm grasp of the principle that political struggle is the key to economic
struggle. The proposition
that politics always takes priority over economics in periods of revolution is
in fact the very heart of
Leninism.” Schram, The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung, 33.
93. The use of the term “propertyless class” in Chinese to render
the Marxian word “proletariat”
also obscures the difference between industrial workers and landless
peasants.
94. See Mao Tse-tung, “The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese
Communist Party” (1939),
Selected Works, III, 72–101, esp. 88–92, 97; “On New Democracy” (1940),
ibid., 106–56, esp. 150.
See also “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship” (1949), ibid., V, 411–24, esp.
415, 417, 421.
Strikingly pro-capitalist statements appear in Mao Tse-tung, “On Coalition Government’
(1945), ibid.,
IV, 244–315, esp. 273–78, 299.
95. Once in power, the Chinese Communists did seek the help of
capitalists as experts on
industrialization. Liu Shao-chi, then the leading Party theorist after Mao, is
reported to have addressed
Chinese businessmen along the following lines: “As Communists, we consider that
you are exploiting
your workers; but we realize that, at the present stage of China’s economic development,
such
exploitation is unavoidable and even socially useful. What we want is for you to go ahead and develop
production as fast as possible and we will do what we can to help.” Quoted by Michael Lindsay in Otto
B.
van der Sprenkel, ed., New China: Three Views (New York: John Day, 1951),
139. For more of this
statement and two others conveying the same message, see my Communism and the
Politics of
Development, 46.
96. Deprived of its Marxian meaning, the term “class struggle” has
been retained by the Chinese
Communists to refer to their conflicts with opposing or dissident elements.
 97. Thus, “feudal” elements can be added to “bourgeois” ones, as
when Mao lists “the allies that
should be won over (middle peasants, small independent craftsmen and
traders, the middle
bourgeoisie, students, teachers, professors and ordinary intellectuals, ordinary
government employees,
professionals and enlightened gentry).” “On Some Important Problems of the
Party’s Present Policy”
(1948), Mao, Selected Works, V, 181–82; italics added. “The motive forces of
the Viet-Nam revolution
at present are the people comprising primarily the workers, peasants,
petty-bourgeoisie and national
bourgeoisie, followed by the patriotic and progressive personages and
landlords.” “Platform of the
Viet-Nam Lao Dong Party,” People’s China 3, no. 9 (May 1, 1951): supp.
98. “Speech by Liu Shao-chi at the Conference of Trade Unions of
Asia and Oceania,” For a
Lasting Peace, for a People’s Democracy, December 30, 1949, 2. Also in
Pravda, January 4, 1950;
translated in Soviet Press Translations, 5, no. 6 (March 15, 1950):
168–72.
99. With respect to the Indian Communist Party, I documented it
fully in my Moscow and the
Communist Party of India (New York: John Wiley, 1956; reprint, Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press,
1982).
100. I did so in the 1950s and 1960s in a dozen writings collected
in my Communism and the
Politics of Development.
101. These statements, along with similar ones by a number of
Soviet writers, are quoted,
respectively, from TASS International News Report, May 24, 1964, and from
Pravda and Izvestia of
December 22, 1963, in Uri Ra’anan, “Moscow and the ‘Third World’,”
Problems of Communism 14,
no. 1 (January-February 1965): 24, 27; Ra’anan also stresses opposition
within both the Soviet and the
Arab Communist parties to this friendly approach to non-Leninist modernizing
regimes in
underdeveloped countries. Also in 1964, Khrushchev awarded the Algerian leader Ben Bella and
Nasser the title Hero of the Soviet Union, though the Egyptian Communists had just been released
from jail
and their Party remained illegal.
102. Writing in the period between Castro’s victory on New Year’s
Day 1959 and his declaration
that he was a “Marxist-Leninist,” the general secretary of the Cuban Popular
Socialist Party (the
Communist Party), with its principal strength in Havana, stated clearly that the Cuban
Revolution had
been non-Communist: “The armed struggle was initiated by the petty bourgeoisie. The
working-class
action could not be the decisive factor of the revolution…. The revolution marched
triumphantly from
the countryside to the towns, from the provinces to the capital. The political leadership
of the armed
struggle was in the hands of the petty bourgeoisie while the rebel army consisted mainly of
poor
peasants and farm laborers.” Bias Roca, “The Cuban Revolution in Action,” World Marxist Review
2,
no. 8 (August 1959): 18.
103. For documentation of the developments mentioned in this and
the preceding ceding paragraph,
see my Communism and the Politics of
Development, 97–100, 109–13, 146, 148–51, 154.
104. “Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and the Colonial
Questions” (1920), CW, XXXI,
150. During the 1905 Revolution in Russia, when the issue of cooperation with
