The Palgrave Handbook of Leninist Political Philosophy

Tom Rockmore, Norman Levine, Tom Rockmore, Norman Levine

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781137516497
• eBook ISBN: 9781137516503
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Eastern European History

This intellectually discomfiting, disturbingly provocative, yet still thoroughly scholarly Handbook reproduces the intellectual ferment that accompanied the Russian Revolution including the wholly polarising effect at that time of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The Palgrave Handbook of Leninist Political Philosophy does not settle for one safe interpretation of the thought of this world-historic figure but rather revels in a clash of viewpoints. Most interestingly it presents a contrast between the Western editors who emphasise pure democracy and Marxian humanism with many of the contributing scholars who take a more sanguine view of the Leninist political project. Perhaps reflecting the current Western political crisis, some of the volume's other European and North American scholars more closely align with their colleagues from the Global South.

Key Features:

·         Places particular emphasis on the key elements of Lenin's thought – the dictatorship of the proletariat (which is trenchantly defended), the nature of the dialectic and  the New Economic Policy

·         Additional comprehensive coverage includes the theory of the party, Bolshevism, imperialism, and the class struggle in the countryside

·         Examines the relation of Lenin's thought to the ideas of his most influential contemporaries (including Luxemburg, Stalin and Trotsky) as well as the most eminent thinker to interpret Lenin since his death – György Lukács

This Handbook is essential reading for scholars, researchers and advanced students in political philosophy, political theory, the history of political ideas, economics, international relations and world history. It is also ideal for the general reader who wishes to understand some of the most powerful ideas that have shaped the modern world and that may yet shake the worldagain. 

© The Author(s) 2018

Tom Rockmore and Norman Levine (eds.)The Palgrave Handbook of Leninist Political Philosophyhttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51650-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Tom Rockmore^{1, 2}

(1)

Durham, NC, USA

(2)

Peking University, Beijing, China

Tom Rockmore

Email: [email protected]

Tom Rockmore

is an American philosopher, now living in Avignon, France. He studied in the USA and Germany. He has held regular or visiting appointments in Yale, Nice, Fordham, Vanderbilt, Laval, Duquesne, Temple, and Peking. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Humanities, Professor of Philosophy and Member of the Institute of Foreign Philosophy in Peking University, China. His area of research encompasses all of modern philosophy, with special attention to aspects of German idealism. He has published many books on various philosophical themes, most recently on German idealism and epistemic constructivism.

End Abstract

Everyone knows that after—and as a result of—the Second World War , Germany was divided into two parts that were later reunified in 1990. The film Good Bye, Lenin ! (2003) is a German tragicomedy about the ambivalent attitude of East Germans to the political coup d’état that overtook their country, its hopes and dreams for socialism of a different kind, and even its past, which began to disappear following reunification with, and absorption into, the Federal Republic of Germany . The destruction and then removal of the statue of Lenin in Berlin in 1992 symbolize the passing of Lenin’s heritage in this part of the Soviet empire he did so much to create. The film suggests that nothing has really changed despite so much apparently having changed. It points to the continuing influence of Lenin, who, as much as if not more than Marx , contributed in practice to realizing a version of Marx ’s theoretical vision of a possible future.

Lenin , who was a many-sided figure, larger than life, a world-historical individual in the Hegelian sense of the term, made contributions of the most varied kinds. This book—the joint work of many hands—offers an encyclopedic grasp of Lenin ’s political philosophy understood in the widest possible sense of the term. It is difficult to define and even more difficult to quantify the amorphous concept of influence. Yet suffice it to say that Lenin is by any measure one of the twentieth century’s most influential figures. Despite this, there has been surprisingly little philosophical effort to grasp Lenin ’s political philosophy, especially in recent decades. Lenin was arguably the single most important figure in the Bolshevik Revolution that led to the creation of the Soviet Union, including Russia and its associated satellite countries. And though, for reasons that still have not been successfully clarified, the Soviet Union has now ceased to exist, at the time of writing Lenin remains singularly important in his continuing impact on Marxism –Leninism , which is still the official ideology of a number of countries, above all the People’s Republic of China .

The relationship of Marx to Marxism is one of the complex issues that we must face if we are to understand either the man or the movement, even in a broad, non-specific way. Marx ’s entire opus constitutes an effort to offer an alternative to traditional theory, however understood. Marx—who eschewed traditional philosophical theory, which he believed changed nothing in simply leaving everything in place—formulated what he believed was an intrinsically practical theory, or a theory focused on changing practice. Marxism in all its many forms has always sought and still seeks, wherever it has the opportunity, to realize itself in practice.

Marx has not always been well served by his followers. Many things done under his assumed patronage are, at most, only distantly related to his position, however interpreted. There are often important differences between Marx ’s position and the positions of those who have so often spoken and continue to speak in his name, invoking his prestige for practices that are sometimes consistent with, but often inconsistent with, the letter and even the spirit of his view. Marxism, which was mainly invented by Marx’s colleague and friend Friedrich Engels, was inspired by Marx’s own position; however, it was politically not identical (though certainly very similar) to that position, and was largely different from it philosophically. During its existence, under the aegis of Bolshevism in power, the Soviet empire was based on the political hegemony of a form of Marxism that Lenin mainly derived through his study of Engels ’ writings. The tardy appearance of several crucial Marxian texts, above all the so-called Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, also called the Paris Manuscripts or the Manuscripts of 1844, fostered a rich, philosophically interesting debate on Marxian humanism . The even more tardy appearance of Marx ’s Grundrisse and Theories of Surplus Value raises a series of questions about Marx’s position, which looks very different now from how it appeared in the late 1880s. This is compounded by the controversy surrounding the precise status of German Ideology; we now know that Marx and Engels did not write this, but it is routinely taken as a basic exposition of their single joint view, more plausibly based on the political premise than on philosophical grounds. After Marx ’s death, Engels , in seeking to unite a disparate political movement that later came to be known as the First International , created Marxism.

