CHAPTER EIGHT

CRITIQUE OF CLASSICAL MARXIST LENINIST IDEOLOGY

Nevertheless there comes a time when a detour ceases to be a detour, when the dialectic is no longer a dialectic... 1

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Classical Marxism is a powerful social theory that gives people a compelling understanding of history's dynamics and uncovers a great many of its hidden but important attributes. Nonetheless it has numerous weaknesses which are highly consequential precisely because of the ways they affect Classical Marxist practitioners' abilities to fully understand their surroundings and to consciously change them for the better.

Classical Marxism is based on a dialectical approach that is somewhat unbalanced and quite narrow and that thereby causes excessive dichotomizing and fixating.

It is based on a theory of knowledge that is narrow, that does not understand the full dynamics of thought processes, that overemphasizes the dominating importance of material needs, that does not understand the dynamics of defensiveness and sectarianism, and that therefore postulates no powerful methods for dealing with either.

It is based on an unenlightened understanding of human behavior " that largely ignores the importance of many human needs, tendencies, and desires, and as a result has almost no understanding of the full complexity of human motivation, believing all such issues in any case to be secondary and 'unmaterial'.

As a result of these weaknesses Classical Marxism is not well suited to analyzing tactics with regard to their likely effects on real concrete in-the-world people.

Further Classical Marxism develops a theory of history, Classical historical materialism, that is also so lacking.

It is based on an unbalanced view of historical forces that underestimates and misunderstands the relevance and the dynamics of racism, sexism, authoritarianism, and even classism.

It is based on a non-psychological highly abstracted theoretical basis, and so does not understand the dynamics of short run events and day to day occurrences, all of which it most often dismisses as simply accidents or irrelevancies of history.

It is based on a view of people that stresses scarcity almost entirely and that therefore creates a theory that overemphasizes the importance of class, and underestimates the importance of other groups, and of 'ideas'.

It is based on a theory of contradictions that makes classes dominant but ignores the reality of 'revolutionaries' who are no longer explicable as solely class motivated people. It is not self-critical and does not promote self-criticism among the people it selects for creating change.

It doesn't really understand oppressive dynamics in their totality and it gives no very powerful understanding of why oppression is and has always been so prevalent. It abstracts away much that has been important to history's course and then protects itself against understanding its own resulting deficiencies.

It doesn't provide any means for postulating goals because it doesn't really talk about human fulfillment. It does not really say where the 'good' will come from or what it will look like, merely that it will arrive.

Perhaps most important of all, because of the peculiar dynamics of its weaknesses and because of the ways it affects its practitioners and the ways they affect it, Classical Marxism does not change over time. It becomes a kind of religion in which people have an on-going interest causing them to worship it rather than to try to critically understand its tenets. Classical Marxism gives believers a vested interest in stability rather than in change; and it creates a strategy that reflects all these weaknesses in a variety of ways.

Classical Leninism exaggerates the importance of immiseration and underestimates the importance of a knowledge of viable future alternatives.

It has no capacity to understand the dynamics of tactics as they affect practitioners or 'recipients' and so its decisions about such issues are highly problematic, and quite often wrong. It doesn't arm people to effectively compose or evaluate their own programmatic efforts.

It makes a fetish of discipline and hierarchy to the absolute detriment of real revolutionary potentials in the people who use it and in the people they encounter.

It overemphasizes the importance of class conflict and underemphasizes the importance of struggles around race, sex, dignity, freedom, and alienation.

It compels people to be 'protestantly workerlike' at exactly that moment in history when they are struggling to be free of old identities and definitions in order to adopt newer better ones. It pushes people to submit to new authorities at exactly that moment when it is most critical that they confront all authority.

It makes a fetish of whatever it first finds important and hardly ever flexibly adapts to changing conditions -- it is sectarian to an extreme that increases as its practitioners have more and more power.

It is a poor blueprint for a power take-over -- it says almost nothing important about the dynamics of an all-sided revolution that would successfully eliminate exploitation, much less all other modern forms of oppression.

And it leads to practice that reflects all these weaknesses in their most brutal imaginable forms. Practice that ignores most human needs, tramples opposition, learns almost nothing from experience, and becomes progressively more and more despotic as its practitioners gain power, or more and more irrelevant as they encounter insurmountable difficulties they can't really understand.

