Aug. 30, 1949
Dear J:
Please forgive the disorganized form this letter will of necessity bear. I am trying to get down in rough some of the ideas which have been bobbing in my head in preparation for our discussion, and would rather it "write itself out" than wait for a logical order to give it form.
First, there are three developments in Lenin's approach to dialectics. In 1900 he is in prison where he has finished "Dev. of Cap. in Rus."1 and he begins to read Hegel, Kant and the "French naturalists".2 The result is an "organization plan" which is consummated in 1902 in "What Is To Be Done?"3 (This little fact ought to be worth something to us when we get down seriously to the dialectic of the party. Why did I never before note that he read philosophy - probably for the first time (as the works previously, both What Are the Friends of the People & Cap. in Russia,4 seem to show only a second-hand knowledge of dialectics; he mastered Capital and relied on Marx for his logic as well) - just before he worked out the party?).
In 1908 he rereads and the result is Materialism and Empirio Criticism;5 a certain "degeneration" you might say, to have to return to elementary epistemology, but unavoidable because concretely the counter-revolution in Russia brought god-seekers right within the ranks.6
1914-16 there come the magnificent philosophic notebooks and from them on nothing, absolutely nothing, fails to bear the stamp of Hegelian dialectic.
The more I read Lenin's notes the more I am led to the objective situation, or objective world-connections as he would call them, and the deeper I get into the dialectics the softer I get to my "enemies": first it was Plekhanov7 who began to make sense, at least within historic context; then I began to appreciate Luxemburg's attempt to find a fundamental economic cause for imperialism.8 Well, now, now I am even ready to forgive LT his permanent revolution.9 1903 is such a damned important year! It was too abstract and definitely did nothing for him; but it was an expression of something,10 what the proletariat was preparing. Something was in the air. Lenin creates a category: the party. LT creates a category: the permanent revolution. And in 1905 the Russian proletariat burst forth. What they did is lost both upon Lenin and Trotsky, although the former, being the concrete "feeler" sees, if not the soviets, at least the counter-revolution. Indeed the counter-revolution - "betrayal" of liberal bourgeoisie, establishment of bourgeois monarchy, penetration of bourgeois ideology into Marxist party - taught him more than the revolution. But here precisely is where hindsight should make us go back to this objective world-connection, with new sight.
At every stage in the development of capitalism (indeed in development of humanity at all stages, but I am interested here only in capitalism) revolts occur, first they may be blind protests, but I doubt since the Luddite riots11 they ever were just blind. No, in each case the workers not only revolted but created a new "form" of how it would run society. It is defeated and little parts of the program "stolen". That is how capitalism moves on. This, in turn, defines the character of the labor movement. The capitalistic stamp of the labor movement is that of the defeated revolt.
Soviets arise in the first period: trade unions in the second. Let me put it another way. In the first period - in the period of revolt - the proletariat shows an entirely new mode of life, a truly human way of living, producing, enjoying. It smashes the old to smithereens and says, Here is how it should be done, soviets, not factory slavery; soviets, not monopoly of education. Now that is true in every period, long before the Russian proletariat in 1905 gave it its distinct form and class content. For example, even as far back as the 1820s in America the workers organized themselves simultaneously in unions and labor parties and demanded not simply higher wages but higher education, and then even when they had to compromise and organized unions, it was on the scale of K of L,12 that is a social organization. The unions as a business organization reflected the stages of capitalistic production, that is, only after the defeats, does the labor movement reflect the movement of capitalistic production, and that movement too is what the capitalists "stole" from the workers. When the turbulent '80s had gone and the heart-breaking '90s sounded the full triumph of big capital - even then the workers rose merely not to ever higher heights, but to new horizons, new categories. Such a new category was 1905 when the Russian proletariat showed how society can look. Once that is defeated, the counter-revolution runs high not only in Tsarist Russia but on a world scale and it is that the genuinely capitalistic law of motion, unhampered by revolts, reveals itself and heads directly for WWI.
