book review

Lenin Rediscovered: What Is To Be Done? In Context by Lars T Lih, Historical Materialism Book Series, 2006; pp xx + 867, 141 Euro. Also available in paperback (Haymarket, 2008), $50.

Even leftists in times of retreat accept variants of this.

The second moment, related to the p rofoundly democratic revolution of O ctober 1917, was the firm rejection of popular aspiration by the non-Bolshevik p arties, including the other socialists, and the imperialist-aided civil war that raged b etween 1918 and 1920, devastating Russia and destroying all civil society institutions.4

The “original” moment, stressed by numerous writers as the “original sin” of Leninism, sees What Is To Be Done? (hereafter WITBD) as the central Bolshevik text, and reads the message of the book as one according to which Lenin was suspicious about working class movements (identified with “spontaneity”) and wanted to impose tight party control on the movement. The academic backing for this argument is seen to be provided by the following pieces of evidence: the contemporary criticisms of Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky, the critical comments by Vladimir Akimov, a delegate to the Second Party Congress who wrote an obscure piece revived in the late 1960s, and certain passages of WITBD.

Why was this obfuscation necessary? Or, to put it differently, if what Lih claims and the present reviewer agrees with, that Lenin was a democratic revolutionary, and that WITBD was not as central to the evolution of his politics as so many scholars claim it to have been, and finally that his message in WITBD was very different from how he has been interpreted, then what prevented these scholars from recognising this simple truth? The answer cessful in its ability to make people believe that liberal capitalism is the best of all possible worlds. Accordingly, bourgeois ideology also functions to make people believe that even if capitalism is bad, there is no alternative worth fighting for. It, therefore, becomes necessary to p retend that there are no differences between Marx and Lenin on the one hand, and between Stalin and Pol Pot on the other.

In the so-called free press, this campaign is done in the most aggressive m anner, with little attention to such minor issues as historical truth. But in the a cademic world where certain apparent norms have to be observed, radical s cholars find themselves politely marginalised, not selected for jobs or funding, dismissed with the argument that their views show nothing new.

The marginalisation of radical left positions requires no conspiracy. Scholars wishing to get research funding and promotions would tend to adopt positions aligned to the “mainstream”. Anti- Leninism served the interests of not only the extreme right wing, but also a range of others – including Social Democrats, anarchists, as well as Stalinists. Nor did the emergence of New Left currents help much. From Althusserians to postmodernists, the various left currents, barring the few Trotskyists, shared the views about Lenin mentioned above, sometimes approvingly, sometimes disapprovingly, but without ever actually studying Lenin in context. So the Trotskyists could be quietly dismissed. Ernest Mandel, Tony Cliff, John Molyneux, Paul Le Blanc, or Achin Vanaik, have written about Lenin and party building, but one would look for citations of those texts in the massive “Leninism-as-evilincarnate” factory’s o utputs in vain.

It is in this context that we need to r ecognise the tremendous achievements of Lars T Lih. The first statement in Lih’s acknowledgement states that the study

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was undertaken and completed without any institutional support.

Context to the Text

Lih starts from a point made repeatedly by Lenin. According to Karl Radek, when WITBD was proposed for republication in 1921, Lenin objected, urging at least good commentaries “in order to avoid false application”.5 Yet bourgeois scholarship has repeatedly failed to do this. A text, it seems, is a text that requires no context. Who was Lenin polemicising against in WITBD? What had they written? What, for example, was the difference between “the straightforward RM” and the “weathercock Krichevskiis and Martynovs”? Why worry about such minute details, when one simply needs to know that Lenin had an “unspoken assumption” that the “majority of the population is actually or potentially reactionary”, and an unspoken conclusion, “that democracy leads to reaction”.6 Or, as Leopold Haimson writes, implicit in WITBD “was not merely a lack of faith in the capacity of the labour movement to grow to consciousness by its own resources, but also a basic distrust in the ability of any man to outgrow his ‘spontaneous’ elemental impulses, and to act in accord with the dictates of his ‘consciousness’ without the guidance, and the restraint, of the party and its organisations.”7 It appears that for such writers, contextualising WITBD would only confuse the reader.

