Lenin's Theory of Revolution for Western Democracies

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Lenin and a theory of revolution for the

West
Written by Sandra Bloodworth
“Do not only show the goal, show the path as well
For so closely interwoven with one another are path and goal
That a change in one means a change in the other,
And a different path gives rise to a different goal.”
ISSUES [1]
– Ferdinand Lassalle, Franz von Sickingen
No.1 Spring 2010 “People who pronounce themselves in favour of the method of legislative reform in
place of and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social
No.2 Autumn 2011
revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same
No.3 Spring 2011 goal, but a different goal. Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new
society they take a stand for surface modifications of the old society.”
No.4 Winter 2012
[2]
– Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution
No.5 Summer 2013
By October 1917 Lenin had theorised the relationship between the ultimate goal of
No.6 Winter 2013
socialism and the path to it. His experiences of workers’ struggles, from the mass strikes of
the late 1890s to the 1905 revolution, and the upsurge of industrial struggles after 1912,
No.7 Summer 2014
had convinced him that:
No.8 Winter 2014
The real education of the masses can never be separated from their independent
No.9 Summer 2015 political, and especially revolutionary, struggle… Only struggle discloses to [the
exploited class] the magnitude of its own power, widens its horizon, enhances its
No.10 Winter 2015 [3]
abilities, clarifies its mind, forges its will.
No.11 Summer
He knew that revolution is not manufactured by revolutionaries; it cannot be brought on at
2016
will. The contradictions in the system which cause economic turmoil, war and the like give
No.12 Winter 2016 rise to social crises which create the conditions for revolution. He understood that not all
workers came to revolutionary consciousness at once, and that the most advanced – the
“vanguard” – needs its own political party. This party must be more than a propaganda
machine; it must intervene to take every struggle to the highest level possible. Out of this
ongoing class struggle such a party can and must train a membership capable of assessing
the political situation, immersing themselves in the working class and leading those around
them. He had theorised the state and the role of the soviets as the basis for a new workers’
state, which was the only basis on which the broad masses could begin the task of building
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[4]
socialism.
The tragic defeat of the Russian revolution and the rise of Stalin’s bureaucratic dictatorship
were to cast a long shadow. The association of Stalin’s one-party state with Lenin’s
liberatory vision – promoted both by Stalin’s acolytes (to give themselves a revolutionary
aura) and by the West (where it suited imperialist interests to confront a monstrous state
which could be said to be the result of a workers’ revolution) – to this day creates doubt in
the minds of many activists who genuinely want to see a better world. The fact that workers
in western Europe, in spite of a wave of massive struggles after 1917, failed to carry
through successful revolutions has also contributed to confusion and doubt about the
possibilities of socialist revolution in the developed democracies.
These doubts and confusions have if anything become more widespread even on the far
left, after three decades of the neoliberal offensive by the capitalist class, the failure of the
working class to offer a serious challenge to this class war from above and the decline and
fragmentation of the left. The terms of debates on the international left over the last few
years have moved a significant distance from the conclusions Lenin came to. Lenin’s own
writings and interventions into the international socialist movement between 1917 and his
tragically early death in January 1924 are a good starting point to defeat those doubts and
confusions. In this article I want to show that they can answer the two questions which cast
that long shadow over Lenin’s contribution to Marxism: did Lenin lead to Stalin, and can
there be a revolution in advanced democracies?
If Lenin was wrong and cannot teach us about socialist revolution, to whom then should we
look? It is inconceivable that today, in a time of demoralisation and disarray, a new
revolutionary theory can be developed. If one is needed it will have to wait until the next
revolutionary challenge by the working class to capitalist rule. Otherwise we would have to
assume most of historical materialism is incorrect, that there is no dialectical relationship
between theory and practice, and that a theory of how to achieve socialism can be the
outcome of good ideas dreamed up in activists’ and writers’ heads, rather than developed in
close relationship with the class struggle.
Many of the discussions of Lenin’s ideas and practice give the impression that he was the
only one who drew these conclusions. But his theory of revolution was the overwhelming
consensus of the Bolsheviks, summarised by Nikolai Bukharin in the program they put to
[5]
the Third International. The arguments against Lenin which Rosa Luxemburg made from
time to time prior to 1917 are cited by some of Lenin’s opponents. If such a great
revolutionary disagreed, this must throw doubt on his ideas. But she came to agree with him
on the fundamental aspects of his theory of revolution. Figures such as Klara Zetkin, Karl
Radek and Leo Jogiches were also in fundamental agreement with Lenin. The arguments
made in the Prison Notebooks by Gramsci, a relatively minor figure at the time, have, since
the 1970s, been held up as the Marxist debunking of Lenin. The truth is, Gramsci’s writings,
both in the Notebooks and his conclusions from the experience of the Biennio Rosso, are in
broad agreement with the thrust of Lenin’s theory of revolution. Georg Lukács, inspired by
the Russian revolution, for a few brief years developed a philosophical defence of Lenin’s
[6]
theory and practice. After years of bitter disputes with Lenin, Trotsky, a figure of great
standing at the time, became a consistent advocate of Lenin, especially as he struggled to
resist the rise of Stalin and to bring about successful revolutions internationally. We have a
2 of 32 12/18/16 8:19 PM
good chance of keeping alive a genuinely revolutionary understanding of the road to

socialism by learning from the heritage they have left us, drawn from the experience of
years when workers came closer to overthrowing capitalism in its heartlands than at any
other time.
An explanation of the degeneration of the revolution matters very much if we are to

