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

Lenin was not alone amongst Iskra ’s editors in wanting a united Russian Marxist party with a consistent message and a centralised leadership to direct the strands of activity within the Empire. With the ever-present threat of the Okhrana, it made sense that the party’s Central Organ be small and based abroad. But Lenin pushed further into centralisation with his proposal that the Local Committees of the party should be composed exclusively of “fully convinced Social Democrats who should devote themselves entirely to Social Democratic activities”. There should be no part-time members or those who worked for a living elsewhere. These stable mini-centres should direct all other subordinate bodies (factory branches, discussion circles, literary circles) and their decisions should be binding on those bodies. No one but the full-time professional revolutionaries would set policy.

This was the Ur-text of the Vanguard Party–a concept which Eric Hobsbawm rightly called “Lenin’s formidable contribution to Twentieth century politics”. 12He meant it positively, but the concept of the Vanguard Party was one of the most disastrous things ever to befall the socialist ideal, one reason it was opposed from the start by most Russian socialists. They saw immediately that Lenin’s plan was a radical departure from the large and growing socialist parties of Europe, most of which were formed between 1885 and 1905, and which for all their flaws were organically rooted in the working class and the trade unions.

Reflecting Germany’s position as the new industrial powerhouse of Europe, the largest and most significant was the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). By 1914 it had over one million members and an entire support structure for them–libraries, choirs, youth clubs, crèches, health benefits, financial loans, occupational training, etc. Even Finland’s Socialist Party, formed in 1899, followed the model of the German SPD, despite Finland being a territory of Imperial Russia. The Belgian Labour Party, formed in 1885, called the first general strike in European history in 1893 to demand universal male suffrage. Its victory meant that by 1911 it had grown to 276,000 members and was a major force in Belgian politics. By 1904 the Italian Socialist Party, created in 1892, had secured a fifth of the national vote. Even the United States had a mass socialist party with roots in the trade unions and a popular leader, Eugene V. Debs. In Australia a reformist labour (but not socialist) party formed the federal government in 1912.

The picture was not uniform. Although the German SPD was relatively united, Italian and French socialists were torn between syndicalism and parliamentarianism. The leadership of the French Socialist Party was contested by the passionate syndicalist Jules Guesde and the radical parliamentarian Jean Jaures. The British Labour Party, founded in 1906 and not to adopt any kind of socialist creed until 1918, emerged over decades out of the cooperative movement, Chartism and single-issue campaigns like the Land and Labour League. These coalesced eventually into the Independent Labour Party, founded in 1893 and led by Kier Hardie, and finally into the Labour Representation Committee/Labour Party. The drawn-out formation of the Labour Party, and its ambiguous and contested relationship to socialism ever since, has been a true reflection of its working-class base–class conscious but non-ideological, politically collectivist but personally individualistic, periodically militant but culturally conservative.

Russia was very different. With secretive, conspiratorial methods justified by the conditions of Tsarist autocracy, Lenin ploughed on. His strongest asset was the time he devoted to the concerns of Iskra ’s Praktiki back in Russia. This gave him a loyal following within the activist base and deflected the concerns of those who felt he was becoming too dictatorial. For these reasons Martov and other leaders of the nascent RSDLP did not openly attack What Is To Be Done? . Despite the fact that its language was brutal, it described and recommended what most RSDLP activists were already doing. Martov and others did not realise that whilst they saw the paper as “a bearer of propaganda and agitation and to a lesser extent as a mutual information bulletin for Social Democrats”, 13for Lenin it was something else. For him the paper was useful not only to propagandise for his conception of a highly centralised party run by professional revolutionaries, but also as the means to create that party .

In 1903, revolutionaries and socialists of all kinds were dependent on the newspaper, the agitational leaflet and the political meeting to reach, inform and mobilise potential supporters. Today these methods of communication and organsation are almost irrelevant, replaced by the Networked Individual and Networked Social Movements, which through creative use of social media have fundamentally changed the rules of political engagement. All mainstream political parties now utilise social media (websites, Twitter feeds, etc.), but these are still messages from on high. At the grassroots are independent activists who use digital and social networks–Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, Indymedia–to create and sustain independent, ad hoc anti-capitalist campaigns and actions.

Far removed from printed pamphlets smuggled past border guards and passed hand to hand, these new networks are, in the description of the sociologist Manuel Castells, “the fastest, most autonomous, interactive, reprogrammable and self-expanding means of communication in history”. 14They create and foster civic cultures of democratic dissent and debate. They were central to the revolutionary self-activity that led to the Arab Spring of 2010-12 and other mass anti-capitalist actions such as the Indignados campaigns in Spain and Greece, and the occupations of public spaces such as St Paul’s in London and Zuccotti Park in New York by the Occupy movement. 15

Governments and security agencies are keenly aware of the power of social media and the Internet. As Edward Snowden’s revelations about the US National Security Agency (NSA)’s monitoring of private citizens’ online activity demonstrated, they devote enormous resources to tracking and controlling these networks. They also seek to control and limit file sharing and Open Source technology. Yet the genie is out of the bottle. During the first days of the Egyptian revolution of 2011 and the occupation of Tahrir Square–events which were propelled by anti-Mubarek activists posting provocative videos on YouTube and then going viral on Twitter–the Egyptian government attempted to “switch off” Internet access and mobile phone networks within the country. On 27th January, 2011 it blocked text and Blackberry messaging. The next day it ordered Egypt’s biggest Internet Service Providers (ISPS) to turn off their connections. The ISPS then used ISP routers to access and delete most of the IP addresses connected through that provider. Ninety-three percent of Egypt’s internet traffic was disabled.

In response a global community of hackers, cyber-anarchists, Open Source activists and libertarians rallied to reconnect Egypt to the World Wide Web. Instructions to circumvent the blockages, to use dial-up by mobiles or laptops, were sent via fax and ham radio. These were blogged, re-blogged and tweeted. ISPs outside the country set up new channels to connect to Egypt. Google and Twitter set up a new system that converted voicemail messages into tweets. With Twitter accounts in Egypt blocked, Twitter created a new account called @twitter-globalpr which handled this traffic. Al Jazeera fed satellite news to telephones on the ground, which brought more protestors on to the streets. Within five days the attempted disconnection was circumvented and the Egyptian government, which had lost $90 million due to loss of telecommunications and Internet business, restored the ISPs.