Fragment on Lenin

This is a fragment of an attempted essay from at least two years ago, I spent some time rewriting it to account for my worse writing back then. It was initially intended to be an opening section to a larger essay called “Postleninism”, a play on postmodernism and an attempt to rectify the politics of bolshevism with the twenty first century. It doesn't necessarily have an ending but the basic critique and analysis is largely complete in the work. 

I will probably continue to post these rehabilitated fragments to my blog until I finish one of my bigger contemporary projects. 

In the 1943 children’s story, The Little Prince, the eponymous prince is acquainted with a grandiose king isolated to a planet barely large enough to hold his long flowing robes. This king extols his conviction of universal sovereignty, proclaiming to the prince that even the sun and stars would follow his decree. The Little Prince, naively askes of the king to wield his purported power to create a sunset, the passage goes as follows:

"I should like to see a sunset... do me that kindness... Order the sun to set..."

"If I ordered a general to fly from one flower to another like a butterfly, or to write a tragic drama, or to change himself into a sea bird, and if the general did not carry out the order that he had received, which one of us would be in the wrong?" the king demanded. "The general, or myself?"

"You," said the little prince firmly.

"Exactly. One much require from each one the duty which each one can perform," the king went on. "Accepted authority rests first of all on reason. If you ordered your people to go and throw themselves into the sea, they would rise up in revolution. I have the right to require obedience because my orders are reasonable."

"Then my sunset?" the little prince reminded him: for he never forgot a question once he had asked it.

"You shall have your sunset. I shall command it. But, according to my science of government, I shall wait until conditions are favorable."

"When will that be?" inquired the little prince.

"Hum! Hum!" replied the king; and before saying anything else he consulted a bulky almanac. "Hum! Hum! That will be about—about—that will be this evening about twenty minutes to eight. And you will see how well I am obeyed."(1)

The king, discreetly aware of his powerlessness argues that his apparent inability to assume spontaneous command of the stars is the product of his reasonable “science of government”. The king argues that he is by no means a subject of the universe, he is its master, while at the same time he staunchly confirms his inability to express this mastery except in ideal conditions. He is trapped in a frantic deviation between his purported power and his inability to exercise it. The pathology of the king is an inability to reconcile with powerlessness and megalomaniacally absolute aspirations, bound between the two he can only negotiate ideologically.

Of course the king is a madman trapped within his own hubris. However, such a dilemma can be imagined in reverse. Picture a true sovereign, (a god even), who is nonetheless trapped within the complex of such “science of government”, who needlessly obeys the laws of the sun simply out of a pathological fear of unreasonableness. Here is entertaining to imagine an even deeper hubris for the king, to imagine him as being completely truthful in his claims to sovereignty, limited only by an earnest belief in responsible limits. Such a king would be confined not by physical limitations, but by pure ideology.

Exactly thirty years before the little prince was published, in 1913, the opera Victory over the Sun was performed in the city then called Petrograd. The drama served as a narrativization of the politico-artistic manifesto The Non-Objective World, impatiently calling for an end to reason and truth, offering as substitute a reconstructed modernist universe. This drama took the form of the capture of the sun, destruction of time and subsequently, of reality itself. With a production staff including a rogues gallery of the Russian avant-guard, this performance served as a visualized metaphor for the artistic movements greater vision, the forceful domination of even the highest powers in the universe, and the supplanting of these powers with the untamed vision of a rejuvenated human will. The narrative moves erratically, allowing for unquestioned leaps in space and time; characters traversing history as easily as the Little Prince traversed the cosmos. The protagonists, for lack of a better title, of the performance, are listed as: “Two STRONG MALE INHABITANTS of the Future Country”; the First One and the Second One, respectively. They proclaim, as statement of Intent:

The First One:

There will be no end!

We strike the universe

We are arming the world against ourselves

We are organizing the slaughter of scarecrows

Plenty of blood Plenty of Sabers

And gun bodies!

