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Lenin and the Revolutionary Party
Paul Le Blanc
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Lenin and the Revolutionary Party
Paul Le Blanc
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For generations, historians of the right, left, and center have all debated the best way to understand V. I. Lenin's role in shaping the Bolshevik party in the years leading up to the Russian Revolution. At their worst, these studies locate his influence in the forcefulness of his personality. At their best, they show how Lenin moved other Bolsheviks through patient argument and political debate. Yet remarkably few have attempted to document the ways his ideas changed, or how they were in turn shaped by the party he played such a central role in building.In this thorough, concise, and accessible introduction to Lenin's theory and practice of revolutionary politics, Paul Le Blanc gives a vibrant sense of the historical context of the socialist movement (in Russia and abroad) from which Lenin's ideas about revolutionary organization spring. What emerges from Le Blanc's partisan yet measured account is an image of a collaborative, ever adaptive, and dynamically engaged network of revolutionary activists who formed the core of the Bolshevik party.
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1.
Introduction: Authentic Leninism
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was the foremost leader of the worldâs first working-Âclass socialist revolution, which swept Russia in 1917 and continues to reverberate down to our own time. People throughout the worldâlonging for an end to injustice, war, and oppressionâhave looked hopefully to the example of the Russian Bolsheviks and to the ideas of Lenin as a guide for liberation struggles and social change in their own countries. As another leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, Leon Trotsky, explained: âThe main work of Leninâs life was the organization of a party capable of carrying through the October revolution and of directing the construction of Socialism.â1 Because of this, revolutionary-minded men and women have given special attention to Leninâs views on the revolutionary party.
With the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin and his comrades turned their attention to the task of helping revolutionaries in other countries mobilize the workers and the oppressed for the purpose of overthrowing capitalism on a global scale to establish a worldwide cooperative commonwealth in which, as Marx and Engels had written in the Communist Manifesto, âthe free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.â2 Renaming their own organization the Communist party, the Bolsheviks established the Communist International in 1919 in order to advance this expansive goal.
Millions of peopleâfrom a rich variety of cultures, traditions and experiencesâresponded to the revolutionary appeal of Bolshevism and the Communist International. One of these was James P. Cannon, a veteran of the American Socialist partyâs left wing and of the militant and colorful Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Cannon helped to found the American Communist party in 1919, and he was one of its central leaders until his expulsion in 1928 as the Communist International became increasingly bureaucratized. Yet he never abandoned his revolutionary convictions, and in a remarkable essay written in the 1960s continued to affirm:
The greatest contribution to the arsenal of Marxism since the death of Engels in 1895 was Leninâs conception of the vanguard party as the organizer and director of the proletarian revolution. That celebrated theory of organization was not, as some contend, simply a product of the special Russian conditions of his time and restricted to them. It is deep-rooted in two of the weightiest realities of the twentieth century: the actuality of the workersâ struggle for the conquest of power, and the necessity of creating a leadership capable of carrying it through to the end.
Recognizing that our epoch was characterized by imperialist wars, proletarian revolutions, and colonial uprisings, Lenin deliberately set out at the beginning of this century to form a party able to turn such cataclysmic events to the advantage of socialism. The triumph of the Bolsheviks in the upheavals of 1917, and the durability of the Soviet Union they established, attested to Leninâs foresight and the merits of his methods of organization. His party stands out as the unsurpassed prototype of what a democratic and centralized leadership of the workers, true to Marxist principles and applying them with courage and skill, can be and do.3
These perceptions have been shared by innumerable workers and peasants and students and intellectuals of every continent. They consider themselves Leninists because they are animated by âthe categorical imperative to overthrow all conditions in which man is a debased, enslaved, neglected, contemptible being.â4 They are Leninists because they are committed, in a very real and practical way, to replacing the tyranny of capitalism with a socialism in which the immense economic resources of society will be the common property of all people, democratically controlled in order to ensure that the free development of each person can be possible.
1. What Leninism Is Not
Leninâs ideas on the revolutionary party have been greatly distorted by many different kinds of people. It may be useful to survey some of these interpretations.
