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The Wheels of War Go Round and Round

By Saqib
Lenin, in his articulation of how war can be used as a tool of the socialist agenda, he seems to echo language from the current era. He describes how in situation when the bourgeois use oppressive means in exercising power over the Proletariat, war can be waged "for the liberation of other nations from the bourgeoisie." He justifies this under the reasoning that the bourgeois would naturally be inclined to attack states that have recently freed their labor classes from the elites, thus making such war defensive in nature.

The result, it seems, is that the Marxist ideology is not one bound by nation state or homeland, but one meant for global dominion. "Only after we have overthrown, finally vanquished and expropriated the bourgeoisie of the whole world, and not merely in one country, will wars become impossible." Pacifism is dismissed offhand. From the Marxist perspective, I suppose the reasoning is that no matter how free the ideology is allowed to flow in different states, the bourgeois will crush its actual implementation.

Much as I disagree with the assumptions Lenin has made on how to achieve this final objective, I can understand how he may view the end goal as global rather than local. Nation states, from his perspective, are arbitrary products of historical and cultural conditions. The Proletariat are viewed as a single class of humanity unbound by ethnic and geographical considerations. The dominance of the bourgeois is similarly seen as an endemic problem perpetuated by the capitalist model foisted on the labor class.

My issue all along with the agenda is that the Proletriat is viewed as a monolith, a single mass completely in tune with the Marxist message. Lenin seems to refuse to admit that there may be genuine threats to his project that may come from the very target group he intends to liberate.

Comments

Shaunak Sastry said…
Saqib,

You're right about global dominion as the ultimate goal of the proletarian. The working man (sic) has no country.
As regards the construction of the proletarian as a monolith, I think Marx and Engels do provide a pretty substantial thesis about that. It is precisely a bourgeois gesture to regard the working classes as the 'mass', the faceless millions. In Kant, we see the use of the word 'pile' when translated from the German.
M&E are not ignorant or dismissive of the political/religious/cultural diversity of the working class across the world. They regard these as the 'superstructure' upon which society is based.

However, the crux of their argument is that this 'superstructure' is not a free-forming entity developing on it's own. It is fundamentally related to the relations of production of that society. The superstructure is an index; a yardstick of the relationship of that social class (religo-politico-gendered) to the factors of production.
February 7, 2010 at 9:19 AM
Saqib said…
Thanks for clearing that up, I guess I was confused on whether superstructure meant the economic or social model.
February 7, 2010 at 9:47 PM
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