410
PARTISAN REVIEW
Russia that destroyed (compromised) socialism-as Pipes and, earlier,
Max Weber put it-or rather was it revolutionary socialism that,
because of its political, indeed, metaphysical hubris imposed immense
sufferings on Russia? Thus, objecting to young Georg Lukacs's celebra–
tion of Lenin's takeover of power in Russia, Weber insisted on the
impossibility of building up the socialism Karl Marx had envisioned in
the absence of genuine capitalist, bourgeois, market developments.
"It
is with good reason," he wrote, "that the
Communist Manifesto
empha–
sized the
economically revolutionary
character of the bourgeois capital–
ist entrepreneurs. No trade unions, much less state-socialist officials,
can perform this role for us in their place." Before many later critics of
Sovietism, Weber concluded that the Leninist experiment would dis–
credit socialism for the entire twentieth century.
The debate on Leninism bears upon the possibility of radical–
emancipatory practice and the need to reconstruct areas of autonomy in
opposition to the logic of instrumental rationality. The burning question
remains whether such efforts are predestined to end up in new coercive
undertakings, or, rather, Leninism was a peculiar, sui generis combina–
tion of Marxism and an underdeveloped political and economic struc–
ture. Indeed, the defeat of "world revolution," the main strategic
postulate on which Lenin had built his whole revolutionary adventure,
made the rise of Stalinism a sociological and political necessity. Here we
may remember Isaac Deutscher's analysis:
Under Lenin, Bolshevism had been accustomed to appeal to the
reason, the self-interest, and the enlightened idealism of "c1ass–
conscious" industrial workers.
It
spoke the language of reason even
when it appealed to the
muzhiks.
But once Bolshevism had ceased
to
rely on revolution in the West, once it had lost the sense of its
elevation above its native environment, once it had become aware
that it could only fall back on that environment and dig itself in, it
began
to
descend to the level of primitive magic, and
to
appeal to
the people in the language of that magic.
How does one make sense of the fact that unlike all other East Euro–
pean societies, Russia is the only one that seems unable to restore the
pre-communist traditions and parties? Where are the SR, Kadets, Men–
shevisks, even Bolsheviks? The answer is that, whatever one says or
thinks about the final disintegration of Leninism, it was a quite suc–
cessful experiment in reshaping political community according to a cer–
tain interpretation of social science. As Louis Althusser once put it,
