How to relate to the Leninist tradition? How to extract its truth? The basis of Lenin’s success was the perfect adaptation of his political strategy to the historical terrain of late Tsarist Russia, with its still quasi-feudal agrarian structure, its absolutist state and its supine bourgeoisie. But the Bolsheviks mistakenly drew from this experience the conclusion that they had discovered a general formula for revolutionary transformation: a cadre party of full-time revolutionaries aimed at the seizure of state power. This generalization was of course a distortion since Lenin was a highly sophisticated political thinker, who understood the importance of linking the socialist project to the democratic movement against the Tsarist autocracy. But after the revolution a certain schematism set in, especially with the establishment of the Communist International and the demand that all affiliated parties adhere to the 21 points. This forced an unhealthy process of splitting which severely weakened the international socialist movement. (This was not the only reason for its weakness: invasion of the infant socialist state by imperialism’s armed forces forced it onto the defensive; anti-Bolshevik social democracy had played its own negative role as well.) 

We can approach the question of how to relate to Leninism by considering how Gramsci related to it. Gramsci was a committed Leninist, but he famously hailed the Bolshevik victory as a revolution not only against capital, but against Capital. In the Prison Notebooks, he overcame the technocratic involution of Leninism, in the sense that he realized its deeper truth while casting aside its contingent historical carapace. He did so in a code constructed as a series of allusions to Machiavelli and Bodin. Bodin, Gramsci points out, was only superficially anti-Machiavellian; in reality, like the Florentine, he was the founder of scienza politica, but in France where the question was not the founding of the state, but rather the conditions of consent to an existing political order. Both Machiavelli and Bodin were Machiavellians in the sense that each was attempting to carry out a political strategy designed for the historical terrain on which he struggled. To pursue an overtly ‘Machiavellian’ politics in sixteenth-century France would be an historical anachronism. Or, to put it in the terms of another of Gramsci’s favourite allusions, an explicit Machiavellianism in sixteenth-century France would lead to a ‘Cadornist’ disaster: a wasting of troops through a direct assault on the trenches. Gramsci was reflecting on the problem that was fundamental to all his thinking in prison: what was the appropriate revolutionary strategy for the west? For Gramsci, to follow Lenin’s example in the west was precisely to break with Leninism in the fetishized sense; mass party, not cadre party, and above all a productive and creative relationship to the specific national-democratic revolutionary political culture in which one operates. 

The American right has not learned this lesson. The current vogue among the likes of Bannon, Rufo, etc. for deploying the tools of Leninism in pursuit of their reactionary fantasies relies on a crude and superficial understanding of Lenin’s ideas. They are like the Malaparte of the Tecnica del colpo di Stato; they see Leninism as a timeless political technology and thus cannot grasp that a properly Leninist strategy in a developed capitalist democracy must break with Leninism itself. They do not see that Lenin in America will appear in Jeffersonian guise. The American Lenin will deploy the ideas of self-determination, freedom and independence. He will attack the Hamiltonian state subordinated to finance and, increasingly, to Trump’s entourage. He will praise the dignity of independent labour, somehow laminating an ideology of simple commodity production to a socialist project. Above all he will be the unmasker of ‘corruption’, which must, however, be transformed into a social concept rather than a journalistic slogan. Can the left see this? More depends on this question that virtually any other in this historical moment. 

Read on: Ilya Budraitskis, ‘Lenin’s Laughter’, NLR 140/141.