eBook - ePub

Unfinished Leninism

Name: Unfinished Leninism
Author: Paul Le Blanc

The Rise and Return of a Revolutionary Doctrine

Paul Le Blanc

Share book

230 pages
English
ePUB (mobile friendly)
Available on iOS & Android

eBook - ePub

Unfinished Leninism

The Rise and Return of a Revolutionary Doctrine

Paul Le Blanc

Book details

Book preview

Table of contents

Citations

About This Book

Praise for Paul Le Blanc's Lenin and the Revolutionary Party:

"A work of unusual strength and coherence, inspired not by academic neutrality but by the deep conviction that there is much to learn from the actual ideas and experiences of Lenin." —Michael Löwy

As a leader of the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Lenin was perhaps the greatest revolutionary of the twentieth century. These clearly written essays offer an account of his life and times, a lively view of his personality, and a stimulating engagement with his ideas.

Paul Le Blanc is a professor of history at La Roche College and has written widely on radical movements.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?

Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.

Can/how do I download books?

At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.

What is the difference between the pricing plans?

Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.

What is Perlego?

We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.

Do you support text-to-speech?

Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.

Is Unfinished Leninism an online PDF/ePUB?

Yes, you can access Unfinished Leninism by Paul Le Blanc in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Politique et relations internationales & Politique russe. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher

Haymarket Books

Year

2014

ISBN

9781608464265

Topic

Politique et relations internationales

Subtopic

Politique russe

Chapter One

LENIN’S RETURN

This is a review of the following books: Lenin Rediscovered: “What Is to Be Done?” in Context, by Lars T. Lih (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2006); James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890–1928, by Bryan D. Palmer (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007); Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth, edited by Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

About forty years ago, my great-uncle George Brodsky (now long dead) gave me an old handbill printed in red ink, issued by District 2 of the Workers Party, which proclaimed LENIN LIVES! It urged us to “Come En Masse” to Madison Square Garden to a Sunday afternoon event chaired by Ben Gitlow (a central leader of US Communism who later devolved into a professional anticommunist on the far right. The event that included the four-hundred-voice Freiheit Chorus, a one-hundred-piece symphony orchestra, and speeches from William Z. Foster, C. E. Ruthenberg, Moissaye Olgin, and Jack Stachel—for an admission fee of fifty cents (not a negligible sum in 1925) and with an exhortation at the handbill’s bottom: LONG LIVE LENINISM!

“Lenin Lives!” He had died, in fact, but was alive in the hearts and minds of those rallying in Madison Square Garden, alive in the very nature of that culturally vibrant assemblage, and the relevance of the handbill is reflected in the three remarkable books above, while also posing sharp questions about the terrible times in which we live. Consider three films that capture aspects of our reality as we feel our way toward the close of the new century’s first decade. The poignant German comedy Goodbye Lenin! (2003)—reflecting on the beautiful, tarnished, murderously corrupted, deadeningly bureaucratized dreams of the Communism that proved so utterly unsustainable throughout Eastern Europe—shows a monstrous statue of Lenin being carried away, through the air, by a helicopter, as a stunned female Communist-idealist (herself close to premature death) watches with uncomprehending wonder.

The edgy thriller Syriana (2005) shows us ruthless machinations of Communism’s triumphant and relentlessly profiteering adversary, as the corporate-capitalist driven empire “takes out” a thoughtful, progressive, radical-nationalist of an oil-rich country, perpetuating the global exploitation and misery of millions, which—in turn, thanks to the absence of revolutionary alternatives—generates suicidal fundamentalist violence.

Fast forward to the year 2027 portrayed in the uncompromising Children of Men (2007): in the absence of a socialist alternative (protest movements for global justice were not enough), the world has begun its downward slide into barbarism, a vast cemetery, with the final enclave of “civilization” standing as an increasingly authoritarian and exclusionary (anti-immigrant, anti-refugee) husk whose inhumanity infects many who struggle against it—but images of Lenin appear, in the midst of religious icons, in an obscure, nurturing haven of those who hope and reach for humanity’s future.

