The Future of Lenin

Power and Revolution in the 21st Century

Alla Ivanchikova, Robert R. Maclean, Alla Ivanchikova, Robert R. Maclean

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781438488080
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Situated in a particular historical moment marked by the violent crises of capitalism—the rise of the alt-right, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Black Lives Matter movement— The Future of Lenin collects essays by an international cohort of scholars to assert Lenin's relevance for twenty-first-century politics and thought. Taking different and sometimes opposing vantage points on Lenin's value for the future, the contributions to this volume reveal an unexpected Lenin, one who escapes the stale Cold War-era discourse of demonization and hagiography. Instead, the future-oriented Lenin in these pages comes to life as our contemporary: an interlocutor who is surprisingly relevant for Black and anticolonial struggles in the US and beyond; for building the new Left; and for assessing Bernie Sanders' movement as well as alt-right anti-statism. In short, Lenin's concrete development of Marxism for his historical conditions may yet offer lessons for revolutionaries to come.

PART I

LENIN, OUR CONTEMPORARY?

Chapter 1

Rejecting Lenin for the Left

DAVID J. OST

It has been a while since the Left has revolved around Lenin. Fifty years ago, or fifty years after the Russian Revolution, young leftists were eagerly reading his works, wrestling over his ideas, assessing their contemporary relevance. That is certainly not the case today, and not only in the global capitalist core. Lenin does retain some hold on the Left in the global periphery, where his ideas on imperialism have long seemed more relevant. But global interconnections have made the possibility of Leninist revolution seem less likely everywhere, which explains why so much of the semi-peripheral Left has in recent years focused attention on viable social reform without regime transformation, such as with the so-called “Pink Tide” wave in Latin America.¹

And so it was not so surprising that 2017, the centenary of the Russian Revolution, went by without much excitement or commemoration. Russia itself largely ignored the centenary, its leaders wary of any sympathy for revolutionary ideas that might infect the public. But even elsewhere the Left paid scant homage. Past triumphs and leaders were duly acknowledged, but few Left parties or papers treated the Revolution, or Lenin, as vital elements for contemporary political practice. China Miéville published a stirring popular book about the Revolution, October, appealing to Left sentiments, though as to why the Revolution deserves celebration today even he seemed rather stumped, meekly concluding: “The standard of October declares that things changed once, and so they might do so again.”²

Yet if we look a little closer, we find a mini-revival of interest in Lenin, starting unexpectedly on the Right, but lately emerging in parts of the Left as well. As for the Right, this is the radical, illiberal, antidemocratic, essentially neofascist political Right that has lately been gaining in prominence.³ This is a Right that promotes a powerful state and a belligerent, exclusionary nationalism, demands “national unity” around its own program, rejects liberal democracy’s precepts of minority rights and rule of law, opposes feminism as a dire enemy, accepts a limited welfare state provided it is run only by the state (and not civil society actors such as trade unions), and rewards only those considered part of “the nation.” This new Right seems to find Lenin almost irresistible. For them, Lenin appears as a contemporary figure with significance and relevance, not just historical mystique.

Here is former Trump strategist and would-be global “alt-right” organizer Stephen Bannon speaking in 2013: “I’m a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”⁴ Before Bannon came Grover Norquist, the éminence grise behind the wedding of the American Right’s corporate and religious tendencies into one happy family, who, in his home where such unity-building meetings took place, is reported by an ex-comrade to have had a “majestic portrait” of Lenin hanging in the living room.⁵ Classic antistate liberals enamored with the market have long been fans of Lenin’s passion and methods. “We can learn a great deal from Lenin and the Leninists,” Murray Rothbard, the influential libertarian “anarcho-capitalist” advised his fellow free-market rebels already in a 1961 memo tellingly titled “What Is To Be Done?”⁶ His 1977 Toward a Strategy for Libertarian Social Change is not only peppered with quotes from Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders, but for those who still did not understand, makes the point starkly: Those of us “who attack Communists for being willing to kill capitalists … are incorrect; the problem with the Communists is [only] … that their ends (the dictatorship of the proletariat) are incorrect.”⁷ Rothbard persuaded Charles Koch; in his memoir, Koch lists Marx and Lenin as two primary influences.⁸ In the early 1980s, Cato and Heritage Foundation libertarians called for “a Leninist strategy” to dismantle the New Deal, the evolution of which Nancy MacLean documents in her recent book on the radical Right.⁹ As Che used to do for the Left, Lenin does for parts of the intellectual Right: signal their membership in a special community with a clear mission, cause, and purpose.

Nor is the fascination limited to the American Right. Philippe Vardon, a leader of the French nativist “Bloc Identitaire” closely associated with the National Front, has boasted of being a “classic Leninist” political activist.¹⁰ There is also Jarosław Kaczyński, architect and leader of Poland’s Law and Justice Party (PiS) which, since winning the 2015 elections, has been rapidly installing a Far Right regime. After an earlier attempt at holding power in the mid-2000s had gone awry, Kaczyński turned into a decided admirer of the organizational capacities of the Bolsheviks. “We became firmly convinced,” he writes, “that in order to really accomplish something, we would need to have what Lenin called a ‘party of a new type,’ made up of people committed, attested for, and capable of disciplined action.”¹¹

What is it that today’s “populist” Right so admires about the Bolshevik leader? Above all, his absolute conviction, his eyes always on the prize, his utter determination to attain state power regardless of the supposed impossibility of doing so. They salute his courage in trying not just to tamper with the system but to smash it. They revel in his plain and persistent insistence that rule by his party would be more democratic than any “so-called democracy” that results from elections. They do not especially care for democracy, but recognize that we live in a democratic age and that to some extent they must play by its rules. Such flexibility is what they also admire about Lenin, who, for all his implacable revolutionary ardor, was always able to temper his demands or make short-term coalitions in order to realize ultimate goals. What else, after all, was Lenin’s concession of “land to the peasants,” when socialist and Bolshevik policy had always treated private land ownership as a reactionary relic of the past?