the bourgeoisie also
arose, Lenin had written: “A Social-Democrat must never for a moment forget that the
proletariat will
inevitably have to wage a class struggle for socialism even against the most democratic
and republican
bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie. This is beyond doubt. Hence, the absolute necessity of a
separate,
independent, strictly class party of Social-Democracy.” “Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the
Democratic Revolution” (1905), CW, IX, 85.
105. On August 10, 1990, the New York Times quoted two
Nicaraguan Sandinista leaders as saying
that the Soviet Union was “no longer a sufficient guide for
orienting the political activity of the
Sandinista Front” and “if we think the contradiction in this
country is between the proletariat and the
bourgeoisie, we will have the wrong approach.”
106. In April 1990, the ruling Communist party in Mongolia, the
Mongolian People’s Revolutionary
Party, dropped the word “Communism” from its constitution but, according
to a Party spokesman,
“remains Marxist-Leninist.” New York Times, April 13, 1990, A4. In 1991, it
governed in coalition
with other parties and itself split, but in June 1992 it won an overwhelming victory
in supposedly free
parliamentary elections. The Albanian Communist Party of Labor remained strong enough to
win an
election in 1991, but, now renamed the Socialist Party, shared power for some time with a
non-
Communist opposition and then lost a parliamentary election and the presidency in 1992.
107. The governments of Angola, Mozambique, Benin, and the Congo
renounced Marxism-
Leninism, and Marxist-Leninist Southern Yemen merged with non—Marxist-Leninist Yemen.
108. In March 1990, Mengistu had changed the name of his Ethiopian
Workers Party to the
Democratic Unity Party of Ethiopia, and a billboard of Marx, Engels, and Lenin in
Revolution Square
in Addis Ababa had been removed. The statue of Lenin in Addis Ababa was torn down as the
Mengistu regime fell. Its successors (see note 1), now desirous of U.S. support, have discovered their
attachment to “democracy” and “free enterprise.” The new leader in Addis Ababa, Meles Zenawi, a
former
medical student who led the Marxist-Leninist League of Tigre, had once favored an “Albanian-
style hard-line
Communist system” (New York Times, May 29, 1991, A4), but “it seems doubtful that
the hard-line
Marxist talk, prevalent during the guerrilla war, will stick when it comes to the reality of
governing.”
“Much of the Marxist rhetoric of the new rulers in Addis Ababa derives from their long
years in the bush,
when rote learning from Marxist tracts was part of the training.” Jane Perlez, “A
New Chance for a
Fractured Land,” New York Times Magazine, September 22, 1991, 51.
109. The New York Times of December 9, 1991, reported on two
Communist party congresses. The
South African Communist Party, significant because of its close links with
some of the leadership of
the African National Congress, proclaimed its “Marxism-Leninism” and its
identification with Cuba.
The Communist Party of the United States, with 3,000 dues-paying members,
denounced the Soviet
leadership of Gorbachev and Yeltsin as well as factionalism
within the Party. One dissident said, “We
don’t want to air our dirty Lenin in public.”
110. Lenin quotes “the Menshevik Maslov” as saying “a dictatorship
of the proletariat and the
peasantry would run counter to the whole course of economic development”; he
responds: “It is
precisely here that the roots of the divergencies between Bolshevism and Menshevism must
be
sought.” He then adds: “The struggle between Bolshevism and Menshevism is … a struggle over the
question
whether to … overthrow the hegemony of the liberals over the peasantry.” “The Historical
Meaning of the
Inner-Party Struggle in Russia” (1910), CW, XVI, 376, 378.
111. I outlined this track of “modernization from without” and
contrasted it to the one of
“modernization from within” in my The Political Consequences of
Modernization.
112. While the profound differences between the Marxist Mensheviks
and the Leninist Bolsheviks
were long obscured by questions of personalities and of formal party structure,
it is interesting to note
that the Menshevik Pavel Axelrod, as early as 1903, when the split in the Russian
Social-Democratic
Party occurred, saw the conflict as one between the “subjective aims” of Marxists and the
“objective
reality” of their Party as it had responded to Russian conditions. In an article in Iskra
no. 55 (December
15, 1903) and no. 57 (January 15, 1904), as summarized and quoted in Abraham Ascher,
“Axelrod and
Kautsky,” Slavic Review 26, no. 1 (March 1967): 97, Axelrod wrote: “Subjectively,
Marxists were
committed to promoting the ‘class consciousness and political initiative of the laboring
masses’ and to
uniting them into an ‘independent revolutionary force under the banner of Social Democracy.’
They
favored a political movement in which the masses would participate actively and exercise control. In
fact, however, a highly centralized party had evolved because of the conditions of secrecy and
