One Lenin, many Leninisms

You can read other contributions to the discussion sparked by Dan La Botz’s “Goodbye to Lenin and Leninism” here.

LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal has published more than a half-dozen recent contributions on Lenin, Leninism and the problems of working-class organisation and leadership. Understanding the Leninist legacy can help us avoid repeating mistakes in the future, while providing insights into what happened in the past; namely, why the first revolution to put working people in charge ultimately fail and Lenin's role in this.

Trotsky’s explanation

Leon Trotsky, Isaac Deutscher and others share a common view on why the Russian Revolution did not lead to working people democratically controlling their society. They contend that the Russian Revolution had to confront adverse forces that it could not overcome, including:

1. 14 countries invading Russia;
2. the failure of the 1918-19 German Revolution along with other revolutions on the continent;
3. the country being overwhelmed with disease, famine and other deprivations; and
4. the fact that the Russian Revolution overthrew capitalism where it was weakest, rather than where the working class was most developed. 

As technocrats and managers flooded into the Russian Communist Party, these factors fed a political reaction to the revolution, which Trotsky called “The Thermidor,” drawing a parallel with the French Revolution. According to Trotskyists, the Soviet Thermidor established a nationalistic bureaucracy in the party and state. In Trotsky’s analysis, criticism of Lenin’s leadership is overshadowed by the impact of adverse conditions. It had been understood since Karl Marx that “socialism in one country” was unsustainable; that is why the Russian Revolution failed, according to this narrative.

Blaming Lenin

An alternative story pins the Soviet Union’s authoritarian nature and eventual collapse on Lenin’s organisational principles. According to Dan La Botz, “Lenin, and what became Leninism, played a very large role, a decisive role, in extinguishing socialist democracy.” Lenin’s organisational principles put a party-elite in control of a centralised political apparatus with top-down discipline. After taking power, the Bolsheviks merged the party with the state and outlawed all opposition. 

Paul Le Blanc observed that critics describe Leninist organisation as a “mechanism far more centralist than democratic, requiring on the one hand ‘a strong leader’ and on the other hand a rank-and-file membership ‘consciously and joyfully submitting to the leadership imposed on it by senior members’.”

To only consider the Bolsheviks and not the conditions they faced (or vice versa) is a one-dimensional analysis. As Anthony Teso explained, any 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 the authoritarian bureaucracy that ran the Soviet Union until its collapse.

What Lenin wrote/what the Bolsheviks did

La Botz asks: “If Lenin was always right, why did things go so wrong?” We could instead ask: how much of a difference did the Bolsheviks’ organising principles make, given the overwhelming conditions they faced? And why were Lenin’s writings on organisation so different to what the Bolsheviks did?

Simon Pirani studied newly-available Soviet records after the Soviet Union’s fall. His writings challenge both the Trotsky/Deutscher explanation of hostile historical conditions as well as those who blame Lenin for the revolution’s retreat. Pirani’s “third interpretation” is based on the interaction between Bolshevik practice and social changes that went beyond their control and even understanding. He writes:

From 1918, as the revolution retreated, the shifts in Bolshevik ideology and policy were in the opposite direction. The ideas in Lenin’s The State and Revolution, which was written under the influence of the surge of soviet activity in 1917 and extolled popular participation in government, were dumped. By 1921, as the Red Army invaded Georgia to help depose the local Mensheviks, the principle of self-determination of small nations — which had in December 1917 been cited as a justification for granting independence to Finland — was set aside.

Bolshevik ideas animated their actions; the outcomes further shaped Bolshevik ideas.

Ultimately, we cannot make history as we please. As Marx wrote: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Autocratic traditions did not disappear with the Russian Revolution. Russia’s single-ruler tradition survived under Tsarist, Communist and capitalist regimes. Teso notes, “Tsarist Russia was an autocracy that lacked stable law, a functioning parliament, and basic freedoms of the press, assembly and organisation.”

Major social change takes generations, not years. It took centuries to complete the transition to capitalism in western Europe. The Soviet Union itself was, as Le Blanc explains, a

variant of the transitional formation between capitalism and socialism which Marx and Engels had theorised — but in this case forced to exist on a capitalist planet much longer than anticipated. Consequently, it became bureaucratised, authoritarian, and corrupt, proving unable to move forward to socialism and unable to endure.

The Leninisms we inherited

Bureaucratised and authoritarian, the Soviet Union defined world Communism through the Communist International (Comintern). The Comintern created what the world calls “Leninism” today. This adds another dimension to the problem: there is what Lenin wrote, what Lenin and the Bolsheviks did, and what the Comintern disseminated as “Leninism.”

