Goodbye, Lenin

A former comrade of mine recently shared with me a note that he had sent to a long-time leader of the small Trotskyist organization we had both been part of (the League for the Revolutionary Party, or LRP for short; those unfamiliar are welcome to Google them, but I am not providing a direct link so as to spare you the temptation of seeing evidence of their severe political and organizational degeneration, or their ca. 1999 web design), on the subject of Leninism, Trotskyism, and their political ineffectiveness. A brief correspondence developed, in the course of which I articulated in writing some thoughts that I had thus far kept to private conversation. I concluded therefore that it might be of broader interest than the ranks of those who might once have crossed paths with one idiosyncratic organization. The following has been edited lightly to remove some personal details about individuals who are not public figures, and to correct some minor errors of fact. The title of this post represents my perspective, not that of my correspondent.

G. wrote:

While I am engaging in this political exchange of thoughts with you, I would like to make a more general comment. This is for the benefit of you and other comrades in the group, so that you may have a better overall picture of where I am at politically. Naturally a lot of what has happened to me is simple demoralization and loss of interest in politics. The Middle East conflict drags me back into political thinking not even because I want to or because I enjoy it, but because I have to think about it in order to carry on my everyday social and personal life, regardless of my personal interest in politics or lack of it in recent years. As Trotsky wrote, "You may not [still] be interested in politics, but politics may [still] be interested in you." The politics of the recent events in the Middle East seem to be interested in almost everyone, perhaps especially in the New York City area.... Nowadays in the New York metropolitan area, if you have nothing to say about political events, people think you're either a boring person or you're just an idiot. I admit that this dynamic has a lot to do with my current interest in discussing the events with somebody, with anybody. [Yes, Trump had the same effect, but it was and is easy to denounce Trump in almost any conversation in the NYC area; this did not stimulate further political discussion and thinking.]

But keeping in mind my demoralization and general loss of interest in politics, I do also want to share with you and comrades in the group a more general picture of where I stand politically these days. To put it in general terms, I question the correctness of Leninism as a political program. It's hard to argue with the Marxist analysis of all history as the history of class struggle; if anything, I agree with that analysis even more so now than I did before, because it holds up so well and almost any historical research confirms it, regardless of one's current interest in politics in the present day. It's also hard to deny that Das Kapital is a brilliant analysis of the capitalist mode of production. Further, I still recognize that Lenin's leadership of the Bolsheviks in the revolution in 1917 was simply brilliant, effective, and necessary, as were the policies and actions of the new Soviet government and the Bolshevik leadership during the Russian Civil War and for a few years thereafter until Stalin's "Soviet Thermidor". If the White Army had won the civil war, they would have committed every major crime against humanity of the 20th century rolled into one (the Holocaust, Stalin's Great Terror, and much more) and then doubled, tripled, or quadrupled. Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolshevik leadership of the Red Army stopped that catastrophe from happening. So unlike some other critics of Leninism, none of that is where my questioning of Leninism lies.

Here is the problem I have: It has now been a full entire century since Stalin's Thermidorian reactionary takeover of power in the Soviet Union. During that entire 100 years of history since then, Leninism or Trotskyism, which we both recognize are actually the same thing, simply hasn't worked at all. Not even once. Not anywhere. Not in any time period. I have described my crude analysis of the last 100 years of global political history as follows:

After Lenin's death, to put it in crude terms, the socialist movement divided into thugs on the one hand--Stalin, Mao, and all the political leaders and tendencies whom Trotskyists describe as "Stalinist"--vs. intellectuals on the other hand--Trotskyists, but also including other far left anti-Stalinists of various stripes. Over the past 100 years, the "thugs" have succeeded in seizing and holding power all over the place. The "intellectuals" have provided logical and insightful analysis of political events, including cogent political critique of the "thugs"--but they haven't been able to successfully lead mass movements and seize or hold power anywhere at any time.

When this state of affairs persists not just for a decade or a few decades, but for a whole entire 100 years, something is wrong. For almost the last 50 of those years, the LRP has believed that it was the only true representative of the Leninist political program in the global socialist movement. I don't disagree with this either, even now. My issue is whether Leninism itself can possibly be an effective political theory and guide to action in today's world. Think about it this way: As much time has elapsed since the founding of the LRP up to now, as had elapsed since Trotsky's exile from the Soviet Union up to the founding of the LRP. That is quite a long time period. The LRP explained the failures of the revolutionary socialist movement after Trotsky as the failures of Pabloism (primarily). This might have made sense to explain the time period from 1945 to 1976, but it is much harder to blame Pabloism for the political failures and ineffectiveness of revolutionary socialism for the past 50 years. [Note by J-KT: "Pabloism" is a political tendency within post-World War II Trotskyism, of which there are as many definitions as there have been Trotskyist organizations which have defined themselves, at one time or another, as "anti-Pabloite".]

