Lenin was a Radlib
Lenin the Liberal
Karl Marx was a champion of democracy as well as rights such as freedom of the press and so on. But he was no liberal. Sometimes self-described followers of Lenin will oppose democracy, freedom of the press, and so on, while at the same time claiming to be Marxists. How can they justify this? Their answer, when they are confronted with the voluminous evidence that Marx supported democracy and freedom of the press, will typically be that Marx was writing when capitalism was in its ascendancy, but that after Marx's death, capitalism reached its imperialist stage, and required a different set of strategies. Here they wAnyone with a solid grasp of Marxist theory is able to see the ways in which Lenin was liberal, particularly in his analysis of imperialism.
Ask any follower of Lenin what makes their theory distinctive, and they will tell you: Leninism is Marxism of the era of imperialism. But Lenin's way of dealing with imperialism was liberal rather than Marxist, both on the theoretical and the practical level. Lenin turned away from traditional Marxism and instead embraced the liberal theories of the British bourgeois economist, J. A. Hobson. Of course, Lenin had studied Marx quite thoroughly, and knew how to dress these theories up in Marxist language, but in his analysis of imperialism, Lenin ceased to be a traditional Marxist and adopted an ideology that was a blend of Marxism and Hobsonism, with the accent on the latter rather than the former, as well as the influence of other liberal economists like Hans Gideon Heymann and the Austrian banker Theodor Vogelstein. In Lenin's pamphlet, Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin quotes from Heymann and Vogelstein at length, and has the intellectual honesty to report, at the very beginning of the Preface, describing the entire work, "I made use of the principle English work on imperialism, the book by J. A. Hobson, with all the care that, in my opinion, that work deserves." In other words, as I've already indicated in my previous essay, "Lenin the Anarchist-Politician," Lenin was an eclectic thinker. He was not purely a Marxist, nor purely a Hobsonist; rather, his thought contained elements of Marxism, and elements of many other kinds of ideas. In that essay, I focused on the anarchist, Narodnik, voluntarist, syndicalist, and councilist elements of his thought and practice. In this essay, I will focus on the liberal aspects, which are predominant.
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| John A. Hobson |
Who was J. A. Hobson? John Atkinson Hobson (1858-1940) was a British liberal economist, an advocate for capitalism, but also a Romantic, in the old sense - a fan of John Ruskin, the painter, art critic, and idealist moralist social reformer. He studied economics at Oxford, where he came to know some of the people who would go on to form the London School of Economics, and who came to be known as "Fabian Socialists," but disagreed with them and pursued his own quirky economic ideas, for which he was generally ostracized from academia, failed to obtain a professorship, and instead went into journalism. This was something of a return to the family business; his father had owned a newspaper.
Before we go further, we must mention Hobson's close friend, Albert F. Mummery. Mummery was the heir of a tannery fortune, and inherited the family business at a time when the tanning industry was so noxious that it made people seriously ill even to be near a tannery, and thus tanners were forced to operate far outside of large cities. The workers essentially worked themselves to death. After Mummery had made enough money to live a life of leisure, he became mayor of Dover, and then he became interested in economics, working together with Hobson for a time. Indeed, it was he who inspired several of the most innovative ideas that have been attributed to Hobson. In 1889, Mummery and Hobson wrote and published their seminal yet oft-forgotten book, The Physiology of Industry. But Mummery quickly grew bored with economics and instead turned to mountain climbing, and was soon a world famous mountaineer. His team was the first to scale the Zmutt Ridge of the Matterhorn, and had several other "firsts," and then, in 1895, he died along with his entire party while scaling the Nanga Parbat in the Himalayas, in a disaster that made world headlines. It was unknown whether they reached the summit, because their bodies were never found.
After Mummery's death, Hobson became a foreign correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, covering the Second Boer War. In 1900, these articles, with some supplementary material, were published in book form, entitled War in South Africa, in which he expressed his vehement opposition to the British aggression. (His journalism also covered a kind of British innovation: during the Boer War, the UK had invented concentration camps.) This was immediately followed, in 1901, by The Psychology of Jingoism, an even more ringing moral indictment of the British public and their bloodthirsty warmongering. Hobson made it clear that he was a nationalist, but in his opinion, jingoism is an "inverted patriotism," susceptible to manipulation by imperialism. Then, in 1902, he came out with what is generally regarded as his magnum opus, Imperialism: a Study.
Imperialism: a Study is an examination of the economic roots of imperialism. But here Hobson advances a rather unusual thesis, which he covers over with such hemming, hawing, and prevarication that one can easily miss it if one is not reading carefully. Usually, when people think of the economic roots of imperialism, they think of the extraction of natural resources, or perhaps the search for cheap labor markets. Hobson does not deny that any of this exists, but none of that is his focus. Instead, he emphasizes the role of imperialism in opening up new foreign markets for consumer goods produced by the imperialist nation. For Hobson, the primary and predominant cause of imperialism is the development of industrial production to such a point that it produces more goods than the populations of the nations at the center of the imperium can consume. As he puts it, in the introduction to the book:
"...Whereas various real and powerful motives of pride, prestige, and pugnacity, together with the more altruistic professions of a civilizing mission, figured as causes of imperial expansion, the dominant directive motive was the demand for markets and for a profitable investment by the exporting and financial classes within each imperialist regime. The urgency of this economic demand was attributed to the growing tendency of industrial productivity, under the new capitalist technique of machinery and power, to exceed the effective demand of the national markets, [that is to say] the rate of production to outrun the rate of home consumption. This was not, of course, the whole story. [There was also the need for...] raw materials [...] more imported food for larger urban populations [...] imported consumption goods for a rising standard of living. [...]
