The treatment of the three people examined here [Lenin, Stalin, Mao] is very thin given the immensity of their life’s work, but it is necessary to put them together, even if inadequately, to demonstrate the evolution of an ideology. Lenin is presented here as an heir to Marx in a way that German Social Democracy was not. He broke out of the constricting non-activism of Social Democracy to reunify theory and practice, to restore the idea of the active agency of the industrial working class, to defend the aim of freedom as the essence of Marxism against the bureaucratic, étatiste and nationalist revision of Marxism in Social Democracy. For Kautsky, the revolution was ‘inevitable,’ predicted by a passive contemplative science, regardless of the activity of men. It was just this viewpoint that Stalin revived in his conception of the role of the economic basis: socialism was, by definition, the economic structure of the Soviet Union, not a system of social relationships and power. He similarly replaced State and Revolution by the Social Democratic alliance of State and nationalism, replacing class with nation. Mao Tse-tung made yet again the attempt to break out of this constricting dogma into activism, but, given the conditions of China, at the cost of Marxism, not its recreation in Leninist terms. His substantive revisions in theoretical terms are small, but his essentially voluntarist practice, his pursuit of national revolution rather than world proletarian revolution, his stress on military action from the most backward areas of a country over many years, constitute major revisions in fact. What constitutes the revolution here is not the most advanced urban masses securing their own emancipation by their own efforts, but guerilla warfare by the least advanced rural groups, operating outside the ordinary social structure over many years, in order to seize power and begin industrialisation. His revival of activism made tremendous achievements in defeating imperialism and beginning the immense process of development, but it should not obscure the social content of the Chinese Revolution since this social content will determine the future course of that revolution. It is precisely the ‘classless’ quality of Maoism which makes it particularly appealing for radical intellectuals, Marxist or liberal; the absence of specific class content, the romanticism and elitism, the special dominant role in manipulating ideology granted to intellectuals, make it attractive to those who are frustrated and outside the normal social structure with no social forces behind them. A would-be new class within a rotting social structure fits naturally into Maoism, although even more naturally into Castroism which carries less ideological baggage with it. Outside the underdeveloped world however there is little role for such intellectuals except identifying at a distance; Maoism in Western intellectuals can coexist comfortably with the elitism of the Labour Party or Scandinavian Social Democracy; the common aspiration to ‘classlessness’ makes this easy. The escape from class here is however little more than the demand to be the ruling class, to be the intellectual elite that guides society in ways the elite knows best, and links to a very ancient tradition among European intellectuals, at least as old as Plato. It is married in Maoism with the praise for ‘pragmatism,’ that is, escaping from a specific political programme embodying the demands of a specific class. Mao is said to have reshaped Marxism pragmatically, to have ‘discovered’ the peasantry as a revolutionary class, as if this were one of the elements which were optional in Marxism. However, the writing of Marx is explicitly put forward as the theory appropriate to the consciousness of the industrial working class in the most advanced countries. To see Marxism as a technical guide to revolution that can be ‘applied’ to quite inappropriate circumstances, is to try and exploit the tradition of one sort of revolution for the furtherance of a different sort, to see Marxism not as true consciousness but as ideology. The social content cannot be left out to leave a ‘technique,’ the purposes of the theory cannot be changed for other purposes except in non-Marxist and purely eclectic terms. If Marxism is to mean anything it must have some bearing on the works of Marx, and, more particularly, the central elements in that work; otherwise; it means no more than pursuing a revolution, any sort of revolution, at any cost with any purpose. And there is no obvious reason why a bourgeois revolution should not be executed under Marxist banners. More important, socialists completely disarm themselves before a new class regime: they no longer have the weapons of appraisal and criticism to determine the true and the false, they no longer have a vision of the end which determines the stages towards that end.
