Sadia Schneider

Marxism vs the state

On 25 October 1917, the Russian working class took power. At a meeting of the Congress of Soviets, the peak democratic body representing millions of workers, peasants and soldiers, Lenin declared: “We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order”. How? Lenin continued: “Creative activity at the grass roots is the most 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 of the masses themselves”.
Within a fortnight of the revolution, the revolutionary government issued a Decree on Workers Control. Decisions about production were to be made by workers’ organisations: the soviets, the factory committees and the trade unions.
It was only one of a whirlwind of revolutionary decrees: in its first year, the Soviet government decreed universal suffrage and abolished inherited wealth, removed state control of marriage and divorce, and removed homosexuality from the criminal code. National minorities were granted the right to independence—including secession from Russia; religious minorities were empowered through the introduction of full freedom of religion.
Women workers won equal pay with men; many became the elected leaders of soviets and workers’ militias. To aid women’s full participation in political life, the impoverished and war-ravaged country put together communal kitchens, and childcare centres were created, to free them from the burdens of family life.
The revolutionary government issued decree after decree, expecting the empowered revolutionary workers to carry them out through self-organisation. “Never since the creation of the world have so many orders been issued”, Leon Trotsky later wrote, “by word of mouth, by pencil, by typewriter, by wire, one following after the other”.
Eight months earlier, in the February revolution, a wave of strikes had overthrown the centuries-old autocratic dictatorship. Months of chaotic debate had followed. From February onwards, Russia’s population, writes historian Rex A. Wade, “burst forth in a dazzling display of self-assertiveness, public meetings, and creation of new organizations. Announcements of congresses, conferences, committees, meetings, organizations being formed, and other manifestations of a newly unfettered public life filled the newspapers”. But for months it was unclear what the outcome of this debate would be: a moderate settlement? Capitalist democracy? A restoration of right-wing rule or military dictatorship? After eight months of debate, the working class decided to take power, and the October Revolution took place.
How did workers get from February’s “dazzling display of self-assertiveness” to October’s decision to take power and construct “living, creative socialism”, without being defeated by counter-revolution or exhausting themselves in disorganisation and internal dispute? The role of the much misunderstood revolutionary Bolshevik Party was the key element.
The Bolsheviks were an overwhelmingly working-class party, composed of some tens of thousands of working-class socialists, mostly organised in the workplaces of the big industrial centres. By the end of 1917 the party had hundreds of thousands of members, as the most dedicated revolutionary activists joined them.
The “talking, talking, talking” atmosphere had drawn millions of workers into debates. Political questions had been posed and solved. New demands were raised, and aspirations grew. At each point in these debates, the Bolsheviks had argued for workers to be bolder, to organise themselves and take responsibility for leading the revolution.
The horror of the First World War had led to the revolution. Impoverished peasants in Russia’s countryside demanded redistribution of land, and increasingly militant workers demanded control over their workplaces. These three questions dominated the period after the overthrow of the old dictatorship in February. The Bolsheviks argued that to solve these problems, workers would need to take power into their own hands. They emphasised the connection between political and economic struggle and attempted to forge bonds of solidarity between peasants, workers and soldiers.
The great hope of the February Revolution was that it would end the war. But after the fall of the tsar, a new self-appointed and unelected “provisional government” proclaimed itself the new authority, and it was committed to the war’s continuation. The head of the government, Alexander Kerensky, informed troops that “the inevitability and necessity of sacrifice must rule the hearts of Russian soldiers” and that “I summon you not to a feast but to death”.
To continue the imperialist war necessitated order, not revolutionary freedom. Strikes were proliferating, and workers raised demands ranging from wage rises to the eight-hour day; the provisional government called for “restraint on both sides”. Izvestia, the newspaper of the Menshevik party, argued that “the wartime situation in the revolution forces both sides to exercise extreme caution in utilising the sharper weapons of class struggle such as strikes and lockouts. These circumstances make it necessary to settle all disputes by means of negotiation and agreement rather than by open conflict”. Both Kerensky and the Mensheviks were supposedly socialists, but now they were arguing to restrain the revolution, to hold back workers’ struggles and to prolong the war.
The Bolsheviks’ anti-war position was unique. It drew the connection between the war and international workers’ revolution. Lenin, the most important leading figure of the Bolsheviks, argued that the provisional government’s capitalist nature drove its pro-war stance. To end the war, workers of all nations would have to fight their own ruling classes. Marx’s old slogan, “Workers of the world unite”, was given a concrete meaning: soldiers of opposing armies should fraternise, and workers should make war on their bosses.
The drive to restore order sent the provisional government and its moderate socialist supporters on a collision course with the institutions of popular democracy, which in turn increasingly supported the Bolsheviks. More than 2,000 trade unions emerged in 1917. Factory committees—elected in workplaces by all workers regardless of sex, religion or background—emerged to deal with everything from fixing light globes to leading fights for better conditions. But the most significant institution was the soviets: a network of revolutionary councils of representatives of any and all workplaces, plus soldiers and peasants. The moderate socialist chronicler of the revolution Nikolai Sukhanov rightly called the soviets “the very crucible of great events, the laboratory of the revolution”. Institutions like these had to be repressed to carry out a disciplined war effort.
By the middle of the year, strikes escalated into a movement for workers’ control of the factories. But workers’ control at the level of an individual workplace was more and more obviously insufficient. The economy was collapsing under the strain of the war. Prices rose 2,300 percent between February and October; real wages fell by almost half.
