Lenin the Lawyer

 

 

Lenin studied law at Kazan University.  He was expelled for his political activity, but nonetheless managed to pass the law exam - indeed, he was top-ranked - and was awarded a law degree in 1891.  Of course, his career took a different turn.  But he would have made a great lawyer.  He had a very lawyerly mind.

What is a lawyer?  To use some contemporary (or perhaps slightly outdated) vocabulary, a lawyer is a member of the "professional managerial class," or more accurately, the professionalized, that is to say, highly educated and salaried, sector of the proletariat - a highly specialized form of labor.  Indeed, Lenin's primary historical importance is his role in the historical development of the complex blending together of the movement of proletarian socialism with the general tendency of capitalism towards specialization and professionalization.  Lenin made important contributions to the theory of the "professional revolutionary," though he did not invent this role - indeed, there was a rich and complex history of professional revolutionaries that preceded him, especially in Russia, including people like Mikhail Bakunin.  It's also worth remembering the Karl Marx, too, equally born into the professional class, was studying law, just like his father, until his career too took a different turn. 

Interestingly, both Marx and Lenin became journalists and editors of newspapers - in Marx's case, the Rheinische Zeitung and other papers, and in Lenin's, Iskra.  Like Marx, Lenin studied law but instead of pursuing a career as a lawyer, chose to become a media figure - in essence, a publicist.  Indeed, Lenin, with characteristic honesty, called himself such, in his unfinished essay, "Notes of a Publicist."  Lenin became a master of public relations, avant la lettre.  (Although one can find scattered examples of the phrase "public relations" as far back as 1897 in reference to Westinghouse's AC and the railway, the term did not become commonly used until the appearance of Edward Bernays's 1945 book of that title.)  Lenin used the skills he had honed in his education in the law to mount legalistic arguments as propaganda.  He had a knack for self-promotion, usually by attacking his rivals, but rather than appealing to a jury, he addressed his arguments to the court of public opinion.

There are two aspects to being a lawyer: first, a lawyer's specialty is the law - not just the statutes passed by the legislature, but the entire history of case law- the precedents of previous court cases and judicial rulings that pertain to any given proceeding.  That is to say that a lawyer's job is to interpret a massive text or group of texts - thus a lawyer is something somewhat akin to a literary critic or a historian, and requires similar skills.  But a lawyer's job is not to interpret this history of texts scientifically or impartially.  This brings us to the second aspect of being a lawyer: namely, that lawyers are hired to represent the interests of their clients.  The interpretation of these texts will thus be slanted to serve the immediate goals they have been paid to pursue.  If a judge is hearing a case from two competent lawyers, let's say a prosecuting attorney and a defense attorney, or perhaps two opposing litigants in a tort, the judge will first hear one lawyer, who will present a case, and make it seem as though a common sense understanding of all of the historical precedents to this case make it clear and obvious that the law favors their own client - and then the opposing lawyer will present another interpretation that make it just as obvious and common-sensical that all the precedents support their own client's interests.

The history of Lenin's life is the history of a sequence of battles in which Lenin bested his opponents and rivals by laying out a very convincing case: first his "case" against the "Friends of the People", then his "case" against the "Economists" of the Rabochaya Mysl school, along with many "cases" against the Mensheviks, then against the followers of "Empirio-Criticism," and so on.  There are many, many such "cases," so to speak.  Of course, the text that Lenin was referencing in his arguments was not "law" in the traditional Russian sense - though Lenin understood that very well - but rather the body of Marxist theory and the history of organizations and their decisions and the principles of their structure: the writings of Marx and Engels and Lassalle and Kautsky, the history of the First and Second (and Second-and-a-Half) Internationals, the principles of democratic centralism as laid out by their founder, Jean Baptista von Schweitzer, and so on.  Like any good lawyer, Lenin again and again selectively mined this body of material to support his side in all such cases, shifting his interpretation this way and that as the present case demanded, interpreting and reinterpreting, flowing one way and then another, like water.

