By: Gil Schaeffer

Gil Schaeffer — Mon, 09 Aug 2021 21:09:02 +0000

I would like to draw readers’ attention to two articles I have written in reply to the historical and strategic interpretations of Eric Blanc and his associates at Jacobin magazine: “The Curious Case of the ‘Democratic Road to Socialism’ that Wasn’t There” (New Politics magazine, 4-24-2020) and “Lenin and the ‘Class Point of View'” (Cosmonaut magazine, 12-2-2020). These articles do not defend either Leninism or what Blanc calls the strategy of insurrection. Instead, they focus on both Kautsky’s and Lenin’s writings prior to 1918 on the democratic republic as the primary strategic political goal of Marxism, insurrection being just one possible political tactic that might be necessary to achieve that goal. I include 1917 because even in “State and Revolution” Lenin did not abandon the goal of a democratic republic as a strategic political objective. Despite writing in one place that “A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism,” in the fourth paragraph from the end Lenin wrote, “We, however, shall break with the opportunists; and the class-conscious proletariat will be with us in the fight- not to shift ‘the balance of forces’, but to overthrow the bourgeoisie, to destroy bourgeois parliamentarism, for a democratic republic after the type of the Commune, or a republic of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, for the dictatorship of the proletariat.” Here Lenin still held to the classic Marxist distinction between a democratically stunted parliamentary republic and a genuine democratic republic, a distinction most fully elaborated by Kautsky in 1905 in “The Republic and Social-Democracy in France.” Blanc does not discuss the implications of this distinction in Kautsky’s or Lenin’s pre-1918 writings and mistakenly asserts that Kautsky always believed that the working class had first to secure a majority under any parliamentary regime, no matter how undemocratic its structure. Kautsky only adopted this purely parliamentary position after 1909, a historical dividing line that Blanc originally acknowledged but now neglects. Even though I generally agree with Blanc’s criticisms of post-1918 Leninist conceptions of history and theory, his interpretation of the pre-1918 Kautsky and Lenin is incomplete and inadequate.

By: Larry140

Larry140 — Mon, 09 Aug 2021 19:33:20 +0000

The working class cannot merely lay hands on the bourgeois state and use it for its own purposes. It must smash that state to pieces and erect its own. This includes parliaments. The soviets were a replacement state, ready to go. Kautsky did not respect Marx’s judgment about the working class’s relation to the bourgeois state after the experience of the Paris Commune. I wonder what Eric Blanc says about The State and Revolution? Is this explanation by Lenin not valid?

Comments on: Socialists Should Take the Right Lessons from the Russian Revolution

By: Gil Schaeffer

By: Larry140