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

2 David Shub, Lenin: A Biography , Penguin Books, 1948, p.91

3 Ironically, the Tsarist Ministry of the Interior’s attitude was not very different from Lenin’s after October 1917. Although the Bolsheviks sought to raise literacy levels amongst the peasantry they did not do so in order to bring literature to the masses, much less to promote critical thinking. “The purpose of ‘liquidate illiteracy’”, said Lenin in 1922, “is only that every peasant should be able to read by himself, without help, our decrees, orders and proclamations. The aim is completely practical. No more” (quoted in Robert Conquest, Lenin , Fontana Modern Masters, 1972, p.30).

4 Maureen Perrie, The Agrarian Policy of the Russian Socialist-Revolutionary Party: From its Origins through the Revolution of 1905 - 07, Cambridge University Press, 1976, p.9

5 For Sergei Semenov see Figes, Ibid, pp.233-38

6 The intervention of Chase Manhattan Bank in the Zaptatista uprising at Chiapas in January 1994 and Roett’s injunction that the Mexican government crush the rebellion are documented at http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/46/025.html

7 Subcommandante Marcos’ speech quoted in Staughton Lynd and Andrej Grubacic, Wobblies and Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism and Radical History , PM Press, 2008, p.8

8 Cliff, Ibid, p.87

9 Shub, Ibid, p.75

10 V.I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done? , Progress Publishers, 1947 (first published 1902), p.31, taken from Volume 5 of the English edition of Lenin’s Collected Works , Progress Publishers.

11 Lenin, Ibid, p.78. Although Lenin is brutally clear in What Is To Be Done? about the inadequacy of the working class as an independent force in the formulation of a socialist alternative to capitalism, some of his earlier work in the 1890s–when he was, for the first and only time in his career, personally engaged in grass-roots industrial struggle–indicate otherwise. In his 1899 “On Strikes”, he wrote, “Every strike brings thoughts of socialism forcibly to the worker’s mind […] A strike teaches workers to understand what the strength of the employers and the strength of the workers consists in; it teaches them to not to think of their own employer alone and not of their own immediate workmates alone but of all the employers, the whole class of capitalist and the whole class of workers. A strike, moreover, opens the eyes of the workers to the nature, not only of the capitalists, but of the government and the laws as well”. This was essentially the argument of “On Agitation” and those, like Martov, who had taken this strategy to the Marxist Study Groups of the 1890s and turned them into effective agitational bodies leading industrial actions. At the time Lenin saw its efficacy, but once in exile in Switzerland he seems to have lost touch with the complex reality of working-class struggle and regressed to the Marxist dogmatism of his earlier days.

12 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875 - 1914, Cardinal, 1987, p.298

13 Conquest, Ibid, p.37

14 Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age , Polity Press, 2015, p.15

15 For an examination of one particular Occupy action, and how it creatively used social media to generate publicity and support, see my article for the Institute of Employment Rights (IER) on OccupySussex, in which students at Sussex University occupied a campus building to protest the privatisation of the facilities provided by the campus and the transfer of the employees providing them to the private sector http://www.ier.org.uk/blog/privatisation-and-%E2%80%98pop-unions%E2%80%99-occupy-sussex-fights

16 http://www.redpepper.org.uk/the-case-for-radical-modernity/

17 Castells, Ibid, p.7

18 Lih, Ibid, p.65

19 The dramatic story of the Second Congress of the RSDLP has been translated into film, TV and theatre. Snippets of what is presumably meant to be the Congress are portrayed in the film Nicholas and Alexandra (1971). An entire episode of Fall of Eagles , the epic 1974 BBC historical drama about the fall of the pre-WWI European dynasties, written by the socialist playwright Trevor Griffiths, was devoted to the Congress, with Patrick Stewart as Lenin, Michael Kitchen as Trotsky and Edward Wilson as Martov.

20 Getzler, Ibid, p.68

21 Getzler, Ibid, p.70

22 Martov, Second Congress, quoted in Abraham Ascher (Editor), The Mensheviks in the Russian Revolution , Thames and Hudson, 1976, p.47

23 Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography , Pan, 2000, p.155

24 Theodore Dan, The Origins of Bolshevism , Schocken Books, 1964 (originally published in Russian 1944), p.244

25 Pavel Axelrod, “The Unification of Russian Social Democracy and its Tasks”, Iskra No 55, December 1903, p.15

26 The Mensheviks in the Russian Revolution , “Documents of Revolution” series, edited by Abraham Ascher, Thames and Hudson, 1976, p.11

27 Irving Howe, Trotsky , Fontana Modern Masters, 1974, p.22. An elegantly written, concise and insightful introduction to Trotsky’s life and politics. In the 1930s Howe was a gifted young Trotskyist who had many bruising encounters with the Stalinists of the CPUSA at City College, New York. In later years he created the democratic socialist magazine Dissent and wrote fine literary and social history, including World of our Fathers , a massive and sensitive recreation of the life experiences and cultural world of Eastern European and Russian Jews who settled in America (mainly New York’s Lower East Side) between 1880 and 1920. After 1917 there was an influx of Mensheviks fleeing the persecution of the Bolsheviks, many of whom then became active in the American trade union movement. The best biography of Howe is Gerald Sorin, Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent , NYU Press, 2005.

28 The entire text of Luxemburg’s article is at https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1904/questions-rsd/ch01.htm

29 Rosa Luxemburg, Leninism or Marxism?, I.L.P publications, 1935 (first published 1904), p.14

1 Cliff, Ibid, p.119

2 V.I. Lenin, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back , Progress Publishers, 1948, p.28

3 Cliff, Ibid, p.129

4 Cliff, Ibid, p.130

5 Pavel Axelrod, Letter to RSDLP organizations, November 1904, reprinted in Ascher, Ibid, p.53-56

6 George Gapon, The Story of My Life , New York, 1906, p.144

7 Englert, Ibid

8 Figes, Ibid, p.182

9 Viktor Chernov, Revoluyutsionnaya Rossiya No 67, May 1905, p.3

10 Perrie, Ibid, p.108

11 Baruch Knei-Paz, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky , Oxford University Press, 1978, p.53. Knei-Paz’s work is in my opinion the most considerable and interesting examination of Trotsky as a writer and thinker. Ernest Mandel dismissed Knei-Paz’s scrupulously fair and comprehensive work because of his “failure to understand Trotsky’s more daring dialectical combinations” (Mandel, Trotsky: A Study in the Dynamic of His Thought , NLB, 1979, p.150), a common problem with daring dialectical combinations.

12 Liebman, Ibid, p.87

13 Cliff, Ibid, p.161

14 Liebman, Ibid, p.88

15 Liebman, Ibid, p.85

16 Cliff, Ibid, p.230

17 Carr, Ibid, p.59

18 Lenin, Collected Works , Vol. 8, p.325, cited in Shub, Ibid, p.102

19 In a priceless comment, Tony Cliff concludes the 1905 Revolution failed “in spite of Lenin’s correct tactics and strategy” because “the proletariat was insufficiently developed”. But if this were so should not Lenin have taken it into account when formulating his tactics and strategy? Cliff, Ibid, p.234