In the factories, Bolshevik activists led strikes, but they also raised political slogans like “All power to the soviets” and “Overthrow the provisional government” during debates about wages, working conditions and other economic questions. As the historian David Mandel puts it: “[T]he very strong interconnections between the economic and political spheres, both in the workers’ consciousness and in objective reality itself, were evident from the very start. It was the desire of the moderate socialist leadership of the Soviet to keep the two separate that, in fact, underlay the first conflict between it and the worker rank-and-file ... these interconnections would grow into a virtual merging of the two spheres with all threads uniting in one overriding demand: ‘All power to the soviets!’”
The Bolsheviks called on poor peasants to rise up against landlords and seize land for themselves. Unlike the other political parties, the Bolsheviks encouraged peasants to take direct action rather than wait for the provisional government’s constantly delayed inquiries into the land question. By August, 482 of Russia’s 624 districts had experienced peasant revolts. Bolshevik militants convinced urban workers to champion the needs of the rural poor. They understood that, for workers to take and hold power, they would need to be the recognised champions of all the oppressed.
The Bolsheviks had spent the year arguing for workers to take power while also leading on-the-ground struggles. Their orientation bore fruit in August, when a decisive battle took place against a coup attempt by the tsarist loyalist General Lavr Kornilov. The factory committees, under Bolshevik leadership, organised 40,000 volunteer “Red Guards” led by Trotsky, while worker militants in key industries took control of the production process to create havoc for Kornilov’s troops, redirecting vital shipments, as Trotsky wrote: “In a mysterious way, echelons would find themselves moving on the wrong roads. Regiments would arrive in the wrong division, artillery would be sent up a blind alley”. The coup was defeated in four days. On the heels of the defeat of the coup, the provisional government attempted, unsuccessfully, to disarm and disband the workers and factory committees.
The Bolsheviks had won the support of the working class, because only they supported the self-activity of the working class in a way that could defeat counter-revolution. “All power to the soviets” was not just a slogan: it was a perspective that informed their entire intervention. In the permanent debates in the streets as well as in the trade unions, the factory committees and the soviets, Bolsheviks argued for workers to take political positions, make decisions about society and use their collective strength to make those decisions happen.
Not long afterwards, the provisional government threatened to surrender the city of Petrograd to the German army in order to crush the heart of worker militancy. In the second week of October it ordered the radical soldiers of the Petrograd garrison to leave the city and go to war. Historian Alexander Rabinowitch recalls that this provoked “an avalanche of anti-government resolutions adopted by garrison units”. A meeting of the Petrograd-based Second Baltic Fleet Detachment was reflective of the mood: it adopted a resolution that proclaimed: “[A]s ardent enemies of the coalition Provisional Government ... we await with great impatience the portentous opening of the Congress of Representatives of the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, in which we have faith, and which we invite to take power”. Similar resolutions came out of the factories.
On 22 October, three days before the insurrection, again the masses made their wishes clear. This was the “Day of the Petrograd Soviet”, when rallies had been called in support of this revolutionary institution. The city became engulfed in mass meetings, concerts, factory debates and gatherings in every available city hall. To the mushrooming crowds Trotsky, at this time one of the Bolsheviks’ central leaders and best known public figures, posed the question of whether they would support and defend soviet power, and they roared back: “We swear it!” The intervention of party activists cohered the revolutionary workers on a mass scale, and prepared them for decisive action.
On 25 October, the day of the insurrection, Red Guards stormed the Winter Palace and arrested the remaining leaders of the provisional government. The insurrection had not just mass support, but mass participation, as Trotsky recounts: “In the provincial industrial regions ... armed workers would remove managers and engineers, and even arrest them ... Sabotage on the part of the property owners and administrators shifted to the workers the task of protecting the plants ... Roles were here interchanged: the worker would tightly grip his rifle in defence of the factory in which he saw the source of his power”.
Trotsky was able to write so clearly of the insurrection because, as a leading activist of the Bolsheviks, he was one of its most active participants. As Sukhanov witnessed: “Trotsky ... rushed from the Obukhovsky plant to the Trubochny, from the Putilov to the Baltic works, from the riding school to the barracks; he seemed to be speaking at all points simultaneously. His influence, both among the masses and on the staff, was overwhelming”.
The seamlessness of the insurrection reflected the fact that Bolsheviks had spent weeks debating, preparing and organising for it. Red Guards enrolled whole factories as volunteers, women created Red Cross divisions and gave lectures on caring for the wounded and organised factory level bands of nurses. Workers requisitioned and inventoried automobiles to build up their apparatus of self-defence. Debates raged about the potential timing of an insurrection at party congresses and in party papers; polemics were often leaked and reprinted in bourgeois papers.
The idea that October was a coup does a disservice first and foremost to the Russian masses. They had been deep in debate for all of 1917. In fact, defeating August’s right-wing coup had laid the basis for their uprising in October. They had resisted attack after attack by the provisional government, had thrown bosses out of factories, and by October many were organised into socialist militias. The October revolution was swift and relatively bloodless because it had mass support. Sukhanov wrote: “To talk about military conspiracy instead of national insurrection, when the party was followed by the overwhelming majority of the people, when the party had already de facto conquered all real power and authority was clearly an absurdity”. Menshevik leader Julius Martov acknowledged: “Understand, please, that before us after all is a victorious uprising of the proletariat—almost the entire proletariat supports Lenin and expects its social liberation from the uprising”.
Robert Service, an anti-Bolshevik historian, similarly is forced to admit: “What really counted was that the Bolshevik political programme proved steadily more appealing to the mass of workers, soldiers and peasants as social turmoil and economic ruin reached a climax in late autumn. But for that there could have been no October revolution”.
The art, music, theatre, pedagogy, environmental policies, literacy programs, child care and communal kitchens that proliferated in the first year of workers power are the subject of much admiration and discussion even today. However, to move beyond nostalgia and reach those heights again, we have to take seriously the politics that made it all possible. The workers’ conquest of power required both their own spontaneous, creative revolutionary energy, and a working-class political organisation dedicated to helping that energy transform the world.

