The Minneapolis Truckers’ Strike Was Led by Left Revolutionaries

AN INTERVIEW WITH BRYAN D. PALMER

When the Great Depression sank workers to new depths, craft unions weren’t up to the task. Then, in 1934, a team of revolutionary leftists in Minneapolis organized a brave and bloody strike that reinvigorated labor and changed the course of American history

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Police battle with striking truck drivers in Minneapolis, 1934. (National Archives and Records Administration via Wikimedia Commons)

The following is an interview conducted for Organize the Unorganized: The Rise of the CIO, a Jacobin podcast series produced in collaboration with the Center for Work and Democracy.

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INTERVIEW BYBENJAMIN Y. FONG

Bryan Palmer is professor emeritus of history at Trent University. He’s the author of several books, including James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890–1928, James P. Cannon and the Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States, 1928–38, and, most applicable to this project, Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Truckers’ Strikes of 1934.

Our interview focused in particular on the 1934 Minneapolis truckers strikes, and how they presaged the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) moment. The left-wing leadership of the strikes was rather small, but it was disciplined and bore a protracted view of building industrial unionism. For Palmer, the Minneapolis strikes are evidence of what dedicated left-wing organizers can do when embedded in trade unions.

In the interview below, Palmer mentions this quote from Saul Alinsky’s biography of John L. Lewis. That biography slips often into hagiography, and in any event is not the authoritative biography of Lewis that Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren van Tine have written. Nevertheless, it correctly highlights the importance of the Minneapolis strikes to the fateful turn in US labor initiated a few years later by Lewis and the CIO:


Lewis watched the unrest and flare-ups of violence through the summer of 1934. He saw the Dunne Brothers in Minneapolis lead a general strike of truck drivers into a virtual civil war. Blood ran in Minneapolis. In San Francisco a general strike spearheaded by Harry Bridges’ Longshoremen’s Union paralyzed the great Western city for four days. Before that year was out, seven hundred thousand workers had struck. Lewis could read the revolutionary handwriting on the walls of American industry.

BENJAMIN Y. FONG

Could you describe the genesis of the 1934 Minneapolis truckers strike?
BRYAN D. PALMER

The Minneapolis trucker strikes of 1934 involved three strikes, which is pretty incredible, in a one-year period: a strike in February, another in May, and a final victorious strike in July and August. Those strikes were led by Trotskyists who were originally Communist but broke away from the Communist Party in 1929. They had been working, a small number of them, probably no more than eight to ten people, in the Minneapolis trucking sector, particularly in the coal yards, since the 1920s.

And they had a very protracted view of trying to build an industrial union within the local of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, or the IBT. They worked diligently over the course of the early years of the Depression, which of course were terrible years for trying to organize workers. Their union, the IBT, was totally opposed to organizing broadly in the trucking sector and among those workers who were affiliated with trucking but loaded produce at markets and things like that. The Teamsters Union hierarchy basically resisted anything of that nature, and the Trotskyists thought that was the way forward.

The amazing thing about these strikes they organized was that they were probably the most successful of the three mass strikes that took place in 1934, the others being the one among longshoremen in San Francisco and the one among auto parts workers in Toledo. The Minneapolis strikes were so successful that they basically broke the back of what had been a nonunion town. Minneapolis had been known in the ’20s as a center of resistance to unionism. And the strikes that were fought there were fought in a disciplined manner against a very recalcitrant and oppositional set of employers, against local police and municipal politicians, against in some ways a Farmer-Labor governor in Minnesota at the time, and, as I said, against their own trade union leadership.The amazing thing about these strikes they organized was that they were probably the most successful of the three mass strikes that took place in 1934.

This small group of dedicated revolutionary Trotskyists took a union that probably had no more than two hundred people in 1932 or ’33, and by the end of 1934 it had over seven thousand members. From 1934 into the later 1930s, they parlayed this into an over-the-road organizing drive among truckers in the Midwest that really precipitated the Teamsters into a very forceful presence in the American labor movement.

It should be remembered that this was done out of the depths of the Great Depression, and before the CIO had achieved its major successes in 1936–37 with the Flint sit-down strike and other major breakthroughs into mass-production unionism. So in some senses, the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934 were basically a preface to the CIO, if you will, but taking place inside instead of outside of the American Federation of Labor (AFL).

BENJAMIN Y. FONG

Could you describe the origin and role of some of the key leaders in the ’34 Teamsters strike?
BRYAN D. PALMER

The leadership of the Minneapolis Teamsters came out of the Communist Party. Many of them had been active in radical politics and revolutionary politics for years. Some of them were members of the Socialist Party, particularly its ethnic Scandinavian section. And some were members of the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World, or the Wobblies.

