By Gordon Hull
In a previous post, I noted that Foucault strongly implies in a 1978 interview that his communist detractors are bureaucrats, and tied that to an earlier interview with Maoists in which he suggests that structuring populist tribunals on the model of bourgeois courts would fail to break with the power structure of the bourgeois court system: the model of impartiality is intrinsically bourgeois, and so importing that model into communist popular tribunals would iterate the very power structures that were to be replaced. Here I want to flesh out a little more some of the resonances of an accusation of bureaucracy in the context of 1970s Marx debates in France. I should say in advance that these are notes more than a complete assessment, designed to pick out highlights. The back and forth polemics of Marxists are byzantine, and we should all be grateful that Foucault sets it as a rule not to engage in them. Here I will mainly draw from Trotsky’s critique of Stalin and Lenin, with a closing gesture to a representative text of the French far-left that emerged in the aftermath of the 1968 student uprisings.
1. Trotsky vs. Stalin
Without much risk of hyperbole, one can assert that the main looming questions for the French left were what to do about Stalinism. After Stalin died in 1953, and the grip of Stalinism on communism loosened, it became urgent to decide what the source of Stalin’s terror was. One of Stalin’s leading critics, from early on, had been Trotsky (whom Stalin had assassinated in Mexico in 1940), and one of Trotsky’s primary arguments had been that Stalinism devolved into an anti-intellectual bureaucracy. Trotsky made this argument in a number of pamphlets and books. For example, in the Stalin School of Falsification (1937), Trotsky begins by pointing to the vigor of the Party in 1917, underlining its openness to debate but also its unique structure:
“The Bolshevik party of 1917, the one that led the revolution to victory, was the most unusual political organization in the world. Strictly centralized and intolerant of the dilution of its principles, functioning illegally under Czarism and therefore dispersed by repression to the far corners of Russia and all the other countries of the earth, it nevertheless led a much richer and more democratic inner life than do most parties today. Its vigorous internal discussions and disputes, often conducted by means of temporary groupings, factions and their special periodicals, were not peremptorily settled by appeals to constituted and sanctified authority, to say nothing of administrative repressions or bureaucratic measures against minority opinion. The combination of party democracy and centralization enabled the party to live and flourish even under Czarist reaction, to pass through the Revolution of 1905, the long years of reaction and World War which followed, and finally to emerge victorious in the decisive conflict of November, 1917.”
Trotsky then argues that one of Lenin’s greatest concerns in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution was the growth of a bureaucratic state apparatus:
“After the Bolsheviks established their government, one of Lenin's greatest concerns was the preservation of this party of ‘fire-tested revolutionaries’ from the negative effects of the power which had suddenly come into their possession in a country with a low cultural level and with powerful traditions of bureaucratism. He was the most tireless and merciless critic of the party and Soviet bureaucracy, and his last two years in particular were filled with increasing apprehensions over its alarming growth.”
2. Lenin
The problem stems, one might note, from Lenin’s presentation of the need for the party to operate as a non-democratic vanguard in his What is to be Done? There, Lenin argues that the revolution requires growing a class of professional revolutionaries, who would be able to coordinate, network, and advance the revolutionary political cause against Tsarist absolutism. Lenin’s opponents argued, on his presentation, that it would be better to follow more openly democratic procedures and to support the “spontaneous” uprisings of trade unions. Lenin argued that these measures failed to generate support for the larger revolution, since they failed to connect the economic issues facing the workers to the political issues facing everyone under the autocracy. Thus, “Social-Democracy” (= what Lenin is advocating) “leads the struggle of the working class, not only for better terms for the sale of labour-power, but for the abolition of the social system that compels the propertyless to sell themselves to the rich” (Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 5, 500; references to this ed., available here). Not just for the gain of trade unions, but for everyone, because the oppression of everyone, not just in factories, is the business of the Tsar:
“The rural superintendents and the flogging of peasants, the corruption of the officials and the police treatment of the “common people” in the cities, the fight against the famine-stricken and the suppression of the popular striving towards enlightenment and knowledge, the extortion of taxes and the persecution of the religious sects, the humiliating treatment of soldiers and the barrack methods in the treatment of the students and liberal intellectuals—do all these and a thousand other similar manifestations of tyranny, though not directly connected with the “economic” struggle, represent, in general, less “widely applicable” means and occasions for political agitation and for drawing the masses into the political struggle? The very opposite is true. Of the sum-total of cases in which the workers suffer (either on their own account or on account of those closely connected with them) from tyranny, violence, and the lack of rights, undoubtedly only a small minority represent cases of police tyranny in the trade-union struggle as such.” (402).
Pointing all this out to the workers will advance the revolutionary cause by causing workers to intuit the connection between the various components of the repressive state apparatus:
“The most backward worker will understand, or will feel, that the students and religious sects, the peasants and the authors are being abused and outraged by those same dark forces that are oppressing and crushing him at every step of his life. Feeling that, he himself will be filled with an irresistible desire to react, and he will know how to hoot the censors one day, on another day to demonstrate outside the house of a governor who has brutally suppressed a peasant uprising, on still another day to teach a lesson to the gendarmes in surplices who are doing the work of the Holy Inquisition, etc.” (414).
