Letter: Lenin’s not elitist? (2004)

Letters to the Editors from the October 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lenin’s not elitist?

Dear Editors,

The article ‘Lenin: a socialist analysis’ (January Socialist Standard) quotes from The Myth of Lenin’s Concept of the Party by Hal Draper, to support the assertion that Lenin was an elitist.

   

A reading of the full Draper essay reveals something completely different. Draper argues that Lenin did not hold to the view that only intellectuals forming a cadre of professional revolutionaries should make up a revolutionary organisation.

   

Lenin did indeed pick up the idea from Neue Zeit, dropped it into What is To be Done? and promptly neglected it unless the notion was resurrected by his political enemies when Lenin would “ . . . consistently and firmly repudiate it”.

   

What Lenin meant by professional revolutionary is described by Draper as “a party activist who devoted most (preferably all) of his spare time to revolutionary work . . . He must work to earn a living, of course, but this is not his life”. Any member of the working class could fit into this description. It is not elitist at all.

   

It should even, dare I say it, describe the average member of the Socialist Party!

Armitage Bulstrode, 

Birmingham

Reply: 

The purpose of quoting from Draper’s The Myth of Lenin’s "Concept of the Party" was to show that Lenin’s concept of the party was essentially the same as Kautsky’s and the Second International generally.

   

According to Lenin’s more famous interpretation, the working class was incapable of self-emancipation. Some workers may join the ranks of the professional revolutionaries in the vanguard party, in Lenin’s view, but this does not affect his belief that emancipation had to be brought to the working class by a political organisation. Although Lenin went on to change some aspects of his concept of the party, this elitist position never changed and had catastrophic consequences when implemented in the Bolshevik revolution.

   

When the Socialist Party was formed in 1904 it repudiated leadership in any form. The Socialist Party’s history is a practical refutation of the role of leadership. Leninists often deceive themselves that they believe it, but the Socialist Party really does insist that the emancipation of the working class has to be the work of the working class itself.–Editors.