Introduction
We have not yet resolved the issue of democratic revolution.
First, we mean that the establishment of a “true democracy,” a “democratic and social republic,” still overshadows the horizon of our uprisings. Second, that “seizing state power” and thus transforming our movements into a vehicle for this end remains the only way to achieve this true democracy. Finally, that none of this ever happens as promised by the supporters of the first two assertions, the social democrats of various currents, but instead ends up destroying the revolutionary process and movement.
If we to stick to the framework in which these currents define themselves, the fundamental difference between these sensibilities would lie between “reformists” and “revolutionaries,” both of whom are obviously in competition with each other. The “reformists” are those who, still within this framework, aim to transform the capitalist system through reforms, as part of a transition to socialism carried out without leaving the realm of bourgeois legality, in short, through elections, as in Allende’s Chile (or more recently with Gabriel Boric who took the lead of a leftist government after the 2019-2020 uprising in Chile), for example. The call for the creation of a constituent assembly as a way out of the uprisings falls within the same framework, even if Leninists may rally it for tactical reasons.
The self-proclaimed “revolutionaries” are those who do not reject the use of illegal methods to seize state power. They are mostly Leninists of various tendencies (because within this current, there are supporters of Mao, Stalin, Trotsky, Bordiga, etc., who consider each other enemies), even if some of the groups claiming themselves to be anarchists are quite social democratic in their perspectives… but that’s another story.
We are opposed to this distinction. For us, it is absurd to describe Leninists as “revolutionaries.” They are—as we will see later—rather “usurpers of revolution ” in the sense that their tactic is to insert themselves into the revolutionary movements of our class, not to build and strengthen them as movements, but above all to take over their leadership and steer them toward the seizure of the state.
Within the broad social democratic camp that constitutes the bulk of the “left,” two main variants can be distinguished, depending on their integration into the state and institutions, which includes their relationship to legality. “Traditional” social democracy is the more institutional and legalistic fringe, while Leninism is the “illegalist” fringe. It emerged in clandestinity and in the struggle against a dictatorship, that of Tsarist Russia. But Leninists can certainly act within the legal framework if possible, and these categories are far from watertight: Leninist parties can move towards “traditional” social democracy, while “traditional” social democrats can radicalize their positions and move closer to Leninism.
While “traditional” social democrats have merged into what is now commonly referred as the “left of government” and are harmless to capitalists, Leninists have not abandoned the socialist perspective of expropriating the bourgeoisie in order to nationalize production and remove it—at least on a national scale—from the market, replacing it with state-controlled planning. They are extremists, which means in our society that they are consistent in their ideas. This is also why this variant will be the main focus of this text. Indeed, it encompasses everything that the rest of social democracy proposes, namely: taking over the state, establishing a radical democratic regime, implementing an emergency social and ecological program, etc.. And finally, unlike the rest of the social democrats, it intends to bring this program to its conclusion… which nevertheless does not corresponds to the stated objectives.
The Leninist’s promise is that of the “One Ring” in The Lord of the Rings. The situation is bleak. Despair reigns supreme. Yet one force, that of the state and the productive forces of capital, could transform the world—the proof: it is already transforming it! Why couldn’t we take it and put it to work for us? It is this promise, the one that says “you will have the power to transform the world,” that we will examine here, in a critique that takes up the three fundamental proposals of the Leninist program. Each point responds to and complements the other in a circular fashion, and so does our critique.
These three points are as follows:
1. Take over the state.
2. Build the party.
3. Seek efficiency in capitalist modernity.
These three “programmatic” points are in no way outside the social democratic framework of their time, and before criticizing them, we will return to this point.
Lenin was a leader of Russian social democracy and a member of the Socialist International.
Like other social democrats of his time, he sought to seize state power in order to establish a new regime. A political and social democracy based on nationalization and therefore the supposedly rational and planned organization of the economy. This new regime was itself supposed to be “transitional” i.e. limited in time. The stated goal was to pave the way for a new type of society, communism, at the end of the rationalization process.
As we can see in every uprising of our time, where the mirage of the struggle for a social and democratic state reappears, this social-democratic perspective has never ceased to exist. It is a form of progressivism, a vision of history as a process with a direction that unfolds according to a certain pattern. In this pattern, capitalist development undermines the foundations of traditional society and the power of the old aristocratic ruling classes.