From the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution down to the present, liberal and conservative ideologists of the capitalist status quo have utilized immense resources to spread the notion that Lenin and his worksâÂespecially his concept of the revolutionary partyâconstitute a hideous threat to law, order, simple human decency, and Western civilization. One of the clearest expositions of this viewpoint was offered by the late director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover. In Masters of Deceit, the FBI chief gave this explanation to millions of frightened readers: âLenin conceived of the Party as a vehicle of revolution. . . . The Party must be a small, tightly controlled, deeply loyal group. Fanaticism, not members, was the key. Members must live, eat, breathe, and dream revolution. They must lie, cheat, and murder if the Party was to be served. Discipline must be rigid. No deviations could be permitted. If an individual falters, he must be ousted. Revolutions cannot be won by clean hands or in white shirts; only by blood, sweat and the burning torch. . . . The skill of Lenin cannot be overestimated. He introduced into human relations a new dimension of evil and depravity not surpassed by Genghis Khan or Attila. His concept of Party supremacy, girded by ruthless and ironclad discipline, gave communism a fanaticism and an immorality that shocked Western civilization.â5
This basic interpretation is also offeredâfrequently in a more sophisticated and scholarly formâby many influential academics and intellectuals who are engaged in the defense of âWestern civilization.â Essential components of that civilization are a myriad of âunavoidableâ inequalities and âregrettableâ injustices, not to mention the immense power of the big corporations and, of course, the aggressively procapitalist thrust of U.S. foreign policy. Although undoubtedly sincere, many of these ideologists have, like J. Edgar Hoover, been in the pay of the U.S. government or have been conscious participants in government-controlled or corporate-funded operations designed to generate and spread antiradical, antirevolutionary propaganda. They are not objective commentatorsâthey have an axe to grind. And yet their biased interpretations have a substantial impact among many who do not share their particular commitments to U.S. corporate-Âgovernment power.6
Other powerful distortions emanate from a quite different sourceâthe Communist movement itself. Many people drawn to it over the years have absorbed interpretations of Leninâs ideas that have little to do with the experience of the Bolsheviks as, in the years leading up to 1917, they grew into a revolutionary party. Instead, these individuals have been trained in more rigid and stilted conceptions that became dominant particularly after Leninâs death in 1924. Such conceptions gained currency as a rising bureaucratic layer, led by Joseph Stalin, sought to consolidate its control and privileges within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics from the 1920s onward. The âLeninismâ fashioned in this period assumed dominance among revolutionary-minded activists, but it proved to be more useful for enhancing the authority of the new ruling group in the Soviet Union than for duplicating the successes of the Bolsheviks for the peoples of other countries.7
A shrewd and somewhat cynical observer in the Soviet Union during this period was New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, who was sympathetic to Stalinâthough with a decidedly nonrevolutionary detachment. He noted that a growing number of old Bolsheviks âwere showing signs of restiveness, partly because they saw that Stalinism was progressing from Leninism (as Leninism had progressed from Marxism) towards a form and development of its own, partly because they were jealous and alarmed by Stalinâs growing predominance.â Duranty wrote as follows: âWhen Lenin died what ignorant mortal could know whether Stalin or Trotsky was the chosen son? Only results could prove that. . . . Stalin rose and Trotsky fell; therefore Stalin, inevitably, was right and Trotsky wrong. . . . Stalin deserved his victory because he was the strongest, and because his policies were most fitted to the Russian character and folkways in that they established Asiatic absolutism and put the interests of Russian Socialism before those of international Socialism.â8
Stalin portrayed his âprogression from Leninism,â however, as nothing more nor less than the most uncompromising defense of Leninist principles. At Leninâs funeral, he religiously intoned: âLeaving us, comrade Lenin enjoined on us to hold high and keep pure the great calling of member of the party. We vow to thee, comrade Lenin, that we will with honor fulfill this thy commandment. Leaving us, comrade Lenin enjoined on us to keep the unity of our party as the apple of our eye. We vow to thee, comrade Lenin, that we will with honor fulfill this thy commandment. . . . Leaving us, comrade Lenin enjoined on us loyalty to the principles of the Communist International. We vow to thee, comrade Lenin, that we will not spare our lives to strengthen and extend the union of the toilers of the whole worldâthe Communist International.â Instead, Stalin sought to destroy politically (and, eventually, physically) all Communistsâincluding most of Leninâs closest comradesâwho challenged his authority, to drive out of the Communist party of the Soviet Union and Communist parties throughout the world all who were unprepared to abandon the âold Leninismâ of the Bolsheviksâ heroic period, and to subordinate the revolutionary aspirations of parties belonging to the Communist International to narrowly defined foreign policy considerations of the Soviet Union. He went so far as to formally dissolve the Communist International during World War II in order to reassure his wartime capitalist allies. Yet a typical, even obligatory, comment by Communist ideologists while such things were happening was that âthe Party is training its cadres in Bolshevik ideological intransigence, is rallying its ranks still more closely around its Leninist Central Committee, around its leader and teacher, Comrade Stalin.â Communists throughout the world were lectured that âa study of the history of the Bolshevik Party is impossible without a knowledge of the chief works of its founder and leader, Lenin, and of his best disciple, Stalin, who is continuing his work.â9
The organizational norms propagated in this period, peppered with fragments from Lenin quoted out of context, stressed âthe Bolshevik conception of the Party as a monolithic whole.â This was elaborated for the world Communist movement in such works as Leninâs Teachings About the Party, by Stalinist ideologist V. Sorin, and circulated widely throughout the Communist International in the early 1930s. Excerpts from that work are quite revealing:
The Party is governed by leaders. If the Party is the vanguard of the working class then the leaders are the advanced post of this vanguard. The special feature of the Communist Party is its strictest discipline, i.e., the unconditional and exact observance by all members of the Party of all directives coming from their Party organizations. . . . The Party must be sure that each of its members will do what the Party tells him even if he disagrees with it. . . . Discipline, firm and unrelenting, is necessary not only during the period of underground work and struggle against Tsarism, not only during civil war, but even during peaceful times. . . . The stricter the discipline, the stronger the Party, the more dangerous is it to the capitalists.10
Such follow-the-leader conceptions of Leninism helped to overcome the danger of a critical-minded revolutionary membership questioning the policies developed by the Stalinist leadership of the Communist movement. But they had little in common with the organization that actually made the worldâs first socialist revolution. These conceptions continue to influence would-be Leninists of our own time, however. The pamphlet Leninâs Teachings About the Party, for example, was reprinted in the 1970s by former ânew leftâ activists who, influenced by the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions, believed that âa new communist party is essential for the revolutionary movement in the United States.â Revolutionary-minded people throughout the world have mistaken such distortions for genuine Leninism.
