See, that’s the problem right there. Revolutions aren’t phenomena with some kind of fixed nature. This speaks to a tendency among Marxist-Leninists to apply the lessons of the Russian Revolution in a mechanical way. It’s not historical materialism, but dogmatism.
The logic goes like this: The Russian Revolution was the “most successful” socialist revolution, therefore the forms of organization that brought it about have been tested and validated, so it follows that they are applicable today and indeed, the only way forward.
Leninism was a mode of leftwing organization crafted in a unique set of conditions that will never be replicated again.
America in 2019 is a far cry from Russia in 1917.
Russia was a backwards, semifeudal state with a weak bourgeoisie and working class that had been savaged by war on a scale never before seen.
The US is an advanced capitalist nation with a strong ruling class exercising intellectual and political hegemony through a highly sophisticated mass media. Great contradictions exist obviously, but they are manageable and liberal democracy has grown reasonably adept at managing them.
In Russia, under the Tsar, socialist organizations were illegal, so it made sense to have a paramilitary top-down organization, but once in power, Lenin and the Bolsheviks transformed the theorized “dictatorship of the proletariat” into a dictatorship of a “vanguard party” composed of the “most advanced elements,” i.e. not just workers but bourgeois intellectuals and literal nobility, like Lenin himself.
Lenin’s analysis of imperialism and capitalist was Marxist but Leninism as praxis was Blanquist, with its self-selected caste of “professional revolutionaries.” The Russian Revolution was a tragedy of socialism. The potential for real mass participatory democracy embodied by the soviets and the soldiers’ committees was ultimately squandered and reduced to a tool for the Bolsheviks to achieve power and implement socialism on behalf of the workers.
But they didn’t succeed. Instead of building socialism from the bottom up, they replicated much of the same exploitation that exists under capitalism Bureaucratic devolution inevitable followed from the basic contradiction of “democratic centralism.”
To the extent that we should emulate Lenin, we should do what he did and freshly apply Marxist analysis to our current conditions.
I don’t think Bernie is going to lead us to the Promised Land, but he’s a means to an end. We have to recognize the basic fact of ideological hegemony in the United States and plot a course toward breaking it. Part of this hegemony is entrenched anticommunist indoctrination in the general public as well as the two parties.
Bernie won’t bring socialism but he’s the first step to chipping away at this hegemony. Before a more radical vision of socialism in the narrow sense can be feasible, the idea of socialism in the broad sense, which includes social democracy, has to be rehabilitated in the US. Bernie is doing well by making socialism no longer a dirty word.
There’s always a risk that Bernie and AOC will act as a safety valve by channeling working class anger into just voting once every four years, but at the same time the candidacies of the two have swelled the ranks of the DSA and other organizations, who are putting those people to work in grassroots organizing. For example, our local workplace organizing collective has already unionized one workplace and is about to organize another.
And as a big tent organization, DSA brings together multiple tendencies. So “progressives” who think socialism means the post office and free healthcare are exposed to a more radical vision from libsocs and Leninists.
Like it or not, electoral politics is the political language that Americans speak. Election to office confers legitimacy to politicians and the ideas they hold. You have to meet people where they are and bring them to where they need to be.
