BÚSQUEDA DE BIOMARCADORES DE RESISTENCIA A PERIFOSINA

Speaking at the Eighteenth Party Congress in 1939, Stalin argued that Marxist-LeninistideologylayatthecentreofSovietpolitics:

ThereishardlyanyneedtodwellontheseriousimportanceofPartypropaganda, of the Marxist-Leninist education [vospitanie] of our workers [rabotnikov] ... It mustbeacceptedasanaxiomthatthehigherthepoliticallevelandtheMarxist -LeninistconsciousnessofworkersinanybranchofstateorPartyworkthebetter andmorefruitfulwillbetheworkitself ...and,conversely,thelowerthepolitical leveloftheworkers,andtheirMarxist-Leninistconsciousness,themoreprobable will be disruption and failure in work, the more probable will it be that workers will become superficial and that they will degenerate into pragmatists and pedants [deliagi-krokhobory],themorelikelytheir[complete]degeneration.¹

The significance and meaning of statements such as this have been the subjectofdisagreementamonghistoriansofStalinism.WhydidStalin,a leadersofrequentlydenouncedbyhisrivalsasamediocretheorist,payso muchattentiontotheroleofideasinpolitics?W hatwastherelationship betweenideasandStalin’spoliticalbehaviour?Andwhatwasthenature ofthe‘Marxist-Leninist’ideologyheclaimedtobesocommittedto?

It used to be common to assume that Stalin was indulging in empty rhetoricandthathehadlittleinterestinpoliticalideas.Forsome,Stalin wasbestseenasatypicalmodernisingstate -builder,apragmatistwhose commitmenttoMarxismwas‘skin-deep’. Forothercommentators,the 2

‘basicprinciple’ofSoviethistorywasthecreationofanall -powerfulstate and the oppression of the individual; ideology was merely something invented or manipulated by Stalin and his court intellectuals to justify thisprocess. Nowithasbecomemorecommontotakethepoliticalideas 3

of Stalin andthe Bolsheviks seriously, and to relate them tothe broader

1 I.V.Stalin, Sochineniia,3vols.,RobertMcNeal(ed.),(Stanford:TheHooverInstitution, 1967),I( XIV),pp.380–1.

2 E.H. Carr, The Russian Revolution from Lenin to Stalin (London: Macmillan, 1979), p.163.

3 See,forinstance,LeszekKolakowski, MainCurrentsofMarxism.vol.3.TheBreakdown (Oxford:ClarendonPress,1978),pp.7–8.

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politicalcultureoftheBolshevikParty,buttherearedisagreementsover their nature. As Sheila Fitzpatrick has argued, many recent studies of Stalinist political culture and practice have tended to take either a

‘modernity’,‘Enlightenment’approach,ora‘neo-traditionalist’position. 4

For one group, Stalin and the Bolsheviks were trying to create an Enlightenment utopia, in the tradition of Condorcet and the French philosophes; working on the basis of ‘scientific’ principles, they used often brutal social engineering in order to create a rational harmonious society. For the other, Stalinism was a system of thought and political 5

practice that, whatever its intentions, led to the emergence of a ‘neo- traditionalist’ order in which a new society of ranks and estates was established. The ideology articulated by Stalinist leaders mayhave been auniversalistandmodernisingone,butinpracticeitgaverisetoarigidly hierarchicalandpaternalisticpoliticalculture. 6

Each of these approaches is useful in describing elements of Soviet political culture and practice in the 1920s and 1930s. They may also explain aspects of Stalin’s own thought, although the neo-traditionalist paradigm is probably not as applicable as the Enlightenment approach.

