peaccenicked
7th March 2002, 18:10
Lenin: Debunking the Myths (From the International socialist)
My motivation in writing this talk was that most intellectually unworthy of inspirations: annoyance. Annoyance at the lies and misinformation passing for "controversy" social democratic and anarchist critics of socialism routinely produce to challenge revolutionary socialist thinking they variously call "authoritarian", "Stalinist" or "Leninist". Indeed, at one event we organised this year, an activist who I have enormous respect for and who is one of the most principled critics of capitalism I have ever spoken to told us he was going to be "controversial" and then proceeded to give the same arguments against Lenin and the Bolsheviks as one could hear from any liberal apologist for capitalism! This, to me at least, seems like a particularly bizarre state of affairs. But, in other ways it makes perfect sense. Writing of Marx in 1917, Lenin observed:
During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes have invariably meted out to them relentless persecution, and received their teaching with the most savage hostility, most furious hatred, and a ruthless campaign of lies and slanders. After their death, however, attempts are usually made to turn them into harmless saints, canonising them, as it were, and investing their name with a certain halo by way of of "consolation" to the oppressed classes with the object of duping them; while at the same time emasculating and vulgarising the real essence of their revolutionary theories and blunting their revolutionary edge.
This is exactly what has happened to Lenin! Either - and this is the main view now, the one they teach you in sixth form history - he's presented as a power-hungry crazed dictator who lead a coup d'etat or - and this was more common before the fall of the Berlin Wall - the Stalinist gravediggers of the Russian Revolution or the traitor leaders of various Communist Parties around the world presented him as this absolute god who never made mistakes and was perfect. In the process, and to try and justify their own disgusting totalitarian regimes, they mangled, distorted and hid his important theories and contribution to history.
The aim of this talk is to dispel both these sorts of myths about Lenin, and to reclaim his as one of the great figures in our working class movement's heritage. My aim here is firstly to deal to those two great shibboleths of the Stalinists, "democratic centralism" and "vanguardism". Once we've put paid to that, we can then look at Lenin the radical democrat, author of The State and Revolution, champion of the oppressed. And the Lenin who made heaps of mistakes! We in the International Socialists are trying to build a mass working class revolutionary socialist party and we're only going to achieve this if we're honest about the strengths and weaknesses of the tradition we stand in. We'd be the first to say that Lenin fucked up on heaps of stuff - we disagree with him on the theory of the labour aristocracy for example. But I'm sure there'll be more than enough time for that in our discussion rounds. Let's move on to democratic centralism now.
Democratic Centralism
The first thing we need to say about democratic centralism is that, contrary to what most lefties and even many socialists think, democratic centralism is not something Lenin invented. It was a term that the Bolsheviks seem to have borrowed from the reformist German Social Democratic party. Even the Mensheviks - the Bolsheviks' reformist rivals - called themselves democratic centralist.
Throughout the many years he was an active revolutionist Lenin formulated all sorts of different organisational plans to suit the needs of particular periods. What he emphasised throughout was the need for rigorous internal democracy, freedom for minority tendencies to exist, freedom for debate and freedom for dissension. What, at its most basic, democratic centralism meant for Lenin was this: "freedom of discussion, unity in action". In other words, you can voluntarily join the party and in doing so voluntarily submit yourself to a sense of discipline and duty, you should vigorously take part in the internal life of it, and when the time comes for action that you've all democratically debated and discussed the need for you follow it through.
One of the reasons why the Bolshevik Party was so successful in its actions and programme was because its level of internal dissension was so great. Members of the party felt like they owned it, like it was theirs and not the tool of some elect group of leaders. Trotsky put it like this:
The inner regime of the Bolshevik Party was characterised by the method of democratic centralism. The combination of these two concepts, democracy and centralism, is not in the least contradictory. The party took watchful care not only that its boundaries should always be strictly defined, but also that all those who entered these boundaries should enjoy the actual right to define the direction of the party policy. Freedom of criticism and intellectual struggle was an irrevocable content of the party democracy. The present doctrine that Bolshevism does not tolerate factions is a myth of the epoch of decline. In reality the history of Bolshevism is a history of the struggle of factions. And, indeed, how could a genuinely revolutionary organisation, setting itself the task of overthrowing the world and uniting under its banner the most audacious iconoclasts, fighters and insurgents, live and develop without intellectual conflicts, without groupings and temporary factional formations?
There are many examples in history to prove this. For example, two members of the Bolshevik central committee, Zinoviev and Kamenev, opposed the October Revolution - and published secret plans in an opposition paper! - but were not thrown out of the party. Indeed, they were actually re-elected to their positions! Disputes in the Bolshevik Party were fought out in the open, with positions put in mass circulation papers.