The book is divided into three parts – titled “Erfurtianism”, “Lenin’s Significant Others”, and “The World of What Is To Be Done?”. There are several appendices and annotations. Finally, the author provides a fresh translation of Chto Delat? for reasons that will emerge shortly.

Erfurtianism

Lih begins by asking what it meant to be a revolutionary socialist, or Marxist, in the 1890s. The term he uses is Erfurtian, a neologism he creates from the Erfurt C ongress of Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) which adopted a revolutionary political programme drawn up by Karl Kautsky and Fredrick Engels. Lih defines the term Erfurtian carefully. Today, after the betrayal of 1914, after the supine surrender to Hitler in 1933, and

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after the total integration with bourgeois politics after the second world war, it may be difficult to conceptualise the SPD as an inspiration, quite like what the Bolshevik revolution became later, but in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, SPD was the principal inspiration for revolutionaries across the world. Lih documents with ample details, the nature of SPD politics. However, since Lih stops at 1904, there is a slight tendency on his part to exaggerate the identity between Lenin and the orthodox Marxists in Russia on one hand, and the SPD on the other.

Lih then goes on to examine the influence of Karl Kautsky on Lenin. Lih’s argument is that Kautsky’s commentary on the Erfurt programme, and his book Parliamentarism, were profoundly influential and the latter work brought together the logic behind what the Russians called the strategy of hegemony of the proletariat in the democratic revolution. Kautsky argued that Social Democracy, that is, a political strategy based on the ideas of Marx and Engels, had to merge with the working class movement. Social Democracy was needed, and would be heeded. It would be heeded because it was bringing, in Lih’s formulation, good news for the proletariat. Kautsky’s argument was that originally, socialism and the worker movement were separate, but the birth of revolutionary socialism or Marxism changed that.

Lih argues that the Erfurtian socialists displayed a set of features: an explicit acknowledgement of three sources of authority – the party, the programme, and Kautsky’s writings; a commitment to the concept of merger mentioned previously; a definition of Social Democracy’s mission as spreading the good news of the world-historical mission of the proletariat; an ambition of building a class-based p olitical party – disciplined yet democratic,

o rganised on a national plane; an insistence on the priority of achieving political freedoms; an expectation that the party would eventually lead the entire people (i e, a commitment to a strategy of a chieving proletarian hegemony). Finally, E rfurtianism, meant a commitment to internationalism.

Lih then proceeds to examine Lenin’s early writings. Lih begins with the book

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length manuscript Who The ‘Friends of the People’ Are and How They Fight against the Social Democrats? from which he quotes a passage8 that provides succinctly all but one of the Erfurtian features, namely, the open commitment to Erfurtianism, which in turn is to be found elsewhere in the manuscript. The conclusion Lih draws is, Lenin does not develop any new core v alues between late 1899 and late 1901. So if WITBD is supposed to tell us about the core values that Lenin later applied in other situations, then the conclusion is, the core values of WITBd derive from Erfurtianism, and that is that.

The Iskra Period

So we have to turn to WITBD as a polemical tract, examining its specific context. This was the context of the Iskra period, and the struggle for party building.

There are distinct stages in the history of the growth of the Social Democratic movement in Russia and its transformation into a well-knit party. In the early 1890s, the handful of Social Democrats had focused on recruiting individual workers into study circles and the movement remained underground due to repression. When the class struggle began to intensify in the mid-1890s, social democrats, including Lenin, made a turn towards agitation around workers’ immediate economic demands. Some of the younger social democrats in this period began to overestimate the importance of the economic struggle and to downplay the importance of organising the working class for a political struggle. This trend tried to theorise this limitation itself as the right strategy and culminated in a tract called the Credo written by E D Koskova in 1899. There she wrote

Any talk about an independent worker political party is in essence nothing more than the product of the transfer of alien task, alien results, onto our soil. … For the Russian Marxist there is only one conclusion: participation by helping the economic struggle of the proletariat, and participation in liberal oppositional activity.9

This argument, that the economic struggle was the only one worth waging for the workers, and that at most they should provide the economic struggle itself a political colour (i e, pressure group

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politics, as opposed to revolutionary p olitics) was what the orthodox Marxists termed “Economism”, or in Lenin’s hands at least, tred-iunionism (I follow Lih here). By this was meant, not doing trade union work, but seeking to restrict politics to the politics of trade unions.

