Rediscovering Lenin

MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS
Rediscovering
Lenin
Dialectics of Revolution and
Metaphysics of Domination
Michael Brie
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms
Series Editors
Marcello Musto
York University
Toronto, ON, Canada
Terrell Carver
University of Bristol
Bristol, UK
The Marx renaissance is underway on a global scale. Wherever the critique
of capitalism re-emerges, there is an intellectual and political demand for
new, critical engagements with Marxism. The peer-reviewed series Marx,
Engels and Marxisms (edited by Marcello Musto & Terrell Carver, with
Babak Amini and Kohei Saito as Assistant Editors) publishes monographs,
edited volumes, critical editions, reprints of old texts, as well as translations
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that appeals to a diverse and international audience. Our main areas of
focus include: the oeuvre of Marx and Engels, Marxist authors and
traditions of the 19th and 20th centuries, labour and social movements,
Marxist analyses of contemporary issues, and reception of Marxism in the
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Michael Brie
Rediscovering Lenin
Dialectics of Revolution and Metaphysics
of Domination
Michael Brie
Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung
Institute for Critical Social Analysis
Berlin, Germany
Translated by
Loren Balhorn
Berlin, Germany
Jan-Peter Herrmann
Berlin, Germany
ISSN 2524-7123 ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic)

Marx, Engels, and Marxisms
ISBN 978-3-030-23326-6 ISBN 978-3-030-23327-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23327-3
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This book is dedicated to my father, Horst Brie (1923–2014)
series foreword
The Marx revival

The Marx renaissance is under way on a global scale. Whether the puzzle
is the economic boom in China or the economic bust in ‘the West’, there
is no doubt that Marx appears regularly in the media nowadays as a guru,
and not a threat, as he used to be. The literature dealing with Marxism,
which all but dried up 25 years ago, is reviving in the global context.
Academic and popular journals and even newspapers and online journal-
ism are increasingly open to contributions on Marxism, just as there are
now many international conferences, university courses and seminars on
related themes. In all parts of the world, leading daily and weekly papers
are featuring the contemporary relevance of Marx’s thought. From Latin
America to Europe, and wherever the critique to capitalism is remerging,
there is an intellectual and political demand for a new critical encounter
with Marxism.
Types of publicaTions
This series brings together reflections on Marx, Engels and Marxisms
from perspectives that are varied in terms of political outlook, geographi-
cal base, academic methodologies and subject matter, thus challenging
many preconceptions as to what ‘Marxist’ thought can be like, as opposed
to what it has been. The series will appeal internationally to intellectual
communities that are increasingly interested in rediscovering the most
powerful critical analysis of capitalism: Marxism. The series editors will
vii
viii SERIES FOREWORD
ensure that authors and editors in the series are producing overall an eclec-
tic and stimulating yet synoptic and informative vision that will draw a
very wide and diverse audience. This series will embrace a much wider
range of scholarly interests and academic approaches than any previous
‘family’ of books in the area.
This innovative series will present monographs, edited volumes and
critical editions, including translations, to Anglophone readers. The books
in this series will work through three main categories:
Studies on Marx and Engels

The series will include titles focusing on the oeuvre of Marx and Engels
which utilize the scholarly achievements of the on-going Marx-Engels
Gesamtausgabe, a project that has strongly revivified the research on these
two authors in the past decade.
Critical Studies on Marxisms

Volumes will awaken readers to the overarching issues and world-changing
encounters that shelter within the broad categorisation ‘Marxist’. Particular
attention will be given to authors such as Gramsci and Benjamin, who are
very popular and widely translated nowadays all over the world, but also
to authors who are less known in the English-speaking countries, such as
Mariátegui.
Reception Studies and Marxist National Traditions

Political projects have necessarily required oversimplifications in the twen-
tieth century, and Marx and Engels have found themselves ‘made over’
numerous times and in quite contradictory ways. Taking a national per-
spective on ‘reception’ will be a global revelation, and the volumes of this
series will enable the worldwide Anglophone community to understand
the variety of intellectual and political traditions through which Marx and
Engels have been received in local contexts.
Toronto, Canada Marcello Musto

Bristol, UK Terrell Carver
TiTles published
1. Terrell Carver and Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions

of Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts, 2014.
2. Terrell Carver and Daniel Blank, Marx and Engels’s “German
Ideology” Manuscripts: Presentation and Analysis of the “Feuerbach
chapter,” 2014.
3. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The History and Theory of Fetishism, 2015.
4. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Marx’s Associated Mode of Production: A
Critique of Marxism, 2016.
5. Domenico Losurdo, Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical
History, 2016.
6. Frederick Harry Pitts, Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to
Read Marx, 2017.
7. Ranabir Samaddar, Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age, 2017.
8. George Comninel, Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of
Karl Marx, 2018.
9. Jean-Numa Ducange and Razmig Keucheyan (Eds.), The End of
the Democratic State: Nicos Poulantzas, a Marxism for the 21st
Century, 2018.
10. Robert Ware, Marx on Emancipation and the Socialist Transition:
Retrieving Marx for the Future, 2018.
11. Xavier LaFrance and Charles Post (Eds.), Case Studies in the
Origins of Capitalism, 2018.
12. John Gregson, Marxism, Ethics, and Politics: The Work of Alasdair
MacIntyre, 2018.
ix
x TITLES PUBLISHED
13. Vladimir Puzone and Luis Felipe Miguel (Eds.), The Brazilian Left
in the 21st Century: Conflict and Conciliation in Peripheral
Capitalism, 2019.
14. James Muldoon and Gaard Kets (Eds.), The German Revolution
and Political Theory, 2019.
TiTles forThcoMing
Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello and Mauricio de Souza Sabadini
(Eds.), Financial Speculation and Fictitious Profits: A Marxist Analysis
August H. Nimtz, Marxism versus Liberalism: Comparative Real-Time
Political Analysis
Shaibal Gupta, Marcello Musto & Babak Amini (Eds), Karl Marx’s Life,
Ideas, and Influences: A Critical Examination on the Bicentenary
Juan Pablo Rodríguez, Resisting Neoliberal Capitalism in Chile: The
Possibility of Social Critique
Igor Shoikhedbrod, Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism: Rethinking
Justice, Legality, and Rights
Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The Bourgeois and the Savage: A Marxian
Critique of the Image of the Isolated Individual in Defoe, Turgot and Smith
Ducange, Jean-Numa, Jules Guesde: The Birth of Socialism and
Marxism in France
Spencer A. Leonard, Marx, the India Question, and the Crisis of
Cosmopolitanism
Kaan Kangal, Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature
Vesa Oittinen, Marx’s Russian Dimension
Victor Wallis, Socialist Practice: Histories and Theories
Marcello Mustè, Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis: An Italian Perspective
from Labriola to Gramsci
preface
The title of this volume, Rediscovering Lenin, is in a way highly personal.

What I present on these pages constitutes nothing less than my own per-
sonal journey. More than 40 years ago as a young philosophy student in
Leningrad, I stepped into the international bookshop on Nevsky Prospect
and bought the first of the 40-odd dark brown volumes of Lenin’s Collected
Works—each one costing about one rouble. Over the years I managed to
acquire the entire set, including the volumes containing his letters, and
referred back to a number of writings from this edition extensively during
special seminars at the Humboldt University and in my Habilitation.
Nearly 40 years later, in the spring and summer of 2016, I finally man-
aged to catch up on something I had wanted to do for a long time: namely,
to read the works and letters chronologically and compile comprehensive
excerpts from them. This volume represents the outcome of that reading.
My ultimate aim was to gain a better understanding of how Lenin
thought—for, as Louis Althusser once wrote, ‘no one could deny that
Lenin does think, i.e. thinks systematically and rigorously’ (Althusser
1971, 48). He managed, in a way that only a very small number of figures
in history have, to perfectly merge two distinct roles—that of an iron-
willed, intervening politician, and that of a strategic, social-analytical
thinker (Hill 1971, 162). It was no accident that Lenin loved chess. He is
said to have been a ‘chess player of considerable talent’ (Elwood 2011,
126). During his visit to a party school organised by the Russian author
Maxim Gorky on the island of Capri, he fought with his comrade Bogdanov
not just over philosophical questions but also on the chess board. As
Carter Elwood writes: ‘He became involved in fiercely competitive chess
xi
xii PREFACE
matches with Bogdanov and, according to Gorky, was a poor loser’

(Elwood 2011, 142). But in 1917 Lenin started a new, real game—now
on the stage of world history. For this he had prepared his whole adult life
since the execution of his beloved older brother Alexander by Tsarist
authorities in 1887. This book begins at the point when Lenin finished
preparing for the most important ‘game’ of his life—the socialist revolu-
tion in Russia.
I have attempted, above all, to understand Lenin, to engage with his
line of argument and reconstruct it in its specific context. I assumed and
continue to assume that Lenin acted upon the most profound Marxist
convictions and was prepared to accept all of the responsibilities his beliefs
entailed. I sought to understand this conviction and flesh out its conse-
quences. This volume, then, is neither a biography or complete represen-
tation of Lenin’s work, nor a contextualisation thereof in its respective
historical moment. Rather, it represents an attempt to reconstruct and
substantiate some of his central, strategically relevant positions from within
his work itself. My focus is on the period beginning in 1914, the years that
preceded Lenin’s intervention in Russian and world politics, and the years
leading up to his death. I consciously limit myself to a single aspect—the
formation and development of his strategy and the significance of central
insights and ideas in the process. This is a deliberate constriction of the
analysis of Lenin’s work and represents the foundation of this book. Yet
this is precisely the aspect that always intrigued me about Lenin most:
what can we learn from Lenin in order to intervene strategically?
In my view, Russia’s revolutionary epoch from 1905 into the 1930s
illustrates the tremendous impact ideas can have. What is possible during
extreme social and political crises does not lie in the hands of the actors
involved. But they must choose between various options or risk disappear-
ing into historical oblivion. The option they select is largely determined by
the ideas guiding them. The stronger these ideas and greater the actors’
faith in their validity are, the more determined their intervention and their
willingness to stake everything on one card.
While reading Lenin’s works and letters I focused on four questions in
particular. Firstly, I was keen to understand Lenin’s strategic leverage dur-
ing the Russian Revolution in 1917 to the extent that it was conditioned
by his own work. I therefore dedicate the first section of the book to his
work between August 1914, the beginning of World War I, and October
1917. Through this decision, one of Lenin’s most important achieve-
ments is presupposed in this depiction—namely, the development of the
PREFACE xiii
conception of the party of a new type. On this, see, inter alia, Tony Cliff
(2002) and Lars T. Lih (2008). Secondly, I inquire as to why he was so
insistent on the armed insurrection in October 1917 and so readily pre-
pared to dissolve the freely elected Constituent Assembly in January 1918.
Thirdly, I seek to understand how he attempted to address the internal
contradictions of the Soviet system as it evolved out of revolution and civil
war, taking into account the dynamic international developments between
1918 and 1922. Fourthly, I turn to the question of Leninism, which con-
stitutes less an investigation of Lenin himself so much as the ideological-
political-social system he so decisively helped to construct. In the following
I discuss Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis of the Russian Revolution and
Bolshevik rule after October 1917. The concluding section addresses the
question of to what extent Lenin’s politics in 1917–1918 stands in the
tradition of Marx’s views on socialism and communism. This problem has
sparked major controversies until today, for good reason. After all, here
once again we find the crucial role of ideas when attempts are made to set
a new course in times of great crises.
Readers seeking to learn more about events in Petrograd in 1917–1918
are best advised to turn to the books by Alexander Rabinowitch (1976,
2007). Russian historian Vladlen Loginov depicts Lenin’s impact on the
year 1917 with great empathy and detailed knowledge (2019). In terms of
a document composed by a brilliant contemporary witness, Nikolai
Sukhanov’s The Russian Revolution (1962) is highly recommended. A
harsh, realistic account of the period from the late nineteenth century
until 1924 in Russia is presented by Orlando Figes (1997). Among the
many Lenin biographies available I would also like to highlight the three-
volume work by Tony Cliff, written from the standpoint of a dedicated
Trotskyist (2002, 2004, 2012). The last three months between early
December 1922 and early March 1923 are reconstructed in great detail in
Moshe Lewin’s Lenin’s Last Struggle (2005). Slavoj Žižek’s most recent
work on Lenin (2017) noticeably falls far behind Lewin’s work and even
some earlier works of Žižek himself (2002). Whoever seeks to delve into
Lenin’s intellectual biography can draw on the more recent, well-founded
and comprehensive work by Tamas Krausz (2014). To this day, Georg
Lukács’ study of Lenin—conducted in the spirit of Leninism—impresses
through its brilliance and reconstruction of Lenin as a materialist-dialectical
practitioner of revolutionary realpolitik (2009).
A very lively account was written by Angelica Balabanoff (1964), who
worked in Lenin’s immediate milieu for many years, at over 90 years of age.
xiv PREFACE
Another informative source is the documentary compilation by Arnold

Reisberg in two volumes (1977a, b), despite the fact that it is coloured to
some extent by traces of Marxism-Leninism. Readers seeking to refamiliar-
ize themselves with the historical Lenin debate, which dates back half a
century, ought to refer to the work on Leninism produced by Projekt
Klassenanalyse (1972). Because the body of literature on the Russian
Revolutions of the twentieth century and on Lenin himself is seemingly
endless, I prefer to confine myself to these rather personal recommenda-
tions for further reading.
I would like to thank Lutz Brangsch and Wladislaw Hedeler for their
comments on the manuscript, shielding me from numerous mistakes and
helping to sharpen my thoughts. Likewise, I would like to thank Gerd
Siebecke from VSA Verlag for his tenacity in demanding the manuscript,
and my colleagues at the Institute for Critical Social Analysis at the Rosa-
Luxemburg-Stiftung for exhibiting such tolerance and patience for my
journey of discovery. Special thanks go to the translators Loren Balhorn
and Jan-Peter Herrmann. The fifth section was translated by Eric Canepa.
Given that this volume emerged from an intense reading of Lenin’s
works, it is fairly self-evident that it contains a large number of quotes. In
order to restrict the number of references, I refer to the English editions
available online free-of-charge in PDF form, originally published by
Progress Publishers in Moscow in the 1960s and based on the Russian
editions commissioned by the Ninth Congress of the RCP(b) and the
Second Congress of Soviets of the USSR. ‘LW’ stands for Lenin’s Works,
followed by the volume and page number. Much has been written about
the shortcomings of these editions—shortcomings which later editions
have largely failed to correct. For the collected works of Marx and Engels
(MECW) a similar approach will be used. A number of Lenin’s previously
unpublished documents have become available since that time (Pipes
1996; V. I. Lenin 1999). They do not change my perception of Lenin, but
rather sharpen its contours at best—albeit in a way which I already could
have gathered from the edition I purchased on Nevsky Prospect many
years ago.
Berlin, Germany Michael Brie

PREFACE xv
references
Althusser, Louis. 1971. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly
Review Press.
Balabanoff, Angelica. 1964. Impressions of Lenin. Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press.
Cliff, Tony. 2002. Building the Party. Lenin 1893–1914. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
———. 2004. All Power to the Soviets. Lenin 1914–1917. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
———. 2012. The Revolution Besieged. Lenin 1917–1923. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Elwood, Carter. 2011. The Non-Geometric Lenin. Essays on the Development of the
Bolshevik Party 1910–1914. London: Anthem Press.
Figes, Orlando. 1997. A People’s Tragedy: Russian Revolution, 1891–1924.
London: Pimlico.
Hill, Christopher. 1971. Lenin and the Russian Revolution. Middlesex:
Penguin Books.
Krausz, Tamas. 2014. Reconstructing Lenin. An Intellectual Biography. New York:
Monthly Review.
Lenin, Vladimir I. 1999. Neizvestnye dokumenty. 1891–1922 (Unknown Documents.
1891–1922). Moskva: ROSSPĖN.
Lewin, Moshe. 2005. Lenin’s Last Struggle. Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press.
Lih, Lars T. 2008. Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? In Context. Chicago/
Minneapolis: Haymarket Books.
Loginov, Vladlen. 2019. Vladimir Lenin: How to Become a Leader. London:
Glagoslav Publications.
Lukács, Georg. 2009. Lenin. A Study on the Unity of His Thought. London: Verso.
Pipes, Richard, ed. 1996. The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive. New
Haven: Yale University Press.
Projekt Klassenanalyse. 1972. Leninismus – neue Stufe des wissenschaftlichen
Sozialismus. Zum Verhältnis von Marxscher Theorie, Klassenanalyse und revolu-
tionärer Taktik bei W.I. Lenin. Berlin: VSA.
Rabinowitch, Alexander. 1976. The Bolsheviks Come to Power. The Revolution of
1917 in Petrograd. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.
———. 2007. The Bolsheviks in Power. The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd.
Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Reisberg, Arnold. 1977a. Lenin – Dokumente seines Lebens 1870–1924. Band 1.
Leipzig: Reclam Leipzig.
———. 1977b. Lenin – Dokumente seines Lebens 1870–1924. Band 2. Leipzig:
Reclam Leipzig.
Sukhanov, Nikolai. 1962. The Russian Revolution. Vol. I–II. New York: Harper
& Brothers.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2002. Repeating Lenin. London/New York: Verso.
———. 2017. Lenin 2017. Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through.
London: Verso.
conTenTs
1 What Is to Be Done in Times of Powerlessness? Lenin’s

Years in Switzerland, September 1914 to April 1917 1
2 What Is to Be Done in the Struggle for a New World? 37
3 What Is to Be Done with Power? 75
4 Whoever Is Not Prepared to Talk About Leninism Should

Also Keep Quiet About Stalinism 121
5 Rosa Luxemburg’s Symphony on the Russian Revolution 131
6 The Power and Impotence of the Marxian Idea of

Communism 143
Bibliography 187
xvii
abouT The auThor
Michael Brie is a philosopher and political scientist. He works as a senior

fellow at the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung’s Institute for Critical Social
Analysis in Berlin. He works on the history and theory of socialism and
communism and is editor-in-chief of the series Beiträge zur kritischen
Transformationsforschung. His most recent books are Das
Kommunistische. Oder: Ein Gespenst kommt nicht zur Ruhe (edited
together with Lutz Brangsch) (2016), Karl Polanyi in Dialogue. A
Socialist Thinker for Our Times (2017), Karl Polanyi’s Vision of a Socialist
Transformation (edited together with Claus Thomasberger) (2018)
and Rosa Luxemburg neu entdecken. Ein hellblaubes Bändchen zu ‘Freiheit
für den Feind! Demokratie und Sozialismus’ (2019).
xix
lisT of figures
Fig. 1.1 Lenin’s impact between August 1914 and April 1917 4
Fig. 3.1 Lenin’s search process between late 1920 and March 1923 87
xxi
CHAPTER 1
What Is to Be Done in Times

of Powerlessness? Lenin’s Years
in Switzerland, September
1914 to April 1917
‘Russia – that is the France of the current century. The revolutionary

initiative for a new social transformation is correctly assigned to it in
accordance with the laws.’
Friedrich Engels (quoted in Lopatin 1883, 488)
Using the exile ProPerly

This book begins in August 1914. These were leaden times in which the
mole of history had buried itself deep in the ground. No date revealed the
powerlessness of the Left in Europe like 4 August 1914, when the SPD
group in the Reichstag voted unanimously to approve war credits. Rosa
Luxemburg spoke of a ‘world tragedy’ (Luxemburg 2004, 313). The out-
break of World War I marginalised the radical Left in Europe entirely.
Only a few immediately and definitively branded the war an inter-
imperialist conflict and declared war on it in turn. They formed a small,
upright grouping: the German Gruppe Internationale, the Russian
Bolsheviks and the grouping of internationalist Mensheviks, the Dutch
Tribunists, the French syndicalists, the small Social Democracy of the
Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, as well as minorities in other political
groups. Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Vladimir Lenin, and Anton
Pannekoek all belonged to this group. The state of war marked a deep
caesura. Class struggle was removed from the political agenda in favour of
the war of nations. Censorship and political repression made work among
the proletarian masses and the army nearly impossible.
© The Author(s) 2019 1

M. Brie, Rediscovering Lenin, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23327-3_1
2 M. BRIE
Thus, what is to be done in times of powerlessness? The following sec-

tion takes a closer look at Lenin’s Swiss years between August 1914 and
April 1917 as well as the summer of 1917 in Russia. News of the outbreak
of World War I reached him in Austro-Hungarian-occupied Poland. He
had moved to Krakow in July 1912 from Paris, where he primarily resided
since 1908, in order to intensify his contacts to Russia. He spent the sum-
mer of 1914, as he already had in 1913, in the Gutóv-Mostovich guest
house in Poronin, a tourist location in the High Tatras. He was arrested
immediately after war’s outbreak on suspicion of spying for Russia.
Released through the intervention of Polish and Austrian socialists, he
travelled to neutral Switzerland together with his wife and her mother as
fast as possible. He would remain there for two years and eight months
until he was able to take a train through imperial Germany to Sweden (for
more details see Gautschi 1973; Solzhenitsyn 1976). From there he
boarded a ship to Finland and went to Petrograd carrying with him his
famous April Theses, his slogans for a socialist revolution in Russia.
After settling in Switzerland Lenin was largely isolated and contact to
Russia cut off almost entirely. He sought out collaborators. Grigory
Zinoviev together with his wife and G.L. Shklovsky as well as Ines Armand
also came to Bern. This constituted ‘the circle of friends with which he
discussed daily’ (Reisberg 1977, 560). The most important organ of com-
munication with the member of the party in Russia, the newspaper Pravda,
had already been banned in July 1914. The members of the Bolsheviks’
Duma delegation were sentenced and banished to East Siberia.
Using the Time of Exile Properly

On 19 September 1915, Lenin wrote to the left Socialist Revolutionary
Alexandrovitch: ‘Dear Comrade, Comrade Kollontai has forwarded your let-
ter on to me. I have read and reread it attentively. I can understand your pas-
sionate protest against the emigrant colony, which apparently did anything
but please you. The experience of 1905, however, has proved, in my opinion,
that there are emigrants and emigrants. Part of the emigrant body, which prior
to 1905 had devised the slogans and tactics of revolutionary Social-Democracy,
proved in the years 1905-07 to be closely linked with the mass revolutionary
movement of the working class in all its forms. The same applies today, in my
opinion. If the slogans are correct, if the tactics are the right ones, the mass of
the working class, at a given stage of development of its revolutionary move-
ment, is bound to come round to these slogans.’ (LW 43: 493)
1 WHAT IS TO BE DONE IN TIMES OF POWERLESSNESS? LENIN’S YEARS… 3
Looking back on the 32 months Lenin spent in Switzerland one can say
with certainty that no one before him ever used their time in exile to pre-
pare for their major political moment quite as systematically and conse-
quently as Lenin did. During a period in which he was unable to take any
action, he did what he did best: he prepared the conditions for his own
actions. Lenin turned ‘inward’ in the truest sense of the word. Everything
was put to the test. As he remarks in his overview of Hegel’s Science of
Logic, which will be referred to again at a later point: ‘The movement of
cognition to the object can always only proceed dialectically: to retreat in
order to hit more surely—reculer pour mieux sauter’ (LW 38: 277f).
In the following, the individual elements of this ‘retreat’ are sketched
out in their internal interconnectedness. Some details of Lenin’s work in
this period were due to circumstance, often external occasions were the
trigger. But the whole of his work in this time of external powerlessness is
characterised by impressive consistency and explains to a large degree
Lenin’s ability to unfold a strategic efficacy far overshadowing that of his
opponents when the opportunity arose in the revolutionary months of 1917.
While Lenin’s individual writings from this period are often taken for
themselves, here we address their embeddedness in a strategically oriented
searching process. Proceeding from the firm conviction that the war would
lead to a European socialist revolution, much like a chess player Lenin
sought to anticipate a whole series of possible moves in advance. Eight
elements in Lenin’s decisive contribution enabled the Bolsheviks to seize
power in autumn 1917 and establish their dictatorship (see Fig. 1.1).
Moreover, these eight elements are conducive to a better understanding of
why the Bolsheviks’ epoch-making success ultimately led them into a his-
torical dead end.
Although the individual elements of Lenin’s search process depicted in
the following were developed in relative temporal succession, owing above
all to the concrete possibilities for action at hand at the time, the succes-
sion was of course fluid. Adding to this were what cybernetics calls feed-
back: each subsequent step sharpens the ‘No’ that forms the starting
point, modifies social analysis, radicalises revolutionary theory, specifies
scenarios, contributes to new ideas about the emancipatory horizon and
the role of state power, and prioritises new strategic focal points accompa-
nied by specific corresponding transitional projects.
4 M. BRIE
Fig. 1.1 Lenin’s impact between August 1914 and April 1917
FormUlating a ‘no’
Small groups in many Second International parties rejected the World
War, opposed their own party leadership, and searched for a strategy com-
mensurate to the new situation. A network began to form around Social
Democracy’s left pole that would go down in the history of European
socialism as the ‘Zimmerwald movement’.
The Zimmerwald Movement

The declaration passed in September 1915 described war—‘Regardless
of the truth regarding immediate responsibility for the outbreak of this
war’—to be ‘the result of imperialism, the striving by capitalist classes of
each nation to feed their greed for profit through exploitation of human
labour and natural resources around the entire globe’. Addressing the pro-
letarians of Europe, it called: ‘Since the war began you have placed your ener-
gies, your courage, and your endurance at the service of the ruling classes. Now
the task is to act for your own cause, for the sacred aims of socialism, for the
deliverance of oppressed peoples and subjugated classes through irreconcilable
proletarian class struggle.’ (International Socialist Conference 1915)
A left wing in turn formed within this Zimmerwald movement driven

forward primarily by Lenin. Although it voted for the manifesto of the
conference quoted above, it noted in the minutes that the declaration was
insufficient: it contained ‘no clear characterisation of the open opportun-
ism as well as that which is obscured by radical phrases’ and offered ‘no
characterisation of the primary means of struggle against the war’ (quoted
in Lademacher 1967, 154).
Lenin’s position toward the war had been clear from August 1914 onward:
firstly, a break with the Second International and the founding of a new
Communist International, and secondly the promotion of the central slogan
‘Turn imperialist war into civil war’. If he initially responded rather sceptically
to reports about the SPD’s unanimous vote in favour of war credits in Polish
newspapers on 4 August 1914, his first recorded remark was then: ‘That is
the end of the Second International’ (quoted in Reisberg 1977, 533).
Lenin’s first written theses appeared shortly after his release from prison
in Austro-Hungary around the beginning of World War I, in which he
demanded—in the name of ‘leaders of the Russian Social-Democratic
Labour Party’—the establishment of a new International to ‘rid itself of
this bourgeois trend in socialism’ (LW 21: 17). His central assertion was
the ‘need for a revolutionary war by the proletarians of all countries,
against the bourgeoisie of all countries’ (ibid.: 16). Moreover, he insisted
on the consideration of extra-legal means of struggle alongside legal
forms. According to Lenin, propaganda had to be pursued ‘involving the
army and the theatre of hostilities as well, for the socialist revolution and
the need to use weapons, not against their brothers, the wage slaves in
other countries, but against the reactionary and bourgeois governments
and parties of all countries’ (ibid.: 18). This corresponded to Karl
Liebknecht’s demand for mercilessly settling accounts with the ‘deserters
and turncoats of the International’ and establishing a sharp clarity with
regard to the ‘principles of our attitude to the world war […] as a special
case of our view of the capitalist social order’: ‘The task is above all to lay
down the practical conclusions flowing from these principles, and to do so
unwaveringly in every country’ (Liebknecht 1915).
In contrast to the majority of socialists, Lenin thought beyond the con-
crete situation of the Left’s almost total incapacity to act. Nor was he
intimidated by the laws of war when calling for disobeying of orders and
encouraging revolt. He assumed that the war itself would result in crises
from which a revolutionary situation would emerge. To the extent it was
possible, the Left had to prepare for them and educate the masses about
the needed action in such situations beforehand.
6 M. BRIE
In its determination, Lenin’s ‘No’ simultaneously represents a tremen-

dous sharpening of emphasis. While this accounts for its strength, it also
constitutes its limitation. The expected revolution was understood as the
transformation of the imperialist war between the slaveholders into a civil
war against the slaveholders. Only the violent choice between two abso-
lute opposites in terms of an either-or decision and not also an open space
of political alternatives stood at the heart of this conception of revolution.
Likewise, his ‘No’ to the ‘Social Chauvinists’ and ‘Opportunists’ was
absolute. It left no room for ‘vacillating’ or ‘deviating’ from the position
accepted as correct. A common democratic search process was thus made
more difficult, anticipating the ‘21 Conditions’ adopted in 1920 at the
second congress of the Communist International.
Working oUt a PhilosoPhy oF Dialectical Practice

anD evolUtionary leaPs
A selection of Marx and Engels’ correspondence was published in 1913.

Lenin compiled an elaborate conspectus to which he would subsequently
refer on numerous occasions and also penned a review. In the process he
came across—not least in the context of discussions about Capital—trea-
tises by Marx and Engels on the philosophy of Hegel and dialectics more
generally. He remarks: ‘The rational in Hegel’s Logic, in its method. [[Marx
1958: paged through Hegel’s Logic again and would like to have explained
in 2 or 3 print sheets what the rational in it is.]]’ (LW 38: 40). The signifi-
cance of dialectics in Marx and Engels’ correspondence appears to have
moved Lenin to devote this time of relatively practical inactivity to a deep-
ened engagement with Hegel’s work and the writings of other authors to
which Marx and Engels repeatedly refer—including Heraclitus and Leibniz
(specifically, Feuerbach’s text on Leibniz). Further immediate impetus was
provided by the fact that he was working on an extensive article about Karl
Marx for the Russian Granat Encyclopedia (LW 21: 43–91).
If one were to attempt to define in a single word the focus, so to speak, of

the whole correspondence, the central point at which the whole body of
ideas expressed and discussed converges—that word would be dialectics.
The application of materialist dialectics to the reshaping of all political
economy from its foundations up, its application to history, natural science,
philosophy and to the policy and tactics of the working class—that was what
interested Marx and Engels most of all, that was where they contributed
what was most essential and new, and that was what constituted the masterly
advance they made in the history of revolutionary thought. (LW 19: 554)
While the first major battles of World War I were being waged in the
last four months of 1914, Lenin concentrated, at least if measured by
time invested and texts produced, on the aforementioned article about
Marx and the study of Hegel’s Science of Logic. His distance from the
actual political struggle could hardly have been greater. As Stathis
Kouvelakis writes:
This taking distance, this solitude, which is often to be found at moments of

sudden change, not only among thinkers but also among men of action, is
an absolutely necessary moment of the process of events itself: the caesura of
the initial event (the war) is silently echoed in their taking distance, a silence
from which the new initiative, the opening to the new, will resurge. It is only
in the light of this novum that the process can retroactively appear as neces-
sary, the self-criticism of thought interacting with the self-criticism of things
themselves, which it recognizes as its own, without anything managing to
reduce the share of contingency in this encounter, its complete lack of any
advance guarantee. (Kouvelakis 2007, 167)
In a situation of all-out crisis and almost absolute incapacity to act,

Lenin commenced the study of what appears to be one of the most abstract
philosophical theories in its purest form: Hegel’s logic. His political state-
ments during this period amount to less than 30 pages, while he dedicated
another 50 pages to Marx. The conspectus of the Science of Logic, how-
ever, is no less than 140 printed pages long. He never studied and evalu-
ated any other book in written form in such depth.
As Kevin Anderson writes in his analysis of the Leninian reception of
Hegel: ‘This is a rather surprising balance of theoretical versus more politi-
cal writings for a Marxist who is usually regarded as primarily an organiza-
tion man rather than a theorist’ (Anderson 1995; see also Kouvelakis
2007; Löwy 1976). Unlike most of his work, in Lenin’s reading of Hegel
it is not the analysis of the given society, the formulation of concrete politi-
cal positions, nor the polemical conflict that stands in the foreground but
rather the appropriation of methodological principles, structures of think-
ing, and acting in contradictions.
Following Lenin’s reading of Hegel (this reading is analysed, inter alia
in Althusser 1971; Arndt 1982, 329–429; Anderson 1995, 57–59), it
becomes clear how his incipient feeling of obligation—he realised how
highly Marx and Engels regarded Hegel and did not want to stand back—
turns into an intellectual pleasure, a liberating encounter. Lenin was above
all fascinated by the concluding chapter in the Science of Logic, titled ‘The
Doctrine of the Notion’. He noted: ‘In this most idealistic of Hegel’s
8 M. BRIE
works there is the least idealism and the most materialism’ (LW 38: 233).
Lenin replaced the practical idea of the good in Hegel’s depictions with
the concept of praxis, and in doing so formulated several thoughts going
far beyond his previous philosophical horizon as evidenced years earlier in
Materialism and Empirio-criticism. Over several pages he squeezed the
following maxims into his notes:
Man’s consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but creates it.
[…] The “good” is a “demand of external actuality,” i.e., by the “good” is
understood man’s practice = the demand (1) also of external actuality (2).
Practice is higher than (theoretical) knowledge, for it has not only the dignity
of universality, but also of immediate actuality. […]
The “objective world” “pursues its own course,” and man’s practice,
confronted by this objective world, encounters “obstacles in the realisation”
of the End, even “impossibility….” […] What is necessary is the union of
cognition and practice. […]
First premise: The good end (subjective) versus actuality […]
Second premise: The external means (instrument), (objective).
Third premise or conclusion: The coincidence of subjective and objec-
tive, the test of subjective ideas, the criterion of objective truth. (LW 38:
212, 213, 214, 216)
What strikes the reader vis-à-vis Marx’s third Feuerbach thesis is that
Lenin develops a conception of praxis that remains within the framework
of instrumental reason, which emphasises the individual deed that demon-
strates its truth by its objective result, but not also by the self-transformation
of subjects, their relations to each other, and their progress towards eman-
cipation. Praxis is reduced to the subject-object relation; the dialectic of a
processing subject-subject-object relation does not appear. Praxis is under-
stood above all as creating but not as an open process of changing and
self-changing of actors in the living social space, which only then becomes
emancipatory if the possibilities of free discussion and democratic decision-
making are expanded.
In his brief sketch ‘On the Question of Dialectics’ written in 1915,
Lenin attempts to summarise the insights gained from reading Hegel and
other philosophers. Four theses stand out in particular:
(1) ‘The splitting of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory
parts […] is the essence (one of the “essentials,” one of the principal, if not
the principal, characteristics or features) of dialectics.’ (LW 38: 357)
(2) ‘The unity (coincidence, identity, equal action) of opposites is condi-

tional, temporary, transitory, relative. The struggle of mutually exclusive
opposites is absolute, just as development and motion are absolute.’ (ibid.:
358)
(3) ‘Every universal is (a fragment, or an aspect, or the essence of ) an
individual. Every universal only approximately embraces all the individual
objects. Every individual enters incompletely into the universal, etc., etc.
Every individual is connected by thousands of transitions with other kinds
of individuals (things, phenomena, processes), etc. […] transformation of
the individual into the universal, of the contingent into the necessary, transi-
tions, modulations, and the reciprocal connection of opposites.’ (ibid.: 359,
360)
(4) ‘Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be transformed
(transformed one-sidedly) into an independent, complete, straight line,
which then (if one does not see the wood for the trees) leads into the quag-
mire, into clerical obscurantism (where it is anchored by the class interests of
the ruling classes). Rectilinearity and one-sidedness, woodenness and petri-
fication, subjectivism and subjective blindness—voilà the epistemological
roots of idealism.’ (ibid.: 361)
This study of Hegel is a decisive contribution to Lenin’s thought and

surely marks a complete break with a linear concept of evolution as had
characterised the Marxism of the Second International for decades. Roland
Boer speaks in this context of ‘ruptural dialectics’ (Boer 2015). Kautsky
and others simply projected the social and democratic achievements of the
relatively stable phase of the late nineteenth century into the future; both
Lenin and Luxemburg, on the other hand, saw barbarism’s writing on the
wall. Lenin cites Hegel’s depiction of the transition from quantitative to
qualitative changes, emphasises the ‘breaks in gradualness’, notes to him-
self that ‘gradualness explains nothing without leaps’, and writes the word
‘Leaps!’ in the margins three times (LW 38: 123). Every tendency, he
recognises, is contradicted by a counter-tendency, the whole is character-
ised by the mutually reinforcing overlapping of many opposites which
cannot be reduced to one another, and thereby seemingly becomes a
totality threating to break apart at any moment. The derived, secondary,
or seemingly marginal may assume a determining role in a concrete situa-
tion, while sudden shifts and individual events disrupt the continuity and
allow for radical intervention.
10 M. BRIE
Dialects as the Art of Sailing Against the Wind

Walter Benjamin described dialectics in his writings as the art of sailing
against the wind. The concepts in this image represent the sails: ‘What mat-
ters for the dialectician is to have the wind of world history in his sails.
Thinking means for him: setting the sails. What is important is how they are
set’ (Benjamin 1999, 473). In that same context we also come across the
phrases ‘To the process of rescue belongs the firm, seemingly brutal grasp’,
and ‘The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe.’
(Benjamin 1999, 473)
DeveloPing a Distinct narrative

Lenin began in August 1914 with a ‘No’. But every ‘No’ is underlaid by a
‘Yes’ that must be brought to light in order to unfold its organising and
connecting power. Or, as Albert Camus put it: ‘What is a rebel? A man
who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a
man who says yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebel-
lion’ (Camus 1991: 13). The ‘Yes’ must be defined through a specific
narrative. The postmodern declaration of the end of ‘grand narratives’ in
1979 (Lyotard 2015) corresponded to Margaret Thatcher’s claim that
there was no society, but rather only ‘individual men and women and […]
families’, which in turn became the ideological foundation of neoliberal
market radicalism. Yet precisely the wage-earners and the subaltern social
classes and groups, the oppressed peoples, are most dependent on collec-
tive self-organisation to assert their interests. In order to cooperate they
require a common narrative. They need a convincing justification for why
collective self-organisation makes sense, what goals to pursue, what means
are legitimate, and what steps should be taken (on the basic structure of a
narrative see Greimas 1987; on the meaning of a Left narrative see Klein
2011). The function of such narratives is the construction of a potential
collective identity where existing identities have lost their function. They
address the possibility of counter-hegemony constituted as an idea: that
which has been divided, split, and isolated must be linked together anew
(Laclau and Mouffe 2001; Haug 2004). It is no coincidence that the vari-
ous currents of the Left elaborated such distinctive narratives of their own
after August 1914, for those without such a narrative have already lost the
battle before it begins.
One central task Rosa Luxemburg dedicated herself to from autumn
1914 on was to preserve the movement’s spiritual identity in the midst of
the catastrophe of Social Democracy’s failure. In September 1914 she
wrote: ‘…shredded concepts and shattered beliefs cannot be glued

together again’ (Luxemburg 1974, 11). The ‘socialist workers’ had to ‘see
that they do not allow their holy ideals to disappear beneath the ruins of
bourgeois society’, and quoted Goethe’s Faust: ‘We carry / The ruins off
into nothingness / And grieve / Over the lost beauty. / Splendid among
/ Earth’s sons / Magnificent, / Build it again / In your heart build it!’
Like Luxemburg, Lenin also dedicated a significant amount of his time
to developing a distinct narrative in this situation of rupture—albeit less
poetically. Lenin primarily engaged with the main representatives of the
Second International who had switched to the position of ‘defence of the
fatherland’. A meeting of Bolshevik organisations abroad adopted Lenin’s
positions and called for the founding of a Third International. On the
foundation of linking the struggle against the war with the call for revolu-
tion, the goal was established ‘to re-establish the Social-Democratic Party
organisations of the working class, on the basis of a decisive organisational
break with the social-chauvinists’ (LW 21: 164).
The double ‘No’ was now embedded in a narrative. Lenin derived the
thesis of the corruption of the highest layers of the working class in the
imperialist centres from his analysis of imperialism, pointing out these
groups’ interest in national and colonial oppression, and analysed the oli-
garchisation and bureaucratisation of sections of Social Democracy inte-
grated into the bourgeois-imperialist system. Lenin produced texts in
rapid succession to propagate this position. It was above all a narrative of
the treachery of the leaders of most Social Democratic parties. They had
shifted to the position of ‘defence of the fatherland’ in the imperialist war
and thus objectively supported the war. For this reason, an entirely new
internationalist and revolutionary Left was required: ‘It is not socialism
that has collapsed, in the shape of the present-day European International,
but an insufficient socialism, i.e., opportunism and reformism’ (LW 21:
21). In this narrative the divide between the different wings of Social
Democracy was deepened into moral enmity.
Lenin articulated his positions in an increasingly clear language and
sought to spread them against resistance from within his own ranks: the
imperialist character of the war, the struggle for the defeat of one’s ‘own’
government’, transformation of the imperialist war into a revolutionary
civil war against one’s own government, strict demarcation between revo-
lutionary Social Democracy and ‘social-chauvinism’ and the construction
of a new International, revolutionary organisation and propaganda on the
front and at home, the right to self-determination of nations vis-à-vis the
12 M. BRIE
imperialist powers and an alliance with the anti-colonial movements, and

the possibility of a successful revolution in only one country (see, in sum-
mary, LW 21: 295–338). All elements of a good ‘narrative’ come together
here: there are heroes and enemies, good goals and bad intentions, good
and bad means, abetters and accessories on both sides, and of course trai-
tors to the worthy cause. Grand, often hidden powers are at work, whose
power is revealed by the actions of the opponent (Keller and Hafner
1990, 88f).
strategically orienteD social analysis

In order to understand the concrete action situation Lenin turned to the
analysis of capitalist societies and imperialist world system. During the first
years of the war Lenin intensified his studies of the existing writings on
imperialism. He contributed a foreword to Bukharin’s Imperialism and
World Economy, worked his way through the main works on the imperial-
ism debate (specifically, Hilferding’s Finance Capital), and wrote a popu-
lar outline under the title Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (for
an assessment of this work see Hedeler and Külow 2016). His excerpts on
imperialism from 1915 and 1916 alone span 900 pages (see ‘Notebooks
on Imperialism’, LW 39).
Lenin did not aspire to great theoretical accomplishment in the field
of political economy, but rather was interested in the central contradic-
tions that possibly indicated where possible breaks in the systemic links
of imperialism may first appear. In doing so he sought to raise himself to
the height of the analysis. His goal was to identify the weakest ‘links in
the chain’ of imperialism (LW 22: 264), that is, the potential breaking
points at which even socially disadvantaged forces could induce greater
changes by exploiting the contradictions. There are three questions on
which the articles, writings, and draft resolutions of 1916 largely turn
and which are more closely related to his analysis of imperialism: (1) the
analysis of imperialist contradictions and the possibilities for their social-
ist resolution, (2) the exploration of possible development scenarios for
capitalist agriculture, and (3) the relationship between imperialism and
the national question.
Firstly, remarkable about Lenin’s text on imperialism is above all what
he places centre stage. Five theses are at the heart of the depiction, as he
recapitulates in his foreword to the French and German editions in 1919:
(1) Imperialism is parasitical capitalism, which by no means rules out growth

and development, but does push the latter in a certain direction: ‘More and
more prominently there emerges, as one of the tendencies of imperialism,
the creation of the “rentier state”, the usurer state, in which the bourgeoisie
to an ever-increasing degree lives on the proceeds of capital exports and by
“clipping coupons”’ (ibid.: 305). It would be mistaken to believe that this
tendency towards decay excluded a rapid growth of capitalism; individual
branches of industry, individual segments of the bourgeoisie, and individual
countries strongly exhibit one tendency and then the other in the epoch of
imperialism. The formation of monopolies would also not end competition,
but rather raise it to a new level.
The internal and external contradictions of capitalism would sharpen.
‘On the whole, capitalism is growing far more rapidly than before; but this
growth is not only becoming more and more uneven in general, its uneven-
ness also manifests itself, in particular, in the decay of the countries which
are richest in capital (Britain)’ (LW 22: 300). It was therefore a ‘decaying
capitalism’ (ibid.).
(2) World War I was a thoroughly imperialist war which had nothing to
do with ‘defence of the fatherland’, ‘a war for the division of the world, for
the partition and repartition of colonies and spheres of influence of finance
capital, etc.’ (ibid.: 189f ) This does not exclude the possibility, however,
that wars of liberation could occur under these conditions. According to
Lenin there was a high degree of unequal development (a) between the key
capitalist centres and (b) between these centres and the colonies, semi-
colonies, and subjugated peoples they ruled over. Imperialist and colonial
wars—as well as liberation struggles—become inevitable.
(3) Imperialism is the immediate preceding stage to socialism, ‘the eve of
the social revolution of the proletariat’ (ibid.: 194). The degree of socialisa-
tion, concentration, and centralisation have reached a stage allowing for the
assumption of direct economic control by the state. Capitalism as the condi-
tion for the development of productive forces has become redundant.
(4) The extra profits earned through exploiting the world allow one
tenth of the world’s population to squeeze the other nine tenths, covering
the costs of a global labour aristocracy which represents the social base of
revisionism and opportunism (ibid.).
(5) A path of reforms is ruled out on principle. He states: ‘The questions
as to whether it is possible to reform the basis of imperialism, whether to go
forward to the further intensification and deepening of the antagonisms
which it engenders, or backward, towards allaying these antagonisms, are
fundamental questions in the critique of imperialism.’ (ibid.: 287) His alter-
native is unequivocal—to him, revolutionary intensification represents the
only possible socialist path forward.
14 M. BRIE
The second focus of his analysis during this time is the development of
agriculture in different capitalist societies. Considering that the vast major-
ity of Russia’s population lived in rural areas (about 80 per cent), the ques-
tion as to how this majority could be won over to the revolution was
crucial. After his earlier works on the development of capitalism in Russia
with a special focus on the peasant masses (see esp. LW 3: 21-608), he
now turned to the United States and Germany to study agricultural devel-
opments in greater detail. The ultimate question was whether peasant self-
management could be sustained in the long run. He concluded that the
capitalist form of enterprise at least by tendency establishes itself over
smallholding agriculture, inevitably placing large segments of the peas-
antry in an intensifying conflict with those capitalist tendencies. The alter-
native, in his eyes, is only between Prussia’s reactionary Junker path or the
bourgeois path pursued in the U.S. (LW 22: 13-102). He regarded the
development of common forms of production by Russian peasants, a kind
of agrarian socialism in the countryside—the agricultural programme of
the Socialist Revolutionaries—as an illusion. He emphasised class struggle
in the village and above all sought to win over the landless and poor
peasantry.
A third essential question for the Russian Revolution was that of the
relationship between the central Russian state and the nations and nationali-
ties on the territories of this state accounting for more than half of its popu-
lation (counting the Ukrainians and Byelorussians as nationalities, which the
Tsarist census did not). While Rosa Luxemburg considered the preservation
of large state structures to be a precondition for combating nationalist divi-
sions among the working class and did not see sufficient reasons or interests
for secession and Austrian Social Democracy conceived democratic federal-
ist models of these states’ reorganisation (Baier 2011), Lenin unwaveringly
defended the right to national self-determination. Almost a third of his writ-
ings in 1916 are devoted to this topic (see Krausz 2014, 110f). Crucial is
the distinction he makes between three different types of nations, which he
counterposed to all abstract and generalising statements about ‘the’ nation
by focusing on the unequal relations between them:
First, the advanced capitalist countries of Western Europe and the United
States. In these countries progressive bourgeois national movements came to
an end long ago. Every one of these “great” nations oppresses other nations
both in the colonies and at home. The tasks of the proletariat of these ruling
nations are the same as those of the proletariat in England in the nineteenth
century in relation to Ireland [supporting separation from England –MB].
Secondly, Eastern Europe: Austria, the Balkans and particularly Russia.

