Thanks to Fred for posting what are now now five articles on Lenin and Leninism. I've started writing this note twice. I haven't read the fifth paper yet but decided to send my note before I forget it.
> On May 9, 2026, at 05:28, Fred Fuentes via groups.io > <[email protected]> wrote: > > Dan La Botz' essay "Goodbye to Lenin and Leninism" > https://links.org.au/goodbye-lenin-and-leninism has provoked further debate: The debate published in Links is mostly among people from a Trotskyist tradition. Others may not find this interesting, it may grate on some, but I think the legacies of the "Leninisms" are important to working class organization, and thus it's very important to this list. Trotsky's Explanation ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I learned about the Russian Revolution and its aftermath from Trotsky, Deutscher and others. They explained that the Russian Revolution suffered adverse historical forces it couldn't overcome: (1) international capital financed a civil war; (2) the 1918-19 German Revolution failed as did others on the continent; (3) the country was overwhelmed with disease, famine, deprivations from WWI and the civil war; (4) the Russian Revolution had overthrown capitalism where capitalism was the weakest rather than where the working class was most developed. The small Russian working class suffered the privations mentioned above plus the collapse of Russia's industrial base. As technocrats and managers flooded into the Russian Communist Party, these factors fed a political reaction to the Revolution that Trotsky called "The Thermidor," drawing a parallel with the French Revolution. According to the Trotskyists, the Soviet Thermidor established a nationalistic bureaucracy in the party and in the single-party state. In Trotsky's analysis, there is little to criticize in Lenin or in the Bolshevik's actions that aren't overshadowed by adverse historical forces. It has been understood since Marx that "socialism in one country" is unsustainable, and that's what happened - in this narrative. Blaming Lenin ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ An alternative narrative pins the authoritarian nature of the USSR and its eventual collapse to Lenin's organizational principles: According to Dan La Botz, "Lenin, and what became Leninism, played a very large role, a decisive role, in extinguishing socialist democracy" (Dan La Botz, https://links.org.au/goodbye-lenin-and-leninism). Lenin's organizational principles had a vanguard-elite in control of a centralized political apparatus with top-down discipline; Lenin merged the party with the state and outlawed opposition in both. "Critics have commonly described it as a mechanism far more centralist than democratic, requiring on the one hand 'a strong leader' and on the other hand a rank-and-file membership 'consciously and joyfully submitting to the leadership imposed on it by senior members'" (Paul Le Blanc https://links.org.au/lenin-and-todays-socialist-struggle-united-states). It's a one-dimensional analysis, however, to consider only the Bolshevik actors and not the conditions that they faced. It's also one dimensional to consider only the historical conditions that were arrayed against the Revolution for its retrenchment. We instead need to consider the interaction between various forces under specific conditions. A serious critique "...must address how soviet power was displaced by party and state structures under the intense pressures of isolation and civil war, rather than drawing a direct equation between Lenin’s decisions" and the authoritarian bureaucracy that ran the USSR until its collapse" (Anthony Teso https://links.org.au/lenin-democracy-and-anti-leninist-shortcut). What He Wrote and What They Did ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ So Dan asks the question: "If Lenin was always right, why did things go so wrong?" We might instead ask: How much of a difference did the plans and organizing principles of the Bolsheviks make under the overwhelming conditions that they faced? Would a democratic USSR be able to defy international capital until capitalism's demise? Why was what Lenin and other Bolsheviks wrote so different from what they did? Simon Pirani studied newly-available Soviet records after the fall of the USSR. He argues that the working class was politically expropriated by the Bolshevik party in the period 1920–24. This was not simply forced on the Bolsheviks: Pirani challenges the Trotsky/Deutscher view that the working class was too weakened by the civil war to exercise power. His book, "The Revolution in Retreat" is a work of history, however, and not a critique of Leninism. It's not clear to me how much the Revolution's retreat is intrinsic to the Bolshevik's "Leninism," and how much is a function of the Revolution's enemies, isolation and the effects of Great Russian culture. "Tsarist Russia was an autocracy that lacked stable law, a functioning parliament, and basic freedoms of the press, assembly and organisation" (Teso, https://links.org.au/lenin-democracy-and-anti-leninist-shortcut). Major social change takes generations, not years. It took centuries to complete the transition to capitalism in western Europe. The USSR itself was a "variant of the transitional formation between capitalism and socialism which Marx and Engels had theorized — but in this case forced to exist on a capitalist planet much longer than anticipated. Consequently, it became bureaucratized, authoritarian, and corrupt, proving unable to move forward to socialism and unable to endure" (Le Blanc, https://links.org.au/lenin-and-todays-socialist-struggle-united-states). The