When the leadership of the International Marxist Tendency was confronted with my doubts in February 2020, I was recommended to read two texts to win me back to the ‘correct position’ – Marcel Liebman’s Leninism Under Lenin and Victor Serge’s Year One of the Russian Revolution. I was told that if I still had differences after reading these texts, I should write up a document to be circulated around the membership for an ‘internal debate’. Knowing that all of these internal debates are rigged in favour of the leadership, and realising by this point that I was in a cult, I decided to resign before reading either text. However, I still ordered both books and read them with interest, even making notes in Microsoft Word about what I had read. Needless to say, this was not reciprocated by the cult, whose members were convinced that they had all the information they needed in Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. A close reading of both texts failed to convince me. Indeed, I even found information in them that actually confirmed some of my criticisms, and tore a gaping hole through many of the preposterous claims being made by the organisation. I actually began questioning whether Ben Curry, who had recommended them, had even read the books he was lauding, so underwhelmed was I by both of them. Serge’s book (which will receive its own separate review) is a mendacious work of propaganda, though in its more honest moments it reveals how the Bolsheviks truly saw the working-class, and confirms the ideological impetus behind things like War Communism, instead of blaming everything on ‘objective conditions’. Liebman’s is more nuanced, more academic and more honest, but still lapses into disingenuity every now and then.
Marcel Liebman (1929-1986) was a Belgian Jewish Marxist historian and academic. His 1975 book on Leninism seeks to rehabilitate Lenin as at heart some kind of libertarian socialist, whose emancipatory aims were blown off course by a combination of unfortunate circumstances and mistakes. The goal, in keeping with the libertarian Marxist/Trotskyist argument, is to separate the virtuous Lenin, who stood for ‘real socialism’, from the monster Stalin. The title of the book gives away its purpose – it discusses ‘Leninism Under Lenin’, as opposed to ‘Leninism’ as it would be formulated under Stalin’s regime, which codified ‘Leninism’ into a coherent theoretical doctrine for the first time, with the purpose of edifying the cadres. Liebman’s argument is an utterly unconvincing one. Still, the book is informative and puts a lot of Lenin’s ideas and actions into their proper context, something which is often ignored by both his detractors and his admirers. Sprinkled throughout the book are actually criticisms of some of Lenin’s policies, which, ironically, coincided with my own views, views that had led me out of the IMT in the first place. This is in contrast to Serge’s largely uncritical work of propaganda. I once again ask myself – has Ben Curry properly read this text, or did some other ‘full-timer’ recommend it to him and convince him that it would wipe away all my doubts? Or has he forgotten what he read? It must be remembered that the point of keeping me busy with all this reading of ‘approved’ texts was to keep me from reading information that would be even more devastating to the Trotskyist worldview, and this is the best they could come up with. When a cult proscribes doubters reading material, it is not in the interests of stimulating intellectual curiosity or critical thought, but of reinforcing the line. Unfortunately for them, I retained my intellectual integrity even in reading texts which did not disguise their sympathy for Leninism.
Lenin and Centralism
Throughout the book, Lenin defends Lenin’s ‘centralist’ view of the party, whilst simultaneously pointing to examples of Lenin deviating from strict centralism in practice. A pattern throughout the book is that, while insisting that Lenin’s authoritarian ideas about the running of the party were necessary in certain contexts, he produces evidence showing that, if anything, Leninist centralism caused harm to the party (though he refuses to draw this conclusion), whilst, to the extent that it was decentralised and democratic, it actually flourished.
Liebman repeats the standard Trotskyist claim, also championed by Tony Cliff, among others, that Lenin’s infamous assertion that the workers could not arrive at socialist consciousness independently was a polemical exaggeration, aimed at countering the Economists and their mealy-mouthed reformism. (p.31) This is based on a defence Lenin made of his controversial text, What is to be Done?, at the 1903 Russian Social-Democratic Party conference, in which he stated:
We all now know that the “economists” have gone to one extreme. To straighten matters out some body had to pull in the other direction—and that is what I have done. I am convinced that Russian Social-Democracy will always vigorously straighten out whatever has been twisted by opportunism of any kind, and that therefore our line of action will always be the straightest and the fittest for action.
The misinterpretation that Hal Draper, Tony Cliff, Ted Grant and other defenders of Lenin have willfully chosen to make on the basis of this quote is that Lenin was telling us all that he didn’t really believe what he wrote when he denounced ‘spontaneity’ in favour of the subordination of the workers’ movement to the vanguard of Marxist intellectuals. But that is not what he was saying at all. When Lenin said that the Economists went in one extreme, he wasn’t saying that he, also, had chosen to go to an extreme in expressing himself polemically, but merely that he had chosen to correct their extremism by reasserting what he took to be a fundamental principle of Marxist Social Democracy in the face of the perversions of the doctrine being encouraged by Eduard Bernstein and his ilk. Lenin was not saying anything controversial from the perspective of the Second International’s official doctrines, but was advancing a mainstream view. He would stick by this position even as Kautsky became a ‘renegade’ later in life and ended up denouncing the Bolsheviks and their dictatorship. Lenin did not see himself as the extremist here, but as ‘straightening out’ the extremism of his opponents. Lenin would do this throughout his life, plotting a middle course between the ‘opportunism’ of people like the Economists, the Mensheviks and moderate Bolsheviks in his own camp, and the ‘ultra-leftism’ of people like Bogdanov and Bukharin. Lenin always portrayed himself as in the right, as the sensible one, against ‘extremists’ on both his flanks.
