PRAGOTI

Leninism handles the class struggle in an integral manner by eliminating the inherent moral determinacy of an issue. It thereby enables an assessment of any issue based on its scheme interactive position in the scheme of its internal and external relations and its bearing on the class struggle.

IV: Materialism

“Marx’s Philosophy is a consummate philosophical materialism which has provided mankind, and especially the working class, with powerful instruments of knowledge” - V.I. Lenin

“Class Struggle is continuing and it is our task to subordinate all interests to that class struggle” - V.I. Lenin

Materialism: Practice and Utility

Thesis V: Leninism is the transformation of Materialism into a weapon in the proletariat’s political class struggle

Thesis VI: Leninism is the integral materialist handling of the class struggle

Engels, in what has now become an iconic definition of sorts, delineated class struggle into economic, political and theoretical categories. Of these, Stalin said that politics and ideology should be in command at all times. In terms of the philosophical position of Marxism, Lenin, echoing Marx and Engels, made it unequivocally clear that “the philosophy of Marxism is materialism”. The rigorous and intense campaign waged by Lenin against positivism, empirio-monism, neo-Kantianism and other forms of overt and covert idealism preached by Mach, Avenarius et al. and parroted by ‘Marxists’ like Bogdanov is well documented. E.M.S. Namboodiripad even compared Lenin’s battle as a partisan for materialism against idealism with the Marx and Engels’ struggle for materialist dialectics against mechanistic materialism. Given the vast amount of incisive literature on this subject that is available [including Materialism & Empirio-Criticism itself], we shall not deal with the theoretical facets of Lenin’s materialism, with one exception. Lenin having died as soon as he did, could not have read the Economic & Political Manuscripts of 1844 and a few other unpublished works of the Hegelian and Feuerbachian Marx of old. [And this Marx of old, of whom today’s Marxists speak so dearly, was no Marxist; this was the Marx who attested that “communism, to be specific, is a dogmatic abstraction” and talked of speculative fantasies such as “inverted world consciousness” so on and so forth] Even then, after having studied the available entirety of Marx and Engels, Lenin correctly delineated the formative and mature works of Marx and Engels, and adjudged that Marxism, as a practical and theoretical doctrine, attained its majority consequent to The Poverty of Philosophy and The Communist Manifesto. In this, he identified an ‘epistemological break’ in all but name much before Louis Althusser could ahvene even heard of Marx. In the perspective of the legacy of the theoretical revisionism of Praxis, Raya Dunayevskaya, EP Thompson, Fromm, et al. upon ‘Marxism’, Leninism stands as a bulwark of a materialist, mature, homogeneous and scientific interpretation of socialism.

However, the Leninist handling of the theoretical and philosophical aspects of the class struggle reaches far beyond being a mere instrumentality of delineation – so far as to herald a quantum leap in the development of Marxism. Leninism made the dialectical vault of transforming materialism from a philosophical asset to a concrete weapon in the political class struggle of the proletariat.

Materialism as a Weapon: Marx and Engels, through their advocacy of materialism, gave the revolutionary class for the first time the science of History and a dialectical means with which to interpret it. History, through materialist dialectics, is transformed into a rallying point for class consciousness and a theoretical weapon in the working class’ arsenal. Leninism, however, staged a qualitative revolution in the utilization of materialism. In his journals, Lenin noted:

The Commune’s Deeds.

Its minuses: …

- infatuation with nationalistic and revolutionary talk

further, he recorded -

Marx’s Warning [Contra Blanqui, who founded Partie en danger in 1870]: … “They must not allow themselves to be swayed by the national memories of 1792”

The futility of national sentiment - one of amongst the most potent in the long list of idealisms - was thus noted by Lenin. Nationalism - a case in point in the Leninist attitude towards various idealisms - was to be opposed politically, not because of any theoretical flaw – of which it has no dearth – but because it undermined, and continues to undermine the integrity of the proletariat’s class struggle. Whil many European revolutions [and in particular the German revolution of 1919] were killed in childbirth due to the existence of national-chauvinist (idealist-opportunist) impediments inside social-democracy, the contrast of the situation in Russia owed much to the political materialism of the Bolshevik Party. In such Leninist hands, Marxist materialism took the form of a political weapon that served to liberate the proletariat from any ideological-political idealist commitments that could/can subvert the class struggle and/or pave the path for class collaborationist failure.

Such is the case with the Leninist attitude towards humanist idealism too. For our evidence, let us again turn to that nursery of Leninism, the Paris Commune. Listing the errors of the Paris proletariat in a speech in Geneva, Lenin pointed out that one of its mistakes “was excessive magnanimity on the part of the proletariat: instead of destroying its enemies, it sought to exert moral influence on them”. Clearly, humanism, when it comes in the way of the diacectical course of the class struggle, became a Achilles heel to the proletariat and a weapon in the hands of its class-enemies.

Leninism’s materialist opposition to the right-revisionist and collaborationist tendencies of idealist-humanism is all too clear here for all except those who are determined to disbelieve glaring fact. Humanism, as an idealism that transcends class boundaries in preaching the theological inviolability of all men, is not only theoretically antithetical to philosophical materialism, but also an onerous cannonball chained to the workers’ limbs that consistently holds the proletariat back in its revolutionary class struggle. In the Leninist scheme of things, an ideology that spreads idealism and adds to the bourgeoisie’s arsenal is to be desisted and combated. Marxism-Leninism, thus, stands in complete and total opposition to humanism - which is nothing but an ideological weapon in the hands of the ruling class of spreading the notion of universal fraternity amongst the toilers, while knowing fully of the impossibility of such a condition under capitalist hegemony.

