Paul Le Blanc. Historical Materialism. Volume 25, Issue 4. 2017.
Leninist abstraction has returned to be real because the Leninist utopia is again a desire. — (Antonio Negri, 2014, p. xxiii.)
The growing field of Lenin Studies has been nurtured by the growth of crises and struggles in our own time. And some believe the nurturing can go both ways—that the growing number of studies can contribute to present-day activists’ efforts at developing revolutionary strategy, organisation and struggle.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and his comrades in the revolutionary Bolshevik wing of the Russian socialist movement had multiple facets and impacts. Our focus in this particular survey of Lenin Studies will be restricted to Lenin’s revolutionary method, through a critical and comparative exploration of works by Antonio Negri, Alan Shandro and Tamás Krausz. This will leave out much of interest and value. Roland Boer’s splendid research and reflection on Lenin and religion is only one example. Another is August Nimtz’s invaluable excavation of the centrality of electoral politics in Lenin’s revolutionary strategy.
Of considerable importance have been memoirs and studies of on-the-ground Bolshevik and Leninist practice from the early 1900s through the early 1920s, as well as early experience-based theorisations by sophisticated practitioners (such as Georg Lukács and Antonio Gramsci) in other countries. Attention to such material—which cannot be incorporated into the present essay—will enable us to connect what Lenin and other political leaders had to say with the practical work of the activists who paid attention to, and helped to shape, what was theorised, providing essential insights into past events and future possibilities. As this suggests, genuine Leninism cannot be grasped if we restrict our attention to Lenin himself. If there are to be future incarnations of a usable Leninism, they must have that quality of democratic and international collectivity.
Is It Permissible to Speak of ‘Leninism’?
This brings us to a terminological quibble that has recently assumed significant proportions among some scholars and activists identifying (or wrestling with whether or not they should identify) with Lenin’s political thought and practice.
One reasonable formulation was advanced by the late revolutionary theorist Daniel Bensaïd, who commented that ‘the invention of “Leninism” as a religiously mummified orthodoxy, was part of the process of bureaucratisation of the Comintern and the Soviet Union’, concluding: ‘That’s why, as far as possible, I personally avoid utilizing this “ism”.’ Yet when we look at how such prominent Bolsheviks as Gregory Zinoviev and Nikolai Bukharin actually characterised the nature and quality of Lenin’s political thought and practice, we find formulations that differ from Stalin’s.
Noting that ‘the Russian Leninists, the Leninists of the Communist International and of the whole world are confronted by grand and important tasks’ in the wake of Lenin’s death, Zinoviev urged comrades to ‘strengthen and solidify the union between the most advanced Communists and the whole of the non-party working masses’, and to ‘succeed with the plough of Leninism in raising new and deeper layers … assisting even those who have only a spark of talent’ and ‘helping the multi-million working mass in educating itself and in raising its cultural level, in order to fit itself for the work of socialist reconstruction.’ Comparing the views of Marx with those of Lenin, Bukharin argued, ‘it is clear that Leninist Marxism represents quite a particular form of ideological education, for the simple reason that it is itself a child of a somewhat different epoch.’ At the same time, Bukharin added, ‘if we regard Marxism not as the entirety of ideas such as existed in the time of Marx’, but as a distinctive tool and methodology, then ‘Leninism is not something that modifies or revises the method of Marxist teaching’ but ‘a complete return to the Marxism formulated by Marx and Engels themselves.’
While such formulations do not bear the marks of bureaucratic authoritarianism or mummified orthodoxy that one might be led to expect, there is truth in the way Bensaïd characterises certain early articulations of the term ‘Leninism’. Serious historians such as E.H. Carr documented long ago that the term was utilised as a device to advance factional and bureaucratic agendas, in a campaign against a fabricated ‘Trotskyism’.
Sharing the skittishness regarding the terms Leninism and Leninist, Tamás Krausz reaches for something else to refer to what elsewhere he calls ‘Lenin’s Marxism’ and ‘Lenin’s approach to Marxism’ and (perhaps absent-mindedly) ‘the Leninist tradition of Marxism’. And so we find (fortunately not often) awkward reference to ‘the Leninian approach to socialism’ and ‘the Leninian legacy’.
Negri’s solution seems preferable. Arguing ‘the first and greatest danger is that of entering into a debate on “Leninism”’, he quite simply proclaims: ‘Leninism does not exist.’ He immediately modifies the proclamation: ‘… or rather, the theoretical statements contained in this term must be brought back to bear on the set of comportments and attitudes to which they refer: their correctness must be measured in the relationship between the emergence of a historical subject (the revolutionary proletariat) and the set of subversive problems that this subject is confronted with.’ And then, again quite simply, he makes free use of the terms Leninism and Leninist when discussing Lenin’s thought and practice.
Pioneers in the Field of Lenin Studies
The current phase in Lenin Studies could be said to have opened in 2001, when a conference in Essen (Germany) gathered together many contributors to the field (including Negri and Shandro). The conference presentations were published several years later in a volume of renewal, Lenin Reloaded.
This added, of course, to earlier studies by E.H. Carr, Isaac Deutscher, Tamara Deutscher, Moshe Lewin, Marcel Liebman, Ernest Mandel, Ernst Fischer, Neil Harding, Tony Cliff, Ronald H. Clark, and others, as well as to what had been offered by a more critical current that included Robert C. Tucker, Christopher Read, Ralph Carter Elwood, James D. White, the early Robert Service and the older Neil Harding. There was, as well, the distinctive and extremely influential sub-branch of Lenin Studies represented by ex-leftist and moderate leftist, liberal, and conservative analysts guided by the sensibilities of Cold War anti-Communism. This included: Bertram D. Wolfe, Alfred G. Meyer, Robert V. Daniels, Louis Fischer, Adam Ulam, Stefan T. Possony and Richard Pipes, with some later scholars, such as the older Robert Service, following in their wake.
But outstanding among the pioneers are Lars Lih and Nadezhda Krupskaya. Their contributions deserve special attention.
Within the ranks of those currently interested in Lenin, there is a significant contingent seeing Lars Lih as being pretty much the beginning and the end of any serious study of Lenin. Lars himself would never make such a claim. Just as it is crucial to place Lenin in his context in order to understand the Leninism of Lenin, so should Lih be seen within the larger context of Lenin Studies.