understand arguments Lenin made in the last seven years of his life. They can only be
understood in the historical context. Any analysis which assumes a seamless line from
What Is to Be Done to his arguments to take power in October, and to the rise of Stalin,
[7]
cannot make sense of his significant theoretical contributions.
Tragically, when the truth which lay behind the iron curtain could no longer be ignored –
revealed as it was by tanks rolling into Hungary in 1956 to crush a classic working class
revolution which would have thrilled Lenin, then into Czechoslovakia in 1968 to crush the
democracy movement – many on the left were riven with doubt about the very idea of
workers’ revolution and socialism. The starting point is to understand Lenin in the context of
the defeat of the revolution to which he devoted his life. Does the degeneration prove that
Lenin’s ideas are irrelevant? I argue it proves him correct in his understanding of the
historical conjuncture in which he found himself. Therefore his ideas before October 1917
and then in the Third International must be judged as a contribution to the struggle for
socialism by a revolutionary Marxist who, contrary to the cynical portrait so many paint of
him, genuinely stood for human freedom. To that end he argued, following Marx and
Engels, that goal would only be achieved by workers taking power into their own hands,
ideas which permeate his writings to his last letters and article.
[8]
Explaining the rise of Stalin
Most conventional academic history provides a linear narrative in which the role of key
individuals is usually overstated. Anything that happens was pretty much a foregone
conclusion, even if that is only evident in hindsight. And historical events are the result of
ideas and intentions in the participants’ heads. On the other hand, much of what passes for
Marxist history, especially in academia, paints a picture of events driven by economics or
social structures. Neither of these approaches can explain the catastrophe which emerged
from the revolution Lenin and the Bolsheviks had led in 1917. On the one hand, it is argued,
Lenin’s party implemented the increasingly repressive measures, some of which began
while Lenin was alive, which consolidated Stalin’s bureaucratic rule. So Lenin, for all his talk
of freedom, must have always envisioned such a state. Alternatively, he was genuine, but
either power corrupted him, or the rot at the heart of Bolshevism was revealed. All of these
conclusions undermined the idea that socialists should study Lenin’s theory, politics and
practice. For the Stalinists, masquerading as the “orthodox” Marxists, the mantle of
revolution enabled the Communist Parties in the West to maintain a radical veneer. Their
opportunistic (or perhaps in some instances simply misguided) promotion of Stalin’s
monstrous state as the desired outcome of Lenin and the Bolsheviks reinforced the
anti-Leninist arguments in a suffocating vice of obfuscation. Lars Lih, in his monumental
study Lenin Rediscovered, explains in exhaustive detail how the caricature of Lenin’s ideas
and the nature of Bolshevism was nurtured on both sides of the East-West divide during the
[9]
Cold War. Its proponents built on a mythology begun by Lenin’s contemporary opponents.
3 of 32 12/18/16 8:19 PM
To understand the degeneration and ultimate defeat of the revolution we need a dialectical
understanding of the relationship between social, objective circumstances and subjective
intervention by individuals, parties and classes. Trotsky had argued before the 1905
revolution that there could be a socialist revolution in backward Russia. It could not succeed
unless the revolution spread to the capitalist centres of western Europe – which was highly
probable as any revolutionary crisis in Russia would be mirrored in other important capitalist
[10]
centres. Lenin never stated that he came to agree with Trotsky’s theory of permanent
revolution. However his study of world imperialism after 1914 led him to very similar
conclusions. In his April Theses he outlined a program which went well beyond his previous
assumption that the revolution would remain within the bounds of a bourgeois democratic
revolution. Now he argued that the bourgeois provisional government would not and could
not satisfy the demands of the masses, so the workers needed to continue the revolution
and take power through the soviets. The fate of the workers’ state would depend on the
revolutions in the West which he fully expected to follow because of the generalised crisis
caused by the war.
Lenin never hid the fact that he considered that the fate of the revolution depended on
workers’ revolutions in the West. In mid-January 1918 he said in an address to the Third
All-Russian Congress of Soviets, “[w]e have never cherished the hope that we could finish
[the transition from capitalism to socialism] without the aid of the international proletariat.”
Returning to this question in the same speech he stated: “The final victory of socialism in a
[11]
single country is of course impossible.” Trotsky comments in his Permanent Revolution,
written as a polemic against Stalin, that no Bolshevik would have dreamed of any other
view of their prospects in 1918. The defeat of the revolutions which swept across Europe
left the revolution isolated and doomed. Everyone expected that counter-revolution would
come in the form of White armies backed by invading imperialist forces, or the overthrow of
the soviet government by counter-revolutionary Mensheviks or the Socialist Revolutionaries
based on the peasantry. The fact that it was led by an old Bolshevik, using much of the
rhetoric of the revolutionary days, albeit distorted and even turned on its head, has been a
source of profound confusion ever since.
There are clear indications that Stalin overturned the fundamental principles of the
Bolsheviks in order to consolidate his rule, but they are not understood, or at worst,
deliberately ignored. For instance, Stalin’s declaration in 1924 that he would build “socialism
in one country”. The internationalism of the Marxist tradition was trashed in that one slogan.
But the overthrow was not just ideological. In the midst of mass poverty, even mass
starvation, and the terrible destruction caused first by war then civil war – with workers
displaced from factories by either sabotage by capitalists or shortages caused by imperialist
blockade – the population could not assert themselves. During the civil war the soviets
ceased to function. How could they? Organs of workers’ and peasants’ self-rule do not exist
as the result of sheer willpower or in a vacuum. They can only function on the basis of
revolutionary masses engaged in the day to day struggle to defeat their class enemies.
The responsibility for the defeat of the Russian masses lies in part at the feet of Western
socialists who had failed to build revolutionary organisations capable of leading the
revolutions which promised relief for Russia. Whatever mistakes or unsavoury statements
we can find in the written records of Bolshevik activity, whatever repressive measures Lenin
4 of 32 12/18/16 8:19 PM
was prepared to sanction in order to hold on until the German revolution revived the
material basis for workers democracy, none of these are responsible. They are the
consequences of a dire situation, of impending defeat. This is clear if we read the record
honestly and not in order to “prove” Lenin was always an aspiring dictator because he was
for a party and a workers’ state. Trotsky referred in 1937 to a historical fact which should put
paid to the idea that Lenin’s Bolshevik party laid the basis for Stalin, the importance of
which seems beyond the imagination of most mainstream historians and even Lenin’s critics
on the left.
The present purge draws between Bolshevism and Stalinism not simply a bloody line
but a whole river of blood. The annihilation of all the older generation of Bolsheviks,
an important part of the middle generation which participated in the civil war, and that
part of the youth that took up most seriously the Bolshevik traditions, shows not only
a political but a thoroughly physical incompatibility between Bolshevism and
[12]
Stalinism. How can this not be seen?
Lenin after 1917
Those who claim that Lenin began implementing his intended, but previously secret,
undemocratic plans as soon as the Bolsheviks formed a government ignore the historical
context. To argue that the new soviet government could have moved to build socialism is to
accept that socialism in one country, even one as backward as Russia – a reactionary
anti-Marxist concept – is possible. It also ignores Lenin’s actual arguments.
Volume 27 of Lenin’s collected works traces his gradual realisation that the Bolsheviks
could not implement all the programs they had hoped to. At the extraordinary seventh
congress of the party in early March 1918, if Lenin was intent on a one-party dictatorship,
determined to repress the masses, you would expect it to be reflected in his address to this
internal meeting of comrades. Instead he says: “It was the great creative spirit of the
people, which had passed through the bitter experience of 1905 and had been made wise
[13]
by it, that gave rise to this form of proletarian power.” This point is made in various ways
not once, but repeatedly. However he warns against any triumphalist idea that the next
steps in the revolution will be as easy as it was to take power in October. He outlines the
“fundamental differences” between the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions. The
bourgeoisie had gradually built up its economic organisation “in the womb of the old order,
gradually changing all the aspects of feudal society.” Their revolution faced just one task, “to
destroy all the fetters of the preceding social order.” The socialist revolution not only has to
destroy the capitalist order, but also create its own organisation of industry and the
economy. In a backward country like Russia, this means raising the cultural level, basic
things like accounting, coordinating the economy “in such a way as to enable hundreds of
millions of people” to be guided in the project. And the problems are exacerbated by the
effects of the war:
[O]nly by the hard and long path of self-discipline [will] it be possible to overcome the
disintegration that the war…caused in capitalist society,…only by extraordinarily hard,
long and persistent effort [can] we cope with this disintegration and defeat those
[14]
elements aggravating it.
5 of 32 12/18/16 8:19 PM
The second issue which confronted the workers’ state was “the need to solve the
international problems, the need to evoke a world revolution, to effect the transition from our
strictly national revolution to the world revolution. This problem confronts us in all its
[15]
incredible difficulty.” He repeats several times this basic point: “There would doubtlessly
be no hope of the ultimate victory of our revolution if it were to remain alone… I repeat, our
[16]
salvation from all these difficulties is an all-European revolution.” Never, from now until
his death, does Lenin hold out the promise of building socialism in Russia alone. He returns
to this absolute necessity for the German revolution to rescue them another two or three
times in the same address. But it was not an argument to give in to counter-revolution: “This
does not in the least shake our conviction that we must be able to bear the most difficult
[17]
position without blustering.”
His theme, in defending the Brest-Litovsk agreement signed with Germany and violently
opposed by the Left Communists, is to face reality, to recognise the dangers, to avoid
adventures like trying to fight a war with a disintegrating army. “If the European revolution is
late in coming, gravest defeats await us because we have no army, because we lack
organisation, because, at the moment, these are two problems we cannot solve. If you are
unable to adapt yourself, if you are not inclined to crawl on your belly in the mud, you are
not a revolutionary but a chatterbox; and I propose this, not because I like it, but because
we have no other road, because history has not been kind enough to bring the revolution to
maturity everywhere simultaneously.” And finally, “[w]e should have but one slogan – to
learn the art of war properly and put the railways in order… We must produce order and we
must produce all the energy and all the strength that will produce the best that is in the
[18]
revolution.”
In those words we get a glimpse of the contradiction which Lenin would face: the need for
order out of chaos and destruction, while maximising the energy of the masses he always
relied on to make the revolution, when they were starving, facing mass unemployment and
without the means to rebuild industry.
At the end of March Lenin refers to “the extremely critical and even desperate situation the
country is in as regards ensuring at least the mere possibility of existence for the majority of
the population, as regards safeguarding it from famine – these economic conditions
urgently demand the achievement of definite practical results.” The countryside could
possibly feed itself, he says, but only if a distribution system of “the greatest economy and
carefulness” is put in place, “with millions of people working with the precision of
[19]
clockwork”. Lenin had emphasised what he saw as the core of proletarian democracy,
first seen in the Paris Commune and then in the soviets: decision-making and execution of
those decisions are united, unlike in bourgeois society where their separation is seen as
admirable. Now, with the desperate attempts to keep production going, he begins to talk
about having individuals in positions of authority, weakening the core of soviet democracy.
But every time he mentions this, Lenin accompanies it with statements like this one:
[N]aturally, the aspect characterised by discussion and the airing of questions at

meetings prevails over the business aspect. It could not be otherwise, for without
drawing in the new sections of the people into socialist construction…there could be
no question of any revolutionary change. The endless discussions and endless
6 of 32 12/18/16 8:19 PM
holding of meetings – about which the bourgeois press talks so much and so
acrimoniously – is a necessary transition of the masses…from historical somnolence
[20]
to new historical creativeness.
In the same article he returns to this question: “The masses must have to choose
responsible leaders for themselves. They must have the right to put forward any worker
[21]
without exception for administrative functions.”
Both Neil Harding and Lars Lih, two of the most astute and honest biographers of Lenin,
trace the ambivalence of many of Lenin’s formulations from now on. Both chart something
of a disintegration of his usually sharp, coherent thinking. And both understand it in the
[22]
context of the reality he faced. This is a critical point. Because there is contradiction,
ambivalence, unresolvable problems, those with an ideological agenda can find any number
of quotes which paint Lenin as an unrelenting authoritarian. Policies which served
emergency purposes in order to survive until the revolutions in Europe brought help
became entrenched because the rescue never came. And gradually, during the late 1920s,
they became associated with the Stalinist bureaucracy. It is too simplistic to draw a straight
line from the beginning to that end point. As Harding points out:
[P]olicy proposals and organisational suggestions [made in the desperate situation in

1918 when feeding the population looked almost impossible] were to characterise the
entire subsequent attitude of the Bolsheviks towards the economy. Many
commentators assume that they had always been part and parcel of Lenin’s
“organisational scheme”; they had not. They were radical revisions of his initial
project and incompatible with it however desperately Lenin sometimes sought to
[23]
square the circle and make them appear as one.
Gradually Lenin more clearly admitted the measures his government was implementing
were not steps towards socialism, but in fact a retreat. Writing about the employment of
bourgeois specialists at high salaries, he spells it out:
Clearly this measure is a compromise, a departure from the principles of the Paris
Commune and of every proletarian power, which call for the reduction of all salaries
to the level of the wages of the average worker, which urge that careerism be fought
not merely in words, but in deeds…it is also a step backward… To conceal from the
people the fact that [this is a retreat from socialist principles] would be sinking to the
[24]
level of bourgeois politicians and deceiving the people.
His words are not those of someone who either relishes being at the top of a bureaucracy
or who is indifferent to this threat. At the end he states that the more the government has to
resort to using individuals to organise production, “the more varied must be the forms and
methods of control from below in order to counteract every shadow of a possibility of
distorting the principles of Soviet government, in order repeatedly and tirelessly to weed out
bureaucracy.” And he concludes:
[A]n extraordinarily difficult, complex and dangerous situation in international affairs;

