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PARTISAN REVIEW
of History, and History has chosen the proletariat to become the agent of
productive forces which will overcome the capitalist mode of production and
create the New Society, socialist first and Communist when it has fully ma–
tured.
The parties formed in the name of the
Communist Manifesto
liked to
threaten the powers that be with the inevitability of their downfall and the
victory of socialism, but they were never strictly Marxist. It would actually
be rather difficult to set up a trade union or a political party on the assump–
tion that such movements are mere puppets of great impersonal forces. To
have history on one's side - rather, to hear leaders tell one that this is the
case - may sound encouraging to some, but an un-Marxian element of
voluntarism crept into the socialist movement from the start. In England it
was dominant from the Chartists to the Fabians and further to the Labour
Party. With the formation of parties and a growing belief in their capacity to
change things here and now came Social Democracy, that is, the grudging yet
sincere acceptance of the rules of the open society. Versions of positivism
entered into a curious marriage with socialism. By 1914 liberalism may have
died, but socialism was alive and kicking in the democracies of Europe, and its
parliamentary representatives voted for the war loans of their respective
governments just as proletarians of all countries went to war against each
other instead of uniting behind the red flag.
The events of 1917 do not mark just another stage of the same de–
velopment. While Lenin obviously belonged in the tradition to which I have
alluded here with almost frivolous lightness, the framework of his analysis
owes little if anything to the growth of Social Democracy in Europe, a great
deal to uniquely Russian traditions, and an important impetus to Marx. The
reason for this particular debt is in many ways perverse, because it derives
from an error of theory and of history which needs to be exposed.
As
you
know, Marx tried to link the struggle of classes to underlying socioeconomic
forces. The suppressed class draws its strength as well as its rhetoric from
forces of production which are held back by the ruling class and by the mode
of production which it represents. Marx needed the conflation of politics and
economics to make the case for the inexorable march of History, but he had
little history to go on. Some kind of class struggle had (perhaps) provided
ammunition for the French Revolution; the Industrial Revolution can
(probably) be described as the unavoidable removal of an older mode of
production in order to make way for the new forces of technology, enter–
prise, and wage labor. The two revolutions, however, did not happen in the
same place or at the same time, except in the books of Marx and Engels,
where the revolt of the Third Estate and the breakthrough of industrial pro–
duction were superimposed by the strokes of two pens.
Marx was more interested in the revolution of the future than in those
of the past. However, his theory in all its abstract splendor made little sense