oppression
under which Marxists had to operate in Russia. The enormous success of this type of
organization had
infected the leadership with a ‘fetishism of centralism,’ or belief that the party should
be controlled by
a small group of revolutionaries—the very antithesis of the Marxist ideal.”
113. I developed this argument at some length in my “Myth,
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy and Symbolic
Reassurance in the East-West Conflict,” Journal of Conflict
Resolution 9, no. 1 (March 1965): 1–17,
reprinted in my Communism and the Politics of
Development, 121–44.
114. I draw parallels between the history of the PCF and PCI, on
the one hand, and that of the SPD,
on the other, in my article “Karl Kautsky and Eurocommunism,” Studies
in Comparative Communism
14, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 3–44, reprinted in my Karl Kautsky: Marxism,
Revolution, and Democracy.
115. Maurice Zeitlin and Richard Earl Ratcliff, “Research Methods
for the Analysis of the Internal
Structure of Dominant Classes: The Case of Landlords and Capitalists in
Chile,” Latin American
Research Review 10, no. 3 (Fall 1975): 5–61.
116. As quoted from El Siglo (Santiago), December 2, 1970,
in William E. Ratliff, Castroism and
Communism in Latin America, 1959–1976 (Washington, D.C.:
American Enterprise Institute, 1976),
162–63, Luis CorvalSn, the secretary-general of the Chilean Communist
Party, said of the program of
the Popular Unity coalition that it was meant to “liberate Chile from
imperialist domination, to destroy
the power centers of the oligarchy, to take
the country out of underdevelopment, to build an
independent and modern economy, to create a new condition
of justice and a more advanced
democracy, and to begin the construction of socialism.” Some of these points
are clearly Leninist,
while those about the “oligarchy,” “justice” and “democracy,” and “socialism” can,
given the
ambiguity of these terms, be seen as either Marxist or Leninist.
117. “La rivoluzione contro il ‘Capitale,’ “ Avanti,
November 24, 1917, in Antonio Gramsci, Scritti
giovanili (Turin: Einaudi, 1958), 150. Between the
two passages quoted, giving evidence both of
Benedetto Croce’s influence on him and of the voluntarism
typical of modernizing intellectuals in
underdeveloped countries, Gramsci says that the Bolsheviks “deny
some assertions of Capital” but
that they live “Marxist thought, which does not die, which is the
continuation of Italian and German
idealist thought and which in Marx had become contaminated by
positivistic and naturalistic
incrustations. And this thought always puts as the most important factor of
history not brute economic
facts, but man, the societies of men [who develop] a collective social will and
comprehend economic
facts and judge them and adapt them to their will.”
118. “Gramsci had intuitively grasped the nature of Leninism, as
the theory and practice of a
revolution in a retarded country where the masses were suddenly hurled upon
the political stage under
the leadership of the Bolshevik vanguard.” Lichtheim, Marxism, 369.
119. In a footnote to a thoughtful essay reviewing the literature
on the history of the German Social-
Democratic Party, Geoff Eley says: “Unfortunately most work on
Luxemburg, Kautsky and other
representatives of the SPD’s Marxist tradition has been preoccupied with
defining their relationship to
post-1917 Leninism, not the most auspicious of beginnings for a
well-contextualized historical
understanding … locating particular theoreticians in the specific historical
circumstances that lent
coherence to their ideas. But this (an elementary principle for any materialist
sociology of knowledge,
one might have thought) is all too frequently absent from Marxist discussions of
their own tradition.”
“Joining Two Histories: The SPD and the German Working Class, 1860–1914,” in Eley’s
From
Unification to Nazism (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1986), 195, n. 27.
120. Paul Hollander, who denounces such intellectuals, has even
discovered a few admirers of
Enver Hoxha’s Albania and Samora Machel’s Mozambique. Paul Hollander,
Political Pilgrims.
Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, 1928–1978
(New York: Oxford
University Press, 1981), 275–77, 481–82.
121. In his preface to the first edition of Capital, Marx
had written: “The country that is more
developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image
of its own future.” It is impossible
to conceive of Marx reversing this statement.
122. Even in the 1930s, when I attended the Gymnasium in Vienna,
the only non-European country
ever mentioned in eight years of history instruction was ancient Egypt.
123. The assumption that German Marxists would feel involved in
Russian politics because Russia
was European, in sharp contrast to their attitude toward more distant
countries, is nicely, though not
deliberately, illustrated by the opening sentence of an article on Russia
by Alexander Helphand
(Parvus), a Marxist writer active in Germany and Russia.
