PRAGOTI

Pragoti team pays tributes to Lenin on his birthday.

Pragoti is publishing "Contours of Leninism" written by Nandan Maniratnam,in parts. Nandan carries out an incisive analysis of all facets of Leninism and concludes that"In an age of bourgeois hegemony, Leninism, through the proletarian homogeneity and tempered solidity of organization, presents the sole path for the proletariat to wage a class struggle in most decisive and revolutionary manner possible"

I: Theory

“The proletariat can, and inevitably will, become an invincible force only through the ideological unification on the principles of Marxism being reinforced by the material unity of organization, which welds millions of toilers into an army of the working class” -V.I. Lenin

“A Utopia becomes a crime as soon as it becomes a reality” -Karl Marx

Theory and Practice

Thesis I: Leninism is the dialectical unity of theory and practice

The spatial and functional set of relations between theory and practice, the course of history indicates, has seldom been marked by exact correspondence. From the PT (Workers’ Party) in Brazil to the ‘Green’ movement in Germany, it is nearly impossible to ignore the experience of the subordination of ideology by practice. Ideological ‘orthodoxy’s’ subordination to the whims of opportunism and political advantage owes much of its causation to its own ideological nature. Ideology, as an entity, is bound up by the wraps of the particularity of relations that shapes its configuration. It is because of the existence of wrought-iron canons instead of functionalities within the ambit of ideology that lacunae often arise between the prisons of dogma and the vicissitudes of practice.

Idealist socialism too, has not escaped this seeming damnation of ideological politics. Blanqui, the arch-socialist, in the wake of the turmoil of France in 1871, forgot his life-long theoretical case for socialism and fell back on Versailles counter-revolution’s slogan of “The Country is in Danger”. The nationalist fervour and social chavininsm (as Lenin puts it) of the ‘Marxist’ clique of Vandervelde, Austerlitz, Kautsky, Scheidemann et al. had disastrous effects on the prospect of European revolution in the early part of the twentieth century. In the course of the First Imperialist War, the ideology of verbal Marxism that these ‘renegades’ practiced caused much harm to the proletariat’s class struggle.

Orthodox Marxism, as interpreted by Lenin, solves this seemingly irreversible “iron law” [to borrow from von Goethe] of the declining rate of Ideological conformity of practice with time through a fundamental rejection of ideology itself. It shatters the structural confines of ideology by recognizing the epistemological primacy of actuality and locating itself not within a particular moment, but in the course of historical development. Instead of ideally promulgating the class struggle, Marxism recognizes its origin within the course of the class struggle. Instead of arbitrarily promulgating eternal principles from the parochiality of its origins, Marxism acknowledges the dynamic nature of historical development and calibrates its theory to best suit the modalities of class struggle in each particularity. Such is Engels’ case in attesting that “The communists took as their point of departure all past history, especially the actual contemporary results in civilised countries, not this or that philosophy” [my italics]

Herein lies the unique quality of Marxism as a scientific theory in the midst of proto-theological and sophistic ideologies. Marxism-Leninism does not chart its conceptual outset from the fantastic constructs of the creative faculty of the human mind, as did Owen, Blanqui, Proudhon and Saint-Simon, but from the material actuality of revolution. “Historical Materialism” – Marx’s science of historical development – is termed by “is the theory of proletarian revolution”, as scientific socialism arises from and takes as its gnosseological premise the concrete course of history.

It was the lived experience of the revolutions of the 19th century and the un-abstracted actuality of previous social revolutions that formed the kernel of Marxist thought. These Periods of decisive accentuation of the class struggle – revolutions – themselves constituted not only the premise and basis, but also contained within themselves the object of all of Marxism itself.

Marxism is the method of waging the proletariat’s struggle, rooted in actuality, against its class enemies, whilst both sustaining and qualitatively enhancing this struggle by utilizing the general theory of the workers’ revolution. It renders impotent the ‘iron law’ of ideological depreciation of practice simply by standing utopianism and ideology on its head; no longer is one concerned with the ideological consistency of the class struggle, but the qualitative and quantitative efficacy and efficiency of the same. An ideology, defined being “a closed system that produces nothing new, never ceasing to repeat itself because it has only one goal: to legitimate certain prejudices, results or objectives established in advance” is discarded with in totality. And in its place, one is left with in this process is “an open ended discipline” with “infinite” scope – a complex of practice and scientific theory.