the necessity of manoeuvring and retreating; a period of waiting for new outbreaks of
the revolution which is maturing in the West at a painfully slow pace; within the
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country a period of slow construction and ruthless “tightening up”… Try to compare
with the ordinary everyday concept “revolutionary” the slogans that follow from the
specific conditions of the present stage, namely, manoeuvre, retreat, wait, build
slowly, ruthlessly tighten up, rigorously discipline, smash laxity… Is it surprising that
[25]
when certain “revolutionaries” hear this they are seized with noble indignation.
At a meeting with the most active workers in Moscow at the end of April 1918, in a report on
the immediate tasks of the soviet government, Lenin explicitly informs them that they are
really in a holding operation, depending on the German revolution: “Our task, since we are
alone, is to maintain the revolution, to preserve for it at least a certain bastion of socialism,
[26]
however weak and moderately sized, until the revolution matures in other countries.” In
his address to the July 1918 All-Russian Congress of the Soviets, he grasps at any news
that workers are learning how to better administer the economy and takes every opportunity
to urge his audience to keep pushing workers into positions of responsibility. Speaking of
resources put towards organising food for the cities, he argues: “Much still remains to be
arranged, and you can do it if you only have the desire. But through whom, I do not know.
Not through the old officials, surely? Our workers and peasants on the Soviets are learning
to do it (applause).” His address ends on a hopeful note. Steps are being taken to deal with
profiteers, workers are learning from their mistakes and understand the gravity of the
situation. Fair trade with the poor peasants is beginning to be organised, exchanging
discounted textiles for bread. The poor must be the first to benefit. Always he makes an
assessment of the involvement and advances of the masses: “We have made tremendous
strides in the education of the peasants, and they are now no longer novices in the struggle
[27]
for socialism.”
Lenin sounds less harried, whether because he is trying to imbue his audience with the
strength to go on, or because he feels they have made important steps forward. But within
weeks the counter-revolution, which until then had been confined to scattered acts of terror
and sabotage, became a serious threat. In a communication of 20 July to Bolsheviks in
Petrograd, he urges them to send thousands of workers to Moscow or the government will
perish under attack from the Czech troops threatening the city. A week later he sends word
that 60,000 troops in the Kuban are advancing to join up with the Czechs and contingents of
British troops and Cossacks. If Petrograd does not send thousands of workers, the
Bolshevik leaders “will make themselves responsible for the downfall of our whole
[28]
cause.” The civil war had now advanced from a political contest to all-out military conflict.
“Holding on” took on a whole new meaning that would continue until his death because of
the failure of the revolutions in western Europe. In 1923, in one of his last articles, he
combines optimism that the revolution will be victorious with a recognition that, as Lars Lih
puts it:
All socialist Russia had to do was hold out (proderzhat’sia) until the final victory. In
this article of five printed pages Lenin not only uses “hold out” twice, but also employs
words with related meanings and based on the same root (derzhat’) for a total of six
[29]
more times.
The horrors of the civil war are well known. Victor Serge, a libertarian with an eye for the
authoritarianism he abhorred, follows the process during 1918 whereby the hopes of
8 of 32 12/18/16 8:19 PM
October were curbed and modified. He makes it quite clear this was not Lenin’s program,
but the necessary response to imperialist and counter-revolutionary threats beginning days
after the Petrograd seizure of power. His account of the Left Communists in the Bolsheviks,
now named the Russian Communist Party, makes it clear it was not just the “authoritarian”
Lenin who rejected their program. At the Seventh Congress of the RCP at the end of
February 1918, they moved a resolution which stated “It would be in accordance with the
interests of the world revolution, we believe, to accept the sacrifice of Soviet power, which is
[30]
becoming purely formal.” This in itself clarifies the stark choice the workers’ state faced:
accept counter-revolution or hold out. Serge supports Lenin’s reply, in which he said this
statement was “strange and monstrous”, “truly dishonourable”.
Far from improving the chances of the German revolution, he pointed out
commonsensically, the sacrifice of Soviet power would do it considerable harm. Did
[31]
not the workers of Britain become cowed by the defeat of the Commune in 1871?
Serge’s own summary of the Lefts’ position closely parallels Lenin’s critique of them, even
using terms like “childish” which Lenin had imputed to their ideas. If there had been a
libertarian alternative, Serge would have embraced it enthusiastically, but he did not:
The Left Communists’ case was founded…upon deeply rooted feelings: indignation,
sorrow, anger and a tragic pessimism on the future of the revolution, all the more
tragic in that it was mingled with an almost blind enthusiasm which involved a desire
for total sacrifice…expressed in a number of surprising declarations: “If the Russian
revolution…does not flinch, no one can master it or break it”… How was the country
to hold on in reality? A “mobilisation of spirit” was needed… Here a very perceptive
idea was mixed up with a very misleading utopianism…it was childish to argue that
[32]
German technique could be opposed with socialist convictions.
In reply to a comrade who advocated full freedom of speech in 1921, Lenin’s words reflect
the extreme situation they faced. This would not just mean freedom of speech, but freedom
for the bourgeoisie to organise politically, which would mean “making the enemy’s job easier
and helping the class enemy”. This enemy had the support of the encircling imperialists, the
Mensheviks and other powerful forces. “We do not wish to do away with ourselves by
[33]
suicide.”
The Bolsheviks had a choice: leave the masses to the brutality of the Whites, which by then
was well known, or continue to defend the revolution in the hope of revolution in the West.
Serge and others have documented the creeping bureaucratisation of the RCP which
resulted from this defensive situation. As one of the few who witnessed this degeneration
and remained a supporter of the revolution, Serge is clear. In a chapter on “war
communism”, he links the increasing centralisation to the civil war.
The party’s old democratic customs give way to a more authoritarian centralisation.
This is necessitated by the demands of the struggle and by the influx of new
members who have neither a Marxist training nor the personal quality of the pre-1917
militants; the “old guard” of Bolshevism is justly determined to preserve its own
[34]
political hegemony.
9 of 32 12/18/16 8:19 PM
Those who charge Lenin with responsibility for the repressive state apparatus which Stalin
was to build conjure up an image of his ruthless thirst for power and his authoritarian
agenda. They either explicitly or implicitly create the impression that there was a peaceful,
democratic alternative available to him. But as he argued from 1917 until 1924, the fate of
the Russian revolution rested entirely on revolution in the West. There would be no
socialism only within the borders of Russia. But we can agree with him and the rest of the
Bolshevik leadership – and the millions who mobilised for three years to drive out the
imperialists and to defeat the Whites – that they were right to fight in order to hold on. They
could not predict that the revolutions which swept Europe after November 1918 – when
German sailors mutinied and workers’ and soldiers’ soviets were created in Germany –
would all fail.
In spite of the unimaginable suffering of millions as they defended their hope for a new
society against everything the capitalist world could throw at them, the arguments Lenin and
other Bolsheviks made during those terrible years do not represent the core ideas of
Marxism or of Lenin. They are the expression of that holding-on operation. We can leave
the last word on this tragic situation to Rosa Luxemburg, who is often misleadingly invoked
as an opponent of Lenin:
The awkward position that the Bolsheviks are in today, however, is together with most
of their mistakes, a consequence of the basic insolubility of the problem posed to
them by the international, above all the German, proletariat. To carry out the
dictatorship of the proletariat and the socialist revolution in a single country
surrounded by reactionary imperialist rule…that is squaring the circle. Any socialist
party would have to fail in this task and perish… The blame for the Bolsheviks’
failures is borne in the final analysis by the international proletariat and above all by
[35]
the unprecedented and persistent baseness of German Social Democracy.
The relevance of Lenin’s theory of revolution
At the same time as dealing with civil war, chaos, famine and assassination attempts, Lenin
put considerable effort into establishing the Third International, for which he had been
agitating ever since the collapse of the Second International in 1914. Now it was the logical
political conclusion from his conviction that the victory of revolutions in the West were the
only way out for Russia. The first letter of invitation went out days after Luxemburg and
Liebknecht had been murdered in Berlin. The German revolution made the possibility of a
genuine International a reality. The attempts to guide the revolutionaries who had before the
war been inside mass parties with a rhetorical commitment to Marxism, but reformist in
practice, provide us with a rich source of revolutionary theory which remains relevant today.
This is not the place for a history of the Third International; one journal article could not do
[36]
justice to the wealth of knowledge which exists.
Many of the debates in the International’s congresses concerned tactical issues such as
how to implement a united front, what attitude to take to “left” or “workers’ governments”.
And these have been the subject of much debate. How useful are the debates and
decisions in the Congresses of the Third International as a guide to what revolutionaries
should do today? John Riddell, who has done the most to record the history of the early
years of the Third International, makes a valid point in one of the most recent exchanges:
10 of 32 12/18/16 8:19 PM
Lenin’s Comintern is no infallible guide to socialist program and strategy in the

twenty-first century. That said, we must guard against the impulse to turn our backs
on its achievements. The early Comintern is strong on many issues where today’s
Marxism is weak; it engages with issues that today’s Marxism often evades; even its
[37]
errors, often overlooked, are instructive.
In order to judge these debates and take from them what is useful today we need a
compass. What is the goal? If you don’t support workers’ councils taking power, then you
will have a very different assessment of the value of the Comintern debates from someone
who does. How do we define socialism? Is it human liberation, or a more humane version of
capitalism? How can it be achieved? Here I want to outline the theory of revolution which
Lenin articulated and with which the other great revolutionaries of the time grappled, and
test the relevance of their conclusions for this century in light of arguments being made on
the international left today.
In October 1919 Lenin gave a definition of socialism: “the abolition of classes”. And he went
on to spell out the idea central to his thinking: “The dictatorship [of the proletariat] will only
become unnecessary when classes disappear. Without the dictatorship of the proletariat
[38]
they will not disappear.”
Arguments against this position which have gained popularity with some on the international
left today are put forward as new, innovative, and in tune with the modern world. But they
read like nothing more than reworked versions of ideas first promoted in the years
1918-1923 by Karl Kautsky and others in the Independent Social Democratic Party of
Germany (USPD). Murray Smith, one of the most prolific English language promoters of
these ideas, also assumes that the advanced economies differ so radically from Russia that
the experience of 1917 is tantamount to irrelevant. He declares: “There has never been a
socialist revolution in an advanced capitalist country with a more or less long tradition of
bourgeois democracy. Never, nowhere”, as a justification for his argument that the struggle
for socialism will not inevitably involve insurrection in which workers’ organisations take
[39]
power.
But Lenin, Trotsky, other Bolshevik leaders openly talked about the difference between
Russia and western Europe in the debates in the Comintern. In 1919 Lenin wrote: “I have
had occasion more than once to say that it was easier for the Russians than for the
advanced countries to begin the great proletarian revolution, but that it will be more difficult
for them…to carry it to final victory, in the sense of the complete organisation of a socialist
[40]
society.” What Smith should have said is that there has not been a successful revolution
in the advanced countries. France in 1936 and again in 1968, Italy in 1969-1970 for
instance raised the possibility. However, I think his criterion is too restrictive. How many
countries were both advanced economically and had a long tradition of bourgeois
democracy until well after World War II? This criterion leaves us with very little historical
experience on which to draw. Was Chile in 1972-1973 “advanced”? It certainly had a
tradition of bourgeois democracy. Germany might not come up to his definition of having a
tradition of democracy, but Kautsky and others drew a sharp distinction between it and
Russia to justify their position in opposition to the Bolsheviks. The revolutionary upheavals
in Ireland at the end of World War I occurred under a long-established bourgeois
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democracy. Was Italy in 1919-1920 advanced? Bordiga argued that it was qualitatively
different from Russia to justify his ultra-leftism. Spain in the 1930s was a democracy, but not
advanced. The experience of all these failed revolutions provides vital lessons for any
theory of revolution in the advanced countries today – as long as we can take account of
the differences with each country’s experience.
Lenin quickly began to draw conclusions from the German revolution.
Until it had been put to the test, it was still impossible to say what changes, of what
depth and importance, the development of the world revolution would bring. The
German revolution has provided that test. An advanced capitalist country, coming
after one of the most backward, has demonstrated to the whole world in a matter of a
hundred-odd days not only the same principal revolutionary forces and principal
direction of the revolution, but also the same principal form of the new, proletarian
[41]
democracy – the Soviets.
And in his arguments with revolutionaries in the West he regularly refers to the experience
of Russia, drawing out the lessons from the 1917 revolutions which have general relevance.
In “The Third International and its Place in History”, written in April 1919, he points to the
uneven nature of developments, which is to be expected. Not all revolutions will develop
along the same lines or at the same pace. Revolutionaries have to develop the ability to
judge both national and international developments and respond correctly. But it is clear
that the fundamentals do not change: the struggle for workers’ power and no illusions in
[42]
bourgeois democracy. So it tells us nothing to assert, as does Murray Smith, that
socialist“strategy and tactics…will have to be developed in the course of the struggle and
[43]
they will be very different from Russia in 1917.” This is the self-evident conclusion of
Lenin’s theory of revolution. Lenin’s reply to Bordiga in Left Wing Communism, an Infantile
Disorder, written in April-May 1920, is also the answer to Smith:
[T]he unity of the international tactics of the communist working class movement in all
countries demands, not the elimination of variety or the suppression of national
distinctions…but an application of the fundamental principles of communism (Soviet
power and the dictatorship of the proletariat). The overthrow of the bourgeoisie; the
establishment of a Soviet republic and proletarian dictatorship – such is the basic
[44]
historical task [in the advanced countries].
Lenin’s argument just as easily applies across time as it does to geographical space as long
as capitalism remains the mode of production.
In Russia, the dictatorship of the proletariat must inevitably differ in certain particulars
from what it would be in the advanced countries, owing to the very great
backwardness and petty-bourgeois character of our country. But the basic forces –
and the basic forms of social economy – are the same in Russia as in any capitalist
[45]
country, so that the peculiarities can apply only to what is of lesser importance.
Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci and Luxemburg, drawing on the experience of revolutions in the
advanced European countries, concluded that parliamentary democracy was the mode of
capitalist rule, a bourgeois dictatorship. And the soviets, or the “conciliar system” as it was
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called in Germany, represented the foundation on which a new society could be built. These
two systems represent rule by different classes and so they cannot coexist indefinitely.
Lenin’s theory of revolution
To understand Lenin’s arguments after 1917 and his debates about revolution in the
developed democracies, it’s useful to sum up the different elements of Lenin’s theory and
practice which, when taken together, constitute a coherent theory of revolution.
The arguments for soviets, workers’ power, revolution and insurrection rest on a
fundamental thesis first put forward by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology. In order
to establish socialism, they argued, “the alteration of people on a mass scale is necessary,
an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; the revolution
is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other
way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding
[46]
itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew”.
There is an assertion by a section of the left today that mass disillusionment with the old
reformist parties means the distinction between reform and revolution is no longer relevant.
This is to seriously misunderstand the material roots of reformist ideas. For one thing,
reformism is only one specific version of bourgeois ideology. The influence of these ideas
does not rely on mass reformist parties alone. In any case, even where unions have been
seriously weakened, the trade union bureaucracy still has influence capable of keeping
alive reformist illusions, or at least keeping a lid on spontaneous outbursts of struggle. The
response to the devastating austerity programs of the European ruling classes is a graphic
reminder of this influence.
A theory of revolution needs to be grounded in an understanding of the influence of

