Lenin and today’s socialist struggle in the United States

“Essential and Distinctive Qualities in Lenin as Applied to Today’s Socialist Struggle in the United States,” by Paul Le Blanc, is a paper written as a contribution to the debates to take place at the upcoming national convention of the Tempest Collective. It is simultaneously released on LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal and Communis with the author’s authorization.

A comrade has asked me to share thoughts on Leninism that might be relevant to issues being raised in an internal discussion within the Tempest Collective regarding democratic centralism, Leninist organization, and related matters. This collective exploration of Lenin’s thought goes far beyond the confines of a small revolutionary collective. In our time of crises and catastrophes, it is a global development spreading among scholars and activists alike.1

The goal of Lenin and his comrades was to help mobilize the workers and oppressed of the Russian empire to oust the oppressive tyranny of Tsarism, as a key step in overthrowing global capitalism through socialist revolutions. That purpose shaped his organizational approach. Socialist activists today can learn much from studying that approach and adapting it to the somewhat different realities facing us. Three mistakes are often attributed to “Leninism,” and yet Lenin’s actual orientation represented a rejection of such mistakes.

In the first place, it is not enough for a few people simply to plant their banner in the ground and proclaim that they represent the working class (or the vanguard of the working class) and pretend that this will somehow constitute an effective challenge to capitalism. The ideas and activities of socialists must make sense to — and win the active support of — broad layers of the working-class majority.

Second, all too often, there is a fixation by members of the so-called “revolutionary vanguard” on not compromising their purity. The desire for such purity turns socialist theory into a rigid dogma rather than a more flexible guide to action. This can prevent the kind of creative and critical thinking needed for dealing with complex realities. Free expression and democratic openness within the group are seen as threats to such purity, leading to a bullying and heresy-hunting attitude toward those who don’t conform.

A third mistake occurs when socialist groups too often abstain from building actual, effective mass struggles of workers and the oppressed, because these struggles are for “mere reforms” under capitalism and are seen as a distraction from socialist revolution. This contrasts with Lenin, but also with Rosa Luxemburg and many other revolutionary socialists of the past, who believed that the effective struggle for reforms would be, in fact, the pathway for building a working-class movement capable of bringing about a transition to socialism.

Bolsheviks certainly made serious mistakes of their own, but — as Rosa Luxemburg put it — we should “distinguish the essential from the non-essential, the kernel from the accidental excrescences in the politics of the Bolsheviks.”2 Here our focus will be on some of the essentials (the meaning of and struggle for socialism, organizational conceptions), concluding with a suggestion of distinctive qualities of Lenin’s approach.

Lenin’s socialism

In considering “Lenin’s socialism,” it may be helpful to give our attention to what is actually meant by the word socialism. Socialism is a word that — like democracy — has been widely used by political leaders and movements in ways that are entirely, and sometimes even murderously, incompatible. Sticking with the word “democracy” for a few moments, there are at least three distinctions worth making right from the start:

1. There is an actual definition (democracy can be defined literally as “rule by the people”);
2. There is the meaning the word has for a self-proclaimed adherent (for example, Abraham Lincoln saw it as “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” — many would add something like: regardless of race, national origin, creed, color, or gender);
3. There is the label — which may be inconsistent with the actual definition, as can be seen in three of many possible examples:
   • A self-proclaimed “Democratic Party” that is actually — just like the Republican Party — run by small groups of power-players;
   • A so-called “People’s Democracy” that is actually controlled by a repressive one-party dictatorship;
   • Finally, a self-proclaimed “democratic republic” in which the real decisions are made by a power-elite concentrated in society’s economic, political, and military institutions, over and above the majority of the people.

