Lenin’s Intentions for the New Soviet State: Blanquist rather than Marxist?
In the following treatment of Lenin’s possible Blanquist plans for the fledgling Russian Soviet regime, I do not seek completely to emulate either Antony’s manifest or latent intention as revealed in the opening passage from Mark Antony’s speech from William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar.
--
I have no intention of burying Lenin. I have only praise for Lenin’s strategy of democratic centralism, which he developed out of the Blanquist, Tkachevist doctrine in Russian Populism. What I do not praise is what I see as Lenin’s uncritical acceptance of the dark side of this doctrine: the idea that socialism can be given to the masses by a single Party exercising full control of the state apparatus. I seek here to interrogate this intention critically. My hope is that my Marxist comrades will reexamine their own investment in this policy—whether it is conscious or unconscious. And that my conservative and liberal medical freedom comrades will see from this that Marxism is not necessarily totalitarian.
Let’s start by discussing two quotes, both written shortly before the October 25th insurrection. After I present each individually, I will add comments about what I see as hints of a Blanquist rather than Marxist policy for the structure of the new regime: single-party substitutionalism, substituting the vanguard for the masses, vs., if at all possible, opening up the revolutionary regime to mass democratic participation, via the establishment of a multi-party soviet democracy.
Here is the first one, which Lenin wrote in August-September 1917:
By educating the workers' party, Marxism educates the vanguard of the proletariat, capable of assuming power and leading the whole people to socialism, of directing and organizing the new system, of being the teacher, the guide, the leader of all the working and exploited people in organizing their social life without the bourgeoisie and against the bourgeoisie. By contrast, the opportunism now prevailing trains the members of the workers' party to be the representatives of the better-paid workers, who lose touch with the masses, "get along" fairly well under capitalism, and sell their birthright for a mass of pottage, i.e., renounce their role as revolutionary leaders of the people against the bourgeoisie"—Lenin, State and Revolution, Chapter 2, "The Experience of 1848-51", section 1, "The Eve of the Revolution".
And here is the second passage, this one from Can the Bolsheviks Retain Power, which Lenin finished at the beginning of October 1917:
Since the 1905 revolution, Russia has been governed by 130,000 landowners, who have perpetrated endless violence against 150,000,000 people, heaped unconstrained abuse upon them, and condemned the vast majority to inhuman toil and semi-starvation.
Yet we are told that the 240,000 members of the Bolshevik Party will not be able to govern Russia, govern her in the interests of the poor and against the rich. These 240,000 are already backed by no less than a million votes of the adult population, for this is precisely the proportion between the number of Party members and the number of votes cast for the Party that has been established by the experience of Europe and the experience of Russia as shown, for example, by the elections to the Petrograd City Council last August. We therefore already have a "state apparatus" of one million people devoted to the socialist state for the sake of high ideals and not for the sake of a fat sum received on the 20th of every month.
In addition to that we have a "magic way" to enlarge our state apparatus tenfold at once, at one stroke, a way which no capitalist state ever possessed or could possess. This magic way is to draw the working people, to draw the poor, into the daily work of state administration.
To explain how easy it will be to employ this magic way and how faultlessly it will operate, let us take the simplest and most striking example possible.
In and of itself, for revolutionary socialists, there is little to object to here. Of course, after the insurrection, the vanguard will certainly need to continue to teach, guide, and lead the working class. Hopefully, within a democratic structure, the working class will understand the need to accept such leadership, alongside and enriched by their own democratic empowerment and activity, and inclusion in the process of democratic socialist decision-making.
And if indeed, as they seemed to be threatening to do, the other, more opportunist workers’ parties would balk at the offer, by the Bolsheviks, of forming a coalition with the latter to rule Russia, where the Bolsheviks had won a majority, then, yes, of course, the Bolsheviks would have to assume “full state power” within the new soviet regime.
What is disturbing, however, in these passages, is the idea that this vanguard, apparently all by itself, should assume “power...[and] and direct and organize “the new system.’ To me, this sounds like the Blanquist substitutionalism that Trotsky and Luxemburg had identified in Lenin’s worldview by the first half of the 1900’s decade.