bourgeois ideology, because a transition to a society of freedom has to involve destroying
its influence. Why do workers accept ideas which justify their own exploitation, which
naturalise oppression and keep their rulers in power? Lenin did not explicitly articulate a
theory about this question. However his practice flowed from the Marxist theory of
consciousness. In Capital Marx discusses how the market and the commodities sold on it,
while created by humans, dominate our lives and obscure how society works. The feeling of
powerlessness this breeds means workers defer to authority figures and therefore are
prone to accept ideas propagated by them. Lukács called two dialectically related
processes – commodity fetishism and alienation – reification.
There is both an objective and a subjective side to this phenomenon. Objectively a

world of objects and relations between things springs into being (the world of
commodities and their movements on the market). The laws governing these
objects…confront [us] as invisible forces that generate their own power…
Subjectively…a worker’s activity becomes estranged from himself, it turns into a
commodity which, subject to the non-human objectivity of the natural laws of society,
[47]
must go its own way independently of people just like any consumer article.
Workers therefore tend to accept bourgeois ideas, including reformism, not because they
are stupid or uneducated. It’s not that they’re just duped by the media or reformist parties,
but because of very real, material circumstances inherent in the structure of the capitalist
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economy. Any explanation of how workers can become class conscious and the subject of
history must, then, look to the structures of capitalism. The contradictions inherent in the
system, the ceaseless “revolutionising of the means of production”, create recurring crises
which have the potential to bring workers into ever sharper confrontation with their
employers and the capitalist state. These crises reveal that there is nothing “normal” about
the rule of the market and raise the possibility of revolution. Lenin was always clear that
revolutionaries do not make revolutions, they need to be organised and prepared to lead
the masses when they enter revolutionary struggle. Once workers break the chains of
passivity and acceptance, as Marx famously concluded in the Theses on Feuerbach,
workers change themselves.
The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and
that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed
upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator
must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to divide society into two
parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of
circumstances and of human activity or self-change [Selbstveränderung] can be
[48]
conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionising practice.
Mass struggles, by ripping away the veil of mysticism which surrounds our lives, by
breaking apart the sense of powerlessness which crushes workers into subservience, raise
the possibility of revolutionary consciousness.
As early as 1895, Lenin had concluded that workers learnt most from struggle. In a draft
program for the social democrats he drew out this point: “The mass of working folk learn
from [the] struggle, firstly, how to recognise and to examine one by one the methods of
capitalist exploitation… By examining the different forms and cases of exploitation, the
workers learn to understand the significance and the essence of exploitation as a whole,
learn to understand the social system.” And in the process of struggle they “learn to
understand the need for and the significance of organisation.” As the struggle widens, it
[49]
“develops the workers’ political consciousness.” This would be a theme in Lenin’s
writings until his death. In 1915, addressing students in Zurich, he said: “Only struggle
educates the exploited class. Only struggle discloses to it the magnitude of its own power,
[50]
widens its horizon, enhances its abilities, clarifies its mind, forges the will.” This is the
answer to the problem of bourgeois ideas such as reformism. In her book The Mass Strike,
Rosa Luxemburg celebrated the spiritual and cultural development of the workers in the
strikes which swept the Russian empire in 1905.
In his Prison Notebooks Gramsci outlined an aspect of consciousness which is an important

addition to Marx, Lenin and Lukács. It takes account of the fact that workers enter the
struggle with mainly reformist ideas.
The active person-in-the-mass has a practical activity, but has no clear theoretical
consciousness of their practical activity… Their theoretical consciousness can indeed
be historically in opposition to their activity. One might almost say they have two
theoretical consciousness (or one contradictory consciousness); one which is implicit
in their activity and which in reality unites them with all their fellow-workers in the
practical transformation of the real world; and one, superficially explicit or verbal,
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which they have inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed. But this verbal
conception is not without consequences. It holds together a specific social group,
influences moral conduct and the direction of will, with varying efficacy but often
powerfully enough to produce a situation in which the contradictory state of
consciousness does not permit of any action, any decision or any choice, and
produces a condition of moral and political passivity. Critical understanding of self
takes place therefore through a struggle of political “hegemonies” and of opposing
[51]
directions.
This also strengthens the argument for a revolutionary (vanguard) party, so that the most
advanced workers can play a vital role in that struggle between different currents of thought
in the workers’ movement.
Genuine class consciousness is more than just understanding that this is a class society.
Gramsci’s definition of class consciousness was the “precise consciousness” of a class of
[52]
“its own historical identity”. Workers need to understand that as a class they are capable
of running a new society and that they can defeat their present rulers. In practice, Lenin saw
genuine class consciousness in these terms (although he used the term loosely all the
time). For instance, in 1917, some of his most urgent agitation was for the Bolsheviks to
imbue workers with a sense of their own ability to run society, not to trust the government,
that they had to take power through their own organisations. As Gramsci puts it: “The unity
of theory and practice is not just a matter of mechanical fact, but a part of the historical
process.” A feeling of independence can mature and progress “to the level of real
[53]
possession of a single and coherent conception of the world.”
From late 1917 and during 1918 Lenin repeatedly returns to the concept of socialist
consciousness – as opposed to a class consciousness, which is learned by industrial
struggle, and political consciousness developed by taking up political issues and dealing
with the violent reactions of the ruling class to workers’ struggles. Workers could only
develop socialist consciousness by the struggle to defend the workers’ state, learning to
administer the tasks of the state and organise the economy, thereby developing a
confidence in their own creativity and ability to run society. “Creative activity at the grass
roots is the basic factor of the new public life… Socialism cannot be decreed from above. Its
spirit rejects the mechanical bureaucratic approach; living, creative socialism is the product
[54]
of the masses themselves.” Neil Harding sums up Lenin’s thinking on this issue well
when he points out that for Lenin, workers’ involvement in running society themselves and
dealing with ruling class parasites and saboteurs was “the means to attain the goal and the
[55]
goal itself.
Murray Smith dismisses “a strategy based on seizing state power from the outside” in which
case “you seize power through insurrection and build a new state power”, because we know
from Russia that it “was not so easy”. So by implication, his strategy which is “based on a
conquest of power through universal suffrage and therefore occupation of the state” would
be easy. He admits we don’t know if it can be done, but “the hypothesis would be that a
government would come to power, would begin taking measures in the interest of those
who had elected it, begin to make inroads into capitalist power and property, and also begin
to transform the state. It would certainly encounter resistance from within the state and from
15 of 32 12/18/16 8:19 PM
[56]
without, from within the country and without, and would need to mobilise its social base.”
Ed Rooksby, in an ongoing debate in the publications of the British Socialist Workers Party,
echoes Smith’s and others’ arguments. The road to socialism will be mass mobilisations to
force a “left” or “workers” government to implement so-called “revolutionary reforms”. In
Smith’s hypothesis, “forms of popular self-organisation based on workplaces and
neighbourhoods would appear, not in a confrontation with the state but in support of their
[57]
government, even with some inevitable elements of friction”.
Not to take power, not to take control into their own hands, just to support a parliamentary
government. See how this jars when compared with how revolutionaries who thought
self-emancipation was the only basis for socialism spoke of the working masses involved in
actual revolutions. Smith and Rooksby give no explanation of how the mass of workers, let
alone the masses from the middle classes who surround them, would develop the
consciousness to make them capable of transforming society. Gramsci’s attack on those
who lack confidence in workers to take control comes to mind: “They see the workers as the
material instruments of social transformation rather than as the conscious and intelligent
[58]
protagonist of revolution.”
Winning proletarian hegemony
Lenin spells out how the class struggle continues after the revolution; that while weakened,
the bourgeoisie in Russia is far from defeated. And the working class has to continue to
attempt to lead the petty bourgeois masses, to “give leadership to the vacillating and
unstable [social elements]”. Gramsci would later theorise this as winning “hegemony”. This
ongoing struggle, argues Lenin, shows “how unutterably nonsensical and theoretically
stupid is the common petty-bourgeois idea shared by all representatives of the Second
International, that the transition to socialism is possible ‘by means of democracy’ in general.
The fundamental source of this error lies in the prejudice inherited from the bourgeoisie that
[59]
‘democracy’ is something absolute and above classes.” We should note here that Lenin
is not just talking about Russia. He is making a general point about the nature of the
struggle for socialism; it must involve first the overthrow of the ruling class, and second the
establishment of working class hegemony and power.
For all the fetishisation of the concept of hegemony in discussions of Gramsci, it is most
often misrepresented. Distorted accounts of his position are employed to legitimise the
argument that the key struggle for socialists is not a direct assault on state power, but the
struggle for ideological hegemony over civil society. This is a long drawn out process, a “war
of position” which in practice leads to limiting potentially revolutionary class struggle as
premature. Actually, Gramsci argues in the Prison Notebooks that the totality of civil society
and the state apparatus forms an “integral state” which ensures the continuing hegemony of
the ruling class. “In actual reality civil society and State are one and the same.” And he
argues that, confronted with this integral state, the working class must fight for ideological
dominance over other social layers which can potentially be allies. Ultimately it will need
mass forces which can impose its domination over its enemies by a revolutionary seizure of
power. And, like Lenin, Gramsci thought workers would win this hegemony in the class
struggle, not simply by propaganda. Even when the war of position plays a predominant
part, Gramsci speaks of a “partial” element of the war of manoeuvre. It may play a “more
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[60]
tactical than strategic function.” At any time there can be an outburst of struggle, initiated
by either side in which their relative strengths are tested; or perhaps one side may inflict
something of a defeat on the other, changing the place they occupy in the trenches of the
war of position.
Lenin and Gramsci – for all the attempts to use Gramsci’s writings to insist there is little to
be learnt from Lenin – had essentially the same fundamental theory of revolution. There is
nothing to suggest Lenin would have disagreed with Gramsci when he wrote that “the
supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as ‘domination’ and as ‘intellectual
[61]
and moral leadership’.” In his summary of the history of the Bolsheviks in Left Wing
Communism, Lenin’s account of preparation for revolution, the period of reaction after 1907
and the years of the war is dominated by ideological clarification and the struggle to defeat
non-revolutionary theories. Even the months between February and October in 1917 were
spent making arguments to the mass of workers to win them away from the influence of the
[62]
Mensheviks and others.
These years of propaganda and theoretical work prepared for revolution. Lenin’s discussion
of the sharp reorientation any revolutionary party must make when revolution is on the
agenda does not contradict Gramsci, but in fact confirms the similarity in their positions:
“[W]hen it is the question of practical action by the masses, of the disposition, if one may so
put it, of vast armies, of the alignment of all the class forces…for the final and decisive
battle, then propagandist methods alone…are of no avail… In these circumstances one
must count in tens of millions. In these circumstances we must ask ourselves…whether the
historically effective forces of all classes…are arrayed in such a way that the decisive battle
is at hand.” For that, the mass of the proletariat must see the bankruptcy of the ideas of the
petty bourgeoisie and the necessity for determined revolutionary action must have
[63]
“emerged and grown vigorously”.
Gramsci’s writings about civil society have encouraged the idea that the main struggle is
against the church, the education system, the media. The ideas propagated by them do
have to be combated. But once workers move into struggle the biggest danger comes from
reformist and centrist ideas propagated by those who are supposed to be on their side.
They feed that lack of confidence rooted in the very structures of capitalism and create
hesitations which open up the opportunity for the bourgeoisie to unleash counter revolution.
After a year of failed revolutions in western Europe, Lenin was acutely aware of this. Just
one typical passage will suffice as illustration.
One of the necessary conditions for preparing the proletariat for its victory is a long,
stubborn and ruthless struggle against opportunism, reformism, social-chauvinism,
and similar bourgeois influences and trends, which are inevitable, since the
proletariat is operating in a capitalist environment. If there is no such struggle, if
opportunism in the working-class movement is not utterly defeated beforehand, there
[64]
can be no dictatorship of the proletariat.
Dictatorship of the proletariat
Lenin had by then polemicised bitterly and relentlessly against Kautsky and the USPD. In
an article “The proletarian revolution and the renegade Kautsky”, published in Pravda on 11
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October, 1918, he had begun to clarify “a question of the utmost importance, the question of
the relation between the dictatorship of the proletariat and ‘democracy’.” Because “it is here
[65]
that Kautsky’s complete break with Marxism is particularly evident.” In his better known
pamphlet The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, Lenin emphasised that
“the dictatorship of the proletariat…is a question that is of the greatest importance for all
countries, especially for the advanced ones… One may say without fear of exaggeration
[66]
that this is the key problem of the entire proletarian class struggle.”
In popular discourse, it is not generally appropriate to talk of dictatorship of the proletariat.