Lenin’s response to the publication of the Credo was swift. His article argued that the assertion about the Russian working class not having put forward political aims revealed ignorance about the R ussian revolutionary movement. Lenin was particularly incensed, because people claiming to be Social Democrats were putting forward just the kind of non- revolutionary programme the populists accused Marxists of having. Lenin argued that if the working class struggle was restricted to economic issues, it would become the tail of Liberals or populists, and lose the independent and potentially leading role in the struggle against autocracy.

The Polemical Warrior

Not long after the emergence of economism, social struggles began to take on a more political character, which gave urgency to the ideological conflict over economic versus political struggle. It was in an atmosphere of increasingly militant workers action and student demonstrations in the early years of the last century that Iskra was launched. Two groups came together in the project – the founders of Russian Social Democracy, led by George Plekhanov, Pavel Akselrod and Vera Zasulich, and a younger group represented by Lenin, Martov and Aleksander Potresov.

In three chapters, Lih sets out a narrative of the Iskra period (including the role of a large number of individuals, like Plekhanov, Martov, and others), a discussion of those Russians in the socialist movement who were opponents of Er furtianism as well as those who were Erfurtians. Particularly skilful is Lih’s treatment of how Lenin functioned in group conflicts. In political battles where a number of groups fight for hegemony, very often, groups who are close, but have separate existence because of secondary differences, can have extremely sharp polemics to establish that the rival groups’ seemingly slight differences are actually the beginning of a massive slide into

o pportunism, sectarianism, or some other error. Lenin emerges, from Lih’s account, as a very able polemicist in this tradition. This is not something very new. It is possible to look at other phases of party and Russian history to see him doing similar things. Thus, there exists a need to study each case, not as a general Leninist p olitical strategy, but as a specific reaction by Lenin to a specific conflict.

Lih does two things very clearly. Along with the myth of Lenin’s scepticism about the revolutionary potential of the working class, there had grown up, of necessity, a myth about the “worker-phile” attitude of the Economists. Lih brings to light the exact articles in dispute, and shows that the Economists wanted to avoid the s truggle for democracy, and in some cases firmly rejected the Erfurtian model. Lih provides a translation of an editorial from the Economist paper Rabochaia mysl, No 1, October 1897, so that readers can read it for themselves. The editorial rejects the view that the working class struggle has any historic mission, of bringing socialism, not within a few days or years, but for the future. The editorial, as Lih shows, was actually written by an intellectual, and does not reflect any “authentic” working class voice. Combating this attitude, not controlling workers, was what Lenin was concerned about.

Chapter five, “A Feud within Russian Erfurtianism”, deals with the conflict between Rabochee dyelo and Iskra, and Lih shows clearly that the entire Iskra group was involved. Indeed, Plekhanov showed a much more intolerant and unethical attitude in this affair. Because Rabochee dyelo too was Erfurtian, the dispute with Iskra was not over fundamental principles, but tactics. It was in course of this tactical dispute that Boris Krichevskii wrote an article in Rabochee dyelo where he introduced the concept of stikhiinost. I follow Lih in retaining the Russian original.