Pride of place among pioneering Lenin scholars goes to Nadezhda Krupskaya. In contrast to the rigid definition proposed by Stalin—that ‘Leninism is Marxism in the epoch of imperialism and of the proletarian revolution’—Krupskaya presents us with the approach and ideas and practices actually developed by Lenin in the course of his life as a revolutionary activist, engaged in the struggle to end all oppression and exploitation through working-class democracy and socialism. This understanding of ‘Leninism’ was of little use to a rising bureaucratic dictatorship that—out of the isolation and erosion of the Russian Revolution—sought a dogmatic ideology to help reinforce its own increasingly abusive power as it ruthlessly sought to modernise backward Russia. The Stalinist evaluation of Krupskaya has been helpfully clarified by one of Stalin’s closest associates, V.M. Molotov:
Krupskaya followed Lenin all her life, before and after the Revolution. But she understood nothing about politics. Nothing … In 1925 she became confused and followed Zinoviev. And Zinoviev took an anti-Leninist position. Bear in mind that it was not so simple to be a Leninist! … Stalin regarded her unfavorably. She turned out to be a bad communist … What Lenin wrote about Stalin’s rudeness [when he proposed Stalin’s removal as the Communist Party’s General Secretary] was not without Krupskaya’s influence … Stalin was irritated: ‘Why should I get up on my hind legs for her? To sleep with Lenin does not necessarily mean to understand Leninism!’ … In the last analysis, no one understood Leninism better than Stalin.
Krupskaya, a committed Marxist since the mid-1890s when she was in her early twenties, was not only ‘an active militant’ throughout two decades of exile but also Lenin’s ‘collaborator in every circumstance’ (according to the esteemed historian of international socialism, Georges Haupt) and ‘above all the confidante of the founder of Bolshevism’.
Krupskaya’s book Reminiscences of Lenin suffered disfigurement from having to be composed and published amid the growing intolerance and repression of the Stalin regime, yet holds up well as an ‘informative and generally accurate’ account of Lenin’s life and thought, partisan yet relatively free from ‘personal acrimony or exaggerated polemics’, and overall ‘admirably honest and detached’—as biographer Robert H. McNeal aptly describes it. Appearing in the early 1930s, before the worst and most murderous of Stalin’s policies would close off the possibility of even its partially-muted honesty, it is a truly courageous book. In his 1935 diary, Trotsky wrote of her in this period that she had ‘consistently and firmly refused to act against her conscience’. An educated Marxist and experienced revolutionary, she was determined to tell as much of the truth as she was able about the development of Lenin’s revolutionary perspectives, with extensive attention to his writings and activities, and to the contexts in which these evolved. Within a few years, like so many others, she felt compelled to capitulate utterly, completely and shamefully in support of Stalin’s worst policies. As Haupt once put it, ‘there is still much that is left unsaid on the drama of her life, on the humiliation she underwent’. But the memoir of her closest comrade remains as a monument to the best that she had to give over many years, and as an invaluable (in some ways unsurpassed) source on the life and thought of Lenin.
Among the most significant contributions to Lenin Studies in our own time, of course, have been those made by Lars Lih. Emphasising the fundamentally democratic qualities of Lenin’s political thought, and his boundless optimism regarding the capacity of the working class to bring about socialism, Lih has challenged an influential interpretation of the relationship of Lenin’s thought to the Marxism of his own time. Lenin’s thought is often separated from and counterposed to the variation of Marxism represented by Karl Kautsky within the German Social-Democratic Party and the Socialist International (or Second International). This counterposition could take three forms:
- that Lenin’s thought constituted a break from genuine Marxism, represented by Kautsky, with all of its democratic sensibilities and historical-materialist realism;
- that Lenin, in contrast to people like Kautsky, did not flinch from following through in the authoritarian-totalitarian potentialities inherent in the Marxism of Marx;
- that Lenin—unlike Kautsky and many others—actually grasped and embraced the truly revolutionary essence of Marxism, and therefore was able to embark on a qualitatively different and superior political project. (This third notion has been developed in various ways by revolutionary Marxists and in a different way by Stalinists.)
Whatever the form or variation, this stark counterposition happens to be incompatible with the take on reality articulated by other significant commentators. Krupskaya’s reminiscences, for example, and Gregory Zinoviev’s History of the Bolshevik Party, as well as writings of Leon Trotsky (and of some influenced by him, such as Isaac Deutscher and Ernest Mandel)—all indicate that the Marxism associated with such figures as Karl Kautsky and George Plekhanov is an integral component of the Marxism of Lenin and other early Bolsheviks. And Lars Lih helps to clinch the matter.
Lenin was organically connected with the best in ‘the Marxism of the Second International’. Referring to the 1891 Erfurt Programme of the German Social-Democratic Party, a document largely composed by Karl Kautsky and explicated in his classic work The Class Struggle, Lih suggests the term ‘Erfurtian Marxist’ could be applied to Lenin (and others in the revolutionary wing of the world-socialist movement of that time).
Diverging from Kautsky
Yet a distinction can be made between the theoretical basics of Marxism and certain vitally-important strategic specifics and on-the-ground practical policy (which also have theoretical implications). It can also be shown that divergences began to unfold between Lenin’s and Kautsky’s parties in the years leading up to the First World War.
We find in Lenin’s writings immense respect for Kautsky before the First World War, an engaged reference to one or another of his ideas, and the sense of a shared theoretical framework. But there is nothing that smacks of discipleship. Lih emphasises that Lenin was ‘in love’ with Marx and Engels and saw them, in Lenin’s words, as ‘the genuine article’. Lenin’s pre-1914 approach to Kautsky lacked such intimacy.
At the same time, one finds pulls and tugs within Kautsky’s Marxism, between activist and fatalist dynamics. The former produced greater sensitivity toward complexities of, and openness to, revolutionary possibilities, while the latter closed off possibilities and reduced reality to simpler propositions, consistent with either a dogmatic optimism or fatalistic pessimism. Kautsky’s revolutionary-activist inclinations were only partially checked by elements of dogmatic fatalism up through 1909, but by 1910, and even more by 1914 and 1917, his Marxism was increasingly characterised by the latter.
Alan Shandro argues that despite common ground shared with Kautsky prior to 1914, Lenin had a very particular way of conceptualising the notion of proletarian hegemony (working-class predominance) in the struggle for democracy—involving ‘the political ability to act independently as a class and hence … an organized vanguard informed by Marxist theory and capable of diagnosing and acting upon significant movements in the logic of struggle’. Antonio Negri makes a similar point about the necessity for a ‘guarantee of the independence of the proletariat as the hegemonic class of the revolutionary process’, adding: ‘The party is both the continuity of the struggle for democracy and the condition for the unification of the proletariat and of the socialist struggle.’