To those ‘Humanist Marxists’ who still do not believe what they know to be true, the following counter-revolutionary telegram sent by Lenin serves as an extreme test requiring copious skill of voluntary blindness to circumvent:

Comrades! The insurrection of five kulak districts should be pitilessly suppressed. The interests of the whole revolution require this because 'the last decisive battle' with the kulaks is now under way everywhere. An example must be demonstrated.
1. Hang (and make sure that the hanging takes place in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers.
2. Publish their names.
3. Seize all their grain from them.
4. Designate hostages in accordance with yesterday's telegram.
Do it in such a fashion that for hundreds of kilometres around the people might see, tremble, know, shout: they are strangling and will strangle to death the bloodsucking kulaks.

Telegraph receipt and implementation.
Yours, Lenin.
P.S. Find some truly hard people

Had Lenin not resorted to such legitimately intense forms of class struggle against the bloodsucking landlords in the context of the Russian Civil war and - as the Paris proletariat had done in 1871 - underestimated “the significance of direct military operations in civil war” because of “excessive magnanimity”, the “blood soaked week of May” in 19th Century Paris could have well been repeated in 20th century Petrograd. The above measure against the counter-revolutionary reaction of the rural gentry and (Stolypin’s ‘children’), the Kulaks, whilst being a true example of the imperatives and practice of the class war, must not in any sense be taken in absolute. The indiscriminate and non-contextual worship of violence in the style of the anarchists, as we see being practiced by the ‘Marxist’ Naxalites, is another version – albeit in a left-sectarian form – of idealism, which is as much an impediment to the total autonomy of the proletariat in its class struggle as any other type of idealist practice, including humanism. By maneuvering clear of both such philosophical and ideological mousetraps, the Leninist practice of political materialism gives the proletariat a totally autonomous hand in the pursuit of its class interest in its struggle against the bourgeoisie

Thus, by granting the proletariat philosophically unencumbered autonomy in the class war, The Leninist practice of political materialism acquires the status of a weapon in the class struggle

The Integral Approach to Class Struggle: It was Engels who, in his polemic against the moral absolutism of Eugen Duhring, first elucidated in exclusive terms the Marxist attitude towards ethics. He made it clear that all morality was of a relative epochal character and rejected in toto the biblical fiction of the universality of good and evil. Answering the question of the truth of the many existing and prospective moral schemata, including that of the proletariat, Engels replies, “Not one of them [is true], in the sense of absolute finality”. This Marx-Engels conjuncture of the epochal relativity of morality was further developed by Lenin into the relativity of good and evil with the interests of the class struggle.

Within the ambit of Leninism, the litmus test of morality and immorality is the class struggle itself. Morality itself is transformed from a metaphysical to a functional category, where it too is determined and constantly transformed by the dialectical particularity of the class struggle within the loci of time and context. To this effect, Lenin attest that “Our morality stems from the class struggle”, further saying “that our morality is subordinated to the interests of the proletariat’s class struggle”;, he reiterates again “[that] To us, morality is subordinated to the interests of the proletariat’s class struggle”; finally, he defines Communist morality as “that which serves this struggle and unites the working people against all exploitation”

There is little to be added to V.I. Lenin’s clarity in the analytic sense of things. And, unlike what Kautsky, Scheidemann, Vandervelde and the other ‘renegades’ might have had to say, the Leninist theory of evaluation of morality based on the interest of the revolutionary class war is just the organic continuation of the well established Marx-Engels thesis of the primary nature of the material, and the secondary, derivate character of the ideal.

In the context of the actuality of the class struggle, the essence of the Leninist attitude towards morality is the perfect congruence of right actions and wrong actions with correct actions and incorrect actions. Leninism serves to eliminate the imaginary, ideal notion of the ethical intrinsic particularity of any action. That an initiative is not determinate in and for itself [to borrow from Hegel] allows the proletariat to take a dialectical view of things. No longer does it have to worry about the imaginary and isolated spiritual inherence of any action, for, with the Lenin’s doctrine of the correspondence of the right and the expedient, the proletariat frees itself from the shackles of metaphysical chains.

The rejection of the existence of an ethical pre-determination also allows the proletariat to measure actions in a truly dialectical way, by looking solely at the particularity of the given action in the actual set of internal and external relations. Judgments of Leninist materialism, therefore, are made and assessed not on the basis of the fantastic notions of immanence, but instead on how such actions will impact the sum total of relations that affect that monistic pursuit of Marxism: the class struggle.

Therefore, whilst the compromise with imperialism in Brest-Litovsk, the compromise with capitalism in the New Economic Policy and the compromise with Fascism might seem utterly detestable to those metaphysicians under the thrall of bourgeois moral absolutism, all of the above are perfectly moral actions to the Marxist-Leninists. In the perspective of the dialectical integral, the aforementioned are perfectly moral, since they have all advanced, in totality, the class interests of the proletariat. Brest-Litovsk, and the NEP, are both correct and moral in that they helped save the proletariat’s Dictatorship from liquidation. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is also commensurately valid and right as it laid the foundations for the heroic resilience of the Socialist Dictatorship of the proletariat and played a pivotal role in the liberation of the German, Czechoslovak, Hungarian et al. toilers from the oppressive hold of the Nazi-Fascist reaction. This is the track record of the correct application of Leninist political materialism in the field of ethics.

In eliminating all the metaphysical, supra-natural theories of moral inherence, the proletariat is empowered the capability of arriving at a decision based not upon the action itself, but how the action will affect the dialectical relations of the integral scheme. The above is just an example of the scope and utility of the Marxist theory of ethics as developed by Lenin to the proletariat. Proceeding specialibus generalia quaerimus, we must conclude:

Leninism handles the class struggle in an integral manner by eliminating the inherent moral determinacy of an issue. It thereby enables an assessment of any issue based on its scheme interactive position in the scheme of its internal and external relations and its bearing on the class struggle.

Continued

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part V