Introduction to Lenin

 

Introduction to Lenin 

I've been hesitant to write anything about Lenin, but it's difficult to avoid.  It seems unhelpful, and often downright counterproductive, because it can divide the left.  (My only consolation is that there's not that there's much of a left, these days, to divide!)  I'm certainly willing to work together with those who consider themselves Lenin's followers on specific projects, and I don't want to waste my time or theirs pointing out all of Lenin's shortcomings.  On the other hand, it feels a bit dishonest not to let them know my negative opinions of Leninist theory - or rather, the facts, which often speak for themselves.  I definitely don't want to be the type of person who spends all of his time writing about how bad Bolshevism was - mostly because that would be very boring, and there are so many more interesting things to write about.  To me, the Bolshevik era is not an especially important time and place in history - I don't fetishize it in any particular direction, as either the best of times or the worst of times.  (I certainly don't regard it as an "Event" with a capital E.)  There are other parts of history that are at least as important, if not much more so. 

I do not, even for a moment, pretend that my (or anybody else's) nerdy fascination with the minutiae of this long-gone historical period does anything to contribute to the development of an emancipatory project for the 21st century.  I'm tempted to say, as some Marxists now do, that the Bolshevik experiment has only negative lessons for us - lessons on "what not to do".  But even this is untrue.  Even most of the negative lessons that people are tempted to learn do not really apply, because the material conditions in which we live are so different from those of the Russian Empire in the early 20th century.  

But at a certain point in almost all political conversations, whether with soi-disant followers of Lenin, right-wing conservatives, anarchists, or mainstream liberals (and in my experience, that point comes rather quickly) the history of this period becomes the elephant in the room, and it becomes impossible not to deal with it.  In fact, it even keeps coming up in my own writing, even when not in dialogue with people of other political perspectives.  And so it has become obvious to me that, just for the sake of intellectual honesty, as well as saving time, it's necessary for me to nail down at least some basics on how I look at this stuff, so that I don't have to reinvent the wheel, every time it comes up.  Debating Lenin is boring for me, and most of the time I would rather skip it, so that I can get to more interesting conversations.  If anyone wants to know my position vis-a-vis Lenin, I would rather just direct them here.

If there is a time when a historical assessment of Lenin and the Bolshevik movement seems appropriate, now seems as good a time as any.  There was a time when even the slightest criticism of the U.S.S.R. would be denounced by self-declared Marxists, who saw themselves as defending "Actually Existing Socialism" (AES) against the "dreams" and "fantasies" of "utopian" "revisionists".  That time was called "the cold war."  But the cold war is over, and Russia, the land of Lenin's birth and rule, is now under the control of an anti-communist regime.  So am I betraying anything that actually exists, by combing through this ancient history?  Anyone who thinks that that's what's happening is delusionally living in the past.  (I like to say that what they are defending is NAES: Not Actually Existing Socialism.)  As for the left in the west, it barely exists, and to the extent that it does, it is so scattered and disjointed that some clarity on what we're for and what we're against literally couldn't hurt.

So I've had to force myself to sit down and get these thoughts out.  My first temptation was to write some quick, dismissive slogans, leave it at that, and move on.  But I realize that this, too, would be a bad idea - it would invite misinterpretation on an already emotionally charged subject, where the temptation to uncharitable reading and confirmation bias is already very high.  And so I am, against my own spontaneous inclinations, attempting to write something a bit more disciplined, coherent, researched, and nuanced.  I want to resist reducing the complex history of Lenin to a soundbite.

My purpose here is neither to make Lenin into a hero, nor to demonize him, but simply to understand him. 

