Marxism and Leninism

An Essay in the Sociology of Knowledge

John H. Kautsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351309424
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

One of the pre-eminent scholars in the history and theory of European socialism, John Kautsky in this volume develops the argument that Marxism and Leninism are two quite different ideologies. He counterposes this view with the commonly accepted one of Leninism as simply one form that Marxism took in the course of its evolution. The easy identification of Marxism and Leninism with each other has been responsible for great confusion in the realm of both scholarly and political discourse.

Kautsky develops his position within the tradition of the sociology of knowledge, by the close examination of the different meanings of the Marxist vocabulary as it was used by Marxists and Leninists. His frame of reference turns on the position of labor in turn-of-the-century industrial Europe and the role of modernizing intellectuals in underdeveloped countries. While the vocabulary used was often common to Marx and Lenin, Marxism was explicitly concerned with appeals to workers in industrial nations such as Germany and Austria, whereas Leninism appeals to revolutionaries in underdeveloped nations such as Russia and China.

Whatever be the current assessment of the future of socialism and communism, Kautsky holds that it is important to study the core structure of both Marxism and Leninism, since they were major phenomena that powerfully affected the world in the twentieth century. Beyond that, in dealing with how different ideologies can be ensconced within the same rhetoric, the book offers an outstanding entrance into the sociology of knowledge as a tool for political analysis. This is a unique work in the function of language no less than the nature of ideology.

The work is divided into five parts: Two environments, two ideologies, one terminology. The evolution of Marxism, its appeals in the German Empire. The evolution of Leninism, its appeals to strata involved in making modernizing revolutions. The differential outcomes of Marxism in the East and Leninism in the West. And finally, an examination of why Marxism and Leninism have been seen as a single ideology. In a new essay prepared for this new edition, Kautsky provides important autobiographical as well as historical reflections on how this book fits into the overall pattern of the author's work.

Chapter One

Introduction: Two Environments—Two Ideologies—One Terminology

---

Why Bother with Dead Marxism and Leninism?

The scholarly and journalistic literature commonly applies the single term “Marxism” to the thought and practice of such political thinkers and leaders as, among many others, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti, Maurice Thorez and Georges Marchais, V. I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev, Fidel Castro and Salvador Allende, Daniel Ortega and Abimael Guzmán, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot, Najibullah, Amilcar Cabral, and Mengistu Haile Mariam.¹

Calling all these people Marxists, as they have called themselves, suggests that they share a common ideology and represent a single movement, a notion that appears to be widely, if vaguely, accepted. On the other hand, it seems obvious that huge differences divide some of these so-called Marxists, that particularly those near the beginning and those toward the end of the above listing have little, if anything, in common. Thus, it is difficult to conceive of Karl Kautsky in the context of Afghan politics or of an Ethiopian army colonel leading a mass labor movement like German social democracy.

By differentiating between Marxism and Leninism as distinct ideologies, this essay suggests a way of looking at this area of great intellectual confusion that may help to explain both the major differences among movements and regimes commonly referred to as Marxist and the fact that they can all think of themselves as Marxist and all speak, at least to some extent, the language of Marxism. I try to develop my explanation by taking a sociology-of-knowledge approach of relating ideology to its social environment, a perspective that seems generally in accord with Marx’s view of ideology and may thus be particularly appropriate for a discussion of the Marxist and Leninist ideologies.

For my purposes here, I distinguish between two types of environments: industrialized and industrially underdeveloped. Ideologies that have proved to be widely appealing across many national and cultural boundaries must be explained with reference to broad types of societies. The dichotomy I draw between industrial and underdeveloped societies, though it obviously oversimplifies reality, is thus a useful one in accounting for the two ideologies I distinguish, each associated with one type of society. I also mention areas neither fully industrialized nor largely underdeveloped, like Italy of the 1920s or mid-twentieth-century Chile, with the composite ideologies of Gramsci or Allende that contain some elements of one ideology and some of the other.

I believe that my conception of two ideologies can serve to explain far more reality, and explain it better, and can bring more order into this area of the history of ideas and of political movements than can the notion of a single Marxist ideology from Marx to Mengistu or the possible alternative notion of dozens of different Marxisms.

But is this analysis still of interest when the death of Marxism and of Leninism is being proclaimed every day? As these lines are being written, the pictures and statues of Marx and Lenin are coming down in much of the world, Karl-Marx-Stadt is once again Chemnitz, and Leningrad is once again St. Petersburg. Is this essay then being rendered irrelevant by the dramatic events that have been taking place in the past few years in the Soviet Union and its successor states and in what used to be called its Eastern European satellites?

First, it must be noted that my argument that Marxism and Leninism are different ideologies implies that whatever the fate of one may be, the fate of the other is distinct from it. In my view, Marxism and Leninism changed for different reasons and in different ways, although both changed so drastically in important respects that one can fairly say that they have been dead for a long time.

