Marxism and Leninism: An Essay in the Sociology of Knowledge by John H Kautsky

Author:John H Kautsky [Kautsky, John H]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781351309431
Goodreads: 52811476
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

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

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