The same is true of the word socialism — but even more so. Simply in regard to basic definitions, we find diversity and confusion. According to a Gallup Poll in 2018, “When asked to explain their understanding of the term ‘socialism,’ 17% of Americans define it as government ownership of the means of production.” We’ll come back to this conception of socialism as “government ownership of the economy” later in these remarks. Continuing with the Gallup Poll report, we are told: “Americans today are most likely to define socialism as connoting equality for everyone, while others understand the term as meaning the provision of benefits and social services, a modified form of communism, or a conception of socialism as people being social and getting along with one another. About a quarter of Americans were not able to give an answer.” On the other hand, Adolf Hitler’s “National Socialist” ideology (Nazism) has been described as genuinely socialist by some conservatives, while Bernie Sanders has defined socialism as the equivalent of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal social programs.

By focusing on Lenin’s understanding of socialism, things get less chaotic, though Lenin himself didn’t simply come up with his own definition. Scholar Lars Lih aptly notes that Lenin, as a revolutionary theorist, was “in love with Marx and Engels,” commenting to one close friend that “really ... they are the genuine article.” In his biographical study of the young Lenin, Trotsky makes a similar point: “Marx has never had a better reader or one in closer harmony with him, nor did Marx have a better, more penetrating or more grateful, nor a more attentive, congenial, or capable student.” For that matter, the most prominent reformist theoretician in the German Social Democratic Party, Eduard Bernstein, commented in his later years: “The Bolsheviks are not unjustified in claiming Marx as their own. Do you know? Marx had a strong Bolshevik streak in him!”3 To understand Lenin, then, it makes sense, first of all, to consider what Marx and Engels have to say.

We should be clear that they often used the word “communism” as well as “socialism” to describe the envisioned alternative to capitalism — sometimes preferring one word or the other, but generally treating them as synonyms, referring to their approach as representing “scientific socialism.” The mass workers’ movement that arose throughout Europe after Marx’s death, while embracing his ideas, referred to its goal with what was then another synonym — social democracy. For most of his political life, Lenin referred to himself as a Social Democrat, though in his final seven years, he switched to the term Communist.

Revolutionary democracy

For now, let us consider the meaning that Marx and Engels gave to the synonymous communism or socialism. In the Communist Manifesto the first step of transition to socialism involves the working-class majority winning “the battle of democracy.” The workers would then be the ruling class. Using their control of the State to take control of the economic means of production, they would ensure abundance by increasing “the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.” This would open up a transitional period of “despotic inroads” on capitalist property relations and conditions of production, involving a series of economic and social reforms further increasing the power and well-being of the working class, at the same time revolutionizing the entire economic system. This development would lead to the elimination of classes and class antagonisms, that would be replaced with a free association of the producers “in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”4

This understanding of socialism or communism expressed in the Manifesto was repeated by Marxist-influenced socialists around the world, whom Lenin considered comrades. The German Social Democratic Party, with which Lenin identified until August 1914, demanded in its 1891 Erfurt Program, “the transformation of the capitalist private ownership of the means of production — land and soil, pits and mines, raw materials, tools, machines, means of transportation — into social property and the transformation of the production of goods into socialist production carried on by and for society,” which, for the population as a whole, would turn the economy into “a source of the greatest welfare and universal, harmonious perfection.” In the United States, the socialist leader who in 1918 won Lenin’s highest praise, Eugene Victor Debs, summed it up succinctly in that same year: “all things that are jointly needed and used ought to be jointly owned … [and] industry, the basis of our social life, instead of being the private property of a few and operated for their enrichment, ought to be the common property of all, democratically administered in the interest of all.”5

Rosa Luxemburg saw things in just that way, emphasizing that socialism requires “the most important democratic guarantees of a healthy public life and of the political activity of the laboring masses: freedom of the press, [and] the rights of association and assembly,” because “without a free and untrammeled press, without the unlimited right of association and assemblage, the rule of the broad mass of the people is entirely unthinkable.” Explaining that the growth of socialist society represents “new territory” which inevitably generates “a thousand problems,” Luxemburg noted: “Only experience is capable of correcting and opening new ways. Only unobstructed, effervescing life falls into a thousand new forms and improvisations, brings to light creative force, itself corrects all mistaken attempts.”6

