Cliff Connolly reviews Paul LeBlanc’s latest work ‘Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution’, available from Pluto Press on September 20th. Cliff will be speaking on a panel regarding this book at the upcoming Socialism 2023 Conference titled Lenin: Catastrophe and Revolution.
Everybody should read Paul Le Blanc’s new book on Lenin, but nobody should stop there. Le Blanc has gifted us with an unparalleled introduction to the history of Lenin and the Bolshevik party in their authentic historical context: they were pragmatic revolutionaries who waged a principled and protracted struggle for genuine democracy. The book busts several pernicious myths surrounding its protagonists, clearly defining concepts like the vanguard party and democratic centralism. However, it misses the mark in many places and adds more confusion to popular misconceptions of issues such as the minimum-maximum program and the tragedy of Stalin’s political project. Thus, Le Blanc’s effort in this text is not a definitive set of ready-made answers but a valuable guidepost for deeper analysis. Readers will be wise to follow Le Blanc directly to the source of his commentary, familiarizing themselves with the work of eminent scholars like Rabinowitch and Lih and ultimately the primary sources written by Lenin himself and his contemporaries. A thorough investigation of the facts will reinforce the points that Le Blanc gets right and illuminate the cracks in his arguments for all to learn from.
The central thesis of the book is the well-documented claim that Lenin was at every point of his political career a thorough-going champion of democracy:
As with Marx and Engels, and with authoritative interpreters Karl Kautsky (in Germany) and George Plekhanov (in Russia), Lenin and his co-thinkers were convinced of the need for both the working class and socialism to merge into a unified entity if either was to triumph. And in all countries—but countries such as Russia most of all—the working-class struggle for socialism was inseparable from the struggle for genuine and thoroughgoing democracy. (pg 20)
This phenomenon has been distorted by decades of anti-communist Cold War propaganda and Marxist-Leninist sect dogma. In other words, those who hate Lenin and those who love him have both misrepresented historical fact in order to paint him as an autocrat who saw communism as separate from and superior to democracy. Le Blanc refines and expands on the work of other writers who have shed light on the truth, all while being careful to avoid “great man history” and acknowledge the diverse efforts and ideas of the Bolshevik party. In contrast to many sympathetic historians, however, Le Blanc concedes and contextualizes the actions of Lenin and his party that may seem strikingly undemocratic at face value– suppression of the bourgeois press, political police, summary executions, and more. This flows from a clear definition of Lenin’s conception of democracy and its differences from the “common-sense” definition propagated by bourgeois ideologues:
Lenin believed a genuine democracy could only exist under the political rule of the proletariat: ‘The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to communism, will for the first time create democracy for the people, the majority, along with the necessary suppression of the exploiters, the minority.’ This would amount to ‘the proletariat organized as the ruling class.’ (pg 81)
Bourgeois republics (the typical state form of capitalist oligarchy) must suppress the working-class majority through institutions like police militarization, mass incarceration, voter roll purges, gerrymandering, legalized political bribery (they call it “lobbying”), constitutional “checks” on democracy like the electoral college, upper legislative houses, judicial review, and more in order to prevent majority rule and maintain the tyranny of the capitalist minority. In contrast, the democratic republic (the only state form through which socialism can be established according to Marx and Engels) must suppress the capitalist minority through various means in order to make majority rule possible. In the context of the Soviet republic led by Lenin, this meant defending the working-class majority from vicious attacks during a brutal civil war. Extraordinary measures were taken to do so, just as bourgeois republics take similar measures during civil wars of their own (see Lincoln’s executive orders, Sherman’s march through Atlanta, Union irregulars’ raids in Missouri, etc). Thus, suppression of anti-revolutionary elements was not enacted by the Bolsheviks in order to do away with democracy but in order to defend it.