In 1918, during the heated debate over whether to sign a peace treaty with Germany, the Central Committee members publicly argued three different positions. In the 1920-21 debate over the role of trade unions, the central committee had supporters over eight different positions in its ranks. Once again the minority were not removed, and were re-elected. In 1921, when the faction fight with the Workers' Opposition was in full swing, Lenin supported having two representatives from this opposition - an opposition he opposed by the way - on the central committee. So much for a monolithic anti-democratic theory! Maybe reformist critics of Leninism should try applying some of their arguments to Jim Anderton - where more than a trace of authoritarian leadership can be found - rather than to Lenin.
Before I move on to talking about the idea of a vaguard, I should point out that our comrade in Australia, Mick Armstrong, has written a really excellent article on democratic centralism. All serious activists, and especially our own comrades, should study this article very carefully. But now we can turn to that other bugbear, the "vanguard".
The Vanguard
To our reformist and anarchist critics, revolutionary socialists' ideas around the "vanguard party" are amongst the things that make us second or first cousins of the Stalinists. The reformists reject the idea of a vanguard because they don't actually want to confront the reality that this system needs changing. Our anarchist critics have more integrity than this, far more. And, since they too believe in trying to overthrow capitalism, their criticism of the Leninist conception of a vanguard are worth taking seriously. They believe the idea of a vanguard is elitist and leads to tyranny. The Australian Anarchists Love and Rage put it like this:
Our opposition to "vanguardism" is strictly in a political sense. This means that our group seeks not to make itself a hierarchical organisation which forces entire social movements to conform to its ideology and be subordinate to its organs of power, popping in and out of campaigns where there is no longer benefit for recruitment.
And, unfortunately, this is how many groups claiming to stand in the revolutionary socialist tradition have behaved at different times. But it is most certainly not the Leninist conception of the vanguard party.
Just like with democratic centralism, Lenin's conception of the party changed enormously over time, as is to be expected for someone leading the most militant section of the working class into entirely uncharted waters. Anarchists usually have a far more rigid understanding of Leninism than any Marxist!
What the vanguard for Lenin was, roughly speaking, was a group of politically conscious and active workers marching in much the same direction. Talking about a vanguard is recognising the extreme unevenness of working class political activity, recognising that, most of the time, only a minority - and a changing minority at that - is involved in union activity, strikers, protests and the like. A vanguard is made up of the most committed workers, and its task is to prepare the ground for a successful revolution through constant interaction with the rest of the class.
This isn't elitist: in fact, it places a great faith in the ability of ordinary people to change and develop and to learn. Instead of seeing a group of full time "activists" as the only ones able to achieve any change. The vanguard's role is to "patiently explain", to show the mass of workers that they are the ones who should have the power.
And it isn't all one way either. For Lenin the party must constantly learn from the working class's experience. Lenin had a great enthusiasm for the resourcefulness of ordinary workers. For him, the aim of a revolutionary socialist party was to tap the natural potential resources of energy and ingenuity hidden in the masses. The party has to learn from the workers in the struggle. "There is an enormous amount of organising talent among the people, that is, among the workers and the peasants who do not exploit the labour of others. Capital crushed these talented people in thousands; it killed them and threw them upon the scrap heap."
Two final points are important about the vanguard. One, and this should be obvious to anyone with even a scrap of understanding of Marxism, is that you can't declare yourself a vanguard, you have to grow and develop as a party into one. In other words, the ISO is not a vanguard party yet. Would that we were!
More importantly is that for Lenin, as for Marx and Engels, the self-emancipation of the working class can only be achieved by the working class itself. So the vanguard can't substitute itself for the class. The task of the vanguard is to lead the working class to take power itself. Lenin made this clear: "victory cannot be won by the vanguard alone". Unlike other thinkers, such as the anarchist Bakunin who advocated "revolutionary hierachy", Lenin saw the role of the party as a facilitator for the power of the class itself.
Again, history bears this out. When in 1917 others were clamouring for the Bolsheviks to seize power, Lenin resisted. His slogan was "all power to the soviets" - all power to the working class' representative bodies. The October Revolution didn't happen until the Bolsheviks had a majority in the soviets: until the revolutionary course was the will of the majority. And there were even representatives of other parties on the revolutionary committee! So much for a coup d'etat. This is why the October Revolution was an almost bloodless affair.
I know this will come up in discussion, so its worth talking a little about now. Yes, the Civil War in Russia was a terrible affair where millions were slaughtered, and almost the entire Russian working class was killed. But when did this war start? When 14 other countries invaded Russia and started trying to strangle the Revolution! Are we to blame Lenin and, by implication, the workers of Russia who fought so valiantly to defend their revolution, because they got invaded by the armies of imperialism? That seems crazy to me.