Now the pre-1914 Marxists thought that this law of collapse would bring the revolution automatically and from then on no one needs worry about socialism. I will not stop here to show that the "growing revolt" is what gave capitalism its movement (I believe it can easily be established in cooperation, manufacture, and machinofacture, and I will try to be prepared for that in the discussion) but wish merely to limit myself here to two things: (1) technology; (2) competition. Somewhere Marx says that technology sets the mode of production, etc. etc. & this has often been repeated, but what has been forgotten is that that same paragraph states that a true history of technology would show it was not great men who discovered, but great masses. The names we all repeat in a bourgeois manner - from Watts to Edison, from Bessemer to Ford - built no foundation and Andrew Carnegie summarized the bourgeois attitude perfectly when he said "Pioneering does not pay".13 Marx moreover points out that even after the discovery has been made (that I believe is in Vol. III) and "applied", it doesn't actually operate till after the workers in the factory have applied. He let the capitalists get away with nothing, but we merely state such and such is only in the pilot stage as if the inventor merely completes it abstractly, instead of the inventor without labor, etc. etc. The second thing is: when is the invention introduced? Again we have been bourgeois in our answer; we have said competition forces him to; but Marx shows that competition is only a reflection of declining rate of profit, and it is also only a reflection of growing revolt. A labor saving device is introduced to get rid of rebellious labor, to simplify operation so that women and children can be introduced into the factory and meanwhile the workers is always a grumbling: why do it this stupid way, when this would be better, and all this the great dead machine soaks up into its brain and the voice of the worker is lost. When we have worked this out completely, we will see that the growing revolt has been as much forgotten as the smashing of the state machine.
Let me add one final example in order to be able to bring in who is Marx's enemy. When capitalist production "moves on its own", it is promptly overcome by stagnation and parasitism. You see when the Chartist movement14 met defeat in 1848 English production moved on to its "golden age" and sclerosis set in immediately, although it did not immediately bow to "Yankee ingenuity".15 Now this golden age in turn corrupted the proletariat, the higher strata. Marx said they were bourgeoisified, but he ignored them and their leaders (he went looking for lower strata instead). They were not the real enemy. The real enemy was Lassalle.16 Why? It is not only after the plunge to freedom that the positivist and not the reformist is the main enemy. The impatience of the calm-looking positivist to get "immediately to the absolute" means forgetting those unskilled workers and playing around with - Bismark.17 Lassalle saw the unions and their opportunism; he was such a "revolutionist" and abhorred them so that he even invented the theory of the iron law of wages to show they could not accomplish anything for the proletariat; while he set off to "capture" the state to bring in socialism in hot-house Bismarckian fashion.18 Lordy, how we keep repeating the mistakes of the past; can't you see in him Bukharin?19 That is the law, the law of thought and the law of activity.
I have tarried too long here and forgotten Lenin in 1914 as he moved from official Marxism to true Marxism. He clutches on to Engels's criticism of the Erfurt Program20 (Where were all the "loyal" Marxists in 1901 when that 1891 devastating criticism was finally published? There is something in that of the movement of capitalistic production) and especially so to the statement on concrete vs. abstract. L's philosophic notebooks are permeated with that and the references are all to value and Ricardo and Hegel and Kant.21 Now, Marx accused Ricardo not of being abstract, but of being "violently" so instead of going to higher and truer abstraction. But before you can go higher, you must go lower. You must explain how the abstract theory of value works out in the concrete phenomena of the market. Don't yell: Value is the essence; price is merely the phenomenon; show how the two unite. First, you have to introduce further distinctions into value, c/v; then you have to show that rate of sv and rate of profit are not identity ("violent abstraction") but, on the contrary, the manner in which one is transformed into the other, means only v is creative of sv, etc. etc.22 In other words, before you can explain the phenomena of the market, you must go to the higher abstraction of a theory of surplus value and you thereby have both the logical development and the concrete distinctions, oppositions, and you need not "spirit away" c but rather emphasize it. Everything lies in the how; just as how s.v. is realized, showed not market but expanded reproduction, so how ratio of s.v. becomes rate of profit will show, on the one hand c ever expanding but producing naught, and v ever shrinking but producing all that is produced.
