Rediscovering Lenin

Dialectics of Revolution and Metaphysics of Domination

Michael Brie, Loren Balhorn, Jan-Peter Herrmann, Loren Balhorn, Jan-Peter Herrmann

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030233266
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030233273
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Europa orientale

Translated from the original German Lenin Neuentdecken and available in English for the first time, this volume rediscovers Lenin as a strategic socialist thinker through close examination of his collected works and correspondence. Brie opens with an analysis of Lenin's theoretical development between 1914 and 1917, in preparation for his critical decision to dissolve the Constituent Assembly in January 1918 in a struggle for power. This led from the dialectics of revolutionary practice and social analysis to a new understanding of socialism, which is compared and contrasted to the alternative Marxist ideas and conceptions of the state posited by Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg. Rediscovering Lenin then moves to 1921, when Lenin begins a new stage of his theoretical development concerned with resolving the reversal of the revolution's aims and its results. This process remains unfinished, and the questions raised a hundred years ago remain: How can one intervene successfully and responsibly in social and political crises? What role do social science theories, ideological frameworks, and other practices play in transforming the economic, political and cultural power structures of a society? Brie concludes with a retrospective on the ideas developed by Marx and in the Second International, and their impact on Lenin's strategic thinking. Placing Lenin's writing itself in the foreground and arguing from inside his own self-learning, Rediscovering Lenin focuses on the reflective relationship between ideology, theory, and practice.

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© The Author(s) 2019

Michael BrieRediscovering LeninMarx, Engels, and Marxismshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23327-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. What Is to Be Done in Times of Powerlessness? Lenin’s Years in Switzerland, September 1914 to April 1917

Michael Brie¹

(1)

Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, Institute for Critical Social Analysis, Berlin, Germany

Michael Brie

‘Russia – that is the France of the current century. The revolutionary initiative for a new social transformation is correctly assigned to it in accordance with the laws.’

Friedrich Engels (quoted in Lopatin 1883, 488)

End Abstract

Using the Exile Properly

This book begins in August 1914. These were leaden times in which the mole of history had buried itself deep in the ground. No date revealed the powerlessness of the Left in Europe like 4 August 1914, when the SPD group in the Reichstag voted unanimously to approve war credits. Rosa Luxemburg spoke of a ‘world tragedy’ (Luxemburg 2004, 313). The outbreak of World War I marginalised the radical Left in Europe entirely. Only a few immediately and definitively branded the war an inter-imperialist conflict and declared war on it in turn. They formed a small, upright grouping: the German Gruppe Internationale, the Russian Bolsheviks and the grouping of internationalist Mensheviks, the Dutch Tribunists, the French syndicalists, the small Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, as well as minorities in other political groups. Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Vladimir Lenin, and Anton Pannekoek all belonged to this group. The state of war marked a deep caesura. Class struggle was removed from the political agenda in favour of the war of nations. Censorship and political repression made work among the proletarian masses and the army nearly impossible.

Thus, what is to be done in times of powerlessness? The following section takes a closer look at Lenin’s Swiss years between August 1914 and April 1917 as well as the summer of 1917 in Russia. News of the outbreak of World War I reached him in Austro-Hungarian-occupied Poland. He had moved to Krakow in July 1912 from Paris, where he primarily resided since 1908, in order to intensify his contacts to Russia. He spent the summer of 1914, as he already had in 1913, in the Gutóv-Mostovich guest house in Poronin, a tourist location in the High Tatras. He was arrested immediately after war’s outbreak on suspicion of spying for Russia. Released through the intervention of Polish and Austrian socialists, he travelled to neutral Switzerland together with his wife and her mother as fast as possible. He would remain there for two years and eight months until he was able to take a train through imperial Germany to Sweden (for more details see Gautschi 1973; Solzhenitsyn 1976). From there he boarded a ship to Finland and went to Petrograd carrying with him his famous April Theses, his slogans for a socialist revolution in Russia.

After settling in Switzerland Lenin was largely isolated and contact to Russia cut off almost entirely. He sought out collaborators. Grigory Zinoviev together with his wife and G.L. Shklovsky as well as Ines Armand also came to Bern. This constituted ‘the circle of friends with which he discussed daily’ (Reisberg 1977, 560). The most important organ of communication with the member of the party in Russia, the newspaper Pravda, had already been banned in July 1914. The members of the Bolsheviks’ Duma delegation were sentenced and banished to East Siberia.

