374
PARTISAN REVI, EW
of romantic .and idealistic gratuitousness in it which must be eliminated
before it can be brought into line with historical materialism.
To be sure, it is more hindsight than insight that now
enables us to gauge the fallacies in Bolshevik thinking. Under the
stress of action even the wisest and most devoted leaders are apt to
take short cuts and to follow the line of least resistance. Also, however
profound their consciousness, it is inexorably limited by the historical
situation which produced it. We would do well to recall Marx's
observation in the preface to the
Critique of Political Economy
that
"just as little as we form an opinion of an individual in accordance
with what he thinks of himself, just so little can we appraise a revo–
lutionary epoch in accordance with its own consciousness of itself."
I hope that the reader will not mistake my critical approach to
Leninism for that total negation of it which has of late become so
common among independent radicals. The political description of
such radicals cannot stop with the word "independent"; one must
also admit that they are disoriented; and in their search for a new
integration they will discover that an historical experience of the
magnitude of Leninism can neither be ignored nor rejected out of
hand in a mood of moral resentment and despair. I, for one, do not
sympathize with those ultra-left moralists whose program is not to
assimilate Leninism but simply to disgorge it. To return to the Utopian
origins of socialism will get us nowhere, or rather it will merely throw
us back to the pre-political stage of socialism. What distinguished the
socialist movement in that early stage was its creative
Schwiirmerei
or enthusiasm, in the old-fashioned sense of that term. Now it is much
too late for that. The politics that we oppose can be counteracted
only by the revitalized politics of democratic and libertarian socialism;
and the first lesson that we can learn from the Leninists is precisely
that there is no substitute for the instrumentalities of politics.
As
a
system of ideas Leninism has of course been deeply compromised by
the course that the Revolution has taken under Stalin; but it is
im–
permissible to forget that a line of blood separates the Leninist gene–
ration from Stalin and his accomplices. What is of value in Leninism
is its luminous and powerful will to socialist action, and also the
immediacy and daring of its theoretical inquiries into social reality.
What is to be repudiated is its denigration, at once so naive and
arrogant, of democratic processes, its reduction of moral discipline to
party discipline, and its generally authoritarian interpretation of
Marxist thought, an interpretation that breeds destructive attitudes
