Lots of food for thought here.
The grim fact is that we may not be genetically programmed to live
together individually.
Such a World might be as difficult to find as...as that Land of Milk
and Honey on The Big Rock Candy Mountain.
Carl Jarvis
On 7/1/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Dilemma of Vladimir Lenin
Chris Hedges
The Dilemma of Vladimir Lenin
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
Chhris Hedges gave this talk Friday at Left Forum in New York City.
Vladimir Lenin has two legacies. One is the brilliant revolutionary
tactician. The second is Lenin the New Czar. He was, ironically, Russia’s
most fervent champion of the very thing he eradicated—revolutionary
anarchy.
His pamphlet “The State and Revolution” was an unequivocal anarchist
manifesto, with Lenin writing that “as long as there is a state there is no
freedom; when there is freedom there will be no state.” But Lenin in power,
like Leon Trotsky, was an opportunist who made promises, such as “all power
to the soviets,” that he had no intention of keeping. He employed political
terror, widespread arrests and executions to crush the autonomous,
self-governing soviets and workers committees. He led a centralized,
autocratic ruling elite. He criminalized dissent, outlawed competing
political parties, muzzled the press and instituted a system of state
capitalism that stripped workers of their autonomy and rights. He, like
Maximilien Robespierre, may have thought of himself as an idealist, but one
of his estranged comrades, Angelica Balabanova, playing on a line from
Goethe, declared that he “desired the good … but created evil.” Stalinism
was not an aberration. It was the natural heir of Leninism.
In power, as Rosa Luxemburg pointed out in “The Russian Revolution and
Leninism or Marxism?” Lenin became the enemy of democratic socialism. He
turned to the fanatic Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the newly formed
Cheka,
which during the first year of the revolution officially executed 6,300
people, which I suspect is a huge underestimate. This was the same Lenin
who
in November 1917 said: “We do not apply terror as did the French
revolutionaries who guillotined unarmed people, and I hope we shall not
apply it.” The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin warned, presciently, that Marxists
proposed to replace the capitalist with the bureaucrat. The Marxist
society,
he said, was nothing more than capitalism under centralized state
management
and it would, he said, be even more oppressive. This is why Noam Chomsky,
correctly, calls Lenin the dictator a “right-wing deviation” and a
“counter-revolutionary.”
But there is no denying Lenin’s brilliance. He redefined the political
landscape of the 20th century. Decades after the Russian Revolution, in
Spain, China, Cuba, Vietnam and South Africa oppressed peoples looked to
Lenin and the revolution for inspiration. The social inequality and
destruction of democratic institutions wrought by neoliberalism and the
corporate seizure of power in our own time give relevancy to Lenin, who was
examining many of the same questions about despotism, imperialism and
capitalism. Lenin the revolutionary has a lot to teach us. He, like John
Dewey, understood that as long as the capitalist class has control of the
means of production no real democracy will ever be possible.
Lenin was acutely aware that revolutions occur because of spontaneous
combustions that no one, including the revolutionaries, can predict. The
February 1917 revolution was, like the French storming of the Bastille, an
unexpected and unplanned popular eruption. As the hapless Alexander
Kerensky
pointed out, the Russian Revolution “came of its own accord, unengineered
by
anyone, born in the chaos of the collapse of Tsardom.” This is true for all
revolutions. The tinder is there. What sets it alight is a mystery.
The key to success—this too is true for all revolutions—is the refusal by
the police and military, as occurred in Petrograd, to restore order and
defend the old regime. Trotsky asserted that decayed regimes inevitably
elevate leaders of stunning incompetence, corruption and imbecility,
figures
like Czar Nicholas II and Donald Trump. Even the elites, in the end, do not
want to defend them. The ossified systems of governance—evidenced in the
United States by our corporate-managed elections, our dysfunctional
Congress, our commercialized press and our failed judiciary, which just
legalized gerrymandering, an updated version of Britain’s 19th-century
“rotten borough” system—are transparent puppets of the ruling cabal. Reform
through these structures is impossible. This understanding creates a huge
divide between the liberals, who hold out hope for reform—you can see them
once again foolishly investing time and energy in the Democratic Party—and
revolutionaries who seek not to placate or work within the system but to
destroy it.