You say that every time you reread Imperialism you are led to Capital, and every time you reread that you are led to Logic.23 Yes, and I am immensely impressed with L's statement that the whole of the Logic must be understood before the 1st chapter of Marx can.24 There is movement there that not only explains the being, pre-bourgeois society; it explains the being, the essence and notion. Marx begins with Sec. 1 or dual character of commodity; then in Sec. 2 he deals with the essence or dual character of labor; in Sec 3 he returns to being, but the forms of value are not simply cast, but rather from the elementary form of value to the universal form he "plays" on the highly dialectical I-P-U; and finally in Sec 4 he deals with notion.25 First he tells us that the whole fetishism arises from the form, the fantastic form which makes relations between people appear as an exchange of things. But immediately thereafter he states that the very discoverers of the theory that labor was the source of all value are as mystified by the form. Moreover, there seems to be contradiction in his materialism, a shifting of ground, when he explains Aristotle's26 failure to get to the common substance of all difference use-values because he lived in a slave society, whereas free labor has to assume "the fixity of a popular prejudice" before you can see straight; and at the same time he says Smith-Ricardo27 lived in the latter type of society and still did not "understand"; only "freely associated men" can.
Now it seems to me that they did not understand precisely because they were men of Understanding - the old man you so masterfully revealed in the Nevada document.28 I was led to Hegel's Second Attitude to Objectivity, where Hegel shows that empiricism, in common with metaphysics, "elevates the facts included under sensation, feeling, perception into the form of general ideas, propositions or laws"... "Empiricism therefore labors under the delusion, if it supposes that, while analysing the objects it leaves them as they were: it really transforms the concrete into abstract", and finally: "So long then as this sensible sphere is and continues to be for Empiricism a mere datum, we have a doctrine of bondage..." (#38).29
"The battle of reason is the struggle to break up the rigidity to which the understanding has reduced everything". And "freely associated men" "consciously regulating" their production seeing the future in the present can "break up the rigidity" and strip off the mystical veil and thus we get to the notion not only of the bourgeois but of the proletariat.
All this Lenin saw as he read Hegel and when he came to write Imperialism, he included his Critique, or attitudes of thought (classes) to objectivity (imperialism). Now the outline of the book (pp. 197-8 of Notebooks on Imperialism30) reveal this:
"IX. Critique of Imperialism1. Critique - the general idea2. Apologists (Fabians)313. Petty bourgeois democrats4. Kautsky vs. Hobson (Kautsky & Spectator, NB)325. Forward or backward?6. Free competition vs. duties, dumping, etc.7. Export into dependent countries.8. Ultra-or inter-imperialism?9. Pol. traits of imperialism (diplomacy) (reaction) (national oppression)."
Now of the 9 subtitles 4 (in which #8 on ultra imperialism is included in the one on Kautsky) are included, and after the definition that he is here dealing with attitudes of classes to this phenomenon which is so overwhelming that not only small & middle, but every very small capitalists have made a wholesale transition to the side of imperialism, and this moreover is true not only of the possessing classes but permeates also the working classes, he settles down to the 3 attitudes:
(1) Subjective idealists, or bourgeois scholars who defend imperialism and (a) obscure its complete domination, & (b) its profound roots while (c) they emphasize only details and reforms.(2) Cynical, frank imperialists who admit absurdity of reforming.(3) Petty bourgeois critics, with which is merged Kautskyism who tells capitalism what it "ought" to be, the pious wish of those who, not "recognizing" the ground of imperialism is capitalism (trusts) itself, try to contrast imperialism with free competition and democracy as if it were a matter of choice and policy instead of the inevitable result of concentration: that is, they forget "the qualities of imperialism".
Now I will not further stress the parallel to Hegel here, but I do wish to bring out that in the outline of this, as of all works following, is the unity of opposites and the fact that every single thing without exception can be transformed into its opposite, and only on the basis of a higher unity can struggle for socialism continue concretely. Thus in these Notebooks, he takes up also Pannekoek33 and even where he defends him against Kautsky he writes: "This formula (the struggle for socialism) is incorrect. The struggle for socialism consists of the unity of the struggle for immediate interests of workers (in correspondence to reforms) and struggle, revolutionary, for power, for expropriation of bourgeoisie for overthrow of bourgeois govt. & of bourgeoisie".
