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Marx, Lenin and the Corruption of the Working Class

Fear of corruption is greater in some traditions of discourse than in others. It was, for instance, crucial to republican thought but is of relatively little importance in liberalism. For liberals corruption is an annoying yet manageable problem of bribery of public officials but for republicans the term connotes systemic moral decline, a loss of civic virtue affecting both officeholders and citizenry. Because republics depend for their existence on the virtuousness of members their willingness to subordinate personal interest to the collective good republican theorists tend to worry about corruption more than liberals do.’ When we turn to the Marxist tradition of discourse, fear of corruption appears to be absent from it. Indeed, C.J. Friedrich has claimed that ‘the socialist movement, and more especially Marxism, developed its revolutionary ideology without any stress on the corruption of the social and political order it proposed to supersede’.* Friedrich’s claim, however, is not entirely accurate, for though it is true that Marxism did not phrase its critique of capitalist society in the language of corruption, both Marx and Lenin were concerned about corruption within the socialist movement itself. The progress of the movement was threatened by the corruption of its leaders and even the rank-and-file, the source of that corruption being bourgeois society and its wealth. Marx and Lenin did not reject capitalism because it was hopelessly corrupt but they did believe that it could exert a corrupting influence on the movement which sought to transform bourgeois society. Marx and Lenin disagreed, however, about how serious the threat of workingclass corruption was or what should be done about it. Indeed, the difference between Marx and Lenin on the problem of corruption is not unlike the difference between liberalism and republicanism. Like liberals, Marx did not worry much about corruption, nor did he emphasize the need for virtue to counter it. Lenin, on the other hand, was deeply anxious about the corruptibility of the proletariat. As I shall demonstrate, virtue therefore played a crucial role in his theory. For Lenin the problem of corruption resulted from a lack of virtue in certain sections