But I also want to avoid writing anything here that could be appropriated by right-wing propagandists and used against workers who are struggling against the forces of capital today.  To be clear, when I specify a position as distinct from Lenin's, I am writing from a position to the left of Lenin.  Not that there's anything special about me.  Many, many people around the world today are further to the left than Lenin, and indeed it's easy and normal to be further to the left than Lenin, for two reasons: first, because a century of history separates us from Lenin, and vast progress has been made on a wide variety of fronts since his time.  When Lenin, for instance, published "What is to be done?" in 1902, the vast majority of nations of Europe were still some sort of inherited aristocracy.  In fact, there were only two official exceptions - France and Switzerland (Portugal would become a republic 9 years later, in 1911).  Yes, some of these monarchies, duchies, principalities and so forth were limited by a constitution, but few could be considered a democracy in any meaningful sense.  Even in the UK, perhaps the most liberal government of Europe, the unelected upper house of parliament, the House of Lords, where people inherited their membership, could veto an act of the lower, elected House of Commons until the Parliament Act of 1911.  And the "Master and Servant Acts" still allowed employers to whip employees.  Even in the United States, there were severe limitations on political freedom of speech and the press and the Supreme Court ruled again and again that the government could arrest people for having opinions with a "bad tendency".  Women had the right to vote in only three places: New Zealand, South Australia, and the Isle of Man, and most people in many nations believed that the man should be the head of the household and that wives were and should be chattel.  Anti-Jewish legislation was common throughout the world, and pogroms happened regularly in the Russian Empire and elsewhere.  Segregation was the law in the United States, and open racism was the rule nearly everywhere on Earth, or at least everywhere that European imperialism had managed to invade.  Furthermore, very few nations had any kind of welfare state to speak of and millions died of starvation, malnutrition, and the diseases that are attendant of poverty.  Indeed, as Lenin was writing, China, India, and parts of Southeast Asia were in the grips of a famine that would kill tens of millions.  Children were often worked to death in factories, as were adults, both men and women.  In most parts of the world there was no electricity, and in many parts no plumbing, sanitation, refrigeration, or basic medicine - and of course, no antibiotics, which meant that even a small cut could cause an infection that meant dismemberment or death.  Perhaps no region of Europe was more backward than Russia, the "gendarme of European reaction" as Marx called it.  The Czar ruled with an iron fist and a famously vicious and guileful secret police, not to mention the city police who whipped people in the street, or the Cossacks.  Economically, the Russian Empire was still in a fairly early phase of the development of industrial capitalism, and many if not most parts of the Empire still might be considered semi-feudal.  I could go on and on, but the point is that the world has come a long, long way from 1902, materially, economically, and politically.  We can say that, to the extent that "left" implies progress, the whole world has moved enormously to the left.  

If you think that none of that matters, and the entire question of how far to the left Lenin was should be considered in terms of his personal qualities - his "principles," his courage, his discipline, and his understanding of Marxist theory, say - then your political ideology is more of romantic heroic "great man" theory than it is based in material conditions and a larger analysis of the global historical framework.  If this is the case, your analysis is more ideological than it is rooted in material reality.  Individual minds simply don't matter that much.  (For a contemporary, personal, comparison: I often ask myself - how have my politics changed in the wake of the 2007/2008 economic crisis?  "Officially," so to speak, my political views have not changed.  But looking at writings before and after this crisis, I do feel like I notice a difference - although I'm not sure what it is.  I probably need a disinterested outside observer to tell me.  My point is that one's political position is often more a function of one's time and place in history with its material conditions than it is a matter of personal understanding.) Sure, most of the (small) ruling class is to the right of Lenin, including the owners of the media, the book publishers, etc., and their employees generally at least pay lip service to being to the right of Lenin; but in poll after poll, when people are asked their opinions on a wide variety of issues, most of the rest of us are to the left of Lenin.

