Where to Begin

“...they take from Marxism all that is acceptable to the liberal bourgeoisie, ...cast aside only the living soul of Marxism, ‘only’ its revolutionary content.” VI Lenin The Collapse of the Second International

Standing with me on a cold corner with a sign urging bank disinvestment, a venerated comrade reminded me of the lasting value of Vladimir Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?. Food for thought: while we read this classic in our political youth, does it retain its relevance as we gain experience and mature?

What Is To Be Done? began as a promissory note to expand a polemical sketch written in May of 1901 entitled “Where to Begin.” The question lingered in Lenin’s mind for nearly a year before the lengthy pamphlet emerged.

What Is To Be Done? is not an easy read. It is filled with esoteric references to journals, personalities, and events specific to turn-of-the-last-century Russia, as well as unusually named political tendencies. It is easy to confuse the various “Rabochaya” or “Rabocheye” (workers’ newspapers) or forget the meaning of “Economism,” “Narodnism,” or “legal ‘Marxism’.”

But Lenin’s goals can be put rather simply:

● Identify the political trends or tendencies that are obstacles to advancing to socialism.

● Establish conditions necessary for the advancement to socialism.

“Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.” Martynov “The movement is everything, the final aim is nothing.” Bernstein

For Lenin, the epigrams pronounced by A.S. Martynov and Eduard Bernstein-- a German theoretician of socialist gradualism-- were symptomatic of an infection to the body of revolutionary socialism. For those “socialists,” socialism was simply the product of the struggle for reforms, an inevitable final step or stage in the evolution of the workers’ movement. Set in motion, political and economic struggle would-- on its own-- through “timid zigzags” (Lenin’s characterization) ultimately lead to socialism.

In Lenin’s words, they and their adherents imagine that movements “...pure and simple can elaborate, and will elaborate, an independent ideology for itself, if only the workers ‘wrest their fate from the hands of the leaders’.” They submit that it is bureaucratic and foot-dragging trade union and political leaders who retard the natural evolution of reformism toward discarding capitalism and constructing socialism.

Democracy+continual reforms=socialism, in the minds of Martynov, Bernstein, the French socialist Millerand, the German socialist Georg von Vollmar and their ilk.

Lenin regards these views as a sharp departure (revision) of the theory of revolutionary socialism, a departure based upon the unjustifiable faith in spontaneity. He views ‘spontaneity’ as a key concept in understanding both the potential of struggle and its limits. Using the industrial strikes of 1896 in Russia as an example, he shows that the working class movement and the people’s movement will always generate a fight back, a response to exploitation and oppression. But it will always be limited to immediate grievances and immediate remedies without the further introduction of a conscious element, a leap to attacking capitalism itself. The idea that spontaneous political motion will, by itself, find its way to socialism is a false and harmful illusion.

Defiance, resistance, sabotage, demonstrating, civil disobedience, etc. are largely spontaneous responses of individuals or groups; strikes, planned actions with demands, political initiatives, and other collective actions are often spontaneous, in Lenin’s sense, but “nothing more nor less than consciousness in an embryonic form.” Because they have elements of planning and goals, though limited and immediate, these struggles offer the potential for more radical, more profound change. They lack only ideology, organization, and a program of advancement, elements that must come from a united, disciplined, and committed group of socialist partisans. Those partisans must bring a vision beyond simple reformism to provide the tools for overthrowing the grip of capitalist social and economic relations.

[R.M. writing in Rabochaya Mysl says:] “That struggle is desirable which is possible, and the struggle which is possible is that which is going on at the given moment. This is precisely the trend of unbounded opportunism, which passively adopts itself to spontaneity.” (Lenin) [my emphasis]

The embrace of spontaneity as the wellspring of political and social change is identified by Lenin with withdrawal from the struggle for qualitative change, from meaningful engagement with the source of exploitation and oppression. This surrender to “realism,” pragmatism, the “possible” is opportunistic because it courts respectability or an easy legitimacy and compromises the fight for the liberation of working people from the chains of exploitation to garner the nearest goals of the closest moment.