Leninisms We Inherited ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The bureaucratized and authoritarian USSR influenced world communism through the Communist International (Comintern). The Comintern created what the world calls "Leninism" today. This adds another dimension to the problem: There is what Lenin wrote, what Lenin and the Bolsheviks did, and then what the Comintern disseminated as "Leninism." Geier and others have argued that what we know as "Leninism" in political and organizational practices came from Comintern leader Grigory Zinoviev. It was thus "Zinovievism" and not "Leninism" that issued from the Comintern's Fifth Congress of 1924 with its theory of the "vanguard party" and its policy of "Bolshevization," which effectively meant that "every party was expected to carry out instructions from the Russian party, in reality from its Politburo" (Geier https://isreview.org/issue/93/zinovievism-and-degeneration-world-communism/index.html) US Communist leader, James P. Cannon was an original believer in Bolshevization and wrote that "Bolshevization of the party, ... like all slogans of the Communist International, means ... a struggle against false ideology in the party. The Bolshevization of the party, for us, means the struggle for the conquest of the party for the ideology of Marxism and Leninism" (Cannon https://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1924/bolsh.htm). Note the contrast between "false" versus "true" ideologies. Cannon would later accept Trotsky's Leninism against Zinoviev's version that enabled Moscow to expel Cannon from the US party less than a year after it expelled Trotsky from the All-Russian CP. Cannon and others eventually founded the Socialist Workers Party as a Trotskyist/Leninist party. But was it? Late in the 20th Century, the US SWP abandoned Trotskyism. Peter Camejo, an expelled party leader, thought that the SWP's "Leninism" was idealistic: Idealism was inherent in the idea of the "correct program," which differentiates a truly revolutionary vanguard party from petty-bourgeois political groups. "That myth is that what Lenin did was gather a cadre around a 'correct' program, build a hard, centralized organization and when the masses radicalized they were won over. Having won the masses, Lenin’s party was then able to take 'power'. A whole series of corollaries followed from this erroneous concept and, over time, became part of the Trotskyist dogma" (Camejo, https://www.marxists.org/archive/camejo/1995/materialism.htm). Create Two, Three, Many Lenins ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Camejo wrote that "Cadres became the defenders of the Holy Grail, and usually there was in each group just one 'Lenin of today' who could interpret and adjust the 'program'." This would contribute to the continual fragmentation of Trotskyist groups into ever-smaller formations around a single enduring leader. Camejo added: "Also, amazing as it might seem, while these organizations produced endless written materials on all kinds of political phenomena, almost nothing can be found seeking to explain this astounding phenomena of the cultification of Trotskyist organizations" (Camejo, https://www.marxists.org/archive/camejo/1995/materialism.htm). The astounding theft by Jack Barnes of the SWP assets in New York City, however, has been well-documented. The single-leader tradition stretches back to the Bolshevik party, which was co-founded by Lenin and Bogdanov, who Lenin subsequently had expelled. Why couldn't they coexist in the Bolshevik party? The practice of investing a single individual with extraordinary powers has not served the international left well, overall. And neither has the notion that there can be only a single vanguard party from each country. Or that an international federation of parties should itself be subject to democratic centralism and party-level discipline from some politburo. These diktats are post-Lenin, from the Fifth Congress of the Comintern in 1924. Lenin vs The Vanguard Party ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Following the experiences of the Russian Revolution and the USSR, many on today's left would agree with Anthony Teso that "a genuinely-democratic organization grounded in the self-activity of the working class ... requires rejecting the party’s monopoly over the working class" (Teso, https://links.org.au/lenin-democracy-and-anti-leninist-shortcut). As far as I can tell, there is nothing against working-class political pluralism in Lenin's writings or speeches. I don't find the term "vanguard party" in Lenin's writings but in Zinoviev's speeches and other documents from the Fifth Congress of the Comintern. Today, it's hard to find an introductory class on Lenin that does not use the phrases "vanguard party." But it's arguable that Lenin purposely did not use the term "vanguard party" because he did not believe in such a thing. Goodbye to Leninism but not Lenin ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ We can learn too much from Lenin to say goodbye to his writings, speeches, and life's work. Leninism, however, today exists in multiple, incompatible forms, most having little to do with Lenin's writings and perhaps even his intentions. We should say goodbye to Leninism. But the basic works of Lenin that Dan mentioned in his article should remain in the curriculum of those introductory classes on socialism or communism. But we might want to also teach how Lenin has been used, abused, and reinterpreted by Leninist groups to better understand Lenin's real legacy. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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