But surely the images of Lenin as nurturing hope are misplaced—even radicals agree with liberals who quote conservatives who assure us that Lenin was a monster. In his little essay on Lenin in Time/CBS News People of the Century: One Hundred Men and Women Who Shaped the Last One Hundred Years, David Remnick explains to us that the great revolutionary held a “view of man as modeling clay and sought to create a new model of human nature and behavior through social engineering of the most radical kind,” and he goes on to quote Richard Pipes that “Bolshevism was the most audacious attempt in history to subject the entire life of a country to a master plan. It sought to sweep aside as useless rubbish the wisdom that mankind had accumulated over millennia.” Such an inhuman approach to humanity inevitably breeds nothing but inhumanity—unless the liberal/conservative allegation is a lie.

As my book Marx, Lenin, and the Revolutionary Experience was about to be published in 2006, I was unable to shake the feeling that what I was doing in that book hardly reflected my own thoughts alone. Against what had become so standard an interpretation of Lenin, as I was writing in the post-9/11 world, it felt that dominant ideologies were being undermined by political and social crises that would be generating insurgent forces ready to connect with the ideas of the “universally” dismissed revolutionary. Perhaps, I thought, we are about to see a Lenin revival. The appearance, at approximately the same time, of these three volumes (two of which I was able to quickly take note of on my book’s page proofs) reinforce that sense.

Lenin Reloaded

Taking the most recent first, Lenin Reloaded presents a remarkable set of essays by an impressive set of twenty-first-century intellectuals—with contents causing the working-class child in me to recoil in panic, fearing that I will be too dull-witted to understand what all these learned people, using strange words and esoteric allusions, are saying with such apparent fluency. As I labor over what they have written, I bump into the militant young activist within me who scoffs at such “over-intellectualizing,” yet the aging scholar in me feels unable to follow the young comrade’s impatient advice to close this book—in part because what many of these people are saying is so interesting, so strikingly put, and (yes) so mind-expanding.

Frederic Jameson, beginning with an account from Trotsky’s 1932 diary of a dream-conversation with Lenin, describes Lenin’s formidable writings as coming from a man who is unaware that he is dead—

He doesn’t know that the immense social experiment he single-handedly brought into being (and which we call Soviet Communism) has come to an end. He remains full of energy, although dead, and the vituperation expended on him by the living—that he was the originator of Stalinist terror, that he was an aggressive personality full of hatred, an authoritarian in love with power and totalitarianism, even (worst of all) the rediscoverer of the market in his NEP—none of those insults manage to confer a death, or even a second death, on him. How is it, how can it be, that he still thinks he is alive?

This imagery is an eloquent way of stating the simple premise that “Lenin still means something,” but it gains one’s attention, nonetheless. So does Slavoj Žižek’s description of a Slovenian Communist who led a heroic uprising in a fascist prison, an uprising that became part of the mythology of a triumphant Communist state, a state that then arrested and imprisoned the same man and assigned him to a forced-labor work brigade that was creating a monument glorifying the antifascist uprising that he had led—“a perfect metaphor for the twists of Stalinism.” There is Terry Eagleton’s challenging and clever essay—with wonderful turns of phrase (he describes Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, while defending it, as “a work in which one can hear the occasional gurgling of a man well out of his depth”). Eagleton reflects on Lenin’s much-maligned notion of a “revolutionary vanguard” (commonly dismissed as the arrogant elitism of a middle-class intellectual) with this fine point:

Those members of the Citizen Army and Irish Volunteers who fought with James Connolly against the British imperial state in the Dublin Post Office in 1916 constituted a vanguard. But this was not because they were middle-class intellectuals—on the contrary, they were mostly Dublin working men and women—or because they had some innate faculty of superior insight into human affairs, or because they were in serene possession of the scientific laws of history. They were a vanguard because of their relational situation—because, like the revolutionary cultural avant-gardes in contrast with modernist coteries, they saw themselves not as a timeless elite but as the shock troops or front line of a mass movement. There can be no vanguard in and for itself, as coteries are by definition in and for themselves. And a vanguard would not be in business unless it trusted profoundly in the capacities of ordinary people, as elites by definition disdain them.

