by KIERAN ALLEN
Lenin once suggested that when revolutionaries are alive, they are vilified, but after they die, are treated as harmless icons. In his own case, it is the exact opposite.
When he was alive, Lenin and the Russian revolution were widely celebrated. The word ‘soviet’ was used to describe worker occupations during the Irish revolution. The Sinn Féin member, Aodh de Blacam, noted that ‘never was Ireland more devoutly Catholic than today… yet nowhere was the Bolshevik revolution more sympathetically saluted’.
But in more recent years, Lenin has become the main target of ruling class bile. Richard Pipes books in the 1990s on the Bolsheviks set the tone by portraying Lenin as a crafty manipulator, intent on becoming a dictator. Pipes, however, was never a neutral ‘value free’ historian. He served on Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council and later headed up a CIA think tank. The former leader of the defunct Progressive Democrats, Michael McDowell, writes in a similar vein. He recently used his Irish Times column to charge Lenin with ‘personal addiction to mass execution of political opponents’.
In universities, Marx regularly crops up but Lenin never gets a mention. Why the contrast?
The primary reason is that Lenin led the first successful socialist revolution and has never been forgiven. In his short book on Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought, György Lukács gets to the heart of the matter when he states, ‘The actuality of Revolution: this is the core of Lenin’s thought’. To explain what he meant, Lukacs drew a contrast between the way a social democrat thinks and Lenin’s method. The former sees:
“The foundations of bourgeois society are so unshakable that, even when they are most visibly shaking, he only hopes and prays for a return to ‘normality’, sees its crisis as temporary episodes, and regards struggle even at such times as an irrational irresponsible rebellion against an ever- invincible capitalist system.”
Lenin, by contrast, sought to
“detect beneath the appearances of bourgeois society those tendencies towards proletarian revolution which work themselves in and through it to their effective being and distinct consciousness.”
In other words, revolution was the touchstone for Lenin’s analysis of all the questions of the day and it was necessary to devise a strategy to accelerate it.
This confidence came from Lenin’s profound understanding of dialectics. Like the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, he knew that contrary to appearances, society underwent constant change. The prejudice of ‘normality’ assumes that what currently exists, will always be. But for a dialectical thinker, everything that is, will pass. To the question, ‘Do you really think a socialist society is possible?’ Lenin might well reply ‘Do you really think capitalism will exist forever?’ He knew that change occurs through rupture and contradiction. There is no smooth evolutionary glide in history.
This general approach, however, had to lead to a concrete understanding of concrete circumstances. And this is where Lenin’s genius mattered. In the modern anti-capitalist movement, there is often a culture of denunciation. So, we know that the arms industry or racism is disgusting and must be ‘called out’. And that is certainly a good starting point, particularly when it pulls away the mask of bourgeois hypocrisy. But for Lenin, moral anger had to be linked to specific tactics that helped to advance working class consciousness, and therefore revolution.
His writing on imperialism will serve as an example. In the midst of the horror of the first World War, Lenin wrote Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. He wanted to show that the war was not the result of ‘skidding off course’ because of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Instead, the war was an inevitable outcome of imperialist conflicts that arose from monopoly capitalism. In many ways Lenin’s theoretical argument was not as sharp as Nikolai Bukharin’s Imperialism and World Economy, written a year before. It probably lacked the sophistication of Rosa Luxembourg’s The Accumulation of Capital and borrowed key concepts from Rudolf Hilferding’s Finance Capital. But where it scored was in the concrete strategy that socialists should adopt.
Essentially, Lenin argued that the current stage of capitalism drew all countries, no matter how underdeveloped, into the maelstrom of the system. It stimulated demands by oppressed nations for national liberation but then crushed them. As a result, the alliance which Lenin fought for in Russia between workers and peasants to overthrow Tsarism had to be expanded on a global scale so that workers formed an alliance with national liberation movements by supporting them against their own imperialist rulers.
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