Lenin, democracy and the anti-Leninist shortcut

Dan La Botz’s essay, “Goodbye to Lenin and Leninism” indicts Vladimir Lenin for the outcomes of the Russian Revolution, directly linking Bolshevik methods to subsequent tragedy: the suppression of opposition, the Cheka, the Kronstadt uprising, the ban on factions, and the erosion of Soviet democracy. The force of this indictment is undeniable; these tragedies are historical facts (Bhatti, Shah, and Bharti 2025, 1-20). Yet a Marxism that refuses to confront defeat honestly abandons its own critical foundation.

La Botz’s argument is weakened by its historical framing. He interprets the revolution’s degeneration primarily as a product of Lenin’s moral failures, largely abstracted from its material context: civil war, foreign invasion, economic collapse, famine, social fragmentation and international isolation. Lenin appears as a moral tragedian rather than an historical actor shaped by objective forces. Such an approach substitutes moral condemnation for historical materialist analysis grounded in concrete conditions.

La Botz highlights the “ratchet effect,” suggesting each authoritarian measure created conditions for further repression. While the Constituent Assembly’s suppression, the Cheka, War Communism, Kronstadt and the ban on factions undeniably restricted working-class democracy, the ratchet metaphor flattens the complexity of these processes. Revolutions are not mechanical sequences; each Bolshevik decision was shaped by the shifting and coercive pressures of war, famine, sabotage and social disintegration.

La Botz draws a straight line from What Is to Be Done? to Joseph Stalin, but this teleological reading obscures substantial complexity. The Bolsheviks seized power amid social collapse and multiple competing pressures: the fall of the old regime, attempts at bourgeois restoration, imperial intervention, peasant demands for land, and workers’ demands for dignity. The soviets emerged organically from these conflicts. The Bolsheviks prevailed because they acted on these demands when every other major party failed to

Anti-Leninist critics often overlook this reality. The Bolsheviks did not secure power solely through manipulation or organisational centralism. Their influence grew because every other major party compromised with the Provisional Government, the war effort, the landlords or the bourgeois order. The Mensheviks and Right Socialist Revolutionaries squandered critical opportunities, restraining the revolution rather than advancing it (Lenin 1917). The Bolsheviks were far from faultless, but they were not a conspiratorial sect isolated from society. In 1917, they gave organisational expression to the revolutionary aspirations of workers, soldiers and peasants (Brovkin 1990, 350–373).

Democracy and class

In examining democratic forms, La Botz presents the Constituent Assembly as the primary democratic alternative, but this framing is insufficiently concrete. The Assembly captured a static electoral snapshot taken during a rapidly shifting revolution, whereas the soviets functioned as living organs of class struggle. A Marxist analysis must always ask: democracy for which class? The Assembly was dominated by parties that no longer reflected the revolution’s real social divisions, especially following the split between the Right and Left Socialist Revolutionaries. The soviets, despite their limitations, were rooted in the ongoing self-activity of workers, soldiers and peasants.

The central issue is not a simple choice between soviets and parliament, but the process by which soviet democracy was subordinated to party-state domination. Serious critique must address how soviet power was displaced by party and state structures under the intense pressures of isolation and civil war, rather than drawing a direct equation between Lenin’s decisions and Stalinism.

This distinction is key. Without it, La Botz’s argument reduces democracy to a formalism that obscures the difference between bourgeois parliamentarism and proletarian democracy. Marxists should neither defend the suppression of working-class political freedoms nor claim universal suffrage in a class society represents the highest form of democracy. Soviets, councils, strike and factory committees, and soldiers' committees are not merely symbolic; they are mechanisms for direct rule by the exploited. The tragedy in Russia was not the Bolsheviks’ devotion to soviet power, but the gradual erosion of that power under civil war, social collapse and bureaucratisation.

Lenin’s conception of the party

La Botz is also too quick to treat Lenin’s theory of organisation as the original sin. While authoritarian tendencies undeniably existed in Lenin’s conception of the party — and figures such as Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky identified the dangers of his centralism — later “democratic centralist” organisations often degenerated into small-scale bureaucracies of their own. Polemics, however, should not substitute for analysis. The essential question remains: why did Lenin’s organisational model initially resonate so powerfully with revolutionaries?

Tsarist Russia was an autocracy that lacked stable law, a functioning parliament, and basic freedoms of the press, assembly and organisation. Revolutionaries faced arrest, exile, infiltration and death. No loose educational society could sustain a revolutionary movement under such conditions. Lenin’s insistence on discipline, professional revolutionaries and centralised organisation was not mere authoritarianism; it was a considered response to illegality and state repression. One can critique the model’s dangers without pretending that an obvious democratic alternative existed.