And so Lenin had left even Lenin of 1914 behind when he still wrote that socialization of labor "is bound to" lead to revolution.
It is 3 a.m. and I am tired so instead of continuing in this disorganized way I will leave it to your discussion. But one final thing I do wish to state here regarding Grace. Her last on U-P-I was magnificent and I dropped her a note on that as soon as I received. The reason however, I wish to re-record it here for everybody is that until this correspondence on Lenin's Notebooks I did not fully appreciate G's philosophical contribution, whereas now I breathe so freely on that fact that I am "for" her even when you are "against". That is to say, at this stage in my own development she is such a brilliant clarifier (what a hell of a word) that even such overly glib letters as the one on L's State and Revolution34 and the not deep enough Schelling-Bukharin35 were a great aid to make me dig down concretely.
1 Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, (1899).
2 'French naturalists' appears to be a reference to French literary authors like Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant.
3 Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, (1902).
4 Lenin, What the "Friends of the People" Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats, (1894). Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, (1899).
5 Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-criticism, (1909).
6 On Lenin and the issue of 'god seekers' in the revolutionary movement in Russia, see e.g.: 'The Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion', (1909).
7 Georgi Velentinovich Plekhanov (1856-1918), was one of the founders of the first Marxist organisation in Russia (the Emancipation of Labour Group, founded 1883). He was a major intellectual influence on Lenin.
8 Trying to understand imperialism, as the contemporary stage of capitalism, was one of the main motivations behind Rosa Luxemburg's research and writing of The Accumulation of Capital, (1913). See also her reply to her critics in The Accumulation of Capital: An Anti-Critique, (1915). Lenin's Comments on The Accumulation of Capital, were written shortly after the publication of Luxemburg's book, but not published until the 1930s.
9 LT is Leon Trotsky. The theory of permanent revolution was first formulated during the Russo-Japanese War, the loss of which was a spark for the 1905 Russian Revolution. The concept of 'permanent revolution' was advanced in a debate over what form revolution would need to take in Russia. The majority of Russian Marxists agreed that a bourgeois-democratic revolution was necessary to overthrow the Tsarist regime and establish effective capitalist production, including in agriculture. In Results and Prospects, (1906) Trotsky argued that the conditions in Russia meant the capitalist class would prevaricate and that the working-class would need to join the peasantry to make the revolution permanent. Trotsky further elaborated on the concept in his book The Permanent Revolution, (1930). Dunayevskaya critically examined Trotsky's development of the concept in chapter four of Philosophy and Revolution, (1973). Tony Cliff also discusses the development of the concept in chapter six of the first volume of his four-volume biography of Trotsky.
10 What appears to be the word 'something' was hand-written on the manuscript.
11 Luddism was a form of worker organisation in England in the early nineteenth century. The Luddites attacked and smashed up factory machinery in protest at the suppression of labour association at a time when machinery, operated by unskilled workers, was being introduced across industries and in the context of high unemployment and falling living standards. The term Luddite is commonly removed from this social context and used as a term of derision to refer to people who are anti-technology in and of itself.
12 'K of L' is an abbreviation of 'Knights of Labor', a late nineteenth century American labour organisation established in Philadelphia in 1869, by 1881 it had a membership of over one million. It was also notable for including African-Americans and women in its membership.
13 Watts, Edison, Bessemer, Ford and Carnegie are often held up as examples of innovative and pioneering industrial capitalists. Dunayevskaya challenges this romantic idea. The eulogising of Carnegie was challenged by his contemporaries in the American labour movement, by organisers like Eugene V. Debs and Daniel de Leon.
14 The Chartists was the first independent mass movement of English workers. They were active in the 1830s and 1840s. They campaigned on a range of issues, including workplace issues (e.g. trade union rights, factory legislation, for a ten hour working day), welfare (e.g. they were critical of the punitive workhouse system) and state coercion (e.g. policing in industrial areas and coercion in Ireland). They have been best remembered for The People's Charter, their campaign for universal suffrage. Engels, and to a lesser extent, Marx, wrote favourably about the Chartists.