Here it was the twentieth century that particularly developed the bourgeois-
democratic national movements and intensified the national struggle. The
tasks of the proletariat in these countries, both in completing their bourgeois-
democratic reforms, and rendering assistance to the socialist revolution in
other countries, cannot be carried out without championing the right of
nations to self-determination. The most difficult and most important task in
this is to unite the class struggle of the workers of the oppressor nations with
that of the workers of the oppressed nations.
Thirdly, the semi-colonial countries, such as China, Persia and Turkey,
and all of the colonies, which have a combined population of 1,000 million.
In these countries the bourgeois-democratic movements either have hardly
begun, or have still a long way to go. Socialists must not only demand the
unconditional and immediate liberation of the colonies without compensa-
tion—and this demand in its political expression signifies nothing else than
the recognition of the right to self-determination; they must also render
determined support to the more revolutionary elements in the bourgeois-
democratic movements for national liberation in these countries and assist
their uprising—or revolutionary wars, in the event of one—against the
imperialist powers that oppress them. (LW 22: 150–152)
In contrast to many socialist European contemporaries in the capitalist

centres, Lenin (and Trotsky) recognised the explosive potential of the
anti-colonial and national struggles early on. The fissures between the
imperialist powers and nationally and colonially oppressed peoples bore
great revolutionary potential. Regarding the armed Easter Rising in
Ireland in 1916, he wrote:
To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small

nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by a
section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without a movement
of the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses
against oppression by the landowners, the church, and the monarchy, against
national oppression, etc.—to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution.
[…] Whoever expects a “pure” social revolution will never live to see it.
Such a person pays lip-service to revolution without understanding what
revolution is. (LW 22: 355f)
The assertion that there can be no such thing as a ‘pure’ socialist revo-
lution is surely by far the most significant conclusion Lenin took from his
studies of imperialism. He identified numerous breakpoints within
capitalist-imperialist societies and the corresponding international system.
16 M. BRIE
System-threatening conflicts may emerge at any of these points and could

not be classified into a hierarchy. Each of these conflicts, according to
Lenin, bears socialist potential that can actively be unleashed. He saw the
task of radical left politics as imputing the resolution of all these conflicts
with a socialist direction. Georg Lukács pointed out that an analysis of
Lenin’s specific theoretical method demonstrated
how the whole is always contained in each link of the chain; that the crite-
rion of true Marxist politics always consists in extracting and concentrating
the greatest energy upon those moments in the historical process which—at
any given instance or phase—contain within them this relationship to the
present whole and to the question of development central for the future—to
the future in its practical and tangible totality. (Lukács 2009, 82)
theory oF revolUtion: revolUtion oF theory

Since the formation of the Social Democratic movement in Russia in the
1880s the shared position had been clear: Russia was now irreversibly on
the path to becoming a capitalist society without any chance of preventing
this trajectory. Not the peasantry but rather the emerging working class
was the only truly revolutionary force. A ‘petty-bourgeois peasant social-
ism’ was impossible, wrote G.V. Plekhanov in his 1885 article ‘Our
Differences’. From this emerged a double strategy of the formation of the
Russian workers’ movement as an independent political force and their
struggle for a fundamental bourgeois-democratic transformation in Russia
while simultaneously defending wage earners’ most basic rights. It was a
strategy of two distinct phases. In Russia, the bourgeois revolution consti-
tuted the first step. Only after it had created the conditions for a free and
democratic development of capitalism could the struggle for socialism be
commenced on this foundation. Plekhanov based his ‘Programme of the
Social Democratic Emancipation of Labour’ on this strategy (Plekhanov
1974a). Attempting an immediately socialist revolution was doomed to
fail: should Social Democracy attempt such a feat, it would make ‘a most
disgraceful fiasco for the Russian socialist party’ inevitable (Plekhanov
1974b, 328).
The positions of Plekhanov and the Mensheviks and Lenin and the
Bolsheviks began to diverge during the revolution of 1905. Even before
the revolution the Bolsheviks had reached the conclusion that the Russian
bourgeoisie was entirely incapable of breaking decisively with Tsarism and
clearly lacked the necessary will to do so. In their view it was therefore
unable to play any greater role in a bourgeois-democratic revolution. This

role thus shifted to Social Democracy as representatives of the working
class and the Socialist Revolutionaries as representative of the peasantry.
The Bolsheviks’ immediate objective was the establishment of a
proletarian-peasant dictatorship in order to implement needed political
and social reforms. In opposition to positions championed by the
Mensheviks, Lenin argued in support of Social Democratic participation
in government in the case that it constituted a different class dictatorship.
The task at hand was a ‘revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and
the peasantry’ that was to implement ‘the task of the most radical demo-
cratic revolution’ (LW 8: 285, 282). The goal was the foundation of a
‘democratic republic, the last form of bourgeois domination and the best
form for the class struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie’ (ibid.:
273). Essentially, this amounted to the programme of a bourgeois revolu-
tion under socialist leadership.
The Mensheviks considered such a project a mistake in principle,
doomed to miserable failure. To substantiate their position, they pointed
to Engels’ text on the German Peasants’ War of 1525 written in 1852.
Engels had claimed, guided not least by his assessment of the European
revolutions of 1848, that a revolutionary party’s attempt to represent the
interests of another class by declaring them its own necessarily had to fail
(MECW 10: 469f). In January 1905 Menshevik A.S. Martynov published
a work titled ‘Two Dictatorships’ in which he argued for the strict rejec-
tion of any participation in government by the proletarian Social
Democratic Party, as it would discredit the party in the long term and
necessarily end in desperate minority rule. This would in turn be reversed
into its opposite, into personal dictatorship and the imperialism of
Napoleon (see Martynov 1905, 42). He concluded: ‘The struggle for
influence over the course and outcome of the bourgeois revolution can
only be expressed in that the proletariat exerts revolutionary pressure on the
will of the liberal and radical bourgeoisie, that the more democratic “below”
of society forces its “upper layers” to agree to carry the bourgeois revolu-
tion to its logical conclusion’ (Martynov 1905, 58).
After the revolution of 1905 revealed just how weak Tsarist rule had
become, how little the Russian bourgeoisie was in the position to pursue
a political project of its own, and how quickly it had entered into an alli-
ance with the forces of the old Russia, yet also after the revolutionary
potential harboured by the Russian working class as well as the peasantry
had become obvious and it was plain that the Tsarist government could
18 M. BRIE
not rely on the loyalty of the armed forces indefinitely, the position within
Russian Social Democracy radicalised. Leon Trotsky drafted sketches of a
concept that would later become known as the theory of permanent
revolution.
Trotsky’s Concept of the Uninterrupted Revolution

In his text Results and Prospects first published in 1906, Trotsky wrote:
‘we shall inevitably be driven by the logic of our position. It is possible to
limit the scope of all the questions of the revolution by asserting that our
revolution is bourgeois in its objective aims and therefore in its inevitable
results, closing our eyes to the fact that the chief actor in this bourgeois
revolution is the proletariat, which is being impelled towards power by the
entire course of the revolution. We may reassure ourselves that in the frame-
work of a bourgeois revolution the political domination of the proletariat
will only be a passing episode, forgetting that once the proletariat has taken
power in its hands it will not give it up without a desperate resistance, until
it is torn from its hands by armed force. We may reassure ourselves that the
social conditions of Russia are still not ripe for a socialist economy without
considering that the proletariat, on taking power, must, by the very logic of
its position, inevitably be urged toward the introduction of state manage-
ment of industry.’ (Trotsky 1969, 66f)
Proceeding from his notion of an ‘uninterrupted revolution’ (ibid.: 80),
Trotsky concluded: ‘Without the direct State support of the European prole-
tariat the working class of Russia cannot remain in power and convert its
temporary domination into a lasting socialistic dictatorship. Of this there can-
not for one moment be any doubt. But on the other hand there cannot be
any doubt that a socialist revolution in the West will enable us directly to
convert the temporary domination of the working class into a socialist dic-
tatorship.’ (Trotsky 1969, 105)
The conception of two phases in the Russian Revolution appeared

increasingly questionable to Lenin by the outbreak of World War I at the
latest. For if the socialist revolution stood on the agenda for all of Europe, if
its victory in individual countries appeared possible, and if imperialism and
war had turned socialism into both the objective as well as subjective order
of the day to prevent looming civilisational collapse, then it appeared that
demands for democracy, social rights, land for the peasants, and national
self-determination could only be achieved as part of a socialist revolution.
Lenin’s position further radicalised with the beginning of the February
Revolution. Using the wealth of knowledge he accumulated in the previ-
ous years, he began to abandon the decades-old dogma of two phases of
the revolution in Russia in a matter of weeks. He had long defended it

against his own insights during the 1905 revolution as it represented a
central element of Marxism to him. He had been certain that without a
certain level of maturity of objective conditions there could not be suffi-
cient maturity of subjective conditions for a socialist revolution either.
As Michael Löwy writes in his analysis: ‘The objective determines the
subjective; the economy is the condition of consciousness; here, in two
phrases are the Moses and the Ten Commandments of the materialist gos-
pel of the Second International which weighed upon Lenin’s rich, political
intuition’ (Löwy 1976, 8). According to Löwy, Lenin actually abandoned
this gospel in his ‘Letters from Afar’ written for Pravda in March–April
1917 while still in Switzerland. If Bernstein had ‘revised’ Marx from a
reformist position, then Lenin’s work can be characterised as a ‘revolu-
tionary revisionism’ (Bollinger 2006, 12). In his third letter, Lenin sug-
gested a series of immediate measures and observed:
These measures do not yet constitute socialism. […] They would not yet
constitute the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, only the “revolutionary-
democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the poor peasantry”. It is not
a matter of finding a theoretical classification. We would be committing a
great mistake if we attempted to force the complete, urgent, rapidly devel-
oping practical tasks of the revolution into the Procrustean bed of narrowly
conceived “theory” instead of regarding theory primarily and predomi-
nantly as a guide to action. (LW 23: 329f)
Steps Towards Socialism as the Order of the Day
“This is a bourgeois revolution, it is therefore useless to speak of social-
ism,” say our opponents. But we say just the opposite: “Since the bourgeoi-
sie cannot find a way out of the present situation, the revolution is bound to
go on.” We must not confine ourselves to democratic phrases; we must
make the situation clear to the masses, and indicate a number of practical
measures to them, namely, they must take over the syndicates—control
them through the Soviets, etc. When all such measures are carried out,
Russia will be standing with one foot in socialism. Our economic pro-
gramme must show a way out of the debate—this is what should guide our
actions. (LW 24: 309)
Once again the aforementioned Menshevik, Martynov, contradicted him.

Although he no longer ruled out government participation by the Social
Democratic parties, the goal could not be the implementation of a socialist
20 M. BRIE
programme, but instead had to be ‘limited to the only feasible task—ending

the war and implementing vigorous measures to guarantee the convocation
of the Constituent Assembly’ (Martynov 2017, 219). In combination this
would also improve the conditions for a revolutionary situation in Western
Europe, as a result of which socialism would be placed on the agenda there.
The ‘father’ of Russian Social Democracy, G.V. Plekhanov, penned a response
titled ‘On Lenin’s Theses and Why Deliriums Are Occasionally Interesting’,
accusing Lenin of switching over to the anarchists, who ‘have incessantly
called the workers of the world to socialist revolution without investigating
which phase of economic development this or that country may currently be
undergoing’ (Plechanov 1997, 241).
In the spring of 1917 the overwhelming majority of Soviets shared the
notion that the revolution could only be bourgeois in nature and the gov-
ernment had to be controlled by the Soviets in order to fulfil its respective
tasks. However, the Soviet of the fortress city of Kronstadt assumed sole
power as early as May 1917, refusing to take orders from the Provisional
Government (Smoljanskaja 2017). Lenin for his part managed to win over
the majority of his own party in a short period of time, although represen-
tatives of the party leadership like Zinoviev and Kamenev remained scepti-
cal or even hostile. Alexander Bogdanov, one of the most influential
intellectuals within the Bolshevik Party for a long time, tried to argue that
the working class was not close to ready for nor indeed capable of social-
ism. As long as it remained a technological adjunct to the machinery, he
contended, it could not become the active owner of the means of produc-
tion (Bogdanov 1990, 349ff).
the ePoch as a concrete action sitUation

‘What is to be done?’ and ‘Who does it?’ have always been central question
for the Left. What Is to Be Done? was a novel written by Nikolai
Chernyshevsky while languishing in a Tsarist prison, posing the question
as to how humans can contribute to changing society through their con-
crete individual action (Chernyshevsky 1989). Lenin borrowed the title
for his 1902 pamphlet What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our
Movement (LW 5: 357–530). David Harvey recently reintroduced the
phrase (Harvey 2011) and applied it to the current conjuncture. Mostly
on the defensive, confronted with seemingly irresolvable problems, and
driven by the highest aspirations of radical change, no other political force
has put itself on the spot quite like the Left. The epoch was conceived
above all as action-space-time. It is no coincidence that Lenin more than

anyone else linked the Marxist classifications of epochs (see Jameson 1997)
to an immediate action orientation, and that he developed the elements
which he considered essential precisely during a time of blocked opportu-
nities for action at the beginning of World War I. Who—with what objec-
tives and using which means—can have an impact so as to transform a
foreseeable crisis into an epoch-making event that breaks with capitalism?
For Lenin, determining the specific epoch means determining (1)
‘which class stands at the hub of one epoch or another’, (2) with that deter-
mining ‘its main content, the main direction of its development’ as well as
(3) ‘the main characteristics of the historical situation in that epoch’ (LW
21: 145). To him ‘Marx’s method consists, first of all, in taking due
account of the objective content of a historical process at a given moment,
in definite and concrete conditions; this in order to realise, in the first
place, the movement of which class is the mainspring of the progress pos-
sible in those concrete conditions’ (ibid.: 143).
This conception of epochs implies concrete action constellations at a
given time and in a social space riven with contradictions. They emerge
from (1) the overlapping of real long- and medium-term tendencies, (2)
from their potential but not inevitable overlapping during concrete events,
and (3) the possibilities for intervening action in a specific situation emerg-
ing from this.
We could also speak of two different types of epochs: on the one hand
there are epochs of evolution when actors, the balance of forces between
them, the modes of production and ways of life, and natural relations are
relatively stable. Social and political conflicts alter the weight of individual
tendencies and the influence of certain forces within this framework.
Chronos with his hour glass, sand trickling back and forth, is the god of
this epoch. Then there are epochs of ruptures which mature during epochs
of evolution. In epochs of rupture new directions can be set. This is the
moment of the god Kairos (Agamben 2005, 68). It is a moment that can
be exploited or whose window of opportunity can also close again.
According to Paul Tillich, ‘Kairos is the time which indicates that some-
thing has happened which makes an action possible or impossible’ (Tillich
1972, 1). Sometimes historical time appears to the living more as the gen-
tle river of Chronos. But then this river suddenly transforms into roaring
rapids, in which only those who exploit the moment and latch onto the
Kairos survive.
22 M. BRIE
To express the meaning of Kairos, Posidippus of Pella (third century

BC) composed a dialogue of the observer with the god Kairos in his epi-
grams from Olympia:
Who are you? / I am Kairos, who conquers all! / Why do you walk on tiptoes?
/ I, Kairos, walk unceasingly. / Why do you have wings on your feet? / I fly
like the wind. / Why do you carry a sharp knife in your hand? / To remind
the people that I am sharper than a knife. / Why does a lock of hair fall onto
your forehead? / so that those who encounter me can grasp me. / Why is the
back of your head so bald? / After I have slid by with my flying feet, / none
will catch me from behind / as hard as they try. / And why did the Creator
create you? / To teach you, wayfarers. (Wikipedia 2015)
Immanuel Wallerstein speaks of the link between historical cycles and

secular trends that grow stronger during moments of chaotic imbalances,
where branching out, bifurcations—that is to say, non-predictable new
paths—are possible, creating a ‘transformational TimeSpace’ (Wallerstein
2004, 9). This is the moment of epochal rupture (Demirović 2014, 426).
The head of the Academy after Plato, Arcesilaus (born 315 BCE, died
241–240 BCE), compared the epoch with the moment in which a driver
restrains his horses in order to think about the further strategy of goals,
pathways, and means, the situation in which a boxer on the defensive dares
the possibility of an attack (see Görler 1994, 855). Such a moment had
arisen for Lenin and the revolutionary Left as a whole in August 1914—
fall back in order to prepare for the attack.
The Second International repeatedly debated the idea that the out-
break of a great war between Europe’s imperialist states could lead to a
socialist revolution (see already Engels in MECW 26: 450f). War was a
widespread notion of how the Kladderadatsch (August Bebel), the col-
lapse of capitalism, could arrive, alongside the notion of an economic col-
lapse as a result of an extensive economic crisis or the heightening of
political tensions through a Social Democratic electoral victory. In light of
the growing military tensions the Basel congress of the Second International
in 1912 not only called on its member parties to do everything possible to
prevent the outbreak of a European war, but also declared: ‘Should the
war nevertheless break out, they are obligated to advocate for its rapid end
and work with all strength to exploit the economic and political crisis
caused by the war to agitate the people and thereby accelerate the elimina-
tion of capitalist class rule’ (Parteivorstand der SPD 1912, 49).
Lenin argues in the conclusion of his analysis of imperialism that the

period of a capitalism associated with democratic forms in the centres and
relative international stability in relations between the key states of the
world system had ended by 1900. He viewed imperialism as an increas-
ingly parasitic economic system and a reactionary political system in which
wars between the imperialist states were inevitable. In this sense imperial-
ism represented a pre-stage to socialism, at least objectively: positively by
allowing for the conscious socialisation of production and exchange, and
negatively because it was no longer able to harness these potentials pro-
ductively. Now that the war had begun the subjective preconditions for
socialism would also have to be created.
Lenin’s Definition of the Epoch

The imperialist war is ushering in the era of the social revolution. All the
objective conditions of recent times have put the proletariat’s revolutionary
mass struggle on the order of the day. It is the duty of socialists, while making
use of every means and of the working class’s legal struggle, to subordinate
each and every of those means to this immediate and most important task,
develop the workers’ revolutionary consciousness, rally them in the interna-
tional revolutionary struggle, promote and encourage any revolutionary
action, and do everything possible to turn the imperialist war between the
peoples into a civil war of the oppressed classes against their oppressors, a war
for the expropriation of the class of capitalists, for the conquest of political
power by the proletariat, and the realisation of socialism. (LW 21: 347f)
Unique about Lenin’s approach following the outbreak of World War I

is that he links a general statement—the epoch of socialist revolution has
begun—to the capacity for concrete analysis of the concrete situation and
the establishment of very specific orientations for concrete action. From
the unequal development of capitalism and the profound contradictions of
imperialism he derives the possibility of a successful socialist revolution in
one or several countries, although he initially assumed for the Russian case
that this revolution would only be able to succeed in the context of subse-
quent revolutions, at least in Germany.
Lenin reinterpreted pivotal Marxist concepts such as capitalism, impe-
rialism, class, nation, revolution, etc. to detect the potential breakpoints in
hegemony, to point out where fissures can be deepened to a degree that
larger groups of people are set in motion and challenge their rulers. It was
for this reason that in 1917 he could so resolutely demand immediate
peace, the immediate redistribution of land to the members of village
24 M. BRIE
communities and the right to self-determination for the peoples within the
Russian Empire, workers’ control and state regulation of the economy:
precisely because he identified potential lines of condensation of struggle in
these questions.
Lenin attentively studied the forms of war economy and state-monopoly
regulation for how they could be deployed by a socialist state. He pre-
pared his positions on state capitalism under the control of a Communist
state party, that is, the New Economic Policy, early on. In contrast to
practically all of his socialist contemporaries, Lenin and the Bolsheviks
were both strategically as well as mentally prepared to take the slogan of
turning the weapons against their own government deadly seriously. It
testified to Lenin’s intrepidity vis-à-vis the consequences of such a politics
when he placed the revolutionary civil war onto the agenda in 1914. Anti-
colonial wars were not only to not be prevented, but rather:
civil war is just as much a war as any other. He who accepts the class struggle
cannot fail to accept civil wars, which in every class society are the natural,
and under certain conditions inevitable, continuation, development and
intensification of the class struggle. That has been confirmed by every great
revolution. To repudiate civil war, or to forget about it, is to fall into extreme
opportunism and renounce the socialist revolution. (LW 23: 78f )
For the Left, civil war must be ‘made the pivot of tactics’ (LW 21: 355).
Lenin, like Engels with a view to the Revolutions of 1789, 1848, and
the Paris Commune, conceived of an epoch of wars between victorious
socialism in individual countries and a hostile international environment.
Following the model of the French Republic from 1793 on, the transfor-
mation of wars of defence into revolutionary wars of intervention was not
ruled out. Consequently, the epoch of socialist revolution was imagined as
an epoch of European civil wars. As Lenin wrote in September 1915: ‘Life
teaches. Life is advancing, through the defeat of Russia, towards a revolu-
tion in Russia and, through that revolution and in connection with it,
towards a civil war in Europe’ (LW 21: 382). In this regard he also studied
von Clausewitz’s On War in the first half of 1915 (Wladimir I. Lenin
1957), again inspired by Marx and Engels’ correspondence.
Lenin’s understanding of his own epoch is characterised by a dual
emphasis: on the one hand he sees capitalism in its imperialist stage, shaped
by processes that increasingly and inevitably become economically, politi-
cally, and militarily destructive. Capitalism’s capacity for progress appears
irreversibly exhausted. In this sense, to Lenin imperialism is not only the
most recent but also the highest and final stage of capitalism. He shared
this position with most Marxists of his day. On the other hand he con-
cludes from the exhaustion of capitalism’s progressive potential that move-
ments against capitalism will necessarily grow stronger and more diverse in
form, emerging from the highly diverse conflicts imperialism brings forth.
To Lenin these include above all movements against social, national,
and colonial oppression, against the curtailment of democratic freedoms
and imperialist wars. His claim is that only socialism provides a progressive
pathway out. Due to the specific character of imperialism, these move-
ments had no choice but to declare war on the ruling circles. The alterna-
tive was thus imperialism or socialism, imperialist wars or civil wars. In
April 1917 he writes: ‘Outside of socialism there is no deliverance of
humanity from wars, from hunger, from the destruction of still more mil-
lions and millions of human beings’ (LW 24: 37).
state, revolUtion, anD commUnist vision

The question of the character of a socialist or communist society had always
played an important role in the programmatic debates of Russian Social
Democracy. From the outset Lenin emphasised—unlike Plekhanov—a rad-
ical-emancipatory vision of the free development of individuals. Prosperity
alone was not enough for him (see LW 6: 21, 35, 44). It was not until late
1916, however, that the question of the concrete character of a transitional
period and the institutional forms of a transitional society and the role of the
state in this revolution became central for Lenin. It seems reasonable to
believe that he considered other questions, such as those addressed above,
to have been resolved by then.
Yet it, by all means, remained an open question as to what character the
new, post-capitalist society to emerge in the wake of a socialist revolution
would exhibit and what this would entail for the relation to the post-
revolutionary state. It was necessary to determine what was to be done
following the seizure of political power and how the state’s monopoly on
violence was to be dealt with. The most prominent works on this topic
were published by August Bebel (1910) and Karl Kautsky (1903, 1910),
but had not dealt with the state question extensively. The immediate cause
of Lenin’s engagement with this question was a critique of Nikolai
Bukharin’s concepts of socialism and the state published in December
1916. Lenin referred, among other things, to the fact that Bukharin gen-
erally emphasised the importance of Social Democracy’s ‘hostility to the
state in principle’ (LW 23: 166). Lenin’s view was somewhat more nuanced.
26 M. BRIE
From late 1916 to February 1917 he completed the preparatory work

on an article titled ‘Marxism and the State’ he intended to place in the
Sbornik Social-Demokrata (‘Social-Democratic Review’). He chronologi-
cally documented most of Marx and Engels’ statements in this regard, but
given the journal’s discontinuation due to lack of funds the article
‘Marxism and the State’ remained unwritten. He did not continue the
planned work until returning to Russia.
Lenin wrote his masterpiece State and Revolution alongside articles
for the Bolshevik newspapers and notes to party committees in August
and September 1917 while hiding in Finland always within a train’s
reach of Petrograd, the centre of the Russian Revolution. In this tense
situation he managed to produce more than 100 printed pages of dense
theoretical work. Lenin’s aspiration in State and Revolution was nothing
less than ‘to re-establish what Marx really taught on the subject of the
state’ (LW 25: 391).
Lenin waged a war on two fronts: on the one hand he opposed Kautsky
for not emphasising the goal of smashing the bourgeois state apparatus
and replacing it with a new type of state, the dictatorship of the proletariat.
On the other hand he opposed left-communist positions he ascribed to
Bukharin, who allegedly failed to comprehend its simultaneously radical-
democratic and dictatorial character. Three questions took centre stage:
firstly, the character of the state within antagonistic class society; secondly,
the need to establish an entirely new state of the dictatorship of the prole-
tariat in its concrete form, as well as thirdly the elaboration of this state’s
functions during phases of transition to higher stages of communism.
The basic theses concerning the state in antagonistic class society are to
be found on the book’s first pages: according to Lenin, the state is ‘a prod-
uct and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms’ (ibid.).
It forms ‘an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by
another’, and its task is ‘the creation of “order”, which legalises and per-
petuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between the classes’
(ibid.). And, finally, the revolution—allegedly constituting the difference
with Kautsky and other representatives of the so-called ‘Centre’ of Social
Democracy—would have to be ‘violent’ and necessarily entail ‘destruction
of the apparatus of state power which was created by the ruling class’
(ibid.: 393).
Secondly, Lenin reconstructs Marx and Engels’ writings in order to
demonstrate how their conceptions evolved over time. While doing so, he
emphasises the question of establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat in
the wake of smashing the bourgeois state, formulating apodictically: ‘Only

he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the
recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat’ (ibid.: 417).
This dictatorship would be required for the ‘entire historical period
which separates capitalism from “classless society”, from communism’
(ibid.: 418). He pays particular attention to information regarding the
concrete form of such a dictatorship of the proletariat, which Marx had
derived largely from his analysis of the Paris Commune. According to
Lenin, ‘institutions of a fundamentally different type’ (ibid.: 424) than
those of the bourgeois state had been created in 1871. He emphasises the
return to a certain ‘primitive’ democratism based on the achievements of
the capitalist era, as this was the key condition enabling the participation
of broad masses. The elements Lenin lists include the arming of workers,
simplification of government tasks to mere ‘registration, filing, and check-
ing’, exercising official functions at a common worker’s wage, unrestricted
election and recall at any time, the unity of legislative, executive, and judi-
cative powers within the organs of the commune, and the transformation
of representative bodies into working bodies. In other writings from this
period he elaborates what he planned to include as the seventh chapter of
his book—the model of the Soviets as a new form of statehood, of the
‘organisation of the armed people (such as the Soviets of Workers’ and
Soldiers’ Deputies…)’ (ibid.: 468).
Lenin grasped all of this in a deeply contradictory image of a society
organised as a unified, centralised organism, subjugated to a state on the
model of the Paris Commune:
A witty German Social-Democrat of the seventies of the last century called

the postal service an example of the socialist economic system. This is very
true. At the present the postal service is a business organised on the lines of
a state-capitalist monopoly. Imperialism is gradually transforming all trusts
into organisations of a similar type, in which, standing over the “common”
people, who are overworked and starved, one has the same bourgeois
bureaucracy. But the mechanism of social management is here already to
hand. Once we have overthrown the capitalists, crushed the resistance of
these exploiters with the iron hand of the armed workers, and smashed the
bureaucratic machinery of the modern state, we shall have a splendidly-
equipped mechanism, freed from the “parasite”, a mechanism which can
very well be set going by the united workers themselves, who will hire tech-
nicians, foremen and accountants, and pay them all, as indeed all “state”
officials in general, workmen’s wages. (ibid.: 431f)
28 M. BRIE
Lenin’s deliberations repeatedly stress that the state of the dictatorship

of the proletariat is by no means simply the rule of the majority over the
minority, but rather an ‘an organisation for the systematic use of force by
one class against another, by one section of the population against another’
(ibid.: 461)—in this case against the bourgeoisie. Even before the
Bolsheviks’ seizure of power, he made it clear that democratic rules would
be suspended for the subjugated bourgeois class and that naked class rule
without freedom or democracy would apply:
And the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the organisation of the vanguard
of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of suppressing the
oppressors, cannot result merely in an expansion of democracy. Simultaneously
with an immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes
democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for
the money-bags, the dictatorship of the proletariat imposes a series of
restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists,
We must suppress them in order to free humanity from wage slavery, their
resistance must be crushed by force; it is clear that there is no freedom and
no democracy where there is suppression and where there is violence.
(ibid: 466f)
In a third step, Lenin poses a question that was new to Marxist debates
in this form: does the state have any other function vis-à-vis the workers
apart from suppressing the bourgeois class, beyond the mere ‘administra-
tion of things’ as Engels calls it with reference to Saint-Simon? In my view,
the consistency with which Lenin tackled this question prior to seizing
state power is remarkable. He attempted to draw every possible conclu-
sion regarding the question of the state from his reading of Marx and
Engels. Marx explained the need for applying bourgeois law in the assess-
ment of labour output during that ‘first phase of communist society as it
is when it has just emerged after prolonged birthpangs from capitalist soci-
ety’ (MECW 24: 87). But law requires an instrument in order to be
enforced—namely the state. Lenin concluded from this that the state of
the commune, the state of the dictatorship of the proletariat would by
definition bear some of the features of the state only just destroyed—the
bourgeois state!
In its first phase, or first stage, communism cannot as yet be fully mature
economically and entirely free from traditions or vestiges of capitalism.
Hence the interesting phenomenon that communism in its first phase retains
“the narrow horizon of bourgeois law”. Of course, bourgeois law in regard

to the distribution of consumer goods inevitably presupposes the existence
of the bourgeois state, for law is nothing without an apparatus capable of
enforcing the observance of the rules of law. It follows that under commu-
nism there remains for a time not only bourgeois law, but even the bour-
geois state, without the bourgeoisie! (LW 25: 476)
Proceeding from this position, Lenin could assume that the state would
have little trouble dealing with the small minority of the expropriated
bourgeois class, and therefore ‘the need for a special machine of suppres-
sion will begin to disappear’, and the state would be ‘no longer a state in
the proper sense of the word’ (ibid.: 468). At the same time, however, he
expected that during the first stage of communist society all citizens would
be employees of the state, that they would all, in their ‘capacity as a private
individual’, be subordinated to this ‘bourgeois state without the bourgeoi-
sie’ and its law, power, and violence. The question as to how the related
conflicts are fought out institutionally, how an uncontrolled growth of this
state’s apparatus of violence can be prevented, receives no specific treat-
ment in Lenin’s work. He appears to assume that the direct-democratic
constitution of the workers’ state represents a guarantee that the interest
representation of all ‘members of society’ will not be usurped by a special
group and no domination of a new minority established. Yet if violence in
the name of all members of society is necessary and if ‘there is no freedom
and no democracy where there is violence’, a situation becomes imagin-
able in which individuals are forced to relinquish all their individual free-
dom and democratic rights in the name of the common good, and can
only have them—or lose them—together.
concrete transitional Projects

as an alternative ‘yes’
For Lenin, the February Revolution was merely the first step to a socialist
revolution: ‘After the “great rebellion” of 1905—the “glorious revolution”
of 1917!’ (LW 35: 296). The moment had arrived to apply the strategy
developed to a concrete tactic which corresponded to the new situation.
Now back in Russia, he would have to prove whether he had made the best
use of his time in exile, whether he was able to develop ‘slogans’, propose
‘tactics’ to which ‘the mass of the working class, at a given stage of develop-
ment of its revolutionary movement, is bound to come round’, as he had
written to Alexandrovitch more than two years earlier.
30 M. BRIE
All seven elements culminated in the formulation of a concrete strategy

in March and April 1917, the aim of which was the immediate conquest of
political power. It became known by the slogan ‘All power to the Soviets’.
It initially emerged among left-wing Bolshevik circles and the anarchists
within the Petrograd worker milieu. Lenin, however, inserted this slogan
‘from below’ into a strategy ‘from above’ as expressed in his April Theses,
placing the socialist revolution on the agenda. The Soviets were to consti-
tute the basic form of a new kind of state. Immediate peace negotiations,
redistribution of land to the peasants, and socialist-oriented economic
regulations under direct worker control comprised the most important
immediate goals.
Nikolai Sukhanov, a left Menshevik and contemporary witness to the
revolution, recalls: ‘Suddenly, before the eyes of all of us, completely swal-
lowed up by the routine drudgery of the revolution, there was presented
a bright, blinding, exotic beacon, obliterating everything we “lived by”’
(Sukhanov 1962, 247f).
Valeriu Marcu on Lenin’s Slogans in 1927

His speeches and pamphlets stood out as models of lucidity against the
deluge of words which was turning the soil of all Russia into mud. Ulianov’s
[Lenin –MB] Party gained the day in meetings, in the discussions of work-
ers, peasants and soldiers, because what the Bolsheviks had to say was the
thing the people wanted as anxiously as they wanted the peace that would
not come and the bread that grew daily scarcer. Slogans fought like men in
a hand-to-hand scuffle; and the more substantial and simpler bore down the
others. (Marcu 1927, 255)
The strategy of the April Theses aimed, firstly, at overcoming the situa-
tion of dual power in which the Soviets themselves had handed over power
to the Provisional Government, and secondly at a Bolshevik majority in
the Soviets themselves. This in turn was to pave the way for an armed
insurrection and seizure of state power. Although Lenin never ruled out
the possibility of a peaceful transition of power, and although he claimed
that the Bolsheviks themselves would not launch a civil war as long as
there was no violence against the Soviets and the freedom of criticism was
preserved, he was ultimately certain that power could only be won and
defended through armed violence in this revolution. The bourgeois forces
would never allow any other option.
In the same way as he viewed the general strike of 1905–1906 primarily

as a means to prepare for the insurrection and armed seizure of power
(LW 10: 152) and considered the Soviets not primarily organs of worker
self-organisation but as ‘a fighting organisation’ (ibid.: 72), in the April
Theses he regarded the Soviet-based takeover of power through the armed
overthrow of the Provisional Government as the primary goal. Lenin
shared Blanqui’s notion of the centrality of an armed seizure of power
through insurrection, but drew decisive conclusions from Blanqui’s
repeated failure:
To be successful, insurrection must rely not upon conspiracy and not upon
a party, but upon the advanced class. That is the first point. Insurrection
must rely upon a revolutionary upsurge of the people. That is the second
point. Insurrection must rely upon that turning-point in the history of the
growing revolution when the activity of the advanced ranks of the people is
at its height, and when the vacillations in the ranks of the enemy and in the
ranks of the weak, half-hearted and irresolute friends of the revolution are
strongest. That is the third point. And these three conditions for raising the
question of insurrection distinguish Marxism from Blanquism. Once these
conditions exist, however, to refuse to treat insurrection as an art is a
betrayal of Marxism and a betrayal of the revolution. (LW 26: 22f)
Lenin’s strategy from April 1917 on aimed precisely at creating these

three conditions and entering into concrete organisational and military
preparations for the insurrection. A victorious government would then
immediately be compelled to address the pressing questions of peace, land
redistribution to the peasants, and the implementation of direct worker
control over the economy. According to Lenin, this was simultaneously a
programme for the direct transition to socialism—at least in the cities, for
as he writes, ‘socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist
monopoly. Or, in other words, socialism is merely state-capitalist monop-
oly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that
extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly. There is no middle course here’
(LW 25: 362).
According to Lenin’s position, the tasks urgently required in this con-
crete situation to fend off the imminent catastrophe of Russia’s total col-
lapse directly coincided with the greater goal of socialism through taking
power. That was his understanding of dialectics: ‘transformation of the
individual into the universal, of the contingent into the necessary’.
32 M. BRIE
ProsPects
On the evening of 25 October 1917 (old calendar) Petrograd was under
the control of the Bolshevik-led armed forces. The overthrow of the
Provisional Government was announced to the cheers of the remaining
delegates at the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and
Soldiers’ Deputies in the Smolny Institute. ‘The 670 delegates included
300 Bolsheviks, 193 Socialist Revolutionaries (more than half of them
leftists), 68 Mensheviks, 14 Menshevik-Internationalists, 16 United Social
Democratic Internationalists, and 69 delegates of national socialist parties
and independents’ (Saweljew 2017, 73). The right-Socialist Revolutionaries
and Mensheviks left the congress in protest of what they saw as a coup
d’état. Their hopes rested on the Constituent Assembly. The Soviet con-
gress passed the decrees concerning peace and land—a new era had begun.
Lenin had achieved his main goal: the takeover of government power by
the Bolsheviks. Weeks later the left-Socialist-Revolutionaries joined the
government. Now, the task at hand was the defence of this power as well
as the implementation of the objectives underlying this claim to power.
Measured by immediate results, Lenin’s strategy had worked: the eight
elements of this strategy developed mainly in exile had apparently stood
the test. For the first time in world history a socialist-Marxist party had
seized power with hardly any bloodshed. The historical test of this power’s
emancipatory substance and historical viability, of the relation between
ends and means, would come afterwards. In contexts such as these Engels
often liked to apply the English phrase ‘the proof of the pudding is in
the eating’.
If we inquire as to what the eight elements of Lenin’s strategy forma-
tion depicted above have in common, it is certainly the orientation towards
antagonism, the irresolvable opposition, the either-or, the ruling out of
any middle ground, the state of exception. The ‘No’ was absolute, the
philosophical conception aimed for a pointed heightening and aggravation
of the contradiction and the leap, while the narrative implied the ultimate
break with Social Democracy. The analysis rules out any lasting capacity for
reform on the part of capitalism and imperialism; the scenarios depict only
the barbarism of war on one side and socialist civil war against the capitalist
slaveholders on the other. For all those who object, the emancipatory hori-
zon promises the suspension of each and every democratic and civil right.
The central project is ‘proletarian power’ exercised by the Bolshevik Party,
which mercilessly suppresses all of its political opponents.
Each of these elements of Lenin’s strategy is conceived from the

extremes. It is a strategy of civil war. This proved to be a strength on the
path to power in 1917 under Russian conditions and World War. Now the
question was how this power would be applied.
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CHAPTER 2
What Is to Be Done in the Struggle

for a New World?
Constituent Assembly or revolutionAry

DiCtAtorship, september 1917 to JAnuAry 1918
Lenin is said to have burst out in ringing, uncontrollable laughter until
tears rolled down his face when he learned that the All Russian Constituent
Assembly had been sent home by the sailors’ guard after its first and only
session on the early morning of 6 January 1918 (according to accounts by
Nikolai Bukharin and Fyodor Raskolnikov; see Protasov 1997, 318). To
Lenin, the delegates to this assembly represented a ‘company of corpses…
mummies with their empty “social” Louis Blanc phrases’ (LW 26: 431).
He issued orders that no violence be committed against the delegates but
they were to be prevented from re-entering the palace after leaving it
(Protasov 1997, 317). The Constituent Assembly was dissolved by a proc-
lamation of the Soviet government that same day. A vibrant account of
Lenin’s view on the convocation of the Constituent Assembly following
the October insurrection is presented by Leon Trotsky in his recollections
of Lenin (Trotsky 2018, 279–287). It becomes clear that Lenin was quite
alone in his demand to refrain from convening the assembly and push for
new elections, at least initially. The decisions proposed by Lenin were
based on clear ideas on revolution, state power and violence. This chapter
analyses these ideas which sharpened in the crucial time after October
1917 and changed the world.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23327-3_2
38 M. BRIE
The Bolshevik chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee

of the Soviets and thus de facto head of state, Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov,
demanded in his opening address to the first session of the Constituent
Assembly that it recognise all decrees issued by the new Soviet power and
accept that all legitimate power lies ‘entirely and exclusively with the masses
and their authorised government—the councils of workers, soldiers and
peasants’. He implored the Constituent Assembly to confine its work to the
‘general elaboration of the most important foundations for the socialist
transformation of society’ (Novickaja 1991, 70). Bukharin declared in the
name of the Bolsheviks: ‘We say, comrades, in this moment, in which the
fiery glow of revolutionary flames is about to set the entire world ablaze—if
not today, then certainly tomorrow—that we declare, from this very stage, a
struggle of life and death against the bourgeois-parliamentary republic. We
Communists, the workers’ party, aspire to the creation of the first great
Soviet republic in Russia’ (Novickaja 1991, 90). Subsequently, the parlia-
mentary groups of the Bolsheviks and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries
exited the meeting hall e, thus ceasing their participation in this assembly.
Around 4:30 on the morning of 6 January the commander of the guard
at the Tauride Palace in which the Assembly was meeting, Zheleznyakov,
approached the assembly’s chairman, leading Socialist Revolutionary
Viktor Mikhailovich Chernov, and told him: ‘I request that the meeting be
terminated. The guard is tired and wants to sleep’. Chernov is said to have
screamed at him, asking who gave him the right to do such a thing, to
which Zheleznyakov responded calmly: ‘The workers don’t need your
palaver. I repeat: the guard is tired!’ (Wikipedia 2017). The delegates sub-
sequently postponed their meeting to 6 January, 17:00, and left the
Tauride Palace, the doors of which then shut behind them forever. At
least, that is how the historical myth goes.
Indeed, the delegates to the assembly of the French Estates-General
had acted quite differently from the All-Russian Constituent Assembly.
Inside the ballroom building in which the delegates of the third estate
convened, they solemnly swore on 20 June 1789 ‘never to separate, and
to meet wherever circumstances demand, until the constitution of the
kingdom is established and affirmed on solid foundations’ (quoted in
Furet and Richet 1996, 64; see also Kropotkin 1909, 55). When the king’s
Grand Master of Ceremonies delivered the order for their dispersal,
Mirabeau responded with his ‘thunderbolt speech’ that would later
become famous—and the genesis of which Heinrich von Kleist explains as
follows in his text On the Gradual Construction of Thoughts During Speech:
2 WHAT IS TO BE DONE IN THE STRUGGLE FOR A NEW WORLD? 39
“Yes,” Mirabeau replied, “we have heard the King’s command.” I am sure
that during this humane opening he was not yet thinking of the bayonet
with which he concluded: “yes, sir,” he repeated, “we have heard it.” One
can see that he still does not really know what he wants. “But what entitles
you”—he continued, and now suddenly a well of immense possibilities
breaks through to his consciousness—“to draw our attention to commands
in his place? We are the representatives of the Nation.” That was what he
needed: “The Nation gives orders and does not take them”—only to hoist
himself at once on to the peak of audacity. “And to ensure that I am making
myself perfectly clear to you”—and only now he finds the words to express
all the resistance for which his soul is armed: “go and tell your King that
nothing but the bayonet’s power will force us to leave our seats”—where-
upon, satisfied with himself, he sat down on a chair. (von Kleist, 43)
As heroic as the constitution of the third estate into the French National
Assembly at the beginning of the Great French Revolution may have been,
as tragi-comic was the end of the Russian Constituent Assembly ten
months into the Russian Revolution. In the result of the election the
Socialist Revolutionaries received 39.5 per cent, the Bolsheviks 22.5 per
cent, the bourgeois Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets) 4.5 per
cent and the Mensheviks 3.2 per cent of the vote. A total of 14.5 per cent
went to national branches of socialist parties. National parties with a non-
socialist orientation received 9.6 per cent (for details see Protasov 1997,
164ff). But Socialist Revolutionaries on one side, dominant in the
Assembly, and the Constitutional Democrats (Kadets) on the other no
longer had the will nor stamina to unconditionally defend this assembly. A
demonstration in Petrograd in its defence was violently dispersed by Red
Guards; according to official figures 21 people died (Wikipedia 2017).
Attempts by Socialist Revolutionaries to secure the defence of the
Constituent Assembly through military means or even take Lenin or
Trotsky hostage foundered beforehand, or rather were abandoned as they
lacked the necessary support. The rump of the Constituent Assembly that
convened in Siberia in 1918 was dissolved by White Army General
Kolchak; an uprising against him led by the Socialist Revolutionaries failed.
Neither the Reds nor the Whites were particularly fond of the assembly at
this point. Nevertheless, the Constituent Assembly would remain a recur-
ring point of reference for forces challenging the Bolsheviks until 1923.
The demand for a Constituent Assembly in Russia dated back to the
aristocratic Decembrists’ revolt of 1825. Since the 1860s the goal of con-
vening such an assembly formed the central point of convergence between
40 M. BRIE
all revolutionary and democratic programmes. Russian Social Democracy

also demanded the convocation of a Constituent Assembly elected by the
people in its 1903 party programme. As late as September 1917 Lenin
would justify his criticism of the Provisional Government by pointing out
that it rejected free elections for such an assembly and that only the over-
throw of the Provisional Government could clear the way for this assembly
(LW 26: 20). In his view the bourgeoisie was terrified of it, and yet only a
few months later he himself pushed for this body’s dissolution, although it
supposedly embodied something about which Maxim Gorky would later
say: ‘best people of Russia, for more than a century, had lived for the idea
of a constituent assembly, a political organ providing Russian democracy
with an opportunity for the free expression of the people’s will’ (quoted in
Protasov 1997, 23). For Lenin, however, history had moved beyond this
idea: the bourgeois-democratic revolution of February 1917 would finally
make way for the ‘Great October Socialist Revolution’, the Constituent
Assembly would be replaced by the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Lenin used the term October Revolution for the first time in his speech
on the land question during the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets
on 28 October (8 November), introducing it as follows: ‘We maintain that
the revolution has proved and demonstrated how important it is that the
land question should be put clearly. The outbreak of the armed uprising,
the second, October, Revolution, clearly proves that the land must be
turned over to the peasants’ (LW 26: 257). Thus, the uprising was equated
with a revolution merely one day after the overthrowing of the Provisional
Government—a second revolution that had allegedly not been a bour-
geois but a socialist revolution. In January 1918, the term ‘Great October
Revolution’ (LW 26: 429), in analogy to the French Revolution, and
eventually the ‘Great October Socialist Revolution’ becomes the preferred
term. As critical of Lenin as he may have been, Julius Martov had good
reason to write to longstanding Socialist Revolutionary Axelrod:
‘Understand, please, that before us after all is a victorious uprising of the
proletariat—almost the entire proletariat supports Lenin and expects its
social liberation from the uprising’ (quoted in Cliff 2012, 2).
There is a historical myth for the October Revolution as well, staged in
a visually stunning manner in Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein’s 1927 film
October. In this impressive epic not the meetings of the Congress of Soviets
on 25 October but the preceding armed action leading to the overthrow
of the Provisional Government, the cannon fire from the cruiser Aurora
and workers, soldiers and sailors storming across the Palace Square to the
Winter Palace take centre stage. The staged images of this ‘storming of the
Winter Palace’ that never actually took place in this form were later exhib-
ited in Soviet revolutionary museums or printed in books about the
October Revolution as ‘original photographs’.
This fixation on the ‘storming of the Winter Palace’ would have corre-
sponded to Lenin’s intention as well: he had emphasised the centrality of
the insurrection since 1905, the direct armed action in Moscow in
December 1905 as the highest form of revolution (LW 23: 247). In the
autumn of 1917 he unambiguously rejected tying the insurrection to top-
ple the Provisional Government to a resolution by the Second All-Russian
Congress of Soviets as Kamenev and Zinoviev demanded, and wrote to
the Central Committee: ‘Delay is criminal. To wait for the Congress of
Soviets would be a childish game of formalities, a disgraceful game of for-
malities, and a betrayal of the revolution’ (LW 26: 141). For him, the
matter was clear: ‘Further, a revolution differs from a “normal” situation
in the state precisely because controversial issues of state life are decided by
the direct class and popular struggle to the point of armed struggle. It
cannot be otherwise when the masses are free and armed’ (LW 25: 203).
Lenin reluctantly submitted to the Central Committee’s decision to
postpone the insurrection to the immediate run-up to the congress.
Trotsky and others pointed out that the congress would provide the
required legitimation for the uprising, even if issued afterwards (Institut
Marksizma-Leninizma pri ZK KPSS 1958, 81ff; Rabinowitch 2007,
151–314). At the same time, Lenin ensured that the Congress of Soviets
would not convene until after the successful military operation and seizure
of the Winter Palace along with the arrest of the Provisional Government’s
ministers. It was precisely this order of events—the insurrection prior to
authorisation through the Congress of Soviets—that not only leading
Bolsheviks Kamenev and Zinoviev but also and particularly the other left-
wing forces opposed. In their view, the unseating of the Provisional
Government ought to have been based on a resolution passed by the
Soviets supported by all socialist forces, instead of occurring as the result
of an insurrection resolved and enacted by the Bolsheviks and the
Bolshevik-led Petrograd Military Committee. In their eyes, the uprising
had been a ‘military conspiracy […] behind the backs’ of all non-Bolshevik
parties inside the Soviets and had ‘buried the meaning of the Congress of
Soviets as the legitimate representative of revolutionary democracy
(Martov 2014, 260). Moreover, Martov demanded in December 1917
that given that not a socialist but a ‘universal democratic’ revolution was
42 M. BRIE
the order of the day in Russia power would have to be transferred to the
Constituent Assembly as quickly as possible, for anything else was no more
than utopia leading to disaster (Martov 2000a).
Even 100 years later, the significance of this dispute for the competing
parties at the time must be clear. The rather simple question confronting
each and every revolution is that which Mirabeau raised in 1789 and
Chernov in 1917: the question as to who is allowed, and by which right,
to give and assert any kind of universally binding orders in society. It is the
question, ultimately, of who is the sovereign. In 1789 the representatives of
the Third Estate were able to establish themselves as the sovereign vis-à-vis
the king, in 1917 the Bolsheviks did so vis-à-vis the Constituent Assembly.
In revolutionary times, the old sovereign finds their legitimate claim to
rule challenged as the willingness to accept their orders disappears.
This is precisely what characterises a revolutionary crisis. Even those
challenging the sovereignty of the Ancien Régime have not yet succeeded
entirely at the moment of the enduring crisis. Nothing is decided. A revo-
lutionary crisis is the moment in which no one can say who can give orders
and whose orders will be obeyed. The ‘monopoly of the legitimate use of
physical force in the enforcement of order’ (Weber 1978, 54) no longer
exists and has not yet been re-established.
Sovereignty
In his foundation of the modern theory of sovereignty in the late 16th
century, Jean Bodin declared ‘him to be an absolute soveraigne, who next
unto almightie God, is subject unto none: neither holdeth any thing next
unto God, but of his owne sword’ (Bodin 1606, 114).
This sovereignty rests on three pillars: firstly, belief in the legitimacy of
the claim of those issuing the order. This implies that the orders are viewed
as legitimate by those obeying them, even if they may not correspond
entirely with their own beliefs or interests. Only rarely is sovereignty abso-
lute. This first pillar of sovereignty rests primarily on the ‘sword bearers’, the
‘service class’ of the sovereign with means of violence at their disposal. As it
were, legitimacy can also be achieved through the active support of a minor-
ity capable of acting that is prepared to kill if necessary. The second pillar is
the loyalty of those who need not regard the sovereign’s rule as legitimate
but are prepared to accept it and comply with orders. In most cases they
represent the majority of a society. They maintain a distance and arrange
themselves within existing conditions as long as no viable alternative is in
sight. The third pillar of sovereignty is the ability of the sovereign to control
and regulate (cultural, military, political, and economic) systems which
provide the necessary sources of legitimacy and loyalty—attractive interpre-

tations, superior arms, effective administrative systems and forms of negotia-
tion, as well as material and spiritual goods. In a revolutionary situation the
pillar of legitimacy comes to the fore—the third pillar being crucial with
regard to maintaining power in the long term. In the short term, faith and
the sword decide; in the long term, the reproduction of resources of power
is required lest the service class lose its faith and the masses withdraw their
loyalty to the sovereign. In this case both the search for alternatives and the
sovereign end up ‘naked’ (on the significance of this ‘third pillar’ of sover-
eignty see Brie 1998).
‘State and revolution’ constitute opposites that mutually engender one

another, and Lenin placed precisely this question at the heart of his book
of the same title. The positions formulated in this text exerted a significant
influence on his actions when implementing the Soviet order and dissolv-
ing the Constituent Assembly. That said, he was fully aware that revolu-
tions represent pointed struggles over the question of which social order
will emerge from a comprehensive organic social crisis and subsequently
be accepted as legitimate. Lenin’s April Theses, which he drafted while still
in exile as well as on his journey to Russia, had such an impact because
they made clear that he, in contrast to almost everyone else, did not pur-
sue bourgeois ‘normality’ but rather socialism and an entirely new type of
sovereignty and statehood along with it.
Revolutions
Revolutions are not a ‘state of exception’ in which the state of normality
is defended by means which are usually unavailable during such a ‘normal
state’ (commonly in the form of emergency laws or the state of war). In
contrast to the state of emergency (Agamben 2005, 54), violence no longer
has any reference to a valid constitutional order during revolutions. In revo-
lutions, distinct, oppositional normative understandings of sovereign order
and power confront one another. Each side lays claim to the (if necessary)
violent enforcement of their norms. Each promises to simultaneously
address, through the transition to a new order (or the restoration of the old
order), the most immediate and urgent questions in the best possible way.
As Paul Ricour stressed, any revolutionary situation is a ‘crossroad of two
violences with the one defending the established order, the other forcing the
access to power of new social strata’ (quoted in Mayer 2002, 84). Yet that
not only includes the rivalry between two distinct social and political actors,
but also between differing legitimate concepts of power and social forces.
What is contested is the question of who exercises power and how.
44 M. BRIE
During a revolutionary situation, the ultimate goal of founding a legiti-

mate order and the immediate goal of alleviating pressing grievances (peace
accord and land distribution, worker self-administration, and national sover-
eignty of Russia in 1917) converge. Openly revolutionary situations are
characterised by so-called dual power. One of the French Revolution’s main
theoreticians, Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, understood that in a revolution the
existing powers have lost their legitimacy. The constituted power (pouvoir
constitué) is radically challenged. A revolution is marked by the confronta-
tion of antagonistic contestants—be it in the name of God, the king, the
people, class, race, human rights, order itself—who each claim constituent
power (pouvoir constituant), i.e. the founding of a new order.
In his ‘Critique of Violence’ written in 1921, Walter Benjamin distin-
guished between ‘lawmaking and law-preserving’ violence in this regard
(Benjamin 1996, 287). During revolutionary crises, law-preserving violence
is no longer capable of exercising its power, while at the same time none of
the competing law-making forces has yet emerged victorious. Revolutions
are not a state of exception but a contestation between the revolutionary
re-founding of a new order and the attempt at counter-revolutionary pres-
ervation of the old order.
The decision of the coalition government between the Bolsheviks and

