John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

After Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” in 1956 and the acknowledgement of Stalin’s crimes, the myth of the Soviet Union took a severe blow. The New Left which emerged in the early 1960s drew intellectual sustenance from a diverse range of thinkers, such as the neo-Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, the sociologist C. Wright Mills, the cultural theorist Stuart Hall, and E.P. Thompson. In 1959 Thompson described this new young generation of leftists as a

generation which never looked upon the Soviet Union as a weak but heroic Workers’ State; but rather as the nation of the Great Purges and Stalingrad, of Stalin’s Byzantine Birthday and of Khruschev’s Secret Speech; as the vast military and industrial power which repressed the Hungarian Rising and threw the first Sputniks into space […] The young people are enthusiastic enough. But their enthusiasm is not for the Party, or the Movement, or the established Political Leaders […] They prefer the amateur organisation and amateurish platforms of CND to the manner of the left wing professional. 24

In the 1960s and 1970s Marxism and Leninism–sometimes enmeshed in the new quasi-religious cult of Maoism–underwent an unexpected intellectual resurgence, at least amongst the student and academic left. But it had a limited impact on the labour and trade union movement. The main reason for the failure of the 1960s New Left to sustain itself was its inability to understand or connect to working-class struggles. In 1968-69 it seemed for a brief moment that a genuine alliance between the radical elements of the New Left and the trade union movement, especially in France and Italy, might emerge. But it was not to be. The unions had more realistic goals than revolution in mind and the New Left preferred its social and intellectual wonderland.

By the end of the 1960s New Left thinking had bifurcated. On one side there was the beginning of Cultural Theory and “the long march through the institutions”, a march that usually ended up in the tutor’s common room and a villa on Lake Como. On the other, in reaction to this, there was a reassertion of a heavily intellectualised Marxism that reproduced the worst aspects of Leninism under the guise of Structuralism. In Britain the leading lights of the New Left Review produced long, scintillating and insightful essays on British Labour and British culture, skewering and damning both, but never turned their analytical weapons on the record of the Bolsheviks during 1917-21. Small wonder that the Whitehall-Oxbridge Stalinist E.H. Carr praised the intellectual mandarins of the NLR and strongly endorsed his friend Isaac Deutscher’s attack on George Orwell and 1984 . Orwell’s crime was not only to have seen through Leninism and the Soviet myth long before New Left intellectuals eventually woke up but to have also, in Animal Farm , delivered it an artistic death blow.

The same dynamic played out in America. The popular base and promise of the American Socialist Party was shattered by the Bolshevik Revolution and the attempts of American Leninists to re-orient the party towards Moscow and the Comintern. The American New Left of the 1960s, although it stemmed from democratic and inclusive movements such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), also took a futile detour into Leninism and Maoism, which meant it had absolutely no attraction to American workers. By 1971 SDS organisers with a base in the working class, such as Jack Newfield, could write with justification, “in its Weathermen, Panther (White) and Yippee incarnations, the New Left seems anti-democratic, terroristic, dogmatic, stoned on rhetoric and badly disconnected from everyday reality”. 25

At the same time the libertarians of the European left, such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit, went their own way. In Obsolete Communism: The Left Wing Alternative (1968) Cohn-Bendit attacked the new fashion on the left to uncritically revere Lenin and Trotsky. Drawing instead from Luxemburg, Kollontai and Reich, he condemned Lenin and the Bolshevik Party as an exploiter and then a fetter on the revolutionary energies unleashed by the February 1917 Revolution. For him, October represented “the point where the action and aspiration of the masses co-incided with those of the temporarily de-Bolshevised Bolshevik Party”. He disinterred the struggles of Makhno and the Kronstadt sailors and concluded, “it was not in 1927, nor even in 1920, but in 1918 and under the personal leadership of Trotsky and Lenin that the social revolution became perverted–a fact Trotsky could never understand, simply because he himself was one of its prime architects”. 26

Yet, incredibly, Leninist theorists continue to churn out the same discredited arguments in various tomes– Lenin Reloaded , Lenin Rediscovered , Lenin Reconstructed , Unfinished Leninism , etc. Although these works vary in quality, they display the same historical blindspots, the same refusal to directly address the record of rigged Soviets, suppressed strikes, the EAD and the Cheka, and how early in the revolutionary process these appeared. Even the admirable Paul Foot, whose Red Shelley and The Vote are outstanding radical histories full of passion and intelligence, can casually mention in the latter book “The destruction of the Russian Soviets in the 1930s”, 27when the Soviets as functioning democratic organs were stone dead by 1920.

The attempted resurrection of Leninism is doomed to failure. Mass resistance to vicious austerity and galloping inequality has found expression in a variety of new movements and campaigns such as Occupy, the Indignados , Climate Camp, Comunilidad , the Bolivarian Revolution, the Arab Spring, Syriza, Podemos and the campaign to elect and re-elect Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party. These campaigns–some successful, some stalled–have all eschewed the authoritarian, top-down programmes of the traditional Leninist and/or Social Democratic Party. They have taken the path suggested by Hilary Wainwright in 2015, that of “the need to abandon purisms and single perspective politics–whether pure anarchism, pure parliamentarianism, pure syndicalism or any other one-track approach–and instead to urge a hybrid and experimental politics where collaboration is the guiding method”. 28

The strength of this kind of broad, experimental radicalism–and one reason it has had more impact than all the “revolutionary socialist” groups combined–is that it does not ground its political activity on an exclusionary and anachronistic notion of the working class. In post-industrial capitalist societies the working class is now so heavily stratified, fragmented and lacking in common social and cultural referents that the concept itself can hinder as much as liberate. This does not mean that “we are all middle-class now”. On the contrary, we are, if anything, all working-class now, if the working class is defined as the vast majority of the population outside the charmed circle of the political and economic elite–the 99% as opposed to the 1%.

Trotsky often referred to the “molecular movements” of the masses. But molecules mutate and evolve. When Murray Bookchin wrote of “class decomposition”, he meant it not solely as an economic process, nor as a process that would have a depoliticising effect, but as one that offered liberation from cultural prisons constructed by the elite. He considered that “the process of decomposition embraces not only the traditional class structure but also the patriarchal family, authoritarian modes of upbringing, the influence of religion, the institutions of the state, and the mores built around toil, renunciation, guilt and repressed sexuality”. 29If this were the end result of the dissolution of the proletariat, it could be welcomed as a necessary step towards broader social emancipation, as obviously progressive as women’s liberation or racial equality.