The anniversary business, as practised in the Soviet Union, shows how even Lenin's centenary can be used as an opium to the people.
With the 'official' communist movement using the occasion for its ends, and the bourgeois press making their contribution towards distorting everything that Lenin stood for, we are forced to give battle a hundred years after he happened to be born, forty-six years after he died, to defend the politics of Lenin and revolution.
Lenin was a Russian revolutionary and an international revolutionary. He founded the Bolshevik party and the Third International, led the October revolution and directed the Soviet state for the first five years of its existence. All this the bourgeoisie and its ideologists can readily admit. But what their class position does not allow them to admit is precisely what is most essential to taking up the fight here in Britain. Lenin was above all a revolutionary Marxist, whose work represents, to a degree still unparalleled, the unity of the theory of scientific socialism and the practice of class struggle. The bourgeoisie can never admit that class-conscious workers have a privileged access to the most advanced social science—Marxism; and that they can use this knowledge as an instrument to transform society and overthrow all forms of oppression and exploitation. To admit that would be ideological liquidation for the bourgeoisie.
Conversely, if we are to make any headway in the immense task of advancing from the inchoate struggles of students and young workers, to reconstruct the whole rotten mess of British society along socialist lines, it is absolutely vital to master the tools of Marxism. Which means, in part, to learn from the achievements—and the mistakes—of the masters of Marxist theory and practice, and in the first place—from Lenin.
Marx and Lenin
What a myth the bourgeoisie tries to put over when it contrasts Marx, the supposed 'historical determinist' who believed in the inevitable evolution of capitalist society into socialism, with Lenin, the 'voluntarist,' 'Blanquist,' who saw that capitalism wasn't developing into socialism and thought he could step in with a small group of conspirators and push Russia—and the world—onto the socialist path! Marx spent his whole adult life in the service of the workers' movement. His theoretical work aimed to provide the working-class with an understanding of how capitalist society functions, of what the working class has to do in order to emancipate itself (smash the bourgeois state and organise its own form of political power), and for thirteen years he was active in building the early working-class organisations (Communist League 1847-1852, International Workingmen's Association 1864-72).
Just as Marx the 'theorist' was an active organiser, Lenin the 'activist' was a systematic theorist. The starting point of Lenin's political practice, and which Lenin reverted to at every decisive turning, was the socio-economic analysis of Russian—and later of international—society. In Siberian exile in 1897, Lenin the 'voluntarist' completed his book The Development of Capitalism in Russia. His first major work, it is an exhaustive analysis of the Russian social formation, and the dynamic way in which the traditional forms of patriarchal peasant economy were being eroded by the capitalist market. It defined the objective features of the specific class society in which the Russian workers' movement had to operate, an analysis which was to constitute the starting-point of Bolshevik strategy. It is still unsurpassed as an example of Marxist sociology. And it demonstrated at a point when this was not clear that capitalism was the dominant development in Russian society and that the working-class would be its decisive social force. In 1916 Lenin's more famous though less exhaustive book Imperialism also served to orient the international strategy of the Bolshevik party and the Comintern in the 'highest stage of [text lost at the foot of the column in the scan] predictions and expectations of orthodox social-democratic 'Marxists.' In Russian, in contrast to the social democrats in Western Europe, revolutionaries faced problems that forced them to discover those implications of Marxist theory for political practice which Marx himself had not developed. Russia had on the one hand an advanced capitalist sector and consequently the basis for a socialist workers' movement. But it had not yet achieved its bourgeois-democratic transformation and was still overall a peasant society dominated by the bureaucratic Tsarist state. It was impossible for Russian revolutionary Marxists to import a model for their political role from the advanced capitalist countries of Western Europe. Their political tasks were not mapped out for them—they had to decide them for themselves.