What little Marxism there was in Russia died with Menshevism and the triumph of Leninism long ago. There having been no Marxism in the Soviet Union since then, recent events there prove nothing about the vitality of Marxism one way or the other. In the industrialized West, Marxism had directed its appeal to alienated industrial workers and promised to end their alienation. As their alienation was ended or at least reduced—though not only by the policies of Marxists—Marxism lost its appeal to workers and, in this sense, died.²

Similarly, Leninism committed suicide in Russia by the achievement of its goals. Leninism appeals to alienated intellectuals in underdeveloped countries and promises to bring them to power and to realize the rapid industrialization of their backward societies. When this was accomplished some decades ago in the Soviet Union and the other now industrialized countries of Eastern Europe, Leninism necessarily died.

What died only recently, then, as a result of the collapse of most Communist regimes, is not Marxism and Leninism but only their outward symbols: the pictures and statues, and also—except among a few hidebound leaders of surviving Communist parties—the vocabulary that Lenin had taken over from Marx.³ That this Marxist vocabulary was used by both Marxists and Leninists is the principal reason for the assumption that Marxism and Leninism are one and the same ideology. To demonstrate that a single vocabulary can serve to express what are more usefully seen as two distinct ideologies is therefore a major objective of this essay.

Whether Marxism or Leninism is dead or alive, what I attempt here should be of some interest, for if my analysis is valid, it follows that a very widely held view that links or somehow identifies Western labor movements and their socialism with what also came to be known as socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe rests on a pervasive historical misunderstanding. This view not only has been accepted by scholars but came to play a prominent role in politics. On the one hand, it served the Right to attack the laborite and socialist Left in the West by identifying it with Communism in the East. On the other hand, it led some leftist advocates of pro-labor change in the West, for example, some French Communists and “marxisant” intellectuals, to associate themselves with or defend the Soviet regime. Indeed, the peculiar character of Communist parties in industrial Europe, as I interpret it in chapter 4, and possibly their very existence were in good part a result of this misunderstanding.

Communists and anti-Communists, some socialists, and many antisocialists in the West as well as more or less neutral observers and, of course, the rulers of the Soviet Union, especially in its early years, have all helped perpetuate this misunderstanding. The misleading identification of Marxist “socialism” and Leninist “socialism” is likely to be with us for quite some time. A very few in the West will argue that labor should follow the Leninist path, because it was not Lenin, but Stalin and/or Mikhail Gorbachev, who failed in the Soviet Union, while very many others will say or imply that the failure of Communism in the Soviet Union discredits the programs and policies of Western Social-Democratic parties. In East Germany, where Social Democrats were strong before 1933, they have lost elections after the collapse of the Communist regime, no doubt in good part because voters resentful of that regime oppose the “Reds” and “socialism,” symbols that Leninists and Marxists have shared.⁴

In any case, a reexamination of the relationship of Marxism and Leninism remains appropriate and even necessary because of their historical importance. There is a huge scholarly and popular literature that sees Lenin and his successors as the successors of Marx and Engels and regards Leninist or so-called socialist regimes in underdeveloped countries, beginning with the Soviet Union, as somehow resting on Marx’s ideology and therefore as in some way related to the ideology of Marx’s Social-Democratic successors. The conception of Marxism and Leninism as a single ideology has been so very widespread and influential among scholars and intellectuals, policymakers and the newspaper-reading public, and has caused so much misunderstanding of both Marxism and Leninism that an attempt to view it as a misconception and to explain how it arose and why it has remained so powerful would seem to be well worthwhile.

Two Ideologies

A political ideology, as I use the term here, is a view of the political world, involving description and explanation that may or may not be accurate from the perspective of an outside observer, as well as prescription, from a particular value position or point of view.⁵ In the case of any one individual, that view may have been conditioned by all sorts of different factors involving the individual’s experiences and personality. A widely held ideology, however, must express a widely held view conditioned by factors that affect great numbers of people in similar fashion. A political point of view is likely to be widely shared by people who occupy more or less the same position within a political and social system and share a common attitude toward that position or a common interest in preserving or changing it. That is the basic assumption underlying the argument in this essay.

In the next two chapters, I will link Marxism and Leninism to their respective social groupings in specific social environments. Here I must briefly define and distinguish between these two ideologies. One is the Marxism associated with the labor parties of the final decades of the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth century in industrial Europe, especially the German and Austrian Social-Democratic parties, that is sometimes referred to as the Marxism of the Second International. Marxism is one ideology in a broader category of laborite or social-democratic ideologies, all of which share a characteristic emphasis on the industrial labor movement and the improvement of the status of labor and on parliamentary democracy as a method and as a goal.

What distinguishes Marxism—though not necessarily very clearly—from other laborite ideologies, like British Fabianism, German Revisionism, or Scandinavian social democracy, is not only Marx’s conception of history (of which his analysis of capitalism is a part) with its emphasis on class struggle and revolution, but also the specific vocabulary by which he expressed this conception. That vocabulary, however, employed to express a different conception, is used by Leninism as well. As my focus is on the distinction between Marxism and Leninism, and not between Marxism and other laborite ideologies, I cannot define Marxism with reference to the vocabulary it shares with Leninism, but I can define it with reference to its emphasis on labor and parliamentary democracy, which it shares with the broader category of laborite ideologies and which distinguish it from Leninism.

