From Marx to Lenin to today and tomorrow
Paul le Blanc discusses the connections between Marx & Lenin’s ideas and what they could mean today in the monthly Marx Matters series organised by Arise.
In his 1936 classic Man’s Worldly Goods, Leo Huberman made a key point regarding Lenin’s relation to Marxism. Here’s what he said:
Seventeen years before the end of the nineteenth century, Karl Marx died.
Seventeen years after the beginning of the twentieth century, Karl Marx lived again.
What had been theory with Marx was put into practice by his disciples — Lenin and the other Russian Bolsheviks — in their seizure of power in 1917. Before that time, the teachings of Marx had been familiar to a small group of devoted followers; after that time, the teachings of Marx had the spotlight of the world focused on them. …
One could argue that this is oversimplified. After all, throughout Europe’s mass labour movement, the teachings of Marx were embraced, in some form, by working-class activists and intellectuals well before 1917, with spill-over in North America and elsewhere. Yet there is validity to Huberman’s point on at least two levels.
First of all, the 1917 revolution, which Lenin was central in helping to lead, and the consequent Communist International, which Lenin was central in helping to organise, had a powerful global impact on all continents and among all peoples. It generated among many thousands and, ultimately, millions of people – those hostile as well as those sympathetic to the revolutionary upheaval – an awareness of, and for many an intensive engagement with, the multifaceted body of Marxist theory which Lenin and his comrades utilised and propagated.
Related to this, what Lenin represented and helped generate contributed to remarkable developments in Marxist theory and analyses not only in various parts of the world that had little or no previous experience with this body of thought, but it opened new pathways of Marxist thought in the early Soviet Republic of 1918-1930, and also throughout Europe, including the unfolding of what came to be tagged “Western Marxism” (whose foundational figures – George Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Karl Korsch – emerged from the leadership of the early Communist movement, of which Lenin was a central reference point).
There were certainly creative innovations within Marxism, independent of Lenin, from the 1890s through to 1917 – but there was, at the same time, a powerful tendency toward convergence between the thought of such innovators and the thought of Lenin. Two outstanding examples can be found in the work of Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky. Although both of these outstanding revolutionary Marxists were in no way dependent on Lenin’s own contributions, and more than once became involved in heated polemical exchanges with him, over time Luxemburg and – even more – Trotsky were increasingly drawn into the Leninist orbit.
What Lenin represented and helped generate contributed to remarkable developments in Marxist theory and analyses not only in various parts of the world that had little or no previous experience with this body of thought, but it opened new pathways of Marxist thought in the early Soviet Republic of 1918-1930. This impacted profoundly throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas, also spilling over into the other inhabited continents of Africa and Australia.
Built into Lenin’s approach to Marxism was a blend of respect for the structure and underlying principles of Marx’s approach, with an inclination to be open and innovative in applying that approach. He complained that many Marxists of his time saw “capitalism and bourgeois democracy in Western Europe following a definite path of development” and projected this as a universal model. “Certain amendments,” he insisted, are required: “While the development of world history as a whole follows general laws, it is by no means precluded, but, on the contrary, presumed, that certain periods of development may display peculiarities in either the form or the sequence of this development.”
For example, “because Russia stands on the borderline” between European and non-European countries, she was “bound to reveal certain distinguishing features; although these, of course, are in keeping with the general line of world development, they distinguish her revolution from those which took place in the West European countries and introduce certain partial innovations as the revolution moves on to the countries of the East.”
Related to this reality were other key elements in Lenin’s political orientation. The predominance of the peasantry in such countries as Russia, combining with the “open Marxism” inseparable from the dialectical approach, contributed to Lenin’s conceptualisation of a worker-peasant alliance so central to his strategic orientation. Lenin’s revolutionary internationalism – more intensive than was the case with many Marxists – was entwined with the dialectical necessities involved in making a proletarian revolution in non-industrial Russia.
This dovetailed with an essential resistance to the complex dynamics of imperialism – in the form it took as a keystone of the tsarist system, making Russia a “prison house of nations,” as well as in the form it took through the voracious global capital accumulation process at the heart of the modern capitalism. Such imperialist realities engulfed a majority of the world’s peoples, oppressed by competing and contending elites of the so-called “Great Powers.” This raised, for Lenin and his co-thinkers, the need to support struggles for national self-determination among oppressed peoples, while fighting against the nationalism of oppressor nations.
