Lenin, moral liberalism and the voluntarist premise
With “Lenin, moral liberalism and the voluntarist premise,” Anthony Teso continues the discussion started by Dan La Botz’s article “Goodbye to Lenin and Leninism,” first published in LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal on April 25. La Botz’s original article elicited the following responses: “Saying goodbye to Lenin?” by Paul Le Blanc, “Lenin, democracy and the anti-Leninist shortcut” by Anthony Teso, “The rise and fall of ‘Leninism’” by John Marot, and La Botz’ rejoinder “Lenin versus democracy”.
In his latest contribution to the discussion on Lenin and Leninism, “Lenin versus democracy,” Dan La Botz clarifies the disagreement, which is useful. The real difference is not about defending authoritarian regimes or supporting democracy. It is about two ways of thinking. One is historical materialism, which looks at society through material and economic forces. The other is a kind of liberal moralism that uses socialist terms but focuses on moral criticism. Liberal moralism judges political strategies and outcomes chiefly in terms of abstract principles, such as individual rights or fairness, detached from underlying class structures or social forces. It treats democracy mainly as a set of formal rights and procedures, separate from who actually holds power. This approach often highlights moral shortcomings while overlooking the real constraints or material interests at play.
Alternatives
La Botz says that “history, ruthless and relentless as it was, did not deprive Lenin and the Bolsheviks of their volition,” and that they “still exercised free will.” This demonstrates the difference. Marxists do not judge revolutionary politics by whether people have free will. That idea is more common in legal or religious thinking. For Marxists, the question is not whether people could have chosen differently in theory. Of course they could have; they are not robots. The real question is whether those options were actually possible, given the social, economic and political forces at the time. This includes which classes existed, how aware workers and peasants were, what the state looked like, and what was happening internationally.
La Botz does not clearly say what the alternatives were. He suggests Lenin might have been able to create a genuine multi-party governing coalition with other working-class parties in the soviets. But which parties is he talking about? The Mensheviks and Right Social Revolutionaries (SRs) left the Second Congress of Soviets in October 1917. They refused to join a soviet government because they did not accept the soviet system; their priority was a return to a parliamentary republic based on the old state structure. Historians, such as Alexander Rabinowitch in The Bolsheviks in Power, have shown these parties not only opposed the soviets’ authority but actively worked to undermine them, rendering a real coalition unworkable after October.
The Left SRs, whom La Botz often conflates with the Right SRs when discussing the Constituent Assembly, did join a coalition with the Bolsheviks. But, as Sheila Fitzpatrick and Rabinowitch document, that coalition broke down over concrete issues, such as the Brest-Litovsk treaty and grain requisitions, not over abstract questions of democracy. The split was deep and reflected social and political realities rather than a mere failure of will. Although there was an attempt at a coalition, it failed because neither side would give up its core beliefs. The broader context of civil war and foreign intervention intensified those divisions.
Soviets versus Constituent Assembly
La Botz calls my view “the classic Trotskyist argument;” in reality, his argument is closer to the classic Kautskyist argument. The text he is echoing (whether he means to or not) is Karl Kautsky’s The Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Kautsky argued that the Bolsheviks’ methods, even if understandable during the struggle, were basically authoritarian and would always lead to despotism. Kautsky said democracy and dictatorship could not coexist and that the Constituent Assembly should not have been dissolved. Lenin replied in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, that Kautsky separated “democracy” from its class basis, treating parliamentary democracy as the only real form of democracy. When you do that, every revolutionary action seems like a power grab.
This is what La Botz does in his argument. He treats the Constituent Assembly as a higher form of democracy, rather than just one institution among others. The Assembly was elected using old party lists that did not show the split among the SRs. At the same time, there were two powers: the soviets had become the real government, and peasants were already taking and sharing land under the Bolshevik Land Decree. The Right SR majority in the Assembly opposed this land redistribution. La Botz suggests the Bolsheviks could have “carried out a campaign in the assembly, the soviets, and society to win over the peasant majority to the Bolsheviks' land decree.” But the Second Congress of Soviets had already put the Land Decree into effect on October 26. The peasants were not waiting to be convinced; they were already acting. The Right SR majority in the Assembly was blocking what was happening, not standing for democracy.
Still, it is important to recognise why many socialists, including some with revolutionary credentials, continued to value the Constituent Assembly despite its limitations. For them, the Assembly represented a promise of universal suffrage and formal political equality after centuries of autocracy. Many believed that even an imperfect parliament could be a site for socialist advance or debate. Some socialists feared that dissolving the Assembly would set a precedent of restricting broad political participation or cut off space for dissent that could prove harmful later. These concerns should not be dismissed, since they speak to real anxieties about how revolutions can go wrong. However, these arguments often overlook the shifting realities on the ground: by early 1918, the soviets had become the real organs of popular power, while the Assembly's majority was no longer reflective of the revolutionary process or the demands coming from below.
