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Welcome to the new books network. Welcome to new books and historical materialism, a new series from the new books network. I'm your host, Stephen Doseman. View figures stand as prominently in Marxist theory and history as Vladimir Lenin.
The revolutionary who played a pivotal role in one of the most important events in world history has received reverence, and discrimination, and everything in between. But much of that response depends on deep misunderstandings of both what he thought and what he did. This misunderstanding was deep enough that even he took notice of it at several points, remarking that readers tended to take his theories out of their context and misunderstand the underlying points. Understanding Lenin then will not just mean rereading his work, but understanding the world Lenin is working in.
But what's impossible to understand without considering the where's, when's and why's? To that effect, Ellen Shandro, I guess today, has stepped in with a book that seeks to do just that. Lenin and the logic of hegemony is a sustained attempt to reread Lenin in light of ground. She is often ignored remark that Lenin was one of his biggest influences in developing his own theories of hegemony.
The book spends the first couple chapters contextualizing Lenin by looking at some of his contemporaries, particularly Kowski, Bernstein, and Plekonoff, before turning to Lenin's own works and reading through them slowly and meticulously. The result is a study that works its way through Lenin's writings all the way from the 1890s to the end of his life in the 1920s, giving us the ability to see Lenin's development of ontological and epistemological themes that run throughout his life and work. Well, Shandro is not always easy to read. The book has a number of crucial insights for political organizers and will repay serious effort.
Many books have been written on Lenin over the years, but few have bothered to study his work so meticulously and thoroughly. Ellen Shandro is a professor of political theory previously at Laurentian University and is currently a visiting professor at York. He's on the editorial board for science and society. Ellen Shandro, welcome to the new book's network.
Well, thanks very much, Stephen. Good to be here. Yeah, so to kick things off, I always like to have guests introduce themselves. So could you tell us a little bit about your background and what your work and research tends to focus on?
Okay, up until very recently, I was a professor of political science at Laurentian University. The ups and downs of capitalism taught me though that recently that university has been the first in Canada to go through essentially bankruptcy protection, which was a maneuver for the administration to get around the collective agreement and get rid of about 40% of the staff. I guess I'm a meritist there now and I'm a visiting scholar at York University. And I work on Marxist political theory, political philosophy.
Not quite sure what the right, still not sure what the right term is. Yeah, a lot of different angles to go in at. But to kick off this conversation, so at the beginning of your book, you know that Gramsci credits Lenin with the development of the concept of hegemony, something that has generally baffled scholars of both thinkers. So as a starting point, can you explain what you were trying to do by taking this remark by Gramsci seriously as a way of going back and rereading Lenin?
Sure. First, perhaps the easiest thing is to start off with what it's not. It's not a declaration that I'm somehow trying to find the roots of Gramsci's conception of a gem or at least to explain what Gramsci's conception of the gem really is. It's rather just to kind of one to get people to think seriously about Lenin as a thinker rather than simply a practitioner of Marxism.
He's widely respected, at least amongst Marxists as a practitioner of Marxism. But say for example, in talking about Gramsci's reference to Lenin and his reference to Lenin as making a contribution, I guess, through metaphysics, I'd like to think anti metaphysics, through the conception of hegemony, the editors of English translation, Quentin Bora and Geoffrey Knoll-Smith, suggest they express their bafflement at this, and they treat it as though Lenin was, you know, there's something Lenin did, and Gramsci's now going to provide the theory of. But Gramsci's actual statements would seem to suggest that there's more there. Secondly, what I wanted to do by the reference to so, I'm looking at Lenin's conception of the gem and I'm concerned to see what there might be there.
And while I make some comparisons here and there with Gramsci, there's no attempt for that to be systematic, and there's no claim that Lenin, Lenin prefigured Gramsci's conception of the gem and although, you know, there are connections, and I point out some of them, and then they will get on to those. Secondly, a lot of the discussion of Lenin, why Lenin has been treated as a practitioner is in my view, because the lens through which his writings and his activity have been viewed has been the lens of his largely, the lens of his opponents' way of framing questions. So that's perhaps most evident with the famous infamous claim in what is to be done, that the socialist consciousness must be brought from without into the spontaneous working class movement, which his critics at the time, and subsequent critics opponents and almost all readers of, at least almost all non-communist readers have read through something like Marx's third piece of son Feuerbach, the idea that the materialist doctrine that men are the products of circumstances and therefore change men are the product of change circumstances, ignores that men must change circumstances and necessarily arrives at dividing society into two, educators superior to society and the educated. And so, we seem to sanction a rather elitist relation of Marx's intellectuals to workers.
That's how the problem in the quotation is set up by his opponents, economists at the time later on, men should extend, that's passed into the bulk of activists and scholarly literature, but that's not at all as I show, when I post the issues, post in those terms what Lenin writes seems some combination of dogmatic and scattered and improvisatory. If you understand it, you understand it, you know those terms. And as I started studying that work, what is to be done in particular and that controversy in particular, I wasn't expecting this, but I came to the conclusion that it couldn't be understood without reference to not so much Grampshees, but Lenin's conception of the German, and the Germanian, the bourgeois democratic revolution. Grampshees popularization, I'm not sure that's the right word, but I'll use it, popularization of the concept has lent that some kind of currency thinking the reference to Grampshees, I hope, and the examples need to kind of decentralize Lenin's own work from the terms imposed by his activist and scholarly adversaries, and so get a closer look at how he actually taught.
Excellent. So, turning to the concept of hegemony, one thing I found interesting about your book is that hegemony is often at least in some popular accounts, thought of as being an abstract, structural, ethereal phenomena above and beyond material conditions, but your account of a Leninist hegemony has that has it much more deeply intertwined with the political and economic coordinates of workers and organizers and their everyday experiences. Can you give us some introductory remarks about this shift, how rereading hegemony in Lenin's work gives you a hegemony that is much more concrete and not something that simply obscures one's conditions but is much more a part of them. Sure, shift or shift back, because it seems to me that you're quite right, the way in which hegemony is discussed for the most part, and this is certainly through liberal readings of Grampsheep, norbert Obobio might be a key figure there, but also amongst many academic Marxists.
