A Lenin for the 21st century

“The Meaning of Lenin for the 21st Century: Comments to German Comrades” is Paul Le Blanc’s individual contribution to MarxIs’Muss Kongress 2025, to be held in Berlin from 29 May to 1 June 2025. Published simultaneously on LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal and Communis.

In discussion with comrades as I prepared this talk, I concluded that I should confess to you some of what turned me towards Lenin many years ago, in the 1960s, when I was a young activist in the “New Left” group Students for a Democratic Society. Two concerns were decisive for me.

One was a firm belief I had that if we are actually to achieve socialism, this goal and the struggle for it would have to make sense to, and be capable of engaging, the everyday working-class trade union members and their families with which I was intimately familiar as I grew up in my own union household. And because of that, I felt shock and an intense anger as I discovered that the primary concern among some “New Left” leaders involved their own rebellious self-expression rather than connecting with the working-class majority to change the world. 

Another concern was with what I labeled “passive-ism” and “activity-ism.” The first had to do with some “New Leftists” who liked to think radical thoughts and talk radical talk but were all-too satisfied to be passive, not being inclined to engage in action to bring about the changes we so badly needed. The second affliction — “activity-ism” — had to do with those who seemed compulsively inclined to engage in political and radical activity: one activity after another after another. But these activities seemed disconnected from actually bringing about the changes we so badly needed. And I found that even some of the efforts that seemed to make more sense, engaging larger numbers of people, proved incapable of bringing about the desired success.

I concluded that we had to do better than that. Many of you have come to similar conclusions, based on your own experience. There is — today more than ever — an urgent need to find an approach to revolutionary change that can actually help us bring about the changes we so badly need.

Ours is a time of immense, incredibly fluid change, evolving crises, and cascading catastrophes. To understand what is happening and what is to be done, it is urgent that we make use of the best tools of social science, and many of us insist that we must therefore make critical-minded use of Marxism. In summing up the importance of Marx for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Isaiah Berlin, a relatively conservative political philosopher, wrote:

The true father of modern economic history, and, indeed, of modern sociology, in so far as any one man may be called that, is Karl Marx… Not only conflicting classes and groups and movements and their leaders in every country, but historians and sociologists, psychologists and political scientists, critics and creative artists, so far as they try to analyze the changing quality of life of their society, owe the form of their ideas in large part to the work of Karl Marx.1

In addition, many have come to agree with a key point stressed by Leo Huberman in his 1936 classic Man’s Worldly Goods regarding Lenin’s relation to Marxism. According to Huberman:

Seventeen years before the end of the nineteenth century Karl Marx died. Seventeen years after the beginning of the twentieth century Karl Marx lived again … What had been theory with Marx was put into practice by his disciples — Lenin and the other Russian Bolsheviks — in their seizure of power in 1917. Before that time the teachings of Marx had been familiar to a small group of devoted followers; after that time the teachings of Marx had the spotlight of the world focused on them …2 

One could argue that this is oversimplified. After all, throughout Europe’s mass labor movement the teachings of Marx were embraced, in some form, by working-class activists and intellectuals well before 1917, with some spillover in North America and elsewhere. Yet there is validity to Huberman’s point on at least two levels.

First, the 1917 revolution which Lenin was central in helping to lead, and the consequent Communist International which Lenin was equally central in helping to organize, had a powerful global impact on all continents and among all peoples. It generated among many millions of people — those hostile as well as those sympathetic to the revolutionary upheaval — an awareness of, and for some an intensive engagement with, the multifaceted body of Marxist theory which Lenin and his comrades utilized and propagated. Let us spend a little more time on this before moving on to the second level of Huberman’s valid point.