Other aspects of Marx’s view of socialism — or communism — emerged in points Marx and Engels made in the 1870s, and these also influenced Lenin. In Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx fleetingly commented that “between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat,” by which he meant uncompromising political domination by the working-class majority. Following this transitional period, Marx went on to identify two phases that the future society was likely to go through. The initial phase would involve “a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.” Over time, he suggested (consistent with the point that we have seen Luxemburg making) critical and creative efforts of society’s laborers would generate an evolution to “a more advanced phase of communist society,” characterized not only by greater abundance, but also fewer holdovers from capitalist dynamics, and greater opportunity and freedom for cooperative human development, transforming human consciousness.7

We should note that Lenin gave special emphasis to this outline in his classic The State and Revolution, but he chose to re-label the first phase as socialism while reserving the word communism only for the higher phase. My own inclination in this presentation, however, is to continue with Marx and Engels in treating socialism and communism as synonyms, and to stress (whichever word we use) that it goes through different phases.

Global freedom struggle

The three phases of post-revolutionary society indicated by Marx can be found here: (1) the transitional phase in which the working class seizes State power and begins the socialist reconstruction of the economy; (2) the first phase of socialism in which the final vestiges of capitalism are overcome; and (3) the eventual higher phase in which classes and class conflict give way to a society of equals, based on economic abundance and harmonious functioning beneficial to all. The need to keep order through policing and repression consequently withers away, and so does the State apparatus that exists for that purpose. (It is interesting to see Lenin’s distinction of democracy as a practice in contrast to democracy as a state institution. Under communism, he envisions a “full democracy” which is so thoroughgoing that it “becomes a habit,” enduring even after the democratic state apparatus evaporates.)

As revolutionary internationalists, Marx and Engels also understood the creation of socialism as a necessarily global phenomenon — something that could not come into being in just one country. This is why they focused such attention on building international organizations, with the appeal workers of all countries unite! As early as 1847, Engels stressed that simply for economic reasons it would not be possible to create a socialist oasis in the world capitalist economy. “By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the Earth … into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others,” he explained. A quarter of a century later, in assessing the defeat of the working-class uprising of the 1871 Paris Commune, Marx emphasized the central importance of international working-class solidarity, “the basic principle” of the first workers’ international which he helped create and lead. “Only when we have established this life-giving principle on a sound basis among the numerous workers of all countries,” Marx stressed, “will we attain the great final goal which we have set ourselves.” He concluded that the Paris Commune was defeated because in other capitalist countries there had not “developed great revolutionary movements comparable to the mighty uprising of the Paris proletariat.”8

This conception of socialism outlined by Marx and Engels was essentially Lenin’s own — reflecting the same revolutionary internationalism, the same working-class radicalism, the same humanistic and transformative ethos, the same revolutionary democracy. The centrality of genuine and thoroughgoing democracy to socialism had special importance for Lenin in two respects: first, the working class cannot carry out a socialist revolution unless it is prepared for that through serious struggles for all democratic demands; and second, “socialism cannot maintain its victory and bring humanity to the time when the state will wither away unless democracy is fully achieved.” Especially regarding this second point, Rosa Luxemburg would be moved to comment: “No one knows this better, describes it more penetratingly; repeats it more stubbornly than Lenin.”9

But something else was related to the essential element of revolutionary internationalism. As Lenin explained in his “Letter to American Workers” of 1918: “We are banking on the inevitability of the world revolution,” adding: “We are now, as it were, in a besieged fortress, waiting for the other detachments of the world socialist revolution to come to our relief.”10 But the other revolutions did not succeed or materialize. Instead, Lenin and his comrades had to face the incredible violence of immensely powerful global forces prepared to destroy the revolution through economic strangulation (with consequent waves of famine and disease), through military invasion, and through the generous funding of counter-revolutionary forces in a brutal civil war.

