The Other Side of the Looking Glass

Yeah Lenin oversaw the consolidation of the state but he was the Bolshevik most realistic and conscious of it. In that way he was tragic, and split between being a revolutionary communist and the necessities of a statesman who knew he was becoming the personification of a “bourgeois law, but even the bourgeois state, without a bourgeoisie!”

Even before the New Economic Policy, he had also predicted that a strategy dependent on state power would require a consolidation of state capitalism. I think his great error was to think that this could carry over into a specifically “proletarian” form of the state, which laid the basis theoretically for Stalin’s “mightiest and strongest state power that has ever existed” and practically for the political state’s substitution for the republic of councils.

But even this he noticed to some degree, like in the 1920-1921 trade union debates when he called Trotsky’s advocacy for militarization of labor “bureaucratic harassment of the trade unions. .” He thought Trotsky conflated the class-as-state with the class’s organs of self-governance. Lenin thought the distinction was extremely important, because the role of the professional state could only be to prepare the way for its withering away by allocating the resources for workers and peasants to learn self-governance and self-planning.

Even though I think Lenin overestimated the positive content of the revolutionary political state by considering it already the class-as-state, I think he already understood many of the basic dynamics that would lead to the class and the party being collapsed into the administration of the “bourgeois state” and accumulation of the total national capital managed by the state. At one point he went as far as to say this:

“If we take Moscow with its 4,700 Communists in responsible positions, and if we take that huge bureaucratic machine, that gigantic heap, we must ask: who is directing whom? I doubt very much whether it can truthfully be said that the Communists are directing that heap. To tell the truth they are not directing, they are being directed.”

This is why his final articles were almost entirely about how to prevent bureaucratization and total professionalization of governance. What he didn’t realize is that one of the things that led to the party dissolving into the administration of the state was that the party had already been constructed as a “state within a state” along Social-Democratic lines. So there was a built in justification for expediency in the name of the self-preservation and a substitutionist logic towards the class that was later transferred from party to state.

But the fact that he knew very clearly that there was a mortal problem is extremely historically significant. He was the model for very future head of state for the “socialist republics,” but unlike almost any of them apart from Mao, Che, Ben Bella etc he understood the difficulty of his position as a communist. This is how I think about Lenin’s own actions in Kronstadt and elsewhere. He didn’t gloat over Kronstadt, it was the first great tragedy of the revolution. But the logic of necessity and self-preservation of society that he had invoked as the statesman leading its repression ended up becoming an end in itself as the revolutionary content slowly withered. It became a question of the self-preservation of the political state and the national capital, which is what’s going on later in Stalin’s concept of overwhelming necessity.

Look to the examples of Palestine Action and the Blekingegade Gang, whose material support for the palestinian cause has undeniably done far more than any march for palestine, or the flotillas which seem to be more about PR than anything else (though I would be as elated as anyone else if they had actually managed to reach the shores of Gaza with their aid). I'm not going to suggest anyone should go out and participate in these groups illegal actions, but know that every little helps, for example giving money to a palestinian family in need like so many of us have been doing, providing e-sims. "Solidarity is something you can hold in your hand" (Lauesen).

the kind of third-worldist analysis of the labour aristocracy put forward by the blekingegade group (i haven't read kuhn's book, but i'm familiar with the perspective of the KAK, the predecessor of the M-KA) does not hold up. i've written a long post about that here. the fifth chapter of a critique of maoist reason does a good job of tracing the history of this tendency, from its origins in the KAK and MIM through to maoist-third-worldist formations between their time and ours. it also does a good job pointing out the fundamental flaw of maoist-third-worldist conceptions of the labour aristocracy (even if i disagree with that book on other levels):

If there is no proletariat in the imperialist metropoles, and thus no proletarian movement, the first world third worldist cannot make a correct assessment of anything since it cannot practice the mass line. With no revolutionary masses in which to embed a revolutionary movement (because these revolutionary masses are elsewhere) how can it test its ideas, struggle with the masses, and thus develop theory through practice? Considering that MTW disagrees with the assessments of the most significant third world Maoist movements regarding the first world proletariat, it is not as if it is learning from the revolutionary masses it claims to valorize, either. Thus, even if MTW is correct it has no way of knowing it is correct, or developing a theory regarding its correctness, since it has no means of testing these ideas in practice. That is, MTW is not falsifiable and thus not scientific.

this elevation of anti-imperialism over class struggle is absolutely not confined to people and organizations that consciously identify as maoist or third-worldist; in fact it is extremely common amongst "anti-imperialist" actionists, activists and organizers in the imperialist countries today (even those who are "marxist-leninist"). for a recent example, see this article from just two days ago about the 2024 A15 palestine solidarity economic blockade actions (i do want to commend the authors of this for actually producing a summation of their practice, something that is really lacking these days). most of the people i have heard express it are young, are not from the "third world" themselves (and those who are from the "third world" are overwhelmingly immigrant petit bourgeois), want to do something that has an immediate impact, probably don't even know who lin biao was, and so on. i've written a post abt the basis for this tendency here.

you write that "demonstrations and protests are best used as a recruitment tool" and i agree. but recruitment of who and into what? since you say that workers have no revolutionary potential, the only recommendations you offer are not-suggesting people participate in illegal direct actions, and doing charity. this is not a revolutionary strategy. the A15 article, while arguing in theory for the need to build a leninist vanguard party of the working class, also says that in the practical action it sums up, "successes were due to existing affinity groups and informal activist communities." this is exactly the approach that would-be revolutionaries in the anglo imperialist countries need to get out of.

i would offer this instead: demos and protests (whether in solidarity with palestine, venezuela, targets of ice, or whoever else) are best used as a tool to recruit ideologically or politically advanced workers into politically independent mass organizations of the working class with workplace committees as their basic units, to recruit advanced students and youth into finding jobs where they can begin to organize and into other forms of mass work like social investigation, to recruit intellectuals with socialist perspectives into supporting the infrastructure of these organizing efforts, and to build up the leading role of these independent working class organizations within a broader anti-imperialist anti-war united front. to paraphrase the A15 article, this is a marathon, not a sprint.

in your reblog you compare the effectiveness of peaceful demonstrations, activist direct action, the flotillas, and individual charity. what is missing from this comparison is the boycotts and strikes by organized workers in, for example, france, italy, greece, and spain. all of these are imperialist countries belonging to the EU and NATO. what do they have that makes this possible that the anglo imperialist countries lack? sure, they are not quite as close to the very peak of imperialism today, but the main difference is communists actually engaged in leading the organized struggles of the working class.

to conclude: in principle i agree with that quote from lauesen, whose writing does genuinely have some worthwhile insights, but i want to add as a corollary this quote from samora machel, a revolutionary actually from the "third world":

International solidarity is not an act of charity; it is an act of unity between allies fighting on different terrains toward the same objectives.

i'm not trying to bite yr head off here, i wanted to write out an honest response because i think this is an important issue. thx for engaging.

afraid of bugs and monsters and fire