Remembering Lenin

When WWI broke out in 1914, as against the many opportunist European social democrats who cowed to the imperialist agenda of their national capitalist retainers, Lenin was among a minority of internationalist leaders such as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht who firmly argued for the imperialist war to be turned into a “civil war” — where each country’s workers, instead of slaughtering their fellow international coworkers, should “turn their weapons, not against their brothers, but against the enemy of their own country” — that is, to be turned into a class war.

History, as in 1917 when “the war to end all wars” was to implode upon its own contradictions, proved Lenin and his fellow “defeatists” correct all along. In February, massive workers-led upheavals in Petrograd (St. Petersburg), at first triggered by women workers on strike, forced Tsar Nicholas II to abdicate — in one week, thirty decades of Romanov rule came to a majestic end. Filling its place, however, was not the working class, but a loose motley of liberal democrats and constitutional monarchist-restorationists who took the revolution for granted as they wormed their way into the Provisional Government and pushed on with the war anyway. Meanwhile the Mensheviks and other reformist factions within Russian social democracy were able to assume leadership of the soviets (democratic workers’ councils) and advocated for “revolutionary defencism”, by which the war must be continued in order to “defend” the gains of the Russian revolution against German imperialism. By then these reformist leaders, who clung to the bourgeois order and meanwhile sought compromise with the landlords and capitalists, had been scheming about collaborating with the provisional ministers. By May, many would have taken up positions in the government themselves.

Like Trotsky, Lenin had known for the longest time that the “progressive” capitalists of Russia were anything but. Caught between imperialist interests abroad and feudal interests at home, what little profit margin they could squeeze themselves in the world market and out of their backward domestic economy was enough of a burden to bear. “In capitalist society,” wrote Lenin in The State and Revolution (1917), “we have a democracy that is curtailed, wretched, false, a democracy only for the rich, for the minority.” This is generally the case. But it was much more so in early-20th-century Russia where the primitive capitalist class was itself oppressed and its democracy fettered, and where the working class was much more exploited. Both classes were weak, but the weak bourgeoisie was made all the more afraid by the “weak” proletariat — the latter only so latently. Hungry workers, not least hungry workers forced into war with other hungry workers, simply had much less to lose. For the weak national bourgeoisie to effect its authority and dictate capital upon backward Russian society, while forced to play by the imperialist’s book, it was to rely much more deeply on corruption and collusion, if not violence, in its much less publicly approved wielding of state power.

Here it must be pointed out, in passing, that liberal “historians” and even some among his “followers” have not ceased their intellectual tradition of chalking up the socialist beginnings of Lenin’s to his brother’s fatal act of individual terrorism in 1887. Not that this assessment is entirely wrong, but that was all: a factor. Beyond that they stopped short of analyzing for themselves his intellectual growth and theoretical development through his practice of revolutionary Marxism, his life’s work. A considerable few have gone further, especially so-called “Marxist-Leninists”, attempting to find in this an “explanation” for his supposed “indecision”, as “opposed” to Trotsky, as regards who in his “revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” was to take the lead. Like their Menshevik forebears these modern reformists and Stalinists jump at any opportunity to drive a wedge between Lenin and Trotsky — not in pursuit of clarity (for instance, to clarify what Trotsky did in fact himself admit to, that he had committed the error of attempting, to no avail, to reconcile the Bolsheviks with the Mensheviks), but to discredit the revolutionary program of both Marxists, whose revolutionary politics, in practice, advanced in common.

What is often and conveniently overlooked when the reformists reflect upon their historical mistakes is Lenin’s own criticism of the Mensheviks’ “anarchist position” already at the turn of the 20th century, particularly in their aversion to proletarian state power. While the anarchists (as represented by the Social Revolutionaries, or SRs) outright rejected the state, the Mensheviks actively paralyzed the soviets by insisting they must never “take power” but remain “organs of pressure” on the bourgeois Provisional Government. In practice, this meant surrendering the independent class organization of the workers and peasants to the authority of the liberal bourgeoisie — a class incapable and unwilling to break from imperialism, nor from feudalism. Like the anarchists, the Mensheviks were gripped by a fear of “the dictatorship of the proletariat” — which they mischaracterized as authoritarianism — and thus opposed the revolutionary seizure of power. But unlike the SRs, who at least openly rejected the state, the Mensheviks defended a capitalist state under the guise of democracy. In this, they betrayed the scientific socialist principle that the working class must smash the bourgeois state and replace it with its own state apparatus — a democratic workers’ state — as a necessary phase in the transition to socialism.

