The anniversary business, as practised in the shows how even Lenn s centenary can be used as an opium to ine With the 'official"
communist movemen! using the occasion tor its ends, and the bourgeois press making their contribution towards distorling everyling that Lenin stood for, we are forced to give battle a hundred years after he happened to be born. forty-six years after he died, to defend the pollics or Lenin and revoluton Lenin was a Russian revolutionary and an international revolutionary. He founded Ind Bolshevik party and the Third International. led the October revolution and directed the Soviet state for the first five years of its existence All this the bourgeoise and Is ideologists can readily admit. But what their class position does not allow tem to admit is precisely what is most essential to taking up the light here in Britain. Lenin was above all a revolutonary Marxist, WROSC presents. to a degree still unparalleled, the unity of the theory of scientific socialism and the practice of class struggle. The bourgeoisie can never admit inal class-conscious worker have a privileged access to the most advanced social science-Marxism; and that they car use inis knowiegre as an instrument to transform society and overthrow all forms of oppression and exploitation. To admit that would be ideological quidation for the bourgeoisie Conversely, if we are to make any headway in the immense task of advancing from the inchoate struggles of students and young workers. to reconstruct the whole totten mess of British society along socialis lines. it is absolutely vital to master the tools of Marxism. Which means, in part, to learn from the achievements- -and ine mistakes of the masters of Marxist theory and practice.
and in the first place-from Lenin.
MARX AND LENIN What a myth the bourgeoisie tries to put over when it contrasts Marx. the supposed historical determinist who believed in the inevitable evolution of capitalist society into socialism. wilh Ine voluntaris!
Blanquist, who saw that capitalism wasn't developing into socialism and thought he could step in with a small group of conspirators and push Russia-and the worldonto the socialist path! Marx spent his whole service of the workers adult me in ine movement. His theoretical work aimed to provide the working-class with an understanding of how capitalist society functions, of what the working class has to do in order to emancipate itself (smash the bourgeois state and organise its own form of political power), and for thirteen years he was active building the early working-class organisations (Communist azue 18471852. International Workingmen's Association 1864-72).
Just as Marx the theorist" was an active 'activist was OreanIsCT. systematic theorist. The starting point of Lenin's political practice, and which Lenin reverted to at every decisive turning, was the socio-economic analysis of Russian—and later of international-society. In Siberian exile 89 renin "voluntarist"
completed his book The Development of Capitalism in Russia. His first major work, it is an exhaustive analysis of the Russian social formation, and the dynamic way in which the forms of patriarchal peasant economy were being eroded by the capitalist market It defined the objective features of the specific class sod ety in which the Russian movement had to operate.
analysis which was to constitute the startingof Bolshevik strategy. an example of Marxist And it demonstrated at a point this was not clear that capitalism was ant development in russian society would be its book Lenin making a tape recording in the Kremlin. predictions and expectations of orthodox social-democratic Marxists.' In Russian, in contrast to the social democrats in Western Europe, revolutionaries faced problems that forced them to discover those implications of Marxist theory for political practice which Marx himself had not developed. Russia had one hand an advanced capitalist onune sector and consequently the basis lor a socialist workers movement. But it had not yet achieved its bourgeois-democratic transformation and was still overall a peasant society dominated by the bureaucratic Tsarist state. was impossible for Russian revolutionary Marxists to import a model for political role from advanced capitalist countries of Western Europe. Their political tasks were not mapped out for them-they had to decide them for themseives.
The first Russian Marxists of the 1880's. Plechanov and the Emancipation of Labour COUP fundamental aim of the workers movement -h30 a ready. decided that the in Russia must be the overthrow of Tsarism. Lenin built an organisation able to lead the working class in this political struggle against the state. In the course of constructing what was to become the Bolshevik party, the weapon of this struggle, Lenin reached two further conclusions, which essentially define "Leninism."
LENINISM Firstly, if the revolutionary workers' party has to choose its strategic aims, then it cannot be the party of all workers, or of all who are "for socialism" or even of those who pay lip service to Marxism. The Marxist party must be the instrument of the strategy " has chosen, and so membership must be open only to those whd accept 1s programme, and who personally participate party's oreanisations (Bolshevik resolution at the 2nd Party Congress, 1903).
Secondly, the internal organisation of the party must be such as to put this strategy, and the tactis chosen to realise it, into effect. This means that although the party's line is decided on democratically by a party congress, after this decision the minority must work loyally with the majority to put it into practice. Between congresses the central committee elected by the congress must have the authony to make any tactical changes required by unexpected conditions.
revolutionary EWe COnCEDES militancy and democratic centralism gave the Bolshevik party a quite different character from its Social Democratic contemporaries in the West and from its Menshevik rival in Russia. It sought to be first and foremost a rather than a mass party, cacre DaTE although the bourgeois myth of a group of conspirators is amply refuted by the fact that "conspirators" nad grown to 0.000m February 1917 and to 240,000 by October 1917, backed at that time in elections and Ilass mobilisations majority of the industrial working-class. The Bolshevic party built up its organisation and 2 mass pace under sans!
the Second Internatona proletarian internationalism and GIC nO!| meekly follow its ruling class into the World War; its tactical flexibility and discipline enabled it to take advantage of favourable conjunctures: to the point of leading the first victorious proletarian revolution.
REVOLUTIONARY CRITICISM The most strenuous revolutionary criticism made 182 1 ALROUET organisation and tactics he developed for the Bolshevik provided successful instrument for overthrowing the Tsarist and the embryonic bourgois state in Russia, the highly and CYCL monolithic party already structure DOISACYIN contained the seed of a bureaucratic elite ITOR producine stateoutin this retarian baby alone with ine bainwaiet. Ency canno put forward an alternative force overthrow bourgeois Stale forced to rely on nebulous solutions spontaneity, autonomou local SOVIELS workers councils revolutionary working class upsurge from th Paris Commune of 1871 to the May events of 1968 has proved, cannot by themselves displace the bourgeoisie from power. Even though without them the working class can never achieve power.
libertarian's reading of Leninism forgets that it is forged on the action of the masses of workers and peasants. They offer as an alternative to Lenin the opposite of crude schematisations OWI Bolshevism. The distorting Stalinist orthodoxy bears a heavy responsibility fro these errors; so do those who refuse to study Lenin for themselves. For the successful organisation of the revolution is built on the dialectic of political force and the masses. In Russia —the Bolshevik party, the Soviet state and the Red Army, and the innumerable independent actions of workers and peasants The Bolshevik party conducted its revolution in a highly specific hissorical conjuncture, one which posed the most immense construction of socialism.
problems for me But its social base was firmly rooted in the industrial working-class, and its revolution was a democratic one-for the working class At the moment of the seizure of power, the unorganised support or at least acquiescence of the peasant masses. But the spontaneous peasant land redistributions of 1917, which the Bolsheviks had no alternative but to accept, doomed the working-class party to transform the agrarian economic structures (in which 80% of the Russian was embedded). from the outside. Socialism had to be built against the peasantry. The govern a peasant country (bureaucratic in the Marxist bureaucrauc suare. bull up sense, i.e. one separated from the class from which it arose), ended up by dominating the and soviets
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party enjoyed both the organised support of the absolute majority of the class, and the