From Jacobinism to Leninism

Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels produced an explanation of why the first revolution had not fulfilled the promises of the Jacobins. It was that 'Modern bourgeois society, rising out of the ruins of feudal society, did not make an end of class antagonisms. It merely set up new classes in place of the old.'

As Marx and Engels were scholars and men of the world, they should not have been surprised to find that 'the history of all human society past and present has been the history of class struggles,' and, had they not be-come possessed by the Jacobin dogma, they would have thought it most probable that there would be class struggles in the future. But in the Jacobin philosophy the world as it is must be transformed; the day is soon to come when history, reaching its culmination, will end, and there will be no more struggles. So Marx and Engels decided that one more, though this time the conclusive and the final, revolution was called for, in order to achieve the classless society: 'The proletariat ...is compelled to organize itself as a class,' and 'by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production.... Then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.'

The revolution which is behind us has failed. But the revolution which is still to come will put 'in place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms ... an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.'

By the beginning of the twentieth century it was becoming more and more apparent that Marxism was going to undergo the same disappointment as had the Jacobin movement. Since Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto a very considerable progress had been made in carrying out its specific planks. What that document had asked in 1848, 'the most advanced nations'' had gone a long way toward doing. They were taxing inheritances, they had virtually nationalized central banking, transportation and communications, they were extending the industries owned by the state, they were abolishing child labor and providing free education in public schools. 

Yet these reforms were not leading to the classless society. Instead of one class or no class it was more probable that modern societies were heading towards a diversity of classes. Nor, as Engels had promised in his 'Anti-Duhring,' did it look as if 'the state ...withers away.' As a matter of fact the progressive reforms were requiring a rapid enlargement of the powers of the state and an expansion of the bureaucracy. The Marxian predictions were not being fulfilled. The rich were not becoming richer while the poor became poorer. The middle class was not disappearing. It was growing larger. Society was not splitting into the two great hostile camps of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. If it was splitting, it was into factions and into pressure groups.

Owing to the wide disparity between the dogma and the existential reality of things, a crisis developed within the revolutionary socialist movement. This crisis was resolved by Lenin. He could not do again what Marx had done a half century earlier. He could not once more identify the next class, and this time the positively last class, that had to be overthrown. He could not point to the last barricade that had to be stormed. It was then that Lenin resolved the crisis within the revolutionary movement by committing it to the totalitarian solution. Abandoning the naive but attractive promise that utopia would follow simply and automatically from the revolutionary act, he replaced it with the terrible doctrine that utopia must be brought about by an indefinitely prolonged process of unlimited revolution which would exterminate all opposition, actual and potential.

The totalitarian tendency has always been present and logically implied in the modern revolutionary movement. Yet Mr. Isaiah Berlin is no doubt right in saying that while Lenin's solution of the crisis within the revolutionary movement 'marked the culmination of a process,' this was 'an event ...which altered the history of our world.'

In 1903, at the conference of the Russian Social Democratic Party, which began in Brussels and ended in London, Lenin was asked by a delegate named Posadovsky 'whether the emphasis laid by the 'hard' Socialists... upon the need for the exercise of absolute authority by the revolutionary nucleus of the Party might not prove incompatible with those fundamental liberties to whose realization Socialism, no less than liberalism, was officially dedicated.' Posadovsky asked whether the basic, minimum civil liberties -- 'the sacrosanctity of the person''- could be infringed and even violated if the party leader so decided.

The answer was given by Plekhanov, one of the founders of Russian Marxism, and, says Mr. Berlin, 'its most venerated figure, a cultivated, fastidious and morally sensitive scholar of wide outlook,' who had for twenty years lived in Western Europe and was much respected by the leaders of Western Socialism. Plekhanov was the very symbol of civilized 'scientific' thinking among Russian revoiutionaries. 'Plekhanov, speaking solemnly, and with a splendid disregard for grammar, pronounced the words, salus revolutiae suprema lex. Certainly, if the revolution demanded it, everything--democracy, liberty, the rights of the individual --must be sacrificed to it. If the democratic assembly elected by the Russian people after the revolution proved amenable to Marxist tactics, it would be kept in being as a Long Parliament; if not, it would be disbanded as quickly as possible. A Marxist revolution could not be carried through by men obsessed by scrupulous regard for the principles of bourgeois liberals. Doubtless whatever was valuable in these principles, like everything else good and desirable, would ultimately be realized by the victorious working class; but during the revolutionary period preoccupation with such ideals was evidence of a lack of seriousness.'

Mr. Berlin goes on to say that 'Plekhanov, who was brought up in a humane and liberal tradition, did, of course, later retreat from this position himself The mixture of utopian faith and brutal disregard for civilized morality proved too repulsive to a man who had spent the greater part of his civilized and productive life among Western workers and their leaders. Like the vast majority of Social Democrats, like Marx and Engels themselves, he was too European to try to realize a policy which, in the words of Shigalev in Dostoevski's The Possessed, 'starting from unlimited liberty ends in unlimited despotism.' But Lenin accepted the premises, and being logically driven to conclusions repulsive to most of his colleagues, accepted them easily and without apparent qualms. His assumptions were, perhaps, in some sense, still those of theoptimistic rationalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the coercion, violence, execution, the total suppression of individual differences, the rule of a small, virtually self-appointed minority, were necessary only in the interim period, only so long as there was a powerful enemy to be destroyed.'But how was it that Lenin, and so many after him, have accepted easily and without apparent qualms the repulsive process of violence, executions, suppressions, deception, under the unlimited rule of self-appointed oligarchs? Why do the full-fledged totalitarians, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, not shrink from the means they adopt to achieve their end? The answer is that the inhuman means are justified by the superhuman end: they are the agents of history or of nature. They are the men appointed to fulfill the destiny of creation. They have been known as atheists. But in fact God was their enemy, not because they did not believe in the Deity, but because they themselves were assuming His functions and claiming His prerogatives.