Cosmonaut Magazine prints Cliff Connolly’s remarks from two panels in 2023 on Lenin’s political legacy.
After reading and reviewing Paul Le Blanc’s excellent new book Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution, I was given two opportunities to speak at length with him and a few other comrades regarding the book’s political implications. The first instance was on September 2, 2023, where we both spoke alongside Promise Li at the Socialism Conference in Chicago. The second time was an online panel hosted by Haymarket Books entitled Lenin: In His Time and Ours on September 28, 2023, where we talked with Jodi Dean and Linda Loew. Both conversations helped me sharpen my understanding of Lenin’s contribution to socialist political strategy and its role in our current moment of struggle. I believe it is of the utmost importance to examine the roots of the socialist movement and tease out the lessons from our forebears’ achievements and failures. What follows are my remarks from the two panels.
Bolsheviks, Abolitionists, and Paul Le Blanc
The central thesis of Comrade Le Blanc’s book is the well-documented and ever-relevant fact that Lenin was at every point of his political career a thorough-going champion of democracy. There could not be a more timely or relevant intervention for the contemporary North American socialist movement. This phenomenon has been distorted by decades of Cold War propaganda and sect dogma. In other words, those who hate Lenin and those who love him have both misrepresented history in order to paint him as an autocrat who saw communism as separate from and superior to democracy. In contrast to many sympathetic historians, Comrade 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:
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.
– Lenin (State and Revolution Ch.5)
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, democratic republics (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. Thus, suppression of counter-revolutionary elements must be pursued not in order to do away with democracy but in order to defend it.
Comrade Le Blanc’s book demonstrates the democratic nature of both Lenin’s political thought and the Bolshevik party structure. Two examples in particular are worth highlighting: the idea of the vanguard party and democratic centralism 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 term.– 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 martial metaphor.
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. But, Le Blanc describes 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.
Clearly, the Bolsheviks were not the conspiratorial band of elite autocrats they are so often painted as. With Lenin leading the way, they forged a democratic mandate for power and conducted the world’s greatest experiment in proletarian democracy in the early Soviet Union. For those of us looking to build on their foundations for a just and livable future, there are several important lessons to be found in their successes and mistakes.
Since we can only interact with Lenin as a historical figure, it’s important to look at how he was influenced by his own historical forebears. He saw the narodniks (a group of Russian agrarian populists who predated his generation of socialists) as flawed but irreplaceable forebears of Russian Social Democracy. According to Lenin, their sacrifices demanded not only high praise but sharp criticism. Their mistakes would be in vain if future generations refused to learn from them. We should adopt a similar attitude to the forebears of American socialism: the revolutionary abolitionists and militant trade unionists of the 19th century.
Both groups won historic victories in their respective struggles, and both groups were ultimately crushed before achieving their aims in the same year: 1877. The defeat of 1877 was two-fold. Reconstruction ended with the withdrawal of federal troops from the South and the rise of Jim Crow, and those same federal troops were deployed to crush the Great Railroad Strike which had galvanized workers in the North. Marx had insisted years prior in Das Kapital that Black liberation and proletarian emancipation were inexorably intertwined in North America. He was proven correct here in the most tragic manner possible. Had the revolutionary abolitionists and radical trade unionists united in a common organization with a common plan of action, each could have found success with the support of the other. The economic demands of the labor movement would only have been possible to realize under the thoroughly democratic political regime that the abolitionists fought for. The democratic state that the abolitionists intended to create could only be built with the support of the militant mass organizations of the working class. Yet both groups refused one another to their mutual destruction.
Learning from our ideological ancestors’ mistakes and applying them to our organizing today is crucial. We cannot hope to transform society without the advanced elements of the working class (the militant trade unionists) on our side. Neither can we hope to win material gains for the working class without a change in the political structure we live under. Socialism and the labor movement must merge into one fighting organization, which cannot be achieved by ignoring or tailing the organic demands of the proletariat. In practice, this means we have to win the working class over to the demand for a new constitution, one that operates on a genuinely democratic basis and enshrines socialism in law.
