IV
CONCLUSIONS
At the centre of this discussion have been three different conceptions of the state’s role in the development of civil consciousness.
For Hegel, the theory of the state, as it is presented in Philosophy of Right, is a parenthesis within Hegel’s account of reality in general. As explained in Chapter One, the primary reality is, for Hegel, Absolute Mind. Absolute Mind does not stand aside from material reality. Rather, material reality is alienated Absolute Mind; it is Absolute Mind having entered into its finite phase and existing in a state of separation from itself. As Hegel explains in the Phenomenology of Spirit, history is the process by which Absolute Mind overcomes this separation, and finite mind is reintegrated into infinite mind. This historical movement is necessary because, without it, Absolute Mind would be, in Hegel’s words, “only the universal”.[1] Mind in its initial, undifferentiated form would be incapable of reflecting upon itself and being conscious of itself as Absolute Mind. In this form, Mind has only perfect identity with itself and is analogous to “the night in which, as the saying goes, all cows are black”.[2] In order to break with this self-referential identity, Absolute Mind must separate off from itself a finite sphere. Absolute Mind thus objectifies itself in the form of finite human mind, and in the form of all material reality that human beings encounter. It is through finite mind’s mediation that Absolute Mind is able to reflect upon itself and become truly self-conscious of itself as absolute. History is thus, for Hegel, a process in which Absolute Mind divides itself into an infinite and a finite sphere, and then strives to overcome this separation between subject and object, universal and particular.
In Hegel’s political philosophy, the state is the highest form of Mind as it exists in the world of human experience. Its purpose is to facilitate the historical process of reuniting finite mind with the universal by helping its citizens to understand their own freedom as a particular instance of the universal will. In the actual Hegelian state, freedom and obligation are no longer separate. This is not to say that the private sphere is swallowed up in a ‘totalitarian’ fashion. Rather, the institutional structures of the state—the Executive and the Estates—mediate between the private and collective spheres and bring about a coincidence of the two. Though these institutional structures are composed of people, the collective will as it is embodied in the state is understood by Hegel not to arise from popular opinion but from historical reason. In short, history as it is revealed in the lives of human beings is the process by which the empirical world comes to reason in accordance with the imperatives of Absolute Mind, and the state is the motivating force behind this process.
For Hegel, the alienation of the individual will from the collective will, and its subsequent resolution, is essential; in contrast, Marx sees alienation as inessential and invariably a negative thing. While to Hegel the purpose of the state is to help people reconcile their self-interest with the interest of the ethical community, Marx sees the state as an instance in which people become slaves to their own creation. Marx’s critique of the state, as it was described in Chapter Two, was derived in part from Feuerbach’s critique of religion, which revealed God to be the objectification of such qualities as benevolence and wisdom which are subsequently projected upon Heaven and confronted by human beings as independent realities. God was, to Feuerbach, the illusory objectification of all of the things that human beings most desired. Similarly, Marx saw the state as the illusion of objective universality. In his “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State”, through an evaluation of the mediating structures posited by Hegel—the Executive and the Estates—Marx demonstrated that Hegel’s ‘universal’ state would fail to engender ethical thought in its citizens. Instead, the state was shown to be subordinate to the self-interest of the bureaucrats and representatives of which it was composed, and to private property. From this, Marx concluded that the state had no power to engender ethical life in civil society, and that the state was nothing but a section of civil society which exercised the state’s coercive instruments in its own interest and justified its actions with a thin veneer of universality. To Marx, the reconciliation of the individual and collective wills which Hegel sought could not be achieved by attempting to bring the self-interested individual up to the level of the ‘universal’ state; rather, this illusory universal must be reabsorbed into each individual. This reabsorption would not entail the extinction of individuality for the sake of the universal good, but the full emancipation of the individual by substituting authentic community life for the ersatz community of Hegel’s state.
