This special section on ‘Rethinking Leninism’ emerges from sessions organized at the Society for Socialist Studies’ Annual Meetings, held at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in May 2009 at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The articles re-consider Lenin’s legacy, suggesting new ways of understanding his political thought and the implications for political strategies on the left today

Levant, Alex

English

Wilfrid Laurier University

Wilfrid Laurier University Scholars Commons @ Laurier Communication Studies Faculty Publications Communication Studies Fall 2009 Rethinking Leninism Alex Levant Wilfrid Laurier University, alevant@wlu.ca Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.wlu.ca/coms_faculty Recommended Citation Levant, Alex, "Rethinking Leninism" (2009). Communication Studies Faculty Publications. 13. https://scholars.wlu.ca/coms_faculty/13 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Communication Studies at Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in Communication Studies Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca. Socialist Studies: the Journal of the Society for Socialist Studies 5(2) Fall 2009: 36-40 Copyright © 2009 The Author(s)  Alex Levant is a Sessional Lecturer in Political Science at York University and Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada.  He writes on the problem of subjectivity in classical and contemporary Marxism.  He can be reached at alevant@yorku.ca.  Alex Levant est chargé d’enseignement en science politique à York University et en communication à Wilfred Laurier, Canada. Il écrit sur le problème de la subjectivité dans le marxisme classique et contemporain. Il peut être contacté à alevant@yorku.ca.  www.socialiststudies.com ISSN 1918-2821    SPECIAL SECTION ON RETHINKING LENINISM  Introduction: Rethinking Leninism  ALEX LEVANT Departments of Political Science, York University & Wilfrid Laurier University, Toronto & Waterloo, Ontario, Canada   Abstract: This special section on ‘Rethinking Leninism’ emerges from sessions organized at the Society for Socialist Studies’ Annual Meetings, held at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in May 2009 at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The articles re-consider Lenin’s legacy, suggesting new ways of understanding his political thought and the implications for political strategies on the left today.  Résumé: Cette section spéciale sur le theme ‘Re-penser le léninisme’ est le résultat de sessions organisées lors des réunions annuelles de la société pour les études socialistes, qui se sont déroulées pendant le Congrès des sciences humaines en mai 2009 à Carleton University à Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Les articles réinterrogent l’héritage de Lénine, suggérant des nouvelles manières de comprendre sa pensée politique et leurs conséquences en termes de stratégie politique pour la gauche aujourd’hui.  Keywords • Leninism • political strategy • socialism Mots clés • Léninisme • stratégie politique • socialisme  This section is based on two panels entitled ‘Rethinking Leninism,’ which were held at the annual conference of the Society for Socialist Studies in Ottawa in May 2009.  Senior and innovative scholars presented their recent work, breaking a near-silence on Leninism in the academy.  These panels were organized as part of an effort to consider the nature and significance of Lenin’s intervention in Marxist praxis.  While there is little LEVANT: Introduction – Rethinking Leninism   37 disagreement about the magnitude of his influence on Marxism, this influence is not properly reflected in contemporary Marxist scholarship.  Rethinking Marxism has won a measure of legitimacy in the academy, but rethinking Leninism continues to exist largely on the margins.  The current collection, along with the recent publication of Lenin Reloaded, edited by Budgen, Kouvelakis, and Žižek, and Lenin Rediscovered by Lars T. Lih, points to the importance of returning to Lenin, to re-examining his engagement with a set of questions, which continue to confront us today.  Perhaps the most significant and enduring of all the questions is: ‘What is to be done?’  Lenin’s 1902 pamphlet on the subject remains an important point of reference in Marxist theory.  His conception of a ‘party of a new type’ has been seen as a turning point in the break with bureaucratic, reformist, and fatalist tendencies that plagued the Second International.  However, as some of the contributors to this special section forcefully argue, Lenin’s thought on organization is not so straightforward.  On the contrary, there seems to be the development of an engagement with Lenin that is much richer and perhaps even more ground breaking than the Leninism we know.  As the title of Paul Kellogg’s piece provocatively states, ‘Leninism: It’s not what you think.’  Our current understanding of Lenin’s work is, in fact, quite limited.  However, this should come as no surprise given the various ways in which his thought has been refracted through the fissures in the communist movement and through the ideological wars between East and West.  Vilified by some and deified by others, he continues to be one of the most controversial figures of our time.  Shortly after his death, and against the wishes of his widow, Nadezhda Krupskaia, he was mummified, and countless colossal statues of his likeness were raised across the USSR.  It is interesting to note her plea to the Soviet people in Pravda only days after his death.  On 24 January 1924, she wrote, ‘Comrades Workers and Peasants!  I have a great request to make of you: do not allow your grief for Ilich to express itself in the external veneration of his person.  Do not build memorials to him…. If you want to honour the name of Vladimir Ilich – build day care centres, kindergartens, homes, schools’ (Buck-Morss 2000, 72).  This collection of articles is not another memorial to Lenin; it is part of a renewed effort to open Leninism to a critical re-examination.  For instance, Paul Kellogg identifies two very different Leninisms: the Leninism of the Third Congress of the Comintern (1921) with which we are more familiar – ‘the central leading body of the Party controls the activity and the correct functioning and composition of all the committees subordinate to it’ – and that of Lenin’s own comments in 1905 which insist Socialist Studies: the Journal of the Society for Socialist Studies 5(2) Fall 2009: 36-40 38 on ‘the autonomy of every Party organization’ and that all higher-standing bodies should be ‘elected, accountable, and subject to recall.’  