But for the purposes of a serious discussion of the question of revolution and workers’
power it remains a clarifying concept. Lenin returns to this question repeatedly, raising
issues which remain relevant today. The crux of Lenin’s attack on Kautsky is that he
misrepresents the Marxist understanding of the state because “he takes every opportunity
to energetically preach ‘the democratic instead of the dictatorial method’.” This
counterposition “is a complete renunciation of the proletarian revolution, which is replaced
by the liberal theory of ‘winning a majority’ and ‘utilising democracy’!” Kautsky has rejected
the need for workers “to ‘smash’ the bourgeois state machine.” He “has renounced Marxism
by forgetting that every state is a machine for the suppression of one class by another, and
that the most democratic bourgeois republic is a machine for the oppression of the
[67]
proletariat by the bourgeoisie.”
Smith and Rooksby do not explain what a reforming government and mass mobilisations
could do to avoid the inevitable state violence and political mobilisation by the capitalist
class. Smith predicts that “[i]n the best of cases, the two elements, the government and the
[68]
mass movement would mutually reinforce each other.” Typically, Smith asserts this as a
possible scenario, but cannot point to one “left” or “workers” government which even
supported and encouraged revolutionary mobilisations by workers, let alone any which tried
to carry through the transition to socialism. Every such government has played a key role in
defusing the mass movement and ensuring the preservation of capitalist rule. The German
reformists and centrists of the SPD and USPD formed a government in 1918. They used
their positions as politicians to sow confusion by blurring the distinction between bourgeois
and proletarian democracy. They participated in the process of building armed militias which
became the basis for the Frei Korps which marched around Germany crushing strike
movements, uprisings and protests. Four and a half years later, in 1923, a so-called
“workers’ government” was formed in Saxony. Brandler, a key Communist Party (KPD)
leader, against his better judgement, entered this coalition with the SPD. When troops were
moved in to crush it, the SPD threatened to walk out if Brandler called for a general strike,
paralysing the revolutionaries. The twentieth century was plagued by similar betrayals. The
Popular Front government in Spain in 1936, which refused to arm the working class in
response to Franco’s military uprising; in France in 1936 the Popular Front government
moved to defuse the mass upheaval which brought it to power; Allende’s Popular Unity
government in Chile in 1973, backed up by the Communist Party, took generals into the
cabinet as they prepared their coup.
In Hungary and Bavaria in 1919, bourgeois power virtually collapsed and “workers’
governments” formed. The main participants in these governments were revolutionaries. In
Bavaria, the revolutionary Leviné argued that the government must arm the working class
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and begin the process of establishing workers’ councils based in the workplaces as the
basis for genuine workers’ power. Anything short of this, he argued, would end in counter-
revolution. He rightly refused to join the government with centrists and reformists who he
knew would refuse to carry out these tasks. In the event both revolutions were crushed
because the revolutionaries failed to establish workers’ states. Leviné’s position was similar
to the one Lenin had adopted in the final months of 1917. The Kerensky government, even
if it only included the workers’ parties, had to be replaced by soviet rule. The most Lenin
would countenance was to be a loyal opposition if and as long as the government began
implementing major demands of the masses. In any case, history shows that revolution may
or may not be sparked by the election of a “workers” government, but it is not by any means
the general rule. The German revolution of 1918 to 1923 began with sailors’ mutinies and
the creation of workers’ and soldiers’ councils. Italy’s Biennio Rosso of 1919-1920 and
again the Revolution in Slow Motion of 1969-1970 were both the result of factory
occupations and mass strikes. In France 1968 student rebellions sparked mass strikes
which put revolution on the agenda.
Formulations by Smith and others imply that if the movement just keeps inching forward
with “revolutionary reforms”, the capitalists will be driven back, even if they are “hostile”.
They seem to assume the masses provide some orderly army which will act at the behest of
an elected government. Or, even more unrealistically, that the government will respond
positively to initiatives by the masses. This ignores the actual history of the crises, ruptures,
partial victories and setbacks which are inevitable in any revolutionary process as capitalists
respond and reformists intervene. All the historical evidence shows that governments and
mass movements did not just reinforce each other in revolutionary situations. And the
nature and role of bourgeois democracy and parliament as compared with workers’ own
institutions of democracy has become a vital question. The example of Germany will suffice
as illustration. An account of any of the revolutionary situations I have mentioned would
serve, not in any way to contradict, but to reinforce the point.
In Germany, Luxemburg and the Spartacists struggled to form the KPD in the midst of the
first revolutionary upsurge at the end of 1918. Then they floundered when workers
mobilised in January 1919. Luxemburg correctly opposed calls for insurrection as
premature; but, unlike Lenin in July 1917, she lacked an organisation with roots among the
masses which could have given her the authority to help minimise the offensive and lead
workers in an orderly retreat. Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Jogiches and others paid with their
lives, leaving an inexperienced party to deal with tumultuous events. In March 1920, right
wing generals sent General Kapp to Berlin to bring down the SPD government. It had only
been tolerated to prevent a Communist takeover; now the SPD had served its purpose. The
KPD faltered. It opposed calls for strikes and so was sidelined by a massive response by
the working class, missing an opportunity to strike a decisive blow against the old regime.
Then in March 1921, a newly confident KPD with a mass membership lurched into an
ultra-left adventure. They urged workers to arm for an insurrection. Untrained in the politics
of the united front, they declared “who is not with us is against us”.
Tragically, non-communist workers did not respond, giving the SPD and its bourgeois
backers the evidence they needed to paint the KPD as divisive wreckers, creating the
atmosphere for full-blown counter revolution. In the growing crisis of 1923, the KPD
leadership, lacking confidence to take the lead and call on workers to go on the offensive
19 of 32 12/18/16 8:19 PM
and prepare for an uprising, let a revolutionary situation gradually dissipate. Brandler’s
participation in the government built illusions among workers that the government would
solve the crisis for them, breeding passivity just when they needed to advance. The KPD
could not even defend the government, let alone revive the possibility of insurrection,
sealing the fate of the revolution.
Lenin’s arguments cut through the ideology surrounding bourgeois democracy which
permeated the centrist USPD and which has echoes in the arguments raised by Smith and
others today, on several levels. Kautsky presented the question as “the contrast between
two socialist trends”, that is, Bolshevik and non-Bolshevik, which “is the contrast between
two radically different methods: the dictatorial and the democratic”. Kautsky accuses the
Bolsheviks of “opportunely” taking up one “little word” (dictatorship) used by Marx as
justification for their undemocratic methods. Lenin’s outrage at this “substitution of
eclecticism and sophistry for dialectics” is palpable. The degree to which Marxism had been
misinterpreted and misrepresented in the Second International went well beyond the
despicable sell-out of 1914. Now Kautsky was denying the need for proletarian revolution
and the suppression of the capitalist exploiters. Lenin’s detailed refutation of every aspect of
Kautsky’s fudging and misstatement of the issues is fascinating reading, his anger
permeates his polemic. He revisits the experience of the Paris Commune and the
conclusions Marx and Engels drew from it – which he had rediscovered when he returned
[69]
to Marx and Engels after 1914 and spelt out in his pamphlet The State and Revolution.
Lenin does not fudge the fact that workers need to crush their bourgeois exploiters. He had
summed up the key questions in the earlier, shorter piece in Pravda. All states exist for the
suppression of one class by another. It is not possible to “have liberty, equality and so on
where there is suppression. That is why Engels said: ‘So long as the proletariat still needs
the state, it does not need it in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its
adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such
ceases to exist.’ Bourgeois democracy…is always narrow, hypocritical, spurious and false;
it always remains democracy for the rich and a swindle for the poor. Proletarian democracy
suppresses the exploiters, the bourgeoisie – and is therefore not hypocritical, does not
promise them freedom and democracy – and gives the working people genuine
democracy.”
The examples he gives of what Russian workers did to ensure their democracy are easily
imagined in a modern democracy. Things such as taking mansions away from the
bourgeoisie (today, instead of palaces, it could be huge convention centres and hotels),
without which freedom of assembly is sheer hypocrisy; taking the print-shops and stocks of
paper away from the capitalists, without which freedom of the press for workers “is a lie”;
and replacing the bourgeois parliament with the “democratic organisations of the Soviets,
[70]
which are a thousand times nearer to the people and more democratic”.
In the Pravda article he demands that Kautsky “admit that the Soviet form of organisation is
of world-wide, and not only of Russian significance, that it is one of the ‘most important
phenomena of our times’ and that it promises to acquire ‘decisive significance’ [Kautsky’s
words] in the future ‘battles between capital and labour’.” Kautsky’s position “that the
Soviets are all right as ‘battle organisations’, but not as ‘state organisations’ is a capitulation
to Menshevism”, the followers of which had at the time mostly joined the counter-revolution
20 of 32 12/18/16 8:19 PM
in Russia. Lenin’s sarcasm gives a sense of how much he despised this kind of fudge by
centrists trying to maintain some credibility as Marxists while abandoning Marxism’s central
propositions in practice.
Marvellous! Form up in Soviets, you proletarians and poor peasants! But for God’s
sake, don’t you dare win! Don’t even think of winning! The moment you win and
vanquish the bourgeoisie, that will be the end of you: for you must not be “state”
organisations in a proletarian state. In fact, as soon as you have won you must break
up!.. Workers of Europe, don’t think of revolution until you have found a bourgeoisie
[71]
who will not hire [political and military reactionaries] to wage civil war on you!
Lenin was determined to convince the revolutionaries in the West that Kautsky’s arguments
did not represent a more democratic road to socialism, were not a more moderate
interpretation of Marxism, but a complete break from Marxism and a betrayal of the fight for
socialism. This was a theme of his intervention into the First Congress of the Third
International in March 1919. By then he had the concrete experience of the failed German
revolution and the murder of two of Europe’s greatest revolutionaries in the debacle. If
anything was to be rescued for the world’s workers, the argument for the workers’ councils
to take power had to be won. In the “Theses on Bourgeois Democracy”, he wrote that those
who present the issues as “non-class or above-class”, in other words, those who do not
distinguish between bourgeois and proletarian democracy but speak of “democracy in
[72]
general” or “dictatorship in general”, have joined the ranks of the bourgeoisie.
Pierre Broué’s wonderful book on the German revolution draws out very clearly how the
arguments of Kautsky and the centrist USPD disoriented revolutionary militants in
[73]
Germany. For all the reasons outlined by Daniel Lopez in this issue, the naturalisation of
bourgeois rule means it is imperative that revolutionaries can provide a clear theoretical and
political alternative for workers finding their way to power. Such an alternative rests on a
rigorous adherence to a class view, explaining issues from the different viewpoints of the
exploiters and the exploited. So Lenin contrasts the Marxist and liberal views of democracy.
The Marxist view is that the state, including a democracy, serves the interests of the
exploiters “as long as there are exploiters who rule the majority”. Therefore the democratic
state is an instrument of their rule. The liberal says “the majority decides, the minority
submits. Those who do not submit are punished. That is all. Nothing need be said about the
[74]
class character of the state…because it is irrelevant.” As Laine pointed out in one of his
questions, Smith sounds more like Kautsky than Marx. Just like Kautsky, he gives lip
service to mass mobilisations, even attributing a role to popular councils while using the
very classless terminology Lenin critiqued: “If the Left is not capable of winning majority
support how is it going to carry out its programme and confront the forces of reaction?” And
the popular – note not workers’ – councils would exist “not in a confrontation with the state
[75]
but in support of their government”, as if the government is separate from the state.
Soviets
A critique of bourgeois democracy and the alternative posed by workers’ revolution invites a
discussion of soviets, or workers’ councils.
Kautsky argued that the soviets played a positive role as combat organisations which
21 of 32 12/18/16 8:19 PM
embraced the whole of the working masses. Indeed the soviet “promises to acquire decisive
importance in the great decisive battles between capital and labour.” What that decisive role
would be is immediately obscured by his argument that the Bolsheviks, only after the
October revolution, “set out to transform the Soviets…into a state organisation”. Lenin
makes three arguments against this. First, Kautsky has not noticed that at least since his
April Theses Lenin had argued that the soviets needed to take power. Secondly, as a matter
of theory, it is not coherent to approve of the soviets as instruments of class struggle but
then oppose them taking power. How else can the working class end the rule of capital and
begin the process of defeating the forces which rally to the old ruling class, while building a
socialist society? Thirdly, at the level of practical politics, it was clear in the Paris Commune
and in Russia that “such an organisation, of its own accord, with the development of the
struggle, by the simple ‘logic’ of attack and defence, comes inevitably to pose the question
point blank.” The Mensheviks, whose arguments Kautsky is mimicking, in fact tried, by
exercising their influence, to use the soviets to subordinate the working class to the
[76]
bourgeoisie.
Lenin was developing his ideas about the soviets well before 1917. After the 1905
revolution, he had outlined the important role the soviets play in drawing the vast mass of
the population behind the working class. The soviets create a forum in which the masses
can participate in debates and discussions about the struggle. They can, and indeed
[77]
should, include non-proletarian forces, to involve them in the revolutionary process. They
are the most profound form of democracy yet seen. Delegates are recallable at any time, a
fact shown by the shifts in Menshevik, Socialist Revolutionary and Bolshevik influence
during 1917. The Bolsheviks lost some of their influence after the July Days. But after their
leading role in the struggle against the Kornilov coup in August, their numbers began to rise
relentlessly, giving them a majority in those which held elections by early September. No
bourgeois parliament can reflect rapidly developing class consciousness like that. So the
soviets are at once forums for political debate by the masses and a vehicle for mass
involvement in the political process; they express the political opinion of the masses. And, in
the final showdown between exploiters and oppressed they provide the structures by which
the working class and its supporters can be involved in first destroying, or “smashing” (the
word Lenin repeatedly used, following Marx and Engels) the existing state machinery, and
then learning to run society themselves.
In early March 1917, in the first of his Letters from Afar, Lenin described the Soviet of
Workers’ Deputies as “the embryo of a workers’ government, the representative of the
interests of the entire mass of the poor…i.e., of nine-tenths of the population, which is
[78]
striving for peace, bread and freedom”. Luxemburg is appropriated as an opponent of
Lenin’s arguments because she criticised the Bolsheviks for abolishing the Constituent
Assembly in January 1918. But a year later, she agreed with the Bolsheviks when she took
on the arguments of Kautsky in the context of the actual revolution. She wrote:
The choice today is not between democracy and dictatorship. The question which
history has placed on the agenda is: bourgeois democracy or socialist democracy…
The dictatorship of the proletariat…means using every means of political power to
construct socialism, to expropriate the capitalist class… A class organisation is
needed to sharpen [the conscious will of workers], to organise this activity: the
22 of 32 12/18/16 8:19 PM
[79]
parliament of the proletarians of town and country.
Like Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg, Gramsci came to see the importance of workers’
councils through his experience. In the occupation of the Turin factories in November 1920
he saw that they could not just be improvised when revolutionaries decided. They are born
as an organ of workers’ struggles in the workplaces. He wrote: “The problem of the
development of the internal commissions…came to be seen as the fundamental problem of
[80]
the workers’ revolution; it was the problem of proletarian ‘liberty’.” And Lukács, in accord
with all the great revolutionaries of the time, wrote one of the best summaries of the
importance of soviets:
As organisations of the entire proletariat (both conscious and unconscious) the

