Development,
Part 2a
Reactionary
Petty-Bourgeois Utopia
To
understand the controversies of the present day intelligently (to borrow a
phrase from the attached text), one needs to go back. Yesterday we went back to
Engels’ 1872 book on “The Housing Question”, and today we go back to Lenin, in
1905.
Lenin’s “Petty
Bourgeois and Proletarian Socialism” is an example of the antipathy of
both these writers, Engels and Lenin towards “reactionary petty-bourgeois
utopia”. Both of them opposed the liberal view of emancipation, whereby the
worker’s household is re-constituted as a miniature image of the bourgeois
household.
The
relevance of it is also to the concept of “development”, a word that is not
used in Lenin’s article, by the way. But clearly, Lenin is looking at a
situation wherein “development” in our modern, vulgar sense is very much on the
agenda, i.e.: The masses are poor. Something must be done.
Lenin
points out the class realities: “Will the
fullest liberty and expropriation of the landlords do away with commodity
production? No, it will not.”
“…after destroying the power of the bureaucracy and the landlords, it
will set up a democratic system of society, without, however, altering the
bourgeois foundation of that democratic society, without abolishing the rule of
capital.”
Lenin,
already in 1905, 15 years before he launched the concept of the National
Democratic Revolution (in the report-back of the Commission on the National and
Colonial Question to the Second Congress of the Communist international in
1920) had fully grasped the necessity of such an NDR and its close relationship
to the trajectory of social development in its full, dialectical sense. He
writes:
“Can a class-conscious worker forget the democratic struggle for the
sake of the socialist struggle, or forget the latter for the sake of the
former? No, a class-conscious worker calls himself a Social-Democrat for the
reason that he understands the relation between the two struggles. He knows
that there is no other road to socialism save the road through democracy,
through political liberty.”
But Lenin
refuses to allow the revolution to ossify into any sort of equivalent to the
idea of a static, perpetual “National Democratic Society”. He says:
“The peasants' struggle against the landlords is now a revolutionary
struggle; the confiscation of the landlords' estates at the present stage of
economic and political evolution is revolutionary in every respect, and we back
this revolutionary-democratic measure. However, to call this measure
"socialisation", and to deceive oneself and the people concerning the
possibility of "equality" in land tenure under the system of
commodity production, is a reactionary
petty-bourgeois utopia, which we leave to the socialist-reactionaries.”
What is a
reactionary petty-bourgeois utopia? The illustration above, a German Nazi
poster dating from about 25 years after Lenin wrote the linked article,
expresses the full picture: a reconstruction and development programme that
presents itself as purely utilitarian and even innocent. The progress that it
offers is also offered as the end of all progress. This is the kind of thing that
Paulo Freire referred to as “necrophilia”.
Please
download the document, read it and appreciate the extraordinary clarity and
foresight that Lenin was able to achieve, aged 35, in 1905, and how much of it
rings true even today.
- The above serves
to introduce the original reading-text: Petty-bourgeois
and Proletarian Socialism, 1905, Lenin.
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