Lenin and the Bomb

A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history. Historicism gives the ‘eternal’ image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past. The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called ‘Once upon a time’ in historicism’s bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history.

-Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History

A couple of months ago my reevaluation of Lenin's contemporary role began with an impassioned rejection of his centrality in the "revolutionary socialist" movement. While most of the Left had already written off Lenin, he surreptitiously retained a hegemony on both the hopes of self stylized revolutionary socialists and over their unequivocal failures ever since, say, the winter of 1917, or the civil war or something.

Among the more reasonable segments of the Leninist left, the eventual defeat of the Russian Revolution was an inevitable one, not because of an ideological failure necessarily, but because the material conditions of the middling Russian state had caught up with Bolshevik heroism, will, and strategy. This brief analysis itself captures the root of the obsession with Lenin: he was entirely correct, the error was either in Stalin's rise to power alternative to Trotsky, or the gutted Soviets post civil war. Lenin's "correctness" should not be entirely discarded, but reactivated. Reactivated not as a dressed corpse, as a prescriptive abomination, or even as a "lesson learned." What the now disoriented left (in a way it will always remain disoriented) can do is grasp the figure of Lenin as the discrete (extra)historical actor. His "correctness" doesn't lie in an eternal party form, it is the expression of the revolution that attempts to stand apart from the conditions that have prompted its necessity and inevitability.


The Prescriptive Lenin

For decades the Bolsheviks have served as a forcibly accommodating model for revolutionary politics. In brief, I refer to the vanguardist, democratic centralist, disciplined revolutionary party as outlined in What is to be Done? I don't think I need to catalogue the failures of Leninist party experiments post 1917, look around. However, there is a need to review these failures, so we should look back to the social and political character of its most successful setting: 19th century Russia.

The Bolshevik party was birthed out of a border state. Russia was not quite Europe nor Asia, West nor East, and materially an excellently confusing case of uneven economic development. I lack the knowledge to go past a crude analysis of the 19th and early 20th century Russian economy, but it is important to at least recognize the disparate elements of the terrain that the Bolsheviks were faced with. While urban centers were rapidly rationalizing to industrial centers, the center of Russian political power was still largely beholden to mysticism in place of the inept tsar. Further, I think the Bolsheviks' (and later Communists) perpetual problem of the massive Russian peasantry is a sufficient illustration of Russian society. Due to focused works like The Development of Capitalism in Russia, Russian socialists were well aware that the peasantry was both a weight behind the wedge of revolution and an obstacle to its ends. Thus, the vanguard of the new world, the next stage of history, confronted a class whose transformations are all wrong and unintelligible. It's easy to say they got it wrong, either by reinstituting market forms to rural communities, or by forcibly extracting their products too quickly, or too late, or some combination of policies. But these were questions of will and action, not some resolution to be answered by the deciphered course of history.

Today, we obviously don't have the same problem. But we are facing an under-theorized transnational capitalism. Nations that would previously be referred to as industrial nations are undergoing a process of de-industrialization to some extent and growth of the service sectors. Politically, the typical neoliberal order seems to face some challenges, either among the far right in Europe or in the ghastly "postmodern president" of Trump. The US labor movement's vanguard is not the same as it were in Lenin's time, instead, it appears to be non-value-productive school teachers. We don't know where a revolutionary act will come from, but it is important to remember Lenin's conception of the revolutionary party as the unexpectedly defined tribune of the oppressed. The Trotskyist fixation of who REALLY is preserving Leninism and his party form is not a productive way to approach this new landscape.

The Otherworldly Lenin

An illustration of this comes from a bit of a joke, albeit an inspirational joke. Posadism is one of those idiosyncratic Marxist sects that insists upon its own historical materialist rigor. There are many interesting nuances to Posadism, but the one that interests me here is the moment before the promise of utopia is brought. This is the proletarian nuclear bomb. The bomb addresses the failure of the socialist movement to have brought about the next stage; when faced with an analysis of the totalizing global capitalist order, it finds something it can do to destroy it. Only then can the extraterrestrial "Vanguard Outside of History" step into revolution, where the end of the state of things is possible.

If our mushroom cloud is going to dissipate, revealing a new horizon, first we have to launch it. And here is Lenin's primary break with Marx (or if you subscribe to Marx's omniscience, Lenin's clarification), the major theme running through What is to be Done?: the distinction between spontaneous consciousness - i.e. the "historical consciousness" of Marx's naturally occurring Communist - and revolutionary consciousness dredged out of the waking class-for-itself by the party. This difference finds its Bolshevik expression in Lenin's emphasis upon politics and discretely in the flexibility of these politics until the moment of their necessary action.

To end the intermediate period of delegated power to the bourgeois provisional government, Lenin sent a flurry of letters to Bolshevik leadership urging insurrection against this government, in one he reprimands the hesitant Bolsheviks as "consummate idiots." Here we see the aforementioned politics of action in an abandonment of the bourgeoisie. Though they failed to fulfill their historical mandate and make some future socialism possible; the proletariat, having its opportunity in its hands, must take it.

The valuable Lenin is the nuclear bomb Lenin, who presents on an alien level, one that cannot be invoked as an eternal thread of history. It is something new and unexpected, it is also entirely inevitable once it occurs. What I want to communicate is not Leninist politics as a miraculous program that has derivated clear solutions for today, but rather as a heterodox blip of history. That is not to say, in Marxist terms, that the revolutionary Leninist moment should be seen as a rejection of dialectical materialism. Its dictating laws are merely obscured, lying outside of the "scientific" rigor of historical materialism; I believe Lenin talks about grasping the chain of society at any link you can see and desperately believing it's the one that can pull the whole thing apart.