The bourgeoisie, or at least an enlightened and liberal section of it, would be a progressive part of society that stands up against the power of the old regime in order to establish a new model more favorable to its interests: bourgeois democracy, as in France, Germany, and the USA. In these states, led by elected governments, a certain degree of political freedom is guaranteed within the country’s borders for adult citizens with valid papers (trade unions, the right to vote and freedom of associations, etc.).
The strategy of the majority of socialists of the 19th and early 20th centuries was based on an optimistic prediction: capitalism would strengthen the bourgeois class, which would lead the democratic revolution and establish a regime favorable to capitalism. Then, as capitalism developed, the number of workers and, more generally, proletarians would grow, and with them the votes for socialist workers’ parties. After a while, they became the majority in society, and then, all they have to do is to take power democratically… and socialism would begin.
The originality of Leninist discourse lies in its diagnosis 1 of the situation in Russia: the bourgeoisie, terrified of the proletariat, will not carry out the democratic revolution. It will therefore fail in its historic mission and will not create the conditions for capitalist development.
This diagnosis is also a promise. Despite everything, the democratic revolution is underway in Russia 2. Therefore, according to Lenin, the conclusion is clear: since the bourgeoisie will not respond to the call of history, it is up to social democracy to take the lead in the revolutionary process and carry out this program.
If there is one opinion that almost all socialist currents share 3, beyond the method of achieving it or knowing who will lead the revolutionary process, it is this: the revolution that is approaching in Russia will have the “nature” of giving the country a bourgeois democratic regime.
Let us now consider this hypothesis. Today, we are still confronted with this same diagnosis among leftists and even the vast majority of anarchists regarding the “nature” of the revolutions of our time: whether these countries are police dictatorships or liberal democracies (these two types of regimes tending to converge), the goal is to establish a “true democracy,” and the nature of the revolution would therefore be “democratic.”
This is a serious confusion in which the dynamics of a revolution and the content of its defeat are lumped together under the same term of “nature.” It seems unlikely that a revolution as fantasized by democrats, i.e., one that would build a “European-style” state, could take place in Iran, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, etc. And above all, at what cost and for what purpose? Let us put aside the regimes that grip themselves the most to power, such as Iran, which relies on blackmailing its population bringing the threat of a bloody civil war. For a “democratic transition” to take place, a compromise must be reached with the ruling classes, following the model of regime change in the former Latin American dictatorships. This could only happen on the ashes of any aspirations for real change, since such a compromise would mean leaving the power of the wealthy classes untouched… and this is what we are witnessing where uprisings are bringing down political leaders.
In writing this, we are aware that this aspiration for a democratic regime is widely shared among those involved in the uprisings. More broadly, a significant proportion of those participating in the struggles of our time aspire to peace, to a regime that is not murderous, to a welfare state, etc. We are not going to deny such an established fact. We are simply saying that it will not go well. That it is illusory and dangerous to take this direction, to place our trust in any way in the hands of the state: there is nothing but blows to be expected, and that is an understatement.
In short, if the revolution remains in the political sphere, it will meet a disastrous fate, as it always has been the case in the past. Democracy and political revolution—and this has been the case since the founding moment of the French Revolution—are a set of counterrevolutionary measures by which a ruling faction positions itself as the representative of the movement against the movement itself and thus limits the revolution to political transformation, centralizes power, and ultimately drowns the revolution into politics, regardless of its initial intentions.
From the 19th century to the present day, there has been fundamental agreement on the program between the various social democratic tendencies, including the Leninists. It is the realization of this program that they call “socialism” 4. And their socialism never means throwing away work, but modernizing it and organizing it rationally.
For these people, capitalist modernity is progress. And the State is the operator that will enable this rationalization 5 to be organized in the best possible way. This is the content of what they call the “socialist transition.” Hence the fundamental importance of engineers, managers, and executives in this transition. It is therefore no coincidence if this ideology spread at a key moment in the history of capitalism i.e. the Taylorist overhaul which occurs through the strong concentration of capital in gigantic companies known at that time as trusts, nor if it is reappearing today, at a time when capital is undergoing a new period of similar upheaval.
The history of the 20th century seems to indicate the success of the Leninist “solution” as a model for nationalist development. This specific form of state capitalism emerged in many so-called socialist countries as the recipe for developing capitalism and industry in the context of imperialist pressures that made it difficult for “self-centered” capitalism to emerge .”