Yeah, hegemony is ideas and one can certainly find that in Grampsheep, hegemony is contrasted with dictatorship, ideas, the space of democratic debate versus the realm of force. But that's, I think, only a part of Grampsheep's treatment of hegemony. Thus, for example, he will refer to hegemony as encompassing both coercion and consent. And if you think about what the term means, it's a word for leadership, and if one contrasts consent and coercion, if one contrasts hegemony with dictatorship, you could say one's contrasting the statesman or the popular leader with the dictator, with the armed coup or something like that, but it's also the case, the political leaders, even those who seek to win over the consent of their followers or neutrals or even opponents, will, indeed, must in the real world, use means other than simply a battle of ideas.
So, I guess I want to say, if you view it in terms of the, you know, hegemony is the manufacture of consent, I guess what I would want to say is very often it turns out to be the manufacture of acquiescence rather than consent. And if one looks at Grampsheep's conception of hegemony, one of the things that's there that's key and that we, I think we can, in fact, trace that to Lenin, is the idea that the ordinary consciousness of people is a contradictory consciousness. They have ideas that would lead them to cooperate with their rulers, but they also have ideas that usually implicitly, usually not fully worked out, are ideas of resistance and perhaps of revolt and revolution. Now, typically it's the former rather than the latter, that would be dominant, but, and that would have to be with the context in which people are thinking, what's the practical course of action?
I may be sick of unhappy with my life, I may not like living in the flat, I'm living in, I may not know what to do with my kids, but I've got to do something with them in the short run. So I need to, there is pressure to cooperate with the institutions of society. So there's a kind of pressure there. There's the kind of thing that, what does Marx call it in the first volume of capital?
Something like the dull or the silent compulsion of economic relations, right? So not exactly coercion, although it has its coercive component, not exactly consent, although one's acquiescing in it. So, anybody who considers political leadership has to consider using or restructuring the institutions that shaped people's ideas and actions. Now, part of how you do that is appeal to people's ideas.
If you want to appeal to their subordinate ideas in their consciousness, but part of it also is to see if you can't restructure or lead them in restructuring. Social institutions, practices, conventions that reinforce those set of ideas rather than others. So hegemony, the struggle for hegemony, the struggle for ideas is indeed grounded in material realities. But I think it's worth going back a little further than that.
I mean, in fact, one of the arguments I made is that hegemony was a problem that presented itself to the earliest Russian Marxists in trying to keep up with. A lot of their interests, in trying to orient themselves in these new circumstances. And a lot of their intellectual and political battles involved figuring out what that would mean. What the hegemony or leadership of the proletariat in a democratic, bourgeois democratic revolution would amount to.
And it was not just Lenin who had a take on that. the Mensheviks. And I suggest, and here I'm following in some significant measure, the Mensheviks scholar Theodor Dan, his origins of Bolshevism, a very interesting book is actually available in English, but there were two opposing conceptions of hegemony. And I suggest in the book that the Menshevik conception of hegemony is probably more focused on on hegemony as ideas, as hegemony as a as a feature of proletarian consciousness.
And they developed a form of political practice that was geared towards setting up situations in which the workers would directly confront the bourgeois or the capitalists and in that direct confrontation develop their class consciousness. Whereas, and that to a certain extent involved the kind of prefiguration of a struggle and and or telos of the struggle that may not have been the most dominant thing in the present. With Lenin on the other hand, what was crucial was establishing an alliance, including within the working class, but extending beyond it, of those who were in fact fighting already the forces that be so how to strategic and it had a structural aspect to it, in addition to the battle over ideas. Yeah, moving into the kind of historical contextualizing that you do for the first couple chapters, you turn to Karl Kotsky, and you know that his theory and practice have received much criticism both from Lenin and others, but you argue that many criticisms of him have missed the mark by misunderstanding his own understanding of socialist consciousness, and better appreciating the limits of his thought means understanding his theory in the context is it was developed.
Can you unpack his orientation for us? I'll try. That's about the longest chapter in the book. So we'll see what we can do.
The reverence to Kotsky in the way I was in the way the research project developed stems from the problem I mentioned earlier with Lenin's what is to be done in the thesis, as I call it, the thesis of consciousness from without. Lenin refers to a passage from Kotsky on that subject. And so I thought I should go back and look at that. Often Kotsky is contrasted as a mechanic, you know, the materialism in the third thesis on Feuerbach, the one that sees men as the product of circumstances and change men as the product of change circumstances, but does not appreciate that men change circumstances.
And consequently, a kind of elitist attitude. Kotsky is widely regarded as an exemplar of that kind of thing, which is character, which might be characterized as mechanical materialism. Now, I suggest that there's a couple of ways of understanding that kind of criticism. And I would say one of them we could characterize as ontological.
So people aren't really capable of inventiveness through their practice, right? We are just really sophisticated machines or something like that. And that something like that is how Kotsky, Plakonov, much of second international Marxism, including importantly the Menshevics, are characterized. So it isn't a matter of debating what politics Kotsky in or Luxembourgist, Plakonov or Trotsky, what the Menshevics or council communism, it isn't a matter of debating what course of action practically.
Rather, it's a debate about philosophical ontology, right? These people can't understand changing things. And so it's a matter and changing things becomes a matter of adopting in particular. Understanding of practice.
What it doesn't involve is a debate over what are the circumstances under which we are or aren't acting. And it seems to me that if one looks, as I spend a lot of time, at various points in the thesis, doing what Kotsky, if one looks at Plakonov, if one looks at the Menshevics, that understanding of them just doesn't hold up. The debate ought not to be practice or revolutionary practice versus fatalism is a term that's often used by Kotsky's critics in particular. It's rather how do they analyze the situations in which one acts.
Now interestingly, Lenin, of course, and famously, has developed a criticism of Kotsky, which can broadly be characterized under the same term. Kotsky was a kind of mechanical, that's to say, not dialectical materialist. But here I think the critique is an epistemological critique, rather than an ontological critique. So that some at least of Kotsky's earlier works, I would say, especially his works on the agrarian question.
