Lenin understood that working class consciousness and militancy is not fixed but fluid and that what was “realistic” and “practical” changed in accordance with circumstances. He also lived in a period which was revolutionary, quite unlike our own. The Russian workers, both Menshevik and Bolshevik, took up arms and went to the barricades twice during Lenin’s lifetime - in 1905 and again in 1917. They sought the overthrow of the Tsarist autocracy and its replacement by a democratic republic and the development of capitalism modelled on Western lines. In April 1917 Lenin persuaded his reluctant party to change line and break with the Mensheviks and Provisional Government and to take power in the name of the Soviets.
He did so not as a dreamy idealist who thought it a matter of “principle” to insistently call on the workers to seize power. His starting point was always the prevailing level of mass consciousness and relationship of forces. His strategic turn was based on the rapidly evolving consciousness of the industrial workers and garrison soldiers in Petrograd and elsewhere. In July, however, he opposed their spontaneous uprising and urged restraint because he did not yet consider the balance of power to be favourable. A few months later, he did and the Bolsheviks took power. When it became necessary to again reverse course in 1921, a year before his incapacitating stroke, Lenin urged the party to abandon War Communism in favour of the New Economic Policy. He freely admitted it was “state capitalism”, but justified it as a necessary but temporary accommodation to peasants at home and foreign capital abroad to relieve discontent in the cities caused by food shortages and other privations.
A resurrected Lenin would risk indictment by today’s ultra-left sectarians as a “Menshevik” if he were to declare that the Western working class, while restive, was not yet demonstrating the will or capacity to move beyond reform to revolution or even to break decisively to the left of their existing political and trade union leadership - in large part due to bourgeois democratic institutions and living conditions missing in his own time.
He did so not as a dreamy idealist who thought it a matter of “principle” to insistently call on the workers to seize power. His starting point was always the prevailing level of mass consciousness and relationship of forces. His strategic turn was based on the rapidly evolving consciousness of the industrial workers and garrison soldiers in Petrograd and elsewhere. In July, however, he opposed their spontaneous uprising and urged restraint because he did not yet consider the balance of power to be favourable. A few months later, he did and the Bolsheviks took power. When it became necessary to again reverse course in 1921, a year before his incapacitating stroke, Lenin urged the party to abandon War Communism in favour of the New Economic Policy. He freely admitted it was “state capitalism”, but justified it as a necessary but temporary accommodation to peasants at home and foreign capital abroad to relieve discontent in the cities caused by food shortages and other privations.
A resurrected Lenin would risk indictment by today’s ultra-left sectarians as a “Menshevik” if he were to declare that the Western working class, while restive, was not yet demonstrating the will or capacity to move beyond reform to revolution or even to break decisively to the left of their existing political and trade union leadership - in large part due to bourgeois democratic institutions and living conditions missing in his own time.
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