CRISTO RAUL.ORG '

READING HALL

THE DOORS OF WISDOM

CONTEMPORARY EAST EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY

8.

Howard L. Parsons,

Lenin's Theory of Personality

Lenin’s theory of personality must be understood within the context of his theory of society and history. Following Marx, he saw individual personality as shaped and directed by the physical, biological, and social conditions of his body and his environment, all interacting in determinate ways. Individuality exists; it is evident to everyday observation. But we must not be misled by taking it as an ultimate fact. The ultimate facts are the facts of spatio-temporal, material nature and, in man’s case, the facts of his social life and social production. These material things and events, however, are not given, fixed, and static. They are in continuous motion, interaction, change, and transformation. Lenin’s viewpoint of nature, society, and personality is the viewpoint of dialectical materialism. This viewpoint is not a still picture. It is a dialectical method which engages the knower through practice in social struggle with the world of nature and with classes that stand over against him. Lenin’s theory of personality was a reflection of his revolutionary social practice on the side of the working class and peasants against the ruling class of old Russia.

Such struggle is an inescapable feature of all persons living in class society. This struggle is a particular expression of the generic feature of every person to struggle in a creative way with his environment. A principle of unrest, of negativity, characterizes man as it characterizes all things. In the case of man this unrest appears in the forms of specific needs and in the drive of man to move toward other persons and toward the non-human environment to explore that outer world interactively and to fulfill those needs. This is an arbitrary, spontaneous, necessary self-movement driving the individual toward his world.

The unrest in man takes the form of “the purposive activity of man”, or valuation toward a more or less imagined, conscious outcome. This factor is not philosophically stressed by Lenin, but it is presupposed throughout.

In his drive to live and to overcome the negativities within his body, the individual comes up against conditions which resist his action, which interlock and unite that action, and which negate and affirm it. He discovers a scarcity of food, of clothes, and of housing; other men who command and buy his labor power; and conditions of war, poverty, and the exploitation of one class of men by another class. These conditions of the Other, however, are not a pure or “empty” negation of man. As objective, material conditions that exert their own power upon their own environments, they impinge upon man as material forces and in the form of sense data. They are mediated to man in the patterned reflections in his brain.

Things and persons do not exist “in themselves”, self-contained and autonomous, as in the models of bourgeois thought from G. Leibniz to R. Nixon. Their very being is determination by others and their movement toward and against others, as, reciprocally, others move toward and against them. Thus everything is interconnected, in transition, in process of being united and differentiated. Everything is mediated.

The world other than the individual man is mediated to him through his sense organs and his brain. Materially removed and uncognized by man, the world of the Other is indeterminate for him (though determined for its affected environment). The moment that world affects man and is mediated to him, then it determines him; it opposes him, but it also unites with him. Man acts toward it with a specific purpose, and it accordingly is mediated to man through man’s senses and the patterning of sense data in man’s brain. The negation of man by the Other is thus not a vacuous negation but it is a negation that is in part determined by what man brings initially to it. The negation contains and preserves man’s determination in some sense and reacts to man not only as opposite but also in unity. Cognition brings man into a unitary relation with the Other. Sense data and their patterns signify the qualities and relations, the character of the external, objective world. “Mechanical and chemical technique serves human ends just because its character (essence) consists in its being determined by external conditions (the laws of nature)”.

“Our sensation, our consciousness is only an image of the external world” that is prior to and independent of our perception. And the sensation provides the link between man and the external world, sensation is “the transformation of the energy of external excitation into a state of consciousness”. Such transformation goes on repeatedly among us. At the same time this recapitulation of the external material in the train in the form of sense data, images, forms, and relations is not merely passive reflection. Man’s consciousness is active; it is in part a function of his purposiveness. Purposiveness is the drive of man transformed by the impact of events upon the organism, imparting to it sensations and patterns (ideas) of events. But the brain in turn transforms these transformations. Under the influence of need and vague purpose, it selects, emphasizes, and organizes the data induced in it. It creates hypotheses and imaginatively projects their consequences. This creation and projection is a function of purpose. (“Man’s consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but creates it”). But purpose in turn is a function of the dialectics of the human body with its total operative environment. Lenin had a theory of man’s creativity, but that creativity is always determined.

Bourgeois theorists puzzle as to how Marxists can reconcile freedom and creativity with determinism. They presuppose a sharp dualism of freedom and determinism. But this dualism is a reflection of the antagonism between the individual worker, loosed from feudal ties and protection and “free” in the market, and the coercions of the capitalistic economy and state. (The alternative is the pessimism of mechanical materialism.) Similarly, ancient thought could extricate the individual from the coercions of slavery and empire (symbolized as the will of the gods, or blind fate) only by presupposing a dualistically separated “free” soul which has its reward in the afterworld. The Marxist theoretical reconciliation of freedom and determinism is a guide to present action for overcoming the antagonism between the capitalist, “free” in his wealth, power, and status but determined by the economy, and the worker, whose “freedom” to achieve the freedom of the capitalist is a sham both as a human value and a practical possibility within the determinations of monopoly capitalism. Marxist theory is an anticipation of a society when all men will purposively determine their own genuinely human freedom (creative self-fulfillment) in association with the self-determining freedom of all other men on the planet.

