One Lenin, many Leninisms
You can read other contributions to the discussion sparked by Dan La Botz’s “Goodbye to Lenin and Leninism” here.
LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal has published more than a half-dozen recent contributions on Lenin, Leninism and the problems of working-class organisation and leadership. Understanding the Leninist legacy can help us avoid repeating mistakes in the future, while providing insights into what happened in the past; namely, why the first revolution to put working people in charge ultimately fail and Lenin's role in this.
Trotsky’s explanation
Leon Trotsky, Isaac Deutscher and others share a common view on why the Russian Revolution did not lead to working people democratically controlling their society. They contend that the Russian Revolution had to confront adverse forces that it could not overcome, including:
- 14 countries invading Russia;
- the failure of the 1918-19 German Revolution along with other revolutions on the continent;
- the country being overwhelmed with disease, famine and other deprivations; and
- the fact that the Russian Revolution overthrew capitalism where it was weakest, rather than where the working class was most developed.
As technocrats and managers flooded into the Russian Communist Party, these factors fed a political reaction to the revolution, which Trotsky called “The Thermidor,” drawing a parallel with the French Revolution. According to Trotskyists, the Soviet Thermidor established a nationalistic bureaucracy in the party and state. In Trotsky’s analysis, criticism of Lenin’s leadership is overshadowed by the impact of adverse conditions. It had been understood since Karl Marx that “socialism in one country” was unsustainable; that is why the Russian Revolution failed, according to this narrative.
Blaming Lenin
An alternative story pins the Soviet Union’s authoritarian nature and eventual collapse on Lenin’s organisational principles. According to Dan La Botz, “Lenin, and what became Leninism, played a very large role, a decisive role, in extinguishing socialist democracy.” Lenin’s organisational principles put a party-elite in control of a centralised political apparatus with top-down discipline. After taking power, the Bolsheviks merged the party with the state and outlawed all opposition.
Paul Le Blanc observed that critics describe Leninist organisation as a “mechanism far more centralist than democratic, requiring on the one hand ‘a strong leader’ and on the other hand a rank-and-file membership ‘consciously and joyfully submitting to the leadership imposed on it by senior members’.”
To only consider the Bolsheviks and not the conditions they faced (or vice versa) is a one-dimensional analysis. As Anthony Teso explained, any serious critique “must address how soviet power was displaced by party and state structures under the intense pressures of isolation and civil war, rather than drawing a direct equation between Lenin’s decisions” and the authoritarian bureaucracy that ran the Soviet Union until its collapse.
What Lenin wrote/what the Bolsheviks did
La Botz asks: “If Lenin was always right, why did things go so wrong?” We could instead ask: how much of a difference did the Bolsheviks’ organising principles make, given the overwhelming conditions they faced? And why were Lenin’s writings on organisation so different to what the Bolsheviks did?
Simon Pirani studied newly-available Soviet records after the Soviet Union’s fall. His writings challenge both the Trotsky/Deutscher explanation of hostile historical conditions as well as those who blame Lenin for the revolution’s retreat. Pirani’s “third interpretation” is based on the interaction between Bolshevik practice and social changes that went beyond their control and even understanding. He writes:
From 1918, as the revolution retreated, the shifts in Bolshevik ideology and policy were in the opposite direction. The ideas in Lenin’s The State and Revolution, which was written under the influence of the surge of soviet activity in 1917 and extolled popular participation in government, were dumped. By 1921, as the Red Army invaded Georgia to help depose the local Mensheviks, the principle of self-determination of small nations — which had in December 1917 been cited as a justification for granting independence to Finland — was set aside.
Bolshevik ideas animated their actions; the outcomes further shaped Bolshevik ideas.
Ultimately, we cannot make history as we please. As Marx wrote: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Autocratic traditions did not disappear with the Russian Revolution. Russia’s single-ruler tradition survived under Tsarist, Communist and capitalist regimes. Teso notes, “Tsarist Russia was an autocracy that lacked stable law, a functioning parliament, and basic freedoms of the press, assembly and organisation.”
Major social change takes generations, not years. It took centuries to complete the transition to capitalism in western Europe. The Soviet Union itself was, as Le Blanc explains, a
variant of the transitional formation between capitalism and socialism which Marx and Engels had theorised — but in this case forced to exist on a capitalist planet much longer than anticipated. Consequently, it became bureaucratised, authoritarian, and corrupt, proving unable to move forward to socialism and unable to endure.
The Leninisms we inherited
Bureaucratised and authoritarian, the Soviet Union defined world Communism through the Communist International (Comintern). The Comintern created what the world calls “Leninism” today. This adds another dimension to the problem: there is what Lenin wrote, what Lenin and the Bolsheviks did, and what the Comintern disseminated as “Leninism.”