It is hardly the case that all of these writers are in agreement with each other. Antonio Negri argues “not only must Lenin’s thought be re-examined with energetic fidelity, but it must also be reframed—as it were—‘beyond Lenin.’” Of course, in going beyond Lenin, Negri and cothinker Michael Hardt presented a notion of the world, in their stimulating best-seller Empire, that argued for the obsolescence of Lenin’s classic Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. This is in stark contrast to what Georges Labica argues in Lenin Reloaded—“contemporary globalization is nothing other than Lenin’s ‘new imperialism,’ now reaching a still higher stage of development.” It is worth pondering how this yet “higher stage” is described:

If we finally take into account elements unknown to the old “new imperialism,” since they simply did not exist, or at least in some cases not on such a scale, such as the weight of debt controlled by international monetary institutions, which has led to the ruin of an entire continent (Africa), we have such things as the threat of nuclear weapons, the dangers to the environment, the foreseeable shortage of drinking water, and the general commodification that extends to the sale of organs and the massive prostitution of children, so that we should not be afraid to speak of a regular “criminalization of the world economy.” The drug trade, another element previously unknown, stands at the head of world commerce, narcotics being the commodity with the highest rate of profit.

Also in these pages are prominent leaders of would-be Leninist parties, such as Alex Callinicos of the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and Daniel Bensaïd of the French Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR)—capable intellectuals from substantial organizations. Callinicos articulately challenges, among other things, what one might call traces of Stalinist residue among others in this volume, yet with a comradely tone and with a respect for the common ground they share in relation to what has been the sterile anti-Leninist consensus. He usefully concludes his contribution with a serious-minded discussion of Lenin’s relevance to today’s Left—having to do with what he sees as 1) Lenin’s strategic analysis of capitalism, 2) his perspective of the specificity and centrality of politics, and 3) his view on the necessity of political organization. This seems remarkably consistent with points made in Bensaïd’s own distinctive essay, which concludes with the thought that “a politics without parties (whatever name—movement, organization, league, party—they are given) ends up in most cases as a politics without politics: either an aimless tailism toward the spontaneity of social movements, or the worst form of elitist individualist vanguardism, or finally a repression of the political in favor of the aesthetic or the ethical.”

As suggested in Negri’s earlier-noted comments, there are those who emphasize how one can use Lenin to go beyond Lenin. In exploring Lenin’s radical engagement with Hegel of 1914–16, Kevin Anderson comments that “by widening the orthodox Marxian notion of the revolutionary subject, he helped pave the way for later attempts to widen this still further, to embrace not only, as Lenin had begun to do, national and ethnic liberation movements, but also those of women, ecologists, gays and lesbians, and youth.” At the same time, Anderson goes out of his way to stress that one can “still appreciate the many attractive features of this great revolutionary leader without in any way self-identifying as a Leninist, which in the dominant discourse usually means an adherence to his elitist concept of the vanguard party.” We have noted that some of Anderson’s fellow contributors differ with him here—but none so completely as another scholar who also avoids “self-identifying as a Leninist,” Lars T. Lih, who buoyantly argues (against critics like Anderson and against more than one defender in this volume) that the Lenin of the 1902 classic What Is to Be Done?—no elitist at all—got his perspectives on organization from none other than Karl Marx himself, “but more concretely and effectively from Marx as incarnated by European Social Democracy and the German SPD in particular.”

All of this is interesting, and yet we happen to live in a time when, as the editors of this collection observe, “global capitalism appears to be the only game in town and the liberal-democratic system as the optimal political organization of society, [and] it has indeed become easier to imagine the end of the world than a far more modest change in the mode of production.” Their response: “For us, ‘Lenin’ is not the nostalgic name for old dogmatic certainty; quite the contrary, the Lenin that we want to retrieve is the Lenin-in-becoming, the Lenin whose fundamental experience was that of being thrown into a catastrophic new constellation in which old reference points proved useless, and who was thus compelled to reinvent Marxism.”

The rich, diverse contributions offered in this book—in some cases jostling aggressively against each other, while unified around the common perspective voiced by the editors—is a challenge for all serious intellectuals and activists of our time.

Lenin Rediscovered

A limitation of Lenin Reloaded is that the essayists do not have an opportunity, between its covers, to demonstrate amply the virtues embodied in Lenin that are implied in their provocative, sharp-edged assertions. This cannot be said, however, about the volume that one of them has recently produced. Lars T. Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered: “What Is to Be Done?” in Context reminds me of a saying a Swedish comrade once shared with me—“enough to choke a horse.” It is massive, almost overwhelming—and yet, it is a magnificent contribution to our understanding of Lenin, Bolshevism, Marxism, and the history of the Russian revolutionary movement and of Communism.