The four, I would say, key figures were three brothers, the Dunne Brothers — Vincent Ray Dunne, Miles Dunne, and Grant Dunne — and a Scandinavian socialist named Carl Skoglund. They had all been, by the late 1920s, very active in the Communist Party. But they left the Communist Party in 1929 when they were expelled for refusing to abide by a party dictate, the Communist Party dictate, against James P. Cannon, who led a very small group of people away from the party because of Trotsky’s critique of the degeneration of the Communist International and how that affected the American party.

Cannon was expelled along with those who were aligned with him. And the Minneapolis Teamsters who were members of the Communist Party, they really didn’t understand or know what the issues were. But they knew enough to know that this was a big deal, signifying a potential break in the party. They thought that if there was going to be a fight around Trotskyism, they should at least be allowed to read the documents and come to their own conclusions.The Trotskyists saw the need to organize all workers who worked in the sector, including those who just unloaded produce in the markets, who heaved coal and who loaded up the trucks, as well as the drivers.

In this, they basically ran up against a party bureaucracy, led by Jay Lovestone, that was trying to silence people. It stopped them from reading documents, stopped them from looking at what was going on in the wider Communist International. When the Communists in Minneapolis, the Dunne brothers, Skoglund, and others said, “Well, we’d like to read the material, and we’d like to find out what this is about,” they too were expelled.

And so they aligned with Cannon and others in an organization, the first Trotskyist organization, called the Communist League of America. And it was as members of the Communist League of America that they devised this protracted strategy of organizing and building a new kind of unionism.

They were revolutionaries who understood that it wasn’t necessarily a revolutionary situation, and that the struggle wasn’t to build a kind of revolutionary entity within the Minneapolis Teamsters; but instead, that the struggle was to build a mobilization that would achieve union recognition and develop mass-production unionism within the AFL, which was dedicated to craft unionism.

In some senses, it’s kind of a contradiction — the notion that Teamsters and workers in the trucking sector were a highly skilled workforce. They weren’t, but they had this notion of the privileged elite workers being the ones who should be organized. This was a centerpiece of the IBT ideology, if you will. The Trotskyists saw the need to organize all workers who worked in the sector, including those who just unloaded produce in the markets, who heaved coal and who loaded up the trucks, as well as the drivers. And this was anathema to the employers in the sector who wanted nothing to do with a union that organized all workers as opposed to just a few who moved the actual trucks.
BENJAMIN Y. FONG

How did the Minneapolis trucking strike lay the groundwork for the expansion of the Teamsters in the later ’30s, and also for the CIO?

BRYAN D. PALMER

The central importance of the Minneapolis strike was that, first of all, it showed that the battle to build a new kind of unionism could be built not only by revolutionaries and leftists within the labor movement, but also within the shell of the old declining AFL craft unionism. So that’s very significant.

And in some ways, it showed that there was a fighting spirit among workers that was developing by 1934. In the depths of the Depression, the workers’ movement had been dealt such blows through mass unemployment and plant closures and shutdowns that the old craft unions were withering on the vine of the social relations of production in America, basically handcuffed by depression and economic collapse.

And so the fact that this was taking place within the old, ossified craft unions showed an element of the leadership in those older unions, led by people like John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers of America, that there was a fighting spirit in the working class that was beginning to emerge out of the doldrums of the Great Depression. There were workers thirsting for a new kind of unionism — the organization of the unorganized, and the organization of mass production workers and the organization of new sectors.There were workers thirsting for a new kind of unionism — the organization of the unorganized, and the organization of mass production workers and the organization of new sectors.

Lewis himself looked at what happened in Minneapolis, and he saw the fact that blood had been spilled in the streets. And not just workers’ blood. What was decisive in the Minneapolis truckers strikes was that the workers fought back. In one of the first and decisive battles in the early strikes, when the employers’ association organized a bunch of special deputies to basically function as strikebreakers and break the picket lines, the workers routed them in the marketplace. And two of those special deputies actually succumbed to injuries and died.

This became the stuff of newsreels. The class battles unfolding in Minneapolis streets were filmed by large theater companies and shown as short features before the main movie was screened. Workers watched this and saw other workers fighting back. And people like Lewis, the progressive elements in the more ossified labor leadership of the AFL, saw this and saw a way forward. It moved these people to see the possibilities of a new kind of unionism.

And these were not radicals. John L. Lewis had been an archreactionary in the 1920s. He had organized gangsters and thuggery against the militants and dissidents within his own union, many of whom were communists. He was a violent anti-communist in the 1920s. But he was pushed by the militancy that was evident in the streets of Minneapolis to see that there was a new possibility, and that the old, ossified union structures in the AFL were in some senses archaic, outmoded, and needed to be pushed aside, and a new kind of unionism formed.

