Socialist Theory and Practice | Which criticism of which Lenin?

"Back to Lenin" is a popular slogan. Many have wanted it: Mikhail Gorbachev, Slavoj Zizek , and Dietmar Dath. This is countered by an anti-authoritarianism that is more reflexive than reflective. Just get away from this Lenin story, they say, because the man is authoritarian, a despot, and anyone who flirts with him, like the new "red groups" currently do, represents an authoritarian formation that must be fought with equally authoritarian liberalism. Or with value critique and solidarity with Israel.

This is more theory than practice, even among council communists from Cajo Brendel to Henri Simon . They exhibit no activism of their own, but consider themselves merely chroniclers of the class struggle. They believe that any avant-garde intervention would manipulate the pure class struggle. Brendel and Simon radicalize the fundamental idea of ​​council communism: "Revolution is not a party matter."

In contrast, another strand of criticism of Lenin, namely the Marxist-social democratic one, hardly appears anymore. This claims that the Russian revolutionary was a Bakuninist voluntarist who instigated a revolution in an underdeveloped country that did not yet possess any developed productive forces, let alone come close to a developed bourgeois society. According to this view, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was not a true Marxist at all, and the Russian Revolution was a "revolution against capital" by Karl Marx, as the early Antonio Gramsci still argued.

In retrospect, the Marxist criticism of Lenin, which accuses him of anarchism and, with Engels, points to the premature peasant uprising of the rebel bands around Thomas Müntzer , sounds plausible. However, it must ignore the fact that Lenin did not personally organize the Russian Revolution, but merely skillfully and knowledgeably, as a practitioner and pragmatist, managed and guided a revolutionary process – against the backdrop of the battlefields of the First World War, strikes, spontaneous land seizures, and mass desertion. The great rupture, the inability of the rulers to cope, the explosion of social counter-violence (which was undirected), existed before the Bolsheviks seized control.

Revolution is a party matter

Indeed, for Lenin, revolution cannot be conceived or carried out in any other way than as a party matter. It is supposed to be the party that forms itself in anticipation and with the intention of taking power. A revolutionary left therefore always poses the question of power and considers how to take it over at a critical moment. However, what does power mean? What does "taking over" mean? What function should a party play in this?

When it came to power, Lenin was familiar with the dialectic of minority and majority politics: The party was always a party of consciousness, that is, anticipatory, that is, a minority. It had to establish itself as such and gain clout, but it had to be able to relate to a majority in the population; otherwise, Blanquism and voluntarism threatened—and ultimately, failure. The party uses theory as a position-determining and mobilization resource, as practice-oriented thinking.

Of course, Bolshevism was inherently capable of organizing a coup – and the October Revolution of 1917, with the overthrow of the Provisional Government, which Lenin carried out in alliance with the Left Social Revolutionaries, a radical breakaway from the large, peasant-dominated Social Revolutionary Party, had such a coup quality. However, the October coup was embedded in a comprehensive revolutionary scenario. The overthrow of the Provisional Government would not have been possible had the Bolsheviks not relied on an alliance with broader classes and strata than the urban industrial working class.

Oppressed classes and peoples

This undoubtedly entailed something progressive. The Bolsheviks particularly appealed to women of the lower classes, who were supposed to free themselves from patriarchal oppression and violence, from all kinds of ideologies legitimizing hierarchies, but especially from religion and superstition. More importantly, they courted the poor peasants, who—if they were revolutionary and anti-monarchist—were more likely to lean toward the Socialist Revolutionary Party. Finally, they courted the "oppressed peoples" of the multi-ethnic state of Russia, which later led to the enormous impact of the Russian Revolution on the Tricontinent.

Contemporary critics from the Marxist camp sharply attacked Lenin's formula of the "right of self-determination of peoples." For the orthodox council communists, this represented an opportunist weakening of class politics. For the Polish-born revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, the Bolsheviks should have defended the entire territory of the revolutionary conflagration in the spirit of internationalism and the rejection of petty-bourgeois nationalism.

But Lenin and Trotsky countered: Tsarism, as a prison of nations, had to be destroyed, and urban-metropolitan revolutionaries had to gain access to and sympathy from the periphery. Ultimately, Bolshevism became darker, more multicolored, Black , because it allied itself with the "oppressed peoples" by colonialism. In light of today's jihadism, one sometimes casts an almost wistful glance back at left-wing nationalism, arguing along Leninist lines, which sought to lead "the world after the empires" (Adom Getachev) to post-colonial independence. Neo-autocrats like Putin still despise Lenin for his "right of self-determination of nations."