In it, he says he will deal with Russian
political developments quite objectively, “as if it was not we
ourselves who were involved but
someone else, as if events there took place not in Russia, but in some
distant land beyond mountains
and oceans, in China or in Ethiopia or in the land of cannibals.” Parvus,
“Die gegenwärtige politische
Lage Russlands and die Aussichten für die Zukunft,” Die Neue Zeit 24/2
(1906): 108. Helph-and-
Parvus could not know that the Russian future he sought to predict would, in
important respects, be
less similar to the future of Germany than to that of China and Ethiopia, which in
his mind were linked
with “the land of cannibals,” but where traditional empires were also to be overthrown
by
revolutionary modernizers.
124. I sought to demonstrate this in my book The Politics of
Aristocratic Empires (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1982; New Brunswick: liansaction
Publishers, 1997).
125. Similarities and differences being in the eye of the beholder
and a matter of emphasis, this is
not to suggest that parallels between the Russian and the French
revolutions cannot be valid and useful
for certain kinds of analyses. There is a long tradition of work
comparing the two revolutions, from
Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1938; rev. ed., New York:
Vintage Books, 1965) to Theda Skocpol, States and Social
Revolutions (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1979), to name only two insightful non- Marxist
studies.
126. Trotsky’s characterization of Stalin as “Thermidorian” figures
promi- nently in his attack on
Stalin, while Deutscher, who sympathized with Trotsky, stressed parallels
between Stalin and
Napoleon. Isaac Deutscher, “The French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. Some
Suggestive
Analogies,” World Politics 4, no. 3 (April 1952): 369–81.
127. Five each on China (1886, 1900, 1908, 1911, 1912) and what was
then called Persia (1892,
two in 1910, two in 1911), four on Turkey (1900, 1902, 1904, 1908), three on
India (1891, 1897,
1900), two each on Mexico (both in 1911) and on Egypt and the Sudan (1883, 1884), one
each on
Cameroon (1888) and on three colonies in Southeast Asia (1884, 1896, 1914).
128. “The War in China” (1900), CW, IV, 372–77.
129. “Inflammable Material in World Politics” (1908), CW,
XV, 182–88; “Events in the Balkans
and in Persia” (1908), CW, XV, 220–30.
130. “Democracy and Narodism in China” (1912), CW, XVIII, 163–69;
“Regenerated China”
(1912), CW, XVIII, 400–01. The following year, Lenin devoted a two-page article to “the
revolutionary democratic movement” in the Dutch East Indies. “The Awakening of Asia” (1913), CW,
XIX,
85–86.
131. “Democracy and Narodism in China” (1912), CW. XVIII,
165.
132. Ibid.
133. Michael Pawlowitsch, “Die revolutionäre Bewegung and die
politischen Parteien im heutigen
China,” Die Neue Zeit 29/2 (1911): 37–42, 80–84; and “Die grosse
chinesische Revolution,” ibid., 30/1
(1911–12): 372–85, 494–506, 557–70. Twenty-five years earlier, Kautsky
had predicted that railroads
would “revolutionize the Chinese people.” “Die chinesischen Eisenbahnen and
das europäische
Proletariat,” ibid., 4 (1886): 515–25, 529–49, at 547.
134. Quoted in Tony Cliff, Lenin (London: Pluto Press,
1975), 78, from Z. Krzhizhanovskaia,
Neskolko shtrikov iz zhizhni Lenina (Moscow, 1925), II, 49.
135. I cannot be absolutely certain that
Lenin nowhere referred to Mexico, but neither the index to
the 4th Russian edition of Lenin’s Collected
Works (Moscow: Government Publishing House of
Political Literature, 1956) nor the index to works newly
included in the full collection of the works of
Lenin (Moscow: Government Publishing House of Political
Literature, 1966) contains an entry
“Mexico.” The volumes of Lenin’s English-language Collected
Works from 1910 to 1924 contain no
subject indexes (except XXXVIII, Philosophical Notebooks),
but vols. XXXIV—XLV, consisting of
letters, messages, speeches, draft resolutions, and notebooks, do have
name indices. There is no
reference in them to Porfirio Diaz, Francisco Madero, Francisco Villa, or
Emiliano Zapata. I also
checked, more haphazardly, the indices of other collections of Lenin’s writings and
of several dozen
secondary works on Lenin without finding a single reference to Mexico. In 1921, Lenin did
have a
meeting with a Mexican Communist and an interview with an Argentine Communist with whom he
discussed
agrarian reform in Mexico. See articles in Voprosy istorii [Problems of History; Moscow]
(1961): 1,
163–66, and (1984): 11, 84–92.
136. Paul Zierold, “Die Revolution in Mexiko,” Die Neue Zeit
29/2 (1911): 396–402.
137. A quite unsystematic and incomplete survey of works by and
about these authors revealed no
reference to the Mexican Revolution. Trotsky, of course, spent his last
years in exile in Mexico.
138. “The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up” (1916),
CW, XXII, 357.
139. “Democracy and Narodism in China” (1912), CW, XVIII, 163–69.
140. “Our Revolution” (1923), CW, XXXIII, 477.
141. Ibid., 480.
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 Index