In their pamphlets written after the split in the RDSLP, Our Political Tasks, and Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy, Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg noted this substitutionalist tendency, and Lenin’s, in his What is to Be Done? and his fellow Iskra editors’ seeming ignorance or indifference to the need for revolutionary intellectuals to encourage the “democratic activity” of the workers in politics. This was an omen, which however most Marxists ignore because of the fact that both pamphlets incorrectly opposed Lenin’s advocacy of centralism.
The Views of Petr Tkachev: Lenin’s Blanquist Forerunner
Let us now compare these problematic passages with the views of Russian Blanquist Petr Nikitch Tkachev. First, however, let us establish the fact that Lenin consciously was a follower of Tkachev’s views, not only in Lenin’s further development—all to the good--of Tkachev’s advocacy of party centralism into the organizational principle of democratic centralism. He also seems to have been a fan of Tkachev’s totalitarian substitutionalism. This is an account from Bonch-Brueyvich, the “unofficial librarian” of a library of revolutionary literature in Geneva that Lenin frequented: Lenin paid “particular attention to Tkachev, remarking that this writer was closer to our viewpoint than any of the other” revolutionary authors that he read there. Bonch-Bruyevich concludes his memoir, “I think that Vladimir Illyich’s research helped him when the proletariat seized power and our Party took over the administration of the country.”i
Now, since this is hearsay and speculation, it is not by any means conclusive proof that Lenin valued not just Tkachev’s party centralism, but also, his totalitarian views on how the new regime should be structured (and staffed). But it is highly suggestive that Lenin accepted both of Tkachev’s legacies.
And now let’s compare a passage from Tkachev’s essay, “Rising Forces”:
The revolutionary minority, having freed the people from the yoke which had oppressed them and from the fear and terror of the old regime ... directs[force] shrewdly toward the destruction of the enemies of the revolution…. Putting revolutionary ideas into effect not only does not contradict the true needs of the people but engenders them with the spirit of communal solidarity which will, in turn, interpenetrate the whole social structure. This will occur in such a way that there will not be the slightest basis for assuming that the people would refuse their passive support for the revolutionaries. [my emphasis--TS]ii
Again, I will grant you, this does not represent conclusive proof of a Blanquist nature of Lenin’s intentions for the new regime. But this “elective affinity” of Lenin’s language with Tkachev’s, is disturbing.
What is even more disturbing is the omissions, and the questions begged, by these passages. As follows:
Exactly in what context will the Marxist workers party be set, so that it might serve as the ‘teacher, the guide, the leader?”
Is Lenin willing to take the risk that the workers may not want the workers party to serve this roll, because they have been co-opted by opportunism?
Will they be given the choice, within a pluralistic soviet party system, as to whether they wish to be led by a Marxist, or an opportunist workers party?
Is Lenin saying the Marxist party must fight for this role within such a pluralistic structure? Or is he saying the Marxist party, as it leads the workers during the insurrection, must create a structure where the workers will be made an offer they cannot be allowed to refuse?
Does Lenin propose that the role of the mass of the, non-vanguard workers in the new regime to be a passive one, or, at most, to serve as the “administrative”, bureaucratic extensions, the eyes, ears, feet and hands, of the vanguard? Or does he intend to have the vanguardsee as its role not just to guide, lead, teach, and direct, but encourage the democratic self-activation into active politics of the working class?
We have seen evidence that all these questions would have been answered by Lenin in accordance with Blanquist, rather than democratic Marxist doctrine. We have seen this evidence in the writings of the author who had perhaps the most important intellectual influence upon Lenin: Petr Tkachev. And we have seen it among the criticisms leveled against Lenin’s What is to Be Done by Luxemburg and Trotsky.
Finally, we see the actual policies carried out on Lenin’s insistence, once the Bolsheviks came to power, including the following:
Lenin’s insistence that the insurrection be carried out before the meeting of the Soviet Congress.
His refusal to permit Kamenev and other moderates to engage meaningfully in negotiations to create a multiparty, proportionally representative socialist coalition government: but instead a government that was overwhelmingly Bolshevik in composition.