Lenin was such a gifted lawyer that he was able to present an interpretation of these texts in such a way that he successfully managed to make it seem as though this interpretation was the obvious, common-sense interpretation.  So much so, indeed, that what might be called the Leninist interpretation of Marxism has become by far the dominant interpretation of Marxism.  Nearly every Marxist tendency is inflected with Lenin's interpretation.  Indeed, almost all people today, whether they are friendly towards Marxism or antagonistic towards it, interpret Marxism along something like Leninist lines.  There are only a tiny (though gradually growing) minority of people who even attempt to interpret Marx differently, and usually even their interpretation is influenced by Lenin's, either directly or in reaction against it, and usually a mixture of both.  

This is all very ironic, given the fact that, in his own time, although Lenin began as a more or less mainstream Marxist, his interpretations of Marx gradually came to be seen by mainstream Marxists as more and more extreme, distinctive, eccentric, and frankly bizarre.  Respected theorists such as Kautsky and Pannekoek saw Leninism as a right wing deviation within the Marxist movement.  Even his own wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, herself an important communist organizer - indeed, her political activities and membership in revolutionary organizations preceded those of Lenin himself - after the publication of the April Theses, concluded "I'm afraid that it looks as if Lenin has gone insane."  

Most followers of Lenin downplay this, but Slavoj Zizek has predictably celebrated the apparent "insanity" of Lenin, in a kind of quasi-Foucauldian exhortation towards ecstasy and the limit-experience.  As for me, I'm not particularly beholden to the idea that Lenin was "insane" or mentally different.  Clearly there was something going on inside his brain, which eventually led to his paralysis and death, and people have speculated for a century now on his diagnosis, but I'm not going to engage in that kind of speculation.  I'm not in either camp - the celebratory or diagnostic camp.  I don't really think he was insane - on the contrary, I see a kind of calculation in each of his interpretive shifts, even if at times he painted himself into a strange logical corner.  My point is that he was such an extraordinarily effective lawyer that his highly idiosyncratic interpretation of Marxist theory has become a kind of norm.  (Though it must also be admitted that this would have been impossible for him without the assistance of the even more eloquent and persuasive Alexandra Kollontai.)  As I will explain in subsequent essays, I don't see Lenin's perverse and idiosyncratic misreading of Marx as motivated by personal psychological factors, but rather by particular historical political exigencies, some of which were within but most of which were outside of Lenin's control.

Lenin's strategy as a lawyer, "conclusion shopping" so to speak, digging through the precedents in Marxism for confirmation of his already foregone preconceptions, was almost always the same.  Usually, he would entirely ignore Marx's main masterpiece and magnum opus, that is, Capital (Das Kapital), Volumes I, II, and III.  Oh, he might grab a quick snippet or a brief quote from that work, taken completely out of context, when it suited him.  But usually, instead, he would focus on tiny, insignificant works of Marx - private letters, brief articles written about Ireland, Poland, and Hungary, unpublished notes and fragments, and internal memos like the Critique of the Gotha Program, which Leninists have fixated upon with irrational intensity, and interpreted so perversely, focusing on a few phrases, not even complete sentences, and ignoring the rest, that they take the document to mean the exact opposite of its clear intent.  (The Critique of the Gotha Program, and its fatuous reading by Leninists, deserves an essay on its own.)  This hyper-fixation on the minutiae of Marx's writings and simultaneous ignoring of his most important work is characteristic of ideology, which is rarely completely false, but operates like a funhouse mirror, producing a distorted image in which tiny details are made huge and the main body is made small.  I am reminded of Woody Allen's famous parody, The Metterling Lists, written for the New Yorker magazine in 1969, a mock-review of a fictional "long-awaited" publication of philosopher Hans Metterling's laundry lists.

This demonstrates the first aspect of being a lawyer, but what of the second?  Who was Lenin's "client," so to speak?  Whose interests did he represent?  That is the subject of the next essay.