Making a revolution is more interesting than writing about one

First published at Rabkor. Translation by Dmitry Pozhidaev for LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal.

Many years ago, I was persuaded to teach a political science course to students at the Moscow Aviation Institute.1 Needless to say, future aviation engineers and aircraft designers did not particularly need it, and my expectations during seminars were fairly modest. Still, when we reached the topic “Lenin as a Political Thinker,” the result left me stunned.

The student assigned to give the presentation first pleaded unpreparedness, but when I insisted that the task was not actually that difficult, and certainly easier than dealing with Aristotle or Max Weber, he began:

Lenin lived in the nineteenth century.

At that point I became slightly uneasy.

And he fought against Tsarism.

A pause followed.

And eventually he overthrew Tsarism, although at the time he was abroad. So he had to govern Russia from overseas at first. Then he returned to Russia in an armoured railway carriage, became friends with Stalin, and died.2

That’s all?

That’s all.

I went to the administration office and submitted my resignation.

Yet as time passes, I find myself understanding that student better and better. Ignorance certainly deserves no excuse, but it does require an explanation.

Once quotations from Lenin ceased to be hammered into students’ heads in Soviet courses on Marxism-Leninism, a lamentable vacuum emerged in many minds, filled largely with informational noise. Even the revival of academic interest in Marxism, influenced in part by Western university programs, has not improved matters all that much.

Unfortunately, Lenin did not leave us a body of conventional academic texts that can easily be placed on reading lists. Instead, we encounter a multitude of ideas and conclusions scattered across an enormous number of articles, speeches and short books sometimes more akin to pamphlets.

Hardly anyone is going to read the complete Collected Works from cover to cover. The problem is not simply that we view many things differently today. After all, one can appreciate Aristotle’s political thought without sharing his views on slavery and understand Thomas Hobbes’ significance without accepting his arguments on the benefits of authoritarian rule.

Lenin’s political thought first requires reconstruction, and only afterward evaluation in light of contemporary realities and experience accumulated during the 20th century.

Some people, it is said, no matter what they think about, eventually come around to money. Some men think about women every fifteen minutes. Lenin, whatever he happened to be writing about, ultimately thought about revolution.

The strategy and tactics of revolutionary transformation was central in his thought: the role of power, how to seize and retain it, what a revolutionary party should be, how a revolutionary situation emerges and develops, how it differs from the normal life of society, and how it can be used.

What matters is that Lenin posed these questions for himself in a genuinely theoretical way, not merely a pragmatic one. Before doing anything, one must understand the essence of the problem by generalising it.

Revolution is not simply the sum of political actions. It is movement along a path, not always clearly visible in advance, that requires investigation and generalisation carried out alongside action and shaped by it. This is not academic theory. It is an instrument of practice, one that is not always successful.

Such an approach makes Lenin a difficult author for academia. It is useless to study his texts without context, but that does not mean the texts themselves lack value. Even today we must reflect on the possibilities of political action under conditions of systemic crisis, on Lenin’s famous observation that “the upper classes cannot rule in the old way and the lower classes do not want to live in the old way”; on the dialectic of spontaneous protest and class consciousness.

His book What Is to Be Done? provoked fierce debate and criticism, yet it raised questions that remain with us today. We must think about the tendency of the left toward opportunism and revolutionary sectarianism, discussed in Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, and about the social base of revolution. What, for example, is to be done with the peasantry in a petty-bourgeois country shaken by political storms?

Of course, as events unfolded, the Bolshevik leader constantly reconsidered his positions. His views evolved, a process brilliantly described by Teodor Shanin in Revolution as a Moment of Truth. Lenin was continually rethinking and rewriting his ideas.

This is perhaps what contemporary leftists most need to learn from him. Not memorizing ready-made answers, but engaging seriously with questions that we will inevitably have to answer again, and in new ways.

When Soviet ideologues, beginning with Nikolai Bukharin and Joseph Stalin, attempted to construct a closed and coherent system called Leninism by summarising the ideas of the deceased leader,3 they missed the essence of his theoretical approach: a permanent, non-dogmatic openness in which theory is inseparable from ever-changing practice.

Unfortunately, such an approach is of little use to those seeking to build ideological constructions that justify and sustain themselves, which is precisely what the disciplines of Soviet Marxism-Leninism became.

We no longer memorise quotations from Lenin’s works, although those who studied in the Soviet Union can never quite rid themselves of them. They seem to reside somewhere in our subconscious.

Yet having freed ourselves from compulsive quotation, it might not be a bad idea occasionally to open the blue volumes of the Collected Works and rediscover Lenin.4 Incidentally, that is also the title of a book by Michael Brie, which is highly useful for anyone wishing to understand the subject.

Ultimately, all of the Bolshevik leader’s theoretical explorations lead back to the phrase with which he concludes the unfinished work State and Revolution: “Making a revolution is far more interesting than writing about it.” It is entirely possible that this formulation has not yet lost its relevance.

• 1

  MAI (Moscow Aviation Institute) is one of Russia's leading engineering and aerospace universities.

• 2

  The reference to Lenin returning to Russia in an "armoured railway carriage" reflects a common confusion of the historical episode known as the "sealed train," in which Lenin travelled from Switzerland through Germany to Petrograd in April 1917.

• 3

  The reference to Bukharin and Stalin concerns early Soviet attempts to systematize Lenin's ideas into a coherent doctrine known as "Leninism," most famously codified in Stalin's The Foundations of Leninism (1924).

• 4

  The “blue volumes” refers to the standard Soviet edition of Lenin's Collected Works, popularly known for its distinctive dark blue covers.