Revolutionaries (24 page)

The relatively cursory passages of
Imperialism
are expanded into a rather fuller argument in
Imperialism and the Split
. The existence of a labour aristocracy is explained by the super-profits of monopoly, which allows the capitalists ‘to devote a part (and not a small one at that!) to bribe their own workers, to create something like an alliance between the workers of a given nation and their capitalists against the other countries'. This ‘bribery' operates through trusts, the financial oligarchy, high prices, etc. (i.e. something like joint monopolies between a given capitalism and its workers). The amount of the potential bribe is substantial – Lenin estimated it as perhaps one hundred million francs out of a billion – and so, under certain circumstances, is the stratum which benefits from it. However, ‘the question as to how this little sop is distributed among labour ministers, “labour representatives” . . . labour members of war industrial committees, labour officials, workers organized in narrow craft unions, office
employees, etc. etc. is a secondary question'. The remainder of the argument, with exceptions to be noted below, amplifies but does not substantially alter, the argument of
Imperialism
.

It is essential to recall that Lenin's analysis was attempting to explain a specific historic situation – the collapse of the Second International – and to buttress specific political conclusions which he drew from it. He argued first, that since opportunism and social chauvinism represented only a minority of the proletariat, revolutionaries must ‘go down lower and deeper, to the real masses', and second, that the ‘bourgeois labour parties' were now irrevocably sold to the bourgeoisie, and would neither disappear before the revolution nor in some way ‘return' to the revolutionary proletariat, though they might ‘swear by the name of Marx' wherever marxism was popular among the workers. Hence revolutionaries must reject a factitious unity between the revolutionary proletarian and the opportunist philistine trend within the labour movement. In brief, the international movement had to be split, so that a communist labour movement could replace a social democratic one.

These conclusions applied to a specific historical situation, but the analysis supporting them was more general. Since it was part of a specific political polemic as well as a broader analysis, some of the ambiguities of Lenin's argument about imperialism and the labour aristocracy are not to be scrutinized too closely. As we have seen, he himself pushed certain aspects of it aside as ‘secondary'. Nevertheless, the argument is in certain respects unclear or ambiguous. Most of its difficulties arise out of Lenin's insistence that the corrupted sector of the working class is and can only be a minority, or even, as he sometimes suggests pole, mically, a tiny minority, as against the masses who are not ‘infected with “bourgeois respectability”' and to whom the marxists must appeal, for ‘this is the essence of marxian tactics'.

In the first place, it is evident that the corrupted minority could be, even on Lenin's assumptions, a numerically large
sector of the working class and an even larger one of the organized labour movement. Even if it only amounted to 20 per cent of the proletariat, like the labour organizations in late-nineteenth-century England or in 1914 Germany (the illustration is Lenin's), it could not simply be written off politically, and Lenin was too realistic to do so. Hence a certain hesitation in his formulations. It was not the labour aristocracy as such, but only ‘a stratum' of it which had deserted economically to the bourgeoisie (
Imperialism and the Split
). It is not clear which stratum. The only types of workers specifically mentioned are the functionaries, politicians, etc. of the reformist labour movements. These are indeed minorities – tiny minorities – corrupted and sometimes frankly sold to the bourgeoisie, but the question why they command the support of their followers is not discussed.

In the second place, the position of the mass of the workers is left in some ambiguity. It is clear that the mechanism of exploiting a monopoly of markets, which Lenin regards as the basis of ‘opportunism', functions in ways which cannot confine its benefits to one stratum only of the working class. There is good reason to suppose that the ‘something like an alliance' between the workers of the given nation and their capitalists against the other countries (and which Lenin illustrates by the Webbs' ‘Birmingham Alliances') implies some benefits for all workers, though obviously much larger ones for the well-organized and strategically strong labour aristocrats among them. It is indeed true that the world monopoly of nineteenth-century British capitalism may have provided the lower proletarian strata with no significant benefits, while it provided the labour aristocracy with substantial ones. But this was because there was, under the conditions of competitive, liberal ‘
laissez-faire
' capitalism and inflation no mechanism other than the market (including the collective bargaining of the few proletarian groups capable of applying it), for distributing the benefits of world monopoly to the British workers.