Lenin was anything but a Russian centralist or even a nationalist. In the years following the founding of the Soviet Union, Bolshevik politicians attempted to prevent a form of centralism reminiscent of Tsarism, while still holding together the gigantic and ethnically, religiously, socially, and politically divergent country under the slogan of the "Soviet Republic." With Stalin's industrialization policy, at the latest, a brutal development policy was once again implemented along national and ethnic lines, at the cost of millions of deaths.

Achieving the possible

Whoever wants power must want to achieve the possible, that was the core Bolshevik idea. Lenin and Trotsky advocated this right from the start of the revolution, when they sought a negotiated peace with the Germans in Brest-Litovsk in early 1918 – grudgingly accepting territorial losses. Within the Bolshevik Party, there were voices like Bukharin's who refused to accept such a compromise and sought a revolutionary war until victory. Other revolutionary groups from the political milieu of the Left Social Revolutionaries and anarchists also relied on the logic of a continued people's war against the Germans and for world revolution, driven by revolutionary enthusiasm. The fiery, revolutionary-sounding appeals at the time came from these forces, but Trotsky and Lenin took the more politically sensible position, because it was enforceable and implementable.

When does the authoritarian misery begin?

What remains unclear is the issue of continuity between Lenin and Stalin. When did the authoritarian misery begin? When were the first signs of totalitarian rule laid? When did the "dictatorship of the proletariat" move toward party dictatorship and "general state slavery" (Rudi Dutschke) and no longer toward the self-empowerment of the proletariat?

Various factions of the left could always be recognized by the point at which they identified this breaking point . Some voices were keen to blame Zinoviev, who, in the summer of 1924, after Lenin's death in January, coined the term "Leninism" at the Fifth Congress of the Communist International in order to bring the fledgling communist parties of other countries into line through "Bolshevisation." Indeed, Zinoviev, along with Kamenev, had criticized individual voluntarist statements by Lenin starting in 1917, but the two remained by Lenin's side out of loyalty to the party.

Anarchists in particular interpreted 1921, the year in which the Kronstadt Sailors' Revolt was crushed, as a turning point, if not a turning point, then at least a sign of the emergence of the counterrevolution. In March 1921, the sailors of the High Seas Fleet, who had already played a key role in the revolution in 1917, rebelled against the Bolsheviks' requisition policy and party dictatorship. They wanted to establish a genuine council democracy in its place and thus opposed the Bolsheviks with the original slogans of Red October. It was a coincidence, perhaps a portent, that the well-known Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin died in February 1921. Kropotkin's funeral was also the last major demonstration of anarchist and libertarian-socialist forces in Russia.

The persecution of the opposition

The process of authoritarian formation and the persecution of oppositionists began as early as 1918, before the civil war. Rosa Luxemburg's criticism shortly before her death is worth noting here. In the context of the news of Bolshevik persecution of other, non-Bolshevik revolutionary groups that reached her in Berlin, she formulated her famous phrase: "Freedom is always the freedom of those who think differently." In 1919, the camps in Soviet Russia were filled with anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists, and social revolutionaries. The Bolsheviks deceived their revolutionary allies, whom they still needed at the moment of their seizure of power, but who then became a nuisance. The well-known anarchist Emma Goldman and her companion Alexander Berkman reported on the persecution of the opposition under Lenin. Their reports were largely ignored by the left abroad.

Under Lenin, the party's faction ban was enforced, and freedom of the press did not exist under the Bolsheviks. Lenin wrote that this transitional period was a million times more democratic than bourgeois democracy because in it, formal freedoms were imbued with real—that is, social—content for the majority of the population. The fact is that this more democratic society never came about under the Bolsheviks, just as Lenin never lived up to his proclamations of freedom of the press in practice.

Tactics, power and terror

It is this purely tactical relationship with fellow travelers that ultimately became the core of Bolshevik power politics, a principle of ethical lack of principles and of "necessities" that obeyed pure power calculations, and which did not even spare the Bolshevik Party itself. The "solar eclipse" of the 1930s, which Arthur Koestler impressively portrayed in his famous novel, was already hinted at in the shadows that the Bolshevik terror cast over the revolutionary process.