Kellogg argues that the difference between the two approaches reflects Lenin’s close attention to context.  In fact, according to Kellogg, Lenin critiqued the ‘hard Leninism’ of the Third Congress as ‘too Russian,’ i.e. as inappropriate to conditions that existed in liberal democracies.  ‘There is, in other words, a discontinuity – a very large discontinuity – between what most people think Leninism is (the authoritarian, top-down, steel-hardy party) and the “Leninism”  that Lenin himself thought appropriate for liberal democracies in advanced capitalist society: party organization that allowed tremendous scope for debate, disagreement and discussion, party organization where the central unit was not the Central Committee, but the local organization, party organization imbued with democracy from top to bottom.’  The point of this special section is not, however, to rehabilitate Lenin, to rescue a ‘nice, democratic’ Lenin from the shadow of his ‘authoritarian, vanguardist’ image.  His rehabilitation is only necessary for, and occurs in the process of, uncovering a rich terrain of Marxist thought that is useful for struggle in the present.  Similar to Kellogg, Stephen D’Arcy approaches Lenin with an eye to the current context.   D’Arcy’s article, ‘Strategy, Meta-strategy and Anti-capitalist Activism,’ offers an original reading of Leninism as a political strategy that is relevant for contemporary anti-capitalist activism.  He argues that the political strategy that we tend to associate with Leninism is only a first-order strategy – a strategy developed for the situation in Russia at the time.  However, underlying this first-order strategy is a second-order meta-strategy – a deeper set of strategic imperatives that are broader in scope and applicability.  D’Arcy identifies this meta-strategy and applies it to the current context, generating a Leninism for today.  The result challenges some deeply-held assumptions about Leninism and offers strategic vision for anti-capitalism today in the form of the concept of ‘anti-capitalist attrition.’  Perhaps the most ground-breaking intervention in contemporary scholarship on Lenin has been Lars T. Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered (2006), which challenges the significance and meaning of Lenin’s What is to be done? as an articulation of a ‘party of a new type’ that eventually signalled a break with the reformism of the Second International.  ‘The experts regarded What is to be done? as the founding document of Bolshevism, the book where Lenin first revealed the essence of his outlook.  But even the experts worked without a proper knowledge of context – particularly the large context of international Social Democracy and the small context of LEVANT: Introduction – Rethinking Leninism   39 the polemical infighting among the Russian Social Democrats in late 1901.  To speak plainly, they misread What is to be done? and therefore misunderstood Lenin, and then successfully raised up this image of Lenin to textbook status’ (4-5).  Through a meticulous reconstruction of the debates of the day, Lih re-contextualizes Lenin’s pamphlet bringing it into focus in a new and astonishing way.  ‘I reject all the central propositions of the textbook interpretation.  The keynote of Lenin’s outlook was not worry about workers but exhilaration about workers.  The formulations about spontaneity are not the heart of What is to be done? but a tacked-on polemical sally.… What is to be done? did not reject the Western model of a Social-Democratic party but invoked this model at every turn.  Lenin certainly advocated a “vanguard party,” for this was the common understanding of what Social Democracy was all about.… The positions advanced in What is to be done? were not the cause of the party split in 1904’ (20).  Among the various consequences of Lih’s reading is the surprising continuity between Kautsky and Lenin.  Specifically, he notes the origin of the ‘party of a new type,’ not in Lenin’s What is to be done? but in Kautsky’s 1892 Class Struggle.  He demonstrates that Lenin considered himself a Kautskyist up to 1914, and that even after 1914, when he referred to Kautsky as a ‘renegade,’ he continued to see himself following the principles expounded by Kautsky pre-1914, i.e. that it was Kautsky, and not himself, who changed course.  This reading challenges not only our understanding of Leninism, but also how we have understood the relationship between the Second and Third International, and the problem of reformism through this ‘Leninist’ lens.  Lih continues to develop this line of thought in his present piece, ‘Lenin’s Aggressive Unoriginality, 1914-1916.’  He demonstrates that Lenin continued to draw on Kautsky’s thought even after 1914.  In fact, he makes a convincing argument that Lenin’s ideas from 1914 to 1919 do not represent a break with orthodox Second International Marxism, that in fact his ideas at that time came directly from Kautsky, especially Kautsky’s 1909 work Road to Power, as well as other orthodox writers, and that Lenin himself emphasized his own unoriginality.  This article is a continuation of Lih’s recent work, which has shaken the textbook interpretation of Lenin, the consequences of which are yet to be fully appreciated.  This special section offers a re-examination of Leninism that leaves the reader with a Lenin that is no longer larger than life, a Lenin that does not obstruct our view of the strategic debates of this important time in the Socialist Studies: the Journal of the Society for Socialist Studies 5(2) Fall 2009: 36-40 40 history of socialism.  For too long, ‘Leninism’ has served as a gloss on a complex history of struggle, which grappled with many of the issues that continue to confront the Left today.  The articles in this collection contribute to clearing some of the deadweight that has been associated with Leninism, uncovering a rich terrain of ideas that we would be wise to examine.  References Buck-Morss, Susan. 2000. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge: MIT Press. Budgen, Sebastian, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek (eds.). 2007. Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth. Durham: Duke University Press. Lih, Lars T. 2006. Lenin Rediscovered: ‘What is to be Done’ in Context.  Leiden: Brill. 