But under the conditions of imperialism and monopoly capitalism this was no longer so. Trusts, price maintenance, ‘alliances', etc. did provide a means of distributing concessions more generally to the workers affected. Moreover, the role of the state was changing, as Lenin was aware. ‘Lloyd Georgism' (which he discussed most perceptively in
Imperialism and the Split
) aimed at ‘securing fairly substantial sops for the obedient workers, in the shape of social reforms (insurance, etc.)'. It is evident that such reforms were likely to benefit the ‘non-aristocratic' workers relatively more than the already comfortably situated ‘aristocrats'.

Finally, Lenin's theory of imperialism argues that the ‘handful of the richest, privileged nations' turned into ‘parasites on the body of the rest of mankind', i.e. into collective exploiters, and suggests a division of the world into ‘exploiting' and ‘proletarian' nations. Could the benefits of such a collective exploitation be confined entirely to a privileged layer of the metropolitan proletariat? Lenin was already keenly aware that the original roman proletariat was a collectively parasitic class. Writing about the Stuttgart Congress of the International in November 1907 he observed:

The class of those who own nothing but do not labour either is incapable of overthrowing the exploiters. Only the proletarian class, which maintains the whole of society, has the power to bring about a successful social revolution. And now we see that, as the result of a far-reaching colonial policy the European proletariat has partly reached a situation where it is not its work that maintains the whole of society but that of the people of the colonies who are practically enslaved . . . In certain countries these circumstances create the material and economic basis for infecting the proletariat of one country or another with colonial chauvinism; of course this may perhaps be only a
temporary phenomenon, but one must nevertheless clearly recognize the evil and understand its causes . . .

‘Marx frequently referred to a very significant saying of Sismondi's to the effect that the proletarians of the ancient world lived at the expense of society whereas modern society lives at the expense of the proletarians' (1907). Nine years later, in the context of a later discussion,
Imperialism and the Split
still recalls that the ‘Roman proletariat lived at the expense of society'.

Lenin's analysis of the social roots of reformism is often presented as if it dealt only with the formation of a labour aristocracy. It is of course undeniable that Lenin stressed this aspect of his analysis far more than any other, and for purposes of political argument, almost to the exclusion of any other. It is also clear that he hesitated to follow up other parts of his analysis, which seemed to have no bearing on the political point he was at this time overwhelmingly concerned to make. However, a close reading of his writings shows that he did consider other aspects of the problem, and that he was aware of some of the difficulties of an excessively one-sided ‘labour aristocratic' approach. Today, when it is possible to separate what is of permanent relevance in Lenin's argument from what reflects the limits of his information or the requirements of a special political situation, we are in a position to see his writings in historical perspective.

If we try to judge his work on the ‘aristocracy of labour' in such a perspective, we may well conclude that his writings of 1914–16 are somewhat less satisfactory than the profound line of thought which he pursued consistently from
What Is To Be Done?
to the
Draft Theses on the Agrarian Question
of 1920. In fact, though much of the analysis of a ‘labour aristocracy' is applicable to the period of imperialism, the classic nineteenth-century (British) model of it, which formed the basis of Lenin's thinking on the subject, was ceasing to provide an adequate guide to the
reformism of, at least, the British labour movement by 1914, though as a stratum of the working class it was probably at its peak in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century.

On the other hand, the more general argument about the dangers of ‘spontaneity' and ‘selfish' economism in the trade union movement, though illustrated by the historic example of the late-nineteenth-century British labour aristocracy, retains all its force. It is indeed one of the most fundamental and permanently illuminating contributions of Lenin to marxism.