Left Socialist Revolutionaries issued on 6 January 1918 (Hedeler and Külow
2016, 415ff) to dissolve the Constituent Assembly was aimed at prevent-
ing a new dual power, only this time of Soviet power and the Constituent
Assembly. Lenin’s childhood friend, left Menshevik Julius Martov, had
warned against such a solution in December 1917. According to him, the
peasantry was the majority of Russia’s population. This majority with all its
general-democratic and peasant-petite-bourgeois objectives dominated
the Constituent Assembly and no government would be able to pursue
progressive policies against this bloc. He wrote: ‘Our current conflict with
the Bolsheviks is not about whether there must be a “more left-wing class”
alongside the representation expressing the “middle consciousness”, that
pursues an independent policy and “pushes the representative body
towards decisive steps”, but rather whether a “more left-wing” state power
independent of and alongside the Constituent Assembly should exist’
(Martov 2000b, 362). His position essentially demanded that the Soviet
government place executive power in the hands of the Constituent Assembly.
Lenin saw this very differently. With all his characteristic determination
and clarity, he formulated: ‘To relinquish the sovereign power of the
Soviets, to relinquish the Soviet Republic won by the people, for the sake
of the bourgeois parliamentary system and the Constituent Assembly,

would now be a step backwards and would cause the collapse of the
October workers’ and peasants’ revolution’ (LW 26: 435). Even before
the Constituent Assembly was convened he had made it plain that
‘Naturally, the interests of this revolution stand higher than the formal
rights of the Constituent Assembly’ (LW 26: 382). Whoever attempted to
‘consider the question of the Constituent Assembly from a formal, legal
point of view, within the framework of ordinary bourgeois democracy and
disregarding the class struggle and civil war’ would be betraying their class
(ibid.). Lenin was convinced that the Soviets as organs of socialist power
ranked high above the bourgeois bodies of power—both in terms of class
substance as well as their far more democratic form. The subsequent his-
tory of the Soviet Union would show whether both would be confirmed
in practical terms: are the interests of workers and peasants really expressed
and represented better and is their participation in state power really guar-
anteed to a greater extent than in a bourgeois-democratic order? All this
would depend on the character of the Soviets.
From Lenin’s point of view no constituent power beyond the Bolshevik-
dominated Soviets was to be tolerated under any circumstances. The min-
utes of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee’s session on 6
January 1918 recount Lenin’s concluding remarks in a speech: ‘The
Constituent Assembly is dissolved. The Soviet revolutionary republic will
triumph, no matter what the cost. (Stormy applause. Ovation.)’ (LW 26:
441). The Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets convened in late
December 1917 was to provide the constitutional foundation for the new
power. It commenced its meeting on 10 January 1918. From this moment
on, the Soviet government openly declared civil war on all opponents of
Soviet power: either accept unrestricted Soviet power or face terror and
war. Any third way had been blocked; there would be no negotiations, no
free elections, no compromise.
In his report to the Council of People’s Commissars before the Congress of

Soviets on 10 January 1918, Lenin declared: ‘That is why, comrades, our
reply to all the reproaches and accusations hurled against us of employing
terror, dictatorship, civil war, although we are far from having resorted to
real terror, because we are stronger than they […] yes, we have openly pro-
claimed what no other government has been able to proclaim. The first
government in the world that can speak openly of civil war is the govern-
ment of the workers, peasants and soldiers. Yes, we have started and we are
46 M. BRIE
waging civil war against the exploiters. The more straightforwardly we say
this, the more quickly will this war come to an end, the more quickly will all
the working and exploited people understand us, will understand that Soviet
power is fighting for the real, vital cause of all the working people.’
(LW 26: 461)
Such words as quoted here reflect a specifically communist conviction

of Lenin’s. Friend and foe, end and means are clearly defined. Lenin’s
conviction is rooted in Marxism (on this see Chap. 6 of this book). Lenin
who now set out to submit the ‘theoretical implementation of the com-
munist ideas’ to a ‘practical experiment’. In the midst of the revolutionary
days of 1917, he demanded the renaming of the Social Democratic
Workers’ Party of Russia (Bolsheviks) as Russian Communist Party, based
on three arguments: firstly, the party’s perspective extended beyond social-
ism which would immediately follow capitalism. ‘Our Party looks farther
ahead: socialism must inevitably evolve gradually into communism, upon
the banner of which is inscribed the motto, “From each according to his
ability, to each according to his needs”’ (LW 24: 85). Secondly, in his view
the name Social Democracy itself was misleading: ‘Democracy is a form of
state, whereas we Marxists are opposed to every kind of state’ (LW 24:
85). He added: ‘My third argument: living reality, the revolution, has
already actually been established in our country, albeit in a weak and
embryonic form, precisely this new type of “state” (in form of the
Soviets—M.B.), which is not a state in the proper sense of the word’ (LW
26: 85). It was precisely these ideas which vested in Lenin that determina-
tion which all of his opponents and most of his own comrades lacked. This
determination was matched—in a rare combination—with the strongest
conceivable flexibility in concrete circumstances, always assuming that the
ultimate goal was to thereby take and secure state power so as to advance
the communist idea.
the iDeAs GuiDinG lenin in the CruCiAl time

of the vACuum of leGitimACy
But which ideas in particular guided Lenin when he chose to pursue the
path outlined above, conquering political power in Russia through an
insurrection instead of a Constituent Assembly? It shall be demonstrated
that the decision for an insurrection was not primarily the result of a cer-
tain tactic but rather deeply rooted in the ideological foundations of
Lenin’s thought. Any deviation from the insurrectionary strategy, although

contemplated time and again, would in fact have been owed mainly to
tactical considerations. Lenin’s consequent insistence on the insurrection
against all hesitation and any objection coming from the most inner circle
of leading Bolsheviks, however, resulted from the fact that he was fully
convinced that only revolt and civil war would ultimately lead to a success-
ful socialist revolution.
In order to substantiate this hypothesis, I will firstly recapitulate his
conceptualisation of the state as formulated during his increasingly heated
dispute with Karl Kautsky between 1917 and 1918. Secondly, I will dis-
cuss his understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat, its class and
transitional character, and address his relationship to individual protective
and civil liberties. Thirdly, I consider the question as to what constitutes a
legitimate socialist order in the eyes of Lenin and what role questions of
democratic elections and majorities and minorities play in this context.
Fourthly, I will present Lenin’s views on the legitimacy of terror.
The State as Organ of Class Rule

On 11 July 1919 Lenin gave a lecture on the topic of the state at the Y. M.
Sverdlov Communist University, which had been established as the central
school for the Soviet state’s cadres and the Communist Party in 1918.
During his presentation Lenin summarised, in succinct and popular form,
his views on the question of the state and the dictatorship of the prole-
tariat developed and elaborated in his writings against Kautsky since 1917.
It read, quite concisely: ‘The state is a machine for the oppression of one
class by another, a machine for holding in obedience to one class other,
subordinated classes’ (LW 29: 480). Those in power create ‘an apparatus
of physical coercion, an apparatus of violence’ (LW 29: 471). The histori-
cal distinction consists only in the respective forms of this state machine
(LW 29: 474). In State and Revolution he already emphasises: the state
emerges ‘where, when and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot
be reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the
class antagonisms are irreconcilable’ (LW 25: 392). He adds: ‘According
to Marx, the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of
one class by another; it is the creation of “order”, which legalises and per-
petuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between the classes’
(LW 25: 392).
48 M. BRIE
This can be contrasted to the understanding of the state developed by

the founder of liberal state political theory, John Locke. To him, ‘govern-
ment has no other end but the preservation of property’ (Locke 2003,
141). For Locke, the ‘general term property’ stood for life, freedom and
assets of individuals (Locke 2003, 155). In his view, the state had to pro-
vide, firstly, a ‘standard for right and wrong’ (laws), secondly, an ‘indiffer-
ent judge’ and, thirdly, the power to enforce a just verdict (Locke 2003,
154f). As Hermann Klenner has noted, John Locke was the first bour-
geois thinker who ‘understood property relations as the central category’
of a theoretical system of the state (Klenner 1980, 306). Yet this must not
lead us to overlook the broad character of Locke’s notion of property, as
the life and freedom of citizens were an indivisible part of this notion.
In Lenin’s thinking the bourgeois state is reduced entirely to its func-
tion of enforcing and preserving the capitalist property order. The central
basis of legitimation of this order—the reference to individual rights—
remains, however, unaddressed. That is why Lenin was able to arrive at the
utterly undialectical conclusion that ‘there is no freedom and no democ-
racy where there is suppression and where there is violence’ (LW 25: 467).
Bourgeois democracy appears merely as a façade of class rule and not as a
contradictory relation between class rule and individual rights. Lenin’s
antagonistic dialectic of revolution thus exhibits as its flipside the meta-
physics of rule.
The bourgeois state as politically organised guarantor of the capitalist
mode of production can only fulfil its function of class rule if it maintains
at least a modicum of commitment to the protection of the life, freedom,
and wealth of its citizens. Even in the state of emergency of austerity poli-
cies, massive social expropriation of property, or open dictatorship, the
connection to the bourgeois norm of protecting individual rights always
remains somewhat intact. Whether based on natural law or derived from
the categorical imperative to act in a way ‘that you use humanity, whether
in your person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an
end, never merely as a means’ (Kant 1996, 80)—the class character of
bourgeois legality is founded on the recognition of subjective individual
rights and their legitimate claims to the protection of their health, life, and
participation in public matters, and therefore represents a very particular
battleground.
Political contestations on the terrain of this type of state are conflicts
relating to the following contradiction: which life is worthy of protection?
What are the social, cultural, and political minimum standards of this
protection? Which freedoms are guaranteed in what way? Who has what
political rights and freedoms, in terms of organisation, free speech, or

active and passive voting rights? Which property must be protected? Does
this include entitlements to a kind of social basic income, the preservation
of nature and natural diversity, etc.? Do property rights exist with regard
to personal information, and how are they protected? If bourgeois state-
hood is understood in terms of such contradictoriness, it is quite imper-
missible to discount ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’ as mere empty phrases (see
by contrast LW 29: 377)—freedom is then more than just ‘freedom from
oppression’ by another class (LW 30: 117).
The Leninian reduction of the bourgeois state to class rule had deep
implications, the severity of which became manifest in 1917 and even
more so in the years that followed. They had an impact on his outlook on
the new Soviet state’s dictatorship of the proletariat about to be estab-
lished. In this mode of thinking there is no liberal legacy that socialism
ought to preserve. Individual rights have no value to him as such beyond
their relevance to the defence of class interests. The objective of individual
freedom within a community of solidarity remains only as a distant goal, a
promise to one day be fulfilled.
Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Civil Liberties

Ernst Bloch’s Natural Law and Human Dignity was published in West
Germany in 1961. The East German leadership had forced him into retire-
ment as early as 1957, and he chose never to return to Leipzig from a visit
to the Bayreuth Festival in 1961 after the border between East and West
Germany was closed. Written while still in the East, Natural Law and
Human Dignity attempted to rediscover the legacy of natural law for
socialist thought—a legacy Lenin and his successors had sought to see cast
onto the oft-invoked dustbin of history.
For Bloch, however, commanding the knowledge of forty years of his-
tory of Leninist-inspired societies, ‘the task of a socialist heritage’ on
behalf of ‘these formally liberal, but not merely liberal, human rights’
(Bloch 1986, xxviii) would persist indefinitely. He demanded consonance:
‘There can be no true installation of human rights without the end of
exploitation, no true end of exploitation without the installation of human
rights’ (Bloch 1986, xxix). Invoking a revolutionary heritage dating back
to Spartacus, he wrote: ‘The ultimate quintessence of classical natural law
[…] remains the postulate of human dignity; the man, and not only his
class (as Brecht said) is not happy when he finds a boot in his face’ (Bloch
1986, 203). Alongside the idea of anti-mammon, the struggle against the
50 M. BRIE
dominance of capital valorisation, that of anti-Nero—the fight against

state oppression—also had to be considered. The task at hand in Bloch’s
view was not just overcoming relations ‘that have alienated man from
things that have not only been reduced to being merchandise’, but in fact
the overthrow of all relations in which the individual is ‘even stripped of
all their own value’ (Bloch 1986, 203). Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev’s
1956 ‘revelations’ concerning the crimes of the Stalin era and the Great
Purge were still quite fresh. Bloch recalled the images of the Soviet secret
police death squads, their torture chambers, and camps quite vividly when
he penned the awful expression ‘stripped of all their own value’—man as a
mere waste product of power.
As Lenin repeated time and again after 1917, the doctrine of the dicta-
torship of the proletariat represented the core of Marxism. For Lenin the
necessity of such a dictatorship emerges from the specificity of the socialist
revolution. A shared belief among Marxists was the understanding that
bourgeois society was conceived in the cradle of feudal society and then
gradually transcended it. According to this understanding the bourgeois
revolution merely had to clear away the last residue of feudalism and
enforce the political and legal framework appropriate to the already exist-
ing bourgeois society. The working class, by contrast, having risen to
power must deploy the state as the crucial demiurge of the new society and
first create the conditions for its coming-into-being.
In State and Revolution Lenin already emphasises: the state emerges
‘where, when and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot be recon-
ciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class
antagonisms are irreconcilable’ (LW 25: 392). He adds: ‘According to
Marx, the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one
class by another; it is the creation of “order”, which legalises and perpetu-
ates this oppression by moderating the conflict between the classes’ (LW
25: 392). Lenin systematically and acutely appropriated all these ideas of
both Marx and Engels once more in the last months before the eruption
of the Russian Revolution as already described in Chap. 1. The renaming
as Russian Communist Party resolved at the Seventh Party Congress of
the Bolsheviks in March of 1918 prompted Lenin to once again emphasise:
… as we begin socialist reforms we must have a clear conception of the goal

towards which these reforms are in the final analysis directed, that is, the
creation of a communist society that does not limit itself to the expropriation
of factories, the land and the means of production, does not confine itself to
strict accounting for, and control of, production and distribution of prod-
ucts, but goes farther towards implementing the principle “From each
according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. That is why the
name of Communist Party is the only one that is scientifically correct.
(LW 27: 127)
To Lenin, the dictatorship of the proletariat was the ‘machine’, that

‘bludgeon’ with which two years into the October Revolution the
Bolsheviks would ‘destroy all exploitation’. The perspective here is clear:
We shall use this machine, or bludgeon, to destroy all exploitation. And

when the possibility of exploitation no longer exists anywhere in the world,
when there are no longer owners of land and owners of factories, and when
there is no longer a situation in which some gorge while others starve, only
when the possibility of this no longer exists shall we consign this machine to
the scrap-heap. Then there will be no state and no exploitation. Such is the
view of our Communist Party. (LW 29: 488)
In both the Marxian and Leninian understanding the main function of

the dictatorship of the proletariat is the targeted, violent, and above all
organised communist restructuring of society—the totality of objective and
subjective conditions, the mode of production and living. A state is con-
ceived tasked with abolishing the very conditions of its own existence in an
ongoing process, ultimately withering away. The dictatorship of the prole-
tariat is allegedly a class state, the ruling class of which eliminates the condi-
tions of all class rule and thereby executes the transition to a classless society.
In such a state there is no opposition between the state of normality and that
of emergency, for its normality is constant self-transformation and thus self-
negation. A state is sought that perpetuates both the revolution as well as the
sublation of its own foundations and forms of rule. In this state the opposi-
tion between state and revolution would be disguised. The state would rep-
resent the institutionalised revolution, which would endure for the duration
of an entire historical period. According to this vision the revolution would
have constituted itself as a state which, under the leadership of a Communist
Party, continuously sublates itself (Negri 2014, 77). Individuals, insofar as
they are distinct from the ‘class’—to Lenin represented by the Communist
Party—do not figure into in this conception of the state.
52 M. BRIE
The Anarchists’ Objection to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

They [the Marxists—MB] say that this state yoke, this dictatorship, is a
necessary transitional device for achieving the total liberation of the people:
anarchy, or freedom, is the goal, and the state, or dictatorship, the means.
Thus, for the masses to be liberated they must first be enslaved. […] They
claim that only a dictatorship (theirs, of course) can create popular freedom.
We reply that no dictatorship can have any other objective than to perpetu-
ate itself, and that it can engender and nurture only slavery in the people
who endure it. Liberty can be created only by liberty, by an insurrection of
all the people and the voluntary organization of the workers from below
upward. (Michael Bakunin 2005, 179)
Marx had dealt with the same question in his analysis of the 1871 Paris
Commune. In his view as in Lenin’s, the practical process had produced
several insights on crucial requirements: the suspension of officialdom and
free election of all civil servants based on ‘universal suffrage’, their poten-
tial dismissal at any time and the introduction of salaries for public employ-
ees corresponding to average workers’ wages, the ‘self-government of the
producers’ within a federal system, the dissolution of the standing army
and creation of a popular militia: ‘The Commune was to be a working, not
a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time’
(MECW 22: 331).
The Supremacy of the Soviets Over Bourgeois Democracy

The more direct influence of the working masses on state structure and
administration—i.e., a higher form of democracy—is also effected under the
Soviet type of state, first, by-the electoral procedure and the possibility of
holding elections more frequently, and also by conditions for re-election and
for the recall of deputies which are simpler and more comprehensible to the
urban and rural workers than is the case under the best forms of bourgeois
democracy; secondly, by making the economic, industrial unit (factory) and
not a territorial division the primary electoral unit and the nucleus of the state
structure under Soviet power. This closer contact between the state apparatus
and the masses of advanced proletarians that capitalism has united, in addition
to effecting a higher level of democracy, also makes it possible to effect pro-
found socialist reforms. Soviet organisation has made possible the creation of
armed forces of workers and peasants which are much more closely connected
with the working and exploited people than before. If this had not been done
it would have been impossible to achieve one of the basic conditions for the
victory of socialism—the arming of the workers and the disarming of the
bourgeoisie. Soviet organisation has developed incomparably farther and
deeper that feature of bourgeois democracy which marks historically its great
progressive nature as compared with medieval times, i.e., the participation of
the people in the election of individuals to office’ (LW 29: 107f). For the first
time ever the masses governed themselves, proving ‘that Soviet power, i.e.,
the present form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, is a million times more
democratic than the most democratic bourgeois republic (LW 28: 249).
Some years after the October Revolution, the ideas Lenin developed in
State and Revolution and during the months leading up to the seizure of
political power resound: administrative tasks would be radically simplified
so that anyone could take charge of them, even alongside regular work in
production. As a result, the working class would be able to govern as a
class directly and without any special bureaucratic apparatus. The separa-
tion of rulers and subalterns would be eliminated, at least with regard to
the working class. As Lenin put it in the spring of 1917: ‘… our emergent,
new state is no longer a state in the proper sense of the term, for in some
parts of Russia these contingents of armed men are the masses themselves,
the entire people, and not certain privileged persons placed over the peo-
ple, and divorced from the people, and for all practical purposes undis-
placeable’ (LW 24: 85).
In order to prevent the eventual trajectory of the dictatorship of the
proletariat from becoming a dictatorship over the proletariat, the ‘volun-
tary organization of the workers’ (ibid.: 179) would have to be protected
rather than restricted and repressed. Moreover, if such a dictatorship was
to retain its transitional character towards a classless society this voluntary
organisation in the form of the Soviets would have to evolve into a societal
dynamic aimed at the implementation of communist objectives. Yet the
‘voluntary organization of the workers’ was oppressed to the same degree
Soviet power was consolidated. The refusal to guarantee the political
rights of free speech, the right to assembly, and the right to organise irre-
spective of whether they benefited the ruling power or not ultimately
destroyed any possibility for workers to form themselves as subjects of
their own rule. Instead, they became objects of representation by the
Communist Party, which no longer emerged from the self-conscious
action of the workers. The historical test as to whether this self-organisation
would pursue a communist direction never materialised.
In his speeches and writings after 1917 Lenin radicalised his notion of
the dictatorial character of the dictatorship of the proletariat compared to
that of Marx and Engels. From their scarce deliberations Lenin developed
54 M. BRIE
a theory of socialist statehood which, in accordance with Bodin, is sover-

eign in an absolute sense, indivisible and permanent. In his ‘A Contribution
to the History of the Question of the Dictatorship. A Note’ from 1920 he
succinctly sums up his understanding and posits three determinants of a
dictatorship: ‘Authority—unlimited, outside the law, and based on force
in the most direct sense of the word—is dictatorship’ (LW 31: 351).
As early as State and Revolution Lenin already formulated quite tersely
that ‘it is clear that there is no freedom and no democracy where there is
suppression and where there is violence’ (LW 25: 467). After the revolu-
tion this position is further sharpened: ‘You cannot have liberty, equality
and so on where there is suppression’ (LW 28:108). Elsewhere, Lenin
writes that the ‘enemies of socialism may be deprived for a time not only
of inviolability of the person, and not only of freedom of the press, but of
universal suffrage as well’ (LW 42: 48). In odd or perhaps typical fashion,
the inviolability of the person, that is, the protection of physical and psy-
chological integrity from state violence, is valued less than the political
right to vote. Lenin makes it clear that the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat,
which is recognised by our Party Programme’ means ‘that without such a
dictatorship, that is, without a systematic, ruthless suppression of the resis-
tance of the exploiters, which sticks at no bourgeois-democratic formulas,
one cannot conceive of any consistently democratic, leave alone socialist,
revolution’ (LW 42: 50—emphasis MB). And yet it is precisely these ‘for-
mulas’ which are intended to oblige the state to protect the life, liberty,
and wealth of its citizens. The dictatorship conceived by Lenin, however,
knows no such protection. Once in power the sovereignty of this party is,
in line with Bodin, absolute, dependent only on the rulers’ beliefs (Bodin’s
‘God’) and the ‘sword’.
In Lenin’s 1918 text The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade
Kautsky, one finds a formulation that reflects quite well the ambivalence of
the Leninian understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It reads:
‘dictatorship does not necessarily mean the abolition of democracy for the
class that exercises the dictatorship over other classes; but it does mean the
abolition (or very material restriction, which is also a form of abolition) of
democracy for the class for which, or against which, the dictatorship is
exercised’ (LW 28: 235). It is thus suggested that the dictatorship of the
proletariat may ‘not necessarily’ but possibly imply an ‘abolition of democ-
racy’ for the proletariat itself.
Now, this obviously stands in utter contrast to all documented socialist
objectives and beliefs. For if the proletarians themselves no longer have
any democratic rights, then who is exercising the dictatorship in their

name? If workers can no longer freely organise and assemble, if they are
denied the possibility to form independent trade unions and parties, to
express their social demands in the form of strikes, to discuss with each
other, freely and unrestrictedly, about their own situation, their interests
and their goals—then how can anything calling itself a dictatorship of the
proletariat even be possible? Was Bakunin right after all when he told
Marxists that their concept of a ‘scientific socialism’ ultimately amounted
to little more than ‘the highly despotic government of the masses by a
new and very small aristocracy of real or pretended scholars’ (Bakunin
2005, 178f )?
From the outset Lenin’s works are rife with extensive deliberations
emphasising the centrality of the workers’ struggle for the aforementioned
democratic rights and civil liberties under the conditions of the semi-
feudal Russian Tsarist Empire, but just as much in developed capitalist
countries. ‘Without political liberty’, he wrote in 1903, ‘all forms of work-
ers’ representation will remain a miserable fraud, and the proletariat will
remain in prison as hitherto, without light, without air, and without the
elbow-room it needs for the struggle to attain its complete emancipation’
(LW 6: 515). The Bolsheviks’ programme in 1917 was radically demo-
cratic and included as a matter of course the ‘inviolability of person and
domicile’ and the ‘unrestricted freedom of conscience, speech, the press,
assembly, strikes, and association’ (LW 24: 472). The permanent emphasis
on political freedoms, however, consistently transpires with view to one
single aspect in Lenin’s writings prior to 1917—the improvement of the
conditions of struggle for the workers (and peasants) ‘both from the
standpoint of the immediate interests of the proletariat and from the
standpoint of the “final aims of socialism”’ (LW 9: 25).
For Hannah Arendt on the other hand politics is based ‘on the fact of
human plurality’ (Arendt 2005, 93). With view to the Greek polis as the
origin of ancient democracy, she states: ‘Here the meaning of politics, in
distinction to its end, is that men in their freedom can interact with one
another without compulsion, force, and rule over one another, as equals
among equals, commanding and obeying one another only in emergen-
cies—that is, in times of war—but otherwise managing all their affairs by
speaking with and persuading one another’ (Arendt 2005, 117). This dis-
tinction of the meaning of politics from external aims was utterly foreign to
Lenin. In his view, ‘Bourgeois democracy, which is invaluable in educating
the proletariat and training it for the struggle, is always narrow, hypocritical,
56 M. BRIE
spurious and false; it always remains democracy for the rich and a swindle
for the poor’ (LW 28: 108). As early as 1917, Lenin already pointed out
that each of the demands pursued previously would change completely
from the moment of taking state power. In a footnote in his important text,
‘The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It’, he states: ‘I have
already had occasion to point out in the Bolshevik press that it is right to
argue against the death penalty only when it is applied by the exploiters
against the mass of the working people with the purpose of maintaining
exploitation. It is hardly likely that any revolutionary government whatever
could do without applying the death penalty to the exploiters (i.e., the
landowners and capitalists)’ (LW 25: 345).
Democratic rights lost their significance for Lenin after the conquest of
power, they begin to appear as counter-revolutionary phrases. This only
appears to be inconsistent; in reality it is just the other side of the same
coin: that which improved the conditions of struggle for workers and their
parties prior to the conquest of power, that which had previously been the
ultimate indispensable condition of struggle—the possibility to dissemi-
nate one’s own positions in public with as little restriction as possible, to
organise people for taking up the struggle for social reforms and for state
power (LW 29: 486)—appeared to him more as an obstacle after the con-
centration of power in Bolshevik hands, preventing the consolidation of
this power and threatening the construction of socialism. For these very
freedoms would also be freedoms for the Bolsheviks’ opponents.
‘[F]reedom of assembly to the capitalists’, Lenin remarked, constituted
‘a heinous crime against the working people; it would mean freedom of
assembly for counterrevolutionaries’ (LW 29: 354). Anyone demanding
democratic or social rights would be confronted by him with the conse-
quent position of either-or, and not only in civil war:
If you have come here to help us, then do so, but if you are going to publish
newspapers and incite the workers to strike, and these strikes cause the death
of our Red Army men at the front, and every day of a strike causes tens of
thousands of our factory workers to suffer privations, pangs of hunger—the
pangs which are causing us so much concern—then you may be right from
the Constituent Assembly point of view, but from the standpoint of our
struggle and the responsibility we bear, you are wrong, you cannot help us,
so get out […] or else you will go to prison. And that is what we shall do
with them. (LW 29: 264)
At the aforementioned Seventh Party Congress of the Bolsheviks in

March 1918, Lenin substantiated his position with regard to democratic
rights as follows:
General proclamations of broad principles are important to the bourgeoisie:

“All citizens have freedom to assemble, but they must assemble in the open,
we shall not give them premises.” But we say: “Fewer empty phrases, and
more substance.” The palaces must be expropriated—not only the Tauride
Palace, but many others as well—and we say nothing about freedom of
assembly. That must be extended to all other points in the democratic pro-
gramme. (LW 27: 135)
The workers, Lenin stated, had free access to the printshops which they
themselves owned. Now, Lenin continued, there was nothing standing ‘in
the way of any workingman (or groups of workingmen, in any numbers)
for enjoying and practising equal rights in the use of public printing-
presses and public stocks of paper’ (LW 28: 461). What he omitted was
the fact that the Soviet bodies regulating access to the printing-presses and
public stocks of paper were, in turn, controlled by the Bolshevik Party. No
worker nor group of workers would ever be able to exercise, relative to the
extent of the consolidation of Soviet power, the right to use these public
means of communication against the ruling party organs. Publicly stating
one’s opinion or a mere political joke could mean prison, camp, or even
death. The silence regarding enforceable democratic rights and the
obstruction of all opportunities to meaningfully claim the latter lasted into
the 1980s.
Rosa Luxemburg’s Prognosis of 1918

In place of the representative bodies created by general, popular elec-
tions, Lenin and Trotsky have laid down the soviets as the only true repre-
sentation of the laboring masses. But with the repression of political life in
the land as a whole, life in the soviets must also become more and more
crippled. Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press
and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public
institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy
remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen
party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and
rule. Among them, in reality only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading
and an elite of the working class is invited from time to time to meetings
58 M. BRIE
where they are to applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve pro-
posed resolutions unanimously-at bottom, then, a clique affair-a dictator-
ship, to be sure, not the dictatorship of the proletariat, however, but only
the dictatorship of a handful of politicians, that is a dictatorship in the bour-
geois sense, in the sense of the rule of the Jacobins. (Luxemburg 2004, 307)
The promise of a universal and comprehensive guarantee of all demo-

cratic rights after the transition to communism, after fulfilling the histori-
cal mission of the dictatorship of the proletariat legitimised the suspension
of precisely these rights during this dictatorship for all those whose posi-
tions and actions did not immediately and entirely align with the interests
of the working class as represented by the Communist Party. Every possi-
bility for workers to evaluate, freely and publicly, whether their representa-
tion through the Communist Party was legitimate and appropriate in
terms of character and substance was rendered impossible.
John Locke’s Warning to His Class

In contrast to Thomas Hobbes, it was clear to John Locke that ‘absolute
monarchy […] is indeed inconsistent with civil society’ (Locke 2003, 138).
He warned his own class against granting unrestricted political power. No one
should be permitted to stand above the law, including and especially not the
rulers of a given society. People (i.e., citizens) could not be so naïve to accept
‘that all of them but one should be under the restraint of laws, but that he
should still retain all the liberty of the state of nature [i.e., lawlessness—MB],
increased with power, and made licentious by impunity [as bearer of state
power—MB]. This is to think, that men are so foolish, that they take care to
avoid what mischiefs may be done them by pole-cats, or foxes; but are con-
tent, nay think it safety, to be devoured by lions.’ (Locke 2003, 140)
In the Leninian understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat,

working-class rule is limited to the articulation of its interests by the
Bolshevik Party. In his eyes the party is not the representation of the work-
ing class but rather the latter itself—in its most advanced manifestation.
The power of the proletariat, the power of the Soviets, the power of the
Bolsheviks all merge (and not only in his view) in the moment of struggle
for power: ‘It should be equally indisputable for every Bolshevik that pro-
letarian revolutionary power (or Bolshevik power—which is now one and
the same thing) is assured of the utmost sympathy and unreserved support
of all the working and exploited people’ (LW 26: 179).
However, the formation and articulation of the interests of the working

class increasingly ceased to emerge from the lively public self-organisation
of workers in Russian society after October 1917 but was monopolised by
the Bolshevik Party, even against the workers. The heroic identification of
the proletariat and Bolshevik Party during the revolutionary period
became an empty claim by a ruling party invoking its superior grasp of the
laws of historical motion. As Lenin puts it: ‘The Party could not be guided
by the temper of the masses because it was changeable and incalculable;
the Party must be guided by an objective analysis and an appraisal of the
revolution’ (LW 26: 191).
Total disposition over the central means of production, the means of
state power, and public speech lay concentrated in the hands of the
Bolshevik Party. As soon as any positions which failed to correspond to
those of the Bolsheviks were voiced and resolutions passed in the Soviets,
trade unions, and other organisations, party sanctions were imposed and
dismissals and disciplinary transfers occurred—even in the years prior to
1922. No party member had the right to ‘sponsor resolutions at non-
Party congresses which run counter to the decisions of the Party’s C.C.’
(LW 42: 185), as the Politburo of the RCP(b) stated in March 1920.
Considering the fact that 97 per cent of the delegates present at the Fourth
Congress of Soviets in September 1918 were already Bolsheviks (LW 28:
303), it becomes clear who really called the shots and who merely occu-
pied the function of acclamation. For Locke it is the bourgeois property
owners who control the state as the political form of their class rule via
parliaments and courts. For Lenin the Bolshevik cadre party forming since
1903 assumes this function of controlling the state apparatus. The dicta-
torship of the proletariat thus becomes the dictatorship of a single party,
or rather its leadership. The link between the party and the working class
itself is thus increasingly based exclusively on the claim to superior insight
into the latter’s best interests.
Lenin’s steadfast conviction that only the Communist Party can repre-
sent the interests of the working class had its downside: all the character-
istics of the workers, which according to Marx are characteristics of
workers as conscious members of their class, were concentrated within the
party, or more precisely in its leading bodies. To the same extent, then,
workers were alienated precisely from these characteristics and stripped of
their right and opportunity to represent positions in the name of their
class deviating from those of the party leadership. They were degraded to
60 M. BRIE
the status of mere private individuals without any political rights. The
trade unions and other workers’ organisations lost their character of pro-
letarian self-articulation and self-management. They either submitted to
the political line decreed from above—by those claiming to exercise power
in the name of the working class—or were suppressed.
The fact that the dictatorship of the proletariat necessarily had to turn
into a dictatorship over the real workers once they articulated their interests
independently, voiced positions, pursued objectives, or chose means that
were not identical with those selected by the party leadership was inherent
in Lenin’s understanding of the former. The original assumption that at least
the majority of workers, and presumably most of the poorer peasants, would
permanently support the politics of the Russian Communist Party (B), was
put to the test in the years following 1917. During the crisis in the spring of
1921 open conflict erupted, treated in more detail in Chap. 3 of this vol-
ume. What matters at this point is that it was not the self-organised workers
who determined—in terms of freely and publicly exercising their democratic
rights—whether their positions corresponded to that of their class, but the
Bolsheviks who had monopolised this prerogative ever since 1917 and
fiercely defended this monopoly through all means available to them. The
annulment of democratic rights for the capitalist and landowning classes as
well as members of the bourgeois parties and Socialist Revolutionaries was
expanded: each and every individual citizen of the Soviet state was ultimately
left with just one right—the right to approve the resolutions passed by
Communist Party leaders.
In a society in which everyone was declared a worker and employee of
the state, a ‘crude communism’ of equality of all labour and wages (see
MECW 3: 295) emerged, resulting in a state of general propertylessness
and complete alienation. The functions of ownership were just as central-
ised as those of political decision-making, public discourse, and the right
to reform and renewal. All members of society were summoned to dele-
gate matters upward and to consider themselves as the incarnation of the
overall owner, the politically organised common interest, the communist
idea, to suppress their instinctive desire for individuality and independence
decried as petite-bourgeois and to follow the leadership. While the utmost
activity and proactive initiative were being encouraged and even demanded,
any real independence and serious deviance were sanctioned. Given that
this amounted to an untenable situation in practice, a wholesale shadow or
niche society emerged, informal practices and attitudes spread, and the
political joke became the ideological caricature of Marxism-Leninism.
The structurally induced situation of delegating power to a small lead-

ership group that Luxemburg recognised early on as well as the continu-
ous hollowing out and suppression of all possibilities for democratic
self-organisation is what produced the overwhelming role of charismatic
leaders and the cult surrounding their personalities. In Lenin’s case this
was already ongoing by 1918. In such a system the symbolic energy of a
society was focused onto one single point, concentrated in one individual
person. To the extent that the articulation of individual hopes and desires
was suppressed and everyone was obliged to suppress them in themselves,
these hopes and desires were projected onto others. Before victory the
awareness of one’s own power in the struggle had still been substantially
greater, there had been many people who one could identify with and
whose vigour could be admired. The struggle produced many heroes. Yet
when the opportunity to voice criticism, propose new ideas, find solu-
tions, remove obstacles, etc. was cancelled, and when it became obvious
that all the others including ‘leaders’ were likewise prevented—albeit in a
more privileged position—to do so themselves, all this had to be done by
the one and only legitimate person embodying the communist idea, the
revolution, and the society that emerged from it: the leader. This person’s
reputation and power emerged precisely from the dual function of first
taking the power to criticise, initiate innovations, and proactively fighting
for greater change away from all others while simultaneously assuming this
task on behalf and in the name of all others. The circle of symbolically
elevated positions was then gradually thinned out until there was only one
left—first Lenin, and later Stalin.
The leaders now concentrated in themselves, in their own person, all cre-
ative power, all hopes of renewal, all the criticism which eluded everyone else.
Where everyone was forbidden to speak freely, one person was allowed to do
so. Where no one was permitted to voice harsh criticism, one person did so
with all poignancy. Where an open search for alternative reforms was ruled
out, one person was allowed, even obliged, to introduce ever new initiatives—
and to reverse them if they went off course. The bureaucratic service class for
its part was forced into the contradictory role of unconditional subordination
to the leadership on the one hand, and the management of a reality which was
in every aspect resistive on the other. It was a crucial producer of the leader-
ship cult, while at the same time being confronted more than anyone else with
the sheer impossibility of implementing the leadership’s projects it was tasked
to organise. This class represented a kind of transmission belt that was perma-
nently stretched to the breaking point.
62 M. BRIE
As with all cults, the Communist leadership cult was above all a quasi-
religious process of alienation. Paraphrasing Marx, we may speak of the
‘fantastic realisation of the communist essence’ in the form of the super-
elevation of the leader, because the communist essence had no true essence
in this society—unlike in the preceding process of revolution. Given that
self-emancipation was made impossible, the myth of the liberating leader
was created.
The desire for a cult, for charismatic leadership, emerged firstly as a
result of the suffocation of those dynamics that produced the revolution in
the first place; dynamics which however were not fulfilled by the victory of
the revolutionary party. The hopes of nevertheless building a society of the
free and equal, of remaining true to the communist revolution and initiat-
ing new departures, sought an embodiment. Where could creativity, inde-
pendence, and revolutionary spirit be reflected if not in the leadership?!
The Sovereignty of the People: Insurrection and Civil War

As previously discussed, Lenin saw only one sovereign act through which
the constituent or legislative power of the socialist revolution could vali-
date itself: the uprising. A constituent assembly would only be capable of
establishing a bourgeois republic. Proceeding from the armed actions of
the sailors, soldiers, and workers, Lenin was convinced that the socialist
Soviet republic must be attained under the organisational leadership of the
Bolsheviks or would otherwise remain an illusion.
In bourgeois constitutions the question of the form of the political
system and the adherence of the sovereign to basic values (human dignity,
human rights, ownership rights, etc.) takes centre stage. To Lenin, this
merely pertains to the specific form in which the rule of capital is endowed
with a constitutional guise. He draws a strict distinction between the class
character of the specific political system (i.e., which class rules over which
class?) and the political form of this rule. The latter is significant only to
the extent to which it improves or impairs the subaltern’s condition of
struggle. In his view, bourgeois democracy is the most overt form of capi-
talist class rule.
[Y]ou say your state is free, whereas in reality, as long as there is private
property, your state, even if it is a democratic republic, is nothing but a
machine used by the capitalists to suppress the workers, and the freer the
state, the more clearly is this expressed. Examples of this are Switzerland in
Europe and the United States in America. Nowhere does capital rule so
cynically and ruthlessly, and nowhere is it so clearly apparent, as in these
countries, although they are democratic republics, no matter how prettily
they are painted and notwithstanding all the talk about labour democracy
and the equality of all citizens. The fact is that in Switzerland and the United
States capital dominates, and every attempt of the workers to achieve the
slightest real improvement in their condition is immediately met by civil war.
(LW 29: 487)
Lenin was convinced that the question of who rules is ultimately always
decided by violence. His point of reference is the storming of the Bastille,
not the assembly of the Third Estate in the ballroom—the terrorist dicta-
torship of the Jacobins, not the French constitution of 1793 (which never
came into effect). The link between these processes fades into the back-
ground entirely. Power and violence alone dominate the discourse. This
also colours his view on the Soviets. As Lenin wrote in the autumn of 1917:
All the experience of both revolutions, that of 1905 and that of 1917, and
all the decisions of the Bolshevik Party, all its political declarations for many
years, may be reduced to the concept that the Soviet of Workers’ and
Soldiers’ Deputies is a reality only as an organ of insurrection, as an organ of
revolutionary power. Apart from this, the Soviets are a meaningless play-
thing that can only produce apathy, indifference and disillusion among the
masses, who are legitimately disgusted at the endless repetition of resolu-
tions and protests. (LW 26: 143; see also LW 25: 191 and, retrospectively,
LW 31: 347)
The idea of first waiting for the Congress of Soviets to then topple the
government with democratic legitimation to him represented ‘utter idi-
ocy’ and degraded ‘the Soviets to the status of wretched debating par-
lours’. He added: ‘First defeat Kerensky [head of the Provisional
Government—MB], then call the Congress’ (LW 26: 83).
On the evening of 24 October Lenin wrote a last letter to the members
of the Bolshevik Central Committee before the overthrow of the
Provisional Government he demanded was carried out. In this letter the
innermost core of Leninian strategic thinking becomes evident at the most
crucial of moments. He states:
‘It would be a disaster, or a sheer formality, to await the wavering vote of

October 25. The people have the right and are in duty bound to decide such
questions not by a vote, but by force; in critical moments of revolution, the
64 M. BRIE
people have the right and are in duty bound to give directions to their rep-
resentatives, even their best representatives, and not to wait for them.’
According to Lenin, it does not matter which formal body assumes power
(in the end it was the revolutionary military committee of the Petrograd
Soviet); what matters is that this power ‘will relinquish power only to the
true representatives of the interests of the people, the interests of the army
(the immediate proposal of peace), the interests of the peasants (the land to
be taken immediately and private property abolished), the interests of the
starving’ (LW 26: 234f). The letter ends as follows: ‘The government is tot-
tering. It must be given the deathblow at all costs. To delay action is fatal.’
(ibid.: 235)
Lenin wanted to create a fait accompli prior to the All-Russian Soviet