“We have said that there could not have been Social-Democratic [socialist] consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labor legislation, etc. The theory of socialism… arose as a natural and inevitable outcome of the development of thought among the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia.” (Lenin)

Lenin’s distinction between trade-union consciousness and socialist consciousness holds true, over a hundred years later. No events since have shown Lenin’s assessment to be wrong. No working class or popular movement has taken up socialism without its introduction from outside the movement, typically through a socialist political organization. In a world dominated by the ideology of capitalism, in the course of “the drab ordinary struggle,” the idea of socialism is alien. It is the task of dedicated socialist revolutionaries-- armed with a program and of one mind-- to bring socialist consciousness to the popular movements.

Those like the Russian acolytes of Bernstein in Lenin’s time-- the Economists, the “legal” Marxists, the Socialist Revolutionaries-- “...kneel in prayer to spontaneity, gazing with awe (to take an expression from Plekhanov) upon the ‘posterior’ of the proletariat.”

The Communist movement coined the term “tailism” to more politely capture Plekhanov’s vivid description of political opportunism. Slavishly deferring to the “drab, everyday struggles” of the trade union movement or the spontaneous peoples’ movement will get us no closer to socialism.

Political forces will invariably arise that promise to spur spontaneous action by the popular masses through acts of terrorism; they intend to “excite” the working class, to give it “strong impetus” to press its supposedly latent radicalism. For Lenin, this is equally a departure from sound revolutionary strategy. Like reformism (Economism), the anarchism of the act (early Narodism and the Socialist Revolutionaries) fails to recognize a role for determined agitating and organizing the people for the overthrow of capitalism and the building of socialism.

Revolutionaries are not aloof from the fight for democratic reforms: “He is no Social-Democrat [revolutionary] who forgets in practice his obligation to be ahead of all in raising, accentuating, and solving every general democratic question.” [Lenin’s emphasis]. But Lenin also emphasizes that this practice must not “for a moment [conceal] our socialist conviction.”

But revolutionaries should not be confused into thinking that the fight for democratic reforms is more than it is: “Trade-unionist politics of the working class is precisely bourgeois politics of the working class.” [Lenin’s emphasis]

“Give us an organization of revolutionaries, and we will overturn Russia!”

Lenin’s famous proclamation is not an idle boast, but a concise statement of the necessity of an organization of committed, dedicated revolutionaries placing the struggle for socialism above all.

The task before the revolutionary movement is to develop and maintain working class leadership of the popular movements while shedding the patronizing attitude of delivering only that which is “accessible” to the masses. Recognizing the “excellently trained enemy,” Lenin insists that revolution must be a profession, combining the skills of propagandist, organizer, and agitator. The revolutionaries must develop tools: leaflets, pamphlets, books, etc., but most importantly a national organ (newspaper, website, etc.) that serves as a collective propagandist, agitator, and organizer, a tool for raising a definitive political line and rallying and making contact with followers.

Of course socialist revolutionaries must come together as an organization, as a party, as a vehicle for overthrowing capitalism. A loose-knit, independent scattering of even the most dedicated revolutionaries could hardly pose a threat to the forces and resources defending capitalism and its ruling class. That party must bring to the masses a program, a road map leading to socialism above all else.

Lenin stresses that a revolutionary organization cannot be seduced by the sirens of “primitive” or “toy” democracy, the false radicalism of direct representation so often advocated by young intellectuals and anarchists. Lenin cites the experiences of Sidney and Beatrice Webb (Fabian Society) and Karl Kautsky (German Social Democratic Party)-- two sources at odds with Leninism-- on their negative practical experiences with the folly of strict referenda democracy. Lenin recognized that direct democratic decision-making under the harsh, war-like conditions imposed by battling capitalism was sheerly utopian.

These are the answers that Lenin gave in his time to the question What Is To Be Done?

Twenty-first Century Relevance?

Does Lenin’s revolutionary theory hold relevance for the struggles of today?

Over generations, Lenin’s insights, admonitions, strategies, and tactics have been muted, diluted, or revised by many prominent left-wing thinkers in capitalist countries. The seduction of parliamentary politics, the burnished image of bourgeois democracy, doubts about the working class as a force for change, the rise of cultural and life-style radicalism combined with many other factors to distract the left from the revolutionary socialist program. The Cold War and the demonization of Communism further prodded the US and much of the academic and student Western European left to distance itself from Leninism. The ABC phenomenon-- Anything But Communism-- became deeply embedded in the “radicalism” of the late twentieth century. A “new” left-- purposefully new in order to dissociate from Leninism and Cold War ostracization-- sought new forms of radicalism, new approaches to struggle, new types of organizations.