Leninist ideology is associated with revolutionary modernizing, antitraditional, and/or anticolonial movements in underdeveloped countries. It first appeared in turn-of-the-century Russia and also the Balkans, then in China, and has since inspired revolutionary movements in such nonindustrial countries as Vietnam and Cambodia, Southern Yemen and Afghanistan, Angola and Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and Ethiopia, and, at least after the revolution, in Cuba. Its most outstanding thinker and founding father was clearly Lenin, and I therefore refer to this ideology as Leninism.

Leninism is one ideology in a broader category of modernizing ideologies, all of which share characteristic emphases on agrarian and antiimperialist revolution, on the key role of intellectuals, and on rapid modernization. What distinguishes Leninism from other modernizing ideologies, like those represented by Jawaharlal Nehru or Carnal Abdel Nasser or, earlier, by the Mexican Revolution, is above all Lenin’s use of Marx’s vocabulary. Since it obviously does not distinguish Leninism from Marxism, and as I am not concerned with distinguishing Leninism from other modernizing ideologies, I define Leninism with reference to the characteristics it shares with the broader category of modernizing ideologies rather than with reference to its specific character (i.e., its vocabulary).

Leninism is, of course, all too generally referred to as Marxism, but I see these ideologies as belonging to two very different categories, and each of their founding fathers is associated with one of these. Just as the term Leninism is, in everyone’s mind, linked to the thought of Lenin, so I am using the term Marxism, as it once was but is evidently no longer generally employed, to point to a linkage with Karl Marx’s thought. That makes it impossible to refer to Stalin, Mao, or Mengistu as a Marxist, as is so often done, for the thought and the policies of such revolutionary leaders reflected not Marx’s laborite thought but Lenin’s modernizing one.

The following matrix may help clarify what different ideologies, including Marxism and Leninism, have in common and what distinguishes them.

As I seek to explain the thought of ideologists with reference to their sociohistorical setting rather than their personal character or intelligence, I am not arguing that the laborite Marxists were closer to Karl Marx’s thought than Lenin and his followers because they were more upright and honest or more insightful and scholarly. Rather, the social-democratic and laborite Marxist ideologists were closer to Marx than ideologists in underdeveloped countries could be because the industrial environment to which they were responding was closer to the one to which Marx had responded, especially during the last three decades of his life. After all, ideology as a conceptual apparatus is wedded to the ideologist’s experience, and ideology as a moral perspective is wedded to his or her task or mission.

Marx and Marxism

A few remarks are in order here to explain why I include Karl Marx’s thought and Marxism among laborite and social-democratic ideologies.

To associate Marx with Marxism rather than with Leninism, as I have now defined these ideologies, I do not need to become involved in the endless and fruitless debates of the past hundred years as to what constitutes “true” Marxism. I merely need to point to the undeniable fact that most of Marx’s work is focused on the development of industrial capitalism and of the industrial working class, and very little of it on problems of underdevelopment and colonialism, many of which did not arise until well after his death.⁶ If I refer to Marxism as “laborite” as well as social-democratic, this is not to suggest that it was the ideology of narrow trade unionism, concerned only with workers’ short-term interests, but simply to stress its link to labor as one of the major characteristics distinguishing this ideology from Leninism.

Marx’s attitude toward parliamentary democracy, as distinguished from that of Marxist parties functioning after his death, is not as clear as his interest in the proletariat, for in his lifetime substantial legal labor parties hardly existed and most parliaments, including the House of Commons, were not yet elected by universal suffrage. The French and Swiss parliaments, elected by universal manhood suffrage, represented still overwhelmingly nonindustrial populations, and the imperial German Reichstag was largely powerless. Thus, the question of labor playing an effective role in parliaments did not arise for Marx, but he clearly did favor majority rule and universal suffrage.

Friedrich Engels, who had collaborated closely with Marx for four decades and survived him by twelve years, was intimately involved with the early Social-Democratic parties, especially the German party led by August Bebel and also the Austrian one led by Victor Adler, and approved of their participation in electoral and parliamentary politics.⁷ Marxist Social-Democratic parties were henceforth, throughout their century-long history, strong advocates and defenders of parliamentary democracy with universal suffrage.

It can be argued that Marxist ideology should not be considered “laborite,” because to Marx and his followers the ultimate goal was the “emancipation” of all of humanity, not merely of the working class. However, their concern with human liberation from all kinds of oppression and discrimination was hardly more than a vague ideal. It was quite secondary to their concern with industrial labor, for they saw human liberation as a necessary consequence of socialism—often simply because they defined socialism to encompass it—and they regarded the working class as the instrument that would bring about socialism. Already in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels saw the proletariat as the only revolutionary class and asserted that its victory must bring the end of the oppression of women and of hostility between nations. While racial and ethnic discrimination and the position of women were given relatively little serious thought, the organization ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: Two Environments—Two Ideologies—One Terminology
• 2. The Evolution of Marxism
• 3. The Evolution of Leninism
• 4. Marxism in the East, “Leninism” in the West
• 5. Why Marxism and Leninism Have Been Seen as a Single Ideology
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index