In fact, Lenin repeated this formulation about class-conscious vanguardism vs spontaneity on more than one occasion throughout his life, which demonstrates that he meant what he said. Indeed, a glance at An Anarchist FAQ will show you plenty of evidence of Lenin defending this formulation, borrowed from Kautsky, over the years. We were fond of claiming, in the IMT, that Lenin ‘withdrew’ this ‘incorrect’ idea by the time of the 1905 Revolution at the latest (contradicting our other claim that he had never believed this, but was merely ‘exaggerating’), but this is a lie. True, Lenin temporarily abandoned his elitist attitude to the working-class when he saw that abandoning the Soviets to the Mensheviks and SRs was isolating the Bolsheviks from the workers, but this was a matter of tactics. Deep down, he believed that the workers were incapable of achieving anything with Bolshevik leadership. Reversing the Bolshevik policy of boycotting the Soviets that had arisen in the revolutionary upheaval was simply a better means of gaining control over the workers, and manipulating them for Bolshevik ends. The initial distrust of the Soviets by the Bolsheviks stemmed from the fact that it had arisen from the revolutionary ‘spontaneity’ of the working-class, and had not been guided in its establishment by the Marxist intellectuals. Indeed, the initial response of the Bolsheviks when the Petrograd Soviet rejected its radical demands was to walk out. Lenin realised that this was a tactical error, but he did not renounce his belief in principle that the workers needed the guidance of himself and his fellow intellectuals.
So we are given the argument that Lenin (a) never really agreed with Kautsky’s elitist position, but used it in a polemical exaggeration to counter the Economists – in which case, we cannot take anything Lenin says seriously because all his writings are filled with cynical polemical exaggerations of the same kind. Or (b) he believed in it briefly, but then renounced its belief by 1905 at the latest, which contradicts (a). Or (c) – another excuse we often used when I was in the IMT – that Lenin wasn’t completely wrong, that the vanguard was still needed and that the workers could gain independent political understanding through their own efforts but only to an extent. They could at best gain a semi-conscious political understanding, but they still needed the vanguard to give full expression to the semi-conscious yearnings of the masses. So even when he was wrong, Lenin was right! Hilarious. Lenin is infallible!
On page 32, Liebman makes the following, revealing claim:
These ideas were undoubtedly affected by Lenin’s Russian environment and the special circumstances of the revolutionary struggle that was going forward in Russia. But it is nevertheless certain – and it is important to underline this – that Lenin’s theory of the relations between party and class, and his critique of “the cult of spontaneity” have general application: that the ideas thus worked out did not apply, in their author’s view, merely to the proletariat of Russia – only recently born and in some ways very backward – but also to the developed proletariat of Western Europe, richer as that was in experience and consciousness.
We always loved to claim that Lenin’s ‘authoritarian’ conception of the party was a response to the ‘objective conditions’ of the struggle against Tsarism. If so, why then did we borrow our own organisational structure from that used by Marxists in 20th-century Russia? After all, our objective conditions, living in a modern, advanced liberal democracy, were very different. We could hardly complain about liberal critics taking WITBD out of context if we did the same thing. Indeed, WITBD was prescribed reading for everyone who joined our organisation, and the foundation of everything we did. Liebman’s interpretation (which I agree with) confirms that Lenin did not in fact see the ideas of vanguardism and its relationship to the working-class expressed in WITBD as specific to Russia, but as a restatement of general principles inherent to Social Democracy internationally. Why else did he litter the text with praise for the example of the Social Democrats and their leaders in Germany? If one takes the position, as I do, that the centralist attitudes adopted by Lenin at this early stage contain the origins of Stalinism (as the young Trotsky also argued), then we are forced to reject the argument that ‘objective conditions’ rather than bad ideas were what brought about Stalinism. Instead, we must accept that Leninist ideology, indeed, Marxist ideology as expressed by the likes of Karl Kautsky and even Marx and Engels themselves, helped bring about the disaster of Stalinism. We were fond of saying that Rosa Luxemburg’s criticisms of Lenin (echoing criticisms made by the Mensheviks) were just an over-reaction to her own bad experience with the bureaucratic nature of the German SPD, and that she didn’t appreciate the ‘objective conditions’ within Russia that required Leninist centralism. This bullshit argument is blown out of the water when you remember that none other than Lenin used the SPD as a model for building a centralised vanguard party. Clearly, the different objective conditions existing in Russia and Germany were no obstacle to holding up the SPD as a model for all Social Democrats everywhere, including Russia.