The first Russian Marxists of the 1880's, Plechanov and the Emancipation of Labour group, had already decided that the fundamental aim of the workers' movement in Russia must be the overthrow of Tsarism. Lenin built an organisation able to lead the working class in this political struggle against the state. In the course of constructing what was to become the Bolshevik party, the weapon of this struggle, Lenin reached two further conclusions, which essentially define 'Leninism.'
Leninism
Firstly, if the revolutionary workers' party has to choose its strategic aims, then it cannot be the party of all workers, or of all who are 'for socialism' or even of those who pay lip service to Marxism. The Marxist party must be the instrument of the strategy it has chosen, and so membership must be open only to those who accept its strategic programme, and who 'personally participate in one of the party's organisations' (Bolshevik resolution at the 2nd Party Congress, 1903).
Secondly, the internal organisation of the party must be such as to put this strategy, and the tactis chosen to realise it, into effect. This means that although the party's line is decided on democratically by a party congress, after this decision the minority must work loyally with the majority to put it into practice. Between congresses the central committee elected by the congress must have the authority to make any tactical changes required by unexpected conditions.
These two concepts of revolutionary militancy and democratic centralism gave the Bolshevik party a quite different character from its Social Democratic contemporaries in the West and from its Menshevik rival in Russia. It sought to be first and foremost a cadre party rather than a mass party, although the bourgeois myth of a 'group of conspirators' is amply refuted by the fact that the 'conspirators' had grown to 30,000 in February 1917 and to 240,000 by October 1917, backed at that time in elections and mass mobilisations by the overwhelming majority of the industrial working-class. The Bolshevic party built up its organisation and a mass base under Tsarist repression; it was the only major party of the Second International that remained true to proletarian internationalism and did not meekly follow its ruling class into the World War; its tactical flexibility and discipline enabled it to take advantage of favourable conjunctures: to the point of leading the first victorious proletarian revolution.
Revolutionary Criticism
The most strenuous revolutionary criticism made of Lenin is that although the organisation and tactics he developed for the Bolshevik party provided a successful instrument for overthrowing the Tsarist and the embryonic bourgois state in Russia, the highly centralised and even monolithic structure of the Bolshevik party already contained the seed of a bureaucratic elite divorced from the masses: inevitably producing Stalinism and the degeneration of the Soviet revolution. Thus libertarian socialists reject the Leninist forms of organisation. In so doing they throw out the baby along with the bathwater. They cannot put forward an alternative force which can overthrow the bourgeois state. They are forced to rely on nebulous solutions of spontaneity, autonomous local soviets or workers' councils which, as every revolutionary working class upsurge from the Paris Commune of 1871 to the May events of 1968 has proved, cannot by themselves displace the bourgeoisie from power. Even though without them the working class can never achieve power.
The libertarian's reading of Leninism forgets that it is forged on the action of the masses of workers and peasants. They offer as an alternative to Lenin the opposite of their own crude schematisations of Bolshevism. The distorting Stalinist orthodoxy bears a heavy responsibility fro these errors; so do those who refuse to study Lenin for themselves. For the successful organisation of the revolution is built on the dialectic of political force and the masses. In Russia—the Bolshevik party, the Soviet state and the Red Army, and the innumerable independent actions of workers and peasants.
The Bolshevik party conducted its revolution in a highly specific hissorical conjuncture, one which posed the most immense problems for the construction of socialism. But its social base was firmly rooted in the industrial working-class, and its revolution was a democratic one—for the working class. At the moment of the seizure of power, the party enjoyed both the organised support of the absolute majority of the class, and the unorganised support or at least acquiescence of the peasant masses. But the spontaneous peasant land redistributions of 1917, which the Bolsheviks had no alternative but to accept, doomed the working-class party to transform the agrarian economic structures (in which 80% of the Russian population was embedded), from the outside. Socialism had to be built against the peasantry. The bureaucratic state, built up to govern a peasant country (bureaucratic in the Marxist sense, i.e. one separated from the class from which it arose), ended up by dominating the party and the workers' soviets and transforming them in its own image.