Joel Geier and others argue that what we know as “Leninism,” in terms of political and organisational practices, came not from Lenin but Comintern leader Grigory Zinoviev. It was “Zinovievism”, not “Leninism,” that emerged from the Comintern’s Fifth Congress of 1924, with its theory of the “vanguard party” and “Bolshevisation” policy. According to Geier, this meant “every party was expected to carry out instructions from the Russian party, in reality from its Politburo.”
US Communist leader James P. Cannon was an original believer in Bolshevisation. He wrote that
Bolshevization of the party ... like all slogans of the Communist International, means ... a struggle against false ideology in the party. The Bolshevization of the party, for us, means the struggle for the conquest of the party for the ideology of Marxism and Leninism.
Note the contrast between “false” versus “true” ideologies. Cannon would later accept Trotsky’s Leninism. But by that time, Zinoviev’s Leninism had enabled Moscow to expel Cannon from the US party less than a year after it expelled Trotsky. Cannon and others eventually founded the Socialist Workers Party (US SWP) as a Trotskyist/Leninist party.
Late in the 20th century, the US SWP abandoned Trotskyism. Peter Camejo, an expelled party leader, wrote that the SWP’s “Leninism” was idealistic. Idealism was inherent in the idea of the “correct program,” which differentiates a truly revolutionary vanguard party from petty-bourgeois political groups. For Camejo, the
… myth is that what Lenin did was gather a cadre around a ‘correct’ program, build a hard, centralized organization and when the masses radicalized they were won over. Having won the masses, Lenin’s party was then able to take ‘power’. A whole series of corollaries followed from this erroneous concept and, over time, became part of the Trotskyist dogma.
Create two, three, many Lenins
Camejo wrote: “Cadres became the defenders of the Holy Grail, and usually there was in each group just one ‘Lenin of today’ who could interpret and adjust the ‘program’.” This contributed to the continual fragmentation of Trotskyist groups into ever-smaller formations around a single enduring leader. Camejo added:
Also, amazing as it might seem, while these organizations produced endless written materials on all kinds of political phenomena, almost nothing can be found seeking to explain this astounding phenomena of the cultification of Trotskyist organizations.
The astounding transfer of New York City SWP assets to the personal account of long-time leader Jack Barnes, however, has been documented.
The single-leader tradition stretches back to the Bolshevik party, which was co-founded by Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov, who Lenin subsequently had expelled. Why could they not coexist in the Bolshevik party? The practice of giving a single individual extraordinary powers indefinitely has not served the international left well.
Neither has the notion that there can only be a single vanguard party in each country. Or that an international federation of parties should itself be subject to democratic centralism and party-level discipline from an ultimate authority. These diktats are post-Lenin, from the Comintern’s Fifth Congress.
Lenin versus the vanguard party
Following the experiences of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union, many on the left would today agree with Teso that “a genuinely-democratic organisation grounded in the self-activity of the working class ... requires rejecting the party’s monopoly over the working class.” As Camejo put it, “truth can only be ascertained through the conflict of ideas. Without differences, debate and a really open, democratic culture a movement can easily adopt positions disconnected from reality.”
Lenin seemed to have no argument against working-class political pluralism in his writings or speeches. The term “vanguard party” appears not in his works but in Zinoviev’s speeches and other documents from the Comintern’s Fifth Congress. It is arguable that Lenin did not use the term “vanguard party” because he did not believe in such a thing. Yet, today, it is hard to find an introductory class on Lenin that does not use the phrase “vanguard party”.
Bidding goodbye to Leninism, but not to Lenin
The Bolsheviks led the Russian Revolution, a watershed moment in history of great importance to socialists. Lenin led the Bolsheviks and interpreted the Marxist tradition. Lenin’s most important writings contain organisational and tactical insights that we need today. In his 1914 work on national self-determination, for example, Lenin asked how the Ukrainian worker could trust the Great Russian worker to not betray him to preserve Great Russian privilege. One could substitute the term “Black worker” for “Ukrainian” and see the struggle for Black equality as a catalyst to the struggle of workers, as CLR. James did.
There is too much to learn from Lenin to say goodbye to his writings, speeches, and life's work. Leninism, however, today exists in multiple, incompatible forms, most having little to do with Lenin’s writings and perhaps even his intentions. We should say goodbye to Leninism, but Lenin’s basic works should remain in the curriculum of introductory classes on socialism or communism. The curriculum should also include the history of the many Leninisms to better understand the distortions, errors, and genius, in Lenin’s legacy.