The second reason that it is easy and normal, today, to be further to the left than Lenin was, is that, while Lenin was a member of a leftist organization, the so-called "Second International," compared to the wave of leftist opinion, organization, and movement going on all around him, Lenin represented a relatively conservative force within this larger movement.  In brief, Lenin and his movement represented a right wing deviation within Marxism.  Many, many people were further to the left than Lenin even in his own time - for instance, Antonie Pannekoek, the astronomer, scientist, and leader of the councilist movement in the Netherlands.  At first, Lenin had been a follower of Pannekoek in his break from the leadership of the Second International - people like Karl Kautsky.  But when Pannekoek voiced his disapproval of some of Lenin's positions, Lenin wrote his famous tract, "Leftwing Communism: an Infantile Disorder," in which he attacked the many people in the movement who were further to the left than himself - not only people like Pannekoek and the similar Herman Gorter, as well as Otto Rühle's movement in Germany, but also the quite different movement in Italy, led by Antonio Bordiga.  Although these may not be familiar names nowadays, these were seen as mainstream intellectual leaders of the Marxist left of their time.  Lenin was seen as a lone crank.  Pannekoek, Gorter, and Kautsky would become increasingly critical of Lenin as time went on, but with the help of German imperialism, Lenin became the leader of a major country, and thus he is remembered and they are largely forgotten.  And there were many, many other such people, to the left of Lenin that we could discuss.  As for me, although I respect Pannekoek and Gorter, as should be clear from the following essays, my analysis of Lenin is quite different than theirs, and should not be confused with any of the above.

So: how can we confront the legacy of Lenin from the left?

One way we can begin the discussion is to say this: if Karl Marx had lived to see the U.S.S.R., he would doubtless have been the first to ruthlessly criticize it.  It's a great irony that Leninists like to defend what they call "Actually Existing Socialism" - since that phrase comes Karl Marx, and what he was saying, quite precisely, is that we need to critique actually existing socialism - or rather, "actually existing communism".  He wrote:

"...Therefore I am not in favour of raising any dogmatic banner. On the contrary, we must try to help the dogmatists to clarify their propositions for themselves. Thus, communism, in particular, is a dogmatic abstraction; in which connection, however, I am not thinking of some imaginary and possible communism, but actually existing communism..... [T]he abolition of private property and communism are by no means identical, and it is not accidental but inevitable that communism has seen other socialist doctrines – such as those of Fourier, Proudhon, etc. – arising to confront it because it is itself only a special, one-sided realisation of the socialist principle." [emphasis mine]

This quote comes from his famous letter to Arnold Ruge of 1843, in which he calls for a "relentless criticism of all that exists" (or "ruthless criticism of all that exists," in other translations).  What Marx was advocating here was "critique" in the sense of classical German critical philosophy - not rejection, or abandonment, or idle contempt, but rigorous engagement, so that a movement can become more fully what it is - as Marx puts it, to help them "clarify their propositions for themselves."  This passage is often read uncarefully, and people take it to mean that Marx was advocating critiquing Fourier and Proudhon.  He did, of course, critique them, but that's not what he's saying here.  He includes the works of Fourier and Proudhon as "other socialist doctrines" in contrast to communism, and insists on critiquing communism.  For instance, he includes, among the actually existing communists that he plans to critique, Alexandre Théodore Dézamy, a man for whom he had a great deal of respect - and in spite of that, or rather because of that, he felt it necessary to critique him.  (In "The Holy Family," Marx had praised Dézamy as a "scientific" communist, in contrast to the utopians, a founder of "materialism" and "the logical basis of communism." )  Is it possible, in a similar way, to "help" the Leninist "dogmatists" "clarify" their "propositions" "for themselves"?  If so, then we would need to perform a kind of immanent criticism on Leninist theory, while always keeping in mind the material conditions of this theory.

At this point, the response is usually something like, "How dare you criticize Lenin, from your perch in the United States!  Look what he accomplished!  What have you done?"  To which I answer: How was Marx able to criticize August Willich, the important military general who accomplished much more in a material sense than Marx did, all over the world?  How was he able to criticize Napoleon III?  Those who imply that only those who have accomplished the deeds of others are capable of criticizing them, then are, in their fond imaginations, instituting a laughable system of peerage in which Great Men can only be questioned by other Great Men.  I'm not sure what they fear from my criticism.  Again, I am only trying to understand Lenin, and to express this understanding honestly. 

