Week 2: The Second International: Lenin and Luxemburg

Seminar Question: “What do Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg’s accounts of the imperialist stage of capitalism tell us about the dynamics of revolution?”

Key Readings: Lenin, V.I. (1934) Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Lenin, V.I. (1976) State and Revolution: The Marxist Teaching on the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution. Luxemburg, R. (1961) The Russian Revolution, Anarchism and the General Strike.

(1) Introduction

Last week we examined Marx’s original statement of the ‘The Historical Tendency of the Capitalism Mode of Production’. Specifically we looked at:

The emergence of the M-C-M relation as the dominant mode of economic activity

The maturation of industrial capitalism: the application of machine technologies to the productive process; the capitalization of every branch of productive activity; the progressive increase in the ratio of ‘fixed’ to organic capital

Contradictions in the mode of production: over-production, under-consumption, over-capitalization resulting in a constantly declining rate of profit.

As the average rate of profit falls, so the system becomes more exploitative: longer hours, more intensive work, lower wages, deskilling, universal impoverishment, increasing unemployment

Ideology and class consciousness: cyclical crises produce and increasingly homogeneous working class; the collective experience of exploitation ruptures the sphere of bourgeois ideology; the proletariat achieves a revolutionary self-consciousness

Responses: imperialism, colonialism, authoritarianism

The final crisis: armed confrontation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; the dictatorship of the proletariat; the transition of communism

What we have in Marx’s analysis therefore is a straightforwardly materialist account of the emergence of the revolutionary the working class:

(i) Increasing exploitation produces increasing self-consciousness; (ii) Political organization emerges spontaneously from within the body of

exploited humanity; (iii) Therefore the transition to communism is immanent in the regime of

capitalism.

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This however begs a number of important questions – questions which were the focus of the Second International’s attempts to apply Marx’s ideas to the world situation immediately after his death (1879-1914):

Is the collapse of world capitalism economically determined?

To what extent is imperialism able to provide a solution to problems of over-capitalization of markets?

What is the effect of the internationalization of markets on the revolutionary body of the working class?

To what extent does the possibility of a socialist revolution emerge simultaneously with the possibility of barbarism and the end of human society?

Can capitalism be reformed to meet Marx’s demands for freedom and equality?

What is the nature of the spontaneous political organization which arises in the working class?

What is the nature of the transition form capitalism to socialism?

What would post-capitalism society look like?

What I want to do therefore is to elaborate the ideas of the two most influential thinkers of the Second International – Lenin (1870-1924) and Rosa Luxemburg (1870-1919) - on these questions.

(2) The Second International (1879-1914)

Around the time of Marx’s death in 1883, the state of world capitalism appeared to be following the trajectory he had set out in Capital: crises of over-capitalization, the proliferation of conflicts over foreign colonies, and the emergence of increasingly militant workers movements.

The formation of the Second International therefore was an attempt to form a strategy for the coming revolutionary struggle – to theorize the role that working class would take in the transition from Capitalism to Socialism.

The International itself was divided between revolutionaries (Lenin and Luxemburg, for example) and reformers ((Bernstein and Kautsky for example) – the latter believing in the possibility of reforming the fundamental structures of capitalism to accommodate Marx’s revolutionary demands.

Let me begin by examining Lenin and Luxemburg’s respective analyses of the imperialist phase of capitalism.

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(3) Lenin and Luxemburg on Imperialism

In chapter fourteen of Capital Volume Three however Marx identifies six ‘counteracting factors’ through which capitalism manages to slow down the speed at which the average of rate profit declines: the fifth of theses is the growth of foreign trade. The effect this has is to:

Lowering the cost of raw materials, thereby lowering expenditure on fixed capital, and increasing the rate of profit on the same commodities

Less developed (non-Western) economies provide new, under-capitalized markets in which commodities can be sold at higher prices

Thus as industrialized markets become increasingly monopolistic, so the opportunity for higher rates of profit offered by pre and partially capitalist markets becomes essential to the reproduction capital (Ibid. 348).

I want then to examine Lenin and Luxemburg’s respective accounts of this process.

Luxemburg: The Accumulation of Capital (1913)

Let me briefly summarize the argument from chapter 26 of The Accumulation of Capital (Luxemburg, 1968: 348-367):

(i) For capital to continue to turn over there must be enough disposable wealth (wages + profits) in the economy to absorb the commodities produced in each round of production;

(ii) However, this ‘ideal unity’ can never be achieved: more and more commodities are produced that are worth less and less; and so the internal market of developed economies is always marked by falling demand and underconsumption;

(iii) Luxemburg maintains that Marx severely underestimated capitalism’s dependency on imperialistic control of undeveloped economies, under-exploited classes, and enclaves of craft manufacture;

(iv) Thus Marx’s account of the ‘countervailing factors’ which slow down the collapse of developed economies, actually conceals a much more rapid temporality of decline which emerges as ‘pre-capitalist milieu’ are used up

(v) For Luxemburg this objective tendency was visible in the imperialist conflicts played out in the years leading up to the First World War; conflicts which, for her, portended the final crisis of world capitalism.