A common solution to the problem posed by the development of capitalism and industry in countries that arrived later in the capitalist economy was to establish a specific form of capitalism, state-controlled, planned, and directed by administrators: this “solution” was and still is the one promoted by the Leninists.
For them, it is a question of claiming leadership of society for themselves in the service of a development program that they consider necessary but unachievable by the national bourgeoisie. If we were to summarize the socialist proposal in a concise slogan: “The capitalists have failed in their management. Let’s expropriate them and use the state as an interface to run the capitalist machine at its maximum capacity.“ This perspective can be described as an ”apology for capital.” It sees capital as a powerful force for social modernization that must be directed, not destroyed.
In short, what is being proposed here is a ruling class of replacement.
Like other social democrats, Leninists are modernizers and realists. They speak the language of what is possible, reasonable, and progressive. They are therefore the enemies of any real communist perspective, because this implies going beyond what is possible, venturing into the unpredictable and “unrealistic”: the destruction of work and the state, the real liberation of the proletariat, “to get everything for everyone,” an anti-political social revolution that does not aim to establish a new regime but to put an end to classes and regimes.
First Leninist proposal : the centrality of taking over the state
October 17 was a political revolution whose first act was to legalize the revolutionary process already undergoing 6. When the state began to organize the production of the revolution: it was the beginning of the end. The new government moved to nationalize businesses, integrate and repress the revolutionary movement. In short, it brought the democratic political revolution to its conclusion…to realize that at the end of the process lays the dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party, then of the dictator, and still the capital.
Thus, the Bolsheviks inaugurated the tragedy of the revolutions of the 20th century. All of them would lead to dictatorships (USSR, Cuba 1960, Algeria 62, Iran 79…) with the exception of the particular form of “democratic transition ” (Portugal 74, Chile after Pinochet, fall of the USSR, post-apartheid in South Africa) in which the revolutionary dynamic was stifled by social democracy, which established a compromise with the old regime. These two forms, bureaucratic dictatorship and democratic transition, are the two sides of the pincer that has gripped our uprisings, both yesterday and today.
Let us return to the centrality of state power. For Leninists, the state is the only force capable of transforming society and defending this transformation against opposing forces (dominant classes, etc.). This is combined with a rhetoric of urgency: catastrophe is coming 7, we must be realistic and use the tools at our disposal to change reality today, which means taking over the state. Here too, the distinction with the rest of social democracy does not lie in the basic principle: both tendencies agree on the importance of state power.
Since World War I, “integrated” social democrats have agreed to be loyal managers of the capitalist state. They believe it is possible to carry out reforms within capitalist society, transforming it into a socialist society while respecting bourgeois democratic institutions. They are legalists. Leninists believe that it is not possible to seize power through the electoral process, or that the power thus gained will not be sufficient to break the resistance of the capitalists to their reforms. They therefore seek to take the lead in a revolutionary movement in order to transform it into a vehicle for their conquest of power: to lead a political revolution. For them, this political revolution is a prerequisite for a second revolution, this time a social one, which will be the work of the proletarian state.
On the contrary to what is often claimed by democrates’s critiques of the Russian Revolution, this position is not a rupture with democracy, but rather its extreme form. For the Bolsheviks, the Russian Revolution was above all a radical democratic revolution. But democracy has a function. It serves to distinguish between rulers and ruled, while producing a bloc of support among the ruled for the power of the rulers.
The reason why leaders are needed… is work. Representatives are needed to keep things running while others return to the factory. However, this issue is taken into account by Lenin, who is well aware of the contradiction between the assertion that “all power belongs to the workers” and the reality of their situation. The “solution” he proposed, the introduction of Taylorism to reduce working hours, is not really a solution at all, if we can even call that a solution. The introduction of Taylorism did not lead to a reduction of work, but to the contrary i.e. to its intensification and increased hardship, and serves above all to break resistance to work in the factory: it is a repressive tool against the workers.
The centrality of the state as the only force capable of bringing about social revolution for Leninists led them to consider state power and their control over it as absolutely vital for the survival of the revolution. Once caught up in this spiral, everything follows from there. If we look back at the course of the Russian Revolution, at the end of 1917, two and a half months after the seizure of power, a political police force was established: the Cheka.
