April 22 is the 125th anniversary of the birth of the leader of the Russian Revolution, V.I. Lenin. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is increased debate over Lenin's contribution to the movement for socialism, and the relevance of Leninism today. This article is abridged from the text of the second Jim Percy Memorial Lecture.
Socialists who want to study and learn from the experiences of previous revolutionaries often have to push past the ideological barricades and warning signs erected around the political heritage of the socialist movement: "Danger! Do not touch! This ideology has passed its use-by date."
This has been made easier because a perversion of "Marxism-Leninism" has been used to justify the horrendous crimes of the Stalinist bureaucracies. Now most of those regimes have collapsed or, as in China, seem determined to manage the return of capitalism.
But the ideas, political method, and experiences contained in the work of Marx, Engels and Lenin have very little to do with the sterile dogma of the Stalinist regimes. In fact, they offer us essential tools with which to understand and abolish Stalinism.
Why study Marxism-Leninism and not just Marxism? Some who call themselves " Marxist" expressly reject not only Lenin's unique and valuable contribution to the thought and practice of the socialist movement but also (and this is most important) the need to use and test Marxism in the process of trying to change the world.
There are many "Marxist scholars" who would prefer that Marx's revolutionary ideas be kept safely locked away in museums and libraries, in the section on "Nineteenth Century European History". Lenin upset quite a few of these types when he vigorously applied the ideas of Marx and Engels to early 20th century politics. The mild professors and reformist politicians of that time tried their best to sever the ideas of Lenin from those of Marx, and today some of their arguments are being resurrected.
There are some common themes:
What did Lenin stand for that makes him the target of such concerted attack?
A clear and concise presentation of Lenin's main thought is provided in George Lukacs' little book Lenin: A study in the unity of his thought, published in 1924. In a 1967 postscript to this book, Lukacs warned his readers to approach Lenin's work "in the spirit of Lenin". This meant being careful to understand Lenin's writings, arguments and actions in historical context and always to take into account new conditions when trying to apply them. If you do this, wrote Lukacs, Lenin's work, " especially the method of what he said and did, can still retain a contemporaneity under very changed circumstances".
Lenin's contribution to Marxism, Lukacs explained, was not only to reclaim it from the "vulgar Marxists" and the reformists, but also to develop, concretise and mature the method itself. Lenin brought the theory of Marx and Engels closer to the daily battles of the working class, the agent of socialist revolution.
Our approach to "Leninism" should also be to try to bring it closer to the actual struggles of the working class. Hence our defence of Leninism should be grounded in today's reality, as understood and constantly tested through revolutionary activism.
We can group the main elements of Leninism into four major propositions. These are intimately connected, and Lukacs shows that they stand or fall together.
These four propositions frame the debate in the movement today. This is not only because our movement has to continually reassess its theory and practice but also because the problems of the actuality of revolution, the agents of social change, class consciousness and state power all confront the movement in real life.
When we assess the nature of the period, it is not just a matter of describing how much our movement is going forward or backwards. In a revolutionary period, it is possible to suffer defeats. Lenin never believed that being in a revolutionary period gave revolutionaries an automatic ticket to victory.
Are we still living in an epoch of wars and revolutions?
If we answer this question with a global perspective and not with the narrow and blinkered vision of people privileged to be temporarily sheltered, we have to concede that this is still the nature of the period. Those wanting to believe otherwise had better not read the papers, switch on the news or travel overseas.
Imperialism is as real as ever. Global inequality now meshes with an ecological crisis that threatens human survival. Famine coincides with massive food surpluses, and new diseases and diseases once thought to have been eliminated plague the Third World and even the wealthiest countries. And wars are certainly a constant feature of life in the 1990s.
None of these symptoms of capitalist decay mean that capitalism is going to collapse of its own accord. What they do mean is that major conflicts will continue to erupt. And people will continue to struggle against these oppressions and ills.
A revolutionary period does not mean that a revolutionary situation confronts the workers in every country, all the time. It certainly does not confront us today in Australia. Lenin urged revolutionaries to learn to recognise a revolutionary situation and to prepare for them. A revolutionary situation, he said, occurs "when the `lower classes' do not want the old way and the `upper classes' cannot carry on in the old way".
A revolutionary situation involves a complete national crisis, so we will not fail to notice it. But we can fail to be prepared for it.