Classical Marxist Leninists don't grasp what revolution really is -- they limit themselves to a less than full picture of the society they wish to change, they have only a minimal sense of the people they expect to do the changing, and they have almost no vision of what the new society should be like.

They don't perceive the importance of a clearly outlined goal. They don't really understand that revolution doesn't come because a situation is totally intolerable but because of a clash between what is, and what people want and realize could be. They don't see that misery alone usually produces only demoralization and competition, while political understanding of viable alternatives produces action. They don't know the dynamics of oppression; they refuse to acknowledge the oppressive behavioral baggage they have been given by their capitalist backgrounds.

Modern movements must open up new potentials through their practice and through their demeanor for their 'practitioners' and for the 'masses.' Classical Marxist Leninists don't see that revolutionizing all people's thoughts is the priority, while revolutionizing just the thoughts of a few leaders is impossibly counter-productive. And they don't realize these things not because they are stupid but because the weaknesses of Classical Marxism Leninism steer their consciousnesses away from understanding -- and because the dynamics of Classical Marxist Leninist revolutionary practice and their own bad traits give them vested interests in this 'ignorance.'

Classical Marxist Leninists can not see that a revolution to a classless society can't arise from a traditional class conflict over power, but only from the dissolution of all oppressed sectors and the emergence of a revolutionary collectivity. A modern revolution will be carried out against the ruling classes, not by oppressed classes, but by masses of democratically organized revolutionaries no longer primarily identifiable as 'class people.' Classical Marxist Leninist understanding is based on a revolution wherein people are concerned with power transfers; but people are now (and perhaps always?) concerned rather with an all-sided revolution that would deal with every aspect of the social question.

Workers and others develop revolutionary ideologies precisely to the extent they throw off their old traditional patterns of thinking and of acting. Classical Marxist Leninists don't realize that the worker must become less (capitalistically) workerlike and more revolutionary, that the doctor must become less doctorlike and more revolutionary, that each remains worker or doctor though each may also develop new skills, but that both become in the first place, revolutionaries. And Classical Marxist Leninists don't understand that the same is true for women, service employees, youths, Blacks, etc. Classical Marxist Leninists have yet to realize that work under capitalism inculcates more bad habits and more bad ways of thinking and acting than good -- and that that is a large part of why it is so oppressive. They have yet to sense that it is necessary for people to step outside the dictates of their present roles so as to construct new ways of being, more suitable to their own needs and to the needs of people around them. Though people must preserve what is good in their old ways, they must also drop what is bad; make fetishes of nothing.

Classical Marxist Leninists don't realize that when they cynically exploit the nature of the hierarchical factory's effects to bring people into hierarchical parties they are doing more harm than good. They don't have any idea of what it takes to create an environment that will allow people to escape from reactionary world views into revolutionary ones. They don't even address many of the major forms of oppression workers and others feel.

The Classical Marxist Leninists' problem isn't even that they will lead an abortive American revolution but that they will lead no American revolution at all. Americans won't risk comparative comfort and security because a central committee so orders them. Those Americans who are at the point where they might move spontaneously and then be co-opted as happened in Russia, know that they are too few and too weak alone. No one is too interested in taking risks for a central committee that is part racist, part sexist, and authoritarian and bourgeois; it looks more promising and less dangerous to take lesser risks for fascists or capitalists who offer substantially the same rewards and have the same attributes. But there are exceptions. Some people do rapidly feel their injustices and further recognize that socialism of some kind is the only possible remedy. They then try to function in existing socialist movements but more often than not are unable to grow there. The movement dynamics foster the movement's members' own worst tendencies -- people become slaves of their movements, or they become immobile and despondent and drop out, or they rise in its hierarchy and make other members miserable. Classical Leninist parties, Classical Leninist centralism, and Classical Leninist narrownesses just can't sustain revolutionary activism over long periods in people who are struggling for freedom, integrity, and an end to illegitimate authority.

