richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

60 Gramsci is Deadautocratic country, ‘broad democracy’ in revolutionary organizationbecomes a ‘useless and harmful toy’ (136; italics in original).To avoid a facile and one-sided critique of vanguardist modes oforganization, it is important to note that Lenin made a distinctionbetween the forms appropriate to the cadres of professionalrevolutionaries and those which were applicable in the organization ofthe workers themselves. ‘Centralization of the secret functions of theorganization’, he pointed out, ‘by no means implies centralization ofall the functions of the movement’ (122; italics in original). He believedthat workers’ groups that sought to engage a ‘broad public’ shouldbe ‘as loose and as non-secret as possible’ (123), and should ‘remainwithout any rigid formal structure’, so as to minimize their chancesof being infiltrated (115). Thus Lenin represents social-democraticrevolutionary intellectuals as being forced into an unpleasant butnecessary exigency—they value democracy very highly, but arepragmatically constrained to work in anti-democratic ways becauseof the repressive context in which they find themselves.If this were the case, that is, if Lenin believed that non-democraticforms of organization were appropriate only to absolutist contexts,then one would expect a hundred flowers to have bloomed, as itwere, after the revolution. But instead we find him, in 1919, arguingagainst those ‘hypocrite friends of the bourgeoisie’, those ‘stupiddreamers’ who believe that ‘pure’ democracy can be achieved at once,without passing through a phase of dictatorship of the proletariat(1955/1919a: 21). Now it is not the secret police who make itimpossible for democracy to flourish, but the need to ‘suppress theresistance of the exploiters’, that is, of the remnants of the capitalistclass within Russia. By 1923, the last year of his active political life,Lenin had begun to point out that external capitalists also representeda threat to the nascent Soviet revolution. ‘It is not easy for us …to keep going until the socialist revolution is victorious in moredeveloped countries’, he lamented (1966/1923: 498). Invokingonce again the theory of proletarian hegemony, he declared that‘[w]e must display extreme caution so as to preserve our workers’government and to retain our small and very small peasantry underits leadership and authority’ (499). The way to do this was to make thestate apparatus more efficient; as efficient, indeed, as the countries ofwestern Europe. But, once again, the problem of spontaneity rearedits ugly head. Lenin felt that the workers who were ‘absorbed inthe struggle’ to build a new order were ‘not sufficiently educated.They would like to build a better [state] apparatus for us, but they