workers’ councils by their mere existence point the way forward beyond bourgeois
society. They are by their very nature revolutionary and organisational expressions of
the growing significance, the ability to act and the power of the proletariat.
As such they are the true index of the progress of the revolution. For everything that
is achieved and attained in the workers’ councils is wrested from the defiant grasp of
the bourgeoisie, and is therefore valuable not simply as a result, but chiefly as a
means of education for class-conscious action.
Attempts to “anchor the workers’ council in the constitution”, to assign them a legally
established field of activity, therefore indicate a new peak in “parliamentary cretinism”.
Legality is the death of the workers’ council…
Legality in any shape or form – i.e. integration into bourgeois society, with precisely
defined limits to its competence – would transform its existence into a sham: the
workers’ council would turn into a cross between a debating society and a poor man’s
[81]
parliamentary committee.
But the soviets alone are not an organisational solution to the problem of hegemony and
revolution. The Bolsheviks had to fight for the leadership of the soviets. Lenin argued
between the July Days and September: “It is not a question of Soviets in general [on which
a new state needs to be built], but of combating the…treachery of the present Soviets”, in
which the moderates had a majority. The tragedy of the German revolution reinforced his
argument. The revolutionary forces were too weak, they lacked a coherent centre and roots
in the masses. And so the reformist SPD and the centrists like Kautsky in the USPD, all
former advocates of socialism, kept control of the majority of workers’ councils, not in order
to win socialism, but in order to turn them into administrative bodies for the re-establishment
[82]
of bourgeois rule.
It was the experience of the confusion created in the German revolution by the arguments
of Kautsky and others in the USPD for the “conciliar” system to be combined with the
parliamentary system which enraged Lenin. “Don’t laugh!” he warns delegates at the Third
International Congress, but there are those who
propose…that the [workers’] councils be combined with the assembly [the