...But with these qualifications in mind, it is nevertheless true that the most potent drive [...] was the excess of capitalist production over the demands of the home market." [emphasis mine] (p.1-2)
For anyone who has even a cursory awareness of the history of imperialism, this seems a bit upside-down. The imperialists have been primarily concerned with exploiting foreign labor markets for cheap labor without safety standards, benefits, or environmental regulation, as well as extracting natural resources - that is their "most potent drive" - and secondarily, yes, the populations of these countries have also been marketed to as consumers, but that came later, of course - once these populations were economically developed enough to be able to afford these consumer goods. This focus on consumption rather than production will be a theme for Hobson, as we shall see.
If some of Hobsons's statements about imperialism seem somewhat confusing to today's reader, they must be understood in the context, first of all, of the breakdown of Lord Salisbury's policy of "splendid isolation," as the United Kingdom became gradually embroiled in the conflicts of Europe, and secondly, by comparison with Bismarck's welfare state, and in particular Bismarck's pointed disinterest in colonial adventures for Germany - and the breakdown of this policy after Bismarck's fall from grace during the controversy over the Anti-Socialist Laws, and especially after the Berlin Conference, during the "scramble for Africa," at which point Germany belatedly entered the imperialist game. Hobson always was, and remained, a nationalist. But for him, as he explains in the first section of Imperialism: a Study, entitled "Imperialism and Nationalism," "Nationalism is a plain highway to internationalism." If, instead of international solidarity, conflict arises between nations, this is a "perversion" of nationalism, and "Such a perversion is imperialism." (page 9)
Hobson's ideas and books are not altogether evil or stupid. In fact, they are interesting, full of factual information, and worth reading. But his interpretation of this information is simplistic, moralistic, and thoroughgoingly liberal. Hobson's critique of imperialism is a liberal nationalist's critique of imperialism, a reactionary call for a return to the policies of Salisbury and Bismarck - the warning from a moralistic apologist for capitalism that colonial adventurism has gotten out of hand, stoked by an irresponsible, "jingoistic" "psychology," and that the prudent thing to do is to put the brakes on this process, before it develops such momentum that it becomes unstoppable and leads all of the interested parties (that is, liberal capitalist nation-states) into a cataclysmic conflict on a world scale. As such, and particularly from the vantage of the emergence of World War I, Hobson's work seems very insightful and even prophetic. But it is nothing like Marxism.
What distinguishes radicalism from liberalism, rather than a commitment to use violence to further their political goals (after all, liberals have used violence again and again, ever since the bourgeois revolutions like the French Revolution and even before that) is that the liberal analysis of politics focuses on representations and thus remains in the sphere of the ideal, whereas radicalism seeks out the structural roots of politics in the material world - the realm of economics and ecology. Frederic Jameson once remarked "I have always understood Marxism to mean the supersession of politics by economics." Radicals have always eschewed moralism, and a genuine radical refrains from blaming a social problem on the conscious deliberate decisions of individual moral agents, instead striving to focus on a hard, amoral, dispassionate analyses of the larger forces at play, at a structural rather than personal level. This is true for Marxism, but not for Leninism. For Marx, politics was in the superstructure, whereas the economic mode of production was in the base- and in the last instance, it is the base that is determinative. For Lenin the liberal, however, politics superseded economics. If the material economic conditions for revolution did not obtain, then these conditions could be imposed upon reality through "iron discipline" and "will". Thus he was constantly invoking the importance of "truly
iron discipline" and "tenacity, discipline, and a single and inflexible
will." For Lenin, it was passion that came first, and politics flowed from that passion, and then economic facts were massaged to fit the politics. Essentially he was a romantic.
Lenin, who lived in London on and off between 1902 and 1908, quite quickly came under the spell of Hobson. From the relative comfort and security of a rather posh flat in Pentonville (modern-day Islington), Lenin was safely separate from the day-to-day struggle of radical activists who were building a workers' movement among the unions and other labor institutions in a Russian empire ruled with an iron fist by the Czar and his secret police. Lenin had the luxury to indulge in the pleasant but naive notions of Hobson and other liberal theorists, and to use these ideas to criticize the methods of the activists on the ground as impure and incorrect- a luxury that could not be afforded by, for instance, fighters for what Lenin called "economism" (a term they did not use to describe themselves) like the writers for the Russian newspaper, Рабочая Mысль (Rabochaya Mysl, "Workers' Thought"), such as Apollinariya Yakubova and Karl Kok, and the similar newspaper Рабочее дело (Rabocheya Delo, "Workers' Cause") against whom Lenin wrote his famous diatribe "What is to be done?" (published 1902). People like Yakubova, one of the founders of the "League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class" group that later evolved into Bolshevism, were free from Hobsonist influence, and this was one of the clarion distinctions between their position and Lenin's. For Lenin, "economist" was a grave insult, and when Marxists dared to point out that his fond notions were detached from material reality, and thus put themselves in the way of his "iron discipline" and "will," he accused them of being "economists." There is nothing more offensive to a liberal than to point out that if his indignant moral imperatives have no grounding in material reality, they are nothing but wishes. I am sorry to inform the Leninists that Marx was an economist.
