By NAZARENO GODEIRO
Lenin died on Jan. 21, 1924, at 6:30 a.m., near Moscow, three months before his 54th birthday. He had been in power for six years, since the socialist revolution of October 1917, which established the power of the workers, the Soviet power in Russia.
At the Second Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party in 1903, Plekhanov, the founder of Russian Marxism, referred to the young Lenin, saying: “From this wood are made the Robespierres,” comparing Lenin to the leader of the French Revolution of 1789. This comparison was very appropriate, since the two were the main leaders of the greatest revolutions that changed the world: the bourgeois revolution in France in 1789 (Robespierre) and the proletarian revolution in Russia in 1917 (Lenin). However, it can be stated, without a doubt, that Lenin was the greatest revolutionary in the history of mankind; the influence of the Russian revolution reached a third of the earth’s surface and his works were translated into hundreds of languages, all over the world.
Lenin was born and grew up in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk), a central region of Russia, dominated by the largest river in Europe, the Volga, and the Ural Mountains, the natural border between Europe and Asia. In this region two great peasant insurrections took place (that of Stepan Razin, in the 17th century and that of Pugatchev, in the 18th century), the first spontaneous revolts of the Russian bourgeois revolution.
Therefore, in Lenin the East and the West were fused. His universal knowledge was rooted in deep Russian roots. His Franciscan simplicity[1] was combined with his experience in European countries, where he lived and learned to speak fluent French, English, German, as well as Russian, and read and communicated in Italian, Latin, Greek, Polish and Czech.
He died at the height of his fame, respected by millions of workers around the world. Today, however, on the centenary of his death, his role as an international communist leader is forgotten, despised, distorted and buried by the earthquake of the bureaucratic degeneration of the Russian revolution, which culminated in the restoration of capitalism in all the so-called “socialist” countries (USSR, China, Eastern Europe, East Germany, Cuba, etc.) in the 1980s and 1990s.
Lenin did not see the bureaucratization of the Soviet state as a foregone conclusion, but he devoted the last six months of his life to the struggle against the first symptoms of this virus that was spreading silently in the organs of the state and the Bolshevik party. His last writings were directed to this struggle and his will recommended the removal of Stalin from the general secretariat of the party. His last act as a political leader was the severance of personal relations with Stalin. His premature death prevented him from fighting this battle to the end.
The French Revolution also went through a process of degeneration and restoration of the Bourbon monarchical regime, which lasted more than 40 years, from 1804 to 1848. Thus, history advances through class struggle, never along a straight path, nor always in a pre-determined direction. It was from these class struggles, especially from their culmination in revolutions and counter-revolutions in the 19th century, that Marx and Engels elaborated a materialist conception of history, the Marxist theory, a scientific vision of the world and its communist transformation through a proletarian revolution.
Lenin was lucky to be close to the source of this movement, since he belonged to the first generations of revolutionaries who embraced Marxism: he became leader of the Russian revolutionary movement in the early 1890s, 10 years after the death of Karl Marx in 1883, and when Engels was still alive.
Trotsky asserted that geniuses like Lenin emerge every 100 years, not as demigods already born with innate wisdom, but as products of their epoch. Lenin’s epoch was a time of transition from bourgeois-democratic revolutions to socialist revolutions. Lenin was the man of transitions, always looking for the movement of a process to push forward the revolution. He developed Marxist theory, establishing a connection between the democratic revolution (which was left behind) and the socialist revolution (which was entering the scene) in a complex and contradictory combination[2].
The democratic (sometimes anti-colonial) revolution as an end in itself, separate and opposed to the socialist revolution, is the ideology of reformism, which went over to the side of the bourgeoisie. Lenin confronted this international current, which betrayed Marxism in the war of 1914, which refused to fight for the proletarian revolution, and which refused to promote the democratic tasks as levers for the proletarian revolution. Reformists of all kinds (representatives of the Second [Social-Democratic] International, joined by Stalinism in the 1930s) halted their advance in the face of bourgeois-democracy, trying, in vain, to “humanize capitalism,” to perfect bourgeois democracy, an ideology which hides their complete capitulation to the imperialist system.
Already in power, he predicted that this international reformist current could delay the transition from capitalism to socialism for several decades. He hit the nail on the head. However, he did not imagine that this prognosis would become a repeating pattern, with the capitalist restoration in the former USSR, China, and other degenerated and deformed workers’ states.
Lenin, through the Bolshevik party, used all tactics at his disposal: he encouraged the economic struggle without being economist, fought for reforms without being reformist, participated in parliament without being parliamentarist, used guerrilla warfare without being guerrillaist, participated in elections without being electoralist, made alliances of all kinds without being an opportunist. For him, all tactics were at the service of the strategy: the seizure of power by the proletariat and the establishment of a socialist society.
Tactics, strategies, programs and principles—agitation and propaganda—were connected to develop the class consciousness of the proletariat and the urban and rural poor on the necessity of a violent revolution to overthrow capitalism. On the other hand, proletarian revolution, when separated and opposed to democratic revolution, also becomes a lifeless dogma, the ideology of the ultra-leftists, who refuse to use revolutionary democratic demands as levers of socialist revolution. This is why Lenin identified ultra-leftism as an enemy to be confronted, even though he designated it, in 1920, as an “infantile disease of communism.”
“Because to think that the social revolution is conceivable without insurrections of the small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary explosions of a part of the petty bourgeoisie, with all its prejudices, without the movement of the unconscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against landlord, clerical, monarchical, national, etc. oppression; to think thus, means to abjure the social revolution. (…) Whoever hopes for the ‘pure’ social revolution, will never see it. He will be a revolutionary in words, who does not understand the real revolution.”[3]
Lenin’s entire contribution to Marxism was embodied in the resolutions of the first four congresses of the Communist International, in a constant struggle against opportunism and sectarianism within the international workers’ movement.
Translation:
From Portuguese to Spanish – Natalia Estrada. From Spanish to English – Carlos Sapir
NOTES
[1] Lenin always lived modestly, even after he came to power. In this he was also compared to Robespierre, known as the “incorruptible.” Both refused to use high government positions to enrich themselves, as is very common today. Lenin, as chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, received the average salary of a worker, like all workers in the Soviet Union. Once, his secretary increased Lenin’s salary without his knowledge. He received a public warning from Lenin, under threat of summary dismissal if the fact was repeated.
[2] “The common imagination grasps the difference and the contradiction, but not the transition from one to the other, and that is the most important thing. Intelligence and understanding. Intelligence grasps contradiction, enunciates it, relates things to each other, allows ‘the concept to become transparent through contradiction,’ but does not express the concept of things and their relations. Thinking reason (understanding) sharpens the indifference of diversity, the mere multiplicity of the imagination, and transforms it into opposition. Only when they reach the apex of contradiction do the various entities become active and alive in their relation to each other, acquire the negativity which is the inherent pulse of self-movement and vitality.” — Lenin, V.I., “Philosophical Notebooks,” Collected Works, vol. 29.
[3] Lenin, V.I., Collected Works, vol. 30, “Balance of the discussion on self-determination,” 1916, p. 56.