Groucho Marxism

Vladimir Lenin was born Vladimir Ulyanov into a upper middle-class family in 1870 in the provincial Russian city of Simbirsk, which has since been renamed Ulaynovsk in his honour. His elder brother was executed by Tsarist forces for revolutionary activity when Lenin was just 17. This event had a huge impact on the young Lenin and from that point on he became a committed revolutionary himself. In 1897 Lenin was exiled to Siberia, after which he fled Russia for Western Europe. He returned to Russia in 1917 and in October that year led the successful revolution which removed the Tsar for good. However leading the revolution took a huge toll on Lenin’s health and he fell seriously ill four years later. His health never recovered and he died in 1924.

What Is to Be Done? is a book written by Lenin in 1901 and published in 1902. Having just finished reading What Is to Be Done? I thought I would provide a short summary. The book’s central focus is the ideological formation of the proletariat. Lenin first confronts the so-called ‘economist’ trend in Russian socialism that followed the line of the German Marxist Eduard Bernstein. Economism in Marxist usage means reducing the workers’ movement to immediate economic demands – wages, hours, and workplace conditions – and treating broader political struggle for independent class power as secondary, derivative, or unnecessary. Lenin argues forcefully that workers will not develop class consciousness through economism.

Reflecting on the wave of strikes in late 19th century Russia, Lenin observes that “the history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own efforts, is able to develop only trade union consciousness”; that is, the conviction that it must combine into unions and petition the government for pro-labour legislation. Lenin refers to this unguided, raw, and natural struggle of the working class as ‘spontaneity’, and argues this alone will never result in the overthrow of capitalism. Instead, Lenin argues, workers need a centralized vanguard party of professional revolutionaries to lead them. According to Lenin, socialist theory and political awareness must be brought to the working class from the outside by educated intellectuals and dedicated activists.

Lenin argues further that the revolutionary movement requires a tight, highly disciplined organization of professional revolutionaries, and that a centralized newspaper should act as the collective organizer, linking scattered local groups and spreading political ideas. His call for a core of professional revolutionaries stirred controversy and contributed to the Bolshevik-Menshevik split in 1903. Many treated What Is to Be Done? like it was Lenin’s last word on revolutionary organizing, when in fact it was an early formulation by him on how a small group of Russian socialists could begin to build an effective movement. Many also misread Lenin’s views on spontaneity, claiming he was hostile to spontaneous struggles when he was not against these struggles per se but against relying on them exclusively.

There has been much debate about whether What Is to Be Done? is still relevant. In my view, the three core arguments put forward in the book – the insufficiency of economism and spontaneity, the need for an organized group of professional revolutionaries, and the importance of theory in underpinning the revolutionary movement – remain as applicable today as they were when Lenin wrote about them 125 years ago. On the other hand, there is a lot of detail that is specific to Russia at the turn of the 20th century that is not so relevant now. What Is to Be Done? is written as a manual for underground resistance, which was necessary in Tsarist Russia but not so applicable to the freer societies most of us live in today.

One criticism often leveled at What Is to Be Done? is that the concept of a centralized vanguard party is fundamentally undemocratic and inevitably leads to dictatorship and totalitarianism. Those putting forward this criticism tend to point specifically to the red terror: the brutal campaign of mass arrests, torture, and executions launched by the Bolsheviks from 1918 to 1922. Enforced by the secret police known as the Cheka, its goal was to crush political opposition and secure communist power. Some high-profile contemporary Marxists, such as Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Kautsky, were highly critical of the Bolsheviks for this approach. There are even some who even argue that the vanguard party concept paved the way for Stalinism and all the horrors that unleashed.

Proponents of the red terror argue that extreme violence was a compulsory, defensive reaction to existential threats. The Bolsheviks faced civil war against the White Army, foreign invasions, economic collapse, and assassination attempts, including the near-fatal shooting of Lenin in 1918. These proponents claim that crushing the bourgeoisie and counter-revolutionaries was required to prevent the return of Tsarism or capitalist exploitation. There is certainly some truth to this. When assessing the red terror we do need to take into account the fact that there was a brutal war going on at the time. And as the architects of the first ever socialist revolution, the Bolsheviks faced an existential threat from capitalist countries whose leaders were terrified of the revolution spreading beyond Russia’s borders.

It is notable that the red terror did not begin immediately when the Bolsheviks came to power, but only after the assassination attempt on Lenin, which occurred almost a year later. The Bolsheviks had brought in a lot of progressive policies in the meantime, such an 8-hour workday, free education, a literacy campaign, and land redistribution. Thus rather than seeing the red terror as an inevitable consequence of the vanguard party concept, I think it is better viewed as a defensive manoeuvre instigated in response to the situation the Bolsheviks found themselves in. They may have overstepped the mark in terms of the level of brutality required, but it’s easy to say that when there isn’t a civil war going on and with the benefit of 100 years’ hindsight.