Attentive readers may have noticed that the anti-Communist and the Stalinist descriptions of the Leninist party have much in common. Sometimes they are blended together, as in the case of Wolfgang Leonhard, a Stalinist functionary and instructor at the Karl Marx Political Academy of the German Communist party who defected from East Germany in 1949 and became a critical commentator on Communist affairs. Leonhard refrained from adopting the bitterly reactionary orientation of many who went through similar breaks, continuing to identify with what he calls humanist Marxism. Yet he offers the following as an objective description: âInstead of a democratically organized body representing the interests of all workers who engaged in free discussion, Leninâs doctrine of the Party now envisaged an elite led by professional revolutionaries, organized on the principle of democratic centralism, with restricted freedom of discussion, and making great demands on Party members, who must operate in unity and with closed ranks in order to lead the working class.â11 Not surprisingly, many revolutionary-minded people have concluded that if this is Leninism, then Leninism is not for them.
Within the broadly defined socialist movement there is a particularly influential source for the notion that Leninism is basically authoritarian. This is the moderate-socialist current of post-1917 Social Democracy, many of whose spokespersons refer to themselves as âdemocratic socialistsâ in order to distinguish themselves from âauthoritarian Communism.â They tend to perceive democracy as electoral politics within a capitalist framework, to favor the implementation of reform legislation as a means for gradually eliminating the evils of capitalism, and to recognize a kinship with Leninâs moderate-socialist rivals in Russia. In many countries they can boast of mass parties (for example, the Labor party in Britain, the Socialist party in France, the Social Democratic party in Germany), which have sometimes taken office and implemented positive social reforms but have never even attempted to overthrow capitalism. Their current orientation in the United States, as Michael Harrington, of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), has put it, holds that âthe American social democracyâ is an âinvisible mass movementâ consisting of the liberal-labor alliance in the Democratic party with its âranging program for the democratization of the economy and the society.â It is natural that the adherents of this position would find intolerable Leninâs âdogmaticâ insistence that it is impossible to peacefully and gradually reform capitalism out of existence. They are inclined to echo, with varying degrees of sophistication, the interpretation articulated for many years within DSAâs predecessor, the Socialist Party of America, when it was led by Norman Thomas. Thomas portrayed Leninism as âan authoritarian dogmatism which boasts that it is scientific.â In 1931 he explained that Leninâs party was âorganized with military discipline, exacting an unquestioning obedience from its members worthy of the order of Jesus.â Twenty years later he continued to explain: âIn Leninâs theory the Party was to be a dedicated group bent on serving the interests of the workers and the peasants, which it understood better than the masses themselves.â Asserting that Stalinâs policies were a continuation of the Leninist commitment to âthe eventual world-wide triumph of communism,â Thomas wrote that Stalin âemphasized Leninâs use of any tactics, including unbounded deceit and violence, to achieve that result.â12 This interpretation of Leninismâremarkably similar, in important ways, to those offered by apologists for Stalinism, on the one hand, and for capitalism, on the otherâis widely propagated even by formerly new-left adherents of âdemocratic socialismâ who are not inclined to share Norman Thomasâs support for U.S. Cold War policies.
Recently there has evolved another source from which a distorted interpretation of Leninism has arisen. Among new Western scholars studying the history of the Soviet Union, there is an innovative current that, while yielding some valuable new research, has also begun to fashion what Sheila Fitzpatrick has delicately termed âa less judgemental approachâ to the Stalin era. Quite similar in temperament and in some of their perceptions to such earlier admirers of Stalin as Walter Duranty, these scholars are also inclined to be somewhat more aloof. âThere was a wildly impractical and utopian streak in a great deal of Bolshevik thinking,â writes Fitzpatrick. She adds the following, however: âNo doubt all successful revolutions have this characteristic: the revolutionaries must always be driven by enthusiasm and irrational hope, since they would otherwise make the commonsense judgement that the risks and costs of revolution outweigh the possible benefits.â Fleetingly entertaining the question âof whether in some cosmic sense it was all worthwhile,â she draws back with the warning that this is âdangerous ground for historians,â who should restric...