by PAUL LE BLANC
Nadezhda Krupskaya and Lenin with journalist Lincoln Eure in the Kremlin, February 1920.
February 19, 2012 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — There has been a competing set of political agendas underlying the recently initiated historical debate over how to understand Lenin and the Bolsheviks. From the standpoint of revolutionary socialism, this aspect of the debate is hardly cause for dismay. As activists we are appropriately attempting to get a handle on “what is to be done”. This does not absolve us of the responsibility to get the history right. But for Marxists the point is not simply to understand history, but also make use of such understanding to help change the world.
In initiating an attack on the presumably false “Leninism” provided by Tony Cliff’s 1975 work Building the Party (the first volume of his political biography of Lenin), Pham Binh was laying the groundwork for a political argument. That became clear in his contribution “Another socialist left is possible”, submitted late in the series of exchanges that he initiated: advocating the creation of a multi-tendency socialist organisation, contrasted with the ideal of a Leninist party which he contends bears little relation to the actual theory and practice of Lenin. In responding to him, I sought to challenge what I saw as serious historical inaccuracies, but I have also been concerned to defend what I see as a valuable Leninist tradition that is a resource for revolutionary activists of today and tomorrow. (Paul D’Amato obviously had a similar motivation, but I will allow him to speak for himself rather than trying to speak on his behalf.) My own political agenda is made fully explicit in my own just-published “Revolutionary Organisation and the ‘Occupy Moment.’”
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