Lenin the Moralist
It will probably cause me to lose friends all across the political spectrum when I say that the problem with Lenin was that he was too moral. Deal with it. Moreover, modern-day soi-disant Leninists are even more moralistic than he was - and therefore, all the more romantic and delusional, and their analyses all the more pointless.
I do not mean to imply that Lenin was not responsible for the deaths of many people - he was. Nor am I saying that Lenin did not commit enough atrocities - that he was not violent enough, not ruthless enough, too timid to accomplish his goals, or anything of the like. No, no, no. My point is that Lenin's ideology diverted sharply from Marx's critique of political economy, and in part this was because he tried to reinterpret Marxism into a kind of moral campaign, when Marx had intended nothing of the kind - and, by the way, Lenin's moralistic distortion of Marxian analysis was a partial cause of the mass violence of the Bolshevik regime.
Moral crusades never end well.
* * *
Perhaps the chief innovation that Karl Marx brought to the socialist and communist movements was that Marx strove towards a non-moral critique of the capitalist system. By this, I do not mean to imply that Marx was personally either immoral or amoral, but simply that his economic theory was not an argument based in morality - just as a chemist, when analyzing a chemical compound, does not present moralistic reasons why a molecule should be composed of such-and-such elements. There had been many socialists and communists before Marx came along, and there had been many economists who analyzed the capitalist system, often in quite critical ways, pointing out, for instance, the massive inequalities between classes that capitalism produced: see, for example, William Thompson, John Bray, John Francis Bray, Percy Ravenstone, and so forth - but all of them criticized capitalism from a fundamentally moral standpoint.
It is precisely Marx's avoidance of moralistic precepts undergirding his analysis that makes him a materialist. This should not be read as giving license to all kinds of immoral behavior, but simply as a temporary methodological bracketing, for the purposes of analysis. His style is dispassionate, detached, often ironic, arch, observant, and occasionally very funny. He's especially funny when he's making fun of other socialist writers of his time - the critique of critical criticism. His style is often raucous, transgressive, and politically incorrect.
That said, it might be added that at a personal level, Marx had quite a few colorful habits and activities. He was notoriously slovenly, and his house was famously a terrible mess. He was overweight and unathletic, often wearing stained, mismatched clothes and sporting long hair and a large unkempt beard. He was also a heavy drinker and smoker. (He even named his dogs after his favorite drinks, such as "Whisky" and "Toddy".) As a student in Trier, he had been co-president of the drinking club. One night, he and Bruno Bauer got hammered, rode donkeys through the town square, yelled profanities at the townies, smashed some lamps, and nearly got thrown in jail. Later, in London, he and his friends went on what would now be called a pub crawl, attempting to have a beer in every tavern in Tottenham Court Road. More famously, he was a bit of a philanderer, who had a child with his housekeeper, Helene Demuth, and then he did not love or acknowledge this child. He was also known to get into barfights and duels, such as the saber duel he got in 1836, in which he was cut above his eye, giving him a scar. The entire social scene of which Marx and Engels were a part was a tangled web of criss-crossing duels. Marx challenged at least two newspaper editors to duels, but nothing came of it. Emmanuel Barthelamy, a follower of Blanqui, coached Marx in fencing; August Willich challenged Marx to a duel; Marx refused but Konrad Schramm challenged Willich on Marx's behalf, with Barthelamy as Willich's second. Schramm was shot in the head but survived, and Barthelamy continued to duel - two years later, in 1852, he killed a man named Cournet, another leftist revolutionary, who had insulted Barthelamy's girlfriend. It was the last fatal duel in England, for which Barthelamy was hanged. In 1864, another of Marx's rivals, Ferdinand Lassalle, himself died in a duel with another suitor over a woman. And so on. It was a rough scene. But fun.
It might be added that Marx also played the stock market. Engels was an even more avid, enthusiastic, and skillful stock trader, but Marx, too, was a diamond-hand ape trying to ride a stonk to the moon, as he remarks in a famous letter to Lion Philips, dated June 25th, 1864:
"I have, which will surprise you not a little, been speculating — partly
in American funds, but more especially in English stocks, which are
springing up like mushrooms this year (in furtherance of every
imaginable and unimaginable joint stock enterprise), are forced up to
quite an unreasonable level and then, for the most part, collapse. In
this way, I have made over £400 and, now that the complexity of the
political situation affords greater scope, I shall begin all over again.