To be clear, the working class was, and still is, the only revolutionary class capable of leading the mass of exploited and oppressed people against the ruling capitalist order. This historic role is forged in the capitalist mode of production by itself. Conditioned by industry and urban life, historically, as the most technically advanced and knowledgeable class, as well as the most united and disciplined, the working class, as a class, in itself, in fact possesses the command of entire economies. This is objectively true. However, only by effective means of revolutionary intervention in the class struggle, by a revolutionary vanguard party, can the consciousness required to unite the proletariat politically, independent of the bourgeoisie, and to gear its struggle toward seizing state power, for itself, be subjectively attained.

In relation to this need for a subjective factor (this is particularly important to those who maintain that the “conditions are not ripe for socialism”) to elevate the class struggle from the economic to the political plane, here we should also mention the vital role of democratic centralism as a key organizational mechanism that would enable the party and its members to effectively navigate the turbulent tide of a mass movement. It was Lenin’s critique of the primitiveness of “Economism” from which flowed the need for such a vanguard, and for it to be effective, therefore, the need also for both democracy and unity. It is as he entitled his 1906 short, Freedom to Criticize and Unity of Action. Whether, respectively, this other practical formula of Lenin’s should be read into as “democracy from below” and “centralism from above”, or vice versa, is a thing of impertinence; in this linguistic pit we shall once more leave behind the sophists.

With what has been said so far, it hopefully becomes possible for today’s reformists — as well as anarchists — to draw scientific conclusions as to what made up the difference, say, between the failure of the German Revolution — as well as that of the Spanish Revolution for the anarchists — with the success of the Russian Revolution, which we must now return to. This was, of course, despite the fact that, until then, over nine out of ten Russians had been peasants. So indeed stratified was the peasantry, unlike the proletariat, that it could not really qualify as a class. Some “peasants” (farmers), granted, were as rich and as loaded with private property and land as their bourgeois compatriots, while the majority of peasants proper were increasingly expropriated and swiftly becoming proletarianized as capitalism crept over the decaying feudal empire.

How, then, did the proletarian revolution fail where the proletariat was strongest, and succeed where it was ostensibly weakest? The answer is twofold. Objectively, Russia formed, as Lenin reportedly described, “the weakest link in the chain of world capitalism”. Subjectively, then, it was the Bolshevik leadership — shaped through decades of Marxist theory and class struggle — that made all the difference. In contrast, the German and Spanish working classes had numbers, militancy, and moments of revolutionary opportunity, but what they did not, it was a revolutionary party that was able to lead — a party that had broken from bourgeois influence, from reformist illusions, and from anarchist spontaneism. In Russia, the Bolsheviks did none of these, nor did they fetishize “horizontalism”. Rather they spent years building and preparing a cadre organization rooted in revolutionary Marxist strategy, capable of intervening decisively in moments of crisis.

After the fall of Tsarism, Russia was in a highly contradictory situation of dual power. The Russian bourgeoisie and what was left of the monarchy, as represented by the Provisional Government, could not have co-opted the revolution. They could only hold on to a semblance of power by clinging on to the crumbling old order, yet by doing so they ran into severe limits to how much “democracy” could be conceded to the masses. This was thanks to the Bolsheviks, who had spent more than a decade intervening in the class struggle. The soviets they had helped build along the way had had years of lessons under Tsarist repression and reformist attack to learn from. Above all they had had years of democratic organizing to make sense of what real democracy ought to be. The imperialist war had meanwhile been arming the working class, many of whom had now deserted the army. And by spring 1917, soviets had been in control, especially in Petrograd, of key industries and sectors, as well as social institutions and communities, not to forget the barracks. The working class had earned the trust of the massive immiserated peasantry and dispossessed middle classes, as well as much of the youth. The February revolution was indeed history’s confirmation of “the dictatorship of the proletariat” — that is, the role of the working class as the leader of both the bourgeois-democratic and the democratic-socialist revolution, the one to pass onto the other “uninterruptedly”.