Rethinking Leninism

Scholars Commons

Wilfrid Laurier University 
Scholars Commons @ Laurier 
Communication Studies Faculty Publications Communication Studies 
Fall 2009 
Rethinking Leninism 
Alex Levant 
Wilfrid Laurier University, alevant@wlu.ca 
Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.wlu.ca/coms_faculty 
Recommended Citation 
Levant, Alex, "Rethinking Leninism" (2009). Communication Studies Faculty Publications. 13. 
https://scholars.wlu.ca/coms_faculty/13 
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Communication Studies at Scholars Commons @ 
Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in Communication Studies Faculty Publications by an authorized 
administrator of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca. 
Socialist Studies: the Journal of the Society for Socialist Studies 5(2) Fall 2009: 36-40 
Copyright © 2009 The Author(s) 
 
Alex Levant is a Sessional Lecturer in Political Science at York University and Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier 
University, Canada.  He writes on the problem of subjectivity in classical and contemporary Marxism.  He can be 
reached at alevant@yorku.ca. 
 
Alex Levant est chargé d’enseignement en science politique à York University et en communication à Wilfred Laurier, 
Canada. Il écrit sur le problème de la subjectivité dans le marxisme classique et contemporain. Il peut être contacté à 
alevant@yorku.ca. 
 
www.socialiststudies.com 
ISSN 1918-2821 
 
 
 
SPECIAL SECTION ON RETHINKING LENINISM 
 
Introduction: Rethinking Leninism 
 
ALEX LEVANT 
Departments of Political Science, York University & Wilfrid Laurier University, Toronto & 
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada 
 
 
Abstract: 
This special section on ‘Rethinking Leninism’ emerges from sessions organized at the 
Society for Socialist Studies’ Annual Meetings, held at the Congress of the Humanities 
and Social Sciences in May 2009 at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The 
articles re-consider Lenin’s legacy, suggesting new ways of understanding his political 
thought and the implications for political strategies on the left today. 
 
Résumé: 
Cette section spéciale sur le theme ‘Re-penser le léninisme’ est le résultat de sessions 
organisées lors des réunions annuelles de la société pour les études socialistes, qui se 
sont déroulées pendant le Congrès des sciences humaines en mai 2009 à Carleton 
University à Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Les articles réinterrogent l’héritage de Lénine, 
suggérant des nouvelles manières de comprendre sa pensée politique et leurs 
conséquences en termes de stratégie politique pour la gauche aujourd’hui. 
 