But some also of his strategic works. And Lenin suggests up to roughly 1909 or so. Sometimes he suggests up to the first world, where Kotsky had been a Marxist, right? But he was incapable of adapting, because what Marxism is, is it certainly involves an understanding of it, if not a telos, at least a direction in historical movement, one to which the working class movement ought to bend its efforts.
But it also involves, because it's a road we must travel on. It's not a pre-planned road. In fact, the road is a road of class struggle. And that means one's adversaries are also capable of action, capable of innovation.
And they can adopt courses of action, which we might not have expected. And indeed, they can use us or some of our mistakes or some of the actions that worked in the past and bend them to their own purposes. And if that's the case, if that's the road forward, and it's not simply our intentions, or our end orientation that's important in consciousness, our ability to adapt, rethink questions, so on and so forth. And that's what on Lenin's reading, I think, and I think correctly, is not there with Kotsky.
Now, how I put that, I guess what I would add to that, or how I would attempt to flesh that kind of perspective out is, that I read Kotsky's historical account, not as simply mechanical, he understands that workers are involved in practice and economic practice and political practice. And through the development of capitalism, socialism, socialization of the productive forces, the workers come to be able to form unions, to combat the workers more effectively, for economic demands, for political demands, and come to pose broader questions. Now, where consciousness needs to be brought from without is it's a consciousness of that process, or rather, it's a theoretical consciousness of that process, it's an understanding of that process as a whole. So what in fact the intellectuals contribute bring from the outside is a clarification of the practice of the working class movement already, but in terms of, you know, so one, there's an understanding of practice there, and there is a prospect before the movement of more unity, more struggle, greater ambitions and the possibility of conquering and establishing socialism.
And there again, Kotsky certainly saw that happening through the conquest of a parliamentary majority and the subordination of bureaucracy in the first instance to the parliament, but he also saw that as setting up a situation in which he worked and in which the institutions, conventions and understandings of that society on its way to socialism, but still bound up with the institutions and practices of a capitalist society, there's a prospect of its further transformation. So there is a revolutionary perspective there. The problem is that it doesn't account for if you want the reaction of its enemies and the necessity of of adapting trulocs. And I think one of the reasons, or the reason that that isn't question, a reason, at any rate, is that the assumptions of Kotsky and Orthodox Marxism, this kind of march of history that unifies the working class and makes the most advanced organized conscious workers in the largest institutions involved in the party and so on, their consciousness is a consciousness and a practice that all the other backward segments or less advanced segments of the working class and even the peasants who if they haven't yet been dispossessed will be, that's a consciousness to which they were coming.
So in a sense, the more advanced sections of the working class, German social democratic party represent those backward segments. And Kotsky sees in the practice of German social democracy, increasing votes for the party, increasing membership in the social democratic trade unions, subscriptions to the party news membership and youth organizations, women's organizations, those are all increasing. So that's the empirical evidence, right? But what he doesn't see is that some of the backward segments, and I, you know, there are a couple of instances in German history, Red Wedding State in Hamburg, which I, I, I, I cite Richard Evans work on that.
And the Moabits disturbances in 1910, in which working class demonstrations eventually in riots, which can be understood and were understood by Kotsky as the lumpen proletariat, the kind of backward, you know, showing their failure to discipline and organize themselves and what we need to do is make them more organized. Those are understood as backwards, they aren't any, any part of them, a reaction to the slowness, the limitations, the perhaps self satisfaction of the more advanced sections, right? In other words, Kotsky doesn't treat as possibly, possibly problematic, incipient divisions within the working class and more broadly popular movement. So the practical basis on which he might challenge the optimism of, of, of, you know, the hopeful optimism of, of his progressive march of history is, is, is, is, is kind of undercut.
So again, once again, it's, it's not that there's no conception of practice there. It's not that there's no, no understanding of, of revolutionary practice. What there isn't, is an ability to address the particular problem, the, the, the problems that arise out of the, particular forms that struggles take. And that's all the more significant, because all of Kotsky's works up until the First World War were addressed to the revisionist challenge to the Orthodox Marxism of the German Social Democratic Party, represented first and foremost by Edward Bernstein's revisionism.
And what, what Bernstein does is, it doesn't just say reforms are okay. That's all we need. He said, he suggests that the movement of capitalist society is ever greater diversity. I refer to him as the book as the first post-Marxist, because this emphasis on diversity, individuality, variety, and so on is something that I think the two kinds of critics of, of, of Marxism have in common for Bernstein, like socialism was like organizing liberalism, right?
So he gives Kotsky the cue to pick up on all this diversity and difference, Kotsky does it. And I think it's not that failure of self-reflexiveness in his Marxism that constitutes the limit of that Marxism. Yeah, so moving past Kotsky, you turn to pre-revolutionary Russia, particularly the work of George Plackenov. And it's here that a number of themes around hegemony will start to be developed, particularly around the relationship between the working classes, their political consciousness, and the role of Vanguard intellectuals and activists in the midst of it all.
So much of the theoretical developments, it should be noted we're developed in response to what you were earlier talking about with the ambiguous coordinates of the emerging Russian capitalism, which in many ways didn't fit neatly into Marxist theoretical accounts since its political and economic structures had very different paths of development than places where he wrote and analyzed like Germany, France, and England. So can you give us a quick sense of the terrain here so as to that the stage for Lenin's interventions? Sure. Now the early debates around Marxism in Russia need to be understood in the context of an engagement, a practical and theoretical engagement with Russian populism.
Thus Marx's own interest in Russian, he became quite interested towards the end of his life. And probably most famous in Marx's writings would be his letter to Vyros Azulich. Azulich was actually a comrade of Plackenov. They had been activists in a populist organization and recently, this is the early 1880s, had converted to Marxism, but they were still asking themselves questions prompted by populism.
