Lenin, Day 2 (16 September, 2010)

The accusations against Lenin: 

1. Opposes the workers’ spontaneous organization,
2. Thinks that workers must be led by Marxist intellectuals (“professional revolutionaries”), and
3. Is anti-democratic.

The first count bases itself in texts like the following: “the task of Social Democracy is to struggle with spontaneity, to cause the workers’ movement to stray from this spontaneous striving of trade unionism to come under the leadership of the bourgeoisie” (p. 9).


In order to address the accusation, we must answer 3 questions:

1. What is spontaneity? 
2. Why does the workers’ movement have a spontaneous tendency towards trade unionism and bourgeois leadership? 
3. How does Social Democracy struggle with spontaneity?

On the definition of spontaneity, we sussed out three senses:

1. Spontaneity as the beginning of purposiveness – the unorganized outburst of discontent among the masses, which calls forth efforts to organize that energy into purposive struggle to address the causes of the discontent.
2. Spontaneity as whatever happens in the absence of organized revolutionary activity – this is the course the class struggle takes for an observer, for one who watches but does not participate.
3. Since the observer’s non-participation does not produce the non-participation of all other parties, this second sense shades into a third, according to which those who kow-tow to spontaneity are guilty of letting the enemies of the working class go to work without offering any resistance.  In this sense, those who kow-tow to spontaneity are giving up the struggle, and spontaneity really means the untrammelled activity of one’s enemies.

This last sense allows us to answer the second question: the workers’ movement has a spontaneous tendency towards trade-unionism and bourgeois leadership because bourgeois ideologists will never cease to be active so long as bourgeois ideology exists.  Look at p. 10.


This brings us to the third question: How does Social Democracy struggle with spontaneity? This will also lead us to the second accusation, and to the question the leadership role Lenin envisions for Marxist revolutionaries.


The struggle against spontaneity is, in its essence, the struggle against bourgeois ideology.  This is something I left off the schema I put on the board last time: Capitalism doesn’t just produce the prerequisites of socialism – science and technology, socialized production, representative democracy, and the technology of government – it also produces a major impediment to socialism, a barrier which must be overcome, bourgeois ideology.

For Lenin, it seems to me, the essence of bourgeois ideology is a sense of self that extends only so far as what one can have, hold, control, or enjoy in an immediate way.  The essence of bourgeois ideology is a small mind.

The revolutionary struggle against bourgeois ideology is therefore a struggle to enlarge the mind and sense of self, the struggle to see how everything is connected in such a way that what concerns you concerns me also. 

So, Lenin says that a certain sort of politics arises “spontaneously” (that is, by the effects of un-combated bourgeois ideology) among the workers – “trade unionist politics, viz., the common striving of all workers to secure from the government measures for alleviating the distress to which their condition gives rise, but which do not abolish that condition” (10).  Social Democracy must struggle against this ideology and this spontaneous politics (“workerism”) if it is to establish a truly socialist politics among the masses.

This brings us to the second accusation: that Lenin believes the masses must be led by Marxist intellectuals.  Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that this is true.  We must answer two questions:

1. Who are the Marxist intellectuals?
2. In what does their leadership consist?

As to the who, Lenin’s footnote 14 addresses this question.  The Marxist intellectuals may also be workers (though they need not be), but they are never merely workers – one must do something besides work in a factory in order to understand the scientific principles of socialism.  Working in a factory may make you sympathetic to socialism – see footnote 15 – but it will not teach you socialism.  Indeed, Lenin thinks one of the tasks of Social Democracy is to make it possible for all workers to be socialist theoreticians.  This will not happen under capitalism, though!

To go one step further, I would say that the leadership of Marxist intellectuals consists in making as many workers as possible into Marxist intellectuals.  That is, to see their own position as dependent upon the position of everyone else in society, to see society with society’s eyes.

This is to be accomplished, so far as it is possible under capitalism, by means of the publication and distribution of comprehensive political indictments.  What are these?  See p. 11, p. 12, p. 16, p. 17.