The Thinking Reed

We can follow the motif as it is repeated from one of Lenin’s writings to another. Bureaucracy is the fundamental danger, and the principal antidote to it is culture. Lenin argues roughly like this: Why are the workers and peasants in a dependent position in the first workers’ and peasants’ state? Why is even the ruling party under the control of a bureaucratic apparatus? First and foremost because the proletariat needs this apparatus; cannot get by without it. The workers and the Communists cannot solve their own problems by themselves, because they lack the necessary level of consciousness. Therefore they put themselves in a position of dependence on the bureaucrats.

In themselves the bureaucrats are by no means bearers of high culture: ‘Their culture is miserable, insignificant, but it is still at a higher level than ours.’150 In more civilized countries there are traditions of independent thought, self-government and democracy. Even when the economic base for workers’ democracy has been undermined by ruin or war, these traditions go on existing in people’s heads. That enables democracy to ‘hold out’ for a certain time and — relying on culture, tradition and so on — to restore its own economic basis. In Russia there is neither economic basis nor culture. Consequently the political power of the Bolsheviks must be used to develop both, in rapid tempo. Culture is the most decisive link. To raise it is the hardest task. Without that, the task of economic construction will be very difficult to accomplish. Finally, the cultural level must be raised as quickly as possible, so as to counteract bureaucratization.

In his day Marx, looking at the problem of bureaucracy, warned: ‘In the case of an irrational people one cannot speak at all of a rational organization of the state.’151 But what does one have to do in order that the people may become ‘rational’, in Marx’s broad sense of the concept? ‘Widely disseminated education and training of the people’, said Lenin, ‘is a decisive factor for overcoming and eradicating bureaucracy.’152 One can repeat the objection that ‘education’, by itself, is not enough — that what is needed is democratic organization, or at least some developed elements thereof — that culture alone will not solve the problem. Yet Lenin understood very well the actual historical logic which is revealed with particular clarity in the history of Russia: that the only rational basis for bureaucracy lies in the inadequacy of culture. Culture and bureaucracy are incompatible. They are antipodes. A fight against bureaucracy therefore cannot but be a fight for culture.

What did Lenin mean by culture? We have to remember that he did not draw a sharp distinction between civilization and culture, and this somewhat confused his thinking. First and foremost, naturally, the people had to be taught to read and write. But that was a precondition for culture rather than culture itself. For Lenin the main thing was, evidently, the culture of thought. The workers and peasants had to be taught to think for themselves. Art, political education, self-teaching — all these means were good, provided they led to this result. But the need to raise the level of culture presupposed a bearer of this culture, on whom the state would have to rely. The bureaucrat was not fit for this role because he had a vested interest in not letting the masses attain to culture in Lenin’s sense — to the culture of independent thinking. This meant that one was left with the intelligentsia. On its members one had to count for the fulfilment of this task. But Lenin did not draw that conclusion. He was simply unable to, because he died before he had managed finally to decide what course to follow or what action to undertake. Lenin lost the power of speech in the very heat of his struggle against Stalin and the Party bureaucracy. In the last eleven months of his life he was unable to write a single line. His last articles represent only a beginning — the preparation for a great work, both theoretical and practical, which he could not carry out.

Notes

3 The Bureaucratic Labyrinths, or The Rules of the Game