Lenin, like Karl Marx, understood that revolutions were not made by the
lumpenproletariat. The lumpenproletariat are more often the enemy of
revolution and the natural ally of fascists. They gravitate to reactionary
armed vigilante groups, lured by the intoxication of violence, and build
their warped ideology around conspiracy theorists and white supremacy. We
see this among some Trump supporters and among white militias and hate
groups. Lenin had a temperamental dislike of intellectuals, but he knew
there was no other class that could shape and lead a revolutionary
movement.
This is why he relied so heavily on intellectuals such as Trotsky and Lev
Kamenev, both of whom would be liquidated by Josef Stalin.
Revolutionaries, Lenin said, must be constantly self-critical and
self-reflective. They must closely examine and learn from failures and
defeats. They must be steeped in history, philosophy and the study of
economics and culture. They must have a single-minded devotion to the
cause,
a disdain for personal security, an iron discipline and adherence to the
party hierarchy, a slavish devotion to duty, and the ability to submerge
their personalities into the group. Revolutionaries, however utopian their
ideals, must also be political realists. Lenin disdained doctrinal purity,
reminding his followers that “theory is a guide, not a Holy Writ.” He knew,
however, that most intellectuals—he and Trotsky being exceptions—lacked the
ability to act quickly and decisively. This would explain why Lenin in
power
turned increasingly to thugs such as Stalin and Yakov Sverdlov, who oversaw
the execution of the deposed czar and his family. Trotsky, for all his
brilliance as an orator and the commander of the Red Army, had little
interest in the mundane day-to-day mechanics of governing, a deficiency
that
would see Stalin push him from power, force him into exile and eventually
send a secret agent to Mexico to plunge an ice pick into his head.
Revolutions are invariably led by messianic leaders such as Cromwell and
Robespierre who have the strange combination of high ideals and, as Crane
Brinton writes, “a complete contempt for the inhibitions and principles
which serve most other men as ideals.” These revolutionary leaders are not,
Brinton points out, Plato’s philosopher-kings, but philosopher-killers.
These qualities allow them to sweep aside the moderates, who are given
nominal power after a revolution, and forge revolutionary parties into
effective machines. These qualities allow them to crush the forces of
reaction that inevitably rise up to destroy the revolutionary order. Lenin
and Trotsky had to swiftly mobilize to fight the czarist White armies and
their foreign allies on a dozen fronts shortly after taking power.
Mass uprisings, Lenin understood, provide fleeting moments that if not
seized by the revolutionary may never again occur. In these moments the
revolutionary must skillfully exploit the self-destructive delusions that
blind and paralyze the ruling elites and ride the wave of unrest to power.
Timing was all, Lenin repeated monotonously. At timing, Lenin was a master.
“There are decades when nothing happens—and there are weeks where decades
happen,” he wrote.
Lenin abhorred anarchist violence, the “propaganda of the deed.” The
anarchist assassinations of czars, princes, empresses, presidents and prime
ministers, which he dismissed as acts of neurotic self-indulgence, never
had
and never would, he pointed out, instigate a popular uprising. Terrorism,
he
wrote, quickly demoralizes those who practice it and destroys the
revolutionary group that resorts to it. He would have excoriated the
adolescent vandalism and lack of coherent organization and ideas that
define
the black bloc and antifa. Lenin called such renegade anarchists “liberals
with bombs” because they, like liberals, believed that propaganda alone, of
deed and word, would bring about radical change. As Lenin pointed out,
terrorism and violence only frightened the population, demonized and
isolated the revolutionaries and legitimated state repression. Violence was
never a substitute for mass mobilization. It was never a substitute for the
long and tedious work of building a revolutionary political party. And
without a revolutionary party, Lenin warned correctly, revolution was
impossible.