The civil war of 1918-21, the intervention [foot of the column cut off in the scan]
and the consequent slaughter of thousands of irreplacable worker-Bolsheviks helped to engender the divorce of the working-class from its own state. Above all, once the Russian revolution was isolated, the objective class relations in which the Bolsheviks took, and had to take, power, prejudiced the programme Lenin set out in The State and Revolution.
In the Chinese revolution, the Communist Party succeeded, on the basis of very different social and political conditions, to base itself firmly in the majority class, the peasantry. In the advanced capitalist countries, where the industrial proletariat has for decades formed the majority of the population, the socialist revolution can only be a majority revolution. Whatever problems we have to face, and they will be many, the tension between state and society produced by minority class rule (the objective setting for the deformations suffered by the Russian revolution) will not be one of them. But it remains that the party Lenin built, though and advanced instrument for making the revolution at the political level, was not perfectly equipped to confront the tasks of socialist construction. From its weaknesses there are lessons to be drawn for revolutionary practice and revolutionary organisation today. The Bolshevik party could deal with the contradiction between the people and the enemy, between the forces of revolution (the workingclass and poor peasantry) and those of reaction (Tsarism, the bureaucratic state and the bourgeoisie). It could not deal adequately with the contradictions that arose among the people themselves.
This weakness comes through in a number of different ways. The Bolshevik party, the centralised strategic vanguard of the revolution, could never relate satisfactorily to the Soviets, a revolutionary but essentially heterogenous force. In 1905 the Bolshevik party saw the Soviets as a dangerous rival, and although Lenin criticised this position, he did not put forward a coherent alternative. In 1917, although Lenin now saw the Soviets as the state form of the proletariat, it was implicit in the October seizure of power that the Bolsheviks would use their majority in the Soviets as the instrument of party decisions, and all opposition would be firmly dealt with. Between 1917 and 1920 opposition Soviet parties were gradually squeezed out, under the exigencies of the civil war. But no theory was developed of the changed role that the unforeseen one-party state assigned the Bolshevik party. The ban on organised factions within the party, imposed in 1921, specifically stressed the right of tendency and provided for new forms of inner-party discussion, but the means to guarantee this discussion were lacking. The degeneration of inner-party relations in the mid-'twenties proved that a revolutionary party's control of its own actions, and its ability to openly acknowledge and rectify mistakes and not compound them by distortion and suppression, cannot be guaranteed by any formal organisational structure.
In Russia after Lenin's death these weaknesses greatly facilitated the takeover of the Bolshevik Party by the state apparatus, and the stifling of political discussion. If the contingent weaknesses of the Bolshevik party had been corrected—they might have been had Lenin lived—then the party would have had the means to openly check and correct mistakes, the period of 'primitive socialist accumulation,' for all its inevitable hardships, need not have involved Stalin's crimes of the 'thirties, and the Soviet Union would not be in the absolute impasse in which it finds itself today.
Lenins Genius
Revolutionary militancy and democratic centralism are fundamental principles laid down by Lenin that differentiate the revolutionary party from reformism, and without which no revolutionary organisation and no proletarian revolution is possible. But the specific forms of revolutionary organisation have to be evolved both on the basis of national circumstances—and it was Lenin's genius to have done this for Russia—and on the past experience of the revolutionary movement internationally. No formal organisational structure can guarantee these principles; they can only be guaranteed by the ideological level and critical independence of the party rank and file, and by a theory of organisational problems developed from past experience. It is crucially important for us to study Lenin's political practice and the Russian revolution, its achievements and its limitations. Just as it is vital to study the Chinese experience which solved some of the problems unresolved by Lenin (eg. how to handle contradictions among the people when the proletariate is still a minority class. Though the Chinese experience also does not provide an accomplished example to be mechanically applied in the West. Above all we need to start where Lenin started, with the scientific investigation of our own society, its socio-economic formation and its history, and to discover forms of political practice specific to the task of building a revolutionary workers' [foot of the column cut off in the scan]