In recent years the LRP felt the need to abandon its 40+ year programmatic position of rejecting support for voting for any capitalist party in elections. But this raises the question: If such a mistake can go unnoticed and uncriticized by any comrade for 40 years, how many other such mistakes may still lie lurking in the LRP / Leninist political program, which will only eventually be noticed and criticized when some other new traumatic political event (such as Trump's rise to power) forces a reexamination and reconsideration?

A Leninist political program is inarguably and undoubtedly effective in accomplishing at least one type of goal: maintaining the internal organizational functioning of the Leninist group itself through Leninist political discipline of the comrades of the group. But such a goal is only worthwhile, if the end result of the group's political activity has a significant positive and successful impact on the outside world, on major political events on a grand scale. Meanwhile, such internal discipline does not come without its own personal costs in myriad ways. Example: I am afraid that a certain person's very sad recent descent into an openly Zionist pro-Israel view may not be unrelated to the personal toll of many years of the physical and mental stresses of carrying out all of the tasks mandated by the political discipline of a Leninist group.

I'm sorry to say, after expressing all of those comments, that I don't have any good answers or solutions. Sure, I could point to some "gentler" group such as Peter Hudis and Kevin Anderson's International Marxist-Humanist Organization (IMHO), but I cannot pretend to believe that it is likely that such a group has found the answer to the problem of the right form of socialist organization either.

Everything worked out perfectly for Lenin's Bolshevik Party: The timing of its founding was such that it had just enough time, a couple decades, to build an effective organization in preparation for the revolutionary events of 1917, but not too many decades, such that it would suffer internal political and organizational decay, as every Leninist tendency apparently has over the course of the past 100 years. Lenin himself was well aware of his own very good fortune in this respect. But he also did not have to contend with well-organized groups of "socialists" run by thugs (i.e., Stalinists) within the Russian social-democratic movement in the 1890s, 1900s, or in 1917 itself. Yes, the Bolsheviks had political opponents within the socialist movement, but nothing like the Stalinist groups who have emerged over the past 100 years.

Again, I did not write all of this in order to arrive at any kind of brilliant answer or solution to the problems that I have described. I do not have any answer or solution of my own. I share these comments simply as some food for thought for any comrades who are interested in reconsidering what is still valid and what may not be valid in the LRP / Leninist political program, including Leninism itself.

To which I replied:

Your letter is well-written and approximates where I was in my thinking approximately 3-6 years ago, 2017-2020.

My turn toward anarchism over the last three years has been gradual but ultimately decisive, and coincides--not coincidentally--with my coming out as trans. My initial coming-out blog post contains a veiled critique of the LRP. Frankly, my situation is a much better illustration of the personal toll argument that you make than the one you gave. The fact that, for years after that Convention, I remained convinced that I could not explore my gender identity without breaking "discipline" (and then the hangover after that, no longer under the LRP's organizational discipline but having internalized enough transphobia that I believed that I could not be politically effective in the way I wanted to be without staying in the closet), is a lasting indictment of it. I don't disclaim responsibility for my own suffering. I made the choices I made, based on my own understandings of Leninism, and based on considerations that were not at all political (e.g. the fear of what would happen to my marriage). But I learned those understandings from the members of the LRP's Central Committee, and Sy Landy is the only one of those whom I am prepared to alibi at all (and only because of his age at the time and the fact that he is now dead).

I am not as convinced as you are that the LRP's turn on the electoral question was right, i.e., that their old arguments against it were wrong. But it is quite clear that their analyses of "the Gay question" (and all the other questions they swept under that rug) were wrong. Having been better than the Spartacists in the 1970s is a positive historical point, but one of limited utility.

That crack having been made by circumstance, I was able over time to question other things. At some point recently, I think 2021, I finally actually read Paul Avrich's history of the Kronstadt rebellion. One can read it without accepting the latter-day anarchist mythology that the rebellion's success would have opened up Soviet democracy. There's clear evidence actually of there having been substantial antisemitism in the 1921 peasant revolts, of which Kronstadt was a symptom. Even passing familiarity with Russian history renders this unsurprising. But the details of how the revolt was put down, in connection with the 10th Party Congress, show pretty clearly that the seeds of Thermidorean reaction were present not only in the dominant apparatus but in its contemporaneous oppositions ("Workers Opposition") and the oppositionists yet to come (Trotsky). Inasmuch as historical events fit into dramaturgical conventions, Kronstadt fits the definition of a "tragedy". All actors were doomed.