Minneapolis played a decisive role in that. A very early biography of Lewis by Saul Alinsky, a Chicago organizer, has a quote in it that goes something like, “Lewis looked to Minneapolis, he saw the militancy, he saw the blood in the streets, and he knew that the way forward had to be different than the way of the past.” That’s the real significance of the 1934 strike. Minneapolis was a preface to the mass campaigns that would culminate in the organization of the CIO later in the 1930s.
BENJAMIN Y. FONG

What were the most important things that the CIO did to finally realize the dream of industrial unionism?
BRYAN D. PALMER

The CIO broke through the notion that trade unionism was the terrain of the skilled, white, male working class. By the 1930s, there were whole new sectors of capitalist development that relied not on the old nineteenth-century tradesmen, but on mass production work that depended on machine tenders and factory operatives.The CIO broke through the notion that trade unionism was the terrain of the skilled, white, male working class.

Many of these people, the bulk of them I think, were immigrant workers with ethnic backgrounds, women, or African Americans. What the CIO did in organizing the mass-production sector — industries like steel, electrical, rubber, the industries of the second industrial revolution that were central to the auto sector and other areas — what it did was to organize people who had been, really for a century, outside of the trade union movement. And thus it expanded tremendously, not just the quantity of people who could be affiliated with trade unions, but it also changed qualitatively the nature of trade unionism by making it far more inclusive, by making it far more representative of not only new sectors of industry, but of the American population as a whole.
BENJAMIN Y. FONG

How would you describe the relationship between the “top-down” and “bottom-up” elements in the CIO?
BRYAN D. PALMER

I think new steps forward for the trade union movement are always animated by developments from the mass base of workers who are looking for new possibilities, new avenues of mobilization, new kinds of organizing, alongside of a leadership that can be radical, and can even have revolutionary ideas and commitments. That leadership is also always going to contain more conservative elements. If you look at somebody like John L. Lewis, he was not instinctually radical, was certainly not revolutionary. But he nonetheless saw that there had to be a change in the trade union movement in the United States. He had the insight and the progressive inclinations to see that the new moment demanded new perspectives, new initiatives, a new kind of unionism. But it was never going to be a unionism that pushed the boundaries toward revolutionary possibility and the creation of a worker state.

But that unionism was willing to take radical people as organizers — Communists, Trotskyists, anarchists, other social democrats, socialists — because they were the most experienced and most dedicated organizers in this mass production unionism. All of the major strikes of 1934 that prefaced the creation of the CIO were led not by traditional AFL leaders, but by revolutionaries, people in the Communist Party, people in the Trotskyist movement, people who aligned with A. J. Muste and his American Workers Party in Toledo.

What Lewis saw was the potential to use these people to advance a new kind of unionism that would organize the unorganized, organize the mass-production sector. But he was never going to give those people free rein to push the boundaries of that toward the creation of a union movement that would push politically toward, for instance, a worker’s state.All of the major strikes of 1934 that prefaced the creation of the CIO were led not by traditional AFL leaders, but by revolutionaries.

This is summed up in what is one of Lewis’s more famous statements. He was asked, “Why would you hire communists to be organizers when, in the 1920s, you used your own iron heel to crush them?” And his response was, “Well, who gets the bird? The hunter or the dog?” And so he was using these people to further his own ends, and they advanced the cause of unionism.

But at the same time, Lewis was never going to move the trade union movement onto an entirely different plane that many militants at the base and many of the radical and revolutionary organizers who worked in such dedicated ways to build the CIO might well have themselves been deeply committed to. So there was always this tension between the leaders and the militants, and how the rank-and-file workers actually related to both of those contingents.
BENJAMIN Y. FONG

What lessons can we draw from the CIO moment for today?

BRYAN D. PALMER

It’s important to remember how bleak things would’ve looked in 1933–34. I don’t think people today have an appreciation of how decimated the workers’ movement was, how devastatingly bad things were for working people in the depths of the Depression in 1932–33. And yet out of that came the upheavals of 1934, which prefaced the larger mobilizations of the CIO in the ’36–37 period. So as bad as things look today, there are the possibilities of organizing new sectors, of building different kinds of unionism, of addressing the experiences of people who’ve been locked out of the possibilities of trade union entitlements and, in some sense, isolated from the historic struggles of the working class. Things were also bleak in the mid-1930s, when dedicated corps of labor organizers, many of whom were militantly committed to socialist or communist politics and highly critical of capitalism, worked to rejuvenate unions. So I think that breakthroughs can be made even in times that look very inauspicious.

But another lesson to be learned is that those breakthroughs will never happen unless there is an organized contingent of committed leftists who are both embedded in the trade union movement and willing to fight for new kinds of unionism, but also organized outside of it. Each one of those major strikes in 1934 was led by dissidents, politically committed leftists either in Muste’s American Workers Party, Cannon’s Communist League of America, or the Communist Party of America. The difficulty we have today is not only that the workers movement has suffered decades of defeats, but also that the revolutionary Left has basically been obliterated.