An eyewitness of the Russian Revolution of October 1917, a young American newspaper correspondent named John Reed, immediately cabled the news back to the United States: “The rank and file of the Workmen’s, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Councils are in control, with Lenin and Trotsky leading. Their program is to give the land to the peasants, to socialize natural resources and industry and for an armistice and democratic peace conference… No one is with the Bolsheviks except the proletariat, but that is solidly with them. All the bourgeoisie and appendages are relentlessly hostile.”3

Two years later, in his classic eyewitness account Ten Days That Shook the World, Reed went on to emphasize: “If the masses all over Russia had not been ready for insurrection it must have failed. The only reason for Bolshevik success lay in their accomplishing the vast and simple desires of the most profound strata of the people, calling them to the work of tearing down and destroying the old, and afterward, in smoke of the falling ruins, cooperating with them to erect the framework of the new …”4 This is corroborated by an immense amount of later scholarship. In an excellent study published in 2000, historian Rex Wade summed up the revolution in all its complexity:

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was a series of concurrent and overlapping revolutions: the popular revolt against the old regime; the workers’ revolution against the hardships of the old industrial and social order; the revolt of the soldiers against the old system of military service and then against the war itself [that is, against the first World War]; the peasants’ revolution for land and for control of their own lives; the striving of middle class elements for civil rights and a constitutional parliamentary system; the revolution of the non-Russian nationalities for rights and self-determination; the revolt of most of the population against the war and its seemingly endless slaughter. People also struggled over differing cultural visions, over women’s rights, between nationalities, for domination within ethnic or religious groups and among and within political parties, and for fulfillment of a multitude of aspirations large and small. These various revolutions and group struggles played out within the general context of political realignments and instability, growing social anarchy, economic collapse, and ongoing world war. They contributed to both the revolution’s vitality and the sense of chaos that so often overwhelmed people in 1917. The revolution of 1917 propelled Russia with blinding speed through liberal, moderate socialist and then radical socialist phases, at the end bringing to power the extreme left wing of Russian, even European, politics. An equally sweeping social revolution accompanied the rapid political movement, and all this occurred within a remarkably compressed time period — less than a year.5

The interplay of Lenin, the Bolshevik party, the broader Russian working-class movement, and the insurgent masses of workers and peasants animates most serious studies of the Russian Revolution. And it comes through in an account by John Reed’s fellow left-wing journalist from the United States, Albert Rhys Williams. Reed and Williams, along with Louise Bryant and Bessie Beatty, found themselves traveling to Russia (before the Bolshevik seizure of power) with a small cluster of returning Russian-American revolutionaries, whom Williams described as “free, young, sturdy spirits,” but who “were neither fools nor imbeciles. Knocking about the world had hammered all of that out of them. Nor were these men hero-worshippers. The Bolshevik movement was elemental and passionate, but it was scientific, realistic, and uncongenial to hero-worship.” Williams emphasized “their faith in the historic role of the workers, their hardheaded reasoning, their compassion — [and] probably the most essential ingredient: self-discipline. That, and their relentless optimism, a spirit of courage and daring.”6 

Lenin himself had made the point in the 1900 essay “The Urgent Tasks of Our Movement,” insisting — in the language of classical Marxism — that the Russian working class must “fulfill its great historical mission — to emancipate itself and the whole of the Russian people from political and economic slavery.” But this would not happen, he insisted, unless it produced “its political leaders, its prominent representatives able to organize a movement and lead it.” He added that “the Russian working class has already shown that it can produce such men and women.” Lenin concluded: 

We must train people who will devote the whole of their lives, not only their spare evenings, to the revolution; we must build up an organization large enough to permit the introduction of a strict division of labor in the various forms of our work. … Social-Democracy does not tie its hands, it does not restrict its activities to a single preconceived plan or method of political struggle; it recognizes all methods of struggle, provided they correspond to the forces at the disposal of the Party and facilitate the achievement of the best results … Before us, in all its strength, towers the enemy fortress, which is raining shot and shell upon us, mowing down our best fighters. We must capture this fortress, and we will capture it, if we unite all the forces of the Russian revolutionaries into one party which will attract all that is vital and honest in Russia.7 

An essential element of the Bolshevik party is aptly captured in this observation by the Indian Marxist scholar and revolutionary feminist Soma Marik:

The Bolshevik party that emerged by February 1917 was not a personal creation of Lenin. While he was its foremost theoretician, the party was created by protracted interactions between practical workers and theorists, and repeatedly remodeled. The core idea of What is to be Done? — which was the idea that since the working class is fragmented and large parts of it subjected to the domination of non-proletarian ideologies, the advanced workers have to be organized separately in order to gain greater striking power — was validated by subsequent experience. At the same time many ideas and organizational concepts had to be modified and discarded under the pressure of events and under class pressure.8

