Lenin, Partiinost' and Political Correctness
In fashioning an elite revolutionary party, Lenin was obsessed, perhaps tormented, with questions of ideological purity and orthodoxy. For Lenin, theoretical considerations were paramount: 'Without a revolutionary theory', wrote Lenin in
What is to be Done?, 'there can be no revolutionary movement' (Lenin, 1946, 341).[4] Only a specifically revolutionary theory, Lenin believed, would prevent the incipient revolutionary movement from abandoning 'the correct path' (Lenin, 1946, 341). Despising the exemplar of liberal democracy represented by England, Lenin believed that if a small revolutionary party was to maintain its sense of purpose and seize power, then it had to avoid becoming just a forum for discussion, with all the in-fighting and factionalism that involved. Party discipline and the sense of purpose could only be maintained, according to Lenin, if there was a rigidly enforced party line on all questions: from the materialist explanation of knowledge and reality, the supposed crisis of imperialism which led to World War One, to a free press or the role of women in the future communist utopia, there was, if the party theoretician knew his seminal and patristic texts, a politically correct answer.
Commentary: You can see this at work among the leftists in the Gawker ring. Leftists hunt heretics. They hunt deviationists like dogs after foxes. Either you're with them or you're nothing. It does work.
Lenin himself, as in so many things Soviet, set the precedent and the standard for dealing with deviations from the party line. His tone varies according to the status of the addressee. Lenin can be the teacher, impatient with some skeptic who lacks his commitment to ideology or, fearing his criticism of his peers, he shows himself to be the master of the
ad hominem attack. In an article first published in 1906, in response to a draft resolution of a party congress, demanding freedom to criticise, Lenin accused the resolution's drafters 'of totally, incorrectly understanding the relation between
freedom of criticism within the party and the party's
unity of action' (Lenin, 1947, 408, emphasis in the original). 'The Central Committee's resolution', argued Lenin, 'is incorrect in essence and
contradicts the party's statutes' (Lenin, 1947, 409, emphasis in the original). Even Plekhanov, one of Russia's foremost interpreters of Marx, was attacked by Lenin for,
inter alia, '
incorrectly assessing the real relationship of the proletariat towards both the government and the bourgeoisie' (Lenin, 1947, 412, emphasis added). In his ferocious polemic Lenin asks 'whether comrade Plekhanov has
acted correctly' and answers his own question: 'No, he has behaved
completely incorrectly' (Lenin, 1947, 412, emphasis added). In a later article, also published in 1906, Plekhanov came in for another bout of Leninist invective: 'He [Plekhanov] is profoundly mistaken. "Treachery" is not "a strong word" but
the sole correct expression from a scientific and political point of view to describe the actual facts and the actual aspirations of the bourgeoisie' (Lenin, 1947, 437-438, emphasis added). One can note here, in passing, that Lenin conflates political and scientific correctness in his riposte to Plekhanov. Karl Kautsky, another prominent interpreter of Marx, received the same treatment when in
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1918) he warned of the violence that would ensue from the Bolshevik dictatorship. As a counter attack Lenin rote
The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918), consigning Kautsky to the ranks of the ideologically damned. Lenin's manner of dealing with politically incorrect deviations justifies Grossman's observation that: 'In an argument Lenin did not seek the truth [istina], Lenin sought victory' (Grossman, 1974, 169).
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[3] Tat'yana Tolstaya's essay identifies the various themes of political correctness in the West - racism, sexism, lookism - yet understates or largely ignores the repressive legal and intellectual infrastructure that supports political correctness and the corrupting effects on the university, though the Soviet maxim cited by her points to precisely that: 'if you don't know then we'll teach you, if you don't want to know then we'll force you' (Tolstaya, 1998, 131). She also fails to identify the Leninist contributions. Her use of korrektnost', which is a literal translation of the English, instead of pravil'nost' is misleading since it implies non-Soviet origins. The same error can be found in The Concise Oxford Russian Dictionary where political correctness is translated as politicheskaya korrektnost' (1998, 816).