Ironically, the New Left found answers that already failed in the past, in the kinds of politics toward which Lenin had earlier targeted his ideological weapons. And today’s US and European left reproduces many of the same tendencies.

It has been a common thread weaving through the US left that so-called participatory democracy is the foundation of radical politics and emancipatory or empowering for oppositional movements. From the New Left of the sixties to the Occupy and Indignados movements, this approach has been foundational. The fetish for procedure has not only overshadowed establishing a common program, but often blocked the achievement of one.

Organizationally, the insistence upon participatory democracy is stiflingly rigid. It fails to acknowledge the various types of democracy: direct, representational, ballot, referenda, etc.; it fails to recognize the appropriateness of the different types by time, place, and circumstance; and it fails to grasp the organizational fit of different democratic modes.

Accordingly, obsessive participatory, direct democracy becomes an obstacle to the establishment of an effective revolutionary organization charged with the tasks of building a movement for socialism to face the gale forces of the immensely powerful resources and the security apparatuses of a ruthless ruling class. Revolutionary movements must respect democratic norms, but not the cult of procedure that Lenin mocks as “toy” or “primitive” democracy.

Occupy and similar movements have floundered on the rocks of organizational chaos grounded in procedural sectarianism, a failure to establish efficient and effective leadership channels. Many once-promising movements fall as quickly as they rise without the appropriate, effective democratic standards.

It is a commonplace with today’s left to assume that removing the brakes that are thought to be restraining broad movements-- typically bureaucratic, entrenched leaders-- will in itself unleash worker or mass action. On this view, existing popular institutions-- trade unions, political parties, advocacy organizations, etc.-- only need fresh, democratically elected leaders to unleash the march toward a better world, towards socialism. Rather than tackling the difficult task of planting the germ of socialist thought into the movements, modern-day US leftists too often expect to see the idea of replacing capitalism-- the commitment to socialism-- flower spontaneously.

History knows of no serious challenge to capitalism emerging automatically, without the intervention of a revolutionary organization. Nonetheless, many in the US left deny the necessity or the desirability of a Leninist “organization of revolutionaries.” Instead, they count on the magical, spontaneous emergence of a socialist consciousness where none existed before. Swayed by Cold War dogma, they unthinkingly fear the ogre of “vanguardism.”

Despite many lifetimes of shredded hopes of taming capitalism by working for change within the Democratic Party, a new generation of idealistic youth are placing their hopes in the Democratic Party and a class collaborationist trade union movement. They follow modern day “legal” Marxists and other theorists of social democracy who ask them to “kneel in prayer to spontaneity,” expecting a radical vision to spring forth without the intercession of a revolutionary organization. Tailing bourgeois institutions and workers’ organizations umbilically linked to bourgeois institutions can only bring bourgeois politics, paraphrasing Lenin.

With dissatisfaction and anger growing, with confrontation intensifying, and with more and more institutions and authority discredited, the need for effective responses grows. Over a hundred years ago, Lenin’s famous pamphlet What Is To Be Done? cleared much of the ideological underbrush, discarded most of the false roads and missteps foiling a movement for socialism.

Today, these false roads, missteps, and ideological thickets again block the road to twenty-first-century socialism.

What Is To Be Done? demonstrates the need for a political organization of ardent, committed revolutionaries, united with a program to overthrow capitalism. Since the retreat of Communism, Leninism has unfortunately been discarded by many on the left. But the wisdom of Lenin’s pamphlet is needed now more than ever.

Greg Godels 
zzsblogml@gmail.com

Spontaneous Combustion and a Knight in Shining Armor

“Give us an organization of revolutionaries, and we will overturn Russia!” V.I. Lenin

The US left suffers from two maladies that persistently thwart any effort to move beyond the malaise of internet negativity and the false activism of online petitions. Setting aside those still desperately clinging to the Democratic Party womb, well-intentioned and serious radicals, young and old, have yet to draw the lessons necessary to unify and focus the seemingly limitless committees, coalitions, and centers that constitute our dysfunctional left.