So where does this leave Lenin's theory of imperialism, as outlined in "Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism"? To be blunt, the book is an incoherent mess. It would be not to far off to say that Lenin had no theory of imperialism - or at least that he has no consistent definition of imperialism. And this kind of inconsistency is what one would expect from a liberal analysis of imperialism, or, worse yet, a half-baked hodge-podge of Marxism and liberalism. Lenin acknowledges in Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism that Hobson was not a Marxist, but merely by admitting that Hobson was a reformist who repudiated violent revolution. But this is by no means the only thing separating Hobsonism from Marxism. Hobsonism and Marxism are different, not only in their prescription for how to achieve a more just society, or what that society might look like; much more importantly, in their fundamental economic understanding of how capitalism functions, they are completely different and even opposed. In his analysis of imperialism, Hobson makes no reference to the organic composition of capital, to fixed capital or variable capital, to absolute surplus value or relative surplus value, to the length of the working day, or to any of the familiar conceptual tools that Marx employed in his critique of political economy. Instead, Hobson operates completely within and according to the framework and the tools of classical economics, unchallenged and unquestioned. Like other liberal economists, he treats economic categories like the commodity and supply and demand and so on as transhistorical truths, rather than as historically contingent.
Hobson and Mummery are usually credited with developing a theory of "underconsumptionism," from which Hobson's theory of imperialism arose quite directly. And it's true that Mummery and Hobson were thinking about these issues decades before the Keynesians developed their theories of aggregate demand, which is somewhat analogous (though Keynesians have a much more articulated examination of money supply than Mummery and Hobson ever did). But in truth, underconsumptionism has a long and varied history, which long precedes Mummery and Hobson. We can see elements of underconsumptionism as early as the mercantilist economist Barthélemy de Laffemas in the 16th century, and it formed an important part of the economic theories of Sismondi (whom Marx mocked in the Communist Manifesto), certain members of the German Historical School, and Ferdinand Lassalle. There are many variations of underconsumptionism, but the general idea is simple enough, and usually goes something like this: as industrial capitalism develops, for a variety of reasons, workers are immiserated (for Lassalle, this was due to the "iron law of wages"), and their share of wealth and thus purchasing power becomes smaller and smaller. For this reason, they can no longer afford the goods and services that industrial capitalism sells (they under-consume) and this results in a loss of revenue for the capitalists - if it is serious enough, it may result in recession, depression, or even a crisis in the capitalist system.
This way of thinking about capitalism is often mistaken for Marxism, even occasionally by people who consider themselves Marxists. And there's no doubt that Marx wrote quite a bit about the impoverished conditions of workers, and so on. But there's one problem: Marx himself was very critical of the theory of underconsumption. In Capital Vol. II, Marx writes:
It is sheer tautology to say that crises are caused by the scarcity of
effective consumption, or of effective consumers. The capitalist system
does not know any other modes of consumption than effective ones,
except that of sub forma pauperis or of the swindler. That commodities
are unsaleable means only that no effective purchasers have been found
for them, i.e., consumers (since commodities are bought in the final
analysis for productive or individual consumption). But if one were to
attempt to give this tautology the semblance of a profounder justification
by saying that the working-class receives too small a portion of its own
product and the evil would be remedied as soon as it receives a larger
share of it and its wages increase in consequence, one could only
remark that crises are always prepared by precisely a period in which
wages rise generally and the working-class actually gets a larger share of
that part of the annual product which is intended for consumption. From
the point of view of these advocates of sound and “simple” (!) common
sense, such a period should rather remove the crisis. It appears, then,
that capitalist production comprises conditions independent of good or
bad will, conditions which permit the working-class to enjoy that relative
prosperity only momentarily, and at that always only as the harbinger of
a coming crisis. [emphasis mine]
Yes, you read that right. For Marx, workers' wages going up (not down!) precedes a crisis. We might add here that history seems to be mostly on Marx's side of the argument, and against the underconsumptionists. Most of the major events of violent turmoil and class conflict over recent centuries have happened immediately after periods in which things were going relatively a bit better for the oppressed classes, when their standard of living and purchasing power were increasing, not decreasing.
Indeed, much of Marx's work is concerned with critiquing existing political economy, and especially critiquing the assumptions, baked into classical economic theory, that lead to "common sense" conclusions like underconsumptionism. Marx critiqued Lassalleanism, for instance in the Critique of the Gotha Program, partially precisely for this reason. (Not coincidentally, Lassalle had met with and written to Otto von Bismarck quite sympathetically. It seems that Bismarck may have toyed with Lassalle, cynically, to try to win over some socialists for his political career and then turned his back on them when they were no longer useful. The laissez-faire capitalist right wing critics of Bismarck, meanwhile, started to call the welfare state that he developed "state socialism," and Bismarck opportunistically adopted this phrase and wore it as a badge of honor. The original generation of Marxists, like Wilhelm Liebknecht, referred to Lassalleanism as "state socialism" as a term of abuse. Hal Draper claims that Marx called Lassalle a "Bonapartist" to his face, but I'm not sure where he gets that information. In any case, it's clear that Marx was ruthlessly critical of Lassalle's style of socialism. (Marx also wrote some very rude and racist things about Lassalle, but that's a whole other story.)) Lenin, for his part, rather symptomatically begins his work "What is to be done?" with a quote from Lassalle.
For Hobson and Lenin, it is precisely underconsumption, in the core country, that necessitates imperialism - the very purpose of imperialism, ultimately, is help stoke consumption. But this imperialism is only a kind of stop-gap, according to Lenin, which results, a few years later, in its own crisis, bringing all of capitalism to an end. Thus, for Lenin, imperialism was the "highest" stage of capitalism, that is to say the last stage, the sign that capitalism was decadent and on the verge of total collapse.
