The closing section from the script of Episode 1 of my "Lenin's Vanguard - A Marxist Critique" (that whoops, turned into a series)
"...The rest of this essay follows a fairly simple arc. First, I track how the Leninist vanguard emerges as a plausible answer to a specific historical problem. Then I follow what that form actually does once it has a state in its hands. Finally, I ask what is left of Marx’s demand that the working class emancipate itself, and what kind of organisation could honour that demand today (Marx 1871; Marx 1875).
Episodes 2 looks at the conditions under which Lenin is thinking: Tsarist autocracy, uneven industrialisation, and the strange mix of underground circles and sudden mass uprisings that defined Russian politics. It also takes seriously the trauma of the First World War, when the great socialist parties of Western Europe voted for war credits and lined up behind their own ruling classes. For Lenin, that betrayal proves that “spontaneous” working-class politics and the mass parties of the Second International can slide very quickly into nationalism (Lenin 1914; Lenin 1916). Episode 3 then stages the theoretical confrontation: Marx’s insistence that the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself, grounded in the experience of the Paris Commune (Marx 1871; Marx 1875), against Lenin’s “party of a new type” in What Is To Be Done? and the vision of soviet power in State and Revolution (Lenin 1902; Lenin 1917a). This is also where I bring in early Marxist critics like Luxemburg and Kautsky, and council-communist arguments for workers’ councils as the true subject of emancipation (Luxemburg 1904; Kautsky 1918). By the end of Episode 3, the key question is clear: Is the subject of emancipation in Lenninism still the class, or has it become the party?
Episode 4 traces the sequence from the creation of the soviets in 1917, through the October insurrection, to civil war, War Communism, and the decisive moments of the Workers’ Opposition and the Kronstadt rebellion (Kollontai 1921; Avrich 1970). Here the abstract problem of “who acts?” becomes very concrete: factory committees and trade unions demand real control over production; sailors at Kronstadt call for free soviet elections and an end to party monopoly; the party leadership answers with bans on factions, and with artillery. Episode 5 follows the same form into the 1920s and 1930s: the New Economic Policy, the growth of a party bureaucracy, the codification of “Leninism” and “socialism in one country,” forced collectivisation, crash industrialisation, and the rise of a managerial layer that directs labour and accumulation from above (Stalin 1924; Cliff 1964). It also looks at the international side: the role of the Communist International, the response to Fascism and Nazism, and the way national and colonial revolutions are organised under party and state leadership (Trotsky 1938; Lenin 1917b). In these Episodes, the vanguard is no longer a small conspiratorial group under Tsarism. It is a social stratum fused with the state and acting, in many respects, like a collective capitalist class.
Episode 6 asks, quite bluntly, what actually withered in the Soviet experience: the state or the capacity of workers and peasants to act as subjects in their own name. It sets State and Revolution, and Marx’s writings on the Commune against the reality of a hypertrophied security apparatus, a permanent bureaucracy, and a one-party system, and it uses both sympathetic and hostile witnesses to name what the vanguard became (Luxemburg 1918; Trotsky 1937; Goldman 1923; Cliff 1964). It also looks at how that apparatus decomposed into the post-Soviet Russian Federation, with party and state officials turning political power into private ownership. Episode 6 then turns outward and forward. It tracks how the logic of substitution survives in new forms: in a left geopolitics that treat rival capitalist states as “our” camp; in discourses that write off workers in the core as hopelessly bribed or backward; and in digital platforms, NGOs, and professionalised campaigns that coordinate people’s lives and politics from above. Finally, it sketches the outlines of non-substitutionist organisation under fire: councils, unions and movements that hold on to revocability, rotation, transparency, and internationalism from below, even in crisis.
The point of this roadmap is simple. I do not wish to produce a moral fable about good or bad leaders. I am trying to follow a form of organisation; from its birth in Tsarist underground politics and the disaster of 1914, through revolution and civil war, into bureaucratic state power and eventual collapse, and to ask whether that form can really be reconciled with Marx’s demand for self-emancipation. The rest of the essay is the long version of that question."