Le Blanc does an excellent job throughout the text of demonstrating the democratic nature of both Lenin’ political thought and the Bolshevik party structure. Two examples in particular are worth highlighting: the vanguard party and democratic centralism, two concepts that are as historically misunderstood as Lenin himself. Le Blanc provides poignant clarification on both concepts. The vanguard party is often explained by adherents and detractors as a party consisting of elite full-time socialists who plan out the revolution and direct their minions in the working class from the comfort of their party headquarters. This could not be any further from what Lenin described in his writings or what the Bolsheviks practiced in their daily routines. This is obvious from the origin of the phrase– it is a military metaphor in which the “vanguard” is the unit at the front of the battle line, making first contact with the enemy forces and leading the rearguard into the fray. Confused historians and activists employ this term to describe the opposite behavior– officers studying maps and relaying orders from the command center. This organizing model would be better termed “the general staff party” in keeping with the bellicose metaphor. Le Blanc’s commentary on John Molyneux’s explanation is instructive:
Molyneux himself quickly added this clarification: ‘the party is a vanguard, but the vanguard is not a tiny elite standing outside the main body of the class; it is the hundreds of thousands of workers who actually lead the class in its everyday battles in the factories, the pits, the offices, the housing estates and the streets.’ This suggests the would-be revolutionary party is not ‘the vanguard.’ The vanguard is a layer of the working class that has a developed sense of class consciousness and is capable of providing practical leadership in struggles to advance the interests of the working class. A revolutionary party approximates the status of ‘vanguard party’ only if its orientation is embraced by the broad vanguard layer of the working class Molyneux describes. (pg 21)
Democratic centralism is similarly misconstrued by friends and enemies of the socialist movement alike. According to contemporary conventional wisdom, it is a method of decision-making in which party leaders decide what each party member should believe and how they should behave, with members expected to obediently follow orders. Le Blanc investigates the problems with this idea by examining the origin of the term:
In discussions and resolutions dealing with the matter of organizational functioning, the Mensheviks introduced the term democratic centralism, which seems to have first arisen in the German socialist labor movement in the late 1860s. The Bolsheviks also embraced the term. In later years it was incorrectly assumed to be an invention of Lenin himself, developed to ensure ‘complete inner unity of outlook,’ as a Stalinist educator once put it. (pg 51)
He continues by describing the actual mechanics of democratic centralism as they were practiced in the Bolshevik party:
The highest decision-making body in the party was not a central committee or political committee but rather the party congress (or convention). The central committee was elected by and answerable to the party congress. The congress was to be held every year or two, consisting of elected delegates from every local branch of the party. These elections were to take place after a period of written and oral discussion and debate on the issues facing the party, and the decisions considered ‘binding’ on the members and lower-level organizations were those made by the party congress. Lenin ‘always, as long as he lived, attached tremendous importance to Party congresses,’ recalled Krupskaya. ‘He held the Party congress to be the highest authority, where all things personal had to be cast aside, where nothing was to be concealed, and everything was to be open and above board.’ (pg 52)
This organizational practice is obviously far more democratic than it is normally described, and often more democratic than the practices of those who denounce it. No better example of this misunderstanding can be found than in the bylaws of the Democratic Socialists of America, which contain a clause (Article I, Section 3) that allows for the expulsion of any member “under the discipline of any self-defined democratic-centralist organization”. It has never been used, and today many active and effective organizers within DSA meet the above criteria. However, it belies the standard ahistorical view of democratic centralism which has plagued the socialist movement for almost a century. The organizing model as it actually worked for the Bolsheviks in practice is identical to how the DSA is meant to function. The DSA has never successfully lived up to this goal, however, with the last few years seeing constant struggles to subordinate our central committee (the National Political Committee or NPC) as well as paid DSA staffers to our party congresses (the bi-annual conventions). Thus, the DSA takes a hostile stance toward democratic centralism while practicing an organizational model that is more bureaucratic than the Bolsheviks ever would have tolerated during Lenin’s time.
Beyond the vanguard party model and democratic centralism, there are several important clarifications found in Le Blanc’s work. He explains the Bolshevik/Menshevik party split, the myopia of economism, the mass democratic character of the October Revolution, the application of the united front tactic, independence from capitalist political parties, the complex legacy of the USSR and the Third International, and more. These interventions are sorely needed in the all-too-often historically illiterate North American socialist movement. That said, this text is not above the occasional error; now we must turn our attention to its deficiencies.
