LIONEL ABEL
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deauthenticate Lenin morally. Certainly Lenin was responsible, along
with Trotsky, for the crime of
Kronstadt,
the pilot massacre in the long
series of executions, one of whose latest episodes, "Tiananmen Square,"
we were able to watch on June 3rd of 1989, appropriately enough on
television.
Lenin was - or thought himself to be - an orthodox Marxist. But
is Marxism
in any sense
a moral doctrine? To those who regard it as such,
Lenin, as things stand now, can hardly be an exemplary figure; he can
remain a hero, however, to those who have always regarded Marxist in–
dignation against capitalism and imperialism as so much political propa–
ganda, possibly poetry of a sort. So before trying to judge Lenin morally,
one must answer this question: in what sense is Marxism moral?
Professor Kai Nielson, the author of a philosophical work,
Why
Be
Moral?,
tried to answer this question in the Fall 1989 issue of
Social Re–
search.
His article is entitled, "Arguing for Justice," and this is just what
Marxists, according to Professor Nielson, are arguing for. Let me say at
once that his discussion of the issue is a thoroughly academic one. I feel
entitled
to
say this in criticism, because Professor Nielson has shown that
he is fully aware of the insufficiency of academic argument on a political
matter of this kind. To do him justice, when he condemned American
foreign policy during our war with North Vietnam, he did not restrict
himself to academic argument but actually renounced his American citi–
zenship and betook himself to Canada, in one of whose colder
provinces, Calgary, he is now teaching philosophy. Now to show in
nonacademic fashion that Marxism argues for justice, Nielson would not
have had to go anywhere: certainly he would not have had to leave
Calgary for an even colder province. But he would have had to face up
to a very warm political fact, namely that leading Marxists - and I in–
clude among them the compassionate and ethically-minded Rosa
Luxemburg - have argued
against
the idea of justice.
It
was Rosa who
called justice "that old Rosinante, on which our Don Quixotes ride
forth to save the world, only to come back with their eyes blackened,"
which is hardly something to say about justice if what you are doing is
to be called "arguing" for it.
According to Nielson, Marxism argues for justice in this sense; it
condemns the capitalist's profit, which it claims has been subtracted from
the worker's wage, and should properly be called "theft." Should not
"theft" be condemned in the name of justice? Quite so. But what Niel–
son has failed to note is that Marx's objection to the capitalist profit was
linked conceptually by him with the prediction that the system entailing
it was going to founder, and that its end was already in sight. Were it
not - such is my reading of Marx - capitalist wages might be objected
