Page 3 of 5 THE SHAPE OF US POPULISM, Part 6 The birth of the New Deal By Henry C K Liu
described as "the ideology of Russia’s peasant democrats". (On Narodism,
Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1975 Moscow, Volume 18, pp 524-528)
Lenin wrote: "The theory of Narodism is the theory of the bourgeois
white-washing of capitalism with the aid of catchwords like ‘labor economy’; it
is a theory which plays down, obscures and hinders the class struggle by means
of these very same catchwords, by advocating restriction of the mobilization of
the land, and so forth. ... Narodism stands for bourgeois democracy
in Russia." (The Bourgeois Intelligentsia's Methods of Struggle against the
Workers, V I Lenin, Collected Works, 4th English Edition, Progress
Publishers, Moscow, 1964 Vol. 20, pp 455-86)
Narodism arose in Russia after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 under Tsar
Alexander II, which signaled the coming end of the feudal age in Russia. This
coincided with the US Civil War, which began in 1861. Noticing that freed serfs
were being sold into wage slavery in which the bourgeoisie had replaced
landlords, Narodism aimed to become the political force of populism to counter
regressive developments in Russia.
Narodniks rallied in response to the growing conflicts between the peasantry
and the prosperous kulaks (rich large farm owners) who hired peasant labor to
work their properties. Narodniks generally aimed nostalgically to reverse
modern agricultural capitalism back to primitive agricultural socialism by
opposing industrialization. By rejecting industrial socialism as a goal, they
rejected industrial capitalism as its prerequisite. Russian Norodism had common
threads with US populist communal agrarianism. Both resisted industrialization
due to its socioeconomic consequences.
Narodniks viewed the peasantry as the revolutionary class that would overthrow
feudal monarchism and identified the village commune as the embryo of
agricultural socialism. However, they believed that the peasantry would not
achieve revolution on their own, and that history could only be made by heroic
leaders. Narodnik writers, such as Vasilij Voroncov, called for the Russian
intelligentsia to "bestir itself from the mental lethargy into which, in
contrast to the sensitive and lively years of the 1870’s it had fallen; and to
formulate a scientific theory of Russian economic development". The upper-class
Narodnik intelligentsia needed to provide a concrete system of economic ideals
and goals that would uphold the paramount importance of the village commune.
These writers called for immediate movement towards revolutionary action that
went beyond philosophical and political discussion.
In the conclusion of What Is To Be Done? - written between the end of
1901 and early 1902, Lenin divided the history of Russian Social Democracy into
three periods. The first period spanned a decade from 1884 to 1894, a time of
embryonic development of the theory and program of Social Democracy in the
absence of a working class movement. This period coincided with that of
populism in the US.
The second period embraced four years, from 1894 to 1898, during which Social
Democracy appeared as a social movement from an upsurge of the masses to become
a political party. The third period was "a period of disunity, dissolution, and
vacillation, and the voice of Russian Social Democracy began to break, to
strike a false note." This period coincides with that of the co-option of
populism into the two-party system in US politics.
Lenin wrote that ...
... it was only the leaders who wandered about
separately and drew back; the Social Democracy movement itself continued to
grow, and it advanced with enormous strides. The proletarian struggle spread to
new strata of the workers and extended to the whole of Russia, at the same time
indirectly stimulating the revival of the democratic spirit among the students
and among other sections of the population. The political consciousness of the
leaders, however, capitulated before the breadth and power of the spontaneous
upsurge; among the Social Democrats, another type had become dominant – the
type of functionaries, trained almost exclusively on 'legal Marxist'
literature, which proved to be all the more inadequate the more the spontaneity
of the masses demanded political consciousness on the part of the leaders. The
leaders not only lagged behind in regard to theory ("freedom of criticism") and
practice ("primitiveness"), but they sought to justify their backwardness by
all manner of high-flown arguments. Social Democracy was degraded to the level
of trade-unionism by the Brentano adherents in legal literature, and by the
tail-enders in illegal literature.
Lujo Brentano (1844-1931),
the German bourgeois economist and author of a variety of bourgeois distortion
of Marxism known as Brentanoism, advocated "social peace" in capitalist
society, the possibility of overcoming the social contradictions of capitalism
without resorting to class struggle, maintaining that the solution of the
working-class problem lay in the organization of reformist trade unions and the
introduction of pro-labor legislation and that the interests of workers and
capitalists could be reconciled.