When laying out his theory of the revolutionary socialist state in State and Revolution, Lenin invoked the name of Marx and insisted that his theory was true to Marx’s doctrine on the state. However, as was shown in Chapter Three, though Lenin agreed with Marx’s conclusion that the state is necessarily a reflection of the myriad egoistic self-interests of civil society, his vision of socialist revolution was premised upon the leading role of the state. Marx did believe that state power would have to be consolidated under the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, and that this state form would administer the transition from bourgeois society to communist society—in which the state would be superseded. Thus, Marx clearly did not equate the dictatorship of the proletariat (a kind of state) with the achievement of a commune-society (the negation of the state). Most importantly, because he recognized that any state is inherently a symptom of class conflict, he had no faith in the capacity of a state, proletarian or not, to engender universality in its citizens. The state, as Marx argued, cannot determine that by which it is determined. Because of Lenin’s emphasis on the leading role of the state in socialist society, there is a theoretical tension that runs throughout State and Revolution. While Lenin agrees with Marx that the state is a reflection of class conflict, and an admission of the irreconcilability of this conflict, he also upholds the capacity of the state to ameliorate class conflict, to be universal, and to recast civil society in the image of its universality. In State and Revolution, class domination is made the condition of class emancipation, and the state is made an instrument rather than something to be transcended.
At first, it might seem contradictory that I insist upon driving a wedge between Marx and Lenin having also granted, at the outset of my discussion, the strength of Kolakowski’s position that such an act has, of necessity, ideological underpinnings. Our attitude towards the relationship of Marxism to Bolshevism, according to Kolakowski, ought to be similar to our attitude towards, for example, the relationship between Christianity and the Spanish Inquisition. The enquirer into the history of Christian thought cannot be content to argue that the excesses of the Inquisition resulted from the depravity of Torquemada or the distortion of the true Christian doctrine. Rather, he must seek what it was about Christianity that, in the fullness of time, gave rise to such cruelty and extreme actions. Similarly, the student of Marxist thought cannot be content with the conclusion that the genesis of the totalitarian Soviet state can be located entirely in Lenin’s misinterpretation of Marx’s writing or in the primitive material conditions of post-Tsarist Russia. Lest his inquiry turn into an ideological exercise which aims either to legitimize Soviet communism by demonstrating that Lenin was the rightful heir of the Marxist torch, or to absolve Marx of responsibility for Soviet communism by demonstrating Lenin’s deviation from orthodox Marxist theory, the enquirer must also ask how Marx’s thought made Bolshevism, and the Soviet state, possible.
When one considers the works of Marx which were available to Lenin, Lenin’s revolutionary doctrine can be seen as an entirely logical outcome of Marx’s thought. In writings such as the Communist Manifesto, Marx pointed to a future in which the division between the particular desires of individual people, and the needs of the community, would be overcome. However, the classless future adumbrated by Marx was not accompanied by any well-articulated principles of revolutionary practice. Thus, Lenin faced serious problems when trying to draw practical conclusions from Marx’s thought and translate it into a political program. To the extent that Marx recognized the high probability of revolutionary violence in the abolition of the bourgeois order, and that state power, consolidated under the transitional dictatorship of the proletariat, would be necessary to do away with the remnants of bourgeois power after the spontaneous collapse of capitalist production, Lenin’s subsequent practice can be considered ‘Marxist’.