On the other hand, I think it's not so important to understand Lenin, as an individual.  Karl Marx was never trying to analyze capital on the basis of individual moral agents, but rather to expose the larger structures of society through which these individuals operated and in which they were formed.  However, he did write about the capitalist as "personifying" capital.  In a similar way, I think Lenin is interesting to the extent that he "personified" Bolshevism, which is in turn interesting as an example of a reaction to a particular historical global configuration of capital - and, perhaps more importantly, as a reaction against a historical proletarian uprising against capital.

Why would anyone make such a study?  For me, I'll admit that I'm mostly motivated by a nerdy, idle historical curiosity.  I have mentioned before that "in history, there is no criticism" and I stand by that.  A series of essays on Lenin like this is obviously not an attack on Lenin.  I, and everyone else, cannot possibly attack Lenin.  Nor can anyone support Lenin.  Because, if you haven't noticed, Lenin is dead.  Lenin has been dead for a century.  To the extent that a study like this could be part of a political project at all, it is directed not at Lenin, but to contemporary and future people.

Perhaps the chances that we have to move beyond Lenin can be classified into three types:

1. First and foremost, to notice the ways that our situation - primarily our economic situation, in terms of global supply chains, etc., but also our political situation, our cultural situation, etc., etc., has changed since Lenin's time.  Thus, there may be strategies that may have been effective in Lenin's time, but not for ours.

2. Secondly, there may be ways in which Lenin had incomplete information.  Lenin could not possibly have foreseen the consequence of his policies, but with the benefit of hindsight, we can.

3. To notice that, even given the information Lenin had, he could have made decisions differently.  

Of these, I think (1) is the most important point, but it is a much larger issue than the scope of a series of essays about Lenin, and so far the most part I will ignore it here.  The following essays will tend to focus on (2) and (3), and save (1) for future projects.  Of course, in practice, these are not rigid categories.  (1), (2), and (3) will all blur together.

For the most part, I will be ignoring the question of whether the U.S.S.R. was "socialist" or "state capitalist" or a "deformed worker's state" or a "non-mode of production" (Tiktin), etc., etc., etc..  I have perused the literature on this, and I do not feel that I have anything particularly useful or insightful to add to it.  As I see it, this seems to be merely a matter of definitions, and if anything, the inability to come to a consensus on which category applies only shows how these terms were never very well-defined in the first place, and have only arisen in an ad-hoc, usually politically tendentious way.  In other words, this is an debate over the ideal rather than the material.

 

One thing I will not be doing here: I will not be explaining how Lenin, and his Bolshevik Party, and the decisions they made, caused the U.S.S.R. to fail.  Fail it did, of course.  But I do not moralistically blame Lenin or the other Bolsheviks for its failure.  Rather, I am trying to develop a theory for why the U.S.S.R. failed, one that has very little to do with Lenin as an individual, or even all that much to do with the leadership of the Bolshevik Party.  Understanding the historical causes for the failure of the U.S.S.R. is a very large project, far beyond the scope of these five little essays.  

I am not particularly interested in figuring out "who was to blame" for the failure of the Soviet Union.  That kind of question seems utterly pointless to me.  There are important questions to be asked, however.  Most of these are forward-looking and practical, rather than backward-looking and moralistic.  As I have indicated elsewhere, I support worker ownership and control of the means of production.  It's clear that in the U.S.S.R., among other experiments, the workers failed to achieve this level of control.  I do think it's worthwhile to ask questions like, "How can we prevent workers from losing control of the revolutionary so-called 'dictatorship of the proletariat' in the future?" and studying history, including the history of the Bolshevik Revolution, may help in part to investigate this question.  We might ask: "Why were the soviets, also known as workers' councils, so weak?" "What caused the workers' councils, to lose power and effectively to become a meaningless body that merely gave a rubber stamp of approval to the dictates of the Politburo?" or, more importantly, "How can we ensure that all power remains invested in the workers' councils?" or even more fundamentally, "Are workers' councils the most effective strategy of organization for establishing worker control?"  All of these are worthy of investigation, both in theory and through practice, and it is with an eye to these questions that I will attempt the following essays, though, truth be told, the story of Lenin does not offer us any conclusive answers to them.  After all, the evidence one can gather about a single person - or even a single nation - will only be anecdotal, and means little once one considers history in its millennia-long sweep.  These more important kinds of questions are beyond the scope of the present essays, and the present essays, if they are useful at all, can only be considered a prelude to these deeper, broader, and more urgent inquiries.