ZahnZee
The closing section from the script of Episode 1 of my "Lenin's Vanguard - A Marxist Critique" (that whoops, turned into a series)
"...The rest of this essay follows a fairly simple arc. First, I track how the Leninist vanguard emerges as a plausible answer to a specific historical problem. Then I follow what that form actually does once it has a state in its hands. Finally, I ask what is left of Marx’s demand that the working class emancipate itself, and what kind of organisation could honour that demand today (Marx 1871; Marx 1875).
Episodes 2 looks at the conditions under which Lenin is thinking: Tsarist autocracy, uneven industrialisation, and the strange mix of underground circles and sudden mass uprisings that defined Russian politics. It also takes seriously the trauma of the First World War, when the great socialist parties of Western Europe voted for war credits and lined up behind their own ruling classes. For Lenin, that betrayal proves that “spontaneous” working-class politics and the mass parties of the Second International can slide very quickly into nationalism (Lenin 1914; Lenin 1916). Episode 3 then stages the theoretical confrontation: Marx’s insistence that the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself, grounded in the experience of the Paris Commune (Marx 1871; Marx 1875), against Lenin’s “party of a new type” in What Is To Be Done? and the vision of soviet power in State and Revolution (Lenin 1902; Lenin 1917a). This is also where I bring in early Marxist critics like Luxemburg and Kautsky, and council-communist arguments for workers’ councils as the true subject of emancipation (Luxemburg 1904; Kautsky 1918). By the end of Episode 3, the key question is clear: Is the subject of emancipation in Lenninism still the class, or has it become the party?
Episode 4 traces the sequence from the creation of the soviets in 1917, through the October insurrection, to civil war, War Communism, and the decisive moments of the Workers’ Opposition and the Kronstadt rebellion (Kollontai 1921; Avrich 1970). Here the abstract problem of “who acts?” becomes very concrete: factory committees and trade unions demand real control over production; sailors at Kronstadt call for free soviet elections and an end to party monopoly; the party leadership answers with bans on factions, and with artillery. Episode 5 follows the same form into the 1920s and 1930s: the New Economic Policy, the growth of a party bureaucracy, the codification of “Leninism” and “socialism in one country,” forced collectivisation, crash industrialisation, and the rise of a managerial layer that directs labour and accumulation from above (Stalin 1924; Cliff 1964). It also looks at the international side: the role of the Communist International, the response to Fascism and Nazism, and the way national and colonial revolutions are organised under party and state leadership (Trotsky 1938; Lenin 1917b). In these Episodes, the vanguard is no longer a small conspiratorial group under Tsarism. It is a social stratum fused with the state and acting, in many respects, like a collective capitalist class.
Episode 6 asks, quite bluntly, what actually withered in the Soviet experience: the state or the capacity of workers and peasants to act as subjects in their own name. It sets State and Revolution, and Marx’s writings on the Commune against the reality of a hypertrophied security apparatus, a permanent bureaucracy, and a one-party system, and it uses both sympathetic and hostile witnesses to name what the vanguard became (Luxemburg 1918; Trotsky 1937; Goldman 1923; Cliff 1964). It also looks at how that apparatus decomposed into the post-Soviet Russian Federation, with party and state officials turning political power into private ownership. Episode 6 then turns outward and forward. It tracks how the logic of substitution survives in new forms: in a left geopolitics that treat rival capitalist states as “our” camp; in discourses that write off workers in the core as hopelessly bribed or backward; and in digital platforms, NGOs, and professionalised campaigns that coordinate people’s lives and politics from above. Finally, it sketches the outlines of non-substitutionist organisation under fire: councils, unions and movements that hold on to revocability, rotation, transparency, and internationalism from below, even in crisis.
The point of this roadmap is simple. I do not wish to produce a moral fable about good or bad leaders. I am trying to follow a form of organisation; from its birth in Tsarist underground politics and the disaster of 1914, through revolution and civil war, into bureaucratic state power and eventual collapse, and to ask whether that form can really be reconciled with Marx’s demand for self-emancipation. The rest of the essay is the long version of that question."
2 weeks ago (edited) | [YT] | 24