The history of ideas is a tempting subject for the intellectual, for after all it deals with his own trade. It is also an extremely misleading and confusing one, and never more so than when vested interest, practical politics or other untheoretical matters are involved. Nobody will understand the split between the eastern and western churches in terms of theological discussion alone, or expect a purely intellectual history of the debate on cigarettes and lung cancer to reveal anything except the power of bias and self-delusion. Marx's famous reminder that it is not men's consciousness that determines their material existence but the other way round is never more to the point than where the printed word seems to be the primary reality, even though in fact, but for certain practical phenomena, it would not exist or be significant. It was not the intellectual merits of Keynes's
General Theory
which defeated Treasury orthodoxy, but the great depression and its practical consequences.

‘Revisionism' in the history of socialist and communist movements illustrates the dangers of an isolated history of ideas particularly well, because it has always been almost exclusively an affair of intellectuals. But the number of articles, books and authors which a political tendency produces is notoriously a poor measure of its practical importance, except of course among intellectuals. Guild socialism, an articulate and much described
creed, deserves at best a footnote in the actual history of the British labour movement. Trotskyism in the Soviet Russia of the 1920s had more numerous and abler spokesmen than the ‘right-wing deviation', but its actual support among the party cadres outside the universities was almost certainly very much less. Conversely, of course, neither the number nor the nature of the arguments used by theoreticians tells us much about the actual movements with which they may be associated.

The German Social Democratic Party condemned Bernstein almost unanimously, but in fact the policy of its reformist leaders was if anything more moderate than the one he recommended. The Hungarian revisionists of 1956 claimed to return to a purer and more democratic leninism, but, as Mr W. Griffith rightly points out in one of the few useful contributions to the subject in the Congress for Cultural Freedom's symposium
Revisionism
,
¹
the actual direction of events in Hungary during those hectic days was away from any kind of leninism. In brief, a study of ‘revisionism' which is chiefly, as the present book claims, a set of ‘essays in the history of marxist ideas' is likely to confuse rather than to illuminate.

This is not to deny the interest of the study of ideas as such, though even in this specialized and rarefied atmosphere we must beware of the occupational hazard of both the theorists and the heresy-hunters, that of overestimating the unambiguity and the compelling force of intellectual concepts. The capacities of the human mind, given enough incentive, to put almost any practical construction on almost any theory, are easily under-rated. It might seem difficult to turn orthodox marxism, the specific annunciation of revolution by the proletariat, into an ideology of gradualism, or of bourgeois liberalism. But plenty of western social democratic marxists did the first, by arguing that the time
for revolution had not yet arrived because capitalism had not yet worked itself into its final polarization, and the Russian ‘legal marxists' (who are barely referred to in this book) did the second, by using Marx's argument that there was a phase of historical development (namely, now) when liberal capitalism was progressive and should be encouraged. There were historical reasons for both these apparently perverse procedures: the strength of the marxist framework in continental labour movements which local gradualists (unlike the British Fabians) were loath to abandon or the absence of any powerful intellectual tradition in Russia which allowed businessmen to feel self-confident and socially useful, even for a limited historical space of time. Nevertheless, the phenomenon of a theory being, without much apparent modification, turned into its practical opposite, should warn the enthusiastic historian of pure doctrine, as also the believers in
post hoc ergo propter hoc
.

It is evidently dangerous to confuse the context of an idea with its consequences. Thus we know that the ‘Hegelian' strain in early marxist analysis (‘alienation') has strongly attracted the revisionists of the 1950s. It enables them to devise a case against capitalism, the ‘alienating society' which survives the comforts of the age of affluence, while at the same time stressing the humanist aspects of Marx, his moral passion and concern for freedom. Yet, as Mr Daniel Bell points out, this argument is relatively new. In the 1930s ‘alienation' played a negligible part in, or was absent from, both orthodox and dissident marxist argument, and the retreat from Hegel, enshrined in the
Short History of the CPSU
passed with little comment. Moreover, the few Hegelian marxists or near-marxists were either, like Ernst Bloch and the Frankfurt group, outside politics and party struggle or, like Lukács and Lefebvre, loyal stalinist communists. Conversely, if unorthodox or ‘liberal' and ‘gradualist' marxism had any philosophical affiliations it was (as with Bernstein, the ‘legal marxists', and lately with Kolakowski) Kantian, rather than
Hegelian; a tendency scarcely mentioned in this book.