Lenin summed up his approach to Marxism, more than once, with succinct clarity:
“Our theory is not a dogma, but a guide to action,” Marx and Engels always said, rightly ridiculing the mere memorising and repetition of “formulas” that are capable of marking out only general tasks, which are necessarily modifiable by the concrete economic and political conditions of each particular period of the historical process.
Eight components seem essential to Lenin’s Marxism:
- A belief in what Georg Lukács called “the actuality of revolution” – or as Max Eastman once put it, a rejection of “the people who talked revolution but did not intend to produce it.”
- commitment to utilising Marxist theory dialectically, not as dogma, but as a guide to action, understanding that general theoretical perspectives must be modified through application to “the concrete economic and political conditions of each particular period of the historical process.”
- Building up an organisation of class-conscious workers combined with radical intellectuals – operating as a revolutionary collective, both democratic and disciplined – capable of utilising Marxist theory to mobilise insurgencies to replace the tyrannies of Tsarism and capitalism with democracy and socialism.
- An approach to the interplay of reform struggles with the longer-range revolutionary struggle, permeated by several qualities –
- (a) a refusal to bow to the oppressive and exploitative powers-that-be,
- (b) a refusal to submit to the transitory “realism” of mainstream politics,
- (c) a measuring of all activity by how it would help build the working-class consciousness, the mass workers’ movement, and the revolutionary organisation that will be necessary to overturn capitalism and lead to a socialist future.
- An insistence that the revolutionary party must function as “a tribune of the people,” combining working-class struggles with systematic struggles against all forms of oppression, regardless of which class was affected – deepening and extending into the centrality of a workers’ and peasants’ alliance in the anti-Tsarist struggle.
- A strategic orientation combining the struggle against capitalism with the struggle for revolutionary democracy.
- Characterising global capitalism as having entered an imperialist stage, involving economic expansion beyond national boundaries for the purpose of securing markets, raw materials and investment opportunities, embracing all countries in our epoch, with a majority of the world’s peoples oppressed by competing and contending elites of the so-called “Great Powers.”
- A consistent, unrelenting revolutionary internationalism: understanding that capitalism is a global system, seeing struggles against exploitation, oppression, and tyranny, that global solidarity and global organisation are essential to socialist revolution.
I’d like to conclude with an excerpt from a very interesting book that I’ve been reading, entitled Global Marxism, by Simin Fadaee [See-min Fad-eye]. It deals with nine revolutionaries from the so-called “third world,” the Global South – East Asia and South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America – who were profoundly influenced by the understanding of Marxism that was popularized by Lenin. She quotes the recently deceased sociologist Michael Buroway, who tells us that Marxism as a tradition resembles
a tree with roots, trunk, branches, twigs, and foliage. Its growth has an “internal logic” of its own founded in the roots, the “fundamental” writings of Marx and Engels. But it also possesses an “external” logic responsive to the climate and winds of the time.
“In other words,” Fadaee [Fad-eye] adds, “context impacts the way we embrace Marxism, but it also inspires new questions that need to be answered to tackle today’s problems as well as those of the future.”
It is, of course, possible to construct a more stable, consistent, unchanging, pedantic version of Marxism – which makes it much easier to talk about, to write about, to give lectures about, and to utilise in developing critiques of a variety of activist efforts and real-life struggles (including those represented by Lenin). But on this, I think, we would be better served by considering a complaint from Lenin himself about the failure of some Marxists – in times of revolutionary struggle – to understand the need for “the utmost flexibility,” preferring instead to “walk around and about” this dynamic inherent in genuine Marxism “like a cat around a bowl of hot porridge.” In response to such pedantic misuse of his ideas, Marx was moved to comment: “All I know is that I am not a Marxist.” The approach of Lenin – utilised critically and creatively – can help us as we seek to make use of Marx’s approach in our own time.
You can watch Paul le Blanc speak on this in the second of the monthly Marx Matters series here.
- Marx Matters is a series of in-person and online talks from prominent writers on Marxism exploring the relevance of Marx’s work today. You can buy a ticket to help fund the whole series here.
- You can get tickets for the 2nd November Marx Matters event, “Marx and Multipolarity,” here.
- You can get tickets for the 7th December Marx Matters event, “Marx on Ireland – Lessons for our struggle today,” here.
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