Inevitably, this will involve critiquing the ideology of Lenin and the Bolshevik party, sometimes rather harshly - but this critique can only be deeply rooted in the quirky particulars of the concrete history of this conflict.  So, for example, I think a simplistic, yet helpful summary answer to some of these questions mentioned above about how and why the workers' councils (soviets) lost power would probably involve a reference to the ban on factions, the establishment of a one-party government, and the imposition of the famous "21 conditions" of the Third International.  All of these are policies with which I absolutely disagree, and I consider them to be major errors, and it's indisputable that Lenin and the leadership of the Bolshevik party were responsible for them.  But to say simply that these woefully mistaken policies singlehandedly caused the workers to lose control in the "soviet" bloc would be to put the cart before the horse.  If anything, it was the reverse: the lack of worker control was problem; the ban on factions, the establishment of one-party government, and the 21 conditions were symptoms of this lack of control.  It would be an idealist abstraction if we stopped there and asserted that the actions of the state, which is a part of the ideological superstructure, caused the failure, rather than seeking deeper causes at a material, economic level.

The general purpose of these essays is not a positive picture of the real causes of the failure of the U.S.S.R., but a quick and dirty dismissal of some of the easy, simplistic answers, which would attempt to place the blame on the actions or theory of an individual person.  In that sense, these essays should not be considered final and definitive but rather introductory to a larger and more important project.  For the problems we must address are not personal, they are structural.  Had Lenin never been born, I do not think history would have played out all that differently.  Western imperialism, particularly that of Germany, would have found a different pawn - but even the German high command were, themselves, pawns in an even greater game, one that was determined less by political beliefs and more by economic realities.

If I were to sum up the flavor of my conclusions about Lenin in a single adjective, it would be "deflationary".  From a materialist perspective, Lenin just doesn't matter all that much.  No individual does.  Individuals matter, of course, but not so much that one person's decisions can override the massive tide of economic and political forces that sweep through and shape history.  Marx famously observed that "Men make their own history, but not in conditions of their own choosing."  As I will attempt to show, most of Lenin's actions are merely reactions to circumstances largely beyond his control.  Lenin's decisions while in power are not the predominant determinant of the direction of history, and his theoretical ideas matter even less.

To some degree, one could say that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.  There probably wasn't anything they could do to prevent the failure of the U.S.S.R., because that failure merely reflects the global economic and political development of the proletariat at that time - and, of course, the response of the entire bourgeois order, including many bourgeois governments, to that development.  I don't like describing political strategy in terms of "tailing" - I consider this to be an inherently ideal and un-material analysis - but if we want to put things very briefly and schematically, we might say that the practical exigencies of maintaining a revolutionary regime in the former Russian Empire in the early twentieth century meant that it would be impossible to sustain a purely proletarian movement, and thus necessarily required "tailing," or at least, forming a kind of working compromise with, elements of the peasantry - an uneasy and unstable compromise, full of complex contradictions, symbolized by the famous "hammer and sickle" symbol.  The inevitable result was a confused regime, with elements of what the Marxist tradition would call adventurism, voluntarism, Bonapartism, and Lassalleanism.  (I will explain this further in the next essay.)  This compromise was perfectly understandable and indeed imposed upon Lenin and the Bolsheviks by the material conditions that they faced.  But it would be the purest, most absurd folly for someone to repeat these strategies in the twenty-first century, when the material conditions we face are entirely different - if such a thing were even remotely possible.

