Leninism, the Rushing of History

Shore’s own judgments and connections

Leninism is a method for speeding history up, not steering it elsewhere: workers are slow to reach class consciousness unaided, so it must be carried to them from outside.

Put simply Lenin: history's destination is fixed, but it can be sped up. Workers are slow to grasp their situation as a class on their own, so that understanding must be brought to them from outside.

Other readings Lars Lih (Lenin Rediscovered, 2006) reads What Is to Be Done? as an expression of the orthodoxy of Karl Kautsky's German Social Democracy, resting on confidence in workers' revolutionary inclinations.

Classical Marxism invites the Calvinist's question: if the outcome is fixed anyway, why act? Lenin's answer gives intellectuals a role: not to wait, but to hurry history along.

Put simply Marxism raises a question Calvinists, who believe salvation is decided in advance, also face: if the outcome is fixed anyway, why act? Lenin's answer gives intellectuals a role: not to wait, but to hurry history along.

Against Lenin, Luxemburg holds that any elite eventually turns conservative; genuine revolutionary energy lives in the proletariat, which must be trusted to reach consciousness by itself.

Marxism, for Lukács, stands or falls on totality: revolution comes only from a standpoint that sees the social whole, and trade-unionism plainly fails that test.

Put simply Lukács: Marxism depends on seeing society as one connected whole, its "totality". Revolution comes only from that view, and trade unions, which fight for better pay and hours, plainly lack it.

A lesson in contingency: had anything stopped Lenin's sealed train reaching Petrograd in April 1917, Shore thinks, there is arguably no Bolshevik Revolution and a wholly different twentieth century.

Put simply Shore: history can turn on chance. Had anything stopped Lenin's sealed train reaching Petrograd in April 1917, she thinks there would arguably have been no Bolshevik Revolution and a wholly different twentieth century.

For Marx history can only move forward, through stages, toward communism; what he leaves open is the timetable, how long each stage lasts.

In the text In his letter to Vera Zasulich of March 8, 1881, Marx writes that the "historical inevitability" of capitalist development is "expressly restricted to the countries of Western Europe".

Shore's judgment: as the French Revolution shadowed the nineteenth century, the Bolshevik Revolution shadows the twentieth, making it arguably the century's seminal event, whether or not a good one.

Communism, for Marx, is what history's laws must produce, not a wish: hence his contempt for utopian socialists like Fourier and Saint-Simon, who merely hope for a kinder world.

Consciousness derives from one's objective place in the socioeconomic structure (being precedes consciousness, as Shore renders Marx and Engels), so for Marx workers will naturally become class conscious.

Put simply Marx: how you think follows from where you stand in the economy ("being precedes consciousness", as Shore renders it). So workers will come, on their own, to see how the whole system fits together, not just that they are exploited.

Where to read it Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, Part I; The Communist Manifesto, Part I.

Left to its own efforts, Lenin argues, the working class develops "only trade union consciousness": better pay, shorter hours, cleaner workplaces, never a grasp of the whole system.

Leninism is a method for speeding history up, not steering it elsewhere: workers are slow to reach class consciousness unaided, so it must be carried to them from outside.

Put simply Lenin: history's destination is fixed, but it can be sped up. Workers are slow to grasp their situation as a class on their own, so that understanding must be brought to them from outside.

Other readings Lars Lih (Lenin Rediscovered, 2006) reads What Is to Be Done? as an expression of the orthodoxy of Karl Kautsky's German Social Democracy, resting on confidence in workers' revolutionary inclinations.

Classical Marxism invites the Calvinist's question: if the outcome is fixed anyway, why act? Lenin's answer gives intellectuals a role: not to wait, but to hurry history along.

Put simply Marxism raises a question Calvinists, who believe salvation is decided in advance, also face: if the outcome is fixed anyway, why act? Lenin's answer gives intellectuals a role: not to wait, but to hurry history along.

Those who actually grasp Marx and Hegel are bourgeois intellectuals, tainted by class origin; Lenin's fix is a vanguard of them, professional revolutionaries carrying class consciousness to the workers.

Put simply Lenin's problem: the people who actually understand Marx and Hegel are middle-class intellectuals, tainted by their background. His fix: a "vanguard" of them, full-time revolutionaries who carry that understanding to the workers.

Other readings Lars Lih (Lenin Rediscovered, 2006) reads What Is to Be Done? as an expression of the orthodoxy of Karl Kautsky's German Social Democracy, resting on confidence in workers' revolutionary inclinations.

Under Lenin, Party membership means giving it your whole life: readiness to die, devotion bordering on worship, and the secrecy and conspiracy that the threat of prison or Siberia demands.

Against Lenin, Luxemburg holds that any elite eventually turns conservative; genuine revolutionary energy lives in the proletariat, which must be trusted to reach consciousness by itself.

Lenin's centralism smells of Jacobinism, the centralizing zeal that produced the Terror of 1793-94, and it drives a wedge between party leaders and the workers they represent.

