Author: Blair Vidak.
28 April 2023.
Introduction.
We should not currently be interested in the ‘recipes for the kitchens of tomorrow’.
Do the ends justify the means?—A question improperly posed.
The Necessity of Revolution.
Lesson I—Stalin the murderer, Stalin the venerator.
Lesson II—The Leninist model of revolution.
Lesson III—The ‘easy’ and the ‘difficult’.
Various types of anarchists avow their support for the masses, but refuse to get their hands dirty in movement work. Instead, they prefer to support the mere abstract idea of the masses. Something called ‘moral perfectionism’ is the justification that they have for washing their hands of having to actually do anything.
If the movement is not perfect, so I have observed, it is not worth supporting. One does not, fortunately, have to show your face at Invasion Day, for instance, due to its ‘liberalism’. Usually this comes part and parcel with the promotion only events sponsored by one’s own organisation, and the refusal to court or field support from anyone outside the organisation.
This is the classic formation of the political Cult.
Anarchists continue to repeat the same old well-peddled faerie tales about the cunning and blood-thirstiness of Marxists. Let me mention Kronstadt again for you, comrade.
I am sick of being drawn on the question of the questions of (a) how the Capitalist State is to smashed; and (b) what is to come after its smashing. I would like to argue in this pamphlet that:
I am sick and tired of having to assent to what I will term ‘moral puritanism’—that is, the idea that if one wasn’t born with the right ideas in their head, then they are not worth social communion.
We should not be concerned with what will happen after the Revolution. As I have always said: ‘let us cross that bridge when we get to it’. Lenin is entitled, in State and Revolution to speculate about what should happen after a Revolution because he made one. Even then his suggestions are modest and realistic.1
Let us storm heaven first. Let us get inside, and then decide what we are going to do.
One gets the sense, looking over the actual black letter of Lenin, that he is not so much concerned with persuading than explaining. You must understand, to simply deny that the October Revolution was a Revolution at all is no longer permitted in this discussion. It is a tired talking point, and, in true anarchist fashion, refuses to engage with the concerns of others outside their movement. The point is, whether or not you take Lenin to be an impish liar, he is explaining his justification for storming the Winter Palace.
Tell the workers that they has not achieved a revolution. Ah, but, remember comrade, every Government is the same, “it does not matter so much whether one is being beaten by the ‘People’s Stick’”. I will return to this point in Chapter 2. It is the last lesson (III) of the chapter.
The Slovene Slavoj Zizek continues to have a lasting influence on the intellectual direction of our movement. Despite his battyness, despite his clown-like performativity, I think he is absolutely right on the question of what is good about the legacy of the Soviet Union.
So help me, if you refuse to listen to him—you do not understand anything more than a high school education on the October Revolution or the Cold War. Marxists are accused of avoiding the elephant in the room on the issue, so I may as well explode this stereotype: in this chapter I do not plan to humanise Stalin so much as to allege that to reject moral puritanism requires one to have to relate oneself to the consequences of the October Revolution.
Socialist Alternative are particularly irritating on this issue, with their insistence that there is a ‘break’ somewhere along the line after October 1917, whereupon Tony Cliff pronounces the Soviet system as no longer socialist but ‘state capitalist’.
I am perfectly happy to accept Trotsky’s conception of the later ‘degenerated worker’s state’ as a form of Proletarian Bonapartism—that is, what was required in Soviet Russia, as well as the Eastern Bloc was not another mode of production so much as another Revolution, except this time (again?) within the superstructure of the Soviet system--a Political Revolution.2
Here, I will recite three lessons from The Slovene:
In the face of the legacy of Lenin, Stalin showed humility. The political philosophy of Marxism-Leninism is just that—a mandate from Lenin, not Stalin. In this way Stalin is a follower, not the teacher.
Anarchists are shrill in their denunication of the supposed practical implications of Marxism: ‘the ends justify the means’. Much of my criticism of this commonplace from the anarchists turns on how to interpret the phrase ‘might makes right’. We can call this the Question of Macchiavelli.
You had better get your hands dirty, in Revolution-making. Further, take responsibility for your associations. Nothing is more ethically disgusting than a ‘Beautiful Soul’.
Comrades, we Communists are people of a special mold. We are made of a special stuff.3
If one looks no further than the surface, this is merely a quotation of Stalin that affirms that Communists are of a particular gumption—they possess a kind of cleverness, an acumen unrivaled by their enemies.