Using the Time of Exile Properly

On 19 September 1915, Lenin wrote to the left Socialist Revolutionary Alexandrovitch: ‘Dear Comrade, Comrade Kollontai has forwarded your letter on to me. I have read and reread it attentively. I can understand your passionate protest against the emigrant colony, which apparently did anything but please you. The experience of 1905, however, has proved, in my opinion, that there are emigrants and emigrants. Part of the emigrant body, which prior to 1905 had devised the slogans and tactics of revolutionary Social-Democracy, proved in the years 1905-07 to be closely linked with the mass revolutionary movement of the working class in all its forms. The same applies today, in my opinion. If the slogans are correct, if the tactics are the right ones, the mass of the working class, at a given stage of development of its revolutionary movement, is bound to come round to these slogans.’ (LW 43: 493)

Looking back on the 32 months Lenin spent in Switzerland one can say with certainty that no one before him ever used their time in exile to prepare for their major political moment quite as systematically and consequently as Lenin did. During a period in which he was unable to take any action, he did what he did best: he prepared the conditions for his own actions. Lenin turned ‘inward’ in the truest sense of the word. Everything was put to the test. As he remarks in his overview of Hegel’s Science of Logic, which will be referred to again at a later point: ‘The movement of cognition to the object can always only proceed dialectically: to retreat in order to hit more surely—reculer pour mieux sauter’ (LW 38: 277f).

In the following, the individual elements of this ‘retreat’ are sketched out in their internal interconnectedness. Some details of Lenin’s work in this period were due to circumstance, often external occasions were the trigger. But the whole of his work in this time of external powerlessness is characterised by impressive consistency and explains to a large degree Lenin’s ability to unfold a strategic efficacy far overshadowing that of his opponents when the opportunity arose in the revolutionary months of 1917.

While Lenin’s individual writings from this period are often taken for themselves, here we address their embeddedness in a strategically oriented searching process. Proceeding from the firm conviction that the war would lead to a European socialist revolution, much like a chess player Lenin sought to anticipate a whole series of possible moves in advance. Eight elements in Lenin’s decisive contribution enabled the Bolsheviks to seize power in autumn 1917 and establish their dictatorship (see Fig. 1.1). Moreover, these eight elements are conducive to a better understanding of why the Bolsheviks’ epoch-making success ultimately led them into a historical dead end.

Fig. 1.1

Lenin’s impact between August 1914 and April 1917

Although the individual elements of Lenin’s search process depicted in the following were developed in relative temporal succession, owing above all to the concrete possibilities for action at hand at the time, the succession was of course fluid. Adding to this were what cybernetics calls feedback: each subsequent step sharpens the ‘No’ that forms the starting point, modifies social analysis, radicalises revolutionary theory, specifies scenarios, contributes to new ideas about the emancipatory horizon and the role of state power, and prioritises new strategic focal points accompanied by specific corresponding transitional projects.

Formulating a ‘NO’

Small groups in many Second International parties rejected the World War, opposed their own party leadership, and searched for a strategy commensurate to the new situation. A network began to form around Social Democracy’s left pole that would go down in the history of European socialism as the ‘Zimmerwald movement’.

The Zimmerwald Movement

The declaration passed in September 1915 described war—‘Regardless of the truth regarding immediate responsibility for the outbreak of this war’—to be ‘the result of imperialism, the striving by capitalist classes of each nation to feed their greed for profit through exploitation of human labour and natural resources around the entire globe’. Addressing the proletarians of Europe, it called: ‘Since the war began you have placed your energies, your courage, and your endurance at the service of the ruling classes. Now the task is to act for your own cause, for the sacred aims of socialism, for the deliverance of oppressed peoples and subjugated classes through irreconcilable proletarian class struggle.’ (International Socialist Conference 1915)

A left wing in turn formed within this Zimmerwald movement driven forward primarily by Lenin. Although it voted for the manifesto of the conference quoted above, it noted in the minutes that the declaration was insufficient: it contained ‘no clear characterisation of the open opportunism as well as that which is obscured by radical phrases’ and offered ‘no characterisation of the primary means of struggle against the war’ (quoted in Lademacher 1967, 154).

Lenin’s position toward the war had been clear from August 1914 onward: firstly, a break with the Second International and the founding of a new Communist International, and secondly the promotion of the central slogan ‘Turn imperialist war into civil war’. If he initially responded rather sceptically to reports about the SPD’s unanimous vote in favour of war credits in Polish newspapers on 4 August 1914, his first recorded remark was then: ‘That is the end of the Second International’ (quoted in Reisberg 1977, 533).

Lenin’s first written theses appeared shortly after his release from prison in Austro-Hungary around the beginning of World War I, in which he demanded—in the name of ‘leaders of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party’—the establishment of a new International to ‘rid itself of this bourgeois trend in socialism’ (LW 21: 17). His central assertion was the ‘need for a revolutionary war by the proletarians of all countries, against the bourgeoisie of all countries’ (ibid.: 16). Moreover, he insisted on the consideration of extra-legal means of struggle alongside legal forms. According to Lenin, propaganda had to be pursued ‘involving the army and the theatre of hostilities as well, for the socialist revolution and the need to use weapons, not against their brothers, the wage slaves in other countries, but against the reactionary and bourgeois governments and parties of all countries’ (ibid.: 18). This corresponded to Karl Liebknecht’s demand for mercilessly settling accounts with the ‘deserters and turncoats of the International’ and establishing a sharp clarity with regard to the ‘principles of our attitude to the world war […] as a special case of our view of the capitalist social order’: ‘The task is above all to lay down the practical conclusions flowing from these principles, and to do so unwaveringly in every country’ (Liebknecht 1915).

