Lenin 2/6

The collapse of the Second International in the First World War cleared the way for Lenin and the Bolsheviks to carry the flag of socialist revolution. It might have been possible to rescue something out of the confusion, and spread sound Socialist understanding, after the 1914-1918 war. Particularly as workers everywhere, feeling that they had been betrayed, were in a ferment of discontent. But the Bolsheviks, by corruption, distortion, betrayal and mud-slinging, destroyed this possibility, setting out by lies, trickery and distortion to politically, and sometimes physically, destroy all the parties and individuals who were not prepared to be abject tools of the Bolshevik dictatorship. In the first flush of Bolshevik victory, radical parties all over the world acclaimed the victory and gave them generous support, even where they had doubts on some of the methods adopted. It soon became evident that Russia was not embarked upon even a democratic society. The secret police and the concentration camp were on the way. The mass of the Russian people knew nothing about Socialism; most of them could not even read. The peasants, who formed the bulk of the population, wanted land, and all wanted peace and bread. Hard as the road to Socialism always was, the Russians have made it harder, and have destroyed, or driven to despair, many genuine fighters for the workers' freedom from Capitalism, even if some of these have been mistaken in their methods.

You can't have a revolution unless you make it for yourself. Marx's conclusion in 1881 as that of workers struggles should be “pursued by all the means which the proletariat has at its disposal, including universal suffrage, thus transformed from the instrument of trickery which it has been up till now into an instrument of emancipation”. There is no reason why parliamentary institutions could not be used by a class-conscious socialist majority to win power for the socialist revolution. The main, but by no means only distortion, by Lenin concerns the vanguard party. Lenin argued that workers were incapable of self-emancipation and instead must be freed from above by professional revolutionaries who have the workers' best interests at heart. (similar to Kautsky's position.) But Marx and Engels profoundly disagreed , as they made clear in a circular in 1879:

“At the founding of the International we expressly formulated the battle cry: The emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the working class itself. Hence we cannot co-operate with men who say openly that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves, and must first be emancipated from above by philanthropic members of the upper and lower middle classes”.

Alexander Rabinowitch’s research points, in particular, to the fact that the Bolshevik Party in 1917 was not a monolithic bloc under Lenin’s thumb. He shows how in fact Lenin’s views were often ignored by other Bolshevik leaders in closer touch with the feelings of soldiers and factory workers. Lenin favoured a naked seizure of power by the Bolshevik Party; most of the other Bolshevik leaders were more circumspect; they realised, as Rabinowitch documents, that while most of the workers and soldiers wanted “peace, land and bread” and, by November 1917, were in favour of the overthrow of the Provisional Government under Kerensky because it sought to continue the war, they wanted to see it replaced by a government made up of all the “socialist” parties of Russia, i.e. of the Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries as well as the Bolsheviks, that would emanate from the Congress of Soviets and which would take Russia out of the war. The Bolsheviks, therefore, followed the more subtle approach of disguising the seizure of power advocated by Lenin as an assumption of power by the Congress of Soviets. Thus, the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917 looked to be a “Soviet” revolution, with power appearing to pass into the hands of these makeshift representative institutions (the Russian word “soviet” means simply “council”) that soldiers and workers had formed to give expression to their political views. In fact, power had passed into the hands of the minority Bolshevik Party which was determined to hold on to it, alone, come what may.

Sharp differences existed between Luxemburg and Lenin, particularly on the question of leadership, where Luxemburg, the social-democrat, opposed the essentially "Jacobin" revolutionary, Lenin. The true interest of the people was represented by the Jacobins, if only the people were enlightened enough to recognise it. For "the people", Lenin substituted "the proletariat", which was hardly appropriate since 90 per cent of Russians were peasants. However, this did not worry Lenin since he decided the working class was incapable of progressing beyond a trade-union consciousness and that the revolution would have to be carried out in its name by an élite of professional revolutionaries, the "vanguard party". Once this had been accepted, there was nothing left of Marx's statement that "the emancipation of the working class itself". The words "dictatorship of the proletariat" meant little more than the dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party. When, in January 1918, an election was held for a Constituent Assembly, the Bolsheviks found themselves in a minority and reacted by using troops to disperse the Assembly. When workers showed their hostility to the régime, the Bolsheviks had no hesitation in using the utmost brutality to suppress them, as at Kronstadt in 1921. Lenin's "proletarian dictatorship" meant rule by a clique of Party members.