parliament], that the Councils be granted…a certain place in the Constitution. To
reconcile, to unite the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the
23 of 32 12/18/16 8:19 PM
proletariat! How simple! What a brilliantly philistine idea! The only pity is that it was
tried in Russia, under Kerensky, by the united Mensheviks and Socialist
Revolutionaries, those petty-bourgeois democrats who imagine themselves
[83]
socialists.
Expanding on this polemic, he denounced Kautsky and others for “at the crucial moment of
the struggle for socialism…betraying the whole doctrine of the class struggle…renouncing it
completely and actually deserting to the camp of the bourgeoisie”. He argued that “to
describe the soviets as the combat organisation of a class, and deny them the right to
convert themselves into a ‘state organisation’ is actually tantamount to…proclaiming, or
advocating, that the bourgeois machine for the suppression of the proletariat (that is, the
bourgeois-democratic republic…) should remain inviolate; it is actual desertion to the camp
[84]
of the bourgeoisie”.
Lenin focused on the strategic arguments about how workers could win against the
capitalists. Lukács links the experience of the workers’ councils to the way political class
consciousness develops.
The workers’ council spells the political and economic defeat of reification… The
struggle for [a classless society], in which the dictatorship of the proletariat is merely
a phase, is not just a battle waged against an external enemy, the bourgeoisie. It is
equally the struggle of the proletariat against itself: against the devastating and
[85]
degrading effects of the capitalist system upon its class consciousness.
Implications for today
Lenin’s theory of revolution is based on four fundamental premises. If any of them are
removed, the structure of the argument is no longer coherent. First, revolutions are made by
the mass of workers in response to the social and economic crises created by the inherent
contradictions of capitalism. In the struggle, because workers’ acceptance of bourgeois
ideas is rooted in the structures of capitalism, those ideas can begin to be challenged. In
fact, it is only in struggle that masses of workers can begin to become class conscious, i.e.
see their own potential historic role. Secondly, by leading struggles which inspire, the
working class can win hegemony over non-proletarian layers. But they need to be prepared
to use force to impose their will on these classes and to confront the power of the
bourgeoisie. So thirdly, for victory, workers need to destroy, “smash”, the capitalist state
which, even in its most democratic form, serves the interests of the bourgeoisie.Winning
government does not put workers’ parties in power because they do not gain control over
the economic base of capitalist power. As Luxemburg argued, “where the chains of
oppression are forged, there they must be broken”. So fourthly, the only way workers can
take control is through organs of power based in the workplaces, in the profoundly
democratic forms workers themselves discovered in revolutions. They need to understand
that they have to use their power to suppress and defeat the capitalist class and all its
hangers on.
Any dismissal of Lenin’s position requires some serious argument. Not because the
revolutionary left is anywhere in a position to lead a revolution in the short term. But if any
serious revolutionary organisations are to be built, they need a core of revolutionary theory,
24 of 32 12/18/16 8:19 PM
in which a cadre is educated, to provide a guide to action in any future revolutionary

upheavals. To do otherwise is to build an organisation which will repeat the failures of the
past. The argument by Kautsky and other centrists sowed confusion and disarray. The
openly reformist SPD took them up to isolate the KPD as divisive and extreme because
they argued for the councils to be built up as the basis for workers to take power. This
played a key role in the defeat of probably the most important workers’ revolution in history.
With the left in disarray internationally after decades of working class retreat, virtually no
one wants to talk about what an actual revolution would entail. When Corey Oakley wrote in
this journal that“[t]he system of world capitalism that we confront today cannot be
[86]
overturned by any means short of mass insurrection”, leading members of Socialist
[87]
Alliance in their reply scoffed in disbelief; perhaps he didn’t mean it, they declared. Dave
Holmes wrote:
Perhaps the term “mass insurrection” is just a throwaway phrase, but I think it is
wrong and misleading. Toppling capitalism in this country or that may involve an
armed uprising if a dictatorship leaves people with no choice but it certainly doesn’t
have to happen like that. For instance, in France in the almost-revolution of May-June
1968 there was nothing of the sort – the strikes spread everywhere and the
government of Charles De Gaulle was simply left suspended in a void. Had the
revolutionary forces been larger, and had they overcome the anti-revolutionary line of
[88]
the Communist Party…the issue could have been settled very easily.
Very easily! Consider the extreme difficulties workers faced in Germany 50 years earlier
and think of the increased state power and experience in defeating workers’ struggles the
capitalists have in the modern world. Holmes argues that talk of insurrection miseducates
our comrades. Of course it’s disorienting if you talk as if we are planning for insurrection in
the next little while. But it is profoundly disorienting to talk about a left government leading a
mass movement to socialism without overthrowing the capitalist state, whether you think it’s
a short or long term perspective. An organisation based on such ideas will repeat the
charlatanism of Kautsky and the other centrists which played a central role in preventing the
victory of the German revolutionary workers and therefore the defeat of the Russian
revolution. If we want to draw a connecting line to Stalin it should begin with Kautsky. If
genuinely revolutionary organisations are to be built, they need to be capable of relating to
the situation we find ourselves in without abandoning a commitment to revolution when
workers, by their own actions, begin to pose the question.
Conclusion
Lenin’s sharp polemics against the luminaries of the Second International after 1917 relied
not just on theory, but on the practical experience of Russia and then Germany. These petty
bourgeois democrats, he argued, “are distinguished by an aversion to class struggle, by
their dreams of avoiding it, by their efforts to smooth over, to reconcile, to remove sharp
corners. Such democrats, therefore…regard it as their duty to concoct schemes for
reconciling the two contending forces instead of leading the struggle of one of these
[89]
forces.”
Anyone who rejects Lenin’s arguments is in fact turning their back on a body of theory
25 of 32 12/18/16 8:19 PM
developed not just by Lenin, but by the best of a generation of revolutionaries and theorists
who lived through revolutionary upheavals the like of which have not been experienced
before or since. Those who reject this body of theory need to convince us on several points.
What has fundamentally changed since Lenin’s day? We still live in a capitalist economy.
The capitalist class is, if anything, stronger, with a state armed to the teeth. Its ideological
apparatus is even more deeply entrenched, and the ideology of “democracy”, “equal rights”
and the “rule of law” is central to that. And it is more experienced in dealing with mass
challenges to its power. This makes Lenin’s theory of revolution even more vital, not less.
As Lenin pointed out, even a strike often invites the violence of the state, let alone the
response to mass mobilisations, well short of any revolutionary uprising. Batons, rubber
bullets, tear gas, water cannon and hysterical media campaigns are the widespread
experience of workers across Europe as they just try to defend their living standards against
the “austerity” onslaught since the financial crisis. Lenin, when replying to Kautsky,
commented that you can debate all the details and variations of the bourgeois state, but this
simply obscures the real, class nature of the state and its purpose. We can reply in a similar
vein to modern day theories and discussions about challenges from within or from without
the state. How, other than by involvement in the struggle to overthrow both the capitalists’
economic and state power, can workers and the masses around them develop the
commitment to make the sacrifices which will be demanded of them? How will they ever
develop the profoundly different ideas needed to found society anew if they are only called
on to support “their” government? Can anyone who seriously wants to come to grips with
what is entailed in the struggle for socialism not recognise the commonality of experience
between now and then when they read Lenin’s polemics? Does not this passage from The
Renegade Kautsky ring true?
The historical truth is that in every profound revolution, the prolonged, stubborn and
desperate resistance of the exploiters, who for a number of years retain important
practical advantages over the exploited, is the rule. Never…will the exploiters submit
to the decision of the exploited majority without trying to make use of their
[90]
advantages in the last desperate battle, or series of battles.
References
Adler, Alan (ed), 1983, Theses, Resolutions and Manifestoes of the First Four
Congresses of the Third International, Ink Links Ltd.
Armstrong, Mick, 2013, “Trade Union Strategy in the Bolshevik Era”, Marxist Left
Review, 6, Winter.
Arnove, Anthony, Peter Binns, Tony Cliff, Chris Harman, Ahmed Shawki, 2003, Russia:
From Workers’ State to State Capitalism, Haymarket Books.
Bloodworth, Sandra, 2013, “Lenin vs Leninism”, Marxist Left Review, 5, Summer.
Bramble, Tom, 2012, “Does Australia have a labour aristocracy?” Marxist Left Review, 4,
26 of 32 12/18/16 8:19 PM
Winter.
Broué, Pierre, 2006 [1971], The German Revolution 1917-1923, Haymarket Books.
Bukharin, Nikolai, 1920, The Communist Programme of World Revolution, The

Proletarian Publishing Association.
Cliff, Tony, 1988 [1948], State Capitalism in Russia, Bookmarks.
Fredman, Nick, Pip Hinman and Susan Price, 2013, “Revolutionary unity to meet the
capitalist crisis”, Marxist Left Review, 6, Winter.
Gramsci, Antonio, 1971, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, International Publishers.
Gramsci, Antonio, 1978, Selections from Political Writings 1921-26, Lawrence and
Wishart.
Gramsci, Antonio, 1990, Selections from Political Writings 1910-1920, University of

Minnesota Press.
Hallas, Duncan, 1985, The Comintern, Bookmarks.
Harding, Neil, 2009 [1977-78], Lenin’s Political Thought, Haymarket Books.
Haynes, Mike, 1997, “Was there a parliamentary alternative in Russia in 1917?”,

International Socialism,76.
Laine, Joonas, 2013, “Socialism, the European Union and the perspectives of the
European Left”, interview with Murray Smith, http://www.revalvaatio.org/wp/eu-sosialismi-
ja-eurooppalainen-vasemmisto-murray-smithin-haastattelu/#lenglish.
Le Blanc, Paul, 1990, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party, Humanities Press.
Lenin, 1965, Collected Works, Progress Publishers.
Lih, Lars T., 2008, Lenin Rediscovered. What Is to Be Done?In Context, Haymarket
Books.
Lih, Lars T., 2011, Lenin, Reaktion Books.
Lukács, Georg, 1970 [1924], Lenin. A Study on the Unity of his Thought, NLB.
Lukács, Georg, 1983, History and Class Consciousness. Studies in Marxist Dialectics,
Merlin Press.
Lukács, Georg, 2000 [1925-26], A Defence of History and Class Consciousness. Tailism
and the Dialectic, Verso.
Luxemburg, Rosa, 1972, Selected Political Writings, Jonathan Cape.
Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels, 1968, Selected Works in One Volume, Lawrence and
Wishart.
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Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels, 1976, The German Ideology, Progress Publishers.
Oakley, Corey, 2013, “What kind of party do socialists need?” Marxist Left Review, 5,
Summer.
Riddell, John (ed), 1986-1993, The Communist International in Lenin’s Time (five
volumes), Pathfinder.
Riddell, John (ed), 2011, Towards the United Front. Proceedings of the Fourth Congress
of the Communist International,1922,Haymarket Books.
Serge, Victor, 1992, Year One of the Russian Revolution, Bookmarks, Pluto Press and
Writers and Readers.
Trotsky, Leon, 1937, “Stalinism and Bolshevism”, http://www.marxists.org/ archive/trotsky

