Hans-Jürgen Krahl: Notes on Lenin's What Is To Be Done
Hans-Jürgen Krahl: Notes on Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? (1967)
from Konstitution und Klassenkampf: Zur historischen Dialektik von bürgerlichen Emanzipation und proletarischer Revolution. Schriften und Reden 1966-1970. pp. 159-161. 5th Edition 2008, originally published 1971. Verlag Neue Kritik.
(Constitution and Class Struggle: On the Historical Dialectic of Bourgeois Emancipation and Proletarian Revolution. Writings and Talks 1966-1970)
Lenin, in his polemic against the economists, presents the struggle against repression as the place where repression concretely comes into view [zu Erscheinung] [1]. To prepare this struggle falls to the political pedagogy of specialized propagandists and agitators, who have to enlighten the blind spontaneity of the movement and communicate the mature autonomy of the self-liberating proletariat. Propagandists and agitators communicate the theory on material violence, keeping the organized [political] base abreast of current events; criminological "comprehensive political exposures" apply this theory. The propagandist inductively ties the derivative, reified appearance of capitalist social formations back to their essential, objective position in the production process through journal articles, political tracts, and pamphlets, while the agitator deductively demonstrates to the masses the essential elements of the capitalist mode of production from their appearances as repression, domination, and crisis. The organization of comprehensive political exposures treats these appearances as evidence of deeds which they have caught the character-masks which function as the ruling class in the act of carrying out; abstract domination is re-personalized, and the moral and political disgust of the masses directly coincide.
Lenin however reworks [funktioniert um] the late-bourgeois anti-enlightenment ideology of elites and masses into something revolutionary (Nietzsche: Overman – Herd animals, Weber: Charismatic leader – masses). To his concept of agitation belongs [the theory] that the masses autonomously retrace from their own experience that which the vanguard-strategists communicate to them, namely the concrete experience of abstract domination. This takes place using the personalizing procedure of criminology, which was possible then in still feudal Russia: The vanguard-strategists have (thoroughly moralistic) “exposures” to provide about what the ruling class plots, and they must “catch them in the act” in order to rile up the masses.
This theory of organization shows the regressive course of history: During the competitive capitalism of Marx and Engels, class struggle was a fact of everyday life, [but] in the imperialist stage of self-monopolizing capitalism it must first be constituted (The Mass Strike by Rosa Luxemburg). Lenin can act on the assumption of the existence of a vanguard of consciousness; his problem is that of agitation. Today we are referred back to the constitution of consciousness-groups which could once take over the function of the vanguard strategy.
It is not only because the material vital world of need is separated from the emancipatory vital one, and physical immiseration has been sublimated into psychic [immiseration], that moral and political protest have fallen apart. Domination and repression, translated by means of propagandistic and agitational personalizing exposures into the practical experience of the masses, want to bring the essence into appearance [2]. The exponentiation and expansion of abstract labor—the real fiction that manipulatively provides exchange value with the character of use value—permits no more personalizing revelations of abstract domination. The masked faces have disappeared behind the character-masks, the persons behind the functionaries. The denunciation of things, how they appear as commodities, and of institutions takes the place of exposing the character-masks. With the advanced integration of the masses, above all the working class, through the potentization of abstract domination in the system of expanding abstract labor, the degree of abstraction in propaganda and agitation has also increased. Students and schoolchildren are presently more open to such abstraction, since they are more capable of learning and educational processes, of reflection and experience, and therefore of criticism. The mode of agitation naturally concretizes to the extent that repression is still experienced as physical compulsion (Black Power). Lenin’s position on terrorism rested on the revolutionary pedagogy that raises the masses to activity, i.e., their spontaneous movement towards autonomous liberation on the ground of exposures of concrete manifestations of autocratic systems of repression, violence, and domination. Where these conditions, which indicate the classic relation between leadership and mass-base, are no longer present, revolutionary propaganda and agitation must be differently organized. The political education of the masses must start earlier. Agitational mediation of abstract rule, which can no longer be personalized on fungible character-masks, can only take place in a sensibly manifest protest movement. This indeed confirms the much-bemoaned break between theory and practice; on the other side is the course of action between theoretical abstracta and political action when they are not fully mediated with regard to content and therefore shortened in actuality.
Lenin’s formula that political consciousness could only be introduced into the working class from outside demonstrates the insight that political consciousness can only be formed from experiencing the link between economic and extra-economic relations of force [3]. Economistic practice rigidly separates the economic from the political struggle und through this rejects the cataclysmic practice of the revolution in favor of that of reform. Because economist practice only encompasses the trade-union activity of the proletariat, the political [practice] however [only encompasses] the alliance of Marxist intellectuals and liberals. The mere economic struggle integrates the masses into economic relations of domination and forces them into apathy towards extra-economic force. Reformism has contributed to the destruction of political categories of perception and the ignorance towards manifestations of brutalization in all areas of social life.
[1]: Lenin, Selected Works: Volume 1. p. 164
[2] This sentence is difficult to interpret. Here is the German original for reference:
Die durch propagandistische und agitatorisch erfolgende personalisierende Enthüllung in praktische Erfahrung der Massen umgesetzte Herrschaft und Unterdrückung will das Wesen zur Erscheinung bringen.
[3]: Late-bourgeois elements in Lenin’s theory of organization of his conception of a party of professional revolutionary cadres with privileged consciousness: the commonly accepted thesis that Lenin reduced the historical subject of revolutionary change, the proletariat, into an object is insufficient. His central problem was in fact that of Marx’s established postulate, that theory would have to become material force. How can theory be transformed into the consciousness of the masses? Does this mean that every proletarian becomes a critic of philosophy and political economy? To scientifically communicate the theory from such an academic socialist [kathedersozialistischer, literally “lectern socialist”] intention is Kautsky’s formula, that consciousness must be introduced into the masses from outside.
The part at the start of the second footnote doesn’t make any more sense in the German original: “Spätbürgerliche Elemente in der Leninschen Organisationstheorie seiner Parteikonzeption eines berufsrevolutionären Kaders von Bewusstseinsprivilegierten”