Congress on 25 October, prioritising the newly won power and its use in
the interest of the workers and peasants, not democratic legitimation
through procedures. This legitimation—if even necessary—could also be
obtained ex post: ‘Further, a revolution differs from a “normal” situation
in the state precisely because controversial issues of state life are decided by
the direct class and popular struggle to the point of armed struggle. It
cannot be otherwise when the masses are free and armed. This fundamen-
tal fact implies that in time of revolution it is not enough to ascertain the
“will of the majority”—you must prove to be stronger at the decisive
moment and in the decisive place; you must win’ (LW 25: 203).
In contrast to Lenin, for Karl Kautsky the question of the conquest of
power by the working class and its party, Social Democracy, was above all
a question of majorities. Immediately after the Bolsheviks rose to power in
Petrograd and other Russian urban centres in January 1918 he published
an article titled ‘Demokratie und Diktatur’ (democracy and dictatorship).
Although he still wished the Bolsheviks success ‘most vividly’, he also
began to hint at some initial differences with their ‘methods’ (Kautsky
2017, 142). To him, the majority of the population’s support for Social
Democracy represented the vital precondition for any conquest of political
power and the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat. Provided
a universal, democratic right to vote, he was certain:
Where it [the proletariat—MB] does not come to rule under democracy,

that stems either from the fact that it is not yet numerous enough, that it
does not yet encompass the majority of the population, that it does not yet
outweigh the propertied classes, or from the fact that large parts of the
working classes are still intellectually non-independent, allow themselves to
be jerked around by the bourgeois parties, or lastly from the fact that among
its parts which have acquired an independent class consciousness, many still
doubt its power and believe they can achieve more if they appeal to the
goodwill of bourgeois elements, rather than lead the ruthless class struggle.
(Kautsky 2017, 143)
Lenin harboured nothing but raw contempt for such an understanding

of socialist politics:
Only scoundrels or simpletons can think that the proletariat must first win a
majority in elections carried out under the yoke of the bourgeoisie, under
the yoke of wage-slavery, and must then win power. This is the height of
stupidity or hypocrisy; it is substituting elections, under the old system and
with the old power, for class struggle and revolution. […] the proletariat
wages its class struggle and overthrows the bourgeoisie without waiting for
any preliminary elections (supervised by the bourgeoisie and carried out
under its yoke); and the proletariat is perfectly well aware that for the success
of its revolution, for the successful overthrow of the bourgeoisie, it is abso-
lutely necessary to have the sympathy of the majority of the working people
(and, it follows, of the majority of the population). (LW 30: 58f )
The real strength of the proletariat, according to Lenin, is expressed

not in the share of votes for Social Democratic parties during elections but
in civil war. Even under the most favourable conditions, revolutionary
Social Democracy in bourgeois society could only ever organise a minority
of workers. Pointing to Germany, he wrote: ‘What is this largest propor-
tion of politically conscious and active wage slaves that has so far been
recorded in capitalist society? One million members of the Social-
Democratic Party—out of fifteen million wage-workers! Three million
organised in trade unions—out of fifteen million!’ (LW 25: 465) The par-
liamentary system, the ignorance and fraud, and the influence of the bour-
geois press would disadvantage the proletariat in the parliamentary struggle.
In his view it was therefore understandable ‘why in all the circumstances
and the entire situation of parliamentary struggle and elections the strength
of the oppressed classes is less than the strength they can actually develop in
civil war’ (LW 26: 33). From this perspective the shift of the battleground
from elections to the extra-parliamentary struggle, even to revolt and civil
war is by all means required in order to rearrange the balance of forces in a
way impossible under parliamentary conditions. According to Lenin, only
this way could the question of power be decided in favour of the proletariat.
66 M. BRIE
It is the civil war that creates a situation in which any ‘third way’ is ruled out,
or, as Lenin said to Gorky in 1918: ‘He who is not with us is against us […]
Even if we grant that such people did once exist, at present they do not and
cannot exist’ (quoted in Fischer 2001, 281).
In a text published in December 1919 Lenin addressed the question as
to how it was possible that the Bolsheviks were able to perform the ‘miracle’
of seizing state power although they had only received a quarter of the votes
(at a turnout of 53.8 per cent; see Protasov 1997, 201) in the simultane-
ously occurring elections to the Constituent Assembly. The condition for
this had been that, firstly, the Bolsheviks gained the majority in the two cities
of Petrograd and Moscow. Secondly, the Bolsheviks had obtained ‘an over-
whelming majority among the proletariat’ (LW 30: 262). Furthermore,
their adversaries were divided and an alliance between Socialist Revolutionaries
and Constitutional Democrats was no longer even contemplated by the
former. Adding to this was that half of the army was also supposedly
‘Bolshevist’. Lenin concluded: ‘An overwhelming superiority of forces at
the decisive point at the decisive moment—this “law” of military success is
also the law of political success, especially in that fierce, seething class war
which is called revolution’ (LW 30: 258). This allowed for a ‘very short-
lived and unstable victory’ (LW 30: 262) that was only consolidated when,
after this victory, the Bolsheviks had been able, following the decrees of the
Soviet power on peace and land, to ‘win to their side the majority of the
non-proletarian working masses’ (ibid.). Lenin also extended this concept to
other countries. It had a strong influence on the politics of the Comintern.
In September 1920 Lenin elaborates at a party congress: ‘In Germany, the
Communists stuck to their slogans. When the German leftists got to saying
such an absurdity as that a civil war was not necessary but that on the con-
trary what was needed was a national war against France, it was an unheard-
of stupidity […] Without civil war you will not get Soviet rule in Germany’
(V. Lenin 1996, 103).
In Lenin’s view majorities are not won prior to the revolution, but
rather established by the latter relative to the degree of violent polarisation.
If socialist majorities only emerge during civil war, then it becomes clear
why Lenin places all his hopes on the insurrection, why he declares the
question of civil war the ‘pivot of tactics’ from the outset of World War I
(LW 21: 355), and why in the spring of 1917 the ‘controversial issues of
state life are decided by the direct class and popular struggle to the point
of armed struggle’ (LW 25: 203), ‘resolved by the class struggle in its bit-
terest and fiercest form—civil war’ (LW 25: 203f). The civil war is the
father of this socialism to the same extent that war was the precondition
for the revolution from which it originated. The right and power to issue
orders and demand obedience ultimately lay with that force which emerged
from the civil war victoriously—the Bolsheviks.
The Legitimacy of Terror

Slavoj Žižek sees the distinction between Lenin and many other leftists in
the fact that Lenin assumed responsibility and was prepared to pay the
‘price […] in the guise of concrete and often “cruel” political measures’
involved in doing ‘the necessary dirty work’ (quoted in Callinicos 2007,
20). Yet political responsibility involves a specificity which this remark
conceals: namely, it is mainly others who pay the price. Often enough, the
‘concrete and “cruel” political measures’ are not directed against those
who give orders (albeit in the sense of pangs of conscience) but against the
objects of this politics. The responsibility Žižek points to must have a
standard of measure if it does not wish to open the gates to immeasurable
human destruction. There is no question that Lenin was aware of this
problem. At the plenary session of the All-Russian Central Council of the
trade unions in April of 1919 he stated:
Comrades, one of the speakers, who was called the speaker for the
Opposition, demanded in a resolution that we should turn to our
Constitution. When I heard that I wondered whether the speaker was not
confusing our Constitution with the Scheidemann [‘right-wing’ German
Social Democrat—MB] Constitution. […]
Clause 23 of the Constitution says: “Guided by the interests of the work-
ing class as a whole, the R.S.F.S.R. deprives individual persons and individ-
ual groups of rights used to the detriment of the socialist revolution.” We
did not promise liberties right and left; on the contrary, we, in our
Constitution, which has been translated into all languages—into German,
English, Italian and French—said definitely that we shall deprive socialists of
their liberties if they use them to the detriment of the socialist revolution, if
they are used to cover up liberties for the capitalists. That is why this refer-
ence to the Constitution was wrong even from the formal point of view […]
I ask calmly and categorically which is better, to imprison several scores
or hundreds of instigators, guilty or innocent, deliberate or unwitting, or
lose thousands of Red Army men and workers? The first is better. I don’t
care whether I am accused of committing every mortal sin imaginable and
of violating liberties, I plead guilty, but the interests of the workers will be
furthered. (LW 29: 298, 300)
68 M. BRIE
The interests of the workers, however, were not defined by the workers
themselves but by the Bolshevik Party led by Lenin. No other leading social-
ist politician of the Second International had such clear awareness of the
need for violence and was prepared to apply it with all determination as did
Lenin. His only criterion concerning the price people had to pay for the poli-
cies he so decisively shaped was revolutionary expedience, meaning: con-
quest and stabilisation of Bolshevik power as the guarantor of a socialist and,
at least in the long run, communist rebuilding of society. ‘We say: morality is
what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the working
people around the proletariat, which is building up a new, a communist soci-
ety’ (LW 31: 293). The ends alone determined the moral content of an
action to Lenin, for as Angelica Balabanoff quotes him: ‘Who takes the part
of the exploited assumes a noble task’ (Balabanoff 1964: 21). This also
included the Red Terror (on this, see Ruge 2010: 215–251; Ryan 2012).
Violence and Terror?

When violence is referred to here or in the following, it is to be under-
stood in the strict sense of the ‘intentional physical (and psychological, MB)
destruction of people by people’ (Nunner-Winkler 2004, 28). Violence
consciously and purposefully intrudes into the innermost existential pro-
tected space of another person, the space in which hiding is not possible and
from which there is no escaping—the body of another human being. It
transforms this space into a mere shell surrendered to destruction. Violence
is the ‘wanting of a physically effective, palpable and visible suffering’
(Röttgers 2001, 55) of others. The human being becomes an animal. As
Wolfgang Sofsky warns: ‘an analysis of violence that only speaks of actions,
interactions, or conflicts misses and belittles its object’ (Sofsky 1997, 104).
The distinction between violence and terror is often neglected. It is a dis-
tinction that Lenin, when asked, considered to be ‘possible in a manual of
sociology, but it cannot be made in political practice’ (LW 31: 249). The
social objective of terror is to spread fear and horror, a goal for the achieve-
ment of which violence is quite purposefully stripped of all restraint: the
reference to the actions or inactions of those who become the target of
violence is sublated. People become the object of terror not because of their
individual behaviour or public statements nor because they pose any kind of
specific threat to others. Terror is directed against people exclusively as a
symbol—representative of a social group, lifestyle, nationality, religious
belief, class, physical or mental peculiarity, ‘race’, sexual orientation, etc.
Terror is a particular strategy of political communication. It aims to instill
fear; the opponent is to be demoralised. Those who have thus far only
passively looked on from the side-lines are warned not to side with that of
the opponent. Terror embodies the completion of the tendency to regard
another human merely as a means, as mere raw material for the exercise of
power. The Other cannot surrender to the enemy and thereby escape
destruction. There is no test as to whether someone is guilty of any particu-
lar behaviour of which they are accused. As Lenin makes quite plain in the
speech cited: the distinction between guilt and innocence, between inten-
tional and unintentional action is suspended. If the elimination of represen-
tatives of a certain group sends out an effective horrifying signal then terror
appears politically expedient.
The Soviet authority’s first People’s Commissar for Justice, left-Socialist

Revolutionary Isaac Steinberg (1888–1957)—who resigned from this
post following the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918—retrospec-
tively viewed the equation of revolutionary violence and terror by the
Bolsheviks quite critically. According to Steinberg, revolutionary violence
is ‘defensive, unavoidable, and necessary,’ while revolutionary terror is
‘aggressive and provocative’ (Mayer 2002, 87f) Steinberg coined the for-
mula: ‘Struggle—always; violence—within limits; terror—never’ (quoted
in Mayer 2002, 88).
The Quintessence of the Red Terror

We are destroying the bourgeois class. Therefore, there is no need to
prove whether this or that individual acted against Soviet power through
words or actions. The first thing we need to ask those we arrest is the follow-
ing: which class do they belong to, what is their origin, how were they
raised, what did they train as? These questions ought to determine the fate
of the prisoner. This is the very quintessence of the Red Terror. Martin
Ivanovich Latsis, one of the leaders of the Cheka, in the paper Red Terror, 1
October 1918 (quoted in Sidorovnin 1991, 215).
The notion that the terror was forced upon Lenin and the Bolsheviks by
their political opponents does not hold up to serious examination. Both
state oppression of political opponents as well as terror became integral
components of Bolshevik governing policies from the moment they took
power. The crucial distinction between revolutionary violence for the
enforcement of a new political order and terror was eliminated from the
outset. As early as December 1917 Lenin demanded that ‘one out of every
ten idlers […] be shot on the spot’ (LW 26: 414)—which included the ‘rich’
as much as it did workers who were dodging work. His greatest fear was not
an overly excessive use of violence on the part of the Soviet government but
rather too little. Critically, he emphasised: ‘Dictatorship is iron rule, govern-
ment that is revolutionarily bold, swift and ruthless in suppressing both
70 M. BRIE
exploiters and hooligans. But our government is excessively mild, very often
it resembles jelly more than iron’ (LW 27: 265). The unleashing of violence
in the form of the terror coincided with the loosening of language regarding
those he viewed as enemies. Correspondingly, members of the bourgeois
class as well as ‘the idlers and the rowdies’ in his words become ‘the dregs of
humanity’. They supposedly represent the ‘hopelessly decayed and atro-
phied limbs’, and the task is to eliminate ‘this contagion, this plague, this
ulcer that socialism has inherited from capitalism’ (LW 26: 410). The adver-
sary is denied any and all dignity. This entirely erases any distinction between
capital owners as individuals and as ‘personifications of economic categories’
which Marx drew rather strictly in his preface to Capital: ‘I do not by any
means depict the capitalist and the landowner in rosy colours. But individu-
als are dealt with here only in so far as they are the personifications of eco-
nomic categories, the bearers [Träger] of particular class-relations and
interests. My standpoint, from which the development of the economic for-
mation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any
other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he
remains, socially speaking, however much he may subjectively raise himself
above them’ (MECW 35: 92).
Lenin’s Letter Dated 11 August 1918

The following handwritten lines by Lenin were only finally published in
the Komsomolskaya Pravda in 1992:
To Comrades Kuraev, Bosh, Minkin, and other Penza Communists
Comrades! The uprising of the five kulak districts should be mercilessly
suppressed. The interests of the entire revolution require this, because now
“the last decisive battle” with the kulaks is underway everywhere. On must
give an example.
1. Hang (hang without fail, so the people see) no fewer than one hun-
dred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers.
2. Publish their names.
3. Take from them all the grain.
4. Designate hostages—as per yesterday’s telegram.
Do it in such a way that for hundreds of versts around, the people will
see, tremble, know, shout: they are strangling and will strangle to death the
bloodsucker kulaks.
Telegraph receipt and implementation,
Yours, Lenin
P.S. Find some truly hard people. (Lenin 1999)
* * *
For Lenin, the founding of a new, socialist world could only result from
the uprising, from civil war. This was inextricably linked to his understand-
ing of the state, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the role of violence and
ultimately of terror. What all these concepts had in common was that they
did not allow for protective rights and civil liberties—except in some dis-
tant future. The workers’ autonomy to act—the independent action of
those who were supposedly the protagonists of the socialist revolution—
was thus suppressed. This meant that a class for itself that had made the
Great Revolution and victory in the civil war possible once again became
a class in itself. The working class of the Soviet Union was a social group
whose members no longer had the possibility to develop an awareness of
their own interests independently of the ruling party and articulate and
organise itself correspondingly. It shared this status with other social
groups such as the peasants, the intelligentsia, and white-collar workers.
The major historical achievement of the Leninian concept of socialist revo-
lution had an historical downside: the Soviet Union ended up in a dead
end, having lost its capacity for renewal. The reasons for this can also be
found in Lenin himself. In Chap. 3 of this volume I describe how Lenin
began addressing initial manifestations of this development and what
approaches he developed in order to combat the dangers of economic
decline, bureaucratic ossification and political decay.
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CHAPTER 3
What Is to Be Done with Power?
Revolution at a CRossRoads, deCembeR 1920

to maRCh 1923
Beginning in mid-1921 Lenin’s exhaustion repeatedly forced him to

retreat to the dacha allocated to him in Gorki near Moscow. His condition
deteriorated drastically in the spring of 1922. It was during a convales-
cence stay when on 22 February he suffered the first of several strokes
from which he would never fully recover. The intervals between periods of
work grew longer, and he gradually was forced to withdraw from central
decision-making processes altogether. His access to materials and informa-
tion was now in the hands of Stalin who the Central Committee commis-
sioned to take charge of this task. From his sickbed in late 1922 and early
1923 he once again attempted to take stock of the nature of the revolution
he had led, intervene in ongoing decisions, and establish several last points
in what has become known as his political testament. He was no longer
able to write, making him feel as if in captivity. Considering the extent of
the assistance he depended on, he remarked to his secretary L.A. Fotieva:
‘“If I were at large (at first he made a slip, then repeated, laughing: if I
were at large) I would easy do all this myself”’ (LW 42: 515).
A new era had begun. The Soviet Union had prevailed in the civil war
and against intervention, but the world revolution had not materialised
and capitalism had stabilised. Peace lasted at first, even if the Treaty of
Versailles was regarded as little more than a ceasefire agreement at least by
the larger part of the German elites and population. A new strategic

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23327-3_3
76 M. BRIE
situation emerged, and in this situation Lenin, confronted from all sides
with various competing positions, entered into an intense, constantly
driven and restless search process to develop elements of a new strategy.
This time he was not in the libraries of Bern and Zurich but his office in
the Moscow Kremlin and later the mansion in Gorki where he was recov-
ering and cared for. Based once again on Lenin’s writings, in the following
I will attempt to reconstruct his new strategic search process between early
1921 and the spring of 1923. In this I will largely be guided by the struc-
ture formulated in Chapter I with regard to the period between August
1914 and April 1917. This allows for a comparison and also aids in iden-
tifying continuities and ruptures.
The few books Lenin was still able to read at this point included Nikolai
Sukhanov’s The Russian Revolution 1917 mentioned in the first chapter.
In January 1923 Lenin dictated an article ‘Our Revolution (Apropos of
N. Suhkanov’s Notes)’ that was published in Pravda in May. What infuri-
ated him most about Sukhanov’s depiction of the Russian Revolution was
the ‘slavish imitation of the past’, the measurement of developments in
Russia by the ‘German model’ (LW 33: 476). He rejected the notion that
a successful socialist revolution could only be accomplished once a certain
level of civilizational development had been reached. His answer was
unequivocal:
You say that civilisation is necessary for the building of socialism. Very
good. But why could we not first create such prerequisites of civilisation in
our country as the expulsion of the landowners and the Russian capitalists,
and then start moving towards socialism? Where, in what books, have you
read that such variations of the customary historical sequence of events are
impermissible or impossible? […] Our Sukhanovs, not to mention Social-
Democrats still farther to the right, never even dream that revolutions
could be made otherwise. Our European philistines never even dream that
the subsequent revolutions in Oriental countries, which possess much
vaster populations and a much vaster diversity of social conditions, will
undoubtedly display even greater distinctions than the Russian revolution.
(LW 33: 480)
In this context Lenin cited a phrase supposedly coined by Napoleon

(On s’engage, et alors on voit) which he relayed as: ‘First engage in a serious
battle and then see what happens’. What he neglected to mention, how-
ever, was that Napoleon is said to have made this remark to his chamber-
lain Tristan de Montholon on St. Helena, an island in the South Atlantic
3 WHAT IS TO BE DONE WITH POWER? 77
far away from any mainland, stripped of his power once and for all.
Napoleon won almost all of his battles for many years, but not his great
war with the old European powers and Great Britain. Needless to say, such
metaphors are somewhat problematic. Lenin had also only won battles at
this point, while the future of his socialism remained utterly unclear. Yet
Lenin was also right when he said here, in one of his last articles, that the
Bolsheviks ‘in the main […] have been victorious’. However, he was also
aware that there had only been two battles so far: the takeover of political
power and the civil war. In January, February, and March 1923 he was left
with only a few hours and at the very end only a few minutes to attempt
to influence what would happen after his death in a new most important
battle—the battle over who would rule the Soviet Union and how.
In his reflections on ‘Our Revolution’ Lenin addresses the primary dis-
agreement between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1917: the Mensheviks
were convinced that in Russia, a country with a peasant population of
80 per cent devastated by war and Tsarist mismanagement, a socialist revo-
lution was simply not in the cards. Julius Martov, both former childhood
friend and opponent of Lenin and the only one of his comrades Lenin
addressed with the informal ‘you’, declared at the time that a ‘leap to a
communist economy on the foundation of the miserable relations of pro-
duction in modern Russia’ was no more than a utopia, and that the task of
the day was to erect a ‘consequential democracy’ (Martov 2000, 386). For
this reason he and his comrades rejected the Bolshevik seizure of power
and demanded a unity government of all socialist forces. Martov empha-
sised that the political-social system that had to be created could not be a
‘formal bourgeois-parliamentarian democracy’ protecting the privileges of
the rich, but would have to be linked to ‘a system of asserting social mea-
sures’ that would express the will and the rule of the ‘labouring majority
of the people’ (Martov 2000, 386). Marxist common sense taken from
Marx’s preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
served as the backdrop:
No social formation is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for
which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of
production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their
existence have matured within the framework of the old society. Mankind
thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer
examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the
material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the
course of formation. (MECW 29: 263)
78 M. BRIE
Lenin developed a conception of the ‘maturity’ of conditions for a

socialist revolution that was fundamentally distinct from that of Marxist
orthodoxy up to that point. He measured the ‘maturity’ of the conditions
exclusively by the ability of socialists (in Russia, this meant the Bolsheviks
to him) to take power. The rest would simply have to be taken care of at a
later point. Lenin found a highly concentrated working class with strong
potential to exert economic, political, and military pressure. It was con-
centrated in three larger centres. According to scholars’ current estimates
the country had roughly 3.5 million factory workers in the narrower sense
and a total of around 18 million wage labourers. Lenin saw a peasantry
mobilised by the war and demanding to finally receive peace and land,
which the bourgeois classes refused to do for fear of an all-out attack on
private property. Consequently, the peasantry had to turn to the prole-
tariat for help. This seemed to mark the point at which the conditions of
existence for the establishment of socialism were sufficiently ‘present’ or at
least ‘in the course of formation’. He gauged the ‘maturity’ of conditions
by the Bolsheviks’ ability to take power. The rest would have to be accom-
plished at a later point. Lenin emphasised the emergency situation that
had already led to the endorsement of forced state capitalism during the
war, a measure which now only had to be completed. Furthermore, he saw
the enemy’s utter inability to act.
“This is a bourgeois revolution, it is therefore useless to speak of socialism,”

say our opponents. But we say just the opposite: “Since the bourgeoisie can-
not find a way out of the present situation, the revolution is bound to go
on.” We must not confine ourselves to democratic phrases; we must make
the situation clear to the masses, and indicate a number of practical measures
to them, namely, they must take over the syndicates—control them through
the Soviets, etc. When all such measures are carried out, Russia will be
standing with one foot in socialism. (LW 24: 308)
To him, these conditions together taken represented sufficient means—

perhaps not for a ‘mature’ socialism, but certainly for a socialist govern-
ment. The latter would of course have to initiate a process of renewal in
order to create the lacking economic and cultural conditions for socialism
in the aftermath.
What Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and all other Marxists in the Second
International shared was the notion of socialist revolution as put forward
by Engels somewhat tersely in his text Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.
The conditions for the end of capitalism emerge based on large-scale
industry and an organised working class as well as a progressing concentra-

tion and centralisation of capital and its transfer into capitalist state prop-
erty: ‘The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of
production into State property’ (MECW 24: 320). At that point the pro-
letariat initiates the process of transforming the mode of production as
mentioned above, as a result of which a ‘kingdom of freedom’ is created
(MECW 24: 324). Yet while the Mensheviks wanted to wait until capital-
ism had largely completed the process of development of large-scale indus-
try and the socialisation of production in Russia, Lenin convinced the
Bolsheviks that due to the contradictions of capitalism and imperialism
coming to crisis in Russia, not least because of the war, there were unique
subjective conditions in favour of a socialist victory there in contrast to the
more developed capitalist countries—an opportunity that had to be seized
at all costs, rather than wait until capitalism had fully developed even the
last preconditions of socialism in mature form.
This was certainly a convincing position. Yet it had a downside: it
became vital, particularly in such a situation of the primacy of socialism’s
‘subjective conditions’, to determine what exactly constitutes ‘socialism’.
The more ‘immature’ the conditions, the more ‘mature’ those who
claimed leadership and pushed through their own concept of socialism in
the name of the working class had to be, and the greater the temptation to
blame any resistance on others’ lack of understanding and political imma-
turity—indeed, to view them as enemies. The conception of socialism nec-
essarily must have a crucial influence on which strategy was selected, which
processes and projects were pursued, which processes were pushed back,
and on which forces hopes for implementation thereof rested. These ques-
tions grew increasingly pressing following the Soviet government’s victory
in the civil war.
The moment of strategic reorientation came in late 1920. The task at
hand was to create the ‘objective’—economic, political, cultural—founda-
tion for the superstructure of the Bolshevik party state and thereby secure
the socialist and communist path of development. Poland and the Soviet
Union agreed to a ceasefire on 12 October 1920 and in November General
Wrangel had to withdraw his anti-Bolshevik troops from Crimea, the
Whites’ last remaining stronghold. At the international level a very cold
peace emerged. This moment of military-political triumph became the
point of departure for the Bolsheviks’ greatest crisis of power since October
1917. Henceforth they were no longer threatened from the outside but
from within: first, a wave of peasant revolts broke out. The largest erupted
80 M. BRIE
in Tambov and neighbouring provinces in the Russian heartland where

the peasantry had already risen up in 1917. The War Communism policy
of confiscating large portions of the harvest was met with fierce armed
resistance. Peasants’ goals included an end to harvest requisition, free
trade and movement of goods, and the removal of the Soviet administra-
tion as well as the dissolution of the Cheka. Moreover, they demanded
democratic rights and the convening of a Constituent Assembly. Large-
scale industry was to remain in state hands, but peasants wanted smaller
enterprises to be reprivatized, albeit with strict economic supervision
enforced and guaranteed by the state. In their view the provision of the
population with basic goods ought to take priority (Sennikov 2004).
From the programme of the rebellious peasants in Tambov gubernia, autumn

1920
The Union of Toiling Peasants has set itself the task of overthrowing the
government of the communist-bolsheviks, which has reduced the country
to penury, ruin and shame. The Union, which organises volunteer partisan
detachments, is waging an armed struggle in order to destroy this detestable
government and its rule. Its aims are as follows:
1. Political equality for all citizens, without division into classes.
2. An end to the civil war and a return to civilian life.
3. Every effort to be made to ensure a lasting peace with all foreign
states.
4. The convocation of a Constituent Assembly on the basis of equal,
universal, direct and secret suffrage, without predetermining its choice of
political system, and preserving the voters’ right to recall deputies who do
not carry out the people’s will.
5. Prior to the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, the establish-
ment of provisional authorities in the localities and the centre, on an elective
basis, by those unions and parties which have taken part in the struggle
against the communists.
6. Freedom of speech, the press, conscience, unions and assembly.
7. The full implementation of the law on the socialisation of the land,
adopted and confirmed by the former Constituent Assembly.
8. The supply of basic necessities, particularly food, to the inhabitants of
the towns and countryside through the cooperatives.
9. Regulation of the prices of labour and the output of factories run by
the state.
10. Partial denationalisation of factories; heavy industry, coal mining and
metallurgy should remain in state hands.
11. Workers’ control and state supervision of production.
12. The opportunity for both Russian and foreign capital to restore the
country’s economic life.
13. The immediate restoration of political, trade and economic relations
with foreign powers.
14. Free self-determination for the nationalities inhabiting the former
Russian empire.
15. The initiation of wide-ranging state credit for restoring small-scale
agriculture.
16. Freedom for handicraft production.
17. Unfettered teaching in schools and compulsory universal literacy
education.
18. The volunteer partisan units currently organised and operating must
not be disbanded until the Constituent Assembly has been convened and it
has resolved the question of a standing army.
Tambov gubernia committee of the Union of Toiling Peasants. (Danilov
2007, 223f )
In economic and social terms, this anticipated some essential elements

of the New Economic Policy Lenin and the Bolsheviks would launch sev-
eral months later. It is quite symptomatic that the peasant revolts did not
erupt until after the Whites’ defeat, for the latter had been regarded as
supporters of Tsarist land holdings. Some of the revolts were staged under
the slogan ‘Long live the Bolsheviks! Death to the Communists!’ Some
peasants saw the Bolsheviks as those who had given them the land in 1917,
ended the war, and introduced self-management through the Soviets, and
simultaneously viewed the Communist Party (the renaming had taken
place in early 1918) as an entirely different party—one which had reversed
precisely these policies. They praised Lenin and cursed Trotsky, the latter
of whom was Commissar for War and Provisioning at the time. The revolts
spoke a very clear language, as Lenin noted. The peasantry had made it
plain that it was ‘dissatisfied with the form of our relations, that it does not
want relations of this type and will not continue to live as it has hitherto’
(LW 32: 215f). In Lenin’s view, this peasant threat to Soviet power was far
greater than any posed by the White armies (LW 32: 179).
Secondly, protests became more frequent in the industrial centres where
extreme destitution brought workers into conflict with the Soviet govern-
ment. The reduction of the already meagre bread ration by one third in
Moscow, Petrograd, and other industrial cities in January 1921 triggered
a series of strikes organised in part by Mensheviks and Socialist
Revolutionaries. Even the most privileged workers received bread rations
82 M. BRIE
of only 1000 kilocalories per day—less than half of the necessary mini-
mum. As a result, the strike wave that already began in 1920 soon grew
into a serious political threat approaching the point of open rebellion. The
Soviet government deployed the military.
Sailors from the Kronstadt naval base established links with workers in
Petrograd and seized power in the city in early March 1921. Their main
slogan was ‘All Power to the Soviets—None to the Communist Party’.
The three most important demands were (1) new, secret elections to the
Soviets following a period of unrestricted agitation, (2) freedom of the
press for the workers, peasants, anarchists, and left-socialist parties, and
(3) freedom of assembly and association for the workers and peasants. The
demand to abolish forced requisition of crops and the toleration of small-
scale agricultural and artisanal production were also on the agenda
(Naumov and Kosakovskij 1997, 50f). The claim that no broad support
for democratic rights existed in Russia cannot be maintained. Alongside
the demand for basic rights, this agenda included in particular an under-
standing of democracy as ‘freedom exercised within a community, be it the
village, the workshop, or the factory, in which the members jointly made
the decisions, shared the ensuing benefits and burdens, and were only
minimally subject to outsiders’ (Gooding 2002, 67). This stood in dia-
metrical contradiction to Lenin’s concept of a centralised dictatorship of
the proletariat.
A New, Third Revolution?

On 8 March 1921, the day the Red Army launched the assault on
Kronstadt under Leon Trotsky’s leadership, the stronghold of the uprising’s
newspaper published an article in which the beginning of a third revolution
after February and October 1917 was proclaimed: ‘Carrying out the
October Revolution, the working class hoped to achieve its emancipation.
The result, however, was the creation of a still greater enslavement of the
human personality. The power of police-gendarme monarchism passed into
the hands of usurpers, the Communists, who brought to the laborers,
instead of freedom, the fear every minute of falling into the torture chamber
of the Cheka. […] But what is most putrid and criminal of all is the creation
by the Communists of a moral cabal. They have laid hand even on the labor-
ers’ internal world, forcing them to think in their way alone. With the aid of
the bureaucratic trade unions, they have tied the workers to their benches,
having made labor not a joy, but a new serfdom. To protests by peasants
[…] and by workers […] they answer with mass executions. […] Here in
Kronstadt has been laid the first stone of the Third Revolution… […] The
present Revolution gives the laborers the possibility of having, finally, their
own freely elected Soviets, working without any and all violent party pres-
sure, and to reform the bureaucratic trade unions into free organizations of
workers, peasants, and the laboring intelligentsia.’ (Provisional Revolutionary
Committee of Kronstadt 1921)
This time, however, the threat did not emanate just from forces outside
the Communist Party but, thirdly, also from inside the party itself. As
Lenin confirmed in January 1921: ‘We must have the courage to face the
bitter truth. The Party is sick. The Party is down with the fever’ (LW 32:
43). The bureaucratisation and centralisation of the economy and society
had already been criticised internally for some time. While the workers
encouraged by the Bolsheviks had initially taken over their factories and
introduced forms of collective management, the principle of one-man
management was subsequently elevated to the status of law and the strict
subordination of all enterprises to central economic institutions became an
absolute imperative. Lenin had already responded to the ‘Left Communist’
criticism that the ‘introduction of labour discipline, coupled with the lead-
ership of capitalists in industry’ would ‘lower the class initiative, activity
and organised character of the proletariat’ and threatened ‘serfdom for the
working class’ (quoted in LW 27: 299) in 1918. Lenin’s counter-argument:
‘This is untrue; if it were the case, our Russian revolution as regards its
socialist tasks and its socialist essence would be on the point of collapse’
(ibid.). For Lenin the main question for socialism at the moment was dis-
cipline. He had already branded any deviation from a strict hierarchical
leadership as syndicalism long before. That said, he did not discuss whether
or not this signified an abandonment of worker socialism.
Trotsky’s attempts to make the recalcitrant trade unions fall in line with
methods of ‘shaking them up’ and rigidly appointing obedient cadres fos-
tered additional tensions and garnered criticism from Lenin. Devoted
Communists and Bolsheviks became increasingly aware of the contradic-
tion between their ideals proclaimed in 1917 and actual developments on
the ground. Given the victory in the civil war, the main argument used to
justify this contradiction thus far—the necessities of a military state of
exception—no longer applied. The time appeared ripe for a return to a
politics corresponding more closely to their own ideals.
One expression of this development was the formation of the Workers’
Opposition inside the RCP(b) beginning in late 1919. Its base was com-
prised mainly of Bolshevik cadre in the trade unions, party members in
84 M. BRIE
large industrial enterprises, and segments of the Bolshevik intelligentsia.

Its central demand was the management of the economy through eco-
nomic organs elected from below by the workers who were united in trade
unions and production organisations. At the same time they criticised the
total neglect of workers’ social, cultural, and even hygienic needs that
stood in stark contrast to the privileges enjoyed by the bureaucrats.
Alexandra Kollontai wrote: ‘To find a stimulus, an incentive to work—this
is the greatest task of the working class standing on the threshold of com-
munism. None other, however, than the working class itself in the form of
its class collectives, is able to solve this great problem’ (Kollontai 1977:
176). The only thinly-veiled position of the Workers’ Opposition
amounted to the rejection of the Communist Party’s leading role, at least
in the economy. Only five per cent of delegates at the Tenth Party Congress
of the RCP(b) supported the Workers’ Opposition’s arguments.
The Workers’ Opposition at the 10th Congress of the Russian Communist Party
(Bolsheviks)
Management of the national economy of the RSFSR (Russian Socialist
Federative Soviet Republic—MB) should be constructed according to the
Soviet principle of worker centralism, the electability and accountability of all
managing and organising national economic organs from the top down vis-à-vis
the organised producers and all toilers. […] The organisation of the manage-
ment of the national economy lies with the All-Russian Congress of Producers,
united in occupational and production associations […] The transition from the
currently existing bureaucratic economy to the self-activity of the masses must
occur in organised form and begin with the consolidation of the lower cells of
the professional and producers’ groups… in the interests of success one must
precisely determine the steps and order of the transition of workers’ trade unions
from the current, passive participation in the organs of the national economy to
an active and initiative-taking participation in the direction of the country’s
economy. (Rabočaja oppozicija 1933, 790, 791)
One thing was and remains unmistakable: when comparing Lenin’s

ideas about the new Soviet order from the spring and summer of 1917
with the reality at the end of the civil war, the blatant discrepancy is obvi-
ous. Goal and results diverged considerably. Regardless of who was respon-
sible the Bolsheviks were certainly haunted by this contradiction, as it
became the source of countless political jokes which also came to Lenin’s
attention and were grist to the mills of anti-Communist propaganda. As
Helmut Bock summarises:
At the outset of the revolution in 1917 Lenin promised a people’s state

modelled on the Paris Commune, a democracy of the broad masses of the
working people. But in the course of the revolution a one-party-regime with
growing omnipotence and centralisation in the hands of the leading
Bolsheviks emerged: a party dictatorship that abolished the direct democ-
racy of the Soldiers’ Soviets, incapacitated the Workers’ and Peasants’
Soviets, and kept all revolutionary-democratic parties and institutions under
surveillance. (Bock 2013, 261)
The discrepancy between promise and reality becomes clear when con-
trasting some of Lenin’s remarks from 1917 with those of later years. In
1917 the civil war pursued as the inevitable end point of the revolution
since 1914 was still imagined to proceed with little if any bloodshed, in no
comparison to World War I. The people would overwhelmingly support
the Bolsheviks, and given the weakness of the bourgeoisie the notion of
‘rivers of blood’ was inconceivable (LW 26: 28–30). The actual conclu-
sion looked utterly different, however, prompting Lenin to quip laconi-
cally in 1919 that civil war was ‘more stern and cruel than any other war.
This has been the case throughout history’ (LW 29: 371). ‘The Russian
civil war caused wide-scale devastation economic ruin; loss of an estimated
seven to eight million people, of whom more than five million were civil-
ian casualties of fighting, repression, and disease; the emigration of an
estimated one to two million others; and approximately five million deaths
caused by the famine of 1921–1923’ (Millar 2003, 270). When Kautsky
claimed that a class was unable to immediately self-govern itself, Lenin
replied: ‘such an absurdity could only have been uttered by a “parliamen-
tary cretin,” who sees nothing but bourgeois parliaments’ (LW 28: 241).
In 1921 he criticised the Workers’ Opposition, insisting that the dictator-
ship of the proletariat could not be ‘exercised by a mass proletarian organ-
isation’ (LW 32: 21) alone but instead only by the party, that is to say by
a minority. In 1917 Lenin identified the destruction of the old state appa-
ratus as the central task of the proletarian revolution. On 20 November
1922, in his very last public speech, he felt compelled to concede that the
old, destroyed state apparatus had re-emerged: ‘We still have the old
machinery, and our task now is to remould it along new lines. We cannot
do so at once, but we must see to it that the Communists we have are
properly placed. What we need is that they, the Communists, should con-
trol the machinery they are assigned to, and not, as so often happens with
us, that the machinery should control them’ (LW 33: 442). In 1917 the
promise was made that none could become bureaucrats any longer, as
86 M. BRIE
everyone would participate in management. Tasks would be simplified to

such an extent that anyone would be able to perform them. In 1921–1922
bureaucratism is declared the main enemy which can only be overcome
over an extremely long process. Lenin points to the division of labour
within the Politburo between the (male) members and (female) secretar-
ies. He does not discuss the gender question in this context. The list of
such contrasting statements goes on much further. He was aware as early
as 1918 that this would be the source of infinite Soviet jokes: ‘What a lot
of material for witticisms this provides, and for saying: when your Party
was not in power it promised the workers rivers flowing with milk and
honey, mountains of sugar candy, but when these people are in power
there is the usual transformation, they begin to talk of accounting, disci-
pline, self-discipline, control, etc.’ (LW 27: 302).
Lenin found himself confronted not only with the contradiction
between vision and reality, but also with the fact that his possibilities to
influence let alone determine the direction of developments were dimin-
ishing. His determination to seek socialist methods of processing and
resolving the contradictions of Soviet reality remained unbroken until the
end. As long as the most important achievement of 1917, the dominance
of the Bolshevik Party within the new state, was protected, nothing
appeared hopeless. Yet to what extent was this party, its leadership, or
indeed he himself still able to control and manage developments? At the
last party congress he was able to attend in March 1922 it becomes clear
how uneasy he was about this diminishing ability to steer the process:
Well, we have lived through a year, the state is in our hands; but has it oper-
ated the New Economic Policy in the way we wanted in this past year? No.
But we refuse to admit that it did not operate in the way we wanted. How
did it operate? The machine refused to obey the hand that guided it. It was
like a car that was going not in the direction the driver desired, but in the
direction someone else desired; as if it were being driven by some mysteri-
ous, lawless hand, God knows whose, perhaps of a profiteer, or of a private
capitalist, or of both. Be that as it may, the car is not going quite in the
direction the man at the wheel imagines, and often it goes in an altogether
different direction. (LW 33: 279)
seaRChing foR a new PoliCy

But how could Lenin react to this new situation? In later Soviet times the
following joke was common: one day in the mid-1920s Zinoviev found a
note on his desk that read: ‘Dear Grigory Yevseevich, my death was only a
hoax. I’m in Zürich. Take after me immediately. We’re starting from

scratch. Yours, Lenin’ (on the reasons for the rising of political joke in
Soviet countries see Brie 2004). Lenin did in fact launch a new struggle in
the spring of 1921—albeit not from scratch, but based on the Russian
society that emerged between 1918 and late 1920 in the battles, chaos,
misery, and hopes of the civil war. Within a matter of months the peasant
uprisings, unrest in the industrial areas, and the mutiny in Kronstadt were
crushed while party unity was consolidated through the ban on factions
and personnel transfers. The members of the Workers’ Opposition lost
almost all of their influence. Simultaneously, a pivot from War Communism
to the New Economic Policy (NEP) was carried out. The transition to
largely peaceful reconstruction and the reintegration of vast areas of
Russian territory was initiated and implemented. International relations,
particularly with Germany and the Western powers but also with Turkey
and Persia, were placed on a new foundation. At the same time Lenin’s
ability to work continued to dwindle.
Lenin started this new strategic search process as the head of state
(Fig. 3.1), and was almost entirely occupied with administrative work dur-
ing phases of good health and full working capacity. Comprehensive stud-
ies and quiet reading periods were more or less out of the question,
meaning that a systematic evaluation of experiences did not take place.
Only starting points began to emerge, lines were begun the end of which
could not be foreseen. The question remained: what is to be done in
power when the latter threatens to take on a life of its own?
Fig. 3.1 Lenin’s search process between late 1920 and March 1923
88 M. BRIE
foRmulating a ‘yes, but’

Trotsky’s demand to end the forced requisitioning of crops from the peas-
ants and replace it with taxes in kind was rejected in early 1920. But given
the peasants’ resistance and dwindling productivity, this demand had been
put forward time and again by others as well. The year 1920 marked a
renewed wave of War Communist measures instead. But in late 1920 and
early 1921 the Soviet leadership executed an abrupt turn in its relationship
with the peasantry. The looming peasant strike, threats to cease all plant-
ing, growing armed resistance, the hunger in the cities, the ongoing decay
of industry, and ultimately tendencies towards disintegration of the Red
Army (itself composed mainly of peasants) and the demobilisation of half
of the troops (around 2.5 million people) would have forced the Soviet
system to its knees had it failed to change its economic policy. A dual strat-
egy was pursued under Lenin’s leadership: the securing of political power
by all means and sweeping change of the economic-social means while
preserving control by the party state. It represented an unambiguous yes
to the retention of the Soviet state-party system with all its underlying
structures, and a clear but with regard to the economic forms of War
Communism, the bureaucracy, and the boundlessness and arbitrariness of
the terror.
Lenin’s ‘Yes’ referred to the three great achievements since 1917, which
he identified as: ‘(1) we developed the forces of the working class for its
utilisation of state power to an extent never achieved before; (2) we struck
a blow that was felt all over the world against the fetishes of petty-bourgeois
democracy, the Constituent Assembly and bourgeois “liberties” such as
freedom of the press for the rich; (3) we created the Soviet type of state,
which was a gigantic step in advance of 1793 and 1871’ (LW 33: 22). His
‘But’ was the rejection of the attempt to immediately organise the full
range of economic life in a communist way, to ‘socialise’ agriculture and
small industry, and rely exclusively on ‘revolutionary enthusiasm’ in com-
bination with terror. He was compelled to recognise that the social base of
Bolshevik power was fragile. Lenin’s summary: ‘The surplus-food appro-
priation system in the rural districts—this direct communist approach to
the problem of urban development—hindered the growth of the produc-
tive forces and proved to be the main cause of the profound economic and
political crisis that we experienced in the spring of 1921’ (LW 33: 64).
Hence Lenin’s ‘But’: the renunciation of War Communism and the intro-
duction of a new economic policy. As we will see further on, in this context
he was able to draw on existing approaches from 1917 and 1918. While
significant changes in the economic sphere did in fact occur, the political
system remained structurally almost unchanged. There were adjustments;
some steps away from the civil war’s revolutionary arbitrariness to a kind
of ‘revolutionary legality’ were taken. The basic understanding of the dic-
tatorship of the proletariat, however, remained unchanged, while the key
institutions of this dictatorship were further strengthened.
The Imbalance between Economy and Politics

Is it not clear that in this specific situation we must make every effort to
avoid two mistakes, both of which are of a petty-bourgeois nature? On the
one hand, it would be a fatal mistake to declare that since there is a discrep-
ancy between our economic “forces” and our political strength, it “follows”
that we should not have seized power. Such an argument can be advanced
only by a “man in a muffler”, who forgets that there will always be such a
“discrepancy”, that it always exists in the development of nature as well as in
the development of society, that only by a series of attempts—each of which,
taken by itself, will be one-sided and will suffer from certain inconsisten-
cies—will complete socialism be created by the revolutionary cooperation of
the proletarians of all countries. On the other hand, it would be an obvious
mistake to give free rein to ranters and phrase-mongers who allow them-
selves to be carried away by the “dazzling” revolutionary spirit, but who are
incapable of sustained, thoughtful and deliberate revolutionary work which
takes into account the most difficult stages of transition. (LW 32: 339f )
PhilosoPhiCal RefleCtion: the dialeCtiCal logiC

During the years referred to here Lenin was unable to study classic philo-
sophical literature as he had in Bern and Zurich. All he could do was turn
back to the insights he gained seven or eight years earlier. Had he taken
the time while in Switzerland to read not only Hegel’s Science of Logic and
Lectures on the History of Philosophy but also Hegel’s The Phenomenology of
Spirit from 1806, he may have come across a thought in the section cover-
ing the Enlightenment and the French Revolution particularly relevant for
the Bolsheviks in 1921–1922: namely, the question of a split in a victori-
ous party. This was precisely the sort of decay Lenin sought to prevent,
while simultaneously preserving the RCP(b)’s political monopoly and
unity at all costs.
90 M. BRIE
Hegel’s Observations on the Decay of the Victorious Party

One party proves itself to be victorious by breaking up into two parties;
for in so doing, it shows that it contains within itself the principle it is attack-
ing, and thus has rid itself of the one-sidedness in which it previously
appeared. The interest which was divided between itself and the other party
now falls entirely within itself, and the other party is forgotten, because that
interest finds within itself the antithesis which occupies its attention. At the
same time, however, it has been raised into the higher victorious element in
which it exhibits itself in a clarified form. So that the schism that arises in one
of the parties and seems to be a misfortune, demonstrates rather that party’s
good fortune. (Hegel 1976, 350f )
The political monopoly of a state party can only be preserved if it is able

over the long term to bear within itself the contradictions of the society of
which it is a political expression and over which it rules. In 1914 Lenin
made a note of the following line from Hegel’s Science of Logic: ‘But if an
existent something cannot in its positive determination also encroach on
its negative, cannot hold fast the one in the other and contain Contradiction
within itself, then it is not living unity, or Ground, but perishes in
Contradiction’ (quoted in LW 38: 140f). Now, in 1921, it was clear just
how difficult it was for the Soviet system that had been created to spread,
in its positive determination, to its own opposites—markets and capital
valorisation or the defence of the subjective rights of the individual vis-à-
vis the state. By the end of the 1920s at the latest, the will to suppress and
eliminate any and all ‘negativity’ prevailed.
Lenin recalled his Hegel studies in the library in Bern above all during
the 1921 trade union debate, which he regarded as a tremendous ‘misfor-
tune’. In Lenin’s view, specific tasks of the trade unions had each been
made one-sided during this heated political dispute inside the RCP(b):
representation of the immediate social interests by the trade unions or
participation in economic management, or even the idea that the economy
should be placed in the hands of the union representatives altogether, or
organs for disciplining the workers, or for Communist training. Informing
each of these respective standpoints was a distinct understanding of the
role of the Communist Party, the organs of the state, and the trade unions.
The role of the trade unions appeared particularly unclear and contra-
dictory. If the state ran the economy and the party ‘led’, then what was
their specific purpose? The notion that workers ought to take over control
of the economy as the RCP(b) party programme called for also continued
to linger in the air. In an argument with Bukharin, Lenin attempted to
illustrate the need for a dialectical approach to the problem of the trade
unions with reference to the example of a tumbler. Lenin appreciated
Bukharin’s ‘theoretical ability and keen interest in getting at the theoreti-
cal roots of every question’ (LW 32: 90). In 1921 as well the link between
Marxist theory and politics remained central, for as he explained: ‘you
cannot have a proper understanding of any mistake, let alone a political
one, unless you dig down to its theoretical roots among the basic premises
of the one who makes it’ (ibid.).
Bukharin had developed a mediation proposal for the union debate
intended to accommodate both sides. In it he introduced the metaphor of
a tumbler to the debate: it was simultaneously a cylinder and a device for
drinking a beverage. Lenin now accused him of linking up the opposites in
the discussion only superficially, eclectically, through the artifice of an ‘as-
well-as’ of formal logic. He retorted with what he called dialectical logic.
The latter takes up some of the central points that had already fascinated
him about dialectics in 1914: the universality of concrete mediations, the
self-movement linked to these dialectical contradictions, the criterion of
practice, and the concrete character of truth.
Dialectical Logic
Dialectical logic demands that we should go further. Firstly, if we are to
have a true knowledge of an object we must look at and examine all its fac-
ets, its connections and “mediacies”. That is something we cannot ever
hope to achieve completely, but the rule of comprehensiveness is a safeguard
against mistakes and rigidity. Secondly, dialectical logic requires that an
object should be taken in development, in change, in “self-movement” (as
Hegel sometimes puts it). This is not immediately obvious in respect of such
an object as a tumbler, but it, too, is in flux, and this holds especially true for
its purpose, use and connection with the surrounding world. Thirdly, a full
“definition” of an object must include the whole of human experience, both
as a criterion of truth and a practical indicator of its connection with human
wants. Fourthly, dialectical logic holds that “truth is always concrete, never
abstract”, as the late Plekhanov liked to say after Hegel. […] On the one
hand, the trade unions are a school, and on the other, an apparatus; but they
also happen to be an organisation of working people, an almost exclusive
organisation of industrial workers, an organisation by industry, etc. Bukharin
does not make any analysis for himself, nor does he produce a shred of evi-
dence to prove why it is that we should consider the first two “facets” of the
question or object, instead of the third, the fourth, the fifth, etc. (LW 32:
94 and 95f)
92 M. BRIE
In one central aspect Lenin developed a position that at least in its

approach goes beyond his reading of Hegel in 1914: he arrived at a new
understanding of contradictions. The antagonistic character of contradic-
tions occupied centre stage in 1914 and after: what one side wins must
necessarily be lost by the other side. A kind of ‘either-or’ approach. During
the trade union debate Lenin introduced a new type of contradiction in
which the opposing sides both develop positively, mutually reinforcing and
advancing one another. One could also refer to this as the solidary media-
tion of contradictions instead of their antagonistic collision.
the solidaRy mediation of ContRadiCtions