What Lenin meant by characterising the period as one of wars and revolutions was that its internal dynamic was to keep throwing up revolutionary situations. Some in the socialist movement doubt that new revolutionary situations are going to be thrown up in the 1990s. Yet, ironically, a source of their pessimism is the very fact that we are witnessing so many revolutionary situations developing today in countries where there are not sufficiently prepared revolutionary contingents of the working class - the Balkans, Haiti, Somalia, the Gulf, southern Africa.
Here we also see, in the negative, the importance of Lenin's understanding of the role of the working class in the colonial and semicolonial countries. In the absence of revolutionary working-class parties, the revolutionary momentum is being squandered as bourgeois and petty bourgeois parties inadequately fill the leadership gap.
In the West, the betrayals and retreats by the union bureaucracies are also a source of scepticism about the revolutionary potential of the working class. But since the decline of most of the mass social movements in the West, the underlying importance of the organised working class has once more come to the fore.
The defeats suffered in the late 1980s, in particular the collapse of the Soviet Union and the austerity which capitalist governments have imposed for more than a decade, are an obvious source of demoralisation. These are real retreats and we acknowledge them in any assessment of the period. But to draw the conclusion that revolutionary situations are no longer unfolding would be foolish.
Some jump from the correct observation that the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the neo-liberal offensive means that any revolutionary regime has less room to manoeuvre than before to the false conclusion that revolution is now off the agenda altogether.
So, what do we do? "What is to be done", Lukacs wrote in his little book, is more than the title of Lenin's 1902 book. It is a symbolic title for Lenin's whole literary and political activity. Academics may have been content to stop at understanding what is going on, but for Lenin the question was always posed: what is to be done? Lenin implemented Marx's last thesis on Feuerbach in all his work.
Do we sit and wait for revolutionary situations to unfold, or do we prepare now for that eventuality?
Which way we jump can decisively colour our outlook. For instance, if you take the stance of working to build up the conscious forces, then you might more easily recognise the new battalions of workers which are coming into being as a direct result of capitalism's neo-liberal "solution" to its economic crisis. What the capitalists trumpet as their "solution" ( greater freedom of trade, the forcible opening of markets, globalisation) has also created one of the most spectacular growths in the world's working class for a long time. This underlies the political crises in countries like Brazil, South Korea, Mexico, the Philippines and Indonesia. Combine this with the replacement of older workers by new generations free of the demoralisation suffered by the passing generation, and you can understand the narrowness and short-sightedness of the vision clouded by the immediate retreats.
But what are we to do in the midst of the real retreat and confusion in the working class? Lenin's answer in What Is To Be Done is pretty clear: organise the most conscious (i.e. the "vanguard") elements and pit them in ideological struggle against the consciousness of the rest of the class.
What else should we do? Adapt to the narrow consciousness encouraged by the capitalist ideologues and the immediate reality of individual situations faced by individual workers? That would be a recipe for disaster.
The building of a professional revolutionary party, in a nutshell, is Lenin's solution to the problem of class consciousness.
Engagement with the masses in struggle against capitalism is what separates genuine revolutionaries from sectarians. And in the end, vanguards either prove themselves or else are condemned to irrelevance. In Lenin's own words:
"... it is not enough to call ourselves the `vanguard', the advanced contingent; we must act in such a way that all the other contingents recognise and are obliged to admit that we are marching in the vanguard."
Doesn't the "elitism" of Lenin's vanguard party idea lead to Stalinist tyranny and ultimately to capitalist restoration? Lenin's struggle against the bureaucratisation of the Bolshevik Party - which he carried out from his sickbed - shows us his counter-intuitive answer: Better Fewer But Better (the title of one of his last writings). In other words, tougher selection on the basis of politics of who should be in the party.
Here we see the relationship between political selection and party democracy.
One makes possible the other. Similarly, democracy makes possible centralism and
real unity in action. Unity in action tests our politics and prevents it
ossifying into dogma.
The apparent "broadness" of mass social democratic parties, like the Labor Party, disguise their essentially elitist nature. They might not worry about political selection (except to keep out revolutionaries), but this matters little because of their parliamentarians' "independence" from party policy and their leadership selection based on "marketability" or appointment by cliques.
But what really proves the correctness of Lenin's idea of a revolutionary party is the fact that no revolution has succeeded against capitalism without an organised political vanguard. In Cuba it was the July 26 Movement, in Nicaragua the Sandinista National Liberation Front, in Vietnam the Vietnamese Workers Party, and so on. The point is proven also in the negative: history shows that revolutions without an organised vanguard fail.
