Che Guevara
Stalinism, a
threat to the revolution
School
Introduction – 5th Session
This is the last of five prepared “openings to discussion”
for the school that is scheduled to begin tomorrow morning in Benoni. The other
four are (linked to the relevant blog-page):
Each of the five was originally chosen so as to problematise
a critical question. Each is linked to at least six reading texts that may be suitable
to serve as “codifications” and stimulate dialogue. The five prepared sets have
subsequently been adapted to accommodate those who may want to “break up into
workshops” on the basis of a further prescriptive division. Therefore each “opening”
is divided into three abstracted parts, plus a fourth potential part that would
potentially synthesise and restore the concrete wholeness of the original
question.
In practice, the school will discuss what it wants to discuss. Preparation is done with the aim of making critical dialogue possible.
More bourgeois
than the bourgeoisie
In the 4th session, based around Lenin’s “The
State and Revolution”, we saw that Lenin in 1917 conceived of the problem of
revolution as being in the realm of freedom. He treated the question of the
withering away of the state as a priority.
After the October, 1917 revolution Lenin survived for little
more than five active years, some of which time was passed in warfare against the
“White” reactionaries and their Imperialist allies. Lenin instituted the
principles of National Democratic
Revolution in the Communist International, and at home in the Soviet Union,
the New Economic Policy.
Lenin’s writings survive in great abundance. After Lenin,
the record is much more obscure. The late Cyril Smith, a former Trotskyist,
considered that Lenin was far in advance of the other Bolsheviks, but that none
of them, and particularly not Trotsky, had a sufficient command of philosophy
to be able to guide and lead the revolutionary processes that they had
unleashed.
If Smith’s view is correct, and notwithstanding his personal
aversion to Stalin, then it must follow that the problem of “Stalinism” was not
a Stalin problem, but was a general reversion to bourgeois thinking by all of
the Bolsheviks, except Lenin, who in any case died at the beginning of 1924
after a year of serious illness. This reversion was not so much to a reliance
on the State as such, but to reliance on a State that was a resuscitation of
the bourgeois State. This resurrected State contained the germ or DNA of
bourgeoisdom, long before the fact of actual bourgeois restoration some sixty
years on.
This kind of reversion has infected other communist parties
at different times, and quite commonly in the name of anti-Stalinism, or
Euro-communism, trends which managed to be more Stalinist than the alleged
Stalinists they attacked.
For all that, the phenomenon is real. In South Africa, the
SACP is relatively, but not completely, free of dogmatism and utilitarian
objectivism. The mass movements and the mass organisations of the working
class, however, remain at risk.
Problematisation
How can South Africa be guarded against the “revolution
eating its own children”? Is it the case that political education is the thin
line that stands between the revolution and its own reversal? How can political
education itself be safeguarded from authority, dogmatism and indoctrination?
The
NDR
In the “Communist Manifesto” Marx writes of a “vast
association of the whole nation” in which “the free development of each is the
condition for the free development of all”
The principal documents of the South African
National Democratic Revolution are in keeping with this vision of Karl Marx’s.
The purpose of the National Democratic Revolution
is to develop the collective power of the people through organisation at every
level and from border to border of the nation.
As Lenin pointed out, and which we have already
quoted, the greater the democracy, the closer will be the moment when it
becomes possible to transcend the state of democracy and to enter the post-state
realm of full human freedom.
The bourgeois aspect of the state is its reversion
to authority, whereas the direction of the true proletarian revolution is
towards freedom and the full redundancy of the state, to be replaced by fully
human life without class conflict.
Problematisation
Using the two given documents, Strategy and
Tactics, and SA Working class and the NDR, can it be shown that the on-going
revolution is assured? If these documents have become antiquarian and without
living support, then how can we revive their revolutionary character and
currency?
Freedom
The bottom line is always freedom, or “power to the
people”. To paraphrase Christopher Caudwell, we are communists because we
believe in freedom.
Freedom is the power of “The Subject”. Freedom is
“agency”. Freedom is “free will”. Human freedom must first be individual, but it
must also be social, or collective. Freedom is humanism.
The discourse of freedom runs through the entire
literature of historical human culture. Shadowing it has always been its
irrational, anti-human opponent, the consequence of class-divided society’s
necessity to justify its unjust existence and to rationalise the irrational.
Gramsci, in his last, unfinished piece of writing
before his incarceration (Some Aspects of the Southern Question) managed to
synthesise the questions of class struggle, human intellectual leadership,
culture and freedom.
James Heartfield, confronting the irrational
post-modernists who are still our contemporaries, though weaker than before,
succeeded in reminding readers of the titanic struggle between rational
humanism, of which Marxism is the vanguard, and the irrational fatalism that
suits the degenerate Imperialist bourgeoisie of today.
Ron Press, more lucid and candid than both of
these, though no less profound, manages to shine a light forward so that his
readers can see that freedom is the stable choice. Mathematically as well as in
terms of political science, freedom turns out to be the resting condition of
humanity, and its rule rather than its exception.
Problematisation
How to propagate freedom? How to do so in the
masses, and how to do so in the structures.
Synthesis
All our struggles are not the same, but the struggle for
freedom is common to all other struggles. Caudwell said that freedom is the
good that contains all other goods.
How can this understanding, this enthusiasm, be revived?
The struggle for freedom is ours. How can we retain it and
prevent others from stealing the clothes of the freedom fighters, when they are
not freedom fighters at all?
Amilcar Cabral