The most glaring issue in the book is its poor characterization of the minimum-maximum program. This type of party platform was historically the basis of workers’ political parties in Lenin’s lifetime. Acceptance of the program was part of the criteria for party membership and elected representatives of the party were expected to adhere to its demands. Today there is an unfortunate trend of shrinking these programs to mere ideological exercises in which the minimum section was a set of pragmatic reforms to be immediately pursued while the maximum section was a set of pie-in-the-sky ideas to be implemented in some far-off future communist utopia. Le Blanc unfortunately buys into this abstraction, even going so far as to blame the minimum-maximum program for the SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany) supporting their country’s participation in the First World War:
A common orientation among parties of the Second International contributed to this shocking turnaround. A seemingly quite reasonable separation had been made between a minimum program (reforms that could actually be achieved under capitalism) and a maximum program (the replacement of capitalism with socialism, when the time was right). The crystallization of a bureaucratic apparatus evolved to ensure the practical functioning of the party. This included avoiding moves toward revolutionary socialism when the time was deemed (by the bureaucracy) not to be right. There was a keen sense of the need to prevent revolutionary goals from undermining the reformist goals of the minimum program. There was also a powerful inclination to avoid the fierce repression that would be unleashed upon socialist parties seeking to block ‘patriotic’ policies on behalf of imperialism and war. Such dynamics contributed to the pro-war orientations of many socialists. (pg 68)
This identification of the minimum-maximum program as the partial cause of the pro-war pivot in the Second International is based on a total misunderstanding of the subject. The minimum program consisted of the bare minimum demands that had to be met in order for the Social Democratic parties to enter government1, whereas the maximum program was the series of policies that would be enacted after taking power to enact the transition from capitalism to communism. In other words, the minimum section detailed the party’s revolutionary goals while the maximum section described the party’s reconstructionist goals. For example, the SPD’s Erfurt Program contained a minimum section demand which called for the abolition of the standing army and its replacement by universal arming of the people. This demand was in no way possible under the imperial rule of Wilhelm II, nor was it meant to be; the minimum demands of the Second International parties were meant to be taken together as the foundation for revolution and working-class sovereignty. Thus, the assertion that the minimum-maximum format is partially responsible for the renegade turn of many Social Democrats is patently false. How could supporting the German imperial military be consistent with demanding its complete abolition? As Lenin himself noted at the time, it was precisely the minimum demands of their programs that the renegades betrayed.
Another grievous mistake in Le Blanc’s writing concerns his approach to Lenin’s immediate legacy– the consolidated Communist Party-State spearheaded by Joseph Stalin. The seed of a powerful critique of this regime lies buried under a mountain of speculation, hyperbole, and psychoanalysis. Several of Le Blanc’s sources come from anti-communist Cold War narratives, painting Stalin as a scheming tyrant obsessed with power and uncommitted to any egalitarian ideology. Quotations are cherry-picked from his personal enemies, describing him as brutish, corrupt, cunning, closed-up, and morose. Similar quotations could be found to describe Lenin in order to fashion him as a conniving dictator, while other historical figures could be quoted to represent Stalin as a benevolent servant of the people engaged in collective leadership. Le Blanc would no doubt rightfully be as unimpressed by this as the shrewd reader will be unimpressed with his hyper-focus on Stalin’s personal affect. There is also the problem of wholesale historical fiction, such as the claim from Soviet dissident-turned-Putin admirer Roy Medvedev that the gulag system was primarily responsible for Soviet industrialization. This would mean that less than one percent of the USSR’s population miraculously constructed the majority of the country’s productive industry and infrastructure.2 Le Blanc further employs Medvedev to argue that the immense human cost of rapid industrialization, the war effort against the Nazis, and the early period of the Cold War was exclusively caused by Stalin’s “cruel recklessness” and in no way shaped by “the difficulty of the task”. While it is well-documented that Stalin’s policy choices often made the worst of a bad situation, it is ludicrous to claim that he was solely responsible for the often nigh-apocalyptic situation confronting the Soviet Union during his lifetime.