Marx was far more concerned with the process of production than he was with a crisis of consumption as precipitating a crisis of capitalism. Marx approaches this in a variety of ways, most famously in Capital Vol. III, when he outlines his theory of the Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall. It's a complex argument, but to put it in a nutshell, as firms compete with each other, they will (among other things) increase what he calls the organic composition of capital - that is, the difference between the rate of surplus value (s/v) and the rate of profit (s/(c+v)). In other words, they will tend to use more "dead" labor - machines, and other forms of fixed capital, and less "living" labor - human beings in the production process. But since value is defined here in terms of average socially necessary human labor time, this means that the rate of profit (though not necessarily the mass of profit), over the long term, will have the tendency to fall. It is thus a crisis in the production process that precipitates the crisis in capitalism, not anything directly due to a crisis in consumption (though all of this is, of course, predicated on the commodity form).
Marx's famous "Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League" from March of 1850 is instructive here. First, I must point out that the way Marx uses the term "liberal," it is not a synonym for "democratic," for he compares the liberals and the democrats as two separate groups, when he states that "the democratic petty bourgeoisie [...] now occupies the same position
in the opposition as the liberal bourgeoisie did before 1848" and "This
democratic party [...] is far more dangerous for the workers than were
the liberals earlier." The two groups are profoundly related and similar, alike in many respects, and yet, according to Marx, they are not the same. In fact, Marx breaks up his targets even further into more refined categories: the "most progressive elements of the big bourgeoisie," the "constitutional-democratic petty bourgeois," and the "republican petty bourgeois". Marx goes on to warn his audience that "All these fractions claim to be ‘republicans’ or
’reds’, just as at the present time members of the republican petty
bourgeoisie in France call themselves ‘socialists’." Note that it is not enough for a party to call itself "communist" or "socialist" or even "Marxist" for it to lose its liberal character. Even if it purports to oppose capitalism, if its analysis of capitalism is essentially liberal (as Hobson's, later, would be), it remains functionally liberal even if not in name.
As I said in the introductory essay, my purpose here is not to attack Lenin, per se, which would be useless and pointless. Lenin is dead. He has been dead for about a century. My criticisms are instead aimed at persuading living people who are fighting for the rational interests of the oppressed and dispossessed to employ a different strategy than Lenin used. Those who cling to Lenin’s strategies and imagine that somehow they could be repeated in a completely different historical material context do the exact opposite of what Marx counseled his readers to do. Marx's advice, in the 1850 Address, was twofold: 1. on a practical level, work with the liberals; give them material support and aid, to win the conquest of democracy. 2. Do so without illusions; continually, on a theoretical level, distinguish between yourselves and them, so that everyone can clearly see and understand the alternatives. Therefore, it's fine to work together with Leninists (liberals), so long as we theoretically clarify the differences between Leninism and genuine radicalism. The online western fans and boosters of "Actually Existing Socialism" (most of which does not "actually exist" anymore) who are continually trying to rehabilitate the legacy of Lenin, Stalin, et al, do the exact opposite of this. Instead of materially supporting a real movement, but without illusions, modern so-called "Leninists" do nothing to support an unreal movement, but with illusions.
It's been said that theory is the enemy of all ideology. The difference between Marxism and Hobsonism is a difference between theory and ideology. Theory is difficult - it takes work for the proletariat, as subject, to master it. Ideology, on the other hand, is automatically instilled in us. It takes no work to understand it; on the contrary, the spectacle is so powerful that it takes work to overcome the ideology that already surrounds us and penetrates us. Hobsonism is a perfect example: ideology works in and through Hobson, coming to automatic conclusions, so that its logic seems perfectly natural, like common sense. It requires a significant amount of work to uproot Hobsonian ideology, just as it takes work to think critically about other forms of bourgeois liberal ideology. As Marx put it, "The same difference... holds in respect to all phenomena and their hidden substratum.
The former appear directly and spontaneously as current modes of thought;
the latter must first be discovered by science."
So let's do the work of theoretically distinguishing Mummeryism-Hobsonism-Leninism from Marxism. First, let's point out that it's understandable that Lenin abandoned Marx's analyses in favor of Hobsonism. Look at the context from which his theory emerged. The Second International, of which he was a member (but which he later called the "Yellow International") was a complex intellectual environment. The First International had been a multi-tendency organization, with soi-disant Marxists only ever constituting a small minority of the membership. Although the Second International was far more explicitly Marxist than the First International had ever been, especially after the expulsion of Bernstein's revisionists, it still was a rich, heady cauldron in which many different intellectual currents coexisted and swirled, sometimes placidly and sometimes with sometimes with some turbulence. Although nearly everyone was a Marxist of some sort, very few were narrow-minded, pure Marxists, without any other ideas allowed into their heads. Some were into Darwin, some were into phrenology, and some were followers of Ernst Mach or Richard Avenarius, and some went much further than Mach towards a kind of anti-materialism. It's not surprising that, in such an environment, some people were drawn in by the ideas of someone like Hobson, and indeed, many were - not just Lenin.