“The utter uselessness of terror is clearly shown by the experience of the
Russian revolutionary movement,” Lenin wrote, although his own brother was
executed in a failed plot to assassinate the czar. “… [I]ndividual acts of
terrorism … create only a short-lived sensation, and lead in the long run
to
an apathy, and the passive awaiting of yet another ‘sensation.’ ”
Revolutions may be made by militant minorities, but their power comes from
articulating the conscious aspirations of most of society. The obsession
with specific ruling figures, rather than the structures of repressive
power, divert attention from the most important targets. Lenin referred to
the czar as “the idiot Romanov” and told his fellow Bolsheviks he was a
person of little consequence. He would have dismissed our preoccupation
with
Donald Trump. Corporate totalitarianism with its wholesale surveillance,
endless wars, militarized police, transference of wealth upward, austerity
programs, and collapse of infrastructure and basic social services—from
education to health—ecocide, punishing debt peonage and disempowering and
impoverishment of workers all predated Trump. Mike Davis in “Prisoners of
the American Dream” illustrates how waves of state violence and repression
against the working class and the left by Democratic and Republican
administrations have effectively pre-empted the emergence of socialism.
Lenin warned that when capitalism is seriously threatened, fascism is
always
the default option, not only for the ruling elites but for the liberal
class. The liberals, who fear the radical left, become in a revolutionary
moment the revolutionary’s enemy. Lenin, like Trotsky, closely studied the
French Revolution and the Paris Commune. When the French elites could not
get the invading Prussians to destroy the Commune, they did it themselves,
leaving 30,000 dead, of whom 14,000 were executed, both men and women.
After
World War I the German minister of defense, Gustav Noske, a member of the
Social Democratic Party, organized war veterans into the Freikorps, a
right-wing militia. Noske used the militia, the antecedent of the Nazi
Party, to crush the German Revolution of 1918-19 and the Marxist Spartacist
League uprising. In doing so, the Freikorps abducted and assassinated Karl
Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg on Jan. 15, 1919. During World War II in
France, Marshal Philippe Pétain and the Vichy collaborators allied
themselves with the Nazi occupiers to thwart what they feared would be a
communist uprising.
Lenin argued that the most effective way to weaken the resolve of the
ruling
elite was to tell it exactly what to expect. This audacity and brazenness
attract the notice of state security, but it does not lead to public
hostility to the revolutionary movement; indeed it gives the movement an
allure and cachet. The revolutionary, he wrote, must make unequivocal
demands that, if met, would mean the obliteration of the current power
structure. And the revolutionary must never compromise on these demands.
The
public exposure of corrupt centers of power, including the military, saps
the confidence and credibility of the ruling elites. As a revolutionary
force gathers momentum, the ruling elites attempt to make concessions that
further weaken their credibility and strength.
Imperial powers, he saw, were especially vulnerable and fragile. They were
not self-contained, but instead depended on the exploitation of foreign
resources and foreign labor as well as on vast military machines that
drained the state of resources. Imperialism brings with it corporate
monopolies, a characteristic of the late stage of capitalism. It shifts
power away from the manufacturing class to a parasitic class of financiers,
the rentiers, whose profession, Lenin wrote, “is idleness.” The late stage
of capitalism inverts classical economics. What was considered
unproductive—the parasitism of the rentier class—becomes the real economy.
And what was considered the productive sector of the economy—labor and
industry—is treated as the parasite. The ascendancy of global speculators
is
deadly to the capitalist system, which consumes itself.
Luxemburg, who was perhaps the only contemporary Marxist that was Lenin’s
intellectual equal, foresaw the danger of Lenin’s iron rule over the party
and eventually Russia itself. She was as fierce an opponent of the
capitalist order and imperialism as Lenin, but opposed centralized
authority
and chastised Lenin’s implicit contempt for the working class. Any
revolution that justified, as Lenin did, a dictatorship, even if he
insisted
it was temporary, was dangerous. The only way to protect revolutionary
socialism from autocracy and calcification was to empower the population
through democratic institutions and freedom of expression.