La Botz advocates “more democracy” as a solution but does not specify what forms that democracy should take or in what contexts. Moving beyond critique requires proposing concrete democratic structures capable of withstanding both revolutionary and counterrevolutionary pressures. Such structures would include: freely elected soviets at every level, with delegates elected and recallable by their base; pluralism among socialist tendencies and parties to ensure genuine debate within soviets; institutional independence of unions and workplace committees from both party and state; protections for opposition rights, including minority press and assembly freedoms; rotation of offices to prevent entrenchment; and regular congresses and assemblies, where major decisions are openly discussed and voted upon.

Safeguards against bureaucratic overreach, such as transparency requirements, publication of meeting records and strict term limits, are essential. Democratic control over armed forces and militias, with officers elected by rank-and-file soldiers, further anchors accountability. Critiquing Leninist choices without reckoning with the realities of counterrevolution produces moral clarity at the expense of strategic substance; concrete proposals such as these are what can actually guide the construction of democracy during revolutionary upheaval.

Kronstadt

Kronstadt represents the most challenging case. The rebels articulated legitimate demands: free soviet elections, freedom of organisation for socialist and anarchist groups, release of political prisoners, union rights, and an end to party privilege. These demands expressed the profound exhaustion of the revolutionary population. The Bolshevik crackdown was a serious blow to socialist democracy.

Nevertheless, La Botz risks flattening a complex tragedy into a convenient illustration. Kronstadt occurred after years of civil war, famine, blockade, insurrection, economic collapse and White terror. The Bolsheviks feared, with some justification, that any concession could open a breach for counterrevolution. That fear does not justify every action taken, but it clarifies why the issue was never simply “democracy versus dictatorship.”

The same considerations apply to War Communism and the Cheka. These were not socialist achievements but emergency measures adopted under conditions of social collapse. Some became monstrous, generating institutions and practices that later served bureaucratic consolidation. To present them primarily as expressions of Leninist doctrine is misleading; they were, above all, responses to siege conditions.

The Bolsheviks were not governing a stable workers’ republic and resorting to gratuitous coercion. They were governing a starving, invaded and disintegrating country while the former ruling classes attempted to reclaim power with foreign backing. Context does not excuse every action but, without it, criticism collapses into moralising.

Material roots of Stalinism

La Botz’s central weakness lies in his neglect of the international dimension. Lenin recognised that socialism could not be built in isolated, underdeveloped Russia alone. The Bolsheviks staked their future on the prospect of international revolution, particularly in Germany, but that prospect was never realised (Rosenberg 1934).

Once this wager failed, the Russian Revolution was left in isolation: the working class shrank, the soviets lost their vitality, the economy collapsed, and the party was left to administer scarcity. The state took on the burden of national survival. Bureaucracy expanded not simply because of Lenin’s organisational theory, but because a social layer was objectively required to direct labour, allocate scarce resources, discipline the peasantry and hold the country together.

This constitutes the material root of Stalinism. Stalinism was neither the inevitable fulfillment of Leninism nor a mysterious betrayal with no structural explanation. It represented a bureaucratic resolution to the contradiction between a proletarian revolution and the absence of the material and international conditions required for socialism. Leninism did contain elements — substitutionism, top-down centralism, faction suppression, party monopoly — that made this outcome more likely. Yet Stalinism also constituted a qualitative counterrevolution within the revolution: the consolidation of a new bureaucratic ruling stratum over and against the working class.

Against La Botz’s assertion that Lenin led inevitably to Stalin, John Westmoreland argues that the claim Leninism produced Stalinism is a fiction and that “Stalinism was the negation of Leninism” (Westmoreland 2020). A more precise Marxist formulation is that Stalinism emerged from the defeat, isolation and bureaucratic deformation of a revolution that Lenin simultaneously led, defended and, at critical moments, compromised. Lenin was neither wholly innocent nor simply culpable. He was a revolutionary whose politics embodied both the highest aspirations of working-class self-emancipation and dangerous substitutionist tendencies that proved catastrophic under extreme historical pressure.

Lenin as a strategist

This is why “Goodbye to Lenin and Leninism” is an inadequate response. We do not need Lenin as an icon, an artifact, a doctrine or an organisational brand. Lenin’s embalmed figure belongs in the history of failed political cults. Marxists must, however, study Lenin as a strategist of revolutionary rupture, party-building, imperialism, war and state power. To discard Lenin entirely is to discard not only his mistakes but also the fundamental revolutionary question he posed: how can the working class move from protest to power?