So what was it that made Hobsonism so appealing to so many in the Second International? What made them turn away from Marxism, pure and simple? Well, first of all, many in the Second International were frustrated with the failure of Marx's predictions of the end of capitalism to arrive. When Marx and Engels wrote the earliest texts of their movement in the late 1840s, they thought they were observing a transformation that was occurring before their very eyes - especially in the wave of revolutions of 1848, of which Engels took part. But these revolutions failed to achieve socialism, or even the far more modest aims of Engels' fellow revolutionaries. Then in the early 1870s, the Paris Commune, which was hailed by Engels as the dictatorship of the proletariat, lasted less than 2 months before it was brutally suppressed by the French government. In Germany, the socialists were crushed by Bismarck through his Anti-Socialist Laws and other actions, and Marx died in 1883. Then in the late 1880s, the Anti-Socialist Laws were rescinded, and a new, much larger communist movement emerged in Europe, a groundswell that eventually resulted in the establishment of the Second International in 1889, and many hoped that this would finally be "the final conflict" (as the old song, The Internationale, goes) - especially since Europe had also been hit by the "Long Depression" - a kind of "double-dip," the first of which lasted from 1873 to 1879, and a second began in the 1880s and lasted until 1896. In addition, there were brief, intense panics in 1884, 1890, and 1893. But Engels died in 1895, and the Second International split into two movements each led by one of his former followers, Bernstein and Kautsky, and by the end of the first decade of the 20th century, it looked to many like this movement was fizzling out as well.
Put yourself in the shoes of a Marxist in this time period. Time and time again, you would have witnessed what looked like the promised final crisis in capitalism, and a potential moment for the rise of socialism, only to have these hopes dashed each and every time. I can't help but think of millenarian apocalyptic movements, like the Millerites, whose leader had prophesied the end of days and the return of Christ in the year 1844 - a year that would go down in history among Millerites and their offshoots (like the 7th Day Adventists) as "The Great Disappointment". It's not surprising that many within the Marxist movement would begin straying and looking for other sources of an explanation - some looking to Mach, some to Avenarius, and yes, some to Hobson.
Rethinking imperialism seemed especially intriguing to the theorists of the Second International, since it not only represented a missing piece in Marx's theory, an area that had not been fully theoretically developed, but also because it was thought that imperialism might potentially help explain why the promised crisis was so long in coming.
Lenin thought that Hilferding's theory of imperialism was influenced by Hobson, and even that Kautsky's was. That may be true. I will take Lenin's word for it, though I have not found any citations to back up that assertion, and at least upon a superficial glance, it would seem that Kautsky was arguing the opposite of what Hobson had asserted - that sufficiently advanced capitalist nations would work together, rather than increasing in their rivalry. As for Hilferding, in my reading, he seems to have developed his ideas from (and at the same time to be quite critical of) the early theorist of cartel economics, Josef Gruntzel, who developed his own theory quite independently of J. A. Hobson and published an important book on the subject some months before Hobson's (and who, incidentally, had been writing about workers' councils as early as 1896). But, if we take Lenin at his word, and these theorists were influenced by Hobson, then it's perfectly understandable that Lenin would be taken in by Hobsonism, as many people in the Second International were, including the leadership and the most respected and influential intellectuals. Even so, Lenin went further than Hilferding or Kautsky in his Hobsonism. Indeed, one of his chief criticisms of Kautsky was that, in his mind, Kautsky was not Hobsonist enough. Lenin writes: "It should be noted that Kautsky's 'conception' of imperialism - which is tantamount to embellishing imperialism - is a retrogression not only compared with Hilferding's Finance Capital (no matter how assiduously Hilferding now defends Kautsky and unity with the social-chauvinists!) but also compared with the social-liberal J.A. Hobson. This English economist, who in no way claims to be a Marxist, defines imperialism, and reveals its contradictions, much more profoundly [than Kautsky or Hilferding do] in a book published in 1902."
(By the way, I should make it clear - just because I am critiquing Lenin's theory of imperialism, do not assume that I therefore agree with Kautsky's - or Hilferding's for that matter. They also made serious errors. But that is a topic for another time.)
So Lenin's analysis of imperialism became fanatically Hobsonist. Even though he knew that Hobson's analysis was liberal, and rejected Hobson's reformism in favor of revolution, Lenin preferred Hobson's analysis to the work of the all the most sophisticated mainstream Marxist theorists of his time. In fact, in some ways one could go so far as to say that Lenin was more Hobsonist than Hobson himself - i.e., that he took Hobson's ideas further than Hobson was willing to go. Bolstered by Hobson's notion that an underconsumptionist crisis was what gave rise to imperialism, Lenin thought that imperialism and its crisis in World War I spelled the end of the road for capitalism. Thus, the title of his famous pamphlet. He thought that he was living through the "highest" stage of capitalism - by which he meant the last stage of capitalism. Lenin thought that he would witness the end of capitalism within his lifetime - indeed, within a few years. As an aside: Spencer Leonard is simply factually false in his understanding of Lenin's theory of imperialism. Leonard opines that Lenin didn't really believe that imperialism was the final stage of capitalism; rather, in Leonard's account, Lenin believed that capitalism becomes imperialist again and again - including, for instance, the period of Bonapartism in France, after what Marx nicknamed the "18th Brumaire" coup. But this flatly contradicts Lenin's direct statements. In fact, the interpretation that Leonard defends is one that Lenin imputes to Kautsky. Lenin writes, in his work "Imperialism and the Split in Socialism" (1916): "Neither Marx nor Engels lived to see the imperialist epoch of world
capitalism, which began not earlier than 1898–1900." Period. End of story. And this is an absolutely absurd statement on Lenin's part, which shows how wildly off his theory of imperialism is, both from Marx's analysis of political economy and from historical fact.