Put simply Luxemburg: Lenin's centralized party resembles the Jacobins, the centralizers behind the French Revolution's Terror of 1793-94. It drives a wedge between party leaders and the workers they represent.

Lenin's ultra-centralism, Luxemburg writes, bears "the sterile spirit of the overseer": his concern is less a fruitful party than a controlled one, narrowing and binding the movement, not developing it.

History's logic runs ahead of those living it: "the unconscious comes before the conscious." Against Lenin, Luxemburg argues that history's stages must be respected and that party leaders turn conservative.

Put simply Luxemburg, against Lenin: history moves by its own logic before people grasp it ("the unconscious comes before the conscious"). So its stages must be allowed to run their course, and party leaders turn conservative.

Where to read it Luxemburg, "Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy" (1904), Part I.

Marxism, for Lukács, stands or falls on totality: revolution comes only from a standpoint that sees the social whole, and trade-unionism plainly fails that test.

Put simply Lukács: Marxism depends on seeing society as one connected whole, its "totality". Revolution comes only from that view, and trade unions, which fight for better pay and hours, plainly lack it.

The Party understands the workers' true class consciousness, perhaps before they do; what proletarians empirically happen to think is another matter, and confusing the two is "opportunism."

Put simply Lukács: the Party knows the workers' true understanding of their place as a class, perhaps before they do. What workers actually happen to think is another matter, and confusing the two is "opportunism."

Much as he admires Luxemburg, Lukács thinks she underplays the Party, which embodies class consciousness, unites theory with practice, and supplies the iron discipline a revolution needs.

Žižek admires Lenin for his nerve: stepping into a situation nobody understands and simply declaring that now is the time to act.

The Bolsheviks who seized power in October 1917 formed a tiny minority acting not for Russia's few actual workers but for a proletariat that rushed industrialization would later create.

Put simply Lenin's Bolsheviks, who seized power in October 1917, were a tiny minority. They acted not for Russia's few actual workers but for the working class that rushed industrialization would later create.

Lenin thought the 1918 separate peace with Germany at Brest-Litovsk hardly mattered: workers everywhere were about to rise, within days at most, and sweep away every bourgeois government.

In the text In his January 1918 Theses on a separate peace, Lenin writes that the socialist revolution in Europe will come, but that basing policy on its arriving within six months would be "nothing but a blind gamble".

Shore cites the historian Alexander Rabinowitch: Lenin's wager that workers worldwide were about to rise, a wager that failed, was the twentieth century's single biggest mistake.

In the text In a 2007 Indiana University news release on The Bolsheviks in Power, Rabinowitch is quoted calling Lenin's expectation that October would spark revolution across Europe "one of the biggest misjudgments of the 20th century."

Trotsky's verdict on the Mensheviks who would not follow the Bolsheviks: bankrupt, their part played out, they belong in "the dust bin of history."

Put simply Trotsky, to the Mensheviks (Marxists who wanted to let history play out and would not follow the Bolsheviks): you are bankrupt, your role is played out, you belong in "the dust bin of history."

Shore's judgment: the Soviet Union was history's most far-reaching social-engineering experiment, aimed at remaking human beings, and its catastrophe shows how an excess of faith in human perfectibility can end in torture chambers.

A lesson in contingency: had anything stopped Lenin's sealed train reaching Petrograd in April 1917, Shore thinks, there is arguably no Bolshevik Revolution and a wholly different twentieth century.

Put simply Shore: history can turn on chance. Had anything stopped Lenin's sealed train reaching Petrograd in April 1917, she thinks there would arguably have been no Bolshevik Revolution and a wholly different twentieth century.

Emancipation of the serfs in the Russian Empire.

Rosa Luxemburg flees to Zurich to escape imprisonment for revolutionary activity.

What Is to Be Done? Что делать?

Russian Social Democratic Labor Party splits into Bolsheviks (majority) and Mensheviks (minority) at its Second Congress.

Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy

Revolution of 1905, beginning with Bloody Sunday in St. Petersburg.

World War I, set off by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.

General Kornilov's attempted right-wing coup fails.

February Revolution: soldiers mutiny and refuse to fight; Tsar Nicholas II abdicates.

Germany smuggles Lenin from Switzerland to Petrograd in a sealed train car with Bolshevik comrades, hoping he will help take Russia out of the war.

All-Russian Congress of Soviets in Petrograd: Lenin declares "Yest' takaya partiya" ("Yes, there is such a party").

Bolsheviks take the Winter Palace in Petrograd (October/Bolshevik Revolution).

Lenin makes a separate peace with Germany at Brest-Litovsk.

Near-successful communist revolutions in Hungary, Slovakia, and Germany in the Bolshevik Revolution's immediate aftermath.

Rosa Luxemburg is seized and killed by Freikorps officers during the failed German revolution; her body is thrown into the Landwehr Canal in Berlin.

History and Class Consciousness