La Botz does not provide a substantive answer. He advocates building democratic socialist organisations — a goal few would oppose. But democracy alone is not a strategy. The capitalist class commands a state apparatus: courts, police, prisons, borders, banks, media, armies and, when needed, fascist reserves. A revolutionary movement requires organisation, discipline, leadership and the capacity for decisive action. The alternative to bureaucratic centralism is not vague democratic moralism, but a genuinely democratic revolutionary organisation grounded in the self-activity of the working class.

This requires rejecting the party’s monopoly over the working class. It entails defending the existence of factions and tendencies, and guaranteeing the independence of unions, councils, social movements and organs of struggle. It requires recallable delegates, open debate, pluralism among working-class parties and protection of the socialist opposition. It also means establishing workers’ control over production, rather than limiting change to state ownership. Soviets must function as living institutions, not as formalities. The party should seek leadership through political persuasion, not through administrative command.

These principles are not abstract ideals. In Argentina’s recuperated factories, workers have established elected workplace assemblies that make major decisions collectively and allow delegates to be recalled at any time (Tauss 2014). In Chile’s social uprising, horizontal networks played an essential coordinating role, though debate continues over whether such networks can sustain mobilisation without physical anchors: classrooms, neighbourhoods, workplaces and organic friendships (Joignant and Garrido-Vergara, 2025).

Drawing on these experiences, contemporary organising can ground democratic practice in collective control, accountability and the genuine exercise of power from below. No revolutionary politics can avoid coercion, rupture and confrontation with the old order. The bourgeoisie will not be voted out of existence and quietly accept defeat. Any serious socialist revolution will face sabotage, capital flight, legal obstruction, media hysteria, police resistance, armed reaction and imperial pressure.

To defend against these threats, democratic forms of self-defence become necessary. This could include workers’ militias or self-defence units accountable to elected assemblies, legal defense committees to protect activists from repression, rapid response teams to counter state violence, and solidarity funds for supporting those targeted by the authorities. All such forms must be firmly anchored in the movement’s democratic structures to prevent the rise of unaccountable security bodies and maintain the trust and participation of the working class. The working class will need democratic organs capable of defending the revolution.

Neither Lenin cult nor anti-Leninist shortcut 

The lesson of Russia is not that power corrupts and should therefore be avoided. That is anarcho-liberal despair. The lesson is that working-class power must remain democratic, pluralist, internationalist and rooted in mass participation — or it will be captured by a bureaucracy claiming to act in the class's name.

Lenin must be criticised rigorously: the ban on factions, the suppression of Kronstadt, one-party rule, the subordination of unions, and the roots of substitutionism, all demand serious reckoning. But that criticism should be conducted from within a Marxist framework, not from the standpoint of a disillusioned liberal democrat startled by the violence and complexity of revolutionary history.

La Botz’s essay is valuable in reminding us that socialism without democracy degenerates into domination. Yet it falls short by portraying Leninism primarily as a sequence of authoritarian choices, rather than a contradictory revolutionary politics forged under extreme historical pressure. The task is not simply to reject Lenin, but to discard Leninism as dogma while preserving the essential questions Lenin posed: organisation, power, revolution, imperialism and the state.

The future socialist movement requires neither a Lenin cult nor an anti-Leninist shortcut that confuses renunciation with strategy. It needs what the Russian Revolution embodied at its best and forfeited at its worst: the self-emancipation of the working class, organised democratically, acting internationally, and taking power without surrendering it to a party-state that rises above the class itself. 

The urgent task is to build organisations and movements, where democracy is not merely an aspiration but a lived practice — and to carry that practice into every site of struggle, so that the possibility of genuine working-class power is renewed in our own time.

Anthony Teso was an activist in the late 1960s and early ’70s and is currently a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, Tempest Collective and Solidarity in the United States.

References

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Joignant, Alfredo and Garrido-Vergara, Luis. “Revisiting the Chilean Social Uprising: Explanations, Interpretations, and Over-Interpretations.” Latin American Research Review, 2025 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/latin-american-research-review/article/revisiting-the-chilean-social-uprising-explanations-interpretations-and-overinterpretations/119A011B3A7F0E58F8BAEE0C4C7EDCDC

Lenin, Vladimir. “The Russian Revolution and Civil War.” Marxists.org (1917). https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/sep/29.htm.

Rosenberg, Arthur. A History of Bolshevism: From Marx to the First Five-Year Plan. Chapter 11. https://www.marxists.org/archive/rosenberg/history-bolshevism/ch11.htm

Tauss, Aaron. “Argentina’s Recuperated Workplaces.” Workerscontrol.net. 2014. https://www.workerscontrol.net/authors/argentina%E2%80%99s-recuperated-workplaces

Westmoreland, John. “Did Lenin inevitably lead to Stalin?”, Counterfire. 2020 https://www.counterfire.org/article/did-lenin-inevitably-lead-to-stalin/