The Bolshevik revolution: why a revolutionary party matters

Twenty-one-year-old Black Panther Party deputy chair Fred Hampton and his comrade Mark Clark were assassinated in a 1969 pre-dawn raid in Chicago. Arguably the most talented and politically astute of the Panther leaders, Hampton was renowned for inspiring activists of all colours. But he was betrayed by William O’Neal, his bodyguard and the Panthers’ head of security, who was an FBI informant. 
Hampton was a victim of the bureau’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO). Between 1956 and 1971, the FBI carried out activities, many of them illegal, to infiltrate, disrupt and discredit a range of political organisation throughout the country. Following the assassinations of Malcolm X in 1965 and Martin Luther King Jr in 1968, the virulently anti-communist FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, wrote of his fear of “the rise of a new Black Messiah”. He labelled the Black Panthers “the biggest threat to the security of the US” and ordered agents to employ “hard-hitting programs to destroy, disrupt, and neutralise” them. 
The US domestic intelligence services budget in 1969 was $7.4 billion. Of 295 operations against Black groups, 233 were aimed at the Panthers. In that year alone, 28 members were murdered by the FBI. Records show that even community organising efforts were deemed a threat. Hoover even directed COINTELPRO resources against the Panthers’ free breakfast program in poverty stricken Black neighbourhoods. A US Senate select committee report on the FBI operations against the Panthers concluded that tactics “were clearly intended to foster violence, and many others could reasonably have been expected to cause violence”. 
The Panthers were a radical outgrowth of the civil rights movement, formed initially as a Black self-defence group to protect communities from racist police brutality. Its armed members followed police and surrounded them when they hassled Blacks. They identified as revolutionary socialists and had a 10-point program of demands ranging from improved health care and education for Black communities to police and prison abolition. The group was formed in 1966, and at its height in 1970 had thousands of members in 68 cities. But by 1971, COINTELPRO had virtually wiped it out. 
It wasn’t just by killing them. Many Panthers were sent to prison on spurious charges; some are still there after decades, often in solitary confinement. Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act report discussions between agents about how to create animosity among leading members of the group. Stanley Nelson’s documentary Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution reveals how the FBI forged abusive letters and planted threatening messages and mocking cartoons to cause trouble between the Panthers and other Black nationalist groups and street gangs. People’s Law Office defence attorney Jeffrey Haas’ first-hand account of how the state conspired to murder Hampton and Clark gives an account of the role of O’Neal: 
“He never attended political education classes and pushed actions over thought and politics; he advocated the most militaristic line ... O’Neal didn’t talk politics. He proposed actions, frequently armed ones. This conflicted with my image of an informant as the silent, observant type, following orders from his control to remain inconspicuous. Looking back, he was clearly a provocateur, but I hadn’t realized then that this could be a good cover for an informant.”
While the Panthers were not the first, they were the most notorious targets of COINTELPRO. Other socialist and communist organisations, civil rights, anti-war, environmentalist and First Nations activists and groups were also attacked. King’s “I have a dream” speech won him the label of “the most dangerous Negro in the future of this Nation” in an FBI memo. King won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and was then subject to a concerted campaign to discredit and destroy him. Most famously, the FBI sent him an anonymous letter, detailing his alleged marital infidelity and insinuating that he ought to commit suicide: “There is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is”.
At the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement, students at Ohio’s Kent State University protested Richard Nixon’s expansion of the war into Cambodia. In response, the National Guard stormed the campus and fired 67 rounds, killing four students and hospitalising nine. The event led to walkouts and protests by more than 4 million students at universities around the country. At one demonstration at the University of Alabama, a building was set on fire and the protests declared “unlawful assemblies”, resulting in the arrest of hundreds of activists. The man responsible for the fire, Charles Grimm Jr, was working as an FBI informant at the time. 