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Lenin: Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916)

Lenin’s analysis of the imperialist phase of capitalism is in fact very similar to Luxemburg’s. Let me summarize:

(i) The free market capitalism which predominated for most of the nineteenth century gives rise to cartels, syndicates and trusts through which the largest corporations monopolized the major branches of industrial production;

(ii) This consolidation of industrial corporations is reinforced by the growth of finance capital; for without the enormous amount of credit which is provided by the banks, the constant development of the means of production which is required by monopoly capitalism could not take place;

(iii) As the internal markets of the most economically developed countries become over-capitalized, so the export of capital to less developed nations becomes essential to the reproduction of corporate profits;

(iv) Consequently the big corporations of each of the major industrial powers (Lenin specifies France, Germany, Britain and America) begin the process of partitioning the world: each nation acts to consolidate its military, economic and political presence in the colonies it has already acquired and to expand its influence over those which currently belong to its competitors;

(v) The outcome of this universal competition for resources is the total partitioning of the globe; for every territory which is, or might become, useful to the maintenance of a particular monopoly is appropriated by one or other of the major powers (Lenin, 1934: 81);

(vi) Thus competition among imperial nations is always about re-partitioning; it is a violent struggle which constantly alters both the distribution of finite resources and the geopolitical organization of hegemony (Ibid. 83-84).

So, the accounts of capitalist imperialism presented by Lenin and Luxemburg are complementary rather than exclusive. Both:

Emphasize the link between monopoly capitalism and the competition for colonial territories

Provide an account of the growing dependency of finance and industrial capital on the exploitation of external markets

Conceive imperialism as the final phase of the conflict between private appropriation and the socialization of the means of production.

Lenin and Luxemburg’s basic agreement on the relationship between capitalism and imperialism however does not extend to the politics of revolutionary change.

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Lenin’s critique of ‘providentialism’:

(i) Although the imperialist stage of capitalism is marked by increasingly violent conflicts, the crises that arise from the partitioning of the world do not necessarily produce the kind of revolutionary class consciousness which could bring about the transition to socialism;

(ii) Indeed he claims that imperialism has led to the emergence of a

constellation of ideological illusions which he groups together under the term ‘opportunism’;

(iii) So, as the financial oligarchies and industrial corporations accumulate more and more capital in the most prosperous nations, an increasingly large section of the working class is bought off by the promise of higher wages, a greater say in the government of the state and the possibility of exerting a moderating influence over the worst excesses of capitalism (Lenin, 1934: 94);

(iv) The theoretical counterpart of this cooption of the working class is, for Lenin, to be found in Kautsky’s notion of ‘ultra-imperialism’1: the idea that the concentration of finance and industrial capital in the hands of a few imperialist nations marks the point at which it is possible to conceive of a cosmopolitan association of states which would function to preserve international peace and the equal distribution of resources (Ibid. 106).

(v) Lenin’s response to this providential Marxism is to argue that the dynamics of monopoly capital are such as to exclude the attribution of idealistic motives (universal respect for humanity, the pursuit of perpetual peace2) to those nations who are struggling to expand their share of a totally partitioned world (Ibid. 113).

(vi) The only way to bring about the peaceful coexistence of humanity therefore is through the abolition of capitalism; and this, for Lenin, requires the strategic intervention and leadership of the Communist Party in the formation of revolutionary class consciousness.

Leninist critiques of Luxemburg maintain that her account of social revolution commits the same kind of idealist fallacy as Kautsky.

For even though she rejects the idea of reformism on the same grounds as Lenin, it has been argued that her belief in the breakdown of capitalism led her to maintain that revolutionary praxis would arise spontaneously from the conflicts inherent in its imperialist stage.

We need therefore to specify the difference between Luxemburg’s revolutionary autonomism and Lenin’s account of the strategic necessities of class and party organization.

1 Kautsky, K. (1914) ‘Ultra-Imperialism’ in Die Neu Zeit. The possibility of a cosmopolitan association of capitalist states to restrict competition. 2

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(4) Revolutionary Politics and the Crisis of Capitalism

The question I want to examine is the one which preoccupied the Marxists of the Second International; that is, whether capitalism gives rise to spontaneous associations whose very ‘untimeliness’ offers the chance of revolutionary change (Luxemburg), or whether such movements require the strategic activity of the party apparatus in order to become effective (Lenin).

We need therefore to examine Luxemburg’s idea of the ‘Revolutionary Wave’ and Lenin’s account of the destruction of the bourgeois state apparatus.