And that is, do we have to, you know, we understand that capitalism is the way forward for Russia. It will bring advance, but does that mean that we have to wait for centuries for capitalism to work its way through our backward country and the working class can have a revolution? Now Marx made a reply, which was largely designed not to discourage anybody from engaging in anti-zarist political activity. He suggested that the Russian village commune, which the populists had looked to as an exemplar and possible foundation for socialism, that might wither away but under the pressure of capitalism, but it existed in the historical context of an already developed capitalism.
And that being the case, it could be rescued and preserved, but only if deleterious influences, i.e. itsarism, were removed. Marx didn't identify any forces inside Russia that would accomplish that task. It was populist intellectuals who were then laying siege to the czar using terrorism amongst other things, Lenin's older brother among them.
But it wasn't like Marx was not an activist on the ground in Russia. He didn't leave us with much in the way of an understanding of the political forces that would be involved in a Russian revolution. This is where George Plakanov comes in. And he argues against a populism that suggests that capitalism cannot develop in Russia.
Russia is very different. What we need then is a revolution that would be at once a socialist revolution and a revolution of the peasantry. And Plakanov is dismissive of the revolutionary capacity of the peasantry. He suggests, and he has a conception of the development of capitalism, that's very similar to Kowski's, kind of uni-linear historical development, the material and organizational bases of a possible future socialism develop at the same base as its subjective or conscious aspects, the material bases through the economic development of capitalism and the subjective bases through the development of the working class and through its struggles.
But what we're faced with now for Plakanov, it wasn't necessarily that capitalism would arise internally to Russia. It could be imported by the government, seeing the need to compete with the advanced technologies of the West. But there's kind of an historical logic that would eventually in the development of capitalism through one or another of those of those needs. So people who want socialism then need to turn to the working class.
And more actually than the bourgeoisie, because the bourgeoisie was still, the Russian bourgeoisie made its profits as much or more from ministerial favors and so on and so forth and so was bound up with the feudal or semi-feudal relations of Russia and little able to free itself. So the idea of the proletariat being almost by default the force that could lead a bourgeois revolution was central to his thought. Now Plakanov was writing in the mid-1880s, those ideas stayed at the center of his thought probably throughout his career. When it enters the scene 10 years later, the kind of populism that he's addressing is a little bit different.
Plakanov had been contending with a revolutionary populism. We need to overthrow the Tsar in order to free up the commuis. When Lenin entered the scene was a more developed capitalism. That capitalism was developing, was clear, but if one is to maintain the working class movement as a central political institution or a central political force aimed at transforming Tsarist autocracy in a democratic direction, the idea that capitalism might have been the product of the state importing capital suggests well then what the state decides, if the state can decide to do that, surely the state can decide to support various reform or semi-socialist or populist ventures and you had what was called a legal populism had become more prominent by that time and it was that that Lenin was arguing against.
For him, when Lenin adopted a perspective that's probably closer to Kowski's than Plakanos, in his works of the 1890s culminating in the development of capitalism in 1998, he portrayed a capitalism that was everywhere growing from the grassroots up and that its movement was not external, it was just springing from everywhere. So this idea of somehow getting around it or somehow using the state to get around it was just not on. The problem for Lenin, whereas for Kowski, the problem was in a sense getting capitalism off the ground, the bourgeoisie was still tied up with the feudal state. For Lenin, the proletariat was the vanguard of this vast process that involved agricultural laborers and even peasants who were not yet expropriated, but the problem here is how do you conceive of that leadership and the leadership was kind of like, as in the Kowski in case, the advanced proletariat of massive industrial complexes in Moscow, St.
Petersburg, so on and so forth, that was kind of like the tealos at the end that everybody else would become. But if they were representing everyone else, and why are we not talking about a socialist revolution? Yeah, I can maybe step in here. You spend a lot of time, so you kind of set up some of the first things I wanted to ask about Lenin, but I want to turn to his 1902 text, What is to be Done, which occupies quite a bit of space for obvious reasons, for a couple chapters in this book.
So you note that this book has received a fair number of critiques from both Marxist and non-Marxist alike for this sort of vanguardist elitism, particularly in the idea that consciousness of the workers must be delivered from without by an intellectually elite revolutionary vanguard. And this version of Leninism is then seen as a sort of primordial seed for movements like Stalinism, but you argue it relies on some severe misunderstandings of the key terms and dynamics Lenin discusses, particularly with the relationship between vanguard and the broader working class and the use of theory to help maintain a more militantly antagonistic consciousness against attempts at assimilation. So can you unpack this a bit, bringing more into lens? First I need to note a couple of features of the context here.
This is 1902. The Bernstein controversy in German social democracy, and really it extended throughout all the social democratic or Marxist parties in Europe and really across the world. A challenge to orthodox Marxism on the basis of a kind of progressive reformist, right? That had exploded also in Russian social democracy.
That's crucial background to the turn of the century debate. There was also a crisis specific to Russian Marxism, the Russian workers movement, associated with a movement or a trend of thought dubbed economist. In its purest form, this was roughly the idea after a strike wave of the mid-1980s had been disrupted by police attacks, brutality of employers, so on and so forth. And the social democratic or Marxist activists had been scooped up by the political police.
And what organizations were left were run by some rather inexperienced people. Certain level of demoralization occurred. The thought was, let's leave politics. Let's struggle for the workers' wages and working conditions.
Let's leave politics to the liberals, right? Small steps, reforms will lead further. That, of course, challenged the perspective of proletarian hegemony, right? And even in, and it merged with the revisionist controversy.
So the idea, Lenin's recourse to the idea that consciousness in the form of Marxist theory would have to be imported into the working class movement arose in that kind of polemical context. And unlike Kowski, he made the claim, and this was as a basis for the idea that we need to organize a party, that needs to be tight, but it needs to be informed by theory, and it needs to be informed by a theory that's capable of analyzing our specific circumstances and not simply applying general formulas to them. So we need to, in order to do that, you need a pretty significant mastery of theory. We need that in order, one, to fight the political police, two, not to allow our activists to become demoralized when there's a bad turn, and three, to lead not just the working class movement, because we're claiming hegemony, to lead all of the diverse sources of resistance to sorryism.