The case of another informant, Tommy Tongyai (“Tommy the traveller”), was made famous by a 1971 documentary, The Revolutionary Was a Cop. Tongyai claimed that he was a member of Students for a Democratic Society – a radical anti-war organisation with almost 100,000 members. He showed students how to make Molotov cocktails, encouraged them to kidnap congressional representatives and convinced students at Hobart College in Geneva, New York, to firebomb a campus building, which they did and for which they were charged. 
The Communist Party was an obvious FBI target at the height of the Cold War, but smaller socialist groups weren’t spared either. Thanks to a 1986 lawsuit filed by the Socialist Workers Party, a US Trotskyist organisation with about 3,000 members, 10 million pages of evidence were released, exposing the FBI’s operations against the group. “The FBI had used 300 infiltrators and 1,300 informers over a 15-year period, and burglarized SWP offices and members’ homes more than 200 times”, Michael Steven Smith, writing in the Indypendant, a New York newspaper, noted last year. “Wiretaps had been employed for 20,000 days and listening devices for 12,000. Landlords were contacted in an effort to get people evicted and workplaces were visited in order to get people fired.” The federal agents orchestrated racist smear campaigns against Black members of the party when they ran for public office and forged letters filled with racial slurs and insults, supposedly written from white to Black party members.
Violence against the left by the political right was favoured by COINTELPRO. In San Diego, the FBI financed and armed members of an anti-communist vigilante group to create the Secret Army Organisation, which targeted anti-war activists. One of the group’s victims was Peter Bohmer, an economics teacher at San Diego State College. He was subject to a campaign of intimidation consisting of threatening phone calls, a firebombing outside his house and the publication of a special public bulletin with his address, phone number, licence plate and the message: “For any of our readers who may care to look up this Red Scum, and say hello, here is some information that may help”. 
Another right-wing provocateur on the payroll of the FBI, Gary Thomas Rowe, helped plan and carry out a Ku Klux Klan attack on the Freedom Riders – anti-segregationist civil rights activists who travelled across the US. The FBI allowed him to attack the Freedom Riders’ bus for 15 minutes before they intervened, enough time for Klansmen to set it on fire with the people still in it. Four years later, Rowe was in the car with Klansmen when they shot and killed civil rights activist <a>Viola Liuzzo</a> outside Selma, Alabama. Most damning of all, Rowe was likely responsible for the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that killed four African American girls. He was given immunity by the FBI and was never convicted of any crimes. 
COINTELPRO was wrapped up in 1971. But there is little doubt that comparable operations continue to this day. The FBI is just one arm of the repressive apparatus of the US state alongside city, county and state police, the CIA, the NSA, the National Guard and the military. When the system is under threat, the role of these institutions becomes clear. By 1970, the US military in Vietnam was disintegrating in mutinies, and capitalist rule at home was rocked from all sides as the anti-war movement and radicalising civil rights activists took over university campuses and city streets. COINTELPRO was the Vietnam War coming home. US imperialism abroad required the bloody restoration of domestic peace. 
The current Minneapolis-born rebellion has spread to almost every US city, inspired hundreds of thousands to fight and, predictably, provoked the full mobilisation of the US state. Programs like COINTELPRO tell us a lot about how the ruling class has and will again respond to challenges to the system. Our enemies have not changed much, and neither have our tasks. The radicals of the 1960s were committed to a cause that resonates with more urgency today – the destruction of a system built on profit, exploitation and oppression. In one of his last speeches, Hampton gave some solid advice about what the struggle needs to look like: 
“We don’t think you fight fire with fire best; we think you fight fire with water best. We’re going to fight racism not with racism, but we’re going to fight with solidarity. We say we’re not going to fight capitalism with Black capitalism, but we’re going to fight it with socialism ... We’re going to fight their reactions with all of us people getting together and having an international proletarian revolution.”