Some parts of the movement today - especially those confronting new electoral openings - seem to believe that the capitalist state can be reformed, or at least transformed into a neutral power. Without ruling out the possibility of temporarily neutralising the capitalist state through this or that manoeuvre, in the end the state is a weapon of class rule, and the working class must be prepared to deal with this fact. The alternative is to risk another Chile 1973 or Indonesia 1965.
The new electoral openings demand tactical flexibility, but as Lenin once said, you can't cheat classes. There are certainly no clever ways to trick the old class into giving up its rule.
Often those who challenge this proposition confuse the debate with the debate on whether to use the tactic of armed struggle or insurrection. Others talk of "transition" with deliberate ambiguity - confusing a period of transition to socialism which can follow a revolutionary seizure of power by the working class and its allies, with a transition to power. This latter transition can be nothing other than a political revolution. This act, in which one class rule gives way to another, Lenin said, would be violent not because we like violence but because the ruling class does not like relinquishing its "special weapon of class rule".
Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg and countless Marxists all saw quite clearly that this was the point at which there will be a sharp discontinuity, a necessary clash that gives way to a radical change in the order. In contrast, the transition period that follows the working class becoming the new ruling class was to be, in Marx's and Lenin's view, an evolution in which the new power would wrest by degrees the economy from the capitalists.
The confusion of these two transitions exploits the widespread and legitimate repugnance at Stalinist tyranny of millions of workers around the world. So we see the counterposition of a supposedly "statist" Leninist revolution to some vaguely defined mass-driven democratisation, a process that is supposed somehow to operate with the capitalists looking on benignly while holding on to their state.
First let us clear Leninism of the charges of "statism" in the transition to socialism. Lenin's vision of this transition was similar to, if more concrete, than Marx's. Before October 1917, Lenin predicted that, especially given the backwardness of Russia, there would have to be a long period of transition. But the first socialist revolution soon confronted civil war and military intervention from the Western imperialist powers. The Bolsheviks were forced to introduce "war communism", subordinating everything to the military needs of the threatened revolution. But later, when the civil war was won, Lenin urged the return to a gradual transition to socialism through the New Economic Policy.
The over-centralised, "commandist", economy that Stalin instituted after Lenin's death, and which became the trademark of all Stalinist regimes, had nothing to do with Lenin's idea of the transition.
Some of the sections of the socialist movement hide their rejection of revolutionary politics with the claim that they want to avoid an over- centralised state-dominated system. But ironically, they have ended up with prescriptions for building socialism without a revolution but with extensive help from the capitalist state - through welfare programs, tripartite arrangements, industry policy. All they offer is more "statist" prescriptions based on utopian expectations of the capitalists' state.
The result of such tactics, as we have seen under the Accord, is at best the demoralisation of the working class and its allies and the alienation from the parties that stand for such a course as it becomes clearer that the capitalist state is using such programs for its own end.
The most likely course of those refusing to recognise the class nature of the state will be to accommodate to capitalism. This position has been taken to its logical conclusion in the debate in the FMLN. Joaquin Villalobos, leader of the ERP, argues:
"... there cannot be political pluralism without economic pluralism; it's the existence of different economic sectors and their relation to forms of property that determine political currents. To negate an economic sector or social class their right to exist, is to negate democracy. Consequently, if one is anti-capitalist, one cannot be seriously democratic ..."
Much of the confusion in the movement arises out of an over-reaction to the overly militarist, guerillaist or bureaucratic traditions most sections of the movement today are trying to break from. They associate Lenin's theory of the state with Stalinist distortions of this theory. They pessimistically conclude that if our movement sweeps away the capitalist state, all we can replace it with is a totalitarian model. And in their search for a more democratic model, they fail to imagine anything beyond a more pure parliamentary democracy.
We know that we will not have socialism without democracy - the ruins of the Stalinist era in Eastern Europe are a constant reminder of this fact. But we won't find a road to socialist democracy through the deceitful rhetoric of parliamentary politicians. All their talk of democracy, Marx once said, is so much "empty noise".
Our alternative is to popularise and promote a new power based on democratic institutions independent of the ruling class (whether called soviets or not). This has the real chance of inspiring, mobilising and enabling the working class to take power in its own right and begin the transition to socialism free of Stalinism and in a qualitative expansion of democracy.
It is important to realise that we are not talking wistfully about the past, or just dreaming about something way into the future. The question of building the new power is a practical here-and-now task. The democratic institutions of the new revolutionary power are not things that will be built only after the revolution, by decree of the revolutionary party. Like the soviets in Russia, they will have to come into being in the struggle against the old order, as necessary instruments of mass revolutionary struggle.