Yet neither are entirely successful in accounting for the less scientistic, rationalisticelementsinStalin’sdiscourse.AnanalysisofBolshevismasa religious or quasi-religious system of thought – whether as a Marxism influenced by Orthodoxy, or a form of ‘political religion’, a messianic ideologywithambitionstocreateapuresociety,freeofevil‘alien’groups – mightcontributetoanexplanationoftheseideas. ButIshallarguethatit 7

ismorehelpfultoseeStalin’spoliticalideasinthecontextoftensionsboth

4 SeeSheilaFitzpatrick,‘Introduction’,inSheilaFitzpatrick(ed.), Stalinism.NewDirections (London:Routledge,2000),p.11.

5 SeeinparticularStephenKotkin, MagneticMountain.StalinismasaCivilisation (Berkeley:

UniversityofCaliforniaPress,1995),pp.6–8;DavidHoffman,‘EuropeanModernityand Soviet Socialism’ in Yanni Kotsonis and David Hoffman, Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp.245–60. Erik van Ree also places Stalin firmly in the Enlightenment tradition, although he does argue that there wereromanticelementsinhisthinking.ErikvanRee, ThePoliticalThoughtofJosephStalin.

AStudyinTwentieth-CenturyRevolutionaryPatriotism (London:RoutledgeCurzon,2002), pp.283–7.

6 See Terry Martin, ‘Modernisation or Neo-traditionalism? Ascribed Nationality and SovietPrimordialism’,inFitzpatrick(ed.), Stalinism,pp.348–67.

7 FortheargumentthatStalin’sthinkingshouldbeunderstoodinaspecificallyOrthodox Christian context, see Mikhail Vaiskopf, Pisatel’ Stalin (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2002). For the view that Marxism and Bolshevism had an eschatological, fundamentally religious structure, see Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness and Salvation in Soviet Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,2000).SeealsoAmirWeiner, MakingSenseofWar:TheSecondWorldWarandthe FateoftheBolshevikRevolution (Princeton:UniversityofPrincetonPress,2001),pp.27, 32 for this emphasis on messianism and purification, although he also sees the Soviet

within Marxism and Bolshevik political strategy, rather than as a form of religious thinking. His ideas in the period 1917–39, like those of most Bolshevik leaders, changed over time and were often inconsistent.

However, I shall argue that Stalin tended to adopt a voluntaristic and sometimes populist view of politics that had its roots in left Bolshevik thinking. Onemightdescribetheseideasasaformofquasi -romantic(as 8

opposedto‘Enlightenment’)Bolshevism,characterisedbyanemphasison heroism, socialist commitment, will, and struggle, and by a hostility towards a narrow ‘petty-bourgeois’, mechanistic, scientistic view of the world. OronemightuseaWeberiantypology,anddefineitasavarietyof 9

‘charismatic’ (as opposed to ‘rational-legal’) Bolshevism, according to which the party, like Weber’s charismatic agent, had the right to rule becauseithadextraordinarypowersandaccesstoahighertruth;members ofthenewsocialistorderweretobejudgednotprimarilyaccordingtotheir technical knowledge or professional attainments, but according to their abilitytotransformtheworldthroughheroismandwill. Thischapterwill 10

also argue that the appeal of this voluntaristic Bolshevism to Stalin was closely related to practical politics, and his interest in strategies of mobilisation. 11

These aspects of Stalin’s thinking have often been obscured by the common assumption that Stalin was a conservative figure, whose most significant contribution to Bolshevik ideology was his justification of political and economic inequality. In defining both a centralised state and the presence of economic inequalities within the planned system as

Unionasasocialengineering‘gardeningstate’.Forolderapproachesofthistype,see JacobTalmon, TheOriginsofTotalitarianDemocracy (Harmondsworth:Penguin,1986), pp.8–13.NoneoftheseworksdealswithStalin’sownthoughtinanydetail.

8 By‘populist’Imeanabeliefinthevirtuesofthe‘proletariat’orthe‘Sovietpeople’.Iam notreferringtotheRussian‘Populists’andtheircommitmenttotheRussianpeasantry.

