International Socialists

Lenin. Turned into a peep show and a god by Stalin and the gravediggers of the Russian revolution. Painted as a tyrant and dictator in the West by the capitalist opponents of socialism.

He was neither of these parodies. He dedicated his life to the emancipation of working people, not only in Russia but throughout the world. He fought to build a tough party of revolutionaries to help organise the working class struggle to overthrow capitalism and establish democratic socialism.

Above all, Lenin placed his belief in the ability of working people to throw off the chains of their oppressors.

In this classic article, Tony Cliff, who died recently and whose obituary appears on the previous 2 pages, shows that, despite the lies of rulers in the former Soviet Union and the West, Lenin's ideas remain essential for socialists today.

 

 

On the 21st of January 1924 the great revolutionary socialist leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin died. Ever since Stalinist leaders in the East and opponents of socialism in the West have done their best to distort the real historical role that he played. The legend was cultivated over a long period that Lenin was the father of Stalinism, a man who believed in totalitarian dictatorship. What happened to Lenin was prophetically foretold by him in his brilliant work, State and Revolution, when he described the fate of revolutionary leaders in the past.

 

During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonise them, so to say while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarising it.

 

Above all, Lenin had supreme confidence in the creative abilities of the masses. Thus, for instance, he wrote in June-July 1905, "Revolutions are festivals of the oppressed and the exploited. At no other time are the mass of the people in a position to come forward so actively as the creators of a new social order, as at a time of revolution. At such times the people are capable of performing miracles, if judged by the limited, Philistine yardsticks of gradualist progress."

 

Workers learn in the struggle. They learn from their own experience in battle. The role of a really consistent socialist workers' party is not to lecture to the workers but to learn from the workers in struggle and teach them in struggle.

 

The real education of the masses can never be separated from their independent political, and especially revolutionary, struggle. Only struggle educates the exploited class. Only struggle discloses to it the magnitude of its own power, widens its own horizon, enhances its abilities, clarifies its mind, forges its will.

 

The aim of the revolutionary socialist party is to tap the natural potential resources of energy and ingenuity hidden in the masses. The party has to learn from the workers in struggle. "There is an enormous amount of organising talent among the 'people', that is, among the workers and the peasants who do not exploit the labour of others. Capital crushed these talented people in thousands; it killed their talent and threw them onto the scrapheap."

 

To learn from the masses the party must also be able and ready to learn from its own mistakes, to be very self critical. As Lenin put it, "a political party's attitude towards its own mistakes is one of the most important and surest ways of judging how earnest the party is and how it fulfils in practice its obligations towards its class, and the working people. Finally acknowledging a mistake, ascertaining the reason for it, analysing the conditions that have led up to it, and thrashing out the means of its rectification - that is the hallmark of a serious party; that is how it should perform its duties, and how it should educate and train its class, and then the masses."

 

Of course, inner party discussions must not lead to a lack of discipline and unity of action. But on the contrary, inner party democracy has to serve as a base for unity in action. As Lenin so well put it, "We have more than once already enunciated our theoretical views on the importance of discipline and on how this concept is to be understood in the party of the working class. We define it as thus: unity of action, freedom of discussion and criticism. Only such discipline is worthy of the democratic party of the working class."

 

Contrary to Stalinist mythology - as well as that of liberal opponents of Bolshevism - the Bolshevik Party under Lenin's leadership was never a monolithic or totalitarian party. Far from it.

 

Internal democracy had always been of the utmost importance to party life. Thus for instance, when the most important question of all, the question of the October insurrection in 1917 was the order of the day, the leadership was sharply divided. A strong faction led by Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, Piatakov, Miliutin and Nogin, opposed the uprising.

 

After taking power, the differences in the party leadership continued to be as sharp as before. On a number of crucial questions Lenin at times found himself in a minority, for example, on the elections to the Constituent Assembly in December 1917 and peace negotiations with Germany at Brest-Litovsk. During these periods he acted in accord with the decisions of the majority, while at the same time using every opportunity to argue for a change in policy within the leading bodies of the party.

 

As a result of the weakness of the Russian working class, after nearly seven years of war and civil war, the isolation of the Russian revolution following the betrayal of the German revolution by right wing labour leaders - including the murder of the great socialist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht - the Stalinist bureaucracy rose in Russia.

 

It consolidated itself after the mass murder of Lenin's old comrades-in-arms during the 1930s. One-man management in the factories where managers earned a hundred times more than workers, where workers had no right to strike and were deprived of all freedoms, became the hallmark of the Stalinist regime.

 

But the future belongs to the ideas of Marx and Lenin:

That the working class is the agent of socialism.

That the working class needs a vanguard party to lead it, to raise its combative ability, consciousness and organisation.

The need to smash the bureaucratic militarist police state machine of capitalism and replace it with democratic workers' councils, where all officials get the same wage as the workers they represent, with regular elections of all officials and the right to recall them.

These ideas are of vital importance to workers everywhere, whether in Britain or Russia, the United States, China or India (or New Zealand).

 

The future belongs to the ideas of Marx and Lenin.