Lenin was wrong, Marx was right (2024)

Book Review from the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

During the 125 years or so since the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, the Socialist Standard has published numerous articles about that event and its acknowledged leader, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin). The view those articles have taken is that what Lenin and the Bolsheviks did in 1917 and after, despite their claim to be following Marxist ideas, ran entirely counter to Marx’s advocacy of a democratically run, marketless, socialist society based on production for use not profit and on the idea of from each according to ability to each according to need. Instead, Lenin set up a tyrannical one-party regime run by and in the interests of a small group of bureaucrats with the market mechanism still operating even if commanded by the state, amounting to a form of capitalism – state capitalism. Furthermore Lenin’s – and then Stalin’s – Russia failed Marx’s ‘test’ for socialism (or communism – he used the two words synonymously), which was that such a society had to – could only – arise from advanced capitalism, not from what existed in Russia in the early 20th century, ie, an economically underdeveloped, largely agricultural society in which capitalism had barely begun to take hold. It could not possibly ‘jump’ the capitalist stage and somehow go straight to socialism – something in fact that Lenin, from his speeches and writings, showed he knew, even if this did not stop him from claiming to follow Marx and to have the aim of establishing socialism.

Marxism-Leninism?

One of the inevitable outcomes of such claims by Lenin has been that, over the period since these events, the cry has gone up – and continues to from many ill-informed quarters – that Marxism (or socialism) has been tried and failed. Not only, so the story goes, did it preside over unbridled violence and brutality, starvation and other unimaginable horror in the years of ‘war communism’ (1918 to 1922) and show itself to be an entirely undemocratic authoritarian form of society for decades after that. It also, though Lenin himself died in 1924, sowed the seeds for a dictator – Stalin – to take absolute power and establish an authoritarian tyranny in which people were arrested, deported and slaughtered in their thousands at the arbitrary whim of an all-powerful leader.

There have of course also been others – not just writers in the Socialist Standard – who have studied the ideas and events in question closely, seen through these arguments and concluded that the Bolshevik takeover under Lenin and what happened later in the Soviet Union can in no reasonable sense be seen as Marxism or socialism in action. A recent example worth citing is the 2021 book by Steve Paxton, Unlearning Marx. Why the Soviet Failure was a Triumph for Marx, which, by careful analysis of the social and economic situation of Russia in the period leading up to 1917, illustrates ‘the failure of capitalist production to penetrate the lives of the mass of ordinary Russian producers’ and the inevitably premature nature of the seizure of power by Lenin and the Bolsheviks ‘in the name of the proletariat’ (June 2022 Standard review). The writer’s conclusion is that, since ‘Marx specifically predicted that projects like the Soviet Union would fail’, such an outcome does not in any way mean that ‘socialism has been tried and found wanting’. Another interesting example arises from the 2005 discussion on Marx on the BBC Radio 4 programme, In Our Time. The presenter, Melvyn Bragg, urged the three participants, all well known as practitioners of political ideas and philosophy though not necessarily as socialists or adherents to Marxist ideas (A.C. Grayling, Gareth Stedman Jones and Francis Wheen), to confirm the ‘received’ wisdom that Lenin’s imposition of revolution from the top down (as well as that of later dictators such as Mao, Pol Pot, etc.) was a reflection of Marx’s ideas. But all three disagreed vehemently. One stated that Marx had become a ‘magical name’ that people liked to quote but whose ideas had been distorted by figures such as Lenin, who in fact had ‘turned Marx on his head’. Another said that others ‘took, adapted and twisted him’. The third participant was even more robust in stating that what happened in Russia (and later elsewhere) ‘vindicated Marx’s point’, ie, that revolution imposed from above by ‘heroes on horseback’ inevitably ‘leads to a police state’ and so was ‘a negation of everything he [Marx] stood for and argued for’. In this light the association implicit in the claim to be ‘Marxist-Leninist’ often made by those on the left can be seen as a stark contradiction in terms. This also receives confirmation from parts of Lenin’s own speeches and writings of 1921-22, in which, with Russia in a piteous state after the mass violence, destruction and brutality of its civil war, he admitted defeat by stating ‘our attempt to implement socialism here and now has failed’ and talked about the need ‘to fall back on state capitalism in many economic spheres’.