Modern western revolutionaries are confronted by a situation that the Classical Marxist Leninists have yet to fully appreciate:

...the process of the disintegration (of old forms) now becomes generalized and cuts across virtually all the traditional classes, values, and institutions. It creates entirely new issues, modes of struggle, forms of organization, and calls for an entirely new approach to theory and praxis. 2

The Classical Marxist Leninists rely on economic crisis even though it doesn't appear likely for the U.S. and isn't essential to revolutionary success. They aim at only workers even though many strata are in motion. They focus entirely on poverty when the distribution of centralized wealth is a major problem. They have a negative approach that attacks existing conditions when what is needed is a positive approach that aims at new conditions. They centralize and demand obedience when decentralization and anti-authoritarianism are critical. They prove incapable of understanding racism and sexism and of relating honestly to anti-racist and anti-sexist struggles even though these are growing more and more important. They cling to old tactics, old thoughts, and even old culture, and they do it because their identities, their interests, and their ideology demand that they do it. And though the best Classical Marxist Leninists quite obviously often get beyond many of these weaknesses, a little study usually shows that they are simultaneously and to the same extent getting beyond Classical Marxist Leninist dogma.

Classical Marxism is supposedly a philosophy of change and yet Classical Marxist Leninists do almost nothing to overcome the most pressing reactionary philosophic belief of our times: the belief that most if not all people are essentially lazy, dumb, evil, and greedy; the belief that no one can ever form a societal organization that is significantly better than that now existing in the United States. Classical Marxist Leninists damn just about anything and everything but they do almost nothing to constructively suggest new possibilities. There is very little in Classical Marxist ideology that can convince people things can get better and there is almost nothing in their practice that can convince people of the same thing. In fact their practice usually does more to prove the reverse. Perhaps Maurice Brinton is not going too far when he writes:

In the struggle for these (truly humanitarian) objectives Bolshevism will eventually be seen to have been a monstrous aberration, the last garb donned by a bourgeois ideology as it was being subverted at the roots. Bolshevism's emphasis on the incapacity of the masses to achieve a socialist consciousness through their own experiences of life under capitalism, its presumption of a hierarchically structured 'vanguard' party and of 'centralization to fight the centralized state power of the bourgeoisie', its proclamation of the historical birthright of those who have accepted a particular vision of society (and of its future) and the decreed right to dictate the vision of others - if necessary at the point of a gun - all these will be recognized for what they are: the last attempt of bourgeois society to reassert its ordained division into leaders and led, and to maintain authoritarian social relations in all aspects of life. 3

It would seem that the theory of the unconscious should be applied more broadly than it has been to include revolutionary groups as well. The phenomenon of the inversion of ends and means leads one to suspect that from the very first there were subconscious goals underlying the conscious ones, and that great differences existed between them. The conscious goals, centered upon a society without classes or a state, in circumstances like these only serve to conceal the movement's subconscious desire to absolutize itself once it reaches power. Individual Marxists have also contributed to this tendency, albeit unintentionally, by giving simplified and ultimately vague definitions of the goal of socialist revolution, which in their view is the seizure of power. 4

The Russian revolution has given us a lesson in what is not to be done. It killed the soviets, it bombarded the Kronstadters, it destroyed the Makhnovites, it trampled opposition and reestablished capitalistic authoritarian dynamics, and then later and quite consistently it unleashed Stalin upon the peoples of the Soviet Union and the world.

There is a tremendous amount we can learn from Marx and those who followed, but a great deal of care should be taken lest we turn out as the Bolsheviks did. Being part right and cocksure is at least as bad as being all wrong but humble about it.

Kurt Vonnegut has a passage in a book essentially about Fascism's roots in human capacities for self-deception, that with some literary license, provides a fitting close to our present somewhat similar discussion:

I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears whose teeth have been filed at random. Such a snaggle toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even substandard libido whirls with the jerky, gaudy, pointlessness, of a cuckoo clock in Hell.

Jones wasn't completely crazy. The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined.

Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell -- keeping perfect time for eight minutes and thirty three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year.

The missing teeth of course are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten year olds, in most cases.

The willful filing off of gear teeth, the willful doing without certain obvious pieces of information --

That was how a household as conspicuous as one composed of Jones, Father Keely, Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer, and the Black Fuehrer, could all exist in relative harmony --

That was how my father-in-law could contain in one mind an indifference toward slave women and a love for a blue vase --

That was how Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, could alternate over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz great music and calls for corpse carriers --

That was how Germany could see no important differences between civilization and hydrophobia. 5

FOOTNOTES

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror, Beacon Press, Boston, Mass. 150.

2. Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Ramparts Books, San Francisco.

3. Maurice Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control, Solidarity, London. 85.

4. Svetozar Stojanovic, Between Ideas and Reality, Oxford University Press, London. 185.

5. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Mother Night, used with permission of Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte Press.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.