Okay, Lenin's formulation of the relationship between the consciousness and the spontaneous working class movement differed from Kowski's and was more radical than Kowski's, in that he did not think that although consciousness may come from outside, nonetheless, it would be congruent with a spontaneous movement. He didn't think only that. He thought he talked about the need to combat spontaneity, which suggests that there's a resistance of the workers to Marxist or socialist theory, so on and so forth. And that of course, is that of course would seem to suggest the scenario that there is on Foyerbach and the educator must be educated, you have an elite above.
The workers is applicable, but I think perhaps the most straightforward way of explaining that, of understanding it, is that Lenin distinguished two different distinctions, that between base and superstructure, so economic movement on the one hand, and ideas on the other. It from a distinction between consciousness and spontaneity. The spontaneous movement, what is the spontaneous movement? Now, as a movement of the working class, based on its position in capitalist production, so exploited subject to the brutalities of the capitalist workplace, denied dignity, and so forth.
So there's resistance there, but what there is also, and this qualifies as spontaneous, in the sense that it's outside the control of the conscious, and that is the ideological influence of the bourgeoisie over the spontaneous working class movement. That too is spontaneous. So the spontaneous movement contains contradictory tendencies. And in a sense, Lenin says at various points, the spontaneous movement is the embryo out of which consciousness grows.
So you want to nurture that, but on the other hand, one needs to combat spontaneity. And what that I think means is, one needs to combat the tendency whereby workers take on the spectacles provided for them in the daily press of the bourgeoisie to construe their exploitation as, I don't know, gods, curse, or a temporary thing we have to get through until we get older and we can afford our own house, or a thousand different themes to reconcile one's sufferings, hardships, exploitation, so cradrons with roughly the world as it is or as it can be made without fundamental challenge to the authorities. Now this can take any number of forms, right? Okay.
What the initial economists and what even other forms, oh, before I get on to that, what I will say is, in distinguishing those sets of those two kinds of distinctions, what Lenin is doing is an attendancy in Orthodox classical Marxism was to identify the agency of one class with the spirit of the age, right? It's the bourgeoisie's time. No, it's the working class this time. The context of hegemony is a context in which there's contention for leadership.
So the superstructure isn't just dominated by one set of ideas, bourgeois ideas, and it's worth noting at this time, along with the advent of the communism, you had the emergence of a kind of liberal bourgeois opposition to Zarism, which Lenin thought threatened to use working class militancy as a kind of stage army to threaten the Zar and get kind of constitutional concessions. Okay. So you then have a threat to the claim to ambition to proletarian hegemony for leadership. You have the possibility of bourgeois leadership, but that is the form that takes requires use of the popular movements as a threat to Zarism.
It's kind of bargaining. So forms of working class militancy that might be in favor of higher wages, let's go out on strike, or even saying we want political rights so that we can better organize to get higher wages, right? Or those can play into the strategy of bourgeois hegemony, a bourgeois led revolution. So that needs to be combated.
So part of what constitutes consciousness is an understanding of that. So yes, we're fighting for a classless society ultimately, an end to exploitation, so on and so forth. The end is there, but what's important is forging the road. And the road isn't just paved for us.
It needs to if you want always be cut out of the forest that stands in our way. The problem is the forest is moving. It's like the forest in Macbeth. It doesn't stay still, it resists, it fights back.
And so you always need to adapt your consciousness. If I can maybe step in, kind of alluding to another question I had on what is to be done, you're talking about this kind of dynamism within the political coordinates, and you bring up particularly the question of freedom and the various uses, it has endured through a number of different political debates, and you show how its flexibility as a term allows it to slide around leading to a sometimes deliberate muddying of the waters. And more specifically, you see Lenin finding it sometimes used to stifle debate, even within left political parties, which can lead to defeats down the road. Can you maybe kind of connect this to the questions around freedom that Lenin was also wrestling with and what is to be done?
Yeah, I mean, this is a kind of criticism that's also caught on and become kind of enduring. The first chapter of what is to be done is entitled dogmatism and freedom of criticism. Now, Lenin borrows the terms from his critics who called themselves the, an erance of Bernstein called themselves the critical, right? So freedom of criticism contains an ambiguity in it.
But the charge against Lenin and Placonov and company was that they were dogmatists and they weren't open to freedom of criticism. And one can only build the party through freedom of criticism. Therefore, we should kind of get together. Lenin's argument, the analysis gets kind of complex, so I can't go through all of it.
But Lenin attempted to turn the argument around. One of his starting points was one, an acknowledgement that everyone in the progressive socialist and democratic movements agreed with constitutional rights to freedom of speech and criticism. That he said wasn't in or he implied, wasn't in question. But what he found problematic, puzzling, was if the critics thought that their point of view was right, why were they arguing for freedom of criticism, i.e.
for the different views to coexist, rather than for the replacement of the wrong view with the right view? And the suggestion is that there's the kind of demogogy involved there. And it seems to me, although I don't go into this in the book, it seems to me it's a kind of demogogy that's not that one finds in some left movements. Thus, for example, I think the Sanders movement has been criticized for not allowing centrist Democrats a voice in it.
The labor party in Britain under Corbyn has been criticized for not allowing a voice to centrist or even right-wing labor people or sufficient voice or something like that. In other words, the Russian Orthodox Marxists, Sanders, Corbyn, various left-wing movements are treated as though they're the state. In other words, you can't organize your view alone without hearing us on the inside. And that makes you dogmatic.
And in substance, what Lenin does is he links the question of freedom of criticism, a freedom of speech, a question of freedom of association. And here, the issue of freedom, the context of the irreconcilable antagonism of class interests under capitalism. And that implies, that I probably should have said before, is that the core of what Lenin as a Marxist understands socialist consciousness to be. Okay, let's take this from a little bit different angle.