For Lenin consciousness—as sensing and thinking—is only an intermediate phase in the dialectic of man with the world.

Unless to Thought is added Will,

Apollo is an imbecile.

Man must fulfill his unrest, he must unite himself with an antagonistic world and overcome it, he must feed and clothe himself, he must negate poverty and war, the great negations of his species. The logic of man’s life is to test his consciousness through practice. Practice is the criterion of the objectivity of man’s thought. Only then does the object emerge from its hidden and meaningless “in-itself” character and become “for-others”. Only then does the notion become “for-itself”, relevant to a man’s and a class’ purposes.

Thus for Lenin, as for Marx, man is a practical-critical being. He is also social; he is a member of a ruling class or a ruled class; he is engaged in a struggle to survive, and this struggle is concurrent with the class struggles going on throughout the world. Class struggle is an ultimate fact of all history thus far. Personality, creativity, and morality are all shaped by it. Insofar as man may choose sides in this struggle, the right side to choose is that of the proletariat. “Our morality”, wrote Lenin, “stems from the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat”. The reason for that choice is the drive of men to live and to fulfill themselves—not of the few, who own and exploit, but of the great mass of men who struggle against exploitation. That is a decision against the ‘accursed’ maxim: Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost; and the rule: All for each and each for all”.

For Lenin all men can be moral, altruistic, and creative in the highest human sense. But the fact is that they are not, because of dehumanizing class systems. Hence the problem is to create a classless society. Then personalities can set about to become genuinely human beings. Bourgeois analysts put the problem the other way around. Conservatives claim that only the members of an elite are creative and that the mass of men do not matter; hence exploitive systems must be maintained and extended. Liberals claim that all men are potentially creative; hence bourgeois government (excluding the workers) must dispense “welfare”, and so help men to realize their potential. Both views proceed from an identification with the interest of the ruling class and suppress awareness of the demands of the masses in the class struggle. Both views posit a fixed “human nature” independent of the class struggle. They thus blunt profound, revolutionary, truly human change.

For Lenin the class struggle is a necessary, essential part of man making his humanity. Men can collectively change and create their own history. The first step on this self-creation is the overthrow of the class system. After that men can then seriously begin to transform the old “human nature”. This transformation cannot occur where men are exploited under a class system—even where half of the population of the class society, as in the United States, has a high standard of living. This “middle class”—a euphemism for a class of white-collar and blue-collar workers ambivalent about their role in the class struggle—is testimony to that. Here the high incidence of crime, delinquency, personality disorders, boredom, pleasure-seeking, drugs, and unhappiness show that the misery of feudal man and ancient enslaved man has not been overcome; it has only taken on a new form.

The critical difference is that Lenin stressed social struggle; the conservatives and liberals want to suppress, control, and balance the drive and struggle of the masses of men for creative, humanizing, social change. Lenin was a realist. “People have always been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics”, he wrote, “and they always will be until they learn to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises. Interest is a specific form of man’s drive to live”. It is shaped and directed by one’s material and social situation. Personal interests arise within and are determined by social classes. All interests are interests of persons; thus a ‘class interest’ is the summated interests of persons in a given class in defense of that class. The problem of revolutionizing practice, of class struggle on the part of the exploited class, is to bring into consciousness the real, human interests of the workers, to become consciously aware of class antagonism and class struggle, to develop a theory of revolutionary change, and to organize their power. For “the only effective force that compels change is popular revolutionary energy”. This energy must be materially organized, disciplined, and directed “by a revolutionary ideology”.

Lenin was a man of practice, and his theory reflected that emphasis on practice. Practice comes from interest, and it feeds, develops, and channels interest into habit. Lenin despised all that is impractical—abstract theory, phrase-mongering, sectarianism, opportunism, bureaucracy, inefficiency— not because he was a “pragmatist” but because practice is the way of testing the value of ideas in man’s realization of his life. The impractical is the anti-human. Speaking of the cooperatives, he called for the participation of large masses, material support of the cooperatives, and “as little philosophizing and as few acrobatics as possible”. He thought that “living practice” was a way of “distracting the attention of both ourselves and our readers from the stinking bureaucratic and stinking intellectual Moscow (and, in general, Soviet bourgeois) atmosphere”.

As a man of unbounded interest and enthusiasm himself, he realized the importance of these elements in the lives of people and especially in revolutionary social change. To say that such change must be mass-based meant that it must be based on what is deepest in people— their drive to live, their love of life, and their enthusiasm for it. But this drive and enthusiasm must be sustained and rendered effective. That requires social organization. It requires “personal interest, personal incentive”, and at one stage “business principles”.