/1937/08/stalinism.htm.
Trotsky, Leon, 1969, The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects, Merit
Publishers.
Trotsky, Leon, John Dewey, George Novack, 1973 [1938], Their Morals and Ours.
Marxist vs. Liberal Views on Morality, Pathfinder Press.
Trudell, Megan, 2000, “The Russian civil war: a Marxist analysis”, International
Socialism, 86.
Waters, Mary-Alice (ed), 1970, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, Pathfinder Press.
[1] Quoted in Trotsky et al, 1973, pp49-50.
[2] Waters (ed), 1970, pp77-78.
[3] Lenin, 1965, Volume 23, p241.
[4] This article builds on my earlier one, “Lenin vs Leninism”, in which I discuss how Lenin
came to these conclusions and the kind of party the Bolsheviks were. See Bloodworth,
2013.
[5] Bukharin, 1920.
[6] Lukács, 1970; Lukács, 1983; Lukács, 2000.
[7] For one of the most serious and successful debunkings of this view of Lenin see Lih,
2008.
[8] This article is not the place to give a complete account of the degeneration and defeat of
the revolution, or how the Bolsheviks became a party ruling over not a socialist state, but a
monstrous dictatorship. This has been done well by a number of writers and historians. For
some of the best explanations see Arnove et al, 2003, Cliff, 1988, Haynes, 1997, Le Blanc,
1990, pp289-327, Trudell, 2000.
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[9] Lih, 2008, pp3-37.
[10] Trotsky, 1969.
[11] Lenin, 1965, Volume 26, pp464 and 470.
[12] Trotsky, 1937.
[13] Lenin, 1965, Volume 27, p90.
[14] Lenin, 1965, Volume 27, p91.
[15] Lenin, 1965, Volume 27, p92.
[16] Lenin, 1965, Volume 27, p95.
[17] Lenin, 1965, Volume 27, p98.
[18] Lenin, 1965, Volume 27, pp101, 108.
[19] Lenin, 1965, Volume 27, p211.
[20] Lenin, 1965, Volume 27, p210.
[21] Lenin, 1965, Volume 27, p212.
[22] Lih, 2011, Harding, 2009.
[23] Harding, 2009, Volume 2, p189.
[24] Lenin, 1965, Volume 27, p249.
[25] Lenin, 1965, Volume 27, p275.
[26] Lenin, 1965, Volume 27, p290.
[27] Lenin, 1965, Volume 27, p531-532.
[28] Lenin, 1965, Volume 27, pp544 and 552.
[29] Lih, 2011, pp170-171.
[30] Serge, 1992, pp199-200.
[31] Serge, 1992, p199.
[32] Serge, 1992, pp202-203.
[33] Quoted in Lih, 2011, p171.
[34] Serge, 1992, p370.
[35] Luxemburg, 1972, pp241-242.
[36] Hallas, 1985, is a good short history; Adler, 1983 is an accessible collection of
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documents; one of the most valuable sources is the series of volumes containing the
documents of the International with comments beginning with Riddell, 1986, the latest being
Riddell, 2011.
[37] Riddell, 2014, “Weighing the Legacy of Lenin’s Comintern”, http://johnriddell.

wordpress.com/; as an example of how looking at errors can be instructive, see Armstrong,
2013 and Bramble, 2012, pp103-110.
[38] Lenin, 1965, Volume 30, pp114-115.
[39]Laine,2013.
[40] Lenin, 1965, Volume 29, p301.
[41] Lenin, 1965, Volume 28, p478.
[42] Lenin, 1965, Volume 29, pp305-319.
[43] Murray Smith, May 2013, “Will the Real European Left Stand up?”, http://leftunity.org
/will-the-real-european-left-stand-up/.
[44] Lenin, 1965, Volume 31, p92.
[45] Lenin, 1965, Volume 30, p108.
[46] Marx and Engels, 1976, p60.
[47] Lukács, 1983, p87. Daniel Lopez gives a more complete account of Lukács on
reification in his article in this issue.
[48] Marx and Engels, 1968, pp28-29.
[49] Lenin, 1965, Volume 2, p115.
[50] Lenin, 1965, Volume 23, p241.
[51] Gramsci, 1971, p333.
[52] Gramsci, 1971, p273.
[53] Gramsci, 1971, p333.
[54] Lenin, 1965, Volume 26, p288.
[55] Harding, 2009, Volume 2, pp170-179. Quote is on pp171-172, italics in original.
[56] Laine, 2013.
[57] Laine, 2013.
[58] Gramsci, 1978, p362.
[59] Lenin, 1965, Volume 30, pp114-116.
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[60] Gramsci, 1971, p243.
[61] Gramsci, 1971, p57.
[62] Lenin, 1965, Volume 31, pp26-39.
[63] Lenin, 1965, Volume 31, p94.
[64] Lenin, 1965, Volume 30, p275.
[65] Lenin, 1965, Volume 28, p106.
[66] Lenin, 1965, Volume 28, p231.
[67] Lenin, 1965, Volume 28, p107.
[68] Laine, 2013.
[69] Lenin, 1965, Volume 28, pp231-317.
[70] Lenin, 1965, Volume 28, p108 for this and previous paragraph.
[71] Lenin, 1965, Volume 28, p109.
[72] Lenin, 1965, Volume 28, p457.
[73] Broué, 2006, pp157-188.
[74] Lenin, 1965, Volume 28, p250.
[75] Laine, 2013.
[76] Lenin, 1965, Volume 28, pp257-263.
[77] Lenin, 1965, Volume 10, pp243-245; Lenin, 1965, Volume 11, pp90-91.
[78] Lenin, 1965, Volume 23, p304.
[79] Broué, 2006, p166.
[80] Gramsci, 1990, p293.
[81] Lukács, 1983, pp62-63. Daniel Lopez in this issue outlines Lukács’s philosophical
defence of the soviets.
[82] Broué, 2006, pxiv.
[83] Lenin, 1965, Volume 29, pp312-313.
[84] Lenin, 1965, Volume 29, p393.
[85] Lukács, 1983, p80.
[86] Oakley, 2013.
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[87] Fredman et al, 2013.
[88] Dave Holmes, “Australia: how should a united socialist party work?”, talk presented to
the “Organising for the 21st Century” seminar, Sydney, June 2013.
[89] Lenin, 1965, Volume 30, p108.
[90] Lenin, 1965, Volume 28, pp253-254.
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Lenin's Theory of Revolution for Western Democracies

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Lenin and a theory of revolution for the West http://marxistleftreview.org/index.php/no8-winter-2014/114-lenin-...

Lenin and a theory of revolution for the

good chance of keeping alive a genuinely revolutionary understanding of the road to

An explanation of the degeneration of the revolution matters very much if we are to

Lenin after 1917

[N]aturally, the aspect characterised by discussion and the airing of questions at

[P]olicy proposals and organisational suggestions [made in the desperate situation in

[A]n extraordinarily difficult, complex and dangerous situation in international affairs;

The relevance of Lenin’s theory of revolution

Lenin’s Comintern is no infallible guide to socialist program and strategy in the

Lenin quickly began to draw conclusions from the German revolution.

Lenin’s theory of revolution

A theory of revolution needs to be grounded in an understanding of the influence of

There is both an objective and a subjective side to this phenomenon. Objectively a

In his Prison Notebooks Gramsci outlined an aspect of consciousness which is an important

Winning proletarian hegemony

Dictatorship of the proletariat

In popular discourse, it is not generally appropriate to talk of dictatorship of the proletariat.

As organisations of the entire proletariat (both conscious and unconscious) the

propose…that the [workers’] councils be combined with the assembly [the

Implications for today

in which a cadre is educated, to provide a guide to action in any future revolutionary

Bloodworth, Sandra, 2013, “Lenin vs Leninism”, Marxist Left Review, 5, Summer.

Bukharin, Nikolai, 1920, The Communist Programme of World Revolution, The

Cliff, Tony, 1988 [1948], State Capitalism in Russia, Bookmarks.

Gramsci, Antonio, 1990, Selections from Political Writings 1910-1920, University of

Hallas, Duncan, 1985, The Comintern, Bookmarks.

Harding, Neil, 2009 [1977-78], Lenin’s Political Thought, Haymarket Books.

Haynes, Mike, 1997, “Was there a parliamentary alternative in Russia in 1917?”,

Lenin, 1965, Collected Works, Progress Publishers.

Lih, Lars T., 2011, Lenin, Reaktion Books.

Luxemburg, Rosa, 1972, Selected Political Writings, Jonathan Cape.

Trotsky, Leon, 1937, “Stalinism and Bolshevism”, http://www.marxists.org/ archive/trotsky

Waters, Mary-Alice (ed), 1970, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, Pathfinder Press.

[1] Quoted in Trotsky et al, 1973, pp49-50.

[2] Waters (ed), 1970, pp77-78.

[3] Lenin, 1965, Volume 23, p241.

[5] Bukharin, 1920.

[6] Lukács, 1970; Lukács, 1983; Lukács, 2000.

[9] Lih, 2008, pp3-37.

[10] Trotsky, 1969.

[11] Lenin, 1965, Volume 26, pp464 and 470.

[12] Trotsky, 1937.

[13] Lenin, 1965, Volume 27, p90.

[14] Lenin, 1965, Volume 27, p91.

[15] Lenin, 1965, Volume 27, p92.

[16] Lenin, 1965, Volume 27, p95.

[17] Lenin, 1965, Volume 27, p98.

[18] Lenin, 1965, Volume 27, pp101, 108.

[19] Lenin, 1965, Volume 27, p211.

[20] Lenin, 1965, Volume 27, p210.

[21] Lenin, 1965, Volume 27, p212.

[22] Lih, 2011, Harding, 2009.

[23] Harding, 2009, Volume 2, p189.

[24] Lenin, 1965, Volume 27, p249.

[25] Lenin, 1965, Volume 27, p275.

[26] Lenin, 1965, Volume 27, p290.

[27] Lenin, 1965, Volume 27, p531-532.

[28] Lenin, 1965, Volume 27, pp544 and 552.

[29] Lih, 2011, pp170-171.

[30] Serge, 1992, pp199-200.

[31] Serge, 1992, p199.

[32] Serge, 1992, pp202-203.