Since September we have been talking about switching from the principle of
priority to that of equalisation. […] The question is not an easy one, because
we find that we have to combine equalisation with priority, which are incom-
patible. But after all we do have some knowledge of Marxism and have
learned how and when opposites can and must be combined; and what is
most important is that in the three and a half years of our revolution we have
actually combined opposites again and again. […] After all, these opposite
terms can be combined either into a cacophony or a symphony. […] And so
if we are to raise this question of priority and equalisation we must first of all
give it some careful thought, but that is just what we fail to find in Comrade
Trotsky’s work […] Here is what we find in his latest theses: “The equalisa-
tion line should be pursued in the sphere of consumption, that is, the
conditions of the working people’s existence as individuals. In the sphere of
production, the principle of priority will long remain decisive for us” […]
This is a real theoretical muddle. It is all wrong. Priority is preference, but it
is nothing without preference in consumption. If all the preference I get is a
couple of ounces of bread a day I am not likely to be very happy. […] The
workers are also materialists; if you say shock work, they say, let’s have the
bread, and the clothes, and the beef. (LW 32: 27f)
The Marxists of the Second International had not systematically

reflected on the question of internal contradictions of a post-capitalist,
socialist society. Little went beyond Marx’s Critique of the Gotha
Programme. In Bebel’s influential text Woman and Socialism—the stan-
dard reader for educated workers and, moreover, a bestseller—it was
ignored altogether. The convergence of interests and the enthusiasm in
fighting for a good cause were more important. In socialism, according to
the shared assumption, ‘the conflict of interests will be removed. Everyone
will develop his abilities to serve himself and will thereby serve society. At
present, satisfaction of personal egotism and service of society usually are
extremes that exclude each other. In the new society these extremes will
not exist. Satisfaction of personal egotism and service of society will be
harmonious; they will coincide’ (Bebel 1910, 377).
The end of the civil war in Soviet Russia allowed the contradictions of
the new society to come to the fore and within them those of the old
Russia as well, albeit in a new form. Rather than being ‘harmonious’, how-
ever, what emerged was fierce ‘discord’—not least within the ruling party
itself. How could these contradictions be processed? In his marginal notes
on Bukharin’s text Economics of the Transitional Period jotted down in
May 1920, Lenin comments: ‘Antagonism and contradiction are not the
same. The latter disappears, the latter remains in socialism’ (W. I. Lenin
1920). Obviously, there were limitations to both Communist enthusiasm
as demanded by Lenin in the ‘Great Beginning’ (LW 29: 409–434) and
the suppression of conflicts. This had become all too clear during the crisis
of Soviet power at the end of 1920. Lenin became part of a search process
within the Soviet leadership and its advisers for forms of non-antagonistic
mediation of the contradictions in Soviet society. Some of Lenin’s insights
and proposals in this regard are presented in the following sections. Yet
these ideas were ultimately unable to blast apart that straitjacket of an
understanding of socialism as a society in which all interests ‘ultimately’
converge, faced as they were with the specific ideas about social property
and the unity of political power within a state party. The ideal stipulating
that socialism had to be a politically, economically, and ideologically con-
sistent mono-subject remained dominant. The notion of an immediate
convergence of interests was ultimately never broken, although critical
voices became increasingly vocal. The acknowledgement of diversity and
contradictions was confronted with the primacy of politics based on a con-
fluence of interests. After all, the leading role of the party had always been
substantiated with the argument that it expressed the interests of the
working class based on scientific understanding, enforcing them against
any deviating position. The party’s unity had its foundation in the unity of
interests among the working class, which in turn was grounded in the col-
lective ownership of the means of production. The inner relations of such
a socialism left no room for contradictions.
During the trade union debate a new option appeared on the horizon:
unity as a solidary, productive, emancipatory mode of mediation by actors
whose interests could by all means be in opposition to one another. This
94 M. BRIE
raised utterly novel questions regarding the conception of socialism: why

should individuals and groups, on the basis of socialist relations, not have
the right to organise independently to articulate and represent their own
particular interests? Why should economic organisations, even those run
by the state, not enjoy a high degree of entrepreneurial autonomy? Was
there after all a need for legally guaranteed protective rights for these and
many other actors of a complex society—secured through independent
courts and also protecting individuals from the state? What role would the
social sciences play in such a society? These questions were raised during
every crisis of Soviet socialism—at the end of the 1920s, after Stalin’s
death, at the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s, and finally in the late
1980s. And yet it proved impossible to formulate a positive response to
any of them within the Leninist conception of socialism. The dialectical
logic upon which Lenin based himself was sacrificed for the metaphysics of
dictatorial power.
A Brief Digression: Mao Zedong Reads

Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks
After the Long March Mao Zedong was the recognised leader of the
Chinese Communist Party. In contrast to the Russian Bolshevik Party,
however, the party was characterised less by splits so much as a constantly
shifting balance of forces between more or less permanent factions. These
distinct wings were each based in relatively autonomous military-social
territories of liberated areas and various provinces with substantial mass
bases and confronted with numerous conflicts. Mao Zedong gave a series
of lectures at the Communist University in the liberated area around the
city of Yan’an in China’s northeast that would solidify his role as theoreti-
cian (Short 2000, 355ff). Here he developed a Marxism ‘with Chinese
characteristics’, merging Western-Marxist, Soviet, and traditional Chinese
approaches into what was later declared ‘Mao Zedong Thought’. Two of
his lectures, ‘On Practice’ and ‘On Contradiction’, drew directly from
Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks published in Russian in 1929–1930. It is
noteworthy that Stalin is only quoted once in these lectures, at least in the
versions printed when Stalin was alive. The main point of reference was
Lenin’s Notebooks. Part of it consisted of the attempt to establish a close
relation between Lenin’s thought and Chinese reality and its embedding
in Chinese philosophical-literary tradition.
In contrast to the tendency dominant in the Communist International

to assume a constant ‘heightening’ of the contradictions and largely equate
them with antagonisms, Mao firstly emphasised that the task now at hand
was to differentiate between distinct contradictions, which could ‘only be
resolved by qualitatively different methods’ (Mao Tse-tung 1965, 321).
Secondly, he developed the undogmatic position that antagonistic contra-
dictions could be transformed into non-antagonistic contradictions and
that each could also result in antagonistic or non-antagonistic forms of
resolution (Mao Tse-tung 1965, 344f). In 1957, eight years after the end
of the Chinese civil war, Mao Zedong delivered a speech ‘On the Correct
Handling of Contradictions Among the People’ in which he pointed out
that there were contradictions ‘between this government and the
masses’. He added:
These include the contradictions between the interests of the state and the
interests of the collective on the one hand and the interests of the individual
on the other, between democracy and centralism, between the leadership
and the led, and the contradictions arising from the bureaucratic style of
work of some of the state personnel in their relations with the masses. All
these are also contradictions among the people. Generally speaking, the fun-
damental identity of the people’s interests underlies the contradictions
among the people. (Mao Tse-tung 1977, 385f )
This position was elaborated in an article by leading Chinese intellec-

tual Ai Siqi that same year: ‘In non-antagonistic contradictions, using an
antagonistic form of resolution can and should be avoided, but in some
circumstances, (for instance, at times mistaken handling and unjustifiable
subjective errors in resolving contradictions among the people, perhaps a
loss of vigilance …) they also can often develop an antagonistic form’ (Ai
Siqi 2006, 836).
These discussions illustrate that every serious attempt to renew socialist
politics always affects the philosophical frames of reference, the under-
standing of contradictions and social praxis under conditions of highly
complex societies and increasingly threatening relations to nature. The
solutions so far have been unsatisfactory, but a direction became apparent:
the open-ended search for solidary and emancipatory forms of working
through social contradictions.
96 M. BRIE
new naRRative: desCending while asCending

In order to convey the transition to the New Economic Policy that stood
in such blatant contradiction to the communist beliefs held by many mem-
bers of the RCP(b), Lenin developed two distinct narratives. He priori-
tised questions of ‘revolutionary strategy’ that the RCP(b) had ‘adopted
in connection with our change of policy’, and ‘the extent, on the one
hand, to which that policy corresponds to our general conception of our
tasks, and, on the other hand, the extent to which the Party knows and
appreciates the necessity for the New Economic Policy’ (LW 33: 83f).
One of Lenin’s narratives referred to the strategy of Japanese general
Nogi during the Russian-Japanese War of 1904–1905. Following a failed
charge against the Russian fortification Port Arthur in the Chinese city of
Lushun occupied by Russia, he decided to switch to a siege strategy.
Without the experience of failure this strategic shift would have been
impossible (see LW 33: 84f). The second narrative is more interesting and
personal. Lenin composed it in early 1922 when, showing clear signs of
exhaustion, he was forced to take a lengthy leave of absence. This moment
of political powerlessness forced upon him once again opened a space of
reflection, although systematic and profound analytical work was out of
the question. What he produced were the incomplete ‘Notes of a Publicist’,
some of which were published in April 1922. They begin with ‘ascending
a high mountain’, intended ‘by way of example’.
On Ascending a High Mountain: Descending in Order to Ascend Even Higher

Let us picture to ourselves a man ascending a very high, steep and hith-
erto unexplored mountain. Let us assume that he has overcome unprece-
dented difficulties and dangers and has succeeded in reaching a much higher
point than any of his predecessors, but still has not reached the summit. He
finds himself in a position where it is not only difficult and dangerous to
proceed in the direction and along the path he has chosen, but positively
impossible. He is forced to turn back, descend, seek another path, longer,
perhaps, but one that will enable him to reach the summit. The descent
from the height that no one before him has reached proves, perhaps, to be
more dangerous and difficult for our imaginary traveller than the ascent—it
is easier to slip; it is not so easy to choose a foothold; there is not that exhila-
ration that one feels in going upwards, straight to the goal, etc. One has to
tie a rope round oneself, spend hours with alpenstock to cut footholds or a
projection to which the rope could be tied firmly; one has to move at a
snail’s pace, and move downwards, descend, away from the goal; and one
does not know where this extremely dangerous and painful descent will end,
or whether there is a fairly safe detour by which one can ascend more boldly,
more quickly and more directly to the summit. It would hardly be natural to
suppose that a man who had climbed to such an unprecedented height but
found himself in such a position did not have his moments of despondency.
In all probability these moments would be more numerous, more frequent
and harder to bear if he heard the voices of those below, who, through a
telescope and from a safe distance, are watching his dangerous descent.
(LW 33: 304f)
Lenin knew that an ‘analogy is not proof. Every analogy is lame’ (LW
33: 205). Yet precisely this type of example has the advantage of illustrat-
ing how personal identity is linked to the social task to which an individual
commits themselves. In Lenin, the person who ascended so high repre-
sents the ‘Russian proletariat’. The latter had risen ‘to a gigantic height in
its revolution, not only when it is compared with 1789 and 1793, but also
when compared with 1871’ (LW 33: 206). Once again, the points of ref-
erence are the Great French Revolution and the Paris Commune. Three
achievements of the Russian proletariat are emphasised: the completion of
the bourgeois-democratic revolution ‘more than had ever been done
before anywhere in the world’, the revolutionary end to the reactionary
imperialist war, and the creation of a ‘Soviet type of state’. In his view this
heralded a new era, ‘the era of the political rule of the proletariat’. None
of these three accomplishments could be reversed (LW 33: 206f).
This shows that Lenin’s thoughts in this period of reflection, firstly,
harboured not the slightest doubt that the October Revolution marked
the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. If anything, this
notion is informed by a very narrow understanding of this bourgeois revo-
lution based solely on the fact that the peasants were given land, only to
be subsequently expropriated by so-called collectivisation albeit perma-
nently this time a decade later. The protection of bourgeois political free-
doms, the granting of basic bourgeois rights beginning with the protection
of individuals and extending to the right to free association, assembly, and
the press, however, were permanently denied. The Bolsheviks had become
idolaters of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the guise of the Communist
state party. To continue this metaphor: during Stalin’s show trials, the
Bolshevik old guard was then offered as human sacrifice to these idols.
Secondly, nor is the transition from war to civil war called into question,
despite the fact that this civil war from 1918 to 1922 represented an abso-
lute catastrophe for the Russian peoples on par with World War I. There are
only two types of actors in Lenin’s mountaineering metaphor: the brave
98 M. BRIE
mountaineers and the spectators who fear exposing themselves to danger

and provide advice at best, or in the case of failure even heckle maliciously.
The largest group in numerical terms was the mass of the largely peasant
population who desired little more than to finally be given land and work
it in peace, manage their own communities, and elect representatives to
protect their interests. This group does not appear in the metaphor. That
said, nowhere is the question of the minority’s responsibility for the major-
ity of people who are affected by the former’s policies but have no chance
of effectively exerting influence raised.
Another unbroken assumption is, thirdly, the notion that the political
rule of the RCP(b) was identical with the rule of the proletariat. For not
only had this proletariat disappeared almost entirely, having borne the
brunt of the civil war on the side of the Soviet government and given that
large-scale industry was mostly destroyed, but more importantly the work-
ers’ Soviets, factory councils, and trade unions were also under the total
control of the state party. There was no longer any question of workers’
independent articulation, a real workers’ movement.
This takes us to the key problem: to Lenin, the required ‘reversal’—a
reversal intended to help find a new route to the summit—resulted from
the simple fact that the current route had not allowed for seriously ‘build-
ing even the foundations of socialist economy’ (LW 33: 206). Let us
remind ourselves of the relevant Marxist categories in this context:
according to Lenin, the October Revolution had managed through
political-military means to create a socialist superstructure that thus far
lacked a socialist base. He would increasingly begin to address the inade-
quacy of civilizational and cultural conditions as well. Given that a political
system had emerged that made the free political self-organisation of work-
ers and all other groups in society impossible, the question should have
arisen of what exactly it means to create an adequate base for such a super-
structure. The Second International’s orthodox Marxism had assumed
that socialism’s base consisted of large-scale industry. Lenin shared this
view. As already stated earlier, to him the highly bureaucratised and cen-
tralised imperial German postal service represented a model organisation
that could in fact be taken over and subordinated to socialist purposes
with practically no alterations.
All this of course cleared the way for the conception that socialism is
above all subordination to a centralised cause—in politics, ideology, and
economics. The process of industrialisation initiated in 1928 would end
the NEP and embark on precisely this path. Friedrich Engels wrote in his
dispute with the anarchists in the 1870s that large-scale industry required
a kind of work organisation that ‘is much more despotic than the small
capitalists who employ workers have ever been’ (Engels 1972: 423).
Paraphrasing Dante, Engels stated rather tersely: ‘At least with regard to
the hours of work one may write upon the portals of these factories:
Lasciate ogni autonomia, voi che entrate!’ (ibid.) (‘Leave, ye that enter in,
all autonomy behind!’). Following the Bolsheviks’ assertion of political
power, the loss of autonomy on the part of those who lived within the
RCP(b)’s realm of power became a dictate of political behaviour. Lenin’s
metaphor suggests that the real problem in the early 1920s was the fact
that there were ‘still’ economic conditions which allowed for autonomous
behaviour—such as the peasant masses’ small-scale goods production that
the NEP made necessary and out of which capitalism could potentially
grow. The identification of democratic freedoms with capitalist rule had its
equivalent in Lenin in the equation of economic autonomy and capitalism.
The elimination of the peasants’ autonomy in the late 1920s was the logi-
cal consequence of such an understanding of socialism.
From Volker Braun’s poem, ‘Ascending a High Mountain (In the Style of Lenin)’
Where are we going to go.
Is this really the mountain we honour
Or an Egyptian pyramid.
Why are we so tired.
Should we not have turned around by now
And descend from our posts.
And untie ourselves from the safety catches.
For this path will not lead us to the goal.
Toddling in the uncertainty from which we emerged.
(Braun 1981, 34)
analysing soviet Russia

Four years after the revolution a new situation emerged for the Soviet
power both internationally and domestically. The war-time intervention of
the Entente and its allies ended. The military threat remained over the
medium and long term, however, and could become aggravated again at
any point. The defeat of Tsarist Russia in the war with Germany had not
been forgotten nor had the threat emanating from Japan. To the van-
quished populations the Treaty of Versailles appeared less as a peace treaty
so much as a ceasefire agreement. The capitalist world economy entered
100 M. BRIE
into a phase of stabilisation around this time, and the revolutionary mobil-
isations that characterised the end of World War I receded. The leading
Soviet politicians were all too aware: the Soviet Union was a socialist island
in a sea of capitalism. It had gained no more than a short moment to catch
its breath and had to make the very best of it. The question was how.
There is no room at this point, and indeed no need, for a more com-
prehensive depiction of the Leninian analysis of the domestic situation in
Soviet Russia after 1921. Only three central moments will be stressed in
the following. Firstly, the existence of a working class let alone a revolu-
tionary working class could no longer be asserted. Many workers had died
in the civil war, been integrated into the party and state apparatus, fled to
the countryside, or were unemployed as industry lay in ruins. Those
employed in industrial production themselves, the workers ‘steeled’ by
class struggle constituting the Bolsheviks’ main base of support in 1917,
had disappeared or became part of the nomenklatura. Although industri-
alisation could bring forth a new working class, a lively workers’ move-
ment remained out of the question indefinitely.
Secondly, the attempts to accelerate the ‘socialisation’ of peasant pro-
duction through state-sponsored model farms had failed. Lenin remarked:
‘The collective farms are not an immediate problem. I know that the
collective farms are still in such a state of disorganisation, in such a
deplorable position, that they deserve the name of alms-houses’ (LW 31:
527). Urban actors’ experiments with such enterprises were met with the
peasants’ deep mistrust, as they observed the former’s utter incompe-
tence and were generally hostile towards a different life with new cultural
patterns. Given that the immediate War Communism compulsion no
longer applied, only one option remained at least for the time being: a
step (forward or backward) towards a market-oriented mode of produc-
tion including corresponding small-scale production in the countryside.
Rather than polarise the 1917–1918 land reform strengthened the mid-
dle peasantry, as Lenin now discovered: ‘Everything has become more
equable, the peasantry in general has acquired the status of the middle
peasant’ (LW 32: 216). Nevertheless, the notion of class struggle in the
village remained virulent.
Boosting peasant production required stable frameworks, a reliable cur-
rency, and above all industrial production providing peasants with desired
goods in sufficient quantity. This was the basic precondition for maintaining
supplies to the cities, allowing for the export of crops and enabling investment
in industry and infrastructure. Russian industry’s weakness of was one of the
causes of the agricultural goods shortages from 1927 onward. The peasants
were unwilling to deliver without receiving the desired industrial goods in
return. So-called collectivisation broke the peasantry’s economic power and
put an end to their economic ‘autonomy’. Economic relations between city
and countryside were now replaced with administrative relations, and ini-
tially even relations of open war economy.
The Peasant as Enemy

We must do our best to establish proper relations between the workers
and the peasants. The peasants are another class. […] The peasants prefer to
go it alone, each one on his own farm, and with his own stock of corn. This
gives them power over everybody. An armed enemy is lying in wait for us,
and if we are to prevent him from overthrowing us, we must establish proper
relations between the workers and the peasants. (LW 32: 109)
Thirdly, an enemy had entered the scene which, at least according to

the promises of 1917, should not have even been possible in the first
place. Lenin claimed in 1917 that the workers’ and peasants’ Soviets, the
transformation of state administration into tasks to be performed by
anyone, would cause bureaucracy to disappear. Soviet bureaucracy
appeared to be a contradiction in itself. However, by 1919 Lenin already
identified the former as the most dangerous enemy alongside illicit trade.
He actually attributed a share of the conflicts between workers and the
Soviet authorities to the fact that a ‘workers’ state with bureaucratic dis-
tortions’ (LW 32: 48) had emerged in Soviet Russia. According to Lenin
the task was not only to utilise the trade unions ‘to protect our state’, but
also ‘to protect the workers from their state’ (LW 32: 25). Lenin’s claim
that bureaucracy was rooted mainly in small-scale production and the civil
war (LW 32: 351) is hardly convincing. The Central Committee decided
to launch a ‘systematic campaign against red tape’ (LW 35: 533).
People’s Commissar for Justice Dmitry Kursky subsequently wrote to
Lenin in his first report:
It involves a great deal of labour to single out the processes in which this
organisational defect (viz., the ponderousness and bureaucratic complexity
of our apparatus, inter-departmental relations, friction, etc.) does not have
such a decisive effect, and red tape is the result of the activity of persons, and
not an objective consequence of the insufficiently smooth working of our
apparatus. (quoted in ibid.)
102 M. BRIE
Yet how could one impose individual punishments if this was true?
Noticeably annoyed, Lenin replied: ‘With such an approach, of course,
nothing will come of the struggle against red tape. It is the responsible
persons who are to blame for these “organisational defects”; these, and no
others, are the ones we must learn to prosecute and punish with exemplary
severity. You will never catch a saboteur engaged in red tape’ (ibid.).
To Trotsky and his followers this Soviet bureaucracy represented the
social base for what they would later regard as the Stalinian Thermidor—
the elimination of the Leninian leadership, drawing a parallel to the 9th
Thermidor, or 27 July 1794, when the Jacobins led by Robespierre were
toppled from power, marking the end of the revolution within the revolu-
tion. They spoke of a ‘bureaucratically degenerated workers’ state’ (Trotsky
2004). Socialist critics of developments under Stalin would later speak of
the Soviet bureaucracy as a new ruling class (Djilas 1957).
Post-RevolutionaRy tRansfoRmation and new

tRansitional PRojeCts
According to the Leninian logic of 1917–1918 and again from 1921
onward, no immediate transition to socialism was possible under existing
conditions in Russia. What was possible, however, was a socialist revolution
that would bring Communist (meaning Bolshevik) forces to power. Even
before the Bolsheviks seized power Lenin put out a programme of eco-
nomic reforms (thereby taking into account discussions within his own
party and other left forces) amounting to a blend of state capitalism and
state socialism under control of the Soviets. In Lenin’s words, ‘given a really
revolutionary-democratic state, state-monopoly capitalism inevitably and
unavoidably implies a step, and more than one step, towards socialism!’
(LW 25: 361f). Even in the immediate aftermath of October 1917 the
Bolshevik government’s economic policies largely pursued stabilisation
through state-capitalist means. Yet they were confronted with the political
crisis, mistrust, and the hostility of the bourgeois classes on one side, and the
enormous pressure from the workers to implement direct control over pro-
duction on the other. A wave of capital flight set in along with spontaneous
socialisation from below. The civil war for its part necessitated the militarisa-
tion of industry and the central organisation of the exchange of products
without money. In 1921–1922 Lenin pointed out repeatedly that the newly
launched New Economic Policy was actually an old policy and signified a
return to 1917–1918 (see, for example, LW 33: 61).
To Socialism and Communism through State Capitalism

Borne along on the crest of the wave of enthusiasm, rousing first the
political enthusiasm and then the military enthusiasm of the people, we
expected to accomplish economic tasks just as great as the political and mili-
tary tasks we had accomplished by relying directly on this enthusiasm. We
expected—or perhaps it would be truer to say that we presumed without
having given it adequate consideration—to be able to organise the state
production and the state distribution of products on communist lines in a
small-peasant country directly as ordered by the proletarian state. Experience
has proved that we were wrong. It appears that a number of transitional
stages were necessary—state capitalism and socialism—in order to prepare—
to prepare by many years of effort—for the transition to communism. […]
The proletarian state must become a cautious, assiduous and shrewd
“businessman”, a punctilious wholesale merchant—otherwise it will never
succeed in putting this small-peasant country economically on its feet.
Under existing conditions, living as we are side by side with the capitalist
(for the time being capitalist) West, there is no other way of progressing to
communism. A wholesale merchant seems to be an economic type as remote
from communism as heaven from earth. But that is one of the contradic-
tions which, in actual life, lead from a small-peasant economy via state capi-
talism to socialism. (LW 33: 58f)
This concept called for the state-controlled promotion of, firstly, small-
scale agriculture and industry; secondly, the toleration of private trade in
these areas; thirdly, restructuring state enterprises with the aid of foreign
capital in order to turn them into competitive businesses; and fourthly the
issuing of concessions to foreign corporations in order to attract invest-
ment. Simultaneously, a cultural revolution was to be driven forward
through literacy campaigns, the development of a modern system of voca-
tional training, as well as the appropriation of bourgeois techniques and
technologies and the most modern management methods (particularly
Taylorism).
By autumn of 1922 one of the few issues of Soviet government policy
in which Lenin intervened was the question of foreign trade monopolies.
Economic experts were proposing to soften them, seeking to create spe-
cial economic zones, open some of the ports, and allow direct trading of
certain goods between Russian companies and foreign partners. They
proposed leaving a share of the foreign currency revenue with the compa-
nies. Lenin observed this discussion very closely and read all the corre-
sponding materials. In the process he developed an increasingly decisive
104 M. BRIE
rejection of the proposition, fearing a total loss of control on the part of

the state. The profit interest of capital was so strong, he argued, that it
could hardly be controlled, particularly under the conditions in Soviet
Russia after the civil war. Lenin predicted that state-controlled foreign
trade would generate massive profits in the long run and opposed weak-
ening it for the mere hope of uncertain tariff earnings. He warned: ‘Is
there anything like a correct approach to the matter when major questions
of trade policy are decided in a slapdash manner, without collecting the
pertinent material, without weighing the pros and cons with documents
and figures?’ (LW 33: 376).
The downside of this position was a wide-ranging decoupling of Soviet
enterprises from the international market. Only the state itself acted as
‘entrepreneur’ in foreign trade. Domestic prices and world market prices
were entirely disconnected. The advantages of the international division of
labour could hardly be exploited, and the extensive reduction to exports
of raw materials and agricultural products was thereby essentially preor-
dained. A viable balance between protection and control on the one hand
and opening and competition on the other could not be found in the
decades to come either.
The central problem facing Soviet power under these conditions was
the fact that while it was forced to accommodate and foster the intrinsi-
cally dynamic forces of a market economy in order to boost production,
this simultaneously threatened its monopoly on power and undermined its
moral authority as a Communist Party. Groups from within the state appa-
ratus and the entrepreneurs of the NEP period formed alliances and began
to overlap. Soviet power was compelled to unleash forces over which it
could not ensure its control over the long term.
Who Will Come Out On Top?

The restoration of capitalism would mean the restoration of a proletarian
class engaged in the production of socially useful material values in big fac-
tories employing machinery, and not in profiteering, not in making
cigarette-lighters for sale, and in other “work” which is not very useful, but
which is inevitable when our industry is in a state of ruin. The whole ques-
tion is who will take the lead. We must face this issue squarely—who will
come out on top? Either the capitalists succeed in organising first—in which
case they will drive out the Communists and that will be the end of it. Or
the proletarian state power, with the support of the peasantry, will prove
capable of keeping a proper rein on those gentlemen, the capitalists, so as to
direct capitalism along state channels and to create a capitalism that will be
subordinate to the state and serve the state. (LW 33: 66) The self-empow-
erment of citizens, including conflicts with state authorities, is not addressed.
The either-or remains.
Lenin’s last and most fierce battle still waged from his sickbed was
against the attempt to administratively subordinate the various Soviet
republics directly to the Russian Federation and thereby effectively annex
them. Lenin only gradually came to grasp the dimensions of the policies
Stalin initiated as People’s Commissar for Nationalities, and his opposition
grew increasingly adamant. He was deeply infuriated by learning of the
use of physical violence by Politburo member Ordzhonikidze against
members of the Georgian Bolshevik Central Committee. He demanded
that the larger nation must not only grant the smaller nations equal status,
but indeed a better one. His main concern was to shape the emerging
union as a confederation of solidarity so as to curb nationalist tendencies
(LW 42: 422). On 6 October 1922, Lenin wrote to the Politburo:
I declare war to the death on dominant nation chauvinism. I shall eat it with
all my healthy teeth as soon as I get rid of this accused bad tooth.
It must be absolutely insisted that the Union Central Executive Committee
should be presided over in turn by a
Russian
Ukrainian,
Georgian, etc.
Absolutely!
Yours,
Lenin. (LW 33: 372)
It also became clear during this conflict that Lenin did not ask himself
whether the conflicts really stemmed primarily from Stalin’s ‘hasty’ actions,
the incivility and chauvinist attitudes of the rising leadership circle sur-
rounding the general secretary, or whether they actually had much deeper
roots—namely in the power structures of the Soviet system itself. To what
extent could there be any talk of relative autonomy for the non-Russian
Soviet republics when the Politburo, its general secretariat, was in com-
plete control of all the key instruments of power—the party, the secret
police, the most important economic and political organs of the individual
Soviet republics—and moreover was in charge of staffing policies? Lenin
himself provided enough examples of how he directly intervened in the
106 M. BRIE
politics of other states or parties in order to, as he called it, ‘sovietize’ them
(V. Lenin 1996, 88). It was thus only a question of political skill and intu-
ition as to how this monopoly would be used. In this regard a gulf was
clearly beginning to emerge between Lenin and his long-time protégé
Stalin that would evolve into open hostility (at least on Lenin’s part) dur-
ing the first months of 1923. First Stalin’s recklessness, then the excesses
in the ‘Georgian’ question, and finally Stalin’s vulgar insulting of Lenin’s
wife Nadezhda Krupskaya opened Lenin’s eyes to who the person he had
supported for years was and to whom he had handed over the most wide-
ranging powers within the party (see Ruge 2010, 364).
One important change in Soviet domestic policy was the transition to
‘revolutionary legality’. The largely arbitrary open terror of the civil war
period was to be replaced by more orderly procedures. The extent of the
direct use of force had to be curbed in order to not threaten economic
reconstruction. Under the conditions of NEP economic actors required a
greater level of security from arbitrariness if they were to be persuaded to
pursue and realise their own interest with good faith in Soviet legality.
The jurisdiction of the Cheka was to be restricted, its rights concerning
arrests limited, and the duration of detainment without a court trial sig-
nificantly shortened. Convictions without a trial were to be banned (see
LW 42: 366f ).
The Transition to ‘Revolutionary Legality’

The task now confronting us is to develop trade, which is required by the
New Economic Policy, and this demands greater revolutionary legality.
Naturally, if we had made this the all-important task when we were attacked
and Soviet power was taken by the throat, we would have been pedants; we
would have been playing at revolution, but would not be making the revolu-
tion. The closer we approach conditions of unshakable and lasting power
and the more trade develops, the more imperative it is to put forward the
firm slogan of greater revolutionary legality, and the narrower becomes the
sphere of activity of the institution which matches the plotters blow for
blow. This conclusion results from the experience, observation and reflec-
tion of the government for the past year. (LW 33: 161)
This should not be mistaken for a rejection of terror. In a letter to a

Politburo member (Kamenev), Lenin wrote: ‘It is the biggest mistake to
think that NEP will put an end to the terror. We shall return to the terror,
and to economic terror’ (V. I. Lenin 1970, 428). Thus, terror was above
all to remain an always contingent means in the fight against political
opponents. As Lenin wrote to Commissar for Justice Kursky, the task was
‘to put forward publicly a thesis that is correct in principle and politically
(not only strictly juridical), which explains the substance of terror, its
necessity and limits, and provides justification for it’ (LW 33: 358).
Lenin added:
The courts must not ban terror—to promise that would be deception or
self-deception—but must formulate the motives underlying it, legalise it as
a principle, plainly, without any make-believe or embellishment. It must be
formulated in the broadest possible manner, for only revolutionary law and
revolutionary conscience can more or less widely determine the limits within
which it should be applied. (ibid.)
Proceeding from there, Lenin proposed an article clearing the way for
the oppression of any kind of dissent or those accused thereof. Stalin’s
show trials of the 1930s were able to link up with this ‘conception of the
law’ seamlessly.
Lenin’s Draft for an Article Supplementary to the RFSFR’s Criminal Code

‘Propaganda or agitation, or membership of, or assistance given to
organisations the object of which (propaganda and agitation) is to assist that
section of the international bourgeoisie which refuses to recognise the rights
of the communist system of ownership that is superseding capitalism, and is
striving to overthrow that system by violence, either by means of foreign
intervention or blockade, or by espionage, financing the press, and similar
means, is an offence punishable by death, which, if mitigating circumstances
are proved, may be commuted to deprivation of liberty, or deportation.’ In
a second version the word ‘objective’ is added, allowing for a conviction
irrespective of the purposes of the defendant and whether or not they had
actually violated Soviet law. It was solely a matter of whether the act of the
defendant ‘that objectively serves the interests of that section of the interna-
tional bourgeoisie which, etc., to the end’ (LW 33: 358f ). According to
Lenin, the question of whether this is the case ‘objectively’ was supposed to
be decided by the ‘revolutionary law and revolutionary conscience’ of the
judges. This way the conviction was simply a question of the respective
political objectives.
One element of policy in the early NEP years was the expulsion from
Russia of leading figures in the bourgeois intelligentsia. Strike actions were
conducted by members of the academic intelligentsia in the winter of
1921–1922 beginning with a doctors’ protest against the new class health
108 M. BRIE
care system. In line with their Hippocratic oath they demanded that all
citizens receive equal medical treatment. This explains the large number of
doctors among those expelled. Lenin openly demanded their expulsion in
an article published in March 1922, evoking the slogan: ‘We will purge
Russia for a long time to come’ (Lenin 1996: 169).
Systematic preparations began in May. The task was assigned to the
Cheka’s successor organisation (the GPU—State Political Directorate, or
State Political Administration) headed by Dzerzhinsky. More than 270
leading intellectuals were persecuted, 81 of them forced to leave the
country. Others who were permitted to stay mostly fell victim to the
purges of the 1930s (Artizov et al. 2008). The representatives of the newly
banned socialist parties were also driven into exile. The intelligentsia’s
attempts to interpret the transition to NEP as an intellectual-political
‘thaw’ ended in an ice age that continued for the social sciences and
humanities well into the 1950s and never really ended. Russia lost its
potential for humanistic-philosophical reflection that had gradually
evolved over the past 200 years. Without this potential, however, any
transformational politics that was even halfway up to date was impossible.
By the 1980s the Soviet Union no longer disposed of economic, social, or
political sciences that would have even come close to being able to deal
with the challenges of an upheaval so great as the one initiated by Mikhail
Gorbachev. Blind flying would follow, ending in a crash. The party pro-
gramme of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of 1919 had stipu-
lated the restriction of political liberties as a ‘temporary measure’ in the
fight against the exploiters. But even after the end of the civil war the
Bolshevik leadership did not consider the political threats averted in the
slightest. In 1922 a show trial against Socialist Revolutionaries was held,
and the last remnants even of left political parties were eliminated. The
RCP(b) established an unrestricted political monopoly. During the Great
Purge almost all known members of these parties—if they resided in the
Soviet Union—were murdered.
Persecuting Dissidents
From the GPU report to the politburo of the Central Committee of the
RCP(b), 1 June 1922 (top secret):
The New Economic Policy of Soviet power called forth the danger of a
unification and consolidation of the forces of bourgeois and petite bour-
geois groups, which find growing support under the conditions of NEP. The
anti-Soviet intelligentsia uses the opportunities to organise and gather its
forces offered to it in a broad fashion, which were created by the peaceful

course of the Soviet power and the reduction of the activities of the organs
of repression. A worrying symptom of the organisation of a future united
counter-revolutionary front is posed by the spontaneous emergence of
numerous private social associations (scientific, economic, religious, among
others) and private publishing houses, around which the anti-Soviet ele-
ments group themselves. […] The anti-Soviet intelligentsia has sought out
the prime arena of struggle against Soviet power: university institutions,
various administrative congresses, theatre, cooperatives, trusts, merchant
organisations, and most recently religion, among others. (Artizov et al.
2008, 118)
After Lenin’s death debates grew more intense to the same degree that
the internal contradictions of NEP unfolded and disagreements around
the party’s political orientation were more and more linked to power
struggles (see Siegelbaum 1992, 188ff). Under the conditions of the sta-
bilising rule exercised by Stalin and the Communist Party’s middle man-
agement closely aligned to him who made their ascent after 1917, the
open search process Lenin hinted at in his 1922 ‘Notes of a Publicist’—
the readiness to constantly seek out new paths, to experiment, to conduct
an analysis as sober as possible and not link it directly to inner-party bal-
ances of power—came to an end. The question of revising objectives and
means of socialist transformation going beyond Lenin became impossible.
on the Pathway to Redefining soCialism

Lenin had little time left to address the question of whether the initiated
changes of NEP would demand a fundamental revision of the understand-
ing of socialism. Politically he saw no reason for this—only economically.
Yet was the economy not the basis of politics in the Marxist conception?
At the same time Lenin still insisted on the primacy of politics, to him part
of the ‘ABC of Marxism’ (LW 32: 83). In the speeches and writings of
1921–1922 we find no deeper reflection as to whether the changes in
economic policy necessitated additional changes in the political system
and party.
The following formulation stands out from the mass of Lenin’s deliberations
following the introduction of NEP: ‘Not directly relying on enthusiasm, but
aided by the enthusiasm engendered by the great revolution, and on the
basis of personal interest, personal incentive and business principles, we
110 M. BRIE
must first set to work in this small peasant country to build solid gangways
to socialism by way of state capitalism. Otherwise we shall never get to com-
munism.’ (LW 33: 58)
What does it mean to take seriously the demand that individual interest
and collective economic interest ought to form the foundation upon
which to advance? In principle it implies that individuals as autonomous
subjects decide for themselves where they work, what they purchase, how
they live—given a stable political framework. Moreover, under these con-
ditions economic units act as more or less independent enterprises ori-
ented towards the markets within this framework. Is this just an
intermediate step until large-scale industry is consolidated and markets
can be placed under tighter control once again, or does it open up the
path to something like a ‘socialist market economy’? Until then a socialist
market economy had been an oxymoron—the combination of absolute
opposites.
Lenin, too, had seen one thing and one thing only emerge from mar-
kets since 1890: capitalism. During the brief period of NEP that Lenin
himself had helped devise discussions raged around all of these questions.
That said, even by the end of the 1980s (and indeed to this day) they were
never really resolved. The Communist parties of China and Vietnam have
adopted the socialist market economy into their platforms. The question
of whether socialism and market economy can truly develop alongside one
another, or if the outcome is more likely to be a developed capitalism that
at some point sheds its political shell of state-party socialism, remains
contested.
The statements Lenin made during a discussion with leading represen-
tatives of the state planning commission headed by Gleb Krzhizhanovsky
are quite interesting in this regard. Instead of the War Communist notion
of direct registration and control of all industrial enterprises, approaches
were developed targeting a combination of central priorities and a frame-
work set by the state to enforce the necessary proportionality of the indi-
vidual branches of the national economy (see, for example, LW 32:
371–374). The backdrop was the great plan for Russia’s electrification, the
GOELRO plan. In a directive issued by the Council of Labour and
Defence headed by Lenin to local Soviet institutions, Lenin demanded
steps towards the development of a statistics allowing for a detailed analy-
sis of basic economic processes (LW 32: 375–398). He considered it cru-
cial that they exhibit self-initiative and begin experimenting, of course
under the condition of complying with centrally stipulated priorities. The

key contradictions of such planning became increasingly palpable, and the
search process instrumental to processing the former began.
The Beginning of a Discussion on Socialist Planning

We must be bolder in widely applying a variety of methods and taking
different approaches, giving rein to capital and private trade in varying
degree, without being afraid to implant some capitalism, as long as we
succeed in stimulating exchange at once and thereby revive agriculture and
industry. We must ascertain the country’s resources by practical experience,
and determine the best way to improve the condition of the workers and
peasants to enable us to proceed with the wider and more fundamental work
of building up the economy and implementing the electrification plan.
(LW 32: 379)
Yet Lenin’s search for a new understanding of socialism went beyond

this. On 4 and 6 January 1923 he dictated one of his last articles: ‘On
Co-operation’. The issue of cooperatives had already been quite promi-
nent in the first months following the October Revolution. This primarily
concerned the organisation of the distribution of goods and trade.
Moreover, it was planned to establish model farms as quickly as possible in
order to convince the peasants of a collective mode of production’s viabil-
ity. Time and again Lenin was approached by the anarchist Kropotkin and
others who urged him to devote more attention to the question of coop-
eratives. During his time of illness his interest in this matter grew stronger.
The article ‘On Co-operation’ constitutes Lenin’s most far-reaching
attempt to develop a new conception of socialism. The notion of society
as one unified enterprise, as a ‘German postal service’ under Communist
leadership, is replaced with the model of a society held together from
above by the dictatorship of the proletariat under Communist leadership
while growing from below through voluntary cooperative association.
The political revolution, Lenin explained, had created the conditions to
do what had still appeared as ‘fantastic, even romantic, even banal’ (LW
33: 467) under capitalism, under the conditions of a bourgeois form of
government. Lenin even goes so far as to demand support for the coop-
eratives exceeding that for heavy industry—which, as it were, represents
the exact opposite of policy under Stalin when the ruthless exploitation of
the peasantry freed up resources for forced industrialisation. Lenin’s con-
cept can be referred to as the concept of primitive accumulation of coopera-
tive cooperation through state funding. Alongside violence, financial state
112 M. BRIE
support is declared the midwife of a cooperative socialism. ‘A social system

emerges only if it has the financial backing of a definite class. There is no
need to mention the hundreds of millions of rubles that the birth of “free”
capitalism cost. At present we have to realise that the co-operative system
is the social system we must now give more than ordinary assistance, and
we must actually give that assistance’ (LW 33: 469).
This signifies a return albeit in a new form to the ideas of the utopian
socialists, particularly Owen and Fourier, but also the Russian cooperative
movement. It had always been a fundamentally shared understanding
among the socialist and workers’ movements in England, France, and
Germany that forming cooperatives and workers’ cooperative takeover of
factories would pave the way to socialism. Many demanded state support
for this aim, including Proudhon and Lasalle. Marxists had declared this
path as unviable under capitalist conditions, claiming that cooperatives
were no more than evidence that workers were capable of running pro-
duction independently. In Russia as well, a longstanding tradition of coop-
erative socialism existed that Lenin had observed very closely. Now, under
a socialist government, he thought the time had come to build this kind
of socialism. Yet how exactly the relation between cooperatives and the
‘social ownership of the means of production’ would look remained unclear.
Lenin’s Last Words on Socialism

In conclusion: a number of economic, financial and banking privileges
must be granted to the co-operatives—this is the way our socialist state must
promote the new principle on which the population must be organised. But
this is only the general outline of the task; it does not define and depict in
detail the entire content of the practical task, i.e., we must find what form of
“bonus” to give for joining the co-operatives (and the terms on which we
should give it), the form of bonus by which we shall assist the co-operatives
sufficiently, the form of bonus that will produce the civilised co-operator.
And given social ownership of the means of production, given the class vic-
tory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, the system of civilized co-
operators is the system of socialism. January 4, 1923. (LW 33: 457)
unity of the PaRty and navigating unknown wateRs

The Tenth Party Congress of the RCP(b) in 1921 passed radical resolu-
tions on party unity. Supporters of the Workers’ Opposition were largely
removed from leading positions and banished. Open political will forma-
tion within the party, whose members could decide on political and
personnel matters in a democratic process, became impossible. Dramatic

in his own view, Lenin pushed through the resolution that even members
of the Central Committee could be excluded from this body if approved
by a two-thirds majority, regardless of the fact that they had been directly
elected by the party congress (LW 32: 244). It was agreed that this point
would not be made public (LW 32: 249). Factions were dissolved and the
continuation of factional work would henceforth be punished by exclu-
sion from the party. There is one occurrence that demonstrated Lenin’s
unbroken sense of reality and reminded everyone of the fact that, at least
in the past, he had often been in the minority within the Bolshevik Party
and its leadership—this was the case with regard to the April Theses, the
preparations for the 1917 insurrection, or the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in
1918. While the old Social Democrat David Riazanov even suggested
banning elections by slate, which would have ruled out any open forma-
tion of political will within the party entirely, Lenin opposed him.
Lenin’s Support for the Possibility of Slate Elections

