January 03, 2006: Unevenness
If time is the central category in Marx's thought, unevenness is the core of Lenin's.
For Lenin, all real-world processes develop according to their own contrasting temporalities. I suppose that's an overly-fancy way of saying, at their own speeds. We're used to thinking of "uneven development" as a factor which distinguishes societies from one another; for instance, Third World countries from First. For Lenin, unevenness is fundamental to all processes of change. All of these things develop at different rates: societies; the classes within societies; the layers, fractions and groupings within classes; the individuals within different layers.
Lenin's notion of the "vanguard" is a corollary to this more central concept of unevenness. The "vanguard" of a class is that portion of the class which has developed furthest at any moment in time. A "vanguard party" tries to orient toward these leading layers, as opposed to the more backward elements.
It follows that for Lenin the vanguard constantly shifts. Elements or even individuals who are ahead of the others one day may fall behind, potentially overnight. This is always inevitably true: it's a consequence of uneven development.
Stalinist practice devalues unevenness. Declaring that party and vanguard are equivalent amounts to claiming that the party is outside of time.
Comparable devaluation of unevenness is one of the hallmarks of contemporary left sectarianism. While declaring themselves to be the vanguard, sectarians in practice orient toward the greenest, most backward elements of the milieux in which they operate. As you participate in antiwar coalitions, watch the sectarian cadre at work: who do they try to recruit? Always, the inexperienced.
Comments
But note the teleology implied by the definition of vanguard. "The 'vanguard' of a class is that portion of the class which has developed furthest at any moment in time." Developed toward what? I believe this definition is accurate for Lenin, and that the teleology is present in Lenin's thinking as a holdover from Plekhanov's scholastic/schematic Marxism.
Posted by: Mark Phillips | January 5, 2006 12:29 AM
Does anyone know the original Russian word translated as "unevenness"? It is worth noting that in Louis Althusser's For Marx--in particular the key essay "On The Materialist Dialectic: On the Uneveness of Origins"-- Ben Brewster translates as "unevenness" the French word "inegalite," which I presume is the standard French translation of Lenin's term.
Posted by: Ted Stolze | January 5, 2006 06:45 PM
In his intro to Paul le Blanc's book on Lenin, Mandel takes an interesting shot at formulating a non-teleological explanation of the need for a "vanguard party":
This paragraph begins by surveying multiple explanations for the disunity and heterogeniety of working class class consciousness, then ends by defining the vanguard of the class as that minority which is capable of "a qualitatively higher level of continuous activity", where the purpose of that activity is unification of the self-consciousness of the class. Thus for Mandel the unevenness which is the basis of the need for a vanguard party is not per se that of consciousness within the class but instead of different people's ability to be continuously active.
Mandel's point here seems difficult to disentangle from the elitism of self-appointed, self-proclaimed vanguardism. It offers no explanation of which individuals are capable of higher levels of continuous activity; of how those people are identified and selected for inclusion in the vanguard organization; of who does the selecting and including; or of exactly why continuous activity is supposedly so crucial.
Posted by: Mark Phillips | January 15, 2006 01:51 PM