Adler, Victor, 6–7, 22, 113 n.25

Afghanistan, 1, 5, 35, 93
Africa, 38, 52, 60, 100, 106
Albania, 62, 124 nn.106,
108, 126 n.120
Algeria, 33, 59,
110 n.10, 123 n.101
Alienation, 2, 74,
77–79, 82, 96
Allende, Salvador, 1, 2,
84, 86
Anarchism, 21, 75,
77, 81, 95
Angola, 5, 63, 124 n.107
Anti-Semites, 21
Anti-Socialist Law, 17
Arabs, 123 n.101
Aristocracy: Russian, 28, 103, 116 n.56; in underdeveloped
countries, 30–
31,
33, 49, 56, 62; Western, 13–14, 16–18, 23–24, 65, 68, 74, 101
Asia, 38, 52, 100, 102, 105–6
Asiatic Mode of Production, 102, 110 n.6
Austria, 16, 43,
102, 113 n.25
Austrian Social-Democratic Party. see Social-Democratic Party, Austrian
Austro-Marxism, 8
Axelrod, Pavel, 105, 125
n.112

Balkans, 5, 27, 98
Bauer, Otto, 6, 8, 113 n.25
Bebel, August, 6–7, 17, 22, 104, 106
Ben Bella, Mohammed, 59, 104, 123 n.101
Benin, 63,124 n.107
Bernstein, Eduard, 6, 22,
113 nn.22, 24,25
"Better Fewer, But Better" (Lenin), 41
Bismarck, Otto von, 17, 112
n.19
Blanqui, Auguste, 104
Blanquism, 77
Bolsheviks, 8, 63,
69, 72–73, 86, 98, 125 nn.110, 112
Bonapartism, 103
Bourgeoisie: in Chile, 83–85; in Germany, 16, 18, 22–23; in industrial
societies, 11–14; in Leninism, 38, 45, 53, 58–59, 61; in Marxism, 28,
42–43, 101; Russian, 28, 50, 67–68, 102–3; in underdeveloped countries,
49; the
word, 9, 12, 32
Boxer Rebellion, 104
Brandt, Willy, 6, 8,
35
Britain, 13–18, 23, 35, 37, 43, 56, 68, 74–75, 83, 102, 105
Bulgaria, 62, 71,
82
Bureaucracy: in Germany, 17–18, 23; labor, 20; managerial, 33, 62;
Russian, 103; Soviet, 27; in underdeveloped countries, 30,
49, 56
Burma, 59
Busia, Kofi, 66, 69

Cabral, Amílcar, 1, 6
Cambodia, 5, 121 n.90
Cameroon, 127 n.127
Capital (Marx), 84, 126 n.121
Capitalism: in Chile, 83; Marxism on, 6, 34, 42–43, 101; and modernizes,
41–42; in Russia, 67–68, 95, 99; the word, 9, 12, 19, 32, 61
Cárdenas, Lázaro, 6, 70–71, 96
Castro, Fidel, 1, 6,
57, 59, 69, 86, 93, 96, 104, 123 n.102
Chile, 2, 62, 83–87, 125 n.116
China, 5, 30, 33, 49, 57–58, 62, 71, 93, 96, 101–2, 104–7, 110 n.10, 115
n.40, 120 n.83, 127 nn.123, 127
Class consciousness, 14–15, 21, 25, 54–55, 68, 73, 99
Class struggle: in Leninism, 28, 38, 44, 50–54, 58, 60–61; in Marxism, 11,
15, 17, 23, 25, 36, 49, 101; as a Marxist term, 9, 32, 79
Colonialism, 7, 17,
30–34, 41, 49–50, 56, 62, 65–67, 83–84, 86, 104, 106
Combined development, 50, 118 n.61
Communist International, 52, 60, 71, 97,99
Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels), 7, 17
Communist Party: French, 3, 71, 74–82, 125 n.114; German, 71, 73–74, 76,
82; Italian, 71, 74–82, 85, 125 n.114; Spanish, 81–82
Congo, 63, 107,
124 n.107
Conservative Party: British, 17; German, 16, 18, 112 nn.16, 19
Corvalán, Luis, 125 n.116
Croatia, 82
Croce, Benedetto, 126 n.117
Cuba, 5, 30, 59, 62, 66, 93, 96, 110 n.10, 123 n.102, 124 n.109
Cyprus, 71
Czechoslovakia, 71, 78,
82
Czech Republic, 82

Darwinism, 15
Democracy, 32. see also Parliamentary democracy
Democratic Party of the Left, 80
Deng Xiaoping, 1
Determinism, 54–57,
68, 120 n.85
Diaz, Porfirio, 128 n.135
Dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, 46, 116 n.51, 125 n.110
Dutch East Indies, 127 n.130

Eastern Europe, 2–3,

27, 40, 63, 109 n.3
East Germany, 3, 24,
82, 109 n.4
Egypt, 33, 59, 110 n.10, 123 n.101, 126 n.122, 127 n.127
El Salvador, 62
Engels, Friedrich, 1, 6–8, 23, 29, 32, 36–37, 89, 93, 110 n.7, 116 n.59
Erfurt Program, 23, 57,
120 n.85
Eritrea, 109 n.1
Ethiopia, 1, 5, 30, 33, 35, 60, 63, 93, 107, 109 n.1, 121 n.90, 124 n.108, 127
n.123
Eurocentrism, 100–108
Eurocommunism, 80, 82

Fabianism, 4, 6
Factory councils, 77, 84–85
Fascism, 16, 78–80
Feudalism, 101–3
Finland, 71
France, 16, 48, 68, 72, 74–76, 78–83, 110 n.7
Franco, Francisco, 82
Frankfurt School, 110 n.8
French Communist Party, 3, 71, 74–82, 125 n.114
Gandhi, Mohandas, 118 n.60
General strike, 75–78
German Communist Party, 71, 73–74, 76,82
German Empire, 11, 14–24, 35–36, 43, 48, 56, 75–76, 79, 81, 102, 106, 111
n.14, 112 n.21, 113 n.23
German Social-Democratic Party. see Social-Democratic Party, German
Germany. see German Empire see Weimar Republic
Ghana, 59, 66
Godesberg Program, 25
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 3, 125
n.109
Gotha Program, 118 n.64
Gramsci, Antonio, 1, 2,
57, 83–87, 92, 105, 110 n.8, 126 nn.117, 118
Greece, 62, 71
Guatemala, 62
Guinea, 59
Guinea-Bissau, 5
Guzmán Reynoso, Abimael, 1, 6, 109 n.1