The lesson of the CIO is that if you want the trade union movement to move forward, that if you want social movements in general to push forward into new territories and advance the causes of social justice and a whole series of progressive possibilities, there simultaneously needs to be a rebuilding of the revolutionary left and a rebuilding of the trade union movement, aligned with the social movements that have become so important in our time. Without that connection, it seems to me, they will be handcuffed in their capacities to affect the kind of broad social change that they want.

So the CIO moment reveals the possibilities of breaking out of confinements that seem both rigid and insurmountable, but it also reveals that what’s necessary to make those breakthroughs is a rebuilding of the Left, as well as a rebuilding of the workers’ movement and the connections that are made between that rebuilt left, the trade union movement, and the social movements of our time.

CONTRIBUTORS

Bryan D. Palmer is a Canadian historian of labor and the Left, and author of the forthcoming James P. Cannon and the Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States, 1929–1939.

Benjamin Y. Fong is honors faculty fellow and associate director of the Center for Work & Democracy at Arizona State University. He is the author of Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge (Verso 2023).

MY FAVORITE BOLSHEVIK

Alexander Bogdanov Was One of Russia’s Great Revolutionary Thinkers and a Sci-Fi Pioneer

BYJAMES D. WHITE

DECEMBER 2023

JACOBIN

Alexander Bogdanov played a key role in Russia's socialist movement in the years leading up to the 1917 revolution. He was also a remarkably creative thinker who wrote a sci-fi novel about a socialist civilization on Mars.

Portrait of Alexander Bogdanov in 1903. (Wikimedia Commons)

Alexander Bogdanov was one of the most versatile and creative thinkers of Russia in the revolutionary era. Besides being a political activist, he was a prolific writer on philosophy, economics, education, and culture, whose works included a science-fiction novel about a socialist civilization on the planet Mars.

Due to his conflict with Vladimir Lenin, however, he was almost entirely written out of the historical record. When Bogdanov was mentioned in Soviet times, it was exclusively from the Leninist viewpoint. Only recently has Bogdanov’s life and works become the subject of academic study. Bogdanov deserves to be remembered as one of the most intriguing figures from the Russian socialist movement in a tumultuous time.

Early Life

“Bogdanov” was the pseudonym of Alexander Alexandrovich Malinovsky, who was born in the village of Sokółka, in the province of Grodno on August 22, 1873. His childhood and youth were spent in Tula, a town near Moscow, where his father was a school inspector. In 1892, Bogdanov entered Moscow University to study the natural sciences, specializing in biology, but two years later he was expelled for his presence at a student demonstration and banished to his home town of Tula.Alexander Bogdanov was one of the most versatile and creative thinkers of Russia in the revolutionary era.

Being an industrial center, Tula was home to a large number of workers, some of whom had organized study groups. Bogdanov was invited by one of the workers to teach a class on economics. It was from this class on economics that Bogdanov’s first publication emerged — his A Short Course of Economic Science, published in 1894.

The Short Course is in effect an exposition of Karl Marx’s economic ideas, though this is not stated explicitly in the book. The approach is historical, beginning with the collectivism of primitive society and progressing through slave society and feudalism to the capitalist era. In subsequent editions of his book, Bogdanov added refinements that were inspired by his philosophical writings.

An important example of this was the conception that as society progressed, it ceased to be undifferentiated, but divided into two basic groups: those who gave orders and those who carried them out. In later historical periods, society divided even further as trades and professions emerged, each with its own particular fund of experience.

Bogdanov envisaged that with the increased mechanization of industry, machines would carry out routine operations, leaving the workers to perform mainly supervisory functions. In this way, the worker would acquire the characteristics of an organizer as well as of a person who carried out orders. Consequently, the age-old division of functions would be overcome.

Theorizing in Exile

Although he was barred from returning to his studies at Moscow University, Bogdanov was able to gain permission to study medicine at Kiev University and to qualify as a doctor. For conducting socialist propaganda among the workers, he was arrested in November 1899. After six months’ imprisonment in Moscow, he was exiled first to Kaluga, and then to Vologda, where he spent three years.

Bogdanov’s Vologda exile was an important period in his intellectual development. In the process of debating with other political exiles there, particularly with Sergei Berdyaev, he formulated some of his most characteristic ideas. One of these was the conception of socialism as a state of continuous development, a vision that he incorporated into his science-fiction novel Red Star.

Red Star, which was published in 1908, depicted a high-tech socialist civilization on Mars through the eyes of its narrator, a Russian scientist and revolutionary who is brought to the planet by a Martian emissary. It inspired later writers of science fiction, both in the Soviet Union and in the West.Red Star depicted a high-tech socialist civilization on Mars through the eyes of a Russian scientist and revolutionary who is brought to the planet.

While in Vologda, Bogdanov also wrote the first of the three volumes of his main work of the period, Empiriomonism. The second volume appeared during the 1905 revolution and the third in 1906.

Bogdanov’s training as a natural scientist and a physician reinforced his conviction that philosophy must incorporate the two most important scientific discoveries of the times: the theory of natural selection and the conservation of energy. He found inspiration in the works of the writers who had adopted this approach, Richard Avenarius and Ernst Mach.

