History without engines

Abstract

In the autumn of 1901, after spending three years in exile in a peasant’s hut in Siberia, Lenin began writing what would become his most influential book:What Is To Be Done? (Lenin, 1902) “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement,” the Russian Bolshevik famously argued in the first chapter of his pamphlet. But more than a plea for the importance of ideas in the making of history, Lenin’s argument was essentially about the leading role of the party in the revolution. The workers themselves, he thought, couldn’t reach spontaneously the consciousness of their historic mission. Revolutionary theory could then only “be brought to [the workers] from without,” “from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers” (Lenin, 1902: 48). Behind the abstract laws of historical materialism, Lenin’s task was, as the Belgian Marxist Marcel Liebman once wrote, to create the “instrument” through which the revolutionary project could be realized (Liebman, 1973: 15). Historical turns required organizations that could channel collective struggles into specific directions. In order to be more than “just one fucking thing after another,” to quote Alan Bennett, history had to be coerced into grand narratives. The flow of events could only be shaped by collective and conscious actors. Class struggle was the steam of History but it needed an engine to move forward. The fall of the Soviet Union, exactly ninety years after Lenin theorized the revolution, would however put History on hold. As Fukuyama famously wrote, we had reached “the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.”While his end of history didn’t imply the end of conflicts nor that all societies would embrace liberal democracy, it nonetheless meant the replacement of ideological battles by “boring” “economic calculation,” “the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands” (Fukuyama, 1989). As in Frederick Taylor’s scientific management, governments wouldn’t require anymore “generals or statesmen” but engineers to deal with what would remain: “economic activity.” Citizens could opt out from grand narratives, unbound by the will of the majority and free to lead their lives as they wish within the rules set by technocrats. And in effect, the expansion of markets as the ordering principle of the social order—guiding investment and reshaping the global division of labor—reduced the relevance of collective decisions. Citizens could now exert their rights as consumers, outside any kind of collective body. Voting on the marketplace, as Milton and Rose Friedman argued, could bring “unanimity without conformity” (Friedman and Friedman, 1980: 66).