In Ten Days That Shook the World, John Reed makes a point consistent with what we have seen Leo Huberman stressing: “No matter what one thinks of Bolshevism, it is undeniable that the Russian Revolution is one of the great events of human history, and the rise of the Bolsheviks a phenomenon of worldwide importance.”9 

Related to this is the second level of Huberman’s valid point. What Lenin helped generate contributed to remarkable developments in Marxist theory and analyses that opened new pathways of Marxist thought in the early Soviet Republic of 1918-1930, and also throughout Europe, including the unfolding of what came to be tagged “Western Marxism” (whose foundational figures — Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Karl Korsch — emerged from the leadership of the early Communist movement, of which Lenin was a central reference point). No less important was Lenin’s expansive internationalism, which — especially reflected through his analysis of imperialism and his commitment to creating a genuine Communist International — pushed beyond Europe, embracing the peoples of Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

There were certainly creative innovations within Marxism independent of Lenin, from the 1890s through to 1917 — but there was, at the same time, a powerful tendency toward convergence between the thought of such innovators and that of Lenin. Two outstanding examples can be found in the work of Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky. Although both of these outstanding revolutionary Marxists were in no way dependent on Lenin’s own contributions, and more than once became involved in heated polemical exchanges with him, over time Luxemburg and — even more — Trotsky were increasingly drawn into the Leninist orbit.

To adequately assess the distinctive qualities of Lenin’s Marxism, we must have a sense of the qualities of the Marxism that was prevalent as his own conceptualizations were crystallizing. In her 1903 essay “Stagnation and Progress of Marxism,” Rosa Luxemburg commented that Marx’s theoretical achievement “transcends the plain demands of the proletarian class struggle for whose purposes it was created,” and that “we have not yet learned how to make an adequate use of the most important mental weapons which we had taken out of the Marxist arsenal on account of our urgent need for them in the early stages of our struggle.”10

Of course, revolutionaries such as Luxemburg and Lenin were able to get much (as we can in our own time) from this early variant of Marxism. Essential to Marx’s outlook — labeled the materialist conception of history — was the understanding that the capitalist economy of our own epoch can be placed in a broad historical framework. Since the rise of civilization over 5000 years ago, human societies have been divided into powerful and wealthy elites and exploited majorities whose labor sustains the dominant upper-class minority. This laboring majority, over the millennia, has included slaves, peasants and peasant serfs, and (increasingly) wageworkers. Capitalism has proved to be the most dynamic of economic systems to have arisen in history, increasingly embracing all of humanity. Relentlessly driven by a voracious process of capital accumulation, it has proved to be both incredibly productive and incredibly destructive in multiple ways, more and more permeating all facets of life across all the varied regions of our planet. A key aspect of capitalist development has been the drive of capitalist businesses to squeeze as much wealth as possible out of the laborers it hires to create the commodities that it sells at the marketplace. This generates antagonisms and struggles — sometimes hidden, sometimes open, but always present — between the capitalist class and the working class. 

“A rather summary version of Marxism” in this pre-Leninist period, as Ernest Mandel has explained, “boiled down to a few central ideas: the class struggle; the socialist goal of that struggle, through collective ownership of the major means of production and exchange; the conquest of political power to achieve that goal; and international solidarity of the workers.” Mandel notes that for masses of workers the political perspectives of Marxism combined a recognition of the need for “strong political organization and a general understanding of the need to combine trade-union action with class independence and political action.” Beyond this, Marxism imparted “a general feeling of ‘marching with history’; the feeling that capitalism was doomed and that socialism must succeed it.” The main weakness of this particular summary version of Marxism “lay in its narrow determinism, verging on fatalism, that saw the suppression of capitalism by socialism in a more or less inevitable fashion, occurring under the combined impact of economic evolution and socialist organization (for the workers).” The result was a variant of Marxism that “failed to stress the political initiative and conscious action of the party and the masses.”11 

Central to Lenin’s Marxism was precisely this stress on “the political initiative and conscious action of the party and the masses” — what Georg Lukács termed “the actuality of revolution.” Max Eastman — in seeking to define Lenin’s contribution in his 1926 study Marx, Lenin, and the Science of Revolution — insisted that essential to Leninism was a 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.” This attitude was inseparable from Lenin’s approach to building a revolutionary party, described by Eastman in this way:

It is an organization of a kind which never existed before. It combines certain essential features of a political party, a professional association, a consecrated order, an army, a scientific society – and yet it is in no sense a sect. Instead of cherishing in its membership a sectarian psychology, it cherishes a certain relation to the predominant class forces of society as Marx defined them. And this relation was determined by Lenin, and progressively readjusted by him, with a subtlety of which Marx never dreamed.12 

Lenin’s increasing immersion in Marxist thought, from the early 1890s onward, is captured in Trotsky’s account of the young Lenin, who would “follow the evolution of Marx’s thought,” experiencing “its irresistible force” and discovering “under introductory sentences or notes lateral galleries of conclusions,” profoundly impressed by their “aptness and depth.” Trotsky concludes: “Marx never had a better reader, one more penetrating or grateful, not a more attentive, congenial, or capable student.” He adds that Lenin “mistrusted in advance the attempts of self-satisfied ignoramuses and well-read mediocrities to replace Marxism with some other, more-portable theory.”13 

For Lenin, Marxism was a revolutionary guide to practical action. In his 1927 dual biography of Marx and Engels, the outstanding Marx scholar David Riazanov emphasized the importance, for Lenin’s political orientation, of an 1850 address by Marx and Engels evaluating the revolutionary experience of 1848:

While the democratic petty bourgeois want to bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible, achieving at most the aims already mentioned, it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far — not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world — that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers. Our concern cannot simply be to modify private property, but to abolish it, not to hush up class antagonisms but to abolish classes, not to improve the existing society but to found a new one.14

Lenin knew these words by heart, according to Riazanov, and “used to delight in quoting from them.” Riazanov went on to emphasize the key points: “We must use every possible means to goad on the revolution, to make it permanent, and not to let it lapse … We cannot afford to be satisfied with immediate conquests. Each bit of conquered territory must serve as a step for further conquests.”15 

Against some comrades who preferred the purity of sectarian isolation, however, Lenin pushed for active participation by revolutionaries in mass organizations and struggles not under their control — social movements, trade unions, democratic councils (soviets), etc. Functioning intelligently, sharing their ideas, and helping to win victories in these broader contexts would enhance their influence and authority, contributing to an increasingly expansive class consciousness and revolutionary struggle. As his companion Nadezhda Krupskaya later explained, such things must be grounded in specific demands around urgent needs. Among factory workers this had not begun with demands of workers’ control of industry, but “with a campaign for tea service, for reducing working hours, and paying wages punctually.” Only in successful struggles for reforms, connecting with people’s actual levels of consciousness and enhancing their sense of dignity and their capacity to change things for the better, could the pathway to revolution be found. The consequent political “impurities” and allegedly reformist capitulation were denounced by some of Lenin’s comrades. Krupskaya recounted:

A Bolshevik, they declared, should be hard and unyielding. Lenin considered this view fallacious. It would mean giving up all practical work, standing aside from the masses instead of organizing them on real-life issues. Prior to the Revolution of 1905 the Bolsheviks showed themselves capable of making good use of every legal possibility, of forging ahead and rallying the masses behind them under the most adverse conditions. Step by step, beginning with the campaign for tea service and ventilation, they had led the masses up to the national armed insurrection. The ability to adjust oneself to the most adverse conditions and at the same time to stand out and maintain one’s high-principled positions — such were the traditions of Leninism.16 

Consistent with Marx’s own outlook, Lenin’s orientation emphasized the need to struggle against all forms of oppression, insisting in his classic pamphlet of 1902, What Is To Be Done?, that the socialist ideal “should not be the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects.”  He stressed that this was essential in the struggle for a socialist transformation of society. A revolutionary tribune of the people is a person “who is able to generalize all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every event, however small,” combining socialist convictions and democratic demands “in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.”17 

As Krupskaya notes, for Lenin — amid the catastrophic First World War, on the eve of Russia’s 1917 revolution — “the role of democracy in the struggle for socialism could not be ignored.” He articulated a strategic orientation combining the struggle against capitalism with the struggle for revolutionary democracy (including a republic, a militia, election of government officials by the people, equal rights for women, self-determination of nations, etc.). Lenin stressed: “Basing ourselves on the democracy already achieved, and exposing its incompleteness under capitalism, we demand the overthrow of capitalism, the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, as a necessary basis both for the abolition of the poverty of the masses and for the complete and all-round institution of all democratic reforms.”18 This restated Marx’s own deep commitments. 