In the face of such horrific realities, Lenin and the Bolsheviks resorted to extreme authoritarian measures: the Red Terror and a dictatorship not of the workers and peasants, but of a beleaguered and increasingly dictatorial Russian Communist Party. Some have consequently come to misunderstand Lenin as propagating a new political model designed to achieve socialism through a sweeping and violent authoritarianism. But a serious study of what Lenin and his comrades wrote and said and did indicates that they were not driven to create a new pathway to socialism, so much as simply and desperately trying to survive the horrific realities they faced. Through such desperate measures, they hoped to hold on until socialist revolutions spread to more countries that would join with Soviet Russia to build a better world.11

The fact remains that the terrible situation, and some of the policies and modes of functioning that the Russian Communist Party engaged in during this period of 1918 to 1922 had a brutalizing and corrupting impact on many of the comrades. Two eyewitness-participants (Victor Serge and Natalia Sedova) later recalled: “Lenin’s speeches and writings of 1921-22 … did not conceal his uneasiness and occasional bitterness. Reminiscences by his contemporaries show that Vladimir Ilyich was ... highly critical of the outlook and conduct of those Party leaders who favored a bureaucratic dictatorship.”12

In 1922 Lenin was felled by the first of four strokes that brought his death two years later. Returning from a visit to him, a prominent comrade, Lev Kamenev, addressed the question “what does Lenin condemn?” The answer, he noted, was: “Very much and first of all, with special emphasis, our bureaucratic apparatus.” In my recent book on Lenin, when focusing on his final years, I trace some of what he tried to do to reverse the situation — boldly, anxiously, and for the most part unsuccessfully. There is no time to elaborate here on what I found, but it was grounded in his lifelong revolutionary commitments, and consistent with what Tamás Krausz has indicated — an effort to move developments toward “self-governing socialism, the culture of workers’ councils, forms of cooperatives leading to the self-defense and self-organization of the working people.”13

Transitions to socialism

Lenin was keenly aware of the fact that the realities of Soviet Russia were in no way socialist — certainly not the higher stage that Marx talked about in Critique of the Gotha Program, but just as certainly not the lower stage. Rather, it remained in the very initial, transitional stage between capitalism and socialism.

Particularly revealing in regard to the free society he saw the revolution striving to attain are Lenin’s comments on new cultural trends. Commiserating with his German comrade Clara Zetkin, he commented: “It is beyond me to consider the products of expressionism, futurism, cubism and other ‘isms’ the highest manifestation of artistic genius. I do not understand them. I experience no joy from them.” But he went on to confess: “Yes, dear Clara, it can’t be helped. We’re both old fogies. For us it is enough that we remain young and are among the foremost at least in matters concerning the revolution. But we won’t be able to keep pace with the new art; we’ll just have to come trailing behind.” Insisting that “art belongs to the people,” he believed that it was necessary to start by raising general educational and cultural standards of society’s laboring majority.14

After Lenin’s death the bureaucratic dictatorship that he had resisted was able to consolidate its hold, under the leadership of his comrade Joseph Stalin, who expressed a commitment to building socialism in a single country and labored to modernize Soviet Russia in the name of socialism. By 1930, his regime was claiming that socialism had now been achieved.

“Our soviet society is a socialist society, because the private ownership of the factories, works, the land, the banks and the transport system has been abolished and public ownership put in its place,” Stalin explained to U.S. journalist Roy Howard in 1936. “The foundation of this society is public property: state, i.e., national, and also co-operative … property.” The primary purpose of such a society would be industrial and agricultural development to advance living standards and cultural levels of the population, and to strengthen the nation. At the same time, Stalin explained (for example, in his report to the 1930 Party Congress), “correct leadership by the Party” is essential for such efforts: “The Party should have a correct line; ... the masses should understand that the Party’s line is correct and should actively support it; ... the Party should ... day by day guide the carrying out of this line; ... the Party should wage a determined struggle against deviations from the general line and against conciliation towards such deviations; ... in the struggle against deviations the Party should force the unity of its ranks and iron discipline.” Scholar Erik van Ree has suggested that this approach was consistent with Stalin’s view of democracy, which he saw not as rule by the people but as “policies alleged to be in the interest of the people” and as “a system that allowed the population to participate at least in state organs, even without having a determining say in it.”15