Hilferding, Rudolf, 6, 8
Hitler, Adolf, 78
Ho Chi Minh, 1, 6, 96, 104
Hoxha, Enver, 126 n.120
Hunan Report (Mao), 57
Hungary, 62, 71,
78, 82

Iceland, 71
Ideology: defined, 4, 9–10, 89, 92, 99, 109 n.5; and environment, 2, 6, 9–
10, 65, 69, 83, 90–94; Marxist view, 2, 93–95, 97, 99
Imperialism, 41, 50,
55, 58–61
Imperialism (Lenin), 61
India, 33, 37, 57, 62, 67, 101–2, 104, 110 n.10, 115 n.40, 123 n.99, 127
n.127
Indian National Congress, 67
Indonesia, 33, 66–67
Industrialization, 30, 62, 122 n.95; French and Italian,
79–82; German, 18,
23, 73, 113 n.21; goal of modernizers,
3, 27, 31, 33, 39–40, 60, 86; in
 Leninism, 39–40, 42, 60, 68; Russian, 100; Soviet, 27–28, 40, 55, 68, 73,
77, 85, 95, 115 n.38; Spanish, 82; Western, 13–14, 68
Intellectuals, 65; attracted to Marxism, 11, 15; in Leninism, 28, 42–44, 48,
51, 60, 115 n.41; managerial, 33, 42; in Marxism, 28; modernizing,
2–3,
11, 28–33, 36–44, 46–50, 55–58, 60, 63, 65–68, 73, 75, 77, 83, 85–86,
95–96, 103, 114 n.27; Russian, 39, 67, 95, 100; SPD, 19; in the West, 70,
73–74, 96, 101
International: Second, 4, 97–99, 104; Third, 52, 60, 71, 97, 99
Ireland, 106
Italian Communist Party, 71, 74–82, 85, 125 n.114
Italy, 2, 16, 43, 72, 74–76, 78–85, 110 n.7

Jacobinism, 77, 103

Japan, 58
Jaurès, Jean, 6

Kautsky, John H., 108

Kautsky, Karl, 1, 6,
8, 10, 23, 29, 57, 94, 103, 105–6, 108, 113 nn.23, 25,
117 n.59, 120 n.85, 126 n.119, 127 n.133
Kemal, Mustafa, 6, 70–71
Khrushchev, Nikita, 1, 59,
123 n.101
Korsch, Karl, 110 n.8
KPD, 71, 73–74, 76, 82
Kreisky, Bruno, 6, 8
Kronstadt uprising, 78
Kuomintang, 59

Laborite ideologies, 4–7,

10
Labor movement: French and Italian, 75, 80–82; German, 16–24, 72, 106,
111 n.11; in industrial societies, 4–5, 8,
10–11, 13–16, 28–29, 35, 37, 43,
66–67, 71, 77, 85, 94; international, 40, 98; Russian, 68, 95; Spanish, 81;
in underdeveloped
countries, 48
Labour Party, 16–17
Lassalle, Ferdinand, 17
Latin America, 38, 52,
83, 100
Lenin, V. I., 3–5; as
revolutionary modernizer, 9, 27–29, 36, 38, 40, 47–49,
54, 63, 93, 106, 108, 110 n.9; as theorist, 28,
46, 54, 120 n.82. see also
 Leninism
Leninism: and bourgeoisie, 38, 45–46, 48, 53, 58–59, 61; and class struggle,
28, 38, 44, 50–54, 58, 60–61; dead, 2–3, 62; defined, 5–6, 60–61;
employs Marxist terms, 3, 5, 9, 11–12, 29, 35–36, 43, 46, 53–54, 61, 67,
69–72, 79, 86–87, 103, 106, 110 n.9; and imperialism, 41, 50, 60; and
industrialization, 39–40, 42, 60, 86, 114 n.32; and intellectuals, 28,
42–
44, 48, 51, 60, 115 n.41; and nationalization,
86; and the Party, 43–44,
48, 50–51, 54, 58–59, 84, 114 n.28, 122 n.91; and peasants, 28–29, 44–
48, 50–52, 54–55, 57–58, 61, 102, 105, 116 nn.51, 56, 57, 117 nn.59, 60,
119 n.79; and revolution, 34–37, 44–48, 59, 61, 114 nn.29, 30, 116 n.57,
118 n.62, 121 n.90, 126 n.118; and revolutionary
movements, 52, 54;
and
trade unionism, 28, 44,
55, 76; voluntarism,
55–57, 121 n.90, 122
n.92; in the West,
69, 71, 73, 81; and workers, 28, 36, 38, 42–48, 50–51,
55, 57, 61, 114 n.28, 116 n.56, 118 n.63, 119 n.69, 120 n.83
Liberal Party: British, 15, 17; German, 16, 18, 21
Libya, 33
Lichtheim, George, 117 n.60
Liebknecht, Wilhelm, 17
Li Li-san, 57
Liu Shao-chi, 58, 122
n.95
Louis Napoleon, 116 n.58
Lukács, György, 110 n.8
Luxemburg, Rosa, 1, 6,
92, 105, 126 n.119