Lenin, moral liberalism and the voluntarist premise
In “Lenin, moral liberalism and the voluntarist premise,” Anthony Teso continues the discussion started by Dan La Botz’s article “Goodbye to Lenin and Leninism,” first published in LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal on April 25. You can read the other contributions here.
In his latest contribution to the discussion on Lenin and Leninism, “Lenin versus democracy,” Dan La Botz clarifies the disagreement, which is useful. The real difference is not about defending authoritarian regimes or supporting democracy. It is about two ways of thinking. One is historical materialism, which looks at society through material and economic forces. The other is a kind of liberal moralism that uses socialist terms but focuses on moral criticism. Liberal moralism judges political strategies and outcomes chiefly in terms of abstract principles, such as individual rights or fairness, detached from underlying class structures or social forces. It treats democracy mainly as a set of formal rights and procedures, separate from who actually holds power. This approach often highlights moral shortcomings while overlooking the real constraints or material interests at play.
Alternatives
La Botz says that “history, ruthless and relentless as it was, did not deprive Lenin and the Bolsheviks of their volition,” and that they “still exercised free will.” This demonstrates the difference. Marxists do not judge revolutionary politics by whether people have free will. That idea is more common in legal or religious thinking. For Marxists, the question is not whether people could have chosen differently in theory. Of course they could have; they are not robots. The real question is whether those options were actually possible, given the social, economic and political forces at the time. This includes which classes existed, how aware workers and peasants were, what the state looked like, and what was happening internationally.
La Botz does not clearly say what the alternatives were. He suggests Lenin might have been able to create a genuine multi-party governing coalition with other working-class parties in the soviets. But which parties is he talking about? The Mensheviks and Right Social Revolutionaries (SRs) left the Second Congress of Soviets in October 1917. They refused to join a soviet government because they did not accept the soviet system; their priority was a return to a parliamentary republic based on the old state structure. Historians, such as Alexander Rabinowitch in The Bolsheviks in Power, have shown these parties not only opposed the soviets’ authority but actively worked to undermine them, rendering a real coalition unworkable after October.
The Left SRs, whom La Botz often conflates with the Right SRs when discussing the Constituent Assembly, did join a coalition with the Bolsheviks. But, as Sheila Fitzpatrick and Rabinowitch document, that coalition broke down over concrete issues, such as the Brest-Litovsk treaty and grain requisitions, not over abstract questions of democracy. The split was deep and reflected social and political realities rather than a mere failure of will. Although there was an attempt at a coalition, it failed because neither side would give up its core beliefs. The broader context of civil war and foreign intervention intensified those divisions.
Soviets versus Constituent Assembly
La Botz calls my view “the classic Trotskyist argument;” in reality, his argument is closer to the classic Kautskyist argument. The text he is echoing (whether he means to or not) is Karl Kautsky’s The Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Kautsky argued that the Bolsheviks’ methods, even if understandable during the struggle, were basically authoritarian and would always lead to despotism. Kautsky said democracy and dictatorship could not coexist and that the Constituent Assembly should not have been dissolved. Lenin replied in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, that Kautsky separated “democracy” from its class basis, treating parliamentary democracy as the only real form of democracy. When you do that, every revolutionary action seems like a power grab.
This is what La Botz does in his argument. He treats the Constituent Assembly as a higher form of democracy, rather than just one institution among others. The Assembly was elected using old party lists that did not show the split among the SRs. At the same time, there were two powers: the soviets had become the real government, and peasants were already taking and sharing land under the Bolshevik Land Decree. The Right SR majority in the Assembly opposed this land redistribution. La Botz suggests the Bolsheviks could have “carried out a campaign in the assembly, the soviets, and society to win over the peasant majority to the Bolsheviks' land decree.” But the Second Congress of Soviets had already put the Land Decree into effect on October 26. The peasants were not waiting to be convinced; they were already acting. The Right SR majority in the Assembly was blocking what was happening, not standing for democracy.
Still, it is important to recognise why many socialists, including some with revolutionary credentials, continued to value the Constituent Assembly despite its limitations. For them, the Assembly represented a promise of universal suffrage and formal political equality after centuries of autocracy. Many believed that even an imperfect parliament could be a site for socialist advance or debate. Some socialists feared that dissolving the Assembly would set a precedent of restricting broad political participation or cut off space for dissent that could prove harmful later. These concerns should not be dismissed, since they speak to real anxieties about how revolutions can go wrong. However, these arguments often overlook the shifting realities on the ground: by early 1918, the soviets had become the real organs of popular power, while the Assembly's majority was no longer reflective of the revolutionary process or the demands coming from below.