What Lenin's argument about hegemony is concerned with, is establishing the political independence of the working class movement. And that would involve kind of drawing a line of demarcation between who's on our side and who, although they might also be opponents of, sorry, who belongs in another camp, whether bourgeois, peasant, religious minorities, or whatever. So in order to establish that independence, one needs to be able to distinguish one's point of view from that of others. And I think what Lenin thought he was dealing with in the context of the revisionist crisis and the economist crisis and so forth, where people who were making the claim, all we're all on the same side, really, we're all in favor of of socialism, even if we don't think it's some of us don't think it goes through class struggle and some of us do.
Let's sit down and sort ourselves out. So and what Lenin was saying is, okay, let's do the sorting then, what is your what is your point of view? Because we need to be able to figure out whether we can act in a coherent fashion together, or in order to do that, we need to distinguish ourselves from you. And you're not giving us substantive reason to think that we might be able to act together.
You're making a broad claim about freedom of speech or freedom of criticism, and kind of intimating that anybody who doesn't yield to that claim is acting in an authoritarian fashion. And doing that is rather demagogic when what you're refusing to do is actually engage with the substance of the issue. And in some ways, the substance of the issue is the Marxist claim that in a capitalist society, there is an irreconcilable antagonism of interest between different classes. And of course, the Bernstein and revisionists, although they would distinguish different classes, thought precisely that those interests could be reconciled, right?
Well, by raising the issue of freedom of criticism and making that front and center without engaging in the issue of the substantive differences, Lenin treated that as a kind of demagogic. And he treated it as a kind of demagogic way of undermining, because it prevented what might be necessary lines of demarcation, it prevented the short circuited, the kind of discussions that would be necessary to draw those lines of demarcation. And in that sense, the call for freedom was in fact, I guess, undermining the freedom of association of some groups, Lenin leaves it, you know, if you're not you don't have to be in the same party, or I should say perhaps my take on Lenin is the implication of his argument is nobody's silencing you. You can take, you can make arguments against us as a matter of fact, we are far more fiercely repressed by the Tsarist government than you are, right?
And then you're complaining to us as opponents of freedom of speech and authoritarianism and so on. In fact, if you speak from where you are, you can make the same criticisms from out there, stop interfering with our discussion. Yeah, yeah, moving along, you alluded to this earlier, but you spend a lot of time on the Bolshevik and Menshevik debate, which has a number of contours, but to kind of lead into this discussion, you highlight two aspects of this and then tie them together. You've got the consciousness of the workers on one hand and party structures on the other.
And essentially, you seem to see the consciousness of the workers, their awareness of their situation, as well as their sense of agency or capacity to change it, is tied to questions of organizational structure as I redo. Can you unpack this element for us? Sure. Well, try.
Let me begin with consciousness and practice. You're right, I did allude to the different sense of hegemony and the different sense of consciousness as between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks earlier on. And I guess if we distinguish two aspects of consciousness as I did earlier, the idea of intentionality or consciousness's direction toward an end to be accomplished or attained on the one hand and consciousness as reflexive adjustment to changing circumstances. Anybody who has a sense of consciousness is going to have some sense of both of those.
But I guess what I would say is in the Menshevik political practice, the intentionality or telos is primary and practice is understood as kind of prefiguring or expressing in embryo that end. And whereas, although there is an ambition in Lenin, I don't want to say it in Lenin's conception of consciousness, when Lenin talks about socialist consciousness or communist consciousness, social democratic consciousness, it's he never, and I think that this is even true of state and revolution, he never talks about what socialism will look like, right, or what communism will look like. He talks about what one needs to do to adjust, to deal with the circumstances of the day. And so he often talks about what's changed, what's new about these circumstances, what we missed beforehand.
So the reflexive aspect is crucial and consequently, the idea of change and adaptation. So if that's how you, if you understand consciousness in those terms, what you need in terms of an organization is probably one that centralized in at least this minimal sense, it has authority to enforce decisions. It has an authority to organize discussions and enforce the decisions that result from those discussions. So that when one changes one's analysis, one can act on the change circumstances, or perhaps they're not changed, perhaps one's made a mistake.
In order to find out whether one's made a mistake or not, one needs to be able to act and relatively organized cohesive fashion. So the idea of consciousness as kind of developing a scientific research program really tends to support a relatively centralized organization or an organized by centralized, I mean, an organization capable of wielding authority, understanding that democracy is also a form of authority. If one makes the ultimate end and the prefiguration of it central, then the idea of expressing that, well, to a certain extent, it coincides with or re-prezes that burns any idea of socialism as organizing liberalism. You want all kinds of diversity.
And here I think the idea of practice, I think I mentioned the the the the mentioned practice of setting up scenarios in which the workers can confront the capitalists directly and kind of demonstrate outside their their meetings and things like that. So that there's a sense of of the concrete as kind of confronting tangibly the struggle and so embodying the possible solidarity of workers, which would be part of the end and their assertion of their independence from the capitalist and opposition to them, which would be part of the end to be attained. That's given tangible form. And so what matters in an organization is something that would allow that expression and experimentation and the diversity involved in that.
So it's something in which centralization, I should say, an authoritative organization would not be the central thing, but rather one that was more liberal. Yeah, moving along from that, one area I found particularly interesting throughout the book or one theme is the way struggle often needs to not only win terrain, but to reshape it in new ways and new forms. The danger for much working class organizing is that it will see the shape of the territory, the terms of the debate, and the form struggle takes to bourgeois pathways of movement, when what is needed is for organizers to allow new forms of struggle and solidarity to take place so as to keep the struggle from succumbing to the traps and dead ends set by reformist liberals and capitalists. Can you unpack this aspect of hegemonic struggle here?
Well, in the book that appears centrally in relation to the idea of the Soviets, which were forms of organization that were invented by the workers in the spontaneous course of their struggles. And that led and one of the things that Lenin thought was, or perhaps the thing that Lenin thought was crucial about that is this is a form of organization that was accessible to everyone, certainly to all the working people by which he did not mean only working class people. He also meant white-collar workers, petty bourgeoisie, peasant soldiers, so on and so forth. And he thought that that was essential because it was an organization in which, starting perhaps as a strike committee, but through the course of that struggle, taking on roles that were governmental, it could serve as if properly led the embryo of a new state, what he would call the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.