From the perspective of Marx's critique of political economy, Lenin gets his theory of imperialism backwards. Lenin thought that the advent of imperialism signaled the end of capitalism. But in Marx's analysis - and in historical fact - imperialism was not the final, or highest phase of capitalism.
On the contrary, from a Marxian perspective, capitalism was, from its
very inception, imperialist. Indeed, imperialism preceded capitalism by
centuries, and capitalism could not have arisen had it not been built
on the foundation of imperialism. Marx makes this abundantly clear.
There are (at least) two practical, political problems with identifying imperialism as the highest, final stage of capitalism. The first is that, if imperialism were the final stage of capitalism, then this would justify any kind of anti-imperialism, including everything from nationalistic anti-imperialism to Islamic jihadism to liberal movements whose interests happen to coincide temporarily with anti-imperialist goals. This pious belief that the end of imperialism will also mean the end of capitalism thus intrinsically and inescapably tends towards unprincipled theoretical eclecticism. We can see this most obviously in the case of Poland, as well as many other nationalist republics that emerged in the collapse of the Russian Empire. Józef Klemens Piłsudski, who is nowadays is regarded as the founder of the rebirth of the Polish nation, after its 18th century partition. Piłsudski's older brother, Bronisław, had been one of the co-plotters with Lenin's older brother, Alexandr Ulyanov, to assassinate the Czar, for which Alexandr was executed and Bronisław was sent into exile. The two younger brothers, Piłsudski and Lenin, went on to become leaders of their respective countries. In the case of Piłsudski, his commitment to socialism was purely opportunistic; upon achieving independence and consolidating power, he gave a famous speech in 1918 in which he declared, "Comrades, I took the red tram of socialism to the stop called Independence, and that's where I got off." (He went on to cozy up to the capitalist barons of industry and secured their support, created a cult of personality around himself, declared a party of moral "purification" (sanation), had his political rivals imprisoned and killed, and went to war against the U.S.S.R..) Piłsudski was merely more straightforward and honest about his treachery than most - in general, most of the wave of "socialist" movements that spread throughout the world starting around 1917 were socialist in name only, as a way of drumming up support by waving red flags; in reality, they were not socialist, but nationalist. But those who follow Lenin's flawed, liberal interpretation of imperialism are doomed to be duped by these frauds again and again, supporting nationalist leaders in their supposed struggle against imperialism.
To his credit, Lenin was explicit about his departure from Marxism. It was precisely on the question of Polish independence that Lenin split from Marxism. On the basis of Lenin's
Hobsonist, essentially liberal analysis of imperialism, he developed his
theory of nationalism, or, as he put it, "the right of nations to
self-determination," which he elaborated in his short work of the same name. A more or less coherently Marxian analysis of the situation had been given by Rosa Luxemburg, and Lenin responded to it very explicitly in chapter 7 of that work, "The Resolution of the London International Congress, 1896," where we find the following sentence, in black and white:
"But while Marx’s standpoint was quite correct for the forties, fifties and sixties or for the third quarter of the nineteenth century, it has ceased to be correct by the twentieth century."
-Lenin
Of course Lenin, writing He
fully realized that his opponents within the Second International had
the weight of Marxist theory definitively on their side, but he tried to
wheedle and reinterpret his own Hobsonist theories into the Marxist
literature, trying to ram a square peg into a round hole, by claiming that Luxemburg and other leaders of the Polish Socialist Party's attempt "to 'establish' for all time the point of view Marx had
held in a different epoch was an attempt to use the
letter of Marxism against the spirit of Marxism." This Christian theological language, concerning "letter" vs. "spirit" allowed Lenin to rearrange Marx's theory to justify his own Hobsonian liberal nationalism.
But none of this would be a particularly ringing indictment of Lenin's theory of imperialism if it weren't for the second practical, political problem with identifying imperialism as the highest, final stage of capitalism - a problem much greater than the first, and a problem so glaringly obvious that I feel a bit ridiculous pointing it out, but apparently I must. The problem is, of course, that it's just not true. As it turned out, imperialism, as Lenin defined it, was not the final stage of capitalism.
Lenin's language is embarrassing and hilarious at this point, in retrospect "moribund"
Let's grant that World War I was a result of the contradictions in imperialism. Even so, it does not follow that the collapse of imperialism brought about by the violent catastrophe of the great war meant the end of capitalism - as is obvious, now, since capitalism did not end. Even imperialism did not end. It merely, once again, changed its form. The crisis of 1914-1948 turned out not to be the end of imperialism, as Lenin thought it would be, but merely the transition from one type of imperialism to another type of imperialism. Capitalism remains a world system - indeed, even more firmly entrenched than it was in Lenin's time. The imperialist system has, if anything, become more efficient and powerful. Imperialism as Lenin understood it came to an end, but this only demonstrated the limits of his understanding. This is not to say that Lenin was evil or stupid - simply that he turned out to be wrong. Lenin's position is understandable, if a little out there and speculative - after all, he could not see the future. But anyone who tries to maintain Lenin's theories now, after their predictions have been definitively factually eliminated, has lost touch with material reality.
Now it becomes necessary to understand how Lenin's obviously false predictions about imperialism followed from his definition of imperialism being too narrow, too shallow, and too liberal. Again, Lenin's understanding of imperialism is too inconsistent to be a rigorous definition.
monopoly
But Lenin went further than this
"Monopoly is a good thing, reasons M. Proudhon,
since it is an economic category, an emanation 'from the impersonal
reason of humanity."
