Y.O. reacts to the recent death of Mikhail Gorbachev, final leader of the USSR, with a reflection on the legacy of Marxism-Leninism in what they argue is a now-firmly post-Soviet world.
I must confess that the title of this article is somewhat misleading. Though the death of Mikhail Gorbachev, final General Secretary of the CPSU and leader of the USSR, is what prompted the author to write this, it is ludicrous to suggest that Gorbachev giving up the ghost was the final nail in a coffin sealed 31 years ago. But his death – quiet and surrounded by the ruins of his failure – reflects the state in which the communist movement has found itself since that fateful Christmas Day in 1991.
“Leninism” is dead. By this, I do not mean that the lessons the Bolsheviks have provided us are no longer relevant. Lenin will continue to be an icon of the international proletarian movement, and its future incarnations will likely continue to march under his banner. By “Leninism,” I mean that mode of politics directly inspired by those bureaucratic socialist states spearheaded and guided by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The USSR’s twists and turns, successes and failures, realpolitik and ideology were its lifeblood, and now that it is gone, this supposedly “immortal science” has been exhausted. The red thread is severed.
Marxism-Leninism as an ideology has reached its limits; not as a previous stage in linear progress toward a new, universal Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as Gonzaloites suggest, nor towards a new horizon opened up by the Cultural Revolution as proposed by Badiouans. As Marxists, we must reject this notion of linear progress toward Truth. Science is a living and messy thing, always branching off in new directions. What was initially the largest and most promising branch of socialism – the Marxist-Leninist party-state – has ultimately withered and died.
Everywhere, the “Leninists” scatter, desperately grasping onto life, mutating into countless new strains and directions. Witness the final devolution of the former official communist parties into social-democratic ones! Witness the bloody farce of the Peruvian Shining Path, supposed to inaugurate a higher level of Marxism, but merely replicating all the worst characteristics of the old, exhausting itself before ever coming to power! Witness as they cling to Cuba, the final bureaucratic socialist state, besieged on all sides by American capital! It needs us more than we need it: it is ultimately up to us to ensure that the Cuban Revolution doesn’t meet the same fate as the Russian or Chinese.
Some of these ghosts of futures past cling to North Korea, yet another shard of the wreckage of the Soviet collapse. But Juche, regardless of how one characterizes it, seems to amount to little more than a desperate plea for American imperialism to leave the Korean people alone. Hardly the new beacon of a new socialist movement. Others choose a reactionary but anti-American state to champion instead: Russia, Iran, the Ba’athist states, past and present. In doing so, they objectively place themselves outside of the communist movement and shall be discussed no further.
Perhaps a light that shines brighter in this post-Soviet darkness is China. There is much to admire and much to condemn about the People’s Republic, but here too are the Leninists frustrated. “Dengism” is a developmental ideology born of a bureaucratic socialist state embracing bureaucratic capitalism (with heavy socialist baggage), and those bureaucrats are determined to avoid a Soviet-style collapse. This ideology is openly particularist (“socialism with Chinese characteristics”): there will never be an international movement that upholds Xi Jinping Thought, and despite the wishes of a few online “patriotic socialists,” there will never be socialism with American characteristics either. And we simply cannot ignore Chinese military assistance in suppressing Maoist guerillas in its neighbors: is this the state that will lead the international communist movement?
It may be that these Maoists are the last Leninists who fight and die for a communist horizon. But they too have their limits, the massacres and ultra-leftism of the Shining Path serving as the most extreme example. The Naxalites in India and the New People’s Army in the Philippines have not made meaningful headway against their respective states despite decades of guerilla warfare. And the victorious Nepalese Maoists ultimately fell prey to the class-collaborationist tendencies baked into Maoism – the original sin of the CPC, forced upon it by the Soviet Union.
Thus perish the Leninists. But with their demise, the anti-Leninists are dragged down with them, robbed of an enemy to define themselves against. Trotskyism’s claim to fame among the socialist movement was that it could serve as a unifying pole against the “official” Stalinists and social-democracy. But with no USSR to either critically support or scorn depending on one’s flavor of Trotskyism, Trotsky’s heirs can be found supporting every combination of positions imaginable; unable to rise above the same trends that destroyed the followers of Stalin, they are swept away as well.
Meanwhile, if the Marxist-Leninists have become social-democrats, the social-democrats have become liberals. Any pretenses at socialism as the ultimate goal are abandoned entirely, and now these parties are incapable of defending the welfare states they created, let alone expanding them. Without the threat of USSR-backed revolution dangling overhead, as empty as those threats turned out to be, there is no longer any need to give further concessions, nor anyone to resist their dismantling. The brief social-democratic “revival” of the late 2010s, represented by Sanders in the US and Corbyn in the UK, was inaugurated by relics from another political era where social-democracy meant something, and inevitably fell apart under the weight of the contradictions that led all the other social-democrats to this point. UK Labour is lost to socialists for at least a generation, and the Democratic Party was never going to be ours at all.
On the internet, the dominant tendency of the Anglosphere left now seems to be an anti-tendency. Sometimes its adherents describe themselves as anarchists (or various alternatives that mean the same thing), sometimes they describe themselves as social-democrats (ditto), and often they reject any form of identification at all. They can, however, be identified by their fundamental “anti-Stalinism.” To combat the tattered remnants of Leninism is of utmost importance, just as serious as opposing liberalism or fascism – and they will often don the social-democratic Three Arrows as a logo. “Tankies” must be driven out at all costs, and in their zeal, they end up reinventing the paranoia and tactics of the Man of Steel himself.