Bogdanov took Avenarius’s Critique of Pure Experience as a starting point for the development of his own philosophical ideas. He considered a shortcoming of Avenarius’s work to be that it approached the question of knowledge from the point of view of the human individual, rather than that of society as a whole.

For Bogdanov, the criterion of objective truth was its “social validity.” The idea of the human collective was the viewpoint from which the validity of knowledge should be judged. The corollary of this argument was that the standpoint of the isolated individual gave a fragmented view of reality and engendered all kinds of fetishism, including commodity fetishism in Marx’s sense of the term.

Bogdanov and Lenin

The Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), with its division into Bolshevik and Menshevik factions, had taken place while Bogdanov was in his Vologda exile. However, he had been able to keep abreast of events through correspondence with Lenin. In the spring of 1904, he visited Lenin and his wife in Geneva.

Bogdanov took the side of the Bolsheviks because he considered the Mensheviks to be in the wrong for having flouted the resolutions of the Congress. He did not agree with the conception that Lenin had advanced in his pamphlet What is to be Done?, according to which the workers were incapable of coming to the socialist ideal without the help of the socialist intelligentsia. To Bogdanov’s mind, it was the unruly intelligentsia that needed the input of discipline that the workers could provide.

At the time of Bogdanov’s visit, Lenin was isolated politically, the Mensheviks having gained control of the party institutions and its newspaper, Iskra. Bogdanov helped Lenin make the Bolsheviks a serious political force by finding finance for a newspaper which Lenin could edit, by enlisting his contacts to contribute articles to the paper, and by organizing a Third Party Congress, which only Bolsheviks attended.Bogdanov helped Lenin make the Bolsheviks a serious political force by finding finance for a newspaper which Lenin could edit.

At the outbreak of the revolution in January 1905, while Lenin was in Geneva editing the newspaper Vpered (Forward), Bogdanov was in St Petersburg heading the Bolshevik organization in Russia. Although the circumstances demanded a centralized leadership, Bogdanov insisted that it should still be subject to the democratic control of party members — that is, there should be what he termed “democratic centralism.”

As a member of the Executive Committee of the St Petersburg Soviet, Bogdanov was arrested in December 1905 and was only released from prison in May 1906. Increasing political repression by the tsarist regime made it necessary for Bogdanov and Lenin to leave Russia for Western Europe at the end of 1907.
Between Two Revolutions

In the aftermath of the 1905 revolution, serious disagreements emerged between Bogdanov and Lenin. Bogdanov believed that the factors that had brought about the 1905 revolution still operated and that a new revolutionary wave would emerge before long. This meant that cadres of workers should be trained in party schools in preparation for the future revolution.

Lenin, on the other hand, argued that the revolutionary period had come to an end. The best tactic to employ now was parliamentarianism, taking advantage of the parliament (Duma) that the tsarist government had been forced to concede. Bogdanov objected that participation in the Duma should not be the only tactic of the Bolsheviks and that the Duma fraction of the RSDLP should not be allowed to act in defiance of party policy.In the aftermath of the 1905 revolution, serious disagreements emerged between Bogdanov and Lenin.

He demanded that the fraction be given an ultimatum: either adhere to party policy or be recalled from the Duma. Lenin, for his part, accused Bogdanov of the heresies of “recallism” and “ultimatumism” and of creating a political base in the party school that he organized on the island of Capri.

In order to undermine Bogdanov’s standing as a philosopher, Lenin published the polemical work Materialism and Empirio-Criticism in 1909. This work did not confront Bogdanov’s ideas directly, but attacked thinkers that Lenin claimed to have influenced Bogdanov, primarily Mach and Avenarius.

In his bid to show that Bogdanov was an idealist, not a Marxist, Lenin attributed to Bogdanov ideas that he did not hold. In reply, Bogdanov published the pamphlet Faith and Knowledge, which pointed out Lenin’s distortions and also the quasi-theological attitude that both Lenin and Georgii Plekhanov had toward the writings of Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Although Bogdanov held his own in theoretical debate, Lenin was able to defeat him politically. At a specially convened meeting of the Bolshevik Centre in June 1909, Lenin and his associates expelled Bogdanov from the Bolshevik fraction of the RSDLP. Although the action was illegitimate, the expected party congress at which it could be overturned failed to materialize. From then on, Bogdanov remained outside any political party.
Responding to War

Taking advantage of the amnesty granted in 1913 to mark the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty, Bogdanov returned to Russia and settled in Moscow. When war broke out in 1914, he was mobilized into the army as a junior doctor. He was shocked by the collapse of the Second International and the propensity of the working class to succumb to the war fever that engulfed the belligerent countries.