Related to this, Tamás Krausz comments on the growing hegemony of the Bolsheviks in the workers’ movement from 1912 to 1914, their successes grounded ‘in the Bolsheviks’ aiming to connect the short-term—even daily—demands of the workers with prospects for the “proletarian dictatorship.”’ Legal work and reform-struggles were integrated into a revolutionary approach to winning political power for the working class. The notion of hegemony, emphasised by Shandro and Negri, resulted in an organisational orientation enabling the Bolsheviks, as Krausz notes, to edge-out moderate Menshevik competitors—gaining control of trade unions and cooperatives, surging in subscriptions to Bolshevik as opposed to Menshevik newspapers, and finally in electing more working-class delegates to parliament. Such developments from 1912 to 1914 would have powerful repercussions in 1917.
One need not agree with all that is presented in these new studies to conclude that there are rich deposits of theory and insight in the approach and ideas and practices developed by Lenin in the course of his life as a revolutionary activist.
Leninist Method
With an appeal for us to ‘return to Lenin’, Antonio Negri’s Factory of Strategy: 33 Lessons on Lenin provides an exploration of the context and logic of Lenin’s theorisations. The book was developed decades before his widely-read works co-authored with Michael Hardt—Empire, Multitude and Commonwealth. Published in Italy during the 1970s, Factory of Strategy reflects discussion and debates on the Italian Left of that time, as activists and intellectuals associated with workerist-autonomist currents that confronted, and sought to forge a dynamic left alternative to, an increasingly reformist mass Communist Party.
It is significant that Negri more than four decades later, in a very different context, believes the book has continued relevance. He stresses: ‘Clearly there can be times when Lenin’s discourse is summed up and valued, but as the outcome of a confrontation, not as a premise.’ This corresponds to the view of Tamás Krausz, who tells us in Reconstructing Lenin that ‘the Leninist tradition of Marxism is the only one that has offered, at least for a time, an alternative to capitalism’, that ‘in a search for alternatives, the discontented keep running into “Lenin’s Marxism” at every turn’, and that ‘the legacy of the primacy of Lenin’s Marxism is not a thing of the past’. Alan Shandro, in his Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony, joins the chorus, with more rarefied vocabulary, when he tells us: ‘Lenin’s politico-strategic logic of the struggle for hegemony yields insights useful for thinking about the constitution of a proletarian-popular community through the struggles of an irreducible plurality of political actors.’
Each of these writers recognises that Lenin’s time is qualitatively different from our own in quite important ways. ‘A historically adequate interpretation of Lenin’s Marxism—in Marxist terms—must begin’, Krausz tells us, ‘with the recognition that Lenin’s legacy is essentially a specific, practical application of Marx’s theory of social formation’ in a specific moment in history, and that ‘Lenin’s political and theoretical legacy, as a historical variant of Marxism, is unique and unrepeatable.’ The mass left-wing working-class movements, powerfully influenced by revolutionary theories of Marx and others, and essential components of the political scene in the time of Lenin, have faded. Negri tells us: ‘The composition of the contemporary working class in struggle and the composition of the entire proletariat have nothing whatsoever to do with the composition of the proletariat of the early twentieth century.’ Dramatically insisting that ‘we are a planet away from Lenin’s issues’, he explains:
The working class we struggle in … has been turned into mass by the capitalist mode of production itself, transformed by the technological changes introduced by capital in order to combat those Leninist ‘vanguards’ and beat their overbearing and victorious organized isolation; the composition of the class we struggle in is entirely different. Today’s mass worker turns her deskilling, which capital imposed on her as a sign of a new isolation, into the unity of all abstract labor; it transforms the interchangeability of her tasks into chances of general mobility across sectors and territories, and so on.
Krausz, drawing from the later writings of the aging Georg Lukács, also pushes in this direction—but he goes further, into Lenin’s own time, suggesting that ‘Lenin was unable to identify the economic features of the “latest” stage of capitalist development, the transformation of the workers’ movements in the “developed countries”, which—he suggests—resulted in the unanticipated isolation of the Russian Revolution. Unlike Negri, Krausz seems to believe there were deeper socio-economic reasons for the Western European working classes’ failure to follow the example set by the revolutionary workers of Russia. Yet he offers no comparative examination of the specifics of labour processes and working conditions, living conditions, cultures and sub-cultures, and the consciousness of the working classes of Russia and other countries. Nor are such considerations (the possibility of revolutionary incapacity within Western-European working classes) entertained by Shandro—and, as will be suggested below, there may be grounds to justify his disinclination to do so.
Whatever their differences with each other, Krausz and Shandro fully agree with Negri that revolutionary activists must seriously engage with Lenin if they hope to move forward in replacing destructive capitalist tyranny with life-affirming socialist democracy. He insists that ‘by looking into the Leninist relation between tactical strategy and organization to verify in a particular class composition (as correctly interpreted by Lenin) the general laws it identifies’, it will be possible to ‘put these laws to the test of practical criticism’. This is a process of ‘recognizing the shifts, leaps, and discontinuity that workers’ theory is forced to confront’, and in his opinion ‘there are no other ways of linking our thought to Lenin’s today’. Understanding the methodology Lenin utilised in his context, Negri insists, sheds light on what we must do in our own.
Garbling Lenin—or Sharpening the Knife?
Negri’s Factory of Strategy is sometimes so closely-reasoned as to allow no sunlight between its complex layers of analysis. In his explanation and defence of Lenin’s thought he employs conceptualisations and vocabulary that seem so specialised as to cause (one imagines) Lenin himself to vigorously scratch what hair was left on his head with extreme perplexity.
According to this philosopher-activist, Lenin’s revolutionary political thought has a very particular trajectory—from Marx’s analysis in Capital (related to Russian specificities), which logically extends to a specific theory of organisation, which in turn logically culminates in a theory of revolution, including the strategy and tactics of insurrection. This in itself may seem a rather bizarre mix-up. One would think that there should first be an analysis of society and how it should be altered, followed by the development of strategy on how to bring about such change, and only then the development of an organisation capable of carrying out that strategy for social change.
What is worse, we are presented with what seems a topsy-turvy set of terms. It seems it is good to be sectarian, while avoiding codism, with a working class that leads the proletariat (aren’t they synonyms?), culminating in a revolution from above (this is projected as good and necessary) that burns one’s previous work, all in the name of Leninism, and somehow this will lead not to a multiple train wreck, but instead to communism, a society of the free and the equal.