An additional quality of Lenin’s political orientation involved his uncompromising attitude regarding how the revolutionary organization must function — which helped generate tensions and even splits, garnering for Lenin a reputation for factionalism, arrogance, and intolerance (a reputation Marx also had). Krupskaya saw things differently, explaining “the comrades grouped around Lenin were far more seriously committed to principles, which they wanted to see applied at all cost and pervading all practical work.” She described the significant numbers of comrades who sharply disagreed with this approach as having “more of the man-in-the-street mentality … given to compromise and concessions in principle” among diverse perspectives within the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. They had, she said, “more regard for persons,” and were therefore more inclined to maintain a conciliatory ethos.19 

Trotsky was among the most vehement and eloquent of such “conciliators,” leading to fierce polemics between him and Lenin over more than a decade. Yet when all was said and done, Lenin’s Bolsheviks proved to be a cohesive and effective revolutionary instrument, and the politically diverse conglomeration which Trotsky and others sought to maintain did not. As Trotsky later concluded:

A simple conciliation of factions is possible only along some sort of “middle” line. But where is the guarantee that this artificially drawn diagonal line will coincide with the needs of objective development? The task of scientific politics is to deduce a program and a tactic from an analysis of the struggle of classes, not from the [ever-shifting] parallelogram of such secondary and transitory forces as political factions.20 

Related to the disputes among Marxists was the fact that not all understood and utilized Marxism in the same way. Nikolai Bukharin, another of Lenin’s Bolshevik comrades, adds an essential element in understanding his approach to Marxism. One must embrace not “the entirety of ideas such as existed in the time of Marx,” but rather the general approach and “methodology of Marxism,” Bukharin argues, concluding: “It is clear that Leninist Marxism represents quite a particular form of ideological education, for the simple reason that it is itself a child of a somewhat different epoch. It cannot simply be a repetition of the Marxism of Marx, because the epoch in which we are living is not a simple repetition of the epoch in which Marx lived.”21 

This brings us to the centrality of dialectics in Lenin’s political orientation. In his 1914 summary of Marx’s life and ideas for Granat encyclopedia, Lenin did something unusual for Marxists of that time — placing an explication of dialectical philosophy (rather than historical materialism or economic analysis) at the beginning of his discussion of Marx’s thought:

In our times, the idea of development, of evolution, has almost completely penetrated social consciousness, only in other ways, and not through Hegelian philosophy. Still, this idea, as formulated by Marx and Engels on the basis of Hegel’s philosophy, is far more comprehensive and far richer in content than the current idea of evolution is. A development that repeats, as it were, stages that have already been passed, but repeats them in a different way, on a higher basis (“the negation of the negation”), a development, so to speak, that proceeds in spirals, not in a straight line; a development by leaps, catastrophes, and revolutions; “breaks in continuity”; the transformation of quantity into quality; inner impulses towards development, imparted by the contradiction and conflict of the various forces and tendencies acting on a given body, or within a given phenomenon, or within a given society; the interdependence and the closest and indissoluble connection between all aspects of any phenomenon (history constantly revealing ever new aspects), a connection that provides a uniform, and universal process of motion, one that follows definite laws — these are some of the features of dialectics as a doctrine of development that is richer than the conventional one.22 

Lenin more than once complains that many calling themselves Marxists have a “conception of Marxism [that] is impossibly pedantic. They have completely failed to understand what is decisive in Marxism, namely, its revolutionary dialectics. They have even failed absolutely to understand Marx’s plain statements that in times of revolution the utmost flexibility is demanded.” Marx’s dynamic approach to revolution was something they “walk around and about … like a cat around a bowl of hot porridge.”23 

Applying this both to historical analysis and practical tactics, Lenin complained that many Marxists of his time saw “capitalism and bourgeois democracy in Western Europe following a definite path of development” and projected this as a universal model. But “certain amendments,” he insisted, are required: “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 

Related to this were other key elements in Lenin’s political orientation. The predominance of the peasantry in such countries as Russia, combining with the “open Marxism” inseparable from the dialectical approach, contributed to Lenin’s conceptualization of a worker-peasant alliance so central to his strategic orientation. Lenin’s revolutionary internationalism — more intensive than was the case with many Marxists — was entwined with the dialectical necessities involved in making a proletarian revolution in economically backward Russia.