Lenin in context

Of course, there are those who find value and relevance in Marx’s ideas but are not necessarily averse to their ‘adaptation’ by later political figures such as Lenin who claim Marxist inspiration. An example of this is to be found in the recent book by the American left-wing academic, Paul Le Blanc (Lenin, Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution. Pluto Press, 2023). The key to the association Le Blanc is prepared to make between Lenin and Marx is to be found in the title: ‘Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution’. Implicit in this is the idea, often repeated in the pages of an invigoratingly written book that sweeps us informatively through the whole of Lenin’s personal and political life, that the Bolshevik leader, while following in Marx’s footsteps, had to adapt and respond to the circumstances he and Russia found themselves in at the time, to be ‘flexible’ (a frequently used word). Hence Lenin’s work becomes a kind of Marxism in action, ‘open, critical-minded’, adapted to ‘a particular historical situation’ and conditioned by ‘interactions with others’. In support of this, the author quotes a reference by Lenin to the words of Marx and Engels that ‘our theory is not a dogma but a guide to action’. So, according to Le Blanc, Lenin, while sharing and aiming for Marx’s fundamental goal of a free, classless, stateless society, found himself having to deal with ‘living realities and actual struggles, not abstract revolutionary “correctness”’. In this light, therefore, according to the author, far from the ‘architect of totalitarianism’ Lenin is often presented as by conservative commentators, he was rather a leader ready to face the twists and turns of a reality that was ‘complex, ever-changing and contradictory’ and to take action accordingly – the justification for which Lenin himself framed as the application of ‘revolutionary dialectics’.

Yet Le Blanc is not always or unequivocally ready to accept such justification, and it would be unfair to characterise his study as some kind of uncritical rehabilitation of Lenin. It is, however, difficult not to sense a ‘benefit of the doubt’ tendency and this throws up a number of seeming contradictions in the way Lenin’s thought and actions are presented – the author seeming on occasion to want it both (or all) ways. So, while keen to present Lenin as a Marxist in action striving for socialism, he also states (realistically as pointed to by the evidence) that Lenin saw ‘the upcoming revolution’ as ‘not a transition to socialism, but a transition to a capitalist social and political order’. Again he refers to Lenin’s understanding of nationalism as a ‘secular faith’ and ‘the great rival of socialism’, while at the same time pointing to a view he expressed that ‘there were different forms of nationalism – some worthy of support, others worthy of denunciation’. He refers with brutal frankness to the ‘emergency measures’ taken by Lenin’s ‘new Communist regime’ in the period of Russia’s civil war (‘one-party dictatorship’, ‘Red Terror’, ‘persecution of party dissidents’) and the ‘repressive bureaucratic dictatorship’ that came after, yet this does not prevent him from describing the early years of the ‘Communist International’ which Lenin was closely associated with as demonstrating ‘heroic and impressive qualities, crackling with insights’.

Even-handed?

All this could of course simply be regarded as a form of ‘even-handedness’ on the part of the author, and so entirely positive. But it could also perhaps be understood by reference to the phenomenon of ‘cognitive dissonance’ which Le Blanc himself spends a paragraph explaining. Under this dynamic, confronted with evidence that conflicts with our well-established worldview, we experience an uncomfortable mental conflict which tends to make us dismiss that evidence and simply carry on as before. Examples he gives of this are people currently denying ‘the documented reality of climate change’ and others ‘not wanting to acknowledge the horrific realities associated with the Stalin regime’. So, in the case of this author’s take on Lenin, while himself presenting evidence of the ‘horrific realities’ he presided over and what most people would regard as outright distortions (not just ‘adaptations’) of Marx, we have an ongoing attachment to the man, the Bolshevik takeover and the overall claim that Lenin’s ideas seem more relevant than ever now.

Of course, even if the Socialist Party will see this as a serious blind spot in the author’s analysis of the historical struggle for a socialist society from Marx onwards, there is much in his book that socialists would accept and agree with. We would not, for example, want to challenge the author’s brilliantly incisive description of modern capitalism (‘a voracious market economy designed to enrich already immensely wealthy elites … intimately connected with environmental destruction engulfing our world’) or his clear characterisation of class society in capitalism ‘(the working class is those who make a living (get enough money to buy basic necessities and perhaps some luxuries) by selling their ability to work (their labor-power) to an employer. Out of the labor-power, the employer squeezes actual labor in order to create the wealth that is partly given to the workers (usually as little as possible), with the rest of this labor-created wealth going to the employer)’. On the other hand, we would see as misguided various of the ‘remedies’ for this often heard on the Leninist or Trotskyist Left which the author seems to quote with approval, for example the need for workers to have the correct ‘leadership’ for a new society to be established and ‘experiences of struggle that will convince working people of the inevitability of revolution and the significance of communism’. We would also challenge that other commonly held left-wing perspective found in this book of ‘Lenin good, Stalin bad’ (ie, that there was no continuity between the two), though we would heartily agree with one commentator’s view noted here that ‘Stalinism was as different from socialism as the hippopotamus from the giraffe’.

Right or wrong?

So was Lenin a Marxist (or a socialist)? Perhaps in the end what Paul Le Blanc’s eminently readable book can be taken as saying is that he would have liked to be and considered himself one but that circumstances prevented it. But wasn’t that what, if you were a Marxist, you should have known was bound to happen, since Marx saw socialism as arising from advanced capitalist development not from the chronically underdeveloped society that was early twentieth century Russia?

Howard Moss