Machel Samora, 126 n.120

Madero, Francisco, 128 n.135
Mali, 59
Mao Zedong, 1, 5–6, 8, 57–58, 92, 93, 96, 104, 114 n.30, 118 n.60, 122
nn.91, 92, 123 n.97
Marchais, Georges, 1
Marcuse, Herbert, 110 n.8
Marx, Karl. see Marxism
Marxism: appeal of, 11, 15–16, 18–20, 23–24, 34, 39; and capitalism, 6, 34,
41–43; and class struggle, 11, 15, 17, 23, 25, 49; conception of history,
4–5, 10–11, 19, 28, 34, 37, 43–43, 54–56, 94, 96, 101; dead, 2–3;
defined, 4–6, 8; and democracy, 7; determinism, 20, 28, 55–57, 120
n.85; an ideology, 2, 93–95, 97, 99; and industrialization, 42–43; and
 intellectuals, 28, 36, 42; and nationalization,
86; and peasants, 28,
48,
54, 116 nn.58, 59; and revolution, 11, 15, 18–20, 23, 34–36, 47, 85;
terminology, 3, 5, 8–9,
11–12, 15, 32; in underdeveloped countries,
32,
65–69; and workers, 6–7, 15, 25, 28, 34–37, 42–43, 48, 50, 54–55, 86,
106, 118 n.64
Mengistu Haile Mariam, 1–2,
5–6, 8, 35, 63, 92, 109 n.1, 124 n.108
Menshevism, 2, 8, 43, 67–69, 86, 91, 97–98, 103, 118 n.61, 125 nn.110, 112
Mexico, 5, 71, 96, 105–7, 110 n.10, 127 n.127, 128 nn.135, 137
Military: in Germany, 17–18, 23; in Russia, 103; in underdeveloped
countries, 30,
33, 37, 49, 56, 65
Miró Cardona, José, 66, 69
Modernizing ideologies, 5–6,
11, 27, 30–32, 38, 43, 59–63, 73, 81
Modernizing movement, 5, 12,
27, 29, 40, 49–50, 54, 58–59, 61–63, 66, 94,
104, 110 n.10
Mongolia, 62, 120 n.83,
124 n.106
Mossadegh, Mohammed, 104
Mozambique, 5, 63,
124 n.107, 126 n.120
Myth, 12, 32–35, 70, 73, 77–80, 97

Najibullah, 1, 6, 35
Napoleon Bonaparte, 127 n.126
Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 5–6,
59, 104, 123 n.101
National democracy, 59
National Front, 59
National Liberal Party, 16, 18
Nazis, 16, 24, 73, 79
Nehru, Jawaharlal, 5–6,
67, 104
Neo-Colonialism (Nkrumah), 61
Nepal, 62
Neue Zeit, Die , 104–5
New Unionism, 15
Nicaragua, 96, 124 n.105
Nkrumah, Kwame, 6, 61,
69, 104
North America, 13, 101
North Korea, 62
North Vietnam, 96
Norway, 75
Nyerere, Julius, 96, 104

Oldenburg-Januschau, Elard von, 112 n.19

Oriental despotism, 102, 110 n.6
Ortega Saavedra, Daniel, 1, 96, 104

Paris Commune, 103

Parliamentary democracy, 4–5,
7, 10, 16, 19, 24, 56, 76–77, 81, 85, 94
Paz Estenssoro, Victor, 6, 104
PCE (Spanish Communist Party), 81–82
PCF (French Communist Party), 3, 71, 74–82, 125 n.114
PCI (Italian Communist Party), 71, 74–82, 85, 125 n.114
PDS (Democratic Party of the Left), 80
Peasantry: in Ethiopia, 63; in France and Italy, 74, 76, 79; in Germany, 18,
22, 24, 73, 112 n.21, 117 n.59; and industrialization, 14; in
Russia, 36,
68, 77, 101, 103, 117 n.59; in underdeveloped
countries, 31, 44,
49, 56,
65–66. see also Leninism, and
peasants; Marxism, and peasants
Peking, 58
Persia, 104, 127 n.127
Peru, 109 n.1
Petty bourgeoisie, 14; in Cuba, 123 n.102; in France and Italy, 76,
79;
German, 18, 24; in Leninism, 45, 58; in underdeveloped countries, 38,
49
Philippines, 62
Plamenatz, John, 110 n.9, 120 n.83
Plekhanov, G. V., 67–69,
102
Poland, 24, 62, 82
Pol Pot, 1, 6, 92
Popular Front, 59
Popular Unity, 84, 86,
125 n.116
Portugal, 62, 71
Proletariat, 9, 12,
32, 58, 122 n.93. see also Workers
Prussia, 16–18, 24, 112 nn.16, 19