We socialists are not pacifists, but we are not pacifists because we hate violence so much. After all, the Bolsheviks and Lenin were the only party in Russia capable of stopping World War One. But, unlike the pacifists who ooh and aah over suffering, the Bolsheviks were prepared to defend themselves and the workers' revolution with force to prevent it from being destroyed completely. Consider this comment from Malcolm X: "I do not agree with Martin Luther King that one should love a racialist whether he is lynching you or whatever he is doing. I believe in fighting a racialist physically". The Russian Revolution was being lynched by 14 differnt capitalist countries. Think twice before you attack Lenin on the grounds that he did mind the working class dying, especially from the easy position we're in now. But I'm sure I'll hear more on that in discussion, so lets's finish on a high note, Lenin's great little book The State and Revolution.
The State and Revolution
Let's be honest about it, The State and Revolution,is not exactly the best written book ever. But its author was right in the middle of the most important event in our class's history, so I guess we can forgive him his prose! What is amazing about The State and Revolution is the way it lays bare, absolutely bare, the lie that is liberal democracy, the freedom "to decide every few years which member of the ruling class is to repress and oppress the people through parliament.
Unlike the sellouts whose "theories" - if we can call them that - he was discussing, unlike those who were more interested in plum jobs and nice titles than in fighting for socialism, Lenin recognised that the people with the power in this society - the bosses, the big business leaders - would never give up their power without a fight. But, when the great majority of workers, farmers, peasants, soldiers and unemployed stood together under the leadership of the working class, we could smash the capitalist state, and build "the proletarian form of the state an absolutely complete democracy".
It is over eighty years since Lenin wrote those fateful words, and capitalism has done little to remedy itself. It is an obscenity on a global scale - a mass of war, environmental destruction, poverty and hopelessness. But in us, the working class, it has built its own gravediggers. When we fight together we can win together, we can build a truly democratic, socialist world. A better world. This is the essential message of both Lenin's theories and the cause to which he sacrificed his life. We in the International Socialists are proud to stand in a tradition that draws inspiration from figures in our class' history as determined and fiercely principled as Lenin. Hopefully this evening I have done a little to rescue his thoughts from the lies of his detractors
My motivation in writing this talk was that most intellectually unworthy of inspirations: annoyance. Annoyance at the lies and misinformation passing for "controversy" social democratic and anarchist critics of socialism routinely produce to challenge revolutionary socialist thinking they variously call "authoritarian", "Stalinist" or "Leninist". Indeed, at one event we organised this year, an activist who I have enormous respect for and who is one of the most principled critics of capitalism I have ever spoken to told us he was going to be "controversial" and then proceeded to give the same arguments against Lenin and the Bolsheviks as one could hear from any liberal apologist for capitalism! This, to me at least, seems like a particularly bizarre state of affairs. But, in other ways it makes perfect sense. Writing of Marx in 1917, Lenin observed:
During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes have invariably meted out to them relentless persecution, and received their teaching with the most savage hostility, most furious hatred, and a ruthless campaign of lies and slanders. After their death, however, attempts are usually made to turn them into harmless saints, canonising them, as it were, and investing their name with a certain halo by way of of "consolation" to the oppressed classes with the object of duping them; while at the same time emasculating and vulgarising the real essence of their revolutionary theories and blunting their revolutionary edge.
This is exactly what has happened to Lenin! Either - and this is the main view now, the one they teach you in sixth form history - he's presented as a power-hungry crazed dictator who lead a coup d'etat or - and this was more common before the fall of the Berlin Wall - the Stalinist gravediggers of the Russian Revolution or the traitor leaders of various Communist Parties around the world presented him as this absolute god who never made mistakes and was perfect. In the process, and to try and justify their own disgusting totalitarian regimes, they mangled, distorted and hid his important theories and contribution to history.
The aim of this talk is to dispel both these sorts of myths about Lenin, and to reclaim his as one of the great figures in our working class movement's heritage. My aim here is firstly to deal to those two great shibboleths of the Stalinists, "democratic centralism" and "vanguardism". Once we've put paid to that, we can then look at Lenin the radical democrat, author of The State and Revolution, champion of the oppressed. And the Lenin who made heaps of mistakes! We in the International Socialists are trying to build a mass working class revolutionary socialist party and we're only going to achieve this if we're honest about the strengths and weaknesses of the tradition we stand in. We'd be the first to say that Lenin fucked up on heaps of stuff - we disagree with him on the theory of the labour aristocracy for example. But I'm sure there'll be more than enough time for that in our discussion rounds. Let's move on to democratic centralism now.