La Botz misses this point because his way of thinking does not allow for it. Democratic legitimacy is not just about parliamentary elections. The soviets were a higher form of democracy because they demonstrated active working-class involvement, with delegates who could be recalled at any time. Choosing the Constituent Assembly over the soviets is not really about defending democracy; it is just picking one institution over another without considering the class basis of either.
Rosa Luxemburg
La Botz ends, as he began, by mentioning Rosa Luxemburg. But this is selective. Luxemburg criticised the Bolsheviks on the Constituent Assembly, land reform and press freedom. She did this while in prison, with limited information, and wrote a manuscript she chose not to publish. Leo Jogiches, her closest collaborator, was against publishing it. But the important Luxemburg is not the critic of 1918; rather it is the revolutionary who, after her release, helped found the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) along Bolshevik lines, opposed the Social Democratic Party-Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany coalition government for giving in to the old state, and led the KPD into the January 1919 uprising, even though many in her party disagreed. She was killed for taking the idea of insurrection seriously.
Her famous line, “freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently,” is often quoted by people who would not have agreed with her actions. The deeper point is this: Luxemburg never separated democracy from the question of class power. For her, democracy was the self-activity of the working class in struggle; it was not just a set of procedures. To treat democracy as something outside class struggle, and as a means of judging Lenin’s decisions, is to confuse liberalism with socialism. Luxemburg knew the difference. So did Lenin.
Did Lenin really lead to Stalin?
La Botz’s argument depends on an idea he does not prove: that Lenin’s choices led directly to Joseph Stalin. He says, “The decisions he made piled up until finally leading to the bureaucratic, collectivist, totalitarian state that was the Soviet Union.” But he does not demonstrate why this is the case. This idea, called the continuity thesis, is a central point in Cold War anti-Communist histories by writers such as Richard Pipes and Robert Service. It has been debated for a hundred years, not just by Trotskyists but also social historians such as Moshe Lewin, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stephen Cohen, and, more recently, Lars Lih.
Lewin, for example, argued Stalinism’s rise was not a straightforward continuation of Bolshevik politics but rather reflected big changes and crises within Soviet society after the revolution, especially under the pressures of civil war and isolation. Fitzpatrick emphasised the complex and often chaotic evolution of Soviet institutions, showing that the new state was shaped by improvisation and mass participation as well as by repression from above. Lih’s careful study of Bolshevik political culture has challenged the “Leninist coup” narrative that La Botz repeats, showing Bolshevik goals in 1917 were rooted in broad popular aspirations rather than a preordained path to dictatorship. These historians do not deny the tragedies that followed 1917, but they show that the continuity thesis simplifies and distorts a far more complex history.
The continuity thesis also cannot explain what happened under Stalin: the killing of the Bolshevik Old Guard, the Moscow Trials, and the destruction in the 1930s of the people who made the October Revolution. If Stalin was simply Lenin’s natural successor, why did he have to get rid of every Leninist? The Thermidorian idea, even if Leon Trotsky did not fully develop it, at least asked the right question: what social process turned the revolution into its opposite? La Botz’s version replaces this with a moral story. He turns eleven decisions into steps leading to Stalin. The deaths of the most committed workers in the civil war, the revolution’s isolation when it did not spread to Germany, and the rise of bureaucracy that Lenin warned about in his last writings — all this gets lost in a story about Lenin’s personality.
Leninism’s ongoing relevancy
La Botz says, “One does not need Lenin to be a socialist or a revolutionary.” That is true. No one needs to treat any historical figure as a hero. But the real question is not whether we need Lenin as a symbol. The question is whether we need the ideas and strategies associated with Leninism: his analysis of imperialism, his understanding of the party as a collective instrument for the oppressed, his theory of state power and, above all, his insistence that the working class can only act as a class through conscious, organised action.
In debates like this, “Leninism” gets treated as a package of methods and approaches specific to the conditions that made the Russian Revolution possible. In contrast, when people speak only of “socialist principles,” “democratic discussion,” and “members’ commitment and self-discipline,” they are referring to general values that almost all currents on the left would affirm but that, in themselves, do not provide a concrete strategy or organisational form. The distinction matters because substituting Leninism for general principles risks losing the orientation toward seizing power, the understanding of the state as an instrument of class rule, and the building of an organised force capable of acting decisively in moments of crisis. Without these, “socialist principles” remain abstract ideals, never translated into effective action or durable achievements. We gain inclusivity and moral clarity by stressing general principles, but we risk losing the strategic focus and organisational lessons that come from Marxist experience.
Leninism is not perfect nor should it be copied mechanically, but abandoning it for vague principles leaves us without tools to confront the realities of power as they are. In short, La Botz’s alternative is not just about who leads. It is about the basic choice between Marxist and social-democratic strategies, as history has shown many times.