In contrast to the majority of socialists, Lenin thought beyond the concrete situation of the Left’s almost total incapacity to act. Nor was he intimidated by the laws of war when calling for disobeying of orders and encouraging revolt. He assumed that the war itself would result in crises from which a revolutionary situation would emerge. To the extent it was possible, the Left had to prepare for them and educate the masses about the needed action in such situations beforehand.

In its determination, Lenin’s ‘No’ simultaneously represents a tremendous sharpening of emphasis. While this accounts for its strength, it also constitutes its limitation. The expected revolution was understood as the transformation of the imperialist war between the slaveholders into a civil war against the slaveholders. Only the violent choice between two absolute opposites in terms of an either-or decision and not also an open space of political alternatives stood at the heart of this conception of revolution. Likewise, his ‘No’ to the ‘Social Chauvinists’ and ‘Opportunists’ was absolute. It left no room for ‘vacillating’ or ‘deviating’ from the position accepted as correct. A common democratic search process was thus made more difficult, anticipating the ‘21 Conditions’ adopted in 1920 at the second congress of the Communist International.

Working Out a Philosophy of Dialectical Practice and Evolutionary Leaps

A selection of Marx and Engels’ correspondence was published in 1913. Lenin compiled an elaborate conspectus to which he would subsequently refer on numerous occasions and also penned a review. In the process he came across—not least in the context of discussions about Capital—treatises by Marx and Engels on the philosophy of Hegel and dialectics more generally. He remarks: ‘The rational in Hegel’s Logic, in its method. [[Marx 1958: paged through Hegel’s Logic again and would like to have explained in 2 or 3 print sheets what the rational in it is.]]’ (LW 38: 40). The significance of dialectics in Marx and Engels’ correspondence appears to have moved Lenin to devote this time of relatively practical inactivity to a deepened engagement with Hegel’s work and the writings of other authors to which Marx and Engels repeatedly refer—including Heraclitus and Leibniz (specifically, Feuerbach’s text on Leibniz). Further immediate impetus was provided by the fact that he was working on an extensive article about Karl Marx for the Russian Granat Encyclopedia (LW 21: 43–91).

If one were to attempt to define in a single word the focus, so to speak, of the whole correspondence, the central point at which the whole body of ideas expressed and discussed converges—that word would be dialectics. The application of materialist dialectics to the reshaping of all political economy from its foundations up, its application to history, natural science, philosophy and to the policy and tactics of the working class—that was what interested Marx and Engels most of all, that was where they contributed what was most essential and new, and that was what constituted the masterly advance they made in the history of revolutionary thought. (LW 19: 554)

While the first major battles of World War I were being waged in the last four months of 1914, Lenin concentrated, at least if measured by time invested and texts produced, on the aforementioned article about Marx and the study of Hegel’s Science of Logic. His distance from the actual political struggle could hardly have been greater. As Stathis Kouvelakis writes:

This taking distance, this solitude, which is often to be found at moments of sudden change, not only among thinkers but also among men of action, is an absolutely necessary moment of the process of events itself: the caesura of the initial event (the war) is silently echoed in their taking distance, a silence from which the new initiative, the opening to the new, will resurge. It is only in the light of this novum that the process can retroactively appear as necessary, the self-criticism of thought interacting with the self-criticism of things themselves, which it recognizes as its own, without anything managing to reduce the share of contingency in this encounter, its complete lack of any advance guarantee. (Kouvelakis 2007, 167)

In a situation of all-out crisis and almost absolute incapacity to act, Lenin commenced the study of what appears to be one of the most abstract philosophical theories in its purest form: Hegel’s logic. His political statements during this period amount to less than 30 pages, while he dedicated another 50 pages to Marx. The conspectus of the Science of Logic, however, is no less than 140 printed pages long. He never studied and evaluated any other book in written form in such depth.

As Kevin Anderson writes in his analysis of the Leninian reception of Hegel: ‘This is a rather surprising balance of theoretical versus mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. What Is to Be Done in Times of Powerlessness? Lenin’s Years in Switzerland, September 1914 to April 1917
• 2. What Is to Be Done in the Struggle for a New World?
• 3. What Is to Be Done with Power?
• 4. Whoever Is Not Prepared to Talk About Leninism Should Also Keep Quiet About Stalinism
• 5. Rosa Luxemburg’s Symphony on the Russian Revolution
• 6. The Power and Impotence of the Marxian Idea of Communism
• Back Matter