★

National Theatre, Prague - Karel Prager

"It is harder for us to administer the country because of our victories […]. When we speak of dictatorship, it is not because we are centralists. The regions we conquered considerably expanded the territory of Soviet Russia. We have conquered Siberia, the Don and the Kuban. There the proletariat represents only a small percentage of the population, a smaller percentage than here. Our duty is to go directly to the workers and tell them frankly that the situation has become more complicated. We need more discipline, more personal direction and more dictatorship.

[…] The annexation of territories inhabited by peasants and kulaks imposes a fresh strain on the forces of the proletariat."

It was in this period (spring 1920, but a little later: May-June) that Lenin wrote "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder. It bears the mark of the same turning point, insofar as its formulations, which energetically reject any utopian temptation in matters of labour organisation, may appear to contradict the insinuations of A Great Beginning. [130]

Footnote 130:

[A Great Beginning: "The communist organisation of social labour, of which socialism is the first step, rests and will rest ever more on the conscious and freely consented discipline of the workers themselves […]". "Communist Saturdays are infinitely precious as the effective beginning of communism".

The Infantile Disorder…: "Through these industrial unions, the division of labour among men will later be abolished; we shall move on to the education, instruction and formation of universally developed men, universally prepared and capable of doing everything. Communism is heading there, must head there, and will arrive there, but only after many years. To try today to anticipate in practice this future outcome of a fully developed communism, solidly constituted at the summit of its maturity, is like trying to teach advanced mathematics to a four-year-old child. We can and must begin to build socialism, not with imaginary human material or material specially prepared for it, but with what capitalism has bequeathed to us".

These two quotations do not deal with exactly the same point, but they address similar realities, and it is clear that the mood underlying these two approaches to the question of labour (organisation, discipline, division of labour) is different. It is hard to imagine the valuation of "human material" found in the enthusiastic passages of A Great Beginning. The speech to the trade unions cited earlier, which poses the question of the organisation of labour in new terms in light of the military situation, helps us understand this variation. These minute comparisons may seem excessive. But there is no other way to grasp Lenin's thought as a movement of contradictions. The common method of piling up fragments of Lenin's texts, abstracted from their context and detached from the standpoint of the concrete situation, is unfortunately an absurdity: it has long allowed, at little cost, the support of every possible variant of revisionism and dogmatism. It evidently liquidates the very essence of Lenin's thought: dialectical thought, perpetually at war with reality and with itself, achieving and destroying always provisional adequations. In this sense, Lenin's published work constitutes an ongoing ideological and theoretical work, unique compared with any contemporary production to which it might be compared. Its specificity lies precisely in its extreme sensitivity to the variations of reality, and its own variations are proof of this, often in spectacular fashion. This was not the case with other thinkers and revolutionary leaders of the same period, including the most theoretically brilliant. Rosa Luxemburg contradicted herself less than Lenin. But the Spartacist insurrection, which she heroically led, was annihilated within a matter of weeks. And Lenin kept the Soviet Republic in existence against wind and tide…]