ROAPE’s Ray Bush reviews a major new volume on the politics, practice and legacy of Lenin. In a highly original volume, the editors, Hjalmar Jorge Joffre-Eichorn and Patrick Anderson, have assembled contributions including love letters, fiction and political treatises which affirm the significance of Lenin’s contribution to understanding and engaging in revolutionary moments. Bush commends a breathtaking array of contributions each animated by the desire to undermine the horrors of militarised, genocidal late capitalism.
By Ray Bush
The mention of Lenin’s name generates anxiety and concern among the ruling class and reactionary social and class forces everywhere. His shadow is (mostly) enlivened by Leninists deploying often varied understandings of theory and practice for revolutionary transformation. It just isn’t enough to tear down his statue as fascists in Ukraine and elsewhere enjoy so much. As one contribution in this collection notes, ‘A proper memorial to Lenin is not a monument but a practice’. ‘Lenin’s cause is a workers cause. It is a daily commitment to engage in society, its transformation, and the liberation of workers’ (see Anatoli Ulyanov’s essay in the collection ).
The editors of this collection on Lenin and his lasting influence, have collated a simply wonderful and critically engaged celebration of the 20th century’s most significant political actor. It’s difficult to summarise the 104 contributions that include poems, love letters, imaginary dreams, fiction and ‘dialogue’ with Lenin as well as theoretical treaties and political manifestos. The collection provides insight and dynamic interpretations of the range of many of Lenin’s contributions to political struggles that shaped revolutionary transformations for generations and continues to do so.
The editors, Hjalmar Jorge Joffre-Eichorn and Patrick Anderson, joined by Johann Salazar as founders of Kick Ass Books have in their words attempted ‘to create a new style of left-activist publications: edited volumes dictated by the actually lived struggles, questions and convictions of our contributors, expressed in a variety of forms that speak to their own personal-political reality’. In doing this they have assembled a volume that delivers their promise to promote ‘lesser heard voices’ in combatting ‘revisionist histories’ reclaiming ‘the dignity of past victories and defeats’ that may help contest present day oppressions. They have certainly succeeded in this volume on Lenin. It provides a ‘platform for a truly broad range of authors and artists’ who express their thoughts, visions and pain deploying narrative, poetry, song and images as vehicles for highlighting struggles against oppression. The volume includes activists and examples of activism from more than 50 countries including Afghanistan, Philippines, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Tanzania, Russia and Ukraine, Peru, Thailand, Cuba, Slovenia.
Yet this is not a Cook’s tour. On the contrary. The editors claim the immodest project of the book is to be an active part of the process of ‘communisting’, in an ‘unapologetically Leninist’ way. This advances Nadezhda Krupskaya’s call to ‘learn to live with Ilyich without Ilyich’ or to do all that is possible to put ‘his teachings into practice’. For that to be delivered Lenin’s manner of struggle is central and in that call to arms, literally and metaphorically, this volume assembles a breathtaking array of contributions. They both affirm and continue to highlight the significance of Lenin’s contribution to understanding and engaging in revolutionary moments. It also crucially helps to foster and drive struggles against contemporary hegemonic ruling classes.
The book is at its analytical best, and most fervent, when it reminds the reader what, and how, Lenin explored and analysed historically specific conjunctures and how he argued against those who tried to undermine him. That might have been over issues of theory – the central importance of dialectical and historical materialism or why pulling Czarist Russia out of the imperialist WWI was an integral and systemic part of Marxist analysis.
The volume is less exciting when contributors slip into the world of reflection, ‘well, what would Lenin have done now’? or worse, when some contributions flirt with Trotsky’s critique of Stalin, asserting that Lenin had tried too late and unsuccessfully to prevent Stalin’s rise to power. That doesn’t work well where authors fail to present the historical context of persistent imperialist military and economic attempts to scupper the October revolution and the building of socialism. Several authors also rhetorically talk of Russian and Chinese imperialism with no substantiation other than the Russia-Ukraine conflict and trade war between China and Washington and a (continuing) poor (and exploited) Chinese working class without providing any evidence.
This is nevertheless an exhilarating collection that grabs you from the start. It’s a ‘who done it?’ that doesn’t lose traction when we know exactly who the main player is and why unpacking his analyses helps to inform contemporary villains and class enemies. There are at least two big takeaways that wet the appetite, exciting a return to Lenin to help inform analyses of key global drama’s and conflicts: Politics (class stuggle) and imperialism.
Lenin was a political pragmatist with a keen eye on delivering the goal of socialism. While he noted that revolution will likely only be possible when ‘lower classes do not want to live in the old way and the “upper classes” cannot carry on in the old way’ he always had a keen eye on how social and political mobilisation could push a class impasse into a revolutionary transformation. This involved more than the development and focus on the vanguard party, over which so much has been said often by over zealous party hacks who may reify organisation and theories of class purity instead of engagement with social and political mobilisations that may be structured, initially at least, around issues of gender and race. Lenin was acutely aware of struggles around social reproduction for instance as several authors here note (see the essay’s by Anara Moldosheva; Espasandín Cárdenas; Daria Dyakonova; Elsaa and La’al).
Lenin’s pragmatism was grounded in the understanding that socialist transformation required ‘revolutionary theory’ because without it, as he famously argued in What is to be Done ‘there can be no revolutionary movement’ (see Sandro Mezzadra in the volume). The relationship between theory and practice in the development of revolutionary politics is a recurrent theme in this collection. We are reminded of his oft quoted favourite passage from Goethe’s Faust reflecting on Mephistopheles, ‘theory my friend is grey but green is the eternal tree of life’. As one contributor notes, ‘The historical task of the revolutionary organisation does not ..consist in somehow magically awakening (dead) labour and the sleeping masses into a revolutionary class, but to detect and to participate in the process of their awakening’ (Gal Kirn).