Even Liebman admits (on page 60) that Lenin could go too far with his centralism, even as he defends it on the grounds of necessity. Clearly Ben Curry, or whoever recommended the text through him, did not read this part, or ignored it. It is to Lenin’s credit that at crucial moments, like the 1905 Revolution, he was willing to abandon old schemas, at least temporarily, and adapt himself politically, but his core principles never changed and were the basis on which the totalitarian Soviet experiment was built. A close reading of Liebman’s text gives examples of when Lenin’s centralism was actually counterproductive. There is the aforementioned example of the 1905 Revolution, when Lenin’s disciples in Russia made the tactical error of boycotting the soviets because they wouldn’t do as they were told. Here is an extended passage by Liebman, in which he encapsulates the problem with an organisation so dependent on trained cadres from above to guide it:
Clandestine and persecuted, the Bolsheviks had been deprived of their political leaders inside Russia, through the arrest and exiling of Kamenev, Ordzhonikidze, Stalin and Sverdlov. The Party’s weakness was such that the Petersburg Committee found itself unable in January 1917 to bring out a leaflet on the occasion of the anniversary of “Bloody Sunday”.
…After the exiling of the principal leaders, the Party inside Russia was led by the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee, made up of Shlyapnikov, Molotov and Zalutsky. Shlyapnikov, who had been in contact with Lenin by letter before the outbreak of the revolution, figured as the principal leader of the Party. In his reminiscences of the February days, V.N. Kayurov, a member of the Bolshevik committee in the industrial district of Vyborg, on the outskirts of Petrograd, tells us that, during the first days of the insurrection, they “received absolutely no guidance from the leading organs of the Party. The Petrograd committee had been arrested, and Comrade Shlyapnikov, representing the Central Committee, was unable to give [them] directions for future activity”. And Sukhanov, in his invaluable reminiscences, confirms and extends the relevance of this remark. Recording a meeting that took place on February 25th, at which representatives of the Bolshevik Party were present, he notes that “their flatfootedness or, more properly, their incapacity to think their way into the political problem and formulate it, had a depressing effect on us.”
…That the Bolsheviks should have been taken by surprise by the February events is thus in conformity with the logic of social dynamics. One might at least, though, have expected them to reveal a certain aptitude for adapting themselves to the events taking place, a readiness to guide the activity of the crowds, show them the implications of their success and give them a clear awareness of the new possibilities – a will and power to carry on an independent policy, preventing the victory won by the proletariat from being exploited by a bourgeoisie which had played no part in the action. Yet, as long as Lenin was still absent from the scene, the Party’s leaders proved incapable of framing a policy that was clearly different from that of its Right-wing Socialist opponents. On the contrary, despite the radicalism and dissatisfaction of many Party members, there was a tendency for the Bolsheviks to accept the platform of the Mensheviks and S.R.s, or at least not to challenge it. This failure of independent leadership was all the more serious because the Mensheviks and S.R.s were deferring to the bourgeoisie and leaving the latter no room for any illusions about the interests of a class which had just demonstrated its counter-revolutionary spirit.-pp.116-119
Remember all that talk in WITBD about how a centralised party was needed because the workers could not achieve anything without a ‘class-conscious’ vanguard? Yet here we have an example of a party so dependent on several dozen people at the top that it became paralysed once those people were removed from the scene, whether through execution, arrest or exile. Without Lenin, the Bolsheviks were hopeless. Far from displaying the virtues of vanguardism, the 1917 Revolution demonstrates the ridiculousness of Lenin’s claims that a more centralised organisation is necessarily more effective. Alexander Rabinowitch, in his account of the 1917 Revolution, notes that, due to the lack of leadership from on high, local Bolshevik cells increasingly began taking matters into their own hands, and even defying orders from the ‘committee-men’ who had been placed in nominal command of the party. Even when Stalin and some of his accomplices had returned from internal exile to lead the party at the beginning of the February Revolution, they were unable to command any authority. The harsh years of struggle had actually made them more conservative, whereas it had made the workers more radical. They adopted a cautious and conservative position of recognising the Provisional Government. When Lenin returned from exile, he encouraged the disobedient spirit among the rank-and-file in order to push the conservative bureaucrats at the head of the party to a more left-wing position of coming out against the Provisional Government. We have here a classic example of workers and rank-and-file party activists being more class-conscious than the most seasoned cadres of the vanguard!
Liebman makes a note of the influx of new members the Bolsheviks gained in 1917:
‘In particular, the fact that, beginning in April 1917, the Bolshevik Party was reinforced by a steady and large-scale influx of new members. This influx had the effect of crushing the nucleus of “old Bolsheviks” who claimed to be guardians of Leninist orthodoxy, submerging them under the weight of new members who had been radicalized by the revolutionary events and were not paralysed by the principles of that orthodoxy.’-p.131
One is reminded of when Militant faced an influx of new members as a result of the turmoil of the 1980s, only to collapse under the pressure. Why did Militant collapse and not the Bolsheviks? Maybe because Britain at that time was not in a revolutionary situation or even close to it, and therefore perhaps its collapse was inevitable (objective conditions), but also because Militant’s internal regime, lacking the openness of the Bolsheviks’ own, was destined to crumble as soon as serious differences emerged (the subjective factor). The IMT replicates this rotten regime. Rather than lose control, the leaders would prefer to resort to splits and expulsions and maintain the purity of their sect. More proof of the weakness of Leninist centralism, taken to the extreme form that Militant adopted. The Bolsheviks were successful insofar as they deviated from this rigid, centralist ideal, something Lenin benefited from as he appealed to the radical rank-and-file against the leadership.
