Heroic class leadership: Lars T. Lih's ‘Lenin’

Doug Enaa Greene reviews Heroic class leadership: Lars T. Lih's ‘Lenin’.

Lenin’s third preoccupation was the growth of the bureaucracy and decline in culture. Lenin wanted to bring the advanced workers into the state. He also wanted to eliminate tsarist habits that he saw coming back into the organs of power. He hoped to raise the cultural level of the country through a large-scale campaign of mass education. Yet Lenin died before his ideas took off and the bureaucrats were able to take over.

It is at this point that Lih points out the paradox of Lenin. Lih recognises that Lenin was a supporter of political freedom, but once in power the Bolsheviks suppressed their opponents. Lih sees a link between these actions of the Bolsheviks and the later Stalin dictatorship. Lih believes that the Bolsheviks saw it as easier to spread their message through the organs of power than by persuasion. Although Lih doesn’t ignore the civil war context, it doesn’t seem that Bolsheviks’ actions were so much a short cut as finding a means to survive when surrounded by bayonets.

Emphasis Mine

Lenin's mistake was probably to gamble everything on an international Communist revolution. If the revolutions had been successful in Germany and Italy, then it was very likely the industrial and cultural backwardness of Russia could have been overcome without Stalinism. This would have been done through the transfer of knowledge and capital from the more advanced countries.

On the other hand, the Bolshevik's hand was forced through the protracted civil war and associated intervention by the Capitalist countries. Lack of political unity in the face of foreign invasion would have been fatal to the October Revolution. The intensity of the fighting across the whole country meant that ruthless decisions had to be made quickly, and implemented likewise.

In any event, the chance for sympathetic parties to develop their thinking was lost when they were suppressed. In a way, Venezuela's protracted period of dual power allows for a multitude of left-leaning parties to flourish. This allows for wide-ranging debates about how the Boliveran Revolution should proceed. And this allows parties to maintain their identity without being corrupted by careerists as happened with the Bolshevik Party under Stalin.

Trotsky recognised that not everyone developed at the same rate or in the same way. Most people would have to see and experience a Communist society in action before they could be convinced.

It would seem that a period of protracted dual power is necessary for a successful Communist Revolution. Yet this is not the case in Cuba. There only one party is allowed, but independents are permitted to stand for election. Indeed, about half of the elected representives are independents. This allows non-party people to participate in the political system.

However, it makes it difficult to develop politically outside of the offical party. And it can lead to ossification of the offical party as there is no competition in ideas and strategies. This is a price Cuba has to pay in the face of unrelenting attacks by the USA for any party, other the Communists, is very likely to subverted by the USA for the destruction of the Socialist system in Cuba.