I think that, regrettable as it may be, Comrade Ryazanov’s suggestion is
impracticable. We cannot deprive the Party and the members of the Central
Committee of the right to appeal to the Party in the event of disagreement
on fundamental issues. I cannot imagine how we can do such a thing! The
present Congress cannot in any way bind the elections to the next Congress.
Supposing we are faced with a question like, say, the conclusion of the Brest
peace? Can you guarantee that no such question will arise? No, you cannot.
[…] I do not think we have the power to prohibit this. If we are united by
our resolution on unity, and, of course, the development of the revolution,
there will be no repetition of elections according to platforms. […] But if
the circumstances should give rise to fundamental disagreements, can we
prohibit them from being brought before the judgement of the whole
Party? No, we cannot! This is an excessive desire, which is impracticable, and
I move that we reject it. (LW 32: 261)
If the Bolsheviks remained the only force regarded as a largely demo-

cratic institution after the civil war, this character was now almost entirely
lost and from 1928 on there could no longer be any talk of the existence
of democratic institutions in Soviet Russia, at least when measured by the
most elementary ‘formal’ democratic principles. Simultaneously, cadres
were increasingly subjected to the nomenklatura system. Superior instances
had complete control over the selection and appointment of all important
positions. The proposals discussed as recently as the Tenth Party Congress
114 M. BRIE
demanding a decoupling of open debate on controversial questions from

political discussion and thereby the preservation of the freedom of
exchange of opinions depended entirely on the degree to which the party
leadership responded to or participated in the respective discussion and
whether certain members or groups within the leadership made reference
to certain standpoints to any greater extent so as to award them ‘factional
status’. At a closed session during the 11th Party Congress, a number
Workers’ Opposition members were expelled from the party. They had put
forth a critical statement concerning developments within the RCP(b) to
the Comintern, the highest instance of the Communist movement.
The question of party unity and upholding the Politburo’s and Central
Committee’s capacity to lead increasingly depended on cohesion among
the small group of longstanding Bolsheviks. In 1921 and 1922 a shift
occurred in the balance of forces within the central leadership. Stalin’s
authority was extended. He became General Secretary upon Lenin’s direct
recommendation in 1922, thus handed utmost control over the apparatus,
personnel decisions, and cooperation between the most important party
organs. Aided by Lenin’s helping and organising hand, Stalin became
what Isaac Deutscher called a ‘coadjutor’ (Deutscher 1960, 234). Lenin
suffered his first stroke only two months after Stalin’s appointment as
General Secretary, and the Politburo’s capacity to provide leadership was
weakened while the General Secretariat was strengthened.
Ordzhonikidze and Molotov, for instance, were Stalin confidantes and
advanced into the inner circle. Lenin increasingly viewed the growing divi-
sions within the party leadership as the most severe threat. In a letter to the
party leadership, the sick Lenin writes: ‘If we do not close our eyes to real-
ity we must admit that at the present time the proletarian policy of the
Party is not determined by the character of its membership, but by the
enormous undivided prestige enjoyed by the small group which might be
called the Old Guard of the Party. A slight conflict within this group will
be enough, if not to destroy this prestige, at all events to weaken the
group to such a degree as to rob it of its power to determine policy’
(LW 33: 257).
Lenin’s writings to the party leadership that would later become known
as his ‘Political Testament’ sought to prevent this ‘slight conflict’. His
proposals exhibit two distinct emphases. Firstly, he seeks to expand the
Central Committee to include up to 100 people (LW 36: 594). These
considerations were embedded in the following assessment of the prob-
lems in 1923:
It is enough that in five years we have created a new type of state in which
the workers are leading the peasants against the bourgeoisie; and in a hostile
international environment this in itself is a gigantic achievement. But knowl-
edge of this must on no account blind us to the fact that, in effect, we took
over the old machinery of state from the tsar and the bourgeoisie and that
now, with the onset of peace and the satisfaction of the minimum require-
ments against famine, all our work must be directed towards improving the
administrative machinery. (LW 36: 597)
In Lenin’s view ‘the best elements that we have in our social system—
such as, first, the advanced workers, and, second, the really enlightened
elements for whom we can vouch that they will not take the word for the
deed, and will not utter a single word that goes against their conscience—
should not shrink from admitting any difficulty and should not shrink
from any struggle in order to achieve the object they have seriously set
themselves’ (LW 33: 489), and were to be assembled here.
What becomes clear is Lenin’s idealisation of the ordinary worker, not
only unspoilt by capitalism but now also unspoilt by Soviet power. Did he
really believe that their ‘class instinct’ would provide sufficient counter-
weight to the power struggles within the party leadership and the Soviet
bureaucracy? The old, ‘sober’ Lenin may well have seen through such
hopes as illusions based on the phrase of a healthy working class. In this
sense, it was precisely this expansion of the Central Committee to include
people who had largely been selected by the General Secretary and came
from the apparatus’s middle level that contributed decisively to pushing
the ‘old guard’ into the minority in the party’s leading bodies. Stalin used
this to first slander, then expel and ultimately liquidate this old guard.
Idealising the Worker Members of the Central Committee

In my opinion, the workers admitted to the Central Committee should
come preferably not from among those who have had long service in Soviet
bodies (in this part of my letter the term workers everywhere includes peas-
ants), because those workers have already acquired the very traditions and
the very prejudices which it is desirable to combat. The working-class mem-
bers of the C.C. must be mainly workers of a lower stratum than those
promoted in the last five years to work in Soviet bodies; they must be people
closer to being rank-and-file workers and peasants, who, however, do not
fall into the category of direct or indirect exploiters. I think that by attend-
ing all sittings of the C.C. and all sittings of the Political Bureau, and by
reading all the documents of the C.C., such workers can form a staff of
116 M. BRIE
devoted supporters of the Soviet system, able, first, to give stability to the
C.C. itself, and second, to work effectively on the renewal and improvement
of the state apparatus. (LW 36: 587)
Quite contrary to his critical view on the Russian peasantry since 1890,
constantly predicting its split into capitalists (kulaks) and wage labourers,
Lenin had an affirmative relationship with workers—provided they were
enabled to develop the correct consciousness. This corresponds to the fact
that he never critically questioned the proclaimed self-understanding of
the party and himself of being the most progressive representative of the
working class, nor did he ever discuss the question of whether this could
be substantiated in a different way than referring to his own superior
understanding based on Marxism. In Lenin’s thought, the idealisation of
the working class and the Bolshevik Party’s claim to leadership are inextri-
cably linked.
In 1934 Stalin launched the Great Purge, finally destroying the
Bolshevik Party and murdering the bulk of the old revolutionary guard
and all those who had experiences of a democratic party of Russian Social
Democracy and a democratic revolution and had acted independently
within it. Bolsheviks capable of speaking their own language no longer
existed. Their so-called confessions during the Moscow Trials were a cyni-
cal mockery and torture-induced reversal of free speech. They served the
party one last time and provided it with one last sacrifice: their lives.
Leninism had thus come to a dialectical-logical but far from historically
inevitable end and dominated the Soviet Union until 1953 in the form of
Stalinism, a Leninism without Bolsheviks. This perhaps marks Stalinism’s
innermost secret.
Stalin was aware that he would ultimately prevail only if he removed
that leading group of Bolsheviks. Ironically, he consciously based himself
on precisely the expansion of the Central Committee Lenin had suggested
in 1923, except for the difference that he did not appoint ordinary work-
ers but instead ‘loyal, accomplished cadres’. At the height of the Great
Purge on 7 November 1937, the twentieth anniversary of the October
Revolution, Stalin elaborated on this during a dinner speech after invoking
the unity of the USSR, of which Georgi Dimitrov provided quite a lively
account in his diaries.
J. Stalin’s Dinner Speech on the Twentieth Anniversary of the October

Revolution
‘Therefore, whoever attempts to destroy that unity of the socialist state,

whoever seeks the separation of any of its parts or nationalities—that man is an
enemy, a sworn enemy of the state and of the peoples of the USSR. And we will
destroy each and every such enemy, even if he was an old Bolshevik; we will
destroy all his kin, his family. […] To the complete destruction of all enemies,
themselves and their kin!’ It becomes rather obvious to whom he is referring, as
he goes on: ‘I have not finished my toast. A great deal is said about great leaders.
But a cause is never won unless the right conditions exist. And the main thing
here is the middle cadres—party, economic, military. They’re the ones who choose the
leader, explain our positions to the masses, and ensure the success of our cause. They
don’t try to climb above their station; you don’t even notice them. […] Why did we
prevail over Trotsky and the rest? Trotsky, as we know, was the most popular
man in our country after Lenin. Bukharin, Zinoviev, Rykov, Tomsky were all
popular. We were little known, I myself, Molotov, Vor[oshilov], and Kalinin,
then. We were fieldworkers in Lenin’s time, his colleagues. But the middle cad-
res supported us, explained our positions to the masses. Meanwhile Trotsky
completely ignored those cadres.’ (quoted in Dimitrov 2003, 65f)
The second point of emphasis in Lenin’s ‘Political Testament’ was the

question of the future leadership of the party. He favoured Stalin until the
autumn of 1922, a loyal follower of Lenin’s since 1917 who supported him
during inner-party struggles and refrained from attempts to distinguish
himself through differences with Lenin. However, the more Lenin was
forced to withdraw from active politics the more Stalin’s character and
objectives also became apparent. Based on the last letters Lenin dictated, we
can safely assume that he developed an increasingly clear position. If on 24
and 25 December 1922 he had been content with describing the merits and
weaknesses of the party leadership’s most important members, on 4 January
1923 he concluded that the question was no longer if Stalin had to be
removed as General Secretary, but rather how. The mistake was made never-
theless: after pointing out each and every weakness of all potential candi-
dates for the position of General Secretary, Stalin’s roughness and the
uncertainty as to ‘whether he will always be capable of using that authority
with sufficient caution’ (LW 36: 595) appeared almost trivial. If they were
all inadequate, why should the personal shortcomings of one be any more
significant than the political and theoretical shortcoming of others? The tes-
tament in the form presented to party delegates after Lenin’s death at a
1924 congress was certainly unsuitable for encouraging or even forcing the
removal of Stalin as General Secretary. The latter pledged to better himself
and remained in office, but would always remember that testament and take
brutal revenge on the listed rivals. None of them would survive the purge.
118 M. BRIE
If measured in terms of the consequences for the party Lenin founded

and led for over 20 years, he probably committed his gravest political error
in late 1922 and early 1923. Instead of concentrating exclusively on the
removal of Stalin and making sure he left behind an adequate proposal for
his successor, he criticised everyone. His assessments exhibit not least a
rather patronising attitude on Lenin’s part, ascribing each one a mark and
writing that Trotsky was ‘perhaps the most capable man in the present C.C.,
but he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccu-
pation with the purely administrative side of the work’ (ibid.). Moreover, he
points out Trotsky’s ‘non-Bolshevism’ (as the latter had not joined the
Bolshevik Party until the summer of 1917). He went on to hold their dis-
agreement with the insurrection in October 1917 and their call for a gov-
ernment of all socialist parties against Kamenev and Zinoviev. Bukharin, for
his part, may be the ‘favourite of the whole Party’, but ‘there is something
scholastic about him’ and he had ‘never made a study of dialectics… never
fully understood it’ (ibid.)—implying that Lenin or others had ‘fully’ under-
stood it. Compared to Trotsky’s ‘non-Bolshevism’, Kamenev’s and
Zinoviev’s betrayal in October 1917 for which Lenin had demanded their
expulsion from the party, and Bukharin’s lack of dialectics, it appeared as
though Stalin exhibited ‘only’ a single flaw, namely that of his character. But
why should this all of a sudden become the most important aspect, given
that the question had always been ‘who will come out on top?’
Both of Lenin’s sickbed proposals in his attempt to prevent the split in
the party and limit the dangers of a conflict between Stalin and Trotsky
were less an expression of his weakness so much as of the dangers in fact
intrinsic to the structures of power he had constructed. The cure he sug-
gested became the poisonous venom that reinforced the evils he sought to
eliminate. The expansion of the Central Committee provided Stalin with
the social and electoral base to outmanoeuvre his rivals via ‘democratic’
means. A criticism of Stalin that did not serve to really oust him could only
contribute to bolstering his ‘roughness’ into full-blown paranoia, an unre-
served envy and hatred towards the more ‘talented’ comrades.
Lenin died on 21 January 1924. Stalin turned the funeral into a self-
dramatisation as the most loyal of all committed Leninists. On behalf of
the whole party, he vowed:
Comrades, we Communists are people of a special mould. We are made of a

special stuff. We are those who form the army of the great proletarian
strategist, the army of Comrade Lenin. There is nothing higher than the
honour of belonging to this army. There is nothing higher than the title of
member of the Party whose founder and leader was Comrade Lenin. It is
not given to everyone to be a member of such a party. It is not given to
everyone to withstand the stresses and storms that accompany membership
in such a party. It is the sons of the working class, the sons of want and
struggle, the sons of incredible privation and heroic effort who before all
should be members of such a party. That is why the Party of the Leninists,
the Party of the Communists, is also called the Party of the working class.
Departing from us, Comrade Lenin enjoined us to hold high and guard
the purity of the great title of member of the Party. We vow to you, Comrade
Lenin, that we shall fulfil your behest with honour! (Stalin 1953, 47)
Stalinism was not inevitable. That said, the forces of opposition had
already been weakened, dispersed, or even eliminated under Lenin.
Conditions were unfavourable for a long-term historical learning process
both internationally and domestically. In 1924 the democratic and eman-
cipatory legacy asserted in 1905 and 1917 had not yet vanished entirely. It
re-emerged during the reform movements of the 1950s and 1960s, the
Soviet dissident movement, and perestroika, partly with reference to
Lenin, partly in markedly critical distinction to him. This legacy decisively
influenced the dynamic of Soviet society until its end.
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(New York: International Publishers, 1972), 730–33.
Gooding, John. 2002. Socialism in Russia. Lenin and His Legacy, 1890–1991.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hegel, G.W.F. 1976. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lenin, Wladimir I. 1920. Zameca ̌ nija na knigu N.I. Bucharina “Ėkonomika
perechodnogo perioda” (Comments to the Book of Bukharin “Economy of the
Transitional Period”).
Lenin, Vladimir I. 1970. Pis’mo k L.B. Kamenevu (1922). In Pol’noe sobranie
socǐ nenij, vol. 44, 427–430. Moskva: Izd. pol. literatury.
———. 1996. Letter from Chicherin to Lenin, with Lenin’s Marginalia. In The
Unknown Lenin. From the Secret Archive, ed. Richard Pipes, 85–88. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Mao Tse-tung. 1965. On Contradiction. In Selected Works. Volume I, 311–347.
Peking: Foreign Language Press.
———. 1977. On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People
(1957). In Selected Works. Volume V, 384–421. Peking: Foreign Language Press.
Martov, Julius O. 2000. Linija social-demokratii (Strategy of the Social Democracy).
In Izbrannoe, 386–392. Moskva.
Millar, James R., ed. 2003. Encyclopedia of Russian History. New York: Macmillan
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“Demokratija”.
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For? In Kronstadt Izvestiia, No. 6, March 8. libcom.org.
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Tambov 1918 to 1922).
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1918–1929. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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All-Union Congress of Soviets. In Works, vol. 6, 47–53. Moscow: Foreign
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Is It Going? Trans. Max Eastman. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.
CHAPTER 4
Whoever Is Not Prepared to Talk

About Leninism Should Also Keep
Quiet About Stalinism
‘If we follow the path of Lenin we will not only ruin socialism,
but bourgeois freedom as well.’
A worker soldier during consultations on Lenin’s Theses presented
in Petrograd in April 1917 (quoted in Bock 2013, 219)
During perestroika the critical reappraisal of Stalinism took centre stage in

the Soviet debate while Leninism itself remained a positive point of refer-
ence for some time. Even post-Communist parties upheld this distinction
during the upheaval. Correspondingly, in a speech at an extraordinary
party congress of the Communist state party of East Germany, the Socialist
Unity Party (SED), Michael Schumann summed up its quintessence in the
famous phrase: ‘We are breaking irrevocably with Stalinism as a system!’
(Hornbogen et al. 1999, 179). Yet what he subsequently described were
less the particular features of Stalinism so much as the structures gradually
imposed in Soviet Russia and subsequently other countries under
Communist state party rule after October 1917. Lenin’s era was deliber-
ately omitted. There was talk of a ‘Stalinist line dating back to the twenties
(of the twentieth century—MB)’ (Hornbogen et al. 1999, 182). As had
previously been the case during perestroika, many in the SED now
renamed SED/Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) believed reforming
socialism entailed some kind of return to Lenin. Lenin’s brief period in
government (at least when compared to Stalin) of only five years, however,
forged a template that many subsequent Bolshevik-inspired revolutions

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122 M. BRIE
and seizures of power would adhere to before eventually disappearing into

historical oblivion or transforming itself like in China or Vietnam. The
institutional framework of Soviet society remained unchanged during all
these decades. This chapter analysis the main features of this framework.
For me, Leninism represents a political current since 1903 and from
1918 onward a system of political and social rule that developed its specific
form in the Soviet Union into the 1930s and later also shaped other coun-
tries. This system exhibited four fundamental features (see Brie 1998):
Firstly, the underlying legitimising ideology: Leninism asserts its claim to
power in the name of the working class and is dedicated to the goal of estab-
lishing a society based on the common ownership of the means of
production (initially in a state-run form). Starting from here all forms
of domination are to wither away, at least in the longer historical perspec-
tive. Considering both internal and external resistance and the magnitude
of the historical tasks, it is stated, this task of comprehensive social trans-
formation demands the complete and unconditional concentration of
power in the hands of a leading party. It asserts this claim with reference
to its ‘scientific worldview’.
Secondly, the form of rule: the decisive means of preserving this power is
the sustained and permanent removal of all legal possibilities for public
dispute, self-organisation, and self-representation of citizens and the
establishment of an intellectual, political, social, and economic party-state
dictatorship.
Thirdly, the institutions: the essential institutions for the assertion of
state-party rule are (1) the destruction of the democratic public space and
the propagation of a monolithic legitimising ideology, (2) a state of instru-
mental measures in a permanent (latent or acute) state of emergency, (3)
the oppression of any public or democratic self-organisation by means of a
political police and judiciary as well as prisons/camps, and (4) the appoint-
ment of all decision-makers in a top-down manner (the nomenklatura
principle).
Fourthly, the shadow society: depending on convenience public counter-
tendencies concerning social norms or legal regulations, semi-formal self-
organisation, or even markets are tolerated within the proscribed
institutional framework to attenuate the system’s functional shortcomings.
The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in early January 1918
briefly depicted in this book marked the transition of Leninist Bolshevism
from an idea and a party forming since 1903 to a system of political and
social power. This system’s legitimising basis was the stated reference to
4 WHOEVER IS NOT PREPARED TO TALK ABOUT LENINISM SHOULD ALSO… 123
the interests of the working class and Marxism as the scientific expression
of these interests. These interests now found an expression, namely in the
form of Bolshevik Party rule entirely independent of real workers and the
working population. The Bolshevik Party’s leadership asserted power on
behalf of the workers while at the same time preventing any form of inde-
pendent action by those workers. The dictatorship of the proletariat
became an instance decoupled from the will of the members of the prole-
tariat and their actions. This was justified with reference to scientific insight
into the laws of history.
This step helped resolve a contradiction inherent in Marx and Engels’
Communist Manifesto. Here it is written of the Communists in bold lan-
guage that ‘theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat’
nothing less than ‘clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions,
and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement’ (MECW 6:
497). This superior understanding postulated in the Manifesto is
removed—albeit merely rhetorically—from the discursive, never-ending
process of open communication always exposed to doubt, criticism, and
scrutiny for plausibility when it reads: ‘The theoretical conclusions of the
Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been
invented, or discovered by this or that would-be universal reformer. They
merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an exist-
ing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very
eyes’ (ibid.: 498). Although this ‘merely’ appears modest, it is in fact quite
a presumption: according to this claim Communist principles are not
statements about the real historical movement but indeed statements by
this very movement itself, effectively revelations of reality as such. Marx
and Engels’ claim thus implies that the Communists are nothing less than
a medium for the true historical movement in its purest form, beyond any
and all special interests in its most consequent manifestation. One can
identify a propagandist volte in this passage, a bold self-dramatisation and
an expectation. As long as space for open disagreement in which this claim
can be challenged remains, it can be regarded as legitimate in such a mani-
festo. That said, as soon as this claim was asserted through violence it
became a legitimising ideology.
In the Manifesto the tension between theoretical insight, the party, and
real movement is held together by postulating a tendency towards the
convergence of idea, deed, and reality. The tension of a Communist avant-
gardism is present in embryonic form, regardless of whether it is justified
through reference to the actual workers who really organise and really
124 M. BRIE
constitute themselves as a class (or ‘make’ themselves into a class; see

Thompson 1968), effectively demanding their democratic rights. What
remains is the condition of the real praxis of real subjects. It remains a part
of the tension in any emancipatory movement as long as subjects can claim
or reject this condition. But what happens if this identity turns out to be
an illusion? If the idea is not applied to reality and reality does not corre-
spond to the idea?
As it stands, two of the Left’s distinct legitimising principles already
collide in the Manifesto: the principle of the superior understanding of the
workers’ collective interests on one side and the principle of the active
expression of the workers’ will through elections, assemblies, strikes, dem-
onstrations, and even uprisings on the other. This contradiction is inher-
ent in any and all left politics as such, and simultaneously constitutes one
of the sources of its effectiveness or ineffectiveness. It can therefore not be
‘resolved’, but only repeatedly processed time and again. Avant-gardism
and self-organisation of the social forces represent two sides of the same
coin. What matters are the forms in which this contradiction is dealt with.
Under conditions of dictatorship the reference to the ‘class’ becomes
an invocation of an imaginary subject unable to speak for itself. No ‘dis-
senting thinker’ is permitted to speak, no ‘dissenting actor’ tolerated. As
long as a democratic space persisted, this claim to speak on behalf of the
class was merely an assertion put to the test by the real actions of people
in actual movements and institutions. It could thus be evaluated. With the
destruction of this only just painfully emerging democratic space in Russia
from January 1918 onward, however, such evaluation became impossible.
There was only the pretension of acting as a party in the name of a silenced
mono-subject whose purported mission was to build a socialist society
based on public ownership.
The Bolsheviks’ decision against the Constituent Assembly was not only
a decision against this specific institution of ‘bourgeois democracy’ as they
claimed. Had they stopped at the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly
and allowed the Soviets to assert themselves as the form of radical democ-
racy (as promised), the abandonment of parliamentary forms of representa-
tion could indeed have signalled the transition from bourgeois to socialist
democracy in the spirit of a major historical experiment. The decisive con-
sideration of demands emanating from broad sections of society—peace,
land, and workers’ self-management—could have by all means coincided
with intensive efforts towards forging an equally broad coalition for the
civilising of conflicts, a united front against White reaction. The Soviet
government established important preconditions in terms of the social

question after October 1917. But the next step was never taken. The dem-
ocratic Left constituted by the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks
failed miserably with regard to the questions of war and land. The Leninist
Left now was mistaken regarding the question of democracy. As a result,
both democracy and socialism were doomed to fail together.
Even when workers constituted the major segment of the population in
the Soviet Union—when, according to the textbooks of Marxism-
Leninism, all preconditions for a socialist society to emerge had been
met—one thing was never granted even well into the late 1980s: the right
to free speech and free elections. For at no point in time was it certain that
the actual workers would support the established system of state-party
socialism in the long term under conditions of a free and democratic pub-
lic space. This circumstance was repeatedly highlighted in 1953, 1956,
1968, 1970, and during all other crises of Leninist-inspired socialism. One
can also derive from this, however, that this socialism and the democratic
self-determination of the working classes are incompatible. In that case,
the whole experiment was doomed to fail from the outset. The collapse of
the Soviet camp and the Soviet Union occurred because no socialist path-
way out of this dead end could be found.
This cancels out the most important argument in Leninism’s favour: its
success. The centralisation and repression of any opposition represented
weapons that ensured victory in the civil war. This appeared to be an ade-
quate justification. Yet they were not simply the means to an end but
rather means which corresponded to the end. The immediate end was the
establishment of a power that no longer had to fear any kind of internal
rival so as to be so united, coherent, and pure that it could implement col-
lective public ownership. This power was not the coincidental by-product
of circumstance, a makeshift means of self-assertion. It was itself the goal.
Only through this power did the immediate unity of idea, power, and real
movement become reality—but as unity beyond all real underlying contra-
dictions: a common idea, cohesive party power, and collective ownership
of the means of production was the vision. Once seized this power was
never to be shared again, no dissenters were ever to be granted free speech
or the chance to act independently so that what had been achieved could
never again be questioned.
What this did, then, was turn socialism upside down, or rather base it on
the party. The primacy of the self-emancipation of the oppressed was
replaced by their subordination to those who monopolised this emancipation
126 M. BRIE
and, in their endeavour, prevented any independent self-organisation of the

oppressed. But an order that degrades the working classes to underlings of
a state party, denying them free speech and the right to freely organise, can-
not be called socialist. The myth of the victory of socialism in one country
obscured this fact for many years. A party dictatorship without democracy
may perhaps be anti-capitalist, but it never became a step forward towards
socialism. The last chance of this occurring disappeared after the CPSU’s
17th Party Congress in 1934. According to a report by Mikoyan, 260 of the
1225 delegates voted against Stalin during an anonymous vote, yet only
three against Leningrad party secretary Kirov. During the following years
more than half of those present at that party congress were arrested and one
third murdered. Of the 139 members and candidates of the Central
Committee, 98 were killed.
There is a slogan dating back to Soviet times that expresses the brazen
core of Leninism: ‘Leninism is omnipotent because it is true!’ Lenin had
claimed such an omnipotence with regard to ‘Marxist doctrine’ in 1913
(see LW 19: 33). The destruction of the political field as a ‘realm of free-
dom’ (Arendt 2005) reversed this phrase in real terms: Leninism was only
able to assert the truth in such uncontested fashion because it possessed
the omnipotence to prevent any kind of public contradiction. It was the
violently enforced rule of a party that exempted the assertion of truth
from any kind of scrutiny through discourses on truth. The disappearance
of the political space simultaneously entailed the disappearance of the pos-
sibility to distinguish between ideology and truth.
Leninism cannot, however, be reduced to this. As I hope this book
demonstrated, Leninism is of the same flesh as socialism as well as Marxism.
The strength of the Leninist version of legitimising power was that it
linked the power of the Communist state parties to an overarching histori-
cal vision—to the claim of establishing the very conditions that would
eradicate all rule of people over people. The overcoming of class rule was
to be introduced on the basis of public ownership and social equality. On
this foundation domination in its statist and any other form was to become
redundant and wither away, allowing for individual freedom. This dicta-
torship thus did not aspire to a dictatorship in the name of minorities, not
for the preservation of the status quo, not oppression as the aim and end—
but the exact opposite. For this reason no other political dictatorship
throughout the twentieth century managed to survive as long as the
Leninist-legitimised, the late forms of which continue to shape states and
societies today. In the wake of the squalor and degeneration of the Tsarist
empire and horrors of World War I, it appeared as a viable alternative to

many contemporaries in Russia. This vision of unifying the greatest pos-
sible degree of emancipation and effective power also exhibited its appeal
at later points in history, seen as providing the capacity to overcome capi-
talism. The objective to be achieved was no less than an immense emanci-
pation from powerlessness by the lower classes. But the outcome was
renewed powerlessness on the part of precisely those workers called on to
emancipate themselves.
Leninism is inconceivable without its humanist point of reference, and
yet is ‘ahuman’ at the same time. The dignity of the individual, the intrin-
sic value of human life vis-à-vis all social objectives is negated in ahuman-
ism, which instead bases itself on ‘instrumental reason’ (Horkheimer
2012). The working class, or humanity, is transformed into an abstract
ideal and thereby an idol to which real living humans are sacrificed as mere
means. Leninism as institutional form lacks the space for shared humanity.
Moreover, there are no institutional barriers preventing such a politics nor
any possibility to refute such an ideology through reference to facts. For
these facts are explained via those conditions which Leninism has set out
to overcome.
From this perspective even totalised terror is a legitimate expression of
the fight against inhumane conditions. Any resistance to such politics can
thus be repressed by insisting that the conditions for humanity are not yet
given. According to the argument, these conditions must first be created
through domination and violence, that is to say through inhumane means.
Leninist politics exhibits an inherent tendency towards excessiveness. It
was only when it became self-destructive during the crisis of autumn 1920,
in the late 1930s, and the early 1950s that this excessiveness was reined in
to preserve the party’s dominant position and ensure cadres’ (relative)
security. At the same time, however, it made the party more susceptible to
a process of internal evolution and self-sublation.
Why were Communists, who had dedicated their entire lives to an idea,
so powerless vis-à-vis the Leninian and subsequently Stalinian party dicta-
torship? The first reason for this is made clear in a text by Karl Polanyi,
who wrote in 1939: ‘The working class must stand by Russia for the sake of
socialism. Both parts of the sentence are of equal importance. To stand for
socialism and not for Russia is the betrayal of socialism in its sole existing
embodiment. To stand for Russia without mentioning socialism would
also be the betrayal of socialism, which alone makes Russia worth fighting
for’ (quoted in Nagy 1994, 99). As Artur London retrospectively wrote
128 M. BRIE
about his arrest and conviction in 1952: ‘It is easy to fight someone you
know is your enemy. In the class war and the battle against the Nazi occu-
pants, heroism was natural […] But I was here at the behest of my party
[…] How can one fight against such a foe? […] In such conditions, it is
not only impossible for a communist to prove his innocence but it presents
him with a grotesque conscience problem: if you agree to “confess”, in the
Party’s eyes you enter the path of your redemption. But if you refuse to
sign because you are innocent you are a hardened culprit who must be
mercilessly liquidated’ (London 1971, 160f).
Yet these pangs of conscience in conflict with one’s ‘own’ party do not
explain why it was possible to understand a political and social system
without a lively democracy as socialism, why the Soviet Union could be
seen as the incarnation of the socialist idea (albeit incomplete and under
siege by hostile forces). This brings us to the second, more profound rea-
son for the political-intellectual inability to resist Leninism. In the
Bolshevik socialist tradition there is no space for internal contradictions.
Any conflict is an externally-induced antagonism. Any divergence from
the interests of the whole is at best petit bourgeois resentment, and at
worst open betrayal of the Communist cause and idea. Unity appears as
the ideal, and difference itself represents an incursion of guilt vis-à-vis
the ideal.
In his influential 1842 Code de la Communauté Théodore Dézamy
develops basic positions of worker communism in the tradition of Babeuf.
Here, he declares the immediate identity of interests between the indi-
vidual and the community to be both the precondition and product of
communism and claims: ‘Must we not centralise, concentrate, combine,
unify, and bring into harmony all activities, efforts, talents, and all ener-
gies? In a word, do we not need the complete and unrestricted society of
communal property, the universal society of communal property?’
(Dézamy 1975, 501f).
The reduction of society to a single, indivisible, universal community
(on this see Ruben 1998) represents the genuinely communist legacy
within Leninism. From this perspective the Communist Party logically
appears as the anticipated ideal community that will gradually encompass
the entire society. This implied, however, that staunch Party Communists
considered even the ‘slightest dispute’ with the party to be a painful self-
contradiction and un-Communist per se. The protection of the individual
from the larger community, the contradiction between the individual and
the society, the constitution of cultural, political, and economic special
interests let alone a political opposition, appeared in this perspective as

petit-bourgeois ‘birthmarks’ of the old society to be tolerated at best, pos-
sessing no positive social substance whatsoever. The party understood
itself to be both an association of the free and equal (in this sense antici-
pating a communist society free of domination) and as a fighting organisa-
tion enforcing this association against all resistance. The path to sublating
domination lied precisely in complete subordination to this imperative.
Until the communist utopia was realised, individuals would remain at the
mercy of Leninist power.
Leninism was a contradiction in itself and thus capable of developing at
least for a certain period of time. The instrumentalisation of concrete
social, democratic, and peace-oriented demands in the context of a human-
ist vision produced strong counter-tendencies given that the rule of the
party and state ownership of the means of production was conceived as a
means to achieve individual freedom. In Realpolitik, moreover, the reality
of complex socialisation processes also had to be accounted for if the sys-
tem was to survive. Conflicts of interest erupted and were difficult to con-
tain. Social and cultural reform movements and dissidence emerged from
this interplay of ideals, Realpolitik, and conflicting interests, work on
establishing social normativity took place, reforms of criminal law and the
judiciary occurred. The more the belief in the immediate attainment of
the communist utopia eroded and the more the concrete needs of major
social groups had to be taken into account (in order to retain control) and
the realities of complex societies considered, the greater the space for such
reforms in the here and now actually became. Over the course of succes-
sive waves they gradually eroded the substance of Leninism and the per-
suasive power of its legitimising ideology (on the various crises cycles of
state-party socialism see Brie 1992).
The history of Soviet-inspired state socialism can only be understood if
this internal contradictoriness of Leninism and social engagement with
these contradictions in the Communist leadership, between members of
the state party and between segments of the population, is taken into
account. Leninism foundered upon itself, upon the impossibility of con-
tinuing its project under the conditions of a complex society. It turned
into Brezhnevism, for which stability became the end in itself. But this
only held for two decades. The followers of Leninism were ultimately
forced to make a decision: either cling to a hollowed-out claim to power
or re-orient on a nationalist, universalist, conservative, liberal, or socialist
foundation.
130 M. BRIE
It took 70 years before movements from below like Solidarnosć as well

as from above (perestroika) once again reopened a space of dialogue and
freedom destroyed in 1918. These movements and reform projects grew
out of the internal contradictions of Leninism itself, its reference to the
working class on the one hand and a grand humanist vision to be unlocked
on the other. As it turned out, the working classes had come to learn from
experience that Leninism was incompatible with the emancipation of the
working class by the working class and for the working class.
Yet the task of solidary emancipation remains on the agenda to this day,
albeit in a new form. Socialism as a real movement going beyond capitalism
will only have a future if it breaks with Leninism as a system, the very Leninism
that held this vision captive for more than 70 years. Democracy and socialism
are necessarily and inextricably linked, represent both the journey and the
destination, the means and end, form and substance of solidary emancipation.
This constitutes the vision of a twenty-first-century socialism yet to be realised.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brie, Michael. 1992. “Selbstaufhebung” des Realsozialismus. In Zwischen den
Zeiten. Ein Jahrhundert verabschiedet sich, ed. Michael Brie and Dieter Klein,
57–100. Hamburg: VSA.
———. 1998. Staatssozialistische Länder Europas im Vergleich. Alternative
Dézamy, Théodore. 1975. Gesetzbuch der Gütergemeinschaft. In Von Babeuf bis
Blanqui. Französischer Sozialismus und Kommunismus vor Marx. Band II: Texte,
ed. Joachim Höppner and Waltraud Seidel-Höppner, 468–502. Leipzig: Reclam.
Horkheimer, Max. 2012. Critique of Instrumental Reason. London: Verso.
Hornbogen, Lothar, Detlef Nakath, and Gerd-Rüdiger Stephan, eds. 1999.
Außerordentlicher Parteitag der SED/PDS. Protokoll der Beratungen 8./9. und
16./17. Dezember 1989 in Berlin. Berlin: Karl Dietz.
London, Artur. 1971. The Confession. New York: Ballantine.
Nagy, Endre J. 1994. After Brotherhood’s Golden Age: Karl and Michael Polanyi.
In Humanity, Society, and Commitment. On Karl Polanyi, ed. Kenneth
McRobbie, 81–112. Montréal/New York: Black Rose Books.
Ruben, Peter. 1998. Die kommunistische Antwort auf die soziale Frage. Berliner
Debatte Initial 9: 5–18.
Thompson, Edward P. 1968. The Making of the English Working Class.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
CHAPTER 5
Rosa Luxemburg’s Symphony on

the Russian Revolution
The PrehisTory
Let us go back to the summer of 1918. Rosa Luxemburg was moved to
the prison in Wrocław one year before. She has to put up with fresh mal-
treatment. Her health is ruined. One of her closest friends, Hans
Diefenbach, falls at the front. The world is in commotion, in the East
more than anywhere else, but she remains imprisoned. In Germany,
resistance against the war is growing but there is no mass refusal to obey
orders yet, and no councils and no revolution yet either. In Russia, her
closest political allies, the Bolsheviks, have taken power and are strug-
gling to impose socialism. Nevertheless, if we look at the articles written
by Rosa Luxemburg at this time, the socialism she so yearned for appears
to be distorting the ideals she is committed to. She deeply fears a new
disappointment.
In this situation she does something utterly impossible. She circum-
vents the logic of us or them and so doing both appraises and criticises the
Bolsheviks. She criticises them for not doing enough to abolish the roots
of capitalism, hatred between peoples and war because the Bolsheviks
gave land to the peasants, enabled subjugated peoples to gain indepen-
dence as nations and signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Germans.
Thereby, writes Rosa Luxemburg, they chose paths that did not directly
lead to socialism and even took paths that could potentially discredit
socialism. Harsher still is her criticism of the Bolsheviks’ transition to

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132 M. BRIE
dictatorship. A jotted note like a wild shoot on the side of her manuscript
still resonates today:
Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members
of one party—however numerous they may be—is no freedom at all.
Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differ-
ently. Not because of any fanatical concept of “justice” but because all that
is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this
essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when “freedom”
becomes a special privilege. (Luxemburg 2004a, 305)
She may have taken the term ‘one who thinks differently’ from a collec-
tion of essays by Russian writer Maxim Gorky that appeared in 1918
(Gorki 1918, 21). Since the first publication of Luxemburg’s work ‘On
the Russian Revolution’ in the early 1920s no other work of her has been
so controversial. This chapter tries to answer why.
Some say one ought not reduce Rosa Luxemburg to the sentence ‘free-
dom for the one who thinks differently’. Reducing a thinker and politician
like Rosa Luxemburg who has left such a large and complex compilation of
texts to a single sentence is either banal, or an attempt to remove the power
from this sentence as if it had been purely ornamental, as if it had escaped
Rosa Luxemburg accidentally in the heat of a polemic. Notwithstanding,
she sees in the abolishment of democracy a disastrous instrument of
Bolshevik policy and writes: ‘for it stops up the very living source from
which alone can come the correction of all the innate shortcomings of social
institutions. That source is the active, untrammeled, energetic political life
of the broadest masses of the people’ (Luxemburg 2004a, 302).
In the discussion of this note both ‘friends and foes’ often forget that
Rosa Luxemburg did not simply criticise the Bolsheviks as undemocratic
but also as not socialist. For reasons I will describe later in her view the two
critiques are inseparable. To her it is unthinkable to first suspend democ-
racy, then build the house of socialism and at a later point give the house’s
inhabitants the opportunity to discuss the fundaments. In her understand-
ing socialism and democracy are intrinsically related.
Luxemburg had followed the debates about the Russian revolution in
Germany very closely (this discussion is documented in Schütrumpf 2017)
and began to intervene more and more critically. The trigger for Luxemburg’s
manuscript The Russian Revolution was a footnote by Ernst Meyer after
Leo Jogiches, the editor of the Spartacus Letters, was detained. In this foot-
note the author carefully but nonetheless clearly distances himself from
5 ROSA LUXEMBURG’S SYMPHONY ON THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 133
Luxemburg’s criticism of the Bolsheviks. The manuscript The Russian

Revolution from early autumn 1918 is an incomplete but nonetheless clearly
structured and therefore nearly complete manuscript. The following analy-
sis of this manuscript will not be to pick out individual arguments and con-
trast them with positions held by Lenin or Trotsky on the one side and
Kautsky as their often quoted antipode on the other. What I aim for is a
reconstruction of the context Rosa Luxemburg creates in the text. To this
end, I will treat this small but very powerful work in its entirety. I will look
at it as if it were a symphony, with its classical four movements, composed
as much through logic as by passion. My focus is not on the historic or cur-
rent truths of Luxemburg’s statements. I am more interested in the direc-
tion she was taking—in what Rosa Luxemburg wanted to say and not what
was caused by what she said.
The manuscript The Russian Revolution begins and ends with an
appraisal of the Russian revolution and the Bolsheviks. These are sec-
tions I and II and the final part—they can be interpreted as the first long
and the short fourth movement of her ‘symphony’. The first massive
movement is like a beating drum presenting the theme: ‘The Russian
Revolution is the mightiest event of the World War’ (Luxemburg 2004a,
281). This theme is repeated numerous times. The appraisal of the role
the Bolsheviks played in the revolution leads to the main theme: the
Bolsheviks, she states, were the ones who understood that in Russia as
much as in Europe, socialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, was the
order of the day. With their demand of all power to the Soviets, they had
given the ‘watch-words for driving the revolution ahead’ and drawn ‘all
the necessary conclusions’ (Luxemburg 2004a, 289). They had shown
the truth of the motto ‘not through a majority, but through revolution-
ary tactics to a majority—that’s the way the road runs’ (Luxemburg
2004a, 289). As Rosa Luxemburg writes, the Bolsheviks had thereby
‘won for themselves the imperishable historic distinction of having for
the first time proclaimed the final aim of socialism as the direct program
of practical politics’ (Luxemburg 2004a, 290).
The manuscript ends with an appraisal of the Bolsheviks stating that
they had managed to go beyond ‘questions of tactics’ and instead focused
on ‘the most important problem of socialism’: ‘the capacity for action of
the proletariat, the strength to act, the will to power of socialism as such’
(Luxemburg 2004a, 310). Luxemburg ends her manuscript with the
sentence: ‘And in this sense, the future everywhere belongs to “Bolshevism”’
(Luxemburg 2004a, 310). One could also read this final sentence as: ‘It is
only in this sense, that the future everywhere belongs to “Bolshevism”’.
134 M. BRIE
The beat of the drum has become a fortepiano, played loudly at first, and
ending much more quietly.
It is worth thinking about why Rosa Luxemburg did not focus on the
seizure of power, the installation of a socialist government and the devel-
opment of socialist institutions by the Bolsheviks in Russia as a Leitmotiv
with which to start and end her text. Instead, she concentrated on the
Bolsheviks’ efficiency in developing the working class’ and the Russian
masses’ capacity for revolutionary action. For her, this and only this was
the lasting merit of the Leninist party. Her true interest rests with the mil-
lions of workers, peasants and soldiers building-up socialism from the
grounds and not in the fact that the red flag was hoisted above the Kremlin.
Here a side theme of her symphony begins to develop. As in earlier arti-
cles, the goal of her analysis of Bolshevik policies—both of her appraisal
and her criticism—is overcoming the ‘fatal inertia of the German masses’
(Luxemburg 2004a, 284).
All of her articles on the Russian Revolution between spring 1917 and
autumn 1918 ask with increasing desperation when the German prole-
tariat will finally fulfil its historic duty for socialist revolution (Luxemburg
1974a, 1974b, 1974c, 1974d, 1974e, 1974f ). The article The Russian
Tragedy (with the aforementioned note by Ernst Meyer) concludes with
the words:
There is only one solution to the tragedy in which Russia in caught up: an
uprising at the rear of German imperialism, the German mass rising, which
can signal the international revolution to put an end to this genocide. At this
fateful moment, preserving the honour of the Russian Revolution [in the
eyes of Rosa Luxemburg this honour was endangered by the separate peace
between Soviet Russia and the German Empire in Brest-Litovsk—Michael
Brie] is identical with vindicating that of the German proletariat and of
international socialists. (Luxemburg 1974g, 392)
Instead of the Russian Bolsheviks, her manuscript is aimed at the ‘iner-

tia’ of German workers. Her criticism of Bolshevik hopes to lead German
workers to achieve what she sees as the true accomplishment of the
Bolsheviks in Russia: revolutionary socialist action of the masses.
But according to her this cannot be ‘called forth in the spirit of the
guardianship methods of the German Social-Democracy of late-lamented
memory. It can never again be conjured forth by any spotless authority, be
it that of our own “higher committees” or that of “the Russian example”’
(Luxemburg 2004a, 284). She is convinced that
not by the creation of a revolutionary hurrah-spirit, but quite the contrary:

only by an insight into all the fearful seriousness, all the complexity of the
tasks involved, only as a result of political maturity and independence of
spirit, only as a result of a capacity for critical judgement on the part of the
masses, whose capacity was systematically suppressed by the Social-
Democracy for decades under various pretexts, only thus can the genuine
capacity for historical action be born in the German proletariat. To concern
one’s self with a critical analysis of the Russian Revolution in all its historical
connections is the best training for the German and the international work-
ing class for the tasks which confront them as an outgrowth of the present
situation. (Luxemburg 2004a, 284)
In summary: whereas Luxemburg’s manuscript The Russian Revolution

chiefly appraises the Bolsheviks’ success in finding the right slogans to
move and provide the masses with a focus towards revolutionary action,
she also follows a second goal, namely to criticise Bolshevik policies pre-
cisely there where they stand against this understanding of socialism as a
creation by the workers themselves. Both high esteem and harsh criticism
of the historic accomplishment of the Bolsheviks are measured by the
same standard. For Rosa Luxemburg socialism always essentially depends
on one thing: ‘The whole mass of the people must take part in it’
(Luxemburg 2004a, 306). This measure binds the manuscript together.
Whilst the first long part of Luxemburg’s manuscript appraises the
Bolsheviks, sections III and IV concentrate on criticism. She focuses her
criticism of the Bolsheviks on three central aspects: First, agrarian reform,
second the proclamation of the right of nations to self-determination and
the separate peace with Germany, and third the ‘suppression of democ-
racy’ (Luxemburg 2004a, 299). The first two points are discussed in sec-
tion III, and the third point in section IV; both are nearly equally long.
These are the movements two and three of Luxemburg’s symphony The
Russian Revolution.
Luxemburg’s CriTiCism of The boLsheviks: Too LiTTLe

soCiaLism, Too LiTTLe DemoCraCy
Luxemburg’s critique of the Bolshevik policies is well known. I will restrict
myself to pointing to one unusual aspect of this criticism. As it were, both
critical sections of her manuscript seem to oppose each other in an
unbridgeable logical contradiction. First, the Bolsheviks are criticised for
136 M. BRIE
their policies on easing tensions between the government and possible

opponents. She develops proposals that—one must assume—would have
increased resistance to the Bolsheviks. But afterwards she recommends the
Bolsheviks implement radical political democratisation. Let us look at this
contradiction more closely.
In section III of the manuscript the Bolsheviks are criticised for their
agrarian reform and policies with regard to the ‘national question’. Rosa
Luxemburg criticises the Bolsheviks’ decision to give peasants land for
their own private benefit and to grant the suppressed peoples of the
Russian Empire the right to self-determination. She neither wants to
strengthen private property, nor nationalist divisions. Rosa Luxemburg
understood that ‘as a political measure to fortify the proletarian socialist
government’ the Bolshevik policy criticised by her ‘[…] was an excellent
tactical move’ (Luxemburg 2004a, 290) aimed at ‘binding the many for-
eign peoples within the Russian Empire to the cause of the revolution’
(Luxemburg 2004a, 294f). In both cases the Bolsheviks yielded to the
pressure of a large share of the population, be it the peasants, the Finns,
Estonians, Lithuanians, or Georgians and so forth. Furthermore, the so-
called peace of Brest-Litovsk grew mainly out of the incapacity of the
Bolsheviks to continue mobilising soldiers for the war effort. Any other
policy would have, at least according to Lenin, either made it impossible
for the Bolsheviks to seize power or would have led to their rapid demise.
Why then did Rosa Luxemburg criticise these decisions so harshly?
For Rosa Luxemburg Bolshevik power was to a certain degree a less
pressing issue than saving the honour of the left. Although she does not
say this directly, in my view I think she would have found it easier to accept
the downfall of Bolshevist Russia than to witness a further betrayal of
socialist ideals as had been committed by right-wing social democrats in
1914. This is especially true with regard to the prospects for socialist revo-
lutions in Germany and Western Europe she regarded as decisive. Faced
with the possibility that the Leninist government, which found itself in a
hopeless situation in autumn 1918, might consider an alliance with the
German Empire to secure its power, she wrote:
Russia was the one last corner where revolutionary socialism, purity of
principle and ideals, still held away. It was a place to which all sincere social-
ist elements in Germany and Europe could look in order to find relief from
the disgust they felt at the practice of the West European labour move-
ment, in order to arm themselves with the courage to persevere and in faith
in pure actions and sacred words. The grotesque “coupling” of Lenin and
Hindenburg would extinguish the source of moral light in the east.
(Luxemburg 1974g, 390)
Whoever writes like this, with such an appeal to absolute values, makes
it clear they aim for all or nothing.
Although Rosa Luxemburg is aware of the political reasons behind
Lenin’s policies, she nonetheless recommended the Bolsheviks follow a
strategy that would have placed them even more strongly in opposition to
the population, in particular to peasants, soldiers, and the periphery of the
former Russian Tsardom. She assumed that any real steps towards a real
socialist policy must at least not ‘bar’ or ‘cut off’ the road leading to
socialism (Luxemburg 2004a, 291). Evidently, she envisages this socialism
in the context of the predominance of social property and international
solidarity of peoples within a unified Soviet state. Rosa Luxemburg could
not accept the strengthening of peasant private property and the bolster-
ing of the self-determination of peoples that had already been part of the
economic and market areas dominated by Russia. She viewed the small
property owners and the new small ‘nation states’ as the natural partners
of imperialism and counter-revolution.
In the second movement of her symphony, to stick to this metaphor,
Rosa Luxemburg recommends the Bolsheviks adopt a communist policy
of centralisation and concentration of economic and political power
grounded in robust principles and in opposition to what she calls the
‘spontaneous peasant movement’ (Luxemburg 2004a, 293) and the
‘bourgeois and petty-bourgeois classes’ (Luxemburg 2004a, 295) of the
suppressed nations. She sees the reasons behind the Bolshevik policies that
in her view contradict socialist principles and assumes that ‘unfortunately,
the calculation was entirely wrong’ (Luxemburg 2004a, 295). Historically
this turned out to be a misjudgement, even though in early autumn 1918
many facts seemed to indicate that Lenin’s government would fall. The
Bolsheviks though were able to maintain power for 70 years; also thanks
to the German and Austrian revolutions of November 1918, the outcomes
of the civil war, and great internal and external concessions (the New
Economic Policy) as well as accelerated industrialisation and expropriation
of peasants (called ‘collectivisation’) in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
More interesting in our context though is the fact that Rosa Luxemburg
proposed measures in the second movement, which from the point of view
of the Bolsheviks would have created greater opposition among the masses
138 M. BRIE
of Russian peasants and the Russian periphery. Yet in the third movement,
she strongly refutes precisely the measures taken by the Bolsheviks to sta-
bilise their power in the face of already existing opposition: dictatorship
and terror. It seems Rosa Luxemburg believed that it was possible to
simultaneously implement a policy of the immediate socialisation of the
means of production (in the city and partly in the countryside) as well as a
policy of all-encompassing democratisation. Socialist democracy and the
establishment of democratic socialism should go hand-in-hand (Luxemburg
2004a, 308).
Rosa Luxemburg saw the separation of interests in any area of the econ-
omy as strengthening private property. Equally, she believed that allowing
entire peoples to leave the imperial constructs into which they had been
economically integrated constituted a division of the working class. She
was also against any alliance with the internal or foreign bourgeoisie. But
at the same time, she demanded freedom of speech and assembly, and
elections that were open to the participation of the government’s oppo-
nents and their foreign ‘advisories’. Rigorously and fundamentally, she
therefore emphasised: ‘Without general elections, without unrestricted
freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies
out in every public institution’ and that it led to ‘the dictatorship of a
handful of politicians’ (Luxemburg 2004a, 307). This dictatorship she
then characterises as ‘bourgeois’ precisely because it is a ‘dictatorship for a
handful of persons’ (Luxemburg 2004a, 307). She justifies this again by
solving the antagonism between dictatorship and democracy in
her own way:
The proletariat, when it seizes power, can never follow the good advice of
Kautsky, given on the pretext of the “unripeness of the country,” the advice
being to renounce the socialist revolution and devote itself to democracy. It
cannot follow this advice without betraying thereby itself, the International,
and the revolution. It should and must at once undertake socialist measures
in the most energetic, unyielding and unhesitant fashion, in other words,
exercise a dictatorship, but a dictatorship of the class, not of a party or of a
clique-dictatorship of the class, that means in the broadest public form on
the basis of the most active, unlimited participation of the mass of the peo-
ple, of unlimited democracy. (Luxemburg 2004a, 307f )
Rosa Luxemburg sees the reason behind the failure of the Bolsheviks to
gain broad support—and this in spite of the numerous concessions they
made—alone in the fundamental opposition to socialism of the bourgeoisie,
petty-bourgeoisie and peasants. She argues that the departure from social-
ist principles cost the Bolsheviks the support of the masses of workers and
strengthened counter-revolutionary forces. She writes:
Instead of warning the proletariat in the border countries against all forms
of separatism as mere bourgeois traps, they did nothing but confuse the
masses in all the border countries by their slogan and delivered them up to
the demagogy of the bourgeois classes. By this nationalistic demand they
brought on the disintegration of Russia itself, pressed into the enemy’s hand
the knife which it was to thrust into the heart of the Russian Revolution.
(Luxemburg 2004a, 297)
The anTiCiPaTeD harmony of oPPosiTes: neeDs