Here is a truly spectacular example of Leninist centralism’s dramatic failure during the July Days, in the aftermath of which, the Bolshevik rank-and-file was disoriented and distrustful of its bungling leaders.
‘To take one example, the executive of the Party branch in one of the largest iron and steel works in the Petrograd area resolved by sixteen votes to four, with four abstentions, to declare itself independent of the Party and to remain so until a new Central Committee had been elected.’-p.138
We are often told that Bolshevik centralism was necessary to ensure an ‘orderly’ retreat of the working-class in the face of the onslaughts of the Provisional Government, yet that does not explain why some local branches chose to forego the protection of their benevolent leaders – many of whom were actually arrested or forced into hiding (including Lenin himself) after this debacle. Centralism would appear to be a liability in both retreat and advance. Liebman, presumably out of his own Leninist bias, does not draw this conclusion. Nor does Alan Woods, in his own account of the Bolshevik Party’s path to power. He does not even mention this incident at all! Instead, he makes the following astonishing claim on page 633:
The experience of the July Days was a painful one, but the workers learned to trust the judgement of the Bolsheviks who had warned them in advance of what would happen, but then participated shoulder to shoulder with them.
Not being a trained historian, Woods does not bother to provide any evidence for this assertion. Why the workers would trust the judgement of a party that couldn’t make up its mind whether or not to launch an insurrection at the moment it presented itself, and brought more repression on the workers in so doing, is unclear. The seizure of power by the Bolsheviks months later owed more to luck than to Leninist genius, or the participation of the working-class. The truth is that the Mensheviks and SRs could not bring themselves to approve a final blow by the Provisional Government against their Bolshevik enemies, who were still fellow revolutionaries. Their motto of ‘no enemies to the left’ gave the Bolsheviks the time and space to recover from what should have been their total destruction. Indeed, even Lenin was convinced at one point that all hope was lost, until he saw the feeble response from the authorities to the Bolsheviks’ attempted coup.
Throughout all of this, Liebman mentions the numerous acts of ‘indiscipline’ on Lenin’s part, like his constant appeals to the rank-and-file over the heads of the leaders, which in any Trotskyist sect today would get people expelled. But when Lenin does it, it is perfectly fine. The fact that the Bolsheviks were openly divided, and were comfortable with having these furious debates within their ranks in public, is a stark contrast to today’s Trotskyist sects, with their obsession with ‘internal debate’, secret and hidden from the masses.
In the IMT, we would always credit Leninist centralism and ‘discipline’ for the Bolshevik victory in October. But this ‘centralised’ and ‘disciplined’ organisation spent days, weeks and months bickering about whether to launch an insurrection at all, and, once it had been decided to launch one, when it should be carried out. At the meeting of October 17th of the Petrograd Bolshevik Committee and the Military Organisation (days before the planned insurrection) there was yet more bickering. Finally, it was Sverdlov who finally spoke up for democratic centralism, demanding an end to the talk and instructing the meeting to consider how best to carry out the action decided upon. (p.145) Only a week before the insurrection was ‘full freedom of criticism’ curtailed. Only a day before the insurrection did the Military Revolutionary Committee appoint a sub-committee to draw up a final plan. What a smooth, sophisticated military operation. It was more like an amateurish farce.
Liebman’s description of the Bolshevik Party in 1917 couldn’t be more different from what Lenin had envisaged in WITBD, and how we structured our organisation in the IMT:
…historical analysis shows that in 1917, in the course of the revolution that made of Bolshevism a universal model, the Leninist organisation underwent profound transformations, a kind of metamorphosis that makes it dubious, even false, to identify, without qualification, the Party of the revolution, the Party that “made” the October revolution with the Party that prepared the way for it under the Tsarist regime. It was indeed a metamorphosis that occurred. Reduced in 1910 to membership that was certainly less than 10,000, and in February 1917 numbering no more than 20,000, the Party saw its membership increase thereafter more than tenfold. Having been obliged by force of circumstance to organise in a not very democratic way, or even in a basically anti-democratic one, the Party opened itself in 1917 to the life-giving breeze of democracy. The rules of underground work, though they did not wholly vanish, became less important than the methods of public discussion. The monolithic character that Lenin had tried to give the Party during the last pre-war years disappeared completely, yielding place to a variety of tendencies that were in many ways mutually contradictory. The right of these tendencies to exist and develop, proclaimed in theory in 1905-6 but denied in practice during the years of reaction, now became a reality. The requirements of discipline and “absolute obedience” faded away, and, at the same time, the rigid centralism that was a corollary of this discipline and hierarchical spirit declined, under the influence of a thousand tumultuous, ungovernable pressures. In other words, 1917 saw the birth of a new, or renovated, Party, which had broken with its original conditioning and transcended this in a dialectical way, a Party that opened itself at last, and very freely, to the irruption of the masses to the political scene.’-pp.148-149
Liebman, a loyal, albeit critical Leninist, still defends the past, undemocratic conduct of Lenin on the grounds of ‘necessity’ in the face of Tsarist repression. Of course, as aforementioned, he provides evidence that undermines this claim, and shows that this centralism actually damaged the party by leaving it vulnerable when its best leaders were thrown in jail, or when it was dependent on ineffectual individuals like Stalin and Shliapnikov. By contrast, the party blossomed into a mass movement only at the point where real democracy was actually permitted. Thus far, we see that insofar as the party remained centralised, it was actually a weaker force. Its leadership was divided, its rank-and-file more militant than even many of their superiors. 1917, as with 1905, refuted Lenin’s assertion that the workers could only attain ‘trade union consciousness’.