Political pragmatism is used in contemporary politics as a stick to usually beat conservative politicians with but Lenin’s analytical clarity was to always remind his interlocutors that while the vanguard party was essential to edge towards delivering a revolutionary transition, the frequently used ‘correct line’ of contemporary self-declared Marxist (Trotskyist?) parties may be reluctant to engage with ‘elements of rupture and discontinuity’ – how objective conditions may quickly change and revolutionary parties need to adapt to changing political conjunctures (Mezzadra, for example, highlights this point). This theme underpins several contributions on Zimbabwe (Tafadzwa Choto) Nigeria (Baba Aye) and Afghanistan (Naweed).
Lenin was scathing about promoting what might be called politically correct positions in arguing against the capitalist ruling class or non revolutionary groups or other so called revolutionaries. For while Lenin was more than able to hold his own in polemical combat ‘what was primary for him was helping mobilise practical struggles capable of materially defending and advancing the urgent needs of workers and the oppressed’ (Paul Le Blanc). ‘Political practice’ for Lenin maintained ‘its specificity when acting upon the concrete situation’ (Natalia Romé). Lenin many times reminded comrades of Marx and Engels’ comment, ‘Our theory is not a dogma, but a guide to action’.
And herein lies one of the ever present constants that gnaws at the well-being of the capitalist class: Marxism/Leninism, and Mao Zedong thought, deploys critical political economy that highlights the stuctural flaws in capitalism and the specific social historical analysis to intervene to overthrow it. The tools to analyse the conjuncture underpin Lenin’s ability to develop a conception of emancipatory politics. ‘It is in this sense that Lenin can be said to have been the inventor of politics’. Lenin promotes three core principles – the building of a political party that represents the working class in the political arena’, ‘to outline and fight for a uniquely dialectical proletarian politics’ and a communist future, and the insistence that the party has ‘confidence in the independent action of the broad masses and not just that of the working class’ (see, in particular, Michael Neocosmos’ contribution).
The role of the broad masses in overturning capitalism and promoting socialist transformation is a recurrent theme in this collection (Alain Badiou) that also raises question of what or who is a revolutionary social force. Leo Zeilig reminds us in his engagement with resistance to capitalism of Walter Rodney’s words, ‘The only great people among the unfree are those who struggle to destroy the oppressor’. The role of classes in the transition to socialism provides the key linkage between Lenin’s politics, analysis of imperialism, the centrality of worker-peasant alliance and the national question and struggles for genuine sovereignty. These debates are ever present even when not always explicit in this volume and they include crucial arguments about race, black power and anti-imperialism (Issa Shivjii; Earl Bousquet; Christian Høgsbjerg).
Lenin’s Imperialism -the Highest Stage of Capitalism highlighted the transformation of late 19th century capitalism, the role that monopoly plays in the scramble for African resources and lays the ground for analysis on how and why the imperial triad of the US, EU and Japan promote the permanent dispossession of the Periperhy (Demba Moussa Dembélé). Lenin’s Development of Capitalism in Russia is his other monumentally empirically rich and analytically important work of engaged research that also underlines possibilities for emancipatory political intervention. He highlighted the significance of the trajectory of capitalist development and its impact in shaping economic development beyond the European and US economic powerhouses. Lenin also highlighted why, as in the case of Czarist Russia, revolutionary overthrow is possible where the industrial working class was small with the majority of the population being a mostly illiterate but socially differentiated peasantry – hence the need for worker-peasant alliances.
Lenin’s analysis from these two volumes continues to have immense implications for the Periphery. In Africa, for example, there is urbanisation without proletarianisation that may help explain why it was that Egypt and Tunisia are the locations of the two most recent, politically significant upheavals that were driven by small farmer mobilisations and by the dissafected landless and not by an (organised) industrial working class.
The contribution by Adam Mayer is important here as he notes that ‘Lenin taught us that monopoly capital rules through imperialism, which in the neocolonial context means domination also through war or the threat of war’. Mayer problematises the important role that militaries can and do play in creating conditions for social transformation, national liberation and anti-imperialism. In so doing, he also reminds us that a revolution can emerge in the absence of a numerically high or strategically strong industrial working class. As Mayer writes, ‘Class conscious peasants, informal workers, market women have attacked colonialist occupiers on African soil, and radical states [have] built radical armies on the continent’.
Mayer argues that while rallying behind soldiers may not always come easily to Marxists it is in fact our ‘dialectical responsibility’ to do so. Left support is necessary. As Cabral noted, ‘When your hut is burning, it is no use beating the tom-tom’…’we are not going to succeed in eliminating imperialism by shouting or by slinging insults, spoken or written, at it. For us, the worst or best we can say about imperialism, whatever its form, is to take up arms and struggle’ (Abel Djassi Amado).
This volume is ultimately, and at its core, a collection of hope and suggestions for creating the conditions to deliver the dream of socialism by undermining the horrors of militarised genocidal late capitalism. Buy it and spread the word.
To purchase a copy of Hjalmar Jorge Joffre-Eichhorn and Patrick Anderson (eds), Lenin: the heritage we (don’t) renounce (Daraja Press and Kickass Books, 2024) click here.
Ray Bush is Professor Emeritus of African Studies at the School of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) at the University of Leeds. He is also a leading member of ROAPE’s Editorial Working Group.
Featured Photograph: A statue of Lenin at Kalyani, West Bengal (2 August 2016).