However the sense in which ‘a Communist’ is spoken of here is meant to refer to a particular Communist: Lenin himself. Never mentioned is the fact that this was said as a eulogy to Lenin himself, and further silence is reserved for the passages that follow the mere two opening sentences of the eulogy itself:
We are those who form the army of … Comrade Lenin. There is nothing higher than the honor of belonging to this army. There is nothing higher than the title of member of the party whose founder and leader was Comrade Lenin. It is not given to everyone to be a member of such a party. It is not given to everyone to withstand the stresses and storms that accompany membership in such a party. It is the sons of the working class, the sons of want and struggle, the sons of incredible privation and heroic effort who before all should be members of such a party. That is why the party of the Leninists, the party of the Communists, is also called the party of the working class.
Departing from us, Comrade Lenin enjoined us to hold high and guard the purity of the great title of member of the party. We vow to you, Comrade Lenin, that we shall fulfill your behest with honor!4
How simply is it put! With characteristic bluntness Stalin sets out that nobody was above Lenin when it came to the possession of political resourcefulness and good sense.
Perhaps the legacy of Stalin is a more disturbing one than we in the West are willing to admit: the usual pop psychoanalytic diagnosis of Stalin in the pages of Red Flag, or the Guardian, or the ABC for that matter, are that he was a psychopathic paranoiac. Jealous of his position as leader of the Soviet Union, like King Herod he feasted while the kulaks were crushed.
Is Stalin to be considered realistically, or with the insulting saccharine Hollywood screenplay starring Jude Law? Here we find Stalin the murderer.
However Zizek is trying to draw our attention to a deeper conception of the Soviet Union. He we find Stalin the venerator. Stalin below Lenin. Indeed in Stalin’s mouth we find his philosophy titled humbly Marxism-Leninism.
“Sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing to do.”5
In 15th century Russia, occupied by Mongols, a farmer and his wife walk along a dusty country road. A Mongol warrior on a horse stops at their sight and tells the farmer that he will now rape his wife. He then adds: “But since there is a lot of dust on the ground, you should hold my testicles while I’m raping your wife, so they’ll not get dirty. After the Mongol finishes his job and drives away, the farmer starts to laugh and jump with joy. The surprised wife asks him: “How can you be jumping with joy when I was just brutally raped?!” The farmer answers: “But I got him! His balls are full of dust.”
This sad joke tells of the predicament of dissidents. They thought they were dealing serious blows to the Party Nomenklatura [higher officials of the Soviet Union], but all they were doing was getting a bit of dust on the Nomenklatura’s testicles. Is today’s critical left all too often not in a similar position? We think we are doing something terribly subversive, but we are just… Our task is to discover how to make a step further. Critical leftists have hitherto only dirtied with dust the balls of those in power. The point is, to cut them off.
What is the Leninist model of Revolution? Looking through State and Revolution, the blueprint for October, I continue to be astounded by the candour with which Lenin sets out his plans.
First Premise: The State is the site of irreconcilable class antagonism, therefrom springs the Capitalist State: in order to keep down the 99%, the 1% weild the State as a political weapon.
So far so good? Anarcho-syndicalists at this stage should be remaining onboard.
Second Premise: The State—in particular, the Capitalist State—is an instrument of class rule. The State possesses the police, the court system, and its legal code as a system for oppressing the 99%.
Conclusion: The State must be smashed, as it is evil in kind, and not in type, and cannot be taken over and weilded as a ready instrument of the 99%—à la Kautsky; Bernstein; the Australian Labor Party.
Lenin’s broader point about Revolution is that, sometimes, and, indeed quite often, centralism can be used for good.
Do I need to repeat this idiom on the rooftops? Do not throw the baby out with the bathwater. This is a point of great dialectical subtlety that anarchists and liberals alike are wont to ignore. Another idiom with the exact same meaning that is oft repeated is ‘do not make the perfect the enemy of the good’.
Lenin’s broader point about Revolution is that, sometimes, and, indeed quite often, centralism can be used for good. Anarchism will have nothing of this. But isn’t it true? At least both sides will agree to the definition of the terms in this instance. But, again, our literacy of Marxism has faded.