At least since Plato , many observers have suggested that politics and philosophy are interrelated. Many examples could be cited. It is, for instance, sometimes noted that Hegel ’s left-wing and right-wing followers met on the field of battle at Stalingrad. Marx ’s relationship to Marxist politics is at the very least unclear. The Marxian contribution to various forms of Marxist dictatorship is counterbalanced by his concern, above all in the Paris Manuscripts, with what—when this seminal text appeared—quickly became known as “humanism,” and sometimes “Marxian humanism,” but more often “Marxist humanism.”

The term “Marxist humanism ” is arguably inconsistent. Dictatorship and social freedom are obviously incompatible. Either one is interested in Marxism , which, since Lenin , is dictatorial, or one is interested in humanism, which presupposes freedom, hence rejects dictatorship . Marxist humanists and Marxist anti-humanists both tend to see Marx ’s position as turning from an early interest in alienation toward a later interest in the structure of modern capitalism . Those interested in so-called Marxist humanism tend to emphasize the Marxian theory of alienation, while those who reject Marxist humanism emphasize his later works, which are thought to be more concerned with the structure of modern industrial capitalism.

The difference in perspective between those who insist above all on the theoretical goal of social freedom and those who think social freedom can be achieved only through dictatorial means rapidly led to opposition. This antagonism often descended into open polemics between Marxism in power—which inevitably assumed a dictatorial form—and intellectual criticism, which, because of obvious restrictions within Russia and its allies, mainly arose in intellectual debate outside the Soviet bloc. The opposition between left-wing Marxist humanism in the West and Soviet -style dictatorship in the East paradoxically lasted only as long as the Marxist political reality it opposed, and which was its reason for being. When the Soviet dictatorship collapsed through the sudden, largely unexpected but irrevocable foundering of the Soviet Union late in the last century, it simultaneously swept away the Western debate on Marxist humanism—which, for various reasons, was never an important theme in the Russian debate—as well as Western interest in the main Marxist figures and doctrines.

Marxism is, in theory, based on the continuing Marxist reception of Marx ’s writings. Put simply, we can say that on the theoretical level Marxism is a nineteenth-century phenomenon that only achieved political reality in the twentieth century. Hegel passed from the scene at the height of his powers in 1831. Marx , who was active from the 1840s to the 1880s, is a mid-nineteenth-century thinker; he entered the German university system soon after Hegel ’s passing, and emerged a decade later in 1841, at a moment when Hegel was still the central thinker of the period, with a PhD in philosophy. He only later turned to political economy in the process of formulating a non-standard theory of modern industrial society, through which he sought to transform capitalism into communism . Marxism, to which Marx did not subscribe—to which he literally could not have subscribed, since it did not exist in his lifetime—was created, shortly after Marx died, almost single-handedly by Engels , Marx ’s close colleague over many years, initially in his pamphlet on Feuerbach . Engels , through this short but powerful text, strongly influenced those who, in his wake, became Marxists, or, in principle, followers of Marx , whose theory they, like Engels and Marx , sought to realize in practice.

Marxism in power is a twentieth-century phenomenon that has lasted into the early part of the twenty-first century. Neither Marx nor Engels lived to see Marxism in power, something that was largely brought about by Lenin and his followers as the result of the Bolshevik Revolution . Since that time, there has been a widespread intellectual tendency to treat Lenin and those influenced by him as if they would somehow slink away without leaving a trace, disappearing into the recesses of history, though this is clearly far from the truth. We ignore Lenin and his heirs at our peril. Lenin was clearly, to utilize a Hegelian term, a world-historical individual—someone, according to Hegel , whose purpose lies in realizing history, though perhaps not, depending on the perspective, what that individual had in mind. Alexander the Great , Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan were such figures. At the Battle of Jena, when he saw Napoleon , Hegel famously remarked that he had encountered world history on a horse. In the twentieth century, Mikhail Gorbachev is another such figure—someone who, according to all accounts, unwittingly as well as astonishingly brought the Soviet empire, which had emerged through violent revolution, to an end, even if this was not his intention, without a shot being fired.

As a world-historical figure, Lenin is worthy of careful study both for what he did and what he failed to do in his effort to bring about revolutionary change in Russia, leading eventually through the Soviet Union to the emergence of Putin’s post-Soviet Russia. By virtue of Lenin ’s enormous and continuing influence, above all indirectly in the People’s Republic of China as it exists today, it is important to grasp the warp and woof of Lenin ’s ideas. Though Lenin and a number of figures influenced by him have been studied in the past, in proportion to his importance little attention has been paid to him in recent years. The single most important recent work we are aware of does not aim to examine Lenin ’s legacy; rather, through rallying the troops, as it were, its intention is to create political interest in Leninism , which is understood as a potentially viable approach, a task which seems exceedingly unlikely to succeed at present. The present volume is intended to play a somewhat different, clearly more academic, role in the debate. We are aware of no single effort to explore the length and breadth of Lenin’s political philosophy in a single, comprehensive volume. And what there is in the debate is often only satisfactory at best from a revolutionary political standpoint, but far from satisfactory—indeed, unsatisfactory—from an academic one. Indeed, more often than not, when Lenin is not simply ignored, his view is misrepresented in the debate by both right-wing and left-wing observers, in both cases essentially for political reasons.

The Handbook of Leninist Political Philosophy in Context

The sudden, unexpected collapse of the Soviet U...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. Lenin and Political Philosophy
• Part II. Lenin and Individual Figures
• Part III. Lenin and Problems
• Back Matter