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.).