More important than petty internet squabbling, leftists of this stripe often attempt to sever the umbilical cord between themselves and Marxism-Leninism entirely. They have uncritically accepted capitalist narratives about the collapse of the USSR and merely dipped them in red paint. With a smug “I-told-you-so” attitude, they dismiss the Soviet experience in its entirety. The Bolsheviks simply should not have seized the state, this being the original and fatal sin of the October Revolution. Depending on their specific politics, “anti-tendency” leftists will instead string together a series of short-lived “purer” revolutions like beads on a rosary or champion those social-democratic governments that actually attempted something resembling socialism. Never mind what developments allowed these brief triumphs, and never mind the terrible fates they met soon after!
In periods where the struggle is at its strongest, our “anti-Leninists” hail the riot. They are mystified when, having built no lasting mechanisms to capture and temper spontaneous popular anger, the momentum of these insurrections quickly fizzles out, with very little to show for it. In periods where the struggle ebs, they will latch onto any politician with the slimmest “progressive” credentials and demand that the left provide them not-so-critical support. And just like their liberal counterparts who demand that we “vote blue no matter who,” they will be continually off-guard when conditions continue to deteriorate. Their supposed anti-imperialism is skin-deep, and they will somehow always echo Washington’s line regarding inter-imperial conflicts: witness the “anarchists” who cheerlead Ukraine in the latest string of pointless nationalist wars in the wreckage of the Soviet collapse!
The anti-Leninists will never meaningfully challenge or contest state power. They will never uplift the working class. They will never dismantle the American Empire. At best, they amount to a futile attempt to preserve what little neoliberalism has not destroyed of the previous epoch, at worst they provide a leftist figleaf for neoliberal offensives. Alongside the Leninists they despise, they are swept into the gaping abyss of post-Soviet politics, forever intertwined in death. The ghosts of Leninism and the Quixotes of anti-Leninism are animated by that same post-Soviet phenomenon: a politics of despair.
Arthur Koestler voiced a similar plea decades before the Soviet collapse in his magnum opus Darkness at Noon: “For forty years they had been driven through the wilderness, with threats and enticements, with bogus flights and shame consolation; but where was the Promised Land?” His protagonist dies uncertain if the atrocities he has committed in the name of communism were worth it. He dies seeing nothing but “wilderness and the darkness of night” and with a “shrug of infinity.”
To this, we can only rest assured in the small and cold comfort that so long as capitalism is the dominant mode of production, there will always be a proletariat, and thus a proletarian movement. It may finally succeed decades, perhaps even centuries from now, but so long as there are capitalists, there will always be communists. The meek may still yet inherit the Earth.
As for right now, the wheel of history keeps on turning. The apotheosis of liberalism after the Soviet collapse has proven just as illusory as the Soviet party-state. Gorbachev, the man who oversaw liberalism’s supposedly final victory over communism, dies in a year where the pax Americana is flimsier than ever. New struggles take the stage alongside old ones, and with them new defeats and victories. The real movements to abolish the present state of things keep struggling on, and it is up to us communists to show them their true objective, pick up the Soviet standard, and lead them into the “final conflict” once more.
In the United States, the left is slowly beginning to regroup under the banner of “democratic socialism” – first under Sanders’s leadership, now the collective one of the Democratic Socialists of America. DSA is the first socialist organization in the United States to integrate communists of multiple tendencies under one roof since the end of the New Left. Despite its messy internal culture, it has still managed to transcend the microsect form. The current National Political Committee is not a “Leninist” Central Committee capable of purging entire factions and branches for deviating from a (practically non-existent) party line.
But much work remains to be done. What is the actual content of “democratic socialism?” DSA is rife with factional disputes that refuse to admit that they are factional disputes, obscured by several layers of interpersonal conflict. The disorganization of the DSA’s left opposition allows the DSA right to dominate the conversation. It seems to the author that the current NPC Majority represents the interests of a nascent bureaucratic centralist clique, its efforts to consolidate control frustrated more by DSA’s continued disorganization and decentralization than organized opposition. It is up to the left opposition to transform the conflict-averse culture of DSA into one more conducive to democratic deliberation. It is only then that we can truly reassume an offensive stance.
The author offers no special insight that will allow us to escape the long winter of the global left. We are all adrift together, groping through this darkness. The stars above have gone out, and they may never reignite again. I end this article with an impassioned plea: turn our gaze away from the “pure” revolutions, strangled in their cradle before they could ever become a reality. Behold the crucifix, the God-that-failed! The Union’s shadow looms over us still, its bony hand seizes our throats! Stop looking under your beds for the Stalinist bogeyman, and start looking at real socialism, with real accomplishments, destroyed by real contradictions!
The death of Gorbachev should mark the death of all leftist truisms about revolution and the Soviet bloc – whether they amount to mindless praise or mindless condemnation. Instead, let us seriously grapple with the problems posed by the USSR and its disintegration! How do we balance realpolitik with proletarian internationalism? How do we construct a state that will actually wither away, rather than a bureaucratic Leviathan that drives the revolution off of a cliff decades down the line? Having seized power, just what are we going to do with it?
My final, paradoxical request is that we turn our eyes upon the dead so that we may lay them to rest.