Some (on both the right and left of the political spectrum) have insisted on labeling this as “actually existing socialism,” but other labels have also been applied, such as: state-socialism, state-capitalism, bureaucratic collectivism, degenerated workers’ state, and totalitarian state economy.16 My own inclination is to see it as a variant of the transitional formation between capitalism and socialism which Marx and Engels had theorized — but in this case forced to exist on a capitalist planet much longer than anticipated. Consequently, it became bureaucratized, authoritarian, and corrupt, proving unable to move forward to socialism and unable to endure.

What seems clear, however, is that what the Soviet Union became was not consistent with Lenin’s conception of socialism. His conception — which he shared with Marx and Engels, with Eugene V. Debs and Rosa Luxemburg, and with many others — remains for many of us an alternative to capitalism that is worth considering and fighting — for.

A summing-up of these Leninist essentials might involve the following notions. Socialism (or communism) — in its Marxist variant, to which Lenin adhered — can be defined as the social ownership and democratic control of the economy, and its utilization to meet the needs of all society’s members. It also includes the following three points:

1. It envisions the creation of a society in which freedom and equality would be the condition for each and every person living within it.
2. Given the nature of the global economy, this must be international in scope.
3. Given the complexities of the changes, it involves, a process encompassing three phases: first a transitional phase in which the working-class majority oversees the transition from capitalism to socialism; second, an initial phase of development in which the cooperative and classless society taking shape is still marked by previous capitalist dynamics; third, a higher stage infused by the new resources, experiences and consciousness generated by an extended period of socialist evolution — in which the need of any form of state repression evaporates: the free development, creative labor, and experience of genuine community among society’s individuals has become an all-encompassing social reality.

Lenin’s organizational approach

What was essential in Lenin’s thought flows from the revolutionary perspectives of Marx and Engels and was shared by many revolutionary socialists of his own time. But what qualities in Lenin’s thought made it distinctive?

Many have emphasized that Lenin’s organizational thought is the answer. Lenin, we are told, sought to create a highly centralized and disciplined revolutionary vanguard party — what was tagged in the Stalin era as a “party of a new type” — that would be capable of bringing about a socialist revolution, a party guided by the principle of democratic centralism. Critics have commonly described it as a mechanism far more centralist than democratic, requiring on the one hand “a strong leader” and on the other hand a rank-and-file membership “consciously and joyfully submitting to the leadership imposed on it by senior members.”17 But this is not how the term was understood by Lenin and his comrades.

In fact, the term democratic centralism has been traced back to the German workers’ movement of the 1860s and seems to have been introduced into the ranks of Russian Marxists in 1906 by the Menshevik faction. According to the Mensheviks, in addition to democratic decision-making and democratic elections within all party organizations, “decisions of the guiding organizations are binding on the members of those organizations of which the collective is the organ,” and “decisions of lower-level organizations are not to be implemented if they contradict decisions of higher organizations.” The Bolsheviks agreed with this, granting “elected centers full powers in matters of ideological and practical leadership,” but emphasizing that this elected leadership is also “subject to recall” and that “their actions are given wide publicity, and they are to be strictly accountable for these activities.”18

In line with this, Alexander Bogdanov (at the time a central leader of the early Bolshevik faction) stressed that a revolutionary party “espoused the comradely principle [that] was alien to naked centralization and blind discipline,” which added up to the need for “free and conscious comradely connection” and “democratic forms of organization.” Lenin concurred that the health of the revolutionary organization required “that the ideological struggle in the Party on the question of theory and tactics … [be] conducted as openly, widely and freely as possible,” just so long as this did not “disturb or hamper the unity of revolutionary action.” Lenin also underscored the necessity for “the rights of all minorities and for all loyal opposition” as well as for the relative autonomy of local organizations. He summarized the concept as involving “freedom of discussion, unity of action.”19