The problem is that this work is very dangerous, and needs to be directed in order to succeed. Lenin accordingly advocates the training of revolutionary classes that operate in a clandestine, secret network to promote these objectives. The vanguard class, then, emerges out of the specific needs of Russia. Lenin summarizes:
“I assert: (1) that no revolutionary movement can endure without a stable organisation of leaders maintaining continuity; (2) that the broader the popular mass drawn spontaneously into the struggle, which forms the basis of the movement and participates in it, the more urgent the need for such an organisation, and the more solid this organisation must be (for it is much easier for all sorts of demagogues to side-track the more backward sections of the masses); (3) that such an organisation must consist chiefly of people professionally engaged in revolutionary activity; (4) that in an autocratic state, the more we con-fine the membership of such an organisation to people who are professionally engaged in revolutionary activity and who have been professionally trained in the art of combating the political police, the more difficult will it be to unearth the organisation; and (5) the greater will be the number of people from the working class and from the other social classes who will be able to join the movement and perform active work in it” (464)
3. Back to Trotsky
The problem is the one that Trotsky points to: given a tight organizational structure that is necessarily not subject to democratic control (because that would require the publicization of the party organizational chart, the histories of its members, etc., which would lead to its instant destruction by the authorities), how does one transition into holding state power without devolving into bureaucracy? Trotsky thinks Stalin utterly failed in this regard. In 1923, for example, Trotsky wrote that “if bureaucratism, as the resolution of the Central Committee says, threatens to detach the party from the masses and consequently to weaken the class character of the party, it follows that the struggle against bureaucratism can in no case be the result of non-proletarian influences. On the contrary, the aspiration of the party to preserve its proletarian character must inevitably engender resistance to bureaucratism.”
In 1935, he wrote:
“Stalin needs apostates, bellowing renegades, people who are shamelessly ready to call black white, who beat their hollow breasts, pathetically, while their minds are actually occupied with pie-cards, automobiles and summer resorts. The party and the state apparatus is overrun with such swindlers, double-dealers, and corrupt cynics. They are unreliable but indispensable: bureaucratic absolutism which has come into an irreconcilable contradiction with economic and cultural requirements of the workers’ state is in acute need of swindlers ready for anything.”
By 1937, Trotsky was arguing that “Conservatism, routine, adaptation, bureaucratism-all were producing significant changes in the political mentality of the party, from top to bottom.” The Stalinist purges replaced able leaders with incompetent bureaucrats: “the facts are that precisely those men have been wiped out who were not only the Old Guard of Bolshevism, but the ablest government administrators, the most competent economic directors, the best equipped representatives of the Soviet republic abroad. Even a partial list of the most prominent of these men, all of whom have been driven out, imprisoned or murdered by Stalin, will show the devastating havoc wrought in the country by the bureaucracy in the period of its rise to omnipotence.” And “Industry, agriculture, planned economy, finances -- in all these the ravages of the bureaucracy have wiped out one draft of functionaries and directors after another.” In sum, “The Stalin bureaucracy which has concentrated all power in its hands is, for the time being, the triumphant bearer of a political counter-revolution.”
4. Gauchisme
The eclipse of Stalinism, then, and the rise of Maoism, led to the revitalization of this critique, especially in the context of the French gauchists (the far left, associated especially with the student movement of 1968) and their opposition to the PCF. Lenin had declared leftism an “infantile disorder,” writing in 1920 that “the experience of the victorious dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia has clearly shown even to those who are incapable of thinking or have had no occasion to give thought to the matter that absolute centralisation and rigorous discipline of the proletariat are an essential condition of victory over the bourgeoisie” Here are Gabriel and Daniel Cohn-Bendit responding in Leftism: Cure for the Senile Illness of Communism: it “will be necessary to show how, historically, the masses have found forms of self-organization” (16). In other words, the effort is against the notion of a vanguard class, and Cohn-Bendit views part of his work as the recovery of a “tradition of the revolutionary movement with which the leftist parties had broken” (16).
One consequence of the breakdown of the party apparatus and vanguard class is the dissolution of bureaucratization of the role of intellectuals:
“The division of society into manual and intellectual workers is a fundamental aspect of every society of exploitation. Every revolutionary movement ought to try in both its actions and forms of organization to surmount this division, while knowing that it will only be definitively abolished in a socialist society” (14-15)
To return to theory and practice, then, we might say that for Cohn-Bendit, the theory-practice problem is endemic to the organizational structure of the left, inherited from Lenin. And this organizational structure is one that a rhetorical tradition (for lack of a better term) ties to the Stalinist dictatorship and the official positions of the PCF. I haven’t said anything about Foucault’s relation to this leftist tradition – and one should note that Trotsky was also an advocate of the vanguard class, so the critique of bureaucracy is not identical to the critique of vanguardism – but I hope this suffices to indicate some of the rhetorical background against which Foucault’s engagement with Marxists, and his concern about bossy Marxist theorists, happens.
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