Philosophy and Religion, Part 4a
Three Sources and
Component Parts
Lenin’s “The 3
Sources and 3 Component Parts of Marxism” (attached; download linked
below) is a favourite because it is very concise - only four pages long - and
very illuminating.
But it also contains
mistakes, and it encourages mistakes.
For example, Lenin writes: “… there is nothing resembling
"sectarianism" in Marxism, in the sense of its being a hidebound,
petrified doctrine, a doctrine which arose away from the highroad of
development of world civilisation.” Which is correct.
But Lenin immediately
follows with: “The Marxian doctrine is
omnipotent because it is true. It is complete and harmonious, and provides
men with an integral world conception” - in other words, he says, it is
fixed, hidebound and petrified.
This pair of sentences
constitutes a self-contradiction by Lenin. What happened to the “highroad of
development of world civilisation” in between the two statements? Did it come
to a dead end (i.e. was it “completed”)?
“The philosophy of Marxism is materialism,” writes Lenin, and not “old and rotten idealism.” This is philosophy reduced to
catechism, or of pat answers to “Frequently Asked Questions”. It is not much
use, not even as propaganda. It is so much simplified as to be dangerous.
Actually, Marx himself
opposed the concept of a “doctrine” that would be “omnipotent because true”,
or “complete”. Marx’s work was not complete in his lifetime, and if he had
been blessed with two lifetimes, he would surely have left, not less, but
more like double the amount of revolutionary work-in-progress. The more work
Marx did, the larger was the frontier that he opened up.
Lenin writes: “Where the bourgeois economists saw a
relation of things (the exchange of one commodity for another), Marx revealed
a relation of men.” This is true. Marx was concerned with the men, more
than with the things. This is why it is necessary to be careful with the word
“materialism”.
Lenin writes: “The doctrine of surplus value is the
cornerstone of Marx's economic theory.” This is only half true. Surplus
Value is not merely the cornerstone of some discrete part of Marxism called
“economic theory”. It is much more than that. The sale of Labour-Power to a
capitalist at the point of production, and the subsequent expropriation of
the entire product of the worker’s labour by the capitalist, is the source of
Surplus Value. It is also the source of class differentiation and class
conflict. It is the reason for the necessity of the development of a
collective popular Subject of History around the working-class cause.
In short, it is good to
examine the abstract parts of any phenomenon, including “Marxism”, but only
if one is to proceed to a synthesis, or concretisation of these parts into a
dynamically-comprehended whole. That is how dialectics works. That is how an
examination of the sources and component parts of Marxism should be
concluded, but in this instance Lenin does not quite succeed in doing so.
Instead, he leaves the parts as parts. He leaves us with a list of
ingredients, but not the finished cake.
Lenin writes: “While increasing the dependence of the
workers on capital, the capitalist system creates the great power of united
labour.”
Capitalism does create a
working class, and organises it as a labour-force, but it does not unite it
politically. This, like the previous examples, shows the danger of
over-simplification. Lenin was no doubt writing for workers, and brevity was
his aim, and he possessed an extraordinary ability to compress difficult
ideas into a few, clear words. Yet even Great Lenin, the most famous advocate
of determined, deliberate political organisation, including vanguard
organisation of professional revolution (e.g. in “What is to be Done?”)
could be tempted to undermine himself in the over-pursuit of simplification.
Lenin recovers this
particular matter of organisation in the document’s concluding paragraph,
where he even mentions South Africa (this was in 1913):
“Independent organisations of the proletariat are
multiplying all over the world, from America to Japan and from Sweden to
South Africa. The proletariat is becoming enlightened and educated by waging
its class struggle; it is ridding itself of the prejudices of bourgeois
society; it is rallying its ranks ever more closely and is learning to gauge
the measure of its successes; it is steeling its forces and is growing
irresistibly.”
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The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: 3 Sources and
3 Component Parts of Marxism, 1913, Lenin.
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