The increasing refusal of Lenin’s Sovnarkum to be accountable to the directives of the Soviet.
The Bolsheviks’ policy, carried out over and over again, to suppress opponent parties on the basis of the ideology of collective punishment for the actions of individual members.iii
Even worse was the suppression of the Bolsheviks’ former primary governmental partner, the Left SR’s. The assassination of the German ambassador, Count Mirbach, was carried out by only two Left Srs, without the foreknowledge of other members of that Party. Yet the entire Party was suppressed. Even more disturbing: one of the assassins was welcomed into the Bolshevik Party just a few years later. This raises the question—was this the first time he became a Bolshevik? Or was it rather the case that he was an operative who had infiltrated the Left SR’s in order to carry out the, false-flag, assassination?iv.
All these doubts and unanswered questions do not conclusively prove anything. What they should do, however, is to put all us Marxists on guard that Lenin intended to create a socialist workers-democratic regime when the Bolsheviks seized power. Was the Bolsheviks’ failure to do so, the fault of all the other parties: and therefore, that we should consider Lenin blameless? Or was this, as is far more likely, deliberately intended?
And as far as non-Marxist medical freedom activists are concerned, my doubts and questions, I hope, might lead you to question the idea that socialist revolution must inevitably lead to totalitarianism. It may indeed, if the lead revolutionary in question deliberately (and foolishly) intends this outcome. But perhaps not, if he, she, or better yet, we, have democratic intentions.
What Was the Motivation(s)? Finding “a Magic Way”—or Petit Bourgeois Magical Thinking?
Blanquist totalitarianism is understandable in the context in which Lenin's idol, Petr Nikitch Tkachev, found himself in the 1870s. There was very little of a working class so far. Most of the Russian people were backward, isolated, patriarchal, reverently religious and traditionalist peasants. To encourage such people to engage in democratic self-activity seemed ridiculous and futile. the intellectuals would have to carry the burden of launching the new society, all by themselves.v
But when Lenin starts his career as a revolutionary, the Russian proletariat, though still tied to the village, It does have the potential to self-activate democratically, and Marxists like Plekhanov, Axelrod, and Trotsky understand this.
Why didn't Lenin?
I believe Trotsky is correct to hint, in his 1904 pamphlet, Our Political Tasks, that Lenin's Jacobinism-Blanquism, along side the Economists' reformism, were just two peas in the same, petit-bourgeois pod. On the one hand, the Economists unconsciously seek to maintain their privileges by purely collaborating with the bourgeois revolution (Unfortunately, as Trotsky and Parvus understood, the bourgeois revolution was not going to happen unless the proletariat took it over and drove it onto the tracks of the "permanent," beginning-of-the-socialist revolution, And this could only come about via the intellectuals’ education of the workers to socialist consciousness, as both Kautsky and Lenin and his fellow Iskra=ites argued,)
On the other hand, by promoting a one party totalitarianism, Lenin unconsciously hoped to secure his own middle-class privileges, by creating a "socialist" state ruled over by a bureaucratic caste. Like the priestly caste ruling over the Asian bureaucratic mode of production, this new caste of the “vanguard” would secure its caste privilege by its monopoly of specialized knowledge. The knowledge monopolized by the old priestly caste, was the science of socialism. The knowledge monopolized by this vanguard caste, would be a version, revised-to-order, of Marxian socialist consciousness and scientific socialism. The only problem with this conception is that Marx would never have gone along with it. Socialist consciousness must become the consciousness of the entire class, within a democratic political process—not the private property of a caste. But as I’ve written elsewhere, this group-narcissist, petit bourgeois conception of socialist consciousness, and science, is the basis for much of the scientism and dogmatism within the Marxist movement today, making it prone to class collaboration with Covid repression. If we have a monopoly on the science of socialism, then the (fatuous) claim of Anthony Fauci that he personally embodies science (without presenting any evidence for safety or effectivity), can be credited as good coin.
