Lenin versus democracy: A reply to critics of ‘Goodbye to Lenin and Leninism’

In “Lenin versus democracy,” Dan La Botz replies to criticisms of his article “Goodbye to Lenin and Leninism,” first published in LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal on April 25. La Botz’s rejoinder is appearing simultaneously on LINKS and Communis.

La Botz’s original article elicited the following responses: “Saying Goodbye to Lenin? A Response” by Paul Le Blanc, published in Communis and LINKS on April 30; “Lenin, democracy and the anti-Leninist shortcut” by Anthony Teso, published in LINKS on May 1; and “The Rise and Fall of ‘Leninism’” by John Marot published in LINKS and Communis on May 8.

I am pleased and thankful to see that Paul Le Blanc, Anthony Teso and John Marot took the time to critically engage with my essay, “Goodbye to Lenin and Leninism.” Leftists often have an uncritical fixation on Vladimir Lenin’s role. Moreover, the notion that his theories are a model for the left is a serious problem. So, I am glad these three well-informed socialist comrades have engaged in this debate. All three are knowledgeable about the issues and make some interesting points. However, I disagree with their views and methods.

Toward the start of my essay, I listed eleven different moments at which I believe Lenin made decisions that separated him from the tradition of Marxism and democratic socialism. I saw Lenin’s decisions as both a pattern and a cumulative process, each one making possible the next bad decision. To remind readers, these are what I saw as Lenin’s key political decisions:

• The organization of the Bolshevik faction, which later became the Bolshevik Party, and then the Russian Communist Party;
• The organization and execution of the Bolshevik coup, which detonated the October 1917 Russian Revolution;
• The shutting down of the democratically elected Constituent Assembly in January 1918;
• The establishment of a Bolshevik-led coalition Soviet government, which soon became simply a Bolshevik government;
• The establishment of “one-man management” in Soviet industry;
• The establishment of a political police, the Cheka, and unleashing of the Red Terror;
• The establishment of War Communism and militarization of society to win the Civil War;
• Russia’s war on Poland, which ended in defeat;
• The crushing of the Kronstadt Rebellion;
• The banning of factions in the Communist Party; and
• Lenin’s empowerment of Joseph Stalin.

My argument is that Lenin’s decisions proved incapable of defending and advancing a democratic socialist revolution — in fact, they contributed to the frustration and failure of the revolution, the results of which we are all familiar with. Yes, the objective conditions were terrible, oppressive, practically overwhelming, etc. But even within that context, the question remains: were there no alternatives to Lenin’s strategic decisions? Might other approaches have led to different outcomes? There is no guarantee, of course; but they might have. So, the question deserves discussion.

Paul Le Blanc

I will take the essays up in the order they came to my attention, starting with Paul Le Blanc’s piece, “Saying goodbye to Lenin?” Paul is a Lenin scholar who has read just about everything there is to read about Lenin and has at hand a wealth of information and an abundance of quotations. He devotes much of his essay to refuting my claim that Lenin was an authoritarian or, as I wrote, that “Lenin’s conception of the party was from the beginning authoritarian, and as the man who dominated the party’s leadership, he was the ultimate authority.”

To refute my claim, Paul quotes people from all social classes, walks of life and political stripes. Here are a few examples of what Paul writes:

According to so sharp a political opponent as the prominent Menshevik Raphael Abramovitch, who knew him personally and spent time visiting with him and his companion Nadezhda Krupskaya in their 1916 Swiss exile, “it is difficult to conceive of a simpler, kinder and more unpretentious person than Lenin at home.”...

“I have never met anyone who could laugh so infectiously as Vladimir Ilyich,” commented Maxim Gorky. “…implacable in his hatred of the capitalist world, could laugh so naively, could laugh to tears, barely able to catch his breath.”

While interesting anecdotes, they do not address my argument. In writing about Lenin’s authoritarianism, I was not talking about his social graces. Lenin may have been a delightful dinner party guest, a wonderful conversationalist and a man who enjoyed a good laugh. But the issue is not his personality; it is his political character and mentality. The question is not whether Lenin was a nice guy in social situations, but whether his political decisions — especially the eleven that I listed — had an authoritarian character and a dangerously anti-democratic impact.

Paul quotes from different documents in which Lenin wrote about the importance of democracy. Lenin often wrote about the significance of democracy but, to put it crudely, talk is cheap. Or as Stalin once said (and others before and after him have said): “Paper will put up with anything that is written on it.” The question is not what Lenin said or wrote, but what he did.

In the eleven cases I gave, he chose an authoritarian position over a democratic one. As a counterexample, had Lenin taken a different approach to politics from the start — one that involved compromise and coalition-building — he might have been able to create a genuine multi-party governing coalition with the several working-class parties in the soviets, an alliance that could have withstood the challenges of the revolution’s first couple of years.

Anthony Teso

In his reply, “Lenin, democracy and the anti-Leninist shortcut,” Teso writes:

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.

Teso’s is the classic Trotskyist argument: that the revolution was frustrated and degenerated because of the factors he lists. This argument is not wrong. Those overwhelming factors were tremendously important, and I mentioned all of them in my article. But my question is still: given those factors, what decisions did Lenin and the Bolsheviks make at each turn?

Teso writes, quite rightly: “Revolutions are not mechanical sequences; each Bolshevik decision was shaped by the shifting and coercive pressures of war, famine, sabotage and social disintegration.” I hardly disagree at all with Teso’s explanation, and he agrees with a good deal of my criticism, writing:

Lenin must be criticized 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.

