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

Trotsky had let the cat out of the bag. The Dictatorship of the Party, not the Proletariat, would always prevail over the “transitory mood” of the working class. Given the variety and fluidity of opinion within that class it could hardly be otherwise.

It became clear after 1917 that although he relentlessly used the word “socialism”, Lenin had no firm conception of what it was. His only consistent vision–the Dictatorship of the Proletariat–was negative and authoritarian, a concept of state power congenial to a man whose favourite adjectives were “ruthless”, “merciless”, “disciplined” etc., but who, unlike Trotsky in his better flights of fancy, could not conceive of a fundamentally more civilised society. Emma Goldman, after a traumatic few years in Soviet Russia, concluded that after October 1917 “the whole subsequent history of the Revolution is a kaleidoscope of Lenin’s compromises and betrayals of his own slogans”. This was only true if one took Lenin’s slogans from the April Theses to October as the essence of Leninism. But those slogans were the necessities of the moment. Enthused by the onrush of revolution, Lenin appears to have toyed with genuine libertarian ideas for about six months. Once confronted with the challenges of real governmental power it was quickly apparent, as Goldman realised, that “the centralised political State was Lenin’s deity”. 3

For all his fetish for organisation, Lenin had not bothered to prepare coherent economic policies for the post-revolution world. In 1916 Bukharin, who at least tried to think about such matters, recommended the economic policies of the Dutch Socialists to Lenin as a model to be followed. The Dutch programme included nationalisation of the banks, an eight-hour day, progressive taxation and a welfare state. Lenin dismissed the programme not because of specific disagreements, but because it was a waste of time to consider it before the revolution had arrived. “Since at present the socialist revolution in the designated sense has not begun”, he wrote, “the programme of the Dutch is absurd”. 4

Lenin’s vision was exclusively that of political revolution . It came easy to him to conceive of “smashing the state” and then letting workers build a new one, but in real terms this meant nothing. Society needed to continue to function in the days, weeks and months after revolution, and it could not do so simply through improvisation and terror. In 1921, after years of economic chaos partly rectified by the massive reversal of the NEP, Lenin candidly admitted:

We expected–or perhaps it would be truer to see that we presumed without having given it adequate consideration–to be able to organise the state production and the state distribution of products on communist lines in a small peasant country directly as ordered by the proletarian state. Experience has proved that we were wrong. 5

Lenin had an equally poor sense of the possible in foreign affairs. Emma Goldman records that when she met him in 1920 his first question to her was, “When can we expect the social revolution in America?” 6It was true that post-war America was politically volatile. There was a General Strike in Seattle in 1919 in which 100,000 workers took action. For five days the city was run by a General Strike Committee. The experiment in city-wide direct democracy was only brought to a halt by an invasion of US marines. There were also race riots in several cities and mass strikes in the steel and textile industries. But national revolution was and remained a dim prospect, partly because the American left had fractured itself at precisely the wrong moment.

In the decade before the First World War, a mass-based American socialist movement had started to emerge. This found expression in the Socialist Party of America (SPA) led by Eugene V. Debs, and in the “One Big Union” of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), whose leader “Big Bill” Haywood sat on the SPA’s Executive Committee. By 1912 the SPA had 150,000 members and over 1,000 public officials, including the socialist Mayor of Milwaukee and the first socialist elected to the US House of Representatives–Victor Berger–in 1910, to be followed by Meyer London in 1915. It had supporters in the wider labour movement (including the leaders of the mineworkers, brewery workers and ironworkers trade unions), immigrant communities, populist farmers organisations and the progressive middle class. In 1912 Debs, against the overwhelming hostility of American newspapers, received 6% of the vote in the Presidential election.

After 1912 the SPA went into a period of decline driven by poor leadership and failure to support fighting trade unions like the IWW. But since 1918 SPA membership had shot up to 100,000, although a great amount of this was foreign-born workers joining the SPA’s foreign-language federations in a fit of enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution. The SPA’s vote increased, especially in its urban heartlands, reaching 34% in Chicago and 35% in Cleveland. In 1919 four million American workers took part in strikes; as in Britain, mineworkers demanded the nationalistion of the mines. At the 1919 SPA congress Bolshevik supporters pressed for the party to affiliate to the Comintern. A massive split ensued, leading to the dubious expulsion of the SPA left wing and its own immediate split into the Communist Labour Party and the Communist Party of America. A divided left was easily dismantled by the “Red Scare” of 1919-20. Had the SPA maintained cohesion and built on Debs’s tradition of popular native socialism, it might have matured into a mass party of the left. Instead by 1929 it had 6,000 members and had ceased to be a political force.

Goldman knew that the American Communist Party (as it became when the two factions merged) was a sectarian caricature of Bolshevism in a country where Bolshevism did not even apply. The chance of a social revolution in America, at least in the Bolshevik sense, was near zero. This did not mean there were no prospects for socialist and trade union advance, as the radical CIO unions demonstrated in the 1930s. But to have any chance of success they had to respect and reflect American culture and not tie themselves to a “foreign body” like the Comintern, whose strategies for revolutionary underground work were utterly irrelevant to America. This approach demanded a Menshevik attitude to trade union and working-class initiatives and a respect for democratic civil rights, things Lenin despised.

And yet the Bolshevik seizure of power had been predicated on Lenin’s perception of the German working class and his belief that it would soon carry out its own revolution and come to the aid of its Russian comrades. Lenin’s laxness in preparing an economic programme for post-revolutionary Russia was in great part because he assumed the Germans would do it for him. This was a gamble of enormous proportions. As even Isaac Deutscher admitted, “It was an extremely simple-minded notion that history could so precisely and so rapidly repeat itself in country after country”. 7

In 1917-18 the great dynasties of the pre-war epoch–Romanov, Hohenzollern and Hapsburg–all fell, and the political boundaries of the modern world shifted. Inevitably there was great social upheaval, but aside from a short-lived revolutionary government in Hungary in March-August 1919, which overreached itself and lost mass support, it did not produce socialist revolution. Germany, on the other hand, having been defeated in war, was far more volatile. After the Kiel Mutiny of November 1918 a Republic was declared and the Kaiser abdicated. The SPD took power under Chancellor Frederich Ebert, but it had to contend with militant forces on its left such as the Spartacist League, the USPD and the “Revolutionary Stewards” movement led by Richard Muller and Emil Barth. In November 1918 the Stewards formed Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, i.e. Soviets, across the country, and demanded they become an integral part of the new state. Ebert was forced to offer the radical USPD seats in his governmental coalition as well as work with the Executive of the Councils.