If one approaches this work with patience and attention, however, and with some knowledge of Lenin’s actual writings (this was, after all, a set of lectures designed to accompany the reading of such texts by groups of activists), what might seem a hopeless chaos assumes a more interesting focus. One is reminded of a story Krupskaya tells:
Vladimir Ilyich and I were once reminded of a simile used by Lev Tolstoy. He was going along and saw from afar a man squatting and waving his arms about in a ridiculous way; a madman, he thought, but when he drew nearer, he saw it to be a man sharpening a knife on the kerb. The same thing happens in theoretical disputes. From the outside it seems a sheer waste of time, but when you go into the matter more deeply you see that it is a momentous issue.
Sifting through the rarefied terminology brings us closer to the sharpening of the theoretical scalpel. There are, of course, different uses of terminology among various Marxists—for example, Lenin’s use of the word ideology, simply a neutral reference to a set of ideas or a belief-system that helps one make sense of reality, would mean that Marxism itself is an ideological perspective. But many (including Negri) define the term quite differently as conveying a false or distorted understanding of reality, to which Marxist science should be counterposed. Making the complex, important point that the notion of ceaseless change and development is built into the methodology of Marxism and into its analysis of the most dynamic of all economic systems, capitalism, Negri emphasises discontinuity as being essential both to the nature of capitalism and the working class, concluding with the potentially baffling comment that ‘the discontinuity of Marxism is a negation of ideology’.
There are other words that Negri seems to use in peculiar ways that are not so easily resolved, most seriously when he discusses ‘the political composition of the working class and the proletariat in Russia’. Utilising the two italicised synonyms might seem redundant, but consider this sentence: ‘Where the working class was distinct within the vanguard of the proletariat, the externality of the process of organization and the need to impose the recomposition of the proletariat from above amounted to a need and desire for a theoretical isolation of the vanguard from the process of masses in conditions of emergency.’
There is more than one complication in the sentence—but it is clear that the two (again) italicised words are not meant to be synonymous. Given the lack of clarification within the text, one must guess at the meaning of this unusual distinction. Is ‘proletariat’ (derived from its usage in ancient Rome) referring to the impoverished masses in general? Does it include landless and poor peasants and the degraded urban poor? Does ‘working class’ refer ‘only to industrial labor’, which ‘excludes all other laboring classes’ (as Negri indicates in his later Multitude)? If these things (or something like them) are the case, then this and other sentences in the text would make sense, corresponding to on-the-ground realities in Tsarist Russia, and would become politically useful. The industrial working class must play the leading role in rallying the masses of the Russian people, but it must also maintain political independence, not becoming submerged in the great impoverished mass. Negri explains: ‘This leadership is the hegemony of the interests of the working class in its specificity, which must initially be represented by the independence of organization, and is here shown to be an ability to actualize this dialectical shift, to dominate the series of democratic stages in the most radical deepening of the revolutionary process, in the withering-away of the state, in the destruction of the machine of power that has been built around wage labor.’
There are simpler mysteries that can be solved through a close reading of Negri’s text. At a certain point he is critical of certain Marxists in the Second International because for them ‘Marxism was not a sectarian standpoint’, whereas ‘the originality of Lenin’s reading of Marxism’ involves the ‘grasp of its determinate existence as a sectarian judgment’. A common definition of the term sectarian connotes divisively placing the outlooks and needs of one’s small religious or political group ahead of everything else, stilting one’s relationship with the rest of humanity and reality, and (in regard to would-be ‘Marxist’ sectarians) doing this at the expense of the actual, living struggles and movements of the workers and the oppressed. But Negri’s usage of the term is quite different, connoting bias and partisanship for the working class and the class struggle. As he explains:
Throughout the civilized world the teachings of Marx evoke the utmost hostility and hatred of all bourgeois science (both official and liberal), which regards Marxism as a kind of ‘pernicious sect.’ And no other attitude is to be expected, for there can be no ‘impartial’ social science in a society based on class struggle. In one way or another, all official and liberal science defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared a relentless war on that slavery.
At the same time, he keeps warning against something that is translated as ‘codism’—and it takes several pages before he refers to this in the same clarifying breath as ‘a static conception of reality’. This appears to be akin to dogmatism—although codismo in Italian refers to ‘tailing’ or ‘tail-ending’, which in left-wing parlance indicates following uncritically behind. Related to the resistance to such things, we are confronted with this odd sentence: ‘Each single objective, when reached and consolidated, must be burned by the revolutionary party.’ The thought is repeated: ‘The political decision of the vanguard of the organized proletariat posits and then burns each single moment of the development that contains the struggles.’ He links this with a persistent conceptualisation of permanent revolution—for example, he asserts, ‘the notion of the democratic-bourgeois dictatorship of the proletariat, a fundamental concept from the standpoint of permanent revolution, is located in this framework’, and again:
Lenin states that Marxists recognize the actual need for a state, and thus for a dictatorship in the particular phases that the revolution goes through; they especially recognize where the contents of the struggle, needs and power of the masses can only produce a bourgeois-democratic determination of the contents of the revolutionary process. However, all of this must constantly be burned and overcome: the permanent revolution is the goal of communists.
This connotes a dialectical process of building-up one phase of the revolutionary struggle which can make possible (but only through ‘burning’ or fuelling or being consumed and transcended by) the next phase of revolutionary struggle—a succession of revolutionary moments necessarily succeeding each other.
Yet another odd insistence comes from Negri with the assertion that ‘we have come to appreciate the significance of the revolution from above so strongly advocated by Lenin’. Such revolutionary Marxists as Lenin were known for their enthusiastic support for ‘from-the-bottom-up’ revolutionary democracy. But Negri’s ‘revolution from above’ formulation (which Lenin himself never employed) refers—in part—to notions that are consistent with revolutionary-democratic perspectives. It involves the question of leadership, of ‘the organizational ability of the working class to lead’ the revolutionary struggle of society’s broader layers of the impoverished ‘proletariat’ (to use Negri’s particular conceptualisation), and ‘the organizational ability to set into motion the mechanisms of the permanent revolution at each moment’, and ‘the subjective ability of the class vanguard to be the point of the diamond, an effective military force to lead this process’ of revolutionary insurrection.
