The Guardian of Liberty - Nemzetőr, 1985 (8. évfolyam, 1-6. szám)

1985-01-01 / 1. szám

How Communists Cheer and Boo — 8 ’’Proletarians of All Countries, Unite! This clarion call, which now appears on the masthead of Pravda and all East European Party newspapers, derives from the „Workers of all countries, unite!“ at the end of Marx’s Communist Manifesto of 1848. Communism’s basic cheer is for the „proletariat.“ Marx’s concept of the „proletariat“ first appeared in the introduction to his Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, written at the end of 1843. In it he wrote: „A class must be formed which has radical chains, . . . a class which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society which has a universal character because its sufferings are universal, ... which can redeem itself only by a total redemption of humanity. This ... is the proletariat... In Germany n o type of enslavement can be abolished unless all enslavement is destroyed .. . The eman­cipation of Germany will be an e - mancipation of ma n.“ This passage is remarkable for its religious tone, with its references to „redemption“, al­though it is overtly anti-religious (it was at the opening of this same Introduction that Marx said „Religion is the opium of the peo­ple“); the fact that it consists of an abstract chain of reasoning; and that it is specifically rooted in the condition of Germany. » Never­theless the belief that the „Proletariat“ cannot emancipate itself without emancipating the whole of society, and that it is its „historic mission“ to do so, has remained the basis of Marxism. In the Communist Manifesto (ch 1), Marx said: „Of all the classes which stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the prole­tariat alone is a truly revolutionary class.“ Only two paragraphs af‘er this assertion, however, comes a passage which shows that the poorest members of an industrialised society need not expect much sympathy from Marx if he judges them unlikely to support his Revolu­tion: „The ,dangerous class’, the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may here and there be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life however pre­pare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.“ The Revolution in fact needs to be organised, although the proletariat is a „truly revolution­ary class“; this is where the Communists come in. In ch. 2 of the Manifesto, „Proletarians and Communists’, Marx says: „The Communists... are . . . the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others . .. The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, over­throw of bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat." It is immediately apparent that „class“ here means an organised insurrection, and is not being used in its normal sense. Lenin made the same point, that the Revolution needs to be organised, in terms which amount to a denial that the proletariat is a „truly revolutionary dass“: „A Socialist Revolution is out of the question unless the masses become classa conscious and organised, trained and educated in an open class struggle against the entire bourgeoisie“ (Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, July, 1905, ch. 2). At the beginning of ch. 1 of the Manifesto Marx said : „Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps . . . Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.“ A little earlier in the same chapter he had described the two camps as „oppressors and oppressed“ ; here is the mainspring of the appeal of Marxism. This appeal is double: partly that it has a look of intellectual brilliance, with its reduction of multiplicity to simplicity, but much more be­cause of the emotional appeal of its prophecy that the oppressed will overthrow their oppres­sors, and its call to work towards that end. This latter appeal was the mainspring of Marx’s own emotions, his laudable horror at the exploitation and social distress which accom­panied the Industrial Revolution. It gradually became clear, however, that Marx’s „two great hostile camps“ were not taking shape. Lenin, without of course criticis­ing Marx, found himself obliged to face the complexity of the contemporary world. For instance, in a pamphlet on the Irish rebellion of 1916, included in The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up and published in Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrata No. 1 (October, 1916), Lenin wrote: „To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty-bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi­proletarian masses against oppression by the landowners, the Church and the monarchy, against national oppression, etc. — to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution... Whoever expects a ,pure' social revolution will never live to see it.“ Yet it was Marx who prophesied what Lenin here calls a „pure“ social revolution. Besides, the „small nations“ to which Lenin refers ought themselves to be divided by class struggle, according to Marxist theory. Marx, near the end of the Manifesto, said candidly: „The Communists everywhere support every revolu­tionary movement against the existing social and political order of things“ ; he was apparent­ly unaware of the implications of this view for his theory; so was Lenin. Marx was thinking of the industrialised countries of Europe, and saw the urban work­ers as having a common „class“ interest which overrode any national interest. His scheme of history, though it varied slightly at different times, always postulated „capitalism“ and the „bourgeoisie“ as the immediate precursor of the Socialist society. Towards the end of his slife, howeverr, the question arose whether a Socialist Revolution was possible in a pre-industrial society. In the preface to the 1882 Russian edition of the Manifesto, signed jointly by Marx and Engels, we read: „If the Russian revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West. . . the present Russian common owner­ship of land may serve as the starting-point for a communist development.“ Lenin took the same idea further in his speech to the Second Congress of the Comintern on July 26. 1920: „If the victorious revolutionary proletariat conducts systematic propaganda among the backward peoples, and the Soviet governments come to their aid with all the resources at their disposal — in that event it will be a mistake to assume that the backward peoples must inevitably go through the capitalist stage of development.“ Here is Lenin outlining a plan for ultimate world conquest and showing special interest in the „backward peoples“, whom we now know as the „Third World“; since the Bolshevik Revolution he had kept saying that world revolution was imminent. However the asser­tion that „the capitalist stage of development“ could be bypassed involves abandoning one of the fundamental doctrines of Marxism. We are left with a „proletarian internation­alism“ without proletarians; the slogan however remains even after it has lost its real meaning, as when President Cherrnenko said in his acceptance speech on election as Party General Secretary at the Central Committee Plenum on February 13, 1984: „We Soviet Communists, . . . unswervingly loyal to the principle of proletarian internationalism, have ardent sym­pathy and deep respect for the struggle waged by our foreign comrades.“ Marxist-Leninists are cheered whether or not they are proletarians, but proletarians are booed if they are not Marxist-Leninists, as they were by Marx. The small schoolgirl daughter of journalist Igor Yakovlev is a satirist — or perhaps the unconscious creator of satire. In an article in a recent issue of Izvestiya, the Soviet Government daily, her father said that she had been awarded only two marks, the lowest, for an ideologically „incorrect Schoolgirl Satirist treatment“ of a subject which she painted in her school art class. She was asked to illustrate „the construc­tion of the Baikal-Amur Railway (BAM)“ — a huge project which has been beset with difficulties. But, as little Miss Yakovleva had never seen a „construction,“ she used her imagina­tion. She painted a railway track, a snow drift with a spade stuck in it, and a line of footprints stretching to the edge of the paper. She called her picture „Lunch-break on the BAM.“ 3 JANUARY-FEBRUARY, 1985

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