Lenin famously explained this phenomenon in terms of the presence within the proletariat of an “aristocracy,” which benefited from the profits of imperialism. For Bogdanov, however, the reaction of the workers to the war signified that they had been overwhelmed by the force of bourgeois culture. He believed that a collectivist proletarian culture existed in embryo but needed to be developed considerably in order to withstand the individualist environment fostered by the bourgeoisie.Bogdanov was shocked by the collapse of the Second International and the propensity of the working class to succumb to the war fever.

A recurring theme in Bogdanov’s writings is the fragmentation of human knowledge brought about by the division of labor and the emergence of trades and professions. His chief work is Tectology, the Universal Science of Organization, which he began in 1913. It seeks to overcome this fragmentation by revealing patterns that cut across disciplines and are equally applicable to things, people, and ideas.

For Bogdanov, examples of these patterns were “Selection” and “Law of the Leasts.” In the case of the former, he held that the principle of selection was applicable not only in biology, but in all spheres of existence, since every system survived or perished depending on its relationship to the environment, according to its capacity or incapacity for adaptation.

The Law of the Leasts also had a universal application: in any system, the whole was dependent on the weakest of its component elements. The strength of a chain was determined by its weakest link; a squadron could only sail as fast as its slowest ship; a logical chain of argument would collapse if one of its links could not stand up to criticism. Bogdanov saw Tectology as a proletarian encyclopedia — a work that integrated knowledge and experience in a way that a future collectivist society would need.

While many socialists were optimistic that a socialist society would emerge from the centralized war economies that were established in the belligerent countries during World War I, Bogdanov did not share this view. He regarded these economies as a form of “war communism” and a symptom of an economy in decline.

Cultural Revolution

When the tsarist regime collapsed in February 1917, he hoped that this would usher in a new democratic order in Russia. In the Bolsheviks, however, he saw the same authoritarian features that had characterized tsarism. The remedy, in Bogdanov’s view, was a “cultural revolution,” a movement that would at least school Russian society in democracy.

In 1918, Bogdanov refused an invitation to join the new Soviet government, deeming it too authoritarian and lacking in “comradely cooperation.” Nevertheless, he made an important contribution to the Soviet system in 1921 by formulating the principles of Soviet economic planning.Bogdanov refused an invitation to join the new Soviet government, deeming it too authoritarian and lacking in ‘comradely cooperation.’

Bogdanov held that since all branches of the economy were interdependent, an equilibrium should be maintained between the various sectors. In conformity with the tectological Law of the Leasts, he argued that the growth of an economy was constrained by the size of the most backward of the basic branches of production. It was these branches that should be prioritized by directing resources and labor power into them. These principles underlay Soviet economic planning until Joseph Stalin renounced them in 1929.

Between 1918 and 1920, Bogdanov’s influence was at its height. His writings were the standard works on socialist and Marxist theory, while his novel Red Star contained the only vision of a socialist society that the Bolsheviks had at their disposal.

His ideas inspired the Proletkult, a popular organization with branches throughout the Soviet republic and boasting an international section. In 1920, Lenin contrived to end the independence of Proletkult by subordinating it to the Commissariat of Education. In the same year, he launched a campaign against Bogdanov personally by arranging to have his book Materialism and Empiriocriticism republished with an introduction denouncing Tectology and other theoretical works by Bogdanov.

The anti-Bogdanov campaign culminated in Bogdanov’s arrest by the State Political Administration (GPU) in September 1923. He was suspected of having ideological connections with the opposition group Workers’ Truth, but was able to convince Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the GPU, of his innocence. In all, Bogdanov spent five weeks in prison and considered himself lucky to have escaped with his life. Following this incident, it became more difficult for Bogdanov to publish his writings or engage in any academic activity.

Bogdanov’s Legacy

These restrictions left Bogdanov with medical research as his main sphere of activity. At his suggestion, the Soviet Commissariat of Health established an Institute of Haematology and Blood Transfusion in 1926 and appointed Bogdanov as its director. At that time, the procedure of blood transfusion was in its early stages and much about the characteristics of blood remained unknown.Bogdanov’s intellectual legacy has begun to be rediscovered and his role as a pioneer of system theory recognized.

For Bogdanov, blood transfusion had a special significance as he regarded it as a form of social integration and had described it in this way in Red Star. In March 1928, Bogdanov attempted to perform an exchange of blood with a student from Moscow University, a standard procedure at the institute. However, incompatibilities in the blood of Bogdanov and the student, which could not have been foreseen at that time, caused the operation to fail. Bogdanov suffered fifteen days of painful illness and died on April 7, 1926.

Bogdanov is an outstanding figure in the history of the Russian revolutionary movement and the early years of the Soviet state. As a socialist thinker his works are of abiding interest. Because he fell foul of Lenin and became a nonperson from 1920 onward, his existence has been barely noticed by historians.

In recent years, however, Bogdanov’s intellectual legacy has begun to be rediscovered and his role as a pioneer of system theory recognized. But much still has to be done in according Bogdanov the place in modern Russian history that he truly merits.