Most damaging is the mindless and groundless faith in spontaneity. Far too many of our brothers and sisters believe that political action, organization, and change will come the way it does in Hollywood horror movies. The people will emerge from their homes, recognize the danger, and rally to confront the alien threat. Danger combines with self-interest to generate a spontaneous common resistance and a common response. While it makes for entertaining fiction, it seldom if ever happens in real life.

The Occupy movement was the latest iteration of this faith. Life proved that the notion of spontaneous organization and governance would end, leaving barely a trace of its prior existence. Decades before Occupy, the so-called New Left cast its fate to spontaneity. Programs, parties, agendas, etc. were eschewed; the “Movement” would find its own way. Oracles of that flawed thinking have gone on to their life's work as professors, professionals, and Democratic Party operatives.

In the rear-view mirror of bourgeois historians, political movements are depicted as spontaneous risings-- a kind of spontaneous combustion sparked by a particularly hostile affront or violent act. The US colonial rebellion against the British was “sparked” by the Boston Tea Party or the confrontations at Lexington and Concord, never mind the years of debate, struggle, and planning by the Sons of Liberty and other evolving organizations of resistance. Similarly, popular history poses the Civil Rights Movement as a burst of activism ignited by Rosa Parks' courage and channeled by police dogs and fire hoses. The decades of organized and planned resistance that prepared for this moment are largely ignored.

Faith in spontaneous struggle, trust in an instinctive, automatic confrontation with power, spawns inaction. If the oppressed and exploited will unerringly marshal resistance, there is no need to organize and agitate among them; they will find their way without the uninvited help of organizers and agitators. Professional revolutionaries need not apply. They must simply add their bodies to the “movement” when the magic moment arises.

A logical conclusion of the faith in spontaneity is the dangerous and destructive notion that “the worse things get, the better.” When enough pain is felt, the masses will rise; until then we meet in our diverse and numerous causes, sending checks, signing petitions and reassuring each other that something big will undoubtedly erupt.

Among Marxists, the cult of spontaneity takes the form of what V. I. Lenin called “economism.” By acknowledging only the objective conditions, the unseen operations of the laws of capitalist development, the tendency for capitalism towards crisis and the “immiseration of the proletariat,” these “Marxists” see no role for agitation and organization; they see no need for a party of revolutionaries. Instead, they count on the grinding inevitability of crude determinism.

Marxists (and trade union leaders) who fall into the trap of “economism” invariably bury the Marxist principle of class struggle in the day-to-day administration of trade unionism. In writing about the Marxist “economists” of his time, Lenin charged that they “demoralized the socialist consciousness by vulgarizing Marxism, by advocating the theory of the blunting of social contradictions, by declaring the idea of the social revolution... to be absurd, by reducing the working class movement and the class struggle to narrow trade-unionism and to a 'realistic' struggle for petty, gradual reforms. This was synonymous with bourgeois democracy's denial of socialism's right to independence and, consequently, of its right to existence; in practice it meant a striving to convert the... working class movement into an appendage of the liberals.” (What Is To Be Done?)

Faith in spontaneity diminishes politics. Neither the vulgar belief that collective pain will birth action nor the “sophisticated” and distorted Marxist claim that objective laws will inexorably bring change stands the test of history. Agency-- the planned, concerted, and collective effort of organized groups-- make history.

“If only we had a Lenin, Martin Luther King, Ralph Nader, etc., etc....”

A different, but closely related malady retards political action on the US left: the Knight in Shining Armor syndrome. Like spontaneity, it postpones action until something unknown and unpredictable happens; it replaces planned, concerted action with faith.

Many on the left are frozen with inaction while waiting for the next great emancipator or political super-star. This variant of celebrity worship is nurtured by the all-too-common brief appearance of prominent figures on the political stage while leaving no lasting movement or organization in their wake.

The Jesse Jackson Democratic primary campaigns of 1984 and 1988 are cases in point. Jackson offered the most progressive Democratic Party platform since the New Deal. In the first primary battle, he captured nearly 20% of the popular vote. In 1988, he ran again, establishing himself as the front runner after handily winning the important Michigan primary and finished by more than doubling his previous vote total and securing 11 states.