One of the most important documents illuminating the Bolsheviks' terror content is the work of Isaac Steinberg, the left-wing Social Revolutionary and first People's Commissar of Justice of revolutionary Russia: "Violence and Terror in the Revolution: The Fate of the Humiliated and Insulted in the Russian Revolution" (1931). He sees the formation of the Cheka, a secret police force with extensive powers of terror, as the end of a revolutionary process. The latter, he argues, was also associated with acts of violence, but these were more spontaneous, less permanent, irrational, and cruel than a state-organized organization of violence. By the time the Soviet Union was officially founded at the end of 1922, the dictatorship had already been installed.

Lenin was perhaps the best power politician of his lifetime; there is no doubt about his intelligence and his clarity, nor about his ruthlessness. Even his later critical writings on bureaucratization indicate that he could also have been a critic of the Russian situation, of which the Bolsheviks were a part. Despite all his criticism of Kautsky, Lenin was also a Marxist social democrat. Their vision of society – with the "Communist Manifesto" behind it – was centralization and socialization of labor as a prerequisite for a classless society. The Bolsheviks ultimately truncated this program of all those aspects of Marx that make him appear as a "theorist of anarchism" (Maximilian Rubel): the free association of producers, the abolition of hierarchical division of labor, the end of wage labor and alienated labor.

Catching up on industrialization

Lenin was already the theorist and practitioner of catch-up industrialization. Peasant interests, which in Russia were by no means solely expressed in a selfish, proprietary way, but were also partly community-oriented, were perceived only as hindering industrialization. The violent requisition of agricultural products was not merely due to the imposed civil war after the First World War, but resulted from a contempt for peasant life, which in turn produced momentous reactionary responses on the part of the peasants. Reading texts by Trotsky and – less so here – Lenin on the peasant question, the transitions from Leninism to Stalinism become very clear. The council communist Willi Huhn convincingly demonstrated this in his work "Trotsky – The Failed Stalin" (1973): After Trotsky's disempowerment, Stalin adopted his hyperindustrialization policy, which Bukharin had opposed internally and at least cushioned by Lenin.

Lenin strove for a "New Man," one that would be neither the bourgeois property owner nor the immature, illiterate peasant. With this, he spoke from the heart of many young peasant workers in Russia, who had still come from the confines of patriarchal village life and had experienced the factory world. The city was better than the village, the factory better than the field. But many of the initially enthusiastic Bolshevik industrial workers ultimately rebelled against being largely subjected to a militarization and Taylorization of labor without genuine unions. The transformation of factories into barracks and the disempowerment of independent union workers' representation took place under Lenin's rule.

The smallest margins

If Karl Marx still holds fascination today, it is through his early writings, which proclaim unalienated labor, a diverse, self-determined life, and true individuation. In their early days, Lenin and early Bolshevism also had lofty utopias of a New Man. But this man was to be so consistently welded to technology and industry, and only find himself in it, that all the liberal utopian ideas Marx promised for the era after the authoritarian transitional society were broken – in the name of historical necessity. Certainly: there was no time, no resources, and too many enemies for utopianism. When Lenin pronounced: "Perish or charge ahead at full steam? That is the question posed by history," it becomes clear the tragedy in which Lenin, too, was caught as a revolutionary. Ultimately, the revolutionary Bolsheviks were also personally concerned with survival. The civil war narrowed the scope for maneuver immeasurably.

We or they

At the same time, in Lenin's thinking, the civil war was the complexity-reducing machine of the us-or-them paradigm. At the end of the civil war, the revolutionary process had not deepened, nor had it spread to the West; a military expansion into Poland had failed. In Germany, a brief revolutionary window opened again only in 1923: too brief and unsuccessful.

The civil war had revealed the dictatorial face of the Bolshevik Revolution more clearly, but the first ugly traits of this grimace had already appeared before the civil war. Nothing legitimizes the massacre of revolutionaries like the one in Kronstadt in 1921 in the spirit of any kind of realism. Perdition or repressive consolidation of power against all sides? As an alternative to perdition, the Bolsheviks might have had the option of obtaining exile in Switzerland or Mexico. The world would have been spared the fact that communism is today associated with camp rule and party dictatorship. However, the capitalist world would also have been spared the oppressed and subjugated sections of the population, with the myth of the Russian Revolution and Lenin in mind, rebelling against their colonial oppression or their exploitation in the factory halls.

Today's leftists should be aware of this dialectic. They can point to the very practical effects of a myth as a positive. After all, the antagonism persists – even after the collapse of real socialism and despite the toppling of many a statue of Lenin.