Luxemburg: The Russian Revolution, Anarchism and the Mass Strike (1906)

Luxemburg’s analysis remains solidly ‘Marxist’ in the sense that she maintained the impossibility of reforming the capitalism, and that it was the working class who were the proper agent of revolutionary change.

However, her analysis of the unsuccessful Russian revolutions of 1896 and 1905 present a theory of the autonomous formulation of the proletariat as an intrinsically democratic body. She argues that:

(i) The economic conditions which bring about the mass strike (the depression of average wages, increasing unemployment, the exhaustion of under-capitalized markets) should be understood as part of a process of political formation that is intrinsic to the capitalist mode of production.

(ii) This process is one in which the commonality of all sections of the masses is at stake. For as the momentum of the strike begins to pick up, and its economic demands become the focus of strategic and ideological confrontations, so those groups who have been consigned to the margins of the class struggle (not just Marx’s lumpenproletariat, but also déclassé entrepreneurs, petty bourgeois officials, artists and writers) are drawn into the revolutionary movement of the proletariat.

(iii) Thus for Luxemburg the unsuccessful revolution of 1905 should be seen in terms of the wave of strike activity which began in Russia in 1896, and which spread from industry to industry until the state was forced violently to suppress the worker’s movement which had been formed in the struggle for social and economic emancipation (Luxemburg, 2004: pp. 10-26).

(iv) The disparate elements of the oppressed therefore create their commonality through the economic and political conflicts which arise from capitalism; and so the transformation of human society is brought about through a collective praxis which is originally and spontaneously democratic (Luxemburg: 2004: p. 22).

Thus, for Luxemburg the concept of a socialist revolution depends upon the spontaneous alliances that arise from the economic conflicts of capitalism.

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Without this spontaneity the revolution ceases to be socialist and lapses into the old forms of authoritarianism.

Lenin: The State and Revolution (1917)

The Leninist response to Luxemburg’s account of revolutionary politics is that it lapses into a kind of providentialism.

For in so far as she maintained that it was the mechanism of capital accumulation which would determine the conditions under which revolutionary class consciousness would emerge, she failed to develop a theory of how the sovereign body of the working class would seize power from the repressive apparatus of the state.

The State and Revolution, on the other hand, sets out a complex analysis of the political bodies through which class solidarity becomes a sovereign power, and the ways in which these bodies should function to destroy the relations of servitude were the essence of bourgeois democracy (Lenin, 1976: pp. 44-68). He argues that:

(i) The bourgeois state is not just an administrative structure; it is constituted through repressive functions which are designed to perpetuate the system of private property and private appropriation. These ‘special functions’ include: the law, parliamentary democracy, cooption of worker’s movements, military force;

(ii) The task of the revolutionary body of the proletariat therefore is to smash

the state apparatus. For without this act of historical violence the transition to communism cannot take place;

(iii) Thus, the struggle of the proletariat against the state apparatus is the key to the revolution, and this requires the strategic and intellectual leadership of the Communist Party;

(iv) It is only through this leadership that it is possible for the revolution to take place; for there will never be a providential conjunction of the breakdown of capitalism and the emergence of a revolutionary proletariat;

(v) The Party, in other words, has to orchestrate the action of the proletariat within its present historical circumstances. (The Russian Revolution, for example, arises in one of the more backward European economies.);

(vi) Once power is seized, it is the task of the Party to dismantle the state apparatus. This involves the establishment of a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ to keep watch over the atavistic forms of bourgeois life and culture (The Koulaks, for example);

(vii) It is only after this that a spontaneously democratic order can emerge.

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(5) Conclusion: Leninism versus Autonomism

There is a sense in which the ‘Lenin or Luxemburg’ debate is both irresolvable, and irreducibly contemporary.

It marks a point of division within Marxism between those who prioritize the strategic necessities of political struggle (Callinicos, Eagleton, Anderson etc) and those who emphasize the recognition of difference as essential to democratic socialism (Klein, Hardt and Negri etc).

Thus there is a sense in which the spirit of Luxemburg’s claim that ‘freedom is always the freedom of dissenters’ returns in the contemporary anti-capitalist movement:

A belief in the spontaneous constitution of lines of communication and cooperation among disparate protesting groups (anarchists, greens, feminists, deep ecologists, farmers, union members etc);

An idea of democracy and diversity as the strength: a body which is constantly in a nomadic state is impossible to isolate an kill

Utilization of the technological instruments of global capitalism as means of intensified communication;

New forms of sabotage: ‘skulling’, ‘hacking’, ‘do-it-yourself’ etc as forms of undermining corporate ideology, tarnishing brands etc.

More conventionally Leninist approaches to the Anti-Capitalist movement however tend to see it as a ‘young movement’ which requires: (a) education about its common class position; and (b) the strategic guidance of a coordinated party apparatus.

I will return to these debates in the final week of the module on ‘Late-Marxism’.

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