anD freeDom
But how can this work? Use of the ‘iron hand’ of ‘proletarian dictatorship’
to suppress all interests not immediately in line with a socialism under-
stood like common ownership of the means of production and ‘freedom
of the press’, ‘the right to association and assembly’ (Luxemburg 2004a,
307), implementing measures in an ‘unyielding and unhesitant fashion’
while allowing ‘unlimited democracy’? Rosa Luxemburg, it appears, wants
something that is impossible and she even wants it democratically. Sections
III and IV—or the second and third movement of her ‘symphony’—stand
in clear opposition to each other. She demands both at the same time—the
suppression of all social and nation state plurality and the highest appraisal
of political freedom; the struggle with an iron hand against all private pos-
session of land and against splitting Russia and the greatest possible pro-
motion of political freedom and democracy as the ‘living sources of all
spiritual riches and progress’ (Luxemburg 2004a, 306). Historically at
least these opposites fell apart. Whereas bourgeois-capitalist society and
political democracy proved to be at least temporarily compatible, this was
not the case for the type of socialism characterised by a centrally planned,
nationalised economy.
Rosa Luxemburg overcame these contradictions; in the end, she united
them and created a vision of true harmony of the two opposed movements.
This unity was only possible because she was convinced that through their
everyday practices workers and the masses would change the ‘thousands of
complicated difficulties’ that develop while constructing socialism into
‘unobstructed, effervescing life’ (Luxemburg 2004a, 306). ‘Social instincts
in place of egotistical ones, mass initiative in place of inertia, idealism which
140 M. BRIE
conquers all suffering, etc., etc.’ (Luxemburg 2004a, 306) would develop.
She believed that these instincts and initiatives as well as the necessary ideal-
ism would take society in exactly the direction of the form of socialism she
proposed once the basic institutions of common ownership were put in place.
Therefore, she could envisage that the greatest degree of freedom would lead
to the greatest degree of insight into the truth of socialism as a society of
socialised property, common interests, internationalism and peace.
But Rosa Luxemburg also seems to have believed that the opposite too
is true. By stopping peasants, if necessary by force, from privately appro-
priating land and forcing them into collective forms of production, by not
granting national independence to the peoples of the Russian Empire but
instead keeping them within a political and economic sphere where they
work together in socialised factories, and participate in the development
and implementation of production plans, a space for experiences develops
that will lead to the acceptance of this socialism. According to her, this
would lead to support for socialism and its enthusiastic defence. In par-
ticular, her discussion of the national question points in this direction.
Driven by bourgeois nationalists she believes the separation into different
peoples develops into hatred. She seems to have thought that even if unity
in a revolutionised country was implemented in the beginning when nec-
essary by force, acceptance of this unity would later develop.
In Rosa Luxemburg the free action by the masses and historic necessity
have a tendency to go hand-in-hand. Leadership then, is mainly the capac-
ity to actively promote this development. To her, dictatorship and terror
are the deadly enemies of socialism because by suppressing freedom of
action by the masses they equally suppress the real agents of any enforce-
ment of socialist demands. Dictators are the gravediggers of socialism
because they bury the agents of socialism in the prison of a command
society from which there can be no path towards the realm of freedom.
In contrast to Lenin and Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg simply did not
believe that spontaneously-arising convictions would necessarily lead away
from socialism and that there was therefore a need to install socialist ‘con-
sciousness’ in the working class from outside (something Lenin was will-
ing to do even by force). Instead, she believed that the everyday practices
of workers and the working masses would lead directly to socialism—at
least if such a practice were free and built on autonomous action and not
on paternalism and manipulation. Furthermore, there would have to be a
true unity of production and life. As Rosa Luxemburg had already argued
against Lenin in 1904: ‘The Social Democratic movement is the first in the
history of class societies which reckons, in all its phases and through its
entire course, on the organization and the direct, independent action of
the masses’ (Luxemburg 2004b, 251). To her socialism is not a centrally
planned machine. Instead, it is life, free action by free men and women
united by direct cooperation. Should such a relation between direct expe-
rience and socialist goals—conceived as the socialisation of the means of
production—really exist, then, and only then, would the dictatorship of a
party and terror not only be morally wrong but also the wrong means of
building political power. Rosa Luxemburg repeatedly emphasised this.
What she did not realise though, is that if socialism is understood as a
centralised social economy then it is diametrically opposed to the free
action of the masses. Yet Rosa Luxemburg never critically reflected on the
necessary pre-conditions for her assumptions on socialism, and instead
only pointed to concrete problems emerging in the Bolshevik attempt to
implement socialism in post-war Russia.
bibLiograPhy
Gorki, Maxim. 1918. Ein Jahr russische Revolution. Süddeutsche Monatshefte 16: 1–62.
Luxemburg, Rosa. 1974a. Die Revolution in Russland. In Gesammelte Werke, vol.
4, 242–245. Berlin: Dietz Verlag Berlin.
———. 1974b. Der alte Maulwurf. In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, 258–264. Berlin:
Dietz Verlag Berlin.
———. 1974c. Zwei Osterbotschaften. In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, 385–392.
Berlin: Dietz Verlag Berlin.
———. 1974d. Brennende Zeitfragen. In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, 275–290.
———. 1974e. Die geschichtliche Verantwortung. In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4,
374–379. Berlin: Dietz Verlag Berlin.
———. 1974f. Der Katastrophe entgegen. In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, 380–384.
———. 1974g. Die russische Tragödie. In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, 385–392.
———. 2004a. The Russian Revolution. In The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, ed.
Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson, 281–310. New York: Monthly
Review Press.
———. 2004b. Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy. In The
Rosa Luxemburg Reader, ed. Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson, 281–310.
Schütrumpf, Jörn, ed. 2017. Diktatur statt Sozialismus. Die russische Revolution
und die deutsche Linke 1917/18. Berlin: Karl Dietz.
CHAPTER 6
The Power and Impotence of the Marxian

Idea of Communism
Lenin and the Second internationaL’S

conception of SociaLiSm
The strategy of the Bolshevik government was not all that changed after
the shift from War Communism to the New Economic Policy (NEP) in
1921–1922. The relationship of many bourgeois forces and Russian intel-
lectuals to the Soviet power also shifted. As Part 3 illustrates, the Soviet
government adopted various liberal measures both economic and cultural.
On the other side, as mentioned above, punitive law was tightened on
Lenin’s direct orders and many intellectuals were expelled from Russia.
The Communist Party was concerned with maintaining its ideological and
political monopoly. The latter appeared all the more threatened given that
NEP increased the government’s dependence not only on the cooperation
of the peasantry—a sector which had grown aware of its own interests and
power—but also on the ‘bourgeois specialists’ and their professional
expertise. Moreover, in an attempt to rebuild the economy, the support of
relevant foreign actors was also to be pursued. To many this shift of poli-
cies seemed to be a distortion of Marx’s ideas on socialism and commu-
nism. The following chapter analysis these ideas in the form they influenced
the Second International and looks back on Marx’s own search for a com-
munist solution for the contradictions of complex bourgeois societies.
In 1921 discussion circles grappling with the new situation and trying
to understand whether this radical turn was to be taken seriously and
intended as a permanent arrangement emerged in various sections of the

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23327-3_6
144 M. BRIE
Russian intelligentsia. Among them were also groups willing to actively

support the new policy. Many of the latter entered the state administration
and the economy, ultimately ending up among the first victims of the
Stalinist show trials and terror during the late 1920s and early 1930s. This
new wave of terror was part of the radical change of course towards a new
form of command economy and far-reaching expropriation of the peas-
antry and NEP bourgeoisie.
One of the documents produced by the part of the Russian intelligen-
tsia turning towards Soviet power in the early 1920s are the memoirs of
Nikolai V. Volski (N. Valentinov, 1879–1964). He came from an aristo-
cratic background and became a revolutionary at the end of the nine-
teenth century. While in exile he met Lenin who repeatedly sought to win
him over to the Soviet power. After 1922 Volski worked in Russia’s high-
est planning commission, the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy,
and edited the Torgovo-promyshlennaya gazeta (‘Commercial-Industrial
Gazette’). From 1928 onward he was the editor of the paper published by
the Russian trade mission in Paris and severed all ties with the Soviet power
due to the abandonment of NEP—a move that saved his life.
In his recollections of the NEP published in Paris in 1956 Volski talks
in detail about one of the discussion circles. It quite intentionally dubbed
itself the ‘League of Observers’. According to Volski, one of its members
delivered a lecture in 1923 on how ‘life had destroyed the ideas proclaimed
by Lenin in 1917–1918 and led to the NEP’. He went on to say that ‘this
transition from utopianism to a realistic policy allowed for an optimistic
outlook on the further economic development in Russia’ (Valentinov
(Vol’ski) 1991, 32). Subsequently, Volski recounts a 38-page document
titled ‘The Fate of the Main Ideas of the October Revolution’ was pro-
duced. The author of the speech for the ‘League of Observers’ mainly
referred to Lenin’s conceptual deliberations in his writings State and
Revolution and ‘The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It’
produced in the summer and early autumn of 1917 (for more details see
Part 1 of this volume). He particularly emphasised Lenin’s assumption
that the exchange of goods and services in a socialist economy could occur
without monetary transactions and that all productive processes would
take place under joint centralised supervision coordinated by a unified
general plan. All working people would become employees of the state.
The maturity for the transition from capitalism to socialism was deter-
mined above all by the state of concentration and centralisation processes
in major industries and the banking sector. In this regard, the author
6 THE POWER AND IMPOTENCE OF THE MARXIAN IDEA OF COMMUNISM 145
referred to Lenin’s claim that ‘socialism is merely state-capitalist monop-

oly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that
extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly’ (LW 25: 362). During the War
Communism period, the author continued, Lenin advocated a policy of
comprehensive nationalisation of even the smallest enterprises. The estab-
lishment of kolkhozes was violently pushed forward in the countryside in
1918, justified as part of the transition to socialism.
The extent to which these positions were dominant among the
Bolsheviks is illustrated by the book The ABC of Communism by Nikolai
Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhensky. It was intended to explain the pro-
gramme of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in a popular man-
ner and summarised the positions the Bolsheviks developed during War
Communism. The communist society, it reads, was ‘a huge working
organisation for cooperative production’ (Bukharin and Preobrazhensky
1922, 70). The fragmentation and anarchy of production had been elimi-
nated and competition among entrepreneurs suspended given that ‘the
factories, workshops, mines, and other productive institutions will all be
subdivisions, as it were, of one vast people’s workshop, which will embrace
the entire national economy of production’ (Bukharin and Preobrazhensky
1922, 70). Commodity production would come to an end and money
become obsolete. In a matter of only a few decades goods would be dis-
tributed according to actual needs. The authors responded to the ques-
tion, ‘But will not people find it to their interest to take more than they
need?’ as follows: ‘Certainly not. Today, for example, no one thinks it
worth while when he wants one seat in a tram, to take three tickets and
keep two places empty. It will be just the same in the case of all products’
(Bukharin and Preobrazhensky 1922, 72–73). The central aspect is the
abolition of the division of labour:
Under communism, for example, there will not be permanent managers of

factories, nor will there be persons who do one and the same kind of work
throughout their lives. […] Nothing of this sort happens in communist
society. Under communism people receive a many-sided culture, and find
themselves at home in various branches of production; today I work in an
administrative capacity, I reckon up how many felt boots or how many
French rolls must be produced during the following month; tomorrow I
shall be working in a soap factory, next month perhaps in a steam laundry,
and the month after in an electric power station. (Bukharin and
Preobrazhensky 1922, 71–72)
146 M. BRIE
The sheer power of these ideas should not be underestimated. Given

the Soviet Union’s economic, social, and political crisis in the late 1920s,
confronted with the fascist threat to the west and an aggressive Japanese
imperialism to the east, large sections of the Bolshevik state party believed
that the time had come to abandon NEP. It appeared to them as no more
than an imposed temporary distraction from the actual communist objec-
tives. The return to Communist terror, the expropriation of the peasantry,
and the swift nationalisation of the entire economy and trade were also
seen as progress on the path to socialism and communism. An utmost
centralisation of power appeared as a veritable expression of socialism.
Simultaneously, Stalin’s pivot left no doubt concerning the relations of
power. The peasantry was eliminated as an economic factor in its own
right, the dependency on NEP entrepreneurs was ended, and the intelli-
gentsia was reduced to its technological and ideological function inside
the state party socialist system.
In 1923 the ‘League of Observers’ pointed out that Lenin had down-
played the massive problems linked to the coordination of a complex
economy when he stated that planning, leadership, and control were being
radically democratised through the participation of all working people and
that everyone would conduct both productive and managing functions
from the outset. They quoted a text by Lenin dated October 1917 in
which he seeks to find an answer to the question of whether the Bolsheviks
would have been able to exercise power had they successfully overthrown
the Provisional Government. Lenin writes that the Bolshevik Party already
had 240,000 members and at least a million supporters, adding: ‘In addi-
tion to that we have a “magic way” to enlarge our state apparatus tenfold
at once, at one stroke, a way which no capitalist state ever possessed or
could possess. This magic way is to draw the working people, to draw the
poor, into the daily work of state administration’ (LW 26: 112). The
members of the discussion group in 1923, however, were unable to ascer-
tain whether this was simply demagoguery on Lenin’s part or as Volski
claimed an expression of the ‘utterly ill-conceived views, ideas, assump-
tions’ which constituted ‘the foundation not only of Lenin’s worldview,
but in fact the entire socialist paradigm’ (Valentinov (Vol’ski) 1991, 39).
The concept of a socialist and communist economy as one big coopera-
tive workshop that realised its processes of exchange without the use of
money and with a central coordination was by no means distinctively
Bolshevik, but rather widespread. For instance, mathematician, economist,
and philosopher Otto Neurath, a staff member at the economic department
of the Ministry of War in Austria-Hungary since 1916 and private lecturer

of Max Weber in Heidelberg, proposed establishing a Central Office of
Economics and the implementation of a moneyless economy to the Bavarian
council government in 1919. He himself was to be its president. The early
defeat of the Bavarian Soviet Republic put an end to the experiment before
it even began. Otto Neurath was sentenced and imprisoned for high trea-
son. He based his plans for the introduction of a moneyless economy on his
postdoctoral thesis titled War Economics and Its Significance for the Future
which had earned him his Habilitation in 1917. In April 1919 his work
Through War Economy to Economy in Kind was published. In the preface
Neurath wrote that the works he presented were ‘all inspired by the idea
that the era of free exchange economy is ending while that of administrative
economy is beginning; that money economy will dissolve to give way to a
thoroughly organized economy in kind’ (O. Neurath 1973, 123f). The war
economy had demonstrated the enormous potential of conscious social
administration with the aim of achieving major objectives and, moreover,
‘breathed new life into the idea of a utopia’ (O. Neurath 1973, 153).
Karl Kautsky, the Second International’s recognised authority on
Marxism, outlined the basic features of a socialist society in countless writ-
ings, among them The Social Revolution in 1902. The second part of this
text was ‘The Day After the Social Revolution’, at the heart of which stood
the question: ‘Let us imagine then that this fine day has already come, in
which at one stroke all power is thrown into the lap of the proletariat.
How would it begin?’ (Kautsky 1916, 107). The most important step in
Kautsky’s view, based entirely on Marx’s Capital, was the ‘expropriation
of the expropriators’. He saw the crucial measure to achieve this in strip-
ping them of their opportunities to exploit the workers, in forcing them to
sell their enterprises to the state or municipality or hand them over to
cooperatives. This included all areas of economic activity except for small-
scale family production. Wages and prices would be fixed and thereby
withdrawn from the law of value, gradually diminishing their significance.
Productivity would be increased mainly through the closure of inefficient
enterprises and the concentration of large segments of production in
highly productive large-scale factories. Ultimately, the task was to trans-
form the ‘organization of production’ from an unconscious to a conscious
form of production (Kautsky 1916, 156f).
The assumption shared by Otto Neurath, Karl Kautsky, the Bolsheviks,
and indeed all staunch Marxists of the day was that the ‘thoroughly
organised’ moneyless economy in kind run by collectively organised workers
148 M. BRIE
organising their own reproductive process in a centralised manner on the

basis of free collective decisions entailed four essential advantages over the
capitalist market and money economy: firstly, the decisions made in this
economic system would rest on the free decision of the overwhelming
majority of the population determining the objectives and means of eco-
nomic processes. Secondly, the new economic and social system would be
free of economic crises and offer absolute security of employment, income,
and social protection. Thirdly, the fact that workers themselves controlled
the means of production on behalf of their own interests would result in a
higher motivation to work and bolster work discipline. Fourthly, this system
would unleash a productivity superior to capitalism. There was no doubt in
this matter: socialism would not only be more just, but far more productive.
Due to the importance of economic resources for the government’s strug-
gle to survive as he already experienced during the civil war, Lenin was very
clear: ‘In the last analysis, productivity of labour is the most important, the
principal thing for the victory of the new social system. Capitalism created a
productivity of labour unknown under serfdom. Capitalism can be utterly
vanquished, and will be utterly vanquished by socialism creating a new and
much higher productivity of labour’ (LW 29: 427).
One reason why critique of the Bolsheviks for their dictatorial and ter-
roristic forms of rule was so easily dismissed was that they assumed this
only represented a more or less brief transitional stage. Once the socialist
economic system developed its full potential and the four advantages bore
fruit, approval of socialism would become overwhelming and the forms of
repressive rule could, with reference to Engels, ‘wither away’. Both the
Bolsheviks and Marxist Social Democrats completely discounted the pos-
sibility that this economic system could entail a permanent division of
managing and labouring classes, that it would suffer from new types of
crisis, be permanently plagued by a lack of motivation to work and work
discipline, and would end up permanently inferior to the capitalist mode
of production in terms of labour productivity and innovative capacity. The
differences between the distinct currents of the workers’ movement con-
sisted in the course of action, not in the objective as such. The Bolsheviks
considered the suspension of democratic forms an emergency measure, yet
in contrast to Social Democrats were willing to implement these measures
on behalf of the stated goal for as long as it took the superiority of the
socialist economic and social order to prove itself in practice. The reason
why it became permanent, then, was that the economic weakness vis-à-vis
the advanced capitalist societies became chronic, even increasing once
again from the late 1960s onward. As a result, any free democratic deci-
sion by popular majorities threatened to turn against not only Soviet state
party socialism as a political order, but also as an economic system.
This retrospective knowledge, however, should not obscure the fact
that Marxist socialists as a whole were convinced for a long time that Marx
had not only provided them with a powerful theoretical tool in the form
of his critique of capitalism and proven that capitalism necessarily headed
towards some kind of terminal crisis, but had also pointed to the basic type
of economic and social organisation that would succeed capitalism. The
central paradigm would be the SPD’s Erfurt Programme adopted in 1891
immediately after the German Reich’s Anti-Socialist Laws were lifted,
along with the writings of Karl Kautsky.
When the SPD was able to legally convene again after 1890 following
the repeal of the Anti-Socialist Laws it gave itself a new platform: the
Erfurt Programme. In the eyes of its leaders the programme firstly was
based on the scientific method of Marxism, secondly corresponded to the
real contemporary conditions of the German Reich and German capital-
ism, and thirdly had proven to be adequate for decades. The strategy the
SPD and its predecessors had pursued since the late 1860s represented a
consistent unity between assumptions and conclusions, the failure of
which in 1914 tends to overshadow its initial success. The reasoning
behind this unity was presented at the Erfurt congress by both Wilhelm
Liebknecht, who referred to the programme itself, and August Bebel who
gave a speech on tactics, that is to say on strategy. In fact, they conveyed
the SPD’s intentions far more clearly than the programme itself. Liebknecht
underscored the extent to which the programme and its inherent strategy
corresponded to that of Marx and Engels. To him, the party’s develop-
ment since 1875 had coincided above all with ‘the scientific development
of the party, the upbringing towards scientific socialism’ (SPD 1891, 329),
that is, Marxism. The programme’s consistent theme was the notion ‘that
those who own the means of production possess the means for the subju-
gation, exploitation, and proletarianisation of their fellow men who do not
own means of production’ (SPD 1891, 333). Fully in line with the spirit
of Marx’s Capital and the accumulation theory it contained as well as
Engels’s writings, Liebknecht emphasised: ‘The division of society is
increasingly becoming deeper and more complete—those who stand
between the two extremes of capital and labour, the so-called middle
classes […] are disappearing more and more’. ‘Expropriation in perma-
nence’ (SPD 1891, 337) occurred as a natural necessity.
150 M. BRIE
The SPD’s leaders assumed the polarisation between ever fewer owners
of capital and propertyless proletarians as well as the increasing internal
crisis-proneness and tendency towards a world war would eventually lead
to a situation they referred to as the collapse of the capitalist system and
catastrophe, or in the words of Bebel, the Kladderadatsch. The strategy
was built entirely on this assumption: the task was to establish a socially
embedded political force through legal means (Bebel listed in particular
agitation, elections, and the trade union struggle) that would be able to
intervene in such a major crisis with all determination and political convic-
tion to seize power. As Bebel put it at the 1891 party congress:
Bourgeois society is so eagerly working towards its own demise that all we
must do is wait for the right moment to seize the power falling from their
hands… Yes, I am convinced that the realisation of our goals is so near that
there are only few in this room who will not see that day. […] The develop-
ment of the economic conditions, the continued war armament, where one
may well say if war does not start today or tomorrow, it will certainly come
the day after tomorrow, and the certainty that all these things will lead to the
ruin of today’s society, all this has meant that nobody today denies any lon-
ger that we are heading towards catastrophe. (SPD 1891, 172, 175)
What was needed, Bebel asserted, was to ‘make the party more fit for
action, so as to achieve the greater, comprehensive goal more rapidly and
thoroughly’ (SPD 1891, 278). He exhorted his comrades of the need to be
prepared for the hour of crisis and decision:
Beware, or one day you will end up like the asinine virgins in the Bible when
the groom appears and they have no oil left in the lamp. In other words: you
seem to fail to grasp the situation so gravely that you will be surprised by
events and will not know what is to be done. It would not be the first time
that this happens to the leadership in times of radical transformations. (SPD
1891, 281)
The centrality of the fight for political power emerged from the fact
that in contrast to capitalist ownership relations, socialist relations of social
ownership could not emerge in the womb of the old society but had to be
consciously politically introduced. If the bourgeoisie first gained economic
and then political power, the labour movement would have to reverse the
order in its bid to achieve the goal of socialism: ‘We are unable to build the
rule of the working class on the winning of economic power, we must take
the reverse approach. We must first conquer political power and then use
it to attain economic power through the expropriation of bourgeois soci-
ety’. Bebel added: ‘Once we have political power in our hands, the rest will
sort itself out by itself’ (SPD 1891, 159). This ‘rest’ that would resolve
itself ‘by itself’ referred to clear, albeit somewhat general expectations.
Bebel and Liebknecht left it to Kautsky as the party’s leading Marxist
theoretician to outline the essential features of the socialist society to
which they aspired.
Kautsky for his part was certain that the transfer of the means of pro-
duction into social ownership implied the cessation of commodity produc-
tion. The outcome would be the ‘replacement of production for sale with
production for needs’ (Kautsky 1899, 114). The underlying explanation
went as follows: ‘Such a cooperative production for needs is nothing else
than communist, or, as it is called these days, socialist production’ (Kautsky
1899, 116). Ultimately, all enterprises converted into cooperatives would
have to be merged into ‘a single large-scale cooperative’ (Kautsky 1899,
117) within the framework of a modern state (Kautsky 1899, 119). This
illustrates that the concept of a socialist or communist society Lenin put
forward in 1917 proceeded seamlessly from the Second International’s
orthodox Marxism. The unique aspect, only revealing itself after the
Bolsheviks took state power and encountered massive resistance to their
politics, was that they regarded the dictatorship of the proletariat as a form
of government in which basic political freedoms would have to be sus-
pended at least temporarily.
Renowned German liberal Eugen Richter (1838–1906) published his
dystopian book Pictures of the Socialistic Future (Freely adapted from Bebel)
in 1891 immediately after the repeal of the Anti-Socialist Laws. Speaking
in the Reichstag, he asserted: ‘Only the repeal of the Anti-Socialist Laws
has made such critique possible once again, for now one is able to success-
fully criticise that which was forbidden to recite or defend’ (quoted in
Lorenz 2001, 218). The book, a fictitious story about a supporter of Social
Democracy after the triumph of socialism, reached a circulation of over
250,000 and was translated into nine languages. The narration starts with
the words: ‘The red flag of international Socialism waves from the palace
and from all the public buildings of Berlin. If our immortal Bebel could but
have lived to see this! He always used to tell the bourgeoisie that “the catas-
trophe was almost at their very doors”’ (Richter 1912, 1). Richter depicts
how the socialist government’s initial success and great hope descends into
economic decline, an economy of scarcity, and a constantly growing
152 M. BRIE
national deficit leading to the mass exodus of the technical intelligentsia.

Democratic support for the socialist government recedes, the socialist
countries France, Germany, and Russia are on the brink of war with each
other, and eventually a major strike movement by the core sectors of the
working class, the metal workers, threatens to bring the social-democratic
system down. Civil war erupts.
The notion that the Bolshevik strategy of centralising all economic,
political, and intellectual power in a one-party state had nothing to do
with Marx is quite widespread among sophisticated leftists. For example,
Peter Hudis writes:
…relatively few scholarly readers of Marx today would contend that his
philosophical perspective had much to do with the totalitarian, single-party
state that ruled in his name. His emphatic support for democracy, free asso-
ciation, and critique of statist domination, found from his earliest to his last
writings, offers strong support for this claim. (Hudis 2012, 5)
This would imply that those who based themselves mainly (and to the
very end) on Marx in the twentieth century were either far from commit-
ted to his ideas, completely deluded, or simply proceeded in a purely
manipulative manner. This claim is hardly tenable. The concept of the
dictatorship of the proletariat as a path and transitional stage towards an
economic order of social ownership of the means of production, based on
central control and the primacy of in-kind economic processes of alloca-
tion and exchange with only a marginal use of commodity-money forms
represented the core of Marx’s concept of socialism to Second International
Marxists. The difference between Communists and Social Democrats
within the Marxist camp after 1917 consisted of the extent to which dem-
ocratic forms should be suspended and whether Russia was indeed suffi-
ciently ripe for socialism.
In this sense, a blatant paradox emerges if we refrain from denying the
Bolshevik-Communist leaders of the state parties that came to power in
the Soviet Union, China, and other countries their basic Marxist convic-
tions: how on earth could those who invoked Marx and were dedicated to
his categorical imperative with great zeal and under risk of death, guided
by the aspiration ‘to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased,
enslaved, forsaken, despicable being’ (MECW 3: 182), establish a political
and economic system so conspicuously accompanied by new forms of
bondage? The ‘particular circumstances’ of the emergence of socialism in
Russia, China, or Cuba are frequently emphasised in this context. Yet how
under these very specific as well as distinct conditions were courses of
action chosen with the utmost enthusiasm and radical determination that
ultimately led to a new rule over the working classes, despite contrary
objectives at the outset of these endeavours? And how was this possible
with reference to Marx? If Marx was disappearing in Lenin (Levine 2015,
175ff), which Marx was it?
In my view, it is apparent that this was possible not least because of the
conceptions the Marxist protagonists themselves developed. Marx once
wrote: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they
please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but
under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the
past’ (MECW 11: 103). Both belong together: subjection to the condi-
tions and the actors’ choice of the specific course of action, the influence
of the objective circumstances, and the conscious action that forms his-
tory. As Marx put it, the coming social revolutions—as opposed to the
bourgeois political revolutions—would draw their ‘poetry’, their visionary
passion and force not from the past, but ‘only from the future’ (ibid.:
106). This very poetry of the future is what Marx was able to offer his fol-
lowers, developing great mobilising and historical power. But what exactly
did this ‘poetry’ consist of and what inherent contradictions did it entail
allowing so many different strategies to base themselves on it?
marx and the future Land of fog

On 6 January 1881 Belgian socialist Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis
wrote a letter to Marx in which he first asked for support publishing a
popular edition of Capital in Dutch. This edition appeared later that same
year under the title Karl Marx. Kapitaal en Arbeid and was reissued in
1889. Nieuwenhuis included the following dedication in the book: ‘To
Karl Marx, the bold thinker, the noble fighter for the rights of the prole-
tariat, this book is dedicated by the author as a token of respectful esteem’
(quoted in MECW 46: 488). Secondly, Nieuwenhuis posed the question
to Marx as to what ought to be the very first legal measures socialists
should implement after taking power. He suggested discussing this prob-
lem at a socialist world congress in Switzerland that same year. As became
clear, however, and as Marx correctly predicted, the time for a new
international association of socialists had not yet arrived. The congress
154 M. BRIE
rejected a discussion of this agenda item. From today’s perspective Marx’s

response to Nieuwenhuis is quite intriguing in this respect. In his letter
dated 22 February, Marx writes the following:
The forthcoming Zurich Congress’s “question” which you mention would

seem to me a mistake. What is to be done, and done immediately at any
given, particular moment in the future, depends, of course, wholly and
entirely on the actual historical circumstances in which action is to be taken.
But the said question, being posed in the land of fog, in fact poses a falla-
cious problem to which the only answer can be a critique of the question as
such. We cannot solve an equation that does not comprise within its terms
the elements of its solution. Come to that, there is nothing specifically
“socialist” about the predicaments of a government that has suddenly come
into being as a result of a popular victory. On the contrary. Victorious bour-
geois politicians immediately feel constrained by their “victory”, whereas a
socialist is at least able to intervene without constraint. Of one thing you
may be sure—a socialist government will not come to the helm in a country
unless things have reached a stage at which it can, before all else, take such
measures as will so intimidate the mass of the bourgeoisie as to achieve the
first desideratum—time for effective action. (MECW 46: 66 [translators’
note: in the Marx & Engels Collected Works the expression ‘in the land of
fog’ (‘im Nebelland’) is translated as ‘out of the blue’])
Indeed, the first socialist government in world history comprised of

Bolsheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries did not feel any ‘constraint’ at all
and immediately took the necessary ‘measures’ to intimidate the bour-
geoisie. Even before the seizure of power Lenin made it very clear that ‘all
that is obsolete must be swept away with “Jacobin” ruthlessness and
Russia renovated and regenerated economically’ (LW 25: 366). Victory in
the civil war would provide the socialist government with a brief respite.
What initially remained entirely unclear, however, was the nature of the
‘effective action’ towards further transformation beyond the consolidation
of rule Marx had written about. The question would remain hotly con-
tested until 1928–1929. Conceptions of a regulated market economy, a
system of council democracy, or a command economy all represented pos-
sible outcomes. Ultimately, the concept of a renewed War Communism
linked with rapid industrialisation and state-collectivist serfdom of a mod-
ern type in the countryside and many large-scale factories along with
GULAG slavery gained the upper hand. After Stalin’s death in 1953 and
during the 1960s the question of ‘effective action’ again became a pressing
matter. But the reforms during the thaw in relations fizzled out, were sup-
pressed, or led to chaos. Towards the end of the 1970s the leading pro-
tagonists lost faith in the state-socialist system.
How had Marx been able to reject the question of a revolutionary
socialist government’s agenda so decisively? From where did the convic-
tion come that the right answers would be found in the hour of need? Let
us return once more to his letter to Nieuwenhuis:
A doctrinaire and of necessity fantastic anticipation of a future revolution’s

programme of action only serves to distract from the present struggle. The
dream of the imminent end of the world inspired the struggle of the early
Christians against the Roman Empire and gave them confidence in victory.
Scientific insight into the inevitable disintegration, now steadily taking place
before our eyes, of the prevailing social order; the masses themselves, their
fury mounting under the lash of the old governmental bogies; the gigantic
and positive advances simultaneously taking place in the development of the
means of production—all this is sufficient guarantee that the moment a truly
proletarian revolution breaks out, the conditions for its immediate initial (if
certainly not idyllic) modus operandi will also be there. (MECW 46: 67)
Marx left a clear vision of the future as a legacy to his followers. This is
true particularly with regard to his magnum opus Capital. While it falls
short of providing ‘receipts … for the cook-shops of the future’ (MECW
35: 17), it certainly does not lack inspiring substance. Marx envisioned the
establishment of a society based on the social ownership of the means of
production, oriented by a common plan, without markets and with clear
transparency in all relations. Individual labour powers would be subsumed
as a single social collective labourer. In his letter to Nieuwenhuis Marx
referred to early Christians’ expectations for the future and equated them
with the ‘scientific insight into the inevitable disintegration, now steadily
taking place before our eyes, of the prevailing social order’. This scientific
insight regarding the role the working class would play in the proletarian
revolution to translate the decay of capitalism into the constructive estab-
lishment of communism, thereby preventing the plunge into barbarism,
was something Marx always referred to as his own achievement, an
achievement of critical German communism.
Unlike the triumph of Christianity, however, victory was to be achieved
through an earthly socialist revolution. For many, the scientific guarantor
of this conviction was Marx’s Capital. There is good reason to describe
twentieth-century Party Communism as a ‘religion of the book’, with
156 M. BRIE
Capital at its heart (Widmann 2017). In Lenin’s view, Capital had trans-
formed the Communist Manifesto of 1848 and its reasoning of the role of
the working class in the historical process leading to a communist society
from a hypothesis into ‘a scientifically proven proposition’ (LW 1: 142).
He concluded: ‘The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true’
(LW 19: 23). This certainty of victory based on a book is a characteristic
feature of the parts of the socialist and communist movements of the late
nineteenth century and long periods of the twentieth century basing
themselves on Marx. The abandonment of this certainty of victory also
ended the relation to Capital as the unassailable scientific assurance.
Contrary to widespread belief, Capital is actually full of hints and expli-
cations concerning a post-capitalist society. They form a continuous point
of reference, whether in terms of the proof of the historic limitations of
the capitalist mode of production or with regard to the demonstration of
approaches going beyond it (see in detail Brie 2018). When reading
Capital with special attention to the anticipation of post-capitalist modes
of production, a surprising picture emerges. Almost every section and
chapter contains references to socialism and communism. Marx presented
the most elaborate depiction of a post-capitalist order in the first chapter
of Volume One of Capital. Here, he juxtaposes the value form of the
labour product—‘the most abstract, but […] also the most universal form,
taken by the product in the bourgeois production’ (MECW 35: 91f)—
with other forms of production in which the product precisely does not
become a commodity: Robinson’s mode of production, European feudal-
ism, rural patriarchal peasant family production, and ‘by way of change, a
community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of
production in common, in which the labour power of all the different
individuals is consciously applied as the combined labour power of the
community’ (MECW 35: 89). He adds: ‘All the characteristics of
Robinson’s labour are here repeated, but with this difference, that they are
social, instead of individual’ (MECW 35: 89). Ideally, such a society—at
least with regard to labour and production—is a consistent mono-subject.
Just as Robinson must subordinate himself to the individually defined pur-
pose of production ‘for the entire duration of the labour process’, here it
is the community of free individuals. Every individual and every economic
collective is part of a labour power that asserts the common will. Marx
presupposed the emergence of the common will from the free decisions of
the emancipated workers establishing their own dictatorship.
In this part of Capital Marx assumes a condition of a communist soci-

ety ‘not as it has developed on its own foundations, but on the contrary,
just as it emerges from capitalist society, which is thus in every respect,
economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth-
marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges’ (MECW 24: 85).
He writes:
We will assume, but merely for the sake of a parallel with the production of com-
modities, that the share of each individual producer in the means of subsistence
is determined by his labour time. Labour time would, in that case, play a double
part. Its apportionment in accordance with a definite social plan maintains the
proper proportion between the different kinds of work to be done and the vari-
ous wants of the community. On the other hand, it also serves as a measure of
the portion of the common labour borne by each individual, and of his share in
the part of the total product destined for individual consumption. The social
relations of the individual producers, with regard both to their labour and to its
products, are in this case perfectly simple and intelligible, and that with regard
not only to production but also to distribution. (MECW 35: 89f)
This implies that the individually performed labour is performed and

recognised as immediate social labour strictly adhering to a predetermined
plan. There must be unmediated identity between individual and society,
between the individual, collective, and social labour power.
Excluding the chapter on the ‘Modern Theory of Colonization’, the
first volume of Capital ends with the section on the ‘Historical Tendency
of Capitalist Accumulation’. The initial hypothesis is the argument that
the ‘primitive accumulation of capital’ either transforms slaves and serfs
into wage workers (a ‘mere change of form’ of exploitation) or amounts
to an ‘expropriation of the immediate producers’ (MECW 35: 748). This
process of primitive accumulation produces its own mode of production:
…it flourishes, it lets loose its whole energy, it attains its adequate classical
form, only where the labourer is the private owner of his own means of
labour set in action by himself: the peasant of the land which he cultivates,
the artisan of the tool which he handles as a virtuoso. This mode of produc-
tion presupposes parcelling of the soil, and scattering of the other means of
production. As it excludes the concentration of these means of production,
so also it excludes co-operation, division of labour within each separate pro-
cess of production, the control over, and the productive application of the
forces of Nature by society, and the free development of the social produc-
tive powers. (MECW 35: 749)
158 M. BRIE
The primitive accumulation of capital facilitates the transition ‘of the

pigmy property of the many into the huge property of the few’ (MECW
35: 749). This process is then continued on the basis of the capitalist
mode of production.
Here, Marx substantiates the necessity of the replacement of the capi-
talist mode of production with the contradiction between the fact that, on
the one hand, the means of labour are socialised, science and the system-
atic exploitation of the earth are driven forward, the capitalist regime is
internationalised, while on the other hand a decreasing number of major
capital owners ‘usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of
transformation’ (MECW 35: 750). As a consequence, Marx concludes,
‘grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation;
but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always
increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very
mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself’ (MECW 35:
750). The most definitive features of a society that is ripe for the transition
to communism are large-scale production and a high concentration and
centralisation of control.
The first volume of Capital turns on this point of the historical ten-
dency of capitalist accumulation. Starting from a depiction of social rela-
tions of free and equal commodity owners and the commodity as the basic
form of social wealth in the capitalist mode of production, Marx’s Capital
guides the reader through ever deeper characteristic layers of the capital-
labour relation, seeking to demonstrate that this relation must necessarily
culminate in the ‘expropriation of the expropriators’. Simultaneously, the
depiction is intended as an analysis of real relations and corresponding
forms of consciousness as well as a contribution to the self-enlightenment
of the working classes. It can just as well be read as a collective journey
through hell and into the cleansing purgatory of social revolution and pas-
sage into the realm of freedom (see Roberts 2016).
The explanation for the transitory character of the capitalist mode of
production Marx provides in this context is three-fold: firstly, the contra-
diction between the social character of productive forces and the private
form of control that would lead to anarchy, crises, and catastrophes. Engels
would later elaborate this point in his text Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.
Secondly, the contradiction between the immense increase in productivity
resulting from the social character of labour and the exclusive use of the
gains of this development in the interest of a small number of capital own-
ers accompanied by the growing powerlessness of the masses. Thirdly, the
growing self-conscious agency of workers and their diminishing readiness

to tolerate this situation any longer. When these contradictions erupt in a
sudden major crisis the ‘popular masses’ will expropriate the usurpers and
transfer the means of production into social ownership, creating the basis
for renewed individual appropriation. According to Marx, the ‘first nega-
tion [is that] of individual private property, as founded on the labour of
the proprietor’. ‘But’, he continues,
capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its

own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish
private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based
on the acquisitions of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation and the posses-
sion in common of the land and of the means of production. (MECW 35: 751)
The corresponding expropriation of the few private capitalists required

is therefore an act of the popular masses and significantly more easily
achievable than the arduous process of primitive capitalist accumulation.
At this point in Capital and only at this point does Marx make reference
to the Manifesto and its assertion of the inevitability of the triumph of the
proletariat, the only truly revolutionary class.
To sum up, we can say that Marx anticipated the elements of post-
capitalist societies in his analysis of the capitalist mode of production in the
first volume of Capital grouped around three central ideas: (1) the strug-
gle under capitalism in which the proletariat constitutes itself as a self-
conscious class, (2) the revolutionary overcoming of capitalism through
the establishment of collective ownership of the means of production, and
(3) the transformation of the technological mode of production and sub-
jectivity of producers towards the primacy of free cultural development.
From this perspective, victory over the bourgeois classes is followed by the
transfer of all means of production into socially owned property. A dicta-
torship of the proletariat is tasked with ensuring this process and protect-
ing it from all attempts at restoration. The creation of a centralised planned
economy, the gradual pushing back and overcoming of the market econ-
omy, and the conscious, targeted transformation of the entire mode of
production represent the central tasks. Labour productivity would be
greatly enhanced as a result. In the self-understanding of Lenin and other
leading Bolsheviks this was precisely their programme, which they sought
to realise under the specific conditions in Russia. Indeed, they saw no
alternative to the applied means of civil war and dictatorship given the
160 M. BRIE
backdrop of Russia’s backwardness and their own isolation. Contrary to

the Social Democratic current within socialism, they were prepared to
assume responsibility for the application of such measures until the proven
superiority of the new order would render them obsolete.
Yet if it is true that those who seized power in Russia in 1917 and man-
aged to defend it for more than 70 years were Marxists, and if it is correct
that they temporarily turned Russia into one of the world’s great industrial
powers, that they were able in alliance with the United States and Great
Britain to win the war against Hitler’s Germany and assert themselves dur-
ing the Cold War, and if this power and this social system developed an
enormous force of attraction throughout the twentieth century while it is
equally obvious that these successes did not stand the test of time and the
Soviet Union ultimately failed, then the question of the strength and
weakness of the Marxian idea of socialism and communism must be raised.
Both sides of the story are inextricably linked and must be grasped as a
totality. The attempt to blame the failure exclusively on the political rela-
tions of state socialism omits the fact that these relations had a specific
economic base, namely state ownership of the most important means of
production and a centralised administrative economy.
Whoever seeks to understand Lenin’s course after 1917 and grasp why
Lenin initiated an entirely new search process (as elaborated in Part 3) and
why this search took him to the limits of Marxism must also address the
inherent contradictions of Marx’s ideas. While they of course do not pro-
vide an explanation for each and every open question, the difficulties in
Lenin’s search process and that of his successors among Marxists in the
Soviet Union (and China and other countries governed by Communist
state parties) cannot be understood without their clarification. More
importantly: a redefinition of socialism in the twenty-first century must
openly address the Marxian legacy and its contradictions.
marx’S communiSt deciSion

The spectre of communism was unleashed in France and England in the
1830s, and soon after in the German-speaking countries. In November
1841 the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung noted that within the commu-
nist ‘system of fear, one spectre supersedes the next’ (quoted in Schieder
1982, 484). By 1842 this spectre reached the Rheinische Zeitung and its
editor, Karl Marx. The Berlin Left Hegelians, also known as ‘the Free’,
frequently referred to communist ideas in their contributions to the paper.
The Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung accused it of ‘Prussian communism’

as a result. Marx responded to this allegation by stating that the Rheinische
Zeitung ‘does not admit that communist ideas in their present form pos-
sess even theoretical reality, and therefore can still less desire their practical
realisation, or even consider it possible’ (MECW 1: 220). And yet he added:
We are firmly convinced that the real danger lies not in practical attempts,
but in the theoretical elaboration of communist ideas, for practical attempts,
even mass attempts, can be answered by cannon as soon as they become
dangerous, whereas ideas, which have conquered our intellect and taken
possession of our minds, ideas to which reason has fettered our conscience,
are chains from which one cannot free oneself without a broken heart; they
are demons which human beings can vanquish only by submitting to them.
(MECW 1: 220f)
A year later he submitted precisely to this idea of communism, adhered

to it for the rest of its life, and gave it a form that would have a decisive
impact on the twentieth century. He set the course towards proletarian
critical communism.
In his Philosophy of Right Hegel sought to understand
the rich inward articulation of ethical life, i.e. the state—the architectonic of
its rationality—which, through determinate distinctions between the circles
of public life and their rights and through the strict proportion in which
every pillar, arch, and buttress is held together, produces the strength of the
whole out of the harmony of the parts. (Hegel 2008, 9)
He implied an ‘immanent structure of reason’ (Jaeschke 2010, 275)

underlying the complexity of society and its totality of family, bourgeois
society, and the state, a structure that does not correspond to everything
that exists but to the ‘real’ within the existing. After 1830 and even more
so 1840 the Prussian state increasingly came into contradiction with the
obstinate ‘reason’ of its citizens. Consent to the real state of Prussia dimin-
ished dramatically. The rising bourgeois middle classes and industrial and
commercial capital, the intelligentsia, the peasantry, and eventually the
emergent proletarian classes articulated their liberal, democratic, and
social demands increasingly openly, while the Prussian monarchy under
Frederick William IV sought to initiate a romantic-reactionary restoration
of absolutism. Rapid economic development in the framework of the
German Customs Union had unleashed forces which now began to assert
162 M. BRIE
their own interests. The reconciliation of ‘reason’ with the Prussian state
became impossible. The will of growing parts of the population increas-
ingly came into conflict with the internal make-up of state and society.
This propelled the radicalisation of left-Hegelian critique, which openly
took on democratic, anarchist, and communist forms. Ludwig Feuerbach
eventually stripped Hegelian philosophy of its foundation through his
philosophical revolution. The ‘essence of reason’ as independent force
separate from the real individual was no longer a tenable concept. In his
1842 Provisional Theses for the Reform of Philosophy Feuerbach drew the
consequences. Philosophy, in his view, had to proceed from ‘non-
philosophy’ (Feuerbach 1996a, 13), from real people and their real needs
and desires: ‘Only the needy entity is a necessary entity. Existence without
need is unnecessary existence’ (Feuerbach 1996a, 12f). The Hegelian
‘essence of freedom’ outside and beyond the free individual was decon-
structed as a reversal of subject (real individuals) and predicate (the prod-
ucts of their own action) (Feuerbach 1996b, 60). This entailed an
immediate consequence: the new political-philosophical question of how
a reasonable critique of real conditions, proceeding from real people
within their real relations, could be possible. The Pandora’s box of revolu-
tionary popular sovereignty Rousseau opened and Hegel painstakingly
attempted to close was wide open once again.
The conundrum Marx sought to solve in conscious succession of
Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel was how to reasonably substantiate and estab-
lish an ‘association of free human beings’ under the conditions of moder-
nity. He already put forward the guiding idea of such an association in the
Rheinische Zeitung as early as 1842, while simultaneously introducing a
vision of the relation between individuals and social totality (at this point
still conceived as the state):
The true “public” education carried out by the state lies in the rational and
public existence of the state; the state itself educates its members by making
them its members, by converting the aims of the individual into general
aims, crude instinct into moral inclination, natural independence into spiri-
tual freedom, by the individual finding his good in the life of the whole, and
the whole in the frame of mind of the individual. (MECW 1: 193)
In this understanding the individual and the whole are mutually depen-
dent on one another, although the state is awarded a higher status vis-à-vis
the individual in the Hegelian sense. At the same time the authoritarian
state is juxtaposed with reciprocity between individuals. Correspondingly,