It may be strange to read here that Lenin’s Blanquism was idealist, for those accustomed to reading, in Lenin’s State and Revolution, his scathing critiques of the idealist methodology of reformists, who believe that the bourgeois State can reconcile the contradictions of class society from on high. But in his 1904 pamphlet, Our Political Tasks, Trotsky makes two references to Lenin and the Iskra-ites idealism. Both are in response to Lenin’s advocacy of party centralism and education of the workers by party intellectuals. This animus, Trotsky eventually, and correctly, rejected. But the critique is nevertheless interesting to note. In Part III, “Organizational Questions,” in the section, “Discipline and Centralism,” and against what Trotsky considers the Iskra-ites’ fetishism of discipline, he writes,
If on the road to this objective [party unity] the “minority” [the Mensheviks, to which faction Trotsky belonged at the time] has had to damage what the “majority” [Lenin’s Bolsheviks] calls discipline, all that remains is to draw the conclusion: perish this “discipline” which crushes the vital interests of the movement! In any case, “history” will take care of it. For unlike the Yekaterinoslav Committee, she does not hold to the idealist principle: “Perish the world – so long as discipline survives!”
In Part IV, “Jacobinism and Social Democracy,” after previously presenting Lenin’s self-declared ties to Jacobinism in What is to be Done, Trotsky critiques what he considers to be Lenin’s over emphasis upon of the importance of the party intellectuals having the correct ideas, and injecting them into the consciousness of the working class: “The Jacobins were pure idealists; they were ‘the first’ to recognise the ‘principles of universal morality.’ They believed in the absolute strength of the Idea, of Truth.”vi
Rosa Luxemburg offered a similar critique in her pamhlet, written in the same year, Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy. At its conclusion, Luxemburg criticizes Lenin for his Fichtean celebration of the Will of the Absolute Ego, taking up residence in the dogmatically pure guardianship of an omniscient and omnipotent Central Committee in order to protect so promising and vigorous a labor movement against any misstep….” Here, Luxemburg recognizes the “the symptoms of …subjectivism“
Again, we are far more interested in the basis these critiques of Lenin’s centralism pose as potential critique of Lenin’s later state totalitarianism in 1917. They do offer a very powerful critique, which Trotsky avered, but Luxemburg further developed with her pamphlet, which Paul Levi psothumously published, The Russian Revolution. At the end of Organizational Questions, Luxemburg is prophetic: “the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee.” In his own pamphlet, Trotsky writes in similar, prophetic fashion, about the future Soviet state under Lenin’s Blanquist leadership,
In the internal politics of the party these methods lead ... to the party organisation ‘substituting’ itself for the party, the central committee substituting itself for the party organisation, and finally the dictator substituting himself for the central committee.
Luxemburg and Trotsky are correct in citing these dangers posed by party centralism —a loss of awareness of the need to empower the masses’ own self-activity, as well as party autocracy. The latter was manifest more than once within the Bolshevik Party, as a result of Lenin’s repeated bending of the rules of democratic centralism. Most egregious was his ramming through party channels of approval for the signing of the Brest Litovsk Treaty, which Yuri Felshtinsky has discussed in detail, and also speculated that in his severe wire-pulling, of which Trotsky even complained that Lenin had robbed the rest of the Bolsheviks of their Party, Lenin may not have had the best of motives. Felshtinsky shows that Lenin wanted the Treaty signed at any cost, in order to prevent being forced to concede leadership the World Revolution to the Spartakusbund! vii
But we must recognize that centralism, with its dangers, is an absolutely necessary organizational principle. To get rid of it, in order to eliminate such dangers, is like the basic non-principle of anarchism/libertarianism: it is through the state, the organization, the constitution, political parties, by which we are oppressed by the capitalists. Therefore, we will have no more states, organizations, constitutions, or political parties! Yet how much more dangerous is the other darker, totalitarian side of Blanquism? We need the centralist side—we most certainly do not need its totalitarianism.