The idea that a revolutionary constitution is necessary for any meaningful transformation of American society is not new. It comes directly from the abolitionists responsible for the last great liberatory change in our country’s political economy. When John Brown forged his plan to march South and strike the Slave Power’s heart in Virginia, he worked hard to ensure this plan had the backing of the whole abolitionist movement. It caught on fast. A convention was called in Chatham, Ontario to chart a thorough plan for revolution. The majority-Black delegation not only adopted Brown’s battle plan but also elected a government-in-waiting and ratified Brown’s draft of a provisional constitution which radically reorganized society. The loyalty that later abolitionists went on to show the federal government in the wake of the Civil War was eventually rewarded with the total abandonment of Reconstruction. The earlier revolutionary wing of the abolitionist movement was vindicated in their assertion that their goals were only attainable when the Slaver’s Constitution was defeated. This is as true today as it was then. We as socialists have a responsibility to carry the spirit of the Chatham convention into the 21st century. A revolutionary movement for a new constitution is not only possible, but necessary for the construction of socialism in North America. Foremost among those calling for this course of action is the Marxist Unity Group, a faction within the Democratic Socialists of America which I’m a member of. Allow me to close with a quote from our Points of Unity:
No one can be truly free if they are forced to bow to a reactionary constitution written by the dead. We want socialist leaders to erode the popular legitimacy of the U.S. Constitution through combative political agitation: never bowing to the old order, and always acknowledging the need for a working class revolution in the United States. The revolution will not base its legitimacy on the laws of the slaveholder constitution. We will base it on a democratic majority mandate for socialism. To win, millions of working people must be mobilized in their workplaces, at the ballot box, and in the street. We fight the Constitution to win a democratic socialist republic in North America. Forged in revolution, this continental republic will strive for the global liberation of all working and oppressed people.
Lenin’s Story and Ours
Lenin scholar Lars Lih once wrote that Marxism is not only scientific in content, but crucially, narrative in form. His exact words, referring to excerpts from Engels’ Socialism, Utopian and Scientific were:
Scientific socialism tells the proletariat a story about itself: its past (historical conditions), its present (oppression), and its future (world-freeing deed). Since this story will itself inspire the proletariat to carry out the great deed, telling the story is a precondition for freeing the world.
Lenin was perhaps the best storyteller of the 20th-century socialist movement. While his writing on organization and internal party matters often received more attention, he was adept at crafting a narrative of liberation for the Russian working classes of his time. He wrote about their past struggles against serfdom and the heroic but doomed movement of the populist narodniks. He wrote scathing political indictments of their present circumstances which oriented workers and peasants alike against the monarchy even during the course of what could have been purely economic shopfloor disputes. One of his best-known works, State and Revolution, painted a beautiful picture of the ideal future for a socialist state in Russia, which sadly faded in the wake of the wider European revolution’s failure. Lenin understood how to address the laboring classes’ past, present, and future in such a way that they were inspired en masse to undertake the greatest experiment of majority rule and economic planning in world history. The central theme of Lenin’s story was the proletariat’s call of duty – to raise the red banner of socialism and lead the charge as the vanguard in the battle for democracy.
We need a story that will speak to the 21st-century American proletariat and set our movement on fire. Just like the narrative crafted by Lenin and his Bolshevik comrades, it must contextualize our history and showcase our roots in the struggles of the past, explain the challenges and opportunities we face in the present, and inspire with a grounded vision of the future where our class accomplishes its historic mission. While the focus of this panel is Lenin’s relevance to the class struggle of our era, I’m sure we all recognize he was not a lone genius hatching brilliant plans and giving marching orders. The liberatory narrative of the Bolsheviks was crafted collectively, with sharp debates forging a final product that was greater than the sum of its intellectual parts. Our process will be no different or it will produce nothing of value. Thus, the narrative I sketch out today is not intended for the printing press. It is one of what will hopefully be numerous drafts, and I invite all who listen to put their criticisms on paper for all to read. Economic data, campaign platforms, strike waves, theoretical texts, and party meetings all appeal immensely to a small minority of dedicated movement activists. But as Lenin once remarked, serious politics begin in the millions. If we want to reach the millions, we need a damn good story.