Beneath the rubble of this polemical disaster lies its most significant victim– a thoughtful critique of Soviet political economy under Stalin’s leadership. Fragments of such can be found in Le Blanc’s argument. He criticizes specific policies such as artistic censorship by the state and the turn from democratic centralism to bureaucratic centralism within the party. This could have been the foundation for a stronger overall analysis had the author stuck with the facts rather than focusing on perceived deficiencies of personality. The reader is often left wondering why they spend so much time on Stalin’s character flaws in a book ostensibly about the political project of Lenin and the Old Bolsheviks. The answer can be found not in history but in Le Blanc’s analysis of our contemporary political juncture:
Instead, there has been a proliferation of problems and crises, and these—dovetailing with Communism’s collapse and the disorientation and disintegration of an organized left-wing working-class movement—has generated a conservative and right-wing onslaught throughout much of the world. Serge put his finger on aspects of its early beginnings: ‘The reactionaries have a clear interest in confusing Stalinist totalitarianism—the exterminator of Bolshevism—with Bolshevism itself and thus eventually with socialism, Marxism, and even liberalism.’ This has had a powerful impact on the writing of history, but also in the realm of social policy and contemporary politics—including the phenomenon of right-wing ‘populist’ authoritarianism entering the political mainstream, contesting for power and in a growing number of cases coming to power in countries around the world. (pg 172)
Here we find the source and cause of Le Blanc’s confused critique of Stalin– he identifies the weakness of the left and relative strength of the right (a phenomenon most present in the Global North which he generalizes to the world) with the legacy of Stalin’s political thought. This itself is suspect; there are many places with a powerful left-wing force that take inspiration from Stalin (however accurate their appraisals of Stalin’s historical contributions may be). That said, the boogeyman of Stalinism certainly does present a barrier to socialist organizing in some cases, and the historical impact of Stalin’s policy choices ultimately led to the defeat of the 20th-century communist movement and the restoration of capitalism in several formerly socialist countries. This makes a sharp critique of Stalin all the more important. Le Blanc’s attempt leaves much to be desired. There are other minor mistakes in the book– misconceptions regarding the Narodniks’ political orientation3, half-truths of the Bolshevik approach to electoral work4, and tailism of terms with vague references to “elites” and “political correctness”. These quibbles are far more easily ignored than the issues detailed above. All that said, the few mistakes contained in this biography only slightly detract from its overall quality. Well-researched and dutifully contextualized, Le Blanc paints a striking portrait of Lenin as an unwavering champion of democracy. As the thriving ecosystem of contextualized communist history flourishes across multiple continents and political tendencies, Le Blanc bestows upon us a powerful introductory text. Just like the work of Lenin himself, it demands a careful reading.
- The idea here being that if only some of the minimum demands were met, socialists would be entering a bourgeois government and administering capitalism (to disastrous effect). If all demands were met, the socialists would effectively be entering the government of a workers’ state in order to facilitate the transition from capitalism to communism. The SPD famously betrayed their program in 1914 by backing their own ruling class in the First World War, betrayed it further by entering government without their minimum demands met in 1918, and ended up being butchered in the fascist genocide which immediately followed their time as the federal guardians of the German capitalist oligarchy.
- Robert Allen, Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003), pg 107-108
- On page 5 of Le Blanc’s book, he claims the terrorist cell in which Alexander Ulyanov (Lenin’s older brother) participated in blended Marxist ideas with the populism of the Narodniks. This is a mischaracterization of the group. The Narodniks were socialist but not Marxist, Marx was socialist and supported Narodniks despite saying their methods wouldn’t work for Western Europe, and Ulyanov was straightforwardly Narodnik. Contra Le Blanc, Marx did not bring socialism to Russia; the Narodniks encountered it via Herzen before engaging with Marx. Ulyanov read Marx, but their only agreement in terms of political strategy was that Marx’s methods had no place in autocratic Russia. Thus, it is not accurate to say Ulyanov blended Marxism with narodism. The elder Ulyanov was simply a Narodnik who had read Marx, which was not at all uncommon for his milieu.
- Le Blanc under-emphasizes the Bolshevik electoral project in his biographical treatment of Lenin, which gives the reader only a foggy picture of the revolutionaries’ life. Much of Lenin’s energy was spent on electoral campaigning, agitational journalism on electoral affairs, and advising RSDLP-affiliated elected officials. Le Blanc ignores this history in favor of a narrow focus on 1905, a period of mass upheaval in which Lenin emphasized street action over electoral work. For the rest of the Bolsheviks’ history up to 1917, Lenin was an ardent proponent of running candidates for office in order to provide the party with a platform that could reach millions of workers who did not yet read the party press or attend street demonstrations. Far better analysis of Lenin’s electoral efforts can be found in the scholarship of August Nimtz, particularly his recent book The Ballot, the Streets—or Both: From Marx and Engels to Lenin and the October Revolution.