COINTELPRO: how the US state dealt with the last radicalisation

The cliché of the authoritarian Lenin has become so common that the vast majority of writers repeat the mantra without feeling compelled to cite any evidence at all. Recycling a few hacked up, decontextualised quotes suffices. The mirror image of this caricature is the Stalinist conception of Lenin the mastermind, single-handedly pulling the strings of mass sentiment to orchestrate a revolution that would put him and the Bolsheviks at the helm of the Soviet state.
These pictures share a disdain for the potential of workers to change society through social struggle. Both rely on the trope of an ill-informed, easily manipulated mass led blindly, for better or worse, into the throes of a revolution.
Western commentators and Stalinists alike have been completely unscrupulous in quoting Lenin out of context, contorting his legacy to fit their agenda. The caricatures they present couldn’t be further from the truth.
Lenin was a democrat first and foremost. From his early struggle against the Narodnik terrorists, to his orientation to political rivals and throughout 1917, a democratic spirit underpinned Lenin’s thought and practice. He articulated this affirmation of the democratic heart of socialism in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution:
“Creative activity at the grass roots is the most basic factor of the new public life. Let the workers set up workers’ control at their factories … Socialism cannot be decreed from above. Its spirit rejects the mechanical bureaucratic approach; living, creative socialism is the product of the masses themselves.”
What is to be done?
Lenin was a product of the traditions of Russian socialism. The repressive conditions that characterised tsarist Russia made democratic rights not only desirable but a necessary demand for all oppositional political currents. For the socialist movement, the basic tasks of organising workers meant a political confrontation with the regime.
Handing out a leaflet, organising a meeting, printing an oppositional newspaper, let alone organising a strike – all could result in a prison term or exile in Siberia. As historian Neil Harding points out, “The imperative to work for political reform, for the realisation of democratic freedoms, was in this way shown to be no mere abstract formulation of Russian orthodoxy. It proceeded rather from the everyday struggle of the working class”.
Lenin was one of the most fervent advocates of democratic rights. He cut his teeth arguing against the conspiratorial tactics of the Narodniks, and he distinguished his political friends and enemies on the basis of their commitment to the struggle for democracy. For example, he was adamant that the lack of socialist credentials of the populists did not disqualify them as key allies in the democratic struggle. On their program, he iterated: “It is progressive in so far as it puts forward general democratic demands, i.e. fights against all survivals of the medieval epoch and of serfdom”.
Lenin’s detractors often cite a single work to substantiate their claims. The text in question, What is to be done? (WITBD), is one of the most quoted and least understood works of all time. Characteristic of the dominant readings of WITBD, right wing historian Richard Pipes asserts that Lenin held a deep distrust of the masses, hated spontaneity and believed that socialist consciousness was a quality restricted to a select few “professional revolutionaries”.
In his encyclopaedic study of WITBD, Lars Lih offers a different reading, one much more in line with the cut and thrust of Lenin’s earlier and later convictions. According to Lih, WITBD was premised not on distrust of the masses but the opposite – the belief that the workers’ movement was surging towards a revolutionary challenge to tsarism, but the socialist movement – in particular the intellectuals – was lagging hopelessly behind.
WITBD was a polemic against the tailing tendencies of his rivals who wanted to limit the workers’ movement to economic demands and who, as Lenin put it, “treated the workers to ‘politics’ only at exceptional moments, only on festive occasions”. Lenin’s own words leave little doubt as to the target of his polemic: “No one, we think, has until now doubted that the strength of the present-day movement lies in the awakening of the masses (principally, the industrial proletariat), and that its weakness lies in the lack of consciousness and initiative among the revolutionary leaders”.
The February Revolution 
This history helps us to understand the role of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in 1917.
The February revolution is often distinguished as the legitimate, popular revolution because it was “spontaneous”, in contrast to the planned insurrection in October. This conception misunderstands both the nature of the February events and the broader relationship between spontaneity, consciousness and organisation. The February revolution was sparked by women workers taking to the streets in opposition to the deprivations of the war, convincing male workers at nearby factories to walk out and join them.