James D. White is reader in Russian and East European history at the University of Glasgow. His works include Lenin: The Practice and Theory of Revolution and Red Hamlet: The Life and Ideas of Alexander Bogdanov.

A century after Lenin’s death, the USSR’s founder seems to be an afterthought in modern Russia


BY JIM HEINTZ
 January 20, 2024

Not long after the 1924 death of the founder of the Soviet Union, a popular poet soothed and thrilled the grieving country with these words: “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live.”

A century later, the once-omnipresent image of Vladimir Lenin is largely an afterthought in modern Russia, despite those famous lines by revolutionary writer Vladimir Mayakovsky.

The Red Square mausoleum where his embalmed corpse lies in an open sarcophagus is no longer a near-mandatory pilgrimage but a site of macabre kitsch, open only 15 hours a week. It draws far fewer visitors than the Moscow Zoo.

The goateed face with its intense glare that once seemed unavoidable still stares out from statues, but many of those have been the targets of pranksters and vandals. The one at St. Petersburg’s Finland Station commemorating his return from exile was hit by a bomb that left a huge hole in his posterior. Many streets and localities that bore his name have been rechristened.

Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union, poses for a photographer in this 1922 photo in Gorky, outside Moscow. He died on Jan. 21, 1924. (AP Photo)

The ideology that Lenin championed and spread over a vast territory is something of a sideshow in modern Russia. The Communist Party, although the largest opposition grouping in parliament, holds only 16% of the seats, overwhelmed by President Vladimir Putin’s political power-base, United Russia.

Lenin “turned out to be completely superfluous and unnecessary in modern Russia,” historian Konstantin Morozov of the Russian Academy of Sciences told the AP.

Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov talks as if Lenin still was in charge: “100 years since the day when his big and kind heart stopped, the second century of Lenin’s immortality begins,” he said.


Russian Communists carry a portrait of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union, and red flags after visiting his mausoleum marking the 152nd anniversary of his birth in Red Square in Moscow, Russia, on Friday, April 22, 2022

. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, File)

Putin himself appears inclined to keep Lenin at arm’s length, even aiming some darts at him.

In a speech three days before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Putin dismissed its sovereign status as an illegitimate holdover from Lenin’s era, when it was a separate republic within the Soviet Union.

“As a result of Bolshevik policy, Soviet Ukraine arose, which even today can with good reason be called ‘Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s Ukraine.’ He is the author and the architect,” Putin said.

In a speech a year earlier, Putin said that allowing Ukraine and other republics the nominal right to secede had planted “the most dangerous time bomb.”


Russian Communists and supporters walk with their flags and a portrait of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union, to visit his mausoleum in Red Square in Moscow, Russia, to mark the 149th anniversary of his birth, on Monday, April 22, 2019. 

(AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, File)

Whatever objections to those policies, Putin also is clearly aware of the emotional hold that Lenin retains for many Russians, and he does not support initiatives that arise periodically to remove the body from the mausoleum.

“I believe it should be left as it is, at least for as long as there are those, and there are quite a few people, who link their lives, their fates as well as certain achievements ... of the Soviet era with that,” he said in 2019.

Such links may persist for decades. A 2022 opinion survey by state-run polling agency VTsIOM found that 29% of Russians believed Lenin’s influence would fade so much that in 50 years he would be remembered only by historians. But that response was only 10 percentage points lower than one to the same question a decade earlier, suggesting Lenin remains important.

Lenin’s hold on Russia’s heart is still strong enough that three years ago, the Union of Russian Architects succumbed to a public outcry and canceled a competition soliciting suggestions for how the Red Square mausoleum could be repurposed. That competition did not even specifically call for the removal of Lenin’s body.
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The embalmed corpse of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union, lies behind glass in his mausoleum on Red Square outside the Kremlin wall in Moscow, Russia, in this photo taken on Nov. 30, 1994. (AP Photo, File)

Lenin died on Jan. 21, 1924, at age 53, severely weakened by three strokes. His widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, wanted him to be buried in a conventional grave.

Lenin’s close associates had feared his death for months. Artist Yuri Annenkov, summoned to do his portrait at the dacha where he was convalescing, said he had “the helpless, twisted, infantile smile of a man who had fallen into childhood.”

Amid those concerns, Josef Stalin told a Politburo meeting of a proposal by “some comrades” to preserve Lenin’s body for centuries, according to a history by Russian news agency Tass. The idea offended Leon Trotsky, Lenin’s closest lieutenant, who likened it to the holy relics displayed by the Russian Orthodox Church — a staunch opponent of the Bolsheviks— that had “nothing in common with the science of Marxism.”

But Stalin, once a divinity school student, understood the value of the secular analogue to a saint.


The first mausoleum of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union, who died on Jan. 21, 1924, is seen in Red Square next to the Kremlin Wall in Moscow, Russia, on Feb. 25, 1924. 