We can see that the principle of democratic centralism — in this variant — although essential to what we call “Leninism,” was by no means a distinctive quality in Lenin’s organizational approach. Of course, it came to be understood differently after the 1917 revolution. Lenin himself was complaining by 1918 that “there is nothing more mistaken than confusing democratic centralism with bureaucracy and routinism.”20 In 1920, Lenin was explaining in Left-Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder that the Bolshevik experience showed that a disciplined revolutionary vanguard party required three qualities. The first exists independently — a class-conscious layer of the working class, which must be the base of a would-be vanguard party. The second quality is an intimate connection of this organized vanguard layer to the broader working class. The third quality is a leadership able to advance a correct political strategy and tactics — but this could not be proclaimed but must be the conclusion drawn by “the broad masses” based on their own experience.

Lenin went on to describe the consequences if a party sought to short-circuit this process. “Without these conditions, discipline in a revolutionary party really capable of being the party of the advanced class, whose mission it is to overthrow the bourgeoisie and transform the whole of society, cannot be achieved,” he wrote. He added: “Without these conditions, all attempts to establish discipline inevitably fall flat and end up in phrase-mongering and clowning.” In fact, “these conditions cannot emerge at once. They are created only by prolonged effort and hard-won experience.” His stress on the need for what he called “a correct revolutionary theory” implied that not every “revolutionary theory” is necessarily correct. Such theory, he emphasized, “is not a dogma, but assumes final shape only in close connection with the practical activity of a truly mass and truly revolutionary movement.”21

Achieving this is hardly a simple matter. Between 1907 and 1910 it led to an intense conflict and rupture within the Bolshevik faction between Lenin and Bogdanov. One of Lenin’s co-thinkers, Gregory Zinoviev, has explained it in this way:

Comrade Lenin’s main idea was that we had to remain with the working class and be a mass party and not to coop ourselves up exclusively in the underground and turn into a narrow circle. If the workers are in the trade unions, then we must be there too; if we can send just one man into the Tsar’s Duma, then we shall: let him tell the workers the truth and we can publish his speeches as leaflets. If something can be done for the workers in the workers’ clubs, then we shall be there. We have to use every legal opportunity, so as not to divorce ourselves from the masses.22

Lenin’s approach struck Bogdanov and others as a betrayal of the revolutionary Bolshevism of 1905 and as an adaptation to the reformism of the Mensheviks.

Distinctive qualities

It is here that we find something distinctive in Lenin’s own “Leninism”. As with Marx, Lenin was profoundly influenced by the dialectical philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Lenin’s orientation is suggested by his 1915 description of Hegel’s approach to the dialectics of reality and of research, and also of Lenin’s activism. Lenin emphasized “living, many-sided knowledge (with the number of sides eternally increasing), with an infinite number of shades of every approach and approximation to reality (with a philosophical system growing into a whole out of each shade),” providing “an immeasurably rich content” as compared with more static analytical approaches.23

Flowing from this, he criticized many Social Democratic adherents of Marxism, whose understanding of Marxism he saw as “impossibly pedantic.” They failed to understand Marx’s “revolutionary dialectics.” They were inclined to see how things developed in Western Europe as a universal model for all places and all times, failing to comprehend this essential point: “While the development of world history as a whole follows general laws, it is by no means precluded, but on the contrary presumed, that certain periods of development may display peculiarities in either the form or the sequence of this development.”24 Regarding many Communist adherents of Marxism, Lenin was especially exasperated by pseudo-revolutionary pretentiousness, insisting that “we must at all costs set out, first, to learn, secondly, to learn, and thirdly, to learn, and then to see to it that learning shall not remain a dead letter, or a fashionable catch-phrase (and we should admit in all frankness that this happens very often with us), that learning shall really become part of our very being, that it shall actually and fully become a constituent element of our social life.”25