Keywords 
• Leninism • political strategy • socialism 
Mots clés 
• Léninisme • stratégie politique • socialisme 
 
This section is based on two panels entitled ‘Rethinking Leninism,’ which 
were held at the annual conference of the Society for Socialist Studies in 
Ottawa in May 2009.  Senior and innovative scholars presented their 
recent work, breaking a near-silence on Leninism in the academy.  These 
panels were organized as part of an effort to consider the nature and 
significance of Lenin’s intervention in Marxist praxis.  While there is little 
LEVANT: Introduction – Rethinking Leninism 
 
 
37 
disagreement about the magnitude of his influence on Marxism, this 
influence is not properly reflected in contemporary Marxist scholarship.  
Rethinking Marxism has won a measure of legitimacy in the academy, but 
rethinking Leninism continues to exist largely on the margins.  The current 
collection, along with the recent publication of Lenin Reloaded, edited by 
Budgen, Kouvelakis, and Žižek, and Lenin Rediscovered by Lars T. Lih, 
points to the importance of returning to Lenin, to re-examining his 
engagement with a set of questions, which continue to confront us today. 
 Perhaps the most significant and enduring of all the questions is: 
‘What is to be done?’  Lenin’s 1902 pamphlet on the subject remains an 
important point of reference in Marxist theory.  His conception of a ‘party 
of a new type’ has been seen as a turning point in the break with 
bureaucratic, reformist, and fatalist tendencies that plagued the Second 
International.  However, as some of the contributors to this special section 
forcefully argue, Lenin’s thought on organization is not so straightforward.  
On the contrary, there seems to be the development of an engagement with 
Lenin that is much richer and perhaps even more ground breaking than the 
Leninism we know.  As the title of Paul Kellogg’s piece provocatively states, 
‘Leninism: It’s not what you think.’ 
 Our current understanding of Lenin’s work is, in fact, quite limited.  
However, this should come as no surprise given the various ways in which 
his thought has been refracted through the fissures in the communist 
movement and through the ideological wars between East and West.  
Vilified by some and deified by others, he continues to be one of the most 
controversial figures of our time.  Shortly after his death, and against the 
wishes of his widow, Nadezhda Krupskaia, he was mummified, and 
countless colossal statues of his likeness were raised across the USSR.  It is 
interesting to note her plea to the Soviet people in Pravda only days after 
his death.  On 24 January 1924, she wrote, ‘Comrades Workers and 
Peasants!  I have a great request to make of you: do not allow your grief for 
Ilich to express itself in the external veneration of his person.  Do not build 
memorials to him…. If you want to honour the name of Vladimir Ilich – 
build day care centres, kindergartens, homes, schools’ (Buck-Morss 2000, 
72).  This collection of articles is not another memorial to Lenin; it is part 
of a renewed effort to open Leninism to a critical re-examination. 
 For instance, Paul Kellogg identifies two very different Leninisms: 
the Leninism of the Third Congress of the Comintern (1921) with which we 
are more familiar – ‘the central leading body of the Party controls the 
activity and the correct functioning and composition of all the committees 
subordinate to it’ – and that of Lenin’s own comments in 1905 which insist 
Socialist Studies: the Journal of the Society for Socialist Studies 5(2) Fall 2009: 36-40 
38 
on ‘the autonomy of every Party organization’ and that all higher-standing 
bodies should be ‘elected, accountable, and subject to recall.’  Kellogg 
argues that the difference between the two approaches reflects Lenin’s 
close attention to context.  In fact, according to Kellogg, Lenin critiqued the 
‘hard Leninism’ of the Third Congress as ‘too Russian,’ i.e. as inappropriate 
to conditions that existed in liberal democracies.  ‘There is, in other words, 
a discontinuity – a very large discontinuity – between what most people 
think Leninism is (the authoritarian, top-down, steel-hardy party) and the 
“Leninism”  that Lenin himself thought appropriate for liberal democracies 
in advanced capitalist society: party organization that allowed tremendous 
scope for debate, disagreement and discussion, party organization where 
the central unit was not the Central Committee, but the local organization, 
party organization imbued with democracy from top to bottom.’ 
 The point of this special section is not, however, to rehabilitate 
Lenin, to rescue a ‘nice, democratic’ Lenin from the shadow of his 
‘authoritarian, vanguardist’ image.  His rehabilitation is only necessary for, 
and occurs in the process of, uncovering a rich terrain of Marxist thought 
that is useful for struggle in the present.  Similar to Kellogg, Stephen D’Arcy 
approaches Lenin with an eye to the current context.   
D’Arcy’s article, ‘Strategy, Meta-strategy and Anti-capitalist 
Activism,’ offers an original reading of Leninism as a political strategy that 
is relevant for contemporary anti-capitalist activism.  He argues that the 
political strategy that we tend to associate with Leninism is only a first-
order strategy – a strategy developed for the situation in Russia at the time.  
However, underlying this first-order strategy is a second-order meta-
strategy – a deeper set of strategic imperatives that are broader in scope 
and applicability.  D’Arcy identifies this meta-strategy and applies it to the 
current context, generating a Leninism for today.  The result challenges 
some deeply-held assumptions about Leninism and offers strategic vision 
for anti-capitalism today in the form of the concept of ‘anti-capitalist 
attrition.’ 
 Perhaps the most ground-breaking intervention in contemporary 
scholarship on Lenin has been Lars T. Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered (2006), 
which challenges the significance and meaning of Lenin’s What is to be 
done? as an articulation of a ‘party of a new type’ that eventually signalled a 
break with the reformism of the Second International.  ‘The experts 
regarded What is to be done? as the founding document of Bolshevism, the 
book where Lenin first revealed the essence of his outlook.  But even the 
experts worked without a proper knowledge of context – particularly the 
large context of international Social Democracy and the small context of 
LEVANT: Introduction – Rethinking Leninism 
 