(AP Photo, File)

The weather may have tipped the scales. Temperatures were reportedly as low as minus 30 C (minus 22 F) when Lenin’s body was displayed during a wake in Moscow, stalling decomposition and inspiring authorities to hastily build a small wooden mausoleum in Red Square and make further efforts to preserve the body.

A later version, a more modernist take on ancient stepped pyramids clad in somber deep red stone, opened in 1930. By that time, Trotsky had been forced into exile and Stalin was in full control, bolstered by a determination to portray himself as absolutely loyal to Lenin’s ideals.

In the end, the cult of “Lenin After Lenin” may have worked against the Soviet Union rather than strengthening it by enforcing a rigid mindset, in the view of some historians.

“In many ways the tragedy of the USSR lay in the fact that all subsequent generations of leaders tried to rely on certain ‘testaments of Lenin,’” Vladimir Rudakov, editor of the journal Istorik, wrote in this month’s issue.

The Mayakovsky poem that proclaimed Lenin’s immortality was “a parting word, or a spell, or a curse,” Rudakov said.

People walk by a statue of Vladimir Lenin, painted in the colors of Ukraine’s national flag, in Velyka Novosilka, Ukraine, on Thursday, Feb. 19, 2015. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda, File)

About 450,000 people file past Lenin’s corpse per year, according to Tass, about a third of the number of Moscow Zoo visitors and a sharp contrast from the Soviet era when seemingly endless lines shuffled across Red Square.

The honor guards whose goose-stepping rotations fascinated visitors were removed from outside the mausoleum three decades ago. At the annual military parade through Red Square, the structure is blocked from view by a tribune where dignitaries watch the festivities.

Lenin is still there — just harder to see.

Bertrand Russell on his meeting with Vladimir Lenin in 1920

Vladimir Lenin's Legacy: An In-Depth Look at His Impact on Communism and Socialist Movements


BioQuote
Mar 8, 2023

Vladimir Lenin was a Russian revolutionary and political leader who played a key role in the establishment of the Soviet Union. He was born on April 22, 1870, in the town of Simbirsk, in central Russia. His parents were well-educated members of the middle class, and his father was an inspector of schools. Lenin was an intelligent and ambitious student, and he developed an interest in revolutionary politics at an early age. He was particularly influenced by the ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and he began to read their works while still in high school. In 1887, Lenin's older brother, Alexander, was executed for plotting to assassinate Tsar Alexander III. This event had a profound impact on Lenin, and he became more determined than ever to fight for political change in Russia. In 1893, Lenin moved to St. Petersburg (then known as Petrograd), where he became involved in radical political groups. He quickly rose through the ranks of the Marxist movement, and he soon became a leading figure in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP). In 1903, the RSDLP split into two factions, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, and Lenin became the leader of the Bolsheviks. Over the next several years, Lenin worked tirelessly to promote his vision of a socialist revolution in Russia. He wrote numerous articles and pamphlets, and he organized underground cells of Bolshevik supporters throughout the country. In 1917, his efforts paid off, and the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution. As the leader of the Soviet government, Lenin implemented a series of radical policies aimed at transforming Russia into a socialist society. He nationalized industry, redistributed land, and established a system of worker control over the means of production. However, these policies were not without their challenges, and the country soon faced economic hardship and political turmoil. Lenin suffered a series of strokes in the last years of his life, and his health deteriorated rapidly. He died on January 21, 1924, at the age of 53. His body was embalmed and placed on public display in Moscow's Red Square, where it remains to this day. Despite his controversial legacy, Lenin remains an iconic figure in Russian and world history. His ideas and leadership continue to inspire revolutionary movements around the world, and his legacy continues to shape the course of political discourse and action. 

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The Lenin Quintet—a series of works published to mark the centenary of his death.

The Lenin Quintet includes new editions of Lenin's work, including The State and Revolution, Not By Politics Alone, and Imperialism and the National Question, with contributions from Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Tariq Ali, and Antonio Negri. See all the books here.

The Lenin Quintet

Ruth Wilson Gilmore asks how might the politics explained or implied in Lenin’s writings inform our analytical and practical grasp of what is to be done now, in her Introduction to Imperialism and the National Question.

Antonio Negri argues that The State and Revolution by Lenin is the best introduction to Marxism as it places bodies within the daily revolutionary struggle.

In this excerpt from Lenin’s Childhood, Isaac Deutscher creates a scene from the Twentieth CPSU Congress, 1956, where an imagined Lenin reflects on what Leninism has become.

In Not By Politics Alone, Tamara Deutscher describes a Lenin whose whole being was geared to one purpose, the purpose of the revolution.

STATE AND REVOLUTION    THE FOUNDERS OF THE BOLSHEVIK PARTY BOGDANOV, GORKY, LENIN LENIN AND MARX Lenin's last photo he had four strokes