Democratic Centralism
The first thing we need to say about democratic centralism is that, contrary to what most lefties and even many socialists think, democratic centralism is not something Lenin invented. It was a term that the Bolsheviks seem to have borrowed from the reformist German Social Democratic party. Even the Mensheviks - the Bolsheviks' reformist rivals - called themselves democratic centralist.
Throughout the many years he was an active revolutionist Lenin formulated all sorts of different organisational plans to suit the needs of particular periods. What he emphasised throughout was the need for rigorous internal democracy, freedom for minority tendencies to exist, freedom for debate and freedom for dissension. What, at its most basic, democratic centralism meant for Lenin was this: "freedom of discussion, unity in action". In other words, you can voluntarily join the party and in doing so voluntarily submit yourself to a sense of discipline and duty, you should vigorously take part in the internal life of it, and when the time comes for action that you've all democratically debated and discussed the need for you follow it through.
One of the reasons why the Bolshevik Party was so successful in its actions and programme was because its level of internal dissension was so great. Members of the party felt like they owned it, like it was theirs and not the tool of some elect group of leaders. Trotsky put it like this:
The inner regime of the Bolshevik Party was characterised by the method of democratic centralism. The combination of these two concepts, democracy and centralism, is not in the least contradictory. The party took watchful care not only that its boundaries should always be strictly defined, but also that all those who entered these boundaries should enjoy the actual right to define the direction of the party policy. Freedom of criticism and intellectual struggle was an irrevocable content of the party democracy. The present doctrine that Bolshevism does not tolerate factions is a myth of the epoch of decline. In reality the history of Bolshevism is a history of the struggle of factions. And, indeed, how could a genuinely revolutionary organisation, setting itself the task of overthrowing the world and uniting under its banner the most audacious iconoclasts, fighters and insurgents, live and develop without intellectual conflicts, without groupings and temporary factional formations?
There are many examples in history to prove this. For example, two members of the Bolshevik central committee, Zinoviev and Kamenev, opposed the October Revolution - and published secret plans in an opposition paper! - but were not thrown out of the party. Indeed, they were actually re-elected to their positions! Disputes in the Bolshevik Party were fought out in the open, with positions put in mass circulation papers.
In 1918, during the heated debate over whether to sign a peace treaty with Germany, the Central Committee members publicly argued three different positions. In the 1920-21 debate over the role of trade unions, the central committee had supporters over eight different positions in its ranks. Once again the minority were not removed, and were re-elected. In 1921, when the faction fight with the Workers' Opposition was in full swing, Lenin supported having two representatives from this opposition - an opposition he opposed by the way - on the central committee. So much for a monolithic anti-democratic theory! Maybe reformist critics of Leninism should try applying some of their arguments to Jim Anderton - where more than a trace of authoritarian leadership can be found - rather than to Lenin.
Before I move on to talking about the idea of a vaguard, I should point out that our comrade in Australia, Mick Armstrong, has written a really excellent article on democratic centralism. All serious activists, and especially our own comrades, should study this article very carefully. But now we can turn to that other bugbear, the "vanguard".
The Vanguard
To our reformist and anarchist critics, revolutionary socialists' ideas around the "vanguard party" are amongst the things that make us second or first cousins of the Stalinists. The reformists reject the idea of a vanguard because they don't actually want to confront the reality that this system needs changing. Our anarchist critics have more integrity than this, far more. And, since they too believe in trying to overthrow capitalism, their criticism of the Leninist conception of a vanguard are worth taking seriously. They believe the idea of a vanguard is elitist and leads to tyranny. The Australian Anarchists Love and Rage put it like this:
Our opposition to "vanguardism" is strictly in a political sense. This means that our group seeks not to make itself a hierarchical organisation which forces entire social movements to conform to its ideology and be subordinate to its organs of power, popping in and out of campaigns where there is no longer benefit for recruitment.
And, unfortunately, this is how many groups claiming to stand in the revolutionary socialist tradition have behaved at different times. But it is most certainly not the Leninist conception of the vanguard party.
Just like with democratic centralism, Lenin's conception of the party changed enormously over time, as is to be expected for someone leading the most militant section of the working class into entirely uncharted waters. Anarchists usually have a far more rigid understanding of Leninism than any Marxist!
What the vanguard for Lenin was, roughly speaking, was a group of politically conscious and active workers marching in much the same direction. Talking about a vanguard is recognising the extreme unevenness of working class political activity, recognising that, most of the time, only a minority - and a changing minority at that - is involved in union activity, strikers, protests and the like. A vanguard is made up of the most committed workers, and its task is to prepare the ground for a successful revolution through constant interaction with the rest of the class.
