Lenin, day 3 (21 September, 2010)

The defense of Lenin continues:

1.      Lenin is not opposed to the spontaneous organization of the workers, but to allowing this spontaneous organization to fall prey to the imposition of bourgeois ideology.

2.      Hence, he does think the workers must be led by Marxist intellectuals, but only in the sense that committed socialist theoreticians must communicate Marxist theory, and the ideology of socialism, to workers through comprehensive political indictments (agit-prop).

3.      We must now consider whether this makes Lenin anti-democratic.

In one sense, this just seems obviously false.  Lenin is at pains to point out that a Social Democratic politics necessarily encompasses democratic political demands.  The political leadership of the Marxist intellectual consists, he says, in taking advantage “of every event, however small, in order to set forth his socialist convictions and his democratic demands” (17, III.E).  Again: “he is no Social Democrat who forgets in practice that ‘the communists support every revolutionary movement,’ that we are obliged for that reason to expound and emphasize general democratic tasks before the whole people” (ibid.).

That is, political democracy – election of officials by the people – and social democracy – operation of the means of production by the soviets – are essential goals for all Marxists.  In this sense, then, Lenin is obviously not anti-democratic.

Nonetheless, the accusation draws its plausibility not from a doubt about Lenin’s democratic goals, but from a doubt about the means by which he seeks to achieve those goals.  The really thorny question is this: Can democracy be established democratically?

For Lenin, this question cannot be answered in the abstract – his whole approach is to ground the discussion in the conditions of “absolutist Russia” (18, IV.C).  Within this context, Lenin clearly argues that democracy can only be achieved via revolution, and that a democratic revolution cannot be brought about democratically. 

Within this context, Lenin wants to differentiate between two sorts of organization, each with its own tasks and principles of organization.  It is counter-intuitive, but Lenin actually wants to develop as close an analogue to the Western European models as possible, wherein the socialist political parties are separate from the trade unions.  It’s counterintuitive because the argument for collapsing workers’ organizations and political organizations seems to appeal to the specificity of absolutist Russia, where both labor unions and political parties are illegal.  But Lenin wants to adapt the Western model in a different way.  Rather than bow to the repression of the czar by having just one sort of illegal organization, combining economic and political tasks, Lenin insists on the necessity of keeping labor organization and political organization separate.

1.      The labor unions, according to Lenin, should be an “organization without members”: as broad-based as possible, as loosely organized as possible, open only to workers and organized by trade, and as public as possible (hence, as apolitical as possible).

2.      The political party, on the other hand, must be: as small and highly-organized as necessary, composed only of committed revolutionaries, agnostic about class and trade backgrounds, and as secret as possible. 

By means of this separation, the secret functions of the organization are to be centralized without centralizing the movement as a whole (24, IV.C).

The revolutionary party:

The party is to be made up of revolutionaries by trade, those who have “undergone an apprenticeship in the art of combating the political police” (ibid.).  Again and again, Lenin comes back to this again and again: the art and trade of the revolutionary is the struggle with the political police.  We’ll come back to this.

Lenin addresses two objections:

1.      This amounts to conspiracy and terrorism, and

2.      This contradicts the principle of democracy.

Lenin basically says, yeah, it’s a conspiracy – it has to be secret in czarist Russia, and acknowledging this necessity is a virtue of such a political party.  But it is not terroristic.  Indeed, good organization is the only possible safeguard against giving in to terrorism.  Terrorism is a weapon of the weak and disorganized, a lashing out into extraordinary action by those who do not feel that there is any trajectory that will take their organization from where it is to being strong enough to lead a rebellion.

Now, finally, to the question of democracy. 

Democracy presupposes publicity and election of officers, both of which are impossible for a clandestine revolutionary organization.  In place of democracy, Lenin appeals to the sort of criteria for leadership befitting his conception of revolutionaries by trade: leaders emerge from the revolutionary movement because they prove to be good at being revolutionaries, such that “the comrades surrounding them had confidence in their wisdom, in their energy, in their loyalty” (29, IV.E).  These leaders are controlled, not by publicity and election, but by the need they have of the trust and loyalty of those they command.