A theory analogous to that of Brentanoism was propounded in Russia by the chief
representative of "legal Marxism", P B Struve, in an attempt to use Marxism in
the interests of the bourgeoisie. Lenin pointed out that "Struveism" takes
"from Marxism all that is acceptable to the liberal bourgeoisie and rejects its
living soul, its revolutionary nature. Struve ascribed to capitalism aims that
were foreign to it, namely the fullest satisfaction of man’s needs; he invited
people to learn from capitalism and openly advocated Malthusian ideas."
According to Lenin, Struve was the "great master of renegacy, who, darting with
opportunism, with 'criticism of Marx', ended in the ranks of
counter-revolutionary bourgeois national-liberalism".
Lenin observed that the "Credo program" had been put in operation when the
"primitive methods" of the Social Democrats caused a revival of revolutionary
non-Social Democratic tendencies. Proponents of economism, or opportunism,
grouped around the "program Credo", written in 1899 by Y D Kuskova. Economism,
a Russian variety of international opportunism, was an opportunist trend in
Russian Social Democracy at the turn of the 20th century. It limited the tasks
of the working class movement to the economic struggle for higher wages, better
working conditions and so forth, asserting that the political struggle was the
affair of the liberal bourgeoisie. They denied the leading role of the party of
the working class, considering that it should merely observe the spontaneous
development of the movement and record events.
According to Lenin, deferring to the "spontaneity" of the working-class
movement, economism belittled the importance of revolutionary theory and
class-consciousness, and claimed that socialist ideology could develop from the
spontaneous working-class movement. Adherents of economism denied the necessity
for bringing socialist consciousness into the working-class movement from
without, by the Marxist party, and thus, they actually cleared the way for
bourgeois ideology.
They championed the existing scattered, isolated study circles with their
parochial amateurish approach, encouraged disunity in the Social Democratic
ranks, and opposed the creation of a centralized working class party. Economism
threatened to turn the working class away from the path of class, revolutionary
struggle, and to convert it into a political appendage of the bourgeoisie. Thus
Bernstein's famous opportunist statement: "The movement is everything, the
final aim is nothing." The Credo of 1899 advocated that workers should confine
themselves to the economic struggle, leaving the political struggle to the
liberals.
Lenin concluded that scientific socialism ceased to be an integral
revolutionary theory and became a hodgepodge "freely" diluted with the content
of every new German textbook that appeared; the slogan "class struggle" did not
impel to broader and more energetic activity but served as a balm, since "the
economic struggle is inseparably linked with the political struggle"; the idea
is formed of a party did not serve as a call for the creation of a militant
organization of revolutionaries, but was used to justify some sort of
"revolutionary bureaucracy" and infantile playing at "democratic". Thus Lenin
proclaimed: "we may meet the question, ‘What is to be done?’ with the brief
reply: Put an end to the Third Period [of Social Democracy in Russia]."
Bernstein and the revisionists were opposed by all prominent figures of the
orthodox Marxism: Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Georgy Plekhanov and others. But the
orthodox response was not uniform and itself was transformed in the ensuing
debate. Kautsky first replied that there was no theory of breakdown in Marx's
work on capitalism, and in 1902 he acknowledged there was a theory of "chronic
depression", not a big-bang breakdown, but rather one that stressed the
increasing severity of recurrent crises.
In 1913, Rosa Luxemburg argued that it was not obvious what Marxist
"surplus-accumulation" was supposed to achieve, particularly if would come a
point when there would be nobody to buy more goods produced by expanded
production and thus realize further surplus. In her critique of the Marxist
worldview, Luxemburg argued that crisis is only inevitable in a closed system,
but that in an open system (that is, a system with exogenous consumption), the
crises can be averted by obtaining new buyers in non-capitalist pre-industrial
countries.
Imperialism, she argued, was the competition of capitalist nations for
precisely these consumers. Beginning in the 1990s, globalization of trade and
finance provided market capitalism with an expanded open system. Two decades
later, the open system is showing signs of reaching its limits to once again
become a closed system. Crisis then again becomes inevitable.
Modern-day German Populism
German president Horst K๖hler, former managing director of the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) taking on a populist tone, expressed in a
Stern magazine interview published on May 15, 2008, the contempt among German
politicians towards bankers as a result of the current credit crisis. He
likened bankers to "alchemists", accusing them of "massive destruction of
assets" and described global financial markets as "a monster" that urgently
needed reining in.