It is actually later Engels from which Lenin draws most of his philosophical ammunition. Again and again we should be returning to the flanking assault motion Engels undertook against Herr Duhring, so that Marx could finish Kapital:
… That force, however, plays yet another role [other than that of a diabolical power] in history, a revolutionary role; that, in the words of Marx, it is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one, that it is the instrument with which social movement forces its way through and shatters the dead, fossilized political forms — of this there is not a word in Herr Duhring. It is only with sighs and groans that he admits the possibility that force will perhaps be necessary for the overthrow of an economy based on exploitation — unfortunately, because all use of force demoralizes, he says, the person who uses it. And this in Germany, where a violent collision — which may, after all, be forced on the people — would at least have the advantage of wiping out the servility which has penetrated the nation’s mentality following the humiliation of the Thirty Years’ War. And this person’s mode of thought — dull, insipid, and impotent — presumes to impose itself on the most revolutionary party that history has ever known!7
With fascinating imagery, we are again treated not just to an incredible idiom for how historical materialism functions, but also to a fine counter-example against the neo-Kantian Marxists—Engels is nowise ecclectic here, but a fine dialectician.
Force, i.e. Revolution, is the midwife of society. The baby is coming, how will it be born? This has important implications for what I will say in the second chapter of this part. We are making revolution, and it is something that occurs in time. One part is determined. On the eve of revolution, a new society is due to be born. If it is true, and we are the midwives of this new society, how best are we to intervene to ensure the success of the birth?
The point is that coercion is not necessarily representative of Macchiavellianism. I have written elsewhere about the ghostly spirit of Macchiavelli within the phrase ‘might makes right’.8 This is an argument of significant merit against both anarchists and liberals alike: liberals accommodate themselves to Macchiavellian opportunism, whereas anarchists decry it, disavowing it, assuming the Yogi-like pose they so often warn against:
The attempts to produce Change from Within on a mass-scale were equally unsuccessful. Whenever an attempt was made to organise saintliness by exterior means, the organisers were caught in the same dilemmas. The Inquisition flew off at a tangent; the Churches in the liberal era circle round and round the peak without gaining height. To subordinate the End to the Means leads to a slope as fatal as the inverse one. Gandhi’s slope started with non-violence and made him gradually slide down to his present position of non-resistance to Japanese conquest: the Japanese might kill a few million Indians but some day they would get tired of it, and thus the moral integrity of India would be saved.9
Indeed, sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing of all.
Lesson III—The ‘easy’ and the ‘difficult’.
Similarly, it is easy to fall in love with the crazy creative unrest of the first years after the October Revolution, with suprematists, futurists, constructivists, and so on, competing for primacy in revolutionary fervor; it is much more difficult to recognise in the horrors of the forced collectivisation of the late 1920s the attempt to translate this revolutionary fervor into a new positive order. There is nothing ethically more disgusting than revolutionary Beautiful Souls who refuse to recognise, in the Cross of the postrevolutionary present, the truth of their own flowering dreams about freedom.10
Here I address the liberals: get your hands dirty. It is my hope that the anarchists will pay attention while I speak to you. We need to test our ideas. Revolutions are made, new societies are created—and, what is more important, capitalist social relations are maintained by our actions.
Win or lose, right or wrong, we tie our flags to the masts of the causes to which we are associated. To abdicate our attachment to a cause, to disavow the consequences of our midwifery—to be like the Apostle Peter and cringe at the thought that what we tried to bring into this world did not turn out quite right would make us a poor progressive.
2700 words.
1V. I. Lenin, Collected Works of Lenin, “The State and Revolution” (25, June-September 1917) Chapter III, Section 2—’What Is To Replace The Smashed Machine?’.
2Ted Grant, Democracy or Bonapartism in Europe - A Reply to Pierre Frank (August 1946); Once Again Setting the Record Straight—A Reply to M. S. (February 1947).
3Joseph Stalin, Stalin on the Death of Lenin (Pravda, 30 January 1924).
4Loc. cit.
5Slavoj Žižek, Violence (2009) 217.
6Apocyphal.
7Friedrich Engels, Anti-Duhring (1877) Part II, end of Chap.IV, 193; as cited in V. I. Lenin, State and Revolution, above n 2, 404.
8Blair Vidakovich, The Capitalist State: Natural or Conventional?
9Arthur Koestler, The Yogi and the Commissar (The Danube Edition, 1965) 18.
10Slavoj Zizek, “Dialectical Materialism at the Gates”, Parallax View (2005) 5.