La Botz misses this point because his way of thinking does not allow for it. Democratic legitimacy is not just about parliamentary elections. The soviets were a higher form of democracy because they demonstrated active working-class involvement, with delegates who could be recalled at any time. Choosing the Constituent Assembly over the soviets is not really about defending democracy; it is just picking one institution over another without considering the class basis of either.
Rosa Luxemburg
La Botz ends, as he began, by mentioning Rosa Luxemburg. But this is selective. Luxemburg criticised the Bolsheviks on the Constituent Assembly, land reform and press freedom. She did this while in prison, with limited information, and wrote a manuscript she chose not to publish. Leo Jogiches, her closest collaborator, was against publishing it. But the important Luxemburg is not the critic of 1918; rather it is the revolutionary who, after her release, helped found the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) along Bolshevik lines, opposed the Social Democratic Party-Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany coalition government for giving in to the old state, and led the KPD into the January 1919 uprising, even though many in her party disagreed. She was killed for taking the idea of insurrection seriously.
Her famous line, “freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently,” is often quoted by people who would not have agreed with her actions. The deeper point is this: Luxemburg never separated democracy from the question of class power. For her, democracy was the self-activity of the working class in struggle; it was not just a set of procedures. To treat democracy as something outside class struggle, and as a means of judging Lenin’s decisions, is to confuse liberalism with socialism. Luxemburg knew the difference. So did Lenin.
Did Lenin really lead to Stalin?
La Botz’s argument depends on an idea he does not prove: that Lenin’s choices led directly to Joseph Stalin. He says, “The decisions he made piled up until finally leading to the bureaucratic, collectivist, totalitarian state that was the Soviet Union.” But he does not demonstrate why this is the case. This idea, called the continuity thesis, is a central point in Cold War anti-Communist histories by writers such as Richard Pipes and Robert Service. It has been debated for a hundred years, not just by Trotskyists but also social historians such as Moshe Lewin, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stephen Cohen, and, more recently, Lars Lih.
Lewin, for example, argued Stalinism’s rise was not a straightforward continuation of Bolshevik politics but rather reflected big changes and crises within Soviet society after the revolution, especially under the pressures of civil war and isolation. Fitzpatrick emphasised the complex and often chaotic evolution of Soviet institutions, showing that the new state was shaped by improvisation and mass participation as well as by repression from above. Lih’s careful study of Bolshevik political culture has challenged the “Leninist coup” narrative that La Botz repeats, showing Bolshevik goals in 1917 were rooted in broad popular aspirations rather than a preordained path to dictatorship. These historians do not deny the tragedies that followed 1917, but they show that the continuity thesis simplifies and distorts a far more complex history.
The continuity thesis also cannot explain what happened under Stalin: the killing of the Bolshevik Old Guard, the Moscow Trials, and the destruction in the 1930s of the people who made the October Revolution. If Stalin was simply Lenin’s natural successor, why did he have to get rid of every Leninist? The Thermidorian idea, even if Leon Trotsky did not fully develop it, at least asked the right question: what social process turned the revolution into its opposite? La Botz’s version replaces this with a moral story. He turns eleven decisions into steps leading to Stalin. The deaths of the most committed workers in the civil war, the revolution’s isolation when it did not spread to Germany, and the rise of bureaucracy that Lenin warned about in his last writings — all this gets lost in a story about Lenin’s personality.
Leninism’s ongoing relevancy
La Botz says, “One does not need Lenin to be a socialist or a revolutionary.” That is true. No one needs to treat any historical figure as a hero. But the real question is not whether we need Lenin as a symbol. The question is whether we need the ideas and strategies associated with Leninism: his analysis of imperialism, his understanding of the party as a collective instrument for the oppressed, his theory of state power and, above all, his insistence that the working class can only act as a class through conscious, organised action.
In debates like this, “Leninism” gets treated as a package of methods and approaches specific to the conditions that made the Russian Revolution possible. In contrast, when people speak only of “socialist principles,” “democratic discussion,” and “members’ commitment and self-discipline,” they are referring to general values that almost all currents on the left would affirm but that, in themselves, do not provide a concrete strategy or organisational form. The distinction matters because substituting Leninism for general principles risks losing the orientation toward seizing power, the understanding of the state as an instrument of class rule, and the building of an organised force capable of acting decisively in moments of crisis. Without these, “socialist principles” remain abstract ideals, never translated into effective action or durable achievements. We gain inclusivity and moral clarity by stressing general principles, but we risk losing the strategic focus and organisational lessons that come from Marxist experience.
Leninism is not perfect nor should it be copied mechanically, but abandoning it for vague principles leaves us without tools to confront the realities of power as they are. In short, La Botz’s alternative is not just about who leads. It is about the basic choice between Marxist and social-democratic strategies, as history has shown many times.