 
39 
the polemical infighting among the Russian Social Democrats in late 1901.  
To speak plainly, they misread What is to be done? and therefore 
misunderstood Lenin, and then successfully raised up this image of Lenin 
to textbook status’ (4-5).  Through a meticulous reconstruction of the 
debates of the day, Lih re-contextualizes Lenin’s pamphlet bringing it into 
focus in a new and astonishing way.  ‘I reject all the central propositions of 
the textbook interpretation.  The keynote of Lenin’s outlook was not worry 
about workers but exhilaration about workers.  The formulations about 
spontaneity are not the heart of What is to be done? but a tacked-on 
polemical sally.… What is to be done? did not reject the Western model of a 
Social-Democratic party but invoked this model at every turn.  Lenin 
certainly advocated a “vanguard party,” for this was the common 
understanding of what Social Democracy was all about.… The positions 
advanced in What is to be done? were not the cause of the party split in 
1904’ (20). 
 Among the various consequences of Lih’s reading is the surprising 
continuity between Kautsky and Lenin.  Specifically, he notes the origin of 
the ‘party of a new type,’ not in Lenin’s What is to be done? but in Kautsky’s 
1892 Class Struggle.  He demonstrates that Lenin considered himself a 
Kautskyist up to 1914, and that even after 1914, when he referred to 
Kautsky as a ‘renegade,’ he continued to see himself following the 
principles expounded by Kautsky pre-1914, i.e. that it was Kautsky, and not 
himself, who changed course.  This reading challenges not only our 
understanding of Leninism, but also how we have understood the 
relationship between the Second and Third International, and the problem 
of reformism through this ‘Leninist’ lens. 
 Lih continues to develop this line of thought in his present piece, 
‘Lenin’s Aggressive Unoriginality, 1914-1916.’  He demonstrates that Lenin 
continued to draw on Kautsky’s thought even after 1914.  In fact, he makes 
a convincing argument that Lenin’s ideas from 1914 to 1919 do not 
represent a break with orthodox Second International Marxism, that in fact 
his ideas at that time came directly from Kautsky, especially Kautsky’s 
1909 work Road to Power, as well as other orthodox writers, and that 
Lenin himself emphasized his own unoriginality.  This article is a 
continuation of Lih’s recent work, which has shaken the textbook 
interpretation of Lenin, the consequences of which are yet to be fully 
appreciated. 
 This special section offers a re-examination of Leninism that leaves 
the reader with a Lenin that is no longer larger than life, a Lenin that does 
not obstruct our view of the strategic debates of this important time in the 
Socialist Studies: the Journal of the Society for Socialist Studies 5(2) Fall 2009: 36-40 
40 
history of socialism.  For too long, ‘Leninism’ has served as a gloss on a 
complex history of struggle, which grappled with many of the issues that 
continue to confront the Left today.  The articles in this collection 
contribute to clearing some of the deadweight that has been associated 
with Leninism, uncovering a rich terrain of ideas that we would be wise to 
examine. 
 
References 
Buck-Morss, Susan. 2000. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East 
and West. Cambridge: MIT Press. 
Budgen, Sebastian, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek (eds.). 2007. Lenin Reloaded: 
Toward a Politics of Truth. Durham: Duke University Press. 
Lih, Lars T. 2006. Lenin Rediscovered: ‘What is to be Done’ in Context.  Leiden: Brill. 


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