[4] The section from which this is taken is entitled "Engels concerning the significance of the theoretical struggle".
To assist his drive for ideological paramountcy Lenin invented
partiinost', which in English translation can mean party membership, party-mindedness or party spirit. To this list one could also add party truth (see Berger below). According to Kunitsyn, partiinost' was first used by Lenin in 1894 in a dispute with opponents concerning the objective state of knowledge (Kunitsyn, 1971, 45). Knowledge and truth, argued Lenin, are a product of one's class. In fact, what is called objective knowledge is a part of the bourgeois conspiracy to retain power and control so that the working classes can be exploited. In non-Marxist thought truth and knowledge are merely bourgeois biases. This dispute features prominently in all Marxist-Leninist polemics and adumbrates the intellectual relativism of postmodernism, specifically that truth is a matter of perspective. The idea that knowledge and truth (and latterly perspective) are class-specific (or in Neo-Marxism community-specific) defines the Leninist notion of
partiinost', as can be seen from the following:
Quote:
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If, having examined the origins of this question, one tries to formulate the concept of partiinost' which emerges from Leninist assumptions, then it may be looked at in the following manner: the partiinost' of ideology (in particular journalism, literature and art and so on) is then the conscious struggle of the ideologue, theoretician, publicist, artist (of each using his own specific means) for asserting the interest of one or another social class (Kunitsyn, 1971, 55-56, emphasis in the original).
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A later Soviet study reaffirmed the basic thrust of what we are to understand by
partiinost':
Quote:
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Partiinost' in communist propaganda is fidelity to the higher, class interests of the working class and its mission of the revolutionary transformation of the nature of social relations. The principle of partiinost' rejects the pretensions of bourgeois ideology and propaganda to "non-partiinost'", "objectivity" and "pluralism" as masking the bourgeois mechanism of social control (Beglov, 1984, 362).
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Taking his lead from Lenin, Kunitsyn, in his analysis of
partiinost', repeatedly emphasizes the correctness of Leninist teachings. Thus, he refers to 'the
correctness of the chosen path' (Kunitsyn, 1971, 99, emphasis added). Various supporters of the Bolsheviks are upbraided for being 'unable
correctly to understand Bolshevism' (Kunitsyn, 1971, 99, emphasis added). Of another party member we are told that he 'lost the
correct orientation and was even ready to accuse Lenin of "factional tendentiousness" (Kunitsyn, 1971, 166, emphasis added). Certain individuals, who though willing to sacrifice their lives for the cause, 'did not always think and act
correctly' (Kunitsyn, 1971, 166, emphasis added). Colleagues who make ideological mistakes need to be the focus of '
correct work' (Kunitsyn, 1971, 180, emphasis added) and problems of culture are to be resolved in '
a correct Leninist way' (Kunitsyn, 1971, 183, emphasis added). Then we are instructed as to the need for 'the foundation of the
correct relations of the proletariat and the revolutionary intelligentsia' (Kunitsyn 1971, 224, emphasis added). Even science must submit to the dictates of
partiinost': 'Lenin's solution of the problem of the interrelationship of gnosiological and political
partiinost' enables us correctly to understand the problem of the
partiinost' of science,
correctly to set about the practical selection of authors writing in the press on scientific questions' (Kunitsyn, 1971, 134, emphasis added). The frequency with which Kunitsyn and other Soviet interpreters of Lenin - and later, Mao - identify Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy with correctness and ideological absolutism reveals much about the state of Soviet scholarship in this field, and elsewhere. We are confronted here not so much with a study of a serious subject but rather a sustained panegyric, even a hagiography, of Lenin, the father of all theoreticians, in which the hagiographers are more concerned to demonstrate their own political correctness than intellectual rigour.
Lenin's concept of partiinost' is, I believe, the most likely progenitor of political correctness.
[onto page 57, three more Thur.]