In his history of the revolution, Leon Trotsky articulates what made this possible: “In every factory, in each guild, in each company, in each tavern, in the military hospital, at the transfer stations, even in the depopulated villages, the molecular work of revolutionary thought was in progress … Elements of experience, criticism, initiative, self-sacrifice, seeped down through the mass and created … an inner mechanics of the revolutionary movement as a conscious process”.
Trotsky emphasised the limited and elitist character of the explanations of these events that fetishised spontaneity:
“The mystic doctrine of spontaneousness explains nothing … To the smug politicians of liberalism and tamed socialism everything that happens among masses is customarily represented as an instinctive process, no matter whether they are dealing with an anthill or a beehive. In reality, the thought which was drilling through the thick of the working class was far bolder, more penetrating, more conscious, than those little ideas by which the educated classes live … To the question, ‘Who led the February revolution?’ we can then answer definitely enough: conscious and tempered workers educated for the most part by the party of Lenin.”
Alongside the establishment of the provisional government, the February revolution resurrected the revolutionary workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ councils that arose originally in the 1905 revolution. Based on direct democracy in the workplace, immediately recallable delegates capable of making and enacting political and economic decisions, these institutions were the embryo of a democratic workers’ state. Lenin’s unwavering commitment to the workers’ councils, articulated in the slogan “All power to the soviets”, shaped his orientation throughout 1917.
The October Insurrection
The soviets had the support of the vast bulk of Russian workers, peasants and soldiers. While the provisional government had de facto power, the soviets were in fact in charge. The Bolsheviks were the only party to call for the soviets to take power. They were a minority in the soviets in February. But by September, as the provisional government refused to budge on the two key demands of the revolution – an end to the war and land to the peasants – the balance had shifted decisively in favour of the Bolsheviks.
It was on the basis of this democratic legitimacy that the Bolsheviks went about organising the October insurrection. The precondition of widespread support for insurrection was no abstract formula. Lenin argued:
“To be successful, insurrection must rely not upon conspiracy and not upon a party, but upon the advanced class. That is the first point. Insurrection must rely upon the revolutionary upsurge of the people. That is the second point. Insurrection must rely upon that turning point in the history of the growing revolution when the activity of the advanced ranks of the people is at its height … That is the third point. And these three conditions for raising the question of insurrection distinguish Marxism from Blanquism.”
Given this history, the misrepresentations that predominate in school textbooks seem ludicrous. As Harding writes: “The insistence upon the need for democratic rights was so integral to Lenin’s strategy, was so central to the orthodoxy he inherited and was repeated almost ad nauseam by him in virtually all of his programmatic statements, that it is almost inexplicable to find chorus of commentators asserting that Lenin had jettisoned the struggle for democracy”.
This is just one of many distortions that pervade scholarship on the Russian revolution. Little is written of Lenin’s opposition to World War One, of the decree to give self-determination to nations oppressed by Russia or of Lenin’s views on women – all of which put today’s “progressive” politicians to shame. Lenin’s stance on these issues was not extraneous but fundamental to his commitment to real and thoroughgoing democracy – a system that puts the vast majority of the world, the working class, in charge.
Lenin wasn’t always right, and was often in a minority in his own party. Nevertheless, Lenin’s key interventions reflect an optimism based on faith in ordinary people. This was no fatalistic, deterministic optimism that hoped for better days. It was an optimism that put a premium on organisation, clarity of ideas, the need to do battle and debate, on seizing opportunities and seeing potential, however nascent it might be.
The Russian revolution was defeated. Stalinism, which grew in the ashes of the revolution, embodied the antithesis of the revolution and the democratic spirit it had unleashed. For both Stalin’s acolytes in the East and Cold War warriors in the West, the myth that Lenin led to Stalin served their respective agendas – in one part of the world to glorify dictatorship as communism; in another to denounce communism as dictatorial. In both cases, this narrative sought to crush a sentiment that we ought to resurrect and champion: “Another world is possible”.