She wrote:
“
Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of
one party—however numerous they may be—is no freedom at all. Freedom is
always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Not
because of any fanatical concept of “justice” but because all that is
instructive, wholesome, and purifying in political freedom depends on this
essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when “freedom”
becomes a special privilege.
Luxemburg, in this sense, was the truer revolutionary. A socialist
revolution would not be built through a self-anointed vanguard that
dominated all aspects of society and culture but through endless
experimentation, creativity, dissent, open debate, reverses and advances.
“Socialism by its very nature cannot be introduced by ukaz [edict]. … Only
unobstructed, effervescing life falls into a thousand new forms and
improvisations, brings to light a creative force, itself corrects all
mistaken attempts.”
She went on:
“
But with the repression of political life in the land as a whole, life in
the Soviets must also become more and more crippled. Without general
elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a
free struggle of opinion, life dies in every public institution, becomes a
mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active
element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of
inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. Among them
in
reality only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading and an elite of the
working class is invited from time to time to meetings where they are to
applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions
unanimously—at bottom, then, a clique affair—a dictatorship, to be sure,
not
however of the proletariat, but only a handful of politicians. … Such
conditions must inevitably cause a brutalization of public life: attempted
assassinations, shooting of hostages, etc.
Leninists, of course, will argue that the authoritarian tools Lenin and
Trotsky used to build and protect the Soviet state were essential, that
without them the revolution would have been destroyed. We cannot glibly
dismiss this analysis, given the very real existential threats faced by the
new revolutionary order and the multiplicity of forces arrayed against it.
Bakunin and the anarchists may have been correct in their analysis of the
dangers inherent in a centralized Bolshevik state, but then what? They do
not offer, to me, convincing solutions but instead present dreamy
platitudes
about voluntary cooperation and the federalism of communes.
History has amply illustrated that if there is no revolutionary party, or
if
a revolutionary party is destroyed, the forces of reaction triumph. We need
only to look at the rise to power of the French general Louis-Eugène
Cavaignac, who crushed the 1848 uprising in Paris; Louis Napoleon; the
German general Wilhelm Groener, who brutally put down the popular uprisings
following the country’s defeat in World War I; Benito Mussolini; Adolf
Hitler; and in our own era Suharto and Augusto Pinochet. The old czarist
generals, starting with Lavr Kornilov, who a fellow general said was a man
with “the heart of a lion, brains of a sheep,” were preparing, backed by
their Western allies, to pounce on the new revolutionary order and snuff it
out.
But we can ask if the cost Lenin imposed is worth it. If we must create
mirror images of autocracy and terror to endure, then we are no better than
the monsters we sought to slay. Luxemburg was right: The ends never justify
the means. Those who go down that road, who cast all morality aside, as
Lenin did, do not come back, and there is some evidence that as Lenin
neared
the end of his life he was revolted by his creation. “You think you are
driving the machine, and yet it’s driving you and suddenly other hands than
yours are on the wheel,” he lamented.
Perhaps Lenin’s greatest legacy is his political realism, his hatred of
dogmatisms and his meticulous study of power. If we do not understand power
and how it works, we are doomed. Che Guevara’s belief in his own
propaganda—the doctrine of foquismo, which argues that revolution is
ignited
by small, armed rebel bands—not only led to his own death in Bolivia but a
series of failed uprisings in Latin America and Africa and the foolish
decision by the leaders of Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, the
largest anti-war movement in the United States during the Vietnam War, to
implode itself to form its own foco, the Weather Underground. We can learn
much from Lenin the revolutionary about what to do, and much from Lenin the
dictator about what not to do. Lenin would have insisted we do so.
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist,
a
New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree
program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers…
Chris Hedges
