Of all the tens of thousands of memes that have crossed my
newsfeed on Facebook, one of my most favorite is this: “Leadership is not
wielding authority. It is empowering
people.”
In 1883, Karl Marx wrote a letter to Jules Guesde, organizer
of the French Workers Party (Parti Ouvrier Français in French), and his own son-in-law, Paul
Lafargue, the party’s leading theorist, accusing them of “revolutionary
phrase-mongering” for their opposition to “reformism”. It included his famous statement that “if
this is Marxism, all I can say is that I am not a Marxist”.
The origin of this dispute was the Programme of the French Workers Party drafted in London in 1880 by Marx,
Guesde, Lafargue, and Friedrich Engels.
Marx wrote the programme’s preamble, or maximum section, while all four
collaborated on the following political and economic sections of the document, which
were together known as the minimum section.
Marx and Engels were especially proud of the economic section, which
Marx in particular praised it as deriving from the demands of the proletariat
themselves which were closely achievable goals on the way to a full revolution while
Engels recommended it to the German Social Democratic Party in his 1891 Critique of the Erfurt Programme.
As a whole, the Programme
of the French Workers Party is notable in socialist literature for its brevity
and clarity. It can be found in its
entirety on the Marxist Internet Archive under the name “Programme of the Parti
Ouvrier”.
The dispute between Marx and his two French proteges arose
three years after the document’s drafting when the latter two disdained both
parts of the minimum section as “reformism”, referring to its principles as
mere bait to lure the working-class away from Radicalism movement. Radicalism in this case is the general name
by which the left opposition movement of French republicans has been known since
the constitutional July Monarchy of Louis Phillipe I. He came to power in 1830 after his Orleanists
overthrew the House of Bourbon which had been restored after the fall of
Napoleon Bonaparte in 1814. His government
made it illegal for political parties to call themselves “republican”, so the
former “republicans” adopted the moniker “radical” from the Brits. The movement’s current incarnation is the
Union of Democrats and Independents.
It would be fair and accurate to describe the self-proclaimed
Marxist but actually anti-Marx positions of Guesde and Lafargue as
“proto-Leninist”, since Lenin followed their ideology of using democratic and
human rights demands of the working class as bait to lure in its members for
his and his faction’s own ends.
Leninism and all its offshoots and derivatives—Trotskyism, Zinovievism,
Stalinism, Maoism, Fidelism, Dengism, Prachanda Path, Hoxhaism, Titoism—directly
descend not so much from the ideology of Marx and Engels as from the
“revolutionary phrase-mongering” of the two who wrongly claimed to be their
heirs. Engels chosen heir, in fact, was
Karl Kautsky. Kautskyism Luxemburgism,
and council communism are the only legitimate branches of actual Marxism.
Kautsky, unfortunately, originated the doctrine of
vanguardism, a departure from Marx and Engels, which Lenin corrupted for his
own purposes, its origin giving his mutated, anti-democratic ideas legitimacy. Kautsky also popularized the term Marxism
for his ideas in direct opposition to his own mentor’s wishes, largely in
opposition to the revisionist Eduard Bernstein, who also began to use the term
afterward. Engels, in fact, strongly
opposed the designation on the grounds that his and Marx’s philosophy should
not be a personality cult.
I always think of the term “revolutionary phrase-mongering”
when I encounter self-proclaimed leftist revolutionaries of any of the Leninist
brands denouncing all types of reformism, even that advocated by the man in
whose name they claim to speak. To them,
Marx—who sided with imperial capitalism against the slavocracy of the American
South and supported the Young Ireland nationalists—would not count as a “true
Marxist” in the same way that Dragging Canoe would not qualify for any of the
three federally-recognized Cherokee tribes because his father was born
Nipissing and his mother was of the Natchez.
In the same vein, that phrase comes to mind when those same
type people and their fellow-travelling pundits and intellectuals defend such
authoritarian figures in Southwest Asia and North Africa as Mohammed Morsi,
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Muammar al-Qaddafi, and, lately, Bashar al-Assad, all in
the name of a false anti-imperialism.
When they denounce the White Hats in Syria as false flags or victims of
Syrian regime atrocities, Russian bombings, and Iranian attacks as paid actors,
they remind me of right-wing pundits in the United States, or its current
president, condemning victims of mass shootings the same way, as paid
actors. They share the same lack of
morality and truthfulness.
To the revolutionary phrase-mongering pseudo-Left, the only
paradigm that counts is East vs. West, which, among other things, ignores the
North-South paradigm. In addition to lack
of insincerity and lack of authenticity, this tendency stems from an archaic
hangover from the Cold War. To these
people, every act of the West is born out of imperialism and neocolonialism
while those of whomever claims to act against the West acts are always acts of
liberation. As well as archaic, this
point-of-view is itself neocolonialist since it erases the native voices of the
people in whose name they claim to speak.
In truth, though, these people do not speak in the name of
any of those people but in the name of the governments oppressing them. Their approach flips the meme I praised at
the start of this piece from “Leadership is not wielding authority; it is
empowering people” to “Leadership is not empowering people; it is wielding
authority”, because wielding authority, and power, their own authority and their
own power, is all that they are about.
One of the best pieces I’ve read on this aspect of the civil
wars in Syria is called ‘The anti-imperialism of idiots’ by Leila Al Shami,
published on her blog. I highly
recommend it. At its end, Leila writes:
“I won’t lose any sleep over targeted strikes aimed at regime military bases
and chemical weapons plants which may provide Syrians with a short respite from
the daily killing. And I will never see people who place grand narratives over
lived realities, who support brutal regimes in far off countries, or who peddle
racism, conspiracy theories, and atrocity denial, as allies.”
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