This relates to Negri’s understanding of Lenin’s theorisation of the interplay between spontaneity and organisation. He sees in Lenin ‘an exaltation of spontaneity that is not occasional but permanent and systematic’, a notion that workers’ spontaneity will always be at the basis of revolutionary social democracy and its process of organisation. At the same time, ‘even at the spontaneous level and in economic struggle, the working class fights directly against the overall power structure that confronts it, and the moment of this insurgence is absolutely fundamental to the genesis, and thus the organizational development, of social democracy.’ Working-class hegemony in the struggle for human liberation can crystallise only to the extent that experienced and thoughtful working-class activists who work together, vanguard elements of the working class, are able to provide leadership to the larger and broader struggles—utilising their skills and understanding to help advance the spontaneous upsurge, but also to propose a path forward, and to win increasing numbers of people to embark upon that path. Negri tells us, ‘Lenin never forgets that the refusal to submit to spontaneity is not a negation of spontaneity. Quite the opposite: the refusal to submit to spontaneity emerges, affirms itself, and consolidates when spontaneity is at its highest.’ He concludes: ‘The main problem today is one of organization, or the ability to channel the movement toward the full consciousness of its power.’
Distinctive Elements in Lenin’s Approach
Compelling as Negri’s reasoning is, questions can be raised. Not all of the questions, however, necessarily hold up as criticisms. Some force us into clarifications.
For example, are all the closely-reasoned explications of Lenin’s thought applicable only to him? Could not the same type of elaborate exegeses, or in some cases precisely the same points, be articulated in regard to Karl Marx, Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg? In regard to Marx, the answer is obviously yes (as Negri himself demonstrates at various points in this text), although Lenin is credited with brilliantly applying Marx’s approach to unique turn-of-the-century specifics of the Russian socio-economic reality. Kautsky and Luxemburg are—unlike Marx—largely absent from this text, but that ‘gap’ is easily explained. Negri is focused on Lenin’s actual writings, and unlike Marx they were not the central reference points in those writings. The same can be said for each of these figures: they are disciples of Marx, not of each other. Kautsky is fifteen years older than Lenin and Luxemburg, and of the three he was the first to engage with what Marx and Engels offered. Both Lenin and Luxemburg respected him, and his work certainly influenced them, but the two younger revolutionaries went on to forge their own paths.
The fact that Negri can sustain his analysis in a close reading of a quite significant range of Lenin’s writings suggests a multifaceted and multi-layered intensity inherent in Lenin. The thoughtful, often excellent, analyses and theorisations offered in the writings of Karl Kautsky would necessarily yield quite different exegeses than that which Negri is able to construct around the writings of Lenin, at least in part because Lenin is developing his thought in a different context. More than this, the realities of which he is part, and the role he plays within his own party—in contrast to what is the case with Kautsky—would naturally pull his conceptualisations in a somewhat different direction.
Negri’s comments on Lenin’s orientation dovetail with Alan Shandro’s contribution. Shandro sees Lenin’s distinctive contributions to Marxism flowing from the way he approached issues of spontaneity and hegemony. We need to unpack this in order to grasp the thrust of his analysis. Conceptualisations common to an ‘orthodox Marxist’ perspective can be found, Shandro shows us, in writings of the young Lenin, the young Leon Trotsky, the young Rosa Luxemburg, and others taught and mentored by such eminent theorists as Kautsky and Plekhanov. But beginning in the early 1900s, he argues, Lenin felt increasingly compelled to develop a more complex and dynamic view that moved beyond conceptions embraced by Kautsky. (Shandro misses the fact that others—particularly Luxemburg and Trotsky—were, each in their own way, also moving beyond what Shandro calls the ‘matter of fact didacticism’ of so-called orthodox Marxism.) For Lenin, Shandro asserts, this was generated by three crises: (1) challenges posed by the rise of strong reformist and economistic currents within the socialist movement, (2) challenges of the 1905 revolutionary upsurge, and (3) challenges posed by the First World War.
In treading this ground, Shandro takes issue with certain influential interpretations of Lenin’s thought. According to Marcel Liebman and Tony Cliff, the 1905 upsurge caused Lenin to reject an allegedly ‘elitist’ element inherent in his earlier thinking, and Shandro joins with Lars Lih in demolishing this view. Another influential interpretation, given special stress by Raya Dunayevskaya and Kevin Anderson, has to do with Lenin’s study of the dialectical philosophy of Hegel during the First World War, which is said to have generated a veritable revolution in his own thought, reflected in all subsequent writings. While he does not dismiss the importance of Lenin’s philosophical clarifications, Shandro sees the so-called ‘Hegelian epiphany’ as seriously overstated. The three historical moments of challenge force Lenin to deepen and develop his Marxism, not to fundamentally revise it.
Instead Shandro insists that—far from a ‘break’—there is a fundamental continuity in the development of Lenin’s thought, stretching from What Is to Be Done? (1902) and One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (1904) to Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution (1905) to Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) and The State and Revolution (1917) to The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918). He does not provide a full discussion of these crucial texts, his purpose being to trace within them a distinctive approach to questions of spontaneity and proletarian hegemony. One can certainly find the notion of proletarian hegemony in the theorisations of Kautsky, Plekhanov and the Mensheviks, but there are different twists that one can give to this notion—and the Leninist twist, he argues, facilitated ever-greater (and necessary) debate within the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. This centred on the configuration of class alliances, with Lenin’s strategy crystallising around a ‘worker-peasant alliance’ which (in the opinion of Menshevik Raphael Abramovitch) replaced ‘an analytical Marxian outlook’ with ‘romantic utopianism’, seeking ‘to make a bourgeois revolution without the bourgeoisie, against the bourgeoisie’. This approach, Shandro argues, enabled Lenin to develop a far-more nuanced and effective revolutionary politics. It also generated early unease and then bitter opposition among those influenced by the traditional orientation (the ‘unilinear historical logic’, as Shandro terms it) Lenin was moving beyond.
This connects with points made in Reconstructing Lenin. Not seeking to create an independent ‘ism within Marxism’, Krausz tells us, what Lenin did was to ‘rediscover, reenergize, and deepen elements of the Marxist tradition that mainstream European social democracy was intent on burying.’ In the process of doing this, he observes, Lenin ‘contributed many original ideas to the theoretical reconstruction of revolutionary action and movement in opposition to reformist social democratic tendencies’. Rule by the people over their collective economic life, and the free development of each and every person, brought about through revolutionary struggles of the world’s labouring majorities, constituted the animating vision of Marx—‘the conscious human activity to transform society … the self-movement and self-creation of history through social classes and individuals.’ As Negri puts it, ‘Marx and Lenin’s definition of our task of destruction of the state for communism will only be given within the recognition of a newly recomposed strategic project, and in a subsequent cycle of international workers’ struggles.’