Also, in accepting the commune, as it is portrayed in Marx’s Civil War in France, as the appropriate model for post-capitalist society, Lenin upholds the only social form for which Marx showed any enthusiasm. As A.J. Polan has argued, Lenin’s integration of the commune into his political program represented a “straightforward inheritance” from Marx.[3] To Polan’s mind, Lenin incorporated the only form of communist social organization described by Marx—the commune—without alterations, omissions, or additions. Assuming the veracity of this claim, it is possible to see how, from the perspective of Michel Foucault, Marx’s texts made Lenin’s politics possible, and how, from the perspective of Kolakowski, Marxism provided a way of thinking which, in time, gave rise to Bolshevism. Because the texts of Marx can be connected to the practice of Lenin in this fashion, Kolakowski is correct to compare Marx to Prometheus who awakes from his dream of power “as ignominiously as Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphosis”.[4]
However, Kolakowski’s insistence on casting Marx as Gregor Samsa, the man who awoke to find he had been transformed into a giant cockroach, perhaps obscures the fact that a more apt comparison might be Josef K. from Kafka’s Trial—the man who was served with charges against which he could not respond and condemned for an offense about which he had no knowledge. While Kolakowski’s approach saves his analysis from the ideological absolutionism which was characteristic of discussions of Marx and Lenin during the Cold War, it also makes the question of whether or not Bolshevism was a valid interpretation of Marx’s thought a meaningless one. Kolakowski avoids the profitless discussion of Bolshevism as a distortion of ‘what Marx really said’ only by making it impossible to deny that it was, in fact, Marxism which culminated in Bolshevism. In a response to Kolakowski, Ralph Miliband writes that Kolakowski improperly takes as settled that it really was Marx’s thought which culminated in Soviet reality. Because of this, Kolakowski
badly underrates the degree to which so much that came after Marx directly contradicted his ideas at crucial points, and cannot therefore reasonably be taken to be in any way congruent with Marx’s Marxism, or to be a ‘possible interpretation’ of it.[5]
Kolakowski’s approach to the discussion of Marx and Lenin provides grounds for a rational discourse which is more than an ideological exercise to absolve Marx of responsibility for Lenin’s deeds. However, as Miliband points out, Kolakowski’s approach uncritically conflates Marxism and Leninism in a fashion which is “quite arbitrary and question-begging”.[6] Kolakowski’s implicit claim that Marx’s thought is the beginning of a slippery-slope ending in Bolshevism has the virtue of excluding, from the outset, all attempts to absolve Marx of culpability for Lenin’s deeds. Yet, the cost of this exclusion is the exclusion of all critical comparison. Kolakowski, ultimately, eliminates the ideological content of the discussion of the relationship of Marx and Lenin by abrogating the discussion altogether.
Rather than accepting the conflation of Marxism-Leninism as legitimate, Miliband believes it to be “much more reasonable and accurate to stress how much that is of crucial importance separates Marx from Lenin”.[7] Kolakowski might argue that to do so only serves ideological purposes and, thus, is not very informative. However, as this study has suggested, it is possible to compare and contrast the ideas of Marx and Lenin while avoiding the ideological mire. One can never say with any certainty what Marx would have thought about Lenin, or how he would have assessed Lenin’s socialist program. Marx cannot be made to respond to a reality he knew nothing about. Yet, the fact that Marx offered no “condemnation in advance” of Lenin does not prescribe an uncritical conflation of ‘Marxism-Leninism’ after the fact.
In sum, Lenin should not be castigated for calling himself a Marxist even while holding ideas about the role and capacity of the state which were not up to the standards that Marx set for Hegel. The purpose of this study was to come to a better understanding of Lenin in his own right, not to dismiss him or offer an apology for him. As I have suggested though, there is a way to drive a wedge between the ideas of Marx and Lenin which avoids both extremes. While it would be an overstatement to characterize Lenin’s theory of the revolutionary state as ‘Hegelian’, reading Lenin from a Hegelian perspective casts some aspects of Lenin’s theory into clearer relief. Furthermore, though Marx’s writing provides no “condemnation in advance” of Lenin’s practice, Marx’s “condemnation after the fact” of Hegel is as instructive. As I have demonstrated, Marx’s theory of the state arose from an explicit rejection of the Hegelian theory. Marx’s theory of the state does not contain an anticipation and condemnation of Bolshevism, nor should one be sought. Nevertheless, because Lenin’s account of the state affirmed certain capacities of the state which Marx rejected in Hegel’s theory, Marx’s explicit critique of Hegel also offers an implicit critique of Lenin. Lenin’s theory of the revolutionary state, intentionally or not, bore the mark of Hegel; thus, Marx’s “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State” speaks to the reality of Bolshevism in a way that Marx’s historical or political studies cannot.
Back to Table of Contents[1]Phenomenology of Spirit (A.V. Miller, trans.; Oxford, New York, Toronto, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1977 [1952]), §20.
[3]A.J. Polan, Lenin and the End of Politics. (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 7.
[4]Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: I. The Founders (P.S. Falla trans.; Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987 [1978]), 420.
[5]Ralph Miliband, “Kolakowski’s Anti-Marx” in Political Studies (Vol. XXIX, No. 1; March 1981), 120.