This dovetails with a pragmatic quality noted by Lenin’s older sister Anna, that the young Lenin was impatient if “there was no action, but mostly idle talk and showing off,” adding: “He shrank from all empty talk; he wanted to take his knowledge and his abilities to the class which he knew was destined to accomplish the revolution — the working class.” This corresponds to a conclusion of Max Eastman (at the time a prominent left-wing intellectual), who noted Lenin’s rejection of “people who talk revolution, and like to think about it, but do not ‘mean business’ … the people who talked revolution but did not intend to produce it.”26

Such elements in Lenin’s approach, as Kevin Anderson has capably shown, contributed to a variety of innovative contributions “around such issues as imperialism, national liberation, the State, and revolution.” He goes on to suggest the relevance of this approach to such additional realities as the ecological crisis, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.27 One can also glean from John Riddell’s invaluable studies on the Communist International in the time of Lenin28 a similar blend of qualities we have been examining here — both essential and distinctive. They culminated in a global movement seeking to combine aspirations relevant to our own time:

• The deepening of democracy and the expansion of socialist consciousness;
• The realization of working-class capacities for mass action and united fronts;
• The combined advance of winning life-giving reforms and of revolutionary liberation.

There is something else — both essential and distinctive — which is inseparable from such deepening, realization, and advance. An activist organization must be brought into being, with an expanding core of experienced cadres, that can help turn these aspirations into living realities. The challenge for us (not simply in Tempest but in all revolutionary groups) is to determine what we can actually do that will help bring about the realization of these interrelated goals. The United Left Platform (ULP), to which Tempest adheres, can be seen in this framework, and the same is true of many elements in Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).29

Practical applications for today

It makes sense for revolutionary socialists in the United States (including the Tempest Collective) to be actively engaged with comrades of the ULP and DSA in efforts to build class-conscious struggles of the actual, diverse working class in the United States — through mass movements and united front coalitions — geared to win victories beneficial to the working class and all oppressed people.

This should involve a blend of mass actions, socialist agitation and education, and socialist electoral work that will guide the efforts of an evolving network of revolutionary collectives stretching throughout our country. Special attention should be given to:

• Building ecosocialist consciousness and struggles;
• Defending living standards and quality of life for all people in our diverse working class;
• Solidarity with and support for anti-imperialist and national liberation struggles;
• Defense and radical expansion of democracy.

Organizationally, the necessary balance between (1) openness and flexibility, along with local initiative and vibrant creativity, on the one hand, and (2) coherence and strategic seriousness on the other, will require a genuinely democratic centralism. The truly Leninist commitment to learn and learn and learn means far more than simply reading, lectures, and discussions. Even more profoundly, it involves practical experience, outreach and connection with more and more people, and the test of shared activism. Through collectively shared projects and campaigns, with periodic “tasks and perspectives” evaluations, it will be possible to sustain an ongoing dialectic of learn/test-in-practice/learn/test-in-practice that, if done right, can help win life-giving reforms in the capitalist present, leading ultimately to the revolutionary liberation of a socialist future.

• 1

  See “Lenin’s Return,” in Paul Le Blanc, Unfinished Leninism: The Rise and Return of a Revolutionary Doctrine (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), 7-23, and “Lenin Studies: Method and Organization,” in Paul Le Blanc, Revolutionary Collective: Comrades, Critics, and Dynamics in the Struggle for Socialism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), 1-26. 

• 2

  “The Russian Revolution,” in Socialism or Barbarism: The Selected Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, ed. by Paul Le Blanc and Helen C, Scott (London: Pluto Press, 2010), 237.

• 3

   Lars Lih, Lenin (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 13; Leon Trotsky, The Young Lenin (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972), 187; Bernstein quoted in Sidney Hook, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx (New York: John Day and Co., 1933), 43 

• 4

  “Manifesto of the Communist Party” in Karl Marx, The Political Writings, ed. by David Fernbach (London: Verso 2019), 80, 81.

• 5

  “The Erfurt Program, 1891” in Marxist Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/1891/erfurt-program.htm; Debs, “Statement to Court” in Jean Y. Tussey, ed., Eugene V. Debs Speaks (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1995), 275.