Marx accused the author of an editorial in the Kölner Zeitung: ‘The lead-
ing article … makes the state not an association of free human beings who
educate one another, but a crowd of adults who are destined to be edu-
cated from above and to pass from a “narrow” schoolroom into a “wider”
one’ (MECW 1: 193).
The question demanding an answer, the conundrum to be solved, as
Marx wrote in his 1843 critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right, was
how the real social foundation, the real conditions of real people could be
reshaped in a way that the essence of human beings, namely being reasonable
and free, could be brought to fruition as a genuine act of precisely these people
themselves. In order to find a consistent answer to this question Marx made
four defining decisions in the autumn and winter of 1843–1844. His first
decision was to conceive of universal emancipation as a dual process. This
was his definitive socialist-communist decision. Emancipation was to be
understood, firstly, as a process of comprehensive conscious organisation
of all social forces, and secondly as a transformation of these forces into
modes of free development of the individuals as ‘species-being’
(Gattungswesen). He was determined to find a radical solution for the
problems of his time that truly went to the root of the matter. In this
endeavour he broke with Hegel’s approach of mediating the contradic-
tions between family (and human beings in their concreteness), bourgeois
society (and human beings as bourgeois), and the state (and human beings
as citizens). As Alexandros Chrysis writes: ‘Hegel’s reconciliatory approach
as imprinted in his “hybrid of constitutional monarchy”—to recall Marx’s
expression in his letter to Ruge (of 5 March 1842)—constitutes an irresist-
ible challenge for Marx to extend his critique to the Hegelian theory of
the state and defend his own thesis on democracy and, in particular, “true
democracy”’ (Chrysis 2018, 137). Marx’s aim was not to find new forms
of mediating these contradictions but rather to search for a way to elimi-
nate the very cause of these contradictions and thereby render all alien-
ation essentially impossible. Marx thus reformulated the concept of
emancipation, writing in his work On the Jewish Question:
All emancipation is a reduction of the human world and relationships to

man himself. […] Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself
the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-
being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situa-
tion, only when man has recognised and organised his “forces propres” as
164 M. BRIE
social forces, and consequently no longer separates social power from him-
self in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have
been accomplished. (MECW 3: 168)
Marx’s second decision to address the problem of attaining an ‘associa-

tion of free human beings’ under the conditions of proliferating industrial
capitalism and the looming European revolution was the elaboration of a
new concept of critique: Between 1843 and 1845 Marx gradually devel-
oped his new, five-tier approach to critical reflection: (1) critique of theo-
retical and practical awareness as far as they apologetically relate to real
conditions or apply abstract moral standards from outside, (2) critique of
actual forms of domination and exploitation as temporary forms of an
antagonistic development, (3) critique as an effort to uncover those ten-
dencies and elements that already transcend current society, (4) critical
self-reflection by the truly emancipatory movements to clarify their goals,
means, and strategies, and (5) the permanent criticism and self-criticism of
the ‘enlighteners’. Such criticism should become an organic part of these
movements. This was a ‘Copernican revolution’ of the notion of critique
drawing on both Kant and Hegel (see Röttgers 1975). Marx saw critique
as an organic element of revolutionary practice, seeing as ‘the coincidence
of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change can
be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice’
(MECW 5: 4). Critique, however, could only achieve this if it was a con-
scious and self-disciplined reflection of the preconditions, conditions,
strategies, and consequences of the practices aiming to transform society.
Marx’s third decision in 1843–1844 was to regard the proletariat as the
force that would consummate the act of radical emancipation, regarding it
as a ‘class with radical chains’ (MECW 3: 186). The cause of these radical
chains was the scandalous circumstance that in a society in which private
property represented the basis of freedom and equality the growing class
of the proletariat was both the producer of this property and excluded
from appropriating its fruits. In Marx’s view, the wealth created by the
proletariat becomes the source of its own immiseration. Proceeding from
his in-depth reception of the French historians’ work on the Revolution of
1789, he wrote:
The role of emancipator therefore passes in dramatic motion to the various

classes of the French nation one after the other until it finally comes to the
class which implements social freedom no longer on the basis of certain
conditions lying outside man and yet created by human society, but rather
organises all conditions of human existence on the presupposition of social
(i.e. not private—MB) freedom. (MECW 3: 186)
From this moment onward Marx would conceive of freedom, equality,

and property in social terms.
Marx’s fourth decision in late 1843 and early 1844 concerned shifting
his focus of study to political economy. From this perspective he intended
to subject the totality of society (law, morals, politics, etc.) to critique. It
marks the beginning of a search for a methodology of critical social analy-
sis proceeding from the mode of production of material life. The critique
of political economy becomes the key to all social critique as well as the
substantiation of the proletariat’s revolutionary role and a communist
social revolution. Consequently, he writes in the Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts of 1844: ‘It is easy to see that the entire revolutionary move-
ment necessarily finds both its empirical and its theoretical basis in the
movement of private property—more precisely, in that of the economy’
(MECW 3: 297).
These four decisions constitute Marx’s critical proletarian communism,
a concept to which he ‘chained’ himself. In his view critical theory defined
the task of intellectuals in the struggles it shaped. The elaboration of the
materialist concept of history, the understanding of history as the history
of struggles between economically determined classes, the critique of
political economy in its specifically Marxist form, the notion of the dicta-
torship of the proletariat as a long historical period of transition to com-
munist society—each was politically motivated. They concerned the
consciousness Marx was convinced the proletarians would require in order
to take hold of the world and reshape it on the basis of solidarity and
emancipation.
After moving to Paris Marx completed his communist turn already
begun in Germany and initially exposed in his contributions to the Deutsch-
Französische Jahrbücher. In 1844 Marx wrote apodictically:
Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-

estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence
by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to
himself as a social (i.e., human) being—a return accomplished consciously
and embracing the entire wealth of previous development. This commu-
nism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed
166 M. BRIE
humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict

between man and nature and between man and man—the true resolution of
the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-
confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and
the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself
to be this solution. (MECW 3: 296f)
Once again, he invokes the Hegelian categories of essence and exis-

tence, while now proclaiming their ultimate, communist reconciliation.
In the context of the German critical communism research paradigm
(as Marx referred to the approach—MECW 11: 455) and its realisation,
Marx gradually developed an understanding of communist society as it
would emerge in the wake of a social revolution led by the working class.
As early as 1844 in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, far earlier
than his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme, he already assumed post-
capitalist societies would exhibit various stages. And while the early stages
of what Marx called communist society in 1875 were called socialism in
Soviet Marxism, he himself stated the opposite in 1844. Marx wrote:
‘Communism is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the
immediate future, but communism as such is not the goal of human devel-
opment, the form of human society.’ Only socialism no longer requires
alienated forms of mediation, neither intellectually nor in practice, it is ‘no
longer mediated through the abolition of private property, through com-
munism’ (MECW 3: 306). The reason for this choice of terminology was
due to the particular emphasis on free development and the creation of a
new mode of production and life by French and English socialists, while
the communists focused on questions of power and ownership. Even in
1844 he was convinced that it ‘takes actual communist action to abolish
actual private property’ and that this ‘will constitute in actual fact a very
rough and protracted process’. ‘But’, he added, ‘we must regard it as a real
advance to have at the outset gained a consciousness of the limited char-
acter as well as of the goal of this historical movement—and a conscious-
ness which reaches out beyond it’ (MECW 3: 313).
This fundamental notion of three essential and consecutive steps lead-
ing to a truly human society would underlie all further writings of both
Marx and Engels. The first step is the social revolution establishing the
dictatorship of the proletariat. The second step marks the comprehensive
centralisation of control over the means of production by the united pro-
ducers. In a third step the latter initiate a ‘revolutionising of the mode of
production’ (a brief summary of this strategic concept of revolution can be

found in the Communist Manifesto; see MECW 6: 504–506). Both main-
tained this position even long afterwards (see Marx in MECW 24: 340
and Engels in MECW 24: 325).
marx’S gLimpSe into the future: an aSSociation

of free human BeingS
Marx admonished Nieuwenhuis in his letter: ‘A doctrinaire and of neces-

sity fantastic anticipation of a future revolution’s programme of action
only serves to distract from the present struggle’ (MECW 46: 67). In this
sense, any questions pertaining to the actions following a successful take-
over of power lay in the ‘Land of Fog’. Marx’s position not to conduct an
analysis of concrete problems of a future society was understood by his
followers as a legitimate warning against utopianism. But it concealed a
fundamental problem at the same time: after all, as shown above, Marx’s
writings—including the Manifesto (1848), Capital (1867), The Civil War
in France (1871), and the Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875)—by
all means contained a basic vision of a future society. The essential ele-
ments thereof corresponded to the positions of other communist and
socialist theoreticians and politicians of his time. Distinguishing them was
their specific combination in the outlined strategy of the three steps of a
communist social revolution by the working class. This strength had a
downside: significant contradictions inherent in the concept were omitted
and legitimate objections other socialists put forward were insufficiently
taken into consideration. The reason for this refusal to engage in a critical
debate over potential problems in a communist society was linked to the
way Marx performed his communist turn in 1843–1844, which must
therefore be inspected in more detail.
Marx’s redefinition of the concept of emancipation in his work On the
Jewish Question was a direct outcome of his appropriation and discussion of
Rousseau, to whom Hegel had also referred. Eighty years earlier Rousseau
posited the problem of founding a free association of free human beings
(which Marx now moved to the centre of attention) in his ‘Social Contract’
as follows: ‘To find a form of association that may defend and protect with
the whole force of the community the person and property of every associ-
ate, and by means of which each, joining together with all, may nevertheless
obey only himself, and remain as free as before’ (Rousseau 2002, 163).
According to Rousseau, all clauses of the Social Contract could be ‘reduced
168 M. BRIE
to a single one, namely, the total alienation to the whole community of each
associate with all his rights; for, in the first place, since each gives himself up
entirely, the situation is equal for all; and, the conditions being equal for all,
no one has any interest in making them burdensome to others’ (Rousseau
2002, 163—emphasis M.B.). The contract, however, was based on an
essential condition: the surrendering of one’s own powers to society, that is,
their alienation, had to be absolute in order for the association to be com-
plete: ‘…for, if any rights were left to individuals, since there would be no
common superior who could adjudicate between them and the public, each,
being on some issue his own judge, would soon claim to be so on all; the
state of nature would still exist, and the association would necessarily become
tyrannical or pointless’ (Rousseau 2002, 163f).
Rousseau drew key conclusions from the Social Contract with major
consequences for the political philosophy of the following century and
also encapsulated them terminologically, namely by distinguishing between
the state, sovereign, and power on the one hand and people, citizens
(Citoyen), subjects (Sujets), and bourgeoisie on the other (Rousseau 2002,
164). They represent distinctions Hegel also made, and which Marx grap-
pled with immediately prior to his work on the articles for the Französisch-
Deutsche Jahrbücher and the accompanying proletarian-communist turn.
Indeed, in 1843–1844 Marx dealt with the problem posited by Rousseau
similarly to Alexander the Great when confronted with the impossibly
tangled Gordian Knot, the untying of which promised his rule over Asia:
Marx simply cut the Rousseauian knot of contradictions between citizen
and bourgeois, between the community and the individual, between sov-
ereign and subject. Instead of a contract for difference, he proclaimed
immediate unity. Marx did not define emancipation as the organisation of
the powers of individuals surrendered (in Rousseau’s words: alienated) to
society, but as ‘reduction of the human world and relationships to man
himself’ (MECW 3: 168). If only people were to consciously organise their
relations in a free manner and their life activities themselves were to
thereby become immediately social, the contradictions posited by
Rousseau and elaborated by Hegel into the totality of family, bourgeois
society, and state would simply be merged into one immediate identity. In
this approach neither the individuals would have to delegate disposition
and power to ‘alienated social powers’ under communist conditions nor
could disposition and power create something that would then confront
individuals as an alienated force, given that every social development
would simultaneously become immediately free individual development.
Marx’s notion of the ‘reduction … to man himself ’ was directly pre-

ceded by a longer quote on Rousseau’s ‘Social Contract’. Rousseau wrote:
Whoever dares undertake to establish a people’s institutions must feel him-

self capable of changing, as it were, human nature, of transforming each
individual, who by himself is a complete and solitary whole, into a part of a
larger whole, from which, in a sense, the individual receives his life and his
being, of substituting a limited and mental existence for the physical and
independent existence. He has to take from man his own powers, and give
him in exchange alien powers which he cannot employ without the help of
other men. (quoted in MECW 3: 167f)
Marx literally reversed this thought: instead of surrendering one’s own

powers and conveying and thereby ‘alienating’ them to the community of
all as an associated citizen, the existing religiously, politically, and eco-
nomically alienated social powers had to be appropriated as one’s own
powers. According to Marx ‘real, individual man’ was to reabsorb the
‘abstract citizen’ in himself by turning his empirical life activity and indi-
vidual conditions of life into ‘species-being’ (Gattungswesen) after he ‘has
recognised and organised his “forces propres” as social forces’. Here we find
a dual implication: the character of individual activity becomes a direct
expression of human ‘species-being’, that is concrete-universal, while it is
organised as an immediately social force. Hence, it is neither an abstract
activity of one-sided monotonous physical or intellectual labour nor an
abstract private activity, where the social character of the performed labour
is then recognised—or not—by the market ex post facto. The social is
immediately individual and vice versa. The distinction of individuals into
citizens and bourgeois, sovereign and subjects in Marx’s view loses every
and any purpose. In the association of free human beings he conceives
there is no basis for the conflicting interests between this association as a
whole and individuals.
Marx revisited Rousseau’s terminology three decades later in his 1875
Critique of the Gotha Programme. Here, Marx discusses questions of dis-
tribution of the social product generated according to plan and remarks
that in this case ‘what the producer is deprived of in his capacity as a pri-
vate individual benefits him directly or indirectly in his capacity as a mem-
ber of society’ (MECW 24: 85, emphasis M.B.). According to Marx, the
exact share the individual is eligible to receive in his or her capacity as
private individual in a communist society is ‘just as it emerges from capital-
ist society’ (MECW 24: 85) regulated by the ‘same principle … as that
170 M. BRIE
which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is the exchange

of equal values’ (MECW 24: 85). The ‘bourgeois right’ continues to apply
(MECW 24: 85). Marx takes the ideas concerning distinct distributional
principles from the debate among French socialists during the 1830s and
1840s (Höppner and Seidel-Höppner 1975).
This notion of a potentially contradictory relationship between indi-
viduals in their capacity as members of the society and as private individu-
als in the early stages of a communist society is qualified in the sense that
Marx sees it as an historically disappearing contradiction. In his Critique
of the Gotha Programme he outlines the conditions under which an imme-
diate identity of interests between all as members of society and each and
every individual person could be achieved. These conditions include the
disappearance of ‘the enslaving subordination of the individual to the
division of labour, and thereby also the antithesis between mental and
physical labour’, the transformation of labour into ‘life’s prime want’ and
a process in which ‘with the all-round development of the individual, …
all the springs of common wealth flow more’ (MECW 24: 87). The prin-
ciple applies: ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to
his needs!’ This illustrates that, according to Marx, bourgeois principles
are needed in an early stage of communism in order to mediate the
remaining contradictions born out of the old (capitalist) mode of pro-
duction and structures of wants. In State and Revolution Lenin puts for-
ward a similar argument when he concludes that under such conditions
‘even the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie!’ (LW 25: 476) would
continue to exist.
Marx linked this conception to the objective of creating a society that is
a free association of free human beings in which the conflicts of interest
between individual, collective, and overall social development are elimi-
nated through an identity no longer requiring mediation. As Engels put it:
‘…the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things,
and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not “abol-
ished”. It dies out’ (MECW 24: 321). This suggests that the administra-
tion of things and the management of productive processes has no need to
reconcile any fundamentally conflicting interests in a communist society
on its own foundation. Every worker and every productive collective and
every region would find their own interests reflected by the general inter-
est. The more thoroughly the interests of all are asserted the more the
interests of each individual can be taken into account and vice versa.
Relations of production as relations between subjects with diverging inter-
ests (resulting from their specific disposition over the means of produc-
tion) will be a matter of the past, as will market-based exchange, legal
relations, or politics as public mediation of interests. In this understanding
all the aforementioned forms will die out to the same extent that society
becomes communist. What Marx conceived as an ‘association of free indi-
viduals’ knows no complexity of contradictory relations as formulated
by Rousseau.
Marx’s solution is radical and indeed very beautiful: he assumes that
‘the collective society based on common ownership of the means of pro-
duction’ (MECW 24: 85) allows for an immediate identity of interests
between the whole of society and each individual. At the same time this
ensures, as claimed in Capital, that the relations are ‘perfectly simple and
intelligible’. Appearance and essence would converge. Everyday con-
sciousness would be identical to the consciousness of the underlying social
relations. If everybody acts according to their own abilities and needs and
becomes part of the ‘combined labour power of the community’ (MECW
35: 89) and vice versa, there are no longer any fundamental conflicts
between interests. There is only one relation of production: the ownership
of all members of society of the jointly administered means of production.
Instead of politics, Marx assumes, only administration outside of any con-
flicting interests would remain.
Marx’s radical solution for the problem of how to establish an ‘associa-
tion of free human beings’ in modern society, however, was only a pseudo-
solution. It was too simplistic by any standard. His vision of communist
society promised that in the future ‘Land of Fog’ there would be simple
and transparent relations free of contradictions. In his fight against utopia-
nism he formulated a utopia going beyond all previous ones—namely of
an association of free human beings that would not be marked by any
fundamental contradictory relations. This association, in which the inter-
ests of all and those of each individual were identical, was conceived as a
non-society, as a community (Tönnies 2001; Ruben 1995).
Marx was radically mistaken: the very conditions which he identified as
necessary for the withering away of the ‘bourgeois’ forms of mediating the
lingering contradictions between all as ‘members of society’ and each indi-
vidual as ‘private individual’ to the extent of the development of commu-
nist society do not eliminate these contradictions, but rather transform
them and place them on a new footing. This is true in a double sense:
firstly, each human attempt to appropriate their own powers and socially
organise them under the conditions of a complex society produces new
172 M. BRIE
forms of mediation. Individuals and the groups they form necessarily cre-
ate new complex relations between the powers they organise socially, those
they shape collectively, and those which remain individual. The difference
between human beings as members of society, parts of a collective, and
individuals cannot be eliminated. They are part of the human condition.
Marx concealed this by demanding the immediate sociality of individuals
on behalf of their own emancipation and promised that said immediate
sociality would become free individual self-development. While Rousseau
regarded the total alienation of individual powers to the society of associ-
ated citizens as a precondition for freedom, Marx by contrast demanded
total appropriation. Yet without an understanding that in a complex soci-
ety this only leads to new forms of mediating the differences between
human beings in their distinct capacities as members of society, collective
beings, and individuals, the emphasis on the radical emancipation of indi-
viduals may well engender the willingness to blindly forge new chains
rather than eliminate the chains that exploit, oppress, and debase human
beings. And given that they are forged blindly, the danger is particularly
great that they lead—forged with a vision of total appropriation and total
emancipation as they are—to total alienation and total domination. Such
a blind attempt at implementing Marx’s ‘categorical imperative to over-
throw all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despica-
ble being’ (MECW 3: 182) would therefore turn into its exact opposite.
Secondly, a new contradictoriness would arise precisely because of that
tendency Marx described of a new mode of production free of oppressive
subjection to the division of labour, between physical and intellectual
labour, city and countryside, and to the same extent that labour would
become the prime want in life and the self-development of each individual
would come to the fore: the class antagonism would be replaced by the
conflict between highly divergent concepts of life and society. An increase
in freedom would simultaneously entail new contradictions. The levelling
down in the old factory with its submission to the diktat of the machines
would be a thing of the past. The question of needs would not primarily
refer to slightly more or slightly less means of consumption but rather to
an elaborate structure of concrete conditions of production and reproduc-
tion. Contrary visions would clash. The conflicting views would pertain to
environmentally friendly transit in cities or the construction of large had-
ron colliders, the colonisation of Mars, the closure of material circuits, and
the way in which kindergartens and schools are run and care work is
organised. It would include all of today’s conflicts in advanced societies,
albeit free of the compulsions of a capitalist-dominated society. Once a

majority jointly decided these matters on the basis of common ownership
of the means of production these conflicts would merely take on new
forms. They would no longer be class conflicts but rather conflicts over
personal and collective recognition as well as over alternative visions of life
and society.
unSoLved proBLemS
The vision of a communist society that Marx and Engels put forward was
put to the test in 1917. The Bolsheviks led by Lenin encountered a num-
ber of problems in Marx’s legacy, five of which are scrutinised in more
detail in the following. Marx not only failed to prepare his followers for
these problems, but indeed contributed, as will be demonstrated below, to
the fact that convinced Marxists actually by definition had to encounter
difficulties in solving them. The problems were neither new nor unex-
pected. The various approaches to their solution were contested above all
between Marx and Proudhon, between Marxists and anarchists from the
1840s to 1870s. The contest was fierce. As Marx wrote to Weydemeyer
with regard to Proudhon: ‘Communism must above all rid itself of this
“false brother”’ (MECW 40: 377). The side-lining of the anarchist cur-
rent in the Second International had far-reaching consequences. The
questions and objections of this socialist ‘brother’ are what I mostly focus
on in the following.
First: the most obvious problem the Bolsheviks encountered was the
relationship between democracy and dictatorship, leading to a clash between
Kautsky, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, and many others (see Chaps. 2 and 5
of this volume). It has already been pointed out that Marx observed a divi-
sion of communism into a ‘democratic’ and a ‘despotic’ camp back in 1844
(MECW 3: 536). Political communism, emerging from the Conspiracy of
the Equals (1796), discussed the problem of democracy and dictatorship in
the 1790s and concluded that control over a National Assembly would
require temporary dictatorial powers for the secret Directorate (Directoire)
(Buonarroti 1836, 225ff). The backdrop was the French Revolution and
particularly the Jacobin dictatorship, under which press freedom was mas-
sively curtailed, the courts became organs of political terror, and popular
organisations starting with women’s organisations were banned (Roessler
1996, 146–161) or co-opted by the state apparatus (Soboul 1962: 381).
The contradictions between an avant-garde minority invoking the general
174 M. BRIE
interest and basing itself on revolutionary virtues, self-organised popular

groups pursuing their own respective interests, and rapidly changing views
and majorities among the general population were not unknown.
Marx wrote of the Paris Commune: ‘Its true secret was this. It was
essentially a working-class government, the produce of the struggle of the
producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discov-
ered under which to work out the economical emancipation of Labour’
(MECW 22: 335). Universal suffrage, paying civil servants a regular work-
er’s wage, the unity of executive and legislative powers, the permanent
recallability of delegates, the comprehensive inclusion of all in public
affairs, the establishment of a popular militia, etc. appeared as adequate
conditions for the government’s ‘legitimate functions to be wrested from
an authority usurping pre-eminence over society itself, and restored to the
responsible agents of society’ (MECW 22: 332f). There is a certain irony
in the fact that Marx based himself on principles which were particularly
heavily influenced by those he considered the fiercest opponents inside the
socialist workers’ movement: the Proudhonists. During the few weeks of
the Paris Commune’s existence, they attempted to implement principles
of federalism, local self-government and direct democracy.
The Commune enjoyed only a brief 71-day existence. The contradic-
tions inherent within it never became manifest. Essentially, it mostly lim-
ited itself to declaring certain principles heavily influenced by the
Proudhonist wing of French socialism. The Commune was brutally sup-
pressed, tens of thousands were murdered and deported to penal colonies
before any of those principles’ adequacy for everyday life could be tested.
But even in this short timespan the question arose of what would happen
if internal contradictions erupted within the Commune, when majorities
were lost, when larger groups in society turned against the leaders of the
Commune with recourse to freedom of the press and the right to organise,
and new majorities emerged from elections. Newspapers were banned, the
Commune council developed a secret practice that prevented the clubs,
the directly elected representational bodies of Paris districts, from making
public statements, and on 1 May 1871 a welfare committee in the style of
the Jacobins was set up to pool all forces to repel the counter-revolution’s
assault. The whole situation was overshadowed by a state of civil war.
Given these circumstances, did not any objection naturally have to appear
as siding with the enemy waiting outside the city gates? Had the Paris
Commune’s weakness not been the failure to sufficiently concentrate
power in its hands? These were at least the conclusions both Marx and
subsequently Lenin drew from the episode.
Bakunin and his followers predicted that the attempt to first concen-
trate all political power in one hand in order to then exert it in the form of
the dictatorship of the proletariat for a comprehensive social transforma-
tion entailed the danger of a new ruling group emerging, a danger which
the Bolsheviks became aware of at least since their victory in the Russian
civil war in 1921. According to Bakunin, this was all the more valid given
that the government also seized control of the economy:
This government will not content itself with administering and governing
the masses politically, as all governments do today. It will also administer the
masses economically, concentrating in the hands of the State the production
and division of wealth, the cultivation of land, the establishment and devel-
opment of factories, the organization and direction of commerce, and finally
the application of capital to production by the only banker—the State All
that will demand an immense knowledge and many heads “overflowing with
brains” in this government. It will be the reign of scientific intelligence, the
most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and elitist of all regimes. (Michail
Bakunin 1971, 319)
Second: in 1843 Marx developed a concept of critique that appeared to

allow for deriving from the analysis of the real social conditions which
actors with which goals and means would be able and willing to carry out
the radically emancipatory revolutionising thereof. In The Holy Family
drafted in the autumn of 1844, Marx and Engels summarised this convic-
tion as follows
It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole pro-
letariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the prole-
tariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be
compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably fore-
shadowed in its own life situation as well as in the whole organisation of
bourgeois society today. There is no need to explain here that a large part of
the English and French proletariat is already conscious of its historic task and
is constantly working to develop that consciousness into complete clarity.
(MECW 4: 37)
This was accompanied by the belief that the scientific analysis of the
position of the working class within bourgeois society, that is the critique
of political economy, would grant Marx and his followers an advantage
over all other socialist and communist groups in two specific regards: ‘The
Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced
176 M. BRIE
and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that sec-
tion which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they
have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly under-
standing the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results
of the proletarian movement’ (MECW 6: 497). In a letter to Marx dated
May 1846 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon warned him of the authoritarian ten-
dencies that could accompany such positions (P.-J. Proudhon 1970, 1038).
An even fiercer attack on Marx came from Bakunin a quarter century later:
The words “learned socialist” and “scientific socialism,” which recur con-
stantly in the writings and speeches of the Lassalleans and Marxists, are
proof in themselves that the pseudo-popular state will be nothing but the
highly despotic government of the masses by a new and very small aristoc-
racy of real or pretended scholars. The people are not learned, so they will
be liberated in entirety from the cares of government and included in
entirety in the governed herd. A fine liberation! The Marxists sense this
contradiction, and, recognizing that a government of scholars, the most
oppressive, offensive, and contemptuous kind in the world, will be a real
dictatorship for all its democratic forms, offer the consoling thought that
this dictatorship will be temporary and brief. (Michael Bakunin 2005, 178f)
Bakunin thus anticipated the problem of one party’s claim to leadership

based on scientific theory, thereby immunising itself against democratic
objections while simultaneously rendering any free scientific criticism
impossible through its own political power.
Third: Marx’s analysis of the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of
the Citizen’ of 26 August 1789 had a decisive impact on his followers.
Marx saw the declaration above all as a codification of the rights of the
bourgeoisie and bourgeois political rule. Proceeding from his excerpt of
Wilhelm Wachsmuth’s work Geschichte Frankreichs im Revolutionszeitalter.
Teil 1–4 (‘A History of France in the Age of Revolution. Parts 1–4’),
which he produced in 1843 (Marx 1981, 163–176) and had just been
published, he concluded: ‘None of the so-called rights of man, therefore,
go beyond egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil society, that is,
an individual withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private inter-
ests and private caprice, and separated from the community’ (MECW 3:
164). Adding to this was that the citizen (or citoyen) ‘is declared to be the
servant of egoistic homme’. Marx added: ‘…the sphere in which man acts
as a communal being is degraded to a level below the sphere in which he
acts as a partial being’ (MECW 3: 164). In Capital Marx describes the
‘sphere of circulation or commodity exchange’ as ‘a very Eden of the

innate rights of man: There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and
Bentham’ (MECW 35: 186). Marx reconstructed the reference to human
rights mainly as a petit-bourgeois ideology. The idealised position of the
small property owner was, in his view, elevated to the status of normative
standard of social critique. This is precisely what Marx rebuked Proudhon
for: ‘He wants to soar as the man of science above the bourgeois and the
proletarians; he is merely the petty bourgeois, continually tossed back and
forth between capital and labour, political economy and communism’
(MECW 6: 178). According to Marx, Proudhon moved within that con-
tradiction in the sense that he ‘is criticising society, on the one hand, from
the standpoint and with the eyes of a French small-holding peasant (later
petit bourgeois) and, on the other, that he measures it with the standards
he inherited from the socialists’ (MECW 20: 27).
Proudhon referenced the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the
Citizen’ from the French Revolution in his famous work What is Property?
In his view, all of the revolutionary constitutions had assumed ‘an inequal-
ity in fortune and status incompatible with even a shadow of equality in
rights’ (P.-J. Proudhon 2003, 29). He contended that the ‘edifying article
of the Declaration of Rights’ contained one central mistake: ‘The people
finally legalised property. God forgive them, for they knew not what they
did. For fifty years they have paid for their miserable folly’ (P.-J. Proudhon
2003, 30). Yet while freedom, equality, and security qualify as absolute
rights, property does not, according to Proudhon:
…property … is a right outside of society; for it is clear that if the wealth of

each were social wealth, the conditions would be equal for all, and it would
be a contradiction to say “Property is the right of a man to dispose of prop-
erty in the most absolute way.” Thus, if we are associated for the sake of
liberty, equality, and security, we are not associated for the sake of property;
thus, if property is a natural right, this natural right is not social but antiso-
cial. (P.-J. Proudhon 2003, 42)
Proudhon did in fact search for a synthesis of two contrary principles—

communism and liberalism. He wanted to secure the autonomy and self-
determination of the individual under the conditions of a society
increasingly marked by social production, the division of labour, and ubiq-
uitous exchange. He rejected the communist solution seeking to ensure
this autonomy by rendering all individuals collective owners, a solution
which to Marx represented the starting point of the social revolution
178 M. BRIE
following the proletariat’s seizure of power. Proudhon wanted to elimi-

nate the (private) property of the few as an exclusive monopoly by making
forms of free, voluntary association and the exchange of services and
goods according to laws of justice and based on the protection of indi-
vidual and collective autonomy, and the correspondingly required prop-
erty, the dominant mode.
Marx assumed that on the one hand the ownership of the means of
production was a necessary precondition for freedom, but that in a society
based on the division of labour this could only be possible in a ‘collective
form’ (MECW 24: 340). If all members of society cooperatively con-
trolled the means of production then ‘individual property’ would be
ensured on this basis (MECW 35: 751). Following this approach, many
Marxist socialists considered it a necessity that the rights of individuals
would likewise be best protected by delegating these rights to society as a
whole. They never asked themselves the question of what powers would
remain for the individual when all individual powers were socially organ-
ised. There was no room for the notion that there could be such a thing
as basic individual rights which had to be protected against the associated
members of society in the form of a dictatorship of the proletariat and thus
could not be delegated. Political rights were regarded as indispensable
means of struggle against bourgeois rule and were claimed and indeed
won, but seemed to be invalid once the working class seized power. Many
were convinced that the articulation of individual criticism of one’s own
class was an expression of petit-bourgeois backwardness and could be
appropriated by the class enemy.
Marx had not conceived the dictatorship of the proletariat as a process-
ing relation between autonomously organised members of a class and their
own class rule nor as a mutual relationship between legitimate poles of the
individual, collective, and social. Instead, he assumed direct-democratic
self-organisation and class dictatorship, individual property and collective
possession as entirely free of contradictions. Individuals would have no
reason, neither as owners nor political subjects, to claim any rights differing
from their shared rights as associated owners and participants in the collec-
tive dictatorship. The concept simply did not intend for any legitimate
dissent. The notion that the members of the class surrender their power to
the organs of their class rule, which then deprive them of their rights and
possibilities of legitimate collective self-organisation and free opinion,
seemed absurd. Correspondingly, it was unthinkable that individuals would
retain any basic rights they would not hand over to their associated power.
The task was precisely to collectively build common strength in order to
create the conditions for the free development of each individual on this
basis. Yet through that initial step of delegating all individual rights to ‘all’
the individuals surrendered their power to control the will of ‘all’, to con-
tinuously redefine it, to voluntarily submit themselves to this freely formed
will of ‘all’, and to defend their individual freedom rights that would allow
them to do the aforementioned in the first place.
In the Soviet tradition this meant that the legal claim to genuinely sub-
jective rights of individuals vis-à-vis the state was ruled out. For it seemed
utterly out of the question that the community of all would have any rea-
son to unjustifiably oppress themselves as individuals. Should this occur
and organs of the state in fact oppress an individual, this could only be due
to residual bureaucratic deficiencies which would be best remediated
through the intervention of higher state organs. As a result, individuals
were stripped of the possibility to act as autonomous and conscious sub-
jects of socialisation vis-à-vis the very state claiming to represent their col-
lective interests. The party state became the only legitimate social actor.
Claims to individual human rights were deemed bourgeois propaganda
and viewed as expressions of petite-bourgeois consciousness. As Ernst
Bloch, who had been disabused of Stalinism but remained hopeful none-
theless, remarked, also with regard to human rights, too, ‘there is no
absolute gap between yesterday and tomorrow’ (Bloch 1986, 199). ‘But
it should be the same banner of human rights that exalts the workers of
capitalistic lands to their rights to resist, and that opens the way for them
in socialistic lands by means of the construction of socialism, and the right
(and even the obligation) to criticize. Otherwise authoritarian socialism
would prevail—contradictio in adjecto—even though the Internationale
fought for the human right of organized maturity and responsibility’
(Bloch 1986, 178).
Fourth: In the Critique of the Gotha Programme of 1875 it reads:
Within the collective society based on common ownership of the means of

production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does
the labour employed on the products appear here as the value of these prod-
ucts, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capi-
talist society, individual labour no longer exists in an indirect fashion but
directly as a component part of the total labour. (MECW 24: 85)
180 M. BRIE
Although the maintenance of the achievement principle signified that

‘bourgeois law’ was still in place (i.e., unequal things are valued equally),
this was not true ‘on the average’ but only ‘in the individual case’ (MECW
24: 86). The distinction between use value and value, between abstract
and concrete labour that Marx had taken as the point of departure for
Capital appears suspended in such a society. To the individual the follow-
ing applies:
He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an

amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with
this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as
much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he
has given to society in one form, he receives back in another. (MECW 24: 86)
In Marx’s model of a communist economy there was no room for com-

modity production and markets, for credit and the fluctuating relation
between supply and demand. Everything appeared predeterminable: the
needs of individuals and society as well as the productive capacities to meet
those needs are ascertained, and on this basis a general social plan is com-
piled taking both into account. In the course of implementation each of
the recorded needs corresponds to a product that can then be obtained
from the superior organs in exchange for a certificate indicating performed
labour or via direct allocation. Although it could have hardly appeared any
simpler, the reality was very different. The cooperative experiments of the
1820s already revealed problems which Marx left unconsidered in his
model. When he writes that ‘labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined
by its duration or intensity’ (MECW 24: 86) this was in fact fraught with
conflict from the very outset. For it turned out that the question of how
exactly the labour of an individual or working group and their product was
to be recognised was a rather contradictory social process. Should physical
and intellectual labour be valued the same, and who was to decide this?
Given that the products were the outcome of collective labour, what was
to be recognised: collective or individual labour? Defining targets was one
thing, yet what happened if the product ultimately did not meet expecta-
tions but material and labour had nonetheless been committed? What was
to be done when targets were not met or, as was inevitably the case, new
problems (or possibilities) arose in the process? Where would the needed
resources come from? How much scope was there for innovations, for
experiments into unknown territory? Cases allowing for the study of these
problems included, for example, Robert Owen’s cooperative experiments

in New Harmony, Indiana (United States), in 1825–1827 and Queenwood
(England) from 1839–1845 as well as the National Equitable Labour
Exchange in London from 1832–1834 (Brie 2015, 30–46). The idea that
a complete knowledge of all by all could be created revealed itself to be an
illusion even in the smaller experiments, but was absolutely impossible in
the context of a national economy like Russia’s. There were also feedback
effects: because resources would likely be scarce, everybody demanded
more than they actually needed (Kornai 1992). The planning committees
were fully aware of this fact. Consequently, new forms of negotiating
beyond the plans were cultivated and grey markets of resource exchange
between state enterprises emerged.
The assumption that the labour of an individual and of small-scale col-
lectives could on the basis of common ownership be immediately social
proved to be a fiction in practice. Forms of standardisation, economic
accounting with abstract indices (and not only labour power and use val-
ues) became necessary amendments to the planning process. The outcome
were hybrid mixtures combining plans and markets. The related questions
remained unsolved in terms of both theory and practice until the end of
the Soviet Union (Steinitz and Walter 2014). It became clear that labour
performed in complex processes under conditions of planning require rec-
ognition as social labour. There could be no question of a complete
transparency in relations. The economic interventions both at the begin-
ning and towards the end of Soviet state socialism were largely marked by
a severe blindness with regard to both the actual conditions and the con-
tradictions that truly (and urgently) needed addressing.
Fifth: Marx assumed as a matter of course that a communist society
would engender a rapid development of the forces of production and
social wealth would grow significantly. Not a single thought was wasted
on potential obstacles. Only the motivation to work was debated in this
context: it was to be strengthened through the achievement principle to
the point that labour itself would become a prime want in life. Yet not one
of the various socialist economic systems has confirmed this prediction to
this day. The Soviet system developed mainly through the extensive exploi-
tation of labour power and natural resources on the basis of existing tech-
nologies. A new situation emerged with the introduction of the
Chinese-style socialist market economy, which represents a hybrid of stat-
ist, capitalist and socialist elements. The Chinese system is utterly distinct
from Marx’s ideas about a communist society.
182 M. BRIE
As noted by Wolfgang Fritz Haug:
Today an epoch-making emptiness yawns where there used to be a histori-

cally fundamental faith (in socialism and its productive potential—M.B.). It
forms the negative core of the post-communist situation. An anti-capitalism
that does not go beyond the “anti” in respect to capitalism to arrive at a
“pro”, a “pro” that attempts to liberate that kind of productivity from the
competitive logic of profit and in so doing from its destructiveness, cannot
dispute capitalism’s right to exist … Even those suffering under capitalism
will in great part not follow a project that falls behind capitalism. Measuring
oneself critically in this way in relation to capitalist productivity does not
glorify it but directs one’s energy to the project of the progressive transcen-
dence of capitalism in the direction of production for people and of keeping
the planet habitable. (Haug 2007, 20)
That said, Haug does not raise the question of what constitutes capital-
ism’s productivity and how it might be sublated in a new socialist social
formation. In this sense he presents a helpless critique of ‘helpless anti-
capitalism’ that fails to unfold the contradiction between the dominant
and exploitative character of capitalism on one side and modern forms of
development in complex societies on the other in a critical-socialist manner.
In the first volume of Capital Marx showed how the self-valorisation of
capital, expressed in the formula M-C-M′, occurs through the combination
of means of production and labour power. According to Marx this is only
possible when the direct producers are separated from the means of pro-
duction. Natural resources, labour power, and the produced goods must
be more or less freely available on the market. Furthermore, competition
must force capital, landowners, and workers to subordinate themselves to
the requirements of capital valorisation. For capitalist entrepreneurs this
means pushing through a combination of production resources that is as
profitable as possible, as they otherwise lose their disposition over capital
and it is ultimately placed under the control of others, that is, they other-
wise cannot survive in the competitive process. As Marx put it: ‘Free com-
petition brings out the inherent laws of capitalist production, in the shape
of external coercive laws having power over every individual capitalist’
(MECW 35: 276).
What appeared above all as a process of capitalist accumulation based
on the appropriation of other people’s labour from Marx’s perspective
appeared to Joseph Schumpeter as a process of innovative renewal through
the creative destruction of existing forms of combining productive means.
According to Schumpeter, ‘carrying out New Combinations’ of economic
factors under the pressure of competition represents the root of the eco-
nomic dynamic in modern capitalist societies (Schumpeter 1939, 86ff).
To Schumpeter the separation of producers from the means of production
was the desired precondition for innovation. Only entrepreneurs (under-
stood as the social function of economic organisations) were dynamic eco-
nomic subjects in his view. Only through them did the potential new
combinations of productive factors become actual innovations (Schumpeter
1939, 102ff). Schumpeter speaks of the ‘process of industrial mutation
[…] that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within,
incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This
process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is
what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live
in’ (Schumpeter 1994, 83). Consequently, Schumpeter defined capitalism
as ‘that form of private property economy in which innovations are carried
out by means of borrowed money, which in general, though not by logical
necessity, implies credit creation’ (Schumpeter 1939, 223).
Marx had pointed out the institutional conditions from which the essen-
tial peculiarity of capitalism emerged, ‘constantly revolutionising the instru-
ments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with
them the whole relations of society’ (MECW 6: 487). The exploitation of
labour power and nature and their innovative transformation represent two
sides of the same coin. Marx’s notion of a communist association of free
producers founded upon the common ownership of the means of produc-
tion, however, offered no argument as to why this feature of permanent
innovation would be maintained under altered institutional conditions and
why stagnation and inefficiency would not become pervasive. Yet precisely
that new close link between producers and property would in fact necessar-
ily impede innovative transformations and have a static effect, unless any
additional powerful factors existed to neutralise such an effect. Marx left the
question of how processes of constant innovation can be institutionally
secured in a communist society entirely unconsidered. The problems tied to
this question surprised the Bolsheviks. Although the centralised and often
violent mobilisation of resources allowed for catch-up modernisation, it
failed to achieve what has been called intensely expanded reproduction since
the 1960s, that is to say the development of production not through
increased resource investment but through the innovative (re-)combination
thereof. This failure to maintain continuous innovation was a main reason
for the Soviet Union’s failure.
* * *
184 M. BRIE
Marx left to his successors a grand theory, a clear strategy, and an immensely
attractive communist vision. The enormous power of this legacy concealed
its weaknesses for a long time. This made it difficult for many Marxists in
the early twentieth century to develop their own critical position. Yet only
those who confront the inherent contradictions of Marx’s critical com-
munism will understand why this was possible. In the case of Lenin both
apply: he dared a new beginning and he was Marx’s disciple. His experi-
ences after 1917 quickly took him to the limits of Marx’s vision of com-
munism he had still invoked with such conviction in State and Revolution.
From 1921 onward Lenin and other Bolsheviks began searching for new
ways to build a socialist society. They were forced to grapple with the
unresolved problems in Marx’s theory of communism sketched out above.
Lenin’s search process ended in 1923. Today, nearly a century later, any
attempt to find an alternative to capitalism will also have to deal with the
problems Marx left unresolved. The experience of the Soviet Union,
Western Social Democracy, the New Deal, the People’s Republic of China,
the many syndicalist and cooperative experiments, and the Kibbutz
movement must be part of this critical discussion. Only those who heed
this advice will be able to avoid being haunted by the ghosts of this past.
BiBLiography
Bakunin, Michail. 1971. The International and Karl Marx. In Bakunin on Anarchy,
ed. Sam Dolgoff, 286–320. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
MIT Press.
Brie, Michael. 2015. Wie der Sozialismus praktisch wurde. Robert Owen – Reformer,
Visionär, Experimentator. Philosophische Gespräche, Heft 40. Berlin:
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Rediscovering Lenin

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MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS

More information about this series at

ISSN 2524-7123 ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic)

Cover illustration: Photo 12 / Alamy Stock Photo

The Marx revival

Studies on Marx and Engels

Critical Studies on Marxisms

Reception Studies and Marxist National Traditions

Toronto, Canada Marcello Musto

1. Terrell Carver and Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions

The title of this volume, Rediscovering Lenin, is in a way highly personal.

matches with Bogdanov and, according to Gorky, was a poor loser’

Another informative source is the documentary compilation by Arnold

Berlin, Germany Michael Brie

1 What Is to Be Done in Times of Powerlessness? Lenin’s

2 What Is to Be Done in the Struggle for a New World? 37

3 What Is to Be Done with Power? 75

4 Whoever Is Not Prepared to Talk About Leninism Should

5 Rosa Luxemburg’s Symphony on the Russian Revolution 131

6 The Power and Impotence of the Marxian Idea of

Michael Brie is a philosopher and political scientist. He works as a senior

What Is to Be Done in Times

‘Russia – that is the France of the current century. The revolutionary

Using the exile ProPerly

© The Author(s) 2019 1

Thus, what is to be done in times of powerlessness? The following sec-

Using the Time of Exile Properly

The Zimmerwald Movement

A left wing in turn formed within this Zimmerwald movement driven

In its determination, Lenin’s ‘No’ simultaneously represents a tremen-

Working oUt a PhilosoPhy oF Dialectical Practice

A selection of Marx and Engels’ correspondence was published in 1913.

If one were to attempt to define in a single word the focus, so to speak, of

This taking distance, this solitude, which is often to be found at moments of

In a situation of all-out crisis and almost absolute incapacity to act,

(2) ‘The unity (coincidence, identity, equal action) of opposites is condi-

This study of Hegel is a decisive contribution to Lenin’s thought and

Dialects as the Art of Sailing Against the Wind

DeveloPing a Distinct narrative

wrote: ‘…shredded concepts and shattered beliefs cannot be glued

imperialist powers and an alliance with the anti-colonial movements, and

strategically orienteD social analysis

(1) Imperialism is parasitical capitalism, which by no means rules out growth

Secondly, Eastern Europe: Austria, the Balkans and particularly Russia.

In contrast to many socialist European contemporaries in the capitalist

To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small

System-threatening conflicts may emerge at any of these points and could

theory oF revolUtion: revolUtion oF theory

unable to play any greater role in a bourgeois-democratic revolution. This

Trotsky’s Concept of the Uninterrupted Revolution

The conception of two phases in the Russian Revolution appeared

the revolution in Russia in a matter of weeks. He had long defended it

Once again the aforementioned Menshevik, Martynov, contradicted him.

programme, but instead had to be ‘limited to the only feasible task—ending

the ePoch as a concrete action sitUation

above all as action-space-time. It is no coincidence that Lenin more than

To express the meaning of Kairos, Posidippus of Pella (third century

Immanuel Wallerstein speaks of the link between historical cycles and

Lenin argues in the conclusion of his analysis of imperialism that the

Lenin’s Definition of the Epoch

Unique about Lenin’s approach following the outbreak of World War I

state, revolUtion, anD commUnist vision