Was Lenin a despot or a democrat?

In the face of the worst refugee crisis since World War Two, Europeans are coming out in unprecedented displays of solidarity and empathy. Fortress Europe, a central political project of the European ruling class, is cracking under the pressure of refugee resistance and international solidarity.
When Iceland's government offered an insulting and pitiful increase of 50 places to Syrian refugees, 10,000 people in protest offered their own homes as havens.
In Germany, authorities have complained that the volume of donations – toys, clothing, food – is unmanageable by the bureaucracies intended to search and clear contributions. An anti-Nazi punk song from the 1990s has been given a new lease on life at number one in the German music charts.
The solidarity is being organised from below. Schools, universities and sports clubs are collecting donations while trade unions have started offering free German lessons as a means of reaching out to and teaching newly arrived refugees about their rights at work.
A now famous scene from a Munich station, at which hundreds of Germans met a train load of refugees with cheering, singing and welcome signs, is no isolated phenomenon. At train stations across Germany and Austria refugees are welcomed with cheers and offerings of food, water and candy.
The news of an abandoned truck with 71 asphyxiated asylum seekers struck a chord in Austria. In response, 20,000 rallied outside parliament in Vienna chanting “No one is illegal!” and “Human rights are borderless!” Similar numbers have rallied in Germany, Sweden and France.
When authorities in Hungary refused to let refugees use public transport, up to 2,500 Austrians organised convoys of cars, buses and taxis to bring them across the border. Austrian train drivers have volunteered to work unpaid overtime to transport those without train tickets. In an attempt to stifle such “disorder” the Austrian government has threatened to close the border entirely.
This groundswell of solidarity and empathy is the result of the bravery and defiance of refugees themselves.
Scenes in Hungary in the past weeks are emblematic of the asylum seekers’ desperation and determination. On 1 September, authorities at a Budapest station refused people entry onto trains to Austria and Germany despite them having bought tickets. In response they occupied the station, shutting it down until they were finally allowed to board two days later.
Another train headed for the border was stopped to force people into a local refugee camp. Refugees protested, threw themselves on the railway tracks and refused food and water. The Guardian reports that thousands have broken out of camps in Bicske and Röszke.
These refugees confirm the well-known Palestinian proverb: “To exist is to resist”. As refugee activist Stefan Bornost told Red Flag from Germany, “The images of refugees resisting has humanised them. They are not just victims; they are fighting for their lives and for the lives of their children”.

Marxism vs the state

The Bolshevik revolution: why a revolutionary party matters

COINTELPRO: how the US state dealt with the last radicalisation

Was Lenin a despot or a democrat?

Europeans welcome refugees

Other Media

Shop

Manage Your Subscription

Contact Us