All the hegemony you can eat

The way things have been if I don’t see another buttressing quote from either Lenin, Luxemburg or Tony Cliff for a long while I will be happy. So, in that spirit, let’s talk about Lenin!

One thing I have been adamant about for some time is that the revolutionary party was not Lenin’s key innovation. Firstly, even if he intended to found “The Bolsheviks” he did not intend his party to be a new party. He was trying to found a Russian SPD. Many Communist Parties were not made brand news but founded out of Socialist Party majorities. Despite instants of political hardship (not least of which was Hitler’s invasion of Europe) from the mid-twenties onward the CP was a realistic means for a political career. Lenin intended for the Third International to be revolutionary parties, but being in this case is only the same as doing.

Lenin’s real innovation was his discussion of nationalities. The 20^th century was in many ways the story of revolutionary nationalism. Lenin was so perceptive he was couple of decades ahead of everybody else, including the actual movements. This is important though, what we are talking about here is Lenin the ‘autonomist’, the man who pointed to an expanded revolutionary subject. His particular concern was linking the workers movement in the Russian heartland with the national movements in the outlying countries of the Tsar’s empire. But there are broader applications.

Firstly we are discussing the matter of hegemony. How do movements against aspects of capitalism become movements against capitalism itself? We’re talking not just movements against occupation or imperialism but for civil rights, women’s liberation, LGBT liberation and so on.

But, more importantly, we’re talking about how we build a working class movement in the first place. Wage labour and subsequent exploitation is based on the separation of workers from the means of production. This is an excellent founding fact but too abstract as a basis for day to day politics. People’s living and working conditions are defined by much more than this, by gender, nationality, sexuality, race and so on. We look both for weaknesses in the current capitalist set up but also potential strengths on the part of the working class. An example, in Lenin’s time whole villages would send their sons off to work in particular factories. There was often a pre-existing sense of solidarity, imported from the countryside. This added to the concentrating effect of Russia’s huge factories, made the turn of the century Russian working class a force to be reckoned with.

It’s this kind of confluence that we should be looking for today.

Thoughts for the Brain

What is Marxism? It is historical materialism as a means to progressively change the world. Why does Marxism as a political movement centre on the working class? Because of its position firstly as in independent class with its own aims, second because of its essential role in creating wealth, third because it owns no property in the means of production when it assumes power it has no other group to oppress or exploit, therefore workers power can be used as a means to escape to a classless society.

When we define working class we must insist on wage labour being the key determinant and not things like education or dress or personal consumption. Useful though this may be it is paper abstraction . There is no one who is simply a wage worker. People who insist we are working class and working class only get nowhere. Such an idea can pander to various prejudices, i.e. by suggesting women workers, ethnic or religious minority workers, LGBT workers etc must get over their petty oppression and deal with 'real' working class issues.

What defines wage labour? I remember thinking through why socialists advocate class analysis rather than patriarchy theory. The answer being the former relates to economics while the latter relates to ideology and of course men as a whole do not exploit women as a whole (exploit being the key word, rather than oppress). The former is more immediately economic than the latter but we would be abandoning historical materialism to insist there is an ideology without a basis. Wage labour is in part determined by women's oppression, as it is by racism, homophobia or any other systematic prejudice you can name.

So long as we're clear exploitation is the foundation of capitalism there is nothing wrong with trying to incorporate aspects patriarchy theory into Marxism.