In the Communist Manifesto,
Marx is even clearer in his opposition to monopoly, arguing for
developing a mode of production in which "labour can no longer be
converted into capital,
money, or rent - into a social power capable of being monopolised."
The
idea that Marx wrote his entire corpus, his thousands of pages of
analysis, in the service of defending a program of monopoly capitalism, is so absurd that it is not worth discussing.
It is Lenin, not Luxemburg, who attempts "to use the
letter of Marxism against the spirit of Marxism."
Hopefully
it is obvious at this point how far we are from Marx's theory.
Hobsonism was already a non-Marxist theory; Hilferding made a decisive
break from the economic analysis of Marx; and Lenin took Hobsonism
further than Hilferding, Kautsky, or Hobson himself, developing his
program of monopoly capitalism. But Lenin did not stop there
Defeatism
The German imperialists saw in Lenin someone with whom they thought they could make a deal. This proved to be correct.
Lenin
used his liberal, Hobsonist interpretation of imperialism to advertise
his services to the German imperialists - his Revolutionary Defeatism
(tm) became his resume of theory he used to get them to hire him.
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
Four months after Lenin came to power
Perhaps
it would be an exaggeration to say that the German imperialists
installed Lenin as the leader of the USSR. But it is fair to say that
without German imperialist assistance, it would have been impossible for
Lenin to achieve the position he attained. This only goes to show how
preposterous and untenable Lenin's position was, for the very German
imperialists that he accused Kautsky of selling out to and collaborating
with were the very same German imperialists with whom he had made a
deal, and to whom he owed his position of power. His very bluster was
thin mask through which one could easily make out his unmistakable
political incoherence. Whether or not it was his intention, Lenin made
himself and his party an accessory to a western imperialist project.
For all time, through his example, Lenin provided a worthy lesson to all
future Marxists: if you want to take state power, make yourself useful
to western imperialism.
Lenin's liberal, Hobsonian theory of imperialism led him to support every nationalist tendency against imperialism. But precisely because of the lack of sophistication or accuracy of this theory, it led to some very stupid strategies - and the imperialists were able to take advantage of Lenin's simplistic analysis and use this to manipulate him into becoming a tool of imperialism. This is the dialectical tragedy of Lenin: the more Lenin struggled against imperialism, the more he became a tool of imperialism.
The ironies pile on ironies. Lenin was fond of using epithets against his enemies: "opportunist" "renegade" "social-chauvinist" "social-imperialist" and of course "liberal".
Supporting every "anti-imperialist" nation is a strategy that makes sense if imperialism is the final stage of capitalism, and both are about to end. Indeed, under such circumstances it makes sense to take this further, all the way to a position of revolutionary defeatism. But in other circumstances, the strategy of defeatism does not make much sense. In fact, using this strategy mistakenly because one has failed to comprehend the existing material conditions may open a movement up to being manipulated by the very western imperialism that one is trying to fight. It is not so much a strategy as the lack of any coherent strategy - a posture of altruism and self-sacrifice that accomplishes little more than political grandstanding and seeking moral high ground while failing to accomplish anything for the self-abolition of the proletarian class. In short, in the context of an incorrect analysis of imperialism and global capitalism, defeatism is a liberal strategy, even more childish and irresponsible than simple pacifism.
And that's exactly what happened to Lenin. Lenin miscalculated in the immediate sense that he thought that there would be a wave of revolutions around the world that would bring the capitalist system to an end - most importantly in Germany, which was at war with Russia as he wrote his theory of imperialism.
understanding of geopolitics remained superficial- he failed to comprehend the deeper economic forces at work that were shaping these geopolitical realities.
From the comfort of England, and then from the safety of neutral Switzerland, and then from the backing and support of the Germans that transported him to Finland, Lenin was able to observe the events leading to and during World War I merely as conceptual ideals. He had the luxury and the privilege to moralize about what people in Russia or Poland ought to be doing, and this led him to his intransigent "revolutionary defeatist" stance. Had he been an activist on the ground in Russia at the time, he might have had a more realistic conception of what he was up against. Who knows?
Lenin turned out to have been wrong in his predictions about the world's geopolitical trajectory. This doesn't make Lenin evil or stupid or crazy. If we want to understand the capitalist world system scientifically, we will have to accept the difficult truth that, in science, most theories turn out to be wrong, or at least incomplete. There are simply millions or billions of more ways to be wrong than there are to be right, and so, chances are, every theory has a much better chance of being at least somewhat off the mark than it does of being absolutely completely exactly correct.
But even though Lenin's errors do not make him stupid or crazy, it would make us foolish to continue his strategies as if we did not know, from our vantage in the 21st century, that his conception of imperialism turned out to be incorrect.
* * *
In discussing Hobsonism, from which Leninism is derived, I would be remiss if I avoided the elephant in the room - what is perhaps the most famous aspect of Hobson's thought: his racism and anti-Semitism.
I do not mean to imply here that, just because Lenin's theory is rooted in Hobson's, and Hobson was an anti-Semitic racist, that Lenin, by some supposed transitive property, was racist and anti-Semitic as well. That would be ridiculous. However, Hobson's anti-Semitism amounted to a kind of conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theory is a typically liberal way of analyzing political economy, one that is based on fundamentally liberal assumptions about economics and power. These assumptions are moralistic, individualistic, and above all voluntaristic. The liberal worldview is something like what William S. Burroughs calls "the magical universe" - one in which "nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen." If a terrible misfortune occurs, the conspiracy theorist will immediately begin searching around for the people - individual evil malefactors - who willed this calamity to happen, so that they will have someone to blame.