Reichstag, 7, 17–18, 111 n.14, 112 n.19

Revisionism, 4, 11,
22, 113 n.25
Revolution: bourgeois, 28–29, 34, 38, 43, 45, 47, 53, 67–68, 102–3, 105–6,
116 nn.57, 59; Chinese, 71, 104–7; concept, 9, 11, 18–23, 32, 79, 98, 112
n.20; French, 15, 67, 79, 103, 117 n.59, 127 n.125; German, 19, 23;
Mexican, 5, 71, 105–7, 128 nn.135, 137; of modernizers, 31, 33–38, 43,
47, 68, 77, 85, 93, 95, 106; of 1905, 44–47, 50, 68, 104, 106, 116 n.56,
124 n.104; peasant, 34, 45–46, 52, 67; political, 19–20, 23, 31;
proletarian, 15, 19, 28–29, 34–38, 43, 45, 47, 53, 67–69, 72–73, 96, 102–
3, 106; Russian, 8, 27, 35–36, 39, 47–48, 50, 67, 70–75, 77–79, 84, 103,
106–7, 127 n.125; social, 19–20, 23–24, 31; Turkish, 71; violent, 19, 24,
35
Rifondazione comunista, 80
Robespierre, Maximilien, 104
Romania, 62, 82
Roth, Guenther, 23
Roy, M. N., 52–53,
57
Russia, 2, 5, 27–30, 33, 35–41, 43, 46–52, 54, 57, 60, 67–69, 71–73, 78, 86,
91, 93, 95–104, 106–7, 110 n.10, 115 n.40, 126 n.123

Salvador, 62
Sandinistas, 124 n.105
Sartre, Jean Paul, 110 n.8
Scandinavia, 4, 6
Schram, Stuart, 57
Schwartz, Benjamin, 122 n.91
Seliger, Martin, 109 n.5
Serbia, 82
Shining Path, 109 n .l
Sjahrir, Sutan, 66–67,
69
Slovakia, 82
Slovenia, 82
Social-Democratic Party: Austrian, 4, 7–8, 16, 22, 110 n.7, 111 n.11, 113
n.25; German, 1, 3–4, 7–9, 16–25, 30, 35, 48, 57, 73, 76, 79–81, 93, 95,
98, 107, 109 n.4, 110 n.7, 111 nn. 11, 12, 112 nn.16, 21, 113 nn.22, 23,
117 n.59, 125 n.114, 126 n.119
Sociology of knowledge, 2, 93, 126 n.119
South Africa, 124 n.109
Southern Yemen, 5, 62–63, 124 n.107
Soviet Union, 2–4, 9, 24, 27, 33, 55, 62–63, 71, 77–80, 82, 97, 109 n.3
Spain, 62, 71, 81–82
Spanish Communist Party, 81–82
SPD. see Social-Democratic Party, German
Spontaneity, 44, 55,
76
Stalin, Joseph, 1, 3,
5–6, 40, 55, 70, 78, 95–96, 114 n.34, 115 n.38, 127
n.126
State and Revolution, The (Lenin), 77
Sudan, 127 n.127
Sukarno, 6, 61, 67, 69, 104
Sun Yat-sen, 6, 70–71, 106
Switzerland, 7, 116 n.56
Syndicalism, 16, 75–78, 80–82, 84–85

Tanzania, 96
Thermidorianism, 103
Thorez, Maurice, 1
Three-class suffrage, 18
Tigre, 109 n.1, 124
n.108
Togliatti, Palmiro, 1, 6
Tolstoy, Leo, 118 n.60
Touré, Sékou, 104
Trade unionism, 7, 59; in
Chile, 83–84, 86; in France and Italy, 75–77; in
Leninism, 28, 44, 55, 76; Western, 14–15, 18, 24–25, 75
Traditionalism, 30–31,
33, 49–50, 56, 62, 65–67, 84, 101, 106
Trotsky, Leon, 1, 6,
47, 102, 105, 117 n.60, 127 n.126, 128 n.137
Turkestan, 119 n.69
Turkey, 71, 100,
104, 107, 127 n.127
“Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution” (Lenin),
45

United States, 14, 83,

124 n.109
Universal suffrage, 7, 17,
76
Urrutia, Manuel, 66, 69

Vichy, 79
Vienna, 42
Vietnam, 5, 49, 62, 96, 110 n.10, 123 n.97
Villa, Francisco, 128 n.135
Violence, 18–20,
24, 35, 78
Voluntarism, 55–57,
84, 121 n.90, 122 n.92, 126 n.117

Weimar Republic, 23–24,

72–73, 80, 111 n.11
Welfare state, 24
What Is to Be Done? (Lenin), 44, 51, 60, 122 n.91
White-collar workers, 22, 24, 79
William II, 17, 112 n.19
Workers: in Chile, 83–85;
in France and Italy, 74–79, 84; German, 73, 77;
in industrialized countries,
11–12, 14–15, 24–25, 70, 73, 85, 96; in
Russia, 36, 50, 67–68, 77, 85–86, 97, 99, 103, 116 n.56; in
underdeveloped countries, 31–32, 56, 65–66. see also Leninism, and
workers Marxism, and workers
Workers’ councils, 77, 84–85
World Federation of Trade Unions, 58
World War I, 8, 22,
39–41, 66, 71, 73–74, 76–78, 98, 100, 104–7
World War II, 24, 49,
59, 66, 71, 73–74, 78, 81–82, 85, 104

Yeltsin, Boris N., 125 n.109

Yemen, 124 n.107
Yugoslavia, 62, 82,
120 n.83

Zapata, Emiliano, 128 n.135

Zenavi, Meles, 124 n.108