Again, I do not disagree with putting criticism in its historical context. But that history — ruthless and relentless as it was — did not deprive Lenin and the Bolsheviks of their volition.

The situation was complex and a Marxist framework is useful in understanding it. However, I do not believe that war, foreign invasion, a bad harvest and starvation determined Lenin’s and the Bolsheviks’ behavior. They still exercised free will and made crucial decisions that ultimately determined the revolution’s course. Is it not the case that at each turning point Teso lists, Lenin chose an authoritarian response? And that those decisions accumulated, creating an ever more authoritarian culture, party and regime?

I do disagree strongly with one claim Teso makes, however. He writes: “The Bolsheviks did not secure power solely through manipulation or organizational centralism.” No, not solely. But their organizational centralism and manipulation were fundamental to their methods. The Bolsheviks seized state power without polling the working class and without consulting the other workers’ parties, who were simply informed that parliament had been dispersed and the soviets were now the state. The Bolsheviks also misled the public about the Kronstadt Rebellion they crushed. Centralism and manipulation were key to the Bolshevik revolution.

John Marot

Marot, an incisive historian of the Russian Revolution, turns away from my questions about the decisions Lenin and the Bolsheviks made, arguing we can only understand the issues in terms of “the social-property relations of late Imperial Russia.” In his response to my article, “The rise and fall of ‘Leninism’,” Marot writes:

We cannot ignore the constraints and opportunities for historic action that the Bolshevik Party, the peasantry, the proletariat, and the petty bourgeoisie faced after the destruction of the landed aristocracy and its near-absolutist feudal state.

This is another, more complicated and subtle, version of Teso’s argument: the conditions Russian revolutionaries faced determined the outcome of the revolution. Again, I agree, but the question is still: what did Lenin and the Bolsheviks do, given those “constraints and opportunities”? Marot’s approach, like Teso’s (even if they would disagree about particulars) asks us to look at the big picture, the historic context, to explain and justify Lenin’s decisions.

The largest elements of that bigger picture are Russia’s backwardness, enormous peasantry, reactionary tsarist feudal rulers, and retarded and underdeveloped bourgeoisie. Within that context, Russia’s revolutionaries faced civil war, foreign invasion, harvest failures and starvation, leading to rebellions against the new revolutionary government. Marot writes:

If social-property relations are at all relevant in political matters, as Second International Marxists affirmed, then socialism was not possible in NEP Russia — no matter what policy was pursued. But if socialism was possible had the Bolsheviks adopted “democratic” policies, as Dan La Botz argues in “Goodbye to Lenin and Leninism,” then social-property relations were not an insurmountable obstacle to socialist progress — if there was a democratic will, there was a democratic way. Holding both positions is untenable.

In my essay, I never argued the Russian Revolution could have been saved if Lenin had chosen to fight for more democratic structures. I do not know — and no one can know — if democratic decisions would have opened a democratic path that could have saved the revolution from its terrible destiny.

But let us look at the case Marot raises. He analyzes and justifies Lenin’s dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, chosen by the country’s first democratic election, on the basis that the peasants, who made up the majority of the Russian population, had voted the wrong way and voted for the wrong party. Both the Right (and Left) Social Revolutionaries (SRs) leaders and cadres, Marot tells us, were almost exclusively drawn from “zemstvo [local government] administrative personnel: surveyors, teachers, nurses, agronomists, veterinarians, lawyers, doctors and other professionals.” The Right SRs opposed distributing land to the peasants and thus became counterrevolutionaries.

One wonders if, rather than dispersing the assembly, Lenin and the Bolsheviks — who, after all, had 25% of the Constituent Assembly and a majority in the soviets — could have carried out a campaign in the assembly, the soviets and in society to win over the peasant majority to the Bolshevik’s Land Decree, which abolished private land ownership, confiscated without compensation land from the nobility, church and monasteries, and authorized its redistribution among the peasantry? Instead, the Bolsheviks used force to disperse the assembly and proclaimed the rule of the soviets, which they dominated.

Peasants seized and distributed land, though a few years later, amid the civil war, the Bolsheviks organized grain seizures for the army and the cities. Then, as Marot explains, in just over a decade, “Twenty-five million peasant households were forcibly transformed into a few thousand collective farms, the kolkhoz.” Peasants no longer owned their land and had no right. Was Lenin’s path really the only option?

Le Blanc, Teso, and Marot are all correct to argue that one must look at the larger historical context. Karl Marx wrote in his famous pamphlet, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

On the basis of those circumstances, men and women nevertheless do make decisions, and there are usually alternatives that could have been chosen.

My view is that full socialism was impossible in Russia in 1920, but different decisions could have led to a democratic state, one that in the future could have led to a socialist society. And yet Lenin tended to choose the alternative that kept power in his hands, increasing the Bolsheviks’ control over events while rejecting other more democratic options. Would the revolution have been saved if Lenin had made more democratic decisions? We will never know. But we do know that the decisions he made piled up until finally leading to the bureaucratic collectivist, totalitarian state that was the Soviet Union.

Let me end with the same words I ended my original essay with:

One does not need Lenin to be a socialist or a revolutionary. One does not need Lenin to create a socialist organization. One needs only socialist principles, democratic discussion and members’ commitment and self-discipline. Our socialist organizations must be genuinely and thoroughly democratic, including in their relations with the labor and social movements. Democracy is at the heart of our socialism. Luxemburg was right: there is no socialism without democracy, and no democracy without socialism.

Dan La Botz is editor of New Politics. You can find out more about La Botz and his writings at danlabotzwritings.com.