The Leninist analysis of imperialism is not exactly a conspiracy theory, but it shares certain characteristics with conspiracy theory. In essence, it makes the same fundamental mistake that conspiracy theorists make: it assumes that if bad things happen (like World War I), it is because bad people (imperialists) were motivated by bad motivations (seeking super-profits); thus these problems can be simply eliminated if we swap these rulers out for other, better rulers, keeping the entire structure of the society they rule more or less intact.
Letter to J B Schweizer Feb 1, 1865
"But to regard interest-bearing capital as the main form of capital and to try to make a particular form of the credit system comprising the alleged abolition of interest, the basis for a transformation of society is an out-and-out petty-bourgeois fantasy."
However, there is one thing that separates Hobsonism-Leninism from run of the mill conspiracy theories, one little twist that changes everything. Whereas conspiracy theorists look for the evil "cartel" of "bankers" the group of bad guys that run the world, and finding it, denounce the bad guys and end there, Hobsonism-Leninism adds a punchline to this story: instead of demanding that the monopoly should be dismantled, they conclude: we should be the monopolists! Now that monopoly capitalism has taken over, all that remains is for the soviets, and the Bolshevik party, to take over the monopolies. Lenin is therefore unapologetically pro-monopoly.
It must be remembered that, if Lenin is to be taken at his word, and I see no reason not to, he believed - and hoped, fervently - that Germany would soon have its own communist revolution, after which the "backward" Russians and other Eastern Europeans would be led by the "more developed" German proletariat, in much the same way that the German (and, in general, western) bourgeoisie dominated the Eastern Europeans in the 19th century. Thus, whereas in a more straightforward interpretation, this transformation would mean that one form of western imperialism would thereby merely be exchanged for another form of western imperialism, the purpose of Lenin's special pleading and obscurantist rhetoric was to make the torturous argument that the new imperialism wouldn't be imperialism anymore. Thus Lenin must be understood as an apologist for and defender of real imperialism, and it is precisely in this sense that he was a liberal. He was representing the interests of German imperialism. Whether this was due to duplicity, misunderstanding, or idealistic delusion doesn't ultimately matter.
Lenin's interpretation of imperialism was thus wrong in a threefold manner: he was wrong according to the prevailing common sense of his own time; he was wrong according to Marx's theory; and in he turned out to be wrong in fact.
* * *
After 46 years of waiting in vain for Lenin's prophecies to be fulfilled, it fell to Michael Kidron of the International Socialists to admit it, as he did in his famous essay, "Imperialism: The Highest Stage But One," in which he was forced to acknowledge that capitalism had not, in fact, mysteriously enough, disappeared.
Liberal reformists often claim that they are on the same side as the radical left, that they share the same goals, but that they prefer a gradualist approach, making piecemeal changes rather than violently overthrowing existing society. But workers are left waiting endlessly for the promised changes. How do Leninists see liberal reformism? They ruthlessly criticize liberal reformism, because, in their minds, the liberal reformist politicians promise to improve the conditions of the working class in order to get elected, but never deliver on these promises. But after the revolution, once Leninists are in power, they face a similar impasse. They keep promising that society is slowly moving in the direction of true communism (the "higher phase of communist society" as Marx put it), but gradually more and more of the promises are quietly forgotten, from the restructuring of the bourgeois family and sexual politics to questions of nation, culture, and religion, to genuine democracy in the workplace. Dictatorship is merely a transitional period, they promise, yet this transitional phase, this "semi-state" as Lenin called it extends endlessly. Eventually even the formal promise of the coming emancipation and self-determination of the working class is discarded. Bolshevism and reformism become indistinguishable. Bolshevism is reformism with guns. (Of course, many western "democracies" are also ruled by regimes that amount to reformism with guns. And others have guns without any reforms at all.)
Lenin had a sharp, active intellectual mind, capable
of understanding much, but he was never quite able to countenance the
colossal blunder he had committed. By the time he could have recognized
his error, it was too late - by that time, he had shed so much blood
and sacrificed so many lives in the pursuit of this mistaken idea, that
if he had been capable of acknowledging his misstep, perhaps it would
have precipitated a complete mental collapse.
In contrasting Leninism from Marxism, my purpose here is not to moralistically decry Leninism. I am not saying that pure Marxism is "good" and that Leninism is "bad"; I am only pointing out that they are different. I certainly do not claim that Lenin "corrupted" Marxism, or that Leninism is "infected" with Hobsonism, or anything like that. It is true that Lenin was a liberal revisionist of Marxism - not in the manner of Bernstein, but in his own, distinctive way, derived from Hobson and Hilferding, similar to Bukharin. But again, I am not saying that this is bad. In fact, my purpose is the exact opposite of this. I am saying that Lenin was creative, and original, pushing Hobson's ideas even further than Hobson himself was willing to go. Orthodoxy is as boring as it is useless. I want to show that Leninism is distinct from Marxism not in order to return to a more dogmatic, "pure," academic form of Marxism, but to open the field, so that those who are attentive to history can see beyond both Marx and Lenin. Is it possible to inspire even further innovation, straying more from the path of orthodoxy? Can people now, in the 21st century, come up with new analyses of political economy, and new practical movements, that are as bold, as creative and original as Marx's and Lenin's - or even moreso? Let's start something new.
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