In Lenin’s final five years of life, this inspiring future development was blocked (and was turned into its opposite) by two calamities. First, the failure of revolutions in other lands left Russia isolated in its own economic backwardness. Second, horrific tidal-waves of violence, in large measure generated by powerful forces that feared and hated this ‘strategic project’, came down upon revolutionary Russia with incredible force. The post-revolution breakdown of Lenin’s ‘stateless communism’ orientation, crucially important to any consideration of the Leninist tradition, is discussed by Shandro, Krausz, and Negri. The scope of our exploration here, however, covers the greater portion of Lenin’s life—the more than two decades preceding the post-1917 calamities. Leninist partisans argue that the calamities can be traced to the failure of revolutionaries outside of Russia to develop something akin to the organisational weapons and strategic orientation which Lenin and his Bolshevik comrades were able to forge in those decades.
Democracy was ‘one of the cornerstones of his political concept prior to 1917’, Krausz emphasises, buttressing Lenin’s ‘critique of bourgeois democracy and bourgeois approaches to democracy with the economic and social dimensions of democracy—demonstrating the oppressive functions of the bourgeois system aligned with his critique of capitalism’, and with revolutionary political solutions through which ‘bourgeois democracy in turn becomes plebian democracy and then a workers’ democracy (semi-state)’, with an increasingly just and democratic society ultimately giving way to a stateless communism. Krausz concludes that ‘Lenin’s topicality resides in the fact that he transformed his own historical experiences into a set of theoretical concepts that undermine and destroy any justifications for bourgeois society and, in spite of the contradictions involved, he provides tools for those who still think of the possibility of another, more humane world.’ Negri emphasises the same point, that Lenin’s ‘organizational project is developed with allusions to the contents of communism and to the issue of the withering-away of the state, which becomes a key issue sustained throughout the whole of the revolutionary process.’
Moving beyond the norms of Social Democracy caused political ruptures, particularly with the Menshevik wing of Russian Social Democracy hewing more closely to orientations developed by Plekhanov and Kautsky. It also meant a revolutionary break with what represented—for many—the ‘common wisdom’ among Marxists in the early twentieth century. Consider Angelica Balabanoff’s recollection of Lenin’s articulation of his ‘April Theses’ of 1917: ‘One sentence in the speech he delivered that evening was to recur to me many times in the months that followed, as it has many times since: “Unless the Russian Revolution develops into a second and successful Paris Commune, reaction and war will suffocate it.” She goes on to explain:
I had been trained, like most Marxists, to expect the social revolution to be inaugurated in one of the highly industrialized, vanguard countries, and at the time Lenin’s analysis of Russian events seemed to me almost utopian. Later, after I had returned to Russia itself, I was to accept this analysis completely. I have never doubted since that if the revolutionaries—including many Mensheviks and Left Social Revolutionaries—had not convinced the peasants, workers, and soldiers of the need for a more far-reaching, socialist revolution in Russia, Tsarism or some similar form of autocracy would have been restored.
Alfred Rosmer shared similar recollections. Lenin was seen as having drifted ‘outside the stream of orthodox Marxism’, with some scoffing that his perspectives of 1917 were not Marxist but ‘Blanquism with sauce tartare’. Rosmer recalls that French syndicalists and anarchists such as himself found Lenin’s Marxism to be ‘a pleasant revelation’, which they liked ‘sauce and all’. Won over to Lenin’s outlook, Rosmer concludes that it was, in fact, well-grounded in the texts of Marx and Engels, representing, in contrast to ‘Plekhanov and Kautsky who have gone off the rails’ (as Lenin put it), a genuine and truly ‘undistorted Marxism’. These are points that Shandro and Krausz insist upon, and that Negri hammers home in his lectures.
Logic and History
We have noted that Negri’s study—like the others we are examining here—does not contend that Lenin’s State and Revolution represents a fundamental break from his earlier approach, but instead insists on a continuity of Lenin’s thought from the early 1900s down through 1917. Unlike the others, however, he presents us with an intriguing logical cascade that he attributes to Lenin.
His compelling yet unconventional analysis provides the basis for a specific conceptualisation corresponding to the autonomist Marxism with which Negri has been closely associated (holding that the organisational specifics of Leninism may be correct for Lenin’s own specific context, but not for our own). Negri insists that the starting-point is ‘Lenin’s reading of Marx’, specifically ‘a reading and critical analysis of Karl Marx’s Capital’, and that ‘his approach to the theory of organization [is] derived from a theory of capital.’ In turn, ‘the question of the program … proceeds from a theory of organization to a theory of revolution.’
All of this relates to the very title of his book, Factory of Strategy, which also connects to controversial assertions of Lenin in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back—that, drawing from Marx’s analysis in Capital, one must distinguish between ‘the factory as a means of exploitation (discipline based on fear and starvation) and the factory as a means of organization (discipline based on collective work united by the conditions of a technically highly developed form of production). The discipline and organization which come so hard to the bourgeois intellectual are very easily acquired by the proletariat just because of this factory “schooling.”’ Negri blends this with an ongoing, insistent, reasonable emphasis on the specificities of the Russian social formation under Tsarism, which are profoundly different from our own.
This comes through powerfully in one of the book’s central passages, where he insists that ‘this concept of the party and organization as a factory is adequate to the actual level at which the project of Leninist organization develops, reproducing the technical and political composition of the proletariat.’ The organisation ‘develops by making itself adequate to an ideology of organized labor typical of the large factory and of the class vanguard in Russia, also taking into account the internal and determinate characteristic of the shift we have described, where in fact capital and the organization of the factory are a formidable step forward in the formation and consolidation of an industrial proletariat as a material vanguard of the struggle.’ In Lenin’s argument, Negri tells us, ‘we find an application of some of the fundamental criteria of historical materialism, from which Lenin’s definition of the party grasps a level of class composition in an absolutely correct manner.’ He argues that ‘the factory is able to form a conscious vanguard, exalting the organizational moment and providing the conditions for emancipation, in a way that is all the more clear as the exploitation that a backward society such as Russia is subjected to gets deeper.’ He concludes: ‘For this reason, Lenin’s adherence to an overall situation of the Russian proletariat and to the definition of the levers that will destroy this system determines that conception of the party.’