For me, Lenin is not a hero or a villain, but a historical figure.  Asking whether Lenin was a "good guy" or a "bad guy" is as pointless and as childish as asking similar questions about Genghis Khan or Abraham Lincoln or Charlemagne or William the Conqueror.  To understand Lenin, it is crucially important not to canonize him as the keeper of a sacred tradition, a "red thread" of correct communist theory connecting Marx and Engels with some later movement, perhaps one that has been invariantly true to this very day - rather, it is necessary to contextualize Lenin in his own historical era.  This way, it becomes clear that Lenin was a political leader of this period who called himself socialist - one among many.  I find interesting comparisons to make between Lenin and, say, Hjalmar Branting, Kulervo Manner, Jósef Piłsudski, and James Connolly, and some leaders who did not call themselves socialist, such as Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata, Sun Yat-Sen, and even Woodrow Wilson.  Each of these leaders is just as much worthy of careful, critical, historical study as is Lenin.  What does one find?  Some sharp contrasts, to be sure, but also a surprising number of a continuities and parallels.  This shouldn't be that much of a surprise, since they lived at the same time, and in a few cases, knew each other personally (for instance, Lenin's brother and Piłsudski's brother worked together in the failed plot to assassinate Alexander III), but this comparison only goes so far, because their respective countries faced quite different material conditions.  

Who is "better," Branting or Lenin?  Only an idiot would ask such a meaningless question.  Obviously, each biography was shaped by the particular historical conditions of each country, and it is pointless to babble about moral rankings.  Morality doesn't work like that.  There's no such thing as a moral comparison. 

Though comparison teaches us nothing about morality, this does not imply that comparisons can teach us nothing at all.  I think there is something to be gleaned from comparing and contrasting Lenin with Friedrich Ebert of Germany.  The two men were similar in terms of individual personality and governing style; both considered themselves socialists, but emphasized that they were practical, pragmatic leaders, in contrast to their more utopian and idealistic comrades.  In terms of class position, Ebert came from a somewhat lower working class background, compared with Lenin's more sophisticated education and intellectual pedigree.  Where they really differed was the material economic and political conditions of their respective countries.  Most obviously, Germany was a highly developed, major industrial power in the early 20th century, whereas Russia was by Lenin's own analysis, "backward".  The course of the revolutions in their respective countries had remarkable parallels but also significant differences.  In both cases, councils of workers' and soldiers' deputies became a significant political influence in their own right, while at the same time a democratic constituent assembly was also developing - a period known in both cases as a condition of "dual power".  One important difference was that in the German case, the constituent assembly was dominated by the industrial bourgeoisie, whereas in the Russian case, the constituent assembly was more complex and diverse and the largest single faction was the Socialist Revolutionaries - a populist movement comprised largely of soldiers and (former?) peasants.  The response from both men was to consolidate their own power by crushing the workers' movement and allying themselves with the (German) imperialist industrial bourgeoisie, though in Ebert's case this meant abandoning the earlier rhetoric of socialism, whereas in Lenin's case this meant indulging in a lot of what Marx called "revolutionary phrase mongering".  But though the spectacle was different, the substance was the same.  And in both cases, the gambit worked, sort of - they were both able to consolidate control, briefly, until they each died in office - Lenin in 1924, Ebert in in 1925.  (And they both spent their brief reigns executing other Marxist leaders).