Joel Geier and others argue that what we know as “Leninism,” in terms of political and organisational practices, came not from Lenin but Comintern leader Grigory Zinoviev. It was “Zinovievism”, not “Leninism,” that emerged from the Comintern’s Fifth Congress of 1924, with its theory of the “vanguard party” and “Bolshevisation” policy. According to Geier, this meant “every party was expected to carry out instructions from the Russian party, in reality from its Politburo.”

US Communist leader James P. Cannon was an original believer in Bolshevisation. He wrote that

Bolshevization of the party ... like all slogans of the Communist International, means ... a struggle against false ideology in the party. The Bolshevization of the party, for us, means the struggle for the conquest of the party for the ideology of Marxism and Leninism.

Note the contrast between “false” versus “true” ideologies. Cannon would later accept Trotsky’s Leninism. But by that time, Zinoviev’s Leninism had enabled Moscow to expel Cannon from the US party less than a year after it expelled Trotsky. Cannon and others eventually founded the Socialist Workers Party (US SWP) as a Trotskyist/Leninist party.

Late in the 20th century, the US SWP abandoned Trotskyism. Peter Camejo, an expelled party leader, wrote that the SWP’s “Leninism” was idealistic. Idealism was inherent in the idea of the “correct program,” which differentiates a truly revolutionary vanguard party from petty-bourgeois political groups. For Camejo, the

… myth is that what Lenin did was gather a cadre around a ‘correct’ program, build a hard, centralized organization and when the masses radicalized they were won over. Having won the masses, Lenin’s party was then able to take ‘power’. A whole series of corollaries followed from this erroneous concept and, over time, became part of the Trotskyist dogma.

Create two, three, many Lenins

Camejo wrote: “Cadres became the defenders of the Holy Grail, and usually there was in each group just one ‘Lenin of today’ who could interpret and adjust the ‘program’.” This contributed to the continual fragmentation of Trotskyist groups into ever-smaller formations around a single enduring leader. Camejo added:

Also, amazing as it might seem, while these organizations produced endless written materials on all kinds of political phenomena, almost nothing can be found seeking to explain this astounding phenomena of the cultification of Trotskyist organizations.

The astounding transfer of New York City SWP assets to the personal account of long-time leader Jack Barnes, however, has been documented.

The single-leader tradition stretches back to the Bolshevik party, which was co-founded by Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov, who Lenin subsequently had expelled. Why could they not coexist in the Bolshevik party? The practice of giving a single individual extraordinary powers indefinitely has not served the international left well. 

Neither has the notion that there can only be a single vanguard party in each country. Or that an international federation of parties should itself be subject to democratic centralism and party-level discipline from an ultimate authority. These diktats are post-Lenin, from the Comintern’s Fifth Congress.

Lenin versus the vanguard party

Following the experiences of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union, many on the left would today agree with Teso that “a genuinely-democratic organisation grounded in the self-activity of the working class ... requires rejecting the party’s monopoly over the working class.” As Camejo put it, “truth can only be ascertained through the conflict of ideas. Without differences, debate and a really open, democratic culture a movement can easily adopt positions disconnected from reality.”

Lenin seemed to have no argument against working-class political pluralism in his writings or speeches. The term “vanguard party” appears not in his works but in Zinoviev’s speeches and other documents from the Comintern’s Fifth Congress. It is arguable that Lenin did not use the term “vanguard party” because he did not believe in such a thing. Yet, today, it is hard to find an introductory class on Lenin that does not use the phrase “vanguard party”.

Bidding goodbye to Leninism, but not to Lenin

The Bolsheviks led the Russian Revolution, a watershed moment in history of great importance to socialists. Lenin led the Bolsheviks and interpreted the Marxist tradition. Lenin’s most important writings contain organisational and tactical insights that we need today. In his 1914 work on national self-determination, for example, Lenin asked how the Ukrainian worker could trust the Great Russian worker to not betray him to preserve Great Russian privilege. One could substitute the term “Black worker” for “Ukrainian” and see the struggle for Black equality as a catalyst to the struggle of workers, as CLR. James did.

There is too much to learn from Lenin to say goodbye to his writings, speeches, and life's work. Leninism, however, today exists in multiple, incompatible forms, most having little to do with Lenin’s writings and perhaps even his intentions. We should say goodbye to Leninism, but Lenin’s basic works should remain in the curriculum of introductory classes on socialism or communism. The curriculum should also include the history of the many Leninisms to better understand the distortions, errors, and genius, in Lenin’s legacy.