For sociologist Cihan Tugal, the Right has turned to Lenin precisely because Leninism provides “the tools radicals need in an advanced democracy.”¹² Conceptualizing the core of Leninism not as authoritarian zeal but as the need for elite/mass coalitions to build a new society, Tugal argues that the American Right has moved from a “primitive” antistate Leninism pushed by Rothbard to the “advanced” Leninism of the Koch brothers, focusing on the capture of state power. In this sense, Donald Trump’s post-defeat determination to hold onto power regardless of the rules was an impressive performance of right-wing Leninism, on which Republicans then doubled down with a spate of new state electoral laws enabling them perhaps to even fix elections in the future. If the liberal-Left enemy must be defeated for the new order to take hold, then the Leninist readiness to throw away the rule book is a crucial part of the Right’s new toolkit.

The Right can appeal to Lenin largely because the Left had so decisively given him up. The Left abandoned Lenin for four key reasons: his lessons failed, postwar social democratic capitalism seemed to render Leninism irrelevant, Gramscian cultural politics appeared to succeed as an alternative, and over time the Left grew more committed to the democracy that Lenin always distrusted.

Now, however, as the radical Right enjoys such success, some on the Left are beginning again to embrace Lenin. And precisely for the reason that the Right has done so: a focus on gaining power. I understand the temptation, yet I believe that would be a grave mistake. As a long-time and unapologetic Left critic of the “actually existing” state socialist societies that resulted from the Russian Revolution, I think the record shows that authoritarian state power, even in service of social justice, ends up catastrophically destructive for the Left, sapping it of its principles and almost invariably leading to a disastrous doubling-down on repression once new problems set in, as they must. The Russian Revolution brought gains to workers and set the stage for national development and modernization, while trampling democracy for workers and everyone else. It is hard to see how a renewed Leninism, whatever that might mean, can bring leftist rewards today.

This paper is set up as follows. First, I discuss reasons why the Left has largely given up on Lenin. Then I review three compelling left-wing and Marxist critiques of Leninism. I try to show both that there is not much in Lenin that today’s Left might find useful, and that the Left knew what it was doing in abandoning Lenin. I then critically assess recent Left arguments for a Leninist revival.

The Leftist Turn against Lenin

The Left first turned away from Lenin when it became clear that his insurrectionary project of seizing state power, which succeeded in Russia, failed everywhere else. For the first two years after the Bolshevik Revolution it seemed plausible that the international revolution Lenin thought so crucial would in fact succeed. But a combination of fierce repression and revolutionary overreach led to the crushing of uprisings in Germany, Hungary, and in the Baltics. The Biennio Rosso of 1919–1920 in Italy culminated not in socialist power but in Mussolini’s March on Rome, while in the U.S. rising militancy was met by the Palmer Raids and a comprehensive attack on civil liberties aimed at dismantling the Left. The Comintern, created in Moscow in 1919 to coordinate socialist revolution, having achieved no successes in Europe soon turned its attentions to China, supporting a Communist alliance with the Kuomintang that resulted in a rout and massacre of Communists in 1927. Communists built communist parties, but never again, in the capitalist core, did those parties try to seize power the way Lenin did. The last opportunity came right after World War II, when powerful Communist Parties in France and Italy, having played a leading role in the anti-fascist underground, appeared poised to take power, with many activists eager to do so. But they stood down on orders from Stalin, who sought a stable peace with the West and was concerned above all with consolidating Communist power in Eastern Europe.¹³ Communist parties of course did seize power there, but only because the Soviet Union, whose Red Army occupied the land in the course of defeating the Nazis, insisted they try and made sure they succeeded.

In the core capitalist world the Left abandoned Leninism in the post–World War II era when Leninist parties no longer seemed central to securing the kinds of victories that were possible, given that the overthrow of capitalism was not.

World War II ended with a decided turn to the left. Outside of Eastern Europe, this meant a turn to social democracy, which did not end capitalism but managed, disciplined, and organized it. It was a stunning transformation from the interwar period. Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm calls the thirty years after the end of World War II the “Golden Years”¹⁴—not just for capital, which experienced spectacular growth, but for workers, whose standards of living increased dramatically, and for trade unions, which attained unprecedented responsibilities and prestige under the emerging system of democratic corporatism.¹⁵ Official communist parties were divided by these developments. On the one hand, they saw these changes as a sellout of the Revolution, propping capitalism up at a point when radical systemic change might be on the agenda. On the other hand, communist parties had long been making the kinds of social welfare demands that capitalism was now implementing. In Great Britain and Italy, postwar social democracy even went on a nationalization binge, with the state taking over the “commanding heights” of the capitalist economy in order better to be able to avert future crises through sophisticated Keynesian demand management. Communist parties had intended such calls for anticrisis action to be what Trotsky called “transitional demands”: demands that capitalism could not implement but whose articulation would win the parties popular support, bringing their triumph closer. But with capitalism proving able to implement such policies (aiding chiefly, though not only, the male, dominant-ethnicity working class), Leninist parties and politics seemed increasingly irrelevant....