Swinging the Sickle? More on Lenin in the one-century anniversary year of his death

I posted on January 1 about how 2024 was the 100th anniversary of Vladimir Lenin’s death and how we could expect to see various retrospectives on him. (1)

Those are happening, and I want to comment on at least some of them.

PBS Newshour offers a brief AP piece about how Lenin isn’t thought very highly of in Putin’s Russia these days.

The goateed face with its intense glare that once seemed unavoidable still stares out from statues, but many of those have been the targets of pranksters and vandals. The one at St. Petersburg’s Finland Station commemorating his return from exile was hit by a bomb that left a huge hole in his posterior. Many streets and localities that bore his name have been rechristened.

The ideology that Lenin championed and spread over a vast territory is something of a sideshow in modern Russia. The Communist Party, although the largest opposition grouping in parliament, holds only 16 percent of the seats, overwhelmed by President Vladimir Putin’s political power-base, United Russia. (2)

Since Putin’s government’s promotes a generally ultra-conservative, Orthodox Christian view that’s more Aleksandr Dugin and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (3) than Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, that’s not too surprising.

Some evaluations of Lenin’s legacy are, uh, more serious than others.

It would be hard to deny that When the Sickle Swings is a catchy title. (4) The subtitle is Stories of Catholics Who Survived Communist Oppression. I don’t know if Ms. Van Uden’s book deals with the attitudes of the Russian Orthodox Church toward Catholics over the last couple of centuries.

But I’m going to make a wild guess that this book probably is not the first place you wnat to go if you are looking for an analysis of the critiques Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Kautsky made during Lenin’s lifetime of his concept of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. In fact, she seems to think that present-day Western welfare states (eroded by years of neoliberalism) are just a variant of Communism. (5)

DW News gives this just-the-facts summary of Lenin’s legacy today:

Though he remains little more than a nostalgic touchstone for many in Russia, Lenin's influence is still vivid elsewhere today, most notably in China — a party-state system in which the Communist party embodies the vanguard of his ideology.

Lenin's anti-imperialist posture and his success in creating a socialist state made the former Soviet Union a great friend of those nations who sought to become independent from colonial powers or those seeking a different model from the capitalist West.

This was especially true during the Cold War and after Soviet leader Josef Stalin died in 1953. Russia, like China, paints itself as a partner to those nations who seek to rid themselves of the yoke of colonialism and imperialism today, most notably in Africa and South America.

Lenin has overwhelmingly been seen in the West as an imaginative builder of an alternative to the capitalist model but one who ruled with an iron fist, persecuting dissent in the most violent and fear-inducing manner. (6)

Groups with some kind of socialist orientation are understandably more interested in looking at the historical significance of Lenin than most others. Some of them may be more-or-less small and/or sectarian groups, like the Trotskyist-oriented International Marxist Tendency (IMT).

George Brinkley in 1998 provided an accessible and scholarly account of “Leninism: What lt Was and What lt Was Not.” (7) It’s also a very conventional description, which among other things means it misses a lot what Lenin’s historical contributions were. Here’s a sample:

Already convinced [in 1905] that the working people could not develop class consciousness on their own and would never become a reliable force for revolutionary purposes, Lenin developed the "vanguard" party concept.

But it’s not as though other Social Democratic parties at the time, and all political parties for that matter, didn’t recognize a need to educate their supporters about the party program and organize them to support it. That 1905 dispute was focused on how to organize the Russian Social Democratic party to deal with the specific challenges of organizing against the autocratic czarist regime, when the parties did not have the range of legal possibilities that existed in Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, and some other Western nations.

[T]o achieve the difficult task ahead [in Lenin’s view] an absolute dictatorship would be necessary, especially since fundamental change would have to be forced upon the masses virtually the same way it occurred under capitalism.

Here Brinkley seems to be reading specific developments from 1917 forward back into earlier years.

When Lenin studied conditions in the West to understand why socialist revolutions had not already occurred, he discovered that capitalism had reached a stage unforeseen by Marx, the stage of imperialism.

No, Lenin did not discover the concepts of monopoly capitalism and imperialism. As the controversies over the railroad trusts and the robber barons in the US during the later 19th century illustrated, this process was very obvious in Europe and the US. Nor was he the first to notice that “rivalries among the capitalist powers over colonial possessions would inevitably lead to war.” (Brinkley’s description)

As events like the Congress of Berlin (1878) illustrate, the European powers were already openly competing for colonies and making unstable agreements to divide up the non-colonized world. The Boer War/South African War (1899-1902), the Spanish-American War (1898) which extended into the Philippine-American War (1899-1902), and the European-American intervention in the Boxer Rebellion in China (1900) were distinct markers of the conflicts involved with imperialism of the time. The Moroccan Crisis of 1905-06 and the Second Moroccan Crisis (1911) could have sparked off the First World War even before the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand met his unfortunate end in Sarajevo in 1914.