It is forever claimed, if never proved, that Lenin was violently opposed to spontaneity, and condemned it for its bourgeois tendencies, demanding control from above through a tight, disciplined, small organisation. Stikhiinost is the word u sually translated as spontaneity. So what was Krichevskii talking about and what was Lenin responding to? Krichevskii was writing about political explosions such as the worker demonstrations in 1901 in support of the students, attacking Iskra from the left, claiming that Rabochee dyelo had a better response to the movement under discussion. Krichevskii had seized on an earlier article by Lenin, where Lenin talked about a stikhiinyi explosion, that is, an elemental, unplanned, sudden and powerful event. Indeed, this is a passage

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to which very few authors have paid attention (for obvious reasons), since Lenin was writing that

...it is fully possible and historically much more likely that the autocracy will fall under the pressure of one of those stikhiinyi explosions…. But no political party, unless it falls into adventurism, can base its activity solely in the expectation of such explosions.10

Lenin was arguing that Iskra had been working according to a plan, while Rabochee dyelo tended to jump from event to event, banking on elemental upsurges. The dispute was not one over whether the working class should be controlled, but whether party building should base itself on hopes for sudden explosions. Krichevskii accused Iskra of overestimating a large, purposive, aware, well-organised proletariat.

When Lenin wrote WITBD, therefore, issues like stikhiinost, and konspiratsiia, were forced on him, rather than his having chosen these issues as a matter of core values. Rabochee dyelo had an agreement with Iskra, which it was violating. Lenin was using the existing Rabochee dyelo articles to prove his point. So he had to follow Krichevksii’s usage. He argued that if Krichevskii’s proposal was taken seriously it would lead to denying any need for active Social Democratic leadership. Lenin’s aim, in putting forward these arguments, was not to present a novel proposition, but to argue that his opponents were rejecting a widely accepted Social Democratic position. Lih’s central argument is that nowhere in WITBD does Lenin express what he calls, in shorthand form, “worry about workers”, i e, a worry that spontaneous working class struggles would lead to bourgeois politics, and therefore the working class must be bound tightly to party dictation. Instead, what we find, if we read WITBD as a whole, instead of zooming in on a couple of passages quoted around a thousand times, is Lenin assuming that the working class is rational, and arguing that the task of Social Democracy is to put across the socialist message to the working class movement, because if it is done properly, they will accept it, and will fuse with the socialist theory.

Lih makes a strong case for treating “conspiracy” and “professional revolutionary” also in a different way. The Russian

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word konspiratsiia, translated baldly into English as conspiracy, has a major problem. Konspiratsiia involved successful underground work, and to this extent it overlapped with conspiracy. But the Russian Socialist Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) defined itself from the outset against the Narodnaia Volia strategy of conspiracy against the Tsar and stressed awareness raising and formation of purposivenes among the working class as intrinsic to its political strategy. In WITBD, Lenin is presenting a case of how to combine such konspiratsiia with the expansion of participation. Regardless of the efficacy of his proposal, it is clear that he was trying to work out the tactics that would make possible a mass movement even under Tsarist autocracy.

Limited Purpose Text

The professional revolutionary in Lih’s translation, is a revolutionary by trade, that is, someone who treats it seriously, as a full-time work. The shift by Lih is a legitimate one, yet one which even scholars with a knowledge of Russian had not thought of. Even in WITBD, Lenin talks about professiia, professional’nye soiuzy (trade unions) and so on quite often. Looking at the underground work metaphorically as a trade, he implies that the revolutionary needs a set of skills. While a professional revolutionary could at times be thought of as something akin to a professional soldier, the term revolutionary by trade does not carry the same connotation. The revolutionary by trade was one who knew konspiratsiia, and one who knew the value of division of labour. However, Lih treats the term as one almost accidentally used by Lenin, as a result of reading a passage in an opponent’s writing. Even if this was indeed the origin of the term, Lenin had more serious aims. As Marik has argued, he wanted to ensure that workers could become fulltime revolutionaries.11

Lih traces the Iskra ideas about organisation (indeed the norms developing within Russian Social Democrats generally), including centralism, discipline, development of political skills, opposition to conspiratorialism cut-off from worker milieus, konspiratsiia, division of labour, and the inapplicability of real democracy

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and transparency in the underground conditions. He argues that the ideal organisation presented by Lenin in WITBD (not the real Iskra organisation) was a summing up of the logical culminations of those norms. But these norms were seen as a specifically Russian application, in underground conditions, of the SPD norms, and not any “party of a new type”.