It’s a type of operation that makes demands on one’s time, and it’s
worth while running some risk in order to relieve the enemy of his
money."
[It might be worth noting that £400 in 1864 would be worth more than $80,000 (US) today.]
It just goes to show that Marx's critique of political economy was not a doctrine of personal morality. (As opposed to Gandhi's Satyagraha, which compares speculation on the stock market to gambling, and calls wealth without work the first social sin.)
All of this stuff about Marx's personal habits is somewhat beside the point, though. And that's the point. Marx's theory is not concerned with criticizing individual's behavior, calling people greedy or materialistic (Marx of course identified as a materialist), or denouncing the capitalist class as evil. Rather, he focused on analyzing existing society, which operates according to the bourgeois mode of production, and trying to understand how it might change - what forces it was unleashing and how they might present contradictions and give rise to social antagonism on a large scale. Along the way, he has quite a few entertaining and often sarcastic observations.
But the goal of Marx's analysis was always freedom. Contrary to those who believe that humans will only be productive when we compel them to produce, he believed in freedom and believed deeply that humans will continue to be productive - indeed, will become much more productive - once we are free (in a "free association of workers"). As he put it, "Man produces even when he is free from physical need, and only truly produces in freedom."
* * *
By contrast, Lenin's writing is suffused, through and through, with a shrill, moralistic tone of stern discipline, rectitude, and seriousness. He doesn't have Marx's sense of irony or humor, and I fear that most subsequent Marxists have imitated his style, writing in a dull, dry manner which, in its injured, envious way, fiercely demands to be taken seriously.
Lenin's writings tend to be sharp, lawyerly arguments against his political rivals, demolishing their positions, point by point, in a cold, brisk, impatient, angry (or at least annoyed), somewhat pedantic tone - though not always in a way that is perfectly logical, well organized, or clear. The issues are often finer points of theory, expressed in characteristic Marxist jargon, and it is largely inside baseball. (If you ask a Marxist for the difference between Bolshevism and Menshevism, prepare for several hours of text to come burbling out of them, after which you will understand about as much as you did before. Don't say I didn't warn you.)
If there is an emotion that permeates many of Lenin's "theoretical" writings, it is panic. Perhaps that is to be expected. It's not hard to feel that Lenin's career and, for that matter, the entire USSR lurched from one crisis to another. First came the outbreak of World War I and the betrayal, by the leadership of the Second International, of the Basel Manifesto in which they had sworn not to take sides or to support the war effort, which pitted Lenin and his comrades against their former leaders and colleagues, leaving them temporarily disoriented, disorganized and conflict-ridden in the midst of a brutal war. Then, during World War I, came the outbreak of the (February) Russian Revolution, which took Lenin completely by surprise. Then he joined forces with the Germans, who sent him into Russia, in the midst of chaotic political turmoil. Then came Kornilov's attempted coup. No sooner had Lenin led his own (October) Revolution, than he and everyone were plunged into the Russian Civil War, during which the USA, the UK, France, Czechoslovakia, and Japan all entered the war to defeat the Bolsheviks - and, simultaneously, he was shot in the head by Fanny Kaplan of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. He recovered from this, but at the same time he was trying to lead the "Reds" to defeat the "Whites" on the battlefield, he was also confronted by nearly constant debates and squabbles within his own party - for instance, in 1919, Trotsky and Stalin actually briefly united in opposition to Lenin over the battle of Petrograd. Just as they were finally winning the war, the country sank into a deep famine. Attempting to alleviate the famine with brief market reforms, he was accused of betraying the revolution. And then he had a series of strokes or some kind of brain events, which temporarily made him mute and paralyzed, and which finally killed him. Lenin never had a break, never a chance to pause or relax. Undoubtedly the constant stress contributed to his poor neurological health.
By all accounts, Lenin was a tireless workaholic, driven to political struggle with fierce, focused, unrelenting determination. I believe that it was his passionate sense of justice that drove his will-to-power, rather than the other way around. He did not suffer fools gladly. He could not tolerate, or even comprehend, the slackening, distracted attitudes of people who did not share his self-control. Like the philosopher-kings of Plato's Republic, it wasn't so much vain ambition or the desire to gratify personal pleasures that motivated him to lead, but rather a sense of duty and a conviction that people around him were incompetent to make intelligent political decisions. That's why he berated everyone. In his rhetoric, he made every issue into a moral crusade and a matter of life or death - because, often enough, it was. He was terrified that, if the Bolsheviks did not choose the most prudent strategy, the entire enterprise would come tumbling down, he and his friends along with it - and time and time again, it almost did.
