Claremont Students Should Read Lenin

Understanding political theory means reading the communists.

Vladimir Lenin addressing a Moscow crowd, 1920. (Credit: Grigory Goldstein)

Regular readers of The Forum might (correctly) identify me as a conservative contributor. Naturally, I am unsympathetic to socialist thought, let alone the Leninist variety animating most self-identified socialist governments since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. But I would be among the first to affirm their importance in world history. Russia’s Revolution and the ensuing debates among Marxists defined the course of global ideological development, setting the stage for the Cold War, decolonization, and the current world order. There are courses allowing students to study canonical authors like Plato to obscure authors like the Islamo-Confucian Wang Daiyu, yet not one course across the Claremont Colleges offers students the opportunity to read the political theory behind the 20th century’s greatest struggle.

Lenin’s 1902 pamphlet, What Is To Be Done?, drawing its title from a then-famous 1860s Russian novel, reshaped Marxist approaches to revolution. The communists of the 19th century had predicted that a class revolution would break out spontaneously from “late stage capitalism.” Lenin argued that struggles for better working hours and other labor goals would not lead to the fulfillment of the revolution. Instead, he called for the organization of a “vanguard” political party through which to organize revolutionary action. Understanding this paradigm shift allows one to better understand every major left wing political movement since.

Coming in at hardly a hundred pages is Lenin’s 1917 magnum opus: The State and Revolution. At the time, Marxists generally understood their revolution as necessarily inaugurating a stateless, classless society. Even fellow Bolsheviks who viewed government as a necessity after a proletariat uprising saw it as a precursor for pure communism. Using Marx’s words, Lenin argued for a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” suggesting that its absence led to the failure of the anti-statist Paris Commune. Lenin argued that “the proletariat needs state power” to bring about the conditions for any transition to communism. Rather than calling for the destruction of the oppressive state, Lenin calls for its inversion. Instead of being used to oppress the proletariat and perpetuate capitalism, the state should be used to oppress the bourgeoisie and usher in communism. He called his model “the bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie.” While setting the philosophical stage for the Soviet Union to rule with an iron first, Lenin mocks liberal democracy in terms that drew an eternal line in the sand between his Bolsheviks and the burgeoning social democratic parties to the west. Amazingly, the entire work was written before the outbreak of revolution in Russia, while Lenin remained in Swiss exile.

Reading both texts would be necessities for the sort of communism course the Claremont Colleges lacks. This course could also include intra-Marxist rejoinders to Lenin. Within the Leninist fold, Leon Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed presents the classic critique of Stalin’s USSR as a “degenerated workers’ state.” The works of the revolutionary leader’s closest confidant, Nikolai Bukharin, argued that undeveloped states were unsuited for socialism. As such, Bukharin argued for a reformism that preserved small scale markets, prompting a biographer to declare that “he alone offered for that country a way forward radically opposed to the one adopted by Stalin.” These views are critically important to understand, for they would resurface near the Soviet Union’s end. Deng Xiaoping used similar reasoning to justify China’s capitalist turn and transformation into a global power. 

Not long before his execution, Bukharin inspired the momentous Letter of an Old Bolshevik. Such a work might ground a class devoted to Leninist political theory, cataloguing the bloodshed concomitant with history’s communist states. It hauntingly recounts that “all of us old Bolsheviks who have any sort of prominent revolutionary past are now hiding in our lairs…no one will dare defend us.” Many of the followers of Trotsky and Bukharin, after watching their leaders fall victim to Stalinist purges, went on to write great works of anti-communism. Ex-communists that offer their own broadsides against the ideology include Whittaker Chambers in the beautifully written Witness or the 1948 collection The God That Failed. A course covering the foundations of communist government could thus leave students intellectually and historically rounded.

There are several courses touching on Marxism more broadly. However, these courses typically focus on Karl Marx’s philosophy, which encompasses far more than political theory and has never been politically implemented but through the lens of Lenin and his comrades. Others zoom into specific lenses such as Africana Marxism. These perspectives cannot be understood without a grounding in the fundamental shift Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks brought to international Marxism. One cannot understand Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah’s call to do for “for Africa what Lenin had achieved for the Soviet Union” without understanding what Lenin did to create a revolutionary state from scratch. To understand the thought of the Bolsheviks and their enemies is to understand the world we live in today.