And if centralism has a “idealist”, “subjectivist” basis, how much more so, the idea the idea that a small group of revolutionaries can run an entire society from on high? One need only look at Lenin’s own critique of reformism’s pretensions of using the Bourgeois state to reconcile the contradictions of class society from on high! What is so different about a situation in which these “proletarian dictators” purport to resolve the problems of the post-insurrectional society?! It remains a class society. How then can a revolutionary State, which does not expand participatory rights to include the self empowerment of at least the entire working class, do any better? Yet this is in line both with Tkachev’s notion that the state, once freed of its bourgeois-societal integument, is an instrument, through which, this minority can use “force” to create “communism,”viii and Lenin’s conception, as quoted above, that the workers in their soviets present a “magic way” that the administration of this force may be extended.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks would argue the proposition that the other socialist parties did not really represent the masses, because they were opportunist. They represented the better off workers and the trade union aristocracy.
And this indeed may be true. But to it, we must pose Luxemburg’s 1904 criticism that the masses must be left to make their own errors, if they are to achieve a fully realized version of genuine socialist consciousness. In addition, we must also seriously consider the possibility that these other parties, at least individuals within them (one thinks of Martov and Steinberg, especially), despite their deviations hither and thither, might just be able to think about and present ideas and policies that might further rather than hinder the Revolution, and help the majority, Marxist party become more sensitive to the needs and aspirations of the masses.
Against the proposition that, among the socialist parties, only the Bolsheviks were imbued with Marxist consciousness, guarding them from opportunism, and thus possessed the right to rule autocratically, we must counterpoise the critique waged by Luxemburg and Trotsky—that this view is idealist. It has its roots in Tchakev’s Blanquism-Jacobinism, which he defended in response to Lavrov’s similar critique. No matter what knowledge a party possesses, as Lord Acton says, “power corrupts, and corrupts absolutely.” To this, Tchakev responded,
What are you frightened of? What right do you have to think that this minority—partly due to its social position, partly because of its ideals [my emphasis—TS], and completely dedicated to the people’s interest—by seizing power in its hands would suddenly be transformed into a popular tyranny?
You claim: all power corrupts men. But where do you get the idea that leaders, in seizing power, are better men before they seize power than afterwards? Read their biographies and you get the opposite impression. Robespierre, a member of the Convention, the omnipotent ruler of the destinies of France, and Robespierre, the unknown provincial lawyer, were one and the same person. Power in no way made the slightest change in Robespierre’s moral character or his ideals and intentions, or even in his conduct in his own home.ix
This is so obviously naive. Clearly, Tkachev has concluded, from idealized histories of the Jacobins, that Robespierre lived up to his title of “The Incorrutpible.” But Daniel Guerin’s work, Class Struggles in the First French Republic, belies this delusion. Robespierre was a petit bourgeois politician who favored, in corrupt fashion, the war Industriesi Power presented opportunities he did not refuse.
Lenin’s, and unfortunately, Trotsky’s, belief that the Bolsheviks could rule Russia autocratically, was based on an idealist delusion, fueld by their outrage against the policy of class collaboration of the other socialist parties, it is true—but also, selfish, egoistic motives. As the old saying about the genie goes, however, "be careful what you wish for." By building such a totalitarian society, both Lenin and Trotsky (once he had joined the Bolsheviks, he gave up his criticisms of Lenin’s Jacobinism, unfortunately, and became steeped in filial piety) only secured their own doom (although, in the meantime, Trotsky got a landed estate out of the deal, according to Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy!) They thereby created their own Caliban and gravedigger: Stalin, who had them both murdered. We all know about the icepick that went into Trotsky's head. Much less known is the poison that Stalin ordered Genrich Grigorivich Yagoda, at the time the 2nd deputy Chairma of the GPU, to have administered to Lenin.x
It is not human nature in general, as the conservatives incessantly argue, that the first immediate impulse of human beings is to seek to carve out their own fiefdom. But it is all too often the impulse of particularly middle class human beings to do so, as Wilhelm Reich argued in the Mass Psychology of Fascism, and Erich Fromm in his Escape from Freedom. In the past few years, trying to work with arrogant conservative libertarian would-be autocrats and demoralized, egotistic ex-Greens within the medical freedom movement, this truth has become all too readily apparent. Everybody seems to either want to boss other people around, or masochistically put the former on a pedestal.