Lenin was accustomed to ranting in his characteristic inflated, pearl-clutching rhetorical phrases, such as "the untold horrors, savagery, absurdities, and infamies of capitalist exploitation," [The State and Revolution, Section IV]. Actually the whole larger quote is worth reproducing: "[...]Freed from capitalist slavery, from the untold horrors, savagery, absurdities, and infamies of capitalist exploitation, people will gradually become accustomed to observing the necessary rules of social intercourse that have been known for centuries and repeated for thousands of years in all copy-book maxims."
Here he is explaining what will go on after "the withering away of the state". He goes on:
"They will become accustomed to observing them without force, without coercion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for coercion called the state. The expression 'the state withers away' is very well-chosen, for it indicates both the gradual and the spontaneous nature of the process. Only habit can, and undoubtedly will, have such an effect; for we see around us on millions of occasions how readily people become accustomed to observing the necessary rules of social intercourse when there is no exploitation, when there is nothing that arouses indignation, evokes protest and revolt, and creates the need for suppression."
Hm, yes. "Undoubtedly." Presumably it is unnecessary for me to point out that Lenin has wandered off into utopian thinking at this point, and utopianism of a very special and fascinating type: he dreams of a utopia of manners. One fine day, "habit" will bring society to a point at which the state is unnecessary because people will be so polite: they will be "accustomed" to doing what they have always known they should do, and written about in their "copy-books". (Copy books were books in which schoolchildren in the nineteenth century would write the same phrase or sentence over and over, often hundreds of times. (Something like what Bart Simpson is doing on the blackboard at the beginning of every episode of the Simpsons - sometimes students were forced to copy phrases as a form of punishment, but also they were used as a routine exercise.) These phrases were often moralistic proverbs, usually drawn from the Bible, from popular sermons, or from Victorian Era moralistic poems - which abounded in those days. Copy-book maxims were written under conditions of strict supervision, discipline, and routine, and graded for penmanship - copy-books often had pre-printed lines that students were expected to follow, staying neat and never allowing the pen to slip beyond the line. Historians have hundreds of these books, which were often thrown away after being filled. Here's one in which a student was made to write an inane verse from a sermon that goes "Good nature, like a bee, collects honey from every herb. / Ill-nature, like a spider, sucks poison from the flowers.")
And of course, there's the Kafkaesque flip-side to this: one day, the state will be unnecessary - because we will all have such good manners. (As William S. Burroughs said, "A functioning police state requires no police.") But if there are people living in, say, for instance, Bolshevik Russia, who continue to have bad manners, this just goes to show that we have not yet reached that one fine day, and so there still is "the need for suppression." Catch-22.
That Lenin dreamed of a world of universal politeness is, I think, especially symptomatic. Lenin required and demanded absolute focus, and couldn't stand any noise when he was trying to work. He found music irritating and distracting and demanded people working in offices near him either not play music or keep the volume extremely low. This may have partly been a result of his neurological malady, but there seems to have been a curious kind of moral component as well. Note Lenin's relationship to Beethoven's Appassionata: Lenin loved the piece, but deliberately denied himself listening to it, for fear that he would get carried away by the music of this composer, the founder of Romanticism. As he wrote in a letter to Gorky, it made him "want to say sweet, silly things, to pat the little heads of people who, living in a filthy hell, can create such beauty." But "One cannot pat anyone on the head nowadays [....Y]ou have to beat people's heads, beat mercilessly, although ideally we are against doing any violence to people. Hm- what a devilishly difficult job!"
Thus Lenin worked in silence, and he kept both his personal affects and his office meticulously neat. He insisted that his office workers keep his pencils extremely sharp. He was remarkably well-organized, efficient, and precise, and planned everything very carefully. He was slim, professional but unostentatious in dress, with a fastidious appearance. He drank uncaffeinated herbal tea. One thing in his favor: he loved cats.