This contradiction between the dying order of bourgeois liberalism and the embryonic power of the working class was, in and of itself, a ticking time bomb. In full recognition of this in the immediate aftermath of February, Lenin called for the party and the soviets in his April Theses, upon his return from exile after more than a decade, to reject any form of support for the Provisional Government, and instead prepare the working class for the immediate seizure of state power. The Bolshevik’s revolutionary program, summarized in such memorable practical slogans as “Peace, Land, and Bread” and “All Power to the Soviets”, effectively exposed the cowardice, impotence, and treachery of the “progressive” bourgeoisie and its reformist allies. These were further evidenced by their inability to explain their thematic inaction against the pro-Tsarist forces’ counterrevolutionary attacks during the July Days and later during General Kornilov’s botched coup — whereas Lenin, Trotsky, and other Bolshevik cadres, heavily persecuted in all these reactions, fiercely defended the revolution. By late September the Bolsheviks had managed to gain majorities in many a soviet across the country, most notably, too, in the Petrograd Soviet. Soon, in late October came “ten days that shook the world”, and the first democratic workers’ state in the world was thereafter born.

But the victorious founding of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” was exactly where its real task began. It was, as Lenin said, “the period of transition to communism”, during which the function of the state — i.e., to mediate the irreconcilable class antagonisms (in favor, of course, always of the ruling minority) and justify the rights to private property ownership — would gradually wither away along with the exploiting classes and their exploitative relations. In short the socialist state, unlike the bourgeois state, does not exist to perpetuate domination, but precisely the opposite: to abolish it. The global proletariat’s historic task lies in its elimination of exploitation while laying the foundation for a classless, stateless society, i.e., communism, for an economic system based on need, not greed, and one that allows the historical development of the free association of producers. To administer this revolutionary transition and the withering away of its own historic function is the central task of the workers’ state — to do so, Lenin explained, it must “create democracy for the people, for the majority, along with the necessary suppression of the exploiters, of the minority”. In the first five years of the USSR’s existence, despite the postwar economic misery compounded by brutal imperialist and growing reformist reaction during the civil war, historic leaps and bounds were made on both fronts.

Economically, the Bolsheviks undertook a radical expropriation of the bourgeoisie. Nationalization of land, industry, banks, and transport laid the foundations for planned production to replace the chaos and anarchy of capitalist markets. Through the creation of the Supreme Council of the National Economy, or the Vesenkha, workers’ democratic, collective ownership and control over national production began to take concrete shape — although under conditions of immense material scarcity and social dislocation. The Decree on Land, meanwhile, abolished the landed aristocracy and redistributed the seized land back to the poor, landless peasants.

Politically, unprecedented democratic reforms — full legal and economic equality for women (the USSR was first to legalize abortion, for instance), universal free education and healthcare, the abolishment of all laws discriminating oppressed minorities (with respect to sexuality, nationality, etc.), and so on — were accomplished not out of bourgeois moral imperative, but upon the Marxist principle of the universal right to self-determination. More importantly, these were fought for through the soviet system: direct organs of workers’ and peasants’ power, far surpassing even the most radical forms of bourgeois democracy. Education and culture, in this connection, were soon transformed to serve the people rather than the elite. Illiteracy rates dropped rapidly, and the seeds of a socialist culture were sown even amid famine and war.

Yet these historic gains were not immune to the pressures of material reality. War Communism, an emergency policy necessitated by previously unheard-of imperial reaction during the civil war, soon gave way to the New Economic Policy, a tactical retreat that reintroduced limited market relations under state control to revive a shattered, war-torn economy. Unlike later bureaucratic distorters of Marxism, Lenin recognized that socialism could not be decreed from above, especially in a backward, isolated country. Critically, at around the same time, the German Revolution failed in 1919, led by what had then been a reformist-dominated Social Democratic Party (both Luxemburg and Liebknecht were assassinated in January). After all, the proletarian revolution in Russia was and could never be conceived as a purely national act. It was only meant to be the first breach in the “chain of imperialism”, its “weakest link”, to be followed suit and extended by proletarian revolutions elsewhere, particularly in the highly industrialized West.

