Introduction: Rethinking Leninism (original) (raw)
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Rethinking Leninism: Introduction (2009)
Socialist Studies: the Journal of the Society for Socialist Studies, 2009
This special section on ‘Rethinking Leninism’ emerges from sessions organized at the Society for Socialist Studies’ Annual Meetings, held at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in May 2009 at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The articles re-consider Lenin’s legacy, suggesting new ways of understanding his political thought and the implications for political strategies on the left today.
Platypus Review, 2011
The principal mistake made by those who contemplate Lenin's political thought and action is due to assumptions that are made about the relation of socialism to democracy. Lenin was not an “undemocratic socialist” or one who prioritized socialism as an “end” over the “means” of democracy. Lenin did not think that once a majority of workers was won to socialist revolution democracy was finished. Lenin was not an authoritarian socialist. Socialism is meant to transcend liberalism by fulfilling it.[2] The problem with liberalism is not its direction, supposedly different from socialism, but rather that it does not go far enough. Socialism is not anti-liberal. The 20th century antinomy of socialism versus liberalism, as expressed in Isaiah Berlin’s counterposing of “positive and negative freedoms” or “freedom to [social benefits] versus freedom from [the state],” or the idea that social justice conflicts with liberty, travesties (and naturalizes) and thus degrades the actual problem, which is not a clash of timeless principles—liberalism versus democracy—but a historically specific contradiction of capitalism. To clarify this, it is necessary to return to a Marxist approach, such as Lenin’s. The error consists of addressing a dialectical approach to politics such as Lenin’s in an undialectical and eclectic manner, as if there were a number of criteria to be checked off (anticapitalism, democracy, etc.), rather than a set of intrinsically interrelated historical problems to be worked through together. The actual dialectic of the historically interrelated developments of capitalism, democracy, and the struggle for socialism demands a dialectical approach in both practice and theory. The reason that various moments of Lenin’s thought and action can appear contradictory is due to an undialectical interpretation of Lenin, not to Lenin himself. Lenin is subject to the same interpretive problem as Marx: the question of Lenin cuts to the heart of Marxism.
Platypus Review, 2011
Lenin’s Marxist politics has been profoundly misconstrued and distorted, both positively and negatively, as supposedly having wanted to strip capitalist society of its deceptive veneer and assert the unadorned proletariat as the be-all and end-all of “socialist” society. Certainly not merely the later Stalinist history of the Soviet Union, but also practices of the Soviet state under Lenin’s leadership in the Civil War, so-called “War Communism,” and the Red Terror, lent themselves to a belief in Lenin as a ruthless destroyer of “bourgeois” conditions of life. But, then, what are we to make, for instance, of Lenin’s pamphlets on The State and Revolution (1917) and “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)? For they emphasized both the necessary persistence of “bourgeois right” among the workers in the long transition from socialism to communism, requiring the continuation of state mediation, and the fact that Marxists had understood their effort as trying to overcome capital “on the basis of capitalism” itself. A prime example of Lenin’s insistence on the mediation of politics in society was his opposition to Trotsky’s recommendation that labor unions be militarized and subsumed under the state. Lenin wanted to preserve, rather, the important non-identity of class, party, and state in the Soviet “workers’ state,” which he recognized as necessarily carrying on, for the foreseeable future, “state capitalism” (characterized by “bureaucratic deformations” due to Russian conditions). Lenin thus wanted to preserve the possibility of politics within the working class, a theme that reached back to his first major pamphlet, What is to be Done? (1902). Lenin’s “last struggle” was to prevent the strangling of politics in the Soviet state, a danger he regarded not merely in terms of Stalin’s leadership, but the condition of the Bolsheviks more generally.
Lenin as an Original Political Theorist, or Not: Debunking the Textbook Interpretation
2019
Abstract: Lars T. Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered: “What Is to Be Done?” in Context, containing new translations of heretofore mangled Russian terms, proves that Lenin was not initially an authoritarian. It elucidates why What Is To Be Done? is more democratic than popularly believed, but The State and Revolution – not analyzed by Lih – is, ironically, less democratic, given its technocratic picture of “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” an outgrowth of Marx’s class-reductionist definition of politics and Engels’ vision of communism as the “administration of things.” This essay reveals what Lenin owed to Kautsky’s democratic Marxism and critiques Lukács’ theoretical justification for “Leninism.” Accepted for publication by Theory in Action. Tentatively scheduled for publication in Vol. 12, No. 3, July 31, 2019.