Public opinion polls in Germany have shown the public as increasingly viewing
big business as unwilling to share its profits with the general population,
resulting in rising prices and stagnant wages. Such public opinion has
emboldened trade unions in their quest for record wage settlements this year.
This has led to an escalation in industrial action and persuaded many
politicians, including members of the government, to back higher pay claims.
Bukharin, Bush and the Revisionist Debate
Both Lenin in 1916 and Nikolai Bukharin in 1917 disagreed with Luxemburg's
theory and provided their own view of imperialism. Imperialism, they argued, is
the outcome of capitalist competition for profit derived from rents, not
necessarily the outcome of crisis avoidance, even though that might be the
result. They regarded the First World War precisely as a "hot" version of
competitive capitalism.
Today, the second Bush administration's neo-conservative "transformational"
foreign policy to "enlarge" capitalistic democracy in the world as a strategy
to prevent war is based on the questionable assumption that democratic nation
states do not wage war on each other, a myth created by Winston Churchill to
mask the two World Wars, both conflicts caused by a challenge on the British
Empire by a rising Germany, as a moral struggle between the Democracies and
Fascist states. German expansionism did not begin with the Nazis. It was a key
cause of World War I.
Churchill was merely waving the democracy flag to induce an ideological US to
side with Britain against a rising Germany again in World War II. There was no
democracy in the non-white colonies of the British Empire.
Bukharin, editor of Pravda, was regarded as the foremost theoretician of the
Russian Bolshevism in its early years and a promoter of the "sociological"
approach to Marxist theory championed by Austro-Marxists. Yet his 1917 book
contained an attack on the Austro-Marxist School. Bukharin as leader of the
left opposed Russia’s withdrawal from the war but later sided with Lenin.
His 1918 piece on imperialism was written soon after Lenin's 1916 pamphet:
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. In 1920 Bukharin wrote The ABC of
Communism. He was the main promoter of the New Economic Plan (NEP) in
the USSR, which emphasized small-scale peasant farming and the use of market
incentives in a socialist context. After Lenin's death in 1924, Bukharin became
a full member of the Politburo, and the president of the Third Communist
International (Comintern) in 1926.
Despite his internationalist tendencies, Bukharin elaborated on the thesis of
"Socialism in one country" put forth by Stalin in 1924, which argued that
socialism, the transitional stage from capitalism to communism, could be
developed in a single country, even one as underdeveloped as Russia. This new
theory stated that revolution need no longer be encouraged in the capitalist
countries, since Russia could and should achieve socialism alone. The thesis
became the central theme of Stalinism. The Cold War was as much a conflict of
superpower expansion as a struggle to contain communist expansion. Bukharin was
purged for his opposition to collectivization by Stalinists in the trials of
1938 and subsequently executed.
The revisionist debate energized a group of Viennese lawyers and scholars known
as the Austro-Marxists, including Max Adler, Otto Bauer, Rudolf Hilferding and
Karl Renner. Renner focused on the problem of nationality and the sociology of
law. His 1904 text remains the classic Marxian work on the role of law in
society. During World War I, Renner broke with the left wing of the Austrian
Social Democrats represented by Bauer and attempted a re-orientation of Marxian
thought to account for the rise of white-collar workers and the growth of the
State. Renner was the first Chancellor of the Austrian Republic in 1918 and
President of Austria in 1945.
After the failure of the German Revolution of 1918, which led to the end of the
imperial system and the establishment of a republic, revolutionary goals
inspired by socialist ideas failed. While all socialist were republicans, not
all republicans were socialists. In January 1919, the leadership of the Social
Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands - SPD),
Germany's oldest political party - founded by August Bebel and Wilhelm
Liebknecht, whose Gotha Program was criticized by Marx in his Critique of the
Gotha Program - resisted socialist policies.
Fearing an all-out civil war, the SPD leadership, in line with other
middle-class parties, rejected the complete stripping of the old imperial
elites of their power. Instead they sought reconciliation with them under a new
democratic framework. In this endeavor, they sought alliance with the army and
allowed the Freikorps (nationalist militias) to suppress the "Spartakist"
uprising by force. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, leaders of the
Spartakist, were captured in Berlin on January 15, 1919, by the Freikorps
Garde-Kavallerie-Schtzendivision, tortured and shot. The German
socialist revolution formally came to an end with the adoption of the new
Weimar Constitution on August 11, 1919.
While revisionists opted to justify their new-found position and to alleviate
the fears of the middle classes, by embracing the revisionist idea of socialism
being a "conscious choice" of the
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