Lenin, unlike today’s Trotskyist sects, seems to have, at least temporarily, encouraged open and honest debate within the party – at least when it suited him. Liebman discusses the role of factions in the party:
Their existence dispensed with any official “permission”: it was an accomplished fact, part of the reality of revolutionary Russia and of the Party. At the Bolsheviks’ national conference in April 1917 Lenin said that “it would be advisable openly to discuss our differences”. In September, when he expected an extraordinary congress of the Party was going to be held, he wanted “all elections” within the Party to be conducted around the question of support for versus opposition to participation in the Pre-Parliament.-p.151
If this was Lenin’s attitude to factionalism in a revolutionary situation, fraught with all sorts of dangers, what should the IMT’s attitude be in a situation of relative calm but nevertheless one where there is close to complete political freedom in a sizeable number of the countries in which it operates? Insurrection is not on the agenda, but at the same time no one is going to arrest them for having public discussions. In a way, they are in an ideal position in which the objective conditions give the fullest possible practicality to open and honest political discussion. One will even read in Liebman’s book of local branches strongly defending their autonomy and even their right to their own paper (pp.154-157) and not being expelled! Imagine if anyone did that in any Trotskyist sect today.
In summary, Liebman is not at all convincing in trying to defend Leninist ‘centralism’ on the grounds of ‘necessity’. He provides too much evidence that undercuts his own thesis, and shows that, insofar as the Bolsheviks were a centralised organisation, this centralisation seems to have hampered their effectiveness. In contrast, insofar as the Bolsheviks were an open and democratic organisation, they gained more popular support and were more effective. It just so happens that in this instance, this coincided with Lenin’s own goals – to overthrow the Provisional Government and establish a revolutionary dictatorship. If the workers had remained loyal to the Provisional Government, Lenin would no doubt have dismissed them as brainwashed and in the grip of ‘alien class ideas’, which it was the duty of the vanguard to fight against. Had he not found enough support in his party, he would happily have split to form his own.
Lenin the Statesman
Liebman now turns to Lenin’s role as a statesman for the rest of the book. This section includes the usual Trotskyist defences of Leninist brutality and authoritarianism as a response to ‘objective conditions’. This includes the claim that the working-class in Russia became ‘de-classed’ (p.223, p.292 and p.295), leaving the Communist regime without a social base and forcing it to use more repression in order to hold on to power. This is only half-true. In fact, a diminished working-class continued to exist after the civil war, and took part in militant actions in the form of strikes and protests against the Bolsheviks – something which Liebman prefers to overlook. The workers, though diminished in numbers, were still capable of collective action to fight for their interests. The whole civil war saw a wave of strikes in response to Bolshevik economic mismanagement and the brutal suppression of political freedom, which included the rigging and postponement of Soviet elections. Liebman is dishonest about the role played by Bolshevik authoritarianism in shunting aside the participation of the workers in the building of the new society. Reading his book, you wouldn’t think that the Bolsheviks deliberately undermined Soviet democracy, rigged elections, and arrested and shot workers for daring to protest against the regime or go on strike. The workers disappear from the narrative almost entirely.