So much then for Leninism and Trotskyism. More recently--and this is the topic of what I wrote in the Anarchist Review of Books--the arguments of The Dawn of Everything call into doubt some central pillars of Marxism. (Along the way, a lot of classical anarchist literature, e.g. Kropotkin, also gets pulled down.) I don't think it's accidental that what did it was something David Graeber did with a co-author. I find most of Graeber's writing annoyingly snide and sectarian toward Marxism, in ways that prevented me from appreciating moments when he might have had a point. Wengrow seems to have reigned in some of his co-author's worst rhetorical tics. The book as a whole is a masterpiece.

The net effect is, I am no longer looking for a theory of everything. On a practical level, also, I am less interested in politics of the spectacle (which is often what the demand to take a stand on Palestine boils down to) than in the politics of trying, as a member of a marginalized minority grouping facing the end stages of capitalist decay, to collaboratively survive.

To which G. replied with a further letter asking this question: 'You mention “the politics of trying, as a member of a marginalized minority grouping....” I cannot directly relate to this political priority of yours, because I am a cis hetero middle-aged white male native-born US citizen from a middle-class background. I cannot claim to belong to any oppressed group in any way. Does this mean, according to your views, that I cannot possibly have the same political perspective or views that you do?' The following was my reply:

I think it's more a matter of praxis than of theory. For me part of setting aside Leninism--and particularly the variant of it that we learned in the LRP--was a diminution of the importance of theoretical (or, to use the term Sy preferred, methodological) agreement in favor of the importance of practical coordination. In simplified form, it doesn't matter if we agree precisely on what is the case so long as we are able to coordinate on what is to be done (ha!) about it.

From a practical perspective the differences of what postmodern feminist theorists would call "positionality" are important, because they condition what it is realistic for a person or a grouping to do. For example: I am always going to default into suspicion that cisgender people will not immediately understand why a particular issue that arises is a threat to me as a transgender person. This suspicion is based on personal experience both pre-dating and post-dating my coming out. It's not a foregone conclusion that particular persons or groups will not be able to overcome this suspicion. It's just that, until they do, I will be cautious about how I collaborate with them around certain issues.

In his more democratic moments this is hardly a line of thought that's extraneous to Lenin. It shows up most saliently in his writings on the national question, when he differentiates between the responsibilities of socialists in oppressor and oppressed peoples. (A shame that the actual practice of the Bolsheviks with regard to non-Russian nationalities and peoples in the period 1917-1921 often fell so far short of that theoretical argument, but that's a historical question.) While I am using "postmodernist" language to express it, it's hardly incompatible with a materialist understanding of class such as would be associated with Marxism.

For me the question of the relative importance of class as a means toward achieving a kind of transcendent unity of practice is a matter of political prognosis rather than metaphysical theory. If, as I have been arguing for almost 10 years now, climate change imposes a limited (but not precisely calculable) time horizon for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, as opposed to its decay into new unforeseen types of barbarism, then a politics which takes proletarian unity as its aim has to have a plausible strategy for achieving that unity within a limited time, not the indefinite by-and-by. I am skeptical of that: I am aware of no one who has even articulated such a strategy, let alone is putting it into practice. (My son, bless his heart, is sometimes more optimistic. I remember what it was like to be 16.)

So if my political goal is no longer "the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system achieved through the practical unity of the international proletariat," but "the survival of myself and people I care most passionately about despite the likely further degeneration of the world into new forms of barbarism," then smaller units of solidarity that are achievable within a given time horizon take precedence. These need not be identity-based. It could be a matter of unionizing one's workplace (or building counterhegemonic alternatives to the union bureaucracy in workplaces that are already unionized), mutual aid projects with one's near neighbors, etc.

G. is happy to see this correspondence posted here, because he believes it is beneficial for himself, for myself, and indeed for current and former supporters of the LRP as well as for the LRP itself. G. would also like to make it clear to all readers that his participation in this correspondence does not necessarily imply his endorsement of or agreement with other statements and views expressed in other posts on this blog about the LRP and its current and former leaders and other supporters.