We are Submerging the mountains!

[…]

The Second One:

Sun, you gave birth to passions

And burned with inflamed ray

We will throw a dustsheet over you

And confine you to a boarded up concrete house!(2)

The rhetoric of the inhabitants, the strong men, is the pathology of the king in reverse. The king masks his powerlessness in ideology, he cannot fulfill his title and thus observes star patterns to mimic sovereignty. The inhabitants, on the other hand, do not mask their assumed powerlessness, but antagonize against their assigned station. They fight against the very reality which makes the sun and stars their superior, they do not justify their limits, rather, they seek to destroy them.

One is a fanatic who claims the impossible—the other is a fanatic who seeks the impossible.

Four years before the performance of this opera, in 1909, further west, in the city of Paris, a conflict of ideals came to an abrupt climax. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Lenin, a journalist preeminent member within the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, prepared the expulsion of the physician and philosopher Alexander Bogdanov. While in a shared exile from the Russian Empire, Lenin and Bogdanov had grown from party figureheads to antagonists. Lenin resented Bogdanov’s idiosyncratic interpretation of Marxist doctrine, accusing him of idealism and a revision. Bogdanov, though far less aggressive on his part, made counter-antagonism against Lenin’s undemocratic and dogmatic tendencies.

This split would be the primary political event to decide the meaning of “Leninism”. Now that it had an enemy, a hard surface to repel itself from, Lenin’s philosophy had a new cornerstone. Lenin would write on the event some years later:

His attempts to “modify” and “correct” Marxism have been examined by Marxists and recognized as alien to the spirit of the modern working-class movement. The groups he formerly co-operated with have rejected all responsibility for his literary and other activities. One can think whatever one pleases about Bogdanov after this, but to demand that he be given space in the columns of the workers’ press, which is called upon to disseminate the elementary principles of Marxism, reveals a failure to understand either Marxism, Bogdanov’s theories, or the task of spreading Marxist education among the masses of the workers.

As regards the business of educating the masses of the workers, to which our newspaper is dedicated, our path and Bogdanov’s diverge, for we differ in our understanding of what that education should be. That is the real issue, which, for self-interested motives, is being obscured by hints about personal relations. Workers to whom the trend of their newspaper is dear should brush aside as trash all these attempts to reduce the issue to the “personalities” of certain writers; they must look into the character of Bogdanov’s theories. When they begin to do so they will speedily reach the conclusion we have arrived at, namely, that Marxism is one thing, and Bogdanov’s theories are quite another. A workers’ newspaper should clear the minds of the proletariat of bourgeois, idealistic hodge-podge, not offer them this indigestible fare in their columns.(3)

Lenin firmly affirms here flexibility, pragmatism and idiosyncrasy as poisonous, and following this he characterizes Bogdanov’s unorthodox interpretation of Marxism as an ideologically problematic force. This affirms a clear political line: there is no ‘Marxist-adjacent’ nor ‘Marxian’ only Marxist and Non-Marxist. This defensive stance would not end with this single feud, Lenin would conclude by saying:

Now a word about the Vpered group in the columns of our newspaper, it has been called “adventurist”.

Owing to their inability to think politically and not like philistines, the writers of the letter saw in this too an insinuation against the personalities of the members of this group. This, too, is absurd. Marxists call “adventurist” the policy pursued by groups that do not take their stand on the basis of scientific socialism, such groups, for instance, as the anarchists, Narodnik terrorists, and so forth. No one will try to deny that the Vpered group is leaning towards anarcho-syndicalism, or that they are tolerant of Lunacharsky’s “god-building”, Bogdanov’s idealism, and the doctrinal anarchist proclivities of S. Volsky, and so forth. Insofar as the policy of the Vpered group has tended towards anarchism and syndicalism, every Marxist will call it a policy of adventurism.

This is simply a fact, which has been confirmed by the complete break-up of the Vpered group. As soon as the working-class movement revived, this patchwork group, stitched together from the most heterogeneous elements, without a definite political line or understanding of the principles of class politics and Marxism, fell completely apart.