And this was a form, although nobody had said, let's get all the people together as a way of leading everyone in a revolution. It had occurred spontaneously in the course of proletarian solutions to practical problems, but it had provided a forum and an example that allowed political space or plebeians, pro-letarians, peasants, and so on to engage in political life. And Lenin himself used the term political space to give an image of what was happening. Now, the Tsarist regime also was constrained through the 1905 revolution to allow the emergence of parliaments, jumas, they would call it, and when and certainly used those, once the, or it was in favor of the use of that political space, as it was all that was available.
And it was actually kind of important to him because now hegemony wasn't just about a lot of ideas, and it certainly did include the emergence of new institutions that provided new opportunities and possibilities for working people to engage in politics and develop their capacities through them. But through that, we see the emergence of hegemony as an alliance of workers in peasants, the leader and a key respect in which the workers lead the peasants and bring them into political sphere, either directly or by way of example, that can be reproduced in the countryside and peasant committees, so on and so forth, is providing that political space. But after the Soviets are crushed, 1906 or something, and the peasant committees are crushed, the way in which the workers party can reach the peasants is through the parliament. And when and very much value that reduced as it was, and less important, and large-scale strike movements or revolts of the peasantry and so because that was a way, really the way, because one of the weaknesses of the Bolsheviks party was that it was very weakly implanted in the countryside.
So part of what's involved in a revolution is to engage people in politics. And I would say crucially, it's not just in debating about politics, it's not just politics, in debating what kind of laws or rules we have, it's also, and this is the function of the Soviets, in engaging people in the administration of the decisions taken by the political organs, like the Soviets. Yeah, moving right along and turning to Lenin's wartime writing and thinking, the most central text of this period is generally seen as his 1917 state and revolution. And often commentators see this period as representative of a break with Lenin's pre-war thinking, but as I read you, you see Lenin expanding upon many of his earlier ideas that you've already alluded to, and pushing against the idea of Leninist authoritarianism developing here.
Instead, you see him encouraging, as you've been saying, a polymorphism movement of different actors coming in for different reasons, and class solidarity would develop through struggle as the central antagonisms of capitalism are forced in those struggles to come to the surface and become much more apparent. Can you unpack this development here? Two points, yes. If one looks at, people have wandered to claim that one finds an emphasis on revolutionary subjectivity post-1914 in Lenin, whereas it didn't exist prior to that.
Or one finds an emphasis on multiple subjectivity post-1914, but not before. Another way that people claim to find is that post-1914, one has a sense of the subject that's rooted in concrete circumstances, but not before. And one of the more interesting ones is that some people claim that there is a sense in Lenin after 1914, after his reg able, that theory needs to take account of the very specific concrete circumstances and not before. My discussion of Lenin up to this up to 1914, up to the outbreak of the war.
And I think in terms of understanding the agency of the working class, understanding the agency not just with the working class, but also with the peasantry, coming through the appreciation of the spontaneity of the working class movement and inventing the Soviets and contributing concretely to fleshing out, proletarian hegemony, and consequently teaching the party and Lenin himself, subject situated. And I think also, you'll find, although I haven't been able to discuss it here, I claim in the book that in terms of concrete, or the theorization of particular circumstances, one can find all of that stuff prior to 1914. So yeah, I don't claim that it's just a continuity, but they're what Scrucial's Lenin's analysis of imperialism, the outbreak of an imperialist war. What I would say is that allows Lenin to bring forward a lot of the themes that he had developed to pre-ferts world war and paint them on a larger canvas.
And indeed, some of the some of the features that he had supposed were specific to the character of a bourgeois democratic revolution by contrast with a proletarian socialist revolution actually are imported into his understanding of a socialist revolution. And here I would say the idea of the Soviets resurfaces in state and revolution, as you would point out. But there again, although they are certainly proletarian institutions, in the sense that they arise out of the experience and circumstances of the working class, they're proletarian precisely in the sense that they're open to anyone. And from the point of view of of workers, peasant soldiers acting spontaneously, part of what spontaneity might mean then is that I don't know whether you, my purported leaders, think of me as part of the working class or not.
So we cast our nets, their institutions that cast our nets broadly, that cut down all of the conventions of bourgeois society that would lead people to doubt their own ability to participate in politics, to participate in ruling and making decisions and carrying out those decisions of politics. But but so ruling isn't just enforcing the interests of the working class understood in a narrow corporate sense. One of the things I very much like about Grampshey is that his contrast with hegemony is not economics, it's corporate, having corporate interests, so narrow interests. So part of what the leadership of the proletariat is is to have the peasants also take things in hand and through that look and the exploited nationalities and so on.
So the idea of concrete circumstances, diversity, multiple subjectivity is crucial. So I think what becomes clearer with imperialism and with state and revolution is that what's involved in hegemony is ruling and learning king rule. And rather, I try to suggest that rather than a kind of conventional understanding of land and whereby there's this absolute certainty, one of the one of absolute certainty about the end of the struggle in the final victory of socialism, we know that and we have an almost religious faith in that. Inspiring it, it seems to me that part of what's involved here is a sense that true rule, you need to understand that you may make mistakes and that indeed you will make mistakes.
Yeah, if I can step in and just kind of ask a question that jumps right off of this. In the last chapter on Lenin in the wake of the October revolution, you find Lenin struggling with the process of trying to build a new classless society, a task which in spite of the revolution's success remains enormous as the conditions of the pre-revolutionary society in many ways still cast this shadow over a revolutionary period, meaning certain social structures and forms of consciousness remain. And the key word in this late chapter for you seems to be courage since the workers in spite of their victory struggle to find it in order to start building a new society. So can you tell us a bit about the challenges Lenin was encountering at this late period in his life?