One suspects, however, that aspects of Leninist organisation may be more prosaic than Negri allows, that there are some basic elements of organisational purpose and logic which transcend Russian specifics and the logic of Capital. Workers, like all people, do not telepathically think with one mind, nor do all share an equal amount of political experience, theoretical knowledge, revolutionary commitments, and organisational skills. Those—a relative few—who do have these qualities can be considered cadres, who are essential for the organisation of any social movement and social struggle. This generalisation applies beyond the realities of the factory and social relations in Tsarist Russia. It can be found, as Negri himself shows us, in What Is to Be Done?, among other Lenin texts: ‘no revolutionary movement can endure without a stable organization of leaders [or cadres] that maintains continuity…. Such an organization must consist chiefly of people professionally engaged in revolutionary activity.’
The purpose of the Communist International was to create parties with such cadres outside of Russia, in countries throughout the world, all of which lacked the specificities of the Russian ‘determinate situation’ or social formation. Negri comments starkly that ‘the Leninist party never had anything to do with the kind of communist party of the Third International and the communist reformism it produced.’
Negri is at his weakest when he discusses the Communist International. In contrast to his close reading of Lenin’s writings, here we find sweeping generalisations with no documentation. He smudges together the period of the Third International in the time of Lenin (ignoring the rich experience and hard-won lessons of these initial years) with the period of Stalinist domination, and in this latter period he conflates the phase of ultra-leftist and rigid ‘Bolshevisation’ with that of the reformist People’s Front. It is all a negative blur.
‘It was typical of the process of Bolshevization to try to impose a series of firm precepts on all parties that referred to themselves as part of the Bolshevik revolution’, he tells us. This ‘cut some vanguards off at the legs and made it impossible for them to make themselves adequate to the particular situations they were meant to intervene in.’ He cites the Communist Party of the United States as ‘the extreme example’, whose experienced class-struggle cadres were ‘castrated’ by ‘an incredibly slavish repetition of the model’ of Bolshevisation. He asserts that this resulted in ‘the exclusion of African-American members from the organization (in the name of a politics of nationality that repeated something that might have been valid in Russia, even though in the United States class unity was given and blacks and whites worked on the same assembly line).
The only source cited for this badly-garbled account is Theodore Draper’s 1960 study American Communism and Soviet Russia, with no details or even page numbers. Some of the leading participants who resisted the Stalinist variant of ‘Bolshevisation’ afflicting the us Communist Party in the period of 1924-9 (and were expelled for such resistance) tell a qualitatively different story. Although representing divergent oppositions, they are in basic agreement that the early years of relations with the Communist International were positive and helpful. This is also true in regard to dealing with the African-American struggle and the initial in-gathering of black cadres, a fact corroborated by a number of capable historians in a number of recent studies.
Between 1987 and 2015, John Riddell and teams of collaborators produced a remarkable English-language resource—the proceedings of the first four congresses of the Communist International, held from 1919 to 1922, in the time of, and with the full participation of, Lenin. This invaluable contribution to Lenin Studies presents us with the excitement and powerful energy of a diverse and articulate accumulation of revolutionaries, some exuberantly young and fresh to the struggle and others having considerable political experience, seeking to learn from and apply to their own homelands the lessons of the Bolshevik Revolution, wrestling with striking similarities and differences, discussing and sometimes debating numerous matters of importance with Lenin and other prominent Bolshevik leaders.
The Organisation Question and the Communist International
In the more than 2000 pages of the recently-translated proceedings of the 1921 and 1922 world-congresses, we find speeches, reports, debates, resolutions, motions and counter-motions, on an incredible range of topics. Some of what is said is foolish, and some of what is said is profound. Significant and illuminating attention is given to the matters we have been considering here.
There is little in the proceedings from Comintern world-congresses of 1921 and 1922 that conform to dismissive characterisations advanced by all-too-many scholars, including Negri. One can certainly point to the disastrous ‘March Action’ of 1921 in Germany, in which adventuristic Comintern representatives, in grand authoritarian style, played a decisive role in pushing some less-experienced German Communists into ultra-left and destructive efforts, riding roughshod over more responsible leaders such as Paul Levi and Clara Zetkin. This caused Levi to break decisively with the Comintern. It is clear from Riddell’s volumes, however, that there were sharp differences in the Communist International around this, with Lenin and Trotsky relentlessly criticising the ‘March Action’, a putsch attempt that was, if anything, in stark contradiction to ‘the Russian model’. Far from seeking to ‘break’ the more responsible German leaders, Lenin consulted closely with Zetkin and sought to repair Levi’s status—thwarted not only by Levi’s own angry refusal, but also by the need to compromise with the angry younger leaders of the German Communist Party. This deference to a majority in the German Communist leadership actually reflects democratic rather than bureaucratic tendencies in the early Comintern (even though Lenin agreed with Levi’s critique of what the hotheads had done).
Nor does Negri’s notion of the Leninist party as uniquely Russia-specific find corroboration in what Lenin had to say. Embedded in the early Comintern proceedings is a rich array of materials, directly from Lenin and his comrades, on the creation of revolutionary parties outside of the Russian context, culminating in the 1921 theses, ‘The Organisational Structure of the Communist Parties, the Methods and Content of Their Work’. From background materials presented in one of many useful appendices, we can see that the theses were shaped, in part, with Lenin’s very active input and were put forward in the Comintern’s Third Congress at Lenin’s insistence.
Far from being a dogmatic effort to impose ‘the Russian model’ on all Communist parties, there is an insistence on relative national autonomy:
There is no immutable, absolutely correct structure for Communist parties. The conditions of proletarian class struggle are variable and subject to a process of constant change. In line with these changes, the organization of the proletarian vanguard must also constantly seek appropriate forms. Similarly, the organization of each party must conform to the historically determined features of its country.
And then there is this insistence on leadership authority being rooted in flexibility and in close contact with the actual working class and its struggles:
To lead the revolutionary class struggle, the Communist Party and its leading bodies must combine great striking power with great capacity to adjust to the changing conditions of struggle. Successful leadership also requires close ties with the proletarian masses. Without such ties, the leaders will not lead them but at best only follow along after.
This insistence on engagement with the real, everyday struggles of the working class is a major point stressed in the document:
Communists make a grave mistake if they stand back passively, are scornful of or oppose the day-to-day struggle of the workers for small improvements in the conditions of their life on the grounds that they have a Communist programme and that their final goal is armed revolutionary struggle. However limited and modest the demands for which the workers are willing to fight, this must never be a justification for the Communists to stand aside from the struggle. Our agitational activity should not give the impression that we Communists stir up strikes just for the sake of it and approve of any kind of rash action. On the contrary, we must earn the reputation among the militant workers of being their most valuable comrades-in-arms.