9 Foradiscussionof‘romanticism’inBolshevikthought,seeKaterinaClark, Petersburg:

Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp.15–23. Clark argues that ‘romantic anti-capitalism’ was a powerful strain within Bolshevik culture, a concept which unites hostility to the mundane and materialistic withantagonismtothe‘bourgeois’.Foranotherapproachtotheromanticelementsin early Bolshevik thought, see Anna Krylova, ‘Beyond the Spontaneity–Consciousness Paradigm: ‘‘Class Instinct’’ as a Promising Category of Historical Analysis’, Slavic Review 1(20 03),1–23;IgalHalfin,‘BetweenInstinctandMind:theBolshevikViewof theProletarianSelf’, SlavicReview 1(2003),34–40.

10 MaxWeber, EconomyandSociety:AnOutlineofInterpretiveSociology,GuentherRothand ClausWittich(eds.),(Berkeley:UniversityofCaliforniaPress,1978),I,pp.241–5.For theapplicationofWeberiancategoriestoBolshevikpolitics,seeKenJowitt, NewWorld Disorder:TheLeninistExtinction (Berkeley:UniversityofCaliforniaPress,1992),ch.1;

Stephen Hanson, Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions (ChapelHill:UniversityofNorthCarolinaPress,1997).

11 FortheroleofmobilisationinearlyBolshevikpolitics,andtheproblemsassociatedwith it,seeThomasRemington, BuildingSocialisminBolshevikRussia:IdeologyandIndustrial Organisation,1917–1921 (Pittsburgh:PittsburghUniversityPress,1984),pp.14–17.

‘socialist’ in the early and mid-1930s, he did indeed develop Marxism- Leninism in this direction, but this did not affect his commitment to a voluntaristic version of Bolshevism; rather, he tried to divorce voluntar- ismfromtheegalitarianismwithwhichithadbeenassociatedintheearly years of the regime, and adapted it to a new political and ideological context. Stalin, like other Bolshevik leaders, changed his position frequently. But if we appreciate these tendencies in Stalin’s thought, this chapter will argue, it becomes easier to understand Stalin’s view of the relationship between ideology and political practice, and to explain why Stalin took commitment to Marxism-Leninism so seriously in the late1930s.

Pol itik a versus tek hnik a

Marxism, asmanyhave observed, isan ideologicalsystem whichsuffers fromafundamentalcontradictionbetweenitsscientisticanddeterminis - ticsideanditsmorevoluntaristicandromanticside. At t h e r o o t o f t he 12

conflict is a tension within Marx’s own thought: he argued that many elements of advanced capitalism – the division of labour, hierarchies basedontechnicalexpertise,materialincentives–werevitalforeconomic developmentandthusforbuildingthefoundationsofaproductivecom - munism;thiselementofMarxismcouldbeusedtojustifyatechnocratic society.Yethealsoclaimedthatatsometimeinthefutureworker swould be able to create an egalitarian and extraordinarily productive societyin whichworkbecame‘self-activity’,andtherewasnoneedforpeopletobe compelled or ‘bribed’ to work, by means of material, wage incentives. 13

Thisutopiahadsomethingincommonwitharomantici dealofawholl y unifiedsociety,governednotbymaterialthingsbutbyhumancreativity andself-expression.Marx’sviewsoftheforcesdrivinghistorycouldalso beinterpretedin different ways.Hecouldbeseen asaproponentof the scientisticviewthateconomicforces,discoverablebyscientificinvestiga - tion, would drive society towards communism; the proletariat would bringaboutrevolutionandsocialismbecauseitwasrespondingrationally to these forces. But some of his writings seemed to justify the more voluntaristic and potentially romantic view that the proletariat would

12 ForaclassictreatmentofthesetensionswithinMarxism,seeAlvinGouldner, TheTwo Marxisms:ContradictionsandAnomaliesintheDevelopmentofTheory (London:Macmillan, 1980),ch.3.

13 Forthistensionsee,forinstance,GarethStedmanJones,‘Introduction’,inKarlMarx andFriedrichEngels, TheCommunistManifesto (London:Penguin,2002),pp.178–83.