15 'Yankee ingenuity' is term used to refer to pragmatic problem-solving with limited tools. In a lot of the American left press a derogatory term for workers who think themselves independent and resourceful, when they are in reality tools of capital. See e.g. A. M. Simons 'The United States and World Politics', International Socialist Review, Vol. 1, No. 8, 1901, p. 456.
16 Ferdinand Lassalle (1825 - 1864) was a leading figure in the German socialist movement in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1862 he developed a theory (Lassallianism), in explicit opposition to Marx, in which the state was to act as an organ of justice to achieve emancipation for workers. In 1875 the Lassallian Allgemeine Deutsche Arbeiterverein (General German Workers' Association) and the Eisenacher Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands (German Social-Democratic Labour Party) came together to form the Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands (Socialist Worker's Party of Germany). The unity program of the new party, the Gotha Program, was named after the town (Gotha) where the Unity Congress was held. Marx wrote his Critique of the Gotha Program as criticism of Lassallian tendencies in both the Eisenacher and Lassallian wings of the German workers movement. For more on the Critique, Marx and Lassalle see Karl Korsch's Introduction to the Critique of the Gotha Programme.
17 Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898) was a Prussian and German statesman who was instrumental in bringing about the unification of Germany, under Prussian domination, in 1871. He served as Chancellor 1862-1890 and introduced anti-Socialist laws that banned the Social Democratic party, mass workers' organizations and the workers' press. Bismarck oversaw state-ownership of some industries, which Engels noted, in a footnote in Anti-Duhring, led to:
'a kind of spurious socialism [which] has arisen, degenerating, now and again, into something of flunkeyism, that without more ado declares all state ownership, even of the Bismarckian sort, to be socialistic. Certainly, if the taking over by the state of the tobacco industry is socialistic, then Napoleon and Metternich must be numbered among the founders of socialism'.
Lassalle looked to Bismarck to use the state to make the Prussian/German state work in the interests of workers. For more on Lassalle see David Riazanov, 'Lassalle and Bismarck' (1928).
18 The 'iron law of wages' is explained by Lassalle in the following terms:
The merciless economical rule,under which the present system fixes the rate of wages,in obedience to the so-called law of supply and demand for labor is this : that the average wages always remain reduced to that rate which in a people is barely necessary for existence and propagation; a matter governed by the customary manner of living of each people. That is the inexorable point about which the real wages always gravitate; never keeping long above or below it. (Open Letter to the National Labour Association of Germany, 1862, p. 14).
This 'iron law of wages' provides Lassalle's rationale for why trade union activity on wages is ultimately futile, as wages are governed by laws outside of human control. In his 'Open Letter' Lassalle he makes a case for political agitation for universal suffrage by a German workers' party, on the grounds that only through the state could workers be able to take control over their lives.
19 Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938) was a leading Bolshevik, who worked with Lenin and Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) in exile, before 1917. Lenin, in his Last Testament, (1922/23), described Bukharin as: "not only the most valuable and biggest theoretician of the party, but also may legitimately be considered the favorite of the whole party; but his theoretical views can only with the very greatest doubt be regarded as fully Marxian, for there is something scholastic in him (he never has learned, and I think never fully understood the dialectic)." After Lenin's death Bukharin sided with Stalin against Trotksy, but he fell out of favour with Stalin when he spoke out against the forced collectivisation of agriculture (a policy he feared would undermine the New Economic Policy).
20 The Erfurt Programme was passed by the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) in October 1891. The Programme was proposed and passed in the context of the resignation of Bismark and the expiration of the Anti-Socialist Law. The Programme opened up opportunities for SPD members to work through bourgeois political institutions. Kautsky wrote the official SPF commentary on the Erfurt Programme, which was published as The Class Struggle, (1892).
Engels criticised the Erfurt Programme as opportunist, in a letter to Kautsky. The English translation of Engels's criticisms is not currently (August 2022) available on the MIA, because Lawrence & Wishart, who hold the copyright, have instructed MIA to remove it. A French translation is available on the MIA.
21 value is a central category in Marx's Capital. David Ricardo (1772-1823) was an English economist who helped to develop the labour theory of value.