It is here that one could argue with Lih. He is correct, if he is talking about the Iskra period. But the revolution of 1905, the next period of underground, all led to the Bolsheviks developing ideas about a revolutionary party somewhat different from what the SPD had been even as a n ormative model. Reviewers like John Molyneux have written about this. I do not propose to cover ground already covered by others. But Lih is certainly correct in arguing that WITBD shows a working class desiring better socialist propaganda, and an organisation being needed so that the revolutionaries on the ground could achieve their desired goal of taking to the masses the good news of socialism. Also, WITBD emerges as a much more limited purpose text than is often imagined, or pretended, by many critics for whom it is the core of the myth of Lenin’s antidemocratic attitude. Perhaps the best r evelation is the one where Lih shows Rosa Luxemburg excoriating Lenin for ignoring mass struggles, based on unsigned articles in the Iskra written, unbeknownst to her, by Lenin.

Bringing Consciousness from Outside

This has often been a major issue in storms over Chto Delat? (WITBD). The working class can, Lenin is supposed to have said, arrive only at trade union consciousness and socialist consciousness, developed by the intelligentsia, has to be injected into the working class from outside. Practically every historian who has tilted at the windmill of Lenin’s elitism has cited the concerned passage. Few have bothered to examine the fact that Lenin was actually quoting Karl Kautsky, who was, in turn, presenting his explanation of the programme of the Austrian Social Democratic Party. Of course, this does not solve the problem. Perhaps Kautsky too was elitist. I suggest that Lenin was less elitist than

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Kautsky’s formulation implies. A careful reading of Chto Delat?, even in existing translations, rather than the new one prepared with explanations by Lih, will show several elements. First, the use of the inside-outside counter-position in Lenin’s hand means something different. He argues that the worker, to become revolutionary, cannot see everything purely from inside the factory and immediate surroundings. Second, Lenin, in his own discussion following the Kautsky quotation, injects an important qualification. Certainly, Lenin did write that:

The doctrine of socialism grew out of those philosophical, historical, and economic theories that were worked out by the educated representatives of the propertied classes, the intelligentsia (p 652).

Despite Lih’s admiration for Lenin, in the chapter entitled “Scandalous Passages”, he is compelled to admit that taken by itself the passage does show a move away from Lenin’s Erfurtianism. This leads to a view that socialist doctrines grew up separately from the working class, that is, only non-workers could develop socialism, when we combine this with the other assertion that:

The history of all countries bears witness that exclusively with its own forces the worker class is in a condition to work out only a tred-iunionist awareness, that is, a conviction of the need to unite in unions, to carry on a struggle with the owners, to strive for the promulgation by the government of this or that law that is necessary for the workers and so on (p 650).

However, Lenin moved away from this, a few pages later, when he said that workers such as Proudhon and Weitling participated in the development of socialist ideology. He remarked that they did so not as workers but as theoreticians. If this distinction means anything at all, it means that Lenin is actually contradicting the view that the intelligentsia are representatives of the propertied class. There can be worker intelligentsia as well. And it is as theoreticians of socialism that we need to see any one of them, whether Marx or Kautsky, or Proudhon and Weitling. Moreover, Lenin’s comment, “the doctrine ... grew out of”, suggests he was talking about those who have been called Utopian Socialists. In this sense, of course, the comment can be made to fit what Lih calls “the merger narrative”.

Lenin’s whole thrust is to argue that the working class is ready to absorb socialist theory enthusiastically, and is only prevented by intellectuals who wish to restrict the working class to purely economic issues. Later in the same book, Lenin qualifies the point still further, arguing that, in fact, the working class does indeed gravitate towards socialist consciousness, but that it does not do so in an ideological vacuum.