This isn't elitist: in fact, it places a great faith in the ability of ordinary people to change and develop and to learn. Instead of seeing a group of full time "activists" as the only ones able to achieve any change. The vanguard's role is to "patiently explain", to show the mass of workers that they are the ones who should have the power.
And it isn't all one way either. For Lenin the party must constantly learn from the working class's experience. Lenin had a great enthusiasm for the resourcefulness of ordinary workers. For him, the aim of a revolutionary socialist party was to tap the natural potential resources of energy and ingenuity hidden in the masses. The party has to learn from the workers in the struggle. "There is an enormous amount of organising talent among the people, that is, among the workers and the peasants who do not exploit the labour of others. Capital crushed these talented people in thousands; it killed them and threw them upon the scrap heap."
Two final points are important about the vanguard. One, and this should be obvious to anyone with even a scrap of understanding of Marxism, is that you can't declare yourself a vanguard, you have to grow and develop as a party into one. In other words, the ISO is not a vanguard party yet. Would that we were!
More importantly is that for Lenin, as for Marx and Engels, the self-emancipation of the working class can only be achieved by the working class itself. So the vanguard can't substitute itself for the class. The task of the vanguard is to lead the working class to take power itself. Lenin made this clear: "victory cannot be won by the vanguard alone". Unlike other thinkers, such as the anarchist Bakunin who advocated "revolutionary hierachy", Lenin saw the role of the party as a facilitator for the power of the class itself.
Again, history bears this out. When in 1917 others were clamouring for the Bolsheviks to seize power, Lenin resisted. His slogan was "all power to the soviets" - all power to the working class' representative bodies. The October Revolution didn't happen until the Bolsheviks had a majority in the soviets: until the revolutionary course was the will of the majority. And there were even representatives of other parties on the revolutionary committee! So much for a coup d'etat. This is why the October Revolution was an almost bloodless affair.
I know this will come up in discussion, so its worth talking a little about now. Yes, the Civil War in Russia was a terrible affair where millions were slaughtered, and almost the entire Russian working class was killed. But when did this war start? When 14 other countries invaded Russia and started trying to strangle the Revolution! Are we to blame Lenin and, by implication, the workers of Russia who fought so valiantly to defend their revolution, because they got invaded by the armies of imperialism? That seems crazy to me.
We socialists are not pacifists, but we are not pacifists because we hate violence so much. After all, the Bolsheviks and Lenin were the only party in Russia capable of stopping World War One. But, unlike the pacifists who ooh and aah over suffering, the Bolsheviks were prepared to defend themselves and the workers' revolution with force to prevent it from being destroyed completely. Consider this comment from Malcolm X: "I do not agree with Martin Luther King that one should love a racialist whether he is lynching you or whatever he is doing. I believe in fighting a racialist physically". The Russian Revolution was being lynched by 14 differnt capitalist countries. Think twice before you attack Lenin on the grounds that he did mind the working class dying, especially from the easy position we're in now. But I'm sure I'll hear more on that in discussion, so lets's finish on a high note, Lenin's great little book The State and Revolution.
The State and Revolution
Let's be honest about it, The State and Revolution,is not exactly the best written book ever. But its author was right in the middle of the most important event in our class's history, so I guess we can forgive him his prose! What is amazing about The State and Revolution is the way it lays bare, absolutely bare, the lie that is liberal democracy, the freedom "to decide every few years which member of the ruling class is to repress and oppress the people through parliament.
Unlike the sellouts whose "theories" - if we can call them that - he was discussing, unlike those who were more interested in plum jobs and nice titles than in fighting for socialism, Lenin recognised that the people with the power in this society - the bosses, the big business leaders - would never give up their power without a fight. But, when the great majority of workers, farmers, peasants, soldiers and unemployed stood together under the leadership of the working class, we could smash the capitalist state, and build "the proletarian form of the state an absolutely complete democracy".
It is over eighty years since Lenin wrote those fateful words, and capitalism has done little to remedy itself. It is an obscenity on a global scale - a mass of war, environmental destruction, poverty and hopelessness. But in us, the working class, it has built its own gravediggers. When we fight together we can win together, we can build a truly democratic, socialist world. A better world. This is the essential message of both Lenin's theories and the cause to which he sacrificed his life. We in the International Socialists are proud to stand in a tradition that draws inspiration from figures in our class' history as determined and fiercely principled as Lenin. Hopefully this evening I have done a little to rescue his thoughts from the lies of his detractors