The Dilemmas of Lenin. Tariq Ali
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their sins in 1848 and after. Lenin described their Russian descendants as ‘toadying, vile, foul and brutal’ and the ‘liberal pig which deems itself educated, but in fact is dirty, repulsive, overfat and smug’.
The polemical style of debate in Russia, often attributed to the left, has a much longer pedigree. Seventeenth-century debates within the Church were often harsh. In his classic History of Russian Literature, D. S. Mirsky informs us that Ivan the Terrible ‘was a pamphleteer of genius’. His quill, dripping with ‘satirical invective’, was regularly in action against the boyars and the church:
The best is the letter to the Abbot of St Cyril’s Monastery where he pours out all the poison of his grim irony on the unascetic life of the boyars, shorn monks, and those exiled by his order. His picture of their luxurious life in the citadel of ascetism is a masterpiece of trenchant sarcasm.4
Lenin was more considered when analysing shifts in bourgeois politics, which he always followed closely both at home and abroad. He analysed in great detail, for example, Stolypin’s reforms of 1906 (much favoured by the Russian academy these days as the alternative to the revolution), pointing out that they were doomed to failure not because they were unintelligent from the point of view of the liberal conservatives, but because the cooperation they were proposing with the wealthier sections of the peasantry was, in fact, impossible due to the extreme degree of political polarisation in Russia. This point in particular eluded Hayek in his admiring references to the proposals in The Road to Serfdom, which even he admitted were a response to the 1905 revolution whose aim was ‘to undercut the voices from below and ease the concerns of the landed nobility over confiscation’.
Lenin’s ideas on practical questions of strategy and tactics changed in the years that lay ahead and, while he agreed with the notion of a mass political-economic strike, he strongly disputed the notion, as Plekhanov and Axelrod had done before him, that this could transmogrify of its own accord into a social and political revolution. The coming war helped clarify his ideas further. One thing, however, was clear. Terrorism as a political tactic could not be resuscitated. It simply did not work. It was an inefficient substitute for mass action. It concentrated on individuals while leaving the system intact, which was why it had long ceased to interest or attract the bulk of the intelligentsia. A different path had been opened by revolutionary Social Democracy.
The internationalism of capital produced the internationalism of labour. Workers of the world wanted to unite because they shared a common enemy. This instinctive reflex predated both Marx and Lenin. The propertyless worker who had nothing to lose but his chains certainly did exist, but did not and could not spontaneously move beyond a basic solidarity. Political parties were needed for this, and international organisations. Marx grasped this fairly rapidly and helped organise such a grouping. This was the international of propaganda and agitation. The German Social Democracy laid the foundations for the Second International which united the European workers’ parties under a single umbrella. This worked till the umbrella was punctured by the First World War. Most of the parties opted to fight under the banner of their respective capitalist governments. They mistook the primeval outbursts of chauvinism for something permanent, and, once the war revealed itself for what it was, the parties divided into two and sometimes three currents. This was a huge turning point for Lenin, who had denounced the war from the very first day and regarded the Zimmerwald declaration against it as too weak. The European fault lines stretched back to the French Revolution.
From 1789 to 1815, continental Europe was deeply engrossed in its own wars and revolutions. Two huge American empires constructed by Britain and Spain had been or were being lost to revolutionary settler nationalism. The losses were real enough in economic terms, but there were consolations as well. Those who ruled the former colonies were, for the most part, white-skinned Europeans. The largest factions of European religion, Protestantism and Catholicism, were dominant in North and South America respectively. Four major European languages – English, French, Spanish and Portuguese – had taken root in the New World. German would arrive a bit later. This, apart from all else, maintained links with the mother continent without the settlers needing to accept its domination. The European empires saw each other as rivals. They did not believe in unity against common enemies. General Washington had been extremely thankful for the help received from France, and Ferdinand of Spain’s plea for help against Generals Miranda and Bolívar was brutally snubbed by the British. Imperialist internationalism was a contradiction in terms.
Britain was determined to find colonial replacements elsewhere in the world. All through the Napoleonic Wars, it was slowly expanding its hold on India, where it had acquired Bengal after the Battle of Plassey in 1757. It was not only capitalist greed buttressed by technical advantages in weaponry that led to the scramble for colonies. India and other parts of Asia were in desperate straits. Old empires had collapsed. The end of the centralised Mughal Empire had left India open to new adventurers. The Qing dynasty (1644–1911) was still doing well in the late eighteenth century, but the Europeans and Japanese would close in for the kill in the decades that followed, with Britain initially in the lead. Chaos in the shape of invasions, warlordism, fragmentation and famines had made the continent vulnerable. Asia seemed unable to renew itself. Europe launched the first globalisation. Trading companies from Holland and England saw easy pickings and established outposts that would soon be militarised as a prelude to full-scale colonisation. Grabbing colonies that ‘belonged’ to others never posed a problem for the British on any level.
France, too, had a head start, with imperial possessions in the West Indies and North Africa. Belgium captured the Congo and inaugurated the worst genocide in imperial history. The upstart industrial-capitalist powers – the United States, Germany and Japan – would have to fight for their share of empire. The ultimate results of uneven development and the competitive expansion of industrial capitalism were the two brutal world wars of the twentieth century.
With the industrial revolution in full swing in Britain, spreading rapidly to the rest of the continent and the United States, a working class was also being born, its youth portrayed for eternity in the grim depictions of Charles Dickens, Émile Zola, Upton Sinclair, Maxim Gorky and others, as well as powerful analytical essays by Engels and the Chartist intellectuals of Britain: O’Connor, Harney, Jones.
The call put out by Marx and Engels in 1848 was clear enough: workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains and a world to gain. Would they? Could class unity from below defeat the imperialism espoused by monarchies and republics alike during the last half of the nineteenth century and the first half of its successor? Might the ‘workers of the world’ (i.e., those in Europe and North America) create their own international organisations to combat the wars decided upon by their rulers? Early indications were positive and, when Lenin entered the fray later, he was convinced that there was no other way forward, even in the medium term. Internationalism was given a huge boost by the radical upheavals primarily in France but also in North America and Eastern Europe. France remained the intellectual workshop of the world but, as Marx noted in his essays on developments in that country, ‘the struggle against capital in its highly developed modern form – at its crucial point, the struggle of the industrial wage-labourer against the industrial bourgeois – is in France a partial phenomenon.’1
The 1848 revolution in France, despite its defeat and Louis Bonaparte’s coup, had nonetheless reignited hope. Trade unions, political assemblies and radical newspapers were banned but the industrialisation of the country continued apace, increasing the weight of the working class in French society. The imperial dictatorship ruled the country using a combination of repression and some reforms. Protests were drowned in blood, but attempts were made to effect a reconciliation with workers by improving their standard of living. The king created industrial councils and the state subsidised welfare