Critical Comments on Lih

One problem, stemming from Lih’s purpose, is perhaps an overemphasis on the orthodoxy of Lenin, if by orthodoxy is meant adherence to Kautsky’s line, not just that of Marx. Another very important problem is the inadequate attention paid to the Lenin’s constant attention to the relationship between theory and practice, and his continual effort to refine revolutionary strategy. If we consider Lenin’s position as a finished one, as Lih occasionally comes close to doing, we do him a disservice. Lenin’s views on the state, on the bourgeois nature of the Russian Revolution, on the peasant question, on imperialism, and on the party, all shifted and changed, based on lessons learned directly from the course of struggle and from developments in international capitalism and the international socialist movement. While it can be said that his more mature conceptions of the relationship of the party and class were expressed in embryo in the period we are discussing here, it cannot be said that the Iskra period represents Lenin’s first and last word on party organisation. Lenin’s views on the state, on the bourgeois nature of the Russian Revolution, on the peasant question, on imperialism, and on the party, all changed as he assimilated lessons of the class struggles in Russia and internationally. While it is correct to stress the continuity in his thought, it is inaccurate to say that his ideas of the Iskra period represent his final word on party organisation.

Linked to this is a final set of critical comments. Lih demonstrates, with a mass of evidence, that in 1902-04, Lenin stood much closer to Kautsky than to two revolutionaries he calls heroes of the activist tradition – namely Luxemburg and Trotsky. Yet, if we move forward, we find the picture changing. By the time of the war it had become clear to Lenin. Witness his letter of 27 October 1914 to Shlyapnikov, admitting that Luxemburg had got a better estimation of Kautsky’s degeneration (she had been attacking him since 1910). And from 1914, he repeatedly offered unity to Trotsky (in exile, with Nashe Slovo, back in Russia, between the much bigger B olshevik Party and the much smaller Mezhraiontsi, on very generous terms). Also, Lih seems unnecessarily dismissive in his book towards Georg Lukács and Antonio Gramsci. They were prominent theorists and also, in the 1920s, partybuilding revolutionary activists working in the Leninist tradition. A revolutionary Leninist revival today has much to learn from them, as well as from Luxemburg and Trotsky.

Email: kunal.chattopadhyay@gmail.com

Notes

1 There exists a mass of studies. In a review essay, it is not possible to provide a detailed list. The interested reader can see David Mandel, The Petrograd Workers and the Fall of the Old Regime (London: Macmillan) 1983; David Mandel, The Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power (London: Macmillan), 1984; R G Suny, “Toward a Social History of the October Revolution”, American Historical Review, Vol 88, No 1, pp 31-52, 1983.

2 See for example Paul Le Blanc, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party, Atlantic Highlands (New Jersey: Humanities Press), 1989. For a very recent study, see Soma Marik, Reinterrogating the Classical Marxist Discourses of Revolutionary Democracy

(New Delhi: Aakar Books), 2008. 3 L Schapiro, The Origins of the Communist Autocracy (London: Bell and Sons), 1956, p v. 4 Apart from Le Blanc and Marik, see the Earlier Studies, like Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power (New York: W W Norton), 1976 or David Mandel, The Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power (London: Macmillan), 1984. 5 K Radek, “On Lenin”, International Socialist Review, Vol 34, No 10, November 1973, p 29. 6 Richard Pipes, “The Origins of Bolshevism” in R Pipes (ed.), Revolutionary Russia (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press), 1968, p 49. 7 Leopold H Haimson, The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism (Boston: Beacon Press), 1966, pp 138-39. (First Published 1955 by Harvard University Press).

8 V I Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th edition (Moscow: Gosizdat), 1958-65, Vol I, pp 311-12. 9 Kuskova cited in Lih, Lenin Rediscovered,

pp 235-36. For English translation of the Credo, see Neil Harding (ed.), Marxism in Russia: Key Documents 1879-1906 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp 250-53, and V I Lenin, Colle

cted Works, Vol 4, Moscow, 1977, pp 171-74.

10 V I Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th edition, Vol 5, p 13.

11 Marik traces this from earlier writings. See S Marik, Reinterpreting the Classical Marxist Discourses of Revolutionary Democracy, pp 239-41.

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