Alas, the defeats of the revolutionary waves across Europe left the Russian workers’ state isolated in a sea of hostile capitalism. Along with the devastation of the civil war, the ground was fertilized for the rise of a conservative bureaucracy — a counterrevolution within the revolution itself. After Lenin’s death, this bureaucratic caste, under Stalin’s iron grip, would consolidate itself in its mission to usurp political power from the working class, while preserving the economic foundations of the October revolution. Trotsky, who spent the rest of his years battling against Stalinism in exile, characterized the USSR under Stalin as a degenerated workers’ state. Where the gains of October — namely state ownership, planned economy, monopoly of foreign trade — were preserved, soviet democracy was however destroyed and replaced with totalitarian rule by a privileged bureaucracy. The proletariat, in a word, was politically expropriated; the word “dictatorship” was meanwhile forever perverted.

Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution, confirmed so powerfully in the course of 1917, and so relevant today particularly in the neocolonial world, such as Southeast Asia, held that in countries of belated capitalist development, the national bourgeoisie is incapable of carrying out even the basic tasks of its own historical revolution — such as land reform, democratic rights, and national independence. These tasks, in the imperialist epoch, fall to the working class, which must take power in alliance with the peasantry, leading not to a prolonged stage of bourgeois democracy, but to the uninterrupted — permanent — transition to socialist measures. Yet for socialism to survive, it cannot remain isolated. It must be exported to and extended in more advanced economies. The fate of the Russian Revolution tragically vindicated both Lenin and Trotsky. Isolated and besieged, the workers’ state was rapidly corrupted under Stalin, who codified its break with internationalism into a single nationalist dogma: “socialism in one country”.

Lenin’s true legacy, therefore, is much less measurable by the crimes of Stalinism — as have been the case with so many vulgar historians and “left” revisionists over the years — than by the revolutionary content of October, as when the working class seized history with its own hands, by his ardent defense of its gains, and by his practice of Bolshevism. His revolutionary strategy, his insistence on the necessity of a vanguard party, his unyielding commitment to internationalism, and his masterful application of the Marxist method live on as vital lessons for revolutionary socialists today. As when capitalism plunges ever deeper into crisis — exacerbating war, environmental catastrophe, and grotesque inequality — the tasks of October remain unfinished. To complete them is to rejuvenate Lenin’s and Trotsky’s vision, as they did that of Marx and Engels: a global working-class struggle for the emancipation of all who are exploited and oppressed, under the one banner of international socialism. In honoring Lenin’s birth, let us not merely remember a man who caused more than a ripple in the waters of history. Let his story be our bugle call to raise the subjective factors upon which rests the fate of all social revolutions: revolutionary leadership, revolutionary organization, to which we have now to add Trotsky’s revolutionary transitional program. And let his Bolshevism be our inspiration as we chart our path toward the next October.

Finally, as with all lives, with birth began death. As we remember the great life of Lenin, we dedicate the following passage of Trotsky’s, written at the Tbilisi Station a day after the Bolshevik leader had died on January 21, 1924:

The consciousness of the workers of the whole world cannot grasp this fact; for the enemy is still very strong, the way is long, and the great work, the greatest of history, is unfinished; for the working class of the world needed Lenin as perhaps no one in the history of the world has yet been needed. … And now Vladimir Ilyich is no more. The party is orphaned. The working class is orphaned. … How shall we advance, shall we find the way, shall we not go astray? For Lenin, comrades, is no longer with us! Lenin is no more, but Leninism endures. The immortal in Lenin, his doctrine, his work, his method, his example, lives in us, lives in the party that he founded, lives in the first workers’ state whose head he was and which he guided. Our hearts are now so overcome with grief, because all of us, thanks to the great favor of history, were born contemporaries of Lenin, worked with him, and learned from him. Our party is Leninism in practice, our party is the collective leader of the workers. In each of us lives a small part of Lenin, which is the best part of each of us. … May the pain we feel, which stabs our hearts each time we think that Lenin is no more, be for each of us an admonition, a warning, an appeal: Your responsibility is increased. Be worthy of the leader who trained you!