This dovetailed with an essential resistance to the complex dynamics of imperialism — in the form it took as a keystone of the tsarist system, making Russia a “prison house of nations,” as well as in the form it took through the voracious global capital accumulation process at the heart of the modern capitalism. Such imperialist realities engulfed a majority of the world’s peoples, oppressed by competing and contending elites of the so-called “Great Powers.” This raised, for Lenin and his co-thinkers, the need to support struggles for national self-determination among oppressed peoples, while fighting against the nationalism of oppressor nations. 

To conclude, more attention must be given to four responsibilities facing Marxist activists today. One involves understanding and engaging with the working class of our own time. A second has to do with the essential question of revolutionary organization. A third involves crucial elements for the activist orientation of such an organization, particularly the interplay of reform and revolution — achieving an appropriate balance that will help prevent the degeneration which has all-too-often overcome such organizations. This especially relates to the interplay of reform and revolution. A fourth involves the centrality of revolutionary internationalism. All must be the focus of further deliberations. 

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This is a follow-up to my talk on “Lenin in a Time of Catastrophe,” composed of thoughts I had as I concluded that presentation. These involve four interrelated responsibilities facing revolutionary Marxist activists today. I will list all of them but then focus on two. I will speak from my own experiences with and perceptions of realities in the United States. Things are certainly different, in important ways, in Germany, as they are in the many other countries of our planet. But what I have to say may have some relevance for you as well. The four responsibilities are these: 

1. We must understand and engage with the actual working-class majority of today. 

2. We must help build and strengthen, within that working class, an organization and movement capable of fighting effectively against all forms of oppression and exploitation, and at the same time of helping to bring about a transition from capitalism to socialism — a society of the free and the equal, in which our economy is socially owned (by all of us), democratically controlled, and utilized to provide for a decent life — genuine community, genuine free development, genuine outlets for creative activity — for all people.

3. We must help develop an orientation for such an organization and movement with strategy and tactics to make them an effective force for freedom and socialism — avoiding absorption into the capitalist status quo and avoiding sectarian isolation.

4. We must — in thought and word and deed — understand that a victory for workers and the oppressed can come only through the building of a vibrant and effective international movement embracing all the peoples and cultures on our planet.

In what follows I will focus on the first and third of these points. Other comrades engaged in this discussion will bring in more matters for us to consider.

In my understanding, Marx defined the proletariat — that is, the working class — as consisting of those who sell their labor-power, their ability to work, to an employer, in order to make a living, that is to secure an income enabling them to buy food, clothing, shelter, and other necessities — and perhaps also at least a few of what are called “luxuries.” 

This class, as I understand it, is vast and includes within it a variety of identities. It includes family members who are dependent on that paycheck of the breadwinner. It includes unemployed workers who would be reliant on selling their labor-power if they had a job. It includes a wide variety of educational backgrounds, occupational categories, skill sets and income levels, whether those involved are considered “blue-collar” or “white-collar” — whether they are production workers or service employees. All genders and sexual orientations, all ages and cultural preferences, all racial and ethnic backgrounds, all religious and secular ideologies can be found in the working class.

Some categorizations falsely separate out sections of the population from the working class. Among these categories are intellectuals and the so-called professional classes and educated classes, though when we look at how such people make a living, we often discover they are working class, even if they don’t think of themselves that way. Other such categories include the middle class (often referring to middle-income workers) and “the poor” (which generally means poorly paid workers and the unemployed).

The voracious capital accumulation process has been proletarianizing more and more sectors of the labor force and population in all countries. The proletariat is not disappearing. We are many. Most of us on the Left, as in the population as a whole, are part of this multifaceted working class. Getting this right is essential for working-class consciousness, working-class solidarity, and working-class struggle.