Can anyone, with a straight face, propose that Lenin, and then Trotsky, were immune from these temptations to seek absolute power, and abuse it for their own feeling of security and advantage? Because of his “ideals”, his “complete dedication to the people’s interest”? Or was it perhaps his grasp of scientific socialism that you think immunized him? Then you are just as naive as Petr Tkachev, when he took at face value the notion that Robespierre really was “incorruptible”!
Or do you think that Lenin’s allegiance to the principle of democratic centralism ensured his moral integrity? Well, in the first place, while we greatly thank him for this tremendous contribution to the science of revolution, as a curb against the very corruption to which he and Trotsky fell prey, the fact is that, in his tendency toward megalomania, he violated this principle repeatedly: most egregiously, when he rammed through passage of the Brest Litovsk Treaty.
Far more importantly, in the second place, democratic centralism is useless unless, immediately before, during, and after the insurrection, it is extended and elaborated to become the political principle for all of society. in order to freely activate the subjective agency of the masses to run their own lives, as envisioned by Marx, Engels, and the rest of the Communist League in 1847, when they wrote
[Our goal is] “a democratic State wherein each party would be able by word or in writing to win a majority over to its ideas…. We are not among those communists who are out to destroy personal liberty, who wish to turn the world into one huge barrack or into a gigantic workhouse. . . . We have no desire to exchange freedom for equality. We are convinced … that in no social order will personal freedom be so assured as in a society based upon communal ownership.”xii ,
Thus democratic centralism realizes not only Marx and Engel’s vision, but also, it is a realization, on a higher plane, of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract: which originally inspired the Jacobins and the Blanquists. The people come together, democratically, and on a regular basis, with full right of recall, to elect their delegates, and select the party(ies) they believe should win the right to carry out their “General Will”, so the masses decide what the laws of their society shall be: but now based upon their collective ownership of the means of production.
This totalitarian side of Blanquism, born out of an unconscious, petit bourgeois desire to secure privilege, was largely responsible for the deaths of these great men, and a whole lot of other original Bolsheviks, the bureaucratization and then finally the collapse of the Soviet Union
Notes:
iBronch-Bruyvich, Selected Works in Three Volumes, vol. II, p. 314-316Moscow, 1961. cf. Albert L. Weeks, The First Bolshevik: A Political Biography of Peter Tkachev, NYU Press, 1968, p. 5.
iiTkachev, Sochineniya (Essays), 1932, Vol. III, p. 266. cf. Weeks, pp. 93-94.
iii Tim Wohlforth, “Two Souls of Leninism,” Against the Current, 4-5.
iv Robert Payne, The Life and Death of Lenin, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964, Chapter, “The Ice is Broken”, secion,“The Corruptions of Power”, pp. 461-466
v Isaac Deutscher very concisely summarizes this situation in the beginning of the first volume of his three-volume biography of Trotsky, titled The Prophet Armed.
vihttps://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1904/tasks
viiYuri Feshtinsky, Lenin, Trotsky, German, and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk: The Collapse of the World Revolution, November 1917-November 1918. Russell Enterprises, 2012.
xiiiPetr Tkachev, Sochineniya, II, 51, Cf. Weeks, pp. 82-83. Tkachev expresses this in an essay where he speaks of the “strong” and the “weak” members of society, in language strikingly similar to the Social Darwinists and Nietzsche, the language of the nihilist characters in Dostoevsky’s novels, such as Rodion Raskolnikov and Ivan Karamazov, of the Leopold and Loeb-like characters in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, or the character Kathleen in Edvard Dmytryk’s film Give Us This Day, who urges the protagonist, Geremio to go beyond the morality of “good and bad”, come away with her, abandon his family and working class comrades, and adopt the anti-morality of the “strong vs. the weak.”
ix Tkachev, “Revolution and State”, Nabat, nos. 2-3, reprinted in Sochineniya, III, 246-57. cf. Weeks, ibid. p. 84-85
xDaniel Guerin, Class Struggles in the First French Republic: Bourgeois and Bras nus, 1793-1795. Pluto, 1977.
xiThe truth of this is explored by Trotsky in his biography of Stalin, and further documented by Robert Payne in his The Life and Death of Lenin.
xii the Kommuniste Zeitschrifte, (Journal of the Communist League) September 1847.