Yeah, I mean, one of the things that jumped out at me in reading Lenin is everyone talks about consciousness in Lenin and throughout the revolutionary years, you find references to the courage of the proletariat almost as frequently as references to consciousness. And I think what Lenin means there is not just the physical courage needed to get on the barricades and withstand hails of bullets or you go out into the field where you don't know where death might be stalking you. I think it refers also to the moral courage to take part in politics without any certainty of winning and without any certainty, even of being right. Indeed, even that you are not making a mistake that might be regarded as a crime, executing an innocent hostage or treating someone as a landlord who isn't or those sorts of things are inevitable in revolutionary transformations.
And they have to be done. And I think the idea of, and so in a sense, the idea of courage becomes part of what's meant by consciousness or the kind of consciousness that Lenin hopes to encourage in the working class movement more broadly in the working people. And I think there's a couple of things that enhance the importance of them. One, we don't and can't have, like we have all kinds of ideas.
We have them from Marx, we have them from the documents of the German Social Democratic Party. Now we have them from the experience of various countries and a lot of Marx, we have all kinds of ideas about what we might like to implement in society. But guess what? We're going to have to implement them with a whole bunch of other people and we're going to have to implement them under circumstances that we don't fully know and about which we might have mistakes and we have to rely on, we will encounter one way or another the perspectives of people who we haven't heard from because the institutions that we're operating through and that we're still operating through, even after an initial conquest of power, because people's voices are silenced or held back by that.
So we can't change everything at once in accordance with the blueprint because that involves every one changing and everyone can't change everything all at once. So we will need to live with the imprint of bourgeois social relations and institutions, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. We will maybe even, we will have to live with because we may not know how to operate factories or algorithms or the technology of production right away. We may need to rely on the experience of people who have little or no sympathy with the transformation that we're trying to affect and may indeed try to undermine them.
And that sets us up with some difficult choices and it sets us up with some choices that are not obvious, that have no obvious answer about which there may be deep disagreements. And so we have to have the courage to face those. And the second feature that enhances the problematic nature of this is that this isn't just a debate about this is a debate that involves the use of state power as much as possible. One would like that to be a state which is in process of withering away, i.e.
that it's forcible aspects kind of wither into the community of workers so that it turns into something like the force of public approval, something like that. But we're using force against people and we might be wrong and that's kind of scary and for a lot of reasons but some of which have to do with the reign of bourgeois hegemony, people would rather not do that. They have to overcome that reluctance. They have to have the courage to act on merely relative knowledge which may turn out to be wrong.
So yeah, courage is actually, I think, quite central and it's not central to, I would argue, because if one understands hegemony as a situation in which there are competing pajamas and if one understands that there's no absolute desperate hopeless situation for the bourgeoisie, it will always try to invent a way forward under the circumstances which involves recasting its hegemony and re-jigging the institutions in which bourgeois social relations are, I don't know, organized an experience. There's always going, there's always going to be that struggle, not just in relatively backward countries like a rhetoric ego or a China but in any socialist revolution. Yeah, pulling us to the end of the book, in the final chapter you look at a number of different theorists to understand the possible changes in material conditions that organizers and activists today are going to have to wrestle with. Well, this could easily be a whole new book in its own right.
I'm wondering if you could give us some closing remarks on how this reworked theory of hegemony as well as this reworked reading of Lenin might help organizers and activists think more critically about how to operate within the material coordinates of our present moment a century after Lenin for all forms of emancipation. Well, you're right, that could be another book. But I guess, when I was finishing up the book and maybe for a couple of years afterwards, there was a lot of, there was a lot of talk about we need a new vision or we need a new utopia, right? That's what we need in order to pull the left together.
And I guess what I would say is that's exactly what we don't need, which is not to say we don't need references to what disorder that aspect of a socialist society might look like. But we have tons of those, right? And they will be coming. What we shouldn't do is conceive our unity as depending upon agreement on some kind of vision.
Unity is going to be built out of struggles. And I guess one thing that I would add, it seems to me in terms of thinking of the unity of the working class movement or popular movements, it has become common to think of that and people are emphasizing activism, activity, courage, using to think that unity as a kind of subject. And throughout the book, I suggest that the metaphor of a subject for the unity of a movement needs to be displaced or at least complimented the idea of a community. Another way of putting this might need to say the kind of consensus we need is a kind of overlap in consensus.
I'm kind of shame-facedly borrowing that term from John Rawls. That is to say a consensus in which there's no one thing that everyone agrees upon. Except perhaps the fact that we're in the struggle over things that we're now practically seeking to accomplish together. And it's kind of building that, it's through building that, that unity will come.
And to a certain extent, the idea of a new vision kind of tends to distract us from the need to attend to the specifics of the concrete struggles that face us today. So I guess what I'm saying is that in terms of the two aspects of consciousness or self-consciousness that I distinguished earlier, intentionality and reflexiveness, that perhaps what we need is more emphasis on reflexiveness in our understanding of a reality. And I guess I would say by the way, the fact that Lenin's emphasis was firmly on the concrete circumstances is not, I think, to be understood as nearly an opportunistic pragmatism, but rather as involving a rather deep sense that the struggles of today will grow into and are growing into a socialist revolution, a socialist transformation of society. Yeah, well that brings us through most of the whole book.
So as a final question, what, if anything, are you working on now? I'm thinking about a book. I don't know whether it will be a book or a series of essays proceeding roughly under the title, Lenin Turns East. And that is seeing, and this is maybe a way of thinking of Lenin as relevant now.
Like I did an interview with an Iranian-labored journal a couple of years ago, and they asked me whether I thought revolution was possible. And I'm not satisfied. I said revolution is inevitable. What I think I should have said is revolution is ongoing.
We just don't know how to recognize it because we're expecting something that isn't shaped by the circumstances of a Cuba, of Vietnam, of a China, of an Eritrea, and so on and so forth. Revolution is same place largely in the third world, and towards the end of his life, and even before that, Lenin had turned towards that movement, and it suggested that socialist revolutions will take different forms than we have ever expected. And I guess I want to explore that. Yeah, I could see how that would work as kind of a spiritual sequel to this one.
So Alan Shandro, thank you so much for being with us. It's been my pleasure.