Liebman defends the Cheka’s subordination of the local soviets to its control by appealing to the exigencies of civil war. (pp.228-229) Yet there was nothing objectively necessary or inevitable about the Cheka being a law unto itself, a state within a state. Even many Bolsheviks (such as Kamenev) were uneasy about its powers. It should, in keeping with the supposed democratic principles of the Soviet government, have been placed under strict control and supervision by those soviets which were still functioning, not the other way around. Later on, Liebman notes that Lenin himself talked about reining in the Cheka (pp.316-317). This would seem to show that there was no inevitability about the Cheka running wild and killing innocents. There is no mention in the latter part of the book about the rigging of Soviet elections in the spring and summer of 1918, when the Mensheviks and SRs started making a comeback in terms of popular support, or any mention of the rigging of the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets that triggered the defection of the Left-SRs (p.257 and p.264). Liebman talks of the partial restoration of soviet democracy around the middle and towards the end of the war. However, this was soon suppressed again. Liebman excuses this by saying that ‘The worsening of the economic and social situation had done too much damage throughout Russia to make possible any return to the starting-point.’ (p.231). Of course, the real reason for this was not economic and social hardships, but the totalitarianism inherent in Leninism, which demanded that every aspect of society, political, economic, cultural, be subordinated to the rule of the class-conscious vanguard. This began even before the civil war, and intensified during and after it. The party might occasionally relax its grip so as to appease popular anger, only to bring its first down all the more firmly on dissenters. One can speculate as to whether this was a deliberate ruse by Lenin, a ‘let a thousand flowers bloom’ approach that allowed those workers corrupted by ‘petty-bourgeois’ ideas to unmask themselves, so they could be killed and arrested.
That said, there are still golden moments in the book where the Leninist dogmas we uncritically defended in the IMT are challenged. Liebman rightly defends the Mensheviks from the charge of simply being petty-bourgeois reactionaries given their active role in defending workers’ conditions and freedoms. He also correctly points out the dangers in Lenin dismissing any dissent within the working-class as evidence of a ‘petit-bourgeois mentality’ justifying repression. (He does not draw the logical conclusion from this observation – that this intolerance of different views was something inherent in Lenin’s ideology and conception of the party). It also refutes the nonsensical claim (repeated by Liebman) that the workers had become ‘de-classed’, as they were still able to take collective action and fight for certain demands. The banning of the Mensheviks after the civil war is condemned as a mistake, which cannot be reduced to inevitability, even allowing for difficult objective conditions. (pp.267-270) Again, Liebman does not draw the logical conclusion from this – that this was something inherent in Lenin’s approach to the state and society, and his belief that there was a single, correct, ‘proletarian’ viewpoint incarnated by only his party of the class-conscious vanguard, justifying one-party dictatorship.
Of course, it isn’t long before Liebman lapses back into the familiar apologetics for Leninist totalitarianism. Liebman again claims that the end of democracy inside and outside the party was due to objective conditions causing working-class ‘stagnancy’. (p.295) He once more lapses into a crude determinism, ignoring the fact that the Bolsheviks took certain measures that were entirely unnecessary and only served to demoralise the workers more than they already were. The perfect conditions do not guarantee by any means workers’ democracy. Incidentally there is very little or no discussion of War Communism or militarisation of labour in the book thus far, both of which were counter-productive and only served to hasten the collapse of workers’ democracy. Having checked the index, there are only three mentions of War Communism in the entire book! In one of the few references he makes to it, Liebman takes Trotsky to task for making a virtue out of necessity based on the harsh measures he used to save the railways. (pp.339-340) Again, he doesn’t ask whether this was inherent to the whole Leninist project.
In a close study of Soviet statistics, Liebman provides us with the startling revelation that in 1919 only 11% of Communist Party members were genuine factory workers. (p.305) The official figure of those from a proletarian background was just under 50%, but most of these had been absorbed by the giant Communist administrative and military bureaucracy. Few things illustrate more clearly what little right the party had to call itself the authentic representative of the working-class. Liebman does not draw this obvious conclusion.
During the civil war years, Liebman tells us, 75 to 80 percent of total food supplies during the war years came from the black market. (p.345) These startling statistics confirms (though Liebman does not mention it) the futility of War Communism, which had, as its ostensible aim, the feeding of the cities and the Red Army by means of robbing the peasants’ grain. In fact, as historians and contemporaries like Victor Serge and Nikolai Bukharin have argued, War Communism was adopted on an ideological basis, as a utopian means of speeding up the transition to communism in the countryside, with the hope that this would also allow the regime to meet its resource needs. The economic disaster that resulted saw the peasants turn decisively against the Bolsheviks, forcing an exhausted and isolated Communist regime, existing in a sea of hostile peasants, to reluctantly restore capitalism in the form of the NEP. It also accentuated the most murderous and totalitarian features of Bolshevism, and provided a blueprint for Stalin’s forced collectivisation. All of this is unmentioned by Liebman, who is at pains to separate Leninism, even with all its ‘mistakes’, from Stalinism.
Lenin and the Comintern
Today’s Trotskyist sects point to the early years of the Comintern under Lenin as their inspiration. They would have us believe that all of the negative aspects of the Comintern are the fault of Zinoviev and Stalin, who replaced any leaders who disagreed with them with epigones that would slavishly accept the leadership of the Russian comrades, without talking back. As Liebman’s own account suggests, there were problematic aspects to the Comintern from the beginning.