This brings us to the question of what is the most effective program, what are the most reasonable strategies and tactics, for advancing the class struggle. This must enable us, as Rosa Luxemburg once put it, to tack “betwixt and between the two dangers by which [the socialist movement] is constantly being threatened. One is the loss of its mass character; the other, the abandonment of its goal. One is the danger of sinking back to the condition of a sect; the other, the danger of becoming a movement of bourgeois social reform.” As Luxemburg also stressed, of course, “between social reforms and [socialist] revolution there exists … an indissoluble tie.” Struggles for reforms are the means through which a socialist working-class movement grows, with its members learning how to organize, gaining experience and confidence through winning victories in the here-and-now, even under capitalism, to improve their lives and conditions. 

As Lenin’s close comrade Nadezhda Krupskaya once argued, it would be a mistake to stand aside from the practical work of organizing workers around real-life issues. “Step by step,” she explained, “beginning with the campaign for tea service and ventilation” within the capitalist factory, it gradually became possible for the Bolsheviks to build a mass base and consciousness capable of mobilizing a working-class majority for socialist revolution.

One of the many things that Luxemburg and Lenin agreed on was the need for a certain kind of approach to the interplay of reform struggles with the longer-range revolutionary struggle, an approach permeated by several qualities: (a) a refusal to bow to the oppressive and exploitative powers-that-be; (b) a refusal to submit to the transitory “realism” of mainstream politics — especially if it involved following the “leadership” of pro-capitalist liberal politicians; and (c) a measuring of all activity by how it helps build working-class consciousness, the mass workers’ movement, and the revolutionary organization necessary to overturn capitalism. 

• 1

  Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx, His Life and Environment (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 116, 207-08.

• 2

  Leo Huberman, Man’s Worldly Goods: The Story of the Wealth of Nations (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1936), p. 205.

• 3

  John Reed, “First Proletarian Republic Greets American Workers,” New York Call, November 22, 1917, reprinted in Philip S. Foner, ed., The Bolshevik Revolution: Its Impact on American Radicals, Liberals, and Labor: A Documentary Study (New York: International Publishers, 1967), p. 54.

• 4

  John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (New York: International Publishers, 1926), p. 279.

• 5

  Rex A. Wade, The Russian Revolution, 1917 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 283. Also see Ronald Grigor Suny, Red Flag Unfurled: History, Historians, and the Russian Revolution (London: Verso, 2017).

• 6

  Albert Rhys Williams, Lenin – the Man and His Work (New York: Scott and Seltzer, 1919), pp. 45-5; also see Albert Rhys Williams, Journey into Revolution: Petrograd 1917-1918 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969), pp. 51, 62.

• 7

  V. I. Lenin, “The Urgent Tasks of Our Movement,” Collected Works, volume 4 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1960), pp. 371-2.

• 8

  Soma Marik, Revolutionary Democracy: Emancipation in Classical Marxism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018), p. 289.

• 9

  Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World, p. xii.

• 10

  Rosa Luxemburg, “Stagnation and Progress of Marxism,” in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, ed. Mary-Alice Waters (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), p. 111. 

• 11

  Ernest Mandel, The Place of Marxism in History (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), pp. 74-5.

• 12

  Max Eastman, Marx, Lenin, and the Science of Revolution (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1926), pp. 150, 151, 159-60.

• 13

  Leon Trotsky, The Young Lenin (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972), pp. 187-8.

• 14

  Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League” (London, March 1850), in Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1850-ad1.htm. Also see David Riazanov, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, An Introduction to Their Lives and Work (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), pp. 99-100. 

• 15

  Riazanov, p. 100. 

• 16

  N.K. Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin (New York: International Publishers, 1970), p. 167. 

• 17

  V.I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? in Collected Works, volume 5 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1960), pp. 402, 423.

• 18

  Krupskaya, p. 328.

• 19

  Krupskaya, p. 96.

• 20

  Leon Trotsky, Stalin, An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence (New York: Stein and Day, 1967), p. 112.

• 21

  N.I. Bukharin, Lenin as a Marxist (London: Communist Party of Great Britain, 1925), pp. 17-8, 23.

• 22

  V.I. Lenin, “Karl Marx,” Collected Works, volume 21 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), pp. 54-5.

• 23

  V.I. Lenin, “Our Revolution,” Collected Works, volume 33 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973), p. 476.

• 24

  Ibid., p. 477.