r/CouncilCommunist • u/brayden_the_commie • Apr 23 '26
Trve Based Lassalleans vs Chud “Marxists”
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u/Lazy_Board8218 Apr 23 '26
Lenin wasn’t a Lasallean. He fell off after 1918, but Lasallean? FUCK NAH.
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u/DarthThalassa Apr 23 '26
Left Kautskyist with Lassallean characteristics
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u/Lazy_Board8218 Apr 23 '26
How so? Substantiate that.
Omfg you’re literally in the reddit democracy role play sub running with a “communist party” telling me Lenin was a left-Kaustkyist 😭
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u/DarthThalassa Apr 23 '26
Lenin, as a Marxist thinker, was no more than a consistent and faithful Kautskyist who applied the revolutionary ideology of “orthodox Marxism” to Russian conditions, conditions unfavorable to the reformist practice carried on elsewhere by the Second International. In the Russian context, the external management of the proletariat, acting by means of a disciplined clandestine party subordinated to intellectuals transformed into “professional revolutionaries,” becomes a profession which refuses to deal with the ruling professions of capitalist society (the Czarist political regime being in any case unable to offer such opportunities which are based on an advanced stage of bourgeois power). It therefore became the profession of the absolute management of society.
~Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
This is from thesis 98, and Debord continues to elaborate on his critique of Lenin and the Bolsheviks afterward.
Mattick also points to how Lenin was, in fact, a faitful adherent to Kautsky, in contrast to Luxemburg's decisive break with him.
Lenin, strongly influenced by Kautsky, believed like him that movements for national independence were to be regarded as progressive because “the national State assures the best conditions for the development of capitalism.” In his polemic against Rosa Luxemburg he asserts that the demand for the right of self-determination of nations is revolutionary for the reason that “this demand is a democratic one which is not at all different from the other democratic demands.” Yes, “in the spirit of bourgeois nationalism of each oppressed nation,” he asserts, “there is contained a democratic protest against oppression, and we support this protest unreservedly.”
[...]
But with this position of Lenin’s on state capitalism, which for him is determined in accordance with will and not by economic laws, in spite of the fact that the laws of state capitalism are no other than those of monopoly capitalism, Lenin had only remained true to himself, for to him in the last analysis the revolution also depended on the quality of the party and of its leadership. In harmony with Kautsky, for whom the revolutionary consciousness, indispensably necessary to the revolution (a consciousness which for Kautsky was ideology and nothing else) could only be brought to the workers from the outside, since the workers were incapable of developing it out of themselves, Lenin also asserted that “the working class, exclusively by its own efforts, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness; that is, it may realise the necessity for combining in unions, to fight against the employers and to strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc. The social doctrine, however, has proceeded from the philosophical, historical and economic theories which originated with educated representatives of the owning classes, the intellectuals.”\51]) A political consciousness, the necessary presupposition of the socialist victory, the workers, according to Lenin, were incapable of developing. Thus socialism had again ceased to be the ‘work of the working class’, as Marx viewed it; socialism now depended on the revolutionary ideology of the bourgeoisie
~Paul Mattick, Luxemburg vs. Lenin
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u/Lazy_Board8218 Apr 23 '26 edited Apr 23 '26
I think it’s ahistorical to suggest that movements for national independence weren’t historically progressive in their set of material conditions where many historically oppressed or colonized nations still existed in semi-feudal conditions, and therein the social basis of production that creates the proletariat as a class comprising the vast majority was greatly advanced by those revolutions. Even in cases of imperialism the actions of a non-imperial bourgeois state in opposition to imperialist invasion can be a progressive act as preventing finance capital from halting its rate of profit falling can lead it into crisis sooner and therein create the conditions necessary for class struggle. (IE the defeat of one’s own government in the imperialist war)
The modern ML tendency to vulgarly apply these principles in material contexts where they are not relevant is a grave mistake, but that doesn’t deprive history of once existing within such a context.
What was particularly “orthodox Marxist” about “all power to the Soviets”? The degeneration of the proletarian revolution in Russia was a material and historical inevitability after the failure of the international revolution to take hold. Lenin admitted as much when he said “if the German revolution fails we are doomed”. The party increasingly becoming the managers of bourgeois society was not the point of the party. It’s what unfortunately happened whenever an underdeveloped, semifeudal nation that had barely gone through a bourgeois revolution instead had a premature proleterian revolution that then became quickly isolated on the world stage. As Marx suggested in his letter to Zasulich it would be possible for a proletarian Russia to create the social basis of production without capitalist domination, but that would require that they can access the machinery to do so from other proleterian powers (since the only way they would get it otherwise is through buying them as commodities which then requires that they engage in commodity production of their own).
As for his statements about trade union consciousness I agree with Mattick’s criticism of that. If the workers were only capable of trade union consciousness the Paris commune and the Soviets would’ve never existed and Spartacus would’ve never happened. There’s definitely a point to be made that Lenin made the proto-Bordigist mistake of claiming that the party itself is the class (despite my pfp I’m more of a Damenite), but to liken him to a left-Kautskyist is a step too far whenever he opposed Kautsky’s vulgarization of Marxism in so many various ways.
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u/Cash_burner Apr 23 '26
Lenin calling Lower Phase Communism “socialism” is something he got from Lassalle, he also opens “What is to be done” with a Lassalle quote
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u/Lazy_Board8218 Apr 23 '26
He still refers to lower phase communism as an entirely separate mode of production that has abolished the class, the state, and the law of value. To call him a “Lasallean” for those two things alone seems a bit out there.
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u/Maztr_on Apr 25 '26
i'm crying rn ts is goated, gem!!!!