Characteristic of Lenin's general character is his famous "Testament." Trotskyists like to wave this famous document around, because, to them, it vindicates their position - that Trotsky was the true heir of the USSR, after Lenin's death, and Stalin stole it from him. To them, it proves that Trotsky's obscure political theories constitute the One True Faith of Marxism, and that Stalinism is a deviation, because Lenin said so. But when one takes a moment to actually read the Testament, one finds very little in the way of political theory. Instead, in the famous postscript to the Testament, we read Lenin's objection to Stalin:
Stalin is too rude, and this fault, entirely supportable in relations among us communists, becomes unsupportable in the office of General Secretary. Therefore, I propose to the comrades to find a way to remove Stalin from that position and appoint to it another man who in all respects differs from Stalin only in superiority – namely, more patient, more loyal, more polite and more attentive....
He goes on:
This circumstance may seem an insignificant trifle, but 1 think that from the point of view of preventing a split and from the point of view of the relation between Stalin and Trotsky which I discussed above, it is not a trifle, or it is such a trifle as may acquire a decisive significance.
For Lenin, politeness was no trifle, but rather had a decisive significance. This can sum up a great deal about Lenin. It must be said that Lenin attempted to be polite with his fellow Bolsheviks, even in the midst of war, famine, and chaos. He responded to problems decisively, politely, and in a well-organized way, attempting to be fair even to those he disagreed with.
Lenin and Smoking
Lenin was a non-smoker and found smoking disgusting. But in the famous "sealed train," during Lenin's collaboration with German imperialism, when the Germans sent Lenin and other revolutionaries to Russia by way of Finland, there was a conflict among the passengers: some were using the bathroom to smoke, but Lenin's fellow non-smokers couldn't stand inhaling the second-hand smoke. They turned to Lenin to make a decision, which he made with great haste. He drew up a precise, minute-by-minute schedule, which alternated bathroom use between the smokers and the non-smokers, to which everyone begrudgingly agreed. He personally issued hand-written passes to the bathroom, with priority given to those who actually needed to use the facilities for their intended purpose. Krupskaya writes about this in her memoirs.
Lenin and Alcohol
Lenin rarely drank alcohol. As already mentioned, he preferred herbal tea (as do I, as it happens).
He did drink the occasional beer (again, as do I). This person (Jae Yeon-Yoo) once set about drinking Lenin's brand.
But Lenin was absolutely fanatical about Vodka, which he wanted absolutely prohibited. Indeed, the closest global parallel I see with Lenin's Bolshevism is the American Temperance movement, with which it was roughly contemporaneous.
Lenin and Sex Workers
I do not mean to imply that Lenin was the only person who deformed Marxism into a kind of moralism. Far from it. Indeed, it has been the general trend of Marxist movements to deform into moralistic crusades, often involving denunciations of individuals for their "counter-revolutionary" activities, or even their impure ("un-Marxist") thought. We see examples of this, for instance, also in China, particularly during the Cultural Revolution. What this amounts to is a reversion to a pre-Marxist form of socialism, like that of John Francis Bray. We should expect, and do indeed find, this kind of pre-Marxist socialism having the tendency to arise especially in pre-capitalist regions or in regions that have not reached a certain threshold of capitalist industrial development. In the case of Lenin's party, this was an amalgam of several tendencies of moralism: for Lenin himself, it was an ethic of professionalism; to a large extent, this reflected and reiterated bourgeois moral interests; and in practice, as it was instantiated in the apparatus of the state, it sometimes took on more of a character of the values of the (quite often reactionary) peasantry.
All of this is to say that Lenin - like so many others - had distorted the Marxian critique of political economy - which, at its best moments, had approached something like a science, or had at least aspired to do so - into a pre-capitalist moral crusade. Or, to be brief, it's not far off to say that Lenin and his Bolshevik party, in effect, turned Marxism into a religion.
This is as much as to say that in Lenin's time, Karl Marx's project had been utterly and completely abandoned.
I see Lenin as a figure very much like Savonarola, Jan Hus, Thomas Müntzer, Anne Hutchinson, or especially Oliver Cromwell, or for that matter, Martin Luther himself. That is to say: a person of unbending will, intransigence, exacting logic, profound confidence in their own righteousness, a rebellious spirit towards authority, a quite cunning sense of strategy, a willingness to go to every extreme, and a considerable personal charisma.
This should not come as much of a surprise. On the one hand, I am a lover of science, and a stalwart defender of science, and I have often said that the problem with the Marxist movement is that it is not scientific enough. On the other hand, I have to admit that even I sometimes wonder whether a society based purely on science is possible. I must acknowledge that I'm skeptical whether it could be possible - at the beginning of the 20th century, or even today - for a socialist movement to be successful, except in and through becoming religion.
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