And then he was gone, disappearing from Democratic Party politics, leaving neither a movement nor a political impact on the Party's destiny. By 1992, the Party had moved permanently rightward to embrace right-centrist, Bill Clinton. And twenty-five years later, the progressive wing of the Party waits hopefully and patiently for another celebrity arriving fully armored and on a powerful steed!

Similarly, the Nader Presidential campaigns brought great interest to the Green Party. But the ever-earnest Ralph Nader had little interest in party-building. Though serious, he walked away, leaving others to attempt to construct an on-going political party from the good will left from his runs. Fortunately, the Green Party's latest candidate, Jill Stein, has a more developed understanding of political theory. What she lacks in celebrity status, she more than makes up for with organizational savvy and historical perspective. Her innovative, clever development of the “shadow” cabinet concept is particularly impressive.

But it's not solely the fault of Jackson and Nader--two well-meaning candidates-- that these celebrity campaigns were comet-like. Rather, it is the naïveté of the left that failed to see beyond the immediacy of these political events, that felt no urgency to subordinate an unrealistic chance to actually win to the necessity of leaving something permanent upon which to build.

Behind the Knight in Shining Armor syndrome stands the Great Man (or Woman) theory of history: great events are the work of great personalities. For example, the Pharaohs built the Great Pyramids (All by themselves? to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht). The masses are merely the obliging instruments of superior minds and talented leaders. Lenin refers to this thinking as in the “Ilovaisky manner,” referring to the author of many Russian textbooks who saw Russian history solely as the work of czars and generals.

The political expression of this in Lenin's Russia came from the Norodniks who saw themselves as the saviors of the peasants. Middle class intellectuals impressed with their own superior abilities, the Norodniks “colonized” peasant society in order to surgically implant the great leaders they felt the peasantry lacked. In the words of Soviet writer V.P. Filatov, they believed “that only 'heroes' made history” and that they could turn “the mob into the people.”

Adding the 'Conscious Element'

Lenin's writings demonstrate that there is nothing new or unique in the false ideology of spontaneity. Further, we can learn from Lenin's conclusion: “[A]ll worship of the spontaneity of the working class movement, all belittling of the role of 'the conscious element',... means quite independently of whether he who belittles that role desires it or not, a strengthening of the influence of bourgeois ideology upon the workers...” (What is to be Done?) In other words, only attention to the “conscious element” can advance our cause beyond the false path of spontaneity.

But what does Lenin mean by the “conscious element”?

Going forward depends upon a correct assessment of what constrains our progress. It requires a consciousness of the ideas essential to successfully challenge power. It requires an ideology. Moreover, that ideology must be radically different from the ideology of the forces resisting change. Nor can it compromise with the enemy ideology. Thus, it is a revolutionary consciousness.

But revolutionary consciousness must be converted into mass revolutionary consciousness. For that we need an organization. Because its mission is to take the ideology of revolutionary change to those both most in need of it and most able to use it, that organization counts as a vanguard. It is the idea of a vanguard that allows us to advance beyond the illusion of spontaneity.

Opponents of Leninism charge the idea of a vanguard with elitism, the idea that a select group of revolutionaries knows better than the masses. It is nothing of the sort. Rather, a vanguard is the transmission belt for ideas that will not and cannot arise spontaneously within the working class or broader movement.

In our time, the ideology of resistance is decidedly and necessarily anti-capitalist. But that is not enough. A revolutionary ideology must offer an alternative to capitalism, an alternative that is neither cosmetic nor fanciful. That alternative is socialism.

Popular illusions abound: regulation can wean corporations from rapacious accumulation and dominance; small-scale “social” enterprises and cooperatives can erode the unprecedented political and economic power of monopoly enterprises. Such ideas fall far short of ideological credibility. Only socialism—the elimination of the process of private accumulation through labor exploitation-- reaches that credibility.

And who is to deliver the message of socialism; i.e., who is to serve as missionary for the revolutionary ideology?

The answer is as it was in Lenin's time: An organization dedicated to that task above all else; an organization not encumbered by the fetish of bourgeois elections; a party of revolutionaries; a Communist Party.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com