From spring 1918 onwards repression against all non-Bolshevik forces was unleashed, following a major event: the signature of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The signature of this armistice treaty, which took Russia out of the First World War, also shaped the borders of the revolution and the modern state. This was undoubtedly the Bolsheviks’ real coup: from then on, the Bolshevik government had a real state at its disposal, which would act like all states do to consolidate fragile power: strike hard on anything that stood out. From April 1918 onwards, the anarchists would pay the price. Between October 1917 and the spring of 1918, what was at stake was the halting of the revolutionary process in favor of massive integration into the state.
An entire movement, alive and well, with multiple assemblies, spaces for organization and action, was gradually repressed and integrated to form a new type of self-proclaimed “Soviet” state in which, of course, the soviets gradually lost all initiative in favor to a vertical and centralized structure
Second proposal: building the party
The second proposition lies in the separate and centralized leadership of the workers’ movement: the party as the central operator. It is part of a logical chain with the first proposition (the seizure of the State) and third one (efficiency): the party is the tool for this takeover of the state; the form party is a product of capitalist modernity.
The Leninist proposition about the party and the class is the weakest point of this proposition today. Because it is a proposition that takes its full meaning in, with, and against moments of revolutionary radicalization. Moments that the Leninists are, of course, incapable to provoke (nor is any political faction, for that matter), but which they will attempt to lead.
During a revolutionary situation, Lenin’s proposal to form a “staff-party”, which goes hand in hand with the proposal to take over the state, can quickly gain widespread support. Moreover, it is not specific to Leninists: it is a constant feature of all the political leaderships of our movements: they want us to be sympathizers, they want us to be troops, soldiers, while they intend to form a party-leadership.
Becoming an army, and more specifically a conventional army, is what they propose to the class and the movement, and that is how they see it. To build it, they will begin by seeking to bind to themselves the non-commissioned officers, those who lead the battalions. For them, these battalions already exist, at least as a starting point to be replenished.
For example, in a large part of the world, it will be the unions and associations, the labor movement, to which are now added the political anti-racism movement, the feminist movement, and the environmental movement. The task then is to take the lead and, if necessary, to throw out the bad “legalist” social democratic leaders.
During an uprising, Leninist parties will therefore often try to take the lead by relying on the various existing structures of the left, while at the same time seeking to impose themselves as leaders. Other strategies, relying more directly on the structures of the movement (for example, by infiltrating spaces of coordination and self-organization), may emerge, aiming at the same objectives.
This vision of the revolutionary class as an army is powerful. It has succeeded in taking the lead over numerous revolutions. But it is a dead end: we don’t need a class as barracks, but a class as movement, even where our movements are confronted with the question of military confrontation. We need abundant initiatives, we need an intelligent crowd, one that organizes itself from the bottom up and coordinates itself through capillary action: for us, this is the very basis of future society.
In an opposite way, the Leninist’s instrumental conception of the class, in the sense that it is reduced to a passive tool wielded by the party, is the by-product of a more general idea of efficiency to be sought in capital and its innovations in terms of organization: today, it is a question of managing the crowd, which capitalists theorize as a kind of “dumb-skillful” aggregate, via platforms.
This modern form of organization, the platform, is at the heart of today’s Leninists’ recent conception of the party, within a broad consensual framework ranging from XR (Extinction Rebellion) to the international network formed by the Argentinian PTS, which publishes the website “révolution permanente” in French, to Maoist currents.
From the origins of this current to the present day, the business remains their model of internal organization, convinced as they are to find in the latest developments of capitalist organization, the ultimate form of political and social organization.
Third proposal: prioritizing efficiency
The highest level of Leninist discourse is the cult of efficiency, or rather of a certain kind of efficiency: that of capital. It can be summed up by the belief, to paraphrase Lenin, that capital will sell us until the rope to hang it with. In other words, capitalist technology is neutral and can be use in a perspective of liberation. This Leninist conception of efficiency cannot be summed up by the sole quote about the hanged man’s rope. It is a constant theme in the work of Lenin, who took it from Kautsky, a German social-democratic theorist of whom he was a disciple.
However, the methods of work organization developed by capitalists are not neutral. They are part of the class struggle, serving as weapons to deprive workers of their control and knowledge over production, and to protect capitalists against workers’ resistance. Taylorism is thus a method aimed not simply at “producing more” but primarily at breaking worker resistance by placing the machine at the center of the work process, while transforming it into a series of separate gestures. This prescribed work is never the real work, but a disciplinary framework. The effectiveness of Taylorism is a social fiction for engineers and bureaucrats fantasizing about military discipline.