22 c, v, sv, rate of profit, rate of surplus value are terms that Marx used in Capital: Volume 3. c = constant capital, v = variable capital, sv (or s) = surplus value, c/v is the mathematical notation for the 'organic composition of capital', the rate of profit is expressed as s/(c + v), the rate of surplus value as s/v.
23 Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, (1916). Marx, Capital: Volume 1. Hegel, Science of Logic, (Larger Logic).
24 This is a reference to what is perhaps the most famous aphorism from Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks on Hegel. In his notes on Book Three: (Subjective Logic or the Doctrine of the Notion), Lenin writes:
"Aphorism: It is impossible completely to understand Marx's Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!!"
25 Dunayevskaya is referring to the four sections that make up Chapter 1 of Volume 1 of Capital.
26 In Section 3 of Chapter 1 of Capital, Marx refers to the ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle (384-322 BC), and his discovery that commodities of different kinds (e.g. houses and beds) had something in common that made it possible to express the value of one in terms of the other (e.g. 5 beds = 1 house). Marx also notes that the foundations of the Ancient Greek economy in slave labour, prevented Aristotle from seeing labour as the common property hidden within different commodities.
27 Adam Smith (1723-1790), the Scottish philosopher, is widely considered to be the founder of classical economics. David Ricardo (1772-1823), the English economist, both developed and narrowed Smith's, by focusing more narrowly on the study of economics shorn from the more philosophical groundings provided by Smith. Marx took, and further developed, the idea, developed by Smith and Ricardo that labour was the source of all value (the labour theory of value).
28 'The Nevada Document' (subsequently published as Notes on Dialectics), was written by CLR James in late 1948 (see Footnote 3.2 for more details).
29 The quote is from Hegel's Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (the 'Shorter Logic'), Part One, Section 4, IV. Second Attitude of Thought to Objectivity. Empiricism is the 'materialist' doctrine that sense experience is the sole source of knowledge. Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy concerned with the study of what is "beyond the senses". By the 16th century Metaphysics became synonymous with Ontology, the study of Being or Existence. Often metaphysics is used, in contrast to empiricism, to refer to objects which are 'not possible objects of experience'.
30 Lenin, Notebooks on Imperialism, written 1912-1916, were published posthumously in 1938 in the magazine Proletarskaya Revolutsia, No.~9.
31 The Fabian Society, which still operates, was a British radical organisation that was founded in 1884. It promoted the idea that the transition from capitalism to socialism could be brought about by means of minor and gradual reforms. Key figures in the Fabians included Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Ramsay MacDonald and the writers George Bernard Shaw and HG Wells). Fabian socialism was one of the sources of the British Labour Party ideology from its founding. During the First World War (1914-18) the Fabians took a social-chauvinist stand.
32 Karl Kautsky (1854-1938) was considered by many of his peers to be a leading theorist of the Second International, (and was a major influence on Lenin prior to 1914). At the outbreak of World War I he equivocated on the issue of opposing the war. He did supported the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917 and wrote a pamphlet, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1918), in which he condemned the Bolsheviks and argued that their rule was dictatorial, whereas socialism should use democratic means to govern. Lenin's pamphlet The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918), was written as a response to Kautsky's pamphlet. John A. Hobson (1858-1940), was an English journalist who wrote extensively on British Imperialism. His Imperialism, A Study, (1902) was a reference point for many of the discussions about Imperialism in the Second International.
33 Anton Pannekoek (1873-1960), was a Dutch socialist, who was active in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) from 1906 until the outbreak of WW1. He opposed the war and was a supporter of the February revolution in Russia and, like Rosa Luxemburg, a critical supporter of the October revolution. His criticisms were based on concerns about giving primacy to the Party, over the workers' own organisations. He was a key proponent of 'council communism'. Lenin's "Left-Wing" Communism: an Infantile Disorder (1920) was written as a critique of Pannekoek and other left critics of the Bolsheviks.
34 Lenin State and Revolution, (1917).
35 Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854) was a German idealist philosopher and poet, who developed a critique of Kant. Hegel and Schelling were close friends, but Hegel considered Schelling's critique of Kant to be limited.