More frustrating could be this: To recognize, through discourse tangentially related to such events, how one has left behind what once was an important component of one's political identity, and to have no better outlet for that recognition than a mere blog.
In occasional correspondence with friends, I have for the better part of this year been referring to myself as "no longer a Leninist." This after a lengthy period of simply keeping silent on my relationship to Leninism, in recognition of the fact that it was too much in flux for me to say anything meaningful about it; when in doubt, I follow Wittgenstein's maxim, "whereof one cannot speak, one is obliged to remain silent."
At first the motivation for my change of attitude was largely negative. All too many who profess "Leninism" do so as a means to justify support, against mass uprisings, of some of the world's most hideously repressive regimes. But I have always been aware enough of the diversity of political currents to recognize that these were not the sole representatives. Yet even among more humane representatives of the current, one can find more than a few examples of those who engage in selective readings of sanctified texts and dubious historical analogies to sanction doing, in the present moment, whatever it is they happen to wish to do. This is antithetical to the principled approach to politics that I thought, for most of my adult, politically active life, was represented by the term "Leninism," but I now see it as the sort of thing one ought to expect when one attempts to transform a person with a contradictory life into an Ism.
It is only now--literally, in the last few hours--that I can begin to articulate a positive rationale for my rejection of the Ism. One thing that is striking about the current political moment is how consistently protestors have refrained from putting forward a charismatic leadership. This seems not to be a mere lack, but a conscious resistance, a result of a lesson collectively learned from the last such outbreak, the 2014 events associated with names like "Ferguson" and "BLM". Put bluntly, every person who came forward in that moment as a leadership figure of some sort has either been not-so-mysteriously found dead, or has since exposed themselves as some sort of grifter. The apparent absence of charismatic leadership is better understood, then, as an expression of collective will, a determination not to expose oneself or others to repression or selective buying off. It is an expression, therefore, of the creativity of revolutionary movements so often seen historically, in which lessons learned from prior events take the form of novel means of organizing struggles.
You cannot have Leninism, or any other name-based Ism, without charismatic leadership. And given a choice between allegiance to a name-based Ism, or learning from the creativity of the present movement, I choose the latter. Ironically, it is a willingness to do that which Lenin the historical figure, in contrast to Lenin the Icon, showed at his best moments. Even his closest Bolshevik party comrades were perplexed at times with his enthusiasm for such innovations as the mass political strike or the workers' council (Soviet). Historians better equipped than I am with Russian-language ability have documented how rarely the caricature of lockstep discipline projected back onto the Bolshevik party by opponents and would-be disciples alike was borne out in evidence.
So what to make, then, of the historical figure, rather than the icon? I see him as neither beatific nor demonic, but tragic, in the strict Aristotelian sense of tragedy. His success at intermediate aims--the overthrow of the autocracy and taking of state power--overwhelmed his ultimate aims of the liberation of peoples and worldwide achievement of communism. I recognize that in this reading I am making a choice to read his more democratically inclined writings, such as The Right of Nations to Self-Determination and State and Revolution, as sincerely meant, rather than gestures whose cynicism is "revealed" by the actual practice of Bolshevism in power. That the latter was not a pure emanation of the famous bald pate is, I believe, shown by his final, failed attempts from his deathbed to undo some of the worst abuses of the machine he had helped to create: The sallies against bureaucratization of the state and party, the reminders of the importance of self-determination, the so-called "Testament". (And lest the reader think I am engaged in a certain kind of Trotskyist demonology, let me point out that in the context of civil war, violations of the rights of nations to self-determination were at least as much the responsibility of the Commissar of War and Architect of the Red Army as they were of the Commissar of Nationalities.)
The tragic hero is meant as a warning, an exhibition of flaws for the viewer to recognize and avoid in themselves, not a Christ whose letter-perfect imitation in word, deed, and gesture can usher in a second coming. You don't become a communist by swapping the "J" for an "L" in "WWJD?" The tragic flaw, in this case, was to attempt to harness a relatively new political formation, whose counterrevolutionary and bureaucratizing tendencies had only just begun to be apparent--the mass political party--to a revolutionary aim. To generalize more, the same appreciation for novelty that he showed with regard to the council or the mass strike enabled him to regard the party as a tool that could be used as well in one way as another. In contrast to the standard "Leninist" gloss on Luxemburg, which argues that she was "too late" to recognize the importance of the party, I would argue that both Lenin and Luxemburg were too late to recognize that the ways in which political parties are inimical to their stated emancipatory aims are intrinsic, rather than accidental.
So, to borrow a question which had already been borrowed, what is to be done? I am no longer so arrogant as to think that I know. To borrow another phrase that seems a bit more current, I guess we'll keep fucking around and finding out.