This conception of the future society as the outcome of the development of the technological potentialities of the present capitalist system is still today one of the points of convergence between various currents of the left, Leninist or not. These currents plan to use the “advances” of algorithmic capital to plan the production and circulation of goods and intervene in the environment. The “neo-Leninist” synthesis should not be taken any more seriously than other current capitalist perspectives, but no less either. No more, because the world is not made up of cutting-edge technology and super-intelligent AI, but of containers, pallets, and tires—all of which are useful if you want to build barricades. No less, because like any apologetic discourse about capital, the other side of the coin is ignored with a disturbing naivety. Yet we live on this other side, and we may die because of it.
AI and platforms entail a further fragmentation of work, the generalization of piecework, the refinement of surveillance and control—in short, the increased “shitification” of our lives. Because the real meaning of this technical development is to further attack the proletariat’s capacity of “nuisance” and organization by increasing its atomization.
Not to mention the general reorganization of capitalism and the environmental destruction it entails on a scale that can only be described as apocalyptic. There is the war for resources. There is geoengineering as the content of future warfare because it becomes clear for the states that the only way to manage this crisis is to try to shift the worst conditions onto their neighbors.
Whereas the ruling classes are finding increasingly difficult to offer any perspective other than the bleakest dystopia, these “left-wing” proposals of social engineering see the ongoing capitalist transition with renewed hope. They compose a twilight love song to capitalist and state innovation. We will return to this in more details in a second text.
Yet a different path is there, palpable during our uprisings. Putting the question of revolutionary strategy and the content of the anarchist-communist revolution back at the center of discussions is a necessity born from practice.
Notes :
- This diagnosis is not originally Leninist or even Russian. It has been formulated in various ways by several other theorists, including Trotsky, Parvus, and above all Kautsky. But these theorists either recanted, in Kautsky’s case, rallied to Lenin, in Trotsky’s case, or went off to sell themselves to the bourgeoisie, in Parvus’s case. ↩︎
- Lars Lih, Lénine, une enquête historique, Ed Sociales, Paris 2024 ↩︎
- Except J.W Maiakhavski, see Scientific Socialism (1899) ↩︎
- We call “socialism” this political and social proposal for capitalist modernization . We are aware that some people claim this term, and it is not a question of disqualifying it outright, but of noting that it needs at least to be clarified, to have an adjective added to it. To name a perspective that represents a real rupture with capital, it is usual to speak of “wild,” “libertarian,” or “anarchist” socialism. Finally, we are also aware of the debates within the so-called “Bordigist” communist left, which considers that the USSR was “state capitalism” and not “socialism,” and which argues, with supporting texts, that Lenin himself never claimed to be establishing socialism, but rather a transitional “state capitalism”, pending revolutionary victory in Europe. This may be partially true regarding the texts, and one can find quotes from Lenin both for and against it, but historically it is clear: “real socialism” was the USSR. Moreover, this does not answer the fundamental question: who leads, who makes the revolution? Beyond abstract theoretical quarrels, Leninist currents, even the most radical ones, even those that otherwise remain somewhat faithful to the communist goal, all answer the same thing: the State. ↩︎
- « Socialism is inconceivable without large-scale capitalist engineering based on the latest discoveries of modern science. It is inconceivable without planned state organisation which keeps tens of millions of people to the strictest observance of a unified standard in production and distribution. We Marxists have always spoken of this, and it is not worth while wasting two seconds talking to people who do not understand even this (anarchists and a good half of the Left Socialist- Revolutionaries) ». Lenin, On “Left-Wing” Infantility and Small-Bourgeois Ideas, La Pravda, 1918, quoted in MANIFESTO FOR AN ACCELERATIONIST POLITICS, N.Srnicek et A. Williams, 2014, https://www.cs.gettysburg.edu/~duncjo01/assets/writings/library/accelerate_manifesto.html ↩︎
- This type of practice is still relevant today, as shown by the Chuang collective in their book “Social Contagion.” Indeed, faced with COVID, the Chinese population reacted by setting up a series of collectives, committees, etc., in short, the Chinese population organized itself. The Chinese state responded by partially co-opting this movement while also repressing it. ↩︎
- See, for example, Lenin’s pamphlet “The Impending Catastrophe and How to Avert It,” published one month before October 17. ↩︎