A more obvious and meaningful comparison could be made with the other socialists in contention for leadership of the former Russian empire: Alexander Kerensky, Julius Martov, and Viktor Chernov.  Of course, since history played out the way it did, any attempt to make such a comparison is hypothetical and purely speculative.  Still, if I had to guess, I would wager that history would have played out much the same way if any of them managed to hang on to the rudder of the ship of state, because each of them would have faced much the same economic forces and similar political pressures - or else, history would have spun off in a completely unpredictable way, like the movement of a hurricane changed by the flapping of a butterfly's wings.  Yes, individuals have unique personalities and intellectual political principles, but I tend to think that it tends to be more the office that shapes the person, than the person that shapes the office.  If Chernov had been in Lenin's shoes, he may well have wound up doing more or less the same things that Lenin did - or he may have made different decisions, but with more or less the same results.  It is scientifically inadmissible to make a causal inference of the form, "Lenin made X decision - and that's why Lenin was victorious!"  Similarly, it's impossible to say "Lenin made X decision - and that's why Lenin failed."  A sample size of 1 is no better - and may actually be worse - than having no data at all.

Yet other comparisons could be made, if we step back and open up the scope of our investigation.  The Bolshevik regime can be regarded as a transitional era between a semi-feudal mode of production and an industrial bourgeois mode of production.  Seeing it this way, we might want to compare Lenin with figures like William of Orange, Oliver Cromwell, Maximilien Robespierre, and George Washington.  In a sense, one might say that there have only ever been bourgeois revolutions.  The bourgeois class is, so far, the only revolutionary class.  I think there are insights to be gained here as well, but I won't spend any time in the present essays thinking about this, preferring to focus on trying to understand Lenin within his own contemporary history.  Still, keeping these comparisons in the back of one's mind can be useful for the purpose of maintaining an even keel, avoiding moralizing about Lenin, understanding him as part of a global historical process, and remaining rooted in historical fact.

Then again, although the focus of the following essays is non-moral, this does not imply that I don’t have any moral feelings about Lenin. Intellectual honesty requires me to put my cards on the table and admit that I do- and in order to do so, I will employ a word that Lenin himself used, namely "renegade" - from Lenin's famous essay, "The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky".  In earlier years, Lenin had been a loyal follower of Karl Kautsky, who was probably the foremost Marxist theorist in the world for a period of the development of the Second International.  But for a variety of reasons, including Kautsky's initial failure to vote against war credits in Germany during the outbreak of World War I, Lenin broke with Kautsky - and the rift deepened after the Russian Revolution, which Kautsky criticized as un-Marxist in his pamphlet, "The Dictatorship of the Proletariat."  Lenin's work was his direct response to Kautsky and his moralistic repudiation of him - but precisely as a "renegade": not as someone whose ideology or scientific understanding of political economy was incorrect, but as someone who had "reneged" against his own theory and his own political principles - that is, in plain language, a hypocrite.  Lenin showed that Kautsky said one thing and did another.  Lenin was thus tacitly asserting that he was more Kautskyist than Kautsky himself.  In Lenin's eyes, he had stayed true to Marxist theory as he had learned it from Kautsky, while Kautsky himself had betrayed those principles.  In a sense, one could read Lenin's text as the dialectical aufhebung of Kautsky - upholding Kautskyism precisely by definitively breaking with him.  Lenin was performing a kind of immanent critique on Kautsky - not attacking him from some external position, but showing how Kautsky had failed the constellation of substantive premises and truth-determinations of his own ideology.

By these definitions, it's obvious that Lenin was much more of a renegade than Kautsky ever was.  Kautsky may have gone against the Basel Manifesto - though in so doing, he was merely doing what the principles of democratic centralism required of him.  But Lenin, who had been a leader in the social democracy movement, became a renegade against social democracy as such.  Marx had been a social democrat, and socialism was nothing other than the application of the principles of democracy to the economic realm - worker ownership and control of the means of production.  Marx spent his life in ardently defending democracy.  Thus the very concept of undemocratic socialism is a meaningless oxymoron.  Lenin, too, had been a democrat, as a member of the RSDLP - the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.  In the summer of April 1917, Lenin was calling for democracy, and promising that if the Bolsheviks came to power, they would hold elections for seats in a constituent assembly.  And indeed, after the October Revolution, an election was held.  But when the Bolsheviks did not win this election (they didn't really lose, either - in a multi-party system, they came in second, with about 23% of the vote; the Socialist Revolutionaries decisively won the most votes, about 38%, making for the possibility of a coalition that would represent a majority of voters - an even stronger coalition, if the Mensheviks and other leftist groups were included), Lenin instead chose to renege against the international proletariat, to renege against the people of Russia, to renege against the principles of democracy that he had until then claimed to uphold, and to renege against Marxism.  The Constituent Assembly met once, in January of 1918, and then immediately was forcibly and illegally closed down by Lenin's "All-Russian Central Executive Committee".  