A number of other points emerge, and in particular, a critique of the assumption that holding a theory guarantees the holder against ultimate betrayal. Theory is not a thing that one holds, not an ideology that is given; it is the summation of certain concrete experience related to certain ends, constantly changed by new experience relative to the same ends. If the ends change, then the theory is likely to change, but, even where it does not, it serves a quite new purpose and therefore must be appraised quite separately. That the Soviet Union teaches its people certain ideas says nothing about what the Soviet people will do until we know the purposes those ideas are designed to achieve – theory has no life of its own independent of the men who use it, no autonomy or inbuilt logic that necessitates that men do things regardless of what they want to do. To believe the opposite is to reify theory, to be guilty of a form of idealism that is usually disowned as soon as stated, but is no less common among socialists. It is of interest to note that this view of theory, or rather ‘ideology’ as it is usually called, is usually associated with complete voluntarism – in fact, theory serves only a window-dressing function to disguise unstated purposes. It should be clear from what has followed that merely using a terminology, popular in this century for a number of reasons, offers no guarantee that the user is pursuing purposes for which the terminology was originally designed to achieve, that he is aligned with the right social force. Marxism in the Soviet Union has atrophied into an ideology, no less obfuscating than any other ruling class ideology but with interesting echoes of anti-Communist conservative ideologies. Ossowksi compares the evolution of Marxism to that of Christianity, also a radical doctrine at its inception:
‘After the words and practices that had served the revolutionary movement had been accepted, they were given a different content or their application was restricted to situations without relevance for everyday life. The sharing of bread and wine continued to bear the name “communion” when it was transformed into a sacrament given at the altar. On Maundy Thursday the Bishop continued to carry out the ritual of washing beggars’ feet, but this action did not involve any risk of lessening the gap which divided him from them nor help to make the relations between the Church dignitaries and the Christian population more democratic. Again, every worker who had the opportunity of making a direct approach to Stalin was able to address him as “comrade,” while a charwoman or porter would be called “porter” by those who had unlimited bank accounts, could shop at special stores and had access to special social services for themselves and their children.’ [51]
Given the objective structure of the Soviet Union and China and the roles Stalin and Mao chose to play, it was and is impossible for them to embody the will of the proletariat; in that sense, disputation on the question is as irrelevant as discussion as to whether President Johnson could or could not be a Marxist. Such discussion necessarily separates consciousness from the reality of experience and makes it autonomous, independent of reality; we are back with the Idea leading a life of its own.
Much of the obscurity attached to socialist attempts to appraise the Soviet Union and China turns on the irrelevance to the twentieth century of the classical idea of ‘bourgeois revolution.’ The point has already been argued by Lenin and Trotsky, but the full implication of their case has not been unpacked – in some cases, because they themselves have been interpreted as seeing the world as nothing but a dichotomy between a private and a State (equals socialist) economy. But revolutions to establish the bourgeois democratic republic on the basis of private property and a free market have not occurred this century except in very qualified forms – usually, with the State playing an increasingly important part, even so far as to extinguish the private and democratic elements. Private capital becomes not an alternative class, but a weak auxiliary of the class that holds the State, the bureaucracy, army or new intelligentsia. The immense convulsion of the underdeveloped world, bringing to power in many countries a new class to perform the functions of the old West European bourgeoisie, to smash the old society and begin the process of ruthless industrialisation, can now only be conceived in terms, not of private ownership, but of State capitalism. Primitive accumulation has its own ruthless logic, not impeded for long by the scruples of socialist consciousness except in the voluntarist propaganda of ideology. State capitalism, whether decorated with quotations from Marx or not, is no less a class society in fact or embryo than any other based upon private ownership, whether its genesis lies in a Communist Party seizing power, a non-Communist popular movement doing so, or a military coup by radical young army officers; and it is not legitimate to read off the nature of the present regime from how it reached power. The terminology of Liberalism which identified the West European bourgeois revolution was created by the rising class itself. The new State capitalists have not created their own terminology, but borrowed more or less extensively from the authoritarian traditions of European socialism – Fabianism, German Social Democracy, and Stalinism. This should not be surprising, nor mislead one’s assessment of the colonial revolution: Maoism is not the ‘new phase’ of Bolshevism, but its death. Together, Stalin and Mao from different positions have revised Marxism sufficiently to render it a contradiction of its original purposes. Such is the irony of history.