• 6

  “The Russian Revolution,” in Socialism or Barbarism, 231, 233.

• 7

  “Critique of the Gotha Program,” in Marx, The Political Writings, 1030, 1031.

• 8

  Engels, “Principles of Communism,” Marxist Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm; Marx, “La Liberté Speech” (1872), Marxist Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/09/08.htm.

• 9

  Lenin quoted in N.K. Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 328; Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution,” in Socialism or Barbarism, 234. See also “The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination” (1915) in Lenin, Revolution, Democracy, Socialism: Selected Writings, ed. by Paul Le Blanc (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 232-236.

• 10

  Lenin, “Letter to American Workers,” in Revolution, Democracy, Socialism, 300. 

• 11

  See Paul Le Blanc, October Song: Bolshevik Triumph, Communist Tragedy, 1917-1924 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017).

• 12

  Victor Serge and Natalia Sedova, The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015), 111.

• 13

  Kamenev quoted in Louis Fischer, The Life of Lenin (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 603; Paul Le Blanc, Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution (London: Pluto Press, 2023), 139-166; Tamás Krausz, “Lenin’s Socialism — From the Perspective of the Future,” LeftEast, December 29, 2021, lefteast.org/lenins-socialism-perspective-of-the-future/. 

• 14

  Lenin quoted by Zetkin, “Recollections of Lenin,” in Lenin, On Culture and Cultural Revolution, 233, 234.

• 15

  Interview Between J.V. Stalin and Roy Howard,” March 1, in Marxist Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/03/01.htm; Stalin, “Political Report to the 16th Congress of the C.P.S.U.(B), August 27, 1930 in Marxist Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1930/aug/27.htm ; Erik van Ree, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin: A Study in Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Patriotism (London: Routledge Curzon 2002), 3-4.

• 16

  See Marcel van der Linden, Western Marxism and the Soviet Union: A Survey of Critical Theories and Debates since 1917 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009).

• 17

  Alfred G, Meyer, Leninism (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967), 92, 93, 100.

• 18

  See Paul Le Blanc, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015), 115-128.

• 19

  Paul Le Blanc, “Learning from Bogdanov,” Revolutionary Collective, 58; Lenin, “The Freedom to Criticize and Unity of Action,” in Revolution, Democracy, Socialism, 200-201. 

• 20

  Lenin quoted in Le Blanc, Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution, 156.

• 21

  Lenin, Left-Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder (excerpts) in Revolution, Democracy, Socialism, 306.

• 22

  Gregory Zinoviev, History of the Bolshevik Party, from the Beginnings to February 1917 — a Popular Outline (London: New Park Publications, 1973), 153-154.

• 23

  Lenin, “On the Question of Dialectics” (1915) in Marxist Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/misc/x02.htm. 

• 24

  Lenin, “Our Revolution” (1923) in Marxist Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1923/jan/16.htm.

• 25

  Lenin, “Better Fewer But Better” (1923) in Revolution, Democracy, Socialism, 339. 

• 26

  Anna Ulyanova-Yelizarova, “Reminiscences of Ilyich,” in Reminiscences of Lenin by His Relatives (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1956), 44, 45; Max Eastman, Marx, Lenin and the Science of Revolution (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1926), 150-151. 

• 27

  Kevin Anderson, Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism, A Critical Study (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 251, 253. 

• 28

  John Riddell, Lenin’s Comintern Revisited (Leiden: Brill, 2026).

• 29

  See “United Left Platform,” International Viewpoint, December2025, https://internationalviewpoint.org/_United-Left-Platform,_and Paul Le Blanc, “Lessons from the DSA Convention,” Links, 16 August 2025, https://links.org.au/united-states-lessons-dsa-convention; also see Stephan Kimmerle, Philip Locker, and Brandon Madsen, eds., A User’s Guide to DSA (Seattle, WA: Labor Power Publications, 2025), reviewed in Paul Le Blanc, “Defining Democratic Socialists,” forthcoming in Against the Current, May-June 2026.