From: michael a. lebowitz (mlebowit@SFU.CA)
Date: Sun Dec 14 2003 - 21:50:54 EST
Apropos, here's the abstract for the paper that Paresh wrote for this
year's Marx conference in Havana. You'll note his closing line re the
Soviet experience--- "Marx, indeed, had the last laugh."
Two Approaches to Socialist
Revolution :Marx vs.Lenin-Trotsky
Russia
1917
Abstract
Following Marx,a society of free and associated producers---socialism---is
a product of history,not of nature or arbitrary will.Individuals cannot
bring their own social relations under their proper control before having
created them.Indeed,new,hier relations of production do not appear before
its matériel conditions of existence have already been hatched within the
womb of the old society itself.And if in the existing society we do not
find in a latent form the matériel conditions of production and
corresponding relations of circulation for a classless soceity,all attempts
at exploding the present society would be don Quixotism.These conditions
are basically,first,the existence of the proletariat---« the greatest
productive power »----occupying at least a significant position in
society,and,secondly,the universal development of productive forces and
socialization of labour and production.Given these conditions,socialist
revolution begins when capital has reached a situation where the productive
powers it has generated---including its « greatest productive power »---can
no longer advance on the basis of the existing relations of
production.Socialist revolution itself is seen as an immense emancipatory
project---based on workers’ self-emacipation leading to the emancipation of
the whole humanity---whose very first step is the « conquest of democracy »,
the rule of the immense majority in the inter est of the immense majority.
Against this profound materialist perspective Lenin(and Trotsky)
avanced the thesis that socialist revolution could(would) break out where
the chain of world capitalismsubject to the law of unevenand combined
developmenthas its weakestlink,that is,its productive powers are least
developed .This ‘weakest link’ thesis became a canon of the dominant Left
as well as of those sympathetic to the Bolshevik regime. However,they were
dismissing Marx too rapidly.Lenin soon real ized that a largely
pre-capitalist country with a low level of productive forces and a backward
working class required the development of capitalismof course under a
‘proletarian’ statein order to reach socialism later.This is seen in
Lenin’s own pronouncements of the post-1917 period as well as the
corresponding measures undertaken by the new regime.It need not be stressed
that the development of capitalism is not the task of a SOCIALIST
REVOLUTION.
Similarly,far from inaugurating a socialist revolution as a
self-emancipatory act of the toilers themselves,’conquering democracy’ as a
‘first step’,October 1917 saw the seizure and monopolisation of power by a
tiny minority in the name of the toilers independently of and,in
fact,behind the back of their already established organs of self
administrstion,putting a définite brake on the immense pluralist and
democratic process started by the spontaneous revolutionary upheaval of the
entire mass of the Russian toilers,,rapidly destroying in the process
thetoilers own organsof self-rule.In the event,never able to
suppresscommodity and wage relations,the regime,particularly after the
civil war,took conscious measaures to widen them rapidly and in the process
consummateda bourgeois non-democratic revolution.Marx,indeed,had the last
laugh.
Paresh
Chattopadhyay
University
of Quebec at Montreal
---------------------
Michael A. Lebowitz
Professor Emeritus
Economics Department
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6
Office Fax: (604) 291-5944
Home: Phone (604) 689-9510
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