Liebman confesses to the ‘draconian’ nature of the ’21 conditions’ that established the conditions for entry into the Third International, or Comintern (pp.392-393). This established a system of rigid discipline that subordinated all of the world’s Communist Parties to the leadership of Moscow. Authoritarian as it was, there was, in these early years, a degree of debate and discussion. Comintern leaders openly criticised the ‘Russian’ model and stood up for their own rights – without being expelled. (pp.401-403) Nothing like the IMT! Lenin, perhaps realising that he might be going too far in imposing Russian leadership on the other parties, warned against making the Russian Revolution a universal model or schema for all other countries. (p.410) Paul Levi sharply criticised the intrigues of the Comintern’s representatives behind the backs of the national leaders. (A reason why Lenin and Trotsky stood back and let him be ousted?) In December 1921, a statement by leading German Communists criticised the interference and intrigue by some leading members of the Comintern’s executive. (p.412) This is an anticipation of the way in which today’s Trotskyist ‘internationals’ will carry out intrigue against national sections that dare to challenge them. This leads to the spectacle of entire sections being kicked out and reconstructed with loyal supporters, of certain prominent individuals who are regarded as trouble-makers being kicked out, etc.
Striking a further blow to the idea that Trotsky was entirely innocent of the bureaucratic direction the Comintern started to go down is the fact that he felt confident lecturing the French Communists on who should sit on their leading organs and what should be in their papers. (p.413) This ridiculous level of interference set a terrible precedent. This was in the Comintern’s ‘healthy’ stage!
Attending the November 1922 Congress of the Comintern, Lenin criticised the resolution passed by the last congress as being ‘too Russian’. (p.416) Perhaps, too late, Lenin had come to see that he had made a mistake in creating such an overly centralised organisation, centred so much around the Russian revolutionary experience. It is too easy to say that this was inevitable due to ‘objective conditions’ – nothing forced Lenin and the Comintern leaders to place so much emphasis on building a centralised world party, which history has shown is unworkable. Liebman at least has the intellectual honesty to see through the Trotskyist myths about the ‘heroic’ early years of the Comintern, exposing the reality – an organisation that was losing more and more of its independence to the Russian Communist Party as time went by, a situation that all the leading Bolsheviks, Trotsky included, contributed towards. In their arrogance, they believed that as they had been the first in the world to make a real Marxist revolution, all the other Communist leaders owed them deference and loyalty. This is at the root of the unforced errors it would make over the years, notably the aborted uprising in Germany in 1923, which the KPD was pressured into by Trotsky. The system Lenin had established in Russia was extended to the internal regime of every Communist Party on the planet, which were turned into fossilised cults just like the Russian Communist Party. It is possible Lenin would have taken a more relaxed approach had he lived, and reversed some of the worst centralisation of power, but knowing Lenin’s authoritarian personality and need to control people, it is likely that his more ‘libertarian’ lapses would have given way to renewed demands for loyalty. In all likelihood, some fresh excuse would have been found to do away with democratic discussion and impose blind loyalty and conformity on the Comintern membership, as he had done in the Russian Communist Party.
Conclusion
Liebman’s book is theoretically and politically flawed, even if the historical research is solid. At best, Liebman shows that Lenin was not quite as dictatorial as he is often thought of being, but that does not mean he makes a convincing case for Lenin as a closeted libertarian who believed in democracy on principle. The fact that he had more generous moments, when he was willing to make allowance for democratic discussion and debate, does not change the fact that his default attitude was an authoritarian one. Liebman’s central argument is that Lenin’s authoritarian actions were almost entirely a response to difficult objective conditions, and that, where the conditions allowed for it, he was favourable to party democracy. However, Liebman himself points to moments where Lenin’s authoritarianism is difficult to justify by simply appealing to unfortunate circumstances. The banning of the Mensheviks and the imposition of one-party rule, for example, is rightly criticised. Yet even so, he still insists that this was a mere ‘mistake’, rather than an inherent part of the Leninist agenda. There is no evidence that Lenin envisaged multi-party democracy as part of his ideal of a socialist society. Lenin came out against those moderate Bolsheviks in 1917 who wanted a socialist coalition. When Lenin said, ‘All power to the Soviets!’, this was always a smokescreen for the Bolsheviks transferring all power to themselves under the cover of fighting for Soviet government.