The proverbial writing was on the wall even earlier:

As recently as 1894 the French and the Russian general staffs had linked the fates of their countries in a secret treaty of alliance, so worded as almost to ensure that there could be no further minor complication in European affairs that would not lead to wider hostilities among the great powers. It was in 1898 that there had been inaugurated, for the first time in earnest, the unnecessary and dreadfully misguided effort of Kaiser Wilhelm Il’s Germany to compete with Great Britain in the development of naval power. And throughout all of it the great powers were busy with other military preparations that, however defensively conceived, simply diminished whatever small possibility of avoiding a general conflagration might still have existed. (8) [my emphasis]

The gruesome Balkan Wars of 1912-13 were also a sign of a precariously balanced European imperial system coming unstuck. (9) The official beginning of the First World War was Austrian Kaiser Franz Joseph’s declaration of war on Russia's ally Serbia - made with heavy pressure from Germany.

Brinkley describes one of Lenin’s most important positions this way: “This war, World War I in the event, would provide the opportunity to ‘spark’ revolution in the West by shocking the Western proletariats out of their self-satisfied stupor.”

Uh, not exactly. (Self-satisfied stupor?) What Lenin argued was that the outbreak of the Great War would provide the opportunity and a strong impetus for popular revolution in the various imperial powers. It didn’t work out that way in most of them. But it did happen that way in Russia, a goal which Lenin stubbornly pursued in 1917 upon his return to Russia after the February Revolution.

Brinkley also argues that Lenin was just kidding in 1917 when he pursued a peace agreement with the Germans. “Thus in 1917 Lenin was not looking to make peace; he was merely proposing peace to spark revolution to destroy capitalism.”

Uh, no, he really was serious about pursuing a peace agreement with Imperial Germany and the Central Powers, and even accepted a distinctly ungenerous offer from Kaiser Bill’s government in the Brest-Litovsk Agreements of 1918. Of course, Lenin did want to destroy capitalism. It was the Bolshevik government’s explicit goal, scarcely a hidden agenda and certainly not a surprise to the other powers in the war!

The Entente Powers including the US actually intervened military in Russia to try to force the country to re-enter the war against Germany. So they seemed to take Russia’s desire to be out of the war pretty seriously.

Much later in the article, Brinkley argues:

By January 1918, however, it was clear to Lenin that the spark [of socialist revolutions in other imperials powers] had failed and Russia (at least the Bolshevik regime) was in mortal danger. Therefore, he now insisted, against the wishes of almost all of his fellow Bolshevik leaders, that Russia must actually make peace not just propaganda, and not just with Germany but with all of the capitalist powers.

To the extent this makes sense, Brinkley seems to think that Lenin assumed for two months after the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power that instantly socialist revolution would break out in the major capitalist countries. Or something. He’s really not very clear on this point.

Brinkley also offers up this word-salad:

By the time of the revolution in 1917, Lenin had thus succeeded in integrating his concepts of "vanguard," "state capitalism," "uninterrupted revolution," "spark," and "imperialism" into a comprehensive and universally applicable whole. He had rescued Marxism from oblivion and had shown how the whole world would now experience the triumph of socialism. Unfortunately for him, his predictions were mostly wrong.

The Spark (Iskra) was the name of the party paper Lenin founded. Brinkley’s comment there makes it sound like “spark” was some kind of key conceptual concepts in Lenin’s political theory.

In the same paragraph, he writes of Lenin’s erroneous assumptions, “There would, he felt confident, be another world war.” Dude, there was another world war. You know, Hitler invades Poland and so on?

The last half of the essay is devoted to showing that Lenin’s only real goal was always dictatorship, dictatorship, dictatorship. Which he contends was also what Marx and Engels wanted. No one would argue that Lenin established a Western-style liberal democracy in his years in power. But there is much more to the story than a supposed lifelong fixation of Lenin’s.

Someday, the world may recover from Cold War clichés. We can hope.

But counting in Brinkley’s favor is that he gets kind of testy about rightwinger Richard Pipes overhyping his own scholarship.

Notes: (1) Vladimir Lenin: A 100-year milestone coming. Bruce’s Contradicciones Newsletter 01/01/2024.

(2) Heintz, Jim (2024): 100 years after his death, Lenin seems to be an afterthought in modern Russia. AP/PBS Newshour 01/21/2024. (Accessed: 2024-05-02).

(3) Stegher, Marc (2022): Der Aufstand der Populisten. Die Krise des liberalen Westens und die nationalkonservative Wende Osteuropas, 283-333. Wiesbaden: Spring VS.

(4) Turley, K.V. (2024): ‘Millennial Socialism’: 100 Years After Lenin’s Death, Communism Wages War on Souls. National Catholic Register 01/21/2024. (Accessed: 2024-06-02).

(5) When the Sickle Swings with Kristen Van Uden. Lions of Liberty YouTube channel 11/21/2023. (Accessed: 2024-06-02).

(6) Russian communists mark 100 years since Lenin's death. DW News 01/21/2024. . (Accessed: 2024-06-02).

(7) Brinkley, George (1998): Leninism: What It Was and What It Was Not. The Review of Politics 60:1 151 - 164. (Accessed: 2024-06-02).

(8) Kennan, George (1993): The Balkan Crisis: 1913 and 1993. New York Review of Books 07/15/1993. (Accessed: 2014-17-01).

(9) International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars (1914): Report. Washington: The Endowment.