I spoke at length during our talk in Chicago last month about the immediate forebears of American socialism: the revolutionary abolitionists. John Brown, Harriet Tubman, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, and all the rest not only directly influenced the Marxist emigres from Europe who fought alongside them against slavery. They went on to inspire the home-grown revolutionaries who led the workers’ struggles of the 20th century. But, our movement’s history did not begin with them. Abolitionism was born in the pews, itself a product of the dissident English Protestants who rebelled against the British Empire’s state church and brought their revolutionary energies with them when they colonized North America. Tragically, they did not recognize the contradiction between their struggle for natural rights and their project of dispossessing the indigenous peoples whose land they fled to. Nonetheless, abolitionist thought, and by extension American socialist thought, are both rooted in the English Christian dissident tradition that began shortly after the Black Death in the 14th century and finally exploded with the English Civil War of the mid-17th century.
As Marxists, we understand that popular movements are the result of the underlying economic base they spring from. The post-hoc ideological (in this case religious) justifications come afterward. In other words, factors out of human control create certain economic interests, and humans respond by crafting stories to explain to one another why they must cooperate to pursue these interests. This is true today in the proletariat’s struggle for democratic governance and socialist planning, and it was true seven centuries ago for English dissidents. Their struggle was far narrower in scope, but just as bloody and protracted. English landowners faced a labor shortage and the prospect of having to pay increased wages to their agricultural laborers in the wake of the mass death caused by the bubonic plague pandemic. They found a way around this problem by evicting tenant farmers from their land and building walls around what had been commonly owned land, sometimes illegally and sometimes with the backing of the law, thereby depriving the laboring population of their means of subsistence and forcing them to work for lower wages. This process, known as enclosure, was a key driver of social unrest in England for hundreds of years and resulted in the slow proletarianization of the peasantry and the birth of capitalism in the British Isles.
Those who rebelled against enclosure created narratives to agitate and inspire those around them. They spoke of landowners making deals with the devil and angels sent by God urging them to fight for their ancient right to common ownership of land. One rebel leader, John Reynolds, claimed to be endowed with authority by the King and God himself to tear down the enclosures and protect his comrades with the contents of his sacred pouch. By the time he was caught and executed, he was known to the world as Captain Pouch. The contents of the container in question turned out to be a piece of moldy cheese. The humor in these events belies a deeper truth: a story that captures an audience experiencing a crisis and provides a solution can tear down walls and plant the seeds of revolution…even if the storyteller is up against the most powerful people around and his only material resource is a hunk of green cheese.
Just as socialists today are derided by our detractors as “pinkos” and “reds,” those who fought for communal land in the medieval era were labeled “levellers” and “diggers.” These terms stuck in the English political vernacular. They were later deployed in the 1640s against two particular factions of the republican movement which sought to abolish the monarchy and establish a government led by Parliament. The Levellers were radical democrats who sought to expand male suffrage, establish religious freedom from the state church, abolish debtors’ prisons, and generally reform the parliamentary republic they fought for alongside more conservative forces in the military conflict against the King. The Diggers operated during the same time but rejected the authority of both Parliament and the King in favor of loosely-affiliated agricultural communes which they built by destroying enclosures. Both groups claimed divine authority, with the Levellers emphasizing natural rights endowed upon man by God and the diggers centering the language of Acts 4:32 from the Bible:
The group of believers was one in mind and heart. No one said that any of his belongings was his own, but they all shared with one another everything they had.
Just like the abolitionists and socialists who came after them, the Levellers crafted their revolutionary narrative in a process of comradely debate and then spread that narrative through agitational pamphlets and mass meetings. One of these debates has been repeated throughout history by every revolutionary movement in English-speaking countries: should we be loyal or disloyal to the formal charter of government we live under? In other words, are we fighting to preserve a just system or to smash an unjust system and build something new in its place? For the Englishmen, that charter was the Magna Carta. Their debates raged over whether to claim its authority or stand in opposition to its injustices. Military defeat in their civil war made the question moot as the monarchy was restored and their forces scattered.