Liebman undercuts his defences of Lenin’s ‘centralist’ approach to the party by giving plenty of examples of when this centralism actually hampered the Bolsheviks politically. He fails to rebut the charge of elitism attributed to him on the basis of his infamous claim in WITBD that the workers cannot attain socialist consciousness themselves. He concedes that Lenin’s conception of the party was not simply an adaptation to Russian conditions, but taken from the example of the German SPD, which Lenin saw as a general model for all Social Democrats internationally. There is hardly any mention in the book of the role played by War Communism in the Leninist paradigm, a massive omission in a book ostensibly about the practical aspects of Leninist ideology during Lenin’s life. Perhaps Liebman knew, deep down, that War Communism would be difficult to defend as a mere response to difficult objective conditions as opposed to an ideological crusade against the peasantry. This would fatally undermine his insistence that Lenin was forced into authoritarian actions because of necessity. As such, it was easier to excise it from his work so as not to undermine his thesis. He plays down or fails to mention entirely the fact that the workers, or those of them that remained after the carnage of the civil war, turned against the Bolsheviks. He does not take his own observations to their logical conclusion – like the startling evidence that shows that barely a tenth of party members were active workers, destroying any claim the Bolsheviks might have to represent the working-class. He contradicts himself throughout the book, maybe forced by his own intellectual honesty to accept that Lenin didn’t always make the right call. However, he cannot bring himself to take this to its logical conclusion, and accept that the ideology that informed Lenin’s actions might be flawed. His defence of Leninism is a cautious, but unsatisfying one. As the Trotskyist theoretician Ernest Mandel said in a review of Liebman’s work:
Is Lenin’s theory of organisation responsible (or does it share responsibility) for new forms of alienation of the proletariat? Was Lenin for the exercise of power by the proletariat or for the exercise of power by the Party? Was there in Lenin – but only during a revolution – a “libertarian” side that conflicted with another side of his theory which was Jacobin, or squarely authoritarian? Does Lenin thereby bear, if not the responsibility, at least a certain degree of responsibility, for the bureaucratic degeneration of the Party and of the state? Was this degeneration, moreover, inevitably “written” in the objective elements of Russian society at the beginning of the 1920s, having regard to the disintegration that the proletariat had undergone – first politically, then economically, numerically and even socially? Could the Russian proletariat have kept hold of the direct exercise of power even if the revolution did not quickly prove victorious in the West? Was victory for the proletarian revolution – in Germany, say – objectively possible? Was the Communist International capable of becoming a leading revolutionary force in the proletariat of the West and the East? Did it, in the end, weaken or strengthen the political armament of the international proletariat? In the light of all these factors, was the socialist revolution of October 1917, as a proletarian and socialist revolution, a realistic undertaking; or was Lenin, having been suddenly carried away by “Trotskyist” sinfulness, doomed to found a state and a society contrary to what he had intended to create, as the Mensheviks have steadily asserted ever since 1917, and as so many neo-Mensheviks (who sometimes turn up in the most unexpected quarters) continue to repeat today?
All these questions are either formulated explicitly by Liebman or else are implicit in the successive chapters of his book. The least one can say is that he does not offer clear answers to any of them. More often than not, he offers no answers at all. Thus there is a striking similarity between the masterly biography of Trotsky by Isaac Deutscher and the present work, written by an author who feels himself to be, in some ways, a disciple and successor of Deutscher. Both Deutscher and Liebman are excellent historians. Both of them stumble when they come up against theoretical problems of decisive importance. The source of these inadequacies, not to say of this failure, of Liebman’s analysis lies, above all, in his reluctance to bring together in unity theoretical contributions which, though apparently contradictory, often constitute different aspects of a single totality.
Obviously representing a Trotskyist point of view rather than a liberal one, Mandel has this disappointed conclusion to his review of Liebman’s book:
No, Stalinism is not “Leninism minus dialectics”. Leninism is the theory and practice of the revolutionary conquest and wielding of power by the proletariat in the epoch of imperialism. As realised for the first time in a backward country, in extremely unfavourable circumstances, spoilt by many defects, suffering from the lack of precedents and historical experiences, dragged down by some mistakes, Leninism does not represent, and never represented in the eyes of its founder, a “model” of what workers’ power should be like, everywhere and always. Basing ourselves on the experience of history we can today define better than could be done in 1917 what the institutional, economic, political and cultural conditions are for the proletariat to keep hold, to the greatest extent possible, of the direct exercise of power.
Stalinism, however, is the ideology of a privileged bureaucratic stratum whose very existence requires exclusion of the proletariat from direct exercise of power. No matter what the continuity of the historical process may be, discontinuity is absolute in this matter. It is the essential weakness of Liebman’s book that he has not clearly said so.
Of course, Mandel is talking complete gibberish in a desperate attempt to save the reputation of Leninism from Liebman’s bungled but sympathetic account. There is nothing ‘absolute’ about the ‘discontinuity’ between Lenin’s regime and that of Stalin’s. It is an entirely relative affair. As any good history book will show, the workers were excluded from power as early as the winter of 1917-18, when the Bolsheviks began dismantling the representative organs of the working-class, and rigging elections to maintain their control. If Stalinism’s ‘very existence requires exclusion of the proletariat from direct exercise of power’, the same can be said of Lenin’s regime, which did not trust the ‘backward’ Russian workers, filled with ‘petty-bourgeois’ and ‘anarchist’ ideas, to govern in their own interests. Rather, the vanguard was to be given full power and authority to govern in the best interests of the ignorant workers. It is a credit to Liebman that, despite his desperate attempts to absolve Lenin, he cannot bring himself to draw the preposterous conclusions that Mandel chose to.
Leninism Under Lenin is not a work I would recommend to people who are clueless about the events in question, but for seasoned students of the Russian Revolution, it is an incredibly useful source of information, despite its dubious and unsatisfying conclusions, and Liebman’s frustrating tendency to contradict himself throughout the book. Despite its cautious, pro-Lenin account, one will find plenty of devastating arguments against Leninism if one looks hard enough, and is not afraid to draw the conclusions that Liebman was not brave enough to draw.