Lenin loved to use insults like "renegade," "revisionist," "falsifier,"and so on.  But Lenin was not only a greater "renegade" than Kautsky.  He also proved himself to be more of a "revisionist" than Bernstein.  He and his underlings proceeded to comb through and falsify Marx's theoretical work, transforming him from the ardent defender of democracy and freedoms such as freedom of the press that he had been historically into the very opposite of this, in a shameless post-hoc attempt to justify their own careerist policies.

I can understand why Lenin fascinates people so much, either with a sense of terror or of exhilaration.  There is something puzzling about Lenin, something intriguing that will perplex researchers for a long, long time.

I don't claim to have all of the answers here.  In fact, for me, at the center of this complex history is a baffling mystery: namely, how did Lenin come to power?  What was the October Revolution?  How, precisely, did the October Revolution occur, and more importantly, what were the conditions of its possibility?  And could such a thing be possible again?  The more I probe into these questions, the more dumbstruck I become.  The facts are as awe-inspiring as they are incomprehensible, yet they remain, stubbornly, the facts: in a few short months, Lenin went from being an effete intellectual in exile in Switzerland, writing extremist political theory in obscure journals read only by a relatively small circulation of readers, mostly out of fashion even within his own movement, to suddenly becoming the essentially undisputed leader of a nation - and, a little later, a union of republics occupying a larger landmass than any other nation on Earth.  It defies all credulity, plausibility, and common sense.  How did it happen?

I do not intend to settle this matter once and for all with the following essays.  That is currently beyond my powers, and though I will, no doubt, continue to read and learn this history, it probably will always remain so.  Rather than declaring a final, all-encompassing absolute doctrine about Lenin, I will instead try to present Lenin from several different angles, and particularly angles that are not usually shown by any of the dominant ideologies today.  I will not be discussing Lenin the Hero of the Revolution, Lenin the Champion of the Purest Form of Marxism, Lenin the Genocidal Monster, Lenin the Totalitarian, or Lenin the Betrayer of True Socialism.  If you want to read such narratives, you can look elsewhere, and find them in abundance at your bookstore, library or on the internet.  Instead, I will be presenting a few very different versions of Lenin, that one scarcely ever sees: Lenin the Anarchist-Politician, Lenin the Liberal, Lenin the Moralist, and Lenin the Metaphysician.

As I say, I do not claim to have solved the mystery about Lenin.  Nevertheless, in some ways, though these essays do not solve the mystery, they do at least perhaps tamp down the mystery, so that Lenin appears not as some special, magical being, but as a political figure much like many other political figures in history: not an ideal philosophical principle (either positive or negative) but a mere human being, much like many others, with his own foibles, quirks, eccentricities.  That said, perhaps this only deepens the mystery.  In my account, Lenin appears as a fairly ordinary politician, in extraordinary times.  The deeper mystery, which the riddle of Lenin only points at, is the economic and political and ecological dynamics and forces at work deep beneath the superficial level of quirky individual people.

One day, I think we will look back at the Bolshevik regime as a curious footnote to history: the quirky, quizzical, minor movement which failed to change the world, which preceded the much larger movement that really did change the world.  I hope I can make a small and preliminary contribution to that future literature.

I hope you enjoy it.