Clearly written, well reasoned, and effectively documented, it is a work that no scholar seriously examining the life and thought of Lenin will be able to ignore. More than this, it is a gift to serious political activists seeking to draw on traditions and lessons of the past in order to get present-day and future possibilities into sharper focus. It is unfortunate that this book’s price is prohibitive for most activists, and that the sheer bulk of the volume (more than 860 pages) will be daunting for many. But those who seek to bridge the gap between serious scholarship and serious activism by helping deepen their comrades’ understanding through the development of more widely accessible educational materials will certainly want to draw on this outstanding resource.

Lih’s primary target for criticism is “a strong consensus of informed experts” who “at least from the mid-1950s” have put forward a reading of What Is to Be Done? that “has found its way into textbooks of political science and of Russian history, and, from there, into almost any secondary account that has reason to touch on Lenin. The two or three famous passages that form the textual basis of this reading are endlessly recycled from textbook to popular history to specialized monograph and back again.” He sums up: “Putting all the assertions of the textbook interpretation together, we realize that WITBD is a profound theoretical and organizational innovation, the charter document of Bolshevism, and the ultimate source of Stalinism”—a set of contentions unable to withstand this scholarly onslaught.

Lih presents a Lenin who is absolutely committed to the establishment of political democracy as essential to the struggle for and the realization of socialism, a Lenin who has immense confidence that the working class has a natural capacity for absorbing revolutionary socialist ideas and committing itself to the struggle for a radically better world, a Lenin who is determined to help build a broad working-class party with a principled socialist program flowing from a Marxist understanding of the world. He demolishes the notions that Lenin diverged qualitatively from Marx, that he distrusted the workers and their “spontaneity,” that he was an elitist and an authoritarian.

There is, however, a problematical feature of Lenin Rediscovered. While his primary anticommunist target is effectively dealt with, he also has a bone to pick with how Lenin has been understood by “activists in the Trotskyist tradition” (specifically “writers such as Tony Cliff, John Molyneux, and more recently Paul Le Blanc”—here referring to my 1990 book Lenin and the Revolutionary Party). The activists, he claims, have been inclined to give too much ground to the academics’ positing an elitist and authoritarian content in Lenin’s 1902 classic. While he does have some nice things to say about us, he suggests that the activists are swayed by the unfair and inaccurate anti-Lenin polemics of 1904 advanced by Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky (which are also employed by many of the academics). As I argue in a review that appeared in the journal Historical Materialism, aspects of this argument strike me as too broadly put and somewhat off-base. Yet this strikes me as a minor problem within what remains a splendid achievement.

Lih is able to demonstrate, with scholarly thoroughness, that this vision is at the core of Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? and other writings from the mid-1890s up to the revolutionary upsurge of 1905. Thanks to his knowledge of Russian, he is able to comb through existing English translations to identify problematical formulations that do not exist in the Russian original. In fact, about one-third of the text consists of a retranslation of What Is to Be Done?, with two sections of detailed annotations—an incredible contribution by itself. He also combs through an immense quantity of other Russian-language materials that he utilizes to help bring the context of Lenin’s writings into clearer focus than ever before. For those of us laboring without Russian language skills, this in itself is a precious offering.

More than this, noting that Lenin unambiguously projected a Russian version of the German Social Democratic Party as the kind of organization to bring about socialism in Russia, Lih focuses sustained attention on the German party and its powerful influence on the Russian Marxists. In doing this, he gives well-merited respectful attention to the early contributions of Karl Kautsky and to his importance for the revolutionary Left, Lenin most of all.

One might argue that he “bends the stick” too far—being rather dismissive of the powerful critique of “so-called fatalistic Marxism” of the Second International advanced in the 1920s by the likes of Lukács, Korsch, and Gramsci, and not being alert to the critical insights that Rosa Luxemburg and other revolutionary Marxists (Pannekoek, Riazanov, Parvus, Trotsky, Radek, Rakovsky, and others) were developing at the time. These critical insights found confirmation in the debacle of 1914, causing Le...