Marching under the banner of Marxism, the working-class movement will ignore these groups, these “empirio-monists”, “god-builders”, “anarchists”, and the like.(4)

Discussing on the effects of this divide within Bolshevism, historian Sochor Zenovia would write:

The implications of Lenin's actions were important. By choosing to attack Bogdanov on philosophical grounds, Lenin implanted in Marxism the notion of philosophical heresy and ultimately created a link between a "correct" philosophy and politics. In essence, these actions paved the way for a party line in both philosophy and politics, with strict discipline required from the members and with Lenin in control.(5)

With this established, we should ask two major questions: First, what effect did Lenin’s insistence ‘correct’ philosophy have on his own further ideological development? Second, what were the ‘incorrect’ assertions made by Bogdanov which instigated this controversy? For the sake of a well-paced narrative structure, it would be most efficient to answer the second question first, then move back to the first.

Bogdanov was a proponent of biological immortality, a follower of the scientific and epistemological teachings of Ernst Mach, an early pioneer of cybernetic systems theory, and a science fiction writer. Informing all these branches of interest was his universal theory: Tektology. The “Tektological” model insisted that all scientific, social, and political systems were interconnected on an ontological grid of causality and interrelation. This universal theory would originate from his development of “Empirio-Monism”, a universalist and synthetically Marxist interpretation of empiricism, to which he would pen an eponymous three volume text.

To Bogdanov, Marxism was not a distinct formula, but a universally adaptable one. He treated Marxist theory as one which could be connected too, adapted into, or superimposed over many other models and theories; to this extent Bogdanov stumbled into many theoretical elements which returned under postmodernism almost a century in advance.

A succinct definition of Leninism is its categorical opposition to these divergences. Where Bogdanov envisioned theoretical flux, Lenin mandated the party line, where Bogdanov overlapped his ideals with other contemporary philosophies, Lenin saw in Marx a total incapsulating epistemology. Leninism is best defined as philosophically autarchic Marxism, Marxism as a closed theoretical economy.

Lenin framed extra-Marxist curiosity as a corruptive and tempestuous agent, one which would dissolve Marxism into fanaticism. This principle, however, did not (immediately) translate into an overbearing internal puritanism, rather an overexerted caution from any serious divergence, from any action which could not be summarily linked to the existing scripture of Marxist theory.

Lenin’s orthodoxy followed a line of pragmatic realism, Marx was the upward and downward limit to plausable reality. This of course went in strict opposition to Bogdanov’s views, Bogdanov seeing Marxism as an abstracted framework from which many other philosophies could be interwoven. While this conflict existed only theoretically in the decades leading up to the October revolution, Lenin’s eventual political triumph as the political center of a new Socialist society, put pressure on his own self-imposed limitations.

Marx had always asserted that communism could only arise in a highly developed bourgeois society. In an upturned echo of Hegel’s assertion that the Prussian State was the final point in idealist historical development, Marx identified Germany as the fertile ground for a coming communist revolution. Lenin, naturally, studiously followed these presumptions. However the seemingly unthinkable October revolution, (one waged against a bourgeois republic only a few month detached from full Monarchical feudalism) achieved total political control, control which was meant to be impossible my traditional Marxian analysis.

Lenin, ever the pragmatist, would not turn down victory simply for his ideological peace of mind. Ironically, his greatest success serves to this as one of the primary unresolved contradictions of Leninism.

(1)https://onemorelibrary.com/index.php/en/?option=com_djclassifieds&format=raw&view=download&task=download&fid=14329

(2) https://monoskop.org/images/f/f4/Kruchenykh_Alexei_Victory_Over_the_Sun.pdf

(3) https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/feb/25.htm

(4) Ibid

(5)https://dokumen.pub/revolution-and-culture-the-bogdanov-lenin-controversy-9781501732195.html