Lenin is rightly known for having stood for a centralised hierarchical vanguard party to lead the masses. A case can be made out for saying that up until WWI Lenin was a left-wing Social Democrat who argued that, under the autocratic political conditions of Tsarism, Social Democrats there had to organise as a hierarchical centralised party in order to overthrow the Tsarist regime, and that for Western Europe he accepted the German party's model of an open, democratic party pursuing a maximum programme (of socialism) and a minimum programme of reforms of capitalism, contesting elections, etc. The trouble is that he changed his position after 1917. He now said that the organisational form and tactics that he had advocated for the overthrow of Tsarism (which was not in fact how Tsarism ended as it collapsed more or less of its own accord; his tactics only worked to overthrow the weak government that emerged following this) should also be applied in Western Europe for the overthrow of capitalism. This is when he would have ceased to be a Social Democrat and became a Leninist.

In “What is to be done?” Lenin proposed that the Russian social democrat party must be a tight-knit, exclusive organisation, acting as the vanguard of the working class and turning workers into revolutionaries. Party members must be disciplined in organisation and loyal in doctrine. The party must be highly centralised. This was hugely controversial and Lenin’s divisive activity cause a split at the 1903 Second Party Congress between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Later in “Two Tactics of Social Democracy” Lenin posits that the bourgeoisie cannot be the natural leaders of a Russian anti-Tsarist revolution They will betray the revolution and seek compromise with the ruling class. They can’t be trusted to establish political democracy. There must be a ‘provisional revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.’ Terror is to be used in order to achieve this. Many Mensheviks denounce his proposals as having nothing in common with genuinely socialist politics. Lenin was warned that it would lead to a permanent dictatorship. “April Thesis” published amidst the events of the Russia  Revolution calls on the Bolshevik party to build up majorities in the soviets and other mass organisations and then to expedite the transfer of power solely to them. The Provisional Government is to be overthrown; the transition to socialism to be inaugurated instantly. The Bourgeois and Socialist revolutions to be merged into one under the aegis of the Bolsheviks. Many Bolsheviks members are stunned. Even they had popularly presumed that Russia would require an epoch of capitalist development. No one had suggested that socialism could be ‘leapt to’. But it became accepted policy after much debate and threat of resignation as the leader from Lenin by Bolsheviks at the end of April. The “State and Revolution” was written to clarify key points and as a piece of “libertarian” propaganda. The passage from capitalism to communism requires an intermediate stage called the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. The construction of socialism will thus begin. Mass political participation to be facilitated. An unprecedentedly high level of social and material welfare to be provided. Once the resistance of the former ruling classes has been broken, the need for repressive agencies will disappear. Dictatorship will become obsolete and the state will wither away. Then a further phase – communism – will be inaugurated. Society to be run according to the principle: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Under communism, there would be no political or national oppression, no economic exploitation. Humanity will have reached its ultimate stage of development.

  Once in power, the Bolsheviks established what they misnamed the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. In fact, it was nothing of the kind. It was not even the dictatorship of the Bolshevik party (which again they misnamed the Communist Party), but the dictatorship of a small inner group with Lenin as the guiding star. They established a system of treachery and terrorism, first against opposing elements and eventually internally against those who would not abjectly submit to the dictates of the inner circle. In the end, this led to members of the inner circle trying to destroy each other. First Trotsky, then Kamenev, Zinoviev Bukharin, and Radek fell victims to the terrorism they had built up. Fortunately for him, Lenin died before he could become a victim of the system in which he was the leading actor.

Hard as the road to Socialism always was, the Russians have made it harder, and have destroyed, or driven to despair, many genuine fighters for the workers' freedom from Capitalism, even if some of these have been mistaken in their methods. The lesson to be drawn from the Russian experience is the impossibility of a small group of leaders, with a mass of blind supporters, ushering in anything other than some form of dictatorship; certainly not Socialism, The supreme need of the workers is an understanding of Socialism, what it is and what it implies, and organising together for the sole purpose of achieving it. Finally, that Socialism is an international system which cannot be achieved in one country alone, but requires the understanding and harmonious co-operation of all the workers of the world.