One of the most important aspects of the document is its warning against the very type of centralism that has all-too-often been put forward as ‘Leninism’:
Democratic centralism in a Communist Party should be a true synthesis and fusion of centralism and proletarian democracy. This fusion can be achieved only on the foundation of constant and common activity and struggle by the entire party.
In a Communist Party, centralization should not be formal or mechanical. It should relate to Communist activity, that is, to the formation of a strong, agile, and also flexible leadership.
A formal or mechanical centralization would concentrate ‘power’ in the hands of the Party bureaucracy, lording it over the other members and the revolutionary proletarian masses which are outside the party….
The resolution criticises the lack of genuine (as opposed to ‘formal’) democracy, a deficiency common in the parties of the Second International. It tells us:
In the organizations of the old, non-revolutionary workers’ movement, a pervasive dualism developed, similar to that of the bourgeois state, between the ‘bureaucracy’ and the ‘people’. Under the paralyzing influence of the bourgeois environment, functionaries became estranged from members, a vibrant collaboration was replaced by the mere forms of democracy, and the organizations became split between active functionaries and passive masses. Even the revolutionary workers’ movement cannot avoid being influenced to some degree by the formalism and dualism of the bourgeois environment.
Warnings against the wrong kind of centralism are repeated more than once: ‘Optimal centralization of party activity is not aided by dividing up the party leadership schematically into a hierarchy with many different levels arrayed one above the other.’ Instead, democratically-elected committees in working-class districts and regions should guide the work of the organisation in those localities, suggesting a high degree of relative autonomy within the organisation. This is projected as a way of providing political leadership in a manner which ensures that close contact is maintained between it and the broad masses of Party members in the various locales.
Not only did Lenin help to shape the theses, he also defended them after they were adopted. This comes through clearly in his comments at the Fourth World Congress of the Communist International in 1922. He took some time to speak critically of the organisational resolution he had helped to draft and have adopted at the 1921 Congress. His complaint was that it was ‘too Russian’—in part because ‘it is so long that nobody but a Russian would read it’. As Max Eastman reported, Lenin ‘continued to laugh a little at the memory of that remark after he had begun to say something else’ (according to a footnote by Riddell). While it has become a commonplace to interpret that comment as a rejection of an alleged dogmatism in the organisational theses, the ‘something else’ that Lenin went on to express is the opposite of rejection.
Having already insisted that ‘the resolution is an excellent one’, he emphasised: ‘the resolution is excellently drafted; I am prepared to subscribe to every one of its fifty or more points.’ The problem was not with the content, but with the inability of the non-Russian comrades to absorb the points being made, because ‘we have not learnt how to present our Russian experience to foreigners’. And so ‘foreign comrades have endorsed it without reading and understanding it’. Far from denouncing and repudiating the resolution, Lenin said: ‘That resolution must be carried out. It cannot be carried out overnight, that is absolutely impossible.’ He repeated that ‘the resolution is too Russian, it reflects the Russian experience. That is why it is quite unintelligible to foreigners, and they cannot be content with hanging it in a corner like an icon and praying to it.’ Far from urging that the resolution therefore be overturned, he concluded that it must be studied and explained carefully, because the foreign comrades ‘must assimilate part of the Russian experience’. He stressed that ‘the most important thing we must do in the period we are entering is to study’, and that the foreign comrades ‘must study in a special sense, in order that they may really understand the organization, structure, method, and content of revolutionary work. If they do that, I am sure the prospects of the world revolution will be not only good, but excellent.’
What Lenin sought to convey regarding the organisation, structure, method and content of revolutionary work is captured, in various ways, in the volumes under review, regardless of differences one might have with one or another interpretive detail. Well worth considering, for example, is Tamás Krausz’s discussion of the oft-distorted notion of the revolutionary vanguard party:
The party as vanguard meant simply that the organization must find roots as part of the social class and incorporate all progressive and revolutionary elements (that is, ‘those who are first to mount the barricades’) as mentioned in the Communist Manifesto. This description of vanguard, of course, has no real kinship with the structure that came about in a later period, the bureaucratic embodiment of the ‘Stalinist state party,’ in spite of the fact that the latter kept referring to Lenin and its so-called origins in 1903.
In discussing what is often seen as a hallmark of Leninism, he provides a rich characterisation of genuinely revolutionary politics, worth quoting at length:
The concept of democratic centralism as the ‘law’ of party bureaucracy was a product of a later historical period—the combination of power, pragmatism, and a messianic ‘future expectation.’ It is easy enough to define the basic concept of democratic centralism: democracy in reaching decisions and unity in implementing them. The difficulty resides only in how to apply this basic principle to small propaganda groups that do not have an organic relationship with the working class. That is, groups whose constituencies are not created from among the most class-conscious members of this class through a hard-fought process of selection. The Russian Social Democratic Party, and later the Bolshevik Party, benefited from real feedback thanks to its close relations with its social base. The Social Democratic Party, at least potentially, was a real mass party from the beginning. It had an ideology and an organization chart [organisational structure?], for example, that were recognized by politically conscious members of the working class in 1905 and 1917 as valid expressions of their politics.
This corresponds to the Communist International’s organisational theses of 1921 and to what Lenin defended in 1922. Essential qualities of the revolutionary party that Lenin and his comrades developed in Tsarist Russia were seen to be generally applicable (and adaptable) on a global scale.
Longing and Commitment
Anyone sifting through such historical artefacts—the political thought and practice of Lenin and his contemporary comrades—in what were for Lenin our own far-future realities (on what Negri suggests is a different planet from Lenin’s) may be struck by their seeming applicability in the present day.
But activists who are so inclined face immense challenges. ‘Obviously establishing the party is quite different from longing for it!’, Negri tells us. We face dramatically evolved realities of capitalism, the fading of the organised mass socialist workers’ movement on a global scale, the absence of the kind of revolutionary party Lenin had to work with. Self-satisfied sects can afford to spout Lenin-quotes while denouncing all others on their end of the spectrum for not measuring up (which often amounts to denouncing reality for being inadequate).
For activists who are truly committed to changing the world for the better, not some imaginary rhetorical world but the actual world in which we live, immense challenges remain. The studies explored here, and the Leninist tradition to which they pertain, will certainly be a resource for those who remain true to that commitment.