Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution by Paul Le Blanc (Pluto, 2023)
Paul Le Blanc, a historian and socialist, has spent the better part of his life writing about Lenin. His collection of books has attempted to generalize the authentic tradition of Lenin and the Russian Revolution as he sees it to new generations of activists looking to change the world. As someone who has read most of them, I was excited to see what the latest book would add to the body of work.
Le Blanc frames this book around the catastrophe and how Lenin used catastrophe for his political advantage:
“Lenin saw catastrophe as central to evolving realities of his time. He not only recognized this fact but embraced it as an essential element in the Bolshevik strategic orientation. Catastrophe is also central to the evolving realities of our time, suggesting that Lenin’s orientation may have relevance for activism of today and tomorrow.”
Armed with his convictions that most of human suffering was caused by class distinctions, Lenin helped build a powerful revolutionary movement in Russian, culminating in the Russian Revolution of 1917, which he and his comrades believed would be the beginning of a global wave of socialist revolutions. This book asks the question of whether Lenin’s project offers anything useful for us in our time, and attempts to answer that in the affirmative by dispelling six myths of Leninism:
“(1) Lenin favoured dictatorship over democracy; (2) his so-called ‘Marxism’ was a cover for his own totalitarian views; (3) he favoured a super-centralized political party of a ‘new type’–with power concentrated at the top, himself as party dictator; (4) he favoured rigid political controls over culture, art and literature; (5) he believed that through such authoritarian methods a socialist ‘utopia’ could be imposed on backward Russia; and (6) flowing naturally from all this, he became one of history’s foremost mass murderers.”
The democracy of Lenin
Le Blanc goes to great lengths to show the ways in which the Bolshevik party was not built in Lenin’s image or under his singular control. Rather, it was a “revolutionary collective within which he was an active and influential participant.” The party’s positions, as well as his own, were shaped by the debates between comrades and through lessons drawn from actual experiences in the class struggle. This is exemplified by the ways in which Bolshevik activists went into workplaces and working class communities to recruit young workers to the ideas of Marxism and immerse themselves in the life and struggles of the dynamically growing working class.
The revolution of 1905, know later as the Great Dress Rehearsal, proved to be a learning experience for Lenin, the party, and the Russian working class. Here, new ideas around the organization of the class, the role of a united front and the necessary steps for a successful armed uprising came into focus and would loom large in the years to come. The role of the workers’ councils in directing the struggle and pointing a path way beyond capitalism shaped the unique position the Bolsheviks would hold in 1917 that won them a majority in the democratic formations of the working class, leading to a victory that could only be won with mass working class support.
What kind of party?
To accomplish this goal, Le Blanc makes clear, would require many years more of experience, practice, struggle and the gathering of more and more activists into and around the Bolshevik party. Le Blanc quotes Lenin:
“Our illegal Social-Democratic Labor Party consists of illegal workers’ organisations (often called ‘cells’) which are surrounded by a more or less dense network of legal workers’ associations (such as sick insurance societies, trade unions, educational associations, athletic clubs, temperance societies, and so forth)…their function was to create flexible forms of leadership for local activities in the large centres of the labor movement.”
In contrast with some of the other revolutionary groups active in Russia, Lenin and the Bolsheviks worked to draw more workers into struggle and education to help win the conditions for an improved Russia, while creating the networks and experiences necessary for a successful revolution when the opportunity presented itself again.
The Great War of 1914 would bring the conditions that gave rise to such an opportunity. An unfolding “chain of catastrophes” led Lenin to develop some of his most lasting and impactful works (aside from those on building political parties); in this period he wrote works on imperialism, national liberation, and the state and revolution that helped win debates inside his party and the working class movement, and still loom large around the world. Amidst the tumult of 1917, with the overthrow of the Czar, the struggle for power between Soldier and Workers’ Councils and the provisional government, the repression and threats of coup, Lenin struggled within the party and the party struggled within the broader working class movement to win political arguments that put greater power in the hands of the toilers and the oppressed. On display in those first years of revolution was the expansive, democratic vision that Lenin could see growing between the cracks of catastrophe. His vision for the national self-determination of the empire’s oppressed nationalities, the freedom for religious and sexual minorities, and the moves to empower women stand as testament to his expansive thought and the potential he saw if only the revolution could spread to Germany and beyond.
However, as Le Blanc notes, “defeat to Lenin’s expansive thought was actually inflicted in the 1920s, when the world socialist revolution was blocked, and when Russia’s soviet democracy was decisively overwhelmed, internally, by a repressive bureaucratic dictatorship.” The defeat of the German Revolution meant that revolutionary Russia became a fortress besieged. To combat the terror of the Entente, the Bolsheviks employed terror. Economic isolation led the Bolsheviks to retreat from ambitious worker-centred economic changes.
Genuine Leninism: Ideas in practice
In Lenin, Le Blanc has both celebrated the unique contributions of Lenin and what he views as a genuine Leninism, while also honestly assessing his failures and missteps. And this is what he wants readers to take away; that Lenin’s Marxism comprehended the complex, changing and contradictory nature of reality for the working class while understanding that his contributions to could only “be developed and applied through a coherent, democratic, revolutionary collective of vibrant and strong-minded individuals sharing the revolutionary commitment.”
This is the Leninism that Le Blanc hopes that willing activists will preserve: the trial and error of putting socialist ideas into action in the pursuit of a better world based on the self activity of working people.
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