But then, does the fact that Marxist theory is of a secondary, derived nature in any way place its importance behind practice? The answer is resoundingly in the negative. And such an answer is rendered by Leninism. Whilst recognizing the need to change the world and not halt in the satge of interpretation, Leninism holds that it is impossible to change the world without understanding it. Whilst class struggle is a common thread throughout the span of class society, it is the case of history that practice has often not carried out to its dialectical completion. Opportunism, economism, and revisionism, all bog down the class struggle attaining any qualitative leap or effecting any primal change. Such mitigations of the potency of the class struggle prevent it from reaching its revolutionary ends.

These impediments to the revolutionary intensity of the class struggle arise from the lack of generality and perceptive totality of practice. Further continuing in the path of vicarious reasoning, it is the lack of a correspondence between practice, and theory – defined as the conception of totality and the location of practice in the scheme of totality - that results in the de-revolution-isation of political practice.

What follows synthetically is that it is impossible to wage a class struggle of a coherent and revolutionary character without placing practice in complete dialectical unity with the theoretical prehension of totality – revolutionary theory. This is a fundamental tenant of Leninism - where it must be noted that Leninism is not only “Marxism in the era of imperialism and proletarian revolution”, but also Marxism in era of Bernstein and multifarious forms of revisionism. When Lenin declared that “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement” in that now-famous manner in What is to be Done, he formulated one of the key links of what was then called Bolshevism, and what we now call Leninism. The constitution of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in stating that “In all its activities the Party is guided by the philosophy and principles of Marxism-Leninism”, echoes the same link. Here, it is meant that the “key link” of the People’s Democratic and Socialist Revolutions in the Indian context shall be this complete coherence and interactivity between theoretical and material modes of the class struggle.

The modality of the Indian case, however, is not entirely specific in this case, as it is representative of the vast majority of national scenarios within which Communist Parties operate. In a situation wherein communists and class-conscious workers do not constitute the decisive majority – which is the case with the overwhelming number of countries at this point in time – the revolutionary character of the workers’ movement can be maintained only through the complete Leninist unity of the theoretical, and the political and economic forms of the proletarian class struggle.

Louis Althusser, the French Marxist-Leninist philosopher, articulates the Leninist position on theory and practice while stating that “without Marxist theory, the workers’ movement would have emerged and developed, but it would have not become revolutionary in the objective sense of the term – that is, capable not merely of wishing or hoping for, but of making socialist revolution”. Further emphasizing the symbiotic necessity of the unity of the theoretical and practical aspects of the proletariat’s class struggle, he says
“Without this union, Marxist theory would have remained a dead letter; without this union, the workers’ movement would have not become revolutionary”.

Even if Leninism had halted its explanation of the necessity of this unity at the level of theoretical elucidation, as Althusser had done, it would have presented the workers’ movement with a method of enormous significance and utility. But Marxism-Leninism is the doctrine of the actual, and not the counterfactual. Leninist practice itself is characterised by this dialectical unity of theory and practice, wherein without one, the other becomes futile. In the language of imagery, “Theory becomes purposeless if it is not connected with revolutionary practice”, and practice itself “gropes in the dark if its path is not illuminated by revolutionary theory”.

The true significance of this sumbiotic and mutually inclusive unity lies in that every successful proletarian revolution that the world has seen till date has been made in part within the Leninist crucible of theory and practice. Leninism, and its method of the marriage of theory and practice acquire absolute paramountacy in our movement, for it showed, in flesh, blood and iron of October, that a proletarian revolution, in the face of massive reaction, can only be accomplished through a dialectical unity of scientific theory and revolutionary practice.

In essence, Leninism – the Marxism of Proletarian Revolutions – achieves success in the revolutionary class struggle of the proletariat through the unity of theory and practice.

Continued

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V