The abolitionists, who had read the Levellers’ tracts, incorporated their language of natural rights, and expanded suffrage into the political and religious rhetoric that fanned the flames of their crusade against slavery, faced the opposite problem. They won their civil war, resulting in a half-victory that abolished formal chattel slavery but left open the question of democratic rights for Black Americans, in addition to the loophole under which forced prison labor continues to plague Black communities with mass incarceration to this day. Their debates between loyalty to the U.S. Constitution (and all its anti-democratic clauses) and revolutionary struggle for a democratic republic with Black leadership and a new charter of government (adopted at the Chatham Convention of 1858) ended in victory for the loyalist camp. This was partly the result of revolutionary cadres being killed in John Brown’s failed attempt at insurrection in Virginia, which severely demoralized their supporters. But, it ultimately came down to manpower and materiel. By 1860, the federal government was prepared to defeat the terrible Slave Power on the battlefield and the abolitionists did not feel up to the task on their own. Seizing the opportunity, they joined the fray en masse. With the help of a mass strike by enslaved Black workers in the Confederacy, they successfully pressured the government into changing its war goals from the preservation of the Union to the abolition of chattel slavery.
The abolitionist movement was never confined to this single goal. They pursued the total emancipation of Black peoples in North America, the establishment of true democracy on the continent, and a foreign policy that supported revolutionaries in Ireland, Haiti, India, China, and beyond. They pursued these aims during Reconstruction by entering government as U.S. marshals, bureaucrats in labor departments, and paid organizers in the Freedmen’s Bureau. For all their diligent work and bloody sacrifice, what was their reward? The federal government abandoned Reconstruction, withdrew their troops from the South, deployed those troops against striking workers in the North, and sat on their hands as former Confederate officers waged a terror campaign against Black and abolitionist communities, ultimately resulting in the lynch-mob regime of Jim Crow.
I speak to you today from Atlanta, where we are attempting to stop the construction of an urban warfare training center for our police department, which was founded by the remnants of former slave patrols, on a road named after a slave owner, which once housed a prison plantation where Civil Rights leaders including Kwame Ture were subjected to forced agricultural labor. Slavery and Jim Crow are alive and they are killing my neighbors every day. This is why I call the Civil War a half-victory. The abolitionists accomplished their most immediate goal, but were ultimately defeated because they put themselves in a position of reliance on the federal government not just to realize their political aspirations but to safeguard them from violent reaction. This ended in predictable disaster, as constitutional loyalism always does.
Mass liberatory movements motivated by existential crises are nothing new. Whether people face enclosure, slavery, imperialism, fascism, capitalist exploitation, or ecological collapse, they will eventually respond with revolutionary fervor motivated by stories that imbue their struggles with a higher purpose. Each of these crises I mentioned continues to plague humanity in some form in some part of the globe or everywhere all at once. I have highlighted past attempts at revolutionary responses to crisis in our movement’s forebears in order to center what I believe to be the most pressing question up for debate today: are we going to respond to the potential extinction of our species within the limited bounds of a 300-year-old constitution written by dead slavers, or will we dare to win? Our future is not guaranteed. We will either replace the world’s imperialist oligarchies with socialist republics grounded in democracy and ecology, or we will have nothing at all. In Marx’s time, workers had nothing to lose but their chains. Today we have a world to win…and a world to lose. I will conclude with excerpts from Lenin’s Letter to American Workers:
He is no socialist who does not understand that one cannot and must not hesitate to make even such a sacrifice as…territory…heavy defeat…indemnities to capitalists…in the interest of the beginning of the international proletarian revolution…The American people has a revolutionary tradition adopted by the best representatives of the American proletariat…the greatest, world-historic, progressive, and revolutionary significance of the American Civil War…the overthrow of the rule of slave-owners. The American workers will not follow the bourgeoisie. They will be with us for civil war against the bourgeoisie. The whole history of the world and the American labor movement strengthens my conviction.
Comrades, let us not be cowed into confining ourselves to working within the limits of a constitution that was designed to prevent majority rule and economic planning, the building blocks of socialism. Let us make good on Lenin’s confidence in us and declare war on the bourgeoisie and their oligarchic state. Let us imagine living in a genuine democracy, with an equitable economy, and an actual plan to build a livable future. If we don’t, there may not be another generation to correct our mistakes. That is my story, and I’m sticking to it. Thank you.
