There remains now the summation of our theory - what we consider to be Leninism for our epoch. It is best explained in terms of Leninism itself in its own epoch. It is the only experience we have of the party, the plan, the state in action. During the revolution Lenin stated that the proof that Russia was ripe for Socialism was in the creation of Soviets by the proletariat, the creation of an historic organization for the expression of its creative energies. If the Soviets had not been created, Lenin would have held to his old doctrine of the bourgeois revolution.
Lenin complained in the first years of the revolution that the workers were not administering the state.
Lenin complained that the state was bureaucratically deformed and called upon the party to assist the working class to be able to defend itself against its own state.
Lenin at a certain stage in the Russian Revolution stated that the party was not controlling the state and the state was running away with them and he didn't know where this monstrosity was going. Today we know or ought to.
He warned the country and the party that the few communists in Russia were lost amid the vast number of bourgeois functionaries of the old regime.
Lenin recognized the need for individual management in the sense of petty-bourgeois functionaries and subordination in industry to a single will. But he drew a harsh line between the proletariat and the Bolshevik Party, on the one hand, and those whom the Stalinists and Titoists call the "socialist intelligentsia".
In Left Wing Communism he pointed out that absolutely the most difficult task of all tasks for the proletariat and its party was the conversion of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia into loyal and disciplined servants of the proletarian state.1 The petty-bourgeoisie, to whose individualism Lenin referred in 1920 as being in direct opposition to the aims and methods of the proletariat, is today infinitely more dangerous. The petty-bourgeois has transferred his individualism into "collectivism" which he understands to be statified production, administration and plan, and is now the firm ally of the labor bureaucracy of capital, the plan, against the revolutionary proletariat.
The essence of Leninism may be summed up as follows:
1. The state was necessary for the destruction of the exploiters. But this state was a danger to the proletariat. It was the task of the party to protect the proletariat against the state and "to utilize state measures for the purpose of protecting the material and spiritual interests of the entirely organized proletariat from the state".2
2. The backwardness of the Russian economy and the predominance of the peasantry imposed upon Russian production the necessity for the leadership of technicians, bureaucrats, planners, etc. But in the same way that the proletariat had to be protected against its own state, the proletariat had also to be protected against the necessary bureaucracy. This was the beginning and end of Leninist policy. You understand nothing about the Russian Revolution and the problems of the proletariat, the party and the state, unless you understand this.
These were the problems that could be resolved only by merging them into the world and particularly the European socialist revolution. Lenin always sought for initiative. It was initiative which he sought in 1921 by the NEP, and to the very last, in his insistence on the significance of cooperatives.3
The following quotation exemplifies how he proposed to struggle against the dangers that threatened the Soviet order:
"We possess profound sources of strength, a broad and deep reservoir of human material, such as is not possessed, and never will be possessed, by any bourgeois government. We have material upon which we can draw ever more deeply, by passing from the advanced workers, not only to the average workers, but even lower to the toiling peasants, to the poor and poorest peasants. Comrades from Petrograd were recently saying that Petrograd has given all its political workers and cannot give more. But when the critical hour struck, Petrograd, as Comrade Zinoviev justly remarked, proved magnificent, it seemed to be a city which was giving birth to new forces. Workers who appeared to be below the average level, who had no state or political experience whatsoever, rose to their full height and provided numerous forces for propaganda, agitation and organization, and performed miracle after miracle. Our source of miracles is still very great".4
This is the Leninist policy, the basic policy which applies to every question of transitional regime. The concrete circumstances will differ, but the less powerful the situation of the proletariat, the more necessary, particularly after thirty years, becomes the Leninist policy. That is the decisive test and not abstract arguments about whether the country is ready for socialism.
The application of this Leninist policy is not a question for the future, after the difficulties of the transitional regime have been solved. It is the first step of revolutionary policy, from the very beginning, from the moment of the conquest of power. This was Lenin's conception of the transitional regime, and this is what Trotsky, quoting Lenin on the struggle against officialdom, described as Lenin's policy:
"You must not think that Lenin was talking about the problems of a decade. No, this was the first step with which 'we should and must begin upon achieving a proletarian revolution.'' (The Revolution Betrayed,5 p. 50, emphasis in original).
This also is the reason for Lenin's emphasis on the world proletariat. To anybody who saw the proletariat as Lenin did in relation to its own proletarian state and its own bureaucracy, the revolution of the proletariat in the advanced countries was an imperative necessity. The idea that the Yugoslav leaders are going to learn from books that the world revolution is necessary, which they didn't know before, illuminates what Orthodox Trotskyism thinks of the theory of socialism in a single country. If the Yugoslav leaders saw the proletariat with the eyes of those trying to lead the workers' state in relation to the rest of the population, not books but the necessity of preserving the workers' state would have driven them to the world revolution long before the break with Stalin.
The Leninist policy is dialectical to the core. It is based upon a brutal recognition of the contradictions within the workers' state. It is permeated with the spirit of the revolutionary proletariat: the revolutionary mobilization of the masses against the bourgeoisie in the first stage. Then when the workers' state had been established, to protect against the inevitable encroachments and invasions by its own state, the independence and creative initiative of the proletariat which had begun by creating the soviets.
Lenin's mastery of dialectic, his conviction that socialism could be created only by an emancipated proletariat, enabled him to discover the contradiction and outline revolutionary policy when the majority of his colleagues, it is clear, had no conception that such a contradiction could exist. Today there is no excuse. The maturity of state-capitalism has brought the contradiction which Lenin sensed in to the open. This dominates our epoch. Without the Leninist conception, thoroughly mastered, you end in active uncritical support of the bureaucratic-administrative one-party state. The proof is Yugoslavia.
1 V. I. Lenin, "Left-Wing" Communism: an Infantile Disorder, (1920).
2 The quote is from V. I. Lenin, The Trade Unions The Present Situation (1920).
3 See e.g. V. I. Lenin, On Cooperation, (1923).
4 The quote is from: V. I. Lenin, Report to the Seventh All-Russia Congress Of Soviets, (1919).
5 The quote is from section 2 'Program and Reality' of Chapter 3 of: Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, (1936).
Previous Chapter ¦ Next Chapter