Lenin believed that persons can and will free them­selves from exploitive conditions and create a humane social order. “Life will assert itself”. This belief was confirmed by the success of the Bolshevik revolution and the building of socialism. But he did not believe that any theory or any man was absolutely infallible. Marx’s theory is not “completed and inviolable”; it is a general guide and must be applied differently to different situations. To live and fulfill themselves, persons, are compelled to plan both their private and social lives. But plans must be tried out in practice. Men must observe and reflect on their practice, correct and analyze the significance of their mistakes, and feed their corrections back into their plans and theories. This dialectical unity of theory and practice is the only path of progress. Lenin did not hesitate to acknowledge the mistakes of the workers. He pointed out that after centuries of poverty, savagery, and ignorance, workers and peasants cannot be expected to create socialism flawlessly. And he spoke of the thousands of “great and heroic deeds” done by the toiling masses. “For the first time not the minority, not the rich alone, not only the educated, but the real masses, the vast majority of toilers are themselves building a new life, are deciding by their own experience the most difficult problems of socialist organization”. Here Lenin could point with pride to the living actions of masses which corresponded to his theory of personality and history.

Almost all professional theorists of human personality in the United States do not share Lenin’s optimism about human personality and his militant belief in the efficacy of social action and the possibility of radical political change toward a human order of society for all. Their theories constitute a large variety of types; eclectic equilibrium theories (S. Lipset, T. Parsons), neo-Freudian theories (E. Erickson), behaviorism (B. Skinner), descriptive functionalism (R, Merton), psychosocial theories (E. Fromm), field theories (K. Lewin), interpersonal theories (R. Bales), existentialism (R. May), self-actualization theories (G. Allport, A. Maslow), etc. These theories reduce to two general types: mechanistic, positivistic theories which by “naturalizing” personality dehumanize it and remove its valuation, purposiveness, drive toward unity, and creativity; and “humanistic” theories, which stress the phenomenologically felt qualities and acts of personality but do not undertake to study the laws of mass conflict and progressively directed social change. The latter (humanistic) theories tend to be either individualistic or “other directed”, depicting man as isolated in individual freedom or as absorbed into the local or national group. Neither set of theories faces the broad social conflicts and the class struggle.

Such theories of personality reflect the pluralism and fragmentation of American society. Their attention to surface rather than to depth, to individual behavior or experience rather than to social dynamics to immediate appearance rather than to underlying pro­cesses to existing structure of personality, role, and institution rather than to insurgent social transformation, to static details rather than to dissolving and developing patterns, to passive responsiveness and dependency on environment rather than to active and creative change, to individuality and other-directedness rather than to interactive and reconstructive relations of persons with other persons and with their world to isolated “facts” rather than to facts as means to man's values—such is a symptom that the theorists themselves have been determined and captured by the objects of their study and that the educators themselves need to be educated.

The theorists have accommodated themselves to the values and demands of the ruling groups of a capitalist society. Not until 1940 did the American Journal of Sociology publish an article on the Nazi Party. An index of the Journal from 1895 to 1947 showed three listings under Marx or Marxism and no listings under Lenin or Leninism. Yet American theorists of personality put forward their theories as if they were universally true, unaware that their descriptions of mechanical men eviscerated of power and purpose, of lonely individuals, and of other-directed, organization men are descriptions of crippled and sick personalities. Healthy theory develops when the theorist puts himself in touch with healthy actions, and revolutionary theory emerges when the theorist puts himself on the side of revolutionary forces among men.

Lenin was such a theorist. He observed and joined the struggle of Russian workers and peasants against the conditions of their oppression. His theory of personality was not contemplative, passive, and pessimistic. It was practical, active, and optimistic. That was not existentialism, creating a world out of the vacuum of its despair. It was a dialectical practice which endeavored to draw forth from the masses of men the objective collective, creative power within them in an objective situation demanding struggle, and in which practice and theory developed one another. Under the oppression of capitalism to say and theorize that man is mechanical, lonely, or dominated by society is to find confirmation in society as it is; such theory leaves things just as they are, and it is rewarded by the powers that be. But if one says and theorizes that the oppression must be, can be, and will be transformed by the struggle of the masses, then the theory necessarily becomes an instrument of social practice. It is a hypothesis to be proved. And no one can prove it except the personalities of men in the mass. That is what Lenin meant when before the Revolution he called for mass struggle and when after it he wrote:

The local Soviets, depending on time and place, can amend, enlarge and add to the basic provision worked out by the government. Creative activity at the grass roots is the basic factor of the new public life....Socialism cannot be decreed from above. Its spirit rejects the mechanical, bureaucratic approach; living, creative socialism is the product of the masses themselves.